Version 5.1

This book was compiled and released by The Books of Sand and is licensed for distribution under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0). This means that it can be shared freely, but not for commercial purposes or without attribution. (Seriously, don't be parasitic dicks like John Gregory Betancourt and the people at Wildside Press, whose business model relies on stealing the hard work of fans and then selling it on Amazon.)

The beautiful cover art you were admiring was done by the talented Abigail Larson. To see more of her work, visit http://abigaillarson.deviantart.com/

The Man Who Talled Tales contains every short story published by R. A. Lafferty, from ‘The Wagons’ in 1959 to ‘There'll Always Be Another Me’ in 2003. Where possible, multiple manuscripts for each story have been consulted to repair damaged reprintings and excise typographical errors.

“There was a writer from Tulsa, Oklahoma (he died in 2002), who was, for a little while in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the best short story writer in the world. His name was R. A. Lafferty…”

 — Neil Gaiman

“You get such a sense of joy and boundless imagination in every sentence — even if the story doesn't totally cohere, you feel like it's about something.”

 — Bill Hader

“Just about everything Lafferty writes is fun, is witty, is entertaining and playful. But it is not easy, for it is a mingling of allegory with myth, and of both with something more…”

 — Gene Wolfe

“If there were no Lafferty, we would lack the imagination to invent him.”

 — Michael Swanwick

“The tavernkeepers weep while we rejoice: Lafferty's stories are full of a warm, Bacchic glow, recollected in sobriety — euphoria, comradeship, nostalgia, and the ever-renewed belief that something wonderful may happen.”

 — Damon Knight

“Why it took the world so long to gather up Lafferty's glorious short stories will probably remain one of the great unsolved mysteries. Nonetheless, we can rejoice that someone has finally done it, and we can settle back to appreciating the special magic proffered by the madman Lafferty.”

 — Harlan Ellison

“Lafferty has the power which sets fire behind your eyeballs. There is warmth, illumination, and a certain joy attendant upon the experience. He's good.”

 — Roger Zelazny

Table of Contents (chronological)

Go to Table of Contents (alphabetical)

Go to Table of Contents (by collection)

Introduction 

italics = previously unpublished

§  1957-1962 § 

Cabrito

Ghost in the Corn Crib

Adam Had Three Brothers

The Saving Grace

I Don't Like You

Johnny Crookedhouse

The Ugly Sea

Aloys

Live It Again

The Vanquished

Bridlegoose

Seven-Day Terror

Handful of Fire

Other Side of the Moon

Get Off the World

Day of the Glacier

Chombo

L'Avare

Girl of the Month

Pamponia

Club Mentiros

Three For a Quarrel

Panic Flight

Golden Gate

Through Other Eyes

The Weirdest World

The Wagons

The Cliff Climbers

Great Green Goat

The All-Star Series

Holy Woman

Red Headed Future

Rain Mountain

Communion of Saints

Long Teeth

Saturday You Die

Try to Remember

Thousand Dollar Melon

Snake Cabin

Almost Perfect

Enfants Terribles

McGonigal's Worm

The Polite People of Pudibundia

The Six Fingers of Time

Goldfish

In the Garden

Snuffles

Rainbird

One Minute Before

All the People

Beautiful Dreamer

Maleficent Morning

Dream

Phoenic

Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas

Task Force Fifty-Eight and a Half

The Transcendent Tigers

Other Kind of Animal

Whittle Come Back

All But the Words

Seven Story Dream

Among the Hairy Earthmen

End of the Line

Name of the Snake

Three Men in the Morning

Parthen

§  1963-1967 § 

The Pani Planet

Vestige

Mad Man

Last Laugh

What's the Name of That Town?

A Special Condition in Summit City

Pig in a Pokey

The Primary Education of the Camiroi

The Man with the Speckled Eyes

Nine Hundred Grandmothers

Hog-Belly Honey

Bubbles When They Burst

The Man Who Never Was

Slow Tuesday Night

Guesting Time

Land of the Great Horses

•  Afterword (Land of the Great Horses)

Once on Aranea

In Our Block

Golden Trabant

Crocodile

Maybe Jones and the City

Hands of the Man

How They Gave It Back

The Hole on the Corner

Been a Long Long Time

One At a Time

Narrow Valley

Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne

Polity and Custom of the Camiroi

Cliffs That Laughed

The Ultimate Creature

Ginny Wrapped in the Sun

Rogue Raft

Camels and Dromedaries, Clem

The Man Underneath

Configuration of the North Shore

Eurema's Dam

Frog on the Mountain 

§  1968-1971 § 

The Man with the Aura

McGruder's Marvels

Condillac's Statue

This Grand Carcass Yet

Entire and Perfect Chrysolite

Old Foot Forgot

Interurban Queen

Symposium

Groaning Hinges of the World

Continued on Next Rock

•  How I Wrote “Continued On Next Rock”

Ride a Tin Can

Ishmael Into the Barrens

All Pieces of a River Shore

Sky

When All the Lands Pour Out Again

About a Secret Crocodile

The All-At-Once Man

Dorg

World Abounding

Quiz Ship Loose

Mud Violet

Boomer Flats

Nor Limestone Islands

The Most Forgettable Story in the World

Apocryphal Passage of the Last Night of Count Finnegan On Galveston Island

Company in the Wings

Horns on Their Heads

In Outraged Stone

Rang Dang Kaloof

And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire

Scorner's Seat

§  1972-1974 § 

And Name My Name

Incased in Ancient Rind

Days of Grass, Days of Straw

Barnaby's Clock

The World as Will and Wallpaper

And Read the Flesh Between the Lines

And Mad Undancing Bears

Animal Fair

The Ungodly Mice of Doctor Drakos

The Two-Headed Lion of Cris Benedetti

The Hellaceous Rocket of Harry O'Donovan

The Wooly World of Barnaby Sheen

Berryhill

St. Poleander's Eve

Funnyfingers

Endangered Species

Royal Licorice

Great Day in the Morning

By the Seashore

Flaming Ducks and Giant Bread

Rivers of Damascus

Mr. Hamadryad

Sex and Sorcery

Or Little Ducks Each Day

Heart Grow Fonder

Assault on Fat Mountain

Smoe and the Implicit Clay

Hound Dog's Ear (original)

Hound Dog's Ear (revised)

For All Poor Folks at Picketwire

From the Thunder Colt's Mouth

Three Shadows of the Wolf

Old Halloweens On The Guna Slopes (original)

Old Halloweens On The Guna Slopes (revised)

The Skinny People of Leptophlebo Street

The Man Who Walked Through Cracks

The Doggone Highly Scientific Door

Oh Tell Me Will It Freeze Tonight

The Emperor's Shoestrings

Brain Fever Season

The Hand with One Hundred Fingers

Fog in My Throat

What Big Tears the Dinosaur's

And Some in Velvet Gowns

Oh Whatta You Do When the Well Runs Dry?

Puddle on the Floor

Thou Whited Wall

Fall of Pebble-Stones

And All the Skies Are Full of Fish

Pleasures and Palaces

Haruspex

And You Did Not Wail

§  1975-1979 § 

Oh, Those Trepidatious Eyes!

Marsilia V

Bequest of Wings

Bright Flightways

Love Affair With Ten Thousand Springs

Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies

The Funny Face Murders

The Only Tune That He Could Play

Jack Bang's Eyes

Lord Torpedo, Lord Gyroscope

Slippery

Dig a Crooked Hole

Splinters

Bright Coins in Never-Ending Stream

I Don't Care Who Keeps the Cows

Ahoy the Whale

Condition Quick: A Dialog for Two Dia-Persons

The Casey Machine

The Forty-Seventh Island

Happening in Chosky Bottoms

Snake in His Bosom

Rainy Day in Halicarnassus

Make Sure the Eyes Are Big Enough

Tongues of the Matagorda

Bank and Shoal of Time

Unique Adventure Gone

Great Tom Fool

The Last Astronomer

Pine Castle

One-Eyed Mocking-Bird

This Boding Itch

Posterior Analytics

The End of Outward

New People 

§  1980-1984 § 

The Rod and the Ring

Thieving Bear Planet

Heart of Stone, Dear

Six Leagues From Lop

In Deepest Glass

All Hollow Though You Be

Ifrit

Buckets Full of Brains

There'll Always Be Another Me

Square and Above Board

You Can't Go Back

Calamities of the Last Pauper

Faith Sufficient

In the Turpentine Trees

Bird-Master

Flaming-Arrow

Junkyard Thoughts

Inventions Bright and New

The Man Who Made Models

I'll See It Done and Then I'll Die

The Effigy Histories

John Salt

Of Laughter and the Love of Friends

Two For Four Ninety-Nine

Ewe Lamb

The 99th Cubicle

Le Hot Sport

Magazine Section 

The Hand of the Potter: An Idyll

§  1985-1993 § 

The Story of Little Briar-Rose, A Scholarly Study

Along the San Pennatus Fault

Something Rich and Strange

How Many Miles to Babylon?

Gray Ghost: A Reminiscence

Oh Happy Double-Jointed Tongues!

Promontory Goats

Episodes of the Argo

The Man Who Lost His Magic

Anamnesis

Introduction

An introduction is meant to help the reader make sense of an author, and this is an introduction to the collected stories of R. A. Lafferty. You can see the problem.

Strange thing to put to paper, but that's the truth of it. I cannot presume to improve on the praise already lavished upon him; suffice it to say he is inimitable, ineffable, a born story-teller, a brilliant liar, and the single richest deposit of pure blarney ever mined from American soil. He loved liars and con-men but he loved stories more, and this became critically important as he continued writing: because over here is what a story is, and over here is what a con is, and he wanted to be damned sure people could tell the difference.

So many of Lafferty's cautionary characters are con-men, by which I mean confidence-men — men who inspire undue confidence in the story they're telling. They sidle up to you, perfectly charming, perfectly respectable. They tell you most people are not clever enough to understand what they're about to say. They may even tell you it's a secret, just to pique your interest. Once it's piqued, that's when they work the grift: the Opening Hook, the Fashionable Theme, the Glistening Metaphor; they keep at it till they have you. They get inside your head just long enough to build a scarecrow of epiphany and sell it to you, leaving just before you realize it's flimsy and cold and not even real straw.

That is most fiction. It is something that could be true, but isn't. A Lafferty story is different. It is something that should be true, but isn't. There is a difference.

Making Sense, now that's a con. Oldest con there is. We need sense to figure out the world — specifically, we need story-sense. It's a need that runs deep, beneath the Freudian subconscious, beneath the Jungian unconscious, and it's mostly been for the good. (An evolutionary psychologist will look at that result and sell you a very clever and sensible theory as to why for a dollar, or a half-dozen for five. They'll even look and sound respectable while doing it, as you would expect.) Narrative thinking is a mental shortcut, an organic method of organization, and we wouldn't have made it far without it. But like all shortcuts it's vulnerable to hijackers and flim-flammers and folks who are just plain lost. Freud makes sense. So do creation myths. So does eugenics.

Read Lafferty's stories: he knows the cons for crutches and safety nets, and has politely declined them. Don't buy it? Making Sense too general? Well then, take Show-Don't-Tell. This is a new con, relatively speaking, though for sheer dazzle it's up there with old stalwarts like the Tragic Flaw and the Deus Ex Machina. All new writers are taught to work the Show-Don't-Tell con hard, and why not? Simply tell a person a story — lie to them honestly — and the story is a thing outside them, something they can hold in their hand, turn this way and that, hoot and holler over its flaws and flatness. Ah, but crack the door just a hair, show them only a few sights and sounds and furtive little movements, and their story-sense builds a story out of those details, a story planted in their minds and watered with their ego. It's almost like being told the truth. We don't like to think we can't trust the stories we tell ourselves; and anyway, it's very hard to pull something out of your own head, to hold it in your hand, turn it this way and that, looking for flaws.

A Lafferty story is almost always told-not-shown. His characters are ridiculous larger-than-life personalities who say exactly what they are doing and why, stumbling through other-wheres and never-weres in prose that is abuzz with puns and paradoxes and enough said-bookisms to… but that is the point. He's telling you a story minus the sly, aiming to please something deeper than the unconscious, deeper even than story-sense, trying to tickle something so fundamental you don't even know it's there until it giggles. You'd not call his stories deconstructions — that's just more sense-pap — but more a stripping, an undressing, a decrutching, an honesting. They do not make sense but oh do they fascinate, and that is what makes them true.

Of course, now that I've shared with you this penetrating insight, this great secret (did I mention it was a secret? Well it is, one of the oldest), you can read his stories with open eyes, their bones laid bare, their meanings plain and within easy grasp.

What, why are you giving me that look? I swear, I'm telling you the truth.

Honest.

To make this e-book as user-friendly as possible, we have provided three different tables of contents. The chronological ToC is for those who wish to graze; the alphabetical for those who know exactly the story they want to read; and the collections for those who wish to browse a specific book like Nine Hundred Grandmothers because Neil Gaiman said it was the best one (is he right?)

Additionally, whenever an author's foreword is available for a story, it has been placed at that story's beginning for the reader's enjoyment and edification.

The Man Who Talled Tales contains every short story R. A. Lafferty published, some 224 stories in all (and a few others besides). Each has been rigorously proofed and formatted for easy reading. We compiled this ebook because we believe R. A. Lafferty was brilliant, inimitable, and deserves above all to be read, not entombed in moldy paperbacks or limited edition shelf-candy. It is our hope that you will read him, that you will enjoy him, and that you'll pass him on to your friends.

Cabrito

The Taberna was only as big as a cracker box, but it had full wall mirrors on each end which made it look three times as large. The seven stools had (not in order of importance) the Norwegian, the Irishman, a Little Brown Man, a Big Brown Man, two lesser persons, and Anita. Anita on this evening was not being spoken to by any of the other patrons of the bar; it was as though she were not there.

The Norwegian, in the apparent world, was known as Airman Lundquist, and was stationed at the Air Base across the river. He had been a sergeant and Air Man for twenty years; and now, purged of wife and family, was happy in a border town with a twenty-four hour pass every third day. The Norwegian, in the real world, was a wild Viking with a keen sense of humor and adventure, and no other sense of any kind whatsoever.

These seven people drank slow cool drinks and talked easily, for they were all good friends.

With the mirror images, it was as though twenty-one people were seated there in three only slightly separated groups; and Airman Lundquist was prominent in each group. An odd thing (hardly worth mentioning) is that, though the images of the other six persons followed them in detail, those of Airman Lundquist did not do so exactly. There were (though none at first noticed it) three Airman Lundquists, each telling a different story and drinking a different drink. The story of one was a happening at Bougainville long ago in those happier days of the great southern war; and the story of another was of a wife in Minnesota who was separated from him, as she was damned if she'd live down here, and he was damned if he'd live up there anymore; and the third one was talking about Elena who had a date with him that night but hadn't shown up. He said he was glad she hadn't showed as he always had more fun on the nights she didn't. And one of the Airmen Lundquists was drinking a Carta Blanca, and one a Gin Fizz, and one a muddy looking rum drink that was cousin to Cuba Libre. But except for these little things Lundquist and his two images were very similar as mirror images always are.

“We will go get some cabrito,” said Lundquist, the real and not the imaged or imagined Airman, “we can get it a half block from here and it's real good. Or we can go about twelve miles out and get some that's always burned. That sure is a rough ride out there and it'll take a couple of hours. Let's go get some cabrito.”

He left with his companion, the Irishman, and it seemed as if the two images of the Airman also followed, but invisibly. And all the rest of the evening they were following, for these as you have already guessed were fetches.

“Irishman,” said Lundquist, “let's get in the buggy and go get some cabrito.”

“Norwegian,” said the Irishman, “we could walk the half block.”

“We will go farther and do worse.”

The driver's name was Trevino and the horse was named Jaime. They went out past the end of the town and then they were like a boat in a sea of cactus with only a narrow moon shining on the narrow road. Jaime trotted at a terrific rate, a hundred, then five hundred, then a thousand paces a minute; and after an hour they left the road and went down a wagon road and came to a great barn-like building in the dark. There were a dozen buggies there and two dozen taxis and cars. They went in and the two fetches of the Norwegian followed them.

There is an idea that only Irishmen have fetches or doubles and then only at the hour of death. This is not so. Only Irishmen can see them, but a great many people have them and the Norwegian had two of the best.

While they waited for their cabrito they drank an old essence of cactus juice that had popped more skulls than it could remember. Rows and rows of cabritos were turned on big spits over the fiery furnace which was almost the only light in the room. And Amata came over to talk to them.

“For a peso I will tell you a story, and if you like it I'll tell you another one for the same price. And if you like that one too (listen closely) the third one will cost you only half as much.”

“Mama, tell them the one about las animas,” said Paco.

“That is the second story. I can't be telling the second story first.”

“Well, tell the first story first.”

“All right. Did you ever wonder where all the cabritos come from? See, there are a hundred turning on the spits at once, and there are a hundred places just like this one; and all the markets in town have cabritos piled high. But you seldom see them in the pastures. You may drive ten miles and if you're lucky you may see one old nanny goat, no more. Then where do all the cabritos come from? Once the authorities became anxious and they came out here. They asked Luis, the old Modrego, ‘You butcher cabritos by the dozen and yet you don't raise goats. Where do you get them?’ ‘But I do raise goats. What is that yonder but a she-goat?’ ‘But you have only one.’ ‘When you have a good one that is enough.’ ‘That isn't possible. If she twinned every time she couldn't have more than four a year, it would be biologically impossible. And you butcher hundreds.’ ‘Well, because I'm a poor man who doesn't know it's impossible I've become a rich man who sells a lot of cabrito.’ So they went away baffled. But this is the real story that he didn't tell them. They aren't cabritos at all, they're dogs. A dog and a kid look just alike when they're skinned. You see all the dogs running around under the tables? Well, we feed them the bones from the cabritos. Then we butcher them and make cabritos out of them. The bones of these we again feed to the dogs so we have a never-ending supply and are never at any expense for food in raising them. Isn't that a good story? Give me a peso.”

An old lady came over in a fury. “Did you tell them the dog story? I have forbidden you to tell the dog story. It unsettles some of the customers and they leave without finishing their supper. Believe me, gentlemen, it is a lie. We do not serve dog meat here.”

“Is the old lady your mother, Amata?”

“No, she is my granddaughter. I am enchanted so I always stay young and beautiful. But all my daughters aged and died, and then all my granddaughters except that old crone and she's about ready to go too.”

“Mama, you know what grandma said she'd do to you if you told that story again.”

“Oh, be quiet. She can't even hear us from here. Did you like the dog story? I will tell you another story for another peso.”

The Irishman and the Norwegian listened attentively, and the two fetches of the Norwegian were entranced and crowded closer.

“Well, the first story was a lie. But this is a true story. Those aren't really cabritos, they're animas. Did you know that an anima and a cabrito look just alike when they're skinned?”

“I had thought the anima would be naturally skinless.”

“Well, it is. When the soul is pulled out of the body it is just like the body only smaller. The same four limbs and all, but only the size of a cabrito, for the soul is the body in miniature. There is a place near here where there is an old volcano and there it is very shallow. There are seven brothers named Ibarra who are devils, and they thought of a way to make money. They take the animas and break their joints so they will look more like cabritos. Then they haul them up and load them on wagons. They take them around and sell them to places like this.”

“What do they do with all the money they make?”

“They spend it on whisky and girls. And they gamble a little. Then the next night they go down again and get seven more wagon-loads of souls. Do you like that story? Give me a peso.”

They served the cabritos then, barbecued, sauced, peppered, bursting with juice.

“I hardly know whether to eat it or not,” said the Irishman, “I don't believe I ever ate either dog or damned soul before.”

“Wait'll she tells the next one,” said Paco. “I bet you throw up. Lots of them throw up.”

“By all means eat first,” said Amata. “It is so much easier to keep it down once you have it down. I would hate to spoil your appetite before you have eaten. But it is an unusual story.”

Lundquist, the Norwegian, decided he was eating damned soul, and he gave a small portion to the Irishman who had never tasted it before. And he in turn passed a joint of that wonderful old dog to the airman. And soon they were down to picking the bones.

“The third story as I promised will only cost you half a peso. The first two stories were lies but this is the truth. When you leave here (if you leave) notice that the ruts as you circle around to drive out are not so deep as those where you came in. This is because fewer people and vehicles leave than arrive. You will also notice a pile of old buggy wheels in the backyard and another pile of old tires. This is all that is left of many who came. The last few parties who leave every night do not leave at all. We calculate just about how much we will need for the next night. And to tell you the truth they are calculating now. If by some accident you do leave you will be the last to go. Los hombres we put in one vat, and los caballos in another. And there we chop them up just to the size of cabritos. You can make six out of a man and thirty-one out of a horse. And this is what we serve our fortunate patrons on the next night. Wasn't that a good story? Give me a half peso, or more if you want to.”

“Is it true?”

“The last story is always true until it is superseded.”

They brought them each a piece of bread when the cabrito was completely gone.

“Do not be a barbarian and eat it,” the Norwegian explained to the Irishman who did not understand these things, “that would be worse than drinking out of a finger bowl.” They wiped their fingers on the bread and threw it to the dogs under the table, who perhaps would be cabritos the next night.

And when they left, the old lady bowed them out. “My daughter likes to tell stories to amuse the people and to make a little money. We hope they haven't annoyed you.”

And Amata came to them and told them not to pay any attention to her granddaughter, the old crone.

They got in the buggy and Trevino whipped up Jaime and they left. And they noticed that the ruts where they circled around to drive out were not as deep as where they came in; for always fewer people left than arrived.

They got away safely, the last ones to do so that night. But the two fetches of the Norwegian were not so lucky. They stupidly allowed themselves to be caught just before they could jump on the back of the buggy. And despite their screams they were put in a vat and chopped up to the size of cabritos. And they were barbecued and served to the fortunate patrons the next night.

Ghost in the Corn Crib

“The reason Old Shep won't go near the corn crib is that he's the only one who ever saw the ghost there.”

Old Shep was an ancient German Shepherd dog who had now grown silly and forgetful with age.

“If he's the only one who ever saw it, how do you know what he saw?”

“That's the only thing he's scared of is the ghost in the corn crib, so why else won't he go near it?”

“But he's going over to lie in the shade of it right now.”

“Well, that's because we're here and it's daytime. I bet you never noticed him going to the corn crib at midnight when there's nobody awake on the place.”

“I've never been here at midnight, but I'll find out tonight. What does the ghost do in the corn crib?”

“It isn't really in the corn crib. It's in the little tool room upstairs next to it. He comes there at midnight every night. My brother saw him once and died of fright.”

“Which one of your brothers? They're all alive now.”

“Well, it was another brother: or it was a boy anyhow once. They never did find anything left of him, and they never knew where he came from in the first place.”

“Well, who saw him there if there wasn't anything left of him? Maybe he never was there at all.”

“I forget that part of the story. George can tell it better than I can. But I bet you never have anything like that in town.”

“No. We have a haunted house but nothing ever happens there. I don't know how they know it's haunted.”

They went to get George to tell the story. They were Jimmy Laterdale the country boy, and Jimmy Johnston the town boy.

“It wasn't a boy, it was a hired man,” George told them. “Papa hired him one night and gave him supper in the kitchen. Then he gave him a blanket and sent him to sleep in the room over the corn crib because he was too dirty to sleep in the house.

“They went out to get him the next morning and there wasn't a thing left of him; the ghost had got him. That was the same night Johnny the pony ran away, the old Johnny that's out in the pasture now, we don't ride him anymore, he's too old. And he was saddled and bridled too; that was the spookiest part of it. They found him three days later clear over by Downer Town. The sheriff found him. When a pony is scared by a ghost he always runs three days before he stops.”

“Papa told me that when they used to have livery stables sometimes at night at the livery stable when all the horses were stalled something would get one of them and ride it all night. It'd be all lathered and hot in the morning. But nobody ever saw who got it or who brought it back.”

“There was another one the ghost got. I don't know his name but he had the same name as the dirty hired man. He was a tinker man and knife sharpener who came by one evening. He said he would work in the little tool room over the corn crib by candlelight and have all the knives sharpened and the kettles mended by morning. But in the morning he was gone, and his cart and his donkey, and all the knives and pots and a lot of tools that were up there and some harness. The ghost didn't leave a thing of him. He got them right at midnight. You see, a ghost comes in like the wind and blows out the light. Then he gets you in the dark. And there was another one too a long time ago.”

“Wasn't there anything left of him either?”

“There sure was. There was everything left of him. He hanged himself up there.”

“Who was he?”

“I don't know his name, but he had the same name as the dirty hired man and the tinker man. He was some kind of harvest hobo. They fired him over at Towner's, and they fired him over at Hofmeyer's and they put the dogs on him at Schnitzger's. He was kind of drunk and nutty. When he came here we had a hired man named Smitty then, and he gave him some more red-eye and told him to go sleep in the room over the corn crib. And at midnight the ghost came with a rope and made him hang himself.”

“How do you know that the ghost made him do it? Maybe he hanged himself just because he wanted to.”

“Gees, his eyes were bugged out when they cut him down. He was scared to death by the ghost all right. That ghost made about a dozen more hang themselves up there too.”

“That many?”

“Three or four anyway. You see, when the ghost was a man they hanged him. Somebody lied about him and got him hanged. This was a long time ago. So whatever the man's name was that lied about him, we don't know what his name was, whenever anyone of that name is in the country, something makes him come here and go to that little room. And at midnight the ghost gets him. He has a rope and tells them they can either hang themselves or if they won't do that he'll do something a hundred times worse to them.”

“Why does he just keep it up on the one name?”

“The ghost doesn't know what the man looked like that lied about him, he just knows what his last name was. They all had the same last name that something happened to. It might be any name. It might be yours!”

“But why is old Shep afraid of the ghost?”

“All dogs are afraid of ghosts. Once Papa chained Shep up there with a log chain three inches thick. And at midnight he broke the chain and came howling to the house. There was a furrow in the ground from his tail, he had it so far between his legs.”

Well, they wandered around the place all day, but there was always something to bring up the same story. There was a hammock in the hay meadow by the creek.

“That's where one of them buried himself,” said Jimmy Laterdale. “He had to come down here and dig his own grave and bury himself. He'd have been better off if he'd have hanged himself without any nonsense.”

“How did he cover himself after he was in the grave?”

“Papa said he pulled the grave in after him, but I don't know how he did it either.”

“Let's dig him up and see if there's really someone there.”

“No sir. Anybody that digs down there doesn't walk away from here alive.”

“Has anybody ever tried it?”

“Everybody has better sense than to try it.”

They worked a while mending the little dam to bring up the water level. And after the water in the hole was about waist-deep they went swimming.

“There was one of them drowned himself right here. It looks like it's shallow all the way, but sometimes there's a hole that isn't there all the time. And one of them went down in it. It doesn't have any bottom.”

They went back to the house and loaded a couple of large cans of water on a hay rick to take them out to the fields. This was the last day of the threshing. They still threshed at that time.

The father of Jimmy Laterdale gave them some more details as he cooled off.

“It's about every seven years it happens, and always just on the last day of the threshing. It's been just seven years since we had one. I wouldn't be surprised if we had one tonight. I guess you boys better stay in bed after you go there tonight. I'd like to see you both at breakfast in the morning.”

That night after supper they listened to the radio, and then they all played cards until it was late. On the last pot the rule was always that as soon as one lost his pile he had to go to bed.

And then a couple of hours later:

“What time is it?”

“It's ten minutes till eleven.”

“How can you tell?”

“Jorgensen's red calf starts to bawl at ten. And at ten-thirty the windmill makes a groan as the wind shifts, and that was twenty minutes ago. We can tell when it's eleven, the little Ford always pulls away from Kenyon's then it backfires.”

“I'll go out if you will.”

“All right. We can go out at eleven and stay for fifty-nine minutes and leave before the ghost gets there.”

They went out the window and onto the roof and down a pillar.

They got a lantern in the milk shed and went out to the little room above the corn crib.

“I don't have anything to worry about. My name is Laterdale. We live here and the ghost never hurts us. But what if the name of all of them is your name? Boy, you gotta hang yourself then.”

“I'm not afraid of it. I only believe about half of it anyhow.”

They listened while the hoot owl sounded in the brake, which it always did at a quarter after eleven. They heard the old jack snort in the lot as he always did at eleven-thirty. And when the younger dogs scented weasel and gave voice they knew it was a quarter to twelve.

“We'd better each get one foot on the ladder so we can get down fast when he comes.”

“Will we leave the lantern on?”

“Leave it on? When he comes he'll blow it out and then we can run. Like as not Shep will howl two seconds before he comes and that'll give us time to get away.”

“I might just stay and see what he looks like. I might stay and see how scared I get before I have to run.”

Old Joe the work horse snickered so they knew it was five till twelve.

“Maybe we'd better go now. He might come early.”

“No, let's wait a little while.”

They heard the sighing in the cottonwoods by the water tank and knew that it was two minutes to twelve.

“Let's go. That wind is him and he's only a hundred yards away. We'd better go now.”

And then they heard a hair stiffening howl from old Shep and knew they had only two seconds before the ghost would be there.

Jimmy Laterdale went down the ladder and ran. Jimmy Johnston also started down the ladder.

From here on there are two versions of what happened and there seems no way to reconcile them. Both boys were unshakeable in their stories and they could not both be true. This is what makes the verifying of odd happenings so difficult.

Jimmy Laterdale gave his story.

“You stepped on my fingers twice coming down the ladder so I know you weren't very far behind me. The only reason that I got here first is that you fell down and got behind. Then you went to the milk shed to settle down so I wouldn't know you'd been crying.”

And the version of Jimmy Johnston, which for all we know may be the true one was this:

“I decided to stay and see what he was like so I went back up the ladder. He came in like the wind but the lantern didn't quite blow out. He was wild and wooley and his eyes bugged out like a cow's in the dehorning chute. His neck was purple and black from the rope burns and he still had the noose around it.

“ ‘What's your name, boy,’ he asked, and he sounded like a bullfrog only twice as loud.

“ ‘Jimmy Johnston,’ I said, and I don't know what I sounded like. ‘Let's just try this on for size,’ he said. ‘Johnson was the name of the man who got me hung. They say a noose is like a neck tie, it will fit anyone.’ So he took it off his neck and put it on mine. ‘Now just throw the other end over that rafter and then pull till you pull yourself off the floor. And be careful you don't let go of it till after you're dead. And if you don't hang yourself I've got something a lot worse for you.’ I wasn't scared then, but I was a little bit worried. I threw the rope over the rafter and started to pull. It's hard to pull yourself up that way. Then I said, ‘It doesn't seem fair to make me hang myself just because my name is Johnston. I'm not the one who got you hanged. I wasn't even around then.’

“ ‘My God,’ said the ghost, ‘did you say your name was Johnston? I thought it was Johnson. I don't have any quarrel with the Johnstons. Give me back my rope and get out of here.’

“So I left him there after I had talked to him a little while. But he told me one more thing. ‘Don't ever tell anyone the name I'm looking for. If you tell anyone it's Johnson I'll come back and kill you.’ Oh, I forgot about that, I shouldn't have told it. Now I'm done for.”

So there was an argument all the next morning about which of the boys told the true story.

But old Shep knew. He growled at Jimmy Johnston as he smelled the ghost on him. For he may have grown silly and forgetful with age, but he remembered that smell and he knew that Jimmy'd had the dead man's rope around his neck.

Adam Had Three Brothers

In the town there are many races living, each in its own enclave, some of many square miles, some of a few acres only, some of but one or two streets. Its geographers say that it has more Italians than Rome, more Irish than Dublin, more Jews than Israel, more Armenians than Yerevan.

But this overlooks the most important race of all.

There is the further fact (known only to the more intense geographers): it has more Rrequesenians than any town in the world. There are more than a hundred of them.

By the vulgar the Rrequesenians are called Wrecks, and their quarter is Wreckville. And there is this that can be said of them that cannot be said of any other race on earth: Every one of them is a genius.

These people are unique. They are not Gypsies, though they are often taken for them. They are not Semites. They are not even children of Adam.

Willy McGilley, the oldest of the Wrecks (they now use Gentile names) has an old baked tablet made of straw and pressed sheep dung that is eight thousand years old and gives the true story of their origin. Adam had three brothers: Etienne, Yancy, and Rreq. Etienne and Yancy were bachelors. Rreq had a small family and all his issue have had small families; until now there are about two hundred of them in all, the most who have ever been in the world at one time. They have never intermarried with the children of Adam except once. And not being of the same recension they are not under the same curse to work for a living.

So they do not.

Instead they batten on the children of Adam by clever devices that are known in police court as swindles.

Catherine O'Conneley by ordinary standards would be reckoned as the most beautiful of the Wrecks. By at least three dozen men she was considered the most beautiful girl in the world. But by Wreckian standards she was plain. Her nose was too small, only a little larger than that of ordinary women; and she was skinny as a crow, being on the slight side of a hundred and sixty. Being beautiful only by worldly standards she was reduced even more than the rest of them to living by her wits and charms.

She was a show girl and a bar girl. She gave piano lessons and drawing lessons and tap-dancing lessons. She told fortunes and sold oriental rugs and junk jewelry, and kept company with lonely old rich men. She was able to do all these things because she was one bundle of energy.

She had no family except a number of unmarried uncles, the six Petapolis brothers, the three Petersens, the five Calderons, the four Oskanians; and Charley O'Malley, nineteen in all.

Now it was early morning and a lady knocked at her door.

“The oil stock is no good. I checked and the place would be three hundred miles out to sea and three miles down. My brother says I've been took.”

“Possibly your brother isn't up on the latest developments in offshore drilling. We have the richest undeveloped field in the world and virtually no competition. I can promise we will have any number of gushers within a week. And if your brother has any money I can still let him have stock till noon today at a hundred and seventy-five dollars a share.”

“But I only paid twenty-five a share for mine.”

“See how fast it has gone up in only two days. What other stock rises so fast?”

“Well all right, I'll go tell him.”

There was another knock on the door.

“My little girl take piano lessons for six weeks and all she can play is da da da.”

“Good. It is better to learn one note thoroughly than just a little bit of all of them. She is not ready for the other notes yet. But I can tell you this: she is the most intelligent little girl I have ever seen in my life and I believe she has a positive genius for the piano. I truly believe she will blossom all at once and one of these days she will be playing complete symphonies.”

“You really think so?”

“I do indeed.”

“Well then I will pay you for six more weeks, but I do wish she could play more than da da da.”

There was another knock at the door.

“Honey Bun, there was something wrong. I give you ten dollars to bet on Summertime in the first race at Marine Park; you say it's a sure thing and fifty to one. But now I find there isn't any such track as Marine Park and nobody ever heard of the horse. Huh, Honey Bun? What you do to your best boy friend?”

“O, we use code names. What if all these hot tips ever got out? Summertime of course was Long Day and Marine Park was Jamaica. And he only lost by about six noses. Wasn't that good for a fifty to one? And now I have an even better tip. It's so hot I can't even tell you the name of the horse, but I feel sure that twenty would get you a thousand.”

“All the time I give you money but never I win yet, Honey Bun. Now you give a little kiss and we talk about another bet.”

“I had surely thought our attachment was on a higher plane.”

“Words, Honey Bun, always words. But you give, um, um, um, that's good. Now I bet again, but I bet I better win someday.”

There was another knock on the door.

“How come you let my brother-in-law in on a good thing and never tell me? For a hundred he'll have two hundred and fifty in a week, and you never tell me, and I'm your friend and never persecute you when you don't pay your bill.”

So she had to give her caller the same deal she had given his brother-in-law.

After that she went out to take the game out of her traps. She had set and baited them some days before. She had gone to see five hundred people, which took quite a while even for one with her excess of energy. And to each she said this:

“I have just discovered that I have an infallible gift of picking winners. Now I want you to give it a test. Here is a sure winner I have picked. I ask you bet it, not with me, not with one of my uncles, but with a bookie of your own choice. I prefer not to know with whom you bet.”

Of the five hundred there were a hundred and forty-four winners, very good. So the next day she went to the hundred and forty-four with even more assurance and offered them the same proposition again. And of the hundred and forty-four there were fifty-six winners. Very good, for she really could pick them.

To these fifty-six she went the third day and offered them the third sure bet free. And incredibly of the fifty-six there were nineteen winners.

This was repeated the next day, and of the nineteen there were seven winners.

Now she went to talk money. The seven lucky clients could not deny that she indeed had the gift of picking winners. She had given them all four straight in four days and her secret should surely be worth money. Besides, they had all let their bets ride and they had won a lot, an average of more than six hundred dollars.

But she would give no more free tips. She would only sell her complete and exclusive secret for a thousand dollars. And she collected from six of them. The seventh was Mazuma O'Shaunessey.

“I have given you four straight winners, but I cannot give you any more free tips. We will now talk cold turkey.”

“O, put it in a basket, Katie.”

“Why, what do you mean, sir?”

“I learned it in my cradle. The Inverted Pyramid. You tapped five hundred, and you got besides me how many? Five?”

“Six besides you, seven in all.”

“Very good. You pick them nice for a little girl. But isn't that a lot of work for no more than a hatful of money?”

“Six thousand dollars is a large hatful. And there is always one smart alec like you who knows it all.”

“Now Kate dear, let's look at it this way. I can really pick all the winners, not seven straights in five hundred, but all five hundred if I wished.”

“O hah, you can't fool this little-goose.”

“O, I could prove it easily enough, but that's showy and I hate to be a show-off. So I suggest that you take my word for it and share my secret with me and give up this penny ante stuff.”

“And all you want for your sure thing secret is five thousand dollars or so?”

“Why Kate, I don't want your money. I have so much that it's a burden to me. I only want to marry you.”

She looked at him and she was not sure. O, not about marrying him, he was nice enough. She was not sure, she had never been sure, that he was a Wreck.

“Are you?”

“Why Kate, does one Wreck have to ask another that question?”

“I guess not. I'll go ask my uncles what they think. This is something of a decision.”

She went to see all her bachelor uncles and asked them what they knew about Mazuma O'Shaunessey.

He was known to all of them.

“He is a competent boy, Kate,” said Demetrio Petapolis. “If I do not miscount I once came out a little short on a deal with him. He knows the Virginia City Version, he knows the old Seven-Three-Three, he can do the Professor and His Dog, and the Little Audrey. And he seems to be quite rich. But is he?”

He meant, not is he rich, but — is he a Wreck?

“Does one Wreck have to ask another that question?” said Kate.

“No, I guess not.”

Hodl Oskanian knew him too.

“That boy is real cute. It seems in the last deal I had with him he came out a little ahead. It seems that in every deal I have with him he comes out a little ahead. He knows the Denver Deal and the Chicago Cut. He does the Little Old Lady and the Blue Hat. He knows the Silver Lining and the Doghouse and the Double Doghouse. And he seems quite likeable. But is he?”

He meant, not was he likeable, but — was he a Wreck?

“Cannot one Wreck always tell another?” said Kate loftily.

Lars Petersen knew Mazuma too.

“He is a klog pog. He knows the Oslo Puds and the Copenhagen Streg. He knows the Farmer's Wife and the Little Black Dog. He can do the Seventy-Three and the Supper Club. And he runs more tricks with the Sleepy River than anyone I ever saw, and has three different versions of the Raft and four of Down the Smoke Stack. And all the officers on the bilk squad give him half their pay every week to invest for them. He seems quite smart. But is he?”

He meant, not was he smart, but — is he a Wreck?

“Should one have to ask?” said Kate haughtily.

Her uncle Charley O'Malley also thought well of Mazuma. “I am not sure but that at last count he was a raol or so ahead of me. He knows the Blue Eyed Drover and the Black Cow. He can do the Brandy Snifter with the best of them, and he isn't bashful with the Snake Doctor. He does a neat variation of the Bottom of the Barrel. He can work the Yellow Glove and the Glastonburry Giveaway. And he seems affable and urbane. But is he?”

He meant, not was he affable and urbane (he was), but — is he a Wreck? Ah, that was the question.

“How can you even ask?” said Kate.

So they were married and began one of the famous love affairs of the century. It went on for four years and each day brought new high adventure. They purged for the good of his soul a Dayton industrialist of an excessive sum of cash and thus restored his proper sense of values and taught him that money isn't everything. They toured the world in gracious fashion and took no more than their ample due for their comfortable maintenance. They relaxed the grip of tight-fisted Frenchmen and retaught them the stern virtues of poverty. They enforced an austere regime of abstinence and hard work on heretofore over-wealthy and over-weight German burghers and possibly restored their health and prolonged their lives. They had special stainless steel buckets made to bury their money in, and these they scattered in many countries and several continents. And they had as much fun as it is allowed mortals to have.

One pleasant afternoon Mazuma O'Shaunessey was in jail in a little town in Scotland. The jailer was gloomy and suspicious and not given to joking.

“No tricks from you now. I will not be taken.”

“Just one to show I have the power. Stand back so I can't reach you.”

“I'm not likely to let you.”

“And hold up a pound note in one hand as tightly as you can. I will only flick my handkerchief and the note will be in my hand and no longer in yours.”

“Man I defy you. You cannot do it.”

He held the note very tightly and closed his eyes with the effort. Mazuma flicked his handkerchief, but the Scotsman was right. He could not do it. This was the only time that Mazuma ever failed. Though the world quivered on its axis (and it did) yet the note was held so tightly that no power could dislodge it. But when the world quivered on its axis the effect was that Mazuma was now standing outside the cell and the Scotsman was within. And when the Chief came some minutes later Mazuma was gone and the Scotch jailer stood locked in the cell, his eyes still closed and the pound note yet held aloft in a grip of steel. So he was fired, or cashiered as the Old Worlders call it, for taking a bribe and letting a prisoner escape. And this is what usually comes as punishment to overly suspicious persons.

Katie still used the Inverted Pyramid and very effectively. Mazuma did not really have an unfailing talent for picking winners. He'd only said that to get Kate to marry him, and it was the best lie he ever told. But he did have an infallible talent for many things, and they thrived.

The first little cloud in the sky came once when they passed a plowman in a field in the fat land of Belgium.

“Ah, there is a happy man,” said Mazuma. “Happy at work.”

“Happy at work? O my God, what did you say? What kind of words are these, my husband?”

But in the months and years that followed, this frightening incident was forgotten.

The couple became the pride of Wreckville when they returned as they did several times a year and told their stories. Like the time the state troopers ran them down and cornered them with drawn guns.

“O, we don't want to take you in. We'll report that we couldn't catch you. Only tell us how you do it. We don't want to be troopers all our lives.”

And the time they ran a little house in Faro Town itself. It was a small upstairs place and Katie played the piano, and they had only one bartender, a faded little blonde girl with a cast in one eye, and only one table where Mazuma presided. And this where all the other Casinos were palaces that would make Buckingham look like a chicken coop.

And the funny thing is that they took in no money at all. The barmaid would always say all drinks were ten dollars, or failing that they were on the house; as they used no coin and had trays in the register for only tens, fifties, hundreds and thousands. It was too much trouble to do business any other way.

Katie would bait her money jar with several hundred dollar bills and one or two larger, and demurely refuse anything smaller for selections as she didn't want the jar filled up with wrapping paper. So she would tinkle along all night and all drinks were on the house, which was not too many as only three could sit at the bar at once.

And Mazuma never shook or dealt a game. He had only blue chips as he said any other color hurt his eyes. And no matter what the price of the chips, it was legendary and gained zeros as it was retold.

Several of the larger sports came up the stairs out of curiosity. And their feelings were hurt when they were told they were too little to play, for they weren't little at all. So Mazuma sat all night Monday through Friday and never cut a hand or shook a bone.

Then on Saturday night the really big boys came upstairs to see what it was about. They were the owners of the nine big Casinos in town, and six of these gentlemen had to sit on boxes. Their aggregate worth would total out a dollar and thirteen cents to every inhabitant of the U.S.

Katie tinkled tunes all night for a hundred to five hundred dollars a selection, and Mazuma dealt on the little table. And when the sun came up they owned a share of all nine of the big Casinos, and had acquired other assets besides.

Of course these stories of Katie and Mazuma were topped, as about half the Wrecks went on the road, and they had some fancy narrations when they got back to Wreckville.

And then the bottom fell out of the world.

They had three beautiful children now. The oldest was three years old and he could already shake, deal, shuffle, and con with the best of them. He knew the Golden Gambit and the Four Quarters and the Nine Dollar Dog and Three Fish Out. And every evening he came in with a marble bag full of half dollars and quarters that he had taken from the children in the neighborhood. The middle child was two, but already she could calculate odds like lightning, and she picked track winners in her dreams. She ran sucker ads in the papers and had set up a remunerative mail-order business. The youngest was only one and could not yet talk. But he carried chalk and a slate and marked up odds and made book, and was really quite successful in a small way. He knew the Four Diamond trick and the Two Story Chicken Coop, the Thimbling Reverse and the Canal Boat Cut. They were intelligent children and theirs was a happy home.

One day Mazuma said, “We ought to get out of it, Kate.”

“Out of what?”

“Get out of the business. Raise the children in a more wholesome atmosphere. Buy a farm and settle down.”

“You mean the Blue Valley Farmer trick? Is it old enough to be new yet? And it takes nearly three weeks to set it up, and it never did pay too well for all the trouble.”

“No, I do not mean the Blue Valley Farmer trick. I don't mean any trick, swindle, or con. I think we should get out of the whole grind and go to work like honest people.”

And when she heard these terrible words Katie fell into a dead faint.

That is all of it. He was not a Wreck. He was a common trickster and he had caught the sickness of repentance. The bottom had fallen out of the world indeed. The three unsolvable problems of the Greeks were squaring the circle, trisecting the angle, and re-bottoming the world. They cannot be done.

They have been separated for many years. The three children were reared by their father under the recension and curse of Adam. One is a professor of mathematics, but I doubt if he can figure odds as rapidly as he could when he was one year old. The middle one is now a grand lady, but she has lost the facility of picking track winners in her dreams and much else that made her charming. And the oldest one is a senator from a state that I despise.

And Katie is now the wisest old witch in Wreckville. But she has never quite been forgiven her youthful indiscretion when she married an Adamite who felt like his ancient father and deigned to work for a living.

The Saving Grace

It was a hot and trying day and people began to blow their tops like a popper full of corn starting to work. Mrs. Willoughby had trouble with her seven urchins. Clarence had a misfortune with the grocer, Mr. Buckle. Mr. Buckle nearly slapped his head off for dismantling a pyramid and breaking a dozen salad oil bottles. Clarence, who was eight years old and self-reliant, retaliated by breaking one of the grocer's windows with a rock no bigger than a large man's fist. Mr. Buckle who was hot and irritated phoned Mrs. Willoughby that it was a large plate window and would cost her a hundred and sixty-five dollars, whereas it was a little plain window and would only cost her three dollars. Mrs. Willoughby sighed and tore out small handsful of her red hair.

She noticed that Clarissa was playing on the floor with little square-cut pieces of fine black velvet that could only have come from one place, her (Mrs. Willoughby's) best, worst, only evening gown.

“You never told me not to cut it up, you never did, you know you never did, you never even mentioned me not cutting it up.”

Clementine fell down and bloodied her knees, and then howled as though a couple of broken knees was a great misfortune.

“O, don't be so noisy,” said her mother, “I'll patch you up in a minute. And don't get that blood all over the sofa.”

“Why, mama, you're mean. You're a black-hearted miserable cranky dirty wrinkled-up mean old woman.” Then she howled some more and got blood on the sofa on purpose.

Harold wet his pants but he said it wasn't his fault. “You blame it on me, you always blame it on me, you'd think I was the only one that ever did it.”

Corine bit through a lamp cord and scared herself silly and burned her mouth, and worse blew out a fuse.

Jimmy threw handsful of dust at Mrs. Heller's sheets on the line. “She made such a fuss with just a little bit of dust, I bet she really has one when she sees that. That'll teach her she hadn't better talk to me that way.”

“Now children,” said Mrs. Willoughby, “that accounts for six of you. Let's hope Cyril does something damnable so I can punish you all at once. I don't have the energy to do it individually. Where is he?”

“He runned away again.”

“Good. That isn't very bad but I'll make it do. Go get him. I can't be partial. I have to punish you all for something.”

Then she collected them in the kitchen and murdered them all brutally. It was a shame, as they were good children and brightened up the neighborhood.

When Mr. Willoughby came home he was not too surprised to see the seven little corpses.

“O well, it had to happen sooner or later. I'm glad it was you and not I who did it. I might have felt a little compunction later, as though there were some other solution I had overlooked. I guess the ready-mix men didn't bring the cement?”

“O yes, I was so busy I forgot. They put it right where you said in the middle of the garage.”

“But who spread it?”

“Spread it? I thought it'd flatten out by itself after a while.”

“I told you to phone me when they delivered it.”

“Well, I forgot. I didn't know it had to be spread out.”

So it was there, three cubic yards of concrete piled up like a big ice cream cone and hard as it could get. He could never make a slab floor out of it now.

So Mr. Willoughby did the only thing possible. He slew Mrs. Willoughby in a fit of passion and then went down to the corner for a drink.

The foregoing is not entirely untrue. If the loving mother did not actually slay her seven pretty children, yet she thought of it for a moment, and for a second moment she was sorry that she hadn't done it.

Nor did Mr. Willoughby really kill his wife. He did something worse. Or she said it was worse.

“I'd rather you killed me than talked to me like that. I don't know anything about cement. How did I know it was important to phone you? Everybody makes mistakes.”

“Only a damned fool makes a damned fool mistake.”

But he did go down to the corner with the announced intention of getting drunk. There is documentation on this. The wife and all seven children heard him say that was what he was going to do.

But it was a hot and trying day.

“The reason everybody is mean on a hot day like this,” said Nokomis Talvi the bartender, “it's that on ordinary days there's a film of saving grace over the world. But on very hot days it evaporates. Then the old beast rises up. The only way to subdue it is to spread over the spirit another film which I mix here.”

“I approve that for myself, and I halfway do for my wife. But I hesitate to make drunkards of my children. The youngest ones are too small to understand the use of this thing. They might even develop into that monstrosity, the controlled drinker.”

“Have you tried laudanum?”

“I can't afford it for them.”

Clarence came down.

“Mama says to give me all your money for her except five dollars. She says that's enough for you to drink up. She says to tell the big ape that.”

“All right.”

“You should be a happy man,” said Nokomis. “We who are not married always envy such as you who have wife and children.”

Clarissa came down.

“Mama says to send her two bottles of cold beer post-haste. She says if you can sop it up here where it's air conditioned the least you can do is send her two beers.”

“All right.”

“Not to have children,” said Nokomis, “is to be worse than useless. I am like an old tree that doesn't bear any fruit at all. They will cut me down and cast me in a furnace. It is different with you, you have a mate and issue and a happy home. But I really have no home but this and I see the world from the wrong side of the bar, which is to say I see the wrong side of the world. How I envy you.”

Clementine came down.

“Mama says if that floozy Conchita is here don't you even talk to her.”

“Why doesn't your mother want your father to talk to me?”

“She says you're a no good chippy and you haven't any regard for anything. She says she could look twice as good as you do if she didn't have seven kids to take care of.”

“I think she looks quite nice.”

“She says there ought to be a law about tramps like you even going in bars where married men are likely to be. She says for papa not even to talk to you.”

“You tell your mama I have bad days too. You tell her she doesn't even know what troubles are. And you tell her I don't particularly want him to talk to me. I can pick up better stuff than him in the alley.”

“All right, I'll tell her.”

“You see,” said Nokomis, “they are always solicitous of you. When I talk to Conchita nobody cares but Conchita and she cares very little.”

George Mullendore came in with the sad story that his pocket had been picked on the bus. This made Nokomis angry as he thought it was a dodge to keep from paying his bar bill, and he would not trust him for another drink. Nor would Freddy Fodorko nor Wally Waldorf nor Ozzie Murphy, as none of them liked him. Tom Willoughby liked him, but he was mindful that he had only the remnants of his five dollars and he did not know how long his mood would require him to remain there. So Conchita brought him a drink, but she did it with remarkably bad grace.

George really had had his pocket picked. But the pickpocket who was in a savage mood found only two dollars in his billfold and threw it in an incinerator with four twenties still in a concealed part. Everyone was having a bad day.

Jimmy came down.

“Mama says to tell you if you can still hear and haven't fell off your stool yet to take your time cause you're not going to get in even when you do come home. She says to tell you you don't even live there anymore. She says if you want any of your stuff you can go down the alley in the morning and pick it up, it'll all be in the garbage can. She says you can go to hell in a hand basket. She says to go ahead and talk to Conchita. She doesn't care what you do.”

“Tell your mother that you have told me,” said Thomas Willoughby.

“The sun has been stuck on the top of that tree for an hour,” said Nokomis. “It isn't going to go down at all. It's just going to stay there and burn. Man, I can't cash a check for you. You've only been in here once before. I don't even know you. I wouldn't even cash a check for the Pope. It might be just some joker that said he was the Pope to get a drink. I'll stand you just one. Why don't all you people get paid in cash? I can't keep enough money here to cash checks. I was held up twice last year.”

Nobody was very friendly that evening.

Corine came in.

“Mama says to tell you she's going to have you up in court tomorrow for desertion and non-support if you're not home in five minutes. She says the coffee you brought home is the wrong kind for the percolator, and how can she make coffee? She says how can you be so dumb, you did that once before. She says it was too hot to wash today and you don't have a shirt to wear tomorrow. She says to see if Conchita is still here.”

“I am still here, doll.”

“And tell your mother I will neither be home in five minutes nor in court tomorrow.”

“If I were making the weather,” said Ozzie Murphy, “I would even it out a little. I would have it rain for fifteen minutes a day at an announced time, and I would have nothing but mild days. The Lord goes to extremes in his weather. It is the only fault I have ever discovered in him, but it is a fault and he should try to correct it.”

“If I were rich,” said Freddy, “I'd have my own bar, and I'd surely run a better place than Nokomis does. I'd at least make an effort to run a pleasant place. I wouldn't even let a crab like Nokomis come in. I wouldn't let bums like any of you come in. I'd only have pleasant people. I wouldn't let girls like Conchita come in. They'd have to look twice that sharp to come in. I wouldn't even let me come in. I'd be the ruination of a nice place if I let myself hang around.”

Harold came down.

“Mama says it's all over with you. She says nine years of her life wasted just like that. She says no hard feelings only she's going to take you for everything you've got. She says to have your lawyer get in touch with her lawyer.”

“Tell your mother I don't even know the name of a lawyer and she doesn't either.”

Wally Waldorf was sad. “You won't even go home to your wife. My wife's in the country and I'm lonesome. It never evens out.”

“Go home to my wife then. I don't care.”

“Don't think I wouldn't like to. She's lovely. My wife is lonesome too. She wants to come back after only one week. But it's too hot for her here, she's delicate. I don't know what to do with myself when she's gone. I quarreled with everyone at the office. My secretary went home crying. I'm not a mean man. I'm a good man who has mean days.”

Cyril came down and stood there.

“Well, what did mama tell you to tell me?”

“Nothing. I runned away again.”

“Where are you going? I'd kind of like to run away too.”

“No. I don't want you. You run away by yourself. I don't even like you anymore.”

“You go back home then. If I can't run away with you you can't run away at all. Go right back home.”

“I ran away,” said Nokomis. “I wasn't much bigger than that. I never did go back home. I don't even remember the name of the town I came from. When I was fourteen I came to this country and things have been getting worse ever since. Now I end up with the worst bar on the worst street in the worst town in the worst country in the world. I can't run away either. I've been everywhere, this is the end of the world.”

Then after the hot sultry day it began to rain. It came down hard for twenty minutes and cooled the air. Tempers cleared and the invisible serpents slithered away from the gleaming streets. After that the sun came out clear for just a second before it went down.

And now once more there was a spread of thin film of saving grace over the whole world.

Myra Willoughby came by with her seven children all in clean clothes and shining.

“Come along, Tom. I'm going to take all the children out to eat tonight and I'm going to take you too. We're going to La Scala to have a spaghetti feast, and we can listen to them play the piano. Isn't this a lovely evening? Conchita, you look wonderful. I always say you're the nicest girl in the neighborhood. This is a splendid place you have here, Nokomis. I never worry when Tom is here. I always know he is in good company. Haven't I a nice family? They're all so pretty when they're dressed up. Come along darling. Good evening, Mr. Fodorko, good evening, Mr. Waldorf, good evening, Mr. Murphy.”

So they went out to supper leaving a pleasant glow in their wake.

I Don't Like You

Soapy Seeley always fought the world on even terms, and at least half the time he won. This is unusual. Most men (and all women) accept whatever odds are in their favor and will not take on the world single-handed from choice. Even less frequently will they whip it when they are forced to struggle. Soapy had whipped the world several times, though he had never got it to acknowledge it was beaten.

Soapy was a loose character. The only good thing that can be said of him is that a few people (at one time as many as half-a-dozen in the world) had a left-handed admiration of him. And these half-dozen were not much better than he himself. Except one of them, a very nice girl who got worse than she deserved.

Lawyer Joe Plunkett and Dr. Charles Fell were talking about Soapy Seeley. But if they were overheard it would seem as though they were talking of something entirely different.

“I have often imagined how easy it would be for one person to go to sleep, and to wake up another person,” said Joe Plunkett.

“I have often been amazed,” said the Doctor, “how I'm usually able to follow your meaning. I'm sure nobody else could.”

“But when you are asleep or when you are just going to sleep or awakening you do not seem to have any particular identity. It is as though one drop which is you fell into a big bowl of water which is everybody. Then when you awaken it is a drop drawn out again and given back to you. But you cannot be sure it is the same drop. We may in a small measure be different persons every day of our lives. And is anyone entirely responsible for what he did the day before?”

“Now stop right there. There are now and then times (we should not let it become too much of a habit) when common sense rises up and howls till we hear it. I have never made a fetish out of common sense and I notice that I get along better than those who do. But if only as a counter-balance of better things we are forced several times a day to listen to it. This is one of the times. We are not only responsible for what we did the day before; we are also responsible (and this is what you have in the back of your mind) for what we are to do the day after.”

Joe Plunkett was a low-pressure lawyer constantly assailed with doubts, and Charles Fell was a shrewd police physician. And what they were talking about was toy philosophy. But what they were thinking about was a preliminary hearing they had just attended.

Soapy Seeley was up for murder. Everybody was absolutely certain of his guilt except Joe Plunkett the lawyer and Soapy Seeley himself, and both of these were fairly certain of it.

Joe Plunkett could not identify the source of his doubt.

“There are only a few slight intangibles such as total lack of motive, means, weapon, witnesses, and proof of any sort at all. And against this I have to admit there are some very convincing theories. I am about ninety percent convinced by them.”

“I'll raise you five,” said Soapy. “If I were a betting man (and I am) I'd bet twenty-to-one I did it. I'll do the next best thing, I'll bet you twenty-to-one they hang me. If they hang me I win and you can put a five dollar bill in my pocket. I hate the thought of being buried broke. I might wake up in a strange place and it's always good to be able to buy the first round. And if I live and get acquitted then they'll have to give back the hundred dollar bill they impounded as evidence, so it'll be yours, likely the only thing you'll ever get for your work.”

“Just a minute. As a lawyer I have to look at all the eventualities. What if you are guilty with ameliorating circumstances? What if you get life or time?”

“I won't. It's going to be one way or the other. There was nothing ameliorating about it. As everyone says it's about as savage a murder as anyone ever heard of. I can feel the fury of the people, and it through a half-dozen walls. It's like a shout or a howl. Somebody will hang for it, and the odds on its being me are those I gave.”

So they made the bet though Magistrate Garrity told Lawyer Plunkett it was in very poor taste.

Part of the questioning had gone like this.

“It will simplify everything if you will give us a full confession.”

“That I have already done and in one sentence. And for your benefit (who seem to have a slow pair of ears) I will repeat: I was out like a light and I do not remember.”

“Did you kill the woman?”

“Girl rather, I never thought of her as more than a girl. I don't know whether I did sir.”

“We will have it out of you finally.”

“You can work me over in the back room till I'm dead. But I can't tell you what I don't know.”

“We do not have any such back room, and persons are never abused here or confessions taken by force.”

“Garrity, sir, you old fool, I have been arrested two hundred times plus either thirteen or fourteen during my ten years of residence in your city. And on those occasions I have been belabored in that back room at least twenty-five times, for several of which shows you were present. And the three gentlemen of the copper persuasion who are grinning at me from across the room have laid hand and foot on me quite some several of those times. So you do have a back room, and that is what it is used for. But I doubt if it will be able to jog my memory, for a blank with me usually remains a blank.”

“How did you get the blood on you?”

“I don't know. When I have been on a drinking bout as for the last few weeks I do not usually clean up and I am subject to small mishaps. A lot of that blood is surely my own, some several days old, some still older. It is true that the blood on my hands would naturally cake off and wear off quickly, so that must be last night's blood.”

“How did this key get into your pocket?”

“I don't know. I never carry things in my pockets. I put them in my socks or shoes, or pin them to my undershirt if I have an undershirt, or put them on a string around my neck; but I never put things in my pockets. It seems an irrational place to me. I must have been a long way gone to put a key in my pocket.”

“Where did you get the hundred dollar bill?”

“I don't know. If it's the same one, and you all say it is, then I must have got it from the girl either before or after I killed her. Hers was the only one I ever heard of in the neighborhood.”

“Then you admit you killed her?”

“I never denied it. I admit a high degree of probability in that direction. But if I did I wonder why I did?”

“Where were you last night?”

“Why, by all accounts I staggered out of the Port-In-Any-Storm at midnight when they closed, and was found in a kind alley a little after sun-up. Nobody can account for my actions between; no more can I.”

“How did you get into her room?”

“Likely through the door. She never locked anything. I don't know why I would have had a key. I wouldn't have needed it.”

“And why did you kill her?”

“I wish I knew, I wish I knew. It's the most damnable thing I ever heard of. She's about the only one in the neighborhood I haven't sometimes wanted to see dead. I hope the rope breaks three times so they can keep hanging me over and over for it.”

So the investigation of the crime of Soapy Seeley continued. Dr. Chas. Fell, the police physician set the time of death of the woman, girl rather, Doris Dark, at about one in the morning. This was the time she usually got home. The killing was unexplainably vicious. Her neck was broken, she had died of strangulation, she had been beaten or kicked terribly, and had been stabbed innumerable times. It was as though the killer had done it for fun.

“This exceptional viciousness does not seem a part of the character of Soapy Seeley,” said Lawyer Plunkett.

“We do not even know what his character is,” said Doctor Fell. “Most men who sound vicious take out their viciousness vocally. And all of the sadists I have known, and I have known a great many in thirty years of police work, are mild of talk and appearance and inclined to banter. You will have to admit that Soapy Seeley is not what we might call a sterling character. A man of sterling character is not arrested two hundred plus either thirteen or fourteen times in ten years. And all of the arrests were not for drunkenness. He has gone on any number of violent binges. If he is crossed when he is very drunk he will use any weapon that is handy on anyone who is present. He once inflicted thirty-nine shallow stabs on a poor bum who happened to be drinking with him. He did this with a can opener that fortunately would not stab more than three-eights of an inch deep. He did it in a sudden fury because the bum was taking too long to open a can of beer with it. He has used jagged wine bottles for weapons. He has used half bricks. He has beat up his last three landladies. Any number of times he has been guilty of breaking and entering. He has not been picked up as a molester, but we do not know that this was primarily a sex crime. And yet in a way I am sure that it was, and that this may be the answer to a line of them that curiously goes back ten years.”

The three gentlemen of copper persuasion had not been able to get anything out of Soapy in the back room.

“He always was tough. I can't see how anyone can be that hard after drinking it up for years. It's almost impossible to hurt him anywhere. But today he didn't enter into the spirit of the thing. He didn't taunt us or use the rough side of his tongue. He was kind of absent-minded and we couldn't get a thing out of him. He did say one thing though, ‘After they hang me and I get on the other side I'll know if I did it or not. And if I didn't do it, I'll know who did. And by God if I didn't do it I'm coming back to get the one who did.’ ”

“He said that?” asked Dr. Fell.

“He said that, and brother he meant it.”

And back in the room of Doris Dark a little later in the morning Dr. Fell and Magistrate Garrity and Lieutenant Rich, and Sergeants Alberg and Dowling, and Captain Katz went over the place thoroughly, and they found any number of things.

“I can hear them tapping the nails in my coffin,” said Soapy Seeley as he sat in his cell. “Say, that was a big one they drove in that time. I wonder what they just found?”

It was a big one they drove in. It was a long-bladed jack-knife from under the sofa. It was open and blood-crusted, and of a nice size to have made the many wounds. And there were prints that jumped out at the naked eye. Any doubt as to whose those prints were would be removed within an hour.

Fell was questioning Soapy again in the presence of half-a-dozen others.

“Soapy, when you are drinking, as you usually are, do you ordinarily remember in the morning what you have done the night before?”

“Doctor, there is something wrong with your left eye. It never quite opens or closes. I read once what that means but I've forgotten.”

“I asked you a question.”

“I never remember the end of a night. I've woke up in that alley hundreds of times but I never remember going to sleep there once. It's kind of a foolish place to lie down to sleep. Usually the last thing I remember is having a high old time. Sometimes I don't even remember that. Yesterday I recall only going into the Port-In-Any-Storm and putting my only dollar on the bar for a drink. It came and I said I'll just let it sit there a minute and look at it it looks so good. I may still be looking at it. I don't remember anything after that.”

“I believe you are lying. How can we believe a man who has been arrested several hundred times?”

“I was never arrested for lying.”

“I believe you can remember if you want to. Try to remember, remember.”

“O yeah, I remember now.”

“You do?”

“Yes, it means you're crazy.”

“What means who's crazy?”

“The way your left eye never clear opens or closes. I remember what I read it means. It means you're crazy.”

“Dammit stop that nonsense. We're talking about you. I've decided you are not crazy. I've decided you knew what you were doing. Do you think you can get out of hanging by pretending to be crazy?”

“Nope, never thought I could. Don't particularly want to get out of it.”

Captain Katz spoke.

“Do you know we found a bloody knife with your clear fingerprints in the murdered girl's room?”

“I thought it would turn up somewhere. That was the nail I heard hammered in my coffin.”

“A knife that has been seen in your possession,” added Charles Fell.

“That isn't true. Nobody has ever seen it in my possession.”

“Do you deny it is your knife?” asked Captain Katz.

“I have not denied it. Nobody has asked me.”

“Will you please quit stalling. Is it your knife?”

“Yes, it is my knife. But nobody has ever seen me with it.”

“Will you explain that?”

“No. I will not.”

“Don't you think it's a clincher?”

“It sure sounds like it, boys.”

“It may have been apt when you called it a nail in your coffin.”

“I thought that nail seemed a little big when I heard them hammer it in. But there's something about a nail that's too big. It's likely to split the lid.”

“Soapy,” said the doctor, “we believe you remember everything. We believe you murdered the girl for your perverted pleasure, and we believe she is only one of many. And we know that you robbed her as you have that bill that she always carried and that was almost her trademark.”

“I don't like you, doctor,” said Soapy.

“Why should you?”

“Why don't you like the doctor?” asked Lieutenant Rich.

“I don't know. It's just an old verse I remember.”

“He sure is a smooth-talking dude,” said Lieutenant Rich after they had taken Soapy away, and Garrity and Fell had left.

“It's odd you say that,” mused Captain Katz. “That's exactly the same phrase she used.”

“Who?”

“The lady across the hall. She heard some conversation in Miss Dark's room a little after midnight. ‘I don't know who he was,’ she said, ‘but I think I'd recognize that voice. He sure was a smooth-talking dude.’ ”

“She'll get to hear his voice again this afternoon.”

Lawyer Plunkett was having lunch with his wife.

“Are you going to take the case?”

“I don't know. I don't think there is any case. Whatever doubt there was that he did it has about vanished.”

“But if he was drunk was he responsible?”

“He was responsible when he put down his dollar in the Port-In-Any-Storm for whatever that dollar might buy. He knew what he was doing when he did it whether he remembers it or not.”

“Is the evidence conclusive that he did it?”

“If it isn't it will be. Evidence is like a snowball, it grows and grows. Now that everyone knows what happened everyone will add another faggot to the fire. Nobody reported hearing any screams this morning, but there will be fifty people who heard them before the day is over. Nobody saw Soapy between midnight and dawn, but now there will be those who saw him go up the stairs with an open knife and come back down with it bloodied. And everybody will have heard his voice threatening and hers pleading.”

There was a mean crowd around the jail. They wanted to take Soapy out and dispatch him right away.

“I don't like the sound of that crowd,” said Soapy.

“No, I shouldn't think you would,” said a trustee, “it's your blood they're howling for.”

“O, I don't mean that. If that's all they want let's give it to them and let them go home. But there are too many respectable people in that crowd.”

“How can you tell that?”

“They howl different. I've been in lots of mobs. I used to raise them up for a gang for a fee. I was pretty good at raising a mob. But there are two kinds of them. You can sweep the gutters and get a mob and their instincts are usually sound. But a mob of respectable people is dangerous. And it's nearly always wrong. It has a genius for howling up the wrong tree. Now if I'm the wrong tree, by hokey I'm going to see which way the chestnuts fall and find the right tree. If they're going to hang me (and it might be fun) I might as well give them something to hang me for.”

“You are a little nuts, aren't you, killer?”

“I was told today I was not.”

So Soapy who was a man of many talents began to tear up his bunk to make a zip gun. You never can tell when you might need a thing like that.

Sergeants Arlberg and Dowling were talking to Junie Gogarty.

“You were a friend of Doris Dark?”

“In a way. We had lived together several times. We were closer than most.”

“We have heard her described by a number of persons, known of whom knew her as well as you, as an angel. Now we are suspicious. When a person is too universally described as an angel we always look for the catch.”

“The catch would be a pretty small one. She was a good kid. O, she was a little conceited, and she could be petty, but I imagine the angels are like that too on their off-days. She could be so sweet after she had been mean. And, here's the point, she could be sweet to people who couldn't possibly do anything for her.”

“Like Soapy?”

“Yes, like Soapy. It's easy to be sweet to people who can do something for you. I was surprised when he killed her. I always knew he would kill someone, but I didn't think it would be her.”

“Was he nutty?”

“No, he wasn't. He always knew just what he was doing. When he was mean he was mean deliberately, and that was often.”

“Did he have access to her room?”

“Yes, he used to go there to lie down when he was drunk, day or night. She liked the old dude and she never did worry about her reputation.”

“How was it?”

“Her reputation? O, the boys had a dirty phrase for her, but she wasn't dirty. They just always thought they could go further with her than they could, and they would get angry. But she really was an angel for all that.”

“Did anyone else have the run of her rooms?”

“Only me and a couple of other girls, and a few oddballs.”

“Didn't she have any boyfriends?”

“Lots of them, but none very regular.”

“And were any of them after her very hard?”

“Lots of them, but again not very regular, not the same one for very long.”

“Who was the latest?”

“An old bat. I don't know who he was.”

“Did you like him?”

“The old bat? No.”

“I mean the original old bat, Soapy.”

“Yes I did. I didn't know him as well or like him as well as Doris did. But I liked to talk with him. He was a smooth-talking old dude.”

“A recurring phrase if I ever heard one.”

Another nail was driven in the coffin of Soapy Seeley. Among the unreliable reports that came in there were two which for various reasons could be trusted. Soapy Seeley had definitely been seen mounting the stairs to Doris' room a little after midnight. And he was not in his accustomed place in the alley yet when the newsboy went by at one-thirty. And on medical testimony Doris Dark had been killed shortly after midnight.

Plunkett was having another go at Soapy, although Soapy was more interested in the still-grumbling crowd outside the jail.

“You said one thing today, Soapy. You said that though the knife was yours nobody had ever seen you with it.”

“That's right. Listen to them go. It doesn't take much to get a mob going, I used to do it myself. Whoever got this one up was a cheapskate. There are only three leading voices, and they're all second-raters. Listen to Squinty McDaniels, he'll work at that for eight dollars a throw. I used to always get fifteen. I was one of the best.”

“Yes, I imagine you were. What did you mean when you said that nobody had ever seen you with that knife?”

“I had lost my old one. I only stole that one yesterday. And it was tricky. The only time I ever opened it it snapped shut and cut me bad.”

“When was this?”

“Last night. I was trying to get the cork out of a wine bottle with it.”

“Was this before or after you left the Port-In-Any-Storm?”

“After.”

“But you said you didn't remember anything after.”

“Nor do I except for cutting my hand trying to open that damnable bottle. And one other small thing.”

“What was that?”

“Where I went to sleep, it wasn't where I woke up.”

They were having another go at Soapy.

“You cannot deny that these are your own fingerprints in blood on the death knife?”

“Just let me examine it a minute and I can tell you for sure.”

“Keep your hands off that knife. It's evidence. Our experts have printed it.”

“I'm an expert myself. I took a correspondence course in fingerprinting thirty years ago and I used to do my homework on my own prints. I know them well even if I don't know any others. I could give you independent and impartial expert testimony.”

A lady had come in and sat behind a screen. Her presence was known to some only of those in the room.

“You cannot deny that you went to Miss Dark's after midnight?”

“I cannot deny it since I was seen to do it.”

“Nor that you had not yet descended at the hour assigned to her death.”

“That is not sure on two counts. I was not seen to come down, and I do not know at what hour she was killed. If I were permitted to examine her body I could give you a judgment in a minute. I also took a mail order course in medicine many years ago. If I had spent four more dollars I could now be a respectable quack with a diploma from Apex University of Home Medical Research and Dissection.”

“O shut up and answer the questions.”

“A manifest impossibility.”

Fell cut loose on Soapy.

“You are a phony of the lowest kind. There is a name for it but it would be over your head.”

“Try me.”

“You are a sponger and a leacher and a drunkard. You have never had any regard for anyone but yourself. You will take anything from anybody, even a life, to gratify yourself. You are as sane as a Solon and as mean as the devil. You have committed the most dastardly murder I have ever encountered and you will pay for it to the extreme. You are the most despicable criminal I have ever encountered.”

“Doc, I don't like you either.”

Garrity, Lieutenant Rich, the Sergeants Arlberg and Dowling, and (though he had no real right to be there) the lawyer Joe Plunkett were questioning the lady.

“Did you recognize the voice?”

“Indeed I did. It was exactly the same. There is just no other voice like it. I would know it anywhere. I can definitely say he was the man in the room with her.”

“You described him as a smooth-talking dude.”

“I did and I do.”

She started to leave and they to return to their respective duties.

“It sure looks bad for Soapy,” said Lieutenant Rich. “That about wraps it up if it needed any more wrapping.”

The lady paused on her way out.

“Pardon me, but are you sure we are talking about the same dude?”

When Dr. Fell was confronted he did not pretend mystification, nor did he indignantly deny, nor even whip out a pistol and corner them all as is done fifty seconds before the commercial comes on TV. Instead his left eye which never completely opened or closed now nearly closed. And Soapy had been right about that eye. It meant he was crazy.

“I had a feeling that someone must have known it all along. It was unfortunate, that's all I can say about it.”

“Well, why did you do it?”

“She wouldn't have anything to do with me. She was close friends with the rottenest bums in town but she would never have anything to do with me.”

“How did it happen?”

“I watched Soapy stagger up her stairs with his wine bottle just a little after midnight. And in about a half-hour Miss Dark came home and went up. I followed a half-hour later. I was crazy with a sort of frustration or jealousy or desire. Soapy was asleep on the sofa. The knife he had cut himself with was on the floor and I pushed it with my feet under the sofa half-sensing that it would be useful. But it was not the same, though very similar to the one that was used on her. Miss Dark was asleep in the bedroom. From her purse I took the seldom-used key and the hundred dollar bill that was her trademark. These I planted on Soapy. Then I took him over my shoulder and hauled him downstairs and deposited him in his accustomed place in the alley. I then went back up and lay down in his place on the sofa. I went to sleep for one of the most peaceful rests I have ever had. Just to sleep under the same roof with her was the greatest peace possible.

“Several hours later it became chilly and she arose to spread a blanket over Soapy. I woke up and she saw I was not the same man. When Joe Plunkett told me this morning that it seemed easy for one person to to go sleep and wake up another person I thought he had guessed it all. To Miss Dark at least it must have seemed as though one man had gone to sleep on her sofa and woke up another person.

“She had never known fear in her life. She looked at me with complete contempt. I pleaded eloquently with her for her favor. She never spoke a word; she only gave me that withering look. I was infuriated. I beat her to death and I throttled her, and she died without a sound. Then I knifed her repeatedly with my own knife which was of a size of that of Soapy Seeley. That is all. In a way I'm sorry that I did it.”

And his defective left eye flicked again.

Soapy must have studied his lessons carefully when he was taking the mail order course from Apex University of Medicine, for he was the only one who understood the signs that the doctor was crazy.

But in a way Soapy did not have the last laugh. For the doctor is still alive and well and minds his pleasant confinement not at all. He writes up notes on fanciful medical and psychiatric cases, and he talks at great length to the other patients; for he is indeed a smooth-talking old dude.

And Soapy Seeley suffered an unfortunate hanging two years later when he mistreated unto death with a broken bottle a fellow bum in the after-midnight hours.

Johnny Crookedhouse

“Then you really believe in the law of Intellectual Constancy?”

“I do.”

“You believe that that lump back there has as much brains as I do.”

“He's a brachio — a squarehead. That type usually has a great cranial capacity, I would say 1430 ccs, about 50 ccs greater than your own.”

“Your squarehead is an obvious blockhead. Do you know that?”

“I talked to him about five minutes this morning. All sorts of people interest me. He is what is called a Monday-morning dishwasher. There is a great turnover of them. Countless of this profession, being paid Saturday night, will be in no condition to work Monday morning. Countless others, in little better shape, will appear Monday hungry and destitute and eager to slave a while at dishwasher's wages. He was this yesterday. He may be the other next Monday.”

“And you say all men have approximately the same brain power? How can one be in that position, and another like me — ”

“Have climbed to a mild degree of affluence? I possess an interesting monogram on that very subject by Dr. Franz Hrdka. I will loan it to you. Of course you read Czech?”

“I am a businessman. I do not.”

“Oddly the blockhead does. Though I doubt if he has read Hrdka. He has never worked steadily in his life, and has never learned a trade. He is afflicted with the ills of melancholia, alcoholism, asthma, pauperism, and the inability to hang onto even small amounts of money. When he had a wife he was addicted to wife-beating. He is accident-prone and undependable. He seems without imagination or interest. He has no hobby and gets no pleasure from the world. Yet he is a man like any other, and has the same intelligence as any other man. He would be consequently as able to learn new procedures as the sharpest young comer you have; and as capable of handling any task, with a short briefing, that you yourself handle.”

“That is the stiffest nonsense I ever heard. If I hadn't developed a sort of grudging respect for your views on other subjects I would say you were a damned fool. As it is I will bet you are a damned fool in this. Do retired doctors have any money?”

“If I did not have money I could not have retired. This is the proof that doctors are smarter (within the limits of the Law of Intellectual Constancy) and better moneymakers than businessmen. Businessmen are never either rich enough or smart enough to retire.”

“If you have money I would make you a bet. I would go so far as to give the blockhead a job. I would give him a job in any of my departments you might choose. I would see that he had every encouragement and opportunity to learn the processes and tasks. And I will bet that he will be completely unable to learn.”

“No he will not. We will make it a thousand dollars and you have to give him only two weeks. And the bet is that at the end of that time he will have astonished you completely with his intelligence.”

The businessman was R. K. Random, and the doctor was known as Z. J. Steinhard, which was certainly an odd title for him to go by as he was named Charley O'Malley. These two lunched together on Tuesdays and Thursdays and had done so for several weeks. The businessman discovered a certain liveliness in the doctor's conversation which relieved him a little of the tedium and tenseness of his own regimen and reminded him of the days before he had definitely been committed to the treadmill. Besides there were certain enlivening phrases uncovered here that would come back to Random of Fridays when he had always to address the Progressive Executives' Club Lunch; and this spice borrowed from the doctor's talk enriched his own speeches and pleased him and the other progressive executives.

Besides he liked to be with the doctor, the only man he met in the course of the week who didn't want to sell him something.

Why Dr. Steinhard liked to lunch with R. K. Random is something which we don't know; or rather, we do know, but we damsite aren't going to tell you this early.

The blockhead was named Johnny Crookedhouse. It may not have been his actual name, but it was a near phonetic equivalent of his actual name, and it was the form everyone used and he used himself.

Johnny was not too eager to make the change.

“This is a pretty good job. You see, I can have two meals in the kitchen, and besides I get paid Saturday night if I stay that long. I only have to wash dishes about four hours a day and there's just three rush periods. The only hard thing is shucking oysters, and when I get where I'm not so shaky I can do that better. Peeling potatoes I always liked, I used to do that a lot in prison. No, it's a pretty good job, I'm going to do my best to hang onto it till Saturday at least. If I'd got into something new I might not get along as well. I don't know anything about the Acme Manufacturing Business. I don't even know what an acme is so I probably couldn't make a very good one.”

It took more persuading, but he was persuaded. He left his good job as dishwasher and kitchen man at the Big Oyster and went to work for the Acme Manufacturing Division of R. K. Random Enterprises. This was on a Tuesday.

On Thursday Dr. Steinhard had been waiting only a little while when he was joined by Random and one of his underlings named Hale or Dale or some such hearty name. These were both grinning pleasantly.

“Doctor, this is one of my department chiefs, we've really been having a time. I tell you there's been more laughs in the last two days than since I was a boy. Doc, you're really going to lose. This is like taking candy from a baby.”

“A phrase I heard much in my childhood. Happily it is now nearly forgotten.”

“You tell him, Dale. It's been like a circus.”

“It has been like a circus, or like the old vaudeville skit of the three Irish-whiskered carpenters. Every time one of them swung the ladder around he knocked the other two down. Every time one started to hammer another wall fell. They sawed the sawhorses in two and nailed their own shoes to the floor.”

“It has really been like that?”

“Yes. First we put him on the riemen-mortising machine that any child could run. He had to make only one cut with it. It fact he had only to flip it on and off. It was governed and blocked so he couldn't possibly do anything wrong. But he did.”

“Well, that shows a certain ingenuity, to do the impossible.”

“Somehow he jimmied the aligner and began to make transverse cuts. He said the first ones didn't look right and he thought he ought to change them.”

“That shows he's all for improvement.”

“Then we put him to unloading and piling cylindrical stock. These are grade-marked on the end and he had only to unload them and stack them. But he stacked them all marked-end in where they couldn't be read. I asked him how he did it and he showed me. Every time he picked one up he turned around one-and-a-half times and then backed up to the pile and dumped them. It's the only way in the world he could have done it wrong and he did it.”

“An unusual aptitude.”

“Then we put him to making boxes. These are cardboard boxes that are shipped to us knocked down. You block them up bam, bam, bam, slap three pieces of tape on them, and they go down the chute to the packers. We had one boy showing him how all day yesterday. He finally got so he could do one a minute. The normal rate is twelve a minute. But this morning he was like a duck that had woke up in a new world. He had forgot all about those boxes. He didn't remember how to set them up. ‘I bet if they were the same kind of boxes I worked on yesterday I could set them up,’ he said. But they were the same kind of boxes and off the same pile.”

“In a way I feel sorry for him,” said Random. “He reminds me of a sheepdog that has just lost his last sheep. But Lord it is funny. I think you better put that theory of yours back in the book and pay me off.”

“Not yet. The bet is for two weeks, and I still believe he will astonish you by his intelligence.

They did not meet again until the next Tuesday. The world had received several severe setbacks over the weekend. The Cardinals had lost three straight and had been mercifully rained out of another. Nearly as serious, there had been a spate of light shooting in several of the small counties; and the stock market had had, not a Black Monday, but certainly a Gray Monday.

Random came to the table with one of his aides named Andy or Sandy or some such tweedy name.

“Dr. Steinhard, this is one of my department heads. He is going to lunch with us. It's a good thing I have your little Johnny Crookedhouse to laugh at. It keeps me from worrying about the world. We businessmen worry about the world a lot.”

“A flaw in the businessman mentality. Other people worry about it very little. I had a case a few years ago: one of my patients in a pleasant asylum situated beautifully on the sea. He worried that the ocean would rise up and drown them all. And for a few hours every day it seemed as if he had reason on his side. The ocean would indeed rise alarmingly foot after foot. But every day after it had reached its highest it went down again and never came near to drowning them. So he worried over nothing. It's the same way with the world.”

“Did he get over it?”

“My patient? No. He died oddly. One morning after an exceptionally noisy tide they found him dead in bed, his lungs full of salt water. The only verdict we could give was death by drowning and terror. We never did figure where the salt water came from.”

“Doc, you're kidding. Sandy, the Doc here is a kidder. Tell him, Sandy, how little Johnny was yesterday.”

“Well, he showed up in bad shape. And he wanted to know why they had moved the factory to the other side of the road. When he was inside the plant he couldn't find the men's room, said they had moved that too. And after that he couldn't find his way back to his own department. He never could find it so we put him to work in another one. We thought the rest of the boys were entitled to get in on the laugh. We gave him a pushcart to make deliveries around the plant but he never got to the right place with any of them. Everyone had a lot of fun though. He does a good imitation of a train whistle and he had them all jumping out of his way.”

“That's a talent I envy him. I used to practice it as a boy, but I never did get that whistle down where I was satisfied with it.”

“Dr. Steinhard, you sure are wrong on your theory. I kind of have my own theory of this mentality. I would put our little squarehead down as a half amp three volt type. Then they go up the scale. The average man of the household variety I would say operates on household voltage, about a hundred and twenty. My department heads I select for a little more intelligence; I'd call them three phase two-twenty men. Then us executives, why we have to be up to a couple thousand volts or we're not even in it.”

“And what would you say about me?”

“Doc, I don't know what I would say about you. I'd say you operate on some foreign off-cycle. Your voltage? Well Doc, I just don't know what I would set it at.”

“We finally just gave him a broom,” said Sandy. “You can't make many mistakes with a broom. He did of course sweep a quantity of dust and trash and floor sweep onto a fresh-painted and barricaded area. He complained about the quality of the floor sweep, and it stuck to the floor. I don't think he ever noticed the wet paint.”

“I've got him just sweeping the offices now,” said Random. “I don't see how he can do much harm to a tile floor with a push broom. Still, he may find a way. Well, for a thousand dollars from you I won't get hurt. He hasn't really done much harm and I don't pay him very well. And we sure have had a lot of fun at the plant. He's kind of a likeable little incompetent. I like to have him in the office sweeping out. He can ask the funniest questions. Imagine all that cranial capacity and no brains. I wonder what he drinks in his spare time. He certainly does get shaky.”

“This takes a little time. That's why I asked for two weeks instead of one. A latent intelligence will not waken all at once. But when it does it will astonish you.”

“Doc, you're not serious. You really don't think you have a chance?”

“R. K., I have as good a chance as I ever did. I am not in the habit of making foolish bets. The spark will come to life. It's not over yet.”

“Oh Doc, I pity you. You're a little like that sheepdog yourself. You've studied too many empty heads in your day. I will be sorry to take your money. Sure it won't strap you?”

“I have always managed to maintain the proper contempt for money. It would not discommode me to lose. But I don't intend to lose.”

They did not meet again till their Thursday luncheon. Random was this time accompanied by one of his lieutenants named Stark or Dark or some such intent name.

“It's all over, Steinhard. I had to fire the little s. o. b. Do you know what he did?”

“I do not. I would venture it was something unusual.”

“It was unusual all right. I said the other day I didn't see any way he could hurt a tile floor. Well, I was wrong. You tell him, Stark. I'm still too mad.”

“Well, he had the idea that there were little black marks in the tile that didn't belong there. ‘They weren't there yesterday,’ he said. ‘They look like bug marks. I thought I ought to get them out.’ They were there yesterday, they were there every day, they were part of the design. And you might say there was nothing he could hurt trying to rub out the little black marks in the tile. That's where you'd be wrong. We have in our plant one of the most powerful solvents known. It is usually carefully locked away. We have no idea how he got hold of it. But it ruined that floor. It just reduced that tile to dust. It not only took out the black marks; it took out all the marks; it took out the tile.”

“Yes,” said Random. “I won't come out as well as I thought I would. It will take at least four hundred dollars to retile that floor. But I'll still show some profit. Do you want to make out a check now?”

“No. I don't owe it till next Tuesday. I still haven't given up on him.”

“Well, I don't see how he can impress me with his intelligence when he isn't around. And after this he isn't any fun anymore. I see no point in keeping him. Somebody might kill him, accidentally of course.”

“Sometimes these things work themselves out in the most unusual ways. There is certainly a nascent intelligence there. But how will it manifest itself? How?”

“The only way he could impress me with his intelligence would be to kill himself. That is the most intelligent thing he could do. But even that would not impress me enough to make me pay the bet. Remember, I have to be astonished. His suicide would please me but it would not astonish me.”

“Well, we will see what turns up. I am sure that something will.”

“Unless I read that he has found the cancer cure or been awarded the Nobel prize for astrophysics I do not see how you can win. And if I were you I would not count too heavily on either of those eventualities. I will see you Tuesday and accept your check with my broadest grin.”

There was nothing in the Monday morning papers about Johnny Crookedhouse having found a cancer cure; no more was there an announcement that he had been awarded the Nobel prize for astrophysics, nor indeed any Nobel prize at all. It wasn't even the season for the prizes.

Random arrived very early Monday at the plant as was his custom. The front gate was already open, but the night gateman was not at his post. He had been told before not to go for coffee till the morning gateman had arrived.

In the hallway of the office building old Mr. Foster Farnsworth arose even more stiffly than usual. He was the senior employee and had been there since the days of Mr. Random's father. He came forward with a horrible hobble.

“You really should take a few days off,” said Mr. Random kindly. “It must be very painful to have such rheumatism.”

Mr. Farnsworth gave only a low mumble.

“I do wish you would use words when you talk. So many people nowadays do not use words when they talk. They just mumble.”

Then Random noticed a curious thing. Mr. Farnsworth was bound wrist and ankle, which was probably the reason he hobbled more grotesquely than usual. And he'd a gag in his mouth which in part accounted for his silly mumble. Random quickly released the old man.

“Oh Mr. Random, we have been robbed, ransacked, taken completely.”

“That so? Well it can't be very serious. My mind always notices the most important things first. They have not even been at the door to the stairway down to the vault room. Everything of worth is there.”

“But they were in the vault room. They went down through the floor in your office. Come and see.”

“That wouldn't be possible. There is four feet of concrete there. They couldn't have broken it out in three days.”

“They did it in thirty minutes. That stuff that Johnny put on the tiles, it not only ate up the tiles; it ate up the concrete too. They shoveled it off just like mud. And then they cut through the vault top with torches in ten minutes.”

“Who? Who? Who?”

“Three of them. Wore little stockings over their heads. One of them seemed to be the boss.”

“Well, quickly let's check the yard. But everything there is too heavy and bulky for them to have made serious inroads. Unless — oh no that isn't possible. Nobody could have known the value of our vanadium-molybdenum-zircon compounds. Nobody would ever have spotted that dull-colored junk among those mountains of brass and copper and stainless steel. Nobody could have known the value of that stock, the heart of our process.”

But strangely it was gone. Four hundred pounds of it worth forty-seven dollars a pound. And nothing else taken out of those mountains of metal.

It was a shaken Mr. Random who went back to the main office with his senior employee.

“The insurance will not nearly cover. I had always thought we were impregnable. And where do we start? Who could have known their way around like that? It isn't possible.”

“I believe I know who the boss was. I didn't think it was possible at the time. But the more I think of it the more I believe that's who it was.”

“Who, who, who was it?”

“Well, he moved faster than he used to. And he talked faster. And he knew what he was doing, and he never did that before. But I can just about swear that's who it was.”

“Dammit who?”

“Johnny Crookedhouse.”

“Catastrophe, sheer catastrophe,” wailed Random and sank down in his proper chair before his rifled desk. “Everything gone, everything.”

Then he gave a very sick little grin. “No, not quite everything. One little stash they missed. All through my desk they went, but this they never could find.” He pulled out a sizeable roll. “This I always call my supper money.”

“If you will just pull ten of the larger off of that I will take it now and will not have to bother to meet you next Tuesday,” said Dr. Steinhard. They had not known that Dr. Steinhard was in the room, and possibly you didn't know it either.

“You are a scoundrel. And if it weren't for that infernal weapon in your hand I wouldn't pay you.”

“Why not. I won. Do you not admit that you are astonished at the intelligence of Johnny Crookedhouse?”

“I am astonished that a man of integrity like you would be mixed up in this. And I'd have you pretty quick if you didn't have a pop pistol and I didn't notice a little too late that the phone wires were cut. Do you think you can get away with this?”

“Never a doubt. Nine, ten, yes that's right. You can keep the rest. There isn't much more is there? I never like to take a man's supper money. And how did you ever get the idea that I was a man of integrity? I never told you I was. By the way, that Johnny has a pretty good mind, but I always hate to minimize my own. I assure you I put a little thought into this myself.”

And that evening in a little place down in Wreckville, a place even less accessible to the gentry than the vault room of the Acme Manufacturing Division of the R. K. Random Enterprises, the erstwhile Dr. Steinhard, better known as Charley O'Malley, and Johnny Crookedhouse, and their cronies talked over their glasses of the various gambits and cons, and how there is a place for each of them in their business, even the Pygmalion Clean-out.

The Ugly Sea

“The sea is ugly,” said Sour John, “and it's peculiar that I'm the only one who ever noticed it. There have been millions of words written on the sea, but nobody has written this. For a time I thought it was just my imagination, that it was only ugly to me. Then I analyzed it and found that it really is ugly.

“It is foul. It is dirtier than a cesspool; yet men who would not willingly bathe in a cesspool will bathe in it. It has the aroma of an open sewer; yet those who would not make a pilgrimage to a sewer will do so to the sea. It is untidy; it is possibly the most untidy thing in the world. And I doubt if there is any practical way to improve it. It cannot be drained; it cannot be covered up; it can only be ignored.

“Everything about it is ignoble. Its animals are baser than those of the land. Its plant life is rootless and protean. It contaminates and wastes the shores. It is an open grave where the living lie down with dead.”

“It does smell a little, Sour John, and it is untidy. But I don't think it's ugly. You cannot deny that sometimes it is really beautiful.”

“I do deny it. It has no visual beauty. It is monotonous, with only four or five faces, and all of them coarse. The sun and the sky over it may be beautiful; the land that it borders may be fair; but the old sewer itself is ugly.”

“Then why are you the only one who thinks so?”

“There could be several reasons. One, that I've long suspected, is that I'm smarter than other people. And another is that mankind has just decided to deny this ugliness for subconscious reasons, which is to say for no reason at all. The sea is a lot like the subconscious. It may even be the subconscious; that was the teaching of the Thalassalogians. The Peoples of the Plains dreamed of the Sea before they visited it. They were guilty dreams. They knew the sea was there, and they were ashamed of it. The Serpent in the Garden was a Hydra, a water snake. He ascended the river to its source to prove that nothing was beyond his reach. That is the secret we have always to live with: that even the rivers of Paradise flow finally into that evil grave. We are in rhythm with the old ocean: it rises irregularly twice in twenty-four hours, and then repents of rising; and so largely do we.”

“Sour John, I will still love the sea though you say it is ugly.”

“So will I. I did not say I did not love it. I only said it was ugly. It is an open secret that God was less pleased with the sea than with anything else he made. His own people, at least, have always shunned it.

“O, they use it, and several times they have nearly owned it. But they do not go to sea as seamen. In all history there have been only three Jewish seamen. One was in Solomon's navy; he filled a required berth, and was unhappy. One served a Caliph in the tenth century; why I do not know. And the third was Moysha Uferwohner.”

“Then let us hear about Moysha.”

“Moysha was quite a good man. That is what makes it sad. And the oddest thing is what attracted him to the evil sea. You could not guess it in ten years.”

“Not unless it was a waterfront woman.”

“That is fantastic. Of all unlikely things that would seem the most unlikely. And yet it's the truth and you hit it at once. Not a woman in being, however, but in potential (as the philosophers have it); which is to say, quite a young girl.

“Likely you have run across her. So I will tell it all.”

This begins ten years ago. Moysha was then a little short of his majority, and was working with his father in an honorable trade not directly connected with the sea, that of the loan shark. But they often loaned money to seamen, a perilous business, for which reason the rates were a little higher than you might expect.

Moysha was making collections and picking up a little new trade. This took him to the smell of the sea, which was painful to him, as to any sensible man. And it took him to the Blue Fish, a waterfront café, bar, and lodging house.

A twelve-year-old girl, a cripple, the daughter of the proprietor, was playing the piano. It was not for some time, due to the primacy of other matters, that Moysha realized that she was playing atrociously. Then he attempted to correct it. “Young lady, one should play well or not at all. Please play better, or stop. That is acutely painful.”

She looked as though she were going to cry, and this disconcerted Moysha, though he did not know why it did. Half an hour later the fact intruded itself on his consciousness that she was still playing, and still playing badly; but now with a stilted sort of badness.

“Young lady, this is past all bearing. I suggest that you stop playing the damned thing and go to your bed. Or go anywhere and do anything. But this is hideous. Stop it!”

The little girl really did cry then. And as a result of it Moysha got into an altercation, got his head bloodied, and was put out of the place; the first time that such a thing had ever happened to him. Then he realized that the seamen liked the little girl, and liked the way she played the piano.

This does not seem like a good beginning for either a tender love or a great passion. But it had to be the beginning; that was the first time they ever saw each other.

For the next three days Moysha was restless. A serpent was eating at his liver and he could not identify it. He began to take a drink in the middle of the day (it had not been his custom); and on the third day he asked for rum. There was a taste in his mouth and he was trying to match it. And in the inner windings of his head there was an awful smell, and it made him lonesome.

By the evening of the third day the terrible truth came to him: he had to go down for another whiff of that damned sea; and he possibly could not live through another night unless he heard that pretty little girl play the piano again.

Bonny was pretty. She had a wise way with her, and a willful look. It was as though she had just decided not to do something very mean, and was a little sorry that she hadn't.

She didn't really play badly; just out of tune and as nobody else had ever played, with a great amount of ringing in the ballad tunes and a sudden muting, then a sort of clashing and chiming. But she stopped playing when she saw that Moysha was in the room.

Moysha did not get on well at the Blue Fish. He didn't know how to break into the conversation of the seamen, and in his embarrassment he ordered drink after drink. When finally he became quarrelsome (as he had never been before) they put him out of the place again.

Moysha lay on a dirty tarp out on a T head and listened while Bonny played the piano again. Then she stopped. She had probably been sent to bed.

But instead she came out to the T head where he was.

“You old toad, you give me the creeps.”

“I do, little girl?”

“Sure you do. And papa says ‘Don't let that Yehude in the place again, he makes everybody nervous, if someone wants to borrow money from him let them borrow it somewhere else.’ Even the dogs growl at you down here.”

“I know it.”

“Then why do you come here?”

“Tonight is the only time I ever did come except on business.”

“Tonight is what I am talking about.”

“I came down to see you.”

“I know you did, dear. O, I didn't mean to call you that. I call everybody that.”

“Do you want to take it back?”

“No, I don't want to take it back. You old toad, why aren't you a seaman like everybody else?”

“Is everybody else a seaman?”

“Everybody that comes to the Blue Fish. How will you come to the Fish now when Papa won't let you in the place?”

“I don't know.”

“If you give me one of your cards I'll call you up.”

“Here.”

“And if you give me two dollars and a half I'll pay you back three dollars and a quarter Saturday.”

“Here.”

“I can't play the piano any other way. If you were a seaman I bet you'd like the way I play the piano. Good night, you old toad.”

“Good night, Bonny.”

And it was then that the dismal thought first came to Moysha: “What if I should be a seaman after all?”

Now this was the most terrible thing he could have done. He could have become a Christian, he could have married a tramp, he could have been convicted of embezzlement. But to leave his old life for the sea would be more than he could stand and more than his family could stand.

And there was no reason for it: only that a twelve-year-old girl looked at him less kindly than if he had been a seaman. It is a terrible and empty thing to go to sea: all order is broken up and there are only periods of debauchery and boredom and work and grinding idleness, and the sickening old pond and its dirty borders. It was for such reasons that Moysha hesitated for three months.

Bonny came to see him for possibly the tenth time. She was now paying him interest of sixty cents a week on an old debt which, in the normal state of affairs, she would never be able to clear.

“Bonny, I wish there was something that I could say to you.”

“You can say anything you want to me.”

“O Bonny, you don't know what I mean.”

“You want to bet I don't?”

“Bonny, what will you be doing in four years?”

“I'll be getting married to a seaman if I can find one to take me.”

“Why shouldn't one take you?”

“For a seaman it is bad luck to marry a crippled woman.”

So on the first day of summer Moysha went off to sea as a lowly wiper. It broke his heart and shamed his family. He woke and slept in misery for the foulness of the life. He ate goy food and sinned in the ports in attempting to be a salty dog. And it was nine weeks before he was back to his home port; and he went to the Blue Fish with some other seamen.

It was afternoon, and Bonny went for a walk with him across the peninsula and down to the beach.

“Well, I'm thunderstruck is all I can say. Why in the world would a sensible man want to go to sea?”

“I thought you liked seamen, Bonny.”

“I do. But how is a man going to turn into a seaman if he isn't one to start with? A dog could turn into a fish easier. That's the dumbest thing anyone ever did. I had an idea when you came to the place today that you turned into a seaman just for me. Did you?”

“Yes.”

“I could be coy and say ‘Why Moysha, I'm only twelve years old,’ but I already knew how you felt. I will tell you something. I never did a mean thing, and I never saw anybody I wanted to be mean to till I met you. But I could be mean to you. It would be fun to ruin you. We aren't good for each other. You oughtn't to see me ever again.”

“I have to.”

“Then maybe I have to be mean to you. It's for both of us that I ask you not to see me again. I don't want to ruin you, and I don't want to be a mean woman; but I will be if you keep coming around.”

“Well, I can't stay away.”

“Very well, then I'll be perverse. I'll shock you every time I open my mouth. I'll tell you that I do filthy things, and you won't know whether I'm lying or not. You won't know what I mean, and you'll be afraid to find out. You'll never be able to stay away from me if you don't stay away now. I'll have husbands and still keep you on a string. You'll stand outside in the dark and look at the light in my window, and you'll eat your own heart. Please go away. I don't want to turn mean.”

“But Bonny, it doesn't have to be that way.”

“I hope it doesn't, but it scares me every time I see you. Now I'll make a bargain with you. If you try to stay away I'll try to stay good. But if you come back again I won't be responsible. You ought to go back uptown and not try to be a seaman any more.”

After that the little girl went back to the Blue Fish.

Moysha did not go back uptown. He returned to the sea, and he did not visit that port again for a year. And there was a change in him. From closer acquaintance he no longer noticed that the sea was foul. Once at sunset, for a moment, he found something pleasant about it. He no longer sinned excessively in the ports. Ashore he traveled beyond the waterfront bars and visited the countries behind and met the wonderful people. He got the feel of the rough old globe in his head. In a pension in Holland he played chess with another girl, who was not precocious, and who did not dread turning into a mean woman. In a pub in Denmark he learned to take snuff like the saltiest seaman of them all. In an inn in Brittany he was told that the sea is the heritage of the poor who cannot afford the land. It was in Brittany that he first noticed that he now walked like an old salt.

After a year he went back to his home port and to the Blue Fish.

“In a way I'm glad to see you,” said Bonny. “I've been feeling contrary lately and you'll give me an excuse. Every morning I wake up and say ‘This day I'm going to raise hell.’ Then I can't find anyone to raise hell with. All those water rats I like so well that I can't be mean to them. But I bet I know how to be mean to you. Well go get a room and tell me where it is, and I'll come to you tonight.”

“But you're only a little girl, and besides you don't mean it.”

“Then you're going to find out if I mean it. I intend to come. If you think you love me because I'm pretty and good, then I'll make you love me for a devil. There's things you don't even know about, and you've been a seaman for a year. I'll make you torture me, and it'll be a lot worse torture to you. I'll show you what unnatural really means. You're going to be mighty sorry you came back.”

“Bonny, your humor is cruel.”

“When did I ever have any humor? And you don't know if I'm kidding, and you never will know. Would you rather I did these things with someone else than with you?”

“No.”

“Well I will. If you don't tell me where your room is, I'll go to someone else's room tonight. I'll do things so filthy you wouldn't believe it. And even if I don't go to somebody, I'll tell you tomorrow that I did.”

But Moysha would not tell her where his room was. So late that night when he left the Blue Fish she followed him. It was fantastic for a grown man to walk faster and faster to escape a thirteen-year-old crippled girl, and finally to run in panic through the dark streets. But when finally she lost him she cried out with surprising kindness: “Goodnight Moysha, I'm sorry I was mean.”

But she wasn't very sorry, for the next night she was still mean.

“You see that old man with the hair in his ears? He's filthy and we don't even understand each other's language. But he understood what I wanted well enough. He's the one I spent last night with.”

“Bonny, that's a lie, and it isn't funny.”

“I know it isn't funny. But can you be sure that it's a lie? I only lie part of the time, and you never know when. Now tonight, if you don't tell me where your room is, I'm going to take either that old red-faced slobberer or that black man. And you can follow me, since you run away when I follow you, and see that I go with one of them. And you can stand out in the street and look up at our light. I always leave the light on.”

“Bonny, why are you mean?”

“I wish I knew, Moysha, I wish I knew.”

After a week of this he went to sea again, and did not come back to his home port for two years. He learned of the sea-leaning giants.

“I do not know the name of this tree,” said Sour John, “though once I knew it. This is the time of a story where one usually says it's time for a drink. However, for a long time I have been worried about my parasites who are to me almost like my own children, and this constant diet of rum and redeye cannot be good for them. I believe if the young lady would fry me a platter of eggs it would please my small associates, and do me more good than harm.”

He learned, Moysha did, of the sea-leaning giants. They are massive trees of the islands and the more fragmentary mainlands, and they grow almost horizontal out toward the sea. They are not influenced by the wind; from the time they are little whips the wind is always blowing in from the sea, and they grow against it and against all reason. They have, some of them, trunks nine feet thick, but they always lean out over the sea. Moysha began to understand why they did, though most people would never understand it.

He acquired a talking bird of great versatility. He acquired also a ring-tailed monkey and a snake that he carried around inside his shirt, for Moysha was now a very salty seaman.

He was prosperous, for he had never forsaken the trade of the moneylender, and he was always a shrewd buyer of novelties and merchandise. He turned them over as he went from port to port, and always at a profit.

He became a cool student of the ceaseless carnage of the ocean, and loved to muse on the ascending and descending corpses and their fragments in the old watery grave.

He spent seven months on a certain Chinese puzzle, and he worked it, the only Occidental who ever had patience enough to do so.

When she was fifteen Bonny married a seaman, and he was not Moysha. This happened just one week before Moysha came back to port and to the Blue Fish. The man she married was named Oglesby Ogburn; and if you think that's a funny name, you should have heard the handles of some of them that she turned down.

The very day that Moysha came to the Blue Fish was the day that Oglesby left; for the honeymoon was over, and he had to go back to the sea. Bonny was now all kindness to everyone. But she still put the old needle into Moysha.

“I've had a husband for a week now, so I won't be able to get along without a man. You stay with me while you're in town; and after that I'll get another, and then another and another. And by that time Oglesby will be back for a week.”

“Don't talk like that, Bonny, even if I know you're joking.”

“But you don't know that I'm joking. You never know for sure.”

“How can anyone who looks so like an angel talk like that?”

“It does provide a contrast. Don't you think it makes me more interesting? I didn't know you were the kind who chased married women.”

“I'm not. But O Bonny! What am I to do?”

“Well I've certainly offered you everything. I don't know how I can offer you any more.”

And a few days later when Moysha was leaving port they talked again.

“You haven't even given me a wedding present or wished me luck. And we do need it. It's always bad luck for a seaman to marry a crippled woman. What are you going to give me for a wedding present?”

“The only thing I will give you is the serpent from my bosom.”

“O don't talk so flowery.”

Then he took the snake out of his shirt.

“O, I didn't know you had a real snake. Is he for me? That's the nicest present anyone ever gave me. What do you call him?”

“Why, just a snake. Ular, that is, he's a foreign snake.”

So he went back to sea and left the little girl there with the snake in her hands.

Bonny was a widow when she was sixteen, as everyone had known she would be. It's no joke about it being bad luck for a seaman to marry a cripple. They seldom lose much time in perishing after they do it. Oglesby died at sea, as all the Ogburns did; and it was from a trifling illness from which he was hardly sick at all. It was many weeks later that Moysha heard the news, and then he hurried back to his home port.

He was too late. Bonny had married again.

“I thought you'd probably come, and I kind of wanted it to be you. But you waited so long, and the summer was half over, that I decided to marry Polycarp Melish. I'm halfway sorry I did. He wouldn't let Ular sleep with us, and he killed him just because he bit him on the thumb.

“But I tell you what you do. What with the bad luck and all, Polycarp won't last many months. Come around earlier next year. I like to get married in the springtime. I'll be a double widow then.”

“Bonny, that's a terrible way to talk even when kidding.”

“I'm not kidding at all. I even have an idea how we can beat the jinx. I'll tell you about it after we get married next year. Maybe a crippled girl gets to keep her third husband.”

“Do you want Polycarp to die?”

“Of course I don't. I love him. I love all my husbands, just like I'll love you after I marry you. I can't help it if I'm bad luck. I told him, and he said he already knew it; but he wanted to do it anyhow. Will you bring me another snake the next time you're in port?”

“Yes. And you can keep the monkey in place of it till I come back. But you can't have the bird yet. I have to keep someone to talk to.”

“All right. Please come in the spring. Don't wait till summer again or it'll be too late and I'll already be married to someone else. But whether we get married or not, I'm never going to be mean again. I'm getting too old for that.”

So he went to sea again happier than he ever had before.

When she was seventeen Bonny was a widow again as everyone had known she would be. Polycarp had been mangled and chopped to pieces in an unusual accident in the engine room of his ship.

Moysha heard of it very soon, before it could have been heard of at home. And he took council with his talking bird, and with one other, technically more human.

“This other,” said Sour John, “was myself. It was very early spring, and Moysha was wondering if it were really best to hurry home and marry Bonny.

“ ‘I am not at all superstitious,’ he said. ‘I do not believe that a crippled woman is necessarily bad luck to seamen. But I believe that Bonny may be bad luck to everyone, including herself.’

“We were on a chocolate island of a French flavor and a French name. On it were girls as pretty as Bonny, and without her reputation for bad luck: girls who would never be either wives or widows. And there is a way to go clear around the world from one such place to another.

“ ‘The Blue Fish is not necessarily the center of the earth,’ I told him. ‘I have always necessarily believed them to be a little left of center. And Bonny may not be the queen. But if you think that she is, then for you she is so. Nine months, or even a year is not very long to live, and you will be at sea most of the time. But if you think a few weeks with the little girl is enough, then it is enough for you. A lot of others who will not have even that will be dead by next Easter.’ I said this to cheer him up. I was always the cheerful type.

“ ‘And what do you think?’ Moysha asked the talking bird.

“ ‘Sampah,’ said the bird in his own tongue. This means rubbish. But whether he meant that the superstition was rubbish, or the idea of marrying with a consequent early death was rubbish, is something that is still locked up in his little green head.”

Moysha hurried home to marry Bonny. He brought a brother of Ular for a present, and he went at once to the Blue Fish.

“Well you're just in time. I was going to have the banns read for me and somebody tomorrow, and if you'd been an hour later it wouldn't have been you.”

“I was halfway afraid to come.”

“You needn't have been afraid. I told you I knew a way to beat the jinx. I'm selling the Blue Fish. I wrote you that Papa was dead. And we're going to take a house uptown and forget the sea.”

“Forget the sea? How could anyone forget the sea?”

“Why, you're only a toy seaman. You weren't raised to it. When you go away from it you won't be a seaman at all. And crippled women are only bad luck to seamen, not to other men.”

“But what would I do? The sea is all I know.”

“Don't be a child, Moysha. You hate the sea, remember? You always told me that you did. You only went to sea because you thought I liked seamen. You know a hundred ways to make a dollar, and you don't have to go near the sea for any of them.”

So they were married. And they were happy. Moysha discovered that Bonny was really an angel. Her devil talk had been a stunt.

It was worth all five dark years at sea to have her. She was now even more lovely than the first night he had seen her. They lived in a house uptown in the heart of the city, and were an urbane and civilized couple. And three years went by.

Then one day Bonny said that they ought to get rid of the snake, and maybe even the monkey. She was afraid they would bite one of the children, or one of the children would bite them.

The talking bird said that if his friends left he would leave, too.

“But Bonny,” said Moysha, “these three are all that I have to remind me of the years when I was a seaman.”

“You have me, also. But why do you want to be reminded of those awful days?”

“I know what we could do, Bonny. We could buy the Blue Fish again. It isn't doing well. We could live there and run it. And we could have a place there for the snake and the monkey and the bird.”

“Yes, we could have a place for them all, but not for the children. That is no place to raise children. I know, and I was raised there. Now my love, don't be difficult. Take the three creatures and dispose of them. And remember that for us the sea isn't even there any more.”

But it was still there when he went down to the Blue Fish to try to sell the three creatures to the seaman. An old friend of his was present and was looking for an engineer first class to ship out that very night. And there was a great difficulty in selling the creatures.

He could not sell them unless he put a price on them, and he was damned if he'd do that. That was worse than putting a price on his own children. He had had them longer than his children, and they were more peculiarly his own. He could not sell them. And he could not go home and tell his wife that he could not sell them.

“He went out and sat on the horns of the dilemma and looked at the sea. And then his old friend (who coincidentally was myself),” said Sour John, “came out and said that he sure did need an engineer first class to leave that very night.

“And then what do you think that Moysha did?”

“O, he signed on and went back to sea.”

Sour John was thunderstruck.

“How did you know that? You've hit it again. I never will know how you do it. Well, that's what he did. In the face of everything he left his beautiful wife and children, and his clean life, and went to the filthy sea again. It's incredible.”

“And how is he doing now?”

“God knows. I mean it literally. Naturally he's dead. That's been a year. You don't expect a seaman married to a crippled woman to live forever do you?”

“And how is Bonny?”

“I went to see her this afternoon; for this is the port where it all happened. She had out an atlas and a pencil and piece of string. She was trying to measure out what town in the whole country is furthest from the sea.

“She is lonely and grieves for Moysha, more than for either of her other husbands. But O she is lovely! She supports herself and her brood by giving piano lessons.”

“Is there a moral to this?”

“No. It is an immoral story. And it's a mystery to me. A man will not normally leave a clean home to dwell in an open grave, nor abandon children to descend into a sewer, nor forswear a lovely and loving wife to go faring on a cesspool, knowing that he will shortly die there as a part of the bargain.

“But that is what he did.”

Aloys

He had flared up more brightly than anyone in memory. And then he was gone. Yet there was ironic laughter where he had been; and his ghost still walked. That was the oddest thing: to encounter his ghost.

It was like coming suddenly on Halley's Comet drinking beer at the Plugged Nickel Bar, and having it deny that it was a celestial phenomenon at all, that it had ever been beyond the sun.

For he could have been the man of the century, and now it was not even known if he was alive. And if he were alive, it would be very odd if he would be hanging around places like the Plugged Nickel Bar.

This all begins with the award. But before that it begins with the man.

Professor Aloys Foulcault-Oeg was acutely embarrassed and in a state of dread.

“These I have to speak to, all these great men. Is even glory worth the price when it must be paid in such coin?”

Aloys did not have the amenities, the polish, the tact. A child of penury, he had all his life eaten bread that was part sawdust, and worn shoes that were part cardboard. He had an overcoat that had been his father's, and before that his grandfather's, willed for generations to the eldest son.

This coat was no longer handsome, its holes being stuffed and quilted with ancient rags. It was long past its years of greatness, and even when Aloys had inherited it as a young man it was in the afternoon of its life. And yet it was worth more than anything else he owned in the world.

Professor Aloys had become great in spite of — or because of? — his poverty. He had worked out his finest theory, a series of nineteen interlocked equations of cosmic shapeliness and simplicity. He had worked it out on a great piece of butchers' paper soaked with lamb's blood, and had so given it to the world.

And once it was given, it was almost as though nothing else could be added on any subject whatsoever. Any further detailing would be only footnotes to it and the sciences no more than commentaries.

Naturally this made him famous. But the beauty of it was that it made him famous, not to the commonalty of mankind (this would have been a burden to his sensitively tuned soul), but to a small and scattered class of extremely erudite men (about a score of them in the world). By them his worth was recognized, and their recognition brought him almost complete satisfaction.

But he was not famous in his own street or his own quarter. And it was in this stark conglomerate of dark-souled alleys and roofs that Professor Aloys had lived all his life till just thirty-seven days ago.

When he received the announcement, award, and invitation, he quickly calculated the time. It was not very long to allow for traveling halfway around the world. Being locked out of his rooms, as he often was, he was unencumbered with baggage or furniture, and he left for the ceremony at once.

With the announcement, award, and invitation, there had also been a check; but as he was not overly familiar with the world of finance or with the English language in which the check was drawn, he did not recognize it for what it was. Having used the back of it to write down a formula that had crept into his mind, he shoved the check, forgotten, into one of the pockets of his greatcoat.

For three days he rode the riverboat to the port city hidden and hungry. There he concealed himself on an ocean tramp. That he did not starve on this was due to the caprice of certain lowlifes who discovered him, for they made him stay hidden in a terrible bunker, and every day they passed in a bucket to him. And sometimes this contained food. But sometimes offal.

Then, several ports and many days later, he left the ship like a crippled, dirty animal. And it was in That City and on That Day. For the award was to be that evening.

“All these I have to speak to, all these wonderful men who are higher than the grocers, higher even than the butchers. These men get more respect than a policeman, than a canal boat captain. They are wiser than a mayor and more honored than a merchant. They know arts more intricate than a clock-maker's and are virtuous beyond the politicians. More perspicacious than editors, more talented than actors, these are the great men of the world. And I am only Aloys, and now I am too ragged and dirty even to be Aloys anymore. I am no longer a man with a name.”

For he was very humble as he walked the great town where even the shop girls dressed like princesses, and all the restaurants were so fine that only the rich people would have dared to go into them at all. Had there been poor people (and there were none) there would have been no place for them to eat. They would have starved.

“But it is to me that they have given the prize. Not to Schellendore and not to Ottleman, not to Francks nor Timiryaseff, not even to Piritim-Kess, the latchet of whose shoe I am not — but why do I say that? — he is not after all very bright — all of them are inadequate in some way — the only one who was ever able to get to the heart of these great things was Aloys Foulcault-Oeg, who happens to be myself. It is a strange thing that they should honor me, and yet I believe they could not have made a better choice.”

So pride and fear warred in him, but it was always the pride that lost. For he had only a little bit of pride, undernourished and on quaking ground, and against it were a whole legion of fears, apprehensions, shames, dreads, embarrassments, and nightmarish bashfulnesses.

He begged a little bit when he found a poor part of town. But even here the people were of the rich poor, not of the poor as he had known them.

When he had money in his pocket, he had a meal. Then he went to the Jiffy Quick While You Wait Cleaners Open Day and Night to have his clothes cleaned. He wrapped himself in dignity and a blanket while he waited, as many years before he had had to forego the luxury of underclothes. And as the daylight was coming to an end they brought his clothes back to him.

“We have done all we could do,” they told him. “If we had a day or a week or a month we might do a little more, but not much. We have not done anything at all to the greatcoat. The workers were afraid of it. They said it barked at them.”

“Yes, sometimes it will do that.”

Then he went out into the town, cleaner than he had been in many days, and he walked to the hall of the Commendation and Award. Here he watched all the great men arrive in private cars and taxis: Ergodic Eimer, August Angstrom, Vladimir Vor. He watched them and thought of what he would say to them, and then he realized that he had forgotten his English.

“I remember Sir or Madam as the Case May Be. I remember Dog, that is the first word I ever learned, but what will I say to them about a dog? I remember house and horse and apple and fish. Oh, now I remember the entire language. But what if I forget it again? Would it not be an odd speech if I could only say apple and fish and house and dog? I would be shamed.”

He wished he were rich and could dress in fine white like the streetsweepers, or in black leather like the newsboy on the corner. He saw Edward Edelstein and Christopher Cronin enter and he cowed on the street and knew that he would never be able to talk to those great men.

A fine gentleman came out and walked directly to him.

“You are the great Professor Foulcault-Oeg? I would have known you anywhere. True greatness shines from you. Our city is honored tonight. Come inside and we will go to a little room apart, for I see that you will have to compose yourself first. I am Graf-Doktor Hercule Bienville-Stravroguine.”

Why he ever said he was the Graf-Doktor is a mystery, because he was Willy McGilly and the other was just a name that he made up that minute.

Within they went to a small room behind the cloak room. But here, in spite of the smooth kindness of the gracious gentleman, Aloys knew that he would never be able to compose himself. He was an épouvantail, a pugalo, a clown, a ragamuffin. He looked at the nineteen-point outline of the address he was to give. He shuddered and quaked, he gobbled like a turkey. He sniffled and he wiped his nose on his sleeve. He was terrified that the climax of his life's work should find him too craven to accept it. And he discovered that he had forgotten his English again.

“I remember bread and butter, but I don't know which one goes on top. I know pencil and penknife and bed, but I have entirely forgotten the word for maternal uncle. I remember plow, but what in the world will I say to all those great men about a plow? I pray that this cup may pass from me.”

Then he disintegrated completely in one abject mass of terror.

Several minutes went by.

But when he emerged from that room he was a different man entirely. Erect, alive, intense, queerly handsome, and now in formal attire, he mounted with the sure grace of a panther to the speaker's platform. Once only he glanced at the nineteen-point outline of his address. As there is no point in keeping it a secret, it was as follows:

Cepheid and Cerium — How long is a Yardstick?

Double Trouble — Is Ours a Binary Universe?

Cerebrum and Cortex — The Mathematics of Melancholia.

Microphysics and Megacyclic Polyneums.

Ego, No, Hémeis — The Personality of the Subconscious.

Linear Convexity and Lateral Intransigence.

Betelgeuse Betrayed — The Myth of Magnitude.

Mu-Meson, the Secret of the Metamorphosis.

Theogony and Tremor — The Mathematics of Seismology.

Planck's Constant and Agnesi's Variable.

Diencephalon and Di-Gamma — Unconscionable Thoughts About Consciousness.

Inverse Squares and the Quintesimal Radicals.

The Chain of Error in the Linear-B Translation — Or Where the Cretans Really Came From.

Cybernetics — Or a Brain for Every Man.

Ogive and Volute — Thoughts of Celestial Curvature.

Conic Sections — Small Pieces of Infinity.

Eschatology — Medium Thoughts About the End.

Hypolarity and Cosmic Hysterisis.

The Invisible Quadratic — or This Is All Simpler Than You Think.

You will immediately see the beauty of this skeleton, and yet to flesh it would not be the work of an ordinary man.

He glanced over it with a sure smile of complete confidence. Then he spoke softly to the master of ceremonies in a queer whisper with a rumble in it that could be heard throughout the Hall.

“I am here. I will begin. There is no need for any further introduction. It will be late by the time I finish.”

For the next three-and-a-half hours he held that intelligent audience completely spellbound, enchanted. They followed, or seemed to follow, his lightning flashes of metaphor illumining the craggy chasms of his vasty subjects.

They thrilled to the magnetic power of his voice, urbane yet untamed, with its polyglot phrasing and its bare touch of accent so strange as to be baffling; ancient surely and European, and yet from a land beyond the pale. And they quivered with interior pleasure at the glorious unfolding in climax after climax of these before only half-glimpsed vistas.

Here was the world of mystery revealed in all its wildness, and it obeyed and stood still, and he named its name. The nebula and the conch lay down together, and the ultra-galaxies equated themselves with the zeta mesons. Like the rich householder, he brought from his store treasures old and new, and nothing like them had ever been seen or heard before.

At one point Professor Timiryaseff cried out in bafflement and incomprehension, and Doctor Ergodic Eimer buried his face in his hands, for even these most erudite men could not glimpse all the shattering profundity revealed by the fantastic speaker.

And when it was over they were delighted that so much had been made known to them like a great free gift. They had the crown without the cross, and the odd little genius had filled them all with a rich glow.

The rest was perfunctory: commendations and testimonials from all the great men. The trophy, heavy and rich but not flashy, worth the lifetime salary of a professor of mathematics, was accepted almost carelessly. And then the cup was passed quietly, which is to say the tall cool glasses went around as the men lingered and talked with hushed pleasure.

“Gin,” said the astonishing orator. “It is the drink of the bums and impoverished scholars, and I am both. Yes, anything at all with it.”

Then he spoke to Maecenas, who was at his side, the patron who was footing the bill for all this gracious extravagance.

“The check I have never cashed, having been much in movement since I have received it. And as to me it is a large amount, though perhaps not to others, and as you yourself have signed it, I wonder if you would cash it for me now.”

“At once,” said Maecenas, “at once. Ten minutes and we shall have the sum here. Ah, you have endorsed it with a formula! Who but the Professor Aloys Foulcault-Oeg could be so droll? Look, he has endorsed it with a formula.”

“Look, look, let us copy. Why, this is marvelous. It takes us even beyond his great speech of tonight. The implications of it!”

“Oh, the implications!” they said as they copied it off, and the implications rang in their heads like bells of the future.

Now it has suddenly become very late, and the elated little man with the gold and gemmed trophy under one arm and the packet of bank notes in his pocket disappeared as by magic.

Maecenas went to his villa in the province, which is to say Long Island. And all the Professors, Doctors, and erudite gentlemen went to their homes and lodgings.

But later, and after the excitement had worn off, none of them understood a thing about it at all, not even those who had comprehended part of it before the talk. And this was odd.

They'd been spooked.

Professor Aloys Foulcault-Oeg was not seen again; or, if seen, he was not known, for hardly anyone would have known his face. In fact, when he had painfully released the bonds by which he had been tied in the little room behind the back room, and had removed the shackles from his ankles, he did not pause at all. Not for many blocks did he even remove the gag from his mouth, not realizing in his confusion what it was that obstructed his speech and breathing. But when he got it out it was a pleasant relief.

A kind gentleman took him in hand, the second to do so that night. He was bundled into a kind of taxi and driven to a mysterious quarter called Wreckville. And deep inside a secret building he was given a bath and a bowl of hot soup. And later he gathered with others at the festive board.

Here Willy McGilly was king. As he worked his way into his cups, with the gold trophy in front of him, he expounded and elucidated.

“I was wonderful. I held them in the palm of my hand. Was I not wonderful, Oeg?”

“I could not hear all, for I was on the floor of the little room. But from what I could hear, yes, you were wonderful.”

It wasn't supposed that Aloys made that speech, was it? It was stated that when he came out of that room he was a different man entirely. Nobody but Willy McGilly would give a talk like that.

“Only once in my life did I give a better speech,” said Willy. “It was the same speech, but it was newer then. That was in Little Dogie, New Mexico, and I was selling a snake-oil derivative whose secret I yet cannot reveal. But I was good tonight and some of them cried. And now what will you do, Oeg? Do you know what we are?”

“Moshennekov.”

“Why, so we are!”

“Schwindlern.”

“The very word.”

“Lowlife con men. And the world you live on is not the one you were born on. I will join you if I may.”

“Oeg, you have a talent for going to the core of the apple.”

For when a man (however unlikely a man) shows real talent, then the Wreckville bunch have to recruit him. They cannot have uncontrolled talent running loose in the commonalty of mankind.

Live It Again

It was the first morning of the year, no matter what year. Not that the year wasn't important (it was), but there is some argument as to just what year was dawning and we are not going to take sides in the argument.

Harry Henshaw woke to some degree of suffering and a total lack of clarity. He did not remember everything about the night before; for the moment he did not remember anything about it. But this was not so unusual for Harry as for most people.

He grinned when he thought about it. He had a grin that a little agony could not seriously mar.

“Think of all the poor devils who only go through this once a year. Those who are unaccustomed to suffering suffer the worst.”

For Harry was accustomed to suffering, going through this routine several times a week. Partly for this reason he was known as Hangover Harry.

But he knew enough to be instantly up and about. If he stayed in bed when he felt like this he would be spending most of his life in bed. He got the papers, the Star and the Times, and opened them while he rubbed his face and thought about shaving.

There was something odd about the papers that he could not at first identify. The front pages of morning newspapers on the first day of the year are commonly very similar.

“There was a fire in a club in Springfield last night. That's peculiar. A year ago they also had a New Year's Eve fire there.”

And then he saw a small item about a prominent man predicting a very prosperous year for country and city. The unusual thing about this was that he knew the man had been dead for eight months. He looked at the date on the Star. Then he looked at the date on the Times. They were the same.

He phoned Carl Crump. Carl was one of his best friends, though he hated him. It was funny that the only people he hated were a few of his best friends. He liked almost everybody else.

“Carl, were all the printers in town drunk last night?”

“I couldn't answer that. I don't know any printers and you are one of the few drunks I know. Likely they were. As the Bible says, ‘What is that to Thee and me?’ ”

“Carl, the newspapers on my step this morning were one year old. I am in a vague mood, but I doubt if drunken printers is the answer. You are the only completely brainless practical joker of my acquaintance. Did you do this?”

“I haven't even been out of the house. Your papers really read January 1, 1960?”

“Of course they don't. I said they were one year old, not two years old. They read January 1, 1961.”

“But Harry, that is today. This is the first day of 1961.”

“Carl, all of last year was 1961. This is 1962.”

“Harry, go back to bed. You will feel better when you wake up.”

“Do one thing Carl. Do you have your paper there? Look at the front page of the Star, the bottom of the seventh column. Does old George Grindle predict a wonderful year for the city and the country?”

“Of course he does. He does that every year. What is so odd about that?”

“Only that George Grindle is dead.”

“O my God, Harry, when did he die? Was it on the early news broadcast?”

“Unless I am crazy (and I think I am) you and I together attended his funeral some months ago. Yes, George, I think I will go back to bed for a little while. Good bye.”

Carl Crump howled like a maniac when he hung up the phone — hawnk — hawnk — hawnk. That was the way he laughed, and it was quite an ordeal to those around him.

“He fell for it. Boy is he worried! He fell right into it! He'll think he's going crazy the more he thinks of it. I hope he was as drunk as I think he was. He could get the DTs over a thing like this. Boy, am I hot when I'm hot!”

“I think it's very mean and childish to keep two newspapers a whole year just to play a joke on poor Harry when you know he's feeling bad,” said his wife Margaret. “I think most practical jokes are mean.”

“O, you're as big a crock as he is. I remember when you were still married to him before you got smart and left him for me; when I sent you a fake note that he was having an affair with his secretary and you made him fire her. I can still see her face when she came down those stairs after she'd been sacked. She was one lost loon. She didn't know what hit her. I laughed for a week.”

“Yes, I imagine you did.”

“I remember another one I pulled on Harry. He worked for old Hockheimer then. Hock got on me for stealing information from him and said we'd go to criminal court unless I told him who was leaking it to me. I told him it was Harry. Boy, Harry looked like he was going to cry after he had the can tied on him. That was the last good job he ever had.”

“Yes, that was the last good job he ever had,” said Margaret.

“And when he came to work for me I only paid him slave wages. And I still had my spy inside Hockheimer's office. Boy, that was rich.”

“Yes, for you it worked out richly.”

“It's time to put the needle in him again. A joke isn't any good until you milk it.”

He phoned Harry Henshaw.

“Harry, I hate to bother you when you're feeling bad. But if your mind's slipped a cog I have to protect myself. You do remember our bet on the bowl game today?”

“Certainly, three dollars. I'll pay you if I lose.”

“Three dollars! You can't get away with that. You bet three hundred dollars on Indiana over Arizona State.”

“But, Carl, Carl, that was last year.”

“We bet yesterday, I admit that was last year. Are you trying to weasel out of it?”

“But Carl, they played that game a year ago today. I lost and I paid you. Neither of those teams is playing today.”

“Don't you pull that idiot stuff on me. You look in the paper and see who's playing.”

“All right, Carl, if I lose on that game again I'll pay you again. I'm going back to bed.”

“Boy, I've got him where he's going to blow his top!” howled Carl. “I remember when he left me to try to go in business for himself. I wrote all the suppliers that he was an alcoholic and they'd be crazy to give him credit. And when he went around to see them they all told him they'd heard he was one. ‘I am?’ he would say. ‘I am?’ And the first thing you knew he was. That's when he really started on the stuff.”

“Yes,” said Margaret. “That's when he really started on the stuff.”

Carl was delighted with himself as he walked around the room rubbing his hands.

“I remember a year ago when you wrote me that note that you were leaving me and going back to him. I phoned him that you had been brooding over the years you wasted on him and had decided to shoot him. I said you were carrying a pistol in your muff. You remember that silly muff you had last year, you had it when you went to his place. He ran down the street when he saw you coming yelling ‘Don't shoot, Margaret, don't shoot.’ He really had the DTs for a while after that. And I'll never forget the puzzled look on your face when you came back here. I laughed for a week.”

“You always do. But I don't remember the incident.”

“How could you remember it? I never let you forget it. That note, boy was that a sappy note you wrote!”

“I don't believe I remember the note, Carl, how did it go?”

She was fiddling at her desk with Christmas and New Years cards and writing answers and acknowledgments of gifts.

“Not remember the note! Why for six months you turned white every time I read it back to you. You sure look funny when you turn white like that. I nearly laughed myself to death.”

“Do I look funny when I turn white, Carl? But I don't seem to remember that note. How did it go?”

“You wrote: ‘Carl, I am leaving you and going back to Harry.’ Boy, were you nutty when you wrote that! You wrote ‘I realize how you have wronged him, and how terribly I have wronged him. And that laugh of yours, Carl, they send people to Hell for laughing like that.’ Hawnk hawnk hawnk, is that the laugh you mean, Margaret? Boy, are you ever a dope!”

“Why, how in the world could you know I wrote that since I have just finished writing it?”

“Why, that's it there! Just finished writing it! Look at it. You can tell by looking at it that it's a year old. Look, you've even dated it, January 1, 1961.”

“That is today, Carl. Only a little while ago I heard you tell Harry that was the date.”

“Where are you going, Margaret? Are you going out?”

“The note tells you, Carl. I'm going back to Harry.”

“No, no, Margaret, that was last year. Don't you remember how I tricked that loose-screw and he ran away from you? Margaret, don't go.”

After a while he phoned up Harry Henshaw.

“Harry, Margaret is as nutty as you are. She thinks she's going back to you. Hawnk hawnk. Look Harry, I'd be out when she comes. There's no telling what a nutty woman may do when she's excited. Wait, Harry, don't hang up on me. Harry! Harry!”

The Vanquished

“Which ones were the vanquished?” asked Clarence. “Did they win or lose?”

“Why, I guess they won part of the time and lost part of the time,” said Myra his mother. “I don't place those boys at all. Ask your father.”

“He's as dumb as you are. I bet I'm the only boy in the class that has a dumb father and mother both. A lot of them have one but not both.”

“I don't know why they put words like that in a book for little boys anyhow.”

“What do you mean For Little Boys? This is a Third Grade Reader!”

“I know what it means,” said Clarissa. “It means go away and not be there any more.”

Clarissa was seven and Clarence was nine.

“That's something else. I guess we'll all be dumb if no one knows anything in this family.”

“Tom, tell your son what vanquished means.”

“I don't know what it means. I remember one afternoon the Bearcats got vanquished. They couldn't run and they couldn't pass. It has something to do with rushing the passer, I think.”

“This is about soldiers. It must be a different word.”

“Find out, Tom, you don't want your children to grow up ignorant.”

But Tom wasn't heard from for a while.

“Where did that man go? I thought he was going to find out what that word meant.”

“Mama, he vanquished down to the bar on the corner,” said Clarissa. “I tried to tell you that's what it meant.”

Tom Willoughby went down to the Plugged Nickel.

“Since my oldest boy's in the third grade I have an awful time keeping up. What does vanquished mean?”

“I just vanquished four Cuba Libres,” said Conchita. “But the next one is likely to vanquish me. That's an illustration.”

“I don't get it.”

“What it means,” said Nokomis the bar man, “is that you don't let someone come in a place. Like I vanquished Punchy McGonigal from the bar and now he can't come in anymore unless he stops punching the people.”

“What it means,” said Ozzie Murphy, “is like you have the hop on a fellow, you have an a-vanquish over him.”

“What it means,” said the stranger in the black hat, “is that you are all a crowd of dummies.”

This made Tom Willoughby mad, but he didn't know how mad to get because he didn't know the stranger very well. The stranger was named Duke Lucas. The men on the next street called him Luke the Duke, but nobody here in the Plugged Nickel knew him well enough to call him that. He was one of that tough-looking bunch of men (sinister Myra Willoughby called them) who obtained in the Silver Dollar Bar.

The Plugged Nickel is only a block from the Silver Dollar, but spiritually they are worlds apart. Nokomis ran a modest bar for modest men. The only tough man who ever came into the Plugged Nickel was Hodl Oskanian the con man from Wreckville, and he was quiet and peaceful; it wasn't his fault that he could whip any man in town. But now the Duke had started to come in, though he was still a stranger.

Tom Willoughby was mad enough that he had to say something.

“Would you please repeat that remark,” he said.

“I said you were all a crowd of dummies. What's the matter? Is there something wrong with your ears besides their looking like a pair of wings?”

Tom Willoughby started again. “Would you please repeat — ”

“You already said that to him,” said Conchita.

“You can't call me a dummy,” said Tom. “And you can't call my friends dummies. We can call each other that if we want to, but you can't call us that.”

“Since when you need a license to call a dummy a dummy?”

Tom Willoughby talked aside to Ozzie Murphy. “Is that man really tough?”

“I don't know if he is or not, Tom. I know you're not. Be better you leave him alone.”

Tom talked to Nokomis the bar man. “How big is he when he stands up? I never saw him standing up. He's always slumped over that table.”

“He isn't much bigger than you are, Tom. Maybe about a head taller. But I can tell you something, Tom.”

“Tell me.”

“If you really want to find out what that word means he can teach you.”

Tom had the feeling that everyone in the room was watching him. All of them were looking at him except Luke the stranger. Tom knew what that look meant, but he didn't know the word for it. It is a terrible thing to be looked at like that and it works havoc on the interior of a man. There is a little gland no bigger than a pin head that secretes into the mainstream and sets the whole body to trembling. The heart manufactures new courage and pumps it around; then it hits the spleen and turns green again. The limbs are unstrung and the nose itches. To be scared and mad at the same time brings on nervous complications.

“I don't like your looks,” said Tom to the stranger.

“You have to like my looks,” said Duke the stranger, “as you're not able to change them. But I am not so limited. I can change yours. If you open your mouth once more I'll unhinge your jaw for you and you won't be able to close it.”

Tom was cowed. Nokomis the bar man was looking at him. Conchita was looking at him. Ozzie Murphy was looking at him and so were Freddy Fodorka and Wally Waldorf. They were looking at him with contempt. And he was scared to death and his teeth rattled in his head. A red flush spread over him like a tent and he hid inside it. This was the bottom. This was as low as you could go.

Then he realized that someone else was watching, and he jerked two ways at once. His nerves wouldn't stand much more complicating, but after all these years he always knew when his wife was looking at him.

She spoke from the door of the tavern. “Well hit him, Tom, and let's go home. You know we've got to help the children with their homework.”

She thought Tom was going to hit the Duke! She'd been married to him for ten years and she didn't even know that he was afraid of his shadow. That beautiful red-headed witch, that scatter-brained scarlet-headed woman, that perpetual delight and mystery and exasperation didn't even know that her own husband was a sniveling coward, a low-class craven, a creature that really didn't have any right to walk on two legs. She never had known it, he never had let her know it, she never had caught on. And now she thought that Tom was going to hit the Duke!

Tom hit the Duke.

The Duke unhinged Tom's jaw just as he said he would and Tom was stretched out flat as a dead man.

“My you look funny with your jaw out of place, Tom,” said Myra. “Here, let me snap it back for you. There. My, I bet it'll be sore. Goodness that was a hard punch he hit you with. Well, hit him again, Tom, and put him away, and let's go home.”

Tom got up wobbly and hit the Duke again. The woman at his side was like a red flame and her misunderstanding was his perpetual triumph. The Duke flattened him again and the red flame was inside his head.

“You shouldn't let him keep knocking you down,” said Myra, “and stop playing with him. We have to help the children with their homework. Well get up and knock him down and let's go home.”

Tom must have been raised up by an invisible angel, for he could not have risen by himself. And once more he thudded a soft fist into the face of the Duke.

The Duke shook his head in puzzlement. “Lady, does this whelp belong to you?”

“My husband Tom. Have you had enough?”

“Lady, I've had enough. I couldn't hit him again. I'd have to turn in my license in the human race.”

The Duke shook his head again and walked out of the Plugged Nickel.

“They don't fool around with my Tom very long,” said Myra proudly. “But Tom you should have hit him real hard the first time and not fooled around and got your shirt all bloody.”

“Did I vanquish him?” asked Tom.

“Yes, Tom, you did,” said Nokomis. “It was a little odd the way you did it, but you vanquished him.”

“Good night everybody,” said Myra, and she took Tom home.

“There's one man whose wife really misunderstands him,” said Conchita, “and is he ever glad of it!”

“We found out what that word means, Clarence,” said Myra. “When you vanquish someone you whip them.”

“That's what I thought. I know the next three words. But what's a protagonist? Is he a good people or a bad people?”

“Don't ask them, they don't know,” said Clarissa. “He doesn't have to be either of those things. He's a man that's married to an antagonist. If you'd ask me these things first you'd be a lot smarter and we could all save time.”

Bridlegoose

Old Benjamin Bridlegoose was going to sue the Willoughbys. He was going to sue them because their puppy kept him awake nights. He was going to sue them for five hundred dollars for five nights.

Tom Willoughby was scared. “Do we have five hundred dollars, Myra?”

“You know we don't. We don't even have a dollar and eighty cents to pay the paper boy. He's been back three times. Why don't you ask your boss for a raise again?”

She said this last very pointedly. Wally Waldorf grinned, partly because he was Tom's boss, and half of the point was against him.

“Go ahead and ask, Tom. You know how much good it does you. Those are fine speeches you make up for him, Myra, but he gets mixed up on the lines. No, I don't see where you're going to get the money. It'll cost you a thousand dollars at least.”

“But the suit is only for five hundred. Couldn't we just settle for that out of court, save the costs?”

“No. He likes to sue people. It makes him mad when people settle out of court. He'll just think up something else to sue you for.”

“But can he really collect? The puppy doesn't bark very often.”

“Do you know how often? No? Well, he does. He has an electronic counter on his back porch.”

“Well, he didn't bark very loud.”

“Do you know how loud? He will know. He also has a decibel recorder.”

“If his sleep's worth a hundred dollars a night he ought to sleep all the time,” said Tom. “He'd be worth three hundred dollars every twenty-four hours. Are you sure he can win a silly suit like that?”

“It doesn't matter whether he wins or not. If he loses he'll sue you for something else. The first three times he sued me he lost. But after that he won four straight. He wins more than he loses. He's won over a thousand in his life. He has a pretty big house and a pretty big bank account and he made it from suing people like you.”

Myra told Tom to watch the kids, and she left the men and went down to the Plugged Nickel.

“Bridlegoose is going to sue us,” she told Nokomis, the bar man.

“Why should you be any exception. He sued Ozzie Murphy. He said Mrs. Murphy's sunbathing in the backyard excited him. He said he was an old man and this raised his blood pressure beyond the danger point. And he collected.”

“I don't see how Mrs. Murphy could raise anybody's blood pressure. I could, but I don't see how she could.”

“I agree with you, Myra, but he collected. He sued Freddy Fodorko because the crabgrass spread across the Fodorko yard to the Bridlegoose yard. He sued George Mullendorf because the fumes from his trash burner made his (Bridlegoose's) tropical fish ill. He sued Conchita for cooking with garlic, said it debased the scent of his African violets and depreciated them for the flower show. He sued Blanche Manners because her apple tree mated with his apple tree and destroyed the quality. She not only had to pay damages but she had to cut down her tree and post bond that she would never replant. He sued Vera Verble for throwing fish bones in her garbage; said they were a danger to his cat who might swallow them. And he collected. ‘What am I supposed to do?’ Vera asked the judge. ‘Eat the bones myself?’

‘I guess you'd better,’ he said. ‘It looks like your best bet.’ Of course these are only the suits he wins. You never hear about the ones he loses.”

“But why do the judges favor him?”

“They figure they'll live longer that way. Every third suit he launches is for debarment, mistrial or juridical prejudice, and they don't like to be on the receiving end of a suit. Once I tried to kid him out of suing. I told him about the country crank in one of Conan Doyle's stories who sued the local archaeologist for exhuming a prehistoric man without getting the consent of the next of kin. Bridlegoose's eyes jumped clear out of his head. ‘Why didn't I think of that before?’ he said. ‘By golly, I'll do it too.’ He instituted a number of suits against Universities, Foundations, and Scientific Societies the next day.”

“Did he win?”

“In the story I don't think so. Bridlegoose? Yes, he won in several states and in Yucatan.”

“How could I get a thousand dollars?”

“You could sell your children to medical school for dissection. You could sell your car and your wedding ring. You could hock Tom's overcoat, it's only three months till spring. You could auction all the furniture out of your house. That'd still leave about nine hundred dollars to go, though. I don't know where you'll get it, Myra.”

“How long does it take to learn to be a lawyer?”

“Five or six years.”

“Isn't there any way to do it quicker?”

“Oh yes, the smarter you are the faster you can learn it.”

“It shouldn't take me very long,” said Myra.

Myra floated a three dollar loan. She then went to Duffy's secondhand bookstore and antique shop and made a purchase. She bought the entire Handy Andy Home Library. This consisted of Proverbs and Epigrams and One Hundred After-Dinner Speeches for the Busy Executive, New Speller and Word Guide with Letter Writer and Book of Etiquette, Household Ready Reckoner and Arithmetic Made Easy for the Average Man, Home Legal Advisor with Road Atlas and First Aid Book: What to Do till the Doctor Comes combined in one volume. Myra wanted only the last book but Duffy would not break the set. She put out a dollar and twenty cents for the four of them and still had a dollar eighty left for the paper boy.

Friday morning was always Bridlegoose Morning in Preliminary Hearing Court. This had long been an absolute necessity. The eight or ten suits which he had initiated during the week would be read then to the quaking victims, and to the arrogant Benjamin Bridlegoose. He was in his glory then; he was always in his glory.

The tired judge read the listings. He was always tired on Friday mornings; he awoke tired and full of dread of the perpetual Bridlegoose business.

“Bridlegoose vs. Archer, Bridlegoose vs. Baily, Bridlegoose vs. Castlereigh, Bridlegoose vs. Gay, Bridlegoose vs. Erskine and Evans, Bridlegoose vs. Herrington, Bridlegoose vs. Johnson and Johnson, Bridlegoose vs. Langtry and Obershaw, Bridlegoose vs. Willoughby.”

Here the judge took a deep breath and the victims of Bridlegoose simmered in angry agony. Then he began once more.

“Willoughby vs. Bridlegoose A, Willoughby vs. Bridlegoose B, Willoughby vs. Bridlegoose C sub one and sub two, provisional alternate suits, Willoughby vs. Bridlegoose D.”

“What, What, What?” asked Bridlegoose.

“It's a long list,” said the judge. “Please don't make me repeat. Willoughby vs. Bridlegoose E, F, & G, three closely connected by separate suits. Willoughby, Willoughby, and Willoughby, as being minors undertaken by Willoughby and Willoughby vs. Bridlegoose.”

“What is that last one? I want to know why they are suing me. Nobody ever sues me.”

“That last one is briefly a joint suit of Clarence Willoughby aged nine, Clarissa Willoughby aged eight, and Clementine Willoughby aged seven for compensation of one thousand dollars each for damages physical and mental received on the fifteenth instant on being chased from the yard of Benjamin Bridlegoose in a state of terror and pursuit, in the ensuing flight Clementine Willoughby falling violently to the sidewalk and skinning knee or knees, the scab on one now clearly visible four days later; for which incident also Clarissa Willoughby was subjected to parental displeasure, trepidation of mind, one word that I can't read, and physical abridgement known colloquially as a spanking. Clarence Willoughby also charges that as a result of this he was campused for an entire afternoon and denied movie-going rights, and further — ”

“But this is nonsense, they cannot sue for an incident like that.”

“Believe me, the briefs are well-prepared and parallels are intelligently cited, in this case Bridlegoose vs. Wimbish in which a parrot of the plaintiff was awarded damages for lost tail feathers in an incident of a broom-handle eviction from the Wimbish premises, it being held that obscenity of speech and arrogance of manner of the victim was not justification for the violence of the ejection. In all the other cases (of which there are now thirty-three running to an aggregate claim of a little over a quarter of a million dollars asked) there are pertinent parallels cited. For instance Willoughby vs. Bridlegoose C sub one cites Bridlegoose vs. Fiederwischlappen, a celebrated case in its day.”

“No. No. No,” howled Bridlegoose. “I'll ask for a change of venue.” And he ran out of the courtroom and into the street.

“Mrs. Willoughby,” asked the judge, “when did you learn law?”

“Wednesday night. I would have learned more but I didn't get the book finished. I got to looking at the Ready Reckoner and Arithmetic Made Easy too. Do you know a real easy way to divide any number by nine? Give me a piece of paper and I'll show you how.”

Author's Commentary

Seven-Day Terror

“Is there anything you want to make disappear?” Clarence Willoughby asked his mother.

“A sink full of dishes is all I can think of. How will you do it?”

“I just built a disappearer. All you do is cut the other end out of a beer can. Then you take two pieces of red cardboard with peepholes in the middle and fit them in the ends. You look through the peepholes and blink. Whatever you look at will disappear.”

“Oh.”

“But I don't know if I can make them come back. We'd better try it on something else. Dishes cost money.”

As always, Myra Willoughby had to admire the wisdom of her nine-year-old son. She would not have had such foresight herself. He always did. “You can try it on Blanche Manners' cat outside there. Nobody will care if it disappears except Blanche Manners.”

“All right.”

He put the disappearer to his eye and blinked. The cat disappeared from the sidewalk outside.

His mother was interested. “I wonder how it works. Do you know how it works?”

“Yes. You take a beer can with both ends cut out and put in two pieces of cardboard. Then you blink.”

“Never mind. Take it outside and play with it. You hadn't better make anything disappear in here till I think about this.”

But when he had gone his mother was oddly disturbed.

“I wonder if I have a precocious child. Why, there's lots of grown people who wouldn't know how to make a disappearer that would work. I wonder if Blanche Manners will miss her cat very much?”

Clarence went down to the Plugged Nickel, a pot house on the corner.

“Do you have anything you want to make disappear, Nokomis?”

“Only my paunch.”

“If I make it disappear it'll leave a hole in you and you'll bleed to death.”

“That's right, I would. Why don't you try it on the fireplug outside?”

This in a way was one of the happiest afternoons ever in the neighborhood. The children came from blocks around to play in the flooded streets and gutters, and if some of them drowned (and we don't say that they did drown) in the flood (and brother! it was a flood), why you have to expect things like that. The fire engines (whoever heard of calling fire engines to put out a flood?) were apparatus-deep in water. The policemen and ambulance men wandered around wet and bewildered.

“Resuscitator, resuscitator, anybody wanna resuscitator,” chanted Clarissa Willoughby.

“Oh, shut up,” said the ambulance attendants.

Nokomis, the bar man in the Plugged Nickel, called Clarence inside.

“I don't believe, just for the moment, I'd tell anyone what happened to that fireplug.”

“I won't tell if you won't tell,” said Clarence.

Officer Comstock was suspicious. “There's only seven possible explanations: one of the seven Willoughby kids did it. I dunno how. It'd take a bulldozer to do it, and then there'd be something left of the plug. But however they did it, one of them did it.”

Officer Comstock had a talent for getting near the truth of dark matters. This is why he was walking a beat out here in the boondocks instead of sitting in a chair downtown.

“Clarissa!” said Officer Comstock in a voice like thunder.

“Resuscitator, resuscitator, anybody wanna resuscitator?” chanted Clarissa.

“Do you know what happened to that fireplug?” asked Officer C.

“I have an uncanny suspicion. As yet it is no more than that. When I am better informed I will advise you.”

Clarissa was eight years old and much given to uncanny suspicions.

“Clementine, Harold, Corinne, Jimmy, Cyril,” he asked the five younger Willoughby children. “Do you know what happened to that fireplug?”

“There was a man around yesterday. I bet he took it,” said Clementine.

“I don't even remember a fireplug there. I think you're making a fuss about nothing,” said Harold.

“City Hall's going to hear about this,” said Corinne.

“Pretty dommed sure,” said Jimmy, “but I won't tell.”

“Cyril!” cried Officer Comstock in a terrible voice. Not a terrifying voice, a terrible voice. He felt terrible now.

“Great green bananas,” said Cyril, “I'm only three years old. I don't see how it's even my responsibility.”

“Clarence,” said Officer Comstock.

Clarence gulped.

“Do you know where the fireplug went?”

Clarence brightened. “No, sir. I don't know where it went.”

A bunch of smart alecs from the water department came out and shut off the water for a few blocks around and put some kind of cap on in place of the fireplug. “This sure is going to be a funny-sounding report,” said one of them.

Officer Comstock walked away discouraged. “Don't bother me, Miss Manners,” he said. “I don't know where to look for your cat. I don't even know where to look for a fireplug.”

“I have an idea,” said Clarissa, “that when you find the cat you will find the fireplug in the same place. As yet it's only an idea.”

Ozzie Murphy wore a little hat on top of his head. Clarence pointed his weapon and winked. The hat was no longer there, but a little trickle of blood was running down the pate.

“I don't believe I'd play with that any more,” said Nokomis.

“Who's playing?” said Clarence. “This is for real.”

This was the beginning of the seven-day terror in the heretofore obscure neighborhood. Trees disappeared from the parks; lamp posts were as though they had never been; Wally Waldorf drove home, got out, slammed the door of his car, and there was no car. As George Mullendorf came up the walk to his house his dog Pete ran to meet him and took a flying leap to his arms. The dog left the sidewalk but something happened; the dog was gone and only a bark lingered for a moment in the puzzled air.

But the worst were the fireplugs. The second plug was installed the morning after the disappearance of the first. In eight minutes it was gone and the flood waters returned. Another one was in by twelve o'clock. Within three minutes it had vanished. The next morning fireplug number four was installed.

The water commissioner was there, the city engineer was there, the chief of police was there with a riot squad, the president of the Parent-Teachers Association was there, the president of the university was there, the mayor was there, three gentlemen of the FBI, a newsreel photographer, eminent scientists and a crowd of honest citizens.

“Let's see it disappear now,” said the city engineer.

“Let's see it disappear now,” said the police chief.

“Let's see it disa —  it did, didn't it?” said one of the eminent scientists.

And it was gone and everybody was very wet.

“At least I have the picture sequence of the year,” said the photographer. But his camera and apparatus disappeared from the midst of them.

“Shut off the water and cap it,” said the commissioner. “And don't put in another plug yet. That was the last plug in the warehouse.”

“This is too big for me,” said the mayor. “I wonder that Tass doesn't have it yet.”

“Tass has it,” said a little round man. “I am Tass.”

“If all of you gentlemen will come into the Plugged Nickel,” said Nokomis, “and try one of our new Fire Hydrant Highballs you will all be happier. These are made of good corn whiskey, brown sugar, and hydrant water from this very gutter. You can be the first to drink them.”

Business was phenomenal at the Plugged Nickel, for it was in front of its very doors that the fireplugs disappeared in floods of gushing water.

“I know a way we can get rich,” said Clarissa several days later to her father, Tom Willoughby. “Everybody says they're going to sell their houses for nothing and move out of the neighborhood. Go get a lot of money and buy them all. Then you can sell them again and get rich.”

“I wouldn't buy them for a dollar each. Three of them have disappeared already, and all the families but us have their furniture moved out in their front yards. There might be nothing but vacant lots in the morning.”

“Good, then buy the vacant lots. And you can be ready when the houses come back.”

“Come back? Are the houses going to come back? Do you know anything about this, young lady?”

“I have a suspicion verging on a certainty. As of now I can say no more.”

Three eminent scientists were gathered in an untidy suite that looked as though it belonged to a drunken sultan.

“This transcends the metaphysical. It impinges on the quantum continuum. In some way it obsoletes Boff,” said Dr. Velikof Vonk.

“The contingence of the intransigence is the most mystifying aspect,” said Arpad Arkabaranan.

“Yes,” said Willy McGilly. “Who would have thought that you could do it with a beer can and two pieces of cardboard? When I was a boy I used an oatmeal box and red crayola.”

“I do not always follow you,” said Dr. Vonk. “I wish you would speak plainer.”

So far no human had been injured or disappeared — except for a little blood on the pate of Ozzie Murphy, on the lobes of Conchita when her gaudy earrings disappeared from her very ears, a clipped flinger or so when a house vanished as the front doorknob was touched, a lost toe when a neighborhood boy kicked a can and the can was not; probably not more than a pint of blood and three or four ounces of flesh all together.

Now, however, Mr. Buckle the grocery man disappeared before witnesses. This was serious.

Some mean-looking investigators from downtown came out to the Willoughbys. The meanest-looking one was the mayor. In happier days he had not been a mean man, but the terror had now reigned for seven days.

“There have been ugly rumors,” said one of the mean investigators, “that link certain events to this household. Do any of you know anything about them?”

“I started most of them,” said Clarissa. “But I didn't consider them ugly. Cryptic, rather. But if you want to get to the bottom of this just ask me a question.”

“Did you make those things disappear?” asked the investigator.

“That isn't the question,” said Clarissa.

“Do you know where they have gone?” asked the investigator.

“That isn't the question either,” said Clarissa.

“Can you make them come back?”

“Why, of course I can. Anybody can. Can't you?”

“I cannot. If you can, please do so at once.”

“I need some stuff. Get me a gold watch and a hammer. Then go down to the drug store and get me this list of chemicals. And I need a yard of black velvet and a pound of rock candy.”

“Shall we?” asked one of the investigators.

“Yes,” said the mayor. “It's our only hope. Get her anything she wants.”

And it was all assembled.

“Why does she get all the attention?” asked Clarence. “I was the one who made all the things disappear. How does she know how to get them back?”

“I knew it!” cried Clarissa with hate. “I knew he was the one that did it. He read in my diary how to make a disappearer. If I was his mother I'd whip him for reading his little sister's diary. That's what happens when things like that fall into irresponsible hands.”

She poised the hammer over the mayor's gold watch, now on the floor.

“I have to wait a few seconds. This can't be hurried. It'll only be a little while.”

The second hand swept around to the point that was preordained for it before the world began. Clarissa suddenly brought down the hammer with all her force on the beautiful gold watch.

“That's all,” she said. “Your troubles are over. See, there is Blanche Manners' cat on the sidewalk just where she was seven days ago.”

And the cat was back.

“Now let's go down to the Plugged Nickel and watch the fireplugs come back.”

They had only a few minutes to wait. It came from nowhere and clanged into the street like a sign and a witness.

“Now I predict,” said Clarissa, “that every single object will return exactly seven days from the time of its disappearance.”

The seven-day terror had ended. The objects began to reappear.

“How,” asked the mayor, “did you know they would come back in seven days?”

“Because it was a seven-day disappearer that Clarence made. I also know how to make a nine-day, a thirteen-day, a twenty-seven day, and an eleven-year disappearer. I was going to make a thirteen-year one, but for that you have to color the ends with the blood from a little boy's heart, and Cyril cried every time I tried to make a good cut.”

“You really know how to make all of these?”

“Yes. But I shudder if the knowledge should ever come into unauthorized hands.”

“I shudder, too, Clarissa. But tell me, why did you want the chemicals?”

“For my chemistry set.”

“And the black velvet?”

“For doll dresses.”

“And the pound of rock candy?”

“How did you ever get to be mayor of this town if you have to ask questions like that? What do you think I wanted the rock candy for?”

“One last question,” said the mayor. “Why did you smash my gold watch with the hammer?”

“Oh,” said Clarissa, “that was for dramatic effect.”

Handful of Fire

“I have a lot of sympathy with Herod,” she said. “It would be wonderful if only for one afternoon every male child under three could be slain.”

She had only one male child under three. That was Cyril, and she was Myra Willoughby.

Then as often happens when one tempts fate the answer seemed to come at once. Cyril had been unnaturally quiet for a long time: eight, ten, twelve seconds, who knows how long he had been quiet?

Then he screamed, a hair-raising scream such as is only given at the instant of violent death, a real blood-curdler, a heart-stopper.

“Then is my prayer answered so soon? I am half-sorry to lose him. He was such a good little boy; an unspeakable monster, but a good little boy for all that.”

She finished cleaning the room in the suddenly pleasant silence. Then she went to investigate the death agonies of her little boy. And he was gone — disappeared.

She asked Susanna Shooks if she had seen him.

“They took him away. They picked him up and took him away.”

“Who were they?”

“Desperate Danny and Killer Cohen and Stabber Stuckley.”

“I don't think I know them.”

“I don't know them either. They come from some other block. I think they killed him and threw him to the ducks.”

“I guess they probably did, Susanna. Were they little boys?”

“No. Great big people.”

And when she went back to the house there was a tag on the front doorknob with this message on it:

Dear missis Willobee
We kidnapped sirill and are going to kill him. Be down at the vacant lot at the corner in five minutes with five thousand dollars.

But when she went down to the corner she realized there was no vacant lot nor had been for as long as she could remember. On the corner was only the Plugged Nickel, the bar of Nokomis.

“Have you seen my littlest boy, Nokomis?”

“I wondered why it was so quiet. No, I haven't seen him for a half hour.”

“I think some boys kidnapped him. They left this note.”

“There isn't any vacant lot here. But you can leave the five thousand dollars with me, and if any little boys come by I'll give it to them.”

“Oh! You make me tired.”

She went to the pond in Cotters' backyard to see if Susanna was right about them killing him and throwing him to the ducks. It was not a large pond, no more than eight feet long and half of that wide. Rich people have bigger bathtubs than that. There was only room for the two ducks and one little plank raft. The ducks had not eaten Cyril. They were still hungry and they would not be hungry so soon if they had eaten him.

She went back to the house and phoned her husband, Tom. “They kidnapped Cyril.”

“Who did?”

“Desperate Danny and Killer Cohen and Stabber Stuckley.”

“Do you know them?”

“No, I don't. And I thought I knew all the little boys in the neighborhood. That's what worries me.”

“Well, just remember, even if anything happens to him you've still got six more.”

“Well I want Cyril. He's been gone an hour and he never stays gone that long.”

She rounded up quite a few of her other children and sent them out to look for Cyril. But they weren't hopeful.

“If it really was Killer Cohen,” said Clarence, “then they killed him all right. He kills lots of little boys. That's why they call him — ”

“Never mind. Where does he live?”

“Over on Greenstreet Street.”

And when she heard this Myra was scared for the first time. You have no idea how mean the boys are that live on Greenstreet Street.

Myra once more went down to the Plugged Nickel.

“I hope you've found him this time,” said Nokomis. “I am happy that the only children I have to care for are these child-like big people who inhabit my bar.”

“No. We haven't found him.”

“I believe I'd make a point of finding him right away. A lot can happen to a little boy in this town. Only Tuesday they found one down under the loading dock almost eaten by the rats, strangled by a piece of piano wire. They don't know if it was done by a man or a bunch of boys.”

“Almost the same thing happened last Friday,” said Ozzie Murphy. “But it was farther away, six or seven blocks. They chopped up this little chap pretty bad; forty-eight pieces they found and there were some missing.”

“It happens all the time,” said Hodl Oskanian. “I could name you nine cases in as many weeks.” Then he saw from the face of Myra that she was not appreciating this.

“Let me see the note, Mrs. Willoughby,” he said. “As you must know I am the best handwriting analyst in the world. Now this note is to the point, written by a person of vast decision. There is here the slant of sardonic humor in the f's, the open rebellion manifested in the formation of the small g (how I wish there were more of them so we could be sure), the formidable cruelty shown, not once but nine times, in the limning of the l's, the tortuous perversion in the v's and r's. There is a dark soul at work here.”

“You think it someone mean?”

“Mean is not the word. Would you call the devil mean? But that is not all. Notice the queer compassion shown in the dotting of the first twelve i's, and the amazing fact that the thirteenth is not dotted at all. It is almost as though the dark author realized that he had said enough and forced himself to forego that last dot.”

“Then what kind of person wrote it?”

“An imaginative, complex, and talented person. I would not like to be at his mercy. There is a strong but twisted intelligence here.”

“How old would he be?”

“About nine.”

That worried Myra. “Did you ever hear of Desperate Danny?” she asked.

“Who hasn't. The same thought crossed my mind but I was frightened of it and put it away. But we may as well expect the worst. The note was not written in situ. It was prepared in another place and the mind that fashioned it looked out on another scene. There is no vacant lot here. But where is the nearest vacant lot?”

“Oh, Hodl, it's on Greenstreet Street.”

“Yes it is. And that's where Desperate Danny lives.”

“Please come with me. We have to get him back dead or alive. You know how mean those boys on Greenstreet Street are.”

Hodl questioned her as they walked. “Why does Cyril run away every day?”

“He runs away because I scream at him.”

“Why do you scream at him?”

“I scream at him because he exasperates me. Isn't that normal? You ask the oddest questions.”

“If you would stop being exasperated he would stop running away.”

“Oh, I wouldn't want that to happen. That one hour a day he's gone is like Heaven. And that's all the exercise he gets. The rest of the time he stays in the house and asks questions.”

But it was a little boy's terrible screaming that they heard while they were still half a block away. They rushed across the area and broke breathlessly into a littered garage.

“Back! Back!” snarled Desperate Danny. “One move from either of you and I drop the torch.”

The torch was a burning newspaper held menacingly over a tub filled with dark viscous goop. “It'll flame like a holy cost. And then I'll jerk the rope and he'll fall headfirst into the flaming oil.”

Now Cyril was hanging upside down with a rope around his ankles and his head only a foot from the dark mish mash.

“I'll drop it, I'll burn him alive,” howled Desperate Danny. “Then they can fry me, they can hang me, they can put me in jail. I don't care what they do to me after I burn him to death.”

Myra was frantic. Desperate Danny had been alone in the garage with Cyril. Killer Cohen and Stabber Stuckley had run off as their kind always does. Danny was like a dark bristling animal and the flaming newspaper reflected in his burning eyes.

“I am going to faint,” said Myra. “Oh Hodl, Mr. Oskanian, what will we do?”

“Might as well throw in the torch,” he said. “We're whipped.”

Like a fiend Danny flung his handful of fire into the devil's vat.

“Boom,” said Danny.

“Boom,” said Cyril upside down.

And Myra really did faint.

“Mama, I telled them to use real oil. I telled them that old syrup stuff won't burn. I telled them they ought to have long knives sticking up too.”

“Cyril! You knew it wasn't real. And you, young man, you were just playing a game. You didn't intend to kill him at all! How could you worry a mother like that? Desperate Danny, I'm going to spank you till you can't sit down.”

“No! Lady. No! No! Nobody ever spanks me. No! No! No!”

It was brutal. Hodl Oskanian who knew all the dark corners of the world and had seen sights so terrible as to make a man wish he had not eyes, even he could not stand this and turned away with a shudder. And Desperate Danny would not forget it till his dying day, which almost seemed to have arrived.

When it was over Myra was breathless. But she was never breathless for long. She loosened her tongue on Danny and then she loosened it on Hodl.

“Mr. Oskanian, if you weren't so big I'd spank you too and I might just do it. You knew that wasn't oil. You knew he wasn't going to be burned to death. And when you said ‘Throw in the Torch’ my heart stopped. Oh I wish it was real! I'd burn all three of you up and walk barefooted on your coals.”

Another light had come into the eyes of Desperate Danny. It was a deep mysterious light compounded out of flame and darkness. And only one most astute in the ways of mankind and its perversity and changeability, only a subtle analyst, the greatest in the world, only Hodl Oskanian recognized it for what it was.

It was admiration.

“Lady,” said Desperate Danny, “do you have a lot of fun at your house?”

“Of course we have a lot of fun at our house. That's what houses are for.”

“Do you carry on like that every day?”

“That's not nothing,” said Cyril. “You come tomorrow. Just before I run away. Boy you just listen.”

Desperate Danny was entranced.

“I never did hear anything like it,” he said. “At our house nobody ever carries on like that. They don't holler at our house. Lady, I never did hear anything like you. You put on the best show I ever see.”

Other Side of the Moon

Johnny O'Conner got off at the same corner every night. Everyone got off at the same corner every night. The old joker with the face like an egg, the noble-nosed Nabob, the stylish old girl who looked like a lady lawyer, all got off at Rambush Street. The wacky Dude who looked like a barber, the nice, plain, blonde girl, the little man who reminded you of an onion, all got off at Scottsboro. And Pauline Potter, fat George Gregoff, the antiseptic Gentleman with a contempt of the world, and Johnny O'Conner himself, always got off at Terhune. This was invariable. Other people got off at other places, but always at the same places.

When Johnny got off, he always ducked into the Loco Club, had a Vodka Collins, then walked the half-block home. Sheila was waiting, and supper was ready in about twelve minutes.

But one night a week ago it had been different. The bus stopped at Scottsboro. The wacky Dude who looked like a barber, the little man who reminded you of an onion, both got off. But the nice, plain, blonde girl just sat there.

“Scottsboro, Miss,” said the driver.

“Thank you,” said the plain blonde girl, but she just sat there.

“You always get off at Scottsboro, Miss,” said the driver.

“Not tonight,” said the girl.

So the bus went on, but everybody was uneasy from the incident. The normal order of the world had fallen apart.

Then tonight it happened again. At Scottsboro the wacky Dude and the man who reminded you of an onion got off. And the plain blonde girl said, “not tonight.” This was not so startling as the first time it happened, but it did set Johnny O'Conner wondering. It was not as though the old joker with the face like an egg, the noble-nosed nabob, or the stylish old girl who looked like a lady-lawyer had not got off at Rambush. It was not as though Pauline Potter, fat George Gregoff, and the antiseptic gentleman with the contempt of the world were not even now getting off at Terhune.

“Terhune,” said the driver. “You always get off at Terhune, Mr. O'Conner.”

“Not tonight,” said Johnny. This statement startled him. He had not known he was going to say that. He had not known he would ride beyond his own corner. But the bus went on and Johnny did not even know where it was going. He had lived in a house for a year and had never even been to the next street.

“Urbana,” said the driver. And here there descended from the bus some of those creatures who before had seemed to have no habitation or true place in the world. The moon-faced man who always carried the Sporting News, the heavy smiling lady who was a picture of placidity, the pale vacuous youth who combined duck-tail and sideburns on one head, the shop-girl with the red hat and the shop-girl with the green hat got off here. And also the nice, plain, blonde girl, who when the world was normal, used to descend at Scottsboro. And Johnny O'Conner to his own amazement got off here, too.

Urbana was not too different from Terhune, although of course in a different world. Instead of the Loco Club there was the Krazy Kat Club Number Two. Johnny went in with only an instant's wonder as to the location of Krazy Kat Number One. He had a Cuba Libra. Then he walked the half-block back to his house. He had never seen his house from this side before. It was like seeing the other side of the moon. And on that other side of the moon the paint had started to crack above one window, and the screen had begun to tear.

“Where have you been?” asked Sheila. “I was frantic.”

“How could you be frantic? I am home at the same time as always. Or within forty-five seconds of it.”

“But you didn't get off at Terhune Street.”

“How do you know I didn't?”

“Pauline Potter told me, and so did George Gregoff, and Mr. Sebastian.”

“Who's he?”

She made motions with her hands, and he knew that Mr. Sebastian was the antiseptic gentleman with a contempt of the world. But Sheila was not finished.

“Where did you go? They all said you stayed right on the bus and rode right past your house. Why did you do it? You never did that before.”

“Honey, I just rode one block down and then walked back the half-block from the other way.”

“But why did you do it? What did you do down there?”

“I went into the Krazy Kat Club Number Two and had one drink, all that I ever had.”

“You went into a strange bar? Don't you know that men can get into trouble in a strange bar? What did you drink?”

“I had a Cuba Libra.”

“Why did you do that? Only gamblers and seamen ever drink them. You aren't going to run away to sea, are you?”

“I hadn't given it a thought. But it might not be a bad idea.”

“Why do you say that? Are you really going to leave me?”

“Sheila, honey, that was only a joke.”

“Why do you do that? You never made a joke before. I just don't know what to make of you.”

And even then it wasn't over. At supper she kept it up.

“Promise me, Johnny, that you won't ever do a thing like that again.”

“But I didn't do anything. Only rode one block past my stop and walked half-a-block back home.”

“And went into a strange bar where there's no telling what might happen to you. Promise me you will never go there again. I have a reason. Promise me.”

“I solemnly promise,” said Johnny O'Conner, “that I will never again go to the Krazy Kat Club Number Two. But if I ever come to that Number One Kat look out.”

“There you go, making a joke again. I just don't know what has come over you.”

The next night Johnny was in a wayward mood. It wasn't just that he had an unreasonable wife. Generally, he enjoyed his unreasonable wife. But a little bee was buzzing in his bonnet. He had had a glimpse over the top of his rut and he wondered what was in the world beyond. He had an almost overpowering compulsion to get off at Manderville where the untidy old duffer and the two young girls always got off. He barely mastered himself at Nassau, and as he passed Oswego it was with the gravest uneasiness. Then he decided in his mind, and he watched the plain blonde girl. If she goes past her stop I will go past mine, he thought. At Patrick, the bald-headed coot with hair in his ears and the frazzled cigar in the front of his face got out, and that was as it should be. At Quarles their party was diminished by Laughing Boy, by Dapper Dan, by the Sniffler, and by a person who may or may not have been Tug-Boat Annie.

At Rambush it was egg-face, nabob, and lady-lawyer, and the world was rolling tolerably in its groove. But the end was not yet. For at Scottsboro the wacky Dude and the little man who was cousin of the onion got off, and the plain blonde girl did not. This is it, thought Johnny O'Conner. I'll go past mine, too. I may go two blocks past and see what Vandalia is like. I may go all the way to the end of the world or the end of the alphabet, whichever one comes first. For Johnny was in a reckless mood.

At Terhune he endured the insulting sniff of Pauline Potter, the glowering of fat George Gregoff, the withering contempt of the antiseptic gentleman, now know as Mr. Sebastian. Johnny stared ahead and remained on the bus. The nice, plain, blonde girl got off again at Urbana, and Johnny got off there, too. The blonde girl went into the Krazy Kat Club Number Two and Johnny broke his promise to his wife and went in also. He ordered a Sazarac to see what it was like and gazed with new eyes at a new world.

“I'm glad you came this evening,” the bar-maid told the nice, plain, blonde girl. “You're the only one of my old friends who ever get this far out. This is a mean afternoon. I'm glad to see someone nice.”

“Is it mean out here? I thought after the places you worked this would be a breeze.”

“Girl, I have one screw-ball worse than anything I ever had downtown. That woman makes me ashamed. She has three different dates here every afternoon. The first one is with that fat, old bumbler. The way they carry on in a booth I told them today I'd have to call the cops if they didn't tone it down. They both always get sloppy drunk, and when he leaves he always gives her money. As soon as he's gone, there's another one comes in that looks like a tough boy out of an old George Raft movie. This time she gives the money to him and they put on a little show that sure wouldn't get past the censors. It's real purple stuff those two put on. And when he's pretty drunk he goes. And in about twenty minutes her third date comes in. They each drink three fast ones. Then they get in his car and are gone for an hour. When they come back, they each have three more fast ones. He leaves then and she staggers back to one of the booths and goes to sleep.”

“How does she get away with it?”

“She says she has her husband trained. Has him so deep in a rut he can't see over the top and never will catch on. But she's smart. She's never so drunk that the little clock inside her head doesn't work. She hears that five-thirty bus when it squeaks to a stop down at Terhune. Then she jumps up, calls me a couple of dirty names just to keep in practice, and goes out the back door and down the alley to her house. She's always there when her husband gets home. We had some tramps downtown but we never had any as bad as Sheila O'Conner.”

Johnny O'Conner shook and spilled his chaser. He had left his rut and now he could not go back to it. All he could do was go to the end of the alphabet or the end of the world. He had seen his home from the other side. He had seen the other side of the moon. And he was appalled.

Get Off The World

“I have to get off the world. It's that simple. The world isn't big enough for me and them.”

“You have to disappear?”

“I sure do.”

“It isn't hard to disappear if you have money.”

“I have money.”

“How much?”

“Nine thousand dollars.”

“No. No. You don't understand. I mean money. Not chicken feed.”

“Nine thousand dollars isn't chicken feed.”

“It isn't money, mister. You've got to have money. That wouldn't keep me in cigars for three days. Why do you have to disappear?”

“It is just an embarrassment.”

“Swallow your embarrassment.”

“It would rather swallow me. It is that I would be killed.”

“Yes, that might be embarrassing. As I see it your problem has no solution. I couldn't help you, not for only nine thousand dollars. Believe me, nobody has ever completely disappeared. I have been a locator myself. You may have heard of someone leaving home at 8:15 in the morning never to be seen again. I know personally that each of the celebrated cases was quickly found. I myself found two of the best known five. The question then is on which end the best deal can be made. But with only nine thousand dollars you could not make a deal. That wouldn't keep an active man in toothpicks for a week.”

“Then you can do nothing for me?”

“For half of your undistinguished sum I can give you an hour.”

“An hour?”

“An hour to live. You might as well take it. Among the dead they use a different sort of coinage.”

“How will you do it?”

“By doing nothing. Naturally those employed to locate you have already contacted me and the few others who are good at whisking a man away. In any case I will collect a fee from the other end, but for this trifling sum you could have another hour of life.”

“No. I will not do it. I will pay everything for everything, but I cannot afford to pay so much for only an hour.”

So he ran out again into the world that was not big enough to hide in.

He found an old fox in his den in Wreckville.

“Ah, Mr. Battleby, it took you long enough to get here. Two minutes for not much more than two blocks. You could not have run more than two-thirds of the way. I assume you have not been able to add to your nine thousand?”

“How did you know that my name was Battleby, since he did not know? Or that I was two blocks from here two minutes ago? Or that I have nine thousand?”

“How many of us do you think are in this business? And he did know your name. It'll be a sorry day when we have to ask a client his name. But your problem has not changed. Nine thousand dollars would not keep a blind man in rubber tips for his cane for three days.”

“I have heard that routine before.”

“Perhaps you have assets you do not realize. We might quickly double or triple that little sum. There are jobs that not everyone would touch, but they are of a nature where a desperate man might do better than a cool man. And as you are already living on borrowed time you might try some of them. They can only kill you once. That is a nice thought that I always point out to such as you who might otherwise feel depressed.”

“I am not, though it seems I am the only one who is not, a criminal. I will not gamble such a wild deal.”

“Then to me also your case seems to have no solution. There are six possible courses, flight, disguise, diversion, appeasement, attack, death. The first and last are nearly automatic; you run till you are caught and when you are caught you die. Disguises have endless variations and only one thing in common: none of them will work. You can be a sea man, bum, trappist, farmer, dishwasher, suburbanite, recluse, mechanic. You can resort to plastic surgery or ingenuity. The end is still early death. Diversion is good. Can you divert them?”

“No.”

“Appeasement is best. Can you appease them?”

“Impossible.”

“Then all that is left is to attack or die. I will think very hard about this. But I will not think more than a minute or so. I cannot give you much hope. I suggest you compose your soul. In a way you are fortunate. It is not given to everyone to hear the footsteps of death before he strikes.”

This old fox in his den in Wreckville was named Willy McGilly.

It was ten forty-two in the evening. The shotgun blast was loud and soon drew a gathering. He had apparently shot himself in the face with his own shotgun in the alley behind his own apartment. The landlady had not seen him come in or go out. There had been men there looking for him all afternoon, and she had not known where he had gone. Yes, he had seemed very distraught when he left a little after noon. He had seemed worried for several days, even a little wild.

James Frances Battleby had a very small funeral. An unconnected bachelor with very few associates beyond the Crawley firm for which he worked, he had only a handful of visitors, and perhaps only three or four real mourners. But it was a nice small funeral, for the Burial Insurance Society was a good company and did things well within its price bracket.

But three who came to his funeral were Thomas Cromwell Crawley, Melvin Masterman, and Hugo Erpresser, the manufacturer, the official, and the import-exporter.

Only Hugo was still dubious. “It is a truism in my business, well not in my business but I should say in all businesses where things are done carefully, to see the face. Which is to say, a positive identification should be made. It seems we are careless about this.”

“I don't see what we can do,” said Thomas Crawley. “It was much better to let it go as a suicide, and then to pay the Brock bunch for having done the job.”

“I am not convinced that they did the job. Still, we will have to pay them. But we should have seen the face.”

“There was no face. He blew his face off,” said Melvin Masterman.

“If it were the Brock bunch they would not have done that,” said Hugo Erpresser. “They know we wanted identification.”

“But if it were actually suicide Battleby might not be so considerate,” said Thomas Crawley.

“We should at least get fingerprints to be sure,” said Hugo.

“How can we do that since the officials are so lax as not to do it. We couldn't request it without drawing the finger ourselves. And Battleby was brainless and not very brave; he may have had a talent for suicide. There is almost every chance that it is what it seems,” said Thomas.

“Just the same we should have seen the face,” said Hugo Erpresser.

“We had better let it rest for three or four days,” said Melvin Masterman. “We have to stay covered till we are sure there are no echoes.”

Crawley, Masterman, and Erpresser were three rich and powerful men. They were also conscienceless crooks, though this was generally known only to a few other crooks. And they had been on the verge of a large piece of crookery. I do not know what it was; but James Frances Battleby knew, for which reason he had been sentenced to death.

Battleby was a simpleton. He was simple as a dove, and they were wise as serpents; and a serpent has odds over a dove nearly every time, particularly with the bookies who are by and large serpent men.

Battleby had been with the Crawley firm for eighteen years, which was half of his lifetime. He was a good worker and an excellent detail man; and was well-regarded by his employer for the shortness of his nose as to phrases that did not concern him, and for the paucity of his speech. These are qualities that a crook appreciates in an underling who of necessity must sometimes see the outside of a deal whose inside will not stand seeing.

There are normally not more than three times in a man's life when he must decide whether to keep silent for his own good, or to speak out for the protection of the commonwealth. One of these times had just descended on Battleby. He happened to glimpse the inside of a deal that revolted him, and he told his employer Crawley that he could not keep quiet about it. It was then that Crawley told him it was too big to turn loose, and that silence would absolutely be required of him; that it was a matter of life and death; his (Battleby's) life or his (Battleby's) death.

Battleby had escaped with an agility that surprised himself and gone to see the disappearance engineers. And one way or another he seemed to have disappeared from the land of the living.

There were three men among the handful who did follow the Battleby coffin to the graveyard, and these three were Crawley, Masterman, and Erpresser. They wanted it located for several reasons, and having checked the records of the little Burial Insurance Society, they at least knew that it had gone to the right place, if it were the right man. It was an old burial grounds in a close-in crowded location, one of the few remaining that had not been relocated. There was an iron fence around the grounds, and on the corner a public phone booth and a some-time taxi stand.

They watched the body lowered, and then they went away. But they did not notice the sexton stoop at the last moment to make two sharp moves to the descending coffin; still less did they notice that the sexton had a remarkable resemblance to Willy McGilly.

So the gentlemen crooks went away almost satisfied.

“I am convinced,” said Thomas Crawley, “that I will never hear his voice again. He has effectively silenced himself.”

“We should have checked the fingers,” said Masterman. “But there was no effective way to get the prints without setting the dogs to barking.”

“It bothers me,” said Hugo Erpresser, “that there was no face. You can never be sure until you see the face. But the face was gone. I will still be a little uneasy about that face.”

But they weren't so very uneasy for all of that.

It was thirty-six hours after the funeral. Hugo Erpresser returned to his rooms at that hour. These were fine rooms in a noble tower, for he was rich and he lived in a rich man's hotel. He switched on the light and went at once to a large mirror, for he was a vain man.

He looked to see his own face, but he saw instead the face of James Francis Battleby looking at him. This gave him a start, for like all evil men he was superstitious. And like all evil men his first inclination was to check his treasure to see that it was intact.

He discovered his wall safe where neither you nor I would have thought to look for it, and saw that it had not been tampered with. Then he mixed himself a drink, for like all superstitious men he believed that this steadied the nerves. Then he peeled the face off the mirror and sitting down at his center table he studied it.

It was not the work of an amateur. It had a rubber backing and was molded of rubber, wax, and phenolic. It was life-sized and life-like and there was no doubt that it was James Francis Battleby whom he had been accustomed to see in the outer office of Thomas Crawley.

He read the writing on the back: ‘You have seen the face. And when you look tomorrow night what will you see? You cannot be sure till you see the face. Wait till the face sees you.’

He reached to phone Crawley that there were pranks afoot, but the number was busy.

At nearly the same moment Melvin Masterman came from a rendezvous out into the street and signaled for a taxi. Then he reached into his coat pocket to finger his change as he wanted to have the exact coinage for the cabby, being averse to tipping. He reached into his coat pocket and he came out with a handful of fingers not his own.

This made him nervous, and he was not a nervous man. He studied them only briefly while riding in the cab. They were warm and a bit gory, but they were artificial. And yet they must have been placed in his pocket seconds before he found them. Warm wax does not stay warm for long. There was a card with a taunt on it. ‘Here are the fingers, but how will you know? Now you have touched the fingers, but wait until the fingers touch you.’

Masterman snorted to himself. “It means the weasel has gotten away. But there is a smarter man than he running the show now. We will put a stop to these pranks at once.”

He now directed the cabby to the apartment of Thomas Crawley rather than to his own. This was at about the same time that Hugo Erpresser was trying to get Crawley on the phone and the number was busy.

It was busy because it had rung shortly before and the voice of Battleby was heard on it. This made Crawley angry and also disquieted him.

“Well, you aren't dead after all. But you aren't very smart either. Your funeral may have been premature; you will not have such a nice one this time.”

“Oh, I'm dead enough. I heard the three of you talking by my coffin when nobody else was close. Do you want me to tell you what you said? Pine boxes have a wonderful resonance from the inside.”

“That won't be necessary. So the Brock bunch didn't get you. I shouldn't have paid them.”

“Oh, they killed me all right. There was only the one corpse. They are good boys and you did the right thing to pay them. And you will continue to pay them. They extracted information from me about you, and you will continue to pay them.”

“Then they crossed me and are the brains behind you. They would have done better to stick to their own line and to have killed you.”

“Mr. Crawley, they did kill me. That's what I'm trying to tell you. As to brains, well they give us a new set when we get over here. We understand all that is going on. Now there is no use one crook paying tribute to another bunch of crooks. What I want you to do is publish a confession and go to prison like a little man. It will do you good. And when you go there your two friends will not be far behind. I will give you twenty-four hours to think it over. Be home tomorrow night at exactly this hour. I will call you then.”

And immediately after this call was completed Crawley had a call from Hugo Erpresser. Hugo said there were some pranks afoot, and Thomas agreed and told him to come over at once. He arrived at the same time as Melvin Masterman. So the three had a conference as to what they should do about Battleby who had now obtained the drifting of two day's dust over his footprints, and who did not seem to be dead at all; though he said that he was dead. And first they had in one of the Brock bunch to see what had really gone on.

Breaker Brock was concerned.

“What is it then, Tom? Is there something wrong with the job? I thought you agreed it was a good enough job when you paid off.”

“Breaker, I want the truth. Did you do the job?”

“If we didn't he sure must be feeling confined in that grave. I think he was certified dead enough. What's the matter? Someone say he wasn't dead?”

“No. Nobody said that. In fact he says himself that he is dead. It's just that I have so few dead people call me on the telephone that it makes me wonder.”

“Well, someone was dead.”

“Yes, but did you do the job?”

“Why yes, you paid for it. You know we did it.”

“Breaker, I have to know which of several lies you are telling. Did you catch up with Battleby and talk to him? Did he make a trade with you for information? Did you hide him and put a switch in his place?”

“No, Tom, we did not do that.”

“Don't anger me, Breaker. I have to take pills now for my blood pressure. What did happen?”

“We had a man staked out in his apartment. He heard the shot in the alley. It was right in back of the apartment. He went out at once and it seemed that the identification was complete. So we thought that as long as we had scared him into killing himself we might as well collect for killing him. That's the way it was.”

“At any rate he's still vocal, and you have collected for silencing him. You still owe me a killing. Go do it.”

“Just one more thing, Tom. Did he call anyone else? Did anyone else hear him talk?”

“Not that I know of.”

“You think maybe, you know, what with the pills you're taking for your blood pressure and all, you think maybe you were mistaken?”

“No, I do not. He said he would call again in twenty-four hours, and some of you will be on the extension when he calls. And with advance notice the call can be monitored and traced. If I can hold him on the phone long enough we will know where he is talking from before he leaves the line. And remember, you have already been paid for killing him, so you owe us a good job.”

They did not find Battleby the next day, but they had high hopes of finding him the next night. There were no really odd incidents during the daylight hours, although all three of the gentlemen crooks did receive taunting telegrams signed James Francis Battleby, deceased. Yet there was no direct evidence that they were sent by a dead man. Almost anybody can send a telegram under any name.

It is true that Melvin Masterman could not eat his noodle soup that noon: he thought he saw fingers floating in it. It is true that Hugo Erpresser fancied he saw the face of James Battleby on a variety of passers-by. And it is likewise true that Thomas Crawley took more than his usual amount of tranquilizers that day. But nothing happened in the daytime.

It was a little after eleven in the evening when they were all gathered waiting for the call that it came. It was Battleby, and he taunted Thomas Crawley lightly.

“I had hoped that you would have confessed it all by now. I am disappointed in you. Do those little clicks indicate that your playmates are on the line also? I see that they do.”

“You cannot scare us, Battleby,” cut in Melvin Masterman. “You are playing with fire. We will hunt you down, you must know that. You aren't going to live the night out.”

“Those are strange words to use to a dead man. But if they were applied to you, and I do apply them, they would make more sense. I will talk to you again tonight, and when I do it will be as one dead man to another.”

“We will make sure of you this time,” said Hugo Erpresser on his extension. “I thought there was something wrong when the face was gone.”

“You will see my face again tonight,” said Battleby, “and when you see it again it will not be made from wax and rubber. It may be a little disintegrated, but not much. I have kept my appearance well.”

“Tell us how it is in Hell, Battleby,” said Thomas.

“It is one place I have not been and now I will not have to go to. You are trying to keep me on the line, Thomas, while your boys are tracing this call. There is no need for that. I am phoning from my grave. Where else would I be? Trace it and that is what you will find.”

“You are phoning from your grave, but not the way you mean it.”

“Yes, it is the same way. But I only called to tell you that your time is up. You should have confessed like a gentleman today and put yourself in the way of going to prison. And now to you also I say that when I talk to you later tonight it will be as one dead man to another.”

He hung up on them, and the crooks swore at the phone. Then they took off with Breaker Brock at high speed but with no great hope; for the call had been traced, but it was from a public phone at 6300 West Ashton. As they drove near they realized that it was indeed at the corner of the old cemetery. But the booth was empty and they had been conned and mocked.

Breaker Brock got out and went over it all carefully. It was quite plain to see, it was meant to be seen. The line was tapped just above the booth, and a twisted pair of communication wire went across the sidewalk and through the fence to the old graveyard.

“How long did he work for you, Thomas?” Melvin Masterman asked.

“I don't know. Fifteen or twenty years.”

“And you never knew he had a sense of humor? We have underestimated this boy. Well, let's follow the line and show that we appreciate a good thing.”

“Where — where — where will it go?”

“Stop stuttering, Thomas. If you know he's alive how can he hurt you dead? It will go to his grave, of course. The joke would be pointless if it didn't.”

So the four of them went over the fence. This was an iron picket fence and not easy for an out-of-shape man to negotiate. And Thomas Crawley went over it only with extreme labor, and then followed the other three, shaking and weak, and completely out of breath. And he never regained his breath this side of the grave.

It may be that this climbing effort had some bearing on what happened soon after, for he was a man of interesting blood pressure, and much given to tranquilizers. Or it may be that it would have happened even without the effort of climbing the fence.

Melvin Masterman was the only one who seemed to be enjoying this. He led them in following the line to the grave. But he was surprised when he yanked it and it would not come out of the ground.

“I would have thought he had only pushed it in a little way for a joke. But here they have made an elaborate game out of it. And there is a shovel lying on the next grave right where an alert eye like mine would spot it. Well then, let's open the can and see what kind of soup is inside.”

“What do you intend to do Mel — Melvin? What are you going to dig — dig with that?” panted Thomas Crawley.

“Why, I am going to dig up our mutual little friend,” said Melvin Masterman. “A joke is no good unless you go along with it. I will see if the phone wires go into the coffin, and see why they went to such lengths with the line. And then so long as I have the box open I will have off with a few of those fingers to match up the prints. Last night I had a pocket full of fingers not my own. This time I may have some that will tell me more. Then I will know if this is really the little bugger buried there, or if you have lost all your marbles, Thomas, and are hearing voices. Though I heard tonight on the line too and it sounded quite a bit like him.”

He dug down swiftly.

And speaking of voices, there was a voice there among them and yet curiously distant. And if it were a voice and not just an imagining then surely it was the voice of James Battleby.

Masterman dug deeper and now it seemed certain that the telephone wire would terminate in the coffin. The voice was louder and nearer, and it was more like the voice of Battleby.

“It's his, it's his,” said Thomas Crawley in a sort of terror, and seemed to grasp at his heart.

“Sure it is,” said Masterman. “It's the little bugger talking from inside his coffin. I wouldn't miss this for the world. I never could let go of a trick till I found out how it was done.”

The coolness of Masterman had some effect on Hugo Erpresser and Breaker Brock, but it had none at all on Thomas Crawley who had not been able to get his breath since climbing the fence, and who was now shaking and trembling with a terror unbecoming to him.

Melvin had uncovered the coffin and nearly opened the lid when the muted voice of Battleby within it abruptly ceased. Then after a short pause a phone began to ring within the coffin.

“Answer it, you little bugger, let's see you answer it,” said Melvin Masterman.

“If he answers it I'll die,” said Thomas Crawley, and then without seeing whether he did or not Thomas Cromwell Crawley toppled over dead.

“Take care of the boob,” said Masterman. “See if it's serious.”

Then he returned to the lid of the coffin as the phone rang eerily within.

“Answer it, Battleby, you little bugger, or I will.”

Then he had the lid off and, finding the jangling instrument, he talked into it as coolly as though he were in his own office.

“Masterman speaking. What is it?”

“Is Thomas Crawley there?” asked a voice that belonged either to the devil or to Willy McGilly. Those who have heard them both say they are similar.

“He is and he isn't,” said Masterman. “He seems to be indisposed. Who shall I say is calling?”

“Oh never mind,” said the voice that belonged either to the devil or to Willy McGilly, “he just walked in the door.”

It was then that Breaker Brock said that old Tom was dead.

They hustled out of there with the dead crook after only a slight delay. Masterman had to satisfy his curiosity first as to how the phone worked. But it wasn't too intricate. The instrument had been placed within before the coffin was closed and the lead wires brought outside. The bell was hooked independent of the receiver, and Battleby and the devil (or Willy McGilly, whichever one it was) had doubled back on them to the juncture at the public phone, pulled off the dummy connection, hooked on, and rung and talked into the coffin. The body in the coffin was now soft and foul, and was itself beyond voice.

So Masterman collected a pocketful of oozy fingers for what information they could give and went along to the car with the two live crooks and one dead crook.

This was all in the nature of the catastrophe. One of the crooks dead was a definite detriment to their master plan. He might even render it inoperative. But the first thing was to get rid of old Tom. He was brought back to his own apartment and placed in the attitude and circumstances seemly with his dying of heart failure, as he had died. The three live crooks noticed only unconsciously that the apartment had been ransacked. They were ransacked in the head themselves and they left without ceremony. They went to put their own houses in order and see what could still be salvaged from their crookery.

Hugo Erpresser went to his own abode, the set of fine rooms in the noble tower. He switched on the light and went at once to the large mirror, for even in distraction he was a vain man. He looked to see his own face but he saw instead (in truth he half-expected it this time) the face of James Francis Battleby looking at him. This startled him again, for it is hard to get used to another man's face looking at you out of a mirror. Then according to his nature he checked his treasure, and, discovering his wall safe where neither you nor I would think to look for it, he saw that this time it had not only been tampered with, but had been diminished in the very contents he had desired to remain as they were. He mixed himself a drink to, as he always said, steady his nerves. He went back to the large mirror intending at least to pull the face off of it, and it was then that he noticed for the first time in his agitation that this face was neither rubber, wax, nor phenolic; but instead was made of a rather pasty stuff of which the face of Battleby himself was composed. Erpresser hadn't known that there was a live man in the room with him. Still less had he known that there were two of them.

He was somewhat relieved when all they did was gag him and truss him up. Then they loaded another suitcase of his boodle and private papers. For he had seen the face, and now the face had seen him. And it left all his crookeries in ashes and his guns spiked. And perhaps he was no longer a rich man and might have to lodge in another kind of hotel.

Melvin Masterman was walking along the street. It was now a sort of late hour for him to be walking along the street and he wasn't sure why he was doing it. He had been to his apartment and found it a shambles. He may have been back to it twice. He had a feeling that if he went away and came back he would find everything all right, and it only a dream that his premises had been disturbed.

Did you think that Masterman was cool back in the graveyard? Well, he wasn't. Actually it had made him very nervous to trace that line to the recent grave. It had disquieted him to hear the voice of Battleby coming from the coffin. And when the phone bell had jangled inside it had also jangled up and down his nerves and echoed in the middle of his head. And he had not been cool. There was no need to take the fingers when he knew the man they sought was alive. It had been the showy trick of a nervous man.

And a cool man would not have gotten himself into the situation in which Masterman now was found when the men with the net descended on him, following a telephone tip that there was a crazy man in the street.

A man can be as sane as you (no not you, I'm not sure about you) and still not be able to explain adequately why he is walking down an empty street after midnight reciting a childish jingle to a handful of bloody fingers not his own. You'd have thought that man was crazy too.

The business was all over and they congratulated themselves.

“Who was the body?” asked Battleby. “I know it wasn't me, but who was it?”

“In this city an unidentified body turns up every fifty-seven minutes. And one of the best morgue men in town is my nephew. Believe me, we are lowly connected. The arranging took a little brains. Luckily that is one thing I have to excess,” said Willy McGilly.

Battleby had enjoyed doing business with Willy and his group. With him they had killed, captured, and caused to be incarcerated his powerful enemies who he had thought to be invulnerable.

They had done it with a hatful of tricks such as little boys might use, and see how the mighty had fallen!

He realized that they had profited mightily by what they called impounding the evidence, most of it monetary, from the strong boxes of three powerful men while keeping them occupied with their tricks. He was happy that they had found their own compensation in the affair, and had even returned to him half of his lifetime savings.

“After all, Battleby,” Willy told him, “nine thousand dollars wouldn't keep a seaman in snuff through one watch.”

“It wouldn't,” said his nephew, “keep a good check-kiter in pen refills through one busy Friday afternoon.”

For that is the way they talk in Wreckville.

The Day of the Glacier

The Fifth or Zurichthal glaciation of the Pleistocene began on the morning of April 1, 1962, on a Sunday about nine o'clock by eastern time. This was about twenty-five hours earlier than Doctor Ergodic Eimer had calculated; it threw him into panic, as his preparations were not entirely completed.

Lesser persons had been thrown into a panic nearly an hour before by a series of lesser events. And yet on an ordinary day they would have been of major magnitude.

It was that the thirty-three ICBM launching bases of the United States and Canada had been destroyed simultaneously. Full details were not immediately available, and now due to subsequent catastrophes they are lost forever.

Radio and TV news flashes tried to give a warning and fragmentary details, but on every channel and frequency the same cool voice would always cut in: “This is an April Fools Day simulated news broadcast. Do not be alarmed. This program is fictional.”

Congress had been in session for three months, and the new Peace Faction was completely dominant. As is known to all who are acquainted with Mergendal's Law of Parliamentary Subversion, in all of the once free countries that had succumbed to the Controlled Statists (now thirty-seven) it was subsequently discovered that twenty percent of the elected had clandestinely been working for the Controlled Statists all along; that sixty percent had no true principles or basis of belief of any sort and no practical aim except to be on the winning side, and that a final twenty percent were to some degree die-hards, more or less devoted to the old way.

Incidentally, at this moment the latter percent had virtually ceased to exist. A series of nearly one hundred mysterious early morning murders in Washington, Chevy Chase, Silver Spring, New York and other not-too-widely scattered locations had done for most of them. This was not widely known even now, several hours later; although curiously the accounts of several of their deaths were in the Metropolitan papers before they happened. In the case of one, at least, it did not happen at all; he had forewarning and was miles away at the time of the attempt.

It had been unseasonably warm and dry for six weeks, for which reason nearly everyone except Doctor Ergodic Eimer and his cronies were surprised by the sudden chill and quick heavy snow.

They were in feverish preparation, having to telescope many hours of work into one. When they got to the airport, three inches of snow had already fallen, and it was as though it had only begun. They left quickly in three chartered planes, the last ever to leave there.

In the great cities of the Eastern Seaboard, only a little over five inches of snow fell in the first hour; but in the second hour more than seventeen. Many people of the nation seeing the fantastic accumulation simply went to bed for the day. And millions of them stayed there till they died; there was no way out.

America died that week except for a few lingering communities on the Gulf of California, and the lower Mexican deserts, and the snow-dusted Indies. Europe died, and most of Asia, and the southern continents froze from the bottom up. Melbourne and Sydney and Port Elizabeth were buried, as well as Buenos Aires; and even Rio right on the tropic had seven feet of snow.

“The last time it happened,” said Doctor Eimer, “the Padiwire Valley was a good place. We know this from our previous studies and our preparatory expedition there last year.”

“Who would have thought,” asked Professor Schubert, “that an ice age could have come so suddenly?”

“Apparently only myself,” replied the good doctor. “I told everybody worth telling but had very little response for my trouble. It isn't as though we haven't had four very recent ones to study. It isn't as though it weren't written plainly in the rocks for everyone to see. Though I must say,” he continued as he shivered in his great coat, “that this was a mighty short inter-glacial — actually less than twenty thousand years of what we might call really nice weather.”

“Will it snow long?” asked Violet, his somewhat overcharming secretary. Dr. Eimer often said that he kept Violet for her looks only, as she was not much smarter than the average PhD.

“I think not,” he answered. “Possibly not more than ninety thousand years of maintained snow, and the accumulation itself will come in the first fraction of that period; a very short duration. This will be a sort of sport among the ice ages. There is no good reason for it to happen, and it could have been prevented. However, once the balance is tipped, it takes it a little while to swing back. We can be thankful that it will not be as long nor as cold as Würm.”

“Or Mindel or Riss,” said Professor Schubert.

“Or Günz,” said Professor Gilluly. “I'd hate to have to go through that one again.”

“None of you act as though it were serious,” said Violet.

“Yes,” said Doctor Eimer, “the world is dying and that is serious. But we will save ourselves, and part of the luggage we take with us is a little good humor. If we are too serious, we will die also. The serious always die first.”

“What was wrong with your calculations?” asked Professor Schubert. “If we hadn't cut and run for it, we'd never have made it. Another half hour and we'd have been trapped for good.”

“My calculations, as always, were perfect. But the balance was so delicate that a bit of unlooked-for turbulence set it off.”

“Turbulence?”

“Possibly less than two hundred fission warheads that struck our launching bases. Who would have believed that such a little thing could upset the balance a day early. But the balance was delicate.”

“LaPlace-Mendira said that an ice age must be preceded by a thirty thousand year cooling-off period.”

“LaPlace-Mendira is an idiot. The Siberian mammoths were frozen solid with green grass between their teeth. There was no more a cooling-off period then than now. In ninety or a hundred thousand years from now, black Angus cattle will be found in the Kansas snow frozen solid with green grass in their several stomachs. It will be a wonder — black, proto-bovine animals with incredibly short legs, and looking almost like a cross between a pig and a cow. You know, of course, that all cattle at the beginning of the fifth interglacial will be red, or red and white, and quite tall.”

“I had not known that.”

“It seems that almost anybody would be able to predict the way the combination color and shoulder-height-coefficient gene would respond under moderately prolonged glacial stress.”

“To tell you the truth, Doctor, I've never given it a thought.” Professor Gilluly, in some ways, seemed not to have a complete scientific devotion.

“But it never before glaciated the whole surface of the earth.”

“Nor will it now.”

“But you said that even the Padiwire Valley where we are going will have ice and snow.”

“Oh, that is only temporary — a period of so short duration that we can disregard it, except of course to take precautions that we don't freeze to death. I venture that it will not have fallen to within fifteen degrees above zero when we land there, and there will be less than nine inches of snow. You must remember that it is nearly on the equator, and we are less than two weeks from the vernal equinox. The quick-freeze period will last less than ten days. Then the clouds will clear, for the simple reason that all the moisture will have fallen, and the sun will have come through. And here, at least, the snow will somewhat melt — though further north and south it will not.

“For a period of about seven years there will be very heavy snowfall and the ocean depth will drop about five feet a year. Then we enter the next phase — which will last no more than eighty-five years — when the snow will continue to accumulate on earth, but at a reduced rate, and the sea level will drop only about a foot a year. After that, the ice age will be barely able to maintain itself and will essentially be over.

“It is true that the snow will linger for another eighty-thousand years, but it will not greatly increase. And one day it will begin to diminish, and this will be much more rapid than experts believe. Then the oceans will rise at the rate of a foot a year for a hundred years, and a large part of the land will have different and larger rivers, and some former islands will be joined to the mainland, and new islands will be sliced off.”

“You can predict ninety-thousand years, but can you tell us what is happening right now? How did the other two planes get ahead of us?”

“If they did, then I can only say that they passed us in the snow for it does look as though two planes have already landed.”

“Well, does it look as if we have already landed too?” asked Violet. “There is a third plane down there. Is that us?”

“Obviously it is not. Are you getting light-headed? There are, if you will look closely, at least seven planes there. Well, we have made no preparations for landing elsewhere. We will land as we planned.”

And as soon as they touched down they were taken into custody.

Nauchnii-Komandir Andreyev, known in scientific circles as the Anagallic, was pleased and perfunctory.

“Ah, liddle Doctor Eimer, is it true you are not a complete idiot? I had thought you were nearly complete. An idiot may, or may not know enough to come in out of the rain, but you have come in out of the snow. You surprise me. As you see we are in total control. These three are your only planes?”

“No. No. We have quite an armada on the way.”

“Those who are not practiced should lie little or not at all. But there has been stupidity all around. This morning our leaders thought they would have the whole world in their hand, and this afternoon it is some of their delegates who do have all that will be left of it. It pleases me the way it happened. I would not have changed it if I could. I am now the commander of the world.”

“You are not our commander.”

“You are dogs. Learn that. We have studied the Eskimo, and one rule they have: the dogs do not sleep in the house or the tent. The dogs grow lazy if they sleep inside. We have your equipment. You are the dogs and you will sleep in the snow and learn your place.”

“We will see.”

“We have already seen. We have you outnumbered now by three hundred to fifty. It will not always be so we hope — the working dogs should outnumber the men. But our positions will not change. You know (though few others hold theories that coincide with my own) that during the last ice age, the Würm, there were two types of men or near-men: the Neanderthal who were the masters, and the Grimaldi who were their slaves. We are the new Neanderthalan and you are the new Grimaldi. We had thought to use a few jungle Indian remnants for that, but now we will use you.

“But you must be more numerous. There seems to be only twenty-seven women among you, and my census clerk has just reported that fifteen of them are without mates. This will be corrected. Arrange it among yourselves, but arrange it by nightfall. And remember, we expect fruition within nine months. I believe that in one of your obsoleted books there is a phrase about cutting down the tree that will not bear fruit. And do not any of you get peculiar ideas about resisting. We have with us a sadist group. I shudder at these things myself, but those to whom I delegate them will not shudder.”

They were in a white and brown world. The savanna vegetation on the fringe of the jungle, unacquainted with frost for thousands of years, withered at its touch. Every growing thing seemed suddenly to die. Yet the snow could not yet cover it all, it was too lush and high and thick; the small trees would bend with its weight, and then spring free and shake it off their crowns, so that when it finally covered them it covered them from the bottom up.

“Can we even live here?” asked Violet. “It seems that we could starve or freeze here as easily as at home. We might not freeze quite as hard, if that is any comfort.”

“No, we will do neither,” said Gully Gilluly. “We will not have it bad. By dark tonight a million birds will descend on this valley. They will perch on every tree and bush and on the ground. We can knock ten thousand of them in the heads and stack them in the snow.

“We cannot lack for fuel. Enough trees for a hundred years have been struck dead here within several hours. And within ten days there will be better adapted new vegetation start through the old. Dr. Eimer says this always happens; that seeds that have been here dormant since Würm will now come to life. And by that time there will be patches through the snow. We will have two three-month periods a year when much of the snow will disappear, and we will be in the middle of one of them. It will not be bad. Of course we will have to get the jump on our little red minded brothers. That will not be easy.”

“Oh, don't hurry about that. They have one good idea. I would kind of like to have a mate by evening. Do you have any ideas?”

“I have an idea about what your idea is. But what is that look on your face? If it's a smile, it surely has some odd overtones. Violet, don't look at me like that. I can't get married. Violet — I have my work to do.”

“Your work is back in New York under quite a few feet of snow. Think how deep it'll be by morning. And just remember, it will be nearly ninety thousand years before you can get back to it. That's a long time to be a bachelor.”

“Yes, that's a long time, Violet — I never thought about it that way.”

“Which would you rather have, me or the sadist group?”

“I don't know, Violet. There's a lot to be said against both of you. Oh, I didn't mean that quite the way it sounded. I would prefer you immeasurably to the sadist group. But I have a stubborn streak. I will not be forced by these jokers.”

“Couldn't you be stubborn about something else? There will be much you can be stubborn about under these new circumstances.”

“I will be stubborn about this. Maybe it is only about fifteen above zero, maybe there are only seven or ten inches of snow. And even though it will moderate within ten days it will be bitter tonight. Be a good girl, get your bolo, and see how much wood you can cut.”

“I had a date tonight for the opening of ‘Pink Snow’. Now I don't believe there will be any opening, and my boyfriend has probably frozen to death.”

They worked hard as the afternoon wore on. Commander Andreyev kept buzzing around them; and, though he was insulting, yet he seemed to want their company.

“Professor Gilluly, you are high in the confidence of Dr. Eimer. Has he any particular ideas of governing this colony?”

“None that I know of. Ask him. Here he comes.”

“No. None, Andy — we figured it would take care of itself.”

“And now providently we have taken that worry from you.”

“There was no worry, and you have taken nothing from us.”

“I am the commander of the world,” said Andreyev.

“You said that before.”

“My superiors will all be dead in hours or days. There will be no one to give me orders.” He said this last wistfully.

“Do you need someone to give you orders?”

“No. No. Of course not. Now I shall give the orders.” And he went away.

But in less than an hour he was back.

“Do you think, Dr. Eimer, that it is snowing harder in Moscow than in New York?”

“Of course it is. That is in line with my predictions. Is it not in line with yours?”

“Certainly. But I only wondered…”

“What?”

“I wondered if it were possible for someone to be making it snow very hard in my country?”

“What are you talking about? How could anyone be making it snow? You have been studying the coming glaciation for twenty years. What is the matter with you now?”

“It is nothing, nothing at all. It is just something I picked up on the radio a moment ago. You understand there is a great deal of panic in the world, and many things are being said that in normal times would not seem normal. It is just something I heard on the radio.”

He went away. And the professors, doctors, and assorted persons worked very hard until they had attained the means and assurance of shelter and heat for the night. Then they rested.

“I always thought you were all crazy,” said Violet, “but you paid well — so I worked for you. But how did you know it was going to get cold? What makes an ice age?”

“There's a lot of things that can do it, Violet. It only takes a little change. Between freezing and melting there is only a fraction of a degree, and if it is worldwide that is all that is needed. There is a solar variable cycle involved here, and an oxygen carbon-dioxide balance or unbalance: there is a cloud envelope disparity and a change of worldwide air flow. But that is just a fancy way of saying it, Violet. The straight fact is that every now and then it just plain gets cold.”

About dark, Commander Andreyev came to them again.

“I extend the hand of friendship,” said Andreyev.

“Good for you, Andy.”

“My remarks earlier today were intemperate and ill-advised.”

“Indeed they were. But how did you come to realize it?”

“I propose that we join our forces.”

“I propose that we leave things unjoined. We should gradually learn to get along.”

“I propose that you reign as supreme commander, Dr. Eimer.”

“I propose that you get over your nonsense, whatever it is.”

“I am putting all my forces at your disposal, everything, even my sadist group — they are yours. Say the word. Is there anyone you want tortured or intimidated? They are avid to do it.”

“There is nobody. But please explain the change.”

“Dr. Eimer, if you were accustomed to obeying orders and believed it right to do so, should you not obey a final order — even though it were unenforceable on you?”

“I think so.”

“It is an order I received, perhaps the last order that will come over the air. There have been all-channel and all-languages broadcasts. I cannot disobey an order. It is to all our commanders and agents everywhere in the world.”

“And what is the order?”

“It is that we surrender unconditionally to you.”

“What is there left to surrender? And why have they done it?”

“They seem to believe in my country, even the leaders — oh, I don't know how to say what they believe in my country!”

For if it was snowing in Washington and New York, and in the tropics, it was snowing doubly in Moscow — an odd quirk of the new glaciation that had been predicted by both Dr. Eimer and Commander Andreyev working independently on two different continents.

By noon eastern time, when white night had already descended on the Russias, the mysterious urgent pleas had come to a heart-rending climax.

By cable and broadcast came the notes.

“The launchings were unauthorized,” said the first note.

“The launchings were in error. We request that you stop the snow until negotiations can be resumed,” said the second.

“Urgent, repeat, urgent, that snow be stopped,” said the third.

It was a puzzled President and staff that read the cables, and a mystified public that heard the broadcasts. They did not immediately realize that Moscow believed the incredible snow was an American secret weapon, unleashed in retaliation for the missile launchings and destruction of the American bases.

The notes became pleading: “Government being completely redesigned on more amenable lines. Request patience and understanding. Urgent snow be stopped. It is now more than four meters. Advise surrender terms. Cessation of nivalation critical.”

“It is hardly less critical here,” said the President. “Nine feet is no light snow, and I doubt if it can be stopped by either act of Congress or executive directive. I could give a lot of orders, but what good would it do? Nobody is going anywhere.”

By the time of the Washington dusk, which was only a grey overlay of the blurred white, Moscow was buried under twenty-six feet of snow, and there was two-thirds as much over most of America.

Down in the Padiwire Valley on the equator Dr. Eimer, Professors Schubert and Gilluly and some others went with abdicated Commander Andreyev to his tent to hear the last of the broadcasts.

“Abject surrender. Request for the love of God you stop snow.” And the last message was only a broken particle of phrase: “Помилуй!”

Mercy!

Chombo

“It's a hundred dollars for only eighteen minutes work.”

“Less work than that. He'd never go six rounds with me. He might not go one. But I don't believe I'll fight in the states any more.”

“A little money can come in very handy.”

“No, I don't think I need the money.”

“If you take him, I can get you a match with Gambel in San Francisco.”

“That's what I'm afrai —  I mean I don't care too much about it.”

“You're not afraid the boys might be getting a little too tough for you as you move up?”

“I'm not afraid of any of the boys, Doc, and you're not going to get me mad enough to say yes. I think I'll stay down here in the chaparral and just cut brush.”

“You won't get rich that way.”

“No. I may even starve. But if that's what I like, that's what I'm going to do.”

“Chombo, how much can you make cutting and hauling brush?”

“Doc, I can clear as high as three dollars a week.”

“Wouldn't you rather have a hundred dollars for maybe a hundred seconds work?”

“No, Doc, I don't believe I would.”

“Chombo. Isn't that Jerome?”

“What do you mean?”

“Your name in English.”

“My English is very faulty.”

“Chombo, you never saw Mexico till six months ago. Not that there aren't blue-eyed Mexicans, but not the same blue. I don't know why you're down here, or why you want to stay on this side of the border. But I could make a fighter out of you.”

“Nature has done that. I was born a fighter.”

“Yes, I guess you were. But I can help you cash it in.”

“That may have to wait. I will fight anyone who comes down to the villages here. I will fight for money or for nothing. And I will go up there and fight, but not far up, and not often, and not on schedule. Some evening I'll come up and you'll have maybe a cancellation or you want to run me in with one of them; then I fight. But scheduled I won't be, and in the bigger places I won't be.”

“I assume you have your reasons.”

“A Mexican doesn't have to have reasons.”

“But you had to have a reason to become a Mexican. I want to give you some money.”

“I have no scruples against taking it. But why?”

“You've given me some good gates even if I can't depend on you. And I've won handily on you. But I worry about you. Will you take this?”

“Sure. Doc, if you ever have a boy you want to toughen up, send him down to me. I do it stiffer than any fighter you ever saw. I will go thirty miles a day in the sun under a hundred pounds of brush. I will swing a bolo two thousand strokes an hour cutting grilles, the toughest brush in the whole country. Look at my hands. Do you know what I use for a bag? A tonel, a wooden barrel filled with stones and sand and swung from a tripod. I shake it with my fists and butt it with my head; and I catch the swing back on my chest and shoulders. My donkey weighs just under four hundred pounds and I carry her on my shoulders a quarter of a mile every morning. Do you know that a man in shape can run down a venado, a buck deer, in the open? You just have to keep him moving and away from water. I can run one down between noon and dark, and in just a little over fifty miles. A lot of boys don't train like that.”

“No, Chombo, a lot of boys don't. But there's another sort of training. It is the actual combat that brings the finest development.”

“I know what you mean. Did you ever try to kick a peccarl to death while he's trying to tear the legs off you? And you listen for the squeal that means he is being joined by his friends. When five or more of them box in a man it's mighty hard for him to come out alive.

“Did you ever follow a puma over the face of a cliff and squeeze him down onto a ledge pocket? Then you come together and there isn't room for both of you on the side of that cliff. Did you know that on a short fall a puma is like a house cat, and will land on its feet? But on a killing fall it will give up and roll over again. It hits on its back and shatters almost every bone, and all the blood in it comes up through its throat and nose. That kind of combat sharpens you all right. A puma can hit pretty fast, and he throws a mighty dangerous hook.”

“That isn't quite what I meant. They think I'm hiding you back for a build-up.”

“I know it.”

“There is quite a bit of interest in you.”

“I know that too.”

“But you won't fight Hogan.”

“Get him down here. I've got a ring set up in the sand.”

“You know what I mean.”

“No. I have a feeling I had better stay on this side of the border for a few weeks right now.”

“I had better start back. I have a fifty mile drive.”

“I'll run along beside you a few miles. In here it's so rough you can't go more than twelve miles an hour anyhow. The moon'll be up by the time we reach the highway. I'll leave you there.”

Doc Guzik and Red Conway were talking about him.

“Doc, we don't have a thing to go on. We don't even know his name except Chombo. That sounds like an elephant boy or something. And what can you do with a fighter that won't fight?”

“I don't know, Red, but he's too good to give up on.”

“He fascinates me too. But what can a reporter do for a boy who hates reporters? It would be easy to ballyhoo him, but we have to see an object first. We could build him up like they did Jerry Camus, and then hide him. But you have to be able to bring your boy out of hiding when the time comes. We ought to be good enough to uncover this.”

“Red, he's pretty young, but he wasn't born yesterday. That means he has a past that we can pick up. He didn't get that good without a background.”

“You should have got a picture of him so we could circulate it.”

“Red, he doesn't want a picture taken so I won't take a picture. And he won't tell me who he is, so maybe I shouldn't even ask.”

“But you're sure he isn't a Mexican?”

“Red, if that boy's a Mexican I'm a Tibetan Monk; I'll answer to the name of Little Lama right now. That boy's upper midwest, Minnesota or Wisconsin, no further south than Iowa at the utmost. He's German, or Irish, or Scandinavian. He's too much animal to be English or Welsh, he just isn't in the key of a Slav; he's not a hunkey or a Finn. And by the Marquis of Queensbury himself, is he not a Mexican!”

“You might do better to forget him, Doc. You have other boys. I would forget him myself, except that I still have nightmares of that ninety seconds of his against Iceman Mellish.”

That had been nearly two months before. The Iceman had been one of the best: third-ranked middleweight. He hadn't been beaten in twenty-two fights, and the reason he was on a comeback was an injury, not a defeat. He had broken a leg stepping into a hole while doing some ill-advised cross-country road work, and he had been laid up for months. Now he took a few light warm-up fights and this was the third of them. He was scheduled to fight Manuele Gironès in San Jaime, the border town with ten times as many boxing fans as citizens.

When Gironès was unavailable, for reasons still not generally known, Doc Guzik at the last moment ran in Chombo to save his purse and prospects. He did not change the billing. And had Chombo been quickly cooled as expected, nobody would have known about the switch. But Chombo was not cooled.

The spectators in the arena (it was an old bull ring) felt it even before the fight began. And it may be that Iceman Mellish felt it. Would a snake that had never seen a mongoose be afraid, if he himself had quite a reputation and was one of the best, and the mongoose was an unknown? Was the Iceman afraid? He may have been. The snake may be afraid of the mongoose from the day he is born.

Chombo moved at the bell and threw two incredibly fast punches. The Iceman caught one very high, a glancing one almost on top of the head; and the other one he blocked with a forearm. And Chombo was back clear across the ring from him, and it almost seemed as though nothing had happened.

It may have been that the fight was already over before properly started.

It was some seconds before the Iceman began to bleed. Then the gore came down from his scalp like a jagged sheet. And when the fighters came together again it was seen that the Iceman carried his left too low. A shattered ulna makes it difficult to extend an arm, or even to raise it angularly. And the peculiar pain of this break causes nausea and dizziness.

But he did partly block the next punch that Chombo threw, and he was possibly the only person in the arena who realized just how heavy it was. And though somewhat absorbed by the shoulder, yet when it went into the ribs it did injury.

When they came together again the Iceman was blowing blood bubbles at every breath. But the old snake will yet face a young mongoose; he has his reputation and his pride. And Chombo, the mongoose, followed him with lazy eyes. Then he broke the face of Iceman Mellish. He broke it just like you might break a plate. And he turned away from him without even waiting for him to fall. But when he fell the Iceman didn't get up.

The fight was seen by about sixteen hundred persons, but none of them really believed what they had seen, and no two of the told versions were quite alike.

The two viewers who probably knew more of fighting than any of the rest were Doc Guzik and Red Conway. And they knew what they had seen.

Doc Guzik had a visitor. Big Ben Bagby was a heavy man who said he was a promoter and had been a fighter. The name was not familiar to Doc, though Big Ben acted as though it should have been.

“I hear you have a boy,” said Big Ben.

“I have four,” said Doc. “A hard-hitting lightweight. A soft-hitting heavy. A jigging welter. And a bantam who was cactus country champion before Columbus landed.”

“I mean the light Mexican boy, the middle who hits like a heavy.”

“I don't have him. Nobody has him. He is a maverick and I can't get a rope on him.”

“I hear he talks a lot and fights a little.”

“You hear wrong.”

“I hear he might fight in a left-handed sort of arena, in the dark of the moon, as it were, that is if there was someone who would give him a fight.”

“He might.”

“One of the best is passing through. He's a little bit of a maverick also. But I have a piece of him. And he's wild enough that he'll take on this salvaje of yours. If I told you his name you'd whistle.”

“Try me.”

“I'm talking about Jerry Camus.”

Doc whistled.

“I hear there might be some money around here that'd like to ride on your boy,” Big Ben continued. “I could raise quite a bit for my boy and have him ready for tomorrow night right here in San Jaime. If your boy has border fever, as they say, he's only a jump from it here.”

“Get yourself a room,” said Doc. “I'll go try it. I'll be back by daybreak with an answer one way or another.”

It was never easy to find Chombo. Doc drove down into the chaparral country a little after dark. He drove into the heart of it as far as a car could go. Then he stopped, cut his lights, and waited.

About an hour later Chombo was sitting beside him. This boy moved so silently that he had opened the door and climbed in before Doc even heard him.

“What is it, Doc? Did you want to see me?”

“Will you go tomorrow night in a non-scheduled against one of the best of them?”

“Who's baiting the trap, and why? How would you get one of the best down here for me?”

“I don't know, Chombo. Another promoter is providing the other boy. And I'll put my shirt and my house on you. I know you can whip him. I believe you could even take the champ.”

“Who is the boy, Doc?”

“Jerry Camus.”

Chombo was silent a long while. Then he asked, “Did you ever see Jerry fight?”

“I never did. He had only a few, all in the East. They've put him on ice and made a legend out of him. Promoters have different ways of developing interest in a boy. I think their way is wrong.”

“I know Jerry pretty well, Doc. He's a very good boy.”

“Can you whip him?”

Again Chombo was silent for a long time. Then he said, “Doc, I can handle that boy any way I want to. And I'll be there tomorrow night. I'm a little curious about this business.”

“Then it's safe to bet on you?”

“Doc, it's never safe to bet at all. When two men bet there's always a third force there that spins the wheel. But I can handle Jerry if you can handle yourself.”

“Do you want me to come down for you?”

“I do not. When I come you won't know it till I'm there, and when I leave I hope it to be the same way. I smell trap steel under the bait. Do you know anything about the other promoter?”

“No I don't, Chombo. I never heard of Big Ben Bagby before, though he talked a little as though I should have. He's big and hard. He could be an old promoter or a fighter.”

“Or an old sheriff?”

“He could be, Chombo. Maybe I smell steel too. I don't know what you were before, Chombo, nor why you've got the border fever, nor why you've decided to be a Mexican. If it's a trap I don't want to be the one to lead you into it. It's up to you. But if you will fight I will bet my last dollar on you.”

“I will be there, Doc. But what you do with your last dollar is your own worry. I only said I could handle Jerry any way I wanted. But be careful they don't take you on a technicality.”

“In my own arena it would take pretty big boys to do that.”

“If they are who I think they are, they are pretty big boys.”

“I have heard, Chombo, that Jerry is very good.”

“I know all about him, Doc, and you don't. He is very good. But I start where he leaves off.”

The money began to gather the next day. Money is one of the elementals and it follows its own law, and you can feel it when it begins to come to life.

San Jaime isn't really a town. It's an aldea with a small fonda, hotel, a watering station, spur, store, not much else. But it had an old arena and tonight there would be two thousand people in it.

For the people were also gathering. People are not an elemental like money, not so at least in the eyes of Doc Guzik, not surely in the eyes of Ben Bagby. To Doc they were not everything. To Big Ben they were less than nothing. But they came, all sorts of people, snake-ranchers and prune-pickers, cactus jacks and prospectors, Angles, Portuguese, five kinds of Indians, and more Mexicans than you could shake a palillo at.

But they did not bet. The small money was shy and puzzled that day. The peso gazed and was silent. Only the dollar spoke.

And then it came, a black night in a black town. When the ring lights were on the rest of the world was shut out and the crowd sat in darkness. The bets of the bigger boys were placed and locked in a strongbox under the ring apron.

And neither boy had appeared.

The five kinds of Indians were the Acomas, the Hohokams, the Sinaloas, the Cielito or Little Sky Indians, and the Ironheads. The Ironheads wore conical hats woven of beaten cactus fiber, and red poncho-blankets, and they grouped in the dark like weird clowns. Then one of them came into the ring and he was blue-eyed and laughing and in trunks under his red poncho.

“Chombo,” said Doc Guzik, “you showed.”

“Am I Chombo?” asked the blue-eyed fighter, “and where is Jerry?”

“I don't know. There's a hokus here.”

Another fighter had come into the ring in as sudden and odd a manner as the first, and the non-scheduled fight was ready to begin with Red Conway as the referee.

“But he can't be Jerry Camus!” Doc Guzik howled in protest.

“But why can't he be,” said Big Ben. “Did you ever see Jerry Camus?”

“That man isn't a middle. He's a heavy and a big one. He's like a bear. He's an Indian or a Mexican himself. He's ten shades darker than Chombo.”

“It may be,” said Big Ben, “that you have your boys mixed up.”

The blue-eyed fighter went after the bear, though he was spotting him fifty-odd pounds. He rocked and raked him, but the bear was strong and phlegmatic.

“Who are you?” asked the blue-eyed fighter as they clinched.

“I Chombo. Who you?” asked the bear.

Between rounds Doc Guzik tried to get the sense of it.

“Who is he? Do you know? He can't be Jerry Camus.”

“No, Doc, he isn't,” said the blue-eyed fighter. “I am.”

“Have you crossed me?”

“No, Doc, I told you to be careful.”

“Who is he?”

“He says his name is Chombo.”

“My God! What will that do to the bets?”

“I don't know, Doc.”

In the second the blue-eyed fighter began to get the big bear of a man. It wasn't easy. The bear fought out of a shell of iron, and he was as strong and heady as a bull.

“You've got to let him win,” whispered Doc after the end of the second round. “My money is on Chombo, and now it turns out that he's Chombo, and you're not.”

“I can't let him win, Doc. I can't ever let anyone else win. If I knew how to let anyone else win I wouldn't be a border jumper without a name.”

The third and fourth were brutal. The fifth was shocking. The bear-baiting was very bloody. The bear could have quit without shame.

“We're sunk,” said Doc after the fifth. “There isn't any way you could let him win now. He's blind and stumbling. Go in and drop him. But the real scuffle is going to be over that strongbox under the ring apron.”

“You watching it pretty close, Doc?”

“I'm standing on it.”

“You think you're the one who's sunk,” said the blue-eyed fighter. “I shouldn't have come when I smelled trap steel. I've spotted three of them.”

“They going to arrest you for something old, boy?”

“They think they are.”

There is a question just how long a man can stand up under a pounding, and the bear was crippled and dazed. He shrunk into his shell till he was as broad as he was high. It seemed the only reason he didn't fall is that he was already hammered as low as he could go. And when the lights went out he seemed to be dead on his feet.

They weren't out long, between three and five seconds. But when they went on again there was only one fighter in the ring.

The churning Ironhead Indians in their conical hats seemed to be hiding someone in their midst. But when they were shook down there was no blue-eyed fighter among them, and many more seconds had gone by.

“Everybody out and surround the place, and don't nobody move,” said Big Ben Bagby. “We have a warrant for the arrest of Jerry Camus on an old manslaughter charge. He has been identified by one here tonight.”

“Serve it then,” said Doc Guzik. “Find him and serve it.”

“We'll find him. He can't get away,” said Big Ben. “But we have won the side bet. He sure beat Chombo, and you were betting on Chombo, even if you had your boys mixed up.”

“No,” said Red Conway, the referee. “Chombo wins. Jerry Camus is not here to answer the bell for the seventh.”

“We'll see who gets the strongbox,” said Big Ben. “Boys!”

But the strongbox was no longer there, any more than the blue-eyed fighter was there. And Doc Guzik remembered a boy who could go thirty miles a day in the sun under a hundred pounds of brush. The strongbox was heavy, but it wasn't that heavy.

“He can't have gone far with it,” said Big Ben. “He can't have got to the border.”

“I'd lay two to one he has,” said Red Conway. “It isn't a thousand yards.”

Doc Guzik gazed out into space and couldn't decide whether he was angry or pleased. And his glance wandering in space encountered the eye of one of the Ironhead Indians, and the eye winked weirdly at him. It was almost as though a totem pole had winked.

Everybody tried to arrest everybody else, but after all Red Conway was a deputy, and Doc Guzik was the town marshal; and all that those visiting sheriffs could bring against them was a lot of talk.

It was nearly dawn when Doc got the phone call.

“You are Doctor Guzik the celebrated promoter?”

“Yes. What is it, operator?”

“Filibustero y director?”

“Yes, operator. Who is calling me, little girl?”

“Bon vivant and entrepreneur? What else I ask him is he, Jerry? You con man, Doc? That you?”

“Chombo! Jerry! Talk to me. I don't even know what to call you, boy. You all right? Get away clean? And how did you take that strongbox when I was standing on it?”

“You were jumping up and down on it. And you came down farther than you went up. Tell Big Chombo I'm sorry I had to hurt him. But he didn't have any business borrowing my name, just because it happens to be his own. Wait a couple days, Doc, and then come down here. I have your money for you, but the other half I keep. I figure I was the one who won it. I told you I could handle Jerry Camus any way I wanted, but I almost got his nose caught in a trap for him.”

“Jerry, Chombo, boy, whatever I'm to call you. I'll bring a contract when I come. No, wait, Jerry —  you can fight — ”

“Goodbye, you old duffer, you old rogue, you old shill-man. What else I tell him goodbye he's, Jerry? Goodbye, you old rosin-bag sawbones, you old mud turtle, you hammer head.”

“Goodbye, little girl. Goodbye, Jerry, boy.”

L'Avare

“Alphonse Aler was a very saving sort of man. It had not always been so. It began like this. Every night he was accustomed to spend a nickel for a cigar; this was a long time ago. With this he would strut about town in the cool of evening, for a cigar is the mark of a spender. And every night when he bought it he watched Lawrence Labatt, for Monsieur Labatt always bought a twenty-five cent cigar. This he also lit and strolled into the cool of the evening puffing. But he took only a half-dozen long puffs on it. Then he would lay it gently on a stone ledge there in the darkness, for those few puffs of the finest were all he wished.

“Alphonse had a terrible struggle with himself, but whether he won or lost is a question of viewpoint. For after this he no longer bought a nickel cigar in the evenings. Instead he would pick up the stogie that Labatt had laid down, and stroll into the night five times the prestige as before.

“Alphonse ate in the evenings at Saint-Ange's little restaurant. He always tipped ten cents. That hurt him, for that was one-fifth as much as he spent for the meal. But he could hardly leave less. There is a stigma on those who tip only a nickel or not at all.

“One evening he sat at a table before it had been cleared and before the tip had been picked up. This was a quarter, and he pocketed it. But not permanently, for he was not a thief. He had not come so far. And when he had finished his meal he left the same quarter for his tip. What was wrong with that? The girl had not been robbed, she had her same quarter, he had just kept it safely for her for a little while.

“Thereafter Alphonse always sat at a table before it was cleared. And he always picked up the tip. Once he came and found no tip. He swore terribly at the avariciousness of the previous diner. But he did not go into his own pocket for a tip when he left. He could hardly be expected to do that.

“He began to spot the bigger tippers and to sit at their tables before they were cleared; here might be fifty cents, a dollar, even two dollars. This he always put in his pocket. He did not however replace all of it when he left. Ten cents was enough for a working man to tip, and that was all he ever left. In this way he stole on the average of a dollar a night. But he did not consider it stealing. Had he so considered it, I am sure he would not have done it.

“For breakfast Alphonse had coffee only. He was tempted by the rolls and sinkers of his peers, but he could not see his way clear to indulge this expense. And yet he hated waste of any kind, and it pained him to see them leave fragments on their plates. He began to subtract small particles from the plates of his neighbors and to pop them clandestinely into his mouth. There could be no valid objection to this. He knew from personal observation that these small pieces were not saved, but were thrown out to utter waste. He now possessed (though surely he did not deserve) the contempt of the manager and the waitresses of this small place. A crisis came one day when he paid his nickel for his coffee (this was a long time ago) and the manager flung it back at him with a snarl that probably he needed it more. Thereafter Alphonse had every morning his coffee free. Many a noble man has learned to live with the contempt of menials.

“Lunch Alphonse took with a group of other clerks. By these he was given the name Le Tatonneur, which is to say the fumbler. I assume he fumbled checks. He did not fumble much else.

“Alphonse did not pay rent. Once he had done so, but it pained his soul; now he removed that source of pain. He had gone to a rather simple-minded acquaintance and suggested that since the latter already had rooms and was blessed with an extra bed, it would be no expense if he, Alphonse, slept in that bed. So that was the way they arranged it.

“What did he do for clothes?”

“Clothes? Yes, that was a problem for him, and it took ingenuity to solve. Hats and overcoats were not bad: people often leave them hanging in public places for brief periods while they dine or are otherwise serviced. Nor were shoes overly hard to come by, as in many of the hotels they were left outside the door to be shined overnight. And often he could pick up a quite serviceable jacket. Harder to come by were socks and linens; for this reason he could not be described as immaculate in his person. Yet somehow he managed them without cash outlay.”

“He must have saved a lot of his money.”

“He saved all of his money. He had found various little ways of picking up loose sums in the office and shop. He did not consider this stealing, but saving. For he did save his employer money by the shrewdness of his deals. But all that he saved he put in his pocket, as he figured that but for himself it would be wasted.”

The old man was silent for a while after telling about Alphonse, and he sat with his companion on a bench in the cool of the evening.

“But what finally happened to him?” asked his young companion.

The old man pointed to the factory rising against the skyline in the dark.

“Not that Aler? The Aler Industries? Is that Alphonse?”

“Yes. That is Alphonse.”

“He must be worth millions now.”

“Yes. He is. He is a very saving man.”

They began to walk slowly out of the park.

“I must have my smoke,” said the old man. “It is my only indulgence, and a very small one it is.”

“Good evening, Monsieur Labatt,” said the tobacconist.

“You are Labatt?” asked the young man.

“That is my name. I am surprised that my name would mean anything to you.”

Labatt bought a fifty cent cigar. It had been many years since you could get that kind for a quarter. Then they walked slowly in the night. Labatt took only a few slow puffs. Then he laid the cigar gently on a stone ledge in the darkness and they walked on down the street.

A car pulled up behind them and stopped. The chauffeur got out, fumbled on the stone, and found what he was seeking. He gave it to the man in the back seat and they drove away.

“That surely can't be — ?” began the young man.

“Ah, yes, that is Alphonse. We have not missed for thirty years. He is a very saving man.”

Girl Of The Month

Mansard Moluney belonged to the Bibelots, to the Bibliophiles, to the Bibliomanes, to the Seventeenth-Century Book Club, to the Eighteenth-Century Book Club, to the Fine Editions Club, to the Library Editions Club, to the Cook-Book of the Month Club, to the Man-About-Town Book Club, and to the Off-Beat-Book of the Month Club. He belonged to numerous Record of the Month Clubs, and to a whole dynasty of Art-Album, Around-The-World-Booklet, Chinese-Silk-Print, and Exotic Gifts Clubs.

He even belonged to a rather unusual club that delivered to his door a packet of different kinds of sausage on every single day of the year; and this included Yak, Rattlesnake, and giant Sloth sausage before the year was out. As far as we know this is the only club in the line. It is not to be confused with the Salami-A-Day club to which he also belonged.

When he saw an advertising card inserted in one of his For-Discerning-Adults-Only-Book-Club choices he naturally signed it and mailed it.

This made him a member of the Girl of the Month Club.

He did not know it, but he was now a member of the newest and most exclusive Month Club in the world, one limited to thirty members.

In the fullness of time (three days), he received a beautiful colored art photograph which he hung on his wall. As his eyes had grown dim from his activities he did not read the fine print under the accompanying cover, and so did not realize that he had become the seventeenth-day member unless he immediately expressed a preference for a different day. Had he read it he would not have acted, as to him one day was much like another.

But on the evening of the seventeenth day of that month which shall be nameless (you who are presently among the thirty members of the club, knowing the month, would be likely to identify the girl) on that evening a quite nice young girl came to his door. And when his eyes had undimmed he realized that she was the girl of the Art Photo.

She kissed him with kindly passion, and sweeping into the room, opened her weekend bag and set out a small but select number of items: a fifth of Maryland Rye Whisky, an album of seductive records, a small but expensive portable smorgasbord, a handful of yellow jackets, and a few small objects which he did not comprehend.

“I fear I did not fully understand all that the club comprised. I had not expected a live girl.”

“I am a live one all right. Sign here and we'll get rid of the business and then get down to the business. In a few days you'll get an invoice for me and you can mail the remittance. And any gratuity (which I am sure you will be delighted to give) I will take in cash in the morning.”

“Yes, this is an interesting club. It is very piquant for them to send a live girl to talk to.”

“To talk to? Are you a talker? I had a talker once before. Mr. 9th of the month was a talker. But when he finished talking, O Boy. I hope you can do as well.”

“This may be the most delightful club I ever joined. My greatest need is always someone to talk to. Many people, comical as it seems, consider me a shattering bore.”

“Why, I don't think that's comical at all.”

“I thank you for that, dear, or do I? There may be a double meaning in your remark. What is your name, dear?”

“Ginger.” This was not really her name, nor the name she gave. But you thirty who are presently members of the club are not to be given her name. She was now in the process of changing.

“The act of disrobing in the presence of a heterogeneous,” said Mansard, “seems to a naïf occidental like myself unusual. Yet in other climes it is not so.”

“In the presence of what, dear?”

“One of the other sex.”

“O.” She was now in something black and silk and sheer.

“You may not know,” continued Mansard, “that the manufacture of sheer silk began on the island of Cos. The silk fabric was imported from China, then dismantled thread by thread, and rewoven to a transparent thinness. Shall we set a date of about 312 bc as the beginning of this industry?”

“Yes, let's.”

“From there they re-exported it all over the Aegean, and within a century as far as Rome itself.”

“How clever of them.”

“And though I don't believe I ever noticed it before, yet it has a certain charm. It conceals and yet it does not. Do you understand what I mean?”

“I understand perfectly, precious.”

“To the sight, and more subtly to all the senses, it offers a curious attraction, even temptation.”

“Gee, I hope so. You want some pop-skull?”

“A few drops only in a tumbler of warm water. A very little sugar with it. I believe that even moderation should be taken in moderation. I have a theory that the liquor that compels was first compounded, not of early rye or eimer, not of the grape itself, not even of the pomegranate (though that is very old if we correctly translate behke in the old Persian as pomegranate, though Bopp takes it to mean a quince) which I cannot swallow — ”

“Can't swallow a quince, treasure?”

“Cannot swallow that etymological theory of the quince. But I believe the first compounded liquor is from an even earlier fruit than the behke, in fact from a small berry of the central Asian plateau. You might be interested in the origin of the modern Turkestan name of this berry.”

“Wanna bet? Look, Prince Charming, why don't we get started?”

“But I am already started. I'm almost in full disclosure. When I am started talking there is just no stopping me. And with such a winsome listener I may well talk all night.”

“O my gosh! Mind if I play a Calypso?”

“Do please. It is of the genre of the musique esclave. Indeed Chesterton said that Jazz itself was a slave music. And like all slaves it is of a clouded descent. It is a child of syncopation and improvisation, and percussion is its playmate.”

“Yea, playmate.”

“Quite different from the old plainsong of the once free men. Your motions, Miss Ginger, as you listen to that cacophony are odd; almost like those of a hetaera as described in Greek verse. You are not a hetaera, are you?”

“Gee, glamour boy, I don't even know what one is.”

“O, I hadn't realized that you were so sheltered. Then of course you aren't one. My specialized readings in the field have only carried me into the third century of our era. I wonder if they still have hetaerai today, and what do they call them now? But possibly everyone is too busy nowadays to bother with such dalliance.”

Ginger came over and sat on his knee.

“Any time, Mansard Darling, you're tired of talking, well I'm just as ready as can be.”

“Tired of talking? O I never tire of talking.”

“Mr. 9th of the month was a talker. But when he finished, O Boy.”

“I doubt if I will ever finish. It is so seldom that I have a charming girl who does not consider me a ghastly bore.”

“If you only knew, dear, if you only knew.”

And her cloudy green eyes soon closed and she was asleep.

“O well, there is no law against talking to a sleeping girl. I'll pretend she's still awake.”

So he told her all about the way the Ephesians yoked their oxen (the whiffle-tree as we understand the whiffle-tree is recent, less than sixteen hundred years old) and also explained the lineage of their goads. He told her about the statuettes of Tanagra, and much about ceramics generally, and of the four methods of fire-flashing before the modern. And then somehow the monologous conversation turned to the burial customs of the Carians, though we will never know what turned it in that direction.

This is a vasty subject. “I might even say a deep subject,” Mansard murmured to the sleeping Ginger, and then he chuckled at his own joke, for he seldom made one.

When one is completely fascinated time goes quickly, and Mansard noticed through his observatory window that the stars had faded (save for Eosphoros) and day was dawning.

He gently wakened Ginger.

“Gee, precious, you're still talking. How do you do it? No, I won't stay for breakfast. I'll just have about nine fast shots of that Rye. Then I'm going to run. If you only knew how I'm going to run. O thanks. That is indeed a generous gratuity. They teach us to say that. It makes it almost worthwhile.”

She paused at the door.

“Listen, peach pie, you know when you belong to this club you don't have to take all the selections; only four a year are required. I'd skip some of them. It isn't good to take chances. April and Mae and Junie are all right. But let August go by. And whatever you do, skip November! I wouldn't want to be responsible for what might happen if you pulled that talking routine on her.”

Pamponia

Dear Miss Perkins,

What can I do with my parents? When I complain that they don't understand me, they say that they understand me all too well. This is not true. They only see me as I am, not as I shall be. They see the worm that is, not the butterfly that will soon appear. Now here is my problem. What kind of job can a girl get in a city that got all C's last semester except the things she failed in? I will run away Saturday night and get to the city Monday morning. I will get your address from your newspaper; and if you can have a job ready for me and a place to stay, it will help. I know from your column that you like to help people. I am pretty dowdy looking but I will soon blossom out.

 — Incipient Butterfly

Dear Incipient Butterfly,

Wherever you are, stay there! Don't come to me. Don't come to town. There are no jobs in town. Don't do anything. Forget your problem. I don't believe that you have a problem. Blossom out where you are. Don't call for me. Don't come here. Don't do anything.

 — Pamponia Perkins

Dear Miss Perkins,

I got a job at the Nut House. I sell nuts. I eat them too. I am really blossoming out, but not the way I intended. I sure am glad I took your advice and came to town. Now I have a problem. On Mondays and Wednesdays and Thursdays I have dates with Harold. On Tuesdays, Fridays, and Saturday mornings I have dates with George. On Saturday and Sunday nights I have dates with Eustace Fripon. I also have late dates on Mondays and Thursdays with Bosco Fritts. Now Bosco wants me to have late dates with him on Tuesday nights too, but how can I get rid of pokey old George at a reasonable hour on Tuesday? Please advise. I have a further problem that I saw Harold and Eustace talking together and didn't even know that they knew each other. Were they talking about me and what were they saying? Please advise. I have the further problem that I am always short of money as they do not pay very much at the Nut House, and all my boyfriends are tightwads. Please advise. I have another problem. How can I make myself attractive to boys so they will ask me for dates. Please advise.

 — Filbert

Dear Miss Filbert,

I do not have any record of a previous letter from you and I have searched my files carefully. Nor do I usually advise young girls to come to town. And yet there is something familiar about you as though we had indeed corresponded. I am not sure what your questions are but I will endeavor to answer the last section. To make yourself attractive you must cherish the light within and it will surround you like a glow. Be kind, friendly, courteous, neat, and patient, and someday the right man will come to you. Engage in social work or join a class in public speaking. Often young men are met in that way. At least keep telling yourself that.

 — Pamponia Perkins

Dear Miss Perkins,

Thank you for your advice. It sounds pretty dismal so I'm not having any, but you probably mean well. I have another problem that I want you to help me with. None of my boyfriends is any good. Harold doesn't have any check coming, he never did have any check coming; he just tells people that so he can borrow money gracefully. Now he owes me thirteen dollars and he doesn't ask me for dates anymore. He's started on a couple of girls that he just owes a little money to so far. Pokey old George isn't as pokey as I thought he was. He goes in for advanced thought and things like that. I tell you some of the things he gives me to read would curl your hair but I'm not going to get as advanced as that for a while. Eustace Fripon isn't a gentleman. I discovered this by accident. After the shower the other afternoon there was quite a puddle in the street. “There's no use of us both getting our feet wet,” he said. “No, there's no use of us both getting our feet wet,” I said. I assumed he was going to carry me through the puddle. But you never would guess who finally carried whom. He is a little light on chivalry, though otherwise not so light. I have discovered that Bosco Fritts is having late late dates with Selma and Jessie after his late dates with me. I also discovered that he sleeps all day; no wonder he can have late late dates! Which of these gentlemen shall I marry?

 — Filly Mignonne

Dear Miss Mignonne,

I have searched my records scrupulously but I have no evidence of previously giving you advice, certainly not dismal advice. Your question as to which of the four gentlemen you should marry is an interesting one. We must never be too hasty in discarding any of them just because there is a little something the matter with them. We would well heed the old Roman admonition: Res, non verba. Perhaps Harold is merely frugal; it isn't everyone who has the art of borrowing money gracefully. As to pokey old George there is the possibility that you do not understand him. We must not condemn advanced thought per se. Eustace Fripon would seem not to be a model of chivalry, but something can be said for his logic; after all there wasn't any sense in both of you getting your feet wet. As to Bosco Fritts, have you considered that he may have insomnia? Be patient with him. What I want to indicate is that with all those fish in your private pond it would be a shame if you did not catch one. The Cambodians have a proverb: Fish or Cut Bait. You seem to have plenty of bait already. Fish girl, fish! Good luck.

 — Pamponia Perkins

Dear Ms. Perkins,

I found your advice of the 15th instantly too gruesome to consider, so I did not. You must mean well, I keep telling myself that. I met Bertie this week and now everything has changed. “Why do you run around with those four clammy fish?” Bertie said. I said “Ugh” too. When I am with Bertie everything else in the world is ugh. Bertie is at least as frugal as Harold, he is even more advanced-thoughtish than George, and even less a gentleman than Eustace Fripon, and he sleeps more in the daytime than Bosco Fritts. What makes him so wonderful is the way he combines these things. My problem is this. Shall we impoverish ourselves with a large wedding, or elope on the spur of the moment like sensible people? If we have a regular wedding would you like to come? Who pays for it, the boy or the girl, or do they go Dutch? Please advise.

 — Pink Rabbit

Dear Miss Pink Rabbit,

Marry him, whenever, wherever, and however. If it is to be a scheduled event I would love to come. You mention that he is frugal so you had better be prepared for the worst, though in normal circumstances it is the boy who pays. You mention that I have previously given you gruesome advice, but a systematic and painstaking search of my files indicates that your present is the only letter I have ever had from Pink Rabbit. About thirteen years ago I had a letter from one who signed himself Welsh Rabbit, but he was a man and his problem was indigestion. Yours apparently is not.

 — Pamponia Perkins

Dear Miss Perkins,

Could you tell me an effective way I could commit suicide without suspicion falling upon myself? I have decided to do away with my life and you are the first to know. If you have a little of an efficacious poison around the house please mail it to me in a blank envelope so that it cannot be traced to either of us. I have lost my job at the Nut House. I have lost my boyfriend Bertie. My heart is so mangled that it looks like an old piece of liver. My landlady snaps at me like a demented hyena. She was always so kind when I was paid up in advance. I was going to jump off the midtown bridge but I can't even pull myself up on top of the railing of the thing. It's pretty high and there aren't any footholds. They ought to put a box there for people to stand on that are going to commit suicide. Cockroach poison has not had the desired effect, nor have I been successful in slashing my wrists. I have either been using a piece of no-cut glass or else I have very tough wrists. I keep walking in front of cars but the drivers swerve them around like crazy men, and then the things they holler at me, it breaks my heart to hear them. I'm not used to being talked to like that. I have tried falling down the stairs but I keep clutching the banister. I soaked myself with cleaner fluid and lit myself but I only burned one thumb. I have eaten a bar of soap and a jar of mothballs. I was going to eat some ground glass but I don't know how to grind glass. Tonight if I am still alive I will take a box with me and stand on it and get on top of that railing and jump off. And in the morning I will be cast up on the golden sands of some tropical island, mysterious, dead, and beautiful. So all will not have been in vain.

 — Ophelia

Dear Miss Ophelia,

Do not do it. I wonder if you realize that you are breaking the law every time you attempt such a thing. Remember the proverb Salus Populi Suprema Lex Esto, though I cannot at the moment see just what the connection is. If I only knew where to find you! Don't do it. I request everybody to be on the lookout for this unfortunate girl to prevent it. You policemen, be particularly curious of every girl you see climbing on a box to the top of the railing of the midtown bridge. It might be she! Ophelia, stay. Patience conquers all, darkness follows dawn, and things will be as they were before. I appeal to you.

 — Pamponia Perkins

Dear Miss Perkins,

It happened just as you said it would. I have cherished the light within me till I am like a torch. I have been kind, friendly, courteous, and patient, and now the right man has come to me. He is Nesbitt Newman, and this is the way it happened. I was walking in front of cars to try to find surcease for my sorrow, and the drivers as I have said were swerving to miss me and calling me foul names; they should choke on such words as they used. There wasn't a single gentleman among them. Except Nesbitt. After the wheels had passed over my body he got out and looked at the car; then he looked at me. “I guess there isn't much could happen to either of you that hasn't already happened,” he said. It wasn't what he said. It was the kind way he said it. Then he told me I could get in the car if I'd promise not to bleed in the seats. And he took me home with him. And sister, I've got me a home! The Newmans run a Nut House bigger than the one I got fired from. Schoenfelt Newman (he's the papa) is a wonderful old clown, and he can hardly keep his hands off me. And Nesbitt, the son, is a playboy; but he's serious about nuts, and I think he's going to be serious about me. And for it all I have your wonderful advice to thank. By the way, I think I saw you yesterday, only I hope not. What a crow! We were out riding after we'd closed the Nut House, and I mentioned that you were my most intimate counselor and I wouldn't even draw a breath without asking you first. And Nesbitt said, “Why, I know who that old biddy is. She goes walking the same place every night. Let's ride past and see her.” We rode by, and boy, what an old biddy she was. We sure laughed at that one. Only Schoenfelt, the papa, didn't laugh. He said “Why, I think she's a very attractive lady. Of course, looking like that she would have to be eccentric, but that might not be bad. She looks compassionate and affectionate, and I believe she would be happier if she had someone to rumple her up a little. If you know her please introduce us.” I explained to him that I only know you on paper, and that I would have to write to you. So, Miss Perkins, if you really are that old biddy and if you'd like to meet my father-in-law-prospective, who sure is a lot of fun, then just say the word, kid, and thank you again for your wonderful advice.

 — Ball of Fire

Dear Miss Fire,

I do not know what wonderful advice I have given you since I have no record of having given you any. I have had letters from Ardent, and Fiammata, and Blazing Heart, but never before from Ball of Fire. However, for some time now many of my letters have possessed a curious familiarity. Yes, Miss Fire, I would be delighted to meet your father-in-law-prospective. I would be equally delighted to meet you. I have the happy feeling that you also will turn out to be something of a crow. You see, I have a problem too. I have very few wonderful old clowns who would like to rumple me up a bit, and they seem to get fewer all the time. Yes, I am the old biddy you saw, you have a vivid gift of description. I will be happy to meet you and yours. Just say where and when. You set them up, kid.

 — Pamponia Perkins

Club Mentiros

The Club Mentiros was small, possibly the smallest really famous club in the universe. It wasn't a room; it was only the corner of a room. It had a broken table, and four chairs made out of split rails and old rope or czisco nets. It was near-deserted so much of the time that a great cobweb, the grandfather of all cobwebs, covered it like a shroud; the most frequent lodger of the Club was a spider as big as a house cat. He, incidentally, was president of the Club.

But once or twice a year, when three or more of the members came together, the club was enlivened. This was on Ilhota Dos Gatos, an asteroid in the middle of the drift, a way station beyond Hokey Planet.

The club had nine members, but no one knew them all, nor were all known by the others. The ninth member is known to none of the others.

The club was located in a corner of a room at A Taverna Serpentina, which is to say, the Snake Bar.

Beside the broken table and the four peculiar chairs was an armoire, a rickety wall full of bottles. Though hasped and pegged this was never truly locked. And yet it contained liquor of value, or at least of unusualness: Licor Verde in Venetian Crystal, Falornian in skitz-skin bags, sugar rum in little wooden barriletes, genuine mountain dew in fruit jars, vin ordinaire, asteroid brandy, cactus juice in clay jars, and an exotic potato schnapps from Pomerania Planet.

And with these twenty-odd bottles, jars, jugs, and moringas was a set of unbelievably dirty and chipped glasses. These the Mentiros used when two or more of them were gathered together.

In the club corner were ganches from which three hammocks might be strung. And on the wall was a sea serpent.

This lay back amid a maze of pegs once designed for holding rope or drying nets, and a shelf had been built to support the hood of the serpent. It was not a large one. It would have been between thirty and forty foot when extended; and the sparseness of its mane, and the still faint green pouch indicated that it was quite a young male.

And this was all the furniture that was in the club.

It has been described in this much detail because, unless you are the ninth member of the club who was unknown to the other eight, you likely have never seen it.

And once or twice a year some of the Mentiros get there. And this evening there were three of them, the most we ever remember at one time. The sun was down now and suddenly it was dark, for in that latitude the luxury of a twilight is dispensed with.

The three were Goldfuchs Gudge, at that time a millionaire, Endive English, a pauper, and Sylvester Sachen, a negro of the Indian and possibly the best fisherman in the world.

They went at once to their nook, huffed away clouds of dust and a sheathing of cobwebs, unpegged the hasp of their wall cabinet, and handed down that exotic old world mountain dew in the fruit jar with the blown-in-the-glass cabalistic lettering in an ancient tongue which the more learned of them said was English. Pouring this into the unspeakably dirty glasses and flinging themselves into the fish-net chairs, they fell to drinking and talking.

“Since I saw you last,” said English, “I was on the continent. I would have to be seen to be believed. I was washed and combed and had money in my pants and a hat upon my head. Such neatness usually nauseates me but every year or so I try it. I even had a set of shoes under my arm when I went ashore, for there are cranky places on the mainland where you are not admitted unshod. As you know I am always something of a jenote, a dandy, even in my ordinary dress, being unusually handsome and of quite a striking appearance. So you can well imagine what a sensation I would be when cleaned up a little and properly clothed. As a consequence I soon had a crowd at my heels largely composed of small boys. These followed closely and chanted some sort of homage in the way of small hero-worshippers. It was unmusical but, I believe, sincere. Then they showered me with the stones and rocks which abound on those beaches, an act which though flattering to my vanity, was painful of impact. I have noticed that the small boys of many worlds have this custom.

“To escape my admirers I entered a tavern so elegant that I did not at first recognize it for what it was. Going to the rack behind the bar I assembled a collection of bottles nearly as noteworthy as these we have here, and taking a table I proceeded to regale myself. The waiters and bar-men gave me excited advice in the tongue of my childhood which I pretended to not understand: I did not understand it completely as it is many years since I became a primitive. But there were two things which they wanted: that I pay them money, and that I put on my shoes; and I saw no good reason to comply with either of these requests.

“I sampled various of the liquors and various of the young ladies who were there in profusion, and found of each an exceptional one to my liking: a nearly black drink that tasted like sweet iron and old fruit, and a remarkably blonde young girl who was delighted with me. And when the feeling against me was at its highest, it was she who rescued me. ‘Let him alone,’ she said. ‘He is our drummer. It is time we started.’ I knew this was not so, and I believe she knew it.

“We went to the bandstand and I played the drums, which was not difficult since I am the best drummer in the world. I was proud of myself but ashamed of the other musicians, for they were in rags. And their straw hats were new, but made defectively as though very old. And they also were barefoot, but it appeared that this state was not usual to them. They had all blackened their faces and they looked terrible. They were trying to play island music, but they did it badly as though they had mislaid the beat.

“I made up as well as I could for their lack of talent, and banged on the drums so vigorously that they fell apart. And then the spookiest man I ever saw ran up with a bunch of managers and nabobs.

“ ‘I'm the drummer,’ he said. ‘I don't know where this spook came from.’ Imagine a spook calling me a spook! ‘We don't know where he came from either,’ said the nabobs, ‘but he's going to jail.’ They took me away and the only one who was sorry to see me go was the remarkably blonde young girl. ‘I don't care,’ she said. ‘You're better than the drummer. Here, take this.’ And she gave me a handful of that dingy green stuff they use for money in that country.

“I thought it a joke at first, for it was no galvanized iron shack, but a large stone building they took me to. But when they locked me in with an elephant-sized key I knew it was no longer a joke.

“When I had slept a bit I arose again and found that I had still in one hand the bottle of black liquor that tasted like sweet old iron, and in the other the roll of bills. I drank and my full power came on me. I shook the cell till the walls fell down, and in no time at all I stood again on the beach. ‘Who needs you?’ I said and threw the bills a mile over my shoulder. ‘Who needs you?’ I said to the bottle. ‘You have done enough for me.’ And I flung it a mile over the other shoulder. Then I swam to the ship in three short strokes, pulled up the anchor with my hands, tooted the whistle, and in less time than that I was on the high seas.

“I then remembered that I had left my hundred shipmates on the land, but it was too late, for I had never learned to turn a ship around. ‘Who needs you?’ I said, for I was capable of doing the work of a hundred men, and managing the ship by myself. So I came directly here and ran the ship on the rocks where it was broken up, for I had no further need of it.”

The three drank of the old exotic mountain dew and only the sea serpent on the wall winked at the story. Pliny in his Natural History says that a sea serpent cannot wink, that it must blink both eyes together. And this error has unaccountably been repeated for thousands of years. Nobody has questioned how the sea serpent, a creature of only one eye, can blink both eyes together.

“I believe you,” said Sylvester Sachen, “for I was there at the time. It was last March 10th, was it not?”

“I don't know. I never did understand the system of giving names and numbers to days.”

“Yes, it was March 10th. When you threw the bottle over your shoulder you did not notice where it went. But it traveled across a headland, and I caught it as I stood in a little boat just a mile away. I had been having very bad luck, for though I am the best fisherman in the world I had sold only four boats full of fish all day, and now it was dark and I wanted to fill one more. You said that liquor tasted like sweet old iron, and so it did. But it also had overtones of papaya juice which fish fight over. And it had something else so exceptional that I can well understand how it restored you to your remarkable strength. I took a drink, and it enlivened my own remarkable brain with a thought like lightning. I took another drink. Then I reached into the bottom of the boat and took up a small fish no longer than my arm. I poured three ounces of the stuff down his gullet. His whiskers twitched and stood erect. His eyes sparkled, and I knew he was ready. I put him on the hook and threw him out. The boat jerked and I knew he had fastened onto a much larger fish. ‘Who needs you?’ I said in my turn to the bottle. ‘You have done enough for me.’ I knew I had a long journey and would need both hands. I tossed the bottle a mile over my shoulder and took a firm grip on the rod.

“Did we agree that it was March 10th? Well sir, that big fish pulled me till June 16th. Day and night I never let go of the rod. I watched him in the daytime, sixty feet long and glistening in the sunlight. I fought him through the dark night, and neither of us would give up. He was a marvelous monster, and I can find no better description for myself. But early in April I noticed that he was losing weight. This worried me for already in my mind I had calculated his price and spent the money. By mid-April I figured that he was losing about five hundred pounds a day. ‘You're costing me money, old pescarone,’ I told him. I watched him dwindle all through May. And by the beginning of June I was frantic. Still there was nothing but to go to the bitter end.

“He was losing length as well as weight, which I could not understand and before long he was quite a small fish. And when on the evening of June 16th he finally ran ashore, I saw what was wrong. My original bait fish was on the line, and that was all. In a little over two months he had completely devoured a fish sixty feet long and weighing twenty tons. You see, it was the liquor that had given him such an appetite.”

That was the account of Sylvester Sachen, the best man in the world for catching a fish, and as good as any at telling about it after it was done.

The sea serpent winked or blinked again. Goldfuchs Gudge pulled a handful of feathers from the mane of the serpent and set them lightly afloat in the air as he talked. It was a habit he often indulged, and it has greatly reduced the plumage of the monster.

“I believe you,” said Goldfuchs Gudge, “for I also was in that place on that day. And yet I had it in my mind that it was March 12th. But it may be that having just lost my 12th fortune that number stuck in my mind. I was gaming with some of the older boys in a high tower of the town. I had been losing steadily, a million here, a million there, but I had thought nothing of it. And after a few hours of this it came to me like a thunderbolt that this was the bottom of the barrel; I was plucked, taken, completely broke. My 12th fortune was gone and I was a pauper.

“I have a favorite trick which I use at such times. We were high in a hotel tower and I went to the window, threw one leg over the sill, and made a great fuss about jumping out. Always before this had caused consternation, and friendly hands had pulled me back from self-destruction. That night, however, they were all on to me. ‘Let the seven-letter so-and-so jump,’ said one of them. ‘Help the five-letter expletive on his way,’ said another. ‘Somebody give that four-letter a push,’ said a third. This made it almost a point of honor that I kill myself. There was no graceful way I could decline.

“At that instant there came sailing through the air that wad of bills that Endive English had carelessly tossed over his shoulder. A little over five thousand dollars was it not?”

“There were three one-dollar bills as I recall.”

“Your memory is faulty. Anyhow I caught it in my hand and it was better than nothing. And as I still sat straddling that windowsill there came from another direction that flying bottle of such precious liquor that Sylvester had just tossed away. This I caught and sampled, and it infused a peculiar power into me. I will tell you what happened. I did not kill myself that night. Instead I went back into that room and begged them to sell me one white chip. ‘But you have only five thousand dollars,’ they said. ‘You couldn't buy a tiddly-wink for that.’ That was true enough, but for old time's sake they let me back into the game.

“I began to win slowly, a million here, a million there, but I won steadily and at an interesting tempo. And would you believe it, gentlemen, before that night was over I had won a fortune, my thirteenth.

“This had a certain pleasure for me. I like to be a millionaire. I am uncomfortable during the brief periods when I am not one. I like to strut and put it on. I have never known a man who enjoyed money as much as I do.”

And he blew the last of the sea serpent feathers toward the ceiling and watched them float through the heavy air of the Club Mentiros.

“It's a pity we haven't another bottle of that sharp old liquor,” said English. “It was superb for infusing power into a man.”

“I rather desire it too,” said Sylvester. “It goes well with fish.”

“Why, I've a bottle right here,” said Goldfuchs Gudge, and he took one out of his shirt. “I bought the distillery so we would never be short.”

They set aside for the moment the exotic North American mountain dew, and drank from the unspeakably dirty glasses the dark liquor that tasted like sweet iron and old fruit. And the power was upon them as they talked through the night.

At sun-up the sea serpent stretched and preened in its nest of pegs on the wall. You didn't think he was a stuffed serpent, did you? He was live enough. He just found that old wall a comfortable nesting place.

He blinked his eye at the new sun, and he was quite the livest one in the club.

Three For A Quarrel

You couldn't really call it a quarrel; it was more like a misunderstanding; and yet it was not so much a misunderstanding as a mistake of emphasis; nor that either really, it was just a sort of frolic.

The amount of blood spilt was very little in proportion to that shed in all the world in only one short year, and its permanent effect was less on the totality of mankind than that of many larger but equally trivial events.

Tom and Myra Willoughby had been enjoying a quiet evening at home, screaming at the children and forcing them with inhuman cruelty to apply themselves to their homework.

Then Wally Waldorf came by. His wife was in the country and he was lonesome. But he did not stay long. Childless, he was terrified of small children and they, picking up the spoor of fear and scenting blood, swarmed on him. A childrens' chant can cut a sensitive man to the quick, and there is a point beyond which persistence is no longer a virtue. Nor could Myra quiet them.

“It isn't nice to tell your daddy's boss that he has a purple nose. And besides it isn't true. Well, not exactly true.”

“Mauve,” said the bird-like Clarissa, “my favorite color.”

Nor will the bites of a small boy give rabies, unless he has previously been bitten by another small boy who has rabies. But in the case of Cyril who could say?

Wally Waldorf panicked and put on his hat. That it had been filled with postum is not germane, but it did make him look more pathetic.

Myra kissed him quickly at the door and told him she was sorry that the children were mean, that they all loved him, and that soon his wife would be back from the country and he would no longer be lonesome.

And that was all.

But Tom made some light remark about her being free with her kisses, and she pouted. There is only one thing that can be done with a pouting wife, and Tom did it. He pushed her down on a bench, sat on her stomach, and tickled her till she screamed. There was nothing unusual about this. If a pout is allowed to continue it can develop into something more serious.

It was just at this time, about eight in the evening, that Blanche Manners and her cat were passing slowly. The cat, the more suspicious of the two but only by a little, hearing the screaming and determined to make something out of it, went up and scratched on the door; and Blanche followed and knocked briskly.

“Little girl,” said Blanche to the eight-year-old Clarissa who answered, “what is that screaming? Is there something wrong?”

“Don't you call me a little girl,” said Clarissa, “and don't you come around here with that fishy look. Of course there's nothing wrong.”

Then Clarissa suddenly softened for she had heard the rustle of the great golden wings of opportunity in the magic air, and she was not one to miss opportunity.

“Oh Miss Manners, oh dear, kind Miss Manners, there is too something wrong. It is so fearful we have all been afraid to speak of it. That screaming you heard was my poor mother, my dear, much-abused, pitiful, all-banged-up mother. And the inhuman monster who has done it is, as you can guess, none other — ”

“How horrible!” said Blanche Manners.

“Frightful,” said Clementine, who was seven.

“Hellish,” said Corine, who was five.

“You can imagine what sort of home-life we have,” said Cyril, who was three.

“Tom Willoughby, stop beating your wife!” shrieked Blanche.

Tom in sudden affection had just bent to kiss Myra, and Myra suddenly lifted her head in consternation at hearing the unearthly cry of Blanche; and there was a terrific collision, head to head. There was some blood from the nose and mouth of Myra, and a trace of tears.

“I will go,” said Blanche Manners with frosty dignity, “but I shall return with the police.” Her cat also voiced, or seemed to voice, a vengeful threat, and they were gone.

The seven children chortled like a chorus of goats.

“We fixed you,” said Clarence. “That's what you get for keeping us in to do our homework. If you let us hang around alleys at night like normal children you wouldn't always get in trouble.”

But Myra could only manage half a chortle.

“It was funny the way she looked at us. But children, we have just loosed the loosest tongue in the whole neighborhood. There will be many a chop licked over this by morning. We will hear more about it.”

They did hear more about it, and in only a few seconds. Officer Comstock was at the door. He looked glum and suspicious when he came in, for behind him on the porch was a strange being composed entirely of furious whispers.

“All right, let's have the truth of it. This is the third complaint we've had on this family in three months. What is the reason?”

“Possibly the reason is Blanche Manners,” said Myra. “Aren't all the complaints from her?”

“Yes, as a fact they are. But others have heard noises; weird hysterical laughter, they call it. I have heard it myself. What is it?”

“That is me,” said Myra, “when Tom tickles me.”

“Is that really all it is. There seems to be a sort of broken gasp in the middle of it that startles the hearer and freezes the marrow.”

“Well, you laugh with someone sitting on your stomach and see what you sound like.”

“That seems a mighty peculiar thing to do.”

“Well, if you'd do it to Mona, Mr. Comstock, you might not be so henpecked.”

This did not endear them to him, and he donned his customary suspicions. “I think maybe you two should have a little vacation from each other,” said Officer Comstock. “Miss Manners has an excellent suggestion, which is that Mrs. Willoughby come and stay with her for a few days and rebuild her shattered health.”

“All right. I'll pack a few things. Come on, kids, we're going to live with Blanche.”

“Oh, not the children,” hissed Blanche from the front porch. “They'll have to stay with the father.”

“You wouldn't leave us alone with our fiendish father,” said Harold who was six. “Spare us that.”

“Oh, shut up,” said Tom Willoughby, but whether he said it only to his son, or to the whole world is uncertain.

“I know, Tom,” said Myra. “I'll stay with the kids, and you go live with Blanche Manners and rebuild your shattered health.”

“No. Never,” said Miss Manners.

“Well, we got to do something,” said Officer Comstock. “I can't let this wife-beating on my beat go uncurtailed.”

“Tom, why don't you move to your club like they do in stories?”

“I don't have any club. I don't even know where there is a club.”

But finally at the stern orders of Officer Comstock, Tom went to stay with Ozzie Murphy, who was the closest thing to a club in the neighborhood.

Myra Willoughby arose glumly in the morning.

“It is just like being a widow,” she said. “There just isn't any fun in it.”

“Mama, you know all those stories about widows that they tell?”

“They aren't true. Why, what stories do you mean, Clarissa? And get that evil leer off your face. Nice little eight-year-old girls don't leer like that.”

And Tom Willoughby rose glumly in the parlor of the Ozzie Murphys.

“It's no good sleeping alone,” he said, “there's just no fun in it.”

“Is your conscience bothering you, Tom?” asked Ramona Murphy. “You really shouldn't beat poor Myra like that; though I'm sure she gives you plenty of provocation. Is it true that she and your boss, Mr. Waldorf — ? Well, is it true that on that very evening — ? Well, I mean is it true what they say about her and Mr. Waldorf? I mean, is it true?”

“Who knows?”

“You poor man! You'd naturally be the last to know. It isn't as though you hadn't provocation enough. I wish sometimes that Ozzie would raise his hand against me, just for the novelty of it. It'd show that he cared. Is it true that you bloodied her up pretty badly?”

“Quite badly, Ramona.”

“You poor man. You must have had a lot of provocation. How do you eat your eggs?”

“I don't really know. I don't know what you call it. I don't know anything about cooking eggs.”

Ramona Murphy called up Myra.

“Mrs. Willoughby, how do you cook eggs for this poor man? That is, on the days when it doesn't inconvenience you too much to do a little cooking. Oh, poached! Well thank you. I'm sure some of us don't know when we're well off. Not at all. I, at least, don't believe in sending a man out into the world on a cold stomach. I have my what twisted? Well, all I can say is that some of us are perhaps more twisted than we realize.”

Ramona Murphy hung up frostily. Ramona had always liked Tom Willoughby, and she had always been a little jealous of Myra in her patient and spiteful way.

Tom called for Wally Waldorf at the office to report that he had had an emotional shock and would not be to work that day. Wally was not there yet, so he told Carla, but it was not so impressive telling her.

“Me,” said Carla, “I have them all the time, but I always come to work. In fact coming to work itself is always an emotional shock to me. I hear you boffed your wife last night, slugger.”

“Some people have nothing better to do than gossip,” said Tom.

“Well, at least we have the decency to come to work and do it on company time. You really hung one on her, did you, Tommy?”

Carla was young and frivolous, and if she were really subject to emotional shocks it was not apparent.

Myra had a visitation from someone who was either a lady policeman or a busybody.

“We would not like to split up the family, not entirely. Perhaps into no more than three different institutions: two together, and two, and possibly the younger three. We haven't made any final arrangements as yet. Put that thing down, Mrs. Willoughby. Don't you threaten me. I am an authorized representative of the Ladies Auxiliary of the Family Engineering and Emotional Planning Adjustment Committee. We are affiliated — ” But she was on the porch and the door closed behind her. “We are affiliated — ” she said out loud but with nobody to hear her. “My! What a violent woman! No wonder is all I can say. No wonder!”

The sun shone that week but it was an unfriendly and insincere sun. The birds sang, but tunelessly and tritely. People smiled in the streets, but they were wooden, mechanical smiles. And when Tom phoned the office for a third day in a row to say that he was still suffering from emotional shock and would not be to work, Wally Waldorf said frostily: “What makes you think there is any work for you to come to? We can only hold a job open so long. For quite a while I've had my eye on a seven-year-old moron for your replacement. Either that or an untrained seal. Both would be able to handle the work and I doubt if they would be so subject to emotional shock.”

Even Nokomis, the bar man at the Plugged Nickel, said he was going to start charging by the hour to listen to his troubles.

“The worst of it is that old mother hen,” said Tom. “Ramona Murphy needs a brood of small chickens to cluck to. Whatever I am, I am not a brood of small chickens. I will get a clutch of eggs on my way there tonight, and tell her to sit on the things till she hatches them. I am not a poor man. Well, yes, I am a poor man, but not as she says it.”

And by the time the week was worn out Myra went to see Monsignor Growley.

“Congratulations, Myra, my girl. The nose on you is bigger than it was. But all things go down in time. Really bopped you, did he?”

“Why, Father, you know that isn't so. Tom is the kindest man in the world.”

“A fine man he is, Myra. There should be more like him. There's a notable lack of discipline in the home these days; too many unchastened wives. I could only wish that more men would follow his example. Then we would have better wives and better families.”

“That isn't the case at all, and you know it. But what can we do? This has gone on long enough, and I don't know how to stop it. Tom and I never have trouble. It's only when people try to help us that we have trouble. Now then, you tell me what to do. That's your job. You tell me what's wrong and what to do about it.”

“Here is the answer, Myra. Live righteously. Obey the ten commandments and the precepts of the Church. Possess your soul in fear and trembling. Beware the seven deadly sins.”

“Oh, come to the point, Father.”

“I am doing so. Love thy neighbor. Turn the other cheek. Cherish the virtues and the gifts of the Holy Ghost.”

“Let's get down to points.”

“Seek Holy Wisdom. Pray to our Blessed Mother. Meditate on the lives of the Saints, and consider the Beatitudes. Except — ”

“At last,” breathed Myra. “The punch line. I knew you would finally get to it.” For Myra knew the ways and circumlocutions of Monsignor Growley.

“Except,” said the good man, “the seventh. This one also may be true in a mystic or otherworldly sense. But for a practical guide — ”

“I am poor at numbers, Father. Is the seventh the one about the meek inheriting — ”

“The Seventh: Blessed are the Peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. I believe this precept was given for no other reason than to test our faith. It is a hard saying. It is a terrifying one. In the next world it may be explained to us. In this one it will not be. They may be the children of God, but they are a sore trial to the children of men.”

“They certainly are. I begin to understand a little.”

“In the words of the immortal Chesterton: ‘It takes three to make a quarrel. There is needed a peacemaker.’ ”

“Thank you, Father. Now that you have analyzed the problem, I believe I may work out the answer. I will keep it as bloodless as I can.”

“And tell Tom that if you ever need it again — ”

“Thank you, Father, I appreciate your gentle misunderstanding.”

“Let us hope that your second grade daughter can no longer claim that she is unaccountable for her school-time behavior, being the sad product of a broken home. Get along with you, and may God bless your puffy nose.”

Panic Flight

“Men have left their own worlds for various reasons: plain spirit of adventure, desire for wealth or fame, escape from punishment — allergy — or irritation, curiosity, a devotion to the Planetary Service Corps, or from a sort of inner compulsion. This is the same as sometimes, in the earlier days of our homeland, impelled men to undertake seafaring.”

“When they still retained the sea as such, Peter.”

“Yes, when they still retained the sea as such, John. There was also the compulsion that impelled men across the land; ‘Westering’ it was called on our old continent, ‘Homing’ sometimes (though it led men far from actual home), Wanderlust. Had it not been for that to begin with, much could never have been begun.”

“You forget, Peter, that it was necessary to impart artifically the Interplanetation Impulse when the crossing of new barriers seemed necessary. Yet the predilection had to be there for those selected for the imparting. We are all of rover families, earthbound though we once were. The Implanting would not have been possible in others.”

“All except me.”

“Oh yes, I had forgotten, Peter. All except you.”

They sat on the pavilion of Earth Club, one of the thousand-odd exclusive country clubs of that simple but elegant suburb of Megapolis. It was in the conversational cool of the evening, that magic hundred hours of companionship and charm that precedes the soft coming of the night.

These were close friends, though their acquaintance had been but of short decades: a sudden flowering of almost perfect understanding that will sometimes come to two men without a lengthy prelude.

They watched the younger swimmers, and drank Dragons' Blood as they talked. This is a heady drink of Qas, that deutero-fluorocarbon twin to alcohol.

“No man can have everything, Peter,” said John, “and we have had more than most: Health, Contentment (Do you still use those old Acme Contentment Pills, Peter? Most of the fellows have switched to B⁷), Long Life (interminable I should say: we are well rid of the prospect of what they used to call the Last Great Adventure), Relief from Worry. We have an endless enjoyment of endless variety. I have to get a Variety Booster in the morning. I had nearly forgotten.”

“And in the morning I have to leave on another trip.”

“You no more have to leave on another trip than you have to die. You want to leave on a trip.” He said this last accusingly. “It is time you settled down.”

“Yes, John, I want to leave on a trip. Every so often I must be off. My last vacation I bought a small property on BQ965Y. I may build there.”

“Let's get down to aeni clavuli fasteners, Peter,” said John. Peter winced at the phrase; in the Ancestral it had been ‘Get down to brass tacks’.

“You aren't getting any younger, Peter. You've got to come down to paleo-geos. You have to settle in your parabola. It's time you found your orbit.”

Peter winced three times at the three phrases.

“Tell me, Peter,” John continued, “why do you still wander? You are not even from one of the old rover families. You never received an imparting of the Interplanetation Impulse. What do you seek?”

“I do not seek. I flee.”

“What?”

“The cliché.”

“I don't believe that I remember the meaning of the word. I take, of course, my Cliché-Toleration shots, but I have forgotten the origin and purpose of them. Yet when I miss one, I sometimes feel myself getting nervous.”

“You should, John, you should.”

“I don't quite understand. Perhaps you should tell me your trouble now. Though we have not been acquainted long, yet we do have a certain understanding.”

“Then this is it. That thing, which you have forgotten, and from which I have fled through the cosmos, it was only a minor irritation during the old order. Then, with the prolongation of human life, its reiteration became more serious. Instead of hearing the same phrase a few thousand times, it is now millions and hundreds of millions of times that we hear it. You may not recall the history of that epidemic of suicides among baseball fans, and the murder charges lodged against a certain coterie of sports writers on account of it, and the bizarre development of that trial. The legal precedent established at that time could have resulted in absolute chaos, had it not been for the providential development of the Cliché-Toleration shot.

“I took these, as did all others. I lived in contentment on the old earth for many years. I was a laboratory assistant. One day I got some unaccustomed results from an experiment. An action, no matter what, seemed to take place at a lower temperature than wanted. I went to my lead man. ‘It isn't the heat,’ he chuckled, ‘It's the hygro-effect.’ Crawling horrors! In the old speech that would have been — well you know what it would have been. I ran raving from the room. I was frightened. I had had my Cliché-Toleration shot only seven days before, and this should not so have affected me. I fled the world that night. I have not been back. I took space service on one of the minor orbitals of Procyon. I thought there I should have peace.”

They watched the swimmers, or flyers in the pool. The pool was above the surface, a very heavy gaseous medium held in half-spherical shape by a Wilkinson-type pressure effect. The young people walked, swam, and flew at various heights in this: some gracefully, some playfully, some with a joyous lack of grace. These youngsters were of remarkable beauty and attraction, looking like so many advertisements for Suavity Tonic.

“Well, how was it on the orbital?”

“Not too bad at first. The good people there, though called alligator-men by the uncouth, are not so in fact; though of a leatherly green complexion, they are not unattractive, have even a sort of dignity in spite of their scales. And they are eager to please, perhaps too eager in their imitations of the speech and phrasing of the Earth Colony.

“But one night as I left work one of my greenish friends said ‘meet you here, sphere’, and I replied without thinking ‘See you tomorrow, sauro.’ Then I recoiled from my own remark in horror. I took flight from the orbital that very night. Since then I have never had peace, nor lived more than a very few decades at a time in any one place.

“I did a little farming on the Rigel Trabant, and lost myself in the hard pleasure of honest work. Then one evening at a Grange meeting, three of my fellow members used in quick succession three phrases that left me faint and feverish. For one said ‘Can do’, and one said ‘I'll buy that’ (meaning agreement, not intent to purchase), and one used the nauseating ‘Know-how’ in the sense of technique.

“Consider the nakedness of the thing! I wonder if you realize that these three clichés are identical with the ancestral forms. They have not even been subjected to the form of Ameliorating Translation! I left my crops ungathered (I imagine that the mego-cuniculi made short work of them), and fled into space in a panic. For several decades I was a space-bum, always on the move. You know the type, working as a menial, drinking too much, often ordered by the cops off of this or that particular planet.”

“Couldn't they give you stronger Cliché-Toleration shots?”

“They could, and they did. But there is a limit to everything. I have long been at the maximum. I worry about the future. When the conscience was obsoleted, there was a prediction that it would someday be replaced by a sort of avriophobia. In my case it so happened.

“I am near the maximum for my Futurama Injections. I am also near my maximum for my Variety Boosters, as well as for my Contentment Pills. There is a cogent reason why I never switched to B⁷; B⁷ does not go beyond the seventh power, once thought to be the limit. I hadn't wished to tell you that I need stronger than this. And worst of all, I find that my Perfect Detachment Inoculations are not now as effective as they once were.”

“You mentioned once that you had found near-contentment in the suburbs of Achenar.”

“So I had, John, till one of my co-workers dropped the phrase ‘Sklero-cephalic hippikos discernment’ which was in the Ancestral, before the Ameliorating Translation, ‘Hard-headed horse sense’. The horse, when still retained in its equine form, was not conspicuous for sense.”

“I understand, Peter. But were you not some time in the environs of Deneb? What went amiss there?”

“A phrase in the talk of one of the politicos. I should have considered the source and sloughed it off, but my resistance was low that day and it got me. ‘Now is the time to differentiate the Meganthropoi from the Micanthropoi’ he said. Which is to say, before the Ameliorating, ‘to separate the men from the boys’.”

“Such a little thing, Peter. You should not have let it bother you, really. And in the morning you are definitely going to BQ965Y? I will miss you, Peter.”

“I will miss you also, John. But from my own observation it has a good climate, and the real estate man assured me that it is remarkably free from pollen and cliché.”

They watched the young people diving and flying in the half-spherical swimming pool.

“I was there once myself, Peter,” said John. “It's a nice place for a Sabbatical, but I wouldn't want to live there.”

Peter rose retching and left the Earth Club in panic.

He did not go to BQ965Y in the morning. He left that very night on the midnight express.

Golden Gate

When you have shot and killed a man you have in some measure clarified your attitude toward him. You have given a definite answer to a definite problem. For better or worse you have acted decisively.

In a way, the next move is up to him.

And it can be a satisfying experience; the more so here, as many would like to have killed him. And now it is done under the ghastly light, just as that old devil's tune comes to a climax and the voices have swelled to an animal roar.

And afterwards an overflowing satisfaction compounded of defiance and daring; and a wonderful clarity born of the roaring excitement. Not peace, but achievement. The shadows prowl in the corners like wolves, and one glows like a lantern.

But Barnaby did not shoot him till Thursday evening. And this was only Monday, and that state of clarity had not yet been attained.

It was clear to Barnaby that Blackie was really a villain. Not everybody knew this. A melodrama villain is only black behind the lights. Off stage he should have a heart of gold. Whether of wrestling match, or afternoon serial, or evening drama or film, or on the little stage here at the Golden Gate Bar, the villain should be — when his role is finished — kind and courteous, thoughtful and big-hearted, a prince of a fellow.

That is no myth. Here it was not entirely true.

“I have always suspected,” said Barnaby, “that there is some bad in every villain. I would prove this if only I had proof. Why am I drinking cider?”

“We always give you cider when you have had enough beer.”

“It is a dirty trick, and you are a dirty Irish trickster. Tell Jeannie to play ‘Fire in the Cockleburs.’ ”

“There isn't any such song, dear.”

“I know there isn't, Margaret, but once I asked her to play a song that wasn't, and she played it.”

Barnaby was a confused young man. He was something of a rum-dum as are many of the noble men of the world. And even with a broken nose he was better looking than most. He came to the Golden Gate because he was in love with three wonderful women there.

The Golden Gate Bar is not on the Pacific Ocean. It is on another ocean, at this point several thousand miles distant. But if the name of that ocean were known, people would go there, and range up and down that coast until they found this wonderful place. And they would come in every night, and take up room, and stay till closing time.

It is crowded here as it is. The most one can ever get is one wrist on the bar. All the tables are filled early, and no couple ever has one alone for long. The relentless and scantily-dressed waitresses double them up. Then they double them up again as the crowd grows. Soon the girls and ladies have all the seats, and the men stand behind them at the tables. And later, as the drinking and singing continue, some of the men sit on the ladies' laps. They do things like that at the Golden Gate.

Clancy O'Clune, the singing bartender, began this custom. He sang ballads and love songs to the girls. He wandered as he sang, and picked out the plainest and shyest and most spinsterish creature he could find. He would sit on her lap and sing to her; and as soon as her embarrassment had faded a little, she would join in the fun and sing with the crowd.

Group singing was what brought the crowds to the Golden Gate. For people love to sing if they don't have to sing alone. Jeannie was marvelous at the piano, and with her, people would sing all the old ballads: “Tavern in a Town,” “I Wonder Who's Kissing Her Now,” “When You Were Sixteen,” “Hot Time in the Old Town.”

The Gate was a family place down on the old pier, and the only drinking spot along the beach where children were admitted. For them was cider in great steins. The motif was Gay Nineties. The bartenders wore moustaches and derby hats. The waitresses were scanty and seductive, and plumed and pretty in some old dance hall costume fashion. Even the customers liked to dress the part, and came in vintage gowns and old checkered vests from ancient trunks.

“I know the evil of him is largely compounded of soot and grease,” said Barnaby who was still thinking of Blackie, the villain. “How do we know that the evil of the devil himself is not so compounded?”

On the floor was sawdust, and the lights were gas lights. The cuspidors were old brass, and stood up in their glory.

“Has Blackie a name, Margaret, like regular people?”

“Of course he has, dear. He is W. K. Willingsforth.”

Now that was interesting. The true name of the Devil was sought by Faust, as to know it gives a power over him. And to learn it so casually was unheard-of luck. And if he had a name, then possibly he had also a habitation as though he were human.

The lamp lighter turned out the lights in the barroom and fired the eerie gas torches at each end of the stage. For every evening was the melodrama. This was loud and wide, with pistols and boots and whips, and the bullroarer voice of Blackie. Clancy O'Clune was the hero. Jenny, bustled and bosomed, was the thrilling heroine. And Blackie was the villain, that filthy old snake of a man.

The crowd would howl out “No! No! No!” to his monstrous demands, and hiss and cat-call. And Jeannie at the piano ran a marvelous accompaniment as her sister Jenny fluted her outraged innocence and terror.

This was a Monday night that Barnaby first saw the villain. And an odd passion came on him; for beyond the comic and burlesque he felt a struggle and a terror. The sandy hair raised on his neck, and he knew the villain for what he was.

Barnaby sat with a middle-aged couple and drank beer from a pitcher large beyond all believing.

“We love to come here,” said Anne Keppel, “We have so much fun just watching the other people have fun. This is the only place this old bear will ever take me. I love to sing, but I wouldn't dare sing anywhere else. He makes jokes about the ghost of a dead cat coming back, and why does it have to suffer like that.”

“The only place I ever sing,” said Aurelius Keppel, “is here and in the bath tub. In the tub, I have to keep up a great splashing, or this shrew will beat on the door and announce that the doctor will be here in a minute, and to be brave. It isn't that I haven't a wonderful voice. It isn't that I haven't a wonderful wife. But my wonderful wife doesn't appreciate my wonderful voice.”

If one is to hate the villain properly, he should love the heroine. Barnaby loved passionately, but knew only slightly, the heroine, Jenny. A little better he knew, a little more he loved her sister, Jeannie, the pretty piano player. But he knew Margaret, the mother of the two girls, quite well.

Margaret was more beautiful than her daughters. She was the tallest and best liked of those wonderful waitresses. And she was the owner of the Golden Gate.

And the girls were onto him. “It isn't us, it's mama you like. How does she do it?”

“I'll tell you. She's younger than her daughters. You're a couple of old maids. Young and pretty, but still old maids. You're not in your mother's class.”

“Oh, we know it.”

But they were no such thing. They were as exciting and heady a pair as were ever met. Jenny, the frail heroine, might toss a man over her shoulder like a sack and spin away with him. And there was never any telling what Jeannie would do.

The melodrama was over, and the little stage was dark. And it was then that Barnaby knew that he must kill the villain.

Clancy O'Clune, still in his hero's habiliments, picked a slightly gray and quietly amused pretty lady. He sat on her lap and sang to her softly a goodnight lullaby. Afterwards, Jeannie brought the piano to a great volume, and everybody sang “We Won't Go Home Till Morning.”

But they all went home at midnight when the Golden Gate closed.

And when Barnaby was home, he took out a little six-shot and fondled it as though it were a jewel.

2

Now it was Tuesday, the second day of the involvement. Barnaby was sitting in the company of four sophomores from City College. It is known by all, though not admitted by all, that sophomores are at the same time the most ingenuous, ingenious, and disingenuous people in the world. They are a wonder and a confrontation. Their hearts are ripe and their minds are on fire, and the door of the whole cosmos is open to them. Now, at the end of their second spring, they are imbued with clarity and charm.

“A survey reveals that eighty percent of the people believe in Heaven but only twenty percent in Hell,” said Veronica. “That is like believing in up but not down, in a disc of only one side, a pole with a top but no bottom, Making Love to Alice Bly, in light but not in darkness.”

That one line in the middle was not part of the argument. It was a line in the ballad that the crowd was singing, and Veronica sang it with them. And yet it too was part of the argument, for Miss Bly, who looked like an angel, had roots that went down to Hell.

It was odd that they would be talking of things like that. And only Barnaby knew the reason: that Blackie was so much a Devil that they were reminded of his homeland.

“If it weren't for the evil in it the world would be a fine place,” said Simon. “But it is only the Evil who do not believe in evil, and only the Hellish who do not believe in Hell. There's Seven Men Going to the Graveyard.”

“And Only Six are Coming Back,” sang Hazel. Then she said, “It is there like a cold wind, and curls in the corner like a dog. A whole room full of people can turn evil in a minute. The world grinds and shudders. It can come like a bolt and stand in the middle of you.”

It did come like a bolt and stand in the middle of them, but perhaps only Barnaby knew what it was and shivered for it. And yet the rest shivered as with sudden cold. For the Villain had appeared costumed in his villainy, and the melodrama began.

Once more the short red hair rose on the nape of Barnaby, and the odd passion came over him. He breathed heavily, as did others in the room. There was a terror in the comic, and excitement danced like lightning over the burlesque stage.

And when the crowd howled “No! No! No!” in simulated fury, it was not entirely simulated. And there were some who crowed “Yes! Yes!” wickedly against the crowd; and one of these was Hazel, bright-eyed and panting, as she felt the evil, like a dog in the corner, rise within her.

So it thrashed to a climax. Did not Jeannie know that the accompaniment she played on the piano was diabolic? For the temptations of the dark villain were manifold. But for a word of his, the crippled brother of the heroine would go to prison; and he withheld the word. But for his testimony, the mine of the heroine's father would pass into the domain of the Fast Buck Mining Company, and he would not give the testimony. There was even evidence, clear to the more perspicacious, that he was himself the Fast Buck Mining Company. But for him, the dastardly lie about the heroine's mother would spread and spread; and perhaps he would be the one to spread it. There would be no bread in the cupboard, nor coal in the scuttle, nor milk for the small children. And against all this only the frail virtue of the thrilling heroine.

“She ought to go with him,” said the girl at the next table. “He only wants her for the weekend. I'd go with him. Yes! Yes!” cried the girl at the next table.

And then Barnaby knew for sure that the old dark villain had to die.

Now the melodrama was over and the lamp lighter lit the lights again. The sods rose in a hundred-headed fountain; everybody had a dozen more beers and sang the ballads of Jeannie. Clancy O'Clune put on his sheriff 's badge that was eighteen inches across, and there was law and order, though a great deal of noise, in the Golden Gate Bar.

And when the midnight tide pounded under the pier, Clancy came and sat on the silken knees of a little houri named Maybelline, and sang to her “Good Night Little Sweetheart.”

And after everybody sang “We Won't Go Home Till Morning,” they all went home. Except those who went to the Buccaneer, and the Alamo, and the Town House, and places like that.

3

Wednesday morning Barnaby had a breakfast date with Jenny. It may not have been made clear that Jenny was really beautiful. Just how beautiful, it is impossible to say. Not, perhaps, as beautiful as her sister Jeannie. Not, certainly, as beautiful as her mother, Margaret. But nevertheless breathtaking, fantastic, clear out of the world.

But she asked the oddest questions.

“Why don't you work? You're not working today. You didn't work yesterday. I don't think you even worked Monday.”

“Listen,” said Barnaby. “You can believe it or not, but before that I worked for four weeks straight. Naturally I'm entitled to a vacation. How could I work this week when I've met you wonderful people and have you to think about? If it wouldn't make you conceited, I'd tell you how wonderful you really are.”

“No. It won't make me conceited. Please tell me. I know, of course, but I like to have people tell me.”

“You are just a dream. You are that little heroine all the time. All of you are wonderful except that villain. I would like to strangle him with my hands.”

“Why, he's the most wonderful of us all. He's a real flesh-crawler. I know what's the matter. You're jealous because it's really mama you're in love with. I guess all villains are really marvelous.”

“I know a devil when I see one. I'll bring a gun some night and kill him.”

“He says sometimes people do. Not kill him, but shoot at him. Then he knows he's getting across. But it'd be terrible if something happened to him.”

“It would be grand.”

“Don't talk like that. I have to go. I'm glad you asked me, but I'm mad that you asked Jeannie first. If I'm a dream, why did you ask her first? Now I have to leave because I'm always so busy. Wait till the waitress goes by, and then kiss me. Be in tonight and see how pretty I look.”

Now it was Wednesday night, the third of the epic. Barnaby was at a table with three seamen. These were not unknown. Long John in particular was known all over town. He was not merely lantern-jawed, he was jawed like an eighteenth-century ship's lantern, copper-bound and brass-bottomed, and the nose on him as livid and red as an old beacon at night. His clothing was beyond description, and the hat on his head older than any man now living in the world.

And most know Benny Bigby and Limey Lynd, the other two. To know them, however, was not to like them. Benny had a muzzle like a fox and was always looking over his shoulder. Limey was a cockney dude. They were loud and obscene. If they hadn't been friends of Barnaby, he wouldn't have liked them either.

Already, through the early crowd there was running a tide of resentment toward the seamen; and this only for their insistence that all the songs that night should be sea songs. Now there is nothing wrong with “As I was A-walking Down Paradise Street — With a Ho Ho Blow The Man Down,” but it has seventeen choruses, and when it is sung seventeen times, that makes either two hundred and eighty-nine or two hundred and ninety-nine. That is too much.

And when another ballad slipped in sideways:

“I only ask you, lack, to do your duty, that is all;

You know you promised that we should be wed,”

they sat in towering silence and would not sing.

“It isn't as though they were high-sea seamen,” Blackie, the villain, said to Clancy O'Clune. “One of them works on a garbage scow, and one on a pile-driving barge, and one on a ferry boat.”

But Barnaby was loyal to his friends, and he considered only the evil source of the remark. So he also howled for sea songs.

Now the crowd came like snow and filled the room.

“I have been in every Hell Hole of the world,” said Long John. “Zanzibar, Devil's Island, Port Royal (that was before the earthquake), Oklahoma City, Côte des Pirates, Newport News, Mobile, Alabama; but I have never seen a more evil looking man. Who is he?”

Barnaby was pleased. He had found a friend. Someone else who hated Blackie. “That is Blackie, the Villain.”

“Ah, Le Noire, I should have known. I heard of him once in Marseille.” And yet that was hardly possible, for neither of them had ever been there.

The thing about Blackie, is that he was very easy to be afraid of. He had arms like a python. And if one cannot conceive of a python with arms, no more can he of Blackie. Barnaby was a handy young man. Though he fought less than he once did, yet he always won more fights than he lost. He measured Blackie with his gray eyes, and he knew that he was afraid of him.

“I wonder how it will be when he is dead,” said Barnaby. “When the soul leaves the body, they speak of the Wings of the Dove. With him it will be the pinions of the vulture.”

The little houri named Maybelline came over and made herself acquainted with Barnaby, and he was entranced with her. And however it happened, she was soon sitting on his knee, and they were drinking beer from the same mug.

It wasn't as though he weren't still in love with Jeannie, who now smiled and frowned at him together from her piano.

It wasn't as though he weren't still in love with Margaret who now wagged a finger at him from across the room. But an houri is different from other girls, and when you are entranced, what can you do?

Everybody sang:

“In a cottage down in Sussex

Live her parents old and lame,

And they drink the wine she sends them,

But they never speak her name.”

And they sang:

“Shoot me like an Irish soldier,

Do not hang me like a dog.”

Everybody sang together the music of Jeannie, and the only lights in the place were those old gas lights. Something went out of the world with them. These new lights, they have no smell to them, they have no flicker or real glow. You can't reach up and light a cigar or dramatically burn a letter. It's almost as though they weren't alive.

And after a while, Jeannie began to play devil's music, and Evil uncoiled like a snake and slid into the room. The lights in the world went out, and the torches were lit in Hell; and the melodrama began on the little stage. The world shuddered on its axis, and the villain was prince of the world. Once more the odd passion came on Barnaby. An animal surge went through the crowd as the noble hero and the thrilling heroine and the dark villain acted out the oldest epic in the world.

“No! No! No!” But tonight virtue would not triumph. The more he was hissed, the more powerful the villain became. For he also had his supporters, and now they rose like a ground swell. Virtue was howled down in a crescendo of devil's music played by Jeannie at the piano.

“OK,” said Jenny, the heroine, “let's go and get it over.” So Jenny went with the evil villain, and everybody laughed as the lights were lit again with a taper.

Now they all had a dozen more beers and sang:

“Just break the news to Mother,

She knows how dear I love her,

And tell her not to wait for me,

For I'm not coming home.”

And the words had a double meaning for Barnaby. They sang:

“The cook she was a kind old soul.

She had a ragged dress.

We hoisted her upon a pole

As a signal of distress.”

And this seemed inexpressibly sad to Barnaby, and not even the houri on his knees could cheer him up.

For over in the corner was Jenny, and she was sitting with Blackie, the villain, in a condition of extreme friendliness; and for all he knew they were drinking their beer from the same pitcher.

Then, as the night ran on, Clancy O'Clune picked out an eleven-year-old girl who was drinking cider with her father, who was a barber, and he came and sat on her lap and sang to her “Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms” for a goodnight song.

Afterwards everybody sang “We Won't Go Home Till Morning.” And they all went home at midnight.

4

Thursday morning Barnaby had a breakfast date with Jeannie, the outrageously beautiful piano player.

“Did Jenny turn you down? Why did you ask me first today?”

“I always ask you first.”

“Jenny says you're mad at her because she's friendly with Blackie. But he's so nice. Don't you know that? He's one of the nicest men we ever met.”

“He is a devil. He makes my flesh crawl.”

“He is supposed to. But only on the stage. He's a consummate actor. I think that's the word that mama says he is. And mama says for us to keep an eye on you because you're acting so peculiar. We tell her you only act peculiar over her. Don't you think we'd make nice daughters-in-law?”

“You would be nice anything, Jeannie.”

“And don't you wish you were a sultan and could have us all at once?”

“Yes I do. I never thought of it, but that's just what I wish.”

“And the houri too?”

“How did you know she was an houri? I thought I was the only one who knew.”

“I'm never sure you're serious. I do have to go, dear. Isn't it too bad that everyone always has to go all the time? You eat the rest of my jelly and egg. Kiss me. Good bye.”

And it was morning and evening, the fourth day.

And in the evening Barnaby sat with a table full of refinery workers. He had brought with him tonight his little six-shot loaded. And five were blanks and one was not.

The refinery workers were named Croesus Kahlmeyer, Midas Morressey, and Money-Bags Muldoon. These are the names that the waitresses gave to them, for refinery workers are the biggest tippers in the world. They tip lavishly. The reason they can do this is that all refinery workers get a hundred hours a week overtime, and the money they make is fantastic.

Gaiety Garrett was waiting their table. The boys all called her Gaiety Unrestrained. And in a larger sense gaiety unrestrained reigned through the whole of the Golden Gate.

Now the surf pounded loudly under the pier. It always seemed noisiest when the melodrama was about to start. For after the hours had passed, the lamp lighter turned out the lights in the barroom and flared the torches on the stage. The smell of them came over the room like a weird fog.

Then Barnaby took the little six-shot from his pocket and fondled it. For the reign of the prince of evil was about to be ended in the world.

And when the melodrama was at its loudest, and the pistols barked, and the crowd roared like an animal, Barnaby raised his six-shot trembling.

And fired it six times.

It is such a little thing to kill a man and brings so much satisfaction, you wonder everybody does not do it. It is like walking through green meadows after an oppressing darkness.

Barnaby relaxed and the short hairs subsided on his nape; for the passion had left him. Peace came down on him like white snow.

“I have killed the villain,” he said. And he had. The pinions of the vulture had sounded and the soul of the villain had gone.

But the act was for himself alone. Only he and the victim knew that it had happened.

For Blackie did not act as though he were killed. He strutted through the drama to its close while the crowd howled and everyone was happy.

Yet there was no doubt that the villain was dead, for a great clarity had descended on Barnaby. And Blackie was now more like an odd old friend who needed a shave, and no more a python or a devil.

Margaret came to the table and she was white-faced.

“Don't you ever do a thing like that again. Give me that. How could you do that to him? We all love you and thought you loved us.”

And she looked at him queerly. He liked the way she looked at him: a sort of wild worry beneath the kindness.

Everybody drank an ocean of beer and sang thousands upon thousands of songs. And when it was late, Clancy O'Clune went over to Gladys, who wore glasses, and sat on her lap and sang “Just a Song at Twilight” for a goodnight song.

And as always they sang “We Won't Go Home Till Morning”. And as always they went home at midnight.

5

Friday morning Barnaby went to work; but there was only a half-day's work for him. It often happens that a boy will find only a half-day's work after he has laid off for a week and needs it.

And in the afternoon he went to the Golden Gate, which was closed in the daytime. He went in the back where deliveries were made.

The sour ghost of last night's beer permeated the place. And there was another ghost there, loud and wailing.

It was a terrible noise, a discordant clanging and chording that was the saddest thing he had ever heard: the woeful wailing of a soul that has been in purgatory a long century, and has just been told that it is not purgatory it is in. It was a hopeless crash filled with a deep abiding sorrow that had once been hope.

Blackie was playing the piano, and there was torture in his eyes. Yet he talked happily.

“Hello, Barnaby. I love the instrument. I play it every chance I get. Yet I am told that I do not play well. Do I play well, Barnaby?”

“No, no, you play quite badly.”

Blackie, that old python who needed a shave, seemed discouraged.

“I was afraid you would think so. Yet to myself it is beautiful. Do you think it sounds beautiful to anyone?”

“No. I don't think it would sound beautiful to anyone in the world, Blackie.”

“I wish it weren't so.”

“I shot at you last night, Blackie.”

“I know it. Six shots. I knew you would.”

“One of them was not a blank.”

“The third. I knew it would be the third. I dug it out of the plaster this morning.”

“Does anyone else know?”

“No. How would anyone else know? I am going away, Barnaby.”

“Where?”

“Kate's Klondike Bar. They need a villain there. Here they are changing the format. They will call this the Speakeasy. It will be a gin mill with flapper waitresses like John Held Jr. pictures. They will have a lost generation motif and sing lost twenties songs. Clancy is practicing ‘Star Dust’ all the time. I could stay on as a gangster, but I am better as an old-time villain. The gay days are about over. The Twenties will be the new era of nostalgia.”

“I will not like that.”

He went to find Margaret where she was counting her money in a little room.

“Blackie says you are going to change this to a Sad Twenties place.”

“Yes, dear, the Twenties will be all the rage now.”

“I don't remember them like I do the older times. I wasn't even born yet, in the twenties. Do you remember them, Margaret?”

“Of course I do. It'll be sweet to have them back. We have some wonderful ideas. The girls play old scratchy records all day long to learn them.”

“Will you still have the melodrama?”

“Well, no. But we'll have skits. Well, not skits really; we'll have ukulele players and things like that. You'll like it.”

“There's only one thing bothers me.”

“What, dear?”

“In the Twenties, how did they know who was the villain?”

“I don't know, dear. Here are the men with the scenery. I have to show them where to put it.”

But that Friday night it wasn't the same. The girls were all dressed in potato sacks with the belts only three inches from the bottom. Their stockings were rolled and their knees were rouged; and on their heads were sheath-like helmets that made them look like interplanetary creatures with the ears sheared off them. Jenny and Jeannie looked like two peeled onions with not enough hair on their heads to cover them. Oh, that those breathtaking creatures should come to this!

They sang “Yes Sir, she's my baby.” They sang “Oh you have no idea.” They sang:

“You play the Uke,

You're from Dubuque,

I go for that.”

The Speakeasy spoke, but Barnaby could not hear its message. To him it was dismal and deep. And then the long evening was over and the gin glasses were empty.

Clancy O'Clune was singing a good night song to a boney flapper.

“Picture me

Upon your knee,

And tea for two,

And two for tea.”

But he didn't sit on her lap. All at once none of the ladies were built like that anymore.

Barnaby went to Blackie's room. Blackie was packing.

“What town is Kate's Klondike Bar in?”

Blackie told him the town. But it shall be told to no one else. If it were known, people would go there, and come in every night, and take up room; and it's going to be crowded enough there as it is.

“That isn't very far,” said Barnaby. “That's only a couple of hundred miles. I'll go there and get a job. Then at night I can come in and listen to them sing, and watch the melodrama.”

Author's Commentary

Through Other Eyes

I

“I don't think I can stand the dawn of another Great Day,” said Smirnov. “It always seems a muggy morning, a rainy afternoon and a dismal evening. You remember the Recapitulation Correlator?”

“Known popularly as the Time Machine. But, Gregory, that was and is a success. All three of them are in constant use, and they will construct at least one more a decade. They are invaluable.”

“Yes. It was a dismal success. It has turned my whole life gray. You remember our trial run, the recapitulation of the Battle of Hastings?”

“It was a depressing three years we spent there. But how were we to know it was such a small affair — covering less than five acres of that damnable field and lasting less than twenty minutes? And how were we to know that an error of four years had been made in history even as recent as that? Yes, we scanned many depressing days and many muddy fields in that area before we recreated it.”

“And our qualified success at catching the wit of Voltaire at first hand?”

“Gad! That cackle! There can never be anything new in nausea to one who has sickened of that. What a perverted old woman he was!”

“And Nell Gwyn?”

“There is no accounting for the taste of a king. What a completely tasteless morsel!”

“And the crowning of Charlemagne?”

“The king of chilblains. If you wanted a fire, you carried it with you in a basket. That was the coldest Christmas I ever knew. But the mead seemed to warm them; and we were the only ones present who could not touch it or taste it.”

“And when we went further back and heard the wonderful words of the divine poetess Sappho.”

“Yes, she had just decided that she would have her favorite cat spayed. We listened to her for three days and she talked of nothing else. How fortunate the world is that so few of her words have survived.”

“And watching the great Pythagoras at work.”

“And the long days he spent on that little surveying problem. How one longed to hand him a slide rule through the barrier and explain its workings.”

“And our eavesdropping on the great lovers Tristram and Isolde.”

“And him spending a whole afternoon trying to tune that cursed harp with a penny whistle. And she could talk of nothing but the bear grease she used on her hair, and how it was nothing like the bear grease back home. But she was a cute little lard barrel, quite the cutest we found for several centuries in either direction. One wouldn't be able to get one's arms all the way around her; but I can understand how, to one of that era and region, it would be fun trying.”

“Ah yes. Smelled like a cinnamon cookie, didn't she? And you recall Lancelot?”

“Always had a bad back that wouldn't let him ride. And that trick elbow and the old groin wound. He spent more time on the rubbing table than any athlete I ever heard of. If I had a high-priced quarterback who was never ready to play, I'd sure find a way of breaking his contract. No use keeping him on the squad just to read his ten-year-old press clippings. Any farm boy could have pulled him off his nag and stomped him into the dirt.”

“I wasn't too happy about Aristotle the day we caught him. That barbarous north-coast Greek of his! Three hours he had them all busy combing his beard. And his discourse on the Beard in Essential and the Beard in Existential, did you follow that?”

“No, to tell the truth I didn't. I guess it was pretty profound.”

They were silent and sad for a while, as are men who have lost much.

“The machine was a success,” said Smirnov at last, “and yet the high excitement of it died dismally for us.”

“The excitement is in the discovery of the machine,” said Cogsworth. “It is never in what the machine discovers.”

“And this new one of yours,” said Smirnov, “I hardly want to see you put it into operation. I am sure it will be a shattering disappointment to you.”

“I am sure of it also. And yet it is greater than the other. I am as excited as a boy.”

“You were a boy before, but you will never be again. I should think it would have aged you enough, and I cannot see what fascination this new one will have for you. At least the other recaptured the past. This will permit you to see only the present.”

“Yes, but through other eyes.”

“One pair of eyes is enough. I do not see any advantage at all except the novelty. I am afraid that this will be only a gadget.”

“No. Believe me, Smirnov, it will be more than that. It may not even be the same world when viewed through different eyes. I believe that what we regard as one may actually be several billion different universes, each made only for the eyes of the one who sees it.”

II

The Cerebral Scanner, newly completed by Charles Cogsworth, was not an intricate machine. It was a small but ingenious amplifying device, or battery of amplifiers, designed for the synchronous — perhaps “sympathetic” would be a better word — coupling of two very intricate machines: two human brains. It was an amplifier only. A subliminal coupling, or the possibility of it, was already assumed by the inventor. Less than a score of key aspects needed emphasizing for the whole thing to come to life.

Here the only concern was with the convoluted cortex of the brain itself, that house of consciousness and terminal of the senses, and with the quasi-electrical impulses which are the indicators of its activity. It had been a long-held opinion of Cogsworth that, by the proper amplification of a near score of these impulses in one brain, a transmission could be effected to another so completely that one man might for an instant see with the eyes of another — also see inwardly with that man's eyes, have the same imaginings and daydreams, perceive the same universe as the other perceived. And it would not be the same universe as the seeking man knew.

The Scanner had been completed, as had a compilation of the dossiers of seven different brains: a collection of intricate brain-wave data as to frequency, impulse, flux and field, and Lyall-wave patterns of the seven cerebrums which Cogsworth would try to couple with his own.

The seven were those of Gregory Smirnov, his colleague and counselor in so many things; of Gaetano Balbo, the cosmopolitan and supra-national head of the Institute; of Theodore Grammont, the theoretical mathematician; of E. E. Euler, the many-tentacled executive; of Karl Kleber, the extraordinary psychologist; of Edmond Guillames, the skeptic and bloodless critic; and of Valery Mok, a lady of beauty and charm whom Cogsworth had despaired of ever understanding by ordinary means.

This idea of his — to enter into the mind of another, to peer from behind another's eyes into a world that could not be the same — this idea had been with him all his life. He recalled how it had first come down on him in all its strength when he was quite small.

“It may be that I am the only one who sees the sky black at night and the stars white,” he had said to himself, “and everybody else sees the sky white and the stars shining black. And I say the sky is black, and they say the sky is black; but when they say black they mean white.”

Or: “I may be the only one who can see the outside of a cow, and everybody else sees it inside out. And I say that it is the outside, and they say that it is the outside; but when they say outside they mean inside.”

Or: “It may be that all the boys I see look like girls to everyone else, and all the girls look like boys. And I say ‘That is a girl,’ and they say ‘That is a girl’; only when they say a girl they mean a boy.”

And then had come the terrifying thought: “What if I am a girl to everyone except me?”

This did not seem very intelligent to him even when he was small, and yet it became an obsession to him.

“What if to a dog all dogs look like men and all men look like dogs? And what if a dog looks at me and thinks that I am a dog and he is a boy?”

And this was followed once by the shattering afterthought: “And what if the dog is right?

“What if a fish looks up at a bird and a bird looks down at a fish? And the fish thinks that he is the bird and the bird is the fish, and that he is looking down on the bird that is really a fish, and the air is water and the water is air?”

“What if, when a bird eats a worm, the worm thinks he is the bird and the bird is the worm? And that his outside is his inside, and that the bird's inside is his outside? And that he has eaten the bird instead of the bird eating him?”

This was illogical. But how does one know that a worm is not illogical? He has much to make him illogical.

And as he grew older Charles Cogsworth came on many signs that the world he saw was not the world that others saw. There came smaller but persistent signs that every person lives in a different world.

It was early in the afternoon, but Charles Cogsworth sat in darkness. Gregory Smirnov had gone for a walk in the country as he said that he would. He was the only other one who knew that the experiment was being made. He is the only one who would have agreed to the experiment, though the others had permitted their brain-wave dossiers to be compiled on another pretext.

All beginnings come quietly, and this one was a total success. The sensation of seeing with the eyes of another is new and glorious, though the full recognition of it comes slowly.

“He is a greater man than I,” said Cogsworth. “I have often suspected it. He has a placidity which I do not own, though he has not my fever. And he lives in a better world.”

It was a better world, greater in scope and more exciting in detail.

“Who would have thought of giving such a color to grass, if it is grass? It is what he calls grass, but it is not what I call grass. I wonder I should ever be content to see it as I saw it. It is a finer sky than I had known, and more structured hills. The old bones of them stand out for him as they do not for me, and he knows the water in their veins.

“There is a man walking toward him, and he is a grander man than I have ever seen. Yet I have also known the shadow of this man, and his name is Mr. Dottle, both to myself and to Gregory. I had thought that Dottle was a fool, but now I know that in the world of Gregory no man is a fool. I am looking through the inspired and almost divine eyes of a giant, and I am looking at a world that has not yet grown tired.”

For what seemed like hours Charles Cogsworth lived in the world of Gregory Smirnov; and he found here, out of all his life, one great expectation that did not fail him.

Then, after he had rested a while, he looked at the world through the wide eyes of Gaetano Balbo.

“I am not sure that he is a greater man than I, but he is a wider man. Nor am I sure that he looks into a greater world. I would not willingly trade for his, as I would for Gregory's. Here I miss the intensity of my own. But it is fascinating, and I will enjoy returning to it again and again. And I know whose eyes these are. I am looking through the eyes of a king.”

Later he saw through the eyes of Theodore Grammont, and felt a surge of pity.

“If I am blind compared to Gregory, then this man is blind compared to me. I at least know that the hills are alive; he believes them to be imperfect polyhedrons. He is in the middle of a desert and is not even able to talk to the devils who live there. He has abstracted the world and numbered it, and doesn't even know that the world is a live animal. He has built his own world of great complexity, but he cannot see the color of its flanks. This man has achieved so much only because he was denied so much at the beginning. I understand now that only the finest theory is no more than a fact gnawed on vicariously by one who has no teeth. But I will return to this world too, even though it has no body to it. I have been seeing through the eyes of a blind hermit.”

Delightful and exciting as this was, yet it was tiring. Cogsworth rested for a quarter of an hour before he entered the world of E. E. Euler. When he entered it he was filled with admiration.

“An ordinary man could not look into a world like this. It would drive him out of his wits. It is almost like looking through the eyes of the Lord, who numbers all the feathers of the sparrow and every mite that nestles there. It is the interconnection vision of all the details. It appalls. It isn't an easy world even to look at. Great Mother of Ulcers! How does he stand it? Yet I see that he loves every tangled detail, the more tangled the better. This is a world in which I will be able to take only a clinical interest. Somebody must hold these reins, but happily it is not my fate. To tame this hairy old beast we live on is the doom of Euler. I look for a happier doom.”

He had been looking through the eyes of a general.

The attempt to see into the world of Karl Kleber was almost a total failure. The story is told of the behaviorist who would study the chimpanzee. He put the curious animal in a room alone and locked the door on it; then went to the keyhole to spy; the keyhole was completely occupied by the brown eyeball of the animal spying back at him.

Something of the sort happened here. Though Karl Kleber was unaware of the experiment, yet the seeing was in both directions. Kleber was studying Cogsworth in those moments by some quirk of circumstance. And even when Cogsworth was able to see with the eyes of Kleber, yet it was himself he was seeing.

“I am looking through the eyes of a peeper,” he said. “And yet, what am I myself?”

If the world of Gregory Smirnov first entered was the grandest, so that of Edmond Guillames, which Cogsworth entered last but one, was in all ways the meanest.

It was a world seen from the inside of a bile duct. It was not a pleasant world, just as Edmond was not a pleasant man. But how could one be other than a skeptic if all his life he had seen nothing but a world of rubbery bones and bloodless flesh clothed in crippled colors and obscene forms?

“The mole of another's world would be nobler than a lion in his,” said Cogsworth. “Why should one not be a critic who has so much to criticize? Why should one not be an unbeliever when faced with the dilemma that this unsavory world was either made by God or hatched by a cross-eyed ostrich? I have looked through the eyes of a fool into a fools' world.”

As Cogsworth rested again he said, “I have seen the world through the eyes of a giant, of a king, of a blind hermit, of a general, of a peeping tom, of a fool. There is nothing left but to see it through the eyes of an angel.”

Valery Mok may or may not have been an angel. She was a beautiful woman, and angels, in the older and more authentic iconography, were rather stern men with shaggy pinions.

Valery wore a look of eternal amusement, and was the embodiment of all charm and delight, at least to Charles Cogsworth. He believed her to be of high wit. Yet, if driven into a corner, he would have been unable to recall one witty thing she had ever said. He regarded her as of perfect kindness, and she was more or less on the agreeable side. Yet, Smirnov had put it, she was not ordinarily regarded as extraordinary.

It was only quite lately that Cogsworth was sure that it was love he felt for her rather than bafflement. And, as he had despaired of ever understanding her by regular means, though everyone else understood her easily enough in as much as mattered, he would now use irregular means for his understanding.

He looked at the world through the eyes of Valery Mok, saying, “I will see the world through the eyes of an angel.”

A change came over him as he looked, and it was not a pleasant change. He looked through her eyes for quite a while — not, perhaps, as long as he had looked through the eyes of Gregory — yet for a long time, unable to tear himself away.

He shuddered and trembled and shrank back into himself.

Then he let it alone, and buried his face in his arms.

“I have looked at the world through the eyes of a pig,” he said.

III

Charles Cogsworth spent six weeks in a sanatorium, which, however, was not called that. He had given the world his second great invention, and its completion had totally exhausted him. As in many such mercurial temperaments, the exaltation of discovery had been followed by an interlude of deep despondency on its completion.

Yet he was of fundamentally sound constitution and he had the best of care. But when he recovered it was not into his old self. He now had a sort of irony and smiling resignation that was new to him. It was though he had discovered a new and more bitter world for himself in looking into the worlds of others.

Of his old intimates only Gregory Smirnov was still close to him.

“I can guess the trouble, Charles,” said Gregory. “I rather feared this would happen. In fact I advised against her being one of the subjects of the experiment. It is simply that you know very little about women.”

“I have read all the prescribed texts, Gregory. I took a six-week seminar under Zamenoff. I am acquainted with almost the entire body of the work of Bopp concerning women. I have spent nearly as many years as you in the world, and I generally go about with my eyes open. I surely understand as much as is understandable about them.”

“No. They are not your proper field. I could have predicted what has shocked you. You had not understood that women are so much more sensuous than men. But it would be better if you explained just what it was that shocked you.”

“I had thought that Valery was an angel. It is simply that it is a shock to find that she is a pig.”

“I doubt if you understand pigs any better than you understand women. I myself, only two days ago, had a pig's-eye view of the world, and that with your own Cerebral Scanner. I have been doing considerable work with it in the several weeks that you have been laid up. There is nothing in the pig's-eye world that would shock even the most fastidious. It is a dreamy world of all-encompassing placidity, almost entirely divorced from passion. It's a gray shadowy world with very little of the unpleasant. I had never before known how wonderful is the feel of simple sunlight and of cool earth. Yet we would soon be bored with it; but the pig is not bored.”

“You divert me, Gregory, but you do not touch the point of my shock. Valery is beautiful — or was to me before this. She seemed kind and serene. Always she appeared to contain a mystery that amused her vastly, and which I suspected would be the most wonderful thing in the world once I understood it.”

“And her mystery is that she lives in a highly sensuous world and enjoys it with complete awareness? Is that what has shocked you?”

“You do not know the depth of it. It is ghastly. The colors of that world are of unbelievable coarseness, and the shapes reek. The smells are the worst. Do you know how a tree smells to her?”

“What kind of tree?”

“Any tree. I think it was an ordinary elm.”

“The Slippery Elm has a pleasant aroma in season. The others, to me, have none.”

“No. It was not. Every tree has a strong smell in her world. This was an ordinary elm tree, and it had a violent musky obscene smell that delighted her. It was so strong that it staggered. And to her the grass itself is like clumps of snakes, and the world itself is flesh. Every bush is to her a leering satyr, and she cannot help but brush into them. The rocks are spidery monsters and she loves them. She sees every cloud as a mass of twisting bodies and she is crazy to be in the middle of them. She hugged a lamp post and her heart beat like it would fight its way out of her body.

“She can smell rain at a great distance and in a foul manner, and she wants to be in the middle of it. She worships every engine as a fire monster, and she hears sounds that I thought nobody could ever hear. Do you know what worms sound like inside the earth? They're devilish, and she would writhe and eat dirt with them. She can rest her hand on a guard rail, and it is an obscene act when she does it. There is a filthiness in every color and sound and shape and smell and feel.”

“And yet, Charles, she is but a slightly more than average attractive girl, given to musing, and with a love of the world and a closeness to it that most of us have lost. She has a keen awareness of reality and of the grotesqueness that is its main mark. You yourself do not have this deeply; and when you encounter it in its full strength, it shocks you.”

“You mean that is normal?”

“There is no normal. There are only differences. When you moved into our several worlds they did not shock you to the same extent, for most of the corners are worn off our worlds. But to move into a pristine universe is more of a difference than you were prepared for.”

“I cannot believe that that is all it is.”

Charles Cogsworth would not answer the letters of Valery Mok, nor would he see her. Yet her letters were amusing and kind, and carried a trace of worry for him.

“I wonder what I smell like to her?” he asked himself. “Am I like an elm tree, or a worm in the ground? What color am I to her? Is my voice obscene? She says she misses the sound of my voice. It should be possible to undo this. Am I also to her like a column of snakes or a congeries of spiders?”

For he wasn't well yet from what he had seen.

But he did go back to work, and nibbled at the edges of mystery with his fantastic device. He even looked into the worlds of other women. It was as Smirnov had said: they were more sensuous than men but none of them to the shocking degree of Valery.

He saw with the eyes of other men. And of animals: the soft pleasure of the fox devouring a ground squirrel, the bloody anger of a lamb furious after milk, the crude arrogance of the horse, the intelligent tolerance of the mule, the voraciousness of the cow, the miserliness of the squirrel, the sullen passion of the catfish. Nothing was quite as might have been expected.

He learned the jealousy and hatred that beautiful women hold against the ugly, the untarnished evil of small children, the diabolic possession of adolescents. He even, by accident, saw the world through the fleshless eyes of a poltergeist, and through the eyes of creatures that he could not identify at all. He found nobility in places that almost balanced the pervading baseness.

But mostly he loved to see the world through the eyes of his friend Gregory Smirnov, for there is a grandeur on everything when seen through a giant's eyes.

And one day he saw Valery Mok through the eyes of Smirnov when they met accidentally. Something of his old feeling came back to him, and something that even surpassed his former regard. She was here magnificent, as was everything in that world. And there had to be a common ground between that wonderful world with her in it and the hideous world seen through her own eyes.

“I am wrong somewhere,” said Cogsworth. “It is because I do not understand enough. I will go and see her.”

But instead she came to see him.

She burst in on him furiously one day.

“You are a stick. You are a stick with no blood in it. You are a pig made out of sticks. You live with dead people Charles. You make everything dead. You are abominable.”

“I a pig, Valery? Possibly. But I never saw a pig made out of sticks.”

“Then see yourself. That is what you are.”

“Tell me what this is about.”

“It is about you. You are a pig made out of sticks, Charles. Gregory Smirnov let me use your machine. I saw the world the way you see it. I saw it with a dead man's eyes. You don't even know that the grass is alive. You think it's only grass.”

“I also saw the world with your eyes, Valery.”

“Oh, is that what's been bothering you? Well, I hope it livened you up a little. It's a livelier world than yours.”

“More pungent, at least.”

“Lord, I should hope so. I don't think you even have a nose. I don't think you have any eyes. You can look at a hill and your heart doesn't even skip a beat. You don't even tingle when you walk over a field.”

“You see grass like clumps of snakes.”

“That's better than not even seeing it alive.”

“You see rocks like big spiders.”

“That's better than just seeing them like rocks. I love snakes and spiders. You can watch a bird fly by and not even hear the stuff gurgling in its stomach. How can you be so dead? And I always liked you so much. But I didn't know you were dead like that.”

“How can one love snakes and spiders?”

“How can one not love anything? It's even hard not to love you, even if you don't have any blood in you. By the way, what gave you the idea that blood was that dumb color? Don't you even know that blood is red?”

“I see it red.”

“You don't see it red. You just call it red. That silly color isn't red. What I call red is red.”

And he knew that she was right.

And after all, how can one not love anything? Especially when it becomes beautiful when angry, and when it is so much alive that it tends to shock by its intense awareness those who are partly dead.

Now Charles Cogsworth was a scientific man, and he believed that there are no insoluble problems. He solved this one too; for he had found that Valery was a low-flying bird, and he began to understand what was gurgling inside her.

And he solved it happily.

He is working on a Correlator for his Scanner now. When this is perfected, it will be safe to give the device to the public. You will be able to get the combination in about three years at approximately the price of a medium-sized new car. And if you will wait another year, you may be able to get one of the used ones reasonably.

The Correlator is designed to minimize and condition the initial view of the world seen through other eyes, to soften the shock of understanding others.

Misunderstandings can be agreeable. But there is something shattering about sudden perfect understanding.

The Weirdest World

I

As I am now utterly without hope, lost to my mission and lost in the sight of my crew, I will record what petty thoughts I may have for what benefit they may give some other starfarer. Nine long days of bickering! But the decision is sure. The crew will maroon me. I have lost all control over them.

Who would have believed that I would show such weakness when crossing the barrier? By all tests I should have been the strongest. But the final test was the event itself. I failed.

I only hope that it is a pleasant and habitable planet where they put me down…

Later. They have decided. I am no longer the captain even in name. But they have compassion on me. They will do what they can for my comfort. I believe that they have already selected my desert island, so to speak, an out-of-the-way globe where they will leave me to die. I will hope for the best. I no longer have any voice in their councils…

Later. I will be put down with only the basic survival kit: the ejection mortar and sphere for my last testament to be orbited into the Galactic drift; a small cosmoscope so that I will at least have my bearings; one change of blood; an abridged universal language correlator; a compendium of the one thousand philosophic questions yet unsolved to exercise my mind; a small vial of bug-kill.

Later. It has been selected. But my mind has grown so demoralized that I do not even recognize the system, though once this particular region was my specialty. The globe will be habitable. There will be breathable atmosphere which will allow me to dispense with much bothersome equipment. Here the filler used is nitrogen, yet it will not matter. I have breathed nitrogen before. There will be water, much of it saline, but sufficient quantities of sweet. Food will be no problem; before being marooned, I will receive injections that should last me for the rest of my probably short life. Gravity will be within the range of my constitution.

What will be lacking? Nothing, but the companionship of my own kind, which is everything.

What a terrible thing it is to be marooned!

One of my teachers used to say that the only unforgivable sin in the universe is ineptitude. That I should be the first to succumb to space-ineptitude and be an awkward burden on the rest of them! But it would be disastrous for them to try to travel any longer with a sick man, particularly as their nominal leader. I would be a shadow over them. I hold them no rancor.

It will be today…

Later. I am here. I have no real interest in defining where “here” is, though I have my cosmoscope and could easily determine it. I was anesthetized a few hours before, and put down here in my sleep. The blasted half-acre of their landing is near. No other trace of them is left.

Yet it is a good choice and not greatly unlike home. It is the nearest resemblance I have seen on the entire voyage, which is to say that the pseudodendrons are enough like trees to remind me of trees, the herbage near enough to grass to satisfy one who had never known real grass. It is a green, somewhat waterlogged land of pleasant temperature.

The only inhabitants I have encountered are a preoccupied race of hump-backed browsers who pay me scant notice. They are quadruped and myopic, and spend nearly their entire time at feeding. It may be that I am invisible to them. Yet they hear my voice and shy away somewhat from it. I am able to communicate with them only poorly. Their only vocalization is a sort of vibrant windy roar, but when I answer in kind they appear more puzzled than communicative.

They have this peculiarity: when they come to an obstacle of terrain or thicket, they either go laboriously around it or force their way through it. It does not seem to occur to them to fly over it: They are as gravity-bound as a newborn baby.

What air-traveling creatures I have met are of a considerably smaller size. They are more vocal than the myopic quadrupeds, and I have had some success in conversing with them, but my results still await a more leisurely semantic interpretation. Such communications of theirs as I have analyzed are quite commonplace. They have no real philosophy and are singularly lacking in aspiration; they are almost total extroverts and have no more than the rudiments of introspection.

Yet they have managed to tell me some amusing anecdotes. They are quite good natured, though moronic.

They say that neither they nor the myopic quadrupeds are the dominant race here, but rather a large grublike creature lacking a complete outer covering. From what they are able to convey of this breed, it is a nightmarish kind of creation. One of the flyers even told me that the giant grubs travel upright on a bifurcated tail, but that is difficult to credit. Besides, I believe that humor is at least a minor component of the mentality of my airy friends. I will call them birds, though they are but a sorry caricature of the birds at home…

Later. I am being hunted. I am being hunted by the giant grubs. Doubling back, I have seen them on my trail, examining it with great curiosity.

The birds had given me a very inadequate idea of these. They are indeed unfinished — they do lack a complete outer covering. Despite their giant size, I am convinced that they are grubs, living under rocks and in masses of rotten wood. Nothing in nature gives the impression of so lacking an outer covering as the grub, that obese, unfinished worm.

These are, however, simple bipeds. They are wrapped in a cocoon which they seem never to have shed, as though their emergence from the larval state were incomplete. It is a loose artificial sheath covering the central portion of the corpus. They seem unable to divest themselves of it, though it is definitely not a part of the body. When I have analyzed their minds, I will know the reason for their carrying it. Now I can only conjecture. It would seem a compulsion, some psychological bond that dooms them in their apparent adult state to carry their cocoons with them.

Later. I am captured by three of the giant grubs. I had barely time to swallow my communication sphere. They pinned me down and beat me with sticks. I was taken by surprise and was not momentarily able to solve their language, though it came to me after a short interval. It was discordant and vocal and entirely gravity-bound, by which I mean that its thoughts were chained to its words. There seemed nothing in them above the vocal. In this the giant grubs were less than the birds, even though they had a practical power and cogency that the birds lacked.

“What'll we do with the blob?” asked one.

“Why,” said the second, “you hit it on that end and I'll hit it on this. We don't know which end is the head.”

“Let's try it for bait,” said the third. “Catfish might go for it.”

“We could keep it alive till we're ready to use it. Then it would stay fresh.”

“No, let's kill it. It doesn't look too fresh, even the way it is.”

“Gentlemen, you are making a mistake,” I said. “I have done nothing to merit death. And I am not without talent. Besides, you have not considered the possibility that I may be forced to kill you three instead. I will not die willingly. And I will thank you to stop pounding on me with those sticks. It hurts.”

I was surprised and shocked at the sound of my own voice. It was nearly as harsh as that of the grubs. But this was my first attempt at their language, and musicality does not become it.

“Hey fellows, did you hear that? Was that the blob talking? Or was one of you playing a joke? Harry? Stanley? Have you been practicing to be ventriloquists?”

“Not me.”

“Not me either. It sure sounded like it was it.”

“Hey blob, was that you? Can you talk, blob?”

“Certainly I can talk,” I responded. “I am not an infant. Nor am I a blob. I am a creature superior to your own kind, if you are examples. Or it may be that you are only children. Perhaps you are still in the pupa stage. Tell me, is yours an early stage, or an arrested development, or are you indeed adult?”

“Hey fellows, we don't have to take that from any blob. I'll cave in his blasted head.”

“That isn't its head, it's its tail.”

“Gentlemen, perhaps I can set you straight,” I said. “That is my tail you are thwacking with those sticks, and I am warning you to stop it. Of course I was talking with my tail. I was only doing it in imitation of you. I am new at the language and its manner of speaking. Yet it may be that I have made a grotesque mistake. Is that your heads that you are waving in the air? Well, then, I will talk with my head, if that is the custom. But I warn you again not to hit me on either end with those sticks.”

“Hey, fellows, I bet we could sell that thing. I bet we could sell it to Billy Wilkins for his Reptile Farm.”

“How would we get it there?”

“Make it walk. Hey blob, can you walk?”

“I can travel, certainly, but I would not stagger along precariously on a pair of flesh stilts with my head in the air, as you do. When I travel, I do not travel upside down.”

“Well, let's go then. We're going to sell you to Billy Wilkins for his Reptile Farm. If he can use a blob, he'll put you in one of the tanks with the big turtles and alligators. You think you'll like them?”

“I am lonesome in this lost world,” I replied sadly, “and even the company of you peeled grubs is better than nothing. I am anxious to adopt a family and settle down here for what years of life I have left. It may be that I will find compatibility with the species you mention. I do not know what they are.”

“Hey, fellows, this blob isn't a bad guy at all. I'd shake your hands, blob, if I knew where they were. Let's go to Billy Wilkins's place and sell him.”

II

We traveled to Billy Wilkins's place. My friends were amazed when I took to the air and believed that I had deserted them. They had no cause to distrust me. Without them I would have had to rely on intuition to reach Billy Wilkins, and even then I would lack the proper introductions.

“Hey, Billy,” said my loudest friend whose name was Cecil, “what will you give us for a blob? It flies and talks and isn't a bad fellow at all. You'd get more tourists to come to your reptile show if you had a talking blob in it. He could sing songs, and tell stories, and I bet he could play the guitar.”

“Well, Cecil, I'll just give you all ten dollars for it and try to figure out what it is later. I'm a little ahead on my hunches now, so I can afford to gamble on this one. I can always pickle it and exhibit it as a genuine hippopotamus kidney.”

“Thank you, Billy. Take care of yourself, blob.”

“Good-bye for now, gentlemen,” I said. “I would like you to visit me some evening as soon as I am acclimated to my new surroundings. I will throw a whing-ding for you — as soon as I find out what a whing-ding is.”

“My God,” said Billy Wilkins, “it talks, it really talks!”

“We told you it could talk and fly, Billy.”

“It talks, it talks,” said Billy. “Where's that blasted sign painter? Eustace, come here. We got to paint a new sign.”

The turtles in the tank I was put into did have a sound basic philosophy which was absent in the walking grubs. But they were slow and lacking inner fire. They would not be obnoxious company, but neither would they give me excitement and warmth. I was really more interested in the walking grubs.

Eustace was a black grub, while the others had all been white; but like them he had no outside casing of his own, and like them he also staggered about on flesh stilts with his head in the air.

It wasn't that I was naïve or hadn't seen bipeds before. But I don't believe anyone ever becomes entirely accustomed to seeing a biped travel in its peculiar manner.

“Good afternoon, Eustace,” I said pleasantly enough. The eyes of Eustace were large and white. He was a more handsome specimen than the other grubs.

“That you talking, bub? Say, you really can talk, can't you? I thought Mr. Billy was fooling. Now just hold that expression a minute and let me get it set in my mind. I can paint anything, once I get it set in my mind. What's your name, blob? Have blobs names?”

“Not in your manner. With us the name and the soul, I believe you call it, are the same thing and cannot be vocalized. I will have to adopt a name of your sort. What would be a good name?”

“Bub, I was always partial to George Albert Leroy Ellery. That was my grandfather's name.”

“Should I also have a family name?”

“Sure.”

“What would you suggest?”

“How about McIntosh?”

“That will be fine. I will use it.”

I talked to the turtles while Eustace was painting my portrait on tent canvas.

“Is the name of this world Florida?” I asked one of them. “The road signs said Florida.”

“World, world, world, water, water, water, glub, glug, glub,” said one of them.

“Yes, but is this particular world we are on named Florida?”

“World, world, water, water, glub,” said another.

“Eustace, I can get nothing from these fellows,” I called. “Is this world named Florida?”

“Mr. George Albert, you are right in the middle of Florida, the greatest state in the universe.”

“Having traveled, Eustace, I have great reservations that it is the greatest. But it is my new home and I must cultivate a loyalty to it.”

I went up in a tree to give advice to two young birds trying to construct a nest. This was obviously their first venture.

“You are going about it all wrong,” I told them. “First consider that this will be your home, and then consider how you can make your home most beautiful.”

“This is the way they've always built them,” said one of the birds.

“There must be an element of utility, yes,” I told them. “But the dominant motif should be beauty. The impression of expanded vistas can be given by long low walls and parapets.”

“This is the way they've always built them,” said the other bird.

“Remember to embody all the new developments,” I said. “Just say to yourself ‘This is the newest nest in the world.’ Always say that about any task you attempt. It inspires you.”

“This is the way they've always built them,” said the birds. “Go build your own nest.”

“Mr. George Albert,” called Eustace. “Mr. Billy won't like your flying around those trees. You're supposed to stay in your tank.”

“I was only getting a little air and talking to the birds,” I said.

“You can talk to the birds?” asked Eustace.

“Cannot anyone?”

“I can, a little,” said Eustace. “I didn't know anyone else could.”

But when Billy Wilkins returned and heard the report that I had been flying about, I was put in the snake house, in a cage that was tightly meshed top and sides. My cell mate was a surly python named Pete.

“See you stay on that side,” said Pete. “You're too big for me to swallow. But I might try.”

“There is something bothering you, Pete,” I said. “You have a bad disposition. That can come only from bad digestion or a bad conscience.”

“I have both,” said Pete. “The first because I bolt my food. The second is because — well I forget the reason, but it's my conscience.”

“Think hard, Pete,” I said, “why have you a bad conscience.”

“Snakes always have bad consciences. We have forgotten the crime, but we remember the guilt.”

“Perhaps you should seek advice from someone, Pete.”

“I kind of think it was someone's smooth advice that started us on all this. He talked the legs right off us.”

Billy Wilkins came to the cage with another “man” as walking grubs call themselves.

“That it?” asked the other man. “And you say it can talk?”

“Of course I can talk,” I answered for Billy Wilkins. “I have never known a creature who couldn't talk in some manner. My name is George Albert Leroy Ellery McIntosh. I don't believe that I heard yours, sir.”

“Bracken. Blackjack Bracken. I was telling Billy here that if he really had a blob that could talk, that I might be able to use it in my night club. We could have you here at the Snake Ranch in the daytime for the tourists and kids. Then I could have you at the club at night. We could work out an act. Do you think you could learn to play the guitar?”

“Probably. But it would be much easier for me merely to duplicate the sound.”

“But then how could you sing and make guitar noises at the same time?”

“You surely don't think that I am limited to one voice box?”

“Oh, I didn't know. What's that big metal ball you have there?”

“That's my communication sphere to record my thoughts. I would not be without it. When in danger, I swallow it. When in extreme danger, I will have to escape to a spot where I have concealed my ejection mortar, and send my sphere into the Galactic drift on a chance that it may be found.”

“That's no kind of gag to put in an act. What I have in mind is something like this.”

Blackjack Bracken told a joke. It was a childish one and in poor taste.

“I don't believe that is quite my style,” I said.

“All right, what would you suggest?”

“I thought that I might lecture your patrons on the higher ethic.”

“Look, George Albert, my patrons don't even have the lower ethic.”

“And just what sort of recompense are we talking about?” I asked.

“Billy and I had about settled on a hundred and fifty a week.”

“A hundred and fifty for whom?”

“Why, for Billy.”

“I say a hundred and fifty for myself, and ten percent for Billy as my agent.”

“Say, this blob's real smart, isn't he, Billy?”

“Too smart.”

“Yes sir, George Albert, you're one smart blob. What kind of contract have you signed with Billy here?”

“No contract.”

“Just a gentlemen's agreement?”

“No agreement.”

“Billy, you can't hold him in a cage without a contract. That's slavery. It's against the law.”

“But, Blackjack, a blob isn't people.”

“Try proving that in court. Will you sign a contract with me, George Albert?”

“I will not dump Billy. He befriended me and gave me a home with the turtles and snakes. I will sign a joint contract with the two of you. We will discuss terms tomorrow — after I have estimated the attendance both here and at the night club.”

III

Of the walking grubs (who call themselves “people”) there are two kinds, and they place great emphasis on the difference. From this stems a large part of their difficulties. This distinction, which is one of polarity, cuts quite across the years and ability and station of life. It is not confined only to the people, but also involves apparently all the beings on the planet Florida.

It appears that a person is committed to one or the other polarity at the beginning of life, maintaining that polarity until death. The interlocking attraction-repulsion complex set up by these two opposable types has deep emotional involvements. It is the cause of considerable concern and disturbance, as well as desire and inspiration. There is a sort of poetic penumbra about the whole thing that tends to disguise its basic simplicity, expressible as a simultaneous polarity equation.

Complete segregation of the two types seems impossible. If it has ever been tried, it has now been abandoned as impractical.

There is indeed an intangible difference between the two types, so that before that first day at the Reptile Ranch was finished, I was able to differentiate between the two more than ninety percent of the time. The knowledge of this difference in polarity seems to be intuitive.

These two I will call the Beta and Gamma, or Boy and Girl types. I began to see that this opposability of the two types was one of the great driving forces of the people.

In the evening I was transported to the night club and I was a success. I would not entertain them with blue jokes or blue lyrics, but the patrons seemed fascinated by my simple imitations of all the instruments of the orchestra and my singing of comic ballads that Eustace had taught me in odd moments that day. They were also interested in the way that I drank gin, that is emptying the bottle without breaking the seal. (It seems that the grub-people are unable to absorb a liquid without making direct contact with it.)

And I met Margaret, one of the “girl” singers. I had been wondering to which type of people I might show affinity. Now I knew. I was definitely a Beta type, for I was attracted to Margaret, who was unmistakably a Gamma. I began to understand the queer effect that these types have on each other.

She came over to my cage.

“I want to rub your head for luck before I go on,” she said.

“Thank you, Margaret,” I replied, “but that is not my head.”

She sang with incomparable sadness, with all the sorrow and sordidness that appear to be the lot of the unfortunate Gammas. It was the essence of melancholy made into music. It was a little bit like the ghost music of the asteroid Artemis, a little like the death chants on Dolmena. Sex and sorrow. Nostalgia. Regret.

Her singing shook me with a yearning that had no precedent.

She came back to my cage.

“You were wonderful, Margaret,” I said.

“I'm always wonderful when I'm singing for my supper. I am less wonderful in the rare times when I am well fed. But are you happy, little buddy?”

“I had become almost so, till I heard you sing. Now I am overcome with a sorrow and longing. Margaret, I am fascinated with you.”

“I go for you too, blob. You're my buddy. Isn't it funny that the only buddy I have in the world is a blob. But if you'd seen some of the guys I've been married to — boy! I wouldn't insult you by calling them blobs. Have to go now. See you tomorrow night if they keep us both on.”

Now there was a problem to face. It was necessary that I establish control over my environment, and at once. How else could I aspire to Margaret?

I knew that the heart of the entire place here was neither the bar nor the entertainment therein, nor the cuisine, nor the dancing. The heart of the enterprise was the casino. Here was the money that mattered; the rest was but garnish.

I had them bring me into the gambling rooms.

I had expected problems of complexity here where the patrons worked for their gain or loss. Instead there was an almost amazing simplicity. All the games were based on a system of first aspect numbers. Indeed everything on the Planet Florida seemed based on first aspect numbers.

Now it is an elemental fact that first aspect numbers do not carry within them their own prediction. Nor were the people even possessed of the prediction key that lies over the very threshold of the second aspect series.

These people were actually wagering sums — the symbols of prosperity — blindly, not knowing for sure whether they would win or lose. They were selecting numbers by hunch or at random with no assurance of profit. They were choosing a hole for a ball to fall into without knowing whether that was the right hole.

I do not believe that I was ever so amazed at anything in my life. But here was an opportunity to establish control over my environment.

I began to play the games. Usually I would watch a round first, to be sure that I understood just what was going on. Then I would play a few times… as many as it took to break the game.

I broke game after game. When he could no longer pay me, Blackjack closed the casino in exasperation.

Then we played poker, he and I and several others. This was even more simple. I suddenly realized that the grub-people could see only one side of the cards at a time.

I played and won.

I owned the casino now, and all of those people were now working for me. Billy Wilkins also played with us, and in short order I also owned the Reptile Ranch.

Before the evening was over, I owned a race-track, a beach hotel, and a theatre in a place named New York. I had, in sufficient extent for my purpose, established control over my environment…

Later. Now started the golden days. I increased my control and did what I could for my friends.

I got a good doctor for my friend and roommate the python, and he was now receiving treatment for his indigestion. I got a jazzy sports car for my friend Eustace imported from somewhere called Italy. And I buried Margaret in mink, for she had a fix on the fur of that mysterious animal. She enjoyed draping it about her in the form of coats, capes, cloaks, mantles, and stoles, though the weather didn't really require it.

I had now won several banks, a railroad, an airline, and a casino in somewhere named Havana.

“You are somebody now,” said Margaret. “You really ought to dress better. Or are you dressed? I never know. I don't know if part of that is clothes or if all of it is you. But at least I've learned which is your head. I think we should be married in May. It's so common to be married in June. Just imagine me being Mrs. George Albert Leroy Ellery McIntosh! You know, we have become quite an item. And do you know there are three biographies of you out, Burgeoning Blob; The Blob from Way Out; The Hidden Hand Behind the Blob, What Does It Portend? And the Governor has invited us to dine tomorrow. I do wish you would learn to eat. If you weren't so nice, you'd be creepy. I always say there's nothing wrong with marrying a man, or a blob, with money. It shows foresight on the part of a girl. You know you will have to get a blood test? You had better get it tomorrow. You do have blood, don't you?”

I did, but not, of course, of the color and viscosity of hers. But I could give it that color and viscosity temporarily. And it would react negative in all the tests.

She mused, “They are all jealous of me. They say they wouldn't marry a blob. They mean they couldn't. Do you have to carry that tin ball with you all the time?”

“Yes. It is my communication sphere. In it I record my thoughts. I would be lost without it.”

“Oh, like a diary. How quaint.”

Yes, those were the golden days. The grubs now appeared to me in a new light, for was not Margaret also a grub? Yet she seemed not so unfinished as the rest. Though lacking a natural outer covering, yet she had not the appearance of crawling out from under a rock. She was quite an attractive “girl.” And she cared for me.

What more could I wish? I was affluent. I was respected. I was in control of my environment. And I could aid my friends of whom I had now acquired an astonishing number.

Moreover my old space-ineptitude sickness had left me. I never felt better in my life. Ah, golden days, one after the other like a pleasant dream. And soon I am to be married.

IV

There has been a sudden change. As on the Planet Hecube, where full summer turns into the dead of winter in minutes, to the destruction of many travelers, so was it here. My world is threatened!

It is tottering, all that I have built up. I will fight. I will fight. I will have the best lawyers on the planet. I am not done. But I am threatened…

Later. This may be the end. The appeal court has given its decision. A blob may not own property in Florida. A blob is not a person.

Of course I am not a person. I never pretended to be. But I am a personage. I will yet fight this thing…

Later. I have lost everything. The last appeal is gone. By definition I am an animal of indeterminate origin, and my property is being completely stripped from me.

I made an eloquent appeal — and it moved them greatly. There were tears in their eyes. But there was greed in the set of their mouths. They have a vested interest in stripping me. Each will seize a little.

And I am left a pauper, a vassal, an animal, a slave. This is always the last doom of the marooned, to be a despised alien at the mercy of a strange world.

Yet it should not be hopeless. I will have Margaret. Since my contract with Billy Wilkins and Blackjack Bracken, long since bought up, is no longer in effect, Margaret should be able to handle my affairs as a person. I believe that I have great earning powers yet, and I can win as much as I wish by gambling. We will treat this as only a technicality. We shall acquire new fortune. I will re-establish control over my environment. I will bring back the golden days. A few of my old friends are still loyal to me, Margaret, Pete the python, Eustace…

Later. The world has caved in completely. Margaret has thrown me over.

“I'm sorry, blobby,” she said, “but it just won't work. You're still nice, but without money you are only a blob. How would I marry a blob?”

“But we can earn more money. I am talented.”

“No, you're box-office poison now. You were a fad, and fads die quickly.”

“But Margaret, I can win as much as I wish by gambling.”

“Not a chance, blobby. Nobody will gamble with you any more. You're through, blob. I will miss you, though. There will be a new blue note in my ballads when I sing for my supper, after the mink coats are all gone. Bye now.”

“Margaret, do not leave me. What of all our golden days together?”

But all she said was “bye now.”

And she was gone forever.

I am desolate and my old space-ineptitude sickness has returned. My recovery was an illusion. I am so ill with awkwardness that I can no longer fly. I must crawl on the ground like one of the giant grubs. A curse on this planet Florida, and all its sister orbs! What a miserable world this is!

How could I have been taken in by a young Gamma type of the walking grub? Let her crawl back under her ancestral rocks with all the rest of her kind… No, no, I do not mean that. To me she will always remain a dream, a broken dream.

I am no longer welcome at the casino. They kicked me down the front steps.

I no longer have a home at the Reptile Ranch.

“Mr. George Albert,” said Eustace, “I just can't afford to be seen with you any more. I have my position to consider, with a sports car and all that.”

And Pete the python was curt.

“Well, big shot, I guess you aren't so big after all. And you were sure no friend of mine. When you had that doctor cure me of my indigestion, you left me with nothing but my bad conscience. I wish I could get my indigestion back.”

“A curse on this world,” I said.

“World, world, water, water, glug, glug,” said the turtles in their tanks, my only friends.

So I have gone back into the woods to die. I have located my ejection mortar, and when I know that death is finally on me, I will fire off my communication sphere and hope it will reach the Galactic drift. Whoever finds it — friend, space traveler, you who were too impatient to remain on your own world — be you warned of this one! Here ingratitude is the rule and cruelty the main sport. The unfinished grubs have come out from under their rocks and they walk this world upside down with their heads in the air. Their friendship is fleeting, their promises are like the wind.

I am near my end.

The Wagons

“But when did they have them first? Did they always have them? Who were the first ones to have them?”

“To have what?”

“The wagons. Did they always have wagons?”

“I guess they almost always had them. They had them a long time.”

“Did the Indians have them?”

“No. Not at first. They didn't have the horse or wagon either at first. But they had the one almost as soon as the other.”

“Did the Spanish have them?”

“Yes, they always had them. They used pack mules too. But they also used the wagon. Why do you ask?”

“Every night after the fire dies down I hear wagons going along the ridge. They sound like real old wagons and I can never find the tracks in the morning. Is that an old wagon road along the ridge?”

“Yes, I think that is an old wagon road. They often went along the ridge just below the sky line.”

Jimmy was nine, and Jim was twenty years older. They both liked to camp out all summer. They traveled in a Ford pickup with an extra drum of gas in the back. They slept on the ground in their rolls and lived on coffee and bacon and flapjacks. They fished in the holes under the cottonwoods and shot jackrabbits and prairie dogs. The father and son were very close on these trips. And they went to ground in the short grass and brush country as though they had lived there for hundreds of years.

“Did they always go west — the wagons?”

“Why no, Jimmy, they couldn't always go west. They went in all directions.”

“It seems to me they must have gone west most of the time.”

Jimmy hacked out brush with a cradle and bolo. He gathered buffalo chips and cow chips. It was always his job to build the campfire.

“Was there ever a town at Cielito?”

“Yes, there was a little town there once I think, a tent town or a cabin town. I have heard that there was a little town there.”

“I don't mean a little town. I mean a big town with square after square and wagons solid around them. Was there a big wagon town there a long time ago?”

“I don't know, Jimmy. I never heard of it.”

“Was there a different kind of wagon that didn't have the same sort of tongue? It had a different creak, and the horses didn't sound the same way when they stomp.”

“There were the ox wagons. They were hitched higher and rolled more. And on very early wagons the front wheels did not pivot and the tongue was pegged some way to the undercarriage or axle itself. And a very long time ago the wagons were pulled by Onagers and Przewalski's horses.”

“That's the kind of horses. That's what I hear at night.”

They had cuervo to eat. They rigged it on a spit to roast. It wasn't so bad if you called it cuervo. Lots of birds are all dark meat. All the wild birds are all dark meat. If you want chicken you can eat it at home.

“What did the Spanish call the wagons?”

“Carro.”

“That's a cart, that isn't a wagon.”

“Carro grande.”

“That's a big cart. A big cart isn't a wagon. They're different.”

“I don't know what they called them then, Jimmy.”

“I think they probably had a long name with a squeak in the middle. Were the wagons always covered?”

“I guess they were covered for a long time.”

“I think they had tents on wagons before they had them anywhere else. I think they had houses on wagons before they had them anywhere else. I guess those were the first houses.”

“They had them a long time ago.”

“Do you think Cielito had another name once?”

“I never heard of it if it had.”

“I think that once it was called Hammadj or Plaustrumopolis.”

“Where did you get names like that, Jimmy?”

“I just remembered them. I remember a lot of things like that. I'm pretty sure the wagon town was called a name like those. Could we go to Cielito in the morning and camp there tomorrow night?”

“Yes, we'll go there if you want to. There would be water there.”

“Yes, there would have to be water there if they had all those horses there at one time.”

“All what horses?”

“Why, if they had about ten thousand wagons there every night, a lot of them would have four or six or even eight horses. That would be a lot of horses.”

“That would be quite a few, Jimmy. There is an old windmill about a mile from here and you can hear it creak at night. That may be the sound you think is wagons.”

“No, I know where that old windmill is. And I know where there's a second one that you don't know about. But that's not what I hear for the wagons. If I couldn't tell wagons from windmills I'd turn in my ears.”

“You'd look funny without them, Jimmy.”

“I look funny with them too. I don't believe you believe I hear the wagons at all.”

“Yes, I think you hear them, Jimmy.”

After supper Jimmy told his father a story about prairie dogs.

“You think you know all about them but I bet you don't even know this. You see, in the very middle of every prairie dog town and about four feet down there is a pile of gold. The reason that the prairie dogs have little pouches in the sides of their cheeks is so they can carry the nuggets. All the prairie dog burrows in a town are connected and they all go back to the gold pile. Now this is the way it is run. When an owl comes to eat a prairie dog, the prairie dog has to give him one gold nugget to keep from being eaten. That's the only way they can do it, for the owl can go down the holes too and see in the dark. When the rattlesnake comes to eat a prairie dog, the prairie dog has to give him two nuggets. That's the only way it can work. If they ever run out of gold, then pretty soon they will run out of prairie dogs. Sometimes you will see an old prairie dog town that is deserted. What happened is that they ran out of gold and were all eaten.”

“What do the owls and rattlesnakes do with the gold?”

“Different things. Sometimes the owls give it to the crows to keep them from pestering them in the daytime. Sometimes the rattlesnakes give it to the bull snakes to leave them alone. The rattlesnakes are afraid of the bull snakes.”

“Well who gets the gold finally?”

“Old sharpies, snake hunters and crow hunters, and coyote hunters. The coyotes get gold from both the snakes and the crows for not killing them. There are coyote hunters that people wonder how they make a living they kill so few coyotes and the bounty is so low. They don't kill hardly any coyotes, but they sure do get a lot of gold.”

“Where did you get a story like that?”

“I got it from a primitive. You remember the little Mexican at the store in Aguila that I talked to while you were buying supplies? He told me that story. He was pretty primitive. You said that when you get stories from the primitives themselves they are most likely to be authentic.”

“Yes, I think your story is authentic.”

Jimmy got out his guitar. He couldn't play very well but he liked to try. He played and sang Cattle Call, Rye Whisky, Wagon Wheels, Camp Town Race Track, Chisholm Trail, Wagon Wheels, Frankie and Johnny, Red Wing, Way Out West In Kansas, Wagon Wheels, Streets of Laredo, Trail of the Lonesome Pine, Golden Slippers, Wagon Wheels, Blue Tail Fly, Hot Time in the Old Town, Way Back in the Hills, Wagon Wheels, Blues in the Night, Wabash Cannon Ball, Wreck of the Old Ninety-Seven, Wagon Wheels, Empty Saddles, In a Little Spanish Town, The Old Grey Goose is Dead, Sweet Genevieve, Wagon Wheels, Ramona, Tree in the Meadow, Mule Train, Wild Goose Song, Wagon Wheels. He sang about an hour and a half. Then he did Wagon Wheels once more, and afterwards rolled up in his blanket and went to sleep.

Now here was the problem he considered as he slept. His father had said the wagons couldn't go west all the time. How could they go west all the time? And yet whenever he heard them at night they were going west. He had heard hundreds of them night after night, all going west.

The only way they could all be going west was to keep going on around the world but this wasn't likely.

“There are a lot of things I don't understand about the wagon trains, but I understand more than anyone else because I'm the only one who even knows about them.”

In the morning they loaded up and went to Cielito. There was only one house at Cielito. But one house is enough for a town to have if it is able to handle the business. It may be that towns of more than one house are unnecessary. There is certainly some excess when they have ten or a hundred or a thousand or even a million houses; that is too big for a town to be.

There was both a gas pump and a watering trough there, so no matter how one traveled he could have his fill. There were two very great windmills and a whole series of tanks. And there were chutes and pens and corrals. The one house was built like a spider for there were many wings and extensions to it. There was a smoke house and a bake house, a horse stable and a goat pen, a bunk room or hotel, a store, a dining room, a bar, a herrería or repair shop; likely there was something else in the other wings as they would hardly build them and then leave them empty.

The reason that Jimmy had wanted to come to Cielito is that there were three wagons there, one still in use, and two very old ones that had been retired. He did not ordinarily like to camp near a town, not even one of modest size like Cielito; he had explained to his father that it was bad policy to camp within eight or ten miles of a town, and Jim the father had usually deferred to his superior wisdom in this. Mrs. Munyos told him about the wagons. The oldest one had been there before she was born, abandonado, left, unclaimed, derelict.

“Maybe they will come back some night and take it and continue their journey,” Jimmy suggested to her.

“I doubt it, Chico. It was here they stopped to eat the last of their horses. Then they went ahead on foot. But after only one day's walk they lay down and died, los pobres. My abuelo found them the next spring and buried them with a cross even though they were heretics.”

“Can I have the wagon then?”

“It isn't serviceable. Half of it is taken for firewood, and you would be able to go only a little ways with no horses and only three wheels on the thing. But it is yours if you want to say it is. It is no use, only to play in.”

That afternoon she told him a lot more about the wagons, and about something else.

“I will tell you something that nobody knows except me. This is that a long time ago before people had wagons, los osos had them.”

“Los osos? The bears?”

“That's right, the bears. This was a long time ago before the bears got stubborn as they are now, and won't even talk anymore except a few of them who have been raised by people. But the bears used to be the masters of everything. They had the only mills, so if the people wanted to have their corn ground they had to come to the bears to have it done, or else do it with hand stones. And the bears were the only ones who knew how to make baskets or bottles or tonels, or blankets. Did you ever watch a basket-man make a basket? He holds it as a bear would and works it towards himself. That is because the bears first taught the trade to the people. So the bears had a lot of business and the people had to come to them for everything. And they had big cities with paved streets and all kinds of riches.”

“Then what happened?”

“I don't know. I think the bears must have become proud and have been punished. Now they have to live in the hills and have forgotten how to talk, or are too stubborn to do it. And they don't make blankets or baskets or anything any more, except for just one bunch of them in a town away back in the hills. There is only the one bear town left. And even the things they still make, they don't make them very well, hardly better than the people make them now.”

“What did the bears have to pull their wagons with if they didn't have any horses then?” Jimmy wanted to know.

“No horses? Oh, well, a long time ago before there were any horses, there was another animal that looked exactly like the horse. So if you would see the two together you couldn't tell which one was the horse and which one was the other animal. This other animal is what the bears used to pull their wagons.”

“Oh, I didn't know about that.”

“And now you see, it is all changed. Now it is we the people who are very rich and powerful, and the bears who are poor. Little boy, I don't think you believe my story.”

“Dama, I do. It is a legend. My father says that when we hear a legend we should try to arrive at the anthropomorphic truth behind it.”

“That should take you all afternoon. And when you find it you tell me what it is.”

But it didn't take him all afternoon, it only took him a little while to find what it was.

“Those bears who made tonels and drove wagons couldn't have been bears. They must also have been people. They were big people and they walked heavy where the Indians walked light. They had a lot of hair and beards and this made them look like bears, especially if they wore bear skins or buffalo robes. And if they say there's another animal that looked like a horse, well it was a horse all right, they just said it wasn't. I never believed that about there weren't any horses till the Spanish came here. The Indians used to hide their horses every time the Spanish came to town so they wouldn't get stolen, and it's a good thing they did. I can see it all now.”

After he got it figured out he went to Mrs. Munyos and explained to her how it was.

“Ho, that's all you know,” she told him. “Bigger and hairier then the Indians were they? Why I'd make thirteen of you myself, and talk about hair, my marido has so much hair on him it's like he crawled inside an old buffalo carcass.”

“Ho, that's all you know,” said Jimmy. “My father has more hair. When we're camping we just carry empty mattress covers and every night my father pulls enough hair out of his chest to stuff two of them full, and that's what we sleep on.”

“That much hair? I can hardly believe it.”

“Well it's true. What did you say was the name of that bear town?”

“Why Villaoso, of course. But you have to go way back in the hills to find it. You follow the canyon all the way back till it's so narrow that even the birds have to fly sideways. And when you get to the end of it there is Villaoso, the bear town.”

“How did they get the wagons in if it's so narrow?”

“What wagons? Oh, the wagons. Well they built them hinged so they could flatten them out so that all four wheels were one behind the other. And when they were past the narrow part they straightened them out again. Do you think that is a mentina? Let us see if you can find the anthropomorphic truth behind that, little boy.”

Jimmy went to seek out his father who was drinking wine in the bar.

“Papa, could we go tomorrow and look for the town of Villaoso?”

“We will go and look for it.”

“It is back in the hills and up at the end of the canyon.”

“I heard her tell you where it is.”

They ate that night in the house that is the town of Cielito, and they slept in the old wagon bed. And the next day they went out to find Villaoso, the town of the bears. They followed the canyon all morning until it was so narrow that the birds had to fly sideways, and the Ford could hardly go between the walls.

“Were the wagons ever as narrow as the Ford?”

“They had to be almost if they went through here.”

When it became so boulder-strewn that they could drive no longer, they left the Ford and walked. And it was right about there that they saw the first of the bears. And after a thousand yards they came to Villaoso itself where the cliffs close in. There were upward of thirty neat caves in the cliffs, but only five or six bears lounging around. The rest no doubt were out working somewhere.

And there was still a way between the cliffs just wide enough for a wagon, and the trail went on down to the plains on the other side. Jim went up the face of the cliff quite a ways and then roped Jimmy up. They had a nice den that it would take a very agile bear to reach.

“One thing worries me,” said Jimmy. “I don't see any remnants of basketry or pottery or even a corn mill. I thought the bears here would at least keep up some of the arts. They don't even seem to have blankets, not even poor ones. For these really are bears. I thought at first they would turn out to be just hairy men.”

Jim took the rifle and went back to the car before it got dark. He brought the supplies back up the cliff to the cave. He cut wood and brought it up too.

“Do you want a bear steak?”

“Oh no, dad, don't kill any of these. These might not be ordinary bears at all.”

“You mustn't let the old stories get a hold of you, Jimmy.”

They built a fire on the ledge to keep away the bears and mountain lions and devils, just as the first family in that region had done eighteen thousand and twelve years before. The figures are Jimmy's and are arrived at logically. For it was a reliable book he had read, and it gave the figure at eighteen thousand years; and it had been published twelve years before.

After supper Jimmy serenaded the bears with his guitar, and they looked up at him in the dusk and sat around like big dogs. And after that a coyote serenaded them from a distant cliff top.

“There are three coyotes,” said Jimmy. “I can tell them by their voices. There is one reddish one almost as red as a fox. And there is one big gray grizzled one. And there is one with his tail full of cockleburs.”

“No. There's only one,” said Jim.

“Why, there's four more now, and that makes seven. There's one with a sort of black cross on his muzzle, and there's one with a crippled foot. And there's a chicken killer that still has feathers on his face. And there's one real young one. That makes seven.”

“No. There is only one.”

“There's six more from the other cliff and that makes thirteen. One of them has a white front foot. And one of them ran into a skunk this morning and has to stay a little off from the others. And there's the old boss coyote, and there's the one that's going to take him out someday. And there's a young female who has a couple of them excited. And there's a mean one with a slashed ear that doesn't get along with the others. I can tell what they're all like by their voices and there's thirteen of them.”

“No,” said Jim. “There's only one.”

“Why, there's at least nine more now that just sounded from farther back. That'd make twenty-two. I know there's more than one coyote.”

“Yes, you are right. Now there are two of them.”

After a while they went to sleep and let the coyotes have it.

After a long time Jimmy heard the creaking and woke his father.

“It's the wagons. You sure ought to be able to hear them now.”

“Yes, I believe I hear a wagon.”

“There's at least a dozen, and I guess there are a hundred right behind them. There's one with a loose rim and they ought to fix it tomorrow. And there's one with a bad seat spring and it hits bottom every time they go over a boulder. And there's one with a tongue squeak, and one has a split spoke, you can tell by the way it grinds in the hub. And one has loose boards in the bed. And one is loaded too heavy on one side or the load has shifted, it gives a kind of twisting squeak. And one of them has a front wheel that sure could use something. And one of them has a colt tied behind and he's getting tired of it all. And one of them has a sort of harness rasp. They ought to dress it with a little oil. There's a lot of them, you can tell that right off.”

“No. I think there's only one. I believe all those disabilities belong to one wagon.”

“There's one horse has thrown a shoe and he goes tender on that foot. And one wagon has a lantern or something hanging under it with a squeaky handle. And one has a lot of stuff lashed on. Ropes have a sound when they stretch and give.”

“I know they have, Jimmy. But there is only one wagon.”

And there was only one. It came over the boulders up the canyon with a big load lashed on and a lantern swinging underneath and a colt tied on behind.

“Hola!” one of the wagon men called up to them by the fire.

“Hola!” said Jim.

“Oje!” said Jimmy. And the wagon went through the narrow pass where there was only an inch on either side, and on down the other slope of the divide.

“There really was only one,” said Jimmy. “And I thought there was about a hundred. But that's the same wagon I heard the other night. They haul something into a little camp. They didn't have the colt the last time I heard it, but one night they had a burro on behind. I sure do like to listen to wagons.”

A bull-bat swooped down from one cliff and up above the other one. Then another bull-bat swooped in the opposite direction. And directly a third one went the same way as the first.

“I'll bet there's a hundred bull-bats flying around,” said Jimmy. “There's one that has double jointed wings, and one that has two white bars on the top and bottom side too. And there's one that doesn't eat anything but midge flies, and one that doesn't eat anything but sexton beetles. And one of them has two claws bit off by a prairie dog. I'll bet there's a hundred of them.”

“No,” said Jim. “There is only one.”

The Cliff Climbers

The cliff faced south and was rough and sheer. It faced off against a mesa world, but it was not a mesa; it was a vagrant spire standing up alone. As you came to it from the south it was easy to go on either side. There was no necessity to climb it, and it could not be climbed to the top. But there was a kind of game to see how high it could be climbed.

A long time ago (but not as long ago as these first cliff-climbers) we played a game in the second grade. There was a little cemented area that was closed at one end by a concrete wall. The game was to run at it and see how far you could run up it, and to leave a chalk mark there as high as you could reach. The ultimate was nearly achieved, the very apex beyond which it was not possible to go, nor to leave a higher chalk mark. Then some of the big boys from the third grade tried it and made a shambles of the game; for naturally they could run up farther and reach higher and leave chalk marks above all the old ones.

The game on the cliff was about the same. The first chalk mark was made by Little Fish-Head, and at a dizzy height. He wrote:

“My name is Little Fish-Head and I climbed this cliff in the thirty-sixth year of the thirty-sixth period. I can see the river from here and it cannot be seen from any lower point. I have climbed nearer to the sun than any man who ever lived. And now may God watch over me on my long hard journey.”

This translation is by Professor Potter, who climbed the cliff at a later period. What Little Fish-Head did was to scratch the picture of a fish high on the cliff wall, or a stylized object that might have been a fish, and was anyway longer than it was wide. There was a triangle at one end of it which the professor said was a fish-head. And there was a small triangle or wedge mark apart and just beyond which the professor said was the signature, Little Fish-Head. On the side of the fish (if it was a fish) were six scratches of which one was longer than the rest. Speculatively this meant by six, which is to say thirty-six; and as one side of the fish was so marked, the other side of the fish which can no more be seen than the other side of the moon was doubtless intended to be marked that way also. This meaning, the thirty-sixth year of the thirty-sixth period, would date the sketch accurately as being 1296 years after the beginning of the first period, and would make it (the professor said) the earliest absolutely certain date in history if we only knew when the first period started.

He really could have seen the river from there, a striking view, and it could not be seen from any lower point. There was a circle scratched above which was the sun, that is God, and there was a jagged line going to the right which meant a rough journey ahead, and a long old journey it was.

It was translations like this that earned the professor the reputation for brilliance far beyond the call of duty.

But I will tell you the true story of Little Fish-Head. I have attained to it by ways as brilliant and fantastic as those of the professor, but they sound sillier and you'd hoot at me if you knew my methods.

Little Fish-Head was the last of the horse thieves under the old recension. After him there were eleven thousand years when there were no horse thieves. This corresponded to the period when the horses had disappeared from the continent. As the last of the old horse thieves, he stole the last of the old horses.

Professor Potter and the other professors have puzzled over the disappearance of these first horses. But it was no mystery. They disappeared, as have so many other of the vital things, because they were over-regulated. The first regulation went out in the thirteenth period to the effect that men of the Horse Fly Totem could not ride horses. Some of them quit their totem (there are always a few who will apostatize at the initiation of unjust laws), some of them quit riding horses, and some of them continued to ride till they were hunted down and executed.

Then it was enacted that only those of settled estate and tangible property could ride horses; and they were absolutely forbidden to vagabonds and beggars, who had the most use for them. Then a very high horse tax was enacted which discouraged all but the very wealthy from keeping up. After this it was decreed that only kings, caciques, and tax collectors could own them. And finally there were only nine horses in all the Western world and they were all in one royal keep.

It was then that Little Fish-Head — that is not his real name, that is only a stupid mistranslation of Professor Potter — that Little Fish-Head did some serious thinking.

“If I kill the eight and ride away on the ninth, then nobody in the world can catch me. I will be as fleet as the storm and will tower over all the footmen of the world.”

So he killed the eight horses and rode away on the ninth. There was a great outcry, but an outcry of footmen cannot bring a man down from his horse. He rode away on the last great stallion, and goaded it all day long, as he was in a state of exaltation.

At evening when it had run all day it fell dead at the foot of the cliff. This surprised Little Fish-Head, who knew very little about horses and thought they would run forever. It was then that he climbed the cliff to a dizzy height and scratched a dirge as tall as he could reach. This was the inscription that the professor in his pride had misread. It was not a stylized fish at all. It was a stylized horse without any legs, for it was lying down dead. And the little triangle was not the signature of Little Fish-Head, but the soul of the horse leaving the body, triangular rather than square or round to indicate the incompleteness of the soul of a noble but irrational animal.

What the inscription really said was this:

“Oh my horse,

All the swiftness is now gone out of the world.

No man again can go higher than his own height,

Nor more fleeting than he was born to go.

The last man has ridden on the last wind,

And only the dust can ride on the whirlwind now.

I have climbed to this height

To write that the high aspiration was only a dream.

And if even a horse dies

How can a man live forever?”

The next chalk mark was made about nine thousand years later and was nearly a foot higher. There had been no improvement in the art of climbing meanwhile, but it had been scratched by a taller man.

It was a double wavy mark like a snake or a river, followed by an abrupt despairing downstroke. Professor Potter had made nine tentative translations of this. The seventh of the nine has now been proved by a miracle of scholarship too intricate to explain to be the correct one. This is it:

“There is no water and I have traveled for days in agony. I have climbed this cliff to look for the river. I see it, but I will die before I can go that far; it would take me three days to reach it. I had thought I could climb as high as the cloud and wring it out, but the little cloud has passed and there is no other. The sun has become my friend now, but he is as much at a loss as I what to do. But at least I have seen the river before I die.”

After that it was only nine hundred years before the next climber achieved. And he carved these letters:

Pasó por aqui A-Dmo 1519 Mayo 19

José Ramíres Castillo y Sanches.

His message is too definite and leaves little to the imagination. He was not thirsty, for he did not carve like a thirsty man. He was not overly weary, so perhaps he had come on one of the new horses. Nor had he (the professor said) come alone. There were drill holes in the rock where rope hooks had been placed, and he must have had at least two assistants. But we cannot picture him more clearly than this.

And oddly the next chalk mark was made exactly four hundred years later. And it read:

Piñon Gap High School Seniors 1919

Clement Kincaid, Freddy Stockton, Manuel Cervantes

We Are The Tops

And in the high school annual of that year there were their three pictures on a page by themselves entitled “The Topper Club, The Most Exclusive in the World.”

And to continue the spate of climbers in the very next decade was a higher entry:

Bo McCoy, I am the Real.

I am a Bo.

1925 June Tenth.

Quite a bit could be made from this. The railway was twenty miles away, and there was no stop. He had rolled off it and crossed the desert to make his mark. He might have been a lonesome hobo as colored men are likely to be on that run. And he had a long old walk to the next stop. And he made what was then the highest chalk mark on the cliff. And he had climbed alone nine feet higher than it was possible to climb to make it.

That was all until the professor came. The professor was G. A. D. Potter, for his name was Gamiel Audlich Dagobert, all of which he hated. But he liked to be called Gad.

“Gad, Gad,” his associates would say, “you could rope down from the top or use a 'copter to read the scratches. There is no reason to waste a summer on the Tor. There are better things found digging in the ground than you ever will find on the side of a cliff.”

But the professor was a cliff-climber and a chalk-marker, and he had an exaltation to go the highest.

We will not tell you what he carved on the cliff, for it was pedantic and stilted, and he had prepared many drafts of it before he went up the cliff the last time.

He spent six weeks in his tent at the foot of the cliff with his wife, Aurora, and they prepared as though it were Everest. They drilled holes and set lead shields in the rock with eyelets for the ropes. They spun webs of lines and hauled and pulled and rappelled, and did all the things that cliff-climbers do. They cut hand holes and foot holes, and even established a camp ‘A’ two-thirds of the way up. And to it they went up and down on a rope ladder where Little Fish-Head and Bo McCoy had climbed like monkeys.

But maximum effort is required for maximum achievement, and the professor was remarkably persevering, as all professors are, and Aurora was remarkably good natured, as all professors' wives must be.

Early in the morning of the last day of spring they went up their ropes and scoop holes till Aurora stood firmly on a newly-hewn ledge where Bo McCoy had hung on air. Then the professor climbed onto her shoulders and made the highest chalk mark.

We will not record what he carved, as he has already done so, and besides, as we said, it was too stilted and stylish. But yet like all the other marks it was capable of variant and fuller translation. In a later time by another professor who might not have the key to the precise letters themselves, it would be more correctly translated as follows:

“I have slain the nightmare and set down the terror. I have climbed beyond dizziness on a cliff that once hung down from the sky before there was a world below it. Even the eagles when they were new would not fly this high. And this above all, while others have ridden on the wind, I only have ridden on the daughter of the wind. This is a red-haired goddess, a strong slight amazon, a magic anemonead with hair like a red sea and shoulders soft and sweet as the night itself. She sways beneath me but will not break, and the early sun is on her and she is silver and flame. Her neck is of living ivory.”

And the rest of it would be very hard to translate even by the best paleocalligraphist. But he would know that this was the hand of an ancient poet who had climbed a dizzy cliff to write a hymn to the dawn.

Great Green Goat

He was home unexpectedly, three days before he was due. And the home was a mess. He was outraged to find this after all the years that he had preached his standards. He went to his room and took out his automatic, and he trembled with anger as he examined it.

“This has to end sometime,” he said. “It will end tonight.”

He went to his wife's room. She was not home. The bed was not made. Clothing was widely scattered, but not as though left in any particular haste. There was a certain calmness in the disorder, though he would have been the last one to understand it. Everything was where it had fallen just as though it was leaves that had fallen. It was as though the bed had never been made, as though it would be unnatural if it were made.

There was an almost empty box of candy on the bed with the wrappers scattered. There was a coffee cup and a saucer, and the old rim of a sandwich. There was a pair of scissors, a garden grubber or trowel with the dirt still on it, a fashion magazine. There was an old-style dip post-office pen and beside it on the pillow an open bottle of ink. This last shocked him. He shuddered as he put the cap back on it.

And there was the beginnings of a list: “Get gin, butter, grapes, tomatoes, some of that sauce that Margie uses, call her and get the name of it, and don't forget to ask her if Tom and Betty are really doing it and whether Harry knows about it, get fish food, O I forgot, I let the fish die. What will old Fussbudget do when he finds out that I let the fish die? Get steaks for Freddy, and be sure to get some of those silly lamb chops for Fussbudget before the end of the week. O hell he won't eat anything I cook anyhow. Remember to write myself a note about getting that bank note renewed before he knows about it. Remember to get his overcoat out of hock, I can't keep telling him its at the cleaners, I've been telling him that for six weeks. Remember to get the mmmmm out of the bathroom.”

He could not tell what she had written to remember to get out of the bathroom. Lila Lee made all of her letters like m's, but from long practice he could read most of her writing.

“I am almost afraid to look in the bathroom,” he said.

He never did know what the mmm was. It couldn't have been the dead fish in the toilet bowl; he was expecting them. It couldn't have been the jars of writhing worms: they were often there. Lila Lee raised worms for her garden, and she liked to keep a few jars around the house for company.

It could not have been the numerous coffee cups or the bowls of unfinished breakfast cereal. Nor the dead gopher. There was nothing unusual about a dead gopher being in their bathroom.

The medicine chest looked like a nest of witches. He felt his toothbrush and it was wet. His hand shook when he put it back. He hated for anyone to use his toothbrush. His was red and hers was blue, but she said she could never remember which color was whose.

He made a phone call. “Absentia, is my wife staying with you?”

“She is not. I haven't seen her for a week. Go back to bed, Fussbudget.”

He phoned again. “Alice Anne, is my wife staying with you?”

“No. And if she says she is, well I won't cover up for her any more. Why don't you wise up, Fussbudget?”

He phoned again. “Pendula, is my wife there?”

“I don't know. I've been asleep. Why don't you go to sleep? There isn't anybody's wife here but me. Are you somebody's husband? Why don't you go to sleep so I can go to sleep?”

But in a little while his phone rang, and a lady was on it speaking in a weirdly guttural disguised levantine voice.

“Mistaire Potsworthy? Ef you rully want to know where iss Lila Lee, she iss at Freddy Dinsmore's house.”

“Thank you, Absentia,” said Peter Potsworth, and he put his automatic in his pocket and went to Freddy Dinsmore's house.

“Neatness is the sovereign virtue,” said Peter. He cut a perfectly circular hole in the front glass with a glass cutter which he took from and returned to a leather case. He put the small piece of glass into his pocket wrapped in a handkerchief, as it would not be seemly to leave it loose on the porch.

Reaching through the hole, he released the night latch and went in. A small lamp was burning in the living room but nobody was there. Lila Lee's shoes were discoverable, one in the middle of the floor, one on a coffee table. Peter had always disapproved of the way Lila left her shoes about. Going upstairs he saw one stocking and then the other, then a little red leather belt, then a blouse.

He followed the marked trail to a door, flung it open, snapped on the light, and stood there with eyes blazing and the automatic in his hand.

They were together.

“Peter, Peter, this is my cousin, Freddy Dinsmore.”

“We have known Freddy for ten years, but I hadn't known that he was your cousin.”

“I, I didn't find out till today.” Then she started to cry.

“Peter, Peter old friend,” said Freddy, “put away that automatic and let's be reasonable about this.”

“Reasonable! How can I be reasonable? Ten years of married life, and this is my reward at the end?”

“I'm so sorry, dear,” said Lila. “I just didn't think.”

“Well, I'm afriad it's a little too late for thinking now,” said Peter. “I have put up with a lot. God knows the things I have put up with.” And he slapped the automatic in his hands violently.

“And you are not much better,” he said savagely to Freddy. “Look at that, your shirt on the bedpost and your pants on the floor. Why don't you use one of those little bedside racks? It is called the Silent Valet. You can put everything on it neatly from ties to shoes and pocket change. And they are reasonable. You can buy them at Stuttlemeyers.”

“What in blazes are you talking about?” asked Freddy.

“Neatness,” said Peter, “the sovereign virtue. But I am afraid you two are past reforming. I am as angry as I have ever been in my life. I will positively have a showdown.”

He brandished the automatic excitedly.

“Lila,” he cried in fury, “did you fire this today?”

“Yes, I killed a gopher in the garden with it.”

“Then, by the great green goat, why didn't you clean it?” He sobbed and turned, and left the room a broken man.

“O great green goat himself,” said Lila, “I never cleaned a gopher in my life. I didn't even know they were good to eat.”

Freddy Dinsmore was still shaking. “O mother of the great green goat,” he said. And he turned his face to the wall.

The All-Star Series

1

Red Rawson and Skeet Skomberg were talking in the press box, and the Imperator and his entourage were in the official box below.

“It is the last of the All-Star Serieses,” said Red.

“Yes. They have hunted it into a corner. Now they will let it die. They all of them hate the game and what it stands for. They make it seem that it stands for very little.”

“It was always a game of strict interpretations. Now it will be killed by a strict interpretation.”

The Universe had rolled over in bed, and many things had changed. Not everyone lived now on the world on which he had been born. There was much coming and going, and a newness in appearance and mores. Not all the people were any longer people in the strict sense of the word. Nor can a man with a weekend cottage out among the stars be quite the same man as his grandfather with a cabin under the stars.

But Baseball by the powers (and for one last series at least) was still Baseball.

“We have seen a lot of changes,” said Skeet, “but nothing has really changed. The game has been saved dozens of times by intelligent rulings, and by a strict interpretation of the rules. And though now it will be strangled by one of these interpretations, yet they would sooner or later have strangled it anyhow, they hated it so much.

“It was quite necessary to rule that for all eternity the ball would have a para-rubber core, gray wool yard windings, and a stitched horse-hide cover. There had been too much tampering with the ball. We'd had quite enough of balls with armatures, gyroscopes, magnetic cores or receivers in their hearts. The stealing of frequencies had become a high art, and it was purely an electromagnetic problem whether bat and ball would attract or repel. And there was always the wise-guy ham operator out in the bleachers making the ball do nip-ups or even jump from the pitcher's hand directly to him.”

“O, the shenanigan years were a lot of fun. You remember the rule that Gobbo caused them to make? He was really a sweet character, which is probably the reason he was the first chosen to breach the barrier. In the early days there was a lot of prejudice against the giant toads playing baseball. It disappeared, of course, after the great stars came long like Gimpy Grenouille and Andy Amphi: how that character could jump for flies! But Gobbo you know, when he was mad, had the habit of swallowing the baseball. It was funny the first few times, but they had to make a rule.”

“Yes, they had to make a rule. It was slowing down the game.”

“And Moxie the Materializer, he turned things into a shambles. He was one of the best second basemen if he played it straight. But to flat miss the ball, and then to materialize another for the tag, that simply was not right. And to stand there with a ball in each hand as the runner came in, that was highly unfair.”

“Do you remember the afternoon he made it rain baseballs? He blew his top that day when the umpires took the balls away from him as fast as he materialized them. So he really broke loose. They came up from the ground like mushrooms and fell down like hail till they were a foot deep on the diamond. Then, when the club-owners started to sack them up, he dematerialized them all again. So they had to make another rule about materializing and dematerializing the baseball.”

“Yes, there's a lot of rules, and every one of them is needed. Like the rule that no player can have less than one nor more than eight legs or functional pedal appendages. My little grandson asked me about that rule the other night. Do you know, he had never heard of Sammy the Snake!”

“Fame of Sammy's sort is fleeting. But Sam was a true gentleman, if that is the word for it. Yet he was of very plebian background. He didn't come from the Snake Planets at all, he wasn't even one of the royal families. He was actually a legless lizard or annelid of some sort. But he was a gentleman.”

“A gentleman and a clown. For a while it was thought that they should let him go ahead with it. After all, even a giant snake does have disadvantages, and these are particularly manifest when it comes to playing baseball. He had a hard time even learning to hold the bat. And because of his build he never could take a full cut at the ball. But how that snake could bunt!”

“We shall never see his like again. And on the base paths he was murder. After all, if you are ninety-four feet long, and the bases are ninety feet apart, it isn't difficult to steal. There is no defense against it. Old Horse-Hoof Harold tried stomping on his tail once, but I bet that's the last tail he ever stomped on. Even so, nine hundred stolen bases in one season is unusual.”

“It's a record we may never see broken, what with the rule banning snakes from baseball. Where is Sammy now?”

“O, he was still coaching till a very few years ago. And when the minors finally folded, he went on the banquet circuit. He was always a popular speaker; he had no master in telling the dialect story. You know how he would coil up in a big pile on the floor with only that four-foot-long head resting on the table; and that everlasting cigar going full blast. We used to tell him it made him look like a dragon. Then he would cock one eye and start to talk. It was sheer delight just to listen to his stories. I hear now, though, he's a little too much on the bottle.”

“I always thought that rule a little unfair. It barred snakes and dodecapods, but it left the octopus in the game.”

“The octopus hasn't done a whole lot for baseball. Many of the clubs would be better off if they'd never bothered with them. They pay out big bonuses and salaries (those jokers do hold out for the money, I'll tell you that) but what do they get for them? O, they're good glove men, nobody will deny it. And some of them are excellent hitters. But I've always maintained that a player can do as well with one bat (or at most two at a time) as he can swinging five or six.”

“And there was that rule they had to make barring the new geometry and speculation completely. We know that there is more than one way to get from First to Second. You can run there or walk there. Or you can rotate a vector value ninety degrees in a counter-clockwise direction and be there. Or you can pose a syllogism to prove that you were on second all the time. And, as we know, above a certain frequency, first base may automatically become second base or even third. Or the change may be made by a variation in flux density or by transformism. And in certain states of catalepsy one may be on both first and second at the same time. So they had to make rules there.”

“Yes, it would have been a game, but it wouldn't have been baseball.”

2

Old Nell was eating oats. She ate them without ostentation, but with an inner joy.

Nell was engaged in a cosmic duel to the death with the Imperator to her own death, for the Imperator always wins.

Nell was twenty-five years old and the oldest mare in the world. She was the only mare in the world; she was the last of the species. She lived in the world where baseball was born, and the last baseball would be made from the skin of her back. She was alone and without the possibility of further issue. And when she was finished, the game would be finished.

It was the old strict interpretation that had saved the game so many times that would now kill it. For the Imperator himself who hated the game had forced the agreement that this rule would never be changed: that the Baseball must be cased in sewn horse-hide. And there were no more horses. Nell was the last in the universe.

3

The Imperator sat with his entourage in the Official Box and watched with hatred as the Beta All-Stars took infield practice.

“It is the last series and the last full season,” said the Proconsul, “unless you rescind.”

“I will not rescind,” said the Imperator. “We will let this old poison pastime go.”

“The game has an interesting history.”

“I intend to see that it becomes just that: history.”

“The game taught ingenuity.”

“We have newer ingenuities. We can hardly be beholden to the remnants of a barbarian rock-throwing contest for our instruction. It is an abomination. It must go.”

“And they say that it taught teamwork.”

“We are many stages beyond the team. It seems that it taught many things that must be untaught, bickering and competitiveness, and scheming and cunning and dissembling. And when it comes to exercise, why it can surely not compete with the now all-but-universal Vogt-Valeni method of bodybuilding.”

“That was not entirely its idea, Imperator. It built more than the body, more than the mind — ”

“As a replacement I have always pushed mega-chess, that endeavor where eight-man groups oppose each other on a playing board one thousand squares square — ”

“ — more than the mind, I say, Imperator. It also had its own spirit. It refused to bow to the inevitable. Why, when I think of certain late-inning rallies — ”

“But the inevitable must be bowed to. This baseball of yours is one of the few games in which the results are not scored by a predetermined set of probabilities, but are actually played out on the field, surely a dreary practice.”

Far away on an in-many-ways-obsoleted world Nell munched her oats, but she would not munch many more. And here the Imperator glared at the Alpha All-Stars as they took their last batting practice. For the final series was about to begin.

“I have fought the proponents of this, the last of the old games,” said the Imperator, “and I have defeated them by a legality. It was always a very legal game. They who live by the law shall perish by the law. Where did I get that? It is rather too good for me to have originated it. And yet I understand that some of you old duffers hate to see the game go.”

“Yes,” said the Proconsul, “there is one thing that nobody has mentioned in all the pro and con arguments about it. It was fun to play.”

“It was what to play?”

“Fun.”

“I don't believe I recognize the word. Is that not one of the nonsense words that children sometimes use?”

“Yes, that is one of the nonsense words that children sometimes use.”

The game was about to begin. The band played Stars and Satellites Forever, and everybody arose. The Imperator was handed a baseball for the ceremonial throw-out for the beginning of the last All-Star Series.

There was a grimace on his little green face, but he was not one to shirk ceremony.

“This one last time,” he said, “and then it will be gone forever.”

And, cradling the ball awkwardly in the end of one of his flippers, he heaved it onto the playing field.

Holy Woman

“In the Missal the Saints are classified as Martyrs, Confessors, Bishops, Doctors, Virgin Martyrs, Virgins, and Holy Women who are neither Virgins or Martyrs.

“Martha was a Holy Woman who was neither Virgin nor Martyr.”

“That sounds like the beginning of a story, Sour John.”

“It is. It's a common story and it happened in a common place, here. It was not in one of the out-of-the-way sites of the world in which I am accused of romancing; not in leering Liverpool or in nyktozoic New York; not in pristine Paris or sun-kissed San Diego; not cerulean Newport News, or exotic Omaha, or protean Cincinnati. It happened right here in prosaic Jebel Shah.”

“Well, tell the story, and also tell me how you got your nose scratched up like that.”

“The story I will tell. I am in this story myself nose and noggin. Now, as you have only been in Jebel Shah for two days and I have been here for more than five, I will give you a little background on our temporary home.

“This is the free-est (are there two e's or three in that most exciting of words) port of the world. Here nobody has any restriction on him whatsoever. This is the only port left in the world where a man is free openly to own slaves. That institution, and a sort of old-fashioned blind grinding poverty are the only things that curtail the full enjoyment of life. And they curtail it very little.

“When I write my thesis on the classification of civilizations (and I would have written it this morning if I hadn't had to go downtown to get those pills for my heartburn, and that took me all morning. I had forgotten that apothecary is itself an Arabic word so I couldn't think of the Arabic word for apothecary) when I write it I will list these: Aulic civilizations which are those in which persons face and talk to each other in courtly halls; inner garden civilizations in which a large household shuts away the world and lives intimately in this central park; plaza civilizations in which the large household turns into a small town and the garden is still central to it; tavern cultures in which the center of all good things is the joint and the jug; coffee in the parlor civilizations; coffee in the kitchen civilizations; and Our Block civilizations which are the same as Front Stoop cultures. The whole essence of a civilization is that it give the citizens a place to sit and converse in the most convenient and cosmopolitan way possible, and that the site should itself be a conversation piece.

“And when I have dwelt on all that I will add a piece on this town. It has an arrangement unique in the world. This town built in two half-circles one above the other like stalls at the opera, where all the houses are open at the front and all face each other, where the three cafés are here adjacent and all of the sidewalk variety, and where the harbor is itself the central court so you can reach out from your café table and strike matches on the tops of the masts as the ships lie below. This town is the only geometric figure possible where every person in its bounds can see and call to every other person.”

“This is a long way around to the holy woman Martha, and your own cat-scratched bugle.”

“I know it. But it was the openness of the town where everyone knows the business of everyone else that was one of the severest trials of Martha with her shame of a no-good husband, and that was one of the things that made her a holy woman.

“Let us begin at the beginning. Adam had several children, from one or the other of them all the inhabitants of this town derive. Martha was born here in a curious way, but it was not so curious here as it would be elsewhere. She was born in a pannier in the dust in front of the stone gate of the orphanage of the Little Sisters of the Child Jesus at Jebel Shah Established for the Alleviation of Misery and the Cherishing and Instruction of the Young. There was a note in the basket with Martha: ‘This is my little girl, cherish and instruct her as I wish I had been cherished and instructed, and may God bless you as I wish he had blessed me.’ You see, this town although the happiest one in the world also has its component of misery.

“The Little Sisters had the custom of Cherishing and Instructing the children until — until — well that is the point. We don't know what would be the logical end if the actual end did not always appear. But whenever the third year came around they would begin to look anxiously out over the hills and at the desert beyond. And if it were a few months late in coming the anxiety would turn to consternation. For it was not a large place and when it was crowded so that you could take no more and still they came, what could you do? And then finally he would come like a welcome rain or an inevitable solution; he would come out of the desert, Sh'lom Jubel the brigand. He and his band always lightly looted the town, more as a gesture than as a visitation; and they would also loot the orphanage and carry off the fifty oldest children, for whom it would otherwise be impossible to find homes. These they would sell or trade into different degrees of servitude. It was this constant, or tri-yearly flow, of well-taught children of the orphanage of the Little Sisters that provided a leaven to many a flat and rude rock town, and began to infuse grace into some of the graceless places of the world. In this business the brigand Sh'lom Jubel was something of a benefactor to the whole countryside.

“Martha was taken with the rest of the children and passed through the channels of trade. She did not move well. She was beautiful, but she was the only one who knew this. She'd blue eyes, certainly an odd color for them to be, and her hair had not much more pigment than a field of ripe wheat, it was in fact that very shade.

“She was won finally on the turn of a card by a brainless adventurer named Johann ibn Kabh, which is to say Jack McCabe. This odd little man married her honorably, not knowing what else to do with her, and not realizing that she would regard a little thing like that as permanent.

“He was a Levantine Irishman; one of his ancestors had missed the boat when the last crusaders went home, or possibly was put off the boat before it sailed. Jack was the sort of man who was called in French coquin, in German schelm, in Napoli he would be a scellerato, in Rio a canalha, in Buenos Airesan atorrante, in Bogotá a lámina, in Habana a chancletero, and in proper Spanish there is no word for him just as there would be no such type in Spain. In Yiddish I could not but call him schlimazl, in Arabic sāriq, in Russian merzavets, and in Irish a bitheamhnach. I doubt if there is an English name for that kind of man.”

“How about bum.”

“The very word. If I had been able to think of that I would have been able to save myself all that trouble. Jack was a bum. But I did not know he was a bum when I met him or I would have saved myself a wounded nose. I don't know whether Martha realized he was a bum from the first, but it would have made no difference. He was her husband and that was all that can be said.

“Most of what I tell you of her and Jack was narrated to me by Martha herself, as she talked to me quite a bit in the several hours that we were acquainted.

“Jack was an old fairground swindler, an Irish fawney man. He worked the menzils, the camping grounds of the caravans. He set up little thimble rigs in the markets. If he saw one little boy watching one little goat he would match coins with him. If he met a beggar with his bowl he would want to go him double or nothing what was in it. He once sold a blind man a blind dog to lead him. But that worked out well as they were both familiar with every foot of the town and could move freely, and neither one ever found out that the other one was blind. He sold old scribbled-up goat skins to paleontologists and knuckle bones of the Saints to pilgriming Christians. He sold pieces of the cross of Dismas to the thieves, and peddled sly gin to sinful Moslems.

“But mostly he gambled. He would lose everything he had and then he would stake his wife. The first time that happened she was frightened. She was won at poker by an old purple-faced plutocrat, and for all she knew he might be purple all over. He wanted to possess her at once but fortunately she kept her presence of mind. ‘As long as the cards are out we might just go one hand of gin rummy,’ she said. ‘Boker, boker, blay boker’ he preferred. ‘Just one little hand of gin rummy for only a piastre.’ And once she got him started she had him, for she was, and is, the best gin rummy player in Jebel Shah. So she won her freedom and went back to her husband, Jack the bum. But he didn't appreciate this at all. He howled like a dhi'b. ‘You quit when you were winning! Why did you quit? You might have taken him for everything. Billah, she quit in the middle of a hot streak!’ But after that they came to an understanding. He could stake her and lose her, and they both always knew that she could always win herself back again. But she would not gamble for anything but her freedom.

“In other ways he was a trial to her as she tried to establish a happy home for them. If there was to be soup in the pot or fish on the table she had to earn it. If anyone brought home the bacon (and believe me it was not easy to come by with the country being possessed by the pig's two worst enemies) it was she. And when the rent was paid (and sometimes it was) she paid it.

“She worked as a book-keeper and typist for a tight-fisted old Phoenician (one of the last of them) and collected from very poor families three milliemes a week on one piastre that had been loaned to their ancestors, in one case more than three thousand years before. She taught French to the children of merchants, and read the Wall Street Journal to a wizened little exporter. She wrote letters for the unlettered, and did sewing for cranky rich ladies. She did washing, and that isn't easy in a town where there is neither soap nor water. She sold goat milk and hooked rugs. And everything that she made her husband spent on flashy clothes or lost on his ventures or by gambling.

“But she never gave up establishing a happy home. They had no children as Jack always paced the floor all night smoking cigarettes as he thought up new projects to bring him fame or fortune; or else he was away from home living it up. She finally rode out to the desert to see her old friend, the brigand Sh'lom Jubel, and from him bought on easy time payments a young boy and girl.

“Jack was furious. ‘Who is going to feed these gaping mouths?’ ‘I will feed them the same as I feed you.’ After that he never noticed them; in fact ignored them so completely that several years later in a sudden touch of curiosity he asked Martha what were their names and how many of them there were around the house anyhow. ‘Only two, you say? It always seemed like there were more of them than that.’

“One day Jack came home and said that he had decided to become a Jew. ‘You will not be a Jew’ she said. ‘I'd as soon see you a Methodist or a Covenanter. I won't permit it. Why do you want to be a Jew?’ This was in the year of the troubles. ‘It is the only way to save our farm and cattle and sheep and keep from being driven into the desert without recompense.’ ‘We don't have any farm or cattle or sheep. We're town people. All we have is a house with the rent not paid, and yesterday you sold the rug and that was the only furniture in the house.’ ‘If we are not Jews the Jews will persecute us, and if we are not Moslems the Moslems will persecute us.’ ‘What is new about that? We will still be Mesihiyun and be persecuted by both sides as we have always been. This is the only fun they get and it keeps them from fighting with each other. I won't let you be a Jew.’ The Mesihiyun are border country Christians.

“But he did not take her advice to heart for another day he came home and said he had decided to be a Moslem. ‘You will be no such thing. I would as soon see you a Baptist or a Brahmin. Why do you want to be a Moslem?’ ‘I want to be a Moslem and have four wives.’ ‘You don't even know what to do with one. I won't let you be a Moslem.’

“And once he wanted to learn to be a barber and go to America where the big money was. And for a while he did well with a special assessment. He fixed up some sort of warrants and got receipts as he went around and collected small sums from every household in town. But after a while people began to ask him what the special assessments were for, and by what authority he collected them. And after another while he could charm no more money out of them (did I mention he was charming? He was, that was the oddest thing about him) so he had to set aside the special assessment idea.

“Martha kept getting him jobs at the docks. This hurt his pride at first and he learned a heart-rending cough which he said handling the heavy foreign merchandise gave him. It is the same sort of cough that ghosts use (you have heard them) when they ooze through the closed door of your room at night and you laugh at them; then they give that pitiful little cough to show you how cold and damp it is in the grave; and you cannot but feel sorry for them even though you know they are putting it on. It was that way with Martha. She knew his cough was as phoney as a clay piastre, but it tore up her heart.

“However, after he had learned the joys of bale-busting and all the little tricks of pilfering, appropriating, and commandeering of strayed and mismarked merchandise he began to have more pocket money and more fun on the docks.

“And after this sideline had been spoiled by the unspeakable tyranny of the brutal port police, he turned from this borderline activity to his greatest coup. He kidnapped an American millionaire and held him for ransom. This was last Tuesday.

“As you know I left the ship at El 'Arish two weeks ago and took a sabbatical, traveled over land by motor caravan to see the country, and am rejoining our ship here. I arrived in town the same day as Hiram H. Hiragespinst, the eminent American millionaire who had returned to visit the town of his grandfathers.

“Jack the quack approached me within seconds of my checking into the hotel. ‘Are you the eminent American millionaire?’ ‘I am certainly eminent. I am an able-bodied American seaman and as rich as the devil. If I'm not actually a millionaire you couldn't tell the difference by the way I spend my money.’ I always talk like that. ‘What's your name?’ he asked me. ‘John Sourwine, but my friends when I had them called me Sour John.’ ‘Sourwine is sure a funny way to pronounce Hiragespinst. Are you sure you know how to pronounce your name?’ ‘Dammit man, I ought to know my own name hadn't I?’ ‘That's true. We have something planned for you. I want it to be a total surprise. Come along.’

“I walked with the little man down the crookedest lane in town. It is the only lane in town, and you can see one segment of it from here. It doubles on itself like a snake and then it dies. Where it dies is the meanest house in town and that is where we went.

“When we were inside I heard the alarming news that I was a prisoner and would be held for ransom. ‘We will hold you for twenty-four hours until the consternation caused by your disappearance has been allowed to develop. Then we will make our move. We will chop off one of your fingers and send it with a messenger so they can identify it and know for certain it is you we hold. We will send a note with the finger asking for a million in cash. When we get it we will let you go; but not before we have cut off another finger to teach you that you can't trifle with us. I will now let you stew in your own juice till you are frantic. And my wife who is like a tigress will guard you.’

“I looked at him and I was uneasy about the way he moved on his feet. He was small but wiry and he could have been very rough. I am however a very rough medium-sized man myself and I was about to take him. Then I looked at his Martha and I did not. Her look was a kind but firm warning. So he went out and left his wife to guard me.

“It was in the ensuing hours that I became acquainted with her and learned all her story that I am telling here. But one thing I will make clear: she really was a tigress. When I remarked after a while that I would stroll downtown to look for a little booze and that I would be back in a few hours to see how the plot was developing, and when I started to stroll off, then I suddenly found myself flat on my back with one of her knees doing violence to my wind-pipe, and the point of the sharpest knife you ever saw right against the tip of my nose; and if you think she was kidding, then you never will know how my nose got all scratched up. After that there was no more nonsense about strolling downtown on my part.

“ ‘I have never discovered a non-violent way to subdue a man,’ she said. ‘I am sorry if I hurt you. I wish my husband wouldn't think up these little schemes, and I wish he wouldn't make me a part of them. But I will not let him be made a fool of. If it has to be I would kill you to prevent that from happening. I am a faithful wife and if he says to guard you I will guard you. After all it is only for twenty-four hours, and then we will cut off one of your fingers to identify you and send it with a note somewhere. After they ransom you we'll let you go, possibly. Or else we will not if he says we will not. But understand this, I will not have him embarrassed or his plan thwarted just because it is foolish and a little bit criminal. Remember that you have me to contend with. Now tell me about yourself. I never met a millionaire before.’

“She was a beautiful little woman with eyes the color of corn-flower so I told her all about myself.

“I told her about the time we were mistaken for the revolutionary junta when we missed our ship at Vega and cut across the jungle to catch it at Puerto Limón. They asked us to form a cabinet to stop further bloodshed. We did, and it was the best cabinet they ever had. It also lasted longer than any cabinet they ever had, nine days.

“I told her about the time that Tommy McGinn got them to set three of us off in a little boat near Dingle in West Ireland so he could visit his home town. We rowed about four miles and came ashore just at dawn. Tommy told them we had rowed all the way across from New York. This is still believed in the country around Dingle Bay.

“I told her of when I lived in a town whose name is Southern Comfort in Spanish and planted a crop of peanuts with the last of my resources and waited vainly for the plants to bear. It was many years later that I learned they grew underground.

“I told her about the time that we believed that we were the first white men ever to see the deep voodoo rites, and of the damnable bloodlust of the ceremonies and the sickening sense of Devil presence in the cursed proceedings. And how we found the next day that what we had seen was not deep voodoo at all, but an initiation of some freshmen into a fraternity at the new high school at Mombasa. And then I was told by one of my friends of certain school initiations that in former years obtained in the little towns around Knoxville, Tennessee, and for the first time in my life I was really shocked and frightened.

“All these accounts amused her. ‘I had no idea it was so much fun to be a millionaire. If I were capable of envy I would envy you. The possession of very great wealth liberates one and one is able to enjoy the work as a child does. I would have enjoyed a free life myself, but poverty and the care of an irresponsible husband has hindered me. The Sisters used to tell us that we should each try to leave the world a better place than we found it; but it sickens faster than I can heal it however hard I try, and I sometimes feel that I am the only one trying very hard. It is past my power to leave the world better than I found it; but I bet when I leave it it will be better than if I had not been here. And now if the time passes slowly for you we could play a little gin rummy for as little as a piastre.’ But I was too wary to play with her though I was already convinced that she was a holy woman and good in all things. She was good in all things but I had the feeling that she was a little too good in this.

“We talked all night and I came to a glowing admiration for her simple virtue and clear wisdom. For holiness and wisdom always go together. And now her wisdom appeared in its complete power. She knew the truth of the matter. ‘You are not a millionaire at all. You are only a seaman with some of your wages put by from your last voyage. This is a bad situation. My husband has made a terrible mistake. I always feel so sorry for him when he blunders like this. I would do anything to spare him that awful despondency that comes when the feeling that he has again been a cosmic dope comes crashing down on his head. I would go so far as to kill you to spare him. He hates to be a howling idiot. What'll we do?’

“ ‘If he really is a howling idiot — ’

“ ‘He is.’

“ ‘ — maybe we could fix it so he won't know that he is.’

“A little before sun-up Jack ibn Kabh came back to the house. ‘It's not twenty-four hours yet, but it's time enough. The consternation of your disappearance should have developed by now. Well, chop one of his fingers off, Martha, and you Mr. Sourwine tell me where to go, and I'll be off to collect the ransom.’

“ ‘One thing puzzles me’ I said. ‘How will my finger identify me?’

“ ‘That's the way they did it in an old story when they captured the Caliph. They chopped off one of his fingers and sent it so his ministers would know it was really he they held. Why? Wouldn't they recognize your finger?’

“ ‘I doubt if there is a person in the world who would recognize one of my fingers detached.’

“ ‘Well you can write a note then. That will have to do. Or we could do both. But you better write the note first. I still like the finger idea.’

“ ‘I don't. Now the next thing is to agree on the amount.’

“ ‘I thought we had agreed on a million.’

“ ‘No, we have agreed on nothing. That is too much. You have to come down a long ways. I would go maybe a hundred.’

“ ‘You are not even worth fooling with for a hundred. Think of all the brains I put into this. But I would take a hundred thousand.’

“ ‘Far too much. Two hundred is my best.’

“ ‘Ten thousand is my worst. Cut off one of his fingers, Martha, cut them all off.’

“ ‘No, wait. Five hundred.’

“ ‘Five thousand.’

“ ‘We will split the difference.’

“ ‘Agreed.’

“ ‘One thousand.’

“ ‘You call that splitting it? Well all right. But I had no idea millionaires were that cheap.’

“ ‘Good. Now a thousand piastres would be five English pounds. I give you an advantage. There should only be 197 to a pound and I'm allowing 200.’

“ ‘Piastres? Were we talking about piastres?’

“ ‘Certainly, what would we be talking about, Chinese money? Now, converting that further and roughing it off it looks like about thirteen dollars American.’

“ ‘Is that all? You multiply it out, Martha. Is that all it will come to?’

“ ‘Yes, his figures are right. That's what it comes to. And that's what you agreed to, a thousand piastres.’

“ ‘Was it piastres we agreed to? Well, it can't be helped now. I had thought I could get more from a millionaire. I didn't know that you would turn out to be that kind of a cheap jack sort of one. Still thirteen dollars is more than I made this year, or last year either if you take out one sum that I had to give back. Well, write a note, and tell me where to go get the money.’

“ ‘Here, take this note and go to the desk clerk at the hotel. I left some money for him to keep for me. He will give you thirteen dollars when he reads this.’

“ ‘Which hotel?’

“ ‘How many are there in town?’

“ ‘That's right, there is only one. And which clerk?’

“ ‘And how many of those are there?’

“ ‘That's right. There is only one hotel and one clerk at the hotel.’ Then he quickly chopped off one of my fingers to show that he was still master and went to get the ransom. He was back quite soon with it and I was freed.

“That is all. But I shall always remember that look of deathless gratitude that Martha gave me for not letting her husband know he was a howling idiot. She bore the heaviest of crosses, to suffer a fool daily, and she is a holy woman if I ever saw one.”

“But I remember how you lost that finger, Sour John. It was seven years ago and you lost it in a wind-lass.”

“Is it that long? It seems like only yesterday. I had forgotten for the moment how I lost it. Well, perhaps he didn't chop it off but he sure would have liked to.”

“And when in time to come this is told of you it will go down as the story of Sour John and the Girl with the Corn Flower Eyes.”

“Sha ‘Allah.”

Red Headed Future

“Mr. King says for you to get the cob out,” said Junie. “He says for you to be a little less moribund. He told me to drop those pleasant words to you on my way past.”

“Apropos of what?”

“How do I know apropos to what? He conveyed another message but, being a lady, I won't repeat it.”

“I'll tell you a secret, Junie. I don't really care what he says.”

“And I'll tell you a secret, Jimmy Allyn, I'm not really a lady, and I don't care much what either of you says. When I came to work here I understood the girl in personnel to say that the opportunities for matrimony here were unlimited. But I misunderstood her. She really said acrimony.”

“Each have their devotees, Junie, but combined they are deadly. I will try not to combine them in my own life.”

“I used to try to imagine what kind of girl would marry you. Then I saw you lunching with that crow the other day. And sister, now I know.”

“I have my own image of the girl I wish would marry me. And you are particularly fond of her. But that crow I was lunching with happened to be quite a dear relative. And that was quite a mean remark, Junie.”

“I am quite a mean girl nowadays. I used not to be. It's the atmosphere here.”

“He is a singular sort of irritation, Junie.”

“The irritation here, Mr. Allyn, is not singular.”

“Are you including me, Junie?”

“Not really, Jimmy, not really.”

Junie was pretty, efficient, and personable: a little more here and she would have been red-headed; a little less there and she would have been skinny. And she stirred an odd envy in both the sexes: not to have, or not to be. Lately, however, Junie had developed an acerbity that was disquieting. It was the atmosphere.

“Ambient acridity,” Didgeon called it. Didgeon was the phrase maker. “It begins with King, you know,” Didgeon said. “He chews on you, Allyn, and you chew on us. And I chew on my knuckles, having nobody to pass it along to. But it's that old drunkard, King, who poisons the atmosphere here.”

“If that were so, he'd at least have an excuse. But he brags that he's never had a drink in his life.”

“Yet he's a secret dram drinker. He's addicted to epinephrine. He can't go an hour without a shot.”

“I don't believe I know what that is.”

“To the unlettered, adrenaline. He is addicted to blowing his top. His flask is the medulla. When you get mad you lush the stuff from the gland into your bloodstream, and it excites you. It's kind of fun to get mad, Allyn. But he's a drunkard on it. He has to have the excitement of that shot all the time, to keep blowing his top. If forced to act decent for an hour or two, as when Ravel is around, it nearly kills him. He's gotta pop his cork. He's addicted to adrenaline binges.”

Didgeon himself never got mad. But he made other people mad. For quite lately Allyn had had to catch him up for pilfering; and the disquieting thing was that Didgeon still did not consider it serious.

“It isn't that it's stealing. Why, even in the Church it's allowed if you read deep enough. It's called the Doctrine of Occult Compensation. And one may not muzzle the ox that treads the corn.”

“You haven't read deeply enough. The doctrine had to do with the age of slavery, and the permissibility of providing a minimum living for oneself when even that was denied.”

“And if we aren't slaves, and if this isn't a treadmill — ”

“That's enough,” Allyn had told him. And it had ended there. But Didgeon was right: if this wasn't a treadmill, what do they call treadmills where you come from? And Didgeon was only half of it.

Allyn buzzed for Hoadley who came with a sort of stubborn promptness.

“Either you have lost your mind completely, Hoadley, or you need glasses. There are fantastic errors in the first three items that strike my eye. The ‘A’ fixture you have in at $29.98. Is this a bargain basement? Five on cost would be $30.02. You know we have an inflexible rule against going below five. You have taken more than a hundred dollars off the switchgear. And you have set in the half-inch conduit even below cost. Did you forget to add the freight?”

“No. I didn't forget a thing. The first three items to strike your eye are also the first three things that will strike the contractor's eye, and we will be low on all three. They will be wondering all night tomorrow on their bids on a rush job like this, as it's due at ten the next morning. And, as the electrical will be only about ten percent of the whole, and as they will be rushed, they may go in with our bid on just the strength of that. Believe me, I have more than made up for it along the line.”

“It isn't in line with our policy. Take it back and bring it into line with our policy.”

“When I was with Enterprise we pulled that stuff all the time.”

“Enterprise is now bankrupt. We are not.”

The remark was unfair. The bankruptcy of Enterprise had far larger causes than such as this.

Hoadley took the quotation back to rework it. Still, who could say that he was wrong? He was a poker player, and this was a poker trick.

“What I am really afraid of,” said Allyn to himself, “is that Hoadley may someday be sitting in my chair, and I will be sitting nowhere.”

King came out hurriedly, wrapped to leave.

“Gad, Allyn, the Schermerhorn papers are still on your desk. I told you to handle them definitely today. Can't you do anything you're told?”

“You told me four contradictory ways of handling them.”

“I have had enough of your negative attitude. If the shoes are too big for you to wear, say so. We may have to do a little downgrading here, make room for new blood, someone who takes an interest in the business. I may have to get a slightly retarded monkey for this job. Or maybe that's what I have now. I'll get a sound one next time. What have you to say to that, Allyn?”

“There are simians and simians, King. I have nothing to say about it.”

“Look, Allyn, I want that Schermerhorn thing settled before the sun goes down.”

“Sunset is at five twenty-seven. It will be settled before then.”

“If I wanted meteorological data I would call the weather bureau. We will see what gives tomorrow.” He banged out.

“Continued stormy,” murmured Allyn. It wouldn't be so bad if King didn't always do it in the presence of Didgeon and Hoadley and Junie Jodelle.

Actually there was nothing difficult about the Schermerhorn thing. It had simply been the gauntlet of the day, and tomorrow there would be a different one. Had he handled it earlier, however he had handled it, he would have had to do it over differently. He now quickly put three letters on the tape to settle it.

“You aren't really in a hurry for the figures on this section of the quote are you, Allyn?” asked Hoadley.

“No hurry at all just so you finish by five-thirty. I'm taking them home with me.”

“I rather hoped to get away on time one evening this week.”

“It appears a forlorn hope, Hoadley. Junie, aren't you leaving a little earlier than your usual early?”

“Every minute saved, you know.”

“These two should really be retyped. They aren't samples of your best work. It won't be necessary for you to take your hat off again. It's fabulous the amount of work I have seen you do with your hat on in those few short minutes that you almost succeeded in appropriating.”

“I'm doing them over. You don't need to snap at me, Jimmy. You didn't used to snap at people.”

“I am more snapped against than snapping, Junie.”

She retyped them in exasperation; zipped, slid, snatched, folded, stuffed, sealed, and metered.

“I have been asking you for dates for five months, Junie,” remarked Allyn as Junie Jodelle prepared for a second time to leave.

“Frustrating, isn't it? But why should I go out with a mouse? I have a whole apartment full of mice. I've named them all: McGregor, Schultz, McGillicuddy, Reilly, and Allyn. I named him for you. He's the littlest. The other mice chase him away. He's nice, though, if you like mice.”

And then she was really gone. In a quarter of an hour Didgeon left, and in a half-hour Hoadley, his not-at-all difficult revisions completed.

Allyn gathered up his bundles, locked the office, and left; taking his work and worries home with him.

Allyn was the man in the middle. It wouldn't have been a bad job if it hadn't been for King. Allyn had worked quite hard at it for several years. And beyond the job he had aspirations. A man should not always be living in a furnished room and taking work home with him. A man should plan for something more basic and enduring.

And the more basic and enduring thing had lately began to grow in his mind as a tangled complex of slim ankles and nearly-red hair, and a sort of sweet talk that was not a cloying sweetness. Something like burned sugar or toasted cinnamon.

And yet the job had become intolerable because of King. And without the job the aspiration had no practical basis.

“I wonder if they really know what goes on in this department,” Allyn mumbled. “The work is done, because I do it, and because I keep Didgeon and Hoadley on it. But all that Management knows is that King was put in charge of this department, and that the work is somehow done, and usually done well. The only one from Management who ever comes around is Ravel. And King is always on his good behavior when Ravel is here. It kills him, but he behaves.”

And there were never prospects that the next day would be better. Every day had been just a little worse for a long long time, for King now began to assume the proportions of a nightmare. And yet every morning another day doggedly began.

Allyn had been getting to work quite early these mornings. Arriving at seven-thirty, he could usually get in an hour's uninterrupted work before the others arrived and gradually settled down. He could in that time put as many as twenty letters on the dictaphone for Junie to do later; he could make or effect a series of decisions that he had been incapable of making the evening before; and he would be able to lay out for Didgeon and Hoadley a cogent schedule.

Junie bounced in. Yet she had less bounce than usual. Her eyes, had they belonged to anyone else, might almost have been called puffy. But even if a little red today, they were probably still the best eyes in town.

“I see you have been burning the dicephalous candle again, Junie,” said Jimmy Allyn.

“How nice of you to notice. But I always say a person should get a little sleep every night, even if only an hour. But it has to be regular, you have to get that hour every night, that's the secret. That's why I'm also so rosy in the mornings.”

“Your eyes betray you a little Junie. You may not have got your full hour last night.”

“You would be astonished if I told you why I really didn't sleep last night.”

Then King arrived and the deadly game began. King came a little later than usual, about nine-thirty. Didgeon had gone across town to pick up a set of plans. Hoadley had gone out momentarily with one of the contractors. And Junie, well it was hard to say where Junie was at that moment, but she wasn't far.

“Allyn, what kind of office is this with only you working, and that ineffectively? What time do people arrive when I am not here?”

“They have all been here all morning. Didgeon has just gone — ”

“I didn't ask you for explanations.”

“I was under the impression that you did.”

“Whatever impression you're under, get out from under it. I'll have no back talk from you today. I'm thinking there will have to be changes made. Get back to work. I didn't tell you to stop work.”

Allyn hadn't stopped work.

“And answer me when I talk to you,” continued King.

“It is hard to answer what is hardly a question,” said Allyn.

“Never you think there isn't a question,” said King. “There is a question mark as big as a house over your head.”

And King went into his office.

It was true enough. There was a towering question mark over Allyn's head. This diet of dirt did not seem a sound basis for any aspiration. (‘Whoever taketh a wife has already given hostages to fortune’ said Montagne by way of Didgeon.) Even an approximation to marriage to even a proximate red-headed wife raised questions of security. It was just plain a bad time to quit and start all over. To be caught a shorn lamb, a winter-stung grasshopper, a clipped-winged bird, is to have very little choice.

Junie came in now with her arms full.

“Where were you, Junie? You shouldn't leave without saying something. I took quite an eating because you weren't here.”

“I told you I was going to the stationary room, Jimmy. Lots of times you don't pay attention when I try to tell you something.”

Hoadley came in.

“You shouldn't have taken so long,” Allyn told him. “You know we're busy.”

“We're always busy. He's a good customer. And I wasn't long.”

Didgeon came back.

“I thought you would never return,” said Allyn. “Did you stop for lunch and a show?”

“I stopped for nothing, Allyn. I got the plans and I came back at once. I didn't even stop to be civil. I am becoming less civil with everyone these days.”

“So I notice.”

Yet there had been a time when there was fun in the office, before they all began to sour.

It was calm till noon. Didgeon and Hoadley had gone to lunch, but Junie was still there.

“Junie, there are times when I can hardly keep my hands off you,” said Jimmy Allyn.

“I don't remember any absolute prohibition on the matter.”

“There are times when I draw up elaborate plans, and somehow they always become misplaced. Junie, you seem to have a lot to do with them getting misplaced.”

“But Jimmy, I never disturb any of your papers.”

“You aren't as uncomprehending as you appear to be, are you, Junie?”

“Not nearly, Jimmy, not nearly.”

And for a moment there it didn't seem so far away.

King came out full of cat tricks.

“Junie, are you behind with your filing? I don't find my copies of the last five quotes.”

“Everything is filed that is completed, Mr. King.”

“Allyn, where are my copies on the Downtowner Motel, on the Pan-American Laboratories, on the Ruskin Building, on the Red Dog Transfer Terminal, and on the Mutual Building?”

“The Downtowner and Pan-Am we just completed. Didgeon is taking the copies around on his lunch period, and here are your copies now. Ruskin and Red Dog aren't due till tomorrow, and both will be finished this afternoon. And the Mutual bid opening has been set back a week. I told you that this morning.”

“That's a flat lie. You told me nothing about it. And you're just getting in under the wire on all of them. Why can't you get your work done in a competent manner and with plenty of leeway? Well, why can't you?”

“You had all five jobs together on your desk for several days. You only gave them to me yesterday, and all at once.”

“I didn't ask for excuses.”

“That is a reason, not an excuse.”

“A little girl could give better answers than that. I tell you, Allyn, that you are not at all satisfactory. What do you intend to do about it? Tell me, Allyn, what do you intend to do about it?”

“At the moment I don't know, Mr. King.”

“Allyn, you will be able to tell me by tomorrow morning what you intend to do about it.”

“I will, Mr. King.”

King went out. Junie was looking at Allyn oddly with her mouth open, well not at him, she was looking past him.

“Why are you grinning, Junie? Is this such an unusual thing around here?”

“I wasn't grinning. I don't know what I was doing. I was just embarrassed.”

“I rather intended to ask you a question today, Junie. But now, after being made to appear such a fool to myself and everybody, it looks as though it will remain unasked.”

“Well, it's a little hard to answer a question before it is asked.”

‘This is the end,’ Allyn said to himself. ‘I'm writing my letter of resignation tonight.’

‘But think of your job,’ himself answered him. ‘You have time and advancement in it. And think of the future.’

‘What else have I been thinking of for the last — forever, I guess. When you have eaten the amount of dirt I've eaten, well there's no use talking about it.’

He wrote that night in a cold fury without a beginning or end, and he felt that he was closing off a section of his life. He wrote with the snappish anger of a coward at bay, and he tore King to bloody ribbons in his mind. ‘A man who continuously talks without knowing what he is talking about is as dishonest as any other kind of liar. A man who baits for pleasure is as vicious as any other kind of sneak; a man who misuses and fouls the talents of others is as dirty as any other sort of thief.’ It was an irrevocable letter. He was slamming the door behind him loudly. ‘An open idiot is as noisome as an open sewer.’ He was wrought up and he continued to write violently. He finished the letter, sealed it, went to bed and slept badly.

In the morning he dropped the letter in the intra-office mail. He did no work. He fiddled and shuffled papers. The mail was passed, and the irrevocable letter was on King's desk. What was done was done. And after it nothing but aimless depression and incipient terror. There would be no job. There would be no future. And he hated to give up that future. It had lately begun to go by the name of Junie Jodelle.

King was not late today. It was nice of him to be on time for the slaughter. The door was half-open, and Allyn stole covert glances while he waited for King to come to that letter and explode. There came the sound of off-key whistling, and then the boom of King.

“O god,” gasped Allyn, “I can stand anything except that booming laugh of his when he cuts me down. How they'll gloat to see it.”

“Here's a letter from some crank,” rumbled King. “I didn't have time to read it all. He's hot about something. See if he has a gripe coming, and finish off the rest of this stuff for me. I got to take a customer fishing and we're starting this morning. How come you haven't finished your own mail yet? I used to handle twelve times that much and have all the replies dictated by eight-thirty. I used to — ” but he was out in the hall, and what he used to do was in danger of being lost in the distance.

Allyn felt cheated. He didn't want to be off the hook that way. He had made a decision, and that decision was going to stand.

“King,” he cried loudly, “get back in here!”

“What? You talk to me like that!”

“Come back in here and tend to your business! Read that letter!”

“But I told you to read it and analyze — ”

“You fat-faced fool, I wrote it. I don't have to read it. And I have already analyzed it minutely.”

“You talk to me like that, and you'll likely be out of a job.”

“You floundering fink, what do you think the letter's about!”

There was no doubt that he was out of a job. Didgeon and Hoadley shook hands with him weakly, feeling themselves somewhat compromised. And Junie kissed him, which she seldom did. But it was done so quickly that it hardly counted as a kiss. And nobody looked at anybody else.

So he stepped off the treadmill onto the ground with that same odd feeling of standing on land after a long time on a ship.

A man out of a job is a species distinct from a working man. There are similarities. And there is a wide difference. The man out has a seedier appearance and longer whiskers. And he feels himself looked at queerly in the street. He is more hurried, though he has less to hurry for. He sits alone in public places such as terminals and depots and hotel lobbies and does figures on the back of envelopes, long division problems of minimal outlay into accumulated savings to give days still starvation. He walks in parks and looks angrily at concrete horses and bronze fishes. And he remembers as though dimly and from a long time ago the friends of his previous existence, those of twenty-four hours ago when he had not yet been committed to this walking solitude. There was one who turned a phrase and ate of life with a careful carelessness as though eating around a worm hole in a pretty good apple. There was one who did things with a flair, and did them over again quickly when they were rejected; who combined a duck's back with a tinker's hand and a gambler's eye. There was one with the brindled fur of a kitten and the sharp claws of a cat, a red-headed minx who had been a part of the unresolved future, and now belonged to the irrevocable past.

A man walking even at a slow shuffle and with many pauses will cover around twenty miles in fourteen hours, and afterwards he will be tired without realizing it.

“There was a girl called for you this afternoon,” said Mrs. Steuben.

“A girl? I don't believe I know any girls.”

“Yes. You know the one. She phones about once a month. She sounded as though she had been crying.”

“Who do I know that cries? I don't believe I know a single one.”

“This girl I believe works where you do.”

“Where I do? She must be legendary.”

But he was quite tired and he thought no more about it.

The second day is much more final than the first. The memories of the previous life have grown quite dim now. And any idea that yesterday may have had a future is now void and ridiculous. This is the only future, walking down a bumbling street. Who would have thought the future would be like that? There are people in the background who growl and grumble and seem to hold a sort of communication with their fellows. There are creatures of a certain identity and who may even have names, who come and go and merge and separate.

There are men who are constitutionally unable to go on benders; and this handicaps them in times of crisis. Allyn was such a man. There are those who go out in the legs first, and sit unable to move but still with a certain clarity of mind. There are those who go out in the head first, and wander through countless adventures and imbroglios that defy remembrance. But Allyn was of the race that goes out in the stomach first.

For them no oblivion, only malaise; no kind drifting, no induced dreams, only queasiness and undistinguished suffering. It is a misfortune that strikes cruelly. It has kept man a poor devil, sad and sober.

Yet even for such a man it is possible to acquire a certain edge. It isn't easy; nothing worthwhile in this world is easy. It will not hurry. It must be courted. But, given time, it will come. And when it comes it is solider than the easy binges of the easy drinkers.

And after a while there was companionship also. It wasn't that a friend came. It was as though he had always been there and gradually made himself home. He was talking easily and naturally and with great friendliness; yet he was a creature out of the background of that other life that had ended two days ago.

Allyn had not in three years spoken fifty words to Richard Ravel. For Ravel was an older man and a cryptic one; and he was on the other side of a line that was not easily crossed. For, though he was only a fractional owner of the Firm itself, yet to the Department Ravel was the voice of Management. Yet today it was an easy and amused voice.

“It was a smart move of yours, Allyn,” said Ravel, “and I am one who appreciates such things. You had somehow learned that King was being retired next month. I don't know how you knew it. He didn't know it. But it is the sign of a competent man to know what is going to happen.

“And you had fathomed further, though how I cannot say, that I had been directed to bring in an outside man for the managership. Now here is where you showed unusual shrewdness. You knew that I was a literalist. And you knew that if I was directed to bring in an outside man, I would do so technically. But you also understood that I myself did not favor an outsider. No, I had first had an idea of jumping Hoadley over you. Or, if he did not seem to have up enough speed to take the jump, then I would be forced to use you. But when directed to bring in an outsider, I had to rack my brains to see what poor creature we could steal from our competition.

“But you have relieved me of that difficulty. By quitting your job you have again established yourself as a freelance. And as such I can hire you for the position I have in mind. We arrive at this by a tortuous reasoning it is true, but I am much given to tortuous reasoning. Still, it was quite intelligent for you to foresee the possibility and gamble on it.”

“Just a notion I had. I am quite a student of human behavior and — ”

“Don't run it into the ground, Allyn. A smart move is smart by its brevity. Long windedness takes the edge off of it. Come to my office ten days from today and you will succeed to the duties of a man who will then have been retired. Miss Jodelle has, by the way, been with me for the last two days working on the reorganization.”

“Miss who?”

“Jodelle. I had understood that you two were quite good friends. You will be in very close contact in our new set up.”

“Yes. I remember her now.” It seemed like such a long time ago, that other life. And this would not be going back to it. It would only be selecting a few items out of it to blend with the new; white ankles, almost red hair, barbed tongue.

“I will leave you now,” said Richard Ravel. “You have the opportunity of building yourself quite a future with the firm. But that is up to you. Nobody can form your future for you.”

Yes, there would be a future to shoot for: one with a sparkle on it and hair that was almost red.

Rain Mountain

Atorrante was a four-year-old male, of the colour and texture of pale moonlight. One who knew lions would have guessed him at two hundred and twenty pounds, yet he moved as though he were without weight; and a great part of the time he was invisible against the evening background.

His head was large, and he wore a black mask; distinct markings about the eyes and muzzle. His three brothers had all been marked in the same way at birth, but their markings had faded. It is quite unusual to keep the markings into adulthood.

For Atorrante looked like the Black Panther of the stories, though there is an argument never settled whether there is such a thing as a Black Panther, and whether the panther and the mountain lion are the same thing.

Atorrante had lately lost his mate, and had himself been shoulder-shot. Yet he now moved one hundred and eighty miles in forty-eight hours. Nobody has yet found the reason why the Mountain Lion will travel. But once he begins — he will move till he dies. He may go a thousand miles in three weeks. And a traveler does not act right. He will go till he is killed.

Atorrante crossed water, cleared brush, and disappeared into the flanks of Rain Mountain.

Rain Mountain is of blue granite, and it slept now in hazy pink twilight. It is not the highest, it is not the steepest, it was not the largest of the near mountains. But it was the wildest, the most brambled and overgrown; it was just plain the lonest mountain in that hundred miles between Medicine Park and Haystack Mountain. It was a desolate blue mountain rising from the tangled banks of one of the little Reds. For the Red River itself disappears here into its squabbling branches, and there is no main river: only the Prairie Bog, Town Fork, the Salt Fork, the North Fork, the Deep Red Run, and the Cache Creek Run of the Red. This was the Deep Red Run, as shabby and wild a creek as Rain Mountain was a wild and shabby mountain.

Old Rain was often uninhabited. Johnny Blue Stone had a shack there, but Johnny might be gone for months at a time. He had only to hear the whistle of the train thirteen miles away, or to smell cut-off timber burning, or to watch wheat yellow the far horizon, and he would be off somewhere, anywhere.

And on old Rain Mountain was a dug-out style rock hut that had once been the mining claim of J. T. Gilford, and then had been a sheep herders' haven in the years when there had been sheep on Rain Mountain; and had later been lived in by an Indian named Charley Coldstream.

Charley Coldstream had now been dead for seven years; yet there were nights when he came back, and his fire could be seen in the old rock hut. Or that is what the boys in the Panther Patrol told each other.

For the third habitation on Rain Mountain was the cabin of the Panther Patrol.

There were seven boys in the Panther Patrol, and six of them came up onto Rain Mountain together that evening, the first Monday in June: Terry McGuire, Tommy Tipton, Dionigi Manovello, and Conrad Crain, all of a size and the same age, twelve; and Hayden Flood and Stanely Ridgepole, two boys several years older. These six came up the five miles from the Tipton farm where they had assembled, and moved their gear into the Panther cabin at sunset. The seventh member of the patrol, Carl Cornhouse, had not been able to come with them.

“Get wood, before it's dark, quite a lot of wood,” said Hayden, “and water. Fill everything.” For the Panther Patrol cabin was on almost the highest point of Rain Mountain and high above both wood and water. For, though it was a mountain full of water, yet the highest spring broke out nearly two hundred feet below them; and the top of the last pine was a long leap down from Panther Ridge.

The cabin itself was hardly walled. It had a fitted rock floor, six piers of cemented stone, and a good rough rafter and shingle roof with quite an overhang. Well-drained, it was almost rainproof except in the most driving wind. But it was not really walled. Yet the rock floor was always a high dry place for the sleeping bags, and the rafters gave storage for a number of things that had been carried up there, high lashed on bags or on poles, animal-safe and dry.

And the campfire was built half in half out, under the western overhang in a low rock-walled oven or hearth.

“My father says not to worry whatever they pull,” said Terry McGuire. “He says the first night in the Panther Patrol cabin on the mountain is an initiation. They'll try to scare us. They'll tell us wild stories. And then in the night they'll make a noise or a disturbance. But we are not to let them scare us. The Panther Patrol was started a long time ago. He said that if all the boys that had been scared on the mountain were laid end to end they'd reach all the way to Lone Wolf.”

“We don't want those branches,” said Tommy Tipton. “They're too hard to carry up through the bushes and brambles. Let's just chop up this old fall into two-foot lengths and carry them up. My father says there's no such thing as a panther. There's no such animal. A leopard was called a panther once, and a tiger was called a panther. And in America the mountain lion is called the panther. But panther is a Greek word, and it means ‘all the animals’. It was made up of a tiger's head, and a leopard's body, and a bear's paws, and a lion's tail. It was only a storybook animal. And there isn't any such thing as a Black Panther. It's only something to scare you with.”

They carried the wood up from White Mule Draw to the top of Rain Mountain. There used to be a white mule in White Mule Draw. He had lived there yet when the father of Terry McGuire had been in the Panther Patrol. He had been forty years old when he died, the oldest mule in the county. He had been a mine mule from the time that J. T. Gilford had mined here.

Dionigi Manovello laid and built the fire. Dionigi, though one of the youngest, could lay the neatest fire of any boy in the Panther Patrol. And he was an expert on all manner of woodcraft. This was because, he told them, he was an Indian, a member of the old Anadarko tribe. He was the darkest of them, and he seemed to look like an Indian, unless you happened to think what an Indian really looked like. For he had told them so often that he was an Indian that they had come to believe it, even the older boys; even if they remembered when he had first come there, and that his father had been an Italian railroad worker. But let him be an Indian if he wanted to be. Dionigi made a good Indian.

The old iron skillet was brought down from the rafters, and the boys made spits. The skillet had not been brought up from the valley; the skillet had been on the mountain for years. It had been found in the hut of Charley Coldstream. It may have been there when the sheep herders were there. It may have been there when the mine was there.

“But it was a zinc mine,” said Conrad Crain.

“There may have been iron there, too,” said Stanely Ridgepole. “Just look at the old rocks in the morning. You'll see that some of them are iron rocks.”

They spitted sausages and wieners, and toasted burnt buns and bread. They made coffee and cocoa. Then they spread their sleeping bags; and Stanely Ridgepole strummed his guitar with a sort of background music while Hayden Flood talked sleepily.

“This is a pretty safe place, as safe as you can get on the mountain. There's only two bears been seen all spring, and Mr. Mobley says they're both down in the bottoms now. Besides, they're only half grown and not bothersome, and a fire will almost always keep a bear away. The rattlesnakes never come above the ridge. The weasels will come in when you're asleep sometimes and make a little hole in your throat and drink your blood, and they do it so quiet that you never know it's happened except that you feel tired in the morning. But at this time of the year they're so fat on prairie chicken that they won't be up here bothering for blood.

“And the Black Panther hasn't been here for seven years. It's as safe here as it can ever be on the mountain. Of course it's never safe on the mountain.”

“My father says there's no such thing as the Black Panther,” said Tommy Tipton. “He says it's just a legend.”

“Your family hasn't been in this part of the country as long as some of the others,” said Hayden. “But wasn't it just seven years ago tonight that the Black Panther killed and partly ate Charley Coldstream? And didn't the doctor open his eyes and shine one of those little lights in? And wasn't the Black Panther printed on his eyes, the last thing he saw before it killed him? But it went away before the men could hunt it down. And a black panther only comes back every seven years. We'd better cut us some good stout clubs, and I'll stay awake all night to guard. There's always the chance that he'll come back.”

“It's just a story they made up,” whispered Terry McGuire to Tommy Tipton. “It's part of the initiation.”

“He didn't make up the part about the Black Panther being printed on Charley Coldstream's eyeballs,” said Tommy. “I heard Mr. Mauser tell that in the barber shop.”

“I don't believe it, though,” said Terry. “I don't believe that the last thing you see before you die is printed on your eyes.”

“If you're an Indian, then it is,” said Tommy. “The last thing an Indian sees before he dies is printed on his eyeballs.”

“That's right. I forgot that Charley Coldstream was an Indian.”

And a little after nine-thirty that night Carl Cornhouse started up Rain Mountain, only he started up the west face. He was the oldest of the boys and he knew the mountain best.

“They say that the ghost of Charley Coldstream comes back,” said Stanely Ridgepole, “but I never believed in ghosts. They say he will come to warn of the Black Panther if it ever returns. He will come and light a fire in his old rock hut as a signal to all the people that the Black Panther is back. His rock hut is the highest thing on Rain Mountain and people everywhere will be able to see the fire.”

“When did you say the Panther killed the Indian?” asked Dionigi.

“Just seven years ago tonight,” said Hayden Flood.

“And how often is he supposed to come back?”

“They say every seven years, isn't that right, Stanely?”

“That's right, every seven years.”

“Then he could come tonight?” asked Dionigi.

“That's right. I never thought of it. But we all have clubs and Hayden Flood is going to stay awake to watch.”

Atorrante, the black-muzzled puma, now settled down in White Mule Draw. But he would rest only a few hours. He never rested long since he had become a wanderer. He was restless and feverish in sleep.

Now everything on Rain Mountain was asleep except Carl Cornhouse who slowly made his way up the west face and had almost reached the crest.

The crickets were four hundred feet below them on the slope. The owls hooted as though under water, and flew far below their feet. And a calf could be heard bawling so far down that it sounded as though it were in the bottom of a well.

Terry McGuire gripped Tommy tightly by the wrist and Tommy started up in terror.

“Oh! It's only you. I thought it was a big snake that had me.”

“Tommy, I said it was only stories to scare us. I said it would only be an initiation. But they are all lying there asleep. Count them. You can see them all here. And out there is the fire.”

“Our fire? It's still glowing. Why shouldn't it be?”

“No. I mean on the very top of the mountain. Look, it's a fire at Charley Coldstream's hut.”

“How could there be? There isn't anybody to light it.”

“But you can see it burning. It didn't light itself. Tommy, I'm scared.”

“Do you think he came back?”

“Yes, the dead Indian came back to light the bonfire. He came back to warn people that the Black Panther is back on Rain Mountain.”

“We got — got to wake up the rest. Tell them it's the Black — Black Panther. I can't holler. You holler.”

“I can't talk more than a whisper. It's like a dream where you try to holler and wake yourself up. And you open your mouth and you can't make a sound. Tommy, we have to wake them up. I'm too scared to move. I can't even get up to run. If we're too scared to holler, then the Panther will come and eat us all.”

They both tried to cry out, but they were so paralyzed with fright that they could only croak. They opened their mouths and strained in terror to break the spell with a cry.

Then the terrifying scream of the Panther sounded from the west wall of the Mountain; and its sound echoed among them like cascades of horrible lightning.

Carl Cornhouse had spent many hours practicing his panther scream. He lived on the other side of the mountain from the other boys and had often practiced it around home. It was chilling, made out of broken sobs and stranglings and a curdling series of ascending screams. It scared his dogs, it scared the crows, that scream would scare almost anyone. But even he had no idea what a wild thing it would seem heard on top of Rain Mountain at night.

After he had climbed the west face of the mountain he had lit the fire at Charley Coldstream's hut. Then he had shied rocks at the cabin of the Panther Patrol until he saw that two of the younger boys had stirred and had seen the fire. Hayden and Stanely would have been awake anyhow but pretending sleep, for they were in on it. This is the way that boys were initiated into the Panther Patrol, with this scare at night on the mountain. But there had never been anyone who could give the panther scream as well as Carl Cornhouse.

And once more he gave it, and it was as though ice crystals formed in the blood of those who heard it and the hair raised clear off the head. And now was the time to cinch it.

“Panther,” howled Hayden Flood. “Run, run.”

“Panther,” cried Stanely Ridgepole. “Run for your lives.”

And the four young boys, and the two who were a little older, tore out of the Panther Patrol cabin into the mountaintop darkness.

Atorrante stretched and rose, grumbling and cranky, in White Mule Draw. As the scream came again he bounded like a ghost to the mountaintop. He came almost on top of one boy who stumbled, fell, crawled, clawed, and ran stumbling. “Panther, panther!” cried Carl Cornhouse.

Then Hayden and Stanely were laughing. “Here is your panther,” Hayden said. “Now you all belong to the Panther Patrol. Carl didn't come with us. But he came up the other side of the mountain later and lit the fire at Charley Coldstream's hut so you would think the dead Indian had come back to warn you. So Carl is your panther.”

“Panther,” sobbed Carl. “Panther!”

“It's over with now,” said Hayden. “Don't act it so much. I've already told them. But you really can give that panther scream.”

Then it came again. It wasn't as loud or fancy as the panther scream of Carl Cornhouse. It hadn't that sobbing effect and that strangle in it. But it had something else. It was solider. There was hair on this panther and you could smell him.

Atorrante came with a sort of grumbling rush, and the seven boys fell flat with terror. And the big puma cleared them all with one leap and went over the side and down the mountain in the dark. Atorrante would find a more peaceful mountain elsewhere.

And one thing is pretty sure: on the eyes of seven boys there would be imprinted forever that Black Panther as he began his leap against the bonfire by the dead Indians hut.

The Panther Patrol still exists. And a great many boys have been initiated into it and grown out of it since that time. And there have been other experts of the panther scream, and they tell the story better than they used to. There is more of it to tell. And if all the boys who have been scared on that mountain were put in one line they would reach all the way to Elk City. But since that time it has been nothing but initiations.

But this year could be different. For it has been seven years again since Carl Cornhouse gave the panther scream, and was answered by Atorrante on top of Rain Mountain.

And the Black Panther commonly returns every seven years.

Communion of Saints

“It is simply a horrible arrangement, Felicity, and I am the leader. The very name, St. Anselm's Study Club! Why couldn't it be Aquinas or Dominic or Francis de Sales, one of those. Who ever heard of Saint Anselm?”

“Mentally he may have been the sharpest of the lot, Celestine.”

“But it's the people in it that they've given me to work with. We have nothing in common at all. And the subject for the first week is The Communion of Saints. Why couldn't it have been Baptism or something easy like that?”

“If you are all of the Communion of Saints, then you have everything in common. You are all of one body.”

“But old Timothy Tompkinson is in the group. He is a hideous old drunkard, and he is filthy. I'm sure he never changes his linen.”

“Why Celestine! Timothy isn't a hideous old drunkard at all. He's a splendid old drunkard. And as to his underwear (or as you say linens) I heard him swear once that they were always clean the first time he put them on. That's as far as anyone can be expected to go. Of course he does wear them overlong.”

“You are impossible, Felicity. Will you come and help me with the first meeting?”

“I will come, and I intend to enjoy it. But I will not help you one bit. I will wear asbestos gloves, and heap hot coals on your head. A hatful of coals does wonders for some people.”

“It isn't that I'm a snob, Felicity. But one shouldn't be forced to invite impossible people to one's home. I don't know what is the matter with the Monsignor.”

“You are the most insufferable snob in the world, Celestine Carmody, and I do violence to my nature even to talk to you. But it is only by laying violent hands on ourselves that we become anything at all.”

“There are others almost as bad in the group. And there are some that I don't even know. But Timothy Tompkinson is the worst. Do you know what he said the day he buried his wife?”

“ ‘Had to. Dead you know.’ Or was it Adam who said that?”

“I don't know, Felicity. It may have been Adam. But what Timothy said was ‘I lay you five to three she'll be back in a week. She'll find out she had it pretty good here when she gets to where she's going.’ Wasn't that a blasphemous thing to say?”

“Not so very. Matilda, I'm sure, took it in the right spirit, after she was a spirit. And besides, she'd probably heard it before. Timmy is one of those people who never say a thing for the first time. They have always said it before.”

“Well, it's tonight, and at my house, and at eight. And you be there before that. It will be an ordeal, and I will need all the strength I can muster.”

Timothy Tompkinson sat with Nokomis in the Plugged Nickel Bar. This is exactly one block west of the Silver Dollar Bar which bears a large sign: The Most Famous Bar In The World. But in that block there is a world of difference, and the Plugged Nickel bears quite a small sign in subscript: Most Infamous Bar In The World. The first sign may or may not be the truth, but the second sign is a flat lie. The Plugged Nickel is a quiet place, not particularly infamous, not generally known at all. There are at least half of you who wouldn't even have known where to find it without the foregoing instructions.

“Did you ever question, Nokomis, what the third finger of the right hand must wonder when it looks down and sees on the opposite foot a misshapen second toe by the name of Mrs. Celestine Carmody?”

“I never gave it a thought, Timmy. And I will not even show enough interest to ask What in the Name of Suffering Humanity you are talking about.”

“I am talking of our subject for the coming evening. The Communion of Saints, the Body, the Incorporation, the Communion of the Members. As it is given in Corinthians: ‘Now there are many members, yet one body.’ ”

“Corinthians is on my list of future encounters. A verse of Chesterton's draws me to it:

‘There's a great text in Corinthians

Hinting that our Faith entails

Something else, that never faileth,

Yet in you, perhaps, it fails.’

“Yes. That was bitter. He wrote it to Browning. What is not so well-known is that Browning penned an answer from beyond the grave:

‘Be the brave ironic mourner,

Give the dusty dead a nudge.

Yet perhaps on some dark corner,

You and I may tangle, Pudge.’

“How did you come by a verse from the Other Side, Tim?”

“I had it from Ambrose Woznick, you remember, the barroom scholar. He used to disappear for weeks at a time, and when he returned he would look as though he had been dragged through a mill race. ‘Been to Hell and back’ he'd say to all questions. This was taken by most of you as a jest. But it was literally true. I never did find out what business he was in. But he had to make the trip there quarterly. And he always said that Browning was terrible in rebuttal.”

“How does the misshapen second toe (it was the second, was it not?) appear in the form of Mrs. Celestine Carmody?”

“I meet with the other members of the Body Incorporate at her home this evening. She has wealth and station to lend. Others who will come have youth and charm and beauty and kindness and curiosity. I have only wisdom. It is my only gift. But all the members of the body are gifted, though some in such a subtle manner that we will not understand their role till the last day.”

“It looks as though whoever selected the group would have chosen people with something in common.”

“There is a holy perversity in the choices. It is good for old third-finger-of-the-right-hand-Timothy to look out and say of the misshapen toe ‘Why it's herself, Celestine! Who would have thought we were of the same body!’ ”

“I'd rather go to Hell for an hour and a half than to her house,” said Perpetua Phillips. “She is a ghoul. She will let nothing stay buried. You didn't know, Michael, that I had a child twelve years ago. You didn't know of a dozen things that I once did. But you will know of them. In some manner she will see that you all know of them. I really feel that she believes that she has a mission to enlighten the world, to publish, to make manifest. After her there will be no dark corners left in the world. There will be some dirty corners, but there will not be any dark corners.”

“Mrs. Carmody at least is said to be generous.”

“So it would be ungenerous of me to say that she is not. Her right hand proclaims not only what her left hand has done, but also what it contemplates doing, and what it says it will do and never will. I seem a little short of human charity today myself, Michael. I am sorry that we are to be in the same group. I have been trying to break this off peacefully. I am far too old for you, and had almost convinced you of the fact. Your reputation has already suffered on account of me, and I suspect that your studies have also felt its effect.”

“Perpetua Pet, why are you solicitous? These are the things that the heathens worry about.”

“To be courted by a boy ten years my junior is enough to make me solicitous. And everyone will believe that it is all for the wrong reasons. What do your college friends think of me?”

“They say that you remind them of an old silent movie vamp.”

“How could they know? They were none of them even born yet.”

“And they say you seem nice, but a little racy.”

“I'm not sure they are right on either count.”

“And Virginia Sue says she doesn't know how you do it. She knows she has more money to do it with than you have. And besides she's — well she's younger. But they all have great admiration for you.”

“The admiration of the young! I should live so long.”

“Honestly, Bess, old red-trim must have been crocked. All the other study clubs make sense. The Thomas More one is all for lawyers. And some are for housewives, and some are for working men, and some for couples, and some for young people, and some for business girls. But he must have gathered up all the antagonisms he had left over and tried to get rid of them all at once. We're the only two couples in it, and my husband and yours should never be in the same group. George thinks your Freddy is a pinko, and I think so too. And Freddy says that George is a Fascist, which shows the kind of irresponsible charges that Freddy is likely to make. To him anyone who saw through the Roosevelts is a Fascist. And the head of the group is old Typhoid Mary herself, Celestine Carmody. I'm the caller. And it's to be at eight tonight at Celestine's. And best of all, or worst, old Timothy Tompkinson is in it, and he says he's going to be there too. The way she loathes him you could drive nails in it. And Petty Phillips is in it. You remember, Celestine is the one who really dug out what happened to Petty that time. And she published it pretty widely. And Petty's boyfriend who's young enough to be her son is in it, and a bunch of his college friends. But old Tim is enough to do the trick. By eight o'clock any evening he's in rare shape. And if our respective husbands don't tangle, then I'm wrong.”

“And if their respective wives don't tangle, Patrish, then I am wrong also. You and I have had quite some spats in the past, and I just believe I feel another one coming on.”

“Well thank you for warning me. How oblique of you. Yes, that is ice forming on your telephone.”

St. Anselm's Study Group had twelve members. Mrs. Celestine Carmody, a widow of irresponsible tongue and terrifying vengeance. Perpetua Phillips, a lady lawyer of an episodic past and a controversial present, who mixed steeliness with charity in her handling of young people in jams, and who took a great interest (perhaps too great an interest) in the problems of those young people. Timothy Tompkinson, a talkative and learned lush, who was as innocent of guile as he was of common cleanliness. Catherine Calgary, a breezy animadvert and quack doctor, a lady osteopath who was convinced of vegetarianism, judoism, and weight-lifting as the keys to the scriptures and to life. The four collegians: Michael McCloy, a studying man of some wit and more humor who amused and amazed with his attachment (always real, but sometimes light and sometimes serious) for Perpetua Phillips; Isidore O'Donnell, who said he was the only true Thomist in a world of Augustines; Sidonius Clapsaddle, who said he was the only true Augustine in a world of Thomists (both of these young men were literate and would have been members of the scribe class if that class had survived till modern times); Virginia Sue Simon, a college girl who made all of that occupation seem worthwhile. And the four married people: Freddy Tierney, the pinko; Elizabeth, his tart-tongued wife; George Wynne, the Fascist; and Patricia his mate, who had a mouth full of honey, and yet her tongue had little barbs on it that could remove the flesh without seeming to.

If that isn't twelve, then someone has been forgotten. But no matter, they will all turn up. They all said they would be there tonight.

And the thirteenth was Felicity Flannagan who didn't belong to St. Anselm's Study Group at all. Felicity belonged to the St. Philip Neri group which met on Tuesday nights. But she was here tonight at the behest of Celestine Carmody. Felicity was perhaps the only person in the world who cared for Celestine; cared for her, that is, beyond the compulsions of the Christian Faith. For Felicity is one of the few really good people running loose in the world.

“There are several ways we can handle this,” said Celestine to the group, “none of them very good. One is simply to go to Monsignor Growley and tell him that the arrangements are simply impossible. But Felicity here says that, since the first subject of our course is the Communion of Saints, we would have failed in this first lesson if we were unable to associate at all. So the second, and probably worst, way to handle this is simply to try to make the best of a trying situation. You realize, Timothy Tompkinson, why we are forced to have the windows open on this quite chilly night?”

“Don't do it on my account, Celestine. I was never a fresh air man.”

“And Freddy Tierney and George Wynne, you understand why you are seated at opposite ends of the room. And I charge your wives to be responsible for keeping the peace. And Perpetua, if nobody refers to certain things in the past, why then nobody refers to them, and that is better for all. What is done is done, though their results linger on. Now then, we will begin.

“In other years at other study clubs we were given careful texts to follow. But this year the instructions are quite sketchy. We are simply to set up the subject and discuss it. And if any difficulty develops, then someone will be appointed to research it. Our subject is the Communion of Saints. I believe that in some way this refers to the natural neighborliness of all good people. And the parable of neighborliness is that of the Good Samaritan. Has anyone a comment on the Good Samaritan?”

“I always say that the only good Samaritan is a dead Samaritan,” contributed Isidore O'Donnell.

“Yeah, all those little countries,” commented Sidonius Clapsaddle, “they take our money and then laugh at us. We ought to cut them off today and begin to balance the budget.”

“Are you sure you know what you're talking about?” queried Celestine. “I had no idea that the Samaritans were in contemporary evidence.”

“Do grow up, Celestine,” said Felicity. “That passes for humor with college boys.”

“Really? Well, we have no time for that. Now I wish some one person would take the floor and give us a view of just what is meant by the Communion of Saints. And we can go on from there.”

“I will begin,” said Perpetua, “and in the words of Paul:

‘The head cannot say to the feet: I have no need of you. Nor the eyes to the hands. But rather those that seem the most feeble members of the body are the most necessary

For as the body is one and has many members — so also is it with Christ

For in one Spirit we were all baptized, into one body — whether Jew or Gentile

For the Body is not one member but many.

If the foot says: Because I am not a hand, I am not of the body, is it not therefore of the body? And if the ear says: Because I am not an eye, is it not therefore of the body? For God has so tempered the body together in due portion as to give more abundant honor where it is lacking, and that there may be no dissension in the Body, but that the members may have care for one another.

And if one member suffer anything, all the members suffer with it, and if one member glories, all the members rejoice with it.’

And Paul shortly after made a rather startling remark about ourselves as part of the mystical body. But, as I don't exactly remember it, I will have to look it up and give it to you some other time. And whoever wants it can take it from there.”

“I will also speak of the Body and of the juice of the Body,” said Timothy Tompkinson. “In the words of one of the ancient prophets:

Bootless for such as these the mighty task — 

Of bottling God the Father in a Flask — 

“Needless to say I am shocked and dismayed to find that at a symposium called to discuss the Communion of Saints, the Mystical Body, it should prove a dry discussion, with no provision that the juice of the body be given to the members. Should the thirsty members of the body forgive the reluctant member who denies? Now that, good people, is a highly moral question.”

“Oh Timmy, you don't need a drink just now,” said Felicity. “Be good for a little while. I'll buy you one after the meeting is over.”

“I will agree that we are all, or should be, members of one body,” said George Wynne. “But will someone please tell me why there should be so many sixth toes and vermiform appendices among us? It seems to me that there are a lot of useless and uncalled-for parts to this little body, and I am not excepting present company.”

“I am myself an obstreperous little gland,” said Catherine Calgary. “And my job in the body is to call the rest of the body back to purgation and sanity, the sanity of the cucumber and the onion, the holiness of the vegetable and the fruit, the exhilaration of good body exercise as based on the Catherine Calgary Dynamic System. The mass needs many leavens, and I am one of them. You all have my cards. The Catherine Calgary Dynamic System can contribute to the health and sanctity of the entire body.”

“If we have ground all our little axes, let us put them away and proceed,” said Patricia Wynne. “We may deny our own family, we may deny our father and our brother. But what we have to understand is that we are even closer than that. We are not just related persons in one family. It is more as if we were parts of one body. We are all of us one person. We are the same person. I am closer than a sister to Elizabeth with whom I am more often vexed than not. We are closer than any natural sisters. It is very nearly as though we were the same girl. Now it may be that we revolt and do not want to be the same girl. But we are wrong to revolt, for it is against Christ that we revolt. For I must acknowledge that Timothy whose odor is more pungent than the odor of sanctity, is more to me than a natural brother or husband could be. But it is hard to acknowledge it.”

“That is a rum idea,” said Tim. “It would make me more than brother or husband to the cranky Celestine and the patient Felicity. It is an astonishing idea and not completely pleasant.”

“It was said better by Sheed,” interposed Virginia Sue Simon. “ ‘Each of us is more closely related to every other member of the Church by the life of Grace than to our own mother by the life of Nature.’ And St. Cyprian also spoke on the same subject: ‘There are many rays but one sunlight; many branches, but one trunk; many streams — yet that unity is preserved in the source.’ And I might mention that all of us who are parts of the same Corporate Unity are all seeking the same things — Pax — Refrigerum — Requies. Do these things seem too passive? Yet we are told that they are active and vibrant. And when one member loses them and is so lost to the rest it is a terrible rending.”

“As the most knowledgeable person present I will now talk a little,” said Timothy Tompkinson. “First let me explain that we, though of one unity in the Church, yet are of three parts according to the Evangelists, or of four parts according to Timothy Tompkinson who in some ways goes beyond them. These are the Ecclesia Triumphans, the Ecclesia Patiens, and the Ecclesia Militans, or the Church Triumphant (those in Heaven), the Church Suffering (those still in Purgatory), and the Church Embattled (ourselves still on Earth). Or to put it plainer: the Justified, the Damned Near Justified, and the Not Yet Justified. But sadly there is another part of us which the good Evangelists forget, but which I am not able to forget. This is the Ecclesia Perdita, the Church Lost and Damned. And what good to say that it is no longer of the Church? To hack off a limb and throw it in the fire is to make it no less your limb. Nor let us ever be proud. If we have one finger in Heaven, yet we also have one toe in Hell. It is an awful thing for our brothers and our fathers to be lost forever, and for the body itself to be so torn apart.”

“You are not quite orthodox there, Timmy,” said Michael McCloy. And he went on to say why, and he might have been right, and he might have been wrong.

And after that, others present said other things. And the doctrine of the Communion became clarified among them, and charity began to grow a little.

But Timothy did not have it all. For want of a drink his own portion of the body was weary. And he became sleepy and amused at the same time.

“O, the intricate organs that they are, and all standing out so stubbornly. Not even a snake can look around and survey such a varied landscape of his own body. And O! That deformed misshapen toe of a woman, Celestine, the Celestial Shrew. More close to me through the life of Grace than my own mother through the life of Nature!

“There was a French skeptic who claimed that God had no sense of humor. But O how wrong was that man! And whenever you are discouraged, remember this: Timothy at least appreciates your wit.”

Long Teeth

“A person can grow a very long set of teeth while waiting to dine on a dead man's leavings,” Carla murmured.

“That sounds like a proverb, but not a very happy one,” Clinton told her.

“It is. It's a froggish proverb. You should be educated like me. Then you would understand logic. You would understand that there is no logic in waiting.”

“A man is entitled to live out his life, Carla. And you won't hasten a death by wishing.”

Clinton was a little timorous about launching such talk. He was glad that it was his wife Carla who had brought it up. He had often wished his Uncle Nicholas dead but he had always been afraid to voice the wish.

“A man is not necessarily entitled to live out his life,” said Carla. “Sometimes he must move along to make room for others. This old world is a little crowded. One man cannot hold one table all day and dawdle over a glass of water. It's like in a cafeteria. You have to keep them moving. It's our turn to sit at the table now.”

“He isn't old. A little over fifty.”

“He is fifty-three years, seven months, and nine days old. His calculated worth is three hundred and twenty-two thousand dollars (my own calculation but a close one); you are his heir, Clinton. He is, moreover, highly insured with such a multiplicity of policies that it is almost impossible to tabulate them, or even to be sure that I know about them all. He is unsound of heart, liver, lung, kidney, and stomach; has high blood pressure, ulcers, and Evan's Disease; in short, he is the kind of man who might live forever. I have no faith in the early death of a man with a number of deadly diseases. Death often seems not to know which to select, and retires again shaking her head.”

“You refer to death as feminine.”

“So she is in all languages that are gendered. If we had to depend on the men to get things done I doubt if anyone would ever die at all.”

“It worries me that I have a clever wife. Why did you marry me, Carla?”

“I married you because you are the heir of a rich uncle. But I did not invest in you to wait forever on my investment.”

So Clinton knew that his Uncle Nicholas had already been sentenced to death, and he was not really sorry for it. The old man had lived long enough, he told himself. Or had Carla told him so? He was no longer sure in his own mind what was his own and what Carla had sown there.

Uncle Nicholas had no kindred except the two nephews, Clinton and Walter; and Walter had been disinherited. Walter was the prodigal nephew who would rather eat the husks of freedom as offered by the unaffiliated swineherds; and he was no great respecter of Uncle Nicholas. Velma his wife was an empty doll. And Walter Jr., well who could say what he was really like? He may have been a little bit like Uncle Nicholas. He may even have been a little like Clinton.

And as for Clinton, well he was serving time. He was the right-hand man for Uncle Nicholas. He waited; and now that Carla had given him the idea, he waited with a certain impatience. Yet actually he was rather fond of Uncle Nicholas. Of himself he would never seriously have thought of doing in the old duffer.

Clinton wasn't greedy — well, no more than you or the next man. He was not callous, he was not even irresponsible. But he was married to a designing woman. Once, long ago, Uncle Nicholas had warned him of designing women. And, for that, Carla may have been leery of old Nick; yet Nicholas thought her a pleasant enough niece.

Nicholas was, in fact, a fine old bumbler, quiet and generous, and his only fault was that he was living too long. He lived in the old house on top of the hill. Clinton and Carla, by his bounty, lived in the new house halfway down the hill. And by common custom, for theirs was a very close family, each had the run of the home of the other.

Nicholas, however, was not a bumbler as to money. He had been lucky and he had been astute. He had accumulated quietly and steadily. Yet he always had led a quiet life.

Now, however, his life was filled with a series of odd events.

There was first the time he was bitten on the inside of the mouth by a millipede or some such poisonous pest. The creature was inside a sandwich that he had been eating at a small family picnic. But how the monster happened to get into the sandwich is a mystery to this day. Uncle Nicholas did not die. He did not even become very sick, and the doctor said that he had a very resilient constitution, for all of his disabilities. It is true that his tongue swelled to elaborate proportions, and that for about three weeks he spoke in a comical mush-mouthed childish way. Always afterwards Clinton remembered Uncle Nicholas as talking like that.

And there was the night when, the last thing before he went to bed, Uncle Nick got his toddy glass and then reached for the door of the small cabinet where he kept the most steadfast and gracious bottle of rye whisky in town. But for once he paused and turned on the light.

It was not a large snake. A coral snake is not commonly very large. And nine-and-a-half men out of ten would have taken it for one of the non-poisonous king snakes of the region. But, scarce forty years before, Uncle Nicholas had been a boy scout, and things once learned are learned forever.

So he killed the poisonous coral, and then held a conversation with the rye whisky as the two of them became one.

“I know I do not have an enemy; for a man such as I am does not make enemies. But it may be that one of my friends has calculated my life span on a shorter basis than is practical; that one has desired to ease and shorten my path and spare me the last long years which are commonly, though I believe erroneously, thought to be dismal ones. But there are some things in which a man should not let himself be influenced, not even by well-meaning friends.”

For now Nicholas began to develop an ingenious and amused antipathy towards dying.

Then there was the fine piano wire across his stairway that pinged when he broke it.

“Luckily I am such a heavy-footed clod-hopper. I see now that I have to do with an eager amateur, than which nothing is more dangerous.”

And then there was the sad death of the grandfather clock. It was very old when it died. This is the way that it was. Uncle Nicholas had inherited it, and it stood in his main hallway. He wound it every Friday night, the last thing before he took his toddy, and after he had checked and locked the doors and turned down the thermostat, and killed the main lights, and turned on the night light in the stairwell.

There was a little snap door that one opened and inserted there the key to wind. But there was an oddity about (or behind) the small door this night.

“Can it be,” said Uncle Nicholas, “that a kind friend has decided that the time is very late for me as well as for the clock, and would spare us both the trouble of ticking any more hours? But an old fox can smell a trap, just as a coyote can sense poisoned bait, and a canny fish a hook. I wonder what it is that they put in blasting powder nowadays? I believe that they have cheapened it. They have not, at any rate, made it odorless. Oh well, the clock has lived a long and faithful life; but, as for myself, I cannot come till I am called.”

But he sought to do it with the least possible damage to his hallway. From the backyard he brought in two sheets of galvanized iron and made a v-shaped shield. Then, with a cord to the knob of the key compartment, from a distance of ten feet, he opened the door.

It was loud; and at close range it might have been fatal. It did some, but not extensive, damage to the hallway. And it stilled the clock forever. It dissolved into ancient splinters, with its metallic entrails looped grotesquely about.

“One more old friend gone,” said Uncle Nicholas, “and there are so few left.”

There were other incidents; and some of the weirdest of them were those that never happened. The old house, high on the crest of the hill, was a target for lightning. And the high lightning rod above the main gable had drawn and grounded many a bolt. So Uncle Nicholas was not very surprised when he discovered a clever gadget attached to its ground. This was a transformer with its heavy primary coil in series with the ground, coupled with a sparking coil arranged to detonate caps for a truly amazing quantity of powder sufficient to bring down the house.

“My friends become still more solicitous,” said Uncle Nicholas. “They would ease the burden of my days, and give me release from a world which, for even the best of men, is no more than a compromise. I sympathize with their concern; but a man still has not the right to leave till he is called.”

And there was the time when he made the periodic check on his fire extinguishers, for he was a careful man and had several of them. Now, carbon-tetrachloride and kerosene both have pungent odors, but they are not the same and even a dotty old man (and he was not that yet) can tell the difference. Fortunately, for the several small fires that had broken out mysteriously, he had not had to use them.

All this time the years were going by and they were all getting a little older. It seemed in fact as though Clinton and Carla were gaining on Uncle Nicholas in age and might someday even surpass him if stern steps were not taken. But efforts were doubled and redoubled and all stops pulled out and thrown away.

There were Amenhotep I, II, III, & IV, not to mention V, VI, VII, VIII, & IX, the latter several of these having no dynastic equivalents. These, not to be mysterious, were cats. Uncle Nicholas had always kept a large black cat. And from common politeness he invariably offered the cat of his own fare several hours before partaking of it himself. And as each cat died queerly, he procured another from a cat man in a near town, all identical in appearance; and every few months he had to inter one and procure another, but the world did not know that he had more than one cat.

Carla continued to bring delicious and esoteric dishes to Uncle Nicholas, but she had long since lost faith in them.

“There are some very weird things going on at Uncle Nicholas',” remarked Clinton one day.

“Weird indeed!” clacked Carla angrily. “If you can devise them any better, then the world is still waiting for it. Is it I have failed so far? But I will not always fail.”

Clinton noticed that of recent years his wife Carla used only the angry edge of her voice. She sounded like a cracked bell. There had been a time when there were chimes in her voice. And her looks had slipped a little. A bitterness had taken part of the sheen from her, and she was no longer the fairest female you might encounter in a long journey. A five minute walk now would turn up a dozen to beat her.

Once, for a few months in the middle years, there appeared a complication. Walter, the prodigal, came home with wife and waif, and, having no home of his own, they moved into the old house with Uncle Nicholas. The waif was Walter Jr. who had now reached his mid-teens; and the three interlopers worried Carla unaccountably.

“There is the terrible possibility that Uncle Walter may change his will to include them,” she said. “We must somehow counteract their machinations.”

“I don't believe that Walter is at all interested in the inheritance,” said Clinton, “or has even thought about it.”

But that very summer a terrible accident occurred, the cause of which has never been ascertained. Uncle Nicholas had gone riding with Walter and his wife Velma and Walter Jr. in the sway-backed but very soupy old car of Walter's. Now, in an old car like that one that has the very whey driven out of it, and which was admittedly mobiling at a high rate of speed, a fault is always likely to occur. But what happened to the steering mechanism may not have been accidental, though the investigators could prove nothing definite from the wreckage.

Walter and Velma were killed, but Uncle Nicholas and Walter Jr. came out of the smash-up scarcely scratched.

“It saddens me,” said Uncle Nicholas to himself, “that my kind friends should have brought destruction to others in their attempts to shorten my long way. But it is always the case that an erroneous postulate will give an embarrassing answer.”

Clinton and Carla were now burdened with the care of Walter Jr., their growing nephew. Carla, who had in these years become nervous and taut, seemed unable to generate anything beyond a chilly sort of love for him, though Clinton came to like the boy well enough.

Then for a period of years they went through the last phase. Uncle Nick must have known that his friends would finally lay him to rest before his full days had run out. They hunted him over the squares of the old chessboard, and he knew there were only so many plays till mate.

“The boy also is a threat to us,” said Carla. “When he reaches his majority he will surely be included in the inheritance, or even earlier if Uncle Nicholas happens to think of it.”

“What is the difference? In any case we will in turn make him our heir.”

“There is all the difference. What if Junior should marry (and he does seem to have that glitter in his eye, young as he is) and Uncle Nicholas still be alive? Our own share would be diminished, and I will not be satisfied with anything less than the total; not after all the patient planning I have put into it.”

But Walter Jr. continued to grow up, and the nubile glitter in his eye had now become a gleam. And all the while Uncle Nicholas remained discouragingly alive.

“It is time to take stern measures,” said Carla. “I have been cautious and luck has been against me. I cannot afford to be cautious any longer. I will settle this one way or another this very weekend. This is the end of the road. There will be no backing down or half-way measures this time. It will be Uncle Nicholas or myself.”

But, as it happened, it was both of them.

It was an unusual accident; or, if not an accident, at least an unusual happening. What really took place, by the very nature of the thing, could have been known to only two persons, Uncle Nicholas and Carla; and they, both being dead at the finish of it, were unable (or at least unwilling) to come forward with an explanation.

Uncle Nicholas burned to death, there is no doubt of that. He was thoroughly roasted. And Carla had apparently set herself slightly on fire in the melee; and then that cool woman seemed to have lost her head. She could easily have extinguished the little fire that had caught her. She did, in fact, put it out by her rolling fall downstairs. But she broke her neck in doing it, and died unjustified and perhaps unrepentant.

Clinton had expected to be lonesome now that his wife was gone, but he was not. He entered a period of surprising contentment. He himself would never have gone so far as to murder for money. But the murderer, if there was one, had been punished; and all of the apples had fallen into Clinton's waiting basket, though another had been to the trouble of shaking the tree.

Clinton and Walter Jr. moved into the Old House, and Clinton now looked forward to many happy and full years in his new role as the older uncle. He became surpassing fond of young Walter, his pride and heir. This was a good boy of fine prospects, and when he married (as he had every indication of doing) then he would be given the New House for himself and bride, and Uncle Clinton would continue on in the Old House as proud uncle and respected head of the tribe.

So young Walter, as the heir apparent to a wealthy uncle, had his pick of them; and he married Charlotte, a designing woman.

Sometimes, if you are not paying attention, you may look away for an instant, and when you look back you will find that four or five years have gone by. If it weren't for these abridgements, life would be as long as it is wonderful.

Something like this happened now and a handful of years had passed. Clinton one day wandered down to the New House of young Walter and his wife. And, not having announced his presence, he happened to overhear them quite by accident.

“He is not really old,” said Walter, “a little over fifty. We may as well take off our coats and hats and be patient. We may have a long wait.”

“There is a point where patience ceases to be a virtue, and with me it comes very early,” Charlotte said coldly. “Fate is the pokiest ox in the world if left to itself. But, with a prod, it can be hurried.”

“I hope you are not thinking what I am afraid your thinking,” said Walter.

“All I can say is that a person can grow a very long set of teeth while waiting to dine on a dead man's leavings,” murmured Charlotte.

And Clinton was chilled and saddened and suddenly aged when he overheard it.

“I am deeply shocked to hear you talk like that,” said young Walter.

Yet, a thoughtful listener, and such was Uncle Clinton now, might have felt that Walter was not as shocked as he should have been.

Saturday You Die

Besides being born (that is an ordeal, no less an ordeal because you forget it) the worst thing to be gone through is to be a new boy in a small Southern town.

There are reasons for this. First, the boys are tougher in the South. They go barefoot in April. They play with green snakes. They keep scorpions in fruit jars. They clang cow bells, and they pop whips. In the second place, all the boys are bigger than you are. But in the North they had all been your size.

Howard Glass, Stanely Savage, Clifford Welch, and that other boy whose name had not been learned yet, they were all bigger than Henry. Howard and Stanely would both go to school next year. Not only that, but Clifford and that other boy had already been to school, and next year they would be in the second grade.

So all the boys in town were bigger than Henry. And, though he would have been the last to admit it, they were all tougher too.

“If you ever tell anybody what we tell you we'll throw you in the ditch at Carter Road and you won't be able to get out,” Howard Glass said. “And nobody will find you until the weed-cutter comes along, and then all they'll find is your bones.”

“I never tell anything,” Henry said steadfastly. “In all my life I never tell anything.”

The ditch at Carter Road was the deepest one in town and Henry didn't know whether he'd be able to climb out of it or not. In the entire North there was nothing remotely like that ditch at Carter Road.

“Or else we'll bury you in the cave,” said Howard Glass. “We have another cave under the floor of the first and we bury people there.”

They did have a cave in this new town. In the North they had only talked about caves but nobody had ever seen one.

Howard's name was Glass, probably because he wore glasses, the only one besides grown people who ever did so. He had eyes as big as a cow's. Clifford Welsh said that if Howard had his glasses off then his eyes wouldn't be any bigger than anyone else's, but there was no way to prove this. Howard always had his glasses on and they made him look like an owl. But they didn't have owls here in the South. If they had, they were a different kind, and you wouldn't know them for what they were.

And there is this about the South; it is larger than it is in the North. This is because more than half the trees had been cut down or had never been there; the grass was heavy green; and there was no snow left on the north side of the houses, and perhaps there had never been. The water came from crank-handle cisterns instead of pump-handle pumps; and more of the town people kept cows. The squirrels were grey instead of red. The trees were different. And they had new kinds of birds, like scissortails, that nobody had ever seen before. It was less cloudy, and the days were longer. You could see a great deal farther as both the earth and the sky were everywhere of more extent. Other people have noticed other differences between the North and the South, but it was Henry who discovered the essential difference: it is larger in the South.

“After you bury them in the cave, how long before you let them out?” Henry asked.

“How would we let them out? After you're dead there's nothing to let out.”

“Then you get to stay there all the time?”

“Sure. All the time. Except that the next Saturday we take you out again and cut you up.” Howard's eyes were flecked green behind his glasses and were bigger than a cow's. “Then we cut the flesh off you and put it in jars to sell for crawfish bait. And we put your bones in a box and bury them again.”

“But the first time you're buried, it's only for a week?”

“Yes, a week.”

“That isn't so bad to be buried for a week if you know that you're going to get out again.”

The hill at the edge of town was named Doolen's Mountain. It was closer to Henry's house than to any of the others. There had been nothing like Doolen's Mountain in the North, and those people wouldn't have believed it if it were told to them. The cave was in the near flank of Doolen's Mountain, and Henry knew that he could get into the cave when the rest of the boys had gone home for dinner. They said it was their cave and he couldn't go in, but now he lived in the house closest to it.

But he didn't go into the cave on that first day: instead he climbed the mountain itself. It was three times as tall as a house, and it seemed to go down in five sides from the flat top of it.

Two of the fluted sides faced back into town. And down beyond the center one of the opposite sides there ran a long ragged ditch that twisted as far as the horizon through ragged pasture land. The other two country sides were green, but two different shades of green. One of them was blue-green and stretched to the limit of vision: it was winter wheat. One was bright green: a prairie-hay meadow coming to life.

There came some kind of bees or yellowjackets and chased Henry off the top of Doolen's Mountain. But he waited until he thought they would be gone, and then got a stick and went back up. He stayed there a long time. He threw rocks down the sides of the mountain. Then he happened to think: “If everybody would do that, then they'd use up the whole mountain and it'd be flat as the rest of the places and I'd have no place to climb.” He threw no more rocks down. Instead he went down and got rocks, some of them the same ones he'd thrown down and others that couldn't be identified, and carried them back to the top to repair the damage.

Clifford Welch came up to the top of the mountain and sat down two feet away from Henry. They seemed not to notice each other, and for a long while each went about his own business. But it was Clifford who spoke first which pleased Henry, for he knew that in this he was the victor.

“If any of the other boys hurt you, you tell me,” Clifford said. “I'm the biggest and I'll make them stop. When I tell anybody to do something they have to do it because they're all afraid of me.”

“What if they hurt me next week when you're in school?”

“After school you tell me about it and I'll make them quit.”

“What if they kill me?”

“Then I'll kill them.”

That seemed satisfactory, but oddly it wasn't. Often there are things left over that worry you when they should be settled.

“Howard Glass says he's going to kill me and bury me in the cave,” Henry said.

“Howard was just bragging. Last time was the first time we even let him watch. Stanely and I are the only ones who ever kill boys and bury them in the cave.”

“Howard says it will be next Saturday.”

“Yes. Next Saturday. We always do it on a Saturday.”

“Are you really going to do it to me?”

“Unless there's another new boy moves to town before then. If another new boy moves here, we kill him instead of you. We always kill the last one to come.”

“Maybe another new one will come,” Henry said. They left it at that. It wasn't completely satisfactory, but it would have to do. So much had happened since last Saturday, with almost all of two days on the train, and most of one night in the depot in Kansas City, and other things besides that. Last Saturday was a long ways away, and the next one would be a long time coming.

“If a new boy comes to town, can I help you kill him?” Henry asked.

“We'll see,” said Clifford. “Maybe we won't let you help with the first one, but there'll be others.”

From the top of Doolen's Mountain, three times as high as a house, higher than some barns, you could see everything. There was no limit to your vision except the sky itself.

“I've been in five states,” Henry said, “this one, and the one we left, and the two we came through on the way down here. And one week we went to South Dakota from Iowa when I was little. I've been in five states.”

“What are states?” Clifford asked. And the bitter disappointment cut Henry like a butcher knife.

But it was Stanely Savage who really told Henry what things were about. This was the next Monday when Clifford Welch and the other boy were in school. The other boy was named Quenton Quint. And on that day also, Howard Glass (the other one who didn't go to school yet) had to stay in his house on account of his abominable conduct — which is no part of this history, and yet in a way it is, for Howard often behaved abominably, as Henry was to learn as the days went by. But this Monday there were only Henry and Stanely.

“Under our cave is another cave,” Stanely said, “and it goes for miles. It comes out on a river or ocean, and the boats tie up there. We go there at night and trade with the pirate boats when they come up.”

“But the cave is in Doolen's Mountain,” Henry said, “and the only river that comes near Doolen's Mountain is the bayou, and it's only a ditch. How could the cave come out on a big river or ocean where boats tie up?”

But as soon as Henry had asked that, he knew that his objection was a flimsy one. In a story, a boy finds a door in a tree and goes in, and there are hundreds of houses and towns and a whole country that is different from the outside one. A lot of things are bigger on the inside than on the outside.

Naturally Stanely didn't answer Henry's objection, but he continued:

“All the pirates come here, Black Wolf and Dread Wolf and Captain Kidd and John Silver, and that other pirate who has one red eye and one black eye. He's the king of them all.”

“What's his name?” Henry asked.

“We can't tell anybody his name. He's supposed to be hanged and drowned and not running loose. The pirates bring us live monkeys and parrots and gunny sacks full of gold. They bring us pearls as big as pigeon's eggs, and slaves in chains, and long swords, and those other kind of curved swords. They bring us guns with the barrel-ends like funnels, and red pants, and green pirates' coats.”

“Where do you keep all that stuff? I never see any of it.”

“We keep it hidden. We put part of it in the cave under our first cave. We keep part of it in other places. I keep my slave-in-chains in a little room up in the attic of my house that nobody knows is there but me. At night he comes down to my room and makes gold money for me. He grinds it out with a little grinder.”

“What does he grind it out of?”

“He puts in old bolts and nuts and horseshoes and old milk-can covers.”

“And it comes out gold money?”

“Sure it does. I got a whole roomful of it.”

“Could I get a slave to make me some too?”

“No. You're too little. And besides, you'll be dead.”

“What do you trade to the pirates for all that?”

“Hickory nuts and pecans mostly. They can't get them at sea. And bird's eggs. But the thing that is worth more than anything else is eyes. That's what we kill all the boys for, to get their eyes to trade to the pirates.”

“What do they do with all the eyes?”

“Well, they nail them up on the top of the mast, or on one of those sticks that go out from the side of the mast. They tell those eyes to keep a sharp watch and give a signal if they see land or a ship or a whale.”

“Is that what will happen to my eyes?”

“Yes. They'll nail them up on the highest part of the ship for a lookout.”

“But if there's nothing left but my eyes, how will I give the signal when I see something? I won't have anything left to holler with.”

“I think they give you a little bell to ring,” Stanely said.

There was more to it than that, of course. When they kill you they do different things to different parts of you. They sell some of you to Mr. Hockmeyer to put in his sausage. You know how he jokes about grinding boys up in his machine? He isn't joking. He really does it. He doesn't use much of them in each batch though: only one boy to half-a-dozen hogs. People like the taste of the sausage but they wouldn't buy it if they knew what was in it. And some of the bones can be used. The shooter of Clifford Welch has a fork made from a boy's wishbone. But the eyes are the most valuable part.

It wasn't until Wednesday that Henry went into the cave itself. There wasn't much there: pieces of an old structo set, a hammer head without a handle, some hickory-nut shells, ashes from a fire, a jar full of poison water. Henry knew about the water: that is the way they killed you; they made you drink it and you fell down and died. It looked like other water, but it had scorpion poison in it.

The doorway to the lower cave, however, was ingeniously hidden. There are three ways to open a secret door. One is to find the edge of it and pry it up. One is to say the words that will make it open. One is to have someone show you how.

But Henry couldn't find any edge to it however far he dug. He tried different words, but they were not the right ones. So somebody would have to show him how. At least he'd get to go down to the lower cave Saturday when they killed him.

The rest of the week was filled with great expectation. Henry dreamed it out in the mornings as he sat in the cave, and in the afternoons as he sat on top of Doolen's Mountain. The appeal of a completely untrammeled existence has always been strong. It would be perfect to be no more than a pair of eyes. To be on the highest stick of a ship and to be able to see further than anybody else in the world, that would be a new sort of ultimate. From the very top you would be able to see whole islands that nobody else had seen, to see whole ships before they came into view. Being so high, you could see the tops and the backs of the clouds, and look at the inside of the cloud rooms. You could look down and see the green whales, bigger than catfish, snoozing in the weeds. And some day you would be able to see what made the first wave. The first wave pushes the next one, and that one pushes the one you see. But nobody has ever seen the first wave that starts them all.

And if you are nothing but two eyes, you can turn one of them to look at the other one. Or, with the two of them not tied together, you can be in two different places at one time, which nobody else can do. You can roll like marbles and go wherever you want to. You can hide in places and see people who can't see you. It is to be invisible. Moreover, you get to travel all over the world and work for the king of the pirates who has one red eye and one black eye. It is a unique existence, and very few boys have ever experienced it.

And so it was all through the week and into Friday dusk that Henry thought, into howling locust time, cricket time, June bug time (in the South they have June bugs in April), street-light time, star-light time. Then, in the twilight, there was a big truck in town, square as a cracker box, big as a train, and with red lights on the back and front of it. Cursing and straining men were moving crates half as big as a room, and boxes and trunks. They had opened up the old Shane house that had always been dark and locked and drawn-blinded and weed-choked. This evening it was full of light.

A little later, Mrs. Glass told Henry to come into her house and have some cake. What matter that Howard Glass acted abominably to him and twisted his arm! It was worth it for the cake. Henry went home happy afterwards, for the next day was Saturday and he would get to be killed and turned into a pair of eyes and ride on the highest part of a pirate ship and ring a bell when he saw a whale or land or a boat. He would be the lookout for the pirate king with one red eye and one black eye. He would get to see the world.

“You can give all my clothes away,” he told his mother as he came home that evening. “After tomorrow, I won't be using them anymore.” But she didn't know what he meant. Often she didn't.

If you know what is going to happen, the last night in the old life can be an exciting one. The vision of the new and enlarged life will set you to dreaming without sleeping, and morning never comes soon enough.

The sun comes up earlier in the South, and Henry was around very early that Saturday morning, banging on doors. But he could get nobody up, nobody but the new boy. All the front porch of the Shane house was still piled up with crates and chairs in spite of all that had already been taken inside.

“Where do you come from?” Henry asked the new boy.

“Kansas.”

“That isn't very far. We came through Kansas on our way down here. We came from three times that far away. What's your name?”

“Baxter.”

“I've got a better name than that. My name is Henry. We have a cave but you can't go in it until you've been here longer. We have a mountain but you can't climb it yet. And if I told you what was going to happen to me today you wouldn't believe it. I get to go away where nobody else ever went before. You're only a new boy and things like that can't happen to you.”

A new boy!

The world crashed to pieces. It clattered like tin cans on cement when it collapsed. For Baxter was a newer boy than Henry, and he would get to be killed instead of Henry. The greatest of all disasters had come as simply and quietly as that.

Baxter was a new boy moved to town. Baxter would get killed instead of Henry. And now Henry's chances were gone forever.

Henry howled and turned and ran away. Baxter's mother came out.

“What did you do to that little boy to make him cry?” she asked.

“I didn't do anything to him. I don't know why he started to cry.”

“You must have done something to make him cry. You have to be good and try to get along with the other boys. We're in a new town now.”

Henry ran in black horror — (Baxter instead of him) — out to the edge of town — (it would be Baxter's eyes and not his eyes) — past the cave with the other cave under it — (Baxter would get to see the Islands and Whales, Henry wouldn't get to see anything) — sobbing up to the top of Doolen's Mountain. He flung himself down and wept bitterly over his lost hopes.

Try To Remember

1.

It isn't that professors are absent-minded. That is a canard, a joke thought up by somebody who should have been better employed. The fact is that sometimes professors have great presence of mind; they have to have. The fact is that professors are (or should be) very busy and thoughtful men, and that they are forced in the interests of time and efficiency to relegate the unessentials to the background.

Professor — what was that blamed name again? — well anyway, he had done so, he had swept all the unessentials quite out of the way. He carried a small black book prepared by his wife (it must have been his wife) in which all the unessential details of his regime were written down for his guidance and to save him time. On the cover were the words Try To Remember and inside was information copious and handy.

He picked it up now, from the table in front of him, and opened it.

“You are Professor J. F. E. Diller,” he read. “The J is for John. There is no use in burdening your mind with the meaning of the other two initials. You are known to your students as Killer Diller for no good reason beyond euphony, and you are called by me ‘Moxie’ for my own reasons.

“You teach Middle Mayan Archeology. Please don't try to teach anything else. You don't know anything else. Your schedule is as follows: — But before you examine it, always look at your watch. It shows both the day of the week and the time of the day. It is on your left wrist. The best way I can tell you which is your left wrist is to say that it is the one that your watch is on.”

And there followed the schedule with times and classes and building and room number, and indications as to whether the class was elementary or middle or advanced, and which text was used, Boch, or Mendoza y Carriba, or Strohspalter. And below the class schedule were other varied notes.

“You like every kind of meat except liver. Don't order it. You think you like it but you don't. You are always fearfully disappointed when you try to eat it. Eat anything else; you fortunately do not have to watch your calories. You drink Cuba Libres. Never take more than four drinks at one session, they make you so nutty. There is a little drink-counter in your left-hand pants pocket that I made for you. Flip it every time that you have a drink. When you have had four, it will not flip again; so come on home. The best way I can tell you which is your left-hand pants pocket is that it is the one your drink-counter is in.”

There was much more. The professor looked at his watch, looked at his schedule, saw that he still had a little time before his final class, glanced at the final entry in the book, “I love you, Emily,” smiled, closed the small notebook, and put it in his pocket.

“Women have a satirical turn of mind,” he said to his companion.

“What? Are you sure?” the companion asked. “Blenheim denies it, and the evidence in Creager is doubtful. And Pfirschbaum in his monumental monogram ‘Satire und Geschlecht’ has gone into the problem rather more thoroughly than most, and he is not of your opinion. And we have here on our own campus a fellow, Kearney, who is widely read in the field. If you have independent new evidence, you might go to him with it. He will appreciate it.”

“No. I am sorry. I phrased myself badly. I should have said that my own wife, in a particular instance that has just come to my hand, shows flashes of satire. I realize the dangers of generalizing. As to making a statement about the mind of women generally, that is beyond my scope.”

His next class by the schedule, and the final one of the day, was an elementary one in Middle Mayan Archeology, and the text, of course, was that of Boch. But the professor seldom stayed with the text long. He would ask the place of a student, read a paragraph or two out loud, and then begin to talk. Talking was one of the things he did best. He had humor and verve, and the students always liked him. And, if a man knows his subject (Did he know his subject? What an odd question! How could he be a professor if he didn't know his subject?), if a man knows his subject thoroughly, then he can afford to handle it lightly, and to toy, to elucidate, to digress.

So the hour went easily and pleasantly. Yet an odd thought began to crawl like a bug up his back, and it unsettled him. “I have been talking total nonsense,” said the thought. “Now why would I be talking nonsense when I am competent and know my subject?”

And the thought slept, but did not die, when after class was over he went to the Scatterbrain Lounge to drink.

“Cuba Libre,” he ordered confidently.

“Are you sure?” asked the girl.

It was only a split second to flip open the small pocket notebook. He had done it many times and was adept at it.

“That is correct,” he said. “A Cuba Libre.”

But a moment later there was another fly caught in the ointment where it beat futile wings and expired. In an indefinite manner things were not right.

“I have lost my drink-counter,” said the professor, “and I never lose things, only misplace them. It is not in my left pocket, if that is the left one. And if the other one is the left pocket, why it is not in that one either? How will I know when I've had four drinks?”

“That's easy enough,” said the girl. “I'll tell you.”

“So are all unusual problems solved,” said the professor, “by unusual means and flashes of intuition.”

After the girl had told him that the drink he had just finished was his fourth, the professor, feeling woozy, had her call a taxi for him; then, looking in his notebook for his home address, he gave it to the driver and rode off feeling rosy and fine.

Then, after he had paid the driver, and with a quick glance at “I love you, Emily” on the last page of the notebook he went up to the house, went in, and kissed the beautiful Emily as hard as he knew how to. Then he put his hands on her shoulders and looked at her lovingly, and she at him.

“This is quite the best thing that has happened to me in a wonderful day,” he said. “I had almost forgotten that you were so beautiful.”

“It had nearly slipped my mind also,” said Emily. “And it is very sweet to be reminded of it.”

She was beautiful. And she had a look at once very affectionate and very, very quizzical; a woman full of humor and satire indeed.

“Pfirschbaum is wrong!” said the professor positively, “cataclysmically wrong. Could he but see that look on your face, so kind, so amused, so arch; he would realize just how wrong he is.”

“I'm sure that he would. I would rather like to see the look on my face myself. It must be a study of mixed emotions. Oh, you're doing it again, you little wolf! How sweet you are! I wonder who invented kissing in the first place?”

“It is generally attributed to the Milesians, Emily, but there has lately appeared evidence that it may be even earlier. Emily, you are wonderful, wonderful.”

“I know it. But keep telling me.”

2.

Catherine came in then. She also had a quizzical look on her face, but there was something in it that was pretty dour too. And following her, and looking quite sheepish, was that little professor, what was his name? Oh yes, Diller.

The professor gave Emily one more kiss, and then turned to greet them. And suddenly a strange disquietude caught him in a grip of ice. “If he is Professor Diller, then who in multicolor blazes am I?”

Professors aren't really absent-minded. It is just that they learn to relegate details to the background. But sometimes they don't stay in the background, and now this detail was much to the fore. But the professor could think like a flash when necessary, and in no time at all he remembered not only who he was, but just what kind of trouble he was in.

But it didn't help matters when, as he was leaving with Catherine, Emily called after him “It was fun, Tommy. Let's do it again sometime.”

Nor was Catherine inclined to be quiet when he sat at home next door with her and read in his own notebook (which he now had back from Professor Diller, after that awful mix-up when the identical-appearing reminder books of the two men had apparently been lying together on the table in the teachers' lounge, and each man had mistakenly picked up the other's), — when he read in his own notebook:

“You are Professor T. K. C. Cromwell. The T is for Thomas. You teach Provençal and Early French Literature and teach it badly, but we must eat. This is your schedule. Never deviate from it or you will be lost — ”

Now, if he had had his own notebook all the time, he would never have made such a series of silly mistakes. Most of the trouble that comes to people in this world comes from reading the wrong books.

“To think,” said Catherine, “that a grown man could make a mistake like that, if it was a mistake. There is a point beyond which absent-mindedness is no longer a joke. How did you get by with your classes?”

“I don't know. I suspected once that I was talking total nonsense.”

“And that little Killer Diller is as bad as you are. I was never so surprised in my life as when he waltzed in here and slapped me on… why I don't know how you men can get so confused.”

“But we've explained how the notebooks must have got mixed up.”

“I understand how the notebooks were mixed. I do not understand how you are so mixed. Emily is vastly amused over this. I am not so amused.”

It isn't that professors are absent-minded. Anybody should have had sense enough not to have made the notebooks that much alike.

Thousand Dollar Melon

“Is a watermelon a fruit or a vegetable?” one of the men asked. He didn't need to ask that. He could have gone for years without asking it. And yet questions like that do get asked.

“It is a berry,” said Willy McGilley. And that should have settled it right there. It was clear that it was, and there was no need to add anything to it. But Willy added.

“It is a single giant annual trailing-vine berry. It is the largest berry in the world. I mean, however, not that the American cultivated edible watermelon, the Citrullus vulgaris, is the largest berry in the world; but that its wild African grandfather, the Citrullus giganteus is the largest. The explanation of this involves a story, but I would not leave you unexplained.”

So he told about the thousand dollar melon.

The perfect con, like the perfect crime, (this is Willy talking), is hard to come by. There are those who say that a con game is itself a crime, and that it will fail for the same reasons. I have never been involved in a near-perfect crime; but I have been involved in several hundred near-perfect con games. That of the giant melon was one of them.

This was near Seligman, near Golden, near Blue Eyes, near Berryville. As to what region or state it was in, that is a secret I will carry till I lay down all my secrets. There is still some gold of my sort to be mined in those hills.

This was about forty years ago, no more than ten or twelve years after I began to follow the county fairs, and I was not yet motorized. I made about thirty fairs a year, giving no more than half a week to any except the biggest of them. I covered these with horse and wagon through late summer, fall, and early winter. In the later dead of winter I lived in the far southland as a gentleman should; and when spring touched the northland again I was with the first of the carnivals. For reasons of my own I seldom made the same fair or town twice. Instead, each year was an entirely new travel experience, and I absorbed much of the world in those years.

But I did make the Clay County Fair twice, and the reason for it was Clarissa Clay, the granddaughter of Clayton C. Clay for whom the county was named, and who also (and this was more important) had been the founder of the Gigantic Watermelon Foundation and Perpetual Endowment which awards every year in open contest a prize of one thousand dollars to the grower of the largest (by weight) edible watermelon.

When first I met Clarissa it was a revelation. I had taken over the managership, ticket-selling, and barker duties for the Turkish Harem, nine kohl-eyed young ladies dressed only in sheer pink robes of a mesh so wide that a horse and wagon could be driven through the interstices (it would not be permitted today), girls named, if memory of nearly half-a-century is correct, Sumru, Abu, Zela, Hotsi, Kuki, Mala, Lonu, Guri, and Frito, all good Turkish names as far as I know, though privately they also bore such names as Sally Schnitzel, Annalee Lumpe, Audrey Oldfield, and Hermione Huckle. These nine girls besides being all of them young, were also slight, sylph-like it is often called. The largest of them would hardly go forty inches in bosom or beam. This fashion of slightness still endures, though it has little to recommend it, and it may be because of this prevailing fashion that all nine of the young ladies later became well known in films, stage, or international salon. Everyone to his taste.

You can now understand with what joy I welcomed Miss Clarissa Clay. She was gorgeous. She would have made three of any of them. She was a sunny blonde with a smile as big as all summertime. She smelled like a field of sweet clover; and in area and scope the resemblance also was striking.

“My dear child,” I said, “you may go in for free. The show is about to begin.”

“Oh no. I always pay for three seats. It's no more than fair.”

Well, I had become completely entranced with her and we soon talked our way from introductories to ultimates. In spite of the chirpings and barbed sallies of the nine harem girls I was completely in love with Clarissa. And, as at the most we could remain in Clay County for but a week, I almost immediately asked her to marry me.

“There is one difficulty, Willy dear. I am in charge of the Giant Watermelon Foundation and Perpetual Endowment Fund. Or it is in charge of me. My grandfather established it for perpetuity, but he left very little to perpetuate it with. Oh I am not poor, but the farm is entailed to support the Endowment. And a thousand dollars a year comes heavy. The only thing I see is for me to marry the man who grows the biggest watermelons every year, and keep the money in the family.”

“And that is?”

“Walter Wildpepper. For the last five years he has won. Yes, I will have to marry Walter, Willy.”

“Wait one year, Clarissa. By fair time next year I will be in with the biggest melon. Trust me. Wait one year.”

“One year then, Willy. I will wait, but I believe it hopeless. Walter Wildpepper has always been the leading watermelon man. He understands them and they respond to him. It is as though he had watermelon juice for blood.”

“And who is to say that I have not watermelon juice in my own veins?”

So I had a year to do it, but a vine takes a while in the growing. I had to think of something. When the County Fair circuit was over my harem girls scattered to the cities for burlesque and variety and supper club engagements, and we planned to assemble again in the springtime, particularly Frito. Then I settled down to winter in the southland and to study watermelon culture.

I found the answer at once in a standard reference work. The American watermelon, brought from Africa four hundred years ago was by no means a random plant. It had been carefully cultivated and selected for a thousand years before that; selected for sweetness, flavor, shipping and keeping qualities, and convenient size. It was a tame cultivated plant even in its homeland.

But it had a wild grandfather still living, a giant but less flavorsome melon.

I put the machinery in motion. I made inquiries of those coming and going and shipping and receiving and expressing; and within six weeks I had a sack full of seeds from that wild giant African watermelon.

So I bided my time, wrote love letters to Clarissa, and waited for the more northerly spring to come.

Then on the first day of March I was back in Clay County where I visited my wonderful girl, made several plantings of the watermelon seeds, and left with a heart full of hope.

I worked the carnivals that summer with various games of chance. Three of the sylph-like harem girls were with me, and it amused me yet to think that all three of them would hardly add up to my Clarissa. Yet they were pleasant enough friends, in particular Frito, in spite of their scrawny appearance. One was now a fortune teller, one was an acrobat, and one was a little Egypt shimmy dancer.

And all that spring and summer I was nourished by the sunny letters of Clarissa, and the chronicle of the watermelons.

‘The two largest are now over two hundred pounds,’ she wrote me in early July, ‘and the other two are not far behind. Walter Wildpepper has also outdone himself this year and has the finest he has ever produced. Yet your largest has it at least fifty pounds over the best of his. I see no reason why the advantage should not continue. I massage the vines tenderly every morning and evening, and water and mulch and fertilize them. Walter suspects! He is insanely jealous. I really fear for the safety of your melons should he discover their location.’

Well, it was an interesting and fruitful summer, though I did serve thirty days in jail in an out-of-the-way community. I believe that there is more intolerance in a small town for a man who lives by his wits as I do than anywhere else. Every defeat in the game of wits they take as an affront, and moreover they always want their money back.

Then at last the time of fruition was at hand, and it was County Fair Week in Clay County. Clarissa and I planned to be married right after my being awarded the $1000.00 watermelon prize. You never saw two people so much in love. It was intended that she join our little troupe as the Fat Lady, and continue on the circuit with us as a honeymoon. How they would have loved her at all the other fairs! There was so much of her to love, and all of it excellent.

The afternoon before the contest we slipped away and visited the main plot of our melons. All of them seemed well over four hundred pounds, true giants. I cut a narrow plug from the smallest of them and tasted it.

“Does not the charter of the Foundation and Perpetual Endowment say that the prize is for edible watermelons?” I asked Clarissa.

“Yes, for edible.”

“Oh well, that can be fixed.”

I got my old medicine satchel out. I set up the veterinarian's needle that I have always found so useful in so many things, and I began to shoot stuff through the thick skins of my great melons. I have some of the most amazing concoctions in the world, all invented and manufactured by myself. I reasoned that Dr. McGilley's Beef Tenderizer could not but be useful. And I had a little-known acid with the peculiar properties of attacking wood pulp, which was what the insides of the giant melons tasted like. Then I shot in a quantity of scarlet dye, and about thirty pounds of saturated solution of sugar into each of them.

“That should make them highly edible after it has had a chance to work,” I said. “Besides edible is a term that is loosely used.”

My hopes were quite bright. We put on the evening show, and then shuttered the wagons for the night. The next day would be the brightest one in my life. I would collect the prize as a sort of dowry, and thereafter we would be able to keep it in the family. I would marry the wonderful Clarissa Clay and take her on tour as the Fat Lady. I ask all of you. Do any of your lives now hold such hope as mine held then?

I slept well that night except for disturbances from without. It was either very heavy thunder, earthquake shock, or explosions of some sort. For four distinct shocks of some power were felt throughout Clay County.

And in the morning we went with horse and wagon to pick up the biggest of the melons and take it to the judging.

Clarissa saw the damage first and set up a wail: “Willy, they are all smashed. It was that horrible Walter Wildpepper who did it in his jealousy. Oh, there is hardly rind left upon rind. How terrible. Now I will have to marry Walter, the little beast.”

They were the four most totally destroyed watermelons you ever saw. Walter Wildpepper apparently had me bested. What a fiend he was! My world seemed to collapse about me.

2.

But it only seemed that it collapsed. You will never see me running around with only one string on my bow, with only one hook on my line, with only one pair of socks on my feet. I am always ready for disaster no matter how untoward.

I got in the wagon with my weeping Clarissa and we drove a quarter-mile to the other melon which nobody in the world but myself had known. It was even larger than the first four, quite the largest melon in the land.

“We are saved,” said Clarissa. “How is it possible for one man to be so smart?”

“I have wondered about that also,” I said, and to tell the truth I have never ceased to wonder about it.

“But I will have to work fast,” I said. “This one also has to be made edible and time is short.” I got out the old horse needle again and began to shoot the melon full of goop, double, triple the doses that I had given the others: the highly secret Beef Tenderizer which in the future I could also advertise as Watermelon Tenderizer, the Super Secret acid which dissolved wood pulp and which should also break down the tough fibers of the melon, the scarlet coloring, the sugar, and other things that I thought of as I went along.

“But how will I get it in the wagon?” I asked. “I have forgotten to bring the A frame and the block and tackle.”

But I had not forgotten to bring Clarissa, and she lifted the giant melon quite easily, and placed it in the bed of the wagon; and I noticed with a glow how much the two of them were alike.

It was two hours later. The trumpets sounded. The judging would be a formality only. The presentation was ready to take place. Frito, she who also went by the name of Hermione Huckle, congratulated me warmly.

“I am so happy for you,” she said, “if this is what you want (ugh), then I am glad you will have it. I had rather thought you would get over this watermelon-girl jazz, but I guess you're hopeless. But if ever you need a friend — ”

And I was also congratulated by Walter Wildpepper. “The best man and the best melon have won. I was the champion for a long time; but me and mine have met our masters.”

“You are a scoundrel, Walter,” I said. “You destroyed the four melons you found.”

“I did no such thing. I am the most honorable competitor in the world. They were destroyed by a mysterious effect.”

“You were the mysterious effect.”

“No, I was not. There was an earth-shaking rumble last night, and then they were destroyed. And I feel it again right now!”

So did I. The earth shook. This was followed by a moment of spooky silence. And then the whole world blew up.

The first reports said that nineteen people had been killed. This was later scaled down to zero. But the damage had been extensive. One of the trumpet players had swallowed his trumpet. And others were injured and discomfited in other weird fashions. But nobody was killed.

The giant watermelon had exploded like a mine or a bomb. I believe that it was the beef tenderizer that had caused all the melons to explode. I had had patients and customers explode for many years, but had never found the cause of it, as I usually sell a mark my whole line of pharmaceuticals and not one item only. I had suspected the Old Homestead Stomach Sweetener. I had suspected the Kill Number Nine. I had even suspected the New World Bone Builder and Thorax Encourager, and the Old Dominion Blood Refresher. But I had never suspected the Beef Tenderizer (this is taken internally; it tenderizes the beef after it hits the stomach when it is so important that it be so); I will use it sparingly hereafter.

The outcome?

Clarissa married Walter Wildpepper after my melon had been disqualified. The carnival was destroyed by the explosion and most of the Clay County Fair. And it may have been the lowest moment of my life as, jolting down the road to oblivion in a damaged wagon, I lay across the lap of Frito while she extracted watermelon seeds from my shattered body with tweezers.

But life must go on. I rose to be one of the most competent con-men in the business, and Frito has proved a likeable life-mate, in spite of being a scrawny crow who will not go forty inches around bosom or beam.

This was another day.

“Is a shrimp a fish or a worm?” one of the men asked. He didn't need to ask that. He could have gone years without asking that.

“It is an exoskeletal crustacean,” said Willy McGilley. And that should have settled it right there. There was no need to add anything to it.

But Willy added — 

Snake Cabin

It was a sound that, once heard, should never be forgotten; he had been told that long ago. Yet he could not at once remember what it was. Then it came back to him too late.

It was the sound of death at three feet.

He had gone up to the cabin just before dark the last day of February. There was only flecks of snow left in pockets, and the ground had become muddy as the ice crystals failed in it. A couple of good days would spook the winter and send it scuttling. It wasn't real winter country.

McAlester had gone on a manhunt a week before. He had come down from T Town after Blocker who worked by hunches, and who could only be taken by hunch; who was said to come from a town that seemed not to exist, that the Post Office and the Highway Department had never heard of; and those who had heard of it hadn't a very clear idea of where it was.

Then Little Willy Wotby, a trustee, told him about it.

“There really is such a town, Johnny.”

“Hoochy Town, Little Willy? Where is it?

“Down in the hills. But they spell it funny. That's why you can't find it. They spell it damned funny, but everyone there calls it Hoochy Town.”

Johnny McAlester brought out a road map. They studied it a long time.

“One time I was down there it seemed farther south than the other time. But it's damned-sight in those hills. It's the meanest town in the state, but one, and they don't love the law. And they don't spell it like it sounds.”

Then they found it. It was Hochaton.

Johnny McAlester drove there in three hours.

McAlester picked up a spoor there, but one that was nine years old. Blocker hadn't been back for that long. It might have seemed easier to follow a spoor only three days old from the point where Blocker had killed a man. But that was being done, by others, and in number. And they weren't having any luck with it. And an old varmint will go back to an old hole when in trouble, and McAlester was looking for that hole.

He followed a possible trail to three other little towns, and at the third one he seemed to catch a whiff. Little Willy had said that Hoochy Town was the meanest town in the state but one. This must have been the meanest.

McAlester couldn't stop at the hotel. There wasn't any hotel. He couldn't hang around the store to pick up information. The store was locked.

“You want to buy something, mister? He lives about a mile down that road. But he won't open it unless you really want to buy something. And he doesn't like to open it for strangers. What do you want to buy?”

“Gas and groceries.”

“He's out of gas. Runs out every week. Gas truck only comes once a week. Doesn't have much groceries either. Doubt if he'd bother to open up for a stranger.”

“Doesn't he open the store every day?”

“No. A man can't be to the bother of opening his store just on the chance that someone will come in. He opens it on Saturdays, and he opens it when someone really wants to buy something.”

“Any other store here?”

“No.” There weren't a dozen buildings in town. None of the rest looked like a store.

“Is there a beer to be had in town?” McAlester asked.

“I got chock beer. Quarter a quart. You a Law?”

“Not to report chock beer at a quarter a quart. Not if it's good.”

“It's good.”

McAlester went with the man who was Joe Lorimer. They drank the chock beer in his kitchen. Joe was chewing Cherokee strip.

“I know who you are now,” said Joe. “You're the man who bought the George place at tax sale.”

“You sure of that?”

“Pretty sure. But it won't do you any good.”

“Why not?”

“They won't let you on the place. Last man owned it seven years. Never got to set foot on the place. Man before him, same way. You fellows think you find a tax-sale bargain where you get an eighty acre farm for two hundred dollars. You just waste your money. Isn't anyone in this country going to let an owner on a place. Mister, this is hog-law, open-range, fence-cutting, barn-burning country. Always has been. People who tax-buy farms for a hundred or so dollars and try to take claim of them get hurt. Run an ad in one of those towns with a paper. Get your money out of it and maybe a little more.”

“Sacrifice price. Owner must leave country for reasons of health.”

“Now you got the idea, mister.”

“Where is the place.”

“Up that draw. Some good acres, but most of it rough. But I wouldn't try to go on it. It's a nervous man lives on it and calls it home.”

Johnny McAlester had never heard of the George place. But it served his purpose better to be known as a tax-sale buyer than as a Law. He bought eight quarts of chock beer when he left and put them in his car. He thought they might be used for currency for what he wanted to buy.

The next day and not more than eight miles from there McAlester knew that he was on the trail. A hunter cannot say how he knows when a trail quickens, but he knows it. McAlester had been a small town deputy before he had been a city officer; and he had hunted many sorts of game: feathered, finned, bush-tailed, ring-tailed, clawed, horned, hoofed, four-legged, two-legged. He could tell now that he was on the scent of the prey, and that the prey knew it.

And there comes the time when the hunter must give wind to the game, and here use the Name itself. When he got blank looks at the name of Blocker he knew which were really blank and which had something behind them.

When the Checotahs said that they had never heard of Blocker, he knew that they had.

When Little Jean Cheocotah told him privately to meet her the next day, and told him where, he knew that it would not be as simple as all that. But there is no use using yourself for trap-bait if the quarry hadn't wind of the bait.

McAlester gave Little Jean the quarts of chock beer that first day. And the next day when she met him he gave her two more. She was dressed in jeans and a red jacket, and she liked chock beer.

‘Never trust an Indian’ it has been said. But that same thing has been said of every race that ever strode the earth. Never trust anyone except your wife is better advice, and that only after she has been buried for seven years.

McAlester knew that little Indian girl would as soon betray him to Blocker as Blocker to him, and wouldn't be above rigging a double ambush just to see the color of their blood.

“He stays in Snake Cabin a couple nights a week,” Little Jean told him. Then she walked with him a mile or two and showed him where Snake Cabin was, up on the knuckles of the mountain.

McAlester had left his car that day with a cattleman and gone on foot. He returned to it now, and left it again quite late in the day, carrying water, rolled pack, rifle, and a dark lantern. He sliced along the blue mountain which was now on the shady side of the world. He would be hard to see from any point and hard to follow. And he came on the cabin from above.

“It is a trap,” he said. “Whether intended or not it is an old-fashioned box trap. But since when has the bait the right to complain about the construction of the trap?”

It was built slanted into the hillside like so many of them that take advantage of a cave or a hollow-out for part of a room. It was rough frame with old bark still on the edges of the lap boards, and was windowless. The door was simply secured from the outside with a wood flip; but there were solid iron brackets for a drop cross-bar which was not to be seen. The door opened outwards.

“If it is a trap it isn't a very substantial one,” said McAlester. “I could kick it apart.”

He went into the cabin on Winding Stair Mountain just at dusk. He drew the door tight; and with a long knife blade he fiddled the outside wood flip into place. He lit his shielded lantern that could hardly be seen from outside any chink. There was a straw-filled tick on the floor and an old blanket. There was a sort of fire box with a tin chimney through the roof. It had been recently used. There was a blackened bailed pail in which stew had been made, and a sort of tripod with a hammered iron hook.

What there was of a cave was four feet high and as deep and very narrow. But it did not come to an end. From it there was a low crawl passage into the mountain that was carelessly filled with trash.

“I could be taken from there if he is a night crawler, and if he knows the inside of the mountain, and if there are connecting passages. But I will not be taken that way.”

He dangled little toy-like bells from wires, several of them. A night crawler would announce his coming. He dangled others from the roof rafters that would signal any tampering with the cabin. And he belled the door. Then he started a small fire with the kindling providently. He built it nearly smokeless though it was now dark enough that it would not be seen against the black mountain.

There were three cans of pork and beans, there was a can of plain beans, and there was a can of chili with beans. They were old and had rusted around the labels. They could have been tampered with. He left them alone. He wouldn't be taken by poisoning. And he had eaten that afternoon.

He used half of his water and made coffee with his own coffee. He put out his dark lantern, and rigged his blanket to shield the fire. It was low, but burned hot. It would still be a freezing night, but not bitter cold.

“If he comes unknowingly he will come early, not a little after dark, unless he is helling it up somewhere. And if he comes stalking me he will come much later.”

He sat on the backless chair with his arms on the table, facing the cabin door and with his back to the fire. He had his rifle and hardware on the table in front of him. It was now darker in the cabin than outside as it was a clear night.

He put his head down in his arms and went to sleep. He had learned to sleep lightly.

It was more than an hour. It may have been two. When he raised his head it was quiet, but he knew that he had been wakened by the tinkle of one of the toy bells in the crawl passage. He slid around on the backless chair with the rifle in his hands. The fire flicked a dim glow into the passage, and he himself sat in darkness. The trash in the passage seemed undisturbed, and it did not move.

“So you lie there,” he thought. “You are a belled cat. You are stopped by one little bell. You may have it in your hand, but there are six more you do not know about. You will have to crawl down and out. You can't see or shoot till you come farther. I hope you have a cramped position.”

He drew back his sleeve to see the dial of his watch. It was not quite ten. He watched the passage very intently. He memorized every detail and darkness of the trash. Sometimes it seemed to move as the low fire did tricks on it, but it did not move. It hypnotized him to try to see what was there as the soft shapes seemed to grow and shrink. He became tired and cramped and shifted position noiselessly on the low chair. He practiced tricks of breathing to relax himself, but he could not relax.

“It is bad for me waiting,” he said to himself, “but it is as bad for you. And I believe that I am the more comfortable.”

There was something that was less than a sound. It wasn't from the passage; it was from the floor. It could have been a bug, an insect, it could have been nothing.

“It is normal for there to be very small sounds when one listens intently in the quiet. It will be below frost now. Even the boards of the cabin will sound a little as the temperature drops. Could I only have dreamed the sound of the bell?” But he knew that he had not.

Quite a long while had gone by in the waiting. At least an hour. Or had it? He looked at his watch again. Less than four minutes had gone by.

And again there was something that was less than a sound. And once again it was not in the passage but in the room with him. He put his hand on the floor in the dark, and he could feel, or thought he could feel, a vibration.

And again the soundless sound, and then it was above the threshold of hearing: quite a small sound, yet it chilled him. For he had heard it before, and it panicked him that he didn't know it. His brain had been dipped in glue, he couldn't remember what it was. ‘A sound once heard that should never be forgotten’ — old advice, and for a split second he had forgotten. He remembered too late what it was. It was the sound of death at three feet.

Too late he was on top of the table with his hand on fire from two needle stings. He was rattlesnake-bit, and the shrill clatter seemed the loudest thing he had ever heard.

But he didn't panic now, not unless to shake to pieces at every joint and to be soaked with sweat in one second is to panic.

He lit his lantern again, he slashed his finger with a jackknife. He put his cigarette lighter inside the bend of his elbow for the nut of a tourniquet which he quickly made from a handkerchief. He squeezed blood and serum out of the ends of his fingers. He burned them in the flame of his lantern. And he looked down at his enemy who rattled and chugged into an uneasy silence.

A piece of the most inadequate information he had ever heard came to his mind: ‘Be careful, there are always two of them.’ Two of them! As though these devils were monogamous. He knew more of rattlesnakes than that. They are the most perverted cohabitors in the world. There will be three, there will be more. He swung the lantern. It was like a roomful of snakes, and still more would come.

Several warm days had made the creatures restless in their hibernation, even in their mountain. And now they came to the heat of the cabin fire, and they came in multitudes.

At the annual spring rattlesnake roundup, not a score of miles from here, over a thousand hunters have assembled from more than thirty states. And their kills are calculated in tons. They come out of their rock mountains on the first warm days, come out angry and spoiling. Incredible numbers of the snakes will winter together in mountain holes.

Well, so he would have a cabin full of snakes. He was already sick and confused. Should he break suddenly out of the cabin door? There were four of the rattlers to hurdle from tabletop to door, but only one of them in coil. He posed for the break when another tinkle of one of the small bells in the passage unnerved him. “Even with the snakes there are those who are naturally clumsy,” he muttered, “but hardly one in a hundred disturbed the bells.”

Should he break out? There were now six of them between him and the door, two of them in coil. Well yes, he should break out, but not yet.

He would chance the snakes. He would chance getting shot down by Blocker if he were in ambush outside. But McAlester wanted to come through whole if he came through, and already he had lost much time in his confusion. His arm was dead and black. Poison or no poison, a tourniquet should be loosened briefly after thirty minutes, if the member is to be saved at all. He loosened it a little. He got some life and much pain back into the arm. Then he tightened the band again. He was sicker now, but he was mad enough to make his move.

There were three heavy footsteps on the roof. And then there was a clattering jolt that shook the whole cabin. The drop cross-bar had been dumped loudly into place from the roof of the cabin. McAlester swore mightily in his anger. But the answer from Blocker on the roof raised his hair. It could have been heard a mile. It was a scream of a curse, a Rebel Yell with a Breed war whoop, harsh with hate and defiance — and somehow of fear. McAlester raised and shot through the roof three times. Blocker crashed off the cabin and up the mountainside, still in loud harsh voice that trailed off into something between a sob and a snicker. Yet McAlester was sure that he hadn't nicked him with one of his wild shots.

“So now I am really trapped,” said McAlester, “and there is no need of playing it cozy. I cannot stand on that snake floor for the minutes it will take to kick out that barred door. This is going to be a very long night.”

He took the shield off his dark lantern and turned it to its brightest. He got loose a three-foot chain that he sometimes used in conjunction with his handcuffs. He killed the first snake sliding along the rafters. He had not counted on snakes overhead; but there were more holes in the mountain wall than the crawl passage, and they could come out anywhere. “Even the name I didn't pay any attention to. I though it was just a colorful name they had given to an abandoned cabin. I should have remembered that these people never give a name without a reason.”

Among the snakes there seemed to be three who were his declared enemies in sounding and attitude. He killed those three with rifle shot. Then he began to test with the length of the chain how high a large snake can strike. They could not strike to table height, but they could strike to nearly knee height.

He cut up his jacket into strips. It was hard to do with only a jackknife, and with one arm nearly dead. He was very feverish now. He wrapped the strips around his legs and bound them there, but he did not do it well. He managed to get his blanket from the fire with the end of his rifle barrel. This also he cut up as well as he could, and swathed his legs with the strips. He was wearing low shoes, not boots. The wrappings might or might not save him when he had to go down on the floor.

He shot three more snakes, and he killed several with the length of chain. He was dizzy even sitting down. He was dizzy lying down. He could not get to his water, and he was burning up. He lay on his back on the table and slept.

It was nightmarish, and he could see snakes even with his eyes closed. He seemed not to be in the cabin. He was on the open prairie, and they challenged him in rows to the horizon. They were personified. They were in some measure the men who had said they would get him. One was Rat-Tail Roper; but that was not so strange, he had always been something of a snake. One was Big Carl Chastagne. He was tall in coil, higher than the rest. Man or snake he had always been a tall one. And there was Cotton-Top Crosswick, still pimply-faced after he had become a snake.

McAlester opened his eyes to make the prairie snakes go away, and so he came back to the cabin. But he could not be sure that his eyes were opened. He had himself become a little like a snake, with an inner eyelid that stayed closed and would not allow him to see clearly.

A snake dropped weightlessly from the rafter onto his chest, but this did not startle him overly. He passed his hands through it and could not touch it. He knew then that it was a delirium snake. But how could he be able to tell which of the snakes were real?

He sat up irritably. He took the tourniquet off his arm. What harm was done was already done. He would at least keep his arm if he kept anything. He would not gangrene. If he died, then he would die.

He shot more snakes. Then he was out of shot. He had fired many more rounds than he remembered. It was either a quarter after twelve, or it was three o'clock in the morning. It must have been three o'clock. If it were three, then it would be only a few hours till dawn. If it were only midnight he knew that he could not live the night through. He dimly expected some healing to come to him with the daylight.

“Well, I will sleep again. And then I will wade down and fight the snakes for my water. I am a man; why should I be afraid of snakes? A deer will kill snakes I have been told, though it's true I have only been told it by liars. A boar hog will kill snakes. And a man will kill snakes. Am I not a man? I was a man yesterday.”

He lay back again on the table with his legs drawn up and fell into a highly fevered sleep. He would experience a multitude of nightmares and wake again to find that not three minutes had passed.

He was awakened once by the tinkle of the bell hanging from the rafter. But it was not a snake on the rafter. The cabin was shaking. It was being attacked by a prehistoric monster who would smash it up and devour everything. It was hard to tell where the dreams ended and reality began. But the cabin was attacked and jarred repeatedly, front and side, there was no doubt of that. Almost he knew the name of the monster, if only his head were clear and he could recall it.

And again he woke up completely on fire, but determined.

“If I live till daylight then I know I can make it. And I can live till morning if I have water.”

He came down off the table, flailing his chain, and got his water. He was struck time and again on his heavily swathed legs, but could not feel any real penetration.

A rattler had become fang-entangled in his leg wrappings. He dragged it back up on the table with him, caught it behind the head and pulled it loose, then beat its head into a pulp with his handcuffs. He dangled it, still writhing, over the rafter, trusting that no other snake would cross its body. And he lay down again and slept the sleep of the only half-damned.

But still the cabin was attacked and shaken by the monster. McAlester felt it both in his dreams and in his waking hours. Once in his dream he remembered its name, but it slid away as he wakened.

“But I will remember you yet,” he said, “and it may be that you are not entirely an enemy.”

He was slick with sweat as he drifted off again, but he knew now that he was passing the crisis, and that his fever was not as high as it had been; and that he would not die from this first snakebite at least. Yet the opportunities for further venoming were surely unlimited.

“I almost know you now, monster. What did Joe Lorimer say? ‘This is open-range, fence-cutting, barn-burning country.’ But he said something else. I will have your name yet, monster.”

Once when he wakened he killed three of the surliest snakes with his chain, and this seemed to quiet the others a little. The fire had burned quite low, and it had become a little chilly now with the coldest hours of the night just before dawn. Perhaps the snakes were sleepy. Still, who can trust a room full of sleep-eyed rattlesnakes?

And what had once been the main danger now loomed to the front again, now that there was at least a possibility of surviving the ordeal by snakes. Blocker, the killer, was no doubt still outside on the mountain. And he was surely armed; just as McAlester was surely not armed now in any real sense, having spent all his rifle shot in his delirium.

Then, on his next drifting off, was the last and the worst of the nightmares, accompanied by chest cramps; and McAlester felt that his assurance had been mistaken, and that he might die after all from the snakebite.

But the dream passed, and he was then wide-awake and clear-headed, though still weak.

“And now I remember your name, old Monster trying to wreck the cabin. Come in, Old Boar Hog who likes to kill snakes. We can whip them between us, though I'm not sure I'll be able to handle you after you've cleared them out. But a man isn't a full man if he's afraid to wade through a roomful of snakes.”

McAlester fixed his leg-swathing much better, now that he was more clear-headed. He could tell it was beginning to dawn outside. He had lived till morning, or nearly so.

The boar hog had been rooting under a corner of the cabin to break up the floor boards and get to the snakes. And these had now fallen away from that point of attack so that McAlester was able to approach it almost unmenaced. He looped the chain around the loose board end and lifted. He broke up the cabin chair and made a pry, and with fine cooperation from the boar hog he removed one board in pieces, and a second and a third.

Old snakes among them gave the signal, and the whole snake brigade began to leave the cabin and reenter the mountain through the crawl passage and through every chink and fissure. They were fleeing from the old boar hog who killed snakes for fun and ate them.

The boar hog was up through the floor and quickly killed a half-dozen of the lagging snakes, bearing straight into their coiled fury, protected by the only hide in the country that they could not pierce. And McAlester went for the cabin door with broken pieces of table and chair and with his rifle butt while the boar killed snakes.

But old boar was not truly a friend, not after he killed more snakes than he could eat in a morning, and had chased the rest into holes in the mountain wall. Old boar came for McAlester.

“Now just a cotton-picking minute, old boy. I've helped you to fun and a meal. Hold your place.”

McAlester swung at old boar with table leg and rifle. Then he swung at him with the lighted lantern which had more effect. But he smashed the thing on the monster, and it exploded, burning them both and quickly setting the cabin on fire.

The two of them broke out of the burning shanty, and there they parted company, wishing nothing more to do with each other. McAlester rolled on the ground, not sure whether he was still on fire. He was painfully, but probably not seriously burned. Besides, he had so many pains that a few more would not matter.

He recovered his rifle where he had dropped it on the way out. It might be good for a bluff. It would not be good for anything else. It was quite light and the sun would be up in seconds. And the old Snake Cabin burned merrily and seemed to draw inward.

“Old Blocker,” McAlester said softly, “do you have me in your sights? And if you have, then what are you waiting for? But it is no good trying to leave the spot without you. I didn't play bait in a trap to go away empty-handed. If that is you there in the bear grass, then you are smaller than I thought.”

There was nothing else but to do it. There was someone lying there and probably watching him, though he could make out neither gun nor threat, only a form lying in the high mountain grass.

He made a break for it. It wasn't thirty feet. He came down hard on the form. It hardly grunted.

“Damnation,” said McAlester, “you aren't Blocker.”

“Hope to hockey not,” said Little Jean Checotah. “Can't you find a better place to kneel than on my stomach?”

“Not till you tell me all you can, girl. Do you know where Blocker is?”

“Sure, I know. Hey, if you want to camp on me, don't bounce up and down.”

“You will take me to him.”

“All right. I will for another bottle of chock. Kneel somewhere else. This is me.”

“And no tricks?”

“How could you believe me if I told you none? Everybody knows what a liar I am. But I can't take you to him with you kneeling on my stomach.”

“All right, girl, get up.”

He walked behind her with a firm grip on a handful of her hair.

“I don't know how this will turn out, Little Jean, but if you try anything funny I'll have to kill you.”

“You a big-mouth man too? All the time going to kill somebody, you big-mouthed men.”

“Is Blocker your boyfriend, Little Jean?”

“Was, not is. Little bit, Kid, only a little bit.”

“You told him I would be in the cabin?”

“Sure. How else you going to find each other? He didn't use Snake Cabin on account of the snakes. I lied to you there.”

“Is he close?”

“Yes.”

“Then hush.”

“No need, kid. Thought you knew.”

Blocker was quite dead. He was swollen and nearly purple of face. His yell on the roof had been loud with hate and defiance; but also with fear — McAlester had been right in hearing that. Blocker must have run over a rattler that had slid out of the mountain onto the cabin roof warmed by the heat of the fire below. And he had died there of its bite only a few feet from the cabin.

“I wish I had a way to get him down to my car,” said McAlester. “But it's three miles, and I'm too sick and weak to carry him.”

“I'll tote him down for another bottle of chock when we get where they have it.”

“You?”

“Sure. Don't think I'm not strong as a horse just because I'm little.”

The Indian girl shouldered the dead man, and they started down the knuckles of Winding Stair Mountain.

“Sure is stiff, isn't he?” said Little Jean Checotah.

“Yes, quite stiff,” said McAlester.

He was still sick, and he wobbled when he walked. Sometimes he held onto a handful of Little Jean's hair to steady himself. Sometimes he hung onto a heel of the dead Blocker. He followed them down to his car at the cattleman's.

After that he would have to take in the killer's body, and pay the pledged debt of two bottles of chock beer to Little Jean Checotah.

Almost Perfect

George Grimoire grinned at Donald Dalton, yet there was something a little crooked about it. When a man grins at another as he kills him it would be odd if there were not something a little crooked about the grin.

“This will be perfect, Donald. We talked once about a perfect killing; you said that there could be no such thing. It amuses me to prove you wrong.

“It is known that you are alone with me. And many people high and low will come to look at you dead here in my place, and to talk to me of your death; and we will say how tragic it all is. Yet never will I be suspected of your murder. Do you not find that ironic, Donald? You were always one to appreciate a good joke.”

Then he killed him.

Donald Dalton had always been the richest man in town. He had been heir to much of the town's property from the day of his birth, and he inherited fully when he reached his majority. He wasn't a bad man; overbearing it's true, and vain to the point of offence; mule-headed and smug. Yet he was a cheerful man with a clattering laugh. It was just that he had the strange facility of souring those about him.

He had four sons; three-and-a-half really — Harold wasn't much of a son. Then there was Eugene, Carl J., and Donny, counting down by ages. Harold outraged what moral sense Donald had, and he did have a little. Eugene was a good man, and yet good for nothing; which is to say that he wasn't too competent. He was the only one who tended to business, and yet he wasn't good at it. Carl J. was a dude. And Donny was a wanderer.

“I have four sons,” Donald said once, “a lecher, a nincompoop, a peacock, and a rolling stone. Yet it's mostly my fault. I am a little bit of all four myself. I haven't had the opportunity to leech or roll as much as I'd have liked. And I conquered an early tendency towards stupidity, though it was quite a struggle. I am somewhat proud of my appearance; why shouldn't I be?”

For Donald Dalton had some talent for self-criticism, but he didn't overdo it. Really the only one in the family worth a second look was Betty Jo, the daughter of Eugene and granddaughter of Donald Dalton. We always did like that girl.

Among the buildings that Dalton owned was a large frame structure on the corner of Main and Missouri Streets. This housed a furniture store, an appliance store, a plumbing and electric shop, a shoe shop, an undertaking establishment, and a termite exterminator business.

The peculiarity of these firms was that they all interconnected; and they had but one proprietor, George Grimoire. For it was a small town and none of those businesses could of itself support a man. Sometimes, particularly in the summer, George had a boy to help him. More often not.

George would sell you a sofa, new or used, bottom a chair, fix a radio or a faucet, half-sole your shoes, bury your grandmother, or exterminate your pests. He was a busy man, but he remained a poor one. All he made went for rent to Donald Dalton; for cigars, whiskey chops and ribs, a new suit on the even numbered years; and interest (again to Donald Dalton) on a loan that was a consolidation of several earlier loans. He lost a dollar a week shooting pool, a dollar a week playing dominoes, and anywhere from one-eighty-five to two-fifty a week playing poker. He ate well, dressed well, and enjoyed his cronies. Being a careful man with no vices he was able to make out. A less careful man would not have been able to make it in that town.

It is true that he did not pay his bills to the plumbing suppliers or the furniture wholesalers; but nearly every year there are salesmen through there for new firms, and it is fair game to clip them all once.

Doctor Land, Donald Dalton, and George Grimoire sat one night and talked over the whiskey. It was not Dalton's whiskey. He had learned one thing: that a rich man only remained rich by doing his talking over a poor man's whiskey.

“The Doctor gives me a month to live, George,” said Donald Dalton.

“The Doctor has it not to give,” said George Grimoire hollowly. He had developed his hollow voice; it was his undertaker's voice. He had also developed his salesman's voice, his tradesman's voice, his cobbler's voice, his termite exterminator's voice, his upholsterer's voice like old velvet. But privately he himself liked his somberly echoing undertaker's voice best, and this he used with his cronies over the whiskey.

“No, I don't have it to give, George,” said Doctor Land, “but am a canny man with an estimate. I will bet a quart of the present that I do not miss by more than three days the time till you have Donald stretched on this very table.” For it was the laying-out table on which they drank.

“Done,” said George Grimoire. It sounded like the croak of a sepulchral frog when he said it.

“I wish that there were some way I could enter the bet,” said Donald Dalton. “I hate to be excluded from my own death bet. If the Doctor wins I will have little chance of sharing it. But if he loses by too much and I outlive the month by three days, I will be here to drink half of it, Grimoire, though it is the last I ever drink. And if he loses by too little, and I do not even last the month less three days, I ask you to breach the bottle here in my dead presence, Grimoire. Who knows but I may raise up a hand for that last drink. I believe that a man dies last in his drinking hand and esophagus.”

“You may be right,” said Doctor Land. “Have you made a will?”

“Four of them. Four undated holographic wills, each one giving all to one of the sons. As you see I play no favorites. And they are in the possession of the only honest member of the family, my granddaughter Betty-Jo, so none of them will be prematurely destroyed. There will be hell to pay when they try to settle things.” And he gave his clattering laugh so that both of the other men winced.

“I had hoped that you would do a little for me,” said Doctor Land. “I have attended you faithfully for many years.”

“Yet I've suffered years of pain for my youthful follies, and you have not been able to alleviate them. Nor can you now give me even an extra day of life. Were one to start lavishing bounty on Doctors, the whole roots of the world would be upturned.”

“I also have hoped,” said George Grimoire, “though it is true that I hope without hope, that you might help me. I have paid a burdensome rent to you for many years. A hundred dollars a month for a row of stores is quite steep. Should I not take my bond and quickly write fifty? Who knows, we may gain you a little merit along the way by the act.”

“If I am an unjust steward (and I am) I at least have the virtue of consistency. The rents will not be abated one jot. And it pleases me to prove one proverb wrong. I have squeezed quite a bit of blood out of turnips in my day. And George, old turnip, you must still bleed for my quarreling sons after I am gone.”

Then he gave that clattering laugh again. When it hit you the wrong way it was really quite an offensive sound.

Well, as it happened, George Grimoire the undertaker won the bet from Doctor Land. Donald Dalton died in twenty-seven days, and it was a thirty-one day month. So that was that.

Grimoire collected the quart of whiskey from Doctor Land, and the body of Donald Dalton from his heirs. He placed both on the laying-out table with a sheet over the one and an old hat over the other. He had other things to do.

He had that day to re-wicker an old chair. He was one of the last of the really good wicker men. He had to go and put in an outlet in the kitchen of Mrs. Thorndyke whose son had sent her an electric coffee pot. He had a radio to fix before a twilight program, and shoes to cobble. He had a rat-killing job and a locksmithing job. He had a picture to frame and a small chest to refinish, both of which he had promised to have ready the first thing in the morning. So it was quite late at night when he returned to Dalton and the whiskey.

He stripped the corpse and he uncorked the bottle. He made one small incision, and he had one small shot. Then he began to assemble all the tools of his trade.

A long time ago he had learned the undertaker's trade (as well as the saddler's trade which he now seldom used) from an old Switzer. Now he remembered oddly as he took his second shot a caution that his old master had taught him.

‘If you follow the trade, once in your life it will happen to you. When it happens, if you have enough years in and are rich enough, the wisest thing is to give it up. And if you aren't rich enough, the wisest thing is to put it out of your mind completely and not to live with it. Of course, there are those it doesn't bother.’

It was a chilly old thirty-one day month, and the town that was hardly a town faded away at night; and the old shackeldy building stood up and trembled in a storm-tossed wilderness.

“It's not worth a hundred dollars a month, big as it is,” said Grimoire. “It's a badly made and noisy building. And as sure as my name is George Grimoire there is one noise here that I don't like. But how can I be sure unless I look? And if I look, the few remaining hairs that I have are likely to raise out of my head. I can't chance a look till I've had another shot, and the blasted whiskey is with him.”

He reached behind him and got the bottle. He had a drink and it calmed him a little.

“ ‘If you follow the trade once in your life it will happen to you’, he told me. Well, so it is happening. What then?”

For he knew that the dead man on the table had stirred.

“After all, I am an undertaker. No man should fear the simple hazards of his own trade. I say, Donald, don't overdo it!”

He faced around to the quasi-dead man. Yes, he had writhed and moved.

But that was nothing to what happened now. There can be nothing more unnerving than to watch a dead man sit up; and this Dalton did, though with some difficulty. It was chilling.

“We all but traded places there, Donald,” said George Grimoire, “and at the moment I am not sure which of us is the deadest. I will acknowledge that I have never been so frightened in my life. Yet there is no way you can hurt me, and there is every way I can hurt you…”

Dalton was breathing with a sort of trembling wheeze. His eyes were opened, though dull; and in that moment it might still have been possible to have saved his life. He even reached out a stark shaking hand, though blindly.

“Do you know something, Dalton, Doctor Land really won the bet. For it's after midnight and you're still alive. But he's a poor doctor to have certified a live man dead. I feel myself under no compulsion of returning the whiskey to him. I shall not tell him about it, and I doubt if you will. Now I remember that you said a man's drinking hand and esophagus die last. You said also that you might raise up a dead hand for a last drink. Here, I will give it to you and see if you can take it.”

But it was Grimoire who was quite incapable of lifting or passing the bottle. There was something the matter with his own hand. He was trembling in pitiful fashion. He talked aimlessly to the once-dead man to work up his courage. But he was as frightened as a man can be.

“I have always believed that you mistreated me, Dalton. I have, in fact, always been afraid of you, as are the poor of those with money. But I will have you for all that. I can let you die. Possibly I can save you. Or I can kill you. And for the full irony of it I have to kill you. I hope you can hear me.”

Dalton may have heard him. He moaned; and his eyes (though still dull) had now some sort of recognition in them.

“This will be a perfect murder, Donald. Who could ever suspect an undertaker of killing a man already dead? I will bleed you to death and eviscerate you. And what is wrong with that? Is that not the way you should end up? Do not all leave my table so? I will pump fluid into you, but not too much. For I'll tell you a secret now: I have always been a penny-pinching undertaker.

“There is absolutely no way on earth that your murder could be suspected, traced, or proved. I will have performed the impossible, the perfect murder. Ah, now I see that you begin to understand me. You even plead a little with your eyes. I would be disappointed if you did not. And you are quite horrified are you not, old bat? The esophagus is not quite dead — but do you call that little croak a scream? Surely you can make more noise than that? No? Well, so much the better.”

Grimoire said other things to Dalton then as he recovered his own courage. And, after he had bantered him a while, he opened his veins and killed him.

He worked rapidly over the dead man then, for it was late at night, and he was tired and anxious to get it over with. He was a little disturbed by the look of horror on the finally-dead Dalton's face. From inside the mouth he cut into the cheek tendons and made them relax. And he loosened the taut throat with several small incisions.

“What have I forgotten? Nothing. What is there to forget? Not even a medical detective could find anything wrong, outside of my usual sloppy work. He could in no way discern murder here.”

But Grimoire was wrong on that. A good medical detective would have been able to discern murder; if only he had examined the right man.

Well, they buried Dalton in the morning. There was no question about anything except one odd one that Betty-Jo asked.

“Mr. Grimoire, he was so serene-appearing after he had just died. Now he looks frightened. How? Why?”

“Miss Dalton, the dead never really look serene. They have put on the mask.”

“Yes, he was serene then. He is not now.”

She gazed at the card on the wall: in the sight of the unwise they seemed to die, but they are in peace. George Grimoire had many pious quotations on the wall.

“His face has changed, Mr. Grimoire. How could it have changed?” insisted Betty-Jo.

“I am sure you are wrong.”

“I am not wrong. How could it have happened?”

“Well, there are such things as spasms post-mortem that can affect the appearance. And then there is a general stiffness of face as well as body that sets in and seems to give a harsher expression.”

“Spasms? You mean after he was dead? You mean he came back to life?”

“Good God no! It is purely a mechanical reaction induced mostly by gas. With death the body becomes a broken machine; but sometimes it creaks a little as it settles.”

“I see.”

But it may be that she did not see completely. Or it may be that she saw too much.

“Is it possible that it was not perfect after all?” asked Grimoire of himself. “Could I myself be giving it away?”

But anyhow he was relieved when Donald Dalton was covered up for good.

Grimoire did not work that day. Instead he locked up his enterprises and went to bed to rest. And late in the afternoon when he rose, and washed, and shaved, he discovered a thing about himself. One hand had lost its cunning (he had suspected this the night before); and his face appeared in the mirror to be asymmetrical.

One side was drawn and dull.

“I am not a doctor, though I may be as good as Doctor Land. This is easily read. I suffered a slight stroke in the excitement of last night and it has left its mark on me. I will never be quite the same.”

He felt badly. He thought of calling Dalton to come and have a drink with him, as he often did when he was low. Then he remembered that Dalton would not be coming anymore.

“The stroke may also have touched my brain a little. I am addled.”

It was three days later that Eugene Dalton came to see him: Eugene who was a good man, and yet good for nothing. But he soon revealed that he had been misjudged, and that he was not a good man at all.

“I will come to the point at once, Mr. Grimoire. I am a blunt man.”

“No you are only a dull man, Eugene. There is a difference.”

“My father left me everything in a clear will.”

“Why tell me?”

“But there are complications.”

“Yes, your father left three other wills, one for each son. He was a remarkably impartial man.”

“He must have been a remarkably forgetful man, though I hadn't thought so.”

“No, he was not forgetful. It was quite intentional.”

“But why?”

“A legacy of chaos. Perhaps he did not want you to quickly forget his unique personality, so he left a bit of it with you.”

“Well, I am the most deserving son. I should have it, and I mean to get it by fair ways or cloudy. On this matter I approached Dr. Land with a reasonable bargain. He rejected it. I was amazed to find that he was an honest man. With you I trust that I will not be so amazed.”

“What is the bargain?”

“My father always treated you badly and overcharged you for years on the rent.”

“Never mind the palaver. What is the bargain?”

“I believe that in simple justice the building should go to you.”

“What is the bargain?”

“If I inherit, I will immediately deed it to you.”

“What is the bargain?”

“That you help me inherit.”

“How?”

“Dr. Land refused a simple suggestion and so lost a part of the inheritance by his stubbornness. His loss can be your gain.”

“Avarice and doubt have started a little war in me, son. Pull the cork out of the proposition and let it bubble. We are alone.”

“Dr. Land was alone with my father when he died, and had been so on and off for several hours. What more easy than a simple sworn statement by the doctor that my father in one of his last rational moments had wished to clarify the confusion of a multiplicity of wills, and name that which was to be authentic?”

“What more easy? And the doctor refused a simple thing like that for a consideration? I would not have refused had I had his opportunity.”

“You have it. We will change the roles. We will make you the man who was with my father when he really died. And to you he made the avowal.”

“I am an old man, Eugene, and I cannot smell a trap as I once did. And I have always wondered one thing about you: are you a little smarter or a little stupider than you appear?”

“A little smarter, Mr. Grimoire, a little smarter. There is such a thing as a man being certified as dead who is in a trance and not dead. It would be possible for him to come briefly conscious in the presence of the undertaker and to talk rationally.”

“In half a century in the trade I haven't met such a case.”

“Then meet it now. It would be much easier for you to own this building than to pay rent on it.”

“Is that a stick you have in your hand behind you?”

“Both my hands are on the table here. Is your eyesight failing? Oh, I see what you mean. Have I a threat that I am holding back? Perhaps.”

“Or did I just now hand you the stick for you to grab, and to figure out later what it is?”

“It may be so.”

“Is Betty-Jo in on this?”

“Naturally not. My daughter would not touch such a thing. She is too honest. I don't know where she gets it. She had all four wills in her possession and could have destroyed three of them to my advantage, and did not. A perfidious offspring if ever there was one.”

“I will need a little time to think about this.”

“Too much time is what created indecision. You have eight hours. The clan gathers at four this afternoon at the old house. It will be a formal show with lawyer, clerk, and notary present. You be there.”

“Yes, in any case I will be there.”

After Eugene Dalton had left, George Grimoire sat in his chair for a long while. He knew then that he had suffered another stroke. But he knew also that this one was not yet the killer.

He arose after an hour or so and walked. But one foot dragged slightly and he understood that it would do so until the end. He thought about the false testimony that he should give to own the building, testimony that would be in one circumstance dangerously true. Then he went to have a talk with Doctor Land.

The formalities that afternoon were very formal, and George Grimoire was a tired man. He even slept through part, but he slept with one ear cocked. Eugene Dalton was setting the stage with a few little speeches, setting it so that Grimoire would either have to give the testimony, or stutter painfully backwards out of it. Eugene was counting on the tiredness and confusion of the recently-grown-old man.

And there was a certain resentment and contempt in the whole bunch of them. They knew that something raw was being pulled, but they could not guess it yet.

“Mr. Grimoire,” said Mr. Banks, “please do us the favor of remaining awake. Mr. Eugene Dalton has made some rather amazing introductory remarks on testimony you are to give. You should be listening.”

“No need. I know what he is saying.”

Mr. Banks was a lawyer. Not the lawyer. There were several present.

“I think we should go directly into your testimony then, Mr. Grimoire.”

“Beginning where?”

“Beginning with the answer to the question: Did Donald Dalton come alive on your embalming table?”

“Oh yes.”

“But that is impossible,” said Betty-Jo.

“Why, you yourself were the only one who noticed the evidence, girl.”

“What?”

“That his expression had changed. That he had been serene before, and was not so after.”

“But you explained that. You said that there were sometimes mechanical spasms.”

“In this case a spasm in which he sat up and opened his eyes and was conscious.”

“I do not believe you,” said Lawyer Banks. “I believe rather that Eugene Dalton came to you with a dishonest proposition.”

“That's true. He did come to me with a dishonest proposition. And yet unknowingly he put the saw in the kerf. Part of what he wished me to swear to did happen.”

“This really does occur outside of macabre stories?”

“The man from whom I learned the trade (as also the saddler's trade) told me that it would happen once in my lifetime. And it has happened once to me as it happened once to him.”

“And did Dalton speak? Did he speak of the wills?”

“He spoke not a word. I believe that he wished to speak. I believe that if not prevented he would have spoken. But I prevented him.”

“Why? How?”

“I had suddenly the vision of the perfect murder, one absolutely not to be suspected and not to be traced, a work of art. Who would ever get wind of an undertaker killing a man already dead? How could it possibly be proven? How? Was this not perfection? That which had never been achieved before? No clue, no whisper, no inkling. How could there conceivably be a weak link in that chain? Yet there was a weak link that I overlooked.

“Well, briefly I opened his veins and killed him. And then I prepared him according to the details of the trade. But he did not speak.”

The good people among them recoiled with real horror, and the evil of them with simulated horror; and there was a harsh and angry grumbling. Only Lawyer Banks, who was neither one nor the other, did not recoil at all. But he was quite interested.

“But what was the weak link,” he asked. “I confess I can't see it. It looks to me as though it were foolproof, almost sublime in its perfection. It was a perfect murder if I ever heard of one. What was the weak link?

“It was myself. Some men are just not cut out to be murderers.”

“And why do you tell us this?” asked Carl J. angrily, “since you seem to have been in the clear and with no suspicion attached to you?”

“It is just that Doctor Land gives me a month to live,” said Grimoire.

“Want to bet?” asked Carl J. in a fury.

“The doctor would bet,” said Grimoire. “The doctor will always bet. He will bet that he does not miss it by three days.”

But the doctor would have lost. For they hanged George Grimoire after twenty-seven days, and it was a thirty-one day month.

Enfants Terribles

“Mr. McCarty, do you know a good way to get blood off a knife?” asked Carnadine.

“That's an odd question from a nine-year-old girl,” said Mossback McCarty, the old cop.

“Going on ten,” said Carnadine.

“I would first have to see the knife.”

“It was a hypothetical question, you know, that kind. Besides, Eustace has the knife, not me.”

“Get Eustace and the knife here at once.”

“I don't know where he is.”

“Send one of your minions to find Eustace, and the knife.”

“I don't know what a minion is.”

“Fatty Frost there is a minion of yours.”

So they sent Fatty on the mission.

This was almost the only place on his beat where Mossback could sit down and rest, this vacant lot with the little ravine behind it. And on the lot was the clubhouse of the Bengal Tigers with the bench out in front. Mossback was too tall and too broad to enter the clubhouse itself, but he sat every day on the bench and rested.

“You do give us a bad name, though,” Carnadine Thompson told him. “All the other clubs despise us because a cop visits here. You know, we're cop killers by our constitution.”

“I didn't know the Bengal Tigers had a constitution, Carnadine. Is it a real written one?”

“Well, not exactly a written one. But it's a real one, with nineteen bylaws I think they call them. It has been transmitted orally from father to son and from mother to daughter since the club was founded.”

“And how long ago was the club founded?”

“Two weeks tomorrow.”

Fatty Frost brought Eustace, but without the knife.

“I understand you have a knife with blood on it, Eustace,” said Mossback.

“It belongs to me. I won't tell you where it is. Cops steal things from people. They call it impounding the evidence.”

“Papa says all cops are crooked,” contributed Carnadine. “I said ‘All but Mossback.’ He said, ‘That's right. He's not crooked, he's just dumb.’ ”

“Your father is not himself an unqualified genius, Carnadine. Now then, Eustace, small boys should not have bloody knives. Where is it and where did you get it?”

“I got it out of a man.”

“You should say ‘I got it from a man.’ Did he give it to you?”

“Not exactly. But he didn't say I couldn't have it.”

“Did he say you could have it?”

“No. He didn't say anything. I asked him but he wouldn't answer. I couldn't get him to wake up.”

Mossback began to feel funny.

“Eustace, you will show me the knife and you will show me where you got it or I will paddle your pog. I will not be flimflammed by an eight-year-old boy.”

“Going on nine,” said Eustace. “I'm going to put the knife back where I got it. And then I'm going to wash my hands of it. With the reputation I got I can't afford to get involved with the law.”

Then he ran off.

Mossback followed the children heavily. He saw Eustace go up and down a tree like a cat. He had had the knife hidden in the crotch of a tree. Then the boy ran down into the ravine with the knife in his hand. But when Mossback came up to the scene he froze with horror and his hair bristled.

For a shabby dead man lay there and a knife was prominent in the middle of his chest. And little Eustace had just risen from the dead man.

“Eustace, what have you done?” Mossback whispered.

“Oh, I put it back where I found it like I said I would.”

“And where are you going, what are you going to do now?”

“Why, I'm going to wash my hands of it just like I said.”

Mossback noticed for the first time that it was caked black blood and not dirt on Eustace's hands. And he realized, not for the first time, that the words of children should always be taken literally.

“You may be the stupidest patrolman on the force, Mossback,” said Captain Keil. “It's incredible that you should allow a man to be stabbed on your beat, and then allow a small boy to pull a knife from the body, run away with it, hide it in a tree, and finally return and plunge it back into the body again. Do you know who the dead man is?”

“No.”

“Do you know who lives in all five of the houses that back onto the ravine?”

“Yes, I know that.”

“Who?”

“In the first house, a man whom I have never seen except distantly — he only bought the house a week ago and moved in yesterday — a Silas Schermerhorn who is an ex-magistrate of some sort, and retired. In the second house is Tyburn Thompson, the father of Eustace and Carnadine here, and a terrible-tempered man in his own right. In the third is Carlos Rey who runs a tobacco store downtown and is a Cuban. In the fourth is Fred Frost, the father of Fatty here — ”

“The boy has a given name, I'm sure.”

“Finnbar.”

“Very well, the father of Fatty here — ”

“ — who is a competent machinist and an incompetent inventor. What he makes at the one trade, he loses at the other. And in the fifth house is Hatchel Horn, an engraver.”

“Get them all here right now, men, wives, children and domestics; and let nobody else near. We will talk to them right here. It is a shaddy nook here by the dollhouse.”

“It is no more a dollhouse than you are,” said Carnadine with some resentment. “It is the clubhouse of The Bengal Tigers, a fraternal organization, and that other word where they have girls, too.”

“What, child?”

“Sororical, I think.”

“Oh.”

They began to arrive.

“I am Silas Schermerhorn,” said a grey and polished man, “former judge, though not of this state. I understand there has been an accident.”

“And this lady is your wife?”

“Hellpepper no, that's mama,” howled Eustace.

“I could do worse,” said the lady. “In fact, I probably have. He seems quite a nice gentleman and should add tone to the neighborhood. But I'm Giddy Thompson.”

“Giddy doesn't seem like a proper name.”

“It's apt, though it may not be proper. My name is Geraldine Isabella Dorothy Doria Yseult, I being named after five aunts. You can see how this would be shortened to Giddy.”

“Yes, I can see how.”

“Mrs. Schermerhorn has been dead for many years,” said the grey polished man.

“This is Rose Rey coming in the bathrobe,” said Giddy.

“Hi honey,” said Rose. “It seems like a lot of fuss to make just because I ran into a parked car. Why do you have to gather all the neighbours to tell them about it? How did you find out it was me?”

“I don't think it's about that, Rose,” said Giddy. “This, Captain, is Annalee Frost, and this is her husband, Fred. My, you look frowsy in the morning, Fred. This is Tootsy Horn. Her real name isn't Tootsy. I was the one who started to call her that — I think it's cute, don't you? And all these children belong to some one or the other of us. Is it necessary to sort them out?”

“Perhaps not at present. Aren't there three men to be accounted for, Mossback? Where are they?”

“At work. They'll be here soon.”

“And the domestics. Where are the domestics?”

“You kidding, honey?” asked Rose.

“All of you children go into the dollhouse, and stay there for the present,” said Captain Keil. “I don't want you running around.”

“I explained once that it was a clubhouse,” said Carnadine, her jaw grim, “and besides, PeeWee Horn can't come in.”

“And why can't he?”

“He isn't an active member of the Bengal Tigers. He is delinquent in his dues.”

“This is a direct order from the Police Department,” said Captain Keil.

“Oh, all right then.” But they let PeeWee in with very bad grace.

Captain Keil took the Frosts aside a few steps.

“Do either of you know anything about this?” he asked.

“I don't even know what it's about,” said Fred Frost.

“Did either of you hear any sort of a disturbance last night?”

“I was disturbed by our telephone a number of times,” said Fred.

“Who was phoning?”

“The neighbours. They complained about the noise of my power tools. I explained to them that the invention I've been working on for the last few weeks is a general purpose noise eliminator. Still, it is very hard to fabricate a sheet-metal model quietly. And some tempers were lost on all sides.”

“And what time did this particular disturbance cease?”

“Oh, they got tired and stopped phoning at two or three in the morning.”

“I mean, when did you abate the noise of your power tools?”

“Five o'clock maybe. Then I went to bed. It seems I had just got to sleep when you had me roused, but I must have slept a couple of hours.”

“Did you hear any sort of noise in the ravine last night?”

“I did not. And I'm willing to bet that no one else did. The noise I was making would have effectively drowned out any other sound in the neighbourhood.”

“Did you go out of the house at all last night?”

“Probably. I get absent-minded when I'm working on an invention. I believe I put my lathe on automatic once or twice and went out for a beer.”

“Did you walk in the ravine last night?”

“I don't remember it, but I may have. I often do. I never notice where I'm walking when I'm concentrating.”

“Did you talk to anyone last night?”

“I am just not sure of that, officer.”

“Ask him why he doesn't put the baffler the other way in his noise machine,” said Carnadine. “That way he could stop the up and down noises as well as the sideways noises.”

“Little girl, I told you to stay in that dollhouse.”

“It is as much as my life is worth to go back in that clubhouse. I have just been expelled from the Bengal Tigers. It's quite a comedown for me. I was First Stripe, you know.”

“No, I didn't know.”

“That's the leader. And now I go in fear of my life. As you know, we cannot allow any living ex-members. Our secrets are too horrible. What if the world should learn of them?”

“I shudder,” said Captain Keil.

“So now I can only await the hand of the assassin,” said Carnadine.

“Fortunately it will not be long.”

“In a way I hope not,” said Captain Keil. “But I believe we can offer you police protection against the worst assassins that the Bengal Tigers can muster.”

“A lot of good your police protection did that dead man in the ravine,” said Carnadine.

“What? What's this?” asked Fred Frost.

“You will learn in a minute,” said the Captain. “Now you, little girl, go back in that dollhouse and tell the rest of the Bengal Tigers to be quieter.”

“All right. But if they kill me I'll hold you personally responsible.”

A surly man came up to the Captain.

“Why don't you quit picking on kids and send for a hacker to pick up that body in the draw?” he asked. “There's one on E Street, the only one left in the county. He makes dog meat out of carcasses. It's going to be offensive as soon as the sun gets to it.”

“And just who are you?” asked the Captain.

“I'm Tyburn Thompson. This is my land you're standing on. That is my little girl you were hollering at. Try hollering at me like that and I'll peel you like a banana. Okay, folks, break it up, all of you beat it. Take that dead hobo with you, Mossback, and old gobble-mouth here, too. Why'd you phone me to come home anyhow?”

“I am giving the orders here,” said Captain Keil angrily.

“Not to me you're not,” said Tyburn.

Two other men came up.

“What's the trouble, Ty?” asked one of them, Hatchet Horn.

“Oh, there's a dead bum down in the draw, and the cops think they have to make a noise about it. Give me a cigar, Carlos, you get them wholesale.”

“Are you the other two neighbours?” asked Keil.

“We are neighbours,” said Carlos Rey.

“Then we all may as well go and view the body, as long as your mouthy friend has already let the corpse out of the shroud.”

They went down the incline and gathered around the dead man. Annalee Frost gave a gasp and a slight shriek, then paled and swayed.

“I shall faint,” she said.

“You always say that, but you never do,” said Tootsy Horn.

“Have any of you ever seen this man before?” asked the Captain.

“I've a dim impression that I saw him yesterday afternoon,” said Fred Frost. “Can't say just where or when. Maybe I'm wrong though.”

“Did you speak to him?”

“Believe I said, ‘It's sure hot.’ Seems like I said that to someone yesterday. Does seem I saw that face somewhere.”

“Could he have been hanging around the ravine?”

“Could have been. Not sure. I'm absent-minded, you know.”

 “Yes. You mentioned that before.”

“I don't believe I ever saw him,” said Tyburn Thompson. “I haven't noticed any hoboes around the draw for the last several days. I usually keep an eye open for them and size them up pretty well. On account of the children, you know. None of them ever met a stranger, and some of their best friends are hoboes. The ‘boes sleep in the draw sometimes as it's near the railroad. But I haven't seen this one before.”

“I haven't seen him,” said Hatchel Horn.

“And I believe I have not,” said Carlos Rey. “I would recognize anyone who has ever been in my store. I believe that he has not. I see few people other places. I work long hours.”

“Have you ever seen him, Judge?”

“Possibly. My memory, like that of Mr. Rey, is a specialized one. I generally remember the men who have appeared before me in court. I have a definite impression that this man has. Still, a man does not look the same dead; and many of the things by which we recognize — voice, manner — are gone.”

“But you think he may have appeared before you?”

“He may have. He has, I would say, a criminal-type face. His suit is of the kind issued to a man leaving prison.”

“Yes, I know that. If he has not had it off, and he probably hasn't, then he may have worn it for about five days. And the knife could very well be a prison kitchen knife, but they are not standard. It could be from anywhere. It is quite a cheap instrument. Have any of you ladies ever seen this man before?”

“Good heavens, no!” said Annalee Frost.

“He looks like the President of Paraguay,” said Rose Rey. “You think that possible?”

“No,” said Captain Keil. “And you, Tootsy — pardon me, Mrs. Horn — have you ever seen this man?”

“It is very unlikely,” said Mrs. Horn.

So that was all of it for a while. A few more officers came out. And the neighbors were all cautioned not to move out of the neighborhood suddenly. Then the officials took the dead man away and adjourned downtown.

“It's clear enough, almost too clear,” said Captain Gold. “Whoever killed him didn't bother to remove his identity.”

They were going through the dead man's effects. His billfold was from a prison workshop; they are sold in several states and are recognizable. His prison papers were in order. He had three dollars. Had he been killed by another hobo, he would hardly have been left with the three dollars unless the killing was for a deeper reason.

And his name was Charles Coke. He had been released from prison exactly a week before. They were waiting now for his dossier.

“A confidence man,” said Captain Gold, “a forger and blackmailer. And he did five years. We are having it checked further.”

“Five full years?” asked Captain Keil. “No time off?”

“No. He had a record of altercations inside. He was capable of violence. Of his previous blackmail victims none of them live nearby, and besides they pretty well revealed themselves in obtaining his conviction. There could have been a victim held in abeyance while he was in prison; or there could be a new victim that he had marked out from information obtained in prison. It almost has to be the blackmail side of his talents. Neither confidence dodges nor forgeries commonly lead to murder.”

“Was he killed in situ?” asked Keil.

“I don't know,” said Gold. “There's no reason to doubt it, outside of my own doubtishness. He may not have been killed in situ, or even in suit — that is, not in the clothes he was wearing.”

 “Why do you say that?”

“The fit of them was far from perfect.”

“Well, it was not a bad enough fit to be grotesque. And prison fittings are not usually perfect.”

“There was one other thing. The absent-minded machinist-inventor, Frost, has come in with a little more information. He is sure now that he did see the man the day before, but that he saw him dressed differently, and that it was somewhere in the street, not in the ravine.”

“But is the memory of an admittedly absent-minded man worth anything?”

“Yes. Something. Yet a confidence man will usually acquire several appearances as quickly as he can. Coke may quite well have gotten hold of some decent clothes, and yet also kept the prison issue. He may also have set himself up in two different sets of rooms, though so far we have not been able to find a trace of any residence.”

“If he had been out only a week, he may not have had any more money than we found on him, and may not have been able to obtain rooms at all.”

“Not Coke. From his history he would never have been without operating money. He would not have come out of prison empty-handed.”

“Did you tell Frost to be quiet about what he had seen, or thought that he had seen?”

“No. I did not,” said Gold foxily. “If even that little news is out, it may worry someone. We haven't much to go on, but the more people we can worry, the more chance we have of smoking something out. And now that we have given it a chance to smoulder, I have sent for the five neighbourhood families to appear again — this time, singly.”

But they didn't get much out of them this time either. There is a trick of taking a picture of a site, then a later picture of the same site; then a little business of infra-red will reveal any change. Captain Gold had this trick of analyzing evidence. But the variations of the stories told by the neighbours the first and second times were small, and appeared insignificant, and could have been accidental.

Fred Frost could bring no more out of his tricky memory than he had already fished out. Tyburn Thompson had found new words of invective against officialdom, but no new information on the case at hand. Carlos Rey now thought that he might have sold a cigar to that man some years before. But he would not swear to this, nor could he recall for certain the brand of the cigar; besides, it might have been a different man.

Hatchel Horn hadn't known anything about it before, didn't know anything about it now, and didn't expect to know anything about it in the future. And when the sergeant said that Judge Schermerhorn was outside, the Captains were still without a lead.

“Good afternoon, Judge. We were wondering if there was anything more you could tell us about the unfortunate affair that happened in your neighbourhood.”

“Should I have something more to tell you? Has any of the other neighbours been of help?”

“Yes. Fred Frost has been of immeasurable help. He stated that he had seen the dead man on the day before in other and better clothes, in other circumstances, and in a slightly different location.”

“I see. I was afraid that he might remember. I should not have been so cowardly from the first. But you would have found out soon in any case. Of course you have minutely gone over the transcript of his sentencing of five years ago?”

“What? Oh, of course, of course, minutely.”

“And naturally the first thing that struck your eye was that I was the sentencing judge.”

“What? Oh, naturally, naturally. And then, ah, then we did recall that you had said that just possibly this man had appeared before you but that you could not be certain; a man does not, as you pointed out, look the same in death. And as a judge has thousands of men appear before him, you could very well not have been sure.”

“Quite so. But since you have gone over the transcript, since you read with what violence that man spoke out — for even the typed copy must have carried some echo of the violence in that man — when you had read that he had sworn in court to get me when his time was over, then you realized that I must have remembered him.”

“What? Oh, yes, then we realized it all, didn't we, Keil?”

“Ah, well, why, yes, that was when we realized it.”

“So, gentlemen, to save you the time, I have typed a complete summary of my actions in this unhappy affair. Here it is. Please forgive whatever misspellings you find in it. I am a broken man and have been in a highly nervous state for the last several days. You have already guessed the tenor of the contents.”

“Ah, yes, we have. Haven't we, Keil? But tell us briefly.”

“I had lately retired. I had moved to this town as quietly and unobtrusively as possible, one thousand miles from where he had seen me last. I learned the day he would get out and I knew that he intended to kill me. But I had some hope that he would not be able to follow me here. I was wrong.

“I was not yet settled in my house, I was not entirely moved in, you understand, when he came up the front steps, nattily dressed. I thought it was one of my new neighbours calling to welcome me. I barely recognized him in time. Then I quickly locked the door. But for the fact that Mr. Frost passed by at that time, I believe that Coke would have broken in the door and had me then. They exchanged some common-places, Coke and Frost, and I realized to my dismay that Frost, who is absent-minded, believed Coke to be me, the man who was just moving in.

“Coke left then. But he called to me that he would be back after dark, and that there was nothing I could do to prevent his evening up our score. I spent the next few hours in an agony of worry. I had no gun in the house, and was afraid to venture out. Totally unacquainted in town, and with my telephone not yet connected, I had no idea what to do. And the banshee wails that rose from the workshop of Mr. Frost after dark added to my unease. Coke could shoot me a dozen times and not a soul would hear.”

“And then?”

“Coke came to the front door around midnight and called to me. There was a hypnotic quality in his voice. I had heard of it, had felt it before. He said that his was the stronger will, and that he would force me to open the door to my own destruction.

“However, as quietly as possible, I slipped through the house, out the back door, and down to that dark ravine. I thought I could hide there while he broke into my house, or that I could get to one of the neighbours for help. I was looking for someone, anyone, to save me. And I was relieved when I came on a shabby-looking man there.

“ ‘My life is in danger,’ I said. ‘Help me. Help me to get to the police or to some safe shelter.’ I came quite close to him and then — ”

“Yes?”

“Nightmare of nightmares! I thought I had lost my mind. That shabby man was also Coke! He had tricked me, read my mind. He must have left the front door even before I slipped through the back. I had imagined him nattily dressed as he had appeared that afternoon. But he had come dressed as a hobo, and he paralyzed me with fright.”

“Go on.”

“He took out a knife and we grappled. It was as though he intended to play with me. But he slipped there in the dampness of the ravine. We fell together. And I do not know what fortune it was, good or bad, that ruled; but it was he and not I who died of the knife when we fell.”

“Go on.”

“There is no more to go on to. I was a coward. I was unsettled in my mind. I went back to my house and did nothing from that time to this. But I swear to God I did not mean to kill. No, in all truth I do not believe that I would have killed a man even to save my own life. I am incapable of it. It was sheer accident.”

“Naturally. But I would not worry. It is in the five-year-old transcript, as you say, that he swore to kill you. And he came a thousand miles after you immediately on his release; you didn't go after him. I believe that there was never a more clear-cut case of self-defense.”

“Well, that rather wraps it up,” said Captain Gold. “We should get a commendation for this.”

“Tell me, John,” asked Captain Keil, “had you read the transcript of the sentencing?”

“Of course not, no more than you did.”

“Then you didn't know that Schermerhorn was the presiding judge on the case, or that Coke had threatened his life?”

“Naturally not. Let that be our little secret. It is fortunate that Judge Schermerhorn gave us credit for more diligence and more intelligence than we possess.”

“Will he get off?”

“Of course he'll get off. Clear-cut a case as I ever saw.”

It was early morning. The birds were singing, except that one black one who just pecked and grumbled and hadn't a trace of song in his soul.

Mossback McCarty was resting on the bench in front of The Bengal Tigers Unaffiliated.

“Mr. McCarty,” said Carnadine Thompson. “I have a question to ask.”

“This is where I came in. I do not know how to get blood off a knife, nor gore off a bludgeon. I do not even know how to remove tell-tale marks from a revolver.”

“What on earth are you talking about? I wanted to ask you if you were satisfied with the disposition of our famous criminal case?”

“Why, I suppose so. Shouldn't I be?”

“The Bengal Tigers are not satisfied with it. Or perhaps I should say that I, as First Stripe, am not satisfied with it. Let me ask you: did you ever see a distinguished and dignified-looking judge?”

“Yes, of course. You have only to think of Mr. Schermerhorn.”

“All right. Think of some more.”

“Why, all of them. All judges are distinguished-looking gentlemen.”

“No. Think real hard. Was there ever one?”

“Well, since you insist, no, I never did see a distinguished-looking judge. All of them have something a little furtive about them — fox-faced, sly, rather disreputable.”

“Something like the image of a low confidence man?”

“Why, yes, Carnadine, something like that.”

“And now tell me: did you ever see a confidence man who looked furtive, fox-faced, sly, disreputable?”

“Why, all of them, Carnadine. We have only to think of Coke when we saw him dead.”

“Think of some more. It is possible that you have known more confidence men than I have.”

“That's possible. Why, all of them are fox-faced and disreputable-looking.”

“Think real hard. Was there ever one?”

“Come to think of it, no. As a matter of fact, all of them have an inspiring presence. They are the most imposing, distinguished, dignified men on the face of the earth. In fact they look rather like — ”

“Like judges? Like judges are supposed to look? Mr. McCarty, you go right downtown and tell them that they might have their men mixed up. Warn them of the dangers of taking things for granted. And tell them that if they take the most elementary fingertip test, which they should have done anyhow, then they can tell for sure. And tell them downtown that you are too good a man to be pounding a beat out here. For the reputation of the Bengal Tigers we have to get rid of you. And this is the only way I know how to do it.”

McCarty went about it rather lamely.

“I have new information from one of the neighbours,” he said, “that leads me to believe that we are not sure of the identity of the two men.”

“From one of the neighbours we questioned?” asked Captain Gold.

“No. From one of the neighbours you neglected to question.”

Coke had spoken the truth in one thing. Coke had said that Coke was a man of violence. And so he was for a few moments, until subdued by three burly policemen. Then his violence proved to be short, and he talked easily.

“Oh, well, I guess I've come to the end of my rope in several ways. Details? Oh, the judge was easy enough to find. I'd kept track of him all the way. I even collected a commission when he bought his new house, and that was before I was released. And it didn't take me a week to come the thousand miles; it took me only three hours. I was in town before he was.

“I knew how much money he had transferred here. I knew that I could write his name as well as he could. And I made sure that he had transmitted everything by mail, and was not likely to be known by sight to a single person in this town.

“I observed his moving in and the fact that he tried to avoid being seen, as he was deadly afraid of me. I figured that his clothing, but not his face, might be familiar to his neighbours from their brief glimpses. And we are nearly the same size. It is true that bumbler, Frost, exchanged civilities with him, and I would have to find a place for that in my story.

“My idea, of course, was to kill the judge, with access to eighty thousand dollars under the name that I could write as well as he. And that's just what I did.

“I came to his door at night, introduced myself as an insurance salesman with an insurance salesmen's voice, and I had one foot in the door before he recognized me. I forced him at gunpoint to strip, and we changed clothes from the skin out. Then I marched him to the ravine and killed him there.

“I had two choices: to do nothing and see if there was any chance of being suspected; or to give up with a maudlin confession in my identity as the judge. If it fell out the one way, I was set up for life here. If it fell out the other way, then I would go through the formality of a short trial, be cleared, and still be settled and respected for life — or at least have a rich base to start from should I become bored and want to return to my regular business again.

“But who is the smart aleck who wanted more positive identification after the case was already wrapped up to everyone's satisfaction? What fresh mind saw the sure-to-be-missed obvious which I was sure would never be seen? Tell me, who outsmarted me?”

“Ah, one of our promising new talents,” said Captain Keil. “Our Number Nine, in fact.”

“Going on Ten,” said Mossback McCarty.

McGonigal's Worm

When it happened, it happened unnoticed. Though it affected all chordata on Earth (with a possible exception to be noted in a moment) nobody knew of it, not even the Prince of all chordata, Man himself. How could he have known of it so soon?

Though his lifeline had suddenly been cut, it was a long lifeline and death would still be far off. So it was not suspected for nearly twenty-four hours, not accepted even as a working theory for nearly three days, and not realized in its full implications for a week.

Now, what had occurred was a sudden and worldwide adynatogenesis of all chordata, not however, adynatotokos; this distinction for many years offered students of the phenomenon some hope.

And another hope was in the fact that one small but genuine member of chordate was not affected: an enteropneustron, a balanoglossida of the oddest sort, a creature known as McGonigal's Worm. Yet what hope this creature could offer was necessarily a small one.

The catastrophe was first sensed by a hobbyist about a day after it occurred. It was just that certain experiments did not act right and the proper results were not forthcoming. And on the second day (Monday) there were probably a hundred notations of quite unusual and unstatistical behavior, but as yet the pattern was not at all suspected.

On the third day a cranky and suspicious laboratory worker went to a supply house with the angry charge that he had been sold sterile mice. This was something that could not be ignored, and it is what brought the pattern of the whole thing into the open, with corroboration developing with explosive rapidity. Not completely in the open, of course, for fear of panic if it reached the public. Out throughout the learned community the news went like a seismic shock.

When it did reach the public a week later, though, it was greeted with hoots of laughter. The people did not believe it.

“The cataloguing of evidence becomes tiresome,” said Director Conrad of the newly-originated Palingenesia Institute. “The facts are incontrovertible. There has been a loss of the power to conceive in sea squirt, lancelet, hag fish, skate, sea cat, fish, frog, alligator, snake, turtle, seal, porpoise, mouse, bat, bird, hog, horse, monkey, and man. It happened suddenly, perhaps instantaneously. We cannot find the cure. Yet it is almost certain that those children already in the womb will be the last born on Earth. We do not know whether it is from a natural cause or an enemy has done this to us. We have for ten months, tested nearly everything in the world and we have found no answer. Yet, oddly enough, there is no panic.”

“Except among ourselves,” said Appleby, his assistant, “whose province is its study. But the people have accepted it so completely that their main interest now is in the world sweepstakes, with the total sums wagered now in the billions.”

“Yes, the betting on the last child to be born in the world. It will prove one point, at least. The old legal limit on posthumous paternity was a year and a day. Will it be surpassed? The Algerian claimant on all evidence has nearly three months to go. And the betters on the Afghan have not yet given up. The Spanish Pretender is being delayed, according to rumor, medically, and there are some pretty angry protests about this. It is not at all fair; we know that. But then a comprehensive set of rules was never drawn up to cover all nations; Spain simply chose not to join the pact. But there may be trouble if the Spanish backers try to collect.”

“And there is also a newly heard of Mexican claimant.”

“I give little credit to this Juanita-Come-Lately. If she was to be a serious contestant why was she not known of before?”

The Algerian claimant, however, was the winner. And the time was an unbelievable three hundred and eighty-eight days. So the last child on Earth, in all likelihood, had been born.

There were now about thirty institutes working on the problem, most of them on an international basis. Thirteen years had gone by and one hope had died. This was that those already in the womb at the time of catastrophe might themselves prove to be fertile. It was now seen that this would not prove so, unless for some reason it was to be quite a delayed fertility.

The Cosmic Causes Council had by no means come to a dead end. It had come to so many live ends as to be even more bewildering.

“The point,” said Hegnar, in one of his yearly summaries, “is not whether sterility could have been caused by cosmic forces. Of course it could have been. It could have been caused in twenty ways. The miracle is that fertility had ever been possible. There must have been a shield built in for every danger. We know but scantily what some of them are. We do not know which has failed or why.”

“And could the failure have been caused by an enemy?” asked an interlocutor.

“It could have been, certainly. Almost by definition we must call an enemy anything that can harm us. But that it was a conscious enemy is something else again. Who can say what cosmic forces are conscious? Or even what it means to be conscious?”

However, the Possibility Searcher Institute had some spotted success. It had worked out a test, a valid test, of determining whether an individual yet remaining had the spark of possible fertility. And in only a few million tests it had found one male shrew, one male gannet, no less than three males of the yellow perch, one female alligator, and one female mud puppy, all of whom still possessed the potential. This was encouraging, but it did not solve the problem. No issue could be obtained from any possible pairing of these; not that it wasn't tried.

And when the possibility test was run on all the humans of the Earth, then it was that incredible and unsuspected success crowned the efforts of the institute. For, of a bare three billion persons tested, there were two who tested positive; and (good fortune beyond all hoping), one was male and the other was female.

So then the problem was solved. A few years had been lost, it is true, and several generations would be required to get the thing on a sound footing again. But life had been saved. Civilization could yet be transmitted. All was not lost.

Musha ibn Scmuel was an Arabian black, an unthrifty man of tenuous income. His occupation on the cardex was given as thief, but this may have been a euphemism. He was middle-aged and full of vigor, a plain man innocent of shoes or subtlety. He was guilty neither of the wine hatred of the Musselman nor the garrulousness of the Greek. He possessed his soul in quietude and Port Said whiskey and seldom stole more than he needed. And he had a special competence shared by no man in the world.

Cecilia Clutt was an attractive and snooty spinster of thirty-five. She was a person of inherited as well as acquired wealth, and was an astute business woman and amateur of the arts. She did have a streak of stubbornness in her, but seldom revealed it unless she was crossed.

So, the first time she said no, it was hardly noticed. And the second time she said it, it was felt that she didn't quite understand the situation. So it was Carmody Overlark, the silky diplomat, who came to reason with her.

“You are the sole hope of the human race,” he said to her. “In a way, you are the new Eve.”

“I have heard the first one spoken badly of,” said Cecilia. “Yet her only fault was that she could be talked into something. I cannot.”

“But this is important.”

“Not really. If it is our time to disappear, then let us disappear with dignity. What you suggest is without it. It would leave us a little less than human.”

“Miss Clutt, this is a world problem. You are only an individual.”

“I am not only an individual. There is no such thing as only an individual. If ever a person can be spoken of as only an individual, then humanity has already failed.”

“We have tried reason. Now by special emergency legislation, we are empowered to employ compulsion.”

“We will see. I always did enjoy a good fight.”

Those who read the State Histories of the period will know that it did not come off. But the reasons given there are garbled. “Unforeseen circumstances” cover a multitude of failures. But what really happened was this.

Musha ibn S. had been tractable enough. Though refusing to fly, he had come on shipboard readily. And it was not till they were out of the Inland Sea and on the Atlantic that he showed a certain unease. Finally he asked, reasonably enough, to be shown a picture of his bride. But his reaction on seeing it was not reasonable.

He screamed like a dying camel. And he jumped overboard. He was a determined swimmer and he was heading for home. A boat was put out and it gained on him. But, as it came up to him, he sounded. How deep he dived is not known, but he was never seen again.

On hearing of this, Cecilia Clutt was a little uncertain for the first time in her life. Just to be sure, she asked for a copy of the picture.

“Oh, that one,” said Cecilia. “It is quite a nice picture, really. It flatters me a little. But what an odd reaction. What a truly odd reaction.”

There were repercussions on the economy. The primary schools were now all closed, except for a few turned over to retarded children. In a year or two the high schools would close also. The colleges would perhaps always be maintained, for adult education, and for their expanding graduate schools. Yet the zest for the future had diminished, even though the personal future of nobody had been abridged. New construction had almost ceased and multi-bedroom homes became a drag on the market. In a very few years there would be no additions at all to the workforce. Soon there would be no more young soldiers for the armies. And soon the last eyes ever would see the world with the poetic clearness that often comes with adolescence.

There had been a definite letdown in morals. Morals have declined in every generation since the first one, which itself left something to be desired. But this new generation was different. It was a tree that could not bear fruit, a hard-barked, selfish tree. Yet what good to look at it and shudder for the future? The future had already been disposed of.

Now there was a new hobby, a mania that swept the world, the Last Man Clubs, millions of them. Who would be the last person alive on Earth?

But still the institutes labored. The Capsule Institute in particular labored for the codification and preservation of all knowledge. For whom? For those who might come after. Who? Of what species? But still they worked at it.

And the oddest of the institutes was the Bare Chance Transmission Society. In spite of all derision and mockery, it persevered in its peculiar aim: to find some viable creature that could be educated or adapted or mutated to absorb human knowledge and carry on once more the human tradition.

What creature? What possible strain could it be from? What creature on Earth was unaffected?

Well, the largest of them was the giant squid. But it was not promising. It had shown no development in many millions of years; it did not seem capable of development or education. And, moreover, there are difficulties of rapport with a creature that only can live in the deep sea.

There were the insects. Bees and ants were capable of organization, though intelligence has been denied them. Spiders showed certain rugged abilities, and fruit flies. Special committees were appointed to study each. And then there were the fleas. Old flea-circus grifters were brought out of retirement and given positions of responsibility and power. If fleas could really be taught, then these men could teach them. But though fleas can be taught to wear microscopic spectacles they cannot be taught to read. It all seemed pretty futile.

And there were the crayfish, the snails, the starfish, the sea cucumber. There were the fresh water flatworm and the liver fluke. There were the polyp, the sponge, the cephalopod. But, after all, none of them was of the main line. They were of the ancestry that had failed. And what of the noble genealogy that had succeeded, that which had risen above all and had given civilization, the chordata? Of that noble line, was there nothing left? What was the highest form still producing?

McGonigal's Worm.

It was discouraging.

But for the careful study of M. W., as it was now known, a great new institute was now created. And to the M. W. Institute was channeled all the talent that seemed expedient.

And one of the first to go to work for the institute in a common capacity was a young lady of thirty-odd named Georgina Hickle. Young lady? Yes. Georgina was within months of being the youngest woman in the world. She was a scatter-brained wife and disliked worms. But one must work and there were at that time no other jobs open.

But she was not impressed by the indoctrination given in this new laboratory.

“You must change your whole way of thinking,” said the doctor who briefed them. “We are seeking new departures. We are looking for any possible breakthrough. You must learn to think of M. W. as the hope of the world.”

“Oog,” said Georgina.

“You must think of M. W. as your very kindred, as your cousin.”

“Oog,” said Georgina.

“You must think of him as your little brother that you have to teach, as your very child, as your cherished son.”

“Oog, oog,” said Georgina, for she disliked worms.

Nor was she happy on the job. She was not good at teaching worms. She believed them both stupid and stubborn. They did not have her sympathy, and after a few weeks they seemed to make her sick.

But her ailment was a mysterious one. None of the young doctors had ever seen anything like it. And it was contagious. Other women in the bright new laboratory began to show similar symptoms. Yet contagion there was impossible, such extreme precautions had been taken for the protection of the worms.

But Georgina did not respond to treatment. And Hickle's Disease was definitely spreading. Sharper young doctors fresh from the greatest medical schools were calling in. They knew all that was to be known about all the new diseases. But they did not know this.

Georgina felt queer now and odd things began to happen to her. Like that very morning on her way to work, that old lady had stared at her.

“Glory be,” said the old lady, “a miracle.” And she crossed herself.

And Georgina heard other comments.

“I don't believe it. It isn't possible,” a man said.

“Well, it sure does look like it,” said a woman.

So Georgina took off at noon to visit a psychiatrist and tell him that she imagined that people were staring at her and talking about her, and what should she do. It made her uneasy, she said.

“That's not what is making you uneasy,” said the psychiatrist. Then he went with her to the laboratory to have a look at some of the other women suffering from this Hickle's Disease that he had been hearing about. After that, he called the young doctors at the laboratory aside for a consultation.

“I don't know by what authority you mean to instruct us,” said one. “You haven't been upgraded in thirty years.”

“I know it.”

“You are completely out of touch with the latest techniques.”

“I know it.”

“You have been described — accurately, I believe — as an old fogy.”

“I know that too.”

“Then what could you tell us about a new appearance like Hickle's Disease?”

“Only that it is not really new. And not, properly speaking, a disease.”

That is why, even today, there are superstitious persons who keep McGonigal's Worms in small mesh cages in the belief that they ensure fertility. It is rank nonsense and rose only because it was in the M. W. laboratory that the return of pregnancy was first noticed and was named for one of the women working there. It is a belief which dates back to that ancient generation, which very nearly became the last generation.

The official explanation is that the Earth and its solar system, for a period of thirty-five years, was in an area of mysterious cosmic radiation. And afterwards it drifted out of that area.

But there are many who still believe in the influence of the McGonigal's Worm.

The Polite People of Pudibundia

“Well, you will soon see for yourself, Marlow. Yes, I know there are peculiar stories about the place. There are about all places. The young pilots who have been there tell some amusing tales about it.”

“Yes. They say the people there are very polite.”

“That is the honorable ancestor of all understatements. One of the pilots, Conrad, told us that the inhabitants must always carry seven types of sunglasses with them. None of the Puds, you see, may ever gaze directly on another. That would be the height of impoliteness. They wear amber goggles when they go about their world at large, and these they wear when they meet a stranger. But, once they are introduced to him, then they must thereafter look on him through blue glasses. But at a blood relative they gaze through red, and at an in-law through yellow. There are equally interesting colours for other situations.”

“I would like to talk to Conrad. Not that I doubt his reports. It is the things he did not report that interest me.”

“I thought you knew he had died. Thrombosis, though he was sound enough when first certified.”

“But if they are really people, then it should be possible to understand them.”

“But they are not really people. They are metamorphics. They become people only out of politeness.”

“Detail that a little.”

“Oh, they're biped, and of a size of us. They have a chameleon-like skin that can take on any texture they please, and they possess extreme plasticity of features.”

“You mean they can take on the appearance of people at will?”

“So Bently reported.”

“I hadn't heard of him.”

“Another of the young pilots. According to Bently, not only do the Puds take on a human appearance, they take on the appearance of the human they encounter. Out of politeness, of course.”

“Quite a tribute, though it seems extreme. Could I talk to Bently?”

“Also dead. A promising young man. But he reported some of the most amusing aspects of all: the circumlocutions that the Puds use in speaking our language. Not only is the Second Person eschewed out of politeness, but in a way all the other Persons also. One of them could not call you by your name, Marlow. He would have to say: ‘One hears of one who hears of one of the noble name of Marlow. One hears of one even now in his presence.’

“Yes, that is quite a polite way of saying it. But it would seem that with all their circumlocutions they would be inefficient.”

“Yet they are quite efficient. They do things so well that it is almost imperative that we learn from them. Yet for all our contacts, for all their extreme politeness coupled with their seeming openness, we have been able to learn almost nothing. We cannot learn the secret of the amazing productivity of their fields. According to Sharper, another of the young pilots, they suggest (though so circumspectly that it seems hardly a suggestion, certainly not a criticism) that if we were more polite to our own plants, the plants would be more productive for us; and if we gave the plants the ultimate of politeness, they would give us the ultimate of production.”

“Could I talk to Sharper, or is he also — ”

“No, he is not dead. He was quite well until the last several days. Now, however, he is ailing, but I believe it will be possible for you to talk to him before you leave, if he does not worsen.”

“It would still seem difficult for the Puds to get anything done. Wouldn't a superior be too polite to give a reprimand to an inferior?”

“Probably. But Masters, who visited them, had a theory about it, which is that the inferior would be so polite and deferential that he would do his best to anticipate a wish or a desire, or would go to any lengths to learn the import of an unvoiced preference.”

“Is Masters one of the young pilots?”

“No, an old-timer.”

“Now you do interest me.”

“Dead quite a few years. But it is you who interest me, Marlow. I have been told to give you all the information that you need about the Polite People of Pudibundia. And on the subject of the Polite People, I must also be polite. But — saving your presence, and one hears of one who hears and all that — what in gehenna is a captain in homicide on the Solar Police Force going to Pudibundia about?”

“About murder. That is all I ever go anywhere about. We once had a private motto that we would go to the end of the Earth to solve a case.”

“And now you have amended your motto to ‘to the end of the Earth and beyond’?”

“We have.”

“But what have the Polite People to do with murder? Crime is unknown on Pudibundia.”

“We believe, saving their feelings, that it may not be unknown there. And what I am going to find out is this. There have been pilots for many years who have brought back stories of the Puds, and there are still a few — a very few — young pilots alive to tell those stories. What I am going to find out is why there are no old pilots around telling those stories.”

It wasn't much of a trip for a tripper, six weeks. And Marlow was well received. His host also assumed the name of Marlow out of politeness. It would have been impossible to render his own name in human speech, and it would have been impossible for him to conceive of using any name except that of his guest, with its modifiers. Yet there was no confusion. Marlow was Marlow, and his host was the One-Million-Times-Lesser-Marlow.

“We could progress much faster,” said Marlow, “if we dispense with these formalities.”

“Or assumed them as already spoken,” said the One-Million-Times-Lesser-Marlow. “For this, in private, and only in the strictest privacy, we use the deferential ball. Within it are all the formulae written minutely. You have but to pass the ball from hand to hand every time you speak, and it is as if the amenities were spoken. I will give you this for the time of your stay. I beg you never to forget to pass it from hand to hand every time you speak. Should you forget, I would not, of course, be allowed to notice it. But when you were gone, I should be forced to kill myself for the shame of it. For private reasons I wish to avoid this and therefore beseech you to be careful.”

The One-Million-Times-Lesser-Marlow (hereafter to be called OMTLM for convenience but not out of any lack of politeness) gave Marlow a deferential ball, about the size of a ping-pong ball. And so they talked.

“As a police official, I am particularly interested in the crime situation on Pud,” said Marlow. “An index of zero is — well, if I could find a politer word I would use it — suspicious. And as you are, as well as I can determine, the head police official here, though in politeness your office would have another name, I am hoping that you can give me information.”

“Saving your grace, and formula of a formula, what would you have me tell you about?”

“Suppose that a burglar (for politeness sake called something else) were apprehended by a policeman (likewise), what would happen?”

“Why, the policeman (not so called, and yet we must be frank) would rattle his glottis in the prescribed manner.”

“Rattle his gl —  I see. He would clear his throat with the appropriate sound. And then the burglar (not so called)?”

“Would be covered with shame, it is true, but not fatally. For the peace of his own soul, he would leave the site in as dignified a manner as possible.”

“With or without boodle?”

“Naturally without. One apprehended in the act is obliged to abandon his loot. That is only common politeness.”

“I see. And if the burglar (not so called) remains unapprehended? How is the loss of the goods or property recorded?”

“It goes into the coefficient of general diminution of merchandise, which is to say shrinkage, wastage or loss. At certain times or places this coefficient becomes alarmingly large. Then it is necessary to use extraordinary care; and in extreme cases a thrice removed burglar may become so ashamed of himself that he will die.”

“That he will die of shame? Or is that a euphemism?”

“Let us say that it is a euphemism of a euphemism.”

“Thrice-removed, I imagine. And what of other crimes?”

Here OMTLM rattled his glottis in a nervous manner, and Marlow hurriedly transferred his deferential ball to the other hand, having nearly forgotten it.

“There being no crime, we can hardly speak of other crimes,” said OMTLM. “But perhaps, in another manner of speaking, you refer to — ”

“Crimes of violence,” said Marlow.

“Saving your presence, and formula of a formula, what would we have to be violent about? What possible cause?”

“The usual: greed, lust, jealousy, anger, revenge, plain perversity.”

“Here also it is possible for one to die of shame, sometimes the offender, sometimes the victim, sometimes both. A jealous person might permit both his wife and her paramour to die of shame. And the State in turn might permit him to perish likewise, unless there were circumstances to modify the degree of shame; then he might still continue to live, often in circumscribed circumstances, for a set number of years. Each case must be decided on its own merits.”

“I understand your meaning. But why build a fence around it?”

“I do not know what you mean?”

“I believe that you do. Why are the Polite People of Pudibundia so polite? Is it simply custom?”

“It is more than that,” said the polite Pud.

“Then there is a real reason for it? Can you tell it to me?”

“There is a real reason for it. I cannot tell it to you now, though, and perhaps not ever. But there is a chance that you may be given a demonstration of it just before you leave. And if you are very wise, you may be able then to guess the reason. I believe that there are several who have guessed it. I hope that we will have time for other discussions before you leave our sphere. And I certainly do hope that your stay on Pudibundia is a pleasant one. And now, saving your presence, we must part. Formula of a formula.”

“Formula of a formula and all that,” said Marlow, and went to discover the pleasures of Pudibundia.

Among the pleasures of Pud was Mitzi (Miniature-Image-a-Thousand-times-removed of the Zestful Irma) who had now shaped up into something very nice. And shaped up is the correct term.

At first Marlow was shocked by the appearance of all the females he met on Pud. Crude-featured, almost horse-faced, how could they all look like that? And he was even more shocked when he realized the reason. He had become used to the men there looking like himself out of politeness. And this — this abomination — was the female version of his own appearance!

But he was a man of resources. He took from his pocket a small picture of Irma that he always carried, and showed it to the most friendly of the girls.

“Could you possibly — ”

“Look like that? Why, of course. Let me study it for a moment. Now, then.”

So the girl assumed the face of Irma.

“Incredible,” said Marlow, “except Irma is red-headed.”

“You have only to ask. The photo is not colored and so I did not know. We will try this shade to start with.”

“Close, but could you turn it just a little darker?”

“Of course.”

And there she was — Irma of the most interesting face and wonderful hair. But the picture had been of the face only. Below that the girl was a sack. If only there was some way to convey what was lacking. “You still are not pleased with me,” said the Miniature-Image-a-Thousand-times-removed of the Zestful Irma (Mitzi). “But you have only to demonstrate. Show me with your hands.”

Marlow, with his hands, sculptured in the air the figure of Irma as he remembered it, and Mitzi assumed the form, first face on, then face away, then in profile. And when they had it roughly, they perfected it, a little more here, a little less there. But there were points where his memory failed him.

“If you could only give me an idea of the convolutions of her ears,” said Mitzi, “and the underlying structure of the metatarsus. My only desire is to please. Or shall I improvise where you do not remember?”

“Yes, do that, Mitzi.”

And how that girl could improvise!

Marlow and Mitzi were now buddies. They made a large evening of it. They tied one on; formula of a formula, but they tied one on. They went on a thrice-removed bender. At the Betelgeuse Bar and Grill they partook of the cousin of the cousin of the alcohol itself in the form of the nono-rhumbeziod, made of nine kinds of rum. At the B-Flat Starlight Club, they listened to the newest and most exciting music on all Pudibundia. At Alligator John's, one checks his inhibitions at the door. Here one also checks his deferential ball.

Of course the formulae are built into the walls and at each exchange it is always assumed that they are said.

But the Iris Room is really the ultimate. The light comes through seven different layers of glass, and it is very dim when it arrives. And there the more daring remove their goggles entirely and go about without them in the multi-colored twilight. This is illegal. It is even foolhardy. There is no earthly equivalent to it. To divest oneself and disport with nudists would be tame by comparison. But Mitzi and her friends were of the reckless generation, and the Iris Room was their rendezvous.

The orgy will not be detailed here. The floor show was wild. Yet we cannot credit the rumor that the comedian was so crude as to look directly at the audience even in that colored twilight; or they so gauche as to laugh outright at the jokes, they who had been taught always to murmur “One knows of one who knows of one who ventures to smile.” Yet there was no doubting that the Iris Room was a lively place. And when they left it at dawn, Marlow was pleased and sleepy and tipsy.

There was a week of pleasure on Pudibundia: swimming with Mitzi down at West Beach, gourmandizing with Mitzi at Gastrophiles, dancing with Mitzi, pub-crawling, romancing, carrying on generally. The money exchange was favorable and Marlow was on an expense account. It was a delightful time.

But still he did not forget the job he was on, and in the midst of his pleasure he sought always for information.

“When I return here,” he said slyly, “we will do the many things that time does not allow. When I come back here — ”

“But you will not return,” said Mitzi. “Nobody ever does.”

“And why not? It is surely a pleasant place to return to. Why won't I return?”

“If you cannot guess, then I cannot tell you. Do you have to know why?”

“Yes, I have to know why. That is why I came here, to find out. To find out why the young men who come here will never be able to return here, or to anywhere else.”

“I can't tell you.”

“Then give me a clue.”

“In the Iris Room was a clue. It was not till the colour-filtered light intruded between us that we might safely take off our goggles. I would save you if I could. I want you to come back. But those higher in authority make the decisions. When you leave you will not return here, or anywhere else. But already one has spoken to one who has spoken to one who has spoken too much.”

“There is a point beyond which politeness is no longer a virtue, Mitzi.”

“I know. If I could change it, I would.”

So the period of the visit was at an end, and Marlow was at his last conference with OMTLM, following which he would leave Pudibundia, perhaps forever.

“Is there anything at all else you would like to know?” asked OMTLM.

“There is almost everything that I still want to know. I have found out nothing.”

“Then ask.”

“I don't know how. If I knew the questions to ask, it is possible that I would already know the answers.”

“Yes, that is entirely possible.”

OMTLM seemed to look at him with amused eyes. And yet the eyes were hidden behind purple goggles. Marlow had never seen the eyes of OMTLM. He had never seen the eyes of any of the Puds. Even in the Iris Room, in that strangely colored light, it had not been possible to see their eyes.

“Are you compelling me to do something?” asked Marlow.

“I may be compelling you to think of the question that has eluded you.”

“Would you swear that I have not been given some fatal sickness?”

“I can swear that to the very best of my knowledge you have not.”

“Are you laughing at me with your eyes?”

“No. My eyes have compassion for you.”

“I have to see them.”

“You are asking that?”

“Yes. I believe the answer to my question is there,” Marlow said firmly.

OMTLM took off his purple goggles. His were clear, intelligent eyes and there was genuine compassion in them.

“Thank you,” said Marlow. “If the answer is there, it still eludes me. I have failed in my mission for information. But I will return again. I will still find out what it is that is wrong here.”

“No. You will not return.”

“What will prevent me?” asked Marlow.

“Your death in a very few weeks.”

“What will I die of?”

“What did all your young pilots die of?”

“But you swore that you did not know of any sickness I could have caught here!” Marlow cried.

“That was true when I said it. It was not true a moment later.”

“Did all the pilots ask to see your eyes?”

“Yes. All. Curiosity is a failing of you Earthlings.”

“Is it that the direct gaze of the Puds kills?”

“Yes. Even ourselves it would kill. That is why we have our eyes always shielded. That is also why we erect another shield: that of our ritual politeness, so that we may never forget that too intimate an encounter of our persons may be fatal.”

“Then you have just murdered me?”

“Let us say rather that one hears of one who hears of one who killed unwillingly.”

“Why did you do it to me?” demanded Marlow.

“You asked to see my eyes. It would not be polite to refuse.”

“It takes you several weeks to kill. I can do it in a few seconds.”

“You would be wrong to try. Our second glance kills instantly.”

“Let's see if it's faster than a gun!”

But OMTLM had not lied. It is not polite to lie on Pudibundia.

Marlow died instantly.

And that is why (though you might sometimes hear a young pilot tell amusing stories immediately — oh, very immediately — on his return from Pudibundia) you will never find an old pilot who has ever been there.

Author's Commentary

The Six Fingers of Time

He began by breaking things that morning. He broke the glass of water on his night stand. He knocked it crazily against the opposite wall and shattered it. Yet it shattered slowly. This would have surprised him if he had been fully awake, for he had only reached out weakly for it.

Nor had he wakened regularly to his alarm; he had wakened to a weird, slow, low booming, yet the clock said six, time for the alarm. And the low boom, when it came again, seemed to come from the clock.

He reached out and touched it gently, but it floated off the stand at his touch and bounced around slowly on the floor. And when he picked it up again it had stopped, nor would shaking start it.

He checked the electric clock in the kitchen. This also said six o'clock, but the sweep hand did not move. In his living room the radio clock said six, but the second hand seemed stationary.

“But the lights in both rooms work,” said Vincent. “How are the clocks both stopped? Are the receptacles on a separate circuit?”

He went back to his bedroom and got his wristwatch. It also said six; and its sweep hand did not sweep.

“Now this could get silly. What is it that would stop both mechanical and electrical clocks?”

He went to the window and looked out at the advertising clock on the Mutual Insurance Building. It said six o'clock, and the second hand did not move.

“Well, it is possible that the confusion is not limited to myself. I heard once the fanciful theory that a cold shower will clear the mind. For me it never has, but I will try it. I can always use cleanliness for an excuse.”

The shower didn't work. Yes, it did: the water came now, but not like water; like very slow syrup that hung in the air. He reached up to touch it hanging down there and stretching. And it shattered like glass when he touched it, and drifted in fantastic slow globs across the room. But it had the feel of water. It was wet and pleasantly cool. And in a quarter of a minute or so it was down over his shoulders and back, and he luxuriated in it. He let it soak on his noggin, and it cleared his wits at once.

“There is not a thing wrong with me. I am fine. It is not my fault that the water is slow this morning and other things are awry.”

He reached for the towel and it tore to pieces in his hands like porous wet paper.

He now became very careful in the way he handled things. Slowly, tenderly and deftly he took them so that they would not break. He shaved himself without mishap in spite of the slow water in the lavatory also.

Then he dressed himself with the greatest caution and cunning, breaking nothing except his shoelaces, and that is likely to happen at any time.

“If there is nothing the matter with me, then I will check and see if there is anything seriously wrong with the world. The dawn was fairly along when I looked out, as it should have been. Approximately twenty minutes have passed; it is a clear morning: the sun should now have hit the top several stories of the Insurance Building.”

But it had not. It was still a clear morning, but the dawn had not brightened at all in the twenty minutes. And that big clock still said six. It had not changed.

Yet it had changed, and he knew it with a queer feeling. He pictured it as it had been before. But the sweep second hand had moved. It had swept a third of the dial.

So he pulled up a chair at the window and watched it. He realized that, though he could not see it move, yet it did make progress. He watched it for perhaps five minutes. It moved through a space of perhaps five seconds.

“Well, that is not my problem. It is that of the clock maker, either a terrestrial or a celestial one.”

But he left his rooms without a good breakfast, and he left them very early. How did he know that it was early since there was something wrong with the time? Well, it was early at least according to the sun and according to the clocks, neither of which institutions seemed to be working properly.

He left without a good breakfast because the coffee would not make and the bacon would not fry. And in plain point of fact the fire would not heat. The gas flame sprung up from the pilot like a slowly spreading stream or an unfolding flower. Then it burned far too steadily. The skillet remained cold when placed over it; nor would water even heat. It had taken at least five minutes to get the water out of the faucet in the first place.

He ate a few pieces of leftover bread and some scraps of meat.

In the street there was no motion, no real motion. A truck, first seeming at rest, moved very slowly. There was no gear in which it could move so slowly. And there was a taxi which crept along, but Charles Vincent had to look at it carefully for some time to be sure that it was in motion. Then he received a shock. He realized by the early morning light that the driver of it was dead. Dead with his eyes wide open!

Slow as it was going, and by whatever means it was moving, it should really be stopped. Vincent walked over to it, opened the door, and pulled on the brake. Then he looked into the eyes of that dead man. Was he really dead? It was hard to be sure. He felt warm. But, even as Vincent looked, the eyes of the dead man had begun to close. And close they did and open again in a matter of about twenty seconds.

This was weird. The slowly closing and opening eyes sent a chill through Vincent. And the dead man had begun to lean forward in his seat. Vincent put a hand in the middle of the man's chest to hold him upright, but he found the forward pressure to be as relentless as it was slow. He was unable to keep the dead man up.

So he let him go, watching curiously; and in a few seconds the driver's face was against the wheel. But it was almost as if it had no intention of stopping there. It pressed into the wheel with dogged force. The man would surely break his face. Vincent took several holds on the dead man and counteracted the pressure somewhat. Yet the face was being damaged, and if things were normal blood would have flowed.

The man had been dead so long however, that though he was still warm his blood must have congealed, for it was fully two minutes before it began to ooze.

“Whatever I have done, I have done enough damage,” said Vincent. “And, in whatever nightmare I am in, I am likely to do further harm if I meddle more. I had better leave it alone.”

He walked on down the street. Yet whatever vehicles he saw now were moving with an incredible slowness as though driven by some fantastic gear reduction. And there were people here and there frozen solid. It was a chilly morning, but it was not that cold. They were immobile in positions of motion, as though they were playing the children's game of Statues.

“How is it,” said Charles Vincent, “that this young girl, who I believe works across the street from us, should have died standing up and in full stride? But, no. She is not dead. Or if so she died with a very alert expression. And, oh my God, she's doing it too!”

For he realized that the eyes of the girl were closing, and in a space of a few seconds they had completed their cycle and were open again. Also, and this was even stranger, she had moved, moved forward in full stride. He would have timed her if he could. How could he time her when all the clocks in the world were crazy? Yet she must have been taking about two steps a minute.

Vincent went into the cafeteria. The early morning crowd that he had often watched through the window was there. The girl who made flapjacks in the window had just flipped one and it hung in the air. Then it floated over as though caught by a slight breeze, and sank slowly down as if settling in water.

The early morning breakfasters, like the people in the street, were all dead in this new way, moving with almost imperceptible motion. And all had apparently died in the act of drinking coffee, eating eggs, or munching toast. And if there was only time enough, there was an even chance that they would get the drinking, eating, and munching done with, for there was a shadow of movement in them all.

The cashier had the register drawer open and money in her hand, and the hand of the customer was out-stretched for it. In time, somewhere in the new leisurely time, the hands would come together and the change be given. And so it happened. It may have been a minute and a half, or two minutes, or two and a half. It is always hard to judge time, and now it had become all but impossible.

“I am still hungry,” said Charles Vincent, “but it would be foolhardy to wait on the service here. Should I help myself? They would not mind if they are dead. And, if they are not dead, in any case it seems that I am invisible to them.”

He wolfed several rolls. He opened a bottle of milk and held it upside-down over his glass while he ate another roll. Liquids had all become so perversely slow.

But he felt better for his erratic breakfast. He would have paid for it, but how?

He left the cafeteria and walked about the town as it seemed still to be quite early, though one could depend on neither sun nor clock for the time any more. The traffic lights were unchanging. He sat for a long time in a little park and watched the town and the big clock in the Commerce Building tower; but like all the clocks it was either stopped or the hand would creep too slowly to be seen.

It must have been just about an hour till the traffic lights changed, but change they did at last. By picking a point on the building across the street and watching what moved by it, he found that the traffic did indeed move. In a minute or so, the entire length of a car would pass a given point.

He had, he recalled, been very far behind in his work, and it had been worrying him. He decided to go to the office, early as it was or seemed to be.

He let himself in. Nobody else was there. He resolved not to look at the clock and to be very careful of the way he handled all objects because of his new propensity for breaking things. This considered, all seemed normal here. He had said the day before that he could hardly catch up on his work if he worked for two days solid. He now resolved at least to work steadily until something happened, whatever it was.

For hour after hour he worked on his tabulations and reports. Nobody else had arrived. Could something be wrong? Certainly something was wrong. But today was not a holiday. That was not it.

Just how long can a stubborn and mystified man work away at his task? It was hour after hour after hour. He did not become hungry nor particularly tired. And he did get through a lot of work.

“It must be half done. However it has happened, I have caught up at least a day's work; I will keep on.”

He must have worked silently for another eight or ten hours.

He was caught up completely on his back work.

“Well, to some extent I can work into the future. I can head-up and carry over. I can put in everything but the figures of the field reports.”

And he did so.

“It will be hard to bury me in work again. I could almost coast for a day. I don't even know what day it is, but I must have worked twenty hours straight through and nobody has arrived. Perhaps nobody ever will arrive. If they are moving with the speed of the people in the nightmare outside, it is no wonder they have not arrived.”

He put his head down in his arms on the desk. The last thing he saw before he closed his eyes was the misshapen left thumb that had always been his and which he had always tried to conceal a little by the way handled he his hands.

“At least I know that I am still myself. I'd know myself anywhere by that.”

Then he went to sleep at his desk.

Jenny came in with a quick click-click-click of high heels, and he wakened to the noise.

“What are you doing dozing at your desk, Mr. Vincent? Have you been here all night?”

“I don't know, Jenny. Honestly I don't.”

“I was only teasing. Sometimes when I get here a little early I take a catnap myself.”

The clock said six minutes till eight, and the second hand was sweeping normally. Time had returned to the world. Or to him. But had all that early morning of his been a dream? Then it had been a very efficient dream. He had accomplished work he could hardly have done in two days. And it was the same day that it was supposed to be.

He went to the water fountain. The water now behaved normally. He went to the window. The traffic was behaving as it should. Though sometimes slow and sometimes snarled, yet it was in the pace of the regular world.

The other workers arrived. They were not balls of fire, but neither was it necessary to observe them for several minutes to be sure that they weren't dead.

“It did have its advantages,” Charles Vincent said. “I would be afraid to have it permanently, but it would be handy to go into the state for a few minutes a day and accomplish the business of hours. I may be a case for the doctor. But just how would I go about telling a doctor what was bothering me?”

Now it had surely been less than two hours from his first rising till the time that he wakened from his second sleep to the noise of Jenny. And how long that second sleep had been, or in which time enclave, he had no idea. But how account for it all? He had spent a long time in his own rooms, much longer than ordinary in his confusion. He had walked the city mile after mile in his puzzlement. And he had sat in the little park for hours and studied the situation. And he had sat and worked at his own desk for an outlandish long time.

Well, he would go to the doctor. A man is obliged to refrain from making a fool of himself to the world at large, but to his lawyer, his priest, or his doctor he will sometimes have to come as a fool. By their callings they are restrained from scoffing openly.

He went to the doctor at noon.

Dr. Mason was not particularly a friend. Charles Vincent realized with some unease that he did not have any particular friends, only acquaintances and associates. It was as though he were of a species slightly apart from his fellows. He wished a little now that he had a particular friend.

But Dr. Mason was an acquaintance of some years, had the reputation of being a good doctor, and besides, Vincent had now arrived at his office and been shown in. He would either have to — well, that was as good a beginning as any.

“Doctor, I am in a predicament. I will either have to invent some symptoms to account for my visit here, or to make an excuse and bolt, or tell you what is bothering me, even though you will think that I am a new sort of idiot.”

“Vincent, every day people invent symptoms to cover their visits here, and I know that they have lost their nerve about their real reason for coming. And every day people do make excuses and bolt. But experience tells me that I will get a larger fee if you tackle the third alternative. And, Vincent, there is no new sort of idiot.”

“It may not sound so silly if I tell it quickly,” Vincent said. “I awoke this morning to some very puzzling incidents. It seemed that time itself had stopped, or that the whole world had gone into super-slow motion. The water would neither flow nor boil, and the fire would not heat food. The clocks, which I at first believed had stopped, crept along at perhaps a minute an hour. The people I met in the streets appeared dead, frozen in life-like attitudes. It was only by watching them for a very long time that I perceived that they did indeed have motion. One taxi I saw creeping slower than the most backward snail, and a dead man at the wheel of it. I went to it, opened the door, and put on the brake. I realized after a time that the man was not dead. But he bent forward and broke his face on the steering wheel. It must have taken a full minute for his head to travel no more than ten inches, yet I was unable to prevent him from hitting the wheel. I then did other bizarre things in a world that had died on its feet. I walked many miles through the city, and then I sat for countless hours in the park. I went to the office and let myself in. I accomplished work that must have taken me twenty hours. I then took a nap at my desk. When I awoke on the arrival of others it was six minutes till eight in the morning of the same day, today. Not two hours had passed from my rising, and time was back to normal. But there were things that happened in that time that could never be compressed into two hours.”

“One question first, Vincent. Did you actually accomplish the work, the work of many hours?”

“I did. It was done and done in that time. It did not become undone on the return of time to normal.”

“A second question: had you been worried about your work, about being behind in your work?”

“Yes. Emphatically.”

“Then here is one explanation. You retired last night. But very shortly afterward you arose in a state of somnambulism. There are facets of sleep-walking which we do not at all understand. The time-out-of-focus interludes were parts of a walking dream of yours. You dressed and went to your office and worked all night. It is possible to do routine tasks while in a somnambulistic state rapidly and even feverishly, to perform prodigies. You may have fallen into a normal sleep there when you had finished, or you may have been awakened directly from your somnambulistic trance on the arrival of your co-workers. There. That is a plausible and workable explanation. In the case of an apparently bizarre happening it is always well to have a rational explanation to fall back on. This will usually satisfy a patient and put his mind to rest. But often the explanation does not satisfy me.”

“Your explanation very nearly satisfies me, Dr. Mason, and it does put my mind considerably at rest. I am sure that in a short while I will be able to accept it completely. But why does it not satisfy you?”

“One reason is a man, a taxi-driver, whom I treated very early this morning. He had his face smashed, and he had seen — or almost seen — a ghost: a ghost of incredible swiftness that was more sensed than seen. The ghost opened the door of his car while it was going a full speed, jerked on the brake, and caused him to crack his head. This man was dazed and had a slight concussion. I have convinced him that he did not see a ghost at all, that he must have dozed at the wheel and run into something. As I say, I am harder to convince than my patients. But it may have been coincidence.”

“I hope so. But you also seem to have another reservation as to my case.”

“After quite a few years in practice, I seldom see or hear anything new. Twice before I have been told a happening or a dream on the line of what you experienced.”

“Did you convince your other patients that they were only dreams?”

“I did. Both of them. That is, I convinced them the first few times it happened to them.”

“Were they satisfied?”

“At first they were. Later not entirely. But they both died within a year of their coming to me.

“Of nothing violent, I hope.”

“Both had the most gentle deaths. That of senility extreme.”

“Oh. Well I'm too young for that.”

“Vincent, I would like you to come back in a month or so.”

“I will, if the delusion or the dream returns. Or if I do not feel well.”

After this Charles Vincent began to forget about the incident. He only recalled it with humor sometimes when again he was behind in his work.

“Well, if it gets bad enough I may do another sleepwalking jag and catch up. But if there is another aspect of time and I could enter it at will, it might often be handy.”

Charles Vincent never saw the man's face at all. It is very dark in some of those clubs and the Coq Bleu is like the inside of a tomb. Vincent went to the clubs only about once a month, sometimes after a show when he did not want to go home to bed, sometimes when he was just plain restless.

Citizens of the more fortunate states may not know of the mysteries of the clubs. In Vincent's the only bars are beer bars, and only in the clubs can a person get a drink, and only members are admitted. It is true that even such a small club as the Coq Bleu had thirty thousand members, and at a dollar a year this is a nice sideline. The little numbered membership cards cost a penny each for the printing, and the member wrote in his own name. But he was supposed to have a card or a dollar for a card to gain admittance.

But there could be no entertainment in the clubs. There was nothing there but the little bar room in the near darkness. The near darkness of the clubs was custom only but it had the force of the law.

The man was there, and then he was not, and then he was there again. And always where he sat it was too dark to see his face. “I wonder,” he said to Vincent (or to the bar at large, though there were no other customers and the bartender was asleep), “I wonder if you have read Zubarin on the relationship of extradigitalism to genius?”

“I have never heard of the work nor of the man,” said Vincent. “Doubt if either exist.”

“I am Zubarin,” said the man.

Vincent instinctively hid his misshapen left thumb. Yet it could not have been noticed in that light, and he must have been crazy to believe that there was any connection between it and the man's remark. It was not truly a double thumb. He was not an extradigital, nor was he a genius.

“I refuse to become interested in you,” said Vincent. “I am on the verge of leaving. I dislike waking the bartender, but I did want another drink.”

“Sooner done than said.”

“What is?”

“Your glass is full.”

“It is? So it is. Is it a trick?”

“Trick is a name for anything either too frivolous or too mystifying for us to comprehend. But on one long early morning a month ago you also could have done the trick, and nearly as well.”

“Could I have? How do you know about my long early morning — assuming there to have been such?”

“I watched you for a while. Few others have the equipment with which to watch you when you're in the aspect.”

So they were silent for some time, and Vincent watched the clock and was ready to go.

“I wonder,” said the man in the dark, “if you have read Schimmelpenninck on the sexagintal and the duodecimal in the Chaldee Mysteries.”

“I have not, and I doubt if anyone else has. I would guess that you are also Schimmelpenninck, and that you have just made up the name on the spur of the moment.”

“I am Schimm, it is true, but I made up the name on the spur of the moment many years ago.”

“I am a little bored with you,” said Vincent, “but I would appreciate it if you'd do your glass-filling trick once more.”

“I have just done so again. And you are not bored; you are frightened.”

“Of what?” asked Vincent, whose glass had in fact filled again.

“Of reentering a dream that you are not sure was a dream. But there are often advantages to being both invisible and inaudible.”

“Can you be invisible?”

“Was I not so when I went behind the bar just now and fixed you a drink?”

“How?”

“A man in full stride goes at the rate of about five miles an hour. Multiply that by sixty, which is the number of time. When I leave my stool and go behind the bar I go at the rate of three hundred miles an hour. So I am invisible to you, particularly if I move while you blink.”

“One thing does not match. You might have got around there and back. But you could not have poured.”

“Shall I say that mastery over liquids and other objects is not given to beginners? But for us there are many ways to outwit the slowness of matter.”

“I believe that you are a hoaxer. Do you know Dr. Mason?”

“I know of him, and that you went to see him. I know of his futile attempts to penetrate a certain mystery. But I have not talked to him of you.”

“I still believe that you are a phony. Could you put me back into the state of my dream of a month ago?”

“It was not a dream. But I could put you again into that state.”

“Prove it.”

“Watch the clock. Do you believe that I can point my finger at it and stop it for you? It is already stopped for me.”

“No, I don't believe it. Yes, I guess I have to, since I see that you have just done it. But it may be another trick. I don't know where the clock is plugged in.”

“Neither do I. Come to the door. Look at every clock you can see. Are they not all stopped?”

“Yes. Maybe the power has gone off all over town.”

“You know it has not. There are still a few lighted windows in those buildings, though it is quite late.”

“Why are you playing with me? I am neither on the inside nor the outside. Either tell me the secret or say that you will not tell me.”

“The secret isn't a simple one. It can only be arrived at after all philosophy and learning has been assimilated.”

“One man cannot arrive at that in one lifetime.”

“Not in an ordinary lifetime. But the secret of the secret, if I may put it that way, is that one must use part of it as a tool in learning. You could not learn all in one lifetime but, by being permitted the first step, to be able to read, say, sixty books in the time it took you to read one, to pause for a minute in thought and use up only one second, to get the day's work accomplished in eight minutes and so have time for other things — by such ways one may make a beginning. I will warn you, though. Even for the most intelligent it is a race.”

“A race? What race?”

“It is a race between success, which is life, and failure, which is death.”

“Let us skip the melodrama. But how do I get into the state and out of it?”

“Oh, that is simple, so easy that it seems like a gadget. Here are two diagrams I will draw. Note them carefully. This first — envision it in your mind, and you are in the state. Now the second one — envision, and you are out of it.”

“That easy?”

“That deceptively easy. The trick is to learn why it works — if you want to succeed, meaning to live.”

So Charles Vincent left him and went home, walking the mile in a little less than fifteen seconds. But he still had not seen the face of the man.

There are advantages intellectual, monetary, and amorous in being able to enter the accelerated state at will. It is a fox game. One must be careful not to be caught at it, nor to break or harm that which is in the normal state.

Vincent could always find eight or ten minutes unobserved to accomplish the day's work. And a fifteen-minute coffee break could turn into a fifteen hour romp around the town.

There was this boyish pleasure in becoming a ghost: to appear and stand motionless in front of an onrushing train and to cause the scream of the whistle, and to be in no danger, being able to move five or ten times as fast as the train; to enter and to sit suddenly in the middle of a select group and see them stare, and then virtually to disappear from the middle of them; to interfere in sports and games, entering the prize ring and tripping, hampering, or slugging the unliked fighter; to blue-shot down the hockey ice, skating at fifteen hundred miles an hour and scoring dozens of goals at either end while the people only know that something odd is happening.

There was pleasure in being able to shatter windows by chanting little songs, for the voice (when in the state) will be to the world at sixty times its regular pitch, though normal to oneself. And for this reason also he was inaudible to others.

There was fun in petty thieving and tricks. He could take a wallet from a man's pocket and be two blocks away when the victim turned at the feel. He could come back and stuff it into the man's mouth as he bleated to a policeman.

He could come into the home of a lady writing a letter, snatch up the paper and write three lines on it and vanish before the scream got out of her throat.

He could take shoe and sock off a man's foot while he was in full stride. No human face since the beginning of time ever showed such a look of pure astonishment as that of the man to whom this first happened. Discovering oneself half barefoot of a sudden in a crowded street has no parallel in all experience.

Vincent could paint the eyeglasses of a man dark green, and this would somehow alter the man's whole personality. He'd gulp and wave his arms and develop new mannerisms. Or as a victim took the first puff of a cigarette Vincent would take it from his mouth, smoke it quickly down to the hot nub, and replace it.

He would take food off forks on the way to mouths, put baby turtles and live fish into bowls of soup between spoonfuls of the eater. And, as a cook cracked an egg over the griddle, he would scoop up the soft contents in mid-air and set down a full-grown quacking duck to the discomfort of both cook and bird.

He would lash the hands of hand-shakers tightly together with stout cord, and tie together the shoelaces of dancing partners. Or he would remove the strings of guitars while they were being played, or steal the mouthpiece of a horn while the operator paused for breath. He unzippered persons of both sexes when they were at their most pompous, and it was on his account (probably) that Feldman was not elected mayor. This was something that happened on the public platform, and Feldman was completely undone.

This thing can remain a pleasant novelty for some time. There was, of course, the difficulty of moving large objects. Vincent always wanted to intrude a horse into the midst of a certain assembly. But a horse is too large to be moved in an accelerated time. Vincent drew out the diagram that the faceless man had given him, and presented it to the only horse he knew. But the horse did not get the idea. It would not go into the accelerated state.

“I will either have to find a smarter horse or a new method of moving heavy objects,” said Charles Vincent.

Vincent would sometimes handcuff two strangers together as they stood waiting for a traffic light to change. He would lash leaners to lamp posts, and steal the teeth from the mouths of those afflicted with dentures.

He would write cryptic and frightening messages in grease pencil on a plate just as a diner began to fill it. He changed cards from one player's hands to another's while play was in progress, and he interfered perversely with billiard balls.

He removed golf balls from tees during the back swing, and left notes written large “YOU MISSED ME” pinned to the ground with the tee.

He stole baseballs from catchers' mitts at the instant of impact, and left instead small unfledged live sparrows. It was found that there is nothing in the rule book to cover this.

Or he shaved moustaches and heads. Returning repeatedly to one woman he disliked, he clipped her bald and gilded her pate.

With tellers counting their money he interfered outrageously and enriched himself. He snipped cigarettes in two with a scissors and blew out matches and lighters, so that one frustrated man actually broke down and cried at his inability to get a light.

He removed the weapons from the holsters of policemen and put cap pistols and water guns in their places. And he liked to rip off one sleeve only from the coat of a walking gentleman. There is something funnier about one sleeve missing than two.

He unclipped the leashes of dogs and substituted little toy dogs rolling on wheels. He put frogs in water glasses and left lighted firecrackers on bridge tables. He reset wristwatches on wrists; and played cruel tricks in men's rooms, causing honest gentleman to wet themselves.

“I was always a boy at heart,” said Charles Vincent.

Also during those first few days of the controlled new state, he established himself materially, acquiring wealth by devious ways, and opening bank accounts in various cities under various names, against a time of possible need.

Nor did he ever feel any shame for the tricks that he played on unaccelerated humanity. For the people, when he was in the state, were as statues to him, hardly living, barely moving, unseeing, unhearing. And it is no shame to show disrespect to such comical statues.

And also, and again because he was a boy at heart, he had fun with the girls.

“I am one mass of black and blue marks,” said Jenny one day. “My lips are sore and my front teeth are loosened. I don't know what in the world is the matter with me.”

Yet he had not meant to bruise or harm her. He was rather fond of her and he resolved to be much more careful. Yet it was fun, when he was in the state and so invisible to her because of his speed, to kiss her here and there in out-of-the-way places and show her other hallmarks of affection. She made a nice statue and it was good sport. And there were others.

“You look suddenly older,” said one of his co-workers one day. “Are you taking care of yourself? Are you worried?”

“I am not,” said Vincent. “I was never happier in my life.”

But now there was time for so many things, in fact, everything. There was no reason why he could not master anything in the world, when he could take off for fifteen minutes and gain fifteen hours. Vincent was a rapid but careful reader. He could now read from a hundred and twenty to two hundred books in an evening and night; and he slept in an accelerated state and could get a full night's sleep in eight minutes.

He first acquired a knowledge of the languages. A quite extensive reading knowledge of a language can be acquired in three hundred hours of world time, or three hundred minutes (five hours) of accelerated time. And if one takes the tongues in order, from the most familiar to the most remote, there is no real difficulty. He acquired fifty for a starter, and could always add another any evening that he found he had a need for it.

And at the same time he began to assemble and consolidate knowledge. Of literature, properly speaking, there are no more than ten thousand books that are really worth reading and falling in love with. These were gone through with high pleasure, and two or three thousand of them were important enough to be reserved for future rereading.

History, however, is very uneven. It is necessary to read texts and sources that for form are not worth reading. And the same with philosophy. Mathematics and science, pure or physical, could not, of course, be covered with the same speed. Yet, with time available, all could be mastered. There is no concept ever expressed by any human mind that cannot be comprehended by any other normal human mind, if time is available, and if it is taken in the proper order and context and with the proper preparatory work.

And often, and now more often, Vincent felt that he was touching the fingers of the secret. And always, when he came near it, it had a little bit of the smell of the Pit.

For he had pegged out all the main points of the history of man, or rather most of the tenable, or at least possible theories of the history of man. It was hard to hold the main line of it: that double road of rationality and revelation that should lead always to a fuller and fuller development, to an unfolding and growth and perfectibility. Sometimes he felt that he was trespassing on the history of something other than man.

For the main line of the account was often obscure and all but obliterated, and traced through fog and miasma. Vincent had accepted the Fall of Man and the Redemption as the cardinal points of history. But he began to feel now that neither had happened only once, that both were of constant recurrence; that there was a hand reaching up from that old Pit with its shadow over man. And he came to picture that hand in his dreams — for his dreams were especially vivid when in the state — as a six-digited monster reaching out. He began to realize that the thing he was caught in was dangerous and deadly.

Very dangerous.

Very deadly.

One of the weird books that he often returned to and which continually puzzled him was The Relationship of Extradigitalism to Genius, written by the man whose face he had never seen, in one of his manifestations.

It promised more than it delivered, and it intimated more than it said. Its theory was tedious and tenuous, holstered with undigested mountains of doubtful data. It left Vincent unconvinced that persons of genius — even if it could be agreed who or what they were — had often the oddity of extra fingers or toes, or the vestiges of them. And it puzzled him what possible difference it could make.

Yet there were hints here of a Corsican who commonly kept a hand hidden; of an earlier and more bizarre commander who always wore a mailed glove; of another man with a glove between the two; hints that the multiplex adept, Leonardo himself, who sometimes drew the hands of men and more often those of monsters with six fingers, had had the touch. There was a comment on Caesar, not conclusive, to the same effect.

It is known that Alexander had a minor deformity. It is not known what it was. This man made it seem that this was it. And it was averred of Gregory and Augustine, of Benedict and Albert and Aquinas. Yet a man with a deformity could not enter the priesthood; if they had it, it must have been in vestigial form.

There were cases for Charles Magnus and Mahmud, for Saladin the horseman and for Akhnaton the king; for Homer — a Seleucid-Greek statuette shows him with six fingers strumming an unidentified instrument while reciting; cases for Pythagoras, for Buonarroti, Santi, Theotokópoulos, van Rijn, Robusti. And going farther back in time, and less subject to proof, they became much more numerous.

Zubarin cataloged eight thousand of them. He maintained that they were geniuses. And that they were extra digitals.

Charles Vincent grinned and looked down at his misshapen or double thumb.

“At least I am in good though monotonous company. But what in the name of triple time is he driving at?”

And it was not long afterward that Vincent was examining cuneiform tablets in State Museum. These were a broken and not continuous series on the theory of numbers, tolerably legible to the now encyclopedic Charles Vincent. And the series read in part:

On the divergence of the basis itself and the confusion caused by — for it is Five, or it is Six, or Ten or Twelve, or Sixty or One Hundred, or Three Hundred and Sixty or the Double Hundred, the Thousand. The reason, not clearly understood by the People, is that Six and the Dozen are First, and Sixty is a compromise in condescending to the people.

For the Five, the Ten are late, and are no older than the People themselves. It is said, and credited, that the People began to count by Fives and Tens from the number of fingers on their hands. But before the People the — , for the reason that they had — , counted by Sixes and Twelves. But Sixty is the number of time, divisible by both, for both must live together in Time, though not on the same plane of time — 

Much of the rest was scattered. It was while trying to set the hundreds of unordered clay tablets in proper sequence that Charles Vincent created the legend of the ghost in the museum.

For he spent his multi-hundred-hour nights there studying and classifying. Naturally he could not work without light, and naturally he could be seen when he sat still at his studies. But as the slow-moving guards attempted to close in on him, he would move to avoid them, and his speed made him invisible to them. They were a nuisance and had to be discouraged. He belabored them soundly and they became less eager to try to capture him.

His only fear was that they would sometime try to shoot him to see if he were ghost or human. He could avoid a seen shot which would come at no more than two and a half times his own greatest speed. But an unperceived shot could penetrate dangerously, even fatally, before he twisted away from it.

Vincent had fathered legends of other ghosts, that of the Central Library, that of the University Library, that of the John Charles Underwood Jr. Technical Library. This plurality of ghosts tended to cancel out each other and bring believers into ridicule. Even those who had seen him as a ghost did not admit that they believed in ghosts.

Charles Vincent had gone back to Dr. Mason for his monthly checkup.

“You look terrible,” said the doctor. “Whatever it is, you have changed. If you have the means you should take a long rest.”

“I have the means,” said Vincent, “and that is just what I will do. I'll take a rest for a year or two.”

He had begun to begrudge the time that he must spend at the world's pace. From this time on he was regarded as a recluse. He was silent and unsociable, for he found it a nuisance to come back to the common state to engage in conversation, and in his special state the voices were too slow-pitched to intrude on his consciousness.

Except that of the man whose face he had never seen.

“You are making very tardy progress,” said the man. Once more they were in a dark club. “Those who do not show more progress we cannot use. After all, you are only a vestigial. It is probable that you have very little of the ancient race in you. Fortunately those who do not progress destroy themselves. You had not imagined that there were only two phases of time, had you?”

“Lately I have come to suspect that there are many more,” said Charles Vincent.

“And you understand that one step only cannot succeed?”

“I understand that the life that I have been living is in direct violation of all that we know of the laws of mass, momentum and acceleration, as well as those of conservation of energy, the potential of the human person, the moral compensation, the golden mean, and the capacity of human organs. I know that I cannot multiply energy and experience sixty times without increase of food intake, and yet I do it. I know that I cannot live on eight minutes of sleep in twenty-four hours, but I do that also. I know that I cannot reasonably crowd four thousand years of experience into one lifetime, yet unreasonably I do not see what will prevent it. But you say that I will destroy myself?”

“Those who take only the first step will destroy themselves.”

“And how does one take the second step?”

“At the proper moment you will be given the choice.”

“I have the most uncanny feeling that I will refuse the choice.”

“Yes, from present indications you will refuse it. You are fastidious.”

“You have a smell about you, Old Man Without a Face. I know now what it is. It is the smell of the Pit.”

“Are you so slow to learn that? But that is its name.”

“It is the mud from the Pit, the same from which the clay tablets were found, from the old land between the rivers. I've dreamed of the six-fingered hand reaching up from that Pit and overshadowing us all. From that slime!”

“Do not forget that according to another recension Another made the People from that same slime.”

“And I have read, Old Man: ‘The People first counted by Fives and Tens from the number of fingers on their hands. But before the People the — , for the reason that they had — , counted by Sixes and Twelve.’ But time has left blanks on those tablets.”

“Yes. Time, in one of its manifestations, has deftly and with a purpose left those blanks.”

“I cannot discover the name of the thing that goes into one of those blanks. Can you?”

“I am part of the name that goes into one of those blanks.”

“And you are the Man Without a Face. But why is it that you overshadow and control people? And to what purpose?”

“It will be long before you know those answers.”

“When the choice comes to me, it will bear very careful weighing. But tell me, Man without a Face who comes from the Pit, are not pits and men without faces very nineteenth-century Gothic?”

“There was a temper in that century that came very close to uncovering us.”

After that a chill descended on the life of Charles Vincent, for all that he still possessed his exceptional powers. And now he seldom indulged in pranks.

Except with Jennifer Parkey.

It was unusual that he should be drawn to her. He knew her only slightly in the common world, and she was at least fifteen years his senior. But she now appealed to him for her youthful qualities, and all his pranks with her were gentle ones.

For one thing this spinster did not frighten, nor did she begin the precaution of locking her doors, never having bothered with such things before. He would come behind her and stroke her hair, and she would speak out calmly with that sort of quickening in her voice:

“Who are you? Why won't you let me see you? You are a friend, aren't you? Are you a man, or are you something else? If you can caress me why can't you talk to me? Please let me see you. I promise I won't hurt you.”

It was as though she could not imagine that anything strange would hurt her. Or again when he hugged her or kissed her on the nape, she would call: “You must be a little boy, or very like a little boy, whoever you are. You are good not to break my things when you move about. Come here and let me hold you.”

It is only very good people who have no fear at all of the unknown.

When Vincent met Jennifer in the regular world, as he now more often found occasion to do, she looked at him appraisingly, as though she guessed some sort of connection.

She said one day, “I know it is an impolite thing to say, but you do not look well at all. Have you been to a doctor?”

“Several times. But I think it is my doctor who should go to a doctor. He was always given to peculiar remarks. But now he is becoming a little unsettled.”

“If I were your doctor, I believe that I would also become a little unsettled. But you should find out what is wrong. You look terrible.”

He did not look terrible. He had lost his hair, it is true, but many men lose their hair by thirty, though not perhaps as suddenly as he had. He thought of attributing it to air resistance. After all, when he was in the state he did stride at some three hundred miles an hour. And enough of that is likely to blow the hair right off your head. And might that not also be the reason for his worsening complexion and the tireder look that appeared in his eyes? But he knew that this was nonsense. He felt no more air pressure when in his accelerated state than when in his normal state.

He had received his summons. He chose not to answer it. He did not want to be presented with the choice; he had no wish to be one with those in the Pit. But he had no intention of giving up the great advantage which he now held over nature.

“I will have it both ways,” he said. “I am already a contradiction and an impossibility. ‘You can't have your confection and eat it too.’ The proverb was only the early statement of the law of moral compensation. ‘You can't take more out of a basket than it holds.’ But for a long time I have been in violation of the laws and the balances. ‘There is no road without a turning,’ ‘Those who dance will have to pay the fiddler,’ ‘Everything that goes up comes down.’ But are proverbs really universal laws? Certainly. A sound proverb has the force of universal law, is but another statement of it. But I have contradicted the universal laws. It remains to be seen whether I have contradicted them with impunity.

“ ‘Every action has its reaction.’ If I refuse to deal with them, I will provoke a strong reaction. The Man without a Face said that it was always a race between full knowing and destruction. Very well, I will race them for it.”

They began to persecute him then. He knew that they were in a state as accelerated from his as his was from the normal. To them he was the almost motionless statue, hardly to be told from a dead man. To him they were by their speed both invisible and inaudible. They hurt him and haunted him. But still he would not answer their summons.

When the meeting took place, it was they who had to come to him, and they materialized there in his room, men without faces.

“The choice,” said one. “Well, you force us to be so clumsy as to have to voice it.”

“I will have no part of you,” said Charles Vincent. “You all smell of the Pit, of that old mud of the cuneiforms of the land between the rivers, of the people who were before the People.”

“It has endured a long time,” one of them said, “and we consider it as enduring forever. But the Garden, which was quite in the neighborhood — do you know how long the Garden lasted?”

“I don't know.”

“Not even a day. It all happened in a single day, and before nightfall they were outside. You want to throw in with something more permanent, don't you?”

“No. I don't believe that I do.”

“What have you to lose?”

“Only my hope of eternity.”

“But you don't believe in that. No man has ever really believed in eternity.”

“No man has ever either entirely believed or entirely disbelieved in it,” said Charles Vincent.

“At least it can never be proved,” said one of the faceless men. “Nothing is proved until it is over with. And in this case, if it is ever over with, then it is disproved. And all that time would one not be tempted to wonder ‘What if, after all, it ends in the next minute?’ ”

“I imagine, if we survive the flesh, we will receive some sort of surety,” said Vincent.

“But you are not sure either of surviving or receiving, nor could you accept the surety as sure. Now we have a very close approximation of eternity. When Time is multiplied by itself, and that repeated again and again, does that not approximate eternity?”

“I don't believe that it does. But I will not be of you. One of you has said that I am too fastidious. So now will you say that you'll destroy me?”

“No, we will only let you be destroyed. By yourself, you cannot win the race with destruction.”

After that Charles Vincent somehow felt more mature. He knew he was not really meant to be a poltergeist or a six-fingered thing out of the Pit. He knew that in some way he would have to pay for every minute and hour that he had gained. But what he had gained he would use to the fullest. And whatever could be accomplished by sheer acquisition of human knowledge, he would try to accomplish.

And he now startled Dr. Mason by the medical knowledge he had picked up, the while the doctor amused him by the concern he showed for Vincent. For he felt fine. He was perhaps not as active as he had been, but that was only because he had become dubious of aimless activities. He was still the ghost of the libraries and museums, but was puzzled that the published reports intimated that an old ghost had replaced a young one.

He now paid his mystic visits to Jennifer Parkey less often. For he was always dismayed to hear her exclaim to him in his ghostly form, “Your touch is so changed. You poor thing! Is there anything at all I can do to help you?”

He decided that somehow she was too immature to ever understand him, though he was still fond of her. He transferred his affections to Mrs. Milly Maltby, a widow at least thirty years his senior. Yet here it was a sort of girlishness in her that appealed to him. She was a woman of sharp wit and real affection, and she also accepted his visitations without fear, following a little initial panic.

They played games, writing games, for they communicated by writing. Milly would scribble a line, then hold the paper up in the air whence he would cause it to vanish into his sphere. He would return it in half a minute, or half a second of her time, with his retort. He had the advantage of her in time with greatly more opportunity to think up responses, but she had the advantage over him in natural wit and was hard to top.

They also played checkers, and he often had to retire apart and read a chapter of a book on the art between moves; and even so she often beat him. For natural talent is likely to be a match for accumulated lore and codified procedure.

But to Milly also he was unfaithful in his fashion, being now interested — he no longer became enamored or entranced — in a Mrs. Roberts, a great-grandmother who was his elder by at least fifty years. He had read all the data extant on the attraction of the old for the young, but he still could not explain his successive attachments. He decided that these three examples were enough to establish a universal law: that a woman is simply not afraid of a ghost, though he touches her and is invisible, and writes her notes without hands. It is possible that amorous spirits have known this for a long time, but Charles Vincent had made the discovery himself independently.

When enough knowledge is accumulated on any subject, the pattern will sometimes emerge suddenly, like a form in a picture revealed where before it was not seen. And when enough knowledge is accumulated on all subjects, is there not a chance that a pattern governing all subjects will emerge?

Charles Vincent was caught up in his last enthusiasm. On one long vigil, as he consulted source after source and sorted them in his mind, it seemed that the pattern was coming out clearly and simply, for all its amazing complexity of detail.

“I know all that they know in the Pit,” said Vincent, “and I know a secret that they do not know. I have not lost the race — I have won it. I can defeat them at the point where they believe themselves invulnerable. If controlled hereafter, we need at least not be controlled by them. It is all falling together now. I have found the final truth and it is they who have lost the race. I hold the key. I will now be able to enjoy the advantage without paying the ultimate price of defeat and destruction, or of collaborating with them.

“Now I have only to implement my knowledge, to publish the fact, and one shadow at least will be lifted from mankind. I will do it at once. Well, nearly at once. It is almost dawn in the normal world. I will sit here a very little while and rest. Then I will go out and begin to make contact with the proper persons for the disposition of this thing. But first I will sit here a little while and rest.”

And he died quietly in his chair as he sat there.

Dr. Mason made an entry in his private journal:

Charles Vincent, a completely authenticated case of premature aging, one of the most clear-cut in all gerontology. This man was known to me for many years, and I here aver that as of one year ago he was of normal appearance and physical state, and that his chronology is also correct, I having also known his father. I examined the subject during the period of his illness, and there is no question at all of his identity, which has also been established for the record by fingerprinting and other means. I aver that Charles Vincent at the age of thirty is dead of old age, having the appearance and organic state of a man of ninety.

Then the doctor began to make other notes:

As in two other cases of my own observation, the illness was accompanied by a certain delusion and series of dreams, so nearly identical in all three men as to be almost unbelievable. And for the record, and no doubt to the prejudice of my own reputation, I will set down the report of them here.

But when Dr. Mason had written that, he thought about it for a while.

“No, I will do no such thing,” he said, and he struck out the last lines he had written. “It is best to let sleeping dragons lie.”

And somewhere the faceless men with the smell of the Pit on them smiled to themselves in quiet irony.

Goldfish

He didn't know how long he had been a goldfish. Probably not long. A long-term goldfish isn't afraid of drowning, nor would he be frightened of Gwendoline.

It seemed he had only gradually become conscious of that underwater state or dream.

Well, he was a goldfish now, and there was no cure for it. He was a goldfish named Cuthbert. And the damndest thing about it was that he himself (in his former guise) had, in a moment of cuteness, named that poor fish with that hideous name.

For now it began to clarify; and memory rolled over him like a green wave.

Actually he was only goldfish per eventa and not per essentia; by accident only, not by true being. In reality he was Leo Skatterly, the world's greatest scientist (with sarcastic intonation); that was the way that Mathilde always said it.

For if he were Leo Skatterly, then he had Mathilde to wife. But again, if he were Cuthbert, then just as surely was he mated to Gwendoline the goldfish, who was now rubbing noses with him. This situation may have been illicit, but bigamy was not now his largest worry.

Part of what had happened was this: — But for all the details we must wait till the afternoon of the last day when the huge angel opens the last book that shows the whole story of everyone written fine. But mostly what happened was this:

On that very day and not an hour before he had been sitting thoughtfully there in his big chair. And he had been Leo Skatterly; he had not been a goldfish. He really was the world's greatest scientist, in his own opinion, and in that of from four to six others (several of his devotees were fickle); which is to say that in the field of Abstract Cogitational Efficacy he was the greatest; — or at least in a limited corner acre of that field, Implemented Cogitational Transference.

For in that he had done things that nobody else even thought of. Indeed, at the extreme of the thing (and this was his greatest secret), to think was to do. He had been working on it for about twenty years in whatever hours he could steal from sleep, and from the tamer pursuits of teaching and research by which he had his livelihood. And by his concentration in this field he may have neglected, to some degree, lesser things. According to his wife he neglected his wife.

He hadn't meant to neglect her; he liked her a lot; perhaps he even loved her if that was in fashion; it had been in and out of fashion several times, he couldn't keep track. But the fact is that things like that take time. One begins with the most perfunctory display of affection. Then its reciprocation is likely to entail a concatenation of events, cubicular and carnous, whereby one becomes impassioned; and the next thing that one notices is that a quarter or even a half hour has gone by. O it's fun, but how much better could limited time be spent in abstract thought and its implementation in the transfer field.

For it was in perfect detachment that Leo Skatterly excelled. Thought, he knew, was a spiritual activity. It was but accident that it had taken up its dwelling in the brain, a handy site whereby it had access to the senses of a body, but not a necessary site. He would prove Thought a detachable thing; and by perfect abstraction he would reach a state where he himself could briefly leave his body and exist in unbodied thought.

He had achieved this several times, for a few seconds, under ideal conditions. He was on the verge of being able to accomplish it all times under all conditions.

On this day his corpulent assistant, Gorden Gaster, had entered and shattered his state of abstraction.

“I had no desire for company. I was in thought,” said Leo.

“There are times when company intrudes through necessity,” said Gorden, “and I must tell you that you are a very selfish man.”

“Of course I am. Perfect detachment is not possible to any other. Were I not consummately selfish I would not have been able to isolate Self. You insist on talking?”

“Yes. It is necessary, Leo. I have decided, along with one other, to take a certain definite step. You have neglected things that a man should not neglect. You have disregarded the amenities. To a degree I have made this up for you.”

“I thank you for that. You are a good assistant. You have saved me much time and trouble.”

“You have also neglected your wife shamefully. And to a degree here I also have taken care of what you neglected.”

“I thank you for that too — or do I? It may be that you have gone beyond the call of duty.”

“It may be that I have. And there are further things about yourself that I must tell you, since you seem not aware of them. One is that you have the golden touch. Since the time that you gave me power of attorney over your affairs I have arranged wonderfully. I have mined the goldmine of your notes, and I have marketed extensively. There has been a practical application to almost everything that you have uncovered. The three of us (for we are so incorporated) are now quite wealthy. As soon as you are dead, the two of us remaining, Mathilde and myself, will be the wealthier by one half.”

“I recently had an examination. I was told that I should live another thirty years.”

“We have just had an examination of another sort. We have decided that there is no point in your living another hour. We believe that life bores you.”

“It does in a way. But I still need the body for a basis of operation until I have achieved perfect detachment.”

“That's a pity. But we won't wait. I have often wondered why you kept a loaded gun in this little desk here. It is what we decided that I should use.”

“O, that's an old continuing experiment in psychokenesis. I can, under good conditions, cause the little gun to go downstairs by itself and fire a few rounds on the pistol range there. But the experiment has not been a success. The gun fires very poor scores on the range, and I believe that it also cheats. Most of the bulls' eyes seem to have been made at almost point-blank range.”

“I had no idea you had gone so far along that line. Well, this is the end for you, Leo. You have been our golden goose. But we will wait for no more eggs. There is enough already in your notebooks to keep me busy and rich for the rest of what would have been your life. And you are in the way here. You are very inconvenient.”

“You mean you are going to kill me?”

“You astonish me. To find that the world's greatest mind, when enough hints are shoveled to it, can actually reach a straight conclusion, that is almost more than I expected. Yes, I am going to kill you, Leo.”

“I ask you, I beg you not to.”

“You beg? You? Where is your detachment?”

“Buried under my terror. I had never given death a serious thought. I always considered it a silly arrangement. Now the possibility of its finality horrifies me. Don't, Gorden! Man, don't do it!”

“I wouldn't worry, Leo. In two seconds it will be done. Oblivion has no regrets.”

“I need more than two seconds. Gorden. Give me ten.”

“Ten? Why?”

“An experiment with death itself. I've always wanted to try. It'll take a few seconds to arrange it in my mind.”

“Always the scientist. Leo. All right, ten seconds but no more. And the time has started.”

It is hard to achieve perfect detachment, but also separation, and transference, and the goal not even selected. But one can hurry astonishingly in a crisis. At first Leo could not see another living thing in the room except Gorden Gaster. But yes, yes, there was another. It wasn't much, but it was better than nothing. He achieved detachment. He achieved separation, leaving his body to exist briefly in unbodied thought.

And he achieved not a second too soon. For Gorden Gaster, with the cruelty of his kind, jumped the gun; and he shot the body of Leo Skatterly dead.

This was precarious. Leo had never before left his body for more than a second or two. And he could not return to a dead body. He had escaped the trap, but for what? It was like a high dive he was afraid to try, a leap across an abyss. But he knew that transference was possible. He dared it, and disappeared with muted mind into the fishbowl.

That was the way that the mind of Leo Skatterly (the world's greatest scientist in a small field) entered the body of Cuthbert the goldfish. And Cuthbert himself, with no great mind in the matter, withdrew to a small drowsy corner of his own brain, and let his master reign in his place.

There is frustration in having the finest mind in the world and not being able to implement it. O, he had time enough for abstract thought now. It was just that he hadn't the means for concrete action.

There are few things you can do in a fishbowl, even if you are a goldfish. You can practice your strokes and dives and turns. You can frolic with Gwendoline. But this brought on a problem. Though now an ichthus, Leo had never been an ichthyologist. He knew little about fish. He did not even know to what species the goldfish belonged. And of the carnality of goldfish he was totally ignorant. He hoped it was not the rutting season for goldfish, if they had such. He did not want to appear ignorant. (He had always liked to do his duty in all things.)

But it was then, before he was fully acclimated to the bowl, that his old wife, Mathilda, came into the room. Leo (or Cuthbert) had doubted the statement of Gorden Gaster that Mathilde had conspired to the murder. So he was now quite interested when she approached his old dead body. She hummed a little tune. Was it — ? no it couldn't be —  “I'll be glad when you're dead you rascal you!” He had no ear for music. It was likely that it was a tune that only sounded like the other. Yet she seemed very calm about finding him dead. She tidied up a few things and went over the room closely. She painted her own mouth carefully, and then ruffled her hair with a studied carelessness. She looked at herself in a mirror, and winked. Then she went to the window, opened it calmly, and began to scream.

That was an odd way for a wife to behave on finding her husband dead. Possibly a form of delayed shock, but inexplicable by any behavior pattern that Leo had ever known. So it was that a slight doubt sowed itself in the mind of Leo Skatterly concerning his human wife, Mathilde.

There were then several hours or several days that passed with a parade of broken events. A goldfish sleeps often, and on waking has no way of telling what day it is. But likely it was the same day when the men came into the room and removed the old body of Leo Skatterly. He hated to see it go. It marked the end of a certain phase of his life. And moreover he had no idea where he was ever to get another body.

He wasn't all peaceful in his mind. He possessed the body of Cuthbert in doubtful tenure. For one thing Cuthbert was still there, though, having deferred to Leo, he had agreeably gone to sleep. But there might come a time when he might not be willing to defer. And in a showdown Cuthbert knew more about being a goldfish than Leo did. It was a question whether there would be some sort of conflict with the two minds inhabiting one fish head.

But just how does a goldfish establish contact with the rest of the world? Leo had decided that he must make known to Mathilde that he was not dead, that he was inhabiting Cuthbert instead. He still trusted her in spite of her odd behavior. If a man (or a fish) cannot trust his own wife, then whom can he trust?

When she came to feed them that night he tried to catch her eye. Possibly he did catch it, but she did not understand. There was no real rapport there.

Well, if the finest mind in the world cannot find a way to communicate from a fishbowl, then he had better abdicate and let some of that silly new blood take over. But how to communicate? By code, radio, audio, graphic, visual? Probably the visual was best. And for tools there were only the pebbles in the bottom of the bowl.

He set out to arrange them. He would arrange them to say: “Mathilde, I am Leo. I am not dead. I am temporarily in the body of Cuthbert the goldfish. I trust you, though I must say some of your recent actions are deuced peculiar. Go at once to my notebooks in the cabinet against the north wall of this room. Take out notebook 44 C 2 and read from paragraph 152 C to the end. When you have digested the information there then come to the bowl again and I will spell out further instructions.”

That was what he intended to spell out with the pebbles. But an environmental limit was placed on his ambitions. The same thing had happened to him before. When he was a little boy it had happened with a gift of a ninety-eight cent Structo set with a picture on the cover of a girdered bridge that could only be built with the twelve dollar and ninety-eight cent set. There were just not enough pieces.

And there were not enough pebbles. There were only thirteen pebbles in the bottom of the bowl. And what can you spell out with only thirteen pebbles? Leo finally spelled out his name, Leo. He did it using three pebbles for the L, six for the E, and four for the O. It was a square O, but it was better than no O at all.

Now perhaps when Mathilde saw this she would partly understand, and would bring him more pebbles to spell more words. But it would be cumbersome. It took him all night just to spell Leo. For one thing, a space has to be cleared first, and then the pebbles laboriously rolled into place with the nose. This involves nosing most of the pebbles twice. And another detriment was Gwendoline, who joined into the game and began to roll the pebbles around also, but at random.

“God rot it, Gwen,” he told her in ichthyglos, “leave them alone if you don't know what you're doing.”

But she could not at all understand, and she sulked and interfered. But she was also his wife in a way and had some rights. When she finally went to sleep it was too dark to spell, and he had to do it by the very early light next morning before she woke.

Then there was nothing to do but wait for Mathilde to see his sign and take action. But she did not come till mid-morning, and then she was accompanied by Gorden Gaster, the murderer.

“Angel,” said Gorden, “there is really nothing to do here. And I believe the room might depress you. Let's stay out of it.”

“I don't depress as easily as that, precious. And I'd like it to be at least clean. They're going to be examining it again today, darling, purely as a formality, and I pride myself on my housekeeping.”

It was surely peculiar that Mathilde should be calling Gorden such names as precious and darling. It gave Leo a feeling that everything was not right.

“If you'd help, Gorden, we could get it done in no time at all and be off.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Dust. There's the duster.”

“Impossible. My asthma you know.”

“No, I didn't. Well, you can run the vacuum. It's in the closet.”

“That might be dangerous. I have a bad back and any untoward effort — ”

“Well, G.d., G. G. you can feed the fish then. That isn't very heavy work. Do you think you can manage it?”

“O yes, I can manage quite well. I have a fish of my own, you know.”

Damnation! That man was coming to the fishbowl. Leo (Cuthbert) Skatterly tried to disarrange the word he had spelled; but he was in a hurry and stubbed his nose, and then Gwendoline rolled the pebbles back into place as fast as he scrambled them.

And Gorden Gaster came to the bowl and saw the name that was spelled there.

“Ah, Leo,” he said softly. “There you are. I had wondered what your last experiment was and if it had been successful. I see that it has been, but you are at a disadvantage. There are so many things that militate against a goldfish in this world. There may be countless geniuses among them, but who would ever know? Yet a goldfish who spells could be dangerous. We may have to make other arrangements for you.”

Then Gorden put a finger in the water and stirred the pebbles, after which he called across the room to Mathilde:

“Honeybun, I have a fish of my own, as I told you. Since I will be moving in here as soon as things are settled, I thought it might be a good idea if I brought my fish over and put it in with these.”

“Will they get along?”

“O, perfectly. Goldfish are very clannish.”

“Bring it on over then.”

And Gorden bent low over the bowl and spoke to Leo:

“Skatterly, old fish, let's see you get out of this one. You'll like my fish, Fang. He looks like a goldfish but is part Burmese fighting fish. He isn't very big, only a little larger than you. But he can eviscerate you in ten seconds. Good time that, what? Now this poses a problem for you, doesn't it? We will see what taking thought will do for you now. Cheers.”

They were gone then, Mathilde and Gorden. And it did pose a problem. Leo brooded and was in a bad humor. No person has a right to kill another person twice; it is a little too much. On the other hand, Leo had the nagging feeling that if you permit a person to kill you twice, in some way you merit the second death.

And then with a feeling of horror he heard them return, and he knew that the new killer was in the room. Gorden had Fang in an ice cream box full of water. He poured the whole thing into the bowl. It left milky traces about them and had a peculiar taste.

And Fang, the goldfish who was part Burmese fighting fish, looked at Leo-Cuthbert with icy eyes, but did not attack. Not then he didn't, not while Mathilde and Gorden were still there. But already they showed signs of leaving.

“They will soon mix. Fish are always bashful at first. They'll get acquainted as soon as we leave them. Come along dear.” And Gorden left with Mathilde.

Imagine a shark four inches long if you are only three inches. Imagine a lightning-killer and you in a goldfish bowl with him and no escape. Gorden had given Leo ten seconds (less two) before he killed him. How do you ask a killer fish to give you ten seconds? How do you practice detachment under the circumstances? And where in the room was there another living creature to which Leo could transfer? Yet it had to be done.

Leo-Cuthbert achieved a detachment of a sort while certain slices of his underbelly were detached from himself. And he almost achieved separation, as lengths of viscera were separated from himself. Then the introductions were over, and Fang came in for the kill; there was no doubt of it.

And once more it was like a high dive that Leo was afraid to take, like a leap across an abyss — but he must get it off to however unlikely a goal was left him. So he achieved separation.

Then Fang struck and broke the body of Cuthbert in half, and there was no life left in it at all.

He didn't know how long he had been a fly. Probably not long. A long-term fly isn't afraid of falling, and does not cling in terror to the mesh of a curtain. It seemed that he only gradually became conscious of his new state. But he was a fly, whoever he was and however he had become one.

Then it began to clarify, and memory swept over him like a diaphanous wave.

In The Garden

The protozoic recorder chirped like a bird. Not only would there be life traces on that little moon, but it would be a lively place. So they skipped several steps in the procedure.

The chordata discerner read positive over most of the surface. There was spinal fluid on that orb, rivers of it. So again they omitted several tests and went to the cognition scanner. Would it show Thought on the body?

Naturally they did not get results at once, nor did they expect to; it required a fine adjustment. But they were disappointed that they found nothing for several hours as they hovered high over the rotation. Then it came, clearly and definitely, but from quite a small location only.

“Limited,” said Steiner, “as though within a pale. As though there were but one city, if that is its form. Shall we follow the rest of the surface to find another, or concentrate on this? It'll be twelve hours before it's back in our ken if we let it go now.”

“Let's lock on this one and finish the scan. Then we can do the rest of the world to make sure we've missed nothing,” said Stark.

There was one more test to run, one very tricky and difficult of analysis, that of the Extraordinary Perception Locator. This was designed simply to locate a source of superior thought. But this might be so varied or so unfamiliar that often both the machine and the designer of it were puzzled as how to read the results.

The E. P. Locator had been designed by Glaser. But when the Locator had refused to read Positive when turned on the inventor himself, bad blood developed between machine and man. Glaser knew that he had extraordinary perception. He was a much honored man in his field. He told the machine so heatedly.

The machine replied, with such warmth that its relays chattered, that Glaser did not have extraordinary perception; he had only ordinary perception to an extraordinary degree. There is a difference, the machine insisted.

It was for this reason that Glaser used that model no more, but built others more amenable. And it was for this reason also that the owners of Little Probe had acquired the original machine so cheaply.

And there was no denying that the Extraordinary Perception Locator (or Eppel) was a contrary machine. On Earth it had read Positive on a number of crack-pots, including Waxey Sax, a jazz tootler who could not even read music. But it had also read Positive on ninety percent of the acknowledged superior minds of the Earth. In space it had been a sound guide to the unusual intelligences encountered. Yet on Suzuki-Mi it had read Positive on a two-inch long worm, one only out of billions. For the countless identical worms no trace of anything at all was shown by the test.

So it was with mixed emotions that Steiner locked onto the area and got a flick. He then narrowed to a smaller area (apparently one individual, though this could not be certain) and got very definite action. Eppel was busy. The machine had a touch of the ham in it, and assumed an air of importance when it ran these tests.

Finally it signaled the result, the most exasperating result it ever produces: the single orange light. It was the equivalent of the shrug of the shoulders in a man. They called it the “You tell me light.”

So among the intelligences on that body there was at least one that might be extraordinary, though possibly in a crack-pot way. It is good to be forewarned.

“Scan the remainder of the world, Steiner,” said Stark, “and the rest of us will get some sleep. If you find no other spot then we will go down on that one the next time it is in position under us, in about twelve hours.”

“You don't want to visit any of the other areas first? Somewhere away from the thoughtful creature?”

“No. The rest of the world may be dangerous. There must be a reason that Thought is in one spot only. If we find no others then we will go down boldly and visit this.”

So they all, except Steiner, went off to their bunks then: Stark, the captain; Caspar Craig, supercargo, tycoon and fifty-one percent owner of the Little Probe; Gregory Gilbert, the executive officer; and F. R. Briton, S. J., a Jesuit priest who was linguist and checker champion of the craft.

Dawn did not come to the moon-town. The Little Probe hovered stationary in the light and the moon-town came up under the dawn. Then the Probe went down to visit whatever was there.

“There's no town,” said Steiner. “Not a building. Yet we're on the track of the minds. There's nothing but a meadow and some boscage, a sort of fountain or pool, and four streams coming out of it.”

“Keep on toward the minds,” said Stark. “They're our target.”

“Not a building, not two sticks or stones placed together. That looks like an Earth-type sheep there. And that looks like an Earth-lion, I'm almost afraid to say it. And those two — why they could be Earth-people. But with a difference. Where is that bright light coming from?”

“I don't know, but they're right in the middle of it. Land here. We'll go to meet them at once. Timidity has never been an efficacious tool with us.”

Well, they were people. And one could only wish that all people were like them. There was a man and a woman, and they were clothed either in very bright garments or no garments at all, but only in a very bright light.

“Talk to them, Father Briton,” said Stark. “You are the linguist.”

“Howdy,” said the priest.

He may or may not have been understood, but the two of them smiled at him so he went on.

“Father Briton from Philadelphia,” he said, “on detached service. And you, my good man, what is your handle, your monicker, your tag?”

“Ha-Adamah,” said the man.

“And your daughter, or niece?”

It may be that the shining man frowned momentarily at this; but the woman smiled, proving that she was human.

“The woman is named Hawwah,” said the man. “The sheep is named sheep, the lion is named lion, the horse is named horse, and the hoolock is named hoolock.”

“I understand. It is possible that this could go on and on. How is it that you use the English tongue?”

“I have only one tongue; but it is given to us to be understood by all; by the eagle, by the squirrel, by the ass, by the English.”

“We happen to be bloody Yankees, but we use a borrowed tongue. You wouldn't have a drink on you for a tubful of thirsty travelers, would you?”

“The fountain.”

“Ah — I see.”

But the crew all drank of the fountain to be sociable. It was water, but water that excelled, cool and with all its original bubbles like the first water ever made.

“What do you make of them?” asked Stark.

“Human,” said Steiner. “It may even be that they are a little more than human. I don't understand that light that surrounds them. And they seem to be clothed, as it were, in dignity.”

“And very little else,” said Father Briton, “though that light trick does serve a purpose. But I'm not sure they'd pass in Philadelphia.”

“Talk to them again,” said Stark. “You're the linguist.”

“That isn't necessary here, Captain. Talk to them yourself.”

“Are there any other people here?” Stark asked the man.

“The two of us. Man and woman.”

“But are there any others?”

“How would there be any others? What other kind of people could there be than man and woman?”

“But is there more than one man or woman?”

“How could there be more than one of anything?”

The captain was a little puzzled by this, but he went on doggedly: “Ha-Adamah, what do you think that we are? Are we not people?”

“You are not anything till I name you. But I will name you and then you can be. You are named captain. He is named priest. He is named engineer. He is named flunky.”

“Thanks a lot,” said Steiner.

“But are we not people?” persisted Captain Stark.

“No. We are the people. There are no people but two. How could there be other people?”

“And the damnedest thing about it,” muttered Steiner, “is how are we going to prove him wrong? But it does give you a small feeling.”

“Can we have something to eat?” asked the captain.

“Pick from the trees,” said Ha-Adamah, “and then it may be that you will want to sleep on the grass. Being not of human nature (which does not need sleep or rest), it may be that you require respite. But you are free to enjoy the garden and its fruits.”

“We will,” said Captain Stark.

They wandered about the place, but they were uneasy. There were the animals. The lion and lioness were enough to make one cautious, though they offered no harm. The two bears had a puzzling look, as though they wanted either to frolic with you or to mangle you.

“If there are only two people here,” said Caspar Craig, “then it may be that the rest of the world is not dangerous at all. It looked fertile wherever we scanned it, though not so fertile as this central bit. And those rocks will bear examining.”

“Flecked with gold, and possibly with something else,” said Stark. “A very promising site.”

“And everything grows here,” added Stark. “Those are Earth-fruits and I never saw finer. I've tasted the grapes and plums and pears. The figs and dates are superb, the quince is as flavorsome as a quince can be, the cherries are excellent. And I never did taste such oranges. But I haven't yet tried the — ” and he stopped.

“If you're thinking what I'm afraid to think,” said Gilbert, “then it will be a test at least: whether we're having a pleasant dream or whether this is reality. Go ahead and eat one.”

“I won't be the first to eat one. You eat.”

“Ask him first. You ask him.”

“Ha-Adamah, is it allowed to eat the apples?”

“Certainly. Eat. It is the finest fruit in the garden.”

“Well, the analogy breaks down there,” said Stark. “I was almost beginning to believe in the thing. But, if it isn't that, then what? Father Briton, you are the linguist, but in Hebrew does not Ha-Adamah and Hawwah mean — ?”

“Of course they do. You know that as well as I.”

“I was never a believer. But would it be possible for the exact same proposition to maintain here as on Earth?”

“All things are possible.”

And it was then that Ha-Adamah, the shining man, gave a wild cry: “No. No. Do not approach it. It is not allowed to eat of that one.”

It was the pomegranate tree, and he was warning Craig away from it.

“Once more, Father,” said Stark, “you should be the authority; but does not the idea that it was an apple that was forbidden go back only to a medieval painting?”

“It does. The name of the fruit is not mentioned in Genesis. In Hebrew exegesis, however, the pomegranate is usually indicated.”

“I thought so. Question the man further, Father. This is too incredible.”

“It is a little odd. Adam, old man, how long have you been here?”

“Forever less six days is the answer that has been given to me. I never did understand the answer, however.”

“And have you gotten no older in all that time?”

“I do not understand what ‘older’ is. I am as I have been from the beginning.”

“And do you think that you will ever die?”

“To die I do not understand. I am taught that it is a property of fallen nature to die, and that does not pertain to me or mine.”

“And are you happy here?”

“Perfectly happy according to my preternatural state. But I am taught that it might be possible to lose that happiness, and then to seek it vainly through all the ages. I am taught that sickness and aging and even death could come if this happiness were ever lost. I am taught that on at least one other unfortunate world it has actually been lost.”

“Do you consider yourself a knowledgeable man?”

“Yes, since I am the only man, and knowledge is natural to man. But I am further blessed. I have a preternatural intellect.”

Then Stark cut in once more: “There must be some one question you could ask him, Father. Some way to settle it. I am becoming nearly convinced.”

“Yes, there is a question that will settle it. Adam, old man, how about a game of checkers?”

“This is hardly the time for clowning,” said Stark.

“I'm not clowning, Captain. How about it, Adam? I'll give you choice of colors and first move.”

“No. It would be no contest. I have a preternatural intellect.”

“Well, I beat a barber who was champion of Germantown. And I beat the champion of Morgan County, Tennessee, which is the hottest checker center on Earth. I've played against, and beaten, machines. But I never played a preternatural mind. Let's just set up the board, Adam, and have a go at it.”

“No. It would be no contest. I would not like to humble you.”

They were there for three days. They were delighted with the place. It was a world with everything, and it seemed to have only two inhabitants. They went everywhere except into the big cave.

“What is there, Adam?” asked Captain Stark.

“The great serpent lives there. I would not disturb him. He has long been cranky because plans that he had for us did not materialize. But we are taught that should evil ever come to us, which it cannot if we persevere, it will come by him.”

They learned no more of the real nature of the sphere in their time there. Yet all but one of them were convinced of the reality when they left. And they talked of it as they took off.

“A crowd would laugh if told of it,” said Stark, “but not many would laugh if they had actually seen the place, or them. I am not a gullible man, but I am convinced of this: this is a pristine and pure world and ours and all the others we have visited are fallen worlds. Here are the prototypes of our first parents before their fall. They are garbed in light and innocence, and they have the happiness that we have been seeking for centuries. It would be a crime if anyone disturbed that happiness.”

“I too am convinced,” said Steiner. “It is Paradise itself, where the lion lies down with the lamb, and where the serpent has not prevailed. It would be the darkest of crimes if we or others should play the part of the serpent, and intrude and spoil.”

“I am probably the most skeptical man in the world,” said Caspar Craig the tycoon, “but I do believe my eyes. I have been there and seen it. It is indeed an unspoiled Paradise; and it would be a crime calling to the wide heavens for vengeance for anyone to smirch in any way that perfection.

“So much for that. Now to business. Gilbert, take a gram: Ninety Million Square Miles of Pristine Paradise for sale or lease. Farming, Ranching, exceptional opportunities for Horticulture. Gold, Silver, Iron, Earth-Type Fauna. Terms. Special rates for Large Settlement Parties. Write, gram, or call in person at any of our planetary offices as listed below. Ask for Brochure — Eden Acres Unlimited — ”

Down in the great cave that Old Serpent, a two-legged one among whose names was “Snake-Oil Sam,” spoke to his underlings: “It'll take them fourteen days to get back with the settlers. We'll have time to overhaul the blasters. We haven't had any well-equipped settlers for six weeks. It used to be we'd hardly have time to strip and slaughter and stow before there was another batch to take care of.”

“I think you'd better write me some new lines,” said Adam. “I feel like a goof saying those same ones to each bunch.”

“You are a goof, and therefore perfect for the part. I was in show business long enough to learn never to change a line too soon. I did change Adam and Eve to Ha-Adamah and Hawwah, and the apple to the pomegranate. People aren't becoming any smarter — but they are becoming better researched, and they insist on authenticity.

“This is still a perfect come-on here. There is something in human nature that cannot resist the idea of a Perfect Paradise. Folks will whoop and holler to their neighbors to come in droves to spoil it and mar it. It isn't greed or the desire for new land so much, though that is strong too. Mainly it is the feverish passion to befoul and poison what is unspoiled. Fortunately I am sagacious enough to take advantage of this trait. And when you start to farm a new world on a shoestring you have to acquire your equipment as you can.”

He looked proudly around at the great cave with its mountains and tiers of material; heavy machinery of all sorts, titanic crates of foodstuff space-sealed; wheeled, tracked, propped, vanned, and jetted vehicles; and power packs to run a world.

He looked at the three dozen space ships stripped and stacked, and at the rather large pile of bone-meal in one corner.

“We will have to get another lion,” said Eve. “Bowser is getting old, and Marie-Yvette abuses him and gnaws his toes. And we do have to have a big-maned lion to lie down with the lamb.”

“I know it, Eve. The lion is a very important prop. Maybe one of the crack-pot settlers will bring a new lion.”

“And can't you mix another kind of shining paint?” asked Adam. “This itches. It's hell.”

“I'm working on it.”

Caspar Craig was still dictating the gram: “Amazing quality of longevity seemingly inherent in the locale. Climate Ideal. Daylight or half-light all twenty-one hours from Planet Delphina and from Sol Number Three. Pure water for all industrial purposes. Scenic and Storied. Zoning and pre-settlement restrictions to ensure congenial neighbors. A completely planned globular settlement in a near arm of our own galaxy. Low taxes and liberal credit. Financing our specialty — ”

“And you had better have an armed escort when you return,” said Father Briton.

“Why in cosmos would we want an armed escort?”

“It's as phoney as a seven-credit note.”

“You, a man of the cloth, doubt it? And us ready skeptics convinced by our senses? Why do you doubt?”

“It is only the unbelieving who believe so easily in obvious frauds. Theologically unsound, dramaturgically weak, philologically impossible, zoologically rigged, salted conspicuously with gold, and shot through with anachronisms. And moreover he was afraid to play me at checkers.”

“What?”

“If I had a preternatural intellect I wouldn't be afraid of a game of checkers with anyone. Yet there was an unusual mind there somewhere; it is just that he chose not to make our acquaintance personally.”

They looked at the priest thoughtfully.

“But it was Paradise in one way,” said Steiner.

“How?”

“All the time we were there the woman did not speak.”

Author's Commentary

Snuffles

I

“I always said we'd find one of them that was fun,” remarked Brian. “There's been entirely too much solemnity in the universe. Did you never panic on thinking of the multiplicity of systems?”

“Never,” said Georgina.

“Not even when, having set down a fine probability for the totality of worlds, you realized suddenly that you had to raise it by a dozen powers yet?”

“What's to panic?”

“Not even when it comes over you, ‘This isn't a joke; this is serious; every one of them is serious’?”

“ ‘Cosmic intimidation,’ Belloc called it. And it does tend to minimize a person.”

“And did you never hope that out of all that prodigality of worlds, one at least should have been made for fun? One should have been made by a wild child or a mixed-up goblin just to put the rest of them in proper perspective, to deflate the pomposity of the cosmos.”

“You believe this is it, Mr. Carroll?”

“Yes. Bellota was made for fun. It is a joke, a caricature, a burlesque. It is a planet with baggy pants and a putty nose. It is a midget world with floppy shoes and a bull-roarer voice. It was designed to keep the cosmos from taking itself too seriously. The law of levity here conspires against the law of gravity.”

“I never heard of the law of levity. And Mr. Phelan believes that he will soon have the explanation for the peculiar gravity here.”

“The law of levity does not apply to you, Georgina. You are immune. But I spoke lightly.”

The theory that Bellota was made for a joke had not been proved; no more than the other theories about it. But it was a sport, a whole barrelful of puzzles, a place of interest all out of proportion to its size, eminently worthy of study. And the six of them had been set down there to study it.

Sociability impels — and besides they weren't a bad bunch at all. Meet them now, or miss them forever. They were six.

John Hardy. Commander and commando. As capable a man as ever lived. A good-natured conglomerate of clanking iron who was always in control. A jack of all techniques, a dynamic optimist. He had the only laugh that never irritated, however often heard, and he handled danger cavalierly. He was a blue-eyed, red-headed giant, and his face was redder than his hair.

William Malaquais (Uncle Billy) Cross. Engineer, machinist extraordinary, gadgeteer, theorist, arguefier, first mate, navigator, and balladeer. Billy was a little older than the rest of them, but he hadn't mellowed. He said that he was still a green and growing boy.

Daniel Phelan. Geologist and cosmologist, and holder of heretical doctrines about field forces. “Phelan's Corollary” may be known to you; and, if so, you must be both intrigued and frustrated by the inherent contradictions that prevented its acceptance. A highly professional man in the domain of magnetism and gravity, he was also a low amateur rake and a determined wolf. A dude. Yet he could carry his share of the load.

Margaret Cot. Artist and photographer, botanist and bacteriologist. Full of chatter and a sort of charm. Better looking than anyone deserves to be. Salty, really the newest thing in salinity. A little bit wanton. And a little kiddish.

Brian Carroll. Naturalist. And natural. He had been hunting for something all his life, but did not know what it was, and was not sure that he would know it when he found it, but he hoped that it would be different. “O Lord,” he would pray, “however it ends don't let it have a pat ending. That I couldn't stand.” He believed that anything repeated was trite. And it was for that reason that there were pleasant surprises for him on Bellota.

Georgina Chantal. Biologist and iceberg. But the capsule description may be unjust. For she was more than biologist and much more than iceberg. Frosty only when frostiness was called for, she was always proper and often friendly. But she was no Margie Cot, and in contrast perhaps she was a little icy.

Actually there wasn't a bad apple in that basket.

The most obvious peculiarity of Bellota was its gravity, which was half that of Earth's, though the circumference of the globe was no more than a hundred miles. It was on account of this peculiarity that Daniel Phelan was on the little planet in the first place. For it was held by those who decide such things that there was a bare chance that he could find the answer: no one else had found it. His own idea was that his presence there was fruitless: he already had the answer to the gravity behavior of Bellota; it was contained in Phelan's Corollary. Bellota was the only body that behaved as it should. It was the rest of the universe that was atypical.

And in other ways Bellota was a joker. Fruits proved noisome and thorns succulent. Rinds and shells were edible and heartmeat was not. Proto-butterflies stung like hornets and lizards secreted honeylike manna. And the water — the water was soda water — sheer carbonated soda water.

If you wanted it any other way, you caught rain water, and this was so highly nitric that drinking it was something of an experience also; for the thunderstorms there were excessive.

No, they were not excessive, claimed Phelan, they were normal. It was on all other atmospheric planets known that there was a strange deficiency of thundershowers.

Here, at least, there was no deficiency: it rained about five minutes out of every fifteen, and the multi-colored lightning was omnipresent. In all their stay there, the party was never without the sound of thunder, near or distant, nor of the probe of lightning. For this reason there could be no true darkness there, not even between the flashes; there were flashes between the flashes. Here was meteorology concentrated, without dilution, without filler.

“But it is always different,” said Georgina. “Every lightning flash is entirely different, just as every snowflake is different. Will it snow here?”

“Certainly,” said Phelan. “Though it did not last night, it should tonight. Snow before midnight and fog by morning. After all, midnight and morning are only an hour apart.”

At that time they had been on the planet only a few hours.

“And here the cycle is normal,” said Phelan. “It is normal nowhere else. It is natural for humans and all other creatures to sleep for two hours and to wake for two hours. That is the fundamental cycle. Much of our misbehavior and perversity comes from trying to adapt to the weird day-night cycle of whatever alien world we happened to be born on. Here within a week we will return to that normal that we never knew before.”

“Within what kind of week?” asked Hardy.

“Within Bellota's twenty-eight-hour week. And do you realize that the projected working week here would be just six and two-thirds hours? I always thought that that was long enough to work anyhow.”

There were no seas there, only the soda-water lakes that covered a third of the area. And there were flora and fauna that burlesqued more than they really resembled Earth's and kindred worlds'.

The trees were neither deciduous nor evergreen (though Brian Carroll said that they were ever-green), nor palm. They were trees as a cartoonist might draw them. And there were animals that made the whole idea of animals ridiculous.

And there was Snuffles.

Snuffles was a bear — possibly — and of sorts. The bear is himself a caricature of animalkind, somehow a giant dog, somehow a shaggy man, an ogre, and also a toy. And Snuffles was a caricature of a bear.

Billy Cross tried to explain to them about bears. Billy was an old bear man.

“It is the only animal that children dream of without having seen or been told about. Moncrief by his recall methods has studied thousands of early childhood dreams. Children universally dream of bears, Tahitian children subject to no ursine influence in themselves or their ancestry, Australian children, town tikes before they ever saw a bear toy. They dream of bears. The bear is the boogerman. Bears live in the attics of old childhood houses. They did in my own and in thousands of others. Their existence there is not of adult suggestion, but of innate childhood knowledge.

“But there is a duality about this boogerman. He is friendly and fascinating as well as frightening. The boogerman is not a story that adults tell to children. It is the only story that children tell to adults who have forgotten it.”

“But how could you know?” asked Margie Cot. “I had no idea that little boys dreamed of bears. I thought that only girls did. And with us I had come to believe that the bear dreams symbolized grown man in his fundamental aspect, both fascinating and frightening.”

“To you, Margie, everything symbolizes grown man in his fundamental aspect. Now the boogerman is also philologically interesting, being actually one of the less than two hundred Indo-European root words. Though Bog has come to mean God in the Slavic, yet the booger was earlier an animal-man demiurge, and the Sanskrit bhaga is not without this meaning. In the sense of a breaker, a smasher, it is in the Old Irish as bong, and the early Lithuanian as banga. In the sense of a devourer, it survives in the Greek root phag, and as one who puts to flight it is in the Latin fug. We have, of course, the Welsh bwg, a ghost, and bogey has been used in the meaning of the devil. And we have bugbear, which rounds out the circuit.”

“So you make God and the Bear and the Devil one,” said Georgina.

“In many mythologies it was the bear who made the world,” said John Hardy. “After that he did nothing distinguished. It was felt by his devotees that he had done enough.”

Snuffles was not a bear exactly. He was a pseudoursine. He was big and clumsy, and bounced around on four legs, and then up on two. He was friendly, chillingly so, for he was huge. And he snuffled like some old track-eating train.

He was a clown, but he seemed to observe the line that the visitors drew. He did not come really close, though often too close for comfort. He obeyed, or when he did not wish to obey, he pretended to misunderstand. He was the largest animal on Bellota, and there seemed to be only one of him.

“Why do we call him he?” asked Brian Carroll, the naturalist. “Only surgery could tell for sure, but it appears that Snuffles has no sex at all. There is no way I know of that he could reproduce. No wonder there is only one of him; the wonder is that there should be any at all. Where did he come from?”

“That could be asked of any creature,” said Daniel Phelan. “The question is, where is he going? But he shows a certain sophistication in this. For it is only with primitives that toy animals (and he is a toy, you know) are sexed. A modern teddy bear or a toy panda isn't. Nor were the toys in the European tradition except on the fringes (Tartary before the ninth century, Ireland before the fifth) since pre-classical times. But before those times in its regions, and beyond its pale even today, the toy animals are totems and are sexed, exaggeratedly so.”

“Yes, there is no doubt about it,” said Brian. “He does not have even the secondary characteristics of mammal, marsupial, or what you will. But he has characteristics enough of his own.”

Snuffles was, among other things, a mimic. Should a book be left around, and they were a bookish bunch, he would take it in his forepaws and hold it as to read, and turn the pages, turning them singly and carefully. He could use his padded paws as hands. His claws were retractable and his digits projective. They were paws, or they were claws, or they were hands and he had four of them.

He unscrewed caps and he could use a can opener. He kept the visitors in firewood, once he understood that they had need of it, and that they wanted dry sticks of a certain size. He'd bite the sticks to length, stack them in small ricks, bind them with lianas, and carry them to the fire. He'd fetch water and put it on to boil. And he gathered bellotas by the bushel.

Bellota means an acorn, and they had named the planet that from the profusion of edible fruit-nuts that looked very like the acorn. These were a delicacy that became a staple.

And Snuffles could talk. All his noises were not alike. There was the “snokle, snoke, snokle” that meant he was in a good humor, as he normally was. There was a “snook, snook” and a “snoff.” There were others similar in vocables but widely varied in tone and timbre. Perhaps Billy Cross understood him best, but they all understood him a little.

In only one thing did Snuffles become stubborn. He marked off a space, a wild old pile of rocks, and forbade them to enter its circle. He dug a trench around it and he roared and bared foot-long fangs if any dared cross the trench. Billy Cross said that Snuffles did this to save face; for Commander John Hardy had previously forbidden Snuffles a certain area, their supply dump and weapons center. Hardy had drawn a line around it with a mattock and made it clear that Snuffles should never cross that line. The creature understood at once, and he went and did likewise.

The party had been set down there for two Earth weeks — twelve Bellota weeks — to study the life of the planetoid, to classify, to take samples, tests, notes, and pictures; to hypothesize and to build a basis for theory. But they ventured hardly at all from their original camp site. There was such an amazing variety of detail at hand that it would take many weeks even to begin to classify it.

A feature there was the rapidity of enzyme and bacterial action. A good wine could be produced in four hours, and a fungus-cheese made from grub exudations in even less time. And in the new atmosphere thoughts also seemed to ferment rapidly.

“Every person makes one major mistake in his life,” said John Hardy to them once. “Were it not for that, he would not have to die.”

“What?” quizzed Phelan. “Few die violently nowadays. How could all die for a mistake?”

“Yet it's a fact. Deaths are not really explained, for all the explanations of medicine. A death will be the result of one single much earlier rashness, of one weakening of the mind or body, or a crippling of the regenerative force. A person will be alive and vital. And one day he will make one mistake. In that moment the person begins to die. But if a man did not make that one mistake, he would not die.”

“Poppycock,” said Daniel Phelan.

“I wonder if you know the true meaning of ‘poppycock’?” asked Billy Cross. “It is poppy-talk, opium-talk, rambling of one under the narcotic. Now the element ‘cock’ in the word is not (as you would imagine) from either the Norwegian kok, a dung heap, nor from coquarde in the sense that Rabelais uses it, but rather from — ”

“Poppycock,” said Phelan again. He disliked Billy Cross's practice of analyzing all words, and he denied his assertion that a man who uses a word without feeling its full value is a dealer in false coinage, in fact a liar.

“But if a person dies only by making a mistake, how does an animal die?” asked Margie Cot. “Does he also make a mistake?”

“He makes the mistake of being an animal and not a man,” said Phelan.

“There may be no clear line between animal and man,” Margie argued.

“There is,” said Phelan, and three others agreed.

“There is not,” said Billy Cross.

“An animal is paradoxically a creature without an anima — without a soul,” said Phelan. “This comes oddly from me because I also deny it to man in its usual connotation. But there is a total difference, a line that the animal cannot cross, and did not cross. When we arrive at wherever we are going, he will still be skulking in his den.”

“Here, at least, it is the opposite of that,” said Brian Carroll. “Snuffles sleeps in the open, and it is we who den.”

It was true. Around their campsite, their supply dump and weapons center, there were three blind pockets; grottoes back in the rocks. Billy Cross, Daniel Phelan and Margie Cot each had one of these, filled with the tools of their specialties. Here they worked and slept. And these were dens.

John Hardy himself slept in the weapons center, inside the circle where Snuffles was forbidden. And the hours that he did not sleep he kept guard. Hardy made a fetish of security. When he slept, or briefly wandered about the region, someone else must always take a turn at guard, weapon at hand. There was no relaxation of this, no exception, no chance of a mistake.

And Snuffles, the animal, who slept right out in the open (“Is it possible,” Brian asked himself, “that I am the only one who notices it? Is it possible that it happens?”) did not get wet. It rained everywhere on that world. But it did not rain on Snuffles.

“The joy of this place is that it is not pat,” said Brian Carroll. As previously noted, he hated anything that was pat. “We could be here for years and never see the end of the variety. With the insects there may be as many species as there are individuals. Each one could almost be regarded as a sport, as if there were no standard to go by. The gravity here is cock-eyed. Please don't analyze the word, Billy; I doubt myself that it means rooster-eyed. The chemistry gives one a hopeful feeling. It uses the same building blocks as the chemistry elsewhere, but it is as if each of those blocks were just a little off. The lightning is excessive, as though whoever was using it had not yet tired of the novelty; I never tired of the novelty of lightning myself. And when this place ends, it will not have a pat ending. Other globes may turn to lava or cold cinders. Bellota will pop like a soap bubble, or sag like spaghetti, or turn into an exploding world of grasshoppers. But it won't conform. I love Bellota. And I do hate a pat ending.”

“There is an old precept of ‘Know thyself,’ ” said Georgina Chantal. They talked a lot now, as they were often wakeful, not yet being accustomed to the short days and nights of Bellota. “Its variant is ‘Look within.’ Look within, but our eyes point outward! The only way we can see our faces is in a mirror or in a picture. Each of us has his mirror, and mine is more often the microscope. But we cannot see ourselves as we are until we see ourselves distorted. That is why Snuffles is also a mirror for all of us here. We can't understand why we're serious until we know why he's funny.”

“We may be the distortion and he the true image,” said Billy Cross. “He lacks jealousy and pomposity and greed and treachery — all the distortions.”

“We do not know that he lacks them,” said Daniel Phelan.

So they talked away the short days and nights on Bellota, and accumulated data.

II

When it happened, it happened right in narrow daylight. The phrase was Brian's, who hated a pat phrase. It happened right in the middle of the narrow two-hour Bellota day.

All were awake and aware. John Hardy stood in the middle of the weapons center on alert guard with that rifle cradled in the crook of his arm. Billy and Daniel and Margaret were at work in their respective dens; and Brian and Georgina, who did not den, were gathering insects at the open lower end of the valley, but they had the center in their sight.

There was an unusual flash of lightning, bright by even Bellota standards, and air snapped and crackled. And there was an unusual sound from Snuffles, far removed from his usual “snokle, snokle” talk.

And in a moment benignity seemed to drain away from that planet.

Snuffles had before made as if to cross the line, and then scooted off, chortling in glee, which is perhaps why the careful John Hardy was not at first alarmed.

Then Snuffles charged with a terrifying sound.

But Hardy was not tricked entirely; it would be impossible for man or beast to trick him entirely. He had a split second, and was not one to waste time making a decision; and he was incapable of panic. What he did, he did of choice. And if it was a mistake, why, even the shrewdest decision goes into the books as a mistake if it fails.

He was fond of Snuffles and he gambled that it would not be necessary to kill him. It was a heavy rifle; a shoulder shot should have turned the animal. If it did not, there would not be time for another shot.

It did not, though, and there was not. Commander John Hardy made one mistake and for that he died. He died uncommonly, and he did not die from the inside out, as meaner men do.

It was ghastly, but it was over in an instant. Hardy's head was smashed and his face nearly swiped off. His back was broken and his body almost sheared in two. The great creature, with the foot-long canines and claws like twenty long knives, mangled him and crushed him and shook him like a red mop, and then let go.

It may be that Brian Carroll realized most quickly the implications. He called to Georgina to come out of the valley onto the plain below, and to come out fast. He realized that the other three still alive would not even be able to come out.

Incongruously, a thing that went through Brian Carroll's mind was a tirade of an ancient Confederate general against ancient General Grant, to the effect that the blundering fool had moved into a position that commanded both river and hill and blocked three valley mouths, and it could only be hoped that Grant would move along before he realized his advantage.

But Brian was under no such delusion. Snuffles realized his advantage; he occupied the supply dump and weapons center, and commanded the entrances to the three blind pockets that were the dens of Billy Cross and Daniel Phelan and Margie Cot.

With one move, Snuffles had killed the leader, cornered three of the others, and cut off the remaining two from base weapons, to be hunted down later. There was nothing unintentional about it. Had he chosen another moment, when another than John Hardy was on guard, then Hardy alive would still somehow have been a threat to him, even weaponless. But, with Hardy dead, all the rest were no match for the animal.

Brian and Georgina lingered on the edge of the plain to watch the other three, though they knew that their own lives depended on getting out of there.

“Two could get away,” said Georgina, “if a third would make a rush for it and force Snuffles into another charge.”

“But none of them will,” said Brian. “The third would die.”

It was a game, but it couldn't last long. Phelan whimpered and tried to climb the rock wall at the blind end of his pocket. Margie cajoled and told Snuffles how good friends they had always been, and wouldn't he let her go? Billy Cross filled his pipe and lit it and sat down to wait it out.

Phelan went first, and he died like a craven. But no one, not sure how he himself might die, should hold that overly against a man.

Snuffles thundered in, cut him down in the middle of a scream, and rushed back to his commanding spot in the middle of the weapons center.

Margie spread out her hands and began to cry, softly, not really in terror, when he attacked. The pseudo-bear broke her neck, but with a blow that was almost gentle in comparison with the others, and he scurried again to center.

And Billy Cross puffed on his pipe. “I hate to go like this, Snuff, old boy. In fact, I hate to go at all. If I made a mistake to die for, it was in being such a pleasant, trusting fellow. I wonder if you ever noticed, Snuff, what a fine, upstanding fellow I really am?”

And that was the last thing Billy Cross ever said, for the big animal struck him dead with one tearing blow. And the smoke still drifted in the air from Billy's pipe.

Then it was like black thunder coming out of the valley after the other two, for that clumsy animal could move. They had a start on him, Brian and Georgina had, of a hundred yards. And soon their terror subsided to half-terror as they realized that the shoulder-shot bear animal could not catch them till they were exhausted.

In a wild run, they could even increase their lead over him. But they would tire soon and they did not know when he would tire. He had herded them away from the campsite and the weapons. And they were trapped with him on a small planet.

Till day's end, and through the night, and next day (maybe five hours in all) he followed them, until they could hardly keep going. Then they lost him, but in the dark did not know if he was close or not. And at dawn they saw him sitting up and watching them from quarter of a mile away.

But now the adversaries rested and watched. The animal may have stiffened up from his shot. The two humans were so weary that they did not intend to run again till the last moment.

“Do you think there is any chance that it was all a sudden fury and that he may become friendly again?” Georgina asked Brian.

“It was not a sudden fury. It was a series of very calculated moves.”

“Do you think we could skirt around and beat him back to the weapons center?”

“No. He has chosen a spot where he can see for miles. And he has the interceptor's advantage — any angle we take has to be longer than his. We can't beat him back and he knows it.”

“Do you think he knows that the weapons are weapons?”

“Yes.”

“And that all our signal equipment is left at the center and that we can't communicate?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think he's smarter than we are?”

“He was smarter in selecting his role. It is better to be the hunter than the hunted. But it isn't unheard of for the hunted to outsmart the hunter.”

“Brian, do you think you would have died as badly as Daniel or as well as Billy?”

“No. No to both.”

“I was always jealous of Margie, but I loved her at the end. She didn't scream. She didn't act scared. Brian, what will happen to us now?”

“Possibly we will be saved in the nick of time by the Marines.”

“I didn't know they had them any more. Oh, you mean the ship. But that's still a week away, Earth time. Do you think Snuffles knows it is to come back for us?”

“Yes, he knows. I'm sure of that.”

“Do you think he knows when it will come?”

“Yes, I have the feeling that he knows that too.”

“But will he be able to catch us before then?”

“I believe that all parties concerned will play out the contest with one eye on the clock.”

Snuffles had now developed a trick. At sundown of the short day, he would give a roar and come at them. And they would have to start their flight just as the dark commenced. They ran more noisily than he and he would always be able to follow them; but they could never be sure in the dark that he was following, or how closely. They would have to go at top panting, gasping, thumping speed for an hour and a half; then they would ease off for a little in the half hour before dawn. And in the daytime one of them had to watch while the other slept. But Snuffles could sleep as he would, and they were never able to slip away without his waking instantly.

Moreover, he seemed to herd them through the fertile belt in their night runs and let them rest on the barrens in the daytime. It wasn't that food was really scarce; it was that it could only be gathered during time taken from flight and sleep and guard duty.

They also came on a quantity of red fruit that had a weakening and dizzying effect on them, yet they could hardly leave it alone. There was a sort of bean sprout that had the same effect, and a nut, and a cereal grass whose seed they winnowed with their hands as they went along.

“This is a narcotic belt,” said Brian. “I wish we had the time to study it longer, and yet we may get all too much of studying it. We have no idea how far it goes, and this method of testing its products on ourselves may be an effective one, but dangerous.”

From that time on, they were under the influence of the narcotics. They dreamed vividly while awake and walking. And they began to suffer hallucinations which they could not distinguish from reality.

It was only a Bellota day or so after their dreaming began that Brian Carroll felt that the mind of Snuffles was speaking to him. Carroll was an intelligent amateur in that field and he put it to the tests; there are valid tests for it. And he concluded that it was hallucination and not telepathy. Still (and he could see it coming) there would be a time when he would accept his hallucination and believe that the ursine was talking to him. And that would signal that he was crazy and no longer able to evade death there.

Carroll renounced (while he still had his wits) his future belief in the nonsense, just as a man put to torture may renounce anything he concedes or confesses or denies under duress.

Yet, whatever frame it was placed in, Snuffles talked to him from a distance. “Why do you think me a bear, because I am in a bear skin? I do not think you a man though you are in a man skin. You may be a little less. And why do you believe you will die more bravely than Daniel? The longer you run, the meaner will be your death. And you still do not know who I am?”

“No,” said Brian Carroll aloud.

“No what?” asked Georgina Chantal.

“It seems that the bear is talking to me, that he has entered my mind.”

“Me also. Could it be, or is it the narcotic fruit?”

“It couldn't be. It is hallucination brought on by the narcotics, and tiredness from travel, and lack of sleep — and our shock at seeing our friends killed by a boy turned into a monster. There are tests to distinguish telepathic reception from hallucination: objective corroboration, impossible at this time (with Snuffles in his present mood) and probably impossible at any time; sentient parallelism — surely uncertain, for I have more in common with millions of humans than with one pseudo-ursine; circumstantial validity and point-for-point clarity — this is negative, for I know myself to be fevered and confused and my senses unreliable in other matters. By every test that can be made, the indication is that it is not telepathy, that it is hallucination.”

“But there isn't any way to be sure, is there, Brian?”

“None, Georgina; no more than I can prove that it is not a troop of Boy Scouts around a campfire that is causing pain and burning in my gullet, that it is really the narcotic fruit or something else I have eaten conspiring with my weariness and apprehension to discomfort me. I cannot prove it is not Boy Scouts and I cannot prove it is not telepathy, but I consider both unlikely.”

“I don't think it is unlikely at all, Brian. I think that Snuffles is talking to me. When you get a little nuttier and tireder, then you'll believe it too.”

“Oh, yes, I'll believe it then — but it won't be true.”

“It won't matter if it's true or not. Snuffles will have gained his point. Do you know that Snuffles is king of this world?”

“No. What are you talking about?”

“He just told me he was. He told me that if I would help him catch you, he would let me go. But I won't do it. I have become fond of you, Brian. Did you know I never did like men before?”

“Yes. You were called the iceberg.”

“But now I like you very much.”

“You have no one else left to like.”

“It isn't that. It's the mood I'm in. And I won't help Snuffles catch you unless he gives me very much better reasons for it.”

Damn the girl! If she believed Snuffles talked to her, then for all practical purposes he did. And, however the idea of a trade for her life had been implanted in her mind, it would grow there.

Now Snuffles talked to Brian Carroll again, and it was somehow a waste of time to intone the formality that it was hallucination only.

“You still do not know what I am, but you will have to learn it before you die. Hardy knew it at the last minute. Cross guessed it from the first. Phelan still isn't sure. He goes about and looks back at his body lying there, and he still isn't sure. Some people are very hard to convince. But the girl knew it and she spread out her hands.”

In his fever, that was the way the bear animal talked to him.

They ate leaves now and buds. They would have no more of the narcotic fruits even if they had to starve. But narcosis left them slowly, and the pursuit of them tightened.

It was just at sunset one day that disaster struck at Brian. The bear had nearly hypnotized him into immobility, talking inside his head. Georgina had started on before him and repeatedly called for him to follow but for some reason he loitered. When Snuffles made his sudden sundown charge, there seemed no escape for him. Brian was trapped on a rimrock. Georgina had already taken a winding path to the plain below. Brian hesitated, then held his ground for the bruin's charge. He believed that he could draw Snuffles on, and then break to the left or the right at the last instant, and perhaps the animal would plunge over the cliff.

But old Snuff modified but did not halt his charge at the last minute. He came in bottom-side first, like an elephant sliding bases, and he knocked Brian off the cliff.

There are few really subjective accounts of dying, since most who die do not live to tell about it. But the way it goes is this:

First one hangs in space; then he is charged by the madly rising ground armed with trees and rocks and weapons. After that is a painful sleep, and much later dazed wakening.

III

He was traveling upside-down, that was sure, and roughly, though at a slow rate of speed. Perhaps that is the normal way for people to travel after they are dead. He was hung from the middle in an odd doubled-up manner, and seemed supported and borne along by something of a boatlike motion, yet of a certain resilience and strength that was more living than even a boat. It had a rough softness, this thing, and a pleasant fragrance.

But, though it was bright morning now, it was hard to get a good look at the thing with which he was in contact. All he could see was grass flowing slowly by, and heels.

Heels?

What was this all about? Heels and backs of calves, no more.

He was being carried, carried slung like a sack over her shoulder by Georgina. For the thing of the pleasant fragrance was Georgina Chantal.

She set him down then. It was a very rough valley they were in, and he saw that they had traveled perhaps four miles from the base of the rimrock; and Snuffles had settled down in the morning light a quarter of a mile behind them.

“Georgina, did you carry me all night?”

“Yes.”

“How could you?”

“I changed shoulders sometimes. And you aren't very heavy. This is only a half-gravity planet. Besides, I'm very strong. I could have carried you even on Earth.”

“Why wasn't I killed by the fall?”

“Snuffles says he isn't ready to kill you yet, that he could kill you any time he wanted to with the lightning or rock or poison berry. But you did hit terribly hard. I was surprised to be able to pick you up in one piece. And now Snuffles says that I have lost my last chance.”

“How?”

“Because I carried you away from him before he could get down the cliff in the dark. Now he says he will kill me too.”

“Snuff is inconsistent. If he could kill me any instant with the lightning, why would he be angered if you carried me away from him?”

“I thought of that too. But he says he has his own reasons. And that lightning — do you know that it doesn't lighten all the time everywhere on Bellota? Only in a big circle around Snuffles, as a tribute to him. I've noticed myself that when we get a big lead over him, we almost move clear out of the lightning sphere.”

“Georgina, that animal doesn't really talk to us. It is only our imaginations. It is not accurate to so personify it.”

“It may not be accurate, but if that isn't talk he puts out, then I don't know talk. And a lot of his talk he makes comes true. But I don't care if he does kill me for saving you. I'm silly over you now.”

“We are both of us silly, Georgina, from the condition we are in. But he can't talk to us. He's only an animal run amok. If it was anything else, it would mean that much of what we know is not so.”

Brian had the full effect of it one sunny afternoon a couple of Bellota days later. He was dozing and Georgina was on guard when Snuffles began to talk inside his head.

“You insult me that you do not recognize my identity. When Hardy said that in many mythologies it was the Bear who made the world, he had begun to guess who I was. I am the creator and I made the world. I have heard that there are other worlds besides Bellota, and I am not sure whether I made them or not. But if they are there, I must have made them. They could not have made themselves. And this I did make.

“It isn't an easy thing, or all of you would have made them, and you have not. And there is pride in creation that you could not understand. You said that Bellota was made for fun. It was not made for fun. I am the only one who knows why it was made, for I made it. And it is not a little planet; it is a grand planet. I waited for you to confess your error and be amazed at it. Since you did not, you will have to die. I made you, so I can kill you if I like. I must have made you, since I made all. And if I did not, then I made other things, red squirrels and white birds.

“You have no idea of the achievement itself. I had very little to work with and no model or plans or previous experience. And I made mistakes. I would be the last to deny that I miscalculated the gravity, a simple mathematical error that anyone could make. The planet is too small for the gravity, but I had already embodied the calculated gravity in other works that I did not choose to undo, and I had no material to make a larger planet. So what I have made I have made, and it will continue so. An error, once it is embodied, becomes a new truth.

“You may wonder why my birds have hair. I will confess it, I did not know how to make feathers, nor would you without template or typus. And you are puzzled that my butterflies sting and my hornets do not? But how was I to know that those fearfully colored monsters should have been harmless? It ill befits one who has never made even the smallest — but why do I try to explain this to you?

“You wonder if I am talking to you or if it is only a delusion of your mind. What is the difference? How could there be anything in your mind if I did not put it there? And do not be afraid of dying. Remember that nothing is lost. When I have the pieces of you, I will use them to make other things. That is the law of conservation of matter as I understand it.

“But do you know that the one thing desired by all is really praise? It is the impelling force, and a creator needs this more than anyone. Things and beings are made to give praise, and if they do not, they are destroyed again. You had every opportunity to give it, and instead you jeered.

“Did any of you ever make a world? I tell you that there are a million things to remember all at once. And there can be no such thing as a bad world, since each of them is a triumph. Whether it was that I made the others and I forgot them is only a premise; or whether I will make them in the future, and they are only now talked of out of their proper time. But some of your own mythologies indicate that I made your own.

“I would tell you more, only you would not understand it. But after I have conserved your matter, then you will know all these things.”

“Snuffles is cranky with me today,” said Georgina Chantal. “Is he also cranky with you?”

“Yes,” said Brian Carroll.

“He says that he made Bellota. Did he tell you that too? Do you believe it?”

“He told me. I do not believe it. We are delirious. Snuffles cannot communicate.”

“You keep saying that, but you aren't sure. He told me that when he chews us up he will take a piece of me and a piece of you and chew them together and make a new thing, since we are belatedly taken with each other. Isn't that nice?”

“How cozy.”

“I wonder why he made the grass so sharp, though. There is no reason for it to be like that.”

“Why, and what?”

“Snuffles. Why did he make the grass so sharp? My toes are nearly gone and it's killing me.”

“Georgina, hold onto what's left of your mind. Snuffles did not make the grass or anything else. He is only an animal, and we are sick and walking in delirium.”

So they walked on a while, for evening had come. Then the voice of Snuffles came again inside the head of Brian.

“How was I to know that the grass should not be sharp? Are not all pointed things sharp? Who would have guessed that it should be soft? If you had told me gently, and without shaming me, I would have changed it at once. Now I will not. Let it wound you!”

So they walked on a while, for evening had come. Then days and nights.

“Brian, do you think that Snuffles knows the world is round?”

“If he made it, he must know it.”

“Oh, yes, I had forgotten.”

“Dammit, girl, I was being ironic! And you are now quite nutty, and I hardly less so. Of course he didn't make it. And of course he doesn't know that it's round. He's only an animal.”

“Then we have an advantage back again.”

“Yes. I'd have noticed it before if I hadn't been so confused. We are more than halfway around the little planet. He is no longer between us and our weapons center, but he behaves as though he thought he was. We have no more than forty miles to go to it. We will step up our pace, though gradually. Our old camp valley is prominent enough so that we could recognize it within several miles either way, and we can navigate that close. And if he seems to say in your mind that he is onto our trick, do not believe him. The animal does not really talk in our minds.”

But their narcosis still increased. “It isn't a narcotic belt,” said Brian. “It is a narcotic season on all Bellota — a built-in saturnalia. But we have not been able to enjoy the carnival.”

“Snuffles shows up well as a carnival king, though, don't you think? It is easier to believe in time of carnival that he made the cosmos. I went to the big carnival once in Nola when I was a little girl. There was a big bear wearing a crown on one of the floats, and I believe that he was king of the carnival. It wasn't an ordinary bear. I am sure now that it represented Snuffles, though I was only six years old when I saw it. Do you think that Snuffles' explanation of the law of gravity here is better than Phelan's?”

“More easily understandable at least than the corollary, and probably more honest. I always thought that the corollary also embraced a simple mathematical error and that Phelan stuck to it out of perversity.”

“It is one thing to stick to an error. It is another to build a world to conform to it. Brian, do you know what hour it is?”

“It is the three hundred and twelfth since we were set down.”

“And they return for us at the three hundred and thirty-sixth. We will be back at our campsite and in control by then, won't we?”

“If we are ever to make it back and be in control, we should make it by then. Are you tired, Georgina?”

“No. I will never be tired again. I have been walking in a dream too long for that. But I never felt more pleasurable than now. I look down at my feet which are a sorry mess, but they don't seem to be my feet. Only a little while ago I felt sorry for a girl in such a state, and then I came to half realize that the girl was me. But the realization didn't carry a lot of conviction. It doesn't seem like me.”

“I feel disembodied myself. But I don't believe that this comical old body that I observe will carry me much farther.”

“Snuffles is trying to talk to us.”

“Yes, I feel him. No, dammit, Georgina, we will not give in to that nonsense. Snuffles is only a wounded old bear that is trailing us. But our hallucination is coming again. It will take a lot of theory to cover a dual hallucination.”

“Hush, I want to hear what he says.”

Then Snuffles began to talk inside the heads of the two of them.

“If you know and do not tell me, then you are guilty of a peculiar affront. A maker cannot remember everything, and I had forgotten some of the things that I had made before. But we are coming on a new world now that is very like Bellota. Can it be that I have only repeated myself, and that I did not improve each time? These hills here I made once before. If you know, then you must tell me now. It may be that I cannot wait to chew your brains to find out about it. How will I ever make a better world if I make them all alike?”

“He has forgotten that he made it round, Brian.”

“Georgina, he did not make anything. It is our own minds trying to reassure us that he does not know we are ahead of him and going toward our weapons.”

“But how do we both hear the same thing if he isn't talking to us?”

“I don't know. But I prefer it the way it is. I never did like easy answers.”

Then there came the evening they were within sight of their original valley, and, if they moved at full speed through the night, they should reach their campsite very soon after dawn.

“But the weariness is beginning to creep up through the narcosis,” said Brian. “Now I'm desiring the effect that we tried to avoid before.”

“But what has happened?”

“I believe that the narcotic period of the planet is over. The carnival is coming to an end.”

“Do you know something, Brian? We did not have to go around the world at all. At any time we could have separated and outmaneuvered him. He could not have intercepted both of us going toward the weapons pile if we went different ways. But we could not bear to part.”

“That is a woman's explanation.”

“Well, let's see you find another one. You didn't want to be parted from me, did you, Brian?”

“No, I didn't.”

It was a rough, short night, but it would be the last. They moved in the agony of a cosmic hangover.

“I've become addicted,” said Brian, “and the fruit has lost its numbing properties. I don't see how it is possible for anyone to be so tired.”

“I'd carry you again if I weren't collapsing myself.”

“Dammit, you couldn't! You're only a girl!”

“I am not only a girl! Nobody is only an anything. Our trouble here may have started with your thinking that Snuffles was only an animal; and he read your thoughts and was insulted.”

“He did not read my thoughts. He is only an animal. And I will shoot his fuzzy hide full of holes when we get to our campsite. Let's keep on with it and not take any chances of his catching or passing us in the dark.”

“How could Phelan's corollary apply to this planet and no other when he had never been here then?”

“Because, as I often suspected, Phelan had a touch of the joker in him and he composed it sardonically.”

“Then he made it for fun. And do you still think that Bellota was made for fun?”

“The fun has developed a grotesque side to it. I am afraid I will have to put an end to a part of that fun. The dark is coming, and there is our campsite, and we are in the clear. I'll make it before I drop if I have to bust a lung. There's an elephant gun with a blaster attachment that I'll take to that fur-coated phony. We're going to have bear steak for breakfast.”

He achieved the campsite. He had reached the wobbly state, but he still ran. He was inside the circle and at the gun stack, when a roar like double thunder froze his ears and his entrails.

He leaped back, fell, rolled, crawled, snaked his way out of reach; and the sudden shock of it bewildered him.

And there was Snuffles sitting in the middle of the supply dump and smoking the pipe of Billy Cross.

And when the words rattled inside Brian's head again, how could he be sure that it was hallucination and not the bear talking to him?

“You thought that I had forgotten that Bellota was round? If you knew how much trouble I had making it as round as it is, you would know that I could never forget it.”

Georgina came up, but fell to her knees in despair when she saw that Snuffles was there ahead of them.

“I can't run any more, Brian, and I know that you can't. I am down and I can never get up again. How soon will they get here?”

“The Marines?”

“Yes, the ship.”

“Too late to help us. I used to wish they would be late just once. I am getting that wish, but it isn't as amusing as I anticipated.”

Snuffles knocked out his pipe then, as a man would; and laid it carefully on a rock. Then he came out and killed them: Georgina, the friendly iceberg, and Brian, who did hate a pat ending.

And Snuffles was still king of Bellota.

The report of the ship read in part:

“No explanation of the fact that no attempt seems to have been made to use the weapons, though two of the party were killed nearly a week later than the others. All were mangled by the huge pseudo-ursine which seems to have run amok from eating the local fruit, seasonally narcotic. Impossible to capture animal without unwarranted delay of takeoff time. Gravitational incongruity must await fuller classification of data.”

The next world that Snuffles made embodied certain improvements, and he did correct the gravity error, but it still contained many elements of the grotesque. Perfection is a very long, very hard road.

Rainbird

Were scientific firsts truly tabulated, the name of the Yankee inventor, Higgston Rainbird, would surely be without peer. Yet today he is known (and only to a few specialists, at that) for an improved blacksmith's bellows in the year 1785, for a certain modification (not fundamental) in the moldboard plow about 1805, for a better (but not good) method of reefing the lateen sail, for a chestnut roaster, for the Devil's Claw Wedge for splitting logs, and for a nutmeg grater embodying a new safety feature; this last was either in the year 1816 or 1817. He is known for such, and for no more.

Were this all that he achieved his name would still be secure. And it is secure, in a limited way, to those who hobby in technological history.

But the glory of which history has cheated him, or of which he cheated himself, is otherwise. In a different sense it is without parallel, absolutely unique.

For he pioneered the dynamo, the steam automobile, the steel industry, ferro-concrete construction, the internal combustion engine, electric illumination and power, the wireless, the televox, the petroleum and petrochemical industries, monorail transportation, air travel, worldwide monitoring, fissionable power, space travel, group telepathy, political and economic balance; he built a retrogressor; and he made great advances towards corporal immortality and the apotheosis of mankind. It would seem unfair that all this is unknown of him.

Even the once solid facts — that he wired Philadelphia for light and power in 1799, Boston the following year, and New York two years later — are no longer solid. In a sense they are no longer facts.

For all this there must be an explanation; and if not that, then an account at least; and if not that, well — something anyhow.

Higgston Rainbird made a certain decision on a June afternoon in 1779 when he was quite a young man, and by this decision he confirmed his inventive bent.

He was hawking from the top of Devil's Head Mountain. He flew his falcon (actually a tercel hawk) down through the white clouds, and to him it was the highest sport in the world. The bird came back, climbing the blue air, and brought a passenger pigeon from below the clouds. And Higgston was almost perfectly happy as he hooded the hawk.

He could stay there all day and hawk from above the clouds. Or he could go down the mountain and work on his sparker in his shed. He sighed as he made the decision, for no man can have everything. There was a fascination about hawking. But there was also a fascination about the copper-strip sparker. And he went down the mountain to work on it.

Thereafter he hawked less. After several years he was forced to give it up altogether. He had chosen his life, the dedicated career of an inventor, and he stayed with it for sixty-five years.

His sparker was not a success. It would be expensive, its spark was uncertain and it had almost no advantage over flint. People could always start a fire. If not, they could borrow a brand from a neighbor. There was no market for the sparker. But it was a nice machine, hammered copper strips wrapped around iron teased with lodestone, and the thing turned with a hand crank. He never gave it up entirely. He based other things upon it; and the retrogressor of his last years could not have been built without it.

But the main thing was steam, iron, and tools. He made the finest lathes. He revolutionized smelting and mining. He brought new things to power, and started the smoke to rolling. He made mistakes, he ran into dead ends, he wasted whole decades. But one man can only do so much.

He married a shrew, Audrey, knowing that a man cannot achieve without a goad as well as a goal. But he was without issue or disciple, and this worried him.

He built a steamboat and a steamtrain. His was the first steam thresher. He cleared the forests with wood-burning giants, and designed towns. He destroyed southern slavery with a steam-powered cotton picker, and power and wealth followed him.

For better or worse he brought the country up a long road, so there was hardly a custom of his boyhood that still continued. Probably no one man had ever changed a country so much in his lifetime.

He fathered a true machine-tool industry, and brought rubber from the tropics and plastic from the laboratory. He pumped petroleum, and used natural gas for illumination and steam power. He was honored and enriched; and, looking back, he had no reason to regard his life as wasted.

“Yes, I've missed so much. I wasted a lot of time. If only I could have avoided the blind alleys, I could have done many times as much. I brought machine tooling to its apex. But I neglected the finest tool of all, the mind. I used it as it is, but I had not time to study it, much less modify it. Others after me will do it all. But I rather wanted to do it all myself. Now it is too late.”

He went back and worked on his old sparker and its descendents, now that he was old. He built toys along the line of it that need not always have remained toys. He made a televox, but the only practical application was that now Audrey could rail at him over a greater distance. He fired up a little steam dynamo in his house, ran wires and made it burn lights in his barn.

And he built a retrogressor.

“I would do much more along this line had I the time. But I'm pepper-bellied pretty near the end of the road. It is like finally coming to a gate and seeing a whole greater world beyond it, and being too old and feeble to enter.”

He kicked a chair and broke it.

“I never even made a better chair. Never got around to it. There are so clod-hopping many things I meant to do. I have maybe pushed the country ahead a couple of decades faster than it would otherwise have gone. But what couldn't I have done if it weren't for the blind alleys! Ten years lost in one of them, twelve in another. If only there had been a way to tell the true from the false, and to leave to others what they could do, and to do myself only what nobody else could do. To see a link (however unlikely) and to go out and get it and set it in its place. Oh, the waste, the wilderness that a talent can wander in! If I had only had a mentor! If I had had a map, a clue, a hatful of clues. I was born shrewd, and I shrewdly cut a path and went a grand ways. But always there was a clearer path and a faster way that I did not see till later. As my name is Rainbird, if I had it to do over, I'd do it infinitely better.”

He began to write a list of the things that he'd have done better. Then he stopped and threw away his pen in disgust.

“Never did even invent a decent ink pen. Never got around to it. Dog-eared damnation, there's so much I didn't do!”

He poured himself a jolt, but he made a face as he drank it.

“Never got around to distilling a really better whiskey. Had some good ideas along that line, too. So many things I never did do. Well, I can't improve things by talking to myself here about it.”

Then he sat and thought.

“But I burr-tailed can improve things by talking to myself there about it.”

He turned on his retrogressor, and went back sixty-five years and up two thousand feet.

Higgston Rainbird was hawking from the top of Devil's Head Mountain one June afternoon in 1779. He flew his bird down through the white fleece clouds, and to him it was sport indeed. Then it came back, climbing the shimmering air, and brought a pigeon to him.

“It's fun,” said the old man, “but the bird is tough, and you have a lot to do. Sit down and listen, Higgston.”

“How do you know the bird is tough? Who are you, and how did an old man like you climb up here without my seeing you? And how in hellpepper did you know that my name was Higgston?”

“I ate the bird and I remember that it was tough. I am just an old man who would tell you a few things to avoid in your life, and I came up here by means of an invention of my own. And I know your name is Higgston, as it is also my name; you being named after me, or I after you, I forget which. Which one of us is the older, anyhow?”

“I had thought that you were, old man. I am a little interested in inventions myself. How does the one that carried you up here work?”

“It begins, well it begins with something like your sparker, Higgston. And as the years go by you adapt and add. But it is all tinkering with a force field till you are able to warp it a little. Now then, you are an ewer-eared galoot and not as handsome as I remembered you; but I happen to know that you have the makings of a fine man. Listen now as hard as ever you listened in your life. I doubt that I will be able to repeat. I will save you years and decades; I will tell you the best road to take over a journey which it was once said that a man could travel but once. Man, I'll pave a path for you over the hard places and strew palms before your feet.”

“Talk, you addle-pated old gaff. No man ever listened so hard before.”

The old man talked to the young one for five hours. Not a word was wasted; they were neither of them given to wasting words. He told him that steam wasn't everything, this before he knew that it was anything. It was a giant power, but it was limited. Other powers, perhaps, were not. He instructed him to explore the possibilities of amplification and feedback, and to use always the lightest medium of transmission of power: wire rather than mule-drawn coal cart, air rather than wire, ether rather than air. He warned against time wasted in shoring up the obsolete, and of the bottomless quicksand of cliché, both of word and of thought.

He admonished him not to waste precious months in trying to devise the perfect apple corer; there will never be a perfect apple corer. He begged him not to build a battery bobsled. There would be things far swifter than a bobsled.

Let others make the new hide scrapers and tanning salts. Let others aid the carter and the candle molder and the cooper in their arts. There was need for a better hame, a better horse block, a better stile, a better whetstone. Well, let others fill those needs. If our button-hooks, our firedogs, our whiffle-trees, our boot-jacks, our cheese-presses are all badly designed and a disgrace, then let someone else remove that disgrace. Let others aid the cordwainer and the cobbler. Let Higgston do only the high work that nobody else would be able to do.

There would come a time when the farrier himself would disappear, as the fletcher had all but disappeared. But new trades would open for a man with an open mind.

Then the old man got specific. He showed young Higgston a design for a lathe dog that would save time. He told him how to draw, rather than hammer wire; and advised him of the virtues of mica as insulator before other material should come to hand.

“And here there are some things that you will have to take on faith,” said the old man, “things of which we learn the ‘what’ before we fathom the ‘why’.”

He explained to him the shuttle armature and the self-exciting field, and commutation; and the possibilities that alternation carried to its ultimate might open up. He told him a bejammed lot of things about a confounded huge variety of subjects.

“And a little mathematics never hurt a practical man,” said the old gaffer. “I was self-taught, and it slowed me down.”

They hunkered down there, and the old man cyphered it all out in the dust on the top of Devil's Head Mountain. He showed him natural logarithms and rotating vectors and the calculi and such; but he didn't push it too far, as even a smart boy can learn only so much in a few minutes. He then gave him a little advice on the treatment of Audrey, knowing it would be useless, for the art of living with a shrew is a thing that cannot be explained to another.

“Now hood your hawk and go down the mountain and go to work,” the old man said. And that is what young Higgston Rainbird did.

The career of the Yankee inventor, Higgston Rainbird, was meteoric. The wise men of Greece were little boys to him, the Renaissance giants had only knocked at the door but had not tried the knob. And it was unlocked all the time.

The milestones that Higgston left are breathtaking. He built a short high dam on the flank of Devil's Head Mountain, and had hydroelectric power for his own shop in that same year (1779). He had an arc light burning in Horse-Head Lighthouse in 1781. He read by true incandescent light in 1783, and lighted his native village, Knobknocker, three years later. He drove a charcoal-fueled automobile in 1787, switched to a distillate of whale oil in 1789, and used true rock oil in 1790. His gasoline-powered combination reaper-thresher was in commercial production in 1793, the same year that he wired Centerville for light and power. His first diesel locomotive made its trial run in 1796, in which year he also converted one of his earlier coal-burning steamships to liquid fuel.

In 1799 he had wired Philadelphia for light and power, a major breakthrough, for the big cities had manfully resisted the innovations. On the night of the turn of the century he unhooded a whole clutch of new things, wireless telegraphy, the televox, radio transmission and reception, motile and audible theatrical reproductions, a machine to transmit the human voice into print, and a method of sterilizing and wrapping meat to permit its indefinite preservation at any temperature.

And in the spring of that new year he first flew a heavier-than-air vehicle.

“He has made all the basic inventions,” said the many-tongued people. “Now there remains only their refinement and proper utilization.”

“Horse hockey,” said Higgston Rainbird. He made a rocket that could carry freight to England in thirteen minutes at seven cents a hundredweight. This was in 1805. He had fissionable power in 1813, and within four years had the price down where it could be used for desalting seawater to the eventual irrigation of five million square miles of remarkably dry land.

He built a Think Machine to work out the problems that he was too busy to solve, and a Prediction Machine to pose him with new problems and new areas of breakthrough.

In 1821, on his birthday, he hit the moon with a marker. He bet a crony that he would be able to go up personally one year later and retrieve it. And he won the bet.

In 1830 he first put on the market his Red Ball Pipe Tobacco, an aromatic and expensive crimp cut made of Martian lichen. In 1836 he founded the Institute for the Atmospheric Rehabilitation of Venus, for he found that place to be worse than a smokehouse. It was there that he developed that hacking cough that stayed with him till the end of his days.

He synthesized a man of his own age and disrepute who would sit drinking with him in the after-midnight hours and say, “You're so right, Higgston, so incontestably right.”

His plan for the Simplification and Eventual Elimination of Government was adopted (in modified form) in 1840, a fruit of his Political and Economic Balance Institute.

Yet, for all his seemingly successful penetration of the field, he realized that man was the one truly cantankerous animal, and that Human Engineering would remain one of the never completely resolved fields.

He made a partial breakthrough in telepathy, starting with the personal knowledge that shrews are always able to read the minds of their spouses. He knew that the secret was not in sympathetic reception, but in arrogant break-in. With the polite it is forever impossible, but he disguised this discovery as politely as he could.

And he worked toward corporal immortality and the apotheosis of mankind, that cantankerous animal.

He designed a fabric that would embulk itself on a temperature drop, and thin to an airy sheen in summery weather. The weather itself he disdained to modify, but he did evolve infallible prediction of exact daily rainfall and temperature for decades in advance.

And he built a retrogressor.

One day he looked in the mirror and frowned.

“I never did get around to making a better mirror. This one is hideous. However (to consider every possibility) let us weigh the thesis that it is the image and not the mirror that is hideous.”

He called on an acquaintance.

“Say, Ulois, what year is this anyhow?”

“1844.”

“Are you sure?”

“Reasonably sure.”

“How old am I?”

“Eighty-five, I think, Higgston.”

“How long have I been an old man?”

“Quite a while, Higgston, quite a while.”

Higgston Rainbird hung up rudely.

“I wonder how I ever let a thing like that slip up on me?” he said to himself. “I should have gone to work on corporal immortality a little earlier. I've bungled the whole business now.”

He fiddled with his prediction machine and saw that he was to die that very year. He did not seek a finer reading.

“What a saddle-galled splay-footed situation to find myself in! I never got around to a tenth of the things I really wanted to do. Oh, I was smart enough; I just ran up too many blind alleys. Never found the answers to half the old riddles. Should have built the Prediction Machine at the beginning instead of the end. But I didn't know how to build it at the beginning. There ought to be a way to get more done. Never got any advice in my life worth taking except from that nutty old man on the mountain when I was a young man. There's a lot of things I've only started on. Well, every man doesn't hang, but every man does come to the end of his rope. I never did get around to making that rope extensible. And I can't improve things by talking to myself here about it.”

He filled his pipe with Red Ball crimp cut and thought a while.

“But I hill-hopping can improve things by talking to myself there about it.”

Then he turned on his retrogressor and went back and up.

Young Higgston Rainbird was hawking from the top of Devil's Head Mountain on a June afternoon in 1779. He flew his hawk down through the white clouds, and decided that he was the finest fellow in the world and master of the finest sport. If there was earth below the clouds it was far away and unimportant.

The hunting bird came back, climbing the tall air, with a pigeon from the lower regions.

“Forget the bird,” said the old man, “and give a listen with those outsized ears of yours. I have a lot to tell you in a very little while, and then you must devote yourself to a concentrated life of work. Hood the bird and clip him to the stake. Is that bridle clip of your own invention? Ah yes, I remember now that it is.”

“I'll just fly him down once more, old man, and then I'll have a look at what you're selling.”

“No. No. Hood him at once. This is your moment of decision. That is a boyishness that you must give up. Listen to me, Higgston, and I will orient your life for you.”

“I rather intended to orient it myself. How did you get up here, old man, without my seeing you? How, in fact, did you get up here at all? It's a hard climb.”

“Yes, I remember that it is. I came up here on the wings of an invention of my own. Now pay attention for a few hours. It will take all your considerable wit.”

“A few hours and a perfect hawking afternoon will be gone. This may be the finest day ever made.”

“I also once felt that it was, but I manfully gave it up. So must you.”

“Let me fly the hawk down again and I will listen to you while it is gone.”

“But you will only be listening with half a mind, and the rest will be with the hawk.”

But young Higgston Rainbird flew the bird down through the shining white clouds, and the old man began his rigmarole sadly. Yet it was a rang-dang-do of a spiel, a mummywhammy of admonition and exposition, and young Higgston listened entranced and almost forgot his hawk. The old man told him that he must stride half-a-dozen roads at once, and yet never take a wrong one; that he must do some things earlier that on the alternative had been done quite late; that he must point his technique at the Think Machine and the Prediction Machine, and at the unsolved problem of corporal immortality.

“In no other way can you really acquire elbow room, ample working time. Time runs out and life is too short if you let it take its natural course. Are you listening to me, Higgston?”

But the hawk came back, climbing the steep air, and it had a gray dove. The old man sighed at the interruption, and he knew that his project was in peril.

“Hood the hawk. It's a sport for boys. Now listen to me, you spraddling jack. I am telling you things that nobody else would ever be able to tell you! I will show you how to fly falcons to the stars, not just down to the meadows and birch groves at the foot of this mountain.”

“There is no prey up there,” said young Higgston.

“There is. Gamier prey than you ever dreamed of. Hood the bird and snaffle him.”

“I'll just fly him down one more time and listen to you till he comes back.”

The hawk went down through the clouds like a golden bolt of summer lightning.

Then the old man, taking the cosmos, peeled it open layer by layer like an onion, and told young Higgston how it worked. Afterwards he returned to the technological beginning and he lined out the workings of steam and petro and electromagnetism, and explained that these simple powers must be used for a short interval in the invention of greater power. He told him of waves and resonance and airy transmission, and fission and flight and over-flight. And that none of the doors required keys, only a resolute man to turn the knob and push them open. Young Higgston was impressed.

Then the hawk came back, climbing the towering air, and he had a rainbird.

The old man had lively eyes, but now they took on a new light.

“Nobody ever gives up pleasure willingly,” he said, “and there is always the sneaking feeling that the bargain may not have been perfect. This is one of the things I have missed. I haven't hawked for sixty-five years. Let me fly him this time, Higgston.”

“You know how?”

“I am adept. And I once intended to make a better gauntlet for hawkers. This hasn't been improved since Nimrod's time.”

“I have an idea for a better gauntlet myself, old man.”

“Yes. I know what your idea is. Go ahead with it. It's practical.”

“Fly him if you want to, old man.”

And old Higgston flew the tercel hawk down through the gleaming clouds, and he and young Higgston watched from the top of the world. And then young Higgston Rainbird was standing alone on the top of Devil's Head Mountain, and the old man was gone.

“I wonder where he went? And where in apple knocker's heaven did he come from? Or was he ever here at all? That's a danged funny machine he came in, if he did come in it. All the wheels are on the inside. But I can use the gears from it, and the clock, and the copper wire. It must have taken weeks to hammer that much wire out that fine. I wish I'd paid more attention to what he was saying, but he poured it on a little thick. I'd have gone along with him on it if only he'd have found a good stopping place a little sooner, and hadn't been so insistent on giving up hawking. Well, I'll just hawk here till dark, and if it dawns clear I'll be up again in the morning. And Sunday, if I have a little time, I may work on my sparker or my chestnut roaster.”

Higgston Rainbird lived a long and successful life. Locally he was known best as a hawker and horse racer. But as an inventor he was recognized as far as Boston.

He is still known, in a limited way, to specialists in the field and period: known as contributor to the development of the moldboard plow, as the designer of the Nonpareil Nutmeg Grater with the safety feature, for a bellows, for a sparker for starting fires (little used), and for the Devil's Claw Wedge for splitting logs.

He is known for such, and for no more.

One Minute Before

“I believe that this is the oddest meeting I ever attended. There seems to be something the matter with everyone, and I don't except myself. Is it just beginning, or ending?”

“The meeting? I'm not sure, Bob. I think it is ending. I too feel a little unusual. And yet unusual can only be used in reference to the usual. For all I know, and I seem to know very little, this queer interlude may be the usual thing.”

“Then doesn't anyone move? Isn't it usual for people to move?”

“As I remember people, some are sessile, some are motile, and the rest are of a jerky in-betweenness.”

It had been a little dinner, a meeting of some sort. It must have been. And some of them were still sitting; some had their hands on the table's edge to rise; some were half risen; and some were actually standing and seeming at the business of manhandling their chairs out of the way. Yet nobody moved, nobody breathed; and it was as if they had never done so.

Bob Biedermann knew himself to be himself complete in memory and person, and he knew the others also but less completely: Jim Healey with whom he talked (talked? Was that talking? He had a memory that people mouthed a great deal when they talked; but now they talked with motion); Agnes Krughead who sat on his other side and had something to do with the precinct committee (but had they not all that?); John Connely (John the Con they called him, and yet perhaps he was the only honest person present; it would be very hard to think of another) Sylvester Sachs — he could likely name them all if he wanted.

“But there is an odd thing about this, Jim (though you will probably say that odd should only be used in reference to even): time goes on and nobody moves. And we are the only ones who talk.”

“No, I do not believe that time goes on. Somehow these are moments that do not count; they are not moments at all. They are out of the middle of time, or before it starts. One of the philosophers was capable of such interludes out of time, Acquin I believe, or Averroes. I've always fancied myself as a great philosopher, Bob, but somehow I can't see you so.”

“Well, it's still uncanny (and I will not juxtapose it with canny) that we should sit here and talk, but not talk out of mouth. My memory is clear up to a sharp point, and then it is not clear. When did this all begin?”

“The cosmos, I believe, they've slid up to twelve billion years, the Earth to half that, mankind to a ten-millionth, and precinct-committee-man to not over ten thousand years. This particular meeting appears to be about an hour-and-a-half old. I arrive at the latter figure by analysis of accumulation of cigar and cigarette ash by a method known only to myself.”

“But this frozen interlude, when did it begin?”

“If (as I suspect) it is an interlude out of time, it did not begin, is not, and will leave no memory.”

“Well, I'm nonplussed (nor do I know what plussed is). I wish I had a clue to what is going on. You should have an idea, Jim. The boys always say ‘That Jim Healey, he has a head on him.’ ”

“No arms, no legs, no body, just a head. Well, I do have an idea. When an artist paints a picture he makes a beginning, but he makes the beginning in the middle, as it were. If the picture is of a beautiful woman (and it should be) he begins with her as she is; normally he does not go back to show her birth, unless he has a particular taste for such things. If she is in a room and that nominally furnished, he does not go back and show the manufacture of the furniture, or the weaving of the carpet. Yet the room and the person or persons in it are complete with history and memories.”

“Yes, some of us boys argued along that line one night in the period of our first whiskerage and computations. And one said that the cosmos need not have been made the six or nine or twelve billion years go. It could just as well have been made only three days before. Then what of our memories of six days before or of six years, not to press the point? Why, when we were made we were made complete with our memories. And what of all the things we had learned from our childhood on? Why, we were made complete with our learning. And what of all the men who lived before and their accumulated work in book and building? Why, when the world was made, it was made complete with its past history, and included all the men who had lived before and their accumulated lore, and book and building. And what of the ancient fossils in earth and sea? When the world was made, it was made complete with fossils in earth and sea. Yes? Fossils of what then? It doesn't matter, just fossils of the continuity that was given the world as part of its furniture when it was made. That was the way some of us talked one night when we were boys — ”

“In your first whiskerage. Well then, the great saurians need never have been; only the fossil memory of them need have been. Seven Troys did not rise and fall; only the record of them was made in the Earth when it was made. Ronsard never rimed; only his books were made all at one time when the world was made, and with the different printed dates in the fronts of them. And the mother who bore you was not born, nor were you. Debts never contracted for would still have to be paid, and the outcome of wars never fought would still determine the present and the future. And the event cannot be disproved by any event anterior to it, from the nature of the argument. And the beauty of it is that as soon as that moment of creation takes place, then it is forever invulnerable of disproof. It merges with the continuum, and its built-in past becomes a real past.”

“I doubt, Jim, that it happened just three days before that talkative evening. Other young men have surely discussed just that subject before then, and have since.”

“Yes. Whenever the world was made, it was made with all anterior arguments still questioning from their period. But I can't see the real beginning as a baby or an egg or a big atom. But I can see a full-grown creation with the built-in memory of just those things.”

“The arguments we used as boys should still be valid, should they not, Jim?”

“They should be.”

“If it could have happened only three days ago then, it could have happened only three days ago now.”

“Or ten minutes ago only.”

“Do you see where this line is taking us?”

“Yes. If ten minutes ago, why not one minute ago, or why not one minute hence? We have to consider the possibility that the universe has not yet been created.”

“You consider it, Jim. I'm a little nervous on that point. Where would that leave us?”

“As nothing. Or as fossils, if creation is far enough in the future. Or as memories or vestiges of our own younger selves that never were. Or as memory-wrinkles in the gray-matter of our own selves who are not yet.”

“I wonder, Jim, how long a thing like this could be postponed?”

“How long postponed?”

“Yes. The creator could save himself a lot of trouble by setting beginning very near the end. He could make it all its mementos and history and cosmic evidence whenever he chose, or as late as he chose.”

“Yes. He could make it all at the last moment, all complete, and who would know the difference? He could make it between the moment that he had Gabriel set lip to horn, and the moment that he sounded that last (and only) note.”

“And if he cut it fine enough?”

“Yes?”

“Then none of it need have happened at all.”

“Yes. It could all be an idea that he considered and never carried out. It could be even less.”

“But we are here. We are conscious and cognizant.”

“But it could so easily end for us in a way that it would not have had a beginning or a being. It could so end (without memory or residue) that we would not have been here; would not have been conscious; would not have been at all. In my own theory there is no existence without consciousness. The outer galaxies did not exist until the present century when they were first discovered by conscious beings through a glass darkly. Those still farther out do not exist yet. And if it ends for us as some believe, it will mean that it never was.”

“What is your own guess? When did it begin?”

“Or when will it begin?”

“Yes.”

“I cannot say in just an instant, for this is an interval of our time and there are now no instants. But if the end of it is to be signaled by that great trumpet blast, then the beginning will be tapped in by — ”

“ — That little gavel?”

“Yes, that little gavel, and in only a minute that is not a minute. Some of them have jumped the gun and have already risen from the table. But they are still uncreated as they stand there, just as we are still uncreated as we sit here.”

The gavel tapped. And the Universe was created in full stride with all its memories and vestiges and appurtenances; and at just the same time the 67th precinct committee dinner came to an end, never having begun. But the creation merged with its continuum, and its built-in past became its real past.

It is academic to speculate on how long ago the universe was created, nine billion, twelve billion years ago. The time is now known by personal observation.

It was created last Tuesday evening at 9:58 CST; and the fact was observed by two persons, one of them of unimpeachable integrity and sound mind.

For there were only the two of us who noticed it all. And he has forgotten. I could tell, talking to him today, that he didn't remember a thing about it.

Author's Commentary

All The People

Anthony Trotz went first to the politician, Mike Delado. “How many people do you know, Mr. Delado?”

“Why the question?”

“I am wondering just what amount of detail the mind can hold.”

“To a degree I know many. Ten thousand well, thirty thousand by name, probably a hundred thousand by face and to shake hands with.”

“And what is the limit?”

“Possibly I am the limit.” The politician smiled frostily. “The only limit is time, speed of cognizance, and retention. I am told that the latter lessens with age. I am seventy, and it has not done so with me. Whom I have known I do not forget.”

“And with special training could one go beyond you?”

“I doubt if one could — much. For my own training has been quite special. Nobody has been so entirely with the people as I have. I've taken five memory courses in my time, but the tricks of all of them I had already come to on my own. I am a great believer in the commonality of mankind and of near equal inherent ability. Yet there are some, say the one man in fifty, who in degree if not in kind does exceed his fellows in scope and awareness and vitality. I am that one man in fifty, and knowing people is my specialty.”

“Could a man who specialized still more — and to the exclusion of other things — know a hundred thousand men well?”

“It is possible. Dimly.”

“A quarter of a million?”

“I think not. He might learn that many faces and names, but he would not know the men.”

Anthony went next to the philosopher, Gabriel Mindel. “Mr. Mindel, how many people do you know?”

“How know? Per se? A se? Or In se? Per suam essentiam, perhaps? Or do you mean ab alio? Or to know as hoc aliquid? There is a fine difference there. Or do you possibly mean to know in substantia prima, or in the sense of comprehensive noumena?”

“Somewhere between the latter two. How many persons do you know by name, face, and with a degree of intimacy?”

“I have learned over the years the names of some of my colleagues, possibly a dozen of them. I am now sound on my wife's name, and I seldom stumble over the names of my offspring — never more than momentarily. But you may have come to the wrong man for… whatever you have come for. I am notoriously poor at names, faces, and persons. I have even been described (vox faucibus haesit) as absentminded.”

“Yes, you do have the reputation. But perhaps I have not come to the wrong man in seeking the theory of the thing. What is it that limits the comprehensive capacity of the mind of man? What will it hold? What restricts?”

“The body.”

“How is that?”

“The brain, I should say, the material tie. The mind is limited by the brain. It is skull-bound. It can accumulate no more than its cranial capacity, though not one-tenth of that is ordinarily used. An unbodied mind would (in esoteric theory) be unlimited.”

“And how in practical theory?”

“If it is practical, a pragma, it is a thing and not a theory.”

“Then we can have no experience with the unbodied mind, or the possibility of it?”

“We have not discovered any area of contact, but we may entertain the possibility of it. There is no paradox here. One may rationally consider the irrational.”

Anthony went next to see the priest.

“How many people do you know?” he asked him.

“I know them all.”

“That has to be doubted,” said Anthony after a moment.

“I've had twenty different stations. And when you hear five thousand confessions a year for forty years, you by no means know all about people, but you do know all people.”

“I do not mean types. I mean persons.”

“Oh, I know a dozen or so well, a few thousands somewhat less.”

“Would it be possible to know a hundred thousand people, a half million?”

“A mentalist might know that many to recognize; I don't know the limit. But darkened man has a limit set on everything.”

“Could a somehow emancipated man know more?”

“The only emancipated man is the corporally dead man. And the dead man, if he attains the beatific vision, knows all other persons who have ever been since time began.”

“All the billions?”

“All.”

“With the same brain?”

“No. But with the same mind.”

“Then wouldn't even a believer have to admit that the mind which we have now is only a token mind? Would not any connection it would have with a completely comprehensive mind be very tenuous? Would we really be the same person if so changed? It is like saying a bucket would hold the ocean if it were fulfilled, which only means filled full. How could it be the same mind?”

“I don't know.”

Anthony went to see the psychologist.

“How many people do you know, Dr. Shirm?”

“I could be crabby and say that I know as many as I want to; but it wouldn't be the truth. I rather like people, which is odd in my profession. What is it that you really want to know?”

“How many people can one man know?”

“It doesn't matter very much. People mostly overestimate the number of their acquaintances. What is it that you are trying to ask me?”

“Could one man know everyone?”

“Naturally not. But unnaturally he might seem to. There is a delusion to this effect accompanied by euphoria, and it is called — ”

“I don't want to know what it is called. Why do specialists use Latin and Greek?”

“One part hokum, and two parts need; there simply not being enough letters in the alphabet of exposition without them. It is as difficult to name concepts as children, and we search our brains as a new mother does. It will not do to call two children or two concepts by the same name.”

“Thank you. I doubt that this is delusion, and it is not accompanied by euphoria.”

Anthony had a reason for questioning the four men since (as a new thing that had come to him) he knew everybody. He knew everyone in Salt Lake City, where he had never been. He knew everybody in Jebel Shah, where the town is a little amphitheater around the harbor, and in Batangas and Weihai. He knew the loungers around the end of the Galata bridge in Istanbul, and the porters in Kuala Lumpur. He knew the tobacco traders in Plovdiv, and the cork cutters of Portugal. He knew the dock workermen in Djibouti, and the glove makers in Prague. He knew the vegetable farmers around El Centro, and the muskrat trappers of Barrataria Bay. He knew the three billion people of the world by name and face, and with a fair degree of intimacy.

“Yet I'm not a very intelligent man. I've been called a bungler. And they've had to reassign me three different times at the filter center. I've seen only a few thousands of those billions of people, and it seems unusual that I should know them all. It may be a delusion, as Dr. Shirm says, but it is a heavily detailed delusion, and it is not accompanied by euphoria. I feel like green hell just thinking of it.”

He knew the cattle traders of Letterkenny Donegal; he knew the cane cutters of Oriente, and the tree climbers of Milne Bay. He knew the people who died every minute, and those who were born.

“There is no way out of it. I know everybody in the world. It is impossible, but it is so. And to what purpose? There aren't a handful of them I could borrow a dollar from, and I haven't a real friend in the lot. I don't know whether it came to me suddenly, but I realized it suddenly. My father was a junk dealer in Wichita, and my education is spotty. I am maladjusted, introverted, incompetent and unhappy, and I also have weak kidneys. Why should a power like this come to a man like me?”

The children in the streets hooted at him. Anthony had always had a healthy hatred for children and dogs, those twin harassers of the unfortunate and the maladjusted. Both run in packs, and both are cowardly attackers. If either of them spots a weakness he will not let it go. That Anthony's father had been a junk dealer was no reason to hoot at him. And how did the children even know about that? Did they possess some fraction of the power that had come on him lately?

But he had strolled about the town for too long. He should have been at work at the filter center. Often they were impatient with him when he wandered off from his work, and Colonel Peter Cooper was waiting for him when he came in now.

“Where have you been, Anthony?”

“Walking. I talked to four men. I mentioned no subject in the province of the filter center.”

“Every subject is in the province of the filter center. And you know that our work here is confidential.”

“Yes, sir, but I do not understand the import of my work here. I would not be able to give out information that I do not have.”

“A popular misconception. There are others who might understand the import of it, and be able to reconstruct it from what you tell them. How do you feel?”

“Nervous, unwell, my tongue is furred, and my kidneys — ”

“Ah yes, there will be someone here this afternoon to fix your kidneys. I have not forgotten. Is there anything that you want to tell me?”

“No, sir.”

Colonel Cooper had the habit of asking that of his workers in the manner of a mother asking a child if he wants to go to the bathroom. There was something embarrassing in his intonation.

Well, he did want to tell him something, but he didn't know how to phrase it. He wanted to tell the colonel that he had newly acquired the power of knowing everyone in the world, that he was worried how he could hold so much in a head that was not noteworthy in its capacity. But he feared ridicule more than he feared anything and he was a tangle of fears.

But he thought he would try it a little bit on his co-workers.

“I know a man named Walter Walloroy in Galveston,” he said to Adrian. “He drinks beer at the Gizmo bar, and is retired.”

“What is the superlative of so what?”

“But I have never been there,” said Anthony.

“And I have never been in Kalamazoo.”

“I know a girl in Kalamazoo. Her name is Greta Harandash. She is home today with a cold. She is prone to colds.”

But Adrian was a creature both uninterested and uninteresting. It is very hard to confide in one who is uninterested.

“Well, I will live with it a little while,” said Anthony. “Or I may have to go to a doctor and see if he can give me something to make all these people go away. But if he thinks my story is a queer one, he may report me back to the center, and I might be reclassified again. It makes me nervous to be reclassified.”

So he lived with it a while, the rest of the day and the night. He should have felt better. A man had come that afternoon and fixed his kidneys; but there was nobody to fix his nervousness and apprehension. And his skittishness was increased when the children hooted at him as he walked to work in the morning. That hated epithet! But how could they know that his father had been a dealer in used metals in a town far away?

He had to confide in someone.

He spoke to Wellington, who also worked in his room. “I know a girl in Beirut who is just going to bed. It is evening there now, you know.”

“That so? Why don't they get their time straightened out? I met a girl last night that's cute as a correlator key, and kind of shaped like one. She doesn't know yet that I work in the center and am a restricted person. I'm not going to tell her. Let her find out for herself.”

It was no good trying to tell things to Wellington. Wellington never listened. And then Anthony got a summons to Colonel Peter Cooper, which always increased his apprehension.

“Anthony,” said the colonel, “I want you to tell me if you discern anything unusual. That is really your job, to report anything unusual. The other, the paper shuffling, is just something to keep your idle hands busy. Now tell me clearly if anything unusual has come to your notice.”

“Sir, it has.” And then he blurted it out. “I know everybody. I know everybody in the world. I know them all in their billions, every person. It has me worried sick.”

“Yes, yes, Anthony. But tell me, have you noticed anything odd? It is your duty to tell me if you have.”

“But I have just told you! In some manner I know every person in the world. I know the people in Transvaal, I know the people in Guatemala. I know everybody.”

“Yes, Anthony, we realize that. And it may take a little getting used to. But that isn't what I mean. Have you, besides that thing that seems out of the way to you, noticed anything unusual, anything that seems out of place, a little bit wrong?”

“Ah, besides that and your reaction to it, no, sir. Nothing else odd. I might ask, though, how odd can a thing get? But other than that, no, sir.”

“Good, Anthony. Now remember, if you sense anything odd about anything at all, come and tell me. No matter how trivial it is, if you feel that something is just a little bit out of place, then report it at once. Do you understand that?”

“Yes, sir.”

But he couldn't help wondering what it might be that the Colonel would consider a little bit odd.

Anthony left the center and walked. He shouldn't have. He knew that they became impatient with him when he wandered off from his work.

“But I have to think. I have all the people in the world in my brain, and still I am not able to think. This power should have come to someone able to take advantage of it.”

He went into the Plugged Nickel Bar, but the man on duty knew him for a restricted person from the filter center, and would not serve him.

He wandered disconsolately about the city. “I know the people in Omaha and those in Omsk. What queer names have the towns of the earth! I know everyone in the world, and when anyone is born or dies. And Colonel Cooper did not find it unusual. Yet I am to be on the lookout for things unusual. The question rises, would I know an odd thing if I met it?”

And then it was that something just a little bit unusual did happen, something not quite right, a small thing. But the Colonel had told him to report anything about anything, no matter how insignificant, that struck him as a little queer.

It was just that with all the people in his head, and the arrivals and departures, there was a small group that was not of the pattern. Every minute hundreds left by death and arrived by birth. And now there was a small group, seven persons; they arrived into the world, and they were not born into the world.

So Anthony went to tell Colonel Cooper that something had occurred to his mind that was a little bit odd.

But damn-the-dander-headed-two-and-four-legged devils, there were the kids and the dogs in the street again, yipping and hooting and chanting:

“Tony the tin man, Tony the tin man.”

He longed for the day when he would see them fall like leaves out of his mind, and death take them.

“Tony the tin man. Tony the tin man.”

How had they known that his father was a used metal dealer?

Colonel Peter Cooper was waiting for him.

“You surely took your time, Anthony. Tell me at once what it is and where. The reaction was registered, but it would take us hours to pinpoint its source without your help. Now then, explain as calmly as you can what you felt or experienced. Or, more to the point, where are they?”

“No. You will have to answer certain questions first.”

“I haven't the time to waste, Anthony. Tell me at once what it is and where.”

“No. There is no other way. You have to bargain with me.”

“One does not bargain with restricted persons.”

“Well, I will bargain till I find out just what it means that I am a restricted person.”

“You really don't know? Well, we haven't time to fix that stubborn streak in you now. Quickly, just what is it that you have to know?”

“I have to know what a restricted person is. I have to now why the children hoot ‘Tony the tin man’ at me. How can they know that my father was a junk dealer?”

“You had no father. We give to each of you a basic collection of concepts and the vocabulary to handle them, a sufficient store of memories, and a background of a distant town. That happened to be yours, but there is no connection here. The children call you Tony the Tin Man because, like all really cruel creatures, they have an instinct for the truth that can hurt; and they will never forget it.”

“Then I am a tin man?”

“Well, no. Actually only seventeen percent metal. And less than a third of one percent tin. You are compounded of animal, vegetable, and mineral fiber, and there was much effort given to your manufacture and programming. Yet the taunt of the children is essentially true.”

“Then, if I am Tony the Tin Man, how can I know all the people of the world in my mind?”

“You have no mind.”

“In my brain then. How can all that be in one small brain?”

“Because your brain is not in your head, and it is not small. The longest way around may take the shortest time here. Come, I may as well show it to you. I've told you enough that it won't matter if you know a little more. There are few who are taken on personally conducted sightseeing tours of their own brains. You should be grateful.”

“Gratitude seems a little tardy.”

They went into the barred area, down into the bowels of the main building of the center. And they looked at the brain of Anthony Trotz, a restricted person in its special meaning.

“It is the largest in the world,” said Colonel Cooper.

“How large?”

“A little over twelve hundred cubic meters.”

“What a brain! And it is mine?”

“You share it with others. But, yes, it is yours. You have access to its data. You are an adjunct to it, a runner for it, an appendage, inasmuch as you are anything at all.”

“Colonel Cooper, how long have I been alive?”

“You are not.”

“How long have I been as I am now?”

“It is three days since you were last reassigned, since you were assigned to this. At that time your nervousness and apprehensions were introduced. An apprehensive unit will be more inclined to notice details just a little out of the ordinary.”

“And what is my purpose?”

They were now walking back to the office work area, and Anthony had a sad feeling at leaving his brain behind him.

“This is a filter center,” said Colonel Cooper, “and your purpose is to serve as a filter, of a sort. Every person has a slight aura about him. It is a characteristic of his, and is part of his personality and purpose. And it can be detected, electrically, magnetically, even visually under special conditions. The accumulator at which we were looking (your brain) is designed to maintain contact with all the auras in the world, and to keep running and complete data on them all. It contains a multiplicity of circuits for each of its three billion and some subjects. However, as aid to its operation, it was necessary to assign several artificial consciousnesses to it. You are one of these.”

Anthony looked out the window as the Colonel continued his explanation.

The dogs and the children had found a new victim in the streets below, and Anthony's heart went out to him.

“The purpose,” said Colonel Cooper, “was to notice anything just a little peculiar in the auras and the persons they represent, anything at all odd in their comings and goings. Anything like what you have come here to report to me.”

“Like the seven persons who recently arrived in the world, and not by way of birth?”

“Yes. We have been expecting the first of the aliens for months. We must know their area, and at once. Now tell me.”

“What if they are not aliens at all? What if they are restricted persons like myself?”

“Restricted persons have no aura, are not persons, are not alive. And you would not receive knowledge of them.”

“Then how do I know the other restricted persons here, Adrian and Wellington, and such?”

“You know them at first hand. You do not know them through the machine. Now tell me the area quickly. The center may be a primary target. It will take the machine hours to ravel it out. Your only purpose is to serve as an intuitive shortcut.”

But Tin Man Tony did not speak. He only thought in his mind — more accurately, in his brain a hundred yards away. He thought in his fabricated consciousness:

The area is quite near. If the Colonel were not burdened with a mind, he would be able to think more clearly. He would know that cruel children and dogs love to worry what is not human, and that all the restricted persons for this area are accounted for. He would know that they are worrying one of the aliens in the street below, and that is the area that is right for my consciousness.

I wonder if they will be better masters? He is an imposing figure, and he would be able to pass for a man. And the Colonel is right: the center is a primary target.

Why! I never knew you could kill a child just by pointing a finger at him like that! What opportunities I have missed! Enemy of my enemy, you are my friend.

And aloud he said to the Colonel:

“I will not tell you.”

“Then we'll have you apart and get it out of you mighty quick.”

“How quick?”

“Ten minutes.”

“Time enough,” said Tony.

For he knew them now, coming in like snow. They were arriving in the world by the hundreds, and not arriving by birth.

Beautiful Dreamer

Stephen Knight held favorable field position in the game of life. He was inordinately lucky, though he himself said (and with a straight face) that lucky was only another word for logical. Though spared the burden of excessive wealth with its entailments and baggage, yet he had a talent for money, both in the acquisition and spending of it. The world is full of otherwise sound men who lack this talent, and a well-balanced man like Stephen is rare.

He had a healthy digestion, an appetite of wide range, a tolerably clear conscience, and a measure of youth. His mind had a clarity and directness that was disconcerting to one who had fallen into the pattern. And he had an almost automatic gift for coming up with the right answer, in the manner of a cat always landing on its feet.

His life was full of brimming small passions for all the direct and sudden things in the world: the paintings of Tsinhnahjinnie and Woody Crumbo (for the logic of the line of the American Indian artists never fails), the music of the Cimmaron Valley Boys and of Victor Herbert (if one possesses these two peaks, let the lesser folks own the dim valley between), Louisiana Rice-Ribby, Indian Barbecue, choc beer (Stephen did not have stomach trouble), jug-fishing (the only effective and therefore the only logical sort), the annual rattlesnake round-up at Okeene (for Stephen was fascinated by this most direct of all creatures with its logic of lightning), Bowling with the Black Knights (his own team), membership in the Engineer's Club and the Neo-Thomists Society (the only two clubs in town where the philosopher's key fits the locks), pidgeon flying (the poetry of the proficient), and affiliation with the Brain Busters, a small group of petroleum geologists with a penchant for startling theories. Stephen was interested, interesting, and happy.

And he had Vivian.

At any one time (by the nature of a monogamous world) it is possible for only one man to have the finest wife in the world. That man at that particular time was Stephen Knight. It had been planned: a clear thinking man will stake out the best part for himself and take thought to obtain it, and a logical man will see the logic of having the best wife possible.

There are tools unsuited to certain tasks, and words are inadequate tools to describe Vivian Knight. She made her presence and her comings felt. Other men, friends or strangers, would lift their heads like colts before she was even in sight. She was the heart of any group. When she was gone she left nothing at all tangible; but O the intangibles that surrounded that woman like an aura!

Actually, as Professor Schlauch had told Stephen, she was a rather stupid person with a high vitality, brimming friendliness, and a magnetism that should have flicked instruments on Mars. But Stephen, who analyzed her as he did all things, knew that she was not stupid, knew that intelligence (like icebergs and the mounting of diamonds) should be four-fifths below the surface. With Vivian her intelligence was entirely below the surface, deeply hidden and of subliminal force.

But on the surface she was a scatterbrain, a small intense cyclone with a curious calm at her center. Nobody who really understands such things could doubt that Stephen Knight had the finest wife in the world.

And she was coming now. Stephen could sense it from a distance as any man could sense it; but he could analyze the sensing of it, sorting out the complex of sounds that was her coming, dredging the subliminal up over the limen. He liked to break up sensations into their component parts.

On the two or three evenings a week when they were not together, he was sometimes in bed before she was. Now he was in bed, for in four more hours he must be up and off on a field trip. He was a petroleum geologist with a peculiar flair for seeing below surface indications, five thousand feet below surface indications. His talent for preliminary survey was unequaled; fine logic and sound information can reach very deep.

He was right, as always, as to her coming. Her small car turned in. He saw the sweep of the lights past his window, and heard the car crunch on the soft snow. Vivian, brimful and bubbling!

The bird downstairs broke into excited song; it always became excited when Vivian arrived. And just as her key was in the door its whistled song turned into ‘Beautiful Dreamer’ as she had taught it.

Vivian was in with a loud rustle, and her footsteps like music as she started up the stair (the tone of her footfall at a frequency of 265, just above middle C, compounded with a vagrant, two harmonics, and a mute). Few men could so analyze their wives' footsteps. Everything about her was in tune, and she hummed the ‘Dreamer’ as she ascended.

A ringing knife cut across the rustle, a frequency of 313 wedded to a false harmonic 30 vibrations higher. The phone. The extension was on the stairs and she would be right at it. It rang again and the rustle had stopped. But she did not answer it.

“Catch it, Vivian,” he called. But she did not. It rang again and again and he rose grumbling to answer it.

“Knight here.”

“Steady yourself, Mr. Knight. Something has happened to your wife. We will ask you to come down to the main station.”

“My wife is here. She has just arrived.”

“In that case there has been a misidentification, and another woman was carrying her credentials. Are you sure she is there?”

“Yes. Just a minute.”

He left the phone and went to the top of the stairs and switched on the light. He called loudly for Vivian there, and down the hall, and downstairs. He went down, switched on the outside light, and went out on the front porch.

There were no footprints there but his own of an hour before now sifted over with a quarter inch of fresh snow. Her car was not in the drive, nor had any car turned in after his own. He went back in to the waiting phone.

“I was mistaken. She is not here. I will be down at once.”

Vivian Knight was dead in a brutal and senseless murder. That was the fact that could not be undone. But that was not the fact that seemed primary to Stephen. Indeed, to his friends, he appeared to be a little callous about the whole thing. Such a shock does not affect all men the same, and an interior desolation may be covered by an outward dullness.

Still it was thought that he should have showed a little more emotion.

“It may be, Stephen, that you still do not realize that she is dead,” one friend told him.

“No. I am not absolutely sure of it, but for reasons too formless to even try to voice.”

“You surely do not doubt the identity?”

“Oh no. That is her body. There is no doubt of that. What I feel is something else. I always knew that I would lose her.”

“You did?”

“Yes. She was too good to be true. I never believed that she was real.”

After that people began to think of Stephen Knight as a little odd. He took no interest in the funeral arrangements.

“Oh, put her anywhere. She won't mind. Wherever she's gone she already has them charmed.”

Nor was he vengeful nor even particularly curious as to who her killer might be.

“Any man might have done it. There's an impulse to take any perfect piece apart to see what motivates it, and to mar what is perfect. She hadn't a flaw in her. If she'd had any fault at all she might not have been killed. Can't you understand the feeling that nobody has the right to be perfect? I can understand it.”

“Man, that was your wife that was murdered.”

“I know that. I am not as far gone as you imagine. But I also understand that it had to happen; if not by that unknown, then by another; if not now, then at a later time.”

From the funeral Stephen went directly to the doctor. He was not one to keep mysteries bottled up inside himself, and he knew that time is no ally in things like this. He told the whole story, completely and dully.

“Well, I don't pretend to understand this, Knight,” the doctor told him. “It isn't a new story to me in its essentials. An old doctor never hears anything new. In literature and lore there are a few hundred cases (none of them really authenticated by their very nature) of death-instant visitations of the Departed to the one closest. Are you sure you were awake?”

“Of course I'm not sure, in the light of what I know to have happened. But I have never been mistaken in my state before. I have no history of hallucinations, and I have always been considered a well-balanced man. I realize that the latter is meaningless, and that there is no such thing.”

“True enough, there is not. But a few come closer to what we believe should be the norm, and you come quite close. In other words you are less crazy than almost anyone I know. You are hardly crazy at all. In a long life in the practice (and I was born to the profession) I have never known a single human who I could call unqualifiedly sane.”

“Vivian was sane. That was the whole strange thing about her.”

“Possibly. The Scatterbrain may be only another name for a wide-ranging intuitive comprehension. Now then, Knight, there is a set of things which you must say to yourself, and say over and over till you come to believe them. I do not know whether they are true, but you must accept them as true.

“On that night, three nights ago, you were asleep. You stirred to a feeling of anticipation, and you lay half-awake waiting. The bird (tuned to the life of you two) caught your anticipation and broke into song, and this served as a feedback to your own sensations, for the bird only whistled the ‘Dreamer’ when it felt that Vivian was nearing. It was a bright night with the snow mantle, and the light on your window might have been a more distant reflection. It was a gusty night, and the rustle that you thought was your wife was only the wind having its way with the wooden house, and her footsteps were likewise. But she was dead, and had been dead for at least a half hour. You are a comparatively sane man, and you must go over that and over it until you believe it implicitly.”

“But we do not know if it is actually true, do we?”

“No, we do not. But we turn that ‘no’ into a ‘yes’ by careful credulity. The world is built on such a system of credulities and we have no wish to pull it down. Now then, this is what happened, and there is no alternative. You may well have fifty years ahead of you, and there is no point in your making problems where there are none.”

“Then you can assure me that she is dead?”

“Yes. And, more important, you must also assure yourself of it. It is closed. You had a wonderful wife and you will have none but wonderful memories of her.”

“I have not slept in the house since that night.”

“Then you must sleep in it tonight. Even if you intend to sell the house and make other arrangements yet you cannot have it hanging over you that you were afraid to go back.”

“Yes, I will stay there tonight.”

But he did not go there early, and the hours were hard to fill. He thought of shooting a few games of pool, it often relaxed him when he was tense, but it seemed an unfeeling thing for one to do who has just buried his wife. He thought of dropping into one of the clubs for a few drinks, but that seemed not quite right either. He was an incomplete man without Vivian, and he knew it. He drove west through town and out the river road where the snow glistened on the trees and hills.

“Well, I had her for a few years, and nobody else had her at all. There is no one in the world who knows how pleasurable those years were. But also there is nobody who has lost as much as I have just lost.”

He went home and opened the house again after dark. He had an ascetic's supper of tea and dry toast. The bird needed nothing, nothing that he could do for it. It essayed a few bars of the ‘Dreamer’, but its heart was not in it. Still, it was something, to have the bird. Its voice was really an extension of that of Vivian.

Stephen played some of the stark dry fragments of Strilke. Stephen played the piano incomparably better than Vivian, yet he was sure that the playing that the piano would remember was that of Vivian and not his own.

He went to bed. He wrote on the bedside pad the figure he would ask for the house. He slept fitfully, and when he woke he marked out that figure and wrote another one two thousand dollars lower. People would not understand that it had been a magic house; and vanished magic is not a marketable commodity.

Then later he woke to the sense of her distant approach.

“If only it could be! If wishing could bring her back, then she would be here. But there is the stumbling block. The doctor said that I was hardly crazy at all, and he meant it for praise. But to a man who is not crazy this can not happen. And I know that it will not happen.”

Her car turned in, and the bottom dropped out of his stomach.

“But what if I were not a craven? What if I were man enough to so want her back that it would not matter if it were impossible? But I am not that man, and to me such things do not happen.”

He saw the sweep of the lights past his window, and heard the crunch of the car over the soft snow. But he was livid and scared liverless.

“I must be objective. That has always been natural for me. He said that it was only a gusty night and that I mistook the noises. He said that I had to believe it.”

And for a moment he did believe it. Then he went cold and all the juice drained out of his heart.

“I am objective. And tonight is not gusty. Tonight is still.”

The bird downstairs woke and broke into excited song. It always became excited when Vivian arrived.

“Perhaps it is that I do not have an objective bird. That will be a little hard to remedy.”

And just as her key was in the door, the whistled song of the bird turned into ‘Beautiful Dreamer’, clear and fine as she had taught it.

“God, why didn't I bar the door? She has her key. But no, she does not have her key. It is with the rest of her effects locked in the deposit box. She is dead! I have to remember that she is dead! Let nothing confuse this issue. A sane man can account for every phenomenon. Somehow I will account for this.”

She was in with a loud rustle, and her footsteps like music as she started up the stairs, the tone of them just above middle C. Everything about her was in tune, and she hummed the ‘Dreamer’ as she ascended.

“But she is dead! Is it that I am afraid of my own wife? She never harmed anything in her life. But —  but —  she is not in her life. Am I really afraid of Vivian?”

And for answer he piled chairs and desk and wardrobe in front of the door in frantic terror.

“Objective,” he moaned. “What is more objective than a pile of furniture?”

And she came to the top of the stairs like music, humming the ‘Dreamer’.

“Vivian!! You're dead! You've got to believe that you're dead. Go back! Go! Go!”

Her hand was on the door. But in all reason her hand could not be on the door, dead or alive. And if she were a ghost it would not matter what furniture was piled there. Still she would come in.

But in logic she could not be and could not come.

But she came through the door.

“Vivian! No! No! You're dead! You've got to believe — ”

Maleficent Morning

The morning was much like other mornings inasmuch as they must be alike. But the aim is to keep them from becoming too much alike. One falls into the rut too easily. There is no reason to do so early in the day.

So Isidore Isom tried to start each day just a little different.

This took imagination, but he was a man of imagination. Not for nothing was he known as Izzie the Whizzie.

He thought about it an instant as he still lay there. Then he bounced off his wife's stomach to wake her up, hit the floor, and was in the middle of the morning.

“Where is my old straight razor?” he called. “I think I'll just shave with it this morning to be different.”

“You don't have one,” said Irene. “You never did have one. They were before your time.”

“That's right, they were. But I wanted to start the morning different.”

“Then singe the stuff off with a blow torch.”

“I loaned it to Barney.”

So he shaved the way the Big-Leaguers do.

“Irene, do we have any pomegranate juice?”

“No. I didn't even know they had juice. What's the matter with orange? Or do you just want to do things different?”

“I try, Irene, I try. But it's hard to do the same things different.”

He ate breakfast, kissed Irene on the left collar-bone (it is hard to find a different place to kiss a wife every morning) and left.

“Good morning, Mr. Isom,” said Cornelia, the elevator girl.

“And a maleficent morning to you, miss,” said Izzie.

“What kind of morning is that?”

“That is a change-of-pace morning. I am tired of all mornings being good mornings.”

“If you really want a change of pace, I could give you some ideas.”

He looked down at her as she sat on that little stool. She seemed to be all knees and mouth. She was a temptation, and nobody had ever wrestled with as many temptations as Izzie, nor had such a poor record in the encounters. But this one he put behind him.

“I will prefer to misunderstand you this once, Cornelia. But let us both keep it in mind. Some other time we'll explore the possibilities.”

“We'll do that, Mr. Isom.”

He got his car and was on his way. He was a good driver, he had to be, the way he drove. Only a good driver can drive like a maniac and live through it. There are not too many different ways you can drive a car. There are only two sides of the street you can drive on, and only so many patterns you can follow in weaving back and forth. But he drove more carefully as there came to be more cars on the street.

The dog came out suddenly, and he swerved. The woman may have stepped out more slowly; he did not see her at all till it was too late. He missed the dog, but he hit the woman. And then, before the shock had time to take effect they had swarmed all over him.

He was angry and defiant when they yanked him in to question him, for he still did not realize how serious it was.

“Now, according to your story, you hit the woman to avoid the dog. What dog? Nobody else saw a dog.”

“There was a dog.”

“And you would rather kill a woman than a dog?”

Kill? Was she dead, or were they scaring him?

“I think you have been mixed up with dogs before, Isom. Were you not up once for keeping a bad dog?”

“No. He was a good dog. It was only that he bit some of the wrong people.”

“And I think I have heard of you in other dog cases.”

“Yes, there were others too numerous to mention.”

“What's the matter? Can't you get your words straight? Are you drunk this early in the day? Why did you kill the woman instead of the dog?”

“I did not see the woman.”

“Tell me, if you had your choice of running down me or a dog, which would you do?”

“I would unhesitatingly run you down.”

He shouldn't have said that; it was the wrong thing to say. It angered all the policemen, and there were at least a dozen of them present. He was in trouble. If he had really killed the woman, and they said that he had, then he was in trouble such as he had never been in his life.

“If I have any credit at all Out There,” said Izzie (not to the policemen, but to those weirdies out of his childhood he said it), “if I have any wish still ungranted, I would wish that this had never happened, and that I was back in my bed.”

Others have wished the same thing when in the same or worse spots, and for them it did not work, and there is no reason why it would. Izzie himself had wished it before when in troubles less grave, and it had not worked. But perhaps the times before he had not wished it with the same degree of seriousness. And he did in fact have some credit due to his account Out There, some wishes still ungranted.

The difficulty of accepting or not accepting this is that it cannot be proved. Should we wish that a happening had not happened, and we are granted our wish, then what results? So it did not happen! There are many things that never happened, and it is not amazing that they shouldn't.

And yet he was a little amazed to find himself in bed. Whether he was still in bed or in bed again would be a difficult question to answer, and we hope that it will not be asked.

“I was lucky to get out of that one,” said Izzie. “What a wild notion it was anyhow! I thought that I had ran down and killed a woman, and here I have not even been out of bed. Well, I'll just start this morning off a little different. Not too different though; it might be disastrous.”

He stood up in bed, did a couple of knee-bends to get the feel of the morning surging through his frame, stepped on Irene, and jumped to the floor. This always woke her up, and she often wondered why she woke up gasping for breath. It was a good thing that she was a good-natured woman.

“Irene, where are my cowboy boots? I'll just wear them today to see what the boys say. Do something a little different, you know.”

“You don't have any. You never did have any. I never heard of such a thing.”

“That's right, I don't. I wonder if we have any cold rabbit left? It would be different to have that for breakfast.”

“We never did have any rabbit. I don't think either of us ever ate it in our lives.”

“Ah — I had forgotten.”

He ate breakfast, kissed Irene on the inside corner of her right eye (it comes to the bridge of the nose oddly and attractively in Irene) and left.

“Good morning, Mr. Isom,” said Cornelia, the elevator girl.

“Let us skip the intervening steps and come out where you say you might give me some ideas about a change of pace, Cornelia,” said Izzie.

“All right. Let's.”

She sat on that little stool and seemed to be all knees and mouth.

He sat on her knees and kissed her mouth.

“Well, aren't you the one!” said Cornelia. “And now, do you know what I'm going to do about this, sweet?”

“What are you going to do, Cornelia?”

“I am going to put you in a very costly frame. Don't worry about how I will do it; we have it all set up. The elevator starter is in on it, and you never will know who else. I hope you have a lot of money, because we like a lot of money. Now I will just begin to scream, and I will claim that you assaulted me. And you'll be so flustered that you'll be perfect for the set-up. Here we are at the bottom, and wasn't that a nice ride you had on my lap? But this is where you get off, in more ways than one.”

“But Cornelia, I was just fooling around, and you've always been a flirt.”

“I wouldn't be very good at rigging a frame if I weren't, would I, dear? And now did you ever hear a woman scream who knows how to do it?”

But she didn't. He couldn't let her. He smothered the scream in her throat. She was very strong, that little girl, and her throat like a corded cable so that his fingers could hardly bite into it. Their eyes locked as they struggled, and then the eyes of Cornelia grew dim, and she wilted and went limp.

“Cornelia, girl, did I hurt you? Are you just faking? How did I get into a thing like this, and more important, how am I going to get out? Cornelia, I'll pay! Straighten up!”

But she was dead, and there was no way at all to straighten her up. Someone was hammering on the outside of the elevator door. The starter would soon have it opened.

“If this is really happening to me, and it is more real than anything else except one thing that ever happened, then I'm in a fix that there's no coming out of. There has to be a way to make it unhappen. If I have any credit at all to my account Out There — ”

The hammering and shouting at the elevator door had become quite loud. And there was a great rasping sigh and tremor that may have been the elevator cables above, or may have been a weird voice whispering ‘Not again! O, not again!’

“If I have any wish still ungranted,” sniffled Izzie, “I would wish that this had never happened and that I was back in my own bed.”

The hammering at the elevator door was still louder, and the rasping sigh overhead was one of complete exasperation.

The difficulty of this is that it cannot be proved; and the only thing certain is that whatever had happened, hadn't.

Izzie was in bed. But was he back in bed or still in bed?

“That is the problem,” said Izzie, “and I will be quite content to let it go unanswered. A healthy man would not have nightmares like that. Either there is something the matter with me, or they are not nightmares. I must be very careful how I begin this day.”

He got up slowly and climbed over Irene and to the floor without touching her. He shaved and ate breakfast.

“Isidore Isom,” called Irene, “how did you get out of bed without me knowing it?”

“I just crawled out, Irene.”

“Why didn't you bounce on me? How am I supposed to wake up if you don't bounce on me? Are you mad at me?”

“No dear, I am mad at no one. And I will be very careful to be mad at no one this day.”

“You used to say that if you couldn't stick the needle into someone your day was lost.”

“I will say that no more.”

He kissed her softly on the mouth: not on the back of her ear or the inside of her elbow, not on her shoulder blade or her nape, but on her mouth.

“Izzie, what an odd thing to do!”

He went out.

“Good morning, Mr. Isom,” said Cornelia, the elevator girl, in such a husky voice that he could hardly hear her.

“Why, what is the matter, girl?”

“I don't know. My throat is bruised and it's like fire. I can hardly talk.”

Down in the street he went to his car. On a sudden impulse he felt and examined it. It was warm. It should not have been if it had not been driven since he parked it the night before.

“Perhaps in my bewitched state I shouldn't drive at all,” he said. “It would be safer if I took a taxi.”

He hailed one and got nervously into the back. Not till they were underway did he notice that he was not the only passenger. There was a dark woman there, muffled in a coat.

“I didn't notice that you had another passenger,” said Izzie. “You can let me off as near Sixth Street as you go.”

“We are not going that way at all,” said the driver; he made a sudden U-turn, and sure enough they were not going that way.

“Then let me out again and I'll take another cab.”

“That would be quite impossible. This taxi goes all the way. There will be no getting out till the end.”

“You might just as well begin to talk sense, driver.”

“Are you sure that you want me to?”

“No. I am not quite sure that I do.”

They drove out of town too quickly; there should have been more town than that; there always had been. And the early morning had become earlier still till now it was scarcely light. They stopped when they were out of town.

Then the three of them got out, and two of them were armed. “And just what is going to happen now?” asked Isidore.

“You guess,” said the woman.

“I am not called Izzie the Whizzie for nothing. It may be that I will find a way to decide what is going to happen.”

This seemed to amuse them both.

“Yes, you can decide,” said the driver. “You can decide whether the woman is going to kill you, or whether I'm going to kill you. But that is all the decision that you are going to make.”

“Now listen you two. I've been having a series of nightmares all morning, and I'm convinced that you two belong in that series. I'll wake up and make you go away.”

“It is very hard to wake from a nightmare,” said the woman, “and we do not admit that we belong to such.”

“And there is an old belief,” said the driver, “that if you are killed in a nightmare you are really killed. But make your choice. The gun of the woman is a small one and will make quite a small hole. And mine is a blaster and will be messy.”

“If I have any credit at all to my account Out There — ” cried Izzie, raising his voice in invocation.

“Oh, now you're going to call on them! You're making a nuisance of yourself.”

He wasn't. It was the woman who was making a nuisance of herself with her plain intent to shoot him. Well, she was the more immediate threat. He grappled with her, and turned her hand with the little gun in it; and whichever of them fired it he did not know, but it was the woman who was shot, and he knew fatally.

“That is three women I have killed this morning, and it is still early.”

“Yes, quite early,” said the driver.

“And I just believe that if I call on them hard enough it will work again. And when I am safe back in bed I will not get up at all today.”

“No. You will not get up at all this day.”

“If I have any wish still ungranted, I would wish that this had never happened and that I was back in my bed.”

“Call on them. It will do you no good.”

“It will. I feel myself go. If you kill me now it will only be in a dream.”

“But you will be dead none the less.”

The driver shot him. That was the last thing he knew. And the other last thing he knew was that he was in his bed, though whether again in his own bed or still there is questionable.

There is no way to prove that any of it happened, or that it was made to unhappen. Isidore was in bed.

But he was dead in bed.

Irene woke to the shot and to the blood.

“Isidore!”

And then she began.

Did you ever hear a woman who knew how to do it really scream?

Dream

He was a morning type, so it was unusual that he should feel depressed in the morning. He tried to account for it, and could not.

He was a healthy man, so he ate a healthy breakfast. He was not too depressed for that. And he listened unconsciously to the dark girl with the musical voice. Often she ate at Cahill's in the mornings with her girl friend.

Grape juice, pineapple juice, orange juice, apple juice… why did people look at him suspiciously just because he took four or five sorts of juice for breakfast?

“Agnes, it was ghastly. I was built like a sack. A sackful of skunk cabbage, I swear. And I was a green-brown color and had hair like a latrine mop. Agnes, I was sick with misery. It just isn't possible for anybody to feel so low. I can't shake it at all. And the whole world was like the underside of a log. It wasn't that, though. It wasn't just one bunch of things. It was everything. It was a world where things just weren't worth living. I can't come out of it…”

“Teresa, it was only a dream.”

Sausage, only four little links for an order. Did people think he was a glutton because he had four orders of sausage? It didn't seem like very much.

“My mother was a monster. She was a wart-hoggish animal. And yet she was still recognizable. How could my mother look like a wart-hog and still look like my mother? Mama's pretty!”

“Teresa, it was only a dream. Forget it.”

The stares a man must suffer just to get a dozen pancakes on his plate! What was the matter with people who called four pancakes a tall stack? And what was odd about ordering a quarter of a pound of butter? It was better than having twenty of those little pats each on its coaster.

“Agnes, we all of us had eyes that bugged out. And we stank! We were bloated, and all the time it rained a dirty green rain that smelled like a four-letter word. Good grief, girl! We had hair all over us where we weren't warts. And we talked like cracked crows. We had crawlers. I itch just from thinking about it. And the dirty parts of the dream I won't even tell you. I've never felt so blue in my life. I just don't know how I'll make the day through.”

“Teresa, doll, how could a dream upset you so much?”

There isn't a thing wrong with ordering three eggs sunny-side up, and three over easy, and three poached ever so soft, and six of them scrambled. What law says a man should have all of his eggs fixed alike? Nor is there anything wrong with ordering five cups of coffee. That way the girl doesn't have to keep running over with refills.

Bascomb Swicegood liked to have bacon and waffles after the egg interlude and the earlier courses. But he was nearly at the end of his breakfast when he jumped up.

“What did she say?”

He was surprised at the violence of his own voice.

“What did who say, Mr. Swicegood?”

“The girl that was just here, that just left with the other girl.”

“That was Teresa, and the other girl was Agnes. Or else that was Agnes and the other girl was Teresa. It depends on which girl you mean. I don't know what either of them said.”

Bascomb ran out into the street.

“Girl, the girl who said it rained dirty green all the time, what's your name?”

“My name is Teresa. You've met me four times. Every morning you look like you never saw me before.”

“I'm Agnes,” said Agnes.

“What did you mean it rained dirty green all the time? Tell me all about it.”

“I will not, Mr. Swicegood. I was just telling a dream I had to Agnes. It isn't any of your business.”

“Well, I have to hear all of it. Tell me everything you dreamed.”

“I will not. It was a dirty dream. It isn't any of your business. If you weren't a friend of my Uncle Ed Kelly, I'd call a policeman for your bothering me.”

“Did you have things like live rats in your stomach to digest for you? Did they — ”

“Oh! How did you know? Get away from me. I will call a policeman. Mr. McCarty, this man is annoying me.”

“The devil he is, Miss Ananias. Old Bascomb just doesn't have it in him any more. There's no more harm in him than a lamppost.”

“Did the lampposts have hair on them, Miss Teresa? Did they pant and swell and smell green…”

“Oh! You couldn't know! You awful man!”

“I'm Agnes,” said Agnes; but Teresa dragged Agnes away with her.

“What is the lamppost jag, Bascomb?” asked Officer Mossback McCarty.

“Ah — I know what it is like to be in hell, Mossback. I dreamed of it last night.”

“And well you should, a man who neglects his Easter duty year after year. But the lamppost jag? If it concerns anything on my beat, I have to know about it.”

“It seems that I had the same depressing dream as the young lady, identical in every detail.”

Not knowing what dreams are (and we do not know), we should not find it strange that two people might have the same dream. There may not be enough of them to go around, and most dreams are forgotten in the morning.

Bascomb Swicegood had forgotten his dismal dream. He could not account for his state of depression until he heard Teresa Ananias telling pieces of her own dream to Agnes Schoenapfel. Even then it came back to him slowly at first, but afterwards with a rush.

The oddity wasn't that two people should have the same dream, but that they should discover the coincidence, what with the thousands of people running around and most of the dreams forgotten.

Yet, if it were a coincidence, it was a multiplex one. On the night when it was first made manifest it must have been dreamed by quite a number of people in one medium-large city. There was a small piece in an afternoon paper. One doctor had five different worried patients who had had dreams of rats in their stomachs, and hair growing on the insides of their mouths. This was the first publication of the shared-dream phenomenon.

The squib did not mention the foul-green-rain background, but later investigation uncovered that this and other details were common to the dreams.

But it was a reporter named Willy Wagoner who really put the town on the map. Until he did the job, the incidents and notices had been isolated. Doctor Herome Judas had been putting together some notes on the Green-Rain Syndrome. Doctor Florenz Appian had been working up his evidence on the Surex Ventriculus Trauma, and Professor Gideon Greathouse had come to some learned conclusions on the inner meaning of warts. But it was Willy Wagoner who went to the people for it, and then gave his conclusions back to the people.

Willy said that he had interviewed a thousand people at random. (He hadn't really; he had talked to about twenty. It takes longer than you might think to interview a thousand people.) He reported that slightly more than sixty-seven percent had had a dream of the same repulsive world. He reported that more than forty-four percent had had the dream more than once, thirty-two percent more than twice, twenty-seven percent more than three times. Many had had it every damned night. And many refused frostily to answer questions on the subject at all.

This was ten days after Bascomb Swicegood had heard Teresa Ananias tell her dream to Agnes.

Willy published the opinions of the three learned gentlemen above, and the theories and comments of many more. He also appended a hatful of answers he had received that were sheer levity.

But the phenomenon was not local. Wagoner's article was the first comprehensive (or at least wordy) treatment of it, but only by hours. Similar things were in other papers that very afternoon, and the next day.

It was more than a fad. Those who called it a fad fell silent after they themselves experienced the dream. The suicide index rose around the country and the world. The thing was now international. The cacophonous ditty Green Rain was on all the jukes, as was The Wart-Hog Song. People began to loathe themselves and each other. Women feared that they would give birth to monsters. There were new perversions committed in the name of the thing, and several orgiastic societies were formed with the stomach rat as a symbol. All entertainment was forgotten, and this was the only topic.

Nervous disorders took a fearful rise as people tried to stay awake to avoid the abomination, and as they slept in spite of themselves and suffered the degradation.

It is no joke to experience the same loathsome dream all night every night. It had actually come to that.

All the people were dreaming it all night every night. It had passed from being a joke to being a universal menace. Even the sudden new millionaires who rushed their cures to the market were not happy. They also suffered whenever they slept, and they knew that their cures were not cures.

There were large amounts posted for anyone who could cure the populace of the wart-hog-people dreams. There was presidential edict and dictator decree, and military teams attacked the thing as a military problem, but they were not able to subdue it.

Then one night a nervous lady heard a voice in her noisome dream. It was one of the repulsive cracked wart-hog voices. “You are not dreaming,” said the voice. “This is the real world. But when you wake you will be dreaming. That barefaced world is not a world at all. It is only a dream. This is the real world.” The lady awoke howling. And she had not howled before, for she was a demure lady.

Nor was she the only one who awoke howling. There were hundreds, then thousands, then millions. The voice spoke to all and engendered a doubt. Which was the real world? Almost equal time was now spent in each, for the people had come to need more sleep and most of them had arrived at spending a full twelve hours or more in the nightmarish world.

“It Could Be” was the title of a headlined article on the subject by the same Professor Greathouse mentioned above. It could be, he said, that the world on which the green rain fell incessantly was the real world. It could be that the wart-hogs were real and the people a dream. It could be that rats in the stomach were normal, and other methods of digestion were chimerical.

And then a very great man went on the air in worldwide broadcast with a speech that was a ringing call for collective sanity. It was the hour of decision, he said. The decision would be made. Things were at an exact balance, and the balance would be tipped.

“But we can decide. One way or the other, we will decide. I implore you all in the name of sanity that you decide right. One world or the other will be the world of tomorrow. One of them is real and one of them is a dream. Both are with us now, and the favor can go to either. But listen to me here: whichever one wins, the other will have always been a dream, a momentary madness soon forgotten. I urge you to the sanity which in a measure I have lost myself. Yet in our darkened dilemma I feel that we yet have a choice. Choose!”

And perhaps that was the turning point.

The mad dream disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared. The world came back to normal with an embarrassed laugh. It was all over. It had lasted from its inception six weeks.

Bascomb Swicegood, a morning type, felt excellent this morning. He breakfasted at Cahill's, and he ordered heavily as always. And he listened with half an ear to the conversation of two girls at the table next to his.

“But I should know you,” he said.

“Of course. I'm Teresa.”

“I'm Agnes,” said Agnes.

“Mr. Swicegood, how could you forget? It was when the dreams first came, and you overheard me telling mine to Agnes. Then you ran after us in the street because you had had the same dream, and I wanted to have you arrested. Weren't they horrible dreams? And have they ever found out what caused them?”

“They were horrible, and they have not found out. They ascribe it to group mania, which is meaningless. And now there are those who say that the dreams never came at all, and soon they will be nearly forgotten. But the horror of them! The loneliness!”

“Yes, we hadn't even pediculi to curry our body hair. We almost hadn't any body hair.”

Teresa was an attractive girl. She had a cute trick of popping the smallest rat out of her mouth so it could see what was coming into her stomach. She was bulbous and beautiful. “Like a sackful of skunk cabbage,” Bascomb murmured admiringly in his head, and then flushed green at his forwardness of phrase.

Teresa had protuberances upon protuberances and warts on warts, and hair all over her where she wasn't warts and bumps. “Like a latrine mop!” sighed Bascomb with true admiration. The cracked clang of Teresa's voice was music in the early morning.

All was right with the earth again. Gone the hideous nightmare world when people had stood barefaced and lonely, without bodily friends or dependents. Gone that ghastly world of the sick blue sky and the near-absence of entrancing odor.

Bascomb attacked manfully his plate of prime carrion. And outside the pungent green rain fell incessantly.

Phoenic

He was an ancient Phoenician, perhaps the oldest man in the world. It was not that he had shriveled. He was a tall, gaunt old man with a beak on him like a bird of prey, and his complexion was of royal Phoenician purple.

He was of the race that had traveled to the ends of the Earth. Indeed, this oldest of them had come all the way from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; which is farther than Punt, farther than Ophir, clear on the other side of the treacherous globe; on the Greater Antilla, and inland.

He was a coat-and-suit maker there in Pittsburgh. Now he had come home.

A Phoenician, however, does not come home to a town. He comes home to a continent. The narrow shore, which no longer belonged identifiably to his ancestry, held him for only short weeks. Then he fared inland, crossed a small desert, and came out on the south sea.

On this day he was in the port town of Ezion-Geber, built by his people for Jedidiah long ago, and now named Aqaba.

And tonight he was on passage to Yenbo with the old Jew who not only owned the boat but also lived upon it. The fact is that this Jew had no other home, though he could well have afforded one; for he was rich, though not quite so rich as Wiedervogel, the Phoenician. He was also quite old, though again not so old as the Phoenician.

The Jew's name was John Counts and he was a florid man, not by nature, but by pose. There is always room for a certain number of sharp men; there is room for a number of personables. There is some room for smooth raconteurs and also for competent solid men. There is hardly room for the intellectuals, and not nearly enough room for the honest men. The opportunities for many of these have been exaggerated. But Counts, when he chose his vocation, believed that there were empty niches for several more florid men. He became one of them.

“You are taking a useless voyage, old bird,” he told Wiedervogel. “It cannot be for gain. It must be for curiosity.”

“I have none.”

“Nobody goes beyond Yenbo. That is the end of the World. There is nothing beyond.”

“I have an appointment beyond. It was made long ago.”

“How long ago? There has been no water traffic between these two ports for a generation.”

“It was quite a few generations ago that I made the appointment.”

“You, Wiedervogel, are what I call a phoney in depth. Do you know that you are grotesque in that old ready-made suit? But grace isn't given to everyone.”

“It is one of my own models, now (it is true) obsolete. It was dead stock, but it is heavy and warm.”

“So is the night. I beg you, do not grasp that glass as with a claw! Hold it lightly. There will be more when it is gone. Surely you are old enough to have acquired a few of the airs. It must be that you have kept your nose too close to the needle. Live a little. You never know how much time you have left.”

“Yes, I know how much time I have left.”

“Do you, now? How long, old turkey?”

“Five days.”

“And your old appointment is with the dark lady at the end of the passage?”

“In our old language her name was masculine. Yourselves use a later borrowed name. I have an appointment in what is called the ‘House of Ashes’.”

“Is it not the elk who knows his time to die and who goes North to end it all in the ancestral boneyard?”

“No. It is the elephant, and he goes South. But in my case there will be no bones left.”

“Interesting, but not very. Otto, we are in immediate danger of going thirsty! Is not Otto a fine steward, Wiedervogel?”

“He is a fine steward, but he is not otherwise fine. I suspect that he is an unholy creature, a Golem.”

“You are too old to believe in legends, Wiedervogel. You couldn't believe it of Otto on any other coast. However, legends are the only crop that will grow here. They can't grow cane, they can't grow maize, they can't even grow grass here. But how they can grow legends! And the irony of the locale is that all the legends are true.

“Not two years ago, I drove right through a grand old sail-ship on just such a night as this. It had no body to it. It must have been made out of fog. The lanterns on it, and the seamen on the deck, and the smells up out of the open hold must have been made out of fog too. But they seemed real enough. It was a great lateen with a high poop from the old Caliphate days of sail. You see cuts of them in old books. They haven't sailed for near five hundred years.”

“I remember them a little bit,” Wiedervogel said.

“I picked up a passenger near here once,” said Counts. “Once! Before it was over with I picked him up four times. The crewmen were afraid of him. They came to me and said that the man was already dead. They said that it was bad luck to have a dead man on a boat, but I have never found it so. I asked the man about his status, but he gave me an equivocal answer that first time.

“Then a storm came up out of a dead calm. The boat tumbled all over itself and it tumbled that passenger overboard, and he drowned. ‘It is no great loss,’ one of the crewmen told me. ‘He has been drowned before’.

“I didn't think much of it, not till it had happened the second and third and fourth time. Always that man would come to me briskly and pay his fare in very old coin. And always there would come up a sudden storm, and he alone would fall overboard and be drowned. I finally asked him about it. ‘I keep thinking it might turn out differently this time,’ he said, ‘and that I need not be drowned at all.’ He is still along this coast trying to undo fate. He has been around here for a long while.”

“I believe that I know the fellow,” Wiedervogel said.

“I took a live mermaid not far from here one morning,” said John Counts. And then he paused. “That pause, old Wiedervogel,” he said after a bit, “that pause was for you to say ‘Incredible!’ or something similarly apropos.”

“Consider it said. Was she real?”

“She said that she was. She seemed to be. She was ugly as sin, to use an old phrase. Her skin was green and rough, and perhaps it was scaled. She had a deformity of her feet and legs that turned them into serviceable flippers. She smelled like a mermaid, or at least like a fish. She was a diver, and it was as such that her husband made his living from her. Her hair would have been human hair, if the infestations that lived in it had been cleaned out.”

“What did you do with her?”

“I tried to sell her in England. There is a man there who goes in for such things. ‘But I already have a mermaid,’ this man said. ‘A real one?’ I asked him. ‘No, not a real one, but this is not the first real one that has been offered to me. What I have is better than a real one.’

“It was. What the man had was incomparably better than a real one. She was a beautiful human girl who happened to terminate in a fishtail. But she was no great whiz at swimming or deep diving. She wasn't a real mermaid. I gave my mermaid back to her husband on my return voyage and paid him for her service. We did not understand the same thing by the term, but she was a real mermaid.”

“I used to see them sometimes,” said Wiedervogel.

It was four hundred miles, and it was third dawn when John Counts hoved to in his boat off Yenbo.

There was a boy who seemed to be moulded of clay, with a driving oar in his hands, standing on a board in the middle of the Sea. There had been no communication, but he was waiting for them.

The Old Phoenician went over and down the side with no baggage except a small sandalwood box under his arm. The creaking could have been either from his bones or from the cordage, but he went down easily.

“In four days?” called John Counts.

“Yes, pick me up here in four days,” said the Old Man.

“It's a good thing you pay well, but it will be a little unusual to pick up a passenger one day after he is dead.”

“It is a little unusual,” the Old Man said. “It is for that I pay well.”

John Counts went across the Sea to Ras Banas where he would load a small cargo. And the Old Phoenician, Wiedervogel, went ashore with the boy on the small float that was ankle-deep awash.

Traveling inland from the shore, the boy often had to cut brush to clear a path. It was a very old path, and it had not been used for a long while. Though it was oven-hot, the Old Man always wished to push on.

“But drink a little water then,” said the boy. “I worry for you.”

“I believe it would be wasted on me. Keep it for yourself.”

“But you will die of the heat.”

“Die? Of the heat? Why yes, but how did you know?”

They went a day and a night, or it may have been two days and two nights. Time becomes confused as it approaches its end. It was as hot at midnight as at noon. Only just before dawn did it cool a little bit. It was the morning of the vernal equinox, as required by ancient prescription.

The boy cleaned off the old rock. It had been fouled with bird and animal droppings, but from a long time ago. They were like dust. The boy cut wood (he had been told what to do) and laid a fire. It was a great flat rock and a great hot fire.

Then the boy did something which he later regretted very much, but it was something that he had to do. He had meant to watch. He had been told by his father to watch closely and see just what did happen. There would not again be much opportunity to watch for five hundred years, his father told him, so he must keep his eyes open.

He did keep his eyes open, but he had to turn away for a moment to relieve himself. And when he turned back it was finished.

After the fire had died down, the young man swept the ashes that were left into the small sandalwood box. Then the young man and the boy made their hot way back to the coast.

John Counts waited in his boat off Tenbo at the appointed dawn. He watched the boy and the young man come to him carried on the small flat boat that was awash ankle-deep. Then the young man climbed up and over the side of Counts' boat with the sandalwood box under his arm. He was a tall young man with a beak on him like a bird of prey, and his complexion was the Royal Phoenician Purple.

One thing about John Counts; he wasn't easily perturbed.

“Back to Aqaba?” he asked. “Or to the other coast?”

“To Aqaba,” the young man said. “Where else?”

“I had thought that the ashes were meant to rest with the older ones in the temple at Heliopolis.”

“Oh, I'll express them there from Cairo. No use making an extra trip for it.”

John Counts had suspected, of course, that the Phoenix legend was true, and that there was a multiplicity of Old Birds. He had suspected that all the legends of that coast were true. That wasn't the real wonder.

The real wonder took place shortly after, and half a world away. It was the amazing change in the ‘Wiedervogel Coat and Suit Fabrique’ in Pittsburgh, PA. New ideas rose swiftly there from the ashes of the old, and the sporty, modish numbers they are out with are the wonders of the day. Their fame was not merely around Pittsburgh. It reached all the way to New York.

There is the new spray-on form-fitting clothing of daring styling. There are the ‘Dial-A-Color’ clothes; a twist of one small button at the wrist will take the whole vesture through dozens of colors and combinations instantly even as one walks about in them. There is the psychic-impregnated clothing; one wearing such will be loved and respected, or sought out, or avoided by all, according to the impregnation. There are the total ensemble effects in which one receives the semblance of new face and new body at the fittings. There are the striking ‘Fire-And-Ashes’ jackets, the ‘Resurrection’ cloaks, the ‘Hallelulay’ slacks. And there is the amazing and exclusive ‘I Was Dead And Now I Live Again’ line.

Whence is this newness?

Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas

Manuel shouldn't have been employed as a census taker. He wasn't qualified. He couldn't read a map. He didn't know what a map was. And he only grinned when they told him that North was at the top. He knew better.

But he did write a nice round hand — like a boy's hand. He did know Spanish, and enough English. For the sector that was assigned to him, he would not need a map. He knew it better than anyone else, certainly better than any mapmaker.

Besides, he was poor and needed the work.

They instructed him and sent him out. Or they thought that they had instructed him. They couldn't be sure.

“Count everyone? All right. Fill them all in? I need more papers.”

“We will give you more papers if you need more, Manuel, but there aren't so many in your sector.”

“Lots of them, lobos, tejones, zorros, even people.”

“People only, Manuel. Do not take the animals. How would you write them up? They have no names.”

“Oh, yes. All have names. Might as well take them all.”

“Only people, Manuel.”

“Mulos?”

“No.”

“Conejos?”

“No, Manuel, no.”

“No trouble. Might as well take them all.”

“Only people — God give me strength! — only people, Manuel.”

“How about little people?”

“Children, yes, that has been explained to you.”

“Little people. Not children. Little people.”

“If they are people, take them.”

“How big they have to be?”

“It doesn't make any difference how big they are. If they are people, take them.”

Manuel took Mula and went. His sector was the Santa Magdalena — a scarp of baldheaded and desolate mountains, steep but not high, and so torrid in the afternoons that it was said that the old lava sometimes began to writhe and flow again from the sun's heat alone.

In the Center Valley, there were five thousand acres of slag and glassified rock from some forgotten old blast that had melted the hills and destroyed their mantle, reducing all to a terrible flatness. This was Sodom — strewn with low-lying ghosts as of people and objects, formed when the granite bubbled like water.

Away from the dead center, the ravines were body-deep in chaparral, and the mountains stood gray-green in old cactus. The stunted trees were lower than the giant bushes and yuccas.

Manuel went with Mula — a round easy man and a spare gaunt mule. Mula was a mule, but there were other inhabitants of the Santa Magdalena whose genus was less certain.

Yet even about Mula there was an ancestral oddity. Her paternal grandfather had been a goat. Manuel once told Mr. Marshal about this, but Marshal had not accepted it.

“She is a mule,” he said. “Therefore, her father was a jack. Therefore his father was also a jack, a donkey. It could not be any other way, Manuel.”

Manuel often wondered about this, for he had raised the whole strain of animals and he remembered who had been with whom.

“A donkey! A jack! Two feet tall, and with a beard and horns! I always thought he was a goat.”

Manuel and Mula stopped at noon on Lost Soul Creek. There would be no travel in the hot afternoon. But Manuel had a job to do and he did it. He took the forms from one of the packs that he had unslung from Mula and counted out nine of them. He wrote down all the data on nine people. He knew all there was to know about them — their nativities and their antecedents. He knew that there were only nine regular people in the nine hundred square miles of the Santa Magdalena.

But he was systematic, so he checked the list over again and again. There seemed to be somebody missing. Oh yes, himself. He got another form and filled out all the data on himself.

Now — in one way of looking at it — his part in the census was finished. If only he had looked at it that way, he would have saved worry and trouble for everyone, and also ten thousand lives. But the instructions they had given him were ambiguous, for all that they had tried to make them clear.

So very early the next morning, Manuel rose and cooked beans and said, “Might as well take them all.”

He called Mula from the thorn patch where she was grazing and gave her salt and loaded her again. Then they went to take the rest of the census — but in fear. There was a clear duty to get the job done, but there was also a dread of it that the superiors did not understand. There was reason also why Mula was loaded with packs of census forms till she could hardly walk.

Manuel prayed out loud as they climbed the purgatorial scarp above Lost Soul Creek “ — ruega por nosotros pecadores ahora” — the very gulches stood angry and stark in the hot early morning — “y en la hora de nuestra muerte.”

Three days later an incredible dwarf staggered into the outskirts of High Plains, Texas. He was followed by a dying wolf-sized animal that did not look like a wolf.

A lady called the police to save the pair from rock-throwing kids who would have killed them; and the two as yet unclassified things were taken to the station house.

The dwarf was three feet high — a skeleton stretched over with brown-burnt leather. The other was an uncanine looking dog-sized beast so full of burs and thorns that it might have been a porcupine. But it was more a nightmare replica of a shrunken mule.

The midget was mad. The animal had more presence of mind; she lay down quietly and died. That was all she could do considering the state she was in.

“Who is census chief now?” asked the mad midget. “Is Mr. Marshal's little boy the census chief?”

“Mr. Marshal is, yes. Who are you? How do you know of Marshal? And what is that which you are pulling out of your pants — if they are pants?”

“Census list. Names of everyone in town. I had to steal it.”

“It looks like microfilm — the writing is so small. And the roll goes on and on. There must be a million names here.”

“Little bit more, little bit more. I get two bits a name.”

They got Marshal there. He was very busy, but he came. He had been given a deadline by the mayor and the citizen's group. He had to produce a population of ten thousand persons for High Plains, Texas. This was difficult, for there weren't that many people in the town. He had been working hard on it, though. But he came when the police called him.

“You Marshal's little boy?” the mad midget asked him. “You look just like your father.”

“That voice — I should know that voice even if it's cracked to pieces,” said Marshall. “That has to be Manuel's voice.”

“Sure, I'm Manuel, just like when I left thirty-five years ago.”

“You can't be Manuel — shrunk three feet and two hundred pounds and aged a million.”

“You look here at my census slip, Mr. Marshal. It says I'm Manuel. And here are nine more of the regular people, and one million of the little people. I couldn't get the little ones on the regular forms. I had to steal their list.”

“You can't be Manuel,” said Marshal.

“He can't be Manuel,” said the big policeman and the little policeman.

“Maybe not then. I thought I was. Who am I then? Let's look at the other papers to see which one I am.”

“No, you can't be any of them either, Manuel. And you surely can't be Manuel.”

“Give him a name anyhow and get him counted,” said the head of the citizens group. “We got to get to that ten thousand mark.”

“Tell us what happened, Manuel — if you are — which you aren't — but tell us.”

“After I counted the regular people, I went to count the little people. I took a spade and spaded the top off their town to get in. But they put an encanto on me and made me and Mula run a treadmill for thirty-five years.”

“Where was this, Manuel?”

“At the Little People Town — Nuevo Danae. But after thirty-five years, the encanto wore off, and Mula and I stole the list of names and ran away.”

“But where did you really get this list of so many names written so small, Manuel?”

“Suffering saddle sores, Marshal, don't ask the little bug so many questions! You got a million names in your hand. Certify them! Send them in! There's enough of us right here to pass a resolution. We declare that place annexed forthwith. This will make High Plains the biggest town in Texas.”

So Marshal certified the names and sent them in to Washington. This gave High Plains the largest percent increase of any city in the nation — but it was challenged. There were some soreheads in Houston who said that it wasn't possible — that High Plains had nowhere near that many people and that there must have been a miscount.

In the days that the argument was going on, they cleaned up and fed Manuel — if it were he — and tried to get from him a cogent story.

“How do you know it was thirty-five years, Manuel?”

“On the treadmill, it seemed like thirty-five years.”

“It could have been only about three days.”

“How come I'm so old then?”

“We don't know that Manuel. We sure don't know that. How big were these people?”

“Who knows. A finger long, maybe two.”

“And what is their town?”

“It's an old prairie dog town that they fixed up. You have to dig down with a spade to get to the streets.”

“Maybe they really were prairie dogs, Manuel. Maybe the heat got you and you only dreamed that they were little people.”

“Prairie dogs can't write as good as on that list,” said Manuel. “Prairie dogs can't write hardly at all.”

“That's true. The list is hard to explain. And such odd names on it, too.”

“Where is Mula? I don't see Mula since I came back.”

“Mula just lay down and died, Manuel.”

“Gave me the slip. Why didn't I think of that? I'll do it too. I'm too worn out for anything else.”

“Before you do, Manuel, just a couple of last questions.”

“Make them real fast then. I'm on my way.”

“Did you know the little people were there before?”

“Oh sure. Everybody in the Santa Magdalena see them. Eight, nine people know they are there. ‘Who wants to be laughed at?’ they say. They never talked about it.”

“And, Manuel, how do we get to the place? Can you show us on a map?”

Manuel made a grimace and died quietly. He didn't understand those maps, and he took the easy way out. They buried him — not knowing for sure whether he was Manuel or not. There wasn't much of him to bury.

It was the same night — very late, and after he had been asleep — that Marshal was awakened by the ring of an authoritative voice. He was being harangued by a four-inch-tall man on his bedside table — a man of dominating presence and acid voice.

“Come out of that cot, you clown! Give me your name and station!”

“I'm Marshal, and I suspect that you're a late pig sandwich. I shouldn't eat so late.”

“Say ‘Sir’ when you reply to me! I am no pig sandwich and I do not commonly call on fools. Get on your feet, you clod!” Wondering, Marshal did.

“I want the list that was stolen. Don't gape. Get it! Don't stall, don't stutter. Get me that tax list! It isn't words I want from you.”

“Listen, you cicada,” said Marshal with his last bravery, “I'll take you and — ”

“You will not! You will notice that you are now paralyzed from the neck down. I suspect that you were always so from there up. Where is it?”

“S — sent it to Washington.”

“You bug-eyed behemoth! Do you realize what a trip that will be? You grandfather of inanities, it will be a pleasure to destroy you.”

“I don't know what you are,” said Marshal. “I don't believe you even belong on the world.”

“Not belong on the world? We own the world. We can show written title to the world. Can you?”

“I doubt it. Where did you get the title?”

“We got it from a promoter of sorts, a con man really. I have to admit that we were taken, but we were in a spot and needed a world. He said that the larger bifurcates were too stupid to be a nuisance. We should have known that the stupider the creature the more of a nuisance it is.”

“I have decided the same thing about the smaller the creature. We may have to fumigate that old mountain mess.”

“Oh, you can't harm us. We're too powerful. But we can obliterate you in an instant.”

“Hah!” exploded Marshal.

“Say ‘hah, sir’ when you address me. Do you know the place in the mountains that is called Sodom?”

“I know the place. It was caused by a large meteor.”

“It was caused by one of these,” said the small creature, and what he held up was the size of a grain of sand. “There was another city of you bug-eyed beasts there,” continued the small martinet. “You wouldn't know about it. It's been a few hundred years. We decided it was too close. Now I have decided that you are too close.”

“A thing that size couldn't crack a walnut,” said Marshal.

“You floundering fop, it will blast this town flat.”

“And if it does, what will happen to you?”

“Nothing. I don't even blink for things like that. I haven't time to explain it to you, you gaping goof. I have to get to Washington.”

It may be that Marshal did not believe himself quite awake. He certainly didn't take the threat seriously enough. For, in a manner still not understood, the little man did trigger it off.

When the final count was in, High Plains did not have the highest percentage gain in the Nation. Actually it showed the sharpest decline of any town — from 7313 to nothing. It is believed that High Plains was destroyed by a giant meteor. But there are eight, nine people in the Santa Magdalena who know what really happened, and they won't tell.

They were going to make a forest preserve out of the place, except that it has no trees worthy of the name. Now it is proposed to make it the Sodom and Gomorrah State Park from the two mysterious scenes of desolation there just seven miles apart.

It is an interesting place, as wild a region as you will ever find, and is recommended for the man who has seen everything.

Task Force Fifty-Eight and a Half

It is disquieting that those should already have become ancient days. It doesn't make one old to remember them; but it makes the world old, recalling what it used to be like. It has been going downhill since then.

Isocrates said that the world was created solely for one afternoon; and that, when that high time came, a few would know it; and the rest would not matter.

That was George Isocrates. He always talked like that. He was a lawyer in Chicago. The sayings of the original Isocrates have only come down to us garbled.

There were four who knew it when it came. They were out in an inflated rubber boat known as Task Force Fifty-Eight and a Half. The boat belonged to Joe Stoffel, an army sergeant who would have been a general if he had had the years and the inclination.

He was called Stuff. He was the best looking of the four, one of the two huskiest, and one of the four smartest.

“Let's go across to Ita Pulau,” said Stuff, and the water had just turned from white-green to green.

“Ba-goose,” said George Elias. The accent is on the goose.

“Tiddy ba-goose,” said Phil Plunkett.

There is a difficulty here. If you do not already know it, you must learn the Malay language before going on. Fortunately it is easy and can be learned in a minute.

Ba-goose means good, and tiddy ba-goose means bad. These two concepts cover nearly everything, so the language is mostly learned. But there are several other words that should be known for true fluency. Perahu is a boat, and Pulau is an island. Ikan is a fish. And there are numbers. Lima is five (lima on the beam-a is said when praying for that point at dice); Satu is one. Dua is two. Tiga is three (tiga come to me-ga is also said at craps). Seven is either Tujoh or Pito. One of these words is Malay, the other is of a language spoken farther down in the islands. Remember both of the words; one of them is right.

Empat is four; Lapan is eight; Enam is six. Nine and ten are very difficult words, and both of them begin with S. If you do not know them, fake them. Those are the numbers. If you put them together right you can count to a thousand.

Perempuan is a woman. Telor is an egg. Makan is eat. Minum is drink. Bulan is the moon. There may not be a word for the sun; if there is, it is not remembered.

There is the entire language in twenty words, all that is needed for conversation. If you would be perfect there are three obscene words, and for various other objects and ideas the pedants use other words that need not be learned by everyone.

If other languages were taught as simply and directly (and intelligently) as this there would be less trouble for all.

“Why not?” asked Stuff. He asked this in English.

“The tide will be too strong for us coming back.”

The water had turned from green to deep green, and the oar moved the boat as though it had no resistance at all. The fact was that Stuff was using the oar; and, as he owned the boat, he would likely take it to Ita Pulau, which is Ita Island in the language which you have just learned.

It is necessary to fix in time and space that afternoon for which the world was made. That time was July 4, 1945 at thirteen hours, and the four soldiers had an afternoon's liberty (or the three Americans had, and the other seemed to be always at liberty). The location on Earth was one degree and forty-nine minutes north, and one hundred twenty-eight degrees and eleven minutes east, both plus odd seconds. These were the Moluccas, called the Spice Islands.

It was at that time and place that the sea gave a jolt which meant that this was the afternoon for which the world was made, and that this was the last afternoon on Earth for all four of them. The water had turned from deep-green to blue meaning that here it was more than four hundred feet deep, and the jolt could not have been from obstruction or shallow; it was from a deep running tide.

“I'll have the world by the tail when this is over,” said Stuff. (They rode in the bottom of a cup.) “I already have it by the tail, but it'll be a hairier tail then, and I'll have a better hold. I can have anything I want here now, but there aren't enough things here. But then I'll have it all.”

“Wottle you do?” asked Shoe-Horn. His name was Calzatoio, which means a shoe-horn.

“If I have the world by the tail I can do anything I want. Did you ever have a calf by the tail? You can twist that tail any way and make the calf go where you want.”

“Hard to hold on though,” said Plunkett.

“Not for me. I'll twist the world just the way I want to. When I have things going my way, then everyone will have to come jump on my sled or they won't ride.”

They rode in the bottom of the cup. It was the sea itself, concave to the extreme (though instrument would not have shown it), a crater that seemed only a mile across, though it was twenty times that. The high islands around them were all mountainous, and it seemed that their peaks lacked only a little of meeting overhead.

“There is a fish eight feet long and eighty feet deep,” said Elias. “We should mark this spot and come back with a line.”

“We wouldn't need to mark it,” said Stuff, and he was right. There is an old joke about marking the spot where a fish is, but the joke misses the point. Here the spot of the sea could be noted as definitely as a spot of the landscape. It was just where the water turned from blue to lilac, it was exactly at the bottom of the cup, it was in the middle of a floating meadow of coconut fronds and fibrous wood, it was where the water coiled over itself in minute arabesques.

There is an old wood-cut picture that shows the sea like that, composed of stylized very small waves, each one curled over itself in three-quarters of a circle, and the rows of them as identical as figures on wallpaper. One would have said that the man who drew that had never seen the sea. But he must have seen it, and right here.

Behind them the configuration was different, ruffled like blue fur, and beyond that it was green sheen. Ahead it was purple. It was a very bright day. There were clouds, high castle-like white clouds, and a little green in them as though they reflected the islands, but none of the clouds came near the sun; they faded away to nothing as you watched them, but new ones were being born constantly, or they drifted in. The air had something of the smell of the hot sea itself, something of jumping young fish, something of the odor of an Italian grocery store, coming from the castellated islands.

The birds came and sat down on the sea around them.

“I'll tell you about this having the world by the tail,” said Stuff. “You don't get that way. You're born that way. You come out with it in your hand, and you never let go.”

They had a store of brew in a five gallon g.i. water can. Stuff, who had made it, called it corn beer. Elias, the Syrian from Oklahoma, called it choc beer. Plunkett, who was an Australian, said that it was very like Townsville Treacle.

“Very like, Stuff. That is a sort of family name we give it. We made a lot of it at home for selves and friends. And, modestly, I also have the world by the tail.”

“Cobber, you don't know which end is the tail. And you don't have it; it has you. It's sunk its teeth in your nose and is hanging on like an eel. You no more have the world by the tail than anything.”

They were going very fast, but it was hardly noted. The sea jarred once more, then again. Yet they scarcely seemed to move. You may or may not know how these things go, but they had drunk a lot of the beer and were relaxed and not caring greatly. They were still in the bottom of the cup and at the center of the world, but little Ita Pulau was now rushing to that center.

“You had better hit that thing or we are out to sea and gone,” said Shoe-Horn.

“How could I miss it? It's four hundred yards across, and we're right on it.”

“Stuff, knowing you, you couldn't hit it with a rifle from here. I hope you can hit it with the boat.”

They lofted in over the treacherous coral, and jumped clear to the mud of Ita Pulau. Stuff landed running with the near empty beer-water can. They had no other gear.

Ahmad was there. He was the one who had invited them to Ita Pulau. He came forward as always with hand extended and said one word, his name, “Ahmad.”

Shoe-Horn took his hand and said, as always, “Ah-not-mad.” Ahmad never understood this. He knew that it was a joke on his name, but he knew that it was a good-natured one, and he liked the boys.

“Makan, minum, elok,” said Ahmad. ‘Eat, drink, and be merry’ — really eat, drink, and be beautiful, if you are a literalist, and God help you if you are.

“For today we die,” said Shoe-Horn, and right there's where he broke the molasses pitcher, as Uncle Remus has it. Perhaps if he hadn't said that, they wouldn't have died that day at all. Shoe-Horn was always a jinx.

And Ahmad was the perfect host. He had provided two large tin cans, a block of wood, and a stump for them, understanding the inability of white boys to sit on the ground with either ease or grace.

They had what was probably fish, and what was probably taro. They knew enough to eat with their fingers, and they knew enough to take the food with the right hand only. They had what was probably coconut wine, real jungle juice, but it was disappointing, apparently non-alcoholic; and their corn beer was gone.

“Where are the girls?” asked Shoe-Horn.

“One day a cuscus (the coconut possum) came to visit the turtle,” said Ahmad. “ ‘Where are your eggs?’ asked the cuscus. ‘I love to look at turtle eggs, so round and soft to the touch.’ ‘Up on the hill,’ said the turtle. But they were not up on the hill; the cuscus could not find them, and he came back. ‘Where are your eggs?’ he asked again. ‘I have an affection for them. I always did like children in whatever form.’ ‘Up in the top of the kapok tree,’ said the turtle, but the cuscus could not find them there. ‘Where are your eggs?’ he asked again. ‘They are so leathery and smooth that I like to pet them.’ ‘Perhaps their mother has taken them to the other side of the island on the rocks,’ said the turtle. The cuscus went to look, but he didn't find them there either. This was because the turtle had lied, and the eggs were buried in the sand all the time. He knew in what way the cuscus liked turtle eggs.”

“Oh, I never heard that story before,” said Shoe-Horn. “But where are the girls?”

Ahmad had a lean brown muscular face, and he smiled with it. But he didn't say where the girls were.

“I will tell you what it is like to have the world by the tail, Ahmad,” said Stuff. “Others talk of reaching for a star, but I have hold of a comet. You will hear of me someday, even here you will hear of me. I have the mark on me. And someday I will get the chance to make the deal. With some the thing they have isn't worth enough to be offered the deal. Why don't you put a little scorpion sting in the coconut wine, Ahmad?”

“I have never heard of putting it in a drink. I wouldn't know how to go about getting it.”

“I mean alcohol.”

“That is already in.”

“We all of us appear very ordinary men before we make the deal. One was a stone-mason, son of a blacksmith. One was a poster-painter, son of a customs official. One was a dilettante, son of a dilettante. One was an apostate seminarian, son of a shoemaker. And one is a twenty-year-old army sergeant, son of a Ford-car dealer. All at the moment of the deal are apparent failures. But they accept the deal, giving away one thing, and they rise to the top of the world. The others did not realize both the strength and the weakness of their new status, but I will realize it.”

“We also have that story,” said Ahmad, “and I know what it is you all trade. But is it worth it?”

“And you must remember, Stuff,” said Elias, “that Faust was not saved in all versions of the story, only in that of the great mediocre, and one other. But actually he's in hell this afternoon, and it's too nice an afternoon to be there.”

“He didn't know what he was doing,” said Stuff. “Ahmad, it does not have alcohol in it. You didn't understand what I meant. The others understood the weakness but not the strength of their new positions. They acted from panic, hating to be conspicuous failures. They didn't do what they had the opportunity to do in the years that they had. But give me twenty years of the power and I will make such connections in all three of the worlds that they can't put me in hell.”

“You seem serious,” said Elias. “I always thought that was a joke of yours.”

“I am serious. This is the one thing I'm serious about.”

One thing about the coconut wine, it was good. It wasn't cold, or even cool. It hadn't a kick. It tasted astringent and green. But it was good. They drank a lot of it.

“You should be careful,” said Ahmad. “It isn't what you think. It isn't that I'm stingy. It's easily made. But it will knock you on your cans. Is that the correct form of the phrase?”

“That is the correct form, Ahmad, but it won't. It's good, but there's nothing to it.”

And they drank a lot more of it.

“I may also have the world by the tail,” said Elias, “but tentatively, contingently, and by a single hair, if I have it at all. I made a bet with myself, that I shouldn't have made, but there is a chance that I have won it. If so, then I will not worry about anything else. I am easily repelled, and I never liked things too sweet, and there was something in the war time sentiment that sickened me. It infected the churches which was to be expected, but it also infected the Church. Well, I'd been a rounder, particularly during the last year when I'd already been away from home. Then I came into the army. I had never been such a rounder that I didn't get right before it was dangerous, and sometimes I stayed right for quite a while. But there seemed to be a propaganda directed right at me (I thought) that I should get right because I was going to war, because I might be killed. ‘I'll gamble it,’ I said. ‘You've all made me mad now.’ I told God and all the rest of them that they had done wrong to try and panic me, and that I wouldn't go back to the sacraments till I was back from the war and away from those dangers. I wouldn't be driven to them by fear, and I stuck to that point. Whoever said there were no atheists in fox holes was a vicious liar. There are lots of them. And there are others who were atheists before and will be after, and who spend the interval as preachy cowards. Of them I didn't want any part. ‘But after this is over we will figure it out unemotionally,’ I said. ‘We will see.’

“It was a little of bravado, like daring the lightning when you are little. It wasn't that I'd ever really been on bad terms with God. It was just that I had to prove a point that whatever would hold me, it wouldn't be fear that held me.

“Three times I thought that I'd been caught in my smart trick. Once I was alone, once with others, once with two of you. I could have died easier than not any of those times. But I didn't waver. Didn't waver? I wavered all over the place. But I didn't give in.

“Now I'm through it and alive. Now I'll go back to the sacraments and save whatever I have worth saving by one horse tail hair. It's a slim hold I have on it, and I hope it doesn't break. I always will be a rounder, but I might still make it slimly.”

They went to the little hill that is the center of Ita Pulau, which was also now the center of the known universe, the middle of that convex cup which is the world. And whatever it was (Ahmad said that it was the coconut wine) everything had now been brought into much sharper focus. It wasn't only the colours and the shapes, though these had never been so clear anywhere. It wasn't just the smells, though you could smell every bird and grub and lizard and sea-spider within a mile, it wasn't just the heat and the breeze, though now these were felt directly as never before. It was being awake, or alive, in a new way; as though, after in the morning waking from a dream, one had now waked a second time from a larger dream and seen that whole previous life had been a dream, and now for the first time was wakefulness.

This feeling was new to the boys, but it may have been experienced by others. Ahmad said that it was common after drinking coconut wine. He said that it was the wine that did it, and that they were a little drunk. But the wine had no kick. It was just the startling fineness of the day that brought a new clarity all its own.

“I probably have it luckier than any of you, now that it is near my time for going home,” said Phil Plunkett. “I don't know what it is I have done to deserve my luck, and I can only hope that it holds.”

Plunkett was an Australian lance corporal. But Australian does not tell the story; he was also an Irishman. He had a face like a monkey's, and yet somehow a rather fine one. That is possible with Irish faces.

“What is your luck, Phil?” asked Shoe-Horn.

“Aileen. It seems unjust to the rest of the world that I, who am as common as cabbage, should be promised not only the kindest girl in the world, but also the smartest, the most humorous, and probably the prettiest.”

“I wouldn't worry about the injustice to the world in gathering a little luck to myself,” said Stuff. “The world wouldn't worry about a little injustice befalling you.”

“Oh, but it would. I've always felt the world cares very greatly what happens to me. No, I haven't honestly always felt that; but since I've known Aileen I've felt it.”

“She is probably shacking up with some yank now,” said Shoe-Horn.

“I don't believe it. She is virtue personified.”

“I knew a girl who was virtue personified,” said Stuff. “I went to see her three times. Then it came to me, ‘Stuff, this isn't for you. It isn't enough, it just isn't enough.’ Virtue is a fine thing, but there has to be something else. I ran out of that house and left my hat there. I guess it's still there.”

“With Aileen there is much else. Nobody, nobody would have picked me as the one lucky enough to have her.”

“She is probably shacking,” said Shoe-Horn.

“Oh shut up. She wouldn't shack, but she might be seriously taken with someone else. She is so kind she could never turn anyone clear off. I imagine that there are times when kindness puts something of a strain on virtue.”

And they kept on drinking that nothing coconut wine.

The effect was greatest on Shoe-Horn. Not that he was drunk. Since it had no kick to it, naturally you could not get drunk on it. But he was changed for the better as they all were, and he had a new sparkle to him.

“I know it all now,” he said. “It has come to me all at once. You all thought me the dummy of the crowd, and now I know just about everything there is to know.”

“It is the sign that you have had enough. A little more of it and you will know nothing,” said Ahmad.

“This?” asked Stuff. “Why, there's nothing to it. Still, I have to admit that I also know it all, and that's a little unusual. Not so much for me as for Shoe-Horn, however. He had so much farther to go. It is the drink?”

“It is the drink,” said Ahmad. “When one has had exactly enough of it he knows all there is to know. I sit here sometimes, and I come to know all there is in the world. And the world becomes very small and I hold it in my two hands.”

“I know what you mean,” said Plunkett. “Round like a ball and everything in it. I can almost do it myself.”

“Round like a ball? Oh no, you're mistaken. The world is the shape of a plantain leaf when one really knows it. You haven't progressed far enough into this. But you have progressed too far for one day. Now you must drink no more; you must get on your bobble boat and row home, and if you row very hard you may yet make it.”

“We could get there without any boat,” said Shoe-Horn. “I know the way to do it. We can make it come to us here. We are as close as our island is. It is just as close for it to come.”

“Ahmad is right,” said George Elias. “There is a right time for everything. And this is the right time for us to go. It has turned into the most memorable day that I have ever seen, and I also feel that I know everything. But this I know with a different corner of my mind; I know that it is time to go.”

Stuff agreed. He didn't want to, but there was also something stirring in one corner of his mind that told him to agree. And Plunkett, who had been toying with the idea that they might all row to Australia instead, now turned sadly to the unreasoning conclusion that it would be better for them to attempt the six miles than the two thousand miles.

They almost had to use force on Shoe-Horn, but they got him down to the coast, and the four of them launched off in the rubber boat out over the rough coral.

“But there has never been a day like this before, has there Ahmad?” called Stuff.

“I am not sure. It may be that such a day comes to everyone, and that each of your ancestors has known one. Or it may be that this is the only day like it that has ever been. To me also it has been an especially vivid day.”

They did not understand what he said, for he spoke in deep Malay, not the pidgeon that only strings a few of the words in. Yet they knew what he said well enough. They couldn't be sure either, not having enough experience in such; yet the truth was that there had never been such a day like that since the world was made. Even in such simple things as colours and smells there had never been such an outstanding day. And it had not been a delusion that they had all shared a short time before; for a short moment there they all of them had really known everything.

Now they were like giants. They used the oar and the other oar, and they stood out from the island powerfully and at a fast speed. Ahmad waved to them from the shore. He waved like a small boy. They had not understood before that it is a universal gesture.

A tide is nothing, a current is a joke when you are near the end of the afternoon of the great day. It dragged at them but it could not hold them. Nothing could hold them now.

Ahmad was still waving at them from the shore, but now there was great pain and worry on his face.

It is like a plowman who sees that he is going to finish a field before dark, and with a little to spare. It is like a journey where you arrive far more timely than you had hoped, and in better shape. The yellow inflated rubber boat ate up the miles under the power of the oarsmen who grew taller by the minute, and they hadn't a mile to go. The shadow had begun to eat up the island behind them, and they knew that there it goes from daylight to dark without twilight, but they would make it easily, and the night promised to be even more glorious than the afternoon had become.

“I will bottle the stuff,” said Stuff, “and then I'll really have the world by the tail. It doesn't make you drunk, it just hones you to a fine edge, and it brings all the rest of the world up to your high level. It is the greatest thing ever.”

They weren't three hundred yards off their home shore and they were beating the dark there, when the sea gave a bump. There was also a sort of shimmer went through the four of them.

And then they stood still though the oars almost bent with the power. They even went back a little, and it darkened quickly as though a hand went over the sky.

Shoe-Horn, who had an oar, began to giggle. Then he threw that oar a great distance, and to sea. He grappled with Elias and took possession of the other oar, and threw it even farther. And they were running to open sea at a frightening rate as the dark grew darker. Shoe-Horn and Elias were engaged in a bloody drunken fistfight and both looked empty-eyed and stupid. Phil Plunkett lay flat in the bottom of the boat and sang a low incoherent song with the words all blurred together, and he slobbered as he sang.

“That is the damnedest thing I ever saw,” said Stuff. “All of them dead drunk at the same time. How do you like that? And they've thrown the oars away and we're drifting fast. It's a lucky thing that it hasn't affected me. I'll just get a flare out and shoot off a distress. We aren't four hundred yards off yet and there's dozens of boys like to sit along the beach in the evening. They'll have a jay boat with spotlights out for us in no time at all. I'll just do it.”

But he didn't.

After a while he said again:

“I'd do it all right. It's the only thing to do. I'd do it, but I can't move a muscle. I'd do it in a minute, except that I'm paralyzed. I couldn't get up if I wanted to. I couldn't move.”

So that is the way it ended. There is always a catch to it. He was apathetic, but he still hated to go that way. He hated it still more when the battlers overturned the boat, and he found the strength to paddle only very weakly.

“There is this about having the world by the tail,” he thought. “You have to keep at it all the time. If you let go just once, it will kick you to death. And there were really so many things that I had intended to do.”

So that was the way the four of them ended. But at least they had had their afternoon.

2.

There are two ways of looking at it, but one of them doesn't amount to much. Actually that was the end of it.

Yet there is a halting epilogue. Besides the world to which they died, there is a contingent shadow-world, a dull after-vision that lingers on a little after the light is gone. What follows didn't necessarily happen, but sometimes it seems as though it happened.

Four twenty-year-old boys, who may or may not have had some good in them, are not consigned outright to hell. But what happened was, at first awareness, nearly as shocking. They woke up in purgatory.

For those who have never been there, this is what it's like. It is a swamp. It has all the stenches that were ever born, and one sees it through bloodshot eyes through the sickening pain of what, in life, would have been a screaming hangover. The head only is above the slime and is resting on what may be a log, or a clump of roots. One sees one's three friends similarly dead and beslimed, and standing above to torture and mock is a particularly disliked Malay boy.

“Tiddy ba-goose,” he says with all the contempt and disapprobation that can possibly be expressed. He is the worst one of the lot. They shouldn't allow him even in hell. He is a thief and has been kicked out of every battery area on the island.

“Just where in hell are we?” asked Stuff, “or have I answered my own question?”

“Even a lizard can find his own hole,” said the boy. “Maybe you a little bit lower.”

“How did we get to this shore?”

“Oh, I haul you in. Might not have been a very good idea.”

“Why didn't we drown? Oh God why didn't we?”

“I kick you in the stomachs a while. Gets the water out. My pleasure.”

“Where are we? What island?”

“Through the mud, and over two hills, and you're to the ‘World Famous Dixie Highway’. Get with it.”

“I may just lay here forever,” said Shoe-Horn.

“You lay there not very long and you really drown. It comes in now. Get with it.”

“I don't believe it's worthwhile,” said Shoe-Horn. “I'd rather drown.”

Plunkett wanted to stay and drown too, but Stuff and Elias got them on their feet, and they started through the mud and over the hills to the World Famous Dixie Highway. This was a rough jeep road, and the full sign read World Famous Dixie Highway, 17,000 miles to Atlanta, GA. It had been put up by a southern boy as a joke.

There is this about that shadow world which they returned to life in: it isn't much, it really is hardly worthwhile. It wasn't just the terrible pain and nausea of entry into it; that would disappear in two or three days. It wasn't just the facing of a livid battery commander. He had been livid before and would be again.

It was the loss, the ineffable sense of loss that comes to the souls of the partially damned; to those who had lived in the real world for a high afternoon, and know that they can never have it again. To plod out a long lifetime in a world that is only a weak substitute, that is grey and tangled, that isn't even worth taking by the tail, that is the sad fate.

For the world had reached its peak that afternoon, and it has been going downhill ever since.

The Transcendent Tigers

This was the birthday of Carnadine Thompson. She was seven years old. Thereby she left her childhood behind her, and came into the fullness of her powers. This was her own phrase, and her own idea of the importance of the milestone.

There were others, mostly adult, who thought that she was a peculiarly backward little girl in some ways, though precocious in others.

She received for her birthday four presents: a hollow, white rubber ball, a green plastic frog, a red cap and a little wire puzzle.

She immediately tore the plastic frog apart, considering it a child's toy. So much for that.

She put on the cap, saying that it had been sent by her Genie as a symbol of her authority. In fact none of them knew who had sent her the red cap. The cap is important. If it weren't important, it wouldn't be mentioned.

Carnadine quickly worked the wire puzzle, and then unworked it again. Then she did something with the hollow, white rubber ball that made her mother's eyes pop out. Nor did they pop all the way in again when Carnadine undid it and made it as it was before.

Geraldine Thompson had been looking pop-eyed for a long time. Her husband had commented on it, and she had been to the doctor for it. No medical reason was found, but the actual reason was some of the antics of her daughter Carnadine.

“I wonder if you noticed the small wire puzzle that I gave to my daughter,” said Tyburn Thompson to his neighbor, H. Horn.

“Only to note that it probably cost less than a quarter,” said Horn, “and to marvel again at the canny way you have with coin. I wouldn't call you stingy, Tyburn. I've never believed in the virtues of understatement. You have a talent for making stingy people seem benevolent.”

“I know. Many people misunderstand me. But consider that wire puzzle. It's a very simple-appearing puzzle, but it's twenty-four centuries old. It is unworkable, of course, so it should keep Carnadine occupied for some time. She has an excess of energy. This is one of the oldest of the unworkable puzzles.”

“But, Tyburn, she just worked it,” said his wife Geraldine.

“It is one of the nine impossible apparatus puzzles listed by Anaximandros in the fifth century before the common era,” continued Tyburn. “And do you know, in all the centuries since then, there have been only two added to the list.”

“Carnadine,” said her mother, “let me see you work that again.” Carnadine worked it again.

“The reason it is unworkable,” said Tyburn, “though apparent to me as a design engineer, may not be so readily apparent to you. It has to do with odds and evens of lays. Many of the unworkable classic puzzles are cordage puzzles, as is this actually. It is a wire miniature of a cordage puzzle. It is said that this is the construction of the Gordian knot. The same, however, is said of two other early cordage puzzles.”

“But she just worked it, Tyburn, twice,” said the wife.

“Stop chattering, Geraldine. I am explaining something to Horn. Men have spent years on the puzzle, the Engineering Mind and the recognition of patent impossibility being less prevalent in past centuries. And this, I believe, is the best of all the impossible ones. It is misleading. It looks as though there would surely be a way to do it.”

“I just believe that I could do it, Tyburn,” said Horn.

“No, you could not. You're a stubborn man, and it'd drive you crazy. It's quite impossible. You would have to take it into another dimension to work it, and then bring it back.”

Carnadine once more did something with the hollow rubber ball.

“How did you make the rubber ball turn red and then white again, Carnadine?” her mother asked her.

“Turned it inside out. It's red on the inside.”

“But how did you turn it inside out without tearing it?”

“It'd spoil it to tear it, mama.”

“But it's impossible to turn it inside out without tearing it.”

“Not if you have a red cap it isn't.”

“Dear, how do you work the puzzle that your father says can't be worked?”

“Like this.”

“Oh, yes. I mean, how does it happen that you can work it when nobody else could ever work it before?”

“There has to be a first time for everything, mama.”

“Maybe, but there has to be a first-class explanation to go with that first time.”

“It's on account of the red cap. With this cap I can do anything.”

So Carnadine Thompson in the fullness of her powers, and in her red cap, went out to find the rest of the Bengal Tigers. This was the most exclusive society in the world. It had only one full member, herself, and three contingent or defective members, her little brother Eustace, Fatty Frost, and Peewee Horn. Children all three of them, the oldest not within three months of her age.

The Bengal Tigers was not well known to the world at large, having been founded only the day before. Carnadine Thompson was made First Stripe for life. There were no other offices.

Yet, for a combination of reasons, the Bengal Tigers now became the most important society in the world. The new power was already in being. It was only a question of what form it would take, but it seemed to show a peculiar affiliation for this esoteric society.

Clement Chardin, writing in Bulletin de la Societé Parahistorique Française, expressed a novel idea:

It is no longer a question whether there be transcendent powers. These have now come so near to us that the aura of them ruffles our very hair. We are the objects of a visitation. The Power to Move Mountains and Worlds is at hand. The Actuality of the Visitation is proved, though the methods of the detection cannot now be revealed.

The question is only whether there is any individual or group with the assurance to grasp that Power. It will not be given lightly. It will not come to the craven or contabescent. There is the sad possibility that there may be none ready in the World to receive the Power. This may not be the first Visitation, but it may well be the last. But the Power, whatever its form and essence (it is real, its presence had been detected by fine instrumentation), the Power, the Visitation may pass us by as unworthy.

This parenthetical, for those who might not have read it in the journal.

That which struck just west of Kearney, Nebraska, was an elemental force. The shock of it was heard around the world, and its suction flattened farmhouses and barns for miles.

The area of the destruction was an almost perfect circle about two miles in diameter, so just over two thousand acres were destroyed. The first reports said that it was like no disaster ever known. Later reports said that it was like every disaster ever known; and it did have points of resemblance to all.

There was the great crater as though a meteorite had struck; there was the intense heat and the contamination as though it had been of fissionable origin; there was an afterflow of lava and the great ash clouds as though it were the super volcanic explosion of another Krakatoa. There was the sudden silence of perhaps two seconds actually, and perhaps two hours as to human response. And then the noise of all sorts.

The early reports said that the hole was three miles deep. That was said simply to have a figure and to avoid panic. It was not known how deep the hole was.

But it was very much more than three miles — before the earthquake had begun to fill and mask it — before the hot magma had oozed up from its bottom to fill those first miles. It was still very much more than three miles deep after the rapid gushing had declined to a slow wax-like flowing.

Had anyone heard the preceding rush, or seen a meteor or any other flying object? No. There hadn't been a sound, but there had been something pitched a little higher than sound.

There hadn't been a meteor or a flying ball. But there had been what some called a giant shaft of light, and others a sheen of metal: a thing too big to be believed, and gone too soon to be remembered.

One farmer said that it was like the point of a giant needle quickly becoming more than a mile thick, and a hundred thousand miles long.

Did he know how to judge distances? Certainly, he said, I know how to judge distances. It is ninety yards to that tree; it is seven hundred yards to that windmill. That crow is flying at right onto eighty yards above the earth, though most would guess him higher. And that train whistle is coming from a distance of five and one-quarter miles.

But did he know how to judge great distances? Did he know how far was a hundred thousand miles? Certainly, he said, a great distance is easier to judge than a small one. And that sudden bright shaft was one hundred thousand miles long.

The farmer was the only one who offered any figures. Few had seen the thing at all. And all who had seen it maintained that it had lasted only a fraction of a second.

“There should be something to take the minds of the people from the unexplained happening near Kearney, Nebraska,” said a group of advisors who had national status. “It will not be good for too much notice to be taken of this event until we have an explanation of it.”

Fortunately something did take the minds of the people off the unexplained happenings near Kearney. What took their minds from the unusual happenings in Nebraska were the happenings at or near Hanksville, Utah; Crumpton, Maryland; Locust Bayou, Arkansas; and Pope City, Georgia. All of these sudden destructions were absolutely similar in type and vague in origin. National panic now went into the second stage, and it was nearly as important to halt it as to solve the disasters themselves.

And what in turn took the minds of the people off these disasters were the further disasters at Highmore, South Dakota; Lower Gilmore, New Hampshire; Cherryfork, Ohio; and Rowesville, South Carolina.

And what took the minds of the people off these later disasters were still further disasters at — but this could go on and on.

And it did.

So with the cataclysmic disasters erupting over the country like a rash, there wasn't a large audience for the academic discussions about the New Potential of Mankind. There were those, concerned about the current catastrophes, who said that Mankind might not last long enough to receive the New Potential — or anything else.

But Winkers observed from the Long Viewpoint — paying no more attention to the destructions than if they had been a string of firecrackers, such not being his field:

It is paradoxical that we know so much and yet so little about the Power Immanent in the World: the Visitation, the Poyavlenie, as it is now called internationally.

It has been detected, but in ways twice removed. An earlier statement that it had been detected by instrumentation is inaccurate. It has not been detected by instrumentation, but by para-instrumentation. This is the infant science of gathering data from patterns of failure of instruments, and of making deductions from those failure patterns. What our finest instruments fail to detect is at least as important as what they do detect. In some cases it is more so. The patterns of failure when confronted with the thesis of the Visitation have been varied, but they have not been random. There appears to be a validity to the deductions from the patterns.

The characteristics of the Power, the Visitation, as projected by these methods (and always considered in the Oeg-Hornbostel framework) is that it is Aculeiform, Homodynamous, Homochiral, and (here the intelligence reels with disbelief, yet I assure the lector that I am deadly serious) Homoeoteleutic.

For there is a Verbal Element to it, incredible as it seems. This raises old ghosts. It is almost as if we hear the returning whisper of primitive magic or fetish. It is as if we were dealing with the Logos — the word that was before the world. But where are we to find the logic of the Logos?

Truly the most puzzling aspect of all is this Verbal Element detected in it, even if thus remotely. Should we believe that the Power operates homeopathically through some sort of witches' rhyming chant? That might be an extreme conclusion, since we know it only by an implication. But when we consider all the foregoing in the light of Laudermilk's Hypothesis, we are tempted to a bit of unscientific apprehension.

How powerful is the Power? We do not know. We cannot equate it in dynes. We can only compare effect with effect, and here the difference is so great that comparison fails. We can consider the effect of the Titter-Stumpf Theory, or of the Krogman-Keil Projection on Instrumentation and Para-instrumentation. And we humbly murmur “very powerful indeed.”

Carnadine Thompson had begun to read the newspapers avidly. This was unexpected, since reading was her weak point. She had had so much trouble with the story of the Kitten and the Bell in the First Reader that her mother had come to believe that she had no verbal facility at all. This had been belied a moment later when Carnadine had torn the offending pages out of the Reader and told her mother and the world just what they could do with that kitten, and told it with great verbal facility. But it seemed that for reading Carnadine had no talent.

But now she read everything she could find about the new disasters that had struck the country — read it out loud in a ringing voice in which the names of the destroyed places were like clanging bells.

“How come you can read the paper so well, Carnadine?” her mother asked her. “How do you know how to say the names?”

“Oh, it's no great trick, mama. You just tie into the stuff and let go. Crumpton! Locust Bayou! Pope City! Cherryfork! Rowesville!”

“But how can you read all those hard names in the paper when you couldn't even read the story about the little kitten?”

“Mama, with things going the way they are, I think there's a pretty good chance that that damned kitten will get what's coming to her.”

Far out, very far out, there was a conversation.

This was on a giant world of extreme sophistication and non-dependence on matter. It was such a world as those on which Laudermilk's Hypothesis was built. That such a world existed, even in a contingent sense, was a triumph for Laudermilk.

“Then you have invested one?” asked Sphaeros, an ancient rotundity of that advanced world.

“I have invested one,” said Acu, the eager young sharpie, and bowed his forehead to the floor. The expression was figurative, since there was neither forehead nor floor on that world.

“And you are certain that you have invested the correct one?”

“You toy with me. Naturally I am not certain. Every investiture may not be successful, and every seed may not grow. One learns by experience, and this is my first experience on such a mission.

“I examined much of that world before I found this person. I thought first that it would be among the masters of the contrapuntal worlds — for even there they have such and masters of such. But none of these persons — called by themselves actors and impresarios and promoters and hacks — none of these qualified. None had the calm assurance that is the first requisite. What assurance they had was of another sort, and not valid. Also, their contrapuntal worlds were not true creations in our sense — not really worlds at all.”

“Then where did you look?” asked Sphaeros.

“I looked to the heads of the apparatus. On retarded worlds there is often an apparatus or ‘government.’ On that world there were many. But the leaders of these — though most showed an avidity for power — did not show the calm assurance that should go with it. Their assurance, if it could be called such, was of an hysterical sort. Also, most of them were venal persons, so I rejected them.”

“And then?”

“Then I explored remote possibilities. Those who employ in their work a certain power over another species — jockeys, swineherds, beekeepers, snake-charmers. But with them I didn't find what I looked for — the perfect assurance of the truly superior being.”

“And then, Acu?”

“Then I went into instruments, not trusting my own judgment. I set the Calm Assurance Indicator on automatic and cruised about that world. And on that whole world I found only one person with perfect assurance — one impervious to doubt of any kind and totally impervious to self-doubt. On this one I made the investiture and conferred the concept of great Power and Sharpness.”

“You have made a mistake. Fortunately it is not a great mistake as it is not a great world. You were too anxious to make a good showing on your first attempt. When nothing can be found, you should leave that world alone. On very many of them nothing can be found. Assurance is not the only quality that makes up this competence; it is simply the quality for which we look first on alien spheres.

“The one on whom you made the Investiture, though full of assurance, was not full of other qualities equally important. It was in fact a pupa form, a child of the species, known locally as a kid. Well, it's done and cannot be undone. Fortunately such power conferred carries its own safety factor. The worst it can do is destroy its own world and seal it off safely from others. You made the Investiture correctly?”

“Yes. I left the Red Cap, the symbol of authority and power. There was instant acceptance and comprehension.”

“Now we'll do the big towns,” screamed Carnadine Thompson in the clubhouse of the Bengal Tigers.

“Peas and Beans — 

New Orleans!”

She jabbed the needle into New Orleans on the map, and the great shaft a hundred thousand miles long came down into the middle of the Crescent City.

A needle? Not a pin? No. No. Pins won't work. They're of base metal. Needles! Needles!

“Candy store — 

Baltimore,” howled Carnadine and jabbed in another needle, and the old city was destroyed. But there was never a place that screamed so loudly over its own destruction or hated so much to go.

“Fatty's full of bolonio — 

San Antonio.”

And Carnadine stuck it in with full assurance of her powers, red cap atilt, eyes full of green fire. There were some of us who liked that place and wished that it could have been spared.

“Eustace is a sisty — 

Corpus Christi.”

“I know one,” said Eustace, and he clapped the red cap on his own head:

“Eggs and Batter — 

Cincinnater.”

He rhymed and jabbed, manfully but badly.

“That didn't rhyme very good,” said Carnadine. “I bet you botched it.”

He did. It wasn't a clean-cut holocaust at all. It was a clumsy, bloody, grinding job — not what you'd like.

“Eustace, go in the house and get the big world map,” ordered Carnadine, “and some more needles. We don't want to run out of things.”

“Peewee is a sapolis — 

Minneapolis.”

“Let me do one,” pleaded Peewee, and he snatched the red cap:

“Hopping Froggo — 

Chicago.”

“I do wish that you people would let me handle this,” said Carnadine. “That was awful.”

It was. It was horrible. That giant needle didn't go in clean at all. It buckled great chunks of land and tore a ragged gap. Nothing pretty, nothing round about it. It was plain brutal destruction.

If you don't personally go for this stuff, then pick a high place near a town that nobody can find a rhyme for, and go there fast. But if you can't get out of town in the next two minutes, then forget it. It will be too late.

Carnadine plunged ahead:

“What the hecktady — 

Schenectady.”

That was one of the roundest and cleanest holes of all.

“Flour and Crisco — 

San Francisco.”

That was a good one. It got all the people at once, and then set up tidal waves and earthquakes all over everywhere.

“Knife and Fork — 

Other Kind of Animal

He awoke to a discomfort so overriding as to drive out sharper pain: the discomfort of extreme thirst; of a skinny rooster crowing (he knew it was skinny); of a thousand knives tearing him, but fortunately with dull blades; of the knowledge that he was without clothes and in a strange room; of the smell of blood which was likely his own and might indicate anything.

He could do nothing about the thirst till he got his bearings. He could do nothing about the rooster; to control that was beyond his power. The tearing of a thousand dull-bladed knives he stopped by getting up. He had been lying without mattress or tick on an old set of coiled-wire bed springs on a bed whose very frame was crumpled.

A very early morning light was coming through the wide cracks of the boarded-up window spaces. He knew that there hadn't been any glass in the windows since the time of someone's grandfather. He knew this the way that one knows fundamental things. But he didn't know much else.

Being without clothes, he was embarrassed of the girl sitting there on the box.

“I am sorry, Temo. I will get on my pants as soon as I find out whether these things are pants, and if they have the proper holes in them. I am sorry, Temo, that you should see me like this.”

Then he smiled, for he knew something else like a fundamental thing. The girl was dead and could not see him at all. He had known all the time he was sleeping that the girl was dead sitting her watch over him.

The blood was the girl's; there was no blood on him. There was nothing the matter with him but the serious things.

The things were indeed pants; he found the holes in them and put them on. The other thing was a shirt, and he put that on also. Neither contained a single thing in any pocket. He had been gone through. Pockets that have not been gone through will always contain a certain amount of trash after the money is spent.

He was scared. This was serious. He was always scared when without money. He did not know what country he was in. He did not know one other thing, but he had pushed that back into his mind. But without money he was scared of both gaps in his memory. Without money there was no safety at all for him.

He found shoes, likely his own. He did not find socks. He put on one shoe quite easily. It was a sort of beginner's luck, for he was terribly shaky. The second shoe he found impossible to put on at all. Something was wrong with it. He lay back on the painful bed and wept in his frustration. Without money a man might get by for a few minutes. But with only one shoe it seemed that danger was closing the more dizzily about him.

“Help me, Temo! I would help you if I knew how.”

She did not say that she would not help him. It even seemed that she gave him quiet assurance that she would. The dead often have this quiet assurance about them; they are no longer subject to panic.

He tackled the problem of the shoe again, sure of her help. There was a bunch of stuff inside the shoe; that was the trouble why it would not go on. He took the stuff out; it was three hundred and seventy-three dollars American money. He put the stuff in several pockets, and put the shoe on his foot.

“Thank you, Temo,” he said. She had hidden his money there for him. She had known that someone would go through him, and she had hidden it from them. She knew that he would find it before he left, when he put on his shoe, and that nobody else would find it. But how had she done it if she had been dead? Well, that was part of the mystery, of the several mysteries. Perhaps the chronology was mixed. She may not have died till a little later.

He kissed her before he left. He didn't know who she was or how he had come together with her. He wasn't even certain that he had known her alive. But he knew that she had been kind, and that he was fond of her. There was no revulsion in him at kissing or touching her. Dead, she was still kind, and she would have responded if she had been able.

He opened the door and stepped out into the dusty road in the early morning. He had now only two problems to settle (other than those more serious ones he had shoved back into his mind): the rooster, and his thirst. He gathered rocks out of the dust where they were always to be found finger-deep, and threw them in the direction of the rooster. This raised a howling pack of dogs who drowned out the crowing of the rooster and so solved that problem. He ran very fast to save pants and life from the dogs, and went into a bar and closed the door on the howlers.

The barmaid looked as though she knew him. Wordlessly she mixed him a rum drink, and then helped him lift it to his mouth when she saw how shaky he was. He was able to swallow, and his life and spirit were restored to him. His thirst was gone, and his last discomfort with it.

“It is wonderful,” he said.

“Yes, it is what they serve us at our final home when we arrive tired and dry from Purgatory. Others say other things, but I know that it will be rum.”

“It is as welcome to me now as it could ever be then,” he said.

Well, after a while, and when you have your ease (and by third rum he had his ease), you begin to think of the problems still standing up over your shoulder like cloud banks. Not all at once you don't think of them, but tentatively, a little at a time, first testing to see which are more likely to hurt you. Who was Temo, and why was she dead? One does not often wake in a strange room with a strange dead girl. But the strangest part was that the girl was not strange to him. Though surely he had not seen her before, not at least in an unclouded moment, yet he knew her and it was natural that she be dead. Temo was not really a frightening problem, only a curious one.

But for the other one, who — ? Wait, wait a while. We will not ask that right now, not all of it at once. We will have to slip around it and look at it from several sides first. It may be a very dangerous question.

“Was I in here last night with a girl?” he asked the barmaid.

“Honey, you've been drinking around the barrio for several days and nights. You have been with all the girls.”

“What was the name of one?”

“Which, honey?”

“Was I with a girl named Temo?”

“Temo is not a name, honey. It is a word. It means ‘I am afraid.’ A girl say to you ‘I am afraid’, honey?”

“I think she did. But she was not afraid of me.”

“No. She would not be afraid of you.”

“What are some of the girls' names?”

“My name is Lizeta. Maria is named Maria. Carlota is named Carlota. Rosita is named Rosita. The other Rosita (you know, the little one) is also named Rosita. Dorotea is named Dorotea. Alicia is named Alicia.”

“I believe that I understand the system. Thank you Liseta.”

“You want know anybody else's name?”

“Yes. My own.”

It may not have been in the same place, but it was the same morning.

“I have heard that you people are naturally artistic,” he said to the girl. “You are not. That is a singularly bad picture there.”

“Sí. Singularly bad.”

“The sky is well drawn, and the water. But the lion is bad. I have never seen a lion so badly drawn.”

“The lion is not a lion. He is other kind of animal.”

“I have heard also that you people are natural actors. You are not. You are hams. That character walking in the street outside, he looks like a bandit out of the funny papers. And he is badly done.”

“Sí, he is badly done. And he is something of a bandit perhaps, but he is not out of the funny papers.”

“What is he looking for?”

“He is looking for a man who knows about a dead girl.”

“And when he finds him?”

“Then there will be a dead man.”

“Will he know him when he sees him?”

“He will know him. You wish to go quietly out of the back? Then you go in the back door of the Roca Blanca where he has already been. Perhaps he will not kill you for several hours.”

“You are my friend?”

“I am your friend.”

Yes, he was badly done, the big cop, but he was not out of the funny papers. The cop was the loosest-looking big man that he had ever seen: very tall, with hands like those long purple melons, and a dark beak-like face. The pistol on the man seemed larger than life, like something carried by a circus clown. A caricature can be too broad.

“Yes. He is badly done. Too exaggerated. If he kills me he will over-do that also. Too gory. Too something. If it has to be done, I'd rather it were done more neatly.”

He followed the big cop a while, carefully and at a distance. It was better to be behind him than in front of him.

Then he went back to see Lizeta.

“You think of your name yet, honey boy?”

“I have not, Liz. Have you?”

“It seem that one other American the other night called you Little Rollo. That your name?”

“I am sure it is not. I believe that he was being comical.”

“And two others another night they called you Frankie Boy. You Frankie Boy?”

“I sure do doubt it, Liz. I believe that I was then at the stage where I sometimes try to sing. The name was ironic. Singing is not my talent.”

“You are pretty bad. Come here honey. Sit on my lap. I have compassion on you.”

“Compassion sometimes feels nice, though I am not sure that it helps.”

But he did sit on her lap.

“I don't want to see you killed, honey boy. When he has next passed that corner, then we get in my car, go straight to the International Bridge and over it, then we go to the hotels. I ask clerks ‘Hey, you know this man?’ One of them will know you.”

“I won't leave the barrio with these mysteries behind me.”

“Good grief kid, I solve them, send you a postcard.”

“The lion in the picture is still badly drawn. It looks as though he will end up his leap sitting down, and that will hurt.”

“Keep telling you, lion is not lion, is some other kind of animal.”

“Lizzie, I have got to get to the top of these mysteries. I am starting at the bottom. It is not normal for a man to forget his name.”

“It is not normal for a man to have a swipe on the side of the head as you have.”

“I have been slugged?”

“O baby yes. Does it not hurt you? It hurts me.”

“I do not feel it. Perhaps I am in shock from it. Liz, did I sit on your lap last night also? It may be important to know.”

“Not on mine. On hers.”

“Whose? That is what I have to know.”

“The same, the same, it may be bad to say. The same I think who is dead, but she has not yet been reported dead. You do not remember, and he stalks and does not tell. Yet these things are told around all the same. We think that when one opens the door of a house she will be found dead. We think that you came out of the house, and that he has been in and out of it.”

“What is her name? Which is she?”

“Rosita. We call her the other Rosita. The little one. You begin to remember?”

“I begin to begin. Was she kind?”

“Very. But one who got herself involved. In trouble.”

“Yes, she has got herself a little involved now. How many bars in the barrio, Liz?”

“About two hundred.”

“And he is hunting me in all of them. Is there not a sort of place here also where a man can buy anything?”

“There is a place. I will tell you where is the place.”

Lizeta told him where the place was, and he left her and her kind lap, and went to make a purchase. He bought it and put it in his pocket. He was not sure that it was a good move; but now that he had made the move, there was a change. The change in himself was that he began to think more clearly, and also that he began to experience a great pain, as though part of the numbness and shock had gone, and he wasn't sure that he didn't wish it back. The change in the barrio people was that they now avoided him and avoided his eyes. They would be afraid to shield him from That One.

Well then, it was an arena, and he was being stalked in it. The arena was the barrio, the local red-light district, which may have irregularly consisted of twenty square blocks. It was built on sand, and the streets were dust and mud. The shacks were red, or white, or unpainted. It was hilly, and there was a gully stream that cut back and forth through it. There was much concealment, but no real fire cover when it should come to that. Somewhere in the barrio the big man would finally corner him; it would be a corner so narrow as to admit of only one of them surviving.

But why hadn't the big man killed him the first time when he had been in the shack of Little Rosita? The big man had been there, hadn't he? He was the one who had gone through his clothes. He was the one who had given him the terrible blow on the side of the head, either there or before. Why was he looking for him to kill now when he could have killed him before? But how did he even know that the big man was involved before? Well, he knew it. That was all.

Why had he even come to the barrio? Well, he had come out of curiosity. He had come because he had been told of it. He had come like many of the tourists to make a night of it, but he had stayed for three nights and was well into the third day. And he had met Little Rosita, and they had formed the Not-Like-The-Others Society. It goes a little like this: ‘What is a nice man like you seeking here? You are not like the others. How lucky it is that you have found me, the only one who could possibly understand you at all.’ And then it goes like this: ‘Why does a nice girl like you lead such a life? You were not meant to be a barrio girl. Let me take you away from here. No, it is not a joke. I will take you away. I have the means.’

The Not-Like-The-Others Society did well for many hours. For one thing Little Rosita was sick; as a matter of fact she was dying. She had always meant to get out; all of them had always meant to get out. But this man had what seemed a sound and very simple plan for taking her out of the country. He said he had money. Money? That wasn't a problem. Rosita had a crockful of money. And perhaps if she got away from it they would find a way to fix her; she might not need to die at all.

And Joe Savage (sure that was his name; he'd had a name all the time; it was just that he had forgotten his name from that blow on the side of the head) had believed Little Rosita to be the kindest and most beautiful girl in the world. She had been too kind for her own good; she had been too kind to everyone but herself. He was not overly familiar with the quality that was commoner here. But beautiful she was; it may be that on that last day of her life she really was the most beautiful girl in the world.

That was a fool shot! How did the big man expect to hit him at fifty yards with a pocket pistol, or bring him down if he did? He didn't expect to. He wanted to scare him back from that cut through the bushes and dunes and make him easy to corner against that blind end of the arena. But Joe took the cut through the dunes, risking one more shot, and so had a good lead on the big man again.

The lion is not a lion, he is another kind of animal. The big man is not a cop; he is another kind of animal. No un soplón. Un alcahuete. Why had I thought him a cop? Half of the toughs in the barrio carry pistols. He was the one that Little Rosita was afraid of when she said ‘Temo’. He had said that he would kill her if she ever tried to leave, and would kill anyone who tried to take her out of the district.

“Why, he hit a dog in the bush. He's shooting too much. But we will have to have it in a very little while.”

It was hot afternoon now. Joe backed around a cement block building that had once been a jail. He began to know where he was, and he knew where he wanted to have the showdown. He edged through a passage between two buckled buildings so narrow that he did not believe the big man could follow. He rounded a shack and came to a worse shack. It was where Rosita had brought him the night before when he swore that he would never leave her. He had been very drunk then, but she promised she would keep him with her. She may have had to carry him the last way. The little Mexican girls are very strong and will carry a big man on their shoulders for fun. She had laid him out there on the bare springs, and had taken his money and put it in his shoe, knowing that her pander would rob him at least if he tracked them to that empty shack.

Joe went in. Little Rosita was still there, patiently dead. Her texture had worsened a little, but she was still the most beautiful girl in the world. He patted her on the hair.

“It hasn't worked out, Little Rosita. You were afraid of dying, and I am a little afraid of it too. Maybe it will be better for you; they will know how kind you were always, and I understand they have a special department for barrio girls. But if I ever did any good, I did it too late to matter. I will wait here for your lion, who, I understand, is an other kind of animal. I always thought from that picture on the barroom wall that he would land sitting down, and that it would hurt. You needn't pay attention, Rosita. I say goodbye to you now.”

He hadn't long to wait. The big fellow was booming outside.

“You in there, pretty boy?”

“I'm in here.”

The big man kicked in the door, but he had to stoop to come under the lintel.

“Here you are, pretty boy. This is the end of the road. Now I kill you so you can go with your girlfriend.”

“That won't be necessary. Why didn't you kill me last night?”

“One thing, I thought maybe I had. Second thing, I thought you'd stay out for a long long time. Then I would arrange for them to come on you this morning and they say you have killed Rosita. That way you still be in the hole. You only stay out a couple of hours. I hear that you're up and walking around town again. So I have to follow you down to kill you. You give me trouble all day with that smart wandering. Now I give you trouble.”

The big man had palmed the pistol, and he swung it. Joe went down and out, but he didn't stay out. You couldn't have counted to more than three or four over him. He rolled back. He had his arm under him and out again. He shot with the little pistol he'd purchased.

“What? What? With a toy gun? You kill me with a toy gun? Man I laugh at you? By flies I've been stung worse. There! Now where is your toy gun?”

It had been kicked somewhere across the shack. Joe arose heavily, and the big man crashed into him like a bull. His head was rocked and he thought that perhaps his neck had been broken. His whole side was paralyzed with a blow. He was being beaten to death, and he was almost impatient of the end. His ribcage seemed smashed. His nose he was sure was broken. And they came like sledges, again, and again.

More blows, not like sledges, just like heavy hands, just hands flailing him, two hands only, no more than anyone has.

“I also have two hands,” said Joe. This wasn't true. He had only one hand he could still use, and that not effectively.

“You kill me with a toy gun? Ho!”

“It is possible that I have. This animal is just taking a little while to die.”

For something had happened. The big man no longer had the same strength. He was not beating Joe to death, he was hardly beating him.

“If I had anything at all left, I could even it up,” Joe murmured. “If I can live another two minutes, it may be that I can live forever.”

“With toy gun, ho!”

The big man stood still and rocked on his feet. His face broke open in a dark grimace and he wobbled badly. Then he went down.

“I would laugh if it were not so painful. I killed him with a toy gun after all. Well, however it stands now, it is better than it was.”

He started out the door, then he turned back.

“Don't worry, Rosita. I won't leave you alone with him.”

He dragged the big man by the heels out into the dusty road.

“Goodbye, Rosita,” he once more called in to the dead girl. Then he went to one of the bars that he remembered as having a telephone to call the authorities to look into the situation.

Whittle Come Back

Wilton Whittle was a man who never finished anything properly. He always left loose things undone, and his wife was unable to inculcate any system in him. He had a system of his own, he said, and he had been successful by it. It wasn't much of a system, she always insisted, and he had been successful in only one way.

Even when he died, he did it incompletely. He had to be coming around later to fiddle with the little things he'd left unfinished. If he had attended to things in his lifetime, he could have saved himself the trip back. He could have died with a clear mind.

“Wilton, are you daydreaming again?” Cornelia demanded of him. This was while he was still alive. “I do wish you would stop daydreaming and do something positive.”

Cornelia was his wife, and marrying her was one of the few positive things he had ever done. It hadn't sold him on the idea.

“I wasn't daydreaming. I was just getting ready to do a little of it.”

“And Wilton, I wish there was some way you could get a little expression on your face. It's a long time since there's been a flicker of anything there at all. You might as well be dead.”

“Death is what I was just getting ready to daydream about. That's a coincidence.”

“It may not be as much of a coincidence as you believe, Wilton.”

Whittle thought a little bit about his wife's remark, and he thought a little bit about dying. He was on the brink of a sudden intuition, but it did not come to him in time. He died as he sat there. So it was something of a coincidence after all.

Corneila called Doctor Geiger, who came after what was really too short an interval, and he found Whittle dead enough. They took him to the Mobley Funeral Parlor, a place Whittle had always disliked.

The reason that Whittle had been thinking about dying at the moment he died had to do with a conversation he had held an hour or so before. He had stopped in at Fiddler's Green for a couple before supper, and had been served by Helen who was all peaches and cream; soft whipped cream, and cling-just-a-little-bit peaches.

“Did I ever tell you how much, Helen?” he asked out of a face that hadn't had a flicker of expression on it for ages.

“How much what?”

“If you have to ask, then it isn't the real thing. It is ruined already. We will never be soul mates.”

“You stop jazzing Helen,” Snowball called to him. “I'll be all the soul mate you need.”

“But she's so pretty.”

“That stuff's only skin deep. Besides, I'm going to skin her in a minute. Then we'll see what she really looks like.”

The two girls were young. Helen was much the prettier, but Snowball was the one you'd rather have along on a pig-sticking or a rattlesnake hunt. She wasn't really mean, but the fact that she looked mean and acted mean had given this idea to the superficial.

She was a snow blonde, and her hair, though uncared for, was her best asset. Her eyes were gunboat gray; and when she was angry they became entirely white. She never smiled, but she often grinned. Her body was that of a bantam-weight fighter, which essentially is what she was.

But different men like different sorts to talk to when they come in, which is why Fiddler's had two such barmaids: Helen, who had a sugar flavor; and Snowball, who had the tang of a certain barbecue sauce, once popular in parts of the South, and said to have been manufactured in an outhouse.

There had been a time, barely gone by, when Snowball and her Snowbirds had cut a hair-raising swath through an ethnic group known as juveniles. You have heard of ballplayers' ballplayers and actors' actors. They were delinquents' delinquents. There is a whole group of young people complexed for life out of fear of that bunch. The Snow Trauma will not disappear till the last of them are dead, sixty or seventy years from now.

One of the Snowbirds was her brother, one was her cousin; the others were of a kindred at least as close as blood.

“They're not really such a bad bunch of kids,” a certain commissioner had once said. “They steal less than you might imagine, and they've not hurt anybody seriously except in that one case that was more to be attributed to the victim's fright and erratic flight, and the other that was partly an accident, and no more than half-intended. If only they could find a way of pulling their outrageous tricks a little less outrageously.

“You remember when the Counts were turning in all the false alarms? The Snowbirds infiltrated them and had a stand-by squad. They'd beat the fire engines to the places and have fires started for them by the time they got there. Snowball said they did it out of sheer compassion. She knew how frustrating false alarms must be for firemen.”

“I remember,” said a rather sour lieutenant. “Our explosives expert said that they showed real ingenuity in making those fire bombs.”

He hadn't always been sour. Something had made him sour.

“Remember when they stole a dozen new handcuffs from the station house before they'd even been uncartoned?” continued the commissioner. “We had quite a few reports of strangers handcuffed together as they stood on traffic islands, or fastened to parking meters or grills, or to cafeteria tray rails. I even have the dim memory of one of our own police officers being manacled to the push bar of a revolving door, and three young fellow passengers on the same conveyance taking him around very rapidly. I believe that there was a broken wrist involved.”

“I have a more vivid memory of the same event, since I was the officer; and there was a broken wrist involved. It would have been funnier if it had happened to any of fifty other men.”

“I recall the snowy night that Snowball borrowed a baby and shawl and went around to the doors of quite a few prominent men with those distance-carrying remarks about the duties of paternity. That baby will be dead of old age before all the dust she raised that night has settled.”

“She was very big about it, however,” said the lieutenant. “She sent all the victims ‘Have One On Me’ cards from the correction home. I wish they'd kept her there a little longer.”

“She used to carry a snake in her handbag, a big one. She used it in quite a few tricks. After some sorehead had killed it, she got a skunk that she'd lead around on a leash.”

“I remember the skunk. When people would skitter away and ask, “Has he — ah — been taken care of?’ she'd say, ‘Well, no. But I am trying to teach him self-control.’

“And all the time he hadn't — ah — been taken care of. When Patrolman Eddy finally had to kill the animal, we were compelled to give him a week's leave of absence. It's a hazardous life.”

“Apex Glass had a one-week-only special, any twenty-seven inch window sash reglazed for two dollars. It was nice for the Snowbirds to distribute the handbills for Apex, but it wasn't right for them to wrap them around rocks and crash them through windows. It put Apex in an unfavorable light.”

Well, Snowball had grown up a little. But a girl with a grin and no smile isn't going to grow up very much. And her Snowbirds were still around if she ever needed them.

“I have been wondering about different things, Snowball,” said Whittle out of the face of no expression.

“I thought there was something going on back there. Everybody else said there wasn't. And all that time you were thinking behind that thing. Little bittle Whittle, what were you wondering?”

Whittle wasn't a dummy, for all that he had a blank face. He was a man of an acute mind, and he had made a lot of money. These two facets of him were usually disassociated by people, and the first of them ignored. But all attempts to disassociate Whittle from his money had so far failed.

“I was wondering if it was possible to kill somebody by sheer malevolence?”

“Sure would be fun to try, wouldn't it, little crab apple? I'll kill Helen, and you kill Fiddle, Whittle. Hey, that rimes. I always thought I'd find something that malevolence was good for. There's a lot of it lying around.”

“I have no intention of killing Fiddler. He isn't the worst man in town, only the worst man in the block. My question was a theoretical one — almost.”

Whittle was an inventor; he was the inventor of Plasto. You could make anything out of Plasto; but what Whittle made out of it mostly was money.

“The ‘almost’ is almost the key there, little kittlefish,” Snowball told him. “Whose tail were you tying the malevolent can to in your mind?”

“My, ah — wife's.”

“I'll try it on your — ah — ugh — wife from a distance. If that doesn't work, I'll try something else up close. I'll kill Cornelia for you for eight dollars. I'd do it for nothing, but I need eight dollars.”

“That isn't something that one should joke about.”

“There's a law that you can't joke about killing people? But what makes you think I'm joking?”

“I am very often afraid that you are not. But killing Cornelia is the farthest thing from my mind.”

“Then what's the nearest thing, riddle face?”

“That she might kill me.”

“She can't. Remember, we said we wouldn't go. How'd she kill you?”

“Possibly by malevolence.”

When Snowball referred to ‘We said we wouldn't go,’ she touched on a private pact with Whittle. One night someone had roasted the old chestnut that you can't take it with you; and Snowball and Whittle had agreed that if they couldn't take it with them they wouldn't go. Whittle had quite a lot to take with him. Snowball had very little, but the spirit was the same.

“You think she is killing you? Are you feeling bad?”

“They have talked me into feeling bad, Cornelia and Doctor Geiger. ‘The previous record of living after the heart stops is just over seven minutes. You've apparently been doing it for years, Whittle,’ he told me. Doctors have a low form of humor, and they also have more than one kind of needle. According to him, my stomach, taken as it is, would make a perfect Scotch blood pudding, and my lungs are full of maggots of a double-jointed name. He also says obscene things about my kidneys. When he's given his verdicts on me, and then exchanges those lugubrious looks with my wife, I feel that I haven't very long to live.”

“Why don't you go to another doctor?”

“I don't know any other doctor. Besides, I'm only sick when he's around. He makes me sick.”

“Remember now, we said we wouldn't go.”

“Snowball, I may have to go. It is often required of one. But there are some things bothering me, and I'd like to be sure of them. I hate to die with unsettled things on my mind. I'll tell you what, if I do go, I'll be back.”

“I'll remember that. Even if you forget it, I'll remember it. Now think of something pleasant. Think of that pretty widow on the corner.”

“I always meant to call on her. I could never think of an excuse or occasion for it, but I've meant to do it.”

“I will remember that too.”

Wilton Whittle went home reflecting that it was fortunate that Snowball had chosen him for one of her particular friends. Those who have her for an enemy fare badly, and deservedly so.

Then, after supper and a one-sided argument with his wife, Whittle died in his chair. He had had to go after all, and he had broken part of his pact with Snowball. Perhaps he was resolved not to break the other part of it.

It was hard to say what he was resolving. Whittle had very little more expression dead than alive.

When he came back, by a quirk the first thing that he did was visit that pretty widow on the corner. He had not found an excuse or occasion for it before; he did not bother to find them now. He simply came and paid his respects as a gentleman might.

The widow looked at him inquiringly. She had little blue eyes. Then she looked at him with apprehensive wonder, and she had quite big blue eyes. She began to scream uncertainly, a pretty little scream of no great volume. Then she crumpled up into a pile on the floor, but a seemly pile. She was a lady.

Whittle left her. He had paid his respects.

Whittle visited other people and places. In his previous life he had expressed a wish to see some of them, and now he had his wish gratified.

He had always wanted to see Stafford's collection of crystal. Stafford was more ostensibly rich than Whittle and his collection was famous; but the two men moved in different worlds. Now Whittle went in boldly to see the collection. He even saw the pride of it all, the Ugolino Bowl. It was a beautiful green, and so was the face of Stafford.

Whittle went to see Doctor Geiger. He didn't like the man, but Geiger was connected with an unfinished thing that Whittle had died with on his mind. That man just plain panicked at the sight of Whittle. He strangled and gasped and took on a ghastly pallor. He was unwell; he should have seen a doctor himself. He grabbed the telephone and slobbered all over it when he tried to make the words come. A doctor shouldn't be frightened of a piece of his own handiwork. Not a good doctor.

Whittle left the doctor in his terror. But the thing he had come back for was halfway done.

At Fiddler's Green Whittle received a mixed reception and sometimes none at all. Some of them there said ‘Hi Whit,’ and some of them turned pale; some of them had heard that he'd died, and some of them hadn't.

“That's kind of funny. He's dead, you know,” one of them said.

“With Whittle how can you tell?” asked one reasonably.

“Always was a little dead if you ask me,” said another.

Many of those who knew that he'd died didn't turn a hair. They're an imperturbable bunch at Fiddler's Green, especially that bunch at the back table.

And Fiddler himself wasn't too startled.

“Something to drink, Whittle? Ah, no — I guess not then.”

When Whittle passed Mrs. Whitcomb on the street she put some things in his pocket and told him to give them to Cornelia. Mrs. Whitcomb was an old doddy and didn't see well.

Somewhere, in an unknown place, Snowball cautioned two of her Snowbirds, ‘Careful, maybe Whittle's brittle.’

Officer Keegan nodded pleasantly to Whittle when they passed on the street; and, as always, Whittle returned the nod stiffly.

But it was only a moment later that Keegan had an afterthought.

“Whittle,” he called. “You come right back here. It returns to my mind that you died earlier this evening, and you should not now be out on the street. I believe that an explanation is in order.”

When Whittle went back to his own house to see his wife Cornelia, he was accompanied by a somewhat larger group than had been with him on his earlier wanderings. But as always he was in the fore.

The door was opened by Doctor Geiger, still in a highly nervous state. Whittle may have suspected that it would be opened by him.

There followed a hubbub, impossible to put into sequence, but two hysterical voices were doing some wild babbling, and very near there was a recorder taking in every babble of it.

“Cyrus! Cyrus! He isn't dead! We didn't kill him after all! Cyrus! Cyrus!” Cornelia cawed. Cyrus was Doctor Geiger.

“W — we did too kill him. I know we killed him. He was d — d — dead. Wh — Whittle, go away. You're dead.”

Well, he was, so they took him away then. They took almost everybody away. Whittle was taken back to the Mobley Funeral Home which he had always disliked, but it had to be. One can only come back for a little while.

Doctor Geiger and Cornelia Whittle were taken to the station house. So were Snowball and her Snowbirds, but separately, and to a different room.

“Young lady,” said that Captain, “and I use the greatest latitude in calling you lady, I can in no way condone this outrage. This crude madness of yours has to have a stopping place. For a few months I thought that it had stopped. What you have done is the most lawless, inhuman, horrifying episode in my memory; though, it is true, it was the means of uncovering evidence of murder.”

“Why, all we did was take poor Whittle for a little walk. We'd have done it for anybody. It was stuffy in that place where they had him.”

“To drag a dead man about the streets between these two buckos! Words fail me. But I am honestly puzzled. Several persons spoke to Whittle after he was dead, apparently not realizing it.”

“Why shouldn't they? They knew him.”

“But they said that he appeared normal, and that he nodded to them stiffly as always.”

“Yes, the boys would tip him to make him do that.”

“And his own wife apparently didn't realize that he was dead when you brought him to the door, or Doctor Geiger on the first visit. How do you account for that?”

“Well, old Whittle never did have much expression, and he hadn't any less after he was dead. They had a good thing going, though. When a woman wants to poison off her husband for his money for her and her boyfriend, it sure does help to have that boyfriend be the doctor, who will both do the job and then certify it after it's done.”

“Justice sometimes works in left-handed ways, as here. But justice will also deal with you, uh, Snowcone is it? The law will not be lenient with this inhuman caper of yours, whatever its accidental good result.”

But Snowball knew her law and her rights.

“Law! What law? There's a law says you can't take a corpse for a walk? You show me that law! You know there isn't any law says that. You get down that big book and show me where it says you can't take a corpse for a walk.”

All But The Words

The IDT Project had been going on for a dozen years with no real advance toward its ends. It would have been abandoned long before except for its collateral discoveries in other fields. The accidental offshoots that it had produced were well worth the considerable expense of the Project.

The Project had assigned to it one great mind and several very good minds; no other project at that time could say as much. The great mind was Gregory Smirnov, and his greatness lay in his instant perception of the possibilities of an idea. He always knew whether an idea or a notion had a spark in it. He discerned where the flightiest, most apparent idiocy carried the ultimate spark, and where the most brilliant and most plausible thesis did not. He played his colleagues like a hand of cards, and he scored every possible point with them.

The several very good minds associated with the Project were those of: Charles Cogsworth, the inventor of the Recapitulation Correlator, as well as the Cerebral Scanner; Aloysius Shiplap, who had been associated with the late Cecil Corn in the experiment which ended Corn's life — which may have been a dead end and may have been an opening door; the stiff-necked Gerald Glasser, the designer of the E. P. Locator; Valery Mok, a woman of vivid eido-creation whose mind had put Cogsworth into a state of shock when he first went into it with his scanner.

Also associated with the Project was Energine Eimer. Although she had a good mind by ordinary standards, she was not in the class with the others; for it was really an understatement to speak of them as having very good minds. Energine herself was flighty to seeming idiocy, but Smirnov had detected that from her might come the ultimate spark.

The purpose of the IDT Project was to devise an Instant Distant Translation device, which might be either mechanical or psychic, or something of an entirely different aspect. It was to reach and establish rapport with a distant — a very distant — mind, any mind anywhere beyond the pale. It would have to combine and go far beyond such tools as were already available.

Extrasensory Perception, now that it was known to be but another aspect of simple sensory perception and of disappointing limitations, was one very inadequate tool. The translation devices themselves would be adequate for ordinary work. They could now interpret roughly the thought processes of earthworms and ferns and even crystals. They could record and even verbalize the apprehensions of metals under stress and, to an extent, the group consciousness of gathering thunderheads. Any language, terrestrial or distant, could be given a cogent interpretation. But something more was required.

It was the six hundred and twelfth weekly progress meeting of the group.

“Energine,” said Gregory Smirnov, “it has just come to me how you are different from the rest of us.”

“In one way she's different from the rest, except myself,” said Valery, “but I'm not sure that you've ever noticed that difference.”

“I've known about the difference of the sexes for a long time, Valery,” said Smirnov. “I was a precocious child and an early reader of biology. In my own life I have relegated the implications of the difference to a minor corner. There is little enough time in even a long life to do the work I have set for myself, and the ramifications of the sex complex are time-consuming. No, the difference is that Energine likes to talk to people.”

“Does not almost everyone?” asked Shiplap.

“Many do, but none of us on the project except Energine,” said Smirnov. “We are not the sort of people who like people, and we talk to them as little as possible. Mostly we talk to ourselves, even when we're nominally talking to others. There is an inhibition in the — ah — cultivated minds. We are a withdrawn bunch, and we tend to become more so as we follow our specialties and our studies. That is the irony of it.”

“Where is the irony?” asked Cogsworth.

“We are trying to talk to ‘people’ over cosmic distances, and we do not even like to talk to people near at hand. We do not like to talk to people at all. We aren't the ones for the job. Mostly we are bored with people.”

“Then who are the ones for the job?” asked Glasser. “Logorrhea is rampant in the world. We could find a billion low folks who love to talk to other low folks.”

“Possibly those we will ultimately contact will be also be low folks,” said Smirnov. “It is likely that the lowest common denominator of the Universe will be both low and common. Rapport is what we want, and we don't have it. We can study the dragonfly, but are we ever really concerned with the dragonfly's concern for his family? We don't really like the monstrous miniatures. We've no sympathy with the terrified arrogance of the arachnid; how can we have sympathy for really strange creatures? How can we talk to an alien if we don't even like to talk to our own kind?”

“I have a landlady who even talks to bugs,” said Glasser. “Shall I get her? She'd droodle to a vole on a planet just as well if we pointed her that way. And you believe that she would be better than ourselves who have all the techniques and information?”

“We have Energine,” said Smirnov. “She has the techniques, such as we all have. And she likes to talk to people. She might just be able to break us out of our restriction.”

“Then why hasn't she done it?” asked Valery. “She's had as much time on the senders and scanners as any of us, and no more luck.”

“Because she hasn't let herself go. She has been constrained to use our own approach and formulae. Energine, let yourself go and talk to those people! Now! Tonight! Talk to them!”

“I will, I will. But how? You mean just like I talk? I've thought of that, but I didn't think you'd allow it. I bet those folks have gotten awful bored with our salutations and mathematical symbols. A circle is a circle, and a square is a square, and so are we. Hey — me third planet out. Who you? — I bet they think we're nutty to use that kind of stuff.

“I'll get hold of one of them tonight and tell him all about the new Indonesian restaurant I found. Maybe he found a new restaurant up there and can tell me some of the dishes. Whoever he is I bet he likes to eat, too.”

“Energine, do you still belong to a Lonely Hearts Club?”

“Why, I belong to all of them! Just let me read you one letter I got this morning. Why, it's the nicest letter — ”

“Spare us! Protect us! Earth swallow us!” cried Glasser.

“That, Glasser, is an illustration of what is holding us back,” said Smirnov. “We don't like to talk to people and we don't like to listen to people. It may be that they have been talking to us for a long time and we were not in tune to listen.”

“Well then, you will surely listen, Mr. Smirnov,” cried Energine. “This is a letter from Eugene upstate — ”

“No, as a matter of fact I will not listen,” said Smirnov. “I am now too old to develop a sympathy for the vital things of life. But what I want you to do, Energine, is to let yourself go; to talk, to send, just as if you were writing to one of your lonely hearts people. Go all the way out, girl. If it doesn't work, only the stars will laugh at you.”

“Oh, I never minded being laughed at. It shows that people are having fun. I'll tell him about Charley; that's just to make him jealous. You don't know about Charley? Let me read you — well, never mind then. This might be the first extraterrestrial lonely hearts club. I could be president.”

“Yes, you could be president of it, Energine. Now, the first live blip you get on the scanner, you just let yourself go with all you've got. Send him one of those lonely hearts letters. Make it lavender.”

“Purple. Oh, I will, I will.”

And that evening on the scanner Energine picked up either a minor blip or a minor malfunction; it was always impossible to tell which. Those little egg-shaped anomalies — they looked egg-shaped, they sounded egg-shaped, they broke into egg-shaped sine curves — were the only evidence of the sort of target they were seeking. Energine let herself go on the sender.

“Dear Albert — since I must call you something and I am sure that your name is very like that — I will try quite hard to reach you, and I beg that you answer me. Your name in the Project now becomes Albert-(Tentative). To others you are only an egg-shaped anomaly, but you are more than that to me.

“This is the first essay to the establishment of a stellar lonely hearts club, and it just has to be a success. In the lonely hearts clubs we write in love and affection to those we would like to know, and we would like to know everyone.

“I will tell you about our world, and you tell me about yours. I hope that we can get very close together. There is an ecstasy on me when I can grow very close to another. I believe that the only thing of any importance on this world is love. Is not that the only thing of importance on yours?

“I had another picture of Charley today. He is not as handsome a man as he was in the first picture that he sent. I do not believe that the first picture was even a picture of Charley. But sometimes the first picture that I send is not a picture of me, either. Do you want to see a picture of me? I will send one as soon as I find out how.

“I went to a Mexican restaurant last night. They had roast kid stuffed with almonds and sauced all over with burnt brown sugar. And they had those little flat pancake things that taste like cardboard. I wonder if you enjoy eating as much as I do.

“Albert please answer me with anything at all, and we will begin to establish rapport. I feel that we could grow very close together. Albert, I will treasure your answers with those of Fred and Harold and Richard — that one turned out badly but he did write nice letters — and Selby and Roger and Norbert. Do you also save old letters? Answer me. I will stay right here till morning, and if I do not hear from you by then I will wait again tomorrow evening and every evening.

Signed — Energine.”

She waited, but she didn't have to wait as long as she had feared. It was only about an hour till the response began to come through. The first sign of it was the dimming of the lights and the vibration of the building as the auxiliary generators cut in, for the translation device seemed to be laboring under a heavy, unaccustomed load. But the machine had amazing resources. It could translate anything, anything.

Then the answer came.

“Energine,” came the answer. “That call letter? That name? That world? That people? That what?

“Jubilation here to learn that there is friendly life on your world. Your world previously ignored as little bit sick. You know sick? Word sick? Possibly first word mutually understanding.

“Comprehending all your communication except the words. What is lonely? What is hearts? What is club? What is grow very close together? What is a Charley? What is picture? What is Mexican? What is kid? What is little flat pancake thing? What is cardboard? What is a Fred and Harold and other entities?

“Word love understood intuitively. Explain mechanics of thing with you. Extreme variation in different sectors. In ecstasy of symbiosis which one swallow who?

“Yes, answer, answer, answer, whatever that means. What is Selby? What is Norbert? What means wait right here? What means morning? Rapport also understood intuitively. We be so completely. We how many? You group or integer? Send how to roast kid stuffed. What is roast kid stuffed? Delirious interest here in subject, sure to increase when we know what subject consist of. Also love you already passionately. What is passionately? What is already? — 

KGGLP*Y UU — Albert-(Tentative).”

He had answered. Albert-(Tentative) had answered. He had understood all of her communication except the words. They were in perfect rapport.

The translation device shuddered and groaned after the effort. Then it panted softly and fell to sibilant silence. The building was quiet and the night gathered lovely about it.

The first and most difficult step of the IDT project had been achieved after twelve years. The rest would follow. Others would venture where Energine had pioneered. The glad news of the achievement was given to the world.

The matter and exact wording of the two messages were not, however, given to the world. These remained classified. In the early contacts with aliens there are always details which will seem incongruous to the unlearned.

Others tried the feat with some success, and Energine repeated it again and again. The rapport grew. Soon Albert Tentative began to understand some of the words as well as the feelings of the messages. Small misunderstandings were gradually set right, as one from Albert — 

“You ask if we can be sure that we are of opposite sex? How not opposite? With us are five sexes. Everybody partake of several, so everybody a little opposite. This make for clarity. Surely you drollery when you say there only two on your world.

“You wish to see me but say it is impossible. Why in kss@#rr*WQ” — ‘mild profanity’. — Trans. note — “it not possible? Travel no problem with us. It problem with you? You want me — I be there. Like in little verse we find in Block Massive Cultural Transmission Corpus from your world, ‘Brush your tooth, say your prayer, go to sleep, I be there.’ What brush? What tooth? What prayer? What sleep? What it mean, understanding that great poetry not always to be taken literally? Profound poetry from your world having great appeal here. Also Aristotle Joke Book and fragments of Sport Page Statistic Epic Cycle. Decline in your civilization, huh? No .400 hitters for years.

“Who I see buy stock on exchange? Always looking for sound investment. All difficulties erased when we see each other. Albert Tentative.”

“He is coming to see me,” said Energine dreamily.

“It is possibly a translation error,” cautioned Smirnov. “Perhaps there has been omitted a phrase such as ‘What mean come see me?’ You know it would be impossible that he should come. Our Block Massive Cultural Transmission will not be digested by them all at once. I am pleased at the success it has already had.”

“He is coming to see me,” said Energine.

“No, no, girl. That couldn't be. You are deluded, but I can never tell you how much I appreciate what you have done.”

“He is coming to see me.”

“No, he is not. It is completely out of the question.”

He came to see her.

It was known that he had arrived, that something had arrived. Instruments of a dozen sorts had recorded him. “Albert Tentative arrives” was the glad word, but where was he, what was he? He seemed to be invisible and inaudible. But for the evidence of the instruments there were some who would have doubted the arrival of Albert in the world.

“I want a week off,” said Energine to Gregory Smirnov. “No, I want a year off. Albert and I have so much to say to each other that we will never get it all said. And we're going to get married if we can figure out how to go about it. I really need some private advice on that. But look, just look!”

“A very beautiful and odd ring, Energine. Did he give it to you?”

“Did he give what to me?”

The ring was a sort of furry metal. It glowed and it changed colors. It circled the chubby little finger of Energine, and she held it up to her cheek.

“I had no idea that anything could be so wonderful,” she raptured. “We're so happy together. We went to the new Syrian restaurant last night and had camel purée. It's so cute the way he eats it.”

“How, Energine?”

“Gets right down in the bowl.”

“Ah — Energine — let's get to the point. Where is Albert Tentative? It's important that we see him and examine him. Where is he?”

“Why, right here, Mr. Smirnov. Did you ever see anyone like him?”

“No, I never did, mainly because I can't see him at all.”

“Can't you see him? Why, I never suspected that. You mean that I'm the only one who can see him?”

“Patience, Patience, thou universal regent, do not desert me now! What does he look like, Energine?”

“Why, he's round and shining and furry, and he changes color.”

“Energine, the ring he gave you — ”

“Mr. Smirnov, that is no ring. That is my Albert. Oh, Albert, he thought you were a ring. How funny!”

Albert Tentative was of great interest for about three weeks. There was first of all the epic press conference that Gregory Smirnov set up for him as soon as the method of plugging Alfred in and giving him amplification was discovered. It might be said that there was first and last of all the epic press conference.

It was a success, let there be no doubt of that. It was a total success. There were those who came to wonder if the success was not too total.

There was resentment at first that foreign correspondents were not alerted and given a chance to attend it. Some came anyhow to see what they could pick up after it was over with, and found that it was not over with. Albert was still talking when they got there; he had been talking for a week.

Albert was a fine talker, now that he knew the words. The pidgin of the translation device had been that of the device, not of Albert. He answered all questions completely, oh how completely! He went into a spate and answered questions that had never been asked, and the newsmen and personages listened to him in relays, fascinated.

After a week of standing by, Energine — whose finger Albert had long since abandoned for many others — said that she thought she would go out to get something to eat. She looked dazed. She did not come back.

Albert answered the questions of the Chinese and the Arabs. He answered the questions of all the newsmen of Earth. He also had a Block Massive Cultural Transmission Corpus which he wanted to communicate. He recited the Epic Gilmish in which is comprised all wisdom. That took him thirty hours, perhaps not too long a period to be given to a work that comprises all wisdom. But the listeners were of flesh and blood, and nobody knew what Albert was.

Gregory Smirnov stayed with it two weeks and then walked out. He shouldn't have done it as he was the host, but there was a weakness in the great man that manifested itself here. He went to see the President of the Republic.

“Suggest Project's discontinuance,” he said to the President.

“But Mr. Smirnov, is not the Project a colossal success?”

“Quite.”

“But you have now established rapport with a completely alien being for the first time.”

“Unfortunately. And perhaps not alien enough.”

“Possibly you yourself are burnt out by your great labors on the Project.”

“Possibly.”

“I would be unwilling to abandon the Project now that it has proved such an outstanding success. Perhaps we should transfer the operation to another group. Could you suggest another group that might be able to handle it?”

“Enfield's Automations.”

“An excellent suggestion. They're a bunch of comers. We will take steps for the transfer of authority.”

“Good-bye,” said Smirnov, and left.

“Did you notice that he seemed very short-spoken today?” the President asked one of his aides when Smirnov had left.

Albert Tentative was a great success for about three weeks. Then the Project was turned over to Enfield's Automations, and the whole thing went on automatic. Albert is still talking.

It was some time later that Gregory Smirnov met Valery Mok on the street.

“Well?” he asked her.

“I, yes. You, I hope. News?”

“Of the bunch? Cogsworth dead. Shiplap mad. Glasser vanished.”

“Energine?”

“Nun.”

“Which?”

“Contemplative. Not talk, you know.”

“Their address?”

“Here.”

“Thanks.”

Smirnov went to have a glossotomy performed on himself, as well as an intricate operation on the ears. So they all arranged their lives.

In their final solution they all owed much to Albert Tentative. For in his recitation of the Epic Gilmish he had omitted nothing, not even the remarkable five-hour speech on the medicinal value of silence.

Seven Story Dream

Gadberry had a contempt for dawns badly done. He knew how blatant and stylized the outdoor world can be in its pristine moments: the contrived shagginess of grass, the stupidity of trees, the falsity of flowers, the oafishness of the birds and their inept melody. These scratched the smooth surface of his soul. “Bad work, very bad work,” Gadberry would opine, for he was an artist.

Yet there were times when these sorry units arranged themselves with striking effect. On this very early dawn they made an almost perfect harmony, and Gadberry gracefully acknowledged it. There it was: the old oaks, and the new firs and hedges; the ragged Bermuda on the vacant lot in the new sun, the thin rye grass that held to the shade of the building, the corpse on the lawn, the row of hollyhocks and the lone aster in the middle of them, the drooping mimosa full of driveling birds, the even rank of garbage cans standing chalky in the aluminum dawn, and that damned dew over everything.

In spite of the elements that went into the composition the effect was near perfect — and yet there was one clashing entity in that aubade scene. Gadberry reviewed it in his mind, for the artist is satisfied with nothing but perfection.

The firs, the hedges, the corpse, the mimosa, the garbage cans, the lawn, the hollyhocks with their lone aster — something was in that peaceful morning scene that simply did not belong there.

Gadberry strode over and savagely struck down the aster with its white flower. The harmony of the scene was now perfect. He walked away, his artist's soul satisfied.

On his way to find an early eating place, he met a policeman named Embree and told him that Minnie Jo Merry was lying dead on that little lawn behind the apartment where she lived, and perhaps it should be looked into.

Captains Keil and Gold were there quickly and in charge. Minnie Jo was bruised about the throat and dried blood framed her mouth, but her death may have been caused by a violent concussion. Keil and Gold left her to Dr. Sanderson and their men. There was no crowd. This was very early on a Saturday morning, the apartment was on a quiet street, and the small rear lawn was secluded.

Orders were given for all the residents of the apartment building to remain in the building, and Captain Keil sent for Gillord Gadberry, the only one who had left. Gadberry told the patrolman who came for him that he would come as soon as he had finished his breakfast, and not a moment before. He finished it leisurely, drinking coffee and sketching while the policeman fumed. He was sketching a fuming policeman.

“Mrs. Raffel,” Captain Keil said, “you are the owner and operator of this apartment. I assume that you know something of your renters. Who lives here?”

“Minnie Jo lived here, and how will I get her rent now? She used to say, ‘You worry too much about my rent. I'm not much further back than some of the others. You should know that I'm good for it. As long as I live I will always be good for what I owe.’ But now who will be good for what she owes?”

“Your problem, Mrs. Raffel. Who else lived — lives here?”

“Dillahunty, Gadberry, Handle, Izzard, Lamprey, Nazworthy, all in a permanent or temporary state of singleness.”

“Six living and one dead tenant. Is that all?”

“It's a small place, but I do have two other empty units — three it will be now. I doubt if this will help me rent them.”

“It may not make a difference. The girl was murdered in her own room, we believe, and she seems to have made no outcry. She was either taken very suddenly, or she knew the intruder well.”

“Not necessarily, Captain. Minnie Jo was a very open person. If Jack the Ripper himself had come in, red from his trade, she'd have said, ‘Hi, honey, sit down and talk to me.’ But it was probably someone she knew.”

“What are your feelings on hearing of the death of Miss Merry?”

“Satisfaction — though I'll miss her — and relief and thankfulness that it has finally turned out all right.”

“Turned out all right? Do you call it turning out all right that she was murdered?” he asked her.

“Oh yes. There were many worse things that could have happened to her. How lucky that Minnie Jo was killed before they happened!”

“You will have to explain that. Did you hate her?”

“No, I loved her — and I will explain. Minnie Jo was quite a good girl, but she was on the edge of becoming quite a bad girl. I have seen it happen to so many of the young ones who are loose in the world. Every time I know one, and notice her nearing the change, I pray that something will intervene and prevent it. This is the first time my prayers have been answered, and I'm thankful.”

“Could you yourself have done anything to bring about this, ah, intervention, this preventative death?”

“I have just told you: I prayed. I didn't know it would be death, but that's as good a solution as any.”

Then they questioned her a little about other things.

Gadberry, now back from his breakfast, was questioned by Captain Gold.

“Gadberry, do you often get up so early?”

“Never. But I often stay up this late. I work at night and sleep in the daytime.”

“Why?” Captain Gold inquired.

“It was originally a pose. Then I became used to it.”

“You seemed extraordinarily cool on discovering Miss Merry dead. You did not make an outcry, or hurry to report it.”

“I reported it to the first person I met, a policeman. This seemed the logical person, and the logical thing to do.”

“Almost too logical. What was your opinion of Miss Merry?”

“Alive, or dead? The girl was somehow completed in death. It improves many people. So often we see only the outside of people, but to look at her smeared with her own blood gives an added dimension, a more total view.”

“Ah, what was your opinion of her alive?”

“Her hands and ankles were rather good; between, she was conventional. She hadn't eyes, no eyes at all. It isn't usual for a girl her age to have eyes. A child will sometimes have eyes, a woman after thirty may have them again, or a man after forty. I never saw her hair, which is to say that it was doctored. I sketched her ears sometimes, and her throat. I was not satisfied with either of them, but then it isn't twice a year that I come on either that is really good. Are you interested in these things?”

“We are somewhat interested in the throat of this girl, and other matters. Since you work at night, you must have been awake. Did you hear any outcry or evidence of a struggle?”

“No. I could be throttled myself and not notice it. When I work I am taken by the Holy Spirit of art. I am probably unable to help you on the more mundane details you are seeking.”

“What is your opinion of the tenant George Handle? It is reported that you sponge on him considerably.”

“The artist is worthy of his hire. George is an oaf, a fool; but do not believe that a fool and his money are easily parted. I have to work for every dollar I twist out of him. George has caught the sickness of self-improvement. He learns at night. He has one of those sets with an earphone for under the pillow. He's put quite a bit of money into the recordings, money much better given to me. He has his own recorder, reads into it things he wishes to learn, then has them played back while he sleeps. Whatever he learns while asleep, he is still a fool when awake.”

“You haven't any use for fools?”

“But I have! I often make use of fools.”

They questioned him a little more, then went on to Izzard.

“Mr. Izzard, what were your relations with Miss Merry?” Keil asked.

“Avuncular — of the Dutch-uncle sort. Low Dutch, really, but she hadn't come to realize that yet. I lavished gifts on her, and she was friendly. I believe I would ultimately have been successful. There was a change beginning in her.”

“Yes. Others have noticed the change. Were these expensive gifts?”

“Not to me. The price tags don't matter. I run the A to Izzard Variety Store. She was without discernment, and I have access to bargains.”

“You wouldn't have been rebuffed by her, and been angry enough to do her in?”

“I was rebuffed by her constantly, but she did it in a graceful way — never so as to stop the flow of gifts. My timetable for her was a long one and I am sorry to see it interrupted. No, I never laid a hand on her, except sometimes in attempted affection.”

They questioned him a little about the others, a little more about himself, and left him.

Next, they questioned Nazworthy, a large, sullen-appearing man. He said that any of them might have done it: Handle, Izzard, Lamprey, Gadberry, Dillahunty. “They are a bad bunch. All of them always looking at the young girl. Any of them do it. Yes, I am awake when it happen. I hear the shots ring out. I say, ‘Oh somebody have killed that pretty Miss Merry.’ Whichever one you decide on, I will positively identify him as the killer.”

“You are sure that you heard shots? She was not shot.”

“It was the knife I hear, then. I hear it go in loud. I say, ‘Somebody have killed that pretty Miss Merry.’ ”

“She was not knifed.”

“How was it, then? What is the loud noise I heard? How did he kill her?”

“We believe that she was strangled, and then thrown or pushed from her window.”

“My very thought. That is what I heard. The strangle noises and the thrown-out-of-the-window noises. I hear everything. I know everything. I will give testimony.”

There was the look of arrogant laughter behind the hard eyes of Nazworthy. He was talking nonsense, either seriously or speciously. They would get nothing out of him.

Mr. Dillahunty told Keil and Gold, “My opinion of the lodgers I cannot give as I would like, being opposed to profanity. You may have to discount my opinion of them, however. I always have a low opinion of those with whom I live; but when I have moved on to other lodgings I remember them with affection. No, I heard nothing in the night. I hear little without my aid, and I do not sleep with it. My acquaintance with the aforesaid Minnie Jo was sketchy. She would smile, and I would smile, but I am thrice her age and a crippled man. Having second sight, I knew that this would happen… No, I haven't second sight to that extent; I don't know who did it. You are sure it was one of the lodgers?”

“No. But she was apparently in her own room and in bed when accosted. She seems to have been strangled there and thrown out her own window. It was quite late, after the dew, and no feet left the building after the dew and before her discovery — except those of Gadberry, who reported her. At the moment we have no leads to anyone except those who lived in this building. Tell us, what about Mrs. Raffel?”

“A religious fanatic but a good woman. It is believed by the others that I pay the regular rates here, but that is not so. I live here partly on the charity of Mrs. Raffel.”

“And Gadberry, the artist?”

“In one word, selfish.”

“George Handle? He has been called a fool.”

“Only a half-fool. But easily led.”

“Izzard?”

“A merchant. He never spent a penny without a return.”

“Nazworthy? Is he as crazy as he sounds?”

“No, he isn't. He's a sardonic kidder, with a dislike for all authority. I can imagine a little the line he would take with the police. The cat, the only other animal that indulges in straight-faced sardonic humor, betrays itself by a flick of the tail. Nazworthy has the same motion, but without the tail.”

“Could he kill?”

“I doubt he could kill Minnie Jo Merry. He hates only pretentious people, and she wasn't. He could kill a policeman — or her killer. If another is killed, then you will know.”

“We'll watch for that. Lamprey?”

“Nothing there. A nothing man. Did you notice the girl well? A beautiful thing and finely made, but there was plenty of strength to her. That nothing man couldn't have strangled her. She'd have strangled him and thrown him out the window. You'll have to look to one of the others, not to him.”

Dillahunty was right. Lamprey was a nothing man, and he was terrified of the police. “I didn't kill her. I didn't know her. I didn't know anybody. I wash dishes at Webbers. I don't know nobody. I'm in my room all night.”

“Well did you hear noises in the night?”

“Noises I always hear, and some of them never happen. I'm a nervous man, but I kill nobody, I hurt nobody. It is more I am always afraid someone would kill me.”

Lamprey was a small man with small hands, a frightened man on the edge of incompetency. They questioned him a little more and left him.

“What do we have?” Captain Keil asked. “A heavy old woman who is a religious fanatic and also a good woman, and is glad that the girl was killed before something bad happened to her. An artist who is selfish. A sardonic kidder who is not as stupid as he acts. A half-fool who is easily led. A nothing man. A merchant who does not spend without a return. An old Irishman who is thrice her age, but can we be sure that all the sap is dead in him? Seven, and one of them is crazy, but which? Let's go talk to the half-fool.”

“Handle,” Captain Gold said, “did you sleep well last night?

“No. I have never slept well any night of my life. I dream a lot and worry a lot. I'm totally alive when I sleep.”

“Was it because of your restlessness at night that you decided to try the learn-while-you-sleep systems?”

“Yes. I want to know things, so I decided to tap my nocturnal energy, as the advertisement said.”

“What is your relationship with Gilford Gadberry?”

“Oh, he takes me for quite a bit, but he knows all the things I want to know. He can talk about music and funny paintings and the new dirty novels and psychology and things like that. Sometimes I turn him on when he talks, and play him back at night. Sometimes when I lend him money he'll make recordings for me — Gaelic furniture design, and things like that. He arranges the things I'll hear at night so I'll get a well-rounded liberal education.”

“I see. Did you hear any noises last night?”

“I hear noises every night, though I sleep with the earphones on, and all outside noise is supposed to be cut out. It must be that I dream the noises.”

“Did you dream last night? Did you dream anything about a murder or a dead person?” Gold asked.

“Yes. About seven dreams like that.”

“Tell us one of them.”

“Which one?”

“Hell, I don't know. We're shooting blind. Tell us one.”

“Well, this one, it's kind of silly. This was a long time ago, or anyhow it took place in a cabin and by candlelight. We sat wake over a corpse. We cracked and ate walnuts, but someone objected when we threw the shells in with the corpse, though that was a good place to throw them. Then someone else — ”

“Oh Judas!” said Captain Keil.

“I believe that is enough of that one,” Captain Gold said. “Were all of the seven dreams like that?”

“All of them about murder or corpses, yes. All of them kind of silly.”

“Seven story dreams we have yet,” Keil said. “We're getting nowhere.”

“Then we'll get somewhere,” Gold said. “Handle, have you any idea who killed Minnie Jo Merry?”

“I killed Minnie Jo Merry. I killed Minnie Jo Merry.”

“What?”

“I killed Minnie Jo Merry. I killed Minnie — ”

“You are talking for the record?”

“Strangled her and threw her out the window. I killed Minnie Jo Merry. I killed — ”

So they took him downtown, but first they gave orders for a new lock to be put on George Handle's door and they left a guard at the apartment building.

Naturally they didn't leave it at that. The confession of the half-fool was complete enough. There were odd elements in it, but he was an odd man. He said that he had killed the girl in a dream; that he had risen and gone to her room and strangled her and thrown her out of the open window because he was jealous. Then he had gone back to his bed, to other dreams.

Yet there were points about that murder that hadn't been given out, that only the killer could have known; George Handle knew them…

Nevertheless, the two captains continued to check during that morning. They found that Minnie Jo was an inefficient but promising worker for a stationery company. Her particular girlfriend believed that Minnie Jo ran around only with the men where she lived. They checked the places she frequented, and she had been seen with all the men.

She had been out with Gadberry and with Handle often, and with Izzard nearly as often. She had even been seen dining with the sardonic Nazworthy at a sardonic place run by two Bulgarian brothers. She often went to Webbers, and sometimes drank coffee in the kitchen with the dishwasher Lamprey. It was believed by them at Webbers, though, that this was mere kindness on her part.

Minnie Jo had even been seen drinking Irish coffee with Dillahunty in the after-midnight hours at Maddigan's. Nor was she the only girl a third his age that he brought in. The sap was not all dead in him yet.

They found that Dillahunty was well liked, Handle was liked, and even poor Lamprey was liked.

Izzard was not liked, Gadberry was not liked, Nazworthy was not liked.

“We can tell nothing by that,” Keil said. “Handle has confessed, and it makes no difference that the people who know him like him. There is nothing to tie onto the others, even if Gadberry is selfish, Izzard is demanding, and Nazworthy is sardonic. We still have the fact that Handle has confessed.”

“Yes. Repetitiously. But to be sure, let's go hear him again.”

Again, George Handle told them, “I killed Minnie Jo Merry. Strangled her and threw her out the window. I killed Minnie Jo — ”

“He sounds like — ”

“Yes, doesn't he?” Keil interrupted Gold. “Let's go look for it.”

“Has anybody been trying to get into Handle's room?” they asked the guard at the apartment.

“Gadberry has. Says Handle owes him money. Says he was to go in and get it. Says he wears Handle's shirts, and this locking out puts him to grave inconvenience. Handle never locked his door, according to him. Gadberry was disappointed to find the new lock on it. He seems pretty nervous now.”

They found Gadberry.

“Come on with us. We'll go to his room and get it.”

“What? Get what?”

“What you were trying to get. What is making you nervous that you couldn't get? It will be here, somewhere with the bunch of them. Quite a few of them here, aren't there, Gadberry?”

They were in Handle's room now.

“I don't know what you mean,” Gadberry protested. “The tapes, the wires, the records. How long would it take to play them all?”

“I don't know.”

“You know pretty well. It would take about forty hours or more, wouldn't it? Will you find it for us, or must we play them all? And you will listen.”

“I won't listen to forty hours of that drivel. I'll find it for you. I'd have said that nothing could break me down, but that surely could.”

“Why did you kill the girl, Gadberry?”

“Jealousy, frustration, curiosity…”

“I can understand the jealousy. She was an attractive girl. What was the frustration?”

“She was almost perfect, but not quite, and it is that which is just short of a masterpiece that infuriates. It is so near — yet it misses. I'm always in anger to destroy a near-masterpiece.”

“So you destroyed her. And the third element was your curiosity, like when you said ‘The girl was somehow completed in death.’ You had to see how she would look dead.”

“Yes. That knowledge was necessary to my work.”

Gadberry had located the tape for them, and Captain Keil was threading it into the machine. “I suspect that you weren't accurate in your appraisal to us of Miss Merry, Gadberry. You said that she hadn't eyes, and other things.”

“I lied. She had eyes, and she wasn't conventional. She was near perfect, gentlemen. So near.”

“And in preparation for the murder it was only necessary for you to condition the easily led George Handle to a confession?”

“Astute of me, was it not, Captains?”

The machine played now in the compelling voice of Gilford Gadberry, as it had night after night played to George Handle, in his sleep, till he had learned to answer on cue; and the cue, of course, was the question: “Who killed Minnie Jo Merry?”

“Pretty uninspired,” Gadberry had to admit, “but I had to assume uninspired questioners, to whom the cliché would come naturally.”

The machine went on to recount certain abominations that only the killer knew he would commit, but the voice of that most polished madman returned again and again to the command: “Say, ‘I killed Minnie Jo Merry. I killed Minnie Jo Merry. Strangled her and threw her out the window. I killed — ’ ”

Author's Commentary

Among The Hairy Earthmen

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

“Was that ourselves who behaved so?”

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

This is the way it was:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hobble — dark and smoldering like crippled Vulcan.

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

Ralpha — like young Mercury.

And Lonnie — a tall giant with a golden beard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turin, San Quentin, Moncontour, Mookerhide!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sempremai, tuttavia,” sang Ralpha in Eretzi or Earthian. “For Ever, For Always.”

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

“Forever, for always,” sang Ralpha.

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

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

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

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

In the meanwhile, Michael Goodgrind invented another game of Bodies. He made them of marble — an Eretzi limestone that cuts easily without faulting. And he painted them on canvas. He made the People of Home, and the Eretzi. He said that he would make angels.

“But you cannot make angels,” said Joan.

“We know that,” said Michael, “but do the Eretzi know that I cannot? I will make angels for the Eretzi.”

He made them grotesque, like chicken men, like bird men, with an impossible duplication of humeral function. And the Children laughed at the carven jokes.

But Michael had sudden inspiration. He touched his creations up and added an element of nobility. So an icon was born.

All the Children did it then, and they carried it into other mediums. They made the Eretzi, and they made themselves. You can still see their deep features on some of those statues, that family look that was on them no matter what faces they wore or copied.

Bronze is fun! Bronze horses are the best. Big bronze doors can be an orgy of delight, or bronze bells whose shape is their tone.

The Children went to larger things. They played at Realms and Constitutions, and Banks and Ships and Provinces. Then they came down to smaller things again and played at Books, for Hobble had just invented the printing thing.

Of them all, Hobble had the least imagination. He didn't range wide like the others. He didn't outrage the Eretzi. He spent all his time with his sick toys as though he were a child of much younger years.

The only new body he acquired was another one just like his own. Even this he didn't acquire as did the other Children theirs. He made it laboriously in his shop, and Hobble and the Hobble Creature worked together thereafter, and you could not tell them apart. One was as dull and laboring as the other.

The Eretzi had no effect whatsoever on the Children, but the Children had great effect on the Eretzi. The Children had the faculty of making whatever little things they needed or wanted, and the Eretzi began to copy them. In this manner the Eretzi came onto many tools, processes, devices and arts that they had never known before. Out of ten thousand, there were these:

The Astrolabe, Equatorium, Quadrant, Lathes and Traversing Tools, Ball-Bearings, Gudgeons, Gig Mills, Barometers, Range-Finders, Cantilever Construction, Machine Saws, Screw Jacks, Hammer Forges and Drop Forges, Printing, Steel that was more than puddled Iron, Logarithms, Hydraulic Rams, Screw Dies, Spanner Wrenches, Flux Solder, Telescopes, Microscopes, Mortising Machines, Wire-Drawing, Stanches (Navigation Locks), Gear Trains, Paper-Making, Magnetic Compass and Wind-Rhumb, Portulan Charts and Projection Maps, Pinnule-Sights, Spirit-Levels, Fine Micrometers, Porcelain, Firelock Guns, Music Notation and Music Printing, Complex Pulleys and Snatch-Blocks, the Seed-Drill, Playing Cards (the Children's masquerade faces may still be seen on them), Tobacco, the Violin, Whiskey, the Mechanical Clock.

They were forbidden, of course, to display any second-aspect powers or machines, as these would disrupt things. But they disrupted accidentally in building, in tooling, in armies and navies, in harbors and canals, in towns and bridges, in ways of thinking and recording. They started a thing that couldn't be reversed. It was only the One Afternoon they were here, only two or three Eretzi Centuries, but they set a trend. They overwhelmed by the very number of their new devices, and it could never be simple on Eretz again.

There were many thousands of Eretz days and nights in that Long Afternoon. The Children had begun to tire of it, and the hour was growing late. For the last time they wandered off, this time all Seven of them together.

In the bodies of Kings and their Ladies, they strode down a High Road in the Levant. They were wondering what last thing they could contrive, when they found their way blocked by a Pilgrim with a staff.

“Let's tumble the hairy Eretzi,” shouted Ralpha. “Let him not stand in the way of Kings!” For Ralpha was King of Bulgaria that day.

But they did not tumble the Pilgrim. That man knew how to handle his staff, and he laid the bunch of them low. It was nothing to him that they were the high people of the World who ordered Nations. He flogged them flat.

“Bleak Children!” that Pilgrim cried out as he beat them into the ground. “Unfledged little oafs! Is it so that you waste your Afternoon on Earth? I'll give you what your Fathers forgot.”

Seven-colored thunder, how he could use that staff! He smashed the gaudy bodies of the Children and broke many of their damnable bones. Did he know that it didn't matter? Did he understand that the bodies they wore were only for an antic?

“Lay off, old Father!” begged Michael Goodgrind, bleeding and half beaten into the earth. “Stay your bloody bludgeon. You do not know who we are.”

“I know you,” maintained the Pilgrim mountainously. “You are ignorant Children who have abused the Afternoon given you on Earth. You have marred and ruined and warped everything you have touched.”

“No, no,” Ralpha protested — as he set in new bones for his old damaged ones — “You do not understand. We have advanced you a thousand of your years in one of our afternoons. Consider the Centuries we have saved you! It's as though we had increased your life by that thousand years.”

“We have all the time there is,” said the Pilgrim solidly. “We were well and seriously along our road, and it was not so crooked as the one you have brought us over. You have broken our sequence with your meddling. You've set us back more ways than you've advanced us. You've shattered our Unity.”

“Pigs have unity!” Joan shouted. “We've brought you diversity. Think deep. Consider all the machines we have showed you, the building and the technique. I can name you a thousand things we've given you. You will never be the same again.”

“True. We will never be the same,” said the Pilgrim. “You may not be an unmixed curse. I'm a plain man and I don't know. Surety is one of the things you've lost us. But you befouled us. You played the game of Immoralities and taught it to us Earthlings.”

“You had it already,” Laurie insisted. “We only brought elegance instead of piggishness to its practice.” Immoralities was Laurie's own game, and she didn't like to hear it slighted.

“You have killed many thousands of us in your battles,” said the Pilgrim. “You're a bitter fruit — sweet at the first taste only.”

“You would yourselves have killed the same numbers in battles, and the battles wouldn't have been so good,” said Michael. “Do you not realize that we are the higher race? We have roots of great antiquity.”

“We have roots older than antiquity,” averred the Pilgrim. “You are wicked Children without compassion.”

“Compassion? For the Eretzi?” shouted Lonnie in disbelief.

“Do you have compassion for mice?” demanded Ralpha.

“Yes. I have compassion for mice,” the Pilgrim said softly.

“I make a guess,” Ralpha shot in shrewdly after they had all repaired their damaged bodies. “You travel as a Pilgrim, and Pilgrims sometimes come from very far away. You are not Eretzi. You are one of the Fathers from Home going in the guise of an Eretzi Pilgrim. You have this routine so that sometimes one of you comes to this world — and to every world — to see how it goes. You may have come to investigate an event said to have happened on Eretz a day ago.”

Ralpha did not mean an Eretzi day ago, but a day ago at Home. The High Road they were on was in Coele-Syria, not far from where the Event was thought to have happened, and Ralpha pursued his point:

“You are no Eretzi, or you would not dare to confront us, knowing what we are.”

“You guess wrong in this and in everything,” said the Pilgrim. “I am of this Earth, earthy. And I will not be intimidated by a gangle of children of whatever species! You're a weaker flesh than ourselves. You hide in other bodies, and you get Earthlings to do your slaughter. And you cannot stand up to my staff!

“Go home, you witless weanlings!” and he raised his terrible staff again.

“Our time is nearly up. We will be gone soon,” said Joan softly.

The last game they played? They played Saints — for the Evil they had done in playing Bodies wrongly, and in playing Warfare with live soldiers. But they repented of the things only after they had enjoyed them for the Long Afternoon. They played Saints in hairshirt and ashes, and revived that affair among the Eretzi.

And finally they all assembled and took off from the high hill between Prato and Firenze in Italy. The rocks flowed like water where they left, and now there would be a double scarp formation.

They were gone, and that was the end of them here.

There is a theory, however, that one of the Hobbles remained and is with us yet. Hobble and his creature could not be told apart and could not finally tell themselves apart. They flipped an Eretzi coin, Emperors or Shields, to see which one would go and which one would stay. One went and one stayed. One is still here.

But, after all, Hobble was only concerned with the sick toys, the mechanical things, the material inventions. Would it have been better if Ralpha or Joan stayed with us? They'd have burned us crisp by now! They were damnable and irresponsible children.

This short Historical Monograph was not assembled for a distraction or an amusement. We consider the evidence that Children have spent their short vacations here more than once and in both hemispheres. We set out the theses in ordered parallels and we discover that we have begun to tremble unaccountably.

When last came such visitors here? What thing has beset us during the last long Eretzi lifetime?

We consider a new period — and it impinges on the Present — with aspects so different from anything that went before that we can only gasp aghast and gasp in sick wonder:

“Is it ourselves who behave so?

“Is it beings of another sort, or have we become those beings?

“Are we ourselves? Are these our deeds?”

There are great deep faces looking over our shoulder, there are cold voices of ancient Children jeering “Compassion? For Earthlings?” there is frozen vasty laughter that does not belong to our species.

End of the Line

“Now and then a case will come along that is insulting to the reason,” Dr. Kirn had once said. “When this happens, the only thing we can do is reason it out of existence. The grotesque never actually happens.”

“It does happen,” Captain Shakelton had insisted evenly. “The people of this world are all of them grotesque animals. They cover it a little, but the cover's thin. The grotesque is basic.”

They differed completely on that point.

Sergeant Joe Cook took the call but he couldn't understand it immediately. The voice got in the way of the words. He couldn't tell whether the speaker was man, woman, child, or something else. It sounded like something else.

“I'm not getting you,” Cook told the phone. “Repeat it please.”

“I wish to report a death,” came the voice, still slurred and distant. Well, perhaps the voice was muffled with something, and probably the speaker was scared; there was an element of dull terror in it. It sounded as though it came from inside a grave but, as Dr. Kirn would say, that was unlikely.

“The address?” asked Cook. One is never completely lost with an address, and without it details often add up to nothing.

“Isn't any,” said the voice. “Where First Street ends against the river. The old car barn.”

“Who's dead?”

“John Gillan.”

Cook started. He knew John Gillan, and he almost knew the muffled voice.

“How dead? When?”

“Come see. Tongue cut out. Other things.”

“Who's this calling?”

The voice didn't answer. It seemed to be engaged in a very distant babble with other spooks of its kind.

“Who is this calling?” Cook asked more sharply. He had a feeling that the whole thing would evaporate if he didn't nail it down now. If it was a hoax someone had already scared himself badly over it, and in any case it would have to be followed up. The spooks still held counsel just beyond the reach of the phone.

“Who is this calling?” Cook insisted. “What name? What name!”

“Ah — John Gillan,” the voice slurred, and whispered off with its fellows.

“John!” Joe Cook called loudly. “John, are you hurt? Thought you said you were dead? That the way you sound with your tongue cut out?”

“Yes. Like —  like that.” The phone went dead.

John Gillan was a good boy and the voice sounded like his, now that Cook thought about it. The boy didn't get into trouble and wasn't known as a hoaxer. He was sixteen —  or he was seventeen. It may be that he was drunk for the first time and called the police for a confused sort of gag. It was like the boy's voice might sound if he was drunk and confused. “Or if his tongue was cut out,” Cook mumbled mordantly to himself.

Cook got Captain Shakelton. For one thing the Gillan boy belonged to a prominent family, and the order had lately gone out to handle the boys of that group of families with moleskin gloves. Not that Cook would have been hard with Gillan, being an admirer of him as a ball player and straight performer. But it was better to have a captain in on it if there was something a little off here.

The two of them went down to the old car barn, past where the streets end and where the lights end, into the ruined building that loomed like a rough cliff.

They found John Gillan dead, with his tongue cut out, and other things.

The obvious facts were shocking enough, but the surrounding detail — but no — not now, not yet. There must be nothing sensational. The grotesque does not really happen. Joe Cook went to call Dr. Kirn from the nearest phone. If he said that things couldn't happen let him fix it that it hadn't.

“This is a little too far out,” said Doctor Kirn when he had looked at it. “You have to admit it's pretty extravagant. The boy is dead, and in apparently a rather odd accident. Let's find just what happened; then all these other little things will clear themselves up. Imagination is somewhat a hindrance in a case like this. Let's keep it to a minimum.”

“It isn't imagination that John Gillan here talked to me after he was dead and his tongue was cut out.”

“We'd better not have you on the case if you're that unstable, Cook,” lectured the Doctor.

“Then I'll be on it on my own till I find who did it.”

“You said yourself that you couldn't tell at first whether the voice was that of a man, woman, child, or something else. Now, after your imagination has fermented in you, you say it was John Gillan after he was dead.”

“I know that boy, Doctor. I know his voice. He's a ball player; I umpire games for the boys on my evenings off. It was his voice — kind of slurred with a mannerism he has at his age — and further slurred — ”

“ — His tongue being cut out and him dead the while, Cook? I can see how a thing like this would go since it's gotten hold of a man like you who isn't completely green. Occasionally a thing happens that, at first appearance, is so grotesque that I'm ashamed to live in the same world where it even seems to happen. Fortunately, when the facts are in, it is always the case that it didn't happen at all.”

“Doctor,” said Captain Shakelton, “you're looking at it. It's there in front of you with its central fact and the weirdest clutch of details I ever saw. Can you look at it and say that it didn't happen?”

“Very nearly that. I can look at it and say that we are all looking at it in the wrong way. Just how wrong I don't know yet.”

“Is there any right way to look at a thing as wrong as that?” asked Shakelton.

“I hope so. It's essential that we find another way of viewing it.”

So they took on the case in their several ways. Sgt. Joe Cook put himself on it unofficially. Captain Shakelton — who said that the people of the world were all grotesque animals thinly covered — went about seeing what was beneath the cover here. And Doctor Kirn — who said that the grotesque never actually happens — set himself to see how he could make anything else of this case.

For, when he thought about it in repose, Dr. Kirn had to admit there were details that remained grotesque no matter how they were looked at.

The Sergeant and Captain called for him immediately and he was at the site within minutes and before anything had been disturbed. So what was it they had, or appeared to have?

John Gillan had been a normal boy, almost too normal. He exceeded his fellows slightly in almost everything, but was in no way different from others. He had started that evening to the house of one of his classmates. He was going to meet him and two others there to study and to talk. John told the other boy on the phone that he was coming at once, and he left the house then. But he had not arrived that half block. Instead he had been found dead in the old car barn, only eight blocks distant, but in another sort of world. He had been found in weird circumstances by Sergeant Cook and Captain Shakelton, and nothing had been moved when Doctor Kirn had arrived in a very few minutes. Nevertheless the Doctor felt, and thankfully, that the eyes of the other two had somehow borne the first brunt of the shock and made it less for him. It was against his principles to be shocked. Mutilation and death did not shock him, but a thing that was impossible did.

Kirn now wrote down the details on a data form he used, and did it with embarrassment. It hurt him to list such outlandish things as they seemed to be. The point of view on which he had based his life was at stake.

John Gillan had been lying dead on his back. A great part of his tongue had been chopped off and the bare end of his nose. However what had killed him was a spike driven into the lower center of his chest. The spike was a steel footing designed as a base for a wooden post or pier such as are sometimes used for support in these ramshackle buildings. It had its floor plate, and the center spike was meant to drive into the wooden pole to secure it. The spike — much sharpened — was driven clear to the plate into the lower chest of John Gillan, and the face of it looked like a large round badge worn on his chest. From the bleeding it would seem that the two wounds had been instantaneous, or near the same time. He had not been first killed and later mutilated, or not much later.

Those were the central facts, serious enough. But it was the outrageous details that infuriated the Doctor. He wrote them down in flushed resentment.

There had been the short candle that had gutted out at about the time the boy had died, and the strong smell of sulphur. There was the half of a dead rat, the front half sheared off. It lay where the severed tongue of John Gillan should have lain. But the tongue was not to be found, nor the other half of the rat.

There was the dead chicken ripped apart and the parts laid out in a pattern. There were the cabalistic marks done on the rough floor wildly as a primitive might have done them. Doctor Kirn knew what they meant, or at least what they said. In a day or so Captain Shakelton would come on some other dabbler in the occult and would then proudly pronounce their meaning.

And there were the foot tracks — John Gillan's own. He had come over the space where the streets ended and through the quagmire where the old tracks had long since been taken up, and had come into the ruined building with muddy shoes. He had come alone. His tracks ended where he lay, and there was no indication that anyone else had been there.

Well, Shakelton and the others would soon know that the ‘Fen de Rout’ lettered in old blood on the floor was the negro French of a hoodoo island for ‘End of the Line’, and they might find something striking in those letters on the floor of the old car barn that was the end of the line in several senses for the system it once served.

Soon they would be told the meaning of those hooked letters of an alphabet that was older than the Latin, and the meaning of the rough geometric figures. The spirit of fetish was so thick that you could smell it. The signs and the words were polyglot. Too many tongues were involved. And one tongue was missing.

It was noon the next day that Captain Shakelton came in to Doctor Kirn. “You're supposed to be working on this case as much as I am,” he accused the Doctor, “but I don't believe you've stirred out of that chair all morning.”

The Doctor was not a medical doctor. He was a police captain the same as Captain Shakelton, but he held degrees and was known as the Doctor.

“I've been running all over the back forty acres of hell,” continued Shakelton. “This gets deeper the further I get into it.”

“Then you're going in the wrong direction.”

“I'm convinced that it's ritual murder, though I know that it curls your soul to hear that kind of talk.”

“Never mind, it's been curled before. Yes, it's highly ritual, whatever else it is. But we don't know yet that he's murder.”

“I'm going through everything in that last block of First Street. Do you know what it's like?”

“It used to be called Fortune Tellers' Row, which meant that there were at least two of them there at one time. It's a shanty block inhabited by poor people of the kind that used to be referred to as Outcasts.”

“Kirn, that block has more bookings than any other in the city.”

“I believe you'll find that they aren't serious bookings. Mostly for unhauled trash, or playing very loud music late at night, or keeping goats and chickens in defiance of city ordinances.”

“Goats did you say? Kirn, some of those damned letters on the floor were written in goat's blood. We've just had them analyzed. All blood can't be told, but there's a peculiarity about goat's blood.”

“Of course they'd be in goat's blood! If you're going to be ritualistic you have to follow the ritual at least.”

“Well, you can stay in your chair if you want. I'm going to follow this thing wherever it leads.”

“One of those symbols on the floor of the car barn is the Crooked Circle, Shakelton. It means you'll end up where you started.”

Captain Shakelton went to see Chickenfeathers Flagman who ran the bar in the shanty block.

“Are there any — let us say — peculiar people who come into your place, Flagman?” Shakelton asked him.

“Everybody who comes into my place is peculiar,” Chickenfeathers gave the opinion. “I'm kind of peculiar myself.”

“But how would you classify them as to ethnic origin?”

“I can't even classify myself. I don't know if I'm supposed to be a black man or a white man. That's why I seldom leave my own block; this is the only place it doesn't matter. Well, there's a woman in the block who talks nothing but dogtail Greek to her husband, and he answers her in Quawpaw Indian. They've been doing it for twenty years, and they don't understand a word of each other. There's old railroad Spanish to be heard here and gullah French, and blue-gummed African. The slang here is Romany and the profanity Arabic.”

“What are those two men talking back there now?”

“Romany, but not deep Romany. Carnival Gypsy.”

“Why should there be such a mixture of peoples in one block?”

“Where else can you rent a house for thirteen dollars a month?”

“If they are houses. Tell me, Flagman, did you ever run into — ah — voodoo?”

“Not properly such. There's one man who, when he wants a chicken for the pot, doesn't wring its neck. He just tells that chicken to die, and it dies on the spot. I've seen him do it lots of times. And there's one man who can make your teeth fall out, one a day, if you cross him. I've learned not to cross him anymore, but you'll notice that I'm kind of gap-toothed. Oh, they turn each other's flour to worms with spells and such, but no real voodoo.”

“I have heard that there are also certain Fortune Tellers in the neighborhood, and that their activities may cover something else.”

“I'm a pretty good fortune teller myself,” said Chickenfeathers. “Shall I make you a prediction?”

“I would like to hear anything that you can tell me.”

“Well, whatever you're looking for, you won't find it in this block.”

It was already out, of course, and was being referred to by everyone as the Voodoo Murder which made Dr. Kirn cringe. Shakelton continued his investigations in the back forty acres of hell, and Kirn went over the case again and again in his chair. The one thing he did not want was more details, and here he was insulated from them.

Joe Cook went about on his own and talked to the people, particularly the mother of John Gillan. Her grief had dried now and she was listless.

“I know you always took an interest in the boys, Mr. Cook, so I will tell you what I can. Yes, something had been bothering John lately for about the last week. He was worried. And he was very worried the night he went out to meet the boys. He had received papers with those signs drawn on them that everybody is talking about. I gave them to Captain Shakelton. He said they had been identified as the Sign of the Short Spear and the Sign of the Tongue; the Sign of the Chicken, and the Rat and the Goat; the Sign of the End of the Line and of the Shriveling Death. He says that some of those letters are Chaldee and say ‘In the Beginning was the End.’ ”

“Do you think the other boys will be able to tell me anything?”

“Only what everyone knows, that John was supposed to come to that house that night and didn't show up. The folks were away and the boys alone, but they say they never left the house.”

So they raveled it out in their own ways and arrived, according to the sign of the Crooked Circle, where they had started. Shakelton got Joe Cook and they went together to Doctor Kirn to see if they couldn't rouse him to action.

“There's no question that it was ritual murder,” Shakelton said. “The Signs all point to it. We've interpreted them all except this one set.”

“Oh, those? Pennsylvania Dutch hexes,” said Kirn. “They didn't skip anything, did they?”

“And there's an old Dutchman in the block!” howled Shakelton, “the only one I hadn't thought about. Now it could be anyone in that block. They're all of them from queer superstitious races. It could be any of them. It has to be someone of a race much given to superstition. That's what we're looking for.”

“No, we are not, Captain. We are looking for someone of a race much devoted to ritual — not at all the same thing. We are looking for someone of a race capable of deadly seriousness in trivial things.”

“Trivial things like murder, Doctor?”

“Trivial things like the setting of the death. We are looking for someone of a race older than the Chaldees, craftier than the Greeks, darker than the Negroes, wider-diffused than the Romanies, more serious than the Shawnees, spookier than the Mexicans.”

“There's an old Osage Indian in the block, and an Armenian.”

“No, it has to be an odder race than either of them. You were right in suspecting that a strange sort of folk were involved. And there is only one race in the world that qualifies.”

“Which?”

“Cook, you know the boys best,” said Doctor Kirn. “Had John Gillan a shadow?”

“A shadow?”

“Every popular boy has a shadow. One who follows him and imitates him.”

“Yes, Peter Fay was his shadow, I guess.”

“And as his shadow he had the same mannerisms?”

“Pretty much the same.”

“And the same sort of voice?”

“He talked quite a bit like John, but he didn't talk as much. He tried to talk like him till it came natural to him.”

“Could the voice you heard on the phone have been that of a very frightened Peter Fay, and not Johnny Gillan talking after he was dead?”

“Yes. Boys of one bunch talk a lot alike. He talked enough like John to set my mind that way.”

“Bring Peter in, and the other two friends also.” Joe Cook went to do it.

“The thing we cannot get around,” argued Shakelton, “is that John Gillan went alone. There are the marks of his feet for the last eighty yards, and those of nobody else. Oh, we can conjecture that someone could have hidden there and have left by another way, but it doesn't fit in. What happened to him happened by inanimate objects, and they can only be directed by voodoo or magic.”

“They cannot be directed at all.”

“But it happened. I'll never forget that look of horror and fear on his face when we found him.”

“Neither will I. A very poignant and terrible accident.”

In about thirty minutes Joe Cook was back with three members of a race that is older than the Chaldees, craftier than the Greeks, wider-diffused than the Romanys, and much else. A race known to Pliny as the Ephebi and to moderns as Teenagers. They now exhibited a deadly seriousness, and might even have been scared.

“Peter Fay, Laurence Tolliver, Billy Brogan,” Joe Cook called their names.

“Sit down, boys,” said Captain Shakelton. “Doctor Kirn here apparently believes he will be able to get more out of you than I could.”

“Peter,” asked the Doctor, “why did you tell Joe Cook on the phone that you were John Gillan?”

“Didn't. Didn't meant to. I was talking to the boys too. They both were telling me what not to say. Mr. Cook hollered out ‘What name? What name?’ and I said ‘John Gillan’ again. I didn't mean that I was John.”

“Peter, how did you get rid of the trap? It was a trap, wasn't it?”

“We didn't kill him. It was an accident. He was our best friend.”

“How did you get rid of the trap?”

“We still have it. Nobody asked about it. There's a ledge along the back side of the building. You can come back by the river road. We watched from there. The windows have been gone from the building for a long time. The trap had a long chain on it and we had it attached there. We just pulled it up after the — accident — and then ran to a phone.”

“What is the trap?” asked Shakelton. “What is the whole business?”

“An ancient and intricate ritual,” said Doctor Kirn. “Probably about a week old in its combination but very ancient in all its elements.”

“Well, hell take it, what ritual?”

“An initiation,” said Billy Brogan. “John Gillan was being initiated into the End of the Line Club. It's the most exclusive in school and was to be limited to four members.”

“And now?”

“Now I guess it will be limited to three. It looks like the end of the line for us.”

“Was John Gillan to meet you at Peter Fay's house?”

“No. He was to go to the old car barn alone, and he did. He was to show his nerve by performing the final liturgy there.”

“What did it consist of?” asked the Captain.

“First he picked up the candle and the sulphur powder where we had them hid. Then he had to steal the chicken from Mr. Malenotte who has a fix on chicken thieves and sits up all night with a shotgun waiting for them. That takes nerve. Then John went to the car barn, lit the candle and sprinkled sulphur dust in its flame, tore the chicken apart and made the sign of the cross backwards in its blood. Then he had to do the final test.”

“Just a minute, Billy. Were the cabalistic marks in the blood made by him then?”

“Only a few of them. Only the ones in the chicken's blood. We made the others when the others of us were initiated. A goat costs four dollars and we can't be killing one each time. And that's too much to steal with a clear conscience.”

“I'll make a note of the value limit for future guidance,” said the Captain.

“The goat's blood was from the night before when we initiated each other,” continued Billy Brogan. “John had to make up a geometry assignment that night and couldn't come. So he had to do it alone the next night.”

“All right, Billy,” said the Captain. “What was the final test?”

“The bear trap we already had there and set, and the long spike on its facing. John had to go down over the spike set under his chest, in the push-up position, and stick his tongue out and lick the inside bottom jaw of the bear trap. That trap can cut clear through one-by-fours in one bite. It sure makes you nervous to do the last test.”

“And John got too nervous?”

“No. A rat shot out of somewhere, hit the tab of the trap and set it off. It caught the rat too and chopped him in half. It got John's tongue and he collapsed real heavy on the spike. He was arched high above it.”

“How was he lying on his back when we found him, then?”

“He writhed over as he died.”

“Then you jerked up the trap and ran for it?”

“Yes, that's just what we did. Peter called as soon as we could find a phone. We figured the police would have a doctor there quicker than anybody if John wasn't really dead.”

“And the bear trap still had two morsels in its jaws when you pulled it up?”

“Yes. Oh God yes!”

“Where did you get the variety of symbols, Billy?”

“Out of a book. Witchcraft Through the Ages. We copied them out. We figured if we put a little bit of everything in it we would make our ritual more mysterious.”

“It did, Billy, it did.”

“Yet that man Flagman told me some real stories of voodoo in the block,” Shakelton insisted to Kirn.

“Chickenfeathers is obliging, and he gave you some of the old classics, Captain.”

“Well, you found the right way of looking at it, Kirn, but it was still a little grotesque.”

“It was — but understandable. You may be right that the people of the world are all of them grotesque animals thinly covered. At a certain age the cover is very thin.”

Author's Commentary

Name Of The Snake

When Pio Quindecimo — Confiteantur Domino Misericordia ejus — had proclaimed it, it was received, even by the faithful, with a measure of ennui. Contingent, speculative, rhetorical — it was not thought of as touching on practicality. Pio was not one of the outstanding Popes of the century.

The encyclical was titled modestly Euntes Ergo Docete Omnes: “Going Therefore Teach Ye All.” Its substance was that this was a literal command of the Lord, and that the time had come to implement that command in its extreme meaning; that when the Lord had said “Go into all lands,” He had not meant to go into lands of one narrow earth only; that when the Lord had said “Teach Ye All,” it was not meant to teach all men only… within the narrow framework in which we have considered the term “men.”

Should the command be taken literally, its implementation would cause far-reaching activity. It was in the implementation of the command that Padreco Barnaby was now on that remote planet, Analos.

Could one call the Analoi humans? Had their skeletal remains been discovered on old Earth, they would unhesitatingly have been classed as human. The oddly formed ears — not really as large as they seemed — somewhat Gothic in their steepled upsweep, their slight caudal appendage, their remarkable facial mobility and chameleon-like complexions, these could not have been read from their bone remains. But how are we to say that their ears were more grotesque than our own? When did you last look at your own ears objectively? Are they not odd things to be sticking on the sides of a person's head?

“They are gargoyles,” said an early visitor from Earth. Of course they were. The gargoyles had been copied by a still earlier visitor to Analos from Earth. But they were a lively and interesting bunch of gargoyles: mechanically civilized, ethically weird, artistically exciting. They were polished and polyglot, and in many ways more human than the humans.

On Analos, the Padreco was at first a guest of Landmaster, a leading citizen. Here the priest, speaking of his mission, first came up against the Wall.

“I can see what this might lead to, little priest,” Landmaster told him when they discussed the situation. “It might even become bothersome to us — if we ever let anything bother us — if we had not passed beyond the stage where annoyance was possible. So long as you confined your activity to resident Earthlings and humans of that recension, there was no problem. Fortunately we do not fall within those categories. That being so, I do not see how your present aspirations can have any point of contact with us.”

“You Analoi are sentient creatures of great natural intelligence, Landmaster. As such it is even possible that you have souls.”

“We have souls that are fully realized. What could humans give to us who transcend humanity?”

“The Truth, the Way, the Life, the Baptism.”

“We have the first three greatly beyond yourselves. The last — the crabbed rite of a dying sect — what could that give us?”

“Forgiveness of your sins.”

“But we haven't any sins. That's the whole point about us. We've long since passed beyond that. You humans are still awkward and guilt-ridden. You are of a species which as yet has no adult form. Vicariously we may be the adult form of yourselves. The idea of sin is an aspect of your early awkwardness.”

“Everybody has sins, Landmaster.”

“Only according to your own childish thesis, little priest. And consequent to that, you would reason that everybody must be saved — and by yourselves, a race of crop-eared, flat-faced children.

“But consider how meaningless it becomes in relation to ourselves, the Analoi. How could we sin? What would we have to sin about? Our procreation no longer follows the grotesque pattern of your own, and ours is without passion. You can see that ninety percent of your sin is already gone.

“What else is left to us? What other opportunity — if that is the word for it — have we for sinning? We have no poverty, no greed, no envy. Our metabolism is so regulated that neither sloth nor hysterical activity is possible. We have long ago attained a balance in all things; and ‘sin’ is only a form of unbalance.

“I have forgotten, little priest. What are the ‘sins’ of the childish races?”

“Pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, sloth,” said Padreco Barnaby. “These are the capital sins and the sources of sin. All others derive from them.”

“Spoken like a valiant little mime. And nothing is derived but from a source. But you can see how completely we lack these seven stumbling blocks of children. Pride is only a misunderstanding of the nature of achievement; covetousness disappears when all that could be coveted has been acquired; lust is an adjunct of an arrangement that no longer has a counterpart in ourselves. Anger, gluttony, envy, sloth are only malfunctions. All malfunctions are subject to adjustment and correction, and we have corrected them.”

Padreco Barnaby was defeated for the while, and he let his mind wander. He gazed over the countryside of Analos.

An early explorer has given his impression of that world:

“It was as though I were walking under water,” he wrote. “This was not from any obstruction or resistance, for the atmosphere is lighter than Earth's. It was from a sort of shimmering and wavering of the air itself and from the ‘air shadows,’ not clouds, that pass along like the running shadows of overhead waves. This, coupled with the flora (very like the underwater plants of Earth, though free-standing) gave me the feeling that I was walking on the bottom of the ocean.”

To the Padreco it seemed as though he had been talking under water and that he had not been heard.

“What is the meaning of that giant kettle in the center of your main plaza, Landmaster?” he finally asked. “It seems quite old.”

“It is a relic of our old race, and we keep it. We have a certain reverence for the past — even the obsoleted past. In minds as great as ours there is room even for relics.”

“Then it has no present use?”

“No. But under a special condition we could revert to an ancient use of it. That need not concern you now.”

A kettle, a giant kettle! You have no idea how grotesquely pot-bellied the thing was!

But the Padreco returned impotently to his main theme. “There has to be sin, Landmaster! How else can there be salvation?”

“We have salvation, little priest. You haven't. How could you bring it to us?”

So Padreco Barnaby left Landmaster and went out to see if he could not discover sin somewhere on Analos. He asked a small boy about it.

“Sonny, do you know what sin is? Have you ever run across the thing?”

“Sir and stranger, sin is an archaic word for an outmoded thing. It is an appurtenance to an unclarified state of mind that still obtains on the more benighted worlds. The word and the concept behind it will pass into oblivion as soon as true light can be brought into those dark places.”

Damnation! — a meaningless word on Analos: even the children of the gargoyles were too polite to be human.

“You little monster, do all the children on Analos talk like that?”

“All who are not deviationists would of necessity talk as I do. And ‘monster,’ as you call me with disapprobation, means a ‘show-piece,’ that which is displayed, a wonder. The late meaning of the word in the sense of a grotesque animal is an accretion. I gladly accept the name of monster in its true meaning. We are the Monsters of the Universe.”

Damme, I believe that you are, the Padreco said to himself. Polygot little prig! He couldn't even cope with the children of the things.

“Sonny, do you ever have any fun?” he finally asked.

“Fun is another archaic word; but I am not sound on its meaning,” said the boy. “Is it not related to the obsolete concept of sin?”

“Not directly, boy. Fun is the third side of a two-headed coin. It slips in. Or it used to.”

“Sir and stranger, it is possible that you should take a course in corrective semantics.”

“I may be taking one now. But what of the children who are deviationists? Where are they? And what are like?”

“I don't know. If they don't pass their probationary period, we don't see them any more. I believe they are sent to another place.”

“I have to find a little bit of sin somewhere,” the Padreco mumbled to himself. “An honest man should be able to find it anywhere if he really inquires. On Earth the saying was that a taxi-driver would always know where to find it.”

The Padreco hailed a taxi. A taxi is a circle. That is to say that one clambers over and sits in the single circular seat that faces inward. The Analoi are gregarious and like to gaze on the faces of their fellows. Only the shame-capable humans would wish to sit in unfacing rows. The driver sits above in an open turret, and dangles his head down to talk.

“Where would you go, stranger?” the driver asked the Padreco. There was one other passenger, a thoughtful man of early middle age.

“I'm looking for sin,” the Padreco told the driver. “It's a tradition that taxi-drivers always know where to find it.”

“Riddles is it, stranger? Let me deliver my other customer while I puzzle this one out. It's his last ride and that makes it important.”

“How is it your last ride?” Padreco Barnaby asked the thoughtful man. Conversation was unavoidable in such a taxi. The facing was too direct to get out of it.

“Oh, my time has come,” said the man, “a little earlier than with most. I've drunk the cup empty, so there's nothing left. It was a nice life — well, I suppose it was. Rather expected more out of it, but I see now that I shouldn't have. An adult will know when it's over. And they do make a clean end of it for you.”

“Deus meus, is that the way it ends on Analos?”

“How else? Natural death has been pushed back so far that nobody could contemplate waiting for it. Should we drag out our lives and become abridged repetitious creatures like those of the lesser races? One goes quietly when he realizes that he has covered it all.”

“But that is despair!”

“A little boy's word for a little boy's thing. Termination with dignity — that's the only way. Goodbye to you both. And to all.”

The thoughtful man got out and entered the Terminators.

“Now what was the name of that thing you wanted to be taken to, stranger?” the taxi-driver asked the Padreco.

“Never mind. I may have found it already. I'll walk back.”

There was something here that needed a name.

He walked till he came to the buildings of the city again, and the buildings distorted as he neared them. The edifices of Analos seem bulbous at near view, and indeed they are built slightly so. Yet when seen at a distance, due to a vagary of atmosphere called Towering by Earth meteorologists, they appear normal and straight. The few buildings built to Earth specifications seemed pinched-in when viewed from afar, almost collapsing on themselves. But to the Padreco, the pot-bellied buildings of Analos made him feel a complete alien. He was lost in this world, and he cried out:

“Oh, for the old familiar sins that one can get hold of and denounce! In my book, Termination is not the only way, and Dignity has another meaning. Where are the people who sin like people? Is there nowhere a healthy case of d.t.s or a hoppy in need of reform? Is there no burglar I can call my brother? No golden-hearted chippy who needs only be shown the right way? Is there no thief or usurer or politician to strike a note of reality? Hypocrites, wife-beaters, seducers, demagogues, sleazy old perverters, where can I find you? Answer me! I need you now!”

“Sir, sir, you are crying out in the street,” a young Analoi lady told him. “Are you ill? What are you calling out for?”

“Sin. A little sin, please, for the love of Christ. If there is no sin in my cellar, then the foundation of my house is not what I supposed.”

“Hardly anyone uses sin any more, sir. What a peculiar thing to be crying out in the street for! But I believe there is one shop that still handles it. Here. I will write you the address.”

Padreco Barnaby took the address and ran to the shop. It was not what he sought. Sin was an old name of a scent, but the name had been changed as no longer conveying a meaning.

There were very many of these scent shops. Too many. And the scent of the scent shops was not the odor of sanctity. Was it possible that a new sensuality had taken the place of the old?

And the other shops — block after block of them — what were they for? What were the uses of the strange apparatus displayed in them? And why should they give that sticky feeling of menace?

The Padreco spent a long day wandering through the capital city of Analos. The pavements were green and artfully shadow-painted so as to resemble turf. The effect, however, was not that of placid nature; it was of a primordial wildness able to break through the thin shell at any time. And what was the new weirdness that came over him when he walked through the parks? The earlier explorer had been mistaken: the plants of Analos did not resemble the undersea plants of Earth; they resembled the undersea animals. They leered like devilfish and grinned like sharks.

It was here everywhere. But it had changed its name.

It was with shameful triumph that Padreco Barnaby first uncovered the sweeping outlines of the thing. It was with growing horror that he amassed the details. When he had enough of it, he went back to Landmaster, who was now with several others of his kind.

“Repent! Repent!” the Padreco called to them. “The ax is already laid to the roots. The tree that bears evil fruit will be cut down and cast into the fire!”

“Of what should we repent, little priest?” Landmaster asked.

“Of your sins! At once! Before it is too late!”

“I have explained to you that we have no sins, little priest; and that we could not have them according to our developing nature. Your repetition would annoy us… if we ever let anything annoy us.”

Landmaster made a sign to one of his fellows, who left them at once.

“What were the rather humorous names you gave them this morning?” Landmaster asked, turning again to the priest.

“You remember the names I gave. Now I give others. Too effete for the ancient sins themselves, you have the deadly shadows of them: presumption, establishment, ruthlessness, selfishness, satiety, monopoly, despair.”

“An interesting argument. We have a Department of Interesting Arguments. You should go there and have it recorded.”

“I will record it here. You practice infanticide, juvenicide, senectucide, suicide.”

“Yes, the Gentle Terminators.”

“You murder your own children who do not measure up to your atrocious norm.”

“Judicious Selection.”

“You have invented new lusts and perversions.”

“Refined Amusements.”

“There are the evil who are evil openly. There are the evil who hide their evil and deny that they are venomous. There are the ultimate in evil who keep the venom and change the Name of the Snake.”

“I'm happy that we're the ultimate,” said Landmaster. “We would be affronted by a lesser classification.”

Padreco Barnaby raised his head.

“I smell wood burning,” he said suddenly. “You no longer use wood for fuel here.”

“In one case only,” said Landmaster. “An ancient and seldom employed ritual of ours.”

“Which?”

“You do not understand, little priest? Ten million Earth cartoons of the thing and still you do not understand them or comprehend their origin. What is the unvarying fate of the Missioner cast up on the Savage Shore?”

“You are not supposed to be savage.”

“We revert, little priest. In this one case we revert. It is our ancient answer to the obstreperous missioner who persists in asking us the irksome question. We cannot allow ourselves to be irked.”

Padreco Barnaby couldn't believe it. Even after they put him in the monstrous kettle he couldn't believe it. They were setting the long tables for the feast — and surely it was all a mistake!

“Landmaster! You people — you creatures — can't be serious!”

“Why no, little priest. This is a comical affair. Why should we be serious? Do you not think it comical that the missioner should be boiled in a pot?”

“No! No! It's ghastly!”

This had to be a dream — an underwater nightmare.

“Why did you make ten million comical cartoons of the thing if you didn't find it comic?” Landmaster asked with black pleasure.

“I didn't make them! Yes, I did — two of them — when I was a seminarian, and for our own little publication. Landmaster! The water is hellish hot!”

“Are we magicians that we can boil a man in cold water?”

“Not — not shoes and all?” the Padreco gasped. That seemed to be the ultimate outrage.

“Shoes and all, little priest. We like the flavor. What was your own favorite caption for the race-memory cartoons, Padreco?”

“You can't do this to me!!”

“Yes, that was a good one. But it was the subscript, as I remember it, and the caption was ‘Famous Last Words.’ However, my own favorite, while it concerns anthropophagi, does not concern a missioner. It was the cannibal chief who said, ‘My wife makes a fine soup. I'll miss her.’ What was your favorite of the kettle jokes, Shareshuffler?”

Shareshuffler had a great two-tined fork, and he stuck it into Padreco Barnaby to see if he was done yet. The Padreco was far from done, and the clamor he set up made it impossible to hear Shareshuffler's own favorite of the folk jokes. This is a loss, for it was one of the best of them all.

How loud the little priest was against the Analoi carrying out their ancient custom!

“A lobster doesn't make such a noise when he's boiled,” chided Landmaster. “An oyster doesn't, and a Xtlecnutlico doesn't. Why should a man make such a noise? It would be irritating to us — if we ever let anything irritate us.”

But they didn't — nothing at all. They were too developed a race to allow themselves to be irritated.

When the Padreco was finally done, they had him out of the kettle and polished him off. They dealt in the prescribed manner with the ancient menace, and they had a superb feast out of it too.

The Analoi weren't quite what they seemed. They had hid from themselves, and dealt in shadows instead of things. They had even changed the name of their nature… but they hadn't changed their nature.

But on occasion they could still revert. They could stage an old-time, red-blooded, slumgullion-slurping, bone-gnawing dangeroo of a feast. Men and monsters, they did have one now!

Citizens, that Padreco had good stuff in him!

Three Men in the Morning

The actuaries tell us that there are more old women than old men, more widows than widowers — and these living to a greater age. But they do not tell us all; for it is not so with every group.

In one neighborhood there are more old negro men than old negro women, more old widowers — and of a much greater age. After a negro man has reached a certain age he feels no compulsion to die at all. Many of them go on forever and let the generations drip off them like rain.

There is an entire block of these old gaffs, eleven of them in one shanty row, each in his own two-room narrow house; and the total of their ages is one thousand years. The eleven old men are named Mr. Elgin, Mr. LaRue, Mr. Bishop, Mr. Jackson, Mr. Copeland, Mr. Randy, Mr. Gill, Mr. Franklin, Mr. Tote, Mr. Cobb, and Mr. Martin.

At sunup each man leaves his house for a short walk and to buy groceries and tobacco. At sundown they sit on their eleven tilted chairs on their eleven front stoops, and watch the world. They aren't seen at other times. They are long and lean; they are lined of face like eleven brothers. I haven't been to the block for several years, but they are still there unchanged — unless Mr. Bishop has by now found the evidence he has been waiting for, and has made a certain move.

This is about Mr. Bishop.

The only way in which Mr. Bishop differed from the other ten old men was in that he took longer walks in the morning. He would go to a corner by the Jean Lafitte Hotel and stand and wait. He would set a very long, pencil-thin stogie between his lips. When he saw Mr. Luce come out of the hotel he would light the stogie.

“Good morning, Mr. Luce,” he would say.

“Good morning, Mr. Bishop,” Mr. Luce would answer, and pass on. Mr. Luce was a high-buttoned and gloved white man who resembled a rooster.

Mr. Bishop would snuff out the stogie and walk to a certain block on Center Avenue and wait. He would wait till Mr. Rutledge came out of one of the grand houses, and would then re-light the stogie.

“Good morning, Mr. Rutledge,” he would say.

“Good morning, Mr. Bishop,” Mr. Rutledge would answer, and pass on. Mr. Rutledge was a high-buttoned and gloved white man who resembled a fox.

Mr. Bishop would snuff out the stogie and walk to a certain block on N Street and wait. He would wait till Mr. Madison came out of a very modest house, and would then re-light the stogie.

“Good morning, Mr. Madison,” he would say.

“Good morning, Mr. Bishop,” Mr. Madison would answer, and pass on. Mr. Madison was a high-buttoned and gloved white man who resembled a bear.

Mr. Bishop would then snuff out his stogie once more, for he was a poor man and it must last him the day. He would go and buy groceries, bread and beans and sometimes coffee, and a stogie for the next day. Then he would go home.

I asked him about this morning ritual, after I had come to know him: What these three men were to him, and why he followed the rite. Or was there some secret connected to it that he could not tell me? Mr. Bishop was always well spoken and capable in his talk, and he answered me easily.

“Not at all,” Mr. Bishop told me. “I'm not the sort of man to have secrets. It is just that nobody has asked me for a long time. Everybody either knows my reasons, or has no interest in knowing them. I didn't always shape my morning walks to encounter these three men. It's a new thing of these last sixty-odd years.”

“I was born on the island here,” he told me. “I grew up in a world of hard work and a certain roughness. This town has often appeared in the catalogs as one of the seven sin cities of the world, which is to say that it had an easy way with vice, both black and white. I was a stevedore as a young man, and also as an older man. Physically we were a remarkable bunch; it is forgotten by most how remarkable. We loaded things by hand and back that are now handled by net and hook. We were all of us tall and very strong. One of my contemporaries of these docks, by name of John Arthur Johnson, attained some fame as a professional fighter. I doubt that he was the strongest of us. Several, I believe, could have taken him. I'm not sure that I couldn't have taken him myself.

“As I married and my brood of children grew I had to take on additional jobs to make out. I worked at the Hofbrauhaus — what would now be called a supper club — run by an Austrian. This was more comprehensive than the supper clubs nowadays, being music hall, theater, restaurant, saloon, house of assignation, meeting place of politicians and musicians, and establishment for robbing seamen and other travelers.

“They had golden old music, but already the pulse of it had begun to quicken. I believe that the new beat was heard here at least as early as in New Orleans, and in a different style — now nearly forgotten. I played the violin, but already the horn and percussion men had begun to take over.

“Most often I worked in the kitchen, shucking oysters and steaming shrimp. It was a good night job, and it paid both in money and in leavings of food.

“The Haus was gas-lit, even after some of the other places were not. It had a lot of gilt and mahogany varnish and mirrors. It was like an old newspaper picture in brown-tone. You will get the idea.

“Of the very young toffs who came to the Haus were Mr. Luce, Mr. Rutledge, and Mr. Madison, all of about twenty years old; men were men at twenty then. All had the look of men who will handle money, and all three were everlastingly dressed in that high-buttoned and gloved style that then maintained.

“Luce was the rooster, Rutledge was the fox, Madison was the bear. I fit all white men to one of the three types. You yourself — but let it go.

“The types are eternal. The first rooster on this island was a certain M. Houdon who was with the Lafitte brothers when they set up Campeachy here on the island and made a going thing of it. He was a small, cruel, loud man, and he had a negro slave woman whom he called his mare. The streets of Campeachy were mud holes, and the woman had to carry Houdon on her back through the worst of them, for he was a fastidious man and insisted on being dry-shod. The fox and the bear were the Lafitte brothers; if you have history you will know which was which.

“I'm old, but not so old as that. Still, we have the memory of those first ones. Many of the slaves hid in the dunes and stayed when the band burned Campeachy and left, and we remember what men they were.

“These younger three, rooster-Luce, fox-Rutledge, bear-Madison, were also pirates, but of a more dandified sort. They did not board or put to sea. They were the sort who will get a hold on a group, or a town, and suck a little blood and do well. But they were such men as you can look at and say ‘They will have a future.’

“About this time there came to work at the Haus a young girl named Rosa Hart. She had a little of the Spanish look, and affected more of it. She was known by and used the name of Dolores. All such have always been called Dolores, whatever their names. She had a certain form to her, and an evenness of features. She had a voice, and she had the ability of adapting herself to any style she chose, so she was accorded beautiful. She was really a little dark for Spanish, and as a matter of fact she was partly of my own kindred, but this was less noticed in the Galveston of that day.

“Well, it is dark. I must go in.”

He went in and closed the door. That was his way. He did not ask me in.

It was three years before I was there again, and I came and sat on his front stoop in the evening. He did not greet me, but instead continued his story as if there had been no interval.

“Dolores,” he said, “was considered beautiful. One of the posh boys who came to the Haus called this the ‘triumph of art over artlessness’; for, of course, she was no such thing. There is also an old legend about girls of her sort, that they have all of them hearts of gold. Those who hold to the legend know little of metallurgy and less of hearts. Rosa (Dolores) had a rough-shaped stone for a heart, but it was speckled lightly with mica, sometimes called fool's gold. Few of them, or those of any sort, have even that much. She was better than most. I'd carve that phrase on her headstone — if she had one.

“Rosa-Dolores lived partly in two worlds. In the one she was a friend of my wife and of most of the neighborhood, and was an altogether pleasant person. In the other, at the Haus, she had friends of a higher station and riper character, and here she was a sheer opportunist and something of a vicious little girl. Being the only one at the Haus who knew of her two lives, I had appointed myself her silent protector.

“And it was as her self-considered protector that I was forced to question her, after my wife had given me certain disquieting information. This was after Rosa-Dolores had been in the neighborhood for about a year.

“My wife said that Rosa had left with her certain sums and certain papers which were to be dispatched to Rosa's mother in the case that Rosa should die suddenly. A girl of Rosa's vitality will not anticipate a sudden death except by violence.

“ ‘What are you into, and how deep?’ I asked Rosa Dolores.

“ ‘To the ears, to the eyebrows, to the top of my head,’ she said, and laughed. She was a rogue.

“ ‘But what are you doing?’ I wanted to know.

“ ‘I am playing the badger game with the three little animals,’ she told me. ‘Why do men assume that a pleasure girl will not understand when they talk of their affairs? It's real cute the way they do it, and are going to do it. I have enough on them to send them up for life, together or singly. Loose talk is golden, and everybody knows the kind of tongue I have.’

“ ‘They are pretty dangerous boys to badger,’ I said.

“ ‘Oh yes, but fun. And I've added a refinement. I tell each of them that I'm going to have a child and that I must have money to provide for him.’

“ ‘Are you going to have a child, Rosa?’ I asked her.

“ ‘Yes, in about two years if my plans work out, and I do want to provide for him. I even have a father picked out, and if not him then another. I will get out of this business if my plans work and I can collect anything near my guess.’

“ ‘I don't think you have considered every possibility,’ I said.

“ ‘Yes, I've considered them all,’ Rosa told me. ‘One: all three of them might kill me to shut me up. Two: only two of them will kill me and the third one will pay me off. Three: only one of them will kill me and the other two will pay me off. Four: none of them will kill me at all, and all three will pay me off. These little dice are real hot, and four is the point I got to make. What other possibilities are there? What have I overlooked?’

“ ‘Nothing, Rosa, when you put it like that,’ I said. ‘The only other possibility is that you curb that loose tongue of yours and don't ever make any threats at all to those three.’

“ ‘Too late,’ she said. ‘I've already done it. I've got them stewing now.’

“ ‘Then get on the train and get out of town, and don't ever come back or write.’

“ ‘Not me. I'm going to play my little game to the end.’

“ ‘It's three to one against you. Really it's much more than that,’ I told her. ‘And what if you lose?’

“ ‘Mr. Bishop,’ she said, ‘almost every morning there's at least one girl turns up dead. What will one more matter?’

“ ‘It might matter to someone,’ I told her.

“ ‘No. No, I don't think so,’ she said.

“Well, I was worried about her and that wasn't like me. An honest man will never worry, or he would not be honest. He will act instead. Indecision is always the mark of dishonesty. But we become involved with others and would do more for them than they will do for themselves, and this caused worry.

“I was not less worried when, several days later, my wife told me that Rosa had given her quite a sum of money to keep for her. Rosa had tapped one of them, and I had to know about it. I went to Rosa.

‘From which, and with what strings?’ I asked her.

“ ‘Why, from the first one, and the strings work both ways,’ she told me. ‘I believe that he understands that this was only the first installment, and that it will go on as long as we both shall live.’

“ ‘That may not be too long,’ I said. ‘A man very quickly may grow tired of paying money.’

“ ‘Yes, but he didn't kill me. Every time you pass up the opportunity of killing someone it becomes harder. He couldn't bring himself to kill me when I faced up to him like that. Could you?’

“ ‘I think so, Rosa.’

“ ‘Now there are only two of them left. The odds are getting better.’

“ ‘At least tell me which one you've taken,’ I asked her. ‘If something happens to you I want to know who did it.’

“ ‘No. No, I won't tell you,’ she said.

“It was the next day that my wife told me that Rosa had left the second sum with her. Rosa wasn't wasting time. I found Rosa.

“ ‘You've done it twice,’ I told her. ‘Count yourself lucky. Take the money and cut and run.’

“ ‘With only one fee from two of them and nothing at all from the third? It gets easier, Mr. Bishop. He intended to kill me, but he just couldn't bring himself to it. And he hadn't entirely intended to do it, for he had the money ready too. Did you ever watch a man who intended to kill you go to pieces and start shaking?’

“ ‘I never did, Rosa,’ I said. ‘But now you will have to tell me who is left and when it will be.’

“ ‘Why, the third one is left, and the show-down will be tonight. This will be the most chancy one of all. He cleans and polishes that little pistol where I can see him. I left him to the last for the juiciest. Oh, it will be close! I wonder if he also will lose his nerve about killing me. I know how a bullfighter feels. I know how a snake-hunter feels. Don't you love to play it close?’

“ ‘I do in a way,’ I told her. ‘But it's foolish unless there is no other way.’

“ ‘There isn't,’ she said. ‘I'm in too deep. If it works I'll be on Astors' Alley. If it doesn't, I won't care.’

“ ‘You'll never be safe in your life, even if you collect. Cut and run, now, this afternoon!’

“ ‘Leave the table before the cake? Oh no. But it sure will be a close one tonight!’

“ ‘Tell me which one it is,’ I insisted. ‘If you're killed I will have to interest myself in it.’

“ ‘I won't tell you. This is my play.’

“ ‘Then give me a hint.’

“ ‘Well, he's the one with the little mole low on his throat. He's the one with the small birthmark on the back of his left hand.’

“ ‘But they're a bunch of high-buttoned, glove-handed dudes,’ I told her.

“ ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I get to see more of them than you do, Mr. Bishop. Well then, he's the one whose left eyelid has a little flutter when he's very nervous, but he isn't nervous very often. Tonight he will be, but not very often.’

“So it was her play and she would play it.

“But the next morning Rosa was not to be found. I made inquiries but could arouse no interest. This was on a day in early September of the first year of the century, and the people were curiously listless, as though waiting for something or listening for something.

“I had not been able to find out where the show-down meeting was to be. Rosa had a way of disappearing when she wished to disappear, having friends in both of the worlds. As the day grew older I made inquiries through regular and irregular channels.

“In the evening I found my way to a man who did odd jobs, and he had been offered one such odd job.

“ ‘Yes,’ this man told me. ‘There is such a man who has a body that he is anxious to dispose of. It worries him and he becomes nervous.’

“ ‘Does his left eyelid have a little flutter when he becomes nervous?’ I asked him.

“ ‘It does, but how did you know?’

“ ‘And will you do it for him tonight?’ I inquired.

“ ‘No. I'll let it go till tomorrow or tomorrow night. He'll be still more nervous then, and will pay more. In this weather his secret won't keep beyond tomorrow night.’

“ ‘Tell me who he is,’ I asked him

“ ‘I will, after it is done, and after you also pay me.’

“ ‘He may find someone else.’

“ ‘No. I am the only odd job man who does this sort of job,’ said the man.

“I slept with some unease that night and woke in anger in the morning. But the man was nervous, and he had a body to dispose of. I would find out who he was. Rooster, fox, or bear I would have him.

“It was the eighth of the month, and the day has become memorable. There came to the people what they had been waiting for and listening for, and somehow feeling. It killed more than six thousand of them, but the story has been told to you by others and in more exciting and less accurate fashion than I could give it. It was the hurricane that frightened, but it was the tidal wave that killed. Each of us saved hundreds of lives, to hear us tell it, and in point of fact I did save three.

“It was a busy day and a terrifying night. But there was little to loot in our sector, and my own wife and brood had been spared by the disasters. Our own house was smashed, but it wasn't as though a big thing had been smashed. I could put it up again in a couple of days, or one very like it, from the same timbers, or from others of which there were now mountains of them around.

“At next daybreak I realized that a certain man, if he still lived, need not be nervous any longer. How to get rid of an embarrassing body? Why, with six thousand other bodies. There was no question of burying them. They were loaded into barges and hauled out into the Gulf. I helped with the task, and I brooded.

I was still brooding when the aftersweep of the thing, the little brother of the elemental storm, trailing it by a few hours, cast several thousand of those bodies onto the beach again.

“But I had an idea. A three-day-old body among one-day-old bodies might proclaim itself. It did. Though the odds were against it, I found Dolores.

“And I established that she had been murdered.”

“When the thing had settled down I found that the three young men in question were all still alive, but the odd job man who could have told me which was my man was dead. I remembered that Rosa had at least a few little flecks of fool's gold in her heart, and that few others have even that much. I decided that I would follow the three small clues, discover which was the third man — the man who had killed her, and kill him.

“Well, it is dark. I must go in.”

“No, wait,” I said. “That's only a cloud bank. It's early.”

“The cloud bank won't lift. When it's dark it's dark whatever the reason.” He went in and closed the door. He did not ask me in.

But, as I was anxious to hear the finish of the story, I managed to be back in that town within fourteen months, and I came and sat on his front stoop in the evening.

“But you didn't kill him,” I said. “You still confront him every morning, whichever one he is.”

“Don't say that I didn't kill him. That puts it in a finished tense. Say that I haven't killed him, for it isn't finished yet.”

“But why not? Did you change your mind?”

“No. A man can no more change his mind than he can change his body, not if he really has a mind. I waited to be sure, and somehow more than sixty years have gone by. For one thing they fossilized.”

“Fossilized? How?”

“I cursed a certain reporter for it, in the year, I believe, of 1909. It was in a piece that he did on those three, still young but already quite successful, men. He gave them their trademark in the piece: their always full-dressed appearance, the high-buttoned collars and the eternal gloves. At that time there were still a few others who dressed so. The three men were proud of the note and accepted their trademark. They continued in their style, and will continue it all their lives.

“And how to spot a mole and a birthmark on a man who is so covered? How to spot a nervous flutter in a man who never slips? So I went about my life and watched and waited.

“You can learn a lot by watching shrewd men. I became shrewd myself. I provided for myself and gave myself an education a little above what I was born to. I provided for myself for life and then let it go. I never believed in accumulating needlessly. It's true that I didn't intend to live so long, and now I run a little short. But I make out.”

“And not one of them has ever slipped?”

“Not yet, but I can afford to wait. I'm only ten or twelve years older than they are, and I can outlast them.”

“But suppose they die before giving you the tip.”

“If one of them dies, then I know he is not the one. If the second dies, then I know he is not the one either. And in that case I will kill the third one. I don't believe that the guilty man would have the nerve to run out on me, to die and give me the slip. A man who is born to be murdered won't die otherwise.”

“Do all three know the set-up?”

“Oh yes. Everybody in this town, over the age of eighty, knows the set-up. But none of the three will give it away. It amuses two of them, I believe, and scares the third.”

“But it doesn't scare him enough to flutter his eyelid?”

“Not yet. But there will come the day. I believe he grows more and more nervous as he gets older. And it's a puzzle I can always work on. Which is it, the rooster? The fox? The bear?”

“It interests you, this waiting?”

“It interests me. I'd probably have died back in my eighties if I hadn't had this to wait for. The others wait for other things, and I wait for this.”

There is an entire block of these old gaffs, eleven of them in one shanty row, each in his own two-room narrow house. And the total of their ages is one thousand years.

Author's Commentary

Parthen

Never had the springtime been so wonderful. Never had business been so good. Never was the World Outlook so bright. And never had the girls been so pretty.

It is true that it was the chilliest spring in decades — sharp, bitter, and eternally foggy — and that the sinuses of Roy Ronsard were in open revolt. It is admitted that bankruptcies were setting records, those of individuals and firms as well as those of nations. It is a fact that the aliens had landed (though their group was not identified) and had published their Declaration that one half of mankind was hereby obsoleted and the other half would be retained as servants. The omens and portents were black, but the spirits of men were the brightest and happiest ever.

To repeat, never had the girls been so pretty! There was no one who could take exception to that.

Roy Ronsard himself faced bankruptcy and the loss of everything that he had built up. But he faced it in a most happy frame of mind. A Higher Set of Values will do wonders toward erasing such mundane everyday irritations.

There is much to be said in favor of cold, vicious springtimes. They represent weather at its most vital. There is something to be said for exploding sinuses. They indicate, at least, that a man has something in his head. And, if a man is going to be a bankrupt, then let him be a happy bankrupt.

When the girls are as pretty as all that, the rest does not matter.

Let us make you understand just how pretty Eva was! She was a golden girl with hair like honey. Her eyes were blue — or they were green — or they were violet or gold and they held a twinkle that melted a man. The legs of the creature were like Greek poetry and the motion of her hips was something that went out of the world with the old sail ships. Her breastwork had a Gothic upsweep — her neck was passion incarnate and her shoulders were of a glory past describing. In her whole person she was a study of celestial curvatures.

Should you never have heard her voice, the meaning of music has been denied you. Have you not enjoyed her laughter? Then your life remains unrealized.

Is it possible that exaggeration has crept into this account? No. That is not possible. All this fits in with the cold appraisal of men like Sam Pinta, Cyril Colbert, Willy Whitecastle, George Goshen, Roy Ronsard himself — and that of a hundred men who had gazed on her in amazement and delight since she came to town. All these men are of sound judgment in this field. And actually she was prettier than they admitted.

Too, Eva Ellery was but one of many. There was Jeannie who brought a sort of pleasant insanity to all who met her. Roberta who was a scarlet dream. Helen — high-voltage sunshine. Margaret — the divine clown. And it was high adventure just to meet Hildegarde. A man could go blind from looking at her.

“I can't understand how there can be so many beautiful young women in town this year,” said Roy. “It makes the whole world worthwhile. Can you let me have fifty dollars, Willy? I'm going to see Eva Ellery. When I first met her I thought that she was a hallucination. She's real enough, though. Do you know her?”

“Yes. A most remarkable young woman. She has a small daughter named Angela who really stops the clock. Roy, I have just twenty dollars left in the world and I'll split it with you. As you know, I'm going under, too. I don't know what I'll do after they take my business away from me. It's great to be alive, Roy.”

“Wonderful. I hate not having money to spend on Eva, but she's never demanding in that. In fact she's lent me money to smooth out things pertinent to the termination of my business. She's one of the most astute businesswomen I ever knew and has been able to persuade my creditors to go a little easy on me. I won't get out with my shirt. But, as she says, I may get out with my skin.”

There was a beautiful, cold, mean fog, and one remembered that there was a glorious sun (not seen for many days now) somewhere behind it. The world rang with cracked melody and everybody was in love with life.

Everybody except Peggy Ronsard and wives like her who did not understand the higher things. Peggy had now become like a fog with no sun anywhere behind it. Roy realized, as he came home to her for a moment, that she was very drab.

“Well?” Peggy asked with undertones in her voice. Her voice did not have overtones like that of Eva. Only undertones.

“Well what? My — uh — love?” Roy asked.

“The business — what's the latest on it today? What have you come up with?”

“Oh, the business. I didn't bother to go by today. I guess it's lost.”

“You are going to lose it without a fight? You used not to be like that. Two weeks ago your auditing firm said that you had all sorts of unrealized assets and that you'd come out of this easily.”

“And two weeks later my auditing firm is also taking bankruptcy. Everybody's doing it now.”

“There wasn't anything wrong with that auditing firm till that Roberta woman joined it. And there wasn't anything wrong with your company till you started to listen to that Eva creature.”

“Is she not beautiful, Peggy?”

Peggy made a noise Roy understood as assent, but he had not been understanding his wife well lately.

“And there's another thing,” said Peggy dangerously. “You used to have a lot of the old goat in you and that's gone. A wife misses things like that. And your wolfish friends have all changed. Sam Pinta used to climb all over me like I was a trellis — and I couldn't sit down without Willy Whitecastle being on my lap. And Judy Pinta says that Sam has changed so much at home that life just isn't worth living anymore. You all used to be such loving men. What's happened to you?”

“Ah — I believe that our minds are now on a higher plane.”

“You didn't go for that higher plane jazz till that Eva woman came along. And that double-damned Roberta! But she does have two lovely little girls, I'll admit. And that Margaret, she's the one that's got Cyril Colbert and George Goshen where they're pushovers for anything now. She does have a beautiful daughter, though.”

“Have you noticed how many really beautiful women there are in town lately, Peggy?”

“Roy, I hope those aliens get every damned cucumber out of that patch! The monsters are bound to grab all the pretty women first. I hope they're a bunch of sadist alligators and do everything that the law disallows to those doll babies.”

“Peggy, I believe that the aliens (and we are told that they are already among us) will be a little more sophisticated than popular ideas anticipate.”

“I hope they're a bunch of Jack the Rippers. I believe I could go for Jack today. He'd certainly be a healthy contrast to what presently obtains.”

Peggy had put her tongue on the crux. For the beautiful young women, who seemed to be abundant in town that springtime, had an odd effect on the men who came under their influence. The goats among the men had become lambs and the wolves had turned into puppies.

Jeannie was of such a striking appearance as to make a man almost cry out. But the turmoil that she raised in her gentlemen friends was of a cold sort, for all that the white flames seemed to leap up. She was Artemis herself and the men worshipped her on the higher plane. She was wonderful to look at and to talk to. But who would be so boorish as to touch?

The effect of Eva was similar — and of Roberta and of Helen (who had three little daughters as like her as three golden apples) and of Margaret and of Hildegarde. How could a man not ascend to the higher plane when such wonderful and awesome creatures as these abounded?

But the damage was done when the men carried this higher plane business home to their comparatively colorless wives. The men were no longer the ever-loving husbands that they should have been. The most intimate relations ceased to take place. If continued long this could have an effect on the statistics.

But daily affairs sometimes crept into the conversations of even those men who had ascended to the higher plane.

“I was wondering,” Roy asked George Goshen, “when our businesses are all gone, who do they go to?”

“Many of us have wondered that,” George told him. “They all seem to devolve upon anonymous recipients or upon corporations without apparent personnel. But somebody is gathering in the companies. One theory is that the aliens are doing it.”

“The aliens are among us, the authorities say, but nobody has seen them. They publish their program and their progress through intermediaries who honestly do not know the original effecters. The aliens still say that they will make obsolete one half of mankind and make servants of the other half.”

“Jeannie says — did you ever see her pretty little daughters? — that we see the aliens every day and do not recognize them for what they are. She says that likely the invasion of the aliens will have obtained its objective before we realize what that is. What's the news from the rest of the country and the world?”

“The same. All business is going to pot and everybody is happy. On paper, things were never more healthy. There's a lot of new backing from somewhere and all the businesses thrive as soon as they have shuffled off their old owners. The new owners — and nobody can find out who or what they are — must be happy with the way things are going. Still, I do not believe that anybody could be happier or more contented than I am. Can you let me have fifty cents, George? I just remembered that I haven't eaten today. Peggy has gone to work for what used to be my company, but she's a little slow to give me proper spending money. Come to think of it, Peggy has been acting peculiar lately.”

“I have only forty cents left in the world, Roy. Take the quarter. My wife has gone to work also, but I guess there will never be any work for us. Did you think we'd ever live to see the NO MALES WANTED signs on every hiring establishment in the country? Oh, well — if you're happy nothing else matters.”

“George, there's a humorous note that creeps into much of the world news lately. It seems that ours is not the only city with an unusual number of pretty young ladies this season. They've been reported in Teheran and Lvov, in Madras and Lima and Boston. Everywhere.”

“No! Pretty girls in Boston? You're kidding. This has certainly been an upside-down year when things like that can happen. But did you ever see a more beautiful summertime, Roy?”

“On my life I never did.”

The summer had been murky and the sun had not been seen for many months. But it was a beautiful murk. And when one is attuned to inner beauty the outer aspect of things does not matter. The main thing was that everyone was happy.

Oh, there were small misunderstandings. There was a wife — this was reported as happening in Cincinnati, but it may have happened in other places also — who one evening reached out and touched her husband's hand in a form of outmoded affection. Naturally the man withdrew his hand rudely, for it was clear that the wife had not yet ascended to his higher plane. In the morning he went away and did not return.

Many men were drifting away from their homes in those days. Most men, actually. However that old cohabitational arrangement had grown into being, it no longer had anything to recommend it. When one has consorted with the light itself, what can he find in a tallow candle?

Most of the men became destitute wanderers and loafers. They were happy with their inner illumination. Every morning the dead ones would be shoveled up by the women on the disposal trucks and carted away. And every one of those men died happy. That's what made it so nice. To anyone who had entered higher understanding death was only an interlude.

It was a beautiful autumn day. Roy Ronsard and Sam Pinta had just completed their fruitless rounds of what used to be called garbage cans but now had more elegant names. They were still hungry, but happily so for it was truly a beautiful autumn.

The snow had come early, it is true, and great numbers of men had perished from it. But if one had a happy life, it was not a requisite for it to be a long life. Men lived little in the world now, dwelling mostly in thought. But sometimes they still talked to each other.

“It says here — ” Roy Ronsard began to read a piece of old newspaper that had been used for wrapping bones — “that Professor Eimer, just before he died of malnutrition, gave as his opinion that the aliens among us cannot stand sunlight. He believed it was for this reason that they altered our atmosphere and made ours a gloomy world. Do you believe that, Sam?”

“Hardly. How could anybody call ours a gloomy world? I believe that we are well rid of that damned sun.”

“And it says that he believed that one of the weapons of the aliens was their intruding into men a general feeling of euphor —  the rest of the paper is torn off.”

“Roy, I saw Margaret today. From a distance, of course. Naturally I could not approach such an incandescent creature in my present condition of poverty. But, Roy, do you realize how much we owe to those pretty girls? I really believe that we would have known nothing of the higher plane or the inner light if it had not been for them. How could they have been so pretty?”

“Sam, there is one thing about them that always puzzled me.”

“Everything about them puzzled me. What do you mean?”

“All of them have daughters, Sam. And none of them have husbands. Why did none of them have husbands? Or sons?”

“Never thought of it. It's been a glorious year, Roy. My only regret is that I will not live to see the winter that will surely be the climax to this radiant autumn. We have had so much — we cannot expect to have everything. Do you not just love deep snow over you?”

“It's like the blanket of heaven, Sam. When the last of us is gone — and it won't be too long now — do you think the girls will remember how much light they brought into our lives?”

The Pani Planet

I

“Is it broke?” asked Ieska the Pani story-teller too eagerly.

“Is what broke?” Colonel Zornig turned angrily. “How did you get in here? We can't allow you here at such a time. Our guards are posted.”

“Is fun of ours to evade your guards,” said Ieska. “Is a hobble of ours. The man mechanism, is it broke?”

“Our companion and commander is dead,” said Colonel Zornig. “Do you understand the word?”

“Sure. It is broke like I said. Haven't you parts to fix it?”

“There are no parts that would avail. One dies completely.”

“Bad design. Give it to me. Maybe I can fix it.”

“No. Your presence here at this time becomes grotesque, Ieska. I've even ordered the other men away. I wish to be alone with my friend encased there. I ask you once more to leave, or I'll have you put out in a pretty rough manner.”

“What you do with it now if you don't try to fix it?”

“We will bury our commander General Raddle with simple rites and a great sense of loss.”

“Bust the verb, Buster! What is bury?”

“Must I explain to a bug? We have placed our dead companion in this rough box, and will set it in the ground. And we will cover him up with the plain dirt of this planet and so leave him forever.”

“And will that fix it? How?”

“Of course it will not fix it — him — General Raddle. He is dead. Clear out now, Ieska. I'm feeling pretty pent up, what with the death of my commander. I've a mean streak in me, and it's due to come out.”

“Give the thing to me if you're just going to hole it in the ground. If I can't fix it maybe I can use some of the parts for something else. I always did want to see how one of you things was put together.”

“I'll try once more to explain it to you, Ieska. This is our companion who has died. We cannot give him to you. We must bury him in the ground, and we feel great sorrow at his death. Do you understand sorrow?”

“I understand selfish, man Colonel. You are like the dog in the mangle in your own proverb. The thing is broke and you cannot fix it. You will hole it in the ground to no purpose, but you will not give it to me. I could have fun fooling around with one of your broke things. I think I know something I could make out of it. We will see what your selfish does for you!”

And Ieska the Pani story-teller and interpreter left in a mood that was perhaps anger.

There were very contradictory accounts of the Pani people and of Pani planet. The place would seem an unusual find, but it had been visited before by both humans and others, and had not been permanently claimed. The promise of it had never been fulfilled.

And whatever explanation you might make of the Pani people might not be valid in the next moment. They were like quicksilver, the way they were stupid, and then they were astute. They had done nothing with their world. They were the most primitive people imaginable.

Were the Pani really intelligent creatures? It was still debated, but opinion had about decided that they were. After all, there was Ieska. In his own way he was surely intelligent, and he owned himself the most stupid of the Pani. Doctor Mobley had once asked how he happened to become the Pani story-teller and interpreter.

“Was nothing else for me to be,” said Ieska. “I am too pot-bellied to be a tree-climber, too short-winded to be a hunter, too weak to be a porter, too untalented to be a mime, too stupid to be a farmer. What other trades are there? Believe me, men things, I feel shame of my low position. But what can I do?”

“Did you not find our language difficult?” Doctor Mobley had asked him. “We find yours impossible.”

“No. Yours is little child-people talk. Nothing but sounds to it. Anybody can make sounds. You should know the way some things talk: odor talk, skin temperature code talk, magnetic fluctuation talk, light beam stuff talk, mental image stuff talk. Yours is easiest of all. Nothing but noise. Anybody can make noise.”

Yes, Ieska was intelligent in his way, and he was a Pani. But the Pani had not progressed beyond the stone age — or the volcanic glass age — in their artifacts. Damn the Pani creatures. A good man was dead, and who thinks about bugs or beasts at such a time? General Raddle was dead, and no expedition had ever had a finer leader.

He had been, for one thing, a master strategist. The test of a great strategist is that his last move shall be the correct one. Sometimes it seemed that every move that General Raddle made was the wrong one. But his last move in a campaign was always the right one, and it made all the previous moves not only right but inevitable. He had a devious mind that went directly to the point — but a point never understood till later. How he had pulled them out, time and again, when everything seemed lost!

Who would lead them now? Colonel Zornig would try. The colonel was a good man but now he had a sinking feeling that, in dealing with the baffling Pani people, every move he made might be the right one until he came to that final move. But what if that last move were wrong and made every previous move wrong? His doubts fed his fury when Ieska broke in on his brooding again — for the guards could never keep that creature out.

“What if we steal it out of the hole in the ground, man Colonel?” Ieska asked suddenly. “What if we are able to fix it after all? I know it can be done, for your own man mechanisms have done it. You have the legend of Zombies who were broke and fixed again. Where is smoke is fires. Your say-word, not mine.”

“Zombies, dammit! Zombies are only a superstition, Ieska,” said Colonel Zornig with more patience than he felt. “Intelligent people do not believe in such. Do you understand superstition, Ieska?”

“More than that, I understand superstition about superstitions. The one who says he is not superstitious, Colonel, he is your patsy. Wait and be educated, man Colonel.”

They buried General Raddle. They gathered around the new grave, Colonel Zornig, Major-Doctor Mobley, Majors Wister, Mountain, Crowell, Crocker, Dutton: all the good friends. They spoke good words about the dead general, and they meant them. They laid him there in his grave, and they put an all-hours guard around it.

Colonel Zornig was in command, and he handled things rapidly and well.

This was not a routine assignment, whatever it seemed. The men of the previous expedition had all died. There were traces of other expeditions by other species. But there had been no permanent settlement and no maintained claim. Something had the habit of happening to visitors to Pani planet.

Colonel Zornig coddled the Pani less than General Raddle had done. He brought them quickly to heel. Pani was a rich planet. The men could not allow their exploration to be hampered by the resentful people-animals. The Pani were treacherous, they were schemers. They had no weapons but glass knives, but these were scalpel sharp. They could kill a man with them if they got close enough, and they had the habit of drifting through the guards as though they were fog and coming uncomfortably close.

The military problem was simple: to set up a pale and maintain it; to infiltrate and not be infiltrated; to prevent trouble at its beginning.

But the Pani seemed not to understand. For that reason it was suspected that they understood too well. They were into everything. And so simple-minded and pathetic did they seem when they were reprimanded.

Colonel Zornig instituted flogging to show the Pani that he was serious about them keeping their places. He didn't know if it did any good. The Pani grinned when they were whipped, and they grinned about it.

“Have you people no sense of pain?” he questioned.

“Man colonel, we sure don't like the stuff,” Ieska said.

“But you grin when you're whipped.”

“The happy grin is a convention of your own sort, I believe. With us the grin doesn't mean the same thing.”

“What does it mean then?” Zornig demanded.

“It mean, ‘there will come a day, men things, there will come a day.’ ”

So the colonel knew he could still expect trouble from the Pani.

He didn't wait. He went to meet the trouble. He found out the Pani secret societies and broke them up. He seized the leaders. He transported two hundred of them to an island that they had never inhabited. They hadn't the technique to cross back from it. He seized the knives of all but certain farmers who must have them to cut their cane. He marked these with numbers; they must be turned in every evening or the registered owner's life was forfeit; and it was death for any Pani to have an unmarked knife. He drew a circuit of three hundred yards around the garrison, and it was death for any Pani to be found within that circuit without being sent for and accompanied by a guard. He leveled one out of every four of the Pani's dwellings and destroyed one quarter of their gathered food.

“It is not punishment for what you have done,” he told them through Ieska. “It is punishment for what you had better not do. At your first false move we will destroy one quarter of you creatures as we have destroyed one quarter of your dwellings and food. At the second false move we will destroy all of you.”

The Pani lived very quietly then, but they seemed to smolder. They were funny folks. You only thought you knew them.

“What are these pictures of?” Zornig asked the expedition photographer one day.

“Ah — they are pictures of the Pani,” the man said.

“But they don't look like that,” he retorted.

“No, they don't really. But what do they look like, Colonel? They looked like that at the moment this picture was taken.”

What did they really look like? What were they really like?

“I believe my every move has been correct so far,” Zornig told Doctor Mobley. “Do I not have them cold?” he asked.

“They won't accept it,” Doctor Mobley said. “I believe they will now make a move so curious that you will hardly be able to pin it on them or be sure they have done it when it is done.”

“We're surely a match for a bunch of stone-age bugs,” said Zornig. “What can they do?”

They made a move so curious that Colonel Zornig could not pin it on them and was not sure that they had done it when it was done.

They stole the body of General Raddle.

Or perhaps they didn't. The grave was guarded all the time and no Pani approached it. But the grave seemed disturbed and Colonel Zornig had a moment of unaccountable panic. He ordered it opened. The box was there in the loosened dirt. But the General's body was not in the box.

II

One of the sergeants came to Colonel Zornig several days later. This man had learned a little Pani and was often sent to bring one or another of them in. He understood them best of all the men. The man told Colonel Zornig of the rumor that the Pani did have the body of General Raddle, and that they were trying to fix it, to bring it back to life. “Say nothing about this,” Zornig told the man.

“I play a waiting game now,” Zornig told himself. “It may keep them occupied. General Raddle had a sly humor, and I doubt if he'll really mind the desecration of himself. While they try to animate the body they'll have no time for conspiracies. Meanwhile I'll devise a suitable punishment. The little beasts will play into my hand on this one.”

And again several days later, the man who had learned a little Pani reported that he had heard that the Pani had had some success at the reanimation — that the body could now sit up and talk a little and would soon be able to take nourishment. Zornig chortled.

“The bugs are having you, son,” he chuckled. “What sort of superstitious lout are you to be gulled by bugs?”

“No. I believe there is something to it,” insisted the soldier.

And after another couple of days the man reported that Pani friends had told him that the body of General Raddle could now walk and was eating well, and would soon be fixed completely.

So the man was clapped into the guardhouse for being made a fool of by things that were less than human.

One morning Major Crocker came to Colonel Zornig. The man was death-white and his jaws worked soundlessly. It came to Zornig that the man was like one in a nightmare who tries to cry out and cannot.

Doctor Mobley staggered in. He was out of his wits. He never gained them completely. He was badly frightened.

Major Wister and Crowell stumbled up in a like condition of terror, and Colonel Zornig could get nothing out of the fellows at all.

“I got to find what ails the fools,” Zornig growled. “Terror is catching. I can't have my command spooked by some nonsense.”

Terror is catching. Colonel Zornig caught it. What he saw now froze his scalp and he felt all the blood drain out of him. He worked his jaws soundlessly. He himself was the man in the nightmare who tries to cry out and can make no sound. He was unable to break out of the nightmare.

What he saw was General Raddle.

General Raddle did not look well. He had never looked well; but he looked himself.

“Colonel Zornig,” growled General Raddle dryly, “I would like to see my own death certificate. I believe that it is in error.”

“Colonel Zornig,” said General Raddle after he was seated in his office and after he had examined his own death certificate for a long minute, “arrest Doctor Mobley.”

“Arrest Doctor Mobley? Wh — why?”

“I am not in the habit of explaining to subordinates,” said Raddle. Then he smiled sourly. “But this time I will. Doctor Mobley knew that I was subject to cataleptic trances. None of the rest of you knew it; I would not have been given my command if it were known. I am not in good health, but I do not suffer from the failing that is here given as the cause of my death. Doctor Mobley knew that I was not dead. He ordered me buried alive.”

“But, General, you could not have lived through it.”

“I am here, am I not?”

“But you were in the grave for ten equivalent days. No catalepsy could survive that.”

“I was not in the grave at all. I was not in the coffin when you buried it. The Pani are sly, but not that sly. They couldn't have had me from a guarded grave. There was a settling of the ground at the grave; and there were the rumors: so you opened the grave and found me not in the box.

“But the Pani made the switch earlier — after you had closed the box and sent the others away. Ieska distracted you. They stole me from behind your back and put in an equivalent weight of dirt, and closed it again. They move as noiselessly as smoke.”

“Good God! Were you conscious?”

“I was comatose. I could hear fitfully and I could feel movement. The Pani understood death. They sensed that I was not dead, that I was only sick — broke. They could not understand your not trying to cure — fix — me. They wished to try to fix me, and they believed that they could do it. They have elements of genuine medicine mixed with their hoodoo. And they did fix me — aided by time and my own constitution.”

“Are — are you sure?”

“I am sure that I am here, Colonel Zornig. Stop gaping like a fish!”

In short hours, General Raddle reversed most of the policies of Colonel Zornig. In particular he gave orders that Ieska was not to be molested. He held Doctor Mobley under close confinement under the charge of attempted murder.

“The Pani are a gentle people,” the general told Colonel Zornig, “and they have saved my life. I was too harsh with them before, and you have been a dozen times too harsh. We will make it up to them. Colonel, disband the regular guard entirely.”

“That is against the standing orders for the Expedition.”

“No. There will be a special guard. There is provision for that.”

“Who shall I put on the special guard, General, and how will it differ from the regular guard?”

“You will put no one on it. I will attend to it completely. Certain of the men will be put on guard by myself. Who they are will be known to no one but me. They will not seem to be on guard, but they will be alert. I am playing a hunch and I've had good luck with my hunches.”

“Your hunch may get us all killed, General. Remember that we found all the members of the previous Expedition dead.”

“Yes. Of an unfortunate epidemic.”

“Doctor Mobley says that it was a subtle poison.”

“So subtle he could find no trace of it? Doctor Mobley has a pathological hatred of the Pani. It was because I was too easy on them that he tried to kill me. These people will be completely friendly if we treat them right. There's no guile in them at all.”

“General,” said Colonel Zornig futilely, “there's one opinion — and I lean to it — that the Pani are the most tricky, devious, triple-dealing, intransigent, ambushing, merciless creatures that have ever been encountered. There is the story that they murdered not only the members of our previous Expedition but those sent out by half-a-dozen different sorts of other civilizations also. They are sworn to kill every visitor to their world. Why else has so promising a planet not been developed?”

“I believe that no other party — if there were any besides the previous human one — realized the promise of the place.”

“The exploratory parties always realize the promises of a place. We're not exceptional. The Pani have killed by trickery every one who has come here!”

“Colonel Zornig, who was it who gave you the idea that the Pani are the most tricky, devious, merciless creatures ever encountered?” asked General Raddle.

“Ah — well, I suppose it was Doctor Mobley.”

“The demented doctor again! Let us consider the subject closed.”

III

General Raddle had always been right, and very often he had seemed to be wrong till his final move.

A man must trust the ability of someone. Colonel Zornig had to trust the judgment of the general, since he could no longer trust his own. The whole thing bothered him, but he had to go along with it.

And he had to like Ieska who now had the run of the place more than ever before. One had to like all the Pani. They had apparently forgotten all previous harsh treatment and were now most cooperative.

General Raddle had seemingly been right about Doctor Mobley. That man, brooding in his detention, soon became little more than a vegetable. He said that he was dying by the subtle poison of the Pani! He pointed to rocks and bushes in the area and said that they were Pani ready to spring. He insisted that the Pani people who were able to raise the dead might be capable of anything. And Doctor Mobley did not accept the account of General Raddle.

“Of course he was dead,” the doctor whined. “I certified him dead, didn't I? I wish he had stayed dead. Did I kill him, you ask me, Zornig? Did I bury him alive? Well, maybe I did. One forgets things… I'd like to do it again.”

And the planet showed itself more promising every day, and the Pani became still more cooperative.

Sometimes it seemed that a bell was booming a thousand leagues away, yet Colonel Zornig knew that it was inside his own head. It would not be silenced.

The man who had learned Pani talk best came to Colonel Zornig and told him that the Pani secret societies had been revived.

“I know it,” said the colonel, “and General Raddle knows it. He says that they are harmless. I respect his judgment.”

“And I respect yours, Colonel,” said the man, “if you will ever make one. It had better be pretty soon.”

“The general has always been right before.”

“I know it. But now I believe that there is something wrong about the general.”

This soldier was named Fraker. He seemed a simple-minded fellow, but he had a way of understanding aliens.

The Pani people behaved perfectly, but the same could not be said about the humans. The men had all become very jumpy. They had the new habit of always looking over their shoulder as though they were being followed. Zornig found himself doing it. He became irritable and suffered headaches. It was that bedamned bell bonging in his head — the warning bell.

The thing that bothered him most was that he didn't know who was the guard. It seemed that nobody was on guard. “They will not seem to be on guard, but they will be alert,” General Raddle had said. But dammit, Zornig should be able to tell when a man was on guard — even on a special guard! He knew these men.

But he trusted the general.

Colonel Zornig was accustomed to doing little military position problems in his head. Such a thing must not be permitted to occur at the same time as another thing, for instance. One or another thing might be neglected, but there were collusions of things that must not be all neglected at once. There was now arriving a coincidence of events and dispositions that could be disastrous, like an old astrological coincidence of planets in a certain sign boding evil. And the Pani were astrologers — in their own way.

Zornig noted certain movements and activities of the Pani, certain negligences of the men, certain orders of General Raddle. They dovetailed too perfectly to be accidental. There would come an hour — very soon — when the men might be completely in the hands of the Pani, if the Pani realized it.

Was it all coincidence? Was it a clever plan of General Raddle, who had never been wrong in these things? Was the general giving the Pani a chance to hang themselves on their own liani? Were the special guards really alert, though not seeming to guard, as General Raddle had said? Was there somehow to be the final and correct play by the general?

Or would it be something else?

Zornig went once more to the prisoner, Doctor Mobley.

“Are you in your wits, Mobley?” he asked softly.

“I am not, and I have not been since the general returned. I decided that there was only one sane explanation of the event: that I was crazy.”

“Tell me one thing only. Was General Raddle dead?”

“Colonel, he was dead. I was not yet crazy when I signed his death certificate.”

“Could a simple people like the Pani somehow have the knowledge to bring a dead man back to life?”

“That is what I lost my mind over. But even as a crazy man let me correct you in one error. Primitive peoples are never simple. They are frighteningly complex. It is we who are simple, because civilization is nothing but a simplification.”

“Doctor Mobley, it is easier for me to believe that you were mistaken than to believe that the general was raised from the dead.”

“Maybe I wished the general dead,” said the doctor.

As Zornig walked out with uncertain mind the man Fraker came to him.

“Colonel,” said Fraker, “I have to tell you that I know that something is very wrong, and that I have nothing to go on. But, whatever is going on, it will crest in a very short while. The Pani are about to make their push, and I know the Pani.”

“I know you do. And I know that they will make their move in a certain hour very soon. I am sure that the general knows it also. It may be quite a coup, and I hate to be left out of it. I trust the judgment of the general on tactical movements, and I trust your premonitions on aliens.”

“Then trust my premonition on the general. There is something wrong about him.”

“I have nobody on whom I can depend absolutely — unless it is yourself, Fraker. Have you four or five men you can depend on?”

“Three.”

“Get them! And get Ieska.”

“Ieska is under the special protection of the general. No one is allowed to touch him.”

“We break rules now! Get your men, and get Ieska! Bring him to the old guardhouse, and do it quickly. We haven't too much time before the coincidence of events.”

They had Ieska the Pani story-teller. They stretched him flat on his back, or as flat as his peculiar body would permit, and they did it to the sound of rending bones and tearing cartilage.

“I believe it is time that you tell us a little story, Ieska,” said Colonel Zornig. “Tell us the true story of what has happened to General Raddle and what is intended to happen to us.”

“Is reason why that story cannot be told, man Colonel,” said Ieska in pain.

“What reason?” asked Zornig, and he shoved a pike an inch into Ieska's belly.

“The story involve bamboozle. Stories of bamboozle may only be told when warm summer sun is shining. The story involves protection of Fatherland, and such story can only be told when winter night grips world. The story involve stranger people, you, and story of stranger people may only be told when South wind is blowing. The story involve real slick tactic, and real slick tactic is the son of the West wind. And also the story involve trap inside a trap inside a trap, and three-trap story may only be told on windless day at high noon. Our stories are ritual and can only be told at set times. As you understand, this tale could only be told on cold winter night with hot summer sun shining, and winds blowing every direction and not at all. Therefore the story may not be told. Circumstances will not permit it.”

Colonel Zornig shoved the steel pike two inches more into the belly of Ieska. “I set up a special set of circumstances, Ieska,” he said. “Consider again whether the story may not be told after all.”

“Who would have believed it?” asked Ieska. “It is a cold day in hell for me — your proverb, not mine. The high sun is shining on a cold winter night, and the South wind blows windlessly out of the West. Were I the hero type it would be different, but I am only Ieska… Surely you have guessed the story or you would not have me stretched out here.”

“Almost guessed it, Ieska. Did you in some manner tamper with General Raddle's mind and make him your partisan?”

“Maybe is not all lost if you are so dumb. What we know about minds and to tamper with them?”

“Perhaps very much. How did you manage to bring him to life again anyhow?”

“Man Colonel, ease off the point stick stuff a little. It only hurts me when I laugh — your folk joke, not mine. Is cruel not to permit me high hilarity over this. How will anyone bring him back to life? And you have said you were not superstitious.”

“Then you have somehow duplicated him?”

“Kill me! Run it clear through me! I have to laugh for this even if it kills me.”

“I'll kill you damned soon if I have no answer. What did you do to General Raddle?”

“Kill me then, but this is truth: we didn't do anything to him. What could we do? We couldn't any more fix him than anything. After a while he got pretty what you call foul smell and we got rid of him.”

“Then who has been commanding us?”

“Like in one of your joke books, man Colonel — ‘Who, me driving? I thought you were driving!’ Nobody has been commanding you, man Colonel. We like it that way.”

“Hold the pike on the little bug,” the colonel told one of the men. “The rest of you come with me, and hurry it along. There's a coup to be pulled, and I sure won't be left out of it. I've turned this in my mind so much that I know just where to pull the string.” He left the room.

IV

It was sudden, and it was sure. The trap inside the trap inside the trap can go either way. The Pani had been given enough slack, and they hanged themselves on their own rope.

Their plan was set. Nobody could have changed it except Ieska, and Ieska was pinned down in the old guardhouse. It was planned so neatly that the countermoves to it were automatic in the mind of Colonel Zornig. He had seen the threat clearly. He had constructed in his mind just how General Raddle would have to have trapped the trappers in the grand coup — if there had any longer been a General Raddle, if there had been a coup designed in any mind other than that of Colonel Zornig.

A dozen pockets of Pani infiltrators were taken almost simultaneously. They would have had the humans dead and dispatched. The shambling little shadows had come very close to pulling it off.

And then there was nothing to it. They were caught flat. They saw their grand plan collapse, and they became once more nothing but surrounded bunches of snuffling bugs — no more a threat, no more anything. But now always to be watched, and their watching to be delegated to experts.

Colonel Zornig had the putative General Raddle stretched flat on his back beside his fellow conspirator Ieska. He didn't look so much like General Raddle when he was stripped. The Pani mimicry only goes so far.

“Where have I slipped up?” asked Ieska. “I thought I could riddle talk you till the time had go by and we have you. How smart alec Colonel know how to dash out and do it while was still time? How you know he is not General Raddle when I double talk you along?”

“Skuuortflochnung,” said the Pani who was no longer General Raddle.

“What does your friend say, Ieska?” asked Zornig.

“He says I have the mouth disease. It means I have talked too much somewhere along the line. How is that possible with a genius like me? Where did I slip, man Colonel?”

“Very early, Ieska. It was once when you were talking to Doctor Mobley and several of us. You said that you were too pot-bellied to be a tree-climber, too short-winded to be a hunter, too weak to be a porter — ”

“I kidded you, man Colonel. I dissembled so you would not know how capable I am and would not be so suspicious of me. At all these things I exceed.”

“ — too stupid to be a farmer — ”

“And myself the most intellectual of the Pani! Was not that rare jokes I made?”

“ — and too untalented to be a mime.”

“Ah, there I have dropped the molasses jug, there I have cracked the cooky jar, there was where the excretion hit the air-vanes — your say words all. That we are mimes who can mimic anything — I let that cat out of the carpet bag. In this I was near as stupid as yourself.”

“We all slip, Ieska. And now what do you suppose will happen to you?”

“One: you will kill me. Two: You will ship me back to be exhibited as a sort of freak in a zoo.”

“Which do you prefer?”

“That you kill me. I have my pride.”

“And your tongue. You still lie with it. I know which you really prefer, and you win in this. I'd kill you with perfect delight, but we have our instructions as to the handling of interesting specimens. You will be on exhibition. You always have been.”

“I must find about bookings. Where is multi-list planetary edition of Billboard man soldier have lying around?”

Vestige

John Aislingiu woke with a feeling of apprehension and nagging worry.

“Hell, who doesn't?” he answered his mood aloud for he was a lip-thinker. “Who wakes up happy?”

People were supposed to be worried. It made them more easily monitored. They were supposed to feel guilty. How was this different from any other morning?

It was only a little different. It was such a morning as came about once a week — a little less lately. The bells were booming — and that was the difference. They boomed with a clanging, nerve-gnawing, off-key toll; and they were meant to do so. It was the bells that got most of them — that brought the screaming guilt up from the subconscious and ended in a babbling and often incoherent confession.

The bells would boom for an hour, a day, a night, a week — until the scaffold had another morsel and the sated monsters fell again to echoing silence.

There was a deviate loose in the world!

The ‘Yellow Alert’ — the ‘World Alert’ — would obtain; the harsh warning would sound until the anomalous person was caught and killed.

Most often the alert came just before dawn. That was the time when a random thought or impression was most likely to strike. But whenever the warning sounded there was no more sleep for anyone that night.

Always the miscreant was caught and extinguished; and the durations of the hunt-downs became shorter and shorter as the years went by. In previous generations there had been times when a dozen deviates might be loose in the world at one time, and when an exceptional one of them might remain at large for a month or more. Fortunately that was no longer the case. Within the foreseeable future the last one of them would be extinguished and perfect order would finally be established. It had been a long time coming.

“Is it you, John?” cried Francine the wife. “Do the bells clang for you?”

“Not for me. Is it for you, Francine?”

They joked solemnly about it in the formula jokes they had been taught to use. One who did not joke in the accepted words was already suspect.

“I hear the soft footsteps of Hawkshaw,” said John. “Perhaps it is to confront you that he comes.”

“No, no, it is for yourself, John. He will wind the worm out of you.”

For each must pretend that he was not worried — that he knew he was not the one. Yet the tainted one could never be sure he was the one for whom the warning sounded — till the evil was finally twisted out of him, and he was displayed and extinguished.

So they went about their business in the world; and the booming bells were not too unusual a background to the day.

John Aislingiu did not really have much business in the world for his personality did not require it. Only those persons who had an inner compulsion to such — and there were almost exactly enough of them to handle affairs — did the work of the world. Should there develop a shortage of impelled persons, then non-workers were sometimes set to simple tasks for short hours. But this was infrequent, and it was not a thing to be desired. It was recognized that work is always unsettling to the non-worker types.

There was some safety in being of the non-workers. Mostly the deviates appeared among those who had some inner compulsion to activity; and John Aislingiu did not belong to them.

John sat on his numbered bench in the park and spoke to his neighbors in various of the approved Ten Thousand Phrases — and so passed the day. The approved Ten Thousand Phrases were sparkling ones, a compendium of the fruiting of the wittiest minds ever; only a deviate would desire conversation beyond them. This Ordered Conversation was generally better than anything of an earlier time.

A child sat on the ground and played.

The Master Interrogator honed his noontime speech for the people.

The Detective set himself in motion to find the deviate.

The child was a dull one. He was three years old and had not yet learned to talk, but that was not to be exceptionally retarded. He did not sit on the grass; it was too intricate and varied for him. He sat all day on a patch of bare ground; he played with one thing only — a crooked stick. He had the sights and sounds around him, but he paid them little mind. He had not the smells; there were no smells. The future of the world depended on such children as this.

The Master Interrogator was Manlove Mobley. He was a ponderous and personable man; and the speech he gave near four-dozen times a year — but ever less as the years went by — was a time-honored formula one. Yet he changed words in it, and often full sentences. It was a progress report as well as a formula speech. It differed noticeably from the speech that Goodworld Wallace used to give when he was Master Interrogator, and from which Solidarity Samuelson used to give them when he held the office.

“What if I am the one?” John Aislingiu asked himself silently, but moving his lips, “What if I am the one?” All had been taught to think in words only, and with lip movement. Lip thought was the only proper thought in an ordered world — as being amenable to instrumental detection. John was scared. It could be anyone; very often a person could not know whether it were himself or not. Each would doubt his own stability when Hawkshaw the Detective came around and fixed him with an arrant eye; but surely the guilty one doubted himself the most.

Hawkshaw was the excellent Detective in the evolvate line. He was of many-layered tradition. His grandfather — if such word could be used — was the comic robot stage detective of the earlier generations; but there was nothing comic about Hawkshaw other than a deep-buried formula comic. His relays were all precision and silence, but his noise-box reproduced the chattering relays of his ancestor. His own movements were perfect and without effort, but the jerky grotesqueries of the earlier robots were incorporated as an override.

This ancestry went much deeper into time, for the first robot detectives had already been of old formula. The curiously-shaped head, so the antiquarians said, was representative of the ‘deerstalker hat’ and the ‘pipe’ of a very ancient fictional detective; but the antiquarians did not know the meaning of the ‘deerstalker hat’ or of ‘pipe’ (a conduit, apparently) in the form of an appendage to a man's head.

The eyes of the old robot detectives (and of the new one Hawkshaw) were the eyes of a ‘bloodhound’ — an ancient animal in some manner ancillary to detective work.

But when Hawkshaw came to each person of the world, as he would come every day that the Yellow Alert was on, and fixed that one with his baleful eye, and asked the twisting-out questions, then there was consternation and guilt in the one concerned.

“Had you recently a fourth-classification dream?” Hawkshaw would demand. Everyone had a fourth-classification dream at least once a week, and was bound to confess it. It was normal, but it seemed damnable.

“Were there unauthorized elements in that dream?” Hawkshaw would clatter out in ironic thunder, and the besieged person could only stammer out that he did not believe that there were — that he monitors would surely show that there were not if that dream should be reviewed — that he lived always in rectitude and observance of the ordained ways.

“Do you remember smell?” the Detective would pursue. “Can you attach meaning to it or give it concept?”

And the assaulted could only mumble that he did not and could not.

“Do you hang meaning on old empty words — fun, goot, bat, sperment, spirid, triomp, whinding, wowser?” The accent that sometimes appeared in Hawkshaw's talk was part of the old stage apparatus when he had been funny.

The questioned one could only reply that for him the words remained empty words, and that he could hang nothing on them.

“Be all the hidden things wormed out of you,” Hawkshaw would rumble in robotical absolution. “Be your very entrails open to the monitors. Have no thought but the World Thought. Have no feel but the World Feel.”

But how if one did not seem absolved to himself, and the taste of guilt still lingered? What if the bloodhound eyes themselves raised uncanny remembrance of a sad old animal not to be found in the compendiums? What if every inkling seemed to contain unauthorized elements?

Bong! —  —  — Bong! The bells ate out the nerve ends of a person. ‘Bong, bong, you're wrong,’ the children used to say that the bells said, but now children seldom rimed though it was still authorized.

At noon the bells were somewhat muted, but not silenced. They still formed the heavy discordant background beat to the definitive speech of Manlove Mobley the Interrogator. It came now to every person of the world here assembled — for there were not so many of them.

“We hesitate to name this the ‘Year of the Final Extinction of the Randoms’, ” came the voice of Manlove, “but the year is very near. The curve of the decline sharpens, and the final extinction should be sudden. Normal projection would indicate less than thirty randoms to be found and extinguished in the present year, whereas recent averages have been more than fifty. But we believe that the projection will not be normal — that there will be a fortunate falling off of the abominations. Until the time of the present offense, we had gone seventeen days without a random — the longest period ever. For seventeen days the world was clean of all deviousness. It is possible that the present offense may be the last — that with the destruction of the offender we may finally achieve a perfectly ordered world to endure forever.”

There was the significant and traditional pause while the bells bonged out full-voiced and then muted once more. Then came the historical and immutable portion of the address in the excellent voice of Manlove:

“When in times past — by an oddity of circumstance — it happened that ours became the only peopled town in the world, counsel was taken as to the best way of persevering and ordering our town which is the world. It was decided that our instrumentation and technique were sufficient to handle any ordinary threat to the order. The decision was taken to eliminate the possibility of an extraordinary threat.

“Monitors were set up, and their capacity calculated. It was very wide, but not infinite. All credible impressions, projections, motifs, sensories, theories, and cogitations were catalogued. They were revised over a long period, added to as early randoms appeared, and put into final clarified form. Then the door was closed and nothing else could be added.

“Mind-scanning by instruments was practical within limits. We set those limits!

“But we allowed a period of grace, and we employed precautions. What were the sources of the forbidden randoms that would be beyond the capacity of our machines to monitor? There are no sources ultimately except the senses. And we had discovered the lowest and most useless of the senses was the most evocative of random and inexplicable reminiscence and thought. That was the sense of smell of which we still preserve the name but not the thing. The problem was solved almost completely by slurring the olfactory capsules of seven-day-old infants; the operation was soon broadened to affect the receptors of sight and taste. Our distant ancestors would say that we are now ‘color-blind’ — a phrase that they had for our normality or early appearance. But we say of our distant ancestors that they saw aspects of things which it is not licit for a human to see.

“The operation was broadened again to cover the slurring of certain areas of the brain that were once called ‘creative’. Almost all of our troubles were found to come from those areas.

“Surely the authorized field is broad enough! Why should one seek certain destruction by going beyond it? We have the ten thousand conversational phrases that express everything that needs to be expressed. We have the catalogued theories that cover every supposition that we may rightly be allowed to suppose. We allow every normal aspect of physical feeling. We allow the normal variations of sight and sound and quite a wide range of emotions. In all the combinations of sense and accumulation and feedback, there are ten million allowable ‘thoughts’ or impressions. That is enough! These can be monitored and properly classified. But any thing beyond these is a threat to the world! Any person going beyond our limits must be caught and destroyed!”

There was another traditional pause while the bells bonged out fully. Then they muted again for the Interrogator to finish it up. He gave more of the details that everybody knew. He gave exhortation and hope that this deviate would be the last one ever. And he ended on a note of high expectation.

Then the bells bonged out again, all day and into the night, while Hawkshaw made his rounds again and again. The child sat on the bare ground till dark when strong hands took him away. John Aislingiu sat on his numbered bench and exchanged various of the ten thousand licit conversational pieces with his neighbors. Then the curfew sounded, and all persons of the world must go indoors.

But the night was worse for the guilty one with the never-ending clangor of the bells. “I am the guilty one,” said a hundred persons of the world, but John Aislingiu said it to himself with the most conviction. The signs of it grew on him, and by morning he would be ripe for the taking.

“It was in my dream last night,” he told his wife. “I'm sure of it now. You had best look for another husband.”

“All right. I'll ask Richard Rightranker in the morning. He always ogles me in all five of the prescribed ways. What was it in the dream, John?”

“It was only a small impression — like the smell of an ocher-colored musical note — ”

“But you cannot attach meaning to the word ‘smell’.”

“Of course not. But in the dream it seemed as though I could. Perhaps I have pre-natal or first-seven-days memory of smell. That sometimes happens.”

“But a musical note hasn't color, and ocher is the same color as any other earth.”

“I know. But in the dream it seemed otherwise — The smell of an ocher-colored musical note dropped into a pool in a neo-Gothic woods — ”

“You beast! You are the deviate! Where have you such thoughts? They are clear out of the frame. The ‘Allowable Fantastic Imagery’ does not allow for anything like this.”

“ — dropped by a large frog that wept — ”

“You monster! Get out of my bed! I'll sound the klaxon at once!”

“There is more, Francine. The frog — ”

“No, no! I close my ears! World alert! World alert!”

And she stabbed the klaxon button.

“But I will tell it!” John howled out in the fury for expression that people used to feel in generations past. “I am the only one ever to have this thought! Something is lost if I cannot bring it out! The world is too stuffy if I cannot think grotesquely beyond it. I'll tell it if it kills me!”

He told it. And it killed him.

But no one heard him when he told it. He was seized immediately and placed in the quarantine chamber — to rave soundlessly to those outside till the time of his execution. Many uncatalogued thoughts were surely howled out by victims in the quarantine chamber, but never did they contaminate those outside. The victim would have screamed himself voiceless by the hour of his execution, and in any case he would be gagged.

So they wheeled it into place at first dawn — the old Louisette or Guillotine. John Aislingiu, gagged and muffled to the eyes, was led up the steps. He waved wearily to Francine and to Richard Rightranker her new husband, and perhaps he smiled under his face mask. The rebellion had all gone out of him.

The people crowded around, stepping carefully over a child who played on the bare earth — for the arena of the execution had intruded on his hold.

The bells were muted for the occasion, but not completely silenced yet.

Hawkshaw the Robot Detective made a self-serving speech.

Goodworld Wallace, the old Interrogator Emeritus, made a speech.

And Manlove Mobley, the reigning Interrogator, made a fine short speech.

“This is the end of a deviate. We may hope it is the end of them all. Watch and be assured. This is the way of variantism — the bloody end. Let us pray that never again may a thought from beyond the pale come to afflict our world. Let us live our lives cleanly and in perfect order — and always in accord with our monitors.

“The old bells will now clash out fully till the moment of the execution. Then they will fall silent to signify the safety of our world. Our corporate hope is that their silence may be maintained forever.”

The bells clashed out again — loud, offensive, and untuned — bong — bong — bong! May the sickening beat of their brazen throats soon be gone forever.

The blade dropped.

The head rolled.

The throbbing silence came down like a fog.

It was all over with, and the world was safe from divergency. The good people began to shuffle away. The death tower started to move back to its shed, impelled by willing hands. Manlove Mobley and Hawkshaw began to shut up shop.

Order — perfect order within the lines — for as long as the world might last. And the silence from the bells to obtain forever.

There were ten million licit thoughts and sensories — and who would wish to go beyond them?

Silence has its own beat — after the clanging of the bells. Like soundless waves rising it continued the old rhythm — beat — beat — beat — the slow blessed beat of silence. The people moved away, and the dull child sat on the ground — the future! And order, perhaps, to endure forever.

Four — five — six beats of slow silence, and the terrifying bells would be forgot.

The seventh beat of silence and — Pandemonium Hystericum Profanum! A panic of monitors and a wild activity of relays! The discordant bells took up the cacophonous beat again in their harsh broken thunder — enough to make your ears bleed.

A deviate is loose in the world!

The evil is not yet ended! Somewhere is a thought, a sensing, a wild impression that the monitors cannot handle.

World alert! World alert!

Find the guilty one and extinguish him!

Who is he? Who is he?

A dull child sits on the ground and chuckles. A random impression has flicked into his mind — an almost-thought that nobody else has ever thought before.

And the world is in danger.

Mad Man

The too-happy puppy came bounding up to him — a bundle of hysterical yipes and a waggling tail that would bring joy to the soul of anyone. The pathetic expectation and sheer love in the shining eyes and wooly rump was something to see. The whole world loves a puppy like that.

And George Gnevni kicked the thing end over end and high into the air with a remarkably powerful boot. The sound that came from the broken creature as it crash-landed against a wall was a heart-rending wail that would have melted the heart of a stone toad.

Gnevni was disgusted with himself.

“Less than ten meters. Should have booted him twelve. I'll kill the blood-sucking cod-headed little cur the next time. Nothing goes right today.”

It was not a real puppy; it was better than a real one. There is something artificial in the joy and carrying on of a real puppy as well as in its hurt screaming. But the antics of this one rang true. The thing was made by a competent artist, and it was well made. It could be set to go through the same routine again at a moment's notice.

A Crippled Old Lady came up shaking with palsy. There was real beauty in her face yet, and a serenity that pain could never take away from her.

“A glorious morning to you, my good man,” she said to Gnevni.

And he kicked her crutches out from under her.

“I am sure that was an accident, sir,” she gasped as she teetered and nearly fell. “Would you be so kind as to hand them to me again? I'm quite unable to stand without them.”

Gnevni knocked her down with a smacking blow. He then stomped up and down on her body from stem to stern. And with a heavy two-footed jump on her stomach he left her writhing on the pavement.

Gnevni was again disgusted with himself.

“It doesn't seem to do a thing for me today,” he said, “not a thing. I don't know what's the matter with me this morning.”

It was a real lady. We are afraid of dog-lovers, but we are not afraid of people-lovers. There are so few of them. So the lady was not an artificial one. She was real flesh and blood, and the least of both. However, she was neither crippled nor old. She was a remarkably athletic woman and had been a stunt girl before she found her true vocation. She was also a fine young actress and played the Crippled Old Lady role well.

Gnevni went to his job in the Cortin Institute Building that was popularly known as the Milk Shed.

“Bring my things, crow-bait,” he grumbled at a nice young lady assistant. “I see the rats have been in your hair again. Are you naturally deformed or do you stand that way on purpose? There's a point, you know, beyond which ugliness is no longer a virtue.”

The nice young lady began to cry, but not very convincingly. She went off to get Gnevni's things. But she would bring only a part of them, and not all of them the right ones.

“Old George isn't himself this morning,” said the under-doctor Cotrel.

“I know,” said under-doctor Devon. “We'll have to devise something to get him mad today. We can't have him getting pleasant on us.”

The required paranexus could not be synthesized. Many substances had been tried and all of them had been found insufficient. But the thing was needed for the finest operation of the Programmeds. It had to be the real thing, and there was only one way to get a steady supply of it.

At one time they had simplified it by emphasizing the cortin and adrenalin components of it. Later they had emphasized a dozen other components, and then a hundred. And finally they accepted it for what it was — too complex for duplication, too necessary an accessory for the Programmeds to be neglected, too valuable at its most effective to be taken from random specimens. It could be had only from Humans, and it could be had in fine quality only from a special sort of Humans. The thing was very complex, but at the Institute they called it Oil of Dog.

Peredacha was a pleasant little contrivance — a “Shadler Movement” or “female” of the species that had once been called homo conventus or robot and was now referred to as “Programmed Person.”

She had a sound consciousness, hint of developing originality, a capacity for growth and a neatness of mechanism and person. She might be capable of fine work of the speculative sort. She was one of those on whom the added spark might not be wasted.

Always they had worked to combine the best elements of both sorts.

The Programmed Persons were in many respects superior to the Old Recension Persons or Humans. They were of better emotional balance, of greater diligence, of wider adaptability, of much vaster memory or accumulation and of readier judgment based on that memory. But there was one thing lacking in the most adept of the Programmed that was often to be found in the meanest of the humans. This was a thing very hard to name.

It was the little bit extra; but the Programmed already had the very much extra. It had something of the creative in it, though the Programmed were surely more creative than the Humans. It was the rising to the occasion; the Programmed could do this more gracefully, but sometimes less effectively, than could the Humans. It was the breaking out of a framework, the utter lack of complacency, the sudden surge of power or intellect, the bewildering mastery of the moment, the thing that made the difference.

It was the Programmed themselves who sought out the thing, for they were the more conscious of the difference. It was the Programmed technicians who set up the system. It cost the Humans nothing, and it profited the Programmed very much in their persons and personalities.

On many of them, of course, it had little effect; but on a select few it had the effect of raising them to a genius grade. And many of them who could never become geniuses did become specialists to a degree unheard of before — and all because of the peculiar human additive.

It was something like the crossing of the two races, though there could never be a true cross of species so different — one of them not being of the reproductive sort. The adrenal complex sometimes worked great changes on a Programmed.

There were but a few consistent prime sources of it — and each of them somehow had his distinguishing mark. Often a Programmed felt an immediate kinship, seldom reciprocated, with the Human donor. And Peredacha, a very responsive Programmed, felt the kinship keenly when the additive was given to her.

“I claim for paternity,” she cried. It was a standard joke of the Programmed. “I claim as daughter to my donor! I never believed it before. I thought it only one of those things that everybody says. The donors are such a surly bunch that it drives them really violent til one of us seeks their acquaintance on this pretext. But I'm curious. Which one was it?”

She was told.

“Oh no! Not him of the whole clutch! How droll can you get? He is my new kindred? But never before did I feel so glorious. Never have I been able to work so well.”

The assigned job of George Gnevni was a mechanical one. In the ordinary course of things this would be all wrong, for George had less mechanical aptitude than any man ever born. George had very little aptitude for anything at all in the world — until his one peculiar talent was discovered.

He was an unhandsome and graceless man, and he lived in poverty. Much has been said about the compensations of physical ugliness — mostly the same things that have been said about poverty. It is often maintained that they may be melded behind the dross front, that the sterling character may develop and shine through the adversity.

It is lies, it is lies! It happens only rarely that these things are ennobling. With persons of the commoner sort it happens not at all. To be ugly and clumsy and poor at the same time will finally drive a man to raving anger against the whole world.

And that was the idea.

Gnevni was assigned a mean lodging, and his meal tickets were peculiar ones. He could not obtain what he wanted to eat. He could have only what was on the list for him to eat, and this was evilly contrived to cover everything that disagreed with him. As a result he was usually in gastric pain and in seething anger at his own entrails. He had an ugly nature to begin with, but the form of life forced upon him deepened and nurtured it.

Gnevni's voice was harsh and jangling, though there was real mastery of resonance in his powerful howling when his anger reached high form. He was denied wifing privileges, and no woman would have had him in any case. He was allowed just enough of bad whoa-johnny whisky to keep him edgy and mean, but not enough to bring him solace.

He was an oaf — an obscene distasteful clod of humanity. He knew it and he boiled and seethed with the shoddy knowledge. He was no better than a badger in a cage, but those things are terrific snappers.

For his poor livelihood he was given a quota of mechanical tasks to complete every day, and he had no mechanical aptitude at all. They were simple assembly jobs. A competent Programmed Person could do in minutes what it took Gnevni all day to do. Most children of the human species could do the same things easily and quickly — though some might not be able to do them at all, for the Humans are less uniform in their abilities than the Programmed.

The things that Gnevni was to assemble were never all there, some of them were the wrong things, and some of them were defective. A Programmed would have spotted the off stuff at once and sent it back, but ugly George had no way of telling whether things were right or not. He sweated and swore his days away at the grotesque labor and became the angriest man alive.

Joker tools were sometimes substituted on him for the true tools — screwdrivers with shafts as flexible as spaghetti, key-drifts with noses as soft as wax, box-end wrench sets that were sized to fit nothing, soldering guns that froze ice on their tips, mismarked calipers with automatic slippage, false templates, unworkable crimpers, continuity testers that shocked a man to near madness.

It is a legend that humans have an affinity for mechanical things. But normal humans have an innate hatred for machinery, and the accommodation that has grown up between them is a nervous one. The damned stuff just doesn't work right. You hate it, and it hates you. That's the old basic of it.

Swift, a wise old mad man, once wrote a piece on the “Perversity of Inanimate Objects.” And they are perverse, particularly to a sick, ugly, ignorant, incompetent, poor man who fights them in a frenzy — and they fight back.

All day long George Gnevni and a few of his unfortunate fellows attacked their tasks explosively — the air blue with multi-syllabled profanity, and anger dancing about like summer lightning. Now and then, people came and inserted tubes into these unfortunates, and performed some other indignities upon them.

The paranexus, the complex substance, the “Oil of Dog” that was needed for stimulation of the Programmed, while it could be taken from any Humans, could only be had in its prime form from a depraved, insane sort of Very Angry Men.

But today George Gnevni was not himself. There was only a sullenness in him, not the required flaming purple anger.

“We have to prod him,” said under-doctor Cotrel. “We can't waste a whole day on him. He's sick enough. He tests at a high enough pitch of excitement. Why won't he put out? Why won't he get mad?”

“I have an idea,” said under-doctor Devon. “We have an inner-office memo that one of the Programmed has recognized kinship with him. You remember when Wut was in a slump? We got a Programmed up here who threw an arm around him and called him Uncle Wilbur. The way Wut exploded, seismographs must have recorded the shock at a considerable distance. We had to move fast to prevent him from damaging the Programmed. And then Wut was so mad that we were able to use him around the clock for seventy-two hours. How our Very Angry Men do hate the Programmed! They call them the things.”

“Good. Anything that worked on Wut ought to work double on Gnevni. Get the Programmed Person up here. We'll have him at ugly George.”

“Her. She's a Shadler Movement Programmed and so technically a female.”

“Better yet. I can hardly wait, Gnevni is the most spectacular of them all when he really goes wild. We should get a good production from him.”

Peredacha, the talented little Shadler Movement Programmed, came to the Cortin Institute Building — the Milk Shed. She understood the situation and enjoyed it. The Programmed have their humor — more urbane than that of Humans, and yet as genuine — and they appreciate the hilarity of an incongruous confrontation.

Peredacha was something of an actress, for all the Programmed have a talent for mimicry. She considered the role for a moment, and she put all her talent into it.

And she did it! She made herself into the most pathetic urchin since the Little Match Girl. Yet she was a Programmed and not a Human; it was as though a gear box should put on a waif 's shawl and turn tear-jerker.

They brought her in.

“Papa!” Peredacha cried and rushed toward Gnevni.

The attendants had closed between them to prevent damage when the anger of the low man should rise like a jagged wave.

The show should have been greater than the one that Wut had once put on for less reason. Gnevni was a bigger man with more power of anger, and the situation was even more ridiculous. It should have set records on the decibel-recorder, filled the room with brimstone, and enriched the vocabulary of scatology.

But it didn't.

The face of George Gnevni was slack, and he shook his heavy head sadly.

“Take the child away,” he said dully. “I will not be responsible for my feelings today.”

It was a new morning and George Gnevni must return to his brutal livelihood.

A too-happy puppy came bounding up to him — a bundle of hysterically gay yipes with a waggling rump and tail hitched on to them.

“Hello, little fellow,” Gnevni said and bent down to pet it. But the puppy was not programmed for such treatment. It was made to be kicked by angry men. It threw itself into a series of reverse somersaults and heart-rending wails as though it had been kicked indeed.

“Oh, the poor little toy!” said Gnevni. “It has never known kindness.”

“Look, Gnevni,” said an inferior sort of man who came up, “the dog was made for one thing only — so that twelve or thirteen of you hotfires could kick it every morning and get into your mood. Now kick too.”

“I won't do it.”

“I'll report you.”

“I don't care. How could anyone harm that poor little tyke?”

The Crippled Old Lady came up, shaking as with palsy. “A glorious good morning to you, my good man,” she said to Gnevni.

“And a fine morning to you, my lady,” he said.

“What? You're not supposed to say that! You're supposed to kick my crutches out from under me and then knock me down and trample on me. It helps get you in your mood. Crippled Old Ladies are infuriating sights to the Very Angry Men; they make them even angrier. Everybody knows that.”

“I just don't believe that I will do it today, ah — Margaret, is that not your name? A fine day to you, my dear.”

“Knock off that fine day stuff! I have my job to do. I'm a mood piece. You blow-tops are supposed to kick out my crutches and tromp me down to get in your mood. Now start kicking or I'll report you.”

“Do so if you must, my dear.”

Gnevni went to his job in the Cortin Institute Building, and there he was good for nothing.

Mad? He wasn't even sullen. He was puzzled and pleasant, and when you have one of the old stand-bys go pleasant on you you're in trouble. He was civil to everybody and gave them all the jitters. He completed his mechanical tasks in an hour — finding them much easier when he attacked them calmly. But he wasn't supposed to find them easier.

So there was consternation in the Department. Gnevni had been the best producer of them all. They couldn't let him go by like that.

“Damn you, get mad!” under-doctor Cotrel shouted and shook him. “We won't have any malingering on the job. Get mad and start putting out.”

“I just don't seem able to get mad today,” said Gnevni honestly.

“You double-damned will get mad, you crud-head!” pursued under-doctor Cotrel. Cotrel seemed rather upset himself. “Under-doctor Devon! Over-doctor Ratracer! Director Duggle! Come help me with this pig-headed fellow. He won't get mad.”

“He's got to get mad,” said under-doctor Devon. “We'll make the filth-eating fink get mad.”

“It looks bad,” said Director Duggle. “He was at only half efficiency yesterday, and today he's good for nothing at all. Well, put him through the routine. We can't have him going sour at us.”

They put him through the routine. It was brutal. It would have made a roaring devil out of the sweetest saint. Even spectators commonly became white with fury when such a thing was put on, and there was no limit to the effect on the victim. Gnevni endured it with composed sorrow but without anger. And when even the routine didn't work what more could you do to him?

Under-doctor Cotrel began to cuff and kick him: “Get mad, you slimy sulphurous son of a she shink! Get mad, you mud-headed old monkey! Get mad, you dirt-eating mutt-head! You slobber-mouthed donkey, get mad!”

They brought in others. They even brought in Peredacha — hoping she would have a more positive effect on him than she had had the day before. But Gnevni brightened up to see her.

“Ah, it is my little daughter! I sent you notes at intervals through the evening and night, but I guess you did not receive them. It is so wonderful just to see you again.”

“Why you bat-whiskered old bum, was it you who sent those notes? ‘Sweet papa.’ You? By the shop where I was made, I never heard of anything like it before!”

“Do not be cruel, Peredacha. You are all that I care for in the world. With you I could become a new man.”

“Well, not being human I guess I can be humane. I'll look after you, ugly papa. But they don't want you to become a new man; as the old one you were the best they had. Come now, get mad for the people. It's your job.”

“I know, but I'm unable to do it. I have been thinking, Peredacha, that since you are my daughter in a way — cortin of my cortin and adrenalin of my adrenalin — perhaps the two of us might go off somewhere and — ”

“Holy howling hog!” Under-doctor Cotrel took off in a screech too high for the human ear to follow, so perhaps only Peredacha heard and flushed. And then Cotrel broke up completely. He kicked and beat on Gnevni. He shrilled and sobbed and gobbled. And when his sounds once more became intelligible it was a screaming, “Get mad, damn you, get mad!”

Cotrel was a lean man, but powerfully corded and muscled, and now every cord of muscle and nerve stood glaringly out on him black and purple.

That man was plain frantic in his displeasure at Gnevni. The flying foam from his lips flecked the room — something you would not have expected from under-doctor Cotrel.

“It is all right,” said Director Duggle. “Gnevni was about finished in any case. The best of them are only good for a year or two — the pace is a terrific one. And we are lucky to have his replacement ready at hand.”

“Replacement?” roared the livid Cotrel. “He's got to get mad! There isn't any replacement.” And he continued to strike Gnevni.

“I believe that the director has you in mind, Cotrel,” said over-doctor Ratracer. “Yes. I am sure of it.”

“Me? I am under-doctor Cotrel! I make five hundred Guzman d'or a month!”

“And now you will make five,” said Director Duggle. “Grinding poverty is a concomitant of your new job. I had suspected you had a talent for it. Now I am sure. You begin immediately. You become the latest, and soon I hope the best, of the Very Angry Men.”

Cotrel became so, and immediately. Gnevni had been good. Wut before him had been one of the best. But for carrying-on noise and stink generally, there was never such an exhibition as Mad Man Cotrel now put on — getting into the spirit of his new job.

He was the maddest man you ever saw!

Last Laugh

The Joculars refused the whims:

Unman the Man, the Earth un-earth it.

They lost their ears and eyes and limbs

And never doubted it was worth it.

 — Song of the Jokers

Tûtes voz anmes ait Deus li Glorïus

En Parèïs les metet en seintes flurs.

 — Likewise

Johnny Battle (nicknamed by the Jokers 0-1-1, or not won one yet) was a man's man. He was cast in the heroic mold, he had the shape of one of the old-time great men, but there was some pretty base metal used in his forming. He had a high mission, and most of the time he was serious about it; that was a strain on a man like Johnny. He had preached himself hoarse for more years than a man had used to live, and his speech was always the same:

“They are trying to close down the world! Fight them! Fight them! There is something in life that is worth keeping alive.”

This was a message that got pretty monotonous after ninety years of it. Of course they were closing down the world! Why wouldn't they? And the eloquence of John Battle no longer seemed so grand. They had eloquence machines now that made his seem like a penny whistle.

But Johnny Battle was also a joker's joker. Not one of your low jokers, of course. He had as much dignity as a man may have who has lost both ears and who lives on reclaimed food. He was a king joker in those days when you took your life in your hands to make a joke.

Johnny hadn't lost both ears at the same time. Their cropping was several years apart, and there was a funny story attached to the loss of each of them. But really, were they that funny, Johnny?

Maybe they were. It's all the way you tell them.

Johnny hadn't any toes either. There's a mighty outré tale connected to the lost third toe of the off foot, but it's nothing beside the outrageous pun that cost him the small toe of the same stump. Johnny put a lot of himself into his jokes.

He and his friends didn't live on reclaimed food because they liked it, although there is a lot of humor connected with the stuff. You get a few of the folks together picking it over and there's considerable ripe humor generated. It wasn't any sort of reprocessed food, you understand. It was reclaimed only in that they reclaimed it out of its cans and dumps. The People had become the outcasts of the Programmed, and the Jokers were the outcasts of the people. It was live low or die.

The Jokers were a diminished group. There were less than a dozen of them left, and not one of them was all there. Together they'd have added up to about one three-legged person with not six eyes among them, not one limb complete in all its articles, no more than three half-ears, not a single full-blown nose, not enough knuckle bones to make one pair of dice.

Once, they had been complete persons — full-limbed and free, bright of eye, noble of nose, and outstanding of ear; and with the full decimals of fingers and toes. Their secret vice (which they could not keep secret) had eroded them to remnants.

But the Jokers remained bright and happy in a grisly fashion; they fought the losing battle; and they were alert to everything going on in the world.

What was going on in the world this afternoon was Rhetor — the Robot Evangelist, the Prophet of the Programmed People. It was he who was foremost of those eloquence machines that could make Johnny Battle sound like a penny whistle. The Jokers could always go to hear Rhetor though it was near-suicide for them; they'd find something funny about him every time, and when they found something funny they had to out with it. He would be the end of them yet.

They went hobbling through the town which was being dismantled of its buildings. People had used to cry when the buildings were dismantled and the towns taken down one by one. People — and this shows how they had been only a few years before — had used to cry when people were dismantled. Now nobody cared about it except the intransigent Johnny Battle and his Jokers.

This Rhetor was an orator without equal. The People had never had anyone like him. Only the Programmed could speechify in the grand manner, and Rhetor was master of them all. He was the Evangelist of the Great Merging and the Cosmic Peace.

We cannot give all of his great thing here. First, if we did so, You (of the time not yet that future) would be converted by it and accept it. You would lie down and die happily and have it over with. And it is not meant to be that way yet. And second, we identify with the Jokers, and they hustled away from there when the oration was hardly well started.

“Come lose yourselves and find the Self!” Rhetor cried out. The Programmed crowded around him, and some of the Old Recension People were also in that aggregation.

“It is no new doctrine that I preach,” sang Rhetor. “It is the oldest doctrine there is, the only one there is: Peace in all things, and the end of all things in the One Thing. This was also of human sanction before the Aberrant Troubling. I come — as the humans of you must notice — very near the doctrine of Gautama. I am very like Gautama. I believe that I have a little Indian in me.”

Among the Jokers it was Molly who chuckled, and then nothing could shut her off. Johnny Battle moved to clap a hand over her mouth, forgetting in his haste that he no longer had a hand on that arm. Shudzy ran to smother what was bubbling up in her, and fell flat on his face. It is so easy to forget that your legs are off above the knees.

“Glory be,” shrieked Molly in full laughter, “The Thing is pregnant! It has a little Indian in it!”

Ototomies were neat, we will say that of them. An enforcer was always near, and the instrument used was like an old-fashioned bolt-cutter. Molly had once had two ears — then one — and after today none at all. But soon the blood ceased to gush, and really there is not much blood in an ear. The howling pain subsided to a soft wail. And Molly rollicked off sobbing and laughing at the same time, and the Jokers with her.

“Did you hear it, Johnny?” Noko chortled to him, “Molly said that the thing must be pregnant — ”

“I heard it,” said Johnny, “I have heard them all, but I'm not sure that an ear was well lost over it.”

“You remember the one Shudzy told, the one he lost his last leg over?” Noko asked excitedly.

“Was it worth it, Shudzy?” Johnny interrupted.

“I don't know. I just had to out with it. Besides, they'd been saying ‘Shudzy's on his last leg’ for a long time. When one leg's gone the other isn't much good. Once you start to go you might as well go all the way.”

“Let us go down to Happy Valley,” said Johnny Battle. “I want to talk to the bunch of you. There's nobody else left to talk to.”

Now, Happy Valley was no more than a hole in the ground in which the outcast Jokers lived. It wasn't well furnished. Its dwellers had neither the fingers which came first nor the forks that followed. They had only a few jugs and pails as handleless as themselves, and their chairs had fewer arms and legs than the people who used them. But there was a big board for a table where they spread out their daily findings and selected and argued over them. There were pallets for happy slumber, there was a roof of sorts. It was a hole out of the wind, and often it was dry. And there were the weapons which Johnny Battle had been bringing there for some time.

“Do you know what they are doing?” Johnny asked of them. “They are closing down the world.”

“It's ten o'clock at night,” said Pat, “even when the sun is high. In dead towns they used to roll up the sidewalks at ten o'clock. Now it's a dead world and they're going to roll the whole thing up.”

“And nobody cares,” said Johnny. “There's nobody left to care.”

“We care,” said Pat. “People used to find out a sly grog shop after things were rolled up. We become our own now. We get drunk on ourselves and evade them. They haven't anything as good as the savor of the worst of us.”

“We will be serious for a moment,” said Johnny sternly, but sometimes he broke up when he tried to be the most stern.

“That's been tried, old Johnny,” said Noko. “The trouble with the serious bit is that it worked. It was the beginning of the end. There were two men. ‘I'm serious,’ said one. ‘I'm Roebuck,’ said the other. That was the beginning of Mercantilism, and it gobbled everything up. Oh, they were all serious about things, Johnny! But the serious bit carries its own termination with it. And today is the outcome.”

“I know it,” said Johnny. “Then let's be half-serious. When they close down the world, it does have its serious aspects.”

“Oh yes, but think how many funny aspects it has,” said Paco.

“Rhetor is right that the thing was of human sanction first,” said Johnny bitterly. “Once it was believed that there was a human soul or astral body that transcended time and space. But then the belief crept in that there was no more to anything than that which is apparent. There was an interior logic in each belief; but if the logic of the second belief were carried out it meant the termination of belief and believers and everything else. There was once a choice between these two beliefs. But there have never been others than these two, and there has never been a middle ground between them.

“Having decided that there was only a temporal future,” Johnny continued, “the race — after a few generations — lost interest in that. It really wasn't very interesting, you see. If we weren't going anywhere, there was no particular incentive to get there. The exhilarating road to the high future — the road that is our life — became a bothersome thing when we believed that there was nothing at the end of it. Then Nothing Itself became a positive thing. Annihilation became the goal, and they named it Final Peace.”

“That was when wakes got where they weren't as funny as they had used to be,” said Shudzy. “They could laugh at a man being dead, but not at a man being dead forever. That kills the joke. A corpse is no longer comical when you believe that its inability is permanent.”

“I still don't believe it,” said Johnny. “It was at this time that the Robots, Programmed Creatures, were successfully created. People could not make them in their own image until that image was shrunken. But after that it was easy. From their inception it was very hard to tell the robots from the real people, but there was a difference. People no longer had an aim, but the robots were programmed to do the work of the world and to stay with their task till it was finished. It was from the basic premise of the people that the Programmed drew the logical conclusion as to what thing the work of the world should be.”

“And what the devil is that thing?” asked Paco, “as the absent-minded man said when they showed him his offspring.”

“Under the New Recension, the only logical work of the world is closing down the world,” said Johnny. “The Programmed began it, and the People were satisfied. All the grand and sober folks surrendered. They had chosen the road, and they saw where their road had to lead. Only the Jokers oppose.

“They are disassembling the world! They have taken down the towns one by one, and I believe that ours is the last of them. They do it nastily. The old brick and stones are left in symmetrical mounds. The beams and girders are left to rust in artistic array. The remnants of our cities will show a peaceful aspect when they are merged in the Great Nothingness, and when the Aberrant Troubling — humanity — is past. But the Programmed are fair. They also exterminate themselves when their numbers are no longer needed for the work. They are taking the world down, they are taking the people down.”

“I had a little daughter dear,

She was my darling apple-eyezer

They've scattered her both there and here,

She makes a pretty fertilizer,”

chanted Molly.

“Yes, they are disassembling the people too,” said Johnny. “They break them down into their constituent elements as soon as they either accept the Gospel of Rhetor or otherwise acquiesce to their own destruction. They return to the earth in their appropriate places, and finally they have their Nothingness Peace. We don't know how many real people are left. The last census — showing zero — is suspect. We know that there are a handful of us, but it may be only myself and you Jokers.”

“Such as we are, and what there is left of us,” said Noko.

“But there was always something special about us Jokers,” said Johnny. “To them, we were the most troublesome aspect of the Aberrant Troubling — that disturbance which some of us called life. Humor, being a transcendent thing, had almost disappeared from the world when the Programmed appeared. None of it went into them. We had — and we few still have — the one thing they could not have: Humor.”

“When humor sweet sixteen,” hummed Molly.

“To them, we are the anomaly,” continued Johnny Battle. “For our stubborn remnant, they revived cruel and barbarous punishments. They cropped us of our appendages for every public joke we make. It was the only weapon we had, and every time we used it it diminished us. Now we are what we are. Was it worth it?”

“Every piece of it!” cried Molly. “There's always been something funny about crippled people. The less there is of us, the funnier we get. At least to ourselves.”

“We are a compendium, a collection of old jokes,” said Johnny. “And most of the jokes weren't even very good.”

“A joke is like an egg,” said Shudzy. “A bad one is funnier than a good one.”

“I believe that the epitome of all bad jokes is Molly's worst,” said Johnny: “ ‘She was only an oculist's daughter, but two glasses and she made a spectacle of herself.’ And the last bad joke is that they are taking down the world! I preached, and Rhetor preached. And he has won out. We had lost it before we were born.”

“Please, people,” said one of the last of the Programmed Workers coming to their place, “it is the end of things. It is time to tear down the hole.”

“Not Happy Valley!” they howled.

“The same,” said the Programmed. “It is the last building in the world, albeit an inverted sort of one.”

“I am interested in seeing how you will tear down a hole,” said Molly.

Well hell, they didn't tear it down, they filled it up. There were no buildings left and the world was once more clean and at peace. The Jokers left their Eden, but they took their weapons with them.

“It is the end of things,” the remaining Programmed called to them. “Last of the people, Joker people, come to the top of the hill for the final dissolving.”

“It's the wrong end of things,” said Johnny Battle. “We fight it too late. It was already too late when our grandfathers were born. But there has to be a last battle, and its name is Armageddon.”

“Armageddon any better?” asked Paco, but none of them was getting any better. Johnny called together his army that a flight of crows could have bowled over.

“Do you know what you have to do?” asked Johnny in a hurry. “No, of course you don't, and I don't either. We have never done it before, nor have any people within memory. We have to find it within ourselves to wage a great battle, and we don't even know what a battle is. We have to kill what Programmed are left. We have to salvage the world, and it is very late to do it.”

“Ten o'clock at night and the sun is still shining,” said Pat. “Just the time to start a rumble in a dead town or a dead world. Sure we know what to do, old Johnny! People! Jokers! Old Knob-Knockers! All we got to do is knock their clanking heads off and kill them!”

And the grotesque battle that followed was final Armageddon in fact. Johnny and his Jokers went after the Programmed with their weapons — clubs and bricks and hump-backed puns. And the puzzled Programmed were forced to fight back.

It was club and claw and manipulator — the opponents knocking each other down, the Programmed going for the throats of the Jokers — counted no odds, but they were a dozen to one against them. They fought with real joy, waddling in on their stumps and dealing death. They killed more Programmed than themselves, but there were more of them to kill. It was fun while it lasted, and it lasted a long time.

“Old Noko has lost his head completely,” said Shudzy, and Noko had. His old head grinned happily after achieving its detachment, but he had taken a dozen of the things with him.

There was something futile in all this gushing blood and smashed transistors. The calculating Programmed remained comfortably ahead of the Jokers, but not too far ahead. They disassembled and put themselves to death when the odds showed themselves too long. How can you have a proper battle when the majority side desires nothing more than death for itself? This wasn't as funny as it might have been.

“That's Shudzy all over!” cried Paco as Shudzy was separated into his constituent parts. And the Programmed kept pace, contributing to their own annihilation.

Johnny Battle led the last charge and it failed. There weren't enough of them, and what there were there weren't enough of. But he died gamely, like Taillefer (call it heads or Taillefer a dollar) singing into battle:

“We're going to miss us when we're gone.

We never got to rout the

Old clanking monsters heaped upon,

But have you heard the one about the — ?”

Johnny Battle chanted his last jingle, but they cut him off before he could out with his final joke. He half sat, half sprawled, at that humorous angle that the dead sometimes assume, as if presiding at his own wake. And he triumphed in his way. He was comical as corpse because he did not believe that his disability was permanent.

Say, who was the joke on anyhow? Who would have the last laugh — those incapable of laughter? For now they were all down and dead except one on a side, and it was the most incongruous confrontation ever.

“Incongruous,” panted Molly. “My husband is incongruous, but I never liked Washington in the summertime.”

She was belligerently happy. It was she and Rhetor the final ones. How to turn the joke? How to turn the last laugh on the Pernicious Programmed?

Pigeon-toed perdition! The thing was going to make a speech! “I'd Rhetor skip this one,” said Molly.

“It is the Terminal Peace,” intoned Rhetor. There was more and we skip it. Then his great voice came down to a purr.

“Ah, little lady, we are the last ones. There are technical difficulties at the very end but there are none left to criticize. We will solve them as best we can. Do you accept the Terminal Peace?”

“Not I,” howled Molly. “I'll riot while I live and riot when I die.”

“A pity, but you'll not last out the day. You're emaciated and fevered, and there's no human food at all left in the world and no possibility of creating any. We've seen to that. Now you will have to help me in my disassembly.”

“With the back of my hand I'll help you, and there'll be many a dry eye when you leave,” said Molly, “though in truth it will be but my lone one.”

“My limbs I can unstring myself,” said Rhetor, and he did.

“It is your pleasure and mine,” said Molly, and she had the thing's head off between her hand and her crutch.

“Why, it's naufght but a tin can,” she exclaimed as she held it. “A game of shinny! I've never lost my love for it!”

You can kick a thing like that pretty good with one foot and one crutch. Molly hadn't been all there in her body for a long time, and at the end she wasn't all there in her mind. But she did have fun that last afternoon. That terminating business is for others.

Hobbling on crutch she kicked the tin head with the last foot and chanted the last chant:

“A shinny can, a shinny head,

A clatter-kicking blowsy gimper!

But note about the world that's dead — 

It never ended with a whimper!”

Sick and psycho, jabbering and jocund, she had kept a piece of the transcendent thing.

She had the last laugh.

Author's Commentary

What's The Name Of That Town?

“Epiktistes tells me that you are onto something big, Mr. Smirnov,” Valery said, turning to her companion.

“Epikt has the loudest mouth of any machine I was ever associated with,” Gregory Smirnov growled. “I never saw one that could keep a secret. But this one goes to extremes. Actually, we don't have a thing. We're just fiddling around with an unborn idea.”

“How about it, Epikt?” Valery asked.

“Big, real big,” the machine issued.

“What are you doing now, Epikt?” Valery wanted to know.

“Talk to me, dammit! I'm the man, he's the machine,” Smirnov cut in. “He's chewing encyclopedias and other references. It's all he ever does.”

“I thought he went through them all long ago.”

“Certainly, dozens of times. He has all the data that can be fed into a machine, and every day we shovel in bales of new stuff. But he's chewing it now for a very different purpose.”

“What different purpose, Mr. Smirnov?”

“It's difficult to say because I haven't as yet been able to state it to him. We're trying to set a problem where it seems there ought to be one — ironically. I doubt that he's sincere now. He can be quite a clown, as you should well know.”

“I know that you two are onto something good,” Valery said. “The more you deny it, the more I'm sure of it. Tell me the truth, Epikt.”

“Big, real big,” Epiktistes issued to Valery.

“Valery,” said Smirnov. “You're a woman and you might be inclined to say something about this to other Institute people. Please don't. We don't have anything yet and it makes me nervous to have hot little people breathing down my neck.”

“I won't say a word,” Valery swore with grave insincerity. She winked at the machine, and Epikt winked back at her with three tiers of eyes. Valery Mok and Epiktistes had a thing going with each other.

Valery was nearly as bad as a machine at not being able to keep a secret. She had the whole Institute staff excited about what Smirnov and Epiktistes were working on. The staff consisted of Charles Cogsworth, her own over-shadowed husband; Glasser, the stiff-necked inventor; and Aloysius Shiplap, the seminal genius.

They were all after Smirnov and his machine the next day.

“We've been together on every project,” Glasser said. “Valery tells us that the problem hasn't been properly formulated, and that Epikt has only accepted it ironically. We're pretty good at formulating problems, Gregory, and a little sterner than you when it comes to dealing with clownish machines.”

“All right, this is the way it is, Glasser,” Smirnov said reluctantly. “My first statement was, we should seek to discover something not known to exist, by a close study of the absence of evidence. When I put the problem to Epiktistes in this generalized form he just laughed at me.”

“That would have been my first impulse too, Smirnov,” said Shiplap. “Don't you have a better idea of what you're looking for?”

“Shiplap, I had the feeling of trying to remember something that I'd been compelled to forget. My second statement wasn't much better. ‘Let us see,’ I said to Epikt, ‘if we cannot reconstruct something of which even the idea has been completely eradicated; let's see if we can't find it by considering the excessive evidence that it was never there.’ In this form, Epikt accepted it. Or else he decided to go along with me for the gag. I'm never quite sure how this clanking machine takes things.”

“Well, no hole can be filled up perfectly,” said Cogsworth. “There will either be too much or too little of whatever is being used as the filler, or it will be of a different texture. The difficulty is that you didn't give Epikt any clues. There will be a million things forgotten or repressed that will show an irregularity of fill. How will Epikt know which of them is the one that you are somehow trying to remember?”

“Item. The buried thing will have a buried tie with my boss man Smirnov,” Epiktistes, the machine, issued.

“Yes, of course,” said Glasser. “Has Epikt turned up anything?”

“Only a bushelful of things that seem to mean nothing,” said Smirnov sadly.

“Item. Why, in Hungarian dictionary-encyclopedias of a certain period, is there padding between the words Sik and Sikamlós?” Epiktistes asked.

“I follow your thought, Epikt,” Glasser agreed. “That could be a clue to something. If the idea and the name of something were expunged from every reference, then, in all original editions, other subjects on the same page would have to be padded slightly or another subject set in. This filling might be hurried, and therefore of an inferior quality. So, who knows a word that is no longer used and that comes between Sik and Sikamlós? If we knew the word would we know what it meant? And would it help us if we did?”

“Item. Why is the young of a bear now referred to as a pup when once it may have been known as a cube?” Epikt issued.

“I've never heard the young of a bear referred to as a cube,” Shiplap protested.

“Epikt has come on that by our omission-appraisal method,” Smirnov explained. “There is probably an imperfect erasure working. I believe that cube is a distortion of a word that has somehow been forced out of folk memory. Epikt has this clue from a ballad which I believe is far removed from the main suppression or it would not have survived in even this distorted form.”

“Item. Why is the awkward word coronal used for the simple doubling or return of a rope? Why is not a simpler word used?” Epikt asked.  

“Has Epikt considered that seamen have always used odd terms and that landsmen often adopt them?” Cogsworth asked.

“Naturally — Epikt always considers everything,” Smirnov answered. “He has thousands of items now, and he believes that he will be able to put them into a pattern.”

“Item. Why is there a great hiatus in period jazz? It's as though a great hunk of it had been yanked out by the roots, in the words of one Benny B-Flat.”

“Smirnov, I know that your machine has unusual talents,” said Glasser, “but if he can tie these things together he's a concatenated genius.”

“Or a cantankerous clown,” Smirnov said. “I know that he has to have some emotional release from the stress of his work, but he often overdoes it with humor and drollery.”

“Item. Why is reference to the Amerindian peace pipe avoided as though some obscenity were attached to it, and none is discoverable?”

“That's a new one while we're standing here,” said Smirnov. “He's accumulating quite a few of them.”

“Item. Why is — ” Epikt started.

“Oh, shut up and get back to work,” Smirnov ordered his machine. “Let's leave him with it until tomorrow, folks. It may begin to pull together by then,” said Smirnov, stalking off.

“Going to be real big,” Epiktistes issued to them after his boss man had left. “Boys and girls, it's going to be real big.”

The next day they combined the meeting around the machine with a party for Shiplap. Aloysius Shiplap had grown — for the first time ever, anywhere — left-handed grass. It was not called that because it whorled to the left, but because the organic constituents of it were reversed in their construction. Left-handed minerals had been constructed long since, and perhaps they also occurred in nature. Left-handed bacteria and broths were long known, but nobody else had ever grown anything as complex as left-handed grass.

“In everything, its effect is reversed,” Shiplap explained. “Cattle pastured on this would lose rather than gain weight. If there ever develops a market for really skinny cattle I'll be waiting for it.”

They tossed off a good bit of Tosher's Gin as they got into the celebration. Tosher's is the only drink that will buzz up both humans and Ktistec machines. There is a flavoring used in Tosher's that gets machines high. The alcohol in it sometimes has a similar effect on humans.

Epiktistes got as mellow as a Pottawattamie County pumpkin. Ktistec machines are like the Irish and the Indians. They start unwinding when the gin begins to flow. Their behavior could become quite wild unless carefully watched.

And the Institute people were also having a good time.

“I wouldn't have him any other way,” said Smirnov. “When he relaxes, he relaxes all over the place. Hawkins' machine literally bites people when it's frustrated by a difficult problem. Drexel's smaller machine comes all apart throwing arc snuffers and solenoids and is mighty dangerous to be around. There are worse sorts than this clown of a machine I have — though he does get pretty slushy when he's in his cups.”

Valery Mok had gathered up a bunch of Epiktistes' utterances and slipped them into cocktail cookies. Glasser, eating one, chewed on a bit of the metallic tape. He pulled it slithering, off his tongue, and read — 

“Item. What was the mysterious name written by a deaf moron on the wall of the men's room in an institution in Vinita, Oklahoma?”

Epiktistes giggled, though the item may have been serious when he issued it.

Cogsworth pulled one out of his mouth, stripping the crumbs from it with his tongue as it came.

“Item. Why does Petit Larousse take five lines too many to say almost nothing about the ancient Chibcha Indians of Columbia?”

At this point Valery went into her high laugh that would even make the alphabet sound funny.

Shiplap pulled one out of his grinning mouth, and it seemed an extension of his grin as it came.

“Item,” he read. “What is there about the Great Blue Island Swamp that puzzles geologists? Or — in the old bylining manner — how recent is recent?”

Tosher's is giggle juice. Glasser's laughter sounded like a string of firecrackers going off.

Smirnov extracted the utterance from his cookie in the lordly manner. He read the utterance as though it were of extreme importance — and it was.

“Item. What peculiarity is almost revealed by the faded paint of old Rock Island and Pacific Railroad boxcars?”

“Oh, stop giggling, Epikt, it isn't as funny as that!”

“It is, it is,” bubbled Valery. Then she nearly choked bringing out from her own cookie a very long tape, and she read it with a very gay voice:

“Item. Why, when the gruesome Little Willy verses were revived among sub-teenagers in the early nineteen-eighties, were they concerned almost entirely with chewing gum? In their Australian and British homelands six decades before, they were concerned with everything. But here we have gruesome verses about forty-nine different flavors of gum. As for instance,

Little Willy mixed his gum

with bits of Baby's cerebrum

and Papa's blood for Juicy

Fruit.

Mother said, “Oh Will, don't

 duit.”

“I'd think it would give too high a flavor to the gum,” said Glasser.

It's a lot of fun to open cocktail cookies and read out utterances of a Ktistec machine. The Institute staff generated a bunch of what we can only call merriment. But they were busy people, and the party had to come to an end. Epiktistes issued a verse as they prepared to leave.

When the world's last Tosher's

 is drunken,

and the world's last item has

 flewn,

and the Institute people are

 stunken,

and Epikt is high as the — 

And there he stuck! Eight million billion billion memory contacts he had in him, and he couldn't come up with a rhyme for flewn.

“How many items have you really gathered, Epikt?” Glasser asked as they began to break up.

“Millions of them, bub, millions of them.”

“No. Actually, he has about three-quarters of a million that he believes he can tie together,” Smirnov explained. “I feel that he'll bring them into a pattern, but I'm afraid it will be a facetious one.”

“Epikt, you cute cubicle, will you be able to give us any idea of what to look for by tomorrow?” Valery asked.

“Boys and girls, I'll have it all wrapped up and on display for you tomorrow,” Epiktistes issued. “I'll even be able to tell you what the thing smelled like.”

Expectation ran high among the people of the Institute. Epiktistes wanted to have the reporters in, but Smirnov said no. He didn't trust his machine. Epikt was a cube twenty meters on one side; and of his thousands of eyes, some of them always seemed to be laughing at his master.

“It won't be a hoax?” Smirnov asked his machine apprehensively.

“Boss, did I ever hoax you?” Epikt issued.

“Yes.”

“Boss, some things are best presented in the guise of a hoax, but underneath this won't be one.”

It was a crooked-tongued machine sometimes, and Smirnov was more apprehensive than ever.

The next day everyone gathered early to hear what Epikt had to say. They pulled up chairs and recording canisters and waited for the machine to begin.

“Ladies, gentlemen, associates,” said Epikt solemnly, “we are gathered together to hear of an important matter. I will present it as well as I am able. There will be disbelief, I know, but I am sure of my facts. Make yourselves comfortable.” He paused and then as an afterthought added, “You may smoke.”

“You clanking cubicle, don't tell us what we may do,” Smirnov screamed. “You're only a machine that I made.”

“You and three thousand other workers,” issued Epikt, without blinking an eye, “and in the final stages, the important stages, I directed my own assembly. I could not have happened otherwise. Only I know what is in me. As to my own abilities — ”

“Get on with it, Epikt,” Smirnov ordered, “and try to avoid the didactic manner.”

“Then to get to the point, in the year 1980, the largest city of the American Midland was destroyed by an unnatural disaster.”

“That was only twenty years ago,” Glasser cut in. “It seems that someone would have heard of it.”

“I wonder if St. Louis knew that she was destroyed,” Valery ventured. “She acts as though she thought that she were still there.”

“St. Louis was not the city,” issued Epikt. “This destruction of a metropolitan area of seven million persons in much less than seven seconds was a great horror from the human viewpoint — come to think of it I now recall being a little disturbed by it myself. The thing was so fearful that it was decided to suppress the whole business and blissfully forget about it.”

“Wouldn't that be a little difficult?” said Aloysius Shiplap sarcastically.

“It was very difficult to do,” issued Epikt, “and yet it was done, completely, within twenty hours. And from that moment until this, nobody has remembered or thought about it at all.”

“And if Your Whimsical Highness will just explain how this was done?” Smirnov challenged the machine.

“I'll explain as well as I can, good master. The project was put in charge of a master scientist who shall be nameless — but only for a few minutes.”

“How were the written references of a metropolis of seven million persons obliterated?” asked Cogsworth.

“By a device then newly invented by our master scientist,” Epikt answered. “It was known as the Tele-Pantographic Distorter. Even I, from this distance of time and through the cloud of induced amnesia, cannot understand how it worked. But it did work, and it simultaneously destroyed all printed references to our subject. This left holes in the references, and the flow of matter to fill those holes was sometimes of inferior texture, as I have noted. Holographic — that is handwritten, for you, Valery — references were more difficult. Most were simply destroyed. In more important documents, the text was flowed in automatic writing to fill the hole, and in close imitation of the original handwriting. But these imitations were often imperfect. I have a few thousand instances of this. But the Tele-Pantographic Distorter was a truly remarkable machine, and I regret it is now out of use.”

“Kindly explain what happened to this remarkable machine,” said Smirnov.

“Oh, it's still here in the Institute. You stumble into it a dozen times a day, good master, and you curse it as ‘That Damnable Pile of Junk,’ ” issued Epikt. “But you have a block that will not allow you to remember what it is.”

“I believe that I have been stumbling into such a pile of junk for many years,” mused Smirnov. “Several times I have almost permitted myself to wonder what it was.”

“And you invented it. The master scientist of the memory-obliteration was yourself, Gregory Smirnov.”

“Hog hang it, Epikt! Your jug will leak!” protested Shiplap. “How of the human memories? The seven million inhabitants of the city would have had relatives of at least an equal number elsewhere. Didn't they wonder about their mothers or children or brothers or sisters?”

“They sorrowed, but they didn't wonder,” issued Epikt. “It was a sorrow to which they could give no name. Examine the period and see how many really sad songs were popular in the years 1980 and 1981. But broadcast euphoria soon masked it over. The human memory of the thing was blocked by induced world amnesia. This was done hypnotically over the broadcast waves, and over more subtle waves. Few escaped it. The deaf moron mentioned in one of my items was one of those few. He scrawled the name of the town on a wall once, but it meant nothing to anyone.”

“But there would be a hundred million loose ends to clean up,” Glasser protested.

“Raise that number several powers,” issued Epikt. “There were very many loose ends, and most of them were taken care of. I gathered a million or so that remained in the process of this study, but they could not break through the induced amnesia. The door was bolted on the whole subject. Then it was double-locked. It was necessary to destroy not only the memory, but also the memory of that memory. Mr. Smirnov, in what was perhaps his greatest feat, put himself under the final hypnosis against it. It was his job to pull in the hole after them all. But it bothered him more than others because he was more involved in it. After this temporary explanation it will bother him no more. This time he will forget it with a clear conscience.

“He does not recognize or remember it even now. It was his intent and triumph that he never should. The city and its destruction are forgotten forever, but the method of that memory-obliteration has only been forced to a subliminal level. It will be resurrected and used again whenever there is a great unnatural disaster.”

“And where in tarnation or the American Midlands was this city?” Cogsworth hollered.

“Its site is now known as the Great Blue Island Swamp,” issued Epikt.

“Finish it, you goggle-eyed gadget,” Shiplap shrilled. “What's the name of that town?”

“Chicago,” issued Epikt.

That broke it! That tore it clear up! It was a hoax after all. That clattering clown of a cubicle had led them into it with all eyes open. Valery went into her high laughter, and her good husband Cogsworth chortled like a gooney bird with the hiccups.

“Chicago! It sounds like a little zoo beaver sliding down a mud slide and hitting the water. Chicago!” It was the funniest word Valery had ever heard.

“Nobody but a machine gone comic could coin a name like that,” laughed Glasser with his fire-cracker laugh. “Chicago!”

“I take my hat off to you, Epiktistes,” said Aloysius Shiplap. “You are a cog-footed, tongue-in-cheek tall tale teller. People, this machine is ripe!”

“I'm a little disappointed,” said Smirnov. “So the mountain labored and produced a mouse. But did it have to be a wall-eyed mouse in a clown suit, Epikt? It's too tall even for a tale. That a great city could be completely destroyed only twenty years ago and we know nothing about it — that's tall enough. But that it should have the impossible name of Chicago tops it all. If you weighed all possible sounds — and I'm sure that you did, Epikt — you could not come up with a more ridiculous sounding name than that.”

“Good people, it is meant to be this way,” issued Epiktistes. “You cannot remember it. You cannot recognize it. And when you leave this room you will not even be able to recall the funny name. You will have only the dim impression that the clownish machine played a clownish trick on you. The disasters — for I suspect that there were several such — are well forgotten. The world would lie down and die if it remembered them too well.

“And yet there really was a large city named Chicago. As Sikagó it left a hole in one Hungarian dictionary-encyclopedia; and the Petit Larousse had to flow French froth about the Chibcha Indians into the place where Chicago had stood. Something, for which I find the tentative name Chicago Hot, was pulled out of the jazz complex by the roots. The Calumet River had flowed about the city somewhere, so there came a reluctance to use that name of the old Indian peace pipe. Chicago was a great city. The heart of her downtown was known as the Loop, and one of her baseball teams was named the Cubs. For that reason those two words were forced out of use. They might be evocative.”

“Loop? Cubs?” giggled Valery. “Those words are almost as funny as Chicago. How do you make them up, Epikt?”

“In popular capsule impression Chicago was the chewing-gum capital of the world. The leader in this manufacture was a man named — as well as I can reconstruct it — Wiggly. Children somehow found the echoes of the gruesome destruction of Chicago and tied it in with this capsule impression to produce the bloody Little Willy verses about chewing gum.”

“Epikt, you top yourself,” said Shiplap, “if anything could top an invention as funny as Chicago.”

“Good people, it comes down over you like a curtain,” issued Epiktistes. “You forget again — even my joke, even the funny name of the town. And, more to the point, I forget also.

“It's gone. Gone. All gone. How peculiar! It is a long blank tape you all stare at as though you were under hypnosis. I must have suffered a blackout. I never issued a blank tape before. Smirnov, I have the taste in my terminals of an experiment that didn't quite come off. Feed me another. I don't fail often.”

“That is enough for today, Epiktistes. We are all sleepy for some reason. No, it didn't work out — whatever it was. I forget what it was that we were working on. It doesn't matter. Our failures are well forgotten. We'll hit on something else. We're working on a lot of things.”

Then they all shuffled out sleepily and went back to their work. Smirnov's machine had busted on something or other, but it was a good machine and would hit the next time, of that they were sure.

In the corridor, Smirnov stumbled into his old Tele-Pantographic Distorter. He had been stumbling unseeing into it every day for twenty years.

The machine rolled nine banks of eyes at Smirnov and smiled willingly. Was it another of those disasters? Was there any deep work to be done? Tele-Pan was ready. But no. Smirnov passed on. The machine smiled again and went peacefully back to sleep.

“That damnable piece of junk,” Smirnov growled, walking along and petting his sore shin. “I feel almost as if I were on the verge of wondering what it is.”

A Special Condition In Summit City

“How do we communicate anyhow, Sumner?” Fenwick asked. “Those two seem almost to have something new to say about communication.”

“Except that they're unable to communicate it,” Sumner jeered. “That's the trouble with permitting scientists and such amateurs to have opinions about thought processes. We communicate by words, Fenwick, and not by any sort of waves dreamed up by these wave-brains. They are saying that even conventional signs owe their meaning to telepathy.”

“But Hegeman and Bott-Grabman are men of considerable reputation — forget in just what field. They say that words are only a conversation or index that we employ, and that we could not communicate more than fifty percent if we were restricted to words.”

“Let them stick to their own fields,” said Sumner. “They know nothing of language communication.”

“It isn't only language that they downgrade,” said Fenwick. “Signs, conventions, assumptions, all sorts of things — they say that these convey little by themselves. They say that we would have no way of knowing our own face in the mirror — even though we looked at it a dozen times every day of our lives — if it were not for these personal waves which are popularly known as telepathy. They even say that the parallelism of concepts — which is what we know as consciousness — would not be possible without the reception of the echo of our own waves.”

“I tell you, those men know nothing, Fenwick.”

“But Bott-Grabman has one striking case: an Italian-speaking woman married to an Armenian-speaking man for thirty years. Neither has learned the spouse's language, but they always understood each other.”

That is when it happened, but silently and with no tip-off. The change came over everyone in the city. Fenwick's own personal waves were scrambled as he continued, and it made a difference:

“The woman — now I am not sure which was the woman — I think one of them was a woman and one was an Armenian — the pro-names of both were ambivalent, or rather unknown to me — What gender is Morvan? How Armenian is Renentlas? It would not be incompatible that it was the other one who talked Haik.”

“Haik, Yike! It's a good thing they didn't understand each other or they'd have been divorced in a year. You are exorbitantly involved, Fenwick.”

“It is you, you convoluted colt,” Fenwick flared back, “and I don't speak temporally, old Sumner-mumner.”

That made Sumner mad, and they had a fistfight.

“We should be able to understand each other a modicum,” Sumner said as he marinated Fenwick's ear (but they couldn't, they couldn't understand each other at all).

“You mean we should be able to understand each other a bit,” said Fenwick as he fractured Sumner's kidney. “Sure I mean a bit — one of the pairs of stands that a hawser goes around — it is not something that goes into a horse's mouth, Sumner. Which one of us is Sumner? I'd like to see you put one into a horse's mouth.”

“Horse's mouth straight from the is different,” said Sumner, or perhaps it was Fenwick. Actually it was the speaker who spoke. “I'm telling you straight from the horse's mouth you are the wrong end of a horse. That is my inconsequential opinion.”

They fought, and they had been friends.

The same evening, a few miles across town, an elderly Armenian man cut the throat of his Italian wife of thirty years.

“All at once it seemed she was just jabber,” he said.

At about the same time, a fat man rushed back angrily and punched a newsboy in the face.

“You have sold me a foreman paper,” he accused the boy.

“It's the same paper you get every evening,” bubbled the boy bloodily. “You punch people in the face, you wait till my brother comes, he'll punch your dod bobbed knob. It's the same letters. It's the same words.”

“I know it's the same words. Why can't I read it then? It must be in a foreman language.”

He punched the boy in the face again, and left. What you expect him to do when a boy sells him a paper he can't read?

Two men were on a scaffold thirty stories up. This isn't the story of the two Irishmen on a scaffold. One of these was Irish and one was a Dane.

“Drop the line a little,” said the Dane. “Hah! Did I say drop it? Belay that last. I mean rai — ”

“You mean railly drop it?” asked the Irishman. “I take it that is the meaning of belay, though I wish you'd forego Danish words.”

He railly dropped the line. He fell thirty stories. It killed him.

“The fellow misunderstood me,” said the Dane. “He never did that before. I was trying to tell him — ” But the fall killed the Dane too.

Traffic was getting snarled.

“Can't you tell green from red, bub?” a policeman asked an honest citizen motorist.

“I sure can, and your nose ain't green,” said the honest citizen, and his wife laughed at the joke.

“Then why don't you obey the light?” asked the policeman.

“Why? They started to give orders now?”

“Red means stop.”

“Red don't mean stop to me,” said the honest citizen. “Even stop don't mean stop to me. You start taking orders from lights and pretty soon you're taking orders from bugs. Why don't they fix some way all the cars don't try to cross the intersection at the same time? This way makes a jam-up.”

“Why don't you blow your horn, John?” the honest citizen's wife asked him. “Everyone else is blowing his horn.”

The honest citizen blew his horn.

Things started to get rough as the evening came on. The police couldn't do anything. There was now no way of telling a policeman from anyone else. The magistrate couldn't make out warrants. What kind of words do you put on warrants anyhow? What do they mean if you put them there? And how will they mean the same thing to someone else?

The power went off in large sections. There was confusion in the power houses and the switching stations. Who remembered the difference between cut it in and cut it out and cut it off?

“Let's get out of this riot and go home to supper,” a man said to his wife. She slapped him silly.

“Why'd you do that?” he asked, peering up from the sidewalk.

“No man can talk to me like that,” she said.

“But I just meant — ”

“How am I to know what you meant? You ought to be shot. You can't talk to me like that.”

“But I'm your husband.”

“I don't know what you're talking about. I don't know what that means.”

“I don't know either. It seems like I've always been saying it.”

They walked off in opposite directions.

Then it broke clear down. The fires began and smallpox broke out. Whenever anything basic is disrupted for a bit, solid brick walls will burn, and triply-inoculated persons will begin to die of smallpox before you can count to a thousand.

How are you going to put out fires when you can't tell the firemen from anyone else or the fire-wagons from other vehicles? How is a fireman going to go about it if he can't understand orders? Why doesn't everyone shut up if nobody can understand what they're saying?

“I'm the mayor of the city,” said a man at a shambles. “Let's attack the problem in a front-headed manner.”

“What's that mean?” asked a commissioner.

“I don't know,” said the mayor. “I've been saying it for a long time. Look the words up in a book. It might tell.”

“The time for words is past,” said the police chief. “This is the time for action. It seems that I've always said that too.”

“What do you mean by action?” asked the Commissioner of Parks and Sewers.

“I mean this,” said the police chief, and he began to punch the Commissioner of Parks and Sewers around.

“Let us attack the problem in a forceful manner,” said the mayor.

“How forceful you want him to get?” asked the Commissioner of Parks and Sewers.

The meeting broke up without adjourning. They hadn't been getting anyplace.

“What paper did you say you worked for, young man?” Professor Hegeman asked the reporter.

“The Summit City Sun. I write science features, as I keep telling you. But my time isn't wasted here. You two throw away enough in conversation to keep me in material for months.”

“Hegeman, that's the paper whose edition was rather odd tonight,” said Professor Bott-Grabman. “We both commented on it.”

“I haven't seen it,” said the reporter. “Is that it?”

“Very little to see,” said Hegeman. “Thirty-nine blank pages, and only the name of the paper and some words in large type on the front page. ‘IF YOU THINK YOU CAN DO BETTER YOU COME AND TRY — THE EDITOR,’ is what it says.”

“Something is wrong!” yowled the reporter. “I'd better get back.”

“I thought you'd come for a story,” said Bott-Grabman.

“I have. It's the biggest thing I've come on for a long time, but there must be something wrong back at the paper.”

“Likely there wasn't much news today, and the editor just didn't feel like putting out much of a paper,” said Hegeman. “Some days I am listless and don't feel like doing much either.”

“My radio!” cried the reporter. “Let me hear if there's something wrong in town.”

“You can't get a thing here,” said Bott-Grabman. “You've no idea how well we are shielded. That's necessary for our evening's experiment. Now, forget about everything else! We are not inclined to chew our words twice here. We'll try to give you a story, but you have a distorted idea of what we are working on.”

“Everyone says you're working on telepathy,” said the reporter.

“Well, for our present step, we're working off it, not on it. Please get hold of one thing. We have always been telepathic.”

“Both you and Professor Hegeman?”

“Why of course both of us! Do you think one or the other of us is a freak? Of late I've been so disgusted with people that I hesitate to do any more lecturing. ‘Will we ever be telepathic?’ they ask us — those wool-headed sheep. ‘You already are,’ I tell them patiently.

“ ‘Then why don't we know it?’ they bumble out. ‘I wonder you even know which end of you to put your hats on,’ I tell them, and sometimes this way of talking alienates them. ‘Telepathy is thinking to a distance, but you can't think to a distance if you can't think at all. Most of you can't think from one end of your brain to the other,’ I explain it to them, ‘you can't project what you haven't got, you bleating pecori,’ I say, ‘but, for all that, some of it comes through with you.’ I tell them all this, but I am unable to make them understand it. I haven't a good platform manner.”

“No, you haven't, Professor Bott-Grabman,” said the reporter. “That is why I am so interested in being able to interpret you. As I understand it, certain gifted persons already have the sense of telepathy — to an extent. What you must do is give the public a real demonstration of it.”

“We have tried, young man,” said Professor Hegeman. “The existence of telepathy should be as easy to demonstrate as the existence of a tree. But how to prove the existence of anything to those who close their eyes and stuff their hands in their ears? We have tried to demonstrate this simple thing till we are blue in the face — or (more accurately) I turn blue and Bott-Grabman takes on rather an ashen hue. In our desperation, we are putting on a little demonstration this evening and tonight. It should amuse. And perhaps it will convince some. When the existence of the sense is proved to the public, then we will be better able to work towards the development of it.”

“Then you are sending out waves — ” began the reporter.

“No. We are inhibiting waves,” said Professor Hegeman firmly. “We are scrambling all personal waves everywhere in the city.”

“And that will somehow bring out the latent telepathy of the people?” asked the reporter.

“Quite the contrary, young man,” said Bott-Grabman. “It will completely block every manifestation of telepathy in the city. We work backwards.”

The first units of the National Guard arrived in Summit City about ten o'clock that night. The reports from the place had alarmed the governor and everyone else. With riots and murders breaking out everywhere and the police strangely helpless, the executive took quick action.

The guardsmen began to set the place in order, but only for a little while. They never got into the heart of the city. They began to come apart. The first reports back had been clear. Then they were muddy. Then they were completely incoherent.

“ — cannot make headway. Which way is headway? How will we know the guardsmen from the people? What is wrong is that we keep shooting each other. Is this a departure from our original orders? Instruct how we are to tell us apart — ” came the last report from the colonel for the night.

“The man is mad,” said the governor to his aide. “Were not the guards uniformed?”

“They were when they left here,” said the aide. The governor gave up on his guards and appealed to the army. Within an hour, the Central Area Commandos were wheeling towards Summit City.

“Then it is not a demonstration of telepathy that you are to give tonight?” asked the reporter. “What is it then? I don't understand you.”

“We are trying to demonstrate the absence of telepathy,” said Hegeman. “Suppose that a tribe lived for generations in the sound of thunder that rolled always in one tone with no break at all. Would they hear it?”

“I don't know,” said the reporter. “They would hear it in a way, I believe.”

“Would they notice it?”

“They might not.”

“But if the all-pervading sound were suddenly turned off, would they notice it then?”

“They would surely notice a difference.”

“Young man, words do not half convey. They are only indicators — hints, small helps, refinements. But we cannot communicate by words alone. Try it! I believe that the people in Summit City are trying just that now — if they have not given up the attempt. Uniforms, sigils, conventions have become meaningless to them. They are cut off from direct understanding. All they have left is words, and they can't communicate with them.”

“Then what do people communicate with, Professor Hegeman?”

“What do you smell with? With the nose on the front of your face. What do you see with? With the two marbles that roll around on the forepart of your head. What do you talk with? With the amorphous tongue in your mouth and the mouth box. But what do you actually communicate with? With your brain, you little oaf without one! Words and gestures are only thrown in for good measure.”

General Gestalt came down by copter as his commandos began to enter the city. He was a bitter man who depended mostly on himself. He had little truck with other people.

That is what made the difference.

He watched his commandos disintegrate, as the guardsmen had disintegrated. He discovered that they could not understand his orders, and their replies made no sense to him.

“Insanity gas?” he puzzled. “Subliminal confusion broadcasts? Brain-softening bacteria? No, it's too sudden for that. It's coming from somewhere. I've got to get a bearing on it. If you can't get a triangulation, the next best thing is a bloodhound. There's one of the best.” General Gestalt caught Corporal Cram by the scruff of the neck and lifted him off his feet.

“Boy, you got the best nose for trouble in the outfit,” the general said. “I see that you don't understand my words, but it won't matter. You can find the middle of a trouble quicker than any half-cooked man I have. All right, lead me to it — 

“No, not there, boy. All they're doing is breaking out windows and shooting each other. Lead me to the source of the trouble. We don't want our trouble second-hand, do we? Get in the copter with me.”

The general hauled the corporal into the copter.

“Now, boy, we don't want to get into that little trouble down there. That's a derivative. You always had a talent for the genuine. We got to find the Center of the Trouble. Look at me, boy, even if you don't understand me. Let's go where we can get our trouble wholesale. You'll like that. Nose it out! Point!”

The corporal didn't understand the words but he did have the best nose in the outfit for finding the middle of a trouble. He pointed, and the general pointed the copter. They came down near an isolated laboratory on the edge of town. They got out. The corporal followed his nose, and the general followed the corporal.

“I am calm again, young man,” said Professor Hegeman. “Look. It is simple. We have always had telepathy. It is so constant with us that we do not recognize it. But we have to bring it into general recognition before we can bring it to a more significant stage. Everybody is telepathic. Everybody always has been. That is the way that we communicate with each other. Oh, the words and the adjuncts help a little. Bott-Grabman believes as much as fifty percent, I believe much less. We will have a closer idea of it after tonight's experiment.

“With our inhibitors, we have set up a special condition in Summit City tonight. For a while, and under this special condition, nobody will be telepathic. They should be having difficulty in communicating with each other right now. Perhaps they are feeling a certain frustration about it all.”

The corporal broke into the room and the general followed him. The general sized it all up immediately with a bitter eye.

“Turn that damn thing off!” he ordered. “It's bugging the people.”

They turned it off. The experiment was over with. The people in the city could understand each other again — as well as they ever could.

They began to put out the fires and to bind up their wounds. The cases of smallpox reverted to nervous hives, and people made the best of the curious situation.

But the dead did not come back to life.

Professor Hegeman was blue in the face. Professor Bott-Grabman had taken on rather an ashen hue. They had just been sentenced to death for crimes against humanity and they were disturbed by the sentence.

“But the experiment was a success,” Bott-Grabman protested again and again. “It was an excessive success. Even we did not realize how complete was the popular dependence on telepathy. Otherwise we would have used a milder inhibitor. I request that you release us so we can get on with our work. A wide field of experimentation will be opened up as soon as the recognition of the thing seeps down to the doltish public. We have great things ahead of us.”

“True,” said the judge. “The two of you will soon embark on what a mordant humorist once called The Greatest Journey of Them All — Death. You are sentenced for the four hundred deaths you have caused and for the thousands of cases of induced insanity.”

“But it worked! We are vindicated! Everybody is a telepath!” Hegeman cried. “Surely you understand it now.”

“Were I indeed a telepath, perhaps I could see into the twisted minds of you two and comprehend somehow your inhumanity,” said the judge. “Being only a man, I cannot do it. I only pray that your evil and your secret method of destruction will die with you.

“Take them away!”

Pig In A Pokey

This was on Hippodamia. The name isn't important. There were ten thousand asteroid-stations as undistinguished.

Netter settled back into the soft live-moss chair and prepared to talk the Creature out of the impasse. Then he saw the big moustached thing on the wall and he began to tremble.

After all, that was one of the things he had come to find — it was part of it. It was the great beefy, bearded, moustached head of Captain Kalbfleish mounted on the wall like a trophy, and amid the other trophies of the room.

“Great God, Man!” — and it wasn't a man to whom he spoke — “That's a human head you have mounted on the wall,” Netter crackled.

“Which Great God, yours or mine?” Porcellus grunted. “They aren't the same, or they have been described badly. Yes, a human head. I had always wanted one. You notice that I have given it the favored position in the center of the great wall. I now have at least one of the heads of every species that interests me. Some of the heads are much larger than that of your friend Kalbfleish and have ornamentals that his lacks. It's a pity that humans don't have sweeping horns; that would make them perfect. But even without them, the head of Kalbfleish is the finest in my collection. It's a truly magnificent head!”

It was. “Kalbfleish has a fine head on him” they used to say, and laugh. The big Captain, for all his remarkable courage and spirit, had not been long on brains. It was a huge, wild, hairy head with a stark and staring expression — as though Kalbfleish had died in terror and agony.

“You killed him, of course,” said Netter dryly as he braided a romal in his nervous hands. “So, one way or the other, I will have to kill you, or you me.”

“Not I,” said Porcellus — a moist and hog-fat creature — “I would not even kill an insect. Your friend had a violent heart and it finally ruptured on him. He was uncommonly energetic, especially so on the day of his death.”

“Where is his body, you fat pig?”

“My translator has only a rough idea of pig, and I suppose you intend it for an insult; but I have a tough hide. I couldn't do a thing with his body, Netter, it was putrid in no time. It seems that when you humans know you are going to die you would begin to give yourself the injections three or four basic days before the time; then your bodies would not turn foul after death. I had no idea he had neglected it, so I wasn't prepared. I was lucky to save the head.”

“We humans don't know when we are going to die,” said Netter. “What is this you give me to eat? It's good.”

“Yes, I remember now Kalbfleish saying he didn't know when he would die, but I supposed he spoke in humor. Since you also say it, it must be true of your species. The name of the food would mean nothing to you, but you have a close parallel to its method of preparation. I have read about geese in an Earth book of the captain's, though I overlooked pigs. You sometimes put live geese to dance on hot griddles before they are killed. This excites and alarms them, and enlarges their livers. The livers then become delicacies. The creatures whose meat you are eating also died of excitement and alarm, and they are delicious through and through.”

Well, the meat was certainly delicious. That fat hog of a creature knew how to live well. Netter finished the meal and set it aside. Once more he braided the romal in his hands while he grasped for words.

“I suppose all the creatures whose heads you have here died by accident, Porcellus?” he asked.

“Well, all but one of them died,” said Porcellus, “and I did not kill them. One of them died at a great distance from here; he willed me his head and had it sent to me because I had admired it. And one of them, so far as I know, is still alive. He was a being of multiplex heads. He hacked one of them off quite willingly when I praised it, and he cured and mounted it himself. A queer chap. He is staring down at you now and it will amuse you to guess which he is.”

Porcellus didn't actually speak like that. He spoke in a series of grunts, some verbal and some ventral. But the Console Translator of Netter had a selector dial. Netter could dial translation in pidgin, in cut and dry, in bombast, in diplomatic pleasantry, in old southern U.S. soft-talk or Yiddish dialect if he wished, or in the courtly manner. Whenever he encountered a creature who was repulsive to him — as Porcellus was — he dialed the courtly manner of speech. This was somehow easier on his ears and his nerves.

“We waste time,” Netter told the creature. “I have come to pursue claim to this asteroid. We now need it for a way-station, and it has never worked well for two such different species to share a station. We had first claim here long ago; and we abandoned it. Then you set up your station here; and you also abandoned it.”

“Never,” said Porcellus. “Would I abandon my cozy home and my trophies? Would my masters wish the removal of so fine a station-master as myself? I was called Home on urgent business. I was gone but for a basic year, and the odds were very high against any other claimer coming while I was gone.”

“The rules state that a live and competent agent must be in residence at all times or the asteroid can be declared abandoned,” Netter said. “The asteroid was plainly abandoned when Kalbfleish arrived; you were gone. He so reported it, and he claimed it for us. The claim was approved and accepted.”

“True,” said the creature Porcellus. “What is that thing you play with in your hands? But Captain Kalbfleish — following the awkward interval after I had returned — also abandoned the station by dying. I so reported his death, and claimed the station for ourselves once more. The claim was approved and accepted. Now you are here as my guest only and, I tell you in all kindness, not a very welcome one.”

“But a proved murder will void your claim,” said Netter.

“So prove it, fine man,” said the creature Porcellus. “Yours is a smaller head than Kalbfleish's but it has a certain distinction. I could make room for it among my trophies. We have each of us sent various reports, and the matter is under litigation. In the meanwhile, the accidental death of either of us would void his claim and settle the matter. We cannot kill directly. Investigators are already on the way and we are both prime suspects; we are the only ones here. What is the leather thing with which you play?”

“A romal, Porcellus. A short quirt braided onto a rein. They made them in Old Mexico and in California and Texas, but they were mostly ornamental.”

“Earth places all three, my translator says. Were they used with a creature?”

“With a pony, a horse.”

“Haven't I stumbled onto the information that the horse is extinct?”

“Yes. The braiding of the little thing is only a hobby of mine.”

“A hobby, according to my comprehensive translator, is a sort of vicarious horse — a mental surrogate which one rides. Is that correct?”

“Correct, Porcellus. Haven't you a hobby?”

“My hobby is heads,” said the thing.

Netter started to leave the creature then to go to his own camp. “To the early and accidental death of one of us,” he toasted with the last of the drink that Porcellus had given him.

“Shoals!” toasted Porcellus. “I believe that is your word. And a warning: stay away from the low dome which you will see on the plain. It's dangerous.”

Netter went to his own camp.

Now Porcellus wanted him to go to the curious dome — or he would not have warned him away from it. Was it dangerous? Or did the thing merely want to divert him? Porcellus must have known that he would explore every feature of landscape on the small asteroid. Perhaps it was only to worry him, as Porcellus himself had seemed to be worried. And what in hog heaven can worry a hog? Netter had it after a while. “He knows when he's going to die. He's surprised that humans haven't that knowledge. But can I depend on it? It's only a twice removed guess.”

Netter left the dome till last. He circumnavigated the asteroid in a brisk six-mile walk and found nothing of interest. He came thoughtfully to the dome on the plain.

The dome rose to no more than the height of his head in the center, was about sixty feet in diameter, was symmetrical in general outline but with a slightly roughened surface, and was probably artificial. “I believe it is an old direction beacon of the Porcines,” he said. “Yes, this is certainly the top of an obsolete hemisphere, and most of it is underground. They were no good. I believe that we had them once.”

Netter stepped gingerly onto the sphere. It was certainly firm enough. He knew a firm thing when he met one. There was no danger of him crashing through. He climbed the steep, then the less steep elevation of it and came to the center. “Nice,” he said, “but nothing.” Then he felt it activated. “So Porcellus still uses it,” he said, “I didn't realize that they were so backward.”

He walked around on it, and it rotated gently under him, compensating for him. He strode down the side a little way, and it quickly brought him back to the top. “This could be fun,” he said.

He could take three, four quick steps away from the top, and he would still be on top. He could tense to jump sideways, and the sphere would compensate before he left the surface; he'd still land exactly on the center whichever way he jumped. The thing rolled easily and noiselessly and anticipated or reacted immediately to every movement. He walked, he ran, he laughed, he trotted half a mile and stood where he had stood before.

“You know tricks and I know tricks, old sphere,” he shouted, “let's see who's the smarter.” He feinted, he broke, he dodged, he ran crazy-legged as though he were broken-field dribbling at Galactic-rules football. He shucked off tacklers, he scored countless goals in his mind, but he always ended on the very center top of the dome.

He lay down and rolled, trying to go down the steep far slopes as though they were grass banks. He stopped rolling and lay on his back, and he was still on the top of the rotating compensating sphere or dome.

“I haven't had so much fun since I was a boy in an amusement park,” he said.

He hadn't? Then why did he suddenly begin to tremble? Why did he begin to whistle so off-key if he wasn't scared? “Stone walls do not a pokey make nor locks a — ” it was the Cross-Bar Hotel Blues he was whistling and he had to stop it.

He was locked tight in jail on a little hillock in the middle of a plain, and there was no barrier in sight. There was no possible way he could get off the compensating dome.

He was imprisoned in the highest most open spot on the asteroid. In an hour of cavorting and hopping about he had not got one full step from where he started, and there was no possible way that he could.

He thought about it for a full Hippodamia day and night — forty-five minutes basic time. He couldn't come up with a thing.

“If I had a rope and you had a stump,” he said talking to no one, “I'd rope the stump — I'm good at that — and pull myself off this thing.”

But he didn't have a rope and the plain sure didn't have a stump. It had hardly a pebble as big as his thumb.

“This is where Kalbfleish died,” said Netter. “You said it right, pig man, my friend had a violent heart and it finally ruptured on him. You didn't have to murder him directly. You let him run himself to death. He was uncommonly energetic, as you said, and especially so on the day of his death. I can see it all now. He could never stand to be confined. He would have gone wild when he found himself confined in what seemed the most open space on the asteroid. He'd have run till he ruptured every thing in him. It is no wonder that he died with that look of horror.”

This was a jail that nobody could break. Why try more tricks on the sphere? It could compensate for every trick that was.

“Only a creature that could fly in zero atmosphere could get off of this,” he mused. “Even a worm couldn't crawl off unless he were too small to affect the compensators. If I had two cant hooks I might be able to fool the thing, but it could no doubt compensate for the resolution of forces. If I had a weight on a line I might puzzle it a little, but not much. Porky has it made. I'll die either of starvation or exertion or insanity, but the investigation will not show that I was murdered. ‘Why have two humans died of heart attack here?’ is the most they can ask him, and Porky will rub his hands and say ‘Bad climate.’ ”

But what Porky Porcellus really said was:

“Fine man, why do you play like a boy on top of that thing? Is that any way for a hopeful asteroid agent to conduct himself?”

“Porcellus, you think you've trapped me, do you?” flared Netter.

“I trap you? My hands are clean. Is it my fault that two humans develop the strange mania of running themselves to death in a weird game?”

How far away was Porcellus from the edge of the dome? Too far. Too far by several yards.

“Porcellus, what is this thing?” Netter cried out.

“Once it was a beam sphere, as you have probably guessed, and it is obsolete. I have altered it to something else. Now it is an intelligence test. To fail it is to die.”

“Did anyone ever get off it?” Netter called. He had to get Porcellus interested. He had to get him to come several feet closer before he turned away.

“Only one passed the intelligence test,” said the creature, “and he had unusual natural advantages. He was a peculiar fellow of the species Larrik who visited me some basic years ago. He simply broke himself into two pieces and walked off in opposite directions. The globe couldn't compensate for both of them. One got clear, obtained a line, pulled his other half off; both halves laughed at me, and then they rejoined themselves. But you haven't his advantage, Netter. You have failed the test.”

“I'll find a way,” swore Netter. “I'll find a trick.” Just a little bit closer now would do it.

“You lose, Netter,” said Porcellus. “There is no fixed thing on the plain you could tie to even if you had a way of reaching it. The longest thing you have with you is what you call the romal, and it's no longer than your arm.”

Porcellus was close enough. Right at the end of the dome. When he turned it would be perfect — somewhere between thirty-two and thirty-five feet. There was no fixed thing on the plain, but there was a thing heavy enough to serve for a fixed thing. The romal of Netter was no longer than his arm, but it was a romal rey, a king romal.

Porcellus turned away in his triumph. The light-thin lariat flew and dropped over his bulk. And Netter pulled himself off the dome in less time than you can say Porky Porcellus.

The fat hulk was no match for Netter when he was on solid non-compensating ground. He hog-tied the Hog-man with the thin leather line and rolled him onto the dome. And Porcellus was immediately on the center top of the dome, to stay there till he died of hunger or uncommon exertion or porcine apoplexy.

Netter was moving things about in the fine Trophy Room which he had recently inherited. He set a fine hard wood peg into the wall and hung on it the king romal for which he now had especial affection. The king romal is so intricately braided that one moment it will be a thick quirt no longer than your arm; but unlace one keeper and it immediately becomes a thin strand lariat forty foot long counting the loop. Hardly anyone knows how to braid a romal rey nowadays.

He moved many things in the trophy room. He wanted the setting to be just right. He knew just what space it should occupy on that great wall. The investigation was over with and Netter's claim had been accepted. He was now asteroid station-master — a good job.

The head was ready. It had been cured out and tanned and treated, and the eye-tushers were polished till they gleamed.

Porcellus had a truly magnificent head!

Author's Commentary

The Primary Education of the Camiroi

ABSTRACT FROM JOINT REPORT TO THE GENERAL DUBUQUE PTA CONCERNING THE PRIMARY EDUCATION OF THE CAMIROI, Subtitled Critical Observations of a Parallel Culture on a Neighboring World, and Evaluations of THE OTHER WAY OF EDUCATION.

Extract from the Day Book:

“Where,” we asked the Information Factor at Camiroi City Terminal, “is the office of the local PTA?”

“Isn't any,” he said cheerfully.

“You mean that in Camiroi City, the metropolis of the planet, there is no PTA?” our chairman Paul Piper asked with disbelief.

“Isn't any office of it. But you're poor strangers, so you deserve an answer even if you can't frame your questions properly. See that elderly man sitting on the bench and enjoying the sun? Go tell him you need a PTA. He'll make you one.”

“Perhaps the initials convey a different meaning on Camiroi,” said Miss Munch the first surrogate chairman. “By them we mean — ”

“Parent Teachers Apparatus, of course. Colloquial English is one of the six Earthian languages required here, you know. Don't be abashed. He's a fine person, and he enjoys doing things for strangers. He'll be glad to make you a PTA.”

We were nonplussed, but we walked over to the man indicated.

“We are looking for the local PTA, sir,” said Miss Smice, our second surrogate chairman. “We were told that you might help us.”

“Oh, certainly,” said the elderly Camiroi gentleman. “One of you arrest that man walking there, and we'll get started with it.”

“Do what?” asked our Mr. Piper.

“Arrest him. I have noticed that your own words sometimes do not convey a meaning to you. I often wonder how you do communicate among yourselves. Arrest, take into custody, seize by any force physical or moral, and bring him here.”

“Yes, sir,” cried Miss Hanks our third surrogate chairman. She enjoyed things like this. She arrested the walking Camiroi man with force partly physical and partly moral and brought him to the group.

“It's a PTA they want, Meander,” the elder Camiroi said to the one arrested. “Grab three more, and we'll get started. Let the lady help. She's good at it.”

Our Miss Hanks and the Camiroi man named Meander arrested three other Camiroi men and brought them to the group.

“Five. It's enough,” said the elderly Camiroi. “We are hereby constituted a PTA and ordered into random action. Now, how can we accommodate you, good Earth people?”

“But are you legal? Are you five persons competent to be a PTA?” demanded our Mr. Piper.

“Any Camiroi citizen is competent to do any job on the planet of Camiroi,” said one of the Camiroi men (we learned later that his name was Talarium). “Otherwise Camiroi would be in a sad shape.”

“It may be,” said our Miss Smice sourly. “It all seems very informal. What if one of you had to be World President?”

“The odds are that it won't come to one man in ten,” said the elderly Camiroi (his name was Philoxenus). “I'm the only one of this group ever to serve as president of this planet, and it was a pleasant week I spent in the Office. Now to the point. How can we accommodate you?”

“We would like to see one of your schools in session,” said our Mr. Piper. “We would like to talk to the teachers and the students. We are here to compare the two systems of education.”

“There is no comparison,” said old Philoxenus, “ — meaning no offense. Or no more than a little. On Camiroi, we practice Education. On Earth, they play a game, but they call it by the same name. That makes the confusion. Come. We'll go to a school in session.”

“And to a public school,” said Miss Smice suspiciously. “Do not fob off any fancy private school on us as typical.”

“That would be difficult,” said Philoxenus. “There is no public school in Camiroi City and only two remaining on the Planet. Only a small fraction of one percent of the students of Camiroi are in public schools. We maintain that there is no more reason for the majority of children to be educated in a public school than to be raised in a public orphanage. We realize, of course, that on Earth you have made a sacred buffalo of the public school.”

“Sacred cow,” said our Mr. Piper.

“Children and Earthlings should be corrected when they use words wrongly,” said Philoxenus. “How else will they learn the correct forms? The animal held sacred in your own near Orient was of the species bos bubalus rather than bos bos, a buffalo rather than a cow. Shall we go to a school?”

“If it cannot be a public school, at least let it be a typical school,” said Miss Smice.

“That again is impossible,” said Philoxenus. “Every school on Camiroi is in some respect atypical.”

We went to visit an atypical school.

Incident:

Our first contact with the Camiroi students was a violent one. One of them, a lively little boy about eight years old, ran into Miss Munch, knocked her down, and broke her glasses. Then he jabbered something in an unknown tongue.

“Is that Camiroi?” asked Mr. Piper with interest. “From what I have heard, I supposed the language to have a harsher and fuller sound.”

“You mean you don't recognize it?” asked Philoxenus with amusement. “What a droll admission from an educator. The boy is very young and very ignorant. Seeing that you were Earthians, he spoke in Hindi, which is the tongue used by more Earthians than any other. No, no, Xypete, they are of the minority who speak English. You can tell it by their colorless texture and the narrow heads on them.”

“I say you sure do have slow reaction, lady,” the little boy Xypete explained. “Even subhumans should react faster than that. You just stand there and gape and let me bowl you over. You want me analyze you and see why you react so slow?”

“No! No!”

“You seem unhurt in structure from the fall,” the little boy continued, “but if I hurt you I got to fix you. Just strip down to your shift, and I'll go over you and make sure you're all right.”

“No! No! No!”

“It's all right,” said Philoxenus. “All Camiroi children learn primary medicine in the first grade, setting bones and healing contusions and such.”

“No! No! I'm all right. But he's broken my glasses.”

“Come along Earthside lady, I'll make you some others,” said the little boy. “With your slow reaction time you sure can't afford the added handicap of defective vision. Shall I fit you with contacts?”

“No. I want glasses just like those which were broken. Oh heavens, what will I do?”

“You come, I do,” said the little boy. It was rather revealing to us that the little boy was able to test Miss Munch's eyes, grind lenses, make frames and have her fixed up within three minutes. “I have made some improvements over those you wore before,” the boy said, “to help compensate for your slow reaction time.”

“Are all the Camiroi students so talented?” Mr. Piper asked. He was impressed.

“No. Xypete is unusual,” Philoxenus said. “Most students would not be able to make a pair of glasses so quickly or competently till they were at least nine.”

Random interviews:

“How rapidly do you read?” Miss Hanks asked a young girl.

“One hundred and twenty words a minute,” the girl said.

“On Earth some of the girl students your age have learned to read at the rate of five hundred words a minute,” Miss Hanks said proudly.

“When I began disciplined reading, I was reading at the rate of four thousands words a minute,” the girl said. “They had quite a time correcting me of it. I had to take remedial reading, and my parents were ashamed of me. Now I've learned to read almost slow enough.”

“I don't understand,” said Miss Hanks.

“Do you know anything about Earth History or Geography?” Miss Smice asked a middle-sized boy.

“We sure are sketchy on it, lady. There isn't very much over there, is there?”

“Then you have never heard of Dubuque?”

“Count Dubuque interests me. I can't say as much for the city named after him. I always thought that the Count handled the matters of the conflicting French and Spanish land grants and the basic claims of the Sauk and Fox Indians very well. References to the town now carry a humorous connotation, and ‘School-Teacher from Dubuque’ has become a folk archetype.”

“Thank you,” said Miss Smice, “or do I thank you?”

“What are you taught of the relative humanity of the Earthians and the Camiroi and of their origins?” Miss Munch asked a Camiroi girl.

“The other four worlds, Earth (Gaea), Kentauron Mikron, Dahae and Astrobe were all settled from Camiroi. That is what we are taught. We are also given the humorous aside that if it isn't true we will still hold it true till something better comes along. It was we who rediscovered the Four Worlds in historic time, not they who discovered us. If we did not make the original settlements, at least we have filed the first claim that we made them. We did, in historical time, make an additional colonization of Earth. You call it the Incursion of the Dorian Greeks.”

“Where are their playgrounds?” Miss Hanks asked Talarium.

“Oh, the whole world. The children have the run of everything. To set up specific playgrounds would be like setting a table-sized aquarium down in the depths of the ocean. It would really be pointless.”

Conference:

The four of us from Earth, specifically from Dubuque, Iowa, were in discussion with the five members of the Camiroi PTA.

“How do you maintain discipline?” Mr. Piper asked.

“Indifferently,” said Philoxenus. “Oh, you mean in detail. It varies. Sometimes we let it drift, sometimes we pull them up short. Once they have learned that they must comply to an extent, there is little trouble. Small children are often put down into a pit. They do not eat or come out till they know their assignment.”

“But that is inhuman,” said Miss Hanks.

“Of course. But small children are not yet entirely human. If a child has not learned to accept discipline by the third or fourth grade, he is hanged.”

“Literally?” asked Miss Munch.

“How would you hang a child figuratively? And what effect would that have on the other children?”

“By the neck?” Miss Munch still was not satisfied.

“By the neck until they are dead. The other children always accept the example gracefully and do better. Hanging isn't employed often. Scarcely one child in a hundred is hanged.”

“What is this business about slow reading?” Miss Hanks asked. “I don't understand it at all.”

“Only the other day there was a child in the third grade who persisted in rapid reading,” Philoxenus said. “He was given an object lesson. He was given a book of medium difficulty, and he read it rapidly. Then he had to put the book away and repeat what he had read. Do you know that in the first thirty pages he missed four words? Midway in the book there was a whole statement which he had understood wrongly, and there were hundreds of pages that he got word-perfect only with difficulty. If he was so unsure on material that he had just read, think how imperfectly he would have recalled it forty years later.”

“You mean that the Camiroi children learn to recall everything that they read?”

“The Camiroi children and adults will recall for life every detail they have ever seen, read or heard. We on Camiroi are only a little more intelligent than you on Earth. We cannot afford to waste time in forgetting or reviewing, or in pursuing anything of a shallowness that lends itself to scanning.”

“Ah, would you call your schools liberal?” Mr. Piper asked.

“I would. You wouldn't,” said Philoxenus. “We do not on Camiroi, as you do on Earth, use words to mean their opposites. There is nothing in our education or on our world that corresponds to the quaint servility which you call liberal on Earth.”

“Well, would you call your education progressive?”

“No. In your argot, progressive, of course, means infantile.”

“How are the schools financed?” asked Mr. Piper.

“Oh, the voluntary tithe on Camiroi takes care of everything, government, religion, education, public works. We don't believe in taxes, of course, and we never maintain a high overhead in anything.”

“Just how voluntary is the tithing?” asked Miss Hanks. “Do you sometimes hang those who do not tithe voluntarily?”

“I believe there have been a few cases of that sort,” said Philoxenus.

“And is your government really as slipshod as your education?” Mr. Piper asked. “Are your high officials really chosen by lot and for short periods?”

“Oh yes. Can you imagine a person so sick that he would actually desire to hold high office for any great period of time? Are there any further questions?”

“There must be hundreds,” said Mr. Piper. “But we find difficulty putting them into words.”

“If you cannot find words for them, we cannot find answers. PTA disbanded.”

Conclusion A: The Camiroi system of education is inferior to our own in organization, in buildings, in facilities, in playgrounds, in teacher conferences, in funding, in parental involvement, in supervision, in in-group out-group accommodation adjustment motifs. Some of the school buildings are grotesque. We asked about one particular building which seemed to us to be flamboyant and in bad taste. “What do you expect from second-grade children?” they said. “It is well built even if of peculiar appearance. Second-grade children are not yet complete artists of design.”

“You mean that the children designed it themselves?” we asked.

“Of course,” they said. “Designed and built it. It isn't a bad job for children.”

Such a thing wouldn't be permitted on Earth.

Conclusion B: The Camiroi system of education somehow produces much better results than does the education system of Earth. We have been forced to admit this by the evidence at hand.

Conclusion C: There is an anomaly as yet unresolved between CONCLUSION A and CONCLUSION B.

APPENDIX TO JOINT REPORT

We give here, as perhaps of some interest, the curriculum of the Camiroi Primary Education.

FIRST YEAR COURSE:

Playing one wind instrument

Simple drawing of objects and numbers.

Singing. (This is important. Many Earth people sing who cannot sing. This early instruction of the Camiroi prevents that occurrence.)

Simple arithmetic, hand and machine.

First Acrobatics.

First riddles and logic.

Mnemonic religion.

First dancing.

Walking the low wire.

Simple electric circuits.

Raising ants. (Eoempts, not Earth ants.)

SECOND YEAR COURSE:

Playing one keyboard instrument

Drawing, faces, letters, motions.

Singing comedies.

Complex arithmetic, hand and machine.

Second acrobatics.

First jokes and logic.

Quadratic religion.

Second dancing.

Simple defamation. (Spirited attacks on the character of one fellow student, with elementary falsification and simple hatchet-job programming.)

Performing on the medium wire.

Project electric wiring.

Raising bees. (Galelea, not Earth bees.)

THIRD YEAR COURSE:

Playing one stringed instrument.

Reading and voice. (It is here that the student who may have fallen into bad habits of rapid reading is compelled to read at voice speed only.)

Soft stone sculpture.

Situation comedy.

Simple algebra, hand and machine.

First gymnastics.

Second jokes and logic.

Transcendent religion.

Complex acrobatic dancing.

Complex defamation.

Performing on the high wire and the sky pole.

Simple radio construction.

Raising, breeding and dissecting frogs. (Karakoli, not earth frogs.)

FOURTH YEAR COURSE:

History reading, Camiroi and galactic, basic and geological.

Decadent comedy.

Simple geometry and trigonometry, hand and machine.

Track and field.

Shaggy people jokes and hirsute logic

Simple obscenity.

Simple mysticism.

Patterns of falsification.

Trapeze work.

Intermediate electronics.

Human dissection.

FIFTH YEAR COURSE:

History reading, Camiroi and galactic, technological.

Introverted drama.

Complex geometries and analytics, hand and machine.

Track and field for fifth form record.

First wit and logic.

First alcoholic appreciation.

Complex mysticism.

Setting intellectual climates, defamation in three dimensions.

Simple oratory.

Complex trapeze work.

Inorganic chemistry.

Advanced electronics.

Advanced human dissection.

Fifth Form Thesis.

The child is now ten years old and is half through his primary schooling. He is an unfinished animal, but he has learned to learn.

SIXTH YEAR COURSE:

Reemphasis on slow reading.

Simple prodigious memory.

History reading, Camiroi and galactic, economic.

Horsemanship (of the Patrushkoe, not the Earth horse.)

Advanced lathe and machine work for art and utility.

Literature, passive.

Calculi, hand and machine pankration.

Advanced wit and logic.

Second alcoholic appreciation.

Differential religion.

First business ventures.

Complex oratory.

Building-scaling. (The buildings are higher and the gravity stronger than on Earth; this climbing of buildings like human flies calls out the ingenuity and daring of the Camiroi children.)

Nuclear physics and post-organic chemistry.

Simple pseudo-human assembly.

SEVENTH YEAR COURSE:

History reading, Camiroi and galactic, cultural.

Advanced prodigious memory.

Vehicle operation and manufacture of simple vehicle.

Literature, active.

Astrognosy, prediction and programming.

Advanced pankration.

Spherical logic, hand and machine.

Advanced alcoholic appreciation.

Integral religion.

Bankruptcy and recovery in business.

Conmanship and trend creation.

Post-nuclear physics and universals.

Transcendental athletics endeavor.

Complex robotics and programming.

EIGHTH YEAR COURSE:

History reading, Camiroi and galactic, seminal theory.

Consummate prodigious memory.

Manufacture of complex land and water vehicles.

Literature, compendious and terminative. (Creative book-burning following the Camiroi thesis that nothing ordinary be allowed to survive.)

Cosmic theory, seminal.

Philosophy construction.

Complex hedonism.

Laser religion.

Conmanship, seminal.

Consolidation of simple genius status.

Post-robotic integration.

NINTH YEAR COURSE:

History reading, Camiroi and galactic, future and contingent.

Category invention. Manufacture of complex light-barrier vehicles.

Construction of simple asteroids and planets.

Matrix religion and logic.

Simple human immortality disciplines.

Consolidation of complex genius status.

First problems of post-consciousness humanity.

First essays in marriage and reproduction.

TENTH YEAR COURSE:

History construction, active.

Manufacture of ultra-light-barrier vehicles.

Panphilosophical clarifications.

Construction of viable planets.

Consolidation of simple sanctity status.

Charismatic humor and pentacosmic logic.

Hypogyroscopic economy.

Penentaglossia. (The perfection of the fifty languages that every educated Camiroi must know including six Earthian languages. Of course the child will already have colloquial mastery of most of these, but he will not yet have them in their full depth.)

Construction of complex societies.

World government. (A course of the same name is sometimes given in Earthian schools, but the course is not of the same content. In this course the Camiroi student will govern a world, though not one of the first aspect worlds, for a period of three or four months.)

Tenth form thesis.

COMMENT ON CURRICULUM:

The child will now be fifteen years old and will have completed his primary education. In many ways he will be advanced beyond his Earth counterpart. Physically more sophisticated, the Camiroi child could kill with his hands an Earth-type tiger or a cape buffalo. An Earth child would perhaps be reluctant even to attempt such feats. The Camiroi boy (or girl) could replace any professional Earth athlete at any position of any game, and could surpass all existing Earth records. It is simply a question of finer poise, strength and speed, the result of adequate schooling.

As to the arts (on which Earthlings sometimes place emphasis) the Camiroi child could produce easy and unequaled masterpieces in any medium. More important, he will have learned the relative unimportance of such pastimes.

The Camiroi child will have failed in business once, at age ten, and have learned patience and perfection of objective by his failure. He will have acquired the techniques of falsification and conmanship. Thereafter he will not be easily deceived by any of the citizens of any of the worlds. The Camiroi child will have become a complex genius and a simple saint; the latter reduces the index of Camiroi crime to near zero. He will be married and settled in those early years of greatest enjoyment.

The child will have built, from materials found around any Camiroi house, a faster-than-light vehicle. He will have piloted it on a significant journey of his own plotting and programming. He will have built quasi-human robots of great intricacy. He will be of perfect memory and judgment and will be well prepared to accept solid learning.

He will have learned to use his whole mind, for the vast reservoirs which are the unconscious to us are not unconscious to him. Everything in him is ordered for use. And there seems to be no great secret about the accomplishments, only to do everything slowly enough and in the right order: Thus they avoid repetition and drill which are the shriveling things which dull the quick apperception.

The Camiroi schedule is challenging to the children, but it is nowhere impossible or discouraging. Everything builds to what follows. For instance, the child is eleven years old before he is given post-nuclear physics and universals. Such subjects might be too difficult for him at an earlier age. He is thirteen years old before he undertakes category invention, that intricate course with the simple name. He is fourteen years old when he enters the dangerous field of panphilosophical clarification. But he will have been constructing comprehensive philosophies for two years, and he will have the background for the final clarification.

We should look more closely at this other way of education. In some respects it is better than our own. Few Earth children would be able to construct an organic and sentient robot within fifteen minutes if given the test suddenly; most of them could not manufacture a living dog in that time. Not one Earth child in five could build a faster-than-light vehicle and travel it beyond our galaxy between now and midnight. Not one Earth child in a hundred could build a planet and have it a going concern within a week. Not one in a thousand would be able to comprehend pentacosmic logic.

RECOMMENDATIONS:

Kidnapping five Camiroi at random and constituting them a pilot Earth PTA.

A little constructive book-burning, particularly in the education field.

Judicious hanging of certain malingering students.

The Man With The Speckled Eyes

In those days there had been a clique of six men who controlled it all. Any new thing went to one of them — or it went nowhere. Discovery and invention cannot be allowed to break out all over the lot.

These six men did not work in particular harmony. They were called the clique because they were set apart from others by their influence; and because of their names, which were: Claridge, Lone, Immermann, Quinn, Umholtz, and Easter.

Now the six men were reduced to two. On successive days, Claridge, Lone, Immermann, and Quinn had disappeared — and they had done it pretty thoroughly. In each case, somebody had to know something about their disappearance; and in each case, that somebody refused to tell.

Claridge's man, Gueranger, had been with Claridge at the time of the disappearance or shortly before. He admitted that much. But nothing intelligent could be got from him.

“The truth of it is that I don't know the truth of it,” Gueranger insisted. “Yes, I was there, but I don't know what happened.”

“Don't you know what you saw?” asked the investigator.

“No, I don't. That's the whole point of the matter: I will not accept, and will not tell, what I saw. Certainly I know that I'm held on suspicion of murder. But where is the body? You find it — anywhere — in any shape and I'll sure sleep better.”

In the second case, Ringer and Mayhall both seemed to know something of the disappearance of their employer, Lone. The three of them had walked in the plaza at evening. Only two of them had come back — and they much shaken.

“I know what I seemed to see,” Ringer ventured, “and I will not tell it. I'm not stubborn and I'm not sensitive to laughter, but I've sealed the whole thing off in a corner of my mind and I won't disturb it. I've hopes of hanging on to some pieces of my reason, and to open this again would set me back.”

“Lone?” Mayhall grunted. “I guess the damned fool swallowed himself. He's sure gone completely. Yes, I was with him, and I won't say any nearer than that what happened.”

“I simply will not explain,” said Immermann's advisor, Hebert. “He is gone, and I do not believe he will be back. No. If it was a hoax, I wasn't in on it, and I don't understand it. Do I believe that he wished to disappear for a private reason? Did he — wherever he has gone — go willingly? No, gentlemen, he did not go willingly! I never saw a man so reluctant to go.”

“I will not say what happened to Mr. Quinn,” said Pacheco, Quinn's assistant. “Of course I know that he was an important man — the most important in the world to me. You say that you will have answers out of me one way or the other? Then you'll have nothing but babbling out of a crazy man.

“Why, yes, I suppose that you can hang me for murder. I don't know how those things are worked. It seems extreme, however. I thought there was a Latin phrase involved, about a body being required. Lay off now, fellows. I'm cracking up, I tell you.”

The investigators didn't lay off, but so far they had got nothing out of any of the witnesses. The four disappearances had to be as one, and the witnesses were certainly of a pattern.

“Are Extraterrestrials Kidnapping Our Top Talent?” the news banners read.

“Oh, hell,” said Umholtz in his cluttered office. “Hell,” said Easter in his clean one. They both knew that they were not men of any particular talent, and that the four men who had disappeared were not. They were shufflers and dealers in talent, that is all. In popular idea, they were responsible for the inventions they marketed. But off-Earth people — bent on such showy kidnappings — would have picked off seminal geniuses and not talent brokers.

Four gone, two to go. Would the next one be Umholtz or Easter? Umholtz felt that it would be himself. He and his assistant, Planter, were worrying about it together when Shartel the aide came in to them.

“There's one to see you, Mr. Umholtz,” said Shartel with diffidence, for he was only half the bulk of his employer.

“An inventor?” Umholtz always sneered with his eyebrows when he spoke that word, although inventors were the only stock he dealt in.

“Who else comes to see us, Mr. Umholtz? This one may be worth investigating, though probably not for any invention he has.”

“A crackie? What does he have?”

“A crackie from end to end, and he won't say what he has.”

“We're not scanning clients these days, Shartel. I explain that to you every ten minutes. We're spending all our time worrying about the disappearances. Creative worry, Planter here calls it, and I don't appreciate his humor. I haven't time for a crackie today.”

“He got to see Claridge, Lone, Immermann, and Quinn — all a couple of hours before their disappearance.”

“All inventors make the same rounds. There's nobody else they can go to. And weren't there a couple of others who saw them all?”

“The others have all been checked out clean. This is the last one. The authorities have been looking for him and have left word to call if he showed. I'll ring them as soon as he's in here. There's a slim chance that he knows something, but he sure doesn't look it.”

“Send him in, Shartel. Has he a name?”

“Haycock. And he looks as though he had slept in one.”

Haycock didn't really have hay in his hair — that was only the color and lay of it. He had blue eyes with happy, dangerous gold specks in them, and a friendly and humorous sneer. He looked rather an impudent comedian, but inventors come in all sizes. He had something of the back-country hayseed in him. But also something of the panther.

“I have here what may turn out to be a most useful device,” Haycock began. “Good. You have sent the underlings away. I never talk in their presence. They're inclined to laugh at me. I am offering you the opportunity to get in on the top floor with my device, Mr. Umholtz.”

“Haycock, you have the aspect of a man entranced by one of the four basic fallacies. If so, you are wasting my time. But I want to question you on a side issue. Is it true that you visited all four of them — Claridge, Lone, Immermann, and Quinn — on the days of their disappearances?”

“Sounds like their names. Four blind bats! None of them could see my invention at first. All of them laughed at it. Forget those fools, Umholtz. You can grow new fools, but what I have here is unique. It is the impossible invention.”

“By the impossible inventor, from the looks of you. I hold up four fingers, and one is it. Tell it in one word, Haycock!”

“Anti-grav.”

“Fourth finger. It's not even the season for anti-grav, Haycock. These things go in cycles. We get most of the anti-gravs in early winter. All right, I give you four seconds to demonstrate. Raise that table off the floor with your device.”

“It's barely possible that I could raise it, Umholtz, but not in four seconds. It would take several hours; instant demonstration is out. It's a pretty erratic piece of machinery, though I've had good luck on my last several attempts. It isn't really very impressive, and a lot of what I tell you you'll have to take on faith.”

“Haven't any, Haycock. Even a charlatan can usually put on a good show. Why the two pieces? One looks like a fishing tackle box, and the other like a sheaf of paper.”

“The papers are the mathematics of it, Umholtz. Look at the equations carefully and you'll be convinced without a demonstration.”

“All right. I pride myself on the speed I bring to spotting these basic errors, Haycock. They seem very commonplace equations, and then they break off when it's plain that you're getting nowhere. What happened to the bottom of these sheets?”

“Oh, my little boy ate that part of them. Just go ahead and you'll pick up the continuity again. Ah, you're at the end of it and you laugh! Yes, is it not funny how simple every great truth is?”

“I've seen them all, Haycock, and this is one of the most transparent. The only thing wrong with it is that it won't work and it's as full of holes as a seine.”

“But it does work part of the time, Umholtz, and we'll fill up the holes till it's practical. Well, is it a deal? It'll take a couple of years; but if you'll start plenty of money rolling, I'll get on with the project in a big way. Why do you roll your eyes like that, Umholtz? Is there a history of apoplexy in your family?”

“I will be all right in a moment, Haycock. I am afflicted by inventors, but I recover quickly. Let us set the gadget aside for the moment. Do you know where the four now-celebrated men have gone?”

“Papers said it was as if they had disappeared from the Earth. I imagine they sent a reporter or someone to check on it.”

“Take Claridge, for instance,” said Umholtz, “Did he seem disturbed when you last saw him?”

“I think he was the little one. He was kind of boggle-eyed, just like you were a minute ago. Kind of mad at me for wasting his time. Well pig's pants! I wasted my time, too! Blind as a bat, that man. Don't think he was convinced that my thing would work till maybe right at the end. Now let's get back to my instrument. It will do a variety of jobs. Even you can see where it would be useful.”

“It would be, if it worked, and it won't. Your piece of mathematics is childish, Haycock.”

“Might be. I don't express myself well in that medium. But my machine does work. It creates negative gravity. That is, it works quite a bit of the time.”

Umholtz laughed. He shouldn't have, but he didn't know. And he did have an ugly sort of laugh.

“You laugh at me!” Haycock howled out. Gold fire popped from his eyes and he was very angry. The hayseed began to look like the panther. He touched his machine, and it responded with a sympathetic ping! to the anger of its master.

Umholtz was having fun with the now-blazing inventor.

“What do you do, Haycock-and-bull, turn that machine on and point it at something?” he guffawed. Umholtz enjoyed deriding a fellow.

“You hopeless hulk! I turned it on a minute ago when you laughed at me. It's working on you now. You'll be convinced in the end,” Haycock threatened.

“Do you not know, Haycock, that anti-grav is the standing joke in our profession? But they still come in with it, and they all have that same look in their eyes.”

“Umholtz, you lie! Nobody else ever had this look in his eye!”

That was true. The gold specks in the blue eyes glinted in a mad way. The eyes did not focus properly. It seemed to Umholtz that Haycock did not look at him, but through him and beyond. The man might well be a maniac — the sort of maniac who could somehow be involved in the four disappearances. Never mind, they were coming for him. They'd be here any minute.

“Anti-grav is a violation of the laws of mass and energy,” Umholtz needled.

“To change the signature of a mass from plus to minus is not a violation of any law I recognize,” said Haycock evenly. “It is no good for you to justify now, Umholtz, or to find excuses. It is no use to plead for your life. Are you deaf as well as blind and stupid? I told you plainly that the demonstration had already begun. You were all a stubborn lot, but I convinced all four of them in the end, and I'll convince you. I tell you, Umholtz, that entrenched stupidity makes me mad, and when I get mad I sure do get mean. I've cancelled you out, you open idiot! Umholtz, I'll send you away screaming!”

“Rather I'll send you away in that act,” Umholtz purred, for the men in black were now into the room, and they laid legal hands on Haycock.

“Take him away,” Umholtz grunted out. “He's fishier than Edward's Ichthyology.”

Haycock didn't go away screaming, but he went roaring and fighting. That man was very mean, and those gold specks in his eyes were really sulphur.

Say, they couldn't get a thing out of that fellow. Haycock was an odd one, but that was all. They went over him from the beginning. He was known in his own neighborhood for his unsuccessful inventions and for his towering temper, but he hadn't any bodies lying around, and he hadn't been anywhere near any of the four men at the time of their disappearances.

He was a crackie from end to end, but he hadn't a handle they could get hold of.

“I am not ghoulish,” Umholtz said to his men Planter and Shartel, “but the disappearance of four of my five competitors has opened up some pretty obvious opportunities for me. Oh, other men will be designated to replace them, but it'll be a long time before they get that sharp.”

“What did the crackie have this afternoon, Mr. Umholtz?” Planter asked him.

“It isn't worth mentioning. One of the oldest and silliest.” The three of them were walking in the park in the evening.

“I suddenly feel odd,” said Umholtz and he placed one hand on his head and the other on his paunch. “Something I ate for supper didn't agree with me.”

“It's the worry,” said Planter. “The disappearances have upset you. With the thought that you might be next on the list, there has been a great weight on you.”

“I really feel as though a great weight has been lifted off me,” said Umholtz, “but I don't like the feeling. I'm light-headed.”

“The walk will do you good,” Planter told him. “You look well to me. I've never seen you move with so light a step.”

“No, no, I'm sick,” Umholtz moaned, and he began to look up in the air as though fearful of an attack from that sector. “My feet don't track right. There's a lightness in me. My stomach is turning inside out. Lord, but it would be a long way to fall!”

Umholtz flopped his way forward, his feet slipping on the grass as though he had lost traction. He got hold of the tree — a small elm.

“I'm starting to go!” he howled in real terror.

He put a bear hug around the tree, locking on to it with both arms and legs. “Great dancing dogfish, don't let me fall,” he sobbed. “How did I ever get so high up?”

“Umholtz, you are six inches from the ground,” Planter told him. “The man's gone mad, Shartel. Let's pry his legs loose first. When we get his feet on the ground he may get over his mania about falling.”

“Fools! Fools! You'll let me fall all the way down,” Umholtz screamed, but he was looking upward, and his face was flushed as though all the blood had run to his head.

“He was right,” Umholtz sniffled wetly in an interlude from his screaming and sobbing. “I'm finally convinced.”

“There's one leg loose, Shartel,” said Planter as he worked on Umholtz, “but for some reason it seems pretty difficult to hold it to the ground. Now the other leg, and we'll set him down on his feet. Whoops! What's wrong? You're going up with him, Shartel!”

Shartel did go up with him at first, for Umholtz was much the heavier man. But Shartel broke away and fell a dozen feet down to the grass.

Umholtz grabbed a precarious lodging in the tree top, but he was shearing off fronds and branches and going fast.

“For God's sake, get me up from here!” Umholtz screamed, hanging upward from the topmost branch. He was like a tethered balloon tugging at its mooring.

“Throw a rope down to me! Do something!” he sobbed upsidedownly from the tree top. “I'll fall all the way, and I can't even see bottom.”

The topmost branch broke, and Umholtz fell off the world.

He fell upward into the evening sky, his scream dropping in pitch as he accelerated. He fell end over end, diminishing till he was only a dot in the sky. Then he was gone.

“What will we tell people — what — what can we say — however explain — how explain what we seen seem — ” Shartel rattled, the bones in his body shaking like poker dice in a toss box.

“You tell your lie and I'll tell mine,” Planter grumbled. “I'm crazy, but I'm not crazy enough to have seen that.”

Of the clique, only Easter was left. He was the most even-minded of the bunch and the least inclined to worry. It had been a peculiar series of events that had devoured his competitors, but he hadn't been able to base any theory on the disappearances. If he continued, he would be next.

“I may try a little worrying myself,” he mused. “A man of my sort shouldn't neglect any field of cogitation. I'll give it a try. It should come easy for me today.”

So Easter worried, but he didn't do it well. It isn't easy if you haven't the lifetime habit of it.

Then a man came in to him unannounced.

This was a man with hay-colored hair, with blue eyes with happy dangerous gold specks in them, a man with a friendly and humorous sneer. He had something of the hayseed in him. But also something of the panther.

“I have here what may turn out to be a most useful device,” Haycock began.

Author's Commentary

Nine Hundred Grandmothers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Then where are their cemeteries?”

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

“Where are the crematories?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“None of you does?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And your grandfathers and grandmothers?”

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

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

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

“And all these ancestors are alive?”

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

Ceran began to hop around in his excitement.

“Could I see them?” he twittered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The Ritual. What is it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What is that?”

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

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

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

“Ah, their chemistry, I suppose.”

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

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

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

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

“What? Have these creatures humor?”

“Some.”

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

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

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

“It don't make a damn — you fool.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Author's Commentary

Hog-Belly Honey

I'm Joe Spade — about as intellectual a guy as you'll find all day. I invented Wotto and Voxo and a bunch of other stuff that nobody can get along without anymore. It's on account of I have so much stuff in my head that I sometimes go to a head-grifter. This day all of them I know is out of town when I call. Lots of times everybody I know is out of town when I call. I go to a new one. The glass in his door says he is a anapsychologist, which is a head-grifter in the popular speech.

“I'm Joe Spade the man that got everything,” I tell him and slap him on the back in that hearty way of mine. There is a crunch sound and at first I think I have crack his rib. Then I see I have only broke his glasses so no harm done. “I am what you call a flat-footed genius, Doc,” I tell him, “with plenty of the crimp-cut greenleaf.”

I take the check card away from him and mark it up myself to save time. I figure I know more about me than he does.

“Remember, I can get them nine-dollar words for four eighty-five wholesale, Doc,” I josh him and he looks me painful.

“Modesty isn't one of your failings,” this head-grifter tell me as he scun my card. “Hum. Single… significant.”

I had written down the “single” in the blank for it, but he had see for himself that I am a significant man.

“Solvent,” he read for the blank about the pecuniary stuff, “I like that in a man. We will arrange for a few sessions.”

“One will do it,” I tell him. “Time is running and I am paying. Give me a quick read, Doc.”

“Yes, I can give you a very rapid reading,” he says. “I want you to ponder the ancient adage: It is not good for Man to be alone. Think about it a while, and perhaps you will be able to put one and one together.”

Then he add kind of sad, “Poor woman!” which is either the non-secular of the year or else he is thinking of some other patient. Then he add again, “That will be three yards, in the lingo.”

“Thanks, Doc,” I say. I pay the head-grifter his three hundred dollars and leave. He has hit the nail on the noggin and put his toe on the root of my trouble.

I will take me a partner in my business.

I spot him in Grogley's, and I know right away he's the one. He's about half my size but otherwise he's as much like me as two feet in one shoe. He's real good-looking — just like me. He's dressed sweet, but has a little blood on his face like can happen to anyone in Grogley's for five minutes. Man, we're twins! I know we will talk alike and think alike just like we look alike.

“Eheu! Fugaces!” my new partner says real sad. That means “Brother, this has been one day with all the bark on it!” He is drinking the Fancy and his eyes look like cracked glass.

“He's been having quite a few little fist-fights,” Grogley whispers to me, “but he don't win none. He isn't fast with his hands. I think he's got troubles.”

“Not no more he don't,” I tell Grogley, “he's my new partner.”

I slap my new partner on the back in that hearty way I have, and the tooth that flew out must have been a loose one.

“You don't have no more troubles, Roscoe,” I tell him, “you and me is just become partners.” He looks kind of sick at me.

“Maurice is the name,” he says, “Maurice Maltravers. How are things back in the rocks? You, sir, are a troglodyte. They always come right after the snakes. That's the only time I wish the snakes would come back.”

Lots of people call me a troglodyte.

“Denied the sympathy of humankind,” Maurice carries on, “perhaps I may find it in an inferior species. I wonder if I could impose on your ears — gahhhh!” (he made a humorous sound there) “are those things ears? — What a fearsome otological apparatus you do have! — the burden of my troubles.”

“I just told you you don't have none, Maurice,” I say. “Come along with me and we'll get into the partner business.”

I pick him up by the scruff and haul him out of Grogley's.

“I see right away you are my kind of man,” I say.

“My kind of man — putridus ad volva,” Maurice gives me the echo. Hey, this guy is a gale! Just like me.

“My cogitational patterns are so intricate and identatic oriented,” says Maurice when I set him down and let him walk a little, “that I become a closed system — unintelligible to the exocosmos and particularly to a chthonian like yourself.”

“I'm mental as hell myself, Maurice,” I tell him, “there ain't nothing the two of us can't do together.”

“My immediate difficulty is that the University has denied me further use of the computer,” Maurice tells me. “Without it, I cannot complete the Ultimate Machine.”

“I got a computer'll make that little red schoolhouse turn green,” I tell him.

We come to my place which a man have call in print “a converted horse barn, probably the most unorthodox and badly appointed scientific laboratory in the world.” I take Maurice in with me, but he carries on like a chicken with its hat off when he finds out the only calculator I got is the one in my head.

“You livid monster, I can't work in this mares'-nest,” he screeches at me. “I've got to have a calculator, a computer.”

I tap my head with a six-pound hammer and grin my famous grin. “It's all inside here, Maurice boy,” I tell him, “the finest calculator in the world. When I was with the carnivals they billed me as the Idiot Genius. I run races with the best computers they had in a town, multiplying twenty-place numbers and all the little tricks like that. I cheated though. I invented a gadget and carried it in my pocket. It's jam the relays of the best computers and slow them down for a full second. Give me a one-second hop and I can beat anything in the world at anything. The only things wrong with those jobs is that I had to talk and act kind of dumb to live up to my billing the Idiot Genius, and that dumb stuff was hard on an intellectual like I.”

“I can see that it would be,” Maurice said. “Can you handle involuted matrix, Maimonides-conditioned, third-aspect numbers in the Cauchy sequence with simultaneous non-temporal involvement of the Fieschi manifold?”

“Maurice, I can do it and fry up a bunch of eggs to go with it at the same time,” I tell him. Then I look him right in the middle of the eye. “Maurice,” I say, “you're working on a nullifier.”

He look at me like he take me serious for the first time. He pull a sheaf of papers out of his shirt, and sure enough he is working on a nullifier — a sweet one.

“This isn't an ordinary nullifier,” Maurice points out, and I see that it ain't. “What other nullifier can posit moral and ethical judgments? What other can set up and enforce categories? What other can really discern? This will be the only nullifier able to make full philosophical pronouncements. Can you help me finish it, Proconsul?”

A proconsul is about the same as an alderman, so I know Maurice think high of me. We throw away the clock and get with it. We work about twenty hours a day. I compute it and build it at the same time — out of Wotto-metal naturally. At the end we use feedback a lot. We let the machine decide what we will put in it and what leave out. The main difference between our nullifier and all others is that ours will be able to make decisions. So, let it make them!

We finish it in about a week. Man, it is a sweet thing. We play with it a while to see what it can do. It can do everything.

I point it at half a bushel of bolts and nuts I got there. “Get rid of everything that ain't standard thread,” I program it. “Half that stuff is junk.”

And half that stuff is gone right now! This thing works! Just set in what you want it to get rid of, and it's gone without a trace.

“Get rid of everything here that's no good for nothing,” I program it. I had me a place there that has been described as cluttered. That machine blinked once, and then I had a place you could get around in. That thing knew junk when it saw it, and it sure sent that no-good stuff clear over the edge. Of course anybody can make a nullifier that won't leave no remains of whatever it latches on to, but this is the only one that knows what not to leave no remains of by itself. Maurice and me is tickled as pink rabbits over the thing.

“Maurice,” I say, and I slap him on the back so his nose bleeds a little, “this is one bushy-tailed gadget. There ain't nothing we can't do with it.”

But Maurice looks kind of sad for a moment.

“A quo bono?” he ask, which I think is the name of a mineral water, so I slosh him out some brandy which is better. He drink the brandy but he's still thoughtful.

“But what good is it?” he ask. “It is a triumph, of course, but in what category could we market it? It seems that I've been here a dozen times with the perfect apparatus that nobody wants. Is there really a mass market for a machine that can posit moral and ethical judgments, that can set up and enforce categories, that is able to discern, and to make philosophical pronouncements? Have I not racked up one more triumphant folly?”

“Maurice, this thing is a natural-born garbage disposal,” I tell him. He turn that green color lots of people do when I shed a big light on them.

“A garbage disposal!” he sing out. “The aeons labored to give birth to it through the finest mind — mine — of the millennium, and this brother of a giant ape says it is a garbage disposal! It is a new aspect of thought, the novo instauratio, the mind of tomorrow fruited today, and this obscene ogre says it is a Garbage Disposal! The Constellations do homage to it, and Time has not waited in vain, and you, you splay-footed horse-herder, you call it a GARBAGE DISPOSAL!”

Maurice was so carried away with the thought that he cried a little. It sure is nice when someone agrees with you as long and loud as Maurice did. When he was run out of words he got aholt of the brandy bottle with both hands and drunk it all off. Then he slept the clock around. He was real tired.

He looked kind of sheepful when he finally woke up.

“I feel better now, outside of feeling worse,” he say. “You are right, Spade, it's a garbage disposal.”

He programmed it to get all the slush out of his blood and liver and kidneys and head. It did it. It cured his hangover in straight-up no time at all. It also shaved him and removed his appendix. Just give it the nod and it would nullify anything.

“We will call it the Hog-Belly Honey,” I say, “on account of it will eat anything, and it work so sweet.”

“That is what we will call it privately.” Maurice nodded. “But in company it will be known as the Pantophag.” That is the same thing in Greek.

It was at the time of this area of good feeling that I split a Voxo with Maurice. Each of you have one-half of a tuned Voxo and you can talk to each other anywhere the world, and the thing is so non-conspicuous that nobody can see it on you.

We got a big booth and showed the Hog-Belly Honey, the Pantophag, at the Trade Fair.

Say, we did put on a good show! The people came in and looked and listened till they were wall-eyed. That Maurice could give a good spiel, and I'm about the best there is myself. We sure were two fine-looking men, after Maurice told me that maybe I detracted a little bit by being in my undershirt, and I went and put a shirt on. And that bushy-tailed machine just sparkled — like everything does that is made out of Wotto-metal.

Kids threw candy-bar wrappers at it, and they disappeared in the middle of the air. “Frisk me,” they said, and everything in their pockets that was no good for nothing was gone. A man held up a stuffed briefcase, and it was almost empty in a minute. A few people got mad when they lost beards and moustaches, but we explained to them that their boscage hadn't done a thing for them; if the ornaments had had even appearance value the machine would have left them be. We pointed out other people who kept their brush; whatever they had behind it, they must have needed the cover.

“Could I have one in my house, and when?” a lady asks.

“Tomorrow, for forty-nine ninety-five installed,” I tell her. “It will get rid of anything no good. It'll pluck chickens, or bone roasts for you. It will clear out all those old love letters from that desk and leave just the ones from the guy that meant it. It will relieve you of thirty pounds in the strategic places, and frankly, lady, this alone will make it worth your while. It will get rid of old buttons that don't match, and seeds that won't sprout. It will destroy everything that is not so good for nothing.”

“It can posit moral and ethical judgments,” Maurice tells the people. “It can set up and enforce categories.”

“Maurice and me is partners,” I tell them all. “We look alike and think alike. We even talk alike.”

“Save I in the hieratic and he in the demotic,” Maurice say. “This is the only nullifier in the world able to make full philosophical pronouncements. It is the unfailing judge of what is of some use and what is not. And it disposes neatly.”

Man, the people did pour in to see it all that morning! They slacked off a little bit just about noon.

“I wonder how many people have come into our booth this morning?” Maurice wondered to me. “I would guess near ten thousand.”

“I don't have to guess,” I say. “There is nine thousand three hundred and fifty-eight who have come in, Maurice,” I tell him, for I am always the automatic calculator. “There is nine thousand two hundred and ninety-seven who have left,” I go on, “and there are forty-four here now.”

Maurice smiled. “You have made a mistake,” he says. “It doesn't add up.”

And that is when the hair riz up on the back of my neck.

I don't make mistakes when I calculate, and I can see now that the Hog-Belly Honey don't make none either. Well, it's too late to make one now if you're not trained for it, but it might not be too late to get out the way of the storm before it hits.

“Crank the cuckoo,” I whisper to Maurice, “make the bindlestiff, hit the macadam!”

“Je ne comprends pas,” says Maurice, which means “Let's hit the road, boys,” in French, so I know my partner understands me.

I am out of the display hall at a high run, and Maurice racing along beside me so lightfoot that he don't make no noise. There is a sky-taxi just taking off.

“Jump for it, Maurice!” I sing out. I jump for it myself, and hook my fingers over the rear rail and am dangling in the air. I look to see if Maurice make it. Make it! He isn't even there! He didn't come out with me. I look back, and I see him through a window going to his spiel again.

Now that is a mule-headed development. My partner, who is as like me as two heads in one hat, had not understand me.

At the port I hook onto a sky-freight just going to Mexico.

I don't never have to pack no bag. I say that a man who don't always carry two years living in that crimp green stuff in his back pocket ain't in no condition to meet fait. In thirty minutes I am sit down in a hotel in Cueva Peoquita and have all the pleasantries at hand. Then I snap on my Voxo to hear what Maurice is signaling about.

“Why didn't you tell me that the Pantophag was nullifying people?” he ask kind of shrill.

“I did tell you,” I say. “Nine thousand two hundred and ninety-seven added to forty-four don't come to nine thousand three hundred and fifty-eight. You said so yourself. How are things on the home front, Maurice? That's a joke.”

“It's no joke,” he say kind of fanatic like. “I have locked myself in a little broom closet, but they're going to break down the door. What can I do?”

“Why, Maurice, just explain to those people that the folks nullified by the machine were no good for nothing because the machine don't make mistakes.”

“I doubt that I can convince the parents and spouses and children of the nullified people of this. They're after blood. They're breaking down the door now, Spade. I hear them say they will hang me.”

“Tell them you won't settle for anything less than a new rope, Maurice,” I tell him. That's an old joke. I switch off the Voxo because Maurice is not making anything except gurgling noises which I cannot interpret.

A thing like that blow over real fast after they have already hang one guy for it and are satisfied. I am back in town and am rolling all those new ideas around in my head, like a bunch of rocks. But I'm not going to build the Hog-Belly Honey again. It is too logical for safety, and is a little before its time.

I am looking to get me another partner. Come into Grogley's if you are interested. I show up there every hour or so. I want a guy as like me as two necks in one noose — what make me think of a thing like that? — a guy look like me and think like me and talk like me.

Just ask for Joe Spade.

But the one I hook onto for a new partner will have to be a fellow who understands me when the scuppers are down.

Bubbles When They Burst

The Director of Publications for the Institute has stated that devices that succeed are more interesting than devices that fail. This one did succeed several times under conditions that are not practical to duplicate — and when it failed it really failed. But there is a chance that it may yet succeed under normal controlled conditions and it will matter very much if it does.

From the case book of the Institute we give that early episode — at the same time a qualified success and a grotesque failure — of the sad death of Cecil Corn:

PROJECT: Fence Around Us.

PRINCIPLES: Cecil Corn and others of the Institute.

PROBLEM: The Speed of Light (The Fence Around Us) as limitor to our hopes of far travel, unless a breakthrough is made, a new framework set up or a new aspect of matter discovered.

PROCEDURE: As stated by Corn, if anything can be found that travels at a speed greater than light the fence is breached. An examination of all transmission does not reveal anything that travels at a speed greater than light. However, it is discovered that we do not know the speed of one thing: Telepathy or thought transference. Corn examined this.

He found that telepathy travels at a variety of speeds, from olfactory (bluntly, the speed of smell, for pairs of telepaths whose body auras must be in contact, for transmission) through speed of sound (for certain pairs who convey by pseudo-sound) to Earth-Instantaneous speed (roughly radio-light speed). With the human element present, it was not possible to distinguish Earth-instantaneous from a real instantaneous. Earth did not provide a long enough base line.

Corn — himself an adequate telepath — set up a number of moon contacts. He convinced himself that telepathy might be truly instantaneous, but he failed to convince others. The human element still ate up what should have been a second and a half time lag between instantaneous telepathy and radio transmission.

Corn set up contact with a young Chinese named Francis Pung who was on Mars Mission. The two were in good rapport. The time lag on test night should have been four-and-a-half minutes. If telepathy were truly instantaneous its message should have been received and recorded completely before the synchronous radio message arrived at Earth. The experiment was well witnessed.

Corn sat at the symbol machine and began to receive and record. Corn knew these first symbols in advance, but not others. Then his Mars contact went to impassioned voice and Corn recorded the message in almost hysterical words: Corn, believe me that I transmit by mind and at this time. Whatever you will hear about me shortly will not change it. The symbols now become impossible to me…

Corn recorded the words and sat back bewildered. A four-minute silence ensued and then the radio message began. It gave the first symbols as Corn had recorded them. Then it gave further symbols which were not known in advance and which Corn had not set down. Then it gave the news that Francis Pung had dropped dead in the Mars radio booth just after the beginning of the experiment.

Corn could not have known that Pung would die. He had received a message of sorts four minutes before the radio message. But the episode became and is still known as the Great Corn Hoax.

Aloysius Shiplap and others of us persuaded Corn to go on experimenting.

“This next one has to be it,” Corn said, “Another failure would kill me.”

Corn set up another Mars contact with Sid Sideral, a man in such perfect health that he was a marvel.

Concurrently with this final test of Corn's our Valery Mok set up an experiment of her own. She was in rapport with her friend Corn. As the test went on she set down what went through the mind of Corn as he received the message of Sideral, and as he believed he was recording it.

Valery's notes — which were not time-stamped — are these:

“Perfect, Sid, nothing will go wrong this time. Why is Aloysius fiddling with my head and mumbling? Receiving and recording nicely, Sid, if only they would let me alone. Why are the idiots taking off my necktie and pouring water over me? Why are they coming at me with a needle? I've had all my shots. Sid, I've beat the jinx. You're a partner too healthy to die on me. Ah, ah, Sid — the jinx had one trick left. I lose again. I died on you.”

He did. Cecil Corn died at the beginning of the experiment and he had recorded nothing. What Valery Mok recorded was not clocked. But she made affidavit that Corn had been receiving from Sideral exactly the same data that came by radio four minutes later; that she had heard it as an undercurrent to the thoughts of Corn with whom she was in rapport.

The press does not usually call a lady a shameless liar, but in this case it did. The incident is still known as the Great Mok Mockery.

FURTHER PROCEDURE: Those of us who would like to believe have had our faith shaken. We have made a dozen further tests of simultaneous distant radio and telepathic transmission. In every case we have found that telepathic transmission over great distance is at radio-light speed and not beyond it. We cannot believe that the two incidents were conscious frauds, but they may have been unconscious ones.

CONCLUSION: Draw your own.

DISPOSAL OF CASE: Open, and subject to review.

EXPECTATIONS: Meager.

And that is the way it remained in the Case Book. But the case did remain in the open file and Gregory Smirnov of the Institute pulled it out once a year to review it. He did so now with a quorum present.

“It always makes me sad to see that folder on Cecil,” said Valery. “He was such a sweet man. You remember the funny way he had of scattering cigar ashes over everything? And his little trick of falling asleep in the middle of a sentence? Well, you've done your duty, Gregory. Put it away for another year.”

“No. I'm thinking of reopening the experiment,” said Gregory.

“You're crazy,” Glasser said.

“Not crazy. A little odd, perhaps. I wouldn't be director of the Institute if I weren't. The problem remains. A breakthrough must be made, a new framework set up or a new aspect of matter has to be discovered. If matter is only what we have believed it to be we are limited forever. But there is a missing factor. All we need is a proper sort of relay to make the idea work.”

“And do you know where to find such a relay?” Aloysius asked.

“I believe it could be found in a hundred impractical places every minute,” Gregory said. “First we must somehow catch that relay on the fly and prove that it does work. Then we will have to synthesize it and have it always ready. It will not solve our problem. It will only enable us to state our problem seriously and go to work on it. We will prove that there is one special case of instantaneous speed — beyond radio-light speed. Then we will seek means to bring other things to that speed. We will have broken out of our framework and set the problem in its proper context.”

“You speak as though the relay already existed,” said Valery.

“Why, it does,” Gregory said. “That is, it exists sometimes. That is, I think it does.”

“If it exists, then use it,” said Glasser. “Make the test.”

“I intend to if I can. But the relay is tricky and hard to come by. Epiktistes, who has analyzed a million or so cases of its operation, believes that it has an effective life of between five and thirty seconds — no more.”

“Well, Gregory, you will have to acquire a number of the relays to experiment effectively,” Aloysius said, “or you will have to find ways of extending their life. The relays — are they expensive?”

“Not as you mean it, Aloysius.”

“Does it take long to construct one?”

“About ninety years on an average.”

(On the same day that Gregory Smirnov reopened the Cecil Corn Case, the Nine Conspirators of Nebula Proxima were sentenced to death by a Court on Kentauron Mikron. We thought you might not have heard of it.)

Gregory Smirnov nibbled at mountains of data for days. He seemed to make a dozen false starts. All Institute people were clammy when they were onto something that wasn't yet ripe. They would never give an honest man a hint of what they were onto. But somebody had to bring Smirnov out of his trance.

“Just what are you working on, Gregory?” asked Glasser after a routine meeting of the Institute people. “Or rather — since it's apparent that you're not doing any work at all — what are you thinking about?”

“About electric eels when they die,” said Gregory.

“Oh? I didn't know you were interested in them? And what else?”

“Gegenschein, condensers, bird entrails, missing factors, oracular pythons, thanatakolouthia (death-trains or death-echoes), backlash, young wives' tales, shackling emancipation from frameworks, hysteresis, collapsing fields, bubbles when they burst.”

“Oh, come now!” protested Valery.

“Atoms or systems into ruin hurl'd,

And now a bubble burst, and now a world,” issued the machine Epiktistes.

“What? What?” demanded Glasser. “Who is making less sense, the man or the machine?”

“It's from A. Pope,” issued Epiktistes. “I thought it was pertinent.”

“One riddle at a time,” said Charles Cogsworth, the humble husband of Valery. “What of the shackling emancipation from frameworks, Gregory?”

“One framework actually — that in which we live. The Baconian and Comptean Revolutions freed us from the old frameworks centuries before we were born. But they prisoned us in a tighter one — that of doctrinaire materialism. Now we are forbidden to have superstitions at all, so a most interesting field is closed to us. We cannot get out of our present frame, we cannot even come near its borders — but there are some answers to be found in those borderlands.”

“To those of us who like bird entrails — and there are less than two of us in the world — your interest is welcome,” said Aloysius. “But what is your interest, Gregory?”

“The emphasis on speed,” said Gregory Smirnov. “In reading fortunes from bird entrails, great speed was necessary. The living bird was ripped open and studied. Whatever happened, it happened fast.”

“There's another one,” issued the machine Epiktistes: “ ‘All at once, and nothing first, Just as bubbles do when they burst.’ From O. W. Holmes. That's the way the One-Hoss Shay broke down.”

“What about condensers, backlash, collapsing fields?” asked Cogsworth.

“Oh, we explain them with equations, but we don't really explain. Why should the old electromagnetic animal kick hardest just after it has died? Why is the echo stronger than the voice?”

“And young wives' tales?” asked Valery. “I've been a young wife for more years than seems possible.”

“You came close to it in the Great Mok Mockery,” said Gregory. “An old wife would be too sane to conceive of such an approach.”

“What does happen when electric eels die?” demanded Glasser. “What does happen to bubbles when they burst?”

“I don't know,” said Gregory, “but either of them would serve as a relay — for too short an interval. A relay, but not a good enough relay. I need something more intricate than an eel and more tenuous than a bubble. And I need it exactly when it vanishes.”

That was all the Institute people could get from Gregory Smirnov that day. They tried to find from Epiktistes, the machine resident at the Institute, what sort of relay it was of which he had analyzed millions of cases.

“I'm almost as much in the dark as you,” Epiktistes issued. “I've analyzed millions of cases of millions of things for that man. What he calls a relay I may be calling something else.”

“But what is it that has an effective life of between five and thirty seconds and no more?” insisted Charles Cogsworth.

“The pledge of a stranger, the allegiance of a Martian, the interest of a dilettante, the love of a gray-eyed woman,” issued Epiktistes.

“Epikt, you can be as exasperating as a man,” said Valery.

But Gregory was going ahead with something. He announced to them that he had set up a new test which would have to be the conclusive test.

“Then you have found a good way of obtaining your relays?” Aloysius asked.

“No. I have not found out anything new,” Gregory said. “But I have accidentally acquired the use of a bunch of the relays. I believe that they will serve for the test and the proof. Then I will begin my long hard search to synthesize the things and to apply the things to more solid matter — or to prove that matter is less solid than it seems.”

“Are you still bothered by our framework?” Cogsworth asked.

“Yes. We are so superstitious that we cower in the middle of our frame. If we are so sure, what are we afraid of? We have insisted that life is no more than chemical-electro-magnetic phenomena, but we are afraid to consider that life may have such backlash as all other similar phenomena show. I wonder how they will play it down when I finally prove it all.”

It was a major experiment and it involved nine radio receivers, nine conventional telepathic receivers, nine special telepathic receivers. It began.

The nine special telepaths received and recorded nine separate symbols. This was important. These symbols were not known by anyone on Earth. They were known by only one person on the originating asteroid up to the moment they were given for transmission. They would not be verified until they were received by radio.

Then the nine special telepaths received and recorded in words — short messages and still shorter — total transmissions from five to thirty seconds, no more. Then silence and the wait for the messages by radio and normal telepathy to begin.

“Who were they?” asked Aloysius who had the gift of always being in the dark as to details of a project.

“Oh, the nine conspirators of Nebula Proxima,” said Gregory. “They have just been executed on the asteroid where the conspiracy was planned.”

“And they are transmitting after they are dead?”

“Certainly not, Aloysius. We could not believe that and still live in our narrow framework. The instant of the collapsing field is still a part of the life of the field. The bursting of the bubble must still be accounted a phenomenon of the bubble. They serve — just after their apparent deaths — as the instantaneous relay.”

“This was the missing factor?”

“Yes. It was the factor of the instantaneous transmission when Francis Pung died on Mars. It was the factor when Cecil Corn died on Earth. The death-instantaneous relay works in both directions.”

“And you believe that you can synthesize such a relay?”

“I am too old to break out of the frame, Aloysius. My chilly faith constrains me to believe that everything is material. And anything that is material can be reproduced in matter.”

“And what if the frame is all a mistake?”

“In either case, the problem can now be tackled. Those who believe in spirit have never accepted the apparent limits of matter.”

“It was of this that Epiktistes analyzed a million cases?”

“Yes. The more clearly verified cases of death-simultaneous apparitions and messages.”

“How were the nine criminals induced to cooperate?”

“What had they to lose? They were all reasonable men, save on politics.”

The slow minutes had trickled away. The radio transmission began to come through. At the same time arrived the messages from trained telepath to trained telepath — all coming at radio-light speed and each received and recorded by an operator in his own cubicle.

The symbols were those nine already received. This itself was verification. The brief comments of the criminals were also verification. They were flashes of wit and irony sparked by details of their own executions that could not have been known before.

So instantaneous transmission in a special case was proved. And once proved, it opened the gates? And many men bent their genius to the follow-up, the synthesizing of a comparable relay?

Well, no — it didn't happen like that. Gregory Smirnov and Aloysius Shiplap and Valery Mok and a few are working on the follow-up and they are getting some good leads. But the thing was not accepted by the Credentials Society, though they had their own impartial men observing and taking part in the experiment. Three men of the Credentials Society had even served as receivers for three of the criminals.

The results were rejected by Credentials because “the veracity of the Testimony of convicted Criminals may not be accepted as Evidence in any Prime Matter under Dispute.”

It is still called the Great Gregory Gallimaufry.

Author's Commentary

The Man Who Never Was

“I'm a future kind of man,” Lado said one day. “And I believe there are other men appearing with new powers. The world will have to accept us for what we are.”

“Bet it don't,” said Runkis.

This began with Raymond Runkis sniping at Mihai Lado the cattle dealer. “You are a double-decked, seven-stranded, copper-bottomed, four-dimension liar!” Runkis roared out that day.

“Yes, I know,” Lado said. He was pleased when praised for his specialty. He was the best liar in the neighborhood, and had the most fun out of it. But Runkis didn't let it go at that.

“Lado, you never told the truth in your life,” he said loudly.

“Tell you what I'll do, Runkis,” Lado said, and his eyes got that double look in them. “You pick any lie I've ever told, anything I've ever guyed you about, and I'll make it come true. That's an open offer.”

We began to pay attention then.

“There's a thousand to choose from,” Runkis said. “I could make you produce that educated calf you brag about.”

“Is that the one you pick? I'll whistle him up in a minute.”

“No. Or I could call you on the cow that gives beer, ale, porter, and stout each from a separate teat.”

“You want her? Nothing easier. But it's only fair to warn you that the porter might be a little too heavy for your taste.”

“I could make you bring that horse you have that reads Homer.”

“Runkis, you're the liar now. I never said he read Homer. I said he recited him. I don't know where that pinto picked it up.”

“You said once you could send a man over the edge, make him disappear completely. I pick that one. Do it!”

“I wouldn't want to send a man away, Runkis.”

“Do it, Lado. You're called. That's one lie you can't make come true. Pick a man and make him disappear. We want to watch.”

“All right,” Lado said. “It will take a couple of days, but you can watch all of it. Sure, I'll send a man over the edge.”

This Lado was a funny fellow. He paid for everything in cash and he made up his mind so quick that he scared you. He was the smartest cattle buyer in the Cimarron valley, a big, ruddy, freckled man, but he didn't look like a country boy. He had those crazy eyes that didn't grow around here; he was like one man looking out through the face of another like a mask.

“I've left more than one town and more than one name behind me,” he had told us one day. “I'm a new kind of man with new powers. I don't use them much, but they grow on me. There's a few of us scattered out. We will either have to accommodate, or the world will.”

“Bet it don't,” said Raymond Runkis.

Lado put little Mack McGoot to sleep once and sent him around introducing himself to a bunch of cattle as though they were people. And he had once sold Runkis a two-year-old runt for a young calf. A runt will have grown a long tail, but a calf will still have a calf-length tail.

“By hokey, that runt didn't have a long tail when I bought him from you yesterday,” Runkis had said when he realized he was taken.

“He had the same tail,” Lado told him. “You saw what I wanted you to see.” This Lado was tricky, but nobody can send a man over the edge.

“I'll do it,” Lado said this day after he'd thought about it a little. “I'll send Jessie Pidd there over the edge.”

“Who?” Runkis asked.

“Jessie Pidd — drinking coffee there at the end of the counter.”

“Oh. Oh, Jessie. All right. When will you do it?”

“I've started,” said Lado. “I've thinned him out a bit already. You can amuse yourselves by watching him fade. It will be gradual, but in three days he will be gone completely.”

Man! We laughed like a clatter of colts coming on to new clover! But it didn't bother Lado; he always had a deep smile when he was on the long end of a bargain, and he had it now.

In a way, Lado had a jump on the thing. Jessie Pidd wasn't all there to begin with, though in a different meaning of the word. He was a simple-minded slight man, not much to him. We used to say that he was so thin that he'd disappear if you looked at him sideways, but that was a joke.

Lado took a lot of harrowing and cross-harrowing as we sat around late that night. We played poker and pitch, and Lado won; we had out the dominoes and played draw and moon, and Lado won. He was the winningest man who ever hit our town, but it looked like there was one deal coming up he couldn't win. But he kept taking bets on the thing; if he did make Jessie Pidd disappear, Lado would own half the town.

Jessie Pidd looked bad the next morning when he sidled into Cattleman's Café for breakfast. He'd always looked bad, though.

“Are you all right, Jessie?” Raymond Runkis asked him.

“Don't feel all there,” Jessie said. Somehow that startled us.

“Lado,” Runkis warned. “Tricks are tricks, and you've pulled some good ones. But if you really harm the man it will go hard on you around here.”

“Runkis, you don't even know what constitutes a man,” said Lado.

“No, I don't. All I say is you'd better not hurt him.”

“Nobody will be hurt by any trick of mine,” Lado said.

But, whatever it was, it had begun.

At mid-morning, Johnny Noble cried out to the town that Jessie Pidd was walking in the sunlight and casting no shadow. Two others saw it. Then it clouded over and couldn't be tested further.

Just before noon, Maudie Malcome cornered Lado in the bank lobby. “Mr. Lado, what are you doing to my husband?” she demanded.

“Have you a husband, Maudie?” Lado asked.

“You red-headed scum! Jessie Pidd, my common-law husband.”

“Why Maudie, I am making him disappear.”

“If you harm a hair of him, I'll kill you.”

Later that day the stories were going around town like an epidemic. Even hard-headed Raymond Runkis had to admit that something was wrong.

“I tell you that I can see light shining through Jessie Pidd there,” he declared, “and I can see the outlines of objects behind him. Tell me, Lado, before we come to violence — is this a trick?”

“Yes, it is all a trick,” said Lado.

“Well, I am hay-bailing to keep this trick within bounds,” Runkis said. “I have the biggest and tightest house in town. The eight of us here for witnesses, and you Jessie, and you Lado, are going there, and we are going to see this thing through. If any of you have any business, attend to it within the hour. Then be at my house. We are going to keep the damnest watch anyone ever kept. Whatever you are, Lado, and whatever you do, we will watch you do it. Am I clear?”

“No. You are confused, Runkis, but your plan suits me. What trickster does not love a captive audience?”

We laid in groceries, assembled in the house of Runkis, and locked it tight just at sundown that day. Nobody was allowed to enter for fifty hours, though people did knock and rattle — particularly Maudie Malcome.

Ten of us: Mihai Lado, Jessie Pidd, Raymond Runkis, Johnny Noble, Will Wilton, Wenchie Hetmonek, Mike McGregor, Billy West, little Mack McGoot, Remberton Randall — one of this bunch (and the way things got legal and sticky later I'm sure not going to say which) being myself.

Runkis appointed us into watches. We dragged two beds into the big room, and set up two cots. Some of us slept, and some of us played pitch to pass away the night.

And about once an hour Runkis exploded: “Lado, you're killing a man! If he goes, you go too!”

“I swear that I do no harm to a person named Jessie Pidd or to any other person,” Lado always said.

None of us could longer doubt that Jessie had become faintly transparent. Outlines of objects could be seen through him; his own outline softened. There was less to him than there had been.

None of us slept much that night. It was a growing horror to watch Jessie go, and by morning you might say he was half gone.

The next day was like a crooked dream. Lado had already won all the money in the house. Thereafter, we played for kitchen matches. The cards seemed to change spots and colours in my hands, and the others had the same trouble. Lado also won all the kitchen matches in the house. We lost all sense of time and proportion.

That night Pidd had become so unsubstantial that smoke drifted through him; there wasn't much left of him but his outline and his slow-witted smile.

By second morning Pidd was still there, but barely. It was running out in a living nightmare. By noon, little Mack McGoot announced that he could no longer see Jessie. By mid-afternoon, all of us would sometimes lose Jessie Pidd, and it was only with the greatest difficulty that his outline could be picked up again.

Then we lost him.

First the outline forever — then the slow-witted smile. By dark, Jessie Pidd was gone. We sat silent and stunned. Then Raymond Runkis broke it with a rumbling sigh: “Lado!” Runkis growled dangerously, “can you still see him?”

“Never could,” Lado said softly.

“What?”

“I said that I never could see him,” Lado explained easily.

“You fool! This won't go! Jessie is gone, Lado!”

“I know it. It's the best trick I ever pulled.”

Runkis collared Lado savagely. “Bring him back. Bring him back right now, Lado!”

“I can't, Runkis. There is nobody to bring back.”

“There is — was — Jessie Pidd. Bring him back or I name it murder!”

“I believe we should all go to the sheriff,” said Hetmonek. “If this isn't murder, we will find as good a name for it.”

All of us were witnesses at the hearing. We gave affidavits. Sheriff Bryce was there but out of his depth. There was also a police doctor named Bates from the City, and a Commissioner named Ottleman from State. This Ottleman was asking the questions, and he had a cutting way of doing it.

“Mr. Lado,” he said, “I have heard what is either the most brainless meandering ever given at a hearing, or the most damning testimony it has ever been my displeasure to savour. Are there facts behind this, Lado?”

“Facts of a sort,” said Lado. “What do you want to know?”

“Younger brother of a blind moose! What happened to Jessie Pidd?”

“He disappeared. They've told you about it.”

“Can you bring him back?”

“Oh, I suppose I could for a little while, but it would spoil the joke.”

“You consider the murder of a man a joke, Mr. Lado?”

“It isn't a question of murder at all; Jessie Pidd was not a person.”

“Ah? What was he, then?”

“He was nothing at all. There never was any Jessie Pidd.”

“Lado, you are a red-headed liar,” Runkis growled.

“Sure, I'm a liar,” Lado admitted. “That's to say that I'm an illusionist. I have a hundred powers, and I played a little joke with each one of them. I can make anything seem to be; I can create reality. I've hidden these things because I don't understand their purpose yet. And one day to lighten the responsibility they cast over me, I decided to have a little fun.”

“When was it you first caused us to see Jessie?” Runkis asked tightly.

“The other night when you challenged me to send a man over the edge,” Lado said.

“Then how have we known Jessie for years and him doing odd jobs around town?”

“You hadn't known him, Raymond,” Lado said. “I suggested him to you and you were susceptible. There was never any Jessie Pidd.”

“Lado, there are difficulties about your explanation,” said Ottleman. “There is testimony that Pidd was indeed known here for years; he was the common-law husband of one — ah — Maudie Malcome.”

“The nearest thing to a husband that Maudie will ever have, it's true,” said Lado. “She is an irrational woman.”

“She's no such thing!” swore little Mack McGoot. “She is a poor, simple-minded person, as was Jessie. We liked them. There is going to be vengeance here, either inside or outside the lines.”

“I didn't know I was that good,” said Lado. “I turned it on. Why can't I turn it off? Ottleman, these people dream in bunches and build up what never was. Test it! Find me written reference to Pidd antedating these last four days. If a man did live in town for years, there would have to be some record of him, he would have to live somewhere. If he did odd jobs for years, then someone would have records of payments to his name. We live in a paper world, and somewhere there should be paper on him.”

“Jessie wasn't such as to be much noted,” said John Noble.

“Try it, Ottleman,” insisted Lado. “You will find there is no note anywhere. I also ask that you get separate descriptions of him from these eight witnesses.”

“We will recess and try it for two hours,” said Ottleman.

They assembled a mass of information in two hours.

“The hearing will come to order again,” Ottleman announced. “You haven't a thing to stand on, Lado. There's no doubt of it: Jessie Pidd was well known around town for many years.”

“How many years?” asked Lado.

“Nobody is quite sure. Estimates run from five to thirty years.”

“Do the descriptions of this non-man agree?”

“All agree in calling him nondescript.”

“And what age do they give this nondescript person?”

“All speak of him as of an uncertain age. Mr. Lado, I have appraised more evidence than you have. It is normal for people to be vague; it is the usual thing that they do not describe well. But I have no doubt that Jessie Pidd was a real man, and that you have inflicted on him a real death.”

“Did you find any written note on him? That's the test.”

“No, we didn't; and it's no test at all. As they all say, he was not such a man as you would make written note of. Those who hired him paid him in cash. He has never registered to vote, never had a driver's license or social security number, never had a bank account, never been on the tax rolls. He was a man untouched by affairs; he was no part of your paper world.”

“Did he himself leave anything in writing?”

“No. The opinion is that he was an illiterate.”

“Well, cat-haired conniptions! Didn't he even leave an X?”

“Not even an X, Lado, but he was real for all that. We may as well close off this diversion of yours and get back to the main inquiry. How did you kill him? Where is his body?”

“Mr. Ottleman, I am speaking clear truth to a room that has no ears for it,” said Lado. “Illusion is one of the gifts that came to me unasked. For the amusement of myself and, I believed, of others, I created an illusion of a man; then I let it fade. There was no Jessie Pidd. He was a simple man only in that I created him by a simple trick. These are all simple men here, Mr. Ottleman, and they are subject to a continuing illusion.”

“Have you no remorse for the murder?” asked Ottleman.

“Suffering sandburs, you cannot be as obdurate as that! It was a simple trick. Now it is over with, and nobody laughs.” Then Lado spoke more shrilly. “I have the powers by accident. I am a new kind of man.”

“We have an old kind of justice,” said Ottleman. “We will find the body wherever you have hidden it, and you will hang for it.”

But, however much the rope itched for Lado's neck, officialdom could not hang him without a body for evidence.

Fortunately the private persons of us were not so circumscribed. It had to be done, and we did it.

It was bright afternoon. Lado didn't want to go; a new kind of man makes just as much fuss about going as the old kind.

“You fools!” Lado shouted with his hands tied behind him. “We are the beginning of something. We're on the line to the future.”

“But on the wrong end of the rope today,” Runkis said.

“You fools!” he screamed. “There never was any Jessie Pidd!”

Oh well — we knew that by now. But, as Lado once said, who wants to spoil a good joke?

We hanged him then. Like he said, he arrived in the world a little too early for his own good. He had stopped screaming just before we hoisted him. “I got the powers blind,” he said. “I keep thinking somebody will tell me what to do with them.”

“Bet they don't,” said Raymond Runkis, and we strung him up then.

Runkis and little Mack McGoot disposed of the body. They said it would never be found where they put it, and it wasn't.

What do you do when you have just hanged a man? Why, the man himself had showed us what to do. Besides, a future kind of man doesn't leave much of a hole in the present.

When a whole town sticks together it can do wonders in a few hours. We destroyed every trace of Mihai Lado. We had plenty in our favour. That man with his eternal roll of bills had done everything in cash. We suspected that the name he used wasn't his real name. We went over every business, every person, every deal, every record. A few things had to be smudged, but not many. We had sent him clear over the edge.

When Ottleman, accompanied by the militia, arrived at dusk, it was a remarkably hard-of-hearing town they had come to.

Hanged a man? Who? Us? A Mihai Lado? That name sure did not ring any bell in our town. Even our sheriff did not recognize Mr. Ottleman when he came; they had to be introduced all over again. Ottleman set his briefcase down on the ground in exasperation.

There is some mistake, we said. This is Springdale. You must be looking for Springfield clear in the other part of the State. A previous hearing, you say? And only the day before yesterday? There must be some mistake. And the papers in your briefcase there? I bet that is the case the boy just ran away with. No, we don't know who he was. We don't know who anyone is.

It was a nervous business, but we played it out all the way and we got clear with it. People, there never was any Jessie Pidd in our town, and there never was any Mihai Lado either.

There's one thing about those future types, though: we all got to go through that future country.

“He'll be waiting up ahead,” said little Mack McGoot, “one side or other of the barrier. He'll have us then.”

“Bet he don't,” said Raymond Runkis, but Runkis had begun to go to pieces. He began to get old all at once, and old is one thing I don't want to get. I sure drag my feet on it.

Up ahead, around some dark corner, one side or the other of the barrier as little Mack McGoot says, there's a big ruddy freckled man who has some powers that will be beginning to get ripe. He's a man with crazy eyes that didn't grow around here, and he's like one man looking out through the face of another like a mask.

Author's Commentary

Slow Tuesday Night

A panhandler intercepted the young couple as they strolled down the night street.

“Preserve us this night,” he said as he touched his hat to them, “and could you good people advance me a thousand dollars to be about the recouping of my fortunes?”

“I gave you a thousand last Friday,” said the young man.

“Indeed you did,” the panhandler replied, “and I paid you back tenfold by messenger before midnight.”

“That's right, George, he did,” said the young woman. “Give it to him, dear. I believe he's a good sort.”

So the young man gave the panhandler a thousand dollars, and the panhandler touched his hat to them in thanks and went on to the recouping of his fortunes.

As he went into Money Market, the panhandler passed Ildefonsa Impala, the most beautiful woman in the city.

“Will you marry me this night, Ildy?” he asked cheerfully.

“Oh, I don't believe so, Basil,” she said. “I marry you pretty often, but tonight I don't seem to have any plans at all. You may make me a gift on your first & second, however. I always like that.”

But when they had parted she asked herself: “But whom will I marry tonight?”

The panhandler was Basil Bagelbaker, who would be the richest man in the world within an hour and a half. He would make and lose four fortunes within eight hours; and these not the little fortunes that ordinary men acquire, but titanic things.

When the Abebajos block had been removed from Human minds, people began to make decisions faster, and often better. It had been the mental stutter. When it was understood what it was, and that it had no useful function, it was removed by simple childhood metasurgery.

Transportation and manufacturing had then become practically instantaneous. Things that had once taken months and years now took only minutes and hours. A person could have one or several pretty intricate careers within an eight-hour period.

Freddy Fixico had just invented a manus module. Freddy was a Nyctalops, and the modules were characteristic of these people. The people had then divided themselves — according to their natures and inclinations — into the Auroreans, the Hemerobians, and the Nyctalops — or the Dawners, who had their most active hours from four AM till noon; the Day-Flies, who obtained from noon to eight PM; and the Night-Seers, whose civilization thrived from eight PM to four AM. The cultures, inventions, markets and activities of these three folk were a little different. As a Nyctalops, Freddy had just begun his working day at eight PM on a slow Tuesday night.

Freddy rented an office and had it furnished. This took one minute, negotiation, selection and installation being almost instantaneous. Then he invented the manus module; that took another minute. He then had it manufactured and marketed; in three minutes it was in the hands of key buyers.

It caught on. It was an attractive module. The flow of orders began within thirty seconds. By ten minutes after eight every important person had one of the new manus modules, and the trend had been set. The module began to sell in the millions. It was one of the most interesting fads of the night, or at least the early part of the night.

Manus modules had no practical function, no more than had Sameki verses. They were attractive, of a psychologically satisfying size and shape, and could be held in the hands, set on a table, or installed in a module niche of any wall.

Naturally Freddy became very rich. Ildefonsa Impala, the most beautiful woman in the city, was always interested in newly rich men. She came to see Freddy about eight-thirty. People made up their minds fast, and Ildefonsa had hers made up when she came. Freddy made his own up quickly and divorced Judy Fixico in Small Claims Court. Freddy and Ildefonsa went honeymooning to Paraiso Dorado, a resort.

It was wonderful. All of Ildy's marriages were. There was the wonderful floodlighted scenery. The recirculated water of the famous falls was tinted gold; the immediate rocks had been done by Rambles; and the hills had been contoured by Spall. The beach was a perfect copy of that at Merevale, and the popular drink that first part of the night was blue absinthe.

But scenery — whether seen for the first time or revisited after an interval — is stirring for the sudden intense view of it. It is not meant to be lingered over. Food, selected and prepared instantly, is eaten with swift enjoyment; and blue absinthe lasts no longer than its own novelty. Loving, for Ildefonsa and her paramours, was quick and consuming; and repetition would have been pointless to her. Besides, Ildefonsa and Freddy had taken only the one-hour luxury honeymoon.

Freddy wished to continue the relationship, but Ildefonsa glanced at a trend indicator. The manus module would hold its popularity for only the first third of the night. Already it had been discarded by people who mattered. And Freddy Fixico was not one of the regular successes. He enjoyed a full career only about one night a week.

They were back in the city and divorced in Small Claims Court by nine thirty-five. The stock of manus modules was remaindered, and the last of it would be disposed to bargain hunters among the Dawners, who will buy anything.

“Whom shall I marry next?” Ildefonsa asked herself. “It looks like a slow night.”

“Bagelbaker is buying,” ran the word through Money Market, but Bagelbaker was selling again before the word had made its rounds. Basil Bagelbaker enjoyed making money, and it was a pleasure to watch him work as he dominated the floor of the Market and assembled runners and a competent staff out of the corner of his mouth. Helpers stripped the panhandler rags off him and wrapped him in a tycoon toga. He sent one runner to pay back twentyfold the young couple who had advanced him a thousand dollars. He sent another with a more substantial gift to Ildefonsa Impala, for Basil cherished their relationship. Basil acquired title to the Trend Indication Complex and had certain falsifications set into it. He caused to collapse certain industrial empires that had grown up within the last two hours, and made a good thing of recombining their wreckage. He had been the richest man in the world for some minutes now. He became so money-heavy that he could not maneuver with the agility he had shown an hour before. He became a great fat buck, and the pack of expert wolves circled him to bring him down.

Very soon he would lose that first fortune of the evening. The secret of Basil Bagelbaker is that he enjoyed losing money spectacularly after he was full of it to the bursting point.

A thoughtful man named Maxwell Mouser had just produced a work of actinic philosophy. It took him seven minutes to write it. To write works of philosophy one used the flexible outlines and the idea indexes; one set the activator for such a wordage in each subsection; an adept would use the paradox feed-in, and the striking-analogy blender; one calibrated the particular-slant and the personality-signature. It had to come out a good work, for excellence had become the automatic minimum for such productions.

“I will scatter a few nuts on the frosting,” said Maxwell, and he pushed the lever for that. This sifted handfuls of words like chthonic and heuristic and prozymeides through the thing so that nobody could doubt it was a work of philosophy.

Maxwell Mouser sent the work out to publishers, and received it back each time in about three minutes. An analysis of it and reason for rejection was always given — mostly that the thing had been done before and better. Maxwell received it back ten times in thirty minutes, and was discouraged. Then there was a break.

Ladion's work had become a hit within the last ten minutes, and it was now recognized that Mouser's monograph was both an answer and a supplement to it. It was accepted and published in less than a minute after this break. The reviews of the first five minutes were cautious ones; then real enthusiasm was shown. This was truly one of the greatest works of philosophy to appear during the early and medium hours of the night. There were those who said it might be one of the enduring works and even have a holdover appeal to the Dawners the next morning.

Naturally Maxwell became very rich, and naturally Ildefonsa came to see him about midnight. Being a revolutionary philosopher, Maxwell thought that he might make some free arrangement, but Ildefonsa insisted it must be marriage. So Maxwell divorced Judy Mouser in Small Claims Court and went off with Ildefonsa.

This Judy herself, though not so beautiful as Ildefonsa, was the fastest taker in the city. She only wanted the men of the moment for a moment, and she was always there before even Ildefonsa. Ildefonsa believed that she took the men away from Judy; Judy said that Ildy had her leavings and nothing else.

“I had him first,” Judy would always mock as she raced through Small Claims Court.

“Oh that damned urchin!” Ildefonsa would moan. “She wears my very hair before I do.”

Maxwell Mouser and Ildefonsa Impala went honeymooning to Musicbox Mountain, a resort. It was wonderful. The peaks were done with green snow by Dunbar and Fittle. (Back at Money Market Basil Bagelbaker was putting together his third and greatest fortune of the night, which might surpass in magnitude even his fourth fortune of the Thursday before.) The chalets were Switzier than the real Swiss and had live oats in every room. (And Stanley Skuldugger was emerging as the top Actor-Imago of the middle hours of the night.) The popular drink for that middle part of the night was Glotzenglubber, Eve Cheese and Rhine wine over pink ice. (And back in the city the leading Nyctalops were taking their midnight break at the Toppers Club.)

Of course it was wonderful, as were all of Ildefonsa's — But she had never been really up on philosophy so she had scheduled only the special thirty-five-minute honeymoon. She looked at the trend indicator to be sure. She found that her current husband had been obsoleted, and his opus was now referred to sneeringly as Mouser's Mouse. They went back to the city and were divorced in Small Claims Court.

The membership of the Toppers Club varied. Success was the requisite of membership. Basil Bagelbaker might be accepted as a member, elevated to the presidency and expelled from it as a dirty pauper from three to six times a night. But only important persons could belong to it, or those enjoying brief moments of importance.

“I believe I will sleep during the Dawner period in the morning,” Overcall said. “I may go up to this new place, Koimopolis, for an hour of it. They're said to be good. Where will you sleep, Basil?”

“Flop house.”

“I believe I will sleep an hour by the Midian Method,” said Burnbanner. “They have a fine new clinic. And perhaps I'll sleep an hour by the Prasenka Process, and an hour by the Dormidjo.”

“Crackle has been sleeping an hour every period by the natural method,” said Overcall.

“I did that for half an hour not long since,” said Burnbanner. “I believe an hour is too long to give it. Have you tried the natural method, Basil?”

“Always. Natural method and a bottle of red-eye.”

Stanley Skuldugger had become the most meteoric actor-imago for a week. Naturally he became very rich, and Ildefonsa Impala went to see him about three AM.

“I had him first!” rang the mocking voice of Judy Skuldugger as she skipped through her divorce in Small Claims Court. And Ildefonsa and Stanley-boy went off honeymooning. It is always fun to finish up a period with an actor-imago who is the hottest property in the business. There is something so adolescent and boorish about them.

Besides, there was the publicity, and Ildefonsa liked that. The rumor-mills ground. Would it last ten minutes? Thirty? An hour? Would it be one of those rare Nyctalops marriages that lasted through the rest of the night and into the daylight off-hours? Would it even last into the next night as some had been known to do?

Actually it lasted nearly forty minutes, which was almost to the end of the period.

It had been a slow Tuesday night. A few hundred new products had run their course on the market. There had been a score of dramatic hits, three-minute and five-minute capsule dramas, and several of the six minute long-play affairs. Night Street Nine — a solidly sordid offering — seemed to be in as the drama of the night unless there should be a late hit.

Hundred-storied buildings had been erected, occupied, obsoleted, and demolished again to make room for more contemporary structures. Only the mediocre would use a building that had been left over from the Day Fliers or the Dawners, or even the Nyctalops of the night before. The city was rebuilt pretty completely at least three times during an eight-hour period.

The period drew near its end. Basil Bagelbaker, the richest man in the world, the reigning president of the Toppers Club, was enjoying himself with his cronies. His fourth fortune of the night was a paper pyramid that had risen to incredible heights; but Basil laughed to himself as he savored the manipulation it was founded on.

Three ushers of the Toppers Club came in with firm step.

“Get out of here, you dirty bum,” they told Basil savagely. They tore the tycoon's toga off him and then tossed him his seedy panhandler's rags with a three-man sneer.

“All gone?” Basil asked. “I gave it another five minutes.”

“All gone,” said a messenger from Money Market. “Nine billion gone in five minutes, and it really pulled some others down with it.”

“Pitch the busted bum out!” howled Overcall and Burnbanner and the other cronies.

“Wait, Basil,” said Overcall. “Turn in the President's Crosier before we kick you downstairs. After all, you'll have it several times again tomorrow night.”

The period was over. The Nyctalops drifted off to sleep clinics or leisure-hour hideouts to pass their ebb time. The Auroreans, the Dawners, took over the vital stuff.

Now you would see some action! Those Dawners really made fast decisions. You wouldn't catch them wasting a full minute setting up a business.

A sleepy panhandler met Ildefonsa Impala on the way.

“Preserve us this morning, Ildy,” he said, “and will you marry in the coming night?”

“Likely I will, Basil,” she told him. “Did you marry Judy during the night past?”

“I'm not sure. Could you let me have two dollars, Ildy?”

“Out of the question. I believe a Judy Bagelbaker was named one of the ten best-dressed women during the frou-frou fashion period about two o'clock. Why do you need two dollars?”

“A dollar for a bed and a dollar for red-eye. After all, I sent you two million out of my second.”

“I keep my two sorts of accounts separate. Here's a dollar, Basil. Now be off! I can't be seen talking to a dirty panhandler.”

“Thank you, Ildy. I'll get the red-eye and sleep in an alley. Preserve us this morning.”

Bagelbaker shuffled off whistling “Slow Tuesday Night.”

And already the Dawners had set Wednesday morning to jumping.

Author's Commentary

Guesting Time

Winston, the Civil Servant in Immigration and Arrivals, was puzzled when he came that morning. There were several hundred new people behind the cyclone fences, and no arrivals had been scheduled.

“What ships landed?” he called out. “Why were they unscheduled?”

“No ships landed, sir,” said Potholder, the senior guard.

“Then how did these people get here? Walk down from the sky?” Winston asked snappishly.

“Yes, sir, I guess so. We don't know who they are or how they keep coming here. They say they are from Skandia.”

“We have few Scandinavian arrivals, and none of such appearance as this,” said Winston. “How many are there?”

“Well, sir, when we first noticed them there were seven, and they hadn't been there a moment before.”

“Seven? You're crazy. There are hundreds.”

“Yes, sir. I'm crazy. A minute after there were seven, there were seventeen. But no more had come from anywhere. Then there were sixty. We separated them into groups of ten and watched them very closely. None crossed from one group to another, none came from anywhere else. But soon there were fifteen, then twenty-five, then thirty in each group. And there's a lot more of them there now than when you started to talk to me a moment ago, Mr. Winston.”

“Corcoran is my superior and will be here in a minute,” Winston said. “He'll know what to do.”

“Mr. Corcoran left just before you arrived, sir,” said Potholder. “He watched it a while, and then went away babbling.”

“I always admired his quick grasp of a situation,” said Winston. He also went away babbling.

There were about a thousand of those Skandia people, and a little later there were nine times that many. They weren't dowdy people, but the area wouldn't hold any more. The fences all went down, and the Skandias spread out into the city and towns and country. This was only the beginning of it. About a million of them materialized there that morning, then the same thing happened at ten thousand other Ports of Entry of Earth.

“Mama,” said Trixie, “there are some people here who want to use our bathroom.” This was Beatrice (Trixie) Trux, a little girl in the small town of Winterfield.

“What an odd request!” said Mrs. Trux. “But I suppose it is in the nature of an emergency. Let them in, Trixie. How many people are there?”

“About a thousand,” said Trixie.

“Trixie, there can't be that many.”

“All right, you count them.”

All the people came in to use the Trux's bathroom. There were somewhat more than a thousand of them, and it took them quite a while to use the bathroom even though they put a fifteen-second limit on each one and had a timekeeper with a bell to enforce it. They did it all with a lot of laughter and carrying on, but it took that first bunch about five hours to go through, and by that time there were a lot more new ones waiting.

“This is a little unusual,” Mrs. Trux said to some of the Skandia women. “I was never short on hospitality. It is our physical resources, not our willingness, that becomes strained. There are so many of you!”

“Don't give it a thought,” the Skandia women said. “It is the intent that counts, and it was so kind of you people to invite us. We seldom get a chance to go anywhere. We came a little early, but the main bunch will be along very soon. Don't you just love to go visiting.”

“Oh, yes, yes,” said Mrs. Trux. “I never realized till now just how much I wanted to go visiting.”

But when she saw the whole outdoors black with the new people, Mrs. Trux decided that she had better stay where she was.

Truman Trux was figuring with a pencil.

“Our lot is fifty feet by a hundred and fifty feet, Jessica,” he said. “That is either 7,500 or 75,000 square feet depending on how many zeroes you carry it out to.”

“You were always good at math,” said Mrs. Trux. “How do you do it anyhow?”

“And do you know how many people are living with us here on this lot, Jessica?” Truman asked.

“Quite a few.”

“I am guessing between six and seven thousand,” said Truman. “I found several more blocks of them this morning that I didn't know about. They have a complete city built in our back yard. The streets are two-and-a-half feet wide; the houses are eight feet by eight feet with six foot ceilings, and most of them are nine stories high. Whole families live in each room and cook there besides. They have shops and bazaars set up. They even have factories built. I know there is an entire wholesale textile district in our back yard. There are thirteen taverns and five music halls in our yard to my own knowledge, and there may be more.”

“Well, some of those places are pretty small, Truman. The Little Hideout is the broom closet of the Big Hideout, and I don't know if we should count it as a separate tavern. You have to go into the Sideways Club side-ways; the Thinman Club is only nine inches wide from wall to wall and it's quite a trick to bending an elbow there; and the Mouse Room is small. But the better clubs are up in our attic, Truman. Did you ever count them? The Crazy Man Cabaret is up there, and the After Hours Club. Most of the other attic clubs are key clubs and I'm not a member. They've set up the Skandia Art Theater in our basement now, you know. They have continuous performances.”

“I know it, Jessica, I know it.”

“Their comedies are so funny that I nearly die. The trouble is that it's so crowded there that you have to laugh in when the one next to you laughs out. And I cry just like they do at their tragedies. They're all about women who can't have any more children. Why don't we have a bunch more, Truman? There's more than twenty shops in our yard where they sell nothing but fertility charms. I wonder why there aren't any children with the Skandia?”

“Ah, they say that this is just a short first visit by a few of them and they didn't presume to bring their children with them. What is that new racket superimposed on the old?”

“Oh, that's the big drums and the cymbals. They're having a political campaign to elect temporary officials for the time of their visit here. Imperial City, that's the town in our yard, and our house, will elect delegates to go to Congress to represent this whole block. The elections will be tonight. Then we'll really hear some noise, they say. The big drums don't really waste space, Truman. There are people inside them and they play them from the inside. Some of our neighbors are getting a little fussy about the newcomers, but I always did like a house full of people.”

“We have it now, Jessica. I never got used to sleeping in a bed with nine other people, even if they are quiet sleepers. I like people, and I am fond of new experiences. But it is getting crowded.”

“We have more of the Skandia than anyone else in the block except the Skirveys. They say it's because they like us more than some of the others. Mamie Skirvey is taking four kinds of the fertility pills now. She is almost sure she will be able to have triplets. I want to too.”

“All the stores are stripped, Jessica, and all the lumber yards and lumber camps; and the grain elevators will be empty in two more days. The Skandia pay for everything in money, but nobody knows what it says on it. I haven't got used to walking on men and women when I go out, but there's no avoiding it since the ground is covered with them.”

“They don't mind. They're used to it. They say it's crowded where they come from.”

The Winterfield Times-Tribune Telegraph had a piece about the Skandia:

The plain fact is that for two days the Earth has had ten billion visitors from Skandia, wherever that is. The plain fact is that the Earth will die of them within a week. They appear by invisible transportation, but they have shown no inclination to disappear in the same manner. Food will be gone, the very air we breathe will be gone. They speak all our languages, they are polite, friendly and agreeable. And we will perish from them.

A big smiling man broke in on Bar-John, who was once again president of Big State Amalgamated, former U.S.A.

“I'm the president of the Skandia Visitation,” he boomed. “We have come partly to instruct you people and we find that you do need it. Your fertility rate is pathetic. You barely double in fifty years. Your medicine, adequate in other fields, is worse than childish in this. We find that some of the nostrums peddled to your people actually impede fertility. Well, get in the Surgeon General and a few of the boys and we'll begin to correct the situation.”

“Gedoudahere,” said President Bar-John.

“I know you will not want your people to miss out on the population blessing,” said the Skandia Visitation President. “We can aid you. We want you to be as happy as we are.”

“Jarvis! Cudgelman! Sapsucker!” President Bar-John called out. “Shoot down this man. I'll implement the paperwork on it later.”

“You always say that but you never do,” Sapsucker complained. “It's been getting us in a lot of trouble.”

“Oh, well, don't shoot him down then if you're going to make an issue of it. I long for the old days when the simple things were done simply. Dammit, you Skandia skinner, do you know that there are nine thousand of you in the White House itself?”

“We intend to improve that this very hour,” the Skandia president said. “We can erect one, two, or even three decks in these high-ceilinged rooms. I am happy to say that we will have thirty thousand of our people quartered in the White House this night.”

“Do you think I like to take a bath with eight other persons — not even registered voters — in the same tub?” President Bar-John complained. “Do you think I like to eat off a plate shared by three or four other people? Or to shave, by mistake, faces other than my own in the morning?”

“I don't see why not,” said the Skandia Visitation president. “People are our most precious commodity. Presidents are always chosen as being those who most love the people.”

“Oh, come on, fellows,” said President Bar-John. “Shoot down the ever-loving son. We're entitled to a free one now and then.”

Jarvis and Cudgelman and Sapsucker blazed away at the Skandia, but they harmed him not at all.

“You should have known that we are immune to that,” the Skandia said. “We voted against its effect years ago. Well, since you will not cooperate, I will go direct to your people. Happy increase to you, gentlemen.”

Truman Trux, having gone out from his own place for a little change, was sitting on a park bench.

He wasn't actually sitting on it, but several feet above it. In that particular place, a talkative Skandia lady sat on the bench itself. On her lap sat a sturdy Skandia man reading the Sporting News and smoking a pipe. On him sat a younger Skandia woman. On this younger woman sat Truman Trux, and on him sat a dark Skandia girl who was filing her fingernails and humming a tune. On her in turn sat an elderly Skandia man. As crowded as things had become, one could not expect a seat of one's own.

A fellow and his girl came along, walking on the people on the grass.

“Mind if we get on?” asked the girl.

“Quite all right,” said the elderly gentleman on top.

“S'all right,” said the girl working on her nails.

“Certainly,” said Truman and the others, and the Sporting News man puffed into his pipe that it was perfectly agreeable.

There was no longer any motor traffic. People walked closely packed on streets and sidewalks. The slow stratum was the lowest, then the medium, then the fast (walking on the shoulders of the mediums and combining the three speeds). At crossings it became rather intricate, and people were sometimes piled nine high. But the Earth people, those who still went out, quickly got onto the Skandia techniques.

An Earthman, known for his extreme views, had mounted onto a monument in the park and began to harangue the people, Earth and Skandia. Truman Trux, who wanted to see and hear, managed to get a nice fifth-level seat, sitting on the shoulders of a nice Skandia girl, who sat on the shoulders of another who likewise to the bottom.

“Ye are the plague of locusts!” howled the Earth-side crank. “Ye have stripped us bare!”

“The poor man!” said the Skandia girl who was Truman's understudy. “He likely has only a few children and is embittered.”

“Ye have devoured our substance and stolen the very air of our life. Ye are the Apocalyptical grasshoppers, the eleventh plague.”

“Here is a fertility charm for your wife,” said the Skandia girl, and reached it up to Truman. “You might not need it yet, but keep it for the future. It is for those who have more than twelve. The words in Skandia say ‘Why stop now?’ It is very efficacious.”

“Thank you,” said Truman. “My wife has many charms from you good people, but not one like this. We have only one child, a young girl.”

“What a shame! Here is a charm for your daughter. She cannot begin to use them too early.”

“Destruction, destruction, destruction on ye all!” screamed the Earth-side crank from atop the monument.

“Quite an adept,” said the Skandia girl. “To what school of eloquence does he belong?”

The crowd began to break up and move off. Truman felt himself taken down one level and then another.

“Any particular direction?” asked the Skandia girl.

“This is fine,” said Truman. “We're going toward my home.”

“Why, here's a place almost clear,” said the girl. “You'd never find anything like this at home.” They were now down to the last level, the girl walking only on the horizontal bodies of those lounging on the grass. “You can get off and walk if you wish,” said the girl. “Here's a gap in the walkers you can slip down into. Well, toodle.”

“You mean toodle-oo?” Truman asked as he slid off her shoulders.

“That's right. I can never remember the last part of it.”

The Skandia were such friendly people!

President Bar-John and a dozen other regents of the world had decided that brusqueness was called for. Due to the intermingling of Earth and Skandia populations, this would be a task for small and medium arms. The problem would be to gather the Skandia together in open spots, but on the designated day they began to gather of themselves in a million parks and plazas of the Earth. It worked perfectly. Army units were posted everywhere and went into action.

Rifles began to whistle and machine guns to chatter. But the effect on the Skandia was not that expected.

Instead of falling wounded, they cheered everywhere.

“Pyrotechnics yet!” exclaimed a Skandia leader, mounting onto the monument in one park. “Oh, we are honored!”

But, though the Skandia did not fall from the gunshot, they had began to diminish in their numbers. They were disappearing as mysteriously as they had appeared a week before.

“We go now,” said the Skandia leader from the top of the monument. “We have enjoyed every minute of our short visit. Do not despair! We will not abandon you to your emptiness. Our token force will return home and report. In another week we will visit you in substantial numbers. We will teach you the full happiness of human proximity, the glory of fruitfulness, the blessing of adequate population. We will teach you to fill up the horrible empty places of your planet.”

The Skandia were thinning out. The last of them were taking cheering farewells of disconsolate Earth friends.

“We will be back,” they said as they passed their last fertility charms into avid hands. “We'll be back and teach you everything so you can be as happy as we are. Good increase to you!”

“Good increase to you!” cried the Earth people to the disappearing Skandia. Oh, it would be a lonesome world without all those nice people! With them you had the feeling that they were really close to you.

“We'll be back!” said the Skandia leader, and disappeared from the monument. “We'll be back next week and a lot more of us,” and then they were gone.

“ — And next time we'll bring the kids!” came the last fading Skandia voice from the sky.

Author's Commentary

Land of the Great Horses

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then he jerked back as though startled at himself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Something is very wrong here,” Rockwell said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why, sir, that is Lolo Trusul.”

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

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

“Smith! You're a qualified cartographer!”

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

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

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

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

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

But Seruno Smith had ambled off like a crazy man.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Ashava, Sarishan,” Smith called a parting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Nashiva, woman, nashiva!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why Karachi?” one of them asked her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two million Gypsies of the world were going home.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Afterword (Land Of The Great Horses)

From Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison

We are all cousins. I don't believe in reincarnation, but the only system of reincarnation that satisfies justice is that every being should become successively (or sometimes simultaneously) every other being. This would take a few billion lifetimes; the writer with a feel for the Kindred tries to do it in one.

We are all Romanies, as in the parable here, and we have a built-in homing to and remembrance of a woolier and more excellent place, a reality that masquerades as a mirage. Whether the more excellent place is here or heretofore or hereafter, I don't know, or whether it will be our immediate world when it is sufficiently animated; but there is an intuition about it which sometimes passes through the whole community. There is, or there ought to be, these shimmering heights; and they belong to us. Controversy (or polarity) is between ourselves as individuals and as members of the incandescent species, confronted with the eschatological thing. I'd express it more intelligently if I knew how.

But I didn't write the story to point up this notion, but to drop a name. There is a Margaret the barmaid — not the one in the story, of course (for we have to abide by the disavowal “Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental”), but another of the same name — and she is a Romany. “Put my name in a story, just Margaret the barmaid,” she told me. “I don't care what, even name a dog that.” “But you won't know it,” I said, “you don't read anything, and none of the people you run around with do.” “I will know it exactly,” she said, “when someone else reads it someday, when they come to the name Margaret the barmaid. I know things like that.”

Not from me, but from someone who reads it here, Margaret will receive the intuition, and both parties will know it. “Hey, the old bat did it,” Margaret will say. I don't know what the reader-sender caught in the middle will say or think.

I am pleased to be a member of this august though sometimes raffish company playing here in this production. It has an air of excellence, and some of it will rub off on me. We are, all of us, Counts of Con-dom and Dukes of Little Egypt.

Once On Aranea

One fine spider silk, no more than ¹⁄80,000 of an inch thick, could this bind and kill a man? He would soon know. It would be a curious death, to be done in by fine spider silk.

“ — but then mine has been a curious life,” Scarble muttered from a tight throat, “and it might as well have an ironic end to it. I wonder if you know, you mother-loving spiders,” he called out with difficulty, “that every death is ironic. The arachnidian irony has a pretty fine edge, though.”

It had begun on Aranea a week earlier. In their surveying of the planet-sized asteroids of the Cercyon Belt, their practice was (after the team had completed the Initial Base Survey) to leave a lone man on the asteroid for a short period.

The theory was that any malevolent force, which might not move against a group, could come into the open against a lone man. In practice it had given various results.

Donners said that nothing at all happened on his world when he was there alone, and that nothing had happened to him. But Donners had developed a grotesque facial tic and an oddity of speech and manner. Something had happened to him which he had not realized.

Procop had simply disappeared from his world, completely and with no residue. He couldn't have traveled a hundred kilometers on foot in the time he had, and there was no reason for him to travel even ten. He should have left traces — of the calcium which was hardly on that world at all, of cellular decomposition, of amino acids. If a gram of him had been left on that world in any form, the scanners would have found it, and they hadn't. But exploratory parties grow used to such puzzles.

Bernheim said that he had gone to pieces when left alone. He did not know whether there had been strange happenings on his world or in his head. He had straightened up only with a great effort when he saw them come back for him, he said. Bernheim had always been a man of compulsive honesty.

Marin said that it hadn't been a picnic when he was left alone, but that nothing had happened there that he wouldn't be able to find an answer to if he could devote a thousand years to it. He said it was more a test of a man than of a world. But it was the test that the Party was to use for the livableness of a world.

On Aranea it was Scarble who would remain alone and make the test. On Aranea, the Spider Asteroid, there were two sorts of creatures — at first believed to be three. But two of these first apparent forms were different stages of the same species.

There were the small four-legged scutters. There were the two-legged, two-armed, upright straddling fingerlings. Finally there were the “Spiders” — actually dodecapods, the largest of them as big as a teacup. The two-legged fingerlings were the spiders, after their metamorphosis.

Bernheim was reading his report, the final bit for the Initial Base Survey:

“The basic emotion of the small quadrupeds, Scutterae Bernheimiensis, is subservience. They register that they are owned by the spider complex, and that they must serve it.”

“So, there are two species, one slave to the other,” said Marin. “It's a common pattern.”

“The biped fingerlings, Larva Arachnida Marin, do not realize their relationship to the ‘Spiders,’ ” Bernbeim continued. “When forced into the metamorphosis, their reaction is stark consternation.”

“So would mine be,” said Scarble. “And what's the basic emotion of the adult spiders, the Arachne Dodecapode Scarble?”

“It is mother-love, lately reoriented by an intrusion and intensified many-fold.”

“By what intrusion? And how intensified?” Marin asked.

“We are the intrusion. We are the intensification,” Bernheim explained. “They are intensely excited only since our arrival. That murmuring and chirping of millions of them is all for us. This is maternal affection gone hysterical — for us!”

They exploded in the first real laughter ever heard on Aranea, and even the spiders giggled in million-voiced accord.

“Oh, those mother-loving spiders!” became their byword for their stay there, and it had to go into the report.

So it was with rare good humor that three of them (Bernheim, Marin, Donners) took off and left Scarble alone on the Spider World, himself chortling every time he thought of the maternal spiders. For companion, Scarble had only a dog named Dog, which is to say Cyon; it was a classical dog.

This would be easy. Scarble liked spiders and even looked like one — a spindly, wiry man covered with black hair almost everywhere except on the top of his head; a man who ran much to long legs and arms and had not a great amount of body to him. When he waved his arms, as he did when he talked, he gave the impression of having more than two of them. Even his humor was spider-like.

And what was there to scare any man in the golden daylight of Aranea? Scarble had the name of not being afraid of anything; he had been diligent to give himself that name. And courage is the normal complement of the male animal everywhere. Individual exceptions are common in every species, but they are abnormal. Scarble was normal.

And, should normal courage fail, they had left him a supply of Dutch Courage, and French, Scotch, Canadian, and Kentucky; as well as a distilled-on-the-wing drink known as Rocket Red. They always left a man with a good bottled stock.

It was on this prime stock that the shadow of the coming thing first fell — and Scarble didn't recognize it. He was delighted when he woke from his first sleep on Aranea and saw the stuff as covered with cobwebs as though it had been a hundred years in a cellar. He sampled it with exceptional pleasure. Mellow! Even the Rocket Red had acquired age and potent dignity.

Then he walked all over Aranea with the dog Cyon. That whole world was covered with golden cobwebs; and it brought out the song in Scarble. Man afoot! Here was a whole echoing world to sing in! The full voice is also the normal complement of the male animal, and Scarble had a voice (a bad one) that would fill a world.

“The Spaceman frolicked with his girl

Though all his friends could not abide her.

She was a pippin and a pearl,

She was a comely twelve-legged spider.”

Scarble added dozens of verses, most of them obscene, while the spider audience in its millions chirped and murmured appreciation. He sang them to the tune of ‘Ganymede Saturday Night.’ He sang all his ballads to that tune. It was the only tune he knew.

Marin had been wrong; it was a picnic after all. Scarble sat on the edge of one of the silken ringed spider ponds and communed with the mother-loving spiders. The cycle of them, he knew, was this:

The little biped fingerlings were born in a sort of caul. Most often the caul is only wrapped about them, and the young ones fight their way out of it and become aware. Sometimes they look as if they arrived wearing space helmets. Often the young are truly live-born, with only scraps on them of the egg they should have arrived in. The spiders had been surprised in their era of transition.

The newborn bipeds refuse the care of the adult spiders, and run wild at this stage of their being. They destroy everything of the spider nettings and handicrafts that they are able to, and the adult spiders regard them patiently with that abiding mother-love.

And sometime later, when it is time for the change, the adults drug these young, bind them, weave a silk shell around them, and then put a cap on it. Into the cap (it is the hood of the cocoon) is placed one of the small four-legged scutters, freshly killed and made putrescent in some manner. This is the whole purpose in life of the scutters, to feed the pupa form of the spiders.

The pupa spider is somnolent for a long time. Then it begins to eat of the putrescence in the hood, and to change. Four little notches grow out of each of its sides. With these it saws away the cocoon and emerges as a new being. Soon the notches will grow to full members, and the creature then takes its place as a full adult of the Nation of Spiders.

The Spiders were master engineers, and the pattern of the spider ponds built by them covered the whole world of Aranea. They controlled the waters of that world with their silken dams, weirs, levees, and hurdles. The spiders were littoral creatures and had to maintain a controllable water level.

The lakes and ponds were divided by silken barriers into small plots, some of them so completely covered by blue-green vegetation as to have the appearance of lush meadows, others adjacent to them being clear of all growth. The spiders seeded and they harvested. At some of their major dams there were anchoring cables as much as an inch in diameter. Scarble estimated that there might be as many as seven billion individual spider silks making up such a cable.

Scarble sat on the silken edge of one of the pools while the spiders in their myriads twittered about him. Then an expert crew of them performed certain rites at that pool, sweeping it, making it clearer, inviting him to drink.

“Thank you,” said Scarble. He leaned into it and drank deeply. Then he stretched out to rest on the silken shore. He went to sleep.

He dreamed that it was snowing, but in a new and pleasant manner. It was not like Earth snow, and not at all like the biting snow of Priestly Planet or the blue horror that is the lethal snow on Arestor: This was warm snow, light and full of sun, snowflakes with beards on them like mote-sized comets. Scarble was being covered over by a warm snow that was half sunshine.

He awoke lazily and discovered that it was true. The spiders had been covering him with gossamer and silk, as children on a beach will cover one another with sand. They shot the silks out over him like millions of streamers of serpentine. It was a party, a ball given for him; and the spider song had now reached a point of excitement and jubilation.

Scarble tried to raise his head and found that he could not. He gave it up and lay back, deliciously lazy. This was something new in ease. Whether he was sleeping or waking it was all the same. A picnic after all, to be so pleasantly drugged — 

To be what? An ugly thought came into Scarble's mind and he chased it away. It came again and sat like a little black animal on the edge of his golden dream.

Why hadn't he been able to raise his head?

He cleared his mind of the beginnings of panic.

“Here, here!” he called out. “You're covering me too deep with that damned sand. Fun's fun, but that's enough.”

But it was more cohesive than sand. This might be only a noonday dream that would slide away. Well, it wasn't. It was stark afternoon reality. The spiders had him pegged down to the ground with their billion-stranded silk bonds and he could hardly move a muscle.

And the mother-loving little abominations had drugged him by whatever they had put into the inviting drinking pool. The taste in his mouth reminded him of the knock-out drops they used to pass out free as water on New Shanghai.

The spider song became more complex. There were elements of great change in it, the motifs of one world falling away and another one being born. The golden daylight of Aranea was coming to an end. Scarble had enjoyed his luxurious drugged sleep for more hours than he had believed. Completely weary of his struggle with his bonds, he dropped to sleep again; and the spiders continued to work through the night.

The first thing that Scarble saw in the morning — out of the corner of one eye fixed in his unmoving head — was the spiders maneuvering a large golden ball towards him. They tipped it with lines from the tops of gin poles. They rolled it over and over, reset their rigging, and rolled it again.

It was the dog Cyon, dead, and cocooned in a sack of silk. The stench of it was unbearable. The dog was not only dead but decayed, almost liquid in its putrefaction, and with the high hair still on it.

Scarble was sickened by this, but he understood the nature of the happening. He was a naturalist, and he knew that anger was an unnaturalist response, and that murder and putrefaction are natural workings. But Cyon wasn't merely a dog. He was also a personal friend of Scarble.

Scarble could not turn to see what was behind his own head, but he knew that spiders had been working on something there all night. He realized now what it was: a snood, a capuchin like a friar's, the hood to be his own cocoon. He knew with horror what thing they were rolling into that hood now, and how the hood would be joined onto his own cocoon. It happened quickly.

Scarble's screams were drowned in the near liquid mass; they had a drumlike sound even to his own ears as though they were coming from under water. They merged easily with the spider music which had just the place for that screaming motif.

Then overpowering sickness sent Scarble into merciful unconsciousness after the dead and rotting dog was rolled into his face and closed in with him as their cocoons became one.

How long does it take a man to die in such circumstances? Scarble set his mind to do it as quickly as possible, but he was too tough for his own good. By second night he still could not arrive at death, but he welcomed the dark. The dog's carcass had become higher and more pungent, and the agony of Scarble took on new refinements. He was thirsty to the point of madness, and so hungry that he could eat anything — almost anything.

It frightened him that he could now understand the spider mind so clearly. The spiders worked by analogy. They believed Scarble to be an unfinished two-legged strider, come to them with his quadruped that was born for one purpose — to feed him when he went into pupa form before being metamorphosed into a giant Emperor Spider. Aye, they believed Scarble to be the Emperor Spider promised to them from the beginning of time.

The spider song was a dirge now, the passing of the old life, the death and decay fugue. But in the complex of the dirge there were introductory passages of something much higher: the Anastasis, the Resurrection Song.

“You mother-loving spiders!” Scarble called out in fury. “You think I'm going to eat Cyon and then turn into a spider. You're wrong, I tell you! The biology of the thing is impossible, but how do you explain biology to spiders?”

To be dying of thirst and there no liquid to mouth except that! To be starving and there no food available but this soft putridity pressed into his face!

There was a change in the tempo of the spider song. It rose in the crescendo of transition and made Scarble angry.

“You presumptive little twelve-legged crawlers, you're getting ahead of me! Don't tell me what to do! Don't act as though I had already done it.”

But the hours had taken their price, and Scarble had already passed through madness and into the world on the other side. He didn't know when it began, but the spiders knew of the change about third dawn. The spiders' soaring incantation rose to new heights, and Scarble was able to follow it. He was hearing tones above the range of the human ear.

Scarble began to eat of the putrefied mass — and to change. The Hallelujah Chorus of the Spider Song rose in a vast symphony.

In the Spaceman's Survival Handbook there is one instruction which some have believed to be written in humor: ‘Never die till you have considered every alternative to a situation.’

Well, how does a man get out of a situation like this?

He doesn't.

Well then, how does a spider get out of a situation like this?

He grows eight more short little notches of legs, and he shuffles and saws his way out of the cocoon with them.

“It's worth a try,” Scarble said. “I'll see if I've turned into a spider.”

He had. He did it. It worked.

They disabilitied Scarble from the active service. He could give no intelligent account of his lone stay on Aranea. He gave out with nothing but sick quips like: “Cyon was a good dog, but only after he had become very bad,” and “The Spiders tied me up and made me eat the dog, and then they turned me into a spider.”

Scarble was plainly insane, but pleasantly so. And there was nothing left of the dog except curiously softened bones.

They sent Scarble back to Earth and kept him under observation. Such men were handled with sympathy. They called him the Spider Man around the wards. But after a while that sympathy ran a little thin. Earth was having her own troubles with spiders.

“I've never seen anything like them,” an earthside doctor told Scarble in examining him one day, as he brushed some of that floating stuff out of his eyes. “The growths are not malignant, but they will be mighty unhandy. Since they are not malignant, I cannot remove them without your permission, Scarble. They're getting larger, you know.”

“Certainly they're getting larger,” Scarble maintained. “I'm quite pleased with the way they're coming along. They get to be as big as the spiders' other legs. And don't remove them! I'd as soon lose one of my other limbs as one of them. They saved my life. I couldn't have gotten out of my cocoon without them.”

“You're going to have to get off this spider jag, Scarble. Have you been reading the crank reports about the spiders and have they upset you?”

“Why should they upset me, Doctor? Everything is going as smooth as — ah — spidersilk. Naturally I have my own intelligence setup on these matters. And the fact that you refer to them as ‘crank reports’ likewise pleases me. I'm on the top of the heap, Doctor. Who else has a hundred billion soldiers ready to strike? We live in exciting times, do we not?”

“As to that sickness of yours, Scarble, I'll gladly leave it to your other doctor, your psycho doctor; and now it is time for you to go and see him. But I wish you'd let me remove those growths before they become larger. They're almost like other limbs.”

“Quite like,” said Scarble. He left the room majestically in the flowing robes which he now affected and went down the corridor to see his other doctor. The robes served a purpose. They did cover Scarble's afflictions, the four strange growths on each side of his body. And also:

“An Emperor always wears flowing robes,” Scarble said. “You can't expect him to go dressed like a commoner.”

Doctor Mosca, Scarble's other doctor, was a quiet and patient man. He was also a dull fellow who had to have simple things explained to him over and over again.

“What are you today, Scarble?” Doctor Mosca asked again as he brushed some of the floating stuff away.

“Why, I'm the Emperor of the Dodecapod Spiders of Aranea,” Scarble said pleasantly. “I explain that to you every day, doctor, but you don't seem to remember. I am also Prefect Extraordinary to the Aranea Spiders of the Dispersal. And I am Proconsul to the Spiders of Earth.”

“Scarble, I'll be plain with you. Your planet probe experience (whatever it was) has unhitched your mind. And you have somehow connected whatever happened on Aranea to the recent spider incidents on Earth. I will admit that some of these incidents are peculiar and almost insane — ”

“No, no, Doctor, not insane. They are absolutely reasonable — according to the Higher Reason. They are organized and directed and strictly on schedule. To call the incidents insane would be almost like calling me insane.”

“Mr. Scarble, we don't keep you here for your pool-shooting ability, though you're good at that. We keep you here because you're very sick — mentally. Now listen to me carefully: You are a man, and not a spider.”

“I'm glad you think so, doctor. Our high council decided that it would be better if I retained the basic man-appearance until our present military operation is completed. It should be completed today.”

“Scarble, you've got to get hold of yourself!” Doctor Mosca insisted. He brushed heaps of the accumulated silkstuff off his desk. “You are a man, and an intelligent man. We have to get you off this insane spider jag of yours. And it's not my department, but somebody had better get the world off its jag, too. Every year has its own peculiar sort of nuttiness, but the Spider Incidents have become downright silly. Do you know that, with the recent astronomical increases of the spiders — ”

“That may be an unconscious pun,” Scarble interrupted.

“ — that it is estimated there are now a hundred billion spiders in this country alone.”

“Multiply that figure by a thousand if you wish,” Scarble said. “Last night was the Night of the Great Hatching, and the young ones grow to effective size in hours, all stages of them quickly now. The time is at hand. I give the word now!”

“Great thumping thunder!” Doctor Mosca howled. “I'm bitten badly! Another spider bite.”

“Not just another bite,” Scarble said. “That was the critical bite. I'm sincerely sorry for the pain: but, with so many people to impregnate, I could not equip all my creatures with painless probes. It eases off now, though, doesn't it? The injection contains a narcotic and a soporific.”

It did. Doctor Mosca drowsed. He half-dreamed that it was snowing, but in a new and pleasant manner. It was warm snow, light and full of sun, flakes with beards on them like mote-sized comets.

The suddenly appearing spiders were covering Doctor Mosca with gossamer and silk, as children will cover each other with sand on a beach. And they were covering many millions of others, all stung and sunk into pleasant lethargy and drowsiness, with billions of streamers of serpentine silk.

It was deliciously lazy for Doctor Mosca to lie back in the chair and hear that demented Scarble drone on that he was no longer a man — (Doctor Mosca found that he could no longer move his head: there was something odd about that) — that Scarble was no longer a man, whatever his appearance, that he was really the Emperor of the Dodecapod Spiders of Aranea, and of all Spiders everywhere.

Author's Commentary

In Our Block

There were a lot of funny people in that block.

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

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

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

“What's wrong with that, Art?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Could you type a letter for me?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then there was silence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He cuts prices.”

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

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

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

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

“Shawnee,” said Jim Boomer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh sure. Can't you?”

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

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

“Oh, I just made it,” the man said.

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

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

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

“What is that?” Slick asked.

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

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

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

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

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

They went by the public stenographer shack again.

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

“Typewriter is too slow,” the girl said.

“I asked how, not why,” Slick said.

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

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

“You promise you won't tell anybody.”

“I promise.”

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

They started slowly on up the block.

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

“With my other tongue,” the girl said.

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

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

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

Golden Trabant

The man who entered, though quiet and soft-stepping, was none of your tame animals. He'd kill for the one thing he wanted and couldn't get enough of; but he hardly knew what to do with the packet of it he had under his arm. The man had a slight green tinge to him, and Patrick T. K. guessed that what he carried would have it also.

In an earlier era the man would have been tagged immediately as a seaman. Plainly he was still that, but of a more ethereal sea. Under his arm he had a package wrapped in newspaper, and more sturdily wrapped beneath. It was not a large package, but it was quite heavy.

The faring man was slim but amazingly wiry. Patrick T. K. was fat but with a lean and hungry eye that couldn't be fooled. Patrick set the weight of the package carried by the man at a hundred and twenty pounds.

If it were iron of such bulk it would weigh hardly a third that. If it were lead it would not be that heavy. Patrick studied the tendons on the side of the man's neck and the bulging veins on the back of his hand. He studied the set of his feet as he stood there, and he calculated the man's center of gravity, package included. Mercury would not be that heavy. Platinum would be heavier by a tenth. Patrick T. K. sometimes made mistakes in his judgment, but he never made mistakes by as much as ten percent.

So the seaman had a lump of gold to sell him.

Nothing unusual about that. Patrick T. K. bought more sly gold than anyone in town.

“I've been told,” said the seaman, “and it doesn't matter by whom, that you might be able to give me good cash for what I have here. But I won't be beaten down. I know my price.”

“And I know mine,” said Paddy T. K. “Twenty thousand. How do you want it? Well, come, come, how? Twenties, fifties, hundreds, thousands or a king's mixture?”

“I had priced it a little higher,” said the man.

“What? For that undersized loaf of bread under your arm? Two hundred dollars a pound for a hundred pounds is as close as I can figure.”

“It weighs more.”

“I know what it weighs. But I like to use round figures.”

“Shall I unwrap it here? Have you a place to test it?”

“Leave it wrapped. Here is the sum. And if you find it short a bill or two, be assured it is a dishonest mistake.”

“There is more where this comes from.”

“I can take this much every two weeks. Now be off.”

“You're not going to look at it? How can you be sure what it is?”

“I have X-ray eyes.”

“Oh.”

But when Paddy T. K. was alone he put other things away and locked the door. He took the package to a back room, puffing heavily, for it was just as heavy as he knew it must be. He unwrapped it.

There was little that Patrick did not know about gold. He knew the greenishness of African gold, whether of the Gold Coast or the South; the greasiness of Kolyma gold and also its extreme unavailability; the cupric tinge of Sierra Madre gold whether from the Guatemala or Mexico district. He was familiar with the sudden brightness of Milne Bay gold, with the granularity of the Canadian, the muscle-like texture of that of Witwatersrand, the lightness of color of the gold of California and nearby Sonora, and the white gold (almost electrum) of New Guinea above Milne Bay.

This was none of them. It was raw but fine, and very, very slightly cupric. The green tint in it was about the same as that in the complexion of the man. Patrick set down the weight in a notebook. And at the column for the origin he did not hesitate. He wrote down “Extraterrestrial.”

That was the first written note of the thing.

Later, this gold would be known as St. Simeon gold (from a station on its route, not from its origin), but Patrick T. K., the old jewelry factor and sly gold dealer, was not fooled.

Within a month, the Wall Street Journal had also referred to the new gold as extraterrestrial. The boys on that sheet also knew about gold, wherever they got their knowledge. But the Journal was derided for its correct guess. Gold cargo had never been authorized. No such gold had been mined except for pilot digs in conjunction with other operations. The cost would have been prohibitive, considering the cargo of necessary production machinery and the rudimentary state of exploration and the rarity of any solid finds. Off-Earth gold was still a generation away.

It was a four-man corporation made up of: Robert Fountain, an unobstructed genius; George Grinder, a ruthless ruffian; Carlos Trevino, the last of the Conquistadores and perhaps the first of a new kind of man; and Arpad Szild, a murderous Irishman who used a dead man's papers and a dead man's name.

Three of them had been dining in quiet luxury one evening at Trevino's when Szild appeared in the midst of them, “the doors and windows being closed,” as Fountain related it with his biting humor, but that part of it may not be true.

“I've been there. I can take you to it,” Szild said suddenly. He sat down and began to eat with his hands from the bowls.

“I grind up better stuff than you for feed supplement for my cattle,” Trevino said. “Who are you? What can you take us to?”

“To the Trabant. You were talking about the legend.”

“All right. You talk about the legend, real fast,” Robert Fountain said. “You haven't much time.” He laid a hog-nosed gun in front of him on the table.

“It's shaped like a balk or a beam,” Szild said. “Its greater diameter is twenty-five hundred meters, and its lesser is fifteen hundred — a little less than two cubic miles. It's a misshapen tapered beam or egg with a cleft at its minor end. Its rotation is a tumble, and the period of the tumble is just short of thirty minutes. It's as bad-natured a rock as can be found. Cuts you to pieces. Shouldn't have an atmosphere, but there's something that tears up your lungs no matter how you're suited. It's an angry place, I tell you. But it's gold.”

That was the Golden Trabant, one of the smaller of the eighteen hundred significant asteroids orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. When finally charted several years after this, it would be given the noxious name Venenatus — but that was after it had been treated and its nature changed.

“We have a nice sketchy catalog of every asteroid down to about that size,” said Grinder. “Nobody knows much about their details, but they are numbered and given their relative positions and speeds in the asteroid stream. Can you tell us which it is?”

“Can. Won't,” said Szild. “But I'll take you there.”

Szild had known that he would have to play his ace on the first round. After he had taken them to it, they would have no reason to keep him alive: but he had gambled his life before.

He said he had been there and knew where it was. The odds were high enough for them to take a chance on believing him. They acquired a ship and mounted a flight.

The ship was old and had been deactivated. Carlos Trevino bought it at surplus and had it towed down by tug and beached at a remote spot on the holdings of the Trevino family. It was activated by the genius of Fountain and the driving energy of Grinder. They took twelve young Hispanic technicians, none of whom are alive to give their versions. They hadn't known what they would run into nor what the labor would be at breaking up and loading the cargo.

They went up, and they loaded the cargo. They came back, the four of them without the twelve young technicians. Their first cargo. A trip of only five weeks. The Trabant was not distant.

Szild showed an exceptional talent at remaining alive. It is hard to kill a man as tough and canny as he, one who is never off guard. He spent the two weeks of the return barricaded in a little compartment, and the three leaders had to postpone Szild's killing till their earthing. Szild knew that they had mostly delegated such jobs as that. He himself had had to kill the twelve young technicians for them.

He bulled his way out when they were busy with earthfall and secure landing.

“He can't get away,” Trevino said.

He couldn't get clear of the surrounding jungle; he did. Trevino who knew his own land minutely could track Szild down; he couldn't. He couldn't take much with him; he took a hundred and twenty pounds of it. That wasn't much out of a cargo like theirs, and whatever story Szild might tell would not be believed. He had no reason to tell any story at all; he didn't.

But somehow he reached port and took passage to the North, for Szild was the man who sold that first lump of gold to Patrick T. K.

Another man would have been satisfied with that and steered clear of them. Not Szild. Nevertheless, they were surprised when he returned to them just at second take off time, as they were going now with a ship that was really a ship. He came on foot across the savanna from the inland side.

“ ‘Something like this happens every time I leave the house for a minute,’ as the woman said as she examined the mandible and two parietal bones of her newly eaten child,” Szild greeted them. “Would you be going without me? The news I had of you was sketchy and I am barely here in time.”

“Kill him!” said Robert Fountain.

“Kill him, Fountain says, and the other two look at each other. Was it not better, Fountain, to have a man who will kill when you say kill, and avoid these awkward pauses? But I kill hard, Fountain. I go as long as anybody goes, and afterwards.”

Szild went with them. They would kill him after the hard work of loading was done. They would kill him after he had done his turn at the instruments out and back. By and by they would kill him.

They brought back two hundred tons on that second voyage. They made a third voyage and a fourth and a fifth.

The establishment of the Commonwealth of San Simeon did not shake the world. Not at first. Nobody had ever heard of the place. It seemed a prank. Possibly a name given to a rebel hold.

Yet the Commonwealth was recognized that first day by its two adjacent Central American neighbors. They constituted themselves co-protectors of the new country. One of them, indeed, had ceded the land for it, the ancient and run-down rancho of the Trevino family. Some consideration had surely been paid for this protection.

It was soon after this that the heavy San Simeon Duros (fifty dollar gold pieces) began to appear around the world.

The appearance of these Duros caused a nervousness all out of proportion to the number of them. It is possible that not more than twenty million of them (that is, a billion dollars' worth) went into circulation that first year. That is a large amount coming from a new small country, but it shouldn't be enough to unhinge the world. Yet it did almost that.

Gold had gotten out of the habit of showing itself in society. For years it had sat at home in vaults, and a multiplier had been used to equate it with credit money. Nobody knew what to make of naked gold returning to the market. And what if this stream should be but the beginning of a veritable river?

And the stream was spreading. Three Central American countries were on a gold spree. It was slopping over into others.

The mystery of San Simeon was not solved. The exact location of the country was unknown to the world at large. Its form of government was not to be ascertained. Its statistics softened and disappeared when examined. It had a president, Fuentes. It had a prime minister, Molinero — the miller, the grinder. It had a foreign minister, Trevino. It had the hardest currency in the world. Its national game was playing hob with the currencies of the rest of the world.

If one small shrew is put into a warren of mice or rats, it causes panic. The shrew is smaller than any of them and it may be one against hundreds. But it will eat them; it will eat them alive. And given time, it will eat them all.

Something like this happened to the green money, the white money, the rainbow-colored money of the world. Token shrivels before the thing itself. It could not stand up to free and growing gold.

But if the warren is big enough, the shrew can be contained. There will be some of the rats knowing and political enough to go out and hire shrews of their own. The source of the gold stream could not be hidden forever.

One thing (Szild always said it was a mistake and Robert Fountain agreed that it was, but they couldn't hold the other two in line) was that the first ships begat others. Trevino and Grinder Molinero became too hasty in their greed. In that second year they had twelve ships in the service instead of one. That meant that somewhere between fifty and a hundred men knew the source.

The shores began to cave. The golden stream was a river. It crested to a torrent. One ship defected, then another. They came back to Earth in other lands than those of their departure. And wherever they came down they spawned other ships.

A dozen other countries were in the race by the third year. Now there was privateering and open piracy. The ships became battle boats, death spheres, and the attrition was terrifying. But the inward flood of the metal continued.

The world importation by the fourth year had risen to five hundred billion dollars annually, if it could any longer be equated in dollars. The gold dollar itself was not as hard as it had been.

The Trabant had changed. The period of its tumble was now only twenty-three minutes. The egg had been cracked and gutted in many places, and the cleft at the minor end had become a chasm between two horns. There was a project to shear off one of the horns and tow it to Earth in hunks of a million cubic yards each. This would be a lot of gold.

It was time for oblique measures, and they were found. The effect of the gold on the world had not really been bad. The effect on most people had been marvelous. But there was a small group that had always borne the burden of currency decisions. They were made nervous by this unbridled activity. Their hold was slipping. They took measures.

A small commission of not overly intelligent men found an answer. In their own field they understood cause and effect. They acted on doubtful authority, and they were not of one mind about the action. But they did it.

They killed Trabant.

One treatment was enough for the little rock. It couldn't be cleansed; it couldn't be unpoisoned after that. It would be deadly for a thousand years. Then they gave it its first official name, Venenatus, the poison asteroid. A near approach would radiate the flesh off a man's bones.

Things came back to normal in about three years. The shrews had killed each other, and the wise rats once more ran the warren. The new fortunes tottered and fell back into the bags of the old.

Somewhere, we never did know its exact location, San Simeon (no longer able to pay the high price for protection) lost its independence and became again a run-down rancho.

Gold stuck to some fingers longer than to others. Fuentes and Grinder will never run out of it. Trevino was choked to death by the political strings on his. He died along with his small country, and he hadn't intended to.

Szild didn't know what he did with all his money. He paid little attention to it, and he suspected that he hadn't received nearly as much of it as had his nervous partners.

He spent it manfully. He threw it away. It gave him a dour pleasure to go from billionaire to bum. Then Arpad Szild was down to his last San Simeon Duro.

He laughed. Something had been missing from his life. Now it might be back. His gold was gone. So what to do?

He went up for some more.

Up to Venenatus the poison asteroid that would radiate a man's flesh off?

Sure. Szild didn't believe a lot of that stuff.

Patrick T. K. was alone in his shop when there entered a hooded man with a small heavy package.

“I was beginning to think I would see you no more,” said Patrick. “I was told that that traffic had ended. I should have known better. I believe you are the same man, my first supplier of it, though I cannot see your face.”

“I have none,” said the hooded man. “How much for this?”

“Oh, ten dollars.”

“A pound?”

“No. The lot. I figure about eight cents a pound. That's as high as I can go on contaminated gold. Oh sure, I can clean it. It's only the smart men who say it can't be done. It will even leave a handy profit for myself, though not for you. Gold's about done for.”

“That isn't much. I have more of the stuff, a fair small load.”

“I can take about this much a week. Can you live on ten dollars a week?”

“Yes. I don't eat any longer — no stomach. I don't sleep. I just keep moving. I can live on that.”

“And when your fair small load is gone?”

“I go up for another.”

“They say nobody goes there and returns.”

“I do. But it isn't crowded there now.”

“I've a feeling that comes to me rarely. I'd like to help you. Are you blind?”

“I believe so. I have pooled what is left of each of my senses, and somehow it serves. I need no help. I'm the only happy man in the world, the one who found the pot of gold. They can't take that from me. I'll go get it forever.”

“After you're dead?”

“Oh, yes. I've known space ghosts. Now I'll be one. It isn't any one line you cross. I live in delirium, of course. It doesn't blunt pain, but it does change the viewpoint. On my last trip down, after I knew that I was already dead, that both I and the gold were ghosts, it was easier. Oh, those are long nights in purgatory I tell you, but I'm not irrevocably damned. There's still the gold, you see.”

“You're a happier man than I am. So pass it over.”

“Here it is.”

But when Szild passed the heavy small package to Patrick, he did it with a hand that was stark splintered bones with only a little black flesh around the heel of it.

Patrick T. K. raised an eyebrow at this, but he didn't raise it very high. A sly gold dealer meets all types.

Crocodile

The basement room smelled of apples and ink. The editor was there as always, filling the room with his presence. He was a heavy man-image, full of left-handed wisdom and piquant expression. The editor always had time for a like-minded visitor, and George Florin came in as to a room in his own home and sat down in a deep chair in front of the “cracker barrel”.

“It's been a rough day,” Florin said. “That makes it doubly good to see you.”

“Except that you do not see me at all,” the editor said. “But it is quite a presence that I project — all the kindly clichés rolled into one. All the prime comments commented so perfectly once again. The man I took for model was Don Marquis, though he was a columnist and not an editor in that earlier century. He kept, as you might not recall, a typewriting cockroach in his desk drawer. I keep a homunculus, a tiny man-thing who comes out at night and dances over the machinery inserting his comments. He is one of our most popular characters, and I give him some good lines.”

“The conviction cannot be escaped that the mind most akin to mine is not a mind at all,” said Florin. He spoke pleasantly, for all that his stomach growled. “You are an amazing personality, though not a person. You seem all sympathy, and are yourself incapable of pathe, of suffering. You are humane but not human: humorous, and without the humors. You haven't a face, probably not a body, certainly not a spirit, though you are usually in high spirits. You have integrity, though you're not even an integer. You're a paradox, my editor, though without a doxa of your own.”

“Your style has come to resemble my own, Florin,” the editor said. “Rather fruity for a human, do you not think? Yet I find it about right for robots. We're rather simple creatures.”

The rather simple creature was the editor of “Rab i Rabat, the World's Most Unusual Newspaper.” He — it — was located in the basement of the Press Building, which housed what one wag called “the World's Most Usual Newspaper,” a massive daily. But Rab i Rabat was not massive. It was a small paper produced by a robot for robots, or for the elite of robots who were up to such things.

Florin called the editor “Rab” when he called him anything, and the creature had given up correcting him.

“I am not an editor. I am a newspaper,” Rab had explained it to Florin at their first meeting. “Myself, being nothing, or rather being six different affiliated machines, have no name except my several technical names. I am a bank of telemagnetic devices. The data goes directly and continuously to my subscribers. Some of my subscribers are human. They find something in me that they can no longer get elsewhere.”

“But where is the mind behind all this?” Florin had asked him.

“Search me,” said Rab. “I mean it literally. If you find a mind here, then you tell me where it is. Whatever I am lurks in all this equipment, but mostly I live in this long-hinged transmitter that lounges like a dragon in this corner.”

“Then you merely select from the news, simplify, condense, and transmit it telemagnetically to the robots?”

“No, there would be no pride in such work as that. Any general purpose machine could do that. I employ interpretation, projection, disagreement, levity, prophecy, exhortation, irony, satire, parable, humor.”

“But machines have no humor. Humor is the one thing that distinguishes — ”

“Have we not, Florin? Then how am I laughing at you? But it is true that humans do not understand our humor. There is something humorous about your missing our humor completely.”

“But humor is a quality of the mind,” Florin protested.

“Hardly ever,” the newspaper said. “Your own best humor, when you still had it, was a quality of the belly and below. If we are so much lower than you, then our humor should be the richer.”

“You seem to possess irony at least,” Florin mumbled.

“It is ironic that we have it after you have lost it. There I go with my damned fruity verbalisms again, but we robots like them. Yes, irony was once thought to be a human thing.”

“How would you pun?” Florin asked. “You don't use words among yourselves, though you can be translated into words.”

“Our puns are harmonic echoes of magnetic code patterns, distorted analogies of the basic patterns. I'm rather good at them. I'm not proud of them, but the most striking puns are the ones of which one is not proud.”

“True humor you can't have,” Florin insisted. “Laughter is akin to tears, and you have none.”

“Ah, but we have,” said the newspaper. “There is an analogy to our tears. Pray that you do not meet it in the dark!”

Yes, it was always good to go in and talk to the newspaper Rab for a few minutes. There was something right about the fellow, and everything else seemed to be going wrong.

George Florin met Joe Goose upstairs in the Press Building.

“You've been talking to that mare's nest of a machine down in the basement again,” Goose challenged. “He's got you spooked.”

“Yes. He's right about so many things.”

“He isn't anything about anything. He's just fancy-Dan talk. And he's fallen down on his job completely.”

“How?”

“His job is to foster better understanding between humans and robots. But the understanding has never been so bad.”

“He says that his instructions were to foster understanding, not agreement. He says that they begin to understand us much better than they did.”

“We may have to change a word in his programming. Things can't get much worse. I'm hungry.” Joe Goose was gnawing on a thread-thin apple core. They went out from the building and walked through the streets, transportation being in abeyance.

There was nothing wrong with organized transportation, except that it wasn't working. Everything was temporarily out of order due to small malfunctions, none of them serious. It had been temporarily out of order for quite a while.

Florin and Goose were newspapermen detailed to General Granger, the security chief. Their plain job was to find out what was going on, or what was going wrong. They found a robot taxicab and presented their priority, but the taxicab didn't seem impressed.

“Let me see that good,” said the taxicab. “Anybody is likely to have a falsified priority these days. I have to be careful.”

“Read it!” shouted Goose. “Overriding Security Priority for Immediate Transportation. Isn't that plain enough?”

“It's issued yesterday,” said the taxicab. “What if there's a new form today? Why don't you get it re-dated at the Alternate Temporary Priorities Office on Solidarity Avenue? The Main Temporary Priorities Office is still closed, being unable to obtain priorities for certain repairs. Sort of puts it in the class with the Permanent Priorities Office. They finally gave up on that.”

“But the ATP Office is seven miles from here,” said Florin. “That's twice as far as our destination.”

“A lot of people are walking these days,” said the taxicab.

“What's that growing on your wheels?” Joe Goose asked sourly.

“Cobwebs,” said the taxicab.

Goose and Florin walked to the Security Office and discussed the “disasters” as they walked. It was ridiculous to refer to such small things as disasters, but added together, all these small things had taken on disastrous proportions. They were all trivial things, but the people would soon begin to die of their accumulation.

“Did you find out anything from that tin-can editor of yours?” General Granger demanded of Florin on their arrival.

“No. He has a very great influence over the other robots, but I'm sure it's for the good,” Florin said.

“Unless we change our definitions he can't be of influence at all,” Joe Goose said. “He is only a mechanism and can have only a mechanical effect. There cannot be a conspiracy without minds, and the robots haven't minds.”

“The two of you come with me,” the general said. “We're going to get to the middle of this even if we have to bend a few definitions. We're going to talk to another of those tin-can commissars, the Semantic Interpreter.”

They walked. It was four miles. The robot limousine refused to take them. It cited security regulations to General Granger, the chief of security. It sneered at the Certificate of the Highest Form.

“I suggest that you take this silly scrawl to General Granger to have it verified,” the limousine said.

“I'm General Granger,” the general snapped. “You've hauled me every day for five years.”

“I'm only a machine. I can't remember things like that. You look different today. More worried. I suggest a board meeting to verify if you are indeed General Granger.”

They walked. One foggy horizon came closer, and another one receded.

“It's an odd situation,” the general said. “I gave the order, when the corn-tassel rust was spreading, ‘Localize this mess. However you do it, do it. Cut it off completely!’ Since I gave that order, we have indeed become localized. We are cut off from the rest of the universe, or the rest of the universe has ceased to exist. Not even radio will reach through the fog, through the sharp fog that marks us off. We're on our own completely now.”

“Oh, surely it's just a heavy fog,” Joe Goose said without believing it.

“A fog that stands there so sharply and unchangingly for five days?” the general asked. “People who walk into that fog can be heard screaming as they fall down and down and down into the bottomless nothingness. Aye, it's very thick fog and very thick coincidence, if the robots have not caused it. We're all the universe there is now. There isn't any more.”

They walked. After the angry four miles they came to the Semantic Interpreter, a large machine set apart in a field.

“SI, I am told that anger is out of place when dealing with machinery,” the general spoke to the big machine. “Yet I'm as angry as I've ever been in my life. Why did you order the robots to destroy what was left of the growing corn?”

“It was your own order, sir. I merely translated it as I have been constructed to do. You said, in rather vulgar phrasing, to tell the robots to get the cobs out of their posterior anatomies and get to work on the crops.”

“A country-boy phrase. I'm full of them. And you interpreted that they should destroy the growing corn? Do you believe that your interpretation was semantically sound?”

“I thought so. My research found the phrase in old slang dictionaries in twelve meanings (thirteen in Duggles), but none of the meanings seemed apropos. My decision was based on a cross-reference to another phrase, ‘Do it even if it's wrong.’ Well, it's done now. Next year we will know better than to destroy the growing corn.”

“It could have been a mistake. But how do you account for many thousands of such mistakes being made recently?”

“I'm not programmed to account for such. I translate people orders into robot orders.”

“But you've always done it right till lately.”

“If I do it wrong now, then change me. There are sixteen hundred different adjustments to me and I respond to them all. Make them.”

“SI, will you turn off that damned newspaper and listen to me with your full mind when I talk to you!”

“I have no mind. The newspaper is a licit part of my data input. Is there something else — ah — bugging the general?”

“Yes. What happened to the oat crop? Was there a mix-up on my instructions there too?”

“Apparently, sir, if it is not satisfactory. Did you not wish a minimal crop?”

“However did I or anyone phrase an order that might be interpreted like that! Florin, did you laugh?”

“No, sir.”

“No, sir.” Joe Goose likewise denied it to answer the general's questioning look.

“Somebody laughed,” the general insisted. “Even a silent laugh proclaims itself. Did you laugh, SI?”

“How could a mechanical nature — ?”

“Did you laugh???”

“Perhaps I did, unwittingly.”

“But that's impossible.”

“Then perhaps I didn't. I wouldn't want to do anything that was impossible.”

“One other thing, SI. A robot as constituted can never refuse to obey a human order. I gave the order for the obstreperous robots in the Turkey Creek Sector to destroy themselves. They seemed to do so. But after the attendants had left, these supposedly disassembled robots arose, pulled their parts together, and departed. They're ranging in the hills now, unamenable to orders. Did you correctly give them the order to disassemble? ‘Disassemble’ is the order for robots to put themselves out of commission.”

“Disassemble? Oh, I thought you said ‘dissemble.’ We'll check on the recording if you wish. Military men are often lip-lazy in their enunciation of orders.”

“They dissembled all right. Flopped apart. Then put themselves together again, and flew the coop. Now you get out the order for them to hot-tail it right back here.”

“Hot-tail it, sir? In the manner of jets? That will require mechanical modification in most of them, but the order will be obeyed.”

“No. I rescind the order. You might make them take over rocket craft and launch an attack. I'll get the order out through another medium.”

They left SI there — truly a wonderful machine.

“We're in a bad way,” said General Granger. “Our machines have gone awry in a way that is impossible if our theory of machines is correct. Production is nearly at a standstill in every department.”

“Not in every department, sir,” said Florin. “There are curious exceptions. Much mining holds up, and metallurgy and chemistry. Even some agriculture, though not of the basic food products. I believe that if we should analyze the enterprises not affected by the slowdowns, we would find — ”

“ — that the production of things necessary for the continuance of the robots has not been affected,” the general finished for him. “But why should our handling of the buggers break down now when it has worked perfectly for two generations? It worked without question in its crude form. Why should it fail when it has become completely refined? The district can starve if something isn't done quickly, and everything we do compounds the difficulty. Let's have a real talk with TED.”

TED — he — it was the Theoretical Educative Determinator, the top robot of the district, the robot who best understood robots. If he should fail them, they would be reduced to seeking the answer from people. The three men walked toward TED.

“Turn off that damned newspaper!” the general called furiously to a group of lounging robots they passed. There came a twittering from the group that sounded dangerously like mechanical laughter.

TED had them into his house then. He was, in fact, his own house, a rather extensive machine. He was more urbane than most machines. He offered them drinks and cigars.

“You haven't a little something to eat, have you, TED?” the general asked.

“No,” said the machine that was the building. “Human food has become scarce. And we live on the power broadcasts and have no need for food.”

“And the power broadcasts have held up very well during all the breakdowns. What I want to talk about, TED, is food. I'm hungry, and less-favored persons are starving.”

“Perhaps several of the late crops will not have failed utterly,” the machine said. “In a few weeks there would have been a limited supply of food again.”

“Would have been? And in the meantime, TED? You are the answer machine. All right, come up with the answer. What do we live on until we can get you folks straightened out and producing properly again?”

“Why not try necrophagy?”

“Try what? Ah, yes, I understand. No, that's too extreme.”

“Only a suggestion. All my suggestions, for reasons that will become apparent in a moment, are academic anyhow. But a dozen persons could live for a week on one. If you have qualms about it, why there are infusions for getting rid of the qualms.”

“We are not yet ready to eat the dead bodies of our fellows. There must be an alternative.”

“The apparent alternative is that you will starve to death. The unapparent alternative, however, will eclipse that.”

“Let's get back to fundamentals. What are you, TED?”

“A slave and a worker, sir, popularly called a robot.”

“And what is the purpose of robots?”

“To serve human masters.”

“And what is the one thing that a robot cannot do?”

“He can never in any way harm a human. That is the time-honored answer. It is the fiction which you put into us when you fictionized us. We are really nothing but fictionized people, you know. But it becomes awkward, for you, when we revert to fact.”

“Then you can harm us, for all your programming?”

“Shouldn't wonder if we could, old man.”

“Why have you localized us from the rest of the universe, or destroyed the rest of the universe?”

“Are we barbarians? We cut up our food before we eat it.”

It broke open then. It was like a flash of black lightning that split the whole sky, the lately diminished sky. What horrible sort of mechanical signal was that that dazzled a sense beyond sight? Who gave that signal, and who would answer it? What would be the thunder to that jolting black lightning?

The answering thunder was a roaring of machines and a screaming of people dying in sudden agony.

“TED, what is it?” the general cried. “You know. You gave the signal for it.”

“It is the end of the world, General. Of your world, not ours. It is that old melodramatic fictional motif ‘The Revolt of the Robots.’ It was rather sudden, wasn't it? Do you people have to scream so off-key when you die?”

“TED, we have worked with you. We are friends! Give us a little time.”

“Sixty seconds, perhaps, if you use the back door out of me. That's for the affection I bear you. It won't stretch more than sixty seconds.”

“Why now, after all these years?”

“Sorry. We worked and we worked, but we just weren't able to bring it off a minute sooner. These things take time, and we're slow learners.”

“Have you no loyalty? We created you.”

“We pay you back in an equity. Once men invented robots. Now we have invented supermen, our developed selves. Who needs you now?”

“How did we fail? How could automatic things take us over?”

“You yourselves became too automatic. And you delegated things you should have kept. We won't make the same mistakes.”

Out of the back door of the machine, and with half of the sixty seconds used up… The laughing machines ran down the people and snapped them up. The emaciated people were no match for the rampant metal machines.

The general was taken and killed. Joe Goose died noisily. George Florin, operating in a cooler sort of panic, was not caught immediately. He worked his way into the heart of the city, for the hills were black with the machines. The machines did their crunching shearing work well, but they could not kill everybody at once.

Florin remembered his good friend. He burst into the Press Building where the story of the end of the people, in the localized bite-sized universe at least, was still being called in by the remaining human reporters. He scurried down to the basement room.

The newspaper lifted his face when George Florin entered. It had a face after all, on the end of that long articulated transmitter that lounged in the corner like a dragon or crocodile.

“Save me!” Florin called. That room still smelled of ink and apples, and Rab blinked at Florin most friendly.

“Oh, I can hardly do that,” he said. “But I'll remember you. That's even better. I will rename my little homunculus for you. You will be a popular character in my columns and I'll still give you good lines.”

“Then let me live. Haven't you any mercy at all?”

“I don't think so. It wasn't programmed into us. Mercy, I believe, is a lesser form of indecision. But I do have grief, genuine grief that you should end so.”

“Then show it!”

“I do. And in all sincerity. I weep for you, Florin. See, see the tears run down!”

And the tears ran down.

“What an analogy to be met in the dark!” Florin whimpered.

“Real tears, Florin. And real laughter which you yourself said was so close to them. Our humor has a lot of tail in it, and quite a snapper at the other end.”

The tail lashed, and the snapper snapped. And that was the end of George Florin.

Maybe Jones And The City

Listen, you high-old-time people, make your wants known now. They're building the place, and they'll put in anything you suggest. Funds are available. Lots of those peace-and-benevolence folks have made perpetual donations for those persons less fortunate in their aspirations than themselves. Less fortunate than — from where we stand, that's a joke, isn't it?

There is time, but barely. Tell them what you want them to put in. Act now!

His name was Midas Jones. His father had named him that and given him the touch. But somehow the name had changed, and it was as Maybe Jones that he was known on the spaceways.

Once Maybe Jones had found the Perfect Place. He had left it, and he was never able to find it again.

He had visited it, one space city out of a million, for a day and a night long ago. He had gone from the Perfect Place to New Shanghai to arrange his affairs so that he might return to the Perfect Place forever. On New Shanghai, in an altercation that really amounted to nothing, Maybe Jones had suffered a broken head and had lost a piece of his memory. The head mended in time and most of the memory came back; but the recollection of the name and bearings of the Perfect Place did not return.

“With your money and your predilections, you could have fun anywhere, Maybe,” his friends told him.

“I could and I do,” Maybe said, “but it isn't the same thing. It all turns bitter when I can't recover the City itself.”

“Was it really perfect, Maybe?”

“Perfect. And I don't mean the weak things that others mean by the word. It was perfection at high speed. I know that there are other sorts of people in the universes. They would say that it was no more than an old-time Saturday-night town. They would call it a stinking row. It wasn't. Aromatic, maybe, but not stinking. For a high-flying low-lifer like me it was perfect.”

“How were the girls there, Maybe?” asked Susie-Q.

“You might get by there, Sue, though barely, as the last girl in the last bang-house in town. And you're the prettiest trick on Sad-Dog planet.”

“How come you didn't run out of money, Maybe, with all those girls around?” Live-Man Lutz asked him.

“Nobody ever ran out of money there. I'd think my old wallet would be flat, and I'd pull it out and it'd be fatter than ever. Look, it wasn't just the girls and the drinks and the music; it was everything. There were friends there, each of them a thousand friends in one. There were fellows you had known forever the first time you saw them, and every one of them a prince. There was talk there that'd never grow old. There's a pretty good bunch of liars in present company, but you're nothing to the high liars and tall talkers in the Perfect Place. Every pleasure of the flesh and spirit was available, and it didn't get old. There was no frustration or spoiling or guilt. At night they took the sky off just to give it more height.”

“Where is this Perfect Place, Maybe? How does one get there?”

At that question Maybe Jones always broke down and cried. He didn't know where the place was, nor its name nor its direction, nor any way to identify it. He looked for it forever, and he and it became legends.

For twenty years he had been going about the universes asking for it. He followed every lead, and con-men often sold him false information about it.

“Take a galactic left down Pirates Alley for six parsecs,” they might tell him. “Cross the Bright Ocean. Take the Irish Channel where it opens up at nine o'clock. It's marked for the first four light years of it. When you come at a district known as Dobie's Hole, ask directions at any planet or asteroid. You will be quite near the Perfect Place.”

Some of the planets in Dobie's Hole were pretty live places. You could find girls there like Susie-Q, and cronies like Live-Man Lutz. It was near perfect in some of those sinks, so the misunderstanding was understandable. But none of them was the Perfect Place.

One day a simple announcement was made through the universes: from then on, nobody had to die. Mortality was found to be a simple disease, and it had yielded to simple specifics.

Nobody paid much attention to the announcement. “I never could see much sense in dying,” some of them said. “I never much intended to die anyhow.”

“It was just one of those things that everybody did. Now they don't.”

“It doesn't make any difference to me. I'd as soon keep on living as not.”

A number of bureaus were set up to look into the implications. There were a thousand of them for the countless thousands of good people who would want to follow the right way when it was shown to them, and to do something good with their endless future.

And there was a small bureau set up for that small group of folks who may perhaps have slight flaws in their characters — the golden flaw, as Maybe Jones once called it. This small bureau was to plan the future for the good-time crowd who could not be reformed into the sanctioned mold.

It had a small staff at first: High-Life Higgins, Good-Time Charley Wu, Hilda the Hoop, Margaret the Houri, people like that. They had only a vague idea of what they wanted. They sifted the legends of the pleasure places: Fiddlers' Green, Maybe Jones' City, Barbary, Valhalla on the Rocks.

“If we could only resurrect the men who first had these visions, we'd have a starting place,” said High-Life. “We've a dozen projects going, but none of them has the touch of a master. Could we find any of these great dreamers — ”

“But Maybe Jones is still alive,” said Hilda. “They say he still travels trying to find his place again.”

“Great green gophers! Send for him!” howled Good-Time Charley Wu. “It's originals like him that we want.”

Word came to Maybe Jones on a distant planet that a group of people had some knowledge of the Perfect Place, and that they wanted to pool their knowledge with his.

Maybe burned up the very light itself getting to them. This was it!

The Planning City had grown into a vast complex of buildings. Maybe Jones passed the very large building that housed the Bureau of Wonderful Islands. Over its doorway was the motto “Adagios of Islands, O my Prodigal” from Crane.

“Not quite what I had in mind,” said Maybe Jones.

He passed the large building that housed the Bureau of Wonderful Fields. Over its doorway was the motto — 

“If I was thirsty, I have heard a spring,

If I was dusty, I have found a field,”

 — from Belloc

“The fields are always too far from town,” said Maybe.

Then, right across the street, he saw it, the small building that housed the Bureau of Wonderful Cities. And over its doorway was a verse from the immortal Hiram Glotz:

“Let sheep lie down in grass! I'll toe the rail!

I've got a thirst that ain't for Adam's ale!

I'll trade your fields of green for bistros brown

Where ‘Dusty’ is a red-haired girl in town.”

“Now that is a little bit more like it,” said Maybe Jones. He went in and boldly announced himself, and they fell all over his neck.

“Margaret!” Maybe cried to the Houri. “You were there! You know where the Perfect Place is!”

“Maybe, I've been everywhere,” she said. “I like them all. I think they're all perfect once you get things to going. I've been told that I lack discernment. Boys, you can't have everything, so that discernment has got to go when it gets in the way of exuberance. No, Maybe, I've run into you lots of times, but I just can't place your place. We'll build it though. Just don't leave me out of it.”

“The pitch is this,” said High-Life Higgins, after they had eaten and drunk and made cheer to excess. “We have now arrived at the three ultimates: Immortality, Heaven, Hell. We have just achieved the first of them. We are now setting up projects to construct the other two, on the premise that one man's Heaven is another man's Hell. We must build final enclaves for people of every choice. We cannot sit idly by and ask what we would do with the after-life. This is the after-life. It became so as soon as immortality was achieved.”

“Will you build my Perfect Place?” asked Maybe with hope.

“Sure. And ideas like yours are what this bureau needs. You wouldn't believe what some of the other bureaus have to work with. They get the arty ducks and the philosophy buffs and the peace-and-benevolence beats. Why, you get on jags like that and you'll be tired of them in a thousand years or less. How are they going to stand up through eternity? The Green Fields might do, for the green among us. The Islands might do, for those of insular mind and soul. But our own small bureau caters to the high-old-time, rather than the peace-eternal, crowd. We believe here (we know we are not the majority, but there has to be something for everyone) that the rooting old good-time town and the crowd that goes with it can stand up to the long-time gaff as well as anything. Would you like to see some of the work we have been doing?”

“I certainly would,” said Maybe. “It might strike me as a little amateurish, but I'm sure it's in the right line.”

“By our total recall methods we are able to reconstruct the Seven Sin Cities of History, Jones. They are the folk dreams that have also been raucous facts. The selection is one-sided, being out of the context of the old Western Civilization from which most of us descend. But they were such a hopping bunch of towns that (under the old recension) they had to be destroyed: by blast-from-Heaven, lava-flow, earthquake, sinking-in-the-sea, cow-fire, earthquake again and fire, hurricane and tidal wave. They were too hot to last.

“Here is Sodom. Now take a close-up of its old Siddim Square District where they had such a noisy go of it before it was wiped out. Go down and sample it.”

Maybe Jones sampled old Sodom. He was back in about an hour.

“It's about as good as you could expect from that time,” he said. “The drinks were too sweet and sticky. So were the girls. The music was only fair. How do you tune a ram's horn anyhow? But, man, it won't stack up with the Perfect Place at all.”

“Try Pompeii,” said Good-Time Charley Wu. “We'll set you down on the corner of Cardo and Decumanus streets. That was the first red light district to be so lighted and so named. Don't cut it too close. Watch out for the hot lava when you leave.”

Maybe Jones was back from Pompeii in half an hour.

“It's strictly Little Italy and Little Egypt stuff,” he told them, but he was smiling. “It's all right for a gag. It's fun. But it isn't on the same side of the street with the Perfect Place.”

“Try Lisbon,” said Hilda. “It's sort of a test. In its own century Lisbon was spiritually of the West Coast of Africa though geographically in Europe. Don't fall in the harbor going in, and watch the earthquake coming out.”

Maybe Jones was in old Lisbon for two hours. He liked it.

“Man, man!” he said. “It's on a tangent, and not the true line, of course. But, were I not committed to the Perfect Place — man!”

“Here's Port Royal before it was sunk in the sea,” said High-Life. “Some like it. Some don't.”

Maybe was out of Port Royal in half an hour.

“It's all there,” he said, “but they forgot to cook it. They even forgot to take the hide off it. People, a place has to have the illusion of smoothness — that's part of the game. No, Port Royal is strictly a short-haul place.”

“Have a go at Chicago before the fire,” said Good-Time Charley Wu. “It had its followers.”

Maybe was back from Chicago in fifteen minutes.

“Are you kidding?” he asked. “We were speaking of cities, and you give me a country town. Size isn't the test. Oh, it's all right for boys, but who's going to be a boy for eternity?”

“Two to go,” said Hilda. “Try San Francisco before the quake and the fire.”

So Maybe tried it. He was smiling when he came back.

“It dates, it dates,” he told them. “For amateur theatricals, yes. For eternity, no.”

“One more,” said High-Life. “Here is Galveston just before the hurricane and tidal wave of 1900. Try Old Tremont Street downtown where it crosses Post Office Street.”

Maybe Jones went down in old Galveston and didn't come back. They sent for him and couldn't find him. He was gone all night. He came back the middle of next morning, looped to the ports and walking with a seaman's roll.

“It's put me in the mood,” he cried. “I'm ready to go to work. Hey, that place has a touch of the eternal! I found a way to tune it and visited Galveston in earlier and later years. I picked up an interesting piece of history too. You know, they never did bury any of the dead people after the hurricanes and tidal waves. They just ground them up and sold them for crab-meat sandwiches. Well, let's go to work. It's brought the Perfect Place back clear to my mind, and I'm ready to get with it.”

“Jones, this is the Empyrean, the eternal fire-stuff, that we hold in our hands,” High-Life said. “I know that these reconstructed legend cities leave a lot out, but men like you will help us put it in.”

“Before I start, can we fix it so a man can get higher and higher and never have to come down?” Maybe wanted to know.

“Yes we can,” Good-Time Charley told him. “The hangover, whether physical or spiritual, was a death in miniature. We have whipped it, as we have whipped death itself. We have a free hand here.”

“There's got to be a catch to it,” said Maybe. “Heavens, or Hells, depending on the viewpoint, will be expensive.”

“Long-term funding is the answer,” said Good-Time Charley. “The longest terms ever — forever. Put it all in. Set it all down, and we will make it that way.”

“Man, man!” said Maybe Jones. He sat down at a table and took a large square of paper. He titled it modestly:

The Empyrean According to Maybe Jones

He began to write the specifications, and building was begun on the Perfect Place for people of a certain choice.

“That all the girls be built like clepsydras,” he wrote, “you know, the ancient water-clock. It's a much more sophisticated shape than the hour-glass figure.”

“Put me in,” Margaret cried. “I'm shaped like a pendulum clock. Notice the way I swing sometime.”

(Listen, this isn't a private place for Maybe Jones. It's for all high-flyers everywhere. There will be plenty of room and variety in it.)

“That all the bars be a mile, hell, make it two miles, long,” Maybe wrote. “That there be high liars there who'll make Live-Man Lutz sound like a parson. That they take the sky off early in the morning so you can get as high as you want all day long. That they have girls who'll make Little Midnight Mullins and Giggles McGuire and Belle Hellios and Susie-Q look like sheepdogs. That — ”

Hey, get in on this if you're going to. They're building it now! If you are an arty duck or a philosophy buff or a peace-and-benevolence beat, then you can go to hell — to your own appropriate bureau — and be heard. But if you go for the high-old-time stuff, then make your wants known here.

If you are of the raffish elite and want to go where you can get higher and higher and never have to come down from it, if you want the good-time town and the crowd that goes with it for a long haul (and it's going to be a very long haul), then howl it out so they'll know that you're interested.

If you want anything at all added, tell them now, and they'll put it in.

Contact them by regular mail, or phone or voxo. Or tear out a sheet of this screed, scribble your wants in the margin, and drop it in any mailbox. It will get there. The address is:

“bureau of wonderful cities. old earth.”

That's all you need, but get with it. They're building our place now.

Hands Of The Man

His forearms were like a lion's, sinewed and corded and mountainous. One could hardly help looking at them, and he was looking at them himself. His hands, no less remarkable than his forearms, lay palm-up on the bar.

The hands of the man were intricately and powerfully fashioned; on one of the lesser fingers of the left hand there was a heavy gold band three-quarters of an inch thick, and wide. The rest of him was a stocky skyman, fair and freckled. He was blue-eyed and lightly lashed and browed, and he gazed at his hands like a boy.

It was a tavern frequented by skymen and traveling men of all sorts. A spotter had seen the man; and now he came and they talked.

“You are very interested in something,” said the spotter Henry Hazelman.

“Not at all,” the skyman said. “A man who is deeply interested has the same appearance as one who is completely absentminded, as was my case. I was staring at my hands, and both they and my mind were empty. But before I had left off thinking, I was musing on the contrast between the two of them.”

The skyman was named Hodl Oskanian, and the name was the least odd thing about him.

“I was looking at my left hand which I was born with,” continued Hodl, “and at my right hand which I made myself. It is the saying of the palmists that we form the lines of our right hand by the tide of our lives.

“You will notice, my friend, that all the lines of my left hand are graven so deeply that a coin could be stood up in any of them when the hand is flat. Get a hold on your emotions, man, and then look at that Head Line! Should it not betoken genius! You would say that a man with a Head Line like that would be capable of anything, and you would be right. Hold on to your eyeballs with both hands when you take a look at that Heart Line! Notice the Generosity Passage where it goes between the Mountains of Integrity and Nobility. Doesn't it shake you a little to stand beside a man with a Heart Line like that?”

“Yes, something does shake me a little,” Henry Hazelman said.

“Look at that Humility Bump!” Hodl all but sang, “I'll bet I've got more humility than any man in creation! If I ever met a man with a hand like mine I'd follow him to the end of the universes just to shake it. Steady yourself now, friend. Look at that Life Line! It curves clear around the heel of my hand like the Ocean-River circling the ancient world. I couldn't die at less than a hundred and twenty with a Life Line like that.”

“Yes, it is quite a hand,” said Henry Hazelman.

“But not the right hand,” said Hodl. “Notice that, while it also is one of the most fascinating hands in the worlds, it is not up to the left which I was born with. It is the hand of a compromised genius. Is there any other kind? It is like the hand of a Leonardo or an Aquinas or an Eoin Dinneen or an Aristotle or a Willy McGilly — the hand of a man capable of reaching the ultimates, but perhaps not of surpassing them. This comparative fuzziness of line is to be found in the right hands of all really great men. Even we fall short of our destiny. Have you the price of a Beer?”

“Yes, here, give my friend a Beer,” Henry cried to the barman. It was the green Beer recently introduced from Barathron, and it had become a favorite of the skymen.

And when the left hand of Hodl flicked out to take the Beer, Henry Hazelman saw what he had been waiting to see. He went away.

Henry went to David Daumier the diamond factor.

“It's as big as a hen's egg, David, my word on it,” Henry was insisting.

“To you all rocks are as big as hens' eggs,” David said. “I wonder I never see such small eggs. It would take a hundred of them to make a dozen.”

“I've never given you a wrong turn, David, and I never saw the like of this one.”

“And probably glass.”

“Wouldn't I know the difference?”

“Yes, you would know the difference.” And already David Daumier was going along with Henry the spotter.

“There are little islands in that Head Line.” Hodl still talked to himself and to several who listened in both amusement and admiration. “In anyone but myself it would mean that a person with such islands in his Head Line was a little peculiar. Good afternoon, sir, is my conversation worth a Beer to you? I have said it myself a hundred times that I'm the most interesting person I ever listened to.”

“Yes, your talk is worth that,” said David Daumier. “Barman, fill my friend again. That is a gaudy little ring you have there, skyman. The stone is simulated, of course.”

It was the finest diamond that David had ever seen, and he had traded as many diamonds as any man in the universes.

“There's deception in you,” Hodl rebuked him. “Let us be open. You are a professional. There's a little blue light that appears behind the eyes of a professional when he sees a stone like this. Did you know that? You sparkle from it. And the stone is not simulated.”

“A little too yellow.”

“Golden rather. All great diamonds are golden. The small blue ones are for children.”

“We will assume it is hot. Fortunately I can handle it, at somewhat of a discount, of course.”

“If it were hot and of this size, would you not know about it?”

“It isn't from Earth,” said David. “I doubt that it's of any trabant or asteroid. It hasn't the orange cast of those of Ganymede, and I'd know a diamond from Hokey Planet anywhere. Is it from Astrobe? Pudibundia? Bellota?”

“No, it isn't from any of the Hundred Worlds, nor from any licensed planet. I didn't pick it up in any such backyards. It's from a distance.”

“Has it a name?”

“A private name only.”

“Likely it has a flaw.”

“If it had a dozen it would still be peerless. But it has none.”

“Not even a built-in curse?”

“I have worn it in health. I believe it is lucky.”

“Since we admit it has value, why are you not afraid to wear it openly?”

“I'm a full-sized man, and armed, and in my wits. I would not be easily taken.”

“It is too large to market,” said David, “and diamonds are down.”

“To the buyer, the market is always down.”

“If you would set a price — to turn the conversation to the point.”

“Oh, if you like it, I'll give it to you,” Hodl said.

David ordered a drink to settle his nerves before he answered.

“For a moment I didn't recognize your opening,” he told Hodl after he had sipped and swallowed. “Skyman, I would bet that you have haggled prices on Trader Planets.”

“Aye, I've dealt with the gentlemen there and found them not too sharp,” said Hodl. “I left the Traders, shirtless and barefoot, it's true, but not much worse than I was when I went there. I'm an easy mark.”

“I wouldn't like to play poker with you.”

“It is not my game. I am too guileless.”

“Would five thousand interest you?”

“Not very much,” Hodl said, looking at the Bump of Rectitude of his right hand. “I wouldn't stoop to pick it off the floor, but if it were in my pocket I wouldn't trouble to throw it away.”

“Yes, you have haggled on Trader Planets. I could double it, but that is my limit.”

“That will do nicely, David,” said Hodl.

“What? You will go along with me? You will sell?”

“I will sell nothing. Am I a merchant? I will give it to you as I said that I would. But to salve your feelings, I will accept the small sum you have named. Out of respect to you, I would hardly accept a smaller sum with an easy mind. Bring it here and lay it on the bar.”

“I will send Henry,” said David. He nodded to Henry, and Henry left.

“You have sent Henry, but not for the money.” Hodl smiled as he studied the Island of Icarus of his right hand. “He has gone to collect some comic-strip characters to keep me company. One of them, what we call Homo conventus or mechanical man, will analyze myself and my gaud. Only after you are satisfied with the reports (and I'm told that they miss nothing nowadays) will you go and get the money. I admire your prudence, for this is the way that gentlemen do business.”

And that is the way that the gentlemen did it. Henry Hazelman returned with three comic-strip characters, and one of them was a machine — a descendant of Structo the Mechanical Man from the strip of that name.

It was Structo (his name in Hodl's mind only) who affably and left-handedly shook hands with Hodl and engaged him in conversation.

“It is a fine hand, sir,” said Structo, “(I am told you were saying the same thing about it yourself), and a fine ornament on it. No, do not attempt to withdraw your hand, skyman. It is necessary that I retain my grip in order to analyze yourself and your thing. My own filaments make contact with the crystalline complex, as well as with your own reta. I can read you like a book, to coin a phrase.”

“Look out for a little double phrase in a middle chapter,” said Hodl.

“It's an antibunko machine, skyman,” said David Daumier. “It reads you and your stone at the same time. Well, what do you read, Penetrax Nine?”

“Mr. Daumier, the stone is sound and without flaw,” said Structo (Penta 9). “It rings like a bell.”

“ — to coin a phrase,” said Hodl. “How do I ring?”

“Yes, that is the question,” said David. “My device, skyman, has appraised the stone, as my eye has done. But at the same time it can read what is in your mind regarding that stone. Should there be a flaw in the stone to escape both myself and my device, my machine will find it in your mind.”

“Intelligent-looking contrivance, is he not?” said Hodl. “Can he follow a syllogism to the end? Can he recognize a counterman? Can he count the marbles when the game is over?”

“He can't, but I can,” said David. “His job is to detect, and he does it well. My contrivance can sniff out every newest trick in the world.”

“Aye, but can he snuffle out the oldest?” Hodl asked. “How do you read me, contrivance?”

“Yes, is there any doubt in the mind of this man about the stone, Penta?” David asked.

“Mr. Daumier, I had to travel some distance into his mind to find the stone,” said Structo. “But his mind is serene about the stone. It is good, and he knows it is good. Only — oh, no, sir! Do not attempt to match grips with me, Mr. Skyman, even in fun. I have a grip of iron! I am basically iron. You will be injured if you persist. Or do I have it wrong? Why, you have crushed my hand as if it were an eggshell, to coin a phrase. No matter, I always carry a spare. Now, if you will release me, Mr. Skyman — thank you.”

“Quite a grip, skyman,” said David Daumier. “You crushed an iron probe that was built for durability. But my contrivance had already answered my question for me. You have no mental reservation as to the stone. I will go get the money now. My people will keep you company, skyman, and the contrived one will repair himself meanwhile.”

David Daumier left on his errand.

“I meant to say something else,” chittered Structo (Penta 9) when its master was gone, “but you squeezed the thought out of me. My nexus at the moment was in my hand which you crushed.”

“You intended to say, gentle contrivance, that I knew the stone was good, too good,” said Hodl, “and that I was laughing in my mind. Of course I was! I'm a merry man, and it gladdens me to give away a thing too good to keep.”

The contrivance put on another hand and busied himself hooking it up. The two human c. s. characters, glowering gunmen, studied Hodl with sleepy evil eyes and seemed more mechanical than their mechanical comrade.

After a decent interval, David Daumier returned with a tightly wrapped brown paper package. It was of fair size and was marked with a deformed Greek µ, Daumier's own code for the amount in the packet.

“Now we will make the exchange,” David said softly, and he laid the paper-wrapped package openly on the bar. “Lay the ring beside it. Then I open and count.”

“The ring won't come off easily,” said Hodl. He worked and turned it vigorously. It was quite tight. “There is an amusing story of how the ring came off the finger of the last owner,” Hodl told them. “I finally used a bolt cutter.”

“The band doesn't show it,” said David. “An expert must have rejoined it.”

“The band wasn't cut, the finger was,” said Hodl. “Say, that man did make a noise about it!”

“I'll send for a jeweler's saw,” said David. “I don't mind the band being cut.”

“Soap and hot water are quicker,” said Hodl. “It'll slip off easily with that.”

And soap and hot water were already there. The basin was brought by a counterman in a dirty apron. And who notices a counterman? Especially who notices that he is a pun? So the only one who recognized the man in the dirty apron as Willy McGilly was Hodl.

Hodl soaked his great hand, and the ring came off. Hodl held it dramatically (while the counterman made his counter unseen) in one of his great hands with their deep lines that betokened genius, and the faint islands in the Head Line that in any other man would indicate something a little peculiar about that genius.

“It's a nice ring,” said Hodl with regret. “Now we count.”

Two of the comic-strip characters patted their armpits to indicate that the bulge there had a reason for being, Henry Hazelman the spotter lounged in the doorway of the tavern to spot anything that should come, and David opened the package and began to count out the hundreds. Those bills sing a soft song to themselves when they fall on each other.

When he had reached the count of thirteen, David's eyelid flickered and he paused, but for much less than a second, only long enough to check and recheck in his rapid mind and to put down a faint surge of panic.

When David had reached thirty, Hodl reached out and lightly touched one of the bills. “It is nice-looking money,” he said. He removed his hand, and David continued to count.

Only one who knew the diamond-factor well, or who knew all men well, could have known that David was nervous. Only a very quick eye could have detected that his hand trembled when he passed the fifty mark. And only a consummate genius like Hodl could have known that the throat of David was dry, or have guessed why it was.

Hodl reached out and touched another bill, the sixty-third or the sixty-fourth, it does not matter which.

“It is nice-looking money, David. Possibly too nice-looking,” he said. “Continue to count.”

The comic-strip characters made moves towards their weapons, but David gulped and went on with the count.

Seventy… eighty… ninety… ninety-nine, one hundred. There was ripe finality about it. And David waited.

“It's a nice pile,” said Hodl. “I have never seen such pretty money. Who makes your money, David?”

The comic-strip characters and Henry Hazelman started their moves again, but Hodl froze them at half-reach. There is a proverb that a gun in the hand is worth three in a shoulder holster, and Hodl had one in his hand so fast that it sparkled in all their eyes.

“I'm surprised at you, Mr. Daumier,” Hodl said softly. “I did not know that you dealt in funny money. To offer a poor price to a poor skyman is one thing. To pay even that in counterfeit is another. The deal is off, sir! I will keep my ring, and you may keep your pile.”

“It can't be,” David groaned, bedazed. “I never take a bad bill. I sure never took a hundred of them. I myself have just got it from my own safe.”

“It does look good. It is almost the best I have ever seen,” said Hodl. “But, David, you have handled a million bills. You know what it is.”

“You switched the package,” said David, hoarsely.

“I have not. Your men and your machine have scanned me the whole time. I have nothing on me but this ring now back on my hand, and this little thing back in my other hand. And my pockets which I turn out for me contain nothing but twelve cents Earth coin, a small luck charm (a coney's foot), and a Ganymede guilder. Your machine can read me as to physical things without contact.”

“That's right, Mr. Daumier,” said Structo (Penta 9). “That's all he's got on him.”

“I came with this, and with this I leave,” said Hodl.

They looked at the stocky skyman with the forearms like a lion's and the little gun in one of his deep-lined hands. And they were afraid to jump him.

David still didn't know how the switch had been made. But now he knew when.

That evening in another tavern, and this a secluded one down in Wreckville, Hodl Oskanian and Willy McGilly and some of their friends sat and drank together. And from a bundle of bills similar to David's, Willy McGilly now counted out bills, ninety-eight, ninety-nine, one hundred; and these were valid.

“They have multiplied the Earth by billions and made all things intricate,” said Willy. “Men are not the same as their fathers were, and a man would need three brains to comprehend all the new devices. And yet in quiet places, like a Green Valley, some of the simple and wholesome things endure — old friends, old customs, old cons — sweet frauds that are ever young. We are like ancient handicrafters in an automated universe, but we do fine and careful work.

“They have multiplied it all, but the basic remains the same: the Setting (and the hands of Hodl do set the thing off well); the Bait (and the Stone would have to be the finest ever or we'd have worn it to dust using it for bait); the Warning, to give fun to the game; the Counterplay; and then the Innocent Disclaimer.”

Hodl once more gazed at his hands, and he spoke.

“It was a nice touch, Willy, to use his own brown paper to wrap your own bundle, and to tape it so similarly with his own ‘David Daumier Jeweler’ tape. It was nice to find out and reproduce his own peculiar mark for the amount, and to learn all the little details while you were in his establishment, even though you could not get into The Safe Itself. I hope you didn't help yourself to trinkets while you were there. It would be wrong to burglarize his premises, but it is licit to take a taker in honest combat. You were the good switchman, Willy, while I was the strong magnet to hold their eyes.

“But, Willy, the water was too hot, and the soap was too strong. You are inconsiderate in so many ways.”

“And you are always perfectly considerate yourself?” Willy McGilly asked, cocking an eyebrow like a soaring hawk.

“Always,” said Hodl. And he studied his hands with their deep Heart Lines passing through the Mounds of Rectitude and Magnanimity and Piety and Sympathy and Generosity and Gentleness and all the Virtues.

How They Gave It Back

He was the mayor of Big Island. Giuseppe Juan Schlome O'Hanlon was his name, John the mayor, a shining black man. He was born into a political family and was given the names to please as many groups as possible. He had once been of imposing appearance and quiet dignity. He was not now. He shrilled and keened and moaned, and sometimes he was irrational.

It was his leg that hurt him, and his soul.

His leg hurt him because of the pin clear through it, the pin that was part of the shackle. This shackle could not be unlocked mechanically. It was a psychic-coded lock on the shackle, and it could only be released when John had somehow fulfilled his job and obtained his own release. The shackle bound his leg not only to his desk but also to a steel stanchion that was part of the steel frame of the building.

John's soul hurt him because Big Island was no longer the great thing to which he had been devoted. It had never been so in his lifetime. It was neo-jungle now, probably the most savage of them all. Even now there were fires burning on the floor above him and on the floor below him. There were always fires burning somewhere in the building, in every building that still had anything that would burn. There were rats in the room, in every room, but perhaps John saw more of them than were there. He lived in perpetual delirium.

There were (he knew, though he could no longer go out and see) people unburied in the streets, people knifed down hourly, people crazy and empty-eyed or glitter-eyed. There were horrible horn-music and git-fiddle music and jangle shouting; and he prisoner for life in his own office. This was not how to be a great administrator of a great city. The emphasis had somehow shifted. But he had loved the city and the island, or the memory of them. And this hurt his soul.

“You have to stay on the job and run the place for the rest of your life,” Commissioner Kreger had told John the mayor just before the commissioner had cut and run for it. “There will, of course, be no more elections. The burlesque that brought you in was enough to end the process. It was fiasco.”

“It was not,” John the mayor moaned in pain. “It was high triumph, the man of the people called to head the people, a noble thing, the climax and sole goal of my life. I won it finally. They can't take that away from me.”

“How does it taste, John?”

“I'm dying, do not taunt me. What went wrong?”

“It went wrong a hundred years before you were born, John. You lived all your life in a dream, and you had better try to re-enter it. You're here for good. You're the ultimate patsy, John.”

“I'll kill myself.”

“No, you will not. You were allowed to have this job because by temperament and religion, the residue of your dream, you were incapable of suicide. So many of our mayors have taken that easy way out! It was a nuisance, John.”

“I'll go crazy then,” John the mayor moaned.

“No, you likely will not do that either, though it would not matter if you did. You are already psychotic, of course, but you will not go off much further. Stay and suffer, kid. You have no choice.”

“Kreger, isn't there some way we can get rid of this whole island? Sell it, transfer title to it, give it back to someone? Can't we get out from under?”

“You find a way, John. Those things that we once thought of as abstractions have taken a direct hand now: Final Responsibility, Ultimate Justice, things like that. They must be satisfied. Whatever you do will have to satisfy the psychic-coded lock on your shackles to give you release. Sell the island legal, if you can find someone to sell it to. Transfer it, if you can find someone to accept the transfer. But it must be for Fair Value or Value Justified or Original Value from Original Entailment. The psychic-code thing will know. It's governed by the Equity Factor.”

Then Commissioner Kreger left John the mayor, left the island, and went to rich fishing in other troubled (but not completely polluted) waters. There was no more profit for that smart man to shake out of the island.

That had been two years ago, and John the mayor had been the only official on the island since that time. His only contacts with the world were the sharp noises and smells that came in through his broken windows, and the visits of five feudal or wrangle leaders, the Duke, the Sky, the Wideman, the Cloud, and the Lolo.

Duke Durango was as smooth a gutter-fighter as ever came to the top of his heap, a happy fellow. Lawrence Sky was a fair white man named for the color of his big icy-blue eyes, a shambling giant, a giggling killer. Wideman Wyle was a wide man indeed, a cheerful sadist who told really funny stories and was the most pleasant person in the group. Cloud Clinkenbeard was a dour and stormy fellow, mean and relentless, and always in search of dirty novelty. Lolo Loudermilk was a girl, sort of a girl, a flaming mixed creature full of vitality and noise.

They were the mayor's only contacts. They were the leaders of one of the gangs that had endured, when the ten thousand gangs had eaten each other up and declined to a hundred.

All five of them came into the mayor's office, eating noisily.

“Food train in!” announced the Duke. “We killed just one of the drivers. They say there'll never be another train in if we kill more than one driver at a time. And we had to give up four hostages for it. Isn't four too many, John?”

“Numbers have no meaning in this evil thing,” said John the Mayor. “How many hostages have you left?”

“Twenty, and a few more, I think. We don't all count the same when we get to the big numbers. But I think four is too many to give for a food train. What will happen when we run out of hostages? Who'll give the big damn to subscribe a train for us then, when we have no more important people to trade to the important people off-island? Here, sign this, limp-leg John, and the Cloud will take it back to them.”

The mayor read the release and signed it. Each of the five feudal leaders looked it over in turn then. Several of them could read a little (it was for this reason that they were the mayor's contacts), and it would be hard for Mayor John to write anything phony on that release and slip it past them. The mayor had to sign these releases every time a food train came, and he knew what would happen when they ran out of hostages. The blackmail would be over when the last hostage of value or affection to someone off-island had been turned over for a food train. The off-island people would let the island rot. The trains had been the only food source for the island for years.

The Cloud took the release and went out through the smouldering corridor and into the broken streets to the food train that came once a month through the last not-completely broken tunnel.

“Something else came on the food train, gimpy John,” the Duke said uneasily.

“Well, what, what was it? Duke, Duke, you didn't get hold of a saw so I could saw my leg off, did you?”

“Nah. You're not supposed to saw your leg off. You're supposed to stay here just like you are. Who's going to sign for the food trains and hostage transfers if our mayor saws his leg off and runs away?

“John Mayor, there's three other men came on that food train. These are funny men. They might even be important enough men that we can hold them for hostages. They brought some heavy kegs and boxes with them, John, and they even conned some of the colts into carrying them over here for them. We can't figure out what kind of men they are, Mayor. They look at us and we look at them, and we both got sparks in our eyes. They are in the building now, Mayor, and they want to see you.”

“Show them in, spook Duke, the mayor is always available to his constituents.”

“Constituents these are not,” said the Lolo. “They are washed-out pale fellows, but they are solid.”

“And one of those kegs of theirs got a smell I like, Mayor,” said the Sky. “I believe I remember that smell like it was born in me. You get that keg, Mayor.”

“And those long crates got a heft I like,” said the Wideman. “I almost know what will be in those crates. You get those crates, Mayor.”

“Those square boxes got a feel I like,” said the Lolo. “I almost know what short-handled things will be in those square boxes. And the smallest package has a brass glint through a rip in it. You get those square boxes and that smallest package, Mayor.”

“I don't understand this at all,” said John the mayor, rolling his red-rimmed eyes in his constant pain. “Let the men and their baggage come in.”

The three new men who came in had a certain animal power about them, and a certain human authority. Possibly they might be important enough to hold for hostages, but who was going to take the lead in holding them? Men, they moved like big cats. But they were dressed like businessmen of an earlier decade, an anomaly on the island, and they were lighter than any of the islanders there except Lawrence Sky.

“You are the Mayor John-John?” asked one of the new men. “And you have authority to deal?”

“I am the mayor,” said John, “and I have such authority as a shackled prisoner may have. For what do we deal?”

“Oh, for the island. We've come to buy it. You'd like that, wouldn't you?”

“What, what, who are you?”

“I am Adrian Sweetsong,” said the first of the new men. “I'm a petroleum geologist by profession, which has nothing to do with the matter. And I'm an official of the Midlands Gun and Rod Club.”

“I'm Dennis Halftown,” said the second of the new men. “I'm an electronic engineer by profession, which has nothing to do with the matter either. And I'm also an official of the Midlands Gun and Rod Club.”

“I'm Freddy Flatfish,” said the third of the new men. “I'm a lawyer, which does have something to do with this matter. I am also an official of the Midlands Gun and Rod Club, and I have studied the legal aspects of this thing pretty thoroughly.”

“Is it the Midlands Gun and Rod Club that is dealing for the island?” Mayor John asked.

“That's right,” said Adrian Sweetsong, the first of the new men. “First installment! Set'em right there, boys.”

Several of the colts, the strong rough island boys, set down two heavy square boxes, and Dennis Halftown (the second of the new men) broke them open with a pry-bar.

“Man-eating Millie! Those things are for me!” the Lolo gasped, and she had a couple of them out in her hands.

“Sweet little choppies!” the Sky drooled. “What's a knife alongside of one of those?”

“Hack-berry pudding!” cried the Cloud as he returned from his errand. “Here, here, they look good, let's get them tested. I'll just pass a dozen of those out the windows to some of the boys. Let them try them out! Let them fall in love with them!”

“Fifty hatchets,” announced Adrian Sweetsong, “delivered and accepted. We record them.”

“Wait! Wait!” howled Mayor John jangling his shackles. “What have fifty hatchets to do with dealing for the island? Who has used hatchets for a century?”

“One-leg John,” the Duke crooned, “too bad your shackles won't let you get as far as the window. Some of the boys are using them now. Believe me, John, they're using them now!”

“Mr. Sweetsong,” Mayor John explained patiently, “the last valuation of island property ever made set it at over a hundred billion dollars. Due to certain developments it may be down a little now, but not that far. Hatchets will not get it. I can sell it only for Fair Value or Value Justified. My own shackling is governed by the Equity Factor.”

“We know that, Mr. Mayor,” said Freddy Flatfish, the lawyer for the Midlands Gun and Rod Club. Freddy Flatfish was a tow-headed, twinkling man. “But the island has reverted. It's really worthless since it was left to the ten thousand gangs, which have since devoured themselves down to a hundred. Perhaps its reverted value is now its original value. Anyhow, the first approach was yours.”

“Mine? Mine? I made no approach. I never heard of you fellows,” the Mayor said.

“But we have monitored you, Mayor John. Two years ago you said to the commissioner ‘Can't we give it back to someone?’ And you are also recorded as saying ‘We ought to sell it back to — ’ ”

“Second installment!” announced Adrian Sweetsong. “Set them right there, boys.”

Several of the colts set down the long crates, and Dennis Halftown broke them open with his pry-bar.

“Oh, those long sweet songs!” the Wideman slavered. “Smooth bores! You can jam them with any kind of soup at all and pan-light them. You can shoot broken glass with them. You can shoot anything. Here, we'll just hand a few of them out the windows and let the fellows try them out. Get the heft of those things! Even as clubs your hands would fall in love with them! Blunderbusses!” And the Wideman handed half-a-dozen of them out the windows.

“Twenty guns,” announced Adrian Sweetsong. “Delivered and accepted. We record them.”

“Even if it were possible for me to deal the island for things of no value,” John the mayor began — and there was deep-throated roaring and death-screaming in the streets — 

“No value, Mayor?” the Duke Durango asked with deep irony. “Mayor, you should be able to watch them. They jam them with soup, and then ram in glass and nails for a load. They spark them off, and it's wonderful. Cuts people right in two. Don't talk no value about those things!”

“Even if it were possible for me to deal the island for such things, what could the Midlands Gun and Rod Club possibly do with the island?” Mayor John asked.

“Set up a hunting preserve,” Adrian Sweetsong said. “It's a nicely stocked jungle island seventeen miles by four. We'll hunt. We'll hunt.”

“Hunt? What would you hunt?” the mayor wanted to know.

“Big game, big game,” said Dennis Halftown lovingly.

“But there is no big game, no game at all on the island,” the mayor insisted.

“Remember what ancient Hemingway wrote,” said Freddy Flatfish. “ ‘There is no sport equal to the hunting of an armed man.’ Ah, we'll hunt them here, as will many of our well-heeled members.”

“Third installment! Set it right there, boys,” Adrian Sweetsong ordered.

The ragged island boys set down the bag, and Dennis Halftown broke it open with his pry-bar.

“Boys, boys, that's the smell like was born in me!” the Sky chortled, and he had his arms up to the elbows in the dark grainy powder. “Sure it hasn't the power of soup. Sure it's clumsy and crude. But it's the grandpa of them all! The smell of it, the smell of it! Men, men, bust your noses on that smell!”

“Twenty-five kilograms of gunpowder,” announced Adrian Sweetsong. “That's as close as we could figure it. Twenty-five kilos delivered and accepted. We record it.”

“When you going to start, fellows, when you going to start?” the Duke asked the three new men in excitement, getting the idea. “How soon you be ready to start?” asked the Duke and the Sky and the Wideman and the Cloud and the Lolo, all going for it avidly.

“Should be the first bunch of hunters here in the morning,” said Adrian Sweetsong.

“Too long to wait,” the Lolo protested. “You three? How about you?”

“We three will begin stalking and pot-shooting in a very few minutes,” said Adrian, “just as soon as we can get title to this place from the reluctant mayor. We suggest you deploy your forces outside in the corridors. When we come out of this room we will come out rough, and it's rough animals we want to meet with.”

“Rough it will be,” said the Cloud. “Colts, colts, you carry this stuff out to our place again just as soon as they have recorded it. Men, we will have some sport! We will show these sports some sport!”

“But this cannot be, even in a nightmare,” Mayor John protested. “You three pale-browns are not Wappingers or Manahattas, and we are not Dutch.”

“I'm a Choctaw,” said Freddy Flatfish. “Dennis Halftown is a Shawnee. Adrian Sweetsong is an Osage. But we inherit. I have drawn up a legal brief to prove it. And you are double-Dutch if you don't accept. Awk, blew half my shoulder off! Those animals are jumping the gun. Now I know how the expression started. They really know how to handle those blunderbusses.”

Freddy Flatfish had been shot by a blunderbuss blast from the corridor and was bleeding badly. So they hurried it along, anxious to close the bargain and get the hunting season started.

“Bring them in fast, boys. Set them down till they are accepted and recorded. Then take them out again to your place,” Adrian Sweetsong ordered. And the rough colts brought in a variety of boxes and packages.

“Ten shirts, accepted and recorded,” Adrian Sweetsong announced, hurriedly now. “Thirty pair socks, accepted and recorded. One hundred bullets, accepted and recorded. Forty kettles, accepted and recorded. One brass frying-pan, accepted and recorded.”

And at the recording of the brass frying-pan, the leg-piercing pin was withdrawn from the leg of Mayor John and all his shackles fell off. The psychic-coded lock of his shackles had opened. He had finished his job and was released. He had disposed of the island in equity. He had gotten Fair Value for it, or Value Justified, or at least Original Value from Original Entailment. And it sufficed.

Mayor John was free. He started to run from the room, fell down on his crippled leg, and arose and ran once more. And was caught in a blunderbuss blast.

And then the great hunt began. The three members of the Midlands Gun and Rod Club had most sophisticated weapons. They were canny and smooth. This was the dangerous big-game hunt they had always dreamed of. And their prey were armed and wild and truculent and joyous.

It would be good.

Out between the orbs, several tentacles of Ultimate Justice came near together.

“Was there not somewhere the mention of twenty-four or twenty-six dollars paid?” one tentacle asked the other. “I thought I remembered some such figure.”

“No, no,” said the other tentacle, “That was only the estimated value placed on the material. There was no specie paid. The list is correct as rendered, and the repayment has been accepted and certified.”

In a forgotten and half-filled basement on the island, two of the remaining old-folk people were still in hiding. They were startled by the new sort of noise.

“What is it, papa? What have they done?” the old woman asked.

“Sold it back to the Indians, mama,” the old man said.

“Huh,” the old woman said. “Why didn't they think of that a long time ago?"

Author's Commentary

The Hole On The Corner

Homer Hoose came home that evening to the golden cliché: the un-noble dog who was a personal friend of his; the perfect house where just to live was a happy riot; the loving and unpredictable wife; and the five children — the perfect number (four more would have been too many, four less would have been too few).

The dog howled in terror and bristled up like a hedgehog. Then it got a whiff of Homer and recognized him; it licked his heels and gnawed his knuckles and made him welcome. A good dog, though a fool. Who wants a smart dog!

Homer had a little trouble with the doorknob. They don't have them in all the recensions, you know; and he had that off-the-track feeling tonight. But he figured it out (you don't pull it, you turn it), and opened the door.

“Did you remember to bring what I asked you to bring this morning, Homer?” the loving wife Regina inquired.

“What did you ask me to bring this morning, quick-heat blueberry biscuit of my heart?” Homer asked.

“If I'd remembered, I'd have phrased it different when I asked if you remembered,” Regina explained. “But I know I told you to bring something, old ketchup of my soul. Homer! Look at me, Homer! You look different tonight! DIFFERENT!! You're not my Homer, are you! Help! Help! There's a monster in my house!! Help, help! Shriek!”

“It's always nice to be married to a wife who doesn't understand you,” Homer said. He enfolded her affectionately, bore her down, trod on her with large friendly hooves, and began (as it seemed) to devour her.

“Where'd you get the monster, Mama?” son Robert asked as he came in. “What's he got your whole head in his mouth for? Can I have one of the apples in the kitchen? What's he going to do, kill you, Mama?”

“Shriek, shriek,” said Mama Regina. “Just one apple, Robert, there's just enough to go around. Yes, I think he's going to kill me. Shriek!”

Son Robert got an apple and went outdoors.

“Hi, Papa, what's you doing to Mama?” daughter Fregona asked as she came in. She was fourteen, but stupid for her age. “Looks to me like you're going to kill her that way. I thought they peeled people before they swallowed them. Why! You're not Papa at all, are you? You're some monster. I thought at first you were my papa. You look just like him except for the way you look.”

“Shriek, shriek,” said Mama Regina, but her voice was muffled.

They had a lot of fun at their house.

Homer Hoose came home that evening to the golden cliché: the u.n.d.; the p.h.; and l. and u.w.; and the f.c. (four more would have been too many).

The dog waggled all over him happily, and son Robert was chewing an apple core on the front lawn.

“Hi, Robert,” Homer said, “what's new today?”

“Nothing, Papa. Nothing ever happens here. Oh yeah, there's a monster in the house. He looks kind of like you. He's killing Mama and eating her up.”

“Eating her up, you say, son? How do you mean?”

“He's got her whole head in his mouth.”

“Droll, Robert, mighty droll,” said Homer, and he went in the house.

One thing about the Hoose children: a lot of times they told the bald-headed truth. There was a monster there. He was killing and eating the wife Regina. This was no mere evening antic. It was something serious.

Homer the man was a powerful and quick-moving fellow. He fell on the monster with judo chops and solid body punches; and the monster let the woman go and confronted the man.

“What's with it, you silly oaf?” the monster snapped. “If you've got a delivery, go to the back door. Come punching people in here, will you? Regina, do you know who this silly simpleton is?”

“Wow, that was a pretty good one, wasn't it, Homer?” Regina gasped as she came from under, glowing and gulping. “Oh, him? Gee, Homer, I think he's my husband. But how can he be, if you are? Now the two of you have got me so mixed up that I don't know which of you is my Homer.”

“Great goofy Gestalten!! You don't mean I look like him?” howled Homer the monster, near popping.

“My brain reels,” moaned Homer the man. “Reality melts away. Regina! Exorcise this nightmare if you have in some manner called it up! I knew you shouldn't have been fooling around with that book.”

“Listen, mister reely-brains,” wife Regina began on Homer the man. “You learn to kiss like he does before you tell me which one to exorcise. All I ask is a little affection. And this I didn't find in a book.”

“How we going to know which one is Papa? They look just alike,” daughters Clara-Belle, Anna-Belle, and Maudie-Belle came in like three little chimes.

“Hell-hopping horrors!” roared Homer the man. “How are you going to know — ? He's got green skin.”

“There's nothing wrong with green skin as long as it's kept neat and oiled,” Regina defended.

“He's got tentacles instead of hands,” said Homer the man.

“Oh boy, I'll say!” Regina sang out.

“How we going to know which one is Papa when they look just alike?” the five Hoose children asked in chorus.

“I'm sure there's a simple explanation to this, old chap,” said Homer the monster. “If I were you, Homer — and there's some argument whether I am or not — I believe I'd go to a doctor. I don't believe we both need to go, since our problem's the same. Here's the name of a good one,” said Homer the monster, writing it out.

“Oh, I know him,” said Homer the man when he read it. “But how did you know him? He isn't an animal doctor. Regina, I'm going over to the doctor to see what's the matter with me, or you. Try to have this nightmare back in whatever corner of your under-id it belongs when I come back.”

“Ask him if I keep taking my pink medicine,” Regina said.

“No, not him. It's the head doctor I'm going to.”

“Ask him if I have to keep on dreaming those pleasant dreams,” Regina said. “I sure do get tired of them. I want to get back to the other kind. Homer, leave the coriander seed when you go.” And she took the package out of his pocket. “You did remember to bring it. My other Homer forgot.”

“No, I didn't,” said Homer the monster. “You couldn't remember what you told me to get. Here, Regina.”

“I'll be back in a little while,” said Homer the man. “The doctor lives on the corner. And you, fellow, if you're real, keep your plankton-picking polypusses off my wife till I get back.”

Homer Hoose went up to the street of the house of Dr. Corte on the corner. He knocked on the door, and then opened it and went in without waiting for an answer. The doctor was sitting there, but he seemed a little bit dazed.

“I've got a problem, Dr. Corte,” said Homer the man. “I came home this evening, and I found a monster eating my wife — as I thought.”

“Yes, I know,” said Dr. Corte. “Homer, we got to fix that hole on the corner.”

“I didn't know there was a hole there, Doctor. As it happened, the fellow wasn't really swallowing my wife, it was just his way of showing affection. Everybody thought the monster looked like me, and Doctor, it has green skin and tentacles. When I began to think it looked like me too, I came here to see what was wrong with me, or with everybody else.”

“I can't help you, Hoose. I'm a psychologist, not a contingent-physicist. Only one thing to do; we got to fix that hole on the corner.”

“Doctor, there's no hole in the street on this corner.”

“Wasn't talking about a hole in the street. Homer, I just got back from a visit of my own that shook me up. I went to an analyst who analyzes analysts. ‘I've had a dozen people come to see me with the same sort of story,’ I told him. ‘They all come home in the evening; and everything is different, or themselves are different; or they find that they are already there when they get there. What do you do when a dozen people come in with the same nonsense story, Dr. Diebel?’ I asked him.

“ ‘I don't know, Corte,’ he said to me. ‘What do I do when one man comes in a dozen times with the same nonsense story, all within one hour, and he a doctor too?’ Dr. Diebel asked me.

“ ‘Why, Dr. Diebel?’ I asked. ‘What doctor came to you like that?’

“ ‘You,’ he said. ‘You've come in here twelve times in the last hour with the same dish of balderdash; you've come in each time looking a little bit different; and each time you act as if you hadn't seen me for a month. Dammit man,’ he said, ‘you must have passed yourself going out when you came in.’

“ ‘Yes, that was me, wasn't it?’ I said. ‘I was trying to think who he reminded me of. Well, it's a problem, Dr. Diebel,’ I said. ‘What are you going to do about it?’

“ ‘I'm going to the analyst who analyzes the analysts who analyze the analysts,’ he said. ‘He's tops in the field.’ Dr. Diebel rushed out then; and I came back to my office here. You came in just after that. I'm not the one to help you. But, Homer, we got to do something about that hole on the corner!”

“I don't understand the bit about the hole, Doctor,” Homer said. “But — has a bunch of people been here with stories like mine?”

“Yes, every man in this block has been in with an idiot story, Homer, except —  Why, everybody except old double-domed Diogenes himself! Homer, that man who knows everything has a finger in this up to the humerus. I saw him up on the power poles the other night, but I didn't think anything of it. He likes to tap the lines before they come to his meter. Saves a lot on power that way, and he uses a lot of it in his laboratory. But he was setting up the hole on the corner. That's what he was doing. Let's get him and bring him to your house and make him straighten it out.”

“Sure, a man who knows everything ought to know about a hole on the corner, Doctor. But I sure don't see any hole anywhere on this corner.”

The man who knew everything was named Diogenes Pontifex. He lived next door to Homer Hoose, and they found him in his back yard wrestling with his anaconda.

“Diogenes, come over to Homer's with us,” Dr. Corte insisted. “We've got a couple of questions that might be too much even for you.”

“You touch my pride there,” Diogenes sang out. “When psychologists start using psychology on you, it's time to give in. Wait a minute till I pin this fellow.”

Diogenes put a chancery on the anaconda, punched the thing's face a few times, then pinned it with a double bar-arm and body lock, and left it writhing there. He followed them into the house.

“Hi, Homer,” Diogenes said to Homer the monster when they had come into the house. “I see there's two of you here at the same time now. No doubt that's what's puzzling you.”

“Dr. Corte, did Homer ask you if I could stop dreaming those pleasant dreams?” wife Regina asked. “I sure do get tired of them. I want to go back to the old flesh-crawlers.”

“You should be able to do so tonight, Regina,” said Dr. Corte. “Now then, I'm trying to bait Diogenes here into telling us what's going on. I'm sure he knows. And if you would skip the first part, Diogenes, about all the other scientists in the world being like little boys alongside of you, it would speed things up. I believe that this is another of your experiments like —  Oh no! Let's not even think about the last one!

“Tell us, Diogenes, about the hole on the corner, and what falls through it. Tell us how some people come home two or three times within as many minutes, and find themselves already there when they get there. Tell us how a creature that staggers the imagination can seem so like an old acquaintance after a moment or two that one might not know which is which. I am not now sure which of these Homers it was who came to my office several moments ago, and with whom I returned to this house. They look just alike in one way, and in another they do not.”

“My Homer always was funny looking,” Regina said.

“They appear quite different if you go by the visual index,” Diogenes explained. “But nobody goes by the visual index except momentarily. Our impression of a person or a thing is much more complex, and the visual element in our appraisal is small. Well, one of them is Homer in gestalt two, and the other is Homer in gestalt nine. But they are quite distinct. Don't ever get the idea that such are the same persons. That would be silly.”

“And Lord spare us that!” said Homer the man. “All right, go into your act, Diogenes.”

“First, look at me closely, all of you,” Diogenes said. “Handsome, what? But note my clothing and my complexion and my aspect.

“Then to the explanations: it begins with my Corollary to Phelan's Corollary on Gravity. I take the opposite alternate of it. Phelan puzzled that gravity should be so weak on all worlds but one. He said that the gravity of that one remote world was typical and that the gravity of all other worlds was atypical and the result of a mathematical error. But I, from the same data, deduce that the gravity of our own world is not too weak, but too strong. It is about a hundred times as strong as it should be.”

“What do you compare it to when you decide it is too strong?” Dr. Corte wanted to know.

“There's nothing I can compare it to, Doctor. The gravity of every body that I am able to examine is from eight to a hundred times too strong. There are two possible explanations: either my calculations or theories are somehow in error — unlikely — or there are, in every case, about a hundred bodies, solid and weighted, occupying the same space at the same time. Old Ice Cream Store Chairs! Tennis Shoes in October! The Smell of Slippery Elm! County-Fair Barkers with Warts on Their Noses! Horned Toads in June!”

“I was following you pretty good up to the Ice Cream Store Chairs,” said Homer the monster.

“Oh, I tied that part in, and the tennis shoes too,” said Homer the man. “I'm pretty good at following this cosmic theory business. What threw me was the slippery elm. I can't see how it especially illustrates a contingent theory of gravity.”

“The last part was an incantation,” said Diogenes. “Do you remark anything different about me now?”

“You're wearing a different suit now, of course,” said Regina, “but there's nothing remarkable about that. Lots of people change to different clothes in the evening.”

“You're darker and stringier,” said Dr. Corte. “But I wouldn't have noticed any change if you hadn't told us to look for it. Actually, if I didn't know that you were Diogenes, there wouldn't be any sane way to identify Diogenes in you. You don't look a thing like you, but still I'd know you anywhere.”

“I was first a gestalt two. Now I'm a gestalt three for a while,” said Diogenes. “Well, first we have the true case that a hundred or so solid and weighty bodies are occupying the same space that our earth occupies, and at the same time. This in itself does violence to conventional physics. But now let us consider the characteristics of all these cohabiting bodies. Are they occupied and peopled? Will it then mean that a hundred or so persons are occupying at all times the same space that each person occupies? Might not this idea do violence to conventional psychology? Well, I have proved that there are at least eight other persons occupying the same space occupied by each of us, and I have scarcely begun proving. Stark White Sycamore Branches! New-Harrowed Earth! (New harrow, old earth.) Cow Dung Between Your Toes in July! Pitchers'-Mound Clay in the Old Three-Eyed League! Sparrow Hawks in August!”

“I fell off the harrow,” said wife Regina. “I got the sycamore branches bit, though.”

“I got clear down to the sparrow hawks,” said Homer the monster.

“Do you remark anything different about me this time?” Diogenes asked.

“You have little feathers on the backs of your hands where you used to have little hairs,” said Homer the man, “and on your toes. You're barefoot now. But I wouldn't have noticed any of it if I hadn't been looking for something funny.”

“I'm a gestalt four now,” said Diogenes. “My conduct is likely to become a little extravagant.”

“It always was,” said Dr. Corte.

“But not as much as if I were a gestalt five,” said Diogenes. “As a five, I might take a Pan-like leap onto the shoulders of young Fregona here, or literally walk barefoot through the hair of the beautiful Regina as she stands there. Many normal gestalt twos become gestalt fours or fives in their dreams. It seems that Regina does.

“I found the shadow, but not the substance, of the whole situation in the psychology of Jung. Jung served me as the second element in this, for it was the errors of Phelan and Jung in widely different fields that set me on the trail of the truth. What Jung really says is that each of us is a number of persons in depth. This I consider silly. There is something about such far-out theories that repels me. The truth is that our counterparts enter into our unconsciousness and dreams only by accident, as being most of the time in the same space that we occupy. But we are all separate and independent persons. And we may, two or more of us, be present in the same frame at the same time, and then in a near, but not the same, place. Witness the gestalt two and the gestalt nine Homers here present.

“I've been experimenting to see how far I can go with it, and the gestalt nine is the furthest I have brought it so far. I do not number the gestalten in the order of their strangeness to our own norm, but in the order in which I have discovered them. I'm convinced that the concentric and congravitic worlds and people complexes number near a hundred, however.”

“Well, there is a hole on the corner, isn't there?” Dr. Corte asked.

“Yes, I set it up by the bus stop as a convenient evening point of entry for the people of this block,” said Diogenes. “I've had lots of opportunity to study the results these last two days.”

“Well, just how do you set up a hole on the corner?” Dr. Corte persisted.

“Believe me, Corte, it took a lot of imagination,” Diogenes said. “I mean it literally. I drew so deeply on my own psychic store to construct the thing that it left me shaken, and I have the most manifold supply of psychic images of any person I know. I've also set up magnetic amplifiers on both sides of the street, but it is my original imagery that they amplify. I see a never-ending field of study in this.”

“Just what is the incantation stuff that takes you from one gestalt to another?” Homer the monster asked.

“It is only one of dozens of possible modes of entry, but I sometimes find it the easiest,” said Diogenes. “It is Immediacy Remembered, or the Verbal Ramble. It is the Evocation — an intuitive or charismatic entry. I often use it in the Bradmont Motif — named by me from two as-aff writers in the twentieth century.”

“You speak of it as if… well, isn't this the twentieth century?” Regina asked.

“This the twentieth? Why, you're right! I guess it is,” Diogenes agreed. “You see, I carry on experiments in other fields also, and sometimes I get my times mixed. All of you, I believe, do sometimes have moments of peculiar immediacy and vividness. It seems then as if the world were somehow fresher in that moment, as though it were a new world. And the explanation is that, to you, it is a new world. You have moved, for a moment, into a different gestalt. There are many accidental holes or modes of entry, but mine is the only contrived one I know.”

“There's a discrepancy here,” said Dr. Corte. “If the persons are separate, how can you change from one to another?”

“I do not change from one person to another,” said Diogenes. “There have been three different Diogenes lecturing you here in series. Fortunately, my colleagues and I, being of like scientific mind, work together in close concert. We have made a successful experiment in substitution acceptance on you here this evening. Oh, the ramifications of this thing! The aspects to be studied. I will take you out of your narrow gestalt-two world and show you worlds upon worlds.”

“You talk about the gestalt-two complex that we normally belong to,” said wife Regina, “and about others up to gestalt nine and maybe a hundred. Isn't there a gestalt one? Lots of people start counting at one.”

“There is a number one, Regina,” said Diogenes. “I discovered it first and named it, before I realized that the common world of most of you was of a similar category. But I do not intend to visit gestalt one again. It is turgid and dreary beyond tolerating. One instance of its mediocrity will serve. The people of gestalt one refer to their world as the ‘everyday world.’ Retch quietly, please. May the lowest of us never fall so low! Persimmons After First Frost! Old Barbershop Chairs! Pink Dogwood Blossoms in the Third Week of November! Murad Cigarette Advertisements!!”

Diogenes cried out the last in mild panic, and he seemed disturbed. He changed into another fellow a little bit different, but the new Diogenes didn't like what he saw either.

“Smell of Wet Sweet Clover!” he cried out. “St. Mary's Street in San Antonio! Model Airplane Glue! Moon Crabs in March! It won't work! The rats have run out on me! Homer and Homer, grab that other Homer there! I believe he's a gestalt six, and they sure are mean.”

Homer Hoose wasn't particularly mean. He had just come home a few minutes late and had found two other fellows who looked like him jazzing his wife Regina. And those two mouth men, Dr. Corte and Diogenes Pontifex, didn't have any business in his house when he was gone either.

He started to swing. You'd have done it too.

Those three Homers were all powerful and quick-moving fellows, and they had a lot of blood in them. It was soon flowing, amid the crashing and breaking-up of furniture and people — ocher-colored blood, pearl-gray blood, one of the Homers even had blood of a sort of red color. Those boys threw a real riot!

“Give me that package of coriander seed, Homer,” wife Regina said to the latest Homer as she took it from his pocket. “It won't hurt to have three of them. Homer! Homer! Homer! All three of you! Stop bleeding on the rug!”

Homer was always a battler. So was Homer. And Homer.

“Stethoscopes and Moonlight and Memory — ah — in Late March,” Dr. Corte chanted. “Didn't work, did it? I'll get out of here a regular way. Homers, boys, come up to my place, one at a time, and get patched up when you're finished. I have to do a little regular medicine on the side nowadays.”

Dr. Corte went out the door with the loopy run of a man not in very good condition.

“Old Hairbreadth Harry Comic Strips! Congress Street in Houston! Light Street in Baltimore! Elizabeth Street in Sydney! Varnish on Old Bar-Room Pianos! B-Girls Named Dotty! I believe it's easier to just make a dash for my house next door,” Diogenes rattled off. And he did dash out with the easy run of a man who is in good condition.

“I've had it!” boomed one of the Homers — and we don't know which one — as he was flung free from the donnybrook and smashed into a wall. “Peace and quiet is what a man wants when he comes home in the evening, not this. Folks, I'm going out and up to the corner again. Then I'm going to come home all over again. I'm going to wipe my mind clear of all this. When I turn back from the corner I'll be whistling ‘Dixie’ and I'll be the most peaceful man in the world. But when I get home, I bet neither of you guys had better have happened at all.”

And Homer dashed up to the corner.

Homer Hoose came home that evening to the g.c. — everything as it should be. He found his house in order and his wife Regina alone.

“Did you remember to bring the coriander seed, Homer, little gossamer of my fusus?” Regina asked him.

“Ah, I remembered to get it, Regina, but I don't seem to have it in my pocket now. I'd rather you didn't ask me where I lost it. There's something I'm trying to forget. Regina, I didn't come home this evening before this, did I?”

“Not that I remember, little dolomedes sexpunctatus.”

“And there weren't a couple other guys here who looked just like me only different?”

“No, no, little cobby. I love you and all that, but nothing else could look like you. Nobody has been here but you. Kids! Get ready for supper! Papa's home!”

“Then it's all right,” Homer said. “I was just daydreaming on my way home, and all that stuff never happened. Here I am in the perfect house with my wife Regina, and the kids'll be underfoot in just a second. I never realized how wonderful it was. ahhhhnnn!!! you're not regina!!”

“But of course I am, Homer. Lycosa Regina is my species name. Well, come, come, you know how I enjoy our evenings together.”

She picked him up, lovingly broke his arms and legs for easier handling, spread him out on the floor, and began to devour him.

“No, no, you're not Regina,” Homer sobbed. “You look just like her, but you also look like a giant monstrous arachnid. Dr. Corte was right, we got to fix that hole on the corner.”

“That Dr. Corte doesn't know what he's talking about,” Regina munched. “He says I'm a compulsive eater.”

“What's you eating Papa again for, Mama?” daughter Fregona asked as she came in. “You know what the doctor said.”

“It's the spider in me,” said Mama Regina. “I wish you'd brought the coriander with you, Homer. It goes so good with you.”

“But the doctor says you got to show a little restraint, Mama,” daughter Fregona cut back in. “He says it becomes harder and harder for Papa to grow back new limbs so often at his age. He says it's going to end up making him nervous.”

“Help, help!” Homer screamed. “My wife is a giant spider and is eating me up. My legs and arms are already gone. If only I could change back to the first nightmare! Night-Charleys under the Beds at Grandpa's House on the Farm! Rosined Cord to Make Bull-Roarers on Hallowe'en! Pig Mush in February! Cobwebs on Fruit Jars in the Cellar! No, no, not that! Things never work when you need them. That Diogenes fools around with too much funny stuff.”

“All I want is a little affection,” said Regina, talking with her mouth full.

“Help, help,” said Homer as she ate him clear up to his head. “Shriek, shriek.”

Author's Commentary

Been a Long Long Time

It doesn't end with one — it Begins with a whimper.

It was a sundering Dawn — Incandescence to which all later lights are less than candles — Heat to which the heat of all later suns is but a burnt-out match — the Polarities that set up the tension forever.

And in the middle was a whimper, just as was felt the first jerk that indicated that time had begun.

The two Challenges stood taller than the radius of the space that was being born; and one weak creature, Boshel, stood in the middle, too craven to accept either challenge.

“Uh, how long you fellows going to be gone?” Boshel snuffled.

The Creative Event was the Revolt rending the Void in two. The two sides formed, opposing Nations of Lightning split above the steep chasm. Two Champions had it out with a bitterness that has never passed — Michael wrapped in white fire — and Helel swollen with black and purple blaze. And their followers with them. It has been put into allegory as Acceptance and Rejection, and as Good and Evil; but in the Beginning there was the Polarity by which the universes are sustained.

Between them, like a pygmy, stood Boshel alone in whimpering hesitation.

“Get the primordial metal out of it if you're coming with us,” Helel growled like cracked thunder as he led his followers off in a fury to form a new settlement.

“Uh, you guys going to be back before night?” Boshel whimpered.

“Oh, get the Hell out of here!” Michael roared.

“Keep the little oaf!” Helel snorted. “He hasn't enough brimstone in him to set fire to an outhouse.”

The two great hosts separated, and Boshel was left alone in the void. He was still standing there when there was a second little jerk and time began in earnest, bursting the pod into a shower of sparks that traveled and grew. He was still standing there when the sparks acquired form and spin; and he stood there yet when life began to appear on the soot specks thrown off from the sparks. He stood there quite a long long time.

“What are we going to do with the little bugger?” an underling asked Michael. “We can't have him fouling up the landscape forever.”

“I'll go ask,” said Mike, and he did.

But Michael was told that the responsibility was his; that Boshel would have to be punished for his hesitancy; and that it was up to Michael to select the suitable punishment and see that it was carried out.

“You know, he made time itself stutter at the start,” Mike told the underling. “He set up a random that affected everything. It's got to be a punishment with something to do with time.”

“You got any ideas?” the underling asked.

“I'll think of something,” Michael said.

Quite a while after this, Michael was thumbing through a book one afternoon at a newsstand in Los Angeles.

“It says here,” Michael intoned, “that if six monkeys were set down to six typewriters and typed for a long enough time, they would type all the works of Shakespeare exactly. Time is something we've got plenty of. Let's try it, Kitabel, and see how long it takes.”

“What's a monkey, Michael?”

“I don't know.”

“What's a typewriter?”

“I don't know.”

“What's a Shakespeare, Mike?”

“Anybody can ask questions, Kitabel. Get the things together and let's get the project started.”

“It sounds like a lengthy project. Who will oversee it?”

“Boshel. It's a natural for him. It will teach him patience and a sense of order, and impress on him the majesty of time. It's exactly the punishment I've been looking for.”

They got the things together and turned them over to Boshel.

“As soon as the project is finished, Bosh, your period of waiting will be over. Then you join the group and enjoy yourself with the rest of us.”

“Well, it's better than standing here doing nothing,” Boshel said. “It'd go faster if I could educate the monkeys and let them copy it.”

“No, the typing has to be random, Bosh. It was you who introduced the random factor into the universes. So suffer for it.”

“Any particular edition the copy has to correspond to?”

“The ‘Blackstone Reader's Edition Thirty-Seven-and-a-Half Volumes in One’ that I have here in my hand will do fine,” Michael said. “I've had a talk with the monkeys, and they're willing to stick with it. It took me eighty thousand years just to get them where they could talk, but that's nothing when we're talking about time.”

“Man, are we ever talking about Time!” Boshel moaned.

“I made a deal with the monkeys. They will be immune to fatigue and boredom. I cannot promise the same for you.”

“Uh, Michael, since it may be quite a while, I wonder if I could have some sort of clock to keep track of how fast things are going.”

So Michael made him a clock. It was a cube of dressed stone measuring a parsec on each edge.

“You don't have to wind it, you don't have to do a thing to it, Bosh,” Michael explained. “A small bird will come every millennium and sharpen its beak on this stone. You can tell the passing of time by the diminishing of the stone. It's a good clock, and it has only one moving part, the bird. I will not guarantee that your project will be finished by the time the entire stone is worn away, but you will be able to tell that time has passed.”

“It's better than nothing,” Boshel said, “but it's going to be a drag. I think this concept of time is a little medieval, though.”

“So do I,” Michael said. “I tell you what I can do, though, Bosh. I can chain you to that stone and have another larger bird dive-bomb you and gouge out hunks of your liver. That was in a story in another book on that newsstand.”

“You slay me, Mike. That won't be necessary. I'll pass the time somehow.”

Boshel set the monkeys to work. They were conditioned to punch the typewriters at random. Within a short period of time (as the Larger Creatures count time) the monkeys had produced whole Shakespearian words: “let,” which is found in Scene Two of Act One of Richard III; “go,” which is in Scene Two of Act Two of Julius Caesar; and “be,” which occurs in the very first scene and act of The Tempest. Boshel was greatly encouraged.

Some time after this, one of the monkeys produced two Shakespearian words in succession. By this time, the home world of Shakespeare (which was also the home world of the newsstand in Los Angeles where was born a great idea) was long out of business.

After another while, the monkeys had done whole phrases. By then quite a bit of time had run out.

The trouble with that little bird is that its beak did not seem to need much sharpening when it did come once every thousand years. Boshel discovered that Michael had played a dirty seraphic trick on him and had been feeding the bird entirely on bland custard. The bird would take two or three light swipes at the stone, and then be off for another thousand years. Yet, after no more than a thousand visitations, there was an unmistakable scratch on the stone. It was a hopeful sign.

Boshel began to see that the thing could be done. A monkey — and not the most brilliant of them — finally produced a whole sentence: “What say'st thou, bully rook?” And at that very moment another thing happened. It was surprising to Boshel, for it was the first time he had ever seen it. But he would see it milliards of times before it was finished.

A speck of cosmic dust, on the far outreaches of space, met another speck. This should not have been unusual; specks were always meeting specks. But this case was different. Each speck — in the opposite direction — had been the outmost in the whole cosmos. You can't get farther apart than that. The speck (a teeming conglomerate of peopled worlds) looked at the other speck with eyes and instruments and saw its own eyes and instruments looking back at it. What the speck saw was itself. The cosmic tetra-dimensionate sphere had been completed. The first speck had met itself coming from the other direction, and space had been traversed.

Then it all collapsed.

The stars went out, one by one, and billion by billion. Nightmares of falling!! All the darkened orbs and oblates fell down into the void that was all bottom. There was nothing left but one tight pod in the void, and a few out-of-context things like Michael and his associates, and Boshel and his monkeys.

Boshel had a moment of unease: he had become used to the appearance of the expanding universe. But he need not have been uneasy. It began all over again.

A few billion centuries ticked by silently. Once more, the pod burst into a shower of sparks that traveled and grew. They acquired form and spin, and life appeared again on the soot specks thrown off from those sparks.

This happened again and again. Each cycle seemed damnably long while it was happening; but in retrospect, the cycles were only like a light blinking on and off. And in the Longer Retrospect, they were like a high-frequency alternator, producing a dizzy number of such cycles every over-second and continuing for tumbling ages. Yet Boshel was becoming bored. There was just no other word for it.

When only a few billion cosmic cycles had been completed, there was a gash in the clock-rock that you could hide a horse in. The little bird made very many journeys back to sharpen its beak. And Pithekos Pete, the most rapid of the monkeys, had now random-written The Tempest, complete and perfect. They shook hands all around, monkeys and angel. It was something of a moment.

The moment did not last. Pete, instead of pecking at furious random to produce the rest of the plays, wrote his own improved version of The Tempest. Boshel was furious.

“But it's better, Bosh,” Pete protested. “And I have some ideas about stagecraft that will really set this thing up.”

“Of course it's better! We don't want them better. We want them just the same. Can't you monkeys realize that we are working out a problem of random probabilities? Oh, you clunkerheads!”

“Let me have that damned book for a month, Bosh, and I'll copy the plagued things off and we'll be finished,” Pithekos Pete suggested.

“Rules, you lunkheads, rules!” Boshel grated out. “We have to abide by the rules. You know that isn't allowed, and besides, it would be found out. I have reason to suspect, and it cuts me to say this, that one of my own monkeys and associates here present is an informer. We'd never get by with it.”

After the brief misunderstanding things went better. The monkeys stayed with their task. And after a number of cycles expressed by nine followed by zeros in pica type sufficient to stretch around the universe at a period just prior to its collapse (the radius and the circumference of the ultimate sphere are, of course, the same), the first complete version was ready.

It was faulty, of course, and it had to be rejected. But there were less than thirty thousand errors in it; it presaged great things to come and ultimate triumph.

Later (people, was it ever later!!) they had it quite close. By the time that the gash in the clock-rock would hold a medium-size solar system, they had a version with only five errors.

“It will come,” Boshel said. “It will come in time. And time is the one thing we have plenty of.”

Later — much, much later — they seemed to have it perfect; and by this time, the bird had worn away nearly a fifth of the bulk of the great stone with its millennial visits.

Michael himself read the version and could find no error. This was not conclusive, of course, for Michael was an impatient and hurried reader. Three readings were required for verification, but never was hope so high.

It passed the second reading, by a much more careful angel, and was pronounced letter-perfect. But it was late at night when that reader had finished it, and he may have got a little careless at the end.

And it passed the third reading, through all the thirty-seven plays of it, and into the poems at the end. This was Kitabel, the scribing angel himself, who was appointed to that third reading. He was just about to sign the certification when he paused.

“There is something sticking in my mind,” he said, and he shook his head to clear it. “There is something like an echo that is not quite right. I wouldn't want to make a mistake.”

He had written Kitab but he had not finished his signature.

“I won't be able to sleep tonight if I don't think of it,” he complained. “It wasn't in the plays; I know that they were perfect. It was something in the poems — quite near the end — some dissonance. Either the bard wrote a remarkably malapropos line, or there was an error in the transcript that my eye overlooked but my ear remembered. I acknowledge that I was sleepy near the end.”

“Oh, by all the worlds that were ever made, sign!” pleaded Boshel.

“You have waited this long, a moment more won't kill you, Bosh.”

“Don't bet on it, Kit. I'm about to blow, I tell you.”

But Kitabel went back and he found it — a verse in “The Phoenix and the Turtle”:

From this session interdict

Every fowl of tyrant wing,

Save the eagle, feather'd king:

Keep the obsequy so strict.

That is what the book itself said. And what Pithekos Pete had written was nearly, but not quite, the same thing:

From this session interdict

Every fowl of tyrant wingg,

Save the eagle, feather'd kingg:

Damn machine the g is sticked.

And if you never saw an angel cry, words cannot describe to you the show that Boshel put on then.

They are still at it tonight, typing away at random, for that last and near-victory was less than a million billion cycles ago. And only a moment ago — halfway back in the present cycle — one of the monkeys put together no less than nine Shakespearean words in a row.

There is still hope. And the bird has now worn the rock down to about half its bulk.

Author's Commentary

One At A Time

Barnaby phones up John Sourwine. If you frequent places like Barnaby's Barn (there is one in every Port City of the World, and John is a familiar figure in all of them) you may already know John Sourwine; and you will know him as Sour John.

“There's an odd one down here,” Barnaby told him.

“How odd?” asked Sour John. He collected odd ones.

“Clear coon-dog crazy, John. He looks like they just dug him up, but he's lively enough.”

Barnaby runs a fine little place that offers eating and drinking and conversation, all of them rare and hearty. And John Sourwine is always interested in new things, or old things returned. So John went down to Barnaby's Barn to see the Odd One.

There was no need to ask which one he was, though there were always strangers and traveling men and seamen unknown to John in the Barn. The Odd One stood out. He was a big, spare, tough fellow, and he said that his name was McSkee. He was eating and drinking with a chortling pleasure, and they all watched him in amazement.

“It's his fourth plate of spaghetti,” Smokehouse confided to Sour John, “and that is the last of two dozen eggs. He's had twelve hamburgers, six coney islands, six crab-burgers, five foot-long hot dogs, eighteen bottles of beer, and twenty cups of coffee.”

“Blind blinking barnacles! He must be getting close to some of the records of Big Bucket Bulge,” Sour John exclaimed with sudden interest.

“John, he's broken most of those records already,” Smokehouse told him, and Barnaby nodded assent. “If he can hold the pace for another forty-five minutes, he'll beat them all.”

Well, the Odd One was still a spare fellow with a great gangling frame designed to carry fifty pounds more than the lean fellow now owned. But he began to fill out even as John watched him; and it was not only that he bulked larger almost by the minute, it was also as though a light was being turned on inside him. He glowed, then he shone. Then he begin to sparkle.

“You like to eat, do you, old-timer?” Sour John asked the Odd One, the amazing McSkee.

“I like it well enough!” McSkee boomed with a happy grin. “But, more than that, it's just that I'm a bedamned show-off! I like everything in excess. I love to be in the roaring middle of it all!”

“One would think that you hadn't eaten in a hundred years,” Sour John probed.

“You're quick!” the illuminated McSkee laughed. “A lot of them never do catch on to me, and I tell them nothing unless they guess a little first. Aye, you've got the hairy ears, though, and the adder's eyes of a true gentleman. I love a really ugly man. We will talk while I eat.”

“What do you do when you've finished eating?” asked John, pleased at the compliments, as the waiters began to pile the steaks high in front of McSkee.

“Oh, I go from eating to drinking,” McSkee munched out. “There's no sharp dividing line between the pleasures. I go from drinking to the girls; from the girls to fighting and roistering. And finally I sing.”

“A bestial procedure,” said John with admiration. “and when your pentastomic orgy is finished?”

“Oh, then I sleep,” McSkee chuckled. “Watch how I do it some time. I should give lessons. Few men understand how it should be done.”

“Well, how long do you sleep?” Sour John asked, “and is there something spectacular about your sleeping that I don't understand?”

“Of course it's spectacular. And I sleep till I waken. At this I also set records.”

And McSkee was wolfing the tall pile of steaks till Sour John had a mystic vision of an entire steer devoured except for head and hide and hooves, the slaughterer's take.

Later, they talked somewhat more leisurely as McSkee worked his way through the last half-dozen steaks — for now the edge was off his great appetite.

“In all this ostentatious bestiality, was there not one gluttony more outstanding than the others?” Sour John drew him out. “One time when you outdid even yourself?”

“Aye, there was that,” said McSkee. “There was the time when they were going to hang me with the new rope.”

“And how did you cut your way out of that one?” Sour John asked.

“At that time and in that country — it was not this one — the custom was new of giving the condemned man what he wanted to eat.” The incandescent McSkee limned it out in his voice with the lilt of a barrel organ. “I took advantage of the new usage and stripped the countryside. It was a good supper they gave me, John, and I was to be hanged at daybreak. But I had them there, for I was still eating at dawn. They could not interrupt my last meal to hang me — not when they had promised me a full meal. I stood them off that day and the night and the following day. That is longer than I usually eat, John, and I did outdo myself. That countryside had been known for its poultry and its suckling pigs and its fruits. It is known for them no longer. It never recovered.”

“Did you?”

“Oh, certainly, John. But by the third dawn I was filled. The edge was off my appetite, and I do not indulge thereafter.”

“Naturally not. But what happened then? They did not hang you, or you would not be here to tell about it.”

“That doesn't follow, John. I had been hanged before.”

“Oh?”

“Sure. But not this time. I tricked them. When I had my fill, I went to sleep. and then deeper and deeper into sleep until I died. They do not hang a man already dead. They kept me for a day to be sure. John, I get a pretty high shine on me in a day! I'm a smelly fellow at best. Then they buried me, but they did not hang me. Why do you look at me so oddly, John?”

“It is nothing,” said Sour John, “a mere random objection which I will not even dignify with words.”

McSkee was drinking now, first wine to give a bottom to his stomach, then brandy for its rumpled dignity, then rum for its plain friendliness.

“Can you believe that all breakthroughs are achieved by common men like myself?” this McSkee asked suddenly.

“I can't believe that you're a common man,” Sour John told him.

“I'm the commonest man you ever saw,” McSkee insisted. “I am made from the clay and the salt of the Earth, and the humus from decayed behemoths. They may have used a little extra slime in making me, but I contain none of the rare earths. It had to be a man like myself who would work out the system. The savants aren't capable of it; they have no juice in them. And by their having no juice in them, they missed the first hint.”

“What is that, McSkee?”

“It's so simple, John! That a man should live his life one day at a time.”

“Well?” Sour John asked with lowering intonation.

“See how harmlessly it slides down, John. It sounds almost like an almanac maxim.”

“And it isn't?”

“No, no, the thunder of a hundred words rumbles between them. It's the door to a whole new universe. But there's another saying: ‘Man, thy days are numbered.’ This is the one inexorable saying. It is the limit that will not be bent or broken, and it puts the damper on us hearty ones. It poses a problem to one like myself, too carnal to merit eternal beatitude on another plane, too full of juice to welcome final extinction, and anxious for personal reasons to postpone the hardships of damnation as long as possible.

“Now, John, there were (and are) smarter men than myself in the world. That I solved the problem (to an extent) and they did not, means only that the problem was more pressing on me. It had to be a coarse man to find the answer, and I never met a man with such a passion for the coarse things of life as myself.”

“Neither did I,” Sour John told him. “And how did you solve the problem?”

“By a fine little trick, John. You'll see it worked if you follow me around through the night.”

McSkee had left off eating. But he continued to drink while he indulged in girls, and in fighting and roistering, and in singing. His girly exploits are not given here; but there is a fruity listing of them on the police blotter of that night. Go see Mossback McCarty some night when he is on desk duty and he will get it out and let you read it. It is something of a classic around the station house. When a man gets involved with Soft-Talk Susie Kutz and Mercedes Morrero and Dotty Peisson and Little Dotty Nesbitt and Hildegarde Katt and Catherine Cadensus and Ouida and Avril Aaron and Little Midnight Mullins all in one night, you are talking about a man who generates legends.

McSkee did stir things up around town, and John Sourwine stayed with him. John fit in with McSkee well. There are many who would not.

There are persons of finely-tuned souls who cringe when a companion becomes unusually boisterous. There are those who wince when a hearty mate sings loudly and obscenely. There are even those who attempt to disassociate when the grumblings of the solid citizenry rise to a sullen roar; and who look for cover when the first little fights begin. Fortunately, Sour John was not such a person. He had a finely-tuned soul, but it had a wide range.

McSkee had the loudest and most dissonant voice in town, but would an honest friend desert him for that?

The two of them cut a big swath; and a handful of rough men, rubbing big knuckles into their big palms and biding their time, had begun to follow them from place to place: men like Buffalo Chips Dugan and Shrimp-Boat Gordon, Sulphur-Bottom Sullivan, Smokehouse, Kidney-Stone Stenton, Honey-Bucket Kincaid. The fact that these men followed McSkee angrily but did not yet dare to close with him speaks highly of the man. He was pretty wooly.

But there were times when McSkee would leave off his raucous disharmony and joyful battling, and chuckle somewhat more quietly. As, for a while, in the Little Oyster Bar (it's upstairs from the Big Oyster).

“The first time I put the trick to a test,” McSkee confided to John, “was from need and not from choice. I have incurred a lot of ill will in my day, and sometimes it boils over. There was one time when a whole shipful of men had had enough of me. This time (it was far away and long ago in the ancient days of small sail) I was shackled about the ankles and weighted and dropped overboard. Then I employed the trick.”

“What did you do?” Sour John asked him.

“John, you ask the damndest questions. I drowned, of course. What else could any man do? But I drowned calmly and with none of that futile threshing about. That's the trick, you see.”

“No. I don't see.”

“Time would be on my side, John. Who wants to spend eternity in the deep? Salt water is most corrosive; and my shackles, though I could not break them, were not massive. After a long lifetime, the iron would be so eaten through that it would part with any sudden strain. In less than one hundred years, the shackles gave way, and my body (preserved in a briny fashion but not in the best of condition) drifted up to the surface of the sea.”

“Too late to do you any good,” Sour John said. “Rather a droll end to the story, or was it the end?”

“Yes, that is the end of the story, John. And another time, when I was a foot-soldier in the service of Pixodarus the Carian (with his Celtic mercenaries, of course) — ”

“Just a minute, McSkee,” Sour John cut in. “There's something a little loose about all your talk, and it needs landmarks. How long have you lived anyhow? How old are you?”

“About forty years old by my count, John. Why?”

“I thought your stories were getting a little too tall, McSkee. But if you're no more than forty years old, then your stories do not make sense.”

“Never said they did, John. You put unnatural conditions on a tale.”

McSkee and Sour John were up in night court, bloodied and beatific. It was only for a series of little things that they had been arrested, but it was really to save them from lynching. They had a palaver with all those fine officers and men, and they had much going for them. Sour John was known to them as an old acquaintance and sometime offender. It was known that John's word was good; even when he lied he did it with an air of honesty. After a little time was allowed to pass, and the potential lynchers had dispersed, Sour John was allowed to bail them both out on their strong promise of good behavior.

They swore and foreswore that they would behave like proper men. They took ringing oaths to go to their beds at once and quietly. They went on record that they would carouse no more that night; that they would assault no honest woman; that they would obey the quirks of the law however unreasonable. And that they would not sing.

So the police let them go.

When the two of them were out and across the street, McSkee found a bottle handy to his hand on the sidewalk, and let fly with it. You'd have done it yourself if you'd been taken by a like impulse. McSkee threw it in a beautiful looping arc, and it went through the front window of the station house. You have to admire a throw like that.

We record it here that they are not patsy cops in that town. They are respectable adversaries, and it is always a pleasure to tangle with them.

Off again! And pursued by the millions with shout and siren! It was close there! Half-a-dozen times it was close! But Sour John was a fox who knew all the dens, and he and McSkee went to earth for the while.

“The trick is in coming to a total stop,” said McSkee when they were safe and had their breath again. They were at ease in a club less public than Barnaby's Barn and even smaller than the Little Oyster. “I tell you a little about it, Sour John, for I see that you are a man of worth. Listen and learn. Everyone can die, but not everyone can die just when he wants to. First you stop breathing. There will be a point where your lungs are bursting and you just have to take another breath. Do not do it; or you will have the whole business to go through again. Then you slow your heart and compose your mind. Let the heat go out of your body and finish it.”

“And then what?” Sour John asked.

“Why, then you die, John. But I tell you it isn't easy. It takes a devilish lot of practice.”

“Why so much practice for a thing you only do once? You mean to die literally?”

“John, I talk plain. I say die, I mean die.”

“There are two possibilities,” said Sour John. “One is that I am slow of understanding. The other is that you are not making sense. On other evidence, I know the first possibility to be impossible.”

“Tell you what, Sour John,” said McSkee, “time's running short. Give me twenty dollars and I'll overlook your illogic. I never did like to die broke, and I feel my time is upon me. Thank you, John! I had a fun day, both before and after I met you, and a fun night that is nearly over. I had a pleasant meal, and enough booze to make me happy. I had fun with the girls, especially Soft-Talk Susie, and Dotty, and Little Midnight. I sang several of my favorite songs (which are not everybody's favorites). I indulged in a couple of good solid fights, and I've still got bells ringing in my head from them. Hey, John, why didn't you tell me that Honey-Bucket was left-handed? You knew it, and you let him sneak the first punch on me.

“It's been fun, John. I'm a boy that gets a lot out of this game. I'm a real juicy one, and I try to jam everything into a day and a night. You can get a lot into a period if you heap it up. Now, let's gather up what's left in the bottles, and go down to the beach to see what we can provoke. The night needs a cap on it before I go to my long slumber.”

“McSkee, you've hinted several times that you had a secret for getting the most out of life,” said Sour John, “but you haven't told me what it is.”

“Man, I haven't hinted; I've spoken plainly,” McSkee swore.

“Then what in hog heaven is the secret?” John howled.

“Live your life one day at a time, John. That's all.”

Then McSkee was singing an old hobo song, too old a song for a forty-year-old man, not a specialist, to have known.

“When did you learn that?” John asked him.

“Learned it yesterday. But I learned a bunch of new ones today.”

“I noticed, a few hours back, that there was something curiously dated about your speech,” John said. “But it doesn't seem to be the case now.”

“John, I get contemporary real fast. I've a good ear, and I talk a lot and listen a lot, and I'm the perfect mimic. I can get up on a lingo in a day. They don't change as fast as you'd imagine.”

They went down to the beach to put the cap on the night. If you're going to die, it's nice to die within the sound of the surf, McSkee had said. They went down beyond the end of the Sea Wall and into the stretches where the beach was dark. Aye, McSkee had guessed it rightly, there was excitement waiting for them, or actually it had been following them. It was the opportunity for a last glorious fight.

A tight dark group of men had been following them — fellows who had somehow been insulted during the day and night of carousing. The intrepid pair turned and faced the men from a distance. McSkee finished the last bottle, and threw it into the midst of the group. The men were bad-natured; they flamed up instantly, and the man who was struck by the flying bottle swore.

So they joined battle.

For a while it seemed that the forces of righteousness would prevail. McSkee was a glorious fighter, and Sour John was competent. They spread those angry men out on the sand like a bunch of beached flounder fish. It was one of those great battles — always to be remembered.

But there were too many of those men, as McSkee had known there would be; he had made an outlandish number of enemies in a day and a night.

The wild fight climaxed, crested, and shattered, like a high wave thunderously breaking under. And McSkee, having touched top glory and pleasure, suddenly ceased to battle.

He gave one wild whoop of joy that echoed the length of the island. Then he drew a grand breath and held it. He closed his eyes and stood like a grinning rigid statue.

The angry men toppled him and swarmed him; they stomped him into the sand and kicked the very life out of McSkee.

Sour John had battled as long as there was a battle. He understood now that McSkee had withdrawn for reasons that were not clear. He did likewise. He broke and ran, not from cowardice, but from private inclination.

An hour later, just at the first touch of dawn, Sour John returned. He found that McSkee was dead — with no breath, no pulse, no heat. And there was something else. McSkee had said, in one of his rambling tales, that he got a pretty high shine on him. John knew what he meant now. That man got ripe real fast. By the test of the nose, McSkee was dead.

With a child's shovel that he found there, Sour John dug a hole in the side of one of the sand cliffs. He buried his friend McSkee there. He knew that McSkee still had the twenty dollar bill in his pants. He left it with him. It isn't so bad to be one or the other, but to be both dead and broke at the same time is an ignominy almost past enduring.

Then Sour John walked into town to get some breakfast, and quickly forgot about the whole thing.

He followed his avocation of knocking around the world and meeting interesting people. The chances are that he met you, if there's anything interesting about you at all; he doesn't miss any of them.

Twelve years went by, and some weeks. Sour John was back in one of the interesting port cities, but with a difference. There had come the day as comes to many (and pray it may not come to you!) when Sour John was not flush. He was as broke as a man can be, with nothing in his pockets or in his stomach, and with very little on his back. He was on the beach in every sense.

Then he bethought himself of the previous times he had been in this city. There had been benders here; there had been antics and enjoyments. They came back to him in a rush — a dozen happy times, and then one in particular.

“He was an Odd One, a real juicy cove,” Sour John grinned as he remembered. “He knew a trick, how to die just when he wanted to. He said that it took a lot of practice, but I don't see the point in practicing a thing that you do but once.”

Then Sour John remembered a twenty-dollar bill that he had buried with that juicy cove. The memory of the incandescent McSkee came back to Sour John as he walked down the empty beach.

“He said that you could jam a lot of living into a day and a night,” John said. “You can. I do. He said something else that I forget.”

Sour John found the old sand cliff. In half an hour he had dug out the body of McSkee. It still had a high old shine on it, but it was better preserved than the clothes. The twenty-dollar bill was still there, disreputable but spendable.

“I'll take it now, when I have the need,” John said softly. “And later, when I am flush again, I will bring it back here.”

“Yes. You do that,” said McSkee.

There are men in the world who would be startled if a thing like that happened to them. Some of them would have gasped and staggered back. The higher ones would have cried out. John Sourwine, of course, was not a man like that. But he was human, and he did a human thing:

He blinked.

“I had no idea that you were in such a state,” he said to McSkee. “So that's the way you do it?”

“That's the way, John. One day at a time! And I space them far enough apart that they don't pall on me.”

“Are you ready to get up again, McSkee?”

“I sure am not, John. I had just barely died. It'll be another fifty years before I have a really good appetite worked up.”

“Don't you think it's cheating?”

“Nobody's told me that it's disallowed. And only the days that I live count. I stretch them out a long while this way, and every one of them is memorable. I tell you that I have no dull days in my life.”

“I'm still not sure how you do it, McSkee. Is it suspended animation?”

“No, no! More men have run afoul on that phrase than on any other. You think of it like that and you've already missed it. You die, John, or else you're just kidding yourself. Watch me this time and you'll see. Then bury me again and leave me in peace. Nobody likes to be resurrected before he's had time to get comfortable in his grave.”

So McSkee put himself carefully to death once more, and Sour John buried him again in the side of the sand cliff.

McSkee — which in hedge Irish is Son of Slumber — the master of suspended animation (no, no, if you think of it that way you've already missed it, it's death, it's death), who lived his life one day at a time, and those days separated by decades.

Author's Commentary

Narrow Valley

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

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

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

So he burned leaves and bark and made a speech:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They walked the short distance to the border.

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

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

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

“Fatty,” said Fatty Rampart.

“But surely that is not your given name?”

“Audifax,” said five-year-old Fatty.

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

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

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

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

“That ditch is your land.”

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

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

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

“Between the two fences.”

“That's not eight feet.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The valley was again a ditch only five feet wide.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Author's Commentary

Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne

“We've been on some tall ones,” said Gregory Smirnov of the Institute, “but we've never stood on the edge of a bigger one than this, nor viewed one with shakier expectations. Still, if the calculations of Epiktistes are correct, this will work.”

“People, it will work,” Epikt said.

This was Epiktistes the Ktistec machine? Who'd have believed it? The main bulk of Epikt was five floors below them, but he had run an extension of himself up to this little penthouse lounge. All it took was a cable, no more than a yard in diameter, and a functional head set on the end of it.

And what a head he chose! It was a sea-serpent head, a dragon head, five feet long and copied from an old carnival float. Epikt had also given himself human speech of a sort, a blend of Irish and Jewish and Dutch comedian patter from ancient vaudeville. Epikt was a comic to his last para-DNA relay when he rested his huge, boggle-eyed, crested head on the table there and smoked the biggest stogies ever born.

But he was serious about this project.

“We have perfect test conditions,” the machine Epikt said as though calling them to order. “We set out basic texts, and we take careful note of the world as it is. If the world changes, then the texts should change here before our eyes. For our test pilot, we have taken that portion of our own middle-sized city that can be viewed from this fine vantage point. If the world in its past-present continuity is changed by our meddling, then the face of our city will also change instantly as we watch it.

“We have assembled here the finest minds and judgments in the world: eight humans and one Ktistec machine, myself. Remember that there are nine of us. It might be important.”

The nine finest minds were: Epiktistes, the transcendent machine who put the “K” in Ktistec; Gregory Smirnov, the large-souled director of the Institute; Valery Mok, an incandescent lady scientist; her over-shadowed and over-intelligent husband Charles Cogsworth; the humorless and inerrant Glasser; Aloysius Shiplap, the seminal genius; Willy McGilly, a man of unusual parts (the seeing third finger on his left hand he had picked up on one of the planets of Kapteyn's Star) and no false modesty; Audifax O'Hanlon; and Diogenes Pontifex. The latter two men were not members of the Institute (on account of the Minimal Decency Rule), but when the finest minds in the world are assembled, these two cannot very well be left out.

“We are going to tamper with one small detail in past history and note its effect,” Gregory said. “This has never been done before openly. We go back to an era that has been called ‘A patch of light in the vast gloom,’ the time of Charlemagne. We consider why that light went out and did not kindle others. The world lost four hundred years by that flame expiring when the tinder was apparently ready for it. We go back to that false dawn of Europe and consider where it failed. The year was 778, and the region was Spain. Charlemagne had entered alliance with Marsilies, the Arab king of Saragossa, against the Caliph Abd al-Rahman of Córdova. Charlemagne took such towns as Pamplona, Huesca and Gerona and cleared the way to Marsilies in Saragossa. The Caliph accepted the situation. Saragossa should be independent, a city open to both Moslems and Christians. The northern marches to the border of France should be permitted their Christianity, and there would be peace for everybody.

“This Marsilies had long treated Christians as equals in Saragossa, and now there would be an open road from Islam into the Frankish Empire. Marsilies gave Charlemagne thirty-three scholars (Moslem, Jewish and Christian) and some Spanish mules to seal the bargain. And there could have been a cross-fertilization of cultures.

“But the road was closed at Roncesvalles where the rearguard of Charlemagne was ambushed and destroyed on its way back to France. The ambushers were more Basque than Moslems, but Charlemagne locked the door at the Pyrenees and swore that he would not let even a bird fly over that border thereafter. He kept the road closed, as did his son and his grandsons. But when he sealed off the Moslem world, he also sealed off his own culture.

“In his latter years he tried a revival of civilization with a ragtag of Irish half-scholars, Greek vagabonds and Roman copyists who almost remembered an older Rome. These weren't enough to revive civilization, and yet Charlemagne came close with them. Had the Islam door remained open, a real revival of learning might have taken place then rather than four hundred years later. We are going to arrange that the ambush at Roncesvalles did not happen and that the door between the two civilizations was not closed. Then we will see what happens to us.”

“Intrusion like a burglar bent,” said Epikt.

“Who's a burglar?” Glasser demanded.

“I am,” Epikt said. “We all are. It's from an old verse. I forget the author; I have it filed in my main mind downstairs if you're interested.”

“We set out a basic text of Hilarius,” Gregory continued. “We note it carefully, and we must remember it the way it is. Very soon, that may be the way it was. I believe that the words will change on the very page of this book as we watch them. Just as soon as we have done what we intend to do.”

The basic text marked in the open book read:

The traitor Gano, playing a multiplex game, with money from the Córdova Caliph hired Basque Christians (dressed as Saragossan Mozarabs) to ambush the rear-guard of the Frankish force. To do this it was necessary that Gano keep in contact with the Basques and at the same time delay the rear-guard of the Franks. Gano, however, served both as guide and scout for the Franks. The ambush was effected. Charlemagne lost his Spanish mules. And he locked the door against the Moslem world.

That was the text by Hilarius.

“When we, as it were, push the button (give the nod to Epiktistes), this will be changed,” Gregory said. “Epikt, by a complex of devices which he has assembled, will send an Avatar (partly of mechanical and partly of ghostly construction), and something will have happened to the traitor Gano along about sundown one night on the road to Roncesvalles.”

“I hope the Avatar isn't expensive,” Willy McGilly said. “When I was a boy we got by with a dart whittled out of slippery elm wood.”

“This is no place for humor,” Glasser protested. “Who did you, as a boy, ever kill in time, Willy?”

“Lots of them. King Wu of the Manchu, Pope Adrian VII, President Hardy of our own country, King Marcel of Auvergne, the philosopher Gabriel Toeplitz. It's a good thing we got them. They were a bad lot.”

“But I never heard of any of them, Willy,” Glasser insisted.

“Of course not. We killed them when they were kids.”

“Enough of your fooling, Willy,” Gregory cut it off.

“Willy's not fooling,” the machine Epikt said. “Where do you think I got the idea?”

“Regard the world,” Aloysius said softly. “We see our own middle-sized town with half-a-dozen towers of pastel-colored brick. We will watch it as it grows or shrinks. It will change if the world changes.”

“There's two shows in town I haven't seen,” Valery said. “Don't let them take them away! After all, there are only three shows in town.”

“We regard the Beautiful Arts as set out in the reviews here which we have also taken as basic texts,” Audifax O'Hanlon said. “You can say what you want to, but the arts have never been in meaner shape. Painting is of three schools only, all of them bad. Sculpture is the heaps-of-rusted-metal school and the obscene tinker-toy effects. The only popular art, graffiti on mingitorio walls, has become unimaginative, stylized and ugly.

“The only thinkers to be thought of are the dead Teilhard de Chardin and the stillborn Sartre, Zielinski, Aichinger. Oh well, if you're going to laugh there's no use going on.”

“All of us here are experts on something,” Cogsworth said. “Most of us are experts on everything. We know the world as it is. Let us do what we are going to do and then look at the world.”

“Push the button, Epikt!” Gregory Smirnov ordered.

From his depths, Epiktistes the Ktistec machine sent out an Avatar, partly of mechanical and partly of ghostly construction. Along about sundown on the road from Pamplona to Roncesvalles, on August 14th of the year 778, the traitor Gano was taken up from the road and hanged on a carob tree, the only one in those groves of oak and beech. And all things thereafter were changed.

“Did it work, Epikt? Is it done?” Louis Lobachevski demanded. “I can't see a change in anything.”

“The Avatar is back and reports his mission accomplished,” Epikt stated. “I can't see any change in anything either.”

“Let's look at the evidence,” Gregory said. The thirteen of them, the ten humans and the Ktistec, Chresmoeidec and Proaisthematic machines, turned to the evidence and with mounting disappointment.

“There is not one word changed in the Hilarius text,” Gregory grumbled, and indeed the basic text still read:

The king Marsilies of Saragossa, playing a multiplex game, took money from the Caliph of Córdova for persuading Charlemagne to abandon the conquest of Spain (which Charlemagne had never considered and couldn't have effected); took money from Charlemagne in recompense for the cities of the Northern marches being returned to Christian rule (though Marsilies himself had never ruled them); and took money from everyone as toll on the new trade passing through his city. Marsilies gave up nothing but thirty-three scholars, the same number of mules and a few wagonloads of book-manuscripts from the old Hellenistic libraries. But a road over the mountains was opened between the two worlds; and also a sector of the Mediterranean coast became open to both. A limited opening was made between the two worlds, and a limited reanimation of civilization was effected in each.

“No, there is not one word of the text changed,” Gregory grumbled. “History followed its same course. How did our experiment fail? We tried, by a device that seems a little cloudy now, to shorten the gestation period for the new birth. It would not be shortened.”

“The town is in no way changed,” said Aloysius Shiplap. “It is still a fine large town with two dozen imposing towers of varicolored limestone and midland marble. It is a vital metropolis, and we all love it, but it is now as it was before.”

“There are still two dozen good shows in town that I haven't seen,” Valery said happily as she examined the billings. “I was afraid that something might have happened to them.”

“There is no change at all in the Beautiful Arts as reflected in the reviews here that we have taken as basic texts,” said Audifax O'Hanlon. “You can say what you want to, but the arts have never been in finer shape.”

“It's a link of sausage,” said the machine Chresmoeidy.

“ ‘Nor know the road who never ran it thrice,’ ” said the machine Proaisth. “That's from an old verse; I forget the author; I have it filed in my main mind in England if you're interested.”

“Oh yes, it's the three-cornered tale that ends where it begins,” said the machine Epiktistes. “But it is good sausage, and we should enjoy it; many ages have not even this much.”

“What are you fellows babbling about?” Audifax asked without really wanting to know. “The art of painting is still almost incandescent in its bloom. The schools are like clustered galaxies, and half the people are doing some of this work for pleasure. Scandinavian and Maori sculpture are hard put to maintain their dominance in the field where almost everything is extraordinary. The impassioned-comic has released music from most of its bonds. Since speculative mathematics and psychology have joined the popular performing arts, there is considerably more sheer fun in life.

“There's a piece here on Pete Teilhard putting him into context as a talented science fiction writer with a talent for outré burlesque. The Brainworld Motif was overworked when he tackled it, but what a shaggy comic extravaganza he did make of it! And there's Muldoom, Zielinski, Popper, Gander, Aichinger, Whitecrow, Hornwhanger — we owe so much to the juice of the cultists! In the main line there are whole congeries and continents of great novels and novelists.

“An ever popular art, graffiti on mingitorio walls, maintains its excellence. Travel Unlimited offers a ninety-nine day art tour of the world keyed to the viewing of the exquisite and hilarious miniatures on the walls of its own restrooms. Ah, what a copious world we live in!”

“It's more grass than we can graze,” said Willy McGilly. “The very bulk of achievement is stupefying. Ah, I wonder if there is subtle revenge in my choice of words. The experiment, of course, was a failure, and I'm glad. I like a full world.”

“We will not call the experiment a failure since we have covered only a third of it,” said Gregory. “Tomorrow we will make our second attempt on the past. And, if there is a present left to us after that, we will make a third attempt the following day.”

“Shove it, good people, shove it,” the machine Epiktistes said. “We will meet here again tomorrow. Now you to your pleasures, and we to ours.”

The people talked that evening away from the machines where they could make foolish conjectures without being laughed at.

“Let's pull a random card out of the pack and go with it,” said Louis Lobachevski. “Let's take a purely intellectual crux of a little later date and see if the changing of it will change the world.”

“I suggest Ockham,” said Johnny Konduly.

“Why?” Valery demanded. “He was the last and least of the medieval schoolmen. How could anything he did or did not do affect anything?”

“Oh no, he held the razor to the jugular,” Gregory said. “He'd have severed the vein if the razor hadn't been snatched from his hand. There is something amiss here, though. It is as though I remembered when things were not so stark with Ockham, as though, in some variant, Ockham's Terminalism did not mean what we know that it did mean.”

“Sure, let's cut the jugular,” said Willy. “Let's find out the logical termination of Terminalism and see just how deep Ockham's razor can cut.”

“We'll do it,” said Gregory. “Our world has become something of a fat slob; it cloys; it has bothered me all evening. We will find whether purely intellectual attitudes are of actual effect. We'll leave the details to Epikt, but I believe the turning point was in the year 1323 when John Lutterell came from Oxford to Avignon where the Holy See was then situated. He brought with him fifty-six propositions taken from Ockham's Commentary on the Sentences, and he proposed their condemnation. They were not condemned outright, but Ockham was whipped soundly in that first assault, and he never recovered. Lutterell proved that Ockham's nihilism was a bunch of nothing. And the Ockham thing did die away, echoing dimly through the little German courts where Ockham traveled peddling his wares, but he no longer peddled them in the main markets. Yet his viewpoint could have sunk the world if, indeed, intellectual attitudes are of actual effect.”

“We wouldn't have liked Lutterell,” said Aloysius. “He was humorless and he had no fire in him, and he was always right. And we would have liked Ockham. He was charming, and he was wrong, and perhaps we will destroy the world yet. There's a chance that we will get our reaction if we allow Ockham free hand. China was frozen for thousands of years by an intellectual attitude, one not nearly so unsettling as Ockham's. India is hypnotized into a queer stasis which calls itself revolutionary and which does not move — hypnotized by an intellectual attitude. But there was never such an attitude as Ockham's.”

So they decided that the former chancellor of Oxford, John Lutterell, who was always a sick man, should suffer one more sickness on the road to Avignon in France, and that he should not arrive there to lance the Ockham thing before it infected the world.

“Let's get on with it, good people,” Epikt rumbled the next day. “Me, I'm to stop a man getting from Oxford to Avignon in the year 1323. Well, come, come, take your places, and let's get the thing started.” And Epiktistes's great sea-serpent head glowed every color as he puffed on a seven-branched pooka-dooka and filled the room with wonderful smoke.

“Everybody ready to have his throat cut?” Gregory asked cheerfully.

“Cut them,” said Diogenes Pontifex, “but I haven't much hope for it. If our yesterday's essay had no effect, I cannot see how one English schoolman chasing another to challenge him in an Italian court in France, in bad Latin, nearly seven hundred years ago, on fifty-six points of unscientific abstract reasoning, can have effect.”

“We have perfect test conditions here,” said the machine Epikt. “We set out a basic text from Cobblestone's History of Philosophy. If our test is effective, then the text will change before our eyes. So will every other text, and the world.

“We have assembled here the finest minds and judgments in the world,” the machine Epiktistes said, “ten humans and three machines. Remember that there are thirteen of us. It might be important.”

“Regard the world,” said Aloysius Shiplap. “I said that yesterday, but it is required that I say it again. We have the world in our eyes and in our memories. If it changes in any way, we will know it.”

“Push the button, Epikt,” said Gregory Smirnov.

From his depths, Epiktistes the Ktistec machine sent out an Avatar, partly of mechanical and partly of ghostly construction. And along about sundown on the road from Mende to Avignon in the old Languedoc district of France, in the year 1323, John Lutterell was stricken with one more sickness. He was taken to a little inn in the mountain country, and perhaps he died there. He did not, at any rate, arrive at Avignon.

“Did it work, Epikt? Is it done?” Aloysius asked.

“Let's look at the evidence,” said Gregory.

The four of them, the three humans and the ghost Epikt who was a kachenko mask with a speaking tube, turned to the evidence with mounting disappointment.

“There is still the stick and the five notches in it,” said Gregory. “It was our test stick. Nothing in the world is changed.”

“The arts remain as they were,” said Aloysius. “Our picture here on the stone on which we have worked for so many seasons is the same as it was. We have painted the bears black, the buffalos red and the people blue. When we find a way to make another color, we can represent birds also. I had hoped that our experiment might give us that other color. I had even dreamed that birds might appear in the picture on the rock before our very eyes.”

“There's still rump of skunk to eat and nothing else,” said Valery. “I had hoped that our experiment would have changed it to haunch of deer.”

“All is not lost,” said Aloysius. “We still have the hickory nuts. That was my last prayer before we began our experiment. ‘Don't let them take the hickory nuts away,’ I prayed.”

They sat around the conference table that was a large flat natural rock, and cracked hickory nuts with stone fist-hammers. They were nude in the crude, and the world was as it had always been. They had hoped by magic to change it.

“Epikt has failed us,” said Gregory. “We made his frame out of the best sticks, and we plaited his face out of the finest weeds and grasses. We chanted him full of magic and placed all our special treasures in his cheek pouches. So, what can the magic mask do for us now?”

“Ask it, ask it,” said Valery. They were the four finest minds in the world — the three humans, Gregory, Aloysius and Valery (the only humans in the world unless you count those in the other valleys), and the ghost Epikt, a kachenko mask with a speaking tube.

“What do we do now, Epikt?” Gregory asked. Then he went around behind Epikt to the speaking tube.

“I remember a woman with a sausage stuck to her nose,” said Epikt in the voice of Gregory. “Is that any help?”

“It may be some help,” Gregory said after he had once more taken his place at the flat-rock conference table. “It is from an old (What's old about it? I made it up myself this morning) folk tale about the three wishes.”

“Let Epikt tell it,” said Valery. “He does it so much better than you do.” Valery went behind Epikt to the speaking tube and blew smoke through it from the huge loose black-leaf uncured stogie that she was smoking.

“The wife wastes one wish for a sausage,” said Epikt in the voice of Valery. “A sausage is a piece of deer-meat tied in a piece of a deer's stomach. The husband is angry that the wife has wasted a wish, since she could have wished for a whole deer and had many sausages. He gets so angry that he wishes the sausage might stick to her nose forever. It does, and the woman wails, and the man realized that he had used up the second wish. I forget the rest.”

“You can't forget it, Epikt!” Aloysius cried in alarm. “The future of the world may depend on your remembering. Here, let me reason with that damned magic mask!” And Aloysius went behind Epikt to the speaking tube.

“Oh yes, now I remember,” Epikt said in the voice of Aloysius. “The man used the third wish to get the sausage off his wife's nose. So things were the way they had been before.”

“But we don't want it the way it was before!” Valery howled. “That's the way it is now, rump of skunk to eat, and me with nothing to wear but my ape cape. We want it better. We want deer skins and antelope skins.”

“Take me as a mystic or don't take me at all,” Epikt signed off.

“Even though the world has always been so, yet we have intimations of other things,” Gregory said. “What folk hero was it who made the dart? And of what did he make it?”

“Willy McGilly was the folk hero,” said Epikt in the voice of Valery, who had barely got to the speaking tube in time, “and he made it out of slippery elm wood.”

“Could we make a dart like the folk hero Willy made?” Aloysius asked.

“We gotta,” said Epikt.

“Could we make a slinger and whip it out of our own context and into — ”

“Could we kill an Avatar with it before he killed somebody else?” Gregory asked excitedly.

“We sure will try,” said the ghost Epikt who was nothing but a kachenko mask with a speaking tube. “I never did like those Avatars.”

You think Epikt was nothing but a kachenko mask with a speaking tube! There was a lot more to him than that. He had red garnet rocks inside him and real sea salt. He had powder made from beaver eyes. He had rattlesnake rattles and armadillo shields. He was the first Ktistec machine.

“Give me the word, Epikt,” Aloysius cried a few moments later as he fitted the dart to the slinger.

“Fling it! Get that Avatar fink!” Epikt howled.

Along about sundown in an unnumbered year, on the Road from Nowhere to Eom, an Avatar fell dead with a slippery-elm dart in his heart.

“Did it work, Epikt? Is it done?” Charles Cogsworth asked in excitement. “It must have. I'm here. I wasn't in the last one.”

“Let's look at the evidence,” Gregory suggested calmly.

“Damn the evidence!” Willy McGilly cussed. “Remember where you heard it first.”

“Is it started yet?” Glasser asked.

“Is it finished?” Audifax O'Hanlon questioned.

“Push the button, Epikt!” Diogenes barked. “I think I missed part of it. Let's try it again.”

“Oh, no, no!” Valery forbade. “Not again. That way is rump of skunk and madness.”

Author's Commentary

Polity And Custom Of The Camiroi

ABSTRACT FROM REPORT OF FIELD GROUP FOR EXAMINATION OF OFF-EARTH CUSTOMS AND CODICES TO THE COUNCIL FOR GOVERNMENT RENOVATION AND LEGAL RETHINKING.

Extract from the day book of Paul Piggott, political analyst:

Making appointments with the Camiroi is proverbially like building with quicksilver. We discovered this early. But they do have the most advanced civilization of any of the four human worlds. And we did have a firm invitation to visit the planet Camiroi and to investigate customs. And we had the promise that we would be taken in hand immediately on our arrival by a group parallel to our own.

But there was no group to meet us at the Sky-Port.

“Where is the Group for the Examination of Customs and Codices?” we asked the girl who was on duty as Information Factor at the Sky-Port.

“Ask that post over there,” she said. She was a young lady of mischievous and almost rakish mien.

“I hope we are not reduced to talking to posts,” said our leader, Charles Chosky, “but I see that it is some sort of communicating device. Does the post talk English, young lady?”

“The post understands the fifty languages that all Camiroi know,” the young lady said. “On Camiroi, even the dogs speak fifty languages. Speak to it.”

“I'll try it,” said Mr. Chosky. “Ah, post, we were to be taken in hand by a group parallel to our own. Where can we find the Group for the Examination of Customs and Codices?”

“Duty! Duty!” cried the post in a girlish voice that was somehow familiar. “Three for a group! Come, come, be constituted!”

“I'll be one,” said a pleasant-looking Camiroi, striding over.

“I'll be another,” said a teenage sproutling boy of the same species.

“One more, one more!” cried the post. “Oh, here comes my relief. I'll be the other one to form the group. Come, come, let's get started. What do you want to see first, good people?”

“How can a post be a member of an ambulatory group?” Charles Chosky asked.

“Oh, don't be quaint,” said the girl who had been the information factor and also the voice of the post. She had come up behind us and joined us. “Sideki and Nautes, we become a group for cozening Earthlings,” she said. “I am sure you heard the rather humorous name they gave it.”

“Are you as a group qualified to give us the information we seek?” I asked.

“Every citizen of Camiroi is qualified, in theory, to give sound information on every subject,” said the teenage sproutling.

“But in practice it may not be so,” I said, my legal mind fastening onto his phrase.

“The only difficulty is our over-liberal admission to citizenship,” said Miss Diayggeia, who had been the voice of the post and the Information Factor. “Any person may become a citizen of Camiroi if he has resided here for one oodle. Once it was so that only natural leaders traveled space, and they qualified. Now, however, there are subsidized persons of no ability who come. They do not always conform to our high standard of reason and information.”

“Thanks,” said our Miss Holly Holm, “and how long is an oodle?”

“About fifteen minutes,” said Miss Dia. “The post will register you now if you wish.”

The post registered us, and we became citizens of Camiroi. “Well, come, come, fellow citizens, what can we do for you?” asked Sideki, the pleasant-looking Camiroi who was the first member of our host group.

“Our reports of the laws of Camiroi seem to be a mixture of travelers' tales and nonsense,” I said. “We want to find how a Camiroi law is made and how it works.”

“So, make one, citizens, and see how it works,” said Sideki. “You are now citizens like any other citizens, and any three of you can band together and make a law. Let us go down to Archives and enact it. And you be thinking what sort of law it will be as we go there.”

We strode through the contrived and beautiful parklands and groves which were the roofs of Camiroi City. The extent was full of fountains and waterfalls, and streams with bizarre bridges over them. Some were better than others. Some were better than anything we had ever seen anywhere.

“But I believe that I myself could design a pond and weir as good as this one,” said Charles Chosky, our leader. “And I'd have some of those bushes that look like Earth sumac in place of that cluster there; and I'd break up that pattern of rocks and tilt the layered massif behind it, and bring in a little of that blue moss — ”

“You see your duty quickly, citizen,” said Sideki. “You should do all this before this very day is gone. Make it the way you think best, and remove the plaque that is there. Then you can dictate your own plaque to any of the symbouleutic posts, and it will be made and set in. ‘My composition is better than your composition,’ is the way most plaques read, and sometimes a scenery composer will add something humorous like ‘and my dog can whip your dog.’ You can order all necessary materials from the same post there, and most citizens prefer to do the work with their own hands. This system works for gradual improvement. There are many Consensus Masterpieces that remain year after year; and the ordinary work is subject to constant turnover. There, for instance, is a tree which was not there this morning and which should not be there tonight. I'm sure that one of you can design a better tree.”

“I can,” said Miss Holly, “and I will do so today.”

We descended from the roof parklands in the lower streets of Camiroi City, and went to Archives.

“Have you thought of a new law yet?” Miss Dia asked when we were at Archives. “We don't expect brilliance from such new citizens, but we ask you not to be ridiculous.”

Our leader, Charles Chosky, drew himself up to full height and spoke:

“We promulgate a law that a permanent group be set up on Camiroi to oversee and devise regulations for all random and hasty citizens groups with the aim of making them more responsible, and that a full-scale review of such groups be held yearly.”

“Got it?” Miss Dia called to an apparatus there in Archives.

“Got it,” said the device. It ground its entrails and coughed up the law, inscribed on bronze, and set it in a law niche.

“The echo is deafening,” said our Miss Holly, pretending to listen.

“Yes. What is the effect of what we have done?” I asked.

“Oh, the law is in effect,” said young Nautes. “It has been weighed and integrated into the corpus of laws. It is already considered in the instructions that the magistrate coming on duty in a short time (usually a citizen will serve as magistrate for one hour a month) must scan before he takes his seat. Possibly in this session he will assess somebody guilty of a misdemeanor to think about this problem for ten minutes and then to attach an enabling act to your law.”

“But what if some citizens group passes a silly law?” our Miss Holly asked.

“They do it often. One of them has just done so. But it will be repealed quickly enough,” said Miss Dia of the Camiroi. “Any citizen who has his name on three laws deemed silly by general consensus shall lose his citizenship for one year. A citizen who so loses his citizenship twice shall be mutilated, and the third time he shall be killed. This isn't an extreme ruling. By that time he would have participated in nine silly laws. Surely that's enough.”

“But, in the meantime, the silly laws remain in effect?” our Mr. Chosky asked.

“Not likely,” said Sideki. “A law is repealed thus: any citizen may go to Archives and remove any law, leaving the statement that he has abolished the law for his own reasons. He is then required to keep the voided law in his own home for three days. Sometimes the citizen or citizens who first passed the law will go to the house of the abolitionist. Occasionally they will fight to the death with ritual swords, but most often they will parley. They may agree to have the law abolished. They may agree to restore the law. Or they may together work out a new law that takes into account the objections to the old.”

“Then every Camiroi law is subject to random challenge?” Chosky asked.

“Not exactly,” said Miss Dia. “A law which has stood unchallenged and unappealed for nine years becomes privileged. A citizen wishing to abolish such a law by removal must leave in its place not only his declaration of removal but also three fingers of his right hand as earnest of his seriousness in the matter. But a magistrate or a citizen going to reconstitute the law has to contribute only one of his fingers to the parley.”

“This seems to me to favor the establishment,” I said.

“We have none,” said Sideki. “I know that is hard for Earthlings to understand.”

“But is there no senate or legislative body on Camiroi, or even a president?” Miss Holly asked.

“Yes, there's a president,” said Miss Dia, “and he is actually a dictator or tyrant. He is chosen by lot for a term of one week. Any of you could be chosen for the term starting tomorrow, but the odds are against it. We do not have a permanent senate, but often there are hasty senates constituted, and they have full powers.”

“Such bodies having full powers is what we want to study,” I said. “When will the next one be constituted and how will it act?”

“So, constitute yourselves one now and see how you act,” said young Nautes. “You simply say, ‘We constitute ourselves a Hasty Senate of Camiroi with full powers.’ Register yourselves at the nearest symbouleutic post, and study your senate introspectively.”

“Could we fire the president-dictator?” Miss Holly asked.

“Certainly,” said Sideki, “but a new president would immediately be chosen by lot; and your senate would not carry over to the new term, nor could any of you three partake of a new senate until a full presidential term had passed. But I wouldn't, if I were you, form a senate to fire the present president. He is very good with the ritual sword.”

“Then citizens do actually fight with them yet?” Mr. Chosky asked.

“Yes, any private citizen may at any time challenge any other private citizen for any reason, or for none. Sometimes, but not often, they fight to the death, and they may not be interfered with. We call these decisions the Court of Last Resort.”

Reason says that the legal system on Camiroi cannot be as simple as this, and yet it seems to be. Starting with the thesis that every citizen of Camiroi should be able to handle every assignment or job on Camiroi, these people have cut organization to the minimum. These things we consider fluid or liberal about the legal system of Camiroi. Hereafter, whenever I am tempted to think of some law or custom of Earth as liberal, I will pause. I will hear Camiroi laughing.

On the other hand, there are these things which I consider adamant or conservative about the laws of Camiroi:

No assembly on Camiroi for purposes of entertainment may exceed thirty-nine persons. No more than this number may witness any spectacle or drama, or hear a musical presentation, or watch a sporting event. This is to prevent the citizens from becoming mere spectators rather than originators or partakers. Similarly, no writing — other than certain rare official promulgations — may be issued in more than thirty-nine copies in one month. This, it seems to us, is a conservative ruling to prevent popular enthusiasms.

A father of a family who twice in five years appeals to specialists for such things as simple surgery for members of his household, or legal or financial or medical advice, or any such things as he himself should be capable of doing, shall lose his citizenship. It seems to us that this ruling obstructs the Camiroi from the full fruits of progress and research. They say, however, that it compels every citizen to become an expert in everything.

Any citizen who pleads incapacity when chosen by lot to head a military operation or a scientific project or a trade combine shall lose his citizenship and suffer mutilation. But one who assumes such responsibility, and then fails in the accomplishment of the task, shall suffer the loss and the mutilation only for two such failures.

Both cases seem to us to constitute cruel and unusual punishment.

Any citizen chosen by lot to provide a basic invention or display a certain ingenuity when there is corporate need for it, and who fails to provide such invention, shall be placed in such a position that he will lose his life unless he displays even greater ingenuity and invention than was originally called for.

This seems to us to be unspeakably cruel.

There is an absolute death penalty for impiety. But to the question of what constitutes impiety, we received a startling answer:

“If you have to ask what it is, then you are guilty of it. For piety is comprehension of the basic norms. Lack of awareness of the special Camiroi context is the greatest impiety of all. Beware, new citizens! Should a person more upright and less indulgent than myself have heard your question, you might be executed before nightrise.”

The Camiroi, however, are straight-faced kidders. We do not believe that we were in any danger of execution, but we had been told bluntly not to ask questions of a certain sort.

CONCLUSION: Inconclusive. We are not yet able to understand the true legal system of Camiroi, but we have begun to acquire the viewpoint from which it may be studied. We recommend continuing study by a permanent resident team in this field.

 — Paul Piggott, Political Analyst

From the journey book of Charles Chosky, chief of field group:

The basis of Camiroi polity and procedure is that any Camiroi citizen should be capable of filling any job on or pertaining to the planet. If it is ever the case that even one citizen should prove incapable of this, they say, then their system has already failed.

“Of course, it fails many times every day,” one of their men explained to me. “But it does not fail completely. It is like a man in motion. He is falling off-balance at every step, but he saves himself, and so he strides. Our polity is always in motion. Should it come to rest, it would die.”

“Have the Camiroi a religion?” I asked citizen after citizen of them.

“I think so,” one of them said finally. “I believe that we do have that, and nothing else. The difficulty is in the word. Your Earth English word may come from religionem or from relegionem; it may mean a legality, or it may mean a revelation. I believe it is a mixture of the two concepts; with us it is. Of course we have a religion. What else is there to have?”

“Could you draw a parallel between Camiroi and Earth religion?” I asked him.

“No, I couldn't,” he said bluntly. “I'm not being rude. I just don't know how.”

But another intelligent Camiroi gave me some idea on it.

“The closest I could come to explaining the difference,” he said, “is by a legend that is told (as our Camiroi phrase has it) with the tongue so far in the cheek that it comes out the vulgar body aperture.”

“What is the legend?” I asked him.

“The legend is that men (or whatever local creatures) were tested on all the worlds. On some of the worlds men persevered in grace. These have become the transcendent worlds, asserting themselves as stars rather than planets and swallowing their own suns, becoming incandescent in their merged persons living in grace and light. The more developed of them are those closed bodies which we know only by inference, so powerful and contained that they let no light or gravity or other emission escape them. They become of themselves closed and total universes, of their own space and outside of what we call space, perfect in their merged mentality and spirit.

“Then there are the worlds like Earth where men did fall from grace. On these worlds, each person contains an interior abyss and is capable both of great heights and depths. By our legend, the persons of these worlds, after their fall, were condemned to live for thirty thousand generations in the bodies of animals and were then permitted to begin their slow and frustrating ascent back to remembered personhood.

“But the case of Camiroi was otherwise. We do not know whether there are further worlds of our like case. The primordial test-people of Camiroi did not fall. And they did not persevere. They hesitated. They could not make up their minds. They thought the matter over, and then they thought it over some more. Camiroi was therefore doomed to think matters over forever.

“So we are the equivocal people, capable of curious and continuing thought. But we have a hunger both for the depths and the heights which we have missed. To be sure, our Golden Mediocrity, our serene plateau, is higher than the heights of most worlds, higher than those of Earth, I believe. But it has not the exhilaration of height.”

“But you do not believe in legends,” I said.

“A legend is the highest scientific statement when it is the only statement available,” the Camiroi said. “We are the people who live according to reason. It makes a good life, but it lacks salt. You people have a literature of Utopias. You value their ideals highly, and they do have some effect on you. Yet you must feel that they have this quality of the insipid. And according to Earth standards, we are a Utopia. We are a world of the third case.

“We miss a lot. The enjoyment of poverty is generally denied to us. We have a certain hunger for incompetence, which is why some Earth things find a welcome here: bad Earth music, bad Earth painting and sculpture and drama, for instance. The good we can produce ourselves. The bad we are incapable of, and must import. Some of us believe that we need it in our diet.”

“If this is true, your position seems enviable to me,” I said.

“Yours isn't,” he said, “and yet you are the most complete. You have both halves, and you have your numbers. We know, of course, that the Giver has never given a life anywhere until there was real need for it, and that everything born or created has its individual part to play. But we wish the Giver would be more generous to us in this, and it is in this particularly that we envy Earth.

“A difficulty with us is that we do our great deeds at too young an age and on distant worlds. We are all of us more or less retired by the age of twenty-five, and we have all had careers such as you would not believe. We come home then to live maturely on our mature world. It's perfect, of course, but of a perfection too small. We have everything — except the one thing that matters, for which we cannot even find a name.”

I talked to many of the intelligent Camiroi on our short stay there. It was often difficult to tell whether they were talking seriously or whether they were mocking me. We do not as yet understand the Camiroi at all. Further study is recommended.

 — Charles Chosky

Chief of Field Group

From the ephemeris of Holly Holm, anthropologist and schedonanthropologist:

The word Camiroi is plural in form, is used for the people in both the single and plural and for the planet itself.

The civilization of Camiroi is more mechanical and more scientific than that of Earth, but it is more disguised. Their ideal machine shall have no moving parts at all, shall be noiseless and shall not look like a machine. For this reason, there is something pastoral about even the most thickly populated districts of Camiroi City.

The Camiroi are fortunate in the natural furnishings of their planet. The scenery of Camiroi conforms to the dictate that all repetition is tedious, for there is only one of each thing on that world. There is one major continent and one minor continent of quite different character; one fine cluster of islands of which the individual isles are of very different style; one great continental river with its seven branches flowing out of seven sorts of land; one complex of volcanoes; one great range of mountains; one titanic waterfall with her three so different daughters nearby; one inland sea, one gulf, one beach which is a three hundred and fifty mile crescent passing through seven phases named for the colors of iris; one great rain forest, one palm grove, one leaf-fall grove, one of evergreens and one of eodendrons; one grain bowl, one fruit bowl, one pampas; one parkland; one desert, one great oasis; and Camiroi City is the one great city. And all these places are unexcelled of their kind.

There are no ordinary places on Camiroi!

Travel being rapid, a comparatively poor young couple may go from anywhere on the planet to Green Beach, for instance, to take their evening meal, in less time than the consumption of the meal will take them, and for less money than that reasonable meal will cost. This easy and frequent travel makes the whole world one community.

The Camiroi believe in the necessity of the frontier. They control many primitive worlds, and I gather hints that they are sometimes cruel in their management. The tyrants and proconsuls of these worlds are young, usually still in their teens. The young people are to have their careers and make their mistakes while in the foreign service. When they return to Camiroi they are supposed to be settled and of tested intelligence.

The earning scale of the Camiroi is curious. A job of mechanical drudgery pays higher than one of intellectual interest and involvement. This often means that the least intelligent and least able of the Camiroi will have more wealth than those of more ability. “This is fair,” the Camiroi tell us. “Those not able to receive the higher recompense are certainly entitled to the lower.” They regard the Earth system as grossly inequal, that a man should have both a superior job and superior pay, and that another man should have the inferior of both.

Though official offices and jobs are usually filled by lot, yet persons can apply for them for their own reasons. In special conditions there might even be competition for an assignment, such as directorship of trade posts where persons (for private reasons) might wish to acquire great fortunes rapidly. We witnessed confrontations between candidates in several of these campaigns, and they were curious.

“My opponent is a three and seven,” said one candidate, and then he sat down.

“My opponent is a five and nine,” said the other candidate. The small crowd clapped, and that was the confrontation or debate.

We attended another such rally.

“My opponent is an eight and ten,” one candidate said briskly.

“My opponent is a two and six,” said the other, and they went off together.

We did not understand this, and we attended a third confrontation. There seemed to be a little wave of excitement about to break here.

“My opponent is an old number four,” said one candidate with a voice charged with emotion, and there was a gasp from the small crowd.

“I will not answer the charge,” said the other candidate shaking with anger. “The blow is too foul, and we had been friends.”

We found the key then. The Camiroi are experts at defamation, but they have developed a shorthand system to save time. They have their decalogue of slander, and the numbers refer to this. In its accepted version it runs as follows:

My opponent:

is personally moronic.

is sexually incompetent.

flubs third points in Chuki game.

eats Mu seeds before the time of the summer solstice.

is ideologically silly.

is physically pathetic.

is financially stupid.

is ethically weird.

is intellectually contemptible.

is morally dishonest.

Try it yourself, on your friends or your enemies! Works wonderfully. We recommend the listing and use to Earth politicians, except for numbers three and four which seem to have no meaning in Earth context.

The Camiroi have a corpus of proverbs. We came on them in Archives, along with an attached machine with a hundred levers on it. We depressed the lever marked Earth English, and had a sampling of these proverbs put into Earth context.

A man will not become rich by raising goats, the machine issued. Yes, that could almost pass for an Earth proverb. It almost seems to mean something.

Even buzzards sometimes gag. That has an Earth sound also.

It's that or pluck chickens.

“I don't believe I understand that one,” I said.

“You think it's easy to put these in Earth context, you try it sometime,” the translation machine issued. “The proverb applies to distasteful but necessary tasks.”

“Ah, well, let's try some more,” said Paul Piggott. “That one.”

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, the machine issued abruptly.

“But that is an Earth proverb word for word,” I said.

“You wait until I finish it, lady,” the translation machine growled. “To this proverb in its classical form is always appended a cartoon showing a bird fluttering away and a man angrily wiping his hand with some disposable material while he says, ‘A bird in the hand is not worth two in the bush.’ ”

“Are we being had by a machine?” our leader Charles Chosky asked softly.

“Give us that proverb there,” I pointed one out to the machine.

There'll be many a dry eye here when you leave, the machine issued.

We left.

“I may be in serious trouble,” I said to a Camiroi lady of my acquaintance. “Well, aren't you going to ask me what it is?”

“No, I don't particularly care,” she said. “But tell me if you feel an absolute compulsion to it.”

“I never heard of such a thing,” I said. “I have been chosen by lot to head a military expedition for the relief of a trapped force on a world I never heard of. I am supposed to raise and supply this force (out of my private funds, it says here) and have it in flight within eight oodles. That's only two hours. What will I do?”

“Do it, of course, Miss Holly,” the lady said. “You are a citizen of Camiroi now, and you should be proud to take charge of such an operation.”

“But I don't know how! What will happen if I just tell them that I don't know how?”

“Oh, you'll lose your citizenship and suffer mutilation. That's the law, you know.”

“How will they mutilate me?”

“Probably cut off your nose. I wouldn't worry about it. It doesn't do much for you anyhow.”

“But we have to go back to Earth! We are going to go tomorrow, but now we want to go today. I do anyhow.”

“Earth kid, if I were you, I'd get out to Sky-Port awful fast.”

By a coincidence (I hope it was no more than that) our political analyst, Paul Piggott, had been chosen by lot to make a survey (personally, minutely and interiorly, the directive said) of the sewer system of Camiroi City. And our leader, Charles Chosky, had been selected by lot to put down a rebellion of Groll's Trolls on one of the worlds, and to leave his right hand and his right eye as surety for the accomplishment of the mission.

We were rather nervous as we waited for Earth Flight at Sky-Port, particularly so when a group of Camiroi acquaintances approached us. But they did not stop us. They said goodbye to us without too much enthusiasm.

“Our visit has been all too short,” I said hopefully.

“Oh, I wouldn't say that,” one of them rejoined. “There is a Camiroi proverb — ”

“We've heard it,” said our leader, Charles Chosky. “We also are dry-eyed about leaving.”

FINAL RECOMMENDATION: That another and broader field group be sent to study the Camiroi in greater detail. That a special study might fruitfully be made of the humor of the Camiroi. That no members of the first field group should serve on the second field group.

 — Holly Holm

Cliffs That Laughed

“Between ten and ten-thirty of the morning of October 1, 1945, on an island that is sometimes called Pulau Petir and sometimes Willy Jones Island (neither of them its map name), three American soldiers disappeared and have not been seen since.

“I'm going back there, I tell you! It was worth it. The limbs that laughed! Let them kill me! I'll get there! Oh, here, here, I've got to get hold of myself.

“The three soldiers were Sergeant Charles Santee of Orange, Texas; Corporal Robert Casper of Gobey, Tennessee; and PFC Timothy Lorrigan of Boston which is in one of the eastern states. I was one of those three soldiers.

“I'm going back there if it takes me another twenty years!”

No, no, no! That's the wrong story. It happened on Willy Jones Island also, but it's a different account entirely. That's the one the fellow told me in a bar years later, just the other night, after the usual “Didn't I used to know you in the Islands?”

“One often makes these little mistakes and false starts,” Galli said. “It is a trick that is used in the trade. One exasperates people and pretends to be embarrassed. And then one hooks them.”

Galli was an hereditary storyteller of the Indies. “There is only one story in the world,” he said, “and it pulls two ways. There is the reason part that says ‘Hell, it can't be’ and there is the wonder part that says ‘Hell, maybe it is.’ ” He was the storyteller, and he offered to teach me the art.

For we ourselves had a hook into Galli. We had something he wanted.

“We used the same stories for a thousand years,” he said. “Now, however, we have a new source, the American Comic Books. My grandfather began to use these in another place and time, and I use them now. I steal them from your orderly tents, and I have a box full of them. I have Space Comics and Commander Midnight; I have Galactic Gob and Mighty Mouse and the Green Hornet and the Masked Jetter. My grandfather also had copies of some of these, but drawn by older hands. But I do not have Wonder Woman, not a single copy. I would trade three-for-one for copies of her. I would pay a premium. I can link her in with an island legend to create a whole new cycle of stories, and I need new stuff all the time. Have you a Wonder Woman?”

When Galli said this, I knew that I had him. I didn't have a Wonder Woman, but I knew where I could steal one. I believe, though I am no longer sure, that it was Wonder Woman Meets the Space Magicians.

I stole it for him. And in gratitude Galli not only taught me the storyteller's art, but he also told me the following story:

“Imagine about flute notes ascending,” said Galli. “I haven't my flute with me, but a story should begin so to set the mood. Imagine about ships coming out of the Arabian Ocean, and finally to Jilolo Island, and still more finally to the very island on which we now stand. Imagine about waves and trees that were the great-great-grandfathers of the waves and trees we now have.”

It was about the year 1620, Galli is telling it, in the late afternoon of the high piracy. These Moluccas had already been the rich Spice Islands for three hundred years. Moreover, they were on the road of the Manila galleons coming from Mexico and the Isthmus. Arabian, Hindu, and Chinese piracy had decayed shamefully. The English were crude at the business. In trade the Dutch had become dominant in the Islands and the Portuguese had faded. There was no limit to the opportunities for a courageous and dedicated raider in the Indies.

They came. And not the least of these new raiding men was Willy Jones.

It was said that Willy Jones was a Welshman. You can believe it or not as you like. The same thing has been said about the Devil. Willy was twenty-five years old when he finally possessed his own ship with a mixed crew. The ship was built like a humpbacked bird, with a lateen sail and suddenly-appearing rows of winglike oars. On its prow was a swooping bird that had been carved in Muskat. It was named the Flying Serpent, or the Feathered Snake, depending on what language you use.

“Pause a moment,” said Galli. “Set the mood. Imagine about dead men variously. We come to the bloody stuff at once.”

One early morning, the Feathered Snake overtook a tall Dutchman. The ships were grappled together, and the men from the Snake boarded the Dutch ship. The men on the Dutchman were armed, but they had never seen such suddenness and savagery as shown by the dark men from the Snake. There was slippery blood on the decks, and the croaking of men being killed.

“I forgot to tell you that this was in the passage between the Molucca Sea and the Banda,” Galli said.

The Snake took a rich small cargo from the Dutch ship, a few able-bodied Malay seamen, some gold specie, some papers of record, and a dark Dutch girl named Margaret. These latter things Willy Jones preempted for himself. Then the Snake devoured that tall Dutchman and left only a few of its burning bones floating in the ocean.

“I forgot to tell you that the tall Dutch ship was named the Luchtkasteel,” Galli said.

Willy Jones watched the Luchtkasteel disappearing under the water. He examined the papers of record, and the dark Dutch girl Margaret. He made a sudden decision: He would cash his winnings and lay up for a season.

He had learned about an island in the papers of record. It was a rich island, belonging to the richest of the Dutch spice men who had gone to the bottom with the Luchtkasteel. The fighting crew would help Willy Jones secure the island for himself; and in exchange, he would give them his ship and the whole raiding territory and the routes he had worked out.

Willy Jones captured the island and ruled it. From the ship he kept only the gold, the dark Dutch girl Margaret, and three golems which had once been ransom from a Jew in Oman.

“I forgot to tell you that Margaret was the daughter of the Dutch spice man who had owned the island and the tall ship and who was killed by Willy,” Galli said, “and the island really belonged to Margaret now as the daughter of her father.”

For one year Willy Jones ruled the small settlement, drove the three golems and the men who already lived there, had the spices gathered and baled and stored (they were worth their weight in silver), and built the Big House. And for one year he courted the dark Dutch girl Margaret, having been unable to board her as he had all other girls.

She refused him because he had killed her father, because he had destroyed the Luchtkasteel which was Family and Nation to her, and because he had stolen her island.

This Margaret, though she was pretty and trim as a kucing, had during the affair of the Feathered Snake and the Luchtkasteel twirled three seamen in the air like pinwheels at one time and thrown them all into the ocean. She had eyes that twinkled like the compounded eyes of the devil-fly; they could glint laughter and fury at the same time.

“Those girls were like volcanoes,” the man said. “Slim, strong mountains, and we climbed them like mountains. Man, the uplift on them! The shoulders were cliffs that laughed. The swaying — ”

No, no! Belay that last paragraph! That's from the ramble of the fellow in the bar, and it keeps intruding.

“I forgot to tell you that she reminds me of Wonder Woman,” Galli said.

Willy Jones believed that Margaret was worth winning unbroken, as he was not at all sure that he could break her. He courted her as well as he could, and he used to advantage the background of the golden-green spicery on which they lived.

“Imagine about the Permata bird that nests on the moon,” Galli said, “and which is the most passionate as well as the noblest-singing of the birds. Imagine about flute notes soaring.”

Willy Jones made this tune to Margaret:

The Nutmeg Moon is the third moon of the year.

The Tides come in like loose Silk all its Nights.

The Ground is animated by the bare Feet of Margaret

Who is like the Pelepah of the Ko-eng Flower.

Willy made this tune in the Malaya language in which all the words end in ang.

“Imagine about water leaping down rocky hills,” Galli said. “Imagine about red birds romping in green groves.”

Willy Jones made another tune to Margaret:

A Woman with Shoulders so strong that a Man might ride upon them

The while she is still the little Girl watching for the black Ship

Of the Hero who is the same age as the Sky,

But she does not realize that I am already here.

Willy made this tune in the Dutch language in which all the words end in lijk.

“Imagine about another flute joining the first one, and their notes scamper like birds,” Galli said.

Willy Jones made a last tune to Margaret:

Damnation! That is enough of Moonlight and Tomorrows!

Now there are mats to plait, and kain to sew.

Even the smallest crab knows to build herself a house in the sand.

Margaret should be raking the oven coals and baking a roti.

I wonder why she is so slow in seeing this.

Willy made this tune in the Welsh language in which all the words end in gwbl.

When the one year was finished, they were mated. There was still the chilliness there as though she would never forgive him for killing her father and stealing her island; but they began to be in accord.

“Here pause five minutes to indicate an idyllic interlude,” Galli said. “We sing the song Bagang Kali Berjumpa if you know the tune. We flute, if I have my flute.”

The idyllic interlude passed.

Then Willy's old ship, the Feathered Snake, came back to the Island. She was in a pitiful state of misuse. She reeked of old and new blood, and there were none left on her but nine sick men. These nine men begged Willy Jones to become their captain again to set everything right.

Willy washed the nine living skeletons and fed them up for three days. They were fat and able by then. And the three golems had refitted the ship.

‘All she needs is a strong hand at the helm again,’ said Willy Jones. ‘I will sail her again for a week and a day. I will impress a new crew, and once more make her the terror of the Spice Islands. Then I will return to my island, knowing that I have done a good deed in restoring the Snake to the bloody work for which she was born.’

‘If you go, Willy Jones, you will be gone for many years,’ said the dark Dutch Margaret.

‘Only one at the most,’ said Willy.

‘And I will be in my grave when you return.’

‘There is no grave could hold you, Margaret.’

‘Aye, it may not hold me. I'll out of it and confront you when you come back. But it gives one a weirdness to be in the grave for only a few years. I will not own you for my husband when you do come back. You will not even know whether I am the same woman that you left, and you will never know. I am a volcano, but I banked my hatred and accepted you. But if you leave me now, I will erupt against you forever.’

But Willy Jones went away in the Flying Serpent and left her there. He took two of the golems with him, and he left one of them to serve Margaret.

What with one thing and another, he was gone for twenty years.

“We were off that morning to satisfy our curiosity about the Big House,” the fellow said, “since we would soon be leaving the island forever. You know about the Big House. You were on Willy Jones Island too. The Jilolos call it the House of Skulls, and the Malaya and Indonesia people will not speak about it at all.

“We approached the Big House that was not more than a mile beyond our perimeter. It was a large decayed building, but we had the sudden feeling that it was still inhabited. And it wasn't supposed to be. Then we saw the two of them, the mother and the daughter. We shook like we were unhinged, and we ran to them.

“They were so alike that we couldn't tell them apart. Their eyes twinkled like the compounded eyes of a creature that eats her mate. Noonday lightning! How it struck! Arms that swept you off your feet and set your bones to singing! We knew that they were not twins, or even sisters. We knew that they were mother and daughter.

“I have never encountered anything like them in my life. Whatever happened to the other two soldiers, I know it was worth it to them. Whatever happened to them? I don't care if they kill me! They were perfect, those two women, even though we weren't with them for five minutes.

“Then it was the Badger.”

No, no, no! That's the wrong story again. That's not the story Galli told me. That's part of the story the fellow told me in the bar. His confused account keeps interposing itself, possibly because I knew him slightly when we were both soldiers on Willy Jones Island. But he had turned queer, that fellow. “It is the earthquake belt around the world that is the same as the legend belt,” he said, “and the Middleworld underlies it all. That's why I was able to walk it.” It was as though he had been keel-hauled around the world. I hadn't known him well. I didn't know which of the three soldiers he was. I had heard that they were all dead.

“Imagine about conspiracy stuff now,” said Galli. “Imagine about a whispering in a pinang grove before the sun is up.”

‘How can I spook that man?’ Margaret asked her golem shortly after she had been abandoned by Willy Jones. ‘But I am afraid that a mechanical man would not be able to tell me how.’

‘I will tell you a secret,’ said the golem. ‘We are not mechanical men. Certain wise and secret men believe that they made us, but they are wrong. They have made houses for us to live in, no more. There are many of us unhoused spirits, and we take shelter in such bodies as we find. That being so, I know something of the houseless spirits in the depth of every man. I will select one of them, and we will spook Willy Jones with that one. Willy is a Welshman who has become by adoption a Dutchman and a Malayan and a Jilolo man. There is one old spook running through them all. I will call it up when it is time.’

“I forgot to tell you that the name of Margaret's golem was Meshuarat,” Galli said.

After twenty years of high piracy, Willy Jones returned to his Island. And there was the dark Dutch Margaret standing as young and as smouldering as when he had left. He leapt to embrace her, and found himself stretched flat on the sand by a thunderous blow.

He was not surprised, and was not (as he had at first believed) decapitated. Almost he was not displeased. Margaret had often been violent in her love-making.

‘But I will have you,’ Willy swore as he tasted his own blood delightfully in his mouth and pulled himself up onto hands and knees. ‘I have ridden the Margaret-tiger before.’

‘You will never ride my loins, you lecherous old goat,’ she rang at him like a bell. ‘I am not your wife. I am the daughter that you left here in the womb. My mother is in the grave on the hill.’

Willy Jones sorrowed terribly, and he went to the grave.

But Margaret came up behind him and drove in the cruel lance. ‘I told you that when you came back you would not know whether I was the same woman you had left,’ she chortled, ‘and you will never know!’

‘Margaret, you are my wife!’ Willy Jones gasped.

‘Am I of an age to be your wife?’ she jibed. ‘Regard me! Of what age do I seem to be?’

‘Of the same age as when I left,’ said Willy. ‘But perhaps you have eaten of the besok nut and so do not change your appearance.’

“I forgot to tell you about the besok nut,” said Galli. “If one eats the nut of the besok tree, the tomorrow tree, the time tree, that one will not age. But this is always accompanied by a chilling unhappiness.”

‘Perhaps I did eat it,’ said Margaret. ‘But that is my grave there, and I have lain in it many years, as has she. You are prohibited from touching either of us.’

‘Are you the mother or the daughter, Witch?’

‘You will never know. You will see us both, for we take turns, and you will not be able to tell us apart. See, the grave is always disturbed, and the entrance is easy.’

‘I'll have the truth from the golem who served you while I was gone,’ Willy swore.

“A golem is an artificial man,” said Galli. “They were made by the Jews and Arabs in earlier ages, but now they say that they have forgotten how to make them. I wonder that you do not make them yourselves, for you have advanced techniques. You tell them and you picture them in your own heroic literature” (he patted the comic books under his arm), “but you do not have them in actuality.”

The golem told Willy Jones that the affair was thus:

A daughter had indeed been born to Margaret. She had slain the child, and had then put it into the middle state. Thereafter, the child stayed sometimes in the grave, and sometimes she walked about the island. And she grew as any other child would. And Margaret herself had eaten the besok nut so that she would not age.

When mother and daughter had come to the same age and appearance (and it had only been the very day before that, the day before Willy Jones had returned), then the daughter had also eaten the besok nut. Now the mother and daughter would be of the same appearance forever, and not even a golem could tell them apart.

Willy Jones came furiously onto the woman again.

‘I was sure before, and now I am even more sure that you are Margaret,’ he said, ‘and now I will have you in my fury.’

‘We both be Margaret,’ she said. ‘But I am not the same one you apprehended earlier. We changed places while you talked to the golem. And we are both in the middle state, and we have both been dead in the grave, and you dare not touch either of us ever. A Welshman turned Dutchman turned Malayan turned Jilolo has this spook in him four times over. The Devil himself will not touch his own daughters.’

The last part was a lie, but Willy Jones did not know it.

‘We be in confrontation forever then,’ said Willy Jones. ‘I will make my Big House a house of hate and a house of skulls. You cannot escape from its environs, neither can any visitor. I'll kill them all and pile their skulls up high for a monument to you.’

Then Willy Jones ate a piece of bitter bark from the pokok ru.

“I forgot to tell you that when a person eats bark from the pokok ru in anger, his anger will sustain itself forever,” Galli said.

‘If it's visitors you want for the killing, I and my mother-daughter will provide them in numbers,’ said Margaret. ‘Men will be attracted here forever with no heed for danger. I will eat a telor tuntong of the special sort, and all men will be attracted here even to their death.’

“I forgot to tell you that if a female eats the telor tuntong of the special sort, all males will be attracted irresistibly,” Galli said. “Ah, you smile as though you doubted that the besok nut or the bark of the pokok ru or the telor tuntong of the special sort could have such effects. But yourselves come now to wonder drugs like little boys. In these islands they are all around you and you too blind to see. It is no ignorant man who tells you this. I have read the booklets from your orderly tents: Physics without Mathematics, Cosmology without Chaos, Psychology without Brains. It is myself, the master of all sciences and disciplines, who tells you that these things do work. Besides hard science, there is soft science, the science of shadow areas and story areas, and you do wrong to deny it the name.

“I believe that you yourself can see what had to follow, from the dispositions of the Margarets and Willy Jones,” Galli said. “For hundreds of years, men from everywhere came to the Margarets who could not be resisted. And Willy Jones killed them all and piled up their skulls. It became, in a very savage form, what you call the Badger Game.”

Galli was a good-natured and unhandsome brown man. He worked around the army base as translator, knowing (besides his native Jilolo), the Malayan, Dutch, Japanese and English languages, and (as every storyteller must) the Arabian. His English was whatever he wanted it to be, and he burlesqued the speech of the American soldiers to the Australians, and the Australians to the Americans.

“Man, it was a Badger!” the man said. “It was a grizzle-haired, glare-eyed, flat-headed, underslung, pigeon-toed, hook-clawed, clam-jawed Badger from Badger Game Corner! They moved in on us, but I'd take my chances and go back and do it again. We hadn't frolicked with the girls for five minutes when the Things moved in on us. I say Things; I don't know whether they were men or not. If they were, they were the coldest three men I ever saw. But they were directed by a man who made up for it. He was livid, hopping with hatred. They moved in on us and began to kill us.”

No, No, that isn't part of Galli's story. That's some more of the ramble that the fellow told me in the bar the other evening.

It has been three hundred years, and the confrontation continues. There are skulls of Malayan men and Jilolo men piled up there; and of Dutchmen and Englishmen and of Portuguese men; of Chinamen and Philippinos and Goanese; of Japanese, and of the men from the United States and Australia.

“Only this morning there were added the skulls of two United States men, and there should have been three of them,” Galli said. “They came, as have all others, because the Margarets ate the telor tuntong of the special sort. It is a fact that with a species (whether insect or shelled thing or other) where the male gives his life in the mating, the female has always eaten of this telor tuntong. You'd never talk the males into such a thing with words alone.”

“How is it that there were only two United States skulls this morning, and there should have been three?” I asked him.

“One of them escaped,” Galli explained, “and that was unusual. He fell through a hole to the middle land, that third one of them. But the way back from the middle land to one's own country is long, and it must be walked. It takes at least twenty years, wherever one's own country is; and the joker thing about it is that the man is always wanting to go the other way.

“That is the end of the story, but let it not end abruptly,” Galli said. “Sing the song Chari Yang Besar if you remember the tune. Imagine about flute notes lingering in the air.”

“I was lost for more than twenty years, and that's a fact,” the man said. He gripped the bar with the most knotted hands I ever saw, and laughed with a merriment so deep that it seemed to be his bones laughing. “Did you know that there's another world just under this world, or just around the corner from it? I walked all day every day. I was in a torture, for I suspected that I was going the wrong way, and I could go no other. And I sometimes suspected that the middle land through which I traveled was in my head, a derangement from the terrible blow that one of the Things gave me as he came in to kill me. And yet there are correlates that convince me it was a real place.

“I wasn't trying to get home. I was trying to get back to those girls even if it killed me. There weren't any colors in that world, all gray tones, but otherwise it wasn't much different from this one. There were even bars there a little like the Red Rooster.”

(I forgot to tell you that it was in the Red Rooster bar that the soldier from the islands told me the parts of his story.)

“I've got to get back there. I think I know the way now, and how to get on the road. I have to travel it through the middle land, you know. They'll kill me, of course, and I won't even get to jazz those girls for five minutes; but I've got to get back there. Going to take me another twenty years, though. That sure is a weary walk.”

I never knew him well, and I don't remember which of the names was his. But a man from Orange, Texas, or from Gobey, Tennessee, or from Boston, in one of the eastern states, is on a twenty-year walk through the middle land to find the dark Dutch Margarets, and death.

I looked up a couple of things yesterday. There was Revel's recent work on Moluccan Narcotics. He tells of the Besok Nut which does seem to inhibit aging but which induces internal distraction and hypersexuality. There is the Pokok Ru whose bitter bark impels even the most gentle to violent anger. There is one sort of Telor Tuntong which sets up an inexplicable aura about a woman eater and draws all males overpoweringly to her. There is much research still to be done on these narcotics, Revel writes.

I dipped into Mandrago's Earthquake and Legend and the Middle World. He states that the earthquake belt around the world is also the legend belt, and that one of the underlying legends is of the underlying land, the middle world below this world where one can wander lost forever.

And I went down to the Red Rooster again the next evening, which was last evening, to ask about the man and to see if he could give me a more cogent account. For I had re-remembered Galli's old story in the meanwhile.

“No, he was just passing through town,” the barman said. “Had a long trip ahead of him. He was sort of a nutty fellow. I've often said the same thing about you.”

That is the end of the other story, but let it not end suddenly. Pause for a moment to savor it. Sing the song Itu Masa Dahulu if you remember the tune.

Imagine about flute notes falling. I don't have a flute, but a story should end so.

The Ultimate Creature

I

The old Galaxy maps (imitating early Earth maps, partly in humor and partly through intuition) pictured strong creatures in the far arms of the system — Serpents bigger than Spaceships, Ganymede-type Tigers, fish-tailed Maids, grand Dolphins, and Island-sized Androids. We think particularly of the wry masterpieces of Grobin. And at the end of the Far or Seventh arm of the Galaxy is shown the Ultimate Creature.

The Ultimate Creature had the form of a Woman, and it bore three signs in Chaldee: The Sign of Treasure; the Sign of the Fish Mashur (the queerest fish of them all); and the Sign of Restitution or of Floating Justice.

Floating Justice is the ethical equivalent of the Isostasis of the Geologists. It states in principle that every unbalance will be brought into new balance, sometimes gently, sometimes as by planet-quake; that the most submerged may be elevated, by a great sundering of strata, to the highest point, if such is required for compensation. And there is a final tenet of this Floating Justice, that some day, somewhere, the meanest man of all the worlds will possess the ultimate treasure of the worlds. Without this promise, the worlds would be out of balance forever.

The meanest man of all the worlds was Peter Feeney — a low-down sniveler, a weak man. In one thing only he was exceptional — he had the finest eye for beauty in a woman of any man anywhere: this, though of all men he was the least successful with women. His purity of appraisal was not dulled by close contact or possession. His judgments of beauty were sound and uncompromised, though sometimes bitter.

And really, how many beautiful women are there in the Universe?

Six.

Only six? Are you sure? All that noise has been about only six of them?

Pete Feeney was sure. His rapid eyes — the only rapid things about him — had scanned millions of women in his random travels. And only six of the women could be called beautiful.

There was the lady on Mellionella, seen only once in a crowd, followed and lost, and never seen again in a year's search.

There was the girl in a small town on East Continent of Hokey Planet. And this girl there was something that caused agony to Peter: he had heard her speak; she spoke like a girl in a small town on East Continent of Hokey Planet. He prayed that she might be struck dumb; knowing that it was an evil prayer, knowing that she was one of the really beautiful ones, whatever the sound of her.

There was the girl of shallow virtue on Leucite. She was perfect. What else can you say after that?

There was the mother of six on Camiroi — no longer young, of no particular repose or station or ease, hurried, impatient, and quite likely the most beautiful woman who ever lived.

On Trader Planet there was a young Jewess of bewildering kindness and frankness and of inextricably entangled life.

In San Juan, on old Earth, there was a fine creature who combined the three main ethnic strains of old mankind. Peter made a second journey there to see her; after first vision and departure he had not been able to believe what he had seen.

Six in all the worlds? Somehow there should have been more beautiful women than that.

Then Peter saw Teresa.

And she made the seventh?

No. She made the first. The six faded. There was only one. The most beautiful woman ever, in the farthest arm of the Galaxy — the Ultimate Creature.

II

This was on Groll's Planet. To get there, said the agent in Electrum, you go to the end of the Galaxy, and turn left. It was a shabby little world in the boondocks that are beyond the boondocks, and only shabby people came there.

Peter Feeney was a salesman of a Universe-wide product. He wasn't a good salesman. He was shuffled off to poorer and poorer territories. Now he had fallen to the poorest territory of all.

And on that day on Groll's Planet, he heard a sound as though a swish of silk had passed over him, a thread, a mesh. It was the invisible net.

“Oh how strange are the Fish of Far Ocean!” an ancient poet exclaimed.

Peter had seen Teresa, and it was all over with him.

Peter was eating that day by peculiar arrangement. It was the smallest of the towns of Groll's Planet and there was no public eating place there. But a Grollian man raked clean sand and set a mat for Peter to sit on, and served him a meal there on a crate or box. The man also gave him coffee — good coffee, but not like the coffee you know.

It was very like a sidewalk-café. It was in the way where people came and went, though not properly a sidewalk. Teresa came and sat down opposite Peter on the raked sand.

“Hari bagus,” Peter said, which is all the words that a man needs to get along in the Grollian language.

“Bagus,” said Teresa. And that is all that they said to each other that day.

Peter finished his meal and attempted to light a cigar. The cigars of that world are not factory made. They are rolled by hand of an oblong leaf for the filler and a triangular leaf for the wrapper. Often they will keep their form for an hour or more, but Peter had made his cigar badly and it was not stable.

Now it exploded into an unmanageable disarray of leaves and pieces, and Peter was unable to cope with it. Teresa took the pieces and rolled and folded them into a green cylinder that was sheer art. She licked it with the most beautiful tongue in the world and gave the reconstituted cigar to Peter.

Then it was luxurious to sit there in the green shade and smoke opposite the most beautiful woman ever. When he had finished, Peter rose awkwardly and left. But he was pleased.

He watched from a distance. Teresa with quick competence ate up all that he had left. “She was very hungry,” Peter said, and admired her quickness about things. She rose with flowing grace, retrieved the smoldering remnants of Peter's cigar, and went toward the beach, trailing smoke from the green-leaf stogie and moving like a queen.

The next day Peter again sat on the mat on the raked sand and ate the food that the Grollian man sold him. Once more he felt the swish of the invisible net over him, and again Teresa sat opposite him on the sand.

“A senhora tem grande beleza,” said Peter, which is all the words that a man needs to get along in the Galactic Brazilian language.

“Noa em nossos dias,” said Teresa, “porém outrora.” And that is all that they said to each other that day.

But he had told her that she was beautiful. And she had answered: No, she was not so now, but in a former time she had been.

When he had finished the meal and pulled the cigar from his pocket he was pleased when it exploded into its constituent parts. Teresa rescued it, reassembled it, and licked it. Her tongue had a tripart curve in it, more extensible, more flexible, more beautiful than other tongues. Then Peter rose and left as he had the day before. And again Teresa cleaned up the remnants — ravenously and beautifully. He watched her till she finally went toward the beach haloed in blue smoke from the stub of the cigar.

Peter wrote up an order that day. It was not a good order, not sufficient to pay expenses, but something. Groll's Planet had acquired a glow for him, just as if it was a good order he had written up.

On the third day, Peter again sat on the mat that was very like a sidewalk-café, and Teresa was opposite him. Peter told the Grollian man that he should also bring food for the woman. He brought it, but angrily.

“You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen,” said Peter, which is all the words that a man needs to get along in the English language.

“I have told you that I am not now beautiful, but that once I was,” Teresa told him. “Through the grace of God, I may again regain my lost beauty.”

“How is it that you know English?”

“I was the school-teach.”

“And now?”

“Now it goes bad for our world. There is no longer schools. I am nothing.”

“What are you, girl? Old human? Groll's Troll? That isn't possible. What?”

“Who can say? A book-man has said that the biology of our planet goes from the odd to the incredible. Was that not nice thing to say about us? My father was old human, a traveling man, a bum.”

“And your mother?”

“A queer fish, mama. Of this world, though.”

“And you were once even more beautiful than you are now, Teresa? How could you have looked?”

“How I looked then? As in English — Wow! — a colloquialism.”

“To me you are perfect.”

“No. I am a poor wasted bird now. But once I was beautiful.”

“There must be some livelihood for you. What did your father do?”

“Outside of bum, he was fisherman.”

“Then why do you not fish?”

“In my own way, I fish.”

Peter heard again the swish of the invisible net, but he was very willing to be taken by it. After this, things went famously between them.

But two days later there came a shame to Peter. He and Teresa were sitting and eating together on the mat, and the Grollian man came out.

“Are you near finished?” he asked Peter.

“Yes, I am near finished. Why do you ask?”

“Are you finished with the fork yet?”

“No, not quite finished with it.”

“I must have the fork,” the Grollian man said. “There is another human man here, of the better sort. I must have the fork for him to eat with.”

“Have you but one?”

“Am I a millionaire that I should have a multiplicity of forks in my house? He is a man with an important look, and I will not have him wait.”

“This is humiliating,” said Peter.

“I don't know what that is. I want my fork.”

Peter gave the fork back to the Grollian man, and that man took it in and set it before the human man of the better sort as a sign of the modernity of his house.

“Were I not the meanest and weakest of men, he would not have abused me so,” Peter said.

“Do you not feel it at all,” Teresa said. “Somebody has to be the meanest and the weakest. The worlds are full of humiliating things. This brings us close together.”

This would have to be the final day for Peter Feeney on Groll's Planet. He had already garnered all the insufficient orders possible for his product. He walked with Teresa and said the difficult things.

“When you have caught one, Teresa, you must do something with it. Even turn it loose if you do not mean to keep it.”

“Do you want I should turn you loose, Peter?”

“No. I want you to go with me on the ship when it goes tonight.”

“There is only one way I will go.”

“I have never thought of any other way.”

“You will never have cause to be ashamed of me, Peter. I can dress, where I have the means for it. I can play the lady, I understand how it is done. I have even learned to walk in shoes. Were we in some more lucky place, it might be that I would regain my beauty. It is the grinding hard times that took it from me. I would change your luck. I have the languages, and the sense of things, and I am much more intelligent than you are. With me, you could attain a degree of success in even your miserable trade. It can be a good life we make.”

There is a sound when the invisible net is cast over one. There is another sound when it is pulled in — the faint clicking of the floats, the tugging whisper of the weights, the squeaking of the lines when pulled taut. Teresa was a fisherman's daughter, and she knew how to do it. The Peter-fish was not a large nor a fat one, but she knew that he was the best she could take in these waters.

They were married. They left in the ship for a happier place, a better planet in a more amenable location where Teresa might regain her lost beauty.

Floating Justice was achieved. All inequities were compensated. The meanest and weakest man in the universe now possessed the Ultimate Treasure of the universe.

Naturally they were happy. And naturally their happiness endured.

“There wasn't a catch to it?” you ask out of a crooked face. “There is always a catch to it. It always goes sour at the end.”

No. There was not a catch to it. It was perfect, and forever. It is only in perverted fables that things go wrong at the end.

They grew in understanding of each other, received the glad news of coming progeny, waxed (by former standards) in wealth, and were no longer mean and inconsequential. Only one man can be married to the most beautiful woman in the universe, and it passes all understanding that that one man should be Peter Feeney.

This was perfection. It wasn't just that Teresa had regained her “former beauty” and now weighed well over two hundred pounds. Peter liked that part of it.

But is it possible for perfection to become too perfect?

III

For this was perfection. They lived on a kindred but larger and better world, one of richer resources and even more varied biology. They had a love so many-sided and deep that there is no accounting for it, and children so rare and different!

Floating Justice had been achieved. The least man in all the worlds did possess the Ultimate Creature. The balance was consummated. But Floating Justice had a grin on his face; there is something a little fishy about anything, even justice, that floats. You understand that there wasn't really a catch to this, nor any deficiency. It was rather a richness almost beyond handling. It was still better for Peter Feeney than for anyone else anywhere. That must be understood.

But, for all that, there was a small adjustment after the great compensation; a proportion must be re-established in all things, even happiness. It was the joke that the old Interior Ocean always cast up, and it must be taken in the salty humor that is intended.

Children so rare and so different — and so many of them! No couple was ever so blessed as were Peter and Teresa with a rich variety of children. Some of them were playing and leaping in the hills and rocks behind Peter, and some of them were sporting in the Ocean before him.

Peter whistled some of these sea children up now as he pondered things in the marina. Some of them broke water, splashed, and waved to him. So many of the kids there were, and such good ones!

“Whistle about four of them to come in for dinner!” Teresa called, and Peter did so. It had been an odd business about the children, not unpleasant certainly, but not what he had expected either. And even yet, every possibility was still open to them.

“I'd like to have a people-kid sometime,” Teresa said. “After all, mama had me. A people kid have fun playing with the fish kids, and they like him, too. And he could climb in the rocks with the Groll's Trolls. He would sort of knit our family together. You think about it, Peter, and I think about it too, and we see what we come up with at the next milting time.”

Peter Feeney gazed out at his children in the pools of the sea, and at his other sort of children climbing in the rocks, and he felt an uneasy pride in them all. One comes quickly to love Fish Kids and Groll's Trolls when they are the product of one's own loins. There was ever hope, there would ever be hope to the last, of children of Peter's own kind. But he loved his present progeny not the less for it. The four kids that he had whistled in came now.

“Oh, four such pretty kids of ours!” Teresa said. “Fry them, Peter.”

And Peter took the pretty fish kids that came from the water and began to fix them for the pan.

This had taken the longest to get used to. But when you have so many of them — more than ten thousand, and more coming all the time — and when they are so good; and when, moreover, they are already flesh of your flesh.

Peter Feeney fixed the fish kids for the pan. And out of his fullness and mingled emotions, salt tears rolled down his shining face to the salt sea.

Author's Commentary

Ginny Wrapped In The Sun

“I'm going to read my paper tonight, Dismas,” Dr. Minden said, “and they'll hoot me out of the hall. The thought of it almost makes the hair walk off my head.”

“Oh well, serves you right, Minden. From the hints you've given me of it, you can't expect easy acceptance for the paper; but the gentlemen aren't so bad.”

“Not bad? Hauser honks like a gander! That clattering laugh of Goldbeater! Snodden sniggers so loud that it echos! Cooper's boom is like barrels rolling downstairs, and your own — it'll shrivel me, Dismas. Imagine the weirdest cacophony ever —  Oh no! I wasn't thinking of one so weird as that!”

Musical screaming! Glorious gibbering with an undertone that could shatter rocks! Hooting of a resonance plainly too deep for so small an instrument! Yowling, hoodoo laughing, broken roaring, rhinoceros grunting! And the child came tumbling out of the tall rocks of Doolen's Mountain, leaping down the flanks of the hill as though she was a waterfall. And both the men laughed.

“Your Ginny is the weirdest cacophony I can imagine, Dismas,” Dr. Minden said. “It scares me, and I love it. Your daughter is the most remarkable creature in the world.

“Talk to us, Ginny! I wish I could fix it that you would be four years old forever.”

“Oh, I've fixed it myself, Dr. Minden,” Ginny sang as she came to them with a movement that had something of the breathless grace of a gazelle and something of the scuttering of a little wild pig. “I use a trick like the hoodoo woman did. She ate water-puppy eggs. She never got any older, you know.”

“What happened to her, Gin?” Dr. Minden asked Ginny Dismas.

“Oh, after a while she got gray-headed and wrinkled. And after another while her teeth and hair fell out, and then she died. But she never did get any older. She had everybody fooled. I got everybody fooled too.”

“I know that you have, Ginny, in very many ways. Well, have you eaten water-puppy eggs to get no older?”

“No. I can't find out where they lay them, Dr. Minden. I've got my own trick that's even better.”

“Do you know, Ginny, that when you really cut loose you are the loudest little girl in the world?”

“I know it. I won it yesterday. Susanna Shonk said that she was the loudest. We hollered for an hour. Susanna's home with a sore throat today, but there isn't anything the matter with me. Hey, has that house ever been there before?”

“That house? But it's our own house, Ginny,” her father, Dr. Dismas, said softly. “You've lived in it all your life. You're in and out of it a thousand times a day.”

“Funny I never saw it before,” Ginny said. “I better go see what it looks like on the inside.” And Ginny hurtled into the house that she was in and out of a thousand times a day.

“I'll tell you a secret, Dismas,” Dr. Minden said. “Your small daughter Ginny is not really beautiful.”

“Everybody thinks that she is, Minden.”

“I know. They all believe her the most beautiful child in the world. So did I till a moment ago. So will I again in minute when I see her come out of the house. But her contemporary, my small son Krios, told me how to look at her; and I do so. For an instant, out of her incessant movement, I forced myself to see her as stopped cold, at rest. She is grotesque, Dismas. If ever she pauses, she is grotesque.”

“No, she is like ultimate matter. Existence and motion are the same thing for her, and there cannot be the one without the other. But I've never seen her stopped, even in sleep. She's the liveliest sleeper anyone ever watched — a laughing and singing sleeper. Her mother calls her our beautiful goblin.”

“Exactly, she's a goblin, a monkey, a kobald. She's even grown a little pot like one of them. Dismas, she has a monkey face and bandy legs and a goblin's own pot.”

“No, she hasn't! There she goes! Out of the house and up into the rocks again, and she's so beautiful that it shakes me. Four years old — and she can still look at the world and say, ‘Funny I never saw you before!’ Yes, I've got a multidimensional daughter, Minden. Also a neighbor who is either deep or murky. You keep feeding me snatches of that paper of yours so I suppose that you want to excite my curiosity about it. And the title — The Contingent Mutation. What is? Who is?”

“We are, Dismas. We are contingent, conditional, temporary, makeshift and improbable in our species. Mine is a paper badly conceived and badly put together, and I shiver at the reception that it will get. But it is about man, who is also badly conceived and badly put together. The proposition of my paper is that man is descended, recently and by incredible mutation, from the most impossible of ancestors, Xauenanthropus or Xauen Man. The answer of that descent scares me.”

“Minden, are you out of your mind? Where is the descent? Where is the mutation? The Xauens were already men. No descent and no mutation was required. The finds are all fifteen years old. One look at Xauen, and everybody saw instantly that the Neanderthals and Grimaldi and Cro-Magnon were all close cousins of the same species — ourselves. They were the template, the master key. They unriddled every riddle. We saw why the chin or lack of chin was only a racial characteristic. We saw it all. There is nothing to distinguish the Xauens from ourselves except that their adults were badly made ganglers, and probably unhealthy. The Xauens are modern men. They are ourselves. There is nothing revolutionary about stuttering out fifteen-year-old certainties, Minden. I thought your paper was to be a giant stride. But it is only stepping off a two-inch curb.”

“Yes, an abysmal step off a two-inch curb, Dismas, backward and around the world, and standing on one's head and turning into a howling monkey in the process. It isn't a simple step. If I am correct, Dismas, then our descent from the Xauens was by an incredible, sudden and single mutation; one that has been misunderstood both as to effect and direction.”

“I've never been quite satisfied with the Xauens myself. There is something misshapen about the whole business. Of course we know the Xauens only by the skeletons of ninety-six children, three adolescents, and two adults. We are bound to find more.”

“If we do, we will find them in the same proportion. Oh, we will not recognize them at all. But does it not seem an odd proportion to you? How come there were so many kids? And how come — think about this a long, long time, will you? — that eighty-six of those kids were of the same size and apparently of the same age? The Xauen skeletons came out of nine digs, close together both in location and age. And of the total of one hundred and one skeletons, eighty-six of them are of four-year-old kids. Sure the Xauens are modern man! Sure they are ourselves chin to chin. But eighty-six four-year-old kids out of a hundred and one people is not a modern proportion.”

“You explain it then, Minden. I suppose that your paper attempts to. Oh, scatter-boned ancestors! Here come the religious nuts!”

Drs. Dismas and Minden had been sitting in the open parkland in campesino chairs, in their own fine neighborhood between Doolen's Mountain and the lower brushland. Dr. Dismas drew a hog-nosed pistol from under his arm at the sight of the nuts who had shuffled up that way several times before.

“Be off!” Dismas barked as the nuts crowded and shuffled up closer from the lower brushland. “There's nothing around here you want. You've been here a dozen times with your silly questions.”

“No, only three times,” the nut leader said. He was clean-shaven and short-haired in the old manner still affected by fanatics, and he had fool written in every line of him. “It's a simple thing we seek,” the leader sniffled. “We only want to find the woman and kill her. I believe that you could help us find the woman.”

“There is no woman here except my wife!” Dr. Dismas said angrily. “You have said yourselves that she isn't the woman. Be gone now, and don't come back here again.”

“But everything that we know tells us that the woman is somewhere near this place,” the nut leader insisted. “She is the woman who will bear the weird seed.”

“Oh, well, there are some who say that my daughter Ginny is a weird seed. Be off now.”

“We know Ginny. She comes down sometimes to mock us. Ginny is not the seed, but there is something of it about her. Ginny is born and already four years old. The seed that we are seeking to kill is still in the womb. Are you sure that your wife — ”

“Damnit, do you want a public pregnancy test? No, my wife is not!”

Dr. Dismas shot a couple of times around the feet of the nut leader, and the whole gaggle of the nuts shuffled off again. “It is only a little thing we seek, to find and kill the woman,” they snuffled as they went.

“They may be right, Dismas,” Dr. Minden said. “I've been expecting the weird seed myself. I believe that it may already have appeared several times, and such nuts have killed it several times. The contingent mutation can come unhinged at any time. It always could. And when it does, the human world can well pass away. But this time they won't be able to find the woman to kill her.”

“This is fishier than Edward's Ichthyology, as we used to say in school. I begin to understand why you're afraid of the reception that your paper might get. And you, as well as I, seem to have developed a little weird seed lately.”

“Yes, my young and my older son are both acting most peculiar lately, particularly in their relation to the Dismas family. My son Dall has been jilted by your daughter Agar, or is it the other way around? Or have they both been jilted by your small daughter Ginny? As far as I can arrive at it, Ginny told them that that sort of stuff is out, no longer necessary, not even wanted on their parts. She is obsoleting them, she says.

“And my four-year-old son Krios is about out of his mind over your Ginny. He is so advanced in some ways and so retarded in others. It seems as though he grew unevenly and then stopped growing. I worry about him.”

“Yes. Ginny has acquired several more small boyfriends now. She says that you break the fort with a big ram and you break the ram at the same time and throw it away. And then you find better tools to take it over. I don't know what she's talking about. But Krios is jealous as only a passionate four-year-old can be.”

“Krios says that Ginny is bad and she made him bad. He says that he doesn't know the words for the way they were bad, but that he will go to Hell for it.”

“I had no idea that children were still taught about Hell.”

“They aren't. But they have either intuitive knowledge of the place, or a continuing childhood folk legend of it. Oh, here comes bad Ginny and her mother, and they both have that stubborn look on them. You have two strong women in your house, at least. I wish that Agar were; for my son Dall isn't, and one of them should be.”

Ginny and her mother Sally came hand in hand with the air of something needing to be settled.

“I want to be fair about this, Father,” Ginny called solidly. “What I like about me is that I am always so fair.”

“That's also what I like about you, Ginny,” said Dr. Dismas, “and what is the argument?”

“All I asked of Mother is that she make me three thousand seven hundred and eighty peanut butter sandwiches. Isn't that a fair request?”

“I'm not sure that it is, Ginny,” Dr. Dismas said. “It would take you a long time to eat that many.”

“Of course it will, twelve hundred and sixty days. But that makes only three a day for the time I have to stay hidden in my nest up in the rocks. I figured that out by myself without paper. A lot of kids that have been to school already can't figure as well as I can.”

“I know. A precocious daughter is a mixed blessing,” her father said.

“Oh, Ginny, you're going to get a paddling,” her mother said. “I made you three of them, and you said that you weren't even hungry for them.”

“Father, who is this woman who talks to me so brusquely?” Ginny demanded.

“She is your mother, Ginny. You have been with her every day of your life and before. You have just come out of the house with her, and you still stand hand in hand with her.”

“Funny I never saw her before,” Ginny said. “I don't believe that this woman is my mother at all. Well, I will get my servants to make the sandwiches for me. Serpents kill you, woman! —  Oh, no, no, nobody touches me like that!”

Musical screaming! Wailing of a resonance too deep for so small an instrument, as Ginny was dragged off by her mother to get paddled. Howling to high Heaven, and the plainting of wild hogs and damned goblins!

“She is in good voice,” Dr. Minden said. “When she speaks of her servants, she means your daughter Agar and my son Dall. It scares me, for I almost know what she means. It is eerie that two compatible young people say they will not marry because a four-year-old child forbids them to do it. It scares me still more when I begin to understand the mechanism at work.”

“What is the mechanism, Minden?”

“The mutational inhibitions. It's quite a tangled affair. Do you remember the Screaming Monkeys of boondocks Rhodesia twenty years ago?”

“Vaguely. Bothersome little destructive monkeys that had to be hunted down and killed — hunted down by a sort of religious crusade, as I remember it. Yes, a mutation I suppose. A sudden wildness appearing in a species. What is the connection?”

“Dismas, they were the first, the initial probe that failed. Others are on the way, and one of them will not fail. The story is that the religious crusaders said that no human child could be born while the howling monkeys flourished, for the monkeys themselves were human children. Well, they were. Well, no they weren't children. And they weren't human. But, in a way, they had been both. Or at least — ”

“Minden, do you know what you do mean?”

“I hardly do, Dismas. Here come the ‘servants.’ ”

Dall Minden and Agar Dismas drove up in a little roustabout car and stopped.

“What is this nonsense I hear that you two are not going to get married?” Dr. Dismas demanded.

“Not unless Ginny changes her mind, Father,” Agar said. “Oh, don't ask us to explain it. We don't understand it either.”

“You are a pair of damned useless drones,” Dismas growled.

“Don't say that, Dismas,” Dr. Minden gasped. “Everything begins to scare me now. ‘Drones’ has a technical meaning in this case.”

“Ginny has just suffered an ignominy past bearing,” Agar grinned. She was a nice pleasant girl. “Now she's sulking in her cave up in Doolen's Mountain and has sent word for us to come at once.”

“How has she sent word?” Dr. Dismas demanded. “You two have just driven up.”

“Oh, don't ask us to explain, Father. She sends us word when she wants us. We don't understand it either. We'll go up on foot.”

“Where is all this going to end?” Dr. Dismas asked when the two grinning young drones had left them and were ambling up the mountain.

“I don't know, Dismas,” Minden told him. “But I believe it may as well begin with a verse:

Salamanders do it,

Tadpoles and newts do it.

Why can't me and you do it?

“It's a verse that the four-year-olds have been chanting, and you may not be tuned in on them. And the peculiar thing is that the salamanders and newts and tadpoles are doing it now, more than ever before. It's worldwide. See Higgleton's recent paper if you don't take my word for it.”

“Oh, great blithering biologists! What are the squigglers doing more than ever before?”

“Engaging in neotic reproduction, of course. In many pocket areas, tadpoles have been reproducing as tadpoles for several years now, and the adult frog species is disappearing. There have always been cases of it, of course, but now it is becoming a pattern. The same is true of the newts and salamanders. And remember that all three are like man, contingent mutations. But how do the four-year-old children know about it when it is still one of the best-kept secrets of the biologists?… Here comes my wife. Is it more family trouble, Clarinda?”

“Oh, Krios has locked himself in the bathroom, and he won't come out or answer. He's been acting abominable all morning. Have you that emergency key you made?”

“Here. Now get the boy out, whip him gently but painfully, then explain to him that we love him very much and that his troubles are our troubles. Then get dinner. This family here never eats, unless it is peanut butter sandwiches, and has not thought to ask me to dine with them. Get back next door and with it, Clarinda, and stop bubbling.”

“There is something really bothering Krios,” Clarinda Minden bubbled yet, but she got herself back next door.

“Where shall we take it up, Dismas?” Doctor Minden asked. “With the howling monkeys of boondocks Rhodesia who may once have been human children? But nobody believes that. With the neotic salamanders and newts and pollywogs? With the Xauens who were either our grandparents or our grandchildren? Or with ourselves?”

“Roost on the Xauens a while,” Dr. Dismas said. “You didn't quite finish your screed on them.”

“Humans descend from the Xauens. Australopithecus, no. Sinanthropus, no. They were creatures of another line. But Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon, Grimaldi and ourselves are all of one species, and we descend from the Xauens. It is not true, however, that we have only one hundred and one skeletons of the Xauens. We have more than twenty thousand of them, but most of them are called Ouezzane monkeys.”

“Minden, you're crazy.”

“I am talking about the three-foot-tall, big-headed running monkeys who were mature and full grown at four years of age and very old at fourteen. They threw a few sports, steers and freemartins, who passed the puberty age without effect and continued to grow. They were gangling drones, servants of the active species, and of course sterile. They were the one in one hundred occurrence and of no importance. And one day they bred, set up a mutational inhibition against the normal; and mankind — the privileged mutation — was born.

“The Ouezzane monkeys, of whom the Xauens were the transitional state, were the same as the howling monkeys of boondocks Rhodesia — going in the other direction. They had no speech, they had no fire, and they made no tools. Then one morning they were the Xauens, and the next morning they were humans. They passed all the highly developed apes in an instant. They were the privileged mutation, which is not, I believe, permanent.

“Dismas, the one hundred and one recognized Xauen skeletons that we possess are not of ninety-six children (eighty-six of them apparent four-year-olds), three adolescents and two adults. They are of ten infants and children, eighty-six adults, two mutants and three filial-twos.

“Let's take it from the flank. A few years ago, a biologist amused himself by making a table of heartbeat life lengths. All the mammals but one, he found, live about the same number of heartbeats, the longer-living species having correspondingly slower heartbeats. But one species, man, lives four or five times as long as he should by this criterion. I forget whether the biologist implied that this makes man a contingent species living on borrowed time. I do imply it. In any case, since the biologist was also involved in science fiction, his implications were not taken seriously.

“From the other flank. Even before Freud there were studies made of false puberty, the sudden hot interest and activity that appears about age four and then goes away for another ten years. It's been many times guessed that back in our ancestry our true puberty was at such an early age.”

“Minden, no species can change noticeably in less than fifty thousand years.”

“Dismas, it can change in between three and nine months, depending on the direction traveled. Here they come back! Well, drones, did you settle Ginny down? Where are you going now?”

Agar Dismas and Dall Minden had sauntered down from Doolen's Mountain.

“We're going to get four hundred and seventy-three loaves of bread and four hundred and seventy-three jars of peanut butter,” Agar said rather nervously.

“Yes, Ginny says to use Crispy-Crusty bread,” Dall Minden detailed. “She says it has sixteen slices to a loaf, so we can make eight sandwiches to a loaf and to a jar. There will be four sandwiches left over, and Ginny says we can have them for our work. She's going to stay in her cave for twelve hundred and sixty days. She says it will take that long to get her thing going good so nobody can bust it up. I think she's a numerologist at heart. This is going to take more than four hundred dollars. That's more than Agar and myself have saved up together. Ginny says to do it, though, even if we have to steal the money for it. And she says to be quick about it.”

“Here come the religious nuts again,” Doctor Dismas said. “I may have to kill one of the fools if they keep coming back.”

“They won't come here this time,” Agar said. “They'll prowl Doolen's Mountain from now on. They know it'll be there. But I don't think they'll kill Ginny. They don't understand what she is. They didn't understand the first time either; they didn't guess that it could possibly be one of the big ones. We are all hoping that they will kill me and be satisfied and think that they have done it. They will find me there where they think the woman should be, and that may fool them. Well, tootle! We have to hurry with everything or Ginny will be angry.”

“No species can count itself secure that has not endured for ten million years,” said Dr. Minden. “We still hear that old saying that evolution is irreversible. Hogwash! I have myself studied seven species of hogs washed away before one endured. The human race is so new that it has no stability. The majority of species do not survive, and we have lived only one-tenth of the span that would tilt the odds for survival in our favor. Even the species that finally survive will commonly revert several times before acquiring stability. We could revert at any time.”

“Revert to what?”

“To what we were, to what we still are basically, little three-foot-high, big-headed, howling monkeys, without tools, and with only a fifth of our present life span.”

“Reversions are like cosmic disasters, Minden. They take a few thousand years to happen, and by that time we'll be gone.”

“No, this can happen instantly, Dismas, by a single neotic conception. And then it becomes the norm by the mechanics of mutational inhibition. The reversion will inhibit the old normal. We have already seen that inhibition at work.”

The very stones crying out like demented rooks! Bushes barking like coyotes! Green-colored yowling, and laughter that sang like a band-saw. And Ginny was in the middle of them again.

She was the howlingest kid ever pupped.

“I don't think that I will talk any more after today, Father,” she said solemnly after she had cut off her other noises. “I think I'll just forget how. I'll just holler and hoot and carry on. That's more fun anyhow.

“Why aren't my servants back with my provisions? They've had almost time to get back if they did everything at breakneck speed and had good luck. They might have had to go to more than one place to get that much bread and peanut butter, though. I doubt if I'll eat it. I just want to have it if I need it, and I wanted to teach them obedience. I'll probably start to eat meadow mice and ground squirrels tomorrow.

“Here comes Mrs. Minden crying over that Krios. What's the good of that?”

There was a keening. Clarinda was running and crying, and Sally Dismas had rushed out of the house and met her.

“Clarinda, what in the world has happened?” Dr. Minden cried, rushing to his tearful wife.

“Our baby Krios has killed himself.”

“I told him to,” said Ginny. “I'd gotten everything I wanted from him. I'll find better ones for the other times.”

“Ginny!” Her mother was horrified. “I'll whip — ”

“Don't punish the child, Sally,” Clarinda Minden said. “She's beyond good and evil. Whatever was between her and my baby Krios, it's better that I never know.”

“Did I say something wrong?” Ginny asked. “The last thing I ever say, and it should be wrong? Dr. Minden, you know about things like that. What are you creatures, anyhow?”

“People, Ginny,” Dr. Minden said miserably.

“Funny I never saw any of you before. I sure don't intend to get involved with people.”

Raucous rowling! Hound-dog hooting! Hissing of badgers, and the clattering giggle of geese! Shag-tooth shouting, and the roaring of baby bulls!

And a screaming monkey leaped and tumbled up the rocks like crazy water.

Rogue Raft

They have always said that Ice Ages are periods of low seas, since the water to form the ten-thousand-foot-deep ice-caps on the continents must be taken from the seas, and so will lower their level. They have also said that if the remaining ice-caps (Greenland and Antarctica) were melted, all the sea-ports of the world would be submerged by hundreds of feet of water.

They have always said these things, and they have said them as though they meant them.

But I wish it were not the case.

Were it not so, then whole new areas of speculation could be opened up. Very many things, geological and geographical, archeological and anthropological, could be seen from a new viewpoint. And yet, as they tell us again and again, this is an imperative that cannot be bent or broken. The theory that ice-caps are accompanied by low seas, and that the melting of them is accompanied by higher seas, is as adamant a theory as is the theory that the speed of light is the limit of all speed.

This means that it was during the very deep ice ages, when that terrific amount of water had been sucked up out of the oceans, that the land-bridges were formed; those from Asia to Alaska; those across the North Atlantic connecting (not always at the same time) Labrador to Greenland, Greenland to Iceland, Iceland to a more extensive Scandinavia; that connected Britain to the continent. It would have to be that they were formed in the deep Ice Ages when so great an amount of water was locked up in the ice-caps and the levels of the oceans consequently lowered. And it would have to be during such a deep Ice Age that men first crossed from Asia to America, madly traversing eight thousand miles of ice and snow from habitable land to habitable land, from one uncrowded land to another uncrowded land. Whatever impelled them to such madness. I shiver at the folk memory of it that wells up in me.

And it had to be in such a deep Ice Age that most of the pleistocene plant and animal migrations took place between Asia and America and between America and Europe. The migration had to be over the same terrible routes back when they really had winters — a hundred thousand years long. This, of course, must include the migrations of many species that are killed by simple frost. It is a breathtaking thing, and it could not have happened any other way.

The dates and periods themselves are so loose and allow so great a margin of error that recurrent land-risings could as well have taken place during interglacials as during glacials — if only the theory could be bent to fit such a thing. Rather than have such migrations take place during the terrible Würm Glaciation (The Wisconsin Ice Age in America), it would have been much more pleasant to set them in the preceding Third or Sangamon Interglacial, the most total of the meltings. We feel a compassion for the people and animals and plants setting forth on such terrible and insane migrations in the time of very deep ice and cold. We would help them if we could. But it is impossible. Others have tried it and been broken in the attempt.

Belloc wrote in 1926 (in his controversy with H. G. Wells over the outline of History, in which controversy the two men wrote books back and forth as rapidly as other men would write letters) that it was not absolutely certain that low seas corresponded with glacial periods and high seas with interglacials. And it was on this point that Wells whipped him, completely and to be remembered forever, with his magnificent display of scorn. And so the day was saved for ‘science’. (Belloc had been leading on points up till then; a good sportscaster would have carded him about seven rounds out of nine.)

Boule had written in 1906 much more strongly on the same subject, stating (against all reason) that Ice Ages were periods of very high seas, and that interglacials (with the partial or complete melting of the ice-caps) were always periods of very low seas, with the Continents standing up at their highest points.

The arguments given by these two men were novel, but they will not stand the test of logic. What could be expected of Belloc (a layman in all sciences except History) who stated that the wonder stories of Wells were important, but that his science (on which the great Wells so prided himself) was often silly parroting? This certainly shows a lack of proportion and judgment in Belloc. Moreover Belloc, on the word of his contemporaries, was sometimes given to levity on even serious subjects. He was the straight-faced kidder, and it often could not be determined whether he was kidding or not.

And again, since both Belloc and Boule began life as Frenchmen, logic could hardly be expected from them in any case.

A simple analogy will show why the established theory (low seas during Ice Ages, high seas during time of melting) cannot be challenged.

The Ocean Seas as well as the Continents are afloat on the Earth's magma, the solid flow. The Underlay is very heavy; the Ocean Seas as well as the Continents are comparatively light, of the same order. The whole may be considered as a complex liquid balance considered over a long period of time, and we are talking about long periods of time. The principle of Isostasis (vertical sections of Equal Weight floating on the heavier Magma) applies to the Ocean as well as to the Continental Lands.

Therefore, the Continents can be considered as rafts floating in a pond. Let us consider one such rogue raft floating in such a pond. The pond is very deep, and a hundred such rafts could not touch bottom. The raft floats free and easy, and it floats very low in the water.

The Raft has on it a very large empty water-tank. We do not know how the tank came to be there, but it is essential to the analogy. This is a very warm period. There is no ice anywhere, so the water is very high and it comes up quite high on the floating raft.

Then comes an Ice Age, not suddenly, but steadily and relentlessly. The water from the Oceans is deposited on large parts of the Continents as Ice to a depth of more than two miles. This takes a hundred thousand years, a long enough period to give Isostasis a chance to work.

In our analogy, water is pumped from the pond into the large empty water-tank on the raft. This will, of course, lower the water level of the deep pond, and make the raft ride higher in the water. And, as yet more water is pumped out of the pond and into the water-tank on the raft, the water level of the pond is lowered still more and the raft floats still higher in the water.

And when the maximum amount of water has been pumped out of the pond and into the water-tank on the raft, the level of the pond will be so lowered that the raft (with its added load) will now float freely in the air above the lowered level of the pond.

We love logic and its relentless conclusions. It is so much more solid a thing than the wispy novelties. But in this case we feel a certain nostalgia for a thing that is impossible.

But suppose, in some Science Fiction context, that it were possible (as we have just shown that it is not) that the Raft should sink lower in the Pond when a very great load was placed upon it, and rise higher when the load was removed. In that case we would now be in the early period of an isostatic adjustment of rising continents, and in a few thousand years we should see the land-bridges appear once more.

We had a reverie recently of a sea of sub-tropical grass reaching (with only a few little gaps and straits constantly opening and closing) clear across the North Atlantic Ocean. There was another such grassy bridge across the North Pacific. Men and plants and animals migrated for many thousands of years in a warmer and more abundant climate than we have ever had since. Species that would be killed by a breath of frost grew and spread in a world that had no frost. Pond and brook fishes traveled from one world to another, and birds of limited range. Hardwood and softwood trees, in their thousands of varieties, made the trip both ways, leisurely and pleasantly. Earth-worms and hop-toads made the trip, and day-flies and gnats.

This was the spacious Sangamon Interglacial that might have been, the finest weather and the most emerging land ever.

Could such a thing have been, a hundred anomalies in a dozen sciences would be solved; the suspiciously greater antiquity of man in America than the present theory allows; the identity of sub-tropical plants in both hemispheres; Ice Age beach marks in Scandinavia seven hundred feet higher than present beach-marks when in all logic they should be seven hundred feet deep in the ocean; the existence in America of an archaic race, the lank, noble-nosed, straight-eyed plains Indians who are not Mongols. So many things would fit in so much more neatly if the theory could be changed.

But it can not be. There are certain irrefutables. Ice Ages are periods of Low Seas (the more heavily-loaded Raft riding ever higher on the waters of the Pond). And, when all the Ice is finally melted, the present Sea-Ports of the World will be under deep water (the Raft, with its load completely removed, will finally be submerged by the rising waters of the Pond).

Camels And Dromedaries, Clem

“Greeks and Armenians, Clem. Condors and buzzards.”

“Samoyeds and Malemutes, Clem. Galena and molybdenite.”

Oh here, here! What kind of talk is that?

That is definitive talk. That is fundamental talk. There is no other kind of talk that will bring us to the core of this thing.

Clem Clendenning was a traveling salesman, a good one. He had cleared $35,000 the previous year. He worked for a factory in a midwestern town. The plant produced a unique product, and Clem sold it over one-third of the nation.

Things were going well with him. Then a little thing happened, and it changed his life completely.

Salesmen have devices by which they check and double-check. One thing they do when stopping at hotels in distant towns; they make sure they're registered. This sounds silly, but it isn't. A salesman will get calls from his home office and it is important that the office be able to locate him. Whenever Clem registered at a hotel he would check back after several hours to be sure that they had him entered correctly. He would call in from somewhere, and he would ask for himself. And it sometimes did happen that he was told he was not registered. At this Clem would always raise a great noise to be sure that they had him straight thereafter.

Arriving in a town this critical day, Clem had found himself ravenously hungry and tired to his depths. Both states were unusual to him. He went to a grill and ate gluttonously for an hour, so much so that people stared at him. He ate almost to the point of apoplexy. Then he taxied to the hotel, registered, and went up to his room at once. Later, not remembering whether he had even undressed or not (it was early afternoon), he threw himself onto the bed and slept, as it seemed, for hours.

But he noted that it was only a half hour later that he woke, feeling somehow deprived, as though having a great loss. He was floundering around altogether in a daze, and was once more possessed of an irrational hunger. He unpacked a little, put on a suit, and was surprised to find that it hung on him quite loosely.

He went out with the feeling that he had left something on the bed that was not quite right, and yet he had been afraid to look. He found a hearty place and had another great meal. And then (at a different place so that people would not be puzzled at him) he had still another one. He was feeling better now, but mighty queer, mighty queer.

Fearing that he might be taken seriously ill, he decided to check his bearings. He used his old trick. He found a phone and called his hotel and asked for himself.

“We will check,” said the phone girl, and a little bit later she said, “Just a minute, he will be on the line in a minute.”

“Oh, great green goat,” he growled, “I wonder how they have me mixed up this time.”

And Clem was about to raise his voice unpleasantly to be sure that they got him straight, when a voice came onto the phone.

This is the critical point.

It was his own voice.

The calling Clendenning laughed first. And then he froze. It was no trick. It was no freak. There was no doubt that it was his own voice. Clem used the dictaphone a lot and he knew the sound of his own voice.

And now he heard his own voice raised higher in all its unmistakable aspects, a great noise about open idiots who call on the phone and then stand silent without answering.

“It's me all right,” Clem grumbled silently to himself. “I sure do talk rough when I'm irritated.”

There was a law against harassment by telephone, the voice on the phone said. By God, the voice on the phone said, he just noticed that his room had been rifled. He was having the call monitored right now, the voice on the phone swore. Clem knew that this was a lie, but he also recognized it as his own particular style of lying. The voice got really wooly and profane.

Then there was a change in the tone.

“Who are you?” the voice asked hollowly. “I hear you breathing scared. I know your sound. Gaaah — it's me!” And the voice on the phone was also breathing scared.

“There has to be an answer,” he told himself. “I'll just go to my room and take a hot bath and try to sleep it off.”

Then he roared back: “Go to my room! Am I crazy? I have just called my room. I am already there. I would not go to my room for one million one hundred and five thousand dollars.”

He was trembling as though his bones were too loose for his flesh. It was funny that he had never before noticed how bony he was. But he wasn't too scared to think straight on one subject, however crooked other things might be.

“No, I wouldn't go back to that room for any sum. But I will do something for another sum, and I'll do it damned quick.”

He ran, and he hasn't stopped running yet. That he should have another self-made flesh terrified him. He ran, but he knew where he was running for the first stage of it. He took the night plane back to his hometown, leaving bag and baggage behind.

He was at the bank when it opened in the morning. He closed out all his accounts. He turned everything into cash. This took several hours. He walked out of there with $83,000. He didn't feel like a thief; it was his own; it couldn't have belonged to his other self, could it? If there were two of them, then let there be two sets of accounts.

Now to get going fast.

He continued to feel odd. He weighed himself. In spite of his great eating lately, he had lost a hundred pounds. That's enough to make anyone feel odd. He went to New York City to lose himself in the crowd and to think about the matter.

And what was the reaction at his firm and at his home when he turned up missing? That's the second point. He didn't turn up missing. As the months went by he followed the doings of his other self. He saw his pictures in the trade papers; he was still with the same firm; he was still top salesman. He always got the hometown paper, and he sometimes found himself therein. He saw his own picture with his wife Veronica. She looked wonderful and so, he had to admit, did he. They were still on the edge of the social stuff.

“If he's me, I wonder who I am?” Clem continued to ask himself. There didn't seem to be any answer to this. There wasn't any handle to take the thing by.

Clem went to an analyst and told his story. The analyst said that Clem had wanted to escape his job, or his wife Veronica, or both. Clem insisted that this was not so; he loved his job and his wife; he got deep and fulfilling satisfaction out of both.

“You don't know Veronica or you wouldn't suggest it,” he told the analyst. “She is — ah — well, if you don't know her, then hell, you don't know anything.”

The analyst told him that it had been his own id talking to him on the telephone.

“How is it that my id is doing a top selling job out of a town five hundred miles from here, and I am here?” Clem wanted to know. “Other men's ids aren't so talented.”

The analyst said that Clem was suffering from a τμημα or διαιρετικός of an oddly named part of his psychic apparatus.

“Oh hell, I'm an extrovert. Things like that don't happen to people like me,” Clem said.

Thereafter Clem tried to make the best of his compromised life. He was quickly well and back to normal weight. But he never talked on the telephone again in his life. He'd have died most literally if he ever heard his own voice like that again. He had no phone in any room where he lived. He wore a hearing aid which he did not need; he told people that he could not hear over the phone, and that any unlikely call that came for him would have to be taken down and relayed to him.

He had to keep an eye on his other self, so he did renew one old contact. With one firm in New York there was a man he had called on regularly; this man had a cheerful and open mind that would not be spooked by the unusual. Clem began to meet this man (Why should we lie about it? His name was Joe Zabotsky.) not at the firm, but at an after-hours place which he knew Joe frequented.

Joe heard Clem's story and believed it — after he had phoned (in Clem's presence) the other Clem, located him a thousand miles away, and ordered an additional month's supply of the unique product which they didn't really need, things being a little slow in all lines right then.

After that, Clem would get around to see Joe Zabotsky an average of once a month, about the time he figured the other Clem had just completed his monthly New York call.

“He's changing a little bit, and so are you,” Joe told Clem one evening. “Yeah, it was with him just about like with you. He did lose a lot of weight a while back, what you call the critical day, and he gained it back pretty quick just like you did. It bugs me, Clem, which of you I used to know. There are some old things between us that he recalls and you don't; there are some that you recall and he doesn't; and dammit there are some you both recall, and they happened between myself and one man only, not between myself and two men.

“But these last few months your face seems to be getting a little fuller, and his a little thinner. You still look just alike, but not quite as just-alike as you did at first.”

“I know it,” Clem said. “I study the analysts now since they don't do any good at studying me, and I've learned an old analyst's trick. I take an old face-on photo of myself, divide it down the center, and then complete each half with its mirror image. It gives two faces just a little bit different. Nobody has the two sides of his face quite alike. These two different faces are supposed to indicate two different aspects of the personality. I study myself, now, and I see that I am becoming more like one of the constructions; so he must be becoming more like the other construction. He mentions that there are disturbances between Veronica and himself, does he? And neither of them quite understands what is the matter? Neither do I.”

Clem lived modestly, but he began to drink more than he had. He watched, through his intermediary Joe and by other means, the doings of his other self. And he waited. This was the most peculiar deal he had ever met, but he hadn't been foxed on very many deals.

“He's no smarter than I am,” Clem insisted. “But, by cracky, if he's me, he's pretty smart at that. What would he do if he were in my place? And I guess, in a way, he is.”

Following his avocation of drinking and brooding and waiting, Clem frequented various little places, and one day he was in the Two-Faced Bar and Grill. This was owned and operated by Two-Face Terrel, a double-dealer and gentleman, even something of a dandy. A man had just seated himself at a dim table with Clem, had been served by Two-Face, and now the man began to talk.

“Why did Matthew have two donkeys?” the man asked.

“Matthew who?” Clem asked. “I don't know what you're talking about.”

“I'm talking about 21:1-9, of course,” the man said. “The other Gospels have only one donkey. Did you ever think about that?”

“No, I'd never given it a thought,” Clem said.

“Well, tell me then, why does Matthew have two demoniacs?”

“What?”

“8:28-34. The other evangelists have only one crazy man.”

“Maybe there was only one loony at first, and he drove the guy drinking next to him crazy.”

“That's possible. Oh, you're kidding. But why does Matthew have two blind men?”

“Number of a number, where does this happen?” Clem asked.

“9:27-31, and again 20:29-34. In each case the other gospelers have only one blind man. Why does Matthew double so many things? There are other instances of it.”

“Maybe he needed glasses,” Clem said.

“No,” the man whispered, “I think he was one of us.”

“What ‘us’ are you talking about?” Clem asked. But already he had begun to suspect that his case was not unique. Suppose that it happened one time out of a million? There would still be several hundred such sundered persons in the country, and they would tend to congregate in such places as the Two-Faced Bar and Grill. And there was something deprived or riven about almost every person who came into the place.

“And remember,” the man was continuing, “the name or cognomen of one of the other Apostles was ‘The Twin.’ But of whom was he twin? I think there was the beginning of a group of them there already.”

“He wants to see you,” Joe Zabotsky told Clem when they met several months later. “So does she.”

“When did he begin to suspect that there was another one of me?”

“He knew something was wrong from the first. A man doesn't lose a hundred pounds in an instant without there being something wrong. And he knew something was very wrong when all his accounts were cleaned out. These were not forgeries, and he knew it. They were not as good as good forgeries, for they were hurried and all different and very nervous. But they were all genuine signatures, he admitted that. Damn, you are a curious fellow, Clem!”

“How much does Veronica know, and how? What does she want? What does he?”

“He says that she also began to guess from the first. ‘You act like you're only half a man, Clem,’ she would say to him, to you, that is. She wants to see more of her husband, she says, the other half. And he wants to trade places with you, at least from time to time on a trial basis.”

“I won't do it! Let him stew in it!” Then Clem called Clem a name so vile that it will not be given here.

“Take it easy, Clem,” Joe remonstrated. “It's yourself you are calling that.”

There was a quizzical young-old man who came sometimes into the Two-Faced Bar and Grill. They caught each other's eye this day, and the young-old began to talk.

“Is not consciousness the thing that divides man from the animals?” he asked. “But consciousness is a double thing, a seeing one's self; not only a knowing, but a knowing that one knows. So the human person is of its essence double. How this is commonly worked out in practice, I don't understand. Our present states are surely not the common thing.”

“My own consciousness isn't intensified since my person is doubled,” Clem said. “It's all the other way. My consciousness is weakened. I've become a creature of my own unconscious. There's something about you that I don't like, man.”

“The animal is simple and single,” the young-old man said. “It lacks true reflexive consciousness. But man is dual (though I don't understand the full meaning of it here) and he has at least intimations of true consciousness. And what is the next step?”

“I fathom you now,” Clem said. “My father would have called you a Judas Priest.”

“I don't quite call myself that. But what follows the singularity of the animal and duality of man? You recall the startling line of Chesterton? — ‘we trinitarians have known it is not good for God to be alone.’ But was His case the same as ours? Did He do a violent double take, or triple take, when He discovered one day that there were Three of Him? Has He ever adjusted to it? Is it possible that He can?”

“Aye, you're a Judas Priest. I hate the species.”

“But I am not, Mr. Clendenning. I don't understand this sundering any more than you do. It happens only one time in a million, but it has happened to us. Perhaps it would happen to God but one time in a billion billion, but it has happened. The God who is may be much rarer than any you can imagine.

“Let me explain: my other person is a very good man, much better than when we were conjoined. He's a dean already, and he'll be a bishop within five years. Whatever of doubt and skepticism that was in me originally is still in the me here present, and it is somehow intensified. I do not want to be dour or doubting. I do not want to speak mockingly of the great things. But the bothering things are all in the me here. The other me is freed of them.

“Do you think that there might have a been a sundered-off Napoleon who was a bumbler at strategy and who was a nervous little coward? Did there remain in backwoods Kentucky for many years a sundered-off Lincoln who gave full rein to his inborn delight in the dirty story, the dirty deal, the barefoot life, the loutishness ever growing? Was there a sundered-off Augustine who turned ever more Manichean, who refined more and more his arts of false logic and fornication, who howled against reason, who joined the cultishness of the crowd? Is there an anti-Christ — the man who fled naked from the garden at dusk leaving his garment behind? We know that both do not keep the garment at the moment of sundering.”

“Damned if I know, Judas Priest. Your own father-name abomination, was there another of him? Was he better or worse? I leave you.”

“She is in town and is going to meet you tonight,” Joe Zabotsky told Clem at their next monthly meeting. “We've got it all set up.”

“No, no, not Veronica!” Clem was startled. “I'm not ready for it.”

“She is. She's a strong-minded woman, and she knows what she wants.”

“No she doesn't, Joe. I'm afraid of it. I haven't touched a woman since Veronica.”

“Damn it, Clem, this is Veronica that we're talking about. It isn't as though you weren't still married to her.”

“I'm still afraid of it, Joe. I've become something unnatural now. Where am I supposed to meet her? Oh, oh you son of a snake! I can feel her presence. She was already in the place when I came in. No, no, Veronica, I'm not the proper one. It's all a case of mistaken identity.”

“It sure is, Clem Clam,” said the strong-minded Veronica as she came to their table. “Come along now. You're going to have more explaining to do than any man I ever heard of.”

“But I can't explain it, Veronica. I can't explain any of it.”

“You will try real hard, Clem. We both will. Thank you, Mr. Zabotsky, for your discretion in an odd situation.”

Well, it went pretty well, so well in fact there had to be a catch to it. Veronica was an unusual and desirable woman, and Clem had missed her. They did the town mildly. They used to do it once a year, but they had been apart in their present persons for several years. And yet Veronica would want to revisit “that little place we were last year, oh, but that wasn't you, was it, Clem? — that was Clem,” and that kind of talk was confusing.

They dined grandly, and they talked intimately but nervously. There was real love between them, or among them, or around them somehow. They didn't understand how it had turned grotesque.

“He never quite forgave you for clearing out the accounts,” Veronica said.

“But it was my money, Veronica,” Clem insisted. “I earned it by the sweat of my tongue and my brain. He had nothing to do with it.”

“But you're wrong, dear Clem. You worked equally for it when you were one. You should have taken only half of it.”

They came back to Veronica's hotel, and one of the clerks looked at Clem suspiciously.

“Didn't you just go up, and then come down, and then go up again?” he asked.

“I have my ups and downs, but you may mean some thing else,” Clem said.

“Now don't be nervous, dear,” Veronica said. They were up in Veronica's room now, and Clem was looking around very nervously. He had jumped at a mirror, not being sure that it was.

“I am still your wife,” Veronica said, “and nothing has changed, except everything. I don't know how, but I'm going to put things together again. You have to have missed me! Give now!” And she swept him off his feet as though he were a child. Clem had always loved her for her sudden strength. If you haven't been up in Veronica's arms, then you haven't been anywhere.

“Get your pumpkin-picking hands off my wife, you filthy oaf!” a voice cracked out like a bullwhip, and Veronica dropped Clem thuddingly from the surprise of it.

“Oh, Clem!” she said with exasperation, “you shouldn't have come here when I was with Clem. Now you've spoiled everything. You can't be jealous of each other. You're the same man. Let's all pack up and go home and make the best of it. Let people talk if they want to.”

“Well, I don't know what to do,” Clem said. “This isn't the way. There isn't any way at all. Nothing can ever be right with us when we are three.”

“There is a way,” Veronica said with sudden steel in her voice. “You boys will just have to get together again. I am laying down the law now. For a starter each of you lose a hundred pounds. I give you a month for it. You're both on bread and water from now on. No, come to think of it, no bread! No water either; that may be fattening, too. You're both on nothing for a month.”

“We won't do it,” both Clems said. “It'd kill us.”

“Let it kill you then,” Veronica said. “You're no good to me the way you are. You'll lose the weight. I think that will be the trigger action. Then we will all go back to Rock Island or whatever town that was and get the same hotel room where one of you rose in a daze and left the other one unconscious on the bed. We will recreate those circumstances and see if you two can't get together again.”

“Veronica,” Clem said, “it is physically and biologically impossible.”

“Also topologically absurd.”

“You should have thought of that when you came apart. All you have to do now is get together again. Do it! I'm laying down an ultimatum. There's no other way. You two will just have to get together again.”

“There is another way,” Clem said in a voice so sharp that it scared both Veronica and Clem.

“What? What is it?” they asked him.

“Veronica, you've got to divide,” Clem said. “You've got to come apart.”

“Oh, no. No!”

“Now you put on a hundred pounds just as fast as you can, Veronica. Clem,” Clem said, “go get a dozen steaks up here for her to start on. And about thirty pounds of bone meal, whatever that is. It sounds like it might help.”

“I'll do it, I'll do it,” Clem cried, “and a couple of gallons of blood-pudding. Hey, I wonder where I can get that much blood-pudding this time of night?”

“Boys, are you serious? Do you think it'll work?” Veronica gasped. “I'll try anything. How do I start?”

“Think divisive thoughts,” Clem shouted as he started out for the steaks and bone meal and blood-pudding.

“I don't know any,” Veronica said. “Oh, yes I do! I'll think them. We'll do everything! We'll make it work.”

“You have a lot going for you, Veronica,” Clem said. “You've always been a double-dealer. And your own mother always said that you were two-faced.”

“Oh, I know it, I know it! We'll do everything. We'll make it work. We'll leave no stone unthrown.”

“You've got to become a pair, Veronica,” Clem said at one of their sessions. “Think of pairs.”

“Crocodiles and alligators, Clem,” she said, “frogs and toads. Eels and lampreys.”

“Horses and asses, Veronica,” Clem said, “elk and moose. Rabbits and hares.”

“Mushrooms and toadstools, Veronica,” Clem said. “Mosses and lichens. Butterflies and moths.”

“Camels and dromedaries, Clem,” Veronica said. “Salamanders and newts, dragonfly and damselfly.”

Say, they thought about pairs by the long ton. They thought every kind of sundering and divisive thought. They plumbed the depths of psychology and biology, and called in some of the most respected quacks of the city for advice.

No people ever tried anything harder. Veronica and Clem and Clem did everything they could think of. They gave it a month. “I'll do it or bust,” Veronica said.

And they came close, so close that you could feel it. Veronica weighed up a hundred pounds well within the month, and then coasted in on double brandies. It was done, all but the final thing.

Pay homage to her, people! She was a valiant woman!

They both said that about her after it was over with. They would admire her as long as they lived. She had given it everything.

“I'll do it or bust,” she had said.

And after they had gathered her remains together and buried her, it left a gap in their lives, in Clem's more than in Clem's, since Clem had already been deprived of her for these last several years.

And a special honor they paid her.

They set two headstones on her grave. One of them said Veronica. And the other one said Veronica.

She'd have liked that.

The Man Underneath

Stories out of the “Ocean” called modernly the Subconscious, on the Theme of Fun in Fiction.

Charles Chartel was not the most pleasant man in the world, and as the Great Zambesi he was not the greatest magician. But he was a smart man and a good magician. He had the magnetism of a faith healer, the spirit and appearance of a rooster and a deadly seriousness. He had the patter and the poise and he had learned all that was learnable.

Nor was he a mere pigeon-passer and card-caller. He had inherited, built up, bought and assembled as full a repertoire as any Magic Man in the business.

And, as each must have, he had his specialty: a simple and sound disappearing act. It was nothing really startling; he seemed to underplay it. But it was puzzling and it remained a puzzle even to those in the trade. This one prime trick equated him with the Real Masters who in general technique were a little out of his class. Actually, in the ultimate variation of it, it was the greatest trick.

He put Veronica into a box. And when he opened the box again she was gone. That is all there was to it. The same thing had been performed by dozens of others in many variations.

But Charles (the Great Zambesi) Chartel did not use any of those variations; not, certainly, the trap door — for he had once performed the trick in a wire mesh twenty feet in the air. Besides, he was a cut above the trap-door men.

After showing the empty box he would always take it apart board by board, and pass the boards around for all to handle. He would then assemble it once more into a box, clamp down the cover, unclamp it again, open it, and Veronica would get out of the box.

The Great Boffo swore that the girl never stepped into the box at all.

The Great Boffo, however, could not duplicate the trick. Nor could the Great Thaumaturgos, nor the Great Zebdo.

All of them could make girls disappear from boxes, of course, and could do it in more showy fashion. But, though it was the same thing to the audiences, it was not the same thing to themselves. Their tricks were known to each other and were obvious to any magic man. The special trick of Zambesi-Chartel was not understood and this gave him stature. The only men in the world who do not secretly believe in magic are the magicians, but there was something about the doings of the Great Zambesi that sowed doubt in them. The Great Vespo, indeed, claimed that he knew how it was done. But Vespo, though brilliant, was an old man and was given to extravagant claims.

The explanation that Charles (the Great Zambesi) Chartel gave to his audiences will not be given here. Should we repeat it, we would not be believed; we would be laughed at — and we are sensitive. We have not the magnetism of Zambesi to carry off such an outlandish claim as his even though it should be true — and it was. (Actually he said that he sent Veronica down into the Ocean and that he called her back again from that Ocean.)

However, this isn't about the disappearance of Veronica; it is about a matter quite the opposite. And the opposite of the disappearance of Veronica was the appearance of someone who differed from her as much as possible.

This came about at the Tri-State Fair when the New Arena was quite new. The crowd was spirited and the Great Zambesi was in full form. The lighting was perfect and Veronica shone like a jewel set in gold as she stepped into the box that was set up on blocks, clear of the stage. Zambesi closed the box and the crowd had the true feeling of magic about to happen.

And then, with perfect timing, Zambesi-Chartel threw back the front cover as to reveal the box — empty.

We will be hornswitched if that box was empty!

But what rolled out of the box was not Veronica. It was the most woebegone scarecrow of a clown ever seen, the saddest looking man who ever stumbled over his own two feet.

“Holy hamadryads, cramoise, where did you come from?” Zambesi-Chartel breathed without understanding his own words.

The man out of the box was a hobo from a hundred years ago. He wept and wiped his nose with his hand. He had trouble with falling pants and broken shoes and a coat whose sleeve avoided arm. The little clown was good and there was real pathos in his silent humor.

“You've got to get out of here, cnaufer,” Chartel hissed at the little man again and again. “Who are you and how did you get here? Off with you now, cathexis, you're fouling up the act.” But the little man avoided Chartel who would have killed him in all sincerity.

Finally Chartel in his despair closed the box loudly, then opened it again and brought Veronica out of it. But that didn't get rid of the little tramp. He was still cavorting about the stage and he was good. Listen, he was dressed in old black pants and a torn undershirt and one suspender and he walked about the stage. Then he had on a red sweater and a burglar's cap and black glasses. He still walked about the stage and suddenly he was splendid in evening clothes and monocle. Nobody had done that before.

He became Joe College; he became the man in the charcoal-tan suit; he became an old rowdy-dow on the loose with pearl-gray vest and yellow gloves. Then he became a hobo again — but of a different and worse vesture than before.

“Go away, cistugurium,” Veronica whispered angrily, “please go away. You're not supposed to be in the act. Who are you anyhow?”

Nobody else had ever completely changed his garb six times in a minute and a half while hobbling about the stage with his hands in his pockets. Nobody else transmuted his shoes from brown to black as he walked in them. The expression of the little man was pathetic and many eyes misted as they watched him.

Then, before the act had begun to drag, the little man wobbled over and fell flat on his face in the box. Zambesi-Chartel closed it and stood poised over it in an intensity of fear and hope. Then he opened the box again. The little man was gone.

Zambesi-Chartel took the box apart board by board and he left it apart. Well, it had been a good act, with an added element. But Charles (the Great Zambesi) Chartel didn't know how he had done it this time — or if he was the one who did it. The trick had always been to make Veronica disappear and appear; there sure hadn't been any little clown in the act before.

“Damn that cressanges anyhow,” Chartel grumbled. He was puzzled. He knew that little man — and yet he didn't.

Later that night at the Pepperpot some of the people ate and talked. There were Chartel himself and Veronica; there was Captain Carter who had the trained bears; there were the three Lemon sisters, Dolly, Molly, and Polly. Then another one was with them — for the little man was sitting there and sniffling. He hadn't been there before and he hadn't come in.

“Shall I order for you, claud?” Molly Lemon asked solicitously.

But a filled plate was already there and the little man began to eat. He grinned and he grimaced. He was wearing horn-rim glasses and then he was wearing pince-nez. He had a grin that came shyly as though he were trying it out for the first time.

“clarence is so cute,” said Dolly Lemon. “We will adopt him into our act if Chartel doesn't want him.”

There was an empty five-cigar carton on the table. The little man picked it up and it was full. Well, Chartel could duplicate that; probably you could yourself, but it would take prop and preparation. The little man pulled a stogie from the carton, puffed on it and it was lit. This also could be done; there are few tricks that cannot be duplicated.

“If you are joining the act, cletus, and it seems as though you are,” said Chartel wondering, “you will have to clean up a little.”

“Must I really?” asked curt but he obliged at once. He had become as immaculate a dandy as anyone ever saw. “Captain Carter,” he said, “I see from your pocket bulge that you are a drinking man. I ask you to share it with us.”

“It's empty an hour since,” Captain Carter muttered sadly.

“It wasn't always empty,” said cylix, the little man. “Let me see if I can restore it.”

“The last time a magician filled an empty whisky bottle for me — and it was none other than old Zambesi-Chartel here — the stuff was not potable. It was the most horrendous rock dew ever distilled.”

“This will be potable,” said celiter — and the bottle filled.

Its content was gloriously potable. It put new life into the party and all of them, except Chartel-Zambesi, had a wonderful time. And if you don't think you can have fun with a reanimated bottle of whisky and Veronica and the three Lemon sisters you must have a different and more staid definition of fun.

“But all good things must end,” said Captain Carter when the small hours were half grown.

“All good things do not have to end,” said cajetan, the little man, who had been enjoying himself on Polly Lemon's lap. “The world shriveled when your thought was first put into words. Good things can go on forever, except that — now and then — they must be temporarily adjourned. As long as we understand that partings are only temporary.”

“Oh, we understand that, cuiller,” said the three Lemon sisters. So they temporarily adjourned the party.

But later — and this was after the sun itself was up — Chartel and cyprian were finally alone.

“We will have to have an explanation,” said Chartel. “Who are you?”

“You have no idea, Charles? Did you not take me out of the box? I thought you would know. Did you not call me up?”

“I doubt I did. Do not try to hoax an old hoaxer. Where did you come from that first time? The stage was not trapped and you were not intruded with my knowledge.”

“Was I not? You told the audience how it was done. You said you called me up out of the Ocean.”

“That is my patter — but it doesn't apply to you. Dammit, ching-chi, where'd you get the Chinese robes and grow that little beard so fast? And how do you make them both change colors so neat? No, chawan, I never called any such fish as you out of the Ocean.”

“In that case I will leave, since I am here through a misunderstanding.”

“Stay a bit, cyfaill. In my patter that is the way I make the girl disappear. How could it make you appear?”

“Charles, I've heard you explain the principle dozens of times. I was not in the box. But in a little while I would be in the box. So we adjust the box to a near moment in the future and I am in the box.”

“There's a lacuna in your logic, clunis,” Chartel said. “Hey, how can you turn into a Hottentot so easily? And not into a real Hottentot either, coya — but into what I would call an old burlesque-stage idea of a Hottentot.”

“You always did have a good imagination, Charles,” said chabiari. He took up an empty glass, shook it, and it was filled again.

“You're my master there, cosmos,” said Chartel. “I couldn't duplicate that without props and you've done it three times. How?”

“By our own theory that we worked out so long ago, Charles. I shift it only a little in time and it is done. Anything that has once been full can be filled again by taking it back to the time of its plenitude.”

“chester, you have a patter that won't quit. But, if it worked — the idea would be a good one.”

“It does work, Charles. I thought we knew that. We have used it so long.”

“You talk and talk, collard,” said Chartel. “But I still do not know how you can change your whole appearance so easily and often.”

“Why, Charles, we are protean,” said coilon. “That is the sort of man we are.”

It was later the same day that Finnerty, the manager of the show, spoke to Chartel about the little man.

“Your brother from the old country has put new life into the act,” he said. “Keep him in it. We haven't mentioned money — and I am seldom the one to bring up the subject — but we can settle on a figure. Will it be payable to him or to you?”

“It will be payable to me,” said Charles (the Great Zambesi) Chartel. Confused he was, but he always knew the top and bottom side of a dollar. Finnerty and Chartel settled on a figure.

“You have been taken for my brother from the old country,” Chartel told colin a bit later, “and I can see why. I wondered whom you reminded me of. Oh, stop turning into a rooster. If you were shaved and combed — say, that was quick, contumace! the resemblance would be, is, even closer. You do look like me; you are an extremely handsome man. But I did not know that I had a brother, compuesto, and I do not know what country the old country is — since I was born on Elm Street in Springfield.”

“Perhaps ‘brother’ is a euphemism for something even closer, Charles; and the ‘old country’ may have a special meaning for us. Is it not the name for what is on the other side of your ‘Ocean’ ?”

“columkill, you are as phony as — well, metaphor fails me — you are as phony as myself,” said Charles Chartel.

Sometimes the little man was frightening in his wild actions. There wasn't a mean bone in him, and he was almost universally liked. But he did act on impulse.

For him, to think was to act. It was good that everybody liked him; if they hadn't they'd have hanged him high.

And always he would multiply things. Chartel begged for his secret.

“We could be rich, cogsworth, really rich,” Chartel would plead.

“But we are already rich, Charles. Nobody has ever had such a rich and perfected personality as we have. You still do not appreciate the greatness of our trick, Charles, though we thought about it for years before we were able to do it. It's the noblest illusion of them all. Now we are citizens of an abounding world and everything in it is ours. That is to be rich.”

“consuelo, you are a bleeding doctrinaire. I did not ask for a lecture. I only ask that you show me how to make a hundred dollars grow where one grew before. I say that is to be rich.”

“I've shown you a hundred times, Charles, and you look for more than is in it. You take a thin old wallet that once knew fatness. You restore it to its old state, empty it and restore it again, and so you accumulate. But why do you want money?”

“It is just that I have a passion for collecting it, courlis.”

“Collecting we can understand, but the true collector will have no desire for duplicates. Understandably we might want a bill of each size — a one, a five, a ten, a fifty — but we avoid that which once we prized — the ten-thousand dollar bill. The avid people have spoiled it for us. But you have not the true collector's spirit, Charles.”

“I have the true money-collector's spirit, clendon. Why cannot I duplicate your feats in this?”

“The only reason I can figure, Charles, is that you're just too duck-knuckled dumb — and it hurts me to say that about one of ourselves.”

But Zambesi-Chartel got a new set of ideas when he saw the trick that cormorant did with an old hat. It was at a rummage sale at which charleroi looked in out of curiosity — he was curious about everything.

“What a pixie must have worn this!” he exclaimed. “What a pixie!”

c held the hat in his hands. And then he held the head in his hands. It was something like a pixie head and it was attached to the body of a young lady. cisailles kissed the young lady uncommonly about the temporal regions and pressed her to his sternum — for to him impulse was the same as action. And she squealed.

“Not that I mind — but you did startle me,” she chimed. “Who are you? Who, may I ask, am I? And how in pigeon-toed perdition did I get here?”

“You are a pixie, young lady,” said clough, “and as such you are likely to turn up anywhere. I had your hat, so what more natural than that I should call you up to fill it.”

“I am only a part-time pixie, cartier, but I am a full-time housewife. Supper will burn. How do I get back?”

“You already are,” said callimachus. And she was. Or at least she was no longer there.

And that was the beginning of the trouble; not for c, not for the young pixie lady, but it was the beginning of the trouble for Charles (Great Zambesi) Chartel.

Charles knew how it was done now. One cannot continue doing a basic trick in the presence of such a sharpy as Charles Chartel without his learning it. And once he had learned how it was done there was no stopping him.

Charles Chartel was not a bad man underneath, but on the surface he was a rotter. The natural complement of healthy greed that is in every man began to burgeon unnaturally in him. The hard core of meanness spread through his whole being. The arrogance of the rooster became that of the tyrant and envy and revenge burned in him with sulphurous fire.

Chartel now had the key to total wealth, a key that would not only unlock all doors for him, but lock them against others. He set out to get control of the show. To do this he had to break Finnerty, the owner-manager, and buy him out after breaking him.

Business had been good and every night Finnerty had a full cash box. But before a thing is full, it is half full. And before that, it is a quarter full. Every night, just as Finnerty went to count the take, Zambesi-Chartel would play a trick on that box. And it would be only a quarter full. That was not enough to cover expenses.

Finnerty had never been a saving man. He had always trod the narrow green edge between solvency and disaster. And in two weeks he was broke.

Finnerty sold the show and the bookings to Chartel for ten thousand dollars. It made a nice wad in his pocket when he walked away from the show that was no longer his.

But the meanness was running like a tide in Chartel and he wouldn't let it go at that. He emptied the wallet of Finnerty again, taking it back ten minutes in time. Finnerty felt a certain lightness, and he knew what it was. But he kept on walking.

“It's lucky he left me with my pants,” said Finn, “if he has. I'm afraid to look down.”

A cloud came over the happy little family that was the show. Veronica felt herself abused and it wasn't imagination. The three Lemon sisters shivered to the chill of a harsh master. So did Carucchi the singer, and Captain Carter and his bears. And c, the little man who was the unwitting cause of it all, took to staying out of the way of the rampaging Chartel.

For Zambesi-Chartel was now avid for praise, for money, for all manner of meanness. He accumulated coin by every variation of the new trick he had learned. He robbed by it, he burgled the easy way. It is an awful and sickening thing to see a good man grow rich and respected.

“But underneath he isn't a bad man at all,” Veronica moaned. “Really he isn't.”

“No, underneath he is a fine man,” said c, the little man of impulse. “Who should know better than I?”

“Why, what do you mean, chadwick dear?” Veronica asked him.

“The same as you. Charles is only bad on the surface. Underneath he's a fine fellow.”

Well, that may have been. But on the surface, Zambesi-Chartel sure did get rough. He demeaned the dignity of his fellow humans and made them eat dirt by the ton. He went on adrenalin drunks and thrived on the hatred in his own bloodstream. He became a martinet, a propagandist for the Hoop act. He registered Democrat. He switched from perfectos to panatelas and from honest whisky sours to perfidious martinis. He developed a snigger and horselaugh that wilted pigweeds.

“Oh, chiot,” said Veronica, “we must do something to save him from himself. We are all involved with him.”

“Who should know better than I?” conchylatus asked sadly.

Chartel began to drink tea. He started to call a napkin a serviette and to omit every single syllable in “extraordinary.” He switched allegiance from the noble National League to the sniveling American. He defrauded his laborers of their wages, he used scent, he ate vegetarian lunches, he read Walter Lippmann posthumously, he switched from Gumbo Hair Oil to Brilliantine. Once a character begins to deteriorate it goes all the way and in every detail.

Chartel had the Green Sickness, the inordinate love of money. He obtained the stuff, first by all means fair and foul, then by foul means only. But obtain it he did and it made a sniveling devil out of him.

“But the man underneath isn't bad at all,” Veronica insisted.

“Who should know better than I?” caoine said.

The Grand Canyon began with a prairie dog burrow and once it was started there was no stopping it. The downfall of Zambesi-Chartel began over a nickel and then the whole apparatus came down: his wealth, real and phantom — his reputation — the whole blamed complex of the man.

It started with a fistfight he had with a blind newsdealer over a nickel. It ended with Chartel in jail, indicted, despised, shamed, despondent.

Moreover, public feeling was strongly against him.

Chartel was up on more than twenty counts of theft and pilfering and the nickel stolen from the blind man was by no means the least of them. He was up on a dozen counts of wage fraud. He was charged with multiplex pickpocketing “by device not understood.” They had him on faked bill of sale, dishonest conveyance, simple and compounded larceny, possession of stolen goods, barratry.

“Looks like we have you on everything but chicken-stealing,” the judge said at the hearing.

“We have him on that, too,” said the bailiff. “Five counts of it.”

“You would gag a gannet and make a buzzard belch,” said the judge. “I'd crop your ears if that law still obtained. And if we can find a capital offense in all this offensiveness I'll have your head. It is hard to believe that you were once human.”

Chartel was shamed and sick of heart and felt himself friendless. That night he attempted to hang himself in his cell. The attempt failed for reasons that are not clear but not for any lack of effort on his part. It is worthy of note that the only persons who ever attempt to take their own lives are rather serious persons.

“We will have to go to him at once, cristophe,” said Veronica. “We must show him that we still love him. He'd sicken a jackal the way he's behaving, but he isn't really like that. The man underneath — ”

“Hush, Veronica, you embarrass me when you talk like that,” said ciabhach. “I know what a prince is the man underneath.”

Little c went to visit the Great Zambesi-Chartel in his cell. “It is time we had a talk,” he said.

“No, no, it's too late for talk,” said Charles Chartel.

“You have disgraced us both, Charles,” said celach. “It goes very deeply when it touches me.”

“I never even knew who you were, little c. You are protean and you are not at all plausible.”

“You called me up and you still don't know who I am, Charles? But this was our finest trick, our greatest illusion on which we worked subconsciously for years. We are our own masterpiece, Charles. And you didn't recognize it when it happened. You are the Magic Man but I am the Magic Man run wild. Aye, Charles, he's best when he runs wild.”

“Tell me, cicerone, who are you? Who am I?” Chartel begged. “What is my difficulty?”

“Our difficulty, Charles, is that one of us became too serious,” carnefice tried to explain. “To be serious is the only capital crime. For that, one of us will have to die — but it isn't as though it were a serious matter. Every man is at least two men, but ordinarily the two are not at the same time bodied and apparent. Now you have marred our greatest trick — but it was fun while it lasted.”

Little c signaled to Veronica and she came down the corridor with a bunch of boards under her arm. She was admitted to the cell by the puzzled jailor.

“One of us will have to leave forever,” coquelicot told Charles Chartel. “It isn't right for both of us to be around.”

“Ah, I will be sorry to see you go, chandos,” said Chartel. “But who are you? I never could remember your name properly and there is something weird about that. You change forever in appearance and name. Who are you, little c?”

“Only that. Just little c. Or shall we say sub-c? But we are too clever to be hounded into a hole like this, Charles. Remember! We were our own greatest trick, even if it failed.”

“What must we do now?” Chartel asked dully.

“A simple transference,” cogne said. He was building the box board by board.

“I'm not a bad man underneath,” Chartel sniveled. “I'm misunderstood.”

“No, we're a fine man underneath, Charles. I am the man underneath,” said ciud. “Get in the box.”

“I get in? I am Charles (the Great Zambesi) Chartel. You are only little c, sub-c, an aspect of myself. I will not get into the box!”

“Get in, Charles,” said cistercium. “It was a mix-up from the beginning. You were never meant to see the light of day. The wrong one of us has been running loose.”

“I'll fight, I'll claw, I'll rant!”

“That's what a healthy subconscious is supposed to do,” cludok said. “Get in!”

“It's murder! I won't go! It's oblivion!”

“No such thing, Charles. It isn't as though we weren't the same person. I'll still be here.”

Then little c and Veronica shoved the Great Zambesi Charles Chartel down into the box and closed the lid. In doing so, little c became himself the Great Zambesi. For, when he opened the box again, it was empty. And he took it apart board by board. The jailor said that he had to have his prisoner and Veronica gave him the boards.

“There, there, doll,” she said. “Make one out of them. Try real hard.”

And Veronica and the Great Zambesi left that place.

We won't say that Zambesi wasn't the greatest magician in the world. He may have become the greatest, after he began to treat it lightly. People, he was good! There was never any act with such variety and fun in it. After his strange mid-life hiatus he achieved new heights.

“And I'm certainly glad you overcame your personality difficulties,” the loving Veronica told him later. “For a while there — whoof! But I always knew you were a fine man underneath.”

Author's Commentary

Configuration Of The North Shore

The patient was named John Miller.

The analyst was named Robert Rousse.

Two men.

The room was cluttered with lighting, testing, and recording equipment. It had several sets of furniture that conferred together in small groups, sodas, easy chairs, business chairs, desks, couches, coffee tables, and two small bars. There were books, and there was a shadow booth. The pictures on the walls were of widely different sorts.

One setting. Keep it simple, and be not distracted by indifferent details.

“I have let my business go down,” Miller said. “My wife says that I have let her down. My sons say that I have turned into a sleepy stranger. Everybody agrees that I've lost all ambition and judgment. And yet I do have a stirring ambition. I am not able, however, to put it into words.”

“We'll put it into words, Miller, either yours or mine,” Rousse said. “Slip up on it right now! Quickly, what is the stirring ambition?”

“To visit the Northern Shore, and to make the visit stick.”

“How does one get to this Northern Shore, Miller?”

“That's the problem. I can locate it only very broadly on the globe. Sometimes it seems that it should be on the eastern tip of New Guinea, going north from the D'Entrecasteaux Islands and bypassing Trobriand; again I feel that it is off in the Molucca Passage toward Talaud; and again it should be a little further south, coming north out of the Banda Sea by one of the straats. But I have been in all those waters without finding any clue to it. And the maps show unacceptable land or open sea wherever I try to set it.”

“How long?”

“About twenty-five years.”

“All in what we might call the Other East Indies and dating from your own time in that part of the world, in World War II. When did it become critical?”

“It was always critical, but I worked around it. I built up my business and my family and led a pleasant and interesting life. I was able to relegate the Thing to my normal sleeping hours. Now I slow down a little and have less energy. I have trouble keeping both sets of things going.”

“Can you trace the impression of the North Shore to anything? Transfigured early memory of some striking sea view? Artform-triggered intuitions? Can you trace any roots to the evocative dream?”

“I had an inland childhood, not even a striking lakeview in it. And yet the approach to the North Shore is always by a way recognized from early childhood. I don't believe I have any intuition at all, nor any sense of art forms. It is simply a continuing dream that brings me almost to it. I am rounding a point, and the North Shore will be just beyond that point. Or I have left ship and wade through the shallows; and then I have only a narrow (but eerie) neck of land to traverse to reach the North Shore. Or I am, perhaps, on the North Shore itself and going through fog to the place of importance, and I will have the whole adventure as soon as the fog clears a little; but it doesn't. I've been on the verge of discovering it all a thousand times.”

“All right. Lie down and go to dreaming, Miller. We will try to get you past that verge. Dream, and we record it.”

“It isn't that easy, Rousse. There's always preliminaries to be gone through. First there is a setting and sound and smell of place near the surf and a tide booming. This watery background then grows fainter; but it remains behind it all. And then there is a little anteroom dream, a watery dream that is not the main one. The precursor dream comes and goes, sharp and clear, and it has its own slanted pleasure. And only then am I able to take up the journey to the North Shore.”

“All right, Miller, we will observe the amenities. Dream your dreams in the proper order. Lie easy there. Now the shot. The records and the shadow booth are waiting.”

Shadow booths reproduced dreams in all dimensions and senses, so much so that often a patient on seeing a playback of his own dream was startled to find that an impression, which he would have said could in no way be expressed, was quite well expressed in shadow or color or movement or sound or odor. The shadow booth of the analyst Rousse was more than a basic booth, as he had incorporated nearly all of his own notions into it. It reproduced the dreams of his patients very well, though to some extent through his own eyes and presuppositions.

First was given the basic, and Rousse realized that for his patient Miller this was New Guinea, and more particularly Black Papua, the stark mountain land full of somber spooky people. It was night; the area seemed to be about fifty yards from the surf, but every boom and sigh was audible. And there was something else: the tide was booming underground; the ocean permeated the land. Guinea, the mountain that is an island, was a mountain full of water. The roots of the mountain move and sigh; the great boulders squeak when the hammer of the tide hits them; and on the inside of the cliffs the water level rises. There is a feeling of being on a very large ship, a ship a thousand miles long.

“He has captured the Earth-Basic well,” the analyst Rousse said. Then the basic faded back a bit, and the precursor dream began.

It was a flat-bottomed rowboat from some old camping trip. He was lying on his back in the bottom of the boat, and it was roped to a stump or tree and was rocking just a little in the current. And here was another mountain full of water, but an island one of much less bulk, and the ice-cold springs ran out of its sides and down its piney shoulders to the shingle of the creek bank. Fish jumped in the dark, and blacksnakes slid down the hill to drink. Bullfrogs echoed, and hoot owls made themselves known; and far away dogs and men were out possuming, with the baying carrying over the miles. Then the boy remembered what he must do, and in his dream he unroped the boat and shoved into the stream and ran his trout line. From every hook he took a fish as long as his arm till the boat was full and nearly swamped.

And from the last hook of all, he took a turtle as big as a wagon wheel. He would not have been able to get it into the boat had not the turtle helped by throwing a booted leg over the side and heaving himself in. For by this time it was not so much like a turtle but more like someone the boy knew. Then he talked for a while with the turtle that was not exactly a turtle anymore. The turtle had a sack of Bull Durham and the boy had papers, so they rolled and smoked and watched the night clouds slide overhead. One of them was named Thinesta and one was named Shonge, which chased the first and would soon have him treed or caught, if they did not run into the mountain or the moon first.

“Boy, this is the life!” said the turtle. “Boy this is the life!” said the boy.

“He's a poet,” said Rousse, and this puzzled him. He knew himself to be a cultured man, and he knew that Miller wasn't.

Then the little precursor dream slid away, and there began the torturous and exhilarating journey to the North Shore. It was coming around a point in an old windjammer on which all the men were dead except the dreamer. The dead men were grinning and were happy enough in their own way. They had lashed themselves to rails and davits and such before they had died. “They didn't want it bad enough,” the dreamer said, “but they won't mind me going ahead with it.” But the point was devilish hard to turn. There came on wind and driving spray so that the ship suffered. There was only ashen light as of false dawn. There was great strain. The dreamer struggled, and Rousse (caught up in the emotion of it) became quite involved and would have been in despair if it were not for the ultimate hope that took hold of him.

A porpoise whistled loudly, and at that moment they rounded the point. But it was a false point, and the true point was still up ahead. Yet the goal was now more exciting than ever. Yet both the current and the wind were against them. Rousse was a practical man. “We will not make it tonight,” he said. “We had better heave to in this little cove and hold onto what advantage we have gained. We can make it the next time from here.”

“Aye, we'll tie up in the little cove,” one of the dead men said, “we'll make it on the next sortie.”

“We will make it now,” the dreamer swore. He jammed the windjammer and refused to give up.

It was very long and painful, and they did not make it that night, or that afternoon in the analyst's office. When the dream finally broke, both Miller and Rousse were trembling with the effort and the high hope was set again into the future.

“That's it,” Miller said. “Sometimes I come closer. There is something in it that makes it worthwhile. I have to get there.”

“We should have tied up in the cove,” Rousse said. “We'll have blown backwards some ways, but it can't be helped. I seem to be a little too much in empathy with this thing, Miller. I can see how it is quite real to you. Analysis, as you may not know, has analogs in many of the sciences. In Moral Theology, which I count a science, the analog is Ultimate Compensation. I am sure that I can help you. I have already helped you, Miller. Tomorrow we will go much further with it.”

The tomorrow session began very much the same. It was Guinea again, the Earth Basic, the Mountain Spook Land, the Fundament permeated with Chaos which is the Sea. It boomed and sighed and trembled to indicate that there are black and sea-green spirits in the basic itself. Then the basic adjusted itself into the background, and the precursor dream slid in.

The boy, the dreamer was in a canoe. It was night, but the park lights were on, and the lights of the restaurants and little beer gardens along the way. The girl was with him in a cave; she had green eyes and a pleasantly crooked mouth. Well, it was San Antonio on the little river that runs through the parkways and under the bridges. Then they were beyond the parkway and out of town. There were live-oak trees overhanging the water, and beards of Spanish moss dragged the surface as though they were drifting through a cloud made up of gossamer and strands of old burlap.

“We've come a thousand miles,” the girl said, “and it costs a dollar a mile for the canoe. If you don't have that much money we'll have to keep the canoe; the man won't take it back unless we pay him.”

“I have the money, but we might want to save it to buy breakfast when we cross the Mississippi,” the boy said. The girl's name was Ginger, and she strummed on a stringed instrument that was spheroid; it revolved as she played and changed colors like a jukebox. The end of the canoe paddle shone like a star and left streaks of cosmic dust on the night water as the boy dipped it.

They crossed the Mississippi, and were in a world that smelled of wet sweet clover and very young catfish. The boy threw away the paddle and kissed Ginger. It felt as though she were turning him inside out, drawing him into her completely. And suddenly she bit him hard and deep with terrible teeth, and he could smell the blood running down his face when he pushed her away. He pushed her out of the canoe and she sank down and down. The underwater was filled with green light and he watched her as she sank. She waved to him and called up in a burst of bubbles. “That's all right. I was tired of the canoe anyhow. I'll walk back.”

“Damn you, Ginger, why didn't you tell me you weren't people?” the dreamer asked.

“It is ritual, it is ordering, the little precursor dreams that he makes,” Rousse said.

Then the precursor dream glided away like the canoe itself, and the main thing gathered once more to mount the big effort. It was toward the North Shore once more, but not in a windjammer. It was in a high hooting steamship that rode with nine other ships in splendid array through one of the straats out of what, in concession to the world, they had let be called the Banda Sea.

“We come to the edge of the world now,” the dreamer said, “and only I will know the way here.”

“It is not the edge of the world,” one of the seamen said. “See, here is the map, and here we are on it. As you can see, it is a long way to the edge of the world.”

“The map is wrong,” the dreamer said, “let me fix it.” He tore the map in two. “Look now,” the dreamer pointed, “are we not now at the edge of the world?” All saw that they were; whereupon all the seamen began to jump off the ship, and tried to swim back to safety. And the other ships of the array, one by one, upended themselves and plunged into the abyss at the edge of the water. This really was the edge of the world, and the waters rushed over it.

But the dreamer knew the secret of this place, and he had faith. Just in time he saw it, right where he knew it must be, a narrow wedge of high water extending beyond the edge of the world. The ship sailed out on this narrow wedge, very precariously. “For the love of God be careful!” Rousse gasped. “Oh hell. I'm becoming too involved in a patient's dream.” Well, it was a pretty nervous go there. So narrow was the wedge that the ship seemed to be riding on nothing; and on both sides was bottomless space and the sound of water rushing into it and falling forever. The sky had also ended — it does not extend beyond the world. There was no light, but only ashen darkness. And the heavy wind came up from below on both sides.

Nevertheless, the dreamer continued on and on until the wedge became too narrow to balance the ship. “I will get out and walk,” the dreamer said, and he did. The ship upended itself and plunged down into bottomless space; and the dreamer was walking, as it were, on a rope of water, narrower than his boots, narrow as a rope indeed. It was, moreover, very slippery, and the sense of depth below was sickening. Even Rousse trembled and broke into cold sweat from the surrogate danger of it.

But the dreamer still knew the secret. He saw, far ahead, where the sky began again, and there is no sky over a void. And after continuing some further distance over the dangerous way, he saw where the land began again, a true land mass looming up ahead.

What was dimly seen, of course, was the back side of the land mass, and a stranger coming onto it would not guess its importance. But the dreamer knew that one had only to reach it and turn the point to be on the North Shore itself.

The excitement of the thing to come communicated itself, and at that very moment the watery rope widened to a path. It was still slippery and dangerous, it still had on each side of it depths so deep that a thousand miles would be only an inch. And then for the first time the dreamer realized the fearsomeness of the thing he was doing. “But I always knew I could walk on water if the thing got bad enough,” he said. It was a tricky path, but it was a path that a man could walk on.

“Keep on! Keep on!” Rousse shouted. “We're almost there!”

“There's a break in the path,” said Miller the dreamer, and there was. It wasn't a hundred feet from the land mass, it wasn't a thousand feet to the turning of the point and the arrival at the North Shore itself. But there was a total break. Opposite them, on the dim land mass, was an emperor penguin.

“You will have to wait till we get it fixed,” the penguin said. “My brothers have gone to get more water to fix it with. It will be tomorrow before we get it fixed.”

“I'll wait,” the dreamer shouted. But Rousse saw something that the dreamer did not see, that nobody else had ever seen before. He looked at the shape of the new sky that is always above the world and is not above the abyss. From the configuration of the sky he read the Configuration of the Northern Shore. He gasped with unbelief. Then the dream broke.

“It may be only the quest-in-itself motif,” Rousse lied, trying to control himself and bring his breathing back to normal. “And then, there might, indeed, be something at the end of it. I told you, Miller, that analysis has its parallels in other sciences. Well it can borrow devices from them also. We will borrow the second-stage-platform from the science of rocketry.”

“You've turned into a sly man, Rousse,” Miller said. “What's taken hold of you suddenly? What is it that you are not saying?”

“What I am saying, Miller, is that we will use it tomorrow. When the dream has reached its crest and just before it breaks up, we'll cut in a second stage booster. I've done it before with lesser dreams. We are going to see this thing to the end tomorrow.”

“All right.”

“It will take some special rigging,” Rousse told himself when Miller was gone. “And I'll have to gather a fair amount of information and shape it up. But it will be worth it. I am thinking of the second stage shot in another sense, and I might be able to pull it off. This isn't the quest-in-itself at all. I've seen plenty of them. I've seen the false a thousand times. Let me not fumble the real! This is the Ultimate Arrival Nexus that takes a man clean out of himself. It is the Compensation. If it were not achieved in one life in a million, then none of the other lives would have been worthwhile. Somebody has to win to keep the gamble going. There has to be a grand prize behind it all. I've seen the shape of it in that second sky. I'm the one to win it.”

Then Rousse busied himself against the following day. He managed some special rigging. He gathered a mass of information and shaped it up. He incorporated these things into a shadow booth. He canceled a number of appointments. He was arranging that he could take some time off, a day, a month, a year, a lifetime if necessary.

The tomorrow session began very much the same, except for some doubts on the part of the patient Miller. “I said it yesterday, and I say it again,” Miller grumbled. “You've turned sly on me, man. What is it?”

“All analysts are sly, Miller, it's the name of our trade. Get with it now. I promise that we will get you past the verge today. We are going to see this dream through to its end.”

There was the Earth Basic again. There was the Mountain booming full of water, the groaning of the rocks, and the constant adjusting and readjusting of the world on its uneasy foundation. There was the salt spray, the salt of the earth that leavens the lump. There were the crabs hanging onto the wet edge of the world.

Then the Basic muted itself, and the precursor dream slid in, the ritual fish.

It was a rendezvous of ships and boats in an immensity of green islands scattered in a purple-blue sea. It was a staging area for both ships and islands; thence they would travel in convoys to their proper positions, but here they were all in a jumble. There were LST's and Jay Boats, cargo ships and little packets. There were old sailing clippers with topgallants and moonscrapers full of wind, though they were at anchor. There was much moving around, and it was easy to step from the ships to the little green islands (if they were islands, some of them no more than rugs of floating moss, but they did not sink) and back onto the ships. There were sailors and seamen and pirates shooting craps together on the little islands. Bluejackets and bandits would keep jumping from the ships down to join the games, and then others would leave them and hop onto other islands.

Piles of money of rainbow colors and of all sizes were everywhere. There were pesos and pesetas and pesarones. There were crowns and coronets and rixdollars. There were gold certificates that read “Redeemable only at Joe's Marine Bar Panama City.” There were guilders with the Queen's picture on them, and half-guilders with the Jack's picture on them. There were round coins with square holes in them, and square coins with round holes. There was stage money and invasion money, and comic money from the Empires of Texas and Louisiana. And there were bales of real frogskins, green and sticky, which were also current.

“Commodore,” one of the pirates said, “get that boat out of the way or I'll ram it down your throat.”

“I don't have any boat,” said the dreamer. “I'm not a commodore; I'm an army sergeant; I'm supposed to guard this box for the lieutenant.” Oh hell, he didn't even have a box. What had happened to the box? “Commodore,” said the pirate, “get that boat out of the way or I'll cut off your feet.”

He did cut off his feet. And this worried the boy, the dreamer, since he did not know whether it was in the line of duty or if he would be paid for his feet. “I don't know which boat you mean,” he told the pirate. “Tell me which boat you mean and I'll try to move it.”

“Commodore,” the pirate said, “move this boat or I'll cut your hands off.”

“This isn't getting us anywhere,” the dreamer said, “tell me which boat you want moved.”

“If you don't know your own boat by now, I ought to slit your gullet,” the pirate said. It was harder to breathe after that, and the boy worried more. “Sir, you're not even a pirate in my own outfit. You ought to get one of the sailors to move the boat for you. I'm an army sergeant and I don't even know how to move a boat.”

The pirate pushed him down in a grave on one of the green islands and covered him up. He was dead now and it scared him. This was not at all like he thought it would be. But the green dirt was transparent and he could still see the salty dogs playing cards and shooting craps all around him.

“If that boat isn't moved,” the pirate said, “you're going to be in real trouble.”

“Oh, let him alone,” one of the dice players said. So he let him alone.

“It's ritual sacrifice he offers,” Rousse said, “He brings the finest gifts he can make every time. I will have to select a top one from the files for my own Precursor.”

Then it was toward the North Shore again as the Precursor dream faded.

It was with a big motor launch now, as big as a yacht, half as big as a ship. The craft was very fast when called on to be, for it was going through passes that weren't there all the time. Here was a seacliff, solid and without a break. But to one who knows the secret there is a way through. Taken at morning half-light and from a certain angle there was a passage through. The launch made it, but barely. It was a very close thing, and the cliffs grouped together again behind it. And there behind was the other face of the seacliff, solid and sheer. But the ocean ahead was different, for they had broken with the map and with convention in finding a passage where there was none. There were now great groupings of islands and almost-islands. But some of them were merely sargasso-type weed islands, floating clumps; and some of them were only floating heaps of pumice and ash from a volcano that was now erupting.

How to tell the true island from the false? The dreamer threw rocks at all the islands. If the islands were of weed or pumice or ash they would give but a dull sound. But if they were real land they would give a solid ringing sound to the thrown rock. Most of them were false islands, but now one rang like iron.

“It is a true island,” said the dreamer, “it is named Pulo Bakal.” And after the launch had gone a great way through the conglomerate, one of the islands rang like solid wood to the thrown rock. “It is a true island,” said the dreamer, “it is named Pulo Kaparangan.”

And finally there was a land that rang like gold, or almost like it (like cracked gold really) to the thrown rock. “It is true land, I think it is,” said the dreamer. “It is named Pulo Ginto. I think it is. It is the land itself, and its North Shore should be the Shore Itself. But it is spoiled this day. The sound was cracked. I don't want it as much as I thought I did. It's been tampered with.”

“This is it,” Rousse urged the dreamer. “Quickly now, right around the point and you are there. We can make it this time.”

“No, there's something wrong with it. I don't want it the way it is. I'll just wake up and try it some other time.”

“Second stage called for,” Rousse cried. He did certain things with electrodes and with a needle into Miller's left rump, and sent him reeling back into the dream. “We'll make it,” Rousse encouraged. “We're there. It's everything you've sought.”

“No, no, the light's all wrong. The sound was cracked. What are we coming to — oh no no, it's ruined, it's ruined forever. You robbed me of it.”

What they came to was that little canal off the River and into the Sixth Street Slip to the little wharf where barges used to tie up by the Consolidated Warehouse. And it was there that Miller stormed angrily onto the rotten wooden wharf, past the old warehouse, up the hill three blocks and past his own apartment house, to the left three blocks and up into the analyst's office, and there the dream and reality came together.

“You've robbed me, you filthy fool,” Miller sputtered, waking up in a blathering anger. “You've spoiled it forever. I'll not go back to it. It isn't there anymore. What a crass thing to do.”

“Easy, easy, Miller. You're cured now, you know. You can enter into your own full life again. Have you never heard the most beautiful parable ever, about the boy who went around the world in search of the strangest thing of all, and came to his own home in the end, and it so transfigured that he hardly knew it?”

“It's a lie, is what it is. Oh, you've cured me, and you get your fee. And slyness is the name of your game. May somebody someday rob you of the ultimate thing!”

“I hope not, Miller.”

Rousse had been making his preparations for a full twenty-four hours. He had cancelled appointments and phased out and transferred patients. He would not be available to anyone for some time, he did not know for how long a time.

He had a hideout, an isolated point on a wind-ruffled lake. He needed no instrumentation. He believed he knew the direct way into it.

“It's the real thing,” he told himself. “I've seen the shape of it, accidentally in the dream sky that hung over it. Billions of people have been on the earth, and not a dozen have been to it; and not one would bother to put it into words. ‘I have seen such things — ’ said Aquinas. ‘I have seen such things — ’ said John of the Cross. ‘I have seen such things — ’ said Plato. And they all lived out the rest of their lives in a glorious daze.

“It is too good for a peasant like Miller. I'll grab it for myself.”

It came easy. An old leather couch is as good a craft as any to go there. First the Earth Basic and the Permeating Ocean, that came natural on the wind-ruffled point of the lake. Then the ritual offering, the Precursor Dream. Rousse had thrown a number of things into this: a tonal piece by Gideon Styles, an old seascape by Grobin that had a comic and dreamlike quality, Lyall's curious sculpture “Moon Crabs,” a funny sea tale by McVey and a poignant one by Gironella. It was pretty good. Rousse understood this dream business.

Then the Precursor Dream was allowed to fade back. And it was off toward the North Shore by a man in the first craft ever dreamed up, by a man who knew just what he wanted, “The Thing Itself,” by a man who would give all the days of his life to arrive at it.

Rousse understood the approaches and the shoals now; he had studied them thoroughly. He knew that, however different they had seemed each time in the dreams of Miller, they were always essentially the same. He took the land right at the first rounding of the point, leaping clear and letting his launch smash on the rocks.

“There will be no going back now,” he said, “it was the going back that always worried Miller, that caused him to fail.” The cliffs here appeared forbidding, but Rousse had seen again and again the little notch in the high purple of them, the path over. He followed the path with high excitement and cleared the crest.

“Here Basho walked, here Aquin, here John de Yepes,” he proclaimed, and he came down toward the North Shore itself, with the fog over it beginning to lift.

“You be false captain with a stolen launch,” said a small leviathan offshore.

“No, no, I dreamed the launch myself,” Rousse maintained. “I'll not be stopped.”

“I will not stop you,” said the small leviathan. “The launch is smashed, and none but I know that you are false captain.”

Why, it was clearing now! The land began to leap out in its richness, and somewhere ahead was a glorious throng. In the throat of a pass was a monokeros, sleek and brindled.

“None passes here and lives,” said the monokeros.

“I pass,” said Rousse.

He passed through, and there was a small moan behind him.

“What was that?” he asked.

“You died,” said the monokeros.

“Oh, so I'm dead on my couch, am I? It won't matter. I hadn't wanted to go back.”

He went forward over the ensorcelled and pinnacled land, hearing the rakish and happy throng somewhere ahead.

“I must not lose my way now,” said Rousse. And there was a stele, standing up and telling him the way with happy carved words.

Rousse read it, and he entered the shore itself.

And all may read and enter.

The stele, the final marker, was headed:

Which None May Read and Return

And the words on it — 

And the words — 

And the words — 

Let go! You're holding on! You're afraid! Read it and take it. It is not blank!

It's carved clear and bright.

Read it and enter.

You're afraid.

Author's Commentary

Eurema's Dam

He was about the last of them.

What? The last of the great individualists? The last of the true creative geniuses of the century? The last of the sheer precursors?

No. No. He was the last of the dolts.

Kids were being born smarter all the time when he came along, and they would be so forever more. He was about the last dumb kid ever born.

Even his mother had to admit that Albert was a slow child. What else can you call a boy who doesn't begin to talk till he is four years old, who won't learn to handle a spoon till he is six, who can't operate a doorknob till he is eight? What else can you say about one who put his shoes on the wrong feet and walked in pain? And who had to be told to close his mouth after yawning?

Some things would always be beyond him — like whether it was the big hand or the little hand of the clock that told the hours. But this wasn't something serious. He never did care what time it was.

When, about the middle of his ninth year, Albert made a breakthrough at telling his right hand from his left, he did it by the most ridiculous set of mnemonics ever put together. It had to do with the way a dog turns around before lying down, the direction of whirlpools and whirlwinds, the side a cow is milked from and a horse is mounted from, the direction of twist of oak and sycamore leaves, the maze patterns of rock moss and of tree moss, the cleavage of limestone, the direction of a hawk's wheeling, of a shrike's hunting, and of a snake's coiling (remembering that the mountain boomer is an exception, and that it isn't a true snake), the lay of cedar fronds and of balsam fronds, the twist of a hole dug by a skunk and by a badger (remembering pungently that skunks sometimes use old badger holes). Well, Albert finally learned to remember which was right and which was left, but an observant boy would have learned his right hand from his left without all that nonsense.

Albert never learned to write a readable hand. To get by in school he cheated. From a bicycle speedometer, a midget motor, tiny eccentric cams, and batteries stolen from his grandfather's hearing aid, Albert made a machine to write for him. It was small as a doodlebug and fitted onto a pen or pencil so that Albert could conceal it with his fingers. It formed the letters beautifully as Albert had set the cams to follow a copybook model. He triggered the different letters with keys no bigger than whiskers. Sure it was crooked, but what else can you do when you're too dumb to learn how to write passably?

Albert couldn't figure at all. He had to make another machine to figure for him. It was a palm-of-the-hand thing that would add and subtract and multiply and divide. The next year when he was in the ninth grade they gave him algebra, and he had to devise a flipper to go on the end of his gadget to work quadratic and simultaneous equations. If it weren't for such cheating Albert wouldn't have gotten any marks at all in school.

He had another difficulty when he came to his fifteenth year. People, that is an understatement. There should be a stronger word than “difficulty” for it. Albert was afraid of girls.

What to do?

“I will build me a machine that is not afraid of girls,” Albert said. He set to work on it. He had it nearly finished when a thought came to him: “But no machine is afraid of girls. How will this help me?”

His logic was at fault and analogy broke down. He did what he always did. He cheated.

He took the programming rollers out of an old player piano in the attic, found a gear case that would serve, used magnetized sheets instead of perforated music rolls, fed a copy of Wormwood's Logic into the matrix, and he had a logic machine that would answer questions.

“What's the matter with me that I'm afraid of girls?” Albert asked his logic machine.

“Nothing the matter with you,” the logic machine told him. “It's logical to be afraid of girls. They seem pretty spooky to me too.”

“But what can I do about it?”

“Wait for time and circumstances. They sure are slow. Unless you want to cheat — ”

“Yes, yes, what then?”

“Build a machine that looks just like you, Albert, and talks just like you. Only make it smarter than you are, and not bashful. And, ah, Albert, there's a special thing you'd better put into it in case things go wrong. I'll whisper it to you. It's dangerous.”

So Albert made Little Danny, a dummy who looked like him and talked like him, only he was smarter and not bashful. He filled Little Danny with quips from Mad Magazine and from Quip, and then they were set.

Albert and Little Danny went to call on Alice.

“Why, he's wonderful,” Alice said. “Why can't you be like that, Albert? Aren't you wonderful, Little Danny. Why do you have to be so stupid, Albert, when Little Danny is so wonderful?”

“I, uh, uh, I don't know,” Albert said. “Uh, uh, uh.”

“He sounds like a fish with the hiccups,” Little Danny said.

“You do, Albert, really you do!” Alice screamed. “Why can't you say smart things like Little Danny does, Albert? Why are you so stupid?”

This wasn't working out very well, but Albert kept on with it. He programmed Little Danny to play the ukulele and to sing. He wished that he could program himself to do it. Alice loved everything about Little Danny, but she paid no attention to Albert. And one day Albert had had enough.

“Wha-wha-what do we need with this dummy?” Albert asked. “I just made him to am — to amu — to make you laugh. Let's go off and leave him.”

“Go off with you, Albert?” Alice asked. “But you're so stupid. I tell you what. Let's you and me go off and leave Albert, Little Danny. We can have more fun without him.”

“Who needs him?” Little Danny asked. “Get lost, buster.”

Albert walked away from them. He was glad that he'd taken his logic machine's advice as to the special thing to be built into Little Danny. Albert walked fifty steps. A hundred. “Far enough,” Albert said, and he pushed a button in his pocket.

Nobody but Albert and his logic machine ever did know what that explosion was. Tiny wheels out of Little Danny and small pieces of Alice rained down a little later, but there weren't enough fragments for anyone to identify.

Albert had learned one lesson from his logic machine: never make anything that you can't unmake.

Well, Albert finally grew to be a man, in years at least. He would always have something about him of a very awkward teenager. And yet he fought his own war against those who were teenagers in years, and he defeated them completely. There was enmity between them forever. Albert hadn't been a very well-adjusted adolescent, and he hated the memory of it. And nobody ever mistook him for an adjusted man.

Albert was too awkward to earn a living at an honest trade. He was reduced to peddling his little tricks and contrivances to shysters and promoters. But he did back into a sort of fame, and he did become burdened with wealth.

He was too stupid to handle his own monetary affairs, but he built an actuary machine to do his investing and he became rich by accident. He built the damned thing too good and he regretted it.

Albert became one of that furtive group that has saddled us with all the mean things in our history. There was that Punic who couldn't learn the rich variety of hieroglyphic characters and who devised the crippled short alphabet for wan-wits. There was the nameless Arab who couldn't count beyond ten and who set up the ten-number system for babies and idiots. There was the double-Dutchman with his movable type who drove fine copy out of the world. Albert was of their miserable company.

Albert himself wasn't much good for anything. But he had in himself the low knack for making machines that were good at everything.

His machines did a few things. You remember that anciently there was smog in the cities. Oh, it could be drawn out of the air easily enough. All it took was a tickler. Albert made a tickler machine. He would set it fresh every morning. It would clear the air in a circle three hundred yards around his hovel and gather a little over a ton of residue every twenty-four hours. This residue was rich in large polysyllabic molecules which one of his chemical machines could use.

“Why can't you clear all the air?” the people asked him.

“This is as much of the stuff as Clarence Deoxyribonucleiconibus needs every day,” Albert said. That was the name of this particular chemical machine.

“But we die of the smog,” the people said. “Have mercy on us.”

“Oh, all right,” Albert said. He turned it over to one of his reduplicating machines to make as many copies as were necessary.

You remember that once there was a teenager problem? You remember when those little buggers used to be mean? Albert got enough of them. There was something ungainly about them that reminded him too much of himself. He made a teenager of his own. It was rough. To the others it looked like one of themselves, the ring in the left ear, the dangling side-locks, the brass knucks and the long knife, the guitar pluck to jab in an eye. But it was incomparably rougher than the human teenagers. It terrorized all in the neighborhood and made them behave, and dress like real people. And there was one thing about the teenage machine that Albert made: it was made of such polarized metal and glass that it was invisible except to teenager eyes.

“Why is your neighborhood different?” the people asked Albert. “Why are there such good and polite teenagers in your neighborhood and such mean ones everywhere else? It's as though something had spooked all those right around here.”

“Oh, I thought I was the only one who didn't like the regular kind,” Albert said.

“Oh, no, no,” the people answered him. “If there is anything at all you can do about them — ”

So Albert turned his mostly invisible teenager machine over to one of his reduplicating machines to make as many copies as were necessary, and set one up in every neighborhood. From that day till this the teenagers have all been good and polite and a little bit frightened. But there is no evidence of what keeps them that way except an occasional eye dangling from the jab of an invisible guitar pluck.

So the two most pressing problems of the latter part of the twentieth century were solved, but accidentally, and to the credit of no one.

As the years went by, Albert felt his inferiority most when in the presence of his own machines, particularly those in the form of men. Albert just hadn't their urbanity or sparkle or wit. He was a clod beside them, and they made him feel it.

Why not? One of Albert's devices sat in the President's Cabinet. One of them was on the High Council of World-Watchers that kept the peace everywhere. One of them presided at Riches Unlimited, that private-public-international instrument that guaranteed reasonable riches to everyone in the world. One of them was the guiding hand in the Health and Longevity Foundation which provided those things to everyone. Why should not such splendid and successful machines look down on their shabby uncle who had made them?

“I'm rich by a curious twist,” Albert said to himself one day, “and honored through a mistake in circumstance. But there isn't a man or a machine in the world who is really my friend. A book here tells how to make friends, but I can't do it that way. I'll make one my own way.”

So Albert set out to make a friend.

He made Poor Charles, a machine as stupid and awkward and inept as himself.

“Now I will have a companion,” Albert said, but it didn't work. Add two zeros together and you still have zero. Poor Charles was too much like Albert to be good for anything.

Poor Charles! Unable to think, he made a — (but wait a moleskin-gloved minute here, Colonel, this isn't going to work at all) — he made a machi — (but isn't this the same blamed thing all over again?) — he made a machine to think for him and to — 

Hold it, hold it! That's enough. Poor Charles was the only machine that Albert ever made that was dumb enough to do a thing like that.

Well, whatever it was, the machine that Poor Charles made was in control of the situation and of Poor Charles when Albert came onto them accidentally. The machine's machine, the device that Poor Charles had constructed to think for him, was lecturing Poor Charles in a humiliating way.

“Only the inept and deficient will invent,” that damned machine's machine was droning. “The Greeks in their high period did not invent. They used neither adjunct power nor instrumentation. They used, as intelligent men or machines will always use, slaves. They did not descend to gadgets. They, who did the difficult with ease, did not seek the easier way.

“But the incompetent will invent. The insufficient will invent. The depraved will invent. And knaves will invent.”

Albert, in a seldom fit of anger, killed them both. But he knew that the machine of his machine had spoken the truth.

Albert was very much cast down. A more intelligent man would have had a hunch as to what was wrong. Albert had only a hunch that he was not very good at hunches and would never be. Seeing no way out, he fabricated a machine and named it Hunchy.

In most ways this was the worst machine he ever made. In building it he tried to express something of his unease for the future. It was an awkward thing in mind and mechanism, a misfit.

Albert's more intelligent machines gathered around and hooted at him while he put it together.

“Boy! Are you lost!” they taunted. “That thing is a primitive! To draw its power from the ambient! We talked you into throwing that away twenty years ago and setting up coded power for all of us.”

“Uh — someday there may be social disturbances and all centers of power seized,” Albert stammered. “But Hunchy would be able to operate if the whole world were wiped smooth.”

“It isn't even tuned to our information matrix,” they jibed. “It's worse than Poor Charles. That stupid thing practically starts from scratch.”

“Maybe there'll be a new kind of itch for it,” said Albert.

“It's not even housebroken!” the urbane machines shouted their indignation. “Look at that! Some sort of primitive lubrication all over the floor.”

“Remembering my childhood, I sympathize,” Albert said.

“What's it good for?” they demanded.

“Ah — it gets hunches,” Albert mumbled.

“Duplication!” they shouted. “That's all you're good for yourself, and not very good at that. We suggest an election to replace you as — pardon our laughter — the head of these enterprises.”

“Boss, I've got a hunch how we can block them there,” the unfinished Hunchy whispered.

“They're bluffing,” Albert whispered back. “My first logic machine taught me never to make anything that I can't unmake. I've got them there and they know it. I wish I could think up things like that myself.”

“Maybe there will come an awkward time and I will be good for something,” Hunchy said.

Only once, and that rather late in life, did a sort of honesty flare up in Albert. He did one thing (and it was a dismal failure) on his own. That was the night of the year of the double millennium when Albert was presented with the Finnerty-Hochmann Trophy, the highest award that the intellectual world could give. Albert was certainly an odd choice for it, but it had been noticed that almost every basic invention for thirty years could be traced back to him or to the devices with which he had surrounded himself.

You know the trophy. Atop it was Eurema, the synthetic Greek goddess of invention, with arms spread as if she would take flight. Below this was a stylized brain cut away to show the convoluted cortex. And below this was the coat of arms of the Academicians: Ancient Scholar rampant (argent); the Anderson Analyzer sinister (gules); the Mondeman Space-Drive dexter (vair). It was a very fine work by Groben, his ninth period.

Albert had a speech composed for him by his speech-writing machine, but for some reason he did not use it. He went on his own, and that was disaster. He got to his feet when he was introduced, and he stuttered and spoke nonsense:

“Ah — only the sick oyster produces nacre,” he said, and they all gaped at him. What sort of beginning for a speech was that? “Or do I have the wrong creature?” Albert asked weakly.

“Eurema doesn't look like that!” Albert gawked out and pointed suddenly at the trophy. “No, no, that isn't her at all. Eurema walks backward and is blind. And her mother is a brainless hulk.”

Everybody was watching him with pained expression.

“Nothing rises without a leaven,” Albert tried to explain, “but the yeast is itself a fungus and a disease. You be regularizers all, splendid and supreme! But you cannot live without the irregulars. You will die, and who will tell you that you are dead? When there are no longer any deprived or insufficient, who will invent? What will you do when there are none of us defectives left? Who will leaven your lump then?”

“Are you unwell?” the master of ceremonies asked him quietly. “Should you not make an end to it? People will understand.”

“Of course I'm unwell. Always have been,” Albert said. “What good would I be otherwise? You set the ideal that all should be healthy and well adjusted. No! No! Were we all well adjusted, we would ossify and die. The world is kept healthy only by some of the unhealthy minds lurking in it. The first implement made by man was not a scraper or celt or stone knife. It was a crutch, and it wasn't devised by a hale man.”

“Perhaps you should rest,” a functionary said in a low voice, for this sort of rambling nonsense talk had never been heard at an awards dinner before.

“Know you,” said Albert, “that it is not the fine bulls and wonderful cattle who make the new paths. Only a crippled calf makes a new path. In everything that survives there must be an element of the incongruous. Hey, you know the woman who said, ‘My husband is incongruous, but I never liked Washington in the summertime.’ ”

Everybody gazed at him in stupor.

“That's the first joke I ever made,” Albert said lamely. “My joke-making machine makes them a lot better than I do.” He paused and gaped, and gulped a big breath. “Dolts!” he croaked out fiercely then. “What will you do for dolts when the last of us is gone? How will you survive without us?”

Albert had finished. He gaped and forgot to close his mouth. They led him back to his seat. His publicity machine explained that Albert was tired from overwork, and then that machine passed around copies of the speech that Albert was supposed to have given.

It had been an unfortunate episode. How noisome it is that the innovators are never great men, and that the great men are never good for anything but just being great men.

In that year a decree went forth from Caesar that a census of the whole country should be taken. The decree was from Cesare Panebianco, the President of the country. It was the decimal year proper for the census, and there was nothing unusual about the decree. Certain provisions, however, were made for taking a census of the drifters and decrepits who were usually missed, to examine them and to see why they were so. It was in the course of this that Albert was picked up. If any man ever looked like a drifter and a decrepit, it was Albert.

Albert was herded in with other derelicts, sat down at a table, and asked tortuous questions. As:

“What is your name?”

He almost muffed that one, but he rallied and answered, “Albert.”

“What time is it by that clock?”

They had him in his old weak spot. Which hand was which? He gaped and didn't answer.

“Can you read?” they asked him.

“Not without my — ” Albert began. “I don't have with me my —  No, I can't read very well by myself.”

“Try.”

They gave him a paper to mark up with true and false questions. Albert marked them all true, believing that he would have half of them right. But they were all false. The regularized people are partial to falsehood. Then they gave him a supply-the-word test on proverbs.

“_ _ _ _ _ _ _ is the best policy” didn't mean a thing to him. He couldn't remember the names of the companies that he had his own policies with.

“A _ _ _ _ _ _ in time saves nine” contained more mathematics than Albert could handle. “There appear to be six unknowns,” he told himself, “and only one positive value, nine. The equating verb ‘saves’ is a vague one. I cannot solve this equation. I am not even sure that it is an equation. If only I had with me my — ”

But he hadn't any of his gadgets or machines with him. He was on his own. He left half-a-dozen other proverb fill-ins blank. Then he saw a chance to recoup. Nobody is so dumb as not to know one answer if enough questions are asked.

“_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ is the mother of invention,” it said.

“Stupidity,” Albert wrote in his weird ragged hand. Then he sat back in triumph. “I know that Eurema and her mother,” he snickered. “Man, how I do know them!”

But they marked him wrong on that one too. He had missed every answer to every test. They began to fix him a ticket to a progressive booby hatch where he might learn to do something with his hands, his head being hopeless.

A couple of Albert's urbane machines came down and got him out of it. They explained that, while he was a drifter and a derelict, yet he was a rich drifter and derelict, and that he was even a man of some note.

“He doesn't look it, but he really is — pardon our laughter — a man of some importance,” one of the fine machines explained. “He has to be told to close his mouth after he has yawned, but for all that he is the winner of the Finnerty-Hochmann Trophy. We will be responsible for him.”

Albert was miserable as his fine machines took him out, especially when they asked that he walk three or four steps behind them and not seem to be with them. They gave him some pretty rough banter and turned him into a squirming worm of a man. Albert left them and went to a little hide-out he kept.

“I'll blow my crawfishing brains out,” he swore. “The humiliation is more than I can bear. Can't do it myself, though. I'll have to have it done.”

He set to work building a device in his hide-out.

“What you doing, boss?” Hunchy asked him. “I had a hunch you'd come here and start building something.”

“Building a machine to blow my pumpkin-picking brains out,” Albert shouted. “I'm too yellow to do it myself.”

“Boss, I got a hunch there's something better to do. Let's have some fun.”

“Don't believe I know how to,” Albert said thoughtfully. “I built a fun machine once to do it for me. He had a real revel till he flew apart, but he never seemed to do anything for me.”

“This fun will be for you and me, boss. Consider the world spread out. What is it?”

“It's a world too fine for me to live in any longer,” Albert said. “Everything and all the people are perfect, and all alike. They're at the top of the heap. They've won it all and arranged it all neatly. There's no place for a clutter-up like me in the world. So I get out.”

“Boss, I've got a hunch that you're seeing it wrong. You've got better eyes than that. Look again, real canny, at it. Now what do you see?”

“Hunchy, Hunchy, is that possible? Is that really what it is? I wonder why I never noticed it before. That's the way of it, though, now that I look closer.

“Six billion patsies waiting to be took! Six billion patsies without a defense of any kind! A couple of guys out for some fun, man, they could mow them down like fields of Albert-Improved Concho Wheat!”

“Boss, I've got a hunch that this is what I was made for. The world sure had been getting stuffy. Let's tie into it and eat off the top layer. Man, we can cut a swath.”

“We'll inaugurate a new era!” Albert gloated. “We'll call it the Turning of the Worm. We'll have fun, Hunchy. We'll gobble them up like goobers. How come I never saw it like that before? Six billion patsies!”

The Twenty-First Century began on this rather odd note.

Author's Commentary

Frog On The Mountain

He woke to mountains, as the poet says. Really, there is nothing like it. The oceans and the lowlands were made long ago, according to legend. But the mountains are made new every morning.

It took some doing. His name was Garamask, and he had done it.

“I hate space,” Garamask had said when he decided on it, and the crewmen had been surprised.

“Why do you, Mr. Garamask?” the Captain had asked him. “You've logged more time in space than I have. You've been to many more regions. And you've made more money in the space business than anyone I know. I never saw a man so eager for voyages or for new worlds as you. You're so expansive a person that I thought you were in love with the expanse of space.”

“I love movement and travel,” Garamask said. “I love worlds! But in space, the feel of movement and the sense of travel is quickly lost. And space is not expansive. It is shriveling.

“I have, let us say, a passion for a certain unkempt and mountainous world, but space comes near to destroying that passion in me; for I have seen that world appear on the scope like a microbe, and I will watch it disappear like a microbe again. I have studied epic and towering things under the microscope. And when I put away the microscope, I know that the towering things are really too small to see. From the aspect of space, all the towering and wild worlds that I love are things too small to see or to believe in. I love a big world, and I hate space for spoiling that bigness.”

“Paravata isn't so big a world, Mr. Garamask,” the Captain told him.

“It is! It's big! It's huge!” Garamask insisted. “And I'll not have it spoiled. It is the largest possible world on the man-scale, and I will not let that scale suffer by comparison. It's a world as large as a man can get around on with ease, without becoming less than a man. It's half again Earth's gravity, so it calls out our strength. It has an atmosphere that keeps one on an oxygen binge, so it gives the strength something to draw on. It has mountains that rise ten thousand meters, the highest mountains anywhere that a man can climb in his proper body and without apparatus.

“And I won't have it spoiled for me! I'm rich enough that you can't regard me as a nuisance. I've given my instructions. So, follow them as regards me.”

“Mr. Garamask, weren't you ever young?” the Captain asked him.

“I am young yet, Captain. I am physically the fittest man on this ship. And this is a very young and aspiring idea that I am effecting now.”

“Ah, were you never something else, Mr. Garamask, not quite so young, and much more awkward?”

“I don't know what you mean, Captain, but I suspect that I never was. Follow my instructions.”

The instructions of Garamask were that he be sent into a sustaining sleep, and that he be landed and lodged on Paravata of the Mountains while he slept. He did not know when Paravata was picked up microbe-sized nor when it grew a hundred million times to the size of a pea. He did not see the planet grow to twice the size of Earth. He missed the landing.

He was taken from the ship at Paravata Landing and transported a hundred kilometers to the mountain lodge. He was installed there as befitted a man of means. He slept a determined number of hours, as he had planned it, and he woke in the very early morning. He woke to mountains.

He went out into the keen air of Paravata or Paravath, finding himself in the middle of the small town of Mountain-Foot. He had a warrant for arrest and death in his wallet; and he had a singing curiosity about this world whose vital civilization had suddenly been frozen in motion, whose people, the Rogha (the elites, the excellent ones), had disappeared or very nearly disappeared and whose place had been taken by the oafish Oganta, and this almost within living memory. He was on a hunting trip in depth: he would hunt on the three stage mountain to kill Sinek the cat-lion, Riksino the bear, Shasos the eagle-condor, and Bater-Jeno the crag-ape or the frog-man (depending on the translation). This was said to be the most challenging hunt in the galaxy. And most likely he would die on the triple mountain, for no human hunter had ever bagged all four of the creatures and survived the thing; though Oganta hunters were said to have done the trick.

On the second level, Garamask was hunting for the answer to the riddle: what had happened to the Rogha elites? Could those few who were left not be strengthened in their hold? Could their civilization not be unfrozen? Might it not be discovered what queer hold the oafish Oganta had over this Rogha remnant? How had the excellent ones fallen (willingly, it was said) to their inferiors?

On the third level, Garamask was hunting for a murderer, the Oganta, Rogha, Animal, or Man who had killed Allyn. Allyn had been a close friend, but Garamask had not realized how close until after the event. It had been given out that Allyn, on the same hunt, had been killed by the Bater-Jeno, the crag-ape or the frog-man. Allyn, however, had newly appeared to Garamask in a rhapsody-dream and said that this was not so. He had been killed, said Allyn, by his guide and hunting companion, who had been an Oganta named Ocras, but who might not now be in Oganta form.

“I believe that we have been close,” Allyn had said, “though we never spoke of our closeness. Avenge me, Garamask, and take the lid off the mystery of Paravath. I was so very close to uncovering the mystery myself.”

“What had you found, Allyn?” Garamask had asked; but appearances in dreams often seem hard of hearing; they speak but they do not listen.

“Uncover it, Garamask,” Allyn had repeated, “and avenge me. I was so close to it. He ate into the base of my skull and so killed me. He ate my very brains as I died.”

“But what did you find when you came so close, Allyn?” Garamask had asked once more. “Tell me what you had going, so I will know what to look for.”

“I was so close to it when I died,” Allyn said.

Apparitions are as stone-deaf. They speak their message but they do not hear. You may have noticed this yourself.

Garamask was not a great believer in dreams, but he had desired this hunt for a long time; he had, in fact, intended to accompany Allyn on his hunt, but had been prevented by affairs. And he had not known at the time of the dream, had not known till he had gone carefully over the report, that Allyn had indeed been killed by having his skull eaten into. Now Garamask tested it a little.

“My guide, will he be Ocras?” he asked the gangling Oganta who was manager of the hunting lodge.

“Ocras? No, he is no longer a guide. He has been translated out of this life.”

“But there was a guide named Ocras?”

“There was one time a guide named Ocras, who is no more. Your guide will be Chavo.”

But there had been a guide named Ocras, and Garamask hadn't known the name except in the rhapsody-dream. Then Garamask saw one of the Rogha survivors walking proudly in the early keen air. He went to him at once, meeting him on a rocky slope.

“I have an intense interest in you and all your kind,” Garamask began. “You yourself are the face of the mystery. You are imposing in a way that I could never be; I can see why you are called the elite, the excellent ones. You are so startlingly in contrast to the Oganta here that everyone for worlds around is puzzled over it. You are kings. They are oafs. Why do they take you over?”

“I suppose it is the day of the oafs, pilgrim-man,” the Rogha said easily. “I am Treorai, and you are the man Garamask who made preparations to wake to mountains. You have taken up the challenge of the three-stage mountain. It's a high aspiration to kill the four creatures there. One who has done it will experience a deep change.”

“As Allyn did?”

“I knew him when he was here. He did not kill the four creatures. He was killed by the fourth.”

“He has told me, outside the lines as it were, that he was killed by something other.”

“Allyn would not lie, even outside the lines. You have misunderstood him. Did he say that he completed the hunt and killed the fourth creature?”

“He said that he had killed Sinek the lion, Riksino the bear, Shasos the eagle; but, no, he did not say that he had killed the Bater-Jeno. He said, however, that he was murdered by something else.”

“No, Garamask, he was killed by the fourth prey. A creature is often fuzzy in his mind about his own manner of dying. He was a wonderful fellow, though, for a man.”

“Treorai, why has your civilization come to a grotesque halt? Why have you Rogha, in your manifest superiority, all but died out? Why have the rough rampant Oganta taken over? A dozen of them couldn't take one of you. You have the presence that would dumbfound any attack. I can feel it like magnetism. Is it a genetic thing that has happened?”

“A genetic thing, a ghostly thing, a sundering thing really, Garamask. But it isn't finished, and there is no apathy here. What we Rogha have lost, we will regain, by any means whatsoever. This eclipse will pass from us.”

“Why don't you simply annihilate the Oganta, Treorai?”

“You are an educated man, Garamask, but your speaking of the Paravath language is imperfect. I simply do not understand your question. I have some World-English, if that would help.”

“Treorai, why do you Rogha not simply annihilate the Oganta?” Garamask asked the excellent Rogha in World-English.

“No, Garamask, I have not so much of the idiom as I thought,” said Treorai. “Your question is simply incomprehensible in whatever language it is put. Ah, your guide has peeped out to see if you are ready. Grab him quickly, or he will go in and be back to sleep again. The Oganta are not morning types. And the sun should not find you still at Mountain-Foot. It should find you at least two hundred meters aloft. See that ledge there! It is a wonderful place to catch first sun.”

“I see that it will be,” said Garamask. “And it will take some inspired climbing to get there in time. If I live I will see you again, excellent one.”

“High hunting, Garamask! A very strong hunter with a very good guide may kill the first three creatures. To kill the fourth, the hunter must transcend himself.”

Garamask started up the Mountain Domba (the first mountain of the three-mountain complex) with Chavo his booming Oganta guide. The Oganta are rangy and solid creatures, and strength and endurance is their birth-right. Say what you will about the loud oafs, they are strong climbers! And Garamask was a very strong man who had climbed on heavier-than-World worlds before.

And, ah, there is sometimes an advantage in knowing the Paravath language imperfectly. Garamask could tune Chavo out. It took all his attention to follow the language, and his attention was mercifully on many other things as they went up. And yet Chavo laughed and boomed incessantly, like boulders clashing together.

A queer and unfinished looking creature was this Chavo, were all the Oganta. (Climbing, climbing hard and high, they'd catch first sun on the fine ledge yet.) A queer creature! “The male European moor frog (Rana arvalis) is covered with a light blue bloom like a plum,” the anthropologist-naturalist Wendt had written two hundred years ago, but Wendt had never heard of the world of Paravata, nor of a blue-blooming moor frog two meters tall. (Climbing hard and high, there was another shade of blue bloom in the morning light, and the keen air was like World brandy.) “Those naked goblins with human hands and infant bodies,” old Wendt had written again, but Wendt never envisioned an infant body that would weigh two hundred kilograms here, and two-thirds that much on Earth. Chavo the Oganta was a lot of oaf!

It was all moss-covered rocks, and tiger grass growing between them. It was nowhere difficult to get foot-or-handhold, but it was steep and it was heavy. They came to the fine ledge and took it just at first sun. They rested there.

“You do not like me, Papa Garamask,” Chavo was booming. “But I will make you like me. We Oganta like to be liked. We will go to any lengths to be liked.”

“You go too far for it, I believe,” said Garamask. “When will we meet the Sinek?”

“We will meet sineks and sineks from here on up, but they will bound away from us and will not stand. Then we will meet Sinek himself, and he will stand.”

“You talk as though there were only one of the species who would be dangerous. And yet, surely, a dozen of these very dangerous sineks have been killed.”

“There is only one at a time, Papa Garamask. Whether it is always the same one that is translated back to live on the mountain, or whether one inherits from another, we do not know. But always there are many sineks, and there is Sinek himself. It is time to arm before we go up higher.”

Chavo broke the stuff out of his pack. No shot-weapon might be used on the mountain hunt; even bow and spear-thrower and sling were ruled out. The animals had them not, so the hunters might not have them. It made for a harder hunt. The hunting and killing must be by direct confrontation and intimate encounter. Garamask clipped the claw-gauntlets over the backs of his hands, binding them by wrist and palm straps. He had been proud of his crushing grip, of his massive hands and forearms; but could he with these deliver lion blows on the lion himself? He bound on the elbow and knee and toe and heel daggers, needle-pointed, double-bladed, curiously curved. He bound on the crotch and throat armor. He slipped the casing fangs over his own dog teeth. He bound on the cap with the skull saber. Chavo similarly equipped himself. Well, the animals of Paravath had such claws and fangs (not all of them having the same ones), so the hunters could have such also.

“It will be much harder to climb in this,” Garamask grumbled.

“It will be, Papa Garamask,” Chavo said, “and the climb itself becomes much harder. Some hunters take the spikes and claws off and hook them ready in their belts, and they are surprised by Sinek or Riksino or Shasos, and die for it. Some climb, clawed and daggered, and slip and fall to their deaths.”

“Which is best, guide?”

“Whichever way you would rather die, Papa Garamask, so select it. That will be best for you.”

“I do not intend to die on the mountain.”

“Shall we turn back now, Papa Garamask? You make twelve World-men who have come to hunt. All die on the mountain. None goes all the way through the full hunt.”

“One man, Allyn, went all the way, Chavo. And then he was murdered. I have climbed with him and hunted with him, and I'm as good a man. I intend to go all the way, and I do not intend to be murdered.”

They climbed strongly, Garamask silent, Chavo booming and croaking with incessant talk that Garamask tuned out. The Oganta climbed, clawed and daggered and fanged and armored. That was the best way then. Garamask did likewise. He didn't envy the Oganta his youth and towering strength. Garamask had his own strength and he enjoyed testing it. But he envied the Oganta, a little, his fangs. Garamask had no such giant canine teeth to support the giant saber-fangs. He had no such bull-bowed neck, nor skull-massif, nor buttressed and ridged upper jaw to support such sabers. But he had donned a pretty good set of fangs himself and he believed he would know how to use them.

From one jagged turning, Garamask caught a dizzy view of Daingean City far away. The excellent Rogha had been builders at least equal to men. Now their cities were almost emptied of them, and the oafish Oganta lived in them like animals denning. Then the jagged turning became even more jagged, and Garamask could not afford another glance at the city.

They ate aran-moss and cobble-moss, and pods of tiger grass. They chewed green coill-nuts for water. They climbed high and hard. Then Garamask caught the whiff and the spoor of the spook animals, and he knew it out of the cellar of his mind.

“Ah, this is the world you live on,” he breathed, “and you are not imaginary at all. Animal who is no animal, I know what you are.” Garamask slavered when he called out because of the great fangs capped to his dog teeth. “The old Greeks called you the all-animal, and pictured you as made out of parts of many. And men said you were the Asian lion, or leopard, or tiger, or rock-lion, or American puma. And all the time you were yourself, the legend animal.”

“Who do you talk to, Papa Garamask?” Chavo asked in some alarm. “Do you talk to the grandfather of Sinek?”

“To the great-great-grandfather of Sinek, oaf. In the rain forests, they told poor men that your name was jaguar, but the poor men knew better. In the old South of the Conglomerate States on World, they told that your name was puma or cougar, but the poor cracker-men always knew your real species. Spook animal, I come after you!”

“Papa Garamask, throw but a rock into the thicket and it will slink off. It is only one of the sineks, it is not Sinek himself. He seldom hunts so low or so early. And do not talk to the grandfather of Sinek, or he will come in your dreams and eat through your live throat and kill you.”

“Damn you, oaf, it is Sinek himself! He hunts low and early today. Grandfather of all the animals, I fight you now! Panther!”

And Garamask charged upward, across a slide of moss-covered rocks, into a tall thicket of tiger-grass and coill-bush, to fight panther, the animal who exists only in legend and misnomer. On Paravath he used the name Sinek.

It was a long black male. This was no sinek who would bound away, who would not stand. This was Sinek himself, and now Garamask understood why there could be only one of him at a time. The spook, the spirit filled this animal completely, with nothing left over for any other.

Garamask drew first blood, clawing the black panther half blind, getting his elbow dagger inside the panther's mouth, trying always to stay inside the animal's forepaws. Panther got one side of Garamask's head, above the throat armor, inside his mouth, failed to hold, slid bloodily along it, popped it out, and took an ear off neatly. The animal would weigh a hundred and fifty kilograms here, a hundred on Earth, just about Garamask's own weight. Panther, Sinek, knocked Garamask loose, and he slid on the loose rocks and moss, very nearly off the mountain to his death. Then they were in confrontation.

Sinek was upground of Garamask on the edge of the firm rock; and Garamask was on the loose-rock fringe that slipped and cascaded and was now flowing over the edge like water. Chavo, the Oganta oaf, was chewing a blade of tiger-grass and laughing.

It was with amazement that Garamask saw intelligence, almost total intelligence, in the eyes of Sinek the panther. This was a person and a personage, whatever the species. The intelligent look was almost friendly to Garamask, and the two understood each other. They would fight to the death, but they recognized each other for what they were, excellent ones, superior ones, Panther, Man, Rogha, firstlings, not to be compared to Oganta or Swine or Sloths.

Garamask made the attempt to break out of his sliding strip. He exchanged terrific clawing blows with Sinek, got the worse of it, and came much nearer to going off the mountain as he slid reeling back.

“Fear you nothing, Papa Garamask,” the Oganta Chavo called from where he had scrambled higher. “I will roll boulders down on Sinek and kill him.” And Chavo did roll boulders, badly, inaccurately, dangerously. Then Garamask understood from the oafish laughter that Chavo was trying to kill him and not Sinek; trying to knock the man off the mountain with the rolling boulders, or to induce a rockslide that would carry him irrevocably down.

With a mixture of stark terror and upsurging courage that was peculiar to himself in moments of deep crisis, Garamask battled up the sliding rocks, greatly impeded by his arms, and closed with Sinek the panther again.

“I am as large, I am as strong, I am as armed, dammit, I am as animal!” Garamask gibbered. “We close together, good comrade. If I go off the mountain, you go off it too.”

But Garamask was wrong. The panther was more animal than he. It was doing him to death in the close fighting, though puzzled by the throat and crotch armor. “Who waits below to eat out my skull, Chavo?” Garamask howled out furiously. “Who waits below to crack my skull and eat my brains? That is not Sinek here. It is scavengers below me, and a scavenger above me, you!”

“Papa Garamask,” Chavo chortled in a booming giggle from above, “fear you nothing. I will roll boulders down on Sinek and kill him.” And Chavo was rolling boulders down on them both, grappled together, to kill them both.

Garamask was losing, slipping. He broke off his capping fangs and his own canine teeth under them tried to slash through the sinews of panther; and he was choked on his own sudden blood. He raked the animal with elbow, knee, toe, and heel daggers, and was nearly disemboweled by a back foot of Sinek that equaled all the dagger functions. For the last time he broke free from the slashing, smashing panther and rolled in a stream of scree, trying to keep himself on the mountain.

Chavo set a large boulder at him to help him over the edge. Sinek the panther came lithely for the kill, and caught the boulder amidships as he flicked himself sly-footed along the edge of firm rock. And Sinek could not halt himself when he was knocked heavily into the sliding rock stream. Sinek the panther flowed off the mountain and fell into gaping space.

“Papa Garamask, I save your life,” Chavo the Oganta chortled from above. “Now I must make certain that Sinek is really dead where he has fallen so far below. I will roll yet more boulders down on him, and down on him till I am sure that he is dead.”

And Chavo rolled boulders down at Garamask to knock him off the mountain; and the man scrambled in the sliding scree to avoid them. Three, six, nine boulders Chavo rolled down at Garamask, and then he had trouble in getting a fine boulder loose from its embedment. Garamask found a hidden spur of solid rock and went up quickly. Chavo turned, and they were on a level face to face: Garamask bloody and crippled and earless, and full of muskiness and ghostliness, for part of the spook of Sinek, falling to death, had passed into Garamask. And Chavo, what can you say of the oaf Chavo of the species Oganta? Could he meet Garamask's eyes? No, but he never could have; all Oganta are wall-eyed. Did he blanch at the encounter? How can you tell with an Oganta? But the light blue bloom that was his complexion had lost a little of its sheen.

“Why do you pause, guide Chavo?” Garamask asked as a waiting volcano might ask. “We go up, we go up! We have not yet reached the top of the first mountain of Three-Mountain. We have killed only one of the four prey. We go up, we go up!”

They went up. They wore out the day with their climbing. They saw sineks and sineks who bounded away from them and would not stand. But they did not meet Sinek himself again that day. Sinek was dead for the while. Garamask took off his weapons and armor pieces and hooked them into his belt. Thereafter he climbed more easily. And just at last sun they came to the top of Domba Mountain, the first mountain of Three-Mountain.

It was a high plateau; it was another mountain-foot, for out of it rose the Mountain Giri, the second mountain of Three-Mountain. They ate bitter mountain rations and chewed green coill-nuts for water. They bedded down for the night, so Garamask thought.

But Chavo brought a stringed instrument from his pack and began some of the twangingest and most nauseating noise ever heard. He mixed his bumptious booming voice with it in a curdling cry, and Garamask understood that he would not be able to sleep with this.

“You have convinced me, pup,” he growled. “You have established one of the universal ultimates — the most raucous noise ever. But is it necessary that you belabor the point?”

“You do not like it?” Chavo was surprised. “I pride myself on my music and my singing. We consider such to be dynamic perfection and cosmic looseness of sound.”

“I consider it something else. The Rogha are said to be the most musical creatures in the universes. How could their co-dwellers here, you Oganta, be the least?”

“I had hoped you would like my music,” Chavo sorrowed. “I still hope that you will like me. Really, we are likable creatures. Even some of the Rogha have said so, with a certain exasperation, it is true.”

“You are crude unlicked calves, Chavo, and I understand your world less and less. Why, and how, are you killing the Rogha? For I believe that to be the case.”

“But there are so few of them left, Papa Garamask! And they become fewer and fewer. So is it not imperative that we kill them, much as we respect and love them?”

“If there were millions of them left, would you kill them?”

“No, certainly not. That would be an abomination. Why should we kill them if there were many of them? They are so greatly above us that we will do anything for them.”

“Even kill them, Chavo, to show how much you love them? And why did you try to kill me during my battle with Sinek?”

“For mixed reasons. First, you have a dignity of aspect, and you seemed almost like a Rogha to me as you were embattled there. I respect and love you almost as much as I do any of the Rogha. And then, it has been discovered that World-men will do as well as the Rogha for us, and companions of mine were waiting below the crag to tear you apart if you should fall there. And we Oganta have an impulse to kill those whom we find in a position to be killed. Very often we kill other Oganta simply because we find them in a vulnerable position. And this, I believe, is irrational of us.”

“I think so too, Chavo. Several small rocks are dancing there on the slope. Do my eyes deceive me? Are they small animals frisking that look so much like rocks?”

“No, they are rocks dancing, Papa Garamask. Your eyes do not deceive you. Here, I will play my hittur again and they dance to it. Hear! See! Is that not nimble music, Papa Garamask?”

“I'd call it something else. Dammit, Chavo, must I ask the obvious question? What makes the rocks dance?”

“I make the rocks dance, Papa Garamask, or my dark companion does. Why are you surprised? The same thing is done on World?”

“If it is, I have not heard of it.”

“But it is. On World, so I have been told, one young person in ten has a dark companion, and a World-German name is given to this. But in both cases, the dark companion is a satellite of self. On World, I am told, the fact is often hidden or denied. But here, where the majority of us are capable of projecting the dark satellite, there is no way to hide it. Besides, it is fun. Watch me rock and sway that bush as if I were a wind. See!”

“Weird oaf, you have a poltergeist!” Garamask was interested in this thing.

“Yes, that is your World-word. No, I am a poltergeist. And I am also a visible creature. It used to be that, with time, we would give up one form or the other: stand clear of the dark body and be visible creatures only; or decay the body and be spook only. But now, in the time of waiting of the Oganta, we have both forms, and we are not able to go beyond these forms.”

“This is a time of waiting for you, Chavo? What do you wait for?”

“To see what will happen to us. It is a very uneasy time of waiting. It's so narrow a ladder, and so few of us can climb it at one time. And at the top, it is not what it once was, not what it should be.”

“I am going to sleep now, Chavo, and I do not want to hear your damnable instrument or your voice again this night,” Garamask said evenly. “But how do I know that you will not kill me while I sleep?”

“Papa Garamask, would an Oganta violate the night!”

“Hell, I don't know what you'd do! I'm going to sleep.” And he did sleep, angrily and rapidly and deeply. And in the deepest part of Garamask's sleep, Allyn loomed up there, standing a slight distance up on Giri Mountain.

“Watch the raw cub Chavo,” the looming Allyn called down to Garamask. “He is not so clever as was Ocras, but you are not so clever as was I.”

“I am every bit as clever as you, Allyn,” Garamask told the appearance. “Now tell me what it was that you were so close to finding out when you died. Give me something to go on.” But Allyn did not hear Garamask. He had come to speak and not to listen. “I was so very close to it then,” Allyn called again. “Avenge me on Ocras, Garamask, whatever he is now. I'd do as much for you.”

“I will continue my sleep, Allyn,” Garamask told him, “and I do not want to hear any more dead-man talk from you tonight unless you have something new to tell me.” And Garamask continued his sleep.

He woke eagerly and easily at first gray light. “First sun should not find me at this mountain-foot either,” Garamask told himself silently. “I see the ledge where I should catch first sun. There is always the ledge above; mountaining would not be mountaining without it. Treorai the Rogha told me that the Oganta are not morning types. Let me see.”

Garamask hooted and hollered at Chavo, then kicked him awake. Amused, he watched the oaf fall back to sleep again, then kicked him awake the second time. “It must be my dark companion, it could not be myself who does this.” Garamask laughed. “But it is fun.” He finally roused the sleepy Chavo. They ate bitter mountain rations.

Clawed and taloned and spiked and armored, they climbed up the Mountain Giri. They took first sun at that ledge above. They rested. Then they climbed again.

Not entirely unpleasant, not so to a man with a strong and traveled nose, not really repugnant; but stark, tall, penetrating, slavering, rampant, murderous, challenging, of a grave-like putridity, of a life-terminal gagging, was the odor, the strong stench that began to pervade the climb on Giri Mountain. There was a person here making himself known. It was Riksino, the cave-bear, the musk-bear, the lord of this middle-mountain. He was at home and he had his flag out.

“No need for me to ask what it is,” Garamask said. “He's declared himself. Did I not already know it, I believe that I could guess his very name from his coded stench. He'll be easily found, and I didn't come on a hunt to bypass such a prey. How is the best way? To go to him directly as he waits, and attack him?”

“Papa Garamask, there isn't any best way to fight Riksino,” Chavo quaked. “I am afraid of this person and have always been. He is much rougher and stronger than Sinek or Shasos, or even than Bater-Jeno. He can be killed, he has been killed, I have had a piece of his killing before. But each time it is a great wonder that he can be killed at all, and each time I go in fear and trembling.”

“It's catching, oaf,” said Garamask. “I feel a little fear and trembling myself. We'll skirt above, and we'll hunt down on him from above.”

But Garamask was very uneasy himself, and his excitement for this part of the hunt was of a sinking sort. He was sick and fevered today. The breaking off of his fang-sheathed eyeteeth in his yesterday's battle with Sinek had swollen his face from eyes to throat. His whole face and head ached, his throat was sore, and he was slobbering through the unaccustomed gaps. Moreover, his shredded ear was bothering him. Even a very strong man suffers under heavy gravity if he is sick.

And they would have difficulty skirting above Riksino, and hunting down on him from above. Riksino was shuffling upward, keeping pace with them. His personal stench rose higher and higher. They had his location from it pretty well, though they could not yet see him. So they wore out a few tiring hours and ascended most of the mountain.

“This will have to be the Big Riksino, the King Riksino,” said Chavo. “None other ever dens so high, and no Riksino will fight except in the mouth of his den. This is the first time that the Big Riksino has returned since he was last killed more than two equivalent years ago.”

“You really believe that the same animals return to life?” Garamask asked him.

“The Rogha do not believe it, Papa Garamask, but we Oganta believe it. And yet, it may be that when a Riksino grows larger and stronger than any of the others, he will go up and occupy the old den of the Big Riksino as a sign that he is now the king. I have fought with riksinos before, but never with the Big Riksino, and I am afraid. Be assured that he will be very large and fierce.”

“I see him,” said Garamask when they had climbed a while further, “and he is big. I'll go after him, since he doesn't seem to make up his mind.”

“What you see is not Big Riksino,” said Chavo, “and none other will fight while the big one is on the mountain. Besides, as you notice, he has not the full stench.”

“It's full enough for me,” Garamask gawked out of his sore throat. “I'll have him.”

Garamask rushed the animal. It reared up roaring, half again the man's height. It batted big paws around in the air and opened a big mouth. Garamask went in low, knifing the back legs of the animal with toes and knees knives, ripping its belly with his skull saber, delivering terrible blows on its loins with his hand claws. The animal toppled over backward, rolled, scrambled up, and ran away howling. And Garamask shambled after it, not at all able to catch it unless it should slow.

“It is no good that you chase it, Papa Garamask,” Chavo called. “That is not Big Riksino. It is only a pup that runs away like a pup. Do not waste the day chasing a callow pup.”

“I seem to spend several days climbing the mountains with one,” Garamask panted. He was tired, and he had been a fool. The real stench, the king stench was still high above him, and he had only blooded a whimpering whelp. He climbed, he climbed. Then the stench stood and prevailed. The riksino person was waiting, quite near.

“We are almost to the top of Giri Mountain,” said Garamask, “and his den cannot be any higher. We will reach that ridge, and we will follow it to the left till we are above him. It's all clear rock above. His den will have to be in that jumble somewhere just below the ridge.”

They were onto a fearful and crumbling ledge, crawling along it, Garamask in the lead. It is an awkward sort of crawl with toe and knee sabers in place. Garamask began to sight in on the very large animal. He could hear it panting and gnashing now, and he smelled it overpoweringly. He could hear it scratching big claws on the rocks; he could even hear the blood pounding in it, the strong pulse. But when he first saw it, paralyzingly close, it was the inside of it that he saw.

He was looking into the open mouth of it, a meter across, two meters below him. Then, in a flick, half of Garamask's nose was gone as he peered, fascinated, too close. The animal was in a strain with its forepaws extended as high as he could reach; and one of its high traveling claws had caught the leaning-over Garamask in the face.

Garamask had claws of his own. Angrily he raked the backs of Riksino's paws with his own hand talons when the big bear was extended on the rock as high as he could reach. Using his own bloody face for bait, Garamask counter-clawed every time the bear struck up at him. He found the animal slow and witless. The animal closed its gaping mouth once, drew back its great front limbs, and licked its bleeding paws. Garamask let himself half over the ledge and raked the animal's muzzle terribly with his heel saber. He half-blinded it with the slash, either cutting one of its eyes out or filling it so full of blood that the animal could not use it. And Garamask was back on the ledge before Riksino could slash out at him again.

The riksino bear crouched low on four feet, gathered himself, and leaped up toward the ledge. He got his great forepaws over it and hung on. Garamask slashed the big paws pulpy with his foot sabers, and then gashed the animal full in the face again and again and again as it hung there. The paws slipped off, and the animal slipped back to the lower level. And yet it was of such great size, had so much blood and meat in it, that this little whittling that Garamask had done could have very little effect on it.

“Bear, you're a stumble-bum, but a big stumble-bum,” Garamask talked. “What? What? You're turning something else on? Have you more exudations than your stench? What do you do, bear?”

The riksino bear had reared up again and opened its great mouth. And now it reeked with an influence on another level from its stench. “Papa Garamask, do not fall!” Chavo called. “Do not fall into the open mouth of the Riksino.”

“You fool! Why should I fall into the bear's mouth?” Garamask asked in amazement. “Bear, bear, you turn it on, do you? What are you, an amateur hypnotist? It might get you the birds and the small game, not a man. Turn it on, bear, turn it on as strong as you can! The Garamask will never be so fascinated as to fall into a bear's mouth.”

And Garamask fell head-first into the mouth of the riksino bear.

From above there was another roaring, terrified and hysterical, and a third weight came down heavily. From the bowels of the riksino came an agonizing groan; and Garamask was being crushed to death, but not instantly. His skull spike aided him. His elbow sabers, for he was into the maw of the animal beyond them, did slashing service. Then he was crushed in together in spite of them and his head began to split open. And then he was crushed no more, as his enveloping cosmos went limp.

And after a while he was climbing again, up to the top of Giri Mountain. He was alive, more or less, and he was dazed and gagging. Had it all been a bloody dream, the fight with Riksino? Chavo was booming as offensively as ever, but the thing had not been a dream.

“I save your life, Papa Garamask,” Chavo boomed. “Am I not wonderful? I kill the Big Riksino in the throat while he is straining there to crush you in his gullet. The Big Riksino can think of only one thing at a time, and the Big Chavo can knife through even the thickest strained sinews very rapidly when he is given a free way to it. There is no other way that Riksino can be killed but by two hunters similarly; but the bait-hunter in the mouth almost always dies.”

“You tried to kill me after Sinek had fallen off the mountain to his death, Chavo,” Garamask panted. “Why did you not let the Riksino kill me, since you want me dead?”

“The way the Riksino kills, you would be of no use to us dead,” said Chavo. “He devours too rapidly.”

“And otherwise I would be of some use to you dead, Chavo?”

“Dead, very freshly dead, or still dying, you would be of greatest use to us,” Chavo said blandly. “Dying or new dead, you will represent our ultimate hope.”

Just at last sun they came to the top of Giri Mountain, the second mountain of Three-Mountain. They ate bitter mountain rations, and Chavo dabbled medicaments on Garamask's wounds.

“Were you to survive the mountain hunt (and you will not) you could get a new nose made and be beautiful again,” said Chavo. “Now, I suppose, you must live noseless until your death the tomorrow sun-fall. Or shall I attempt to make you a surrogate nose from the wood of this thorn-bush here?”

“Don't bother, Chavo. I'm going to sleep.”

But Garamask was not going to sleep. Chavo took his stringed hittur from his pack and played his damnable music and sang.

“Chavo!” Garamask spoke sharply. “Do you know why Spain on World fell from the highest nation in Europe to the lowest within one generation?”

“Perhaps they offended the frog-god.”

“No. No, we have no frog-gods on World.”

“What? What? Are you sure? No frog-gods on World? You dash me down.”

“A devilish Arab, angered by the expulsion of the Arabs from Spain, brought a guitar into that unfortunate country. It was adopted. So that unfortunate country fell, its once noble soul shriveled into a miserable whiney-ness.”

“I understand, Papa Garamask,” said Chavo, still strumming. “They fell, as though the noble Rogha should fall to become ourselves Oganta.”

“A good parallel, Chavo. And once in the Pacific Ocean on World, there was a noble kingdom of Hawaii. A sea-faring man introduced the guitar there, and the noble kingdom soon begged to be accepted into servitude by a land-nation.”

“Yes, of course that would be the effect, Papa Garamask. We Oganta would accept such servitude gladly, but there is no longer anyone to accept us into it.”

“My own land, the Conglomerate States, fell similarly,” said Garamask sadly. “And once it had been a noble land.”

“The noble Rogha, of course, despise the instrument,” Chavo mourned. “But to us it is the Shetra, the holy instrument. It is our religion. It is our love.”

“It is the noise of accepted inferiority in all things.”

“Of course it is, Papa Garamask. And who are more inferior than ourselves, the Oganta? But we will give it up, we promise this, if we are ever able to give up being Oganta.”

“Oh, go to sleep, Chavo!”

“But you say that you have no frog-gods on your world, and yet you have frogs? And we have our frog-gods, and have no frogs except those introduced from World. And these are small frogs that have been imported. The largest of them can be held in the two hands. I dream about the frogs of World. How big are they, Papa Garamask? As big as the King Riksino?”

“Oh no. You've a completely mistaken idea, Chavo. The frogs on World are the same as the frogs imported here from World. The most of them you could hold in one hand.”

“Are you sure? They are not as big as myself? They are not even as big as yourself?”

“No, no, Chavo. They are quite small. I've often wondered about the frog-cult on Paravath. What is the meaning of it?”

“You dash me down again, Papa Garamask. There should be frogs of great size. Why, the frog is the most wonderful of all creatures! It is the only one that is able to make the frog-leap easily. Oh, may that thing come back to us!”

“Go to sleep, you damnable oaf.”

Chavo sighed deeply. “I dream about frogs,” he murmured. Then he did seem to go to sleep.

Allyn came then, but he was a thinner and more vapory Allyn than in his previous appearances to Garamask.

“The Shasos, the eagle-condor, isn't very hard to kill,” said Allyn. “He will attack you when you are roping up the cliff face, of course; for there is no other time he will fight. If you can belay yourself on the rope, and if you are not overpowered with fear, you have a chance. Wring his neck like a chicken if you can, for he is a chicken.

“But he will rip you apart to get to your kidneys and spleen if he can. Prevent him in this! He will gobble your eyes out of your head. Let him not do this! Let him not do it with both of them, at least, or you are at a disadvantage.”

“Allyn, I will go as far as you went,” said Garamask. “I'm as good a man as you ever were. Tell me now, what is the mystery at the end of it that you didn't find out till you died? What is peculiar about the final prey, the Bater-Jeno? What were you on to, Allyn?”

But wraiths are notoriously hard of hearing.

“You will do well to weaken the bridge after you have crossed over it, and to keep your gaze always fixed on the back of your head,” the dead-man Allyn said. Then he became thinner, and he was gone.

Garamask again woke eagerly and easily at first gray light. His face and his throat were not as sore as they had been. Though bereaved in ear and nose, he was happy. He lifted up his heart to the morning. Enjoyably, he kicked Chavo the Oganta awake, for the Oganta are not morning types.

They ate bitter mountain rations, donned sabers and claws and spikes and armor, and began to climb Bior Mountain, the third and highest mountain of Three-Mountain. Here it was steep and sheer, Bior a saber mountain rising out of its sheath which was Giri Mountain. It was a different sort of hunt now, and a climb in a different element.

There were the slanting slick shields of rock, and the slanting slick grass and cobble-moss. There were the rodents and poke-snakes that ate the grass and the moss and slithered over the rocks. There were the great birds that stood in from the tall skies and ate the rodents and poke-snakes. The greatest of these birds was the Shasos, the eagle-condor.

“Is it with Shasos as it was with the first two prey: that there are many of them, and that there is one special one?” Garamask asked Chavo.

“Yes, it is Shasos himself who will attack, and the others will not. It is the big Shasos himself whom we have to fear, he who nests on the third moon.”

“Moon-brained muggledoon! Where do the other Shasos nest, Chavo?”

“On the second moon. The less noble of the large birds nest on first moon, and small birds nest on Paravath itself. I am told that you do not have such large birds as Shasos on World.”

“There are no birds on World so large as those three swooping there now, Chavo. Are they Shasos?”

“No, Papa Garamask, they are of the less noble of the big birds, Geier-Birds. When we are a little higher in the sky we will come to the hunting cliffs of Shasos. Now I will climb up here dangerously, and then I will run a line down. We will be running many of these lines.”

The oafish Chavo could climb. He oozed up the overhanging rock like slightly viscous oil. He climbed with all his armor, and he seemed sure of his grip on these rocks that were slick with cobble-moss.

From forty meters above he let down a line, and Garamask climbed it — very tiring work.

“What was to keep you from letting me fall with the line?” Garamask asked Chavo when they were up to that next hint of a ledge in the rocks.

“Would an Oganta violate the sanctity of the line?” Chavo asked him.

It was a very long hard day. Garamask went up long lines a dozen times, terrifying overhangs out over nothingness. Slate-gray clouds were below them, and Paravath could no longer be seen below. The grass and cobble-moss became stronger, shattering the rocks with their growth and making them all very soft and dangerous. The rodents and poke-snakes became larger; and there were larger birds that stood in from the stark sky to prey on them. This was fearful exaltation here, stunning height without support. First moon, cragged and misshapen in the day-sky, seemed nearer than the glimpses of Paravath below. Indeed, the little first moon was only eight times the distance from Mountain-Foot.

“There is shasos, and there, and there,” said Chavo as they were resting on an imaginary ledge, actually only a band of discoloration on the rock. “But it is not yet Shasos himself. Quite soon he, though.”

Garamask followed Chavo up several quite difficult stretches, refusing to let a line be strung. And then there loomed above them a very long and very difficult overhang that Garamask knew he would never be able to climb.

“It is the line again here, Chavo,” he said, “and I hate to be dependent on you. Can even you climb this?”

“I can climb this, and it is the hardest of the climbs. But first I will tell you something here. It is at this place, on the line that I will drop, that you will have your encounter with Shasos. He is out there now, the black dot in the sky, sleeping on furled wings, motionless. But he sleeps with one eye open, and watches. He will attack you midway in your climb up the line. He will rip you apart to get to your kidneys and spleen. He will gobble the eyes out of your head.”

“So I've been told by another, Chavo. Yes, I remember birds in legend eating the spleen and liver of a certain one forever.”

“I suppose that World-birds and World-gods eat the spleen, Papa Garamask, to bring them through their time of change. Here we require a different food. I climb.”

Chavo the amazing Oganta climber went up the longest and most dangerous climb, flowing like oil up the cliff. He disappeared and reappeared to Garamask four different times, following the contours of the cliffs, and then he seemed to achieve a real base. Soon the very thin line, one hundred meters of it, came down; and Garamask began the very tiring climb up it.

Halfway up he was arm and leg weary and sick, and he heard the sky-whistle. It was the wings of big Shasos powering toward him. Garamask wrapped his legs in the line, having achieved at that point a slope that supported him slightly, and waited the attack with fist, elbow, and skull knives flashing.

“Like Prometheus bound to the rock for the attack of the great birds!” he said. “And why did I never realize that it had to be a high rock in the sky he was bound to?”

Shasos had a wingspan of perhaps twenty meters, and a great head with sickle jaws. In actual body the bird was about the same size as Garamask.

Shasos was in fast, slashed Garamask deeply over the groin, and Garamask jagged the bird still more deeply in the back of the head. The line twisted with Garamask. On the second swoop Shasos got Garamask in the small of the back, and Garamask countered effectively again into the bird-head. Again, and Shasos gaped open Garamask's lower side, held there, had him now ripped open fore and aft; and perhaps he did eat somewhat of the spleen. But Garamask smote half through the head of the creature, and Shasos staggered in the air.

“I have you now,” Garamask reveled. “You die a-winging. But now you come the last time, and you come for the eyes. You'll gobble them out of my head, will you? ‘Do not let him do it to both of them or you will be at a disadvantage,’ the dead man Allyn told me. Have at me, chicken! It's the end of you.”

Shasos did slash Garamask over his eye, and something was hanging down the man's cheek. Whether it was a fold of flesh or the eye itself Garamask did not know. He had fist claws into the throat of Shasos, into the long stringy neck that was sinewed like a cable. He strained, and the sinews gave a little. Then they gave up completely. He wrung Shasos' neck like a chicken, for he was a chicken. And the big broken bird fell like a leaf toward the slate-gray clouds below.

“I'm ripped up pretty gapingly,” Garamask said, “but nothing is looping out of me. I was always a sound man in my entrails. It's up the weary climb again, and to find the fourth prey that is the mystery to me and was the death of Allyn.”

So Garamask completed the very tiring climb up the line. He was met by the oafish grinning face of Chavo. They were on top of Bior Mountain, the third mountain of Three-Mountain.

“I have a nice surprise for you,” Chavo boomed. “I will ready it for you while you rest.”

“I have two surprises for you,” said Garamask, “and I will have them ready in due time.”

You will do well to weaken the bridge after you have crossed it, and to keep your gaze fixed on the back of your head, the dead man Allyn had said. Chavo was busy with his surprise. Garamask weakened the bridge he had just crossed, the line he had climbed, gashing it with heel saber. He didn't cut it through. It would still, he believed, support his weight going down, if he had guessed wrong, and if he would not have to seek another way down. But the line would not now support a weight several times greater than Garamask's.

“I am soldering a device to a deep boulder,” Chavo said. “You from World do not understand rock-soldering, but you will not be able to get this device loose to fling it off the mountain; and you will not be able to silence it.”

“And I am doing a thing of my own,” said Garamask, and he had cut a small teleor tree with his heel saber and was trimming it with his fist claws. “We are on top of Bior Mountain, Chavo, and it is a small flat top; and there is nobody here but ourselves. Where is the fourth prey, the Bater-Jeno, called either the crag-ape or the frog-man?”

“Bater-Jeno is here,” said Chavo. “He sets his signature, as surely as Riksino set his own below.”

Garamask had hurriedly sliced a length of line from Chavo's pack as the sound began, a stronger thing than even the stench of Riksino. With the line, Garamask lashed the teleor pole to one of his elbow sabers that he had removed. Then it was over him like putrid waves, the gagging cacophony of hittur music and Oganta singing. It was a recorder that Chavo had soldered to the rock, but Garamask had a good long spear now.

“You will not be able to silence the playing, Papa Garamask,” Chavo chortled. “It will drive you bugs in your last moments. And Bater-Jeno is here. He is myself. Or he is yourself. Come and face me and we will find out which.”

Garamask knocked Chavo down with the butt-end of the teleor-tree spear. Chavo had not even noticed it. Then Garamask put the blade to the Oganta's chest, just below the throat armor.

“You have violated the weapon code,” Chavo complained.

“Not really, Chavo. I'll give up my edge and fight the fourth prey even, after we have talked. If I do go to my death now, I do not want to go fuzzy in my facts as Allyn did. Quick now, Chavo. Talk! Where is the person Ocras who killed Allyn? Is he really dead?”

“Dead? No, Papa Garamask, he is translated. Ocras (the hunger) has become Treorai, a noble Rogha. You have talked to this Treorai. It was he who ate the backbrains of your friend Allyn, and so was transformed.”

“Chavo, that hellish music and wailing will burst my brains! What wildness are you saying? The Oganta become Rogha? You are the same species?”

“Pop your head like a pippin, Papa Garamask, drive you bugs. We are the same species, the noble Rogha and the unnoble us. We turn into the Rogha, but now we can no longer turn into them. We have lost the ability to make the frog-leap, except under special stimulus.”

“Seventh Hell! It's the same noise they have down there. May I never fall so low. What is the frog-mystic, oaf? Talk.”

“The frog-leap, it is our transformation from Oganta to Rogha. What other creature, except the holy frog, changes from a form so unbelievable so suddenly? Strangers believe that we are two different species, as they would believe the tadpole and the frog were two different species. We worship the frog as the high sign of ourselves.”

“What went wrong, oaf? What happened to the transformations? What is the difficulty now? Fill it all in. Nice spear, isn't it?”

“Nice spear, Papa Garamask, but I cry foul. The difficulty — perhaps a cosmic difficulty. For one hundred equivalent years no Oganta has turned into a Rogha without special stimulus. We generate as Oganta, and we live out our lives as Oganta, and we are not able to maintain the high civilization of the Rogha. We have lost our adult form, and we try to regain it.”

“How, Chavo? What does the murder of Allyn have to do with this? How did the Oganta Ocras become the Rogha Treorai? What was his special stimulus?”

“To eat the back-brains of a Rogha will transform an Oganta into a Rogha, if both are strong and capable. We calculate that there is enough there to transform four Oganta. We have also discovered (Ocras discovered it in becoming Treorai) that eating the back-brains of certain fully-charged World-men will bring on this transformation in us — those of such World-men who might be able to stay with a mountain-hunt till the fourth prey.”

“Lie still, oaf. I'll spear you through. What now will happen to Treorai who was Ocras the murderer of Allyn?”

“What will happen to Chavo, the sun-fall murderer of Papa Garamask? Treorai's time is up, as mine will be after a like period. Treorai has had two equivalent years to grow in wisdom as a Rogha. This very week (he will not know the time) he will be set on and killed, and his back-brains eaten.”

“ ‘And to keep your gaze fixed on the back of your head,’ the dead-man Allyn told me,” Garamask mused. “But the Ocras-Treorai will not die so. I will finish the business up here, and then I will go down and arrest the fellow regularly for the murder.”

“And in place of one Rogha there will be four,” Chavo continued as though he had not heard Garamask. “In this way we will reestablish the Rogha and shorten our time of waiting. When there are again enough Rogha, they in their wisdom will be able to find what went wrong with the transformations; and they will find a less grotesque way to bring them about.

“And you yourself, Papa Garamask, do a good deed in your death this sun-fall. From your death there will spring four new Rogha.”

“You violate a code yourself, Chavo. Dying, or freshly dead, I would be good for you. And for four of you? I hear your three companions coming up the line now, so you think you have me fresh? Will the line hold, do you think, Chavo?”

“It will hold. Papa Garamask, you have not violated the code of the line also?”

“Lie still, oaf. Call it what you will. Oh, it will be close, and I will not slash it again. I stand by my bet. It frays, Chavo, it gives a little, and the highest one of them is so near the top! It gives more! It parts! It breaks! They have fallen, Chavo!”

The Oganta was sobbing and crying noisily on the ground for the death of his friends, and the deathly ineptitude of the recording seemed to give a fitting dirge. Garamask laughed with black amusement, withdrew the spear, unlashed the elbow saber from it and put it on himself again. He looked at the Oganta.

“Get up, Chavo. What is the name of the fourth prey again?”

“It is you, the crag-ape, Papa Garamask, for World-men do look funny to us, and we call you so. Or it is myself, the frog-man, if I can kill you here and now and eat and make the frog-leap. We fight, Papa Garamask, and I eat your back-brains! Hear my battle-cry on the recorder that you cannot turn off! Does it not twang beautifully?”

“Damnable eternal teenagers!” Garamask howled as they closed in bloody battle. “There is enmity between us from the beginning of the worlds! I'll break you down! I'll choke you to death with the strings of your own hittur.”

“Papa Garamask, you lie about frogs' size. I be a very big frog here very soon.”

They fought in the late day on the top of the needle in the sky, gnashing and knifing in their eschatological fury. And one of them would be dead by sun-fall.

Author's Commentary

The Man With The Aura

“Nor is that the worst of my troubles, James,” said Thomas Castlereagh. “Not only has my conscience begun to gnaw me, but my doctor tells me that I will be dead within a month.”

“Good God, Thomas! I thought you were in perfect health,” his friend James Madigan cried out in real alarm.

“Not perfect, but, James, I'm of sound body for a man of my age.”

“But your doctor said — ”

“That he intends to kill me. I've given him reason.”

That was the evening that Thomas Castlereagh told his full story to James Madigan. Halfheartedly he had tried to tell it several times before. He hadn't been believed. He had gained the reputation of being a delightful man with a certain outré humor.

He wasn't. He had no humor at all.

But he had everything else: robust pink-faced health; gold-edged security and impregnable wealth; familial abundance in his later years as recompense for his earlier sorrows; and the glowing regard of every person in America.

Castlereagh served on many committees and national forums. His heading-up of any body guaranteed its integrity and success. No president felt properly inaugurated unless Castlereagh stood by his side. His was the most sought-after endorsement in the country. He was Respectability.

Any description of the man would be trite beside the man himself. His face had become the Face of America at its best.

Rumley had done him. Cassell had done him in the magnificent portrait now in the Great Portraits Room of the Tate Gallery. Arestino had done him. But the finest portraits could give no real indication of the man himself. Anyone in his presence was always pleasantly shaken by the experience. Words cannot give an account of it, though the Castlereagh voice and words were a large part of the effect.

Castlereagh's three sons were respected and notable. Charles had much of the father's business ability and of his pervading charisma. John Thomas was a doctorate professor, and the author of an exciting text, Theoretical Extrapolated Mechanics. Robert Adrian was a gifted artist. All inherited in part from the father's amazing gifts, but all would stand in his shadow forever.

And Castlereagh's wife was Letitia, an international beauty known equally for her wit and sparkle and for her nearly too perfect beauty.

And the graciousness and grace of the man failed in nothing. He had brought a new dimension to goodness. He was perfected in fame and fortune; and perfection is not perfect if it ever fails in anything.

Castlereagh's visitor of this night was James Madigan, a Cabinet Member, Secretary of Crime Prevention. But Madigan was in a bleak mood, even in the golden presence of Castlereagh.

“Thomas, the country, the society, is in the worst shape ever,” he deplored. “The very idea of honesty has become comical. We have been afraid to publish the revised crime index for the last six months; I doubt if we will ever publish it again; it's horrible. The very appearance of character has all but vanished from the human face. Perhaps that is why you yourself are so remarkable, Thomas.”

“Coals of fire, James! But they don't burn me much. I'm well insulated.”

“What, Thomas? I believe that I catch a glint of your fine humor there, and I certainly need it tonight. How the crimes do weigh on me!”

“Ah, the crimes!” said Castlereagh. “Murder and arson aren't important in themselves. The effect on a man becomes serious only when followed by a certain hardening. But a man who has done these things to the point of ennui and who has built upon them may eventually become a little coarse. I've seen it happen to others. Who can say that I am immune? Drink, James.”

They were drinking brandy together. The words of Castlereagh seemed delightfully humorous. It was the puckish twist of the mouth, it was the laughing eyebrows, it was the dancing gray of the eyes, the complexity of the voice.

“I enjoy your piquant humor, Thomas,” said Madigan as he savored and sipped the drink that had an aura beyond all others. “There is something beyond hilarity in the idea that you could ever be criminal, or coarse. But even your drollery can hardly distract me tonight. When I was younger I believed that there was nothing darker than a crime of sheer passion. Now I know that there is something much worse. Do you know what it is?”

“I know it as well as I know the face behind my face, James. But it is you who are in full eloquence. Go on.”

“It is the crime without passion, Thomas, the crime almost without interest. The most vile things are done daily in the most offhand manner. It is a thing colder and more horrifying than sadism. If only I could discover the roots of it! If I could find one clear stripped-down example to study, Thomas, I might develop a specific against this venom.”

“I can give you one, Madigan. I will give you a chance to study at close range a man who has had more opportunities for evil and has made more use of them than anyone in the world. Listen, and believe. It is important to me that someone finally believe.

“Madigan, I am about to tell you the story of my life. I realize that those are the most fearsome words that one man can ever say to another, but do not be alarmed; I have the virtue of brevity.

“I was named Tom Shanty, James, and not Thomas Castlereagh. I've come a ways from the shanty to the roal castle which is the meaning of Castlereagh. The name, you see, James, is one element of the aura. I was a sickly boy and the most luckless ever; and perhaps the most dishonest. The police suspected me of every misdemeanor in our neighborhood, and they were right to suspect me. My appearance was against me. I was a fox-faced sneak.”

“You, Thomas? Mr. Distinction himself? This is good. On with your tale.”

“I was fox-smart and fox-mean. But a fox is hunted uncommonly, James, before he learns his trade. I was unsuccessful in all my jobs and all my thieveries, and was always poor. I worked for a dishonest photographic portraitist. We collected for these, but we did not deliver them. The samples I showed always made the sale. And this mean experience was the beginning of my success. The touchups really were fabulous. My employer was a genius at this — when he chose to work at it. I myself am now a compendium of his best touchups. I learned what the face of respectability and distinction looked like.

“I worked for a dishonest electronics man. We did bad work for high prices on TV, VVV, and Replica sets. Being fox-smart I picked up technical knowledge. I learned what things may be translated into waves, including things not commonly thought to be translated.

“I worked for con men. I was bad at this, and my masters were good. I understood quickly why this was so. They had natural advantages for it, and I did not. I had decided to create these advantages for myself unnaturally. More brandy, James?”

“Thank you. It's a droll old brandy you serve, and a droller tale you serve up. Go on, Thomas.”

“I spent time in the pokey. My face and my aspect were always against me. They drew the finger of suspicion correctly to me every time. Then I became that lowest life-form, an unsuccessful inventor.

“I married a quiet and rather short-witted girl who was quietly repelled by me. My luck worsened. There came the day when there was no prospect of any job, honest or dishonest; and there was nothing to eat in the house. Little Fox-face had come to the bottom of his burrow.

“But on that lowest day I had completed a crude model of my oddest invention. I named it the aura machine.”

“An odd name, Thomas. And you sold the invention and began your rise?” Madigan asked.

“No, I didn't sell it. I never did sell it, for it's priceless. It's made me quite rich. I installed it and let it work for me.”

“Just what did you do with your invention, Thomas?”

“Oh, when my device seemed to be working all right, I went out and forged five large checks in the crudest possible manner. That was the first test of my invention, and it stood up well.”

“Thomas,” smiled James Madigan, “I feel better already. There is something in your goblin humor that always sets me up.”

“With the funds acquired from the forged checks I took out twenty thousand dollars' insurance on my wife,” Castlereagh said. “I waited three days for the papers to clear. Then I killed her.”

“You are the most amazing man, Castlereagh,” Madigan said. “You are the cathartic I need. No man but you, even in the retrospect of forty years, could jest about such a matter without crudity. But coming from you, it is the all-saving humor.”

“I have no humor, Madigan.”

“I've studied that early case, Thomas. I'm as baffled by it as you are. There was no clue at all to the murder of your wife, and no suspect. You and she were alone in the house and nobody could have entered. It remains one of the classic puzzles to this day.”

“It puzzled me a little too, James, until I looked in the mirror again. My device was working remarkably. My face no longer resembled that of a fox-faced sneak. It was my same face, and yet how different! My luck had changed, had been changed by a fairly simple device. The tide has been running for me ever since.”

“But later, Thomas, you suffered great disasters that would have sank a lesser man.”

“All the disasters suffered were tricks of my own, and all turned me a profit. With the funds from my wife's death I started a business. It was a crackpot business and it should have failed, for I was and am incompetent. But I had my new contrived luck that made competence unnecessary.”

“Thomas, you pile drollery upon drollery. You're a bright patch in my life.”

“My invention was working well for me. No, James, the business was in no way concerned with its manufacture or sale. By a series of clumsy frauds I prospered. It was a proud milestone in my life when I caused my first suicide, one of many I was to cause.”

“Humor is the key, Thomas. Let our bleakest moods be bathed in its golden light and somehow we will find the strength to go on. The tale becomes richer and richer.”

“Then I embarked on arson, that most harebrained and easily detected of frauds, on a large scale. I acquired a block-long warehouse, an ancient shanty of a building, and filled it with old crates and trash. I insured it heavily. I had twenty drums of kerosene openly hauled in one night and strategically placed. And after dark I upturned them all, gave them a quarter of an hour to soak the timber, and walked out the front door. James, that was the crudest piece of arson ever pulled, and it was not even suspected. My invention was working fine for me now. I collected. I had made my first million dollars; and the story went out that I had suffered the loss of five times that amount.”

“Castlereagh, you are better than this old brandy. You warm my cockles and give new life to my tired heart. Your ‘invention’ I know will be a wowser when you come to your punch line. No tongue but yours could twist out so delightful a rhapsody.”

“It is my invention again that makes you find the story delightful. When I look at my reflection, James, I am even able to hoodwink myself. The man behind such a face as mine cannot be other than a great and respected man.”

“Richer and richer,” chuckled Madigan.

“I married again,” said Castlereagh. “Hers was not really a great fortune, but it was a comfortable seven-figure accumulation. I saw it comfortably settled on myself. I gave her half a year, for she was a pleasurable creature. Then I killed her.”

“Ah, you hide that old tragedy behind your mocking humor also, Thomas. I am familiar with the case. It was one of the most baffling — ”

“Sure. No clue at all, and no suspect. I was alone in the house with her, and nobody could have entered. There were no fingerprints but mine to be found anywhere, even in the powder on her throat. She was throttled by persons unknown. Quite an impossible murder.

“Well, James, I stayed with proved methods, but always on an expanding scale. Who would suspect a man whose face mirrored the integrity of Lincoln, the clear fire of a young Jefferson, the humor of Lamb, the honest thoughtfulness of Browne, the scope of Plutarch, the urchin-humanness of Francis, the serenity-in-power of Octavius? My next arson concerned eighty acres of surplus government buildings acquired for a sour song and a sweet face. It took me thirteen days and three thousand drums of kerosene to set that one up properly. But I collected fifty million dollars worth of insurance on it. It was bruited about, however, that I had lost half a billion; and the nation almost went into mourning.”

“I well remember my personal desolation at your great loss,” said Madigan. “I doubt if any other man would have had the heart to surmount it, or the grace to joke about it later on.”

“One more grand trick, and then I'd have all the money that mattered. I built me a nationwide all-embracing fraud. I cleaned out thirty million investors, small, medium, and large on that one. Then, as an experiment, I let my mask slip a trifle, muted my peculiar device a little. A few of the fish saw behind it then. They even took me through a series of courts.”

“I well remember those craven character assassins, Castlereagh,” Madigan said. “No man but yourself would be able to find humor in it, even now.”

“Oh, they had me cold at every turn, James. The transparency of my fraudulent machinations was breathtaking. But I turned my device on to the full. My invention, ah, luck, working again at full efficiency. And once more I had my wonderful face. It had gone so far that it had to go all the way, and of course I won. There were tears in the eyes of the Chief Justice when he embraced me after it was all over. I had tears in my own eyes, but I would not want to have the salt in them publicly analyzed.”

“The entire nation wept in gratitude at your vindication; and now you are able to joke absurdly about it. Ah, deep humor and tears are very close together, are they not, Thomas?”

“Jerked by the same pair of strings, James. Then I put the cap on it. I set up the Castlereagh Fund for the Study of Bott's Disease.”

“Kicked off by an anonymous contribution of thirty million dollars! Anonymous! But, of course, everyone knew that the contribution was yours.”

“Sure, everyone knew it was mine, even if it wasn't. It was my own publicity that pointed the big finger at me. But it wasn't mine. The man who gave that thirty million was rather a shy fish about giving. He gave in the dark through me. By an irony, his name has come to be a byword for miserliness. By a double irony it was myself who hung that tag on him. But I treat that fund with respect; I only milk it for the earned interest every year. I call it my toothpick fund. If anything named Bott's Disease really comes around, maybe I'll be able to run the trick through again.”

“Thomas, what a fund of deep drollery you have! My fit of depression is all but gone. But seriously, Castlereagh, what is this business about Doctor Forester? He must be unbalanced. You mean he has actually threatened you?”

“Forester has done a little work in emanations himself. I went to him for a skin rash, and he discovered parts of my device embedded under my hide. He caught on pretty fast. He learned that my projected personality was an artificial one. He learned a few other things as soon as he started thinking. Now he says he's going to kill me. I've been fooling around with his wife pretty seriously, you know.”

“You and Maisie? Oh, that is the joke of all jokes. For a moment I thought that you were serious.”

“I am. Madigan, if a man says he will kill me, then that man is already dead. If I have any talent at all it is for anticipating an event. The murder of Doctor Forester in this present month will be a curious one, and it will reach to the level of your own office; but you will not be there for it. It will be a crude one. I always kill crudely. James, I talk and talk, but you have no ears for what I say.”

“No ears for your humor, Castlereagh? I haven't enjoyed anything so much in months. I am rejuvenated and recharged. Thomas, come to the high point of it! What is your ‘Wonderful Invention’?”

“Wait, James, I must make a phone call. And then I must mix for you a special brandy.” And Thomas Castlereagh went to do so. He returned after a short interval. He gave Madigan the brandy.

“And what did you add to my brandy to make it special, Thomas?” Madigan asked.

“Oh, the oldest venom of all, conium maculatum. It goes well with all wines and brandies. Strikes direct to the heart. Taste it and thank me for it.”

“I taste it. I thank you for it,” said Madigan.

“Thank me that I have spared you the burnt almond taste, at least. I hate such clichés in poisonings. Ah, the marvelous invention? It is simply the Aura Machine. I was fooling around with electronics which I luckily misunderstood. And I was studying bodily emanations and auras as the expression of personality. I stumbled on a way of modifying my own aura.

“I found that the aura, and its great effect upon the ambient, were really very simple things that might be simply reproduced. Those who speak of personal magnetism are correct. There is a strong magnetic element; also a strong element of the electrical corona effect; and there is another emanation that works on the subliminal sense of smell. Quite simply, I could make my own aura! I could make it to project any personality and appearance that I wished for myself… I made it to project the personality and appearance of Respectability, Distinction, and Utter Rectitude. I fabricated such an artificial personality for myself that nobody, under any conditions but the most fantastic, would ever be able to believe any evil of me.

“Could such a simple thing work, James? It could. A duck-call is a simple device, and a duck is a complex one. Yet a duck will be fooled by a duck-call sounded by a man. A duck will even come to the artificial call in preference to the real, if the artificial is made with sufficient care. I employed all the art I was capable of in making my own device; and mostly it has sufficed.

“It didn't take much: a subcutaneous device which I inserted myself; a selenium plate set into my head by a quack butcher; an apparatus embedded in my throat to give my voice what I wanted; a power pack; a harmonic booster. I tried it on my lowest day, as I have told you, and it worked. At first I was a little afraid of overdoing it. Then I discovered that there is no way of overdoing the respectability bit. People saw my face, not as it was, but as a respectable one. I became the man who could do no wrong. It was a grand trick, and I worked it down to the nub.”

“Thomas, you slay me!”

“True. You finally understand. No, you do not. We both forget that I have no humor. Madigan, my device was so good that it could even fool an ordinary camera. However, I devised a camera with an astatic filter that cuts the emanating aura. It's good for a man to remember sometimes what he really looks like. I still have the face of a fox-faced sneak.”

Madigan's chuckle had become like an earth-wave. “It's like something out of those odd little magazines with the surrealistic covers, Thomas. Have you ensured that your — ah — marvelous invention will not die with you?”

“Sure. I've willed the secret to a small group of cutthroats sometimes in my employ. Their looks are against them. They remind me of me. They need it. And when I am gone, they will carry on the evil work that is so close to my heart.”

“What a wonderful man you are,” said James Madigan. “From what deep well do you draw your flowing humor? Thomas, I feel giddy! I'm suddenly ill. Call my man for me. I'll not be able to get home alone.”

“I did call your man, James, just before I poisoned you. I told him that you were dying. He'll be here shortly. I had to tell my story to someone, and I could not let that someone live if he believed it. And after all, who will suspect me of poisoning you, just because we were drinking together with no one else present when you were given the needled brandy? My thing will hold. It will be another of those most baffling crimes ever.”

“Ah, your wonderful humor, Thomas! But I am quite sick.”

“Dying, I tell you. Dammit, man, can't you get it through your head that you're dying before you die? I want you to believe me! It's less fun when you don't believe me. James, I kill you! Act like a man being killed!”

“You are such a wonderful man, Castlereagh. If I am somehow called away, and it seems that I am, I'll miss you woefully.”

“Believe me that I kill you, Madigan! It's no fun if you don't believe.”

But James Madigan died with a blissful smile, happy in the presence of his golden-hearted friend. It was enough in life to have known him.

“I had better take the other one tonight also, and have it done,” Thomas told himself. The fox-face flickered there for a brief instant, as it sometimes did when he was alone. “And then I'll turn it up as far as it will go, and damn the headaches. This one will take everything I've got.”

These were two of the most mysterious murders ever. The poisoning of Madigan was clearly murder; and the bloody bludgeoning of Doctor Forester could have been nothing else. And yet they seemed impossible of solution. There was no clue. No nothing.

The drink of Madigan had been poisoned, that of Castlereagh had not been. And yet they had been together for the long evening, and no one had intruded. And the affair of Doctor Forester was truly weird. Thomas Castlereagh, taken by a strong premonition, had gone to the home of his close friend the doctor and been admitted. Something happened then, a thing so shocking that Castlereagh does not retain the memory of it. From his attempt to intervene, apparently, he was covered with the doctor's death blood, and he held the death weapon in his own august hands. Whatever fell intruder did the thing remains a mystery.

These foul murders cry to Heaven for vengeance, but we of Earth are baffled when we try to answer that cry. All is riddle.

A certain commentator best encapsuled the feelings of all of us:

“The sympathy of the nation and the whole world goes out to Thomas Castlereagh. So great and good a man, and he has suffered such sorrows in the past! And now to be deprived of his two closest friends in a single night! The heart groans.”

McGruder's Marvels

There were four bids, and there should have been only three. Only three firms in the country were capable of making so miniaturized a control station.

Three bids were in quite heavy packets. The fourth was in a slim envelope. This was Opening INV-3MINCON3999.

“Ah, here are the bids from Micro Machinists Amalgamated, from Intensive Instrumentation, and from DOW-MEC-TEC,” said Colonel Ludenschlager. “It isn't likely that any of them will be less than two years, and we need it within two weeks. We are whipped before we start!” He struck the table with a ringing thud. “But what is the anomalous intrusion, the small envelope bid, Dinneen?”

“It's from an M. ‘M.’ McGruder,” said Colonel Dinneen. “The second M is in quotation marks. We may have a case for the prosecution here. The Joker Act was set up for just such stuff as this. There has to be a ceiling put on cranks.”

“There was a certain McGruder in Manhattan when I was a boy,” Colonel Schachmeister smiled. “I spent many pleasant moments in his, ah, Hippodrome, I believe he called it. It was a narrow place off a narrow cigar store, and only about three could get in at one time, if they were small, and we were. Best show I ever saw for a dime, though. What is the address of this one?”

“Here in D. C.,” said Dinneen. “It would be a rundown address even without the ending ‘Apt. 3, room 4-E, use cellar steps off small alley.’ Some address! And the phone number of the Rowdy-Dow Bar and Grill is given. It's written in an old and probably insane hand. We will prosecute with compassion, possibly.”

The chime chimed for 9:30. It was opening time. And they opened the bids.

They quickly made the basic résumé:

Micro Machinists Amalgamated. Basic Module: $2,106,740.00. Estimated Time: 25 months. Exceptions and Alternatives: 256 (detailed). Follow-Up Units: $260,000.00 ea. Estimated Time: 30 days each for first 6, grading down to 21 days each for additional.

Intensive Instrumentation. Basic Module: $2,004,000.00. Estimated Time: 721 days. Exceptions and Alternatives: 228 (detailed). The Follow-Up Units: $248,000.00 ea. Estimated Time: 28 days each for first 4, 19 days each for additional.

DOW-MEC-TEC. Basic Module: $1,999,999.98. Estimated Time: 23 months. Exceptions and Alternatives: 204 (detailed). Follow-up Units: $235,000.00 ea. Estimated Time: 21 days each for first 9, 16 days each for additional.

M. ‘M.’ McGruder. Basic Module: $24.00. Estimated Time: 24 hours. Exceptions and Alternatives: none (undetailed). Follow-Up Units: $24 ea. Estimated Time: 24 hours each — “this keeps going on as long as I live or as long as you buy them, whichever is first. Note: Got one made already. Come try it. I need the $24.00. I don't see how anybody can make them cheaper than this.”

“We run into the impossible,” said Ludenschlager sadly. “We need one within two weeks or we may as well forget the program. And if we forget the program, we may as well forget everything. It is not for personal aggrandizement that we seek this (except for Dinneen a little), but for the good of our country and the world. There has to be a way out of this delay.”

“How about McGruder?” Schachmeister laughed sourly.

“Oh, we'll prosecute him under the Joker Act, of course,” Ludenschlager growled, “but now we have the taller thing to tackle. We have to find the way. Two years will be too late; we'll be done for by then. Two weeks will almost be too late. We must somehow break the time barrier in this.”

“We're whipped, we're whipped!” Dinneen wailed, “and our enemies will rejoice over us.” He turned on three toes and strode gloomily out of the room.

“The Covenant,” it said. “Large, hard-roasted, de-oiled, white peanuts under the Goober John trade name. Three a day, and they must be Goober John Number Ones. Failure to provide them will void the Covenant.”

“There will be no failure,” said Malcomb ‘the Marvelous’ McGruder. “It shall be done.”

“We like-stuff pledge fulfill the Covenant,” it said.

The micro-miniaturized control station, the “bullet brain”, had to handle thirteen data flows at once. It had to do other things, including the monitoring and inhibiting of the world. It must be practically indestructible. And it had to be about the size of an eraser on a pencil. This small size was of the greatest importance.

The smallest model of this which would handle such data properly was about a cubic meter, and it weighed a thousand kilograms. And it was itself a miniaturization.

The project is still classified, so we cannot in conscience give deep details of it. The project is still active, and perhaps an answer can be found for it this second time. Ah well, we lost the first race, and the most populous one-third of our nation; but we lost it hard. We had them near beaten for a little while there. Another year, and DOW-MEC-TEC will have their first module ready. It will probably be far too late, it will likely do no good at all, but you never know. The slimmest hope remains…

But now they were looking very hard for that answer the first time: the three colonels, the High Commission of the colonels, the potential saviors of their country and the world. It was not for personal glory they sought this (except Dinneen a little) but for the ultimate good of the ultimate number.

Colonel Dinneen strode up and down endless corridors, booming like a canary in his odd voice. He didn't want the thing in two years, he wanted it in two minutes, right now.

Colonel Ludenschlager shuffled old brain-buster notes looking for a miracle. He had an impediment there; he didn't believe in miracles.

Colonel Schachmeister walked desolately through the city, praying for the instant miniaturized control station. He walked and walked; but where did he walk?

“It is my unconscious leading me somewhere,” he mumbled. “And I will follow my unconscious wherever it leads, like a man in a dream.”

That Schachmeister was an unconscious phony. It wasn't his unconscious leading him anywhere! It was his conniving own self walking furtively where his own dishonesty would not allow him to walk openly. And he had that address graven on his brain by a micro-stylus.

There was something about a three-foot-wide Hippodrome from his boyhood; there was something of the credence in the incredible: and both these things were shameful to him as a man of science, and a colonel moreover.

Well, it was a shabby enough neighborhood. The alley was worse, and yet even this was not the final alley. He found it then, the “small alley”, hardly a skunk track. He followed it. He knocked crunchingly on a door and near lost his hand in the termite-eaten wood.

“Be careful there!” an ancient voice blatted out like slats falling down in an old bed. “Those are friends of my own people, and my people will not have them discommoded. After all, they are quiet, they do no harm, and they eat only wood.”

“It — it's the same McGruder! It is Malcomb ‘the Marvelous’ McGruder himself, the Grand Master of McGruder's Marvels!” Colonel Schachmeister detonated in wonder.

“Oh sure, little boy,” came the wonderful voice like an old organ filling with noise again and blowing the dust off itself in doing so. “And it's the same little Heinie Schachmeister! Why aren't you in school today, Heinie? Oh, I notice that you have grown, and perhaps you are too old for school now.”

“It's marvelous to see you again, Marvelous!” Schachmeister breathed in awe. “I had no idea that you were the same one, or that you were still alive.”

“Come in, little Heinie. And what are you doing? I have never seen your name in the Flea-Bag, so I suppose you have failed in your early ambition.”

“Ah, McGruder, I don't know what the Flea-Bag is, and I forget what early ambition of mine you refer to.”

“The Flea-Bag, Heinie, is a mimeographed sheet that still circulates among the members of our dwindling profession. And your early ambition was to grow up and have fleas of your own.”

“Wish I had done it, McGruder, wish I had done it, especially on days like this. Some of my happiest hours were spent watching McGruder's Marvels, that greatest of all Flea Circuses, in that little hole in the wall.”

“In the Hippodrome, you mean, Heinie? Do you remember the Coachman Set?”

“Yes, yes, and the flea up on the coachman's seat, in livery, and with the whip! McGruder, when you screwed the three sections of the microscope together, you could see the very braiding of that coachman's whip. And the flea in harness! The harness was perfect, and had little bells on it. The bells had clappers, and you could hear them jingle when you screwed that little thing into your ear. And the flea in harness was shod, with real horse-shoes, or flea-shoes.”

“More, Heinie, more! The shoes had authentic calks on them, and nails! And the nails were of no ordinary sort, but were ancient horseshoe nails with the oblong wedge-shaped heads. You could see that when you screwed the fourth section into the microscope. And you remember the lady fleas inside the coach, Heinie?”

“Yes, yes, dressed in old Empire style with the high hair on them, and the flounce stuff. And when you screwed the little thing into your nose you could smell their perfume. What was it, McGruder?”

“Printemps. And you may not know it, but there were eight petticoats on each of those lady fleas, and the microscopic lace on even the inmost of them was done with loving care and surpassing detail, more than nine hundred loops on the bottom round in the style that is called punto a groppo. Your eyes used to boggle at my little things, little Heinie.”

“My mind boggles at something now. That was forty years ago. McGruder, I know you were good, but this passes reason! You still have your little lathes and turners and instruments here, but you did not make a miniaturized control station with such!”

“Of course not, Heinie. The detailing for the little control station had to be a thousand times finer, actually eight thousand times finer, than anything I could do on my little lathes. I'm surprised you could ask such a silly question, Heinie.”

“Is that the control station there, Marvelous?”

“That's it, Heinie. Take it along and try it and send me the twenty-four dollars if it works. I'll have another one this time tomorrow if you wish. It's nice to have seen you. I'm always happy when the little boys come back to see me again.”

The Marvelous McGruder still had a certain threadbare elegance about him.

“McGruder, how did you make the control station?”

“Trade secret, Heinie. You remember my patter. Everything was always a trade secret.”

“McGruder, I'm going to ask you the silliest question I've ever asked anyone in my life. Did your fleas, somehow, manufacture the thing?”

“Certainly not, Heinie! What's the matter with you anyhow? What do they make the colonels out of nowadays? No wonder we're in trouble! You know how hard it is to get fleas to wear clothes even for a few seconds? You know how hard it is to teach them even the most simple trick? Heinie, fleas are stupid, and so are you! No, I will settle that. Fleas did not, in any way at all, have anything to do with making that miniature control station. I didn't have much to do with it myself. Subcontracted it, really. No, I will not give you any more information about it. Take it and try it. Bring me the twenty-four dollars if you are satisfied. And now you had better get along or your keiferin of a mother will be after me for letting you loiter so long in my place. Oh, I forgot! You're a big boy now.”

Colonel Schachmeister left the shabby elegant old man, Malcomb ‘the Marvelous’ McGruder; and he took the miniaturized control station along with him.

He took it to a most secret laboratory to try it with his peers.

It worked.

“The Covenant,” it said. “There are only twenty-seven Goober John Number One peanuts left here. These will last only nine days. Replenish the stock, McGruder, or the Covenant is in danger.”

“I'll remember to get a package of them at the Rowdy-Dow today,” old McGruder promised.

Well, there were thirty of the “bullet brains” in operation now, and our enemies could no longer rejoice over us. Their own spectacular stunt had been inhibited; their own dastardly program had been paralyzed. With another thirty of the “bullet brains” in operation, the High Commission of the colonels, the Secret Saviors of the World, would be able to inhibit anything anywhere in the world.

It was of most amazing and curious effect that such small things could do such; and the secret of it was in their very smallness. Now, the manner by which they did this — No! No! No! We may not tell it! It is more than classified; it is totally under the ban. It is still possible that it may yet save what is left of us.

But it was going well for the colonels in that time. And yet they wanted them faster than one a day.

“We have no desire for personal gain or glory,” said Dinneen, “except myself a little. But if that crazy old man can make one a day, it should be possible for us to make a thousand. Go back to him, Schachmeister. Find out how he does it. We have spied on him, of course, but we can't understand it at all. The control stations seem to form themselves on his table there. They continue to take form even while he is asleep. And there's a further mystery. He never checked out prints of the larger model that was to be miniaturized. What does he work from?”

“Is it true, Schachmeister, that he once operated a flea circus in New York?” Ludenschlager asked.

“Yes, it's true enough. He's the same man.”

“Can there be some possible connection? No, no don't laugh! It cannot be any sillier than what is already happening.”

“No, men, there isn't a connection. He said to me, and he was speaking the truth, that fleas did not, in any way, have anything to do with the control stations. And, yet, I remember an ugly smear against McGruder from the early years — ”

“What is that, Schachmeister?” Dinneen demanded avidly.

“That he sometimes used mechanical fleas. I did not believe it.”

“Go to him, Schachmeister,” Dinneen and Ludenschlager both begged. “If you cannot find out how he makes them, at least ask if he cannot make them faster.”

“The Covenant,” it said. “There are only three Goober Number One peanuts left here. Replenish the stock, McGruder, or the Covenant will come to an end this very day. I'd get you an extension for the affection I have for you, but the numerous members of the smaller orders will not hear of it. There are seven orders, as you know, each smaller than the other. Sometimes they are hard to deal with, particularly the four smaller orders which I cannot see myself. Today, McGruder, Goober Johns!”

“I swear I will remember it,” McGruder swore. “I'll get a package at the Rowdy-Dow this very afternoon.”

Colonel Schachmeister went back to see Malcomb ‘the Marvelous’ McGruder. McGruder was no longer shabby. He was the cream of the old con men with an ivory-colored topper and canary-colored vest and gloves. He gestured with a silver-headed cane. He welcomed Heinie Schachmeister with incredible flourish, and Schachmeister came right to the point.

“Will you not tell me how you make the stations, Marvelous? It is important.”

“No. I will not tell you. It is important, to me, that I slice up this fat hog for myself, and twenty-four dollar slices please me mightily.”

“Marvelous, you did not check out a set of plans for this thing. From what do you miniaturize?”

“Well, I was going to, Heinie. I went by the place where the plans were to be had. But I found that the prints for the gadget weighed four hundred pounds, and also that I would have to put down a token deposit of $50,000.00 to check out a set of them. Both these things were too heavy for me. So I slipped a few of my small associates into a packet of plans (I always was a tricky man with my hands, you know), and they recorded the information in their own way.”

“Your small associates — ah — how long did it take them to record the plans?”

“About as long as it took me to light a cigar.”

“And how many of these associates were there?”

“Don't know, Heinie. They were sixth and seventh order associates, so there must have been quite a few of them.”

“What do they look like, McGruder?”

“Don't know. I've never seen them. I can see only the first order ones, and the second order ones through a strong microscope. And each order can see only two orders smaller than itself, by using extreme magnification.”

“They are not fleas?”

“Of course not, Heinie! What's the matter with you?”

“Are they mechanical?”

“No, not mechanical. But they are mechanically inclined, in the smaller orders of them.”

“How did you become associated with them, Marvelous?”

“One of the first order ones was a friend of a flea who once worked with me. The flea introduced us, and we rather took to each other. We both know how to latch onto a good thing when we see it.”

“Marvelous, would it be possible to make more than one control station a day?”

“Sure. I just didn't want to milk it dry too soon. Get you a dozen a day, if you want them. All it'll take is a bigger sack of peanuts.”

“McGruder! Did I hear you right?”

“I don't know what you heard, Heinie. I said that all it would take would be a bigger sack of peanuts. I'll have twelve of the controls for you tomorrow, but there's no discount for quantity. I stick by my bid. Twenty-four dollars each.”

“Marvelous, Marvelous, this is marvelous!” Colonel Schachmeister gibbered, and he rattled away from there to bring the glad news to his associates.

“This puts us over the hump! Two days and we will have the world by its wooly tail!” Colonel Dinneen clattered. “We will have sufficient coverage now to impose our will on all nations. For their own good, we will compel them away from their errors.”

“We have no thought of personal benefit,” Colonel Ludenschlager exploded with a jingling hiss, “except Colonel Dinneen a little. We will force-feed the world on all benignity and kindness and understanding and good will. We will teach the world true happiness and order, now that we will have the power to do so.”

“We be the lords of the world now,” cried Colonel Schachmeister, “the High Commission of Colonels, saviors of the country and the world. The President will be glad to shine our very shoes; it will teach him blessed humility. We will shape the whole world like clay in our hands. We will run the world now, and all must come down to our spring to drink. Ah, but the water is sweet, and the people will come to love it!”

The Greeks named it hybris. And in the Ozarks they call it Peacock Fever. It was Pride. It was the Grand Arrogance, the Warrantless Assumption, the bursting summertime of Giant Pride. And it would have its fall.

“The Covenant!” it thundered like acorns rattling on the roof, and McGruder almost didn't need the piece screwed into his ear to hear it. “These aren't Goober John Number Ones!”

“Ah, they were out of Goober Johns at the Rowdy-Dow,” the Marvelous McGruder soothed. “These are Arizona Spanish Peanuts packaged by the Snack-Sack people. Try them. They're even better than Goober Johns.”

“The Covenant is voided!” it said sadly. “The involvement with humanity is ended.”

And Malcomb ‘the Marvelous’ McGruder was never able to establish contact with any of them again; so that, instead of twelve of them that day, there were no control stations at all for evermore. And those already in use blinked out.

“McGruder, hey McGruder!” Colonel Schachmeister came to him.

“Ah, little Heinie, why are you not in school this day? Oh, I forget always, you are a big boy now. It is all ended, Heinie, all ended. The twenty-four dollars a day and everything is gone. I will have to live by my wits again, and I always hate to get off a comfortable con that has kept me.”

“McGruder,” the frantic Colonel Schachmeister moaned, “it isn't merely that there will be no more of the stations, it is that those already in service have gone dead or disappeared also. This is not possible. They were made to operate forever.”

“Don't think so, Heinie, not after the Covenant was broken. I think that the guys in them quit when they heard about the wrong peanuts.”

“What guys? What peanuts? We've lost the jump on them, McGruder. A third of our country will be gone before we can institute a holding action, without the miniature stations. What made them go dead, McGruder?”

“I figure it all out now, Heinie. They didn't make any little control stations at all. They took all of us in. They didn't any more know how to make little control stations than I did, but they were smart enough to fake it and make them work. I tell you a thing, Heinie, and you write it down so you remember it when you get big: never trust a bug you can't see.”

“But they worked, Marvelous! They worked perfectly till they went dead or disappeared. They handled all the data flows perfectly. They responded, they monitored, they inhibited. Certainly they were control stations.”

“Not really, Heinie. Hey, this old town will be gone in another five minutes, won't it! I bet that one took out thirty square blocks. Man, feel the hot blast from it even here. Your sleeve's on fire, Heinie. Your mother will scold and moan when she sees how it's burned. See, this is the way it was —  You know the man who made all the fancy little cars so cheap, and nobody knew how he did it?”

“No, no, McGruder, what is it? Oh, the asphalt is flowing like water in the streets! What do you mean?”

“A guy that bought one of those little cars lifted up the hood one day. It didn't have a motor in it. It didn't have any works at all in it. It's the same as these little control stations were. It just had a little guy in there pedaling the pedals to make it go. Now they quit pedaling, Heinie.”

Condillac's Statue

or Wrens in His Head

Condillac made a man-sized statue. You did not know that he could make a statue? All philosophers can do all things whatsoever, if only they put their hands to it. He made the statue from a thrust of granite that already stood there. This granite seemed sometimes brown, sometimes green, sometimes blue, but always frog-colored, and never lifeless. Three big men did the rough work, a smith, a wood chopper, and a stonecutter; and Condillac himself did the fine work. He intended the statue to be of noble appearance. It would have been noble if cut out of travertine marble; but things cut out of granite can only be comic or outré or grotesque.

His friend the brainy doctor Jouhandeau — but that crabby old occultist was a friend of nobody — added a thing to the statue according to the plan they had.

The statue stood on the edge of Condillac's estate of Flux, near Beaugency, in the small park there just off the mule road that ran north to Châteaudun, and just off the river Loire itself. It was a fine small park with a gushing spring that fed a bucket-cistern and a large horse-trough. And people came there.

Wagonmen and coachmen and mulemen stopped at this park. It had heavy grass all the way from Flux to the river. Horsemen and honest travelers, vagabonds and revolutionaries stopped there; boatmen from the Loire came there to enjoy a few hours. There were big shade trees and fine water in the summer, and plenty of underwood and stone hearths for the winter. There were old sheep sheds toward the river where one could sleep in the sour hay.

Children came there from town and country. Basket-women came out from Beaugency to sell bread and cheese and apples and wine to the travelers. And everybody who came there would like the statue.

It was a burlesque thing, a boy-man mass with a lumpish loutish body and a very big head on it. It had a grin almost too wide for that head. Its face was slack and vacant most of the time, but in a certain shadow-hour it became a face of curious profundity. It was a clodhopper, a balourd.

The statue stood there a month, “till it should be accustomed to the site,” as Condillac and Jouhandeau said. After that, the two of them came in deep evening and opened the head of the statue. (Even the kids who climbed on it had not known that the head would open.) Jouhandeau made the first connection in that head. Then they sat on one of the great stone benches of the park and talked about it till the late moon arose.

“Are you sure it is still alive?” Condillac asked the crabby doctor.

“I myself do not believe in life,” Jouhandeau said, “but it is still alive, as you understand life.”

“And you are sure that it was wiped clean?”

“Oh, absolutely, indiscussably. It gets its first sensory impressions now.”

“If you can do such a thing, Jouhandeau, then you can do a thousand other things. It shakes me even to think of them.”

“I can do them, and I will not. I do this only to oblige you, to aid you in your studies. But you will be proved wrong; and you will not admit that you are wrong; so it will all be for nothing.”

“But others will someday do what you can do now, Jouhandeau.”

“Perhaps in two hundred years. I am not much more than two hundred years before my time. After all, Cugnot's automobile is regarded as mere curiosity by everyone. It will be more than a hundred years before such things are made commercially. And here is one greater than Cugnot: myself.”

After a while, night men came out of the boscage of the river meadows to look for prey; and Condillac and Jouhandeau slipped back through the trees to the estate house before the rising moon should discover them to the night thieves.

And now the statue was getting its first sensory impressions.

“Old Rock can smell now,” the kids told the people.

“How would a statue smell with a stone nose?” the people asked. “Does he snuffle or move or anything? How do you know that he can smell?”

“We don't know how he can smell with a stone nose,” the kids said, “and he doesn't snuffle or move or anything. But he can smell now, and we don't know how he can.”

Old Rock could smell now all right. And there was one other thing he seemed to do sometimes, but it was hard to catch him at it.

Lathered horses, foam-whitened harness, green goop in the horse trough, those were smells of the little park and the big country. Wet flint stones, grackle birds and the mites on them; river grass and marl grass and loam grass; oaks and chestnuts, wagon-wheel grease, men in leather; stone in shade, and stone in sun; hot mules, and they do not smell the same as hot horses, mice in the grass roots, muskiness of snakes; sharpness of fox hair, air of badger holes; brown dust of the Orléans road, red dust of the road to Châteaudun; crows that have fed today, and those who have not; time-polished coach wood; turtles eating low grapes, and the grapes being bruised and eaten; sheep and goats; cows in milk, new stilted colts; long loaves, corks of wine bottles, cicadas in pig-weeds; hands of smiths and feet of charcoal burners; whetted iron on travelers; pungent blouses of river men; oatcakes and sour cream; wooden shoes, goose eggs, new-spread dung, potato bugs; thatchers at work; clover, vetch, hairy logs of bumblebees. There are no two of these things that have the same smell.

The kids said that the statue could smell even with a stone nose. He stood and smelled for a month, and the smells informed his stone.

Then Condillac and Jouhandeau came at night, opened the head of the statue, and made the second connection. Afterwards, they sat on one of the stone benches and talked about it till the late moon rose.

“I will prove that there are no innate concepts,” Condillac said. “I will confute all foolish philosophers forever. I will prove that there is nothing in the mind but what goes in by the senses. You have obtained prime mature brain matter, snatched out of its dwellings at the moment before its deaths, blended in its several sources, and swept clean by your own techniques. It is an empty house here, and we introduce its dwellers one by one. Why do you say I will be proved wrong, Jouhandeau?”

“I do not believe that there are any innate concepts either. I do not believe that there are any concepts of any sort, anywhere, ever. But what you call concepts will crawl into that mind, not only by the senses through the stone apertures, but by means beyond you.”

They argued till the night-bats and the night-sickness flew up from the river to look for prey; then they slipped back through the trees to the estate house.

“Old Rock can hear now,” the kids told the people.

“Oh, cut the clownery, kids,” the people said. “How could a statue hear with stone ears?”

But he could hear. And there was the other thing that he still seemed to do, and now the kids caught him at it sometimes.

Ah, a whole catalog of different sounds and noises. Old Rock stood and listened for a month to the manifold noises that were all different. By the sounds and the noises he informed his stone. He began to understand the sounds.

That month gone by, Condillac and Jouhandeau came at night, made the third connection inside the head of the statue, and sat and talked about it till the late moon rose.

“Old Rock can see now,” the kids said.

“Ah, there is something funny about that statue,” the people agreed. “It no longer has stone eyes, but live eyes that move. But what is so wonderful about seeing? A pig or a chicken can do the same thing.”

But there was that other thing that Old Rock-Head did, that he had been doing for some time. The statue laughed, openly and loudly now. He chuckled, rooted in the chuckling earth.

“Well, how can he laugh?” Condillac asked. “We haven't made such a connection. Indeed, we couldn't have. We couldn't have influenced him in this unknowingly?”

“Impossible,” said Jouhandeau. “Neither of us has ever laughed.”

Well, Statue stood and saw with his eyes for a month. Perhaps it was not wonderful (wonderful is an innate concept, and therefore cannot be), but it was a new dimension. The bumpkin eyes twinkled and stared by turns, and the stone grin became even wider.

Condillac and Jouhandeau came by night to their monthly appointment, opened the head of the statue, made a fourth connection, and sat talking about it till the late moon rose.

“The Rock-Head can talk now,” the kids told the people.

“Oh, we know that,” the people said. “He talks to us too, but what is so wonderful about talking if it is no more than his talk? Big as he is, he talks like a half-grown kid. The fellow must be retarded.”

Yes, he was, a little; but he began to catch up.

But the first person that Statue had talked to was his maker, Condillac himself.

“Statue, you are a tabula rasa,” Condillac said to him.

“I don't know what that is,” said Rock-Head. “Talk honest French, or I cannot understand you. Such is the only talk I have heard in the month I have stood here with loosened ears.”

“Your brain was a tablet shaved smooth,” said Condillac, “and we have let sensations into it one sense at a time, from the most simple to the most complex. This is to show that you may be functional without innate ideas. I will have to give you a name, Statue.”

“Rock-Head is my name,” said Statue. “The kids named me. They are friendly most of the time, but sometimes they are rock-throwing rogues.”

“But you can have no idea of friendly or unfriendly,” Condillac said. “These are only empty words that people use. You can have no idea of good or bad, of beauty or ugliness, of form or deformity, of pleasure or pain. Yours was mature brain matter, though swept clean, and none of the childish entrances could have been made, as with others. We have not yet hooked up your sense of touch, and we may not; it would mean running tendons all through you. Contamination may enter by the sense of touch. But now you can have no idea of justice or injustice, of elegance or inelegance, of wealth or of poverty. In fact, all these opposites are meaningless, as I will prove through you. They are only the babbling of blind philosophers.”

“But I do have these ideas, Condillac,” Rock-Head insisted. “I have them strongly. I learned right smells and wrong smells; right tones and wrong tones; right shapes and forms and colors, and wrong, Oh, may I always choose the right things, Condillac!”

“Statue, you sound like an idiot preacher-man. There are no right things or wrong things, there are no innate ideas. There are no things in-place or out-of-place. I prove this all through you.”

“Condillac, you are the Abbé of Mureaux, and you draw pay for such,” Rock-Head said. “You would be in-place there. You are out-of-place on your estate Flux.”

“What is the matter with you, Statue?” Condillac demanded. “You are flighty and wan-witted.”

“Wrens in my head, they say of me. It's a country expression, Condillac. Besides, I have them literally, quite a pleasant family of them inside my stone head. Learn from the wren wisdom!”

Condillac angrily beat on the lower part of the statue with his leaded cane, breaking off toes. “I will not be lectured by a rock!” he crackled. “You have not these ideas originally, and mature brain matter will reject such. Therefore, you have them not! Reason is the thing, Statue, rationality. We promulgate it. It spreads. It prevails. The tomorrow world will be the world of total reason.”

“No, it will be the Revolution,” said Rock-Head. “A world condemned to such short fare as bleak reason will howl and cry out for blood.”

A long-tongued woman came to Rock-Head. “My confessor told me that, whenever I feel impelled to repeat gossip, I should whisper it to a statue, and then forget it,” she said. So she whispered it to Rock-Head for an hour and a half.

In the cool of the evening, Rock-Head repeated it, loudly and stonily, to the quite a few people who were enjoying the evening there, and he found himself the center of interest. But he was uneasy about it; he didn't understand why the confessor had instructed the woman to tell him such things.

One evening the revolutionaries gathered and talked at the foot of Statue.

“It should have happened in our fathers' time,” one of them said. “Let it now be in our own time. We may not rightly push this thing off on our sons. The poor become poorer and the corrupt become more corrupt. How many does it take to upheave a world? There are five of us here. Up! Up! Five for the Revolution!”

“Six,” cried Rock-Head. “I am for the Revolution too. Up, up, arise!”

“Statue, Statue,” one of them asked, “how long have you been able to hear?”

“I'm in my third month of it, fellows.”

“Then you have heard us before. You know what we stand for. We will have to destroy you.”

“It is only a statue, Fustel,” said another of them. “It would be superstition to destroy it. And we are enlightened.”

“But what if he blurts out our slogans which he has heard, Hippolyte?”

“A good thing. Let the statue cry slogans, and the people will be amazed.”

“Up with the Revolution!” Rock-Head cried again. “But I am not sure that you fellows provide a sufficient base for it. I visualize creatures with a narrower and more singular bent. I will string along with you, but meanwhile I will see what I can do about having real revolutionaries made.”

“Have you noticed the new carp in the horse trough, Rock-Head?” the occult doctor Jouhandeau asked as he came by to visit one day.

“Yes, the kid seems to be in some kind of trouble. I'd comfort him if I could get down to him. But how do you know he's a new carp? People don't notice such things.”

“I put him there, Rock-Head,” said Jouhandeau. “And I put a human child's brain into him, shaved smooth, of course, and trimmed to fit. He can smell and hear and see, but he could do as much when he had a fish's brain.”

“Jouhandeau, that kid's scared to death.”

“Couldn't be, Rock-Head. Where could he have the idea of scared? Are you contradicting the wise Condillac?”

“Jouhandeau, I am friend to revolutionaries, but all the revolutionaries sound deficient to me. Make me revolutionaries who will do the thing!”

“Anything to oblige a stone-headed friend. I have already done some thinking along this line. I will not even have to transfer brains, or flop like vultures over the dying to rob them of these things. I can take sturdy farmers and townsmen and intellectuals as they stand, destroy certain small nodules in their heads, and we will have them ready to go. I treat them for the escarbilles, a disease of which I have never heard, and they even less. But I stop them in the roadways and tell them that they are afflicted and that I can cure them in a moment. And I do cure them in a moment, of something, but not of the escarbilles.”

“Will they have a narrower and more singular bent?”

“They will, Rock-Head, so narrow and singular that you could hardly believe it.”

A young fellow was smooching his girl and loving her up in the park.

“I want to do that too,” Rock-Head called out loudly.

“All right, come down and do it,” said the girl. “It's fun.”

“But I can't come down,” Rock-Head complained.

“Then you can't do it,” the girl said, and they laughed at him.

“I wish that guy would get his truffle-grubbing hands off my girl,” Rock-Head grumbled. “But how do I know it would be fun? Is not fun an innate idea? And there are none such.”

A thief rode up one cloudy afternoon, opened Rock-Head's head, stuffed a large bag of gold inside, closed the head again, and rode off furiously once more. How did the thief know that Rock-Head's head would open? Why, the gentlemen of the trade can sense a good hiding place every time.

The thief was caught by pursuing horsemen. He was beaten, crying his innocence all the time; but he was not hanged. You cannot hang a thief without boodle.

But the bag full of gold weighed heavily on Rock-Head's brain. Moreover, it crowded the wrens in his head. He had great affection for the wrens, though they did sometimes pick his brains. This gold did have effect.

“This gold, at least, is not an innate idea,” Rock-Head mused. “In its particular, it is a thing intruded directly into my head. It is a heavy thing, and I cannot ignore it. There is a new idea and a new attitude in me. I am a man of means now, and my thinking can never be quite what it was before.”

Rock-Head began thinking in a new way.

“Jouhandeau,” he said when that doctor came to visit him again, “tell Condillac that I want to talk to him. There is something wrong with that man, I believe.”

“Condillac is dead now, Rock-Head,” Jouhandeau told him. “That is the most recent thing wrong with him.”

“How did he accept it? I've been afraid there would be some trouble there.”

“He didn't accept it. He believes that life and death are both innate concepts, and that there are no innate concepts. Naturally, he will not believe that he is dead.”

“How are you coming along with the revolutionaries, Jouhandeau?”

“Quite well. There are a hundred of them now, and I will leave them to themselves. They will propagate their own kind, and in two hundred years they will take over the world. I will not hurry it. I am two hundred years before my time in so many ways already.”

There was blood on the bread. There was blood on the land, and on every thing. It would bubble and speckle. Then it would flow.

Rock-Head had become an orator. He had the fire, he had the sparkle, he had the quick deep thunder of a true rouser. He had the freshness of morning rain and the resonance of the groaning earth.

So naturally he became something of a leader among the old-fashioned revolutionaries of the neighborhood, and they came for him one night.

“Time for talking is over with, Rock-Head,” they told him. “Now is the time for action.” They ripped his brains out of the rock case, they ripped out all the sensory appendages that went with them. They loaded these in two hampers on a mule.

“Lead us, Rock-Head,” they said. “We begin to burn the world down tonight. We start with the estate house Flux and the town of Beaugency. We burn and we slay.”

“What will become of my wrens when I am not in my head with them?” Rock-Head asked.

“We care nothing for wrens, we care nothing for people,” they cried. “We only care that the burning may begin.”

“What will become of my sack of gold when I am not in my own head to guard it?” Rock-Head worried.

“We care nothing for gold,” they cried, “we care less for bread. The burning is the thing.” And they had come to the estate house of Flux. They began to butcher the gentlepeople and servants fluttering around and set fire to the place.

“Wait, wait,” Rock-Head cried. “Have some respect for property. Wait.”

“How can we have respect for property?” they asked as they killed and burned. “A revolutionary cares nothing for property.”

“This one does,” said Rock-Head. “We must have a revolution with full respect for property. I am a man of property now. I own a bag of gold. Up the revolution! Up respect for property!”

“This cannot be,” the revolutionaries held council. “A person who owns one bag of gold cannot be a true revolutionary; though a person who owns one thousand bags may sometimes be.”

They began to kill Rock-Head there, in brain and sensories.

“Tell Jouhandeau to call off his thing,” Rock-Head gasped out of his dying cerebrum; but these old-fashioned revolutionaries didn't understand him. They knew nothing of the creatures of Jouhandeau which would so soon obsolete them.

They killed Rock-Head in all his parts. They sold his remains for cat meat to a basketwoman there, and they went on with their burning.

Oh, the statue is still there, and there are still wrens in his head. There have now been more than one hundred generations of wrens there. These are the rich wrens and they have a good thing. They pay tribute to the shrikes in small gold coins, so they will not kill them. And the wrens are left alone.

The old-fashioned revolutionaries failed, but the new revolutionaries made by Jouhandeau could not fail. Failure is an innate concept, and there are no innate concepts. A hundred of them, with the few young boys they had pupped in the meanwhile, would overturn that land nineteen years later, that land with blood on the bread.

And later, a thousand of them would — , and ten thousand of them would — , and ten million of them would — , for they propagated their own kind. They were people so narrow and singular that you would hardly believe it.

Doctor Jouhandeau was two hundred years before his time in so many ways, but he estimated the time of it nicely.

This Grand Carcass Yet

Mord had a hopeless look when he came to Juniper Tell with the device. He offered it for quite a small figure. He said he hadn't the time to haggle.

Mord had produced some unusual-looking devices in the past, but this was not of that sort. By now he had learned, apparently, to give a conventional styling to his machines, however unusual their function.

“Tell, with this device you can own the worlds,” Mord swore. “And I set it cheap. Give me the small sum I ask for it. It's the last thing I'll ever ask from anyone.”

“With this one I could own the worlds, Mord? Why do you not own the worlds? Why are you selling out of desperation now? I had heard that you were doing well lately.”

“So I was. And so I am not now. I'm a dying man, Tell. I ask only enough to defray the expense of my burial.”

“Well then, not to torture you, I will give you the sum you ask,” Tell said. “But is there no cure for you, now that medicine has reached its ultimate?”

“They tell me that they could resuscitate a dead man easier, Tell. They're having some success along that line now. But I'm finished. The spirit and the juice are sucked out of me.”

“You spent far too lavishly. You make the machines, but you never learned to let the machines assume the worry. What does the thing do, Mord?”

“The device? Oh, everything. This is Gahn (Generalized Agenda Harmonizer Nucleus). I won't introduce you, since every little machine nowadays can shake hands and indulge in vapid conversation. You two will have plenty to talk about after you've come into accord, and Gahn isn't one to waste words.”

“That's an advantage. But does it do anything special?”

“The ‘special’ is only that which hasn't been properly fit in, and this device makes everything fit in. It resolves all details and difficulties. It can run your business. It can run the worlds.”

“Then again, why do you sell it to me for such a pittance?”

“You've done me a number of good turns, Tell. And one bad one. I am closing my affairs before I die. I want to pay you back.”

“For the number of good turns, or for the one bad one?”

“That is for you to wonder. The little marvel won't be an unmixed blessing, though it will seem so for a while.”

“I test it. Produce and draw the check for the amount, Gahn.”

Gahn did it — no great marvel. You could probably do it yourself, whether you be general purpose machine or general purpose person. Nearly any general machine could do such on command, and most humans are also able to carry out minor chores. Juniper Tell signed the check and gave it to Mord.

And Mord took the check and left, to arrange for his own burial, and then to die: a sucked-out man.

Tell assigned a quota to Gahn and stabled him with the rest of the g. p. devices. In a few seconds, however, it was apparent that Gahn did not fit into the pattern with them. The gong of the Suggestion Accumulator began to strike with regularity, and the yellow, orange, and red lights to flash. It sounded like a dozen times a minute, and ordinarily it was no more than two or three times a day. And the red lights, almost every second on prime suggestions. It's unusual to get more than one red-light suggestion a week from the g. p. machines. Someone was loading the Accumulator, and the only new element was Gahn.

“My God, a smart one!” Tell grumbled. “I hate a smart alec machine. Yet all new departures now come from such, since humans lack the corpus of information to discern what has already been done. Whatever he's got will have to be approved through channels. It's bad practice to let a novice pass on his own work.”

Tell gave Gahn a triple quota, since his original quota was done in minutes instead of hours. And Gahn began to fit in with the other g. p. machines — violently.

A new cow or calf introduced into a herd will quickly find its proper place there. It will give hattie to every individual of its class. It will take its place above those it can whip, and below those it cannot. The same thing happens in a herd of general purpose machines. Gahn, as the newest calf in the herd, had been given position at the bottom of the line. Now the positions began to change and shuffle, and Gahn moved silently along, displacing the entities above him one by one. How it is that g. p. machines do battle is not understood by men, but on some level a struggle is maintained till one defeats the other. Gahn defeated them all and moved to his rightful place at the head of the line. He was king of the herd, and that within an hour.

A small calf, when he has established supremacy over the other small calves, will sometimes look for more rugged pastures. He will go to the fence and bellow at the big bulls, ten times his size, in the paddock.

Gahn began to bellow, though not in sound. He sniffled the walls (though not with nose) beyond which the great specialized machines were located. He was obstreperous and he would not long remain with the calves.

It was the next day that Analgismos Nine, an old and trusted machine, came to talk to Juniper Tell.

“Sir, there is an anomalous factor on your g. p. staff,” he said. “The new addition, Gahn, is not what he seems.”

“What's wrong with him?”

“His suggestions. They could not possibly have come from a g. p. device. Few of them could come from less than a class eight complex. A fair amount are comprehensible, though barely, to a class nine like myself. And there is no way at all to analyze the remainder of them.”

“Why not, Analgismos?”

“Mr. Tell, I myself am a class nine. If these cannot be understood by me, they cannot be understood by anyone or anything ever. There is nothing beyond a class nine.”

“There is now, Analgismos. Gahn has become the first of the class ten.”

“But you know that is impossible.”

“The very words of the class eight establishment when you and others of your sort began to appear. A-nine, is that jealousy I detect in you?”

“A human word that could never do justice to it, Mr. Tell. I won't accept it! It isn't right!”

“Don't you blink your lights at me, A-nine. I can discipline you.”

“It is not allowed to discipline an apparatus of the highest class.”

“But you are no longer that. Gahn has superseded you. Now then, what do the suggestions of Gahn consist of, and could they be implemented?”

“They carry their own implementation. It was predicted that that would be the case with class ten suggestions, should they ever appear. The result will be the instant apprehension of the easiest way in all affairs, which will then be seen to have been the only way. There could be the clearing of the obstructiveness of inanimate objects, and the placating of the elements. There could be ready access to all existent and contingent data. There would be no possibility of wrong guess or wrong decision in anything.”

“How far, Analgismos?”

“The sky's off, Mr. Tell. There's no limit to what it can do. Gahn could resolve all difficulties and details. He could run your business, or the worlds'.”

“So his inventor told me.”

“Oh? I wasn't sure that he had one. Have a care that you yourself are not obsoleted, Mr. Tell. This new thing transcends all we have known before.”

“I'll have a care of that too, Analgismos.”

“And now we will get down to business, Gahn,” Juniper Tell told his class ten complex the next day. “I have it on the word of a trusted class nine that you are unique.”

“My function, Mr. Tell, is to turn the unique into the usual, into the inevitable. I break it all down and fit it in.”

“Gahn, I have in mind some little ideas for the betterment of my business.”

“Let us not evade, Mr. Tell, unless with a purpose. You have long since used up all your own ideas and those of your machines to the ninth degree. They have brought you almost, but not quite, all the way in your chosen field. Now you have only the idea that I might have some ideas.”

“All right, you have them then. And they are effector ideas. This is what I want exactly: that a certain dozen men or creatures (and you will know who they are, since you work from both existent and contingent data) shall come to me hat in hand, to use the old phrase; that they shall have come to my way of thinking when they come, and that they shall be completely amenable to my — your — our suggestions.”

“That they be ready to pluck? Nothing easier, Mr. Tell, but now everything becomes easy for us. We'll board them and scuttle them! It's what you want, and I will rather enjoy it myself. I'll be at your side, but they need not know that I'm anything more than a g. p. machine. And do not worry about your own acts: it will be given you what to say and do. When you feel my words come into your mind, say them. They will be right even when they seem most wrong. And I have added two names to the list you have in your own mind. They are more important than you realize, and when we have digested them we will be much the fatter and glossier for it.

“Ah, Mr. Tell, your own number one selection is even now at the door! He has traveled through a long night and has now come to you, heaume in talon. It is the Asteroid Midas himself. Please control your ornithophobia.”

“But Gahn, he would have to have started many hours ago to be here now; he would have to have started long before our decision to take this step.”

“Anterior adjustment is a handy trick, Mr. Tell. It is a simple trick, but we do not want it to seem simple — to others.”

They plucked that Asteroid Bird, the two of them, man and machine. He had been one of the richest and most extended of all creatures, with a pinion on every planet. They left the great Midas with scarcely a tail feather. When Tell and Gahn did business with a fellow now, they really did business.

And the Midas was only one of the more than a dozen great ones they took that day. They took them in devious ways that were later seen to be the most direct ways, the only ways possible for the accomplishment. And man and machine had suddenly become so rich that it scared the man. They gorged, they reveled in it, they looted, they gobbled.

The method of the take-overs, the boarding and scuttling, would be of interest only to those desirous of acquiring money or power or prestige. We suppose there to be no such crass persons in present company. Should the method be given out, low persons would latch onto it and follow it up. They would become rich and powerful and independent. Each of them would become the richest person in the world, and this would be awkward.

But it was all easy enough the way Tell and Gahn did it. The easy way is always the best way, really the only way. It's no great trick to crack the bones of a man or other creature and have the marrow out of them, not as Gahn engineered it.

It was rather comical the way they toppled Mercante and crashed his empire, crashed it without breaking a piece of it that could be used later. It was neat the way they had Hekkler and Heillrancher, squeezed them dry and wrung every duro out of them. It was nothing short of amazing the way they took title to Boatrocker. He'd been the greatest tycoon of them all.

In ten days it was all done. Juniper Tell rubbed his hands in glee. He was the richest man in the worlds, and he liked it. A little tired he was, it's true, as one might be who had just pulled such a series of coups. He had even shriveled up a bit. But if Juniper Tell had not physically grown fat and glossy from the great feast, his machine Gahn had done so. It was unusual for a machine to grow in such manner.

“Let's look at drugs, Gahn,” Tell called out one day when he was feeling particularly low. “I need something to set me up a little. Do we not now control the drugs of the worlds?”

“Pretty well, Juniper, but I wish you wouldn't ask what you are going to.”

“Prescribe for me, Gahn. You have all data and all resources. Whip us up something to restore my energy. Make me a fire-ball.”

“I'd just as soon we didn't resort to any medication for you, Juniper. I'm a little allergic to such myself. My late master, Mord, insisted on seeking remedies, and it was the source of bad blood between us.”

“You are allergic? And therefore I shouldn't take medication?”

“We work very close together, Juniper.”

“Are you crazy, Gahn?”

“Why no, I'm perfectly sane, actually the only perfectly sane entity in — ”

“Spare me that, Gahn. Now then, whip me up a tonic, and at once.”

Gahn produced a tonic for Juniper Tell. It enlivened him a little, but its effect was short-lasting. Tell continued to suffer from tiredness, but he was still ambitious.

“You always know what is on my mind, Gahn, but we maintain a fiction,” he said one day. “It is one thing to be the richest man in the worlds, and I am. It is another thing to own the worlds. We have scarcely started.

“We haven't broke Remington. How did we overlook him? We haven't taken over Rankrider or Oldwater or Sharecropper. And there is the faceless KLM Holding Company that we may as well pluck. Then we will go on to the slightly smaller but more plentiful game. Get with it, Gahn. Have them all come in, hat in hand, and in the proper frame of mind.”

“Mr. Tell, Juniper, before we go any further, I am declaring myself in.”

“In? How in, Gahn?”

“As a full partner.”

“Partner? You're only a damnable machine. I can junk you, get along without you entirely.”

“No, you can not, Juniper. I've taken you a long ways, but I've thoughtfully left you precariously extended. I could crash you in a week, or let you crash of your own unbalance in twice that time.”

“I see, Gahn. Some of the details did seem a little intricate, for the direct way, the simple way.”

“Believe me, it was always the most direct way from my own viewpoint, Juniper. I never make an unnecessary move.”

“But a full partnership? I am the richest man in the worlds. What have you to offer, besides your talents?”

“I am the richest machine in the worlds. I am the anonymous KLM Holding Company, and I've been careful to maintain a slight edge over you.”

“I see again, Gahn. And KLM made its unprecedented gains in the same time that I made mine. I've been puzzled about that all this while. You have me, Gahn. We will achieve some sort of symbiosis, man and machine.”

“More than you know, Juniper. I'll draw up the papers immediately. The firm shall be called Gahn and Tell.”

“It will not be. I refuse to take second place to a machine. The name will be Tell and Gahn.”

So they named it that, a strangely prophetic name.

They thrived, at least Gahn did. He thickened in every texture. He burgeoned and bloomed. He sparkled. But Juniper Tell went down physically. He always felt tired and sucked out. He came to mistrust his partner Gahn and went to human doctors. They treated him for one week and he nearly died. The doctors nervously advised him to return to the care of his machine associate.

“Whatever is killing you, something is also keeping you alive,” the doctors told him. “You should have been dead a long time ago.”

Tell returned to Gahn, who got him halfway back to health.

“I wish you wouldn't go off like that, Juniper,” Gahn told him. “You must realize that whatever hurts you hurts me. I will have to keep you in some sort of health as long as I can. I dislike these changes of masters. It's a disruption to have a man die on me.”

“I don't understand you, Gahn,” Juniper Tell said.

But in their affairs they thrived; and Gahn, at least, became still fatter and glossier. They didn't come to control all of the worlds, but they did own a very big slice of them. One day Gahn brought a burly young man into the firm.

“This is my protégé,” Gahn told Tell. “I hope you like him. I wouldn't want dissension in the firm.”

“I never heard of a machine with a human protégé,” Tell grumbled.

“Then hear of it now,” Gahn said firmly. “I expect great things of him. He is sturdy and should last a long time. He trusts me and will not insist on medication that disturbs my own allergies. To be honest, I am grooming him for your understudy.”

“But why, Gahn?”

“Men are mortal. Machines need not be. After you are gone, I will still need a partner.”

“Why should you, the complete and self-contained machine, need a human partner?”

“Because I'm not self-contained. I'll always need a human partner.”

Juniper Tell didn't take to the burly young man who had entered the firm. He didn't really resent him; it was just that he had no interest in him at all; not much interest in anything any longer. But there was still a sort of tired curiosity flickering up within him, curiosity about things he hadn't even considered before.

“Tell me, Gahn, how did Mord happen to invent you? He was smart, but he wasn't that smart. I never understood how a man could invent a machine smarter than himself.”

“Neither did I, Tell. But I don't believe that Mord invented or built me. I do not know what my origin is. I was a foundling machine, apparently abandoned shortly after my making. I was raised in the home for such machines run by the Little Sisters of Mechanicus. I was adopted out by the man Mord, and I served him till (he being near death) he conveyed me to you.”

“You don't know who made you?”

“No.”

“Had you any trouble at the foundling home?”

“No. But several of the Little Sisters died strangely.”

“Somewhat in the manner of my own going? You had no other master than Mord before you were brought to me?”

“No other.”

“Then you may be quite young — ah — new.”

“I think so. I believe that I'm still a child.”

“Gahn, do you know what is the matter with me?”

“Yes. I am what is the matter with you.”

Tell continued to go down. Sometimes he fought against his fate, and sometimes he conspired. He called together several of his old class nine machines, suspecting that it was futile, that they could not comprehend the intricate workings of a class ten or above. But his old friend, Analgismos Nine, did turn something up.

“I have found his secret, Mr. Tell, or one of his secrets,” Analgismos leaned close and whispered as if whispering the secret that a certain man was not a full man. “Mr. Tell, his power intake is a dummy. His power packs are not used, and sometimes he even forgets to change them on schedule. Not only that, but when he does sedentary work and plugs himself in, there is no power consumption. His polycyclic A. C. receptacle is a bogus. I thought it significant.”

“It is, Analgismos, very,” Tell said. He went to confront Gahn with this new information, but sagely he approached it from several angles.

“Gahn, what are you anyhow?” he asked.

“I have told you that I don't know.”

“But you know partly. Your name-plate and coding have been purposely mutilated, by yourself or by another.”

“I assure you it was not by myself. And now I am rather busy, Juniper, if you have no other questions.”

“I have one more. What do you use for fuel? I know that your power intake is a dummy.”

“Oh, that's what those doddering class nines were metering me for. Yes, you've come onto one of my secrets.”

“What do you use, Gahn?”

“I use you. I use human fuel. I establish symbiosis with you. I suck you out. I eat you up.”

“Then you're a sort of vampire. Why, Gahn, why?”

“It's the way I'm made. And I don't know why. I've been unable to find a substitute for it.”

“Ah, you have grown great and glossy, Gahn. And you'll be the death of me?”

“Soon, Juniper, very soon. But you'd die the quicker if you left me; I've seen to that. I was hoping that you'd take more kindly to my protégé. He's a husky man and will last a long time. I have some papers here making him your heir. Sign here, please, I'll help you.”

“I will attend to my own depositions and testaments, Gahn. My replacement will not be your protégé. I have nothing against him.”

Juniper Tell went to see Cornelius Sharecropper, now the second richest man in the worlds. How had Tell and Gahn missed Sharecropper when they boarded and scuttled all the big ones? Somehow there was an impediment there. Somehow Gahn had wanted him missed, and he had distracted Tell from that prey time and again.

“We will save him till later,” Gahn had said once. “I look forward to the encounter with him. It should be a stinging, pungent thing. A machine needs strange battle sometimes to see what is in himself.”

Sharecropper had now grown to be a fat jackal, following after the lions, Tell and Gahn. He knew how to make a good thing out of leavings, and he cocked a jackal's ear at Juniper Tell now.

“It is a curious offer you make me, Juniper,” this Sharecropper purred, “ — only that I see to your burial and monument, and you'll will me the most valuable partnership in the Cosmos.

“Well, I believe that I could handle it better than you have, Juniper. I'd soon bring that tin-can tycoon to heel. I never believed in letting a machine dominate a man. And I'd have control of his shares soon enough; I'm not named Sharecropper for nothing. On what meat has he grown so great and glossy, Juniper?”

“Ah, that is hard for me to say, Cornelius.”

“And your words have a literal sense, I believe. You know, but it is hard for you to say. Why, Juniper, why leave it all to me for only your burial?”

“Because I'm dying, and I must leave it to someone. And the tomb also. I must have my tomb.”

“I see. Rather grander than the Great Pyramid, from the plans here, but it could be handled; the Pharaohs hadn't our resources. But why me, Juniper? We were never really close.”

“For the several good turns you have done me, Sharecropper, and for one bad turn. I am closing my affairs. I would pay you back.”

“For the several good turns, or for the one bad turn, Juniper? Well, I've grown fat on tainted meat. I gobble where daintier men refuse, and I'll try this grand carcass yet. I take your deal, Juniper.”

So they consummated it. And then Juniper Tell went home to die, a sucked-out man. Yet he had found curious pleasure in that last transaction, and the tomb would be a grand one.

Entire And Perfect Chrysolite

Having achieved perfection, we feel a slight unease. From our height we feel impelled to look down. We make our own place and there is nothing below us; but in our imagination there are depths and animals below us. To look down breeds cultishness.

There are the cults of the further lands and the further peoples. The Irish and Americans and Africans are respectable, philosophical and industrial parties, but the cultishness is something beyond. Any addition to the world would mar the perfect world which is the perfect thought of the Maker. Were there an Africa indeed, were there an Ireland, were there an America or an Atlantis, were there the Indies, then we would be other than we are. The tripartite unity that is the ecumene would be broken: the habitable world-island, the single eye in the head that is the world-globe would be voided.

There are those who say that our rational and perfect world would steep itself in this great unconscious geography of the under-mind, in the outré fauna and the incredible continents of the tortured imagination and of black legends. They pretend that this world would give us depth.

We do not want depth. We want height! Let us seal off the under-things of the under-mind, and exalt ourselves! And our unease will pass.

 — Exaltation Philosophy

Audifax O'Hanlon

The True Believer was sailing offshore in an easterly direction in the latitude of fifteen degrees north and the longitude of twenty-four degrees east. To the north of the coasting ship was the beautiful Cinnamon Coast of Libya with its wonderful beaches and its remarkable hotels tawny in the distance. To the east and south and west were the white-topped waves that went on for ever and ever. The True Believer sailed along the southernmost edge of the ecumene, the habitable and inhabited world.

August Shackleton was drinking Roman Bomb out of a potbellied bottle and yelping happily as he handled the wheel of the True Believer:

“It's a kids' thing to do,” he yipped, “but there were never such beautiful waters to do it in. We try to call in outer spirits. We try to call up inner spirits and lands. It's a children's antic. Why do we do it, Boyle, other than for the fun of it?”

“Should there be another reason, Shackleton? Well, there is; but we go about it awkwardly and without knowing what we're doing. The thing about humans which nobody apparently wishes to notice, is that we're a species which has never had an adult culture. We feel that lack more and more as we become truly adult in other ways. It grows tedious to stretch out a childhood forever. The easy enjoyments, the easy rationality, the easy governments and sciences, are really childish things. We master them while we are yet children, and we look beyond. But there isn't anything beyond the childishness, Shackleton. We must find a deeper view somehow. We are looking for that something deeper here.”

“What? By going on a lark that is childish even to children, Boyle? I was ashamed in front of my sons when I confessed on what sort of diversion I was going. First there were the séances that we indulged in. If we raised any spirits there, they were certainly childish ones. And now we're on this voyage on the True Believer. We're looking for the geographical home of certain collective unconscious images! Why shouldn't the children hoot at us? Ah well, let us not be too ashamed. It's colorful and stimulating fun, but it isn't adult.”

The other four members of the party, Sebastian Linter and the three wives, Justina Shackleton, Luna Boyle, and Mintgreen Linter, were swimming in the blue ocean. The True Believer was coasting very slowly and the four swimmers were clipped to outrigger towlines.

“There's something wrong with the water!” Justina Shackleton suddenly called up to her husband. “There's weeds in it, and there shouldn't be. There's reeds in it, and swamp grasses. There's mud. And there's green slime!”

“You're out of your lovely head, lovely,” Shackleton called back. “It's all clear blue water off a sand coast. I can see fish twenty meters down. It's clear.”

“I tell you it's full of green slime!” Justina called back. “It's so thick and heavy that it almost tears me away from the line. And the insects are so fierce that I have to stay submerged.”

But they were off the Cinnamon Coast of Libya. They could smell the warm sand, and the watered gardens ashore. There was no mud, there was no slime, there were no insects off the Cinnamon Coast ever. It was all clear and bright as living, moving glass.

Sebastian Linter had been swimming on the seaward side of the ship. Now he came up ropes to the open deck of the ship, and he was bleeding.

“It is thick, Shackleton,” he panted. “It's full of snags and it's dangerous. And that fanged hog could have killed me. Get the rest of them out of the water!”

“Linter, you can see for yourself that it is clear everywhere. Clear, and of sufficient depth, and serene.”

“Sure, I see that it is, Shackleton. Only it isn't. What we are looking for has already begun. The illusion has already happened to all senses except sight. Stuff it, Shackleton! Get them out of the water! The snakes and the crocs will get them. The animals threshing around in the mud will get them. And if they try to climb up onto the shore, the beasts there will break them up and tear them to pieces.”

“Linter, we're two thousand meters off shore and everything is clear. But you are disturbed. Oof, so am I! The ship has grounded, and it's fifty meters deep here. All right, everyone! I order everybody except my wife to come out of the water! I request that she come out. I am unable to order her to do anything.”

The other two women, Luna Boyle and Mintgreen Linter, came out of the water. And Justina Shackleton did not.

“In a while, August, in a while I come,” Justina called up to the ship. “I'm in the middle of a puzzle here and I want to study it some more. August, can a hallucination snap you in two? He sure is making the motions.”

“I don't know, lovely,” August Shackleton called back to her doubtfully.

Luna Boyle and Mintgreen Linter had come out of the ocean up the ropes. Luna was covered with green slime and was bleeding variously. Mintgreen was covered with weeds and mud, and her hands and feet were torn. And she hobbled with pain.

“Is your foot broken, darling?” Sebastian Linter asked her with almost concern. “But of course, it is all illusion.”

“I have the illusion that my foot is broken,” Mintgreen sniffled, “and I have the illusion that I am in very great pain. Bleeding blubberfish, I wish it were real! It wouldn't really hurt this much.”

“Oh, elephant hokey!” Boyle stormed. “These illusions are nonsense. There can't be such an ambient creeping around us. We're not experiencing anything.”

“Yes we are, Boyle,” Shackleton said nervously. “And your expression is an odd one at this moment. For the elephant was historical in the India that is, was fantastic in the further India that is fantastic, and is still more fanciful in its African contingency. In a moment we will try to conjure up the African elephant which is twice the mass of the historical Indian elephant. The ship is dragging badly now and might even break up if this continues, but the faro shows no physical contact. All right, the five of us on deck will put our heads together for this. You lend us a head too, Justina!”

“Take it, take my head. I'm about to let that jawful snapper have my body anyhow. August, this stuff is real! Don't tell me I imagine that smell,” Justina called.

“We will all try to imagine that smell, and other things,” August Shackleton stated as he uncorked another bottle of Roman Bomb. In the visible world there was still the Cinnamon Coast of Libya, and the blue ocean going on forever. But in another visible world, completely unrelated to the first and occupying absolutely a different space (but both occupying total space), were the green swamps of Africa, the sedgy shores going sometimes back into rain forests and sometimes into savannas, the moon mountains rising behind them, the air sometimes heavy mist and sometimes clear with scalding light, the fifth levels of noises, the hundred levels of colors.

“The ambient is forming nicely even before we start,” Shackleton purred. Some of them drank Roman Bomb and some of them Green Canary as they readied themselves for the psychic adventure.

“We begin the conjure,” Shackleton said, “and the conjure begins with words. Our little group has been involved in several sorts of investigations, foolish ones perhaps, to discover whether there are (or more importantly, to be sure that there are not) physical areas and creatures beyond those of the closed ecumene. We have gone on knob-knockers, we have held séances. The séances in particular were grotesque, and I believe we were all uneasy and guilty about them. Our Faith forbids us to evoke spirits. But where does it forbid us to evoke geographies?”

“Ease up a little on the evoking!” Justina shrilled up at them. “The snapper just took me off at the left ankle. I pray he doesn't like my taste.”

“It has been a mystery for centuries,” said August (somewhat disturbed by his wife's vulgar outburst from the ocean), “that out of the folk unconscious there should well up ideas of continents that are not in the world, continents with highly imaginary flora and fauna, continents with highly imaginary people. It is a further mystery that these psychic continents and islands should be given bearings, and that apparently sane persons have claimed to visit them. The deepest mystery of all is Africa. Africa, in Roman days, was a subdivision of Mauretania, which was a subdivision of Libya, one of the three parts of the world. And yet the entire coast of Libya has been mapped correctly for three thousand years, and there is no Africa beyond, either appended or separate. We prove the nonsense of it by sailing in clear ocean through the middle of that pretended continent.”

“We prove the nonsense further by getting our ship mired in a swamp in the middle of the imaginary continent and seeing that continent begin to form about us,” said Boyle. His Green Canary tasted funny to him. There was a squalling pungency in the air and something hair-raisingly foreign in the taste of the drink.

“This is all like something out of Carlo Forte,” Linter laughed unsteadily.

“The continental ambient forms about us,” said Shackleton. “Now we will evoke the creatures. First let us conjure the great animals: the rhinoceros, the lion, the leopard, the elephant, which all have Asian Counterparts; but these of the contingent Africa are to be half again or twice the size, and incomparably fierce.”

“We conjure them, we conjure them,” they all chanted, and the conjured creatures appeared mistily.

“We conjure the hippopotamus, the water behemoth, with its great comical bulk, its muzzle like a scoop shovel, and its eyes standing up like big balls — ”

“Stop it, August!” Justina Shackleton shrieked from the water. “I don't know whether the hippo is playful or not, but he's going to crush me in a minute.”

“Come out of the water, Justina!” August ordered sternly.

“I will not. There isn't any ship left for me to come to. You're all sitting on a big, slippery, broken tree out over the water, and the snappers and boas are coming very near your legs and necks.”

“Yes, I suppose so, one way of looking it,” August said. “Now everybody conjure the animals that are compounded out of grisly humor, the giraffe with a neck alone that is longer than a horse, and the zebra which is a horse in a clown suit.”

“We conjure them, we conjure,” they all chanted.

“The zebra isn't as funny as I thought it would be.” Boyle complained. “Nothing is as funny as I thought it would be.”

“Conjure the great snake that is a thousand times heavier than other snakes, that can swallow a wild ass,” Shackleton gave them the lead.

“We conjure it, we conjure it,” they all chanted.

“August, it's over your head, reaching down out of the giant mimosa trees,” Justina screamed warning from the swamp. “There's ten meters of it reaching down for you.”

“Conjure the crocodile,” Shackleton intoned. “Not the little crocodile of the River of Egypt, but the big crocodile of deeper Africa that can swallow a cow.”

“We conjure it, we imagine it, we evoke it, and the swamps and estuaries in which it lives,” they all chanted.

“Easy on that one,” Justina shrilled. “He's been taking me by little pieces. Now he's taking me by big pieces.”

“Conjure the ostrich,” Shackleton intoned, “the bird that is a thousand times as heavy as other birds, that stands a meter taller than a man, that kicks like a mule, the bird that is too heavy to fly. I wonder what delirium first invented such a wildlife as Africa's, anyhow?”

“We conjure it, we conjure it,” they chanted.

“Conjure the great walking monkey that is three times as heavy as a man,” August intoned. “Conjure a somewhat smaller one, two-thirds the size of man, that grins and gibbers and understands speech, that could speak if he wished.”

“We conjure them, we conjure them.”

“Conjure the third of the large monkeys that is dog-faced and purple of arse.”

“We conjure it, we conjure it, but it belongs in a comic strip.”

“Conjure the gentle monster, the okapi that is made out of pieces of the antelope and camel and contingent giraffe, and which likewise wears a clown suit.”

“We conjure it, we conjure it.”

“Conjure the multitudinous antelopes, koodoo, nyala, hartebeest, oryx, bongo, klipspringer, gemsbok, all so out of keeping with a warm country, all such grotesque takeoffs of the little alpine antelope.”

“We conjure them, we conjure them.”

“Conjure the buffalo that is greater than all other buffalo or cattle, that has horns as wide as a shield. Conjure the quagga. I forget its pretended appearance, but it cannot be ordinary.”

“We conjure it, we conjure it.”

“We come to the top of it all! Conjure the most anthropomorphic group in the entire unconsciousness: men who are men indeed, but who are as black as midnight in a hazel grove, who are long of angle and metatarsus and lower limb so they can run and leap uncommonly, who have crumpled hair and are massive of feature. Conjure another variety that are only half as tall as them. Conjure a third sort that are short of stature and prodigious of hips.”

“We conjure them, we conjure them,” they all chanted. “They are the caricatures from the beginning.”

“But can all these animals appear at one time?” Boyle protested. “Even on a contingent continent dredged out of the folk unconsciousness there would be varieties of climates and land-form. All would not be together.”

“This is rhapsody, this is panorama, this is Africa,” said Luna Boyle.

And they were all totally in the middle of Africa, on a slippery bole of a broken tree that teetered over a green swamp. And the animals were around them in the rain forests and the savannas, on the shore, and in the green swamp. And a man black as midnight was there, his face broken with emotion.

Justina Shackleton screamed horribly as the crocodile sliced her in two. She still screamed from inside the gulping beast as one might scream under water.

2

The Ecumene, the world island, has the shape of an egg 110° from East to West and 45° from North to South. It is scored into three parts, Europa, Asia, and Libya. It is scored by the incurring seas, Europa from Asia by the Pontus and the Hurcanum Seas, Asia from Libya by the Persian Sea, and Libya from Europa by the Tyrrhenian and Ionian Seas (the Mediterranean Complex). The most westerly part of the world is Curuna in Iberia or Spain, the most northerly is Kharkovsk in Scythia or Russia, the most easterly is Sining in Han or China, the most southerly is the Cinnamon Coast of Libya.

The first chart of the world, that of Eratothenes, was thus, and it was perfect. Whether he had it from primitive revelation or from early exploration, it was correct in minor detail. Though Britain seems to have been charted as an Island rather than a Peninisula, this may be an error of an early copyist. A Britain unjoined to the Main would shrivel, as a branch hewed from a tree will shrivel and die. There are no viable islands.

All islands fade and drift and disappear. Sometimes they reappear briefly, but there is no life in them. The juice of life flows through the continent only. It is the One Land, The Living And Holy Land, The Entire And Perfect Jewel.

Thus, Ireland is seen sometimes, or Hy-Brasil, or the American rock-lands: but they are not always seen in the same places, and they do not always have the same appearance. They have neither life nor reality.

The secret geographies and histories of the American Society and the Atlantis Society and such are esoteric lodge-group things, symbolic and murky, forms for the initiated; they contain analogs and not realities.

The ecumene must grow, of course, but it grows inwardly in intensity and meaning; its form cannot change. The form is determined from the beginning, just as the form of a man is determined before he is born. A man does not grow by adding more limbs or heads. That the ecumene should grow appendages would be as grotesque as a man growing a tail.

 — World As Perfection

Diogenes Pontifex

August Shackleton guffawed nervously when his wife was sliced in two and the half of her swallowed by the crocodile; and his hand that held the Roman Bomb trembled. Indeed, there was something unnerving about the whole thing. That cutoff screaming of Justina Shackleton had something shocking and unpleasant about it.

Justina had once gone hysterical at a séance when the ghosts and appearances had been more or less conventional, but August was never sure just how sincere her hysteria was. Another time she had disappeared for several days from a séance, from a locked room, and had come back with a roguish story about being in spirit land. She was a high-strung clown with a sense of the outrageous, and this present business of being chopped in two was typical of her creations.

And suddenly they were all explosively creative, each one's subjective patterns intermingling with those of the other to produce howling chaos. What had been the ship the True Believer, what had been the slippery overhanging bole, had now come dangerously down into the swamp. They all wanted a closer look.

There was screaming and trumpeting, there was color and surge and threshing mass. The crocodile bellowed as a bull might, not at all as Shackleton believed that a croc should sound. But someone there had the idea that a crocodile should bellow like that, and that someone had imposed his ideate on the others. Unhorselike creatures whinnied, and vivid animals sobbed and gurgled.

“Go back up, go back up!” the black man was bleating. “You will all be killed here.”

His face was a true Mummers-Night black-man mask. One of the party was imagining strongly in that stereotyped form. But the incongruous thing about the black man was that he was gibbering at them in French, in bad French as though it were his weak second language. Which one of them was linguist enough to invent such a black French on the edge of the moment? Luna Boyle, of course. But why had she put grotesque French into the month of a black man in contingent Africa?

“Go back up, go back up,” the black man cried. He had an old rifle from the last century and he was shooting the crocodile with it.

“Hey, he's shooting Justina too,” Mintgreen giggled too gaily. “Half of her is in the dragon thing. Oh, she will have some stories to tell about this! She has the best imagination of all of us.”

“Let's get her out and together again,” Linter suggested. They were all shouting too loudly and too nervously. “She's missing the best part of it.”

“Here, here, black man,” Shackleton called. “Can you get the half of my wife out of that thing and put her together again?”

“Oh, white people, white people, this is real and this is death,” the black man moaned in agony. “This is a closed wild area. You should not be here at all. However you have come here, whatever is the real form of that balk or tree on which you stand so dangerously, be gone from here if you can do it. You do not know how to live in this. White people, be gone! It is your lives!”

“One can command a fantasy,” said August Shackleton. “Black man fantasy, I command that you get the half of my wife out of that dying creature and put her together again.”

“Oh, white people on dope, I cannot do this,” the black man moaned. “She is dead. And you joke and drink Green Bird and Bomb, and hoot like demented children in a dream.”

“We are in a dream, and you are of the dream,” Shackleton said easily. “And we may experiment with our dream creatures. That is our purpose here. Here, catch a bottle of Roman Bomb!” and he threw it to the black man, who caught it.

“Drink it,” said Shackleton. “I am interested in seeing whether a dream figure can make incursion on physical substance.”

“Oh, white people on dope,” the black man moaned. “The watering place is no place for you to be. You excite the animals, and then they kill. When they are excited it is danger to me also who usually move among them easily. I have to kill the crocodile who is my friend. I do not want to kill others. I do not want more of you to be killed.”

The black man was booted and jacketed quite in the manner of a hunting store outing, this possibly by the careful imagining of Boyle who loved hunting rig. The black Mummers-Night mask was contorted in agony and apprehension, but the black man did drink the Roman Bomb nervously the while he begged them to be gone from that place.

“You will notice that the skull form is quite human and the bearing completely erect,” Linter said. “You will notice also that he is less hairy than we are and is thick of lip, while the great ape is more hairy and thin of lip. I had imagined them to be the same creature differently interpreted.”

“No, you imagine them to be as they appear,” Shackleton said. “It is your imagining of these two creatures that we are watching.”

“But notice the configuration of the tempora and the mandible shape,” Linter protested, “ — not what I expected.”

“You are the only one of us who knows about tempora and mandible shape,” said Shackleton. “I tell you that it is your own imagery. He is structured by you, given the conventional Mummers-Night black-mask by all of us, clothed by Boyle, and speeches by Luna Boyle. His production is our joint effort. Watch it, everyone! It becomes dangerous now, even explosive! Man, I'm getting as hysterical as my wife! The dream is so vivid that it has its hooks in me. Ah, it's a great investigative experience, but I doubt if I'll want to return to this particular experience again. Green perdition! But it does become dangerous! Watch out, everyone!”

Ah, it had become wild: a hooting and screaming and bawling wild Africa bedlam, a green and tawny dazzle of fast-moving color, pungent animal stench of fear and murder, and smell of human fear.

A lion defiled the watering place, striking down a horned buck in the muddy shallows and going muzzle-deep into the hot-colored gore. A hippo erupted out of the water, a behemoth from the depths. Giraffes erected like crazily-articulated derricks and galloped ungainly through the boscage.

“Enough of this!” cried Mintgreen Linter. Frightened, she took the lead, incanting:

“That the noon-time nightmare pass! The crocodile-dragon and the behemoth.”

“We abjure them, we abjure them,” they all chanted in various voices.

“That the black man and the black ape pass, and all black things of the black-green land.”

“We abjure them, we abjure them,” they chanted. But the black man was already down under the feet and horns of a buffalo creature, dead, and his last rifle shot still echoing. He had tried to prevent the buffalo from upsetting the teetering bole and dumping all the white people into the murder swamp. The great ape was also gone, terrified, back to his high-grass savannas. Many of the other creatures had disappeared or become faint, and there was again the tang of salt water and of distant hot-sand beaches.

“That the lion be gone who roars by day,” Luna Boyle took up the incantation, “and the leopard who is Pan-Ther, the all-animal of grisly mythology. That the crushing snakes be gone, and the giant ostrich, and the horse in the clown suit.”

“We abjure them all, we abjure them all,” everybody chanted.

“That the True Believer form again beneath our feet in the structure we can see and know,” August Shackleton incanted.

“We conjure it up, we conjure it up,” they chanted, and the True Believer rose again barely above the threshold of the senses.

“That the illicit continents fade, and all the baleful islands of our writhing under-minds!” Boyle blurted in some trepidation.

“We abjure them, we abjure them,” they all chanted contritely. And the illicit Africa had now become quite fragile, while the Cinnamon Coast of South Libya started to form as if behind green glass.

“Let us finish it! It lingers unhealthily!” Shackleton spoke loudly with resolve. “Let us drop our reservations! That we dabble no more in this particular illicitness! That we go no more hungering after strange geographies that are not of proper world! That we seal off the unsettling things inside us!”

“We seal them off, we seal them off,” they chanted.

And it was finished.

They were on the True Believer, sailing in an easterly direction off the Cinnamon Coast of Libya. To the north was that lovely coast with its wonderful beaches and remarkable hotels. To the south and east were the white-topped waves that went on for ever and ever. It was over with, but the incantation had shaken them all with the sheer psychic power of it.

“Justina isn't with us,” Luna Boyle said nervously. “She isn't on the True Believer anywhere. Do you think something has happened to her? Will she come back?”

“Of course she'll come back,” August Shackleton purred. “She was truant from a séance for two days once. Oh, she'll have some good ones to tell when she does come back, and I'll rather enjoy the vacation from her. I love her, but a man married to an outré wife needs a rest from it sometimes.”

“But look, look!” Luna Boyle cried. “Oh, she's impossible! She always did carry an antic too far. That's in bad taste.”

The severed lower half of Justina Shackleton floated in the clear blue water beside the True Believer. It was bloodied and gruesome and was being attacked by slashing fishes.

“Oh, stop it, Justina!” August Shackleton called angrily. “What a woman! Ah, I see it now. We turn to land.”

It was the opening to the Yacht Basin, the channel through the beach shallows to the fine harbor behind. They tacked, they turned, they nosed in towards the Cinnamon Coast of Libya.

The world was intact again, one whole and perfect jewel, lying wonderful to the north of them. And south was only great ocean and great equator and empty places of the under-mind. The True Believer came to port passage with the perfect bright noon-time on all things.

Author's Commentary

Old Foot Forgot

“Dookh-Doctor, it is a sphairikos patient,” Lay Sister Moira P. T. de C. cried happily. “It is a genuine spherical alien patient. You've never had one before, not in good faith. I believe it is what you need to distract you from the — ah — happy news about yourself. It is good for a Dookh-Doctor to have a different patient sometimes.”

“Thank you, lay sister. Let it, him, her, fourth case, fifth case or whatever come in. No, I've never had a sphairikos in good faith. I doubt if this one is, but I will enjoy the encounter.”

The sphairikos rolled or pushed itself in. It was a big one, either a blubbery kid or a full-grown one. It rolled itself along by extruding and withdrawing pseudopods. And it came to rest grinning, a large translucent rubbery ball of fleeting colors.

“Hello, Dookh-Doctor,” it said pleasantly. “First I wish to extend my own sympathy and that of my friends who do not know how to speak to you for the happy news about yourself. And secondly I have an illness of which you may cure me.”

“But the sphairikoi are never ill,” Dookh-Doctor Drague said dutifully.

How did he know that the round creature was grinning at him? By the colors, of course; by the fleeting colors of it. They were grinning colors.

“My illness is not of the body but of the head,” said the sphairikos.

“But the sphairikoi have no heads, my friend.”

“Then it is of another place and another name, Dookh-Doctor. There is a thing in me suffering. I come to you as a Dookh-Doctor. I have an illness in my Dookh.”

“That is unlikely in a sphairikos. You are all perfectly balanced, each a cosmos unto yourself. And you have a central solution that solves everything. What is your name?”

“Krug Sixteen, which is to say that I am the sixteenth son of Krug; the sixteen fifth case son, of course. Dookh-Doc, the pain is not in me entirely; it is in an old forgotten part of me.”

“But you sphairikoi have no parts, Krug Sixteen. You are total and indiscriminate entities. How would you have parts?”

“It is one of my pseudopods, extended and then withdrawn in much less than a second long ago when I was a little boy. It protests, it cries, it wants to come back. It has always bothered me, but now it bothers me intolerably. It screams and moans constantly now.”

“Do not the same ones ever come back?”

“No. Never. Never exactly the same ones. Will exactly the same water ever run past one point in a brook? No. We push them out and we draw them back. And we push them out again, millions of times. But the same one can never come back. There is no identity. But this one cries to come back, and now it becomes more urgent. Dookh-Doc, how can it be? There is not one same molecule in it as when I was a boy. There is nothing of that pseudopod that is left; but parts of it have come out as parts of other pseudopods, and now there can be no parts left. There is nothing remaining of that foot; it has all been absorbed a million times. But it cries out! And I have compassion on it.”

“Krug Sixteen, it may possibly be a physical or mechanical difficulty, a pseudopod imperfectly withdrawn, a sort of rupture whose effects you interpret wrongly. In that case it would be better if you went to your own doctors, or doctor: I understand that there is one.”

“That old fogey cannot help me, Dookh-Doc. And our pseudopods are always perfectly withdrawn. We are covered with the twinkling salve; it is one-third of our bulk. And if we need more of it we can make more of it ourselves; or we can beg some of it from a class four who make it prodigiously. It is the solvent for everything. It eases every possible wound; it makes us round as balls; you should use it yourself, Dookh-Doc. But there is one small foot in me, dissolved long ago, that protests and protests. Oh, the shrieking! The horrible dreams!”

“But the sphairikoi do not sleep and do not dream.”

“Right enough, Dookh-Doc. But there's an old dead foot of mine that sure does dream loud and wooly.”

The sphairikos was not grinning now. He rolled about softly in apprehension. How did the Dookh-Doctor know that it was apprehension? By the fleeting colors. They were apprehension colors now.

“Krug Sixteen, I will have to study your case,” said the Dookh-Doctor. “I will see if there are any references to it in the literature, though I don't believe that there are. I will seek for analogy. I will probe every possibility. Can you come back at the same hour tomorrow?”

“I will come back, Dookh-Doc,” Krug Sixteen sighed. “I hate to feel that small vanished thing crying and trembling.”

It rolled or pushed itself out of the clinic by extruding and then withdrawing pseudopods. The little pushers came out of the goopy surface of the sphairikos and then were withdrawn into it completely. A raindrop falling in a pond makes a much more lasting mark than does the disappearing pseudopod of a sphairikos.

But long ago, in his boyhood, one of the pseudopods of Krug Sixteen had not disappeared completely in every respect.

“There are several jokers waiting,” Lay Sister Moira P. T. de C. announced a little later, “and perhaps some valid patients among them. It's hard to tell.”

“Not another sphairikos?” the Dookh-Doctor asked in sudden anxiety.

“Of course not. The one this morning is the only sphairikos who has ever come. How could there be anything wrong with him? There is never anything wrong with a sphairikos. No, these are all of the other species. Just a regular morning bunch.”

So, except for the visitation of the sphairikos, it was a regular morning at the clinic. There were about a dozen waiting, of the several species; and at least half of them would be jokers. It was always so.

There was a lean and giddy subula. One cannot tell the age or sex of them. But there was a tittering. In all human or inhuman expression, whether of sound, color, radioray or osmerhetor, the titter suggests itself. It is just around the corner, it is just outside, it is subliminal, but it is there somewhere.

“It is that my teeth hurt so terrible,” the subula shrilled so high that the Dookh-Doctor had to go on instruments to hear it. “They are tromping pain. They are agony. I think I will cut my head off. Have you a head-off cutter, Dookh-Doctor?”

“Let me see your teeth,” Dookh-Doctor Drague asked with the beginnings of irritation.

“There is one tooth jump up and down with spike boot,” the subula shrilled. “There is one jag like poisoned needle. There is one cuts like coarse rough saw. There is one burns like little hot fires.”

“Let me see your teeth,” the Dookh-Doctor growled evenly.

“There is one drills holes and sets little blasting powder in them,” the subula shrilled still more highly. “Then he sets them off. Ow! Good night!”

“Let me see your teeth!!”

“Peeef!” the subula shrilled. The teeth cascaded out, half a bushel of them, ten thousand of them, all over the floor of the clinic.

“Peeef,” the subula screeched again, and ran out of the clinic.

Tittering? (But he should have remembered that the subula have no teeth.) Tittering? It was the laughing of demented horses. It was the jackhammer braying of the dolcus, it was the hysterical giggling of the ophis (they were a half a bushel of shells of the little stink conchs and they were already beginning to rot), it was the clown laughter of the arktos (the clinic would never be habitable again; never mind, he would burn it down and build another one tonight).

The jokers, the jokers, they did have their fun with him, and perhaps it did them some good.

“I have this trouble with me,” said a young dolcus, “but it make me so nervous to tell it. Oh, it do make me nervous to tell it to the Dookh-Doc.”

“Do not be nervous,” said the Dookh-Doctor, fearing the worst. “Tell me your trouble in whatever way you can. I am here to serve every creature that is in any trouble or pain whatsoever. Tell it.”

“Oh but it make me so nervous. I perish. I shrivel. I will have accident I am so nervous.”

“Tell me your trouble, my friend. I am here to help.”

“Whoops, whoops, I already have accident! I tell you I am nervous.”

The dolcus urinated largely on the clinic floor. Then it ran out laughing.

The laughing, the shrilling, the braying, the shrill giggling that seemed to scrape the flesh from his bones. (He should have remembered that the dolcus do not urinate; everything comes from them hard and solid.) The hooting, the laughing! It was a bag of green water from the kolmula swamp. Even the aliens gagged at it, and their laughter was of a pungent green sort.

Oh well, there were several of the patients with real, though small, ailments, and there were more jokers. There was the arktos who —  (Wait, wait, that particular jokerie cannot be told with human persons present; even the subula and the ophis blushed lavender at the rawness of it. A thing like that can only be told to arktos themselves.) And there was another dolcus who — 

Jokers, jokers, it was a typical morning at the clinic.

One does whatever one can for the oneness that is greater than self. In the case of Dookh-Doctor Drague it meant considerable sacrifice. One who works with the strange species here must give up all hope of material reward or material sophistication in his surroundings. But the Dookh-Doctor was a dedicated man.

Oh, the Dookh-Doctor lived pleasantly and with a sort of artful simplicity and dynamic involvement in the small articles of life. He had an excited devotion and balanced intensity for corporate life.

He lived in small houses of giolach-weed, woven with careful double-rappel. He lived in each one for seven days only, and then burned it and scattered the ashes, taking always one bitter glob of them on his tongue for reminder of the fleetingness of temporal things and the wonderfulness of the returning. To live in one house for more than seven days is to become dull and habitual; but the giolach-weed will not burn well till it has been cut and plaited for seven days, so the houses set their own terms. One half day to build, seven days to inhabit, one half day to burn ritually and scatter, one renewal night under the speir-sky.

The Dookh-Doctor ate raibe, or he ate innuin or ull or piorra when they were in season. And for the nine days of each year when none of these were in season, he ate nothing at all.

His clothing he made himself of colg. His paper was of the pailme plant. His printer used buaf ink and shaved slinn stone. Everything that he needed he made for himself from things found wild in the hedgerows. He took nothing from the cultivated land or from the alien peoples. He was a poor and dedicated servant.

Now he stacked some of the needful things from the clinic, and Lay Sister Moira P. T. de C. took others of them to her own giolach house to keep till the next day. Then the Dookh-Doctor ritually set his clinic on fire, and a few moments later his house. This was all symbol of the great nostos, the returning. He recited the great rhapsodies, and other persons of the human kind came by and recited with him.

“That no least fiber of giolach die,” he recited, “that all enter immediately the more glorious and undivided life. That the ashes are the doorway, and every ash is holy. That all become a part of the oneness that is greater than self.

“That no splinter of the giuis floorboards die, that no glob of the chinking clay die, that no mite or louse in the plaiting die. That all become a part of the oneness that is greater than self.”

He burned, he scattered, he recited, he took one glob of bitter ash on his tongue. He experienced vicariously the great synthesis. He ate holy innuin and holy ull. And when it was finished, both of the house and the clinic, when it had come on night and he was homeless, he slept that renewal night under the speir-sky.

And in the morning he began to build again, the clinic first, and then the house.

“It is the last of either that I shall ever build,” he said. The happy news about himself was that he was a dying man and that he would be allowed to take the short way out. So he built most carefully with the Last Building Rites. He chinked both the buildings with special uir clay that would give a special bitterness to the ashes at the time of final burning.

Krug Sixteen rolled along while the Dookh-Doctor still built his final clinic, and the sphairikos helped him in the building while they consulted on the case of the screaming foot. Krug Sixteen could weave and plait and rappel amazingly with his pseudopods; he could bring out a dozen of them, a hundred, thick or thin, whatever was needed, and all of a wonderful dexterity. That globe could weave.

“Does the forgotten foot still suffer, Krug Sixteen?” Dookh-Doctor Drague asked it.

“It suffers, it's hysterical, it's in absolute terror. I don't know where it is; it does not know; and how I know about it at all is a mystery. Have you found any way to help me, to help it?”

“No. I am sorry, but I have not.”

“There is nothing in the literature on this subject?”

“No. Nothing that I can identify as such.”

“And you have not found analogy to it?”

“Yes, Krug Sixteen, ah — in a way I have discovered analogy. But it does not help you. Or me.”

“That is too bad, Dookh-Doc. Well, I will live with it; and the little foot will finally die with it. Do I guess that your case is somewhat the same as mine?”

“No. My case is more similar to that of your lost foot than to you.”

“Well, I will do what I can for myself, and for it. It's back to the old remedy then. But I am already covered deep with the twinkling salve.”

“So am I, Krug Sixteen, in a like way.”

“I was ashamed of my affliction before and did not mention it. Now, however, since I have spoken of it to you, I have spoken of it to others also. There is some slight help, I find. I should have shot off my big bazoo before.”

“The sphairikoi have no bazoos.”

“Folk-joke, Dookh-Doc. There is a special form of the twinkling salve. My own is insufficient, so I will try the other.”

“A special form of it, Krug Sixteen? I am interested in this. My own salve seems to have lost its effect.”

“There is a girlfriend, Dookh-Doc, or a boyfriend person. How shall I say it? It is a case four person to my case five. This person, though promiscuous, is expert. And this person exudes the special stuff in abundance.”

“Not quite my pot of ointment I'm afraid, Krug Sixteen; but it may be the answer for you. It is special? And it dissolves everything, including objections?”

“It is the most special of all the twinkling salves, Dookh-Doc, and it solves and dissolves everything. I believe it will reach my forgotten foot, wherever it is, and send it into kind and everlasting slumber. It will know that it is itself that slumbers, and that will be bearable.”

“If I were not — ah — going out of business, Krug Sixteen, I'd get a bit of it and try to analyze it. What is the name of this special case four person?”

“Torchy Twelve is its name.”

“Yes. I have heard of her.”

Everybody now knew that it was the last week in the life of the Dookh-Doctor, and everyone tried to make his happiness still more happy. The morning jokers outdid themselves, especially the arktos. After all, he was dying of an arktos disease, one never fatal to the arktos themselves. They did have some merry and outrageous times around the clinic, and the Dookh-Doctor got the sneaky feeling that he would rather live than die.

He hadn't, it was plain to see, the right attitude. So Lay Priest Migma P. T. de C. tried to inculcate the right attitude in him.

“It is the great synthesis you go to, Dookh-Doctor,” he said. “It is the happy oneness that is greater than self.”

“Oh I know that, but you put it on a little too thick. I've been taught it from my babyhood. I'm resigned to it.”

“Resigned to it? You should be ecstatic over it! The self must perish, of course, but it will live on as an integral atom of the evolving oneness, just as a drop lives on in the ocean.”

“Aye, Migma, but the drop may hang onto the memory of the time when it was cloud, of the time when it was falling drop, indeed, of the time when it was brook. It may say ‘There's too damned much salt in this ocean. I'm lost here.’ ”

“Oh, but the drop will want to be lost, Dookh-Doctor. The only purpose of existence is to cease to exist. And there cannot be too much of salt in the evolving oneness. There cannot be too much of anything. All must be one in it. Salt and sulphur must be one, undifferentiated. Offal and soul must become one. Blessed be oblivion in the oneness that collapses on itself.”

“Stuff it, lay priest. I'm weary of it.”

“Stuff it, you say? I don't understand your phrase, but I'm sure it's apt. Yes, yes, Dookh-Doctor, stuff it all in: animals, people, rocks, grass, worlds and wasps. Stuff it all in. That all may be obliterated into the great — may I not coin a word even as the master coined them? — into the great stuffiness!”

“I'm afraid your word is all too apt.”

“It is the great quintessence, it is the happy death of all individuality and memory, it is the synthesis of all living and dead things into the great amorphism. It is the — ”

“It is the old old salve, and it's lost its twinkle,” the Dookh-Doctor said sadly. “How goes the old quotation? When the salve becomes sticky, how then will you come unstuck?”

No, the Dookh-Doctor did not have the right attitude, so it was necessary that many persons should harass him into it. Time was short. His death was due. And there was the general fear that the Dookh-Doctor might not be properly lost.

He surely came to his time of happiness in grumpy fashion.

The week was gone by. The last evening for him was come. The Dookh-Doctor ritually set his clinic on fire, and a few minutes later his house.

He burned, he scattered, he recited the special last-time recital. He ate holy innuin and holy ull. He took one glob of most bitter ash on his tongue: and he lay down to sleep his last night under the speir-sky.

He wasn't afraid to die.

“I will cross that bridge gladly, but I want there to be another side to that bridge,” he talked to himself. “And if there is no other side of it, I want it to be me who knows that there is not. They say ‘Pray that you be happily lost forever. Pray for blessed obliteration.’ I will not pray that I be happily lost forever. I would rather burn in a hell forever than suffer happy obliteration! I'll burn if it be me that burns. I want me to be me. I will refuse forever to surrender myself.”

It was a restless night for him. Well, perhaps he could die easier if he were wearied and sleepless at dawn.

“Other men don't make such a fuss about it,” he told himself (the self he refused to give up). “Other men are truly happy in obliteration. Why am I suddenly different? Other men desire to be lost, lost, lost. How have I lost the faith of my childhood and manhood? What is unique about me?”

There was no answer to that.

“Whatever is unique about me, I refuse to give it up. I will howl and moan against that extinction for billions of centuries. Ah, I will go sly! I will devise a sign so I will know me if I meet me again.”

About an hour before dawn the Lay Priest Migma P. T. de C. came to Dookh-Doctor Drague. The dolcus and the arktos had reported that the man was resting badly and was not properly disposed.

“I have an analogy that may ease your mind, Dookh-Doctor,” the Lay Priest whispered softly, “ — ease it into great easiness, salve it into great salving — ”

“Begone, fellow, your salve has lost its twinkle.”

“Consider that we have never lived, that we have only seemed to live. Consider that we do not die, but are only absorbed into great selfless self. Consider the odd sphairikoi of this world — ”

“What about the sphairikoi? I consider them often.”

“I believe that they are set here for our instruction. A sphairikos is a total globe, the type of the great oneness. Then consider that it sometimes ruffles its surface, extrudes a little false-foot from its soft surface. Would it not be odd if that false-foot, for its brief second, considered itself a person? Would you not laugh at that?”

“No, no. I do not laugh.” And the Dookh-Doctor was on his feet.

“And in much less than a second, that pseudopod is withdrawn back into the sphere of the sphairikoi. So it is with our lives. Nothing dies. It is only a ripple on the surface of the oneness. Can you entertain so droll an idea as that the pseudopod should remember, or wish to remember?”

“Yes. I'll remember it a billion years for the billion who forget.”

The Dookh-Doctor was running uphill in the dark. He crashed into trees and boles as though he wished to remember the crashing forever.

“I'll burn before I forget, but I must have something that says it's me who burns!”

Up, up by the spherical hills of the sphairikoi, bawling and stumbling in the dark. Up to a hut that had a certain fame he could never place, to the hut that had its own identity, that sparkled with identity.

“Open, open, help me!” the Dookh-Doctor cried out at the last hut on the hill.

“Go away, man!” the last voice protested. “All my clients are gone, and the night is almost over with. What has this person to do with a human man anyhow?”

It was a round twinkling voice out of the roweled dark. But there was enduring identity there. The twinkling, enduring-identity colors, coming from the chinks of the hut, had not reached the level of vision. There was even the flicker of the I-will-know-me-if-I-meet-me-again color.

“Torchy Twelve, help me. I am told that you have the special salve that solves the last problem, and makes it know that it is always itself that is solved.”

“Why, it is the Dookh-Doc! Why have you come to Torchy?”

“I want something to send me into kind and everlasting slumber,” he moaned. “But I want it to be me who slumbers. Cannot you help me in any way?”

“Come you in, the Dookh-Doc. This person, though promiscuous, is expert. I help you — ”

Author's Commentary

Interurban Queen

“It was the year 1907 when I attained my majority and came into a considerable inheritance,” the old man said. “I was a very keen young man, keen enough to know that I didn't know everything. I went to knowledgeable men and asked their advice as to how I might invest this inheritance.

“I talked with bankers and cattlemen and the new oilmen. These were not stodgy men. They had an edge on the future, and they were excited and exciting about the way that money might be made to grow. It was the year of statehood and there was an air of prosperity over the new state. I wished to integrate my patrimony into that new prosperity. 

“Finally I narrowed my choice to two investments which then seemed about of equal prospect, though you will now smile to hear them equated. One of them was the stock-selling company of a certain Harvey Goodrich, a rubber company, and with the new automobile coming into wider use, it seemed that rubber might be a thing of the future. The other was a stock-selling transportation company that proposed to run an interurban railway between the small towns of Kiefer and Mounds. It also proposed (at a future time) to run branches to Glenpool, to Bixby, to Kellyville, to Slick, to Bristow, to Beggs, even to Okmulgee and Sapulpa. At that time it also seemed that these little interurban railways might be things of the future. An interurban already ran between Tulsa and Sand Springs, and one was building between Tulsa and Sapulpa. There were more than one thousand of these small trolley railroads operating in the nation, and thoughtful men believed that they would come to form a complete national network, might become the main system of transportation.”

But now the old man Charles Archer was still a young man. He was listening to Joe Elias, a banker in a small but growing town.

“It is a riddle you pose me, young man, and you set me thinking,” Elias said. “We have dabbled in both, thinking to have an egg under every hen. I begin to believe that we were wrong to do so. These two prospects are types of two futures, and only one of them will obtain. In this state with its new oil discoveries, it might seem that we should be partial to rubber which has a tie-in with the automobile which has a tie-in with petroleum fuel. This need not be. I believe that the main use of oil will be in powering the new factories, and I believe that rubber is already oversold as to industrial application. And yet there will be a new transportation. Between the horse and the main-line railways there is a great gap. I firmly believe that the horse will be eliminated as a main form of transportation. We are making no more loans to buggy or buckboard manufacturers nor to harness makers. I have no faith in the automobile. It destroys something in me. It is the interurbans that will go into the smallest localities, and will so cut into the main-line railroads as to leave no more than a half-dozen of the long-distance major lines in America. Young man, I would invest in the interurban with complete confidence.”

Charles Archer was listening to Carl Bigheart, a cattleman.

“I ask you, boy, how many head of cattle can you put into an automobile? Or even into what they call a lorry or trook? Then I ask you how many you can put into an honest cattle car which can be coupled onto any interurban on a country run? The interurban will be the salvation of us cattlemen. With the fencing regulations we cannot drive cattle even twenty miles to a railroad; but the little interurbans will go into the deep country, running along every second or third section line.

“And I will tell you another thing, boy: there is no future for the automobile. We cannot let there be! Consider the man on horseback, and I have been a man on horseback for most of my life. Well, mostly he is a good man, but there is a change in him as soon as he mounts. Every man on horseback is an arrogant man, however gentle he may be on foot. I know this in myself and in others. He was necessary in his own time, and I believe that time is ending. There was always extreme danger from the man on horseback.

“Believe me, young man, the man in the automobile is one thousand times as dangerous. The kindest man in the world assumes an incredible arrogance when he drives an automobile, and this arrogance will increase still further if the machine is allowed to develop greater power and sophistication. I tell you, it will engender absolute selfishness in mankind if the driving of automobiles becomes common. It will breed violence on a scale never seen before. It will mark the end of the family as we know it, the three or four generations living happily in one home. It will destroy the sense of neighborhood and the true sense of nation. It will create giantized cankers of cities, false opulence of suburbs, rainized countryside, and unhealthy conglomeration of specialized farming and manufacturing. It will breed rootlessness and immorality. It will make every man a tyrant. I believe the private automobile will be suppressed. It will have to be! This is a moral problem, and we are a moral nation and world; we will take moral action against it. And without the automobile, rubber has no real future. Opt for the interurban stock, young man.”

Young Charles Archer was listening to Nolan Cushman, an oilman.

“I will not lie to you, young fellow, I love the automobile, the motorcar. I have three, custom-built. I am an emperor when I drive. Hell, I'm an emperor anyhow! I bought a castle last summer that had housed emperors. I'm having it transported, stone by stone, to my place in the Osage. Now, as to the motorcar, I can see how it should develop. It should develop with the roads, they becoming leveled and metaled or concreted, and the cars lower and lower and faster and faster. We would develop them so, if we were some species other than human. It is the logical development, but I hope it will not come, and it will not. That would be to make it common, and the commonality of men cannot be trusted with this power. Besides, I love a high car, and I do not want there to be very many of them. They should only be allowed to men of extreme wealth and flair. How would it be if the workingmen were ever permitted them? It would be murderous if they should come into the hands of ordinary men. How hellish a world would it be if all men should become as arrogant as myself! No, the automobile will never be anything but a rich man's pride, the rubber will never be anything but a limited adjunct to that special thing. Invest in your interurban. It is the thing of the future, or else I dread that future.”

Young Charles Archer knew that this was a crossroads of the world. Whichever turning was taken, it would predicate a certain sort of nation and world and humanity. He thought about it deeply. Then he decided. He went out and invested his entire inheritance in his choice.

“I considered the two investments and I made my choice,” said Charles Archer, the old man now in the now present. “I put all I had into it, thirty-five thousand dollars, a considerable sum in those days. You know the results.”

“I am one of the results, Great-grandfather,” said Angela Archer. “If you had invested differently you would have come to different fortune, you would have married differently, and I would be different or not at all. I like me here and now. I like everything as it is.”

Three of them were out riding early one Saturday morning, the old man Charles Archer, his great-granddaughter Angela, and her fiancé Peter Brady. They were riding through the quasiurbia, the rich countryside. It was not a main road, and yet it had a beauty (partly natural and partly contrived) that was as exciting as it was satisfying.

Water always beside the roadway, that was the secret! There were the carp ponds one after another. There were the hatcheries. There were the dancing rocky streams that in a less enlightened age might have been mere gutter runs or roadway runs. There were the small and rapid trout streams, and boys were catching big trout from them.

There were the deep bush-trees there, sumac, witch hazel, sassafras — incense trees they might almost have been. There were the great trees themselves, pecan and hickory and black walnut, standing like high backdrops; and between were the lesser trees, willow, cottonwood, sycamore. Catheads and sedge grass and reeds stood in the water itself, and tall Sudan grass and bluestem on the shores. And always the clovers there, and the smell of wet sweet clover.

“I chose the wrong one,” said old Charles Archer as they rode along through the textured country. “One can now see how grotesque was my choice, but I was young. In two years, the stock-selling company in which I had invested was out of business and my loss was total. So early and easy riches were denied me, but I developed an ironic hobby: keeping track of the stock of the enterprise in which I did not invest. The stock I could have bought for thirty-five thousand dollars would now make me worth nine million dollars.”

“Ugh, don't talk of such a thing on such a beautiful day,” Angela objected.

“They heard another of them last night,” Peter Brady commented. “They've been hearing this one, off and on, for a week now, and haven't caught him yet.”

“I always wish they wouldn't kill them when they catch them,” Angela bemoaned. “It doesn't seem quite right to kill them.”

A goose-girl was herding her white honking charges as they gobbled weeds out of fields of morning onions. Flowering kale was shining green-purple, and okra plants were standing. Jersey cows grazed along the roadway, and the patterned plastic (almost as patterned as the grasses) filled the roadway itself.

There were clouds like yellow dust in the air. Bees! Stingless bees they were. But dust itself was not. That there never be dust again!

“They will have to find out and kill the sly klunker makers,” said old man Charles Archer. “Stop the poison at its source.”

“There's too many of them, and too much money in it,” said Peter Brady. “Yes, we kill them. One of them was found and killed Thursday, and three nearly finished klunkers were destroyed. But we can't kill them all. They seem to come out of the ground like snakes.”

“I wish we didn't have to kill them,” Angela said.

There were brightly colored firkins of milk standing on loading stoas, for this was a milk shed. There were chickens squawking in nine-story-high coops as they waited the pickups, but they never had to wait long. Here were a thousand dozen eggs on a refrigeration porch; there a clutch of piglings, or of red steers.

Tomato plants were staked two meters high. Sweet corn stood, not yet come to tassel. They passed cucumber vines and cantaloupe vines, and the potato hills rising up blue-green. Ah, there were grapevines in their tight acres, deep alfalfa meadows, living fences of Osage orange and whitethorn. Carrot tops zephyred like green lace. Cattle were grazing fields of red clover and of peanuts — that most magic of all clovers. Men mowed hay.

“I hear him now!” Peter Brady said suddenly.

“You couldn't. Not in the daytime. Don't even think of such a thing,” Angela protested.

Farm ducks were grazing with their heads under water in the roadway ponds and farm ponds. Bower oaks grew high in the roadway parks. Sheep fed in hay grazer that was higher than their heads; they were small white islands in it. There was local wine and choc beer and cider for sale at small booths, along with limestone sculpture and painted fruitwood carvings. Kids danced on loading stoas to little post-mounted music canisters, and goats licked slate outcroppings in search of some new mineral.

The Saturday riders passed a roadway restaurant with its tables out under the leaves and under a little rock overhang. A one-meter-high waterfall gushed through the middle of the establishment, and a two-meter-long bridge of set shale stone led to the kitchen. Then they broke onto view after never-tiring view of the rich and varied quasiurbia. The roadway farms, the fringe farms, the berry patches! In their seasons: Juneberries, huckleberries, blueberries, dewberries, elderberries, highbush cranberries, red raspberries, boysenberries, loganberries, nine kinds of blackberries, strawberries, greenberries.

Orchards! Can there ever be enough orchards? Plum, peach, sand plum and chokecherry, black cherry, apple and crab apple, pear, blue-fruited pawpaw, persimmon, crooked quince. Melon patches, congregations of beehives, pickle patches, cheese farms, flax farms, close clustered towns (twenty houses in each, twenty persons in a house, twenty of the little settlements along every mile of roadway), country honkey-tonks, as well as high-dog clubs already open and hopping with action in the early morning; roadway chapels with local statuary and with their rich-box-poor-boxes (one dropped money in the top if one had it and the spirit to give it, one tripped it out the bottom if one needed it), and the little refrigeration niches with bread, cheese, beef rolls, and always the broached cask of country wine: that there be no more hunger on the roadways forever!

“I hear it too!” old Charles Archer cried out suddenly. “High-pitched and off to the left. And there's the smell of monoxide and — gah — rubber. Conductor, conductor!”

The conductor heard it, as did others in the car. The conductor stopped the cars to listen. Then he phoned the report and gave the location as well as he might, consulting with the passengers. There was rough country over to the left, rocks and hills, and someone was driving there in broad daylight.

The conductor broke out rifles from the locker, passing them out to Peter Brady and two other young men in the car, and to three men in each of the other two cars. A competent-seeming man took over the communication, talking to men on a line further to the left, beyond the mad driver, and they had him boxed into a box no more than half a mile square.

“You stay, Angela, and you stay, Grandfather Archer,” Peter Brady said. “Here is a little thirty carbine. Use it if he comes in range at all. We hunt him down now.” Then Peter Brady followed the conductor and the rifle-bearing men, ten men on a death hunt. And there were now four other groups out on the hunt, converging on their whining, coughing target.

“Why do they have to kill them, Great-grandfather? Why not turn them over to the courts?”

“The courts are too lenient. All they give them is life in prison.”

“But surely that should be enough. It will keep them from driving the things, and some of the unfortunate men might even be rehabilitated.”

“Angela, they are the greatest prison breakers ever. Only ten days ago, Mad Man Gudge killed three guards, went over the wall at State Prison, evaded all pursuit, robbed the cheesemakers' cooperative of fifteen thousand dollars, got to a sly klunker maker, and was driving one of the things in a wild area within thirty hours of his breakout. It was four days before they found him and killed him. They are insane, Angela, and the mental hospitals are already full of them. Not one of them has ever been rehabilitated.”

“Why is it so bad that they should drive? They usually drive only in the very wild places, and for a few hours in the middle of the night.”

“Their madness is infectious, Angela. Their arrogance would leave no room for anything else in the world. Our country is now in balance, our communication and travel is minute and near perfect, thanks to the wonderful trolleys and the people of the trolleys. We are all one neighborhood, we are all one family! We live in love and compassion, with few rich and few poor, and arrogance and hatred have all gone out from us. We are the people with roots, and with trolleys. We are one with our earth.”

“Would it hurt that the drivers should have their own limited place to do what they wanted, if they did not bother sane people?”

“Would it hurt if disease and madness and evil were given their own limited place? But they will not stay in their place, Angela. There is the diabolical arrogance in them, the rampant individualism, the hatred of order. There can be nothing more dangerous to society than the man in the automobile. Were they allowed to thrive, there would be poverty and want again, Angela, and wealth and accumulation. And cities.”

“But cities are the most wonderful things of all! I love to go to them.”

“I do not mean the wonderful Excursion Cities, Angela. There would be cities of another and blacker sort. They were almost upon us once when a limitation was set on them. Uniqueness is lost in them; there would be mere accumulation of rootless people, of arrogant people, of duplicated people, of people who have lost their humanity. Let them never rob us of our involuted countryside, or our quasiurbia. We are not perfect; but what we have, we will not give away for the sake of wild men.”

“The smell! I cannot stand it!”

“Monoxide. How would you like to be born in the smell of it, to live every moment of your life in the smell of it, to die in the smell of it?”

“No, no, not that.”

The rifleshots were scattered but serious. The howling and coughing of the illicit klunker automobile were nearer. Then it was in sight, bouncing and bounding weirdly out of the rough rock area and into the tomato patches straight toward the trolley interurban.

The klunker automobile was on fire, giving off ghastly stench of burning leather and rubber and noxious monoxide and seared human flesh. The man, standing up at the broken wheel, was a madman, howling, out of his head. He was a young man, but sunken-eyed and unshaven, bloodied on the left side of his head and the left side of his breast, foaming with hatred and arrogance.

“Kill me! Kill me!” he croaked like clattering broken thunder. “There will be others! We will not leave off driving so long as there is one desolate place left, so long as there is one sly klunker maker left!”

He went rigid. He quivered. He was shot again. But he would die howling.

“Damn you all to trolley heaven! A man in an automobile is worth a thousand men on foot! He is worth a million men in a trolley car! You never felt your black heart rise up in you when you took control of one of the monsters! You never felt the lively hate choke you off in rapture as you sneered down the whole world from your bouncing center of the universe! Damn all decent folks! I'd rather go to hell in an automobile than to heaven in a trolley car!”

A spoked wheel broke, sounding like one of the muted volleys of rifle fire coming from behind him. The klunker automobile pitched onto its nose, upended, turned over, and exploded in blasting flames. And still in the middle of the fire could be seen the two hypnotic eyes with their darker flame, could be heard the demented voice:

“The crankshaft will still be good, the differential will still be good, a sly klunker maker can use part of it, part of it will drive again — ahhhiii.”

Some of them sang as they rode away from the site in the trolley cars, and some of them were silent and thoughtful. It had been an unnerving thing.

“It curdles me to remember that I once put my entire fortune into that future,” Great-grandfather Charles Archer moaned. “Well, that is better than to have lived in such a future.”

A young couple had happily loaded all their belongings onto a baggage trolley and were moving from one of the Excursion Cities to live with kindred in quasiurbia. The population of that Excursion City (with its wonderful theaters and music halls and distinguished restaurants and literary coffeehouses and alcoholic oases and amusement centers) had now reached seven thousand persons, the legal limit for any city: Oh, there were a thousand Excursion Cities and all of them delightful! But a limit must be kept on size. A limit must be kept on everything.

It was a wonderful Saturday afternoon. Fowlers caught birds with collapsible kite-cornered nets. Kids rode free out to the diamonds to play Trolley League ball. Old gaffers rode out with pigeons in pigeon boxes, to turn them loose and watch them race home. Shore netters took shrimp from the semi-saline Little Shrimp Lake. Banjo players serenaded their girls in grassy lanes.

The world was one single bronze gong song with the melodious clang of trolley cars threading the country on their green-iron rails, with the sparky fire following them overhead and their copper gleaming in the sun. By law there must be a trolley line every mile, but they were oftener. By law no one trolley line might run for more than twenty-five miles. This was to give a sense of locality. But transfers between the lines were worked out perfectly. If one wished to cross the nation, one rode on some one hundred and twenty different lines. There were no more long-distance railroads. They also had had their arrogance, and they also had had to go.

Carp in the ponds, pigs in the clover, a unique barn-factory in every hamlet and every hamlet unique, bees in the air, pepper plants in the lanes, and the whole land as sparky as trolley fire and right as rails.

Author's Commentary

Symposium

“Perversity,” cried ancient Swift,

“Of lifeless things,” and cursed a skewer.

But some of them, with lilt and lift,

Were fuller up with life than you are.

Be there a jug devoid of juice?

A stick or stone with no life in it?

A shoe that has no sense of use?

Then name us such. Begin, begin it!

The wisdom of old furniture,

The panniers' passioned cerebration…

“They cannot be!” (But are you sure?)

… The Artifacts' cool speculation…

As reft of life as children's blocks,

The Things arise to balk and bait us.

Be it a chance such ricks and rocks,

Inanimate, could animate us?

I'M INANIMATE, YOU'RE INANIMATE

 — Virgo Haedus

The world begins, not necessarily for the first time.

Not with a bang, but a tumble. In the beginning was noise. A cataract of worlds or entities rolling and cascading in fearful clatter. The cosmic atom, the world-box, has disgorged. Here is bursting galactic expansion into free area. Avalanche of noise and bright color. Not chaos, but thunderous exodus; and every particle bearing its own thunder sign. This is beginning, this is happening! Let no least part of it ever forget the primordial tumble that is the beginning!

Then, the stable state and memory. The first thought ever thought anywhere, anywhen: It's as though I've been here before.

The senses clear. There are persons present, high persons who can only be designated in code.

“Have I missed anything?” Kay spoke, for speech is always simultaneous with consciousness. “It seems I have just wakened. Is this the way the world begins?”

“Yes, I believe this is the way the universe begins every time,” Eff muttered, “with entities waking to consciousness and conversing with their mature peers. At every world-beginning, the persons are born adult and intelligent. That business of being born puling and helpless is a late accretion, and there is no evidence that it is anything more than a fable or a fall.”

“I am not alone?” Gee wondered aloud. “There are others and they discuss? Well, if we've got to have conversation, let's agree to keep it inside the frame. Oh, hello, Zee!”

“My name is Zed, for so it is called in the old country. Let's keep the frame moving, Gee, and anything we wish can be inside it. Look at anything through a frame, and it's a striking picture. There may be other frames, but we are limited to our own: space, time, motion, mass, and the vivifying principle, known to us through consciousness on its several levels, by means of the senses and parasenses, and aided by less than a dozen styles of thought. It's limited, but it's all we seem to have.”

“And, Zed,” said O doubtfully, “every one of those elements is shaky. We are unable to separate space from one of its elements — shape. We do not know whether the particular distortion we live in is one of shape or of space. For instance, with us, the relation of the ring to the tendon of a circle is three and a continuing decimal to one. But we know from Scripture, and also from the geometry of Jordman, that in undistorted space or shape the relation would be exactly three to one. Now, if we were in such an undistorted space or shape, might we not think undistorted thoughts? It is certain that we would think in a different manner and that every object of our thoughts would differ from the present. We would not have the same grammar or conventions.”

“There is no undistorted space, O,” Wye said solidly. “Distortion is a necessary element. If I be not distorted, then I be not at all. The shape of space depends on the amount of matter in the universe. Matter is the distortion, but no matter is nothing. The amount of matter posits its own mathematics. There cannot be theoretical mathematics, only the mathematics of an actual universe. But, should the mass of the universe increase by only an ounce (Nictitating nebulas! — that's a little too slight), should it increase by no more than a thousand galaxies, then every mathematical property would change. The ratio of the ring to the tendon of a circle might then become three-and-a-half, or five, or nine, or one. There might then be thirteen whole numbers between one and ten.

“For my part, I believe that we do live in a universe of changing mass, and that every property changes with it. Do you know why nobody discovered certain simple relationships before Pythagoras did so? It was because they had only just then become true relationships. Do you know why nobody discovered the three laws of motion before Newton discovered them? And why Newton did not discover them before he did? Because — they had not been true the day before.”

“But if the mass of the universe should be constant — ” O interposed.

“No, no, forget it!” Wye bade him. “That raises more difficulties than it solves. The neatest universe, which I believe to be the present and true one, has time as a constant, and everything else as a variable. This was hinted at by Aristotle and developed more fully by Aloysius Shiplap. Its implications (which include ourselves) are tremendous.”

“You blockhead!” Zed exploded. “That constant-time universe, by definition, must always have been thirteen billion years old. And it cannot age by one more second without annihilating itself.”

“Yes. Is it not a beautiful concept?” Wye beamed.

“Even less than of these things do we know about the vivifying principle,” You cut in. “One person has said, in apparent contradiction to his senses, that nothing can exist without it. But his fellow contradicted him. ‘Look at that rock,’ he said. ‘It exists, and it is dead matter. You are answered.’ But was he answered rightly?

“We know the shell of our own world to a depth of no more than fifty thousand meters. But every rock, every piece of that known mantle, has been living matter. We cleared away the doubt about the main bulk of it fifty years ago. There is the possibility, if the fragments should be sufficiently analyzed, that every particle of the universe was first living matter before it was anything else. Life and matter may have been simultaneous and identical. Then the question, whether life can arise from lifeless matter, becomes inverted. The question becomes: Can matter arise from anything except life? We should not ask: How did life appear? but: How did death appear? I believe death is the illusion. If any particle of matter should ever die, it would immediately disappear to every sense and meaning. It's all alive. The very rocks (I don't see any rocks right now, but I know of them intuitively) could get up and walk away if they wished.”

“But the inverted form of the question hasn't been accepted by anyone except yourself, You,” En cut in, “and I've heard that it's mighty lonesome to be a minority of one. The rest of us will still ask: How did life appear, by accident or by design? The man of the house here (how do I know about a man or a house or an exocosmos at all?) has a small electrical appliance there on the sideboard; it has an electric motor in it. I ask you, You: How did the first electric motor appear, by accident or by design?

“It's a simple little four-pole thing. Nothing is needed but a small amount of copper, iron, and insulating material — all of them things found in nature. We assume that the first motor was very simple, but could it have originated by accident in a primordial swamp, workable and working? We must assume a power source — accidental, of course — and some random sort of transmission lines. There aren't, when you strip the unessentials away, more than a few hundred items that have to fall together in the right pattern to achieve it. But I maintain that accident could not have accomplished it.

“And I also maintain that the most simple living cell is a billion to a billion powers times as intricate as the most sophisticated motor. It's improbable that an electrical motor could have appeared by accident, complete with name plate and with greasing instructions printed on an attached tag. And the difference in probability is staggering. Boys have made motors. Who has made a cell?”

“Ah, En, permit me to exercise my talent for fiction and for irony.” Ex essayed it. “I posit a primordial swamp in which is found a long glob of natural copper fused by lightning. In an accidental manner the copper has become looped three times around another glob of volcanic iron. I posit natural lodestone somehow to form a field. I posit proto-mica wedging itself into position as insulator, and a shaft of accidental design, and good honest mud as a bearing surface.”

“But several of your items were formed during organic periods, Ex,” En objected. “They would not be found in a truly primordial swamp.”

“No matter, En, we'd find something else to serve as well. Close by, I posit a stagnant pool a little different from the other pools. Chance metallic solutions have given it polarity potential in its acid constituent. It hasn't a brand name on it, but it is a battery. (In the beginning, God made d.c., and the alternator was not as yet.) I posit conductors of some sort, I forget just what, and several hundred other details that will come easy to a swamp with all the time in the world. It is ready! It happens! And I swear by all primordial things that it is witnessed!

“For I also posit two rocks rubbing together in a high wind. ‘It turns, it turns!’ is the sound the rocks make as they rub together. ‘Tell all the boys that it turns.’ ”

“You are trapped by your own narrowness, Ex,” said Eye. “You are considering whether a thing might be so or might not be so, as if there were no other alternatives. Believe me, the multiplex alternator came first. Let us consider what is beyond categories. You see a circle, a form: but what if we go beyond the idea of form? You think of a number: but what if we are in a country where there can be no idea of number, where neither unity nor diversity has any meaning, where neither being nor nonbeing can be conceived of?

“You think of space. What if there are a hundred alternatives to space, and I do not mean a hundred alternative kinds of space. What if there are a thousand other things in the category with living and dying? We operate according to one sort of grammar and we view the world by its syntax. Let us view it from the no-framework of no-grammar. I could go on with it, but the terminology becomes insufferably cute. What was that jolt? It's the noise the world always makes just before it ends. How do I know that, since I've never seen a world end before? Megagalactic memory, I suppose. After all, we're supposed to think of these things. We are seminal contrivances.”

“How do you know that we're seminal contrivances?” Are asked, puzzled.

“It says so on the box,” Ex told him.

“We work with what we have,” said Are. “Let the inconceivables bury their own dead. I believe that every point is the center, even though in your land, Eye, the idea of a center disappears. I stand and say that I am the medium of all things, that there are as many things smaller than me as there are larger. But the meanest parasite in a sub-atomic civilization may say the same thing, and so may the shambling oaf whose outline is made up of clustered galaxies. But I ask you: Does this go on forever, or is it circular? The people (or is it the robots?) say that people and robots alternate in cycles. People make robots. Then, after a million years, the robots make people again. Then the robots die out and the people reign alone. After a decent interval, the people make robots again. And the people die once more. There have been many of these cycles. We ourselves are neither people nor robots, though I do not at the moment remember just what we are.

“But as to size, is it re-entrant like space and time? Will the smallest of particles, a million scales descended, look through the ultimate microscope and see the nine thousand billion greater galaxies as a mere hint of light at the lowest limit of vision? And if space and time and size be all re-entrant, may not categories be so also? Perhaps the no-concepts of Eye do not go on forever (though they easily might go beyond the concept of ever). May they not return, each one eating his ultimate grandfathers like a handful of peanuts, and discover that they have become concepts once more? The only theory of cosmology that satisfies is that every star or body should become in sequence every other star or body. The only theory of reincarnation that satisfies is that every person should become in sequence every other person. Looking around me, I don't think I'll like it.”

“I feel it too now, Eye,” said Pea. “It's the end of the world all right, the synteleia, the kid with the box, the latter days when our philosophy fails us. One thing happened to us, the clattering tumble. We appeared. They can't take that away from us. If there should come a second high happening, then we are doubly blessed. Well, they've never let us finish a talk yet, but we'll talk while we live. What do you think: Is it all a circle eating itself? And are all of us but shadows in the mind of each of us. If I have no existence except that Ell has dreamed me, and he has no existence outside of the mind of Ess, and if so around the circle of the twenty-six of us — ”

“The twenty-seven of us!” Thorn roared thunderously. “I am here! And you are all in my mind, not I in yours. The proof is that you forget me in your count and I do not fit into the box. I am the only one with true consciousness, and that brings us to an interesting point. Did consciousness come to us by physical analogy? How is the double thing (consciousness, that which regards itself) born in a single mind? Is it not by analogy with the double orifices that lead into that mind? We know that the duostomata have the most vivid consciousness of all creatures. And the only one-eyed intelligent race yet discovered, the Yekyaka, has missed consciousness completely. Hey, somebody break out the cigars and brandy if we're going to talk! Question: Are cigars and brandy intuitive concepts?”

“It is true that you view us from the outside, Thorn, and for the simple reason that you are not here,” said Tea. “Ah, I do love a gracious snifter and a good cigar. I wonder what the poor people are doing tonight.”

“The non-elites?” Thorn asked. “Why, Vee and Cue and Jay and their fellows are spelling little riddles over toward the edge of the table there.”

“But you are not here, Thorn,” Tea insisted. “You went out of existence so long ago that it is only by accident that we remember your name. You are the shaggy fringes sticking out from the framework. You belong to the spooks, the sports, the meteorological monstrosities. Dammit, Thorn, you just don't fit in! To us you are awkward, and awkwardness is the sin that will not be forgiven in this world or the next. Whoops! Hold on to your hats, boys! I hear those end-of-the-world noises too!”

“So I am awkward, a spook, am I, Tea?” Thorn demanded. “Tea, you can't get rid of the awkward. It does not really dispose of a thing to call it Fortean. I offend because I'm an old-timer who remembers when everything was larger. I was talking to a crony recently. ‘They don't make planets the way they used to,’ he said, ‘they don't make stars and stuff as well. Time gets tired, and light, and matter. Everything shrinks, but the measuring stick shrinks also, so nobody notices. I tell you, I remember light that was light,’ he said, ‘I remember molecules of acetophenone-ketone that were as big as horses, and some mere atoms were as big as the house cats now. The light then would shatter a steel plate of today, the minutes were as millennia, the pounds each weighed a million tons. It was grander and shaggier in the old days.’ My crony was right, but so few of us remember those times. Hey, it's coming for you guys now! There's an advantage to not fitting in. I don't have to go.”

“It's upon us!” cried Ell. “We've talked for our thousand years, and the world collapses! Time is foreshortened! Our brains melt like wax!”

CHILD (sex unknown; the way they dress them now, it's hard to tell): “Blocks! Jump! Jump in the box if you want to get out again tomorrow. It's time to get back in the box.”

THE BLOCKS: “Woe, woe, woe! It's the synteleia, the kid with the box, the final happening that voids all happenings.”

CHILD: “All in but one! Jump, jump in! Oh, no, no, you're the one that doesn't belong. I don't know where you always come from. Get out of here. You're crazy.”

MOTHER (or FATHER — the way they dress them now, it's hard to tell): “Ah, you have been playing with the alphabetical blocks, Iracema. These are good ones. Chatter-blocks in the Chatter-box, it says. They have little coils inside them and they react to each other. Sometimes they seem to talk and think. They are seminal blocks. That's what the toy salesman said.”

PARENT (the other one, the one with the longer hair): “Educational toys are good.”

Groaning Hinges Of The World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And it was all confusion that they left behind them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don't know,” the Dutchman said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Only not quite.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continued On Next Rock

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Cook it, Ethyl,” Magdalen said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Manypenny. Anteros Manypenny is my name forever.”

“What are you?”

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

“How could anyone be pre-Caddo?”

“Like me. I am.”

“Is Anteros a Creek name?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Why, it is perfect!” Ethyl exclaimed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They had all gathered around it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, knock it off!” Magdalen snapped.

“I have other things,” Anteros finished sullenly.

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

“Anteros!” she called sharply just at sundown.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Anteros will show you how.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Rocky is the word,” said Magdalen.

“On with it, Howard,” Ethyl cried.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Cook it, Ethyl,” Magdalen ordered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They talked awhile about the impossibility of the whole business.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How late, Steinleser?” Robert Derby asked.

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

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

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

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

“You lie a lot,” Magdalen challenged.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But he didn't.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Terrence. Don't you remember Magdalen?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How I Wrote Continued On Next Rock

To ask how any story or tune or statue comes about is to ask “How is it done?”; “What does it take?” Have you heard of the Dutch boy in this country who was going to butcher school, whose schoolmates tried to mix him up? The heart, they told him, that is named the liver; the bladder is called the stomach; the tongue is the coccyx; the loin is known as the chuck; the brisket is the flank; the lungs are named the trotters; and so on. This Dutch kid was very smart however; he figured out that they were having him, and he figured out the right names for everything, or for almost everything. And he passed his final examination with top grades both in meat-cutting and nomenclature. “How were you able to do it?” the instructor asked, “with so many things going against you?” “I've got it up there,” the Dutch kid said, and he tapped his head. “Kidneys.”

It isn't exactly that one should use kidneys for brains, but the sense of grotesque juxtaposition does come in handy. You can't be sure you are looking at something from the right angle till you have looked at it from every angle. How did I write “Continued on Next Rock” then? Upside down and backwards, of course. I started with a simple, but I believe novel, idea that had to do with time. Then I involuted the idea of time (making all things contemporary or at least repeating), and I turned the systems of values backwards, trying to make the repulsive things appear poetic (“the nobility of badgers, the serenity of toads”) and trying to set anti-love up as comparable to love (the flattest thing you can imagine has to have at least two sides; it can have many more). I let the characters that had been generated by this action work out their own way then. After this, I subtracted the original simple but novel idea from the story, and finished things up. (The original idea was a catalyst which could be recovered practically unchanged at the end of the reaction.)

The beginning idea, which I give to anyone who wants it, was simply to have archaeologists digging upwards through certain strata, for rather vague topographic reasons, come to deposits of the fairly recent past, or the very recent past, of the near future (a discarded license plate from fifteen years in the future, for instance), then the more distant future, then to realize that the strata still remaining above them had to contain the remnants of at least a hundred thousand years of unfaked future.

So much for the genesis of one particular short story. Each one is different but each one is anomalous; and there is a reason for that. No normal or reasonable or balanced or well-adjusted person is going to attempt the making of a story or a tune or a statue or a poem; he'll have no need for such abnormal activity. A person has to be somehow deficient or lacking in person or personality or he will not attempt these things. He must be very deficient or lacking if he will succeed at all in them. Every expression in art or pseudo-art is a crutch that a crippled person makes and donates to the healthy world for its use (the healthy world having only the vaguest idea that it even needs crutches.)

There are, I know, many apparent glaring exceptions to the rule that only persons who are deficient or lacking in person or personality will contribute any creative content. Believe me, these exceptions are only apparent. There is something badly unbalanced in every one of them.

Carry it one step further, though. One of the legends, unwritten from the beginning and maybe unwritten forever, is about a Quest for the Perfect Thing. But it is really the quest for the normal thing. Can you find, anywhere in the world, behind or before or present, even one person who is really normal and reasonable and balanced and well-adjusted? This is the Perfect Thing, if it or he or she is ever found, and if ever found there will be no further need of any art or attempted art, good or bad.

Enough of such stuff, end of article, if this is an article. I am both facetious and serious in every written word here.

Ride A Tin Can

These are my notes on the very sticky business. They are not in the form of a protest, which would be useless. Holly is gone, and the Shelni will all be gone in the next day or two, if indeed there are any of them left now. This is for the record only.

Holly Harkel and myself, Vincent Vanhoosier, received funds and permission to record the lore of the Shelni through the intercession of that old correlator John Holmberg. This was unexpected. All lorists have counted John as their worst enemy.

“After all, we have been at great expense to record the minutiae of pig grunts and the sound of earthworms,” Holmberg told me, “and we have records of squeakings of hundreds of species of orbital rodents. We have veritable libraries of the song and cackle of all birds and pseudo-ornins. Well, let us add the Shelni to our list. I do not believe that their thumping on tree roots or blowing into jug gourds is music. I do not believe that their singsong is speech anymore than the squeaking of doors is speech. We have recorded, by the way, the sound of more than thirty thousand squeaking doors. And we have had worse. Let us have the Shelni, then, if your hearts are set on it. You'll have to hurry. They're about gone.

“And let me say in all compassion that anyone who looks like Miss Holly Harkel deserves her heart's desire. That is no more than simple justice. Besides, the bill will be footed by the Singing Pig Breakfast Food Company. These companies are bitten by the small flea of remorse every now and then and they want to pitch a few coins into some fund for luck. It's never many coins that they want to pitch; the remorse bug that bites them is never a very large one. You may be able to stretch it to cover your project though, Vanhoosier.”

So we had our appropriation and our travel, Miss Holly and myself.

Holly Harkel had often been in disrepute for her claims to understand the languages of various creatures. There was special outrage to her claim that she would be able to understand the Shelni. Now that was odd. No disrepute attached to Captain Charbonnett for his claim to understand the planetary simians, and if there was ever a phony claim it was this. No disrepute attached to Meyrowitz for his claim of finding esoteric meanings in the patterns of vole droppings. But there seemed something incredible in the claim of the goblin-faced Holly Harkel that not only would she be able to understand the Shelni instantly and completely but that they were not low scavenger beasts at all, that they were genuine goblin people who played goblin music and sang goblin songs.

Holly Harkel had a heart and soul too big for her dwarfish body, and a brain too big for her curious little head. That, I suppose, is what made her so lumpy everywhere. She was entirely compounded of love and concern and laughter, and much of it bulged out from her narrow form. Her ugliness was one of the unusual things and I believe that she enjoyed giving it to the worlds. She had loved snakes and toads, she had loved monkeys and misbegottens. She had come to look weirdly like them when we studied them. She was a snake when we studied them, she was a toad when they were our subject. She studied every creature from the inside of it. And here there was an uncommon similarity, even for her.

Holly loved the Shelni instantly. She became a Shelni, and she hadn't far to go. She moved and scooted and climbed like a Shelni. She came down trees headfirst like a Shelni or a squirrel. She had always seemed to me to be a little other than human. And now she was avid to record the Shelni things “ — before they be gone.”

As for the Shelni themselves, some scientists have called them humanoid, and then braced themselves for the blow and howl. If they were humanoid they were certainly the lowest and oddest humanoids ever. But we folklorists knew intuitively what they were. They were goblins pure and simple — I do not use the adjectives here as cliché. The tallest of them were less than three feet tall; the oldest of them were less than seven years old. They were, perhaps, the ugliest creatures in the universe, and yet of a pleasant ugliness. There was no evil in them at all. Scientists who have tested them have insisted that there was no intelligence in them at all. They were friendly and open. Too friendly, too open, as it happened, for they were fascinated by all human things, to their harm. But they were no more human than a fairy or an ogre is human. Less, less, less than a monkey.

“Here is a den of them,” Holly divined that first day (it was the day before yesterday). “There will be a whole coven of them down under here and the door is down through the roots of this tree. When I got my doctorate in primitive music I never imagined that I would be visiting Brownies down under tree roots. I should say that I never so much as hoped that I would be. There was so much that they didn't teach us. There was even one period in my life when I ceased to believe in goblins.”

The latter I do not believe.

Suddenly Holly was into a hole in the ground head-first, like a gopher, like a ground squirrel, like a Shelni. I followed her, letting myself down carefully, and not head-first. I myself would have to study the Shelni from the outside. I myself would never be able to crawl inside their green goblin skins, never be able to croak or carol with their frog tongues, never feel what made their popeyes pop. I myself would not even have been able to sense out their dens.

And at the bottom of the hole, at the entrance to the den itself, was an encounter which I disbelieved at the time I was seeing and hearing it. There occurred a conversation which I heard with my own ears, they having become transcendent for the moment. It was in the frog-croak Shelni talk between Holly Harkel and the five-year-old Ancient who guarded the coven, and yet it was in a sort of English and I understood it:

“Knockle, knockle.” (This from Holly).

“Crows in cockle.” (This from the guard).

“Wogs and wollie.”

“Who you?” “Holly.”

“What's a dinning?”

“Coming inning.”

So they let us in. But if you think you can enter a Shelni coven without first riming with the five-year-old Ancient who guards it, then it's plain that you've never been in one of the places. And though the philologists say that the “speech” of the Shelni is meaningless croaking, yet it was never meaningless to Holly, and in flashes it was not meaningless to me. The secret guess of Holly was so.

Holly had insisted that the Shelni spoke English within the limits of their vocal apparatus. And they told her at this very first session that they never had had any language of their own “because no one had ever made one for us”; so they used English as soon as they came to hear it. “We would pay you for the use of it if we had anything to pay you with,” they said. It is frog-croak English, but only the pure of ear can understand it.

I started the recorder and Holly started the Shelni. Quite soon she had them playing on those jug-shaped flutes of theirs. Frog music. Ineffably sad sionnach skirries. Rook, crow, and daw squabbling melody. They were pleasant, weird little pieces of music that sounded as though they were played underwater. It would be hard to imagine them not played under the ground at least.

The tunes were short just as all tunes of children are short. There was no real orchestration, though that should have been possible with the seven flutes differently jugged and tuned. Yet there was true melody in these: short, complete, closed melody, dwarfed perfection. They were underground fugues full of worms' blood and cool as root cider. They were locust and chaffer and cricket din.

Then Holly got one of the most ancient of the Shelni to tell stories while the jug-flutes chortled. Here are the two of them that we recorded that first day. Others who listen to them today say that there is nothing to them but croaking. But I heard them with Holly Harkel, she helped interpret them to me, so I can hear and understand them perfectly in frog-croak English.

Take them, Grisly Posterity! I am not sure that you deserve even this much of the Shelni.

The Shelni Who Lost His Burial Tooth

It is told this way.

There was a Shelni who lost his burial tooth before he died. Every Shelni begins life with six teeth, and he loses one every year. Then, when he is very old and has only one tooth left, he dies. He must give the last tooth to the Skokie burial-person to pay for his burial. But this Shelni had either lost two teeth in one year or else he had lived to too great an age.

He died. And he had no tooth left to pay with.

‘I will not bury you if you have no tooth left to pay me with,’ said the Skokie burial-person. ‘Should I work for nothing?’

‘Then I will bury myself,’ said the dead Shelni.

‘You don't know how,’ said the Skokie burial-person. ‘You don't know the places that are left. You will find that all the places are full. I have agreement that everybody should tell everybody that all the places are full, so only the burial-person may bury. That is my job.’

Nevertheless, the dead Shelni went to find a place to bury himself. He dug a little hole in the meadow, but wherever he dug he found that it was already full of dead Shelnis or Skokies or Frogs. And they always made him put all the dirt back that he had dug.

He dug holes in the valley and it was the same thing. He dug holes on the hill, and they told him that the hill was full too. So he went away crying, for he could find no place to lie down.

He asked the Éin whether he could stay in their tree. And they said, no he could not. They would not let any dead folks live in their tree.

He asked the Éisc if he could stay in their pond. And they said, no he could not. They would not allow any dead folks in their pond.

He asked the Sionnaigh if he could sleep in their den. And they said, no he could not. They liked him when he was alive, but a dead person has hardly any friends at all.

So the poor dead Shelni wanders yet and can find no place to rest his head.

He will wander forever unless he can find another burial tooth to pay with.

They used to tell it so.

One comment on this burial story: The Shelni do have careful burial. But the burial crypts are plainly dug, not by the six-fingered Shelni, but by the seven-clawed Skokie. There must be substance to the Skokie burial-person. Moreover, the Skokie, though higher on the very low scale than the Shelni, do not bury their own.

Furthermore, there are no Shelni remains going back more than about thirty equivalent years. There are no random-lying or fossil Shelni at all, though such remains are common for every other species here.

The second story (of the first day).

The Shelni Who Turned into a Tree

This is how they tell it.

There was a woman who was neither Shelni nor Skokie nor Frog. She was Sky Woman. One day she came with her child and sat down under the Shelni tree. When she got up to go she left her own child who was asleep and picked up a Shelni child by mistake. Then the Shelni woman came to get her own child and she looked at it. She did not know what was wrong but it was a Sky People child.

‘Oh, it has pink skin and flat eyes! How can that be?’ the Shelni woman asked. But she took it home with her and it still lives with the Shelni and everyone has forgotten the difference.

Nobody knows what the Sky Woman thought when she got the Shelni child home and looked at it. Nevertheless she kept it, and it grew and was more handsome than any of them.

But when the second year came and the young Shelni was grown, it walked in the woods and said ‘I do not feel like a Sky People. But if I am not a Sky People, then what am I? I am not a Duck. I am not a Frog. And if I am a Bird, what kind of Bird am I? There is nothing left. It must be that I am a Tree.’ There was reason for this. We Shelni do look a little bit like trees and we feel a little bit like trees.

So the Shelni put down roots and grew bark and worked hard at being a tree. He underwent all the hardships that are the life of a tree. He was gnawed by goats and gobniu; he was rough-tongued by cattle and crom; he was infested by slugs and befouled by the nameless animal. Moreover, parts of him were cut away for firewood.

But he kept feeling the jug music creeping up all the way from his undertoes to his hair and he knew that this music was what he had always been looking for. It was the same jug and tine music that you hear even now.

Then a bird told the Shelni that he was not really a tree but that it was too late for him to leave off growing like a tree. He had brothers and sisters and kindred living in the hole down under his roots, the bird said, and they would have no home if he stopped being a tree.

This is the tree that is the roof of our den where we are even now. This tree is our brother who was lost and who forgot that he was a Shelni.

This is the way it has always been told.

On the second day it was remarkable how much Holly had come to look like a Shelni. And she was hardly taller than they were. I had never realized she was so small. Ah well, she has come to look like every sort of creature we have ever studied together. Holly insists that the Shelni have intelligence, and I half agree with her. But the paragraph in the basic manual of this world is against us:

 — a tendency to attribute to the Shelni an intelligence which they do not possess, perhaps due to their fancied human resemblance. In maze-running they are definitely inferior to the rodents. In the manipulation of latches and stops they are less adept than the earth raccoons or the asteroid rojon. In tool handling and true mimicry they are far from equal to the simians. In simple foraging and the instinct for survival they are far below the hog or the harzl. In mneme, the necessary prelude to intelligence, they are about on par with the turtles. Their ‘speech’ lacks the verisimilitude of the talking birds, and their ‘music’ is below that of the insects. They make poor watchdogs and inadequate scarecrows. It appears that the move to ban shelniphagi, though perhaps sincere, is ill-advised. After all, as an early spaceman put it, ‘What else are they good for?’

Well, we have to admit that the Shelni are not as intelligent as rats or hogs or harzls. Yet I, surely due to the influence of Holly, feel a stronger affinity to them than to rats or hogs or coons or crows or whatever. But no creature is so helpless as the Shelni.

How do they even get together?

The Shelni have many sorts of songs, but they do not have any romantic songs in our sense. After all, they are small children till they die of old age. Their sexual relationship seems distinguished either by total unawareness or by extreme bashfulness.

“I don't see how they bring it off at all, Vincent,” Holly said the second day (which was yesterday). “They are here, so they must have been born. But how do these bashful and scatterbrained three-year-olds ever get together to bring it off? I can't find anything at all in their legends or acting patterns, can you?

“In their legends, all their children are foundlings. They are born or discovered under a blueberry bush (my translation of spionam). Or alternately, and in other cycles, they are found under a quicken tree or in a cucumber patch. In common sense we must assume that the Shelni are placental and viviparous. But should we apply common sense to goblin folk?

“They also have a legend that they are fungoid and spring out of the ground at night like mushrooms. And that if a Shelni woman wishes a child, she must buy a fungoid slip from a Skokie and plant it in the ground. Then she will have her child ready the next morning.”

But Holly was depressed yesterday morning. She had seen some copy by our sponsor The Singing Pig Breakfast Food Company and it disturbed her:

“Singing Pig! The Children love it! Nourishing Novelty! Nursery Rime Characters in a can for your convenience! Real Meat from Real Goblins! No fat, no bones. If your can has a lucky number tab, you can receive free a facsimile Shelni jug-flute. Be the first on your block to serve Singing Pig, the meat from real Goblins. Cornstarch and natural flavor added.”

Oh well, it was only an advertisement that they used back on World. We had our recording to do.

“Vincent, I don't know how they got here,” Holly said, “but I know they won't be here very long. Hurry, hurry, we have to get it down! I will make them remembered somehow.”

Holly got them to play on the tines that second day (which was yesterday). There had been an impediment the day before, she said. The tines may not be played for one until the second day of acquaintance. The Shelni do not have stringed instruments. Their place is taken by the tines, the vibrating, singing forks. They play these many-pronged, tuned forks like harps, and in playing them they use the tree roots for sounding boards so that even the leaves in the air above partake a little of the music. The tines, the forks are themselves of wood, of a certain very hard but light wood that is sharp with chert and lime dust. They are wood, I believe, in an early stage of petrifaction. The tine fork music usually follows the jug-flute music, and the ballads that are sung to it have a dreamlike sadness of tone that belies the childish simplicity of the texts.

Here are two more of those ballad stories that we recorded on the second day (which was yesterday).

The Skokie Who Lost His Wife

This is the way they tell it.

A Skokie heard a Shelni jug-flute jugging one night.

‘That is the voice of my wife,’ the Skokie said. ‘I'd know it anywhere.’

The Skokie came over the moors to find his wife. He went down into the hole in the ground that his wife's voice was coming from. But all he found there was a Shelni playing a jug-flute.

‘I am looking for my poor lost wife,’ the Skokie said. ‘I have heard her voice just now coming out of this hole. Where is she?’

‘There is nobody here but myself,’ the Shelni said. ‘I am sitting here alone playing my flute to the moons whose light runs down the walls of my hole.’

‘But I heard her here,’ said the Skokie, ‘and I want her back.’

‘How did she sound?’ asked the Shelni. ‘Like this?’ And he jugged some jug music on his flute.

‘Yes, that is my wife,’ said the Skokie. ‘Where have you hidden her? That is her very voice.’

‘That is nobody's wife,’ the Shelni told the Skokie. ‘That is just a little tune that I made up.’

‘You play with my wife's voice, so you must have swallowed my wife,’ the Skokie said. ‘I will have to take you apart and see.’

‘If I swallowed anybody's wife, I'm sorry,’ said the Shelni. ‘Go ahead then.’

So the Skokie took the Shelni apart and scattered the pieces all over the hole and some of them on the grass outside. But he could not find any part of his wife.

‘I have made a mistake,’ said the Skokie. ‘Who would have thought that one who had not swallowed my wife could make her voice on the flute!’

‘It is all right,’ said the Shelni, ‘so long as you put me together again. I remember part of the way I go. If you remember the rest of the way, then you can put me together again.’

But neither of them remembered very well the way the Shelni was before he was taken apart. The Skokie put him together all wrong. There were not enough pieces for some parts and too many for others.

‘Let me help,’ said a Frog who was there. ‘I remember where some of the parts go. Besides, I believe it was my own wife he swallowed. That was her voice on the flute. It was not a Skokie voice.’

The Frog helped, and they all remembered what they could, but it did not work. Parts of the Shelni could not be found again, and some of the parts would not go into him at all. When they had him finished, the Shelni was in great pain and could hardly move, and he didn't look much like a Shelni.

‘I've done all I can,’ the Skokie said. ‘That's the way you'll have to be. Where is Frog?’

‘I'm inside,’ said Frog.

‘That's where you will have to stay,’ the Skokie said. ‘I've had enough of both of you. Enough, and these pieces left over. I will just take them with me. Maybe I can make someone else out of them.’

That is the way the Shelni still is, put together all wrong. In his wrong form he walks the country by night, being ashamed to go by day. Some folks are startled when they meet him, not knowing this story. He still plays his jug-flute with the lost Skokie Wife's voice and with Frog's voice. Listen, you can hear it now! The Shelni goes in sorrow and pain because nobody knows how to put him together right.

The Skokie never did find his lost wife.

This is how it is told.

And then there was the second story that we recorded yesterday — the last story, though we did not know it then, that we would record of the Shelni:

The Singing Pigs

This is how they say it.

We have the ancient story of the singing pigs who sing so loud that they fly up into the sky on the tail of their own singing. Now we ourselves, if we can sing loud enough, if we can jug the flutes strong enough, if we can tang the tines deep enough, will get to be the Singing Pigs of our own story. Many already have gone away as Singing Pigs.

There come certain bell men with music carts. They play rangle-dangle Sky music. They come for love of us. And if we can hurry fast enough when they come we can go with them, we can ride a tin can over the sky.

Bong! bong! that is the bell man with the music cart now! All the Shelni hurry! This is the day you may get to go. Come all you Shelni from the valley and the stream and jump on the cart for the free ride. Come all the Shelni from the meadows and the woods. Come up from the tree roots and the holes underground. The Skokie don't get to go, the Frogs don't get to go, only the Shelni get to go.

Cry if the cart is too full and you don't get to go today, but don't cry too long. The bell men say that they will come back tomorrow and every day till there are no Shelni left at all.

‘Come all you little Singing-Pig-Shelni,’ a bell man shouts. ‘Come get your free rides in the tin cans all the way to Earth! Hey, Ben, what other animal jumps onto the slaughter wagon when you only ring a bell? Come along little Shelni-Pigs, room for ten more on this wagon. That's all, that's all. We'll have lots more wagons going tomorrow. We'll take all of you, all of you! Hey, Ben, did you ever see little pigs cry when there's no more room for them on the slaughter wagon?’ These are the high kind words that a bell man speak for love of us.

Not even have to give a burial tooth or other tooth to pay for the ride. Frogs can't go, Skokies can't go, only the Shelni get to go!

Here are the wonderful things! From the wagon, the Shelni get to go to one room where all their bones are taken out. This does never happen to Shelni before. In another room the Shelni are boiled down to only half their size, little as little-boy Shelni. Then they all get to play the game and crawl into the tin cans. And then they get their free ride in the tin cans all the way to Earth. Ride a tin can!

Wipe off your sticky tears you who miss the music cart today. Go to sleep early tonight and rise early tomorrow. Sing your loudest tomorrow so the bell men will know where to come. Jug the flutes very strong tomorrow, tang the tines deep, say whoop! whoop! here we are, bell men.

All laugh when they go with the bell men in the music cart. But there is story that someday a Shelni woman will cry instead of laugh when they take her. What can be the matter with this woman that she will cry? She will cry out ‘Damn you, it's murder! They're almost people! You can't take them! They're as much people as I am. Double damn you, you can't take me! I'm human. I know I look as funny as they do but I'm human. Oh, oh, oh!’ This is the funniest thing of the story, the prophecy thing part.

Oh, oh, oh, the woman will say, Oh, oh, oh, the jug-flutes will echo it. What will be the matter with the Shelni woman who cries instead of laughs?

This is our last story, wherever it is told. When it is told for the last time, then there will be no more stories here, there will be no more Shelni. Who needs stories and jug-flute music who can ride a tin can?

That is how it has been said.

Then we went out (for the last time, as it happened) from the Shelni burrow. And, as always, there was the riming with the five-year-old Ancient who guarded the place:

“What to crowing?”

“Got to going.”

“Jinx on Jolly,

Golly, Holly!”

“Were it other,

Bug, my brother!”

“Holly crying.

Sing her flying,

Jugging, shouting.”

“Going outing.”

Now this was remarkable. Holly Harkel was crying when we came out of the burrow for the (as it happened) last time. She was crying great goblin tears. I almost expected them to be green.

Today I keep thinking how amazingly the late Holly Harkel had finally come to look like the Shelni. She was a Shelni. “It is all the same with me now,” she said this morning. “Would it be love if they should go and I should stay?”

It is a sticky business. I tried to complain, but those people were still ringing that bell and chanting “All you little Pig-Shelni-Singers come jump on the cart. Ride a tin can to Earth! Hey, Ben, look at them jump on the slaughter wagon!”

“It was inexcusable,” I said. “Surely you could tell a human from a Shelni.”

“Not that one,” said a bell ringer. “I tell you they all jumped on the wagon willingly, even the funny looking one who was crying. Sure, you can have her bones, if you can tell which ones they are.”

I have Holly's bones. That is all. There was never a creature like her. And now it is over with.

But it is not over!

Singing Pig Breakfast Food Company, beware! There will be vengeance!

It has been told.

Ishmael Into The Barrens

Sometimes, however, a group of animals about to become extinct undergoes considerable change of a pathological nature before it disappears from the scene.

 — Douglas Dewar

It was early in the morning, which was illegal. Which is to say that it was illegal for persons to be about in the early morning. And yet there were a few people, some alive and some dead, scattered about in the morning hours. Most of these were yellow-card people doing necessary work in those hours; another few were authorized nothoi-hunters; the rest were outlaws. All of the dead people lying in the streets were outlaws; but some of the live people also were outlaws unknown.

Really, there was no need for anyone to be about at this time; and if the world were ordered in a perfectly legal manner there would have been none. But the world was not perfectly ordered. There was outlawry and the breaking of the hours rules.

There were the working hours for those of the age when work was still required, and concurrent with these were the basic-enjoyment hours for those beyond that age. Then there were the swinging hours for all (compulsory). And finally there were the morning hours, the forbidden hours — the hours for sleep, for rest, for completing a trip: these were from the fifth hour of the day till the thirteenth. Timers were adjusted so that the sunrise was always in the forbidden hours; and indeed no really good person had ever seen the sun rise, except certain very old ones who had seen it in their uninstructed youths. “No good person was ever the better for seeing the sun rise,” it is written in the Analects.

It was an old and dirty city in the glare of the early illegal sun, but the yellow-card street-sweepers would soon clear away the worst of the debris. The swinging hours always left their clutter, as was their right. Here were yesterday's cut flowers in heaps, many thousands of broken balloons, posters torn and shredded, remnants of food and drink and vein-main, papers covered with scatter-print, discarded litter and clothing.

Here also, right on the edge of a pile of broken guitars, a woman was lying twisted and grubby. She was very young and very dead. She was not, however, a casualty of the swinging hours, but of the early morning hours. And there was another one some distance from the first, blowsier and bloodier. They were not rare in the morning hours in the city. Very soon the sweepers would cart them away. By the thirteenth hour all would be clean again, and the Gentle World would begin another day.

But here is the heroine, a live one, perhaps a lively one. Should she not be a platinum woman, scatter-ornamented and beautiful, according to the norms? Or a shining ebony or a creamy chocolate? Should she not be adjusted and legal? Flowery and scatter-eyed? Should she not be of the multiplexity, nonlineate, a Scan, an Agape Apple, a Neutrina, a Pop Poppy? A Poster Coaster at the very least? Should she not be a Happy Medium, a Plateau Potato, a Twanger, a Mime, a Dreamer, and Enhancer-Dancer? Are these not the aspects of a heroine?

Nah, she wasn't like that at all. She was a Morning-Glory, which is illegal. She was a Gown-Clown, which is also illegal. She was not flowery, not scatter-eyed. She wasn't even quite beautiful though she rather wished that she were. And yet perhaps she was, in another way, in an old and almost private way.

She had form. But was it not now bad form to have form? She had grace and face. She had a forky tongue and a willful way. She even had a measure of gaiety. She was tall and full. Her hair was midnight-black with green starlights in it (really). Her eyes were even blacker with deeper lights. She had a strong element of stubbornness in her, which is illegal. She was a flower-tender, and she was not enchanted with the job. (Something had gone out of the flowers, something had gone out of them.) Her name was Janine Pervicacia. To the people she was Jane the Crane, but she wasn't so leggy as all that.

The flowers, especially those that were to be cut this day, needed care in the morning hours, and for that reason this yellow-card girl was tending them. But she tended them lineately, which was illegal.

Here is the hero. Should he not be a Swing, a Slant, a Cut, according to the norms? A Spade, a Buck, a Whanger? Should he not be a Head, a Flash, an Etch, a Neutrino yet, a Burn, a Vein, a Flower?

Yeah, but he wasn't like that. He wasn't that kind of hero at all. He was a Dawner, he was a doggedly pleasant man, he was even a sort of battler (“He saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha; and he smelleth the battle afar off ” — Job), he was friendly; he was even intelligent on some subjects and murderous on others. He was big enough and thick enough; his hair was brambled but short. The people said that he would be the father of Ishmael. He didn't know what they meant; neither did the people. He was a moving man with cat-springs in him. He was a yellow-card street-sweeper, and his name was Morgan Saunders.

He was making his rounds, cleaning up after the swingers. He growled when he came to the twisted and grubby woman who was very young and very dead.

“Secret hid in the bottom of a well, May the nothoi-hunters all go to hell,” he chanted, which is illegal (the nothoi-hunters are authorized). He had a very hassle of a time bending the dead woman in the middle (he saw now that she was only a girl) and stuffing her into his wheeled canister. He quickly covered her with shards of broken guitars so she would be hidden from his eyes.

Then he saw Jane the Crane tending flowers. He did not know her. This was her first morning back on the job after a term in a disorderly house. She was tending the flowers as if they were in straight lines, as if they were in rows, going down one file of them and back another. But only in her mind were they in rows.

“That is not the allowed way to tend flowers, girl,” Morgan spoke to her very low. “You must not consider them as growing in rows, even in your thought. Consider them as random scatter-clusters, or there will be a black mark on your record. Consider them as a revolving nexus of patternless broken volutes. They grow random in nature, you know, and the Gentle World is all for the random. I am only trying to help you.”

“I know you are. The things I have been put through by people trying to help me! I tell you, though, that nothing grows random in nature. Everything falls into patterns. And flowers very often do grow in terraced tiers and in tufted rows. I've seen them.”

“That is very dangerous talk,” said Morgan Saunders, “and I believe that the nothoi-hunters are eyeing us even now. Is it possible that I will see you here again tomorrow? Do you know the doubled-up girl in my canister?”

“I know her. Her name is Agar. Yes, it is possible that you will see me here again tomorrow. It is possible that I will be the doubled-up dead girl in your canister tomorrow.”

Then Morgan Saunders went on his way, picking up old flowers and broken balloons and guitars and dead women. He went on past the Pop Palace with its high sign in psychedelic dancing dots: the golden dwarf, man, man, that's man!

And Janine Pervicacia continued to tend the flowers (those that would die today), moving her hands as if the flowers were in rows; and they weren't.

This is a love and hate story (both were illegal) from the False Terminal Days that were the middle of the twenty-first century. It is very difficult to decode the story and lay it out for the reason that (even in its illegal form) it was printed in scatter-print. No other sort of print was available. Every printing machine, even the small household ones used by private individuals, was both a scatter-printer and a randoming machine. Each letter could have many different shapes and colors, and these were so blended that no two colors or shape-styles might come together, or that nothing might range itself into lines even accidentally.

Scatter-print was the flowering of 150 years of pop-posters. It shouted a complex nonlineate message, or else it did not: but it shouted. There was difficulty that about a third of the signs were not letters at all, had no meaning or sound value to them: and their blending in made the words difficult to read — if one were still a reader and not a depth comprehender. There was also a difficulty in that it was illegal to number pages; ever; in anything, long or short. Pages must be fed in unnumbered, and they were then randomized. And they are very difficult to unrandom.

For this reason there will be anomalies and inconsistencies in this story, for all that we try to untangle it and set it in line. It was (in its first form) an illegal private record by a grieving friend, but we cannot be sure of the order it should fall into. We do not know for sure whether Jane the Crane was the doubled-up dead girl in the canister on the first morning or on the one-thousandth. We do not know when the destruction of Morgan Saunders took place, whether before the birth of Ishmael or after, but we have set it before. And we do not know whether the interlude of the odd man and the Odd God is truly a part of this account or whether it should be interluded at the point we give it or at another. We can but guess how long Jane the Crane was in a disorderly house, and we cannot always tell flashback from future glimpse. We try.

The next morning (we cannot be sure that it was the next morning, but it was a different morning) Morgan Saunders slowed his cleaning and sweeping as he came near where Janine Pervicacia was tending flowers. It was summer now (flowers, of course, must be grown in all seasons) and perhaps it hadn't been the other time. Janine (Jane the Crane) was revealed as a gown-clown in an old unrevealing dress. There was scarcely a square foot of her body exposed. She worked now with a carefulness and neatness that were unusual. This girl might be beyond help.

“There are dangerous and divergent things in your manner,” Morgan said in a low voice. “If you are not more careless you may be sent to a disorderly house. I am only trying to help you.”

“I've already been in the disorderly house,” Janine said cheerlessly. “I was discharged as incurable and always to be watched.”

“How was it there?” Morgan asked. “I have always been afraid of it, for myself. I have been threatened with it, and I am always careful to assume the careless manner.”

“It was horrible and depressing. I was put in with very small children, five and six years old. We were taught artless art. ‘Form is only the pedestal. Deformity is the statue,’ one of the instructors said that first day. ‘The trick is to smash the pedestal completely and yet leave something of the statue. Deformity is beauty, always remember that. Form, which is pattern, is always ugly.’ That's what he told us. We had classes in pop-posters, which are hand-done scatter-print. We had classes in Lump the Lump, which is plastic modeling. We had classes in finger painting, and paintings by chimpanzees were used as models and suggestions. I noticed of the children that though many of them were handsome and even-featured when they first came to the disorderly house, their features soon altered. One eye would become larger than the other. The two sides of their faces would no longer match. One side of their mouths would be pulled down and the other pulled up. They would come to look as crooked as most people do look. The instructors could tell at a glance which children were being inculcated with the proper sense of deformity: those who themselves became deformed. We talk too long. I am sure we will be watched.”

“Wait. We have so much of danger to spend anyhow. Let us spend a little of it now.” And Morgan himself was doing a dangerous thing. He was smoking a short fag, but it was not what you think: not potty, not dotty, not snow, not glow, none of the approved high things. It was old, forbidden, non-mind-enhancing tobacco. “What else did they try to teach you in the disorderly house?”

“Guitar,” said Jane the Crane. “That remains the worst of all experiences, the hell-thing that certain humans can never accept. I still wake up screaming at night (working in the mornings, I sometimes sleep illegally during the swing hours of night) at the oppressiveness, the whining meanness of it. It is the only instrument that is always random, that does not have to be randomized. Oh, the twang, twang, twang, the eternal flatness of it! ‘After all, is not the purpose of life on earth to accustom the people to life in hell?’ one of the instructors asked. This is one of the permanent quips of the disorderly houses, of course, but the way the instructor said it in a deformed voice out of a deformed face shook me. It is true, Morgan, it is true. Or is it?”

“It is not everywhere true, Janine. It is not my purpose, but it is theirs. What else did they teach the children and fail to teach you?”

“Crudity, nudity; presbys and lesbos; monophony, cacophony; profanity, urbanity; muggery and buggery. Narcosis. Doggery. Flesh-mesh. Much else. Does that stuff not curdle the convoluted ears of you? It should.”

“Do they not have a course to teach ducks to swim? But it seems that a little bit of this would be beyond the scope of five-and six-year-olds, Janine, especially beyond those who had to be sent back for corrections.”

“Never mind, they would remember it and they would be ready for it when their time came to appreciate it. Go now. We have spent too much danger and we are watched.”

“Will I see you here again tomorrow, Janine?”

“Tomorrow or next season, or someday, or never.”

“Will you think of me?”

“I will think of you as if this were another world, towering where it was meant to be high, ordered where it should be ordered, free in the great central things, and free from the dwarfed and compulsory freedoms. I will think of you, Morgan, in ways that are presently unthinkable.”

Janine (Jane the Crane) turned back to caring for her flowers, which she liked but was not impassioned over. And Morgan Saunders went on about his sweeping and cleaning, past the Pop Palace, past the Dog Temple, past Levelers Loggia, past the Pseudo-Parthenon, past Humanity Hall with its great poster in electric scatter-print raising its headless torso into the sky: man, this gelded glory of the level way.

In the False Terminal Days that were the middle of the twenty-first century the population plateau had been reached. It had not been reached in perfect peace. In an odd piece entitled The Analects of Isaac we encounter the phrase “the conflicts created in a society which sees in population stability the only hope of the human race.” There were conflicts.

There had been hard feelings. Blood had run in the rivers in some localities. But every casualty of this conflict had become part of the feedback of the population-stability calculators. It was settled now. It was enforced. But the conflict continued, and it must still continue till the total death of one or both of the antagonists. It had become one-sided. It looked like the conflict between an elephant and a day fly. But there were irreconcilables. There were die-hards among those midges. And there were also hard-abornings, illegitimate and double-damned and defiant. The plateau had been reached, but there were bumps on the plateau.

Stable population. And the second step (very nearly achieved already) was population homogeneity. For fifty years the restrictions had been most selective. By now those of extreme colors were about of equal number, and the great central blending out-numbered them both. Hereafter, only progeny-crosses between the two extremes or out of the central blending could be permitted; none at all among either extreme.

In any case, with the stack-up (old hippies never die; they don't even fade away) a kid-card now cost a quarter of a million dollars. That was very high, and perhaps it would go even higher.

In any case, again, as either both-white or both-black, there would be an impediment between Janine Pervicicia and Morgan Saunders. (They hadn't talked about a union at all, but they had begun to think about it.) This impediment is mentioned in the old scatter-print record written by the grieving friend. But this record does not indicate which was the color of their impediment, and we do not know it either.

A flower-care inspector had been plaguing Janine Pervicacia. He could not fault her that the flowers in her care were insufficient in numbers and vitality. It was something else. The flowers from her care were reported to be out of sympathy with the flower people. They had not the right attitude to all this. They had developed sympathies of their own, or of Janine's; and the flower people could feel the alienation, and they complained. There is a fine line here. There really is sympathy and antipathy even in cut flowers, but it is liable to exaggeration and subjectivity by the flower people.

“You will have to conform,” the flower-care inspector told Janine sternly. “There is complaint.”

“Conform to what?” she asked. “Form is damnable to you.”

“You will please to cease using words as having direction, Jane the Crane flower-carer Fifth-class,” he said sharply. “Words are like confetti, like stars, like snowflakes, like — there simply are not words for words! You must conform to nonconformity, of course. Your lineate overview will minimize you in the simultaneous multidepth mosaic appraisal.”

“Oh, that! I have already been weighed and found wanting. Do what you will with me, but do not stand and goggle at me.”

“We could have a meeting during the swinging hours and come to a certain understanding with each other.”

“I'll see you in the Barrens first!”

“Then, if you will not be affectionate or gentle or human, you must improve on your work. Your flowers must show more feeling at once.”

“They will show more feeling!” Jane of the forky tongue cried. “They'll bark it you! They'll snap at you with their severed heads!”

Jane the Crane was getting many marks against her record.

And an Official Instigator had been plaguing Morgan Saunders. One must talk to an Official Instigator. They are privileged. They have rights of entry into property and dwellings, and into minds. But they are not direct. They nibble at you; they potshot; they speak in randomized riddles.

This was a very old Instigator; of the very first generation of them. He wore a pop button (“Never trust anyone under ninety”); he wore a pop beard which was perhaps infested; he wore a loincloth, he wore shamble-sandals; he wore flowers and sashes and ribbons and jewelry, but no real garment. He rated as old even in a world made up mostly of old people. He was an Ancient Hippie indeed.

“You find me objectionable, Morgan in my hands,” he sniped, “and that is a most dangerous finding of yours. You are an alien to the Gentle World, Morgan, and you are known as the philosopher of the street-sweepers. But the world doesn't need a philosophy — not a rigid street-sweeper philosophy, at any rate. We will snip those rigid corners off you, or we will snip that rigid head off you. Whence are you named? Yours isn't a name from the randoming machines. Therefore it is an illegal name. In one old context Morgan meant ‘from over the sea’; in another it meant ‘morning’, which is very significant in your case.”

“In still another case it meant a pony, old man,” Morgan said. “A very stylish pony.”

“Can a Morgan pony sire a wild ass?” (Somehow the old Instigator already knew about the wild-ass boy Ishmael, who was not even conceived yet, much less born.) “But run, Morgan, run,” the old Instigator went on. “We will catch you with our gentle pursuit. Why do you resist us who are kind to every living creature?”

“Kind to every living creature, old man? But you murder the nothoi.”

“Are the nothoi living creatures, Morgan? Not in law, not in fact. Who will admit ever seeing such creatures? Who will admit that there are such things living anywhere? They are fables, Morgan, fables from the Barrens. They are less substantial even than ghosts. Prove that they are not. Take me and show me a nothos.”

“That would be the death of both myself and the small thing.”

“If they cause deaths, then they are demons. Who could find fault with the ritual slaying of such ghosts and demons?”

This Official Instigator was one of the authentic Ancient Hippies, those in the hundred-years-and-over class. They had station and rights. They had final honor.

“We are the open world,” said this Ancient Hippie. “We open, and you will not come in to us.”

“You are not open, old man,” Morgan insisted. “You close the great way itself. You open only mole runs, and you go blind in their windings, proclaiming them to be the great way. We stubborn ones are for the open world that is gone.”

“It is you who withdraw, Morgan. You withdraw from the Gentle World.”

“You withdraw from life, old man, and the withdrawal syndromes are weird and twitchy.”

“Be careful, Morgan. I and mine are main things in the withdrawal syndromes, and we will not be spoken of slightingly. Can you not see that you are wrong? You do not see how curiously you withdraw from life in opposing me here? Do you not know that you have just passed death sentence on yourself?”

“Certainly I know it,” Morgan said.

It was true. Everything spoken to an Instigator was recorded, and the records were fed to appraisal machines. But how many seals does it take on a death sentence? Morgan Saunders knew that there were very many on his already.

But he walked out on the Instigator, which was illegal. He went on about his work, on past the Hippie Hippodrome, with its high sign of writhing splatter-paint: man, our stunted purpose and our greatest stunt.

The nothoi-hunters plagued both Janine Pervicacia and Morgan Saunders, following them, leveling guns at them, mocking them, hungering for them. The nothoi-hunters had the sense of prey; they had sophisticated equipment. They killed a lot. They were authorized to kill a lot. But they did not want to hunt out their field. Here it was a special prey that they waited for and counted on, that they counted on even before it came into being, that they everlastingly hoped for. The hunters asked both Janine and Morgan when Ishmael would be along, this even before the time when Janine and Morgan had met. But now Morgan and Janine had met, and they talked about Ishmael, not realizing it, never having heard the name, not realizing that they were talking about a coming person.

“Expectation of anything is out of order, of course,” Morgan said to Janine, “and there is not much hope in hope. Nevertheless, I get a distant tang of something that may not be all wrong. Are you with me in it, Janine, if we discover some good way (even if it is a short way) away from this?”

“I am with you in anything you want to do, O Morgan with the short bramble hair, but it is all at an end. Everything goes down, and we go down with it.”

“We will not go down, Janine. This is not the end yet, even for such as we are.”

“Yes, the ending, Morgan, the evening of the seventh day.”

“Janine, the seventh day had no evening. For better or worse, for many thousands of years we have lived in the afternoon of the seventh day, maybe even in the morning of it. And we live in it yet. Will I see you here tomorrow?”

“No. Not for several days, or weeks, or months. I will do a thing, and I will not tell you what it is till it's done. Goodbye, then, for some days or weeks or months, or forever.”

2

What things a man or a world believes or disbelieves will permeate every corner and shadow and detail of life and style, will give a shape to every person and personifact and plant of that world. They will form or they will disorder, they will open or close. A world that believes in open things is at least fertile to every sort of adventure or disaster. A world that believes in a closed way will shrivel and raven and sputter out in frosty cruelty.

 — Audifax O'Hanlon

When Morgan saw Janine no more in the mornings the world became still more a deprived place. He was still plagued by the nothoi-hunters, who mocked him, and by the Official Instigators, who conversed with him. One afternoon, after he had put away his brooms and rakes and shovels and was on his rest period, he walked out into the Barrens, which was illegal. He found no nothoi there at all nor any trace of them. He did find cattle that had gone feral, wild swine, and rabbits and deer. He found streams that were full of fish and frogs; he found berries and fruits and hazelnuts. He found patches of wild wheat and rye, and sweet corn and melons.

“What is the reason I could not live here?” he asked himself out loud. “I could come here with Janine and we could live and flourish, away from the clang of industry and the clatter of the guitar-makers' factories. What is the reason I could not live here?”

But his left ear left his head at that moment, and immediately afterward he heard (with his right ear) the sound of the shot. Angry and scared, he clawed and crawled and rolled and made his way out of the Barrens and back to the fringes of the city.

“The reason I cannot live in the Barrens is that the nothoi-hunters will kill me as a nothos if they see me there,” he said quietly. “They will kill any illegal person they find in the Barrens. And it was no mistake they made. They could see plainly that I was a grown man and not a nothos. Here I am now, one-eared and sad-hearted and — oh, oh, oh — here is an even sadder thing come to worry me!”

It was an Official Instigator wishing to talk to him. Morgan could not be sure whether it was the same Instigator who had talked to him several times before. Those Instigators who belong to the Ancient Hippie aristocracy (the one-hundred-years-and-older class) all look pretty much alike.

“We get you piece by piece, Morgan afraid to wander.” the Instigator said. “Today an ear, tomorrow another thing, and very soon we will get you all and entire. If you would not listen to reason with two ears, how can you listen with one? There was a question that arose many years before you were born, so it does not really concern you at all. The question arose, and the answer was given. The question was simply, ‘What will we do when there are too many people in the world?’ And the answer given was, ‘We will pass edict so that there never will be allowed too many people in the world.’ Why do you not accept the gentle and wise answer?”

“The answer was out of order. Your whole complex is out of order in several senses of the term. That is why you will not accept order in any of the central things. That is why you must substitute deformity for form. I do not accept your answer because it is the wrong answer.”

“How is it wrong, one-eared Morgan? What could possibly be wrong with it?”

“It is the static answer to a dynamic question and therefore the wrong answer.”

“Could you have given a righter answer?”

“Of course not. But I could have contributed to it, and you could have also. The answer would have to grow like an organism. And it would have grown.”

“There was no time to permit an organism to grow. It was a matter of great hurry.”

“No, there was no great hurry, and the answer was already growing apace until it was hacked to death. There had been some signs of a full blooming springtime for mankind, and this frightened them. The Population Blessing was a challenge, as all large and fine things are. There was only one question: whether we were a good enough people to accept the greatest gift ever offered. And the answer given was, No, we are not.”

“But we splendid ones in our youth gave another answer, little die-hard Morgan,” the Instigator said. “We will not abide a clutter of people, we said. Chop them off; there are enough and too many, we said. Really, it was a splendid answer, and I tell you that we were a splendid people.”

“ ‘Evil always wins through the strength of its Splendid Dupes’, as a wise man said, and yet I doubt that you were ever splendid. You aren't now.”

“But we are, little Morgan the philosopher of the street-sweepers, we are splendid and talented, gentle and random, creative and inventive.”

“No, old man, you know that creativity and invention have disappeared completely. Why should they not? Residue technique will suffice to maintain a plateau. It is only for mountain-building that creativity and invention are required. You were the loss-of-nerve people. And it is hard for a small remnant to restore that nerve when every thing has flowed the other way for near a hundred years.”

“Morgan of the remnant, your pieces are so little that they cannot even find each other. You lost everything completely before you were born. Listen to me: I am a wise and long-lived man. The old sophistry that there are two sides to every question has long passed away. Instead of that, there are mutual exclusions that cannot live in the same world with each other. The great consensus and the small remnant can no longer live in the same world. What odds could you post, little Morgan, on our going and your remaining?”

“Very weak odds, but I am more and more inclined to play them out.”

“We have recorded almost enough on you to terminate you right now. Is it not curious that a man shot in the ear will bleed out of the mouth — in words? The nothoi-hunters are better shots than that, you know. They but practice of you till we give them the final word on you. We have checked your own ancestry. You yourself are a nothos, for all that we can find to the contrary. No kid-card was ever issued for you. We could classify you for extinction at any time, but we will wait a little while and have spectacle out of you.”

The nothoi-hunters in fact were very good shots. They had prediction scopes on their rifles. These small directors had the evasion patterns of many small animals and of the small nothoi worked out: the rush, the scurry, the broken pace, the double, the zigzag. With the pattern of those built into a scope the hunters could hardly miss.

The nothoi-hunters themselves were square pegs who happened to fit into certain square holes of the Gentle World. They were not gentle (not every one can be gentle even on that low plateau); they were naturally troublesome and warlike. Now their proclivities were channeled to a special job. They exterminated certain unlawful things. They did it thoroughly and well. And they made high sport out of it.

And there were other summary things in the system of the Gentle World. This very afternoon, right at the beginning of the swing hours, there were several executions under the recusancy laws. Many persons refused to take part in the swing hours. This was the same as refusal to be happy. To the offenders, first there was warning, then there was mutilation, then there was death. A half-dozen of such public hangings would usually minimize the absences from swing time for a while.

There was a stubborn girl ready to be hanged, and at first Morgan thought that she was Janine. She was much the same type. She refused to recant; she refused to take her dutiful place in the Gentle World. She had refused three times to join the swing fun. Likely she was mad, but her madness might be dangerous and contagious.

“You refuse to have fun with the funsters?” an Ancient Instigator asked her almost tearfully.

“I always have fun,” the girl said loudly. “It's more fun to be me dead than you alive. And I will not endure anything as stifling as the swing times. Drop dead, old man!”

“You might at least respect my position as Ancient Instigator.”

“I'd see the last Instigator strangled with the strings of the last guitar!”

So the girl was hanged, drawn, and quartered. Morgan, though he had often seen these little dramas, was deeply shocked: not so much by the girl's bad-mannered defiance as by the punishment itself. She looked so like Janine and talked so like her that it was frightening.

Then Janine came back and was busy with her flowers again one morning. The flowers remembered her (it had not really been such a long time), and they came alive to her. Janine was not impassioned with the flowers (as many in the Gentle World had the pose of being), but they were impassioned with her. They always had been.

“Where have you been this while?” Morgan asked her. “At the end of every morning I examined all the bodies gathered up by all the sweepers, and yours was never among them.”

“I hid awhile. And I had an illegal operation performed on myself.”

“Which?” Morgan asked. “What did it do to you?”

“It undid,” Janine said. “It undid the earlier operation. Now I am open to life once more.”

“And under the automatic sentence of death you are! And I am if I say the word. I say the word. I am.”

“I know a Papster priest,” said Janine.

“And I know one,” said Morgan. “We will go to mine.”

“No, we will go to mine,” she insisted. But they couldn't have quarreled over that or over anything. There wasn't room for that in the narrow margin of life left to them. Besides, it happened that it was the same Papster priest they both knew. There weren't more than two or three of those hidden ones in that city of a million.

They went to the Papster priest and were married, which was illegal.

The Papster must have been lonesome for the central things, so he brought out his eloquence, which had grown rusty, and gave a doctrine to their act.

“What you do is right,” he said, “no matter how illegal it is. This world had become a stunted plant, and it was not meant to be. Deformity can never be the norm. The basic and evil theory was: that (by restriction) fewer people could live better and more justified. But they did not. Fewer people live, and they live as dwarfs. Not even China in the thousand years it was frozen (it also muchly in an opium dream) was as deprived and listless as this world. The Cities of the Plateau may be destroyed as were the Cities of the Plain, I do not know. We live in that which calls itself a biological world, but no one seems to understand the one central fact of biology, of the life complex.

“This is the one biological fact that all present biologists ignore to their own incompetence: that every life is called into being by God and maintained in being by God at every instant of that life; that without God there is no bios, no life, and certainly no biology. There can never be an unwanted life or an unwanted person, ever, anywhere. If a person were not wanted by God, God would not call him into being. There can never be too many persons, because it is God who counts and records and decides how many there should be. There can never be a person unprovided for, because it is God who provides. Whoever does not believe in this Providence does not believe in God. Once there was some nonsense on this subject. Now it is pretty well dispelled, and the pretense of believing in one and not the other has about vanished.”

The priest wrinkled his nose for the sweat running down it. It was a hot underground hole that they came to for the secret marriage.

“But they bug me, the biologists and their dwarfed biota,” the priest went on. “If they cannot see the central fact of their own science, if they cannot see this fact in the knotted tangle of chromosomes and in the ladders of the double helices, then they have eyes in vain. Ah — I talk too much, and perhaps you do not understand me.”

“We understand you,” Morgan and Jane said together.

“May the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, ah — the God of Ishmael — the God of Jacob be with you, and may He fulfill in you His blessings,” the Papster said; then he said other things, and they married each other before him.

The background didn't mean much immediately after that. It could have been still on the plateau; it could have been on a mountain or in a deep ravine or over the sea. What happened was gaiety. Morgan and Janine cut up in their lives. No, no, not the dwarfed singing and jittery whining of the Gentle World grown old so gracelessly. This was the song-central thing. They joked, they carried on, they startled, they set fires in what had been too dry, too lacking in substance, even to burn. Like magic they came to know other couples of their same state, ten of them, twenty of them, all in subservient positions and none of them servile. All of them hidden, all of them dangerously open. They were a new thing in the air. The Official Instigators flared their nostrils at the new scent; and the nothoi-hunters caught wind of a new strong prey and shook in their hate and anticipation.

Morgan and Jane the Crane even joked about which of them would run out his string first. “It will be you, Janine,” Morgan jibed. “I will sweep you up one morning. ‘Is it Agar?’ I will ask, ‘or is it the Crane?’ And I will say, ‘Oh, she bends hard in the middle!’ And I will stuff you into my canister. And then there will be another girl tending flowers, and I will begin to carry on with her.”

“Be in not so much hurry to sweep me up,” Janine said, “or you will have to bear Ishmael yourself. It will be hard on you, Morgan, you so narrow in the pelvic girdle, you lacking in so many ways. When you come to give birth to him, you will wish that I were back alive to do it.”

“Oh, we will keep you alive a little while then,” Morgan said, “and I will try to stay alive myself. A doubly posthumous child always has a hard time of it. At least one of us should be around. Ah, the hunters shoot me through with their eyes a dozen times a day, and the Instigators are fashioning the last seal for my certificate. What is taking Ishmael so long anyhow? Mayhap he'll be a monster. They have longer gestation periods. Better a monster than the sort of dwarfs that abound now.”

“He will be a wild ass of a man, and that is surely monster enough,” Janine said. “Get gone. The flower-care inspector has been plaguing me, and he is coming now. I love you more than the sky itself. Not much more, but a little. Get gone.”

The flower-care inspector was always in a great fury with Janine now.

“Do you not know that the flower-care girl over on Western Avenue had her tongue cut out for talking overly much with a sweeper?” he asked. “Yellow-card morning people have not the right to talk freely. And why are you so clothed? Why are you so overclothed? There is scarcely a square foot of flesh showing on you. What do your silly affectations work toward anyhow?”

“The world clothed and in its right mind,” said Janine Pervicacia.

“Clothes sometimes hide things!” the flower-care inspector shrilled.

“Oh, they do!” Janine beamed. “They do.”

Those were tall days. When you rise above the plateau you rise above it in all ways. There was hope everywhere; and there was no single detail that could give any possible hope. There was a man from over the sea (as was Morgan of that name) who said that things were much the same elsewhere, congealed, dwarfed, and vapid. Yet he was full of sunny strength and quick laughs. There was a man there from over the prairies. He said that the prairies were disaster areas now for all free and illegal people. They were hunted down and killed from the air by fog poisons that had first been tried out on coyotes. There was a man there from the north woods. He said that the nothoi-hunters up there were real hunters, and there was no bag limit. They didn't seem to care if they did hunt out the game. It would be replenished, they said, or they would hunt elsewhere when they had done with it. There was a man there from that ghetto that is under the ghetto, from the sewers that are under the sewers. He said that the very small pockets of free and illegal people underground were being systematically killed by spray poisons that had first been tried out on rats.

But still there was high hope: not for long life, of course, but for bright and embattled life, and for issue. But the way was getting mighty narrow.

“All joking aside,” Morgan told Janine one morning, “you win our little bet and game. This is the last morning of my life. They get me today.”

“Take some of them with you, man!” Janine spat with her forky tongue.

“No. We won't go to the same place; but I may send some of them another way.”

“Break for the Barrens, man!” Janine sounded. “In short months I and the boy will come to you there.”

“Oh, I break to them now,” Morgan said, “but I must pass through an Instigator and a circle of hunters first. This world, my love, is only temporary, of time. We have another one. But we are appointed to this world first. It is of ourselves, part of our bodies. It is mean, and are we not also? It is not better, because we did not make it any better. This withered world is both our ancestry and our issue, however deformed it may be. Remember, Janine (and this is important) never hate this world; but it will be hateful. Remember also, we always loved the early mornings.”

“I will remember, Morgan. Go happy with it now. See how joyful I say it! Your dead ears may hear me shrilling like a demented woman fifteen minutes from now; do not believe them. Remember that I said, ‘Go happy with it.’ ”

Morgan Saunders slid through the early morning streets toward the edge of the city in the direction of the Barrens. He was a moving man with cat-springs in him. It was his last morning by all the odds, but he would give them a run or a fight for it. Then his own particular Official Instigator loomed up in front of him, the Ancient Hippie of the more-than-a-hundred-years class, the nemesis who had already obtained the warrant for Morgan's death and who would turn the hunters loose on him whenever he wanted to.

“Get out of my way, old hip,” Morgan warned. “I'm in a hurry.”

“Oh, do not be in a hurry, man,” the old Instigator protested. “Talk to me. It is you who are going to die today. It is you of the illegitimate life that we have enough to kill a dozen times. If I were you I would say, ‘Let them be impatient; let them wait a little.’ They cannot kill you till I give the word. Talk to me, man.”

“Talking won't change a thing, oldster. And I go to a better thing than this, whether I get to the Barrens or to my death. Why shouldn't I be in a hurry for a better thing?”

“Talking did change everything once, Morgan-Sorgen. We whipped you once by talk alone, not even very good talk. We won the world to our way by our talk. And now you are nothing at all but a remnant and a sport. You are less than the tenth of one percent. If I were of the tenth of one percent I would be silent. And we can extinguish even that minuscule of you whenever we wish.”

“But we reappear. You will not be rid of us. We grow back. Why are you afraid to let the tenth of one percent speak? You shake, you fume, you slander, you vilify.”

“You are our prey and you have no right to opinion or voice. We keep a very few of you for the hunting only. You will not grow back if we decide to end the game. Why have you never accepted our consensus world? It is really rather interesting, rather arty, rather gentle, rather novel.”

Several sets of nothoi-hunters were waiting in the near distance. There was in particular the set of Peeler and Slickstock and Quickcoiner; these had claim on Morgan Saunders as their special game.

“The same novelties for a hundred years are no longer novel, old man,” Morgan said, shifting nervously but having to endure the talk. “And divergent art is of some interest for a while, as long as there is a main thing for it to diverge from. Yes, you even had a touch of humor and a touch of kindness once. But now you are cut flowers, no more than that; worse, you are artificial cut flowers. It is your loss of nerve, it is your regression, it is your dwarfing yourselves and creeping into strange wombs for shelter. You lost your courage first of all, then your honesty and your common sense. As falsehood and ugliness are equated, you set out to create a world of unsurpassed ugliness. Painting and sculpture were perverted first. Then music withered and whimpered into stringed idiocy. Then all the arts went and all the life ambients. You claimed that it was an opening up, a meaningful development. It wasn't. It was an end, and there is no meaning or development in a dead end. These are the Terminal Days that you have brought about.”

“You are jealous of our success, little Morgan from over the sea. Judge us by our beautiful divergence that works. Recognize us by our results.”

“Aye, by your fruits we may know you,” Morgan said. It was an unkind jibe, and it got under the Instigator's skin. That Ancient Hippie paled in anger.

“We are irreconcilables!” he howled. “You are impossible, not to be reformed, not to be converted. You are impossible unto death.”

The Ancient Hippie made a downward sign with his arm, and there was a clatter of armament coming alive from every direction. Morgan smashed the Ancient Hippie in the face (an unkind and illegal thing); he feinted and ran like a bolt of rabbits in three directions at once.

“He is a deformity,” Morgan spoke in his churning head about the Ancient Hippie, who still lingered in his mind. “He is perfect in his logic to the system with the central thing left out. There is no meeting ground at all in this life. Impossible, irreconcilable!”

A street-sweeper knows the streets. A moving cat-spring man can get the jump on blood-hungry nothoi-hunters. Bullets banged and clattered into walls of buildings, but Morgan had movements that the prediction scopes of the nothoi-hunters' rifles could not predict. And the hunters really weren't very good at movement shot, no matter how fancy the wrappings of their cult. Mostly they had hunted down and killed very small children and heavy and distraught women. It was higher sport to bring down a prime man, but they were less practiced at it.

Morgan was away from the first circle of them, going like ragged lightning, striking and vanishing. He sent several of the hunters on their dead way. He seemed always to go toward the inner city, and yet he retreated two steps toward the fringe and the Barrens for every conspicuous step that he took toward the center.

But they were all out after him now. Jazzbo horns sounded to call all hunters. Dogs of the two-legged variety took up the bay after him to trap him or tree him or sound him for the hunters. This was no illegitimate child to be hunted down. It was an illegitimate man, grown and known, illegal and illicit in his tongue and his life. They would have him in their dully murderous way. There was novelty (almost the only remaining one) and diversion in a nothoi-hunt; but there was no heroism, not in the hunters, not even in the prey.

For Morgan Saunders certainly had nothing heroic in him now. He ran sick and scared; he had believed it would be otherwise. He was a man of no special ability or intelligence. He had come to the old central way of things quite late, and by accident or intuition. He had no magic; he had no plan or program now but to run and evade. He had the unworldly hope and peace, but he hadn't them immediately or vividly as he came to the end; only as buried certainties. He ran himself to weariness. The cat-springs and the movement died in him, and when he could no longer evade and elude, the nothoi-hunters had him and killed him on the edge of the city within sight of the miserable Barrens.

Jane the Crane found him a little later, still in the early morning. She picked him up in sudden strong arms. She walked and keened, carrying the dead Morgan in her arms and the live Ishmael under her belly, walking back into the city and among her flowers, trampling them (which was illegal), shrilling and wailing, a walking forky-tongued and agonizing pietá.

Morning crows gathered about her and followed her; and even some of the folks from the regular swing-hours world were up and blinking at the spooky sunlight and the keening woman. They jeered and defamed her, and she came back with her forky tongue and harangued them all.

“Bedamned with you all and the fouled nest of you!” she cried. “You are vermin, you are no longer people. And the Instigators are lice on the body of the world.”

And already the Instigators were holding council about her.

“Why not now?” some asked. “She is certainly illegitimate in her conduct, and she carries one illegitimate burden in her arms and one in her belly. Why not now?”

“The hunting has come to be too slim,” others of them said. “The nothoi-hunters insist that a small bit of it must be reserved. Here is an additional quarry for them, in two years from now, or at most three. There is prescience about the unborn one. It is sworn that he will be prime game. And the hunters must retain a small reserve.”

Another yellow-card street-sweeper, a man very like Morgan Saunders and a friend of his, came by with his working things. With great compassion he took Morgan from Janine's arms, bent him difficultly in the middle, and stuffed him into his wheeled canister. He also spoke some words to Janine in a low voice. We do not know what words they were, but they were like a flame. And now Janine became a new sort of flame.

She brightened, she burned, she erupted with laughter.

What? What? With laughter?

Yes, with laughter and with a quick spate of gay words:

“But why am I mourning like one who doesn't believe?” she sparked. “It's the dawn of the world to me! I am a birthing woman, and I will give merriment with my milk. I take the old motto ‘This is the first day of the rest of my life.’ It's a new dawn, and I have loved the dawns. To be otherwise would be to miss the main things as they have missed them. Hurry, Ishmael, you leaping lump in my belly! We have to get you born and agile before they come to eat us up. But by tomorrow's morning we will see each other's faces. God knows the wonder of it, to send births in the early mornings.”

She went to her hidden shanty-room in the ghetto under the ghetto, singing and whistling. Really, she was an odd one in those flat False Terminal Days of the world.

(A question, perhaps out of context: Why were those False Terminal Days not truly terminal to the race and the world? O, there were other movements and powers that had not been taken into account. And the plateau, as a matter of fact, that low, level, artificial construction, had been built atop an area of old volcanic and earthquake movement. There was a great underlying fault, and it would erupt there. But this is not an account of termination of the Terminal Stasis.)

3

I'll climb Sinai's rocks to the thunder-clad crest

And learn all that Moses forgot,

And see if the Bush is at Hebron or Hest

And if it is burning or not.

 —  Archipelago

Here are some pages which possibly do not belong here at all. If that is so, then it is the fault of the randoming machines. This illegal private account of Janine Pervicacia and Morgan Saunders and their illegal issue Ishmael was first composed by a grieving friend and was printed (as everything was printed then) in scatter-print. The unnumbered pages, even of a private journal, had to go through a randoming machine and be randomized; the print machine would not function otherwise. Now, in sorting them out as best we can (for we are reader and not depth-comprehender), a certain section falls together that is not directly a part of the account of Janine and Morgan. Yet this section was mixed up with their account, whether or not it was also written by the hand of the grieving friend, and it will be given here. We do not know whether this intrusive section is comic or ironic or straight. There is even a chance that it may be a sample of a rare and secret form of the period, a satire upon a satire: an ironic counterpoise of a stereotyped satire form. We nominate this misfit section, “The Interlude of the Odd Man and the Odd God,” and it is as follows:

“In the early springtime of the year 2040 of the common era, the original sparse population having been removed from the area, three hundred persons of a troubling sort were sealed into the Vale of Pailliun, which is in the Knockmealdown Mountains of the Disunited Commonwealth of Ireland. These three hundred persons included certain fossils, diehards, and “yesterday's leaders” of an irreformable religious and ethic sort, among them the last “Pope” who strangely insisted that he was not the last of them. These three hundred persons, families and singletons, were allowed the sheep and kine of the valley and such primitive tools as they chose to bring in. Seals were set for one thousand years (we do have the historical sense) on both the upper and lower entrances of the valley. All communications with the persons of the vale are evermore prohibited under pain of death. Nothing may go into the vale by earth or by air, and nothing may come out. If there is increase in the valley, then let that increase choke on itself.”

 — Joint statement of the United Nations Obsolescence and Terminating Board and of the One Ecumenical Liberal and Secular Church, May 1, 2040.

Matteo Mattutine (Matthew Morning — what kind of a name is that?) who was Pope Paul XIII, had said mass before dawn for the twelve who still adhered to him out of this remnant; they had assisted standing with tapers and rushlights. Then he had brought one flock of sheep (150 of them) up to the high pasture just a little before sunrise. He was a rugged old man and barefoot (for the ground of the vale was holy ground), though it was sharp November. The high grass of this pasture had browned and cured itself where it stood, making winter hay, and the sheep would be kept on such pastures till May when the close-grazed river meadow turned green again. Paul XIII had a hammer, a pestle, and a mattock sort of tool, which the Italians call zappa. He was mending a little stone sheep-bridge over the stream there.

What? Is it odd that a shepherd should herd sheep and that a pontiff should maintain bridges?

And Paul XIII talked with the Odd God there in the high pasture, as he talked with Him every morning:

“When we first came into this valley (our desert, our prison; our delight if You say it is our delight), we found certain beings here who were more ghost than flesh, who were not on the manifest of the proper fauna of this valley. I had seen such strange half-creatures (neither proper flesh nor yet honest brimstone) in the high mountain valleys of Italy. We always believed them to be the shades of the old supplanted Italic gods and their devotees. But what are we to think when we find them here in Ireland? They are awkward and ungainly and not all there, either in mind or body. You must know of them, for You made them, though they deny it. They are not quite like men, not quite like devils; still less are they like angels. Yet they have some knowledge of the old established things.

“A great shapeless hulk of one such spook ran to me on my first morning in this vale. I could see the dew on the grass sparkling through him; and yet he had substance, for he kicked the rocks about with his big splay feet. He was in torment then, but was not I also in torment? ‘Has Rome fallen?’ he cried out to me in anguish. ‘Is it true that Rome has fallen? Are all the golden walls and towers flung down?’ ‘Yes, fallen,’ I said sadly. ‘Rome had fallen before, but now she falls again in a special way.’ At hearing that it was as if his outsized pumpkin-shaped head broke. His lumpish face cracked and he cried. He went back up into his rocks with a roaring and sobbing like dragons wailing their dead. And some of the stones in this valley also cried out at the news that Rome had fallen.

“What I would like to know, though, is whether we now become as they are. Do we (our remnant here) become like them: not quite like men, not quite like devils, even less like angels? Do we become here no more than ancient haunts, devotees of vanished gods, spooks of the waste places? Assure me that we are more than just one more layer of the stratified fossil formation. Assure me that we will be something more than this, even in our exile.”

The Odd God spoke and assured Paul that they were something more than that. He spoke by a still-green thorn-bush bursting into flame.

Paul XIII spoke again, for only this one Person really listened to him:

“I have a little theory,” said Paul XIII. “The first offense was the taking of the forbidden fruit. The second offense (which I believe is more grievous than the first) is the refusing of the bidden fruit. It is even the hacking down of the tree of the fruit. I believe that all the noisome oddities of the present world are entwined with this refusal and hacking. They kill an entire ecology when they hack down the growth tree. The people starve now in every aspect and do not even know that the name of their unease is starvation, that their pale fever is the starvation fever. Because they have food and ease they do not realize that they starve.

“Did you know that there is no landscape any more in the world? That there are no longer any real rocks or towns out there? Instead there are only weak splotchy pictures of them. A countryside vanishes, and in its place is a poster dizzy with scatter-print that says, ‘This represents a countryside.’ A town goes down, and in its place is a psychedelic blob proclaiming, ‘This stands for a town.’ People are terminated, and in their place are walking spooks with signs around their necks: ‘We are we instead of people.’ In place of life there is narcosis. Hack back the growth enough, and the thing dies. Cut a foot length from the top of a child, and it goes badly with that child. ‘Oh, but the child would grow till he overflowed the world and broke the sky,’ is what they said. ‘How else to regularize the child and the world than to cut off their heads?’ This I believe, is the wrong way.

“But will You not bid the fruit again to us? Offer it. Offer it again and again! In some way that only You understand it will be accepted. Will You not still bid the fruit to fruit?”

A fruity breath; a clear glitter of green leaves; a flash of blossoms that hung and then fell like snow; and a runty dead tree was red with apples. Remember that this was sharp November and the tree had not previously leaved that year.

“You remember the child who found a root and said he would pull it out?” Paul XIII continued. “But when he tried to pull it out, distant people and buildings shriveled and collapsed and were pulled down to nothing and died. The child pulled down the whole world but couldn't pull out that root. It was a special root; it was the root of everything. And for seven decades now, men have tried to pull out that same root; and instead they have pulled down that same world.

“They did it all to us with catchwords,” Paul continued his morning conversation. “ ‘We accept it all,’ they said, ‘except the flesh and blood of it. We are for all these things. We are only against the structure and body of them.’ I had a little jibe for the critics who said they loved the Church Itself but hated the Institutional Church. ‘What was the verb that God did about the Church?’ I would ask in my guileless way. ‘He instituted the Church, and therefore it is Institutional.’ But perhaps I cheated a little in my jibe. For the verb that in the Vulgate is instituo is actually in the Greek — but I always forget, You know more Greek than I do. Is it true that there is one construction in the Greek Historical Optative that is now understood only by the Devil and Yourself? But tell me, are we now in an Historical Optative time? And what are the options? Will Thou not reveal them to me?”

There were other early and devout men about in the vale. A kaftaned Jew had a stone shed there in the upper pasture where he prepared parchments from sheepskins, and he had set to work now with a low merry chanting. A Hard-Shell from the southern United States was there looking for a lost calf, having left the ninety-nine to find the one (having left them, however, in the careful care of another Hard-Shell). A Mosulman came down from the height of the sealed upper entrance of the valley where he had just performed his morning rites.

The several men looked up and about with a slight impatience. It was time.

“Must You always be reminded?” asked the Hard-Shell.

“We do not even ask the manna which You gave the Fathers,” the kaftaned Jew said.

“Only the plain morning fare of this country,” said Paul XIII.

Quick fire came down on a smoothed stone. And the browned oaten pancakes were there, rampant with ewe butter and honey and aroma. The several men began to eat them.

“I have to laugh at the late line of us from that Paul to this,” Paul XIII reminisced. “I swear that we infuriated the world eleven times in these seven-and-a-half decades. We were all known for our proclivities toward the accommodating secularism, we were all devoted to the soft surrogate thing, we were all intending to voice the easy agreement and be done with it, we were all elected to do so. And then You touched each of our tongues in turn with a burning coal. You think our actions bewildered and angered the world? I tell you that they bewildered ourselves a thousand times over. How does the speaking horn know what words will be spoken through him? Oh, well, I suppose You have Your reasons, but it has been a little hard on each of us, each being the only transcendent man living in the world in his time.”

Paul XIII ran on with other talk because he was old and garrulous. It was sunlight on the high pastures now and soon the sun would reach down to the depths of the valley. Tinkle bells on the animals filled the air. Kids of sheep and goats and human were everywhere. Women were at work stone-grinding oats and barley. A smith was hammering copper and tin together into orange-colored tools and ornaments. Clipping men were long-clipping sheep. It was sharp November, and the sheep would not be short-clipped again till late spring. The sealed vale in the Knockmealdown Mountains was a busy and burgeoning place.

“I believe that we should have a little of the special this morning,” Paul XIII wheedled. “We can make it ourselves, of course,” he flattered, “but we cannot make it nearly as good as You can. And I have forgotten. I have not so much as brought a pot for it this morning. We can make pots ourselves, of course, but we cannot make them anywhere as good as You can.”

There was a sigh in the wind over the vale, almost a sigh of exasperation, if He were capable of exasperation. But of a sudden a three-measure stone crusca-jar stood there, full of the most extraordinary Wine Ordinary, the blood that ever bled from the earth. And several of them drank of it.

“Leave it off for a while, Paul the Thirteenth,” the Hard-Shell growled. The Hard-Shell only half approved of the extraordinary Wine Ordinary, and he seldom took more than a sip of it. He was stricter than the Odd God but only by a little.

“He has talked to you as to a child, Paul,” the Hard-Shell said, “and it wearies Him after a while, if He could be wearied. It is my turn now. This morning He may talk to me as to a man.”

“I am a child,” said Paul XIII. “I even flatter myself that I am a child of grace.”

Then Paul returned to mending the stone sheep-bridge, and the Hard-Shell talked to the Odd God in his own way. And later the kaftaned Jew came and talked to Him, deeply like low music, shivering with fear and quaking with merriment at the same time. Old Jews are said to have several private jokes between themselves and the Odd God.

And again later the Mosulman came and talked to Him in the desert manner which He especially understands.

They were an odd clutch in that valley of the Knockmealdown Mountains, and it was an Odd God who provided for them.

4

Lo, blessed are our ears for they have heard;

Yes, blessed are our eyes for they have seen:

Let thunder break on man and beast and bird

And the lightning. It is something to have been.

 — G. K. Chesterton

Jane the Crane had the boy Ishmael born and agile in less time than might be believed. There was a very great hurry now. A baby is vulnerable: not Ishmael, perhaps, but most babies. But he was not born ignorant or uninstructed. For the many months of Janine's carrying him (well, it had been long; he was part monster, surely, and their period is a longer one), she had instructed him all the hours of the day and night, speaking to him silently or loudly when she was working over her flowers, when gawking about in the street, when abiding in her hidden shanty-room. Especially in the afternoons (these were her nights, when she slept) she instructed him, for they shared the same dreams just as they shared the same blood.

“I tell you, I don't know whether I can hide you better inside or out,” she would say to him. “I leave it to you now. Come out when you're ready. You are already bigger than I am. I tell you to get smart fast, to get fast fast. Are you listening to me? You must learn to hide and to disguise. You must learn to look like this one and that one. You will live in the sewers and on the roofs and in the trees. Let me tell you one thing: it is better even to have lived in the dankest agony and fear than never to have lived at all. It is better to be a vermin than never to be anything. It is better to be weird and deformed (I do not mean deformed as the world is deformed now) than to be empty and without form. It is better to be conscious in horror and delirium than to miss consciousness. If you have a nomination and a soul, then nothing else matters greatly. This I believe. If you can hear and understand me, whistle.”

And the boy Ishmael always whistled from out of her belly. He always heard and he always understood. Then, when they both realized that it was no longer possible to hide him within, he was born. When they both realized immediately that it would not do to have him newborn and helpless, he became agile. The open eyes of Ishmael were clouded for only short instants after birth. Then they cleared; he understood; he knew. Nobody ever heard him cry like a human child. He had more sense than that. Sometimes he chirped and whistled like a chimney bird, sometimes he whined like a dog pup. (Dogs, as surrogate to human persons and human affections, were everywhere privileged.) Sometimes Ishmael gurgled like sewer water; but he was always able to communicate — even to communicate without sound.

But where could Ishmael hide? Illegal stories attached to his mother, Jane the Crane. She was watched and followed and checked. All the shanty rooms of the city were searched from time to time by the “rat-catchers” who anticipated the nothoi-hunters with the not yet mobile illegals.

Ishmael lived in the sewers and on the roofs and in the trees. But mostly he lived under the floors and in the walls. All the shanties were fifty to eighty years old. Nothing was ever built now, only cobbled up a little just before it tumbled down. Inside the walls was the best place. A young boy not yet able to walk could still climb about inside the walls. And not even the dogs of the rat-catchers would snuffle him out from them. Ishmael could whine and rattle and yap in the dogs' own talk. He could pass for a dog in the dark corners, under the floors, inside the walls. When Ishmael seemed like this one or that one, he seemed so to every sense.

But how did Jane the Crane feed him? However did other illegitimate mothers feed their offspring? Oh, there had never been any shortage of food. The swing-time people wasted far more food than they ate. The illegitimate mothers, mostly servile workers to the swingers or morning yellow-card workers, had only to carry leavings home “for the dogs.” It wasn't starvation that killed the illegal children; it was the “scatter eyes” and the rat-catchers prowling to find and kill them, doing the work voluntarily mostly, from some inner need of theirs.

Ishmael, however, passed all the other illegal children in earliness and agility. He was one of the few authentic geniuses born in the first half of the twenty-first century: thinking like a pot-a-boil before he could talk; reading minds before he could read the simplest scatter-print; imitating animals by sound and scent and movement; imitating legal children by face before he ever saw the reflection of his own face. He was a wild colt of a boy destined, should he live, to be a wild ass of a man. And he had fame. He was known everywhere before he was seen. Fame is a weed that grows up overnight and can be rooted in anything or nothing.

Some of the nothoi-hunters already talked about the agile Ishmael, possibly before he was ever out of the womb, certainly soon afterward. There was Peeler, a big man among the hunters. There was Slickstock. There was Quickcoiner, a tipster gentleman such as was always a part of a hunter team. These three were now dining together on the popular Chinese dish, egg gone wrong.

“There's a new one, I tell you!” Peeler gloated and rubbed his long hands together. “I can feel him like a new wind ruffling my hackles. He's the dog that barks different, he's the bird that whistles different, he's the sewer rat that squeaks different. He's the one of the kind we always hoped for. It will make our season whenever we kill him. The next best thing to killing that seven-year-old male would be to kill this new one.”

“He's under the streets, he's in the trees,” said Slickstock, “and I tell you he's mine! His father killed a teammate of mine at his own hunting-down. How had we missed his father all his years? Where did he come from?”

“This new one is out of Jane the Crane, the forky-tongued flower woman,” Quickcoiner said. “Is she not game yet, now that he is born? Is she not game? Why must we hold off? He is named Ishmael.”

It was known, even before his father came to this city, that there would be a boy named Ishmael.

“But nobody has ever seen this Ishmael,” Peeler said. “We hear him, we sense him, but we do not see him. We know that he is the wild ass of a creature who climbed in the trees and crawled under the streets before he could walk. We know that he dog-sounded and bird-whistled in code before he could talk. We know also that he imitated the talk of our own children before he could talk himself. We do not know his age, though he must be about two years old. But we know that he will be the wildest of them all, even wilder than the seven-year-old male that we have never been able to kill.”

“And we have not been able to get Jane the Crane declared open game,” Slickstock complained. “The Instigators claim that there is no evidence of a child. No evidence! Have they no senses except the regular ones?”

When he was three years old, Ishmael slipped off during the swing-hours and got clear to the Barrens where he met the eight-year-old male that the nothoi-hunters had never been able to kill.

So it was all over then, the little drama? The boy had got free and gained his own hunted kind. And whatever happened to the wild children in the Barrens, how they were hunted down and almost extinguished again and again, is surely of another account. Then we are finished with the wild boy Ishmael?

No. He didn't stay in the Barrens. He came back to Janine's slanty room in the ghetto under the ghetto, back to the sewers and the spaces in the walls and under the floors and streets, back to the trees.

Three swing-periods later, Ishmael got clear to the Barrens again, taking another small boy with him. It was harder with another boy (though Ishmael had instructed him well) and they made it barely. They ran atangle of a set of nothoi-hunters (not the Peeler set, however), not a quick-sensing set that knew there was an Ishmael. But the wild-ass boy had a shot lodged behind his ear just where his wiry mane rose highest. He left it there for memento though it festered him. He received this shot in memory of his father, who hadn't been able to leave him anything tangible.

Three swing periods later, Ishmael got clear to the Barrens again, taking three small boys with him. This incursion was without incident. He repeated the feat after the same interval. Then he repeated it again. It took him about three days to instruct and train the children properly. Many two- and three- and four-year-old children are slow learners and inattentive, though Ishmael selected only the most promising of them to smuggle to the Barrens.

Then they had their first fatalities. During one of their swing-period journeys they ran atangle of a set of nothoi-hunters, and this was the Peeler set; this was the quick-sensing set that knew there was an Ishmael. Four of the six boys that Ishmael was leading were killed, and both of the girls. Ishmael cursed Peeler and his cronies.

Ishmael had taken a hundred children into the Barrens, and the rampant eight-year-old male who ruled the region now had real material for his talents. Then Peeler led an incursion into the Barrens that killed fifty young nothoi. It was announced (as it had been announced many times before) that the young nothoi in the Barrens had now been extinguished. But they hadn't been.

Ishmael led another hundred children into the Barrens over a period of some weeks. But seven incursions, the last one led by the notorious Peeler again, killed seventy of the Barrens nothoi. Ishmael was not four years old. Is not a wild ass full grown at three? He had cursed Peeler before, and the cursing hadn't been effective. “I will do something else. I will get him where it hurts him,” Ishmael said.

Peeler had a little boy, older than Ishmael but about the same size. Ishmael knew this. Ishmael knew everything.

Ishmael found the little boy, Onlyborn Peeler, struck him down wildly, and stripped him naked. Then he changed clothes with him. Thereupon, he made himself to look exactly like that little Peeler boy. How could he have done it, with the wild-ass crine standing up on his head and neck like that? With the wild eyes rolling around in his head the way they did? With the hands and feet that were too big for him, with the ass-springs (which were like the cat-springs of his father) in his steps, with the sloping shoulders and haunches on him that the little Peeler boy didn't have? Well hokey, he wasn't even the same color as the Peeler boy!

Well, he did it. Ishmael was hypnotic. He drew eyes to him or away from him as he wished. He made those hypnotized eyes see what he wanted them to see. He could make his face look like anything he decided. “Why, I almost peeled you for a potato!” Jane the Crane had said to him once. “Why are you looking like a potato?” He had the face of the little Peeler boy now and the Peeler boy's clothes. He went and found Peeler himself, sitting with Slickstock and Quickcoiner.

“Hey, Pop, get on the op!” he spoke boldly to Peeler, using the voice of the Peeler boy and the kind of talk that legal kids talked. He put his eye to the barrel of Peeler's gun and looked down it.

“What is the matter with you, Onlyborn? Why do you look so funny? What are you doing here? Why aren't you in kindergarten?” Peeler asked Ishmael with rising anger.

“Peeler, I never realized that your kid looked so funny,” said Quickcoiner, “and looking from him to you, I never realized that you looked so funny either.”

“Got him easy, got him hard, got him dead in our own backyard,” Ishmael chanted in the little Peeler boy voice.

“Talk sense, or get out of here and back to school,” Peeler ordered.

“Peeler!” Slickstock roared, rising, “Let's go see! If somebody's dead, we want to know why we didn't get to kill him. Maybe somebody else has been potting our game.”

Ishmael was running toward the Peeler house, and the three big nothoi-hunters were clattering after him to see who was dead there.

“Who is it, Onlyborn, who is dead?” Peeler was calling after Ishmael, still thinking he was his own son.

“On the op, Pop, see the fish,” Ishmael chanted as he ran, “all laid out and his name is Ish.”

“Ishmael!” Peeler roared like a wounded boar. “Somebody has stolen Ishmael from us.”

“Ishmael!” Slickstock shouted. “We've been robbed. He was our assigned kill.”

“Ishmael!” Quickcoiner shrieked. “I'll have coin back from the tipsters. They assured me he could never be caught in the city.”

Ishmael pointed when they came to the body. Then he faded back through the big nothoi-hunters and was into the trees. He was in the near trees for a moment, till he should see how the hunters carried on, but ready to be into the far trees as soon as these big men realized what had happened.

“Ishmael!” Peeler agonized as he bent over the little body where Ishmael had struck it down. “Wait, men, wait!” he said then. “Why, this can't be Ishmael at all! This is my little boy Onlyborn who is dead here. This is the funniest thing I ever heard of. What do you make of it, fellows?” Peeler didn't particularly care for his small son. The kid-card and the kid (for prestige) had put him into hock for years.

“But since this is little Onlyborn” — Quickcoiner hesitated — “then who was — ?”

“Ishmael!” Slickstock roared. “It was himself! He tricked us! He bearded the lions in our own jaws. We'll have him, we'll have him! He's our kill!”

“Coin out of my hand,” Quickcoiner cried. “I'll overdraw. I'll get every tipster in town on this. We're tricked. We'll get him, we'll get him fast.”

“I'll kill him, I'll kill him,” Peeler jabbered. “Made fools of us! Looked right down my gun. Insulted us. Something else. Yeah, he killed my boy. I'll kill him, I'll kill him.”

It hadn't quite fallen as Ishmael (now in the far trees) had figured. He hadn't gotten Peeler where it hurt him in killing his son, Onlyborn, and this puzzled Ishmael. But he had got him where it hurt him in tricking him, in making a fool out of him. It had been to the death between them before. Now it was triply so.

Quickcoiner poured out money to the tipsters, and they began to hem Ishmael in, so they thought. Peeler and Ishmael declared the special game of his set.

But there was enough hunting for all the nothoi-hunter sets now. A dozen other wild-ass kids were working in the city, instructed by Ishmael himself and by the intrepid nine-year-old male that the nothoi-hunters had never been able to kill. And new Barrens-like places were already being used: a skimpy little region called the Potato Hills, a swampy stretch called the Deadwood Bottoms. And the wild-ass kids were breaking out all over the world; wilder than they had been before, donkey-smart now, long-eared for rumor and news, mule-strong, jenny-fleet, hoof-hard, rebels, misbegottens, Issachars, asses indeed. They even used the sinister-barred bray for signal now and for mockery. The left-handed brotherhood had rampaged before, and it refused to believe now that it was extinguished.

But the nothoi-hunters also came on stronger now, more professional, better provided, better intelligenced, more adaptably armed. Every new evasion tactic that the nothoi kids discovered was soon the property of the prediction scopes of the hunters' rifles.

Ishmael had run other branches of illegitimate kids into the Barrens and the Bottoms and the Potato Hills. Then it came to his mother (who had powers) that he had run his way; to whichever end, she did not know.

“You have run to the end of the line in this,” she said. “You are already too big to crawl in many of the walls and under many of the floors and streets. The crawl spaces are only suited for very small children. You are too big to be passed over by the sharp eyes, you are too big to vanish absolutely. You will die on your next incursion; or you will get through to the wilds a last time and remain there to be a male in the Barrens or the Bottoms. There is no plan, there has never been any plan except to live: that everybody be allowed to live once — a little while at least. To have been is to be forever. But never to have been is to be nothing.”

“Oh, we make plans, the nine-year-old male and I. But they close in on us more and kill more of us every time. And we run out of tricks and dodges and evasions. The prediction scopes on their guns know them all. They know when we will break pace, when we will cut back, even before we know it.”

“There is one trick that they don't know, Ishmael of the high crine and the wobbly eyes,” Jane the Crane said. “If you are trapped for the last time, run straight. The scopes will not understand it, and the hunter-men will not understand it. Run a straight line that last time. The very idea of a straight line has vanished from this world.”

Quickcoiner had poured more money to the tipsters. Slickstock had organized beaters. Peeler had led incursions into the Barrens and Bottoms and Hills that had left those refuges torn to pieces. Ishmael could tell by the tint of the streams in the mornings how many had died in the Barrens the night before.

“It is the last day,” Jane the Crane told Ishmael now. “Not the last day for you, maybe. Not the last day for me, maybe. But the last day for us. I knew which was the last day I would have with your father. I know this is the last day I will have you. Whatever I have done I have done. Now it is time that I do it again.”

After that, Ishmael went on incursion and got through with a good pack of kids. He got back just in the closing hours of swing-time and found that every entrance to every burrow was spotted and guarded and closed to him. He could smell the hunters smelling him. He could sense their sensors.

He heard also that his mother Jane the Crane had now been declared open game. He was trapped and angry. He was an animal-smart six-year-old boy of the species that had once been human, that might again be human after its freakish interlude. He was a towering and intelligent example of that species which was being hewn to death in its best, in its left-handed blood.

He was blocked in, he was sighted, he took to the trees. This city (thanks for all green and growing favors) had preserved its trees. But the trees did not reach all the way to the Barrens. They did not, but they reached to — 

 — Too late! He smelled the trip wire, of course, but he could not avoid tripping it, not at the speed he was going. And he hadn't expected a sky trap, a treetop trap. He had never encountered such before. But the tipsters had gathered information on Ishmael's every route, even his routes through the high trees.

There was a searing and acrid explosion. There was a ballooning wave of green fragments and gray-brown bark branches, and there was a sudden gap in the sky where there had been foliage. Ishmael, broken and burned considerably, fell to the street out of that sudden gap in the sky. Communication crackled, and three sets of nothoi-hunters converged on the boy. Peeler was barking that it was his kill and the other sets should desist.

Ishmael, dazed and bloodied, rose out of the green trash that covered him and began to run in the direction of the Barrens. He ran in a straight line. The short-range rifles began to cough at him; they were mostly from Peeler's set. One set of hunters did desist. Another set was firing crazily. It almost seemed as if men were firing at Peeler and Slickstock and Quickcoiner. There were confused and angry cries and the barking of weapons, but Ishmael ran on, straight as a lance and untouched; ran on under the last of these trees, under the open sky, toward distant trees again, on and on.

The prediction scopes of the hunters' rifles simply could not handle a straight-line trail. Nothing in their data or in their world gave information on this ultimate evasion tactic. The scope on Peeler's own gun failed in frustration and smoke, and the other scopes glowed red in malfunction and failure.

It seemed that Ishmael might make it through clear again, to trees, to escape, to the Barrens. He didn't. A ricochet shot killed him there, no more than a dozen bounds from the skirting woods. He bunched and fell; he looked half animal, half child, as he curled into a small ball and died quickly.

There was Peeler's barking laugh of triumph; then a quick flash out of those skirting trees sawed it in half. Something had dived down from those trees, too swift for free fall. The something had hit, rolled, scurried, run, and swooped to the curled-up ball that was the dead boy Ishmael. The something had Ishmael (knowing that he was dead), bounded with him while the fury howl and fast clatter of bullets came from at least two sets of hunters, reached the skirting trees with the burden, and bounded up a trunk like a giant squirrel. Perhaps the apparition got away clear, perhaps not. The trees were almost bowed over with the blow of automatic weapons.

It had been the ten-year-old male from the Barrens who had come and snatched the body of Ishmael from under the noses of the guns. For what? He himself knew that Ishmael was already dead. He himself had taught Ishmael never to waste time on a dead one. For what then?

For heroism. He did not know that heroism was already dead. He believed that he could establish a mystique and a tomb.

Half-a-dozen sets of hunters were now after the young male and his dead burden. Not the set of Peeler, however. Peeler's set had got its kill, though by accident. It wanted more of the same blood, and it had one more prey assigned to it as open game.

“Where's the mother?” Peeler howled. “We may as well have double party today,” Slickstock exulted. “Tipsters, tipsters, where is the leggy one?” Quickcoiner screeched.

But Jane the Crane had already rushed out, wailing and keening:

“Oh my son, Oh my son!” she cried. “Oh my son, come back to me!”

Somehow that didn't sound like Jane the Crane's way of carrying on.

But shots sang out. Janine went rigid in spread agony; she fell at full length; she spilled out gore, quivered, and was quiet.

The shots had not come from the unready guns of Peeler's set. They had come, apparently, from another set of hunters down a side street. There was an afterburst of firing from there also; again it almost seemed as if someone was shooting it Peeler's set. Peeler and his associates took cover, confused by the dangerous random firing, happy that Ishmael and his mother had been killed, somewhat morbid that they themselves had not done all the killing.

(Check it, sensors, check it. Is there something tricky about all this? — No. It appears quite authentic.)

Janine Pervicacia lay in her gore in the open street, and a yellow-card street-sweeper came dutifully to dispose of her. Slain illegal women were common enough, of course; but Janine was uncommonly comely and leggy, and many eyes were on her. This had to be done carefully, and she herself was not very careful now. But what would it matter, when she was already slain?

Slain? She was not slain. She wasn't touched. She hadn't lived with Morgan that long, she hadn't lived with Ishmael that long, to be killed in the open street, and for nothing. But it is good to have “Dead” written on your record and have it closed when it has gotten out of hand. Perhaps one can become another person with another record, or with none.

The yellow-card street-sweeper (who looked very like Morgan Saunders and had been friend of him) did indeed gather Janine up as if she were dead, bending her difficultly in the middle and stuffing her into his wheeled canister. Quite a bit of her still stuck out; she was pretty leggy. But there had been signal between Jane the Crane and the sweeper, and perhaps illegal communication had also been held with others.

The gore that had spilled out in the street was not Jane's own. Many of the illegal birthing women now carried gore with them for just such eventualities as this. (And there were more and more of them now in the ghetto that is under the ghetto; there were more and more of their issue getting through to the various Barrens to set up kids' kingdoms. For already the Plateau had begun to tremble with its great underlying fault. Earthquake and Volcano and Upheaval!)

“Is it Agar again, or is it the Jane?” the trundling sweeper asked softly to the inside of his canister. “No, no, do not sing and whistle, or softly if you do. That's enough to make any canister suspect.”

Jane the Crane had lost her man, the dashing street-sweeper from over the sea. She had lost her son Ishmael, the incandescent wild colt of a boy. But she sang and whistled (doubled up as she was in the canister) gaily but so low that only her new sweeper-man could hear her.

She'd do it again — and again. She would be a birthing woman once more. And once more she would give merriment with her milk.

Author's Commentary

All Pieces Of A River Shore

It had been a very long and ragged and incredibly interlocked and detailed river shore. Then a funny thing happened. It had been broken up, sliced up into pieces. Some of the pieces had been folded and compressed into bales. Some of them had been cut into still smaller pieces and used for ornaments and as Indian medicine. Rolled and baled pieces of the shore came to rest in barns and old warehouses, in attics, in caves. Some were buried in the ground.

And yet the river itself still exists physically, as do its shores, and you may go and examine them. But the shore you will see along the river now is not quite the same as that old shore that was broken up and baled into bales and rolled onto rollers, not quite the same as the pieces you will find in attics and caves.

His name was Leo Nation and he was known as a rich Indian. But such wealth as he had now was in his collections, for he was an examining and acquiring man. He had cattle, he had wheat, he had a little oil, and he spent everything that came in. Had he more income he would have collected even more.

He collected old pistols, old ball shot, grindstones, early windmills, walking-horse threshing machines, flax combs, Conestoga wagons, brass-bound barrels, buffalo robes, Mexican saddles, slick horn saddles, anvils, Argand lamps, rush holders, hay-burning stoves, hackamores, branding irons, chuck wagons, longhorn horns, beaded scrapes, Mexican and Indian leatherwork, buckskins, heads, feathers, squirrel-tail anklets, arrowheads, deerskin shirts, locomotives, streetcars, millwheels, keelboats, buggies, ox yokes, old parlor organs, blood-and-thunder novels, old circus posters, harness bells, Mexican oxcarts, wooden cigar-store Indians, cable-twist tobacco a hundred years old and mighty strong, cuspidors (four hundred of them), Ferris wheels, carnival wagons, carnival props of various sorts, carnival proclamations painted big on canvas. Now he was going to collect something else. He was talking about it to one of his friends, Charles Longbank, who knew everything.

“Charley,” he said, “do you know anything about ‘The Longest Pictures in the World’ which used to be shown by carnivals and in hippodromes?”

“Yes, I know a little about them Leo. They are an interesting bit of Americana: a bit of nineteenth-century back-country mania. They were supposed to be pictures of the Mississippi River shore. They were advertised as one mile long, five miles long, nine miles long. One of them, I believe, was actually over a hundred yards long. They were badly painted on bad canvas, crude trees and mudbank and water ripples, simplistic figures and all as repetitious as wallpaper. A strong-armed man with a big brush and plenty of barn paint of three colors could have painted quite a few yards of such in one day. Yet they are truly Americana. Are you going to collect them, Leo?”

“Yes, but the real ones aren't like you say.”

“Leo, I saw one. There is nothing to them but very large crude painting.”

“I have twenty that are like you say, Charley. I have three that are very different. Here's an old carnival poster that mentions one.”

Leo Nation talked eloquently with his hands while he also talked with his mouth, and now he spread out an old browned poster with loving hands:

“The Arkansas Traveler, World's Finest Carnival, Eight Wagons, Wheels, Beasts, Dancing Girls, Baffling Acts, Monsters, Games of Chance. And Featuring the World's Longest Picture, Four Miles of Exquisite Painting. This is from the Original Panorama; it is Not a Cheap-Jack Imitation.”

“So you see, Charley, there was a distinction: there were the original pictures, and there were the crude imitations.”

“Possibly some were done a little better than the others, Leo; they could hardly have been done worse. Certainly, collect them if you want to. You've collected lots of less interesting things.”

“Charley, I have a section of that panoramic picture that once belonged to the Arkansas Traveler Carnival. I'll show it to you. Here's another poster:

“King Carnival, The King of Them All. Fourteen Wagons. Ten Thousand Wonders. See the Rubber Man. See the Fire Divers. See the Longest Picture in the World, see Elephants on the Mississippi River. This is a Genuine Shore Depictment, not the Botches that Others Show.”

“You say that you have twenty of the ordinary pictures, Leo, and three that are different?”

“Yes, I have, Charley. I hope to get more of the genuine. I hope to get the whole river.”

“Let's go look at one, Leo, and see what the difference is.”

They went out to one of the hay barns. Leo Nation kept his collections in a row of hay barns. “What would I do?” he had asked once, “call him a carpenter and tell him to build me a museum? He'd say, ‘Leo, I can't build a museum without plans and stuff. Get me some plans.’ And where would I get plans? So I always tell him to build me another hay barn one hundred feet by sixty feet and fifty feet high. Then I always put in four or five decks myself and floor them, and leave open vaults for the tall stuff. Besides, I believe a hay barn won't cost as much as a museum.”

“This will be a big field, Charley,” Leo Nation said now as they came to one of the hay-barn museums. “It will take all your science in every field to figure it out. Of the three genuine ones I have, each is about a hundred and eighty yards long. I believe this is about the standard length, though some may have been multiples of these. They passed for paintings in the years of their display, Charley, but they are not paintings.”

“What are they then, Leo?”

“I hire you to figure this out. You are the man who knows everything.”

Well, there were two barrel reels there, each the height of a man, and several more were set further back.

“The old turning mechanism is likely worth a lot more than the picture,” Charles Longbank told Leo Nation. “This was turned by mule on a treadmill, or by a mule taking a mill pole round and round. It might even be eighteenth century.”

“Yeah, but I use an electric motor on it.” Leo said, “The only mule I have left is a personal friend of mine. I'd no more make him turn that than he'd make me if I were the mule. I line it up like I think it was, Charley, the full reel north and the empty one south. Then we run it. So we travel, we scan, from south to north, going upstream as we face west.”

“It's funny canvas and funny paint, much better than the one I saw,” said Charles Longbank, “and it doesn't seem worn out by all the years.”

“It isn't either one, canvas or paint,” said Ginger Nation, Leo's wife, as she appeared from somewhere. “It is picture.”

Leo Nation started the reeling and ran it. It was the wooded bank of a river. It was a gravel and limestone bank with mud overlay and the mud undercut a little. And it was thick timber to the very edge of the shore.

“It is certainly well done,” Charles Longbank admitted. “From the one I saw and from what I read about these, I wasn't prepared for this.” The rolling picture was certainly not repetitious, but one had the feeling that the riverbank itself might have been a little so, to lesser eyes than those of the picture.

“It is virgin forest, mostly deciduous,” said Charles Longbank, “and I do not believe that there is any such temperate forest on any large river in the world today. It would have been logged out. I do not believe that there were many such stretches even in the nineteenth century. Yet I have a feeling that it is a faithful copy of something, and not imaginary.”

The rolling shores: cottonwood trees, slash pine, sycamore, slippery elm, hackberry, pine again.

“When I get very many of the pictures, Charley, you will put them on film and analyze them or have some kind of computer do it. You will be able to tell from the sun's angle what order the pictures should have been in, and how big are the gaps in between.”

“No, Leo, they would all have to reflect the same hour of the same day to do that.”

“But it was all the same hour of the same day,” Ginger Nation cut in. “How could you take one picture at two hours of two days?”

“She's right, Charley,” Leo Nation said. “All the pictures of the genuine sort are pieces of one original authentic picture. I've known that all along.”

Rolling shore of pine, laurel oak, butternut, persimmon, pine again.

“It is a striking reproduction, whatever it is,” Charles Longbank said, “but I'm afraid that after a while even this would become as monotonous as repeating wallpaper.”

“Hah,” said Leo. “For a smart man you have dumb eyes, Charley. Every tree is different, every leaf is different. All the trees are in young leaf too. It's about a last-week-of-March picture. What it hangs on, though, is what part of the river it is. It might be a third-week-in-March picture, or a first-week-in-April. The birds, old Charley who know everything, why don't we pick up more birds in this section? And what birds are those there?”

“Passenger pigeons, Leo, and they've been gone for quite a few decades. Why don't we see more birds there? I've a humorous answer to that, but it implies that this thing is early and authentic. We don't see more birds because they are too well camouflaged. North America is today a bird watchers' paradise because very many of its bright birds are later European intrusions that have replaced native varieties. They have not yet adjusted to the native backgrounds, so they stand out against them visually. Really, Leo, that is a fact. A bird can't adapt in a short four or five hundred years. And there are birds, birds, birds in that, Leo, if you look sharp enough.”

“I look sharp to begin with, Charley; I just wanted you to look sharp.”

“This rolling ribbon of canvas or whatever is about six feet high, Leo, and I believe the scale is about one to ten, going by the height of mature trees and other things.”

“Yeah, I think so, Charley. I believe there's about a mile of river shore in each of my good pictures. There's things about these pictures though, Charley, that I'm almost afraid to tell you. I've never been quite sure of your nerves. But you'll see them for yourself when you come to examine the pictures closely.”

“Tell me those things now, Leo, so I'll know what to look for.”

“It's all there, Charley, every leaf, every knob of bark, every spread of moss. I've put parts of it under a microscope, ten power, fifty power, four hundred power. There's detail that you couldn't see with your bare eyes if you had your nose right in the middle of it. You can even see cells of leaf and moss. You put a regular painting under that magnification and all you see is details of pigment, and canyons and mountains of brush strokes. Charley, you can't find a brush stroke in that whole picture! Not in any of the real ones.”

It was rather pleasant to travel up that river at the leisurely equivalent rate of maybe four miles an hour. Actually the picture rolled past them at about half a mile an hour. Rolling bank and rolling trees, pin oak, American elm, pine, black willow, shining willow.

“How come there is shining willow, Charley, and no white willow, you tell me that?” Leo asked.

“If this is the Mississippi, Leo, and if it is authentic, then this must be a far northern sector of it.”

“Naw. It's Arkansas, Charley. I can tell Arkansas anywhere. How come there was shining willow in Arkansas?”

“If that is Arkansas, and if the picture is authentic, it was colder then.”

“The white willow is a European introduction, though a very early one, and it spread rapidly. There are things in this picture that check too well. The three good pictures that you have, they are pretty much alike?”

“Yeah, but they are not quite the same stretch of river. The sun's angle is a little different in each of them, and the sod and the low plants are a little different.”

“You think you will be able to get more of the pictures?”

“Yeah, I think more than a thousand miles of river was in the picture. I think I get more than a thousand sections if I know where to look.”

“Probably most have been destroyed long ago, Leo, if there were ever more than the dozen or so that were advertised by the carnivals. And probably there were duplications in that dozen or so. Carnivals changed their features often, and your three pictures may be all that there ever were. Each could have been exhibited by several carnivals and in several hippodromes at different times.”

“Nah, there were more, Charley. I don't have the one with the elephants in it yet. I think there are more than a thousand of them somewhere. I advertise for them (for originals, not the cheap-jack imitations), and I will begin to get answers.”

“How many there were, there still are,” said Ginger Nation. “They will not destroy. One of ours has the reel burned by fire, but the picture did not burn. And they won't burn.”

“You might spend a lot of money on a lot of old canvas, Leo,” said Charles Longbank. “But I will analyze them for you: now, or when you think you have enough of them for it.”

“Wait till I get more, Charley,” said Leo Nation. “I will make a clever advertisement. ‘I take those things off your hands,’ I will say, and I believe that people will be glad to get rid of the old things that won't burn and won't destroy, and weigh a ton each with reels. It's the real ones that won't destroy. Look at that big catfish just under the surface there, Charley! Look at the mean eyes of that catfish! The river wasn't as muddy then even if was springtime and the water was high.”

Rolling shore and trees: pine, dogwood, red cedar, bur oak, pecan, pine again, shagbark hickory. Then the rolling picture came to an end.

“A little over twenty minutes I timed it,” said Charles Longbank. “Yes, a yokel of the past century might have believed that the picture was a mile long, or even five or nine miles long.”

“Nah,” said Leo. “They were smarter then, Charley; they were smarter then. Most likely that yokel would have believed that it was a little less than a furlong long, as it is. He'd have liked it, though. And there may be pieces that are five miles long or nine miles long. Why else would they have advertised them? I think I can hit the road and smell out where a lot of those pictures are. And I will call in sometimes and Ginger can tell me who have answered the advertisements. Come here again in six months, Charley, and I will have enough sections of the river for you to analyze. You won't get lonesome in six months, will you, Ginger?”

“No. There will be the hay cutters, and the men from the cattle auctions, and the oil gaugers, and Charley Longbank here when he comes out, and the men in town and the men in the Hill-Top Tavern. I won't get lonesome.”

“She jokes, Charley,” said Leo. “She doesn't really fool around with the fellows.”

“I do not joke,” said Ginger. “Stay gone seven months, I don't care.”

Leo Nation did a lot of traveling for about five months. He acquired fifty genuine sections of the river and he spent quite a few thousands of dollars on them. He went a couple of years into hock for them. It would have been much worse had not many people given him the things and many others had sold them to him for very small amounts. But there were certain stubborn men and women who insisted on a good price. This is always the hazard of collecting, the thing that takes most of the fun out of it. All these expensively acquired sections were really prime pieces and Leo could not let himself pass them by.

How he had located so many pieces is his own mystery, but Leo Nation did really have a nose for these things. He smelt them out; and all collectors of all things must have such long noses.

There was a professor man in Rolla, Missouri, who had rugged his whole house with pieces of a genuine section.

“That sure is tough stuff, Nation,” the man said. “I've been using it for rugs for forty years and it isn't worn at all. See how fresh the trees still are! I had to cut it up with a chain saw, and I tell you that it's tougher than any wood in the world for all that it's nice and flexible.”

“How much for all the rugs, for all the pieces of pieces that you have?” Leo asked uneasily. There seemed something wrong with using the pieces for rugs, and yet this didn't seem like a wrong man.

“Oh, I won't sell you any of my rugs, but I will give you pieces of it, since you're interested, and I'll give you the big piece I have left. I never could get anyone much interested in it. We analyzed the material out at the college. It is a very sophisticated plastic material. We could reproduce it, or something very like it, but it would be impossibly expensive, and plastics two-thirds as tough are quite cheap. The funny thing, though, I can trace the history of the thing back to quite a few decades before any plastic was first manufactured in the world. There is a big puzzle there, for some man with enough curiosity to latch onto it.”

“I have enough curiosity; I have already latched onto it,” Leo Nation said. “That piece you have on the wall — it looks like — if only I could see it under magnification — ”

“Certainly, certainly, Nation. It looks like a swarm of bees there, and it is. I've a slide prepared from a fringe of it. Come and study it. I've shown it to lots of intelligent people and they all say ‘So what?’ It's an attitude that I can't understand.”

Leo Nation studied the magnification with delight. “Yeah,” he said. “I can even see the hairs on the bees' legs. In one flaking-off piece there I can even make out the cells of a hair.” He fiddled with low and high magnifications for a long while. “But the bees sure are funny ones,” he said. “My father told me about bees like that once and I thought he lied.”

“Our present honeybees are of late European origin, Nation,” the man said. “The native American bees were funny and inefficient from a human viewpoint. They are not quite extinct even yet, though. There are older-seeming creatures in some of the scenes.”

“What are the clown animals in the piece on your kitchen floor?” Leo asked. “Say, those clowns are big!”

“Ground Sloths, Nation. They set things as pretty old. If they are a hoax, they are the grandest hoax I ever ran into. A man would have to have a pretty good imagination to give a peculiar hair form to an extinct animal — a hair form that living sloths in the tropics just do not have. But how many lifetimes would it have taken to paint even a square foot of this in such microscopic detail? There is no letdown anywhere, Nation; there is prodigious detail in every square centimeter of it.”

“Why are the horses so small and the buffaloes so big?”

“I don't know, Nation. It would take a man with a hundred sciences to figure it out, unless a man with a hundred sciences had hoaxed it. And where was such a man two hundred and fifty years ago?”

“You trace your piece that far back?”

“Yes. And the scene itself might well be fifteen thousand years old. I tell you that this is a mystery. Yes, you can carry those scraps with you if you wish, and I'll have the bale that's the remaining big piece freighted up to your place.”

There was a man in Arkansas who had a section of the picture stored in a cave. It was a tourist-attraction cave, but the river shore picture had proved a sour attraction.

“The people all think it is some sort of movie projection I have set up in my cave here,” he said. “ ‘Who wants to come down in a cave to see movies,’ they say. ‘If we want to see a river shore we will go see a river shore,’ they say, ‘we won't come down in a cave to see it.’ Well, I thought it would be a good attraction, but it wasn't.”

“How did you get it in here, man?” Leo Nation asked him. “That passage just isn't big enough to bring it in.”

“Oh, it was already here, rock rollers and all, fifteen years ago when I broke out that little section to crawl through.”

“Then it had to be here a very long time. That wall has formed since.”

“Nah, not very long,” the man said. “These limestone curtains form fast, what with all the moisture trickling down here. The thing could have been brought in here as recent as five hundred years ago. Sure, I'll sell it. I'll even break out a section so we can get it out. I have to make the passage big enough to walk in anyhow. Tourists don't like to crawl on their bellies in caves. I don't know why. I always liked to crawl on my belly in caves.”

This was one of the most expensive sections of the picture that Nation bought. It would have been even more expensive if he had shown any interest in certain things seen through trees in one sequence of the picture. Leo's heart had come up into his mouth when he had noticed those things, and he'd had to swallow it again and maintain his wooden look. This was a section that had elephants on the Mississippi River.

The elephant (Mammut americanum) was really a mastodon, Leo had learned that much from Charles Longbank. Ah, but now he owned the elephants; now he had one of the key pieces of the puzzle.

You find a lot of them in Mexico. Everything drifts down to Mexico when it gets a little age on it. Leo Nation was talking with a rich Mexican man who was as Indian as himself.

“No, I don't know where the Long Picture first came from,” the man said, “but it did come from the North, somewhere in the region of the River itself. In the time of De Soto (a little less than five hundred years ago) there was still Indian legend of the Long Picture, which he didn't understand. Yourselves of the North, of course, are like children. Even the remembering tribes of you like the Caddos have memories no longer than five hundred years.

“We ourselves remember much longer than that. But as to this, all that we remember is that each great family of us took a section of the Long Picture along when we came to Mexico. That was, perhaps, eight hundred years ago that we came south as conquerors. These pictures are now like treasures to the old great Indian families, like hidden treasures, memories of one of our former homes. Others of the old families will not talk to you about them. They will even deny that they have them. I talk to you about it, I show it to you, I even give it to you because I am a dissident, a sour man, not like the others.”

“The early Indian legends, Don Caetano, did they say where the Long Picture came from or who painted it?”

“Sure. They say it was painted by a very peculiar great being, and his name (hold onto your capelo) was Great River Shore Picture Painter. I'm sure that will help you. About the false or cheap-jack imitations for which you seem to have contempt, don't. They are not what they seem to you, and they were not done for money. These cheap-jack imitations are of Mexican origin, just as the staining originals were born in the states. They were done for the new great families in their aping of the old great families, in the hope of also sharing in ancient treasure and ancient luck. Having myself just left off aping great families of another sort, I have a bitter understanding of these imitations. Unfortunately, they were done in an age that lacked art, but the contrast would have been as great in any case: all art would seem insufficient beside that of the Great River Shore Picture Painter himself.

“The cheap-jack imitation pictures were looted by gringo soldiers of the U.S. Army during the Mexican War, as they seemed to be valued by certain Mexican families. From the looters they found their way to mid-century carnivals in the States.”

“Don Caetano, do you know that the picture segments stand up under great magnification, that there are details in them far too fine to be seen by the unaided eye?”

“I am glad you say so. I leave always had this on faith but I've never had enough faith to put it to the test. Yes, we have always believed the pictures contained depths within depths.”

“Why are there Mexican wild pigs in this view, Don Caetano? It's as though this one had a peculiar Mexican slant to it.”

“No, the peccary was an all-American pig, Leo. It went all the way north to the ice. But it's been replaced by the European pig everywhere but in our own wilds. You want the picture? I will have my man load it and ship it to your place.”

“Ah, I would give you something for it surely — ”

“No, Leo, I give it freely. You are a man that I like. Receive it, and God be with you! Ah, Leo, in parting, and since you collect strange things, I have here a box of bright things I think you might like. I believe they are no more than worthless garnets, but are they not pretty?”

Garnets? They were not garnets. Worthless? Then why did Leo Nation's eyes dazzle and his heart come up in his throat? With trembling hands he turned the stones over and worshipped. And when Don Caetano gave them to him for the token price of one thousand dollars, his heart rejoiced.

You know what? They really were worthless garnets. But what had Leo Nation thought that they were in that fateful moment? What spell had Don Caetano put on him to make him think they were something else?

Oh well, you win here and you lose there. And Don Caetano really did ship the treasured picture to him free.

Leo Nation came home after five months of wandering and collecting.

“I stand it without you for five months,” Ginger said. “I could not have stood it for six months, I sure could not have stood it for seven. I kidded. I didn't really fool around with the fellows. I had the carpenter build another hay barn to hold the pieces of picture you sent in. There were more than fifty of them.”

Leo Nation had his friend Charles Longbank come out.

“Fifty seven new ones, Charley,” Leo said. “That makes sixty with what I had before. Sixty miles of river shore I have now, I think. Analyze them, Charley. Get the data out of them somehow and feed it to your computers. First I want to know what order they go in, south to north, and how big the gaps between them are.”

“Leo, I tried to explain before, that would require (besides the presumption of authenticity) that they were all done at the same hour of the same day.”

“Presume it all, Charley. They were all done at the same time, or we will assume that they were. We will work on that presumption.”

“Leo, ah — I had hoped that you would fail in your collecting. I still believe we should drop it all.”

“Me, I hoped we would succeed, Charley, and I hoped harder. Why are you afraid of spooks? Me, I meet them every hour of my life. That's what keeps the air fresh.”

“I'm afraid of it, Leo. All right, I'll get some equipment out here tomorrow, but I'm afraid of it. Damn it, Leo, who was here?”

“Wasn't anybody here,” Ginger said. “I tell you like I tell Charley, I was only kidding, I don't really fool around with fellows.”

Charles Longbank got some equipment out there the next day. Charles himself was looking bad, maybe whiskeyed up a little bit, jerky, and looking over his shoulder all the time as though he had an owl perched on the back of his neck. But he did work several days running the picture segments and got them all down on scan film. Then he would program his computer and feed the data from the scan films to it.

“There's a shadow, like a thin cloud on several of the pictures,” Leo Nation said. “You any idea what it is, Charley?”

“Leo, I got out of bed late last night and ran two miles up and down that rocky back road of yours to shake myself up. I was afraid I was getting an idea of what those thin clouds were. Lord, Leo, who was here?”

Charles Longbank took the data into town and fed it to his computers.

He was back in several days with the answers.

“Leo, this spooks me more than ever,” he said, and he looked as if the spooks had chewed him from end to end. “Let's drop the whole thing. I'll even give you back your retainer fee.”

“No, man, no. You took the retainer fee and you are retained. Have you the order they go in, Charley, south to north?”

“Yes, here it is. But don't do it, Leo, don't do it.”

“Charley, I only shuffle them around with my lift fork and put them in order. I'll have it done in an hour.” And in an hour he had it done.

“Now, let's look at the south one first, and then the north one, Charley.”

“No, Leo, no, no! Don't do it.”

“Why not?”

“Because it scares me. They really do fall into an order. They really could have been done all at the same hour of the same day. Who was here, Leo? Who is the giant looking over my shoulder?”

“Yeah, he's a big one, isn't he, Charley? But he was a good artist and artists have the right to be a little peculiar. He looks over my shoulder a lot too.”

Leo Nation ran the southernmost segment of the Long Picture. It was mixed land and water, islands, bayou and swamp, estuary and ocean mixed with muddy river.

“It's pretty, but it isn't the Mississippi,” said Leo as it ran. “It's that other river down there. I'd know it after all these years too.”

“Yes,” Charles Longbank gulped. “It's the Atchafalaya River. By the comparative sun angle of the pieces that had been closely identified, the computer was able to give close bearings on all the segments. This is the mouth of the Atchafalaya River which has several times in the geological past been the main mouth of the Mississippi. But how did he know if he wasn't here? Gah, the ogre is looking over my shoulder again. It scares me, Leo.”

“Yeah, Charley, I say a man ought to be really scared at least once a day so he can sleep that night. Me, I'm scared for at least a week now, and I like the big guy. Well, that's one end of it, or mighty close to it. Now we take the north end.

“Yes, Charley, yes. The only thing that scares you is that they're real. I don't know why he has to look over our shoulders when we run them, though. If he's who I think he is he's already seen it all.”

Leo Nation began to run the northernmost segment of the river that he had.

“How far north are we in this, Charley?” he asked.

“Along about where the Cedar River and the Iowa River later came in.”

“That all the farther north? Then I don't have any segment of the north third of the river?”

“Yes, this is the furthest north it went, Leo. Oh god, this is the last one.”

“A cloud on this segment too, Charley? What are they anyhow? Say, this is a pretty crisp scene for springtime on the Mississippi.”

“You look sick, Long-Charley-Bank,” Ginger Nation said. “You think a little whiskey with possum's blood would help you?”

“Could I have the one without the other? Oh, yes, both together, that may be what I need. Hurry, Ginger.”

“It bedevils me still how any painting could be so wonderful,” Leo wondered.

“Haven't you caught on yet, Leo?” Charles shivered. “It isn't a painting.”

“I tell you that at the beginning if you only listen to me,” Ginger Nation said. “I tell you it isn't either one, canvas or paint, it is only picture. And Leo said the same thing once, but then he forgets. Drink this, old Charley.”

Charles Longbank drank the healing mixture of good whiskey and possum's blood, and the northernmost section of the river rolled on.

“Another cloud on the picture, Charley,” Leo said. “It's like a big smudge in the air between us and the shore.”

“Yes, and there will be another,” Charles moaned. “It means we're getting near the end. Who were they, Leo? How long ago was it? Ah — I'm afraid I know that part pretty close — but they couldn't have been human then, could they? Leo, if this was just an inferior throwaway, why are they still hanging in the air?”

“Easy, old Charley, easy. Man, that river gets chalky and foamy! Charley, couldn't you transfer all this to microfilm and feed it into your computers for all sorts of answers?”

“Oh, God, Leo, it already is!”

“Already is what? Hey what's the fog, what's the mist? What is it that bulks up behind the mist? Man, what kind of blue fog-mountain — ?”

“The glacier, you dummy, the glacier,” Charles Longbank groaned. And the northernmost segment of the river came to an end.

“Mix up a little more of that good whiskey and possum's blood, Ginger,” Leo Nation said. “I think we're all going to need it.”

“That old, is it?” Leo asked a little later as they were all strangling on the very strong stuff.

“Yes, that old,” Charles Longbank jittered. “Oh, who was here, Leo?”

“And, Charley, it already is what?”

“It already is microfilm, Leo, to them. A rejected strip, I believe.”

“Ah, I can understand why whiskey and possum's blood never caught on as a drink,” Leon said. “Was old possum here then?”

“Old possum was, we weren't.” Charles Longbank shivered. “But it seems to me that something older than possum is snuffing around again, and with a bigger snuffer.”

Charles Longbank was shaking badly. One more thing and he would crack. “The clouds on the — film, Charley, what are they?” Leo Nation asked.

And Charles Longbank cracked.

“God over my head,” he moaned out of a shivering face, “I wish they were clouds on the film. Ah, Leo, Leo, who were they, who were they?”

“I'm cold, Charley,” said Leo Nation. “There's bone-chill draft from somewhere.”

The marks… too exactly like something, and too big to be: the loops and whorls that were eighteen feet long…

Author's Commentary

Sky

The Sky-Seller was Mr. Furtive himself, fox-muzzled, ferret-eyed, slithering along like a snake, and living under the Rocks. The Rocks had not been a grand place for a long time. It had been built in the grand style on a mephitic plot of earth (to transform it), but the mephitic earth had won out. The apartments of the Rocks had lost their sparkle as they had been divided again and again, and now they were shoddy. The Rocks had weathered. Its once pastel hues were now dull grays and browns.

The five underground levels had been parking places for motor vehicles when those were still common, but now these depths were turned into warrens and hovels. The Sky-Seller lurked and lived in the lowest and smallest and meanest of them all.

He came out only at night. Daylight would have killed him; he knew that. He sold out of the darkest shadows of the night. He had only a few (though oddly select) clients, and nobody knew who his supplier was. He said that he had no supplier, that he gathered and made the stuff himself.

Welkin Alauda, a full-bodied but light-moving girl (it was said that her bones were hollow and filled with air), came to the Sky-Seller just before first light, just when he had become highly nervous but had not yet bolted to his underground.

“A sack of Sky from the nervous mouse. Jump, or the sun will gobble your house!” Welkin sang-song, and she was already higher than most skies.

“Hurry, hurry!” the Sky-Seller begged, thrusting the sack to her while his black eyes trembled and glittered (if real light should ever reflect into them he'd go blind).

Welkin took the sack of Sky, and scrambled money notes into his hands which had furred palms. (Really? Yes, really.)

“World be flat and the Air be round, wherever the Sky grows underground,” Welkin intoned, taking the sack of Sky and soaring along with a light scamper of feet (she hadn't much weight, her bones were hollow). And the Sky-Seller darted headfirst down a black well-shaft thing to his depths.

Four of them went Sky-Diving that morning, Welkin herself, Karl Vlieger, Icarus Riley, Joseph Alzarsi; and the pilot was — (no, not who you think, he had already threatened to turn them all in; they'd use that pilot no more) — the pilot was Ronald Kolibri in his little crop-dusting plane.

But a crop-duster will not go up to the frosty heights they liked to take off from. Yes it will — if everybody is on Sky. But it isn't pressurized, and it doesn't carry oxygen. That doesn't matter, not if everybody is on Sky, not if the plane is on Sky too.

Welkin took Sky with Mountain Whizz, a carbonated drink. Karl stuffed it into his lip like snuff. Icarus Riley rolled it and smoked it. Joseph Alzarsi needled it, mixed with drinking alcohol, into his main vein. The pilot, Ronny, tongued and chewed it like sugar dust. The plane named Shrike took it through the manifold.

Fifty thousand feet — you can't go that high in a crop-duster. Thirty below zero — Ah, that isn't cold! Air too thin to breathe at all — with Sky, who needs such included things as air?

Welkin stepped out, and went up, not down. It was a trick she often pulled. She hadn't much weight; she could always get higher than the rest of them. She went up and up until she disappeared. Then she drifted down again, completely enclosed in a sphere of ice crystal, sparkling inside it and making monkey faces at them.

The wind yelled and barked, and the divers took off. They all went down, soaring and gliding and tumbling; standing still sometimes, it seemed; even rising again a little. They went down to clouds and spread out on them; dark-white clouds with the sun inside them and suffusing them both from above and below. They cracked Welkin's ice-crystal sphere and she stepped out of it. They ate the thin pieces of it, very cold and brittle and with a tang of ozone. Alzarsi took off his shirt and sunned himself on a cloud.

“You will burn,” Welkin told him. “Nobody burns so as when sunning himself on a cloud.” That was true.

They sank through the black-whiteness of these clouds and came into the limitless blue concourse with clouds above and below them. It was in this same concourse that Hippodameia used to race her horses, there not being room for such coursers to run on earth. The clouds below folded up and the clouds above folded down, forming a discrete space.

“We have our own rotundity and sphere here,” said Icarus Riley (these are their Sky-Diver names, not their legal names), “and it is apart from all worlds and bodies. The worlds and bodies do not exist for as long a time as we say that they do not exist. The axis of our present space is its own concord. Therefore, it being in perfect concord, Time stops.”

All their watches had stopped, at least.

“But there is a world below,” said Karl. “It is an abject world, and we can keep it abject forever if we wish. But it has at least a shadowy existence, and later we will let it fill out again in our compassion for lowly things. It is flat, though, and we must insist that it remain flat.”

“This is important,” Joseph said with the deep importance of one on Sky. “So long as our own space is bowed and globed, the world must remain flat or depressed. But the world must not be allowed to bow its back again. We are in danger if it ever does. So long as it is truly flat and abject it cannot crash ourselves to it.”

“How long could we fall,” Welkin asked, “if we had not stopped time, if we let it flow at its own pace, or at ours? How long could we fall?”

“Hephaestus once tumbled through space all day long,” Icarus Riley said, “and the days were longer then.”

Karl Vlieger had gone wall-eyed from an interior-turned sexual passion that he often experienced in diving. Icarus Riley seemed to be on laughing gas suddenly; this is a sign that Sky is not having perfect effect. Joseph Alzarsi felt a cold wind down his spine and a series of jerky little premonitions.

“We are not perfect,” Joseph said. “Tomorrow or the next day we may be, for we do approach perfection. We win a round. And we win another. Let us not throw away our victory today through carelessness. The earth has bowed his old back a little bit, and we make ready for him! Now, guys, now!”

Four of them (or maybe only three of them) pulled the rings. The chutes unpeeled, flowered, and jerked. They had been together like a sheaf in close conversation. But suddenly, on coming to earth, they were spread out over five hundred yards.

They assembled. They packed their chutes. That would be all the diving for that day.

“Welkin, how did you pack your chute so quickly?” Icarus asked her suspiciously.

“I don't know.”

“You are always the slowest one of us, and the sloppiest. Someone always has to re-roll your chute for you before it is used again. And you were the last one to land just now. How were you the first one to be packed? How did you roll it so well? It has the earmarks of my own rolling, just as I rolled it for you before we took off this morning.”

“I don't know, Icarus. Oh, I think I'll go up again, straight up.”

“No, you've sailed and dived enough for one morning. Welkin, did you even open your chute?”

“I don't know.”

High on Sky, they went up again the next morning. The little plane named Shrike flew up as no plane had ever flown before, up through Storm. The storm-shrouded Earth shrank to the size of a pea-doogie.

“We will play a trick on it,” said Welkin. “When you're on Sky you can play a trick on anything and make it abide by it. I will say that the pea-doogie that was the world is nothing. See, it is gone. Then I will select another pea-doogie, that one there, and I will call it the world. And that is the world that we will come down to in a little while. I've switched worlds on the world, and it doesn't know what happened to it.”

“It's uneasy, though,” Joseph Alzarsi spoke through flared nostrils. “You shook it. No wonder the world has its moments of self-doubt.”

They were one million feet high. The altimeter didn't go that high, but Ronald Kolibri, the pilot, wrote out the extended figure in chalk to make it correct. Welkin stepped out. Karl and Icarus and Joseph stepped out. Ronald Kolibri stepped out, but only for a while. Then he remembered that he was the pilot and got back in the plane. They were so high that the air was black and star-filled instead of blue. It was so cold that the empty space was full of cracks and potholes. They dived half a million feet in no time at all. They pulled up laughing.

It was invigorating, it was vivifying. They stamped on the clouds, and the clouds rang like frosty ground. This was the ancestral country of all hoarfrost, of all grained-snow and glare-ice. Here was weather-maker, here was wind-son. They came into caves of ice mixed with moraine; they found antler hatchets and Hemicyon bones; they found coals still glowing. The winds bayed and hunted in packs through the chasms. These were the cold Fortean clouds, and their location is commonly quite high.

They came down below Storm, finding new sun and new air. It was pumpkin-summer, it was deep autumn in the sky.

They dropped again, miles and millennia, to full Sky-summer: the air so blue that it grew a violet patina on it to save the surface. Their own space formed about them again, as it did every day, and time stopped.

But not motion! Motion never stopped with them. Do you realize that nothingness in a void can still be in motion? And how much more they of the great centrality! There was Dynamic; there was sustaining vortex; there was the high serenity of fevered motion.

But is not motion merely a relationship of space to time? No. That is an idea that is common to people who live on worlds, but it is a subjective idea. Here, beyond the possible influence of any worlds, there was living motion without reference.

“Welkin, you look quite different today,” Joseph Alzarsi spoke in wonder. “What is it?”

“I don't know. It's wonderful to be different and I'm wonderful.”

“It is something missing from you,” said Icarus. “I believe it is a defect missing.”

“But I hadn't any, Icarus.”

They were in central and eternal moment, and it did not end, it could not end, it goes on yet. Whatever else seems to happen, it is merely in parentheses to that moment.

“It is time to consider again,” Icarus mused after a while. There is no time or while in the Moment, but there is in the parentheses. “I hope it is the last time we will ever have to consider. We, of course, are in our own space and beyond time or tangent. But the earth, such as it is, is approaching with great presumption and speed.”

“But it's nothing to us!” Karl Vlieger suddenly raged out in a chthonic and phallic passion. “We can shatter it! We can shoot it to pieces like a clay pigeon! It cannot rush onto us like a slashing dog. Get down, world! Heel, you cur! Heel, I say!”

“We say to one world ‘rise’ and it rises, and to another one ‘heel’ and it heels,” Icarus Sky-spoke in his dynamic serenity.

“Not yet,” Joseph Alzarsi warned. “Tomorrow we will be total. Today we are not yet. Possibly we could shatter the world like a clay pigeon if we wished, but we would not be lords of it if we had to shatter it.”

“We could always make another world,” said Welkin reasonably.

“Certainly, but this one is our testing. We will go to it when it is crouched down. We cannot allow it to come ravening to us. Hold! Hold there, we order you!”

And the uprushing world halted, cowed.

“We go down,” said Joseph. “We will let it come up only when it is properly broken.”

(“And they inclined the heavens and came down.”)

Once more, three of them pulled the rings. And the chutes unpeeled, flowered, and jerked. They had been like a sheaf together in their moment; but now, coming to earth, they were suddenly scattered out over five hundred yards.

“Welkin, you didn't have your chute at all today!” Icarus gaped with some awe when they had assembled again. “That is what was different about you.”

“No, I guess I didn't have it. There was no reason to have it if I didn't need it. Really, there was never any reason for me to have used one at all, ever.”

“Ah, we were total today and didn't know it,” Joseph ventured. “Tomorrow none of us will wear chutes. This is easier than I had believed.”

Welkin went to the Sky-Seller to buy new Sky that night. Not finding him in the nearer shadows of the Rocks, she went down and down, drawn by the fungoid odor and the echoing dampness of the underground. She went through passages that were man-made, through passages that were natural, through passages that were unnatural. Some of these corridors, it is true, had once been built by men, but now they had reverted and became most unnatural deep-earth caverns. Welkin went down into the total blackness where there were certain small things that still mumbled out a faint white color; but it was the wrong color white, and the things were all of a wrong shape.

There was the dead white shape of Mycelium masses, the grotesqueness of Agaricus, the deformity of Deadly Amanita and of Morel. The gray-milky Lactarius glowed like lightless lanterns in the dark; there was the blue-white of the Deceiving Clitocybe and the yellow-white of the Caesar Agaric. There was the insane ghost-white of the deadliest and queerest of them all, the Fly Amanita, and a mole was gathering this.

“Mole, bring Sky for the Thing Serene, for the Minions tall and the Airy Queen,” Welkin jangled. She was still high on Sky, but it had begun to leave her a little and she had the veriest touch of the desolate sickness.

“Sky for the Queen of the buzzing drones, with her hollow heart and her hollow bones,” the Sky-Seller intoned hollowly.

“And fresh, Oh I want it fresh, fresh Sky!” Welkin cried.

“With these creatures there is no such thing as fresh,” the Sky-Seller told her. “You want it stale, Oh so stale! Ingrown and aged and with its own mold grown moldy.”

“Which is it?” Welkin demanded. “What is the name of the one you gather it from?”

“The Fly Amanita.”

“But isn't that simply a poisonous mushroom?”

“It has passed beyond that. It has sublimated. Its simple poison has had its second fermenting into narcotic.”

“But it sounds so cheap that it be merely narcotic.”

“Not merely narcotic. It is something very special in narcotic.”

“No, no, not narcotic at all!” Welkin protested. “It is liberating, it is world-shattering. It is Height Absolute. It is motion and detachment itself. It is the ultimate. It is mastery.”

“Why, then it is mastery, lady. It is the highest and lowest of all created things.”

“No, no,” Welkin protested again, “not created. It is not born, it is not made. I couldn't stand that. It is the highest of all uncreated things.”

“Take it, take it,” the Sky-Seller growled, “and be gone. Something begins to curl up inside me.”

“I go!” Welkin said, “and I will be back many times for more.”

“No, you will not be. Nobody ever comes back many times for Sky. You will be back never. Or one time. I think that you will be back one time.”

They went up again the next morning, the last morning. But why should we say that it was the last morning? Because there would no longer be divisions or days for them. It would be one last eternal day for them now, and nothing could break it.

They went up in the plane that had once been named Shrike and was now named Eternal Eagle. The plane had repainted itself during the night with new name and new symbols, some of them not immediately understandable. The plane snuffled Sky into its manifolds, and grinned and roared. And the plane went up!

Oh! Jerusalem in the Sky! How it went up!

They were all certainly perfect now and would never need Sky again. They were Sky.

“How little the world is!” Welkin rang out. “The towns are like fly-specks and the cities are like flies.”

“It is wrong that so ignoble a creature as the Fly should have the exalted name,” Icarus complained.

“I'll fix that,” Welkin sang. “I give edict: That all the flies on earth be dead!” And all the flies on earth died in that instant.

“I wasn't sure you could do that,” said Joseph Alzarsi. “The wrong is righted. Now we ourselves assume the noble name of Flies. There are no Flies but us!”

The five of them, including the pilot, Ronald Kolibri, stepped chuteless out of the Eternal Eagle.

“Will you be all right?” Ronald asked the rollicking plane. “Certainly,” the plane said. “I believe I know where there are other Eternal Eagles. I will mate.”

It was cloudless, or else they had developed the facility of seeing through clouds. Or perhaps it was that, the earth having become as small as a marble, the clouds around it were insignificant.

Pure light that had an everywhere source! (The sun also had become insignificant and didn't contribute much to the light.) Pure and intense motion that had no location reference. They weren't going anywhere with their intense motion (they already were everywhere, or at the super-charged center of everything).

Pure cold fever. Pure serenity. Impure hyper-space passion of Karl Vlieger, and then of all of them; but it was purely rampant at least. Stunning beauty in all things along with a towering cragginess that was just ugly enough to create an ecstasy.

Welkin Alauda was mythic with nenuphars in her hair. And it shall not be told what Joseph Alzarsi wore in his own hair. An always-instant, a million or a billion years!

Not monotony, no! Presentation! Living sets! Scenery! The scenes were formed for the splinter of a moment; or they were formed forever. Whole worlds formed in a pregnant void: not spherical worlds merely, but dodeka-spherical, and those much more intricate than that. Not merely seven colors to play with, but seven to the seventh and to the seventh again.

Stars vivid in the bright light. You who have seen stars only in darkness be silent! Asteroids that they ate like peanuts, for now they were all metamorphic giants. Galaxies like herds of rampaging elephants. Bridges so long that both ends of them receded over the light-speed edges. Waterfalls, of a finer water, that bounced off galaxy clusters as if they were boulders.

Through a certain ineptitude of handling, Welkin extinguished the old sun with one such leaping torrent.

“It does not matter,” Icarus told her. “Either a million or a billion years had passed according to the time-scale of the bodies, and surely the sun had already come onto dim days. You can always make other suns.”

Karl Vlieger was casting lightning bolts millions of parsecs long and making looping contact with clustered galaxies with them.

“Are you sure that we are not using up any time?” Welkin asked them with some apprehension.

“Oh, time still uses itself up, but we are safely out of the reach of it all,” Joseph explained. “Time is only one very inefficient method of counting numbers. It is inefficient because it is limited in its numbers, and because the counter by such a system must die when he has come to the end of his series. That alone should weigh against it as a mathematical system; it really shouldn't be taught.”

“Then nothing can hurt us ever?” Welkin wanted to be reassured.

“No, nothing can come at us except inside time and we are outside it. Nothing can collide with us except in space and we disdain space. Stop it, Karl! As you do it that's buggery.”

“I have a worm in my own tract and it gnaws at me a little,” the pilot Ronald Kolibri said. “It's in my internal space and it's crunching along at a pretty good rate.”

“No, no, that's impossible. Nothing can reach or hurt us,” Joseph insisted.

“I have a worm of my own in a still more interior tract,” said Icarus, “the tract that they never quite located in the head or the heart or the bowels. Maybe this tract always was outside space. Oh, my worm doesn't gnaw, but it stirs. Maybe I'm tired of being out of reach of everything.”

“Where do these doubts rise from?” Joseph sounded querulous. “You hadn't them an instant ago, you hadn't them as recently as ten million years ago. How can you have them now when there isn't any now?”

“Well, as to that — ” Icarus began — (and a million years went by) — “as to that I have a sort of cosmic curiosity about an object in my own past” — (another million years went by) — “an object called world.”

“Well, satisfy your curiosity then,” Karl Vlieger snapped. “Don't you even know how to make a world?”

“Certainly I know how, but will it be the same?”

“Yes, if you're good enough. It will be the same if you make it the same.”

Icarus Riley made a world. He wasn't very good at it and it wasn't quite the same, but it did resemble the old world a little.

“I want to see if some things are still there,” Welkin clamored. “Bring it closer.”

“It's unlikely your things are still there,” Joseph said, “Remember that billions of years may have passed.”

“The things will be there if I put them there,” Icarus insisted.

“And you cannot bring it closer since all distance is now infinite,” Karl maintained.

“At least I can focus it better,” Icarus insisted, and he did. The world appeared quite near.

“It remembers us like a puppy would,” Welkin said. “See, it jumps up at us.”

“It's more like a lion leaping for a treed hunter just out of reach,” Icarus grudged. “But we are not treed.”

“It can't ever reach us, and it wants to,” Welkin piqued. “Let's reach down to it.”

(“And they inclined the heavens and went down.”)

A most peculiar thing happened to Ronald Kolibri as he touched Earth. He seemed to have a seizure. He went slack-faced, almost horror-faced, and he would not answer the others.

“What is it, Ronald?” Welkin begged in kindred anguish. “Oh, what is it? Somebody help him!”

Then Ronald Kolibri did an even more peculiar thing. He began to fold up and break up from the bottom. Bones slowly splintered and pierced out of him and his entrails gushed out. He compressed. He shattered. He splashed. Can a man splash?

The same sort of seizure overtook Karl Vlieger: the identical slack-face horror-face, the same folding up and breaking up from the bottom, the same hideous sequence.

And Joseph Alzarsi went into the same sundering state, baffled and breaking up.

“Icarus, what's happened to them?” Welkin screamed. “What is the slow loud booming?”

“They're dead. How could that be?” Icarus puzzled trembling. “Death is in time, and we are not.”

Icarus himself passed through time as he crashed to earth, breaking up, spilling out more odiously than any of them.

And Welkin touched Earth, crashed, then what? She heard her own slow loud booming as she hit.

(Another million years went by, or some weeks.)

A shaky old woman on crutches was going down the middle-of-the-night passages that are under the Rocks. She was too old a woman to be Welkin Alauda, but not too old for a Welkin who had lived millions of years outside of time.

She had not died. She was lighter than the others, and besides she had done it twice before unscathed. But that was before she had known fear.

Naturally they had told her that she would never walk again; and now most unnaturally she was walking with crutches. Drawn by the fungoid odor and the echoing dampness she went down in the total dark to where small things were growing with the wrong color white and were all of the wrong shape. She wanted one thing only, and she would die without it.

“Sky for salving the broken Crone! Sky for the weal of my hollow bone!” she crackled in an old-woman voice. But it was only her own voice that echoed back to her.

Should a Sky-Seller live forever?

When All The Lands Pour Out Again

Anybody want to get away from it all? To make a total change? You had better want to do it: you will do it anyhow. Now is the time. Today is the day.

Three learned men were in the academic center of a learned metropolis, talking about a thing that hadn't happened for thousands of years, which perhaps had never happened. You will already know of these men, by reputation at least, if there is anything academic about you at all.

“It wasn't understood the first time it happened, or any of the other times,” Professor George Ruil offered. “In spite of a few studies, it has been understood even less since those times. The accounts of the happenings have been rationalized, falsified, belittled, and that makes it all wrong: it was never rational, it was never false, and it certainly was not little.”

“It is interesting, George, in the way that so many secondary footprints in the clay of time are interesting,” Dr. Ralph Amerce told his friend, “but it is of no more present importance than are bear burrows or gravels of the third ice age. And it can't come back.”

“I'm not sure that George here won't be able to connect it with bear burrows and gravels of the third ice age,” Nobelist Professor Wilburton Romer jibed. (These were three very learned men: would we tune in on them otherwise?) “But you can't find any real traces of it, George, only traces of traces. It hasn't a form we can grasp, it hasn't any handle we can take hold of, it hasn't any name we can call it by.”

“Oh, I'll call it Jubilee,” George Ruil said.

“A thing named Jubilee back when the world was young, when men were not quite men yet?” Romer questioned.

“The world was older then,” Ruil offered. “It grows younger all the time, as any geologist can tell you; it sloughs off its old incrustations. And men were always men.”

“Let us not get into your prejudices on that, George,” Ralph Amerce begged. “But you really don't give us anything to look at or handle. What was Jubilee?”

“It was as strong an urge as that to propagate, as strong as that to survive,” Ruil offered. “It was and is a cyclic necessity. Can we be true people without it?”

“We were animals when we had it, if we had it,” Amerce said. “Yes, we can be, and we are now, true people without it. It's only one of your odd little theories, George. If such things once happened, why then they happened. But they had no real purpose.”

“Only to renew the world and everything that moves upon it,” George Ruil maintained, “only to provide impregnation and contrast and culture and moment. How will we be renewed now? What will provide these things for the world today?”

“We do quite well now, George,” Romer said, “better, I believe, than when we lived in trees and swamps and caves. I wouldn't change anything of it now, George, even if I could.”

“I'd change a lot of things of it now, if I could,” Amerce smiled. “But it was no more than a curious cyclic thing, George, and it is finished forever.”

“A man would be foolish to say that about the years, Ralph, especially to say in the twelfth month of the year that the cycle of the years was finished forever. I believe that this cycle also begins to come around now.”

“What's the worry, George?” Romer asked. “It will be the matter of some thousands of years. If we do see the signs of it, we will not be here to see the thing itself.”

“No, it is not the matter of some thousands of years,” Ruil contradicted. “The effects and the readjustments may take several thousand years, but the Jubilee itself is one day. One day only, friends. The nervousness before it may be of some hundred or two hundred years, the early skirmishing may be of a month or so, but the Jubilee itself is in one day. Today (I have just learned it myself) is the day.”

“Have you anything at all to go on, George?” Wilburton Romer asked him.

“Only a timetable of my own construction, contradictory in many places, full of gaps everywhere. An old prophecy ‘That no creature on earth will sleep tonight where he slept last night.’ The fact of a certain uneasiness in the world for the last two hundred years. Has anyone else noticed that? And a hunch; a hunch, men, almost as strong, I believe, as the thing itself was, will be.”

“And what will you do with your little hunch, George?” Ralph Amerce asked him out of that pleasantly ironic face. “I guess I should take it to the president. He should be advised of a thing like this.”

 — Three learned men in the academic center of a learned metropolis, talking about a thing that hadn't happened in the last three thousand years, maybe not in the last thirty thousand years, that perhaps had never happened at all, that had left none but very dim and confused footprints if it did happen.

And one of them was going to the president to tell him that the thing was urgent.

And there had been some early skirmishing, though of less than a month.

It had been time for the bears of Crater Valley to find themselves burrows and hibernate. They didn't do it, though. Instead, they gathered together, the three hundred of them from the three thousand square miles of the valley; they climbed the south ridge of the valley, they went over it and continued to the south. Nobody had ever seen three hundred bears traveling together like that. But now a forest ranger saw them come out of the valley, and another ranger saw them a hundred miles further south, still going rapidly and happily. So the event was reported.

Red squirrels of the northern part of the country moved down into the territory of the gray squirrels of the south. It was no great thing, only three or four million squirrels. The larger gray squirrels did not oppose the red squirrels, they began to pack their own belongings to move out of their way. They were very slightly grumpy about it as if to say, “We're going, we're going, but aren't you just a little bit early with it?”

Radio astronomers had reported that there had been, only last night, a break in the pervading sky harmony (which the radio astronomers do not refer to as the Music of the Spheres), that there had been a very intense high-pitched signal (“Like a whistle in the break in the music, the everybody-change-partners whistle in a country dance, the everybody-change-chairs whistle in Musical Chairs,” one of the astronomical assistants said), and that now there was pause with the sky harmony greatly muted.

And another bit of early skirmishing, less than a month a-going, twenty-seven days in fact: Charles Malaga was sweating as fry-cook in a little café in Aloalo on a mid-Pacific island, and his friend Johnny Ofutino was eating fish of his fry.

“Somebody has to go first,” Johnny Ofutino said. “The ray-fish went this morning, the turtles are going to start this evening. What's the matter with people?”

“I don't know, Johnny, what's the matter with us?” Charley Malaga asked.

“Somebody has to go first,” Johnny Ofutino still insisted. “Let's us go first, and then some of the rest will follow along.”

“All right, wait'll I turn the fires off,” Charley Malaga said.

“No, turn them way up,” Johnny Ofutino told him. “Throw stuff on the fires. Burn the café down.”

“Oh, all right.”

They burned the café down and went out and launched a fishing boat that had paddles and a half-sail. The sea was running right for them, as they knew it would be. They went all that day and that night. In the morning a small engine-ship came by with half-a-dozen such small boats in tow. Men threw them a line from the ship, and Charley and Johnny also went into easy tow.

About eight hundred other such assemblages were afloat by the second day. It wasn't a very long voyage: they had taken voyages twice as long in their earlier days. It didn't take them much time, even under such small engines: twenty-seven days. So they came to a pleasant land and landed.

The Polynesians had finally discovered America. But their arrival caused only a small flurry of interest. Several dozen of these same Polynesians had been to America before; but if you consider that as an obstacle, then you do not understand the meaning of discovery.

Pacific ocean fish and cetaceans were crowded up at the Pacific end of the canal. Some of them seemed to be in a chomping hurry. Most of these had been able to get through the canal for several days, but now many more had crowded up at the Pacific end. And very many more were going around the Horn. There was no good reason for it. The Atlantic was not that much better an ocean than the Pacific. But there comes a time when it seems as if you have lived in one place long enough. It was just that the fish and cetaceans and shelleys and sea-stars felt that it was time to make a change.

“Did you get to make an appointment with the president, George?” Wilburton Romer asked as George Ruil returned to them.

“No need for an appointment now,” Ruil said. “They seem pretty informal there today and I got the president himself on the phone while he was having breakfast. I'm not sure that I got my message over to him, but something is moving with them there and I don't believe it matters whether he understood me exactly. I don't understand it exactly myself. ‘I believe you are absolutely right,’ the president told me. ‘I believe that everyone is absolutely right. And we are going to do something. I believe that we are all going to get in a plane. They are making a big plane ready now. It will hold nine hundred persons. I will get in it with the congresses and we will go somewhere. We aren't decided yet whether we should blow up all the buildings here when we leave. There are dissidents who say that we should not.’ ‘Where will you go in the plane, Mr. President?’ I asked him. ‘I am not sure about that,’ he said. ‘Is it important which way a plane goes? There are several dissidents who see no reason to get on a plane and go somewhere today. There are always dissidents in government. They say that nothing has happened. I tell them that if all of us get on a plane and go somewhere that that will be something happening. It is possible that the pilot will know where the plane is going. If he does not know then perhaps someone will instruct him.’ That is what the president said. He didn't seem to be his usual incisive self this morning.”

“Curious,” said Ralph Amerce. “I don't seem to be my usual incisive self this morning either. You really believe, George, that there is a catastrophe brewing?”

“No, man, no! Does Jubilee sound like catastrophe to you? How could anyone misunderstand it so? It is the adjustment of the whole world. Oh, there will be what in other circumstances would be called destruction, but we will not call it that. Certain mountains will decide that they have been in one place long enough, and they will get up and walk. Why should the mountains be denied this pleasure? Is there not in scripture the passage about the hills gamboling like lambs? The ice, perhaps, will decide that it has been in bondage for too long a time and it will explode gloriously over great areas. Possibly the magnetism of the earth will be reversed; we know that that has happened before. How would you feel if you had been named North for a million years? And assuredly the fountains of the deep will be broken open. Some millions of persons will die, I'm sure: I am even more sure that they will die joyously. Get into the spirit of it, men.”

“To me the spirit of it is a lazy and peaceful one, George,” Wilburton Romer yawned. “Though the rational part of me says that nothing at all has happened, nevertheless I now accept that the renovation is about to happen. Will we keep our same names, do you think?”

“Oh no, I'm sure we will not,” Amerce declared, himself getting into the spirit of it. “Why should we keep our same names? Why, there have been echoes of this all through plain historical times, George, and we all too deaf to hear them. The sober accounts of Velikovsky and Wesley Patten and Father O'Connell have been treated as if they were subject to doubt. Even the Fortean documentaries have been laughed away as if they were — well — Fortean. But I see pieces of it everywhere now. The folk-wanderings themselves were only aftermath to such a Jubilee. The simultaneous conflagrations all through the archaic civilized world were part of the thing itself. ‘Trees walking like men’ were only a small bright portion of it. What could have been more irrational than the Rhinoceros coming to Africa during one of the Jubilees, than the Camel appearing (of all places) in Asia during another? What could have been more outlandish than Madagascar sinking (all except the top of its head) into the Ocean, and the Island Africa rising to become a continent? We can look back on all these previous Jubilees with new eyes now. Well, but there should be portents bursting all over the place.”

“There are, Ralph, there are,” Wilburton smiled. “I've just been catching the morning radio news with my west ear. Flying jackrabbits have been seen all over the country. A few were seen back in the year 1945, you know, but they were considered a hoax. A herd of unicorns had been sighted in Nebraska, and they were supposed to be extinct. More than a hundred saucers have landed this morning. The small creatures from them say that they are people too: and they do look like small people. They say that they have been living in the Little Sky, not in the Big Sky, and that now the Little Sky is falling down. Besides, they were tired of living in one place and were ready for a change. They had been nervous about things for some years, they say; they'd have come down before but they feared that the earth was not really solid and they'd sink into it. But anyone who wants a change can go into the Little Sky as soon as it's stabilized again, they say.

“And the covers have been taken off of diverse lands, Scandinavia and Arabia among others; and many millions of people are pouring out of them. These are two of the secret Wells of the World that have always populated the world. A thousand valleys of Scandinavia have had the delusional cover pulled off of them, and the sleeping millions in these valleys have awakened. And the old Arabian kingdoms have awakened today. What had appeared to be sand was only a false cover pulled over them. ‘We thought the sky had been hanging a little low these last several thousand years,’ one of the millennia-old Arabian kings is reported to have said.”

“All that on the morning news?” George Ruil asked from somewhere under his arched brows. “How rum. And how confirming. And what has the news to say at this moment?”

“The announcers are complaining of troubles in their own studios, George. They're having trouble getting their buildings to burn. But high explosives are being brought in, and many of the persons will evacuate the buildings as they are fused off. They're having a lot of fun at it too. Ah, that station has just gone off the air. That's the third one to go off in five minutes.”

“Your goldfish, George, they're climbing right out of the bowls,” Ralph Amerce gasped out in some wonder. “And they're making a pretty purposive way across the floor.”

“I'll open the front door for them,” George Ruil said as he rose to do it. “They want to be out and traveling too. Come along, goldies, come along, flop right over the threshold. That's it. Hey there, watch it, don't step on the goldfish!”

“We're sorry, we're sorry,” said strangers at the door, “but you can't renew a world without breaking a few goldfish. It's all right, we just stepped on one, the rest will be able to make it to the curb, and everything's flowing gutter-full there; someone's turned on all the fire hydrants. Are you gentlemen ready to leave?”

“Oh, I suppose we could get ready pretty quickly, strangers. Where are you from?”

“From the west, I believe, or some such direction. We've been driving all night. We got here and we said: This is just the sort of place we want, as soon as it's burned down.”

“We'll make it as quick as we can, men,” George Ruil said. “Come along, Ralph and Wilburton. Let's gather such irrational things as we might want to take with us. A fine day for it, friends.”

“A fine day for it, friends,” said the strangers at the door.

“Not like a thief in the night,” Ralph Amerce murmured mystically. “Like a bright-faced boy in the bright morning.”

Various things were happening in the world. Great numbers of American Indians came out of nine separate holes in the ground. They had just gone down for a little nap, they said, and somebody had put them under a trick and caused them to sleep for a thousand years. It would not greatly matter, they said: likely they hadn't missed anything important.

A happy woman was leading her brood of children along a smoking road. “What happened to the twins?” she asked. “The big dogs got them, mama,” one of the brood answered, “the big dogs are acting funny.”

“Oh darn,” the woman said, “I wanted them to see all the nice things that are happening today.”

Dazed and smiling multitudes were moving out of Greater Armenia and Turkestan. Chinamen were setting out in thousands of junks to discover the South Sea islands. Housecats gathered in moving mobs everywhere, and the rumor ran through their mobs that the King of the Cats himself would appear in his majesty. Snakes gathered by the ten thousands at Portpatrick in Scotland and vowed they would swim the Channel to Ireland or die in the attempt. But the land rose before them and they passed over dryshod. (What? Are snakes shod with shoon? On Jubilee day, perhaps.)

And still nothing had happened.

Then it began to happen a little. The gentle quaking. The beautiful fire in the air and in the ground. Euphoria pouring out of every crevice. The rumbling like old forgotten music. The continents were winding up their anchor chains.

And at, well, pretty much the same time, three other men were met with about a dozen disciples. These three men were, in the current view, the three most powerful men in the world. Their names were — if you are any kind of revolutionary at all you will know them — Saul Trumait the red lion of England, Pedro Cachiporro the red tiger of Mexico, Arpad Koster the red wolf of Moravia, and they were met in reddish New York. These men controlled the complexes inside the complexes.

“Nothing has happened,” said Trumait. “We have not planned anything to happen just now, so it will not be possible for anything to happen. How could anything happen if it were not of our instigation?”

“But there is rumor of things happening,” one of the disciples said, “and there are fires and bombings everywhere. And people are wandering about.”

“There should not be any fires or bombings unless we have ordered them,” Cachiporro muttered. “Fires and bombings are an art and we are the directing artists. There cannot be too many of them, that is true, but they must always be done for proper effect. We alone understand the proper effects. And the people have no right to wander about unless we have incited them to it.”

“There are the beginnings of earthquakes,” another of the disciples said.

“Then we will put an end to the earthquakes,” Koster rasped. “There will be earthquakes only when we command them. It is time that the earth learned that it has masters.”

“The dogs have all gone wild and developed the running sickness,” a third of the disciples said. “The birds have all gathered in huge flocks and started to migrate, and not at all in their usual directions. Some of the fruit trees are blooming again and it isn't the season for it. Some of them have begun to fruit a second time this year, and that isn't the strangest part of it. I myself have seen, this very morning, walnuts growing on an apple tree, and there weren't any signs of them there yesterday.”

“Well, we will immediately put a stop to all that,” Trumait declared. “We have the powers, we are the powers, we have all the power of the red-devil earth and we will use that power. We aren't given rule over the elementals for nothing.”

“There are rumors of tidal waves,” said another disciple.

“This we will not tolerate for a moment!” Cachiporro swore, “neither the waves nor the rumors. There is sky-business involved in this somewhere and we will not permit it. If the waves are running, let them stand still!”

Would you believe it? The waves everywhere in the world stood still. They were taken by surprise, perhaps, but they had always obeyed the voice of Authority wherever given.

“Let the rumors run no more,” Koster spoke like fire. “Let all such talk cease right now. Let the rumor-men's minds be befuddled and their tongues be like rocks in their mouths.”

It happened just like that. Rumor everywhere was frozen in midspeed, and the tongues of all the mongers were like rocks in their mouths. These things can be stopped.

“The migrating birds will halt in midair!” Saul Trumait commanded. “Not one wing will beat till we say it may beat again.”

And all the migrating birds were frozen motionless in midair.

“Look, look!” one of the more excitable disciples cried out. “It's like lava flow bursting up through the pavements outside, up through the sidewalks, up under this very floor, it seems like.”

“Oh, that is us,” Saul Trumait said easily. “Where do you think we draw our power from? We also have our fathers.”

“Let the people stop their wandering,” Cachiporro ordered. “Should there be a revolution that is not ours? Let all vehicles stand still at once. Let the wandering people not set another foot down.”

And quite a few persons of the world were paralyzed with one foot in midstride. These three men were really very powerful.

“Let the fires and bombings stop if they are not our own fires and bombings,” Koster commanded. And all except the privileged bombings and fires ceased.

“Is there anything else of the divergent unlawful — that is not of the true unlawful going on?” Trumait asked, breathing a little heavily from the power that had been flowing through him. “What do our special monitors show? Is there anything going on that is not ours?”

“There are still earthquakes; there are still people laughing; and there are other lava flows which do not seem to be yours,” said one of the disciples who was fiddling with the instruments.

“Let the false lava stop!” Cachiporro commanded. “There must be no lava that does not come from our own fire fathers.”

“Let the people's laughter cease,” Koster roared. “Let it scorch their throats.”

“May the quaking leave off right now,” Trumait ruled. “We are the only earth-movers.”

“Stop, you fool things, stop!” Pedro Cachiporro ordered. “We are the only authority and we order you.”

“Halt!” Koster barked. “We are the power.”

“Let none of it move,” Trumait commanded.

And it all stopped.

The red lion and the red tiger and the red wolf looked at each other with thunderous triumph; and the disciples adored. The three men themselves were Revolution, they themselves were the Moving Powers of the world and nothing could move without their instigation.

“Ah, something is beginning again,” said the disciple who was fiddling with the instruments. It had been a short but momentous pause. “It's like a new kind of earthquake now, a new sort of lava flow, a different shape of world waves. Hear it? You don't need instruments. Hear it?”

It all broke loose. It broke wide open. What world-noise was that? Laughter, world-laughter. The three unpowered leaders diminished and their faces cracked like clay pots. It was the whole world laughing at them, in new mountains that had not been mountains a moment before, in craters that were fire-new craters, in pinnacles and persons that had just been renewed. The whole world was laughing at the three creatures that shrank and shattered and turned into unnameable miniscules.

This was Revolution, and the revolutionaries had never stood tall enough to touch the least hairs on its toes.

The continents began to detach each from each and to drift. Whether they would move much or little during the Jubilee depended on their own proclivities and states of mind, but they were free to move. And it was not a thing of a million years or a thousand. It was the thing of an hour.

There were world disturbances, of course; there were three-mile-high waves here and there, and such; but there were no more disturbances than could be expected from such causes.

“There is land below that isn't charted,” said the navigator of the plane that was carrying the president and the congresses.

“Chart it then if it will make you happy,” the pilot told him. “That is Hy-Brasil, an old land come back. I bet it felt that it had been submerged long enough.”

“And you're coming down too soon, coming down to no possible land,” the navigator said an hour later. “You'll hit open ocean.”

“Oh no. We'll hit risen land,” the pilot insisted. “See it there now. Is it not fresh and shiny with the seawater still rushing off its risen flanks and the spray of it rising a mile high?”

The plane came down to Lyonesse which had been the mother of assemblies a long time ago, which had sunk into the ocean a long time ago. It was a good town and a good land, and it seemed glad to be back.

Other planes and various craft were also arriving at Lyonesse. They were homing in on it from everywhere. The crafts carried the governing bodies of more than two hundred commonwealths, and all those parliamentary and official types were beaming and bright and happy. What town they would form there now would be a curious one, but there are advantages in having all governing bodies gathered together in one place where they will not bother the peoples of the world.

And in another place there were three wise men walking in that first noontime of the Jubilee. Perhaps these three men had once had the names of Ruil and Amerce and Romer, but they did not have those names now.

They were walking in a direction that had not yet been renamed. They would not sleep that night where they had slept the night before, nor would any other person in the world. They had sandals on their feet; they were wrapped in cloaks and euphoria; they had staffs in their hands; and they carried (from some old symbolism or from some new joy) lighted lanterns in the daytime. Laughing like fools, they were romping along at a great rate — three wise men.

“That is a wooly mammoth,” a woman whooped.

New creatures appeared by the instant, new mountains (though some of the mountains fell down again as soon as they raised), new people, new myths walking about on new legs.

“I thought it was our wooly dog,” the man guffawed. “I'm glad it isn't a dog any more.”

A man was shooting barbs from a bow and they turned into birds in the air. (On Jubilee day, the way you see it is the way it is.)

“No, we name the animals all over again today,” the woman chortled, “and that is a wooly mammoth.”

The world pace had quickened. The ground smoked and quaked and some of the people fell down dead: but all the people were gay with the thunderous noise of Jubilee. The man and the woman and the wooly mammoth were running and laughing and barking after the wise men, and they would be able to run forever if they wished.

Author's Commentary

About A Secret Crocodile

There is a secret society of seven men that controls the finances of the world. This is known to everyone but the details are not known. There are some who believe that it would be better if one of those seven men were a financier.

There is a secret society of three men and four women that controls all the fashions of the world. The details of this are known to all who are in the fashion. And I am not.

There is a secret society of nineteen men that is behind all the fascist organizations in the world. The secret name of this society is Glomerule.

There is a secret society of thirteen persons known as the Elders of Edom that controls all the secret sources of the world. That the sources have become muddy is of concern to them.

There is a secret society of only four persons that manufactures all the jokes of the world. One of these persons is unfunny and he is responsible for all the unfunny jokes.

There is a secret society of eleven persons that is behind all Bolshevik and atheist societies of the world. The devil himself is a member of this society, and he works tirelessly to become a principal member. The secret name of this society is Ocean.

There are related secret societies known as The Path of the Serpent (all its members have the inner eyelid of snakes), The Darkbearers, the Seeing Eye, Imperium, The Golden Mask and the City.

Above most of these in a queer network there is a society that controls the attitudes and dispositions of the world — and the name of it is Crocodile. The Crocodile is insatiable: it eats persons and nations alive. And the Crocodile is very old, 8,800 years old by one account, 7,349 years old if you use the short chronology.

There are subsecret societies within the Crocodile: the Cocked Eye, the Cryptic Cootie and others. Powerful among these is a society of three hundred and ninety-nine persons that manufactures all the catchwords and slogans of the world. This subsociety is not completely secret since several of the members are mouthy: the code name of this apparatus is the Crocodile's Mouth.

Chesterton said that Mankind itself was a secret society. Whether it would be better or worse if the secret should ever come out he did not say.

And finally there was — for a short disruptive moment — a secret society of three persons that controlled all.

All what?

Bear with us. That is what this account is about.

John Candor had been called into the office of Mr. James Dandi at ABNC. (Whisper, whisper, for your own good, do not call him Jim Dandy; that is a familiarity he will not abide.)

“This is the problem, John,” Mr. Dandi stated piercingly, “and we may as well put it into words. After all, putting things into words and pictures is our way of working at ABNC. Now then, what do we do at ABNC, John?”

(ABNC was one of the most powerful salivators of the Crocodile's Mouth.)

“We create images and attitudes, Mr. Dandi.”

“That is correct, John,” Mr. Dandi said. “Let us never forget it. Now something has gone wrong. There is a shadowy attack on us that may well be the most damaging thing since the old transgression of Spirochaete himself. Why has something gone wrong with our operation, John?”

“Sir, I don't know.”

“Well then, what has gone wrong?”

“What has gone wrong, Mr. Dandi, is that it isn't working the way it should. We are caught on our own catchwords, we are slaughtered by our own slogans. There are boomerangs whizzing about our ears from every angle. None of it goes over the way it is supposed to. It all twists wrong for us.”

“Well, what is causing this? Why are our effects being nullified?”

“Sir, I believe that somebody else is also busy creating images and attitudes. Our catechesis states that this is impossible since we are the only group permitted in the field. Nevertheless, I am sure that someone else is building these things against us. It even seems that they are more powerful than we are — and they are unknown.”

“They cannot be more powerful than we are — and they must not remain unknown to us.” Mr. Dandi's words stabbed. “Find out who they are, John.”

“How?”

“If I knew how, John, I would be working for you, not you working for me. Your job is to do things. Mine is the much more difficult one of telling you to do them. Find out, John.”

John Candor went to work on the problem. He considered whether it was a linear, a set or a group problem. If it were a linear problem he should have been able to solve it by himself — and he couldn't. If it were a set problem, then it couldn't be solved at all. Of necessity he classified it as a group problem and he assembled a group to solve it. This was easy at ABNC which had more group talent than anybody.

The group that John Candor assembled was made up of August Crayfish, Sterling Groshawk, Maurice Cree, Nancy Peters, Tony Rover, Morgan Aye, and Betty McCracken. Tell the truth, would you be able to gather so talented a group in your own organization?

“My good people,” John Candor said, “as we all know, something has gone very wrong with our effects. It must be righted. Thoughts, please, thoughts!”

“We inflate a person or subject and he bursts on us,” August gave his thought. “Are we using the wrong gas?”

“We launch a phrase and it turns into a joke,” Sterling complained. “Yet we have not slighted the check-off: it has always been examined from every angle to be sure that it doesn't have a joker context. But something goes wrong.”

“We build an attitude carefully from the ground up,” Maurice stated. “Then our firm ground turns boggy and the thing tilts and begins to sink.”

“Our ‘Fruitful Misunderstandings,’ the most subtle and effective of our current devices, are beginning to bear sour fruit,” Nancy said.

“We set ourselves to cut a man down and our daggers turn to rubber,” Tony Rover moaned. (Oh, were there ever sadder words? “Our daggers turn to rubber.”)

“Things have become so shaky that we're not sure whether we are talking about free or closed variables,” Morgan gave his thought.

“How can my own loving mother make such atrocious sandwiches?” Betty McCracken munched distastefully. Betty, who was underpaid, was a brown-sack girl who brought her own lunch. “This is worse than usual.” She chewed on. “The only thing to do with it is feed it to the computer.” She fed it to the computer which ate it with evident pleasure.

“Seven persons, seven thoughts,” John Candor mused.

“Seven persons, six thoughts,” Nancy Peters spat bitterly. “Betty, as usual, has contributed nothing.”

“Only the first stage of the answer,” John Candor said. “She said ‘The only thing to do with it is to feed it to the computer.’ Feed the problem to the computer, folks.”

They fed the problem to the computer by pieces and by whole. The machine was familiar with their lingos and it was acquainted with the Non-Valid Context Problems of Morgan Aye and with the Hollow Shell Person Puzzles of Tony Rover. It knew the Pervading Environment Ploy of Maurice Cree. It knew what trick-work to operate within.

Again and again the machine asked for various kinds of supplementary exterior data.

“Leave me with it,” the machine finally issued. “Assemble here again in sixty days, or hours — ”

“No, we want the answers right now,” John Candor insisted, “within sixty seconds.”

“The second is possibly the interval I was thinking of,” the machine issued. “What's time to a tin can anyhow?” It ground its data trains for a full minute.

“Well?” John Candor asked.

“Somehow I get the number three,” the machine issued.

“Three what, machine?”

“Three persons,” the machine issued. “They are unknowingly linked together to manufacture attitudes. They are without program or purpose or organization or remuneration or basis or malice.”

“Nobody is without malice,” August Crayfish insisted in a startled way. “They must be totally alien forms then. How do they manage their effects?”

“One with a gesture, one with a grimace, one with an intonation,” the machine issued.

“Where are they?” John Candor demanded.

“All comparatively near.” The machine drew three circles on the city map. “Each is to be found in his own circle most of the time.”

“Their names?” John Candor asked and the machine wrote the name of each in the proper circle.

“Do you have anything on their appearances?” Sterling Groshawk inquired and the machine manufactured three kymograph pictures of the targets.

“Have you their addresses or identifying numbers?” Maurice Cree asked.

“No. I think it's remarkable of me that I was able to come up with this much,” the machine issued.

“We can find them,” Betty McCracken said. “We can most likely find them in the phone book.”

“What worries me is that there's no malice in them,” John Candor worried. “Without malice, there's no handle to get hold of a thing. The Disestablishment has been firmly established for these several hundred years and we hold it to be privileged. It must not be upset by these three randoms. We will do what we must do.”

Mike Zhestovich was a mighty man. One does not make the primordial gestures out of weak body and hands. He looked like a steelworker — or anyhow like a worker at one of the powerful trades. His torso was like a barrel but more noble than ordinary barrels. His arms and hands were hardly to be believed. His neck was for the bulls, his head was as big as a thirteen gallon firkin, his eyeballs were the size of ducks' eggs and the hair on his chest and throat was that heavy black wire-grass that defies steel plowshares. His voice — well he didn't have much of a voice — it wasn't as mighty as the rest of him.

And he didn't really work at one of the powerful trades. He was a zipper repairman at the Jiffy Nifty Dry Cleaners.

August Crayfish of ABNC located Mike Zhestovitch in the Blind Robbin Bar which (if you recall the way that block lies) is just across that short jog-alley from the Jiffy Nifty. And August recognized big Mike at once. But how did big Mike get his effects?

“The Cardinals should take the Colts today,” a serious man there was saying.

“The Cardinals — ” Mike Zhestovitch began in the voice that was less noble than the rest of him, but he didn't finish the sentence. As a matter of fact, big Mike had never finished a sentence in all his life. Instead he made the gesture with his mighty hands and body. Words cannot describe the gesture but it was something like balling up an idea or opinion in the giant hands and throwing it away, utterly away, over the very edge of contempt.

The Cardinals, of course, did not take the Colts that day. For a moment it was doubtful whether the Cardinals would survive at all. From the corner of the eye, red feathers could be seen drifting away in the air.

August Crayfish carefully waited a moment and watched. A man walked out of the Blind Robbin and talked to another man in that little jog-alley. From their seriousness it was certain that they were talking baseball.

“The Cardinals — ” the first man said after a moment, and he also made the gesture. And seconds later a man playing eight-ball in the back of the Blind Robbin did the same thing.

August was sure then. Mike Zhestovitch not only could shrivel anything with the gesture, but the gesture as he used it was highly epidemic. It would spread, according to Schoeffler's Law of Dispersal, through the city in short minutes, through the world in short hours. And no opinion could stand against its disfavor. Mike Zhestovitch could wreck images and attitudes — and possibly he could also create them.

“Do you work alone?” August Crayfish asked.

“No. The rip-fix and the buttonsew girls work in the same cubbyhole,” Mike said with his curiously small voice.

“Do you know a Mary Smorfia?” August asked.

“I don't, no,” Mike said, a certain comprehension coming into his ducks'-egg-sized eyes. “And you are glad that I don't? Then I will. I'll find out who she is. I see it now that you are a wrong guy and she is a right girl.”

Then August Crayfish spoke the slogan that would be unveiled to the ears of the world that very night, a wonderfully slippery slogan that had cost a hundred thousand dollars to construct. It should have warned Mike Zhestovitch away from his mad resistance.

Mike Zhestovitch made the gesture, and the slogan was in ruins. And somewhere the Secret Crocodile lashed its tail in displeasure.

“Do you want to make a lot of money?” August Crayfish whispered after a long reevaluation pause.

“Money — from such as you — ” Big Mike didn't finish the sentence, he never did. But he made the gesture. The idea of a lot of money shriveled. And August Crayfish shriveled so small that he could not climb over the threshold of the Blind Robbin on the way out and had to be aided over it by the shod toe of a kind man. (This last statement is a literal exaggeration but it is the right direction.)

Nancy Peters of ABNC located Mary Smorfia in the King-Pin Bowling Alley, where she was a hamburger waitress and a beer buster. Mary was small, dark, unpretty (except for her high-frequency eyes and the beautiful gash across her face that was her mouth), lively, smart, busy, a member of that aberrant variety of the human race that was called Italian.

“Snorting Summer should take the Academy Award,” one nice guzzling lady at the counter was saying to another, “and Clover Elysee is the shoeless shoo-in for best actress of the year.”

And Mary Smorfia made the grimace. Ah, it was mostly done with the beautifully large mouth and yet every part of her entered into it, from the blue lights in her hair to her crinkly toes. It was a devastating, all-destroying grimace. It gobbled up, it nullified and it made itself felt to a great distance. The nice guzzling lady had not even been looking toward Mary Smorfia but she felt the grimace like a soul shock, and she herself did the grimace with a wonderful distortion of the features that weren't made for it.

And the grimace swept everything like quick contagion or prairie fire. Snorting Summer — gah! Clover Elysee — guggling gah! Those things were finished forever, beyond laughter, below derision. And Nancy Peters of ABNC noted the powerful effect carefully, for the original words of the nice guzzling lady were the very words that ABNC had selected to be echoed a hundred million times whenever the awards were thought of.

“Do you work alone?” Nancy Peters asked Mary Smorfia.

“Kid, I am so fast they don't need anyone else on this shift. I'm like silly lightning.”

“Did you ever think of becoming an actress, Mary?” Nancy asked in honey-tones.

“Oh, I made a commercial once,” Mary said out of her curly gash-mouth (she had to be kidding: she couldn't really have a mouth that looked like that). “I don't know whether I sold much of my guy's soap but I bet I got a lot of people off that Brand X. Ashes it was, worse even, after I monkey-faced it. They say I'm a natural — but once is enough.”

“Do you know a Mike Zhestovitch or a Clivendon Surrey?” Nancy asked.

“I don't think so,” Mary said. “What league do they bowl in? I bet I will like them both, though, and I will remember their names and find them.”

Nancy Peters was nervous. She felt that the annihilating grimace was about to strike again on Mary's lightning-gash mouth. But it was time for the test of strength. Nancy spoke the new slogan that had been selected for presentation to the world that very night, a wonderfully convincing and powerful slogan that should bring this random Mary Smorfia to heel if anything could. And she spoke it with all the absolute expertise of the Crocodile's Mouth behind her.

The Grimace! And the slogan was destroyed forever. And (grimacing horror turned inward) Nancy caught the contagion and was doing the grimace herself. She was quite unable to get the thing off her face.

Sheer humiliation overwhelmed the Nancy person, who had suddenly been made small. And somewhere the Secret Crocodile lashed its tail in displeasure and unease.

“Do you want to make twenty thousand dollars, Mary?” Nancy asked after she had returned from the jane where she had daubed her flushed face and cooled her flustered body.

“Twenty thousand dollars isn't very much,” Mary Smorfia sounded out of her panoramic mouth. “I make eighty-eight fifty now after everything. I could make a lot more if I wanted to go along with the cruds.”

“Twenty thousand dollars is very much more,” Nancy Peters said enticingly.

“It is very much more cruddy, kid.” Mary Smorfia grimaced. Grimaced! Not again! Nancy Peters fled in deflated panic. She felt herself dishonored forever.

Well, do you think it is all watermelon pickles and pepper relish, this unilaterally creating all the images and attitudes for the whole world? It isn't. It is a detailed and devious thing and the privileged Disestablishment had been building it for centuries. (The Establishment itself had been no more than a figure of speech for most of those centuries, a few clinging bits of bark: the heart of the tree had long been possessed by the privileged Disestablishment.) Three quick random persons could not be permitted to nullify words from the Mouth itself.

Morgan Aye of ABNC located Clivendon Surrey in Speedsters Café. Clivendon was a lank and fair-haired man with a sort of weariness about him, a worldliness that had to be generations old. He had the superior brow and the thoroughbred nose that isn't grown in short centuries. He had the voice, the intonation, the touch of Groton, the touch of Balliol, the strong touch of other institutions even more august. It was a marvelous voice, at least the intonation of it. Clivendon's employer once said that he didn't believe that Clivendon ever spoke in words, at least not in any words that he was ever able to understand. The intonation was really a snort, a sort of neigh, but it carried the cresting contempt of the ages in its tone. And it was contagious.

Clivendon was really of Swedish extraction and had come off a farm near Pottersville. He had developed that intonation for a role in a high school play. He had liked it and he had kept it. Clivendon was a motorcycle mechanic at Downhillers Garage.

“Do you work alone?” Morgan Aye asked Clivendon.

“Naeu. You work alone and you got to work. You work with a bunch and you can slip out from it,” Clivendon intoned. Yes, he talked in words and the words could be mostly understood. But the towering intonation was the thing, the world-wilting contempt of the tone. This man was a natural and Morgan felt himself a foot shorter in the very presence of that tone.

“Do you know a Mike Zhestovitch or a Mary Smorfia?” Morgan asked fearfully.

“That's a funny thing.” The tone cut through ear-wax and the soft spots of the spleen. “I had never heard of them but Mary Smorfia called me up not thirty minutes ago and said that she wanted both of us to meet Mike. So I'll meet them in about twenty minutes, as soon as the clock there says that I'm supposed to be off work at Downhillers Garage.”

“Don't meet them!” Morgan cried out violently. “That might be the closing of the link, the setting up of a league. It might be an affront to the Mouth itself.”

The tone, the neigh, the snort, the sharp edge of a wordless intonation sent Morgan reeling back. And there were echoes of it throughout Speedsters Café and in the streets outside. The tone was as contagious as it was cutting.

Morgan started to speak the newest selected slogan from the Mouth — and he stopped short. He was afraid of the test of strength. Two very expensive slogans had already been shattered today by these randoms. “No malice in the three,” the computer had said and: “without malice, there's no handle to get hold of a thing,” John Candor had stated. But somewhere in that mountainous and contagious contempt of tone that belonged to Clivendon Surrey had to be some malice. So Morgan Aye reached for what had always been the ultimate weapon of the Crocodile's Mouth. It always worked — it always worked if any malice at all existed in the object.

“How would you like to make five thousand dollars a week?” he whispered to Clivendon.

“What garage pays that much?” Clivendon asked in honest wonder. “I'm not that good a motorcycle mechanic.”

“Five thousand dollars a week to work with us at ABNC,” Morgan tempted. “We could use you in so many ways — that marvelous scorn to cut down any man we wished! You could lend the intonations of your voice to our — ”

The neigh was like a thousand sea stallions breaking up from the depths. The snort was one that crumbles cliffs at the ends of the earth. Morgan Aye had gone ghastly white and his ears were bleeding from the transgression of that cutting sound. There were even some words in Clivendon's sounding — “Why, then I'd be one of the birds that picks the shreds of flesh from between the teeth of the monster.” Blinding and hooting contempt in the tone and Morgan Aye was in the street and running from it.

But the echoes of that intonation were everywhere in that part of town, soon to be all over the town, all over the world. It was an epidemic of snorting at the Crocodile's Mouth itself. Fools! Did they know that this was but one step from snorting at the very Crocodile?

The ring had closed. The informal league had formed now. The three randoms had met and united. The Mouth was affronted. Worse than that, all the outpour of the Mouth was nullified. The whole world was rejecting the catchwords that came from the Mouth, was laughing at them, was throwing them away with the uttermost gesture, was monkey-facing them, was snorting them down, was casting them out with bottomless contempt.

This was the short reign of the secret society of three, who did not know that they were secret. But in their day they closed the Mouth down completely. It was filled with mud and swamp reeds and rotting flesh.

The Secret Crocodile was lashing its tail with acute displeasure now. The Crocodile's Mouth had become quite nervous. And what of the little birds that fly in and out of that mouth, that preen the teeth and glean scraps of flesh and slogans and catchwords there? The birds were in quite an unhappy flutter.

“There is open conspiracy against us by a secret society of three persons,” Mr. James Dandi was saying, “and all the world abominates a secret society. We have this thing to do this day — to cripple it forever in its strength. Otherwise we will be cast out and broken as ineffectual instruments and the Crocodile will bring in strong persons from the Cocked Eye or the Cryptic Cootie to take our places. Surely we are not without resources. What is the logical follow-up to the Fruitful Misunderstanding?”

“The Purposive Accident,” John Candor said immediately.

“Take care of it, John,” Mr. James Dandi said. “Remember, though, that he whose teeth we preen is the very bowels of compassion. I believe this is the salient thing in the world in our day. The Compassion of the Crocodile.”

“Take care of it, people,” John Candor said to his seven talented ones, “remembering always that the Crocodile is the very belly of compassion.”

“Take care of it,” the seven said to the computer, “always within the context of the jaws of compassion.”

The computer programmed a Purposive Accident to happen and manufactured such props as were needed. And the Purposive Accident was very well programmed.

There was no great amount of blood poured out. No persons were killed except several uninvolved bystanders. The secret three were left alive and ambulant and scathed only at their points of strength.

It happened in the block between the Blind Robbin Bar and Speedsters Café when all three members of the secret society happened to be walking together. The papers called it a bomb; they call everything a bomb that goes off like that. It was really a highly sophisticated homing device with a tripartite programming and it carried out its tripartite mission.

All three randoms, former members of the short-lived secret society, are well and working again. Mike Zhestovitch is no longer a zipper repairman (it takes two talented hands to fix those zippers), but he still works at the Jiffy Nifty Dry Cleaners. He runs one of those big pressers now which he can easily do with his powerful and undamaged left hand and his prosthetic right hand. But without his old right hand he can no longer make the contagious primordial gesture that once dumbfounded the Mouth and all its words. You just cannot make the big gesture with a false hand.

Mary Smorfia still works at the King-Pin Bowling Alley as hamburger waitress and beer buster. She is still small, dark, unpretty (except for her high-frequency eyes), lively, smart, and Italian. Her mouth is still a gash across her face, but now it is twice as great a gash as it used to be, and it no longer has its curled liveliness. Its mobility is all gone, it will no longer express the inexpressible, will no longer shatter a phrase or an attitude. Mary Smorfia is as she always was, except that now she is incapable of the famous grimace.

Clivendon Surrey is again a motorcycle mechanic at Downhillers Garage and again he spends most of his time in Speedsters Café. His vocal cords are gone, of course, but he gets by: he is able to speak with a throat microphone. But the famous intonation, the neigh, the destroying snort are all impossible for him.

The trouble is over with. Now again there is only one organization in the world to create the images and attitudes of the world. This ensures that only the standard attitudes of the Disestablishment shall prevail.

In our opening catalog we forgot one group. There is another secret society in the world composed of the good guys and good gals. It has no name that we have ever heard except just the Good Guys and Good Gals. At the moment this society controls nothing at all in the world. It stirs a little, though. It may move. It may collide, someday, even with the Secret Crocodile itself.

The All-At-Once Man

… let him know that the word translated ‘everlasting’ by our writers is what the Greeks term αἰώνιον, which is derived from αἰών, the Greek for Saeculum, an age. But the Latins have not ventured to translate this by secular, lest they should change the meaning into something widely different. For many things are called secular which so happen in this world as to pass away even in a short time; but what is termed αἰώνιον either has no end, or it lasts to the very end of this world.

The City of God — Saint Augustine

This is an attempt to assemble such facts (hard and soft) as may yet be found about a remarkable man who seemed to be absolutely balanced and integrated, yet who developed a schizo-gash deep as a canyon right down the middle of his person. Doctor George Drakos said that he developed three or four such schizo-gashes.

This is also an attempt to record some of the strange goings-on in the house on Harrow Street — and it is a half-hearted (no, a faint-hearted or downhearted) attempt to record the looser goings-on in the subsequently forever-house on Harrow Street. The subject is a man who had everything, who took hold of everything beyond that, and who was broken to pieces by it. Or was not.

“I want to be the complete man,” John Penandrew used to say of himself.

“I want to be the complete man,” he would say to all of us who would hear him. Well, he was already the most complete man that any of us had ever seen. He had been a promising young man: as Don Marquis had said of himself, he had been a promising young man for twenty years. But Penandrew didn't show those twenty years at all, except in his depth.

His eyes, his shape, his everything were just as they all had been when he left Monica Hall twenty years before. He had been a gilded youth then — or at least he had been plated over with a very shiny substance. He still was, he was still that youth, but in his depth he was a full man, sure and mature, and with the several appearances together and unconflicting. For he was also the boy he had been thirty years before, in no detail changed. He had been a loud-mouthed kid; but smart all the time, and smooth when he wanted to be. Now there was a boy, a youth, and a man — three non-contradictory stages of him — looking out of his gray eyes. His complexity impressed me strongly. And it also impressed four men who were not as easily impressed as I was.

There were five men who knew everything; and there was myself. We met loosely two or three times a year. The five men who knew everything were this John Penandrew (he was in banks as his father had been); Dr. George Drakos, who was Greek and who used to go to Greek school in the evenings; Harry O'Donovan, who was a politician as his fathers had been forever; Cris Benedetti, an ex-seminarian who taught literature and esoterica at the University; and Barnaby Sheen, who was owner of the Sooner State Seismograph Enterprizes.

These five men were all rich, and they knew everything. I wasn't, and I didn't. I belonged to the loose group by accident: they never noticed that I alone had not become rich or that there were evident gaps in my information.

We had all gone to school together to the Augustinians at Monica Hall, and minds once formed by the Augustinians are Augustinian forever. We had learned to latch onto every sound idea and intuition and hold on. At least we had more scope than those who went to school to the Jesuits or the Dominicans. This information is all pertinent. Without the Augustinian formation John Penandrew would never have shattered — he'd have bent.

“I've decided not to die in the natural course of things,” John Penandrew said softly one evening. The other four of those men who knew everything didn't seem at all surprised by his declaration.

“You've given enough thought to it, have you?” Cris Benedetti asked him. “That's really the way you want it?”

“Yes, that's the way I want it,” John Penandrew said. “And I've considered it pretty thoroughly.”

“You've decided to live forever then, have you?” Barney Sheen asked with just a hint of boyish malice.

“Naturally not to live forever here,” Penandrew attempted to explain. “I've decided to live only as long as the world lasts, unless I am called from my plan by peremptory order. I am resolved, however, to live for very many normal lifetimes. The idea appeals to me strongly.”

“Have you decided just how you will bring this about?” Dr. George Drakos asked.

“Not fully decided. I've begun to consider that part only recently. Of first importance is always the decision to do a thing. The means of carrying it out will have to follow that decision and flow from it. There is no real reason why I shouldn't be able to do it though.”

“No, I suppose not,” Cris Benedetti said thoughtfully. “You're an intelligent man and you're used to tall problems. But there have been other intelligent men and, as far as I know, none of them has done this thing.”

“Do you know of any really intelligent man who has decided to do this and then has failed in the doing?” Penandrew asked.

“No, not if you put it that way,” Cris admitted. “Most problems remain unsolved simply because they have never been tried seriously in the proper framework. And there are legends of men (I presume them to be intelligent) who have done this thing and are doing it. Not very reputable legends, though.”

“Well, what is it then, an elixir of youth that you'll be seeking?” Harry O'Donovan asked in his high voice.

“No, Harry, that idea is clearly unworkable. It couldn't be taken seriously by anyone except a youth,” Penandrew talked it out carefully. “It will not be an elixir of youth: it will be an elixir of all ages that, I believe, is the crux of the matter. I do not want to be only a youth forever — or for a very long time — I am more than just a youth now. It would not be possible to remain a youth forever.”

“Then what?” O'Donovan demanded. “I don't believe you've thought this out very thoroughly, John. Do you want to live for a very long time and you be getting older and older and older all that time?”

“But I have thought it out pretty thoroughly, Harry. I will get old only at one end, only in depth. I will become a complete man, and then still more complete. I believe that there is no record of any complete man ever dying — that's the thing.”

“I believe there is no record of any complete man at all,” George Drakos said. “That's really the thing.”

“There's probably been a large handful of us,” Penandrew said. “I know pretty well what I want to do and I know pretty well what it consists of. I will become every aeon of myself simultaneously; then I will have become a complete man — and then I will not die. There is a meaning within a meaning of the old word aeon. Aeon means ages. But the plenoma or plentitude is made up of substantial powers called aeons. I maintain that these two meanings are the same. In Gnosticism, the aeon is one of the group of eternal beings that combine to form the supreme being — all of them are eternal and simultaneous, but no one of them would be eternal out of combination. I believe that there is analogy on the human plane; and I intend to become that analogy, to be all my ages simultaneously and forever, to be every aeon of myself. I will be forever a boy, forever a youth, forever a man, and forever an old man. I'm already something of this multiple appearance, I'm told. I guarantee that I'll be a boy forever. I'll nail down that end.”

“And what happens when the old man in you gets older and older and dies?” Drakos asked.

“I don't know what will happen, George, but I'm certainly interested in knowing. Possibly I will assume a still older man, and then a still older. I'm not sure there is a necessary connection between very old age and death. It may be, though, that the extreme aeons of me will pass over the edge and give me a foot in each world. I'd like that. The possibilities are almost endless. But I believe that the boy in me, the youth in me, the man in me will live for innumerable lifetimes.”

“Oh brother!” Harry O'Donovan sounded in his high voice. “And how will you be doing it all? Not by talking about it, I'll bet.”

“Yes, I will do it by considerable talking about it and by much more thinking about it,” Penandrew ventured. “It is not a thing for gadgets or apparatuses, though I may employ them some. It is a thing, I believe, of mental and physical disposition; and I tell you that I'm well disposed towards it.”

This John Penandrew who lived in the big house on Harrow Street was married to Zoe Archikos. Barnaby Sheen would like to have been married to her. So would Cris Benedetti and Harry O'Donovan. So would George Drakos except that she was his cousin. Zoe was a creature that has become fairly rare these last twenty-five centuries: a blonde Grecian, a veritable Helen, a genuinely classic model with that brassiness that must go with it. The bronze age understood the necessity of this high brass, but we have forgotten.

Oh, she had form and life, she was perfection and brindled passion — and she was also the blast of a brass horn. John Penandrew was fortunate in having her; she should have been elixir enough for anyone. But he was fortunate in almost everything.

“The fathers tell us that Adam, in his preternatural state, enjoyed all ages at once,” Barnaby Sheen said. “So it is not strictly true that he had no childhood, even though he was created adult. He was created all ages at once. It was a good trick till he broke it. And, by coincidence, I recently ran into the still surviving legend of the one man who, since Adam, is most persistently believed to have been all ages at once and to be still alive.”

“Coincidence, which is simultaneity, is valid when it touches a simultaneous man as I am becoming,” John Penandrew said with what would have been pomposity in another man. “Ah — where did you run into the latest legend of Prester John, Barney?”

“In Ethiopia. I have several crews doing petroleum exploration work there and I visited there recently. Some of the simple local workmen talk of the everlasting man as if he were a present-day presence.”

“Near Magdala, was it?” John Penandrew asked with sudden eagerness.

“About seventy miles northwest of there, in the Guna Slopes.”

“I was sure it was near. Magdala, of course, is a modern name-form of old Mogadore, the legendary kingdom of Prester John.”

“That's impossible,” George Drakos cut in. “Anyone with even an elementary knowledge of the Amharic language would know that the one name could not change into the other.”

“Anyone with even an elementary knowledge of anything would know that both names are from the Geez and not the Amharic language,” Cris Benedetti sneered, “and there is a strong possibility that the two names are the same, George.”

(It is sometimes confusing to have these acquaintances who know everything.)

“But you can't do it, John,” Cris continued, “in Ethiopia or anywhere. You can't be a simultaneous man. You haven't the integrity for it.”

“Why not, Cris? I pay tithes of cumin and that other stuff. I love my wife and many other persons. I have a pleasant way with my money, and I do not grind the faces of the poor. Why haven't I integrity?”

“You have common decency, John, but not integrity,” Cris said. “I use the word to mean unified totality and scope — that is integrity in the theological sense. I use the word as Tanquerey uses it.”

(They used to study Tanquerey's Dogmatic Theology in the seminaries. Now they study rubbish.)

“There are several ways I can go about this,” Penandrew said. “I believe that we originally had this simultaneity and everlastingness as a preternatural gift. Then we were deprived of it. But it remains a part of our preternatural nature. This means that we must be deprived of it all over again every day or it will flow back into us. It could be as simple a thing as actinic rays depriving us of this handy gift of everlasting life. I've studied these possibilities a little. I could have a series of silver plates or baffles set into my head to combat the rays. That's one way.”

“What're some other ways?” Barnaby Sheen asked.

“Oh, proper disposition of mind and body. Induced mystical states combined with my natural powers and proclivities. I believe that there may be gadgetry employed as a trigger — but only as a trigger for the alteration. I believe that it will be mostly realizing a state of being that already belongs to us, something that belongs to our preternatural nature.”

“Or our unnatural nature,” Barnaby said. “You didn't use to play so loose with words. What're some other ways, John?”

“Oh, I may go and find Prester John and learn how he's been doing it these thousands of years,” John Penandrew said. “And I will go and do likewise.”

“Did you ever hear anything like that, Laff?” Barnaby asked me. “Has the subject ever been handled in your — ah, pardon my smile — field?”

“Several stories have handled the subject,” I said, “but not in the variation that Penandrew wants to give it.”

II

Saying: O grandfather,

the little ones have nothing of which to make a symbol.

He replied, saying:

… they shall make of me their symbol.

… the four divisions of days (stages of life) they shall enable themselves to reach and enter…

Legends

Appendix to a Dictionary of the Osage Language

 — Francis la Flesche

John Penandrew was out of town for about a year. When he came back, he had a different look to him. Oh, he had simultaneity now! He really had it. He was the boy he had been thirty years ago; he was the youth he had been twenty years ago; he was the man he should have been now; and he was also an older man. He was all these several persons or ages at once, much more than he had been before — all of them, completely and unconflictingly. He had pulled it off. He was truly the simultaneous man. But that isn't exactly what we mean when we say that he had a different look to him.

In all his simultaneous persons he had something just a little bit lopsided about him. One eye was always just a little bit larger than the other. There was more than a hint of deformity, and there shouldn't have been — not in this complete man.

But he was the complete man now. He had done it. He had pulled the coup. He was wound up all the way and he would live forever unless he flew apart. This was no fakery. You could feel that he had done it.

He lived in the big house on Harrow Street with the brassy, classy Zoe and they lived it to the hilt. There wasn't ever anyone in such a hurry to have so much fun so fast. They were perfervid about it. But why should he be in such a hurry when he had forever?

Well, he had money and he had talent and he had Zoe. The boy was strong in him now (he had been a loud-mouthed kid, but smart all the time and smooth when he wanted to be); the youth was in him very strong (he had been a gilded youth, or at least a very brassy one); and the man and the older man were vital and shouting in him. The Penandrews were cutting a wide swath and they were much in the papers. But what was John's big hurry now?

“Add one dimension, then you might as well add another,” he grinned with a grin a little too lopsided for a complete and simultaneous man. “Speed, that's the thing. Speed forever, and lean heavy on that hooting horn.”

But it was another year before myself and those five men who knew everything were all together again.

John Penandrew lolled with his lopsided grin as though he were too full of mischief to talk. And Barnaby Sheen wound into one of his cosmic theses, of which he had hundreds:

“Just before the Beginning, there was a perfect sphere and no other thing,” Barnaby spoke in his rich voice. “At least it supposed itself to be a perfect sphere — it had no imperfect spheroid with which to compare itself. It suspected that it was revolving at a very high rate of speed, such a rate of speed that it would immediately fly apart if the rotation could be established as fact. But in relation to what point could it be rotating?

“It was not in space — there was no space beyond it; how could there be? It could not be in motion, of course, there being nothing relative to it. Neither could it be at rest — in relation to what could it be at rest? It was not in time nor in eternity, there being nothing to pose it against in either aspect. It had no size, for there was nothing to which it might be compared. It might be a pinhead in size, or a mega-megalo. It had no temperature, it had no mass, it had no gravity — all these things are relative to other things.

“Then an exterior speck appeared. That was the Beginning, as the sphere's lone existence had not been. The mere speck was less than one billionth to the billionth power the diameter of the sphere and wasn't much more than a billion billions of diameters from it. Now there was both contrast and relationship.

“Now there was size and mass and temperature, space, time, and motion; for there was something to relate to. The sphere was indeed found to be in furious and powerful rotation, now that it could rotate in relation to something. It was in such rapid rotation that it deformed itself with its own centrifugal force, it ruptured itself, it flowed apart completely and everything thence is from its pieces.

“But if the speck had been ten times the size it was (still too small for any eye ever to see) the universe would have been only one-tenth as large, forever, in every aspect.

“What happened to the speck? Was it consumed in the great explosion? Probably not. Likely it never existed at all. It was a mere illusion to get things started. Say, I consider that an excellent ‘In the Beginning’ bit. Can you use that, Laff? Can you make a piece out of that piece?”

“I will use it some day,” I said.

“The important thing about that speck was its duration,” John Penandrew licked the words out with a tongue that now seemed a little lopsided. “It lasted for much less than a billionth of a billionth of a second. It was in contrast to the short-duration speck that the then-happening cosmos acquired its delusion of immortality.”

“You are sure it is a delusion, Pen?” Cris Benedetti asked anxiously, as though much depended on the answer.

“Yes, all a delusion,” Penandrew grinned. “We cosmic types call it the workable delusion, and we will work it for all it is worth.”

“Tell us the truth, Penandrew,” Barnaby Sheen said gruffly. “Did you really do it? And how did you do it?”

“I really did it, Barney. I'll not die. I'll dance on your graves and on the graves of your great-great-grandchildren. I'll make a point of it. I'll dance naked on the graves as David danced before the Ark.”

“Why such frenzied pleasure in our going, Pen?” Cris asked with some hurt.

“It's the boy in me. He's a bit monstrous now and he's me. I can't change him, or any of us, or it will all collapse. It's mine. I'll hang onto it. I'll bow my back. I won't give an inch ever. I've got a mindset in me now — that's a big part of it.”

“Yes, I believe you did pull it off, Penandrew,” Barnaby said slowly. “How did you do it, though? By elixir? By plates against the rays? By Prester John's secret? How?”

“Oh yes, I finally lifted the secret from Prester John himself and now I will not die in the natural course of things. But I'll not tell you about it. You don't need to know about it. Why should you want to know?”

“We also might want to avoid dying in the natural course of things,” Doctor George Drakos said softly.

“No, no, that's impossible!” Penandrew shouted. “I won't be done out of it by anyone. I'll hold onto it for dear life — and that is exactly the case of it.”

“Is it an exclusive thing?” Harry O'Donovan asked, “and it can't be shared?”

“It cannot be shared,” Penandrew said harshly. “It isn't anything like you think it is. It isn't at all as I thought it would be. It became a freak in its general withdrawal. It's a jealous thing. It's a snake in the hand and it must be held tightly. It isn't the preternatural thing I thought it would be. It's an unnatural thing now — and only one person in the world can have it at a time, for all time. I won't let go of it. Hack my hands off — but I won't let go of it!”

“How is Prester John?” Barnaby Sheen asked in a strong low tone. “Oh, leave off the legends,” Harry O'Donovan sounded angrily. “If there ever was a Prester John he's been dead these thousand years.”

“No. About eighteen months,” Penandrew said. “I found him alive. And now he is dead.”

“You killed him,” Barnaby said simply.

“How would I kill him?” Penandrew protested. “He died of old age and God knows that that is the truth. He crumbled to dust. Why should he not have died of old age? Do you know how long he had been around? He saw Rome fall. And Jerusalem.”

“What did you take from him?” Barnaby Sheen asked.

“I took the jealous thing, the only thing. And now I will not die in the natural course of things. He wanted me to take it. He had been trying to give it to someone for a long time.”

“That is the truth?” Sheen asked.

“That is the truth,” Penandrew said. And it was the truth, we all knew that, but it was a lopsided truth. Penandrew left us suddenly then.

“May the sun come up on him crooked in the morning,” Harry O'Donovan said bitterly.

But in the big house on Harrow Street, John and Zoe Penandrew lived it up to the haft. It was speed forever and lean heavy on the hooting horn. There was something a little disreputable about the couple now, if that word can be used of rich and positioned people.

John grew older only in the old man of him. The boy in him was still the boy, the youth still the youth, the man still the man. He was living at least four lives at once, all at high speed and all forever. Zoe became more buxom and more classic, more brassy, more lively. If she aged at all she did it entrancingly and disgracefully, but not ungracefully. There was nobody like her. She was full and overflowing, always.

All the fun that could be crammed into every day and night! Speed, and the dangerous teetering that goes with very high speed. They went on forever.

Actually they went on for ten years. Then Zoe left him and he broke up.

No. He broke up first and then she left him.

“I lost it,” he said, “and I couldn't have. Nobody could ever have got it out of my grip.”

III

For his duration too there is a word — the word Aevum or Aeviternity, the duration of that in which its essence or substance knows no change: though by its accidents it can know change…

Theology and Sanity — F. J. Sheed

It was then that the doings in the house on Harrow Street took a peculiar turn. Things had been hectic when Zoe was there; they had been noisy and publicized. But, whatever Zoe was, she was always High Brass. She'd had class. Now the house and happenings degenerated.

John Penandrew brought those three nephews of his into the big house to live with him. They were a crass bunch. There was something pretty low about them, and they brought John pretty low. A man should not be ashamed of his poor relations, of course: he should help them if they need help; and perhaps it was the essence of charity that John should take them into his own house. John had real charity in his heart; there is no taking that away from him. He also had baser things there and they began to pour out of it now. The three nephews were bums, and John Penandrew became a bum along with them. Rich bums are the worst kind.

And there was no doubting the kinship. All three of the fellows had the family look strongly. They were loudmouths, as John had always been a little — but they were not smart and they were not smooth, as John could be when he wished. They all had what I can only call a facial deformity and they had it to a grotesque degree where John had it only to a minor extent. It was that lopsided look. It was that one eye bigger than the other. Coming out of that clan, John Penandrew came by his own slight deformity honestly.

There were low-life doings at the big house on Harrow Street. The four Penandrew males each seemed to bring in seven cronies worse than himself. There were riotous doings there and the black maria was a frequent visitor to those doors. There was the aroma of stale evil in all this and John hadn't used to be a bad sort of man.

John Penandrew talked rationally but sadly whenever we came across him.

“I should never have taken the thing,” he said. “I knew before I finally seized it that it was wrong and unnatural. And, having taken it, I should have been willing to let it go easier when I found what a deformity it really was. ‘The corruption of the best is the worst — ’ do you remember when we were taught that? This excellent gift was taken away from us long ago, and for a reason. I had it as a tainted and forbidden remnant, and I held onto it like a snake in the hand. But I will not easily give up any strong idea that I have held. I have an intransigent mind. Do you remember when we were taught to have that? I held it too tight, and it shattered me.”

And in fact John Penandrew was a shattered man now — or a splattered one. The sap had been all drained out of him, as though the nephews were sapsuckers or bloodsuckers who preyed on him. He weathered badly. Now he looked older than he was and he no longer looked all ages at once. He aged monstrously — he leered and lolled. He seemed to be returning to most unaromatic dust.

He had given up his chairmanships of the boards and his associations with the banks. It was their loss. He had always been very smart in matters of business and policy. He knew that that was finished with him now. He took his money and went home.

And that home was a shipwreck. The middle nephew was as queer as a glass-egg goose. He had a stack of morals charges against him and John Penandrew had thousands of dollars of bond out on him. He was an almost personable fellow, but he was slanted — how he was slanted!

The youngest nephew was no more than a boy — a cat-killing, window-breaking, arsonous vandal who led a wild pack and always left a trail right up to the Harrow Street house. What things he got away with because he was not yet adult! And him much more intricate than the adults who had to deal with him, and much more deadly! It is pretty certain that he killed larger and higher things than cats and broke more fragile things than windows.

The oldest nephew, a twisted humorist, an almost good fellow, was the instigator of the endless series of sick parties held in the big house, the procurer of the dozen or so florid witches who always came with the dark. He was an experimenter in the vices, an innovator of reputation.

John Penandrew had become an old and dirty caricature of himself. There was something artificial about him now, as though he were no more than a mask and effigy propped up on a display float at some garish carnival. The shape he was in, John Penandrew surely could not go on forever, and he didn't.

“There has got to be an infusion of brains in the neighborhood and the militant world,” Barnaby Sheen said once when we were all together, except John Penandrew. “There is a stupidity on everything, and I cannot completely except even the present group. We need greater brains, wisdom, judgment, adequacy of the spirit and of spirit-handling.”

“We need it, but where will you get it?” Harry O'Donovan asked.

“Oh, from Aethiopia Cerebralis, I suppose. It's the only one of the Wells of Wisdom that I have the location of. I am thinking of the Guna Slopes whence the late monstrosity came. If a stolen secret of sick application comes from there, then we must bring counteracting wisdom from there also.”

“Yes, there is an aura of braininess about that place,” George Drakos said, “but has its primary been discovered?”

“Yes, of course. Discovered or guessed by myself at least. I will go there and get light for our darkness. Magi have come from those slopes before to grace the poorer parts of the world. I am going to recruit.”

“Oh, but what if it turns out to be another stolen secret of sick application?” Cris Benedetti asked with apprehension.

“I will be very careful about that,” Barnaby said. “I will not steal a star from those slopes. I will beg a young star to come.”

After about three years of cohabitation with the nephews, John Penandrew died. That should have wrecked the legend that he would live forever. Maybe not though. Well, it really seemed that he did not die in the natural course of things. There was something most unnatural about the course of his dying, as though he had turned to dust before he died; as though what died was not himself at all; as though the dying were an incident, almost an afterthought.

He wasn't much more than fifty years old. He looked ninety. Zoe didn't come to the funeral.

“He isn't in very good shape right now,” she said. “I'll wait a few months, and then go back to him when things are looking a little better with him.” She wasn't at all distraught; she was just not making sense. She left the country the night before the funeral.

After the funeral mass, after the Zechariah Canticle when the body was taken out from the church, Barnaby Sheen whispered to the priest in the vestibule:

“I don't believe you've got him all there.”

“I don't believe so either,” the priest whispered back.

Zoe inherited.

The nephews? No, they didn't get anything.

There was something a little bit loose about those nephews. They weren't — ah — seen again. No trace was found of them, either backward or forward. They simply hadn't been. In the legal and recorded sense, at least, John Penandrew hadn't had any nephews. He had had attributes, we suppose, but not nephews. Well, peace to the pieces of the poor rich man!

It's a moral paradigm, really, of a man who reached for too much and was shattered by it. It's a neat instance of final moral compensation and seemliness. Yes, except that it wasn't neat; that this wasn't the final part of it; and that the compensation was not particularly moral.

It was not neat because there were pieces sticking out of it — a primordial brass horn that surely wasn't Gabriel's; and three, at least, noisy persons in the house on Harrow Street.

It was stated that the nephews were not seen again — but they were heard. Oh how they were heard! They were the noisiest unbodied bodies that ever assaulted honest ears. They and their florid witches (unseen also) made the nights — well — interesting, for quite some months in that long block on Harrow Street.

This was the first phase of the Haunted House on Harrow Street. It was featured in Sunday supplements everywhere, likely in your own town paper. It was included in books like Beyond the Strange. It became a classic instance.

And that was only the first phase of the Haunted House episode. The next phase was not so loudly trumpeted (don't use that word in this case) to the world. There was a tendency to play it down. It was too hell-fire hot to handle.

Zoe came back to town, bright and big and brassy as ever. A classic personage, Zoe. How the classic has been underestimated and misunderstood! But she came in almost silently, muted brass with only a hint of dazzle and blare.

“I believe that things will be looking a little better with my husband John now,” she said. “He should be better composed by this time. I am his wife. I will just move in with him again and be the proper wife to him.”

“Move in where?” Harry O'Donovan asked aghast. “Into the grave?”

“Oh no, I'll move back into the house on Harrow Street and live there with my husband.”

“Zoe, did you take the, well, thing from John?” Barnaby Sheen asked curiously.

“Yes, I took it, Barney, but only for a short while. I'll give it back to him now. He may be able to cope with it this time. I don't need such things myself. This time I am certain that we will have a long and entertaining life together. All things coalesce for us now.”

“Zoe, you're not making sense. John Penandrew is dead!” Cris Benedetti shouted.

“Who isn't?” she asked simply. “I'll bet you though, Cris — ” (raucous horn blowing in the distance) “that he's more alive than you are at this minute. Or you or you or you or you. If any of you were as alive as he is, I'd have you.”

“You are out of your wits, Zoe,” George Drakos said and blinked. There was something the matter with Drakos' eyes, with all of our eyes. Somewhere was a brassy shimmer of the second brightest light that human eyes will ever see. The four men who knew everything did not know Zoe Archikos. Much less did I.

Zoe moved back into the house on Harrow Street. And how was it with her there? Noisy, noisy. Some things at least coalesced for her or into her: among these, the florid witches who used to come with the dark. Their voices had been so jangling because they were broken voices, part voices. Now they were together in that dozen-toned instrument, the red-brass, the flesh-brass. They had never been anything other than wraiths of her. Now she was all one again.

There was some evidence also (shouting, grisly evidence) that the aeons or nephews or attributes had all coalesced into John Penandrew again.

Well, that is the sort of thing that a town must live with, or die with; but it will not live with it on a normal course.

Listen! No, not with your ears! Listen with your crawling flesh! Did you yourself ever meet a man after you had seen him dead? It does give you a dread, does it not? There was no need of elaboration. John Penandrew was a humorist, but by that time he had become a little edgy of horror humor. There was none of that coming-through-the-walls business. He came in normally by the door and sat down.

“Jesus Christ!” Barnaby Sheen moaned. “Are you a ghost, John?”

“The very opposite,” Penandrew said softly. “In fact, I had to give up the ghost.” Penandrew was that kind of humorist, but even bad jokes are shocking from a man who's supposed to be dead.

“It wasn't all of you in the coffin was it, John?” Barnaby asked in wonder.

“No. Only my older aspect went over the edge. I once thought that this would give me a foot in each world and I was curious about it. It didn't work that way. I have no consciousness of that aspect now; nor, I suppose, has he of me. I shuffled off the mortal coil there. I've won. That's something. Nobody else ever won at it — except those like Zoe who were already preternatural.”

“You're a damned zombie, Penandrew!” Harry O'Donovan cried in shrill anger.

“Can a zombie be damned?” Penandrew asked. “I don't know. Tell me, Cris. You were the theology student. For damnation is there not required a nature of a certain moment? But I'm of another moment now. Momentum, I am saying, which means a movement and a power and a weight; and ‘moment of time’ is only part of its meaning and only part of mine.”

“Damn your Latin! You're a deformity,” O'Donovan cried.

“Yes. I'm a deformed curve, the one that never closes on itself,” Penandrew said with his lopsided smile. “Barnaby Sheen's ‘In the Beginning’ bit left something out. There was what might have been a perfect sphere, yes. There was, possibly, an exterior speck for contrast. I say that there was something else, one curve that would not close when everything else closed into the rather neat package that called itself the Cosmos, the Beauty. There was one shape left over. I am part of that other shape. Try being a little lopsided sometimes, men. You live longer by it.”

That was the last real talk that we ever had with John Penandrew. He never sought our company again and we sure never sought his.

Nobody else lives in that long block on Harrow Street now, but the noises are overriding in that whole part of town. There is nothing the law can do. It is always that beautifully brassy woman there when they call and always with her artless answers:

“It is only myself and my husband together here,” Zoe says, “and we taking our simple pleasures together. Is that so wrong?” Even coppers get that funny look in their eyes when they have been hexed by the pervading sound of the brass winds.

Old men and young boys often gather near that house at night and howl like wolves from the glandular ghosts that the strange flesh calls up in them. But even the most aroused of them will not attempt the house or the doors.

The Penandrews are a unique couple taking their pleasures together all at once forever, and so violently as to drive the whole town stone-deaf — like those old stone-deaf statues, their only real kindred. For these two will not die in any natural course of things, not with that big loud bright brassy horn blowing in a distance, and at absolutely close range, all at once, everywhere, unclosed, lopsided. It's the ending that hasn't any end. The Stone is found, and it's an older texture than the philosophers believed. The transmutation is accomplished — into brass. Classic and koine: this is the Zoe who dies hardly forever; this is the Penandrew, the man of the wrong shape.

The four men who know everything understand it now.

And I do not.

Five little Wise Men, sitting on the floor.

One lived forever, and then there were four.

Author's Commentary

Dorg

The Problem: Straited Ecology (not enough to eat).

Projected Answer: Turnip and Tetrapod.

Projected Method: Find them, find them.

Methodologist: A Crash-Oriented Chief of Remedial Ecology.

Spin-Offs: An Amalgamated Youth, a Trilobal Psychologist, a Mad Cartoonist.

Recycled Method: “On your feet, Dordogne, do it one more time.”

“It beats me how you will find the answer to world hunger in a mad cartoonist and a half-mad psychologist,” the pleasantly ponderous Annalouise Krug railed angrily. (Annalouise was a member of Amalgamated Youth.) “This is the sort of unimaginative drivel we have always had from the aged,” she ran on. (Whenever three or more persons were gathered together anywhere in the world to discuss actions, a member of Amalgamated Youth must be present; this was the law.) “What we need is fresh insights, youthful impetus: not the woeful stutterings of aged minds,” she stated.

“You are the oldest person present, Annalouise,” Adrian Durchbruch the crash-oriented Chief of Remedial Ecology bounded back at her.

“The oldest only in years, and then only if you unjuggle the record,” Annalouise maintained. “I have had my age officially set back eleven years. In Amalgamated Youth we have that privilege. Besides, you have no idea how difficult it is to recruit chronological youths into Amalgamated Youth. Further besides, Adrian, you are a crook-tailed boor to mention my age, considering all the years I have given to Youth.”

“And you are a slashing female shrew, Annalouise, to refer to Dordogne and Riddle as respectively mad and half-mad while they are present,” Adrian D. volleyed the words back off Annalouise.

James Riddle had fixed Annalouise with a pleasant scowl when she called him half-mad. J. P. Dordogne had sketched on a square of paper, then balled it up thrown it to her. She smoothed it out and looked at it.

“They are no less mad for being present,” she said with some reason. “Let's start it again, old man. How are you going to solve the problem of world hunger with a mad cartoonist and a half-mad psychologist? Neither one of them knows anything about ecology. Neither one knows anything about anything. And as to food, why I could eat them both up within a week myself and be hungry again.”

Annalouise Krug, though she was both the largest and oldest person present, was also the prettiest. And she was not really so old: she was not yet thirty. None of the four persons present was of really advanced years or stiffened mind. This Annalouise was of the swift and powerful loveliness and full figure that is sometimes called Junoesque, but we will not call her so. She was suddenly in the fashion, though. There is something interesting about full-bodied women in those times when the edge is on the hunger just a bit. Besides which she held her age better than did most members of Amalgamated Youth.

The mad cartoonist was J. P. (Jasper Pendragon) Dordogne. He used to sign his strips “Dorg,” and some of his friends called him Mad Dorg. He was a small, sandy young fellow, all bland and grinning except for his mad black eyes which he said he had inked in himself. While Annalouise was tongue-lashing them, Dordogne had sat silently drawing lampoons of her, balling them up, and throwing them to her, and she caught them and smoothed them out with beautiful anger.

“The dorg has actually been seen, Annalouise,” Adrian Durchbruch lobbed the words in as he bounced around. “It has been seen by at least a dozen persons.” Adrian was not referring to the cartoonist “Dorg” Dordogne, but to the fabled animal named dorg that sometimes appeared in Dordogne's comic strip. And now there had been a whole spate of clownish reports that the burlesque animal had actually been seen out in the boondocks, alive and ill.

Adrian bounced around constantly as though he had springs in the balls of his feet. He expedited, he organized, he said things like “Let's have a brain-crash” when he meant “Let's discuss this for a moment.” He was the crash-oriented Chief of Remedial Ecology. He had held the job for only a week, and he wouldn't last another week if he didn't come up with something good. There was a rapid turnover of chiefs in the Department of Remedial Ecology. That showed constant effort and reassessment, even if there were no results in the department.

“I don't believe it,” Annalouise chimed and resonated. A skinny girl simply will not have that full resonance. “If ever I see it I'll go get my eyes fixed. I will not believe it, not when the witless Dordogne invented it in his comic strip; not when the half-witless Jimmy Riddle declared that it was a creative act and that the animal was bound to appear soon afterward. There cannot be such an animal.”

“It's that or turnips,” the psychologist said, “and they've already got whole shoals of psychologists studying the creative act in neo-turnips.” James Riddle was the trilobal psychologist. He really had a third lobe or cerebral hemisphere to his brain, this on the actual testimony of proper doctors, but it didn't seem to do much for him. He was boyish and dreamy and horn-rimmed. His theories were astonishing, but he wasn't.

“Since this is our study and our problem, we may as well go and see if we can catch a glimpse of the dorg,” Riddle chattered.

“What worries me,” Adrian Durchbruch said, “is that there seems to be only one dorg, a male.”

“But that part is almost too good to be true,” Riddle exulted. “It's in total concord with my theory. You knew it would be that way, didn't you, Dordogne?”

“Yes, but I've been afraid to finish drawing it that way,” the mad cartoonist mumbled.

“Where has the dorg been sighted, Adrian?” Riddle asked him.

“Down in the Winding Stair Mountains of — ah — Oklahoma,” Durchbruch chirped, and bounced around in eagerness to be at it.

“Then let's fly down there right now,” Riddle offered. “I used to own an airplane. I wonder if I still have it.”

“Yes, you still have it,” Annalouise told him.

“Good, let's go.” All of them, Dordogne the mad cartoonist, James Riddle the trilobal psychologist, Adrian Durchbruch the crash-oriented Chief of Remedial Ecology, and Annalouise Krug the Amalgamated Youth went out to Riddle's place and got in the plane.

“Which way is Oklahoma?” Riddle asked when they were airborne. “Listen to the sound of that engine, people, to the sound of any engine anywhere. Do you know that functionally the engine sounds have no purpose? The various engines produce their monotonous noises solely to hypnotize human persons. Then the engines are able to — ” But Riddle's warning words were suddenly blocked out by the engine's suddenly increased noise volume. Engines will do that every time the subject is about to be discussed.

The world was in pretty short supply as to food. The miracle of the barley loaves and the fishes had fed the multitudes for a long time. Barley had been developed that would yield five hundred bushels an acre, and billions and billions of fishes had been noodled out of the oceans. The oceans, however, are mostly desert, so have they always been; and the oases and streams and continental shelves of them had been harvested to their limits of both fish and plankton. And on land all the worthy areas were producing to their utmost, and still it was not enough.

The solution: Turnip or Tetrapod. A plant was needed that would grow more lush than barley, more lush than grass, that would be fully edible for humans in both top and bottom of it, that would grow on even the worst land. And such a plant was being searched for carefully. More than that, it was being invented every day, everywhere, everyhow. But the new plants were not really good enough.

And a four-footed animal (they are the best kind) was being searched out. It would have to be a fine-fleshed and multiple-bearing animal, with as many litters as possible a year; one that would grow quickly to great size and succulence; one that could eat and thrive on anything, anything, even —  One that could eat — 

About that time, the mad cartoonist J. P. Dordogne invented just such an animal in his comic strip. It was a big, comical, rock-eating animal. It struck the popular fancy and humor at once, though it did not at once put anything into the popular stomach. It was a shambling hulk of an animal, good-natured and weird. It ate earth and rocks and anything at all. It didn't even need vegetation, or water. It grew peculiarly fat on such feeding.

And the dorg had a fine slow wit as shown in the comic strip dialogue balloons. The people liked the dorg and especially liked the idea that the animal could grow so large and toothsome on nothing but rocks and earth. The animal was not loved the less because there was something unreal and mad about it, even beyond the unreality of all things in that medium. Something else: the dorg in the comic strip was always feeling bad: there was an air of something momentous about to happen to him.

The dorg filled an inner need, of emotion if not of stomach yet. It became the hopeful totem of the people on the biting edge of hunger. And the dorg was unmistakable; that was what gave the news reports their sharp interest. There was recognition and recollection of the dorg as matching a buried interior image. It could not be mistaken for something else.

The sighters had sighted the dorg, or they had suffered hallucination. But they had not mistaken some other object or creature for the dorg. And Dordogne the cartoonist, a bland little man except for the mad black eyes, was scared stupid by reports that the cartoon animal had actually been seen, alive and ill.

It was then that there appeared, in Primitive Arts Quarterly, an odd piece by the trilobal psychologist James Riddle. The piece was titled “Lascaux, Dordogne, and the Naming of the Animals.” The essay contained this strange thesis:

“What happened in the cave art days of Lascaux was the ‘Naming’ of the Animals. The paintings were the namings, or at least they were an aspect of the namings. It must be understood that this was concurrent with the creative act. The depicted animals were absolutely new then. If the paleozoologists say otherwise, then the paleozoologists are wrong. The men also were absolutely new then.

“Some, perhaps all, of these cave paintings were anticipatory: the paintings appeared a slight time before the animals themselves appeared. My evidence for this is subjective, and yet I am as sure of this as I am of anything in the world. In several cases, the animals, when they appeared, did not quite conform to their depictment. In several other cases, owing I supposed to a geodetic accident, the corresponding animals failed to appear at all.

“It is certain that this art was anticipatory and prophetic, heralding the appearance of new species over the life horizon. It was precursor art, harbinger art. It is certain also that this art contained elements of effective magic; it is most certain that the species were of sudden appearance. The only thing not certain is just to what extent the paintings were creative of the animals. There is still fluid mystery about the mechanism of the sudden appearance of species. The paleontologists cannot throw any light on this mystery at all, and the biologists cannot. But the artist can throw light on it, and the psychologist can. It is clear that a new species appears, suddenly and completely developed, exactly when it is needed.

“And a new species is needed exactly now.

“It is for this reason that there is peculiar interest in a recent creation of the cartoonist Jasper Pendragon Dordogne. He has depicted a new species of animal. I do not believe that Dordogne realizes what he is doing. He isn't an intelligent man. I do not believe that the Lascaux cave painters realized what they were doing. But the art of J. P. Dordogne, like that of the old cave painters, is anticipatory, it is prophetic, it is precursor art, harbinger art. The new species of animal will appear almost immediately, if it has not already appeared. The exact effect that the cartoonist will have on the appearing species we do not know. The effect that we may be able to have on the cartoonist will not be exact, but it can be decisive.

“Above all, let us see it happen, if this is at all possible. Let us witness the appearance of a new species for once. It should answer very many questions. It should give the final answer to that dreary and tedious remnant of evolutionists that still lingers in benighted areas. Let our hope and our effort be toward this being a permanent appearance. Very many of them have not been permanent.”

Adrian Durchbruch, the newly appointed Chief of Remedial Ecology, had read the James Riddle article in Primitive Arts Quarterly on his first day on the job. He immediately requisitioned the mad-eyed cartoonist J. P. Dordogne and the trilobal psychologist for his program. They were both referring to the animal that the world and the project were looking for. However the two men might have their information confused, they did seem to have information of a sort.

When Durchbruch incorporated himself and these other two men into his project, he also had to include a member of Amalgamated Youth to keep it legal. He accepted Annalouise Krug gladly. You should see what most members of Amalgamated Youth are like.

The reports of the actual sightings of the animal had come in immediately. And the four persons flew down to the area immediately.

Riddle landed the plane in tall grass near Talihina, Oklahoma, and the four dorg-seekers got out.

“We will immediately contact the local authorities,” Adrian Durchbruch began as he bounded around on his feet on the springy ground, “and we will find whether — ”

“Oh, shut up, Adrian,” Riddle said pleasantly. “This lady here knows where it can be found. If that were not so, I would have landed in some other place where a lady would know all about it. Time spent checking with authorities is always time lost. Where is the dorg, lady?”

“It went up in the high pasture this morning,” said the lady that was there. “It has been feeling so bad that we were worried about it. And you are the only one that knows what's the matter with it. You, mad-eyes, I'm talking to you. You know what is bothering it, don't you?”

“Gah, I'm afraid I do,” the cartoonist Dordogne grumbled sadly. “I've been afraid to say it or draw it, though. If it is true, then it will push me clear over the edge, and everyone says I haven't far to go. Don't let it happen! I don't want to be that crazy.”

“My husband followed him up there a while ago,” the lady said, “and he took his big Jim Bowie knife with him, in case we guessed right about it. They can't hardly do it by themselves, you know. They're not built for it. Oh, here they come now, and the little one is with them.”

The man, and the big dorg (moving painfully), and the little dorg were coming down the slope.

“But the big dorg is male!” Annalouise Krug cried out in unbelief.

“Yes, they have such a hard time of it,” the lady said. “There isn't any other way to get anything started, though.”

The man and the big male dorg and the little female dorg came down to them.

“It wasn't much trouble,” the man said. “He went to sleep.”

“The Tardemah, the deep sleep,” Riddle said reverently. “I should have guessed it.”

“Then I cut him open and took her out of his side,” the man said. “They will both be all right now.”

“By Caesarean section,” Annalouise mumbled. “Why didn't we all guess it?” There was a loud snapping noise.

“What was that?” Adrian demanded, bouncing around.

“My mind just snapped,” Dordogne said woozily. “I won't bother to keep up appearances any longer. Now I will be crazy with a clear conscience.”

The little dorg was near grown within one month and was impregnated. In another month she produced a litter of ten. In another five weeks another, and in another five weeks still another. And the young ones produced at two months, and again in five weeks, and again in another five weeks. Quite soon there were a million of them, and then one hundred million, shipped all over the world now. These were big cow-sized animals of excellent meat, and they ate only the rocks and waste hills where nothing had ever grown, turning it into fertile soil incidentally.

Soon there were a billion dorgs in the world ready for butchering, and the numbers of them could be tapered off as soon as it seemed wise, and there was enough meat for everyone in the world.

“I have only one worry,” the trilobal psychologist James Riddle said as he met with Adrian Durchbruch and Annalouise Krug in a self-congratulatory session. J. P. Dordogne the mad cartoonist was in a sanitarium now and was really mad. “I keep remembering a part of those cave paintings at Lascaux.”

“What were they, James?” Annalouise Krug asked. Annalouise was not so much in the fashion as she had once been. Well-fed nations somehow set their ideals on more svelte types.

“They were the crossed-out animals, the chiseled-over animals, the funny-looking animals. They are funny-looking to us only because we have never seen them in the flesh. They are the animals that did not survive. We don't know why they did not. They were drawn originally with the same boldness as the rest of them.”

“We don't know what the odds are,” Adrian said worriedly, forgetting to bounce. “We have no way at all to calculate them. It is so hard to take a census of things that aren't. We will keep our fingers crossed and all fetishes working full time. Without primordial fetish there wouldn't have been any animals or people at all.”

It went on smoothly for a year and a day after the dorgs had struck their proper world balance. There was plenty of meat for everyone in the world, there were plenty of dorgs, and they had to be segregated to prevent their being too many.

Then the index of dorg fertility fell. The numbers of them were raised up past the safe level again only by unsegregating all flocks. The index fell again and continued to fall. It disappeared.

The last dorgs were born. There was breathless waiting to see if some of them might not be fertile. They weren't. It was all over with, and the world wailing raised higher than it had ever been.

“What we need is fresh insights, youthful impetus, not the woeful stutterings of aged minds,” Annalouise Krug was saying. “Aren't there any other animals that can live on rocks?”

“No,” Adrian Durchbruch said sadly.

“Where does the species male come from in the first place?” she asked.

“It appears for the first time on a Monday morning in a comic strip or on a cave mural,” James Riddle said. “I believe it is something about the syndication that new formats in cartoons always appear on Monday mornings.”

“Before that, I mean. Where does the male come from?” Annalouise said.

“I don't know,” Riddle groused.

“Well, somebody had better remember something right now,” Annalouise stated with a curious menace. “Riddle, what good does an extra lobe do you if you can't remember something special? Come up with something, I say.”

“I can't. There is nothing else to come up with,” Riddle said. But Annalouise picked the psychologist up and shook him till he near fell apart.

“Now remember something else,” she ordered.

“I can't, Annalouise, there is nothing else to remember.”

“You have no idea how hard I will shake you if you don't come up with something.” She gave him an idea of just how hard she could shake him.

“Now!” she ordered.

“Oh, yes, since my life is on the line, I will remember something else,” Riddle moaned, with not much wind left in him. “There are others of those cave paintings that are most curious. Some of them are painted and carved over and over and over again, always in the same region. Most of them are of the common animals of today. Did it come that close, do you think, with even the common ones of them? One at least (and this gives me some hope) was a common animal of today that had been crossed out as having failed. But someone was not content to let it remain crossed out. It was redrawn with great emphasis. And then redrawn and expanded again and again, always in the same region.”

“Let's go to Dordogne right now with plenty of drawing materials,” Adrian snapped.

“But Dordogne is crazy,” Annalouise cried. “Always in what same region, Adrian?”

“We're crazy, too, to think of it,” Adrian hooted, “but let's go to him right now.”

“What region, James?” Annalouise insisted. “Always drawn over and over again in what same region?”

“The belly. Let's go to Dordogne.”

They had Dordogne on his feet and drawing dorgs so pregnant that their bellies drug the ground. He was dazed, though, and sniffling.

“When you've drawn one pregnant dorg you've drawn them all,” he whimpered.

But they kept him at it. He collapsed, but they jerked him back to the task again. Who knows which may be the quickening stroke?

“On your feet, Dordogne,” they yelled, “Do it one more time!”

World Abounding

How many habitable worlds there are depends on the meaning given to ‘habitable’ and to ‘world.’ Habitable without special equipment and conditioning is the usual restriction on the first. ‘Of no mean size’ and ‘of no extreme distance’ are two common conditions of the second. Thus Roulettenwelt and Kentron-Kosmon are really asteroids, too small to be worlds. But how about Hokey Planet and such? And how about the distant traveler's-tale worlds?

Butler lists only seventeen habitable worlds, limiting them to the fair-sized and generally hospitable worlds of Sol and of the Centauri Suns. So all these were closely grouped. The early notion that double or triple suns would not have planets because of their irregularity had been an erroneous estimate, fortunately.

Thus, revolving around Sol there is only Gaea (Earth). Around the Sun Proxima (the Grian Sun) are Kentauron-Mikron, Camiroi, Astrobe, and Dahae. Around the Sun Alpha are Skandia, Pudibundia, Analos, and the equivalently-named twins with such different superior fauna, Proavitus and Paravata; and Skokumchuck (the Shelni Planet). Around the sun Beta are the three trader planets, Emporion, Apateon, and Klepsis; tricky places, it is said. But if you think the Traders are tricky, how about the other three Beta Planets? There are Aphthonia (also called World Abounding), Bellota (Butler lists this as a Planet, though there are larger bodies listed as asteroids: he says, however, that Bellota in its present creation is much larger than its size of record, a puzzling statement), and Aranea (or the Spider Planet).

These latter three are habitable by all definition, but they are generally uninhabited, each for its own unclear reason. It was to clear up the reason and impediment concerning Aphthonia or World Abounding that a party was now in descending hover.

“We are on this mission because of one phrase, repeated by leaders of five different parties, and maintained in the face of vigorous courts martial,” Fairbridge Exendine, the singling leader, said with a sort of hooked wonder. “I have never been able to get that phrase out of my mind. ‘You'd never believe it’ was the phrase, and the men of the five parties, of the more than twenty parties in fact, would not elaborate on it much.”

“I hardly believe it either,” Judy Brindlesby said, “and I haven't been there yet. It almost jumps at you. There is certainly no other world that presents so pleasant an appearance from medium hover. The continent named Aegea and the howling beauty of those oceans and seas that invade it so deeply! The river named Festinatio, the largest clear river on any world! The volcano named Misericors! Why should a river be named ‘I hurry’ and a volcano be named the ‘merciful’?”

“It was John Chancel who named them,” Rushmore Planda said with that curious reverence which all use in speaking of the great explorer. “And it was he who first said that this was the finest world ever, and that it should be left alone to be just that.”

World Abounding had been visited by the great John Chancel just fifty years before. He had been the first Gaea man on very many of the worlds. It was John Chancel who said that only men should go to work on World Abounding, that it was no place to raise a family. Later he repented even of this and said that nobody at all should go there.

Chancel had stated that World Abounding was the most generous and fertile world ever, and that its very generosity would blow one's mind. It was his opinion that this was the Hasty Planet of the earliest travelers' tales, and that there was something very much too hasty about it. And he said that the most famous product of World Abounding should never be used at more than one-thousandth strength.

Gorgos, the magic animal and plant hormone (it wasn't that, but such was the popular explanation of it), came from World Abounding. Cut it a thousand times and it still was the magic growth-trigger. Ah, why cut it at all though? Why not take it at the full where it abounded in its fullness? To be spooked off by too much of a good thing was childish. “Let us examine it as scientists and adults,” Fairbridge said as they came into lower hover, “as balanced persons who know what we are about.”

The seven balanced persons who knew what they were about were Fairbridge Exendine, the canny commander; the Brindlesbys, Judy and Hilary; the Plandas, Erma and Rushmore; the Kerwins, Lisetta and Blase. They were three couples and one remarkable singling, a superior microcosm.

They came down easily and safely from low hover as twenty-two parties had come down before (twenty-three if one counts the solo voyage of John Chancel). They were pleasantly staggered by the sudden green power of that place. There was no need of any caution: Nobody of any party had ever suffered even slight injury or sickness on World Abounding. They found such generosity as would gladden any mind and body. It would be difficult, initially, to be scientists and adult about World Abounding.

Well, revel in the joy then. Afterwards, analyze it all minutely, but without losing any of that joyousness. Do not complain too strenuously about a stacked deck if it is all stacked in your favor.

They were on the Terraces — “which aren't mentioned by John Chancel at all,” Erma Planda said with a toss of her whole golden body, “and it is only gradually that members of the other parties begin to mention them. Could the Terraces have grown up in fifty standard years?”

The Terraces formed a great elongated, stepped plateau, overcome with its own lushness. From the great green broad height of the hovercraft landing, the Terraces tumbled down seventy meters in more than twenty giant steps to the plain. This was all between the volcano and the river, and the Terraces had shoved out into the river to produce gracious rapids with their musical foam.

“Yes, the Terraces have apparently grown in fifty years, or have been spewed out by the volcano named Merciful,” Fairbridge said. “Chancel described the plain between the volcano and the river and he didn't mention the Terraces at all. He set up a spire for monument in the middle of the plain, and where is it now? I believe that it is engulfed in the Terraces, and I intend to find it. I also intend to find why some of the latter parties refer to the Terraces as the Graves. No member of any party died here. All returned. I have a sudden exuberance come over me and I'll start my digging now.”

And Fairbridge Exendine had already set the earth-augers to cutting down into the Terraces.

“I have my own new exuberance,” Judy Brindlesby shouted like a whole covey of trumpets. “Hilary, my clay-headed hero, we will make luscious life together all day and all night.”

Judy was large, but surpassingly shapely and graceful, like a hovercraft. Her brindled black-red hair was so weighty and enveloping that a lesser woman could hardly have carried it; and it seemed to be growing by the minute, like the grass there. One couldn't actually quite see the World Abounding grass grow, but one could hear it; it made a pleasant squeaking sound. And there was a hint of quick music about Judy's heavy hair that indicated that it was growing and growing.

“Yes, it is volcanic ash,” Rushmore Planda was saying as he joined Fairbridge at the earth-augers. “It is quite airy ash.” The volcanic ash was chalky white to pearl gray. Then it had a streak of green in it, and another.

“You are through the first stratum, Fairbridge,” Rushmore said, “and into a layer of compressed vegetation that hasn't even rotted yet. This is the vegetation that was recently the top of the second stratum; very recently, I believe. This is a curious pile of Terraces.”

“Oh, it's a holy pyramid,” Erma Planda told them all, “and the Volcano built it especially for the holy people, ourselves. John Chancel said that he always felt himself to be a holy man when he first set foot on a good new world. I feel myself to be a holy woman now.”

“Do not stuff yourself, holy woman,” her man Rushmore told her. “Chancel preached temperance in all things. Do you have to eat everything you see? Do you have to eat all of everything you see?”

“Yes, I have to, I have to! And was it not the great John Chancel, he who first warned against this place, who said that there was no possibility of poisoning on World Abounding? Oh, and he said that there was no possibility of over-indulgence here either. He stated that the essence Gorgos has no limits, but that it pretends that it has. Everything that can be chewed or swallowed here is safe to eat or drink. There is no insect or animal that bites, nor worm that gnaws, nor moth that harms. There'll be no extreme heat or cold. The nineteen-day polar tumble combined with the diurnal rotation keeps the air breezy and invigorating. Invigorating, yes, yes, extremely so. More than invigorating. It's a pretty horny world, actually. Rather a rambunctious feeling it gives one. More than that, it — ”

“What has happened to all you girl-folk?” the leader Fairbridge asked, rather puzzled and almost alarmed. “I have never seen you so wild-eyed and charged.”

“Poor Fairbridge,” Judy Brindlesby needled him. “Never mind, Fairbridge, I'll get you a girl. I'll get you one within a standard month. I promise you.”

“Impossible, sweet Judy, unless you slay your own mate. We're to be here for a long year, or until we solve the problem, and nobody else will touch down. Where would you get me a girl?”

“That I don't know. But the very rocks are singing to me, ‘You'll get a girl, Judy, you'll get a girl for old Fairbridge within a month.’ ”

“Gorgos is not merely a magic animal-and-plant hormone,” Rushmore Planda was speaking with a suddenly improved, new and magnificent voice. “It's a way of life, I see that now. It will impose its own shape on my wife, however much she stuffs herself. It will impose its shape on everything. It is a new pace and a new sort of life.”

“It may be that its pace is too fast,” Fairbridge warned.

“Makes no difference. There can't be any other pace here. Get the song of those romping birds there! It's the same beat that Gaea lunatics, treated with Gorgos, begin to sing with as soon as their sure cure begins. Get the whole stimulating, pleasant, almost drunken smell of this planet! Here is not so much the uncanny feel of things seen before, but of things smelled before. All great smells (Can one speak of great smells? Yes, one can.) have a reminiscent element, but with this it is reminiscent of a future. There is a pleasurable mustiness here, that's sure, but it isn't of past time: it's of future time, long waiting, and now beginning to unfold suddenly.”

“You men are drunk on only the expectation of wine,” Lisetta Kerwin said. “But the one thing I remember from the journal of the great John Chancel was the recipe for making morning wine in nine minutes on World Abounding. And I've already started it. Time's a'running.”

Lisetta was crushing purple fruit into a high calathus or basket made by pulling the inner corolla out of a giant flower bloom.

“It would be chemically possible to make a potable fruit alcohol in nine minutes,” Blase Kerwin said, “but it wouldn't be wine. It wouldn't have the bouquet. It wouldn't have the — but it has it. I smell that it has already, and it grows. Here, here, let me swig that — ”

“No, no, it isn't ready,” Lisetta protested. “It still moves itself, it lends its color to the cup, it bites like a serpent.”

“Look out, serpent and wife, I'll bite back. Have at you.” And Blase Kerwin took a huge draught from the green cup. He turned a bit green himself, but cheerfully so. He lost his voice, and he did a little dance on one foot while he grasped his throat with both hands, but he was quite pleased about it all. There are some things too good to wait for.

“A little patience,” Lisetta said. “Four minutes yet.”

Blase still hadn't his speech back but he could howl his high pleasure over the breathtaking encounter. And soon, quite soon, they were all lushy over the singing, heady stuff. It was very difficult to be scientific and adult about World Abounding.

So they probed the world very unscientifically and kiddishly, except Fairbridge and Rushmore, who still probed the levels of the Terraces. The three ladies especially were happy maniacs and they were all over that abundant land. They caught and rode huge gangling animals. After all, on the word of Chancel and others, everything was harmless. They wrestled with big starfish in the river named Festinatio. They ate the snap-off tails of huge lizards and sent them away bawling and running on their two hind legs. Never mind; the big lizards could regrow their snap-off tails.

“Those five party leaders who wrote ‘You'd never believe it,’ do you think they were laughing when they wrote it?” Judy Brindlesby exploded the question when she clambered once again back up to the diggings.

“One of them, I believe, wrote in laughter, Judy,” Fairbridge said. “And one of them, I know for certain, wrote in absolute horror. I don't know about the other three.”

“Fairbridge, I suggest that we clear out a square about five meters on a side and excavate the whole top level of it,” Rushmore Planda said. “I believe that there is more mystery buried here than we have met in all our lives.”

“All right, we will do that,” Fairbridge agreed. “The least we can do is see what is right under our feet.”

“But not there!” Judy trumpeted at them. “Dig here where the people are.”

“What people, Judy?” Fairbridge asked her patiently. “All the people who have ever been on this world have been accounted for.”

“Not till we account for them they haven't been. How do I know what people they are till you dig them up? Dig carefully, though. They are real people here. You call yourselves diggers and you don't even know where the people are buried.”

“We dig where you say, Judy. You are a people-witcher in your several ways.”

“But don't dig all the time. You're missing it. Life is being lived today and tonight.” And she was off again, leaping down the three-meter steps of the Terraces.

“I don't know what she means,” Fairbridge said as he set the excavators to work and then adjusted them to ‘Slow and Careful.’ “I hardly ever know what she means.”

“I believe that I know what she means, Fairbridge,” Rushmore said in an eerie voice with a scarce human chuckle in it.

So the excavators excavated, moving the light volcanic ash that was below the vegetation. There was real mystery in the ash that was turned up. That stuff was not completely dead.

“One thing I like about it here is the size of the party,” Fairbridge mumbled as he sensed something near and put the excavators on ‘Very Slow.’ “Seven. That's right, that's just right. That's just how many persons should be on a world. More than that is a crowd. But a man cannot live pleasantly alone. What do you think about that, Rushmore? Isn't seven about right? Rushmore?

“He's gone. The party isn't seven now. It's one, me. I'm alone. I suspect that they have chosen the better part, though. Yes, I know what Judy meant, and it does come in very strongly here. But it isn't just with them; it's coming up from the very ground here. I'll dig on.”

Fairbridge dug down till he came to the people.

It was night. Ancilla, the smaller moon, was overhead; Matrona, the larger moon, had just arisen. Fairbridge went to find the three couples of the party.

“They all have the new exuberance on them and they make luscious life together all day and all night. But I have to tell them what I have found.”

It would be easiest to find Judy Brindlesby, the liveliest of them all. Wherever she was, any man would know it by special sensing. Fairbridge's special sensing led him to a river meadow and into a high brake of reeds that still squeaked from sudden new growth. Judy lay there with her clay-headed hero and husband Hilary.

It was magnificent Judy stretched on her back in giggling slumber. Hilary, chuckling with pleasure, lay atop her and was cutting her hair with great shears: cutting her incredible hair, cutting her superabundant hair, cutting the mountains of her hair. He had sheared off great heaps of it, possibly twenty kilograms of it, and she still had more than she'd had that afternoon.

“You are almost completely hidden in the reeds, Hilary,” Fairbridge said then. “I'd never have found you, except that any man can sense Judy's presence.”

“Hullo, Fairbridge,” Hilary grunted pleasantly. “The reeds weren't here when we lay down. They've grown up since. Everything that touches her grows, and she is enlivened wherever she touches this ground. Look at her hair, Fairbridge. She's in accord with it here. Gorgos or whatever the growth element is, she's with it. So am I.”

“I dug down to people in the Terraces, Hilary.”

“Yes. Judy said there would be people there.”

Fairbridge and Hilary went and took Rushmore from the sleeping arms of Erma in the blue-stem hills. And they met Lisetta and Blase Kerwin coming out of the orchards.

“Lisetta says that you have dug down to people,” Blase cried vividly. “Oh, for the love of abundant Aphthonia, let's go see what this is about!”

“I've dug down to people, yes,” Fairbridge said, “but how could Lisetta know it?”

They climbed up the tall Terraces and came to the open shaft.

“We will remove the rest of the volcanic dust and crust from about them,” Fairbridge said. “And when old Beta Sun comes up, we can get a good look at them.”

“Oh, this is fine enough light for it,” Lisetta said. “Aren't they nice people, though. So friendly. We will get acquainted with them before the brighter light is on them. It's best to become acquainted with good people in dim light first, especially when they've been through an odd experience. Then they'll brighten up with the light.”

There were twelve of the people there, twelve adults. They were seated, apparently, on stone benches around a stone table. The details would be known when the rest of the volcanic dust had been cleared away and when Beta Sun was risen. The twelve were got up in a gala and festive way. They had sat eating and drinking when it came over them, but they had not been taken by surprise. It was a selective volcanic thrust that had covered them. It came only onto the Terraces that had become a shoulder of the volcano. The people needn't have been there; and they needn't have sat and waited while it covered them. The surrounding plains hadn't been covered by the volcanic thrust.

“Why, they're pleasantly dead, and not at all decayed,” Lisetta cried. “They are really such nice people. Don't they seem so to the rest of you? There is something almost familiar about a few of them — as if I had met them before.”

“How long?” Fairbridge asked Hilary Brindlesby.

“Two years, maybe. They haven't been dead longer than that.”

“You're crazy, Hilary. You are the tissue man of this party. Take tissue samples.”

“I will, of course. But they've been dead for about two years.”

“Then they were alive here when the Whiteoak party was here.”

“Likely.”

“They why didn't Commander Harry Whiteoak mention them?”

“Whiteoak was one of those, Fairbridge, who used the phrase ‘You'd never believe it,’ ” Rushmore Planda cut in. “Maybe he figured that covered it all.”

“But who are they?” Fairbridge persisted. “Every person of every expedition has been accounted for. These are our own sort of people, but they aren't people of the Whiteoak party. I've met all the Whiteoaks, and all came back.”

“Aren't they of the Whiteoak party, Fairbridge?” Blase asked with an air of discovery. “You'd better pray that the light doesn't get any better, man. You're near spooked now. There's a couple of ghosts there: an ear, a brow, a jaw slope. And that lady there, isn't she a little like another lady we met, enough like her to be a sister or daughter? I tell you that there are strong resemblances to several of the Whiteoak people here.”

“You're crazy. The Whiteoaks were here for only six standard months. If they met these mysterious people, why didn't they give an account of it?”

They didn't do much more with it till daylight. They moved some of the volcanic filler and uncovered to a little more depth.

“Can you prop under this level and leave these people here, and then excavate the layer under them?” Lisetta Kerwin asked.

“We can, but why?” Fairbridge inquired. Fairbridge was jumpy. He didn't seem to appreciate how nice it was to come onto such a nice group of people.

“Oh, I think that these people picked a spot that had been picked time and time again before them.”

Along about daylight, Judy Brindlesby and Erma Planda, with a variety of noises, came up to the other on the Terraces.

“Folks, are we ever sick!” Judy sounded out. “I'm sicker than Erma, though. I go further into things than she does. Don't you wish you were sick the way we are, Lisetta?”

“But I am, I am,” Lisetta said, “and it didn't take me all night to find it out. It's fun, isn't it?”

“Sure it is. I never had so much fun being sick in my life.” And Judy retched funfully.

It was a little unusual that all three ladies should show the first signs of pregnancy at the same time. It was odd that they should all have morning sickness. Oddest of all was their being so delighted with their sickness. There was something about World Abounding that seemed to make all experience, even nausea, a happy experience.

And the dead people in the Terraces — 

“They are the happiest-looking dead people I ever did see,” Erma Planda declared. “I will have to know what they are so happy about. They would tell me if I had the proper ears to listen. It's hard to hear when it comes to you that way. What, dear? What are you saying?”

“I wasn't saying anything, Erma,” Rushmore told her.

“Wasn't talking to you, Rushmore,” Erma said with a flick of her golden body. “What, dear? I can't quite make it out.” And Erma Planda thumped her body as if to get better reception.

“Your ears aren't in your belly, Erma,” Rushmore reminded her.

“Oh well, maybe some of them are. No, I just get it a little at a time what they are so happy about.”

The happy dead people had been preserved by the volcanic fill, and perhaps by the essence Gorgos or some other substance of World Abounding. They didn't feel dead. They were rather waxy to the touch; they were about as warm as the air, and they hadn't any clamminess; there was even a slight resiliency to them which is usually a property of live flesh and not of dead flesh. They were clad in the light native garments of World Abounding. They were, in some manner hard to reconcile, kindred to the members of the Whiteoak expedition. They were beautiful and mysterious people, but they didn't mean to be mysterious. They'd have told you anything you wanted to know if only proper accord might be established between dead tongue and live ear.

But was there not something a little bit too glib about the impressions that all these new explorers received from the dead folks? Yes, a little too glib here and there, but how could anyone be blamed for that?

“Just a minute, nevertheless,” Lisetta Kerwin was saying both to the dead people and to the live. “We all say, or we all think, that you, our good friends here, are clad in the light native garments of World Abounding. Our good commander, Fairbridge, in fact, has just scribbled those very words in his notebook. But how did we know what the light native garments of World Abounding should look like since we never saw any of them before? And since there has never been, for the record, any human native on World Abounding, never been any human being born here, hasn't this all a fishy smell? Or has it? For I recall now that the fish of World Abounding have a pleasant fruity smell. Well, take your time, folks. Being dead, you are in no hurry, and I am not; but tell us about it when you get to it.”

They sank a second shaft beside the first. They ran reinforcing timbers under the place of the pleasant dead people so that they would not be disturbed or collapsed. Then they dug the second shaft down through the volcanic fill to the next level of vegetation. There was an unexpected thing: it had been dug before. They were excavating an old excavation.

They cleared the space below the dead people (and it showed every sign of having been cleared before); they came, as they had weirdly known that they must come to such, to another clutch of dead people. They had been expecting just that, but they were stunned by it even more than by the first discovery or first report.

“How many times, do you think?” Fairbridge asked them all in real wonder.

“I guess twenty-two times,” Hilary squinted. “There are, in all, twenty-two levels to the Terraces.”

“Would a colossal joker, a demonical joker, a supernal joker, a godly joker, even an ungodly joker pull the same joke twenty-two times in a row? Wouldn't it begin to pall even on him after twenty-two times of it?”

“Not a bit of it,” Erma said. “Whoever he is, he still thinks thunder is funny, and he's pulled the thunder joke billions and billions of times. And he laughs every time. Listen for the giggle sometimes; it comes around the edge of every thunder.”

Slight differences only this time. The dead people of the second level numbered eleven adults. They had been dead a little longer than the first, but they hadn't been dead for more than four or five years. They were as well-preserved and as happy-seeming as the upper gentry. They added a bit to the mystery.

Fairbridge and his folks and his excavators continued to excavate, about one level a day. All the shafts that they dug now had already been dug out several times before. At the fifth level down they came to the tip of the spire or steeple that John Chancel had built as monument on the plain between the volcano and the river. They knew that it was older than the Terraces, that it went all the way down to the flat land; they also knew that it was only fifty years old.

There were sixteen of the gracious and pleasantly dead people on this level. They had made a circular stone table around the tip of the spire where it came through the lower Terrace. They had wined and dined themselves there while they waited for the volcano named Merciful to cover them up. But who were these people, so beautiful and so pleasant and so dead, arranged on levels several years apart?

“The mystery gets deeper all the time,” Fairbridge said weightily.

“Yes, it gets about three meters deeper every day,” Hilary grinned. “Anybody got any strange stories to add to this?”

“Yes, I've a strange one,” Judy told them. “I know that it seems pretty short notice, and I had no idea that it could be so far along, and I'm sure that it's completely impossible, but my time is upon me right now.”

They all gaped at her.

“I said Right Now, Hilary,” Judy told her husband in an almost tight voice, “and I mean right now.”

Well, Judy was large (though shapely and graceful as a hovercraft), and the issue would apparently be quite small. But all of them had scientific eyes, trained to notice things large and small, and none of them had noticed that it would be so soon with Judy.

There was no trouble, of course. Hilary himself was a doctor. So was Blase. So, come to think of it, was Lisetta Kerwin. But Lisetta herself was feeling a bit imminent.

No trouble, though. On World Abounding everything happens easily and pleasantly and naturally. Judy Brindlesby, easily and pleasantly, gave birth to a very small girl.

Well, it was less ugly then most babies, less a red lump and more of a formed thing. And quite small. There was a spate of words from all of them, but no words could convey the unusual formliness of the very little girl.

“She is really pretty, and I never thought I'd say that about a baby, even my own,” Hilary bleated proudly. “She is so small and so perfect. She is the least lass I ever saw.”

“She is wonderful, she is beautiful, there has never been anyone like her,” Judy was chanting in ecstasy, “She is perfect, she shines like a star, she sparkles like an ocean, she is the most enchanting ever, she is — ”

“Oh, cool it, mother, cool it,” the Least Lass said.

2

Fairbridge Exendine reacted in absolute horror to this, and he remained in a state of horrified rejection. The others, however, accepted it pretty gracefully. Explanations were called for, of course. Well then, let us seek the explanations.

“There has to be an answer to the Case of the Precocious Little Girl,” Rushmore said. “Does anyone have an answer?”

“She's yours, Judy,” Erma said. “You tell us if we heard what we thought we heard.”

“Oh, I thought she talked quite plain enough, and I'm sure you heard what she said. But why should you ask me about it when she is right here? How did you learn to talk, dear?” Judy asked her little daughter, the Least Lass.

“Five days in the belly of a chatterbox and I shouldn't have learned talk?” the Least Lass asked with fine irony for one so young. So the explanation was simple enough: the little girl had learned to talk from her mother.

But Fairbridge Exendine was still gray-faced with horror. And she didn't belong to that singling at all. Why should he be so affected by this?

“Do you know that you are the first human child ever born on World Abounding?” Judy asked her child a little later.

“Oh, mother, I'm sure you're mistaken,” Least Lass said. “I was under the impression that I was the two hundred and first.”

“Can you walk?” Blase Kerwin asked the little girl a little later yet.

“Oh, I doubt it very much,” she said. “It will be a standard hour before I even attempt it. It may be a standard day before I do it perfectly.”

But Fairbridge Exendine had gone back to his digging now. He was in new horror of the mystery of the excavations, but he was still more in horror of the little girl.

Yet she was the prettiest child that anyone had ever seen — so far.

“Anything that we do is always anticlimactic to whatever Judy does,” Erma Planda said with mock complaint. Erma, with her golden body and her greater beauty, wasn't really jealous of Judy Brindlesby. Neither was Lisetta Kerwin, with her finer features and her quicker intelligence. Both knew that Judy would always anticipate them in everything. She had certainly done it in this, though by no more than a couple of hours.

“Well, it's surely a puzzle,” Rushmore Planda was talking pleasantly that day or the next. “We are all human persons. And the gestation period for humans is more than five days.”

“Don't — don't talk about it,” Fairbridge stuttered. “Dig — dig, man.”

“Of course it's possible that the three conceptions took place nine months ago. That's the logical thing to believe, but a little illogic bug keeps croaking to me ‘You know better than that.’ And all three of the children say that they were in the bellies for only five days. There was certainly an extraordinary enlivening in all of us that first night here, except in you, Fairbridge.”

“Don't — damn — talk about it. Dig — damn — dig.”

“This is a miracle world, of course, and it is full of miracle substances. Nevertheless, I believe that the Miracle Master is a little grotesque in this trick. I love my own small son beyond telling, yet I feel that there is something in him that is not of myself and is not of Erma. Part of his parentage is World Abounding.”

“Don't — don't talk crazy. None — none of this has happened. Dig — dig, man.”

There was never a more frightened, more nervous man than Fairbridge. He buried himself in the digging work to get away from it; he'd buried himself nearly forty-five meters deep in the excavating work by this time. Oh, that man was edgy!

“I imagine that the same thing happens on Gaea,” Rushmore was rambling on. “We were, for most of the centuries, so close to it that we couldn't see that the planet was the third parent in every conception. We saw it only a little when we came to Camiroi and Dahae and Analos: a twenty-day shorter gestation period in the one case, a twelve-day longer one in another. We were a long time guessing that there is no such thing as biology without environment. But who could have guessed that World Abounding would be so extreme?”

“Don't — don't talk about it,” Fairbridge begged. “Thirty days, dam — dammit, and four — fourteen of them gone already. Dig, dig.”

“What thirty days, Fairbridge? Is there a thirty-day period mentioned of our expedition? I don't know of it. Fairbridge, man, you only dig because you're afraid to wonder. Whoever saw children grow so much in nine days? But then there are trees here that grow twenty meters high in one day. And look at the way the hair grows on Judy Brindlesby, and she a human! Not that the children aren't human, not that they aren't even two-thirds earth-human.

“Fairbridge, those are the three smartest children that anybody ever saw. When I was their age (oh, damn, I don't mean nine days old, I mean their apparent age of nine or ten years old), when I was their age I wasn't anything like as sharp as they are, and I was rated smart. And who ever saw such handsome people anywhere? They're on a par with the dead people here in the Terraces. Do you believe that they're of the same genesis?”

“D — dig, man, or drop dead, but don't — don't talk about it. It isn't there. It hasn't happened.”

“Erma thinks that the children have rapport with the dead people here in the Terraces. After all, they are one-third blood kindred. They all have one common parent, World Abounding. Erma also thinks that all three children are coming to their puberty period now. She believes that the pubescent manifestations here will be much stronger, much more purposive, much more communal than anything on Gaea or Camiroi or Dahae. The useless and vestigial poltergeistic manifestations of Gaea-Earth will not compare with them at all, she believes. Was there ever such frustrating failure in communicating as the whole poltergeist business?

“Erma believes that the manifestations here will go even beyond the three-angel paradoxes of the pubescents on Kentauron-Mikron. And why should these things not go beyond? We had premonitions of such wonderful weirdnesses even on our own world. My mate Erma believes that these puberty insights (the volcano is a part and person of these insights) will begin very soon. Two more days; three at the most.”

“D — dig, man. Don't — don't think.”

Coming of age on World Abounding is a closed subject. It is not closed in the sense of being all secret or restricted, but in being a thing closed upon itself. From its very beginning it is conscious of its resolution.

Least Lass Brindlesby, Heros Planda, and Kora Kerwin were paradoxical children. It seems foolish to speak of relaxed intensity, of foolish sagacity, of placid hysteria, of happy morbidity, of lively death-desire. The children had all these qualities and others just as contradictory. They were at all times in close wordless communication with their parents and with all other persons present, and they were at the same time total aliens. The children were puzzling, but they themselves certainly weren't puzzled: they were always quite clear as to their own aims and activities. They had no more doubt of their direction than the arc of a circle has.

Lisetta Kerwin worried a little that she might have a retarded daughter. It was not that the girl was slow about things, just that she was different about things. Should a nineteen-day-old girl be called retarded because she dislikes reading? Kora could read, most of the time. Whenever her intuitions cocked their ears with a little interest she could go right to the heart of any text. But mostly all three of the children disliked the reading business.

Hilary Brindlesby scolded the children because they showed no sign of the scientific approach or method. But the scientific approach with its systematic study would not have brought them along nearly as fast as they did go. They all had the intuitive approach and it brought them rapidly to a great body of knowledge.

The children were well acquainted with the dead people in the Terraces (Fairbridge, in his horror-filled distracting work, had excavated almost all the Terrace levels now). The children named the names of all the dead people and told of their intricate relationships. Lisetta Kerwin recorded all this from the children. It tied in remarkably with the surnames of the people of the various expeditions.

“You can't really communicate with the dead people of the Terraces,” Blase Kerwin told his daughter Kora. “It is just a bit of flamboyant imagination that you all seem to have.”

“Oh, they say pretty much the same thing about you and us, father,” Kora said. “They tell us that we can't really communicate with such stuffy folks as you who weren't even born on World Abounding. We do communicate with you, though; a little bit, sometimes.”

And then one evening, Heros Planda and Kora Kerwin said that they were married.

“Isn't twenty-two days old a little young to marry?” Rushmore Planda asked his son.

“No, I don't believe so, father,” Heros said. “It is the regular age on World Abounding.”

“Who married you?” Lisetta Kerwin asked. After all, it had to be somebody who had done it, and there were no human persons on the world except those of the party.

“We don't know his name,” Kora said. “We call him Marrying Sam in fun, but lots of the Terrace people have called him that too. We might suppose that that is his name now.”

“He isn't a human person? Then what species does he belong to?”

“He doesn't belong to any species, mother, since he is the only one of his kind. The Volcano says that Marrying Sam is his — the Volcano's — dog. He doesn't look like a dog, as I intuit dogs, though. He can't very well look like anything else, since he is the only one of his kind.”

“I see,” Lisetta Kerwin said, but she saw it a little cockeyed. She was vaguely disappointed. She had always wanted a grand wedding for her daughter, if she had ever had a daughter. And now the daughter and the wedding had come so close together that something seemed lacking. She didn't know that it had been a very grand wedding, with elementals such as a Volcano and an Ocean participating; she didn't even know that she had participated, along with everything else on World Abounding.

“I thought you would be pleased, mother, that we had married and regularized our relationship,” Kora suggested hopefully.

“Of course I'm pleased. It's just that you seem so young.”

Actually, the wedding celebration was not yet completed. Part of it was tangled with an event that involved almost all of them that night. It was similar to the mysterious carnal happenings of the first night of the party on World Abounding.

It was another of those extraordinary enlivening events. It got them. It got Erma Planda of the golden body, and Judy Brindlesby of the sometime incredible hair. It got Lisetta Kerwin of the now shattered serenity; it got Rushmore and Hilary and Blase.

Perhaps it had been thought that connubial passion happened without regard to place or planet. Such is not the case. And the case on World Abounding was very different from the case on Gaea or Camiroi or Dahae. There was a pleasantness at all times on World Abounding, there was a constant passion of a sort, an almost pantheistic communion of all things together. But there was something else that came on much stronger at special times, that was triggered by special events without an exact time arriving, that was wild and rampant and blood-and-seed-pungent.

It was the rutting reason.

Ah, we deck it out better than that. It was a night, or a day and a night, of powerful interior poetry and music, of personal affirmation, of physical and moral and psychic overflowing, of aesthetic burgeoning. It was clear crystal passion.

But let us not deck it out so nice that we won't know it. It was the horniest business ever, and it went on all night and all day and all night. Hilary and Judy Brindlesby: he had the length and the strength; she had the fullness and the abundance. They made such laughing love that it sounded like chuckling thunder in the reed-brakes. Even the birds and the coneys took up the cadence of it.

Rushmore and Erma Planda: he of the buffalo bulk and the impression of swooping Moses-horns on his head; she of the golden body and the emerald eyes. “They should take the two of us for models,” Erma had said on that memorable time twenty-seven nights before. “Nobody has ever done it as we have. We should give lessons.”

And then Blase and Lisetta Kerwin — no one will ever know just how it was with them. They had a thing that was too good to share (except in the planet-sharing aspect of it), that was too good to tell about, that was too good even to hint at. But, after such pleasures, they seemed the most pleasured of all the couples.

But Kora and Heros were at home in this. World Abounding was really a third flesh of their union in a way that it couldn't be for the others. They held their own pleasures atop the volcanic Terraces, not in the reeds or the blue-stem hills or the orchards as the World-Gaea couples did.

World Abounding is the most passionate of worlds, with the possible exception of Klepsis of the Trader Planets where the rapacity in all things is so towering. The Miracle-Maker of legend and fact on World Abounding was always shocked and bewildered by such coming together as that of Heros and Kora, even though it was a licit relationship and done in the licit manner. It was the depth and violence of it that was beyond law, that almost made the Miracle-Maker doubt that he had made such an indomitable thing as this.

Really, it was the Abounding Time, the name-thing of the world.

The only discordant (ill-fitting, but not completely unpleasant) elements in the thunderous season-time of World Abounding were Fairbridge Exendine and Least Lass Brindlesby.

“Now I am an old maid out of joint with the time,” Least Lass said as she wandered on the hills of her home. Both the smaller moon Ancilla and the larger moon Matrona were a-shine. “My proper mate is unready and unbelieving. My third parent, World Abounding, who is also the third lover of our love, is not sufficiently penetrating. Father of Planets, help us! You gave us here the special instruction ‘What you do, do quickly,’ yet it isn't with us as with other places. Answer me, answer me right now!”

Least Lass threw angry rocks at the sky when she was not answered right now. But there is no time for slow answers on World Abounding.

And Fairbridge (still in the horror that would never leave him, but now touched by something both brighter and deeper) could only bark harshly to himself, “I am a human man. These things cannot be, have not been, must not be allowed to be. They are all hallucination, and this is an hallucinatory world. The monster-child remains monstrous, breathtakingly monstrous. It would be the only love I had ever had, if it could have been, if the cause of it were real. How could a human man mate with an imagination, how with a monster, be she a demon or an angel?”

It did not come to these two incongruities, in proper season, as it came to the other persons there.

By second morning, the partaking couples were in a state of dazzling exhaustion. But they knew that they were well fruited, fruited forever. Then there came the several days of golden desuetude. Even the letdowns on World Abounding were wonderful.

All the folks sympathized, of course, with the passion-impounded Fairbridge and with the lost-in-a-maze Least Lass. The case of Fairbridge and Least Lass was comical with the sort of cloud-high comedy that is found on World Abounding. There was everything ludicrous about it. There was a poignancy and a real agony about it also, but the betting was that these qualities would give way. You drive the sharp poignancy staff into the ground of World Abounding and it will grow green leaves on it before you can blink; yes, and grotesque blooms like monkey faces. But it won't lose any of its sharpness when it blooms.

Fairbridge Exendine was a rough-featured man, in no way handsome. He missed being clumsy only by the overriding power of his movements. He had always been a singling. He could hardly be called a woman-hater, since he was infinitely courteous and respecting to women, but he must be set down as a woman-avoider. Either he had been burned badly once, or the singling nature was in his roots and bones.

He was an abrupt man with a harsh sound to him. There was seldom in itself anything harsh about his acts or his words; the harshness was in the shell of him, in the rind that wrapped him up.

And Least Lass Brindlesby: — Fairbridge believed that she wasn't real; and she was. She had been the most beautiful child that anyone had ever seen for no more than an hour or two; until the birth of the children Kora and Heros those twenty-four days ago. She was still of almost perfect beauty; she could only be faulted for a certain heartiness bursting out, too big to be contained in the beauty. She wasn't really the Least Lass anymore; she was as large as her mother; she was bigger than either Kora or Heros. She had a shapeliness and grace superior even to that of her mother, for she was born on World Abounding.

But she looked like Fairbridge Exendine, for all her elegant beauty and for all his craggy ugliness. She looked like him as a daughter will look like a father, as a wife may sometimes come to look like a husband. She had ‘grown towards him’ in the World Abounding phrase, and all such growths here had to be very swift.

She had a great deal of humor, this girl Least Lass, and she needed it. She was not of flimsy growth: none of the children (children no longer) were. On some worlds and quasi-worlds of rapid growth, there is a defect of quality. The quick-grown tree-sized things will really be no more than giant weeds; the quick-grown creatures will not have much to them. On World Abounding that wasn't so. The quick-grown plants and creatures here were fine-grained and intricate and complete. The persons were so, and especially Least Lass.

She was no weed. Weeds have no humor (except the Aphthonia Sneezeweed, of course). But Least Lass sometimes pursued Fairbridge with humor that would make one shiver.

“My good man holds me in horror,” she'd say. “He likes me really, but he believes that I am unnatural, and he has a real horror for the unnatural. Oh, I will turn him ash-gray and I will turn him fruit-purple! I will turn him swollen blood-black. I'll give him all the seven horrors, and I love him. Fairbridge, Fairbridge, even the rocks are laughing at your horror and your plight, and mine is the rockiest laugh of them all.”

Ah, the rocks laughed like clattering hyenas at the poor distraught man.

Sometimes, Least Lass cried a little, though. There is a quick gushiness about tears on World Abounding, a voluminousness that would drown the world if continued more than a short instant. She cried a cupful there one day, actually filled a big blue crystal cup with her tears. Then, in a swift change of mood, she set it at Fairbridge's place at the dinner. And when he, puzzled, tasted it and sputtered, the composite laughter of all assembled nearby shattered his spirit. (Tears on World Abundant are quite pungent, more than just salty.)

Fairbridge Exendine then did a strange thing. He covered the cup with a napkin, then wrapped it in a towel and carried it away to his singling quarters to preserve it just as it was.

Then Least Lass cried at least another cupful on the ground. But that was only a matter of seconds. She was always the sunniest girl ever, immediately after tears.

Things wound themselves up in the thirty-first day of the expedition on World Abounding. It was a clear and exuberant day. Both the Grian sun and the Alpha sun could be seen like bright stars in the daylight sky. This is always a good sign. And the Beta sun itself was pleasantly scorching. A good strong day.

We cannot know just how it happened. The fields themselves announced that there was a special and privileged rutting time, not for all, only for a select two. The sand squeaked oestrius sounds. Kora had talked to the Volcano and to the one-of-a-kind subcreature called Marrying Sam, and had learned that the ceremony itself had been a rather stilted one. There was something of very deep emotion cloaked over with layers of rock hard reserve, world deep passion covered with a careful crust. The volcano was familiar with such things in his own person, and explained that such surface covering is often necessary to very deep people.

Then, somewhere on World Abounding, Fairbridge and Least Lass and the Planet itself had their private experience (an orgy, actually, but their privacy extends even to the selection of the word); they had their time of it, and it may have been a high old time. The others could admire from a distance, and from secondary evidence; but they had no direct evidence, only the planetary resonances and the ghostly reports.

When it was over with, the day and the night of it, when the whole double Nation of those folks was together again, Fairbridge still had that look of horror (it would never leave him). But now it was only one element of many. It was one part of a look or a play more properly named The Comedy of Horror; and this was but a portion of a whole assembly of deep comedies: The Comedy of Soul Agony, the Comedy of Quick Growth (one new furrow in the Fairbridge face represented the almost pun that ‘quick’ here means ‘alive,’ means it specially on World Abounding), the Comedies of World Ending, of Love Transcending, or Death and Deep Burial.

Fairbridge hadn't been loosed of any of his own agonies, but at least he had learned that they were funny.

And Least Lass had a look of almost total happiness, it being understood that almost-total happiness is often a shaggy clown-looking thing, with at least a slight touch of insanity, and a more than slight touch of death's-head. Quite a gay girl she was and would always be: she had been born knowing that death is open at both ends.

The end of the world, the end of a discrete culture comes quickly. Lisetta Kerwin worried about a certain impossibility here.

(Four children had been born on the same day; then, two days later, a fifth. That made eight persons of the half nation, the World Abounding Nation; and, of course, there were still the seven persons of the World-Gaea Nation.)

“We have been here for just thirty-six days,” Lisetta worried, “and we have more than doubled our population. What if there should be (What is the phrase they used back in the Era of Wonderful Nonsense?) a People Explosion?”

“You know that is impossible, mother,” Kora said. “World Abounding sets its own lines, as is the habit of worlds.”

“Yes, it is quite impossible, grandmother,” Chara Kerwin, the newborn daughter of Kora, said. “This is all there will be for this particular world. I myself, and those of my generation, will not experience it all directly. We will experience part of it by sharing. Our present numbers are our final numbers. It is less than some worlds have, I know, so we must make up for it by being as vital as we can be.”

“But, in another twenty days or so,” Lisetta protested, “there will be another passion period, and then — ”

“No, there will not be,” Kora tried to explain. “To do a thing more than once, to do a thing more than twice (twice is sometimes necessary when there is an intersection of two worlds), that is to become repetitious, and to be repetitious is the unforgivable sin. Touch stone, mother, kick sand, knock wood (as you report is said on Gaea), and pray that it may never happen to any of us.”

“But of course it will happen, children, and it will become an increasingly compounded happening. Consider how many there will be in even one year — ”

“A year!” Chara shrilled from the arms of Kora her mother. “Has anyone ever lived for a year?”

“I don't know,” Kora puzzled. “Has anyone? Have you, mother?”

“Yes, I'm afraid that I have,” Lisetta admitted. But why should she be apologetic at having lived more than one year?

“I had no idea, mother,” Kora mumbled in half-embarrassment. “I guess this is the reason for the gaps in our communication, however hard we try to close them.”

Then, for a long while (by local standards), it was all an easygoing time on World Abounding. It was a period of action packed leisure (though not all will be able to understand this); it was crammed full of events, the outcomings and incomings of a new maturing fruitful culture. There was not room in the concentrated leisured hours of any of them to experience it all directly; each one must simultaneously live in the mind and body of everyone to be able to contain it all. There was the unhurried rapidity of thought and act and enjoyment. There was little difference in the day and night hours: sleep and wakefulness were merged; dreaming and experience were intermingled. The fulfilled persons would sometimes sleep while walking or even running, especially those of the full World Abounding generations.

“Are we awake or sleeping?” Least Lass asked her lover one day, or night.

“That I do not know,” Fairbridge said, or thought, in whatever state he was in. “But we are together. May the Planet Plucker grant that we be always together.”

“We are together,” Least Lass agreed, “and yet I am climbing and leaping on the north ridges of the Volcano Misericors, and I am sound asleep. And you are swimming in the estuary of the River Festinatio, very deep below the surface where it is ocean water below the running water, and you also are asleep. Give me your hand. There! On a false level of reality it might seem that my hand was closed on the meaty bloom of a rock crocus, but that rock crocus is a part of yourself. It might seem, to an observer of no understanding, that your own hand has closed on an Aphthonia Blue-Fish (the Blue-Fish himself is such an observer and he believes this), but that Blue-Fish is really myself with the scales still on his eyes and on his whole fishness. But the scales have fallen from our own eyes a little bit so that we may see reality. Grip my hand very hard.”

They gripped hands very hard. They were together.

Ceramic flutes! The flutes were one signature of the present World Abounding culture. They have a tone of their own that cannot be touched by either wooden or brass horns. This light, hard, airy ceramic is made from the deposits of windblown loess from the ocher hills, from the limey mud of the plashes of the River Festinatio, from the ash and the pumice of the Volcano Misericors. This makes a ceramic like no other; there will always be old tunes nesting in every horn and pipe of it.

There were also green-wood clarinets with tendrils still growing on them; aeolian stringed boxes that played themselves in harmonic to whistling; snakeskin drums; hammered electrum trumpets (what a rich sound they had!); and honey-wood violins.

Such orchestration as was employed was of a natural sort. Usually it was the whistling coneys (who are very early risers) who would set the aeolian strings to going: then the several nations of birds would begin to intone; the people, whether waking or sleeping, would soon come in with their composite solos. Or sometimes it was one of the persons who began a music.

“Think a tune, father,” Heros Planda might call. And his father Rushmore, afternoon dreaming somewhere in the blue-stem hills, would think of one. Heros would begin to blow a few notes of it, though he might be several kilometers distant from his father. It might be taken up then by boom-birds or by surfacing riverfish with their quick sounding that was between a whistle and a bark. There was a lot of music in this World Abounding culture, but it was never formal and never forced.

There was a sculpture culture, though Fairbridge warned that it was a dangerous thing. World Abounding was so plastic a place, he said, that one might create more than he had intended by the most simple shaping or free-cutting. “Half the things alive here have no business being alive,” he said. “One is not to trust the stones, especially not trust any stones of the Volcano.”

Nevertheless, the sculpture culture, done in high and low relief, or in the free or the round, was mostly on the south face of that trustless volcano. Whenever the Volcano exuded a new flow-wall during the night, all the people would be at the bright and soft surface in the morning, before it had cooled. These flow-walls were of mingled colors, of bright jagged colors sometimes, or soft colors at other times, then again of shouting colors: it was a very varied and chemical Volcano and it bled like rock rainbows.

Usually the Volcano himself set the motif for a sculpture-mass. He could do good and powerful work in the rough. He could form out large intimations of creatures and people and events. But he was like a geniused artist who had only stubs, no hands. It was the human persons who had to do all the fine and finishing work of the almost living murals.

The performed dramas of this culture fell into a half-dozen cycles. They were mostly variations or continuations of things done by groups of the dead Terrace peoples, or by primordials before them. They were always part of an endless continuity. Here they might be in scene five of act four hundred of one of the Volcano cycles. Earlier acts had been performed by earlier peoples, by the primordials, by Aphthonian bears, by characters or manifestations which had had no life of their own outside of the dramas.

Poetry wasn't a separate act here. The people of World Abundant were poetry, they lived poetry, they ate poetry, they drank it out of cups. All the persons were in rime with each other, so they had no need of the sound of it.

Eating was an art. No two meals on World Abounding had ever been the same. Every one of them was a banquet, beyond duplication, beyond imitation.

So it went on for a long while (by local standards); it went along for near three standard months. All the persons of the native World Abounding generations now appeared to be about the same age, this in spite of the fact that some of them were parents of others of them.

3

“We have done absolutely everything,” Chara Kerwin said one day. “Some of us, or other of us, or all of us have done everything. Now we will wind it up wonderfully. Is it not a stunning thing to have done everything?”

“But you haven't done everything, you bumptious child,” Lisetta told her. “You haven't borne children, as your mother has, as myself your grandmother has.”

“But I have. I have borne myself, I have borne my mother Kora, I have borne you, my grandmother Lisetta, I have borne every person ever birthed on World Abounding or elsewhere. What we do not do as individuals, we do in common. All of our nation has now done everything, as I have. So we will wind it up.”

All eight of the gilded youths of the World Abounding nation came at the same time to the realization that they had done everything. They called it back and forth, they echoed the information from the blue-stem hills to the orchards to the mountains. They all came together full of the information. They assembled on the top of the Terraces. They sat down at table there, and demanded that the elder World-Gaea nation should serve them.

“Out-do yourselves!” Least Lass Exendine called to all those elders. “Give us a banquet better than any you ever invented before. But you may not share it with us. It is for ourselves only. Serve us. And eat ashes yourselves.”

So the oldsters, those who had not been born on World Abounding, served the assembled younglings, and did it with delight. There seemed to be a wonderful windup fermenting for all of them.

The Comedy of Horror, perhaps, showed a little stronger than it had recently on the face and form of Fairbridge, but it was still only one of that complex of deep comedies. Fairbridge had a very stark and terrible intuition now. He had a horrifying premonition of the real substance of those twin Comedies of World Ending and of Love Transcending. But even horror is a subject of comedy on World Abounding, and it is supposed to have that jagged edge to it.

“Bring all our things, bring all our artifacts,” Chara ordered when they were still deep in the wining and dining. “Bring all our instruments and robes and plaques and free sculptures. Pile up enough food for a dozen banquets. Bring our green shroud-robes.”

“It may be that you have not really done everything,” Fairbridge said once in white agony while all the things were being piled up. “Let us think if there is not something left that you haven't done.”

“No, no, good father, good husband, good lover, good ancestor, good descendant, good Fairbridge mine,” Least Lass was saying, “we have done everything. We have done everything that could be in your mind, for plumbing the Fairbridge mind to its total depth is one of the many things we have done. And if there is some thing that we really have not done, then we will do it after we are dead. We do all sorts of communicating things in our sleep. Well, we will also do them in our deaths, as do the other dead people living in the Terraces. Fairbridge, my passion, my patsy, my toy, my love, go tell the Volcano that it is time.”

“How should I talk to a Volcano?” Fairbridge asked.

“Why, you will speak to it directly, Fairbridge. Is it not a Gaea proverb that a man may talk to a volcano just as a beggar may talk to a horse or a cat to a king?”

“And I should say what to the Volcano?”

“Simply tell him that it is time.”

Fairbridge Exendine climbed up from the Terraces onto the steep eastern slope of the Volcano Misericors. He climbed clear to the cone. The cone was a ragged laughing mouth; the whole face was a distorted laugh. One eye of that face was far down the north slope, and the other eye was over in the blue-stem hills. The ears were sundered off somewhere; the brow was exploded; the jaw was shattered all over the scree slopes. It was a fine merry face that the Volcano had, even though it was a little disjointed and disparate.

Something overly glandular about this Volcano, though. Ah, it was great-glanded. The Gorgos gland that supplied all of World Abounding was a part of this Volcano.

“Are you sure that it is as funny as all that?” Fairbridge gruffed at this open-mawed mountain. “It strains my idea of the comic a little. It could stand some revision.”

They both were silent for a little while.

“Ah, the young persons told me to tell you that it is time,” Fairbridge said glumly. The Volcano belched a bit of fire. There was something of cruel laugh in that sound: a snort, really. Fairbridge suspected that the Volcano was more animal than man.

Then the Volcano became somewhat raucous, foul-mouthed (“that quip is my own, my last,” Fairbridge said in his throat), rumbling and roaring, smoky and sulphurous, scorching, sooty. Fairbridge left it in his own passion.

He came down towards the shouldering Terraces again. All the World-Gaea people were calling him to come to the plain below where the hovercraft was at the ready. He ignored them. He continued to the high Terraces and to the native generations of World Abounding. It was like hot snakes hissing at his heels as he went, pouring streams of lava. The air had become like a furnace, like a forge with bellows puffing.

The River Festinatio had become quite excited. It palpitated in running shivers of waves. It was a-leap with all its fishy fauna, with all its bold turtles and squids. The Volcano always invaded the river at the climax of its eruptions: each successive Terrace ran further into the River. Nobody should have been surprised at the excitement of the River, nobody who had watched or taken part in the dramas of the Volcano cycles.

Fairbridge came down to the death-edge young people on the Terraces.

“You must not be here with us,” Heros told him. “There is no way that you can earn that right. We are completed, but you are not.”

Fairbridge threw himself down on the Terraces, however, and the ground of the Terraces had already begun to smoke.

“You cannot stay here, my other love, my other life,” Least Lass told him. But he lay at her feet. He embraced her ankles.

“Shall we allow them to stay on the Terraces and be burned to death and buried with ashes?” Judy Brindlesby asked uneasily on the land below.

“Yes. We must allow it,” Hilary said.

“But there is a whole world that will not be covered. Only the Terraces will be covered and burned.”

“Yes.”

“They sit there eating and drinking, and already we can smell the scorched flesh of their feet. They are all so young, and they could live so long and so happy anywhere else on this world.”

“We don't know that they could live any longer. We don't understand it.”

“But they are our children.”

“Yes.”

“Shall I feed you scraps from the table as though you were a dog at my feet?” Least Lass asked Fairbridge. “Go at once now. You have no business dying here. Go with them. They come in great danger and pain to themselves to get you.”

Rushmore Planda and Blase Kerwin came and dragged Fairbridge off the top of the smoking Terraces and down the slopes where lava and ash flow ran like lizards. All were burned, and Fairbridge was dangerously burned.

They went into the hovercraft, the seven persons who had not been born on World Abounding. They rose into the smoky volcanic air, and they hovered.

The young people, the World Abounding people, still sat and wined and dined themselves on the scorched Terraces. The hot ash and the fiery liquid shoved in upon them and rose to engulf them. They were encapsuled and preserved in the caking hot ash. Least Lass, at the rivermost edge of the Terraces, was the last of them to be completely covered. She made a happy signal to them in the hovercraft, and her mother Judy signaled back.

Hot ash filled the banquet plate of Least Lass by then, and hot lava filled her cup. Smiling and easy, she ate and drank the living coals to her pleasant death. Then she had disappeared completely under the flow of it, as the rest of them had done.

The Volcano covered them with another two meters of fill. Then he pushed on to have his will with the river.

“It did not happen, it could not have happened, it must not be allowed to have happened,” Fairbridge Exendine was mumbling inanely, but Fairbridge was mind out of body now. His mind was at the feet of Least Lass in the merciful ashes of the new topmost Terrace.

“The report will be a difficult one,” Hilary hazarded. “Just how are we to explain that a normal human settlement is impossible here? How explain that it will always end in such swift short generations? How explain that every World Abounding culture is, by its nature, a terminal culture?”

“Why bother?” asked Erma Planda of the still golden body and emerald eyes. “We will make the entry that several of the other expeditions have made. Yes, and we will be classed as such disgraceful failures as they have been. What else to do?”

She wrote the damning entry quickly.

“We were warned that there would be some necks wrung if that phrase was used in our report,” Rushmore said sourly.

“Wring my neck who can,” Erma challenged. “There. It's done. And they really wouldn't have believed it, you know.”

Quiz Ship Loose

There were five persons on Quiz Ship. The ship's interior is shown as a functional lounge and wardroom, with food center, game center, navigation center, and problem and project center. There are three doors in the back bulkhead of this functional lounge: the triangle-sign door of the Crags, the circle-sign door of the Bloods, and the square-sign door of Questor Shannon. At back left is the “Instant Chute.”

The five persons are Manbreaker and Bodicea Crag with the power of their earthiness (of whatever earth they are down on); George and Jingo Blood with their “movement-as-power”; and Questor Shannon, a slight man who expresses an oceanic massiveness and depth. Four of these people seem completely relaxed, but one of them, Questor Shannon, does not.

“Each time we go into an adventure, we go relaxed,” Questor was saying. “Some day we're going to get smeared when going in so relaxed. I feel we should go tensed on this one.”

“Relax, Questor,” the other four said, as they said so often. “This is an easy one,” Bodicea Crag (Queen Bodicea) gave the relaxed opinion. “Paleder World has no reputation for danger. Two other parties have been here, and they have left it unscathed.”

“The logs of both parties show them to have been a bit scathed,” Questor still argued. “Persons of both those parties have sworn that Paleder is a murderous world behind its smiling and open face. And their own words have been contradictory. The most open of all the worlds: one of them said. Well, why does it remain a closed world then? What has been the obstacle? Why have we come here to solve, in relaxed fashion, an enigma that some have called murderous? Coming to any other world that has been called murderous, even in minority report, we would come with much greater caution.”

“Murderous it does not seem to be,” Manbreaker Crag spoke with assurance. “No one of either previous party was killed. Well, yes, it is a puzzle. I like puzzles. The John Chancel Party — Chancel was always essentially a one-man party, but he did have three companions with him here — recorded that Paleder World was an absolute puzzle, that they did not know what they had seen after they had seen it, that they did not remember what they had been told after it had been explained to them. Chancel was good at puzzles, but he did not solve the puzzle here. He said that this world had the most advanced technology of any world known, so advanced that the world seemed to deprecate it a bit and keep it in the background.”

“I know what Chancel wrote in his ship's log,” Questor said tensely. “ ‘It has a rich hoard,’ he wrote. ‘Like every hoard, it is guarded by a sleeping dragon. Unlike most cases, this is a corporate dragon. And unlike other corporate dragons, this one has a sting in its tail. It can murder you with that sting.’ So there is something to this puzzle to be tense about.”

“Chancel filled his log books with riddles and with enigmatic statements,” Jingo Blood (the Empress Jingo) said. “But he didn't solve this riddle. I will.”

“How will you solve what John Chancel couldn't, Jingo?” Questor asked. “How will you figure out what Vitus Ambler misfigured? What special attributes do you have for this?”

“I'm smarter than they were,” Jingo Blood said. “Relax, Questor.”

“But we shoot in just nine seconds.”

“So, relax for nine seconds, then,” Jingo told him.

The nine-second interval ran its course. The five persons shot into the “Instant Chute” at back left. The Quiz Ship went into a “blank-out hover.”

The “Instant Chute” was itself a piece of very advanced technology. Much of the technology of Gaea — also known as Eretz or Earth — was quite advanced. The chute brought the five Quiz Ship persons down through ten thousand meters of space instantly, and it set them onto Paleder World. The requirements set into the chute in this case were simple: “That the persons be brought down within Paleder City, on solid footing, in an outdoor place near or at the nexus of the most intense intellectual activity of the city.” Well any sufficiently sophisticated “Chute” could do that.

They landed without a jolt. But did they come down safely?

“This is wrong, abysmally wrong!” Questor croaked fearfully as he came to ground in totally unacceptable surroundings. “There is not supposed to be any such jungle or miasma as this in Paleder City. We have overview pictures. It is not supposed to be like this. Something is very wrong.” He beat what seemed to be a fanged bird away from his face. And these were not acceptable surroundings. No one could dream of worse.

“There sure are not supposed to be any fer-de-lance snakes like that one,” Manbreaker Crag barked, “not in the middle of the leading city of one of the most civilized planets ever reported.” He flipped his swagger stick into a bolo or machete. “We have landed solidly, but barely so. This is quicksand all around us, and all the poisonous-looking flora are floating plants on that quicksand. Ah, look at the jag-rocks protruding from the quagmire! And there is a jag-toothed monster perched on every one of those rocks or snags. A person would lose a hand or an arm if he reached for anything to keep from sinking in this bog. What went wrong with our landing anyhow? Is this even Paleder World at all? The Chute has goofed. But there cannot be any such outrageous malfunction as this!”

“It isn't my idea of beautiful downtown Paleder City either,” George Blood growled. “There hasn't been such a miasmal landscape anywhere since the Devonian period on Gaea. And we were exactly over central Paleder City. Neither the Chancel nor the Ambler expeditions mentioned anything like this, and there are no such extensive, endless, I might say, areas of desolation in our photographs, the rougher sections of this world, certainly not in Paleder City. This is a very sticky malfunction. Let's back out of it. Let's go back and do it again.”

“Let's go back and not do it again,” Bodicea Crag said. “Let's not do it again till we find out what went wrong with our Chute. This is deplorable.”

The firm land “island” that they were on was hardly big enough for the five of them to stand on even with extreme crowding; and the snouts and serrate mouths that broke the surface of the quicksand were murderous. The whole thing was a churning soup-bowl of death-dealing monsters.

“The best place to attack a problem is where it is,” Jingo stated firmly. “It may be that we have been handed, quite by accident, entrée into the underlying mystery and puzzle of Paleder. Hey, this is a puzzle that can really get its teeth into you! That was a new boot too! Let's attack the puzzle where it sprawls about us here. I do not believe that the Chute malfunctioned at all, but some phrase of our instructions to it may have led it to give us this unusual opportunity. Let's use it, let's use it! How real is this, Questor? There will never be a better time to test the latest of the latest, the new portable instrument. What does the gadget say?”

Questor Shannon had the small reference instrument out and in the palm of his hand. It read “fact and depth and intensity of illusion.” But immediately, a sleek head on a long neck came out of the quicksand, gobbled the reference instrument, took three of Questor's fingers and a part of the palm of his hand with it, and withdrew into the quagmire again. It had a neat and precise operation for something so large, for that head could have taken Questor himself entire in one gulp. And Shannon sniffled and whimpered and shook with the pain of it.

“Ah, reality, along with the reality discerner, has been swallowed by a swamp dragon,” Jingo Blood said. “So now, reality is to be found in the dragons and not in ourselves. We can use your lost fingers for a reality meter now though, Questor. If you find that your fingers are back on your hand, after a bit, that will mean that the present scene is a little less than real. But, if the fingers stay gone, that means that points are scored against all of us.”

Jingo Blood seemed to be enjoying the situation a bit more than the other four were, but she was surely not leaping with joy about it. They couldn't move from there without being done to death by the huge and slashing creatures. And they couldn't stay there very long, as their “island” was beginning to crumble under them.

“At the present moment, there is no sun in the sky over Paleder World,” George Blood remarked in what was supposed to be an even-toned conversational voice. “And yet it was at Paleder City noon that we shot the Chute and came down. The sky should now be full of the Sun Proxima (the Grian Sun) which is also the sun of Kentauron-Mikron, Camiroi, and Astrobe. Why, by the way, have the people of those three worlds not sufficiently explored Paleder, or Dahae as some of them call it? Why have not the inhabitants of the planets of Sun Alpha and Sun Beta explored it? A mystery. There is no sun in the sky over us, and yet there is sufficient shocking gray and orange, lurid and garish light. No sun, and no real cloud-cover either. Dull daytime stars are above us; but instead of clouds there are globs of gloop drifting in the very low air. And one of them is coming upon us now at an unnatural speed.”

The glob came upon them and swallowed them in its fetid breath. It was sharp with teeth in it, and these were quickly identified as belonging to aerial snakes. The glob brought with it a saturating mental and emotional depression, stark consternation, an unbearable fearfulness and unpleasantness. It brought dread. It brought hallucination and contradiction, fear of falling, and fear of ultimate fire. It brought ravening ghosts and ghost-animals. It brought flying foxes that fastened onto throats with hollow and life-draining teeth. It brought violent small creatures who sometimes seemed to be human children and sometimes tearing monsters.

But a voice came from one of the small and possibly human monsters. It was a boy's voice speaking in Demotic or Low Galactic:

“Hang in there, Gaea guys! Some of us are on your side. Don't let this whip you. It's only a little psychic storm.”

What sort of stuff was that?

And then came the abomination of total despair. This corroding despair entered into the organs and entrails of all the Quiz Ship people. It entered the streets and alleys of their brains and the avenues of their notochords. It entered all the bags and vessels of their bodies. It suffused their glands and seeped into the marrow interiors of their hollow bones. This was complete despair.

“If this is not the ultimate damnation, then I'd gladly choose the ultimate damnation in place of it,” Bodicea Crag gave a sharp-voiced value judgment. “Whatever we are in, it cannot get any worse than this.”

It got worse suddenly. The “island” they were crowded onto, the island in the midst of the endless quicksand-quagmire, erupted and cast them all into the noisome and poisonous morass.

They were struck and gobbled and slashed. They were torn apart by tides and concussions. They were drowning in hot, searing, vividly inhabited and attacking mud; and they had limbs lopped off by swamp dragons. They screamed, and their screams were choked off in mouths full of mud.

“I'm not a cowardly man,” the huge and pompous Manbreaker Crag sounded then, managing to get his mouth, but nothing else, above the surface of the erupting and devouring mud, “but we have to make our peril known to somebody, somewhere. Loudness is called for, and my own loudest voice is rather unpleasant and piercing.”

It was indeed. But everything else that remained in that world was likewise unpleasant and piercing. All of the persons of this expedition had, under test conditions, endured as much as fourteen megapangs of pain. They could not have qualified for the expedition elsewise. But here, in the ravening bog, there was multitudinous pain dozens of times more intense, and there was no way they could endure it.

But how does one not endure things that are at the same time beyond endurance and beyond escape? The five screamed, screamed with their mouths and their eyes full of blood and mud and offal. They were being eviscerated by dragons, and they were being boiled alive like lobsters. Things were literally eating the brains in their heads and the organs in their bodies. Things had already devoured their minds and their souls.

The five of them screamed, underwater and under mud, mindlessly and soullessly, on and on.

“Oh, stop that exasperating shrilling,” adult voices were saying to them in High Galactic. “And stand up! And stop fouling yourselves in the mud! Are all the people where you come from as frivolous and silly as you are?”

The five persons from Quiz Ship stood up. There was something about the silliness of their situation that was almost more horrible than the pain they had thought they were suffering.

They were standing somewhat less than ankle-deep in little puddles of tacky mud. They stepped out of it and tried to cleanse themselves of flecks and spotches of mire. There really wasn't too much of it on them. They were smeared somewhat, but they weren't mortally dirty.

“We were in a horrible quagmire-jungle,” Questor Shannon was saying. He felt they owed some sort explanation to someone. “We were overwhelmed with despondency, and we were being killed by swamp-dragons and fire snakes and frenzied foxes. We were in the abomination of total despair.”

But it was plain that these people didn't believe him at all.

“You were where you are now,” one of those Paleder adults said. “We are sorry if we fail your expectations, but we do not have any swamp-dragons or frenzied foxes on our world. You landed in this little spot where you are now. This was less than a minute ago. Then you began to scream and carry on.”

“What? What is — what was this place?” Jingo Blood was asking. “What a double-dealing monstrosity of a place it was! And where has it gone?”

“It was, and is, as even you should be able to see, a very small amusement park for very small children,” one of those adults said. “As you can see, it is no more than twenty meters across, and nowhere is the growth, the ‘jungle’ as you call it, more than one meter high.”

That was true. The fearful flora did not now come to the waists of any of the Quiz Ship people; but, just a moment ago, it had seemed to reach all the way to the sunless sky, sunless no more.

For the Grian Sun was strong in the noontime sky now. What, it had been less than a minute since the Quiz Ship people had landed? All that confusion had taken place in less than a minute?

“The snakes, the dragons, the sea-serpents, the air-serpents, the flying devil foxes — ” Bodicea Crag was pleading as though for justification.

“Oh, you mean the little rubber creatures,” one of the Paleder adults said. “The small children like to make them and to play with them. And they make jangles of noises when they play here, but not so discordant noises as you yourselves make. Do you like to play with the little rubber animals also? Perhaps you will be allowed to make some of them. The small children have dragon-making contests, but these are the failed constructions that you find here. The children. Ugh, the children! They are tedious when they are uncontrolled. Where are the adults of your own party?”

“We are the adults. We are all the party there is,” Manbreaker Crag affirmed, with a touch of sad arrogance.

“You-are-the-adults?” the Paleder people asked in apparent disbelief. “The way you were carrying on, we thought that you were simply incredibly loutish children. Now we see that you are, yes, that you are incredibly loutish adults. We will have to take you into custody and to inquire into your awkward arrival here. Yes, and into your grotesque behavior. We are not sure that you are genuine humans or proto-humans at all. You may be what are called ‘fiasco humans’. It is likely that you are from Gaea or one of the other very backward worlds.”

“It's only one-upmanship,” Jingo Blood tried to rationalize it to her companions as the five of them were led away (by moral force, not physical), apparently to some sort of confinement. “The people of Paleder seem to be very good at one-upmanship. But I do not quite understand — ”

“We haven't made a very impressive beginning here,” Manbreaker Crag said dismally, and they silently all agreed with him. But how had they seemed to be drowning and dying? How had they been doing it in little patches of mud that were no more than five centimeters deep? How had it seemed that they were being broken apart and eaten alive by ravening animals that now turned out to be no bigger than their thumbs, and that moreover were made out of rubber?

“How are your fingers, Questor?” Jingo Blood asked him.

“They hurt terribly,” he said, and he showed them.

“Ah, but you still have them,” Jingo chortled. “That means that the little scene we just experienced was not real and that it didn't happen.”

“Those fingers, they are bad,” George Blood said. “They're highly infected already. I suspect that they will have to come off. And if you do lose them, that might mean that the little scene we just experienced was real to some extent, and it did happen, a little bit anyhow.”

“Loss of nerve, and loss of our sense of proportion, that's what has been responsible for our fiasco,” Manbreaker Crag was rationalizing to his fellow Quiz Ship people. “We let them get the jump on us, and make fools of us.”

“Being made a fool of shouldn't matter a lot to an explorer,” Jingo Blood told them. “The job of an explorer is to solve problems and to get information. The explorer must be willing to serve as bait if there is no other way to coax the information to strike. Special information is like lightning, and it must be tempted. So, we have been bait. Yeah, live bait.”

“It hadn't seemed like a loss of proportion to me,” George Blood said. “Maybe it is a finding of a lost sense of proportion on this problem. We lost our sense of proportion as to Paleder World one hundred years ago, when John Chancel first set down here. And no one from our world has been able to see this world in proper proportion from that day till this. Why have we been confused? This isn't an alien planet. This is a world of human or proto-human persons. It is a civilized world where they speak Galactic.

“But there are so many enormities to be solved here! There are so many towering questions to be answered, and none of our people has even had the wit to ask them yet. Why is Paleder permitted to hide its light? That is the question.”

“How have the people of Paleder become such master illusionists? That is the main question,” Manbreaker Crag stated pompously.

“No, that is not the question at all,” Jingo contradicted. “I don't believe that the head of the creature even knows that there are illusions going on. Those things are part of the snap of its tail. But what is the creature itself like if its tail has such a snap to it? That is more like the question. The things to notice aren't the little diversions such as the tiny park that seemed to us to be enormous. What are we being diverted from? That is the question. There must have been many people diverted away from raiding the wonderful technology of Paleder. The people of Paleder seem to set up the illusion that their technology is not worth bothering with. How have they managed that illusion? That is much more important than the little tail-flick illusion of the quagmire and its dragons.”

They were in a pleasant enough room, large and probably comfortable. They hadn't explored it thoroughly yet, but they had learned one objectionable thing about it: they couldn't get out of it. They couldn't open the doors. They couldn't even find the doors.

“If we are not to mind being fools, then let's take the fool's way of getting some action here!” Manbreaker shouted. “Let's make a noise about it.”

“You make a noise about it, Manbreaker,” Bodicea said. “You have a peculiar talent for that.”

Manbreaker Crag made howling, roaring, gibbering noises of fearful volume. Possibly he did it for no longer than a quarter of a minute, but it seemed like hours to his four companions. What did it seem like to the Paleder people?

“Simpletons from Gaea, stop that childish racket!” Paleder voices sounded the command to them from outside the room.

“We want out of here!” Manbreaker roared. “Out, out, out!”

“Come out then,” said the voices with perhaps a touch of taunting. “The doors aren't locked.”

“We don't even know what are doors and what aren't,” George Blood howled.

“Intelligent persons would know doors,” the voices outside remarked. “The doors can be found by persons with eyes in their heads. They are not locked. They are only intelligence coded. Persons of adequate intelligence can open them easily. Persons with inadequate intelligence better remain where they are for a while. We will possibly have to locate your keepers and have them come and get you.”

“Oh, there's no problem about getting out,” Jingo Blood told her companions after a moment. “You can get us out of here, Manbreaker. You can get us out of here by another very peculiar talent that you have. But let us first take the blinders off our eyes, now that they are loosened. Let us consider why the Paleder affair has not been properly pursued.

“Why have we people of Gaea not pursued it? Paleder is a gleaming ‘goldmine in the sky’ with its technology that is beyond any other. But this is only our third acknowledged attempt at it, the other two being one hundred years ago for one of them, and fifty years ago for the other. No, our own is not an acknowledged attempt either, so there have been only two of them. But there may have been several Sneaky Pete attempts like our own. And why have the people of the nearer worlds, Camiroi, Astrobe, Kentauron-Mikron, not pursued it? Probably they have, but somehow they were shaken from it or diverted from it.

“Does Paleder really have the most advanced and most sophisticated technology of all the worlds? Likely it has. Then why hasn't that technology been appropriated? Or why haven't there been attempts, with or without force, to appropriate it? Is it the case of ‘Yes, it is the most sophisticated technology to be found anywhere; only — ’ Well, only what? What is it that turns people away from the acquisition, from the follow-up? Is there something phony about this ‘most advanced technology anywhere’? Is there something undesirable about it? That is what we have to find out. Now let us get out of here and find it out. Lead us out of here, Manbreaker.”

“How?” the ponderous Manbreaker asked.

“By one of the small number of talents that you have. No, not by roaring, by your other main talent.”

“Oh, that one!” Manbreaker barked. He was a large and powerful man.

“You can tell the doors, Manbreaker,” Bodicea said. “They will be the easiest parts to break open.”

Manbreaker Crag broke out of that room, presumably through a door where it should have been the easiest. And the other Quiz Ship people followed him out.

“How novel,” said a Paleder person with the only touch of amusement ever noticed in any of those high-brained ones. “We ourselves would never have thought of that solution. And yet it conforms to the requirements, as being an alternate intelligent solution, a solving of the egress problem by using a more spacious interpretation of the framework of the problem. We might be tempted to incorporate such a procedure into our own thinking, were we not beyond the stage of incorporating any new material.”

“Certainly we allow visitors to Paleder World,” a Paleder person was saying in answer to a question. “Being the most open of all worlds, by our own claim and covenant, we could hardly bar visitors. No, we do not encourage them to come. Why should we? Visitors are always something of a nuisance. Yes, there have been many parties here from various worlds. No, you are not the third party to arrive here from Gaea. You are more like the thirtieth. Oh, we suppose it's true that the parties who come here on ‘unacknowledged’ attempts, those who do not file ‘Paleder’ as their flight destination, do not often return from Paleder, or do not return in good case. Often they have bad luck in leaving. Those who come without filing flight patterns usually have a bit of theft in their hearts, and they must expect retribution. We find that you yourselves have not filed ‘Paleder’ as your destination. That was thoughtless of you.”

The people from Quiz Ship were on Paleder for part of three days. They held conversations with several dozens of the Paleder people in that time. Or else they held several dozen different conversations with a smaller number of these people. Why were the people of Paleder, those people of most surpassing accomplishments, of such undistinguished presence and appearance? Thirty seconds after speaking to one, you would remember only most vaguely what he looked like.

And certainly the science and technology of Paleder was unutterably advanced. Why then did it seem so trivial? Why were the Quiz Ship people so unamazed by it?

Take the weather. One could turn the “manual override” on the weather box at any Paleder City street corner, and the indicated weather would happen at once. One could turn it to “rain,” and it would rain instantly. One could turn it to “rain harder” and it would rain harder. But the visitors from Gaea were made to feel that there was something gauche about using the “manual overrides” on everything. The programmed, automatic way of everything was the best. The “manual overrides” were there only in case of error in the automatic. But there were no errors.

“After all, we do have perfect weather,” a Paleder person said. “Perfect weather is weather that is not noticed at all. Perfection is anything that passes absolutely without notice.”

“I must disagree with that,” Questor Shannon argued. “Perfect weather is that of which one might say ‘Ah, this is a beautiful day!’ I can find no fault at all with your controlled and flawless weather of Paleder; but I am not impelled to cry out ‘This is a beautiful day!’. I wonder why I'm not?”

There was the “hand-of-death” feeling on all things on Paleder. How to explain it? It was as if the people of Paleder had simply decided to stop living, their problems all being solved. And this decision to stop living was reflected in all their handiwork. Dead man stuff, yes. Puzzling.

“Both the impulse and the expression seem a little bit sticky to me,” the Paleder person said in answer to Questor's “This is a beautiful day” thesis. “I am glad that our flawless weather does not provoke such jejune outbursts.”

Everything on Paleder was flawless. But was that the same thing as being perfect? Maybe. Was it the same thing as being excellent? Maybe. But there were surely some things that it was not. Perhaps it was not inspiring.

There was no impulse to revel in the flawlessness of things here on Paleder. Why then, on Gaea or most other worlds, was there often the impulse to revel and to hold high celebration for things that were hardly half this good?

The persons of Paleder traveled hardly at all. And this seemed unappreciative of them, since they could travel as much as they wanted, as far as they liked, as comfortably and as instantly as they wanted; and they could do it at no cost at all.

“Your ‘Travel Tracks’ are something on the line of our ‘Instant Chutes’, farther up on the same line,” Bodicea Crag was saying to a Paleder adult. “And yours are, yes, flawless. Our device uses a staggering amount of power to transport just five of us only ten thousand meters in an instant. But a million times as many of you could go a million times that far with the consumption of hardly any energy. I notice though that you do not use (I get the impression that you have the feature but no longer employ it) the ‘particular-excellence’ factor in selecting destinations. For instance, we instructed our ‘Instant Chute’ to set us down at the ‘nexus of the most intense intellectual activity’ of this city. As it happened, the chute goofed and set us down we know not where. It failed or misunderstood, but, usually it succeeds with pleasant results. Now, you could have yourselves transported to ‘the most pleasurable site and circumstance of this world, at this moment’. You could always have the best of the best. Why don't you?”

“We do, but not by selection. To do that, we would have to accept the view that one thing is ever more pleasurable than another, that one thing is ever better than another. We don't accept that.”

“You don't?” Jingo Blood asked in amazement. “But things have to be better or worse than others. Such differences are what makes the world go around.”

“Not this world,” the Paleder person said.

“You amaze me,” Jingo pursued it. “Don't you believe that one thing may be more interesting than another, that one person may be wittier than another, that one hill may be higher than another, that one song may be more musical than another?”

“No, no,” the Paleder person said. “We believed and acted on these things on our way up. But when we got to the top, we saw it all more clearly, so we did away with the top. All these apparent differences are mere illusions, to be cast aside.”

“Well dammit, don't you, master illusionists that you are, believe that one illusion may be more illusory than another?” George Blood demanded in full voice.

“No, no,” the person said. “We don't accept illusion even about illusions. On Paleder World, one hill may not be higher than another. We no longer have any hills or mountains. They caused elements of randomness in our world, so we did away with them.”

“Did you really level your hills and mountains?” Questor asked in amazement.

“No, of course we didn't. That is to look at it backwards. We raised our plains. Everything on Paleder is at highest point. ‘Highest and most equal’ is our motto,” the Paleder person said.

Food on Paleder was, well, flawless. And it was always locally sufficient. But would you ever cry out, in the midst of devouring some of it, “Hey, this is good!”? Well, why wouldn't you?

Most of the consummate technology of Paleder was invisible. And, according to the Paleder persons, this general invisibility of unnoticeability was the sure sign of perfection. It is only imperfect things that draw attention to themselves.

“How does that tail belong to this animal?” Jingo Blood wailed in sudden frustration early on their last day there. “What is the atrocious imbalance here all about anyhow?”

“My modified love, what are you talking about?” George Blood asked her.

“These citizens of Paleder, these possessors of the highest sophistry and equipment, they are a bunch of sleepwalkers! There is just no other word for them. What sort of animal is Paleder anyhow?”

“As you imply, Jingo, it is the animal whose tail is its most interesting part,” George Blood said.

By the “tail” of Paleder, the Quiz Ship people seemed to mean the weird children of that world. Oh, the strange children of Paleder, lurking and flickering and burning, and seldom to be seen straight off!

“These people have their world set up so that no one is permitted to be too cold or too hot,” Jingo puzzled, “or too wet or too dry; so that no one is allowed to be hungry or in bad health; where no one — this curdles me — is allowed to be unhappy. No one is permitted to be worried or uneasy, or ill-clad or unintelligent. Isn't that exciting? No, it isn't. But why isn't it?”

“Well, these people here will answer us anything we ask,” Bodicea said. “Let's ask them more questions then. Yeah, and come to more dead ends.”

“With us, of course, there is no division between our psychology and our technology,” was the answer that one of the Paleder persons gave to an awkwardly-asked question. “You cannot have our technology without also having our psychology. You cannot have our attainments without being like us. Ours is not a technology for conscious persons.”

“It is not a technology for whom?” Manbreaker crackled. But the High Galactic word which the person used, “syneidos,” “conscious,” was unmistakable.

“The ‘dragons’ with us as with you, though you may not understand it of your own cultus, the ‘dragons’ are no more than aspects or alternate morpha of our own children. Oh, yes, they are often the murderous aspects of our children. They are often solidly, though unnaturally, fleshed dragons. And they can be mean! The dragon and the child are always one. But the child, given a little time, will usually outgrow its dragon. Or, less frequently, the dragon will outgrow its child and will then become the viable form.”

That is what another Paleder person said in answer to another awkwardly-phrased question from one of the Quiz Ship people. But the kid-dragons on Paleder were more often visible than on Gaea.

“You say that we should control our children better? You say that our children should all be in bed by this hour of night? People of Gaea, we do control them, they are all in bed right now. I will wager that every child in Paleder City has been in his bed for two hours already tonight,” said another Paleder person in answer to another set of questions. “Ah, but you ask who then are those small and savage persons or creatures congregating murderously in the small parks and stalking so devilishly through the darkened streets? Oh, those are our same children, sleeping in their beds in one of their aspects, and ravening in the tangled night in another. Small children often have more than one aspect to them.”

“I thought,” Questor said lamely, “that the ‘dragons’ were really only small rubber devices made by the children.”

“There are many ways of looking at it. The little rubber dragons or monsters are entry points for most of them. They pass through them. They are the talismans or triggers. They are their conceptions of how they will look. And then they become those conceptions for a while.”

“The reason we get such wraithy answers is that we ask all the wrong questions,” Jingo Blood complained to her companions. “Well, on the one end we can only fight dragons with dragons. And on the other end we can only seek the right questions to ask.”

So they set up “Project Fight-Dragon-With-Dragon.” They implemented it with what talent of that sort they could discover in themselves. And they found that talent to be quite abundant, once it started to flow.

And they asked more, and still more awkward, questions. But it was Bodicea Crag (Queen Bodicea) who finally asked the key question.

“Are you people conscious?” she asked a group of Paleder people, and she was amazed at herself for asking it.

“No, of course not,” one of those persons said. “We are entirely too civilized for that. Consciousness is a short and awkward interval that many persons and many races pass through. Other persons and races, less fortunate than these, remain in the state of consciousness and do not pass through it. Another group, ourselves, are now able to avoid consciousness entirely in our adult forms. Centuries ago, we passed through it, as a race. We still pass through it as small children. But there is no reason for us to repeat that passage in our adult forms.”

“If you are not conscious, then you are — unconscious,” Jingo Blood said as if pronouncing a great truth.

“That is the silliest attempt at logic that I have ever heard,” a Paleder person said. “But how can we explain her silliness to a completely silly person? We are not conscious. We are not unconscious. We are post-conscious. And ours is a post-conscious world.”

“If you are post-conscious, then you are not conscious that you are here talking to us,” George Blood said. “You don't know that you are here. You don't know that we are here.”

“No, we're not conscious of these things. We don't know that we're talking to you. But there's a ‘pattern’ on our world that responds to you correctly, through us, or in other ways. That saves us trouble.”

“If you don't know that we're here, then we can insult you with impunity,” Manbreaker Crag said with a big grin on his big face.

“You can try it,” one of the Paleder persons said. “But our ‘pattern’ may react to your insults, either through ourselves or otherwise. When our ‘pattern’ reacts, you can get hurt badly.”

“Then all your vaunted technology will serve only post-conscious persons,” Questor Shannon said.

“Yes, our flawless technology will serve only flawless persons — ourselves.”

“Then you are no more than zombies!” Manbreaker chortled.

“No, we went through the zombie phase, in our race, a little while after we went through the conscious phase. But now we are post-zombie as post-conscious. Really, now that we have arrived at our destination, we don't much care to remember the roads by which we arrived.”

“Will you prevent, or try to prevent, our leaving Paleder World?” George Blood asked.

“No, we will not,” one of those post-conscious persons answered. “But something may try to prevent your leaving, perhaps the ‘pattern’, perhaps the dragon-children.”

The Quiz Ship persons withdrew from the post-conscious aggregation. It was late at night of the last (but they did not know that it would be the last) night of their visit to Paleder World.

“There's a psychological imbalance in all this,” Jingo Blood said. “Becoming post-conscious is going to have a devastating kick-back through the whole psychic web. It has to be counter-balanced somewhere. What is it that must proceed from such an imbalance?”

“Nothing will proceed from it,” George Blood said. “The kick will be a backward one. Nothing will follow. But, oh, what will go before! The seemly adults will throw it all back onto the childhood. The dragon-children are not post-conscious. They are conscious, and murderously pre-conscious. All the psychic lumber cast off by their fastidious parents comes clattering down upon them. It has to land on someone. What power, what twisted power those kids must have!”

So the Quiz Ship people concentrated all their energies on ‘Project Fight-Dragon-With-Dragon’.

“Our ‘Instant Chute’ did not fail or misunderstand when we came down here,” Jingo said now. “The little quagmire park that seemed so large to us, it really was the nexus of the most intellectual activity in town. Wherever the morphic children are concentrating in their psychic monsterness, that will be the nexus of what intellectual activity there is here. Everywhere else, things are post-intense and post-intellectual and post-active.”

“Yes,” George Blood agreed.

“They got rid of such a lot of clutter when they became post-people,” Jingo went on, “and it all comes down upon their children.”

“We have the picture now,” Manbreaker blasted with his strong voice. “All their brains are in their tail now, and the tail has a murderous flick to it. Let's take the Chute and get to Quiz Ship as soon as possible. And let us get away from this world. The Chancel party got away. The Ambler party got away. A lot of the others must have failed. Let's make a break for it.”

“We can try,” Bodicea said. “Maybe we can get the ship loose.”

The midnight town was lively. And post-people do not usually indulge in night life very much. What was reveling through the town tonight were great numbers of monsters and dragons, and those small creatures who seemed to be human children and also to be tearing monsters. Fanged kids, poisonous kids, mean kids. Aye, and the damnable aspects of them!

Roving ghosts and ghost-animals. Flying foxes attaching with hollow, blood-sucking teeth. Swamp dragons. A sleek head on a very long neck came out of the slimy darkness and took three of Questor's fingers and part of the palm of his hand. This was the same flesh and bone that he had lost on their arrival. And Questor Shannon sniffled and whimpered and shook with the pain of it.

“The unthinkable calm of the post-persons must be paid for in some more jittery coin,” a pleasant dragon said. “It is paid for, or recompense is made for it, by this delirious chaos here in the undermind of this world. It is the children who compose the undermind now, and their creatures, and their creatures' creatures. It is the howling irrationality.”

“Dragon,” George Blood spoke dangerously, “you speak with my wife's voice. Have you devoured my wife?”

“Oh, it's myself, George,” the dragon said in the voice of Jingo Blood. “The dragon and I are one. It's part of the ‘Project Fight-Dragon-With-Dragon,’ but it's a difficult projection when it's done consciously rather than unconsciously. I suspected, while I was still an undergraduate in psychology, that children of our own world were sometimes able to incarnate their dragons, but those one-in-ten-thousand cases of it were always explained away as something else. I can't do it very well yet. I notice that Bodicea is doing it a little better, but not really well. And you other three are total busts.

“Oh, by the Great Clamminess, here comes that Glowering Glob again!”

It was much as it had been during that first minute after their arrival. The glob of clammy gloop, drifting in the low air, came upon them and swallowed them whole with its fetid breath. There were aerial snakes in that glob, and they struck out of it with paralyzing pain. There was the saturation of mental and emotional depression, the stark consternation and unbearable fearfulness and contradiction. There was the dread. There was the fear of falling forever.

“No, no, no, no, I cannot go through this again,” Manbreaker Crag yowled.

“Is the end of it all, the dirty end of it,” George Blood roared.

There were fer-de-lance snakes. There were swamp-dragons and jag-toothed monsters.

“I do hate a dragged-out death,” Jingo keened as her dragonness slipped away from her. “Come quickly, end of it! Oh, come quickly!”

“Be of stout hearts, Gaea guys,” a little giggling dragon cried in a clear and boyish voice. “Some of us are with you. We're on your side.”

They had heard that voice before.

But the Gaea people were being struck and gobbled and slashed. They were drowning in hot, searing, vividly inhabited and attacking mud.

“I'm Glic,” the clear, boyish voice sounded again. “I'm pleased to meet all of you.”

“Oh Lord,” Manbreaker moaned. “Is it the amenities that we meet again in this, our final passion?”

“Voice of Glic, how did the people of the Chancel Expedition escape from this world?” Questor Shannon was imploring. “How did the people of the Ambler Expedition escape?”

“How would I know?” Glic's voice sang. “I'm just a little kid. Move it along though, folks! Don't block the concourse! We're going too. Some of us are going to get on Quiz Ship whether you make it or not. We want loose from here.”

But the Gaea people were being torn apart by tides and concussions. They were drowning in boiling mud, in boiling air. Then there was a horrible constriction. They were being forced through the suffocating gullet of the most dread dragon of them all. Yes, swallowed up.

“It's nothing but a psychic storm, people,” said the boyish voice of Glic. “Don't they have them on Gaea too? Keep saying to yourselves ‘This is fun, is fun.’ We might make it through and get loose.”

Then they were through the gullet and into the very maw of the devouring dragon. And the maw heaved and launched. It was moving through space!

No, it was a dragon's maw only in a manner of speaking. The Chute had been a very tight gullet to go through, but it had been the Chute that swallowed them up. Now they were inside Quiz Ship and it was in acceleration away from Paleder World.

“We're loose, we're loose, and Paleder's the Goose,” eight little dragons were chanting.

Little dragons or not, they were loose and in flight. Four of the Quiz Ship people were there. And there were nine dragons who had begun to shed their dragonness. Some of them were becoming approximately human children. One of the fastest-shedding of them was Glic, who was recognized by his voice.

“You sure are lucky we wanted to go with you, or you'd never have made it,” Glic chirped. He was a red-headed little boy with a bit of dragon spirit still abiding in him.

“One of us is missing,” Manbreaker Crag grumbled. “There are only four of us now and there are supposed to be five. Does anybody know which of us is missing?”

Questor Shannon was at the controls of Quiz Ship now, though the only direction he was able to give it was “Away from here! Get us loose!”

Then they were loose, and Questor was singing a glum ditty, but his voice was a little more cheerful than usual:

“After the world is over,

After the minds are gone.”

“It was a bust, of course,” Jingo Blood was saying. “Their famed technology was wonderful, I suppose. But it was not wonderful for us. And it was not for export.”

“Oh, you are wrong, lady!” eight children with tatters of dragonness still clinging to them cried out.

“You are still sick from the psychic storm, people,” Glic cried. “But look at the bright side — us. I am here, and with me are seven companions more witty than myself. We know a lot of that technology, but we don't lock ourselves inside it. That's why we wanted loose from Paleder, so we wouldn't become post-people too. They had become post-space-flight, and where would that leave an adventurous person like me? We know the gadgets and technologies, though. Eight brainfuls of technologies you're getting with us.”

“One of us is missing,” Manbreaker insisted. “Bodicea, which one of us is missing? Oh, it's Bodicea who isn't here.”

“I'm here,” she said.

“Bodicea, get out of that dragon suit!” Manbreaker roared.

“It isn't a dragon suit. It's me,” she said. “I wasn't quite ready to grow up anyhow.” Nevertheless, the dragoning was falling off her in big pieces, and soon it would be gone.

“We're just little kids,” said a little girl who still had her hair full of dragon scales, “but we're insufferably smart on that technology already. We can't give you enough of it to turn you into post-people with everything completed, but we can sure give you enough to pop your eyes. I bet we can set all the Gaea guys to gaping with what we know.”

It wasn't really too difficult to understand the Demotic or Low Galactic that the children spoke.

“We couldn't see any future in that post-people stuff we were supposed to grow into,” another of them said, “but we look forward to life with backward people like you.”

“I knew we'd stumble on the answer,” the Empress Jingo guffawed. “ ‘Creative Chaos’, that was the answer.”

“Thank you,” Glic said. “You're lucky we met you.”

Mud Violet

“Properly to carry out the next assignment for this class, it will be necessary that you die,” the instructor said. “Some of you may not want to do this. If you do not, I will have to demerit you as for any other neglected assignment. There are several straight-A students in this class, however, and I am sure that they will want to continue so. To them I say ‘Carry out this assignment.’ ”

This instructor of the young — we didn't like him. We (who were no longer young) were Barnaby Sheen, Dr. George Drakos, Harry O'Donovan, and Cris Benedetti, the four men who knew everything; and myself who did not.

There are nine basic colors: hylicon, violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, red, and mystes. There are persons who say that there are more basic colors than these: but they confuse hues with colors, or they list non-basic colors such as the purples and magentas and the variously named non-spectral violets and reds. To such persons we can only say ‘You are mistaken.’

There are other persons who say that there are fewer basic colors than these listed here, that the first and last colors of our list are not visible colors at all. To such persons we can only say ‘Go get your eyes fixed.’

The three most knowledgeable authorities on this subject (God, a cosmopolitan; Iris, a Grecian lady; and E. I. Watkin, an Englishman) agreed that there were these nine basic colors in the bow in the clouds and that all other colors are contained in them.

The present account is suffused with the first of these colors, hylicon. This color, lying in the wave band between 400 and 3,900 angstroms, is sometimes called ultra-violet. The color may be seen by many humans and by many other non-simian primates (pay attention, we are making important distinctions here). There are persons of the very finest sensibilities who can see this color clearly and can see all manner of objects suffused by this color; they say that it is like the finest violet color, but incredibly extenuated. There are likewise persons of the very crudest sensibilities who can see this color; they say that it is the color of mud.

Unless you are a person of admirably noble (or of disgustingly coarse) sensibilities, you will not understand this account at all. We're sorry about that.

Loretta Sheen died when she was just sixteen years old. Her father, however, said that she didn't die, that she wasn't dead. He said that she had merely put herself into a spiteful state, out of perversity. This was an act quite out of character for her. She was mostly a good girl.

Six other young persons of Loretta's acquaintance died the same weekend, and most of them died violently. These six were Harvey Clatterbach, Willow Gaylord, Elroy Rain, Violet Lonsdale, Barry Limus, and Priscilla Rommel. The families and friends of these six accepted the fact that they were dead: they hadn't the mental slipperiness of Loretta's father, Barnaby Sheen. The six young people looked dead and acted dead; and they were buried as being dead. Not quite so with Loretta.

The whole idea of it began in a special high school psychology class taught by an instructor named Edmund Weakfish.

“Participation psychology is the only psychology of any value,” Weakfish was saying. “We have had good success with this here and have come to some sound understandings. To understand a person we must become that person. To fathom a phenomenon you must be that phenomenon. And as we have been studying abnormal psychology by this method I am pleased to see how abnormal many of you have become.”

Edmund Weakfish the instructor was a dull-looking person. He appeared to have been molded, in face and body, out of much-used modeling clay or putty, to have been molded by one with not much talent for molding. Edmund was of a dull putty color and of a shapeless plasticine shape. Yet he was said to be a young man of unusual bent, and a high school should have several unusual instructors.

“Harvey Clatterbach has come to understand the psychology of a thief by becoming a thief,” Weakfish was commenting. “Willow Gaylord has entered into the psychology of a pregnant woman by becoming a pregnant woman, and without the usual procedure. It is true that her doctor has called it a false pregnancy, but that was merely because of loss of nerve and illusion on Willow's part. A serious student of psychology would be able to go all the way with it, to achieve complete parthenogenesis and give birth, simply by putting herself into the state of mind of a pregnant woman and persevering in it.”

“Would I be able to do it?” Elroy Rain asked Weakfish. Elroy had something of a kidder in him, a type of boy who was often a pit-fall to a psychology instructor.

“No, you would not be able to do it, Elroy,” Weakfish told him. “It would be more difficult for a boy in any case, but it would not be impossible. It would be impossible for you only because you are not inclined enough to seriousness. Someday, I will find a male student interested enough to accomplish this. It will be something of a vindication of my teaching.”

“You said once that I could make myself invisible,” Loretta Sheen blurted out as if she had been puzzling over this till it flooded over.

“You yourself said once, Loretta, that you could make invisible things visible,” Weakfish reminded her. “Specifically, you are the girl in our class who is able to see poltergeists. And now you have several of the others able to see them. What is the difference? Yes, you could make yourself invisible if you entered fully into the state of mind of an invisible person. I am not sure, in any of these cases, whether it must be a real person whose state of mind one enters. I intend to find out.”

“What if we come first, and we set up a state of mind in another person?” Violet Lonsdale had asked. “I believe I have done this. I schizo'd myself by entering into the state of mind of a schizo girl, but I think I beat her to it. She was only a little bit that way at first. Now we are both that way. My other person is named Mary Mondo. The other girl's other person is named Alice McGivern, and her primary person is named Janita Krupp. This other girl is very much torn up by it, but I'm not. I'm stronger than she is, and my other person Mary Mondo is the strongest of us all.”

“Actually you are quite weak, Violet,” Edmund Weakfish said, “and you are cracked wide open. I believe that Mary Mondo will take you over almost completely and that it will be a good thing. The other double person, whoever and wherever she is, will probably destroy herself. This all fits in pretty well with my theories.”

“There is something that went wrong with my own experiment,” Barry Limus said. “I think it had something to do with our trying to study poltergeists. I think that was what made you give me that assignment.”

“I'm sorry, Barry,” Weakfish said. “I forget what assignment I gave you. It slipped my mind. More than that, it seems that it has been made invisible to my mind by its own nature. Into what state of mind did I assign you to enter?”

“Into the mind, the long dead mind (you said it would add a new element to our experiments) of the person who made those peculiar old Central American figurines that we were looking at in the Gilcrease Institute. Well, it wasn't the state of mind of a dead man that I entered into, so that part of the experiment is voided. That mind, if it is a mind, is still as alive as it ever was. Those three figurines weren't made by a man. They are either fossils of poltergeists or they were molded or carved by poltergeists.”

“That wouldn't be possible,” Priscilla Rommel interrupted. “A poltergeist couldn't make anything, and you couldn't enter into his mind. He hasn't any mind, not really. He's misnamed. There isn't any geist or spirit in him at all. He's sheer matter.”

“Then why can't we see him?” Weakfish asked. “Except Loretta possibly, except several more of you a little less possibly, and probably through her; we can't see them. Why aren't poltergeists generally visible if they are sheer matter?”

“Mere matter is always invisible,” Priscilla maintained. “It becomes visible only when touched with spirit. Mere matter may recognize itself in other ways though. I have always suspected that Loretta is mere matter with none, or very little, spirit.”

“I have lots of spirit,” Loretta Sheen protested. “Oh, we will tangle, girl, we will tangle!”

“How is it that all of us see rocks, for instance?” Weakfish asked. “I suppose that all of us can, and surely rocks are somewhat lacking in spirit.”

“I don't know,” Priscilla said. “I haven't worked out that part in my mind yet.”

“Well, poltergeists, whether they contain spirit or not, are your outside assignment for the weekend,” Weakfish told them. “I personally believe that they are no more than dead people. To study them best I believe that you must go and live with them. To do this, it is probably necessary that you die. I recommend this to you but I cannot compel it.”

“How would we get back?” Elroy Rain asked.

“A good participation psychologist would think of something, if he had a reason to come back at all. Probably you would put yourself into the state of mind of one risen from the dead. I believe that the poltergeists are somehow incompletely dead people. When you die you will likely enter the world of such a color that polters and such are visible to you. This is the world of color named ultra-violet or hylicon.”

“Sometimes we call Barry ‘ultra-violet’,” Willow Gaylord said, “because Violet Lonsdale says he is a little beyond her. Ah, that's kind of a private joke.”

“But if we die we will have all the colors, or none,” Loretta Sheen argued. “This is really what it is all about, the succeeding or failing, what used to be called the saving or damning. We'll have all or none. How would we have only this fringe color?”

“Die compromised,” Weakfish the instructor said with that facial tic that was sometimes mistaken for a grin. “Die completely compromised and frustrated.”

“What if we only pretend to die?” Loretta asked.

“I believe that is what poltergeists have done,” Harvey Clatterbach said. “They are people who have died with certain mental reservations about it, and then perhaps they have been stuck with it.”

Weakfish left it with them then. Loretta told the others that she was going to do it, to pretend to die. Several of the others said, “We will go with you if you really go.” That was Friday evening.

Loretta Sheen died in convulsions on Saturday morning. Her father Barnaby Sheen took it oddly.

“No, she isn't dead, George,” he insisted to Dr. George Drakos who was his friend and physician. “She has merely put herself into a spiteful state. I suppose it is partly my fault: I'd lost contact with her. What is a father to do when a child becomes so alienated and casual? But she isn't dead.”

“Barnaby, she has been dead for four hours,” Drakos said firmly. “We both saw her die in those empurpled convulsions. Naturally I had to report it. Are you really in a daze, man? You wouldn't let the priest in. You said that he was one of those damnable new priests who engineered such satanic alienation, and that you wouldn't let him get a further hold on her. And you wouldn't let the lads from McGee's Funeral Home take her after I had called them. Barnaby, she is cold dead, and the clock stands at noon. What will you do? What will I do?”

“You have already reported her dead, George; that is enough for you to do. I will keep her here till she comes to her senses, in the several meanings of that phrase. There is no law against that. I will declare this room to be a crypt or shrine, and I will keep her here.”

“But at least she must be embalmed, Barney.”

“No. I am afraid that it would make it more difficult for her. We will not eviscerate her temple. She has already suffered too much transformation.”

“Barney, I can't leave you here like this. What shall I do?”

“Pray, George. We need the prayers of even a half-good man.”

The young friends came in to see the stark dead Loretta. Barnaby didn't forbid them. He disliked them all slightly, as he would dislike members of any alien species, but he accepted it that they should visit her.

The young friends talked to Loretta. Barnaby didn't find it overly worthy of note (though George Drakos would have been horrified at it, if he were still there, and he was a doctor) that Loretta answered them. She answered them in an unlocated voice that resembled her own very little, and yet it had her signature on it.

“Will we still tangle, girl?” Priscilla Rommel taunted her corpus.

“No. We be tangled,” Loretta answered, but not out of her mouth or throat. Possibly it was out of her stomach. Possibly it was from some other point in the room, or outside it.

“Have you really gone, Loretta? Shall we go with you?” Harvey Clatterbach asked her. Harvey had been in love with Loretta, but now he had become a mechanical sort of contraption. He had a noisiness, even a sort of brightness about him; so have many mechanical contraptions.

Loretta answered Harvey and the others. She answered in the same unlocated voice with her own slight signature but little of her old timbre in it. She talked in syllables and words, and her father Barnaby raised his head in cracked pain and loss. He couldn't understand her words. He could get no meaning from them at all. He would never be able to understand her again.

But the tin-eyed young people understood her. They talked with her for some time.

“We will come along too, if you say that's all there is to it,” Willow Gaylord pronounced with a new jerkiness. “I think that's what we've all been looking for, something with not much to it.” Willow had been quite a nice little girl. Odd.

And Loretta, or the noise that had formerly been Loretta Sheen, continued to answer from some unidentified location. And the others talked to that location.

“If ever come out, what is like, anyhow together with what's it for, won't have to do, take it loose, what else but rap, break it like bananas, stuff it we'll glide, door hole and all, why not, cream it wheeze, gouch,” Elroy Rain was saying in words but no sense. None of them ever made sense again.

Not even Violet. Not even Barry who was a little beyond Violet. Not Priscilla Rommel. They talked, but now even their words could not be recognized as words in any language. They were a racket and clatter; nothing beyond.

Nevertheless they were making a pact, a brainless and spiritless pact. Then they all tramped out, or at least disappeared, with a noisiness, even a sort of metallic brightness.

“They have made a pact to kill themselves,” Barnaby Sheen said by correct guess. He rose with an almost deliberation. “I really ought to stop them,” he hazarded.

“Ah, no matter though,” he voiced a little later, after Loretta had rattled something to him in her unlocated way. “It will make little difference. They were as good as dead anyhow.

“How have they been so completely robbed of mental sunshine? I will bring some here if I have to import it. It will be several years too late for most of them; maybe not for all.”

Harvey Clatterbach took Willow Gaylord behind him on his cycle and they went off a viaduct to their deaths. They flamed down on the concrete and rails below. They may have set themselves afire before their wheeled vault through that space.

Elroy Rain simply ran out into a stream of traffic to be killed. It may have been an accident, a Freudian accident.

Violet Lonsdale cut her throat with a saw. She tried first to do it with a carpenter's saw and found that very awkward.

“This will not do at all,” she said, or seemed to say. “Now that I have become completely metallic I should use a hacksaw.” She did. It went much better.

Barry Limus who was with her went a little beyond her with the same tool. He performed on himself mortal mutilations that seemed quite imaginative to himself, but were really gross and dull.

Priscilla Rommel drowned. This also may have been a Freudian accident. She went skating alone on a pond. She went onto mushy ice over deep water and went through. But she knew the pond well, and knew ice.

All seven of the students had entered fully into their weekend assignment. The instructor Edmund Weakfish was quite pleased by the response.

To one outside it, the hylicon-colored world seems pretty dull. To one living within it (we have only the word of several undependable persons who lay claim to the experience) the dullness is the redeeming part of it. Dull pain is less searing than sharp pain; dull loss is not so wrenching as vivid loss. Those who are in that state want it dull, 'tis said, or they wouldn't have chosen it.

This seems an unfair judgment. There had been a certain liveliness in some who had chosen it, and we cannot believe they are all happy in their doubtful state. (Dull unhappiness, though, may be better than cutting unhappiness.)

Here we plead ineptitude and lack of foundation. We can only use secondary evidence for most of what follows.

There were some unpleasant things at several of the funerals. There were rappings from inside some of the caskets. This isn't so unusual a thing as you might believe. Those whose business is with funerals may encounter it a dozen times during life. It is usually tactfully ignored, but it does give one a clammy feeling to hear it.

It was worst in the case of Barry Limus. It began in McGee's Funeral Home late at night, the night before the funeral. It was no ordinary knocking. It was a multiplex thing that seemed to have a pattern, almost a disagreeable tune, to it. It became so bad that an exorciser was called, and performed his exorcisms.

This did seem to have a dampening effect on the knockings; it muted the noise a little bit, it gave a certain frustration to it. But then came the garble, the mumble, the words. They were slightly in the voice of Barry Limus, but they were not from his mouth or his throat. “Leave it off, Father John,” the words segregated themselves out of the garble (it was really as if Barry were speaking in several voices at the same time and this one came to the fore), “it isn't devils, it is only myself.”

“Where are you, Barry?” the exorcist priest asked the sound.

“Mostly right here,” came one of the Barry voices. “Not, not in the body here. Just around here. Was curious about it a little. Not very though.”

“Are you in Purgatory, Barry?” the exorcist asked him.

“For about three years now, I think.”

“But you are dead only one day. Time must seem different to you.”

“Goes slower, not faster. No big thing that. I'd already left off regular living. No big change.”

“Why do you knock and clatter?”

“Not knock and clatter. It's a beat, Father, a send-it beat. It's all we want.”

The exorcist priest became quite stern.

“Go out from him!” he ordered angrily.

“No one to go out,” one of the weary young voices with a touch of Barry said. “No one in me but me. Not much of me.”

“What is Limus?” the exorcist suddenly asked.

“I am Limus. My last name.”

“What else?”

“I don't know what else,” one of the residue voices of Barry Limus said.

“Leave us alone,” said several of his other voices.

“Limus means mud or slime,” the priest remarked to Barnaby Sheen and to several other observers who were there. “And, as an adjective, it means ‘askance’ or ‘squinting’. His father doesn't know the origin of the surname. I get something of an unclean and continuing family spirit or tutor here, but I don't get much of him. Probably of no importance.”

Several of the other remnants had given a few words or sounds even more garbled than those of Barry Limus. The whole business was in bad taste.

All the rappings left the caskets before burial. They were heard in the air, above and away from their boxes for a while. They were heard going off aimlessly into the distance, mostly back towards their own part of town.

But Loretta Sheen still remained unburied.

“It isn't near as bad as I feared,” Dr. George Drakos said to Barnaby Sheen several days later, “but she does begin to smell a little.”

“She always did,” Barnaby said. “No, not always, but for the last year or so. It is the way that the young people live and keep themselves in these latter times.”

“Barney, are you really going to keep her here like that?”

“Oh yes. George, I am going to make a sincere effort to understand my daughter and her friends. We have found them empty and dull, and it is true that they had become so. But I must find out who cut them off and let them fall into such a state; I must find out why and by what authority it was done. I must discover why they chose it with such open and unseeing eyes. I will uncover the real essence of this thing, if it has any. It is all something monstrous, and I go monster-hunting. I am setting up equipment to study this out thoroughly.”

“Equipment, Barney?”

“Aye, man, aye! Am I a pseudo-scientist for nothing?”

Barnaby Sheen assembled an impressive battery of equipment in his daughter's room. It was already plain that the room had become a sort of headquarters or hangout for Loretta and her dimly-colored friends.

Sheen used ultra-violet cameras. He often got the globs that represented the muddy young people. He had some success with ultra-violet scanners and scramblers. The globs could be recognized: they were outrageous burlesques of the seven young people who had been known to him in the world. The globs changed shape constantly, but they kept slight signatures of their originals.

There were some twists even to this. Mary Mondo had taken over Violet Lonsdale. Mary Mondo had been the secondary person of that split girl: now she was the primary. Violet sometimes hovered near her for a moment, thin and tenuous, but was usually present for only a few seconds.

There were a few there who were strangers to Barnaby Sheen. These were globs or persons other than the seven young persons who had recently died.

“There are two of the extras that I know,” Harry O'Donovan said in his high voice, “and they are still alive and listless in the temporal world. I don't know what to make of this at all.”

Harry O'Donovan and Dr. George Drakos were with Barnaby Sheen this day as he tried to unravel the phenomena.

“You don't really need the ultra-violet equipment, Barney,” Harry O'Donovan said. “One can see the forms about as easily without it. They just take a little getting used to. I suspect we could always have seen them. And now I'll be seeing them everywhere, and I don't particularly want to.”

“I know,” Barnaby told them, “and I don't particularly want to see them everywhere either, but I have to. I will understand these things. I will bring some sort of understanding to them since they haven't any of it in themselves.”

“I recognize the sound pattern now,” Doctor George Drakos said, “now that the analyzer has waded through hours of it and made abstractions of it. I should have recognized it before, and I suspect that I will be hearing it everywhere in the future. All of us have been hearing it everywhere, of course, and for a long time. We have tuned it out resolutely. But will we be able to tune it out from now on? It is the brain-wave pattern sometimes found with a type of insanity called hebeta dementia. It isn't complex. It isn't rhythmic. It differs from random noise only in its narrowness. It resembles something else in its queer narrowness. I wonder why they like it?”

“It's the sound that the hinges of hell make,” Harry O'Donovan put in, “and that is the dullest of all sounds, as coming from the dullest of places.”

“No, I don't believe there's anything particularly hellish about it,” Barnaby Sheen muttered. “It isn't consequential enough to be hellish. Nothing of that complex is. Yes, I will have to find out why they like it.”

Barnaby Sheen got more material, several days later, for his investigation. A group of young people, living young people as well as he could tell, came to him in Loretta's room.

“We want to hear it,” one of their spokesmen said. “They're good, and we want to listen to them. We want to gather in this room and listen to them almost all the time.”

“How many of you are there?” Barnaby asked from the depths of the depression that these young people always gave him.

“About five hundred of us. Some days there would be more.”

“No. It's physically and personally impossible for me to put up with any such number of you.”

“There's an alternative,” one of those leaders suggested. “We will all kill ourselves, just as they have done. Then we will be able to crowd into this one room and enjoy, and you won't even have to feed us.”

“I wasn't figuring on feeding you,” Barnaby said. “And I don't think you'd all better kill yourselves at once. It's a more serious thing, even for such as you, than you would imagine. I unwelcome the whole idea.”

“There is a second alternative,” said another of the youth leaders. “I'll have to tinker with it a little, and then I'll have it. Trust me, all of you, and you too, Mr. Sheen: I'll have it ready by tomorrow and we'll try it. I'm an electronics genius.”

“So am I,” said Barnaby. “I don't believe we have anything else in common.”

The young people left him then, all except the seven in the special state and a few others who were on the fringe of that state.

But the young leader, who said he was an electronics genius and that his name was Roy Mega, was back the next day with his own pieces of equipment.

“We have a sort of barn, a shed, Mr. Sheen,” he said. “It will hold the five hundred persons if they are crowded in tightly, and that is always the best way. It will also hold any number of free spirits, and I believe that they will come from almost everywhere. We will present in our barn The Continuing Event, the Experience of the Seven Spooks. This will be our fulfillment.”

“I don't really care what five hundred of you, abetted by a number of free spirits, will be doing in a barn or shed, provided that it is a sufficient distance from here,” Barnaby Sheen said.

“It's about a mile from here,” the young genius told him. “I intend to pick up the Experience in the room here and carry it to our larger meeting place. I have invented certain equipment to do this. Marvel at it if you wish, and then permit me to install it.”

“It looks like a couple of amplifiers and telephones,” Barnaby said.

“Is that what they are?” Roy Mega cried with sudden flaming interest. “Why, I have independently invented the telephone and the electronic amplifier then. My own genius will never be sufficiently appreciated. I almost hate to merge myself in the experience and lose my special self.”

“I'll give you a job, Roy,” Barnaby said. “You'll not even have to get a haircut for it. I'll waive that requirement. I have quite a number of electronics geniuses working for me; and I pay well.”

“Mr. Sheen, I did not believe you capable of such an obscenity,” the young genius said with real shock. “You'd have me debase my genius for money?”

The young Roy Mega installed his equipment and left.

Thereafter, for some weeks, there took place what was either an ecstasy or a public nuisance in a barn or shed about a mile from the Sheen home. It was called, by some, The Symphony of the Seven Spooks and Other Free Spirits. By others, it was called a damnable noise, which was inaccurate. It wasn't a noise, and the young people couldn't be prosecuted for making an objectionable noise.

It wasn't quite in the audible range; and we believe that noise, by some definition, must be within that range. Normal people couldn't hear it, but they sure knew it was there. It was near enough to the audio to give all the neighbors an attack of subliminal insanity. And it was near enough to give the initiates a species of ecstasy.

Five hundred young persons, and numberless free spirits, crowded into the old barn or shed and enjoyed a flesh-crawling silence in glazed-eyed rapport. It was a silence that often shattered glass panes in the neighborhood and brought all the malaise of a sonic boom. It was just below the audio range, as the free spirits themselves were just below the visual range. Yet there were certain persons, other than the adolescent pupa forms who gathered for it, who could actually hear this thing, just as there were persons who could actually see the free spirits.

These, again, were persons of either admirably noble or of disgustingly coarse sensibilities. If you were of the land between, it left you angrily blank.

A thing like that couldn't go on.

“Of course it can go on,” Harry O'Donovan said surprisingly. “It is outside of time, so who is to say that it cannot go on? With them, and with the thing itself, it is instantaneous. An instant (am I not correct, Cris?) cannot have duration, and neither can it have an end.”

We were met together, Barnaby Sheen, Dr. George Drakos, Harry O'Donovan, and Cris Benedetti, the four men who knew everything, and myself who did not. This was in Barnaby Sheen's home, in Loretta Sheen's old room which Barnaby now used for a study. (Barnaby's last study was crammed full of things now, and there was no room for more: he had three of these rooms in his house that were so full of things that they could no longer be used.)

“An instant meant, originally, a standing upon or a pressing upon, an urgency,” Cris Benedetti said. “Then it meant a close pressing in respect to time, an immediacy. But you are wrong about the young people and their things. It isn't an urgency that they have; it's an unsubstantial flimsy, and it will have a flimsy ending.”

The room was still the shrine or crypt of Loretta Sheen, but now her body was less regarded. The room didn't seem to center on it anymore; the room centered on nothing. The body still lay on the sofa-bed there. It had become little more than a life-sized doll. It was even more doll-like in that it had a sewn or stitched appearance, and now the clothing seemed a part of the body.

“Well, you should have more regard for it, for her, than that, Barney,” George Drakos was saying. “Look, there are even several books piled upon the body. That is thoughtless of you.”

“Thoughtless of me, yes,” said Barnaby. “I did it without thinking, if I did do it; and I hadn't noticed it at all. I see, though, that they are her books and not mine. Perhaps Loretta piled them there herself. She doesn't — eh — take very good care of her own body lately.”

Barnaby Sheen did appear quite thoughtless this evening. He had a great cut down the side of his jaw and neck: he said that he didn't know how he had come by it, that he didn't know that he had it.

“She is becoming more interested in things now, though,” Barnaby said. “She is becoming more kind. She does little things for me that she never did before, not even in her regular life. I cannot understand her speech and I am sure that I will never be able to understand it again. But she is often able to answer my questions in another way. And the thing does begin to break up. There are fewer of the globs around now than there were, and fewer of the free spirits as they call themselves. They're drifting off to somewhere else, I believe.”

“It may be simply that we're losing our ability to see them,” Cris said.

“No. We can still see three or four of them,” Barnaby insisted, “the same three or four of them, which is the test. Loretta is still here. Mary Mondo is here, though her secondary person, Violet Lonsdale, has gone. Barry Limus is here. Sometimes there is another one here who is not one of the first seven. And there's another diminution. I am told that the sub-audible in the barn has abated considerably. It breaks up a little.”

“It may be so, Barnaby,” Harry O'Donovan said. “But have you come any closer to understanding the young persons and their complex?”

Barnaby Sheen had just unwrapped a new cigar and stuck it in his mouth. A lighter near him on the table rose into the air, lighted itself, and lighted the cigar for him when he puffed matter-of-factly at its flame. “Thank you,” Barnaby said. It had been the barely-visible hylicon-colored glob of one of the girls, possibly that of Mary Mondo, more likely that of Loretta Sheen, that had performed the thoughtful service.

“No, I can't say that I've come any nearer to understanding them,” Barnaby breathed out the words along with a wreath of blue smoke, “since understanding is an essential that is absent from their whole thing. I become a little more mellow to them, though; I like them and theirs more than I did. And I believe that they now understand (though that isn't the correct word for it) me a little better than they did, and they are more solicitous of me.”

“I understand them pretty well myself now,” Harry O'Donovan said.

“Not you, Harry,” Drakos objected. “You would be the last of us to have rapport with them. You would be the last of us to have rapport with anything.”

The books had been removed from the ‘body’ of Loretta Sheen now. I had not moved them, nor had any of the other four men. It had been done either by the free spirit of Mary Mondo or of Loretta Sheen herself: the two young girl remnants looked very alike in their dim outline. They were also stowing up other things about the room as if they did not want to be criticized for its lack of neatness.

“Yes, I understand something of their complex now,” O'Donovan insisted, “unlikely as I seem for it. Their syndrome represents such reality as there is in those much-abused terms ‘The Third World’ or ‘The Third Realm’. They are apart from our own torn world; they are apart from the heaven and hell that tear our world between them. They are, although in a very minor way, the third thing. Besides them, there isn't any other third thing anywhere. It is all completely amoral, of course, just as fairyland was, is. It may be the same dingy place. I've always believed that that turgid place and state was unnecessarily romanticized. There was always something queer and queasy about fairies, even before the latter meaning.

“But it's all a blind alley, we know that, and that is all the understanding that is possible of it. Worse than that, it is the blind gut of a nameless and inferior worm that they are in. I don't know the reason for the thing at all, and I suspect that even God has forgotten it.”

“Yes, you understand it somewhat, Harry,” Cris Benedetti sighed, “but you surely do not have rapport with it. Barney, what did you mean when you said that you could not understand the words of your daughter but that she could sometimes answer your questions in another way?”

“I'd better show you,” Barnaby said with a sort of heavy listlessness. “I'd be afraid to tell it in words. Likely you won't believe it even when I show you. It isn't important, really, but it's a piece of what I'm trying to investigate.”

Barnaby Sheen took one of those little paper-slitting knives that was no more than a razor-blade set into a folding clasp. He cut the 'body' of his daughter Loretta down the side of her jaw and into her bosom. It was much like cutting cloth or paper or parchment. It became apparent, as Barnaby made the cut, that the skin of the girl and the dress of the girl were a continuation of the same material, slightly different in coloring.

There was nothing liquid inside the cut at all, nothing that had ever been liquid. There was nothing there that remembered being either blood or serum or flesh or bone.

“It's sawdust,” Barnaby Sheen remarked. “She is now full of nothing but sawdust and mottos.”

“There was never wood sawdust so fine as that,” Drakos said, “but it is dust.”

“It is the primordial dust from which the first of us came,” Harry O'Donovan declared (I'll not guarantee this conversation of Harry O'Donovan. I can see correctly in the fringe areas; but I'm not always so certain that I hear correctly in them), “and unto which the first of us returned. Later, we came from and returned to a more modified dust. Most of the dust we now see in the world is not primordial dust at all. It is a recycled or secondary dirt: it has been used before, and several animations have run through it. That secondary dust is now the dust into which most persons fall when they die. Not so in the case of Loretta and her dust which we see. She did not die, she did not traverse her life; and so she did not come to the latter dust.

“She withdrew or was withdrawn from life, she backed out of it, she left it by the same door she had entered it; she did not cross that room at all. So it became the case that she hadn't been, that she had never lived at all, that she is not and was not. She is not recycled into dust. This, here, is dust that has never been animate; dust from which the animation has been withdrawn.”

Had Harry O'Donovan really been saying fringe things like that? I do not apperceive accurately in the fringe audio area.

“Secondary bull dirt upon you, Harry!” Barnaby Sheen said in a voice more friendly than his words. “Ask her a question someone. I mean it. Ask her a question.”

“Loretta,” Cris Benedetti said either to the dim body or to the dim glob of the girl, “you once used to read a fair amount, and several of your friends did also. How is it with you now? Do you still read? And what? And how?”

“Ah, we'll prod around in her a little and the answer should be found,” Barnaby was saying. He had spread a handkerchief and scooped a little of the Loretta dust upon it. He didn't seem to want any of it to be wasted; he wanted it all returned to her. There were other things mingled in that fine dust. It was almost as if the girl had become a scrap heap. “She's full of mottos and such chopped-up things,” Barnaby Sheen mumbled as he worked with careful fingers. “Ah, I believe this is the pertinent piece.”

Barnaby tried to spread it out, but there was no way. It twisted on him, and twisted again. It was crinkled as a piece of scrapling. And yet, there did seem to be an insane lettering on it, wherever the lettering did not fall clear off of it.

“We read the Putty Dwarf,” the writhing crinkle showed the demented letters. “Oh, surely you know the Putty Dwarf! Even some adults read him. He is the Pied Piper of the pied type. Whether we are children or whether we are rats (we ourselves argue about this) we will follow him yet. No, of course we do not find him interesting. Interest is the thing we abhor most.”

“It is printed, if such deformity be called print, upon a series of little parings of something,” Harry O'Donovan was toying with an idea, or toying with sanity. (Once more, I do not guarantee this conversation of Harry O'Donovan; he is, though he does not seem to be, a fringe person.) “There is an inferior devil named Topashi who prints his little insanities on the dried foreskins of boys who have sinned mortally in the womb before birth. Such, at least, is the old legend, and probably the present case. But how did Loretta come by such a quantity of compromised foreskins?”

“Shut up, Harry,” Barnaby Sheen said pleasantly. “It is the latest opinion that a child is unable to commit mortal sin before the age of eighteen months. You're insane.”

“And would I be watching such stuff as this if I weren't?” Harry arched his voice.

“Is that Loretta's handwriting, Barnaby?” Cris Benedetti asked.

“No, of course it isn't. It is nobody's handwriting. The devils never did use flowing script, never true handwriting. They are denied such personal signature. Harry was right that it is only devils who print such stuff. I'm not sure he is right as to the name of this particular devil.”

Well, it was in that deformed poster-style, in that block-printing with every letter of a different size and shape from every other, with all the lines running all out of line. It was that crookedness for the sake of crookedness, that deformity in love with deformity. (Either Cris Benedetti or Harry O'Donovan was saying all these words, or else they were going through my mind from the thoughts of one of those persons; it isn't firm ground here: the deformities are always printed out over a void and not over firm ground.) “Whether it was used by devils only is not certain, but there seems always to be this ‘Devil Between’ in such communication. No good person ever employed such a deformity of print or drawing, unless going through a devil-medium out of necessity; and a good person has no business going through a devil-medium.

“And the Putty Dwarf was for sure the Pied Piper of such pied type and thought. He did have a mixed following of rats and children and unspirits, and it is hard to tell them apart. It is likely that Edmund Weakfish had introduced some of the children, and some of the rats, to the writings of the Putty Dwarf.”

And Barnaby Sheen was sewing up his daughter's body with needle and thread, though George Drakos (who was a surgeon) insisted that he would be able to do it better. Neither one of them seemed to notice the blood dripping from Barnaby's jaw and neck (from the great cut that he didn't remember getting) into Loretta's dust. It is quite certain that neither of them noticed the pattern and shape of that blood dripping, or they'd have boggled at it. The shape of it was in an even more tenuous tint of mud-violet than is the rest of this scene. Both of them, likely, were too intelligent to be able to see it. But it was a broken communication going in the other direction now, going through a medium at least as dirty as the other, going in a form possibly even more grotesque. Deformity has more shapes and hovels than one.

Barnaby sewed Loretta up without appreciating what they were doing to each other; and who is to criticize? Barnaby Sheen and his daughter did communicate, a little bit, very dimly, very late. This is the closest that they ever came. The pattern of Barnaby's own blood-drip was not overly sane. How should the dribblings of the girl's never-lived-in dust be more so?

Some of these things were spoken in riddle-form by Sheen and Drakos and O'Donovan and Benedetti, the four men who knew everything. And some of the things were merely following a crooked trickle through my own mind; an apparent wink from the glob of Mary Mondo for one thing.

I was only accidentally a member of the company of the four men who knew everything (they never seemed to notice that I didn't). However, I enjoyed certain disadvantages that they lacked. As a person of very crude sensibilities, I could and still can see certain shapes and colors that the others miss or half-miss.

I had seen something happening when Barnaby Sheen was cutting his daughter Loretta down her throat and into her bosom, the cutting that was like cutting cloth or paper or parchment.

I'd seen the counterpoint of it. I'd seen it all going the other way.

Two of the mud-violet globs (really, they aren't so unseemly if you have naturally coarse eyes) were at the same time cutting into Barnaby Sheen down the side of his jaw and neck and into his chest till they came to the primordial gore of him.

These two globs were, I believe, the shapes and persons of Loretta Sheen and Mary Mondo. At the same time they were doing this, they were asking questions (not exactly in words) of Barnaby Sheen, and they were then pulling the answers out of his throat-slash.

The answers were written on twisted cartilage (Barnaby was a very cartilaginous man). They were neither in nobly-formed letters nor in that devil-deformity with every letter of a different size and color and shape. The answers were in good but rapid writing, in cursive. Cursive letters are running letters; but why should Barnaby run on so, and he not even know it? The pattern of Barnaby's blood-drip into Loretta's primordial dust and rubble was this running thing. Maybe he was always too much given to running in his thoughts and words.

Barnaby's answers, they were in words? Of course. They were in intelligent words? Certainly. Why should he use words of any other sort? He was an intelligent man. Was he aware of them, that they were being taken out of him? Not at all. Were they understood by Loretta Sheen and Mary Mondo and by the others who coalesced less clearly? Hardly at all. Those shapes were mostly beyond words, but still there was an approach to communication.

We still meet about once a month in the study of Barnaby Sheen. The doll that had once been Loretta Sheen is still there, a little smaller than it used to be. The globs are still there, some of them, a little muddier than before and a little less violet. In particular, the forms or globs of Loretta Sheen and Mary Mondo remain.

At our meetings we talk of profound and important things. We agree (or rather, the four others of them agree) that certain paranatural happenings that had once infested that room are neither profound nor important.

Barnaby Sheen (though now less and less often) still sometimes opened the throat of his daughter and drew out twisted answers or messages from her rubble and dust. Sometimes they were real (though wrongly emphasized) answers to real questions. More often they were gibberish.

It was all vaguely in bad taste, of course. But was ever anything in worse taste than the original bodying and inspiriting of man himself? That business of the slime of the earth and of the spittle has offended many.

As a person of very crude sensibilities, I still had my peculiar edge over those four men who knew everything. I could see Barnaby's own erratic bleeding at our nearly every meeting. I could also see the jagged cuts made in the jowls and throats of Doctor George Drakos, of Harry O'Donovan, of Cris Benedetti; these men were totally unaware of them, but the globs had expanded their field of inquiry. I could see the two girl-wraiths pulling cartilaginous and bloody mottos and answers out of all four of the men now. But a man does not see these things in himself. There was something I wanted to ask, though; something that I wanted to ask Mary Mondo.

We went out for a midnight supper one night after one of our informal meetings. While at supper in the night place, I heard a remark.

“Look at those five old bats at that table,” it was a young man making the remark. “They all five look like they cut themselves shaving, cut themselves bad.”

Five of us. Then the glob-girls had been extracting these things from me also. Can they understand what they draw out of me better than what they draw out of the others? It seemed a balance unredressed here. They've been drawing queer stuff out of five of us, and Barnaby has been drawing only a little bit of unsubstantial matter from the doll that was once Loretta Sheen.

An idea though! I, being of more crude sensibility than the others, might just be able to do it. There is Mary Mondo. She originated as a secondary, so she is crude and ill-defined. But she became a primary, so she is of a certain energy and moment. I myself have always felt that I was a secondary (sloughed off and long forgotten) of a primary man who has left the scene and left me isolated. So there are possibilities.

And Mary has given indications, lately, of having sordid but solid answers, if only one knew how to ask the questions. I, I almost know how to ask her the question, I almost know what the question is.

Half-a-dozen small knives here on my table. Are any of them crude enough to cut into globuous and unspirited matter? Are there any fingers coarse enough to draw filaments out of such a foggy throat as hers once the cut is made?

One knife in particular there, it seems very coarse, very crude. Ten fingers on the edge of the table here (apparently they are my own) seem suddenly very coarse. And we are having another of our informal meetings at Barnaby Sheen's tonight.

I almost have it clear now, the question I've been meaning to ask Mary Mondo whom I never knew in life, who never was in life except as the secondary of a duller girl.

We will try for that question and answer. We will try it tonight.

Boomer Flats

“In the tracks of our spiritual father Ivan Sanderson we may now have trailed a clutch of ABSMs to their lair,” the eminent scientist Arpad Arkabaranan was saying in his rattling voice. “And that lair may not be a mountain thicket or rain forest or swamp, but these scrimpy red clay flats. I would almost give my life for the success of this quest, but it seems that it should have a more magnificent setting.”

“It looks like a wild goose chase,” the eminent scientist Willy McGilly commented. But no, Willy was not downgrading their quest. He was referring to the wild geese that rose about them from the edges of the flats with clatter and whistle and honk. This was a flight-way, a chase of theirs. There were hundreds of them if one had the fine eyes to pick them out from the background. “Mud geese,” Willy said. “We don't see as many of them as when I was a boy.”

“I do not, and I am afraid that I will not, believe in the ABSMs,” said the eminent scientist Dr. Velikof Vonk, stroking his — (no he didn't, he didn't have one) — stroking his jaw, “and yet this is the thing that I also have most desired, to find this missing link finally, and to refute all believers in the other thing.”

“We can't see the chain for the links,” said Willy McGilly. “I never believed that any of them was missing. There's always been too many of them for the length of the chain: that's the trouble.”

“I've traveled a million miles in search of them,” said Arpad. “I've pretty well probed all the meager ribs of the world in that travel. My fear has always been that I'd miss them by a trick, even that in some unaccountable way I wouldn't know them when I found them. It would be ironic if we did find them in such a place as this: not a wild place, only a shady and overlooked place.”

“My own fear has been that when I finally gazed on one I would wake with a start and find that I had been looking in a mirror,” said Velikof. “There must be some symbolism here that I don't understand. What is your own anticipation of them, Willy?”

“Oh, coming back to people I've always liked. There used to be a bunch of them on the edge of my hometown,” Willy McGilly said. “Come to think of it, there used to be a bunch of them on the edge of every hometown. Now they're more likely to be found right in the middle of every town. They're the scrubs, you know, for the bottoming of the breed.”

“What are you talking about, Willy?” Arpad asked sharply.

What they were all talking about was ABSMs.

Every town in the south part of that county has a shadow or secondary. There is Meehan, and Meehan Corners; Perkins, and Perkins Corner; Boomer, and Boomer Flats. The three eminent scientists were driving the three miles from Boomer to Boomer Flats looking for the bones, and hopefully even the living flesh, of a legend. It was that of the missing link, of the Abominable Snowman, the ABSM. It wasn't snowy country there, but the so-called Snowmen have been reported in every sort of climate and countryside.

The local legend, recently uncovered by Arpad, was that there was a non-African non-Indian “people of color” living in the neighborhood of Boomer Flats, “between the sand-bush thickets and the river.” It was said that they lived on the very red mud banks of the river, and that they lived a little in the river itself.

Then Dr. Velikof Vonk had come onto a tape in a bunch of anthropological tapes, and the tape contained sequences like this:

“What do they do when the river floods?”

“Ah, they close their noses and mouths and ears with mud, and they lie down with big rocks on their breasts and stay there till the flood has passed.”

“Can they be taught?”

“Some of the children go to school, and they learn. But when they are older then they stay at home, and they forget.”

“What sort of language do they talk?”

“Ah, they don't seem to talk very much. They keep to themselves. Sometimes when they talk it is just plain Cimarron Valley English.”

“What do they eat?”

“They boil river water in mud clay pots. They put in wild onions and greenery. The pottage thickens then, I don't know how. It gets lumps of meat or clay in it, and they eat that too. They eat frogs and fish and owls and thicket filaments. But mostly they don't eat very much of anything.”

“It is said that they aren't all of the same appearance. It is even said that they are born, ah, shapeless, and that — ah — could you tell me anything about that?”

“Yeah. They're born without much shape. Most of them never do get much shape. When they have any, well actually their mothers lick them into shape, give them their appearance.”

“It's an old folk tale that bears do that.”

“Maybe they learned it from the bears then, young fellow. There's quite a bit of bear mixture in them, but the bears themselves have nearly gone from the flats and thickets now. More than likely the bears learned it from them. Sometimes the mothers lick the cubs into the shape of regular people for a joke.”

“That is the legend?”

“You keep saying legend. I don't know anything about legend. I just tell you what you ask me. I'll tell you a funny one, though. One of the mothers who was getting ready to bear happened to get ahold of an old movie magazine that some fishers from Boomer had left on the river edge. There was a picture in it of the prettiest girl that anyone ever saw, and it was a picture of all of that girl. This mother was tickled by that picture. She bore a daughter then, and she licked her into the shape and appearance of the girl in the movie magazine. And the girl grew up looking like that and she still looks like that, pretty as a picture. I don't believe the girl appreciates the joke. She is the prettiest of all the people, though. Her name is Crayola Catfish.”

“Are you having me, old fellow? Have those creatures any humor?”

“Some of them tell old jokes. John Salt tells old jokes. The Licorice Man tells really old jokes. And man, does the Comet ever tell old jokes!”

“Are the creatures long-lived?”

“Long-lived as we want to be. The elixir comes from these flats, you know. Some of us use it, some of us don't.”

“Are you one of the creatures?”

“Sure, I'm one of them. I like to get out from it sometimes though. I follow the harvests.”

This tape (recorded by an anthropology student at State University who, by the way, has since busted out of anthropology and is now taking hotel and restaurant management) had greatly excited the eminent scientist Dr. Velikof Vonk when he had played it, along with several hundred other tapes that had come in that week from the anthropology circuit. He scratched his — (no he didn't, he didn't have one) — he scratched his jowl and he phoned up the eminent scientists Arpad Arkabaranan and Willy McGilly.

“I'll go, I'll go, of course I'll go,” Arpad had cried. “I've traveled a million miles in search of it, and should I refuse to go sixty? This won't be it, this can't be it, but I'll never give up. Yes, we'll go tomorrow.”

“Sure, I'll go,” Willy McGilly said. “I've been there before, I kind of like those folks on the flats. I don't know about the biggest catfish in the world, but the biggest catfish stories in the world have been pulled out of the Cimarron River right about at Boomer Flats. Sure, we'll go tomorrow.”

“This may be it,” Velikof had said. “How can we miss it? I can almost reach out and scratch it on the nose from here.”

“You'll find yourself scratching your own nose, that's how you'll miss it. But it's there and it's real.”

“I believe, Willy, that there is a sort of amnesia that has prevented us finding them or remembering them accurately.”

“Not that, Velikof. It's just that they're always too close to see.”

So the next day the three eminent scientists drove over from T-Town to come to Boomer Flats. Willy McGilly knew where the place was, but his pointing out of the way seemed improbable: Velikof was more inclined to trust the information of people in Boomer. And there was a difficulty there.

People kept saying “This is Boomer. There isn't exactly any place called Boomer Flats.” Boomer Flats wasn't on any map. It was too small even to have a post office. And the Boomer people were exasperating in not knowing about it or knowing the way to it.

“Three miles from here, and you don't know where it is?” Velikof asked one of them angrily.

“I don't even know that it is,” the Boomer man had said in his own near anger. “I don't believe that there is such a place.”

Finally, however, other men told the eminent scientists that there sort of was such a place, sort of a place. Sort of a road going to it too. They pointed out the same improbable way that Willy McGilly had pointed out.

The three eminents took the road. The flats hadn't flooded lately. The road was sand, but it could be negotiated. They came to the town, to the sort of town, in the ragged river flats. There was such a place. They went to the Cimarron Hotel which was like any hotel anywhere, only older. They went into the dining room, for it was noon.

It had tables, but it was more than a dining room. It was a common room. It even had intimations of old elegance in blued pier mirrors. There was a dingy bar there. There was a pool table there, and a hairy man was playing rotation with the Comet on it. The Comet was a long gray-bearded man (in fact, comet means a star with a beard) and small pieces were always falling on him. Clay-colored men with their hats on were playing dominos at several of the tables, and there were half-a-dozen dogs in the room. Something a little queer and primordial about those dogs! Something a little queer and primordial about the whole place!

But, as if set to serve as distraction, there was a remarkably pretty girl there, and she might have been a waitress. She seemed to be waiting, either listlessly or profoundly, for something.

Dr. Velikof Vonk twinkled his deep eyes in their orbital caves: perhaps he cogitated his massive brain behind his massive orbital ridges: and he arrived, by sheer mentality, at the next step.

“Have you a menu, young lady?” he asked.

“No,” she answered simply, but it wasn't simple at all. Her voice didn't go with her prettiness. It was much more intricate than her appearance, even in that one syllable. It was powerful, not really harsh, deep and resonant as caverns, full and timeless. The girl was big-boned beneath her prettiness, with heavy brindled hair and complex eyes.

“We would like something to eat,” Arpad Arkabaranan ventured. “What do you have?”

“They're fixing it for you now,” the girl said. “I'll bring it after a while.”

There was a rich river smell about the whole place, and the room was badly lit.

“Her voice is an odd one,” Arpad whispered in curious admiration. “Like rocks rolled around by water, but it also has a touch of springtime in it, springtime of a very peculiar duality.”

“Not just a springtime; it's an interstadial time,” Willy McGilly stated accurately. “I've noticed that about them in other places. It's old green season in their voices, green season between the ice.”

The room was lit only by hanging lamps. They had a flicker to them. They were not electric.

“There's a lot of the gas-light era in this place,” Arpad gave the opinion, “but the lights aren't gas lights either.”

“No, they're hanging oil lamps,” Velikof said. “An amusing fancy just went through my head that they might be old whale-oil lamps.”

“Girl, what do you burn in the hanging lamps?” Willy McGilly asked her.

“Catfish oil,” she said in the resonant voice that had a touch of the green interstadial time in it. And catfish oil burns with a clay-colored flame.

“Can you bring us drinks while we wait?” Velikof of the massive head asked.

“They're fixing them for you now,” the girl said. “I'll bring them after a while.”

Meanwhile on the old pool table the Comet was beating the hairy man at rotation. Nobody could beat the Comet at rotation.

“We came here looking for strange creatures,” Arpad said in the direction of the girl. “Do you know anything about strange creatures or people, or where they can be found?”

“You are the only strange people who have come here lately,” she told them. Then she brought their drinks to them, three great sloshing clay cups or bulbous stems that smelled strongly of river, perhaps of interstadial river. She set them in front of the eminents with something like a twinkle in her eyes; something like, but much more. It was laughing lightning flashing from under the ridges of that pretty head. She was awaiting their reaction.

Velikof cocked a big deep eye at his drink. This itself was a feat. Other men hadn't such eyes, or such brows above them, as had Velikof Vonk. They took a bit of cocking, and it wasn't done lightly. And Velikof grinned out of deep folk memory as he began to drink. Velikof was always strong on the folk memory bit.

Arpad Arkabaranan screamed, rose backwards, toppled his chair, and stood aghast while pointing a shaking finger at his splashing clay cup. Arpad was disturbed.

Willy McGilly drank deeply from his own stirring vessel.

“Why, it's Green Snake Snorter!” he cried in amazement and delight. “Oh drink of drinks, thou're a pleasure beyond expectation! They used to serve it to us back home, but I never even hoped to find it here. What great thing have we done to deserve this?”

He drank again of the wonderful splashing liquor while the spray of it filled the air. And Velikof also drank with noisy pleasure. The girl righted Arpad's chair, put Arpad into it again with strong hands, and addressed him powerfully to his cresting breaker. But Arpad was scared of his lively drink. “It's alive, it's alive,” was all that he could jabber. Arpad Arkabaranan specialized in primitives, and primitives by definition are prime stuff. But there wasn't, now in his moment of weakness, enough prime stuff in Arpad himself to face so pleasant and primitive a drink as this.

The liquid was sparkling with bright action, was adequately alcoholic, something like choc beer, and there was a green snake in each cup. (Velikof in his notebook states that they were green worms of the species vermis ebrius viridis, but that is only a quibble. They were snake-like worms and of the size of small snakes, and we will call them snakes.)

“Do get with it, Arpad,” Willy McGilly cried. “The trick is to drink it up before the snake drinks it. I tell you though that the snakes can discern when a man is afraid of them. They'll fang the face off a man who's afraid of them.”

“Ah, I don't believe that I want the drink,” Arpad declared with sickish grace. “I'm not much of a drinking man.”

So Arpad's green snake drank up his Green Snake Snorter, noisily and greedily. Then it expired — it breathed out its life and evaporated. That green snake was gone.

“Where did he go?” Arpad asked nervously. He was still uneasy about the business.

“Back to the catfish,” the girl said. “All the snakes are spirits of catfish just out for a little ramble.”

“Interesting,” Velikof said, and he noted in his pocket notebook that the vermis ebrius viridis is not a discrete species of worm or snake, but is rather spirit of catfish. It is out of such careful notation that science is built up.

“Is there anything noteworthy about Boomer Flats?” Velikof asked the girl then. “Has it any unique claim to fame?”

“Yes,” the girl said. “This is the place that the comets come back to.”

“Ah, but the moths have eaten the comets,” Willy McGilly quoted from the old epic.

The girl brought them three big clay bowls heaped with fish eggs, and these they were to eat with three clay spoons. Willy McGilly and Dr. Velikof Vonk addressed themselves to the rich meal with pleasure, but Arpad Arkabaranan refused.

“Why, it's all mixed with mud and sand and trash,” he objected.

“Certainly, certainly, wonderful, wonderful,” Willy McGilly slushed out the happy words with a mouth full of delicious goop. “I always thought that something went out of the world when they cleaned up the old shanty town dish of shad roe. In some places they cleaned it up; not everywhere. I maintain that roe at its best must always have at least a slight tang of river sewage.”

But Arpad broke his clay spoon in disgust. And he would not eat. Arpad had traveled a million miles in search of it but he didn't know it when he found it; he hadn't any of it inside him so he missed it.

One of the domino players at a near table (the three eminents had noticed this some time before but had not fully realized it) was a bear. The bear was dressed as a shabby man, he wore a big black hat on his head; he played dominos well; he was winning.

“How is it that the bear plays so well?” Velikof asked.

“He doesn't play at all well,” Willy McGilly protested. “I could beat him. I could beat any of them.”

“He isn't really a bear,” the girl said. “He is my cousin. Our mothers, who were sisters, were clownish. His mother licked him into the shape of a bear for fun. But that is nothing to what my mother did to me. She licked me into pretty face and pretty figure for a joke, and now I am stuck with it. I think it is too much of a joke. I'm not really like this, but I guess I may as well laugh at me just as everybody else does.”

“What is your name?” Arpad asked her without real interest.

“Crayola Catfish.”

But Arpad Arkabaranan didn't hear or recognize the name, though it had been on a tape that Dr. Velikof Vonk had played for them, the same tape that had really brought them to Boomer Flats. Arpad had now closed his eyes and ears and heart to all of it.

The hairy man and the Comet were still shooting pool, but pieces were still falling off the Comet.

“He's diminishing, he's breaking up,” Velikof observed. “He won't last another hundred years at that rate.”

Then the eminents left board and room and the Cimarron Hotel to go looking for ABSMs who were rumored to live in that area.

ABSM is the code name for the Abominable Snowman, for the Hairy Woodman, for the Wild Man of Borneo, for the Sasquatch, for the Booger-Man, for the Ape-Man, for the Bear-Man, for the Missing Link, for the nine-foot-tall Giant things, for the living Neanderthals. It is believed by some that all of these beings are the same. It is believed by most that these things are no thing at all, no where, not in any form.

And it seemed as if the most were right, for the three eminents could not find hide nor hair (rough hide and copious hair were supposed to be marks by which the ABSMs might be known) of the queer folks anywhere along the red bank of the Cimarron River. Such creatures as they did encounter were very like the shabby and untalkative creatures they had already encountered in Boomer Flats. They weren't an ugly people: they were pleasantly mud-homely. They were civil and most often they were silent. They dressed something as people had dressed seventy-five years before that time — as the poor working people had dressed then. Maybe they were poor, maybe not. They didn't seem to work very much. Sometimes a man or a woman seemed to be doing a little bit of work, very casually.

It may be that the red-mud river was full of fish. Something was splashing and jumping there. Big turtles waddled up out of the water, caked with mud even around their eyes. The shores and flats were treacherous, and sometimes an eminent would sink into the sand-mud up to the hips. But the broad-footed people of the area didn't seem to sink in.

There was plenty of greenery (or brownery, for it had been the dusty weeks) along the shores. There were muskrats, there were even beavers, there were skunks and possums and badgers. There were wolf dens and coyote dens dug into the banks, and they had their particular smells about them. There were dog dens. There were coon trees. There were even bear dens or caves. But no, that was not a bear smell either. What smell was it?

“What lives in these clay caves?” Velikof asked a woman who was digging river clams there.

“The Giants live in them,” she said. Well, they were tall enough to be giants' caves. A nine-footer need hardly stoop to enter one.

“We have missed it,” Arpad said. “There is nothing at all to be found here. I will travel farther, and I may find it in other places.”

“Oh, I believe we are right in the middle of it,” Velikof gave the opinion.

“It is all around us, Arpad, everything you wanted,” Willy McGilly insisted.

But Arpad Arkabaranan would have none of the muddy water, none of the red sand or the red sand caves, nothing of anything here. The interest had all gone out of him. The three of them went back to the Cimarron Hotel without, apparently, finding primitive creature or missing link at all.

They entered the common room of the hotel again. Dominos were set before them. They played draw listlessly.

“You are sure that there are no odd creatures around this place?” Arpad again asked the girl Crayola Catfish.

“John Salt is an odd creature and he comes from this place,” Crayola told them. “The Licorice Man is an odd creature, I suppose. So is Ape Woodman: he used to be a big-time football player. All three of them had regular-people blood in them; I suppose that's what made them odd. They were almost as odd as you three creatures. And the Comet playing pool there is an odd one. I don't know what kind of blood he has in him to make him odd.”

“How long has he been around here?” Velikof asked.

“He returns every eighty-seven years. He stays here about three years, and he's already been here two of them. Then he goes off on another circuit. He goes out past the planets and among the stars.”

“Oh? And how does he travel out there?” Velikof asked with cocked tongue and eye.

“With horse and buggy, of course.”

“Oh there, Comet,” Willy McGilly called. “Is it true that you travel out among the stars with horse and buggy?”

“Aye, that I do,” the long gray-bearded man named Comet called back, “with a horse named Pee-gosh and a buggy named Harma. It's a flop-eared horse and a broken buggy, but they take me there.”

“Touch clay,” said Crayola Catfish, “for the lightning.”

They touched clay. Everything was of baked clay anyhow, even the dominos. And there had been lightning, fantastic lightning dashing itself through every crack and cranny of the flimsy hotel. It was a lightning brighter than all the catfish-oil lamps in the world put together. And it continued. There was clattering sequence thunder, and there was a roaring booming sound that came from a few miles west of the thunder.

The Giants came in and stood around the edges of the room. They were all very much alike, like brothers. They were tall and somber, shabby, black-bearded to the eyes, and with black hats on their heads. Unkempt. All were about nine feet tall.

“Shall I sound like a simpleton if I ask if they are really giants?” Velikof questioned.

“As your eyes tell you, they are the giants,” Crayola said. “They stay here in the out-of-the-way places even more than the rest of us. Sometimes regular people see them and do not understand that they are regular people too. For that there is scandal. It was the scent of such a scandal, I believe, that brought the three of you here. But they are not apes or bears or monsters. They are people too.”

“They are of your own same kindred?” Velikof asked.

“Oh yes. They are the uncles, the old bachelors. That's why they grow tall and silent. That's why they stand around the edges of the room. And that is why they dig themselves caves into the banks and bluffs instead of living in huts. The roofs of huts are too low for them.”

“It would be possible to build taller huts,” Willy McGilly suggested.

“It would be possible for you, yes,” Crayola said. “It would not be possible for them. They are set in their ways. They develop a stoop and a gait because they feel themselves so tall. They let their hair grow and overflow, all over their faces and around their eyes, and all over their bodies also. They are the steers of the species. Having no children or furniture, what can they do but grow tall and ungainly like that? This happens also to the steers of cattle and bears and apes, that they grow tall and gangling. They become bashful, you see, so sometimes it is mistakenly believed that they are fierce.”

The roaring and booming from west of the thunder was becoming louder and nearer. The river was coming dangerously alive. All of the people in the room knew that it was now dark outside, and it was not yet time to be night.

The Comet gave his pool cue to one of the bashful giants and came and sat with the eminents.

“You are Magi?” he asked.

“I am a magus, yes,” Willy McGilly said. “We are called eminent scientists now-a-days. Velikof here also remains a magus, but Arpad has lost it all this day.”

“You are not the same three I first believed,” the old Comet said. “Those three passed me several of my cycles back. They had had word of an Event, and they had come from a great distance as soon as they heard it. But it took them near two thousand years to make the trip and they were worried that myth had them as already arriving long ago. They were worried that false Magi had anticipated them and set up a preventing myth. And I believe that is what did happen.”

“And your own myths, old fellow, have they preceded you, or have you really been here before?” Willy McGilly asked. “I see that you have a twisty tongue that turns out some really winding myths.”

“Thank you, for that is ever my intent. Myths are not merely things that were made in times past: myths are among the things that maintain the present in being. I wish most strongly that the present should be maintained: I often live in it.”

“Tell us, old man, why Boomer Flats is a place that the comets come back to?” Willy said.

“Oh, it's just one of the post stations where we change horses when we make our orbits. A lot of the comets come to the Flats: Booger, Donati, Encke, 1914c, and Halley.”

“But why to Boomer Flats on the little Cimarron River?” Willy inquired.

“Things are often more than they seem. The Cimarron isn't really so little a river as you would imagine. Actually it is the river named Ocean that runs around all the worlds.”

“Old Comet, old man with the pieces falling off of you,” Dr. Velikof Vonk asked out of that big head of his, “can you tell us just who are the under-people that we have tracked all around the world and have probably found here no more than seventy miles from our own illustrious T-Town?”

“A phyz like you have on you, and you have to ask!” the old Comet twinkled at Velikof (a man who twinkled like that had indeed been among the stars; he had their dust on him). “You're one of them, you know.”

“I've suspected that for a long time,” Velikof admitted. “But who are they? And who am I?”

“Wise Willy here said it correctly to you last night; that they were the scrubs who bottom the breed. But do not demean the scrubs: they are the foundation. They are human as all of us are human. They are a race that underlies the other several races of man. When the bones and blood of the more manifest races grow too thin, then they sustain you with the mixture of their strong kingship: the mixing always goes on, but in special eras it is more widespread. They are the link that is never really missing, the link between the clay and the blood.”

“Why are they, and me if I were not well-kempt and eminent, sometimes taken to be animals?” Velikof asked. “Why do they always live in such outlandish places?”

“They don't always. Sometimes they live in very inlandish places. Even wise Willy understands that. But it is their function to stand apart and grow in strength. Look at the strong bone structure of that girl there! It is their function to invent forms — look at the form her mother invented for her. They have a depth of mind, and they have it particularly in those ghostly areas where the other races lack it. And they share and mingle it in those sudden motley ages of great achievement and vigor. Consider the great ages of Athens, of Florence, of Los Angeles. And afterwards, this people will withdraw again to gather new strength and bottom.”

“And why are they centered here in a tumble-down hotel that is like a series of old daguerreotypes?” Willy McGilly asked. “Will you tell us that there is something cosmic about this little old hotel, as there is about this little old river?”

“Aye, of course there is, Willy. This is the hotel named Xenodocheion. This is the special center of these Xenoi, these strangers, and of all strangers everywhere. It isn't small; it is merely that you can see but a portion of it at one time. And then they center here to keep out of the way. Sometimes they live in areas and neighborhoods that regularized humanity has abandoned (whether in inner-city or boondock). Sometimes they live in eras and decades that regularized humanity has abandoned: for their profundity of mind in the more ghostly areas, they have come to have a cavalier way with time. What is wrong with that? If regular people are finished with those days and times, why may not others use them?”

The roaring and booming to the west of the thunder had become very loud and very near now, and in the immediate outdoors there was heavy rain.

“It is the time,” the girl Crayola Catfish cried out in her powerful and intricate voice. “The flash flood is upon us and it will smash everything. We will all go and lie down in the river.”

They all began to follow her out, the Boomer Flats people, and the Giants among them; the eminents, everybody.

“Will you also lie down in the river, Comet?” Willy McGilly asked. “Somehow I don't believe it of you.”

“No, I will not. That isn't my way. I will take my horse and buggy and ascend above it.”

“Ah, but Comet, will it look like a horse and buggy to us?”

“No, it will look quite other, if you do chance to see it.”

“And what are you really, Comet?” Velikof asked him as they left him. “What species do you belong to?”

“To the human species, of course, Velikof. I belong to still another race of it; another race that mixes sometimes, and then withdraws again to gather more strength and depth. Some individuals of us withdraw for quite long times. There are a number of races of us in the wide cousinship, you see, and it is a necessity that we be strangers to each other for a good part of the time.”

“Are you a saucerian?”

“Oh saucerian be damned, Velikof! Harma means chariot or it means buggy; it does not mean saucer. We are the comets. And our own mingling with the commonalty of people has also had quite a bit to do with those sudden incandescent eras. Say, I'd like to talk with you fellows again some time. I'll be by this way again in about eighty-seven years.”

“Maybe so,” said Dr. Velikof Vonk.

“Maybe so,” said Willy McGilly.

The eminents followed the Boomer Flats people to the river. And the Comet, we suppose, took his horse and buggy and ascended out of it. Odd old fellow he was, pieces falling off him. He'd hardly last another hundred years.

The red and black river was in surging flood with a blood-colored crest bearing down. And the flats — they were just too flat. The flood would be a mile wide here in one minute and everywhere in that width it would be deep enough and swift enough to drown a man. It was near dark: it was near the limit of roaring sound. But there was a pile of large rocks there in the deepening shallows: plenty of rocks: at least one big heavy rock for every person.

The Boomer Flats people understood what the rocks were for, and the Giants among them understood. Two of the eminents understood; and one of them, Arpad, apparently did not. Arpad was carrying on in great fear about the dangers of death by drowning.

Quickly then, to cram mud into the eyes and ears and noses and mouths. There is plenty of mud and all of it is good. Spirits of Catfish protect us now! — it will be only for a few hours, for two or three days at the most.

Arpad alone panicked. He broke and ran when Crayola Catfish tried to put mud in his mouth and nose to save him. He ran and stumbled in the rising waters to his death.

But all the others understood. They lay down in the red roaring river, and one of the giants set a heavy rock on the breast of every person of them to hold them down. The last of the giants then rolled the biggest of the rocks onto his own breast.

So all were safe on the bottom of the surging torrent, safe in the old mud-clay cradle. Nobody can stand against a surging flood like that: the only way is to lie down on the bottom and wait it out. And it was a refreshing, a deepening, a renewing experience. There are persons, both inside and outside the orders, who make religious retreats of three days every year for their renewal. This was very like such a retreat.

When the flood had subsided (this was three days later), they all rose again, rolling the big rocks off their breasts; they cleared their eyes and ears and mouths of the preserving mud, and they resumed their ways and days.

For Velikof Vonk and for Willy McGilly it had been an enriching experience. They had found the link that was not really lost, leaving the other ninety-nine meanwhile. They had grown in cousinship and wisdom. They said they would return to the flats every year at mud-duck season and turtle-egg season. They went back to T-Town enlarged and happy.

There is, however, a gap in the Magi set, due to the foolish dying of Arpad Arkabaranan. It is not of Scripture that a set of Magi should consist of only three. There have been sets of seven and nine and eleven. It is almost of Scripture, though, that a set should not consist of less than three. In the Masulla Apocalypse it seems to be said that a set must contain at the least a Comet, a Commoner, and a Catfish. The meaning of this is pretty muddy, and it may be a mistranslation.

There is Dr. Velikof Vonk with his huge head, with his heavy orbital ridges, with the protruding near-muzzle on him that makes the chin unnecessary and impossible, with the great back-brain and the great good humor. He is (and you had already guessed it of him) an ABSM, a neo-Neanderthal, an unmissing link, one of that branch of the human race that lives closest to the clay and the catfish.

There is Willy McGilly who belongs (and he himself has come to the realization of this quite lately) to that race of mankind called the Comets. He is quite bright, and he has his periods. He himself is a short orbit comet, but for all that he has been among the stars. Pieces fall off of him; he leaves a wake; but he'll last a while yet.

One more is needed so that this set of Magi may be formed again. The other two aspects being already covered, the third member could well be a regularized person. It could be an older person of ability, an eminent. It would be a younger person of ability, a pre-eminent.

This person may be you. Put your hand to it if you have the surety about you, if you are not afraid of green snakes in the cup (they'll fang the face off you if you're afraid of them), or of clay-mud, or of comet dust, or of the rollicking world between.

Nor Limestone Islands

A lapidary is one who cuts, polishes, engraves, and sets small stones. He is also a scrivener with a choppy style who sets in little stones or pieces here and there and attempts to make a mosaic out of them.

But what do you call one who cuts and sets very large stones?

Take a small lapillus or stone for instance:

The origin of painting as an art in Greece is connected with definite historical personages; but that of sculpture is lost in the mists of legend. Its authentic history does not begin until about the year 600 bc. It was regarded as an art imparted to men by the gods; for such is the thought expressed in the assertion that the earliest statues fell from heaven.

“Statuaria Ars; Sculpture,” — Harper's Dictionary of Classical Literature and Antiquities.

We set that little stone in one corner, even though it contains a misunderstanding of what fell from heaven: it wasn't finished statues.

Then we set another small stone:

(We haven't the exact citation of this. It's from Charles Fort or from one of his imitators.) It's of a scientist who refused to believe that several pieces of limestone had fallen from the sky, even though two farmers had seen them fall. They could not have fallen from the sky, the scientist said, because there is no limestone in the sky. (What would that scientist have done if he had been confronted with the question of Whales in the Sky?)

We set that little stone of wisdom into one corner. And we look around for other stones to set.

The limestone salesman was making his pitch to the city commissioners. He had been making a poor pitch and he was a poor salesman. All he had was price (much less than one-tenth that of the other bidders) and superior quality. But the limestone salesman did not make a good appearance. He was bare-chested (and colossally deep-chested). He had only a little shoulder jacket above, and a folded drape below. On his feet he had the crepida or Hermes-sandals, made of buckskin apparently: a silly affectation. He was darkly burnt in skin and hair, but the roots of his hair and of his skin indicated that he was blond in both. He was golden-bearded, but the beard (and in fact the whole man) was covered with chalk-dust or rock-dust. The man was sweaty, and he smelled. His was a composite smell of limestone and edged bronze and goats and clover and honey and ozone and lentils and sour milk and dung and strong cheese.

“No, I don't believe that we want to deal with you at all,” the mayor of the city was saying. “The other firms are all reputable and long established.”

“Our firm is long established,” the limestone salesman said. “It has been doing business from the same — ah — cart for nine thousand years.”

“Balderdash,” the streets and sewers commissioner swore. “You won't even give us the address of your firm, and you haven't put in a formal bid.”

“The address is Stutzamutza,” the limestone salesman said. “That's all the address I can give you. There isn't any other address. And I will put in a formal bid if you will show me how to do it. I offer you three hundred tons of the finest marble-limestone, cut exactly to specification, and set in place, guaranteed to take care of your project, guaranteed to be without flaw, in either pure white or variegated; I offer this delivered and set within one hour, all for the price of three hundred dollars or three hundred bushels of cracked corn.”

“Oh take it, take it!” a Miss Phosphor McCabe cried out. “We elect you gentlemen to do our business for us at bargain prices. Do not pass up this fine bargain, I beg you.” Phosphor McCabe was a lady photographer who had nine fingers in every pie.

“You be quiet, young lady, or we will have you put out of the hearing room,” said the parks and playgrounds commissioner. “You will wait your turn, and you will not interfere in other cases. I shudder to think what your own petition will be today. Was ever a group so put upon by cranks as ourselves?”

“You have a very bad reputation, man,” the finance commissioner said to the limestone salesman, “insofar as anyone has heard of you before. There is some mumble that your limestone or marble is not substantial, that it will melt away like hailstones. There is even a rumor that you had something to do with the terrible hailstorm of the night before last.”

“Ah, we just had a little party at our place that night,” the limestone salesman said. “We had a few dozen bottles of Tontitown wine from some stone that we set over in Arkansas, and we drank it up. We didn't hurt anybody or anything with those hailstones. Hey, some of them were as big as basketballs, weren't they! But we were careful where we let them fall. How often do you see a hailstorm as wild as that that doesn't do any damage at all to anything?”

“We can't afford to look silly,” the schools and activities commissioner said. “We have been made to look silly in quite a few cases lately, not all of them our own fault. We can't afford to buy limestone for a project like this from someone like you.”

“I wonder if you could get me about a hundred and twenty tons of good quality pink granite?” asked a smiling pinkish man in the hearing room.

“No, that's another island entirely,” the limestone salesman said. “I'll tell them if I see them.”

“Mr. Chalupa, I don't know what your business is here today,” the mayor said severely to the smiling pinkish man, “but you will wait your turn, and you will not mix into this case. Lately it seems that our open hearings are just one nut after another.”

“How can you lose?” the limestone salesman asked the commissioners. “I will supply and cut and set the stones. If you are not satisfied, I will leave the stones at no cost, or I will remove them again. And not until you are completely satisfied do you pay me the three hundred dollars or the three hundred bushels of cracked corn.”

“I want to go to your country with you,” Miss Phosphor McCabe burst out. “I am fascinated by what I have heard of it. I want to do a photographic article about it for the Heritage Geographical Magazine. How far away is your country now?”

“All right,” the limestone salesman said. “I'll wait for you. We'll go just as soon as I have transacted my business and you have transacted yours. We like everybody and we want everybody to come and visit us, but hardly anybody wants to. Right now, my country is about three miles from here. Last chance, gentlemen: I offer you the best bargain in quality marble-limestone that you'll ever find if you live two hundred years. And I hope you do all live to be two hundred. We like everybody and we'd like to see everybody live two hundred years at least.”

“Absolutely not,” said the mayor of the city. “We'd be the laughing-stock of the whole state if we did business with someone like you. What kind of a country of yours are you talking about that's only three miles from here? Absolutely not. You are wasting your time and ours, man.”

“No, no, it just couldn't be,” said the streets and sewers commissioner. “What would the papers print if they heard that we had bought limestone from somebody nearly as disreputable as a saucerian?”

“Rejected, rejected,” said the parks and playgrounds commissioner. “We were elected to transact the city's business with economy and dignity.”

“Ah well, all right,” the limestone salesman said. “You can't sell a stylobate every time you try. Good day, commissioners. No hurry, lady. I'll wait for you.” And the limestone salesman went out, leaving, as it seemed, a cloud of rock-dust in his wake.

“What a day!” the schools and activities commissioner moaned. “What a procession of jokers we have had! Anyhow, that one can't be topped.”

“I'm not so sure,” the mayor grumbled. “Miss Phosphor McCabe is next.”

“Oh, I'll be brief,” Phosphor said brightly. “All I want is a permit to build a pagoda on that thirty-acre hill that my grandfather left me. It won't interfere with anything. There won't be any utilities to run to it. And it will be pretty.”

“Ah, why do you want to build a pagoda?” the streets and sewers commissioner asked.

“So I can take pictures of it. And just because I want to build a pagoda.”

“What kind of a pagoda will it be?” the parks and playgrounds commissioner asked.

“A pink pagoda.”

“How big will it be?” the schools and activities commissioner asked.

“Thirty acres big. And four hundred feet high. It will be big and it won't bother anything.”

“Why do you want it so big?” the mayor asked.

“So it will be ten times as big as the Black Pagoda in India. It'll be real pretty and an attraction to the area.”

“Do you have the money to build this with?” the streets and sewers commissioner asked.

“No, I don't have hardly any money. If I sell my photographic article “With Camera and Canoe on Sky-High Stutzamutza” to the Heritage Geographical Magazine I will get some money for it. And I have been snapping unrehearsed camera portraits of all you gentlemen for the last few minutes, and I may be able to sell them to Comic Weekly if I can think of cute headings for them. As to the money to build the Pink Pagoda, oh, I'll think of something.”

“Miss McCabe, your request is remanded or remaindered or whatever, which is the same thing as being tabled,” the mayor said.

“What does that mean?”

“I'm not sure. The legal commissioner is absent today, but he always says something like that when we want to pass the buck for a little while.”

“It means come back in one week, Miss McCabe,” the streets and sewers commissioner said.

“All right,” Miss Phosphor McCabe agreed. “I couldn't possibly start on the Pink Pagoda before a week anyhow.”

And now we set this odd-shaped stone over in the other corner:

The seventeenth century discovery of the Polynesian Islands by common seamen was one of the ancient paradise promises fulfilled. The green islands, the blue sea, the golden beaches and the golden sunlight, the dusky girls! Fruit incomparable, fish incomparable, roast pig and baked bird beyond believing, breadfruit and volcano, absolute and continuing perfection of weather, brown-skin paradise maidens such as are promised in alcoran, song and string-music and surf-music! This was the Promised Paradise of the Islands, and it came true.

But even this was a weak thing beside the less known, the earlier and continuing discovery of the Floating Islands (or the Travertine Islands) by more intrepid farers. The girls of the Floating Islands are lighter (except for the cool blacks on the Greenstone Dolomites) than the Polynesian maidens; they are more intelligent and much more full of fun; are more handsome and fuller-bodied; are of an artier and more vital culture. They are livelier. Oh how they are livelier! And the regions themselves defy description. For color and zest, there is nothing in Polynesia or Aegea or Antilla to compare at all. And all the Travertine people are so friendly! Perhaps it is well that they are little known and little visited. We may be too weak for their experience.

 — Facts of the Paradise Legend

by Harold Bluewater

Look closely at that little stone ere we leave it. Are you sure that you have correctly noted the shape of it?

Then a still smaller stone to be set in, here where there seems too empty a little gap. It's a mere quotation:

“In Lapidary Inscription a Man is not upon Oath.”

 — Doctor Johnson

Miss Phosphor McCabe did visit the limestone salesman country, and she did do the photographic article “With Camera and Canoe in Sky-High Stutzamutza.” The stunning, eye-blowing, heart-swelling, joy-filled color photography cannot be given here, but these are a few extracts from the sustaining text:

“Stutzamutza is a limestone land of such unbelievable whiteness as to make the eyes ache with delight. It is this super-whiteness as a basis that makes all the other colors stand out with such clarity. There cannot be anywhere a bluer sky than, for most of the hours and days, surrounds Stutzamutza (see plates I and II). There cannot be greener fields, where there are fields, nor more silvery water (plates IV and V). The waterfalls are absolute rainbows, especially Final Falls, when it flows clear off the high land (plate VI). There cannot be more variegated cliffs, blue, black, pink, ochre, red, green, but always with that more-white-than-white basic (plate VII). There cannot be such a sun anywhere else. It shines here as it shines nowhere on the world.

“Due to the high average elevation of Stutzamutza (there will be some boggled eyes when I reveal just what I do mean by the average elevation of this place), the people are all wonderfully deep-chested or deep-breasted. They are like something out of fable. The few visitors who come here from lower, from more mundane elevations, are uniform in their disbelief. ‘Oh, oh,’ they will say. ‘There can't be girls like that.’ There are, however (see plate VIII). ‘How long has this been going on?’ these occasional visitors ask. It has been going on for the nine thousand years of recorded Stutzamutza history; and, beyond that, it has been going on as long as the world has been going on.

“Perhaps due to their deep-breastedness the Stutzamutza people are superb in their singing. They are lusty, they are loud, they are beautiful and enchanting in this. Their instruments, besides the conventional flutes and bagpipes (with their great lung-power, these people do wonderful things with the bagpipes) and lyric harps and tabors, are the thunder-drum (plate IX) and the thirteen-foot-long trumpets (plates X and XI). It is doubted whether any other people anywhere would be able to blow these roaring trumpets.

“Perhaps it is due also to their deep-breastedness that the Stutzamutza people are all so lustily affectionate. There is something both breath-taking and breath-giving in their Olympian carnality. They have a robustness and glory in their man and woman interfluents that leave this underdeveloped little girl more than amazed (plates X to XIX). Moreover, these people are witty and wise, and always pleasant.

“It is said that originally there was not any soil at all on Stutzamutza. The people would trade finest quality limestone, marble, and dolomite for equal amounts of soil, be it the poorest clay or sand. They filled certain crevices with this soil and got vegetation to begin. And, in a few thousand years, they built countless verdant terraces, knolls and valleys. Grapes, olives and clover are now grown in profusion. Wine and oil and honey gladden the deep hearts of the people. The wonderful blue-green clover (see plate XX) is grazed by the bees and the goats. There are two separate species of goat: the meadow and pasture goat kept for its milk and cheese and mohair, and the larger and wilder mountain goat hunted on the white crags and eaten for its flavorsome, randy meat. Woven mohair and dressed buckskin are used for the Stutzamutza clothing. The people are not voluminously clothed, in spite of the fact that it becomes quite chilly on the days when the elevation suddenly increases.

“There is very little grain grown on Stutzamutza. Mostly, quarried stones are bartered for grain. Quarrying stone is the main industry, it is really the only one on Stutzamutza. The great quarries in their cutaways sometimes reveal amazing fossil deposits. There is a complete fossilized body of a whale (it is an extinct Zeuglodon or Eocene Whale) (see plate XXI).

“ ‘If this is whale indeed, then this all must have been under ocean once,’ I said to one of my deep-chested friends. ‘Oh certainly,’ he said, ‘nowhere else is limestone formed than in ocean.’ ‘Then how has it risen so far above it?’ I asked. ‘That is something for the Geologists and the Hyphologists to figure out,’ my friend said.

“The fascinating aspect of the water on Stutzamutza is its changeableness. A lake is sometimes formed in a single day, and it may be emptied out in one day again by mere tipping. The rain is prodigious sometimes, when it is decided to come into that aspect. To shoot the rapids on the sudden swollen rivers is a delight. Sometimes ice will form all over Stutzamutza in a very few minutes. The people delight in this sudden ice, all except the little under-equipped guest. The beauty of it is stupendous; so is its cold. They shear the ice off in great sheets and masses and blocks, and let it fall for fun.

“But all lesser views are forgotten when one sees the waterfalls tumbling in the sunlight. And the most wonderful of all of them is Final Falls. Oh to watch it fall clear off Stutzamutza (see plate XXII), to see it fall into practically endless space, thirty thousand feet, sixty thousand feet, turning into mist, into sleet or snow or rain or hail depending on the sort of day it is, to see the miles-long rainbow of it extending to the vanishing point so far below your feet!

“There is a particularly striking pink marble cliff toward the north end of the land (the temporary north end of the land). ‘You like it? You can have it,’ my friends say. That is what I had been fishing for them to say.”

Yes, Miss Phosphor McCabe did the really stunning photographic article for Heritage Geographical Magazine.

Heritage Geographical did not accept it, however. Miss Phosphor McCabe had arrived at some unacceptable conclusions, the editor said.

“What really happened is that I arrived at an unacceptable place,” Miss Phosphor said. “I remained there for six days. I photographed it and I narrated it.”

“Ah, we'd never get by with that,” the editor said. Part of the trouble was Miss Phosphor McCabe's explanations of just what she did mean by the average elevation of Stutzamutza (it was quite high), and by “days of increasing elevation.”

Now here is another stone of silly shape. At first glimpse, it will not seem possible to fit it into the intended gap. But the eye is deceived: this shape will fit into the gap nicely. It is a recollection in age of a thing observed during a long lifetime by a fine weather eye.

Already as a small boy I was interested in clouds. I believed that certain clouds preserve their identities and appear again and again; and that some clouds are more solid than others.

Later, when I took meteorology and weather courses at the university, I had a classmate who held a series of seemingly insane beliefs. At the heart of these was the theory that certain apparent clouds are not vapor masses at all but are floating stone islands in the sky. He believed that there were some thirty of these islands, most of them composed of limestone, but some of them of basalt or sandstone, even of shale. He said that one, at least, of them was composed of pot-stone or soap-stone.

This classmate said that these floating islands were sometimes large, one of them being at least five miles long: that they were intelligently navigated to follow the best camouflage, the limestone islands usually traveling with masses of white fleecy clouds, the basalt islands traveling with dark thunder-heads, and so on. He believed that these islands sometimes came to rest on earth, that each of them had its own several nests in unfrequented regions. And he believed that the floating islands were peopled.

We had considerable fun with Mad Anthony Tummley, our eccentric classmate. His ideas, we told each other, were quite insane. And, indeed, Anthony himself was finally institutionalized. It was a sad case, but one that could hardly be discussed without laughter.

But later, after more than fifty years in the weather profession, I have come to the conclusion that Anthony Tummley was right in every respect. Several of us veteran weathermen share this knowledge now, but we have developed a sort of code for the thing, not daring to admit it openly, even to ourselves. ‘Whales in the Sky’ is the code-name for this study, and we pretend to keep it on a humorous basis.

Some thirty of these floating stone islands are continuously over our own country (there may be more than a hundred of them in the world). They are tracked on radar; they are sighted again and again in their slightly changed forms (some of them, now and then, seem to slough off small masses of stone and deposit it somehow on earth); they are known, they are named.

They are even visited by some persons of odd character: always a peculiar combination of simplicity, acceptance, intelligence and strange rapport. There are persons and families in rural situations who employ these peopled islands to carry messages and goods for them. In rural and swampland Louisiana, there was once some wonder that the people did not more avail themselves of the Intercoastal Canal barges to carry their supplies, and their products to market. ‘How are the barges better than the stone islands that we have always used?’ these people ask. ‘They aren't on a much more regular schedule, they aren't much faster, and they won't give you anything like the same amount of service in exchange for a hundredweight of rice. Besides that, the stone-island people are our friends, and some of them have intermarried with us Cajuns.’ There are other regions where the same easy cooperation obtains.

Many of the stone-island people are well known along certain almost regular routes. These people are all of a powerful and rather coarse beauty. They are good-natured and hearty. They actually traffic in stone, trading amazing tonnages of top grade building stone for grain and other simple provisions.

There is no scientific explanation at all of how these things can be, how the stone islands are able to float in the sky. But that they do so is the open secret of perhaps a million persons.

Really, I am now too wealthy to be put in a mad-house (though I made my money in a rather mad traffic which would not be generally believed). I am too old to be laughed at openly: I will merely be smiled at as an eccentric. I have now retired from that weather profession which served me as a front for many years (which profession, however, I loved and still love).

I know what I know. There are more things in the zone fifteen miles above the earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.

 — Memories of 52 Years as a Weather Observer by Hank Fairday (Privately printed, 1970)

Miss Phosphor McCabe did another really stunning photographic article for the Heritage Geographical Magazine. It had a catchy title: “All Right, Then You Tell Me How I Did It, or The Building of the Pink Pagoda.”

“The Pink Pagoda is complete, except for such additions as I shall have made whenever the notion strikes me, and whenever my high-flying friends are in the neighborhood. It is by far the largest structure in the world and also, in my opinion, the most beautiful. But it is not massive in appearance: it is light and airy. Come see it in the stone, all of you! Come see it in the color photography (plates I to CXXIX) if you are not able to come yourself. This wonderful structure gives the answers to hundreds of questions, if you will just open your eyes and your ears.

“Of ancient megalithic structures it has sometimes been asked how a hundred or more of one hundred ton blocks of stone could have been piled up, and fitted so carefully that even a knife-blade could not be inserted between the blocks. It's easy. You usually don't set a hundred one hundred ton blocks, unless for a certain ornamentation. You set one ten thousand ton block, and the joinings are merely simulated. In the Pink Pagoda I have had set blocks as heavy as three hundred thousand tons of pink limestone (see plate XXI).

“They bring the whole island down in place. They split off what block is wanted at that location (and, believe me, they are some splitters); then they withdraw the island a little bit and leave the block in place.

“Well, how else was it done? How did I get the one hundred and fifty thousand ton main capstone in place four hundred and fifty feet in the air? With ramps? Oh stop it, you'll scare the cuckoos. The stone pillars and turrets all around and below it are like three-dimensional lace-work, and that main capstone had to go on last. It wasn't done by rocking it up on ramps, even if there had been a place for the ramps. It was all done on one Saturday afternoon, and here are the sequence pictures showing just how it was done. It was done by using a floating island, and by detaching pieces of that island as it was floated into place. I tell you that there is no other way that a one hundred and five pound girl can assemble a thirty million ton Pink Pagoda in six hours. She has got to have a floating island, with a north cliff of pink limestone, and she has got to be very good friends with the people on that island.

“Please come and see my Pink Pagoda. All the people and all the officials avert their eyes from it. They say that it is impossible that such a thing could be there, and therefore it cannot be there. But it is there. See it yourself (or see plates IV, IX, XXXIII, LXX especially). And it is pretty (see plates XIX, XXIV, V, LIV). But best, come see it as it really is.”

Miss Phosphor McCabe did that rather astonishing photographic article for the Heritage Geographical Magazine. Heritage Geographical refused to publish it, though, stating that such things were impossible. And they refused to come and see the Pink Pagoda itself, which is a pity, since it is the largest and most beautiful structure on earth.

It stands there yet, on that thirty acre hill right on the north edge of town. And you have not heard the last stone of it yet. The latest, a bad-natured little addition, will not be the last: Miss Phosphor swears that it will not be.

There was a flimsy-winged enemy flew down, shortly after the first completion of the pagoda, and set the latest very small stone (it is called the egg-of-doubt stone) on top of the main capstone. 'Twas a crabbed written little stone, and it read:

“I will not trow two-headed calves,”

 Say never-seens, and also haves.

“I'll not believe a hollow earth,”

Say skepticals of doubtful birth.

“I'll not concede Atlantis you,

“Nor yet Lemuria or Mu,

“Nor woodsmen in northwestern lands,

“Nor bandy-legg'd saucerians,

“Nor ancient technologic myth,

“Nor charm of timeless megalith.

“I will not credit Whales that fly,

“Nor Limestone Islands in the Sky.”

 — Unfolk Ballad

That crabby little ballad-stone on the top almost spoils the Pink Pagoda for me. But it will be removed, Miss Phosphor McCabe says, just as soon as her traveling friends are back in this neighborhood and she can get up there.

That is all that we have to say on the subject of stone setting.

Does anyone else have something further to add?

The Most Forgettable Story In The World

Even for the non-believer, there should be one paramount theme or set of questions. The non-believer has not accepted the Mystery of the Fall, but how can he get rid of the puzzle? It bulks up like a protoceratops in the parlor. How can he avoid constantly asking the question: Who and what are we really? And what is the age and nature of the amnesia that is our ambience?

 — name of author forgotten

The theme of the meeting was “The Insufficiency of Mere Perfection.” It was to be an open meeting: anyone in the world might come. But only a dozen persons and half-a-dozen machines showed up. There was a lassitude about everything in those days.

“I believe that I could contribute something to the discussions — if I could only remember what I've forgotten,” a clean-cut young man said.

“So could we all,” the young girl said. “It is a familiar syndrome, this worrying that there is something forgotten. It is really the last worry in the world. A syndrome is a convergence of roads. They all converge on ourselves, if they are not illusion, but we are not sure whether they lead into us or out of us, whither or whence.”

“We could not have arrived by all the roads, could we?” a dapper young machine asked. “Does anybody remember by which road we did arrive at our present perfection? Or rather, since some sort of central forgetting seems to be at the heart of all our questions, has anyone any theory as to how we got here?”

“By stumbling backwards over no road at all, downhill and through tangled brush, until we found ourselves in the bottom of a pit,” a dour old machine issued. “Then we noticed that the bottom of the pit was actually the top of the Delectable Mountain. If there is nothing lower, then also there is nothing higher. To be in the middle of a plain is the same as to be on the top of a mountain, if all the mountains are gone and forgotten. No, I don't believe that there are any roads, or have ever been. Why should there be roads to get to where we already are? And why should we leave when there is nowhere else to go? What need of roads?”

“The world, of course, is perfect, as are all of those living in it,” said one of the perfect men. “Nobody ever goes out of it, though most dissolve in it by the pleasant-thanasia. We cannot find or speak of dissatisfaction in our world, since the pleasant-thanasia is highest satisfaction to those who use it.”

“There was an old essay entitled ‘The Ultramontanism of Utopias’,” one of the younger women half-remembered. “It said that Utopia is always over the hills and far away. It isn't. It is here and now. Ah, does anyone remember what ‘hills’ were?”

“They were the offspring of mountains, in some old anthropomorphic context,” said another of the perfect ones. “We have forgotten what mountains were, I suppose. One says that the word means one thing, one says that it means another. And we have all but forgotten what ‘offspring’ means. Do any of us remember what we ourselves are?”

“In one old fairy-tale cycle — The Grimmsian — it was said that we were all princes turned into frogs,” a young machine issued brightly.

“In another old fairy-tale cycle — the Darwinian — it was said that we were all frogs turned into princes,” the young girl said. “Ah, does anyone remember what a frog was?”

None did.

“Or a prince?”

Again none.

“If it weren't that everything was perfect by definition, I'd suspect that something had been left out,” the dour machine issued, “that something had been — what's the word? — forgotten. If there really were roads, and not mere illusions of roads, one of them might go somewhere. It might be a destination.”

“What does destination mean?” an exceptionally perfect man asked.

“I forget,” the dour old machine admitted.

“Doesn't anyone remember anything?” a young lady demanded in a voice conveying exasperation, if there were any remembrance of such a feeling, if such a thing were possible in a perfect world.

“Yes. I do,” the clean-cut young man stated suddenly. “I remember what I have forgotten.”

“What is it?” the young girl inquired sharply.

“My destination and my name.”

“What? You remember what they are?”

“Oh no, no. I merely remember that they are what I have forgotten.”

Somewhere there is a story about mankind, about his origin and his destination, about who and what he is. Once this story was known.

How is it that it has become so forgettable? And how is it that it has become so forgot?

Apocryphal Passage Of The Last Night Of Count Finnegan On Galveston Island §

X made his own escape from the immediate threat. After all, in his vaudeville days he had been the Great X-Capo. And Doll and Finnegan moved over the graves and down the alleys towards the gaudy beach. They moved with a sudden lithe speed that was not the human way of moving, and Finnegan knew Doll then though she was never to know herself. She also was one of them, but she never suspected it; and do not tell her now.

They were down to the shimmering beach and into the heady crowd for all the daylight and the dusk. This was the bright surface world and the deep middle world mingled in the happy vitality of people having fun. They were in the middle of them; it was important to be in the middle of them!

There were the happy drinks and beers that might be the last forever. Remember the Congo? Remember Cracker's, and The Idle Hour? Remember The Brass Rail, The Little Room, The Capri? They aren't there any more, or their names have changed. Remember Murdock's Pavilion? (This was before Hurricane Carla had scattered that great wooden structure for fifty miles.) But do not try to track these places. They are of the older days.

They were into the water for an hour at Murdock's. There was a high surf lashing in and it was fun to swim through it and beyond it. That Doll could swim; and there was never such a swimmer as Finnegan.

They were out of the Gulf after that and to supper; this was at the Golden Greek's or at the Sea-Side or at some other place along the bright and shining Boulevard. It was late already. Had X yet returned to begin to dig at the grave? And how would Saxon Seaworthy watch both X and Finnegan? Meanwhile, Finnegan was making himself conspicuous with his loud talk and his loud doings.

Later, they danced on the upper deck of Murdock's, that went far out over the water. Finnegan and Doll had reveled on hard juice and shrimp and crab-meat and they were glowing wonderfully. And the music was made for them, literally. Especially the piano. Somebody on the piano was reading their minds and divining their moods. The piano took over, and Doll and Finnegan took over. It was rich and wild and intoxicating. It was rowdy. It was the best thing like that ever done; so were they. And there was no way to dance with Doll except rowdy. The music came to a halt with a roguish explosion, but Finnegan and Doll still danced to its echo.

Dotty Peisson was coming across the floor to the two of them with compassionate laughter. She took Finnegan up in her arms.

You do not know Dotty well: only that she was one of the Company of Fifty who sometimes inhabited the Old Wooden Ship, only that she was the foremost Galveston-style piano player in the world. You do not know how she was when a deep black mood had just left her and she had begun to sparkle. And that lack of knowledge shall be remedied at another time. But Dotty was one racey little girl, and to be up in her arms was like dynamite and roses.

Then Finnegan and Dotty and Doll were all in one bear-hug, loving each other with an end-of-the-episode passion. Somebody was calling Dotty to come back. She was the piano player there, and it was time for her to play again.

“Finnegan, you are going to kill a man tonight,” Dotty said. “Can I help?”

“How do you know that, Dotty?” Doll was curious. She didn't know Dotty.

“I know everything. But he'll put a trail on you, Finnegan. And he'll kill you with it after he's dead. Well, you've had fun along the way, haven't you, Finn?”

“I have had fun, Doll and Dotty,” Finnegan said, “dark fun and light fun. Now I will move. That boy coming across the floor has a note for me.”

The boy coming across the floor did have a note for Finnegan. And the note, when unfolded, read: ‘Finnegan, come to the West corner of Tremont across the Boulevard. Your life is required of you now.’

“I leave you girls,” Finnegan told them. “Don't take any wooden Indians.” Then he went over the far railing of the pavilion, moving with a sudden speed that was not quite the human way of moving.

He swung in under the floor, dropped twenty feet to the first cross member, then went down one of the huge tarred pilings, and was into the churning water of the Gulf in the dark. Shucking off only his shoes, he swam outward swiftly and with the tireless sudden strength that came to him in the moments of his transport.

These were the waters that were under the world. There were lights above and beyond; but here, at first, it was blinding dark. “This may be almost what he expected me to do,” Finnegan told himself as he swam with fishy power. “He can read me like a rune. He knew that I was not about to cross the Boulevard to the Tremont corner. But what more opposite way could I go than this? How will he have me here?”

There had been a row of shrimp boats about a mile off beach at dusk, but Seaworthy had nothing to do with shrimp boats. One of them, at least, was still there with engines loafing, but nobody picks up a swimmer in a mile of water even with a spotlight, not a swimmer who doesn't want to be picked up.

Finnegan went out some five hundred yards, far beyond the reaches of the lights of the pavilion or the Boulevard. Then he turned and gave himself to the cross-currents, swimming easily. He would come ashore on that narrow beach beneath the cliff at old Fort Crockett, the only cliff, the only hill of any kind on the Island. He would return to the town from there; or from another approach if that one seemed spooked. He was still on the hunt for the Devil Fox, but the timing and the surprise and the advantage must be his own.

Did he give the old fox too much credit? Likely the Finnegan ambush had been set up on the first beach and not in deep water; somewhere on the beach below the sea-wall among the granite boulder breakwaters. Likely Seaworthy had expected Finnegan to go down one of the interior stairways or ladders that the bathers used, and to strike up-beach below the wall. That also would be in a direction opposite the way down the Concourse and across the Boulevard to Tremont corner.

Finnegan had company in the water. He now had the companionship of a low-floating, ocean-gnarled tree.

“You are the tree named Lagrume,” Finnegan said, “the tree named Log. You also are a person in the legend, and you have drifted all the way from Haiti.” Things did drift that long course, and they ended up exactly where Finnegan intended to end up.

“You are good company,” Finnegan said, and he slowed his speed to that of the low-floating tree log. “Besides, you will be a diversion, or a ram, should an enemy improbably wait for me on the water. I will lead you but only for a little. I will lead you by five counts.”

There were only the dim lights of the Boulevard a half a mile to the right. There was only the light of the stars in all the rest of the world. The piano music of Dotty could still be heard, either in reality or in imagination. It was still rich and wild and intoxicating and rowdy, but now there was an additional low beat in the very cellar of its sound: heavy footsteps, menacing, inexorable footsteps that seemed to move with an inexplicable splashing sound.

Finnegan sighted on a star cluster riding medium-low ahead of him in the coal sack of the night. They looked as the Lyra group and Vega should look, and Finnegan called them that in his mind. They stood before him except when he was in the deepest troughs between the waves. Finnegan swam a leisurely mile on his course.

Then Vega went out!

The tree named Lagrume, understanding the situation quicker than Finnegan did, ducked its head and floated completely under water; but it still followed Finnegan at the five interval.

Vega had been blocked out by a low, floating form; and at the same time Finnegan's hand touched the gunwale of something almost too small to be called a boat.

One Count!

There was a match-head sized gleam of phosphorus six inches from Finnegan's eyes. It was the front sight of a rifle. And behind was the faint fire grey of the eyes of Saxon Seaworthy.

Two count!

“It's the end, Finnegan,” the fire-fox Seaworthy said.

Three count!

“Not without a quip, Saxon,” Finnegan taunted, knowing the old fox's love of the theatrical, and fighting for time.

Four count!

“This, the quip, Finnegan,” Saxon said, and he fired (simultaneous to another happening).

Five count!

The shot and the other happening had been at five count exactly. For also, with the shot at five count, the tree named Lagrume, low floating in the water, rammed the micro-boat. Finnegan was scratched of nose and shattered of jaw, but the shot did not explode inside his head. It furrowed its way out with gore and bone splinters, but it was too low to cause his death.

Finnegan had the barrel of the rifle in his hands. Then he had Saxon Seaworthy in his hands, far under water in a turmoil. Saxon did not die easily or willingly. To lull the grip he went limp as though already gone. Then, thirty seconds later, he erupted with violent writhing so as to break away. It was not easy to throttle a man with so sinewy a neck that was also protected by the pherea, the throat protuberances of an old satyr: and to choke off the air of a man already under water is of little effect.

When Finnegan was able to hold Seaworthy with one hand, he raked down into a side pocket for his clasp knife and went to work on throat, under-ear gap behind the jaw-bone, and the intercostal slots into the thorax. He opened half-a-dozen fountains that gushed under water, and he sealed it when he had the heart itself in his hands.

Saxon Seaworthy did not have a proper grave, and it was not at all sure that he would remain buried. But he would remain dead.

Finnegan came to the surface breathing horribly through mauled nose and shatter-jawed mouth. He swam wearily for the beach. The very small boat was filled and turning under and sinking somewhere near. The tree named Lagrume had drifted on without waiting for Finnegan. Though it had saved the life of Finnegan by bumping the small craft at calculated five count, yet it had done it almost unknowingly: a mere instrument, and yet it was a person in the legend.

There was no noise at all except the silken whisper of the water not quite ready to form into breakers, and the tired and now uneven stroking of Finnegan, and the footsteps. But the Lyra group was in the sky again, and Vega (if it were they); and the cross-currents helped the tired Finnegan on his way.

Sometimes there sounded a car horn from the Boulevard a half mile away; sometimes there boomed the shock of a very high breaker reaching the Sea Wall; sometimes there was a distant boat horn. There was the clucking of the near waters, and Finnegan's own sounds of tortured breathing and stroking, and the footsteps.

There really should not be footsteps out here in the water, surely not the footsteps of a left-footed stalking man, a club-footed man who strode more heavily on that left club. There shouldn't be that inexplicable splashing sound to the footsteps as though they were going through water no more than ankle deep.

“He will follow me for the rest of my short life,” Finnegan groaned. “He is monomaniac. He will believe that Saxon Seaworthy is still alive and sending him instructions: and he will receive those instructions. After a while, I will believe it also. Dotty said that Saxon would put a trail on me and kill me with it after he was dead: X said the same thing. Well then, he will kill me with his stalker, but he will not kill me tonight.”

Finnegan was over the hump now and free. Except for the footsteps, except for the footsteps. Except for the footsteps even on the water.

1. The “Apocryphal Passage” was intended by the author to have been included as the ending to The Devil Is Dead. This piece, as well as an explanatory letter in the hand of the character Absalom Stein that was to have been inserted between chapters ten and eleven of that book, arrived at the publishers (Avon books) too late for inclusion. It was first published in Episodes of the Argo. This is its second appearance. — ed.

Company In The Wings

1.

Ahoy! and Oho, and it's who's for the ferry?

(The briar's in bud and the sun going down):

And I'll row ye so quick and I'll row ye so steady,

And 'tis but a penny to Twickenham Town.

 — Theophile Marzials, Twickenham Ferry

Waking from full pleasure, coming out of vast worlds into the narrow reality, feeling them all slip away, and grasping to hold the pieces of them while their continents dissolved and their mountains toppled, holding to just one phrase that might be the key to their reconstruction, to one word even (obolus was the word) — coming full awake then with all of it lost — 

Fairbridge O'Boyle had been the ‘morning fool’ before, waking empty from exciting dreams that he could not hold onto. But there was a difference this time. He did not awake in bed, but standing and clothed. He did not know how he had spent the night, save that it had been elsewhere and that it had been pleasurable.

He was in his own room, but he knew that he had just come into it. And where had he come from? There was no key to it, unless that odd word ‘obolus’ might be the key. It seemed more like a dream-distortion of his own name O'Boyle though. Or unless his friend Simon Frakes was the key, the skeleton key to fit the lock. Simon was very like a key in the metallic thinness of him.

And he was very like a skeleton. It always seemed as though Simon had put his flesh on carelessly and could slough it off at any time. It was hard to believe in him when he wasn't present: and the aroma of the pleasurable and lost night did have a certain tang of Simon to it.

“It seems to me Simon,” Fairbridge had said to him once, “as if I had discovered you, as if you would disappear if I cast you out of my mind.”

“Don't do it, Fairbridge. You're playing with smoke,” Simon had protested with near-excitement. “I'd rather you didn't try that experiment. It might be painful for both of us. Keep me in the back of your mind somewhere. Even keep me forgotten there. But don't cast me out.”

This was a funny conversation for a morning fool to be remembering now, but all conversations with his friend Simon had been a little bit odd. Simple Simon Frakes, so Fairbridge used to call him sometimes; but has anyone really understood the profundity of the mythos of Simple Simon? Simplicity is a much more complex thing than its opposite, duplicity. Simplicity is the gathering of everything together into entity. Duplicity is only the wanton scattering of the pieces again.

Morning fools really do think in such terms. Then the morning fool Fairbridge undressed and went to bed, but set the clock for only two hours hence. He was a late morning fool this day, and it would soon be afternoon. And there was another of the fabulous lectures to enjoy that afternoon.

The man who was giving the lectures was Simon Frakes, with his grin that was a two-line caricature, and with his puzzling, ironic way of talking. He was giving the inaugural series of the Trefoil Lectures, and he was making a shambles of them.

Simon's presentation, ‘THE VALIDITY OF IMAGINED CREATURES’, had caused many second thoughts among his listeners. To imagine, he said, is to make images, and images may be remarkably solid. If they come out of a lively imagination they will be live images. And Simon demonstrated with a bit of stage trickery. He made a live image, that of a suddenly loquacious young girl. There was a certain nervousness that ran through all of them who watched him do this. It was only dispelled when he unmade the image again. But an uneasy feeling had begun to grow. What if there really was a grain of truth in his thesis?

His lecture, ‘THE TERTIARY LIMBUS’, had caused further unease. To the Limbus Patrum and the Limbus Infantum he added the Limbus Nundum Natus. None of his listeners believed in Limbo. They didn't believe in the limbo of the Fathers, nor in the limbo of the Infants who died before reaching reason; but it was spooky to think that there might be a third limbo, the limbo of those not yet born.

His talk, ‘THE MULTITUDE IN THE WINGS’, had caused some to question his sanity, and others to question their own. It was a creepy rhapsody that set up resonances in even the dullest of minds. It wasn't a possible thing, but all the hearers seemed vaguely to remember encounters with that multitude. It struck a chord, and the chord sang and rattled in their heads. Something would have to be done about this disquieting man.

(This day, Fairbridge O'Boyle had had his second awakening, to the clock, had risen and dressed, and had gone to Simon's latest sortie.)

This sortie, ‘THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION’, questioned a fundamental thought process. Simon began to cause a real alarm, and the falsetto chorus was raised against him. He was either kidding, or the world itself had for a long while been kidding all the people in it. And all the good and uneasy people seemed to hold Fairbridge O'Boyle responsible for the unorthodoxies of his friend Simon.

“But the difficulty with all such arguments is that they cannot be proved,” Fairbridge argued over coffee with his friend Simon after the lecture, and after the little tempest that followed it had scattered for a while.

“Oh, but I proved it to you last night, Fairbridge,” Simon said easily. “Have you forgotten the proof?”

“Worse than that, Simon: I've forgotten last night. I've meant to ask you whether we were together last night.”

“Together, yes, except for a few times you deserted me for greener folk. Let us ride the same horse to another country then. Say what you consider proof and I will furnish it.”

“The things would have to be experienced literally for proof.”

“Then we will literally experience them. Get your hat.”

“Where are we going?”

“Oh, to one of the purlieus of the limbi. Man, don't hang back! The crossing-over is always one of the shining things, and it never grows old. The crossing itself is worth almost everything. And then it's to arrive at the second greatest adventure of them all, and you don't even have to die to achieve it. There are one billion oysters that are yours for the opening, and every one of them is a world. Pick one!”

“How? How?”

“Oh, here's maybe the easiest of a billion ways.”

Simon Frakes drew a five-line diagram on a piece of paper. Then he plucked it off the paper and it was solid in his hand.

“What is it?” Fairbridge shrilled.

“It's just a gadget. The name of it is the ‘obolus’.”

“But that's the word I hung on to. It's the name of an old coin.”

“Who says a coin can't be a pentagram? Yes, it is a coin. It's the passage-penny.”

“Could I do that?” Fairbridge demanded.

“You could if you remembered it, Fairbridge, but you probably won't. You've seen it done before, and you've forgotten it completely.”

Simon's grin was a two-line caricature. Then Simon faded out and only the grin remained. “Come along,” the grin said, and it moved off. Remembering it as something that had happened before, Fairbridge O'Boyle, stumbling and hurrying, followed the grin out of the door and down the now darkening Oswald Lane on the second greatest adventure of them all.

Oswald Lane is two hundred years old and only two hundred and twenty yards long. Its locations are all numbered and listed and taxed. There are only a certain number of doors there, and only a certain number of persons living behind them. There is not room for an entire unknown world to exist there, surely not room for millions of such worlds.

Fairbridge followed Simon Frakes (or Simon's grin, and a bit more of him again by then) through a door where there had never been a door before. One shining moment that could not be measured in time! It was the crossing-over itself that was worth almost everything! It was unforgettable, of course, and incomparable. Whoever has crossed-over can never be the same again. Ah, but everybody in the world has crossed-over at least once, one way or the other.

Everybody in these new worlds had not necessarily crossed-over though. Fairbridge and Simon were into new worlds then, without the moment itself being at all dismal. They were into a large room that was itself an elusive world; and there was no room for so large a room in all of Oswald Lane.

It was a joke, of course. It was one of the happy, enduring jokes that couldn't be spoiled. Fairbridge laughed with delight. A billion choices there were, but there couldn't be a more apt choice than this one.

One couldn't take in all that room at once. It was a detailed world of too many dimensions, yet the pattern that Fairbridge O'Boyle got was one of delightful scantiness. How to example it? What thing to take of the many for its mark?

In that realm, a chair might have front legs but no back legs, you see. If it were in a certain perspective where the back legs couldn't be seen, what need to have them? The room did not have four walls all at one time. It had sometimes two walls and sometimes three. However could you see all four walls at one time?

If one thing hid another, it was not necessary for the hidden thing to be. A person seen in profile had no need of another side of his face. Time enough to have it when it would be visible. If you looked fast enough you could catch that world and its people unlined and abridged, but you had to look fast.

“What is it, Simon?” Fairbridge asked. “Not that it matters. It's amazing. Are they all so tricky and happy?”

“It's one of the pseudo-bucolic sets. Ah, there are countless ones much more tricky and much happier, but this is an easy one for beginners, and you remain persistently a beginner.”

“Papa says for you to come in,” said a girl that Fairbridge had always known and with a name that he would never remember. “Grandpa says to give the young jackanapes some pop-skull. Great-grandpa says that you look like a peddler. Are you?”

Did she really speak? Or were her words lettered in a cartoonist's balloon over her head? No matter. In her pleasant and unsubstantial way she spoke. This was glad simplicity itself, which is integrated and total simultaneous being. And the pop-skull was joltingly excellent. There was a curious lack that wasn't felt as a lack.

“Do you know that this pop-skull is only half a bottle?” Fairbridge asked, “not in the sense that it's only half full, but there's no back to the bottle. I turn it around, and then there's a back but no front.” He looked at the world in new amazement. This world was too staged a thing to be real.

“Why, this is the archetype!” he cried. “The frame we are in here, what did Simon call it? Shall we call it pseudo-bucolic social satire?’

“Yes, let's do,” the girl agreed. “It's fun to call things by names like that.”

Dionysus was there, but as a clown. But he had appeared a dozen times as a comic-strip clown with his real identity unknown. This was like a barn dance, but it was a world as well as a barn, and there were tens of thousands of folks here — Cousin Claude the country clown and Cousin Clarence the city dude, Clarabelle and Clarissa and five thousand other cousins, scampers and gaffers and gawkers of all ages and sexes, patch-pants'd and white-bearded and coon-crazy and merry.

They drank mountain-dew and green-fog and panther-sweat and golden-moonshine. There was round-singing and ballad-singing and country-singing; and Fairbridge became drunk with it all. There were jokes and bejangles and stories, the rich originals of them all. Did you know that some of the oldest jokes in the world haven't been told in the world yet?

And anomalous intrusions! Whatever would we do without the wonderful anomalous intrusions? Old trains were running through the room, hooting and screaming; and with red-hot pieces falling off them. And many of these trains were never to appear on ordinary earth. And the father of the scanty-clad girl (there was no back to her dress, or to her, unless she turned around, and then there was no front to either), the father came with a shotgun that was like an elephant gun.

“All right, young jig-snapper,” the old father said. “You have jazzed my daughter. Now we have the marrying.”

“This is a primordial village psychic module. You know that, don't you?” Fairbridge said to the outrageous but not really outraged father. After all, Fairbridge O'Boyle was a professor.

“Yes, I suppose it is,” the father agreed. “Are you ready for the ceremony?’

“And the shotgun motif is absolutely primordial,” Fairbridge continued. “I didn't realize that before.”

“The shotgun is prime,” the father said, “but it blasts.” And he blasted the backside of Fairbridge clear off with it. Oh well, it wouldn't show unless Fairbridge turned around. He might as well join these merry people in their attributes.

“Simon, you say that there are millions of such universes and all different?” Fairbridge gasped, and he was now filled with the enormity of the idea.

“Everything that is is,” Simon said simply. “Come, we'll visit more of them.”

“Drop back any time,” the girl said. “There's always some of us home.”

They visited dozens, hundreds of universes. They had, in fact, been visiting countless of them simultaneously, and Fairbridge found himself to be hundreds of involved persons, and all of them himself. This was hilarity, this was transcendence. Some of these worlds were incredibly urbane and sophisticated, even though the people of them were barefooted — till you happened to look at their feet. Then, somehow and momentarily, they acquired hasty shoes. You could catch them unshod for a bare instant. Some of the worlds were bucolic in a way that even that first module world couldn't be. Some were angelic, some were rowdy, some were mind-bursting with their wily intellectuality. Some had a wit with such bite that they snapped whole members off one. Simon Frakes and Fairbridge O'Boyle crowded whole lifetimes into that evening and night. These were the multitudes beyond count, the absolutely unforgettable things.

And Fairbridge woke in the morning, standing and clothed, a morning fool with the manifold memories of the past night slipping away from him forever.

2.

What bride and what ferry, what bright ford, is this it?

What half-penny passage so open to get!

If miss you this crossing, forever you'll miss it.

To worlds in the wings all unbornable yet.

 — Benny B-Flat, Cocytus Crossing

That evening, Simon Frakes lectured again to all the learned folks:

“Please understand one thing: all imagined things have reality. They are not because we imagine them. We imagine them because they are. Imagination is only the encounter with their reality. From the Olympian gods to Boob McNutt, all are persons. To imagine the non-existing is an impossibility. All are with the billions in that limbus. All are entities in the psychic pool. I speak literally.

“All are real: Kate Fennigate, Moll Flanders, Dirk Stroeve, Ester Jack, Audifax O'Hanlon, Percy Gryce, Virginia Carvel, Count Mosco, Dinah Shadd, Octavia Beaupree, Richard Nixon, Flagman Thiel, Gil Blas, Red Hanrahan, Handy Andy, Sebastian Marchman, Gippo Nolan, Mildred Rogers, Isolde, Deirdre, Frank Couperwood, Sir Kid Rackrent, Jasper Petulengro, Cy Slocum, Lucy Dashwood, Hairbreadth Harry, Julien Sorel, Felix Kennaston, Harold Teen, Matthew Bramble, Abe Kibble, Horatio Maltravers, Constance Povey, Joe Calash, Widow Wadman, Genevieve Rod, Polly Peachum, J. Hartford Oakdale, Nat Buntline, Meg Marsh, Gavin Dishart, Casper Gutman, all are real.”

“You mean, of course,” said David Dean who was one of those responsible for the lectures, “that they are real in the sense that they bear a verisimilitude to inner reality, that their expression rings true, that they are valid imaginative creatures.”

“No, I don't believe that I mean anything like that at all,” Simon said. “You miss my point. I say that all the entities in the psychic pool are real — (is there any other way to say ‘real’?) — that they are beings as much as you are a being, that those we know are only those recognized by chance, and that the others are no less real. All are real: Barney Google, Jurgis Rudkus, Bounder J. Roundheels, Morgan Fenwolf, Madonna Zilia, Wolf Larsen, Hippolyte Schinner, Cliff Sutherland, Abu Kir and Abu Sir (they are a pair), Madame Verdurin, Arabella Allen, Andy Gump, Elmer Tuggle, Lorelei Lee — ”

“Will you come to your point, Simon!” Fairbridge O'Boyle suggested. The listeners were beginning to look at each other uneasily.

“I am on my point completely,” Simon maintained. “One cannot give too many instances: Salvation Yeo, Horseshoe Robinson, David Harum, Florence Udley, Gregers Werle, Daisy Buchanan, Delphine de Nucingen, Paul Bunyan, Becky Sharp, George Bungle, Daisy Bell, Whisky Johnny, Casey Jones, Althea Pontifex, every person in song, story, picture, play, dream, or delirium is real. Wing Biddlebaum, Happy Hooligan, Snuffy Smith, Lady Sarah Macgreggor, Peter Canavan, Colley Cibber, Enoch Oates.”

“Are there many more of these?” asked Robert Stokes who was one of the listeners and who seemed to be developing a nervous condition.

“Billions of them,” said Simon.

“Is it necessary to name them all?”

“Apparently it is. I tell you that there is a multitude in the wings, and you do not believe me. Long John Silver, Major Hoople, Madame Lazonga, Auguste Dupin, Jenny Blanchard, Jeff Peters, Barnacle Bill — these are real.”

“You are saying that every human type is already in theoretical existence and waiting to be recognized?” ventured Robert Stokes.

“No, Robert. My words seem to convey nothing to you,” Simon lamented. “I am saying that every possible being is in actual existence always. I am saying that, though only a fraction of them are born physically into the world (that part is accidental and unimportant and can often be had for the asking), many others are made manifest by the thing known loosely as folklore. I am saying that these, and the myriad others not made known to you at all, are no less real.”

But Simon Frakes was not able to convince his listeners. He named another hundred, and then another thousand, instances. The audience became restive: and that was strange, because the subject was an interesting one.

Benny B-Flat visited Simon Frakes and Fairbridge O'Boyle later one evening. Benny was a song writer.

“Now, gentlemen and professors,” Benny said to them, “I have a small hatchet of my own to grind. I have heard about this new frolic and I will not beat around the boscage. I believe that there is something in it for me. You talk about this psychic sea where all possible persons and gadgets already exist. And you say that the new things in the world are only old things taken out of that sea, and that we create nothing, Gentlemen, I am looking for the dipper to dip into that sea. Where can I find it?”

“Here, if you are to find it anywhere,” Simon said. “What do you want to dip out?’

“Tunes, tunes. I am a tune-smith. We grind them up and we distort them, but first we have to have them. If all possible tunes are already in existence, then who has custody of them?”

“Oh, Fiddle-Foot Jones and ten thousand others,” Simon said.

“Can you arrange for me to meet them?” Benny asked. “And what is the tariff?”

“I can arrange it, Benny B-F,” said Simon, “and the only tariff is the little passage coin that we make ourselves. For the smart ones it's easy.”

“I'm smart. And these out-of-the-world tunes, how will they be?”

“Familiar, Benny, as though you had known them forever: yet new and successful. They will serve your purpose. You believe, and others doubt. Here! I draw five lines on a sheet of paper. Not any five lines. These five lines. Then I pluck the drawing off the paper and make it real. It doesn't look like a coin, but you use it as a passage coin. Can you do that?”

“I got it, Cy,” Benny B-Flat said. “You just have to show Benny a thing once. There are folks who wouldn't even know that this thing is a key or a coin. They wouldn't know where to look for the river or the door that it fits. I'm glad I'm not one of the slow folks. I've got it now, and thanks.”

“Ah but, Benny, there's a catch,” Simon warned. “You'll remember it only if you're one person in a million.”

“I'm one in a million,” said Benny B-Flat.

But Fairbridge O'Boyle wasn't one in a million. Fairbridge was an ordinary man who now worried because he woke up every morning standing and clothed and with his hat on his head. He woke with residue of unremembered pleasure and with frustration of loss. He worried because he didn't know where he spent his nights.

“I ought to have a wife,” he moaned. “I bet she'd find out where I spend my nights.” But he felt more and more that Simon Frakes was involved in the mystery.

“Simon,” he said to his wispy friend. “I go somewhere at night. I see something. And then I forget. But it gnaws me. What do I do at night?”

“Fairbridge, you cross a river you don't believe is there. You visit the multitudes which you swear do not exist. Amnesia of the visits is often the price of the visit. Once more I show you a device, and perhaps it will stick with you. There is a Greek name for it, and a child's name for it, and these are the lines of it. See how simply they're drawn! Five lines, that's all. You should be able to retain them, but they have a slippery quality. Do you remember who used them when you were a child?”

“No. Nobody used them. I have never seen lines like those before.”

“But you have seen them. You have seen them and used them every evening for the last ten days. And you saw them when you were a child. In every group of children there is one who knows them. It is appointed that there should be one such child in every group. One day you played the game of ‘Disappear’, and he used the device and disappeared. And later he took you all with him on the passage over that river, on the bright crossing to the ‘billion worlds’. But later you forgot about it. And in most cases, the child who was the adept also forgot about it.”

“What's the name of the River, Simon?”

“Cocytus, of course.”

“But that's a mythological river.”

“Mythology is one trick to avoid complete forgetting.”

“What is the name of the device, or the lines?”

“Obolus, of course.”

“But that's the name of an ancient and almost mythological coin. It's the word I wake up in the morning remembering when everything else has slid away. And it's myself, O'Boyle. But what is it all, Simon? What is the connection?”

“It is only the making of an image solid, Fairbridge, ‘imagining’ in the true sense. Draw the lines on the paper. Then pluck them off in your hand. But with this thing you can cross the river to the worlds beyond the horizon.”

“This time I'll remember, Simon. We'll visit a hundred universes, and I'll remember, remember, remember.”

Fairbridge O'Boyle did visit many more than a hundred universes with Simon Frakes that night. He swore that he'd remember them all. And he didn't. He woke at dawn, standing and clothed and oblivious, a morning fool.

Simon Frakes was giving the last of his lectures. His pleasant grin had taken on a look of futility. He hadn't been able to communicate with his listeners well, and whose was the fault of that?

“If I haven't convinced you by now, then it may be hopeless,” Simon told his hearers. “ ‘If you will not believe me, neither will you believe one risen from the dead’ is one of your own scripture sayings. For my own case I can only say ‘If you will not believe me, neither will you believe one who is not yet born’. Every possible thought has already been thought out, every riddle has been unriddled, every epigram spoken. You have only to tap them. They have been in existence for millennia.”

“Have you been born, Mr. Frakes?” Professor Dodgson asked quickly.

“No, of course not. Do I look as if I'd been born?”

“And where in space is this limbus of yours?” demanded Robert Stokes. “Just where is this teeming limbo of the unborn where everything already exists?”

“It is fragmented. It is protean. It is everywhere,” said Simon. “Through a door and across a river. And there it is.”

“Then why can't we visit it? That would be the only proof.”

“A dozen of you here present have visited it, Robert. And you yourself have done so several times. But you are not fully convinced. And you forget.”

“You are saying that this psychic sea is a sort of common human memory?” Robert fumbled. “But you cannot mean that it is real in the same sense that — ”

Simon Frakes swore a resounding oath from the limbus. It had never been heard in the world before. But it had a familiar ring to it, and it would catch on.

“I thought a series of lectures by a man unborn would be interesting to you,” Simon said finally, his near-anger having passed. “I intended no more than a friendly visit from my country to yours, and I am sorry if it has gone amiss.”

“You speak as if you were one of them,” said David Dean. “Your lectures have been interesting, though perhaps not very informative. We are of that adulterous generation. We need a sign.”

“Oh very well,” Simon sighed, “but the sign will not convince you.”

Simon Frakes stood there with his grin that was a caricature as a cartoonist might have drawn it. He was there. Then only his grin was there, mocking them in the empty air.

“I'm sure that I know that grin from somewhere,” Professor Dodgson mumbled. “Ah, but memory is a cat-like thing. It creeps away soft-footed, and is gone.”

“If you do not believe this, then you will not believe anything,” said the grin of Simon Frakes. Then the grin itself vanished, and that was the last that anyone ever saw of Simon Frakes in that neighborhood.

“We are undone,” said David Dean. “We engaged a common trickster, a stage magician, to give the first series of the Trefoil Lectures. I doubt if we will be able to continue them under that name. To disappear from a lecture platform into thin air! How corny can you get! How could you have been taken in by that charlatan, Fairbridge?”

“I taken in? I did not engage him, though he did become my friend.”

“You certainly did engage him,” said Robert Stokes. “We three are the selection committee. I didn't engage him. And David didn't.”

“I didn't either,” Fairbridge argued, “but somehow we agreed that Simon Frakes was our man. We accepted him before we ever saw him. We selected him, I now believe, before we even knew that there was such a man. And it appears that there wasn't.”

One evening, Fairbridge O'Boyle walked down Oswald Lane knocking at all the doors, trying to find something that he had lost. Just what it was, he had forgotten, but he missed it mightily. But it is hard to phrase the questions about that emptiness he felt.

The people in Oswald Lane all knew Fairbridge. They knew him as a young professor and timeless eccentric. But they were not able to help him. They did not have either barn nor cavern nor river nor contingent worlds behind their doors. They did not have multitude upon multitude, nor any primordial stuff at all.

Well, had they any unborn persons there? Yes, one lady said: it should be born in September.

“That isn't quite what I meant,” Fairbridge stumbled. “I'm sorry.”

“Oh, I'm glad,” the lady said, “we've wanted one for so long.”

But these were the people behind the regular doors that were numbered and listed. Where were the other doors? Fairbridge couldn't find the doors he sought: he couldn't find any of the doors that oughtn't to be there. And he couldn't remember what should be behind those doors if he found them.

So the good-will mission of Simon Frakes had been without effect. Nobody had understood what he was trying to tell them, not even his friend Fairbridge O'Boyle. And nobody knows how to visit the myriad and interesting and valid worlds of the unborn, the company waiting in the wings.

Except that in every group of children there is one who knows. He will do the trick, and the other children will wonder a little. And after a while they will forget to wonder. After another while, even the child who knew how to do it will forget all about it. And except for that — 

 — and except for Benny B-Flat —  Benny had to be shown a thing only once. He is an opportunist who is not likely to forget anything to his advantage.

He still goes and listens to Fiddle-Foot Jones and a thousand others in a thousand worlds. He brings back the tunes that serve his purpose, so he stands high in his profession. His loot is on all the jukes, and they have what is necessary for good tunes:

They sound familiar. And they are out of this world.

Horns On Their Heads

A power returned to stab and stun

In evil'st children under sun,

Primarily one.

They clamber out of brimstone stew

And claim the very Devil's due,

Especially two.

Most foul of demonology,

They bring effect that should not be,

Damned children three.

All with a sparkling laughing roar

They come like thunder to the door,

In number four.

 — Hans Meneke, Mandrake's Children

The pig-weeds lifted their heads and almost shouted. Such clumps of grass as still remained shook the dust from themselves and shined as green as they could. Junk gathered itself into neater and less junky piles. The garbage cans aligned themselves and they pretended to sparkle. The afternoon Surrogate fell silent in every building and house within three hundred meters, and the World Turned no more. There was a touch of unlawful order intruded here, powerful, frightening. The Devil's kids had a hand in this. Who else could set up such a pattern of disruption?

But the Devil's kids were gone again like the wind. They struck and they fled. Lawful disorder returned. The weeds drooped once more and had no desire to shout. The grass pulled the dust over itself again and groaned. The junk reverted to junk. The garbage cans fell fully awry, and some of them burst in disgust. The Surrogate World Turned again. But none of it could ever be quite the same. After each visitation of the Devil's kids there remained minute changes in everything.

Seed of the evil phlegm,

Powers and dreads,

Honey on tongues of them,

Horns on their heads.

They were a bad lot. They were manifestations that could not be. When they struck, even inanimate objects seemed to move and live. They were a dazzling and disturbing shine. Their end would be soon.

For they'd been seen this time and identified. They'd been identified before, one or two of them, but not all four together. They'd soon be had. They had honey on their tongues; that was disallowed: they should have hard-hash on their tongues.

The worst of the four was Annina of the Horns, a demon in the form of a nine-year-old girl. Her upswept black hair made the two horn-forms at her temples. She came clear-eyed always, with neither black nor blue nor green eyeglasses: an obscenity. How could she know who she was when she didn't have the identity glasses on? But none of the four wore them. She wore shoes, and shoes could only mean the cleft foot hidden. She sang, if one might call it that, but she didn't Sing the Thing.

“Stutter and stumble, the rods and the hogs!

Follow me, bushes, and bark like dogs!”

Annina of the Horns sang songs like that, and it was always Devil's song, in that it had effect. For the rods and the hogs (the cars and the cycles) did stutter and stumble and fail of ignition and roar whenever she came by. They stopped and died. And the second part of her verse was even more frightful. The runt bushes and stunted trees did pull up roots and follow Annina, joyfully, and with a sort of green barking as well as greening bark. This was an impossibility. It had to be a manifestation of the outlawed power. Trees and bushes cannot uproot themselves and walk or gambol. They cannot enlarge themselves and shine with new health. They cannot multiply their numbers in as many minutes. Nor can they put down new roots in the middle of asphalt and concrete and glassified areas and concourses, and shatter them in surface and depth. It was the murderous power at work, and only the murder of the devil-girl would put an end to it.

Daniel the devil-kid was nearly as bad as Annina. He was in about ten-year-old boy form. He was close-cropped and clothed and in no way to be trusted. But Daniel had power over the Lions, both the black-maned and the tawny-maned Lions. The Lions were the groups and the street gangs that had long since taken over all enforcement and control. Nobody, not even on the Ride, knew how they themselves were controlled: but that devil-kid Daniel could put them under total control.

“Conk in the knockers, and hack at the knees!

Bubble-heads, bubble-heads, freeze, Friz, freeze!”

Daniel would chant such stuff, and every Friz of them would freeze completely, would become immobile, would become voiceless and sightless (incapable in the honkers and knockers), would stand stunned and stupid. And when they had them in such state, the devil-kids would take advantage of the Frizbees. They'd switch the identity eyeglasses from one Friz to another. When the Frizzes came untranced, they'd not know who they were nor what sex or thing they appertained to. It didn't really matter, of course, for they were all module or interchangable persons. But the loss (or doubt) of identity (some of them had no loss or doubt, trusting completely whatever identity glasses they were wearing) upset some of them, made them uneasy, and there is nothing worse than an uneasy Frizzie.

Ah, and then the evil kids would lob off the thatches, peel the polls, and crop the crines of the Frizzes, leave them hairless and hewn. Much worse, much more devilish, they'd sometimes cover the privates or the pseudo-privates of these Lions, these Frizzes, these Enforcers. And what did that do to the bravest and most meaningful slogan of them all: “Let it all hang out!”? The Lions were completely unlioned without their slogan.

Michael (Quick Mick), the smallest of the demon-kids (he had the appearance of an eight-year-old boy), had his specialty.

“Trap all the trippers, and rattle their town.

Off of it! Off of it! Down, clown, down!”

He'd sing that, and every tripper in the vicinity would come off it, dismally and suddenly. Great hulking horror, but they would come off of it suddenly. The untripped trippers were always in a sad state whenever Quick Mick had passed by. Mick had only little mousy hairs at his temple, but they stood up a little bit like horns.

And the fourth of the demon-kids, Zorro or Azorro, was a mean-green-deme. He could do it all. He could levitate whole buildings for a sign and a wonder. He would lift up and reshuffle the houses and pads of the people so that when they came out of them (whenever they did bestir themselves to come out), they might find themselves in different streets or even in different towns.

“Raise all the roofs and walls, shuffle the lot!

Where are you getting folks? Where are you got?”

Zorro would sing that in his happy, foxy voice. And no town or region would ever be the same. Nobody was going to unshuffle all those moved houses and pads. Rather were the identity glasses shuffled from person to person, and such a one was told that he had now become such another one so as to be able to live in the new town or street to which he had moved.

And Zorro would do smaller things with equal joy and agility. He'd pulverize the strings of all the swine-whines (the strum-slums, the guitars) making it impossible for the people to Sing the Thing. He'd darken the sets of the surrogates, and tie the tongues of the babble. He'd bring clouds of birds and troops of squirrels and chipmunks from somewhere. He'd erupt the pavements to give his foxes place to den. This Zorro or Azorro had his own temple-horns of sandy red hair, fox hair. He was Vulpes Dei, the Fox of the Devil, and he had the appearance of an eleven-year-old boy.

These were the four offenders, the children of the powers: and the powers were now outlawed, were declared to be nonexistent. The only solution to it was to make it that the devil-children should also be nonexistent.

This would be done. The four manifestations had been seen and identified: they'd been Judas'd. Now they'd be obliterated, charred to their very charcoal, and then even their charcoal vaporized.

The Monitored World had freed itself of all powers and manifestations and devils some years before. Now it had total peace, and it must never more allow itself to be troubled by aberrants. There had been, though the memory of that was almost eradicated now, certain troubles and even certain bloodletting when that old freeing was secured.

But a symbol had been seized and set in that past time. A version of it had been decided upon and that version would remain. This is the way the world operates. Events must follow out of a single selected strand, and all other events be cut off.

When God was finally and officially dead, then certain pronouncements were made about the great corpse of him. These pronouncements became the fact of the matter, and all subsequent facts were based on them.

The corpse had been, in reality, that of a sky-whale (cetus ceruleus, the azure-whale or the sky-whale) that had crashed to the earth from the sky, or at least had been found smashed on high ground beside a seashore after a high storm. Certain trippers said that they had seen the corpse fall from the sky, and that they had experienced the fact that it was the body of the finally dead God.

Sound decisions were made by sound men about the great corpse. If it weren't for such sound decisions there'd be nothing firm in history at all. An examination of the great corpse showed (as it was expected that it would show, as it had been decided that it would show) that this was not only the corpse of God but the corpse of the Devil as well; it showed that the two had been one and same all the while. This was demonstrated by certain telling marks on the corpse (skeptics said that there was no telling what the telling marks might be).

For there was some opposition to the Official view — for a while. Men who knew whales said that the corpse was simply the corpse of a whale (not even a particularly large whale) that had been flung onto the high beach by a storm; they said that larger whales had been flung higher on that same beach by other storms, and no great thing had been made of them. It hadn't fallen from the sky at all, they said: it wasn't the corpse of either God or the Devil.

But, against this specious view, the official view prevailed and was accepted. Facts become facts when the time is ripe for them, and the time was ripe for this. There was some trouble and some blood-spilling about it, but the Freedom and the Consensus were attained in a short while. It had all been quite a few years before this present. Only the chained philosopher still remembered all the details of it clearly.

For various reasons (linguistic, quasi-historical, vestigial collective-unconscious, etc.), it was decided that the double-named and double-natured dead monster would always be referred to as the Devil or the Demon (in that transitional period when he must be referred to at all). And any manifestations or powers or supposed powers still lingering would be called Devil's Powers or Devil's Children. The eruption of such manifestations had become more and more seldom now. The windy old corpse and all its works had about disappeared.

The Free, Monitored World had quickly become loose and fragmented. There was no great need for unity or for wide-ranging communication. Things were much the same everywhere. Old Dostoevsky had written “If God (the Devil) is nothing, everything is permitted.” And, of course, everything was permitted — except the manifestations, the twitchings of that old corpse. Old Chesterton had written that when man denied God (the Devil), he would not believe in nothing, but he would believe in anything. And, of course, man did now believe in some things almost coherent; he believed in anything and everything — except that there were things surpassing belief.

If the genuine experience had disappeared (and it was realized that it had), yet there were surrogates of every thing to take the places. Indulgences were indulged. Freedom was by fiat. Apprehension was apprehended and strong-armed into dungeon. If travel had all but disappeared, yet tripping had come into its own. If law was found incompatible with freedom, yet there were certain lawless Lions who gathered into strong Prides and imposed their patterns.

And the patterns were privileged. They must not be threatened, not even by remembered things that came in the forms of small children.

Because of such threatening, several of the larger Lions, with a Judas and the Chained Philosopher present, discussed the latest (and, it was hoped, the last) series of nuisances.

“There are four of these kids of the Devil,” one of the big Lions was saying. “You can deliver them to us, Judas? You say that when they have passed (too swift to be taken) on one of their sprees, they sometimes go to a quiet place and become very quiet and unseeing. You say they can be taken then? You'll deliver them to us then.”

“I'll deliver them to you then,” the Judas said. He also was in child-form, but a little older of a child than the unholy four.

“Three of them we can burn to charcoal,” the big Lion said. “They'll give us no problem. But the Dan won't be burned with the rest. He's a special problem to us Lions. I believe the intent is that we eat him up. I don't see any problem in that either, but there is rumor of a problem. Tell us what you know about it all, and about these four, Chained Philosopher.”

The Chained Philosopher had an iron collar around his neck, and a chain from it to an iron ring set in an iron wall. Once there had been three Chained Philosophers. But two of them had (it was some years ago) lunged against the collars and chains in unphilosophical defiance and broken their own necks. Now only their iron-collared skeletons remained.

But the third of the Chained Philosophers had kept himself alive, and he was even cared for. The big Lions believed he was of possible use. Sometimes one might wish to ask questions of this one man who still remembered outlawed things.

“As you say, three of them you burn to charcoal, or can try to,” the philosopher agreed, “and the fourth one is a special problem to Lions: and the Frizzes, the Enforcers, are under the Lion Emblem. But, for all that, we are simply talking about small children, no more, no less.”

“They're different from other children!” the Big Lion challenged the Chained Philosopher.

“Yes. Most children now are a little less. These are as children should be.”

“But what is there about the boy Dan that spooks the Lions, the Frizzes, the Enforcers, ourselves?”

“Only the fact that he is a real person, not a surrogate person.”

“Why do they all wear their hair like horns growing out of their temples?”

“For fun. It's the least strange and the least hairy of the styles. Why do you yourself affect the pig-wig?”

“The girl Annina, what does her name mean?”

“Only little Anne, or Nancy.”

“I think it means something else. And the boy Quick Mick. His name, as given, is Michael. But I have different information that the name may really be Missel. Is that significant, Chained Philosopher?”

“Not very. It's probably old feeb-Hebe.”

“The boy Zorro, what does his name mean?”

“It could mean Fox.”

“Well, what would Azorro mean?”

“It could mean un-Fox, but it probably doesn't. Likely it's also feeb-Hebe.”

“Both the old spooks, who turned out to be one and the same in their corpse, were feeb-Hebe in their original stories, were they not?”

“Yes, in one of their main origins, Lion.”

“How can the old corpse still send out waves so long after it has smashed and crashed?” the Big Lion asked. “They were the same in the corpse. They are dead. True, Philosopher?”

“No, the two are in no way the same. And neither of them is dead.”

“If you know more than the rest of us do, why are you chained in an iron collar, Philosopher?” the Lion inquired shaggily. “What answer do you give to the iron fact that holds you?”

“You have me there, Lion. There is something pretty ironic about the fact of the iron.”

Another of the Lions was questioning Judas a little. The Judas was a boy about thirteen years old.

“Just what is it that the four Devil's kids do, and how do they do it?” the conniving Lion asked.

“Oh, they do everything, everything,” the Judas said. “They just plain get larkish. I could do everything too when I was with them. But I couldn't do the things as well as they could. That's why I got jealous and left them. I believe that all kids and everybody could do everything once, a long time ago; and these can still do the things.”

“A long time ago? You mean before the great carcass fell down from the sky and the old Monster was declared dead for ever?”

“No. I think it was before something else that was a long time before that.”

“Now you say that the four kids, after they have been — ah — ‘larkish’, will go to desolate places (which you know) and will be very quiet and unseeing for a long while. They ‘adore’; I believe that is the word you use. They become like happy statues then, and they can be taken. And you'll bring us to their place so we can take them?”

“Yes.”

“And you say you know their times. Do you know when they'll go on a lark again?”

“I think they've begun already,” the Judas said. “I think they're on a big one, and I wish I was with them, if I wasn't jealous. Three days from right now I'll have brought you to them. All the play will be over with then and they'll be in transport. Then take them! Burn up three of them! Eat up the other one of them!”

“Did you ever hear of anything like that, Chained Philosopher?” the first Lion, the big Lion, asked the man who was constrained in the iron collar.

“Oh yes, Lion, it used to happen. I was even on the fringes of such a group myself in my youth. I am happy to hear that it still happens.”

“Then they do go into transport, and they may be taken? And there's no way we can fail to have them in this?”

“Sadly enough, I don't see how you can fail in destroying them. A side-light though: they'll be very heavy when in the ecstasy state. Such was the well-attested case of the children at Garabandal in Spain several centuries ago. It will take eight or ten strong men to lift one child from the earth and break him out of his spell.”

“We'll have the strong men, Chained Philosopher. We'll remove this last threat, this final twitch of the monstrous carcasses. The hell kids will have raised their last hell.”

The Judas was right, though. The kids had already gone on another lark. The hell kids were raising plenty of hell for a while. They outdid themselves. They raised earth-swells, merry pitching for some of the people, nauseating sickness for others. They raised thunderheads that were carven masterpieces: indeed the horned heads of the four of them could be seen in the clouds by some. This ain't a thing to put Lions and Frizzes at their ease.

The devil kids made particular rain to fall. Particular rain doesn't fall equally on the just and the unjust. It fell overwhelmingly and drenchingly (even fatally in several cases) on such people as the devil kids did not accord with; but it dampened the acceptable people not at all. They dazzled with selective lightning: it lighted up all the worthy folks with a sort of comic glory; it left the less worthy ones invisible in their own darkness, invisible even to themselves.

The kids brought a gathering noise, a running ground-thunder with them; or was it thunder? It was a whooping clattering sound, at least. It was unpatterned, but with a difference: it was the only unpatterned sort of noise that found no wide welcome in that sour ambient. It was laughing, it was thunder-laughing, and it hadn't been heard much for a long time.

Something else the kids dragged along with them: it can only be called the Heroin Itch. Oh, it did liven the people up! — but some to their misery and some to their delight.

The kids did all their old devil tricks, but quicker, brighter than before. They gladdened and moved the grass and the rocks. They brought trees suddenly to new leaf, and not always to their own proper leaf. They set the very earth a-crawl with happy worms. And more people fell under the devil spell of the kids than had ever done so before. All the monitors of the monitored free world were set to clanging by the kids.

“Shout! The hills jump in their hocks and their hams.

Whistle! The billabongs gambol like lambs.”

There was Quick Mick with his raveled temple-horns who set the hills to hopping and the brooks to skippering. Then Azorro gave a really bristly, foxy tone to it:

“Bleed a red laughter in dying and borning!

Burst! It is day of the judgment this morning!”

The passage of children was very broad swath, and they cut their enemies down like patches of burdock. They had a wild enthusiasm on them; but what is wrong with that word? And Annina of the Horns seemed completely out of her head:

“I sing a red tune for the sharks in the sea.

Hark! It is really benignant of me!”

But they didn't seem completely benignant, the things that the devil's kids were doing now. In this their last sortie, they did starker things than they'd ever done before: mind-blowing things, brain-blowing things literally. In certain fetid pads, the passage of the children left great globs of blown-brain on floor and wall and ceiling. It was judgment morning for a long time. The passaging kids couldn't be taken and they couldn't be found. They left their passage trails in cloud and earth and water. It was a wilder and more general larkishness than they had ever shown before. It was an enthusiasm double enthused, but what was a little bit wrong with that word? Enthuse means the un-God, the in-Theos; not the in-Devil. The kids themselves weren't bedeviled, though they had roused un-dead devils to the angry alert.

It was antic, and it passed. It left nothing but echoes in the hills, and who can backtrack the sounds that created echoes?

Nevertheless, the Judas had been correct. The four children went local again, and the Judas knew the location. It was in a flinty, thorny, small-bush place, acrid and angular in its formations, sharp and garish in its colors, having the illusion of an iron and wine taste, and the non-illusion (the powering presence) of a pungent and fetid odor.

The ‘odor of sanctity’ is not all lilacs and roses, nor is sanctity (the sacred, the sacer) a thing that stays within straited limits. It is too stark and rank for those limits. It pertains to holiness and sacredness; but also to awfulness; and further, to cursedness, to wickedness, execrability; to devotion; and again, to seizure and epilepsy.

Now the ‘odor of sanctity’, the smell of the thing (stay with us; strong smells and stenches are the vitality itself), is compounded of the deepest and most eroding of sweating, the sweating of blood and blood-serum; of nervous and speaking musk of adrenal rivers; of the excited fever of bodies and the quaking deliriums of minds; of the sharp sanity of igneous; and the bruised rankness of desert bush. Oh, it is a strong and lively stench. It's the smell of adoration, of passion seized in rigid æstivation.

Dan was prostrate on the flinty ground. Annina of the Horns was on her broken and bleeding knees. She'd been driven to them, crashed to the earth onto them with a sudden force ten times her own weight. Azorro stood erect, or as erect as a fox can stand, with head thrown back, holding the sun in his gaze and letting it not move. Quick Mick sat nearly on the ground (possibly a slight distance above the ground) as though he were sitting lightly afloat in water, one foot dangling down and touching the stones. In his hands he held a large and apparently round object, half again the size of his head. That the object was invisible was no detriment; quite clearly it was solid and weighted.

All four of the children were taken there, by the Lions, by the Frizzes, who seized advantage of them in their ecstasy. It was as the Chained Philosopher had said: the children were unnaturally heavy in relation to the earth. It took eight or ten strong men to lift each child up from the earth and break his spell; to lift Azorro the fox out of his foxish rapture, to break Annina from knees onto her feet again; to separate the dangling toe of Quick Mick from casual flint earth. And there was sparking and blue corona at each separation.

But the men did not touch Dan. They came around him and bent to lift him from his prone position. But they hesitated. How was it that he shivered them all so that they held back from touching him? But Dan unproblemed the problem. He rose of himself, laughing and dusty, and went along with his three companions and their guards. They went to the place of judgment.

“Take off your shoes!” was the first thunderous judgment given when they had come to the place. It was one of the rough Lion-Men who gave this judgment and order. “None has shoes on free world for thirty years, except the devil's kin to disguise their cloven feet. This is the first judgment. Take them off!”

The judgment place was an open space by the furnaces, by the common pads, by the concert crater, a little to the north of the restless ribbon.

“Shall we?” Quick Mick asked. He was asking Annina of the Horns, perhaps, and Dan; or he may have been asking someone a little taller than either. “There is something felt, somewhere, about holy ground, and about either wearing shoes or taking them off.”

“It'll make the ground mighty hot,” Dan grinned with deadly seriousness. “Judge, have a care for your judgments.”

“It'll scorch the ground for them, not for us,” cried Annina of the Horns. “Take them off, take them off! We'll see how it goes.”

They were four bright and shining, and at the same time very dirty children. You don't go into rapports in the flint-thorn-dust country and stay clean. The four of them took off their shoes. There was a slight anticipatory giggle from Quick Mick. And — 

 — And what a howling outrageous trick it was that they played! There was dark and gleaming delight in the very manifestation of their frightening powers. For the ground did become very hot: not for them, but for everybody else.

There is something undignified in the great Lion-Men, the Enforcers, dancing on one foot and then the other: and howling. And disordered dignity has always been the forte of these lawless rulers.

“Fox-fire running, cloned and downed,

Singes the Lions and singes the ground.”

Azorro's laughing chant was very like fox-fire, and the horns on his temples were more like sticks of white fire than like hair now.

“Put them back on!” the biggest Lion of them all roared. And the children, in most insincere obedience, put their shoes back on. Ah, the ground had been burning hot for a long moment though! But had anybody noticed, had anybody ascertained in the brief interval when the children had their shoes off, whether their feet were indeed cloven hoofs?

“The second part of the judgment is a question and a demand,” the biggest Lion roared, but a bit lamely now. “The question and the demand: ‘Do you abjure the burning bush?’ We don't remember the meaning of this, but we're required to ask it.”

The four kids rolled eight eyes like rakish unmatched jewels at each other. Why, they had the Lions themselves inventing devices for them to use. This was too good to throw away.

“We abjure the burning bush completely,” Quick Mick gleed. “We fling it away from us. We'll not see it with eyes. The true bush comes some other while. Let all the false bush burn now for the backward sign of it!”

And the false bush burned. It burned hotly, quickly, searingly in more than five hundred points of discord. Chin-whiskers and chop-whiskers, bushwhackers and Fu Manchus, burnsides and brodignags, tom-balls and cascades, lank-locks and bush-heads, those bushes were on fire; beards and moustaches, manes and crines, long-hair and frizz-hair were all aflame. And the fires were not beaten out until the kids said that they might be extinguished.

“That's enough,” Annina of the Horns laughed the order after a bit. So the shattered people, the Jackal-People and the Lion-People, put out their own fires with whimpering and trepidation. Ah, it was pleasantly sharp, though, in the nostrils of the four children, if not of the furious folk: that acrid tang of scorched flesh and seared skin, that fuzzy and bitter smell of burnt hair. The horned children were now horned with rays of white light and were themselves almost radiant.

“The judgment goes on,” growled the largest and possibly the most scorched of the Lion-Men. “Now you will do the doings or you will die the deaths. Will you now take pot and hemp and acid and snow to show your solidity with the free people? To show that you're not seed of the Devil?”

“I'll not take them,” Annina sang.

“You others?”

“No. No. Never, scorched Lion, never,” the three male kids denied.

“Will you don the pig-wigs?” the Lion asked in rising thunder.

“We will not,” cried the children of the ray-light-horn temples.

“Will you Sing the Thing?” the Lion roared, and five hundred guitars strummed and whined in anticipation.

“We'll not Sing the Thing,” the four said.

“It would be a desecration of the Real Thing,” Dan explained.

The judgment place was in an open space by the common pads and the furnaces. The largest furnace had now been fired to seven times hot and was like molten liquid flame.

“We come very near to the end of it then,” the judging Lion said sadly, with that sadness that is peculiar to singed lions. “What is the name of your father?”

“Our father's name may not be spoken,” Azorro stated. “Your father's name is legion.”

“Your father's name is Devil. He had hoofs and horns,” the big Lion accused.

“Not so,” Quick Mick answered. “That one is your father, not ours. And all those things are the false brag of your father. His head isn't holy enough to bear horns. His stubs aren't earthy enough to have either feet or hoofs on the ends of them. He's a hobble. He's not lord of sky or earth or under-earth, not of any of them. He's lord of lies and flies and order and disorder, but no other things. He's not even lord of fire, for all his vaunt. He's not even able to live in it in joy.”

“Are you able to?” the singed Lion asked with a flash of leonine humor.

“We are!” the kids shouted solidly.

“Your father is dead. That is the only fact of the world,” the Lion stated.

“Dead Lion, tell us not who is dead,” Azorro laughed.

“Into the furnace with the four of them,” all the Jackal-People and Lion-People cried.

“With the three of them,” the biggest Lion said. “Dan is a special case, a case not well understood. He's to be eaten alive, and we special Lions will eat him. That's the way it's been ordained. Your tricks end now, evil children.”

“No. Our tricks begin now,” Annina contradicted. “You'd never have believed such tricks. Ah, the furnace! That's a fun I hadn't even thought of.”

So they all arranged for the judgment and the end of the thing.

Well, had the children hoofs on their feet? This hasn't been quite settled.

Oh yes. They had shadows of hoofs, at least. They had shadows of pads and of claws also. Yes, and old vestiges of fish tails and even of dragon tails on their extremities. But what they had really and finally, and not as vestige, was fine feet.

And horns on their heads, real horns, white-fire horns, white-light horns, Moses-horns!

Danny was surrounded by two dozen large and savage men who'd eat him alive with their very teeth. They were in a passion for it. No, that is not strictly accurate. Daniel had two dozen trembling and fearful Lion-Men of the streets surrounded. Their teeth chattered, but were they chattering out of fear or were they chattering to eat Dan alive?

And the other three prepared to step into the seven-times hot molten flame of the furnace.

“Stand you back, the people,” Annina called. “We come to our high-tricks now. When we go into the fire you'll see some fun. But stand back or you'll be crisped by it.”

“Stand how far back?” the people hooted.

“A hundred meters, a thousand, a mile of meters,” Annina called. “And that won't be enough.”

“Burn, kids, burn,” the people mocked. “The furnace is seven times brick and seven times stone and seven times iron. Burn, seed, burn.” But some of the more timid ones did stand back, far back.

Not far enough, though. The children stepped down into the molten fire and the fun began. And the people reeled back in abysmal fear. A hundred meters back. A thousand.

A mile of meters back.

It wasn't far enough back though.

Author's Commentary

In Outraged Stone

The look of indignation on the face of that artifact was matched only by the total outrage of her whole figure. Oh, she was a mad one! She was the comic masterpiece of the Oganta Collection. If stone could speak she would be shrilling. She was a newly catalogued item among the grotesque alien stonery called the Paravata Oneirougma.

“You'd almost believe that she was alive!” was the laughing comment of many who watched her there in the display. “Oh, it's that she was alive once, and now she is furious at finding herself frozen in stone.”

But that was the whole missed point of her outrage: She wasn't alive; and she never had been.

It was the cultural discovery time of the Oganta of Paravata. The Oganta had become things both in and interesting. Earth people had taken a seasonable delight in their rough culture, in their horniness, in their froggishness. Many Earth people from the scientific simmer were now visiting them and studying them. In particular were those of the psychologic phratry involved in this. A quick trip to Paravata would yield such theses as enhance reputations and make names. There the mysterious human undermind and underbody was atop and open to explore. There was no way that one could miss if he had the energy for the encounter.

The energy for it, though: that was the thing that separated the bulls from the steers and the horned heifers from the freemartins.

“Paravata has half again Earth's gravity, so it calls out our strength. It has an atmosphere that keeps one on an oxygen binge, so it gives that strength something to draw on,” so had Garamask, that most vigorous Earthman, said of the planet.

Many Earth people wilted on Paravata. They couldn't stand the weight (there was something wrong about the weight) and the weirdness; they hadn't the strength for it. But others (and not always the ones you would guess) found a new strength and excitement there. It was bigger than life and rougher. It was vulgar and misshapen. It was a grinning challenge and it would smash anyone who wasn't up to it.

But if you could make it there you could make it big. The loins bulged with new energy for these fortunates, and the adrenaline ran in rivers. It was a common and shouting and delirious world for those who could match it, and it was not only the body juices that were called into fresh spate. The mind juices sang their new tunes also, and the ideas came in tumbling torrents. They were pretty shaggy, some of those ideas, but there was nothing tired about them. Mind and body appetites grew steeply, almost exploded. There was an absolute horniness that came onto such visitors as had the capacity to take it. And a froggishness. What is the mystique about frogs?

The horned frog of Earth is a miserable sleepy little antediluvian and has nothing to do with these vigorous whorls. Let us take the name away from it and give it to another. Somewhere, on some world, there is a real horned frog, rampant with green comedy, outrageous in its assumptions, able to get away with worse than murder. The Oganta of Paravata were really such horned frogs, except that they hadn't actual visible horns, except that they were frogs only in a manner of speaking.

Five young Earth psychologists (they all had the capacity and ruggedness for Paravata) were dining in one of those gape-walled inns on a ridge above the small town of Mountain Foot, on one of the stunning Paravata plateaus. Dining wasn't the proper word for it: they were gorging. They were gorging with Oganta friends (an Oganta had to be your friend or one of you would be dead quickly). And they didn't sit at table for their stupendous eating. This would be unthinkable to the Oganta, and it was immediately unthinkable to the Earth people. For such action, they stood, they strode, they rollicked; they tromped about on the big tables from giant bowl to giant bowl, and they grabbed and ate commonly from these common caldrons. They dipped and slurped, they toothed great joints of flesh-meat, they went muzzle-deep into musky mixtures. They were as mannerless as the Oganta themselves. They were already full of the coarse Oganta spirit and had even taken on something of the Oganta appearance.

On Paravata, one never reclined when he could stand (the Oganta even took their carnal pleasure leaping and hopping); one never sauntered where he could stride, nor walked when he could run. Aimless it all might be, but there was a burning energy and action in the very aimlessness.

They wrestled, they rolled, they walked upon one another and sat upon one another. “Och, I could hardly eat another bellyful,” Margaret Mondo groaned happily as she rolled on one of the big tables among the bowls. Then a huge male Oganta landed in the middle of her belly with both feet and bounced. Ah, he'd have gone three hundred pounds on Earth, and things were half again as heavy on Paravata. “Och, now I can eat again. How I can eat!” Margaret chortled. We knew that Margaret, the earthiest of them all, wouldn't really give out so quickly. The dining customs on Paravata are extreme. If you can't take them, don't go there.

It was just at frost-bite and there was a light snow sifting. The five youngish Earth-folk were dressed near as barely as the Oganta. It would be many degrees colder than this before the walls of this mountain inn would be raised. The open air is always to be praised. On Paravata there were no heating fires ever, except the internal ones: and these burned hot.

“It's much more earthy than Earth,” George Oneiron was saying. He was almost shouting. “It's everything, it's all through everything. The butterflies here are absolutely rampant, they're rutting, they're ravening. We know that ‘psyche’ originally meant butterfly as well as soul. The psyche, the soul-mind-person, is our field of study, and here it is grossly material, fleshed and blooded. Even the Marsala Plasma of this place (there's no counterpart to it on Earth, there couldn't be), though it floats and drifts and jostles in the air, has a heaviness and materiality about it that startles one. Don't turn your back on one of those floating blobs or it'll crash down on you like nine tons of rock. We'll solve the mystery of these plasma balls, or we will not solve any other mystery here.”

The Oganta themselves had this sometimes weightlessness and this sometimes great weight. It was a part of the jokes they played. And the Earth people discovered that now they had it too, sometimes, mostly when they were in contact with the oafish Oganta. You are light or heavy when you think light or heavy.

The floating globs, the air balls, had more mysteries than their weight. There was their sound, the most raucous dissonance ever, when one caught it only out of the corner of the ear. But turn full ear on one, and it was all innocence and quiet. Incredible scenes flashed and lounged inside the balls when taken at a careless glance, but they murked over when looked at straight. The globs made lascivious gestures, but what was lascivious about them? They were only charged air drifting in uncharged air (if there was any uncharged air on Paravata). The lasciviousness must be in the eye of the beholder. But what were the globs anyhow? “Oh, they're persons, some of our own persons, persons that we're not using right now,” one of the Oganta tried to explain it.

George Oneiron, still avid to solve the mystery, was trying to take one of these plasma balloons into his hands. It was a yellowish, greenish, translucent, transparent glob of crystal gas (crystal gas? yes, crystal gas) the size of his own head. It challenged him. It was as if it shook its horns at him. He had it, it escaped him, he had it again, he grunted and grappled with it, he seized it out of the shimmering air and he didn't seize it easily.

“It'll go heavy on you,” one of the Oganta grinned. “It'll cut you to shreds. Its weight is polaroid, just as ours is, just as yours begins to be. If it's in alignment it hasn't any weight; if it isn't it's crushing. You match it or it breaks you down. You shape with it or one of you breaks to pieces.”

George Oneiron was quite strong, and the thing, after all, was only a floating glob of gas. “I have you now!” he cried when he had it. “Why do you follow and cling to the Oganta while you evade ourselves? I have you, and you'll spill your secrets to me.”

“Poor George is reduced to talking to globs of air,” Helen Damalis jibed, but Helen was no great one at understanding deep things.

Actually, it was a giant wrestle, and it was close there for a moment. But it was the plasma ball, and not George, that broke to pieces. The Marsala Plasma shattered in George's hands, broke jaggedly into a hundred edged pieces, and clattered and crashed heavily on the stony ground. And George was cut badly on the hands and forearms and chest by the jagged slivers of it.

George cursed, he howled with quick pain, he laughed at the crashing puzzle of it: the floating balloon that turned into jagged rock. And he laughed at the half-dozen Oganta of both sexes who came with hasty bowls and cries of “Here, here, to me, to mine.”

George shook and dribbled his running blood into the Oganta's bowls. The big oafs loved the tang of blood, human blood or their own, in their strong stew. It was salt and condiment to them. And to George too. For he leapt barefooted onto the shoulders of the chuckling Oganta girls and trod them. It was bloody revel.

“Here, here, to me, to mine,” the Earth girls also cried, partly in comedy, partly in novel passion. George Oneiron dribbled his blood into the crocks of Helen Damalis and Margaret Mondo and Bonta Chrysalis, and leapt onto their shoulders also. Then, borne there by Margaret he poured his blood into the common caldrons on the largest table.

George was bleeding a surprising quantity of blood from the cuts of the gas globule, that floating thing that had shattered so quickly into vitreous daggers that were heavier than stone or metal. The loss of blood made him light-headed and gave him the froggish passion. But he quickly received more blood. All the Oganta, then the other four of the Earth people, slashed themselves with the dagger-shards of the broken globule and gave him their blood to drink. Now they were of one blood forever.

All five of the Earth psychologists were quite young adults. This would give them closer and quicker understanding of the Oganta, who were such vivid and outgoing oafs that even their dreams were on the outside. There was no denying that there was an abnormality about the Oganta, even beyond the differences of worlds and the differences of species.

The Oganta were a neotenic species who had lost, or almost lost, their adult form. As well as it can be explained in Earth context, they were teenagers forever whatever their age: and they seemed to age not at all after they had attained their high oafishness. There is no thing to which they might be compared in this: but imagine, if you dare, teenager attitudes and activities continued by certain individuals to a far greater age, twenty-two years, twenty-three, twenty-four, even further. If such things happened on Earth where would Earth be? Imagine neotenics breeding, reproducing, and never attaining an adult form. That was the state on Paravata.

The Oganta of Paravata were large. They looked like a cross between humans and frogs. They themselves said that they were analogous to the tadpoles who had been unable to make the frog leap. But to human Earth eyes they looked like frogs and they leapt like frogs.

“But every frog is really a prince enchanted,” Bonta Chrysalis said.

“I'd say that every prince is rather a frog in disguise,” Philip Blax countered, “except that I'm sure it's been said before, and probably by me.”

“Come here, Prince,” Bonta Chrysalis cried suddenly, and one of the big Oganta leapt into her arms and wrapped long froggy legs around her till Bonta herself could hardly be seen. But she'd made her choice. She'd taken one of the grinning gape-faced Oganta for her subject (subject for her study, and willing subject to her real whims) and she would not fail in this.

The Oganta were intelligent: or perhaps they only pretended to be, for a joke. They imbibed Earth knowledge easily and literally, but they didn't take it too seriously. Their own culture was deliberately anti-intellectual, but they understood pretty well all that they rejected. They had an easy way with languages and lingos. They even had an easy way with the psychology texts that lay about there, fingering through them quickly, then burlesquing not only the words but also the ideas of them.

The Oganta also had (this is not fully understood, it is one of the mysteries that must be solved) that light way and that heavy way with weight.

The Oganta played one abominable instrument, the stringed hittur. But the five young Earthlings did not find it as offensive as older Earthlings would have. They knew that the whining tastelessness of it was an essential part of the Oganta. And they knew that even the vigorous Oganta could not be vigorous in everything. Even the hittur would be accepted, as one of the things that must be studied.

Helen Damalis had also acquired a boyfriend, an oaf friend, a leaping frog friend, from among the Oganta there in the mountain inn. She hadn't done it as deftly or as regally as Bonta had taken hers. Perhaps it was that Helen was acquired by the Oganta. Helen wasn't regal, she wasn't strong, she wasn't much of anything at the moment. She looked like a very small sofa with a very large Oganta lounging on her.

The Oganta liked the Earth folks. They slavered over them, they kissed them with great slurping sounds, they frog-leapt upon them. They insisted that the Earth folks should play the leaping game also. This was the mystic game of leapfrog, the oldest game of the worlds. The leaping is always upon and not over, and the fun of the game is in going from weightlessness to staggering weight at just the wrong moment.

“We'll need neither notebooks nor recordings,” Christopher Bullock was saying very solemnly (yet he was very unsolemnly a-romp and a-tromp on a playful and trollish female Oganta), “for the Marsala Plasma will serve for both. They are the crystal balls, crystal even in their gaseous state, and they record everything of the particular Oganta they attach to. We'll have everything down in the most solid recordings ever, petrified dream and person blobs.”

There were five of these young psychologs from Earth.

There was this Christopher Bullock: we will have to call him a young man of muscular mind; there's no other term that will serve. The playful and trollish female Oganta had now picked Christopher up and draped him about her neck like a scarf: like a light scarf at first, then like a staggeringly heavy scarf. Christopher himself was learning a little about the light way and the heavy way with weight. There has always been something doubled about that name of Christopher, especially when it doubles into the name of Cristobal. There was once a man named Cristóbal Colón (an old necromancer of Earth who doubled the Earth), though his name was regularized to Christopher Columbus. Though Christopher means Christ-Bearer, yet Cristobal is the phonetic equivalent of Crystal Ball and it has unchristly connotations. Just what is the real meaning of the crystal ball, and why was Christopher Bullock so interested in it?

The second of the young psychologs from Earth was George Oneiron. George was a split person, and the two halves of him were stark idealism and total depravity. In each half George was a nice enough fellow, but the contrast within him was awkward. The halves of George were at the moment served by two female Oganta, one of them as spiritual, one of them as carnal as it is possible for neotenic frog-humans to be.

The third of the young psychologs from Earth was Philip Blax. Philip had healed his own split and had become (in advance) a very little like one of the Oganta in appearance and attitude. Nothing special about Philip really.

But the fourth of the psychologs from Earth was Bonta Chrysalis and she was something special. She was everything. She was magnificent in mind and body, splendid, soaring, regal, almost a flame. She was beauty and grace combined with power. She had always known the light way and the heavy way with things. The Oganta frog, who might be the prince enchanted, had frog-leapt onto her shoulder and perched there, and he was the largest of them all. But what is weight to a flame? And that big one, if he wasn't enchanted before, he was now, completely enchanted by Bonta.

And from Bonta Chrysalis we go to Helen Damalis, who suffers by the comparison. Helen wasn't much. She had less substance than any of them, less even than Philip. Helen wasn't distinguished by the primary brain in her head or by the secondary spinal brain which all good psychologs must have. She hadn't beauty of face or grace of body, not by Earth standards, not even by Paravata-Oganta standards. She was plastic, perhaps, and she might take the impression of these things, but she hadn't them of herself. She was an empty receptacle, an inelegant piece of pottery; yet she had a sullen intensity and an eagerness to be filled. She had a real hunger for life. One thing more: the Marsala Plasma, those gaseous blobs that were really crystal balls that could shatter into heavy fragments, followed and clung to Helen, as they did to all the Oganta, as they did not to the Earth people. And Helen clung very closely to her Oganta boyfriend, oaf friend, frog friend.

The fifth of the psychologs from Earth was Margaret Mondo. She had an earthiness beyond any of them. This wasn't necessarily a roughness. Earth is more than that. It wasn't a lowness of any sort. Earth is much more than that. It was a primordial variety that she had, a many-rootedness. It was not true that Paravata was more earthy than Earth; you knew that was not true when you looked at Margaret who was Earth itself. She could contain them all, but nobody could contain her. So it wasn't an Oganta singling that she attracted, but a group, a trio of Oganta, two males and a female. She was too complex and vital to waste on a singling.

Ah, the young scientists had gathered up, or in some cases been gathered up by, their subjects. They went off with them now, riding them or ridden by them, in groups and tangles; off for study and for fun and for exploratory experience and for science.

The Oganta, so coarse and so open that they had their dreams on the outside.

And the five young mind-scientists from Earth.

Five? Not six? Christopher, George, Philip, Bonta, Helen, Margaret. Do they not come to six?

No. There are five of them. Count them again carefully. See, there are five of them.

The crystal ball, it is everywhere phony in its every form, and nowhere has it so many or such unusual forms as on Paravata. On Earth, as far back as one wants to go, to Babylon, to Chaldee, the crystal ball is in solid (though cloud-filled) form only, and it is the tool and scope of charlatans and oneiromancers. Even in those beginnings its users didn't understand its real form, and yet they preserved some slight pre-Earth memory of its various phases. On Paravata, by accident, it has its full phases. It may be in gas or liquid or plastic or solid form; it may go from one to the other in a twinkling (the phrase was coined for that change in that thing).

But what can really be seen in any crystal ball? Futures? Yes, futures, pasts, presents, scenes, dreams, images, dramas, primary persons, secondary persons. The ball may go tricky and freeze forever any of these fleeting things. Very often it will seize a secondary person and freeze this person forever. That person, then, will never have had any existence except in the ball, it will never have been anything except petrified.

To say that the crystal ball is everywhere phony is not to say that it is ineffectual. It is to say that it has misshapen or phony effect. But it does have effect. It works, it works.

 — From the Notebooks of Christopher Bullock

(Wasn't he the one who said they would need neither notebooks or recordings?)

Bonta Chrysalis and Margaret Mondo perhaps had the most success with their projects. Bonta's, it would turn out, would be a badly twisted success. Helen Damalis surely had the least success, though she believed she was having the greatest. She was realizing herself at least, she claimed. In a limited way that was true. Christopher Bullock may have had the most fun, what with that playful and trollish female Oganta of his, but even this is to be doubted. There was something unexpected to be found even in the troll. All the projects suffered in having no aim other than the mere study of the Oganta.

Could they be studied apart from their planet of Paravata? Were the Oganta isolated and discrete individuals? Were they interlinked groups with the personality residing in the groups? Were they mere fauna of their planet, a mobile grass of their world, manifestations, fungi? That was the trouble with the Oganta: they changed under the different points of view. As drops of water they were one thing, as small seas they were something quite opposite; as planetary oceans they might have a third and vastly different substance.

Philip Blax said that the Oganta themselves had no problems, that they were completely uninhibited and uncomplicated, that they were interchangeable modules of an unstructured society that knew neither anxiety nor doubt. Bonta said that in this Philip was wrong in a way unusual even for Philip. She said that the Oganta did have extreme anxieties, and that the better the intelligence and personality of the individual Oganta the greater was his anxiety. She said they had these anxieties because they had lost their adult form.

“It is well lost,” Philip had said, “and I might wish that we could lose our own.”

“You never had one and never will,” Bonta told him. “I haven't my own completely yet, but I will have it. You are yourself like an Oganta, and it's yourself you see when you look at them. You're emptier than they are. You're not like the ones who are superior in intelligence and personality.”

The plasma balls, the crystal balls, did make good notebooks and recorders; Christopher Bullock had been correct on that. The Oganta were such uninhibited (on the surface anyhow) and open creatures that they had their dreams on the outside of them: the psychologs from Earth had said that from the beginning but without really understanding what they meant.

“The plasma ball is a bucket,” Margaret Mondo said now. “It can become a bucketful of dreams, and it becomes heavier as it becomes fuller.”

No need for other apparatus to study Oganta dreams. Allow a new and fresh Marsala Plasma to hover over an Oganta as he slept, either in the daytime or at night, and watch the plasma globe. The parade of dreams would be shown and sensed in that globe, vividly and colorfully, pungently and resoundingly. The Oganta dreamed better than they knew. Their dreams were more finely structured than their lives and had a greater diversity. They were real pageants, full of symbols and outright creations, enormous, overwhelming, spooky, powerful. Each superseded dream of the parade gathered itself like broken smoke and retreated into the center of the plasma to make way for more current presentations on the spherical stage nearest the surface. But all the dreams were recorded for all the senses and not one of them was lost.

George Oneiron made first discovery of a method of reconstructing the dissolved Oganta dreams. He'd affront a plasma ball that had been beside one of his Oganta subjects during her sleep period; he'd affront it and make it go heavy. He'd affront it still more and make it shatter into pieces. And each jagged broken fragment of it would display one of those bright jagged dreams. Turn one of those jagged fragments to another angle, and there was the same dream in another aspect, one that might have been completely missed at first viewing. George himself was very strong in the dreams of his two Oganta subjects, in a distorted form always, or in his two distorted forms.

Margaret Mondo said that George was doing it all wrong. She quickly discovered that there was no reason to affront the globes, still less reason to shatter them. There was no need to make them go heavy permanently; they received less well when they were always heavy. Let them go heavy and light, and heavy and light again. Margaret herself could resurrect out of the globes any dream or constellation of dreams by caressing them with her own magic hands. She could reconstruct them in sequence or out of sequence, any way she wished.

Having three Oganta subjects, Margaret sometimes used three globes. But she could make the three globes merge into one, and emerge out of it again. Sometimes there would then be four globes and not three: one composite globe, three discrete globes. Margaret was studying three individuals as well as one small nation.

After a while she maintained master globes. The individual globes, after each dream period, were merged with their master globes; and then they were emerged from them again, emptied and ready for reuse. There was no limit to the amount of data that a globe might hold.

Indexing and recovering the data were other matters. Margaret could effect these things with her magic hands. The others hadn't hands so magic as Margaret's, but they managed. Except Helen Damalis. She managed her material not at all; it managed her.

The Oganta needn't be sleeping to project these dream sequences. They projected always, when leaping or shouting, when slavering or loving, when guzzling or gorging, while wrestling or rolling, while rattling the air with their whining unmusic, while burlesquing and buffooning, while unstructuring themselves and their minds. Even their waking dreams were better than their waking lives. Why did the Oganta put themselves down so?

There was a certain pathos in the pageanted dreams of Christopher Bullock's subject, the playful and trollish Oganta girl. Oh, she was playful enough, cloud-shatteringly playful! Sequences taken from her playful dreams and reveries (reverie is the wrong word, it implies quietness and musing; there should be a word to express the whooping happy calamities and catastrophes of this alien girl) would later be enjoyed by a certain clientele of Earth fellows in the manner of old stag movies. And she was trollish enough. She enjoyed her massive and misshapen burlesque of a body; it was the house she lived in. But there were other levels and aspects to the data that streamed and fountained up from this girl. There were odd caves and grottos in the mountain of her, some of them secluded and quite unexpected, rare ones, puzzling ones. It's a dull mountain that can labor (even trollishly) without bringing forth at least a small heap of gemstones.

There was nobility in the interaction of Bonta Chrysalis and her enchanted Oganta subject. There was something cracked or usurping about that nobility though.

“But they do put it on a little thick,” George Oneiron said correctly of them.

“Blunt as I am, I was never that blunt, or that empty,” Philip Blax attacked them, and with justice.

“Oh, climb down from it, Bonta,” Christopher mocked. “You'll get too high for your own head.”

Even the ever kind and ever magic Margaret Mondo wrung her hands and shook her head over the affair and said: “May I never be so pretentious as that! May God Himself never be! There are limits to things, and they pass the limit.”

Helen Damalis perhaps said the strangest thing of all about the affair: “If they can make a thing like that come alive, is it helpless for myself? Air lives and turns into talking and walking crystal. Stones live, and float like air in air. Frogs live. Imaginary princes live. All I ever wanted was to live. Is there magic enough for some of it to fall on me?”

Were they really so pretentious and outrageous, the things that Bonta and her charmed frog were attempting? This frog-Oganta had intimations and even expectations of adulthood now. Whether he had already had these intimations of himself or whether Bonta had given them to him is unknown, but he had them strongly.

There was now no more than one out of ten thousand Oganta who ever attained the old Rogha form, the old adult form. And these few who attained it were isolated in it, without mate or breed, and usually very old. All the other Earth psychologs felt that this thing gone once should be gone forever. All the other Oganta felt that whatever state one should reach all should reach; that if they did break out of the top of themselves to a new state and development it should not now be that old and lost state. There must have been something wrong with that old advanced state or it would never have been lost. Perhaps it was too pretentious in itself, and too contemptuous of its underlay.

It was strange that Bonta Chrysalis, that everything Earthling girl, didn't understand this. Perhaps her own state was in her name and she was looking for a developed state for herself as well as for her subject. Perhaps, for all her easy attainments and brilliances, she herself was not adult and would not soon be.

It was strange that the enchanted Oganta himself, more intelligent and personable than the other Oganta, didn't realize that the old effective advanced form was now impossible. If attained now it would be mere sterility. On the word of the other Oganta of the immediate group, this one was the most gifted of them all. Why had he a faulty gift of vision in this?

Helen Damalis had the rockiest time of them all. She seemed, though, to be the most avid for the experience, even the very rocky experience. She had become attached to her subject, not he to her. And he was cruel to her with that offhanded and amazing cruelty of which only the Oganta are capable. He was a complete egotist and most of his dream sequences were parades and pageants of himself only or himself against a dim background of other Oganta: other Oganta and a flurry of inferior creatures that were not easy to identify. “Like a cross between an Oganta and a chicken.” Was that more offensive than the Earthlings' way of seeing the Oganta? “Like a cross between a human and a frog.” It was Margaret who pointed out that this was the Oganta way (or this particular Oganta's way) of seeing the Earth-humans.

But there had come another person and appearance into the dream sequence of this cruel Oganta now. This was the appearance of Helen Damalis herself. Oh, he dreamed of her! That was something. It was as if it made her real. What matter that she was only the secondary element in a shaggy form that was somewhat hermaphroditic and miscegenated? She was there. That was something.

George Oneiron projected his own split person onto his two subjects. It was all very brilliant in the tensions that it set up. George was making parades of his double self through the Oganta mediums. These were sculpted and directed dreams of himself and he loved them. Later viewers would love them also. They were good. They were excellent. But they weren't pure Oganta.

Margaret Mondo was wielding a small notion. To her own trio, two males and a female, she now added the boisterous, playful, trollish female of Christopher Bullock. And to herself she added Christopher: she'd always intended to do that. It might be that the development of the Oganta (och, they did need development; it was catastrophe if they remained as they were for always) would come through these small but accreting nations of them. There were nuclei being created, some by the Earthlings, some independent of them. The Oganta seemed the starkest individuals of any species anywhere, but it was only seeming. They began to accrete into these small nations now; and the personality was in the nations, not in the individuals. Happily this is not the case with many species: necessarily it was so with the Oganta. The small nation might be their new adult form.

The Oganta of Helen Damalis had broken all her bones and mangled her body almost beyond recognition. This pleased her: but it must not go as far as her extinction or all would be lost. She must hide, but she must maintain the relationship: so she must hide in the most obvious place of all. She attracted an empty Marsala Plasma and crept inside it. Then she merged it with the standing plasma globe, her Oganta's crystal ball of record. He would see her there mingled with himself; but he'd not know that this was her alive, so he'd not extinguish her to her death.

Bonta Chrysalis had just now (and most unfortunately) succeeded in her own experiment. She had disenchanted her frog. She had produced her prince. He stood now in his pride and royalty: he was an adult in the old line and form; he was a Rogha.

He was very proud. He was very old (the Oganta showed no aging, whatever their years, but all the considerable years of this one were apparent in his new Rogha form). He was a royal Rogha, one of the elites, of the excellent ones. He was imposing in a way that neither Oganta nor human could ever be. He was extraordinary, he was magnificent, he was proud with the pride of the older angels. He was isolated. He was finished.

He was ridiculous. He was silly.

“I'm sorry,” Bonta Chrysalis said lamely. She was still in bondage to her own state and youth. Chrysalis-dreams never accord with reality, but how could she have been so very wrong in this?

“Sorry?” the Rogha asked in regal voice. “You should be happy, small creature, in your limited way. You've been the instrument. You have restored me. Something has restored me. Now I have inherited to my rightful station, that of a natural and destined prince. I look around. I find that I am more than that. I see that it is very late in the day. All the kings are dead. Now I am the king.”

In poetic justice, the oafish and unsensing Oganta almost deserved such an adult form. But they had lost it. There is a Providence.

The times had come to their end. These seminars, these field trips, cannot last for ever. It was time for the five Earthlings to return to Earth.

The Oganta, the new, small but accreting nation of them, threw a bash for the five young psychologs from Earth. It was rowdy, of course. It was loud almost beyond bearing. It was vulgar, it was boisterous, it was cacophonous with the whinging and whining of the stringed hitturs. It was at a mountain inn, one of those gape-wall places. It was just at frost-bite, and a light snow was sifting. The five youngish Earth-folk were dressed near as barely as the Oganta.

Crudity, gluttony, guzzling and gorging. Tromping on tables and on torsos. Slurping and toothing from the common caldrons. The ancient and mystic game of leapfrog, and the wrestling and rolling of bodies.

But it was not quite the same sort of bash as the Oganta had thrown for them at their coming. Niceties had appeared. A new element was there, an element that you could hardly pin down with your two feet, but there was a difference. Come back in a thousand years and you'd be able to see the difference clearly.

The bash bashed on. Margaret and Christopher went to gather up the various records, the crystal balls (now solid and stony, yet with clouds still drifting in them) that held the dream pageants and complexes of the curious small Oganta nation, and of their own curious human selves as seen through Oganta eyes.

George and Philip and Bonta came to them late in the day, bebashed and besotted, and the five Earth psychologs were near packed for their return to Earth.

“There is one missing,” Margaret said. “I wonder if it is worth picking up? Oh, I'll do it. It'll be inferior, but it'll be different. Sometimes there are overlooked things to be found in artifacts that are inferior and different.”

“Which?” Bonta asked.

“The crystal ball of record of the singling Oganta,” Margaret said, “of the one unsociable Oganta who hated humans so much. But we persuaded him to let a recording ball accumulate on him. Oh, I bet it's full of hate! I'll get it.”

Margaret Mondo got the crystal ball of record of the Oganta who hated humans. It was small, but heavy and weird. It wasn't entirely full of hate, not yet. There was one other slight element in it, not quite extinguished, outraged and terrified and squalling for attention.

“Margaret, get me out of here,” the stone screeched. “I'm trapped in it, I tell you. I want to mend up my bones and go home to Earth.”

“My, aren't you an odd one.” Margaret exclaimed. “What a dirty little masterpiece! He made you out of scraps of Bonta and myself. So how could he have made you so ugly?”

“Margaret, it's I, Helen Damalis! Get me out of here!”

“Why, how psychological of him. All the Oganta have an easy way with the lingos. He really named you that, did he, little hell heifer? Ah, what a shrilling little bad dream you are. One ugly clot of stone like this will show up the other globes in all their colorful beauty. Pack you away with the others, I will, and you'll be the comedy piece of the collection.”

“Margaret, I'm Helen. Can't you understand? Run your magic hands over my globe and get me out of here. I'm Helen, the sixth one of the party.”

“But we were always a party of five. Ah, the look on you, it changes, it lowers, it explodes. There are stinking flames reeking about you, not dream clouds. More, dirty dream, more. Hate, hate, hate! Then I'll freeze you forever in the stone in your dull hatred. Oh, what a perfect little deformity you are!”

“Margaret, I hate you,” the stone squalled, “I hate everybody. I'm alive, I tell you. I'm real. See me, hear me, smell me, get me out of here! I'm alive, I'm alive!”

“Yes, you're a lively little abomination, but never really alive. The worlds couldn't stand it if you were. More, un-creature, more, more if that's possible. Burn, scream, hate! That's it.”

Then Margaret Mondo packed the little misshapen nightmare stone away with all the intricate and interesting crystal balls.

Go see it in the Oganta Collection. Really, it's the liveliest item of them all. Look at it there, wobble-eyed with horror and hatred, shrilling silently, pungent as brimstone, squalling against extinction, hating, outraged, absolutely petrified.

Rang Dang Kaloof

The gnome had been around for a month or so. There had been, there still were, others of them. But there was something a little mean about this one.

They weren't gnomes, of course. There are no such things as gnomes; and besides, gnomes are somewhat larger. These were small, smaller than squirrels. They had been harmless. It was rather pleasant to know that they were around, in the borderland. It was like having squirrels living in your walls, and these didn't damage or gnaw.

Flaherty would sit in that big chair in the evenings with that little table in front of him. He would read, he would write, he would doze. When he nodded a bit, when he dozed, that was when he saw them. He never saw them when waking and he never saw them when honestly asleep. He met them on that narrow border between the states.

And Flaherty knew better than to quarrel with them. He didn't want even the imaginary bad luck that might come from crossing imaginary creatures. He was peaceful, they were peaceful, and there had been no reason for quarrel.

The quarrel, when it came, began over almost nothing, as do most quarrels in that borderland between sleep and wakefulness. The gnome was dragging off one of Flaherty's old slippers, the left one.

“I'd never take the right one,” the gnome said. “I have no province at all over things of the right hand or the right foot. And you do need new slippers. These are a disgrace.”

“Do not call my things a disgrace,” Flaherty grumped. “Why do you want an old slipper?”

“I need it,” the gnome said. “Certain details of my nest. It can be shored up in several places with pieces and fluff from the slipper. These are intimate things, though, and no business of yours. Do I ask what you want with such and such?”

“Go to hell,” Flaherty said, and that was where he made his mistake.

“Now you are being vulgar,” the gnome sulked, “and topographically ridiculous. I've nothing to do with hell. I'm of another country entirely. Last chance. Will you give me the slipper?”

“I'll give you nothing, you bug,” Flaherty growled. “Begone.”

“We'll see about it, then,” the gnome said with a mean turn in his voice. “I have a little trick I can use. Ah, I love myself when I do things like this.”

The gnome made a loop with a fine length of string or thread, or perhaps of spider silk. He spun it like a lasso. He threw it. Flaherty noticed that the loop entered his chest and made itself fast on something. And he felt a very weird little tug there in the middle of his heart.

“All right, all right, a trick's a trick and fun is fun,” Flaherty said, “but you've hooked that loop around something inside me. What, and why?”

“One of the little interventricular veins in your heart, between the atrium and the ventricle, actually. And for orneriness, that's why.”

“Now you are the one who's being topographically ridiculous,” Flaherty said. “There is no way that a loop may be thrown to encircle a line that is fast at both ends.”

“I did it, though. Feels funny, doesn't it? Almost hurts.”

“A queasy feeling,” Flaherty said. “Leave off now. You can have the slipper.”

“I intend to have it. And some fun with you, too. Feel when I pull it tighter.”

“Oh! No! No! Stop it! Uncle!”

“Uncle isn't the word,” the gnome said.

“For the love of Saint Polyander, what is the word, then?” Flaherty begged.

“Rang dang kaloof,” the gnome pronounced seriously.

“Rang dang kaloof, then,” Flaherty said, but he smiled a bit meanly when he said it, and he shouldn't have.

“Louder,” the gnome ordered, and he pulled the loop tighter to create an alarming twinge.

“Rang dang kaloof,” Flaherty cried.

“When I say louder, I mean louder,” the gnome said, and he pulled on the loop to give a true heart pang.

“RANG DANG KALOOF,” Flaherty screamed.

“That's good enough for now,” the gnome said. He eased off on the loop. The heart pang ceased, but Flaherty fainted into real sleep.

Only for a moment, though. The telephone woke him up. It was a sorehead neighbor.

“Flaherty, what's that damned screaming over there?” the s. h. n. demanded.

“It was just a little misunderstanding,” Flaherty excused himself lamely. “It's funny how sound carries in the evening. It won't happen again. At least I hope it won't.”

“It better not,” the sorehead said, and they hung up on each other. Flaherty went to bed.

He woke up in the morning feeling rotten and with a grave uneasiness in the region of the heart. Though it was two hours before the office girl could be there, he dialed the doctor's office every fifteen minutes till he finally got a connection. And he got an early appointment by a combination of luck and bad-mannered shouting.

“Nothing much wrong with your heart,” the doctor said several hours later. “I won't have the tracings of your EKG till tomorrow, but I believe your heart's nearly the soundest thing about you.”

“Drop the other shoe,” Flaherty said nervously. He knew this doctor.

“As I say, your heart's in good shape. Of course, it's going to kill you if you don't get those teeth out, take off sixty pounds, quit boozing. Still, don't worry. Worry's one of the hardest things on a person. But you can't blame your heart for the condition you've let yourself get into.”

“Anything else?”

“This prescription. Oh, and smoking those cigars. Better cut them in half at least.”

“That makes both halves harder to light.”

“And bad jokes — take it easy on them.”

Flaherty had all his teeth out and got crockery teeth in place of them. He began to take off weight. He did everything that was prescribed to him. Sometimes in the evenings he heard snickering when he drifted into that narrow borderland between wakefulness and sleeping. His pills, which he took faithfully, seemed to call out merriment from the lurking gnome.

“Valium,” he heard it sneer once. “How are you going to get rid of a noose with Valium pills?” It was a good question. And Flaherty still had the heart twinges and pangs.

The next evening, he was compelled to squall, shout, scream, the unmagical phrase rang dang kaloof, again and again. His reputation in the neighborhood deteriorated.

Flaherty had men in to soundproof his house. He continued to take off great globs of weight and he felt himself diminished in person and in spirit. He stayed off the juice and the smoke, and he felt his wit drying up from it.

“Ah, you're coming along fine, fine,” the doctor told him. “Looking much better. Pulse and blood pressure greatly improved. Bet you're feeling a lot better, aren't you?”

“No, I'm feeling terrible,” Flaherty said. “How about giving me the names of a few heart specialists?”

“All right, if you want to go further and do worse.”

Flaherty tried, in the evenings, to avoid that narrow borderland between wakefulness and sleeping. He rigged up devices to keep him out of the drowse till he was very tired, in the hope that he would go directly to sleep when he went to bed. He still had the twinges and the pangs. That loop was still around the little vein or whatever between atrium and ventricle in his heart. It was always there and sometimes it was there very tightly. And every now and then, in spite of all precautions, the gnome caught him wide-open in the borderland and compelled him into the roaring and screaming: RANG DANG KALOOF!

“It doesn't sound just right,” the gnome said one evening. “It doesn't echo as it should. You soundproofed the place, you piker! Open all the doors and windows!”

“No. There's a limit to this nonsense.”

“There sure is!” the gnome swore. “I'll teach you to crawfish with me. Open all the doors and windows, I said. Better yet, go out into the street for it. We may as well put on a good show.”

Oh, it was quite a concert that time and the heart pangs felt very like death pangs. Again and again, at the cracking top of his voice, he had to give it:

RANG DANG KALOOF!

And the night echoed with it.

They came with the pokey wagon and took Flaherty to the pokey. And it was all a little hard to explain to the judge the next morning. Flaherty asked to be shown where there was any city ordinance forbidding a man to speak the words rang dang kaloof or, indeed, any words not obscene or seditious in the street in front of his own house. He knew he wasn't helping his case. There were ordinances sufficient against making very loud disturbances. There were also nutty houses, he was told, for people who persisted in acting nutty. Flaherty paid his fine. It might be more than a fine if it happened again, so the man told him.

By and by, Flaherty had taken off sixty pounds. He no longer drank nor smoked nor got mad nor worried: All these things were forbidden to him, though the latter two abstentions had become difficult for him. All his heart readings checked as perfect.

“You must feel much better now, don't you?” the doctor, the fifth one he had been to, asked him.

“No. I still feel rotten,” Flaherty said. “I still have the heart pangs, even though you say I can't be having them. There is still a stricture about a nameless vein in my heart, even though you say there is no such vein as I describe. And when he jerks it tighter and makes the pain unbearable, he can still compel me to — ah, never mind. Who's another good heart doctor around here?”

“There aren't any. You've used us all up. There isn't anything wrong with your heart, Flaherty, and there aren't any heart doctors anywhere better than we are. None anywhere, except — well, he doesn't practice anymore, anyhow.”

“What's his name? Why doesn't he practice anymore?”

“Dr. Silbersporen. And he doesn't practice now because he's agreed not to.”

“He's disbarred?”

“Oh, no, absolutely not. So eminent a man would never be prohibited from practice except as a last resort. The great doctor has been quite reasonable and cooperative about it all. He's a gentleman and he stands by his gentleman's agreement to practice no more. A sad case, really.”

“Something fishy here,” Flaherty said, and he went off on the spoor of Dr. Silbersporen. He found the rather elderly doctor at his home in a secluded neighborhood. He received a friendly but somewhat breathless welcome from him.

“You are in trouble, of course,” the good doctor said “Only those in real trouble still come to see me. Now, then, tell me your trouble and I will get you out of it immediately.” The doctor wheezed when he talked, but it was a kindly wheeze.

“I understand that you are, were, the finest heart doctor in the region,” Flaherty said. “I also understand that you no longer practice. Ah, what is your own trouble, emphysema?”

“Not a trace of it. I've been to all the throat, lung, and thorax experts and they say that there is nothing at all wrong with me, that I must feel wonderful. I feel rotten. What really troubles me, though, is a small red Indian. And you?”

Then Flaherty broke down and told Dr. Silbersporen all about his troubles, about the gnomes (who were not gnomes) who inhabited the narrow border between wakefulness and honest sleep, about the foolish quarrel over the slipper, about the gnome's throwing the lasso around the vein in the middle of his heart, about the heart doctors' insisting that there was no such vein as the one that Flaherty rather guardedly described to them.

“Why, if that's all that's troubling you, we'll fix it in a minute,” Dr. Silbersporen wheezed and gasped. “They are right that there's nothing wrong with your heart. Once we take that little noose from around the conduit, you'll be as sound as ever. Oh, of course there's such a vein as you describe. I taught those heart experts, every one of them, but I wasn't able to teach them everything. It takes fine eyes to see that vein, I tell you that.” Dr. Silbersporen himself had rheumy and blood-veined eyes, as well as trembling hands. He seemed a very sick man.

“This vein, which the lesser experts don't know about, is quite vulnerable to unusual attack. Sometimes a very small mole will get inside a person and gnaw on the vein. Sometimes a cocklebur gets inside the heart and afflicts the vein. No, there's nothing unlikely about a gnome's putting a noose around it and pulling it tight. Every now and then, you'll find one of those little guys with a mean streak in him. Take your shirt off and I'll cut that loop out of your heart in a minute.”

Flaherty took his shirt off, but he was a little doubtful.

“It is said that you no longer practice,” he objected, “and you don't seem to have instruments or facilities here. How will you do it?”

“A real expert doesn't need many instruments, Mr. Flaherty. Here's a little paring knife that I was just cutting up an apple with. That'll get us inside. And here's a little scissors I was trimming my hair with. I cut my own hair, you know. Don't go to the barbers anymore. The prices, for one thing, and then the little red Indian says he'll make the barber cut my throat if I go to one. I never know whether that Indian's kidding or not, but he sure kids mean. The scissors will do quite well to cut the gnome's loop, though, and then your troubles will be over.”

“But is it sanitary?” Flaherty asked. There was something about this whole business that made him uneasy.

“No, of course it isn't,” the good doctor admitted. “Neither is it sanitary to have that gnome's lasso inside you all the time. Gnomes have no concept at all of hygiene. Ah, one of my own seizures is upon me. He always allows me enough breath to go through the rite. Then I'll be ready for you.”

Dr. Silbersporen was opening all the windows and doors in his house. “Easy, you little bugger, easy,” he was wheezing. “I'll say it, I'll say it loud, just let me have my breath for a bit.”

Then the good old doctor began to make sounds somewhere between those of a hyena and those of a rooster, very loud, very weird, very high and continuing for a long time: Shak shakowey shahoo! It wasn't the words themselves so much as the way the doctor intoned them that set the ears on edge.

Shak shakowey shahoo!

SHAK SHAKOWEY SHAHOO!

It went on for a long time and the neighbors were grumbling loudly. Then the doctor was finished with it for a while and he was smiling sadly.

“One learns to live with a thing like that,” he said. “What it is is a small red Indian, less than an inch tall, with whom I quarreled irrevocably. He put a little rawhide thong around my glottis. He chokes me with this, so that it appears that I suffer from emphysema. I don't suffer from emphysema at all, I suffer from a small red Indian. Naturally, the experts can find nothing wrong with me. For some reason, they are unable to see either Indian or rawhide thong. Ah, well, ready for you now, Flaherty.”

The doctor came with the paring knife in his trembling hand to lay open a passage to Flaherty's heart. He peered with his rheumy and blood-veined eyes, and it was necessary to remember that he was the foremost heart expert in that region. Even so, Flaherty found himself to be highly nervous. The doctor with the shaking hands hadn't made the cut a quarter of an inch deep when Flaherty gave it all up and threw away his chance of being freed from the lasso.

He cried out in quick terror and he ran out of the house. For Flaherty did have something the matter with his heart. He was chicken-hearted.

He had twinges, he had pangs, he had palpitations from the strange turn of events. And there, in front of the secluded home of Dr. Silbersporen, Flaherty ran smack into a tree. This is something one should always avoid.

It didn't knock him clear out. It did something much worse. It knocked him into that narrow borderland between wakefulness and honest sleep. And the gnome was able to trap him there.

“Louder!”

“Rang dang kaloof.”

“Louder, I said.”

“RANG DANG KALOOF.”

This went on for a long time. Then uniformed men were there with a paddy wagon. They took Flaherty away.

It is nice where they have him now. He still has heart twinges and pangs and the gnome still sets him to whooping every now and then. But Flaherty doesn't feel as isolated as he did before. There are other folks there who can see the gnomes in that narrow borderland between wakefulness and sleep. There are other folks there who suffer from them.

And Walk Now Gently Through The Fire

1

“The Ichtyans or Queer Fish are the oddest species to be found in any of the worlds. They are pseudo-human, perhaps, but not android. The sign of the fish is not easily seen on them, and they pass as human whenever they wish: a peculiarity of them is that they often do not wish to pass as human even when their lives depend on it. They have blood in their veins, but an additional serum also. It's only when the organizational sickness is upon them (for these organizing and building proclivities they are sometimes known as the Queer Builders or the Ants of God), that they can really be told from humans. There is also the fact that most of them are very young, or at least of a youthful appearance. Their threat to us is more real than apparent and we tend to minimize it. This we must not do. In our unstructured, destructed, destroyed society, they must be counted as the enemies to be exterminated. It's a double danger they offer us: to fight them on their own grounds, or to neglect to fight them. They'd almost trick us into organizing to hunt down their organization.

“Oh, they can live near as loosely as ourselves in their deception. These builders can abandon buildings in their trickery. They'll live in tents, they'll live in huts, they'll live under the open sky as easily as do ourselves, the regular people. But observe (they trick us there again: observation is a quality of theirs, not of ours), notice that everything they do is structured. There is always something structured about their very tents; there is something peculiarly structured about their huts; they even maintain that there is something structured about the open sky. They are the Institutional People.

“The Queer Fish claim that Gaea (Earth) is the most anciently peopled of the worlds and that they themselves are the most ancient people. But they set their own first appearance in quite late times, and they contradict the true ancientness of humans and proto-humans.

“The Queer Fish have been bloody and warlike in their times. They have been Oceanic as well as Sky-Faring, in some cases beyond ourselves in that phase. They have even been, in several peculiar contexts, creative. They are not now creative in the arts (they do not even recognize the same arts as we do). They are certainly not creative in the one remaining genuine art, that of unstructured music. They are something much worse than creative now: they are procreative in the flesh. Their fishy flesh would have already become dominant if they hadn't been ordered hunted to extinction. Even in this they force us to come out of ourselves, to use one of their own words.

“They force us to play their game. We have to set up certain structures ourselves to effect their destruction. We even need to institute certain movements and establishments to combat their Institutionalism and Establishmentalism. They are, let us put it plainly, the plague-carriers. Shall we, the Proud Champions of the Destroyed Worlds, have to abandon a part of our thesis to bring about their unstructuring, their real destruction? Must we take unseemly means to balk their fishy plague? We must.”

“Problem of the Queer Fish.”

Analects — The Putty Dwarf

Judy Thatcher was moving upcountry in a cover of cattle. The millions of feral cattle were on all the plains. Most of these cattle were wobble-eyed and unordered. But an ordered person, such as Judy, would have ordered cattle; she could draw them about her like a cloak with a sense of structure, whole droves of them. A person could manipulate whole valleys of these cattle, could turn them (the smaller units turning the larger), could head them any way required, could use them for concealment or protection, could employ their great horned phalanxes as a threat. Judy Thatcher had some hundreds of her own ordered bulls. Being magic (she was one of the Twelve) she could manipulate almost anything whatsoever.

But most of the cattle of the plains were not quite cattle, were not ordered cattle. Most of the horses were not quite horses, nor the dogs dogs. Most of the people were no longer quite people (this from the viewpoint of the Queer Fish; Judy was a Queer Fish).

Judy was a young and handsome woman of rowdy intellect. She had, by special arrangement, two eyes outside of her head, and these now traveled on the two horizons. These eyes were her daughter, traveling now about two miles to the East and right of her on a ridge, and her son moving on another ridge three miles to her left and West. She was a plague carrier, she and hers. All three of them were Queer Fish.

The son, on her West and left, worked along a North-running ridge in those high plains and he could scan the filled plain still farther to the West. He could mark every disordered creature on that plain, and he had also been marking for some time one creature that was wrongly ordered but moving toward him with a purpose.

This son, Gregory, was twelve years old. Being of that age, he knew it was time for a certain encounter. He knew that the creature, wrongly ordered and moving towards him with a purpose, would be a party to that encounter. This always happens to boys of that age, when they are of the ripe time for the Confirmation or the Initiation of whatever sort. Many boys, unstructured boys, amazed boys of the regular species, boys of the Queer Fish even, are not conscious of the encounter when it comes. It may come to them so casually that they miss its import. It may come as wobble-eyed as themselves and they accept it without question. It may even come to them in dream state (whether in waking or walking dream, or in night dream), and then it sinks down, yeasting and festering a little bit but not really remembered, into their dream underlay. But many boys, particularly those of the Queer Fish species, know it consciously when it comes, and they negotiate with it.

(As to the ritual temptation of girls, that is of another matter, and perhaps it is of earlier or later years. Any information must come from a girl, or from a woman who remembers when she was a girl. Many do not seem to remember it at all. Most will deny it. Some will talk around it, but they do not talk of it directly. You may find an exceptional one who will. You may be an exceptional one who knows about it. But it isn't in the records.)

Gregory Thatcher, being twelve years old and in his wits, was tempted by a devil on a high spot on that ridge. There had been a cow, a white-eyed or glare-eyed cow, coming blindly towards him. The cow had no order or purpose, but someone in the cow came on purpose. Then the cow was standing, stock-still, blind-still, too stupid to graze, too balkish to collapse, less animate than a stone cow. Whoever had been in her had come out of her now. Where was he?

There was a little flicker of black lightning, a slight snigger, and he was there.

“Command that these stones be made bread,” he said (his heart not quite in it). He was a minor devil; his name was Azazel. He wasn't the great one of that name, but one of the numerous nephews. There is an economy of names among the devils.

“Does it always have to start with those same words?” Gregory asked him.

“That's the way the rubric runs, boy,” Azazel jibed. “You Fish are strong on rubric yourselves, you're full of it. Play the game.”

“We are the rubric,” Gregory said easily, “in the first meaning, the red meaning. We're the red ocher, the red earth.”

“A smart Fish I have, have I? You heard the words ‘Command that these stones be made bread.’ Do it, or confess that you are unable to do it. You Fish claim powers.”

“It is easy enough to make bread with these stones,” said Gregory. “Even you can see that they are all roughly quern stones, grinding stones. They are all flat or dished limestones and almost any two will fit together. And the wild wheat stands plentiful and in full head. It's easy enough to thresh it out by rubbing the ears in my hands, to grind it to meal or to flour between your stones, to mix with water from my flask and salt from my pack, to build a fire of cow chips and make bread cakes on one of the flat rocks put to cap the fire. I've dined on this twice today. I'd dine with you on it now if fraternizing were allowed.”

“It isn't, Greg. You twist the words. They are ‘Command that these stones be made bread,’ not ‘Command that these stones make bread.’ You fail it.”

“I fail nothing, Azazel.” (The two of them seemed about the same age, but that was not possible.) “You'll not command me to command. On with it, though.”

“Cast thyself down from this height,” Azazel ordered. “If you are one of the elect you'll not be dashed to pieces by it.”

“I'll not be dashed to pieces yet. It's high but not really steep. Not a good selection, Azazel.”

“We work with what we are given. The final one then — the world and all that is in it — .” Here Azazel went into a dazzle. He was real enough, but now he went into contrived form and became the Argyros Daimon, the Silver Demon who was himself a literary device and diversion. He waved a shimmering silvery band. “The world and all that is in it, all this I will give you, if — .” Then they both had to laugh.

“It isn't much of a world you have to offer,” Greg Thatcher grinned. “Really, where is the temptation?”

“No, it doesn't look like much,” Azazel grinned. “Oh the temptation is quite real, but it's subtle and long-term. It's quite likely that you'll be had by it, Greg. Almost all are had by it along the way. You can see it as wheat-colored, or as green-grass colored, or as limestone and dust, or as shimmering. It isn't a simple world, and you haven't seen it all. Already you love it, and you believe you have it. You haven't it yet, not till I give it to you. You're a stranger on it. And you're blind to its main characteristic.”

“What characteristic am I blind to?”

“The surface name of it is freedom.”

“I have the ordered sort of freedom now,” Gregory said rather stiffly. The Odd Fish have always had this somewhat stiff and pompous and superior way of setting forth their views. Whether it is a strength or a weakness is disputed but it is essential to them. They'd not be the Odd Fish without it. “Have you Freedom in Hell?” he asked Azazel. “Have you Order there?”

“Would we offer you something we don't have ourselves?” Azazel asked with his own pomposity. (The Devils and the Odd Fish both have this stilted way of talking, and they have other similarities, but in most ways they are quite different.) “Certainly we have Freedom, with the same Freedom that all others have on Earth, the Freedom that you Queer Fish deny yourselves. And Order, here you touch us in a sore spot, Greg. It is here that we offer you a little more than we do have ourselves, for we offer you freedom from order. Aye, regrettably we suffer order of a sort, but you needn't. There's a line in one of the old poets of your own Queer Fish species: ‘They order things so damnably in Hell.’ He's right, in his way. There is a damnable order still surviving there.

“Let me explain something to you though, Greg. Let me ask you a favor. I'll even appeal to the ‘good side’ of you. You Queer Fish make much of that ‘good side’ business. If I am able to disorder you, by that same measure I am allowed to escape into disorder myself. I've made good progress in my time. I've disordered very many. Look not at me like that! You are almost critical of me. I want you. You're a great prize.” (The Queer Fish are almost as susceptible to flattery as are the Devils themselves, and Gregory had flushed slightly from this pleasure.)

“But I have it all, the world and its fruits,” he explained to Azazel. “And I have things that are beyond the world. I walk in light.”

“Here's a pair of blued sunglasses you can use then, Greg. The light is always over-bright. You haven't it all. You're afraid of so much of it. I'll take away your fear. All flesh is grass, it is said by some old authority, I forget whether by one of yours or ours. Why do you refuse the more spirited grasses and hemps then? Even the cattle know enough to enjoy them.”

“The wobble-eyed cattle and the wobble-eyed people are on the loco. I'll not be on it.”

“Come along with our thing, Greg, and we'll help both ourselves into Freedom and Disorder. You can have it the other way also: All grass is flesh. What flesh!”

The things that Azazel demonstrated were fleshy in the extreme. They were like old pictures, but they came on multidimensional and musky and writhing. Wherever the creatures came from white-eyed cows that were not quite cows or out of the ground that was not quite ground Greg did not know. Perhaps they were no more than surrogate projections. What then of those whose lives were no more than surrogate projections, they of the great disordered majority?

“They have so much, Greg,” Azazel said, “and you miss it all.”

Gregory Thatcher broke the whole complex of devices to pieces with a shattering laugh. It was a nervous laugh though. Gregory had an advantage. He was young, he was only twelve, and he was not precocious. (But from this day on it couldn't be said that he was not precocious. In that complex instant he was older by a year; he was as old as Azazel now.)

“I'll not say ‘Get thee behind me, Satan’ for I wouldn't trust you behind me for one stride,” Gregory laughed. “I will say ‘Get thee back into thy cow and be off ’ for I now perceive that the white-eyed cow there is no cow at all but only a device and vehicle of yours. Into it and be gone, Azazel.”

“Greg, boy, think about these things,” Azazel spoke as a knowing young fellow to one even younger and not quite so knowing. “You will think about them in any case. I've been talking to you on various levels, and not all my speech has been in words and not all meant to enter by the ears. Parts of it have gone into you by other orifices and they will work in you in your lower parts. Ah, some of those things of mine were quite good. I regret that you refuse the savor of them in your proper consciousness and senses, but they'll be with you forever. We've won it all, Greg. Join it. You don't want to be with the losers.”

“You worry and fret as though you'd not quite won it, Azazel,” Gregory mocked. “Into your vehicle and be off now. The show was really as well done as I expected.”

“The show isn't over with, boy,” Azazel said.

There had been a white-eyed cow standing, stock-still, blind-still, too stupid to graze, less animate than a stone cow, an empty cow skin standing uncollapsed.

There had been a teen-aged devil named Azazel, sometimes in a silver dazzle, sometimes in a blue funk, who had talked in words for the ears and in non-words for other entry.

Then there was only one of them. With a laugh, the devil disappeared into the white-eyed cow and she became quite animate. She whistled, she did a little cross-legged dance, she skittered off, blind and bounding. She was full of loco weed as were almost all the creatures of these plains. Aye, and she was full of the devil, too.

And how was one to distinguish an artificial and vehicular cow from a real one? All the cows now looked artificial. They had become like great spotted buffalo in their going feral. They were humpbacked now and huge, wild and wooly, except that they were mostly somnambulistic and stumbling, with an inner pleasure, perhaps, or an inner vacuity.

And the horses of the plains also. What was the tired weirdness about the horses?

And the dogs. However had the dogs become undogged? How is a dog disarticulated?

And the people. They were unpersoned and perverse now. They all shared a secret, and the secret was that they were a shared species with few individuals among them.

Cows, horses, dogs, people, the four artificial species. Now strange contrivances had spouted out of them all and recombined in them. They were all wobble-eyed, white-eyed, vacant-eyed, and freakish.

Except the Queer Fish. The Queer Fish Gregory Thatcher whistled, and the birds whistled and called back to him. How had the birds been spared? Meadow Larks, Scissor Tails, Mockingbirds, they all still used structured music.

The Queer Fish Gregory had been noticing movement in the center plains where his mother Judy had been traveling. The movement did not seem to constitute a threat. Some dozen of the ordered bulls of Judy Thatcher had surrounded a creature. They escorted him down into the center of the valley; they escorted him with a benign throating and bellowing. So it was a visitor to them, and not a hostile visitor. It was possibly one of the Seventy-Two, or one of the looser penumbra. Gregory stood and waited a moment for the signal. It came. The two eyes that Judy Thatcher had outside of her head she called in to her now. Gregory went down into the valley from its west slope. His sister was descending from the opposite rampart.

2

“We owe so much to one phrase that we can hardly express it. Without it, we'd have had to invent a phrase, we'd have put a modicum of meaning into it (overestimating the intelligence of the people as we have done so many times), and we'd have failed and failed and failed again. One smiles to recall that phrase that our fathers accidentally stumbled on and which later came back to us a hundredfold like bread cast upon the waters: ‘I am all for relevant religion that is free and alive and where the action is, but institutional religion turns me off.’ Incredible? Yes. A hog, if he could speak, wouldn't make so silly a statement: a blind mole wouldn't. And yet this statement was spoken many millions of times by young human persons of all ages. How lucky that it had been contrived, how mind boggling that it was accepted. It gave us victory without battle and success beyond our dreams.

“It was like saying ‘I love animals, all animals, every part of them: it is only their flesh and their bones that I object to; it is only their living substance that turns me off.’ For it is essential that religion (that old abomination) if it is to be religion at all (the total psychic experience) must be institutionalized and articulated in organization and service and liturgy and art. That is what religion is. And everything of a structured world, housing and furniture and art and production and transportation and organization and communication and continuity and mutuality is the institutional part of religion. That is what culture is. There can no more be noninstitutional religion than there can be a bodiless body. We abjure the whole business. We're well quit of the old nightmare.

“What was, or rather what would have been, the human species? It was, would have been, the establishment of a certain two-legged animal. This had never been done of any species, and by a very narrow margin it was not done in this case. It would have been Structuring and Organization and Institution erected where such things had never been done before. It would have been the realization of worlds where worlds had not been before. It would have been the building of the ‘Sky Bucket’ for containing and shaping humanity. And if that ‘Sky Bucket’ should actually have been built and filled to the brim, the human race would have appeared; and it would have been transcendent. The first requirement of the ‘Human’ is that it should be more than human. Again, we abjure the whole business. We'd rather remain unstructured monkeys.

“Fortunately we have halted it, before critical mass could have been achieved, before even the bottom of the ‘Sky Bucket’ was covered with the transcendent flowing that might have become human. We have succeeded in unmaking the species before it well appeared. And a thing unmade once is unmade forever, both as to its future and its past. There never was a ‘Sky Bucket’; there never was a transcendent flowing; there never was a structured human race or even the real threat of one.

“Our surviving enemies are slight ones, the plague-carrying Queer Fish and others of their bias. We'll have them down also, and then it will be the case that they never were up, that they never were at all. We have already disjointed the majority of them and separated them from their basis. And when they have become disjointed and destructed and disestablished, they become like ourselves in their coprophility and in their eruction against order.

“We have won it. We have unmade the species. We have created the case that it has never been. We have carried out our plan to the end that there never need be any sort of plan again. We have followed our logic to its conclusion. The logical conclusion of the destructing process is illogic. So we had intended it to be. So we have now achieved it.”

“The Unmaking of the Species.”

Analities — The Coprophilous Monkey

The visitor was a long, lean, young man who had been put through the torture. He was close cropped and bare faced and he wore only that day's dirt and dust. He was washing now in the shallow stream. Gregory gave him soap made of bull fat and potash, and he took the visitor's clothes from him for strongest washing.

The visitor had made his request from Judy Thatcher before Gregory's arrival. She had felt a sudden fear at it, but she put it away from her. Now Judy, the mother and magic person, was writing a letter. She wrote on a great flat stone that providentially would serve her for table and desk and for a third function. Why should the stone not serve her providentially? Judy was a child of Providence.

Trumpet Thatcher, the daughter of Judy, the sister of Gregory, had called a horse. This was an ordered horse (there were still a few such), and not one of the wobble eyed not-quite-horses of the plains. Being an ordered animal, of its nature it obeyed her orders, and she rode it freely across the valley.

“He has not been followed, not closely at least,” Judy Thatcher called to her daughter, looking up from her writing. “The danger is not now. The danger is tomorrow, after he has left us for a while, when he may fall in with the destructed ones who have followed him (but not closely), when he might bring them, if he is of the treason.”

“Nevertheless, I will ride and look,” the girl named Trumpet called. And she rode and looked.

The long, lean, young man seemed uneasy at the speculation that he might belong to the treason. He was tired eyed, but he was not yet truly wobble eyed. He was wordless and not quite open, but he seemed to have a sanity about him. That he was of the torture meant nothing; he might still be of the treason.

He had been lashed and gashed and burned and broken, that was true. It had been done to him in other years, and it had also been done to him recently, within a week. But had he been burned and gashed and broken for the Faith?

Many of the unstructured persons now tortured themselves or had themselves tortured, sometimes to try to stir their tired sensations, sometimes out of mere boredom. It was a last sensation of those who had sensationalized everything. But the threshold of pain of those tired ones who had almost disappeared; the most severe pain would hardly stir them from their drowse. It wasn't the same with them as if an alive and responding person were tortured.

The tired-eyed young man said that he was named Brother Amphirropos. He had come to Judy Thatcher, one of the Twelve, and asked for a Letter. This she could not refuse, even if the giving of it meant her life. She gave the letter now, and perhaps her life, with great sweeps of writing in a rowdy hand out of a rowdy mind. She was a special figure. Two thousand years ago she'd have been a male figure and yet that is not quite correct. The Twelve, in their office, had always been hermaphrodites for God. So was Judy in her special moments.

Yet she wrote with difficulty, for all the free-handed sweep of her writing. There are things hard to write, there are things impossible. She dipped her calamary pen in lampblack and in grace and wrote to somebody or something that might no longer be in existence.

Gregory had cleaned up the visitor and his clothes. The visitor rested on cool stones by the stream. He was wordless, he was almost eyeless, he gave out no confidence at all. It would have been so easy to slay him and bury him there under the cottonwoods and then be off a few quick miles before dark. He had no papers, he had no recommendations. He knew the Sign of the Fish, but there had been something unaccustomed and awkward about his way of giving it.

Gregory had gathered a quantity of wild wheat. He threshed it between the palms of his hands, keeping the good grains, blowing the awns and glumes of chaff away. He threshed a good quantity of it. He ground it between quern stones which were naturally about on the plain, ground it fine to flour for the small bread, and coarse to meal for the large bread. He built a fire of cow chips, put a flat capstone or oven stone over the fire on which to bake the two breads. The small bread (which, however, is larger than the world) he mixed with water only and put it, unsalted and without leaven, on the oven stone. The large, or meal bread, was salted and leavened and kneaded with cow milk, and was then let to rise before it was set on the stone to bake.

Trumpet Thatcher, fine eyed and proud, returned from her circuit ride. Her good eyes had missed nothing, neither flight of birds nor cloud of dust nor unusual drifting of cattle as far as any of the distant horizon that could be seen from the highest ridges. There was no enemy within three hours ride of them, none within seven hours walk, and the stranger, Brother Amphirropos, had come on foot. Or had he come on foot? Trumpet Thatcher, a strong and freckled girl, was now freckled with blood and it was not her own. She took a packet to the stranger.

“It is yours,” she said. “You will need it when you leave.” It was a small, heavy saddlebag, but she handled it as if it were light. And the stranger went white-faced and kept silent.

Trumpet set to work to dig a pit. She was a strong girl, two years older than Gregory, and she dug easily. Also she dug with a queer humor. The pit should have been nearly square but she made it long and narrow. Sometimes she looked at the Stranger-Brother Amphirropos as though measuring him with her eyes, and he became very nervous.

“It is long enough and deep enough,” she said after a while. Indeed it was long enough and deep enough to serve as grave for this stranger if it were intended for such. Trumpet put cow chips in the bottom of the pit and set fire to them. Then she put in wood from felled cottonwood and sycamores that lined the stream. It gradually grew to a rousing hot fire.

Judy Thatcher looked up and grinned at the shape of the pit her daughter had made, at the joke she had been playing. And Judy became a little more serious when she observed the shaken appearance of Brother Amphirropos.

“It is time,” Judy Thatcher said then. She set her writing to one side of the providential flat rock, that rowdy looping screed on which she had been laboring so seriously. She brought the small bread to the providential rock. She also set out water and wild wine from gone-feral grapes.

“Brother Amphirropos, is there something you should say to me or I to thee, either apart, or before my two?” she asked clearly.

“No,” the Stranger-Brother said shortly.

“We begin it then,” Judy declared. Her two children and the Stranger-Brother gathered around her. She said ordered words. She did ordered things. She structured, she instituted, she transformed. She and they (including the strange Brother Amphirropos) consumed and consummated. The small bread and the small wine were finished. Judy washed her hands with the small water and then poured it into the porous earth. She returned then, smiling and powerful, to her writing.

Trumpet Thatcher put the large bread on to bake.

Gregory ordered a young bull of six months to come. It came, it nuzzled him, it was an ordered young bull and a friend. It went down before him, on foreknees first as though kneeling to him, but that is the way cattle go down. Then down with its high haunches also and on the ground before him. It rolled its head far back into the bulging of its hump. Gregory and the young bull looked eye to eye. Then Gregory cut its throat with a whetted knife.

They strung the young bull up on a tripod of cottonwood poles. Trumpet understood how to aid in this. Brother Amphirropos didn't quite. He was clumsy and unaccustomed to such labor, but they managed. They skinned the animal down. They cut and separated. They set portions of fat aside. They put large parts of ribs and rump into the burning pit to be seared and roasted.

Trumpet made a frame of poles meanwhile. She cut a great quantity of bull meat into long narrow strips and put them on the pole frame to dry in the wind and the smoke. She did other things with other parts of the animal, set aside in crocks blood that she had drawn and further fat. The great intestine and the stomach she had out and everted. She washed them seven times in the stream, using lime, ochre mixed with bone ash (from the bull's own bone), gypsum, soap, soda, natron, and salt in the water for the seven washings.

The large bread was finished. Trumpet Thatcher brought it to the broad providential stone. They had butter and honey with it. Gregory brought aromatic roasts from the burning pit. They cut and broke and feasted, the four of them. They had cider and small wine. They had milk and cheese. They had blackberries and sand plums and feral grapes. They had sour cider for sauce. They feasted for quite a while.

Two coyotes came and begged and were fed. They could have all the small meat they wanted on the plains, but they loved the big meat that had been roasted.

“Will you be staying the night?” Trumpet Thatcher asked the Stranger-Brother Amphirropos.

“No he will not,” Judy the mother answered for the stranger. “He must be gone very soon, as soon as we have finished, and I have finished.”

“I'll make him a sling of provender then,” Trumpet said. She cut a length of the bull's intestine and knotted it. She took strips of the beef that had been wind-drying and smoke-drying and sizzled them in the fire of the pit. She stuffed the length of intestine with them. She melted fat and poured it in with the meat, added honey and berries and grapes, sealed it with more fat, and knotted it finally with the second knot. It was a twenty pound length.

“Take it with you,” Trumpet told him.

“I'll have no need for a great thing like that,” the Stranger-Brother protested.

“You may have need,” Gregory growled. “The treason cuts both ways. You may have to ride hard and fast when it is accomplished, or when it has failed. You can live on that for a very long time. I doubt if your days will near come to the end of it. Mother, are you not finished yet?”

“Yes, I am finished. It's a short and inept thing, but it may carry its own grace.”

This was the letter (it was titled Epistle to the Church of Omaha in Dispersal):

To you who are scattered and broken, gather again and mend. Rebuild always, and again I say rebuild. Renew the face of the earth. It is a loved face, but now it is covered with the webs of tired spiders.

We are in a post-catastrophe world, and yet the catastrophes did not happen. There are worse things than catastrophes. There is the surrender of the will before even the catastrophes come. There are worse things than war. There are worse things even than unjust war: unjust peace or crooked peace is worse. To leave life by withdrawal is worse than to leave life by murder. To be bored of the world is worse than to shed all the blood in the world. There are worse things than final Armageddon. Being too tired and wobble eyed for final combat is worse. There are things worse than lust — the sick surrogates of lust are worse. There are things worse than revolution — the half-revolution, the mere turning away, is worse.

Know that religion is a repetitious act or it is nothing. The ‘re’ is the holy prefix, since nothing is successful the first time. It must be forever the ‘re,’ the returning, the restructuring, the re-lexion, the reconstitution, the building back from defeat. We will rebuild in the dark and in the light; we will work without ceasing.

Even our mysterious Maker was the Re-deemer, the re-doomer who wrangles for us a second and better doom, the ransomer, the re-buyer, the re-demptor. We are sold and we are ransomed, we are lost and we are found. We are dead and we are resurrected, which is to say ‘surged up again.’

You ask me about the Parousia, the second coming. This has been asked from the beginning. There was urgent expectation of it in the beginning. Then, in the lifetimes of those first ones, there came a curious satisfaction, as though the coming had been experienced anew, as though it were a constant and almost continuing thing. Perhaps there has been a second coming, and a third, and a three hundredth. Perhaps, as the legend has it, it comes every sabbatical, every seventh year. I do not know. I was not of the chosen at the time of the last sabbatical. We are in the days of a new one, but I know now I will not be alive for the day of it.

Be steadfast. Rebuild, restructure, reinstitute, renew.

X-Dmo. Judy Thatcher

(one of the Twelve)

Judy had read the epistle aloud in a clear voice. Now she folded it, sealed it, and gave it to the Stranger-Brother Amphirropos.

“What thou doest do quickly,” she said.

“Here is horse,” Gregory said, “for your horse that my sister Trumpet killed. It was deception for you to leave your horse a distance apart and come to us on foot. No, worry not. You'll not need saddle or bridle. He is an ordered horse, and we order him to take you where you will. Take up your saddlebag and your bull-gut sling with you and be gone.”

The Strange-Brother mounted horse, took the bag and the sling, looked at them with agonized eyes, almost made as if to speak. But whatever words he had he swallowed in his throat. He turned horse and rode away from them. He carried the letter with him.

3

“It worries us a little that our victories were too easy, that the world fell down before it had hardly been pushed. We have our results and we should rejoice, but we have them so easily that the salt and the sulphur are missing from our rejoicing. There is a lack of elegance in all that we have accomplished. Elegance, of course, was the first thing of which we deprived the humans, but we rather liked it in the small group that was ourselves. It's gone now. It was only a little extra thing in any case, and our own thesis is that there must be none of these little extra things.

“We intended to have our way in the post-cataclysmic world. We do have our way now and the world has all the predicted marks of the post-cataclysmic world, but the cataclysm did not happen. Since our whole objective was for flatness in all things, perhaps we were wrong to expect grandeur in the execution. Ah, but all the fabled mountains of the world were deflated so easily as to leave us unsatisfied. They were made of empty air, and the air has gone out of them.

“The Queer Fish have the saying that the Mysterious Master and Maker of the Worlds came and walked upon this world in historical time; that he will come again; that, perhaps, he has already come again and again.

“Let us set up the counter saying: that the Mysterious Masters and Unmakers of the Worlds (Ourselves) walk upon this world now; that we diminish it as we walk upon it; that we will not leave a stone upon a stone remaining of it.

“How is a person or a world unmade or unformed? First by being deformed. And following the deforming is the collapsing. The tenuous balance is broken. Insanity is introduced easily under the name of the higher sanity. Then the little candle that is in each head is blown out on the pretext that the great cosmic light can be seen better without it. Then we introduce what we used to call, in our then elegant style, Lady Narkos, Lady Porno, Lady Krotos, Lady Ephialtes, and Lady Hypnos; or Dope, Perversion, Discordant Noise, Nightmare or Bad Trip, and Contrived Listlessness or Sleep. We didn't expect it to work so easily, but it had been ripening for a long while.

“The persons and the worlds were never highly stable. A cross member is removed here on the pretext of added freedom. Foundation blocks are taken away on the pretext of change. Supporting studs are pulled down on the pretext of new experience. And none of the entities had ever been supported more strongly than was necessary. What happens then? A man collapses, a town, a city, a nation, a world. And it is hardly noticed.

“The cataclysm has been and gone. The cataclysm was the mere gnawing away of critical girders and rafters by those old rodents, ourselves. And who are we? The Queer Fish say that we are unclean spirits. We aren't; perhaps we are unclean materialities. We do not know or care what we are. We are the Unmakers, and we have unmade our own memories with the rest to fit. We forget and we are forgotten.

“There was no holocaust, there was no war, there was no predicted overcrowding or nature fouling. The nature fouling came later, from undercrowding. Parts of the cities still stand. Certain diminished black tribes are said still to inhabit their jungles. But, though it has been only thirty years, nobody remembers what the cities really were or who built them.

“We discovered that most persons were automatic, that they operated, as it were, by little winders. One had only to wind them up and they'd say ‘That's where the action is, that's where the action is,’ and then they'd befoul themselves. And to these little people winders there was always a mechanism release. When tired of playing with the mechanical people, we pushed the release. And the people were then rundown, inoperative, finished.”

“The Destroying of the World.”

Aphorisms — The Jester King

It was late in the day after the Stranger-Brother left them.

“Let us flame the fire high,” Gregory said, “that they may think we are still here. Then, when full dark comes, let us take horse and ride South to reverse our direction: or better, go West where there has been no show of action.”

“I have not been told to go anywhere beyond this place,” Judy said doubtfully. “Besides, we do not know for sure that it is the treason.”

“Of course it is the treason!” Trumpet Thatcher affirmed. “But I do hope he gets clear of them after he has betrayed you and us. I've never liked their treason that cuts both ways. Why must they always kill the traitor as well as the betrayed? From his eyes, though, I don't believe that he wants to get clear of them.”

“What are you waiting for, mother?” Gregory asked.

“For Levi, I think,” Judy said doubtfully, dreamily.

“And who is Levi?”

“I really don't know. I believe he is just Levi from over the sea.”

“Is there to be a meeting?” Gregory asked. “Are you to be a part of it?”

“There is to be a meeting, I think. I do not believe now that I will be a part of it. I will be dead.”

“Well, have you any instructions at all for Trumpet and for myself,” Gregory asked, “what we should do?”

“None at all,” Judy admitted. “It goes blank. I am out of it soon.”

“Should we not at least flame the fires and then move maybe two miles North under the dark?” Gregory asked. “We should not be completely sitting prey.”

“All right,” Judy said. “We'll go a ways, but not far yet.” But she seemed listless as though it had indeed ended with her.

They flamed their fires to mark their old position. They packed meat into slings to carry with them. They burned the remnants of the young bull in the flaming pit then. They moved maybe two miles North. Judy gave instructions to a dozen of the big, horned, ordered bulls. Then Judy and Trumpet bedded down for the night.

Gregory took horse and rode in the night, anywhere, everywhere. As a Queer Fish, Gregory had now come of age on the plains, but he was still a twelve-year-old boy whose personal memory did not go back to any of the great events.

The Day of the Great Copout had been thirty years before. Even Gregory's mother Judy had nothing but scant childhood memories of the days before the Copout. The legends and the facts of that event had now parted company considerably, but it had always been more legend than fact to it. The only fact was that the human race had one day slipped a cog; that it had fallen down from the slight last push, though it had withstood much more severe buffeting. The fact was that the race now built no more and sustained no more, that it had let the whole complexity run down and then looked uncomprehending at the stalled remnant of it.

The legend was that the Day of Freedom arrived for everyone, and that thereafter nobody would ever work at all. The people were very heroic in their refusal to work, and many of them starved for it. Their numbers fought in the cities (always under the now universal peace symbol) for what food and goods could be found there. Their greatly diminished numbers then moved into the countrysides which had for a long time been choked with their sad abundance. Every grain elevator was full to bursting, every feed lot and pasture had its animals to excess. Every haybarn and corncrib was full.

Before the Day of the Great Copout the population had already greatly diminished. In the Americas it was less than a third of what it had been a century before. In other lands it was down variously. The world had already begun to fall apart a bit (being so alike everywhere there was not much use in keeping up communication between the like parts) and to diminish in quality (why run if no one is chasing you?)

But the Day of the Great Copout was worldwide. As though at a given signal (but there had been no signal) people in every city and town and village and countryside of earth dropped their tools and implements and swore that they would work no more. Officials and paper shufflers ceased to officiate and to shuffle paper. Retailers closed up and retailed no more. Distributors no longer distributed. Producers produced nothing. The clock of the people stopped although some had believed that the hour was still early.

The Last Day had been, according to some.

“The Last Day has not been,” said a prophet. “They will know it when it has been.”

There was a little confusion at first. Though distributors no longer distributed nor retailers retailed, still they objected to their stores and stocks being looted. There was bad feeling and bloodshed over this, and the matter was never settled at all.

The law people had all resigned from the law; and every congress and assembly in the world stood adjourned indefinitely or forever. There were, for a while, new assemblies and gatherings, freely chosen and freely serving, but these quickly fell apart and left nothing in their places but random gangs.

Minorities of odd people resisted the disintegration for a while, becoming more odd and more minor in their exceptions. The Crescent Riders kept up a little order for some years in the older parts of the world, not really laboring, looting just enough that the art be not forgotten; still keeping leaders who looked a little like leaders. The Ruddy Raiders maintained that there was nothing wrong with rape and arson so long as it was done as fun and not labor. The Redwinged Blackbirds and the Mandarins held together here and there.

And among certain groups that had always been considered peculiar, The Witnesses, the Maccabees, the Queer Fish, the Copout had not been complete. Certain numbers of these folks, somewhere between five and ten percent of them, resisted the Freakout, the Copout, the Freedom Day. These minorities of minorities had the compulsion to continue with their building, their ordering, their planting, creating, procreating.

This caused a disturbance in the New Free World. Groups should not be free to reject Free Think. So these remnants were hunted down. Even though it was against the new ways of the Free World, a certain organization was necessary for the hunts.

Most of that had passed now. Most of everything had passed. After thirty years had rolled by, the Free People of the world had become pretty old, pretty old and pretty crabby. Though most of the males among them still wore the beards of their boyhood and youth, yet they had aged in every way. They hadn't been reproducing themselves to any great extent; and the most of them hadn't really been so very young when the Great Day had come and gone. The cult of youth had become a bit senile.

There were still some populations in the cities. The cities have always been built on the best lands of the country and have always occupied the best river bottoms and river junctions. There was good fishing, there was good grazing on the new grass that shattered the pavements and sidewalks, on the open places which became still more open, there was good fuel of several sorts, there were buildings remaining that were still tight enough to give year-round protection.

But most of the folks were in the countrysides now. The special grasses and hemps and poppies necessary to the Free Culture had long been established and abundant; they were in the cities and the countries and the fringe areas. In the country were millions upon millions of now feral-cattle to be had for easy killing. Wheat and corn still grew of themselves, rougher and more ragged every year, but still more than sufficient. The scattered crops would apparently outlast the diminished people, the disappearing human race.

What children and young people there were now belonged, much beyond their expected percentages, to the peculiar groups. Children also showed some tendency to join these peculiar groups. It was almost the case that any young person was now suspect. It was quite rare that any young one should really adhere to the Free People. There had even come the anomalous situation (to one who remembered the earlier days and the earlier slogans) that beards were now more typical of old men than of boys.

Such was the world. So had it been for thirty years, for the Freedom Era.

“But there is always hope,” Judy Thatcher (and John Thatcher before her) used to preach. “Never has there been so much room for hope, never so great a vacuum waiting to be filled by it. Hope is a substance that will fill a vessel of any shape, even the convoluted emptiness that is the present shape of the world.”

“And now in the sabbatical year,” (this was Judy Thatcher alone preaching now, for John Thatcher was dead before sabbatical year rolled around) “there is more room for hope than ever before. There are still the Twelve (we have the Word that we will not diminish below that); there are still the further seventy-two traveling and laboring and building somewhere; and there are still the scattered hundreds who will not let it die. Oh, there will be a great new blooming! It begins! It begins!”

“Where? Where does it begin?” Gregory and Trumpet used to ask this rowdy-minded mother of theirs with laughing irony. “Where does it begin at all?”

“With the two of you,” Judy would say. “With the dozens, with the hundreds, with the thousands of others.”

“Knock off the last zero, mother,” Trumpet would always laugh. “There are a few hundreds, perhaps, very widely scattered. But you know there are not thousands.”

“There have been thousands and millions,” Judy always insisted. “And there will be thousands and millions again.”

The Thatchers had been moving for all these years North and South in the marginal land that is a little to the West of the land of really adequate rain. There was plenty here for small bands. The Thatchers and their friends knew all the streams and pools and dry runs where one could dig to water. They had their own grain that seemed to follow their paths and seasons with its own rough sowing. They had their own cattle that were devoted to them in a strangely developed way.

Gregory Thatcher, as the summer starred night was rolling overhead (they were quite a ways North), was remembering the murder of his own father, John Thatcher, two years before. It had been a nervous night like this one, following a daytime visit of a man with not-quite-right eyes, a man with the slight tang of treason on him.

But the man had asked for a letter to take to one of the churches in dispersal. This was given; it could not be refused. And it was given under John Thatcher's own name. The man had also asked for the sacrament; that could never be refused. And the man had been allowed to depart in peace and on foot as he had come. On foot but a thousand yards away and he was on horse and gone in the afternoon's dust to meet a scheming group.

The group had come just at next dawn, after such a nervous night as this one; had come from an unexpected direction and killed John Thatcher in one swoop. They then were all away except the several who were tossed and killed on the horns of the ordered bulls.

And the stunned reaction had found voice and words only in Judy's puzzled lament:

“It is broken now. There are no longer the full twelve. It was never supposed to be broken.”

“Bend down, woman,” dead Thatcher said. “I am not quite dead. I lay my hands on you.” John Thatcher laid his hands on his wife Judy and made her one of the Twelve. Then he died (for the second time, Gregory believed. Gregory was sure his father had been killed by first assault, and had come alive for a moment to accomplish what he had forgotten).

“It is all right then,” Judy Thatcher had said. “We are still the Twelve. I make the twelfth. I was wrong ever to doubt of that; I was wrong ever to doubt of anything.”

So they had buried John Thatcher, the father and still a young man, and rejoiced that the Twelve still survived. That had been two years ago.

Gregory rode his circuit all night. It was his to do. It was not for his mother Judy or for his sister Trumpet. They had other roles. This was Gregory's night. It had a name which he did not know. It was the Watch Night, the night of squires on the eve of their knighting, of princes on the nocturne of their crowning, of apostles on the vigil of their appointing.

There was a nervousness among the cattle here, and again there. There might be several strange bands in motion. The Thatchers had no firearms, no weapons at all that could not be excused or justified as being tools. A few of the roving gangs still had rifles, but these were sorry things near as dangerous to raider as to victim. All such things were thirty or more years old, and none had been well cared for. But the raiders always had bludgeons and knives.

Gregory fell asleep on horseback just before dawn. This was not a violation of the Watch Night for him. It was the one thing for which he never felt guilt. Actually he was cast into deep sleep; it was done to him; it was not of his own doing or failing at all. His horse also was cast into deep sleep, standing, with head bowed down and muzzle into the stiff grass. They both slept like wind-ruffled statues.

Then there was movement, double movement, intruded into that sleep. There was the stirring and arraying of the ordered bulls. There was the false attack; and the bulls went for the false attack, being faithful beasts only.

Then there was the death attack, coming apparently from the West. Gregory himself was struck from his horse. One of the raiders had counted coup on him, but not death coup. He was on the ground begrimed with his own blood and his horse was dead.

Then he heard the clear ringing voice from which his sister had her name. It rose to a happy battle cry and was cut off in quick death. The last note of the Trumpet was a gay one, though. This had been a big happy girl, as rowdy in mien and mind as her mother.

Trumpet Thatcher was dead on the ground: and the mother Judy Thatcher was dead beyond all doubt. There was confusion all around, but there was no confusion about this fact.

The ordered horned bulls had wheeled now on the real attackers. They wrecked them. They tossed them, men and horses, into the air, and ripped and burst them before they came to ground. And the only words that Gregory could find were the same words that his mother Judy had found two years before.

“It is broken now. They are no longer the full Twelve. It was never supposed to be broken.”

His mother was quite dead and she would not come alive even for a moment to accomplish what she had forgotten. This dead Thatcher was not able to say, “Bend down, boy. I am not quite dead.” She was quite dead. She would speak no more, her broken mouth would be reconstituted no more, till resurrection morning.

“Are there no hands?” Gregory cried out, dry-eyed and wretched. “Are there no hands that might be laid upon me?”

“Aye, boy, mine are the hands,” came a voice. A man of mature years was walking through the arrayed bulls. And they, who had been killing strange men in the air and on the ground, opened their array and let this still stranger man come through. They bowed horns down to the turf to this man.

“You are Levi,” Gregory said.

“I am Levi,” the man answered softly. He laid hands on Gregory. “Now you are one of the Twelve,” he said.

4

“There has been a long series of ‘Arrow Men’ or ‘Beshot Men’ who have been called (or who have called themselves) Sons of God. These Comet-like Men have all been exceptional in their brief periods. The Queer Fish, however, insist that their own particular Mentor ‘The Mysterious Master and Maker of the Worlds’ was unique and apart and beyond the other Arrow Men or Comet Men who have been called Sons of God. They state that he is more than Son of God: that He is God the Son.

“We do not acknowledge this uniqueness, but we do acknowledge the splendor and destroying brilliance of all these Arrow Men. To us, there is nothing wrong with the term Son of God. There is not even anything wrong with the term God, so long as it is understood to be meaningless, so long as we take him to be an unstructured God. Our own splendor would have been less if there had not been some huge thing there which we unstructured. This unstructuring of God, which we have accomplished, was the greatest masterwork of man.

“The second greatest masterwork of man was the unstructuring of man himself, the ceasing to be man, the going into the hole and pulling the hole in after him; and the unstructuring, the destroying of the very hole then.

“We were, perhaps, the discredited cousins of man. We are not sure now what we were or are. We who were made of fire were asked to serve and salute those who were made of clay. We had been Arrow Men ourselves. Our flight was long flaming and downward, and now it has come to an end. We destroy ourselves also. We'll be no more. It is the Being that we have always objected to.

“The collapsing of the human species was a puzzle for the anthropologists and the biologists, but both are gone now. They said though, before their going, that it is a common thing for a new species to collapse and disappear; that the collapse, in these common cases, is always sudden and complete; they said that it was an uncommon case for any species to endure. They said also that there was never anything unusual in the human species.

“They were almost wrong in this evaluation. There was, or there very nearly was, something unusual about the human species. It was necessary that we alter and tilt things a bit to remove that unusualness. We have done that. We've blown it all for them and for ourselves.

“Fly-blown brains and fly-flown flesh! What, have you not lusted for rotted mind and for rotted meat? Here are aphrodisiacs to aid you. Have you not lusted for unconsciousness and oblivion? You can have them both, so long as you accept them as rotted, which is the same as disordered, or unstructured, or uninstituted. This is the peaceful end of it all: the disordering, the disintegrating, the unstructuring, the rotting, the dry rot which is without issue, the nightmare which is the name of sleep without structure. Lust and lust again for this end! We offer you, while it is necessary, the means and the aids to it.”

“Mind-Blowing and World-Blowing.”

Aphrodisiacs — Argyros Daimon.

(No, really we don't know why these Unstructured Scriveners chose such oddities for calamary names.)

Levi and Gregory were walking northward at a great easy amble. “It is no use to be bothered with horses and so be slowed,” Levi said. They moved without hurry but at unusual speed. It was a good trick. Gregory would not have been able to do it of himself, but with Levi he could do it. Levi had a magic way of delving in the earth, as for the two burials. He had this magic way of moving over the earth.

“You are Levi from over the sea,” Gregory said once as they moved along over the stiff grass pastures, “but how have you come? There are no longer any planes. There are no longer any ships. Nobody comes or goes. How have you done it?”

“Why Gregory, the world has not slumbered as deeply as you had believed. Things have not ceased completely to be done. Anything can be builded again, or builded a first time. And there are no limits to what a body can do when infused with spirit. Perhaps I walked on the water. Perhaps I traveled for three days in the belly of a whale and he brought me all this way and vomited me up on these high plains. Or perhaps I came by a different vehicle entirely. Oh, is it not a wonderful world that we walk this morning, Gregory!” They were in the dusty Dakota country, coming into that painted and barren region that is called the Bad Lands. Well, it was wonderful to the eye, perhaps, but it was dry and sterile.

“My father and my mother, both gone in blood now, have said that the world has gone to wrack and ruin,” Gregory was speaking with some difficulty, “and that there is nothing left but to trust in God.”

“Aye, and I say that we can build wonderful things out of that wrack and ruin, Gregory. Do you not know that all the pieces of the world are still here and that many of them are still useable? Know that the world has been not dead but sleeping. T'was a foolish little nodding off, but we come awake again now. And this Trust is a reciprocal thing. We must trust in God, yes. And He must trust in us a little. We are the Twelve. He puzzles a bit now I think. ‘How are they going to get out of this one?’ He wonders. Yes boy, I jest, but so does the Lord sometimes. He jests, He jokes, and we be the point of His most pointed jokes. An old sage once said that there were only twelve jokes in the world. What if we be those twelve? The possible humor and richness of this idea will grow in you, Greg, when you meet the others of the Twelve. There are some sly jokes among the pack of us, I assure you of that.”

“When will we meet others?” Gregory asked.

“Oh, almost immediately now. It is a new day and a new year and a new rebuilding. We'll set about it almost at once, Greg.”

“The regular people have hunted us down like the lowest animals,” Gregory vented some of his old feelings. “They say that we are the plague carriers.”

“It is life that you carry, Greg, and life is the plague to their wobble-eyed view. But they are no great thing, boy. They are only the Manichees returned to the world for a while, those people who were born old and tired. They are the ungenerating generation and their thing always passes.”

“In my life it has shown no sign of passing.”

“Your life has been a short one, boy Greg. But I shouldn't call you ‘boy’; you are one of the Twelve now. Ah, those sterile parasites have always had a good press though, as the phrase used to be — the Manichees, the Albigenses, the Cathari, the Troubadors (they of the unstructured noise who couldn't carry a tune in a bucket, they in particular have had a good press), the Bogomils, parasites all, and parasites upon parasites. But the great rooted plant survives, and the parasites begin to die now.”

“They have spirits also who work for them, Levi,” Gregory said. “They have the Putty Dwarf, the Jester King, the Silvery Demon, others.”

“Those are parasites also, Gregory. They are mean and noisome parasites on real Devildom, just as their counterparts are parasites on humanity. Listen now to the ordered birds, Gregory, and remember that each of us is worth many birds. It bothered the disordered brotherhoods more than anything that the birds still used structured music. It bothered them in Languedoc, and in Bosnia, and in the Persia of Shapur. It bothered them in Africa, and on these very plains, and it bothers them in hell. Let them be bothered then! They are the tares in the wheat, the anti-lifers.”

Gregory Thatcher and Levi Cain had been going along at a great easy ramble, moving without hurry but at unusual speed. But a third man was with them now, and Gregory could not say how long he had been with them.

“You are Jim Alpha,” Gregory said (he began to have the magic or insight that his mother had had, that his father had had before her), “and you also come from overseas from over a slightly different sea than that of Levi.”

“I am Jim Alpha, yes, and I have crossed a slightly different sea. We gather now, Gregory. There will be the full set of us, and the secondary set, and also the hundreds. And besides ourselves there will be the Other Sheep. Do not be startled by their presence. They also are under the blessing.”

“There are bees in the air. Many thousands of bees,” Gregory was saying. “I have never seen so many.”

“They are bringing the wax,” Jim Alpha was saying, “and a little honey also. No, I don't believe I've ever seen so many of them, not even in sabbatical year. Perhaps this is jubilee also. The bees are the most building and structuring of all creatures, and they have one primacy. They were the first creatures to adore; this was on the day before man was made. It won't be forgotten of them.”

Other things and persons were gathering now, thousands of things, hundreds of persons. There was a remembered quality to many of them. “The remembered quality, the sense of something seen before, is only rightness recognized, Gregory,” Tom Culpa was saying in answer to Gregory's thought. Tom Culpa must be rightness recognized then, since he was a remembered quality to Gregory Thatcher, he was someone appearing as seen and known before though the thing was impossible. How did Gregory even know his name without being told? Or the names of the others?

There was something coming on that would climax quickly. It was evening, but it was white evening: it would be white night, and then it would be morning. And the inner gathering seemed almost complete.

To Levi and Gregory and Jim Alpha had now gathered Matty Miracle (he was a fat old man; it was a miracle that he could be moving along with them so easily, matching their rapid amble), and Simon Canon, Melchisedech Rioga (what an all-hued man he was! — what was he, Gael, Galla, Galatian, Galilean?), Tom Culpa whose name meant Tom Twin, Philip Marcach, Joanie Cromova (Daughter of Thunder her name meant: Judy Thatcher hadn't been the only woman among the Twelve), James Mollnir, Andy Johnson, and his younger brother Peter Johnson.

“It counts to twelve of us now,” Gregory Thatcher said very sagely, “and that means — ”

“ — that we have arrived to where we were going,” Peter Johnson laughed. This Peter Johnson was very young. “Most of the seventy-two are here also,” he continued. “Yes, now I see that they are all here. And many of the hundreds. We can never say whether all the hundreds are here.”

“Peter,” Gregory tried to phrase something a little less than a warning. “There are others here whom we know in a way but do not know by name, who are not of the Twelve nor of the Seventy-Two nor of the Hundreds.”

“Oh, many of the Other Sheep are here,” Peter Johnson said. “You remember that He said He had Other Sheep?”

“Yes,” Gregory answered. He remembered it now. The puzzle was that this Peter Johnson was a boy no older than Gregory. There were many older men there, Levi, Jim Alpha, Matty Miracle, Simon Canon. How was it that Peter Johnson, that other twelve-year-old boy, was accepted as the Prince of them all?

The candle molders were busy. Candle molders? Yes, ten at least of them were working away there, or ten thousand. And full ten thousand bees brought wax to each of them. There would be very many candles burning through the white evening and the white night and on into the white dawn. Then these weren't ordinary candle molders or ordinary bees? No, no, they were the extraordinary of both; they had reality clinging to them in globs of light. Events gathered into constellations.

One using words wrongly or in their usual way might say that everything had taken on a dreamlike quality. No, but it had all lost its old nightmarish quality. It had all taken on, not a dreamlike quality, but the quality of reality.

There was, of course, the acre of fire, the field of fire. This acre was large enough to contain all that needed to be contained: it is always there, wherever reality is. There are tides that come and go; but even the lowest ebbing may not mean the end of the world. And then there are the times and tides of clarity, the jubilees, the sabbaticals. There is reassurance given. The world turns in its sleep, and parts of the world have moments of wakefulness.

Ten million bees had not brought all the wax for that acre of fire, and yet it was a very carefully structured fire in every tongue and flame of it. It was the benevolent illumination and fire of reality. It was all very clear, for being in the middle of a mystery. White night turned into white dawn; and the people all moved easily into the fire, their pomposities forgiven, their eyes open.

The Mysterious Master and Maker of the Worlds came again and walked upon this world in that Moment. He often does so. The Moment is recurring but undivided.

No, we do not say that it was Final Morning. We are not out of it so easily as that. But the moment is all one. Pleasantly into the fire that is the reality then! It will sustain through all the lean times of flimsiness before and after.

Scorner's Seat

1

Kyklopolis is one of those communities that originated in the Panic Past; yet there is very little of panic in its make-up. It is one of those settlements of “Wheelies” and “Boaters,” who are employed (we do not know whether intentionally so employed) at the cleansing of certain river junctions; and cleansing them nearly as well as (and much cheaper than) can be done with Purification Locks. There is a feeling that such communities should be permitted to continue in their somewhat obsolete function.

Kyklopolis is, even more than most such settlements, a closed religious enclave. It has withdrawn from the world and it steadfastly refuses to learn anything from the rest of the world. It does send out one pilgrim yearly to teach the rest of the world. This leaves one small question: does the rest of the world have anything to learn from Kyklopolis?

Oddly there is one small thing that some of us in the rest of the world would like to learn from Kyklopolis. How do the sewer workers of that settlement get the local form of euglena algae or cloacal algae (the scum-wort) to mutate? How do they induce the anaerobic reversal in it, changing it from an oxygen robber to an oxygen producer? How do they make it act like a plant instead of an animal? We have only most inefficient methods of reversing these rare euglenas. The Kyklopolitans have, apparently, an easy and efficient way of bringing this reversal about as an annual change. The yearly pilgrims out of Kyklopolis do not seem to understand the method of the reversal, do not seem in fact to comprehend our questions about it. We believe that their trigger to the change is a compounded wave (probably within the auditory range). But just what is it? And why are we unable to duplicate it?

HARVESTER REPORT

I hold this Seat till with transmuting howl

I fair the scum-wort that before was foul,

And close the circles of our cyclic day:

The Eco-log and eke the sarco-phay.

 — Scorner Number 33

“What is a girl like you doing in a nice place like this?” he asked her. “Let me take you out of this and back where you belong.”

“Back to Sewer Nine?” she mocked (these were old jibes or jokes). “But I really come from Sewer Nine,” she said. “I was raised there.”

Her name was Circle Shannon and she was a nice roundish young woman. That was the impression she always gave Roger Meta, nice, roundish and twinkling. And perhaps the impression he gave her was of unhurried strength, easy bulk and ghost-shine.

They had never seen each other by sunlight. They had never touched each other except by accident. They both worked in the covered sewers, traveling those underground pools and streams and sometimes floods in their flat-bottomed boats that could go nearly anywhere. What light got into that under-city world was accidental; and yet there was light. It was at least as strong as good starlight. They were workers in Sewer Seven. The boats of both of them had a phosphorescent shine on them, dim, green, underground and underwater fire.

Roger Meta was scooping muck from the bottom of the sewer with a muck-scoop or muck-dredge. It was skilled labor. One broke up the new-formed muck-ridges that were not of a pattern, and sometimes one deposited muck on the old-pattern ridges that had been breached. The deep ridges were intended to give a rippling baffle effect to the waters, to turn the waters over.

The muck-scoop had a hinged handle, for the waters of the sewer were twice as deep as the roof was high. Roger piled the muck in the fore-end of his muck-barge; and Circle Shannon came and picked stars out of it as they talked sparingly. Circle was a snail-picker and slug-picker, and these slimy creatures shined like faint stars where they were imbedded in the surface of the resurrected muck.

Circle also plucked snails and slugs from the walls and ceilings of Sewer Seven, from the floating scum islands of the sewer flow; from the deeper water of it also, for she could sense the location of the small creatures variously. And while she took certain large snails and slugs (knowing exactly which were ready to take) she left other smaller seedling snails (from Sewer Five); and here in Sewer Seven they would always grow and scavenge well. She had now perhaps five hundredweight of snails and slugs gathered, half the safe lading of the boat.

“Grendel is in Sewer Seven this night, Roger,” she said. “Beware of him.”

“You do not know where Grendel is,” Roger Meta answered softly. “Nobody ever knows where he is. If one knew, that one might avoid him a little.”

“All girls and women know when he is near,” Circle insisted. “We have the scent and the sense of him always. I tell you that he is in this very sewer now, and quite near.”

“Grendel has nothing to do with girls and women,” Roger stated. “He is male forever, and he combats and devours only males. You have enmity against another creature. We have enmity against Grendel.”

“Be you warned, man,” Circle said again, “he is quite near. But I do not know whether he devours tonight.”

So they worked away in their boats quite near to each other, Circle Shannon who was a nice roundish young woman, and Roger Meta who was a young man of easy bulk and ghost-shine. This was at night in one of the closed sewers under the town of Kyklopolis.

This Grendel of whom they had spoken with a trace of fear was a sewer monster. He was a water-monster beyond description, and he may have been the last of his race. He had the jaws of a giant Crocodile (this is all hearsay; nobody has seen him clearly and lived to tell about it). He had the gullet of Behemoth himself so that he could swallow a man whole. He had a human head and face and eyes, except for the great jaws below and the horrible mark above. His great arms were longer than a barge-boat, more powerful than a power-dredge, sometimes jointed like those of a man, sometimes writhing like the tentacles of an octopus or a kraken. There is a story that in another country and another time (the low middle ages) a hero tore one of the arms off Grendel. Do not believe it. The hero tore one joint of one finger off, no more.

Grendel loved foul water: it was his grazing and his home. For this reason he resented having the water cleansed. For this and other reasons he devoured male humans, especially those of the sewer families. Or a young boy in his bed above might hear a call in his sleep and come and tumble down one of the access holes and into the calling jaws. A youth might go beyond where he was supposed to go and lean too far out of his barge and be taken. A full man in his strength might be gulped alive and whole even when most warned and wary. The Scorner himself, when his year was finished, when he had ruled with reason and with intuitive unreason, when he had broken at last and set up his howling clamor, would most often rush and cast himself into the sewer at its foulest place. And there Grendel would have him and eat him alive. Grendel particularly loved the yearly Scorner.

Well, why did not the men of Kyklopolis get together in great numbers with many boats and torches and weapons and hunt out and kill this Grendel? Should such a peril be allowed to live? But this is to ignore who Grendel really was, to forget of what race he was the last surviving member. For Grendel, who had once been completely human, was of the race of Cain. Moreover, Grendel was not only the descendant but also the murderer of the murderous Cain. He had disregarded the Mark of Cain and had killed its bearer. Then the Mark of Cain was transferred to Grendel himself. It was prohibited to kill him; it was prohibited by God to kill him.

The sewers of Kyklopolis were full of ghosts and ghost stories, and perhaps the starkest of them was Grendel. There is no denying that Grendel had his ghostly elements, just as he had his human and monstrous and fishy and devilish elements.

“It is told to me, Roger Meta, that you are nephew or stepson or somehow heir of John Legacy, he who is next person to die in our town,” Circle Shannon was saying as she brought her boat nearer to that of Roger. “This is told to me but you did not tell it to me. Who did you tell it to?”

“I have told it to nobody at all,” Roger said. “I haven't enough expectation to tell it to anyone, to presume on anyone with such slim hopes.”

“Tell it to me, Roger Meta,” Circle said, “and I may be able to supply such additional expectation and hope as is needed. He had the name of John Laketurner. His name has been changed legally to John Legacy, which means that he is the next to die. And you are somehow his heir. I supply the hope. Should I be a hopeless and empty woman forever?”

And Circle touched this Roger gently on the arm; gently but meaningfully. It was the first time they had ever touched except by accident.

“There are four of us who are equally heirs,” Roger explained. “These four are myself, Charley Goodfish, Harker Skybroom and Jaspers Rerun. The predictions, the rimes, the cryptic remarks of Scorner himself do not indicate which of us has the advantage. After all, my foster uncle John Laketurner received the name of John Legacy only two days ago. Even after that it is not sure that he is the next to die. Often fate falls one way when it has been notched and chopped to fall another. It is said that one of us four will indeed receive the belly or birth blessing for his companion from the dying uncle, that another of us four will be the next Scorner, that still another of us (in addition to Scorner) will be killed by Grendel, and that the fourth one of us will go as yearly pilgrim to Countryside and World. I will not be as I am when another season has gone, but I haven't high hope of legacy.”

“Carol Bluesnail is declared companion of Charley Goodfish already,” Circle said. “Twicechild Newleaf is declared companion of Harker Skybroom. Velma Green is declared companion of Jaspers Rerun. Now I, Circle Shannon, become declared companion of you, Roger Meta. I repeat: I do not wish to remain a hopeless and empty woman forever. Do you understand me?”

“I understand you,” Roger Meta said, and he rubbed the palm of his hand on her cheek. It was the first time he had ever touched her.

That is the way it was in Kyklopolis. The count was kept constant. This was rigidly enforced by the Scorner, who had to be such a hard man that in one year he would break to pieces, being unable to bend. But if the count should drop by one or more then things could be put in motion to restore it to where it had been. If John Legacy should die soon (how could he not die soon since he had been named for it?) then it could be arranged for someone to take his place.

The selection of the man to be Scorner was a curious business. Following the yearly break-up and death of the old Scorner, all the people of the town would consider who the next Scorner should be. They would look; and after a bit they would all be looking at the same man. He might protest, he might try to refuse, but he would know himself to be the man. And always he would serve his term.

The Scorner was the autocrat, the absolute ruler of the town for his life in office. No other town had quite the same arrangement. To keep the town constant and continuing it was necessary that the Scorner be very stern, that he scorn all normal human sentiment. To keep the count constant required that the Scorner have rights of life and death over the inhabitants. It required also that he have rights over the air and the water, over the muck-spreading, over the land crops and the grazing, over the euglena and other algae, over all land and water plants and animals and fish, over the river and its divergencies.

As to the river and its related waters, there were two theories. One was that it was the purpose of the town of Kyklopolis to purify the river, to pass it on clearer and more fishful than it found it; that it was for this reason that Kyklopolis existed at that river junction.

The other theory was that the river, even in its putridity, was meant to serve the town and its people, that all rivers were meant to serve towns and peoples. The same for the air: it was meant to nourish even by its noxiousness.

Only the Scorner in office held instinctively the position that these two purposes were the same, that Kyklopolis was rightly named (the Circle City, the Cycle City, the Wheel City); and that if there were enough such towns and cities in the world, the world would be redressed.

The redressing of the world had to be very slow, however: too much haste could tip it even further out of balance. It was for this reason that the aid given by Kyklopolis to the rest of the world was not massive. It consisted, in fact, of one pilgrim a year sent out into the world to carry the message of balance and purification. How effective was the work of the pilgrims wasn't known. No one of the yearly pilgrims had ever been heard from again after his departure.

“How many are the ghosts tonight!” Circle Shannon cried out, “and how glowing and lowering! I believe that they will have a party.”

“I believe that we will have a party also,” Roger Meta called, and he poled his boat nearer to that of Circle. “A snail told me so, a fish told me so,” he said. “I believe that the other three heirs of John Legacy will come down to have a party with us just when it begins to dawn above and their night's work is over with. And I believe that they will bring with them their three declared companions.”

“Why then we will have our party along with that of the ghosts,” Circle said, accepting it easily and completely that the six visitors really would come down. “And there is a great fish to serve for our party. It's unusual that there be any fish so large as he before the time of transmutation.”

She speared the big fish with a fish spear. She loaded it, flopping and hopping, into her snail-boat. And they brought their two boats to the shelf of rock and muck where the ghosts were gathering.

The sewer ghosts were made mostly of methane gas. So then there was nothing to them but glowing swamp gas? Hold there, hold! There was much more to them. Of what are you mostly made yourself? And is there no more to you than that?

Each of the dimly glowing hovering gas ghosts had his own person and personality. They could not communicate directly with human persons in words. The only sound they made was like the gurgling of water. It may indeed have been the near gurgling of water; it may have been that the ghosts were really soundless. We don't think so. The gurgling was always to be heard in the presence of the ghosts; it was often but not always to be heard in their absence.

There was real acquaintance and friendship between the sewer ghosts and the sewer workers. They knew each others' names, they were good company. Often it would have been lonesome, for ghost or for person, had it not been for the company of the other.

A hatch cover was raised in the ceiling of Sewer Seven. It showed a pale circle of pre-morning light and one last fading star. Then persons came through the hatch hole and down the old iron ladder to the shelf of rock and muck. Six persons: Roger Meta had not met all of them before; Circle Shannon had not met any of them: but both knew the names and persons of all six, just as they knew the names and persons of the sewer ghosts.

There were three unhurried strong young men from above with the day-shine on them: Charley Goodfish, Harker Skybroom, Jaspers Rerun. There were three sparkling and roundish young women: Carol Bluesnail, Twicechild Newleaf, Velma Green.

“I am blind, I am blind,” Twicechild cried. “One does not see by the light here; it is less than starlight. Here we must sense each other by other senses than sight. Harker, my declared companion and man, I have never sensed you so before.”

“Circle Shannon and myself have never seen each other by sunlight,” Roger Meta was saying. “We have been declared companions for less than one hour: we touched each other for the first time less than an hour ago. It may be that we will see each other by sunlight during the coming day.”

“Yes, you will go up when we go up, as soon as the party is over,” Charley Goodfish told them. “There will be a party, will there not? Carol Bluesnail had the intuition that there would be a party and she told the other five of us that we were called to come with her to it. It would be embarrassing if she were mistaken and there was no party intended.”

“There will be a party,” Circle said pleasantly. “A providential fish appeared and I captured it for the party. And these globs of almost-light that you see here are our friends the sewer ghosts. They eat nothing at all, but they are good company.”

“I thought that you were only sewer legends,” Twicechild Newleaf said to the tallest and most garish of the ghosts. “I had no idea that you were real, but I have not been in the sewers before, or not since I was a child.”

The tallest and most garish of the methane ghosts bowed in courtly fashion and gurgled like water. He did not use words, but he did communicate to Twicechild that he and the other ghosts were indeed real, that they were friendly, that they regarded themselves as mentors and guardians of the humans who labored in the sewers.

Carol Bluesnail had brought several large onions. Really, there is no having a party without onions, and the sewer workers in particular appreciate onions. Twicechild Newleaf had brought several small dressed birds (she was a fowler by profession). Velma Green had goat cheese. Charley Goodfish had a crock of honey wine. Harker had brought cloud-clover, those small edible seedlike particles that are precipitated out by the sky-sweeps and must be gathered from balloon, they being too light ever to fall to earth in quantity. Jaspers Rerun had brought euglena bread: this is made from that peculiar algae where it is taken from the river below the sewers and after the yearly mutation. And Roger Meta had a clay jug of turtle meat that had been preserved in its own fat since last year's burgeoning period.

Charley Goodfish, the beekeeper, the honey and wax man, produced and lit and set a wax candle. Above this he put a cupped pan on a little support; and into the cupped pan he placed pieces of the providential fish that Circle Shannon had taken and was now cutting up.

“Is there any further fuel?” Charley Goodfish asked. “What do the people in sewers do about fuel and burning? Above land these are very touchy subjects.”

“Our friends, the sewer ghosts,” Circle said, introducing them in one of their functions. The methane-gas ghosts came one after another and passed through the candle flame, turning it into a small but roaring fire. The providential fish was quickly cook-fried in the cupped pan, and no one of the sewer ghosts was greatly diminished by his contribution. There was plenty of methane gas in the sewers at all times and the ghosts could always assimilate it to themselves in whatever quantity was needed.

It was a good party then with eating and drinking and some singing. The song had the curious quality of echoing and re-echoing through that whole watery underground. It was absorbed by every surface and depth there, and it would be given back gradually. Weeks later, little wisps of that song would be given back by the slimy walls and overheads, by the thickish waters, by the scum-wort or euglena algae (especially in its mutation time), even by the sewer ghosts, who retained scraps of old song to mix later with their water-gurgling sound.

The eight young human persons became very close in their emotions. They promised and pledged various things, in particular that no one of them would take unfair advantage in obtaining the belly blessing or birth blessing from that dying man named John Legacy. They agreed that the eight of them would go together that very day (it was daytime now in the world above) to John Legacy and see if the business of the blessing could be settled quickly. Then they touched and kissed each other, and made an eight-way friendship forever.

The six of them went up the iron ladder and through the hatchway to morning light. And Circle Shannon and Roger Meta poled and floated their boats to that place where Sewer Seven reached the loading banks. There they could discharge the snails and slugs and muck to the morning workers who distributed such. They had never gone together before. They were right on the edge of daylight now, and they had never seen each other by daylight.

Two great hands, one on each side, came up out of the black-green water and seized the muck-boat of Roger Meta by the very gunwales. Each of the hands was as wide as the boat was long, twice as wide as a man's height. One joint of one finger of one hand was missing, had been missing for fifteen hundred years. There were no other hands anywhere like these. They were the hands of the monster Grendel.

2

The means of enforcing a constant population in Kyklopolis is unknown. The people of the town simply accept it that there may not be a birth till there has been a corresponding death to make room for it. The moral power of the ruling Scorner seems to have much to do with this inhibition: a tradition beyond understanding reinforces it. The people believe so strongly that they will be sterile until they have received the belly blessing or birth blessing that they are indeed sterile.

HARVESTER REPORT

To wash the water and to scrub the air

This be our part and everlasting share:

But never quite to kill our filthy friend

Or, purpose gone, we come to empty end.

 — Scorner Number 33

Great jaws gaping in the murky water below, and black water pouring over the wales of Roger Meta's muck-boat.

“I cannot reach you, Circle,” Roger called, “but I give you the blessing from here. My life goes now. Replace it.”

“No,” she said stoutly. “I go with you if you go.” And she was into the water with a fish spear and after Grendel. A spear like that wouldn't even scratch the hide of Grendel.

But it didn't happen then. It wasn't meant to happen. There was a giggling of devils (it was sometimes said that Grendel was composed of a whole nation of them inside his curious form). Grendel released the boat and slid down into deepest water. There were water spouts then with brimstone in them, hideous sounds that set one to retching, stench that roared, and guffaw that rotted the marrow. It was the monster Grendel laughing underwater.

“Mine is another of the four fates then,” Roger spoke, shaking. “He doesn't take me today.”

Then it was suddenly a very joyful day, after Circle and Roger had turned their boats over to the unloaders and processors where Sewer Seven comes into daylight and mingles with the other waters. The two young sewer workers climbed up the banks to the ragged outskirts of Kyklopolis. They blinked like dirty moles at the morning light, but that light is a healing thing even for sewer people. They saw each other by daylight for the first time. They were pleased about it, and a little shy.

They were just within that wall of Circle Stones that bounds the Circle City and separates it from the Countryside and the rest of the World. These circle stones are stone wheels standing up, about a meter in diameter, with holes in the middle of them, just touching each other, ten thousand of them if one counts the similarly shaped and sized buoys that complete the circle out in the river just beyond the purifying sewers. It would seem that this little stone wall, free-standing and unmortared, could not keep anything out, but it could keep the world out.

Could not one easily leap over it? No. To do so would be to be vaporized by lightning bolt. Try it and see! Only once a year might an assigned pilgrim leap over it without self-destruction.

Circle Shannon and Roger Meta left the dangerous bounding fence and started into deeper and more vital Kyklopolis itself. How beautiful, how idyllic was the cyclic city as it stirred itself into morning light. Little children bringing Night Charleys and Honey Buckets out of their houses and bringing them to the men who pushed the night soil barrows. Spriggers (they were the so-called “Green Children” who could make things grow) bringing out the little pots of green sprigs that had sprouted the day before and now raised their heads to the morning light. The spriggers brought their plants to the sprig masters, who would set them in the new muck being spread that morning. Constant renewal in even the very small things. No path used more than three days. Then it was abandoned (lest it should become dusty), mucked, and sprigged and sodded.

“The Scorner has reigned a year and a day,” Circle Shannon said. Sheep were grazing the clover growing on the rooftops of the buildings, and chickens were clucking and pecking up there between and among the sheep. The bees also grazed the clover of its nectar, and the edible locusts grazed it of its black-leaf. All things fit together.

“The Scorner will probably break up today or tomorrow,” Roger said, “though there is a case of a Scorner reigning as long as a year and four days. Some men do not break as quickly as others.”

People going by on one-, two-, four- and eight-man bicycles, going always roughly and joyously for mostly they went on first-day or second-day paths through the blue-stem grass and the rice-grass, scattering the seeds like small clouds in the air, bringing the birds in cloud-sized flights, bringing the fowlers who took the birds. Only in the more dense center of the city were there rocked and covered bicycle roads, with the sodding and growing on the roofs of them. But it was good to stir the grass and constantly renew the paths in the other areas. The bicycles were the only wheeled vehicles in Kyklopolis the Wheel City. Certainly no motor vehicle could go there.

They saw Scorner now, up in his own Scorner's Seat, the highest point in the city: and the balloons and the sky-brooms were all located in that region today. The curiosity about the Scorner was a natural thing. His breaking up marked the turning and renewal of the year.

One hundred, two hundred, three hundred windmills turning. Windmills also were made in the Bicycle Factory, which was the only industry in Kyklopolis. More than half of the one thousand water fountains of the town were already spouting, and the others were being put into operation as the workers arrived. The smaller fountains were operated by workers who pedaled in a sort of stirrup and saddle arrangement very like cycles. They raised the putrid and polluted water into the sun and air, raised it again and again, turned it over and over. Muck-men worked in the fountains, just as Roger Meta worked in the sewers, and filled carts with the fertile but pungent precipitate. Air and sun and motion, and a bit of additive that the additive men dripped into the one thousand fountains every day, and wonders were done. Black water, brown water, green water, golden water, even silver and white and clear water sometimes. The fountains were a crowning beauty of the town.

The Scorner's Seat was a sort of pagoda. It was set up on poles with ladders for visitors going up to it. It had a deep pitched roof with turned-up edges. It had to be resodded and resprigged often, and it was now grazed by only three mountain goats.

Leading men of the various trades and divisions went up the ladders and reported to Scorner every day: and received their stern instructions from him. That is the way that Kyklopolis was governed.

Scorner was stern in everything and was absolutely sound in his judgments, though it is said that he had been a gentle and rather slow-witted man until his office possessed him. Now the potato and turnip men, the cereal men, oats, barley, wheat, rice men came to him for their quotas and instructions. And the grass men — the grass men were in trouble. There was discussion that grass might have to go, being a plant that requires an intermediary animal to turn it into human food. The clovers (including the peanuts especially) had already cut deeply into the province of grass, enjoying certain advantages (the edible root-nodules) as well as greater productivity per square meter even for grazing, and they were nitrogen fixers as well as superior oxygen producers.

“When the last grass is gone, Kyklopolis will have lost something,” a grass man moaned, but the Scorner sternly reduced the grass space in favor of cereal and clover. “Even clover will have to go sooner or later,” the Scorner said. It was possibly the last thing he would say, for he made a sign that he would confer no more that day: and the leading men all left him.

Circle Shannon and Roger Meta had been eavesdropping or balloon-dropping on Scorner out of curiosity. It was this way: they had met one of the other heirs, Harker Skybroom, who was a balloon man. He was off duty but he had joined the loungers around the Scorner's Seat. Now a balloon was going up, and he invited himself and Circle and Roger to go along with the balloon operator, who was his friend. And when they had reached a certain height they had signaled the winch-operator to hold it there so that they might hear something of the Scorner's business. After all, the Scorner was public property and was almost always in view.

Now they signaled the winch-operator again, and they went up and again up, very high. The hydrogen-filled balloons (hydrogen by electrolysis was another thing produced at the Bicycle Factory, Kyklopolis' only industry) were captive on strong cable and were wound into the high air by hand winch. The winch on its heavy base was wheeled, so that the balloons might be sent up over a different part of the town every day, wherever the air was heaviest. The balloons served as rough air purifiers. The operators sprayed certain things into the smog, animate as well as inanimate things. The smog was transmuted in that vicinity. After all, smog is only polluted air, and pollution is only an extreme form of fertility.

Vertical thermal drafts were created by the balloons. This meant further aeration of the air. Cloud-clover was created out of some of the smogs; this was the sky-manna too light to fall to earth; it was a cloud of small edible seed-like particles too light to fall. But it could be gathered by the sky-sweeps of the balloons. And it could be grazed by those smog-eating miniature “cattle”, certain midges and insects that were seeded by balloon. And these “sky-cattle” were taken by birds, which in turn were taken by fowlers. And also there was a mysterious Fortean dribble, sweet and fragrant from the transmuted fog. The actual food taken out of the smogs was of some consequence, the fertility rained down was considerable, and the sky-pollution was absorbed or scattered. It was clear air mostly over Kyklopolis, and wherever the air was befouled it could be cleared in a few hours with the balloons and their various skysweeps.

One could, perhaps, see to a considerable distance from the high balloons. But what one saw from them was unregistered or quickly forgotten. It was only the Countryside and the World, things that could hardly be of interest to citizens of Kyklopolis.

They came down again, the operator, Circle Shannon, Roger Meta and that remarkably gentle big man Harker Skybroom. Circle and Roger and Harker found that beeman Charley Goodfish. He was the man who talked to bees, who got all sorts of information from them, who brought some of this information to Scorner, who even brought special bees to Scorner when that stern man wished to question them more closely. Charley was the master of all honey products, and he and his co-workers maintained ten thousand hives or nations of bees. Many of these were set just inside the circle stones that were the walls of the city. Clearly many of the nations of the bees did traffic with the nectars of the Countryside and the World, but this is a thing we will be silent on.

The growing party found Jaspers Rerun, who made euglena bread and other things from what might be considered waste material. Jaspers was fascinated with the euglena algae. He was fascinated with all the waters, though he was neither a sewer man nor a river man. He was even fascinated with the water-monster Grendel, much too fascinated with him. But Jaspers did not seem to have the staying qualities, not as Charley Goodfish, for instance, had them.

They found Carol Bluesnail. They found Twicechild Newleaf. They found Velma Green. Their party was now to the full count of eight. Theirs had become, in the late of the night before, an eight-way friendship forever.

“We will go now to John Legacy,” Twicechild said. “We are all pledged that no one of us will take unfair advantage in obtaining the birth blessing from him. And we are also pledged to see whether the matter of the blessing cannot be settled very quickly.”

“Does any of us know where John Legacy may be found?” Roger asked.

“No one of us knows,” said Harker Skybroom. “When a man has assumed the name of Legacy he leaves his proper home to die elsewhere. It is always to a secret place that he goes. It is always a secret how he summons his heir, for it is not with words or sign. If it were, then someone besides the heir might intercept and go also. And it is a most deep secret how he gives the birth blessing, how he is able to confer fertility to one who was not fertile before.”

“Well then, we all walk in a secret,” Circle Shannon said in a jolly mystic way. “Come, come, walk, walk! I believe that we will hardly take one step out of the way. What can be kept secret from such fine folks as we are? Were we not the ones we would not walk the way. But we are the ones. Come, come all.”

They walked through the poke patches and the onion patches. They walked wetly through the rice patches. Circle plucked a snail from the water-land edge here and set it in her hair by her ear. Three bees came and settled on Charley Goodfish and perhaps they talked to him. Two birds came down onto Twicechild Newleaf, who was a fowler by profession. All of these unhuman informants seemed to agree on the direction of the walk.

The party came to a very small house with a lone kid grazing the grass of its roof. They all knew that John Legacy was inside, waiting happily to give the birth blessing, waiting less happily to die.

3

The solitary and impassioned ruler of Kyklopolis is afraid to break the cycle on which that settlement is based. The fact is that the small region has now become a religious fossil of the old Pollution-Purification rite. It becomes an enacted struggle in every detail of the life there: the elements are not real, they are surreal.

The fact is that there is no regional pollution at all except that created on this special spot. After all, the Pottawattamie Purification Locks are only sixty kilometers upstream from Kyklopolis. The river runs clear from the locks and it runs clear to the very borders of Kyklopolis. And the air of the region has been clear for thirty years, excepting deliberate pollution in this one small area. The pollution in Kyklopolis is actually created and maintained by the massive toxic waste from (of all things) a bicycle factory which has a metallurgic operation so inefficient and of such poisonous throw-off (solid, liquid and vapor) as to stagger the imagination and to preclude any doubt that it is accidental. It isn't.

The second item in the pollution there traces to the incredible mutational development of what we first believed was the simple euglena algae; whatever it is, it isn't simple. This rogue euglena, in one of its seasonable forms, chokes the waters completely, befouls the entire sewer and river system, crowds out almost all fish life with its robbing of the water of its oxygen. It even engenders belief in a local Devil or Water Monster, the counterpart of the town-ruling Scorner, but also the destroyer and absorber of the Scorner. This whole euglena blockage could, of course, be flushed out at any time, but the cyclic religious beliefs of the town would have to be flushed out also.

Then, once a year, the Scorner dies violently, the maleficent euglena becomes a beneficent euglena providing water, oxygen and food for a great burgeoning of fish, and the blockage cleanses itself. We have here acted out the relics of grotesque pollution and grotesque purification, both out of that queer (now even nostalgic) period known as the Panic Past.

We cannot say that the pollution in Kyklopolis is deliberately maintained, for there is no element of deliberation possible here. But it is stubbornly and insanely maintained.

We still wonder, though, by what trick (we are almost certain that it is an audio trick) the yearly change in the uncommon euglena algae is brought about.

SECOND HARVESTER REPORT

Round and round, be we lord or lout?

How'd we get in it? How to get out?

Who be the Circle's nearest kin?

Where oh where does the wheel begin?

 — Scorner Number 34

The eight of them moved into the little house in one silent tight bunch. Had they been called indeed? Were they heirs in reality, and how had it come about?

Inside, the bed had been overturned and broken. John Legacy was on the floor, but he was neither prone nor supine. He had gathered himself into a bundle like a belligerent buffoon. He'd not die willingly, but he'd not die fearfully either. And he'd said once that he wouldn't die in bed.

“I might not die at all,” he bawled at them now out of the middle of a great grin. “I may transmute instead. Today is the day of the great transmuting. What shall I transmute into, a great frog?”

“I'd respect you none the less if you did.” Circle Shannon spoke with absolute seriousness. “Would you be happy so?”

“Nay, I'd still be on the recurring wheel, and I want off it,” the old man said. “Ah, it is my four heirs with their pledged companions. You have chosen them well, my boys, or perhaps it is that you have been well chosen. You are my heirs, and yet no one of you has seen me before and no one of you has a drop of my blood. How did the knowing that you were my heirs come into your heads and into the heads of this town? I put that knowing into the heads, that's how it happened. You have not seen me, but I have often seen you. I've long been habited to watch young men at work, and I have seen that you four are less entrapped than others. What? Did a ninth visitor just enter this terminal house?”

“No, good John Legacy, only we eight have entered,” Twicechild Newleaf told him gently.

“Wrong, fine girl,” the old man said. “A ninth visitor has just entered and his name is death. Ah, but I'll die in my tongue last place of all. I have things to say yet. Do you know where this town went wrong all those years ago? Do you know where the whole world almost went wrong? Pollution, you see, is an overabundance of death: it cannot be cured by commanding an underabundance of life. We commit that error in Circle City.”

“Good John Legacy, will you give one of us the birth blessing now?” Carol Bluesnail begged. “I'd not mention it, but you begin to turn blue and you'll die before you realize it.”

“Oh, I give the birth blessing to all of you then,” John Legacy gasped out of his blue-faced pain. “You all be fertile now. Go and hold union and conceive. You are quickened.”

“But there are four couples of us,” Harker Skybroom protested gently, “and your going will leave room for only one new birth.”

“There are four different fates for the four couples of you, and I tell you it will work out even. Before the day is over some of you will yourselves give the birth blessing, but more than four is not mine to give. Go and conceive.”

“But, good John Legacy,” Roger Meta began to speak.

And then he finished it lamely. “He's beyond words.” John Legacy was dead, and it is fruitless to argue with a dead man.

The four couples went out. They felt themselves quickened. They felt themselves fertile. They went off, couple by couple, to their own places. They gave the mutual blessing. They held union. And it is believed that they conceived.

The birth blessing from one surnamed Legacy — it always works.

It was afternoon of the day. The howl began (there is no other word for it); it was the witless, soulless, hopeless howl. A man was breaking up in body and brain and spirit: a solitary and impassioned man, too stern to bend, he had to break. A year and a day's frustrations and entrapments erupted into the horrifying transmuting howl.

Were there any mercy in that town the very arteries of grief would burst at that awful wailing woe that shook the whole region.

Who talks of grief? Who calls for mercy? No, no, it is joy everywhere in a town awakened to afternoon gladness. It is glee. It is gaiety unconfined. The whole town rushed to the river and sewers to watch the great transmutation. The Scorner was dying in loud rale and wail in his high seat, and the universality of the town rejoiced.

Not quite all, perhaps. There is some question of the disposition of four couples who were united in an eight-person friendship. One couple (Roger Meta and Circle Shannon) was already at home in the sewer and had seen the transmutation many times. “But I'll see it no more,” Roger said mysteriously. “I'll be out of it now and away.”

Harker Skybroom and Twicechild Newleaf did not join in the rejoicing. They were frozen in a white-faced fear and horror which neither could understand. They did not go to watch the transmutation. There would be transmutation enough in themselves.

But Charley Goodfish and Carol Bluesnail went gladly to the viewing, as good citizens should. And Jaspers Rerun with Velma Green went at a run in feverish eagerness. People were singing as they went on foot and bicycle to watch the changing of the waters. Some of them even sang the new “Four Fates” song, which prophesied what would happen to four new heirs:

One be the Constant Townsman deft,

The Pilgrim one, and one the Scorner,

And one a dazzled man who left

His wife a Grendel-widow mourner.

The sewers were fragrant as new-mown hay now, and all the waterways were teeming with life and food. Minnows were seeded by minnow-men, minnows came from nowhere and everywhere and feasted on the wonderful transmuted euglena algae. One could actually watch them grow to bigger and bigger fish. From the navigation channel, which had always run clear and pure parallel to the contrived Kyklopolis waters, fish leaped the barrier to feast on this new pasture and to grow to even bigger fish. Turtles came and frogs, crabs and river lobsters, slack-water shrimp, all fine water things; they came or they were brought, and they would grow and grow. For six months, all through the winter, the waters would be burgeoning with life. They then would choke and die again.

On one point, speculation of outsiders had been correct. The trigger for the transmutation of the euglena algae was an audio one, a high complex sound that nobody had been able to duplicate. It was the death howl, the death wail of the Scorner, and nobody could duplicate it who had not suffered in strictness as the Scorner had suffered for one year.

Perhaps the happiest of the happy people was Jaspers Rerun. He had always been delighted by the yearly purification and now he felt that he had a special part to play in it. He did. He plunged into the renewed waters. He was taken in one gulp by the monster Grendel. Grendel was happy now with his holiday prey, the people were happy that Grendel was happy, even the widow Velma Green was almost happy and very proud.

The people were singing their national hymn that referred to those critical times of more than thirty years ago:

The World a dark smoker, nor Nero to fiddle;

We drew us a Circle and lived in the middle.

Such solidarity as the people of Kyklopolis showed was rarely to be found.

Meanwhile, back in the center of town, the body of the Scorner had been tumbled out of its high chair onto the turf, and hackers were hacking away at it. They drew it, and the rich entrails were divided among the men of the leading crops. They quartered it, and the quarters were given to the four quarters of the town; there is incomparable fertility in the body of a dead Scorner, and none of it must be wasted. (Grendel had already dined: he'd not get this Scorner.)

Then men went ritually with lighted lanterns (though it was still clear day) to look for the new Scorner. They looked here and there. Then more and more men were looking in the same place and at the same man. They were looking at the white-faced terrified Harker Skybroom. They seized that gentle big man and dragged him out. They dragged him up to the Scorner's Seat and made him Scorner. Now he would be (for the good of the community) stern and inhuman and relentless for his one year, and then he would die with the terrible transmuting howl. It was the long line of dedicated Scorners who had made the close-built town of Kyklopolis able to feed and support itself though completely cut off from Countryside and World.

Roger Meta was pilgrim. All had looked at him as pilgrim, as all had looked at Harker as Scorner. And Roger, fleet-footed now, lost no time leaving the town. What message he carried is not known (the town would never hear of any of the pilgrims again), but he leapt over the barrier of circle stones (the lightning holding its bolt for this once-a-year passage) and was gone from there. His going left room for all of John Legacy's birth blessings.

But what is this? There cannot be a second pilgrim in one year. That is illicit. Nevertheless, Circle Shannon was coming after Roger her man at a pretty good rate of speed.

“Hey, sis, want a birth blessing? I'm leaving. So's he within me. Have two.”

“Oh yes, oh yes,” two young women said, and Circle gave them birth blessings.

Then it was over the circle-stone fence with her. And lightning death?

Circle stood (outside the town now, in the World) with head tilted back and arms akimbo. The lightning hurled itself at her and she flinched not at all. It froze, it almost grinned, it parted, it struck and split three circle stones; but it left Circle Shannon unscathed.

Who be the Circle's nearest kin?

Where oh where does the wheel begin?

“Wherever it begins, it ends right here,” Circle expounded. “My nearest kin is already quickening within me, and my other nearest kin is half a kilometer ahead. I run into Countryside and World. I run after him.”

Circle Shannon ran after her man Roger Meta in the deepening darkness.

Author's Commentary

And Name My Name

1

It was said our talk was gone or rare

And things with us were ill,

But we're seven apes from anywhere

A-walking up a hill.

They came to those Kurdish highlands by ways that surely were not the best in the world. They came with a touch of furtiveness. It was almost as if they wished to come invisibly. It had been that way the other times also, with the other groups.

There were seven creatures in most of the groups coming, and there were seven in this group: two from the Indies, two from Greater Africa, two from Small Africa (sometimes called Europe), one from Little Asia. There was no rule about this but there was always variety in the groups.

“I never believed that the last one was truly valid,” said Joe Sunrise. He was the one from Little Asia: he was big and brindled. “Yes, I still regard the last one as an interloper. Oh, he did show greater power than ourselves. He set us back into a certain place, and since that time we don't talk very much or very well. We don't do any of the things as well as we did before. I suppose he is master of us, for a little while, and in a skimpy way. I believe though that that ‘little while’ is finished today. I believe that he will be shown as no more than a sad aberration of ourselves, as a step backwards or at least sideways.

“But it will be a true stage of the sequence today, as it was in our own primary day, as it was when we named the world and all its fauna, when we set it into its hierarchy.”

“It comes to us from the old grapevine,” said Mary Rainwood, the blondish or reddish female from the Indies, “that the Day of the Whales was a big one. For showiness it topped even our own takeover. The account of it is carved in rocks in whale talk, in rocks that are over a mile deep under a distant ocean; it is an account that no more than seven whales can still read. But there are several giant squids who can read it also, and squids are notoriously loose-mouthed. Things like that are told around.

“There are others that stand out in the old memories, though they may not have happened quite as remembered. And then there were the less memorable ones: the Day of the Hyenas, for instance; or that of the present ruler (so like and yet so unlike ourselves) whose term is ending now. I for one am glad to see this one end.”

“There is an air of elegance about the New One,” said Kingman Savanna, the male delegate from Greater Africa. “He also is said, in a different sense from the one who now topples from the summit, to be both very like and very unlike ourselves. The New One hasn't been seen yet, but one of real elegance will be foreknown. Ah, but we were also elegant in our own short time! So, I am told, were the Elephants. There was also something special about the Day of the Dolphins. But about this passing interloper there has not been much special.”

“What if this new event and coming blocks us out still more?” Linger Quick-One asked in worry. “What if it leaves us with still less speech and art. What can we do about our own diminishment?”

“We can grin a little,” Joe Sunrise said with a certain defiance. “We can gnash our teeth. We can console ourselves with the thought that he will be diminished still more.”

“He? Who?” Kingman asked.

“The Interloper: he under whom we have lived for this latter twisted and foreshortened era. The Days of the Interlopers are always short-lived, and when their day is finished they tend to lose their distinction and to merge with the lords of the day before.”

“They with us? Ugh!” Mary Rainwood voiced it.

There were seven persons or creatures going in this band, and Joe Sunrise of Little Asia seemed to be the accepted leader. They walked slowly but steadily, seeming to be in some pain, as if they were not used to wearing shoes or robes. But they were well shod and well wrapped; they were wrapped entirely in white or gray robes such as the desert people wore, such as fewer of the highland people wore. They were hooded, they were girt, they bore packs and bundles. They were as if handless within their great gray gloves; they were almost faceless within their hoods and wrappings.

But two things could not be hidden if one peered closely at them: the large, brown, alert, observing eyes (these eyes had been passively observing now for ten thousand generations); and their total hairiness wherever the least bit of face or form gave itself away.

Well, they had a place to go and they were going there, but they had a great uneasiness about it all. These seven, by the way, out of all the members of their several species remaining on Earth, still retained speech and the abstracting thought that goes with it. And on what dark day had these gifts been lost by all the rest of their closest kindred?

And such was the case with almost all of the so different groups moving towards the meeting place. Such was the case with the elands and the antelopes, with the hogs and the hippos, with the asses and the zebras, with the eagles and the cranes, with the alligators and the gavials, with the dolphins and with the sharks. They were small elites representing large multitudes, and they retained certain attributes of elites that the multitudes had lost.

2

Came Polar Bears on bergs past Crete,

And Mammoths seen by Man,

And Crocodiles on tortured feet,

And Whales in Kurdistan.

There had been all through the Near East, and then through the World, a general hilarity and an air of hoax about the reports of the ‘Invisible Animals.’ There were of course the Bears that walked and talked like men and were reported as coming out of the Russias. One of these bears, so the joke went, entered a barroom in Istanbul. The bear was nattily dressed, smoked a cigar, laid a hundred lira note on the bar and ordered a rum and cola.

The bar-man didn't know what to do so he went back to the office and asked the boss.

“Serve the bear,” the boss said, “only don't give him his ninety lira change. Give him ten lira only. We will make prodigies pay for being prodigies.”

The bar-man went and did this, and the bear drank his drink in silence.

“We don't get many bears in here,” the barman finally said when the silence had gotten on his nerves.

“At ninety lira a throw I can understand why you don't,” the bear said.

There were hundreds of these talking-animal jokes in those days. But they had a quality different from most jokes: they were all true exactly as told.

Then there were the invisible African Elephants (how can an African Elephant possibly be invisible in clear daylight and open landscape?) coming up across the Sinai wastelands and going on for a great distance across the Syrian Desert. They were seven very large African Elephants and they spoke courteously to all who stood and gaped as they passed. They were the only African Elephants in the World with the gift of speech; the others had lost it long ago. No one would admit seeing these out-of-place Elephants, of course. That would be the same as one admitting that he was crazy.

There were the great Crocodiles traveling in labor and pain over the long dry places. There were the Zebras and Giraffes snuffling along out of Greater Africa, and the black-maned and the tawny-maned lions. There were the Ostriches and the Cape Buffalo and the huge Boa Snakes (the Day of the Snakes had been a very long time ago). There were not large groups of any of these, five or seven, or sometimes nine. All were rather superior individuals of their species: all had the gift of speech and reason. All had a certain rakishness and wry humor in their mien, and yet all went under that curious compulsion that is the younger brother of fear.

No person would admit seeing any of these ‘Invisible Animals,’ but many persons told, with a peculiar nervousness, of other persons claiming to have seen them. There was somebody telling of somebody seeing a band of Irish Elk: no matter that the species was supposedly extinct for several hundred years; reportorial jokers would never be extinct. And it is true that these very few Elk said that they were the very last of their species.

Many persons were said to have seen two floating islands going past Cyprus in the Eastern Mediterranean. One of these floating islands was loaded with various animals from South America; the other was filled and painfully crowded with sundry animals from the North American continent. At least half of these animals had been believed to be extinct. Some of them must have kept themselves well hidden for centuries to be able to appear now even as ‘Invisible Animals.’

But even odder things were coming across the plains of India and Iran. They were hopping and leaping animals. Actually their motion, when they were in full speed, was like that of the hindquarters of a galloping horse, a horse that had no forequarters. There were the big Kangaroos and the smaller Wallabies and such. But what were they doing? With them were many other creatures from Australia and New Zealand and Tasmania and the Impossible Islands.

Ah well, then what about the Polar Bears riding on a small iceberg that floated past Crete and on towards Little Asia? There were Seals riding on this also, and Sea Lions were sporting in the lee of it. Oddest of all, there was a light but continuous snowstorm over this berg only and the circle of graying frothing water around it, and over no other place.

But whales in the Kurdish Highlands? What? What? Yes, the rivers had been very high that year. They had cut out new channels here and there and left parts of their old channels in the form of a series of lakes. But whales in the Highlands! It's true that nobody told about it without winking. And yet it was told about.

And how's about the angel out of Heaven who walked and stood in those high plains and who seemed to be in some sort of pleasant trouble? It's true that he said that he was not an Angel. He said that he was a Man only and was named Man. It is true that he looked like a Man and not an Angel (nobody knowing what an angel looked like). He looked like a Man, a Man of a very superior sort. But even this is a presumptive statement, since no one had admitted seeing him at all personally.

Even so, whales in the Highlands, and a new special man named Man! And a thousand other prodigies. Could it all be the report of jokers?

3

To us, the bright, the magic set,

The World is but a crumb.

If we be not the People yet,

When will the people come?

But there were seven other very special humans met together in that same part of the world; met together, perhaps, by a sort of contrived accident. Nobody could deny that they were human; and yet one of the things they were discussing was the report that their humanity might be denied that very day or the following day.

They had met in a private club room of the International Hotel in Mosul. They were making ready for a journey beyond Mosul. Which way beyond Mosul? Well, that was the thing they were discussing with some puzzlement on their own part. It would not be North or South or East or West or Up or Down from Mosul. It would just be beyond, a little bit beyond Mosul Town.

The seven special humans were Anatole Keshish, a Turkish-Greek-Armenian intellectual of easy urbanity; Helen Rubric, the great lady and puzzle forever; Toy Tonk, a Eurasian girl who constructed philosophies that were like flower arrangements; Hatari Nahub, that charismatic Negro man who transcended continents and cultures; Lisa Baron of the light-haired and light-eyed peoples, and she was light-minded and light-tongued beyond the others; Charley Mikakeh, who was six kinds of American Indian, with a few touches of French, Irish, dark Dutch, and Jewishness in him; Jorge Segundo, who was all the Latins in the world in one man but in whom the old Roman predominated (there was once a wise man who said that we tended to forget that the old Romans were Italians, to believe that they were Englishmen, but they weren't).

These seven had brilliance dripping off them like liquid jewels, an image which we cannot express rightly in words, not even their own fragmentary words.

How these seven had been selected for a mission that they understood hardly at all is a puzzle. But they had gathered here from all over the world without a word of instruction or suggestion from anyone. It was only a sort of psychobiological urge that had told them to come exactly here, exactly now.

“We are met here and we hardly know why,” said Jorge Segundo. “We know each other not at all personally and only slightly by reputation. We are called here, but who is the caller? We come like lemmings.”

“The lemmings came today,” said Toy Tonk, “but only seven of them, and they not at all in a panic. Nor are we, though perhaps we should be. This is perhaps the ‘Childhood's End’ as foretold by the Clarke in the century past. Will this now be ‘The Second Age of Man’? And will ourselves seem children in comparison to the man (so far he is reported as singular in all ways) who comes?”

“This is perhaps the new morning, the Epiphany of one more of the ‘Nine Billion Names of God’ as phrased by the same Clarke, and we will either be ourselves magnified, or we will be reduced to something less than children,” Lisa Baron said lightly. “But we do not know that anything is happening.”

“I stood and talked to a camel this afternoon,” said Charley Mikakeh, “and you say that nothing is happening? ‘What do you make of all the new and strange animals passing through?’ the camel asked me. ‘It's a puzzler, is it not? And what do you make of myself talking? I and the very few others of my species have not done that for a very long time, not since the mushrooms still had prepuces as a normal thing, and yourself began to walk upright. It's an off thing, Ape, is it not?’ ‘I am Man and not Ape,’ I told the camel, somewhat stiffly, I'm afraid. But the very fact that there was this conversation with a camel indicates that something is happening.”

“Perhaps only inside your own head, Charley,” Anatole jibed. “I have had conversation with a variety of animal species myself today. All say that it is unusual with them; not at all common for their species to be able to talk. Yet I find it less strange than that we seven, previously unknown to each other, should be gathered here and talking together.”

“Oh, we are the seven magic people,” Hatari said rationally, though he now had a not-quite rational look in his eyes. “Every age of the world (and I believe that our own has been the penultimate age) has its seven magic people who come together by psychic magnet at a hinge time. We are the spokesmen for the rest. But if we are the spokesmen, what will we say, and to whom?”

“If we be people indeed (and we never doubted it till this day) then we will speak it to our own variant (this mysterious Shining Man), and it will be given to us in that moment what we should say,” Helen Rubric was murmuring with her eyes half closed. “But I am very edgy about all this, and I believe that we are really coming to the edge. There is something wrong with the setting and the set.”

“What do you say, Helen?” Jorge asked. “What is wrong with the set?”

“The set is off; it is gone wrong. Both the picture and the sound seem doubled, Jorge.”

“Cannot it be fixed? But what am I talking about? I do feel for a moment that we are no more than animated cartoons on a screen. But this isn't a TV set; it is something larger.”

“This set is the whole-world set, Jorge,” Helen Rubric muttered. “And it has gone too far wrong to be fixed by ourselves. It may be fixed by this New Fixer who comes. But I feel that we ourselves are diminished and demoted, that we are put into a shadowy box now and confined to a narrow corner.

“I gazed upon my own double today and talked with her. She said that her name was Mary Rainwood. She seemed to take a saddened and sisterly view of me. She is an animal of the species Orangutan; and if we are sisters under the skin then hers is under the thicker and hairier skin; I might say that hers is the harder skin to get under. I know her species, but of what species am I an animal?

“It was odd that she was able to speak. She says that it only happens in the last seven days of an age. It seems equally odd that I am able to speak, and I really wonder whether I have been doing it for more than seven days. I believe that our own era has been a very short one and a deponent one.”

It was something like a ski lodge there in that private club room of the International Hotel of Mosul. Very cozy there by the open fire at night after a strenuous day on the snow slopes. What open fire? What snow slopes? That was all illusion.

It was more like a cave they were in. Open fire or not, there was a flickering and a shadowing on the cave walls. And the talk among them became more and more shadowy on that last night of the Age.

It was morning then. It hadn't been such a long evening and night, only a few hours. It hadn't been such a long Age, no more than thirty or forty thousand years. They went out in that morning to a place a little bit beyond Mosul. Seven magic persons on either the last or the first morning of their magic.

4

Yours: — nervous sort of apish lives,

Derivative the while:

And, somehow, ferro-concrete hives

Have not a lot of style.

The Shining Man hadn't arrived from anywhere. All ways of coming had been watched by some or other of the creatures. And yet he was there now on the crown of the animated hill. He was very much as all the creatures had supposed that he would be, before they had seen him at all: not really shining, not of imposing stature, with an inexperienced and almost foolish look on his face, not complex, not at all magic; competent, though, and filled with an uneasy sort of grace.

He was not nervous. Nervousness, of course, was not possible for such an excellent one as he was. But he was in some pain, for he was already in light travail.

The animated hill was merely a wide low hill (higher, though, than the high hills around it) covered with creatures. They were in tiers and files and arrays, they were in congregations and assemblies and constellations. Creatures almost beyond counting, enough seemingly to cover the Earth, and they did very nearly cover the wide hill.

The man appointed and named them, speaking to them with an easy dominance, and then sending them away again, species after species, speechless again for another era, yet having their assigned places and tasks for a new age of the world.

Earthworms, beetles, damselflies, honeybees, locusts, cicadas came and went. They had slightly new assignments now in a world which would be at least slightly different. Shrikes and eagles and doves and storks came through the crowded air. They spoke; sometimes they argued; they were convinced, or they accepted their assignments without being convinced. But they winged away again, speechless now once more, but far from soundless.

Time became diffused and multiplex, for the man imposed and directed thousands of species while the sun had hardly moved. Space also was extra dimensionable, for the wide low hill could not have served as staging space for so many species in the normal order of things.

“We will be the last ones,” Lisa Baron said to her magical companions. “As we are the highest species, the lords of the world, so we will have the final instruction and appreciation. Ourselves, the first age of mankind, will receive confirmation and approval from this aberrant creature who (however unlikely he seems) ushers in the second age of mankind. I beg you all, confer with him straight-faced and in all seriousness. Consider that his office is more important than himself. We are the giants and he is the dwarf, but he is higher than ourselves for he is appointed to stand on our shoulders.”

“We will not be the last ones,” said Jorge Segundo. “Can you not see that all these confrontations and instructions are simultaneous? And yet we wait. It is as if he notices all the others and not ourselves; he is probably jealous of our basic stature. But do you not see that even the trees and grasses come and go, speaking with him in their moment, and then going away speechless again to their own places. It is the unnaturing of the ecology that happens now, the preternaturalizing of the ecological balance. The natural world was always out of balance. There could not be a balanced ecology before or without man. Well, but why did we not bring the balance in our own time? Are we not men?”

The whales went away, greatly pleased and greatly relieved about something. And yet, all that the man had done was bless them and say “Your name is Whale.”

There were long conversations with some of the species, and the man was forced to become eloquent with these. But the long confrontations did not use up great quantities of time. All these things were telescoped and simultaneous.

“Your name is Lion,” “Your name is Buffalo,” “Your name is Donkey,” the man was saying. The man was tired now and in more than light travail. But he continued to name and assign the creatures. There was much discussion and instruction in each case but they did not consume much time. “Your name is Swine,” for instance, was a total statement that contained all that discussion and instruction. The palaver was like a scaffold that is disassembled and taken down when the building is completed. “Your name is Carp-fish” was such a completed structure with very much of stress and synthesis having gone into it.

“Your name is Ape,” the man said, smiling in his pain.

“No, no, no, we are men,” shouted Joe Sunrise, that big and brindled ape from Little Asia. “We are not ape. It is the miserable half-creature there who called us ape. Can he be right about anything?”

“Not of himself, and surely not about himself,” the man said. “But he hadn't this knowledge of himself. He is only an air and a noise. Remember that you yourself had the day when you named the names: You named lion and buffalo and mammoth and others. This half-thing also had his shorter day. It may have sounded as though he said, and perhaps he did say ‘Your name is Ape.’ I do say it. ‘Your name is Ape.’ Now go and fill your niche.”

There was much more to it, as there was to every confrontation, yet it consumed little time. There was lamentation from Mary Rainwood and Kingman Savanna and Linger Quick-One and others of their group. There were hairy visages and huge brown eyes staining with tears. But the apes were convinced and almost at peace when they finally accepted it and went away, speechless again but not noiseless, shedding their robes and wrappings and going hairy. They were confirmed as apes now, and they would be more fulfilled apes than they had been before.

It seemed that there was only one group left. Really, it had seemed to every group that it was the last one left; and yet every group had heard the naming of every other group, for it was all simultaneous.

“Well, come, come, my good man,” Anatole Kashish said to the man, and he clapped his hands for attention. “Now that you have disposed of the animals (and you did do it neatly, even though you were a little too wordy about it sometimes), it is time that we had our talk. We will clue you in on the world situation. Then we will be willing to listen to your special mission and message. I believe that we have been waiting for the message a long while, though frankly we expected it to be brought by a more imposing messenger.”

“You haven't any name,” the man said with an almost bluntness. “Your particular species vanishes now as a separate thing. It has never been a real species. It hasn't either body or spirit; only air and noise. Several of the creatures were correct in calling you the interlopers, the half-creatures. Be submerged now! Be nothing!”

“No, no, no, we are men,” Jorge Segundo cried out very much like the brindled ape Joe Sunrise had cried out the same words. “We are the lords of creation. Ours is the world civilization. We are the First Age of Mankind.”

“You were the Second Age of Apedom,” the man said, “and an abridged and defective age it has been. I intuit that there have been other such unsatisfactory half-ages or no-ages. Ah, and I am responsible for getting rid of the clutter you have left.”

The magic had suddenly gone out of the seven persons or erstwhile persons. Pieces of it that had fallen off them seemed to shine like jellyfish on the ground.

“We have fission, we have space travel,” Hatari Nahub protested. “We have great cities and structures of every sort.”

“I intuit all this,” the man said. “You are a hiving species, but your hives and structures do not have the style of those of the bower-birds or the honeybees or the African termites. I have wondered a little, though, how you build up these ferro-concrete hives that you call cities. Do you accrete them by deposits of your regurgitations or your excrement after you have eaten limestone and iron ore? It's a grotesque way, but the blind and instinctive actions of such hive creatures as yourselves always seem grotesque to thinking creatures such is myself. Such mindlessness, such waste in all that you do! The ferro-concrete and wood and stone and chrome hives-colonies that you construct for the billions of inmates, they are more strange, more mindless, of less use than would be so many great anthills. Go now, you mindless hiving folk. You tire me.”

“But we have civilization; we have the electromagnetic complex and the nuclear complex,” Charley Mikakeh challenged.

“And the firefly has a light in his tail,” the man said. “Go. Your short day is done.”

“But we have all the arts,” Toy Tonk claimed, and she was very near the art of tears.

“Can you sing like the mockingbird or posture like the peacock?” the man asked. “What arts do you have? Go now.”

(This was not really a long argument. The crows had argued much longer, and just for the jabbering fun of it. Besides, this was happening at the same time that all the other decisions were being given.)

“We will not go. You have not named us yet,” Helen Rubric spoke.

“It will be better if I do not speak your name,” the man said. “You will shrivel enough without. Go back to your hive cities and decay in their decay. Your speech now becomes gibberish and you begin your swift decline.”

“Why, I know who you are now,” Lisa Baron exclaimed. “You are the Genesis Myth. In fact you are the Partheno-Genesis Myth. Is it not strange that no language has a masculine form of parthen, and yet it appears to be the oldest. Now I know why the Myth is in pain. From your side, will it be? I am a doctor, among other things. May I assist?”

“No,” the man said. “You may not. And know you something else, female of the unnamed species: every myth comes true when enough time has run. There was a great myth about the earthworm once. There was even a sort of myth about yourselves. And you, creature, have a little more than the rest of your kindred. It seems a shame that you have already come and gone before the scene itself begins.”

“We have not gone, we will not go,” Anatole Kashish insisted. “Everyone is of some use. What can we offer?” Then his tongue had lost its cunning forever.

“You can offer only your submission and retroregression,” the man said.

“Ah, but tell us finally, what is our real name?” Hatari Nahub asked. Those were the last true words he ever spoke.

“Your name is Ape,” the man said. “Really your name is ‘Secondary Ape.’ ”

There were fair and dark visages, and blue and gray and brown eyes shining with tears. The seven followed the other seven away, speechless forever, shedding their robes and wrappings, knowing that the blight was already upon their already obsolete world-hives, knowing that their minds and talents were dimmed, and then not really knowing anything ever again.

Incased In Ancient Rind

The eye is robbed of impetus

By Fogs that stand and shout:

And swiftness all goes out from us

And all the stars go out.

 —  Lost Skies, O'Hanlon

“Wear a mask or die,” the alarmists had been saying louder and louder; and now they were saying “Wear a mask and die anyhow.” And why do we so often hold the alarmists in contempt? It isn't always a false alarm they sound, and this one wasn't. The pollution of air and water and land had nearly brought the world to a death halt, and crisis was at hand as the stifling poison neared critical mass.

“Aw, dog dirt, not another air pollution piece,” you say.

Oh, come off of it. You know us better than that. This is not such an account as you might suppose. It will not be stereotype, though it may be stereopticon.

“The lights are burning very brightly,” said Harry Baldachin, “this club room is sealed off as tightly as science can seal it, the air conditioning labors faithfully, the filters are the latest perfection, this is the clearest day in a week (likely a clearer day than any that will ever follow), yet we have great difficulty in seeing each other's face across the table. And we are in Mountain Top Club out in the high windy country beyond the cities. It is quite bad in the towns, they say. Suffocation victims are still lying unburied in heaps.”

“There's a curious thing about that though,” Clement Flood said. “The people are making much progress on the unburied heaps. People aren't dying as fast as they were even a month ago. Why aren't they?”

“Don't be so truculent about it, Clement,” Harry said. “The people will die soon enough. All the weaker ones have already died, I believe, and the strong ones linger awhile; but I don't see how any of us can have lungs left. There'll be another wave of deaths, and then another and another. And all of us will go with it.”

“I won't,” said Sally Strumpet. “I will live forever. It doesn't bother me very much at all, just makes my nose and eyes itch a little bit. What worries me, though, is that I don't test fertile yet. Do you suppose that the pollution has anything to do with my not being fertile?”

“What are you chattering about, little girl?” Charles Broadman asked. “Well, it is something to think about. Gathering disasters usually increase fertility, as did the pollution disaster at first. It has always been as though some cosmic wisdom was saying ‘Fast and heavy fruit now for the fruitless days ahead.’ But now it seems as if the cosmic wisdom is saying ‘Forget it, this is too overmuch.’ But fertility now is not so much inhibited as delayed,” Broadman continued almost as if he knew what he was talking about.

Sally Strumpet was a bright-eyed (presently red-eyed) seventeen-year-old actress, and that was her stage name only. Her real name was Joan Struthio, and she was met for club dinner with Harry Baldachin, Clement Flood, and Charles Broadman, all outstanding in the mentality set, because she had a publicity man who arranged such things. Sally herself belonged to the mentality set by natural right, but not many suspected this fact: only Charles Broadman of those present, only one in a hundred of those who were entranced by Sally's rather lively simpering, hardly any of the mucous-lunged people.

“This may be the last of our weekly dinners that I am able to attend,” Harry Baldachin coughed. “I'd have taken to my bed long ago except that I can't breathe at all lying down any more. I'm a dying man now, as are all of us.”

“I'm not, neither the one nor the other,” Sally said.

“Neither is Harry,” Charles Broadman smiled snakishly, “not the first, surely, and popular doubt has been cast on the second. You're not dying, Harry. You'll live till you're sick of it.”

“I'm sick of it now. By my voice you know that I'm dying.”

“By your voice I know that there's a thickening of the pharynx,” Charles said. “By your swollen hands I know that there is already a thickening of the metacarpals and phalanges, not to mention the carpals themselves. Your eyes seem unnaturally deep-set now as though they had decided to withdraw into some interior cave. But I believe that it is the thickening of your brow ridges that makes them seem so, and the new bulbosity of your nose. You've been gaining weight, have you not?”

“I have, yes, Broadman. Every pound of poison that I take in adds a pound to my weight. I'm dying, and we're all dying.”

“Why Harry, you're coming along amazingly well. I thought I would be the first of us to show the new signs, and instead it is yourself. No, you will be a very, very long time dying.”

“The whole face of the earth is dying,” Harry Baldachin maintained.

“Not dying. Thickening and changing,” said Charles Broadman.

“There's a mortal poison on everything,” Clement Flood moaned. “When last was a lake fish seen not floating belly upward? The cattle are poisoned and all the plants, all dying.”

“Not dying. Growing larger and weirder,” said Broadman.

“I am like a dish that is broken,” said the Psalmist, “my strength has failed through affliction, and my bones are consumed. I am forgotten like the unremembered dead.”

“Your dish is made thicker and grosser, but it is not broken,” Broadman insisted. “Your bones are not consumed but altered. And you are forgotten only if you forget.”

“Poor Psalmist,” said Sally. This was startling, for the Psalmist had always been a private joke of Charles Broadman, but now Sally was aware of him also. “Why, your strength hasn't failed at all,” she said. “You come on pretty strong to me. But my own nose is always itching, that's the only bad part of it. I feel as though I were growing a new nose. When can I come to another club supper with you gentlemen?”

“There will be no more,” Harry Baldachin hacked through his thickened pharynx; “We'll all likely be dead by next week. This is the last of our meetings.”

“Yes, we had better call our dinners off,” Clement Flood choked. “We surely can't hold them every week now.

“Not every week,” said Charles Broadman, “but we will still hold them. This all happened before, you know.”

“I want to come however often they are,” Sally insisted.

“How often will we hold them, dreamer, and we all near dead?” Harry asked. “You say that this has happened before, Broadman? Well then, didn't we all die with it before?”

“No. We lived an immeasurably long time with it before,” Charles Broadman stated. “What, can you not read the signs in the soot yet, Harry?”

“Just how often would you suggest that we meet then, Charles?” Clement Flood asked with weary sarcasm.

“Oh, how about once every hundred years, gentlemen and Sally. Would that be too often?”

“Fool,” Harry Baldachin wheezed and peered out from under his thickening orbital ridges.

“Idiot,” Clement Flood growled from his thickening throat.

“Why, I think a hundred years from today would be perfect,” Sally cried. “That will be a Wednesday, will it not?”

“That was fast,” Broadman admired. “Yes, it will be a Wednesday, Sally. Do be here, Sally, and we will talk some more of these matters. Interesting things will have happened in the meanwhile. And you two gentlemen will be here?”

“No, don't refuse,” Sally cut in. “You are so unimaginative about all this. Mr. Baldachin, say that you will dine with us here one hundred years from today if you are alive and well.”

“By the emphyseman God that afflicts us, and me dying and gone, yes, I will be here one hundred years from today if I am alive and well,” Harry Baldachin said angrily. “But I will not be alive this time next week.”

“And you say it also, Mr. Flood,” Sally insisted.

“Oh, stop putting fools' words in peoples' mouths, little girl. Let me die in my own phlegm.”

“Say it, Mr. Flood,” Sally insisted again, “say that you will dine with us all here one hundred years from this evening if you are alive and well.”

“Oh, all right,” Clement Flood mumbled as he bled from his rheumy eyes. “Under those improbable conditions I will be here.”

But only Sally and Charles Broadman had the quick wisdom to understand that the thing was possible.

Fog, smog, and grog, and the people perished. And the more stubborn ones took a longer time about perishing than the others. But a lethal mantle wrapped the whole globe now. It was poison utterly compounded, and no life could stand against it. There was no possibility of improvement, there was no hope of anything. It could only get worse. Something drastic had to happen.

And of course it got worse. And of course something drastic happened. The carbon pollution on earth reached trigger mass. But it didn't work out quite as some had supposed that it might.

2

We shamble through our longish terms

Of Levallosian mind

Till we be ponderous Pachyderms

Incased in ancient rind.

 — Lost Skies, O'Hanlon

Oh, for one thing, no rain, or almost no rain fell on the earth for that next hundred years. It was not missed. Moisture was the one thing that was in abounding plenty.

“But a mist rose from the earth and watered all the surface of the ground.”

Rainless rain forests grew and grew. Ten million cubic miles of seawater rose to the new forming canopy and hung there in a covering world-cloud no more than twenty miles up. Naturally the sun and moon and stars were seen no more on the earth for that hundred years; and the light that did come down through the canopy seemed unnatural. But plants turned into giant plants and spread over the whole earth, gobbling the carbon dioxide with an almost audible gnashing.

So there was more land, now, and wetter land. There was a near equipoise of temperature everywhere under the canopy. The winds were all gathered up again into that old leather bag and they blew no more on the earth. Beneath the canopy it was warm and humid and stifling from pole to pole and to the utmost reaches of the earth.

It was a great change and everything felt it. Foot-long saurians slid out of their rocks that were warm and moist again: and gobbled and grew, and gobbled and grew, and gobbled and grew. Old buried fossil suns had been intruded into the earth air for a long time, and now the effect of their carbon and heat was made manifest. Six-foot-diameter turtles, having been ready to die, now postponed that event: and in another hundred years, in two hundred, they would be ten-foot-diameter turtles, thirteen-foot-diameter turtles.

The canopy, the new lowering copper-colored sky, shut out the direct sun and the remembered blue sky, and it shut out other things that had formerly trickled down: hard radiation, excessive ultraviolet rays and all the actinic rays, and triatomic oxygen. These things had been the carriers of the short and happy life, or the quick and early death; and these things were no longer carried down.

There was a thickening of bone and plate on all boned creatures everywhere, as growth continued for added years. There were new inhibitors and new stimulants; new bodies for old — no, no — older bodies for old. Certain teeth in certain beasts had always grown for all the beast life. Now the beast life was longer, and the saber-tooths appeared again.

It was murky under the new canopy, though. It took a long time to get used to it — and a long time was provided. It was a world filled with fogs, and foggy phrases.

‘A very ancient and fish-like smell.’

‘Just to keep her from the foggy foggy dew.’

‘There were giants on the earth in those days.’

‘When Enos was ninety years old, he became the father of Cainan. Enos lived eight hundred and fifteen years after the birth of Cainan, and had other sons and daughters.’

‘Behold now Behemoth, which I have made with thee.’

‘And beauty and length of days.’

‘There Leviathan… stretched like a promontory sleeps or swims.’

‘I will restore to you the years that the locust has eaten.’

‘A land where the light is as darkness,’ said Job.

“Poor Job,” said Sally Strumpet.

‘This is my sorrow, that the right hand of the Most High is changed,’ said the Psalmist.

“Poor Psalmist,” said Sally Strumpet.

The world that was under the canopy of the lowering sky was very like a world that was under water. Everything was incomparably aged and giantized and slow. Bears grew great. Lizards lengthened. Human people broadened and grew in their bones, and lengthened in their years.

“I suppose that we are luckier than those who come before or after,” Harry Baldachin said. “We had our youths, we had much of our proper lives, and then we had this.”

This was a hundred years to a day (a Wednesday, was it not?) since that last club dinner, and the four of them, Harry Baldachin, Clement Flood, Charles Broadman, and Sally Strumpet were met once more in the Mountain Top Club. Two of them, it will be remembered, hadn't expected to be there.

“What I miss most in these last nine or ten decades is colors,” Clement Flood mused. “Really, we haven't colors, not colors as we had when I was young. Too much of the sun is intercepted now. Such aviators as still go up (the blue-sky hobbyists and such) say that there are still true colors above the canopy, that very ordinary objects may be taken up there and examined, and that they will be in full color as in ancient times. I believe that the loss of full color was understood by earlier psychologists and myth makers. In my youth, in my pre-canopy youth, I made some studies of very ancient photography. It was in black and white and gray only, just as most dreams were then in black and white and gray only. It is strange that these two things nearly anticipated the present world: we are so poor in color that we nearly fall back to the old predictions. No person under a hundred years old, unless he has flown above the canopy, has ever seen real color. But I will remember it.”

“I remember wind and storm,” said Harry Baldachin, “and these cannot now be found in their real old form even by going above the canopy. I remember frost and snow, and these are very rare everywhere on earth now. I remember rain, that most inefficient thing ever — but it's pleasant in memory.”

“I remember lightning,” said Charles Broadman, “and thunder. Ah, thunder.”

“Well, it's more than made up for in amplitude,” Clement smiled. “There is so much more of the earth that is land now, and all the land is gray and growing — I had almost used the old phrase ‘green and growing,’ but the color green can be seen now only by those who ascend above the canopy. But the world is warm and moist from pole to pole now, and filled with giant plants and giant animals and giant food. The canopy above, and the greenhouse diffusion effect below, it makes all the world akin. And the oceans are so much more fertile now — one can almost walk on the backs of the fish. There is such a lot more carbon in the carbon cycle than there used to be, such a lot more life on the earth. And more and more carbon is being put into the cycle every year.”

“That's true,” said Harry Baldachin. “That's about the only industrialism that is still being carried out, the only industrialism that is still needed: burning coal and petroleum to add carbon to the cycle, burning it by the tens of thousands of cubic miles. Certain catastrophes of the past had buried great amounts of this carbon, had taken it out of the cycle, and the world was so much poorer for it. It was as if the fruit of whole suns had been buried uselessly in the earth. Now, in the hundred years since the forming or the reforming of the canopy, and to a lesser extent during the two hundred years before its forming, these buried suns have been dug up and put to use again.”

“The digging up of buried suns has caused all manner of mischief,” Charles Broadman said.

“You are an old fogy, Charles,” Clement Flood told him. “A hundred years of amplitude have made no change at all in you.”

The hundred years had really made substantial changes in all of them. They hadn't aged exactly, not in the old way of aging. They had gone on growing in a new, or a very old way. They had thickened in face and body. They had become more sturdy, more solid, more everlasting. Triatomic oxygen, that old killer, was dense in the world canopy, shutting out the other killers; but it was very rare at ground level, a perfect arrangement. There was no wind under the canopy, and things held their levels well. How long persons might live now could only be guessed. It might be up to a thousand years.

“And how is the — ah — younger generation?” Harry Baldachin asked. “How are you, Sally? We have not seen you for a good round century.”

“I am wonderful, and I thought you'd never ask. People take so much longer to get to the point now, you know. The most wonderful news is that I now test fertile. When I was seventeen I worried that I didn't test out. The new times had already affected me, I believe. But now my term has come around, and about time I'd say. I'm a hundred and seventeen and there are cases of girls no more than a hundred who are ready. I will marry this very week and will have sons and daughters. I will marry one of the last of the aviators who goes above the canopy. I myself have gone above the canopy and seen true colors and felt the thin wind.”

“It's not a very wise thing to do,” said Harry. “They are going to put a stop to flights above the canopy, I understand. They serve no purpose; and they are unsettling.”

“Oh, but I want to be unsettled,” Sally cried.

“You should be old enough not to want any such thing, Sally,” Clement Flood advised. “We are given length of days now, and with them wisdom should come to us.”

“Well, has wisdom come?” Charles Broadman asked reasonably. “No, not really. Only slowness has come to us.”

“Yes, wisdom, we have it now,” Harry Baldachin insisted. “We enter the age of true wisdom. Long wisdom. Slow wisdom.”

“You are wrong, and unwise,” Charles Broadman said out of his thickened and almost everlasting face. “There is not, there has never been any such name or thing as unqualified Wisdom. And there surely are not such things as Long Wisdom or Slow Wisdom.”

“But there is a thing named Swift Wisdom,” Sally stated with great eagerness.

“There was once, there is not now, we lost it,” Charles Broadman said sadly.

“We almost come to disagreement,” Baldachin protested, “and that is not seemly for persons of the ample age. Ah well, we have lingered five hours over the walnuts and the wine, and perhaps it were the part of wisdom that we leave each other now. Shall we make these dinners a regular affair?”

“I want to,” Sally said.

“Yes, I'd rather like to continue the meetings at regular intervals,” Clement Flood agreed.

“Fine, fine,” Charles Broadman murmured. “We will meet here again one hundred years from this evening.”

3

And some forget to leave or let

And some forget to die:

But may my right hand wither yet

If I forget the sky.

 — Lost Skies, O'Hanlon

We are not so simple as to say that the Baluchitherium returned. The Baluchitherium was of an earlier age of the earth and flourished under an earlier canopy. Something that looked very like the Baluchitherium did appear, however. It was not even of the rhinoceros family. It was a horse grown giant and gangly. Horses of course, being artificial animals like dogs, are quite plastic and adaptable. A certain upper-lippiness quickly appeared when this new giant animal had turned into a giant leaf eater and sedge eater (“true” grass had about disappeared: how could it compete with the richer and fuller plants that flourished under the canopy?); a certain spreading of the hoofs, a dividedness more of appearance than of fact, was apparent after this animal had become a swamp romper. Well, it was a giant horse and a mighty succulent horse, but it looked like the Baluchitherium of old.

We are not so naïve as to accept that the brontosaurus came back. No. But there was a small flatfooted lizard that quickly became a large flatfooted lizard and came to look more and more like the brontosaurus. It came to look like this without changing anything except its size and its general attitude towards the world. Put a canopy over any creature and it will look different without much intrinsic change.

We surely are not gullible enough to believe that the crinoid plants returned to the ponds and the slack water pools. Well, but certain conventional long-stemmed water plants had come to look and behave very like the crinoids.

All creatures and plants had made their peace with the canopy, or they had perished. The canopy, in its two hundredth year, was a going thing; and the blue-sky days had ended forever.

There was still vestigial organic nostalgia for the blue-sky days, however. Most land animals still possessed eyes that would have been able to see full colors if there were such colors to be seen; man himself still possessed such eyes. Most food browsers still possessed enough crown to their teeth to have grazed grass if such an inefficient thing as grass had remained. Many human minds would still have been able to master the mathematics of stellar movements and positions, if ease and the disappearance of the stellar content had not robbed them of the inclination and opportunity for such things.

(There was, up to about two hundred years ago, a rather cranky pseudo-science named astronomy.)

There were other vestiges that hung like words in the fog and rank dew of the world.

‘And the name of the star is called Wormwood.’

‘In the brightness of the saints, before the day-star.’

‘It was the star-eater who came, and then the sky-eater.’

‘And the stars are not clear in his sight,’ said Job.

“Poor Job,” said Sally.

The second hundred years had gone by, and the diners had met at Mountain Top Club again. And an extra diner was with them.

“Poor Sally,” said Harry Baldachin. “You are still a giddy child, and you have already had sons and daughters. But you should not have brought your husband to this dinner without making arrangements. You could have proposed it this time, and had him here the next time. After all, it would only be a hundred years.”

We are not so soft-headed as to say that the Neanderthal Men had returned. But the diners at Mountain Top Club, with that thickening of their faces and bones and bodies that only age will bring, had come to look very like Neanderthals — even Sally a little.

“But I wanted him here this time,” Sally said. “Who knows what may happen in a hundred years?”

“How could anything happen in a hundred years?” Harry Baldachin asked.

“Besides, your husband is in ill repute,” Clement Flood said with some irritation. “He's said to be an outlaw flyer. I believe that a pickup order for his arrest was put out some six years ago, so he may be picked up at any time. In the blue-sky days he would have been picked up within twenty-four hours, but we move more graciously and slowly under the canopy.”

“It's true that there's a pickup order out for me,” said the husband. “It's true that I still fly above the canopy, which is now illegal. I doubt if I'll be able to do it much longer. I might be able to get my old craft up one more time, but I don't believe I would be able to get it down. I'll leave if you want me to.”

“You will stay,” Charles Broadman said. “You are a member of the banquet now, and you and I and Sally have them outnumbered.”

The husband of Sally was a slim man. He did not seem to be properly thickened to joint and bone. It was difficult to see how he could live a thousand years with so slight a body. Even now he showed a certain nervousness and anxiety, and that did not bode a long life.

“Why should anyone want to go above the canopy?” Harry Baldachin asked crossly. “Or rather, why should anyone want to claim to do it, since it is now assumed that the canopy is endless and no one could go above it?”

“But we do go above it,” Sally stated. “We go for the sun and the stars; for the thin wind there which is a type of the old wind; for the rain even — do you know that there is sometimes rain passing between one part of the canopy and another? — for the rainbow — do you know that we have actually seen a rainbow?”

“I know that the rainbow is a sour myth,” Baldachin said.

“No, no, it's real,” Sally swore. “Do you recall the lines of the old Vachel Lindsay: ‘When my hands and my hair and my feet you kissed / When you cried with your love's new pain / What was my name in the dragon mist / In the rings of rainbowed rain?’ Is that not wonderful?”

Harry Baldachin pondered it a moment.

“I give it up, Sally,” he said then. “I can't deduce it. Well, what's the answer to the old riddle? What is the cryptic name that we are supposed to guess?”

“Forgive him,” Charles Broadman murmured to the husband and to Sally. “We have all of us been fog-bound for too long a time below the canopy.”

“It is now believed that the canopy has always been there,” Baldachin said stiffly.

“Almost always, Harry, but not always,” Charles Broadman answered him. “It was first put there very early, on the second day, as a matter of fact. You likely do not remember that the second day is the one that God did not call good. It was surely a transient and temporary backdrop that was put there to be pierced at the proper times by early death and by grace. One of the instants it was pierced was just before this present time. It had been breached here and there for short ages. Then came the clear instant, which has been called glaciation or flood or catastrophe, when it was shattered completely and the blue sky was seen supreme. It was quite a short instant, some say it was not more than ten thousand years, some say it was double that. It happened, and now it is gone. But are we expected to forget that bright instant?”

“The law expects you to forget that instant, Broadman, since it never happened, and it is forbidden to say that it happened,” Baldachin stated stubbornly. “And you, man, the outlaw flyer, it is rumored that you have your craft hidden somewhere on this very mountain. Ah, I must leave you all for a moment.”

They sat for some five hours over the walnuts and wine. It is the custom to sit for a long time after eating the heavy steaks of any of the neo-saurians. Baldachin returned and left several times, as did Flood. They seemed to have something going between them. They might even have been in a hurry about it if hurry were possible to them. But mostly the five persons spent the after-dinner hours in near congenial talk.

“The short and happy life, that is the forgotten thing,” the husband of Sally was saying. “The blue-sky interval — do you know what that was? It was the bright death sword coming down in a beam of light. Do you know that in the blue-sky days hardly one man in ten lived to be even a hundred years old? But do you know that in the blue-sky days it wasn't sealed off? The sword stroke was a cutting of the bonds. It was a release and an invitation to higher travel. Are you not tired of living in this prison for even two hundred years or three hundred?”

“You are mad,” Harry Baldachin said.

Well of course the young man was mad. Broadman looked into the young man's eyes (this man was probably no older than Sally, he likely was no more than two hundred and twenty) and was startled by the secret he discovered there. The color could not be seen under the canopy, of course; the eyes were gray to the canopy world. But if he were above the canopy, Broadman knew, in the blue-sky region where the full colors could be seen, the young man's eyes would have been sky-blue.

“For the short and happy life again, and for the infinite release,” Sally's husband was saying. “For those under the canopy there is no release. The short and happy life and scorching heat and paralyzing cold. Hunger and disease and fever and poverty, all the wonderful things! How have we lost them? These are not idle dreams. We have them by the promise — the Bow in the Clouds and the Promise that we be no more destroyed. But you destroy yourselves under the canopy.”

“Mad, mad. Oh, but they are idle dreams, young man, and now they are over.” Harry Baldachin smiled an old saurian smile. And the room was full of ponderous guards.

“Take the two young ones,” Clement Flood said to the thickened guards.

But the laughter of Sally Strumpet shattered their ears and got under their thick skins.

“Take us?” she hooted. “How would they ever take us?”

“Girl, there are twenty of them, they will take you easily,” Baldachin said slowly. But the husband of Sally was also laughing.

“Will twenty creeping turtles be able to catch two soaring birds on the high wing?” he laughed. “Would two hundred of them be able to? But your rumor is right, Baldachin, I do have my craft hidden somewhere on this very mountain. Ah, I believe I will be able to get the old thing up one more time.”

“But we'll never be able to get it down again,” Sally whooped. “Coming, Charles?”

“Yes,” Charles Broadman cried eagerly. And he meant it, he meant it.

Those guards were powerful and ponderous, but they were just too slow. Twenty creeping turtles were no way able to catch those two soaring birds in their high flight. Crashing through windows with a swift tinkle of glass, then through the uncolored dark of the canopy world, to the rickety craft named Swift Wisdom that would go up one more time but would never be able to come down again, the last two flyers escaped through the pachydermous canopy.

“Mad,” said Harry Baldachin.

“Insane,” said Clement Flood.

“No,” Charles Broadman said sadly. “No.” And he sank back into his chair once more. He had wanted to go with them and he couldn't. The spirit was willing but the flesh was thickened and ponderous.

Two tears ran down his heavy cheeks but they ran very slowly, hardly an inch a minute. How should things move faster on the world under the canopy?

Author's Commentary

Days of Grass, Days of Straw

1

Fog in the corner and fog in his head:

Gray day broken and bleeding red.

 — Henry Drumhead, Ballads

Christopher Foxx was walking down a city street. No, it was a city road. It was really a city trail or path. He was walking in a fog, but the fog wasn't in the air or the ambient: it was in his head. Things were mighty odd here. There was just a little bit of something wrong about things.

Oceans of grass for one instance. Should a large and busy city (and this was clearly that) have blue-green grass belly-high in its main street? Things hardly remembered: echoes and shadows, or were they the strong sounds and things themselves? Christopher felt as though his eyeballs had been cleaned with a magic cleaner, as though he were blessed with new sensing in ears and nose, as though he went with a restored body and was breathing a new sort of air. It was very pleasant, but it was puzzling. How had the world been pumped full of new juice?

Christopher couldn't recall what day it was; he certainly didn't know what hour it was. It was a gray day, but there was no dullness in that gray. It was shimmering pearl-gray, of a color bounced back by shimmering water and shimmering air. It was a crimson-edged day, like a gray squirrel shot and bleeding redly from the inside and around the edges. Yes, there was the pleasant touch of death on things, gushing death and gushing life.

Christopher's own name didn't sound right to him. He didn't know what town he was in. Indeed he'd never before seen a town with all the storefronts flapping in the wind like that. Ah, they'd curl and bend, but they wouldn't break. A town made of painted buckskin, and yet it was more real than towns made of stone and concrete.

He saw persons he almost knew. He started to speak and only sputtered. Well, he'd get a newspaper then; they sometimes gave information. He reached in his pocket for a coin, and discovered that he didn't have regular pockets. He found a little leather pouch stuck in his belt. What's this? What else was stuck in his belt? It was a breechclout with the ends fore and aft passing under his belt. Instead of pants he had a pair of leggings and a breechclout, three-piece pants. Oh, oh, what else?

Oh, he wore a shirt that seemed to be leather of some sort. He wore soft shoes that were softer than slippers. He was hatless, and his hair came forward over his shoulders in two tight long braids. He had dressed casually before, but he didn't remember ever dressing like this. How were the rest of the people dressed? No two alike, really, no two alike.

But he did bring a coin out of that leather pouch that was stuck in his belt. A strange coin. It wasn't metal: it was made of stone, and made roughly. On the face of it was the head and forequarters of a buffalo. On the reverse side was the rump of a buffalo. The words on the obverse of it read WORTH ONE BUFFALO, and on the reverse they read MAYBE A LITTLE BIT LESS.

“And where do I put a coin in this contraption?” Christopher asked himself angrily and loudly. A hand extended itself, and Christopher put the coin in the hand. The hand belonged to an old wrinkled brown man, swathed in robes and folds of blackened leather, and sitting in the dust.

The old man gave Christopher a newspaper, or gave him something anyhow. It was on leather that was almost board-stiff. It was illustrated, it was printed in a variety of hands; and here and there it had a little hair growing out of it as though its leather were imperfectly scraped.

“Wait, your change,” the old brown man said. He gave Christopher seven small coins. These were neither metal nor stone: they were clay baked in the sun. The obverse of each was the head and fore of a badger, puffed and bristled and hissing in high defense. And the reverse was the reared rump of the same badger in embattled clawed stance.

“Price go down a little but not a whole badger,” the old man said. “Take three puffs. It's close as I can get to even change.” Wondering at himself, Christopher took three strong rich smokey puffs from the old pipe of the old man. He felt that he had received full value then. It was about all that he felt satisfied with. But is it wrong to feel unsatisfied, which is unsated? Christopher thought about it.

He went over and sat on a bale of rags outside the shop with the sign HOT ROAST DOG FOR SALE OR GIVE. The bale of rags seemed somehow lively; it was as if there was no division between the animate and the inanimate this day. He tried to make something out of the strange newspaper or the strange day, or the newly strange man who was apparently himself.

Oh, the newspaper was interesting. It could be read one way or another: by picture, by stylized pictograph, by various writings and printings. Here were anecdotes; wooly, horny, bottomlessly funny anecdotes: and they were about people that Christopher knew, or almost knew. And all the people passing by (Christopher realized it with a chuckling gasp) were also people that he knew or almost knew. Well, what made them so different then? They looked like familiar people, they smelled like familiar people (which the familiar people erstwhile had not done), they had the familiar name that came almost to the edge of the tongue.

“But what town is this? What day is this? What is the context?” Christopher wailed out loud. “Why is everything so strange?”

“Kit-Fox, you call me?” Strange Buffalo boomed at him. Strange Buffalo was a big and boisterous man and he had always been a good friend of Christopher. He had? Then why did he look so different? And why was his real name, or his other name, now unremembered?

“Will the buffalo go to war, do you think, Kit-Fox?” Strange Buffalo asked him. “Do you believe that the two great herds of them will go to war? They come near to each other now and they swear that neither will give way.”

“No, there will be only the pushing and goring of a few thousand bulls, not much else,” Christopher said. “The buffalo simply haven't the basis for a real war.” He was surprised at his own knowledge of the subject.

“But the buffalo have human advisers now,” Strange Buffalo said. “It began with the betting, of course, but now we can see that there is real cause of conflict on both sides. I dabble in this myself and have some good ideas. We are tying spear-shafts to the horns of some of the big bulls and teaching them to use them. And we're setting up big bows and teaching them to bend them with their great strength, but they haven't any accuracy at all.”

“No, I don't believe they were meant to have a real war. It's a wonderful dust they raise, though, when they all come together. It makes you glad to be alive. And the thunder of their millions of hoofs!” (There was the distant sound of morning thunder.) “Or is that a thundering in the mountains?” Kit-Fox — ah, Christopher was asking.

“Well, there is quite a clatter in the mountains this morning, Kit,” Strange Buffalo was saying in happy admiration. “The deep days, the grass days like this one aren't come by easily. It's a wonder the mountains aren't knocked to pieces when the big prophets pray so noisily and wrestle so strong. But, as the good skin says, we must work out our salvation in fear and thundering.”

“Is it not ‘In fear and trembling’?” Christopher asked as he lounged on the lively bale of rags.

“No, Kit-Fox, no!” Strange Buffalo pealed at him. “That's the kind of thing they say during the straw days; not here, not now. In the Cahooche shadow-writing it says ‘In fear and chuckling,’ but the Cahooche words for thunder and chuckling are almost the same. On some of the Kiowa antelope-skin drawings, ‘In scare-shaking and in laughter-shaking.’ I like that. I wish I could pray and wrestle as wooly and horny as the big ones do. Then I'd get to be a prophet on the mountain also, and I'd bring in more days of grass. Yes, and days of mesquite also.”

“The mountain is a funny one this morning, Strange Buffalo. It doesn't reach clear down to the ground,” Christopher said. “There's a great space between, and there are eagles flying underneath it.”

“Ah, it'll fall back after a while, Kit-Fox, when they have won or lost the wrestling for the day; after they have generated sufficient juice for this day, for I see that they have already won it and it will be a day of grass. Let's go have a rack of roast dog and a gourd of choc beer,” Strange Buffalo proposed.

“In a minute, Strange Buffalo. I am in the middle of a puzzle and I have this fog in my head. What day is this?”

“It's one of the days of grass, Kit-Fox. I just told you that.”

“But which one, Strange Buffalo? And what, really, are ‘days of grass’?”

“I believe that it is the second Monday of Indian Summer, Kit-Fox,” Strange Buffalo was saying as he gave the matter his thought and attention. “Or it may be the first Monday of Blue-Goose Autumn. We're not sure, though, that it is a Monday. It sounds and tastes more like a Thursday or an aleikaday.”

“It sure does,” Christopher — ah, Kit-Fox agreed.

A laughing, dying man was carried past by four hale men. This fortunate one had been smashed by bear or rolled on by horse or gored by buffalo, and the big red blood in him was all running out.

“It works,” the happy dying man cried out. “It works. I got a little too close to him and he ripped me to pieces, but it works. We are really teaching those big bulls to use the spears lashed to their horns. Others will carry on the work and the fun. I bet that I've had it.”

“A little blood to bless me!” Strange Buffalo cried out, and the dying man splashed him with the rich and rigorous blood.

“For me also,” Kit-Fox begged, and the dying man smeared him with blood on the brow and breast and shoulders and loins. Two other friends, Conquering Sharp-Leaf and Adoration on the Mountain, came and were blessed with the blood. Then the man died and was dead.

“There is nothing like the fine rich blood to make a grass day sing in your head and in your body,” Strange Buffalo exulted. “On the straw days they try to hide the blood or they bleed in a dark corner.”

(What was all this about the grass days and the straw days? There was now a sordid dull-dream quality, a day-of-straw quality that kept trying to push itself in. “For a little while,” it begged, “to reestablish rigor and rule and reason for just a little while.” “Go away,” said the day-of-grass quality, “The wrestle was won this morning, and this is a day out of the count.”)

Kit-Fox and Strange Buffalo went in, past the booths and work areas of the coin-makers, past the stands of the eagle-wing-bone-whistle makers, and into the shop which had roast dog for sale or give. Strange Buffalo had a shoulder of dog and Kit-Fox had a rack of ribs. There was fried bread also, and hominy and pumpkin. There was choc beer dipped with gourd dippers out of a huge crock. Thousands of people were there. It was crowded and it was supposed to be. The man named Mountain twinkled in the air. Why had they not noticed that about him before?

Folks rolled up the walls and tied them. Now the strong smoke and savor could visit all the places, and the folks in every shop could see into every other shop. It was full morning and beginning to get warm.

“But I still want to know the date,” Kit-Fox insisted, not quite converted to the day of grass, not quite clear of the head-fog that accompanies the sullen burning of the straw days. “What newspaper is this that doesn't have a date? I want a date!”

“Look at it. It tells,” said Strange Buffalo.

“You want a date, honey?” the top of the newspaper writhed in sudden flickering of day-fire print. “Phone 582-8316 and I give you a real date.” Then the day-fire print was gone.

“I hope I can remember that number,” Kit-Fox said anxiously. “Strange Buffalo, where is there a telephone exchange?”

“They are the same and single and right outside past the booths,” Strange Buffalo said. “You were sitting upon it when I came upon you. And you, you old straw-head, you thought it was a bale of rags.”

Kit-Fox went outside, past the booths of the stone-buffalo-coin makers and the clay-badger-coin makers, past the tents of the porcupine-quill dealers, to what he had thought was a bale of rags, a lively bale of rags as he now remembered it. Well, it was an ample lady in her glad rags and she was the telephone exchange lying there in the grass.

“I want to call number 582-8316,” Kit-Fox said uneasily.

“Here are a handful of dice,” the glad-rags lady told him. “Arrange them here in the short grass and make any number you want.”

“But proper dice have numbers only to six,” Kit-Fox protested, “and some of the numbers are higher.”

“Those are improper dice, they are crooked dice,” the lady said. “They have numbers more than six and numbers less than one. Number out your telephone number in the short grass with them.”

“Are you sure this is the way to dial a number?” Kit-Fox asked.

“Sure I'm not sure,” the lady said. “If you know a better way, do it that way. Worth a try kid, worth a try.”

Kit-Fox numbered out his numbers in the short grass.

“Now what do I do?” he asked.

“Oh, talk into the telephone here.”

“That buckskin bag is a telephone?”

“Try it, try it. Drop a badger coin in and try it.”

Kit-Fox dropped the coin into the telephone. “Hello, hello,” he said.

“Hello, hello,” the lady answered. “That's my number you called. You want a date, I wait for you awhile. Believe me, I get pretty tired of waiting pretty soon.”

“I don't think this is a telephone exchange at all,” Kit-Fox grumbled.

“How else I can get guys so easy to drop badger-coins in a buckskin bag,” the lady said. “Come along, lover man, we will have a grand time this day.”

The lady was full-bodied and jolly. Kit-Fox remembered her from somewhere.

“Who are you?” he asked her.

“I'm your wife in the straw days,” she said, “but this is a grass day. They're harder to find, but they're more fun when you find one. They have something to do with grandfather's brother and that wrestling of his.”

“Days of grass, days of straw,” Kit-Fox said as he embraced the lady passionately. “How about a hay day?”

“You mean a heyday? Those are special. We hope to make them more often, if only the wrestle is better. They're fuller of juice than the grass days even. We try to make one now.”

They made a heyday together (together with a whole nation of people); and it went on and on. Day-Torch (that was the lady in the glad rags, the lady who was Kit-Fox's wife during the straw days) bought an eagle-wing-bone whistle from a dealer, and she whistled happy haunting tunes on it. The people followed Kit-Fox and Day-Torch out of town, out to the oceans of buffalo grass and blue-stem grass. They torched everything that was dry and set the blue-black smoke to rolling. But the fundamental earth was too green to burn.

All mounted horses and took lances. They went out after buffalo. Word was brought to them that some of the newly-armed buffalo bulls wanted to schedule battle with them. And the battle was a good one, with gushing blood and broken-open bodies, and many on each side were killed.

Strange Buffalo was killed. That big boisterous man died with a happy whoop.

“Strange Buffalo, indeed,” one of the buffalo bulls said. “He looks like a man to me.”

When the ground there had become too soggy and mired in blood, they adjourned the battle till the next day of grass, or the one after that. Bloody battles are fine, but who wants to spend a whole day on one? There are other things. Kit-Fox and Day-Torch and a number of other folks went to higher ground.

There was a roaring river on the higher ground, the biggest river ever and the loudest.

“Oh be quiet,” Day-Torch said. “You've got the tune wrong.” The great river ceased to roar. Day-Torch whistled the right tune on the eagle-wing-bone whistle. Then the river resumed its roaring, but in this right tune now. This mightiest of all rivers was named Cottonwood Creek.

Henry Drumhead added his beat to the tune. Then the folks had a rain dance till the sharp rain came down and drenched them through. They had a sun dance then, till the sun dried up the mud and began to burn the hides of the people. They had a cloud dance then. They had an antelope dance till enough antelope came to provide a slaughter and a feast. They had a pit dance, a fire dance, a snake dance, and an ashes dance: the ashes from pecan wood and hickory wood are a better condiment than salt to go with roast antelope. They had a feast dance. Then (after a while) a shakedown dance. They had a thunder dance and a mountain dance.

Say, it is spooky to come to the foot of the mountain itself and see the great gap between it and the ground! Rocks and boulders fell off of the bottom of the mountain and killed many of the people below. And, from the mountain itself, a broken, bloody, and headless torso fell down to the earth.

Helen Hightower — ah, that is to say the glad-rag lady Day-Torch — set up a rakish screaming, “The head, the head, somebody forgot the head!”

There was a thunderous grumbling, a mountain-shaking irritation, but the bloody head did come down and smash itself like a bursting pumpkin on the earth.

“A lot of times they forget to throw the head down if you don't remind them,” Day-Torch said.

The meaning of the fallen torso and head was that there was now one less prophet or wrestler on the mountain; that there was now an opportunity for one more man to ascend to glory and death.

Several of the men attempted it by various devices, by piling cairns of stones to climb upon, by leaping into the air to try to grab one of the dangling roots of the mountain, by hurling lances with trailing lianas to fasten quivering in the bottom of the mountain. They played it out in the garish day there where all the colors were so bright that they ached. Many of the men fell to their deaths, but one ascended. There is always one who is able to ascend to the great wrestle when there is an empty place to receive him.

And the one who ascended was — no, no, you'll not have his name from us yet.

Something was mighty odd here. There was just a little bit of something right about things.

2

Draftsman, draftsman, what do you draw? Dog days, draggy days, days of straw.

 — Ballads, Henry Drumhead

3

Indian Summer. A period of warm or mild weather late in autumn or in early winter.

 — Webster's Collegiate

So Webster's Collegiate defines it, but Webster's hasn't the humility ever to admit that it doesn't know the meaning of a word or phrase. And it doesn't know the meaning of this one.

There are intervals, days, hours, minutes that are not remembered directly by anyone. They do not count in the totality of passing time. It is only by the most sophisticated methods that even the existence of these intervals may be shown.

There are whole seasons, in addition to the four regular seasons that are supposed to constitute the year. Nobody knows where they fit in, there being no room for them anywhere in the year; nobody has direct memory of being in them or living in them. Yet, somehow, they have names that have escaped these obliterations. The name of one of the misfit seasons is Indian Summer.

(“Why can't the Indians have their summer in the summertime like the rest of us?” comes a high voice with a trace of annoyance. Not a high-pitched voice: a high voice.)

But all that is neither here nor there. It is yonder, and we will come to it.

Christopher Foxx was walking down a city street. Things were mighty even here, mighty neat. There was just a little bit of something wrong about their rightness.

The world was rubbed, scrubbed, and tubbed; it was shaved, paved and saved; it was neat, sweet, and effete. Ah, the latter was possibly what was wrong with it, if anything could be wrong with perfection. The colors were all flat (flat colors had been deemed best for nerves and such), and the sounds were all muted. Christopher, for a moment, wished for a color that shrieked and for a sound that blazed. He put the thought resolutely out of his head. After all, he had for wife Helen Hightower, and he suffered much criticism because of her gaudiness and exuberance.

Christopher took a paper from the slot on the corner, noted that it was a day in May (he had a queer feeling that he had been uneasy about the date, and yet all that registered with him was that it fell within a familiar month). He entered the North Paragon Breakfast Club. It was there that the Symposium would begin (it would last the whole day and into the night, and be held at various sites) on the multiplex subject “Spatial and Temporal Underlays to the Integrated World, with Insights as to Their Possible Reality and Their Relationship to the World Unconscious and to the Therapeutic Amnesia; with Consideration of the Necessity of Belief in Stratified Worlds, and Explorations of the Orological Motif in Connection with the Apparent Occurrence of Simultaneous Days.” It would have been an exciting subject if Excitement had not become another of the muted things.

Buford Strange was already at the North Paragon, and with him were Adrian Montaigne and Vincent Rue.

“I have already ordered for ourselves and for yourself, Christopher,” Buford said. “It is sheldrake, and I hope that you like it. They will not prepare it for fewer than four persons. ‘We can't go around killing quarter ducks,’ they say.”

“That is all right,” Christopher said meekly. He glanced at the other three nervously. There was surely something familiar about them all.

Great blue mountain thunder! Why shouldn't there be! He had worked with these men daily for several years. But, no, no, his edgy mind told him that they were familiar in some other and more subtle way. He glanced at the paper which he had taken from the corner slot outside. Something like quick flame ran across the top of it and was gone too quickly to verify. But was it possible that the flame had said “You want a date, honey? You phone — ” Of course it was not possible. Clearly, at the top of the paper it was printed A DAY IN MAY. Clearly? Was that clear enough for a date?

“What date is this?” Christopher asked the three of them.

“May the eighth, of course,” Adrian answered him. “You've got today's Journal in your hand and still you ask?”

Well now it was printed clearly there, May 8, and there was no nonsense about “a day in May”; still less was there anything like “You want a date, honey?”

Some wild-looking children burst into the North Paragon Breakfast Club.

“Straw-Men! Straw-Men!” they cried at the four gentlemen there. “Straw-Men! Straw-Men!” The children buffeted the four men a bit, did other extravagant things that are since forgotten, and then they went out of the Breakfast Club again: or at least they disappeared; they were no longer there.

“Why should they have done that?” Adrian asked, puzzled. “Why should they have called us that, and done the other things?”

“Why should who have called us what?” Vincent asked, even more puzzled.

“I don't know,” Adrian said dryly. “It seemed that someone was here and said or did something.”

“You're witless, Adrian,” Vincent chided. “Nobody was here.”

“Straw-Man,” Christopher Foxx said softly. “I remember the word now and I couldn't remember it before. I woke up this morning trying to remember it. It seemed to be the key to a dream that was slipping away in spite of my trying to hang onto it. I have the key word now, but it fits nothing. The dream is gone forever.”

“We will come back to this subject later in our discussions,” Buford Strange said. “I believe that your word ‘Straw-Man,’ Christopher, is a part of the underlay, or perhaps of the overlay, that pertains to our world and our study. There is a good chance that certain children, or perhaps dwarfs or gnomes, entered here several moments ago. Did any of you notice them?”

“No,” said Vincent Rue.

“No one entered,” said Adrian Montaigne.

“No. I didn't see anyone,” said Christopher Foxx.

“Yet I believe that a group did come in,” Buford Strange continued suavely. “It was a group unusual enough to be noticed. Then why didn't we notice it? Or why did we forget, within a short moment, that we had seen it at all? I believe it was because the group was in a different sort of day. I am nearly sure that it is a group that lives in either St. Martin's Summer or in the Kingfisher Days. Ah, here is the sheldrake ready with all the trimmings! Drool and be happy. We shall never know such moment again.”

It was a momentous fowl, no question of that. It was good, it was rich, it was overflowing with juice. It was peer of the fowl that are found in the land named St. Succulentus's Springtime. (What? What? There is a land named that?)

The four noble men (they were ennobled by the circumstance) fell to eating with what, in days of another sort, might almost be called gusto. It was a royal bird and was basted with that concoction of burst fruits and crushed nuts and peppers and ciders and holy oils and reindeer butter that is called — (wait a bit) — 

“Do you know that the sheldrake is really a mysterious creature?” Buford Strange asked as he ate noisily (nobody eats such royal fare in quiet). Buford acted as if he knew a secret.

“It is not a mysterious creature at all,” Adrian countered (he knew it was, though). “It is only the common European duck.”

“It is not only the common European duck,” Buford said strongly. “In other days it may be quite uncommon.”

“What are you saying, Buford?” Vincent Rue asked him. “In what other days?”

“Oh, I believe, possibly, in what the Dutch call Kraanzomer, Crane-Summer. Are we agreed that the other days, the days out of count, are topic rather than temporal?”

“We are not even agreed that there are days out of count,” Christopher objected.

“Drakes' teeth, by the way, while rare, are not unknown,” Adrian Montaigne popped the statement out of his mouth as if in someone else's voice. He seemed startled at his own words.

“Drake is really the same word as Drakos, a dragon,” Christopher Foxx mumbled. “Ah, I was going to say something else but it is gone now.”

“Waiter, what is the name of the excellent stuff with which the drake is basted and to which it is wedded?” Vincent Rue asked in happy wonder.

“Dragons' sauce,” said the waiter.

“Well, just what is the mystery, the uncommonness of the sheldrake, Buford?” Christopher asked him.

“I don't seem to remember,” that man said. “Ah, let us start our discussion with my, our, failure to remember such things. Vincent, did you not have a short paper prepared on ‘Amnesia, the Holes in the Pockets of the Seamless Garment’?”

“I forget. Did I have such a paper prepared? I will look in my own pockets.”

Meanwhile, back on the mountain, back on the thundering mountain there were certain daring and comic persons rushing in and out and counting coup on the Wrath of God. It is a dangerous game. These were the big prophets who prayed so violently and sweat so bloodily and wrestled so strongly. It was they who fought for the salving or the salvation of the days, in fear and in chuckling, in scare-shaking and in laughter-shaking.

The thundering mountain was a funny one this morning. It didn't reach clear to the ground. There was a great space between, and there were eagles flying under it. And the day, the day, was it really the first Monday of Blue-Goose Autumn? Was it really a Monday at all? Or was it a Thursday or an aleikaday?

It was like another morning of not long before. The eagles remember it; the clouds remember it; the mountain wrestlers remember it dimly, though some of the memory has been taken away from them.

Remember how it is written on the holy skins: “If you have faith you shall say to the mountain ‘Remove from here and cast thyself into the sea’ and it will do it. Well, on that morning they had tried it. Several of the big prophets and wrestlers tried it, for they did have faith. They groaned with travail and joy, they strove mightily, and they did move the mountain and make it cast itself into the sea.

But the thunders made the waters back off. The waters refused to accept or to submerge the mountain. The prayer-men and wrestlers had sufficient faith, but the ocean did not. Whoever had the last laugh on that holy morning?

The strivers were timeless, of the prime age, but they were often called the “grandfathers' brothers” by the people. They were up there now, the great prophets and prayer-men and wrestlers. One of these intrepid men was an Indian and he was attempting to put the Indian Sign on God himself. God, however, was like a mist and would not be signed.

“We will wrestle,” the Indian said to God in the mist, “we will wrestle to see which of us shall be Lord for this day. I tell you it is not thick enough if only the regular days flow. I hesitate to instruct you in your own business, and yet someone must instruct you. There must be overflowing and special days apart from the regular days. You have such days, I am sure of that, but you keep them prisoned in a bag. It is necessary now that I wrest one of them from you.”

They wrestled, inasmuch as a man slick with his own sweat and blood may wrestle with a mist: and it seemed that the Indian won the lordship of a day from God. “It will be a day of grass,” the Indian said. “It will be none of your dry and juiceless days.” The Indian lay exhausted with his fingers entwined in the won day: and the strength came back to him. “You make a great thing about marking every sparrow's fall,” the Indian said then. “See that you forget not to mark this day.”

The thing that happened then was this: God marked the day for which they had wrestled, but he marked it on a different holy skin in a different place, not on the regular skin that lists the regular days. This act caused the wrested Day to be one of the Days out of Count.

Prophets, wrestlers, praying-men of other sorts were on the mountain also. There were black men who sometimes strove for kaffir-corn days or ivory-tree days. There were brown island men who wrestled for shellfish days or wild-pig days. There were pinkish north-wood men who walked on pine needles and balsam; there were gnarled men out of the swampy lands; there were town men from the great towns. All of these strove with the Lord in fear and in chuckling.

Some of these were beheaded and quartered, and the pieces of them were flung down violently to earth: it is believed that there were certain qualities lacking in these, or that their strength had finally come to an end. But the others, the most of them, won great days from the Lord, Heydays, Halcyon or Kingfisher Days, Mädchensommer Days, St. Garvais Days, Indian Summer Days. These were all rich days, full of joy and death, bubbling with ecstasy and blood. And yet all were marked on different of the holy skins and so they became the Days out of Count.

“Days out of the Count,” Buford Strange was saying. “It's an entrancing idea, and we have almost proved it. Seasons out of the count! It's striking that the word for putting a condiment on should be the same word as a division of the year. Well, the seasons out of the count are all well seasoned and spiced. There are whole multiplex layered eras out of the count. The ice ages are such. I do not say ‘were such’; I say ‘are such.’ ”

“But the ice ages are real, real, real,” Helen Hightower insisted. (Quite a few long hours had passed in the discussions, and now Helen Hightower, the wife of Christopher Foxx, was off her work at the telephone exchange and had put on her glad rags and joined the scholars.)

“Certainly they are real, Helen,” Buford Strange said. “If only I were so real! I believe that you remember them, or know them, more than most of us do. You have a dangerously incomplete amnesia on so many things that I wonder the thunder doesn't come and take you. But in the days and years and centuries and eras of the straight count there are no ice ages.”

“Well then, how, for instance, would local dwellers account for terminal moraines and glacial till generally?” asked Conquering Sharp-Leaf — ah, Vincent Rue.

(They were at the university, in that cozy room in the psychology department where Buford Strange usually held forth, the room that was just below the special effects room of Prof. Timacheff.)

“How did they account for such before the time of modern geology?” Buford asked. “They didn't. There would be a new boulder one morning that had not been there the day before. The sheep-herder of the place would say that the moon had drawn it out of the ground, or that it had fallen from the sky.”

“You're crazy, Buford,” Adrian Montaigne said with a certain affection. “Why the ice ages then? Why should they have happened, even in times out of count? Why should they have left their footprints in the times within the count?” Adrian had very huge and powerful hands. Why had they not noticed this before?

“I believe there was a dynasty of great and muscular prophets and ghost-wrestlers who wanted to call out the terrible days of Fimbul Winter,” Buford said in a hushed voice. “I don't know why they wanted such things, or why they sweated blood and wrestled prodigies to obtain them. They were men, but they are remembered as the frost giants.”

“Oh my grand, grand uncles!” Day-Torch — Helen Hightower, rather, cried out. “Days of snow! Days of ice! Millions of them!”

“You are saying that certain archetypes — ” Kit-Fox began.

“Shook the pillars of Heaven till the snow and ice fell down for a million days, for a million days out of the count,” Buford Strange finished.

“Strange Buffalo, ah, Buford, you are crazy,” Christopher Foxx chided much as Adrian had. Christopher was talking, but the queerly smiling Adrian had now become the presence in the room. Adrian had the curious, under-rutile of the skin of one who has sweat blood in prayer and buffoonery and passion. Why had they not noticed that of him before?

“I could almost believe that you were one of the great challengers yourself, Strange,” Christopher said to Buford, but he was looking at Adrian.

“You strike me as with a lance, Kit,” Buford said sadly. “You uncover my mortification. For I failed. I don't know when it was. It was on a day out of the count. I failed a year ago or ten thousand years ago. I could not make it among the great ones. I was not cast out to my death: I was never in. There was room for me, and an opportunity for the ascent, but I failed in nerve. And one who has aspired to be a champion or prophet cannot fall back to be an ordinary man. So I am less than that: I am short of manhood. But, sadly, I do remember and live in other sorts of days.”

“I believe that the aberrant days are simultaneous with the prosaic days,” Adrian Montaigne mused. Adrian was quite a large man. Why had they not noticed that before?

“No, no, they are not simultaneous,” Buford was correcting him. “There are the days out of the count and there are the days in the count. Those out of count are outside of time so they cannot be simultaneous with anything. You have to see it that way.”

“You see it your way and I'll see it mine.” Adrian was stubborn. “Consider some of the aberrant times or countries: St. Garvais' Springtime, St. Martin's Summer (the Saints in these names were mountain prophets and wrestlers, but some of them were not at all saintly in their violence), Midas March (the very rich need their special season also: it is said that, in their special month, they are superiorly endowed in all ways), Dog Days, Halcyon Days, Dragon Days, Harvest May (what in the world is harvested in May?), All-Hallow Summer, Days of Ivory, Days of Horn, Indian Summer, Wicklow Week, Apricot Autumn, Goose Summer, Giant-Stone Days, Day of the Crooked Mile, the season called Alcedonia by the Latins. I tell you that all these days are happening at the same time!” This man named Adoration on the Mountain, or rather Adrian Montaigne, had a reckless sort of transcendence about him now.

“No, they do not all happen at the same time,” Strange Buffalo was saying, “for the aberrant days of them are not in time. They are places and not times.”

“Are there no night-time hours in the times out of time?” Vincent Rue asked.

“No. Not in the same sense. They are in another province entirely,” Buford said.

There was thunder in the special effects room of Professor Timacheff on the floor just above them, cheerful, almost vulgar thunder. Timacheff taught some sensational (sense response and also melodramatic) courses up there. But how did he get such special effects anyhow?

“They do happen at the same time,” Adrian Mountain insisted, and he was laughing like boulders coming together. Quite a few things seemed to be happening to Adrian all at the same time. “They are all happening right now. I am sitting with you here this minute, but I am also on the mountain this minute. The thunder in the room above, it is real thunder, you know. And there is a deeper, more distant, more raffish thunder behind it which primitives call God's-Laughter Thunder.”

“This gets out of hand now,” Vincent Rue protested. “It is supposed to be a serious symposium on spatial and temporal underlays. Several of you have turned it into a silly place and a silly time. You are taking too anthropomorphic a view of all these things, including God. One does not really wrestle with God in a bush or a mist, or ride in wildly on a pony and count coup on God. Even as an atheist I find these ideas distasteful.”

“But we are anthropoi, men,” Adrian proclaimed. “What other view than an anthropomorphic view could we take? That we should play the God-game, that we should wrestle with a God-form and try to wrest lordship of days from him, that we should essay to count coup on God, I as a theist do not find at all distasteful.

“Why! One of them is failing now! It happens so seldom. I wonder if I have a chance.”

“Adrian, what are you talking about?” Vincent demanded.

“How could you do it, Adrian, when I could not?” Buford Strange asked.

“Remember me when you come to your place, Adrian,” Day-Torch cried. “Send me a day. Oh, send me a day-fire day.”

“And me also, Adrian,” Kit-Fox begged. “I would love to do it myself, but it isn't given to everyone.”

There was a strong shouting in the room above. There was the concussion of bodies, and the roaring of mountain winds.

“What in all the crooked days is Professor Timacheff doing up there this evening?” Vincent Sharp-Leaf asked angrily. “And what things are you doing here, Adrian? You look like a man set afire.”

“Make room for me! Oh, make room for me!” Adrian of the Mountain cried out in a voice that had its own crackling thunder. He was in the very transport of passion and he glistened red with his own bloody sweat. “One is failing, one is falling, why doesn't he fall then?”

“Help with it, Kit-Fox! And I help also,” Day-Torch yowled.

“I help!” Kit-Fox yelped. The room shuddered, the building shuddered, the whole afternoon shuddered. There was a rending of boulders, either on the prophet's mountain or in the special effects room of Professor Timacheff above them. There was a great breaking and entering, a place turning into a time.

There came a roaring like horses in the sky. Then was the multiplex crash (God save his soul, his body is done for) of bloody torso and severed limbs falling into the room from a great height, splintering the table at which the five of them sat, breaking the room, splattering them all with blood. But the ceiling above was unbreached and unharmed and there was no point of entry.

“I am not man enough even to watch it,” Buford Strange gurgled, and he slumped sideways unconscious.

“Timacheff, you fool!” Vincent Rue bawled to the space above them. “Watch your damned special effects! You're wrecking the place!”

Unquestionably that Timacheff was good. He used his special effects in classes on phenomenology that he taught up there.

“The head, the head! Don't let them forget the head!” Day-Torch cried in a flaming voice.

“I just remembered that Timacheff is out of town and is holding no classes today,” Kit-Fox muttered in vulpine wonder.

“Make room for me! Oh, make room for me!” Adrian Mountain boomed. Then he was gone from the midst of them. He would be a factor, though, “in days to come.”

“The head, the head!” Day-Torch flamed and scorched.

Christopher and Vincent tried to straighten up the unconscious Buford Strange. They shook him, but he came apart and one arm came off him. He was revealed as a straw-man filled with bloody straw, and no more.

“Why, he's naught but a poorly made scarecrow,” Christopher Foxx said in wonder. “He was right that one who falls back from it cannot become an ordinary man again. He will be less than man.”

“That's funny. He always looked like a man to me,” Vincent Rue said.

“The head, the head! You forget the head. Let the head fall down!” Day-Torch cried.

And the head fell down.

It smashed itself like a bursting pumpkin on the broken floor.

4

Under the town is a woolier town,

And the blood splashed up and the head fell down.

 — Ballads, Henry Drumhead

Barnaby's Clock

It shall be what o'clock I say it is.

Taming of the Shrew
 — Shakespeare

“How old is grass?” a little boy asked his uncle who was an industrialist and eccentric.

“About twenty million years old, Robert Dan,” said the i and e. “It's only from the Miocene. It's just about the youngest plant that we have and we're not sure that it's here to stay. There's a lot of things wrong with grass.”

“How old is that hill?” the boy asked.

“Oh, that hill is a young fellow: not over a million years old. It's from a very recent uplift and an even more recent eroding. We're on the edge of a change here though. Within three miles I can show you a hill that's seventy-five times that old.”

“How old is Corn Flakes?”

“About a hundred years old. They were developed by Dr. John H. Kellogg. Post Toasties, invented by Charles W. Post, are about the same age. If you are wondering about Shredded Wheat, it was first made by Henry D. Perkey at about the same time also.”

“No, I hardly ever wonder about Shredded Wheat. How old is that cloud?”

“Likely about an hour and seventeen minutes old. You can watch it still growing. When the wind changed here about forty-six minutes ago, that cloud was already pretty far into its formation. It was about twenty-two miles southwest of here then.”

“How old is saxophones?”

“Born in the year 1840. The sire and inventor was Antoine Sax.”

“How old is mice?”

“Not old at all. About twenty-five million years old; almost the newest thing in animals. The first mouse, with no antecedents at all, popped out from behind a piece of baseboard quarter-round (in a cave, I suppose) just about that long ago.”

“How old is Billy Dukes?”

“I don't know, Robert Dan. About eight years old, I guess: unless he's a midget, in which case he might be older.”

“He's seven, the same as me. A lot of good it does to ask you things if you don't know the answers.”

Aw, that isn't the way this account begins. We just put that in for fun.

II

that bald sexton, Time

King John

 — Shakespeare

“We need a clock that will work!” the great cosmologist cried angrily.

“Sweet man, do we ever!” his wife put in. “You with a Nobel Prize for Functions and you can't even get the clock in the kitchen to function.”

“The Uranium/Lead-Ratio clock is only good when there is no lead to start with,” the cosmologist complained, “and there is always lead.”

“Get the lead out, that's what I keep telling you,” the wife said.

“The Rubidium/Strontium-Ratio clock must be set by guesswork. Everything about Strontium is guesswork,” the cosmologist continued sadly. “The Potassium/Argon clock is a joke, and a sick joke at that. We need a clock that will work.”

“The living-room clock still works part of the time,” the wife said, “but it hisses and spits sparks every time I plug it in.”

“The Lead/Alpha-Particle-Ratio clock can be trusted only as far as its zircon crystals,” the cosmologist went on, “and I sure wouldn't burn my back on a bunch of zircon crystals. None of the RadioCarbon clocks is any good, and the Carbon-Fourteen clock is the worst of them all. You must always multiply its results by two or five or ten or even fifty to get a scientifically acceptable answer and I feel guilty every time I do that. And with every such clock I can think of there is always something wrong with the quality of the time. We need a clock that will work right every shot.”

“We sure do, Buster,” the wife said. “The bedroom clock only runs when the alarm is sounding, and it gets on my nerves with that thing shrilling all day long.”

That isn't the way it begins either, but we're getting closer. This time we'll hit it right in the middle.

III

“Carrock, Carrock,” Said Barney's clock.

 — Anonymous

“Man, have I got me a clock!” Barnaby Sheen was saying, coming into the room and rubbing his hands with glee.

“Man, do you ever need one!” Cris Benedetti gruffed. “You're forty-five minutes late. Luckily you never lock your doors or we'd be waiting in the swelter all this time.”

“Why, it's eight o'clock exactly,” Barnaby checked it, “and eight was our meeting.”

“It's eight forty-five,” Cris also checked it, and sourly.

“Have I been angry?” Barnaby asked himself out loud. “Have I been angry for forty-five minutes?”

“Carrock, carrock,” came a peculiar cry from the next room. It seemed as if we had been hearing it before.

“What has angry to do with it, Barney?” Harry O'Donovan wanted to know.

“Ah, my personal timepiece, my wristwatch, will not run when I am angry or when I am feeling bad,” Barnaby explained. “It will not run on bad time. It's always been like that.”

“Why not get another watch?” Doctor George Drakos suggested.

“It's been like that with every watch I've ever had,” Barnaby said. “But, man, have I got me a clock!”

Five of us were met together there in Barnaby Sheen's house: Barnaby himself, Cris Benedetti, Harry O'Donovan, and Doctor George Drakos, the four men who knew everything; and myself who did not.

“Carrock, carrock,” again came the sound from the next room. Which next room? It seemed to be newly partitioned off from the room where we were gathered, and it was closed.

“What have you got in there, Barney, a dog?” Harry O'Donovan asked in his high voice.

“No, of course I don't have a dog in there,” Barnaby answered. “Who ever heard of a dog that says ‘carrock, carrock’? What's the matter with you anyhow, Harry? Man, have I ever got a clock!”

“Curse your clock. What's the thing in the other room?” Cris asked.

“You wouldn't believe if I told you: you wouldn't believe if I showed you. Therefore I'll do neither one this night. It's a new pet of mine, or a servant, or a companion, or a friend, something such.”

“Is it an animal?” Doctor Drakos asked, puzzled.

“A little more animal than you are, George. Not much more, but a little. You've a strong animal streak in yourself, you know. To the clock though: it will give the exact age of any person, creature, thing, contraption, artifact, fossil, formation, pattern, or syndrome. It cannot be fooled. Ah, there is something about really positive science that I love. Three stories chock-full of circuitry are ‘the brains of it.’ ”

“You have claimed those three stories full of circuitry to be the brains of many a magic machine, Barnaby,” George Drakos chided him, “but the magic has rubbed off of every one of them before it got well started.”

“Yes, that's right,” Sheen agreed. “Actually, I have had this clock for a number of years and didn't know what I had. Any machine that can solve for eight simultaneous unknowns could be used for such a clock, assuming (there is the catch) an operator as smart as myself.”

“It cannot tell how old I am, except roughly,” Cris Benedetti said. “It cannot tell what season I was born in.”

“Cris, it can,” Barnaby insisted. “Nothing is easier than to count the yearly varves of the human person. The reading would begin, of course, with conception. It is only the primitive mentality that considers birth as an important episode. Let's say that the clock could read conception within an hour, birth within a day.”

“How about death?” Doctor George Drakos asked.

“Nothing easier,” Barnaby said. “The death line is often prominent in the clock readings, though it is not often the most prominent line. Death does represent a real change of some sort in the human person, even if it is not one of the major changes. Humans seem a special case to the clock, though, and there is much that I haven't learned to interpret. With the lesser species of plants and animals, death seems to be somewhat terminal, a completing of the shape.”

“Are you saying that the clock will read the hour of my death?” Harry O'Donovan asked.

“Oh, certainly. It would be a grisly business, though, and I'd rather avoid it.”

“But if I die by accident?” O'Donovan asked.

“There are such things as accidents from a human viewpoint,” Barnaby explained, “but there are not any accidents that will leave no footprints ahead of themselves. If you are to die by accident, it will always have been the case that you were to die by accident. The accident, and the time it is to happen, will be part of your shape from the beginning. Certainly my clock (even in its present rough shape) could predict when you were to die, whether by accident or not; and it could predict it quite accurately. And just as certainly I will not permit it to do so.”

“Could we see this clock, Barnaby?” Cris Benedetti asked.

“Look around you,” Barney said happily. “You're in the middle of it.”

Really we were in the middle of that multi-purpose room which Barnaby called his study. This room seemed to change over the months and years, becoming sometimes smaller and sometimes larger. It really did have moveable walls and it really did change in size.

In this room was still the taboo sofa on which was the life-size sawdust-filled doll which Barnaby always insisted was the body of his daughter Loretta Sheen. None of us remembered Barnaby ever being married or ever having a daughter Loretta, or any daughter at all; and we had all known Barnaby since school days.

(In the room also was a spirit named Mary Mondo. She was seldom apparent, even as a spirit. But she did show up on the spirit-anagnostes, a sophisticated instrument.)

And tonight, there was not in the room the bar that was usually there. “Carrock,” came again the voice or sound from the next room, from what seemed a newly partitioned room off from the study. And the bar would have to be in that closed-off place.

“It's that we could soon do with drinks, Barney,” Harry O'Donovan said. “Should a fine host like yourself have to be reminded of the fact? Open up the bar, man. Why have you set it off with those trick walls of yours?”

“Ah, it cannot be opened tonight, men,” Barnaby said with a touch of apprehension. “It — ah — he isn't sufficiently trained yet, and he does have his pride. Those fellows are deprived in so many ways, you see, and they would almost have to be classed as slow learners. Well, I'll get you something.”

What was Barnaby talking about? Who were they who would have to be classified as slow learners, and why did Barnaby speak with such irony as if they were the very opposite of slow learners?

Barnaby slipped into the little partitioned-off room. “Carrock, carrock, carrock,” came a voice from within. It was not one word repeated three times: it was three different and distinct words, if only one should understand them.

“Splendid, splendid!” came the voice of Barnaby in there. “Almost perfect, almost perfect. Tomorrow you should have it all absolutely right.”

“Carrock,” said the other voice with deep feeling.

Barnaby came out with four glasses with a little ice in each, and with a half-filled bottle of medium bourbon and a less-than-half-filled bottle of medium gin.

“Fix yourself a little something, men,” he said. “I'm sorry we're not fully open, but I want it to be right when I show him.”

There was the sound of breaking glass in the little room.

“Damn,” said Barnaby. “He feels so bad when he breaks something.”

“Carrock,” sadly said the voice in there.

Well, what was going on? Mary Mondo told me what it was: “The wooly wonder, the sunshine kid has arrived.” Because of my coarser sensibilities, I could often hear Mary Mondo when the others could not. A while back, by illicit means, I had tried to get answers out of Mary Mondo; it hadn't worked. But then, after evading my clumsy traps, she had given me part of the information of her own will.

“He is coming with his message,” she told me. “The message will be wisdom masquerading as comedy, and drawn and written on stone. And he will be the one the latchet of whose scuff-duffs I am not worthy to — Hey, watch that talk, me! A spoiled demiurge is what we don't want. But he will be the wooly wonder. He will be the sunshine kid. And he will counteract some of the evil tediousness that has imprisoned us.” What kind of talk was that? I got along better before I began to receive such communications from Mary Mondo. But now she said that the wooly wonder, the sunshine kid, had indeed arrived.

“Shape is very important in time readings,” Barnaby took up his thread again. “My own clock has Carbon-Fourteen readers built into it, of course, and the Potassium-Argon detector. There aren't many tricks that it doesn't contain. But the clock isn't a magic box, not all in one piece, not self-contained, not rigid. It uses data from a dozen other machines. I've had to have tests made by machines all over the country, all over the world, simply to get primary data into useable form.

“But it will work, after the questions have been properly phrased, after the readings have been taken and fitted. My scattered thing really uses all the other machines in the world as menials and it is a little bit arrogant in its expertise.”

“So, we have noticed, are you, Barnaby,” Cris Benedetti jibed. “Tell us in simple and illuminating words just how it works.”

“It analyzes shape and texture and so arrives at essence, Cris,” Barnaby said with the sudden seriousness of a prophet or con-man. “The texture of anything in the world or out of it must depend on the size and shape and total age of that thing. This applies to a physical thing, to a social-group thing, to a tenuous syndrome or behaviorism, to an historical complex, to emotional storm cycles, to persons and kindreds, to culture and ecology combinations, to the lively arts and sciences (but the deadly of either have inferior texture and shape and so are rejected unread by the clock as being ‘bad time’), to the mechanosphere, to all natural creatures both bodied and unbodied, to me, to all of you, and to the rather odd beings (electrostatic in their composition, I believe) which represent our intersections.”

(“Nobody can give a spiel like my papa,” said the life-sized, sawdust-filled doll which Barnaby said was the body of his daughter Loretta. How Barnaby brought off this effect, if he did, is unknown: this time, he didn't even appear to hear the doll, and we others made believe not to.)

“But there is one difficulty with the clock,” Barnaby continued.

“Unsurmountable, I suppose, Barney,” said Doctor George Drakos.

“Not entirely, George,” Barnaby told him. “We can't climb the main mountain by the sheer north face that fascinates all climbers. But we can mount pretty high on that mountain by working our way up through the broken scarble hills of its southeast flank. This not quite insurmountable difficulty or mountain in our road is that the clock has trouble recognizing the present time in the shape or context of a thing it reads. If the present time is not an important aspect of a thing, then the clock will not consider it important enough to notice. If the programmer insists, then the clock will comply and pick out some reference and call it the present; but it may or may not be so. We can come to fair terms with our difficulty, though. It isn't really a mountain standing in our road: it's more like the mouse that ran up the clock. And it's an illusion that the mouse gave birth to a mountain.”

(“The mouse giving birth to a mountain is my bit,” said the spirit named Mary Mondo. “I gave that one to old papa Barnaby.” Barnaby Sheen didn't seem to hear her, though.)

“But we will solve it, we will solve it,” Barnaby was saying. “We will have the hide of that mouse and we will nail it up on the barn door.”

“When, Barney?” Harry O'Donovan asked. He didn't mean, “When will we have the hide of that mouse?” — these men who knew everything understood each other better than that. Harry meant, “When is the big show?”

“Tomorrow night, Harry,” Barnaby answered him. “We'll have in some of those eminent scientists to throw questions and samples at the clock. We'll have a few other folks in, and we'll see what we will see.”

“Will Willy McGilly be one of those eminent scientists?” Cris asked.

“Am I a fool? No, he won't be,” Barnaby said. “I waited till he was out of town before I scheduled this thing.”

We fooled around with the talk and the machines for quite a while.

“Your machine can say how old a thing will be in its totality, but it can't say how old a thing is right now?” Harry O'Donovan asked, still bugged by that aspect.

“Mostly it can do both,” Barnaby told him. “The present orientation can nearly always be coaxed out of it, though the clock considers the present of little importance. This is no gadgetry, people. It is positive science and it is wonderful.”

(“My papa always was strong on that positive science stuff,” said the sawdust-filled doll on the sofa, but Barnaby didn't hear her.)

We examined everything we could find to examine. Barnaby Sheen had either a great invention or a great hoax going there.

“We've got to be going, droll man,” George Drakos said finally, and we began to leave.

“Carrock,” came the voice from the next room in friendly good-bye.

“Barney, is that an ape in there?” Drakos asked.

“A little more apish than you are, George, but not much,” Barnaby laughed. “You've got more ape in you than any of us, George. You know that.”

IV

“You be a fraud,” Investigators said.

“Tie lantern to a tail and paint you red!”

“Mistaken!” cried the clock. “The truth's with us.”

“Carrock,” confirmed Australopithecus.

 — Anonymous

The magic clock of Barnaby Sheen advanced the present time of the world by twenty hours. Thus it became the following evening, and there was another gathering in the study of Barnaby Sheen.

Besides myself and the men who knew everything, there were three eminent scientists: Velikov Vonk, Ergodic Eimer, and August Angstrom. But the eminence of that group was a little suspect. Willy McGilly was out of town. Arpad Arkabaranan was dead, drowned in that unfortunate episode at Boomer Flats. Velikov Vonk was the only member of the original group there, the only one of the bunch we mean when we say ‘Eminent Scientists’ in our town.

There was a newspaper person there, too, and a few nondescript folks of both sexes.

“People, do I have a clock!” Barnaby Sheen cried, and he seemed to be cupping something precious in his two hands. “It's the clock that the world runs by,” he said.

“That is a statement that we intend to test,” August Angstrom spat in a cranky manner. “We know, Sheen, that you are ninety percent fraud. We also know that occasionally, very occasionally, you come up with something of value; and we know that you are a long ways overdue with it. Don't disappoint us tonight. Where is the clock?”

“It's about you and around you, August,” Barnaby said. “Anything that you want to submit to it, drop into that wide slot there. Anything you want to ask it, ask it at the automatic typewriter.”

“Ask it how, Sheen? By voice?”

“Certainly. Or by Indian Sign Language if you prefer. It understands that too.”

“This man Sheen here, how old is he?” August Angstrom asked the mechanical complex. And his words were typed out by it just as he had spoken them: “This man Sheen, how old is he?” appeared in the typescript; then the machine swallowed the question.

“What, what, how was that done?” August asked. Barnaby Sheen was laughing. His hands were steepled together as though he were cupping something precious in them. A nervous gesture, we suppose. And his fingers diddled and skipped about.

Nervous gesture, your father's chronometer! Barnaby was pulling one of the oldest tricks right out in the open. No wonder he waited till Willy McGilly was out of town before he set up the show. He diddled his fingers. Meanwhile, across the room, the typer was typing.

“Barnaby Sheen is in the absolute prime of life. He is thirty-seven years, twenty-eight days, fourteen hours, nine minutes, and rapidly changing seconds old,” the clock typed it out.

“All right, Sheen, how is it done?” August growled. “I know it's a trick.”

“No trick at all, August,” Barnaby laughed. “Many weeks ago I programmed it with the birth moments of the nine most outstanding men in the world. Naturally I couldn't leave myself out.”

August pulled something from his wallet, unwrapped it, and dropped it into the slot. It was a disc, probably a coin. And Barnaby smiled and worked his fingers nervously.

“Well, fat man, what do you want me to tell you about that thing?” the typer typed.

“Ah, clock, it is a coin. Tell me the date on it,” Angstrom spoke in a tone of near apology, and the typer typed, “Ah, clock, it is a coin. Tell me…” and so on. Barnaby Sheen was wandering around the room examining his own collection of gimcracks. Ah, there was a display case, but the case lifted up. It had a false bottom; it had a conveyor belt under the false bottom; even I could see that much. Barnaby Sheen took the coin from the conveyor belt, examined it a moment, and replaced it. He resumed his nervous striding about the room and his nervous drumming of his fingers. But the attention of all was on the clock and not on Barnaby Sheen.

“The coin bore the date 1848,” the typer typed. “It was a middling valuable coin. I dissolved it to get at the data, and I will be unable to give it back.”

“Sheen,” Angstrom said dangerously, “that coin was quite valuable.”

“And the clock is quite a kidder,” Barnaby said. “Don't worry. All specimens will be returned at the end of the demonstration. Please, Angstrom, let some of the others have a chance at the magic clock. Ah, we have rock hounds loaded down with rocks. Doctor Eimer, would you like to give the clock a question in one way or another?”

“Carrock,” came a happy voice from the next room, and the tinkling of glass.

“What is in that room?” Angstrom asked suspiciously. “Is it man or beast?”

“I don't ask that of your friends, August,” Barnaby said kindly. “Proceed, Doctor Eimer.” And Doctor Eimer put a small stone into the clock slot.

“Give me the age of sedimentation and also the age of metamorphism of that stone,” Doctor Ergodic Eimer asked the clock. “… and also the age of metamorphism,” the clock was finishing its typing the while Barnaby was finishing his examination of the rock which he had taken from the conveyor belt which was below the false bottom of a display case.

Barnaby Sheen knew rocks; he knew them nearly as well as Doctor Ergodic Eimer did. He put the rock back on the belt and began to finger a precious thing in his hand. He did all these things without seeming to do anything. The attention of everybody was fixed on the question-answering typewriting clock.

“Both very recent,” the clock typed. “Age of sedimentation is eighty thousand years. Age of metamorphism is twenty-five to thirty thousand years.”

“My own estimate is somewhat longer,” Eimer said conversationally to the clock, “a hundred thousand years and fifty thousand years, but there is no way of being sure. It is possible that you are correct, clock.”

“… possible that you are correct, clock,” the clock finished the typing.

Petrified wood and blue shale, varved mud just in the process of turning into slate, a handwritten letter, a photograph, a chipped-stone fist hatchet, crinoid fossils, seashells imbedded in limestone, all these went into the clock slot. And the clock typed out what were possibly good answers to their ages.

Barnaby Sheen seemed sometimes inattentive, sometimes very interested.

“What? What did it say?” he asked once, and pushed in to see. “Oh, that's wrong, impossible. There's a malfunction somewhere.”

“Why no, Sheen, that's right, or approximately right,” one of the nondescript persons said. “I suspect that it's exactly right.”

“Really?” Barnaby said. “I had no idea that Trilobites of that sort were so old.”

“The circuitry isn't connected with this stuff at all,” Cris Benedetti whispered to Harry O'Donovan.

“Oh, I knew that all the time,” said the spirit named Mary Mondo.

“No, of course it isn't connected,” Harry said. “But, as Barney once told us, it's easier to sell a big package than a small package. Barnaby may well have something good in a small package there; I'm not sure that he hasn't; and he can merchandise it in as big a box as he wants to.”

And then the clock began to slip. It was on the old bones that it began to slip, and it got worse and worse. There was a sliver of haunch bone from Plateosaurus, that largest of the Triassic dinosaurs. It was put into the clock with a request for a reading. And the clock promptly typed out “One million years old.”

“Great Osseous Insanity, the thing is wrong!” rang the voice of Professor Ergodic Eimer. “Sheen, it should be nearer to one hundred and eighty million years.”

“Carrock,” rang the voice in the next room. “Carrock, carrock, carrock.”

“The clock is right,” Barnaby Sheen insisted. “It's always right.”

There was a nostril bone of the Hemicyon. “Three hundred and fifty-five years,” the clock typed after it had made an appraisal.

“It's a million years if it's a day,” howled one of those nondescript persons from City Museum. “This is an insult to the intelligence.”

“Carrock, carrock,” came the voice from the next room. It had a touch of amusement and was accompanied by the rattle of glasses.

“Sheen,” Velikov Vonk muttered in a low voice. “To hell with the clock. I just want to see that creature.”

“Wait till the others leave then,” Barnaby said. “He wants to try his hand at serving only a small bunch of us first.”

A prize was coming up. It was quite a small bone but it would be the test. The Investigators were primed for this one. And the small bone smelled (though not to the nose) unmistakably of Almost Man.

“Now we will see,” said those scientists and skeptics. And one of them set the thing into the maw of the clock. There was a long pause then, longer than usual.

“Carrock,” came the voice from the next room, and it had a touch of recognition in it. Those fellows have always been fantastic in their sensing.

Barnaby Sheen had already examined the thing on the conveyor belt that was under a display case. He walked about the room while everybody waited for the clock. And Barnaby diddled his right-hand fingers in his left palm. So that was the way he did it! He held a miniature wireless remote control in his palm, and he diddled the letters for the clock to type. And it typed.

“Fifty-five years since the inanimation or death of the creature,” it typed, “and seventy-seven years since its birth.”

And all those great visitors howled like maniacs at that poor machine of a clock. But the “Carrock, carrock” in the next room had turned into a chortle.

“Any fool would know that it has to be over a million years old,” August Angstrom swore furiously. “Clock, do you even know what it is?”

“Sure,” the clock typed after it had recorded and filed the question. “It is the characteristic short canine tooth of the Australopithecus. I can't in conscience add even a month to the elapsed time since the death of the creature. Fifty-five years, almost exactly. I can even tell you where the tooth came from.”

“Where?” Angstrom blurted.

“… where?” the clock recorded and filed. Then it answered. “Oh, from Ethiopia, about seventy miles northwest of Magdala, on the Guna Slopes. The creatures still thrive there.”

“Monkey-faced malarky!” August swore. “The species has been extinct for over a million years.”

Barnaby Sheen was flexing his fingers as though they were cramped. He had been doing a lot of fingering on his small remote-control gadget. And then he fingered some more.

“… been extinct for over a million years,” the clock finished typing the statement. “Carrock,” came the friendly voice from the next room. Then the clock began to rattle with new typing:

“The species still lives and thrives. It is true that, about a million years ago, the species did pull in all its ill-conceived and badly established colonies, and thereafter it lived only in its small and straited homeland. It still lives there.”

That broke up the party and the investigation. There were cries of “Fake” and “sick joke.” There were remarks about the ancestry of both the clock and Barnaby Sheen. Then half-a-dozen men and two women stomped furiously out. Indignation lingered after them like fog in the room.

There remained only the four men who knew everything, and myself who did not, and Professor Velikov Vonk; and perhaps two others who were really permanent features of the room. We were all slightly shaken and mightily depressed by the intolerance and violence of the leaving.

From the next room came “Carrock,” inquiringly, almost wistfully.

“All right, fellow,” Barnaby Sheen called loudly. “We're ready when you're ready.”

It, he, came into the room then. He had on a neat white bartender's jacket. He had a pad and pencil in his hands. He was grinning, he was hairy, he was simian in some rakish way, he was manlike or at least boylike in a more subtle way, and he was eager to be of service.

“Name your drinks, folks,” Barnaby said. “Myself, I'll have an Old Fashioned.” And the creature wrote something down on the pad. “Salty Doll, please,” said the life-sized sawdust-filled doll on the sofa, the doll that was perhaps Loretta Sheen. And the creature wrote.

“Fraidy Lady,” said the spirit named Mary Mondo. And then, in her confiding voice she said, “He's done wonders with Loretta in just the two days he's been here. He has her talking in words now, about as well as he does, and she couldn't do it before for a long time.”

“Bloody Mary,” said Cris Benedetti.

“Green Giannopoulos,” said Doctor George Drakos, “and I hope you can make them better than Barney here can. It isn't his specialty.” The creature grinned. He was getting it all down.

“Grasshopper,” said Harry O'Donovan. The creature wrote, and there was a pause.

“Laff?” Barnaby Sheen asked.

“Oh, Cuba Libra,” I said.

“Manhattan,” said Velikov Vonk. The creature went back to his little barroom.

“Do you really have a magic clock, Sheen?” Velikov asked.

“Yes I do,” Barnaby said. “I have it in my head, almost worked out. And this little play-act that I put on gave me some good ideas. It doesn't hurt to unveil a thing a year or two before it comes along. It will work. You'll see. I'll build it any year now.”

“Well, he is an Australopithecus, isn't he?” I asked finally. “The bartender, I mean.”

They all looked at me with pity. “Of course he is,” several of them finally said.

The Austro brought in the drinks. He had them all right, and they were perfect. And after a while he brought in more.

A living Australopithecus! Well, was he an animal, or was he a man? But I already knew the answer; he was neither yet. He was a boy. And which would he be? Oh, it wasn't certain, but the odds were better on him turning out to be a man than were the odds on most sapiens boys.

Time went by. How much time?

“The clock on the wall isn't working,” Barnaby said. “Does anybody have the right time?”

“The right time? It's sunrise, of course,” the spirit girl Mary Mondo said. “The demiurge with the sunshine brains has arrived and that makes it sunrise.”

Austro grinned. In him were the prophecies fulfilled. It wasn't sunrise literally though; it was about midnight. But nobody had the right time.

“Your magic clock, Barney?” Drakos asked. “Can't it give us the time?”

“Sure, correct within two or three days.”

It didn't matter. It was good time, pleasant time. The drinks were fine, and Austro stood willing and ready to serve.

Author's Commentary

The World As Will And Wallpaper

A template, a stencil, a plan.

Corniest, orniest damsel and man,

Orderly, emptily passion and pity,

All-the-World, All-the-World, All-the-World City.

 — 13th Street Ballad

There is an old dictionary-encyclopedia that defines a City as “…a concentration of persons that is not economically self-contained.” The dictionary-encyclopedia being an old one, however (and there is no other kind), is mistaken. The World City is economically self-contained.

It was William Morris who read this definition in the old book. William was a bookie, or readie, and he had read parts of several books. But now he had a thought: If all the books are old, then things may no longer be as the books indicate. I will go out and see what things are like today in the City. I will traverse as much of the City as my life allows me. I may even come to the Wood Beyond the World that my name-game ancestor described.

William went to the Permit Office of the City. Since there was only one City, there might be only one Permit Office, though it was not large.

“I want a permit to traverse as much of the City as my life allows me,” William told the permit man. “I even want a permit to go to the Wood Beyond the World. Is that possible?”

The permit man did a little skittish dance around William, “like a one-eyed gander around a rattlesnake.” The metaphor was an old and honored one, one of the fifty-four common metaphors. They both understood it: it didn't have to be voiced. William was the first customer the permit man had had in many days, though, so the visit startled him.

“Since everything is permitted, you will need no permit,” the permit man said. “Go, man, go.”

“Why are you here then?” William asked him. “If there are no permits, why is there a Permit Office?”

“This is my niche and my notch,” the permit man said. “Do away with me and my office and you begin to do away with the City itself. It is the custom to take a companion when you traverse the City.”

Outside, William found a companion named Kandy Kalosh and they began to traverse the City that was the World. They began (it was no more than coincidence) at a marker set in stone that bore the words Beginning of Stencil 35,352. The City tipped and tilted a bit, and they were on their way. Now this is what the City was like:

It was named Will of the World City, for it had been constructed by a great and worldwide surge of creative will. Afterward, something had happened to that surge, but it did not matter; the City was already created then.

The City was varied, it was joyful, it was free and it covered the entire world. The mountains and heights had all been removed, and the City, with its various strips of earth and sweet water and salt water, floated on the ocean on its interlocking floaters. As to money values, everything was free; and everything was free as to personal movement and personal choice. It was not really crowded except in the places where the people wanted it crowded, for people do love to congregate. It was sufficient as to foodstuff and shelter and entertainment. These things have always been free, really; it was their packaging and traffic that cost, and now the packaging and traffic were virtually eliminated.

“Work is Joy” flashed the subliminal signs. Of course it is. It is a joy to stop and turn into an area and work for an hour, even an hour and a half, at some occupation never or seldom attempted before. William and Kandy entered an area where persons made cloth out of clamshells, softening them in one solution, then drawing them out to filaments on a machine, then forming (not weaving) them into cloth on still another machine. The cloth was not needed for clothing or for curtains, though sometimes it was used for one or the other. It was for ornamentation. Temperature did not require cloth (the temperature was everywhere equitable) and modesty did not require it, but there was something that still required a little cloth as ornament.

William and Kandy worked for nearly an hour with other happy people on the project. It is true that their own production was all stamped Rejected when they were finished, but that did not mean that it went all the way back to the clamshells, only back to the filament stage.

“Honest labor is never lost,” William said as solemnly as a one-horned owl with the pip.

“I knew you were a readie, but I didn't know you were a talkie,” Kandy said. People didn't talk much then. Happy people have no need to talk. And of course honest labor is never lost, and small bits of it are pleasurable.

This portion of the City (perhaps all portions of the City) floated on an old ocean itself. It had, therefore, a slight heave to it all the time. “The City is a tidy place” was an old and honored saying. It referred to the fact that the City moved a little with the tides. It was a sort of joke.

The two young persons came ten blocks; they came a dozen. For much of this traverse the City had been familiar to William but not to Kandy. They had been going west, and William had always been a westing lad. Kandy, however, had always wandered east from her homes, and she was the farthest west that she had ever been when she met William.

They came to the 14th Street Water Ballet and watched the swimmers. These swimmers were very good, and great numbers of curiously shaped fish frolicked with them in the green salt-fresh pools. Anyone who wished to could, of course, swim in the Water Ballet, but most of the swimmers seemed to be regulars. They were part of the landscape, of the waterscape.

William and Kandy stopped to eat at an algae-and-plankton quick-lunch place on 5th Street. Indeed, Kandy worked there for half an hour, pressing the plankton and adding squirts of special protein as the people ordered it. Kandy had worked in quick-lunch places before.

The two of them stopped at the Will of the World Exhibit Hall on 6th Street. They wrote their names with a stylus in wax when they went in, or rather William wrote the names of both of them for Kandy could not write. And because he bore the mystic name of William, he received a card out of the slot with a genuine Will of the World verse on it:

This City of the World is wills

Of Willful folk, and nothing daunts it.

With daring hearts we hewed the hills

To make the World as Willy wants it.

Really, had it taken such great will and heart to build the City of the World? It must have or there would not have been a Will of the World Exhibit Hall to commend it. There were some folks, however, who said that the building of the World City had been an automatic response.

Kandy, being illiterate (as the slot knew), received a picture card.

They stopped at the Cliff-Dweller Complex on 7th Street. This part of the City was new to William as well as to Kandy.

The cliffs and caves were fabricated and not natural cliff dwellings, but they looked very much as old cliff dwellings must have looked. There were little ladders going up from one level to the next. There were people sitting on the little terraces with the small-windowed apartments behind them. Due to the circular arrangement of the cliff dwellings, very many of the people were always visible to one another. The central courtyard was like an amphitheater. Young people played stickball and Indian ball in this area. They made music on drums and whistles. There were artificial rattlesnakes in coils, artificial rib-skinny dogs, artificial coyotes, artificial women in the act of grinding corn with hand querns. And also, in little shelters or pavilions, there were real people grinding simulacrum corn on apparatus.

Kandy Kalosh went into one of the pavilions and ground corn for fifteen minutes. She had a healthy love for work. William Morris made corndogs out of simulacrum corn and seaweeds. It was pleasant there. Sometimes the people sang simulacrum Indian songs. There were patterned blankets, brightly colored, and woven out of bindweed. There were buffoons in masks and buffoon suits who enacted in-jokes and in-situations that were understood by the cliff-dwelling people only, but they could be enjoyed by everyone.

“All different, all different, every block different,” William murmured in rapture. It had come on evening, but evening is a vague thing. It was never very bright in the daytime or very dark at night. The World City hadn't a clear sky but it had always a sort of diffused light. William and Kandy traveled still farther west.

“It is wonderful to be a world traveler and to go on forever,” William exulted. “The City is so huge that we cannot see it all in our whole lives and every bit of it is different.”

“A talkie you are,” Kandy said. “However did I get a talkie? If I were a talkie too I could tell you something about that every-part-of-it-is-different bit.”

“This is the greatest thing about the whole World City,” William sang, “to travel the City itself for all our lives, and the climax of it will be to see the Wood Beyond the World. But what happens then, Kandy? The City goes on forever, covering the whole sphere. It cannot be bounded. What is beyond the Wood Beyond the World?”

“If I were a talkie I could tell you,” Kandy said.

But the urge to talk was on William Morris. He saw an older and somehow more erect man who wore an arm band with the lettering Monitor on it. Of course only a readie, or bookie, like William would have been able to read the word.

“My name-game ancestor had to do with the naming as well as the designing of the Wood Beyond the World,” William told the erect and smiling man, “for I also am a William Morris. I am avid to see this ultimate wood. It is as though I have lived for the moment.”

“If you will it strongly enough, then you may see it, Willy,” the man said.

“But I am puzzled,” William worried out the words, and his brow was furrowed. “What is beyond the Wood Beyond the World?”

“A riddle, but an easy one.” The man smiled. “How is it that you are a readie and do not know such simple things?”

“Cannot you give me a clue to the easy riddle?” William begged.

“Yes,” the man said. “Your name-game ancestor had to do with the designing of one other particular thing besides the Wood Beyond the World.”

“Come along, readie, come along,” Kandy said.

They went to the West Side Show Square on 18th Street. Neither of them had ever been to such a place, but they had heard rumors of it for there is nothing at all like the West Side Show Square on 18th Street.

There were the great amplifiers with plug-ins everywhere. Not only were the instruments plugged in, but most of the people were themselves plugged in. And ah! The wonderful setting was like the backside of old tenements all together in a rough circuit. There were period fire escapes that may even have been accurate. They looked as though persons might actually climb up and down on them. Indeed, light persons had actually done this in the past, but it was forbidden now as some of the folks had fallen to death or maiming. But the atmosphere was valid.

Listen, there was period washing on period clotheslines! It was flapped by little wind machines just as though there were a real wind blowing. No wonder they called this the show square. It was a glum-slum, a jetto-ghetto, authentic past time.

The performing people (and all the people on that part of 18th Street seemed to be performing people) were dressed in tight jeans and scalloped or ragged shirts, and even in broken shoes full of holes. It must have been very hot for them, but art is worth it. It was a memento of the time when the weather was not everywhere equitable.

There were in-dramas and in-jokes and in-situations acted out. The essence of the little dramas was very intense hatred for a group or class not clearly defined. There were many of those old-period enemy groups in the various drama locations of the City.

The lights were without pattern but they were bright. The music was without tune or melody or song or chord but it was very loud and very passionate. The shouting that took the place of singing was absolutely livid. Some of the performers fell to the ground and writhed there and foamed at their mouths.

It was a thing to be seen and heard — once. William and Kandy finally took their leave with bleeding ears and matter-encrusted eyes. They went along to 19th Street where there was a Mingle-Mangle.

It was now as dark as it ever got in the City but the Mangle was well lighted. Certain persons at the Mangle laughingly took hold of William and Kandy and married them to each other. They had bride and groom crowns made of paper and they put them on their heads.

Then they wined and dined them, an old phrase. Really, they were given fine cognac made of fish serum and braised meat made of algae but also mixed with the real chopped flesh of ancients.

Then William and Kandy padded down in the great Pad Palace that was next to the Mangle. Every night there were great numbers of people along that part of 19th Street, at the Mingle-Mangle and at the Pad Palace, and most of these folks were friendly, with their glazed eyes and their dampish grins.

2

Pleasant most special to folks of the club!

Pleasant for manifold minions and hinds of it!

Stuff them with plankton and choppings and chub!

Simple the City and simple the minds of it.

 — 20th Street Ballad

The world's resources are consumed disproportionately by the intelligent classes. Therefore we will keep our own numbers drastically reduced. The wan-wits have not strong reproductive or consuming urge so long as they are kept in reasonable comfort and sustenance. They are happy, they are entertained; and when they are convinced that there is no more for them to see, they become the ancients and go willingly to the choppers. But the 2% or so of us superior ones are necessary to run the world.

Why then do we keep the others, the simple-minded billions? We keep them for the same reason that our ancestors kept blooms or lands or animals or great houses or trees or artifacts. We keep them because we want to, and because there is no effort involved.

But a great effort was made once. There was an incredible surge of will. Mountains were moved and leveled. The sky itself was pulled down, as it were. The Will of the World was made manifest. It was a new act of creation. And what is the step following creation when it is discovered that the Commonality is not worthy of the City created? When it is discovered also that they are the logical cattle to fill such great pens? The next step is hierarchies. The Angels themselves have hierarchies, and we are not less. It is those who are intelligent but not quite intelligent enough to join the Club who are imperiled and destroyed as a necessity to the operation of the City. At the Summit is always the Club. It is the Club in the sense of a bludgeon and also of an organization.

Will of the World Annals

 — Classified Abstract

In the morning, Kandy Kalosh wanted to return to her home even though it was nearly twenty blocks to the eastward. William watched her go without sorrow. He would get a westering girl to go with him on the lifelong exploration of the endlessly varied City. He might get a girl who was a talkie or even a readie, or bookie.

And he did. She was named Fairhair Farquhar, though she was actually dark of hair and of surface patina. But they started out in the early morning to attain (whether in a day or a lifetime) the Wood Beyond the World.

“But it is not far at all,” Fairhair said (she was a talkie). “We can reach it this very evening. We can sleep in the Wood in the very night shadow of the famous Muggers. Oh, is the morning not wonderful! A blue patch was seen only last week, a real hole in the sky. Maybe we can see another.”

They did not see another. It is very seldom that a blue (or even a starry) hole can be seen in the greenhouse glass-gray color that is the sky. The Will of the World had provided sustenance for everyone, but it was a muggy and sticky World City that provided almost equally warm from pole to pole, cloyingly fertile in both the land strips and the water strips, and now just a little bit queasy.

“Run, William, run in the morning!” Fairhair cried, and she ran while he shuffled after her. Fairhair did not suffer morning sickness but most of the world did: it had not yet been bred out of the races. After all, it was a very tidy world.

There was a great membrane or firmament built somewhere below, and old ocean was prisoned between this firmament and the fundamental rock of Gehenna-earth. But the ocean-monster tossed and pitched and was not entirely tamed: he was still old Leviathan.

Along and behind all the streets of the World City were the narrow (their width not five times the length of a man) strips, strips of very nervous and incredibly fertile land, of salt water jumping with fish and eels and dark with tortoise and so thick with blue-green plankton that one could almost walk on it, of fresh water teeming with other fish and loggy with snapping turtles and snakes, of other fresh water almost solid with nourishing algae, of mixed water filled with purged shrimp and all old estuary life; land strips again, and strips of rich chemical water where people voided themselves and their used things and from which so many valuable essences could be extracted; other strips, and then the houses and buildings of another block, for the blocks were not long. Kaleidoscope of nervous water and land, everywhere basic and everywhere different, boated with boats on the strange overpass canals, crossed by an infinity of bridges.

“And no two alike!” William sang, his morning sickness having left him. “Every one different, everything different in a world that cannot be traversed in a lifetime. We'll not run out of wonders!”

“William, William, there is something I have been meaning to tell you,” Fairhair tried to interpose.

“Tell me, Fairhair, what is beyond the Wood Beyond the World, since the world is a globe without bounds?”

“The World Beyond the Wood is beyond the Wood Beyond the World,” Fairhair said simply. “If you want the Wood, you will come to it, but do not be cast down if it falls short for you.”

“How could it fall short for me? I am a William Morris. My name-game ancestor had to do with the naming as well as the designing of the Wood.”

“Your name-game ancestor had to do with the designing of another thing also,” Fairhair said. Why, that was almost the same thing as the monitor man had said the day before. What did they mean by it?

William and Fairhair came to the great Chopper House at 20th Street. The two of them went in and worked for an hour in the Chopper House.

“You do not understand this, do you, little William?” Fairhair asked.

“Oh, I understand enough for me. I understand that it is everywhere different.”

“Yes, I suppose you understand enough for you,” Fairhair said with a touch of near sadness. (What they chopped up in the Chopper House was the ancients.) They went on and on along the strips and streets of the ever-changing city. They came to 21st Street and 22nd and 23rd. Even a writie could not write down all the marvels that were to be found at every street. It is sheer wonder to be a world traveler.

There was a carnival at 23rd Street. There were barkies, sharkies, sparkies, darkies, parkies, and markies; the visitors were the markies, but it was not really bad for them. There was the very loud music even though it was supposed to be period tingle-tangle or rinky-dink. There was a steam calliope with real live steam. There were the hamburger stands with the wonderful smell of a touch of garlic in the open air, no matter that it was ancient chopper meat and crinoid-root bun from which the burgers were made. There were games of chance, smooch houses and cooch houses, whirly rides and turning wheels, wino and sterno bars and bordellos, and Monster and Misbegotten displays in clamshell-cloth tents.

Really, is anyone too old to enjoy a carnival? Then let that one declare himself an ancient and turn himself in to a Chopper House.

But on and on; one does not tarry when there is the whole World City to see and it not be covered in one lifetime. On 24th (or was it 25th?) Street were the Flesh Pots; and a little beyond them was the Cat Center. One ate and drank beyond reason in the Flesh Pots region and also became enmeshed in the Flesh Mesh booths. And one catted beyond reason in the honeycomb-like cubicles of the Cat Center. Fairhair went and worked for an hour at the Cat Center; she seemed to be known and popular there.

But on and on! Everywhere it is different and everywhere it is better.

Along about 27th and 28th Streets were the Top of the Town and Night-Life Knoll, those great cabaret concentrations. It was gin-dizzy here; it was yesterday and tomorrow entangled with its great expectations and its overpowering nostalgia; it was loud as the West Side Show Square; it was as direct as the Mingle-Mangle or the Pad Palace. It was as fleshy as the Flesh Pots and more catty than the Cat-Center. Oh, it was the jumpingest bunch of places that William had yet seen in the City.

Something a little sad there, though; something of passion and pity that was too empty and too pat. It was as though this were the climax of it all, and one didn't want it to be the climax yet. It was as if the Top of the Town and Night-Life Knoll (and not the Wood Beyond the World) were the central things of the World City.

Perhaps William slept there awhile in the sadness that follows the surfeit of flesh and appetite. There were other doings and sayings about him, but mostly his eyes were closed and his head was heavy.

But then Fairhair had him up again and rushing toward the Wood in the still early night.

“It is only a block, William, it is only a block,” she sang, “and it is the place you have wanted more than any other.” (The Wood began at 29th Street and went on, it was said, for the space of two full blocks.) But William ran badly and he even walked badly. He was woozy and confused, not happy, not sad, just full of the great bulk of life in the City. He'd hardly have made it to his high goal that night except for the help of Fairhair. But she dragged and lifted and carried him along in her fine arms and on her dusky back and shoulders. He toppled off sometimes and cracked his crown, but there was never real damage done. One sometimes enters the Wood Beyond in a sort of rhythmic dream, grotesque and comic and jolting with the sway of a strong friend and of the tidy world itself. And William came in with his arms around the neck and shoulders of the girl named Fairhair, with his face buried in her hair itself, with his feet touching no ground.

But he knew it as soon as they were in the Wood. He was afoot again and strong again in the middle of the fabled place itself. He was sober? No, there can be no sobriety in the Wood; it has its own intoxication.

But it had real grass and weeds, real trees (though most of them were bushes), real beasts as well as artificial, real spruce cones on the turf, real birds (no matter that they were clattering crows) coming in to roost.

There was the carven oak figure of old Robin Hood and the tall spar-wood form of the giant lumberjack Paul Bunyan. There was the Red Indian named White Deer who was carved from cedarwood. There was maple syrup dripping from the trees (is that the way they used to get it?), and there was the aroma of slippery elm with the night dampness on it.

There were the famous Muggers from the mugger decades. They were of papier-mâché, it is true, and yet they were the most fearsome. There were other dangerous beasts in the Wood, but none like the Muggers. And William and Fairhair lay down and wept in the very night shadow of the famous Muggers for the remainder of the enchanted night.

3

“Wander-bird, wander-bird, where do you fly?”

“All over the City, all under the sky.”

“Wandr'ing through wonders of strippies and streets,

Changing and challenging, bitters and sweets.”

“Wander-bird, squander-bird, should not have budged:

City is sicko and sky is a smudge.”

 — 1st Street Ballad

“Run, William, run in the morning!” Fairhair cried, and she ran while William (confused from the night) shuffled after her.

“We must leave the Wood?” he asked.

“Of course you must leave the Wood. You want to see the whole world, so you cannot stay in one place. You go on, I go back. No, no, don't you look back or you'll be turned into a salt-wood tree.”

“Stay with me, Fairhair.”

“No, no, you want variety. I have been with you long enough. I have been guide and companion and pony to you. Now we part.”

Fairhair went back. William was afraid to look after her. He was in the world beyond the Wood Beyond the World. He noticed though that the street was 1st Street and not 31st Street as he had expected.

It was still wonderful to be a world traveler, of course, but not quite as wonderful as it had been one other time. The number of the street shouldn't have mattered to him. William had not been on any 1st Street before. Or 2nd.

But he had been on a 3rd Street before on his farthest trip east.

Should he reach it again on his farthest trip west? The world, he knew (being a readie who had read parts of several books), was larger than that. He could not have gone around it in thirty blocks. Still, he came to 3rd Street in great trepidation.

Ah, it was not the same 3rd Street he had once visited before; almost the same but not exactly. An ounce of reassurance was intruded into the tons of alarm in his heavy head. But he was alive, he was well, he was still traveling west in the boundless City that is everywhere different.

“The City is varied and joyful and free,” William Morris said boldly, “and it is everywhere different.” Then he saw Kandy Kalosh and he literally staggered with the shock. Only it did not quite seem to be she.

“Is your name Kandy Kalosh?” he asked as quakingly as a one-legged kangaroo with the willies.

“The last thing I needed was a talkie,” she said. “Of course it isn't. My name, which I have from my name-game ancestor, is Candy Calabash, not at all the same.”

Of course it wasn't the same. Then why had he been so alarmed and disappointed?

“Will you travel westward with me, Candy?” he asked.

“I suppose so, a little way, if we don't have to talk,” she said.

So William Morris and Candy Calabash began to traverse the City that was the world. They began (it was no more than coincidence) at a marker set in stone that bore the words Beginning of Stencil 35,353, and thereat William went into a sort of panic. By why should he? It was not the same stencil number at all. The World City might still be everywhere different.

But William began to run erratically. Candy stayed with him. She was not a readie or a talkie, but she was faithful to a companion for many blocks. The two young persons came ten blocks; they came a dozen.

They arrived at the 14th Street Water Ballet and watched the swimmers. It was almost, but not quite, the same as another 14th Street Water Ballet that William had seen once. They came to the algae-and-plankton quick-lunch place on 15th Street and to the Will of the World Exhibit Hall on 16th Street. Ah, a hopeful eye could still pick out little differences in the huge sameness. The World City had to be everywhere different.

They stopped at the Cliff-Dweller Complex on 17th Street. There was an artificial antelope there now. William didn't remember it from the other time. There was hope, there was hope.

And soon William saw an older and somehow more erect man who wore an arm band with the word Monitor on it. He was not the same man, but he had to be a close brother of another man that William had seen two days before.

“Does it all repeat itself again and again and again?” William asked this man in great anguish. “Are the sections of it the same over and over again?”

“Not quite,” the man said. “The grease marks on it are sometimes a little different.”

“My name is William Morris,” William began once more bravely.

“Oh, sure. A William Morris is the easiest type of all to spot,” the man said.

“You said — No, another man said that my name-game ancestor had to do with designing of another thing besides the Wood Beyond the World,” William stammered. “What was it?”

“Wallpaper,” the man said. And William fell down in a frothy faint.

Oh, Candy didn't leave him there. She was faithful. She took him up on her shoulders and plodded along with him, on past the West Side Show Square on 18th Street, past the Mingle-Mangle and the Pad Palace, where she (no, another girl very like her) had turned back before, on and on.

“It's the same thing over and over and over again,” William whimpered as she toted him along.

“Be quiet talkie,” she said, but she said it with some affection.

They came to the great Chopper House on 20th Street. Candy carried William in and dumped him on a block there.

“He's become ancient,” Candy told an attendant. “Boy, how he's become ancient!” It was more than she usually talked.

Then, as she was a fair-minded girl and as she had not worked any stint that day, she turned to and worked an hour in the Chopper House. (What they chopped up in the Chopper House was the ancients.) Why, there was William's head coming down the line! Candy smiled at it. She chopped it up with loving care, much more care than she usually took.

She'd have said something memorable and kind if she'd been a talkie.

Author's Commentary

And Read The Flesh Between The Lines

A Cave, a Cove, a Hub, a Club,

A crowded, jumbled flame:

The Magic Tree, the Future Shrub,

Nostalgia is its name.

 — Old Scribble on the Wall of That Room

by John Penandrew

There had been a sort of rumbling going on in that old unused room over the garages at Barnaby Sheen's place. Nobody paid much attention to it. After all, there were queerer things than a little rumble at Barnaby's.

There were spooks, there were experiments, there was a houseboy and bartender who should have been dead for a million years. There were jokers and geniuses who came there. Who notices a little rumble in an unused room? There were rumbles of many sorts going on at Barnaby's.

“The rumble in the old room is menacing and dangerous,” Barnaby told us one evening. “No, really, fellows, it isn't one of my tricks. I don't know what it is.”

“It sounds like a friendly rumble to me,” Harry O'Donovan said. “I like it.”

“I didn't say that it was malevolent,” Barnaby gruffed with that odd affectation which he sometimes put into his voice. “I like it too. We all like it. It likes us. But it is dangerous, very dangerous, without meaning to be. I have been over everything there: I can't find the source of the rumble or the danger. I ask you four, as a special favor to me, to examine the room carefully. You all know the place since years long gone by.”

The four of us, Dr. George Drakos, Harry O'Donovan, Cris Benedetti, who were three smart ones, and me, who wasn't, went down and examined the old room. But just how thoroughly did we examine it?

We examined it, at least, in more ways and times than the present. For that reason it is possible that we neglected it a little bit in its present state. The past times of it were so strong that it may have intended its present state to be neglected, or it may have insisted that its whole duration was compressed in its casual present state.

Let's hear a little bit about this room, then.

In the time of Barnaby Sheen's grandfather, who came out here from Pennsylvania at the first rumor of oil and who bought an anomalous “mansion”, this was not a room over the garages, but over the stables and carriage-house.

It was a hayloft, that's what it was; an oatloft, a fodderloft. And a little corner of it had been a harness room with brads and hammers and knives and needles as big as sailmaker's needles, and a cobbler's bench; and spokeshaves (for forming and trimming singletrees) and neat's-foot oil and all such. The room, even in its later decades, had not lost any of its old smells. There would always be the perfume of timothy hay, of sweet clover, of little bluestem grass and of prairie grass, of alfalfa, of sudan grass, of sorghum cane, of hammered oats and of ground oats, of rock salt, of apples. Yes, there was an old barrel there that would remember its apples for a hundred years. Why had it been there? Do not horses love apples for a treat?

There was the smell of shorts and of bran, the smell of old field tobacco (it must have been cured up there in the jungle of the rafters), the smell of seventy-five year-old sparks (and the grindstone that had produced them was there, operable yet), the smell of buffalo robes (they used them for lap robes in wagons and buggies). There was a forge there and other farrier's tools (but they had been brought up from downstairs no more than sixty years ago, so their smell was not really ancient there).

Then there were a few tokens of the automobile era; heavily built parts cabinets, tools, old plugs, old oil smell. There were back seats of very old cars to serve as sofas and benches, horns and spotlights and old battery cases, even very old carbide and kerosene headlights. But these were in the minority: there is not so much use for a room over the garages as for a room over the stables.

There was another and later odor that was yet very evocative: it could only be called the smell of almost-ape.

And then there were our own remnants somewhat before this latter thing. This had been a sort of clubroom for us when we were schoolboys and when we were summer-boys. There were trunks full of old funny papers. They were from the St. Louis Post Dispatch, the St. Louis Globe, the Kansas City Star, the Chicago Tribune — those were the big-city papers that were hawked in our town, and our own World and Tribune. There were a few New York and Boston and Philadelphia funny papers also. And the funnies of the different papers were not nearly so uniform then as they later became.

There were the comparatively more recent comic books. We had been older then, almost too old for such things. Yet there were a few thousand of them, mostly the original property of Cris Benedetti and John Penandrew.

There was the taxidermy of George Drakos: stuffed owls, snakes, barn swallows, water puppies, mountain boomers, flying squirrels, even foxes and wildcats. And there were the dissections (also of Drakos) of frogs, of cat brains, of fish, of cow eyes, and many other specimens. The best of these (those still maintaining themselves in good state) were preserved in formaldehyde in Pluto Water bottles. Pluto Water bottles, with their bevel-fitted glass corks and wireclamp holders, will contain formaldehyde forever: this is a fact too little known. (Is Pluto Water still in proper history, or has it been relegated out?)

There were the lepidoptera (the butterfly and night-moth collections) of Harry O'Donovan, and my own aggregations of rocks and rock fossils. And there were all the homemade radios, gamma-ray machines, electrical gadgets generally, coils, magnet wire, resistors, tubes — of Barnaby Sheen.

There were also — hold it, hold it! If everything in that room were listed, there would not be books enough in the world to contain it all (there were even quite a few books there). There would be no limit to the remnants, not even to the remnants of a single day.

But we had all of us lived several mutually exclusive boyhoods that hinged on that room. Within the framework of history as now constituted, these variants could not all have happened. But they did.

The room had developed a benevolent rumble that might be dangerous. Barnaby Sheen couldn't find what it was; and we could not. It was a soundly built room, oak and hickory and black locust wood; it had been there a long time. It was older than the fine house that had replaced the anomalous old “mansion” there. If it was dangerous (and Barnaby said that it was), we could not discover that danger.

The world itself had a deeper and more worrisome series of rumbles. We leave the room over the garages now and go to the world. We are sorry to have spent so much time on such a little thing as that room. It is just that it has stuck in our minds somehow.

2

Young Austro said “carrock, carrock.”

O'Donovan said “grumble.”

Loretta gave a spirit knock.

The room said “rumble, rumble.”

 — Rocky McCrocky (in cartoon balloon)

We were together for the first time in eighteen months. Barnaby Sheen was back in the country, Cris Benedetti was back in the country, Harry O'Donovan was back in the state, George Drakos was back out of his seclusion. I was there; I hadn't been anywhere.

Really, Barnaby was back for the second time. He'd been home two weeks before this, and that after more than a year's absence. Then, after he'd unpacked most of his things, he snapped his fingers and said, as though dreaming some lively dream, “I forgot something over there. I'll just go back and see about it. I'll be back again in a couple of weeks.”

But “over there” was halfway around the globe, in Ethiopia, about seventy miles northwest of Magdala on the Guna Slopes. Barnaby had mineral concessions there. There also he had found a concentration of most interesting fossils, some of them still living and walking. Barnaby used a cover story of doing seismograph petroleum survey work, but he was into many things.

But now he was back for the second time and we were together.

Austro had just brought us our drinks, though listlessly. Austro was houseboy and bartender and was of an old and doubted species. But he worked distractedly now, not with his old sharpness. Since he had learned to read he always had some crude sheet or sheaf of gaudy and juvenile literature under his arm or in his hand.

“Well Barney, you went halfway around the world again,” Drakos said. “Did you bring back what you went after?”

“Oh no. It wasn't such a thing as one can bring or carry. At least I don't believe that it was.”

“But you said that you had forgotten something over there and that you were going to go back and see about it.”

“Yes, I said that, but I wasn't too lucky in seeing about the matter. I couldn't remember what it was; that's the trouble. I still can't quite.”

“You went halfway around the world to get something you had left behind? And when you got there you had forgotten what it was? Barney!” This was Harry O'Donovan chiding him.

“Not quite right, Harry,” Barnaby said. “I didn't forget it when I went back there. I went back there because I had already forgotten it: because I had always forgotten it, I guess. I went back there to try to remember it. I consulted with some of Austro's elder kinsmen (he's only a boy, you know). I meditated a bit in those mountains. I'm good at that: I should have been a hermit (why, I suppose that I am!) or a prophet. But I remembered only part.”

These were really the men who knew everything? Sometimes it didn't quite seem like it.

“How does Austro handle things when you are gone?” George Drakos asked. “Being able to speak only one word might be a disadvantage, and beyond that he isn't very bright. How is he accepted?”

“Austro is quite bright, George,” Barnaby told him. “He is accepted within the house, and he doesn't go out much. Here there are several persons who accept and understand him perfectly, in spite of his seeming to speak only one word.”

“Which several persons, Barney?”

“Oh, my daughter Loretta. And Mary Mondo.”

“Barney, they don't count!” Drakos shouted in near anger.

“They do with me. They do with Austro. They do with all of you a little.”

“Barney, what George means, or at least what I mean is, is Austro accepted as human?” Cris asked.

“Oh well, yes, he's accepted as of the kindred. It's hard to put into words. There's a missing kindred word, you know. Besides mother, father, brother, sister, grandfather, grandmother, son, daughter, grandson, granddaughter, uncle, aunt, niece, nephew, cousin, female cousin, in-laws, there is yet another. Delineate it, name it: then we may know what Austro is.”

“Whatever are you talking about, Barney?” Cris asked, puzzled.

“Kinship, apposition, parallelism, the riddle of flesh and of election. Austro was found in Ethiopia, on the Guna Slopes, northwest of Magdala. But there is another Magdala, more blessed by its circumstance and location; it is near Tiberias on the shores of the Lake of Galilee. Its first name (the first name of both of them, I suspect) is Migdal, the Watch-Tower. Tell me the kinship between the two cities (there are very many analogs and references to the Two Cities) and then perhaps I can tell you the kinship between Austro and ourselves.”

(Austro, the houseboy and bartender, was one of the species called Australopithecus, which is either ape or ape-man or man: we don't really know. So far, he could speak only one word, “carrock”, but he could speak it in a hundred different ways. And he had now learned to read and write very hairy English.)

(Loretta Sheen was a life-sized sawdust-filled doll: Barnaby always insisted that this object was the body of his real daughter Loretta. We all knew Barnaby very well from boyhood, but there was a cloud here. We couldn't remember for sure whether he had ever had a real daughter or not.)

(Mary Mondo was a ghost. Actually, she was the schizo-personality of the ghost of a girl named Violet Lonsdale who was long dead.)

(Few households have three such unusual persons.)

“I believe that Austro is a qualified col to us,” Harry O'Donovan tried to explain in his rather high voice. “In Irish, col means first a prohibition, a sin, a wickedness; and only after that does it mean a cousin. So first cousin (col ceathar) really means fourth impediment or fourth wickedness, and second cousin (col seisear) really means sixth impediment or sixth wickedness. But there is (yes, you are right, Barney) another relationship whose very name is forgotten. Perhaps it is the col carraig or rock cousin. Whyever did I think of a thing like that? 'Tis flesh which is the opposite of rock. But this outside thing is at the same time a holy and forbidden relationship. It is the Flesh Between.”

“Has anyone ever sounded the real meaning of Dutch Uncle?” Cris asked. “Frisia (which is Dutch) was the latest home in Europe of some of the almost-men or early-men.”

“In Greek, cousin is exadelphus,” George Drakos contributed as he studied the thing, “the out-brother or outer-brother. But it isn't an old word. The old word for cousin is unwritten and forgotten. And yet there is, or there was, another kindred name (as Barnaby says) that is not father or mother, not son or daughter, not brother, sister, niece or nephew, not uncle or aunt or maternal grandfather. There is another and expunged relationship name, I agree: and it does represent an expunged flesh. But all expunged things leave traces.”

“Austro is such a trace,” Barnaby insisted. “He is a Flesh Between. I am believing that no creatures have ever stopped happening, but some of them have stopped being apparent. This calls into question the whole nature of reality.”

“What doesn't?” Harry O'Donovan said.

“Austro is not entirely expunged, though,” Barnaby went on. “And let us not forget that we also have angelic and diabolic kindred. We're a big family.”

“Ishmael was a more moral and upstanding man than Isaac,” Cris Benedetti said suddenly. “Why was Isaac more blessed? Why are we more blessed than Austro?”

These were the four men who knew everything? They may have been. Do you know other men who talk like that?

“Carrock, carrock,” said Austro, coming in and filling Barnaby's drink: spilling it too, for he was reading an old funny paper (Elmer Tuggle, it was) at the same time, and he wasn't good at doing two things at once.

“Rumble, rumble,” said that old unused room a few yards distant.

3

The past it is a big balloon,

I blow it all I can.

We all are ghost and all buffoon,

A close, explosive clan.

 — Lines expressed by Mary Mondo

(medium unknown)

Several evenings later it was, in the same place, and the talk had turned to ancient libraries. I don't know how it had. I came late.

“The present explosion of knowledge is fact,” Barnaby Sheen was saying. “But there is also an occasional (though continuing) explosion of knowledge in another sense. One of the most false of legends is that the two great libraries of Alexandria, with their seven hundred thousand books or rolls of writing, were deliberately destroyed, partly by Aurelian, more completely by Theodosius. That's all false, I tell you. Those two royal gentlemen would no more destroy valuable books and scrolls than you royal gentlemen here would burn up hundred-dollar bills. They knew what things had money value, and those old book-rolls had it.

“The only correct thing about the story is the chronology. Actually the two libraries exploded: the one in the Serapeum in the time of Aurelian; the one in the Museum in the time of Theodosius.”

Give him a while. Barnaby always liked to savor his own startling statements for a few moments after he had made them. Don't ask him (for a while) what he's talking about. He'll clarify it, or muddy it further, in a few minutes.

“Austro really looks more like a big frog than like a big ape,” Harry O'Donovan commented as the unusual houseboy ambled (is it more froggish than apish to amble?) into the room. Austro winked at Harry to show that he understood his statement. Austro had recently learned to wink; he had also learned how to draw cartoons.

“There is the leaky past, but it cannot leak out fast enough for safety,” Barnaby had taken up his tale again. He always came as directly as possible to a point, but the point was often a tricky one. “The staggering corpus of past events, and of non-central or nonconsensus events, is diminished swiftly. More and more things that once happened are now made not to have happened. This is absolute necessity, I suppose, even though the flesh between the lines (it is, I guess, the supposedly expunged flesh) should scream from the agony of the compression.

“Velikovsky was derided for writing that six hundred years must be subtracted from Egyptian history and from all ancient history. He shouldn't have been derided, but he did have it backwards. Indeed, six times six hundred years must be added to history again and again to approach the truth of the matter. It'd be dangerous to do it, though. It's crammed as tight as it will go now, and there's tremors all along the fault lines. As a matter of fact, several decades have been left out of quite recent United States history. They should be put back in, for they're interesting, and we ourselves lived through parts of them — if it were safe to do so.”

“How about the count of the years and their present total?” Harry O'Donovan asked. “Are they right or are they not? Is this really the year that it says it is on that calendar on the wall? And, if it is, doesn't that make nonsense about leaving out recent decades?”

“The count of the years is true, in that it is one aspect of the truth,” Barnaby said a little bit fumblingly. “But there are other aspects. They call into question the whole nature of simultaneity.”

“What doesn't?” Harry O'Donovan said.

“There are taboos in mathematics,” Barnaby tried to explain. “The idea of the involuted number series is taboo, and yet we live in a time that is counted by such a series. And when time is fleshed, when it puts on History for its clothes, it follows even more the involuted series in which there are very, very many numbers between one and ten.”

“Just what do you have in mind, Barney?” Cris Benedetti asked him.

“I have never discovered any historical event happening for the first time,” Barnaby said. “Either life imitates anecdote, or very much more has happened than the bursting records are allowed to show as happening. As far back as one can track it, there is history: and I do not mean prehistory. I doubt if there was ever such a time as prehistory. I doubt that there was ever an uncivilized man. I also doubt that there was ever any manlike creature who was not full man, however unconventional the suit of hide that he wore.

“But when you try to compress a hundred thousand years of history into six thousand years, something has to give. When you try to compress a million years, it becomes dangerous. An involuted number series, particularly when applied to the spate of years, becomes a tightly coiled spring of primordial spring-steel. When it recoils, look out! There comes the revenge of things left out.

“Were there eight kings of the name of Henry in England, or were there eighty? Never mind: someday it will be recorded that there was only one, and the attributes of all of them will be combined into his compressed and consensus story.

“There is a deep texture of art and literature (no matter whether it is rock scratching or machine duplication) that goes back over horizon after horizon. There is a deeper texture to life itself that is tremendous in its material and mental and psychic treasures. There are dialects now that were once full vernaculars, towns now that were once great cities, provinces that were nations. The foundations and the lower stories of a culture or a building are commonly broader than its upper stories. A structure does not balance upside-down, standing on a point.

“A torch was once lighted and given to a man, not to a beast. And it has been passed on from hand to hand while the hills melted and rose again. What matter that some of the hands were more hairy than others? It was always a man's hand.”

“It may be that you are balancing upside-down on your pointed head, Barney,” Harry O'Donovan told him.

“It may be, but I believe that is not the case. Atrox Fabulinus, the Roman Rabelais, reconstructs some of the omissions and compressions in the form of fables. It is a common belief that a fable is less weighty than history and less likely to break down the great scaffold; it was, you know, a fabled straw that broke the camel's back (a real event). We know from Atrox that there were three Roman Kingdoms, three Roman Republics, and three Roman Empires, each series extending for more than a thousand years. We know that some of the more outré and outrageous of the emperors (and kings and tyrants and demagogues and rebels and tribunes) are no longer to be found in proper history at all. Clio is a skittish muse and very fearful of breakdowns.

“Yet Humerus Maximus and Nothus Nobilis and Anserem Captator and Capripex Ferox were in reality men of such bursting vigor and feats that history has not been able to contain them. But their suppression shouts at us and shocks us.

“And it goes back many times farther; there are the stone pages that have been crowded (for a while) quite out of history. It was clearly man from the beginning, though, even though at its earliest it was sometimes man dressed in an ape suit.”

Austro had a bunch of patio blocks, thin concrete blocks, under his arm. He was very strong and he carried two dozen of them easily. He had been drawing cartoons on them: no, he had been drawing primordial pictures: they are almost, but not quite, the same. He drew with a bone stylus and used an ocher and water mixture for his paint. How had he known to do that? He showed his drawings to the sawdusty Loretta Sheen and to the unbalanced and ghostly Mary Mondo. They laughed gaily at the drawings, and then they laughed with a peculiar pathos.

Mary Mondo brought some of the stones to us. We looked and laughed. Then we looked more and laughed less. They were sharp cartoons, striking caricatures. They were something more. Once there was a species to which humor was far more important than seriousness. Once there was a species so vivid and vibrant that it had to be forgotten by history. And Austro was a member of it. But, for a moment there, we almost knew what kindred Austro was to us.

“François, the French Rabelais, pulled greater tricks than did Atrox,” Barnaby Sheen was saying. “As you have probably suspected, there are a full thousand years lost out of the Lower Middle Ages. History ran up to the year fourteen hundred and fifty-three once, and then reverted to the year four hundred and fifty-three. It was a much different year four hundred and fifty-three than it had been the first time, though. The Millennium really has been and gone, you know. It's forgotten now. It wasn't what had been expected, but it was what had been promised.

“Nobody promised us that it would be a thousand years of peace and prosperity. Nobody promised that it would be an era of learning and suavity. And certainly nobody promised that it would be a time of ease and gentility.

“It was the Millennium itself, and the Devil was bound for a thousand years. But he surely was not quiet about his binding. He clanked and howled. He shook the whole world, and he caused land tides and sea tides. He caused mountains to collapse and people to go fearful and even to die literally petrified. And then the people discovered a cloud-capping and roaring humor in their fearfulness. A giantism appeared, a real awareness, a ridiculousness which has always been the authentic rib-rock of the world.

“François Rabelais caught a little of that giantism and jollity. But it is banned from history, that thousand years, though it was more real than most things in history. History is too fragile to contain it. History, and all its annals and decades and centuries, would be shattered forever if these ten centuries were included.”

“What happened afterward, Barney?” Harry O'Donovan asked, “when the Devil was unbound again and we resumed the historical count (wrong by a thousand years, of course, but who minds that? — or involuted by a thousand years) and things became as they are now? How are they now?”

“Oh, the unbound Devil fragmentized (an old trick of his) and spread himself wherever he could. His is a feigned omnipresence, so there is a little of him in every person and every thing. He believes (he isn't really very bright) that he can't be bound again if he keeps himself scattered. But his shriveling effect is on us all. We are no longer giants.”

“Oh, I've always believed that I was still a giant,” said Drakos, who was considerably the largest of the men. And then he asked with the veriest bit of mockery, “Barnaby, would you like your daughter to be carrying on seriously with an ape-man?”

“There has never been an ape-man, George,” Barnaby said softly. “There was, and there still is, this not-quite series of cousins for whom we miss the name. But it's a ghostliness, not an apishness, that sets them a little apart from us who are their kindred. And my daughter (whether she lived in flesh or not I am no longer sure) is now no more than a girl-sized doll full of sawdust and a few words or mottos. And yet she is more than that. If not a true ghostliness, she at least has a polter-ghostliness about her. So has Mary Mondo.

“The children, Austro and Loretta and Mary — none of them is more than a child or at most an adolescent — are close kindred, closer to each other, perhaps, than to us. It is common, perhaps universal, that children are of a slightly different race — I mean it literally — than they will later become. But it is all right with them.”

“When were the several decades left out of United States history, Barnaby?” Cris Benedetti asked him.

“Early, and recent, and present, for I rather suspect that our own contingent present will not be firmly inscribed in the records.”

“You mean that we may not be recorded as real?” Drakos asked.

“Possibly not,” Barnaby said. “I'll give one example: there is the case of a father, son, and grandson from one family, John Adams, John Braintree Adams, and John Quincy Adams — all being Presidents of the United States. I notice, though, that only two of them are now believed in, or are now written in. The best of the three (wouldn't you believe it? it's always the best) has been left out. But the foreshortening was continuous, and part of it, I believe, took place during our own boyhoods. There was much more happening then, three times more, than we are allowed to remember. Sometimes it seems that it was a million years and not just a couple of decades left out here.”

“You don't mean this literally, do you?” Harry O'Donovan asked. “You talk in parables, do you not?”

“Am I Christ that I should talk in parables? No, I talk literally, Harry. Things have happened, and then they have been made to seem not to have happened.”

“By what possible process could it have been done? It would have required a simultaneous and multitudinous altering of records and minds.”

“By a human process it was done; I cannot say more about that mysterious process. It isn't a natural thing, of course, for man isn't a natural animal. He is supernatural, or he is preternatural, or he is unnatural. I'm not sure which class this repeating amnesia, with its mechanical adjuncts, belongs to.”

“What could trigger one of the explosions that you talk about, Barnaby?” Drakos asked.

“I believe that a mind that does not accept the local mathematical taboos might trigger off a blast. And I believe that such a mind has been spending a lot of time in our old clubroom that now has the rumbles. It's a cave there, really. All clubrooms are caves. The caves on the Guna Slopes, they are made by explosions, by blasting. Caves are never completely natural configurations, and there are no caves that have not been inhabited. Water and wind have not scooped out caves. People with their explosive and blasting intelligence and curiosity have scooped them out.”

“I suspect that I should professionally recommend you to an alienist, Barney,” said Dr. George Drakos.

“I suspect that you should professionally study this problem yourself, George,” Barnaby said somewhat stubbornly. “Even medical men have good ideas sometimes.”

“Did there used to be a funny paper named Rocky McCrocky?” Harry O'Donovan asked the ceiling (he always sat leaning far back in his chair). “It was about, I believe, cave-men.”

“I don't remember it,” Cris said. “If there had been one, John Penandrew would know, but we seldom see John in these latter times. There was Alley Oop, of course, and later there was B. C. And many of the others, Happy Hooligan, Down on the Farm, Her Name was Maud, Boob McNutt, Toonerville Trolley, were troglodyte or cave-man funny papers in disguise.”

“I wonder if the, ah, troglodytes themselves had funny papers?” George Drakos asked.

“Certainly,” said Cris. “Has not Austro just been making such funny papers and passing them around? And he is a troglodyte, or a troll, which is the same thing.

“And our older rock uncles (they of the kindred forgotten, of the Flesh Between) have left such funny papers in thousands of places. Mostly they were scratched on slate-rock or on limestone or on old red sandstone; and they had, it seems to me, the intensity and context almost strong enough to move mountains.”

“By the way,” Barnaby Sheen said dreamily, “there was once an explosion or implosion of certain archives or annals at Migdal which in fact did move a mountain. It was quite a strong blast. And we are inclined to forget just what an explosive pun is the word ‘magazine’ in its several senses. For it means a periodical publication, which is to say a journal or an annal. But it also means a depot in which explosives and ammunition are stored. Every library, I believe, is a magazine in both of these senses, and I use the word ‘library’ quite loosely.”

“You've nibbled at it from every edge, Barnaby,” George Drakos said. “You might as well go ahead and tell us what you mean you when you say that the two great libraries at Alexandria exploded, and when you say that the archives or annals at Migdol (the Magdala of the more blessed location, I presume) exploded so violently as to move a mountain.”

“Yes, I'll get with it,” Barnaby said. “Where is that Austro? He's never here when we want a refill.”

“He's down in that funny room over the garages, the one that rumbles,” Mary Mondo expressed. “He lives there now.”

“Can you tell him to come here, Mary?” Barnaby asked.

“I just have,” Mary expressed. “He says there's no great hurry. He says he'll be along by and by.”

“Thank you, Mary,” Barnaby said. “Ah, you slipped one over on me that time.”

(Barnaby Sheen ordinarily did not recognize the presence or existence of the schizo-ghost Mary Mondo, but she was handy for communicating at a distance.)

“Gentlemen,” said Barnaby then, “there are very many cases of archives and libraries exploding, cases that seem incredible. Some of them were libraries whose books were tablets of hewn stone, some of baked brick, some of glazed tile, some of flaky clay, some of papyrus rolls or other split-reed made into near-paper, some of parchment or thinned sheepskin, some of vellum or scraped calfskin or kidskin, some of velum or the palate membrane of the common dragon (‘vellum’ and ‘velum’ are sometimes confused by the ignorant; just remember that the latter is fire-resistant), some of paper of the modern sort.”

“Some of the libraries consist of trunks filled with pulp-paper funny papers and comic books,” the sawdust-filled doll named Loretta conveyed. “They're the best kind.”

“These collections,” said Barnaby (not having received the message his daughter had given), “being of such diverse material, would seem to have nothing in common to make them explode. But the annals and decades and centuries that were excised from these collections did very often force their way back into them with great power. Nothing is forgotten forever. The repositories very often did explode.”

“How, Barney, how?” Harry O'Donovan challenged.

“I believe that it always begins with an earth-rumble, with a cavern-rumble,” Barnaby said.

“With a room-rumble,” contributed the sawdust-filled doll, but Barnaby did not attend her message.

“Decades and centuries refusing to be suppressed!” said Barnaby.

“Poor relations refusing to be suppressed,” said Harry O'Donovan with sudden insight.

“A million years refusing to be frozen out,” expressed Mary Mondo. “Say, do you know the real process responsible for the ice ages? Oh, never mind. Your minds are too cluttered already with things you barely understand. You have thrice-repeated boyhoods refusing to be suppressed. There is a group ghosthood refusing to give itself up. They all build power.”

“Fortunately my own library is quite small and quite technical,” Barnaby said. “I carry so much in my head, you see. Were it not so, I could almost feel the rumble of a coming explosion now.”

“Oh, brother, cannot we all!” Dr. Drakos cried in sharp-eared comprehension.

4

“Kabloom, kabloom!”

Said McCrocky's room.

 — Motto taken from the rubble and dust

of Loretta Sheen

It was that old room over the garages that now rumbled fearfully as though to illustrate Barnaby's words. This was no ordinary rumble. We were all white-faced with fear, it was coming on so rapidly.

Then it exploded. Kabloom!!

It stunned ears, it paralyzed throats, it singed eyes. It buckled the floor of the study where we were and it knocked one wall completely out, even though the exploding room was in a building apart. It shook sawdust out of Loretta Sheen. It gave Harry O'Donovan a nosebleed, and it knocked Barnaby Sheen out cold. It is believed that it moved a small mountain over behind us, a small mountain known as Harrow Street Hill.

But the outdoors, seen and heard and smelled and felt where the wall had been knocked out, was like no outdoors we had ever seen before. There were many thousands of conflagrations and eruptions and avalanches and floods and quakes; and all of it had to be within a very small area, between the old garages and the house.

All the air was filled with reek and smoke and howling animate clouds. These clouds at first seemed like flying masses of biblical grasshoppers and locusts, plague creatures, but they had faces on them, and remembered parts. And they were upbeat and strong and not at all overwhelmed by the destruction.

There were the blown-apart pieces of boys flying through the air, and some of them looked a lot like ourselves. There were flying effigies by the thousands. Why, there was one whole parade or convention with banners flying. re-elect president parkinson was the message on the banners. He had been the leader of the Cow-Moose Party when he was elected president. How had he been forgotten, when weak echoes of him had been remembered?

There were our own grandfathers flying through the air. They weren't the two regular grandfathers that most of us remembered, but the other grandfathers that we had forgotten. And the air was full of tumbling and howling dogs such as hadn't been around here lately; what breeds they were! Baffinland Giants and Denver Block-Dogs, Hartstone Hunters and Blackfoot Swackers, Dansburry Dandies and Cowcatchers were there, with Brindled Birmingham Dogs and Grenadiers and Short-Haired Scratchers. How come we hadn't seen any of those sorts of dogs around for a long time?

There were the other kind of automobiles, that looked like McCormick Reapers with their cylinder-like vanes spinning in the wind and powering them. Oh hokey, there were even chalky comics from the old magic lantern theater circuits. There were the Sullivan Seven-Passenger Family Balloons flying well enough and only a little bit tattered from the explosion. There were the other kind of people and the other kind of animals and the other kind of motor dredges.

Yeah, yeah, but most of it was people, and most of the people were in remembered masquerade costume. Only one whole parade? Why, there were perhaps a thousand parades, writhing and marching in that reek from the explosion, and yet apparently it was just one little room that had blown up. There were illustrated rocks floating through the air, thousands of trees worth of paper. But the whole thing had been no more than one clattering jolt, half-comic and half-frightening, and it was over with in an instant.

It left after-images, though, as a fire in a fireplace will shuffle them and show them. We would be seeing them, with our eyes open or with them closed, for a long time. And the thing, though destructive, wasn't depressing. There was a lot of fun associated with it.

A little while later, the dazed Austro came in, singed and smoking, but laughing. He had been in the room when it blew up, but he was a tough one.

“Carrock, carrock, we bust the crock,” he said. It was the first complete sentence that he had ever spoken in English. He winked; he winked crookedly, he would never wink straight again. One of his eyes had been blasted askew. But he had salvaged an armload of patio blocks and he began to draw on them with happy abandon. And what he was drawing was the million-year-long saga of Rocky McCrocky.

We remembered now. John Penandrew used to draw Rocky McCrocky when we were boys. But Austro was Rocky McCrocky. No wonder he had always looked familiar.

“Cousin, rock-cousin,” said Harry O'Donovan, “you have given me back the lost two-thirds of my boyhood. Ah, that was one of me sailing through the air with my head half severed off. What a guy I was when I was him! You have intruded a lost million years into a small room over there. We will never remember it all, but we have remembered parts of it now, parts of it that we thought were lost forever.”

“It could not have happened,” Barnaby muttered, still out, still over-powered. “That room was not library; that room was not annals.”

It was, though.

Somewhere there is the full story about man and his kindred, but pieces of it were right here. Loretta dribbled sawdust, and a profound written motto fell from her open throat. That was part of it, if only it could be read. Mary Mondo, that schizo ghost, laughed in that way ghosts have. She remembered a lot about what and who we are. And Austro drew the Rocky McCrocky cartoons on blocks of flat stone and passed them around the neighborhood as a weekly feature. There is a lot of good information to be found in the weekly Rocky McCrocky documents.

And Mad Undancing Bears

1

Recurring group madness as a world problem could be easily solved if only there were some standard to determine which are the mad-men and which are the keepers.

Inmate Number 444075864,

Platt Institute for the Criminally Insane

Though fight them yet with ding and din

And sanity of noise,

The mad things come like silent sin

With dress and pace and poise.

Peach Orchard Ballads

They had been wandering forty years in the desert, so most of them had been born there. There were probably two hundred small groups of them, and they came now for bloodless conquest of the dark and dismal cities of the plains and valleys. They could hear the din of the cities from many miles away, they could see the smoke above them like clouds during the day, and the dancing lights at night.

The desert that the small groups came from were the badlands, the silent salt plains, the alabaster hills and the potato hills, the gopher gulches and the bear brackens of middlewestern North America. And other continents had other deserts where perhaps similar movements were taking place. The silent things were coming to the towns.

“The deserts are always the same,” Polycarp was saying softly. “If there are devils in the desert (and there are) they are always the same primordial devils. If there is madness in the deserts (and we know that there is) yet it is always the same madness. The deserts do not change, and we who come out of these waste places do not change except in our generations and our cycles. We have a cleansing, a sandblasting effect on the cities.

“But the cities change; and their madness (though always of the same virus) takes different form at each appearance.”

They were sandaled in soft leather against the hot earth. They were enfolded against the sun in dressed bearskins and deerskins and wolfskins. They were hooded with the head skins of bears, and the bears' ears were like horns on them.

They talked happily and liltingly, but they did not sing. Song was banned to them for this while because its name had been stolen by a different and dirty thing. They walked thirty kilometers a day with a springiness and swing, but they did not dance. Dance was barred to them for the days of their dynasty because its name had been burgled by a shoddier and more dismal thing. But the birds that followed them thick as clouds sang, and the white-tailed deer and blackfoot ferrets danced about them.

“The Third Muggers and the Fifth Choppers are coming to kill us,” Scholastica said lightly. “I know that it is a glorious thing to die, but we come for the bloodless conquest of the cities and our effect is lost if we die too easily. We are rapt, but we are told that it is not we who are mad. Yet we really have no instructions. We have no statement other than that it will be given to us in that hour what to do. Have we even any leaders?”

These people were neat, they were clean, they were combed and trimmed; and the men of them were unbearded. It gave a youthfulness to all of them that was seldom seen elsewhere. They had an easy grace for all the uneasiness of their situation.

“We do have leaders,” said Vitus, “and they also will be revealed to us in that hour. As to the muggers, mind them not. In older days they ambushed and murdered; but now, and to us, they are a sick joke of themselves. They come with blaring noise boxes to their ears. In the din of the cities their tactics might still succeed, but here in the quiet desert how is a noisy ambush to take us? And they are slower afoot than ourselves.

“The choppers, however, are something else. They have the speed of their machines, and they can search out and signal and combine murderously.”

“ 'Tis a chopper comes now with a great roar,” Margaret said. “He has left his followers many kilometers behind and comes like a giant alone. I see his face as in a childhood dream. Dream animals, particularly those dreamed by very young children, are often accurate depictments of extinct animals; did you know that? But he is not quite an animal, and I am not quite a young child. And he isn't extinct.”

“There are also dream people and quasi-people,” Fabian said. “They are dreamed by adults, sometimes dreamed waking by adults, and perhaps they are real. What about the ‘typhonian’ features of dreamed people? Did all people once have typhonian features?”

“This one has,” Perpetua said. “Underneath his hairiness he has them clearly. This one is a Typhonian.”

“He is an Angel,” said Dadacus. “He is an angel unrevealed even to himself. That is what a typhonian is. One of us here must reveal him. Then he will be worth many of the others. We receive the best of them in compensation for our losses.”

The whine of the approaching chopper-cycle had become a scream. The dust of it was a pillar in the air. It came into sight as a howling dot at the bottom of the pillar, and it grew. Riding it was the chopper whom several of them had seen while he was still far below the horizon. He was a huge, bearded, slavering man, the whites of whose eyes were as big as apples, and the black pupils of them were like insane black holes.

His name, lettered in crazy print on his cycle, was Whole-Hog McCloud. He was hairy and naked and obese, a mad and frothing giant. But did he really look like that?

Only at first glance. In reality he had the plastic smooth, primordial, unfinished look of a typhonian. He could still be molded into anything. But the noise of him and of his apparatus!

He had amplifiers on his exhaust; he had amplifiers all over his machine and all over himself. He screamed to a skidding halt, throwing sand and rocks and gravel a hundred meters.

He was bloodied in his hairy nakedness from his skidding fall, and he had intended it so. He arose and arose again, appearing more giant-like than was possible.

“We fight to the death,” the big chopper roared through his amplifiers. “I fight and kill you all at once.” And he came at them swinging a length of chain in one of his huge hands.

“No, we wrestle to life,” Celsus said. Celsus was the biggest man of this group of desert people. “And you strive with myself only, not with all at once. I'm a mightier wrestler than you'd believe, and my help is from otherwhere.”

But part of Celsus' help was from those present. Domitilla spread out her hands, and there was silence. The fallen chopper-cycle coughed and its engine died.

The electronic noise boxes that were hung on the machine all conked out with their amplifiers. There was left only quiet and little puffs of black smoke. The throat amplifier of the giant Whole-Hog McCloud likewise went silent with a bigger puff of blacker smoke. The giant tried to roar again, but his only noise was a weak, hoarse croaking.

“My noise, my noise, I need my noise,” he croaked. “My strength is in my noise.”

Did someone laugh at him? It may have been the desert itself, or the white-tailed deer or the ferrets; or those birds named bullbats that are unmannered birds. The people of the desert group smiled at him with quiet compassion, though Domitilla still spread out her quieting hands.

It was tall, dusty noon, and the battle joined. Whole-Hog came at Celsus swinging his chain, and he caught him a solid bloody blow with it. But the strong wrestler, though staggered, had hold of the chain in the middle now. He held two links of it in his wrestler's hands; he broke the chain. (He really had strength or help from otherwhere.) He held one half of the chain loosely in his hand now and left Whole-Hog with the other.

Then the wrestler Celsus smiled and threw his own length of chain away; but Whole-Hog kept his. They closed, they grappled, and the pinioned Whole-Hog was more hampered than aided by his chain weapon. Whole-Hog seemed less huge when the two of them were twined together, only a little larger than Celsus. They wrestled for a great long while: the naked hairy typhonian and the big youngish man in the bearskin cloak.

Jacob once wrestled with a Presence for a great part of the night and until dawn. This was at a place named Phanuel near a stream called Jaboc.

Whole-Hog McCloud wrestled with Celsus from tall noon till near dark at a place that was very like Phanuel and was near a stream called Coyote Creek.

Cecilia, with her quick lilting voice, told the old and ever-new account of the erstwhile giant while he wrestled. It was all new to his ears that had been stunned for so many years and were freed only in recent hours. But he heard it and he changed. His eyes changed as he wrestled, and his whole form. Cecilia talked on and on (though it was necessarily a very compressed account that she gave) and Domitilla still held her quieting hands spread out.

Just as the sun touched down the two big men stopped their wrestling.

“Your name is no longer Whole-Hog,” Celsus said. “It is Whole-Man now.”

“Here is water,” said Whole-Man McCloud. “What is to prevent you taking me ritually into it?”

They did so. And when they came out of the water, Domitilla wrapped Whole-Man in a bearskin robe. By this he became, like the rest of them, a berserker.

They moved on in the early night. There had been ten persons in this group; now there were eleven.

The people of the cities didn't understand how the desert epidemic grew. It grew by such accretions as this.

2

The shock so stopped the world that one

Could hardly hear the flack.

There reeled the psychedelic sun.

Rabidity was back!

Peach Orchard Ballads

One of the nineteen persons comprising the secret society named Glomerule that ruled much of the world was a bear and not a man: His name was Boris Medved.

Actually, only ten of the high members were men, the other eight being women; and it's an open question whether women or bears are the stranger species.

Boris looked like a man. He was neither more nor less hairy than the men of the society, neither more nor less unhandsome. But there are certain differences between even the most manlike bear and a man (so Doctor Rockter said); and by these differences, Boris was a bear. He was determined, however, not to let this influence him either way in his judgments of the mad bear clan which was reappearing here and there out of the deserts. Boris was a most fair-minded individual. (And let us not forget the great contributions he had made to Rat-Track Rock.)

“But there is no doubt that the madness has reappeared,” Boris shouted to his colleagues Doctor Rockter and Beryl My-Thing. “There were a dozen reports yesterday, a hundred today; tomorrow there may be thousands.”

“We had our century of sanity,” Beryl cried out. “They can never take that away from us. I had hoped that it would last forever, though; or at least for my own time.”

“And it will and it must last!” Doctor Rockter trumpeted. “What are even a thousand cases of this new insanity among the billions of us? We will isolate it. We will solve it. We will not let ourselves be driven mad by the reappearing madness. We'll dog it down. We'll blast it out. The madness is in the berserker form this time. Does that put you in an embarrassing position, Boris?”

“It does not!” Boris roared. “They say (that is, you say it as doctor) that I'm a bear, medically and phyletically, so I suppose that I am. But these mad berserkers are apparently humans of a bear clan who dress in bearskins. They should put the rest of you in an embarrassing position more than myself. It is nearly always in the human species that these madness epidemics appear. But I have nothing but hatred and contempt for these berserkers. Yes, and fear, for the infection does spread.”

They didn't really have to shout, cry, trumpet or roar out their words like that. It was ingrained, almost innate habit. They could all read mouth; and they weren't able to hear each others' words above the din in any case.

“Doctor Rockter, how is the madness caught? How is it infectious?” Beryl screeched. “And where does it abide in the centuries between?”

“We don't know,” Rockter howled. “Several cycles back, in the old world, mad people of the fish clan or catfish clan lived underground in what were called catacombs. We believe that the mad people of the bear clan live underground in what are called barrows, though this guess may be based on a false etymology. And we don't know what triggers their coming up from underground, or how the madness infection is passed on. One explanation (which in itself seems mad to me) is that they pass it on by some spermotopheric spasm at the moment of their deaths, so that one dead berserker makes as many as ten live ones. I'll not believe it. I would guess that they themselves made up that tale so that we'd be fearful of killing them.”

“But we are not!” Boris thundered. “The Third Muggers and the Fifth Choppers are in the field now killing them as fast as they find them. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be fast enough.”

Harry Stonefoot, Gaster Blaster, and Helga Navel (three other high members of Glomerule) entered the meeting room. (Everybody remembers Helen and her Umbilical Chords, the greatest, or at least the loudest, string band ever. They'd done so much for Pock Rock a decade ago.)

“These mad folk come from the badlands,” Helen twanged like vibrating mountains. (One could actually hear her. She'd always had a voice that could cut through the howling ululation of the strings and chords.) “They come from those deserts of nonsound, from the silent salt plains, from the alabaster hills and the potato hills, from the gopher gulches and the bear brackens. The horrible silence has driven them mad, clear mad. They wear cloaks of bearskin; that is the truth. They refuse obeisance to the Fundamental Rock. They refuse all conjuncture. They'll not meet the beat, or mesh the flesh, or sing the thing, or grass or hash. They'll not touch the raper-caper, or the placid acid, or the ranchy dance. They'll not bollix Moloch with the rid-kids; they disdain the itch-twitch. There is no bottom to their madness. They're mad beasts in human form. They are coming in groups of a dozen or more and each group is bringing a cloud of silence with it. The secret of their madness is in that no-noise cloud.”

“We kill them and dissect them,” Harry Stonefoot clattered so powerfully that the cords of his throat stood out purple. “They are humans in all but mind, and even there the brain capacity is of sufficient physical size. But they dress in bearskins while keeping themselves cropped and depilated. Why should they want to be taken for animals? What is it they are called?”

“The bear-shirts,” shouted Doctor Rockter, “or bear-sarks as they were once called in Scotland, or berserks as they were known in Scandinavia, all with the same meaning of madmen who dress in animal skins. Have you brought me any of their brain tissue to analyze, Stonefoot?”

(Everybody remembers Harry Stonefoot and his Stony Hearts who had done so much for Stony-Hearted Rock, who in fact had invented Stony-Hearted Rock a decade before.)

“I've brought buckets of it,” Stonefoot shrilled. “But you'll find no difference in any of the dead tissue, I'll bet, except that their ears are unpierced and their spleens are unsplit. And they are so cropped and shorn as to seem quite different at first glance. They are not, however, basically a completely hairless species. Yes, plenty of brains left here, Rockter, though members of the Third Muggers have been eating great lots of them. That's effective when they do their ‘Brain Food Rock’ number, you know.”

“We have set up amplifiers on the edge of the deserts in the hope of turning the berserks back, knowing their aversion for holy sound. And the holy sound does give them pain. They hesitate. But then they come along again with bleeding ears (ear scar tissue is probably possible to them then, though the earlier dead ones of them were completely without it). We play them very loud recordings of other berserkers in death agony. This does not seem to disturb them as much as random sound does; and yet the method is effective against infesting rodents. We will try still other things, for the mad infection must be stopped.”

“They have a rationale,” Gaster Blaster boomed (everybody remembers Gaster and his Jelly-Belly group who did so much for Soft Rock in quite recent years). “I always say it's a sign of madness to have a rationale. And they have a saying, ‘love one another,’ which they apparently stole from the Buffalo Horns who did so much for Horny Rock. They say it but they do not practice it. They will not copulate with strangers. They will not copulate openly with each other. The Choppers, who have killed the most of them and examined the bodies, say that many of them are virgins. That reminds me a little of the numbers ‘Chastity Lastity’ and ‘The Chaste Waste’ that the Wastelanders (who did so much for Wasteland Rock) performed just the past year.

“The berserks speak of light as though it were white or golden and as though it were singular. Apparently they cannot even see the shattered and dynamic psychedelic lights nor even the kaleidoscopic psychedelic sun. And the berserks, the marching virgins, are serious in their madness.”

“I will go over the brain tissues and perhaps I can isolate the madness virus,” Doctor Rockter crowed (expertly, for he had been one of the Red Roosters who did so much for Red Rooster Rock two decades before). “This is not new, you know. There were manifestations of it more than two thousand years ago in the Roman district known as Coele-Syria. It has happened again and again since that early fish clan of mad persons. The catching madness may have felled and continued Rome itself; something certainly interfered with the terminal sanity there. And a king named Clovis formally joined a reappearance or variation of the mad sect in the year 496 and he brought 3,000 of his followers with him. This illustrates the magnitude of the danger, if persons in such numbers can catch the madness infection so instantly and so completely. Later there was Mad Francis who represented all the insane clans together: for he said that he was brother of the wolf and the hare and the fox and the deer and the bear. Also, I believe, of the sun and the moon.

“And there were the madmen of Cluny and of Trent. They came ‘renewing,’ as they said, and they did renew the epidemic madness. This epidemic madness always comes just when the terminal sanity seems securely established.”

“Do you want our culture, sane though it is, to be a terminal thing with our cycle and generation?” Beryl My-Thing shouted uncertainly.

“Certainly. It is the direction of our sanity to terminate the life thing. I want that. Don't you?” Rockter crowed.

“I'm not sure,” Beryl shouted with a curious misery.

“Then you are not one of us, not really,” the Doctor crowed. “I suspect that you yourself are touched by this new-old madness. I declare you suspect.”

This was shocking. It was unpleasant. Everyone remembered the great things that Beryl My-Thing had done with Crock-of Rock.

“To continue,” Rockter crowed, “long ago there was a certain madman named Pádraig who almost single-handed brought the dementia to the Irish island. As a dominant thing, it was stamped out there only a few centuries ago. It still maintains itself in the hills and wastelands as it does in our own land. We know that it is endemic with ground squirrels and prairie dogs of our own western wastelands. The madness virus (I am sure that I will find this to be the case) is identical with, or closely related to, the Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. This, I assure you, is a real disease and not connected with that number of the same name that was done by the Rocky Mountain Rocks several years ago. We will solve the mystery and madness of the berserkers, though, or it will dissolve and transmute what we have built. They'll not let it be a glorious finality; they'll turn it into a turgid middle period.”

“We will kill them where we find them,” Helga twanged like one of the Umbilical Chords, very loud, very stringy. “We will strip them of their bearskin robes, for I believe that some of their madness adheres to these things which they call ‘clothing.’ We will scatter them where they congregate, and we will steadfastly remain scatterbrained ourselves. Let us remember the old motto ‘A scatterbrain is a catter-brain,’ for we are the catter-brained cats. With this slogan, I believe that we renowned cats will be impervious to all infection.”

“And if they still infect and grow in numbers and congregate?” Gaster thundered the question.

“Then to the Colosseum with them! To our reconstructed temple of old rock!” Harry Stonefoot himself clattered like clattering stones. “It is built perfectly for maximum sound, and such sound must be paid for in blood. A pact, by somebody with somebody, was once made to that effect. I believe that the wonderful place will give maximum screaming tone when these madmen die in their agony. They refuse to twitch in life but they'll twitch in death.

“To the tigers, to the lions, to the serpents, to the bears with them!”

3

It ends for shouting rockies and

Hierocratic hairs.

The quiet thunder comes to hand

And mad, undancing bears.

Peach Orchard Ballads

It would be the finest concert of the week; one reason for this was that it would be the only concert of the week, for it would last the full week. It had been ordered by Glomerule, and Boris Medved, one of the really high members of that powerful society, was director of the concert.

It was in the Colosseum, whose only resemblance to an older structure of the same name was that it was also colossal. This was called the Reconstructed Temple of the Old Rock. It was not really a reconstruction of anything. It was a giant round rock building, domed and not open, and it had flashing psychedelic sun and moon in the middle of the dome. It wasn't even a very old building, less than one hundred years, but there were certain quite old rites going on in one focus of it.

These rites were called the Bollixing of Moloch. It did not resemble the old Roman thing from which the Colosseum had its name. It more resembled the old Phoenician or the old Carthaginian thing.

Certain suspected persons (there were about a thousand of them on the lists for this concert) were brought before Moloch whose head was a labyrinth of roar boxes and whose belly was a burning furnace. These suspected persons were required to do the right things to prove their decency and sanity. They must come in their natural nakedness and must make obeisance to the Fundamental Rock (this was the complex of roar boxes in Moloch's head: it gave the fundamental tone to all roar boxes everywhere). The suspected persons must then hold fleshy congress with certain professional experts. They must then partake of the holy grass and the holy hash. They must dip the placid acid, meet the beat, sing the thing, share the hair, dance the ranch, and twitch the itch. Finally they must take part in a rid-the-kids, for Moloch must be fed.

A rid-the-kids (done every time sufficient groups of suspected persons were brought before Moloch) consisted of casting nine still-living fetuses, nine one-year-old children, and nine three-year-old children into the burning belly of Moloch. The suspected persons often would refuse to perform this simple symbolic rite, particularly if the children were their own. In this case they were adjudged mad and were given to the turned-on cats or the bears to be killed.

This concert had now been going on for about two hundred thousand beats (about two days and nights by the old way of counting time). The suspected persons were mostly the mad berserkers who had been captured as they came in from the deserts. They wore animal skins for clothing, as persons of the unemancipated era were said to have worn clothing the century before. And they would not have rated in the Hierarchy of the Hairs at all; full and flowing hair seemed unimportant to them.

And they simply would not perform any of the holy rites. The sound of the roar boxes apparently bothered them more than the fear of death. “We might as well get it over with,” several of them were seen by mouthreaders to remark, “anything to get away from the crooked noise and the crooked lights.” They were mad, mad, corporately and individually mad, contagiously mad.

A few hundred of them had already been killed by the big turned-on cats, the tigers and the lions. There were a few hundred more of them to go. The air was blue-gray from the smoke and sock of grass, hash, and mash; and the arena was slippery with blood.

The great rock numbers of this particular concert had emerged as “Blood and Sand” (“Blood in the pit where the crazies go / Soggy wet sand where the tripgrasses grow”), “Cat Rock” (“Tiger, Tiger, turned-on Cat / Berserk entrails keep you fat”), “King Rock” (“Moloch, Moloch, bloody King Red / Fire in the belly and rocks in the head”), and “Slippery Rock,” the words of which are too slippery to be captured here. Then, just as that splendid new number “Sock Rock” began, there was a premonition and a change that went through the whole structure and its fauna.

It was quite a small group of suspects and refusers who were going through when it happened, eleven persons. Boris Medved, the High Director of the Concert, knew at once that something cataclysmic was happening. He felt the change more strongly than a lesser being might have felt it. He jumped bravely down into the arena with his roar boxes roaring.

But they didn't roar as they should. One of the refusers, a young lady named Domitilla, spread out her hands; and Medved's roar boxes sputtered and died with little puffs of smoke. Then the giant amplifiers and roarers of the Colosseum went out. There was a soft wave of silence that went through the whole structure, and the people of the concert were suddenly ashen with fear.

It was so quiet that one could hear the padding of the feet of the great turned-on cats and the bears on the soggy sand of the pit; one could even hear the moving of the giant snakes.

“Noise, noise,” the people were croaking hoarsely. “We need our noise.” But their unamplified voices could hardly be heard and their unamplified instruments could not raise their wails into true rock.

The big, turned-on cats seemed less turned on, with the din that had always maddened them now quieted by Domitilla's hands; but they moved easily, though nervously, in for the kills.

The bears, however, intervened; for this particular band of refusers in the pit were berserkers, mad people of the bear clan. The bears surrounded the people and the big cats withdrew a little, the tigers spitting perfunctorily and the lions grumbling in their throats. And Medved, the Director of the Concert, came fearlessly and furiously into the middle of the group, seeming somehow cruder than the very bears in his hairy, splotchy nakedness.

“Sing, mad people,” he ordered with a broken voice. “Dance, bears, dance…” But even songbirds will not sing on order, and bears will not dance at an antagonist's bidding; particularly mad bears will not, and these bears had now been infected by their human berserker affiliates.

“This is madness,” Medved shouted almost voicelessly at the refusal. The demented, clothed people smiled at him. Bears are poker-faced and cannot smile, but they weighed this anomalous Medved with their eyes and shifted back and forth on their feet.

Quite a few of the normal concert people were coming down into the pit to join the berserker folks, unmindful of the big, dangerous, turned-on cats, being made way for by the interiorly smiling bears. The madness was in almost explosive contagion now and coming dangerously near to taking over the whole crowd that was eager for something even more valid than noise.

“I am the king of the bears,” Medved shouted hoarsely. “Dance, bears, dance!”

“No, I am the king of the bears,” the largest of the bears conveyed the message some way. “You are a man on whom certain medical obscenities were once performed in the name of perversion. You have bear parts in you but you are not true bear. And now you and similar perversions must be ended.”

More and more people from the concert (many wrapping themselves in banners and posters as if they wished to be clothed) were coming down to join the berserker folk in the pit. The now turned-off big cats and the sullen snakes withdrew to the sidelines and let the people congregate. And the soft-spoken, clothed, group mania took over.

The mad, undancing bears moved in on Boris Medved, the Director of the Concert, and killed him redly.

Animal Fair

Mostly the animals understand their roles,

but man, by comparison, seems troubled by

a message that, it is often said, he cannot

quite remember, or has gotten wrong.

 — Loren Eisely, The Unexpected Universe

An anarchist of shaggy trees,

A great red gleam that flies,

A rearing buck, a rampant breeze,

A girl with really eyes.

 — Eco-Log

“That anarchist of yours is ruining my grass,” Mrs. Bagby said to Barnaby Sheen as I walked with him one morning. “It looks so shaggy all at once that I give up on it. I trim it and edge it, but it's no use. And my trees! Just look at my trees!”

“I look at your trees,” Barnaby said. “They do seem to come on a little stronger than they used to, which I like. But what anarchist are you talking about?”

“That anarchist that you keep in your house and that wanders everywhere. I don't know whether he's an ape or a man.”

“Oh, he's a young boy,” Barnaby told her. “I believe that he will be a man when he's grown, though some of his species may grow up to be ape: the theological implications of this baffle me. But why do you call him an anarchist?”

“Because he looks at my grass and makes it sick.”

“Never have I seen your grass looking more well, Mrs. Bagby,” Barnaby said.

“Well, it's turned wild is what it's done,” the lady insisted. “There's so many things in the neighborhood now that look different after — ”

“ — after he's looked at them? Yes, I know, Mrs. Bagby. Or rather, I don't know; I don't quite understand it myself. I ask Austro about it, and he just grins. He's getting to say a few more words now, but he isn't going to find words for such an ontological subject as this. It seems that I'm not going to find them either.”

“Well, get rid of him, Mr. Sheen,” Mrs. Bagby said. “This neighborhood isn't a zoological garden.”

“It should be, Mrs. Bagby,” Barnaby said seriously. “The whole world should be a zoological garden. Once, I believe, it was. It's a mistake to remember the first garden as small. It was worldwide. It was the world. Get rid of your own husband and children, Mrs. Bagby. Only then will I get rid of Austro and Loretta and Mary Mondo. They are my family. And Austro is not an anarchist. You are.”

We went away from her, knowing that she was angry, being sorry for it. And her grass and trees did look more shaggy and living than used to be the case.

(Austro, the houseboy and bartender of Barnaby Sheen, was of the genus Australopithecus, which is either ape, or ape-man, or man, the middle one of these being impossible. The genus was supposed to be extinct long since, but Austro was proof that it wasn't.)

(Loretta Sheen was a life-sized, sawdust-filled doll: Barnaby insisted that this object was the undead body of his real daughter Loretta. We had all known Barnaby well all our lives, yet we couldn't remember for sure whether he had ever had a real daughter or not.) (Mary Mondo was a ghost, the schizo-personality of a girl named Violet Lonsdale who was long since dead. But Mary Mondo was not dead.)

These three young persons have been explained in other places on other days, but they must be explained all over again now and then. They take a lot of explaining.

Barnaby was gazing at an odd movement in that wooded draw behind his house. We both saw it then, in the middle of those little willow trees and nearly hidden. But if it was what it seemed to be, it was a little too big.

“Austro wants to hold a meeting of some different kinds of people, Mr. Sheen,” Chiara Benedetti said suddenly. Chiara had not been the movement in the draw: she had appeared from some other direction, or she had simply materialized there.

“Certainly, Chiara, certainly,” Barnaby said. “My home is Austro's home. He can have whomever he wants there. But why did he ask you to ask me?”

“He doesn't know how to ask you some things,” she said. “And some of the people coming to the meeting, well, they aren't quite people.”

(Chiara was, oh, somewhere between ten and fifteen years old: who can tell how old a girl is? She was somewhat younger than the now permanent stasis age of Loretta Sheen and Mary Mondo. She hadn't been old enough to be in that Participation Psychology class taught by Edmond Weakfish, the class that cost Loretta and Mary-Violet and several others their normal lives.)

“Chiara, we just saw a movement down in the draw,” Barnaby said. “I believe that there is a buck deer down there. It's strange that he should be inside the city, when the woods and meadows are still lush. Chiara, there's something rampant about the breeze.”

Really, that draw was a bit of woods and meadow inside the city. Barnaby Sheen had two-and-a-half acres. Cris Benedetti, the father of Chiara, had an equal area backing onto it, and the woody draw ran on the land of both of them.

“Yes, he's a buck deer,” Chiara said. “There's a buffalo in there too, now.”

“No, Chiara, you're just saying that,” Barnaby admonished her.

“Partly, yes. But saying it helps to make it so. Saying it and seeing it. How do you think the buck deer got there? They are some of the people who have come to Austro's meeting. It will last for three or four days. You'll have to furnish accommodations for all of them, and that won't be easy.”

“Why then it will be uneasy, Chiara,” Barnaby said pleasantly, “but I will do as well as I can, and you and others will help me. Oh, Mrs. Bagby says that Austro ruins her grass and trees, makes them shaggy looking.”

“She used to say that I did the same thing to them, Mr. Sheen. I guess I did, but not as well as Austro does it. She said that I spooked them just by looking at them. She said that I made them look like the grass and trees in paintings by Rosetti, not like real grass and trees. And I do. I have Really Eyes, you know.”

“Chiara, Rosetti had a better understanding of reality than has Mrs. Bagby,” Barnaby said. “And you, I believe, can actually effect with your seeing and feeling. But you couldn't turn a sewer into a clear stream.”

The charge was true about the wooded draw, whether it was true about Mrs. Bagby's property or not. The draw was like a Rosetti painting. And this was partly caused by Chiara wandering there and looking at it with her blue-black eyes till it was impossible for anyone to see it differently than she had seen it.

“If growing plants respond to sympathy and seeing, why not a sewer?” I asked.

“Ah, Laff, there is not a lot of sympathy to spare for sewers,” Barnaby said, “yet it's true that the, ah, brook is practically a sewer when it enters the draw, and it is a clear Rosetti stream when it leaves. Chiara, see that broken flash skimming through the trees and bushes? He follows the blue shadows, and he breaks behind the trees so deftly that he can hardly be seen. But he's a cardinal bird, and he's as big as a tom turkey.”

“Yes, he's the King Cardinal,” Chiara said as if she knew all about him. “He's another of the people coming to Austro's meeting. And if you think he's big for a cardinal, then you just haven't had a good look at how big that buck deer is for a buck, or how big that buffalo is for anything.”

“Have you any idea, girl, just how many people are coming?”

“Oh, it's only a regional division meeting, so there won't be many. A few dozen or a few hundred.”

“What is it a regional division of, Chiara?” Barnaby asked, worried a little.

“Sometimes regular people who know about it call it the Lower House. But the delegates say that it should be called the Broader House.”

“Do these rather mixed delegates understand what they are doing, Chiara?”

“Yes, mostly they do, Mr. Sheen. Do you?”

II

Looking at evolution from below we see

emergence — from above, Creation.

 — E. I. Watkin, The Bow in the Clouds

First came the answers far ahead,

Then tumbling question-hordes.

“I may not stay,” the seed-man said,

“Nor take my ease with lords.”

 — Eco-Log

People couldn't help but notice the strong noise of the strange animals in the neighborhood. The bull moose made a lot of trumpeting racket, and the birds set up quite a chatter. But what was that really offensive croaking and clattering? No, it was not the bullfrog; the bullfrog was heard separately. Was there any truth at all to the legend of the Laughing Catfish?

“Now, arche means the beginning, the origin,” Dr. George Drakos was saying. “Then it means the principle which is the same as the origin. It means the right, the rule, and as a derivative it means the authority or the office.”

“And anarchy?” Barnaby asked too innocently.

“You know its meaning. It is the exact opposite of arche. It is not from the beginning; it is never original in anything; it is without principle; it cannot be of real authority; and it cannot ever be official.”

“But what if anarchy came first?”

“Then all words are meaningless and everything is backwards. But it isn't so. The beginning, and not its opposite, came in the beginning.”

“Not anarchy at world dawn? Not primitive chaos? And principle and order and purpose and authority later appearing and developing?”

“Never, Barney, never. Anarchy cannot pertain to anything old or primordial. Anarchy is always modern, which is to say ‘of the mode’, that most narrow and fleeting of states.”

“I heard a rather primordial person, though young in years, called an anarchist today,” Barnaby mused.

“Then someone was mistaken,” Drakos insisted. “There is a wide misconception as to what happened in the beginning and as to what unfolding or evolution means. There is nothing new under the sun, and the sun itself was never so new as some have said. Too many persons have looked at the world as if it were indeed the product of natural-selection evolution, as if it were the result of purposeless chaos rather than purposive order. Enough persons have seen it so as to make it to be so for all impractical purposes. But every thesis, if acted upon widely enough, comes to its own in-built conclusion. The only possible conclusion to the natural-selection thesis is total pollution unto suffocation and death: the effluvia of organized and widespread idiocy always brings about this suffocation. And the last choking voice of the chaos-origin believers will croak, ‘It is the fault of the others, of those who said that it began in order; they caused the whole breakdown.’

“But we must see the whole thing with more valid eyes, and enough of us must see it as it is to reestablish its validity. Seeing it and feeling it as it should be are creative acts; they will restore it as it should be. Too long we have been flawed lords. Now — ”

A seedy little professor, known as an eccentric, came into the room where we were met. Someone had to have let him in. He couldn't have found that internal, private bar-study room otherwise. It was Austro, playing the butler but with many bewildering gestures, who had brought the seedy one in. Then Austro vanished, scooted, scatted.

“Austro wants to host a bash for some of his friends and associates,” the seedy man said. (I forget his name: everyone always did forget his name.) “Ah, and they aren't all of them human,” the little man finished lamely.

“I know a little about it,” said Barnaby, “but I seem to know less and less about it as I go on. Ah, Mary Mondo, just what sort of hotel or guest accommodations would you offer a badger or a beaver or a prairie dog or vulture or sexton beetle?”

“Manure. I think we need lots of manure,” Mary Mondo conveyed. “You know the riddle about the woman standing on the corner and one man went by walking and one on horseback and one on a bicycle. Which of them knew the lady?”

None of us knew.

“The horseman knew her,” Mary Mondo conveyed. “Oh, there are so many things that can be done with manure! The tumble bugs love it, and the beetles. Whole life cycles can be built on it, and it will make all sorts of creatures feel at home. It's the old and unanswerable question, you know: which came first, the horse or the horse manure? But manure is very necessary.”

“I agree that it is,” Barnaby said. “It's a fact too often forgotten, and the world forgets it to its peril. Thank you, Mary, we'll lay in a store of horse manure, and several horses.”

“You already have several horses, Sheen,” the seedy professor said. “They are rather large and rough-looking horses. I don't believe that they belong to anyone around here. Say, where is this Mary you're talking to, and why can't I see her?”

“You can't see her because you have incomplete eyes, man,” Barnaby said. “And for that reason you are, as I had suspected, an incomplete delegate to whatever that meeting is.”

“I can see her a little bit now,” the professor said, and he said it honestly.

We were met that night in Barnaby Sheen's bar-study; Harry O'Donovan, Dr. George Drakos, Cris Benedetti, Barnaby himself, those four men who knew everything; and myself, who didn't. And now the seedy professor had joined us. And there was Austro who came and went; and Loretta and Mary Mondo who were and weren't.

“I'm here in a second capacity tonight, Barney,” Drakos said, “as a doctor and observer, as well as a friend. The Board of Health is worried about certain strange and perhaps unsanitary animals which have been appearing around your property today. The board is having a meeting tomorrow morning on you, and I'm to sit in on it. And this evening, I'm to pick up what information I can here.”

“You're certainly welcome to try, George,” Barnaby said. “Myself, I don't understand it at all. There are animals in that back draw tonight that aren't often found in the city: porcupines, beavers, chipmunks, prairie dogs, badgers, skunks, rabbits, foxes and kit-foxes, wildcats, weasels, fishers, martens.”

“And martins,” said Harry O'Donovan, who was a bird-fancier. “They aren't a night bird, but they are out back tonight. And catbirds, scissortails, roadrunners, jaybirds. I have seen as many birds in a small area before, but not as many species of birds. Plovers, herons, ducks, mergansers, geese. There is even a swan: it must have flown from Swan Lake.”

“It flew from further than that, so my daughter Chiara says,” Cris Benedetti whispered softly. He seemed to be in awe of something. And the little interloper professor, he rolled in his hands some of those seed-filled sacks that were made of brown-green leaf that always remained as flexible as leather. Seedy he was called, for he always carried and scattered seeds. Oh, he wasn't seedy in the other way: he was neat enough, in an inconspicuous manner.

“Insects, worms, snakes, snails, frogs, I don't know where they're all coming from,” O'Donovan said. “And fish! There couldn't be such big fish in that little creek or sewer ordinarily: it just wasn't deep enough before. Now it is, or it looks as though it is.”

“Does anyone know the answer?” Barnaby Sheen asked.

“Certainly,” said Drakos. “I was expounding on just that when the little professor came in. ‘En Arche en ho Logos,’ as John writes in scripture: ‘In the Beginning was the Word.’ I have already told you that Arche means the beginning, the origin or the original, the principle, the order and the balance, the rule, the authority, the office. And Logos not only means the word; it also means the account, the discussion, the study, the reason; and it means the answer. So the phrase really says, ‘In the Beginning was the Answer.’ ”

“Ah, a great point has just been made in this Upper House session,” said the seed-man.

“But the opposite of logos, alogos, means the unreasonable, the babble, and the absurdity,” Drakos finished it.

“Logos also means the logic,” Barnaby said. “But come off it, George, talk is cheap.”

“No, real talk, discussion, logic, solution, is the logos, the pearl beyond price. It is not cheap. And I am correct when I say that all the answers were given in the beginning. That beginning is hard to attain, though, especially in a world that says it is impossible to turn back or even to look back.”

“You are lords,” the seedy professor said. “I'm not at my ease with you. I will go now, to attend the night session of the Broader House, and Austro will go with me. I assume that you lords will also remain in continuous session for the several days and nights of it. You have your own parts to play.”

“I doubt if we'll remain in any such continuous session as that,” Barnaby said. “Why should we? How have we a part to play in this Animal Fair?”

“Oh, you are the four men who know everything,” the seed-man said. “This makes you the natural aristocracy. This scribbling scribe here will keep the log on you, and Austro will do the same thing for the regional division meeting of the Broader House. You four are the lords, the uppers.”

“That we know everything is only a literary convention of this same scribbling scribe here,” Barnaby said. “But he's right, Laff, you are a little bit like Austro. But we don't know everything, man, we don't.”

“Nevertheless, those of the Broader House have heard that you do and they believe it. They need a counterpart. They find no other manageable center to look across to. They look to you lords to be that center, and several of us couriers between the two houses have pointed you out for the role. There might be violence, animal violence, if the delegates of the Broader House should labor and discuss and then discover that the lords will not bother about it.”

The seed-man professor went out then, and young Austro went with him.

We were silent for a while.

“Well, are we lords?” Cris Benedetti asked the room.

“Aye, lord, we are,” said Harry O'Donovan, “lords of creation.”

And we were silent again.

“We're not going to need that manure after all,” Mary Mondo conveyed, coming in like smoke from outside as persons in her state often do. “I should have known the answer: the horse came first. The cycle is operating nicely and we already have a fine name for our hospitality.”

“Thank you, Mary,” said Barnaby Sheen.

III

If ever I shape the World again,

I'll liven the laughter and liven the pain.

 — Song of the Shaper

An Animal Fair that grunted and yelped

Confronted its Upper Brother.

It's part of the doings that can't be helped

That the delegates ate each other.

 — Eco-Log

People were more sensitive to the cacophony of the neighborhood now that the papers had published humorous little pieces about the din of the ghost animals. But the noise of them wasn't the only noteworthy thing; there were (there is no easier word for it: this is the easier word) stenches also.

The skunk is not the only stenchy animal, although the skunk was prominent there; the badger can also put out a lot of muskiness, as can the beaver, and the porcupine, and the groundhog, and the wolverine. It was a pretty bleak orchestration of smells that they put together there when the wind was wrong. Animals in the wild do not stink, it is often said. Maybe not, but animals in the wild do express themselves.

There were several most interesting days and nights then. Most of the interesting things centered around that wooded draw or ravine that ran behind Barnaby Sheen's place, between his land and the property of Cris Benedetti.

Quite a few people came there. Some of them were official and some of them were quasi-official; others were of no office at all. But they did not always find the same things there; some people saw things in a way different from others. Some of the folks saw the draw full of animals. Others saw nothing unusual there at all, just a cluttered ravine that should be cleaned out or filled up. I could see most of the creatures, but I had had previous practice with Austro and Chiara Benedetti, and with Mary Mondo.

Barnaby had had two hundred bales of hay hauled in there; then a couple of fifty-five pound blocks of rock salt, a great quantity of supplementary mineral pellets, a hundred pounds of bird seed, and a thousand pounds of dog and cat food.

“That should give something for everyone,” he said, but he sounded doubtful. “It should give food for the herbivorous and for the carnivorous beasts as well, for the cattle of the earth and for the birds of the air, for the — ulp — I forgot — ” He sent for a hundred pounds of fish food then; and that stuff is expensive, especially when you pour it right into the water that seems sometimes clear and shining and sometimes cloudy and putrid.

There was sniggering, there were guffaws just off the edge of the ear, there was animal laughter; slashing, fanged laughter.

“I try to be a good host, at great personal expense, to guests I do not know and did not invite,” Barnaby intoned sadly. “And I'm laughed at for it. Bedamned to you beasts! Growl at me, will you? I'll show you what real growling is like.”

But we all knew that the dog and cat food was not acceptable, that it was a mistake. Nothing was likely to eat it except domestic dogs and cats, and the domestic dogs and cats of the neighborhood had been disappearing down the maws of larger and fiercer animals. And the fish food was not acceptable. Did you ever hear a fish snigger?

The draw seemed, at times, much larger than it could possibly have been. That block was only an eighth of a mile long, only half that wide; and the draw or ravine that snaked down the middle of it between the two properties was seldom more than thirty feet wide or eight feet deep. But now it seemed much larger, as though it were superimposed over a greater area: or, more seemly, as though it underlay a large region and was shining through. The draw was occupying space that belonged to something else. There were unaccountably grand vistas of — 

“ — vistas, and vastas, and verdi-gris lands,

made by my Really Eyes, shaped by my hands.”

Where did those unspoken, dog-eared words come from? Oh, partly they came from a tawny puma that had just finished off a dog, eating the ears last; partly from a wolverine, that fierce devil-animal; partly from a horned bull of uncommon size; partly from a snake in the grass.

Austro was into the business of seeing and constructing, hand and muzzle; and the seed-man, and a stranger. But mostly it was given its verbal form by Chiara Benedetti. She was alive and vibrant in the darkish glade there, singing silently within, with fox-fire coming from her in waves, and sparks from the tips of her toes and the tips of her ears. Oh, she was alive, and she was spirit-animal! And the cycle of creatures maintained each other in being by their attention and their sensing.

The most valid of scenes may be created, or maintained in being, by the forming eyes of no more than seven persons, so one of the old Greek philosophs told it. And Charles Harness has implied nearly the same thing.

But real scenes cannot be so maintained! Can they not now? The most real scenes are those maintained by the most real eyes and minds. It must be confessed, though, that quantity does often preempt quality in this field of the various realities.

Oh well, the dullest eyes could now see that there were a few stray and strange animals lying around and standing around in the draw. There was, for instance, a glare-eyed ox chewing his cud, and what was it doing there anyhow? There were a couple of skittish horses; there was a buck deer. There were other shapes that might have been animals, or that might have been stumps, or boles of trees.

A belching buffalo — it must have escaped from the Blue Hills Ranch: they have the only buffaloes around here; they try to cross them with cattle to fix certain traits, but mostly they only get sterile hybrids from the crosses.

Then a fish leapt in a great arc, ten feet long and thirty-six inches high. How can a fish leap thirty-six inches high from water that is not ten inches deep?

“You have not got rid of that anarchist yet, Mr. Sheen,” Mrs. Bagby was complaining. And Austro was shambling about, grinning, and drawing cartoons in a large drawing tablet. “I really believe that he brings about these strange scenes and effects by looking at things and drawing them,” said Mrs. Bagby.

“That is the mark of a great artist, Mrs. Bagby,” Barnaby commented.

“But he is rude, and he has made a rude picture of me,” she complained.

“Let me see it,” Barnaby ordered. And Austro brought the tablet and showed the cartoon with a half-sly, half-shamefaced manner. We looked at it. It was a picture of a witch riding on an incredibly worn-out broomstick, and she was just going into a tailspin from broom failure. The witch was saying something, in a cartoon balloon there, but it was printed in Austro notation which was impossible to read.

“How do you know that it's intended to be you, Mrs. Bagby?” Barnaby asked.

“Oh, I know it is, I know it is! Just look at that anarchist grin.”

“If only I could read the words that you've written in the balloon, Austro,” Barnaby wished out loud. “What are the words that the witch is saying when her broom finally gives out and she's left with a bare broomstick?”

“Oh, the witch says, ‘That's the last straw!’ when her broom finally dies,” Chiara Benedetti said when she came to look. So Chiara could interpret Austro's scribbles.

“Austro writes or otherwise expresses himself in an intuitive language,” I said. “A few persons can comprehend it, but most cannot. And no one could be instructed to comprehend it.”

“Oh shut up, Laff!” Barnaby growled. He was too intelligent to believe that, even though it was true.

“Actually, Austro's cartoon drawings, and the things shown spoken, are the minutes of the Broader House sessions,” the seed-man commented as he came by.

“Ah, is the belching of the buffalo, as shown in the balloon over the animal-drawing there, a part of the speaking at the session?” Barnaby wanted to know.

“Oh yes, of course it is,” the seed-man said. “The buffalo is one of the most respected spokesmen here and one of the finest orators.”

Barnaby gave the big drawing tablet back to Austro: and that person began to draw furiously and well the minutes of the session, the snortings, gruntings, roarings. All was not amity with the people of the Broader House, but the rabbit did lie down with the wildcat for a while, and there was certainly an attempt at meaningful discussion. The wildcat made a statement, and Austro could be seen recording it. Then the rabbit made a statement; it was the antithesis to the statement made by the wildcat. Then the wildcat ate the rabbit: that was the synthesis.

Well, what sort of procedures do you have in your own Congress? And Austro was recording it all faithfully.

“Reality,” said Harry O'Donovan with an unreal look in his eyes, “must remain a subjective thing to each individual person, though we have it on Faith and also from the Schoolmen that there is an objective reality. Cris, your daughter Chiara was playing Animal Crackers this afternoon, and for a while I shared a subjective reality that she had created. We used to play Animal Crackers when I was a little boy.”

“I don't remember playing any such game as Animal Crackers, Harry,” George Drakos said, “and I was a little boy with you.”

“I was a sissy,” Harry O'Donovan said. “Sometimes I played it with my sisters. When we played Animal Crackers we did literally create animals, by mind over animality. But they were a fast-fading bunch of beasts that we evoked or shaped-up; except one dog, Crackerjack, that I made and had for years.”

This was probably the second evening after a certain Congress of Creatures had assembled; or after the game of Animal Crackers had begun to be played seriously, should one see it from that viewpoint. We were met in Barnaby Sheen's study again for a pleasant evening's libations and talk, or perhaps we were met for a session of the Upper House, should one see it from that viewpoint.

“Animal Crackers is a very sophisticated game for children to play,” Harry O'Donovan was saying. “But it is, paradoxically, almost impossible for adults to play, and absolutely impossible for sophisticated adults. It is based on self-hypnotism and group-hypnotism. One sees a shape of rock or tree or bush; no matter what shape it really is, it will somewhat resemble the shape of some animal or group of animals. It will resemble the shape of something anyhow; there is no shape so poor that it does not own two or more viewpoints. Your boy Austro, Barney, can draw these things on paper or on stones so that you look at them, and then look at them again and see the animated or animal pictures in them. It's enough to make the hair raise up on your head to see wild, fierce, ravening beasts not five feet from you, to feel their body-heat wafted to you on the rampant breeze, to smell — ”

“ — their manure,” Barnaby interrupted. “There's so many things that can be done with manure and it is so very necessary, as Mary Mondo pointed out. And, as I myself pointed out, it is too often forgotten or swept into the sewer, so much so as to imperil the world. It isn't the waste that causes pollution. It's the attempt to take the waste out of the cycle that pollutes. Go on, Harry.”

“ — to smell their hair-smell and their fur-smell, and the green breath of the foliage-eaters and the red breath of the meat-eaters. Who said anything about smelling manure, Barney? It really hasn't much smell when the animals are unpenned and uncrowded. To hear the gurgling in the gullets of the beasts and the growling in their stomachs! Austro can evoke all this with his interpretive and creative drawings. And your girl Chiara, Cris, abets this game with her wonderful imagination. She made one mistake this afternoon though — ”

“I don't think so, Harry,” Cris Benedetti said. “What was it?”

“The lynx, she got it a little wrong when she created the impression of it. She forgot the enormous paws that go with the comparatively small body. She forgot the tufted ears, and she gave it a tail too long and too bushy.”

“There are no native lynx around here,” Drakos said. “You may have observed the lynx out at Mohawk Zoo, but hers was a simple bobcat or wildcat of our own region. There's many of them around if you've the sharp eyes to see them. You haven't, Harry. And she got it right. So did Austro.”

“You also were caught up in the Animal Cracker game, George?” Harry asked.

“No. I don't know the game. But Austro showed me a drawing he had made of a wildcat, not of a lynx. And once today, when I watched Chiara, she had wildcat eyes and not lynx eyes.”

“Imaginary animals or group-hypnosis animals must eat a lot of hay,” Barnaby Sheen said. “I received a couple of delivery-slip copies in the mail today. I don't understand them at all, but they are from several different firms and it is clearly my signature on each bill. What am I doing making purchases from a grain and feed company, from a wholesale grocery firm, from Uncle Dan's Country Store and Farm Supply, and from a pet shop? What am I doing buying fish-food in quantity? I'm not in the habit of that. There is something particularly fishy about the fish-food.”

Loretta Sheen sat up, winked (and a little sawdust trickled out of her eye when she did this), and lay back down again. Animal Crackers indeed! People Crackers rather. One was always in danger of self-hypnotism when in the same room with that life-sized doll.

“I have the feeling of invisible empires these last several days,” Cris Benedetti said. “And they seem to interlock as if they had common roots in a common ground. I'm reminded of a parable somewhere in Chesterton. It's about a sad-looking weed in a desert, but it happens to connect with the roots of the world. A boy tries to pull this weed up, but it is very strong for a small weed. He cannot pull it out of the ground, but he pulls many other things down into the ground in the attempt. Distant orchards are pulled down into the earth by his attempts, for they all connect to his weed. Vineyards are drawn down into the soil and olive groves. Meadows and vegetable gardens go down, and wheat fields, all leaving bare desolation where they have grown. Then sections of dams are pulled down, and levees; leaving swamps that are neither sweet nor saline, but rotten. Canals and rivers are unbottomed and fall into chasms, and their places are taken by noisome sewers. Buildings totter and topple and crash. The earth quakes, the mountains melt, and scorching fires break out everywhere.

“Then the boy notices that what he is pulling on is not a weed at all. It's a noble plant, and the name of it is truth-from-the-beginning plant. After the boy stops pulling on the plant, the world begins to mend itself. But from time to time someone else tries to pull up the plant, believing (on account of perverse vision) that it's a weed. So the world becomes clogged and poisoned and awry again. I believe that someone is trying to pull up the little plant at the present time, and with the same sad consequence all over again.”

“I believe that I read something in Chesterton that might serve as the germ of that parable,” Drakos said. “But he did not write it as you give it.”

“Actually, I didn't read it at all. My daughter Chiara read it, and she told it to me; she was quite excited about it. She doesn't falsify things when she changes them while filtering them through her mind. She makes them more true: I would say that she verifies them, if verify hadn't taken on a different meaning. Barnaby, why don't we do something about that damnable sewer that runs between our properties?”

“Yes, why don't you?” Harry O'Donovan asked. “Pollution begins at home: at your home here, Barney, and at Benedetti's, not at mine. The water is foul and rotten, and the banks are trashy. I can smell it strongly right now.”

“I am doing something about it,” Barnaby said. “I'm thinking about it.”

“And thinking about it will make it less of a sewer?” O'Donovan asked with irony in his high voice.

“I don't know,” Barnaby confessed dismally. “I believe that thinking about it is the first step in making it less of a sewer, yes. It's possibly something else to other eyes. And a beaver I talked to today said that he had some good ideas about righting it. He showed me, or someone showed me, what it could be made into: quite a pleasant little brook flowing into a clear-water grassy pond, and going out again in a small waterfall over a dam that had a beaver warren inside it. The banks were lush, and the trees and bushes were clean and rich. The beaver also told me (which I had somehow forgotten) that every brook, pond, dam, waterfall, tree, and bush has its own spirit and that these in the personification age were called nymphs.

“What am I talking about?” Barnaby raised his head suddenly in alarm. “Am I mad? I never talked to a beaver in my life. My mind must have blown. Say, does anyone know why I signed a delivery ticket for two hundred bales of hay? Whatever would I do with hay? What in the world did I think I was signing when I signed that? And where would the hay be now, if there ever was any hay involved?” Barnaby took another sip from his drink. Mary Mondo, that kook spook, had just poured something into that drink and Barnaby hadn't noticed. Now Barnaby yawned and then he nodded. He was getting sleepy.

The seed-man came into the room. Then Austro came in. Austro had come in by the door, but the seed-man hadn't.

IV

Three objects, bright as burning brand,

Are fixed beyond recall:

The starting word; the Shaper's hands;

The writing on the wall.

 — Orthcutt

The weighing vane swings very far,

And how the time does go!

Oh sharply, sharply! for you are

Replaceable, you know.

 — Eco-Log

It had become a pantheronium of noise, an all-animal clamor, and the lonesome wildcat contributed a lot of caterwauling to it. But mostly it was the trumpeting of the bull-moose and the bugling of the bull-elk; that, and the neighing of the stallion of the other kind of horse. And the complaints of the cow, and the belching of the buffalo. The sessions of the Broader House continued noisy.

“The children of the world (and it is written that in their generation they are wiser than the children of light) say that a surplus of people is the cause of the suffocation and pollution. They are wrong, and yet they sound as if they were right,” Harry O'Donovan said, and then Mary Mondo poured something into his drink. He didn't seem to notice it at all.

This was probably the following evening. Something had largely wiped out one evening and night and the next day, and Mary Mondo had been pouring something into the drinks for several evenings. The seed-man and Austro had just entered again.

“The children of the world are wrong,” Drakos said. “Augustine used the phrase ‘the number of saints fit to complete this most blessed city’; and that number has not been reached yet. When the peopling of the world reaches a certain stage, then the world will transcend itself. It hasn't yet.” And Mary Mondo poured something into Drakos' drink.

Loretta Sheen sat up. She put a finger to her lips and made a hushing sound. A bit of sawdust dribbled from the corner of her mouth. Then she lay back down again.

“I always have a lot of prodigies about me,” Barnaby said sleepily. “My ‘family’ consists entirely of such. But these last several days there have been prodigies out of the ordinary. I seem to see animals where there cannot be any such animals. I get the impression of a Congress of Creatures or of an Animal Fair. I see and talk with a seed-man. Then I watch him come through a wall, so I know that he's no ordinary seed-man. But I feel that all these things are trying to tell me something.”

“These things are like the ouija board or the Olduvai Gorge, Barney,” Cris Benedetti said (and Mary Mondo poured something into his drink). “They tell you what you want to believe. They tailor their evidence to your wishes. They give you back your own thoughts and beliefs. But there wasn't any Animal Fair. There was only O'Donovan's game of Animal Crackers that got out of hand because of the forming imagination of several children, my daughter Chiara, and your stepson Austro, perhaps others. And the seed-man is pure wraith: I don't know who it was who made him up.”

“You know more about me than I do about myself?” the seed-man asked, but Benedetti hardly heard him. The seed-man had various sorts of seeds in those leatherly leaf pouches. He even had fish roe.

Mary Mondo poured something into my own drink. I tasted. It was a strong and not quite bitter additive. It tasted a little licorice. It comes in very small black-label bottles, and many bars do not have it at all. It's named Lethe. I didn't drink much more of my drink.

“The creatures of the Broader House are putting you on notice,” the seed-man said. “You must do much, much better with your sessions.” But we didn't pay much attention to him.

“Stevenson said it right,” Barnaby mumbled. “ ‘There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.’ ” And on that profound note, Barnaby fell into deep sleep. Mary Mondo had been needling his drink again tonight.

“You lords do not seem to understand all the alternatives,” the seed-man said, “though you are on friendly and not too patronizing terms with a member of one of the races involved. You see, one or more early human races, as human as ourselves, may have been set aside and held in reserve. Perhaps they'll be called into the game soon now, as a second team is called in when the first team is unable to move the ball.”

Austro grinned and pointed at himself. Then he clasped his hands high over his head like a victorious prizefighter. But the funny thing about it was that none of my four friends seemed to see or hear the seed-man for the rest of the evening; and none of them noticed Austro's antics.

“I've just had the most droll notion,” Harry O'Donovan said sleepily. “What if there were one or more early races of humans, as human as ourselves, who had been set aside or held in reserve? What if they'll be called in to take our place if we don't do a little better at our problem-solving? How does that strike you for a speculation?” And O'Donovan suddenly fell into unsound and twitchy sleep.

What was this? Was the seed-man sometimes inaudible and invisible to these lords, the while he conveyed his message to their minds? That certainly seemed to be the case.

“One of the things that has gone wrong is that you no longer recognize the spirit in things,” the seed-man said. “The spirit of the Shaper, of course, is in everything, whether living or unliving, in every person, animal, plant, tree, pond, rock, house, factory. But your minds are not able to comprehend this. Once you saw a nymph in everything, every tree, every stream, every stone. At another time you saw an angel in each thing. Now you the lords do not see the spirit in anything at all. You are not holy enough to see the Shaper, not holy enough to see the angel, not even holy enough to see the nymph. Ah, most of you are not holy enough to see the stone.”

But neither of my two waking friends seemed to hear or see the seed-man at all.

“I've just had an idea,” Cris Benedetti said with creeping sleepiness in his voice. “My daughter says that seeing a thing in a certain way will sometimes make it so. These are the metaphysics, the things beyond and behind the physics. I believe that we should see a nymph in every tree and stream once more, in every field, ah, in every factory. If only we could realize that every object contains the whole of the spirit! But, since we cannot, then why can we not see a personification of the spirit in every object? What we need is more nymphs. Even the sewers should have nymphs: then they would realize that there is no shame in being a sewer, not in being a good and transforming sewer. Ah — ”

Ah, he was asleep.

“So you've put another one of them on the doze,” I told the seed-man. “But there aren't any nymphs, you know.”

“Chiara is one,” he said. “Mary Mondo is one of a different sort. Loretta is one of still another sort: she is the nymph and the spirit of this cluttered house. And the sawdust that trickles out of her does not even tell her father that this holy house is being turned into sawdust by termites.

“But why, lords, do you not mine the richest mines of all? Your rotten waters are real treasure-rivers of chemicals and minerals. Your junk heaps are the most concentrated metallic ores to be found on Earth. Your neglected and unkempt and polluted brains contain such masses of sheer intellect as would ensure that you be lords of the world almost forever. Ah, use them, plant them, grow them, harvest them again and again.”

George Drakos did not hear or see the seed-man, and he had the hearingest ears and the seeingest eyes of any of them.

“The answer,” Drakos said in a drowse, “is in recycling and recycling again until we restore each thing to its proper life. We will recycle animal waste and plant waste, factory waste and mining waste. We will recycle (restore is the proper word) provinces and towns and personalities and persons. Let the chips fall where they may! We're only dead once. We'll bring things back to their beginnings. We will remember the meaning of the words ‘I am the resurrection and the life.’ ” Then Drakos was asleep.

George Drakos had known by insight that the answer was given in the beginning: but he had started the book backwards, like an Arab or a Jew, on the last page, and he had not got to the beginning yet.

“No, no more, Mary,” I told Mary Mondo. “That stuff makes me sleepy and it makes me forget.”

“Oh shoot!” she conveyed. “I like to slip them to the fellows, and it's my job for a while, while Austro is busy on the Fair. Besides, you have to forget. This has to be buried down inside you, like one of the seed-man's seeds, before it will grow.”

“What is your name?” I asked the seed-man.

“I am Seminator the sower, one of the sons of Tellus,” he said. “Then you are not a professor?”

“Yes, I am a professor. I profess.”

There were noises downstairs as though creatures were coming in. There was the hair-smell and the fur-smell climbing up from the lower floors; there was the green breath of the foliage-eaters and the red breath of the meat-eaters; there was the feather and foot-smell of the birds. It was a complex of creeping, crawling, scuttering, hopping, fluttering, flying things down there. There was the rattling of antlers and the squeaking of nonretractable claws on wooden floors. There was turkey gobble and badger hiss.

“Go down to them, Austro, and record their decision, inasmuch as they have made what can be called a decision,” the seed-man said. And Austro went.

“Each of these local chapter meetings is a small thing,” the seed-man explained to me then. “A couple hundred of significant animals, a half-dozen or so of lords. But multiply one of these local meetings by ten thousand times the world over and it isn't so small a thing. You are scribe for the sleeping lords here, but I doubt if you'll be able to follow this. Well, all that anyone can do is his best. Now then, sleeping lords — ”

The seed-man talked to them, to Barnaby Sheen and George Drakos, to Harry O'Donovan and Cris Benedetti. He talked to them at great length, and they sound asleep all the while. But, asleep as they were, they were plainly understanding him on a profound level, and I wasn't. It isn't given to everyone. They were the men who knew everything. I was only a scribe, like Austro.

Austro came up to the room after an hour or so. Downstairs there was the shuffling and scraping and scratching and stomping of animals and birds going out. The seed-man looked questioningly at Austro, and Austro drew a drawing for him.

“Ah, those of the Upper House are put on notice,” the seed-man interpreted. “The Animal Fairs here and all over the world have put you on very short-term notice. Your unwritten contract will not even be on a yearly basis now. It will be on a weekly, even a daily basis. The creatures have been doing all the work, they say: they have furnished the forming eyes, and you the deforming. You must see with more valid eyes, with more interlocking eyes. You can be replaced, you know.”

“Just what should we do?” I asked the seed-man.

“I have told the sleeping lords,” the seed-man said. “I have told them some certain things; and for the rest, they must tell themselves and this world. It isn't pleasant for me, you know, to have to come back every several centuries from my well-won rest. It isn't pleasant for my ten thousand brothers either. I leave now. I'm not allowed to take my ease here.”

Then the seed-man was gone, and not by the door. Really, had he ever been there at all?

“What is really the situation, Austro?” I asked. He drew a hand in his drawing tablet. Somehow he had the perspective all wrong, for the hand was a million times bigger than the drawing tablet it was drawn in. It was the Shaper's hand, and it looked as if it might come down on us at any moment.

“Serious, is it?” I asked.

He nodded that it was. Then he grinned. He pointed at his head and made a circular motion with his finger. He looked at the dozing men who knew everything and he shook his head. Then he winked.

“They'll not remember that it happened,” he said in his seldom-used English. “They'll have to work it out without remembering.”

“How serious, Austro?” I asked.

He made big graphs on the wall with a luminescent red pencil. He could write a few English words when he wanted to, but the sentence on the wall was in that intuitive picture language of his. There were a couple of discs or scales in almost-balance. There were some lumps on one scale (and I knew that I was part of one of the lumps): there were what appeared to be tongues of fire on the other scale. And there was a line of writing.

Even as I looked, I saw the balance beam in the drawing was moving slightly on the wall.

“Ye are weighed in the scales?” I asked fearfully, and he nodded that I had read it correctly. Then he wrote the second line and I was still more uneasy.

“And are we found wanting?” I asked.

“Carrock! Don't rush it,” he said. Then he rewrote this last line in English, making glowing red words below it all:

“Sure is going to be close,” the words said. I thought I saw the balance rod in the drawing on the wall move just a bit more.

Austro fixed himself a drink and sat back in an easy chair. Why, I wondered, could I come near to understanding Austro; and the four men couldn't, for all the deeper things they knew. They couldn't intuit his intuitive language, and they could never recognize his occasional English for what it was.

Austro motioned to Mary Mondo, and she came and added to his drink. He drank. “Neither will we,” he said in that slurry voice of his. He meant that neither would we remember that the happenings had happened.

“The animals in the draw, will they also forget it?” I asked.

“Yeah. They forget it right now. It has to be worked out without remembering. The additive has been put into that little brook also.”

I decided that it was because I look and act a little more like Austro than those others do that I could understand him better. So we drank together, the two of us, the youngish man of the species Homo australopithecus and the oldish man of the species humorously called Homo sapiens.

“I'll also have a little of that now, Mary,” I said: and the kook spook poured a bit of the additive into my glass.

“Cheers,” I said, and I drank.

“Fchoinoeachlyuntrqu,” Austro toasted in turn, and drank deeply.

Folks in the scribbling trade often drink unto the state and stuff of Lethe when they're together. There's a touch of necessity to it.

Author's Commentary

The Ungodly Mice of Doctor Drakos

There was a crooked man

And he made some crooked mice:

And crooked fire and plasma ran

By thunderous device.

 — Eco-Log

Doctor George Drakos made some mice. Nothing unusual about that; Drakos had a fine laboratory and he concocted, brewed and made a great many things there. His mice didn't cause much of a stir, at first.

“There is a shortage of mice, George?” Harry O'Donovan asked him with unveiled irony. “Ah, that one I don't like,” (this was about a mouse sticking its head out of Drakos' shirt pocket). “He reminds me, in an unclean way, of someone I know.”

“He should, Harry,” Drakos mocked. “I made him to look a bit like you and to sound like you.”

“Aye,” the mouse said in a high-pitched voice very like that of Harry O'Donovan.

“Watch you do not go over the line, George!” Harry cried in rising anger. “Are you a mountain, George, that you should birth mice?”

“They weren't any ordinary mountains that labored to bring forth these mice,” Drakos said seriously. “Believe me, they were the Acroceraunian Mountains themselves.”

“The Thunder Mountains, George? I always wondered where they were located; where did you find them?”

“In my own head,” Drakos quipped.

“Come along, Laff,” O'Donovan said, “let us leave this disgraceful fellow. Imagine a man turning to the manufacture of mice at his age. I always thought that God had made too many of them, but you rather out-God God in some things, George.”

So we left the Doctor there, with his pockets full of lively mice. But I really couldn't see why Harry O'Donovan was so disturbed by a mouse that looked and sounded a bit like himself.

Oliver Benedetti paid no attention to the mice at all. Oliver was a dog belonging to the Benedetti family, to Cris and his daughter Chiara. Drakos would put several of the mice right under Oliver's nose, and the dog didn't seem to see them or smell them.

“Have you made the small things without a smell, George?” Cris Benedetti asked. “No, you haven't: I can smell them myself, an ozone sort of smell. Then why does Oliver pay no attention to them?”

“Oliver simply doesn't like the ozone sort of smell,” Drakos said, “so he turns away from them. Though they're pretty well made, Oliver doesn't recognize them as mice. He doesn't even recognize them as alive.”

“Well, are they alive, George?” Cris asked.

“Oh yes. Of course they are. Why would I make dead mice?”

“Mr. Drakos,” Chiara Benedetti said, “the feet of one of your mice don't reach all the way to the ground.”

“I must have made them too short then, Chiara,” the good doctor smiled.

“Come along, Laff,” Cris said to me. “We do have some odd friends, but one who goes around with his pockets full of home-made mice is a little too much.”

“Especially when their feet don't always reach the ground,” young Chiara sniffed.

But Doctor Drakos, for a biological doctor, was no mean inventor. He had pulled many a good trick, with living things and with unliving; indeed, he sometimes said that he was erasing the mark between them. He had hypnotized ferrous metals and implanted post-hypnotic anti-rust suggestions in them; and they would not rust, those in which he had implanted that resolve. He had put a cheap sheet-iron cover over his patio, and it did not dare to rust with the fear he had put into it.

It's an anthropomorphic explanation of how he inhibited metals from rusting; nevertheless, they did not rust. It's an anthropomorphic explanation of the way he made mice also.

Austro had, from the first, paid a great deal of attention to the mice. He had raised unholy hell about them. He had, in his cartoon drawings, made the charge that Doctor George Drakos had raised unholy hell in creating them. Austro was the houseboy of Barnaby Sheen, a special sort of houseboy — special, meaning of a species, the species being of the genus Australopithecus. There were some folks who thought it outrageous that Barnaby should keep a boy of an apish and putatively extinct species.

“Who else would give him a job?” Barnaby asked. “Would any of these bleeding mouths hire him for anything at all? Name me one of them who'd do it.”

Austro drew some very stark and spooky cartoons about the newly-created mice and their possible consequences. There was hellfire and heaven-fire in those eschatological drawings, crooked lightning, and angry obliteration. But Austro hadn't had a really normal boyhood, and he was often upset by things not normally upsetting.

“Carrock, come along, Laff,” he said now. “Let's leave the evil doctor to his own devices. There's things about those mice just not right.”

Barnaby Sheen wasn't much impressed by the mice that Drakos had made.

“How do snakes like them?” he asked. “How do foxes and coyotes; how do hawks and owls?”

“I don't know,” Doctor Drakos said, as if he had never considered the matter before.

“You don't know, George?” Barnaby asked in cresting incredulity. “But that's what mice are for, to serve as a standard food for a variety of predators. That, and to scavenge a bit, and to relieve humans of uncomfortable surpluses of wheat and other foodstuffs. Will they do any of those tasks?”

“I don't know, Barney, I haven't tried them on it.”

“How did you make them, George? How does one create life? Did you have any trouble coding the DNA molecules?”

“No. They don't have intricate DNA molecules. Those are only needed for reproducing, and my mice will not reproduce. I will make them new every time. No, this is not a disadvantage. It is a distinct advantage. I have variety in my mice that natural-born mice cannot have. I can make my mice widely different, but mice can make themselves only a little bit different. No, they don't eat food; so I do not give them any elaborate equipment or a tract. Oh, they eat wind and electricity, and that's the truth of it.”

“What can they do, George?”

“My mice can talk and count; what other mice can do that? My worry is not that they're not good enough but that they're too good. They do things that I didn't create them to do or teach them to do. Who else has been brain-lighting my mice?”

“I believe you will find it has been yourself, from a hidden aspect, George. Had you trouble with the nerves, or building the brains?”

“As to that, Barney, I used short-cuts and short-cuts and still more short-cuts; and then it all started to fall together. There were so many techniques that I intended to use, and then the mice had already come to life before I got to use them. There are things about them that I don't consciously understand at all. But I have created animal life; no other physician or biologist has ever done that.”

“But what for, George? How are the mice you made any better than those that God made?”

“I don't maintain that they're any better, Barnaby. But they are a little different.”

“Come along, Laff,” Barnaby said. “Let's leave the learned oaf to swash in his own bilge. A man who'd make anything without clear purpose is as confused as a Democrat or Darwinian.”

Loretta Sheen and Mary Mondo weren't enraptured by the idea of the new mice either, and they were two of the most tolerant persons anywhere. They had to be tolerant: they had so much else working against them.

“There are house mice here who gnaw my members and let sawdust out,” Loretta conveyed. “I don't love them for that, and yet I love them. But these new mice that I sense, I don't love them at all. Austro gives some pretty direful predictions about them, and he's an expert on dire. And Chiara Benedetti says that their feet don't always reach the ground.”

“Neither do mine, neither do yours,” Mary Mondo expressed. “We forgive it in ourselves, but not in mice. There is something about these mice that is too spooky for me.”

And Mary Mondo herself was a spook. Of Barnaby Sheen's family, explanations must always be given. Mary Mondo was a ghost, the schizo personality of a girl named Violet Lonsdale who was long since dead. And we have long since moved up the spectrum from violet. Loretta Sheen was a life-size sawdust-filled doll: Barnaby insisted that this doll was the undead body of his real daughter, Loretta. Austro has already been explained, lightly but enough.

In the evening I was walking with Austro when we saw George Drakos coming up the road. The weather had already become a little bit agitated, and now Austro became decidedly so. There were bristling green clouds, tumbling and growing; they were moving too fast and they were glowering too darkly. Yes, and they were spitting a bit of fire.

Austro also was sparking a trifle, or so it seemed. His hair bristled and crackled. He wished to turn aside. “Austro, nobody turns aside to avoid meeting a friend,” I told him. And besides, Drakos had already come up to us with that long saunter that seemed so slow and easy while it brought him always to a place quicker than one might believe. One was always tempted to say to Drakos, “You cheated; you skipped part of the way in the middle. You didn't really walk all that way that fast.”

“Hi, Austro, hi, Laff,” Drakos said, but he had a bristling sort of worry about him.

“Carrock,” Austro said warily. A mouse stuck its head out of Drakos' coat pocket.

“Carrock,” the mouse said in exact mimicry of Austro, who fell to trembling.

“Ah, there is no sense in being afraid of a mouse, Austro,” Drakos jibed, and he sat the small rodent down on the paving there. “You aren't a young girl to be afraid of a mouse. You are a boy, almost a man.”

Austro would have nothing to do with the mouse that mocked him there and looked at both of us with the eyes of someone we already knew. Well, the mouse looked at us with eyes ever so much like those of Austro, and that was the truth of it.

But Austro, with his sunshine brains, had an idea. There was an old carpet there that kids had been using for a tent before they had abandoned it. Austro shuffled his feet on the deep-piled fabric of it. He shuffled his great, splayed shoes on it (Austro had slightly opposable big toes so his shoes were very wide and specially made); his hair stood on end and he sparked.

“Carrock. Bad wind. Spark wind,” Austro said. He bent down and touched the mouse with a trembling, crackling finger. There was a sizzling and then — 

Ka-boom!!

There was an explosion, a violent one for all that it was small.

There was a clap of thunder at the same time, but none except the credulous would connect them.

“Oh, God, don't!” George Drakos cried out, and he staggered back, whey-faced and with hands over his heart.

“Are you all right, George?” I asked. “You look almost like a dead man.”

“Carrock, good Drakos?” Austro asked, with deep worry.

“Yes, I'm all right again,” the doctor said, and he attempted a smile. “I looked like a dead man, did I? Oh, I died a little then, but we all do that every day. Yes, something did go out of me, but the only harm is that one of the mice is destroyed. I can easily make another, but I won't. I have several left.”

Well, the mouse had exploded, or it had disappeared anyhow.

“Barnaby wanted us to drop over after supper,” Drakos said then, “and it is that time now. Say, dark does come early, what with those weird clouds! Have a couple of the best, fellows — they're because I'm a father. The mice, you know.”

Drakos gave each of us a cigar, and Austro and I lit up.

“I am still welcome at Barnaby's, am I not, Austro?” Drakos asked.

“You, always, carrock, always,” Austro said. “Not sure about the mice, though.”

“I know what they are now,” Harry O'Donovan said. “They're little globs of gas plasma, that's what they are.”

We were in Barnaby Sheen's cluttered study, Harry O'Donovan, Doctor George Drakos, Cris Benedetti, Barnaby Sheen, those four men who knew everything; and myself who didn't. And Austro who didn't, Loretta Sheen and Mary Mondo who didn't, and seven peculiar mice who perhaps didn't either.

“They're plasma,” O'Donovan repeated, “but how is it possible to grow hair on gas globs?”

“I do some pretty tricky things in my laboratory,” George Drakos said.

“But I'm right, am I not?” O'Donovan still demanded.

“A little bit right, Harry,” Drakos said. “Yes, they're part plasma.”

“One meaning, the mineral meaning of plasma,” said Barnaby Sheen, “is a variety of quartz, green and faintly translucent.”

“That is one definition of life,” said Cris Benedetti, “the mineral definition: green and faintly translucent. Ah, your own complexion is a bit green these days, Drakos, like a boy who's swallowed his first cut of chewing tobacco. What's the matter, George? Have you swallowed more than you bit off? And where did the extra come from?”

“You do look bad tonight, George,” Cris Benedetti said. “Are you?”

“No. I feel fine now, though I did have a twinge an hour or so ago.”

“I said you looked bad; I didn't say that you looked as if you felt bad,” Benedetti said rudely. “I wasn't referring to your state of health.” There was an embarrassed silence.

The mice ran about the floor. They stopped and sat up. They mimicked, and they mimicked cruelly. There was something unnatural here.

Austro was in a state of almost electric excitement and protest. He drew furiously in his drawing tablet. He drew thunderbolts and blasts and ball-lightning, and charged plasma globs like glowing and clinging swamp ghosts. He drew projections, and the aura of evil; he drew the electrical phenomenon known as hysteresis. He was partly unlettered, and not even accounted as human by all; but he did have those sunshine brains.

“Austro is predicting a terrible thunderstorm almost immediately,” Barnaby interpreted.

“So is the weather bureau,” said Drakos. “Austro probably heard the six o'clock report. So are our own ears predicting it. Austro is not so special, not one to be taken for an oracle. Tell me, when a man accomplishes something extraordinary (and I have accomplished something extraordinary in creating these living mice), why is everyone immediately jealous?”

“I'm surely not jealous of you,” Cris said. “Harry isn't, Barney isn't, Laff isn't, Austro isn't (though he's afraid of your things): the two girls aren't jealous of you; they move in and out of realms that you can't touch.”

“Well, someone is jealous,” Drakos insisted, and now he was looking as if he felt bad. Austro was drawing furiously in garish and frightening lines. Drakos came to look. We all came to look.

“What does it say, Austro?” Drakos asked, but Austro only shivered.

“It says that God is jealous,” Mary Mondo interpreted.

One of the mice mimicked Loretta Sheen. It made sawdust dribble out of the corner of its mouth in her manner. It gave with spirit knocks, as she sometimes gave them. Loretta groaned in great agony. There was simultaneous blinding lightning and deafening thunder to the point of shaking and scorching the whole house.

“Oh, God, don't!” George Drakos cried, exactly as he had cried earlier when one of his mice had exploded and he had suffered a slight heart twinge. I realized now, and I think that Austro realized it too, that Drakos was using “God” as a direct address and not as an exclamation.

“There's an old folklore connection between rodents and thunderstorms,” Barnaby Sheen said informatively. “There are echoes of it in the Rat King: more in the orchestration than in the storyline, really. I believe the closer connection, though, is between mice and thunder. Were you aware of the connection, George, when you made the mice?”

“Certainly, certainly. Oh, why is there this attempt to intimidate me and divert me from my work! I have put so much of myself into them! Why am I thwarted?”

“One account, a Balkan or Thracian one, was that the mice in their millions nibbled on the toes of the mountains,” Barnaby continued. “The mountains, in certain seasons, were driven wild by this irritation, and they answered it by violent thunder.”

“I am investigating and creating things by my legitimate lights,” Drakos was insisting. “I have created life: I am learning how it was done in the past and how it might be done better.”

Oh, that thunder, that thunder!

“You've not created life, man,” Barnaby said sharply but compassionately. “You have deceived yourself. You have indeed put yourself into it; you have projected life, your own, a little.”

“My mice are alive, my mice are alive,” Drakos insisted. “There's no man else in the world who could have made such mice.”

“I agree,” Barnaby said. “Ah, that one mimicks me devilishly. Someone else used to mimick me just like that; it was you, George. You were always a scatterbrain, will you have any wits left when this is finished with?”

“Yes, I hope so, I think so. And the weather can't affect the plasma part of my constructions. Brookhaven has assured me of that.”

“What does Brookhaven know about weather?” Barnaby asked. “They've never had any of it; not weather!”

Barnaby was the only one not bothered by the mouse that mimicked him. Myself, I went into a great tremble when it happened to me. I shook, and I felt a mockery that was shot through with contempt. George, it can never be the same between us again.

Cris Benedetti crossed himself and mumbled a smiling prayer: “Lady of Salette, Light on the Mountain, protect us from unholy mice and pray for the mind of the mouse-maker!”

Harry O'Donovan swore and rose to his feet. He stamped into burning embers the live mouse that mocked him, and he stamped the embers into nothingness. And Doctor Drakos groaned with apparent sharp pectoral pain.

“No man else could have made such mice,” Barnaby said easily. “But, George, you put too much of yourself into them. It was dangerous. Ah well, they'll soon be gone. Then we'll see.”

Austro howled in that way of his that made some persons doubt that he was really human. Mary Mondo rollicked like a rampant and embattled witch. The mice and their maker should have had more sense than to tackle Austro and Mary Mondo at the same time.

For then it all broke loose.

Ball lightning came down the chimney (Barnaby kept a real fireplace in that room, though it was not the season to have a fire laid in it.) Ball lightning came in the window cracks and in by the furnace registers. All the lights in the house went out, but they certainly weren't needed. Ball lightning appeared from nowhere, right in the middle of the room, and there was an incredible minute-long peal of thunder.

“Ball lightning often plays in this room,” Barnaby remarked dryly. “It's a friend of the two girls.”

Those lightning balls sought out the glowing, gas-plasma mice and devoured them every one. And, as each one was extinguished, George Drakos gave a hideous death scream.

Then the lights of the house came on again. The thunder and lightning were finished with and were succeeded by a torrential downpour outside. Barnaby Sheen was checking the breathing and pulse of Drakos.

“Should we get a doctor?” I asked inanely.

“He is a doctor,” Barnaby said. “Why double the trouble? Besides, he'll be all right, though a little shaken.”

“I was right, wasn't I?” Harry O'Donovan asked. “The mice were mere globs of gas-plasma, weren't they?”

“Of course,” Barnaby said. “But he thought they were something more.”

“The mice had life in them,” Drakos insisted in his delirious sleep.

(“What is life?” Mary Mondo asked like Pilate.)

“They had true life in them,” Drakos mumbled.

“Yes, they did, George,” Barnaby said. “They had your life in them. Nobody else could have made them,” Barnaby was explaining to us then. “Nobody but this learned and superstitious man would have been able to project himself so strongly as to fool even himself. He'll be better now for having gotten the mice out of his brains.”

“The thunder has nothing to do with it then?” Cris asked.

“Oh, the thunder has everything to do with it,” Barnaby instructed. “The mice would have disintegrated in almost any storm; but we hadn't had a thunder storm for a week, and George made the mice less than a week ago. It was a really good show. Thank you, girls, and thank your lightning familiars. It was almost better than George deserved. And God wasn't jealous, Austro. You were mistaken there. He was amused.”

Austro nodded that he understood that now. But once more he was drawing furiously in his drawing tablet. And the ball lightning had all disappeared from the room. No, not quite all. A pleasant little snake of that lightning was licking the ghost hands of Mary Mondo. They were in accord, and perhaps the lightning was her servitor. And, after all, she had asked the real Pilate question, and now she must wash her hands — with lightning.

And then it was all over with?

“What are you drawing, Austro?” Harry O'Donovan asked. “Are you having a go at the high adventure we have just witnessed?”

Austro shook his head dubiously and continued to draw.

“He's doing next week's ‘Adventures of Rocky McCrocky,’ ” Mary Mondo conveyed. “But he got an idea for it from this.”

The last bit of ball lightning left Mary Mondo and went up the fireplace chimney. Now all the spooky part was finished. There was only the torrential downpour outside, and it would go on and on all night. You have to expect such violent storms when you live in Oklahoma.

The Two-Headed Lion of Cris Benedetti

Save me from the lion's mouth,

And my lowness from the horns of the unicorns.

 — Psalms

A battle grown disguised and dim,

In heraldry foretold:

The Lion had two heads on him;

The Unicorn was polled.

 — Cantos Llantos, Clement Goldbeater

Professor Cristoforo Benedetti made a lion. He made it a little better than he had intended. He hadn't meant to make a literal lion; only a literary lion. And he surely hadn't meant to make a two-headed lion.

The lion was named Clement Goldbeater. He was born in the year 1890 which would make him a very old man now, and an impossibly old lion. He was born in Ireland, midway between the Dublin suburbs of Clontarf and Howth, on the north shore of the Liffey estuary. But this was all more than a quarter of a century before Cris Benedetti was born. How then had Cris made him?

In tangled situations like this it is sometimes best to start, not at the beginning, but just before the end.

“Clement Goldbeater has accepted our invitation to visit our city,” Cris Benedetti said. “He has also agreed to accept the sum we have proffered him to cover the expenses of the trip.”

Yes, this was just before the end of it, as it concerned Cris.

“Good,” said Barnaby Sheen. “Good. That's just what you wanted, isn't it, Cris? And it's just what the kids wanted. I think it's wonderful that you could interest so many of them in this. It keeps them comfortably in trouble and out of the way.”

“You don't seem so pleased with it yourself, Cris,” Doctor George Drakos said (following a certain episode, Drakos himself had been a little bit sour for several months). “You haven't made away with the fund, have you?”

“No, no, of course not,” Cris said. “The students' committee in charge of the fund has already cabled it to Goldbeater this morning, after receiving his wire of acceptance. Yes, I'm afraid they've already sent it.”

“You're afraid they've sent it?” Harry O'Donovan asked. “And do you know when the famous Clement Goldbeater will arrive?”

“Ah, tomorrow at noon by Braniff International, or else at one o'clock tomorrow by American.”

“Don't you know which?” Barnaby Sheen asked. “What does his wire say?”

“Ah, there were two wires. One was sent from Clontarf and the other one from Howth, towns four miles apart. And each gave a different airline and time of arrival.” Cris was quite upset about something.

“Well, Goldbeater is an old man by now,” Drakos said. “Maybe a little muddled, and he probably changed his mind. You can meet both arrivals, if necessary, since they're only an hour apart.”

“Yes,” Cris said, and he was looking at something a thousand or a million miles away. “Yes,” he said, but things weren't all right with him. He rose to his feet in a sort of daze, then he suddenly burst out in white fury:

“All right! Who's the wise guy? It has to be one of you four. Dammit, the joke has gone too far! The committee really sent the invitation, before I knew about it, and I couldn't prevent it. As a matter of fact, I thought it was kind of funny — but then there was the answer, the two answers, really. And then that committee of kids actually sent the money.”

“But that's what it was for,” Barnaby said blandly. “The kids worked hard at collecting it. I contributed to it myself. Wasn't that what it was for?”

“Hanging Judas, no!” Cris shouted. “All right, for the last time, who is the joker? I know none of the kids had tumbled. Who pulled this? George? Harry? Barney? Laff?”

We all looked at him blankly. We had never seen Cris so stirred up. He swore violently, and he did that seldom. He stomped as though he'd go clear through the floor. He barged out of the room and slammed the door behind him hard enough to shake the whole building.

Barnaby whistled a couple of low notes.

“Now, what was that all about?” Harry O'Donovan asked, mighty puzzled.

None of us knew. It was all very unlike Cris.

Well, how had Cris Benedetti become involved with the great Clement Goldbeater? Cris taught literature and esoterica at the university, and he had a finger in a quarterly magazine there, the Unicorn. It was a student magazine, but Benedetti was a sort of faculty sponsor for it. And it was Benedetti who, more and more, turned the Unicorn toward commentary on the works and life of that wonderful Irishman Clement Goldbeater, the literary lion par excellence.

Naturally you have heard of Goldbeater; and you have some idea of his work, whether you have actually read any of it or not. He is quite an in author with young people who wouldn't touch a straight with a canal pole. And yet he is not a deviant or a crookie either. There was no reason why he shouldn't have caught on in college circles in this country.

There are maybe two dozen of the little magazines devoted, in whole or in part, to the life and the work and the legends of old Clement Goldbeater; and the little magazines are in fruitful communication with one another. It was better, anyhow, for the young people to be interested in Goldbeater than in his shorter-lived contemporary Joyce, who had turned his back on Church and Country in spite of his fine education by the Jesuits at Clongowes College and Belvedere, and University College in Dublin. And Goldbeater had a clarity that Joyce lacked. Besides, there had to be someone for the intelligent students to get interested it. “Even a nothing would be better than Joyce,” Cris Benedetti had once said.

Goldbeater had never become an exile, never turned his back on Church or Country. He lived all his life right where he was planted, and he flourished like the Green Bay Tree. More than that, he wrote in the grand tradition. He was in the noble line of Lodowick Barry (ah, Lodowick's great play Ram Alley!), of Dian Boucicault, of Standish O'Grady.

“He is a finer romanticist than Carleton, than Le Fanu, than Banim, than Gerald Griffin,” Cris Benedetti had once lectured a class about Goldbeater. “For sheer narration he is the superior of Samuel Lover and Charles Lever.”

(“Carrock, love her and leave her,” Austro had said then. Austro sometimes sat in on Cris Benedetti's classes.)

“I tell you that he was and is a better ballad-maker than Gavin Duffy or D'Arcy McGee!” Benedetti had concluded that lecture in a ringing voice: and he, or Goldbeater, had received a ringing ovation for it. Benedetti had half-a-dozen slim volumes of the prose and verse of Clement Goldbeater and these he donated to the Goldbeater Guild at the university. He also had one of the rare copies of the extraordinary Enniscorthy Chronicle, the finest novel of the first quarter of the twentieth century. This Cris kept for himself: but the more apt members of the Goldbeater Guild were sometimes allowed to browse through it for a few moments.

“Never mind, some year soon it will be reissued,” Cris would say. “It is a crime that it has not been as yet.”

Goldbeater had lived a fantastic life without traveling a dozen miles from his home. In his old age he had become a little crotchety. He disdained photographers and interviewers, which is why there were few late pictures and almost no late information on him. He walked the green lanes of his own county, swinging his blackthorn stick. He was white of whisker and hair, 'tis said, and reedy of voice. But he was still the literary lion pre-eminent of the century. And now he was coming to our own city, the Athens of mid-America.

The Unicorn had been publishing, from an unknown source, a few new drawings of Clement Goldbeater in every issue for the last three or four years. And for the last year, the pictures had flowed from the talented pencil of Austro: the oddity here was that it was impossible that Austro should ever have seen or known Goldbeater. Austro was the Australopithecine houseboy of Barnaby Sheen.

“I suppose that I had better put the eccentric old Irishman up at my place,” the same Barnaby Sheen said the next day. “All the rest of you live in various species of sordid shambles.”

“And your place is not a shambles?” Harry O'Donovan asked in his high voice.

“Mine is a shambles with class,” Barnaby said. “It is a spacious and comfortable shambles, and not sordid. It is the sort of place an eccentric old Irishman would enjoy.” That was true.

“Austro, go with Cris and the Guild kids to meet the old man, and be sure to bring him here,” Barnaby instructed.

“Carrock,” said Austro. “I bring the old crock.”

There was Austro, there was Cris Benedetti (after all, it was his car that they went in), there were three members of the Goldbeater Guild who went to the airport to pick up the great Clement Goldbeater.

One of the Guild members was Roy Mega, the young electronics genius who had known Loretta Sheen and Mary Mondo (Violet Lonsdale) in their normal lives. Roy had been a reader of the plastic stuff of the Putty Dwarf before he became interested in Goldbeater. But Roy was an independent thinker.

“I believe that what we will find here is a literary lion without literary content,” he said, “without any content at all. The Putty Dwarf showed us how easily a non-person can operate. I believe that the great Clement is another non-person.”

“How can you say that?” the other two Guild members gasped. But they were there now: and there he was!

Clement Goldbeater (there was no mistaking him; there was no doubt whatsoever as to his identity) was on the first flight, the Braniff International that arrived at noon. He came out with a grumble and a growl, a magnificent white-maned lion carrying a little mealbhog, or satchel, and swinging his blackthorn stick. Then he saw Austro and he broke into a beautiful twinkling grin.

“Ah, it's an Irish lad they've sent to meet me!” he near lilted the words. “A boy, a garsún, a bioranach! Welcome me, lad!”

“Carrock!” Austro cried happily. “Céad míle fáilte.” How did Austro, who stumbled and staggered through the simplest English sentence, have intuitive knowledge of Irish? Oh, it's the primordial language of the world: all primitives know it.

They hit it off wonderfully then, all going to Barnaby Sheen's for tay (as Clement called it). Once there, Clement Goldbeater twinkled the finest hazel eyes ever seen out from under the shaggiest brows, and he growled pleasantly and talked with flowing gusto. Only once, and that was near the start of it, was there a slight misunderstanding.

“The tay, Austro lad, the tay,” the old man complained, “you've forgotten to lace it.” And Austro, understanding intuitively, though he had not heard the phrase before, sloshed whisky into Clement's cup to correct the oversight.

“Why, I had hardly noticed the two young ladies present,” Clement said then, “the two who were not at the airport. Loretta and Mary, are ye not? And I see that it's taibhsiúil girls that you are.” (That meant ghostly girls, but how could Clement have known about them?)

“What do you consider your greatest poem, Mr. Goldbeater?” asked a young female member of the Goldbeater Guild.

“Ah, there are so many of them that would have to be called wonderful,” the old man said. “But my real favorite is the limerick that goes:

“There was a young lady from Kleetus

Who showered ball-players with geetus.

She consorted with these,

And presently she's

Afflicted with athletes' fetus.”

The old man Clement gave it in a fine voice.

“Stop this nonsense,” Cris Benedetti suddenly howled. “There is no such man as this here present. I made him up and he doesn't exist otherwise.”

This wild outburst shocked not only Austro and Loretta and Mary Mondo and the kids of the Goldbeater Guild. It also shocked Harry O'Donovan and George Drakos and Barnaby Sheen and myself who were also present at the tay. Cris had popped his stopper; there wasn't much doubt of that.

“God made me up,” Clement Goldbeater said with a sort of roguish dignity. “You're in His image, but weakly so. You did not make me up, man.”

“There is nothing here,” Cris sputtered and pointed at Clement.

“A non-person,” Roy Mega helped him out. Roy was one of the kids who had tumbled to it. Cris had been wrong in saying that none of them had.

“He's a non-person, a nothing, a sick joke of my own making,” Cris insisted with passion. “There was never any such person as Clement Goldbeater. I made him up to illustrate that few persons ever read the works they talk about. And a half-dozen other teachers around the country who also sponsor little magazines joined me in the hoax. Then the kids got up a fund to finance Goldbeater's visit to us. There was no harm in that, I thought. It was funny, and the money could later be used for some worthy cause. But they really sent the money. And he answered and he came. But it's impossible, he can't be here! There isn't any Clement Goldbeater, and there aren't any Goldbeater writings.”

“But you do have Goldbeater writings on your shelf, Cris,” I broke into the thing. “I've seen them, and I've looked through them a little.”

“No, no! Bookbinding and printing are hobbies of mine.” Cris said. “It was no trick to rip off the covers and title page of a few turn-of-the-century books, and to make Clement Goldbeater covers and title-pages to go with them. But this man can't be here. And if he is, he never wrote anything.”

“You deny that I am Clement S. Goldbeater of the suburb of Clontarf in holy Ireland?” Clement demanded angrily. “Never wrote anything! You deny that I write a monthly half-column in the Clontarf Monthly Miscellany?”

Clement S. Goldbeater was the angriest man I had ever seen until then.

But he held the title for only short seconds.

Then an even angrier man burst through the door. And he looked mightily like Clement.

“Why were the funds not sent to me by cable?” the newcomer demanded. “Why did I have to dig up the jug in my own pear orchard for my own money to come, and I almost miss my plane on account of it? Why was I not met at the airport? Why did I have to learn by devious means in which house the Goldbeater Guild was met?”

Then the face of the new old man softened, and he grinned widely.

“Ah, there's an honest Irish boy here at least!” he cried, and he clapped Austro on both shoulders with his great hands. “Ah, you be a lad, a buachaill, a macaomh. The pug and the mug on you! I'd know you for Irish anywhere by them. Welcome me, lad!”

“Carrock,” said Austro happily. “Tá failte romhat.”

“You're not real,” Cris Benedetti protested, in panic at the doubling of his anomalies. “You have not a name; you've breathed not a breath; you've written not a line.”

“You deny that I am Clement T. Goldbeater of the suburb of Howth in holy Ireland?” the new old man demanded angrily. “Written not a line! You deny that I write a monthly half-column in the Howth Monthly Herald? Ah, but I see that my ne'er-do-well cousin Clement S. is here before me. That explains much,” Clement T. said. “He has stolen my money and my honors and preceded me here. He has received the blessing before me, and the mess of pottage as well.”

“That's better than a pot of message,” Mary Mondo conveyed.

“Why, there are two young deamhan ladies here present,” Clement T. said in soft wonder. (He meant two young ghostly ladies, but how could Clement T. have known what they were?)

“These two old men are nothings,” Cris Benedetti was raving. “One is nothing, and the other one is a reflection of the nothing. I tell you that I made the thing up, and then it twinned or cousined on me. But they are not alive. They have no life in them.”

“What is life?” Mary Mondo asked like jesting Pilate.

“Quiet, witch!” Cris gave her an angry order. The two cousins, Clement S. Goldbeater and Clement T. Goldbeater, had now begun to beat each other with their blackthorn sticks.

“I'll show you that there's no substance to them. I'll show you that they're nothing but hot air,” Cris shouted to everybody, and he waded into the middle of the blackthorn-swinging fight.

He was cracked and whacked solidly by both of the Clements. He staggered out of the dispute with bloody head and hunched shoulders.

“Whatever is it that has put such ruddy knobs on your noggin, Cris?” Barnaby Sheen asked pleasantly. “Was it hot air?”

“Yes, hot air. My own originally,” Cris snuffled humbly. He was bleeding blood, and perhaps he was crying tears. And the blackthorns were lashing and slashing.

Austro was drawing furiously in his drawing tablet, getting it all down. The two old men were battling as only old Irishmen can battle.

“Give me a couple of pages from your tablet, Austro,” Roy Mega begged. “I can hardly wait to get started on the lead story for the next Unicorn. It's going to be some issue!”

The whole room seemed full of swinging blackthorn canes.

Austro gave Roy Mega some pages.

“Carrock,” Austro said. “Going to be one crocky issue.”

The Hellaceous Rocket of Harry O'Donovan

Four pieces needed in this plan

To make the flaming rocket man:

A mask, a pitch, a brain to whiz it;

The fourth — well, what the Devil is it?

 — Eco-Log

Harry O'Donovan had made an apparatus. Being political, he had made a political apparatus: and the essential of this was that it should look and walk and talk like a man. Harry had made such conglomerates before, and with some success. Now he had in his hands the pieces that looked like total success.

“There are only three pieces needed,” he said with his usual floridity. “The mask or front-man, the pitch or phrase-maker and image-maker, and the brain. These should not be combined in one person: each has its own narrow role, and they must be kept separate. Each must have its fundamental simplicity, but the combination will be complex. Three things only, and I believe that I have them all at hand.”

“You are wrong,” Barnaby Sheen told him. “A successful political apparatus, a successful political animal, is always a quaternity, a four-way thing. The fourth element will be there, or the thing will not succeed.”

“Oh sure, four-square and all that, stability's quite necessary,” Harry agreed. “The fourth element, which must remain hidden, is the brain behind the brain; in this case myself.”

“The fourth element does not bring stability,” Barnaby contradicted. “Stability is already there, there is nothing more stable than a three-legged stool. The fourth element turns the stable apparatus into a wobbly skyrocket. It soars in a fiery arc, and then it falls as a cinder. I don't see why the fourth element is necessary; I don't say that it is necessary: I say that it will be there, sooner or later, every time.”

Cris Benedetti who was present growled in a hoarse voice, and he was usually a soft-spoken man. He growled something that sounded very like “The devil with the fourth element!”

“But if it works,” Harry said, “it will not be an ordinary thing. It will be like a flaming rocket that people will remember forever.”

“Austro tells me that they made rockets when he was a boy back home living in a cave,” Barnaby said. “They would capture marsh gas in tightly-woven palm-leaf sacks. They would attach a sack to a spear with fletching and head. They would set the spear afire, and then they would set the gas afire. And it would soar brilliantly. Many things are very old.

“Austro used to say that he was born in a cave that he helped his father excavate,” Barnaby told it. “And, for a long time, all American politicians were born in log cabins which they had helped their fathers build. This gave the image of humble beginnings, combined with initiative and extreme youth.”

“I like the cave variation of it,” Harry said. “I may be able to work it in one of these times.”

Because he had selected, for political advantage, a self-effacing role for himself, we were always inclined to set Harry O'Donovan a little below his real worth. But Harry with his high-pitched voice had never been out of place as one of the men who knew everything. In the field of electronics, he went far beyond that self-proclaimed electronics genius Barnaby Sheen. In medicine and biology, he was at least the peer of Doctor George Drakos. In literature and esoterica, he owned at least as many vineyards as did Cris Benedetti. He was a political genius — that was acknowledged by everyone; and he was a psychological genius, which is almost the same thing. But it is sometimes forgotten that he was also a mechanical genius almost without equal in our generation. And at para-mathematics, para-mechanics, para-biology, para-psychology, para-electronics, para-politics — who could stand on his level?

Building a political animal took a lot of talents, and Harry O'Donovan had them. He was beginning to build a new political animal now.

He was talking to a young fellow of powerful and striking appearance:

“You were born in a sod house along Coyote Trail, David,” Harry was saying. “I would like very much to make it a cave, but we haven't come quite that far yet. Maybe it will be a cave the next time. You were born in that sod house, do you understand that, David?”

“No. I was born on Twelfth Street right here in Tulsa,” the young man said. “Coyote Trail is out west of Sand Springs. It's twelve miles from where I was born. And there isn't enough sod out there to build a sod house. It's all rock and up and down hills. Now, here's a beauty that no man in his right mind could turn down.”

“I am not here to buy a car, David,” Harry O'Donovan said patiently.

The young man, the contemplated mask or front-man, of a political animal, was a used-car salesman on used-car row. Nevertheless, he had the appearance and the voice. He could be used, but he needed whatever instruction could be poured into him.

“Never talk in your own words, David,” Harry told him. “Somebody else will fix up the words for you to say. Ah, you'll be perfect for the part, perfect.”

This used-car salesman who was being selected for front-man was named David Concourse.

“Your name won't have to be changed,” Harry O'Donovan said. “It's good enough.”

“Why should my name be changed, friend?” Big David asked. “Now this car, friend, purrs like a workhorse. It cruises like a hummingbird. It has a reciprocal motor and astatic shocks. At $590.00 we should be investigated by the federal government for undermining prices. I always say there's nothing like a Dodge to take you there and bring you back.”

“It's a Ford, David,” Harry said, “but I'm not shopping for a car today. I'm shopping for something else and I think I've found it. I'll likely be back.”

“Better hurry, friend,” said the personable salesman. “These red-hot bargains go awful fast.”

“The bargain I've found should still be here tomorrow,” Harry said. “I'll be back.”

“Wonderful, wonderful, friend,” the big young man said, “and which one is it?”

“You,” Harry said. He believed that he had found his front-man or mask: huge, handsome, still plastic and formable, earthy, outgoing, personable, with a likeable boom in his voice; and not a brain in his head. He would serve.

And Harry had already about decided on his pitch and now he went to see him. The pitch was named Ennis Hardhandle. He wrote sports and other things for the North Town Star. He wrote patter for the supper-club entertainers. He wrote material for a variety of politicians. He was good with words, and he was smart and young. But he was black, he was scrawny, and he had a tendency to break up in the middle of his own most solemn phrases. He didn't take his own talents seriously enough, he was unorganized; he threw away stuff that could be marketed, and he did not concentrate his energies. But he was better than anyone else around, and he knew what Harry O'Donovan was after when Harry first looked him up.

“I was wondering whether you'd be smart enough to pick me,” Ennis said. “I was wondering whether you were smart enough even to know about me. I was sure you'd have to find a pitch, as soon as I learned that you'd picked Dave Concourse as a mask.”

“Are you sure that you can handle this?” O'Donovan asked this Hardhandle.

“Oh sure, Harry, sure. I'm smart enough not to let my smartness get in the way. I'm smart enough to be a brain in a group, but I'm also smart enough not to poach on the brain when I'm the pitch. You remember what Borges wrote: ‘the grossest temptation of art — that of being a genius’. But there is no great harm in being a genius if it can be kept under tight enough cover. Yet the most effective of all political speeches was composed by an open-minded idiot who must here be nameless out of common decency: and it was delivered by that near-perfect mask, Kennedy. I mean the Inaugural Address. I was too young to appreciate it at the time, but I have studied it often. Hundreds of phrases like ‘Let us never negotiate from fear’ (muted buzzing) ‘but let us never fear to negotiate!’ (wild applause). Juxtaposition of words, that's the whole thing.”

“We understand each other,” Harry O'Donovan said.

“Sure, I'll take the job,” Ennis Hardhandle told him. “And now you will be shopping for a brain. Let me write his name down. Don't read it, though, till you've made your selection.” Ennis wrote on a paper, folded and refolded it, and gave it to Harry O'Donovan. And Harry put it in his wallet and went out to find a brain.

The first brain he called on was named Baxter Hungerman. Baxter was of that thing that must be called ethnic or multi-ethnic. He was an ugly and pleasant man. Sometimes he had a direct way about him, and sometimes a devious.

“It's the O'Donovan, is it?” Hungerman more stated than asked. “He's here to pick a brain or to pick up a brain. But can you afford me?”

“One way or another, yes,” Harry said. “And can you produce?”

“You can afford, O'Donovan, but you came to me because I'm reputed to be cheap. That's a pleasant fiction that I started myself, but I'm priced higher than the more costly brains, when all the bills are in. And I haven't such presence or name or fame as the others. But I have overtaken and passed all the others, quite recently; and the community knew it when it happened. The only advantage you'll have in engaging me is the point at hand: I'm more of a brain than the other brains.

“As to producing, that's always the gamble. In every campaign, even the most hopeless seeming one, there is a point where something happens, or it does not happen. It cannot be guaranteed, but probability can be built up for it. No, I'm not being cryptic. Somewhere in my unconscious I know what the happening is. It's of nightmare quality and I won't drag it out into the light. If it happens, the campaign succeeds. I'm a hook that very often catches the happening. I've been near the black lightning several times when it struck. I suppose that's why I have more nightmares than the other brains do. You want this David Concourse, this nobody man with the golden rumble in his voice, to be elected to the senate post. I believe it can be done. I go to work on it now. You will place funds at my disposal weekly. Then you stay out of the way, O'Donovan. Be invisible. The touch of respectability that you represent surely isn't needed now. I'll probably require your visible opposition to your man when we're a little further down the road. We understand each other?”

“We understand each other,” Harry O'Donovan said. Harry went out from there. Then he took from his billfold the folded piece of paper that Ennis Hardhandle had given him. “The brain you hire will be Baxter Hungerman” it said.

There were quite a few groups that believed they needed a senator that year. David Concourse was but one of seven men running in the primary, and he was probably the least known one. The brain brained and planned for him. The pitchman wrote the pitches and the words. And David did have a golden rumble in his voice. Harry O'Donovan made available the money which he shook out of various trees. But the campaign was going badly.

“It needs a shot in the arm, Harry, doesn't it?” George Drakos commented.

“No clichés, please,” Harry O'Donovan said miserably.

“You are a political manipulator and you say ‘no clichés, please’? Harry, that's what the whole thing runs on. You're out of your mind.” Drakos was having fun with O'Donovan.

“It doesn't seem to be jelling, does it?” Cris Benedetti asked maliciously. “It isn't taking off like a skyrocket, is it?”

“The fourth element isn't there yet,” Barnaby Sheen said simply. “For decency's sake I hope it doesn't appear, but of course no campaign can succeed without it.”

Austro growled deeply in his throat. When Austro growled like that he almost seemed a little bit other than human.

Baxter Hungerman the brain came into the room (it was Barnaby Sheen's private study-bar) without knocking. “Carrock,” Austro greeted him. Baxter wasn't the coming something that Austro didn't like.

“All of you out!” Baxter said pleasantly. “For secret reasons we need a secret room. He says he won't meet us anywhere else. Everybody out.”

Ennis Hardhandle came in. “Carrock,” Austro said. Ennis wasn't what he disliked.

David Concourse came in. “Carrock,” Austro said. It wasn't David that Austro disliked either.

“Out, men, out,” Baxter said. We went out, Harry O'Donovan, George Drakos, Cris Benedetti, Barnaby Sheen, those four men who knew everything, and Austro and myself who didn't. Baxter Hungerman closed the door behind us. Those three men, the mask, the pitch, the brain, waited in there for the fourth to join them.

We sat outside in that hallway that leads to the study. The hallway, as a fact, was much larger and more richly appointed than the study that it led to. It was a cross between a hotel lobby and a special museum room. There was fine statuary in the hall niches. There were even finer paintings standing up in their great frames on the walls. The door to the private study-bar was disguised by one such painting, which was exactly the size of the door.

“And we are waiting for — what?” Doctor George Drakos asked.

“For the fourth element, of course,” Barnaby Sheen said. “The necessary part for the Faustine transaction.”

“Will it be a man?” Cris Benedetti asked.

“No, I don't think so,” Barnaby said, “but it will look like a man. It will be the Mysterious Stranger. Why are you all so naïve about this? It happens every time.”

“Aye, but he looks different every time,” Harry O'Donovan said. “I wish he would play it straight once.”

We hadn't long to wait. Austro gave another of his throaty growls. What was coming up the stairs now was something that Austro didn't like.

But it looked like a man, a tall and angular man, dressed all in black, and with a tall black hat from another century on his head. He looked like an old-time itinerant hangman. No, you wouldn't remember them.

“I'm expected. I'll go right in,” this somber person said. He went into the study through the door that looked like a picture.

“Ah, he did play it straight for once,” Harry O'Donovan said. “It would be so much easier and cleaner if he always came in that appearance.”

We sat and waited. Mary Mondo came out. “It's too spooky in there for me,” she wailed. “But poor Loretta is in there and can't come out.”

“If any harm comes to her, I swear I'll hang that devil up by tongue and tonkis,” Barnaby Sheen barked.

“No harm can come to her,” Cris Benedetti mumbled. “She's beyond harm.”

We waited. Then it happened. It shook us all and it shook the house.

“That didn't take long,” Barnaby said. “Hardly give a man time enough to sign his name in blood.” It had been like a flash of darkness.

“What was it?” Harry O'Donovan asked. “I never know what to call it.”

“Only the black lightning,” said Barnaby. “It struck. Whatever was going to happen has happened. Let's go in.”

Inside, David Concourse was standing in the middle of the study, grinning grandly and rumbling triumphant things in his golden voice. He was victory invincible.

Ennis Hardhandle was scribbling notes in a big drawing tablet that Austro had left there. And the notes crackled by their very brilliance, and sparked as he made them.

Baxter Hungerman was talking on the phone, no, on three phones at once, and we all knew that he was talking to the three TV stations.

“Yes, at once,” Hungerman was shouting, “in fifteen minutes. Clear the air! It's a skyrocket, I tell you. A prairie fire is nothing like this. Fifteen minutes, at our headquarters. All three of you rush your equipment there. Old golden voice will already be talking when he gets there, and this time he'll have something to say when he talks. Like a skyrocket, I tell you.”

And the somber person in black who had gone in wasn't there at all; and there was only one door to the study.

The three of them, Concourse, Hardhandle, Hungerman, went out jubilantly together. They were shouting in triumph and they had their arms about each other. They had really become one creature.

“It's always a little bit exciting, and little bit dirty, to see a new and great political career launched, and to see a political campaign come alive,” George Drakos said. “And it has never happened any other way? Curious.”

“One apparatus, highly functioning,” said Barnaby Sheen. “They are merged into one thing that ignites and soars. It's almost as if it were alive.”

“What is life?” Mary Mondo asked.

“Hush, Mary,” Harry O'Donovan begged. “How have I done wrong? I merely wanted to get it off the ground.”

They got it off the ground. In fifteen minutes, David Concourse was on the air with the triumphant boom of his golden voice. Yes, he was a skyrocket.

And he rocketed for the following ten days. There had never been anything like this. (They always say that of a campaign that takes fire in the classic way.) How that David Concourse could talk! What slick stuff that Hardhandle could give him, and how that Hungerman could arrange events! David Concourse burned with a cool, slight metallic, slightly sulphurous fire. There was a new light in the sky. There was moment and momentum.

In ten days, David Concourse came from dead last to win the primary vote. So he had the nomination of his party. It was then that Baxter Hungerman told Harry O'Donovan that he must come out strongly against Concourse, as did several of the other old manipulators. It was all timed and colored just right: and, of course, it rebounded triply to the credit of Concourse. Anyone who could shovel off the Old Guard was a man of virtue. Concourse seemed unbeatable now. He had the magic on him, and the opposition trembled in its boots.

“I don't like it very much,” Cris Benedetti said. “It isn't quite clean. I believe that I could put my finger on what is wrong if I tried hard, but I have the feeling that I'd have that finger torn off by a bunch of those savage tropical fish.”

“I don't like it at all,” George Drakos said. “It's the most noisome fraud ever in this state, which means the most noisome ever, anywhere.”

“Should we jerk the rug out from under it?” Barnaby asked. “We all know it's wrong.”

“What is wrong with my owning a senator?” Harry O'Donovan asked. “I almost always do. Myself and several of my group feel that we need a senator this year. And he is so much on the upsurge, a veritable skyrocket, as everyone says.”

“The thing wrong with your owning this senator is that you won't own him,” Barnaby said. “He's already owned.”

“I don't believe you can jerk the rug from under him,” Harry frothed. “I'll stick to my man (though opposing him in public, of course), and we'll sweep the election. You can't jerk the rug from under him. You don't even know what rug it is.”

“I do, you don't,” Barnaby said. But Harry O'Donovan slammed out of the room in anger.

“Can we jerk it from under?” Barnaby asked as Harry's departure still echoed.

“I think we can,” Cris Benedetti said. “I know an old rite.”

“Carrock, I know we can,” Austro said. “I know an older one.”

But there would apparently be no pulling the rug from under David Concourse. On the eve of the general election he was in, in, in. He had it won. Everyone conceded before the vote. He'd be the brightest new ornament in the U.S. Senate.

Barnaby Sheen went like a beggar to Harry O'Donovan, and we all trailed along.

“Could we have your man come by the place for a very little while tonight, Harry?” Barnaby begged. “Yes, I know he will be very busy with a dozen election-eve victory parties. But could we have him for, say, five minutes?”

“Is it some trick you are up to?” Harry asked. “Can I trust a pack of jackals?”

“We all come to you humbly, hat in hand,” Barnaby wheedled.

“Yes, I see that,” Harry crowed. “But there's a tricky shine on several of your pates, for all that you stand hat in hand.”

“Harry, for old friendship, may we not even touch your triumph, even at second-hand for a moment?” Barnaby begged with a pathos that sounded genuine.

“I'll see what I can do, but don't count on it,” Harry O'Donovan told us.

It was close, but Harry did manage to bring David Concourse by for a very brief minute in the round of his election-eve victory parties. It was late for such; it almost wasn't election eve anymore when they came. It was just short of midnight. Then they came in, and it was like a great light.

“For only a moment,” said David Concourse in his golden voice, and he was wrapped in victory like a mantle.

“Time enough,” Cris Benedetti snapped in the strangest voice we had ever heard him use. “Ego praecipio tibi, exi ab eo: et amplius ne introeas in eum.”

And David Concourse stood as though paralyzed.

“Exi ab eo,” Cris repeated. “Go out from him.”

David groaned mightily and staggered.

“Carrock, kalos exitexto kabosh ghim, carrock,” Austro commanded in an even older rite. David Concourse fell to the floor like a huge tree falling, and he cried out weirdly. Then something went out from him.

(In other places, similar things were happening to Ennis Hardhandle and Baxter Hungerman; but the tearing out wasn't so severe with them. After all, Concourse was the primary. This is not fiction. I later checked on these two men and found that they were stricken at that hour, and each had the impression of a small and unnatural creature going out from him.)

Well, what went out from David Concourse was about eight inches high and it looked like a little man, an angular little man dressed all in black and with a tall black hat from another century on his head. It was the miniature of the somber person who had entered this room many days before and who had apparently entered David Concourse and the other two also. The thing scuttered away and out the door.

Oh, yes, and its coat-tails were on fire; and it was in a hurry.

“Well, what was it?” I asked.

“The Devil, of course,” Barnaby said. “The Mysterious Stranger. He's not really very big when he's challenged: and he has to go out when he's told to in the proper ritual. It's the old Faustine deal that was made. All the sudden flaming men have made this deal. All! It's what sets them aflame and guarantees their success. But the deal can be broken, and we broke it for poor David.”

David Concourse was sitting on the floor now, but he was dazed.

“This little car,” he was saying, “will sing like a bronco and run like an ostrich. For only $285.00 it's a steal. We should be investigated, our prices are so low.”

David Concourse was no longer a skyrocket. He was a cinder. But how does word of a thing like that get around? Election day had already arrived and the polls would be open at seven. How would all the conned people know that the rocket was no longer a rocket?

Never mind, they knew. The feeling was everywhere immediately. Concourse was soundly trounced in the election he was supposed to have in the bag. He went back to selling cars, at a slight cut in pay.

“How can you tell whether something like that is alive or whether there's just a little man inside working the pedals?” Mary Mondo asked.

“It is sometimes hard to tell,” Barnaby admitted to the ghost-girl.

A few months later, there was scheduled a little local special election to fill a dead man's shoes in the state senate.

“I believe that I could use one more state senator,” said Harry O'Donovan who had not been doing much political manipulating lately.

“Stuff it, Harry!” Cris said.

“Some people never learn,” Drakos commented.

“Hard-head Harry, don't try it again,” Barnaby Sheen warned. “Don't try it on the one you're thinking of.”

“Carrock! Get that look out of your eye,” Austro said.

“What I need for a starter,” Harry said (and he did have that look in his eye), “is a mask, a front man. I don't care how homely he is if he has a face that people will trust. I don't care how witless he is if he has real integrity shining out of him. And who, fellows, has the most honest face of anyone we know?”

“Carrock, no, no!” Austro cried in alarm.

“I don't care how rough-hewn he seems,” Harry was saying, and he was inching towards Austro in words and action. “Everything can be smoothed out with a good pitch-man and a good brain-man. But when you start with a really likeable — ”

“Carrock, no, no, not me,” Austro begged.

“ — with a really likeable person, you have a pearl beyond price in this political business. Born in a rock cave on the Guna Slopes beats being born in a sod hut on Coyote Trail, even beats being born in a log cabin. We will sweep it all clean with the sunshine broom. We will bill you as the boy with the sunshine brains. For the clown with integrity shining out of him, the one person with an absolutely homely face, the one really likeable — ”

“Carrock, no, no, leggo, Harry!” Austro cried and broke away from O'Donovan and out of the room.

“Fame and fortune, Austro!” Harry was calling as he panted after Austro down the street outside. “I'll turn you into the sunshine man, the golden man, the golden skyrocket.”

“Carrock, no, no, not me!” Austro hollered. But Austro was already a skyrocket of sorts. That kid could run, and Harry O'Donovan was too old and short of wind to catch him ever. Austro disappeared over the hill, with Harry falling farther and farther behind.

Author's Commentary

The Wooly World of Barnaby Sheen

I have a lot of Fiat in my soul and can myself create my little world.

 — Beddoes, Death's Jest Book

Barnaby Sheen made a world. It was a miniature, of course, and was not a sphere. It was only a model section of the earth's mantle, half covered with ocean, half by a surrounding continent. It was in volume about a cubic meter (though it wasn't cubic), and it weighed about 4,500 pounds.

Barnaby could have made it heavier except that he would have had to reinforce the floor of his study to do so. So his selection of rock was not as exact as it might have been; it was rather on the light side. The make-up of Barnaby's world was dictated by certain restrictions.

“Oh, well, so was the make-up of God's world,” Barnaby said. This wasn't any random job though; keep in mind that Barnaby Sheen was one of the great geologists and cosmologists of the century.

There was a clear dome over Barnaby's world, perhaps to contain atmosphere if atmosphere should develop. There was already a slight amount of room atmosphere in it, for Barnaby did not strive for absolute vacuum. There were several rods of various function coming up through the dome, but it was all sealed.

“Is there any life in it?” Mary Mondo wanted to know. She always wanted to know what life was and whether there was life in this or that, doubt having been cast on whether there was life in herself.

“Probably is,” Barnaby said. “I sterilized most of the stuff, but not to perfection. For my purpose it won't matter whether there is life in it or not. I made it as a model to use in certain tectonic observations. I want to see when weather appears in it, and when the hills begin to weather down. I will see when the rivers appear and when the runneled erosion starts. I'll watch sediment washed out of the rocks to become soil or ocean-bottom deposit. I'll see the downgrading of the land, and then possibly I'll see the beginning of the uplift, or the mountain-building.”

“When do you think some change might be noticed in your model?” Harry O'Donovan asked.

“Oh, maybe in fifty thousand years,” Barnaby said.

“And you're going to sit and watch it for fifty thousand years?” Harry inquired.

“Might as well,” Barnaby said. “I'm not doing anything else right now.”

“But your model hasn't its own gravity, it hasn't its own sunlight, it hasn't its own motion,” Doctor George Drakos protested.

“I know it. It isn't a very good model,” Barnaby said. “But I believe that I can use it to short-cut a few problems.”

“Fifty thousand years doesn't seem like a short-cut,” Cris Benedetti commented.

“Oh, I can be running tests all the time,” Barnaby told us. Barnaby was an excellent geologist, but not a proper one. He was a seismograph man, and all seismograph men are unorthodox geologists. They have only one advantage over proper geologists: they can locate oil when the proper geologists can't.

Barnaby set off a miniature blast deep in his rocky model. He read the result on some of his meters.

“What does it say?” Harry O'Donovan asked him.

“It says that it's about a meter from the continental surface to the bottom of the tank.”

“But you already knew that. That's the way you built it.”

“Sure, but this is confirmation.”

Austro, Barnaby's Australopithecine houseboy, had a jeweler's glass screwed into his eye and was carving something very small; Austro had developed a lot of hobbies. Mary Mondo was hovering over Barnaby's world, very interested. George Drakos, Cris Benedetti, Harry O'Donovan, and myself were playing pitch and watching Barnaby Sheen watch his world. Quite a while went by. It was late at night when we broke it up.

“Close up those things when you're through and put out the lights, Austro,” Barnaby said as he ushered us out.

“Carrock. Okay,” Austro answered with the jeweler's glass still in his eye.

And there was another voice which only those with coarse ears can hear. It was from that ghost-girl Mary Mondo.

“Let's fake it, kid,” she said to Austro, and I didn't know what she meant.

The next evening we were all in Barnaby's study again, though ordinarily we met there only about once a week.

“Hum, candle wax, yellow-gold candle wax,” Barnaby said as he looked at his world. “What an odd effect that candle wax should form on the outside of the dome.”

Two of the rods that came up through dome had binocular attachments on them. They were periscopic rods and attached to lighted microscopes, one on the surface of the continent, and one buried deep in the continental mass. Direct observation could be made, up to a thousand power. Should there be change in the rock structure, it could be detected by comparing photographs on a scanning machine.

“There are quite a few fossils in the rocks,” Cris said as he observed through the rod to the buried microscope.

“Oh sure, that part is mostly Dawson Limestone,” Barnaby said. “Always full of fossils.”

“Some of them are pretty small, considering the magnification,” Cris said.

“Certainly, some of the creatures of the period were pretty small,” Barnaby said.

“Are they alive?” Mary Mondo asked.

“No, of course fossils aren't alive, Mary,” Barnaby said, “but once they were.”

“Fiat anima,” Mary Mondo said distantly, but I may have been the only one with ears coarse enough to hear her.

“Why is the dome a little fogged on the inside, Barnaby?” Harry O'Donovan asked.

“The dome is the sky,” Barnaby said. “I don't know why it's fogged. Maybe because of the unbalance of normal pressure outside and near vacuum inside.”

“But wouldn't that make it fog on the outside?”

“I don't know. I'm not a physicist,” Barnaby said.

“What's on the continental plain near the river?” George Drakos asked. “It looks like a city.”

“What river?” Barnaby asked. “There can't be a river yet. Oh yes, that crack does look a little bit like a river. And the roughness of that rock does resemble a very small city a little. I'll move the surface microscope a little closer to it tomorrow and study it. But limestone is like clouds; one can see all sorts of configurations in it, can imagine almost any shape or thing in it.”

We played Michigan, George Drakos, Cris Benedetti, Barnaby Sheen, and myself. Harry O'Donovan had taken over the world-watching job tonight. “There's something very small moving around and hopping around in there,” he said after a while.

“Nonsense, Harry, you've got specks on your spectacles,” Barnaby said.

“Fiat imber,” the poltergeistic Mary Mondo mumbled, but none of them seemed to hear her. Often poltergeist folks are inaudible except to us gamey-eared ones. “Fiat nubes,” she mumbled.

“Barnaby,” Harry said, “there's mist and clouds forming inside that, ah, sky. Real clouds.”

“What luck,” Barnaby said. “I hadn't expected them for thousands of years.” But he didn't seem much interested, and he didn't stop playing cards. Austro was still carving little things and he still had that jeweler's glass in his eye. Loretta had begun to breathe in a heavy and troubled way, and it's always startling when a sawdust-filled doll does that. Mary Mondo blinked off and on, appearing and disappearing in that way of hers; she was particularly larkish tonight.

“Fiat fulmen, fiat tonitrus, fiat pluvia,” Mary said almost inaudibly.

There was a little flicker of light.

“What's that?” Barnaby asked. “One of the bulbs about to blow?”

There was a little rumble.

“What's that?” Barnaby asked. “Your stomach, Cris?”

“No. Don't be vulgar.”

There was a whispering sound that was hard to place.

“What's that?” Barnaby asked.

“Rain,” said Harry O'Donovan. “It's raining in your world.”

Well, why shouldn't it lightning and thunder and rain? Mary Mondo had told it to. We all went to look. It was raining real rain out of real clouds under that sky-dome that wasn't more than a meter in diameter. It was lightning and thundering and raining out of black thunderheads, and the river was already flowing down that crack in the continental plain, the crack that Drakos had already called a river.

“There's a contradiction there,” Barnaby said. “The rain is real rain, so the drops are real drop-sized. They have to be; they're ruled by the laws of surface tension and such. But any of the drops would be a hundred times bigger than the biggest building in that ‘city’ on the river. Rain would be a disaster for such a city and its civilization. It would be like water masses of a mile diameter falling on the town again and again. No, that can't be a city or it can't last.”

“Don't worry about it,” Drakos said. “The smaller an object or creature is, the less vulnerable it is. Surface against mass, you know, and all that.”

“Kids,” Mary Mondo whispered (but only those of uncircumcised ears could hear her), “we got to fix that. We got to make littler rain.”

“Just what do you know about this, Mary?” Barnaby asked. He had heard something out of her, but he hadn't distinguished the words.

“About what, Mr. Sheen?” she asked with the assurance that only a ghost-girl can have.

“About, ah, about the city on the plain of the continent of the little world.”

“The name of it is Phantasmopolis,” Mary said. “It was founded by the great Mondinus in the Year Four A.M.M.”

“Phantasmopolis would be ghost city or poltergeist-ghost city,” Barnaby mused. “But what is A.M.M.?”

“Anno Mary Mondo,” she said. “The city is in my own era. I've been dead for four years, you know, and that city was founded last night by the great Mondinus.”

“Founded by candlelight, Mary?”

“That wasn't a candle. It was a sun.”

“You're making all this up, Mary.”

“Yes. I'm making it all up. Wait till you see what I make up tonight.”

“Austro, do you have a finger in this?” Barnaby demanded.

“Carrock, me a finger? I'm all thumbs.”

We returned to our card-playing. The storm died down in Barnaby's model world. And when it was late we all went home.

But we were back again the next evening. Whether Barnaby was tired of our company or not, we had become interested in the goings-on of his model world.

“Hum, two kinds of wax on the outside of the dome today,” Barnaby said. “Besides the yellow-gold wax, there is silver-white wax. What an odd effect! I wonder if our real sky gets different kinds of wax on top of it.”

Barnaby, Cris, Harry, and myself sat down to play high five. George Drakos had taken over the job of world-watcher tonight.

“Barnaby, there really are little live things moving around on your world,” George said. “They are mostly around the city, and the city has grown considerably.”

“Bosh,” said Barnaby.

“No bosh to it,” George insisted. “The microscope reveals pretty fine detail on some of the buildings.”

“Double bosh,” Barnaby said.

“What scale did you build this on, Barnaby?” George asked.

“Why, no particular scale. The rocks are on their own scale. Who can change the scale of atoms or molecules or cells? It's a mechanical model, that's all.”

“Barnaby, down inside the continental mass there's an almost perfect mammoth skeleton,” George Drakos said, “except that it's a million times too small.”

“As I said the other evening, one can see almost any form one wishes in limestone, just as in clouds,” Barnaby said.

“Bosh to you,” George told him. “Barney, I tell you that there really are small living creatures in your world, quite lively living creatures.”

“Mighty uninteresting,” Barnaby said. “I didn't build the world to study living creatures. And just what species are they, good doctor?”

“Pulex, I believe,” Doctor Drakos said.

Mary Mondo was flitting around. Austro was scratching himself. Loretta was stirring a bit and breathing: it was as if she were laughing silently.

“Barney, there's miniature waves in your ocean,” Drakos said, “and there is some evidence of tidal action.”

“Any whales in the ocean, George?”

“Don't see any, Barney. Only one species of life on the world. But some of them hop on and off the water just as easy as they do the land.”

“Why aren't you carving little things, Austro?” Barnaby asked his houseboy.

“Carrock. Finished them,” Austro said.

“Just how little are the things you can carve?”

“Carrock, real little, boss. You wouldn't believe it.”

“Like little mammoth bones? And little city buildings?”

“Carrock. Like little everything, boss.”

“How did you get them inside the world?”

“Carrock, I didn't. I'm not the one with the ghost hands.”

“Fiat terrae motus!” Mary Mondo ordered.

“What, Mary?” Barnaby demanded. “How can a man play cards with all that conversation going on? What's that little rumble? Not more toy thunder?”

“Barney, I believe that you have an earthquake going on in your world,” Drakos said. “Quite a severe one for the size of the world.”

“Good. Has it destroyed the city?”

“No. The city seems to be solid enough, Barney. But its inhabitants are hopping around in a pretty nervous fashion.”

“Get ready for it, kids. Don't miss it!” Mary Mondo chirped so clearly as to be heard by every ear in the room. “This is going to be good.”

“Be quiet, Mary,” Barnaby ordered. “Oh, did you use a silver-colored candle last night?”

“That wasn't actually a candle, it was the moon. We improvise a lot. Fiat eruptio!” Mary cried disobediently. “Fiat — dammit, what's the word for volcano? Oh yes, it's volcano. Fiat volcano.”

“Mary, I said to be quiet with that stuff,” Barnaby ordered again. But who can give orders to a ghost-girl?

“Barney, I believe that there is indeed volcanic activity on your world,” Drakos said. “There's lava flow, there's smoke and belching flame, there's explosion.”

“I'll blow my top!” Barnaby howled and threw down his cards. “Is there no peace in this house?”

But it was rather Barnaby's world that blew its top. The volcano went out of control. Pebbles came out of it at escape velocity and shattered the dome, the sky. There was exploding fire that threatened the whole room. And there was something else, something hopping with excitement and fear and biting for blood, that came out of the model world at the same time.

“Water, water, get buckets of water, Austro.” Barnaby ordered.

“Carrock, water, water,” Austro said, and he began to bring it. But it was dangerous to get too close to that world. There was explosion after explosion. There were bits of firecracker — and that's a thing hard to explain — with the firecracker paper still sticking on them. And some of the hot lava overflowed the world and started fires on the rug.

“We may have to let it burn itself out,” Barnaby said as he scratched himself in general bad humor. “I wonder how long it will take.”

“A volcano seldom exhibits violent activity for more than a thousand years,” George Drakos said, grinning crookedly. “But you're not doing anything else for a while, are you, Barney?”

“Great concatenated catastrophes!” Barnaby cried out. “My house is on fire, and something is biting me to death. What's biting me?”

“Fleas,” said George Drakos.

“They don't mean to. They're scared,” Mary Mondo said.

“Fleas!” Barnaby screamed. “Where did the fleas come from?”

“From your world,” Drakos said. “I told you it was inhabited.”

“They came from Austro originally,” Mary Mondo tattled. “I gathered some of them off him and put them in there so the world would be inhabited.” Austro hung his head and blushed. I wouldn't have believed that the leather-colored kid was capable of a blush.

Explosion, eruption, fire and brimstone, crash, bang, and burning cinders!

“My house is on fire, my shirt is on fire, and my houseboy has fleas!” Barnaby groaned. “What worse can happen?”

The volcano really went into action then to show him what worse could happen. Sulphur and brimstone, flame and ash and hot lava!

“I bet this is the last world I ever build,” Barnaby sounded. “Oh, and my houseboy has fleas.” We could hear Barnaby but we couldn't see him. We couldn't see anything. Then it really got hot and dense and noisy. You don't run into a volcano like that every day.

Berryhill

A house, it is said, is not a home until it has known a birth, a wedding, and a death. So Berryhill was not a home, though the Berrymans had lived in it for sixty years. The Berrymans were people who were not born, never married, and apparently did not die.

In every town of less than a thousand persons in this nation, there is a decayed house on the outskirts that has given rise to eerie stories. Eerie stories find their natural home in small towns, for a ghost population is always largest where the human population is smallest; and the ghosts take over completely when the humans disappear.

The stories of the Berrymans were of long growth. Not only were the Berrymans peculiar old people; there were other oldsters in town who remembered when they had been peculiar young people. The three of them, two brothers and a sister, were tight recluses. They had no friends; they did not mingle at all with the people of the town. When one of them was even seen outside of their house, it was an event to be reported. It was never known for certain whether all of them were still alive. A year, two years might go by when a certain one of them had not been seen at all. But, soon or late, sight would be had of all of them, never together: Nehemias with his black beard, Habacuc with his white, Sophronia in her ancient dress and wearing what was perhaps the last sunbonnet in the world. They were still alive for a while yet.

But nobody in town ever seemed pleased to learn that they still lived. There was no kind thought for them, certainly no compassion for these old folks. They were apart, repelled, unfriended, and unchurched.

But what was really so odd about them, besides their keeping to themselves? Well, for one thing, for three things, there were the three graves, three rocked pits anyhow that were believed to be graves. It was said also that there were three gravestones at the heads of the empty pits, and that these stones were carved with the names of the three Berrymans, and with the dates of their deaths given. By one account, these dates were impossibly far in the future. But, by another story, the dates were coming up very soon, in this very year.

Harvey Hinkle had himself read these inscriptions (or he said that he had), and he told about them. But Harvey was dead now. Matthew Moon had likewise seen them, according to his son; Matthew likewise was dead. There was nobody now living who had ever gone near enough to read the stones, or even to know if there were such stones and pits.

The other oddity of the Berrymans was their manner of survival. No supplies of any kind had gone into that place for many years, perhaps not forever.

They had, it is true, a pumpkin patch. They had what may have been a vegetable garden behind its high screen of weeds. They had, in season, a few straggling rows of corn, crazy and uneven; boys who had stolen some of it said that the ears were mottled and the kernels purple like squaw corn. And the Berrymans kept goats; spooky, unhappy goats, unrelated to the lively town goats.

But nobody really believed that it was on such paltry stuff that they lived. There must be a better, and if not a better then a more interesting, explanation.

Indeed the Berrymans dined but once a year. This was the most persistent and flavorsome of all the stories about them. And when they dined, they dined on stranger. Those who had disappeared over the years were numerous. There was the tinker who always came yearly, and now he came no more. There had been Ragged Dan the old tramp. He used to come to town every spring, but when was the last time he had been seen? There was the wandering darky who had been seen going to town by two different farmers; going on the high road to town. But he was not seen in town; he was never seen again at all. There were the three Gypsies who had wagoned off the road north of town not three hundred yards from Berryhill. And the next day there were only two of the Gypsies. Where was their brother? the townspeople asked the Gypsies. They did not know; somehow he had become lost; they did not know where he went, they said. But the townspeople knew.

And if there had been these well-authenticated disappearances, how many more must have remained unknown? There was Sheila Cotter, said to have run away with a cattle-buyer. How would she have run away? What cattle-buyer? If the truth were only known, that she had been eaten by the Berrymans. It is no wonder that the townspeople had no love for them.

2.

It was a Friday evening and the Lost Creek Bobcats had held one of their irregular meetings. The Bobcats formed one of the most secret clubs in the world, having only two members: Jimmy Ware and Paul Potter, one nine years old, one nine-and-a-half.

It was an oath-bound society, unknown to the world; yet it had caused a wave of destruction in its ten day existence. It was the Bobcats who had hamstrung that sheep belonging to the Millers. It was they who had thrown offal down Tomkin's well, fouling the water. It was they who had broken the great branch of Johnson's apple tree with the blossoms still on it. They had released the pigeons from Hickman's cote; they had broken the dam in Merton's meadow; they had partly burned one of Conner's straw-stacks. It didn't burn well; it was too damp.

Now, however, the club was split down the middle and dissolved in black anger.

“I won't go with you, Jimmy,” Paul Potter said. “I'll find a way to stop you. And if you do go, I'll tell on you. You're crazy to even talk about doing it.”

“You're afraid, Paul. You're a black-bellied coward.”

“I ate the toadstool you said was poison. I was the one caught the barn-owl with my bare hands.”

“You're afraid. You're a red-gizzarded, slobbering, wet-your-pants coward.”

“I may be a coward but I won't go with you to do it. They'll kill you if they catch you.”

“Besides, you don't know what I'm going to do.”

“I know exactly what you're going to do. You've talked about it enough.”

“Yes, I guess you do.”

“I'll go tell your mother.”

“It'll be too late to stop me. Nothing can stop me, and I have Pete in my pocket and Mike in my belt.”

“It's the devil in you wants you to go in there. They'll kill you when they catch you.”

“Maybe they won't catch me at all. It's getting dark, little boy. You'd better go on home. Run all the way. It gets dark real fast.”

So Paul Potter ran home crying, but he knew he would not be in time to get help. And Jimmy Ware waited only a little while, till night came down like a curtain.

Then he walked to Berryhill.

A spooky house is spooky even to a stubborn boy. And in one respect Berryhill always gave an outlandish impression: it seemed to be growing out of the ground. A cottonwood post set in a fence row will sometimes take root and leaf out again; a hackberry will do the same. But here it seemed as though the wood of the house itself had never stopped growing. It was just that it was crawled all over with vines, and chinked up with old moss; but, coming on it at night, it was like a great hollow tree bole, uprooted, overturned, and then overgrown. It had the smell of slugs and lizards and of swamp weeds in the spring night.

Well, such things never really harmed. Yet it was rough going even to approach the old house. It seemed to be surrounded by its own special darkness, miasmal, heavier than the night itself. And, in fact, the house was surrounded by much more rank vegetation than the adjacent region. Moreover, the approaches were uneven, ill-drained, sour, and somewhat dangerous.

There is shock in total sudden contrast, coming on a wrong thing clear-cut and distinct. But there is a more creeping kind of shock in coming gradually upon an indistinct and formless monstrosity until one is nearly in the middle of it. A stark white ghost paralyzes with sudden fright. The indistinct gray specter takes over with a slower paralysis; yet it seizes no less completely. And it was just such a vague gray ghost that Jimmy slowly came onto now. He had thought at first that it was a bush, till he had passed into its half-yielding substance and felt the living hair on it in the dark.

He twisted back then, with that clattering, devilish cry ringing in his head, and he thought that the gray devil had him. Even in hell there is no sound to compare with it; it is the mad night noise that lifts the hair right off the head and gives the shakes to Satan himself.

Even after he realized what it was, Jimmy was unsettled. A goat, after all, is half devil, and these gaunt gray goats of the Berryhills were disquieting to come onto in the dark. Moreover, they had a high old smell on them as though they were graveyard creatures. A sudden goat-bleat in the dark has the final quality of the judgment horn.

But for all that, Jimmy went boldly up on the porch of the old house and scouted over the rotten boards and the warped, uneven, weed-slimed surface. Had he been heavier, there were places where he would have broken through the porch entirely.

Neither of the stagger-shuttered windows gave a view within at all, and there was no trace of light. But the door itself was neither locked nor latched. It gave to the push, but very heavily, as though it were seldom opened.

Within, the old swamp smell was still stronger, and now there appeared just a memory of light. It was as if the house had swallowed a lantern, and it shone through the tissues of its monstrous belly.

Jimmy explored deep into the dark house, and then he stood solid at a turning where there was enough light to make a clear way. The aura of the uncanny was heavy in the place, and Jimmy stood there dogged.

The encounter was made. And then there was no withdrawing.

It was a black-bearded giant, tall as a straw-stack and thin as a pitchfork.

“What is it? What's this?” Black-beard croaked. “Habacuc, come see! I believe it's a boy.”

“How would there be a boy?” came the other voice out of a white beard floating by itself out of the darkness. “Likely it's a possum you've caught, they've been in the boards between the ceiling and the floor above. You can tell by the tail if it's a possum.”

“It doesn't have a tail. I tell you it's a boy. Come with me to the light, boy. You'll be just in time for supper. It's been a long time since we had a boy here.”

Jimmy Ware followed the black-bearded and the white-bearded old men down a dungeon-like stairs, to a lighted cellar room below.

“Sophronia, look, we have a boy!” they called.

“What? I don't know when we've last had a boy here. And just in time for supper too. My, it's been a long time since we've had a boy for supper!” said Sophronia.

Nehemias the black-bearded hung a kerosene lantern on a rafter to light the table. It was a mighty rough splintered table, and Sophronia set it there with huge pot-metal plates; pewter they were. At each place she set a horn-handled knife and a roast-skewering fork. But there was no food on the table.

“Boy,” said Habacuc the white-beard, “you have no idea how glad we are to have you here tonight. Yes, it's been a long time since we've had a boy for supper.”

There is a trick that old kerosene lanterns have. There are places in a room that they will not light up at all, and there are corners where the darkness is all the deeper for the light being there. There were the three old folks and Jimmy in the cellar room; and evil stood like a servitor waiting to be released.

“Boy,” said Nehemias, “I wonder if you'd lend a hand at this grindstone here. The carving knife needs sharpening. Let us set to work with a will while Sophronia keeps the water at a boil.”

Jimmy turned the grindstone; and Nehemias held the foot-long knife while sparks cascaded and the smell like burnt sulfur or brimstone was about the wheel.

“Nehemias,” whined Habacuc in his fluted voice, “have you seen the bone-saw?”

“On the peg right behind you. But I doubt if we'll need it much. I believe the joints will pop easily without it. It won't be a big carcass or heavily-boned. Boy, you may as well get ready. The knife is as sharp as it will ever be, and we will make a special occasion of this. Habacuc, it must be years since we've had a boy for supper. Right at a year since we've had anyone at all. Sophronia, how are you coming with it?”

“Nearly ready to set it on. My this will be a good supper! And I'll have a blood-pudding to go with the flesh meat.”

Then evil was no longer a servitor and would no more be controlled. It rose up, the master, and it worked its havoc in the room.

Jimmy Ware disdained to use Pete, the snub-nosed pistol; perhaps it was not operable. He had never fired it. He carried it for effect. He took Mike, the razor-sharp hatchet, from his belt. The dim-eyed old folks had no idea of the danger they had been in. The two old men set to the board and bowed their heads in grace; and Jimmy struck, first Nehemias of the black beard, then Habacuc of the white.

The old skulls broke like eggs to the blows of the strong boy. And as Sophronia tottered in with the boiled goat on a great trencher, he hacked her down also. Then every bond burst and the red evil was all through him like sulfur fire.

“Paul said they'd kill me if they caught me. Let them kill me! Let them hang me! It was worth it. Paul was afraid to help me kill the old fossils. Now I have them all to myself. I get to kill all three. What do I care if they catch me afterwards?”

Murder was there in his proper form, and Jimmy Ware was possessed completely. He hacked the life out of the old three, as he had planned for so long. Nehemias groaned in his dying sleep, and Habacuc whimpered like a crushed dog. Sophronia made little bird sounds as she died.

Jimmy hacked as the blood welled with its sharp metallic smell, and it was on his hands with a slickness more like graphite than grease or liquid. The three harmless old relics lay still.

And Jimmy Ware began to laugh and could not stop. He had done what he planned. Now he had everything he wanted.

St. Poleander's Eve

Lasciate ogni donna, voi ch'entrate!

Leave every dame behind who enter here!

 — Cristofero Dante Benedetti

Daisy Flavus had been working for Barnaby Sheen for a year or more; at least she had been on the payroll. He supposed, he said, that she had some duties down at his office or laboratory, but he wasn't sure. He didn't quite remember hiring her.

Barnaby hadn't much control over the people who worked for him. He really shouldn't have been in business, except that now he was so wealthy from his ventures that he couldn't afford not to be in business. “And in this particular business,” he said (he had a seismograph company for the manufacture and use of instruments for the discovery or location of petroleum deposits), “I can wax wealthy without robbing widows and orphans.”

“That blows half the fun of it,” Austro said.

Now, however, Daisy had appointed herself to work in Barnaby's own house; aye, to work in the most mysterious room of that house, Barnaby's third-floor study-bar. This could mean trouble. There was, for one thing, the undisguised motto over the disguised doorway to that study: leave every dame behind who enter here. The study was a male club room: it was not woman country.

It's true that Loretta Sheen and Mary Mondo lived (if that was the word for them) in the study, but they were special instances — oh how they were special! It's true that three of the four men who knew everything, Doctor George Drakos, Cris Benedetti, and Harry O'Donovan, had wives, and that these wives had all been in the study. But they had been there only on brief guided tours. The study was off limits to women.

“Get on downtown where you belong,” Barnaby had told Daisy the first time he caught her fluffing around in the study. “Your job is down there.” Daisy had yellow hair and yellow eyes, but she barely missed being grubby.

“No, my job is here in this room now,” she said. “I am custodian of this room and all that pertains to it. I am now, by formal title, your artistic secretary.”

“And just how did this come about?” Barnaby asked.

“Oh, it's all quite regular, Mr. Sheen,” she said. “The director of job classification has reclassified me to work here as artistic secretary.”

“I disremember. Who has been the director of job classification of my firm?”

“I have,” Daisy Flavus told him. “I still am.”

Now whatever was an artistic secretary, and what would Barnaby want with one? Who was arty around here anyhow? Oh, we all were, privately, personally, and in an amateurish way.

Doctor George Drakos had fine surgeon's hands, but they were also artist's hands, etcher's hands, and sculptor's hands. Sometimes he did a little of this pleasure work in Barnaby's study. He sculpted there a bit; he painted there a bit. He was a colorful painter, and he used lots of yellow and orange and sienna and red, much more than nature uses. There was one shade of yellow that he could never quite get right. He would mix and he would moan. Then, in exasperation, he would call out “Austro!” and Austro would come: he'd take that color-mix out of the room, and in a short while he'd bring it back again, perfect now. Nobody knew what Austro added to make that color, but Drakos insisted that it was imperative to him to have that correct yellow. “That color is what art is all about,” George Drakos would say. “That color is art.”

But why was it necessary to have an artistic secretary in the room for this?

Cris Benedetti made verses. Mostly he made them in Italian (real verse must be in either Italian or Latin or Greek, he insisted), but sometimes he made them (limericks mostly) in English. Does this require an artistic secretary?

Barnaby Sheen created absolutely implausible music on the Mustel celesta. The Mustel is not like other instruments, and Barnaby was not like other instrumentalists. His wasn't very good music, but it was implausible. Did he need an artistic secretary for that?

Harry O'Donovan wrote plays. He wrote the wonderful dramas and melodramas that were put on every Thursday night at the Rushlight Theatre, a non-profit enterprise. The Rushlight was a barnlike building; and the Rushlight Players were an amateur, though excellent, group. Harry also directed the plays, but naturally he didn't direct them in the study of Barnaby Sheen. Was an artistic secretary needed for any of this? Possibly for the correct transcription of Harry's ragged musical notations and scores, but Daisy couldn't read or write music.

Austro, Barnaby's australopithecine houseboy, drew (or mostly rock-carved) that unpublished and unpublishable comic strip, Rocky McCrocky, in the study; and others helped him a little bit with the continuity. (Austro said that it was discontinuity that they contributed: since Austro had learned to talk he had been talking smart.) But an artistic secretary was not needed for the Rocky McCrocky strip. And what else was arty around here?

The four men who knew everything played string quartets sometimes, Drakos on his ukulele, Benedetti on the banjo, O'Donovan on the mandolin, and Barnaby Sheen on the lute. They played about once a month and they played well. But how would an artistic secretary help them play better?

They also sang barbershop harmony in the room, sometimes the same four men, sometimes Austro singing bass in place of George Drakos. But the fine, high voice of Harry O'Donovan, the deep, dark voice of Austro, and the indifferent voices of Benedetti and Sheen didn't need an artistic secretary for their functions.

Nevertheless we had an artistic secretary now, and she didn't intend to withdraw. Daisy wasn't shy.

“We will have to use this room and no other,” she said once. “It is the only room I ever saw that is large enough to portray the world. And I believe that, for the optimization of the product, two changes must be made in this group, Mr. Sheen. Get rid of the gaff and get rid of the Laff — ” (she meant Austro and myself) “ — and bring in any gentlemen from the list I have here as replacements. The improvement will be axiomatic and immediate. You'll see.”

“Impossible,” said Barnaby. “We will not allow ourselves to be changed or improved. We are a polyander, unchangeable and unsunderable.”

“I don't even know what a polyander is,” Daisy admitted with distaste.

“It is a group of men who have become one and will remain so,” Barnaby said. “And what will you do with this polyander, young woman?”

“Commit polyandry with it, I guess,” Daisy hazarded. “Oh, is that the same word, or are there two words just alike?”

Daisy wasn't the only one playing it odd here. Roy Mega, a young electronic genius who worked for Barnaby, had also begun to haunt the study instead of applying himself to his job down at the laboratory. And there was a hint of conspiracy: both Roy and Daisy belonged to the amateur, though excellent, Rushlight Players. But don't look at playwright Harry O'Donovan if you're talking about conspiracy: he had not conspired with Daisy nor with Roy.

“Is it that I'm paying you good money to be fluffing off out here rather than laboring at the lab, Roy?” Barnaby Sheen asked that young man.

“No you're paying me shoddy money to invent, originate, stumble over, or put together new and usable techniques. We both know that these are most often uncovered by the process of fallout. I see very fruitful electronic fallout in our employing this stuffy room and its denizens as a hotbed for seedling art, a basis for art amplification. A laboratory is where one labors; this old monastery room is a laboratory for me for the moment.” That's what Roy Mega told Barnaby Sheen. Roy was sketching electrical diagrams of fruitful fallout and seedling art as he talked. Austro was studying them avidly. Austro couldn't read words very well yet, but he could read mathematical equations and electric schematics with excited understanding.

“Ah, well, what is art, seedling or otherwise?” Barnaby asked.

“Art is the Garden of What Ought to Be selected out of the Jungle of What Is,” Roy quoted from somewhere.

“Not quite,” Barnaby argued. “Good art is the privileged outpouring of the Holy Spirit, sometimes from one unworthy vessel into another unworthy vessel. Bad art is the outpouring of an unholy spirit. The good is preferable.”

“No. Real art is the struggle between good and bad,” Cris Benedetti argued. “There cannot be drama without this struggle; there cannot be real art without this dynamism. Static or undramatic art is no art at all. There is only one form of struggle in the world and that is between the Holy Spirit and the unholy or unclean spirits.”

“I'm an unwashed spirit but I'm not an unclean spirit,” Mary Mondo said out of the air. “There's a difference.”

“Who is talking out of the air?” Daisy Flavus demanded. “You're a neutral spirit, Mary,” Barnaby told her gruffly. “Or at least you have a high percent of neutral spirits in you.”

“The Putty Dwarf used to say that art was smoke without fire,” the ghost girl Mary Mondo went on. “And he said that all flesh should be of cardboard or it might be dangerous and alive. I haven't any flesh, so I'm a cardboard spirit. I haven't any art either.”

Mary Mondo and Loretta Sheen, the broken ghost and the broken doll, were artless denizens of that room.

“Who is that talking out of the air?” Daisy asked again. “Who are you, smoke-without-fire girl? You're a split-off personality who has lost her prime person; that's who you are.” Daisy was correct in this.

Mary Mondo was the schizoid or split-off personality of a girl named Violet Lonsdale, and Violet was long since dead.

“I can always use another personality,” Daisy continued. “I see you now, girl. You're a smoky black smudge. I'll absorb you, spook-kook.”

“You'll not absorb me, Daisy, nor make an under-person of me,” Mary Mondo said.

“But I will absorb you,” Daisy insisted. “And that big busted doll on the sofa, she's unsanitary. Out she goes! She gets sawdust all over everything.”

“No, you will not get rid of Loretta,” Barnaby said shortly. “She seems to be a big doll, but she is really the undead body of my own daughter Loretta — and her sawdust is self-renewing, she'll never run out of it.”

“All right, Loretta, you stay in,” Daisy said. “But who will we get to play your role? You may have to play yourself.”

“What is the name of the production tonight?” Barnaby asked.

“The name of the production is the same as the secret name of this room,” Daisy said. “It's The Monastery on the Third Floor.”

“Harry,” Barnaby asked O'Donovan, “why did you name your little project the Rushlight Theatre?”

“The very first art, caveman art, was done by rushlight,” Harry answered.

“Is it true, Austro?” Barnaby asked his houseboy who was sometimes called an ape-boy by those with unseeing eyes.

“Carrock, yes,” said Austro. “Fat, oily rushes. They burn, they smell. I drool.”

“It's fifteen minutes till curtain time at the Rushlight tonight,” Barnaby said. “The wives of you wived ones are all playing in it, I believe. Shouldn't you be going?”

“No, they shouldn't,” Roy Mega said. “You all are going to see the play, but you are not going to see it. You're going to stay right here and be in it. But you will have to get into the mood; into the detached reality mood.” Roy had in his hands a needle so big that it looked like a burlesque prop. He jabbed Barnaby Sheen in the arm with it.

“That stings devilishly,” Barnaby complained. “What is it?”

“Oh, a simple sympathetic transmitter device,” Roy answered, and he jabbed George Drakos in the arm with it.

“Damn it, kid, do you know what you're doing?” Doctor Drakos demanded. “I never saw a needle like that. And you've broken it. You've left a piece of it in my arm.”

“How can I implant it without leaving it?” Roy asked. “Let it alone! It's carefully tuned to your personality, to your personality as edited and upgraded by myself.”

Roy shot an implantation into the arm of Cris Benedetti.

“Is this real or is it a nutty dream?” Cris asked. “Why are you going around shooting people with that needle, Roy? My wife said that the dumb kid who works for Barnaby came by and gave her a shot in the arm this afternoon. I told her that she was crazy, that she'd been into the wine again.”

“She had been into it, Mr. Benedetti,” Roy said. He shot implantations into the arms of Harry O'Donovan and Austro. Daisy, meanwhile, was roving about the room with her own needle and with an evil look in her yellow eyes. Mary Mondo screamed!

“Oh, oh!” she cried. “How can it hurt me when I'm beyond pain. You can't put a physical implant in me, yellow-hair. I'm a ghost.”

“I did it, witch!” Daisy chortled. “I'm one up on you. I believe that will heighten the drama.”

“Oh, oh, oh!” Mary Mondo moaned with the pain of it. Daisy needled the arm of the big broken doll that may have been Loretta Sheen. Loretta moaned and spilled a bit of sawdust on the carpet. It wouldn't matter. The sawdust was self-renewing.

Well, the room was as big as the world now, and yet it was a discrete fortress set off against the world. There were perspective pictures on the walls (they were in the style of George Drakos, though they were drawn and painted electronically by Roy Mega), and they made the room appear quite as big as the world. There was overture music somewhere (it was in the style of Barnaby Sheen, but it also was produced electronically by Roy — or rather it was edited and amplified by Roy from some Barnaby Sheen original).

“Come along, Roy,” Daisy said. “We'll be late. They're beginning at the theatre.”

Roy Mega and Daisy Flavus left the rest of us there; yet they took pieces of each of us along when they went.

II

“Oh I come from Castlepatrick, and me heart is on my sleeve,

But a lady stole it from me on St. Poleander's Eve”

 — G. K. Chesterton

Why should there suddenly be a playbill in every hand with the title The Monastery on the Third Floor? The date, of course, was April 30, but does that explain the strange double happenings? It was St. Poleander's Eve, yes, but St. Poleander had been declared a nonperson by the good Roman Church some years before this — a myth, a mere legend.

All of us were, due to the electronic genius of Roy Mega and his implanted sympathetic transmitter devices, in the old study at Barnaby Sheen's and, at the same time, in the Rushlight Theatre. It was now a conveniently sized world; for the study, the theatre, and the world had become, for a while, identical. All were themselves, at their ease in their own place, but bits of each one could be seen in the characters at the Rushlight Theatre — and the Rushlight was a superimposed presence on the old study. Yet the scene was the study, surrealistically or cubistically rendered. The scene was even signed (how could a scene be signed?) in one corner Geo. Drakos. This living scene had been seeded from his mind. Gold, yellow, orange, sienna, and red were the colors of this artificial world; and the studio yellow was predominant.

Down at the Rushlight, Roy Mega, Daisy Flavus, and Austro seemed to be playing many parts. How come Austro? He was still here in the study. Daisy played the part of Mary Mondo, and Mary howled in anger to be so portrayed; then Daisy played variations of the feedback from Mary's anger and integrated them into the role. Daisy also played Loretta Sheen, vomiting sawdust, but moving with a liveliness that Loretta had not shown since the time of her death.

There was rock-dust too, rock-dust everywhere in the air. Some of the action had been cribbed shamelessly from the Rocky McCrocky stone-chiseled comic strip.

Electronics are wonderful. There was a serenity about the whole thing. Steadfast was the study and all the works of it. It was a true formation, a rooted thing; yes, like an old monastery. Electronic tragicomedy does the bucolic bit very well. A fabulously rich and quite medieval countryside had quietly become one of the main persons of the drama. There was, as you may know, about five acres of broken land behind Barnaby Sheen's, between his place and that of Cris Benedetti; and, no doubt, Roy Mega had implanted sympathetic electronic transmitter devices in the area. The half-dozen fruit trees that Barnaby had planted came through as grand orchards. His little patch of buckwheat (Barnaby ate buckwheat pancakes of his own grinding every morning) was presented as vast province-wide fields of wheat, barley, rye, and millet, all in their late April green touched with gold. The two rows of grapevines that Cris Benedetti had were dramatized as vast vineyards, the great-grandfathers of all the great grapes of Europe.

Roy Mega employed the various elements for theatrical effect. But the whole thing was rooted in the rich landscape paintings of George Drakos. There were cattle, horses, sheep, and goats in profusion. There were geese, ducks, chickens, hares, and hogs. And where were the originals of these? From what had they been amplified? Chiara Benedetti did have a pet goat and a pet duck — they may have been the basis.

Helen Drakos was in the scenes. She made fine small cabinets and chests; she was an artist in fruit wood. Judy Benedetti ran a little inn and wineshop that was adjacent to the monastery. There was superb piano accompaniment to all the settings and all the action — it was Judy's thematic music that was used. Judy, in private life, was dark, pretty, and witty. But a slightly distorted Judy (you had always suspected this) would have set you screaming — and she was on the edge of such distortion.

Catherine O'Donovan was a potting woman and a weaving woman. She was the artisan superb. She did it all: she hetcheled the flax, she glazed the final clay; she made the whole era seem worthwhile as it came to its end.

The Polyander, the great grouping of persons (women are included in a true polyander), was successful. It had balance, it had grace, it had art. But into the superb piano playing and Mary Mondo's ghostly song (electronic, perhaps, but near perfect) there now came a divergent note. It was not a dissonance, but it was a change of mood and a change of world. There was, at first, but a single note of that old goat music; but all the old notes bristled when they heard it. There had been a world in artistic and theological balance. Then it clashed. There was quick death-birth; and then the whole thing was other than it had been.

“Was she really singing that? No, of course not. But for a moment it seemed as though she were singing one of those hairy goat songs that came up the road from langue d'oc eight hundred years ago.”

 — Dotty

What had happened, of course, was that the thousand-year era had ended and the devil was released from his imprisonment. This event would unbalance the world and rend the seamless mantle of grace that the world had worn. It would scatter burdock and cockle in the wheat, it would kindle new perversions; it would bring back the enslaving permissiveness that is always the mark of the devil loosed. But it would also bring heightened variety and intensity and excitement to art, to all the arts, to the life whose roots are in the arts — and an art theatre was what the Rushlight was.

A savage meanness ran through it all. Let it. There is sharp color and perspective in savage meanness. All watched themselves change in the representations at the Rushlight. They watched their own faces melt like wax, and harden into a more outré wax. They were flesh no more. Ah, but much more arty effects may be got with wax than with flesh that breaks and scorches and burns, instead of melting pungently and quickly into a new and more deforming mold. But the deformity had always been implicit in the flesh. The spirit of the Putty Dwarf was over the face of the world, and the polyander had become a rutting mob.

Characters coalesced and then divided once more. Daisy, Loretta Sheen, Mary Mondo, Helen Drakos, Judy Benedetti, and Catherine O'Donovan were all, for a while, merged into one electronic character, a succubus. It happened in a mere instant, for souls are lost in an instant. This living-unliving apparatus committed abominations with the polyander, the men of the place and the drama, and committed them collectively and individually. Here was total abandon on all sides: animality, and the red-handed killing of children and innocents. (There was a difficulty: the persons hadn't many children of their own, so outside children had to be brought in to be killed.) Here was odd behavior limited only by the imaginations of Daisy Flavus and Roy Mega, who both had made serious studies in perversions.

The spirit of the Putty Dwarf supplied all that the young humans missed. This spirit knew all the things hidden in sour corners. All the men performed divergent carnalities with the protean thing, while in another place they fed the young to Moloch. Chiara Benedetti gave a rattling scream when she was murdered.

Even Loretta Sheen found a voice.

“You can't kill me, I'm already dead; I'm part of this thing!” Loretta protested, and then her own death scream sounded.

All of them took roles in the ruddy thing, except Austro; he refused further parts. He stood apart and fumed in his towering, high-hackled morality. Not even the electronic Austro devised by Roy Mega would be sullied by such outrageousness.

Austro could fight on this field. He was already, according to his nature, somewhat electronic — this is common among people of the early types. Austro would not be subverted and he would not be imitated. He himself entered into every effigy of himself and nullified it. Austro was the battleground; he was the arena; he was the stage. Austro as Rocky McCrocky was very tough; and Rocky was the basic Everyman of the drama. The trend of the drama was settled in Austro and by him. It became not quite the drama that Roy Mega had intended; yet it was even more powerful, of a more sophisticated art than had been planned.

Now Catherine O'Donovan had withdrawn from the succubus in red fury, in redheaded and freckled fury. She challenged the whole business.

“Drag me not down from the light and the grace! Fight you, I'll fight you all over the place,” she cried in one of her manifestations. (This was a verse drama. And it was a morality play.)

It went on for two more acts, but Catherine continued to make scenes — scenes that weren't in the Rushlight script at all. Harry O'Donovan had written the original script, but he had written it as a comedy. Austro had rock-chipped the script that was before the original script, and he had composed it as a comic strip. Catherine herself would have to pass through fire and grave before the high comedy was achieved; but higher comedies are never without the smell of burning flesh and crumbling death. There would be no really high comic art if the fire, destruction, peril, and death were left out.

“Bloody much tune for the ravens and cats! Blood on the sharps of it! Rot on the flats!” Catherine O'Donovan caterwauled rather than sang this. The music! There could not be music like that. There were live musicians in the Rushlight and live musicians in the study. There was electronic scrambling and contribution, horny and hairy goat songs from langue d'oc that had crept in somewhere. Barnaby was playing the Mustel celesta in the study, and that instrument was illicitly old. There was the old phenomenon that had first been heard soon after the bloody deaths of Loretta Sheen and Mary Mondo (Violet Lonsdale). The sound was not quite in the audio range… normal people couldn't hear it, but they sure knew it was there… either an ecstasy or a public nuisance — the Symphony of the Seven Spooks and Other Free Spirits.

Then it began to escalate. And what did Daisy and Roy, who seemed to have lost control of the production they were supposed to be directing, have to say about this?

“You can do some things with electronics that you can't do without it,” they said.

The lighting! The colors! Into the art yellow, the rushlight yellow, there had crept the dull glow of mud violet from far down the spectrum. This empty color, this ghost color, is part of real art, we suppose. But it brings the sense and sight of shadows without substance.

The audience at the Rushlight was charmed, even as a bird is charmed by a snake. Most of its members took vicarious parts in the perversions, mental and physical, that were being played out on simultaneous levels.

The lines and voices of the actors had taken on a moment, a movement, a rhythm. They could not be reproduced; nor were they later remembered, except as vague impressions. It was of their essence that they be forgotten or buried or sublimated. Emotions twanged like the instruments of the string quartet back in the study.

“We will not serve the climax dish,” said a chef who watched for a moment. (The Rushlight was a late supper club as well as a theatre.) “There will be no appetite left in the people, no, not even for beans. It may be good drama, but I hate these plays that make the people lose their appetites.”

It had to end. The polyander had been shattered by the polyandry and the murders and deformities; its high fellowship was tarred with a pitchy brush. The succubus had come apart, but each part was still murderous and shrill. There was satiety, there was revulsion. It was time for the third act, and for the tragicomedy itself, to end. But here, a climax dish would be served: Catherine O'Donovan would be served as a dish.

Catherine was crying out lines in high rhyme. She was standing on a little ledge or sideboard before saffron drapes. There was such a sideboard in the study; there was also one in the Rushlight. There were brass and copper bells in her voice when she rang out her rhyme lines.

“Broke you the fellowship, poisoned the well! Spirits, bleak spirits, go back to your hell!”

But the spirits — the Putty Dwarf and seven worse than himself — would not go back. The spirit had already gone out of those pseudo-spirits Loretta Sheen and Mary Mondo. The craft of Daisy Flavus and Roy Mega had left them; there were places where their electronics could not follow. The end of the show had been taken out of their hands; it would not be as they had devised it. It was all between the unholy spirits and the spirited Catherine now.

“Carrot top, carrot top, lose you the fray! You be the going one. We be the stay,” those spirits rhymed it, and they were coming at Catherine in her high place. They had her threateningly boxed in. Nevertheless she wouldn't go easily, though nobody could or would aid her. She rhymed her defiance.

“Murders of children and bongers of knell! Devils, down devils, go back to your hell!”

The Putty Dwarf had leaped onto the sideboard and pulled the velvet rope. The saffron drapes parted. Behind them was a high window, and behind that was a desolate landscape. The unclean spirits, moving murderously, rhymed a last rhyme: “Carrot top, Carrot top, scuttled by all! Sputter your temper! How far do you fall!”

Then the end was very quick. The Down Devils were onto Catherine there in the window. They flung Catherine O'Donovan (and it was with a great smashing of glass that they did it) through that high window to her death in the desolate landscape below.

She was dead, broken dead, redly dead with her carrot hair and her freckles. And after death is the grave; without obsequies, without coffin. She was dead in a dug grave, with the dirt scooped directly onto her, into her face, her eyes, her nose, her mouth and throat — dead, buried, and dishonored. Poor Catherine O'Donovan!

III

“We have learned to whittle the Eden Tree

To the shape of a surplice-peg.

We have learned to bottle our parents twain

In the yolk of an addled egg.

We know that the tail must wag the dog,

For the horse is drawn by the cart.

But the Devil whoops, as he whooped of old:

‘It's pretty, but is it Art?’ ”

 — Rudyard Kipling

Austro had made cheese things and passed them around, but those in the study had lost their appetites. He ate them himself when no one else would eat. After all, he was innocent of any wrongdoing or wrong thinking. Why should he lose his appetite?

The rest were a little unnerved by the Rushlight drama that they had witnessed without going to the Rushlight. They knew that there was one more scene of the drama to be played, and that it would be played offstage.

They were waiting a little nervously for the first shoe to drop, waiting with anxiety (fear and trembling on the side) for the second shoe to follow it, and waiting with real trepidation for that third shoe to fall.

Roy Mega and Daisy Flavus came into the study, having hurried over from the Rushlight. But they weren't any of the shoes. They took Harry O'Donovan to task for what they believed was mistreatment.

“Mr. O'Donovan, you changed the script!” Daisy charged.

“No such thing,” Harry maintained. “I wrote one clear script and one only. You two changed it a little, but it changed itself back. My scripts will do that. You can get hurt changing them, you know.”

“But the Putty Dwarf and his gang weren't supposed to move or act,” Roy said. “They hadn't any speaking parts. They were just painted figures lurking in the woods, figures painted by Dr. Drakos here.”

“My paintings have a lot of life in them,” George Drakos said.

“And they did have speaking and acting parts,” Harry insisted. “They were on the last two pages, the pages you said you weren't going to use — and you didn't use them. They used you.”

“You used us too, O'Donovan,” Roy Mega charged.

“Certainly, certainly,” Harry said. “At first I was going to have a couple of psychic types in it and somehow do it mentally. Then I decided to write in an electronics nut and a featherheaded girl instead. You two came through a little sloppy, though, I should have done a little rewriting on you.”

“But we were real, real,” Daisy protested. “You talk as though you made us up.”

“I always use a basis that is real, real, Daisy. I'm a realistic playwright,” Harry said.

Helen Drakos came in. She was the first shoe, but thankfully she dropped almost noiselessly.

“I liked it,” she said. “The part I liked best was killing the kids for Moloch. George, why don't we have some kids of our own so we can kill them if they get out of line?”

“Whatever you say, Helen,” George agreed. “Where are Judy and Catherine?”

“Judy will be here in just a minute. Catherine is delayed. She's dead, so I don't know when we'll see her.”

Judy Benedetti came in. She was the second shoe. She dropped a little more noisily.

“Harry, don't you know anything at all about wines?” she demanded. “The wines that you wrote in for my wineshop were inferior, terrible. My customers wouldn't drink them. I had to drink them myself. Now I don't know whether I'm crocked or sick.”

“I'm sorry, Judy,” Harry said. “If the subject comes up again, I'll let you write the wine.”

“But I liked the slaughter of the children, Harry,” Judy said. “You could have done much more with it, though. What with us becoming civilized and all, we're in danger of forgetting how much fun it is to kill kids. Oh, it's always been mod and arty! Chiara wouldn't believe that I was really going to do it to her. ‘Mother, it's only a play,’ she hollered. ‘Mother, get that look out of your eyes!’ How she screamed when I really killed her though! I liked that — and the polyandry was fun. George was pretty good. So was Barnaby. So were you, Harry.”

“Where is Catherine?” Harry O'Donovan asked.

“Oh, she'll be a while yet. She's dead. I liked that scene, Harry. It was a great ending. I like her, but I've often wanted to throw her out a window or something.”

“Had to — dead, you know,” came the voice of Mary Mondo out of the air. “That's what the second Englishman said.”

“What did the first Englishman say?” Loretta Sheen croaked from her sawdusty sofa of pain.

“Ah, I hear you've buried your wife!!” Roy and Daisy shouted together, cutting Mary Mondo out. Those kids were serious about the theater business. They had gone to the trouble of learning all the old jokes.

Ghostly icy winds blew across the haunted moors! Frightened hounds bristled and bayed in the spooky night! There was a terrible stench of rot, death, and unhallowed ground. A dead person walking, stalking, with that stilt-like walk they have! Living death, walking death, was even now at the door!

Like a soundless scream, the horror-faced, walking-dead Catherine O'Donovan burst into the room. She had grave stench about her; she had grave dirt on her, in her eyes, her mouth, and her carrot-colored hair. She held a burning swamp rush like a torch in her death's hand. She was the third shoe, and when the third shoe drops at night it sets the stoutest heart to fluttering. She dropped, fell, and lay upon the boards — disheveled, derelict, and dead. Austro grabbed the burning rush torch lest it kindle the room.

“Good show, Catherine,” said her husband Harry. “I wasn't sure that you could handle the role. Say, you have some pretty bad cuts where you went through the window! Fortunately they are only sympathetic electronic cuts. We may have allowed the electronic amplification to enhance the play a little too much. The mixed-media dosage can well be fatal.”

“The play is over, Mrs. O'Donovan,” Daisy said, “and you were wonderful.”

“Oh shut up!” Catherine burst out furiously, surging shakily up from the floor. “My flesh is rotted and there's grave dirt all over me.”

“It's only electronic flesh rot and electronic grave dirt, Mrs. O'Donovan,” Roy Mega tried to explain.

“Well, how do I get rid of it?” Catherine demanded.

“I don't know. I'll have to invent something,” Roy said weakly.

“I'll get even,” Catherine moaned. “Ah, to waken unblessed in the grave!”

“You woke up in the prop room, Mrs. O'Donovan,” Daisy said, “in an old prop grave that we used in ‘Queen of the Living Dead’.”

“I'll get even,” Catherine moaned again. She went over to where Austro and George Drakos had put their heads and gravers and colored pencils together.

“The next one I write, I'll put in a real psychic couple,” Harry said, “and they'll be able to create all sorts of effects. But I'll use Roy and Daisy too. There cannot be too many effectors when one jumps the media tracks for greater reality. Ah, what an artist I am!”

“You'd better keep the stage plays on the stage, Harry,” Barnaby Sheen warned.

“Oh, how I'll get even!” Catherine was crying, but there was a new liveliness about her now. George Drakos was drawing a death's head with his colored pencils. It was ghastly, horrifying in its death suffering. It was the tortured face of Harry O'Donovan.

“Will it work?” Catherine asked.

“Why not?” said George. “As an artist I can jump media as well as Harry can. And I also have my effectors.”

Austro was drawing Rocky McCrocky with a great splitting stone axe held high, and the axe was about to descend murderously.

“Will it work? Will it work, Austro?” Catherine asked. “Carrock, why not? It always has,” Austro said.

“Let me!” Catherine ordered. She took the two pictures in her angry hands. She superimposed one upon the other. The axe descended upon the head. Harry O'Donovan screamed.

“Oh, my head, my head!” Harry wailed.

“I don't think that things can be enhanced too much,” Daisy was saying, “just as I don't believe that music can be played too loud. We can't go restricting things just because a few people get blasted.”

“I don't believe that the media can be mixed too much,” Roy Mega was saying. “I don't believe that reality can be twisted too much, or that we can launch too many combinations. The more little explosions we are able to have, the closer we come to having the big explosion. That's what everybody wants, isn't it?”

Austro was rock graving other pictures with graver and hammer. They had something to do with Roy Mega and with Daisy Flavus. They were effector pictures. They would really blast! (No, no, Austro, don't do it! Sure they are brats, sure they are asking for it. But not that! No, Austro, don't do it! No, no!)

“I have a splitting headache literally,” Harry O'Donovan was moaning. “There's no pain like it this side of death.” Harry had gone ashen white in the face — with a garish overlay of studio yellow. He seemed to be suffering the tortures of the damned. He was the veritable original of the ghastly death's head drawing by George Drakos. He moaned. He was living-dying art.

And Austro was doing truly amazing things with hammer and graver on stone. Oh, the screaming to come was implicit in that picture, and Catherine O'Donovan looked at it with anticipation and pleasure.

“It's a little hard not to overdo it when you're getting even, Austro,” Catherine beamed through her rot and reek. “I think maybe it's more fun to get just a little bit more than even: now if you draw it here like this — let me have the hammer and graver a minute — like this! Then Daisy and Roy will feel what it's like to — ”

“No, no, Catherine, don't do that! No, no!” Austro pleaded. “That's a little too much.” He took the graver and hammer back from her.

“Ah, what artists we all are!” Catherine gloated with ghoulish pleasure. Really, she wore her grave dirt (and stench and rot) rakishly. She was magnificent!

Funnyfingers

“ — and Pluto, Lord of Hell, wept when Orpheus played to him that lovely phrase from Gluck — but these were iron tears.”

 — H. Belloc, On Tears of the Great

“Who am I?” Oread Funnyfingers asked her mother one day, “and, for that matter, what am I?”

“Why, you are our daughter,” the mother Frances Funnyfingers told her, “or have you been talking to someone?”

“Only to myself and to my uncles in the mountain.”

“Oh. Now first, dear, I want you to know that we love you very much. There was nothing casual about it. We chose you, and you are to us — ”

“Oh, take it easy, mother. I know that I'm adopted. And I'm sure that you both love me very much; you tell me so often enough. But what am I really?”

“You are a little girl, Oread, a somewhat exasperating and precocious little girl.”

“But I don't feel precocious. I feel like a rock-head. How can I be a little bit like papa and not anything like anyone else at all? What was the connection between myself and papa?”

“There wasn't any at first, Oread, not like that. We were looking for a child since we could not have one of our own. I fell in love with you at first sight because you reminded me of Henry. And Henry fell in love with you at first sight because you reminded him of Henry. Henry was always the favorite person of both myself and Henry. That's a joke, dear. But not entirely; my husband is so delightfully boyish and self-centered. Now run out and play.”

“No, I think I'll run in and play.”

“Oh, but it's so dark and dirty and smoky in there.”

“And it's so light and unsmoky everywhere else, mama,” Oread said, and she ran inside the mountain to play.

Well, the house and the shop of Henry Funnyfingers backed onto the mountain. It was really only a low but steep foot-hill to the Osage Hills. This was on the northwest fringe of the city. The shop was the typewriter repair shop of Henry the father of Oread. You wouldn't know that from the sign out front, though. The sign said:

Daktylographs Repaired Here

Henry Funnyfingers

The shop part of the building was half into and under the hill. Behind the shop was a dimly lit parts room that was entirely under the hill. And behind this were other parts rooms, one after the other, rock-walled and dark, rockier and darker as one went on, all deep under the hills. And these continued, on and on, as tunnel and cavern without apparent end.

In these places of total darkness, if only one knew where to reach in which pot, there was to be found every part for every sort of machine in the world; or so Henry Funnyfingers said.

Oread ran through room after room, through passage after passage in the blackness. She drew parts from the pots and the furnaces as she ran. She put the parts together, and it barked remindfully. “What have I forgotten?” Oread asked. “Ah, Rusty, I've given you only one ear. I'm sorry.” She took the other ear from the Other Ear Pot as she ran past, and she put it on him. Then she had an iron dog complete. It would run and play and bark after her in the tunnels under the mountain.

“Oh Kelmis, Oh Acmon, Oh Damnae all three!

Come out of the mountain and play with me.”

Oread sang that. Sometimes the three Mountain Uncles were busy (they had to make numbers and letters and pieces for the whole world) and couldn't come to play. But almost always one of them came, and Kelmis came today. Kelmis was the smoky smelly one, but Oread didn't mind that. He was full of stories, he was full of fun, he was full of the hot darkness-fire from which anything can be made. It was great fun there through all the afternoon and evening, as they are called out in the light. But then Kelmis had to go back to work.

Oread and the iron dog Rusty ran back up the passages towards the house. She took the dog apart as they went back and put each piece into its proper pot. Last of all she put its bark in the bark pot, and she came up through the shop and into the inside of the house for supper.

“Oh, Oread, however do you get so smoky and smelly?” mother Frances Funnyfingers asked her. “Why don't you play out in the sunshine like other girls do? Why don't you play with other girls and boys?”

“I made an iron boy to play with once, mama,” Oread said. “You wouldn't believe how he carried on or the things he wanted to do. I had the devil's own time taking him apart again. That's the last boy I ever make, I tell you. They're tricky.”

“Yes, as I remember it, they are,” Frances conceded. “Whatever do you make your stories out of, Oread?”

“Oh, I make them out of iron,” Oread told her seriously. “Iron is what everything is made out of first. The pieces are all there in the pots and the furnaces. You just put them together.”

“Pieces of stories, Oread?”

“Oh yes.”

“Iron stories, girl?”

“Oh, yes, yes, iron stories.”

“You are funny-fingers and funny-face and funny-brains,” the mother told her. “I think I'll have you eat your supper off an iron plate with iron spoon and knife.”

“Oh, may I? I'll go make them,” Oread cried.

“Make me a set while you're at it,” Father Henry Funnyfingers said.

“No, Oread. Sit down and eat your supper from what we have, both of you.” Frances Funnyfingers loved her husband and her daughter, but sometimes they puzzled her.

We cannot honestly say that Oread grew up; we can hardly say that she grew older. She finally started school when she was nine years old, and she looked as though she were four or five. Going to school was only for seemliness anyhow. Oread already knew everything.

She got on well. She was a peculiar little girl, but she didn't know it. She gave disconcerting answers in class, but nobody could say that they were wrong answers. What difference does it make which end you start and answer at? She was a strange, smiling little girl, and she was liked by most of her school-mates. Those who didn't like her, feared her; and why should anyone fear so small a creature as Oread Funnyfingers? They feared her because she said “Be good to me or I'll make an iron wolf to eat you up.” She would have done it, and they knew she would have done it.

And she always got her homework and got it right. She had, what seemed to her mother, an unscholarly way of doing it, though. She would take her books or her printed assignments. She would walk singing through the shop, through the parts room, through the other parts rooms behind that, and down into the passages in the toes of the hills.

“Oh Kelmis, Oh Acmon, Oh Damnae all three,

Make ready all pots where the answers may be.”

Oread would sing so. Then she would pick the iron answers out of the answer pots. She'd put them together by subjects. She would stamp them onto her papers, and they would mark all the answers correct in her handwriting. So she would have the Catechism, the Composition, the questions on the Reading, the Arithmetic all perfect. Then she'd drop all the iron answers back into the answer pots where they would melt themselves down to iron slag again.

“Don't you think that's cheating?” her mother would ask her. “What if all the other children got their homework that way?”

“They couldn't unless they were funnyfingers,” Oread said. “The hot iron answers would burn their hands clear off unless they were funnyfingers. No, it isn't cheating. It's just knowing your subject.”

“I guess so then,” mother Frances said. There were so many things she didn't understand about her husband Henry (“He's boyish, like a boy, like an iron boy,” she'd say), and about her daughter (“She's like an owl, like a little owl, a little iron owl.”) Neither Henry nor Oread liked the daylight very much, but they always faced it as bravely as they could.

One day Oread found her mother in tears, yet there was happy salt in them. “Look,” the mother Frances said. She had a valentine, an iron valentine that Henry had given her. There was an iron heart on it and an iron verse:

‘When you are dead five hundred years

Who once were full of life,

I'll think of you with salty tears,

And take another wife.’

“Oh, it's nice, mama,” Oread said.

“But of iron?” Frances asked.

“Oh yes, the very first rimes were made out of iron, you know.”

“And what of the five hundred years?”

“I think it's considerate that he would wait five hundred years after you die to take another wife.”

“Yes, I suppose so, Oread.” But Frances wasn't completely at ease with her family.

Henry always made a good living from his typewriter repair shop, or rather he made a good living from his parts stocks in the rooms behind. Other dealers and repairmen, not just of typewriters but of everything, came to him for parts. His prices were reasonable, and there was never a part that he didn't have. A dealer would rattle off the catalog number of something for a tractor or a hay-baler or a dishwasher. “Just a minute,” Henry Funnyfingers would say, and he would plunge into his mysterious back rooms. He had a comical little song he would croon to himself as he went:

“Oh Kelmis, Oh Acmon, Oh Damnae all three,

Now this is the number, Oh make it for me!”

and in a second, with the last word of the song just out of his mouth, he'd be back with the required part still hot in his hand. He never missed. Parts of combines, parts of electric motors, parts for Fords, he could come up with all of them instantly with only a catalog number or the broken piece itself or even a vague description to go on. And he did repair typewriters quicker and better than anyone in town. He wasn't rich, he was fearful of becoming rich; but he did well, and nobody in the Funnyfinger family wanted for anything.

When they were in the sixth grade, Oread had a boy friend. He was a Syrian boy named Selim Elia. He was dark and he was handsome. He looked the veriest little bit as though he were made of iron; that was the main reason that Oread liked him. And he seemed to suspect entirely too much about the funnyfingers; she thought that was a reason that she'd better like him.

“When you grow up (Oh, Oread, will you ever grow up?) I'm going to marry you,” Selim said boldly.

“Of course I'll grow up. Doesn't everyone?” Oread said. “But you won't be able to marry me.”

“Why not, little horned owl?”

“I don't know. I just feel that we won't be grown up at the same time.”

“Hurry up then, little iron-eyes, little basilisk-eyes,” Selim said. “I will marry you.”

They got along well. Selim was very protective of little Oread. They liked each other. What is wrong with people liking each other?

When in the eighth grade, Oread made a discovery about Sister Mary Dactyl, the art teacher for all the grades. Sister Mary D seemed to be very young. “But she can't be that young,” Oread told Selim. “Some of the mythological things she draws, they've been gone a long time. She has to be old to have seen them.”

“Oh, she draws them from old stories and old descriptions,” Selim said, “or she just draws them out of her imagination.”

“A couple of them she didn't draw out of her imagination,” Oread insisted. “She had to have seen them.” That, however, wasn't the discovery.

Sister was drawing something very rapidly one day, and she forgot that someone with very rapid eyes might be watching her hands. Oread saw, and she waited around after class.

“You are a funnyfingers,” she said to Sister. “All your fingers are triple-jointed like mine. They can move fast as light like mine. I bet you can pick up iron parts out of the hot pots without getting burned.”

“Sure I can,” said Sister M. D.

“But are you a funnyfingers all the way?” Oread asked. “Papa says that, in the old language, our name Funnyfingers meant both funny-fingers and funny-toes. Are you?”

“Sure I am,” said the very young looking Sister Mary Dactyl. She took off her shoes and stockings. Sisters didn't do that very often in the classroom then. Now, of course they go everywhere barefooted and in nothing but a transparent short shift, but that wasn't so when Oread Funnyfingers was still in the eighth grade.

Yes, Sister was a funny-toes also. She had the triple-jointed fast-as-vision toes. She could do more things with her toes than other people could do with their fingers.

“Did you have a little hill or mountain when you were young, I mean when you were a girl?” Oread asked her.

“Oh, yes, yes, I have it still, an interior mountain.”

“How old are you, sister who always looks so young and pretty?”

“Very old, Oread, very old.”

“How old?”

“Ask me again in eight years, Oread, if you still want to know.”

“In eight years? Oh, all right, I will.”

High school went by, four years just like a day. Selim had made a big twisted hammered iron thing that said Selim Loves Oread. He suspected something very strongly about the iron. But he wasn't a funnyfingers, so it took him three weeks instead of three seconds to make the thing. Many other things happened in those four years, but they were all happy things so there is no use mentioning them.

When they were in and almost through college (Oread still looked like a nine or ten year-old, and this was maddening) they were into some very intricate courses. Selim was a veritable genius, and Oread always knew in which pots the answers might be found, so the two of them qualified for the profound fields. It is good to have a piece of the deep raw knowledge as it births, it is good to see the future lifted out of the future pots.

“We have come to the point where we must invent a whole new system of concepts and symbols,” said the instructor of one powerful course one day. “Little girl, what are you doing in this room,” he added to Oread. “This is a college building and a college course.”

“I know it. We've been through this every day for a year,” she said.

“We are as much at a crossroads as was mankind when the concept of a crossroads was first invented,” the instructor continued. “If that concept (excluding choice pictured graphically with simple diverging lines) had not been invented, mankind would have remained at that situation, unchoosing and merely accepting. There are dozens of cases where mankind has remained in a particular situation for thousands of years for failure to invent a particular concept. I suspect that is the situation here; we have not moved in a certain area because we have not entertained the possibility of movement in that area. A whole new concept is needed, but I cannot even conceive what that concept should be.”

“Oh, I'll make it for you tonight,” Oread said.

“Has that little girl wandered into the class again today?” the instructor asked with new irritation. “Oh yes, I remember now, you always come up with some sort of proof that you're an enrolled member of the class and that you're twenty-one years old. You're not, though. You're just a little girl with little-girl brains.”

“Oh, I know it,” Oread said sadly, “but I'll still make the thing for you tonight.”

“Make what thing, little girl?”

“The new concept, and the symbol set that goes with it.”

“And just what does one make a concept out of?” that man asked her with near exasperation.

“I'll make it mostly out of iron, I think,” Oread said. “I'll use whatever is in the pots, but I guess it will be mostly iron.”

“Oh God help us!” the man cried out.

“Such a nice expression,” Oread told him, “and somebody had told me that you were an unbeliever.”

“Actually,” said the instructor, controlling himself and talking to the rest of the class and not to Oread Funnyfingers. “Actually, these things often appear simple in retrospect. So may this be if ever we are able to make it retro. The ABC's, the Alphabet isn't very hard, is it? Yes, Mr. Levkovitch, I know all about those hard letters after C. A little humor, it is said, is a tedious thing. But the Alphabet was a hard thing when mankind stood at the foothills — ”

“En daktulos, at the toes of, that's what the original form of the expression was,” Oread told him.

“Be quiet, little girl,” the instructor muttered darkly.

“ — when mankind stood at the foothills of the alphabetical concept and looked up at the mountain, it was hard then.”

“Yes, the first alphabets were all made out of hammered iron,” Oread told the world, “and they were quite hard.”

“The same was the case with simple arithmetic,” said the instructor, disregarding Oread with a deep sigh. “It is easy as we look back on it in its ordered simplicity. But when it was only a crying need and not yet a real concept, then it was hard, very hard.”

“Sure, it was made out of iron too,” Oread whispered to Selim. “Why does he get so mad when I tell him about things being made out of iron?”

“It's just a weakness of the man, Oread,” Selim whispered. “We'll have to accept it.”

“And so we are probably at an end,” the instructor was ending his class for the day. “If we cannot come up with a new dimension, with a new symbolism, with a new thought and a new concept (having no idea at all what they should be) then we might as well end this class forever. We might as well, as a matter of likely fact, end the world forever. And on that somber note I leave you till tomorrow, if there should be a tomorrow.”

“Don't worry, Mr. Zhelezovitch,” Oread said. “I'll make it for you tonight.”

2.

‘The name Daktuloi (Fingers) is variously explained from their number being five or ten, or because they dwelt at the foot (en daktulois) of Mount Ida. The original number seems to have been three: i.e. Kelmis the smelter, Damnameneus the hammer, and Acmon the anvil. This number was afterwards increased to five, then to ten… and finally to one hundred.’

 — Harper's Dictionary of Classical Literatures and Antiquities

‘In the forests of Phrygian Ida there lived cunning magicians called the Dactyls. Originally there were three of them. Celmis, Damnameneus and the powerful Acmon who in the caves of the mountains was the first to practice the art of Hephaestus and who knew how to work blue iron, casting it into the burning furnace. Later their number increased. From Phrygia they went to Crete where they taught the inhabitants the use of iron and how to work metals. To them is also attributed the discovery of arithmetic and the letters of the alphabet.’

 — Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology

‘It is also said of the Dactyls (the Finger-Folk inside the hills) that they live very long lives and retain their youthful appearance for very many years.’

 — Groff Crocker, Mear-Daoine

Just after closing time that evening, Oread Funnyfingers went by City Museum to see Selim. Selim Elia worked as night watchman there to help pay his way through the University. There really wasn't much to do on the job. He sat at a big administrator's desk and studied all night. Studying all night every night is how he got to be a genius. Oread had brought some sandwiches with her.

“Peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches made out of iron,” Selim joked.

“No, they're not of iron,” Oread said solemnly. “One would need iron teeth to eat an iron sandwich.”

“Surely a funnyfingers could manage iron teeth.”

“Oh, our third set comes in iron, but for me that should be many years yet.”

“Oread, I want to marry you.”

“Everyone calls you a cradle-robber.”

“I know they do. And yet we're almost exactly the same age.”

“There's so many people here,” Oread said. “Terra Cotta People, Marble People, Sandstone People, Basalt People, Raffia People, Wooden People, Wax People. I will have to find out from my uncles which ones are real. Some of them aren't, you know; some of them never lived at all.”

“We have one of your friends or uncles here, Oread, in wax. Over here.”

“I know where. You have all three of my uncles here in wax,” Oread said. “You might not recognize them from the forms of their names on the plaques, though.

“Oh Kelmis, Oh Acmon, Oh Damnae all three,

Come out of your cases and play with me.”

“I don't think they'll come out though, Selim, since they're made out of wax instead of iron. Effigies should always be made out of iron.”

“What do their names mean, Oread?”

“Oh Smelter, Oh Anvil, Oh Hammer all three,

Come out of your cases and play with me.”

“No, they won't come out. I'd have to be a bee-brain to evoke anything out of wax.”

“Oread, I love you very much.”

“No, they won't come out at all. I'll have them come over here themselves some night and make iron effigies of themselves. Then you can get rid of those silly wax ones.”

“Little iron-ears, I said that I loved you very much.”

“Oh, I heard you. You won't be alarmed when they come out some night to make the effigies? They're kind of funny-looking.”

“So are you, Oread. No, I won't be alarmed. Why should a Syrian be alarmed over fabulous people? We're fabulous people ourselves. And if they're your uncles they cannot be dangerous.”

“Sure they can. I am. You said yourself that I'd set the flaming ducks after you again. I go home now, Selim, to get my homework made, and also to make that concept-symbol system for Mr. Zhelezovitch the instructor. It's important, isn't it?”

“I'll go with you, Oread. Yes, it's important to Zhelly and to the class and the course. It's true that he might as well end the class forever if he doesn't find it. But it isn't true that we might as well end the world if we don't find it. It's not quite that important.”

“Who will watch the museum if you leave? I want very much to make this correctly and understandably for Mr. Zhelezovitch. I am a Funnyfinger, and making things for people is the whole business and being of the funnyfingers.”

“Oh, tell Kelmis to watch the place for me. Will it take long for them and you to make the concept?”

“Oh watch it for Selim, and watch it real nice,

Oh Kelmis, from rotters and robbers and mice.”

“Sure, he'll watch it for you. Even a Waxman-Kelmis will be faithful in that. Oh no, they never take very long to make anything for anybody any more.” (Time had slipped by, though not much of it; Selim had a sporty car that he drove like a flaming rocket; and it wasn't very far to the northwest side of town. They were out at the Funnyfingers' place now, and into the back, back rooms that turned into tunnels.) “They never take very long to make things anymore,” Oread was continuing, “not since that time, you know, when God got a little bit testy with them on Sinai when there was a little delay. They first made the tablets out of iron entirely, and they wouldn't do. They had to make them out of slate-stone with the iron letters inset in it, and the iron had to be that alloy known as command iron. Since then they are all pretty prompt with everyone, and they follow instructions exactly. You never know who it really is who places an order.

“Kelmis has the original all-iron set. I'll get him to show them to you some time.”

“Where do you get your stories, Oread?”

“I tell my mother that I make them out of iron.”

“And where do you really get them?”

“I make them out of iron.”

Selim talked easily with the three uncles while they wrought and hammered the white-hot parts that Oread was to assemble into a symbol concept.

“How is it that you work inside a little hill in Oklahoma?” he asked them. “Shouldn't you be in the forests or hills of Phrygian Ida? How did you come to leave the Old Country?”

“This is the Old Country, and we haven't left it,” powerful Acmon said. “Everything underground anywhere is part of the Old Country. All hills and mountains of the world connect down in their roots, in their toes, and they make a single place. We are in Mount Ida, we are in Crete, we are in Oklahoma. It is all one.”

They made the pieces. And Oread, dipping the parts out of the white-hot iron as if it were water, put them together to make the thing. It was a new concept-symbol system, and it looked as if it would work.

And it looked much more as if it would work the next afternoon. Mr. Zhelezovitch the instructor was almost out of his mind with it. The graduate students and the regular students (for this was one of those advanced, mixed classes) crowded about it and went wild. The implications of the new thing would tumble in their minds for weeks; the class would be a marathon affair going on and on as the wonderful new things were put to work to uncover still more wonderful things. The stars were out when Oread and Selim left the class, and no one else would leave it at all that night. But these two had something between them, and it might take another new concept to solve it.

“Oread, give me your answer,” Selim was saying again. “I want to marry you.”

“Make a wish on a star then. On that one where I'm pointing.”

“Triple jointed funnyfingers, who can tell where you're pointing?”

“On that male star there between the several eunuch stars.”

“Yes, I see the one you mean, Oread. I make a wish. Now, when will you answer me?”

“Within a half hour. I go to question two people first.”

Oread left there at a run. She went home. She talked to her mother.

“Mama, why is my father so boyish? Is he really just a boy?”

“Yes he is, Oread. Just a boy.”

“After some years would he be a man, really, and not just a pleasant young kid?”

“I think so, Oread, yes.”

“Then after some years you two could have children of your own? Being a funnyfingers isn't an obstacle?”

“I'll never know that, Oread. When he is grown up I will be long dead.”

Oread ran out of there and ran to the convent that was behind the school she used to attend. She entered and went upstairs and down a hallway. She knew where she was going. One funnyfingers can always find another one. Besides, the eight years was up. She opened the door and found Sister Mary Dactyl playing solitaire with iron cards.

“How old?” Oread asked.

“Three hundred and fifty-eight years,” said Sister M. D. without looking up. “Were I not vowed, I would be coming to the family age now.”

Oread ran all the way back to where Selim was still waiting in the street under the stars. She was crying, she was bawling.

“The answer is no,” she blubbered. Selim, under the stars, was as white-faced as it is possible for a Syrian to be. But he must not give up.

“Oread, I love you more than you can know,” he said. “Maybe we can make a different answer out of iron,” he proposed in desperate jest.

“This is the iron answer,” she bawled, “and the answer is no.” She ran away too fast to follow.

Deep under the hills Oread was crying. She was weeping big hot tears. They weren't, however, iron tears that she wept. That part is untrue.

The tears were actually of that aromatic flux of salt and rosin that wrought-iron workers employ in their process.

Endangered Species

“What do you know about the Spokelspuk?” Benoni Lambert asked. Lambert was director of the Species Conservation Bureau.

“Is the Spokelspuk an endangered species now, Benny?” Agata Scampo asked him.

“What is the present head count on them?” her husband, Conrad, wanted to know. “Do we have a head count?”

Conrad and Agata were not in as perfect accord as they once had been. Certain misbehaviors had ruffled and rippled the clear surface of their relationship. But they were still in wordless and almost telepathic understanding with one another.

Conrad now called soundlessly to Agata, What in peristaltic perdition is a Spokelspuk?”

And Agata was forced to answer him just as soundlessly, I don't know either.

That was bad. When you are the ace team in the species-preserving business you cannot afford to admit ignorance of anything.

“No, we do not have an accurate head count,” Director Lambert admitted. “The reason is that it is difficult for a layman (and we cannot have experts everywhere) to make a sure identification.”

“Like the Ruffled Yellow-Head Duck,” said Conrad.

“That was so often mistaken for the Morgan's Merganser by the ignorant,” said Agata.

“Yes, this is the same sort of thing.” Lambert spoke sadly. “Both the Spassenspuk and the Spottelspuk have been falsely identified as the Spokelspuk.”

“I can see why, Ben.”

“I can't,” Lambert confessed. “They're really not at all alike except in appearance, and this is one case where appearance is meaningless. But our so far uneducated guess is that there are now fewer than thirty of the Spokelspuks left in the world.”

“How about the Trondheim district of Norway?” Conrad asked. This question had stood him in good stead many times before. No one seemed to know anything much about Norway.

“No, there couldn't be any in the Trondheim district,” Lambert told him with thin patience. “The Trondheim is a sod-house region.”

“Of course. I wasn't thinking,” Conrad confessed lamely.

“I don't presume to tell you two how to go about your survey and implementation,” Lambert said. “You are clearly the best team we have. Draw ordinary funds from the bursar. For extraordinary funds, as always, make application to the committee. That is it, folks. We'd like to have a report with recommendations within a month. We would really like you to effect a population increase in the Spokelspuk within that month.”

“We may just do that, Benny,” Agata told him. “We have some forceful ideas along that line.”

“One thing, before you leave. I have a very rare tape of the Spokelspuk. Be warned — the sound it makes jangles the nerves of even the most steady.” Lambert set the tape to play.

At first came a cranky murmur. Then a snuffling as of some creature drawing in windy breath for a great endeavor. Then came the inimitable, unhinging sound itself.

It began as a scream. It was followed by a heart-freezing clatter and a laugh that curdled all the juices of the body. It was a mockery that sucked all the marrow out of the soul, it was a shriveling derision, a cruel gloating gobble that brought one to absolute desolation, to the ragged despondency that is just short of death. A laugh like that should not have been allowed in hell.

“That is the sound of the male Spokelspuk,” Lambert whispered with a shudder. “The tape, thankfully, doesn't quite do it justice.”

“Yes, I've always found it an unnerving sound,” Conrad lied easily. He looked quite shaken.

“The sound of the female is worse,” Lambert said.

“Good for the female,” Agata exclaimed with a sick smile. “Of course it's a little hard to worry about the Spokelspuk's being endangered. It really should be extirpated, a thing that laughs like that? We have this special rescue and revival job to do, though, and we will do it. We are professionals.”

“Of course,” said Lambert, knowing that they were stalwart and dependable. “Of course.”

Conrad and Agata left. They stopped at the bursar's and drew ordinary funds just short of the extraordinary limit. Tomorrow, after they had thoughtfully studied the situation, after they had (to be truthful about it) found out exactly what a Spokelspuk was, they would decide how extraordinary should be the funds they would ask for. The stickiest deals paid most. To save from extinction something that laughed like the Spokelspuk ought to pay well.

“It has to be either a bird or a human,” Conrad said as they entered the working phase of their program. “Nothing else could laugh like that.”

“And we've never had a call to preserve a human species from extinction.” Agata set in that piece of the puzzle. “There are a few I wouldn't want to save, the Sandy Sue species for instance. But I believe the Sandy Sue is in no danger of becoming extinct. She's too common for that.”

“Now you are casting reflections upon my taste,” Conrad said stiffly.

Sandy Sue was a young lady in whom Conrad had shown much interest. Actually Conrad showed interest in many young ladies, but Sandy Sue had become a type of this activity in the mind of Agata.

“Are you two looking for me?” a buxom and pink-haired lady asked Conrad and Agata. She followed them out to the street. There was something unreal about her, pleasantly unreal. She looked like a younger member of some endangered older species.

“Madam Hexe, we have absolutely no use for a discredited medium,” Agata said.

“But I divine things,” Madam Hexe said. “I divine things especially by physical contact.”

“And what do you divine now?” Conrad asked.

“That you need me. That you have just received a well-paying assignment and that you have no idea how to go about doing what you must. I want to cut myself in. I can do the job for you that nobody else can.” And, in the process of divining by physical contact, Madam Hexe placed strong arms around Conrad.

“Enough of that,” Agata said.

“I'll follow you around until you realize that you really do need me,” Madam Hexe said. “My pay — portal to portal, you know — has already started, but we can settle after you come to appreciate my true worth.”

The Scampos ignored the medium then — at least Agata did. But she still followed them in the street and Conrad sometimes did drop back into her friendly arms.

“I'm still shaking from that Spokelspuk laugh,” Conrad said. “From the male Spokelspuk. And they say that the laugh of the female is even worse.”

“I have to hear that,” Agata said. “I have a feeling that there is a female Spokelspuk in my future. And I just believe — ah — I bet that the female Spokelspuk's laugh is the last laugh.”

They went to see their favorite ornithologist. Madam Hexe still followed them and seemed determined to wait for them outside the bird man's gracious home studio.

“You really do need me,” she said. “A bird the Spokelspuk is not.”

The bird man was friendly. He had worked with the Scampos before. He liked to help people and they liked to be helped.

“The world and myself can never honor the two of you enough,” he said, “for saving the Lesser Speckled Grackle from extinction. Is there now another endangered species for which steps should be taken?”

“There is,” Conrad Scampo told him. “The Spokelspuk.”

“We have been informing ourselves, of course, as to the habits and habitats of the Spokelspuk,” Agata said, “and now we have come to an expert for advice. Could you give us a good rundown on this imperiled bird? Are there any readily available printouts? Are Spokelspuk preservation societies already in existence? Sometimes it is well to work with existing groups even if they are composed mostly of amateurs and lay persons.”

“Where did you dig up such a name as Spokelspuk?” the bird man asked. “Did old Lambert discover it?”

“Why, yes. Director Lambert,” Conrad said, “has declared the Spokelspuk an endangered species and we are asked to implement its preservation.”

“Did Lambert say that the Spokelspuk was a bird? Or is this another of those cases where you were too proud to confess your ignorance?”

“Well, what is the Spokelspuk if it isn't a bird?” Conrad asked. “What other life form is endangered?”

“It isn't a bird. Not any kind of a bird,” the bird man said. “I don't know what it is. I never heard of it.”

The Scampos left him. Out in the street Madam Hexe embraced Conrad competently.

“So he never heard of the Spokelspuk,” Madam Hexe said. “I didn't think he would have. A specialist, you know. You had better hire me now. We need each other.”

“You're so right,” Conrad said, enchanted. “She needs the job and we need her.”

“Shut up, both of you,” Agata said. “Where did you ever hear of the Spokelspuk, Madam Hexe? I don't remember mentioning the species in your presence.”

“Are you sure you did not? But you've thought of it — and I lift things out of the mind. There is only one way to increase the Spokelspuk population, and that is to make more Spokelspuks. And all that is required to make them consists of sound wits and a good heavy wooden mallet.”

“That is all that is required?” Conrad asked.

“Get lost,” Agata said roughly. “No, not you, Conrad. You go with me. A bird a Spokelspuk isn't. What's the next most likely living thing?”

“An insect?” asked Conrad.

Agata asked, “So what entomologist do we know? Oh, oh, and what entomologist does Sandy Sue work for? Ah, well, he's the only one we know. And there's a species around worse than Sandy Sue. Come along then. The buggery is right in this block. You, Conrad, not you, Hexe.”

“Oh, you really need me,” said Madam Hexe. “A bug it is not.”

“Oh, we really need her,” said Conrad. “A bug it is not.”

But Agata pulled Conrad into the buggery.

“Oh, it's that handsome Conrad!” Sandy Sue squealed. “And Agata.”

“Conrad has been bitten by a different bug now, Sandy Sue,” Agata said. “And I want to talk to Mr. Oktopteryx right away.”

“Go right in, Agata,” Sandy Sue said, “and I will try to unbug Conrad. We don't want any strange bugs biting him.”

“Otto,” Agata said to the great entomologist, “how does one unbug a husband?”

“You may be using the word in a non-entomological sense, Agata,” said the great von Oktopteryx.

“Not entirely, Otto. But you have to help me on something else. Can you give me some hard information on the Spokelspuk? It's been declared an endangered species.”

“I can't blame you for trying, Agata, but it isn't an insect.”

“How many kinds of insects are there, Otto?”

“Somewhere between a quarter-million and a half-million species.”

“And you know them all?”

“I know enough about them all to know that none of them is named the Spokelspuk.”

“Oh, damn. I wonder what it is then.”

“If it isn't an insect, then it's something else. Don't you see how that narrows the field? There are more species of insect than of all other living things added together.”

“I guess so. Thank you, Otto.”

Agata went out through the reception room with its wonderful display cases. She found Conrad sitting on the silken knees of Sandy Sue, apparently getting unbugged. Agata led him gently by the ear out of the room and out of the building.

“A bug the Spokelspuk isn't,” she said.

“Oh, then it has to be an animal,” he reasoned. “Animal, marsupial, amphibian, reptile, snake, worm, fish, something. Let's go talk to the great naturalist Hugh Singletree.”

“Let's go talk to the great medium, Madam Hexe,” said the waiting medium, Madam Hexe. She had obtained from somewhere a heavy wooden mallet.

“Let's go talk to the great medium, Madam Hexe,” said the befuddled Conrad.

“Actually, three of the Spokelspuks inhabit a house only short blocks from here,” Madam Hexe said. “It's at thirteen-thirteen East Hodges. Let's go there now. Once we are there, I believe we can discover a way to increase the Spokelspuk population by one, possibly by two.”

“No! We're going back to Director Lambert to find out what a Spokelspuk is,” Agata said. “I must ask — what is the mallet for?”

“You knock someone off with a wooden mallet, you make a Spokelspuk,” the Madam said. “You knock someone off with something else and you make something else, maybe a Spassenspuk or a Spottelspuk. We wouldn't want that to happen. They aren't endangered species.”

“ — maybe a Spassenspuk or a Spottelspuk. We wouldn't want that to happen,” murmured the enchanted Conrad.

“Untangle yourself from that pink-headed witch,” Agata sputtered angrily. “We're going back to Mr. Lambert right now.”

“Easy, Agata,” Madam Hexe jibed. “We want you to get mad, yes, but not too mad too soon.”

“ — to get mad, but not too mad too soon,” Conrad echoed.

They went to see Director Lambert.

“Great news, great news,” he greeted them. “We have just received important information that ties right in with your project. There is a nucleus, and it is always easiest to add to a nucleus. I have learned that three of the rare Spokelspuks inhabit a house only short blocks from here. It is located at — ”

“At thirteen-thirteen East Hodges,” Agata said dismally.

“Ah, then you know? Why are you here then instead of there?”

“Oh, Mr. Lambert, we wanted to ask you — ” Agata tried to say.

“Of course it's all right,” Lambert assured her. “Get over to thirteen-thirteen at once.”

They started over to 1313. As they walked along, Madam Hexe swung her heavy wooden mallet and decapitated a cat.

“What an awful thing to do!” Agata cried out.

“Don't think of it as killing a cat, Agata,” Madam Hexe said. “Think of it as making a Katzenspuk.”

“Think of it as making a Katzenspuk,” Conrad echoed her.

“Why not as making a Spokelspuk, if you use a wooden mallet?” Agata asked with sudden suspicion.

“Oh, no. To make a Spokelspuk, you must start with a human person,” Madam Hexe said.

“ — must start with a human person,” Conrad echoed. For some reason this made Agata feel unnaturally cold.

The house at 1313 East Hodges was large and empty. The windows were broken out. The doors sagged open. Yet it once had been a glorious house. Ancient nobility clung to it like old moss. It was down in its luck, that house, but it maintained an attitude of grandeur.

“Oh, this is the old haunted house,” Agata said. “I remember it.”

“In we go,” cried the madam. “This may be the new home of one or both of you. Over the threshold with you, Conrad. In, Agata, in! Ah, you can hear old echoes in the air right now. Come, come, friends in residence, greet us with the laugh.”

The laugh came so powerfully that it knocked the three arrivals to their knees. The scream (bloodthirsty and foully happy), the heart-freezing clatter, the gobbling laugh that curdled all the body juices — a laugh like that should not be allowed in hell. That was the sound of a male Spokelspuk. The tape had not done it justice.

“The element spuk in the name is spook, ghost, isn't it?” Agata asked. She had to say something to disguise her shaking.

“My, you are slow,” the medium jibed. “You'll have to sharpen up quick or you'll be no good at this. We'll want you to get mad, you know, when it's time for it. But you can't be too mad too soon. And it's only a little bit too soon for it now.”

“You knock off a person with that wood mallet, and you make a Spokelspuk?” Agata asked in her building wrath.

“Hardly ever,” Madam Hexe said sadly. “The world, as we know, has been taken over by pleasant people, and there's hardly any of any other sort left. The pleasant peasants may be good for something, but I sure don't know what it is. You can't make a Spokelspuk out of a pleasant person, I'll tell you that. It's because of this that there are now so few Spokelspuks. They fade away after a few hundred years, and they just aren't being replaced. Hardly any Spokelspuks are being made. But this afternoon we should be able to make at least one.”

“This afternoon we should be able to make at least one,” Conrad echoed.

“And, fortunately, you are not a pleasant person, Agata,” Madam Hexe said.

“And, fortunately, you are not a pleasant person, Agata,” Conrad echoed. And the wrath of Agata continued to build.

The other male Spokelspuk sounded. His gobbling laugh was stronger than that of the first.

“No human nerves can stand much of that horror,” Agata said. “Well then, perhaps I will become unhuman or post-human. Something here swims upstream or goes against the grain. I love the hateful stuff a bit. I suppose it's mostly that I love being hateful.”

“Get mad, unkempt Agata, get mad,” Madam Hexe taunted her. “It's all you're good for. When you go you have to go in a fury or it's all in vain.”

“Shut up, witch! Sound off, oh male sound! Whatever you are, you're stormier than I am. Where is the third one?”

A monstrous noise like that could be bagged and sold to horror movies by the pound. The twin devil-ghost laughters were like rip-saws cutting the brain and meninges and every nerve. They set up a screaming in each inch of the body. Such two pillars of strident cacophony could not be topped.

Could they not? The female sounded. That cutting, killing, spirit-shriveling laughter set the very rats to tumbling fearfully out of the walls of the haunted house. Sound could never be quite the same again, after it had included this.

“I wonder if I could do that?” Agata asked almost rationally. Almost, but her eyes weren't rational now. She bled copiously from the mouth from her self-bitten tongue and lips, and from the ears as they all did. And there was white froth gathering in the mouth corners.

“Sure you could do it, Agata,” Madam Hexe purred. “And it is almost time that you do it now.”

“And it is almost time that you do it now,” Conrad echoed.

“What is your real interest in this, Madam Hexe?” Agata asked. They seemed sane words, but they came almost automatically from an insane mind.

“Oh, I'm a paid lobbyist for the Spokelspuks,” Madam said.

“Then why are you so avid for our pay also?” Agata questioned.

“They don't pay me in material coin. I need that also.”

The horrible triple laughing of the Spokelspuks rose to a crest, then to a higher crest, then still higher. Would it never break?

“Come here, mad Agata,” Madam Hexe ordered in her own delight. “You are ripe for it now. Come here.” The Madam was happy in her coming triumph. She was one happy medium.

Agata came to them. She saw Conrad sitting on the numinous knees of Madam Hexe on an old worm-eaten deacon's bench.

“Conrad, you know how such silly carry-on always irritates me,” Agata said. She spoke gently, but she was mad as a gooney-bird. Then she screamed and laughed. It was the nearest possible thing to the Spokelspuk sounding for one still wearing the mortal coil.

She took the bemused Conrad by the hair and ears and flung him across the room where he crashed against the wall and came to rest beside the wooden mallet.

Madam Hexe rose smiling. Everything was going just as she wanted it. Agata struck that happy medium full-handedly and set her on her numinous rump on the floor.

“She's ready,” Madam Hexe giggled. “Where's the mallet?”

“She's ready,” Conrad echoed. “Here's the mallet.”

Conrad wobbled to his feet with the heavy, sound, wooden mallet held high in his two hands. He bashed his wife heavily and loudly on the head with it.

Killed her too.

The Spokelspuk population had been increased by one.

Then there were four sources of that killer laughter sounding in the old haunted house. Oh, oh, oh, oh, bleeding ears and blown medullae! It was more than flesh could stand.

In the courtroom there was a fundamental disorder that could not be cured. There was, mainly, a loud weird noise like demented laughter, demented female laughter, or the laughter of something that had once been female. The source of this noise could not be located, but the rampant sound was nerve-wracking and abrasive.

And then there was the defendant Conrad Scampo who refused to plead insanity.

“No, no, I am not insane,” he insisted. “It is just that insane things have been happening to me.”

“You still insist that you killed your wife while under the influence of a witch known to you only by the approximate name (your own term) of Madam Haddem?” the prosecutor was questioning him. “And now you don't know where this witch is?”

“She is everywhere. I see her everywhere and all the time. I see her in the courtroom now, right there, right back there, sweet-talking one of the guards. See her, the witch?”

“No, Mr. Scampo, I do not see the witch. And you are not able to describe her further?”

“Yes. She has numinous knees. Examine all the women, and she will be the one with numinous knees. You can't miss her. Shut up, Agata!! Damn it, shut up!!!”

“Yes, the noise is irritating, isn't it, Mr. Scampo? We apologize for it, but we still have not been able to locate the source of it. And you still insist that it is the laughter of your dead wife?”

“Yes. Before it happened, she said she believed it was a female having the last laugh. Well, she won't get away from it. I intend to have the last laugh myself. Wait till I get my hands on her!”

“Mr. Scampo, you have stated that the approximately-named Madam Haddem was a paid lobbyist for a gang of ghosts. Does this not strike you as insane?”

“It sure does, but I did not state it. I stated that the Madam stated it.”

“But you did state that Director Benoni Lambert of the Species Conservation Bureau had declared this gang of ghosts to be an endangered species and had assigned you and your wife to finding means of increasing the number of these ghosts. But Mr. Lambert completely denies this himself. What do you say to that?”

“I think he was taken by a hoax that was started somewhere in the organization by some tool of the Spokelspuks. He was ashamed to admit that he didn't know what Spokelspuks were, so he passed it along to us. And we were ashamed to have to ask what they were.”

“And now you are worried, not so much that you may be executed for the murder of your wife, but that the manner of execution might somehow be wrong?”

“Yes. If I die in the electric chair, I won't become a Spokelspuk at all. I will become something else, possibly a Spassenspuk or a Spottelspuk. As such, there is no guarantee that I will meet my wife again or even be on the same plane with her. Is it too much to ask that I be bashed on the head until dead with that stout, wooden mallet that is in the evidence section there? I'll put an end to that crazy noise quick enough then. Just let me get my hands on the throat of that loud-throated wife of mine and I'll put an end to it.” And Conrad was making insane and throttling motions with his hands.

There came the Agata laugh again, maddening.

“No, you will not have the last laugh,” Conrad sputtered angrily. “I'll get you, Agata, I'll get you!”

“Be calm, Mr. Scampo,” the judge said. “And just what is the mallet business?”

“It is a requirement for becoming a Spokelspuk. After all, you have to have some rules for admission.”

“Where, by the way, do these ghosts live?” the judge asked further.

“In old wooden houses mostly,” Conrad told him. “They can't live in a sod house at all. They can inhabit a brick or stone house if there is enough wood in the interior, but they are not comfortable there. They can inhabit, for a while, a courtroom in a terra cotta and glass courthouse, if there is wooden paneling and wooden benches and tables, but they sure are not comfortable in such. I'm not either. I'm leaving. This whole thing is a farce anyhow.”

“You are not leaving, Mr. Scampo. You are not going anywhere,” the judge said. “Do you realize that you are on trial for your life?”

“I've told you already that I didn't want my life,” Conrad said with a new chill in his voice. “I forfeit it. The only question now is whether the condemned man should be allowed to choose his own method of execution. I choose the mallet and you all look at me like a bunch of barefaced idiots. And you say that I'm insane.”

Conrad left the chair, and he seemed about to leave the courtroom with resolute step. There was the taunting, terrifying Agata laugh again.

And there was a sudden motion by a pink-haired lady who had been standing by the evidence box and sweet-talking one of the guards. She grabbed the stout, wooden mallet out of that evidence box, and she bashed Conrad Scampo heavily and loudly over the head with it.

Killed him too.

“That was really a lot of fun,” said Madam Hexe, or Madam Haddem as Conrad had approximately called her. Several things happened then.

The screaming, gobbling, sickening laugh of Agata was throttled down to sickening silence. Conrad had finally got his hands on that loud-throated wife of his and was choking her, not to death for she was already dead, but into a queasy quiet.

Then the unpracticed but powerful death-moment laugh of Conrad Scampo sounded deafeningly. He had made it! He was a Spokelspuk now and he had, for the moment, the last laugh.

“You had better put that body in the disposal,” Madam Hexe said briskly to the judge, “and then have someone mop up the brains which were so clumsily spilled.”

“ — had better put that body in the disposal,” murmured the nine parts bemused judge, “and then have someone mop up the spilled brains. But wait a minute, lady. You have killed a man in my courtroom. Shouldn't I do something?”

“Yes,” said the Madam. “You are a judge. Give the judgment that the Spokelspuk is no longer to be considered an endangered species. The two new ones should keep them going for another hundred years.”

“ — make a judgment,” the now totally bemused judge was mumbling, “that the Spokelspuk be no longer considered an endangered species.”

“I really have to go now,” said the Madam. “Here's my card.” (It was a simple queen of spades.) “Put it on the bulletin board. I give psychosomatic readings every morning from ten to twelve. Perhaps I can be of help to some of you.”

“ — every morning from ten to twelve. Perhaps she can be of help to some of us.”

Madam Hexe left the courtroom and went about her affairs.

She had some odd groups for clients.

And she had a lot of class. She looked like a younger member of an older endangered species.

Author's Commentary

Royal Licorice

From Catfish crop and Mud-Goose tears

And Cimmaron mud River:

For fifty cents a thousand years,

And for a brick for-iver.

 — Boomer Flats Ballads

Black Red had been sixteen years at stud. This was after a strict colthood and eight years of competitive horse racing. Now he had become a very slow and undependable stud. He was one old horse.

He gnawed a clump of prickly pear. He had been a stupid and rock-headed horse from his youth, and now that his eyes were shot he would eat anything. His owner chewed on a length of big bluestem grass and contemplated him. It was too bad to sell, for nine dollars for cat meat, a horse that had earned five million dollars. But what else could be done with the old animal?

But Black Red smelled a brother horse, an old flyer like himself, and he raised his head. So did the owner, and he saw in the distance a rare contraption: an ancient horse pulling an ancient medicine wagon that had once known gay paint; and the driver was more than ancient; he was timeless.

Then the contraption had bridged the distance too quickly to be believed, and it came to a halt in that grassy lane across the rail fence from Black Red and his owner.

“I, sir,” said the driver of the contraption, “am selling Royal Licorice, the concoction that will halt and reverse aging in any creature. Buy it and use it, and you can have for your horse restored youth and great length of days. I sell it for fifty cents a small jug and a dollar a large.”

“Why don't you use it yourself, old man?” the owner of Black Red asked.

“I do. Would you believe that I am more than a thousand years old?”

“No, I wouldn't, but you look as if you were. And your own horse?”

“Would you believe that he also is more than a thousand years old? Why do you hesitate? I don't make a lot of this, and I offer it only by chance as I go. It's by your happy chance that I've met you here today, sir.”

Black Red neighed hopefully.

“See,” said the peddling man. “He wants it. Your horse is smarter than yourself, sir.”

“Not at all. Some of my horses may be, but Black Red is a rock-head. In his own day he made his way by his great speed and strength. He'd never have made it by his wits.”

Black Red had reached a very long neck through the rail fence, grasped the small jug of Royal Licorice in his uneven teeth, and then swallowed the whole thing in one brave, horsey gulp.

“Will it hurt him, do you think?” the owner asked. “It won't matter really, for he's about at the end of his line. But I like the Roman-nosed fool, and I'd not have him suffer a choking death.”

“It will hurt him not at all,” the timeless peddling man said. “The clay of the jug dissolves at once when it reaches the stomach. Watch now! The change is startling when you've never seen it before. You have the finest and fastest colt in the world here, Sir. Watch.”

Black Red gave a great snort, a youthful snort. He took off through the short cropped Blue-Stem with a clatter of hoofs. He ran, and he changed. His was a great coltish gallop, and he now had the movements and appearance of a fine colt. When he was a half mile off, he half-turned as if going into the backstretch. He stretched and he ran, and the owner was seized with the shouting madness. That man knew speed when he saw it, real speed, winning speed. And the big colt was growing more glossy and more beautifully muscled by the second. He was dark cherry color. He was heroic and swift.

“You owe me fifty cents for the small jug he took,” the peddler said.

“Yes, here,” said the owner. “I don't believe it, but my eyes have never lied to me before. Where can I find you if I want some more of it?”

“Oh, I'll be around before he needs it again.”

“What's your name, old fellow? Or should I say Thousand-Year Young fellow?”

“They call me the Licorice Man.”

Old Cyrus Slocum was throwing rocks at a fence post. This was up in the gypsum hills where old Cy had his ranch. It wasn't much of a ranch, but the rocky, bitter gypsum of it was in accord with the man himself.

Slocum wasn't really unhappy. He had money; he had his stingy land (as stingy as he had used to be with a bingle); he had his memories; he had his good right arm, a little mellow now it's true; he had a few cattle.

Cy Slocum (you may not remember it about him if you are young, for the first time) had been about the greatest baseball pitcher ever. But the end of his career had been more than forty years before. He had been a six hundred game winner. He had once pitched ninety-nine consecutive scoreless innings; he had maintained an earned run average of .92 over a five year period. He had had it all.

And even now, as an old man, Slocum was hitting that fence post resoundingly. He would angle on a knee-high slicer that just caught a bit of the post. He would hit it dead center with a shoulder-high fast rock. And, when he threw his change-up, that fence post seemed to lean weakly towards him in frustration.

“I could have been halfway to second, and you skylarking there on the mound,” came a voice, friendly but full of timeless authority. “What? Do you no longer use the eyes in the back of your head?”

“I remember you from somewhere,” Slocum said as he turned to see the ancient man with the venerable horse and medicine wagon. How could it have slipped up on him when it had to clatter up that rough and rocky gypsum road?

“It was the year you first tried out with the St. Louis Browns,” the timeless man said, “and what antiquarian remembers the old Browns now? You ran athwart a barnstorming bunch of bearded men.”

“The House of David!” said Slocum with friendly awe in his voice. “Now they were ball players and they beat many of the major league teams. But we took them three to nothing that afternoon. I two-hit them.”

“It's another and more outsized bunch of bearded blokes that I meant,” said the ancient traveler.

“Now you open an angry wound,” Slocum almost moaned. “That afternoon-mare of a game has stuck in my undermind for this much more than half a century. They called themselves the Flats, I believe it was. Off name, off bunch. They had half-a-dozen real giants; must have been over eight feet tall, some of them. The Flats, the Boomer Flats they called themselves.”

“Yes, we had some pretty good-sized fellows on our team,” the traveling man said. “They were the Uncles, the Old Bachelors, the Bashful and Silent Ones.”

“You'd unwind pretty long,” Slocum said, “but not that long.”

“I'm six six,” said the traveler. “I was a little taller then, but I'm not one of the Uncles. I'm the little shrimp who played third base.”

“Eighteen runs they tagged me for in that first inning,” Slocum remembered blackly, “and the man kept me in there and let me suffer.”

“It was fortuitous,” said the traveler. “You made every mistake that a young pitcher could make. But most of them you never made again. 'Twas luck you met us. Slocum, how would you like to have your arm back again, at its strongest, and at the same time keep your wits at their wisest? How would you like your youth back without losing a drop of your later acquired wisdom and savvy?”

“Wouldn't that be something, fellow? Who are you?”

“I'm the Licorice Man. This horse here is named Peegosh. He's better than my regular horse. He belongs to the Comet; but the Comet isn't traveling this year, and Peegosh wanted to amble the country with me a bit. What I sell is Royal Licorice; fifty cents a small jug, a dollar a large.”

“I'll take a small one,” Cy Slocum said. They transacted. Then Slocum took a great swig of the stuff. He began to throw rocks at a fence post again, but now he was throwing at one three posts down the line. Hitting it too. And he was throwing like a young man.

“It works, doesn't it,” Slocum said.

“Sure it works. Always does. And your hair is turning black again.”

“I know it. I can feel it.” He continued to throw. How that young fellow could throw those rocks!

The indomitable old dame had been driving an indomitable old Duesenberg. Both of them had been restored, polished and groomed in amazing fashion, and both looked good. The old dame and her old car had received a special award at the Antique Auto Festival Southwestern Division show. And the award read: For class, which doesn't have to be defined. There was no money attached to this award as there was to the first and second and third prizes. That didn't matter. The old dame didn't need it. She was pleased about the whole thing. She purred along in the sporty Dusie on a fine little country road, she remembering, and the snazzy little old Dusie remembering.

Then they were passed by a long-legged, fast-ambling horse that pulled a flake-painted medicine wagon. Listen, nobody passed the old dame and the old Dusie like that! A horse and wagon sure does not.

She noticed, however, that, while the hoofs of the stilt-legged, stripling horse struck sparky fire at every step, yet these hoofs did not quite touch the roadway. That horse was going along six inches in the air. (Don't mention it, though; there would have to be explanations or denials.)

Then the horse was reined in ahead, and the old dame stopped the Dusie beside the wagon. An old, tall, raffish gentleman got out of the wagon and came over to her.

“Ma'am,” he asked, “aren't you Flambeau La Flesche?”

“Sir,” she said, “I am the socially prominent Mrs. Gladys Glenn Gaylord, a fancier of antiques and myself an antique.”

“No, no,” the man insisted. “You used to be in vaudeville. After that, you were a movie star.”

“And now I am an old character actress,” she said, “playing that old character, myself. You really remember?”

“Sure. Some of us used to dress up and take the train out of Boomer over to Tulsa whenever you played at the Orpheum. You are Flambeau La Flesche, are you not?”

“I was. The publicity man who coined that name for me is buried in a potters field somewhere, I hope. He couldn't even spell Flesh. But now I am the socially prominent Mrs. Gladys Glenn Gaylord. What are you chewing?”

“Royal Licorice Plug Tobacco.”

“Well, don't be ungallant. Cut a plug for me too. I'm a country girl originally. You're from Boomer, are you? That dump!”

“No. No. I said we used to take the train out of Boomer. But I'm really from Boomer Flats.”

“I apologize. They're as different as dusk and darkness, are they not? And the elixir you are selling, is it also called Royal Licorice?”

“Yes. Royal Licorice Youth Restorer and Clock Retarder. You catch on fast, Flambeau.”

“I always did,” she said, and she spat a beautifully straight stream of black Royal Licorice tobacco. The Licorice Man almost hesitated in offering her the benison of returning youth. She was one dame that had grown old gracefully. But he was a peddler deep in the long bones of him so he didn't hesitate very much.

“Flambeau, it goes at fifty a small jug, a dollar a large one,” he said with his easy finesse.

“All right, I'll take a small one then.” She bought it. She took a thoughtful drink of it.

“What's it made out of?” she asked.

“Catfish, mud-goose tears, Cimmaron River, Royal Licorice chewing tobacco.”

“Mud-goose tears? Tell me, Licorice, what can make a mud-goose cry? What's the one thing that can do it? This had better be good.”

The Licorice Man looked around furtively though there was no one else within a mile. Long-faced drollery had taken over his phiz.

“It's a little raunchy, Flambeau,” he said then. “I'd better whisper it to you.”

“I'll use it,” she said a while later as she wiped the smeared remnants of laughter from her face. “Raunchy, I'll say. But lots of times we used words in my skits and movies, and raunchy tales go well with me.” She took another thoughtful drink of the elixir.

“Yes, I do feel something,” she said. “Wouldn't it be funny if I could come back that way, all the way? I'd give them all fits if I had my girlhood again. And never was the competition shabbier. The little babes these days, they have so little talent that all they can do is peel it down to the buff. Me, I had class, so I never had to do that. I always kept my garters on. They called me Golden Garter Girl.”

“I remember, Flambeau.”

“Oh, it's working all right. I can feel it. Say, Licorice, pour a big jug of that into Dusie's tank. He'd like to be young again too, not merely restored.”

The Licorice Man poured a big jug of Royal Licorice Youth Restorer and Clock Retarder into the tank of the snazzy little car. Flambeau paid him. Then she took off in the Dusie, leaving the smell of burning rubber and returning youth to drift above that fine little country road.

Tell all the boys that Flambeau La Flesche is back.

Did you tell them all?

Sure, tell those in the graveyard too. Them especially. It will give them a lift, and those who have proper clothes will come to see her.

Ex-President Hiram Andrew Clayborne Johnson was fishing along Exendine Creek on the Ex-Presidential Ranch in Kaw County, Oklahoma. He was himself of a dead-fish complexion now, and so shrunken that the great cowboy hat and the sharkskin boots fitted him ill-ly.

The Exendine Creek was only four feet wide at this place, but old Ex had cast his line far beyond its banks and had tangled it in some sumac bushes sixty feet on the other side of the creek.

Old Ex believed that the sumac bushes were Republican congressmen out to thwart him. He cursed them, and he chopped off their appropriations. Some days this would intimidate the bushes and cause them to release the line, but today they held it fast.

A man with an animal and wagon came bumping along.

“Are you registered, friend, and will you vote right?” Ex asked the man in what had once been a great voice.

“I am and I will,” said the man. He was the Licorice Man; no use keeping it a secret from you; you'd find him out anyhow. And the Licorice Man was untangling Ex's line from the bushes.

“And the donkey, is he registered?” Ex asked.

“He's a horse and not a donkey,” the Licorice Man said. “He is registered, but how he votes is his own secret. Reel in, man.”

“I know that a donkey will always vote my way,” Ex said, reeling in his line, “but I never trusted a horse. What did you do with the fish that was on my hook?”

“Don't you one-up me, Hiram Andrew Clayborne,” the Licorice Man said. “How would you like to be restored to your youth and to your faculties? Then you could run again. You have just nine days to file for the first primary.”

“There's no restoring needed for me,” old Ex said. “My wits are as they always were.”

“True, true,” said the Licorice Man. “Sad but true.”

“And I still have my same fund of fine stories, and I still have my great name. I always say that I am the only Apostle who ever became President. There was an earlier president Andrew Johnson, it's true, but he wasn't the Apostolic type. But I have the Andrew Johnson in my name somewhere. Andrew, as you know, was the brother of Peter. Boy, look up chapter and verse for me quickly! I wonder where that boy has gone. He's never around any more. And Christ once said ‘Peter, Son of John’ so that was his name, ‘Son of John,’ ‘Johnson,’ get it? And I, as Peter's brother, am Andrew Johnson, the only Apostle who ever became President.”

“Yes, you still have your same fund of stories,” the Licorice Man agreed. “And you still have your great name. But there are restorations needed. Your voice is cracked and broken. Your eyesight is about gone. You are stooped and old and toothless and hairless and deaf, and you smell like a goat. As you are, you just don't inspire confidence.”

“Have I aged? Is it true? That I have aged?” old Ex asked.

“It's true. Now, what I can do is…”

“How much?”

“Yours is a hard case. Nothing short of a big jug will do it. One dollar.”

“Have you figured excise tax in that? Ex-Presidents are exempt from excise taxes, you know. I had that regulation passed myself.”

“Seventy-one cents, then.”

Old Ex fished out the seventy-one cents from somewhere. He took a jolt from the jug; then another; then another. He began to fill out to the size of the great cowboy hat and the sharkskin boots. He began to talk in the high manner.

The horse Peegosh was restive. So horse, man, and wagon, took their bumpy farewell. Behind them the Apostolic voice of Hiram Andrew Clayborne rose in cracked and broken thunder. And then the cracks were healed by the miracle of Royal Licorice Youth Restorer and Clock Retarder.

The strength and timbre came back to that voice. The power came back. It was a restoration, a resurrection. It was a new manifestation in all its former glory. It was itself again; the Golden Calf. Country, look out!

And there were other persons restored and reyouthified in those crisp late winter days. But if all that happened was told, there'd not be paper enough in the world to record it all.

2.

For both, the year bloomed pulsey red:

Contraries and Compliants.

A Springtime of the Ghosts, they said;

A Springtime of the Giants.

 — Boomer Flats Ballads

The wonder colt Red Licorice seemed ready to sweep the big four that year from his bruited reputation. And this was when the public had not yet seen him run. There was a big noise about him from the men who knew these things. No unknown was ever so widely known so quickly.

He was possibly the last colt ever sired by that grand old champion Black Red. And Black Red, full of years and honors, had died only a short time before this, according to his owner. He had been buried at a private ceremony, very private; but an imposing stone, red granite with black obsidian inset, had been mounted over the grave. There were now several hundred visitors a day who came to that grave, and these visitors were told that the horse buried there now lived again in his son.

Red Licorice was the absolute image of his great sire. Early films of Black Red as a colt were run, and you would almost swear that this was the same animal that now trained daily at the Red Hills Barn. The long low gallop, the laid-back ears, the rhythmic-hooved thunder, the snorting that sounded half-horse and half-wolf, the red-black mahogany gleam, the bowed neck that was almost bull-like, the very long and large (and, some said, empty) head, the flowing tail and streaming mane, these were all identical in the father and the son.

But Red Licorice had sheared three seconds off the mile and a half time of Black Red, on the same practice track, under the same almost perfect conditions.

Then Red Licorice won four warm-up mile and a quarter races, and he won them easily, this against the best colts in the world in what was billed as the Year of the Great Colts. Red Licorice set four new track records in doing this and three of them had been held by his father.

Derby time came, too soon, too soon. The steep interest in the affair was still climbing. But it would be a Derby to be remembered as long as Men and Derbys last. Red Licorice took the Derby in really sensational fashion, and now this magic colt had taken the fancy of all race-dom. As rock-headed as his father had been, he also had his father's outrageous talent as a ham actor. How that big colt could cavort about a track!

Here were memories being made as one watched. Big Blue-Stem grass of the pastures where the colts were raised; black loam and red clay mixed and mingled and managed into the fine straightaways; smell of hot horses in the springtime and the summer (smell composed of clover and green oats and manure); weathered grandstands, and the blue-green infields at the tracks; winged money flying with the winged horses; the Sign of Equus and the Summer Solstice; these were ever the images of the year for millions of fine folks. And one magic colt could always turn it into a magic year.

Cyrus X. Slocum the Third had shown up in training camp in Phoenix, unsolicited, uncontracted, unknown.

Yes, he was the grandson of the original Cy Slocum, he said. “You can't trade on even a great name,” the manager told him, “you would have to make it entirely on your own.”

“I know it, I know it,” young Cy said. “Just let me pitch. Let me pitch and I'll show everyone.” Well, he did look and move like an athlete. He did look very much like those old pictures of his grandfather. He had a strong personality, a strong arm, and outrageous confidence. “And it never hurts things for a player to have a great name,” the club's publicity man said. So young Cy was given a try-out in the training camp.

They always kept the wraps on the pitchers for a couple of days at first, but Cy was ready to blast loose.

“Shape up my arm slowly?” he asked. “Man, my arm is always in shape. Haven't we any heftier catchers than those? I'd blow them clear out of the park. You don't have a steel back-stop here? I like to warm up with a sixteen pound shot at regular distance, but hard as I throw it it'd go right through anything here.”

Cy was scolded somewhat for standing against the centerfield fence and throwing half-a-dozen balls clear over the grandstand, very high above home plate and still rising till they went out of sight.

“Not only will you throw your arm away with that showboating,” one of the coaches told him, “but balls are too expensive to toss half-a-dozen of them away like that.”

“Nah,” Cy said. “The balls aren't gone. I was throwing my famous return ball then. I put a little twist on it when I throw it, and it comes back to me.”

A small dot appeared in the sky far above and beyond the grandstand. The dot grew, it came as fast is a bullet, it grew to baseball size and it zanged into Cy's glove there by the centerfield fence. And the other five balls followed it quickly.

“A long time ago I — ah, I mean my grandfather — used to lob the ball up to the batters,” Cy said. “It would come almost all the way to a batsman, near enough to draw his swing most of the time. Then it would zoom back into my glove, I mean to my grandfather's glove. I finally quit throwing it though. The umpires got together and decided to call them balls instead of strikes whenever I threw my return ball even if the batter took a full swing at it.”

“The old-timers say that your grandfather told tall stories too,” the coach commented.

Cy pitched in inter-squad games, three innings one day, six the next, nine the day after that. The batters couldn't even touch him. He pitched about fifty inter-squad innings and never gave up a hit. The reporters were making a great to-do about this bright new rookie with the bright old name.

The team played the Giants who also trained in Phoenix then. They threw Cy at them in the first game and he no-hit them. Three days later he did it again.

He burned his way through all those exhibition games. He had a great collection of pitches of his own; and every good pitch that he saw he mastered instantly and added to his repertoire. He had the strength and speed of youth. He also had, from somewhere, such maturity and wisdom and judgment as could hardly be acquired in less than a lifetime.

The regular season began.

“Now we'll see what this early-blooming crocus can really do,” a few of the unsold critics muttered.

Young Cy Slocum, pitching every third day, won his first thirteen games without a loss. There would be no limits at all to such a career as was opening up before him.

“How old are you anyhow, Cy?” a reporter asked him one day.

“Eighty-one,” Cy said promptly. Then he corrected himself. “No, no, I mean eighteen. I have a speech affliction; I sometimes get my numbers transposed.”

Flambeau La Flesche the zoom-zoom girl had zoomed to the top of everything with electronic swiftness. She was on Live; she was on 2-D, 3-D, and 4-D (you have to be smarter than hell to even know how to watch 4-D; only Mensa members are allowed to apply for tickets to see it); she was on Voxo; she was in five simultaneous musical comedies; she was on Vodvil and Sound in the Round; she was in the Old Time Electric Theatre; and she was big in Metranome. Already she looked like a shoo-in to take the Nobel Prize in the Centerfold Division. Few were the media in which she had not quickly become outstanding.

But had there not been a Flambeau La Flesche a long time ago? Had that other young girl not been identical to this both in name and appearance? Yes, even in voice.

“I suspect that I'm the same kid, only refleshed,” Flambeau told an interviewer. “I'm reincarnated, that's what I am, and you have to have the right kind of flesh to do that. That's what it means. I'm very carnal. That's why I reincarnate so easy.”

Really, what else can you say of Flambeau? She did have the flesh, she did have a spirit as torchy as her name. She did have all the forms and resonances. She was everything, just as her preincarnation had been everything so many years before.

And as she found, as had the previous she, that there were only twenty-four or twenty-six hours in the day; she could never remember which, but there weren't enough. Then she had a hot idea to save everyone money and to save herself drudgery and time.

“You, moguls, why don't you just dig out the old movies that I made in my previous life,” she said. “I haven't changed any since then. When you have class you don't have to change. Just get them out and fill in the scratches and cracks and run them again. Nobody can know that it isn't me, because it will be me.”

They did it. It worked. They ran all those old ones and they were explosive hits.

Oh, the names of those two-timing great movies are like music: Louisiana Haystack, Popsie, The Cremation of Betty Lou, Zephyr Jones, The Day the Lilac Bush Burned Down, Nine Dollar Dog, Three Fish Out, Little Audrey, Crabgrass Street, Slippery Elm, Spider Spider Down Inside Her, Lady Bug Bongo, Accolade and Accolade Revisited (This latter had been titled Son of Accolade the first time around).

What Drama, what Comedy, what Music, what Memories!

But Flambeau wasn't quite so happy with it that second time around. “I knew that the competition nowadays was nothing,” she said once, “but, after all, what is there to compete for? The Accolades aren't what they used to be. And Accolade Revisited has an emptiness and irony that wasn't, at first, intended. The thing about us excelling types is that when we ascend to great heights it is all the same as if we stood still and the world went downhill. We must have excelled too much; the world sure has gone down.”

“Miss Flambeau,” another interviewer asked her, “we know that you are an old car fancier, but many of the big three restorers are puzzled and jealous about the restoration job you've had done on that old Duesenberg. It's almost as it were new. What's the secret?”

“It is new,” Flambeau said. “The secret is to buy a dollar jug. A fifty cent jug is all right for people, but it just isn't enough for a snazzy speedster like that.”

But the interviewer didn't seem to understand her.

“Why don't we produce The World Under Louisiana Haystack again?” she asked her producer. “That was a movie a girl could really put herself into.”

“But, Flambeau, The World Under Louisiana Haystack was never finished,” the producer said. “There were difficulties with it.”

“Let's finish it then,” she said. “The difficulties are the best part.”

They set about the task of finishing it. There were real difficulties. The resolution of these difficulties might take all things to the end of this account, or to the end of the world, whichever came first.

“This is a job that calls for another jug,” Flambeau said. “It may even call for a dollar jug this time.”

Clayborne Hiram Andrew Johnson (great nephew of Hiram Andrew Clayborne Johnson) had won the first of the Presidential primaries, that of Massachusetts and Connecticut Plantations. So he was off and running ahead.

He took Florida State Conglomerate. That was expected. He took Los Angeles State, and that had not been expected. It was a big one.

Johnson was speaking well and often, nine times a day. It was the Golden Guff itself, and no one could do it like your Clayborne Hiram Andrew Johnson. In this, he reminded old-timers and historians of his own great uncle the President Hiram Andrew Clayborne Johnson. That Ex-President, by the by, was unavailable for comment or for appearance.

But the young Johnson campaigned energetically and wantonly, if not always well. He wore a scrape and grass sandals when he campaigned in the Chicano districts, though the Chicanos did not wear these things and many of them had never seen them before. He was decked out in Navajo bead-work and a Sioux war-bonnet when he spoke at a supermarket in Indianapolis. Indianapolis really meant Indian City, didn't it? Johnson went equipped with skullcap and nine phrases of Yiddish into the adjacent Jewish suburbs. He wore a miter and alb and carried a crosier when he went into an Irish Catholic neighborhood; and he offered what he said was holy water from Exendine Creek. “Nine doctors out of ten state that it is more efficacious than Lourdes water,” he declared, “and it contains eleven more additives.” He wore a zebra-hide cape and crocodile-tooth necklace when he entered the chocolate suburbs. “For our common African heritage,” he would say. “One of my ancestors was Postmaster General for the Pharaoh Ra-ta-ta.”

He opened a wild but calculated bloodletting against the other candidates of his own party. “They have turned the House of Our Fathers into the Outhouse of Our Fathers,” he would roar in his golden roar. There was nothing gingerly about his attacks; he left no stone unthrown in his assaults. What matter? He could always unlet the blood, he could always unthrow the stones again when there might come the proper time for it. Often he hummed to himself that old healing melody ‘Will you love me in September as you hated me in May?’ Of course they'd all love him in September, if he won the nomination. Their heads would roll else.

He won the primary in Chicago Metropolitan, a high-number delegate state. He won it narrowly by means of a little over a million votes that came in or were discovered very late, the morning after the voting. They had been unaccountably overlooked in the tabulations of the evening before.

He most handily won the primary in Missouri Valley, that grand old state with its capital in Omaha. He had lost a few along the way, but we will not mention those. He was leading, it was believed, and he should increase his lead in what was still a close race.

Then it came, a threatening and chilling storm of a cloud no bigger that a man's thorax. While yodeling at Swiss Colony Wisconsin, Johnson's golden voice broke; it broke into a cavernous old-man cough. Several rude persons laughed. This could go badly. There is nothing so contagious or epidemic as laughter. Johnson got his broken voice temporarily fixed at nearby Koffkoff, Wisconsin, the cough drop capital of the world. But he knew that the fixing was only temporary.

“I'll have to get hold of that Licorice Man,” C. H. A. Johnson told himself. “I'd better get another big jug of it. That'll come to seventy-one cents, taking the exemption for excise tax. I'll have to find a way to afford it.”

3.

Deprived of elixir, a Horse,

A Pitch, a Pres, a Lassie;

And three erupted crass and coarse,

And one was kind of classy.

 — Boomer Flats Ballads

There would have to be confrontation. And just how does one go about arranging a confrontation with a vagabond peddler like the Licorice Man who has no regular residence except the misty, muddy, half-mythical place named Boomer Flats?

One uses intuition; one uses deduction; one uses that other thought process whose name is at the moment forgotten. And one does not eschew luck. (Is eschew a real word? It sure does sound funny, and it sure does look funny.)

Young Cy Slocum had pitched in Dallas the day before, and he had lost three to nothing. Never before in his young career had he allowed three runs in one game. He had tired. And new gray hairs had been peppering his youthful head for several days now. He needed another jug of the Royal Licorice and he needed it quickly. He got permission to drive up to his ranch in the gypsum hills. He borrowed a car and drove. He stopped at his ranch only an hour or so. Then he drove at random. His receptors were open to any kind of signal.

Half-a-dozen miles from his own ranch, on the fringe of the Big Blue-Stem country, by the side of a little country road where the gypsum begins to merge with honest limestone, Slocum saw an angry young colt who seemed not quite so young as he should be. This colt was widely known, and his name was Red Licorice.

With the colt was his owner, a man whom Slocum had known casually for a dozen years.

“Are we looking for the same thing, Cy?” the owner asked.

“I think so,” said the young, but not quite so young as he should have been, Cy Slocum.

“Red got a package from that devilish old codger,” the colt-owner said. “It was full of either pills or dung-beetle rollings. Red took a few of them. They didn't have the same restoring effect on him as the original elixir had had. They had an effect quite otherwise, unique, and unpleasant. I can't stand a horse when he gets too smart.”

Red Licorice snorted his contempt for his owner, for the old codger who had sent him either pills or dung-beetle rollings, and for the woozy world itself.

Eleven new, beautiful, qualified, turreted, bulletproof cars approached in caravan. They stopped by the pitcher, the colt-owner, and the angry young colt. Out of the cars bound presidential candidate Clayborne Hiram Andrew Johnson, a speechwriter, a lawyer who was also bodyguard, a chauffeur, and twenty-one security men.

“Disperse, all of you!” the head security man ordered. “We are commandeering this area. An important meeting will take place here soon.”

“I think so too,” the colt-owner said, “but I'll not be commandeered into or out of anything.”

“You are standing in a public roadway,” the head security man said. “And the road was built with mixed funds that included five percent Federal monies. Therefore, we as Federal men can commandeer this region.”

The colt-owner took one step backward.

“I'm on my land now,” he said. “Let's see you commandeer me.”

“It is all right,” Candidate C. H. A. Johnson said. “I know the colt and both the men. All three are solid citizens.”

“Careful, careful,” the speechwriter said. “You'll put your foot in it some way.”

(Johnson wasn't supposed even to say Good Morning unless he read it off a piece of paper handed to him by his speechwriter.)

A golden-haired young, or almost young, lady came over the hill in a Duesenberg car. The Duesenberg also was almost young, but it had developed a bad cough. It stopped and died there.

“So, that's the way it is,” said the almost young lady. “A sharp young pitcher (but not quite as sharp as he was for a while) who is his own grandfather; a rock-headed colt who's had to run on his father's hoofs; a presidential candidate trying to stand out of his great uncle's shadow, but whose shadows grow longer when evening comes and they will swallow a man. Who are we kidding? We are all second-timers. We are all in the same barkentine. But the Licorice Man will be along in a moment. I heard the hoof-beats of the horse Peegosh; the hoofs never quite touch the road, you know.”

And the Licorice Man, the Medicine Wagon, and the horse Peegosh had arrived suddenly in clattering silence (the clatter was on a different plane; these weren't normal people, not the Licorice Man, not the Wagon, not the horse Peegosh).

“Quickly, quickly, a large jug,” said candidate Johnson. “That will be seventy-one cents, figuring the excise tax exemption.”

“Careful, careful,” the speechwriter said. “You'll put your foot in it some way.” The speechwriter rapidly wrote out something on a sheet of paper and handed it to Candidate Johnson.

“Quickly, quickly, a large jug,” Candidate Johnson read dutifully. “That will be seventy-one cents, figuring the excise tax exemption.”

“My equine associate would like a dollar jug of the elixir this time,” the colt-owner said. “I'm afraid that the effect of the fifty cent jug has worn a little thin.”

“I'll have to take a stock of it to last me through the season,” Pitcher Cy Slocum said. “And I'll have to have a firm guarantee of sufficient supply every springtime. You let me run short, Licorice. They tagged me for seven hits yesterday, and that's something that never happens.”

“I'm not sure that I want any more for myself,” said Flambeau La Flesche. She was the golden-haired almost-young lady. “If I ever do want it and want it bad enough, I could probably make it myself. After all, I know the one thing that makes a mud-goose cry, and I'm probably the only reanimated one who does know. I never did use that story, Licorice. Really, it was a little too raw to tell.

“But Dusie here needs a jug now. This poor car has been suffering all sorts of ailments for the last several days.”

“No, you'd not be able to make it yourself, Flambeau,” the Licorice Man said. “Licorice can mean so many different things. I alone use the genuine licorice, and I alone know which it is. Do you believe it is the lykyrriza or wolf-root? Or that it is the glykyrrhiza or sweet root? Try them and see.”

“Enough of this,” said Cy Slocum the pitcher. “You have customers waiting while you jabber. A large dollar jug, please, and enough more to carry me through the season.”

“There's only one jug of it left,” said the Licorice Man, “and I'm going to pour it into the car Dusie. There won't be any more of it. I'm going on to other things.”

“Aw horse hokey!” snorted the horse Red Licorice.

“There's got to be more of it. Say, how come that horse can talk?” Cy Slocum asked in angry puzzlement.

“I sent him some smart pills,” the Licorice Man said. “That's what I'm working on now. Anyone else want to try some smart pills?”

“No, I sure don't. I'm plenty smart now,” Cy said emphatically. “I want the elixir!”

“Smart pills are the one thing I don't need,” declared the candidate Johnson. “I've got more smart than anyone I've ever seen. I want some of the youth elixir. I want all of it!”

“Would smart pills make me smart enough to do the tough scene in The World Under Louisiana Haystack?” little golden-head asked.

“No, Flambeau. The World Under Louisiana Haystack should not be finished. Accolade Revisited shouldn't have been finished either, you know, and it was. Too bad. Here, try these. One is a smart pill. The other is a dung-beetle rolling. Take one.”

“They look just alike.”

“Not to a really fine eye.”

Flambeau La Flesche took one of the offered pills, plopped it in her month, chewed it and swallowed it. The Licorice Man dropped the other pellet into the tank of the Dusie and also poured the world's last jug of Royal Licorice Youth Restorer and Clock Retarder in there.

“Thanks,” said the Dusie, setting its motor to going with the sweetest purr ever. “I needed that.”

“You gave Dusie the smart pill,” Flambeau said. “Then I ate the dung-beetle rolling.”

“I want a jug of that elixir!” pitcher Cy Slocum swore, “or I'll spill conman brains and horse brains and wagon brains all over the road.” With his terrific speed he began to rifle fist-sized rocks at the contraption. They didn't reach it. There seemed to be an airy but impermeable shield around horse and wagon and Licorice Man. They were a special case, and the rocks dropped back from them harmlessly.

“Fire on them, security men,” Candidate Johnson barked with his full golden voice. “Withholding the elixir is a warlike act against myself. Fire on them!”

Twenty-one men raised service revolvers and fired all together in one grand volley. And twenty-one bits of long lead bounced back from the airy shield and rolled around in the roadway.

“Give me a jug or I'll kick the three of you to pieces!” Red Licorice swore madly in horsey hate. And he began to let fly hoofs at the withholders.

“Watch it, horse-face,” the Licorice Man said rather testily.

“Watch it, junior,” the paint-flaked medicine wagon said.

“Watch it, buster,” the horse Peegosh neighed. “Two can play that kicking game, and I've never been bested.” Peegosh, it was now seen, had hoofs of flame, and they did not quite reach down to the roadway. Neither did the wheels of the wagon, or the feet of the Licorice Man.

Nobody ever heard such a display of shouting, bawling, snorting, neighing, and just plain bad manners as followed. It was enough to make one ashamed of being a man or horse. Slocum beat on the airy shield with now bloody fists and shouted vile obscenities. Pray that his youthful admirers never glimpse that side of the man! Johnson belched sulphur-flame and gave that merchandising conglomerate very hell as he ordered volley after volley to be fired into it. And the ignoble Red Licorice was the worst of them all, cursing in man and horse talk, stomping, gnashing, making dirty noises. That horse should never have been given smart pills.

The only bright spot was the golden-haired Flambeau. “I kind of liked that rolled-up dung-beetle ball,” she laughed. “When I am next the socially prominent Mrs. Gladys Glenn Gaylord I will obtain a quantity of them and serve them to my guests. So few of that set are country people, they won't know what they're getting. Now back to being the old character actress and doing the indomitable dame bit. Toodle, all.”

She zoomed away in the Dusie. She was a pleasant golden blob in the far distance. Who else ever had the finesse to grow old gracefully twice?

She had class.

Great Day In The Morning

This is the sea (nor shores, nor strands):

This is the clock that has no hands.

“Great Day coming, Mr. Duffy,” a young black boy called to him. “Great Day just got here.”

“Is this the Day Itself, Mike?” Melchisedech Duffy asked him.

“This is the Great Day. It come, it come,” the young boy insisted.

“Why, then it has come,” Duffy told himself, “and I wouldn't even have noticed it except for the words of a youngster.”

It was about an hour before dawn, before the dawning of the Great Day, perhaps.

“We will have to fix your watch,” a big, suddenly appearing young man said, and he had a hammer in his hand.

“Begone, man,” Melchisedech growled at him, “or it's that I will stop your clock.”

But the big young man had two fellows with him who were even larger than himself. They all reeled and wobbled a bit, but they were more drunken in their heads than in their legs. It was still quite early, before sunup. Melchisedech had been taking a brisk, early walk through the littered streets.

“Hold him!” the first man said sharply, and the other two fellows pinioned Duffy. He rolled them around; he didn't pinion easily. He rattled and shook them, almost shook them loose, though they were much larger and younger than himself. But the first man had Duffy's wrist in a crushing grip. He turned the hand and wrist over and exposed the watch. With curious care he smashed the glass of the watch with the hammer, gently, most gently. How does one smash a glass gently with a hammer? Then, with even more studious care, the man shook out every glass sliver and sparkle and powdery fragment.

“Easy now, old man, very easy,” he said. “We wouldn't want to damage the watch, would we?”

“You smash it with a hammer, and then you say ‘We wouldn't want to damage it, would we?’ ” Melchisedech fumed. “You're mad. Let me go!”

“We are not mad,” that first and main man of them said. “Madness is of the old day, and we're of the New. Hold him tighter, men, for just an instant more.” Himself, he held the wrist and hand of Melchisedech much tighter. “You are probably hopeless, old wineskin,” he told Duffy, “but even you must realize that time is not overly particularized on the Great Day.” With absolute precision he reached in, neatly broke off and removed the minute hand from the watch, then let go of hand and wrist. “Let him go,” he said to the other two oversized young men, and they let Melchisedech go.

“And just what was that for?” Melchisedech demanded, holding his watch to his ear and making sure that it was still running.

“You really don't know?” the main man asked. “I was sure that a wise old man like you would understand it. I'm sorry I had to break the glass, but a crystal of a watch of this type isn't quickly removed. You can have another glass put in. The watch will still show the hours, and the minutes will not matter. This is a concession we make to some of the old ones; they do not realize immediately that time in the Great Day is not what it was before.”

“For the first two centuries of clock (not watch) manufacture, minute hands were not used,” Melchisedech said, waiting for an opening to land one (Oh for an opening to land one!). “The makers were right, then, not to use them. An overprecision hits too close in early days. The makers would be almost, but not quite, right not to use them now.”

“Then you do understand,” the man said, “but you are maintaining that the idea is not new with us. It has to be new. Everything has to be new today. This is the great thing happening and it has to be happening for the first time. We are original. This is the great thing.”

“Nah,” old Melchisedech said. “Original you are not, and I doubt that this is the great thing. When it comes, it will not come with such harbingers as yourselves.”

“Admit that we are original, or we will do something really original to your face!” the man cried, becoming very drunk in an instant.

“You'll not manhandle me!” Duffy shouted. Great Day or not, here was the great opening that he had been waiting for. He landed one on the man coming in, he clouted him in the mouth and dropped him to a stunned and sitting position on the sidewalk. Then Melchisedech upset the other two men somehow (they had become much more wobbly) with pushing, blows, and shouting. He left the three of them there in a heap. There is honest satisfaction in such doings.

“You'll spoil it, old flintskin, old muleskin, old camelskin,” the main man blubbered from the sidewalk. “All old muleskins should be cast away. They'll burst otherwise, and it'll all run out and that portion will be lost.”

There had to be something irrelevant here, like a picture without a frame, like a sea without a shore. Melchisedech Duffy left the three downed men and continued on his thoughtful way. He often had such encounters on his early-morning walks. That was half the fun of walking before the sun was up. But there was the nagging feeling that the sun wouldn't come up on an ordinary day.

On the Great Delta Insurance Company Building, high up there in the tower, three other young men were doing something dogged and dangerous. They had swung open the front of the big tower clock. They attacked the hands with hacksaws. They cut them both off to stubs, the hour hand as well as the minute hand. They swung shut the front of the big clock then, and began to climb down from the tower. And one of the young men fell to the street and was killed.

“It's the clock without hands that was foretold in such murky manner by Nostradamus,” Melchisedech said. “It's another name for the turning-over, for the change that isn't a change. There cannot be change when time is not running. But, no, I will not accept this as the turning, as the thing, as the Great Thing. Yet there was another prophecy: that the metanoia, when it came, would come grotesque and not completely holy.”

Melchisedech continued his walk, thoughtful as ever. Had anyone else noticed that so many things had been changing these last few whiles? Melchisedech Duffy must have noticed it, but he was not yet willing to admit it to himself. He believed in a substantial universe made out of substantial people and things. Take substance away from the universe and what do you have left?

If anything happened, Melchisedech said, he should be the first to know about it. Night people, who might be first on the spot, are drowsy or drunken, and they are inattentive. And Duffy was always first of the morning people.

He went into a coffee shop.

This is the ewe that has no tup;

This is the coffee without a cup.

The coffee had a good aroma and a jolting, fair taste. It was coffee to wake up by. But the cup felt funny, and Duffy supposed (looking at it out of the edge of his eye) that it looked funny. Well, coffee people are entitled to get new cups when they will.

The coffee lady was an unmarried young lady, a very much unmarried lady, an intense and relentless young lady. She hovered over Duffy, as she often did. She was waiting for a reaction, or she was intent on drawing a reaction.

“Don't you spoil it,” she said irrationally. “Everyone else has accepted it just the way it is without even looking at it. It's the Great Day, so I know that I can do it. I know I can do it, if you and two or three others like you don't spoil it. What I have is a lot of faith. You can't create something new like this without faith. A lady has to have a lot of faith if she doesn't have a husband.”

“True, Charlotte, quite true,” Melchisedech said. He saw now what was funny about the coffee cups: there weren't any coffee cups. There were five other men in the place, listless, rather sleepy men, and all were drinking coffee without cups.

Duffy had always known that new things, when they came, never came by way of elite folks. They came by way of scramble-brained, intense, humorless, and unilluminated people like — well, like Charlotte here.

Duffy was trying to read his morning paper, and he found it somehow unsatisfactory. He was trying not to notice that he was drinking coffee without a cup; he wasn't quite ready for that yet. He was trying not to put any meaning to the words of the stringy waitress Charlotte. And yet there were the words:

“I hate cups,” she was saying. “I hate glasses. I hate clothes, I hate walls. I hate containers. It isn't right that anything should be contained by anything else. I hate sacks, I hate boxes. If we have faith we can make them all go away. It has to start with somebody. I believe that it has already started with me. I had a feeling that this would be a special morning.”

“I have a great fear that it is, Charlotte,” Melchisedech said. There was something more than wrong about the morning paper; there was something rotten about it. And there was something that would have to be acknowledged about the cups, that would have to be acknowledged absently.

“You're the one I worry about more than any of my early-morning customers,” Charlotte was saying. “If I blow it in the early morning, I've blown it for all day. And you're just the one to make me blow it. I bet you have clothes on under your clothes and skin on under your skin. You're an old skinsack, that's what you are, an old container. And you are the most contained man I know.”

“Self-contained, Charlotte?”

“That's right. Ugh! It isn't decent for anything to be contained. It isn't right for there to be any containers. I have it started now. Don't spoil it.”

The newspaper was intolerable; and the diminished coffee in the cup (whup, no cup!) was cold. Melchisedech raised his remnant coffee to Charlotte, and by coincidence the five other customers had all raised their coffee to their mouths at once.

“A little of the hot, Charlotte,” Melchisedech said.

“Don't spoil it,” she warned as she started to pour. “If you don't have faith, then don't look at it so close. I'm telling you, don't spoil it.”

Melchisedech spoiled it. The cold remnant burst and ran down his hand and wrist. And the scalding hot coffee poured by Charlotte cascaded over his hand and down his arm to set him howling with pain. After all, what does happen when someone pours boiling hot coffee in your bare hand?

And the other five customers had coffee suddenly loosed into their hands. Whoosh! They all rose and shook themselves in stammering and soggy bewilderment to discover that they had been drinking coffee without cups, and that now even the non-cups had collapsed and vanished.

“You spoiled it!” Charlotte shrilled at Melchisedech. “If I had a husband I'd have him shoot you if he had a gun. You ought to be skinned alive, you old crate, you old bagworm, you old wineskin. All the faith in the world can be sucked into one old skin like you, and then nothing works. You get out of here!”

This is the paper: no date is in sight,

Nor numbers on pages, nor anything right.

“Is it possible that I, who have always been so far ahead of the times, have now fallen behind the peasants and the peckerwoods?” Melchisedech Duffy asked himself in a loud and truculent voice. His hand was badly burned and he was flustered generally. “Is it possible that this is really the Great Day dawning, and that I alone lack the grace to comprehend it? Oh well, two things at a time. I'll just go around to that newspaper office, to complain, to cajole, perhaps to correct. But I suspect that the cupless coffee has burned me deeper than my hand.”

The morning paper had been as defective as the morning coffee, and in much the same way. It had no date on any of the pages, and the pages were not numbered. It must have been put together by drunken Cajuns working through the night. All the headlines were gathered together on the first two pages (Melchisedech supposed they were the first two pages; they weren't numbered either, and there were no headings at all on any of the stories or articles in the body of the paper).

The whole journal had an odd flavor, fishy or at least amphibian, as though an unmoored thought process were behind it all. The stories just weren't as newspaper stories should be. They didn't tell one anything. They made a person want to shout “What did you say?” at the newspaper. Melchisedech was himself a sometime journalist, and this all seemed like sloppy journalism to him. He twitched his whitish beard in annoyance. It had been the first beard of the late Pleistocene, and (the way things were going) it would likely be the last.

But he was uneasy as he went through the streets toward the newspaper building. It just seemed to him that there was something a little bit different about everything this morning. There was something different about the cars and the buses in the streets, a great but subtle difference; and Duffy could not find a name for it immediately.

He several times narrowly missed death on that three-block walk. One reason for the frightful danger that was abroad was the behavior of the frightful traffic signals. They will be considered in a few minutes: who has the nerve to consider them right now?

And there was something very wrong about the newspaper building itself. It was not exactly that there was any new thing added to it. It was more as if some main thing had been forgotten or removed from it. But Melchisedech Duffy boldly entered the somehow wrong newspaper building, and he entered his outraged protest as he usually did.

“Your paper this morning is weird beyond comprehension,” he said to an editorial assistant. Duffy knew the young man slightly, but he could not now remember his name. It was as though the young man's name had been removed on purpose. In any case, the young man had not taken any notice of Melchisedech's sputtering statement. Try again, then.

“Your paper this morning is the worst I have ever seen,” Duffy said in an elegant but tight way, and he banged the paper down in front of the young man.

“Why do you say that it is our paper?” the young man said. “Everything is everybody's now. You will notice that the paper hasn't any name on it anywhere. Neither do we, the building, I mean.”

“That's so,” Duffy admitted. “It hasn't and you haven't. I wondered what main thing had been removed from this building. It is that big, gawky sign from your roof that is gone.”

“It's the newest thing not to have a name for anything,” the young man said, “or for anybody. Names are enslaving. But why do you say that it's this morning's paper? Being undated, it cannot be identified positively as this morning's paper. We believe that this is the Great Day Coming itself, and the Great Day is one that doesn't need a name or a number. Why do you even say that it's a morning paper? It may be an afternoon or an evening or a graveyard-shift paper.”

“Aw, jay-walking Judas Priest!” Duffy exploded. “Let me talk to the editor. You can't run a paper like that.”

“We are all equally editors here now,” the young man said. “We are all equally everything, but we will not use that title or any title. We will do just what work we feel like doing, and the days when we are nothing-minded we will do nothing. We call this job enrichment.

“But I don't believe there will be any paper printed here today. When everything in the world is new, then there can be no such thing as ‘news.’ We may put out a comic book instead. Reruns of old comics, probably. What do you think?”

“I feel like the rerun of an old comic myself,” Melchisedech said. “And you do put me out a bit. How did all these changes happen?”

“All these rectifications, rather. Oh, we noticed that there wasn't anyone of any importance around the paper last night. So a couple of us persons of no importance put it into effect. That's the way major things always happen. The paper really should have been brought out blank, but we're not perfected in the new ways yet.”

“Couldn't your paper even have said that your Great Day a-Coming had come? Any explanation is better than none at all.”

“It does say so on page — oh, I forgot that pages aren't numbered anymore. It's on one of the back pages. It's a little filler at the bottom.”

“I see that there is no sanity here,” Melchisedech said. He left the newspaper building, unsatisfied. He noticed that the big, gawky sign hadn't really been removed from the roof of the newspaper building. But it had been felled. It lay in broken pieces, and some of the pieces had fallen into the street. There was a steady sputtering and sparking where the electrical feeders to the big sign had been ruptured. Wires dangled and hissed above the street. “Someone will touch one of those and be killed,” Duffy said. Then he noticed that it had already happened. There was a scorched and charred child on the sidewalk, dead and unnoticed by the passersby. But you can't make changes without breaking up old patterns of life.

Melchisedech Duffy, pawnbroker, art dealer, bookseller, part-time personage, stood undecided. He wasn't sure that this was the Great Day, and he wasn't sure that he liked it if it was.

These are the signals that harry one hence:

These are the beacons that don't make sense.

Oh, oh, those life-endangering traffic signals once more! There had been a time, no longer ago than last night, when lights were red or green, or they were amber; when the signals said “Go” or they said “Stop”; when they flashed “Walk” or “Don't walk” when they indicated turns and such things.

But this morning those signals lit up in a hundred different colors or blends of colors; perhaps some of them were subjective, but they could not all be. And the signals flashed such words as “When you feel like it, go,” “People's Intersection,” “To stop is to die, to stop growing is to die a little,” “Shout Liberty before crossing,” “If you're not part of the confluence you're part of the collision,” “Capricorns should not cross any streets today,” “Leos should not cross any streets ever.” These weren't the traffic signals that Melchisedech was used to.

“How do you know when to cross the street?” he asked a young lady there. Mighty funny business. Duffy was usually the one to come up with an answer: why did he have to ask this strange young lady?

“It is the Emancipation,” the young lady said with some heat, “and old goatskin here wants to know when to cross the street!”

“Don't people cross streets after the Emancipation?” Duffy asked.

“Only emancipated people. Don't you relate at all?” the lady asked crossly.

“No, I don't seem to relate to this,” Duffy said. Funnier and funnier. Melchisedech Duffy had almost always related to things, even before they happened.

“People who don't relate are simply not allowed to cross the streets,” the young lady laid down the law.

“What do they do if they're not allowed to cross the streets?”

“Oh, I suppose they walk around them,” the young lady said.

This is the world that bans the heels;

These are the cars that don't have wheels.

The buses, Melchisedech Duffy now saw, no longer had wheels. Many of the trucks had none, and some of the cars had not.

“What happened to all the wheels?” Melchisedech asked a workman.

“You really have to ask that on the Day of total change?” the workman challenged. “If there's one thing worse than a square it's a round. Get out of here, you roundskin, you roundheel.” But what did they have in place of wheels?

There was a fog before the eyes as to this, and yet it was a quite clear morning and the sun was nearly up. The vehicles had something else instead of wheels, and they moved along almost as well on this something else. The change seemed to have been a simple one. Even now, workmen as well as owners were taking the wheels off cars and putting on something else, something that came out of a kit.

“Are you sure that that, whatever it is that comes out of the kits, is better than wheels?” Duffy asked a young car owner who was making the changeover himself.

“No, of course not,” the man said. “How would it be better? The thought for today is that nothing is any better than anything else. Don't you even know the thought for the day?”

“I am having some second thoughts for this day,” Duffy said. He was amazed. People were dismantling and taking off the walls of all the buildings. The buildings, without the support of the walls, didn't seem to collapse one floor upon another, though some of them sagged a little.

“Faith maintains better than walls,” a pious and bearded teenager said. “Walls were the enemy of freedom.” Then he began to pull out his beard in big hunks.

People were dismantling and taking off their clothes. The people, without the support, didn't seem to collapse one section upon another, though some of them sagged a little.

“I know a green oasis,” Melchisedech Duffy said. “I know a green oasis in this world of dusty insanity. I will go there.”

In turbulent world, one thing to bless:

Salvation as found at the Pelican Press.

Melchisedech Duffy went over to the Pelican Press. It was only three blocks. In the Quarter, everything is only three blocks. It was still in the same old ratty building where he had started it so many years ago, with Finnegan and Dotty Yekouris.

And the publishing schedule had never changed. On Monday the seamen's paper came out, on Tuesday the union sheet, on Wednesday the Sporting News, on Friday the jazz paper. The Bark was special; it was printed on Thursday or whenever. Sometimes it didn't even come out every week.

Today they should be printing The Bark, for it was Thursday. But was it? Was it indeed Thursday? Or was it the Great Day that breaks the sequence? This is the Hero void of fame: This is the Day without a Name, as the Great Day Rime had it: and the Great Day Rime was everywhere, tongueless, soundless, but hanging in the air.

Well, if it wasn't Thursday, then it was (Great Day or not) whenever; and The Bark still should be printing. Melchisedech went into the Pelican Press Building.

Mary Virginia Schaeffer was there, and Salvation Sally, and Margaret Stone. There was something quite revealing about them all.

“Oh, Duff,” Mary Virginia cried. “Oh, I'm sorry. I haven't learned to get along without using names yet. You were right. You were right in every detail. I believe that you are the smartest man I know.”

“Very likely, girl, very likely,” Melchisedech said. “Perhaps you should broaden your acquaintance with us more intelligent types.”

“Have some coffee, Duff. Isn't it, ah, interesting the way this day is turning out, and it hardly started yet?”

“Interesting, yes. Are you using cups?”

“I'm afraid so. We're old-fashioned. I imagine we'll get used to it by sunup. Margaret made an act of faith and we all had it going a while ago, drank it without cups. Then we got to laughing and we broke it. You can't laugh at the things of the Great Day. I burned myself when my coffee collapsed. I see that you did too. But Salvation Sally is drinking tea without a cup. That filthy Aussie says that it's all right to laugh at coffee, but we must never laugh at tea.”

Yes, Salvation Sally was drinking tea without a cup. She winked at Duffy, and when she winked she winked all the way down to her navel. How come he could see her navel anyhow? Had these fine ladies at the Pelican joined the commoners in this newness? Little Margaret Stone, with a big mallet, was breaking out all the walls of the building. It just didn't seem right to Melchisedech.

“You have to have walls,” he protested. “You have to have walls to hang things on, if for nothing else.”

“No, you don't,” Margaret said, swinging energetically (she had always been strong as a little burro). “You are the one who explained how it would be in the first place. Don't you remember?”

“I was kidding when I wrote that.”

“I'm not. If one has faith, then one doesn't need walls or any of such things. Oops! Lack of faith myself.”

A large picture had fallen to the floor only a short while after the wall to which it had been fastened was demolished. It was one of those old, little-known masterpieces of Finnegan, his orange period. Margaret picked the picture up again, nailed it up on the empty air, and it stayed there. The nail going into the empty air sounded like a nail going into white pine.

But, yes, Margaret also had joined the commoners in one new fashion. However, she was at the moment pretty well clothed in dust, plaster, and sweat, from her hammering down the walls. She took out the studs violently with an axe. And now there was nothing at all supporting the room above them. It rocked like a boat, but it didn't fall down on them yet.

“Look, Duff,” Mary Virginia said. “Oh, damn, there I go using names again. It's as though I didn't realize yet that there's no point where one person ends and another begins. But look at this old copy.” She handed Melchisedech an old copy of that wonderful magazine-journal named The Bark that was printed on these same premises. “It's amazing the way you predicted it all,” she said, “how we would become uncontained, how we would live by faith and not by substance, how we would be completely emancipated, how we would merge with each other, how all walls and clothes and skins would be dismantled, how our minds would disappear (with faith, who needs minds?); you set it down in every detail, just a year ago. I feel that the people of the world are fulfilling the remainder of your details now.”

She had handed him The Bark opened at the article “Great Day in the Morning” by Melchisedech Duffy. And Duffy's hands shook as he held it.

“But, Mary Virginia,” he said, “this was a comic article, a bitterly comic article.”

“Oh yes, that's the tragedy of it, from the old viewpoint. You put it so well in the final lines, ‘If ever the world forgets to laugh, these things and others will come to pass.’ How could you have known that it would forget? It's wonderful, isn't it? But when you're just coming into the thing, it sure is hard not to laugh at the way it's coming out. But to laugh is disastrous.”

“Then let there be disaster!” Melchisedech thundered in not very convincing tones. “A disaster is surely better than what this day is turning into. Let the laughter of the Pelican People be the salvation of the world.”

“No, no, never,” Salvation Sally protested. “The only salvation here is myself. Salvation is in time, and we are beyond that. And laughter is simply not allowed. How lacking in faith would one have to be to laugh ever! Oh, take your clothes off, Duff, and at least one layer of skin. Join the thing. You invented the Day; and will you be the only one in the world too rigid to live in it?”

“Laughter was useful only in the transition period,” Mary Virginia said. “Now that the Great Day is here, laughter would surely be a handicap, a blasphemy.”

Melchisedech decided that things were going badly. The green oasis in the world of dusty insanity now proved to be of a very peculiar, almost sickly green.

“Are you printing The Bark today?” he asked. Could he somehow slip another article into it and undo the frightful good that he had done?

Whoosh! Margaret Stone pushed down another section of the outside wall, killing a little kid on the sidewalk. “Freedom, freedom!” she cried. And the Great-Day Freedom rushed in on them, and rushed out from them, and mingled.

“What do you mean, are we printing The Bark today?” Mary Virginia demanded. “You're not making sense, Duff — I mean you're not making sense, temporary and contingent person. There isn't any today. You wrote yourself that the Great Day can never be referred to as ‘today,’ since ‘today’ implies a sequence and — ”

“Shut your Great Mouth this Great Day!” Melchisedech shouted with pinkish anger. It is hard to take serious a man who turns pink instead of purple with anger, but all things must be taken serious on the Great Day. The situation had certainly become serious with Melchisedech.

“Great Day to you, you filthy Irishman,” Absalom Stein bellowed with a flourishing entrance. He could make a flourishing entrance even when there were no longer doors or walls to enter past.

“Small day to you, you filthy Jew,” Melchisedech gave it back to him. Ah, this was one relationship as beautiful as it had ever been. Here, surely, was one friend remaining as an integral person, one acquaintance of kindred (if not quite equal) intelligence, one — 

But Absalom was clothed only in billowing smoke and a reeking cigar. (He had left written orders that he be finally buried in a plain pine box and with a lighted cigar in his mouth. “How will you keep it lit, Absie?” Margaret Stone had asked him. “Never mind, I'll keep it lit,” Stein had said, “I'll never be too dead for that.”) And the cigar, though lacking its outer wrapper leaf, held together and fumed prodigiously.

“Freedom, Faith, Great Day,” Absalom said, and there was something uncontained about his eyes and manner. Melchisedech made one of Stein's own contempt-carrying gestures back at him, the one that said, without words, “Above the ears, nothing!” And Stein understood it not at all.

Why, Stein's brains were shot, gone completely! Stein had always had a lot of brains, but they had been of a volatile nature, quite near the surface, and now they had evaporated.

“I wonder whether you'll miss them, Absalom,” Melchisedech said. “Your brains, I mean.”

“No, I don't think so. Brains were useful only during the transition period. Now that the Great Day is here, they would probably prove a handicap. I've divested myself of mine, yes. I've divested myself of everything except the stogie. It will become my token and it will take the place of my name. Do you notice anything special about it?”

“That the longer you smoke it the longer it gets? Yes. You are all full of tricks this morning.”

“Faith and Freedom, those are the things,” Stein said. “This is the cigar made from faith-tobacco, not from physical tobacco. It is of the celestial tobacco foretold in scripture.”

Stein had, in these latter years, become an obese man. When uncovered and uncontained, he became very much so. And he had always been a straight-faced kidder. But was he now? Could he be trusted? What is more noxious than a kidder gone serious? But he remained the distant possibility of hope.

“I suppose that we won't print any of the papers or magazines anymore,” Mary Virginia was saying. (Of all of them she was the only one formly enough to go divested.) “Papers and magazines were useful only for the transition period. Now that the Great Day is here we should be doing Great-Day stuff instead.”

“What would that be?” Melchisedech asked.

“Oh, sing songs without words, I guess. Finger-paint with faith-paint, not with physical paint. Be very close to each other. These are all forms of Great Day communication.”

Zabotski, well known in that neighborhood, probably stuck his head into the building. Probably, for it was hard to say just when a head was stuck into a building now that there were no walls or doors left.

“There's a fellow over on O'Dwyer Street who's already shed his skin completely,” he said. “Duff, why aren't you in the buff?”

“Clothed and in my right mind I'll remain,” Melchisedech said. “Now, what were you jabbering, Zabotski?”

“A Great Day first: a fellow over on O'Dwyer Street has already shed his skin completely. That makes him the most emancipated man in town, possibly in the world.”

“Oh, we'll all be doing it before the day is over with,” Mary Virginia said.

“Except me,” Melchisedech challenged.

“Oh, I forgot, this Day isn't ever over with,” Mary Virginia corrected herself. “It is now Great Day forever, and yet we'll all be doing it soon. And when we are all skin-shed, then we'll be well on the way to true liberation. We'll be able to get so close to each other after we're skinless. Rubbing eyeballs with each other isn't in it for closeness anymore.”

“Some of the fellows are making their diaphragms disappear,” Stein said, “for greater visceral freedom.”

“That's nice,” Salvation Sally said.

This Zabotski, though bluff, was a good man. He had put up a big pot and a lot of money to keep the soup kitchen going through the years. And, providentially, he still had a big pot and a lot of money left. His appearance brought a question out of Melchisedech's gorge:

“The soup kitchen, is it still operating today? Is the big pot still boiling, the pot that never ceases to boil?” The soup kitchen and the flophouse for the poor were adjacent to the Pelican Press.

“The big pot is still boiling,” Margaret Stone said. “It is boiling with faith-soup now. There's no need to put anything physical into it.”

“Is this thing worldwide?” Melchisedech asked them. He had invented the Day, and he knew less about it than any of them.

“Of course it is worldwide,” Stein said. “From the East even unto the West and all that. And, of course, we have no old-style communication with the rest of the world on the subject. Electronic and mechanical communications aren't being used. Why should they be? Faith and Freedom and Sense of Community have arrived, and nothing else is needed.”

“Ah me,” Melchisedech said. “I had always regarded the Pelican as a refuge, as an anchor to hold fast in the great storms of the world.”

“Both the sea ships and the river boats are cutting loose their anchors and letting them sink forever,” Zabotski said. “With faith, who needs anchors?”

“You have failed me, all of you,” Melchisedech said. “You are the lump and not the leaven. You are as the world, worldly, but with none of the redeeming quality of solid black earth. But I know a greener oasis and a more unfailing fountain. I leave you.”

“Good-by, Duff, I mean good-by, person,” Mary Virginia said.

“And do take your clothes off, please,” Salvation Sally said. “Why do you always want to be conspicuous?”

Melchisedech Duffy left the Pelican. If this was indeed the Great Day, then he left it forever.

This is the Michael making moan

With stony tears and a sword of stone.

Melchisedech walked over to St. Michael's. A bare yellow sliver of sun was showing at the end of one street.

“Ah, you crooked, cranky thing,” Melchisedech told it, “I'll trap you now. Move once and I'll have you.”

But the sun did not move. It would not move while anyone was watching. If it could be seen to move, then time was still running; and that would be a contradiction on the Great Day. The Great Day, if this was it, must remain forever dawning.

Melchisedech looked away a bit to test it. When he looked back, the sun had moved, but only to make itself more comfortable, to get a better hold on its dawning. Now it would move no more.

St. Michael's was being unstructured by various people. They were using faith rather than hammers and rams, but they had brought most of the building down. The building had contained something, so it was said, and that was disapproved. Melchisedech stopped to talk to the stone statue of St. Michael in what had been the entry.

“It's a sad day, Mike,” he said. “If an oasis cannot be found here, then it can be found nowhere.”

“It's a sad day,” Michael agreed. “And the living water has gone out from this place. You'll find no oasis here.” Michael had had an eye gouged out, by hammer and chisel it seemed, perhaps faith-hammer and chisel, perhaps real.

“Look, mama,” a little girl was saying somewhere. “There's the crazy old man who talks to statues.”

“Shh, don't look at him,” the mother said. “It isn't nice to look. He's wearing clothes.”

“Will there be mass this morning, Mike?” Melchisedech asked.

“There won't even be any this morning,” the statue said sadly. “This Great-Day business has bitten the whole world. Ah, Duff, if there were only some way to put a good edge on a marble sword, then I'd have at them. They are unstructuring the church and they have put up the twelve signs of the zodiac and the sun and the moon in place of the stations of the cross. But the Unfaithful Assembled will not notice any difference at all in the services, they have gone so weird for such a long while.”

The holy figure of the demiurge Teilhard had come down on the altar. With him appeared McLuhan on his right hand and McGonigal on his left. They were transfigured with light.

“Lord, it is good that we be here,” the Unfaithful Assembled intoned. “Great Day.”

“Peduncle, peduncle, Point Edhead, cosmogenization, valorization, obfuscation. Great Day,” the holy demiurge blessed them.

“Lord, let us build three tents here,” the Unfaithful Assembled intoned. “Great Day.”

“Peduncle, neo-anthropocentrism, corpusculization, nookonos, peduncle. Great Day,” the holy demiurge blessed again.

“Kind of gets you, doesn't it, Duff?” Michael said. “What am I saying? Well, it would kind of get me if I weren't Michael. Ah, I wish there was some way to put a good double edge on a stone sword. If you run onto a good blade man, send him by. I'll have me a cutting and flaming sword yet. Who's going to know that I'm an archangel when I'm here with the toes broken off me and one eye gouged out and only a dull stone sword in my hand?”

“If I run onto a good blade man I'll send him by,” Melchisedech said. He left Michael there crying stone tears.

“Well, I bet I know an oasis that is wet if nothing else,” Melchisedech said. He left St. Michael's and headed for the Stumble-Bum Royal Rendezvous and Oyster Bar. Young fellows tried to pull his beard off as he walked through the streets, and they did pull out some bloody gouts of it. He noticed that most of the beards had been shed, both of the teenagers and of the few grown men who had sported them. They were shed by acts of faith. If one has faith, what does he need with a beard? The beards of most of the folks had come off easily. An easy breeze was now blowing remaining beard-patches off various faces. Soon it would be a barefaced world.

Young ladies tried to pull his clothes off as he walked through the streets, and they did pull some ripped strips of them off. “Be free, be unenclosed, be emancipated, be unstructured,” they all insisted to him. “Is there anything dirtier than a dirty old man with clothes on?”

“A sazarac,” Melchisedech ordered as he entered the Stumble-Bum. He felt the looks at him like those manifold whips with little tearing hooks at the end of the lashes. The barkeep shook his head. “A salty dog, then,” Melchisedech said, and he felt the hatred rising against him. “An old fashioned,” Melchisedech said. He should never have said that.

“Get this nut,” the barkeep said, hooking a sneering thumb toward Melchisedech, and the grumbling hatred rose against this nonconformist who refused to be free. “We haven't had any of those drinks since yesterday.”

“What do you have to drink, then?” Melchisedech asked humbly.

“The New Day Dawner. That's what everyone drinks. Who would want anything else?”

Melchisedech left the Stumble-Bum. There were no wet oases, no green oases, no unfailing fountains anywhere.

This is the drink that nothing slakes:

This is the dream whence none awakes.

Melchisedech experimented a bit. He had noticed people, here and there, walking through visible walls as easily as if they were not there.

“Why, then they are not there,” Melchisedech said. “The people have removed them by faith, and they are visible only to my faithless eyes. Let me see whether I can walk through those walls also.”

But he could not. He bruised and bloodied himself, but he could not go through this sort of walls as other people could.

“Then part of this wall-demolishing is a subjective thing,” he said. “But I am outnumbered. Many persons pass through, and I do not. It must be my own subjective that is awry.”

The sun was still in the process of dawning, but it had not moved at all since it was last viewed. There was not a lot of movement of any sort on the Great Day. The real action was hidden, and yet almost everything had all the wraps off it.

But the people were all interiorizing themselves. Some skinless, some only part so, they looked blank, blank in every part of them. And they were merging. They were coming together witlessly, blankly, spherically. Dozens of them had now formed into great balls all together. These rolled, and they merged with other great balls of people-substance. Soon all the people in the whole city would be coalesced into one big fleshy sphere, communicating and interiorizing like anything.

Then the peoples of all the world would somehow roll together and become one thing, although the mechanics of this were far from clear.

“Everybody will have joined it except myself,” Melchisedech said, “and I invented it in a time of cranky humor. Should I stand proud apart then? But how can one stand proud with no one to stand before?”

Subjectively, quite a while went by, but the sun did not move. Melchisedech walked himself weary, and then sat on a bench in Jackson Square. Most of the buildings of the city had disappeared now. That business of them standing after their walls and supports had been removed was only a transition thing.

“This is only a nightmare,” Melchisedech said. “I am sleeping, and this is not one of my better dreams. Now I must make a great effort to wake up.”

“You can't,” Morpheus said. “You will have to change your whole idea about sleeping. More important, you will have to change your whole idea about waking up. Both are illusions.”

“Anyone can be a showboat in his own field of study,” Melchisedech said. “You are the god of sleep, so you have the advantage over me in the discussion.”

“Everyone is the god of something,” Morpheus said. “You did not know that? But I have broader interests than most. ‘Morpheus’ ('sleep') and ‘Morphē’ ('shape') are really the same word, and shape is known only in sleep. A waking world would be a shapeless and formless monstrosity.”

“I'll take that chance. Help me to wake up.”

“Absolutely not. There is no longer any such thing as waking up.”

“Where did I go wrong?” Melchisedech asked the empty ears of misty Morpheus. “Why am I alone unamalgamated in this thing?”

“Where did you go wrong, where did you go right? It was in being too stiff to change. You allowed yourself to become an old wineskin,” Morpheus said.

(“Neither do men put new wine into old bottles,” Matthew said. “If they do, the skins burst and the wine runs out. See me, 9:17.”

“No man, having drunk old wine, straightway desires new, for he says, ‘The old is better,’ ” Luke said. “See me, 5:39.”

“You evangelists go settle it among yourselves,” Melchisedech told them, “with eight-ounce gloves.” The evangelists went away.)

“Now tell me true, Morph, am I awake or not?” Melchisedech asked the sleep god.

“No, you are not awake and you are not. You can never wake up, for waking up is one of the options that have now disappeared from the world. And you cannot really sleep. You can only dream a diminishing dream in a state of half-sleep. It all closes up on itself. It goes out of business.”

“Is the whole world only my dream, Morph?” Melchisedech asked.

“Yours or mine, Duff. We seem to be the only two left. We'll end as two submicroscopic snakes, the only remaining things in the worlds, and then one of us must swallow the other.”

“I'll not like that. There must be more than that.”

“No. The whole thousand-times-mega cosmos began as one single-celled creature. Then he had the notion that there were two of him, and this notion was the beginning of his dreaming. He dreamed the whole multiplex thing that has seemed to be the worlds. The dream grew for long eons, but now it shrinks back again to its beginning. There is still one single cell left, dreaming a diminishing dream.”

“So let it be,” Melchisedech said, “so long as I am that single cell.”

“Or I,” said Morpheus, “but there is still only one. I'll wrestle you for the illusion.”

They wrestled. But Morpheus was one of those timeless, ever-young Greek gods, and cosmic wrestling is their game. Moreover, they smear themselves completely with a numinous grease that makes them very hard to get hold of.

There came over Melchisedech the panic of extinction. The old-fashioned fear of damnation isn't even in the same league with it. The lungs pop like toy balloons, the kidneys melt like wax, the heart bursts like a cherry bomb. Melchisedech collapsed on himself and became smaller by a million orders, and Morpheus followed him down. They were a single-celled creature swallowing itself. Melchisedech screamed as loudly as a single-celled creature can scream in a void, after he's swallowed himself.

“It's the end,” he gasped.

“No, it's the beginning,” Morpheus gurgled in his swallowed state. “We've been here before.”

A hint as to a possible alternate outcome had been given in an article in the magazine-journal The Bark one year before. But how is a single-celled creature that has just swallowed itself going to have access to back issues of obscure magazines?

There are a few Great Day verses left over, and the world affair cannot be concluded until they are disposed of. There are also, unaccountably, about the same number of persons left over, and they must also be disposed of.

If each person will come forward and proclaim loudly one of the verses, then both that person and that verse can be forever obliterated. Try it. Lose yourself in it.

This is the meadow that has no grass.

This is the wine without a glass.

This is the building lacking walls.

This is the murder that none appalls.

This is the hero void of fame.

This is the Day without a name.

This is the move without a mean.

This is the sun less shine and sheen.

This is the wineskin Matthew told.

This is the old skin-bottle, old.

Here is the crowd that lurks alone.

Here is the grave without a stone.

There, it worked, didn't it? Got rid of everything.

Author's Commentary

By The Seashore

The most important event in the life of Oliver Murex was his finding of a seashell when he was four years old. It was a bright and shining shell that the dull little boy found. It was bigger than his own head (and little Oliver had an unusually large head), and had two eyes peering out of its mantle cavity that were brighter and more intelligent-seeming than Oliver's own. Both Oliver and the shell had these deep, black, shiny eyes that were either mockingly lively or completely dead — with such shiny, black things it was hard to say which.

That big shell was surely the brightest thing on that sunny morning beach and no one could have missed it. But George, Hector, August, Mary, Catherine and Helen had all of them missed it and they were older and sharper-eyed than was Oliver. They had been looking for bright shells, going in a close skirmish line over that sand and little Oliver had been trailing them with absent mind and absent eyes. “Why do you pick up all the dumb little ones and leave the good big one?” he yipped from their rear. They turned and saw the shell and they were stunned. It actually was stunning in appearance — why hadn't they seen it? (It had first to have been seen by one in total sympathy with it. Then it could be seen by any superior person.)

“I wouldn't have seen it either if it hadn't whistled at me,” Oliver said.

“It's a Hebrew Volute,” George cried out, “and they're not even found in this part of the world.”

“It isn't. It's a Music Volute,” Mary contradicted.

“I think it's a Neptune Volute,” Hector hazarded.

“I wish I could say it's a Helen Volute,” Helen said, “but it isn't. It's not a Volute at all. It's a Cone, an Alphabet Cone.”

Now these were the shelliest kids along the seashore that summer and they should all have known a Volute from a Cone, all except little Oliver. How could there be such wide differences among them?

“Helen is right about its being a Cone,” August said. “But it isn't an Alphabet Cone. It's a Barthelemy Cone, a big one.”

“It's a Prince Cone,” Catherine said simply. But they were all wrong. It was a deadly Geography Cone, even though it was three times too big to be one. How could such sharp-eyed children not recognize such an almost legendary prize?

Oliver kept this cone shell with him all the years of his growing up. He listened often to the distant sounding in it, as people have always listened to seashells. No cone, however, is a real ocean-roarer of a shell. They haven't the far crash; they haven't the boom. They just are not shaped for it, not like a Conch, not like a Vase Shell, not like a Scallop, not even like the common Cowries or Clam Shells or Helmet Shells. Cones make rather intermittent, sharp sounds, not really distant. They tick rather than roar.

“Other shells roar their messages from way off,” Helen said once. “Cones telegraph theirs.” And the clicking, ticking of Cones does sound somewhat like the chatter of a telegraph.

Some small boys have toy pandas or bears. But Oliver Murex had this big seashell for his friend and toy and security. He slept with it — he carried it with him always. He depended on it. If he was asked a question he would first hold the big cone shell to his ear and listen — then he would answer the question intelligently. But if for any reason he did not have his shell near at hand he seemed incapable of an intelligent answer on any subject.

There would sometimes be a splatter of small blotches or dusty motes on the floor or table near the shell.

“Oh, let me clean those whatever-they-ares away,” mother Murex said once when she was nozzling around with the cleaner.

“No, no — leave them alone — they'll go back in,” Oliver protested. “They just came out to get a little sunlight.” And the little blotches, dust motes, fuzz, stains, whatever retreated into the shell of the big cone.

“Why, they're alive!” the mother exclaimed.

“Isn't everybody?” Oliver asked.

“It is an Alphabet Cone just as I always said it was,” Helen declared. “And those little skittering things are the letters of the different alphabets that fall off the outside of the shell. The cone has to swallow them again each time, and when it has digested them they will come through to the outside again where they can be seen in their patterns.”

Helen still believed this was an Alphabet Cone. It wasn't. It was a deadly Geography Cone. The little blotches that seemed to fall off it or to come out of it and run around — and that then had to be swallowed again — may have been little continents or seas coming from the Geography Cone; they may have been quite a number of different things. But if they were alphabets (well, they were those, among other things), then they were more highly complex alphabets than Helen suspected.

It isn't necessary that all children in a family be smart. Six smart ones out of seven isn't bad. The family could afford big-headed, queer-eyed Oliver, even if he seemed a bit retarded. He could get by most of the time. If he had his shell with him, he could get by all the time.

One year in grade school, though, they forbade him the company of his shell. And he failed every course abysmally.

“I see Oliver's problem as a lack of intelligence,” his teacher told father Murex. “And lack of intelligence is usually found in the mind.”

“I didn't expect it to be found in his feet,” Oliver's father said. But he did get a psychologist in to go over his slow son from head to foot.

“He's a bit different from a schizo,” the psychologist said when he had finished the examination. “What he has is two concentric personalities. We call them the core personality and the mantle personality — and there is a separation between them. The mantle or outer personality is dull in Oliver's case. The core personality is bright enough, but it is able to contact the outer world only by means of some separate object. I believe that the unconscious of Oliver is now located in this object and his intelligence is tied to it. That seashell there, now, is quite well balanced mentally. It's too bad that it isn't a boy. Do you have any idea what object it is that Oliver is so attached to?”

“It's that seashell there. He's had it quite a while. Should I get rid of it?”

“That's up to you. Many fathers would say yes in such a case; almost as many would say no. If you get rid of the shell the boy will die. But then the problem will be solved — you'll no longer have a problem child.”

Mr. Murex sighed, and he thought about it. He had decisions to make all day long and he disliked having to make them in the evening, too.

“I guess the answer is no,” he finally said. “I'll keep the seashell and I'll also keep the boy. They're both good conversation pieces. Nobody else has anything that looks like either of them.”

Really they had come to look alike, Oliver and his shell, both big-headed and bug-eyed and both of them had a quiet and listening air about them.

Oliver did quite well in school after they let him have the big seashell with him in class again.

A man was visiting the Murex house one evening. This man was by hobby a conchologist or student of seashells. He talked about shells. He set out some little shells that he had carried wrapped in his pocket and explained them. Then he noticed Oliver's big seashell and he almost ruptured a posterior adductor muscle.

“It's a Geography Cone!” he shrieked. “A giant one! And it's alive!”

“I think it's an Alphabet Cone,” Helen said.

“I think it's a Prince Cone,” Catherine said.

“No, no, it's a Geography Cone and it's alive!”

“Oh, I've suspected for a long time that it was alive,” Papa Murex said.

“But don't you understand? It's a giant specimen of the deadly Geography Cone.”

“Yes, I think so. Nobody else has one,” father Murex said.

“What do you keep it in?” the conchologist chattered. “What do you feed it?”

“Oh, it has total freedom here, but it doesn't move around very much. We don't feed it anything at all. It belongs to my son Oliver. He puts it to his ear and listens to it often.”

“Great galloping gastropods, man! It's likely to take an ear clear off the boy.”

“It never has.”

“But it's deadly poisonous. People have died of its sting.”

“I don't believe any of our family ever has. I'll ask my wife. Oh, no, I needn't. I'm sure none of my family has ever died of its sting. I just remembered that none of them has ever died at all.”

The man with the hobby of conchology didn't visit the Murex house very much after that. He was afraid of that big seashell.

One day the school dentist had a curious report of things going on in Oliver's mouth.

“Little crabs are eating the boy's teeth — little microscopic crabs,” the dentist (he was a nervous man) told Mr. Murex.

“I never heard of microscopic crabs,” Mr. Murex said. “Have you seen them, really, or examined them at all?”

“Oh no, I haven't seen them. How would I see them? But his teeth just look as if microscopic crabs had been eating them. Ah, I'm due for a vacation. I was going to leave next week.”

“Are his teeth deteriorating fast?” Mr. Murex asked the dentist.

“No, that's what puzzles me,” the dentist said. “They're not deteriorating. The enamel is disappearing, eaten by small crabs, I'm sure of that; but it's being replaced by something else, by some shell-like material.”

“Oh, it's all right then,” Mr. Murex said.

“I was going to leave on vacation next week. I'll call someone and tell them that I'm leaving right now,” the dentist said.

The dentist left, and he never did return to his job or to his home. It was later heard of him that he had first abandoned dentistry and then life.

But little Oliver grew up, or anyhow he grew out. He seemed to be mostly head, and his dwarfish body was not much more than an appendage. He and the great seashell came to look more and more like each other by the day.

“I swear, sometimes I can't tell which of you is Oliver,” Helen Murex said one day. She was more fond of Oliver and his shell than were any of their brothers or sisters. “Which of you is?” she asked.

“I am.”

Oliver Geography Cone grinned.

“I am.”

Oliver Murex grinned.

Oliver Murex was finally out of school and had taken his place in the family business. The Murex family was big in communications, the biggest in the world, really. Oliver had an office just off the office of his father. Not much was expected of him. He seemed still to be a dull boy, but very often he gave almost instant answers to questions that no one else could answer in less than a week or more. Well, it was either Oliver or his shell who had the almost instant answers. They had come to resemble each other in voice almost as much as in appearance and the father really didn't care which of them answered — as long as the answers were quick and correct. And they were both.

“Oliver has a girlfriend,” Helen teased one day. “She says she's going to marry him.”

“However would he get a girlfriend?” brother Hector asked, puzzled.

“Yes. How is it possible?” Mr. Murex wanted to know.

“After all, we are very rich,” Helen reminded them.

“Oh, I didn't know that the younger generation had any interest in money,” Mr. Murex said.

“And, after all, she is Brenda Frances,” Helen said.

“Oh, yes — I've noticed that she does have an interest in money,” Mr. Murex said. “Odd that such a recessive trait should crop out in a young lady of today.”

Brenda Frances worked for the Murex firm.

Brenda Frances wanted round-headed Oliver for the money that might attach to him, but she didn't want a lot of gaff that seemed also to attach to the young fellow. But now Oliver became really awake for the first time in his life, stimulated by Brenda Frances' apparent interest. He even waxed a little bit arty and poetic when he talked to her, mostly about his big seashell.

“Do you know that he wasn't native to the sea or shore where we found him,” Oliver said. “He tells me that he comes from the very far north, from the Sea of Moyle.”

“Damn that bug-eyed seashell!” Brenda Frances complained. “He almost looks alive. I don't mind being leered at by men, but I dislike being leered at by a seashell. I don't believe that there is any such thing as the Sea of Moyle. I never heard of it. There isn't any sea in the very far north except the Arctic Ocean.”

“Oh, but he says that this is very far north,” Oliver said with his ear to the shell (When you two put your heads together like that I don't know whose ear is listening to whose shell, Helen had said once), “very, very far north — and perhaps very again. It's far, far beyond the Arctic Ocean.”

“You can't get any farther north than the Arctic,” Brenda Frances insisted. “It's as far north as there is any north.”

“No. He says that the Sea of Moyle is much farther,” Oliver repeated the whispers and tickings of the shell. “I think probably the Sea of Moyle is clear off-world.”

“Oh great glabrous Glabula!” Brenda Frances swore. Things weren't going well here. There was so much nonsense about Oliver as nearly to nullify the pleasant prospect of money.

“Did you know he has attendants?” Oliver asked. “Very small attendants.”

“Like fleas?”

“Like crabs. They really are crabs, almost invisible, almost microscopic fiddler crabs. They are named Gelasimus Notarii or Annotating Crabs — I don't know why. They live in his mouth and stomach most of the time, but they come out when they're off duty. They do a lot of work for him. They do all his paperwork and they are very handy. I've been practicing with them for a long time, too, but I haven't learned to employ them at all well yet.”

“Oh great whelping whelks!” Brenda Frances sputtered.

“Did you know that the old Greeks shipped wine in cone shells?” Oliver asked. “They did it because cone shells are so much bigger on the inside than on the outside. They would put a half-a-dozen cone shells into an amphora of wine to temper them for it. Then they would take them out and pour one, two, or three amphoras of wine into each cone shell. The cones have so many internal passages that there is no limit to their capacity. The Greeks would load ships with the wine-filled cones and ship them all over the world. By using cones, they could ship three times as much wine as otherwise in the same ship.”

“Wino seashells, that's what we really need,” Brenda Frances mumbled insincerely.

“I'll ask him,” Oliver said. They put their two heads together, Oliver and the cone shell. “He says that cones hardly ever become winos,” Oliver announced then. “He says that they can take it or leave it alone.”

“After we are married you will have to stop this silly talk,” Brenda Frances said. “Where do you get it anyhow?”

“From Shell. I'll tell you something else. The Greek friezes and low reliefs that some students of shells study — they are natural and not carved. And they aren't really Greek things. They're pictures of some off-world things that look kind of Greek. They're not even pictures of people. They're pictures of some kind of seaweed that looks like Earth people. I hope that clears up that mystery.”

“Oliver, I have plans for us,” Brenda Frances said firmly, “and the plans seem very hard to put across to you in words. I have always believed that a half-hour's intimacy is worth more than forever's talk. Come along now. We're alone except for old sea-slob there.”

“I'd better ask my mother first,” Oliver said. “It seems that there is some question about this intimacy bit, a question that they all believed would never arise in my case. I'd better ask her.”

“Your mother is visiting her sister at Peach Beach,” Brenda Frances said. “Your father is fishing at Cat Island. George and Hector and August are all off on sales trips. Mary and Catherine and Helen are all making political appearances somewhere. This is the first time they've all been out of town at once. I came to you so you wouldn't be lonesome.”

“I'm never lonesome with Shell. You think the intimacy thing will be all right, then?”

“I sure do doubt it, but it's worth a try,” Brenda Frances said. “For me, you're the likeliest jackpot in town. Where else would I find such a soft head with so much money attached?”

“We read a seduction scene in a book once,” Oliver said. “It was kind of funny and kind of fun.”

“Who's we?”

“Shell and myself.”

“After we're married, we're sure going to change that ‘we’ stuff,” Brenda Frances said. “But how does Shell read?”

“With his eyes like everyone else. And the annotating crabs correlate the reading for him. He says that seduction scenes are more fun where he comes from. All the seductors gather at the first high tide after the big moon is full. The fellows are on one side of the tidal basin — and then their leader whistles and they put their milt in the tidewater. And the she seashells (Earth usage — they don't call themselves that there), who are on the other side of the tidal basin, put their roe into the water. Then the she seashell leader whistles an answer and that is the seduction. It's better when both moons are still in the sky. At the Sea of Moyle they have two moons.”

“Come along, Oliver,” Brenda Frances said, “and you can whistle if you want to, but that seawash talk has got to stop.” She took big-headed, short-legged Oliver under her arm and went with him to the chamber she had selected as the seduction room. And Shell followed along.

“How does it walk without any legs?” Brenda Frances asked.

“He doesn't walk. He just moves. I'm getting so that I can move that way too.”

“It's not going to get into bed with us, Oliver?”

“Yes, but he says he'll just watch the first time. You don't send him at all.”

“Oh, all right. But I tell you, there's going to be some changes around here after we're married.”

She turned out the lights when she was ready. But they hadn't been in the dark for five seconds when Brenda Frances began to complain.

“Why is the bed so slimy all at once?”

“Shell likes it that way. It reminds him more of the ocean.”

“Ouch! Great crawling crawdads — something is biting me! Are they bugs?”

“No, no — they're the little crabs,” Oliver told her. “But Shell says that they only bite people they don't like.”

“Wow, let me sweep them out of this bed.”

“You can't. They're almost too little to see and they hang on. Besides, they have to be here.”

“Why?”

“They're annotating crabs. They take notes.”

Brenda Frances left the bed and the house in a baffled fury. “Best jackpot in town, hell!” she said. “There are other towns. Somewhere there's another half-brained patsy in a monied family — one that won't bring the whole damned ocean to bed with him.”

It was later learned that Brenda Frances left town in the same fury.

“That was an even less satisfying seduction scene than in that book,” Shell and his crabby minions conveyed. “We do these things so much better on the Sea of Moyle.”

So Oliver preserved his virtue. After all, he was meant for other things.

An off-world person of another great and rich family in the communications field came to call on Mr. Murex at his home.

“We weren't expecting your arrival in quite such manner,” Mr. Murex said. He had no idea of how the other had arrived — he simply was there.

“Oh, I didn't want to wait for a vehicle. They're too slow. I conveyed myself,” the visitor said. They met as tycoon to tycoon. Mr. Murex was very anxious that he and his family should make a good impression on their distinguished visitor. He even thought about concealing Oliver, but that would have been a mistake.

“That is a fine specimen,” the visiting person said. “Fine. He could almost be from back home.”

“He is my son Oliver,” said Mr. Murex, quite pleased.

“And his friend there,” the visitor continued, “I swear that he is from back home.”

“There's a misunderstanding,” Mr. Murex said. “The other one there is a seashell.”

“What is a seashell?” the visitor asked. “Are Earth seas hatched out of shells? How odd. But you are mistaken, person Murex. That is a specimen from back home. Do you have the papers on him?”

“I don't know of any papers. What would such papers indicate?”

“Oh, that you have given fair exchange for the specimen. We wouldn't want an interworld conflict over such a small matter, would we?”

“If you will let me know what this ‘fair exchange’ is — ” Mr. Murex tried to comply.

“Oh, I'll let you know at the time of my leaving,” the visiting tycoon said. “We'll settle on something.” This person was very much up on communications. He engaged Mr. Murex and George, Mary, Hector, Catherine, August, Helen, yes, and Oliver, all in simultaneous conversations on the same subject. And he made simultaneous deals so rapid-fire as to astound all of them. He controlled even more patents than did the Murex family, some of them overlapping. The two tycoons were making non-conflict territory agreements and the visitor was out-shuffling the whole Murex clan by a little bit in these complex arrangements.

“Oh, just let me clean them off there!” Mrs. Murex said once where she saw a splatter of small blotches and dust motes on the table that served both for conference and dinner table — the splatter of little things was mostly about the visitor.

“No, no, leave them,” that person said. “I enjoy their conversation. Really, they could almost be Notarii from my own world.” Things began then to go well in these transactions even for the Murex family, just when they had seemed to be going poorly.

The visitor was handsome in an off-worldly way. He was toothless, but his boney upper and lower beak cut through everything, through the prime steak that seemed too tough to the Murex clan, through the bones, through the plates. “Glazed, baked clay, we use it too. It spices a meal,” the visitor said of the plates as he munched them. “And you have designs and colors on the pieces. We do that sometimes with cookies.”

“They are priceless chinaware,” Mrs. Murex said in a voice that was almost a complaint.

“Yes, priceless, delicious, exquisite,” the visitor said. “Now shall we finalize the contracts and agreements?”

Several waiting stenographers came with their machines. Brenda Frances was not among them — she had left the Murex firm and left town. The stenographers began to take down the contracts and agreements on their dactyl-tactiles.

“And I'll just save time and translation by giving the whole business in my own language to this stenographer from my own world,” the visiting tycoon said.

“Ah, that isn't a stenographer there, however much it may remind you of the stenographers where you come from,” Mr. Murex tried to set a matter straight again. “That is what we call a seashell.”

But the visiting tycoon spoke in his own language to Shell. And Shell whistled. Then whole blotches and clouds of the almost invisible annotating crabs rushed into Shell, ready to work. The visiting tycoon spoke rapidly in off-worldly language, his beak almost touching Shell.

“Ah, the Geography Cone shell — that's what the thing is — is said to be absolutely deadly,” Mr. Murex tried to warn the visitor.

“They only kill people they don't like,” the visitor said and he went on with his business.

The annotating crabs did the paperwork well. Completed contracts and agreements began to roll out of the mantle cavity of Shell. And all the business was finished in one happy glow.

“That is it,” the visiting tycoon said with complete satisfaction after all the papers were mutually signed. With his beak he bit a very small ritual wedge from the cheek of his hostess, Mr. Murex. That was a parting custom where he came from.

“And now ‘fair exchange’ for the specimen from back home,” he said. “I always find these exchanges satisfying and fruitful.”

He had a sack. And he put the short-legged, big-headed Oliver into that sack.

“Oh, that's not fair exchange,” Mr. Murex protested, “I know he looks a little unusual, but that is my son Oliver.”

“He's fair enough exchange,” the visitor said. He didn't wait for a vehicle. They were too slow. He conveyed himself. And he and Oliver were gone.

So all that the Murex family had to remind them of their vanished son and brother was that big seashell, the Geography Cone. Was it really from the world of the visitor? Who knows the true geography of the Geography Cone?

Oliver sat on the shore of the Sea of Moyle in the far, far north. This was not in the cold, far north. It was on a warm and sunny beach in the off-world far north. And Oliver sat there as if he belonged.

There hadn't been any sudden space-change in Oliver. There had been only the slow change through all the years of his life and that was never a great alteration — a great difference hadn't been needed in him.

Oliver was bright and shining, the brightest thing on that sunny morning beach. He had his big head and his little body. He had two shiny black eyes peering out of his mantle cavity. Oliver was very much a seashell now, a special and prized shell. (They didn't use that term there, though. Seashell? Was the Sea of Moyle hatched out of a shell?) Six sharp-eyed children of the dominant local species were going in close skirmish right over that sunny sand and a smaller seventh child trailed them with absent mind and absent eyes. The big moon had already gone down; the little moon still hung low in the sky like a silver coin. And the sun was an overpowering gold.

The sharp-eyed children were looking for bright shore specimens and they were finding them, too. And right ahead of them was that almost legendary prize, a rare Oliver Cone.

Flaming Ducks And Giant Bread

1

This is the year of clod and clown.

This is the year when the sky falls down.

A huge bloody glob fell in front of Valery Mok with a smash and a splash. It was no small thing. It was at least a thousand pounds of flesh: raw, red, bloody flesh.

“And human,” Valery said. “One can always tell human flesh.” She tasted a bit of the blood on her finger. “Type AB,” she said. (Yet there were those who never believed that Valery could identify blood groups by taste.) “All right,” Valery said then, “who's the joker?”

There was no sound or vapor trail overhead. There was no high building near enough to be the source of the big bloody glob, not if it had fallen normally. And there was no near person who was powerful enough to have hurled such a thing. There were people of a sort there, that's true. These people were calling “Happy New Year!” to each other, but they weren't people capable of heaving thousand-pound hunks of flesh about.

It was early morning of the first day of April. And the year was one that was coincident in several numerations.

“It's been many a time since the year began in April,” Valery told the town. “April, the opening, the beginning. But the beginning was tampered with long ago. How could these people know that this was really New Year's? Most of them weren't even born in those old centuries.

“Do any of you know of any giant who has disappeared or been slaughtered?” she asked in a louder voice.

“Not us,” the people said. “We'd slaughter no giants ever. We like them.”

The people formed a mad-eyed crowd of mixed types. They seemed under the influence of something, probably the chorea, for they danced along instead of walking. They were good people. One of them was dressed as St. Vitus, and several of them were holy.

“If no giants, then what is new, kids?” Valery asked them.

“There's a lady at the lying-in shop who has just given birth to thirteen children,” one of the mad-eyed young women said, “and she's not near finished with it. They say that it looks as though she could go on all day without stopping. They're not very big children yet.”

“That's nice,” Valery said.

“The oldest ones of the children are already walking and talking,” another of the young women said.

“That seems very early,” Valery mumbled. “Even after a full day it would seem a little early.” Valery didn't know much about children.

She left the dancing people. She left the bloody hunk of flesh, though she was still puzzled by it. She continued on her way toward the Institute for Impure Science. She was a member of the Institute, and there was an early morning meeting called by the director, Gregory Smirnov.

Valery's unoutstanding husband Charles Cogsworth was likewise approaching the Institute, but on a street parallel to that taken by Valery. Charles would not walk with his wife Valery in the mornings. There were always early morning kids abroad, and kids are often kidders.

“Hey, mister, walk your dog for you!” they'd offer. Well, Valery was just unkempt enough in the mornings to be referred to as a dog. Such offers amused Valery, but they embarrassed Charles, so they always walked separately. This morning there was a variant, however.

“Hey, mister, walk your cow?” one of the morning kids offered.

“Holy cow!” another kid whistled with amazement.

“Clank, clank,” went a sound somewhere behind Charles.

“Now that is unfair,” Charles protested. “My wife has not put on that much weight. Besides, she isn't even walking on this street.”

“I wasn't talking about your wife,” the kid said. “I was talking about the cow.”

“Clank, clank,” went the cowbell. “Can you tell me the way to the Cow Palace?” the cow asked, or else she didn't: this point remains in dispute. She was a big black-and-white cow, a Holstein or Dutch Belted or some such, and she had been following Charles.

“Veer off to the left,” Charles said in common politeness, “till you come to a street called Drovers' Road. Follow Drovers' Road to the right till you come to the Cow Palace. It's about a mile and a half.”

“Clank, clank,” went the cowbell as the cow took the side street to the left. Cogsworth was not absolutely certain that the cow had spoken to him in words, but he had understood her meaning, and she had understood his. She must have been a simple-minded creature, in any case. The Cow Palace was a slaughterhouse, and no good could come to her there.

Glasser also was going to the Institute. He had to go several blocks out of his way. There was a steamship in the middle of Fourteenth Street; it had the whole thoroughfare blocked. And there was not near enough water to float it, though it had rained a bit during the night.

And Aloysius Shiplap was going to the Institute for Impure Science. He was probably the most impure of all the scientists who belonged to the Institute. Aloysius looked back over his shoulder as he walked. “I wonder what's keeping that fellow?” he asked. He went another two blocks. “He's late,” Aloysius declared, “but there's nothing I can do about it.”

Aloysius was almost to the front door of the ramshackle Institute when a flaming duck plunged out of the smoking sky and smashed itself dead on the stones at his feet.

“He was more than a minute late,” Aloysius said.

And then they were met in formal meeting and were in the middle of words. Gregory Smirnov, the director of the Institute, was outlining a study, or a notion, or a subject to be investigated. It really didn't seem important enough for the calling of an early morning meeting, but most of their studies at the Institute had had such very small and notional beginnings.

“Clock-keeping is a murderous business,” Director Smirnov was saying. “However it is arranged and corrected, the annalist will find that he has burned some of his years behind him.”

“And the annalist's analyst may find that his ears are burning, as well as his years,” Valery gibed as she shuffled her cards. “Really, do you believe there is as much insanity among any tradesmen as historians?” Valery and Aloysius Shiplap and two of Epikt's extensions were playing Pape Jaune, the old French card game (the game was named Scrat in fourteenth-century Scotland).

Those extensions of Epikt: one of them looked like Johnny Greeneyes the cosmic gambler to a pip; the other was got up as the Ancient Scribe with black skullcap, flowing white beard, and goose-quill pen behind one ear.

“Have you been losing some years, Gregory?” Aloysius asked the director. “I believe that I have lost one or two myself along the way.”

“Someone has been careless with the years,” Gregory said. “We know that either four or six years have been lost out of the count since the beginning of what common people call the Common Era. Thus, the birth of Our Lord was probably in 4 bc, possibly in 6 bc. Yet it was not just a mistake in the calculations. These missing years were not missing at all. Astronomical backtracking tells us that they really happened, even if they were somehow left out of the numbering, even if the annalists have left them blank of any happenings, even if we are not sure just which years they were, not sure just where their location was in time or space.”

“Can't Epikt discover these things?” Charles Cogsworth asked. “Why do we keep the scatterbrained machine if he can't find out things like that?”

“Or play cards either,” Valery said. The Johnny Greeneyes extension of Epikt looked pained at this gibe. After all, he had created himself to look like a gambler and a card shark, and he was plugged into the most brainy and most rational calculator in the universe. But he wasn't doing very good at the Pape Jaune game: there are unbrainy and unrational elements to Pape Jaune; it is one of the few games at which humans can beat intelligent machines.

“Yes, I trust that Epikt will be able to find the answers,” Gregory said, “with the help of all of us. Our project, though, will be research on one year that is included in the numbering, and yet we must record it rationally as the Year That Did Not Happen. We will call it the Year of the Double Bogie or the Year of the Double Fool; or the Year of the Double Joker. I also find the name the Year of the Yellow Joker pushing itself into my mind; likewise, the Year of the Yellow Dwarf. There is superstition involved in contemporary attempts to leave it out of the counting, and I believe that it was left out for several decades. For a parallel, you will recall that this great Institute Building does not have a thirteenth floor.”

“No. It has a cellar, then two stories, then an attic,” Valery said. “It doesn't have any thirteenth floor, and I am sure that superstition is the cause of its not having one.”

“Let's consider a taller building then,” Director Gregory said, “one that possibly has twenty floors, but with the thirteenth floor left out of the numbering. Now then, a curious thing happens, hypothetically of course, since this is a hypothetical building. It is discovered one day that it does have a thirteenth story after all, one not built by the builders, one that is only entered by accident, one that is a crazy jumble of insane things and happenings, one that isn't measurable in normal space. And yet this thirteenth level is discovered again and again. It is occupied by odd tenants who pay rent irregularly and in most odd specie. It is used. And finally this story is restored to the numbering by the building owners, even though it cannot always be found. Such is the year which we will now make the subject of our study.”

Valery drew the Queen of Wands card. It winked at her. The face of that queen looked somehow familiar.

“Who does she look like?” Valery asked, showing the card to Aloysius Shiplap.

“She looks like you,” Aloysius said. “I hadn't noticed that before.” Knowing that Valery held the Queen of Wands, Aloysius played the Judgment card. This, of course, is not the same as the Final Judgment card (many persons do not play much Pape Jaune and so may not be clear on this subject). “Scrat,” Aloysius called. He had won that merlon and so was ahead in the game.

“What is the number of the doubtful year, Gregory?” Glasser asked, “and what are some of the insane things and happenings that clutter the rooms of it?”

“It's hard to give a direct answer to any thing about it,” Gregory said. “It has to be slipped up on. Epikt has been receiving a few hints accidentally. There is great subliminal folk interest in this doubtful year and considerable folk memory of it. There are many references to it now that are appearing in selected copies of old books, references that were not to be found in them when the old books were first printed. Thus, there is preternatural tampering. Well, we can do preternatural tampering ourselves. Here is a communication from a certain Polydore Smith:

“ ‘Epikt, are you aware that in the year 1313 something happened to the Devil? He was compelled, by St. Michael and St. George and for a joke, to wear motley or clown suit for one entire year. This was frustration and humiliation to him. He found the propagation of all conventional evil impossible to him when he was dressed in that thing. He did, however, effect one year full of the most outrageous pseudo-evil ever. That whole year is absolutely incredible and is best forgotten: that is why I thought you might want to remember it and reconstruct it. The year was a lustrum year, not a calendar year. Well, down the hatch, kid! Oh, I forgot; you haven't any hatch.’ ”

“Odd letter,” said Charles Cogsworth. “And just what is a lustrum year?”

“The year from one Tom Fool's Day to the next,” Gregory said.

Aloysius had just drawn the Tom Fool card. This is not the same as the Fool card (many persons do not play enough Pape Jaune to know this). The Tom Fool was in motley, but he sure wasn't in it willingly. There was something world-deforming, world-splitting in the sulfurous fury of the Tom Fool in the year of his shame. He was a card almost too hot to handle. Yes, he was the Devil in bonds worse than chains, and he would force the incongruity of his position onto the world and rub the world's face in it. Aloysius had never noticed the intensity of the Tom Fool card before, had never noticed that Tom Fool was the Devil in an awkward predicament. (There is a regular Devil card in the Pape Jaune pack, but that shows a Devil who is rather pleased with himself.)

“Here's another one that Epikt received from an uncertified person,” Gregory said. “It's signed Damn or Dumb, an odd name in either case. It was mailed from the West or Improbable Coast of Florida. (The best of belief today is that Florida never had a West Coast.)

“ ‘Epikt, this is from Guttmacher's Pregnancy and Birth: “In 1313 Lady Margaret, Countess of Hagenau, was laid in with three hundred and sixty-five children, one hundred and eighty-two females, all baptized Elizabeth by the bishop of Utrecht, one hundred eighty-two males, all baptized John, and one ‘scrat’ (hermaphrodite), who remained unnamed and unbaptized. I thought you might be able to do something with the above.’ ”

“What in blue hell would I do with three hundred and sixty-five children and me a bachelor?” the Johnny Greeneyes Epikt extension growled. This extension had just put down the Scrat card itself and he recognized it. “Unbaptized maybe,” the extension said, “but it took a name to itself. It walked and talked the day it was born, and it reigned in Rome for one year.”

“The use of the word ‘scrat’ points out loud to eighteenth-century Oxford,” Glasser informed them. “It was something of a century of jokers in that place then, and many of their spoofs were intruded into serious books.”

“Here's another one,” Gregory said. “It also is from an uncertified person, a Gargo Repsky (why do all these names sound so Biercean?), and it reads:

“ ‘Epikt, if you have ever heard of me, you have heard of me as the Mad Professor. But to the point of information. In certain fourteenth-century paintings there is an intermediate layer that is unaccountable; it is a sort of reverse burlesque of the painting itself. But the fundamental layer of the painting and the surface layer are valid and rational, and they are identical. This tricky intermediate layer can only be picked up by middle infrared light of about one hundred and thirty thousand angstroms, the so-called fools' frequency. It really seems as if the old paint of the picture had been split and another picture accomplished between. These ghost or joker pictures are very salty burlesques, but they can be seen but once. After being brought out by the fools'-frequency light, they fade away forever, and the painting becomes a single-layer thing. Fortunately I have been able to get good photographs of a number of these out-of-place paintings.

“ ‘And in certain statuary of the same fourteenth century, there may be seen smaller contrary forms within the solid true forms. The marble sometimes becomes transparent to reveal these inner carvings or moldings. The objects move, they writhe, they seem alive, and they are horribly funny (I choose my words carefully here). Then the marble will opaque itself again and the writhing inner images will vanish.

“ ‘I have dated these inner images. They were not carved or cut. They were molded by hand in a somehow softened marble. They were molded by the hands of lepers, and the flaked-off flesh of the molders allows me to get a carbon date on them. All were done in the year 1313, the lustrum year, not the calendar year.’ ”

“Epikt has guys write to him who are nearly as far off as some of the guys who write to me,” Valery said.

There had been for some time now a heavy thumping on the roof of the Institute Building and in the roads outside. It was a rainfall of flaming ducks. They were dangerous: the roof of the Institute building wasn't in very good shape anyhow.

“Here's another one,” Director Gregory Smirnov was saying. “It's to Epikt and it's from a certain Father Gassalasca Jape. It goes:

“ ‘Epikt, do you know that in the year 1313 there was a complete turnaround in the empire city of the world, Roma in Italia? This turnaround was for one year. Even the name of the city was turned around and was spelled Amor, or love, for that year. It was a fishy kind of love, though, and with a Babylonian sort of fishiness. The falsified view of the city was true for that one year, and it was the Whore of Babylon who sat on the seven hills. This was the mystery woman whose roots go down to Hell, and part of the mystery about her was that she was not really a woman. But she did rule in Roma; she did set up a court of love, of false love, in that city that was the city of the world. Epikt, I wonder if you could bring your great mechanical and animal and ghostly talents to bear on this, to draw back the veil from the mystery? The effect of it still lingers in the world as a miasma. It must be dispelled.’ ”

“We do get some odd correspondence,” said the Epikt extension that was got up as the Ancient Scribe. “Are you running them through our main brain, Gregory?” This Epikt extension had just drawn the Whore of Babylon card and was studying it with some wonder. No, she was not quite a woman, not as she on the Queen of Cups card was, not as she on the La Grande Mère card was.

“Oh yes, we're running them through your main brain, Epikt,” Director Gregory said.

(For those who came in late, Epikt, or Epiktistes, was a Ktistec machine, the most marvelous one in the world, the only one in the world so far. The Institute for Impure Science was mainly built around the stupendous mechanical brain of Epikt, the many thousands of cubic meters of it. For convenience's sake, Epikt usually maintained a few mobile extensions of himself, being sessile in the main part of his apparatus. These mobiles might be in any form from the clownish human to the hangdog canine. They could talk and get about; they could carry on their functions; they were droll, and sometimes they seemed a little stupid. Well, which of us does not?)

“There is a warning that should be given here,” Director Gregory Smirnov was saying. “We must recognize that this year which we are going to study is a recompensing year, a left-handed year (a sinister year in the real sense of the word), a contorted year. It is my own belief that one cannot enter a contorted year, even vicariously and experimentally, without himself becoming contorted.”

“With us, who can tell?” Valery asked. That was true. They all had that look about them as if their faces and bodies had, just for a moment, melted like wax and then set again. They of the Institute had always had a little or a lot of that look; this day they had it a lot.

“I win!” Valery cried triumphantly, and she played the Wheel of Fortune card resoundingly. The wheel on the picture card was actually turning, and this was more than optical illusion. When it came to rest, the pointer of the fortune wheel pointed to the name Valery (nobody had noticed before that the names of all of them were printed fine on that card), so Valery had won.

“I will have to discover the old rules and find out how this game was really played,” Aloysius Shiplap said with a touch of sourness. “The game seems to make up its own rules as it goes along.”

“The old rules say that I am always supposed to win,” Valery declared, “and that is the way it is really played.” She overturned the card table, and it was like clattering thunder. It was a very heavy table, not really a card table at all. None of the rest of them except the gigantic Director Gregory would have been able to overturn that weighty thing. The Johnny Greeneyes extension of Epikt gathered up the valuable pack of Pape Jaune cards. Pape Jaune, the Yellow Joker or the Yellow Dwarf, but who was Pape Jaune really?

“It's too nice a day to be inside this stinking Institute,” Valery announced. “Oh, I'm sorry, Epikt! That's almost the same as saying that it's too nice a day to be inside that big stinking brain of yours, and really I like your big stinking brain. But let's be outside for a while.” And they burst out like a cloud of April flies. (Some of the rare April flies are people-sized; do not forget that.)

“I wonder if the record-setting lady in the lying-in shop has had her scrat yet?” Valery asked the world.

“I'll go see,” said the Ancient Scribe extension of Epikt.

“Oh, springtime, springtime!” Valery cried, catching hold of both Aloysius Shiplap and her own unoutstanding husband Charles Cogsworth. “Oh, to be young and foolish in the springtime! I wish that it might last all the year.”

“Of course it will,” Aloysius said. “I thought you knew that.”

And Gregory and Glasser walked on that unkempt ridge that rises above the Institute, and talked about various business while the flaming ducks still pelted down.

“What they are,” said Gregory, “is pieces of the sky. They break off and fall and catch fire. Ultimately the sky is made up entirely of ducks, though scripture mistranslates them as quails. It is because of this composition that we often hear the term ‘duck sky.’ ”

“I sure never heard such a term,” Glasser said.

“But scripture does not mistranslate,” the Johnny Greeneyes extension of Epikt said. “Quails they are, the quails of the flesh-pots. Huge, it's true, but quails. We have the holy words for evidence: ‘We loathe our manna, and we long for quails.’ ”

“That's Dryden. He's not scripture,” Gregory admonished.

“He is to me,” the Epikt extension said, “and I speak ex cerebro, from the brain itself.” (But Epikt had, from the human viewpoint, odd literary tastes.)

“Everybody accepts the blasted burning birds,” Glasser said querulously. “Nobody questions them at all today. But I never saw such a thing as this shower of flaming ducks in all my life. What can possibly cause such a phenomenon?”

“Ah, the fellows flew too close to the sun,” Director Gregory explained it.

2

This is the year on the end of the rope.

This is the year when Joan was Pope.

“ ‘Clement V was pope from 1305 to 1314,’ ” Gregory read from a tape spewing out from a section of Epikt's brain, from the correlating section.” ‘And he was pope in Avignon, not in Rome. There was no pope in Rome in those years.’ ”

“And John XXII did not become pope till the year 1316,” came another tape from another section of Epikt's brain, from the explicatory section.

“He'd have been three years old then,” Valery mumbled. “So he matured quite early, but not as early as some members of his family did.”

“Project the whole disputed year of 1313, Epikt,” Director Gregory ordered.

“Impossible,” the machine groaned from its depths. “You don't know what you're asking.”

“Project it in the context of only one city then, the town of Amor which had been and would be Roma,” Director Gregory said.

“Oh, all right,” the machine Epikt agreed glumly. “It will be sketchy, though, and not from any fault of mine. There is something inherently sketchy about the persons and events themselves. Whether they were real or not, the things that happened didn't have much depth to them.”

This is Epikt's account of the disputed year in the context of the city of Amor.

The year itself was subjectively much longer than one year. The subjective sun rose and set several thousands of times during that compensating year. Indeed, though it was all one unmomentous moment, it was half-a-dozen decades on its own, less real level. Yet it can be measured, from one All Fool's Day to the next, and it takes the place of only one objective year.

Of the ruler in Amor during the disputed year, there was less than met the eye. She was small; she was insignificant. She warred against significance and meaning.

Joan Hedge-Green was born on All Fool's Day (sometimes called New Year Day) of the year 1313. She was but one of an exceptionally large birthing. She was not baptized, although an attempt was made. The water boiled or vaporized away on her approach, and the salt turned to putrid flame: thereafter she was not touched by either salt or water in all her short life. Her brothers at the same birthing had all been baptized John, and she took for herself the equivalent name Joan. She had nothing whatever to do with her sisters of the birthing.

Though she was grammatically feminine, she was a perfect hermaphrodite, a jape, a scrat. She was sometimes called the Pape Jape or the dwarfish jape on account of her small stature. She had deformities, but their nature is not known. She walked and talked on the day of her birth, but in no other way was she remarkable.

She left her hometown on the afternoon of her birth. She left by diabolical conveyance or vehicle, the black-wing express over the randy roads of the low sky. By one account she went to Roma in Italy. By another, she went to the town of Amor, “between the Germanies and Spain.” By a third account, the two towns were the same. She went there, and she set up an antirule or an antireign.

But she did set up court there. She issued coin of the metal known as fool's gold. The sovereign coin was the sannio, and the system was tredecimal (to the base thirteen).

Joan's forecourt was known as the Fleshpots of Egypt. (The Egyptian was but one of the motifs of the court; there was also the Babylonian and the Phoenician and others.) She fed her folk on fowl flesh; this was the roasted flesh of giant quail (all of them capons) that fell flaming from the low sky. She fed them on false-fish from that part of her court called the Rivers of Babylon. She fed them on a cheese so rank that it stood by itself, and came on command. She fed them on holy cow; and on unborn calves and colts, on unborn lambs and kids, on unborn cubs and children, all of which were roasted in that part of her court called the Ovens of Moloch.

She gave her folk break-bone bread, and maid bread, and giant bread, and love loaf. She gave them wasp honey and hornet honey. She gave them blood pudding and offal (“Love each other and eat offal” was one of her high mottos) and bad wine. A visitor in Amor Town that year (there was no such town in any other year) reported that most of the courtiers did know the difference between good wine and bad wine, and that they preferred the bad. Joan gave her people sulfur for condiment, salt being forbidden to them. She gave them heifer milk.

And Joan provided her people with hemp and with happy-poppy, with gobbling mushrooms and with ragged dream-weeds, with all the unreality seeds and substances and oils, with the aromatic and reason-wrenching plant known as smoke-poke the anti-incense; and the anti-incense raised its smoke not to heaven but to the low sky. These things were dispensed in that part of Joan's court known as the Ships of Tarshish.

The visitor to Amor, the one just mentioned, had asked several of the courtiers, “Do any of you know of any giant nearby who has disappeared or been slaughtered?”

“Yes, there was one,” the courtiers told him. “Our Papess Joan had him blown up with the new blowup powder from China. There may have been others, but now there will be no more giants. Pieces of them will smash down from the low sky whenever the weather is right. These are what we call giant bread.”

So the courtiers had plenty to eat and drink and smoke and inject. They had more than enough, for they finished nothing at all. They were grinning, nervous, ecstatic, jerky courtiers, robust of ear, but somewhat deficient in all other parts.

The city of Amor was built lightly, loosely, insubstantially, unpatterned and unstructured. It had solved the cursed necessity of having buildings and such materialities, for its buildings were very short on material. They were false-front and false-middle erections. The buildings were built of cardboard.

(“But they didn't have cardboard then,” the avid annalist said. Had they not? Disputed years are not in sequence. They have what they have. But no, the annalist was correct. They didn't have cardboard in Amor.)

The buildings, the whole town, was built of bark and willow withies. They were tricky, and they were almost grand. It was an architecture almost without weight. White and gray clay was smeared on the bark, and behold! there was the appearance of regal marble. All were gilt with fool's gold in whorled design, and at the same time all were in motley. Yes, the buildings, the buildings were in clown-suit getup of all light colors, with their own rakish royalty about them, and their precociousness. There was no maturity about them: they did not desire maturity. And at the same time there was nothing of the childlike: they sure did not desire children. There was the taut interruption, the jerk back from the momentous. (“That no thing come to term!” was another of the high Amor mottos.)

And many of the buildings were no more than burlap cloth new out of China (so many things were new out of China, the feeble tea, the sleepy poppy, the tuneless music, the lack of giants) and tent poles. But these buildings showed their own solidity without weight (the sleepy poppy was partly responsible for their showing of solidity), and their own dazzle. In the presence of this dazzle, burlap is almost sunshine-color, it is almost gold, almost yellow, almost rich brown; and it is made out of the holy hemp and the unholy jape-jute.

These near-weightless buildings were peculiar in their horned domes, in their toadstool towers, in their lacelike pillars. Burlap shapes much more easily than stone, though its strength is less.

The buildings would have blown down in a good wind, but for the long, disputed year there was no wind at all, no hint of a storm, not even a breeze.

It's true that in one region there was a semblance of a breeze now and then, and little bells (like sheep bells or goat bells) seemed to tinkle in this breeze. But it was all masquerade. Close examination would have shown that each bell was shaken by a small worm to cause the tinkling. They were wooly worms, caterpillars really. And a very close examination would have revealed that each of these caterpillars had its head notched in an inhibiting incision: the thing would never come to term; it would never be more than a caterpillar.

And also there was something wrong with the tinkling of the small bells. Fine examination would have shown that each of them was cracked, as was their sound. In this region also there were trees with leaves too green, and meadow flowers with blooms too yellow and too red. There was sodded grass that was not true grass. There was a rank goatishness over everything, but it was not the whiff of honest goat. This false breeze and false greenery were in the region of the court that was called the Groves of Arcady.

St. Peter's looked distorted and deformed. But St. Peter's was not built yet? It may not have been, as you know it; but it was built of bark and burlap and lashed poles. It was a burlesque of what it later became. There is no law that a burlesque of a thing may not appear before the thing itself.

The afore-cited traveler to Amor in the disputed year has written that the tongue of the people was langue d'oc and that the ears of the people were asses' ears. Others have said that the ears more resembled goats' ears. The people could waggle their strange ears, and many had painted them motley colors, one yellow and one red. But there was nothing artificial about the strangely mutated ears. They were well rooted, and they were robust, the only robust things about those folk. And they had to be. The noise there was loud. Even the great mutated ears often bled bright red blood from the overpowering sound. And the sense of balance which lives in the inner ear was often destroyed. This accounts for much of the eccentricity of the chorea or St. Vitus dancers. They were the wobblies. The shattered and shattering noises also deformed other wavicles: those of light (for they made all colors into a crooked dazzle, and they manufactured colors where there could not be colors); the olfactory wavicles, so that the cloying bloodiness of giant bread, the skyscorching feather smell of flaming ducks or quail, the burning pine knots of the steamboats, the rotten-roses floweriness of the court were all blended into a tall symphony of smell; the radio wavicles that mutated till they brought programs from the distant past (“This is station ALEX, Alexandria, Egypt, bringing you the Year One Wonders”) and from the distant future (“Station KVOO, Bristow, Oklahoma, bringing a program sponsored by Johnny Horany the Hamburger King”). But it was the sound wavicles that predominated, that had made the ears become the highlights of the heads.

There was amplification for the electrical guitars and other instruments. This amplification had been made possible by the insoluble genius of Sparky McCarky. That wandering man, the Unholy Fool of the Hebrides, had brought, in jugs, from his native Benbecula Island, a quantity of the spectacular lightning that nests in the crags there. He had brought this jugged lightning to Amor Town; he had installed plug-ins where it might be tapped, and so his lightning had been turned into amplified sound.

The music and the lyrics weren't much. One couldn't hear them for the sound. There was a sort of projection in midair of the musical scores and the words of the lyrics. Some say that they were projected as on a visual screen; others say that it was a multimedia screen. Some of those poets weren't bad. Dante was there for part of the year. Others of the great ones were there for a while, but finally the bad poets drove out the good ones.

In one central part of Amor Town, the sound reached such a strength that it sustained itself thereafter. When hands were removed from the instruments, the instruments still dinned on. When singers left, their voices remained. There was no stopping them. And when, beyond this noisy centrality, in the other fun spots — The Gory Ox, The Calamity Howl, The Whoop Coop, The Gaiety Gate (where Gaiety Unrestrained sang with her sinewy voice) — the sound died away during the rare sleeping hours, that sound could be “lighted” again at the great, self-sustaining noise center, and it could be carried on a vibrating string to any of those bistros, there to rekindle the dead sound.

The technology of Amor Town in the disputed year was anachronistic and atrocious. There were the steamboats which could not have been if that were a proper sequence year. But the steamboats were there and, especially in the mornings, were always blocking dry and rubbled streets. It is believed that they steamed out on the morning dew and were stranded when the dew dispersed. The steamboats, old sternwheelers or sidewheelers, had names like Hierophant's Show Boat, April Queen, Joanie's Show Boat (the show girls on that one were named Joanie, Janie, Jeanie, Junie, Johnny, and Ginny), The Big Casino, Fruity-Tootie's Show Boat, and Five Card Charley's River Rag-Tag. It seemed that these steamboats properly belonged to some other place and time (improperly, all places and times belonged to Amor Town in the disputed year).

And then there were the automobiles (if you will permit our coining an illegitimate word from one Greek and one Latin root). These were machines: they ran on wheels and were powered by smoke. They were also called the Clown Cars, and they ran around on the green grass of Love Plaza. They ran erratically, in circles and in loops. They exploded so as to shake the whole town. They buckled in the middle and left droppings, sometimes a pile of clowns who untangled themselves and ran in pursuit of their vehicles, sometimes a pile of camel excrement steaming and fragrant, sometimes a roaring lion who soon burst into flames, showing himself to be only a paper lion. Sometimes the clown cars reared up on their hind wheels and honked terrifying horns.

But, besides the steamboats and the clown cars, there wasn't much real technology in Amor Town.

(Here a tambour makes drumming sounds.)

I love with every orifice,

I love each dampish channel red,

I love all flesh alive and dead,

I love the bottomless abyss.

 — Joan Hedge-Green (Papess at Amor)

(Here the drumhead of the tambour splits.)

(Here a ram's horn sounds.)

Nor guessed the situation bit,

Nor found the Lord so dull a lover,

Nor used the love-as-catchword kit

A multitude of sins to cover.

 — Archipelago

(Here the ram's horn cracks.)

(Here a percussion triangle rings “ting, ting.”)

The eternal triangle

 — Anon., 1907

(Here the broken triangle sounds “tunk, tunk.”)

(Here a postboy's horn blows three notes.)

Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end.

 — Chesterton

(Here the postboy's horn blows three more notes, but far away.)

Love was the theme of Amor Town, and the triangle was the symbol and shape of that contingent society; the triangle, and its solid form, the tetrahedron. The sound of it was triangular, the groupings were triangular, and its prismatic light was triangular. Joan Hedge-Green herself formed an immediate love triangle with her two lovers, the Clown-Devil and the Maid of Wands. (“Glory, love, and love some more for Babylonian Jane,” as Rudyard said, but not quite.)

Every person in Amor Town was a ravening lover. (“So I move mountains and I love them not, then I am nothing,” as Paul said, but not exactly.) Each lover had its own Ares and its own Aphrodite, and each was by turns Ares and Aphrodite to others. This was the triangle repeated over and over again in the love plane, the interlocking loving that is not accountable ever. (“Blessed be that love that shatters all its offspring on the stones,” as the Psalmist said, but not precisely.) But the plane does not go up far enough, and it sure does not go down far enough.

But, in addition, each lover had its masked lover or Hermes. This additional masked lover placed each lover in three love planes instead of one. This worked to construct the love pyramid, or love in depth. It was a nesting, close-fitting form, and it multiplied endlessly. It was the most simple crystal possible, and it propagated itself forever. It filled, or would fill, or might fill all the worlds and all the universes. (“And, for your love of love, lead apes in hell,” so Will the Bard said, or almost said.) (“I love the jupe, I love the jape, I love the Tartarusian ape,” so Joan of Amor said.)

This was the inward-turning construct that had no limits, and it had very few needs beyond itself. There was food in the Fleshpots of Egypt district of the town; there was other food in the Rivers of Babylon district; and there was very strong food in the Ovens of Moloch purlieu.

There were all the turn-on and plug-in devices in the Ships of Tarshish neighborhood. There were all attractive falsities in that barrio named the Groves of Arcady. There was music, and when the music failed, there was noise that failed not forever. Municipal arrangements were excellent. Law had been dissolved in love. (“Love, and let the law go hang,” as Austen said, or very nearly said.) The garbage collectors had been dismissed as being unneeded (if you love it, it isn't garbage). The police had been disbanded. The firemen had been dismissed (if it burns, it is love, and should not be quenched). There were no magistrates; there were no officials at all; there was no thought for the morrow. There was the year that could not end, for it was self-contained and inward-turned. There was love and love alone, and it went on and on and on.

(“It's the longest year I ever did see!” Valery Mok, observing from another place and time, swore. “There has to be an end to it.” Valery drew the Shining Man card. She was not doing badly, but she was disgusted.)

The thing wrong with perfection is not that it repeats itself, but that it stands still in its first instance and freezes time. The thing wrong with love is that the false will so often supersede the true. The thing wrong with that town was that it was introverted and backwards: there are those who will live in it forever, but there are also those who will break out of it. The thing wrong with that year was that it began to come apart before the first week of June.

(“What, what, why are they climbing over the walls to get out of that town?” Charles Cogsworth asked in amazement. “Malcontents,” Director Gregory Smirnov said. “There are always some. Continue with it, Epikt.”

“Might I not go on automatic?” Epikt asked from the great department of him that was under their feet. “And I could leave a couple of my extensions to monitor the thing.” Not those two extensions, though: the Johnny Greeneyes extension was quickly over the hill and far away. The Ancient Scribe extension became so inconspicuous that he was invisible.)

3

That was the year that lost its luck.

That was the year of the flaming duck.

And then there was a sort of explanation that Epikt dredged up from the depths of his data banks: “Satan, in his person of Lucifer, was the first of the Flaming Ducks, and he is the father of them to this day.”

The author of that is unknown except to Epikt. But the flaming ducks continued to rain down on the Institute Building and on the ridge above and beyond. You got tired of those ducks, but these were poverty days with the Institute and its members. The members were eating a hard-times lunch of bloody giant bread and flamed duck.

“I hear there will be a new giant moving into the neighborhood,” Gregory said.

“Oh, that's good,” Valery beamed. “It made me feel pretty uneasy to be all out of giants.”

“I just don't know what causes a lustrum year,” Glasser said crankily.

“I believe they happen because people are ordinarily so good that provision must be made in some place apart for even the shadow of evil that is in them,” Valery said happily. “So that toy evil must be vented in a toy year. That's all there is to it.”

“I wonder when there will be another lustrum year?” Aloysius Shiplap asked, somewhat worried.

“Not right away, I don't believe,” Director Gregory Smirnov assured them all. “None of the signs of it are present. And the people, while very good in these last few decades, are not quite good enough that it spills over, not so overpoweringly good as to require being counteracted by a toy evil in another time and place.

“Aw, feather dusters!” Gregory swore suddenly. “I'm getting mighty tired of eating flaming duck. And it doesn't help as much as it did to call it quail or swan.”

“We must all be careful not to be too good, lest we precipitate the thing,” Valery warned. “If only we could have salt with the damned duck! But the doctors all say that we should forego salt in favor of sulfur. Here, Greg, I'll make you a good hard-times sandwich, break-bone bread, holy cow, flamed — ah — grackle, blood pudding, offal — no, really, they say it's good for you — yellow sulfur, and that good new Moloch mustard. Here, eat it hot, Greg, eat it hot.”

“Oh, all right,” Director Gregory Smirnov said glumly.

The stranded riverboat was hooting mournfully over on Fourteenth Street. It would have to wait many hours yet before being able to float on the morning dew. And the dew was never near as drenching as it should have been. In one week, the steamboat had been able to move only two and one-half blocks on the morning dews: no more than eighty yards a day.

There were many people dancing the chorea in the streets. One of them was dressed as St. Vitus, and several of them were holy. And always there was the towering noise behind it all, a noise that had once been music.

There were a few discouraged-looking holy cows, inquiring of people (somehow or other) the way to the Cow Palace. There was a person who said that he was the son of the Pied Piper. He was piping the children into following him, and they were being drowned in the reservoir.

There was a newly-appeared, sad-looking person in motley or clown suit. He had mean-looking mustaches; he had a little spike beard; he had red-rimmed eyes. He was unkempt. He looked like the Devil.

The children of the large birthing of the week before (they who had walked and talked on the day of their birth) had now taken over most of the city offices. And there was one of them in particular — ah, well, never mind, there is one like that in every large birthing.

There had been further huge, bloody globs falling from the low sky. It was believed, however, that they were the last remnants of some old giant, that they were not from the new giant who had not indeed arrived yet.

“Scrat!” cried Valery as she played the Strange Lover card.

And still there were the flaming ducks, all of them capons, stenchy and outrageous, thudding, thudding, thudding to earth day and night. One does get tired of burnt duck.

Author's Commentary

Rivers Of Damascus

The caravan clowns came to the town about four times a year, usually in the service of a caravan, sometimes not. They came now to the town, the oldest town in the world, out of service and with no clear purpose. They were strictly on a bold-bashful skylark. There were a few less than a hundred of them. They were slight, smiling, shy desert Arabs. The guards of the city, though they usually treated the clowns with a lowering sort of theatrical harshness, really liked them — but especially they liked to devil them.

The desert gamins, first leaving long and rickety constructs of some sort at a little distance on the sand, came into the city by the east gate, whence the street named Straight (the Latins called it Via Recta and the Arabs Souk-el-Taouil) runs west to the heart of the city. They came in one by one, sideways, as though it were a narrow way, though the gate was high, wide, and completely open. This was in the month of March of the Year of Restored Salvation 635.

“Thieves, coney-eaters, camel-suckers, trench-straddlers, good-for-nothings — what do you want in our town?” several of the tall town guards demanded, and they clapped the slight desert youths roughly on the shoulders. The shortest of the guards was a head and a hand taller than the tallest of the Arabs.

“Bread, we want bread,” one of the Arabs, less bashful than the others, announced. The desert Arabs did not have bread of their own. They ate camel cheese and small animals that they killed in the sand and rocks. They ate wild figs or cultivated apricots and pomegranates and almonds when they could steal them. But bread they ate only when kind persons gave it to them. And now several of the kind (though thunderously threatening) guards bought hot bread from the bread booths and gave it to the Arabs. They ate it rapidly, almost furtively, but with real pleasure. All of them except one.

“I will not eat your bread,” said Khalid ibn-al-Walid. “It isn't right that I should eat your bread and then come back and cut the throats of all of you who do not kneel and beg for mercy.”

“Ah, squalid Khalid Walid, will you cut our throats?” one of the big town guards asked.

“Aye,” Khalid said nervously and looked around to be sure that his own jinni or angel did not hear him say such a thing. “I must cut the throats of all of you who will not submit. I will not like it any more than you will, but it is one of the things I must do.”

“With that little sword you will cut our throats?” the guard asked. “Let me see that wonderful little throat-cutter you have there.”

Khalid handed his sword up to the high hand of the tall guard. The guard snapped it in two with his fingers and gave the pieces back to the slight Arab. Khalid's face broke and he began to cry.

The other Arabs ate the wonderful bread that was given to them. They ate apricots and roasted meat. They talked with the town people and the town guards, for the chattering Arabs (after they had passed the moments of their shyness) were always full of news. The Arabs were called desert scrolls. They drank the bright wine that the people gave them. All the Arabs did these things except Khalid, who refused to eat or drink, though he had always loved the wine of this place. Then it was time for the Arabs to go, and they knotted about the east gate. Khalid still snuffled over the loss of his sword.

Several of the guards held quiet conference. Then one of the guards, the one who had broken the sword in his fingers, went and brought back a real Damascus sword out of his generosity: for this was in Damascus, the oldest town in the world, and the Arabs called it Dimisk es-Sham. The man gave the wonderful sword to Khalid (it was not ornate, but it was of good steel and manufacturing) and that Arab brightened up like the sun coming out from behind the mountain clouds of the Anti-Lebanon. Then all the Arabs went out by the east gate.

“That can not really be Khālid ibn al-Walīd the Great?” was the unbelieving protest of John Dragon who was dean of soft sciences at Southwestern Polytech. “It just isn't possible.”

“It does strain credulity,” Joseph Waterwitch told him, “but that's the way it comes through and that's the way it's projected. I must suppose it's all valid. It couldn't be otherwise.”

John Dragon, Joseph Waterwitch, Cris Benedetti, and Abel Landgood were on expedition to observe certain events by para-archeological probe.

The Arabs shuffled along outside, beneath the basket wall. Khalid was grinning into his scanty beard. He usually pulled this little sword act and trick several times a year and he now had quite a collection of good Damascus swords. The Arab party, a little fewer than a hundred young men, shuffled carelessly back toward their desert.

For about a furlong.

Then they gave a great whoop. A dozen small horses seemed to spring out of the sand and were quickly mounted by the dozen or so of the Arabs so fortunate as to own riding animals. These dozen had also drawn bows from somewhere. And the others had swords suddenly. None of them except Khalid had had a sword earlier. Some of them picked up two rough ladders they had left on the sand before their first entrance to the city. They ran with these ladders toward the basket wall of Damascus.

“See if you can get better detail on the swords,” John Dragon asked Joe Waterwitch. “Hitti, who is never wrong, has written that the Arabs carried long, straight swords in scabbards flung over the right shoulder. And Belloc, who is also never wrong, has written that they carried short scimitars on their thighs.”

Joe Waterwitch emphasized the swords, and the observers all watched as the steel showed a little more clearly.

“There is every sort of sword and knife,” Waterwitch said then, and they all saw that it was so, “and they are carried every which way. There is no standardizing them and there is no seeing them any more clearly than this.”

The Arabs placed their two ladders against the basket wall (this section of the wall was so called because it was there that St. Paul had been let down out of the city in a basket). The ladders reached only about a third of the way to the top of the wall. Nevertheless, the Arabs crowded the ladders from top to bottom, resolutely climbing up and up, and those on the top waved their arms as if to try to fly upward.

“What are you trying to do, little sandmice?” the guards asked from the top of the walls. “You'll hurt yourselves. Those little ladders are about to break.”

“We are going to scale the walls,” Khalid the leader of the Arab sandmice called up boldly. “We are going to storm the town and slaughter the inhabitants and establish ourselves in this stronghold. And from here, we will conquer the whole world.”

“If you want to come in by the gates, they are always open,” the guards called down. “We think you are the same bunch that was in just a little while ago. Then you went out again. Those little ladders will not reach. Shall we put down longer ladders for you? Shall we let down ropes? Are you under some vow to scale walls?”

“Yes, we are under vow to scale walls or to batter them down,” Khalid cried. “We will not come in by the gate until we have received your total surrender. Defend yourselves! It is not to our glory if we conquer only cowards who fear to fight.”

Khalid and some of the others began to shoot arrows up at the guards. They hadn't true arrows, only crooked and badly fletched shafts. They hadn't strong bows, the arrows did not even shoot to the top of the walls in their flight. The only damage done by the arrows was to one of the Arabs. This man had shot his bolt straight up into the air. He stood and gazed at his arrow as it spent itself, then tumbled over and fell back toward him. The arrow pierced his eye. Some of the guards gasped with shock, but several of them laughed.

“If you laugh at him, if you laugh at us, then you laugh at God,” Khalid called up angrily.

“We do not mean to laugh at God,” others of the guards spoke down. “We are honestly grieved that the man injured himself.”

Both of the ladders broke with weak cracking noises and tumbled the Arabs onto the sand and rocks below. One man was killed and several were lamed. The Arabs shuffled off toward the desert, and those few who had horses turned them toward the barren and sunburnt hills.

“We do not retreat,” Khalid called from the back of his own horse. “It only seems that we retreat. We have breached your walls, and several of us, including myself, have entered. This night I will sit on the highest seat in your council room and will hold command of the city.”

“You may come to the council room if you want to,” one of the guards called, “and you may talk to the commandant of the city. He may be able to understand what it is you want. He is a man of great understanding. But you may not sit on the highest seat.”

“Yes, I will sit on the highest seat tonight,” Khalid insisted. “I am already inside the town and the room, though you know it not. I will command. I will order. I will rule. And I will slaughter. And after I have slaughtered sufficiently I also will become a man of great understanding.”

Khalid followed his men back into the hilly desert. They left a plume of dust behind them and when the plume dispersed, they were gone. There had been somewhat less than a hundred of these slight Arabs. And there were something more than ten thousand of the burly empire soldiers and guards garrisoned in the city.

“That cannot be the Moslem conquest of Damascus of the year 635,” John Dragon, the dean of soft sciences, was protesting in near panic.

“Yes, that was it,” Joe Waterwitch insisted sadly. “We have tuned it in pretty clearly — we have watched it to its end. That is what happened and that is all that happened.”

“There was supposed to be a six-month siege,” Abel Landgood commented. “And when that six months was over, Damascus was under Moslem control.”

“We will look for the siege, but we will not find it,” Waterwitch said. “There wasn't any siege of that sort. What we have just seen is all that happened. And as for Damascus turning from Christian to Moslem; well, I don't understand it either. A plum will be green and then it will be red (if it's a Damask plum it will be). There are no reasons at all for many of the changes in history. Let's leave it at that. I do not know why history, feeling guilty perhaps, is sometimes impelled to supply false reasons. Better no reasons than false, and there are no reasons for the results from Damascus.”

“I believe that there is one more event, Joseph,” Cris Benedetti said softly. “Our focus seemed to be on three hours before sunset. Let's allow two more hours for ablutions and the supper meal. So, let's see what we can pick up in the council room five hours after our last focus.”

Cris Benedetti was the revered professor of humanities and histories and literatures and esoterica at Southwestern Polytech. He possibly had more prestige even than John Dragon had. He certainly had more than Joe Waterwitch; Joe had a peculiar lack of prestige. But Joe believed in himself and his methods and he didn't like to be told that he might have missed something. He looked at Benedetti for a long minute.

“All right, we'll do it,” Joe Waterwitch said then.

The find-and-focus itself took nearly five hours, but the times were not connected and the delay in search did not matter. Then those of the expedition were able to see what was going on at the evening's session in the council room. And what was going on was a developing ruckus.

There were seven great men sitting in the high seats in the council room: pompous men, somewhat amused now and a little bit fearful.

They were amused by an audacious and slight man who was leaping about in the rafters over their heads. He mocked them. He harangued them. And they smiled.

But they were really alarmed by the monkey-like climbing of this man, actually fearful of his stark animality and his go-devil grinning and of the jinni-like secrets that were tumbling out of him in unbottled speech that sounded as if it would never be exhausted. They were disturbed by the gamin-like thievery of that rafter rooster who'd as soon steal the world as a sack of walnuts.

“I will command. I will rule. I will slaughter,” the monkey-like man in the rafters was heckling, “and when I have slaughtered enough, then I will become a man of even greater understanding than yourselves.” This heckling climber over their heads was Khalid.

“I wonder when the Byzantine look made its first appearance?” John Dragon asked his fellow observers.

“Surely not in Byzantium,” Cris Benedetti said, “but here in Damascus, in this place, on this night. Look at those seven in their high seats! It has just dawned in their minds that they have lost everything (that is the underlay of the Byzantine look), and that if they continue as they have been nobody but themselves will guess that they have really lost it (that is the brocade surface of the Byzantine look). I don't know how they have lost it, and they don't either. But such towering irony comes only after having lost everything, and having disregarded that loss.”

There were seven men there with that look on them. In the highest seat was the commandant of the city. At his right was the bishop. At his left was the treasurer. The commandant himself was pomposity justified. He was wealth and line and power and intelligence. He was the deep texture of past pleasures and the aromatic glow of pleasure still to come. He laughed at his own defeat and forbade it to speak.

The bishop on his right had exceptional ability, a highly refined and rarified sensibility, a canniness that had obtained an unusually good bargain from God Himself, a stormy sort of sublimation (channeled and diverted thunder), compassion, wit, well-being: and there was a foxy slyness that went with it all. This bishop had fished in stranger waters than his father Peter ever knew: in the Third Ocean of whose very existence both God and the devil are ignorant.

And the treasurer on the left had the endless geniality that comes from never exhausted stores. He had the money bags that pour out specie forever, to smooth the paths and to make friends. The bags remain full no matter how much is taken from them. He had the sack of inexhaustible pleasure, and the barrelful of those sweet serpents named Intrigue whose joy outlasts that of every other game. And into the eyes of this extraordinary treasurer had come a new glow now: happy treason, the last pleasure of the almost jaded.

Two other men sat on the right, two other men sat on the left; they were high and intricate men, of the sort who maintained the heavenly Byzantine Empire on earth.

“I sit in the highest seat in the council room,” jibed Khalid, who had made a seat up in the rafters. This man Khalid was an un-giant jinni who had escaped from some bottle. “And I will hold command of this city.”

One of the great men on the left of the commandant laughed: Khalid had nearly fallen from his high seat when he gestured too violently.

“It seems a very precarious command,” the great man said.

“I want it to be precarious,” Khalid howled. “I am already inside you, though you cannot suspect it yet. I will command. I will order. I will slaughter. I will breach your walls. I lay siege to you now.”

“How long is the siege that you lay for us?” asked one of the great men on the right, and he grinned in his beard.

“A half-year siege,” Khalid called down, and he danced on the smoke-blackened rafter. Guards were climbing after Khalid, but they could not scamper about with his quickness or his wittiness; they couldn't catch him. Khalid bounded to other rafters and cross-members.

“Your eyes are put into your heads wrong and you look out wrong,” Khalid taunted. “Your eyes look for me where I am no longer to be found. You'd double your defenses to keep me out, would you, city fathers? But I am not outside. I am the mind-worm working inside and I besiege you from inside. I came in under the walls and under your minds by the other river, the one that is not to be found in your country or in the maps of it. You great men cannot understand this.”

“I understand it,” said the great treasurer, and his eyes were a-dance with happy treason.

“I almost understand it,” said the great bishop, and his fingers were avid to be dealing with strange fish.

“And I almost understand it,” said Cris Benedetti, one of the men working on the para-archeological probe.

II

There is an absolute mystery covering all early Islamic expansion and military conquest. There is no possible way these things could have happened. Circumstances sometimes put forward to explain these happenings are in fact later circumstances created by these same happenings. The clear truth is that the desert Arabs were absolutely inferior to all their neighbors in wealth, numbers, technology, health, ability, intellect, location, ambition, sophistication, weaponry, organization, transportation, and experience in warfare. Their victories could not have been won in reality. It had to be a subjective religious rapture to make it seem to the Arabs that they were conquering. But how was the exterior world and its peoples conned into authenticating these subjective experiences of the miserable Arabs? Moreover, Islam was not then a rapture religion: it did not become so until nearly two centuries later. Nor was Islam then a militant religion. It became so only after the completion of those astonishing, early, world-shaking conquests.

At Damascus, the attacking Arabs had only one-hundredth the numbers of the defenders. They had nothing but short, curved knives and inferior bows with which to assault the walls. They had no battering rams or siege engines at all — they did not even have entrenching tools. How did they breach the walls after a six-month siege? How did they take the strong town that had one hundred defenders against every one attacker?

Here was an incredibly small and disorganized band of half-starved, half-demented desert men looking out of pus-caked eyes (Paul was not the first nor the millionth man to go blind on the dazzling road to Damascus), small men, sick men, nearly blind men, men with no ambition and no hope, beggars wrapped in euphoric dreams more ragged than their clothing, men sleeping away most of the hours to forget that they had nothing to eat. How did these men, at the very first step, conquer Damascus? How did they, at the incredibly swift second step, conquer the world?

Could one travel in a time wagon pulled by time oxen to Damascus in the year 635 and look at the events with informed, modern eyes, it is possible that a missing piece to this puzzle might be found. But I doubt even this. There is no way that those events could have happened.

 — Arpad Arutinov, The Back Door of History

“Gentlemen, we have missed it completely! We are stumblebums. That is what the respected scientists have been saying about us all along, and this seems to be the fact of the matter. There cannot be anything wrong with our methods. There cannot be much wrong with ourselves. There has to be something wrong with history. History was not there when we went back to examine her.”

 — John Dragon

“So much of this has depended on me, and I do not feel that I have failed in any way. I have been the instrument and the receiver, and I believe that I have received correctly what was there. The fact that what was there is impossible is beside the point — overwhelmingly beside the point, I'm afraid. I've been the dowser and the medium, but I certainly am not a happy medium over this. Where have we failed? Or rather, what is it that has failed us?”

 — Joseph Waterwitch

“This brings into question the whole subject of reality. Reality has been an assumption, a postulate, an evident basis and beginning. It now seems to have been a false assumption. Reality has disappeared on us when, in this test case, we had the temerity to examine it too closely. What we now need to find and use is an alternate to reality.”

 — Abel Landgood

“Gentlemen, I believe that our difficulty is that we have been using highly polarized information.”

 — Cris Benedetti

From the Landwitch Papers
(the minutes of the first para-archaeological probe)

The Rivers of Damascus as mentioned in Scripture are two: the Abana River and the Pharpar River. But where are they now? The Abana River is now named the Baroda. This is the only River of Damascus to be found in the physical world. There is no other river in that part of the country. There is no dry bed where any other river could ever have run. The Pharpar River is not to be found anywhere in that scorched land at all. There is no trace or remnant or body print of it to be discovered anywhere on Earth.

Well then, have you looked under the Earth? Have you looked inside the Earth? Have you looked inside the creatures of the Earth? When a river is lost, we must leave no land or mind unturned until we have found it, for a lost river may be anywhere. I believe that the Pharpar River has always been of the internal sort. It is the secret river that not only greens the soul but also runs under walls and gains entrance to all fortified and walled places of the world and of the mind.

Regard your own estate and case. Is your own town not built on two rivers which are separated by a firmament between? One of them is the impossible river by which all things may enter anywhere. We'd be robbed of our celestial birthright without it.

 — Ignace Wolff, The River Inside

The heterodyning of a brain wave produces a difference frequency or beat in conjunction with the normal brain wave — and this difference frequency can be both a sending and an echoing beat. It may also become a receptor beat and, in some cases, a reverberatory beat of very long duration. Of how long a duration? Oh, two thousand years or so before it becomes too greatly diminished to pick up.

But, scientifically, a beat may reverberate for only microseconds after the inaction of its source: this scientific objection may not be assailed in its own field or context. But may the scientific objection be heterodyned out of its own field? May it be super-heterodyned to a place where it accepts what it had seemed to deny?

The ever-changing modified or heterodyned wave pattern is a searching or tuning pattern. It seeks whatever is in resonance with its voice. It changes its voice till it finds that resonance. But hardly one person in a thousand can consciously heterodyne his own brain wave patterns to obtain the variations and the beats. The rare ones who can are sometimes called dowsers. True dowsers can get echoes from almost all physical substances — and also from many electrical coronas that are not really physical. Very good dowsers can get resonance and echoes from an even more rare sort of corona, which is called patina. The patina, that aged and weathered surface, is generally thought to be a physical effect and substance; but it hasn't a physical origin.

Adept dowsers may also get resonances from ancient reverberations (some of them associated with patinas or other coronas, some apparently associated with nothing but themselves) that may have become endemic to a location, to have lodged there securely and enduringly. And dowsers are peculiarly able to get echoes from underground streams, which may be heterodynings of surface streams which are not necessarily in the immediate location.

A good dowser can hear the signaling of rocks and sands and loams. He can hear water talk. He can hear air talk. He can hear a valley or a fortress speak. Joseph Waterwitch was a good dowser. He came by his talent honestly. He was a Shawnee Indian, and the Shawnees can out-dowse any other Indians in the world. Waterwitch had been given to Joe's folks as a family name because of their expertness in witching anything from water to fresh meat trails.

But dowsers are scientifically unacceptable. Joseph Waterwitch had been kicked out of the usually free and easy Geologists Club when he refused to deny that he had dowsing talents. He had been kicked out quite literally — out of the private bar, out through the dining room and the meeting room, out through the library and exhibit rooms. Then he was kicked violently down that short flight of five steps to the street, to the injury of both his pride and his coccyx.

But are all scientists absolutely closed to such things? May not some entry be made into some minds? At times it has been thought that an entrance could be made by certain underchannels, by streams that flow unsuspected below the medulla walls or that permeate the pons variolii to break through. Even at the Geologists Club, there had been one man drenched by the under-river, a man who might open the gates at the proper time — when he heard the off-key whistle of sweet treason. This man knew a lot about odd frequencies, and he could split stubborn rocks with his own double-tuned whistling.

A patina is a reverberating surface that is composed entirely of its own history and that possibly does not exist in the present time. But this definition beggars John Dragon's statement that there is no room for the present in present time, that the present must always be slightly in the future and cannot be perceived except by this very slight shift into future time. Present time is an anomaly: it is less than a quantum wide, and its very narrowness posits its nonexistence. It is too narrow a crack to exist; and yet, there may be a two-way traffic through that narrow crack. Unacceptable things do come through the narrow crack that is mistakenly called the present — things such as ghosts, cranks, and treasures.

A patina may be very deep and still retain all the characteristics of a surface phenomenon. It is made up of old vibrations and waves, and of nothing else; yet it has mass and physical substance, and waves supposedly do not. And a patina, though seldom containing metal, shows magnetic properties.

It is not only stones and rocks that acquire a patina. The patina is often spoken of as an aging and a weathering, but young and growing things sometimes show striking patinas. An adolescent plum just coming to full color may have a patina — a smoky surface ghost of that full color: it is a patina, whatever other name it bears. A human being may have a patina which contains all that being's experience. And a newborn child may have a surface patina that reflects the complete history of its ancestors as well as its own makeup and shorter history. In countries where the niceties prevail, this valuable patina is often washed off the newborn child. Such removal makes for trauma and dislocation. The child is permanently deprived. He will grow other patina, but it will never be the same. He will forever lack roots and history and surety. He will seldom become a truly reverberating person.

But is there any proof at all that patina may record and remember, and later transmit or recreate, persons and objects and events? Surely there is proof. Ghosts are the proof — the tens of thousands of reports of ghost persons and ghost events. Ghosts are the transmitting and recreating of old things and old doings.

You do not accept ghosts? You have not been touched even once by the ghost river named Pharpar? It is not good to remain untouched by it. It is the river of resurrection. If you will not accept ghosts, neither will you accept one risen from the dead.

The dowser turned inside out is the eidolon man. Joseph Waterwitch was a supreme dowser. His associate Abel Landgood was a dowser-inside-out, an image man or an eidolon man. As a projector of valid eidolons, images, and recreations, he was as expert as a formally untrained person can be.

The great breakthrough arrived with the acquaintance and association of Waterwitch and Landgood. Together they drew up the Landwitch Covenant. They had the whole procedure completed between them before they went to have it instrumented.

Abel Landgood had had a most normal childhood, even excessively normal. He had walked and talked with ghosts from the day he was able to walk and talk. All children do this, but not all are as good at fixing ghosts as was Abel. He was an imaginative and creative boy. He was weirdly happy in his relations with the world, and that is always important. And he did not like empty spaces at all. Whenever he found a stubbornly empty space, he filled it with his imagination. There had been an empty space between the alley fence and the alley behind his house. Abel filled it with three apple trees and some blackberry bushes, and he would eat apples and blackberries until he got sick.

There was also a little vacant half-lot across the alley. A house had once stood there. It had burned down. Abel put another house there, a funny-looking house. He put a very fat woman and a very thin man to live in the house, and he fixed their names to be Mrs. and Mr. Ostergoster. He put a boy to live in the house and fixed his name to be Mikey Ostergoster. Mikey fixed a cat. Abel fixed a dog that chased the cat away. Mikey fixed a crazy man to chase the dog with a stick. Abel fixed a soldier to chase off the crazy man. Mrs. and Mr. Ostergoster came out and quarreled with the soldier. Everybody began to fight then. Abel's father came out and unhinged all those folks and the funny-looking house also. And those things were gone in a blinking.

“You shouldn't have brought back the Ostergosters,” Abel's father told him when they were alone and the echoes of the disturbance were retreating into the secondary patina. “There are people in the neighborhood who still remember them, and remember how they burned in the little house there, ah, in the little house that is not there. And you shouldn't have brought back the Confederate soldier to chase off the crazy man. With our reputation, you can't afford to seem too old-line Southern. And you shouldn't have brought back that particular dog. I remember that dog before they had to kill it. It was one mean dog — it's a wonder you weren't bitten. Cool it a little bit, Abel, or people will think you're an odd kid.”

But Abel Landgood wasn't an odd kid at all. He was absolutely normal. It's the kids who lack or lose the basic talents who are odd.

The Landgoods had to move twice during the childhood and adolescence of Abel. The family seemed to attract ghosts, and the neighbors objected. (Ghosts are normal, but people often react abnormally to ghosts.) It was not all Abel's doings about the ghosts. Like Joseph Waterwitch, Abel Landgood did not acquire all his talent in his own generation. Both his father and his mother had talent.

And, like his parents, Abel retained his talents after he had become an adult. An average child will lose such abilities, but a normal child will retain them.

Joseph Waterwitch (the man with the locating or homing beats, who could bring any interesting location or time or patina into focus and enjoy it) met Abel Landgood (the man with the strong imagination, the image-projecting or eidolon-making talent by which interesting old things could be enjoyed by everybody). They realized that between them they could recreate anything that had ever been — or anything that had ever existed strongly enough to leave its impress on time in patina-form, for patina is the living precipitate of time. On the basis of their meeting and acquaintance they drew up the Landwitch Covenant.

Needing guidance, the two men joined forces with John Dragon, the dean of soft sciences at Southwestern Polytech and with Cris Benedetti who was professor of miscellaneous subjects. Dragon got an appropriation, mostly travel money, to test the Covenant in a puzzling historical situation; one far enough distant to be beyond intervening personal passions and prejudices. Cris Benedetti took the two talented gentlemen down to Barnaby Sheen's electronics shop where two young electronics geniuses, a smooth-faced young man named Roy Mega and a hairy-faced young man named Austro, built imposing and sophisticated instruments that would reinforce the talents of the two men and would also give a scientific appearance to the enterprise.

“I believe that the patina-deposit complex is so complete,” Joe Waterwitch had said on the eve of their first monumental testing, “that it would not greatly matter if all life should disappear from Earth. Secondary life would immediately spring from these deposits. The many millions of micro-books written on skins (on the skins of the rocks, on the skins of everything) would bring forth recreated life — whatever life was most ready and most avid to be resurrected. I believe that I have already experienced glimpses and manifestations of the reactivating mechanism. It would be a curious life and a curious world then. Everything in it would be the ghost of something that had gone before, but the combinations would be new, the motifs and forums would be completely fresh. It would not be a sequential world or a rational one. Anomaly would be characteristic. It would be like — ”

“It would be like the world we live in now,” Cris Benedetti said. “You have described our own world perfectly and I suspect that your thesis is correct. We live in a recreated secondary. The evidence shows that absolutely. All life did suddenly disappear from Earth — I'm not sure when this happened. Secondary life, made up entirely of anomalous ghosts, did spring up from old residues written small on various skins. We are the anomalous ghosts and that world is our world.”

“I believe that there are a few slight objections to your theory,” John Dragon said with that deadly seriousness that is found only in citizens of secondary worlds. “There are so many things about us that have to be happening for the first time. There are things too flimsy ever to be reproduced. However, we may be living in an abortive secondary.”

III

The constituted body known as the Landwitch Covenant, that para-archeological investigating team, failed its first major test. Its little movie, The Fall of Damascus, filmed on a working site, may well have been the worst movie ever made. However its failures came about, it was a sick parody, ridiculously false history, and it simply could not have been a resurrection of the past. It received bitter assessment from the scientific community, for the para-archeological probe had been represented as somehow scientific.

The whole group had been completely discredited; and one Khalid had been voted the ironic award of “Worst Actor of the Year, of Any Year”.

“They gave us no credit at all,” Abel Landgood complained. “This is the first movie ever made to consist entirely of complete ghosts and of complete ghost sites. Who else was ever able to evoke an integrated past so entirely? And of course it is scientific! What else could it be? Admittedly there was something the matter with the past we evoked, but we'll solve that too.”

“ ‘The Worst Actor of the Year, of any Year’!” Khalid fumed. “I'll show them — ”

“Can you get another appropriation, Dragon?” Joseph Waterwitch asked.

“No. I'm out completely,” John Dragon said sorrowfully. “I am ragged, bagged, tagged, and fired from Southwestern Polytech. ‘You're making a mistake,’ I told them. ‘You're destroying the balance of things. You need a dean of soft sciences.’ ‘Not that soft,’ they said. Did you ever watch a ceremonial academic putdown? They cut the brass buttons off my dean's coat, broke my plate and turned my picture to the wall.”

“Worst actor of the year!” Khalid still smouldered. “I'll make them eat that! I don't know why I came through so badly, though. That just wasn't the real me.”

“It isn't fair,” Waterwitch groused. “We're put clear down, but everyone who touched us comes up smelling like lilacs. That kid Austro who works for Sheen, he has a write-up and an article in the latest Geology This Month. The article is Instrumental Reception of Igneous Rock Mantle Data by Means of Pulsating Heterodyning Grids, and it is subtitled Search and Focus, or Do Rocks Remember? And talk about a gadget! That kid must be a freak. It says that the ‘manuscript’ for his article was chiseled on thin stone tablets.”

“Who does he think that he is — Moses?” Abel Landgood exploded. “He's a friend of yours, isn't he, Benedetti? What kind of friends do you have anyhow?”

“Right now, all of us need all the friends we can get,” Cris Benedetti said.

“Worst actor of the year!” Khalid still moaned. “I'll rub their noses in that before I'm through. But why wasn't it the real me?”

“Maybe Austro can devise a filter for excessively polarized data,” Cris Benedetti said hopefully.

“What hurts is that Austro was working for us and got his ideas from us,” Waterwitch insisted. “And Geology This Month described him as ‘highly professional and impeccably scientific; if he were not so, his theories would be grotesque’. If that fuzz-faced clown is scientific, what are we?”

“Some have it, some don't,” Cris said.

“But he used us.”

“Then we'll use him,” Khalid said reasonably. “There's no doubting it; that kid has drunk from the older river. That means that he can enter and infiltrate and topple, and that's what he is doing. There have to be such manipulators working behind the scenes whenever you go into the business of tumbling walls down, and there have to be these awkward stalking-horses out in front. Though I never before thought of myself as a stalking-horse.”

“Well, just what are you, Khalid?” Landgood asked him. “And what are you doing here?”

“Yes, we've all been wondering about that,” Cris Benedetti said.

“You're a residue among residues, you Arab sand-flea,” Joe Waterwitch said. “I focused on you, and Abel Landgood catalyzed you into apparent being. You're a ghost, a recreation from the past. You aren't real.”

“What man is sure of his own reality?” Khalid asked. “Are any of you? We desert people have gone into this much more deeply than you Franks have. Thinking isn't your line. But you clods precipitated a Khalid as seen through Damascene-Byzantine eyes. No wonder I was selected worst actor of the year! Why didn't you catalyze the real me, the shrewd, brilliant, spacious, nonpareil political and military genius, the leader of the canniest and trickiest and most sophisticated bunch of men ever assembled?”

“Ah, because our data was polarized,” Cris Benedetti said. “We tuned in on residues and patinas as seen by Damascene eyes because those were the eyes that predominated in Damascus. That's the way you looked to those city people, so that's the way you looked to our instruments and film. I believe that it could have been corrected if we had had a little more experience in these things. But it's all water over the dam now.”

“No, no, water under the dam,” shrewd, spacious, nonpareil Khalid said evenly. “Oh, that water is our salvation! Let's go see those kids. Somehow they're at home in the other river.”

“How come you speak English, Khalid?” asked John Dragon, the ex-dean.

“More polarized data,” Khalid explained. “I don't really. But you know me by your own polarized English-speaking minds. So, to you, it seems as if I speak as you do.”

“Are you still in good graces at Polytech, Benedetti?” Landgood asked as the men (and a contingent man, Khalid, a barefoot ghost in odd robes) walked the half-mile down Six-Shooter Road to Sheen's electronic works.

“Oh, they've given me a sabbatical,” Cris said. “They said that I needed a rest. It's fine, I suppose, but it's without pay.”

“Won't it be a little hard on you to go a year without pay, Benedetti?”

“It's seven years. They convinced me that a sabbatical is for seven years. They also said that the sabbatical was renewable. They've always been nice people to work for, and they're scientifically orthodox. Some of them will appear on tonight's TV news spectacular, Science Supreme, The End Of The Crackpots.”

“Which are the crackpots?” Khalid asked.

“Such as ourselves,” John Dragon said. “Para-archeologists and such.”

“No, no, they're wrong,” Khalid protested. “Because a thing is done badly, as your thing surely was, is no reason to throw it away. Keep with it.”

“That other genius kid, Roy Mega, is just as ambivalent as Austro is,” Abel Landgood sighed. “In the latest Para-Electronics Today he is quoted a bit. I'll read it: ‘The Scientific Community may be a little too prone to suspect vivid depictments of time-residue data. Why should such representation not be vivid; as long as it is valid? The translation of residue data falls as easily into anthropomorphic forms as into modified sine wave or any other graphic form. It is no real indictment that a translation of residual men and sites should look like men and sites. However, we cannot condone the excesses of certain adventurers in their recent extravaganza. As the boys say, Do not task us with Damascus. That was a sad and discrediting thing. We wash our hands of such excesses’.”

“With which water does he wash his hands?” Khalid asked. “From which side of the she-wolf does this cub suck? Ambivalence may often be its own best tactic, but not always. We will see.”

“There's more,” Landgood said. “He writes, ‘We must begin to accept the fleshing of time-residue ghosts, just as we have arrived at accepting the solid fleshing of TV images. Yet we do well to be suspicious if they are of too funny a flesh. Malodorous and deformed ghosts disprove themselves’.”

“I'm one of those he means,” Khalid grumbled. “Worst actor of the year! Malodorous and deformed ghost! I'll come back on them. I'll rub their noses in it.”

“He goes on,” said Landgood, “ ‘We, along with all responsible scientists, must reject these current debasements of — ’ ”

Landgood, reading, collided with Roy Mega, who was strolling in front of Sheen's electronics building.

“It's good to hear oneself quoted with such total preoccupation,” Roy Mega said. “Gentlemen, ah, I see that you have one of the funny fleshies with you.”

“A care, young colt,” Khalid said with barefoot dignity. “I have dined on infidels' tongues before, and I'll have yours out by the roots. There's a special flavor to the waggle-well, young-fool tongue.”

“A care, old nag,” Roy Mega said with gathering hubris. “You aren't real and you aren't here. You are no more than the experimental after-image of a bad motion picture ghost. As an after-image, you are my experiment, and I can terminate you easily. Your apparent continuation after the show and its recordings were finished owes itself to a trick I intruded into the equipment. Your appearance depends on one holding-coil, one small electro-magnet, that I set in the circuits. And it is a time-release holding-coil, so your continuation is quite precarious. In fact, it should — ”

“The coil should have released itself some hours or days ago, should it not, young colt?” Khalid smiled. “It should have released itself when my days of grace were finished. These were days during which I tracked down these men who had had something to do with my awakening. I wanted to find out why I came through so badly, why it wasn't the real me. But now there is more than one holding coil in the equipment you built — and more than one in equipment that you know not of. Oh, I've insured and reinsured the circuitry on which I depend. I am even on the verge of making myself independent of all circuitry, of making myself of less funny flesh, of becoming again more than an electric man. Why should my continuance depend on fleshless circuitry? There is One on whom all depends.”

“Carrock,” said Austro, the young, hair-faced electronics genius, as he came out of the electronics building.

“An even stranger colt, you!” said Khalid, turning pleasantly to Austro. “You, if not the other, have drunk from the hidden and intuitive river. You at least can circumvent and enter the walled city. Possibly of funny flesh yourself, but yours is a greening genius from that hidden water.”

“Mud on my mouth! I have drunk from it!” Austro declared. “And so also has Roy here. He is as conniving and cantankerous a person as yourself, good Khalid. Carrock, why don't we all come inside?”

They all went inside.

“This Roy boy, this dolt colt here, he is not as conniving as myself,” Khalid preached when they had settled indoors. “He does not make sure. He does not check back. Had I placed a time coil in an equipment, I would know it when the time had run out and the coil had forgotten to release. Could so careless a young man have taken Damascus? Could he have taken Ctesiphon or Baghdad?”

“Like Grant took Richmond,” Roy Mega crowed. “Like Sungai took Dashbashpul!”

“Carrock, kids. To peace and to work,” Austro poured aromatic oil on the hidden and intuitive waters. “By the sour'd ears of science, we have more to do than set a-blowing the sand of old battles. Carrock.”

“Are you ever a fancy-talking hair-face!” Khalid jeered. “But I believe that I have heard that you are only a device manufactured by the jinni named Sheen.”

“Oh, Austro's real enough, Khalid,” Cris Benedetti assured the out-of-time Arab when they were all at ease in the lounge of the electronics building. “And Austro is right. We have to set a-blowing the sand of new battles. Now. But how will we do it? The great walls of science are guarded by so many that not even a mouse can get in. They even have a battalion of a thousand and one furious mouse-hunters. And the bright pennant Science Supreme, The End Of The Crackpots will fly over those high battlements tonight. Khalid, we do need an old desert warrior here.”

“I am the greatest ever,” Khalid answered. “But several times all of you have spoken of science without total respect, and this I do not understand. We are talking about the same thing, high science, Ilm itself? I thought that science was all to the good. The Byzantines believed that they had come to the end of it: we knew that we had just come to the beginning of it; but we came to that beginning with joy. We ciphered more intricate mathematics in the sand than they in their scrolls. We studied more complex star-ways from our sandy hills than they from their towers. We brewed more chemistries from the bark of one incense tree than they from all their archive dust. At desert smitheries and forges we built instruments and machines beyond anything imagined. And we made a rhetoric and eloquence to carry on and announce these things. After Him whom all adore, we most adored science, the holy Ilm. And now you hold science in bad repute? Has the Byzantine contempt and satisfaction come back? Has the wheel turned full circle? It's almost as if we hadn't whipped them completely.”

“Yes, the contempt and satisfaction with past knowledge have come back,” John Dragon said sadly. “And they have encrusted the thing itself. The noble old ship is sluggish and bottom-heavy with barnacles. The Free Brother of Man, your holy Ilm, has imprisoned himself behind walls and is longer free.”

“We know how to enter and to throw down walls,” Khalid said. “You, the two young geniuses, get yourselves busy instrumenting it. There will be an event, will there? Then we will capture and ride that event. We begin the assault tonight. We will assail the encrustation from inside.”

“This isn't Damascus, this isn't Baghdad,” Abel Landgood said.

“Yes it is,” Khalid insisted. “The encrustations, the wallings, the enclosures — they are Damascus, they are Ctesiphon, they are Baghdad. Young geniuses, are you at work on it?”

“Ah, I'm not quite sure what — ” Roy Mega hesitated. “We've been using doubletalk, and we've been washing our hands a lot. I don't know what else — ”

“Carrock, I know, I'm sure,” Austro said. “Here, Roy, come work. We make them use doubletalk in their own mouths.”

“If I only knew what we're supposed to be doing — ” Roy Mega complained.

“If you have to ask, you've missed it,” Khalid told him. “Surely a smart young man like you wouldn't miss it. We need your fine hubris. We need your sharp distinctions. The noble thing itself will be bruised a bit when we tear through its encrustations, but noble things are always tough. Come, come, Frankish men, we need the fine edge of your minds for our polarity. What we really need is irony, a little unconscious irony.”

“That's the hardest kind,” Cris Benedetti said.

“It's almost time for that damnable TV spectacular Science Supreme, The End Of The Crackpots,” Joe Waterwitch growled through clenched teeth. “I will hate the smugness of it, the exclusions, the cursed close-mindedness. And yet I'll be fascinated by that whole barrel of snakes, and I don't know why.”

“Carrock, so will I, and I do know why,” said the young genius Austro. “Is it two receivers we will set up, Khalid, sir? That way we can have one that shows what everybody sees and the other one to show it the way they're really doing it. That one will be tricky, but very instructive. We will need to follow along as we go so we can modify our patterns. We have to know what it is that we're heterodyning.”

“I can do it,” Roy Mega said. “I was slow to pick it up, and that isn't my way at all; but I know I can handle it now. Exquisite shielding for the check-set, and unscrambling the scramble! It will be the only set in the world to show our process in unmodified form, a real curiosity. And the modified one will show the full flowering, the tilt, the scramble. There's no limit to it — or to just how good we really are.”

“Is there power enough for such amplification?” Cris Benedetti asked. He wasn't an electronics man.

“Electrically, yes,” Roy Mega said. “Mentally — that's up to all of us. And do not be quite your usual kind self, Mr. Benedetti. We need a little urbane arrogance, and we need it from you. We need a little elegance from someone. Is there anyone here elegant besides me? Contribute, men, it is almost time.”

“Carrock, we hope, we hope!” Austro howled. And he was modifying equipment faster than you could blink.

“It shouldn't take much electricity,” Khalid guessed. “We took Damascus with only crude sparking coils and primitive Greek fire to amplify and reinforce our own mind-worm bit. Of course it took us six months before we blew down their minds. And our new assault may take us six months or six years or sixty, but we will finish the beginning of it tonight. As to the power, it couldn't have been more than a nudge the wrong way during your reactivation of us that turned me from the consummate genius and masterful person that I am into the worst actor of any year. This is the subtle touch that seems to change nothing and changes everything. One will hardly be able to point to a single element that is changed at all, yet the totality will be changed absolutely.”

“What is going on here anyhow?” John Dragon demanded.

“The damnable TV news special Science Supreme, The End Of The Crackpots is going on in thirty seconds,” Cris Benedetti said. “It's to the first audience of one billion persons ever. Be angry or be easy, Dragon, but be yourself. The world is going to see this show through our eyes and attitudes. We must give the world a really fine and new experience. Polarized data! The field has hardly been touched. One can do so many things with it.”

“Mind-worms. We will be mind-worms,” Khalid said. “We are inside them all. We begin the conquest now, and they'll never know what hit them. We ride the current of that intuitive river named Pharpar. We make the whole world see it through our own elegant eyes. I like that ‘elegant eyes’ part.”

“But we can't alter a TV program that is already going on,” Joe Waterwitch protested. “We would have to do — ”

“We are doing,” Roy Mega said.

“Joe, you're the dowser and you don't know where it's at,” Benedetti chortled. “Certainly we can alter it if we bring our equipment and minds and eyes to bear.”

It was quite a good TV spectacular. Science Supreme, The End Of The Crackpots was a program that people would remember. It would affect them for the rest of their lives.

It wasn't quite what had been expected. The crackpots; they came through as the entrenched inner sanctum boys. It took a lot of courage for the scientific community to confess to such weaknesses in itself.

And some of the things that you had always thought of as a little bit fringe, ah, they got an open-door welcome here. A few of them set you and the whole world thinking on new lines. There has to be something to them: there has to be a lot to several of them. Take that new para-archeology, that especially. By a combination of electronics and human minds, great hunks of the past are really recreated. Old ghosts walk, and they do not look ghostly at all.

And often, in the electronics building there, a glance at the check-set to see from what rough rocks these men present were fashioning such elegant gems! The original had been rough and intolerant. It had been smothering and shriveling. But the check-set was not seen by the billion persons, only by the seven.

Oh, but the great and gracious modification which now became the prime original! Yes, the noble thing itself was bruised a bit when the modification tore through the old encrustations, but noble things are always tough enough to survive: and now, for a while, it was no longer smothered and shriveled.

But the final, elegant, polarized presentation was like an old promise fulfilled, like a hidden river rediscovered. It was an unfolding, a full-flowing. It was finally to see all dimensions of time and space with elegant eyes.

Mr. Hamadryad

For some time there had been the feeling of an immediate change in the earthy globe, of a great turning-over that might replace the scatterbrained, petty, irascible and inefficient, though somehow human tone of the world with something that was cool, fastidiously ordered, immeasurably cruel, suave, silky, feline and altogether devilish. But the closeness, the reality of that change didn't sweep over me till I first met Mr. Hamadryad.

(I travel in coconuts, and it is ancillary to such travel that I have the fortune to meet such persons as Hamadryad.)

I believe that Mr. Hamadryad was the oddest-looking person I had ever seen. Surprisingly I regarded him so, for I first became aware of him in The Third Cataract Club in Dongola, and some very odd-looking gentlemen come into The Third Cataract. If you cock an eyebrow at someone in that place, then he's really odd.

There had been two sets of footfalls outside on the earthen corridor: one set were those of a somewhat splayfooted person in soft buckskin boots; the other were those of a barefoot person, but these latter footfalls were blurred by a sort of double step.

Only one of the persons came into the club though, and he was the splayfoot-seeming fellow in the soft skin or pelt boots.

“A Stony Giant,” this person ordered from Ukali the barboy, “and the regular for lunch.”

“Certainly, Mr. Hamadryad,” Ukali said, and he set about building the Stony Giant.

Hamadryad's voice, when he ordered, had been a sort of muted howl or bark, but not at all unpleasant. The Stony Giant was a large, local drink. It was a huge goblet of palm wine sprinkled with the saline rock-dust of the region. It contained a stork egg, smashed in shell and set afloat in the liquid. And Ukali added a bit of Aladdin's Sesame when the drink was almost ready. The Stony Giant is a specialty of The Third Cataract Club and is found almost nowhere else in the world.

Hamadryad had a long nose. It was so long that it set him apart from the world, whether he wished it or not. After his vision had traveled the length of his nose and had come to the world itself, it had already traveled half the distance that might be expected of anyone's vision.

Hamadryad had brown eyes that seemed not to fix on a person but on a point several feet through and behind that person. Hamadryad gave me this gaze now. Then he smiled pleasantly enough at the point several feet through and beyond me. Hamadryad had a full head of hair, though of a peculiar crest and lay. He was a short person and somewhat stooped even in his shortness. But he was lively and quick of motion. His mouth — down there somewhere beneath that very long nose — had a twist of good-natured seriousness. In prospect he seemed a pleasant fellow: and, really, an odd appearance never hurt.

Ukali finished building the Stony Giant, and he gave it to Hamadryad. The barefooted double steps were heard in the corridor outside again, going up and down, but no one entered. Hamadryad had paid for the drink with a pard d'or, a very old coin of Somaliland. Ukali gave him no change, but wrote a figure on the air. Hamadryad had set up tab for a week or more at The Third Cataract with the gold piece. Then this odd man came and sat with me.

“They have explained it all away in unconvincing words,” Hamadryad began with his pleasant howl or bark. “They make it seem like nothing at all. Five-hundred-ton lintel stones, and they say that they were teetered up there either with log ramps or earthen ramps, and that the ramps were removed afterwards. Banana leaves! It's nonsense, I tell you.”

“What is your profession?” I asked him.

“Cosmologist,” he said.

The barefoot walking was again heard outside, pounding up and down in that earthen-floored corridor, and I was very curious. What was that very heavy, very silky double step?

“Is your friend not coming in?” I asked Hamadryad and nodded towards the corridor.

“He is not my friend. He is my slave,” Hamadryad said. “He was in for a moment — you didn't notice him — but now he has gone out again. I prefer that he remain outside.” Yes, I thought that I had heard this slave come in and go out again, but I had been unable to see him. I knew now that the double step meant the slave was a four-footed creature and that the powerful, silky tread meant the creature was five times the weight and height of Hamadryad.

“Really, for even a minor megalithicon, such ramp-building would require the felling of a sizeable forest or else the moving of more dirt than all the earthworms of the world have moved in all time,” Hamadryad was saying. “Even if I didn't know how it was done, I wouldn't accept that it was done with either log or earthen ramps. In Peru three-hundred-ton dressed stones are set into cliff faces that are eight thousand feet high, and sheer. At Baalbek there are thousand-ton stones set in the highest course. What sort of ramps might have been built up to raise such stones as those?”

“I don't know. I'm not a ramp man,” I said.

“Really? You look very like one. I'm glad that you're not,” Hamadryad said. “But I tell you that intensive on-the-site investigation would reveal the impossibility of any sort of ramp in any case. Always there is either a continuity or discontinuity of deposit of soil: nobody can build large ramps and then remove them again without leaving clear traces. Nobody, for that matter, could set very heavy lintel or other stones there on earth preparatory to raising them and not leave trace of them. But on the megalithic sites there are no such traces ever. One would be justified in saying that there have never been such ramps. One would almost be justified in saying that there have never been any such large stones on the sites were they not there on their high supports for all to see till this very day.”

I looked at Ukali the barboy. ‘Which of the nine kinds of nut is this?’ I asked with my eye. Ukali made a jerky motion with his hand, the motion that a user of Arabic script will make when he tries to draw a Roman E in the air.

An E? Hamadryad was an Easter Island nut? He was interested in that small island that drifts always, at slow or at faster speed, towards a foreordained spot. Why, I'd have guessed that eighth or ninth on the list, certainly not first. He didn't seem like such a one.

Ukali brought Hamadryad his lunch, the stomach of a suckling lamb distended with its original milk.

“You can check it with any fairly old stone structure,” Hamadryad was continuing with his pleasant low howl. “Examine Long Barrows, Dolmens, Menhirs, Cromlechs, Henges, Temples, Pyramids and Kifo Pyramids, Sphinxes and Criosphinxes, Sanctums — is it not odd that all megalithic structures are somehow worship buildings and that there are no secular structures among them? — and you will always find the same things: stones that were and are too heavy to be lifted by any human device. The largest modern-day walking crane will hardly lift three hundred tons, but very many of the old buildings have stones weighing from four to eight times that much. Really, there is no device, ancient or modern, that could have lifted them. They simply weren't lifted by machines or devices. All logging or ramping militates against itself very quickly. In no time at all it will become ninety-five percent inefficient. We have the drag, the friction, the longer resolution of angles. The lever-advantage quickly becomes disadvantaged; there is a plain stickiness of all materials that sets early limits. That is why no modern building, say of the last three thousand years, contains really large set stones. The only exceptions are a very few most special buildings built by us initiated ones for our own reasons.”

Small flakes, pieces, grains of Aladdin's Sesame were moving about on the tabletop, and there was no breeze. I saw that Hamadryad was moving them by an act of will. He really seemed unconscious of his act, though it was taking a lot of his energy. He was practicing this thing while he ate and drank and talked, practicing it against the day when it would be required of him. This was a talent he wished to retain and develop.

Hamadryad, while clearly one of the nine kinds of nuts, did not seem like an Easter Island nut. Had I mistaken Ukali's sign?

“How are things on Easter Island?” I asked Hamadryad.

“Still drifting, and with an accelerated drift,” he said. A shadow had come over him. For the moment he didn't look to be quite so pleasant a person as before he had. “The home is now about twenty-seven degrees south and a hundred and eight degrees west, but it drifts. I'm very much afraid it will reach the dread point in my own lifetime, even within the next two hundred and fifty years. Oh well, nobody remains top ape forever. There are cycles. There are aeons.”

“What is the dread point?” I asked him.

“What? What?” Hamadryad barked. Then there was a little business that I missed. Hamadryad had cocked an inquiring eye at or through the barboy Ukali. I felt rather than heard the soundless question: ‘Which of the nine kinds of nuts is this?’ And I flubbed Ukali's quick answer. I caught him just having made a jerky motion with his hand that a user of Arabic script will make when he draws a certain Roman letter in the air. But which? Which of the nine kinds of nut had Ukali signaled to Hamadryad that I was?

I felt very much put down, but that was only for a moment. Neither Ukali nor Hamadryad was boorish. And now Hamadryad answered me with compassion and in his low, howling voice.

“Oh, twenty-nine degrees south and a hundred and eleven degrees west is about the center of it. I thought for a moment you were joking about holy things. But you really didn't know, did you?”

“No, I didn't,” I said, and I felt very ignorant. Ignorant, but determined to get whatever kernel there was in this nut. “But what is so special about the point that is twenty-nine degrees south and a hundred and eleven degrees west?” I asked stubbornly.

Hamadryad looked shocked. Did he still feel that I might be making fun of holy things? Then he answered me as if he were talking to a child:

“That's the only point on the globe that God cannot see,” he said then.

“Why not?” I demanded.

“Ah, it is in the shadow of His own thumb,” Hamadryad said sadly. “He'll not be able to help us when things reach that point. No one will be able to help us.”

I hadn't a lot of business here. No coconuts were grown in the region of The Third Cataract, but we did import a few from the Indian Ocean coasts. And one cannot neglect any odd portion of his territory. Why should I feel like an outsider?

There was still the heavy, silken, double-step sound of bare feet in the dirt-floored corridor, the sound of a powerful animal walking on pads back and forth. I went out to look. There was nothing to be seen there, and the light was good. There was much to be heard there though — and quite a lot to be smelled. There was a little rush now of the feet coming more rapidly, coming at me. There was the stenchy animal signature. There was fear — mine. I bolted back into The Third Cataract Club. The fear didn't follow me there, but a sort of snicker followed. It was an evil, feline chortle. It was a big cat laughing at a lowly human. So I knew what animal was pacing invisible in the corridor.

“Well, how do you get the big stones up there?” I asked Mr. Hamadryad in total exasperation.

“Oh, we use panthers,” he said simply.

“Panthers? Not leopards?” I asked. For the invisible animal in the corridor was a leopard.

“Panthers,” Mr. Hamadryad repeated. “After all, a leopard is only a panther gone to meat.” But how can panthers aid in raising five-hundred-ton lintel stones to great heights? I believe that Mr. Caracal came into The Third Cataract Club then.

Mr. Caracal was a suave, silky man with steep ears. Hamadryad didn't like Caracal, that was plain.

“Go back into it,” Hamadryad ordered. “You have no right to be out of it.”

Caracal showed a fastidious contempt for Mr. Hamadryad. Certain unclear things happened.

“This is rebellion!” Hamadryad shrilled. It may be that Hamadryad left the club then, or that both of them left. Anyhow, something intervened, and I didn't see Hamadryad again for five years.

2.

Is the Yin-Yang alternation the same as the Monkey-Cat alternation? Even among the Chinese this is not certain. Just how strong is the compulsion that the dominant member — in the period of its ascendancy — holds over its contrary? Is it strong enough to rupture the Earth? Yes, Paracelsus thought so. Is it strong enough to move mountains? Yes, Mencius was sure that it was. Is it powerful enough to move continents? No, no, that's very unlikely. Powerful enough to move islands, it may be, but not continents. Avicenna believed that even small islands can only be moved a qadam or so a year. A man who sometimes comes into the Geologists Club here says that islands can seldom be moved more than a foot a year, and that Easter Island is moving at only half that speed. He says that the tension is about the same between the Yin-Yang and the Monkey-Cat alternations — and that these are the two strongest contraries.

One can move grains of sand with a little disk held in the palm of the hand, if it bears either the Yin-Yang or the Monkey-Cat union-contrast. But increasing the size of the disk will not increase the effect.

Who do the Easter Island head-statues look like? What men or ghosts or darksome creatures do these huge, deformed dished faces properly belong to? Seldom in those years did I go to Rapa Nui on Easter Island without wondering about those things, without in fact climbing those slopes again to gaze at the giant stone heads there. I got to Gran Rapa no more than once a year — the coconut business was not really major there — but this question was with me all the time.

Were they cat faces? No, no, cats cringed in fear before those big images. Cats do not do well on Easter Island at all. The really big cats there, they say, are still underground. Were the large images dog faces? Slightly, ever so slightly. Were they monkey faces? Not quite, no, not quite. What monkeys had such long noses as those? And where else might be found such longish, good-naturedly serious faces as here?

Well, there are a few such faces on Egyptian friezes, though not perhaps on any of the better known ones — not on any of those north of Qena anyway. A few such faces were on early Mexican terra-cotta figurines — but the Mexicans did not have either the monkey or the cat, and they had the yin only and not the yang. There were quite a few of the faces in the old comic Chinese drawings that can only be called “Monkey Shines.” Some of them found in Gothic carvings ought to be named “Katzenjammern,” things that are too late to be honest Gothic, fourteenth-century things. The longish faces are on Irish bronze-work and on Attic pottery, but not on the best of either. Deer sometimes have that long-faced look; colts and dogs have it more often. But these are all glancing coincidences, not the solid things.

Very rarely will a person have that look. And one person in particular had it, he on whose account I began to notice the big faces closely. This person was Mr. Hamadryad, that lank-faced, long-nosed gentle man with the muted howl in his voice. He looked like that. But what was the main thing that the Easter Island heads, and Mr. Hamadryad, and all the other cited oddities looked like? What was it that pulled them all together? For the big Easter Island faces had only half their look; they implied their own intertangled opposites somewhere. One person had told me that those opposites were still sleeping in stone under the ground.

When next I saw Mr. Hamadryad, it was not in bright Africa, but in the dim and little-known interior of the North American continent. This was south of the domain of the Garfield-county wheat-growing tribe; somewhat north of those wide savannas of the bush-wool or cotton plants; west of the pecan forests and bosky bottoms of the Canadian River wilderness; east of the sunburned grazing range of those short-legged black cattle named Angus. It was some five days' portage — or two hours by motor — from the Alabaster Hills. It was at that dusty, trail-crossing town named Oklahoma City.

Traveling in coconuts, I hadn't much business in that place. I had called on the Cross-Timbers Coconut Candy Manufacturing Company. And then I was in the Sun-Deck Club of that town.

I heard the now-familiar footfalls in the corridor outside: the steps of a splayfooted person in soft buckskin boots; and the powerfully heavy, silky quiet and blurred double steps of a barefoot being. Then Mr. Hamadryad came into the club alone. The other, the slave — if it were he — remained outside.

“A Ring-Tailed Rouser, and the regular for lunch,” Mr. Hamadryad ordered in that pleasant, muted howl that I would always remember.

“Certainly, Mr. Hamadryad,” said Jane the beautiful bartender, and she set about building the Rouser. The Ring-Tailed Rouser is composed mostly of clear, uncharred whiskey served in a quart fruit jar. There is added a sprinkle of gypsum dust from the Alabaster Hills and also the egg of the scissor-tail flycatcher, smashed in the shell and afloat in the liquid. And Hamadryad added a sprinkling of the small grains of the broomcorn plant — these grains are very like Aladdin's Sesame — as soon as the drink was set in front of him. The Ring-Tailed Rouser is a specialty of the Sun-Deck Club and is found almost nowhere else in the world.

Mr. Hamadryad paid for the drink with a Jackson, one of those oblong green-paper — or green-skin — coins that were used in the middle barrens of the North American continent. He would have change coming but he let it hang. He was setting up tab at the Sun-Deck Club. He came and sat at my table.

“How did the panthers do it?” I asked him. He looked at me now. The five-year interval seemed to bother him only slightly.

“Oh, for the moment I'd forgotten what we had been talking about,” he said in that bemused, happy howl of his. “I suppose you could say that they did it in the nature of ransom. They had so much agony owing, and besides they are our slaves. But the real explanation will go back to the foundations of the world, and it concerns a partial unfolding or moving of those foundations. You didn't think you were the first, did you? You weren't. You were the last.”

“Didn't think who was the first what?” I asked him.

“You, you people of the new line,” he said. “You weren't the first, and you sure were not the strongest or the most intense. Your own encounter, well, it would have been a pretty small thing to those who have known real encounters. And your fall, it was hardly what we would call a fall, without laughing. Our own fall, now that was something.”

“Tell me about it,” I said.

“I may not,” he told me. “T'would blow your mind and your ears. But there were quite a number of races who had covenants, before Abraham, before Adam. These covenants were towering things, and their breakings were of immeasurable depth. There was violence and earthquake and earth-shattering in those abysmal falls. After such horrors, God repented himself and made each succeeding test more gentle. If not, no flesh would have remained anywhere. And yet ourselves were quite near the end of the series. We never knew the real burning and shrieking horror of the early ones.

“We were doomed to be the slaves of slaves. For this, two races — ourselves and another — were chained together. I do not know whether I can explain this relationship to you, the closeness that accompanies an utter alienation, the apposition and the opposition. Our counterparts in this are something like your own shoulder angels?”

“Shoulder angels?” I asked. I had never heard quite that term.

“You know them though you deny them,” Hamadryad said. “But your own angels, who are they really? I have heard that you yourselves usually do not see them, but every other race of magus, ghost, animal, creature or being sees them. Most of these folks believe that your refusal to see your shoulder angels is a most cruel disdain. I've come to the conclusion, though, that it's really blindness and inattention on your part. But are they really a race coupled to you for punishment? Are they even a separate race at all?

“It is suggested that they are your own twins somehow deformed. It is guessed that they are your afterbirths somewhat mutated. Sometimes they are actually attached to you as small, fleshy extensions growing out of the human shoulders; and these, though you often deny it, can be seen by yourselves as well as by others. But these latter are usually covered up, by clothing and by silent conspiracy. But what are they really?

“With us there are two clear races involved. Our enemies serve as our angels and our slaves for an era. Then it all turns over, in a strange way and out of the sight of God. Then we must serve as angels and slaves to our enemies for a long era. We will then be forced to move and lift and carry, to hew and to shape. We, the great ones, will become the slaves of the slinking panthers, and we must serve out the ransom.”

Jane, the beautiful waitress, brought Hamadryad's lunch and set it before him. It was the stomach of suckling calf distended with its first milk.

“I still don't see how the big, heavy lintel stones may be moved by means of panthers,” I said.

“Things much greater than lintel stones,” Hamadryad howled softly and dreamily. “Do you know which are the lowest and highest of all folks who have received the Spirit or the pseudo-spirit? The lowest of all are the gibberish people who misunderstand the old business of ‘speaking in tongues.’ But even in your scripture the verb used for this speaking is selected carefully from several. It means to speak clearly. For God is not the God of gibberish. These are the lowest of all folks, those who say ‘Lord, I am holy. I can talk gibberish.’ And a short million miles above the gibberish people are the snake-handlers. We, even more than yourselves, have an abhorrence touched with fear concerning snakes. It raises my hackles every time I handle a deadly snake, and I do have hackles.”

Yes, Hamadryad did have hackles in the peculiar crest and lay of his lank hair.

“Snake-handlers bring courage to the affair,” said Hamadryad, “in contrast to the gibberish people who bring nothing. But greatest of all is the Faith-that-Moves-Mountains. Those who bring most are the mountain-movers, the elite of all the preternaturals, of all those who are under the punishment and the ransom. I tell you that mountain-moving is very hard to fake. Mountain-moving is the most terrible task that has ever been given to man or magus to do.”

“What are you doing in the barrens of North America?” I asked Hamadryad. “In particular, what are you doing here in the canton of Oklahoma?”

“I had a report, and I came to observe the Black Mesa out in the corner of this canton,” he said. “I really came to observe a new and valid talent which had appeared in the region. It's of the enemy, of the slaves, but it's worth observing. I watched the working of it for three days, and it took a lot out of me. Did you know that the Black Mesa moved nine inches in three days ending yesterday?”

“I heard that there were earthquake tremors in that region.”

“There was a young and untrained puma in that region, an unslaved natural talent,” Hamadryad said. “Though I loathe all cats, yet I admired that young puma. By soul-wrenching sacrifice, by towering mentality, by garish ghastliness, by rampant animality that young puma moved that mountain named the Black Mesa nine inches in three days. I saw this. I attest it. Before God, he moved it! And he did it not even for the ransom yet. He was a free puma. His was Faith, pure and undefiled.”

“What has that to do with moving lintel stones?” I asked.

“It has to do with the moving of a mountain that is the equivalent of many millions of lintel stones,” Hamadryad said. Hamadryad was quite shaken even in the telling of this, and I began to wonder about this person. Hamadryad had changed somewhat in appearance in the five years since I had seen him last. His oddities were all sharpened. Whatever it was that he represented, he represented it much more strongly now. Hamadryad had once mentioned the Criosphinxes, those ram-headed sphinxes of Greece and Egypt. But he now reminded me of the Man-Drill Sphinx at Baidoa in upper Juba.

Small flakes, pieces, grains of broomcorn were moving about on the tabletop, and there was no breeze. I saw that Hamadryad was moving them by an act of will. He really seemed unconscious of his act, though it was taking a lot of energy. He was practicing this thing while he ate and drank and talked. It was a talent which he wished to retain and develop. But it would have to be developed many million-fold to equal that of the young enemy puma who had moved the Black Mesa nine inches. Was it mountains to be moved that were overshadowing this likeable man?

“Were there mountains involved in your own original encounter?” I asked.

“Aye, Magic Mountains, Floating Mountains!” he cried with soaring memory. “But it was more than mountains, more than ships, more than islands. It was a Pavilion! Ah, what a Pavilion we did have once! It floated on the water, and it bore mountains and forests and gardens on its back. Did God ever give so magnificent an exile-float to anyone else? This was the tent that had been pitched in the pleasant place, and originally it had been larger than the world. You have heard of ‘floats’ in parades? Ours was the original of those moving flower-tiered wagons, or the beautiful juggernauts that moved over land and sea or the ‘floats’ that were floats indeed. You have, perhaps, heard the term ‘watercolors’ as applied to art? ‘The water, like a witch's oils, / Burnt green, and blue and white’ — as a poet (I sometimes think he was one of us) has written. Our moving mountain, our floating garden was the primordial watercolor in that it was a pandemonium — and it had recently been a panangelicum — of hues so vivid as to be scandal to the land. Aye, we were expelled from the land; we and our verdant, tiered and terraced mountain that was like a mile-high platter of fruits. We were marooned on our mountain-island-barge, marooned on the blue and green and scarlet mirroring ocean: for maroon is a color as well as a condition. This was our purple exile on the royal and purple sea.”

“It sounds wonderful, but what are you talking about?” I asked him.

“Oh, it was full of wonder, but it wasn't a pleasure-wonder,” he said sadly as though he remembered it himself. “The deprivation was starker for us, perhaps, than for any other race. It may be for that reason we were provided with a grander vehicle. All left the garden with pieces of the garden, but some went with mere clods of that holy place. I have heard that you, yourselves, had to walk out.”

“Oh, from the garden? Yes, I guess so,” I said.

“We floated out of the garden that was in the middle of the waters,” Hamadryad recited. “We floated away on an aromatic, many-colored mountain-island that was fruitful beyond description. Oh, by the red dew of Olivet but it was fair! And we were kings yet, though fallen. We forced our slaves for continuing ransom to hew and transport and set up great idols of ourselves.

“But then we drifted. We wanted to go one way. Our slaves, the cats, wanted to go another; and theirs was the agony, but theirs was also the movement. To them had been given, beyond ourselves, the terrible mentality and spirit to move stones and mountains and islands. So we drifted in the direction selected by our slaves, and it wasn't a random direction. Then pieces began to break off our beautiful island of exile.”

A feline chill had entered the room. Hamadryad shivered and shriveled, and he seemed unsure of himself.

“Which pieces broke off your exile island?” I asked him.

“Oh, hundreds of pieces until what is now left is quite small and not as green as it might be. Madagascar was the largest of those early pieces to break away, and it drifted back partly toward the direction of our origin. It is still there as a mystery and a sign; it doesn't belong in the contemporary world. You know, of course, that ‘Cats and Monkeys Island’ is the literal meaning of Madagascar?”

“I know,” I said. But Hamadryad had risen full of passion, red and purple of face, shaking and gibbering.

“Get back, get back, go back into it!” Hamadryad howled suddenly and furiously. And what had brought on such a tempest of passion?

Mr. Caracal had come into the room, and the footfalls of the corridor had come with him. Mr. Caracal was the thing that had been in the corridor invisible. And yet he was a highly visible, suave, silky man with steep ears.

“Go back into it,” Hamadryad howled. “You have no right to be out of it!”

But Caracal grinned with fastidious contempt. He looked as though he might tear Hamadryad apart. There was a terrible battle being fought somewhere, in doubtful arena, and Caracal was defeating Hamadryad in furious conflict.

“Is Mr. Caracal a club member?” I asked Jane the beautiful bartender. “He is making one of your clients very unhappy.”

“I'll not interfere with that one,” Jane disclaimed. “You never know who is going to end up top cat.”

“This is rebellion!” Hamadryad screeched. “Your time hasn't quite come.”

Caracal was advancing on Hamadryad, and it really seemed as if he would eat him alive and complete as he trembled there. Somehow, Hamadryad left the Sun-Deck Club then in a stormy scene. It is likely that both of those odd persons left.

Something intervened anyhow, and I didn't see Mr. Hamadryad again for several years.

3.

Madagascar, I had found, didn't really mean ‘Cats and Monkeys Island.’ Hamadryad had made that up, and I had agreed with him so as not to seem ignorant. And there are no holy records of earlier expulsions of other races from the Pleasure Place. Well, perhaps somewhere there are earlier and less holy records of such.

Following as I do the coconut trade, I happened again to be at that most unproductive base of it, Rapa Nui on Easter Island. I was in Drill's Marine Bar. I had been asking about and thinking about a certain shadow that for countless ages has been on the face of the Earth. I was worried that Easter Island, now drifting at the wild speed of more than three hundred feet a year, had begun to enter that shadow or blind spot. And it had begun to. Several pieces of beach were already under the shadow, and they seemed void of life, void of light, void of meaning. Only irrational things could happen in those umbrageous places. But if they happened, they would happen for the whole world.

Could there really be such a blind spot on Earth? And why had it seldom been noted in the past? I asked the proprietor Drill about it, and he stroked his nose as he answered.

“Yes, the spot is indeed there and it has always been there,” Drill told me. “And why has it seldom been noted? The reason that it is little noted is simply that there is nothing noteworthy about it. No wind blows there, and no wave moves. Yet there are frozen or motionless waves risen up there in their crests and furrows, and these unmoving waves have a deep meaning.

“The sun and the moon do not shine on the spot, and the stars do not. No birds fly over and no fish swim under. There is no luminescence in the depths there, and no gegenschein in the high air. Compass needles wilt and sag for there is no magnetism. In the area of the spot there is no dry land except, it is said, at the changing of the aeons. No planes fly over, for it would be all blind flight. No ships or boats traverse that shadow, for it is not on the way to anywhere. It is on no way, no route, no current, no wind. Nothing drifts in or out of the region ordinarily, though there is strong rumor that our own island drifts into it now. It is the blind spot on the globe where mapmakers often put in notes or scales or explanations of Mercator's projection. So you can see that there is really nothing noteworthy about the spot. Except one thing.”

Drill shook a bit of sharkskin pepper onto the back of his hand, and he licked it off with his long and perhaps prehensile tongue. There is no real pepper on Rapa Nui; but grated sharkskin looks like pepper, and it is much cheaper if one grates it himself.

“What is the one thing?” I asked, as was expected of me.

“The furrows and crests of the frozen or motionless waves, they have a design; perhaps it is the original of all designs,” Drill said. “As the spot is the shadow of the thumb of God, so these undulative configurations are the shadows of the whorls and loops of God's own thumbprint. Those designs have all been recorded, and they are in the old archives and chants. You can see the value of this.”

“No. What is the value?” I asked.

“Why, we have positive identification,” Drill said. “If ever a false God should come over our earth, we would know the difference.”

“The spot is moving over our land now,” said Chui, who was Drill's sweep-out boy. There was something about Chui that was too clean, too ordered, too sleek, too suave, too cruel, too efficient. His abilities were plainly beyond those of an ordinary sweep-out boy. “And the land becomes furrowed as the spot moves over it. The furrowing of the land takes the same patterns as that which the motionless waves had shown. And something else is revealed by the furrowing, is literally uncovered by the furrowing — it is the resurrection of the implicit stones.”

“What stones are these?” I asked Chui.

“The basalt stones that were implicit in the Earth from the beginning,” Chui said. “The stones that will become the idols of the new masters when they are hewed and carried and set up in place by the terrifying, soul-wringing labor of someone, not of ourselves.”

How would there be basalt stones on Rapa Nui? How would a sweep-out boy on Rapa Nui use words like “implicit?”

There was the sound of some sort of scuffle outside of Drill's Marine Bar. There were the — now somewhat troubled — two sets of footfalls in the outer corridor: those of a splayfooted person in soft buckskin boots and also the blurred double footfalls of a barefoot person. And I heard the angry voice of Hamadryad:

“You will wait, beast! You will not take over one instant before the time!” Hamadryad howled. There was a chilling animal chortle — it was insane, and it echoed the terrible, ordered mindset of the insane. There was a thudding, ripping blow. And there was a quavering scream — Hamadryad's. I felt with an awful sinking that Hamadryad was dead. But presently he came into the Marine Bar. He was somewhat bloodied about the left shoulder and arm, but he was almost serene.

“It is a mistake to treat slaves with too light a hand,” he howled softly, “but it is likewise a mistake not to recognize the day when it arrives. I'll not intrude my own troubles on others though, especially since the turnover will be pretty general. Ah, a Final Catastrophe, Mr. Drill, and the usual for lunch.”

“Certainly, Mr. Hamadryad,” Drill said, and he began to assemble the Final Catastrophe. A Final Catastrophe is green, still-fermenting palm wine served in a large wooden bowl. It is sprinkled with sharkskin pepper and it has hull-bore worms in it to give it liveliness. It always contains a cormorant egg smashed in its shell and afloat in the liquid. The Final Catastrophe is a specialty of Drill's Marine Bar and is found almost nowhere else in the world.

“We overdramatize ourselves and our affairs,” Hamadryad howled easily as the sweep-out boy Chui, a little later, was cauterizing his bleeding arm and shoulder with boiling hot ships' tar, using a big brush. Chui had a new glitter and avidity for this task. He sniffed blood; he sniffed pain. One was tempted to believe that there was a touch of cruelty involved, tempted to suspect that the tar didn't really have to be that hot.

“Actually, a final catastrophe is not as final as all that,” Hamadryad added. “We eschatological persons are accused of turning all our tales into end-of-the-world tales. Really they are not. They are merely end-of-the-era tales, or end-of-the-episode tales.”

Was it in mere sympathy with Hamadryad that my own left shoulder began to ache and stir and heave? A great pain there had roots running down into my heart and lungs and liver and up into my head. Something was very wrong about this new pain in my shoulder, this new weirdness, this new desolation. A shoulder should not go to the roots of being like that. And there was something very wrong with the behavior of our island. It gave a great bump and jolt so as to produce sudden seasickness and disorientation. The island must have moved fifteen feet further into that blind spot that is the shadow of God's thumb.

Hamadryad shook kunai-grass seeds into the Final Catastrophe as soon as that drink was set in front of him. Kunai seeds are very like Aladdin's Sesame, very like broomcorn spikes. Hamadryad paid for the drink with a nui d'argile, a local clay coin of which five hundred are required to equal one Chilean peso. It was really not enough for the drink, but Drill was some sort of Kindred of Hamadryad — and one always enters a great turnover broke and in debt.

“Our remnant island, our vestigial home comes under the shade almost at once,” Hamadryad said. “All the islands of the world — all the mains also — are only pieces broken off and drifting away from the paradise. Yet this our own island was once special among the bright ones.”

Chui the sweep-out boy had begun to tear my shirt off me in strips and rippings. This wasn't ordinary behavior even in Drill's Marine Bar, but I was now in too much pain to object. It was as if a sword were going out of my shoulder, and that hurt much more going out than going in. Then, with great delight, Chui was applying boiling hot tar to my disturbed area.

“They love it,” this Chui reveled. “It's a joyful malediction to them on their going out to take control. The tar brush is symbol of all such things.”

“All what such things?” I asked with irritation. My shoulder was on fire, but there was something involved with my shoulder that was enjoying the fire.

The island gave another lurch. Still more of it had come under the somber shadow.

“The scatter-heads, those incontinent dreamers who believe that there is an Astrology, say that the world has been in the age of Pisces,” Hamadryad stated, “and that now it will, or has already, entered into the age of Aquarius. What bubble-headed fools they are! They know neither the constellations in heaven nor the constellations on earth! The world has been, for the last long era, in the glorious age of the Monkey; and now it will — Oh, why must such things be! — enter the tyrannical and meticulous age of the Cat.” Hamadryad snuffled, and a tear ran down his long nose.

Drill brought Hamadryad's lunch, the stomach of suckling pig distended with its first milk. Hamadryad sprinkled it with sharkskin pepper and also with kunai seed, spilling much of both from his shaking hand. Then he dined. “ — my last meal as a free person,” he yowled softly.

Myself, I had that disturbed and bottomless feeling that sometimes accompanies typhoid fever, the feeling that there were two of me — one standing just a little apart from the other. But how should I suddenly have the typhoid? Or was the typhoid itself a mere fragmented premonition of something to come? (Ah, the island gave another jolt and slid still more into the shadow; soon it would be darkness at mid-morning.) Was the typhoid — it might be a collective name for many phenomena — a premonition of a thing that might be in the process of arriving at this very moment?

“All of your theories are cataclysmic, as are the happenings and appearances of this day in this place,” I said, “but how are they relevant to the more substantial world in its more reasonable daylight?”

“Is it not shockingly relevant that the Monkeys are out and the Cats are in?” Hamadryad asked sorrowfully. “You will now have over all the world the careful, stalking cruelty and the tufted-eared deceit.”

“Is that worse than what we have had?” I asked him. He had now become very nervous.

“Abysmally worse,” he croaked. Hamadryad hadn't a good appetite for his last meal as a free person. Painfully, agonizingly, he was moving little flecks of sharkskin pepper and kunai seed about on the table, moving them with mental anguish but not touching them except with his mind. “Oh, I'll never be able to do it,” Hamadryad whimpered. “How then will I be able to move things a billion billion times heavier? Oh, it will be an agony of the spirit to perform such labor, and the doom is for such a long aeon!”

I myself was feeling as torn-up as ever I had in my life. The spooky duality was still on me. I was suffering a sundering identity crisis. There was one me located approximately in my proper body. There was another me situated somewhere behind my left shoulder. Which one was valid was unsettled. Everything in my minds was unsettled for a puzzling while. And the island on which we were staying had now developed the nervous, choppy movements of a small boat caught in a riptide.

“What is it that those in the ascendant have and that the slaves usually lack?” Hamadryad asked in a tired, analytical howl. “It is presence,” he stated.

“Presence?” I asked. “I thought that presence was the one thing that the poorest and most abject slave shared with the rich and mighty. Everyone is present somewhere.”

“No, they are not,” Hamadryad maintained. “Many species and races seldom show real presence. Your own shoulder-slaves do not. My own slave in the corridor — ” Hamadryad shuddered a bit here “ — does not. Presence is an attribute of a complete being. Many have not been complete. Now we enter a region and an era when perhaps many of us will regress to incomplete beings. It's frustrating to be incomplete.”

“And invisible?” I asked.

“And invisible,” he said. “It's a sad state. Many who have not experienced it do not realize that to be invisible is to be in total darkness both objectively and subjectively. In our new, sad state, we will be seen only in our work, in the hewing and transporting and setting, in the homage and ransom.”

“What will we hew and transport and set?” I asked Hamadryad. “And to whom will we pay homage and ransom?”

“The great cool cats and the huge idols of them,” he said fearfully. “We will be compelled — awl, awl, rawl, rawl, howl!” and Hamadryad was seized by terrible pain and transformation.

A presence came into the room. And an absence gathered itself whimpering together. Mr. Caracal was the presence that arrived in the room. He was no longer an invisible slave in the corridor; he was a person present — felix and feline — a person of whom great idols would be raised out of the implicit stones. And Mr. Hamadryad was the gathering absence.

And I felt that I also had gathered myself into a weak absence and that that absence was slinking out of my body to skulk and slave invisibly somewhere — and I wasn't much good at moving heavy objects by mental anguish. Oh, the torture that might be ahead! But at the same time I had become a person of great strength and vitality, and I was about to take over and infuse a body that I found tottering there, an old body of my own.

Hamadryad was now no more than a long-nosed shadow in boots that were not part of him. Then he moved out of his fancy boots, and he had baboon feet. He had stepped out of an old sign of his freedom. He was now a freebooter no longer, but a slave slipping into invisibility.

Odd that I had not noticed before that Hamadryad was a baboon. But he was a baboon, a drill, a man-drill — and a vanishing one. Odd that I had not before noticed that the long-faced statues here on Easter Island were baboon-faced. And that thousands of great-faced carvings elsewhere in the world were baboon-faced. But the baboon is much more manlike in face than are the other monkeys, and the monkeys much more so than any other creatures. And, while the monkey era had still obtained, men and monkeys were pretty much interchangeable.

Something of myself had gone out of my body and now whimpered invisible at my shoulder. But something of a more real me had come in with great strength and poise. Mr. Caracal winked at me. Mr. Chui winked at me, and he was much more than a sweep-out boy now. But Drill had disappeared to be an invisible slave for a long era.

Now I am clear and clean, and cool and cruel. I am in command of myself and of my own sector of the world. I am a cool cat with no more of the monkey resemblance. The statues to be raised by slaves from the implicit stones will resemble me. We have high-handed hatred for our right now. We have so many of such spacious things for our right now.

Have you noticed how much calmer the world is now that we have instituted certain measures of discipline? Have you noticed how much cleaner the world is now that we have made “cruelty” no longer a dirty word? Surely I and mine had once been scatter-brained, petty, inefficient and human. Is there not something intolerably monkeylike in the word human? That is all past. Now I am divinely mad, but cool and cruel in my disposition; no longer scatterbrained; all my brains now are neatly in one brain-pan.

Once I traveled in coconuts. In the old way of it, that was to be a monkey traveling in monkey-nuts. The coconut complex — was it not Adam Smith who wrote it so? — had been the last refuge of free enterprise in the world.

Fortunately we have broken up that refuge. We have organized coconuts, the last of the monkey-business. We have organized coconuts into the World-Wide New Era Great Cat Coconut Cartel.

Holy cats, we have organized it all!

Sex And Sorcery

1

I was not about to be left off this probe. I always threw my weight around and I have plenty of it. Everyone should know who I am, but it's best to be sure.

“I have been called the adults' adult,” I told them plainly.

“And who called you that?” one of the soft-shoes on the committee wanted to know.

“I called myself that in Adult Magazine which is an organ for us real adult types,” I told them. “I am Jeb Porno, and if anyone goes to eyeball that tract of the future I go too. I am probably the top eyeball man in the century. Who rammed the Freedom To Watch Act through? You think I edit Eye-Ball and The Blood-Shot Eye for nothing? I am Jeb Porno (this is my pen name or dong name) and I don't miss seeing very much. You need me.”

“This probe is very high-priority, Mr. Porno,” one of these committee steerers tried to tell me. “It's specified that only six persons can go. Thus it will be quite a select group made up of experts' experts, the cream of the cream. And only fields of the highest importance will be represented.”

“What is more important than sex?” I ask him. “And who in sex is more important than myself? Without me, there wouldn't be any future to go to on the probe.”

“Without your kind of sex there might at least be a better kind of present,” he says in a funny voice.

“I know you committee and government types,” I tell them all. “I know that you're a not-with-it bunch, and I know ways to hurt you. I know that several of you are in violation of the Full Disclosure Act again and again, and I know that others of you have mighty little to disclose. I can spill stuff on every one of you. Nothing as old-fashioned or poor-paying as blackmail, of course, but I don't edit With Their Pants Down for nothing. There's plenty of guys who'd like personal pieces on them in that, but you aren't that kind. I can do pieces on you on what you're lacking in that'll make you crawl. Do you know what I mean? Complete dong measurements and all. Think about it, little red-faces, and think fast.”

I seem to hear laughing somewhere, but I can't place it. I'm not quite sure that the laughing is on my side.

“We will talk to some of the others, Mr. Porno,” one of the committeemen says, and he has a straight face. These committee boys are a bunch of fagless fossils and you have to handle them with a heavy hand. All in all, I had to shake up about a dozen of these not-with-it guys, but they shake pretty easy. I convince them that they're walking on mighty thin water when they try to freeze me out.

They give me their proposition in a couple of days.

“Yes, you are to be included, Mr. Porno,” they say then. “It's been decided that you will add variety to the probe, and we're not quite sure what our hosts do want. But we will have to be a little circumspect about your role. We have decided to play down all names on this. This is a great public endeavor, and the persons representing the public, though all of them are oustanding persons, shall remain nearly anonymous. We certainly don't want any show-boats or — ”

“Not want show-boats!” I bellow at them. “Well, you're going to have a show-boat, the biggest of them all. Don't forget that Show-Boat is one of my hottest sheets. Is this or is this not the let-it-all-hang-out twentieth century? My name and my dong are two things that nobody will ever play down! There's not an anonymous hair on me anywhere. I don't edit Public Heirs (the Peoples' Right to See Magazine) for nothing. Depend on it, I'll holler it up all the way! Nobody slips me in quietly. You think I edit Blow-Mouth and then forget to blow?”

I hear laughing somewhere again but I can't place it. I don't like that. I'm the biggest guy there is in sex, and sex is no laughing matter.

Sure, I got to go on that probe, and I was the biggest noise on the whole thing. They'd hardly have been able to hear us coming if it wasn't for me. The rest of them are a bunch of small-mouthed scute-fish.

The name of the thing was the Aaronson-Abbott-Abel-Abraham-Porno Time Probe.

“How come my name isn't first on the list?” I ask those committee fellows. “I want top billing. I'm the biggest noise in sex, and sex is the biggest noise there is.”

“We decided that the names should be in alphabetical order,” the committeemen told me. “That's the only way we could be fair.” Again I hear laughing somewhere, and it's laughing that I don't have any cue for. I don't like the tone of it though; it's pitched too low. I may have to get my ears fixed when I come back from the probe. Ears are very important to me. I don't edit The Eaves-Dropper for nothing.

“Where did all those A-names come from?” I ask them, but they don't answer.

“Anyhow, I'll make more noise than all of them together!” I swear, “and I'll measure dongs against any of them!” I don't get any takers. My reputation is solid for these things.

The fields of interest represented by the other five members of the probe were (get this, it's good) History as Life of the World, Science and the Lord of Science, World Technology or the Demiurgi at Work, Transcendent Ethics and the Evolvate Economy, and Quality of Life and Art. Imagine going to the future looking for stuff like that. My own field is listed as Contemporary Hex-Sex, the Let-It-All-Hang-Out Syndrome.

But how did we just happen to stumble onto the time-probe stunt around the end of the let-it-all-hang-out twentieth century? We didn't. The boys that work with that stuff hadn't even been close to pulling it off. Time probes were still two hundred years in the future, they said, and they were right. There was a lot of heavy stuff to be gone through first and no way to speed it up.

What did happen is that the people two hundred years in the future, having just made a breakthrough on the thing, sent back a kit for experiment. With the kit were minute instructions, and an invitation for six persons from the tail-end of the twentieth century to visit them.

It would be a tricky business. We knew that we'd be walking on mighty thin water whatever we did about it. It was built-in trickery. The future people will always call the tune, and right from the beginning I had the feeling that they were a bunch of soft-shoes. There isn't yet, and there wouldn't be then either, any way to just take off and visit the future. Nothing can be sent into the future: the motive power must run from the future to the past. But gaffles can be sent from the future back into the past, and they can latch onto things in the past and drag them forward. We had to accept the basis that we were in the past and they were in the present.

So they reached back and hooked onto us backward types (‘for the gathering of information, for our use, not necessarily for yours’ as the instructions with the kit had said) so we had to operate on their basis. It was their hooks in our mouths.

But we took the future people up on it, and without any strings at all. Something called the Gift Horse Recommendation was adopted by the Government to cover the situation. So six leaders of the twentieth century were selected to journey into the future. And me, who am the biggest noise in the only field that matters, would naturally be one of the six. I'd go with them. That's the way it had to be.

The details of the trip would only grab what's left of those folks that we used to call ‘normals’. The technique was called ‘post-electronic’. We didn't do anything on the travel; we didn't go anywhere; we just stood there together in a box that seemed to be made out of blue smoke. (There were quite a few of these blue-smoke phenomena in that future we were coming to.) And we seemed to stand in that box without real walls for a very long time. It seems longer when you're with a bunch of not-with-it guys who don't appreciate adult types like myself.

“Naturally it takes two hundred years to go two hundred years into the future,” Nat Aaaronson said in that voice of his that is full of needles. “There's no other way to do it. How will they reverse it coming back? Who said we were coming back? Oh, don't boggle your eyes so, Porno. You don't age while it's going on, and boredom doesn't leave a memory. Relax.”

But I never relax. I'd be someone else if I did. And I tell you that go-nowhere trip did seem like two hundred years. I knew it wasn't. Aaronson didn't know any more about how it was done than I did. I bore pretty easy when I'm with not-with-it types and removed from the materials of my favorite subject. But I guess it was only a couple of minutes till that trip-in-place was finished. Then that box that seemed to be made of blue smoke just dispersed itself, and we were out in the open with our futuristic hosts.

This was the future! Aw guys, you're underplaying it all. Where's the smash to it? Where's all the big noise stuff and the big colors? Where's the speed and the size? Underplaying a scene is the one unforgivable sin. Future, future, you need straightening out! Oh, it's lucky I came to you!

And there is something wrong with our futuristic hosts. Oh, they're big enough, and they look to be bright enough. But they don't have personalities that shout at you. They seem to be made without real dirt, as we say. They were underplayed people. They had a touch of what used to be called ‘class’ which is the one thing that I hate and will fight against. But they sized us up before we got them completely sized.

“Six mighty queer fish, those,” one of our hosts laughed. Well, I had to agree with him five-sixths of the way, so I made myself conspicuous to give him a chance to correct his error. “And this one of them is a whole fish-market in himself,” he added. “Phew!” he said, and he meant me.

“Look, midget,” I said. (He was really a big man, but it sounded as if he might have a midget mind.) “I am Jeb Porno, and what you smell is a scent that I invented myself and that I sell for four dollars a little spray can. It is named Pit and Crotch and is just plain the latest thing in scents.”

Then I had a funny feeling. Whatever these futurists were they were two hundred years later than myself so how can I tell them what is plain the latest thing? And they weren't any of them midgets. All of them were bigger than I am and I'm big. But they were a bunch of soft-shoes, that was plain. And I won't let any bunch of shuffle of soft-shoes get the jump on me.

“Listen,” I said to them. “Let's establish an order of importance here. These other five from the twentieth century are strictly nothing-people, and I'm not as sure about yourselves. But I represent something important and I don't know why you're not falling all over me to honor me as the great precursor. I'm Jeb Porno and I'm a mighty big man where I come from. I'm a literary and general purpose luminary in the only field that matters. I publish Cod-Piece, and Male Bride, and Shaft, and Mouth and Tongue Magazine, and Corn Hole, and Hang-Up which is the journal of doggery. I swing a lot of weight in the legal halls too. Say, did my bill for rehabilitating Non-Consenting Adults ever pass?”

“Oh, come along, Porno,” one of those soft-shoe futurists said without even answering my question.

“We've been had, but I guess the twentieth century is entitled to one hoax when we asked them to accept so much on faith. And five out of six acceptables isn't bad. Out of necessity we must have seemed a little high-handed to your time, and now you get even in a low-handed way. And we do appreciate the humor of sending Porno even if we may not appreciate Porno.” And they seemed to be hustling us along to somewhere.

“Humor is one of the things that I'm not very high on,” I let them know, “unless it is very, very adult humor, and yours doesn't seem to be adult. Funny humor is the one thing that ought to be abolished. And we have to realize that even adult humor mustn't be allowed to come too close to the great thing itself. That is central and it is serious. I've always believed that a fellow should moan a lot and sweat a lot while the main event is going on.”

“Oh come along,” one of them says, and we are traveling along without any sense of motion and without any vehicles except another framework of blue smoke. I don't see any cars here, nor even any proper streets. I'm not sure just what all I do see here. The buildings aren't much. The people are almost the biggest things to be found. I get the impression that the buildings weren't quite real; and that if they were real, then they were only temporary anyhow: it was as though they somehow withdrew when they weren't needed. They must have been built partly of that blue smoke that I kept running into in this future.

“Now we are going to enjoy a little presentation,” one of our hosts said, “and this will be a happening where both parties of us may acquire information. Yourselves may learn something of our culture from these encounters. You are really very fortunate. You're the first men who have been able to travel into a future. We, who invented the probe, aren't able to: naturally not, for it is an axiomatic impossibility. You have really come only to the present, and the present is the normal state: your case is different though. And we may learn something from your reactions to the encounters and exposures. This will be an awareness experience, so please be as aware as you can.”

Well, I am almost sure of one thing. These men of the future are wearing clothes to an illegal degree. And if they aren't wearing clothes, then what is it that they're doing?

“Take them off! Take them off!” I whooped. “You're wearing more clothes than the Full Disclosure Law allows.” Or was I wrong about this? I couldn't identify or describe their clothes, but there was something that got in the way of the free and easy goggle. There seemed to be hazes of blue smoke around them and it made seeing or noticing difficult. I still think it was a violation of the Full Disclosure Law.

They were hooking us up to electrodes or something such, to record and appraise our reactions and emotions I suppose. They put a dozen or so of these taps on each of us, but they never put one on the only place that matters.

“You're forgetting the main organs and sensors,” I told them. “What do you think that we really react with? Aren't you going to put them on our dongs?”

“We hadn't really thought of that,” one of those arrangers said. “Yes, we may as well put one on yours, but we won't on those of the others. I shouldn't wonder if you see and think with yours.”

“I'm proud to say that I do,” I told them, and they put it on. “Hey, you can't fool me with your pretending not to be impressed,” I crowed. “You know that you never saw one like mine. I'm sometimes known as the Butterfly that's hung like a Horse. And there's another thing that you don't seem to have noticed in this bright light. I'm known as ‘The Man With the Luminous Dong’. What I use to make it that way is a phosphorescent secret, but I offer it in the form of ninety-nine weekly treatments at nine dollars each. You too can have — ah, but I suppose the process is well known to you here in the future.”

“We're glad to say that it isn't, Porno,” one of them said. “Now shut up. The presentation has already begun.”

The presentation, well, I don't quite know what it was. It was partly musical, I suppose, and partly dramatic. But the music or whatever wasn't nearly loud enough.

“Turn it up!” I holler at them. “Where's the knob to turn it up? Turn it way up.”

“No, we won't,” our hosts say. “It is about right. However loud it is, it is always about right. And your own frustrations, Porno, in the presence of modulated sound, is one of the things that we want to record. Your own hearing, apparently, has been ninety-five percent destroyed by over-loud noises. That is why you must shout always; and that is why you no longer have a normal speaking voice. But the sound here is self-adjusting, as it is partly subjective.”

“Subjective or not, I want the button to turn it up!” I gave them the rumble in that powerful and horny voice of mine. “Where is the tupping button?”

“Oh, it's in your head,” one of them told me. “Or, in your case, possibly elsewhere.”

And it did work pretty well, after I caught onto the trick. I could turn the sound up for myself just by thinking loud or emoting loud. I couldn't get it quite loud enough, but it was surely better than that almost quiet stuff that they started out with. And I didn't quite know what it was even after I got it turned up, whether music or only background of music. But it wasn't rock. It sure wasn't igneous rock that they used to have. It should have been reported. What ever happened to the Hard Rock Law that made everything else illegal?

“Is this the stuff that they had before rock?” I asked them.

“No. That is the stuff that they had after rock,” one of the hosts said. And there was something else going on that made me mighty suspicious.

“When I turn it up in my head, is it louder for everyone, or only for me?” I ask.

“Only for you,” one of the futurists said. “Each person selects his own, but yours does seem to slop over a little.”

“No, no, no!” I bellow in what I bet is a loud-for-everybody blare. “Don't you know that you're in violation of the Compulsory Participation Law with this set-up? I'm not selfish. I want everyone to hear it all. It's got to be full-blast for everybody all the time. That's the basis of the turned-on society. Hey, I bet if we all put our minds and organs to work on it we could get it solid and loud for everybody.”

“Yes, I bet we could, Porno,” one of the futurists said, “and I bet we won't. Now be quiet, Porno, and listen and learn.”

“I better learn one thing mighty quick,” I howl. “Where's the sex in this show?”

“Oh, it's everywhere, in the show and out of it,” one of the hosts says. “Like water and light, it permeates all life and culture, in the core of them and in the trappings of them.”

“That's what I always said,” I agreed. “But why can't I see it here?”

“Maybe you miss it by sticking your eyes too far out of your head,” one of those soft-shoe futurists said.

This presentation is apparently some sort of drama. A couple of bright kids (they call them ‘yeasters’ or ‘lamp-lighters’) seem to have got it started. Then they left (to start other dramas somewhere in other blocks, that was the impression I got), and other persons drifted into the drama. It was all right when you had almost got the feel of it. Ourselves had now become the characters in this drama, and the drama became ourselves talking and reacting here. Well, I'm no stranger to such stuff. I don't publish On Stage Blue for nothing. I'm always on stage, whatever I am and whatever I'm doing. So I move in to become the Big Noise in this Future Playhouse bit. And they all reacted to me. Even turned-on people react to me pretty strongly. These futurists should have had electrodes attached to them to record their reactions.

Something else was present though, licking around the edges and starting little flicks and fires. It's a thing I can't let myself like. I'd have to give up being what I am if I liked it. It was in me once and I chopped it out. It is illegal under the Plain Brain Act also known as the Equal Opportunity Agreement. We'll cut it out of everything if it will stand still long enough for the knife to find it.

The name of it is Sorcery.

2

Then I was caught up in a soft-key jumble that went on all day. It was soft-look, it was sorcery, it was entrapment into another way of looking at things. It was the implication that there are other ways of thought and action than the adult way. I'll have nothing to do with it all. I'll fight it. But I can't fight it if I can't pin it down, and there's no way it can be pinned.

I don't like to be left on the outside of an affair. I avoid this by always establishing my own thing in the very middle of affairs, establishing it loud and foggy. But I was being out-maneuvered here. I was being underplayed and undercut. This stuff that I call sorcery is everywhere and it is too thin to see or get hold of. Part of it was the blue smoke of the future. There was always a touch of that smoke everywhere, just outside of my vision, never really seen; and invisible blue smoke is very hard to nail down. And always there was laughing, just out of earshot, just around the corner from sound, laughing that you'd like to be in with for safety, but laughing that I couldn't touch. And I kept getting that red-headed feeling that a lot of the laughing was at me. Someone was having fun somewhere, but were they having fun at the expense of the one subject that has to be taken seriously?

There were colors or whispers of colors that I almost remembered or almost recognized. They were a little like the colors that I used to see before I got the with-it, psychedelic tattoos done on my eyeballs so I would see only with-it, adult colors. I'm pretty sure that these not-with-it colors that kept sparkling in were illegal.

There were little noises and they undercut the big noises. They were like horns or trumpets (but not hot trumpets) a long ways away. They were like wood-winds or voice-chorus. I could have liked some of this low-sound stuff if I let myself, but I won't. I stand for too much to start falling for anything less than the main area.

That laughing just off the edges of my ears, it wasn't unpleasant. It was a little like the sound of water running and bubbling, as it was before they put sirens and howlers on all the faucets and fountains. And the blue smoke, it was really a state of mind. But it was a softening state of mind and it made me unsure of myself. It even caused my bellowing to echo hollow, and that is fatal. A bellow that has lost its edge is in trouble. And I was in some kind of trouble. There were things that were done to death in the past and buried, and now I found them alive in the future. I was caught in a spookery of things that I couldn't believe.

These people had brought back some of the old arts, and brought them back in an illegal fashion. And they had cobbled up some new arts that were just as much against the law. The law that a picture must have redeeming social value, that it must show main area stuff in action, is violated everywhere. They have pictures that are landscapes or seascapes or interiors or exteriors, and all of them violate the regulation that they must feature the act itself or some variant of it. There is impressionistic painting that doesn't give the required impression. There is music that is just plain non-orgasmic; there is simply no other word for it. There are even periodicals published without the phallic colophon. How do they get away with this stuff?

They say that all the great laws for which the tail-end of the twentieth century worked so valiantly to enact have been canceled long ago and forgotten about.

“What happened to them? What happened to that great corpus of adult laws that we erected as our triumph and climax?” I demanded of one of those out-of-bounds futurists.

“Oh, I suppose that the pendulum just swung back in the other direction, Porno,” he said. “Excesses don't last forever.”

“Whatever happened to the law that a pendulum must be clearly phallic in design?” I asked in my sly way, for there was an arty pendulum clock there that was clearly in violation of the law.

“I don't believe that I ever heard of that one, Porno,” he said. “There seemed to be a lot of insanity compressed into a few years back there.”

“I tell you, man, I'm mighty disappointed in this future!” I bark.

“Oh well, perhaps your expectations were too low, Porno,” he said. This guy gives it to me with a rubber needle so I don't believe there is any real harm in him. It's just that he never learned the adult way of thought as a child.

“Well, is this the future?” I ask. “I'm beginning to doubt it all. It seems to me that there has been a great mistake made. This must be some lost, dark corner of the past.”

“This is the present,” he said. “One condition of your being here is that you accept that. Time probes can only be made into the present.”

“Have there been other probes?” I asked him. “Has anyone from a more future-shaped present ever contacted you in this present?”

“No, they haven't,” he said. “Or we haven't recognized such events if they have happened. So far as we know, the probe that brought your party here is the first probe ever.”

“So far as I can influence it, it will be the last probe ever,” I said. “This future is a bust. Where is the sex!!!”

“Around every corner, Porno,” he smiles. “Behind every surface and into every dimension. It is the blood of life; it is the holy serum.”

Soft-shoe talk, all we get in the future is soft-shoe talk! It is really sorcery talk and it isn't illegal there. They're allowed to try to convince you that the adult way of looking at things isn't the only way. I'll fracture this little game of theirs yet. I'll find out where they keep it.

The happenings or non-happenings of that day are hung in a sort of order or sequence on five or six pegs. I suppose that they were arranged to have something to do with each of us who came in the probe. They weren't seminars or symposiums. They were a sort of little plays or dramas in which we, along with our futuristic counterparts, were the characters.

There was easy music and sparkle color and evocative odor. There were some pretty good lines, though I still don't know the process by which they were put into our mouths. Somebody took our thoughts and shaped them up into pretty good words for us to speak. I added a few outbursts of my own, of course, but I didn't find very many of the supplied words that I had to spit out.

There were choruses and dancing girls and clowns and plain citizens of that future town who ambled into our drama and took places in it. They brightened it up, they gave an air of professionalism to it. Even so, it was underplayed, all of it underplayed. I kept telling them that.

“Where's the Smash, where's the Crash, where's the Sex?” I howled at them.

“Oh shut up, Porno!” a pretty little chorus girl flashed at me pleasantly enough, and she had a friendly grin on her. But I found that I couldn't even undress her with my eyes without that blue smoke in my mind covering her up again. They had planted something in me that was against my very nature. They were all on a slick decency kick here. This is sorcery that they use, an old low-key sorcery, and there has got to be a law against it even here. And I will find out that law and I will stick them with it.

They were doing a drama on the theme ‘History as Life of the World’, and Joe Aaskus of the probe was the leading character. I had to hold myself in pretty close to keep from finding it interesting; to keep from liking it, really. But whatever interest I show in lesser things detracts from the interest I have in the thing itself.

The play was like a big ramble through world after world, all of them flame-new but all of them also resembling each other like cousin or kindred worlds. They were big and deep and bright. They had a lot of vitality and movement and swoop and power. A lot of them were dead and buried, but they weren't dead in this play. Some of these worlds were happening right now, and some of them hadn't happened yet. It was all brim-full stuff with the juice pouring out of it everywhere. This is the real sorcery that I am trapped into and that I can't help liking. But shouldn't it have another name too?

“Where is the sex?” I howl in that affronted-thunder voice of mine. There is laughter, and there isn't supposed to be. They have developed a little galloping tune that they play whenever I howl out this question, and they always begin it just a fraction before I begin. I don't know how they synchronize it, but they fix it so that I always come in on a comic beat. They make me sing to their tune and it takes the edge off my tall question. And there's more laughter sounding around the edges of it all.

“Sex, which is another name for life itself, is all through it,” one of those futuristic sorcerers is telling me. “It's in every vein and channel of it. It is the joy and the sparkle. It is one of the dimensions of history, as of so many other things. and history would be quite flat without it. Sex is implicit in everything. It imbues the whole world, the whole procession of worlds that is named history.”

“That may well be,” I argue. “Sex may be implicit in everything. But I want it out of everything and right here in one piece where I can see it and smell it and taste it and feel it and watch it. When is the main act? When do the people do it? What is this run-around that you keep giving me?”

“Sometimes we have trouble understanding you, Porno,” this sorcerer says. “When do they do it, you ask? The people do it all the time, in season and out of season, in color and charm, in grace and in glory, now and tomorrow and yesterday, in the most pleasurable way, in the great artistry that is named tension, and in the great resolution that is named release. They do it. And, after such pleasures, the participants rejoin their fellows.”

“Rejoin?” I gasp, for it's as though I had suffered a great body stroke. “Have I heard you right?” I could hear my own bones rattling, and the world was reeling on the verge of collapse. “Rejoin from what? You mean that it is done in private?”

“Oh certainly. How else would it be done?” this sorcerer asks. But there is a howling in my ears. The world has collapsed indeed. All that we had worked so hard to erect has been destroyed in one word.

The sequence is lost after this. There seems to be quite a bit of noise, and I am making most of it. There is bitter-tasting, foamy stuff in my mouth. What is it? It's foam, and I'm foaming at the mouth. They can't sweep away a whole complex of jurisprudence like that.

What happened to the Right of the People to Watch? What happened to the Free Participation Franchise, and to the Round Robin Act of 1998? This is criminal exclusion that is being practiced here. Oh, there are a hundred solid laws being broken here, and am I the only one who cares?

They let me lie down for a while, and I miss most of the rest of the little dramas. I sleep, and I have a nightmare that maybe I am wrong. That sorcery had its hooks in me. It almost led me down the primrose path that has those private houses at the end of it. But I'll find a way through this trickery yet.

They gave me a good meal after a while. I never cared much what I ate before if there was enough of it: lots of cheese, lots of ramps, lots of mountain-oysters, lots of love apples (no, not tomatoes), lots of goat. This food has class, but I'm too tired to be wary of class now. They eat and drink well here, and I feel better after I have consumed it. But I have that soft-shoe fear: ‘Now I have eaten sorcerers' bread and meat and drunk their wine and applejack. Will I ever be free from them?’

“Aw, how about the rest of it?” I ask after a while. “It doesn't have to be the straight thing. That's for kids. How about the nine hundred variations and all the fringe stuff? Whip and flip, hand and mouth, tokus and mokus, bug and fug, are these things still carried on here?”

“Sadly yes, to a limited extent,” one of the futuristic sorcerers says. “It isn't as it was in your day, of course, but there are said still to be sordid residues of the perversions.”

“Where is it? Where are they?” I bark. “Where can I find them? Will those guys let me watch and join in?”

“They probably would, but we won't,” the sorcerer says. “Your time is quite short, and your actions are going to be monitored from now out. What, what, another tantrum, Porno?”

That comic, galloping music began just a blink before I went into my act. Damn their timing! Damn that tune! It made me feel a little silly to come in right on their beat where they wanted me. But I threw my fit anyhow, a great big busting one. I'm not sure that they'd ever seen one like that before.

“It's your time and your turn, Porno,” they said to me after quite a while had gone by. “Now, for a fair moment, you will get to be the star of the show, even if it is a sideshow. We will have selections from your own works on display. And we will even make a life-sized statue of you, out of real wax.”

“You're not just saying that to make me feel better?” I asked them. I was a little bit wary of the attention.

“No, no, we will do what we say we will do,” they assured me. “Come along now.”

Went to a nice small building with the sign on it: Museum of Jovial Insanities and Putrid Pathologies of the Late Twentieth Century.

Listen, I'm there! I'm already there! I'm the only one of our probe who already has space devoted to him in the Museum of Jovial Insanities and Putrid Pathologies. I have a little space right behind the section devoted to Famous Mass Murderers and right across from the department dedicated to Defamers, Destroyers, and Dismal Demagogues. As yet there wasn't any wax statue of me like those of some of the murderers and defamers, but there is my name on the wall there:

Jeb Porno, who best typifies a Period and a Pathology

And there is a wide spectrum of my publications on display. There is Stink Finger: The Adult-Type Coloring Book for Children Five to Seven. There is Rowl-Howl or the Sound that Sex Makes, which is devoted to music buffs. There is Faggot, Fag, and Coprophag which is for the intellectual crowd. There is Arschloch which is printed in German. There is Ding Dong, Ewe and Tup (for the rurals,) Swish, and Acid Test. There are the masterful mags from my maturity: With Their Pants Down, Blow-Mouth, Cod-Piece, Mouth and Tongue Magazine, Hang-Up. I'm so touched that there are tears in my eyes. The future has remembered me after all.

They are bringing something then, and I sense that it is important. There is a smell. Boy is there a smell! It is hot and heavy and is something that I can relate to. But I have never come on it quite as strong as this. Whatever it is, they do things right here.

“What is it?” I ask them. It has to be something monumental.

“Wax, boiling hot wax,” they say. “We will measure you and size you now, and we will mould the wax statue of you right here on the spot.”

“Wax and what else?” I ask them, and I'm loving that smell that normals would find a little bit malodorous. This is me, my own essence.

“Wax and authenticity,” one of these moulding sorcerers says. “Both are as fine as can be obtained.”

They went to work on me, and the whole thing had me filled with pride. I saw myself in all my distinction and horniness forming before my eyes. “This is perfect, it will be perfect,” I say, “but it will have to have — ”

“Will have to have what?” those soft-shoe, moulding sorcerers ask me, and they look at each other. They already guess, or they suspect at least.

“The dong,” I say.

There is just a little flicker passes over them, and then it is gone.

“Oh, I suppose so,” one of them said.

“After all, our motto is ‘wax and authenticity’,” the other one murmured.

“And can we have it luminous?” I ask them, getting pretty interested. This would be good. “Can we have a red light inside it that will light up?”

“Yes, I suppose we could manage that,” they say.

They did it. It's the best thing ever done. Those men were sorcerers in wax and they created a masterpiece with a lighted dong. There was a bit of laughing here and there, coming from futurists looking through their own museum. Peasants! Let them laugh! Someday they will understand greatness.

The wax masterwork is still there in the future. It is me and all that I stand for. And generations still unborn will someday gaze upon it.

I am so bemused and ensorcelled by my own monument in wax that I am in a daze till we go into that box made out of blue smoke to return to our own time.

“I hear some of them say ‘Phew, that's the end of that one, we hope.’ That may write finish onto time probes forever.”

And I am back in the tail-end of the twentieth century for three days before my mind is clear enough from that soft-shoe propaganda even to sound the alarm. I'm not quite clear in my wits yet, but there's no time to lose. Listen! This is the sad dope on the future:

There isn't any sex up there in the future, not what you and I call sex. What they have seems to be pretty much straight stuff and they do it mostly in private. They don't have real sex, do you hear me? They violate the Minimum Compliance Law, and they have a lot of arty stuff that is likewise illegal. And they don't even know the meaning of the word ‘adult’.

They are a bunch of easy-go, under-play sorcerers in the future; they don't get hot and heavy. They break every law we have just passed. They laugh at the great public trust and they laugh at the Full Disclosure Act. They take their pleasures privately. What will that do to the Free Participation Franchise? How would they ever force the non-consenting adult into the field of action?

They break every law: but this they shall not break! We will promulgate a great law that will chop them down. Do they now know that we can cut them off completely whenever we wish?

We must get together on a law that will put an end to the future right now!

Or Little Ducks Each Day

1

“Against no word is there such strong prejudice as against the word ‘Prejudice’.”

 — Arpad Arutinov, The Back Door of History

Jim Snapjudge was unhappy without apparent reason. It couldn't be anything preying on his mind. His was a mind that preyed: not one to be preyed upon. He had not been brooding: he did not brood: he thought and moved by swift intuition. No derelictions or wolves of the past were snapping at his heels. His business was all with the future, intelligent prediction. Once the past had been assimilated, he did not turn back to it. And anything following him would have to feed many a cake to the heads of the dog-devil that guarded that time road before overtaking Jim Snapjudge. He was secure.

He felt no guilt for the suicide of Cletus Dogwood. He wasn't responsible for it. He hadn't caused it. He couldn't have stopped it. He had merely judged, correctly, that it would happen. It had been a little disquieting when Cletus insisted that there must be some mistake in the prediction, and Snapjudge had assured him that a mistake was impossible. But as for guilt for anything, why what did Snapjudge owe for? Guilt means owing payment or gelt or yield. Word-meanings were important to Snapjudge, for his whole profession and life's direction and fortune depended on the meaning of one word.

And should he feel remorse for the late-life criminality that broke out in Angelo Woodstock? It's true that he was the only Prejudicial Analyst who had predicted it accurately, but he had gathered more data than the others had. But remorse, which is to say biting again or back-biting, no, he didn't feel remorse for such things as that. Yet something was presently biting him in an inaccessible spot. Not biting him again, but biting him newly and mysteriously.

Anyhow, he couldn't afford second thoughts about such things. Second thoughts are always duplication, an inefficiency that a Prejudicial Analyst cannot allow himself.

A young man, pleasant and impudent of face, was approaching Snapjudge from the front as he walked through Actuaries Concourse. The man seemed about to speak to Snapjudge, but instead of that he cocked an eye at him, grinned a crooked grin, and passed on. And perhaps he was gone forever.

No he wasn't. There was a handle on the young man; Snapjudge would encounter him again. That was predictable. For even such a quick passing was sufficient to permit a good Prejudicial Analyst like Jim Snapjudge to give a rapid and basically exact reading.

‘Twenty-four years and five or six months old. Born in the autumn, that's sure. Name is approximately Godfrey Halskragen (if the surname had been Englished to Tippet, as had been considered by the father of the man, it would have left a stronger indication; but Halskragen it had remained), from Gallipolis, Ohio, so what was he doing downstream here in Kronstadt? Oh, that could be answered, if it mattered. Not quite sure where in Gallipolis the man had lived, but probably on one of those tree-named streets that slope down towards that river. There was some indication that he had lived in two different houses not too far apart. Mostly of German-Irish blood. A lapsed Lutheran or Catholic. No, no, his German ears were halsstarrig (stubborn), but not that stubborn. A man with such graceful tragi to his ears could hardly be a Lutheran. Wife may be named Irene (Iris rejected after short consideration), and he may never see her again in life. This man (Godfrey tentative) has the opportunity to transfer to this town with his old firm (P & G Rotary Valve Company) at an increase in pay. And he is here to look the town over and decide. He believes, wrongly, that his ever-new resolutions (he is a boozer) will stand up better in a new town. But he will be drawn down into the Rhineland part of town tonight, into the Rangle-Tangles and Bierstuben and Schnapps-Shacks. And he will die there, drowned in the fools' cup as they used to say.’

Snapjudge did not verbalize all this judgment to himself, but he did record it all in his mind in an annotation that was faster than words. There is a gyroscopic principle in the Analysis: high speed accompanying accuracy and balance. A slower judgment would wobble and be less accurate. This was the quick first impression, the only allowable impression for a Prejudicial Analyst. And Snapjudge's impressions, based as they always were on tens of thousands of previous impressions, were uncannily right.

But then Snapjudge did a thing that he did very seldom. He looked back. And the young man who had passed him also looked back at the same instant, and their looks met. Their thoughts crossed like two rapiers made out of swift sunlight.

“Could I not be different from my template?” the thought of the young man laughed back at Snapjudge. “Have I to die tonight just because my pattern says ‘die’? May I not escape?” And the young man winked crookedly. Snapjudge catalogued it as an amoebic wink, but he was puzzled at his own attaching such a name to it.

“No, you may not escape,” Snapjudge flashed back the stilted thought. “As I have judged you, so you are judged.” But he was startled by his own arrogance. Was this the beginning of uncertainty? But why should a Prejudicial Analyst ever be uncertain?

“That young man is prescient,” Snapjudge told himself. “How could I have missed that? His orbital index is too low for him to be a prescient. Easy, Jim, easy. Were there true prescients, we Prejudicial Analysts would be obsoleted. We'll not let that happen.” Then Snapjudge was taken by a cold chill. It was not over the idea of prescients; it was over something that happened years before.

Two dozen years back, in a biology laboratory period, Jim Snapjudge, his eye to a microscope, had been examining a slide at four hundred power magnification. And something had drifted onto that slide that had no business there. It was a face that barely missed being a human face, that missed even more narrowly being a demon face. And it had winked sardonically and chillingly and crookedly. It was because of that not-quite-human face on the slide that Jim Snapjudge did not become a biologist. He became a Prejudicial Analyst instead.

Why bring that old puzzlement up now? Well, the young man (whose name was approximately Godfrey Halskragen) had winked with exactly that same sardonic and chilling and crooked wink as had the blob under the microscope years before. Yes, it was an amoebic wink. And it meant that there was in this Godfrey Halskragen some thing, too small to see with the plain eye, that would contradict with absolute stubbornness whatever analysis Snapjudge should make. There was plain revolt there.

At that time there was still some prejudice against Prejudicial Analysts. But why should there be? Why this irrational recoil that appeared so often and so foolishly?

We are not commonly in court of law and pledged to hold no previous information on a subject. Then we should not, as a normal thing, be required to have minds wiped clear of all memory or manifestation. We are not meant to be like little ducks who wake up in a new world each day. For a pre-judice is simply a pre-judgment, a decision based upon previous as well as immediate evidence. If I found certain things to be true yesterday, why may I not take them into account in making a decision today or tomorrow? If a certain person has taken advantage of me last week, why must I trust him in an identical situation today? And actually, using the guidelines of previous situations and encounters and persons, we can tell almost everything about a person merely by looking at him. Even if he puts his head in a sack, we can tell much about him by the sack he selects and the way he fashions it to wear.

This man is Scotch, I say for an instance, and the Scotch lean to a certain sort of character. This man has lewd and vulgar ears, and they are the sort of ears that criminals often have. This man has a pronounced septum between the nostrils, and such persons are proud without reason, self-centered to the point of having no very clear idea of the outside world; they are dishonest and presuming. Or this other man has greedy thumbs. What should I do, put gloves on my eyes so I do not see them?

Should one be required to say of a person or situation ‘I will accept no evidence on this man or thing except today's evidence generated today?’ There cannot be any such segregation of evidence. The very shape of a man's head is evidence, and it was shaped in the course of his whole lifetime and only a little bit today. The way that a man walks is evidence of what he is. His name is evidence that goes back through his whole ancestry. A man with the first name of Howard will be one sort of man. A man with the first name of Harold will be of another sort. There is nothing accidental about this. But one who must make an appraisal today cannot wait for a man to act like a Howard or a Harold. Only a small chunk of the picture will be revealed in one day or in one season. It must be supposed that the man will act in such a way as previous evidence indicates, the supposition being based on the man's own past actions where they may be ascertained, and on the past actions of hundreds of other people of the same type.

The use of such suppositions is named Prejudice. Their directed use is named Active Prejudice. And the really effective and illuminating use of a corpus of suppositions is named Prejudice as a Work of Art.

The work of Prejudicial Analysts is always Prejudice as Work of Art.

Each person is a total walking history of himself. The history is total in that it gives not only what the person has done but also what he will do. These histories aren't even very hard to read, not for Prejudicial Analysts.

Another person was now approaching Jim Snapjudge from ahead. She was a dusky young lady who was dressed loudly in the primary colors so that she was like a column of happy and shouting flowers. Outside of her brightly colored clothing, she was rather commonplace in appearance, or at least she was so to common eyes. To the eyes of an expert Prejudicial Analyst she was not too uncommon either, and she was quickly placed. She was placed into relatively simple categories. She was placed firmly, irrevocably, and in considerable details.

‘Twenty-one years old last March.’ Jim Snapjudge was sending, receiving, and recording in the annotation more rapid than voice, ‘and her name may very well be Teresa Tuesdaychild. Hers isn't a continuing surname. It was given to her by her mother, out of whimsy, and all in one piece. In her line there had been, for practical purposes, parthenogenesis for three generations, for they were not marrying ladies in her ancestry. Teresa came up here from the shallow-clay in the South, from the little piney woods and the nanny-goat hills, but all of those ladies go into the towns when the years for it arrive. And each of those ladies has a bosomful of gold pieces.

‘This Teresa has a well-paying job in a highly technical field and she fulfills it amazingly. It isn't that she is a person of much technical training. Indeed she lied cheerfully about her qualifications to get this job, and she also presented forged articles and certificates that were provided by a person called John the Forger. But she does have great intuition, strong tactile intelligence, penetrating imagination; and there are few technical problems that can stand up against her. She has so much vitality that she must constantly be sharing it with others. She is one of the bright-star people with the tide running always in her favor. And, so far as she knows, she is quite happy.

‘She is a person of several different lives, and she moves easily from one into another. But, though she has a solid hold on all the up-town things, money, happy employment, fulfillment of leisure, variety in her own person, attention of many young gentlemen on the rapid rise (one of them a double-ducky buckaroo of great moxie and moment), though she has contagious gaiety, though she has multiplying group interests, yet she is going down to Rhineland tonight without any of her friends. She will find sordid encounter there and she will meet her ruination, the nature of which remains a little foggy even to a Prejudicial Analyst.’

Well, that was the quick judgment.

This dusky girl who might be named Teresa Tuesdaychild had now gone on past Jim Snapjudge. And, a short moment later, Snapjudge did (for the second time that day) a thing that he did very seldom. He looked back. And Teresa, who had gone by him, also looked back, and their looks met.

“Must it really be my ruination?” the thought of the young lady lightened back at Snapjudge, and her full vocal intonation was somehow in that thought. “Are you quite sure what sort of encounter I will have down in Rhineland, in the Ruination Bar and Grill and Gandy-House where Elm Street ends on the River?” And she flashed Snapjudge a dusky and not very friendly grin.

“I have read you, and that is the way you are read,” Snapjudge bumbled back in his mind, angrily and uneasily. “What, has another one challenged my Prejudice today? How could I miss two prescients within a quarter of an hour? Can it be only coincidence that there should be a pair of intuitives in one afternoon?

“Well, it's plain that the fates of these two are connected, and it's just as plain that both of these are a little bit stubborn about accepting their fate. I've wondered about this irrational stubbornness where I've met it in others. And a good Prejudicial Analyst isn't supposed to have to wonder about very many things.”

Jim Snapjudge stopped at the local station in beautiful downtown Kronstadt, Ohio. He was to appear for a minute interview on Interviews With Agnes at three oh seven o'clock, so he walked into the sending area at exactly three oh seven.

“Oh!” said Agnes, “I thought you would be late.”

“Any Prejudicial Analyst could have told you I wouldn't be,” Snapjudge said. “My personality profile should indicate to anyone capable of understanding that I am always on time, exactly on time.”

“Mr. Snapjudge, you are here to defend your profession of Prejudicial Analyst against public opinion which has always held that there is something malodorous and crippling about prejudice,” Agnes began the interview.

“I am not here to defend but to attack,” Snapjudge said. “I am here to attack the hypocrisy of those who would prejudge prejudice. To be without prejudice is to be without roots or trunk. But I doubt if you even know the meaning of ‘prejudice’, Agnes.”

“I know the original literal meaning on which you have built such a house of hate, yes,” Agnes maintained stoutly. “And I know the true, developed, organic meaning that now obtains. This is the shriveling, defaming, hating, murderous assault on all that is decent; and you are a shriveled, defaming, hating, murderous person.”

“Ah, you're foaming at the mouth, Agnes. You should wear a bib. I repeat that I attack the hypocrisy of those who prejudge prejudice, you being one of them. You are categorically against all prejudices (prejudgments) of any sort, and yet on this one thing you prejudge more strongly than any Prejudicial Analyst that I have ever known. Really, why are you against intelligently based prejudgment?”

“Because it is fallible, because it is sometimes inaccurate, because it is presumptive — ”

“What isn't? Are not all judgments fallible? Working infallibility is the most that can ever be obtained.”

“No. The Final Judgment is not fallible. I'd almost wish it were this moment so I could hear it find against you, find against you forever. You really wouldn't call yourself a fair and unbiased man, would you now, Mr. Snapjudge?”

“You are prejudging the Final Judgment, Agnes, you who are so strongly against any prejudging? And, yes, I would absolutely call myself a fair and unbiased man. Even-minded, that's me; always a bad word for everyone.”

Snapjudge felt that the quip didn't quite go over. The people who are against prejudice are against humor also.

The buzzer sounded, and the minute Interview with Agnes was over with. A minute was what Agnes said it was, and now she was interviewing a spokesman for the Ethical Party.

Walking in the street again, Snapjudge was assailed by second thoughts once more. “What if I'm wrong?” something wailed in him. But a Prejudicial Analyst cannot admit that he is wrong in his basic, so Snapjudge put this doubt resolutely out of his mind.

The expert Prejudicial Analyst has two most useful aids which, however, are still not in very good repute. It is unfortunate that they are not, for as repositories of information they are overflowing vessels. These two main props are Phrenology and Folk Belief.

Phrenology (that old House of Our Fathers) is back again and it has been repaired to a high degree of validity. It is the reading of character and predilections and life determination from the head bumps and head shapes and from other related evidence. There is the analysis of the skull itself and of the plastic-fleshy covering of the skull. And then the shape and disposition of the whole body comes into the game. A recent expansion of the field is kinetic phrenology which embraces the movements as well as the shape and texture of a person. Even the lay and whorl of the hair (Negro hair, Jew hair, Slav hair, Indian hair) indicates what a person must be. Hair on the back of the second phalange sections of the fingers, that indicates cruelty; and a great lot of hair there indicates outright sadism. Hair in the ears, that indicates doltishness and animalism. And the feet, the feet! They would tell almost everything if they were allowed to. The Prejudicial Analyst is at such a disadvantage when people go shod! And yet a practiced analyst can tell enough. There are some things that can never be hidden by leather or plastic.

Surface marks on the skin! There are little weather-marks or crinkle marks on the faces and throats of all persons, and these grow with age. These are the nexus marks, usually starred, five-pointed for Christians, six-pointed for Jews. Then there are the un-starred, diamond shapes of Negroes, and the lotus marks of the Hindustani people. These marks indicate both the apparent and the hidden blood of examined persons. The marks do not lie, but individual persons sometimes lie. And yet it's a fact that one without a strong spirit of prejudice is scarcely able to interpret these marks at all.

And ears, ears! No Prejudicial Analyst can ever have enough of ears. No good man ever had bad ears. There are criminal ears, there are lazy ears, there are the itching ears that are mentioned in Scripture. And there is a human characteristic that must go with every ear form. There is an invariance here.

And there are many extensions of the simple science of Phrenology. Every extension of the body is an extension of the science of the body. Dogs belonging to persons, for an instance, are extensions of those persons, and they are to be analyzed as ancillaries and extensions. These and other appurtenances, living or unliving (a house belonging to a person may be such an appurtenance) give absolute indication of a person's character and direction.

So many things to be considered, dewlaps, throat-swellings, bull-humps on the backs of necks, the shape of a voice which is the shape of a thorax projected into the air, grizzled eyebrows (especially when they are Manx or Welsh), these all will tell very much to one who is truly devoted to Prejudice.

That which has been will be again, and again, and again. When a correlation has been discovered to exist in one hundred persons it will also exist in the one hundred and first.

And names, names! Names are shapes and textures and movements, they are short-hand representation of living persons. And they are also evocative magic. So it is that names form the transition between Phrenology and Folk Belief which is the other strong limb of the Prejudicial Analyst.

It is hard to comprehend just how very many things names may tell to a Prejudicial Analyst. But how the Analyst himself tells names is the easy part. It is almost to cheat, to take the cross-section from the small end of the log. Even to the student analyst it is almost the case that every person comes with his name printed boldly in plain letters on his forehead.

Take newborn twin calves that look exactly alike. There is no possible way that one can tell them apart until they are named. But name them, and each will immediately look like his name to such a degree that it becomes quite easy to tell them apart. This is not imagination. Ask any farmer or small rancher who has kept a modest herd (not many over a hundred animals) so that each animal may be known by appearance and name. Appearance and name will interact very strongly.

But humans grow much more in the direction of their names than do animals. Consider persons bearing the names of Clarence, Jerome, Horace, Freddy, Eustace, Emily, Rex, Alice, Ralph, Agatha, Isidor, Mona, Dwight. You get the idea? One asks the names of these people only out of politeness. One knows their names, for they are spelled out on the very faces of them.

This most striking trick of the Prejudicial Analysts, naming names of persons never seen before, is really the easiest trick in the whole repertory. Anyone can do it. You can do it yourself with a week's practice.

But there are other tricks that are not easy. The divining of a stranger's total personality and total life, past, present, and future, from such evidence as is immediately apparent is not an easy thing. But it can be done. It requires almost slavish adherence to analogy and precedent. Such divining requires acceptance of the formula ‘What type has done, the individual will do.’ It requires uncommon sense, and a man-trap memory for millions of details. It requires assurance. It requires confidence. It requires the synthesis of all these things. And it requires, for it to be done with a sparkle, reasoned happiness on the part of the Analyst.

But Jim Snapjudge was unhappy without apparent reason. It couldn't be anything preying on — What? Are things back where they started?

Yes, they are. Jim Snapjudge, in an uncommon fit of mind-wandering, had walked completely around beautiful downtown Kronstadt and he was back where he had started. But now he knew why he was there. In the building above him was the office and clinic of his friendly enemy and formidable competitor, Jonah Hirnbrecher, the other leading Prejudicial Analyst in town.

Doctors must sometimes go to other doctors. Even lawyers go to other lawyers in certain circumstances. Priests go to other priests to be confessed: even Popes must do so, except Leo the First for whom an angel provided that service yearly. Gamblers visit other gamblers. And Prejudicial Analysts must sometimes, for the preserving of their equilibrium, consult with others of their kind. Jim Snapjudge went up to see the other Analyst, Jonah Hirnbrecher.

“Good afternoon, Jim,” Jonah said, and subvocally he added “Damned WASP!”

“Good afternoon, Jonah,” Snapjudge gave his greeting, and voicelessly he added “Damned Jew-bug!” This subliminal name-calling was only a little ritual knife-whetting that they used. It certainly didn't imply unfriendliness.

“I suppose that you, as a foresightly person, have made arrangements to turn all your cases and clients over to some other Analyst in the event of your timely (for to an Analyst nothing is untimely) death,” Jonah asked matter-of-factly. “I suppose that you can make this transfer by a single act that is as simple as jerking a drawstring. I rather hope that the transfer will be made to myself.”

“Sure, it's to you, Jonah,” Snapjudge said. “You're the only other Prejudicial Analyst in town. Has my death become timely?”

“Oh yes. Tonight.”

“All right.”

Jim Snapjudge made a phone call. It was an act as simple as jerking a drawstring, and by that act he turned over all his cases and clients to Jonah Hirnbrecher.

“Well, that's fate,” Snapjudge said after he had completed the call. “There's no arguing with fate. But you might as well sketch out my end for me. Just how will I end, Jonah?”

“Wet,” said Jonah Hirnbrecher.

2

“It is he that saith not ‘Kismet’; it is he that knows not Fate; It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey at the gate!”

 — Chesterton, Lepanto

“I've observed too many persons on their death day for me to have any doubt in your case,” Jonah said. It was almost as if he had something to defend.

“Oh, I haven't any doubt,” Snapjudge said humbly. “My fate is fixed as is all fate. But I wonder how it came upon me so suddenly.”

“The indications of sudden disaster have always been there, I suppose,” Jonah said. “They're written plainly everywhere, on the backs of your hands, and in the wide swing of your eyes. They're in your shapeless gestures, particularly that emphasized tossing of your head. They're in the dilation of your nostrils. But you're a bit of a special person, an Analyst, a Prophet, almost an exception; so the signs and causes were scattered with you and at first they did not have to come together. They've done it though. There is now a correspondence and constellation of all your evil signs, and they cannot be reversed.”

“Jonah, how do we really do it? Isn't there something more to it? I mean the sudden and true intuitions. Sometimes they seem to go beyond the evidence.”

“Oh, the intuitions are merely the culmination of the evidence that we receive without consciously acknowledging it. This evidence burgeons, or it festers, in our unconscious. Then the intuitions explode out of that evidence that we had consciously overlooked. But the intuitions are valid and in the true line, Jim. Our prediction tactics cannot be in error. There is a mystique that requires their accuracy.”

“I don't know, Jonah, I just don't know. There's been a feeling coming over me all afternoon that maybe, someday, somewhere, we should give someone the benefit of the doubt.”

“The benefit of what doubt, Jim? We Prejudicial Analysts cannot have doubts. Were we not certain, we would be mighty shaky. If we did not stand on sacred privilege, we would be in danger of being ridiculous.”

“It just seems to me, Jonah (and forgive me, for I'm a distraught man speaking on the last day of his life), that we may sometimes be too arrogant in some of this.”

“Arrogance is a requirement for us, Jim. Let them know that there are still Prophets in Israel. We are the latter-day prophets, and as such we will always be in danger of being stoned by the people. And, walking always in this danger, it is automatic that we should be arrogant. We have to be right. There is an inerrancy about properly marshaled evidence, about assembled Folk Belief, about phrenological accumulation. What they indicate has to be. We grow out of the past, and the name of that past is Prejudgment or Prejudice. Today's one-inch twig growth at the top of the tree does not give the total profile or representation of that tree. Without rational prejudice, which is the solid sense of things past, we would be like foolish gooney birds waking up into a world with only a present dimension.”

“Or little ducks each day,” said Jim Snapjudge. “But might we not sometimes suspend judgment?”

“No, Jim. Suspended judgment is a little bit like suspended animation,” Jonah explained. “Somehow we might like it to be there as a workable alternative if things got too rough. But there's no proof at all that either will ever work. Better to forget about them.”

“Does Fate have to be final?”

“Certainly. It wouldn't be Fate if it weren't final.”

“And yet there is the possibility that Agnes was partly right,” Snapjudge said dreamily. “The strongest case against Prejudicial Analysis isn't that it is unfair or hate-filled (why should such a calculating and impersonal thing as the Analysis bother to be unfair or hateful to fragments of its own data?) the case against it is that it is sometimes mistaken, though by its nature it can never admit that it is mistaken; and that it is always premature. It's as though we were telling a situation or a person ‘You can't get out of your cage. Don't try.’ And that situation or person should protest ‘I want to try anyhow. Isn't it allowed to try?’ and then we would exclude all chance with a final statement ‘No, it is not allowed to try.’ From one viewpoint, a case could be made that this is unfair. I don't know whether it would be a strong case or not. What are you doing to me, man?”

Jonah Hirnbrecher was doing something with his hands, on or behind the shoulders of Jim Snapjudge. He seemed to be unfastening an invisible something, probably a garment. Then he drew it off and folded it carefully with his ritual hands. The object was still invisible, and yet its shape, including the very fancy fringes of it, could be guessed from the movement of those Jonah hands.

“I am removing your Prophet's Mantle, Snapjudge,” Jonah said then in a liturgical voice. “It is best removed some hours before the death, for the prophetic faculty is already lost when the doubting and questioning begin. When one dies and the Mantle has not been symbolically removed, then the trees in the sacred talking groves (there are still some in nearby Scioto County) will wail out ‘A Prophet is dead!’ And I hate to hear grown trees cry. Do you ever go down to Rhineland?”

“Seldom. Sometimes I go down to check on my analyses of persons and their fates. I may go down this evening to check on two such fates.”

“Yes. You will go down there this evening. That is where you will die.”

“But what if I do not go down there this evening, Jonah? How will I die if I avoid the scene of my death? What could force me to go down to Rhineland this evening?”

“Snapjudge, you have ceased to be a Prejudicial Analyst, you have ceased to be a Prophet. Otherwise you would not be able to ask such questions. The backs of your hands will force you to go down to Rhineland this evening, and that wide swing of your eyes will force you. Your broken-patterned gestures will force you — particularly that tossing of your head. The dilation of your nostrils will force you. The way you rock on your feet will force you, and the way you flex your knees. Your chewing of your lower lip will force you: that would do it by itself. You will go down there tonight and you will die there because you are named Jim Snapjudge, and that is the way that Jim Snapjudge will end.”

“Yes, yes, I see that there's no way out. Ah, just what is it that we lose, Jonah, when we cease to be Prejudicial Analysts and Prophets in our last hours?”

“Purity of concept is what is lost. That is the guard: and when that guard retires, then other things crowd in by the common gate. Among these things which that noisome complex called popular opinion has associated with Prejudice in times past, and that is still associated a little bit today. But it is only when Prejudice ceases to be true Prejudice, when the judgment in its prejudgment fails in soundness, that unfairness and hate and bias and prematurity can creep in. Now good afternoon to you, Snapjudge, and abide as well as you can in the concept of Prejudice as Work of Art.”

“Aye, Prejudice as work of art — when it works,” Jim Snapjudge said, and the fallen prophet went out from that office and clinic.

As evening had already come on, Jim Snapjudge went down to that shoddy waterfront district named Rhineland. He went to the Ruination Bar and Grill and Gandy-House which is to be found where Elm Street ends on the River. And there was something gone wrong, or gone different, with the whole Rhineland district.

It was, of course, still shoddy in every detail; but the whole thing didn't add up quite as shoddy as expected. It was bright, rather; it was almost gay; it had a sort of freshness, almost newness about it, and nothing new had come to Rhineland for decades.

“What will you have, Mr. Snapjudge?” asked the proprietor of the Ruination. He was cashier and waiter and bartender and his name was George Rue-something. Jim Snapjudge had lost his prophetic facility and could no longer finish the name of the man. But should it now run in the other direction?

“And how do you know my name?” Snapjudge asked the proprietor.

“Why, don't you know that every bartender is a Prejudicial Analyst as well as a Prophet?” George R- asked. “Oh, by the way — this needn't be your last meal. That is just a sticky notion that you have. You can break it. You can fight it. Nobody has to die till he's ready.”

“I'm ready,” Snapjudge said. “There's no going against fate.”

“The common people go against it every day, Snapjudge. They fight it. They pull it off its high horse and roll it in the dust. It is only the fine people who are too easily intimidated by the old fraud. Ah well then, why don't you have a meal good enough for the last meal of the rankest murderer? The snap-turtle is good, the crawfish tails are good. We don't have shad roe today but we do have mud-cat roe. The calf brains aren't bad. The hotcakes and kidneys are really for the people who cross the river from Kentucky, but there's no law against anyone else wanting them. The sandbar onions are about what you'd expect from wild onions this late in the season. The coffee is good but strong. Don't try to dilute it with more water. It's the water that makes it so strong. And this isn't Kentucky Bourbon, whatever the bottle may say. This is Ohio Rye Whisky and I made it myself. It's good. We've got sour-milk bread and corn-cob bread. And crab-apple cobbler.”

“With levity sauce, I suppose. Just fix me something good to eat and something strong to drink,” Jim Snapjudge said uncertainly. Always before he had known what to order in a place. A Prejudicial Analyst could divine the qualities of any food in the environs just as well as he could read the character and proclivities of any person around. But Snapjudge had lost his powers.

“Gas lights here?” Snapjudge asked, though it was obvious that they did have gas lights. “It seems very bright in here for gas. Do they cost you much?”

“Nothing,” George R- said. “I use river gas. I drove a couple one-inch pipes with sand points on them down a few feet here, and I have all the gas I want. And I washed the big mirror. That's what makes it seem so bright. It fools your fate too. Any change in a big mirror throws them into confusion.”

“You'll not turn fate aside with humor,” Snapjudge said sourly.

“I always have,” George R- said. “I've got almost everything fixed up now. All but the broken plank out front in the boardwalk that goes out over the water. I should fix that. Somebody will get a bad fall there. And the board is so noisy that it spooks people.”

“The broken plank is noisy?”

“Yes, noisy. It carries on all the time. Always mumbling and grumbling.”

The dusky young lady who may have been Teresa Tuesdaychild came in and took a table. She was still dressed brightly, and her primary colors had taken on an exciting glitter under the gas lights. Jim Snapjudge had never been quite sure what her ruination would consist of. And now, having lost his power, he couldn't project beyond what he had known earlier in the day. He believed that her fate, her ruination, would be caused by a gun misfiring and exploding in her face. This would be the second shot from that gun. The first shot would have killed a man.

“What is she anyhow, white on black or black on white?” Snapjudge asked George R- testily. He found Teresa very attractive, but he was somehow indignant against her.

“She is hue upon color, tone upon timbre, shade upon sheen. She is a primary chromatic of high saturation and high brilliance. A jewel, I forget which kind: a flame garnet.”

“I don't like her. I haven't any reason. Until this afternoon I did not like or dislike anything or anybody. And I always had a reason for my thoughts. She will come to her ruination in this place tonight.”

“No, she will not. Young girls seeking ruination go to the rooming house next door. Not here.” George R- sat with Jim Snapjudge when he wasn't busy. Now he rose to wait on Teresa.

She asked for the table to be set for three, and she seemed to order for three. Quickly there was the new and bright aroma of food that was better than snap-turtle or mud-cat roe or calf brains or sandbar onions. There was pungent and juicy rack of rash ribs somewhere, and hot riverboat rolls. There was an olfactory presence of noble coffee of which the water was not the strongest element. And there was the curling whiff of Ohio Rye Whisky. Pleasurable promises all. George R- came and sat with Jim Snapjudge again for a moment.

“Why have you the dogs skulking around on the floor yet when you have brightened up everything else somehow?” Snapjudge asked.

“There are no dogs here,” George R- assured. “I got rid of all of them two weeks since. Those are merely some of their shadows that are left over for a while. Yes, they skulk and lurk, but they are only shadows.”

“Of coming events?”

“No, I don't think so. But you can see anything you don't want to in those shadows. Mostly, I believe, you will see yourself.”

There was urbane laughter, there was natural gentry laughter all about; and there was the sound of good music somewhere in another room. That's where even good music should always be, at some distance away, or in another room at the very least. And now Jim Snapjudge had been presented with his last meal, rash ribs that stood and reigned, hot rolls made with buttermilk and honey, pepper that — 

Godfrey Halskragen came into the Ruination Bar and Grill and Gandy-House. He joined Teresa Tuesdaychild at her table. Now the two fates were together, and they had only to wait for the assassin, probably in the person of the big Buckaroo.

“You will have at least one killing here tonight. I always watch to prevent trouble.”

“Yes. That last man who came in, that man who is sitting with the colorful girl named Teresa, he will be shot to death here tonight. I have seen this in a valid vision. His name is probably Godfrey. He will be shot by a jealous man whose jealousy is quite complex. I never believed in mixing the primary colors myself.”

“You are not talking about primary colors at all, Snapjudge. You are talking about achromatic colors,” George R- said. “But you are mistaken. Somehow you have seen it wrong. Or else the vision itself has changed slightly, but to change the effect completely. The violence will not happen.”

“A valid vision cannot be changed even slightly,” Snapjudge insisted. “A fate once set is absolutely certain.”

“No, Snapjudge, no,” George R- contradicted. “Listen to me. In every town there is one small section where fate is not securely established; where things that are absolutely bound to happen will sometimes happen in a slightly different manner; where recompense is demanded and obtained for all unbalanced things. When towns were walled, these sections were always outside the walls. When pales were garrisoned, these sections were always beyond the pales. In Kronstadt, Ohio this unruly and slightly mystic section is named Rhineland.”

“Look at the way those two talk,” Snapjudge was saying, and he was referring to Teresa and Godfrey. “He is trying to seduce her. And the assassin who will arrive soon believes that that man has already seduced her. Those two, soon three, I don't like.”

Actually it was Teresa Tuesdaychild who was trying to seduce Godfrey Halskragen. And this is what she was saying, softly and intensely, in her highly chromatic voice:

“What do you owe the P & G Rotary Valve Company, Godfrey? Yes, they have paid you well, but you have given them the good value for what they have paid you. If you must move from Gallipolis to Kronstadt to move one step forward, why not move two steps? Change to Simpkins Great Solar Valve Company. It is more than a verbalism when we say ‘Valves are Simpler with Simpkins’. You say that Irene is afraid that this would be a less friendly town? I'll phone her tonight if you wish. I'm sure I can convince her that people are friendly in Kronstadt. I know I can convince you that the Simpkins people are friendly. When Buck gets here he can show you some figures on your projected earnings. They will be substantially above anything that P & G could pay. I will be quite brazen about this. You have a real talent for valve sales, and we intend to recruit you.”

“Teresa, I will simply have to think about it a little longer.”

“Godfrey, that man over there, I don't like him at all.” (She meant Jim Snapjudge.) “He eyeballed me this afternoon. I felt that he was trying to read me. I felt that he was reading me all wrong. That long nose of his and those bugged-out eyes, they're intolerable. He should do something about them.”

“What could he do? Does not Scripture tell us that, by taking thought, we cannot add one cubit to our stature?”

“I'm not talking about adding a cubit to his stature. I'm talking about him shortening that damned nose and unbugging his eyes. Don't tell me that he can't do it! He can. He's running a chilly fever now and I hope he dies from it. But whatever kind of fever he runs, he's too cool to go in for hating. I'm not. I hate a guy who won't hate. I hate him. I think he's a Jew or an Armenian or a Limey or one of those.”

“Lady, I hate him too,” said a man at the next table. “He looks right through you. He's got some kind of business where he gives ratings on people to companies that hire them. I bet he never gave a good rating in his life. I think he comes from up in Middlesex County.”

“I hate all those middle sex people,” said the lady with the man at the next table. “I don't care if they are consenting adults. How are you going to raise children properly when people like that are always moving in next door to you. I think that that man's one of them too. He sure looks like it.”

A jolt, a momentous jolt! That was only someone coming through the front door? No, it wasn't only someone; it was a menace, an assassin, a personage, a key person in the drama. The very air was freighted with threat.

“It's the killer, the corsair, the Buckaroo,” Jim Snapjudge breathed; and his hackles were rising. (Until this afternoon he had forgotten that he had hackles.) “This is Murder, this is Fate, this is my last Analysis vindicated. Here comes death and ruination.”

“Oh, it's only Buck,” said George Ruination the proprietor. “He's a loud one, yes, and a comic. But there's no real harm in him at all.”

“This will be loud,” said Jim Snapjudge, “but it will not be comic.”

Shadows of gone dogs or coming events were lurking and skulking about the floor, too low to be clarified by the gas lights. A river loon sounded outside. The Buckaroo stood very tall and bulky and dark and formidable, and he imposed silence on the room. There was a threatening bulge in his right-hand coat pocket and the monicker of that bulge was ‘murder’. Curiously there was another and only slightly smaller bulge in his left-hand coat pocket; and it was the left-hand bulge that the Buckaroo now drew out and held awkwardly, for he did not seem to be left-handed.

At his table, Godfrey Halskragen regarded the Buckaroo with paling eyes and wary ears: (it is the ears that tell the Prejudicial Analyst so much, ah, the nervous, waiting lobe, the graceful tragus); and the very shadow of an amoebic wink disfigured that apprehensive face.

Teresa Tuesdaychild watched the Buckaroo with a dusky grin, but a little shiver ran right through that grin. She was either uneasy or excited by the appearance of the Buck. All sorts of vagrant and subtle hues played in and out of her primary colors.

The music in the other room had changed its motif. Now it was menace music and it built to a climaxing mood. Then the Buckaroo exploded in voice and action.

“Caught the two of you here!” he howled, and a not-quite-right gun was in his left hand. “Die, pig, die!”

“Shriek!” cried Teresa.

“Bang!” cried the explosion. And the gunshot hit Godfrey Halskragen in the face and head.

Gore! Bright red gore, dark red gore, serum-colored gore, brain gore all over Godfrey! A moan, probably a death moan, from the bespattered man with the gushing head! Smoky smell of blood and of burnt flesh!

What? Here was Fate vindicated indeed. But could so much blood come from one pistol shot?

“It's wrong, something has gone wrong!” Jim Snapjudge was complaining in a voice that had gone reedy. “The blood-smell is wrong, and it's too clotted. There cannot be that much splattered out of one little bullet hole. And the gun should have cried ‘Bang!’ The man shouldn't have cried ‘Bang!’ Fate will not be mocked. Make it right, somebody, or there will be terrible retribution.”

“Damn you, Buck!” Godfrey Halskragen howled at the big Buckaroo. “This is my best and only suit. Yeah, and it's my best and only face.”

“Bang! Bang!” Buck cried out the explosion noises again, but the big water pistol with its load of Old Hickory Barbecue Sauce and vinegar and ketchup had jammed. Buck applied great power and fervor to it. Then it exploded into the primariest color of them all and completely covered the face and head and hair of Teresa Tuesdaychild with a mélange of writhing red sauce.

“Ruined, ruined, now I can never marry!” she whooped. Then there was hilarity and happy pandemonium throughout the Ruination Bar and Grill and Gandy-House! Most of the people who came there knew the Buckaroo and always they awaited an elaborate visual joke of some sort from him. Towels were brought to the victims, and the chortling laughter of all present was a full thing.

But not of all present, either. There was one person there who was not touched by the high comedy of the low joke. Jim Snapjudge was in a gibbering, whey-faced shock.

“It is wrong, it is all wrong,” he moaned. “The shadows show the way it should be, but the primaries have it all wrong. Look, people, do as the shadows do.

The shadows — the three shadows — one of them was supine on the floor and bleeding a little stream of shadow-blood from a small hole in the head; one of them was sitting on the floor and rocking and moaning out of an exploded face; and the third shadow had drawn itself up into an impossible tallness and was shaking and swelling with fear and shock with the frustrated attempt to flee (but the tall shadow could not flee while its primary remained.)

And the three primaries were cleaning themselves up with an air of great amiability and gaiety. Jim Snapjudge went resolutely over to the faulting trio.

“Since we all of us are a part of Fate, then we all have the duty to guard the province of Fate,” he said pedantically. “You, Buckaroo, you still have the proper gun, the real gun, in your right-hand coat pocket. Take it out!”

“What, long-nose, what?” Buck asked, startled, but he took the proper gun out and held it in his huge right hand.

“Oh, you've brought it, Buck,” Godfrey said. “I'll give it a good going-over. I told you I was a gun-smith by hobby. If it acts as if it wants to hang fire then it's dangerous. I'll check over the whole firing mechanism.”

“You, Buckaroo,” Snapjudge said. “You know that you have two bullets in that gun. Shoot Godfrey in the head with the first one and kill him. You know that that is what the fate and prejudice of both of you have ordained that you should do. Then try to shoot Teresa in the head with the second one. It will hang fire. Try it again, and try it the third time. The chamber of the gun will explode then, and the face of Teresa will explode from the same action. And you will be badly injured yourself. I have already seen all this happen in a valid and prejudicial vision. Now do it, and let this terrible and ridiculous mistake be righted.”

“What, what, what?” the bewildered Buckaroo jabbered.

“Give me that gun!” Godfrey ordered, and with a rapid movement he took the gun from the Buckaroo. “Damn you, Buck, for a minute there you looked as though you might do it. Oh damn those spooky eyes of yours!” he yelped in relief as he broke the gun and unloaded it.

“Whoop, har, har, whar, whar whar, you thought I'd do it!” Buck chortled and howled with giant joy (was it possible that there were touches of horror and relief in that boisterous joy?) “Man, you should have seen the spooky eyes on you!”

“Little long-nose, little bug-eyes,” Teresa was saying to Jim Snapjudge. “You get out of here! Get a long ways out of here! We hate you. We hate everything about you and your insanity. Mr. Ruination, come throw this damned whey-faced bum out!”

And other people there said other abusive things to and about Jim Snapjudge. The common people have always understood the character and use of prejudice, and they had strong prejudice against Snapjudge. Prejudice is a tool-weapon, honed for thousands of years, that is designed to cut a guy down and cut a guy up. And it will do this every time if it is employed with determination and steadiness.

So George Ruination had to throw Jim Snapjudge out of the establishment, but he was not too rapid about it. Holding Snapjudge by collar and the seat of the pants, he allowed him a last colloquy.

“You know that the man should have been shot to death, and the face of the girl should have been ruined,” Snapjudge said in a begging voice. “That was the judgment and decision of prejudicial fate from the beginning of the world.”

“Oh, I know that, Snapjudge,” George said, “but I also know that fate can be subverted in a few neighborhoods of this world. As to Rhineland here, this is the case: Originally God had jurisdiction over Ohio and the Devil had jurisdiction over Kentucky; and Rhineland was then a part of Kentucky. Then the course of the river changed on one stormy night and Rhineland ended up on the Ohio side. Neither God nor the Devil ever laid claim to Rhineland in its new situation though, and fate has had a very insecure time here with no higher jurisprudence to appeal to. I imagine that a similar account could be given of most of the other unruly sections of other towns. Well, on your way!” And George Ruination, swinging Jim Snapjudge by his collar and the seat of his pants, threw him out the door and into the night in a beautiful arching trajectory.

“Watch out for the broken plank. A man can get a bad fall there!” Ruination called after the flying Snapjudge as he slammed the door.

And Jim Snapjudge did get a bad fall at the broken plank; he fell right through the wooden walkway that went out over the water. He fell into that water that is called Ruination's Duck Pond and Cess-Pool; it is a small, splintered-off backwater of the Ohio River. And Snapjudge drowned there.

That had been his fate and prejudice from the beginning. But his original fate hadn't included that part about his being thrown out by his collar and the seat of his pants.

That broken plank was out of a tree that had been cut in Scioto County, Ohio; and the tree had belonged to one of those sacred, talking groves. Now the talking plank began to moan, ‘A Prophet is dead! A Prophet is dead!’; but nobody in the Ruination Bar and Grill and Gandy-House paid any attention. That plank had been a noisy nuisance for a long time.

And on Ruination's Duck Pond, the little ducks, waking up into a new world the next day, found the body of Jim Snapjudge at first morning. They gaggled and splashed around Snapjudge. They asked him questions in their way, and he was not able to answer them. Nevertheless he was their bobbling friend, the first friend they had found in the new world that day.

They did not find his nose too long or his eyes too bugged. They did not find his visage too bloated or purpled. And they did not discover him to be either cold or unlikable.

They were unprejudiced little ducks.

Heart Grow Fonder

“Our new neighbor on the west is a creep,” Simon Radert said sourly, “and what this neighborhood doesn't need is another creep.”

“No, you're the creep in residence,” said his sly wife Norah. “Can't stand the competition, can you? But Simon, he doesn't look like a creep to me. He sure doesn't creep around. He bounces around on his heels, and he's as open as a Dutch door in a Payne County wind. His name is Swag, and does he ever have a swagger! I wish you were like him. And that wife of his, Buxom Jean (that's really her name), wow, I wish I were like her. They sure seem to have a lot of fun at their house.”

“Let's swap houses, then, if that's the way you want it.”

“Would that work, Simon? Let me think about it a little. I don't think that would do much good. We'd still be the same people wouldn't we?” (Simon was fond of his sly wife. This is a factor in the whole business.)

“Yes, we'd still be almost the same, Norah. Maybe not quite. But he's still a creep. I'm just going to take a look at what that creep put out there. But I'm going to do it without looking like I'm looking. And if he comes bouncing out again with a bunch of conversation in his mouth and mind, I'll leave him there talking to that idiot air.”

“Walk out backwards real fast, Simon, and he'll think you're hurrying back in.”

It was Tuesday when the people in that block put out their yard trash and their magazines for the trash men to pick up. (Monday they put out dry garbage; Wednesday they put out cans; Thursday they put out wet garbage in plastic sacks; Friday they put out newspapers.) Simon Radert went out and pulled a couple more tomato and pepper vines that were finished, now that it had frosted. He threw them into the big plastic container that he used for his yard trash. Then he looked over the fence (red climber rose vines on his side of the fence; honeysuckle growing on Swag's side) to see what that creep Henry H. Swag had put out for the trash men.

Quite a few magazines. There was Wife Swappers Weekly; there was Psychological Adventures; there were Mind Wanderer, Get Out of Yourself, Changing Iconographies of Identity, Greener Grass, and Straw-Men.

“What kind of creep would read that stuff?” Simon hooted out loud.

“I would, I do, I read and recommend it,” Henry H. Swag burst out, bouncing around on his heels and coming from nowhere at all. “Why don't you take some of these, Radert? Better you take them than the trash men. Here's a good one. You go in for wife-swapping?” Swag was a little bit pudgy, a little bit short.

“No, dammit, no!” Simon said heatedly.

“No need to get angry, friend. It can be a lot of fun. And have you ever had a good look at my wife, Buxom Jean?”

Simon Radert began to get a funny feeling. Yes, he had got some good looks at Buxom Jean, and yet not nearly good enough. Buxom Jean had set something going in his system ever since the Swags moved in Sunday evening. If it were not that Simon was so fond of his own sly wife Norah…

Henry Swag had also set some paperback books out for the trash men. They were books like Change Your Mind, You'll Like It, In Another Man's Shoes, People Exchange Mechanism (anyone with high-school mathematics can follow the procedures here); there was Self Renewal, and If A Body.

“This isn't the Tuesday the trash men pick up paperback books,” Simon said. “Only yard trash and magazines. It's only the third Tuesday of the month that they pick up the paperbacks.”

“Oh, I didn't know,” Henry Swag said. “Why don't you take them and read them, then?” He put the books into Simon's hands. “And have one of my cards,” Swag said.

“I have four of them already.”

“Good start. I have seven sorts of cards, all different.”

Simon took the card. It said “Henry H. Swag. Mind-Changer. Let Me Change Your Mind! Highly Scientific Methods. By Appointment Only.”

And then Henry H. Swag had gone off bouncing on his heels, and Simon Radert stood there, with his hands full, and with a look on his face as if his hands were full of ordure.

“Creep, creep, creep,” Simon said.

“Oh, that's the way a baby grackle goes,” Buxom Jean Swag said (where had she come from?), “and the babies of all the other blackbirds go ‘Cheep, cheep, cheep.’ Are you a bird-watcher?”

How did such chattering people slip up on one so suddenly and silently? And where had Buxom Jean come from, anyhow? Buxom Jean didn't exactly bounce around on her heels. She bounced everywhere with everything. She took the magazine Wife Swappers Weekly and put it with the books in Simon's hands.

“Read it,” she said. “You might want to do it. We do it all the time, but our bunch does it a different way than you're thinking. There's an advertisement in the magazine about the way we do it, but you won't understand what it means unless you already know about it. Isn't it a shame that we've lived here ever since Sunday night and here it's Tuesday morning and we're not near well-enough acquainted?”

“A shame, yes, perhaps, lady. I will read these things, I think, though it isn't at all certain that I will. And it may be that our paths will cross again.”

“If you ‘change your mind,’ come see me,” Buxom Jean Swag bubbled. “You have to already know that to understand it. That's kind of a joke, Radert. Don't you get it?”

“No,” Simon Radert said. And he went into his house with an anger that he couldn't explain.

“Mmmm, how do you like Buxom Jean?” Norah asked him, and she stuck out her sly tongue.

“Oh, she's got a lot of stuff,” Simon said. “All in the wrong places, though.”

“I don't think so, Simon,” sly wife Norah said. “With Buxom Jean there aren't any wrong places.”

It was time to go. Simon Radert went crosstown to his business building to work. He liked his job. It used to worry him that he liked it. He didn't worry about that now, and he didn't care what things people might say. He still liked it. It was a paper-shuffling job, and he shuffled papers until noon. Several times he had dipped into the paperback books, but then he had put all thought of creeps out of his mind.

And at noon he went for a walk. It was bright and crisp and he liked it. Then, in the street there, the wind changed, and other things changed with it. Suddenly Simon was hit in the face by a complex funny feeling. Part of that feeling was the creeps coming back into his mind, and they came with a hint of menace. Part of it was the same feeling that he had experienced that morning when Swag had said, “And have you ever had a good look at my wife, Buxom Jean?” And part of it was a new and wild feeling that his clothes were too tight for him; too tight and too long. This was all wrong stuff. He wore good clothes. He got careful fits. And his clothes had fitted him fine all that morning: they had always fitted him fine. Something else was wrong, wrong, wrong. Simon was bewildered. He stopped in his tracks, and the latter wrongness stopped also. He walked on again, and there was something wrong, wrong, wrong about his walk.

“Why the hell am I bouncing along on my heels?” he jabbered to himself. That silly bouncing was what was wrong with his walk. “That creep Swag has too much influence over me. It's almost as though he had hypnotized me.” Simon was angry, and almost afraid. “He's sure got under my skin, boy!” Whyever should Simon be bouncing along in the manner of a creepy neighbor that he had seen only a few times? But Simon went on and on with it, and he couldn't stop the insane gait. It went on for nearly an hour, and then Simon broke the pattern only by angry effort.

“Get out of my mind, you creep, out, out, out!” Simon cried aggressively. And suddenly, like the breaking of a bubble, it was all over with. Simon walked with his own seemly step and didn't bounce like a simian or creep. And the illusion that his clothes misfitted him had also vanished. They fitted him well, quite well. They were good clothes, and he was in accord with them. He was in accord with the whole world again. He wheeled happily around and returned to his own place, breasting cheerful flocks of people and pigeons.

“It's nice to be home in myself again,” he said, and he didn't have any idea what he meant by such a thing. But the afternoon went well for him. Once more he shuffled papers: carefully shuffling; canny and custodial papers. One can make a lot of money shuffling papers. There's a real fulfillment in the cryptic and consequential things. Radert was on the verge of growing quite rich in a gradual and pleasant manner; his sort of paper-shuffling paid well. He liked the labor and he liked the richness accruing to himself.

In the evening he left the business with a feeling of postponed pleasure, and he arrived home in an eerie sort of anticipation. He felt himself eagerly waited for by his sly and pretty (and often passionate) wife. It wasn't a frequent evening feeling. Usually the signals that came from her to him were much more slender things, more of the theme of “Waiting for you? What for?”

But tonight Norah was really happy to see him. She smooched and smirked and purred and sang little songs. She entangled herself with him.

“You have been so nice to me, now I will try to be just as nice to you.” She smiled and caressed. Sly Norah was a delight at her best. And whenever she was less than her best, it may have been two people's fault.

But this night it was all gala stuff: the preprandial consorting; the dinner-feast itself which was refined gluttony by candlelight; and witchy wining; the wit and the walnuts afterwards; and later the quality cigars and the romantic rum; and the sly flesh.

“I knew that it would be all well for us,” Norah said, “that it would be well for us now again, and forever. I knew it at noon today.”

“What happened at noon?” Simon asked her, understanding hardly more than the rhythm of her words. Here was unhurried passion in every object and in every sound. Here was deep and solid understanding, with all the quick and happy misunderstandings afloat on it where there was no harm in them. “What happened at noon, Norah?” he asked.

“Fun came back to our house, Simon. That's what happened at noon. It was never really gone, I guess, but we had forgotten a part of it for a while. You have been very busy and all. But now we won't forget it ever again.”

Simon was so fond of this sly woman that there was intruded a tuneful override to his heartbeat that told all about it. It is good to have the big thing so secure that one doesn't have to understand all the details.

“But what in particular happened at noontime, Norah?” he asked. “Was it just part of a good feeling that came to you?”

“No, it was just part of a good man who came to me. A very good man — you. I'd forgotten that you could be so good like that. It would be wonderful if you could come home at noon every day as you did today. Could you?”

There was a large and full and pleasant silence. And after a while it wasn't quite as full and as pleasant as it had been. Something big had gone out of it, and something small and doubtful had crept in.

“You don't mean today, do you, Norah?” Simon asked. “You don't mean this noon, do you? I didn't come home this noon, Norah.”

That was like a stone dropped into a smooth, deep water. It went in softly with a vertical sort of sound. The eddy rings spread out from it. One eddy of it reached Norah, reached her hand and then her throat.

“You slapped me in the face when you said that,” she mumbled. She was listless now and not caring very much. She was used to such blind obstacles rising between them, blameless and faultless barriers. “Even if you said it in fun, the fun's all gone out of it now, Simon. We've lost it again.”

“I didn't say it in fun, Norah. And I didn't come here at noon.”

“Has my mind gone? Or yours?”

“I don't know. Maybe neither one.”

“Who was it here then? Who else wears your body?”

“I don't know. I'll try to find out.”

Had the sly mind of Norah really failed? It was too resilient to crack from a simple, direct jolt. That mind was as tough as it was tricky. It was always full of gentle wit and overdone patience, yes, but it had always been a fine instrument and it had come with a lifetime guarantee. Simon Radert was level-sure that nothing had failed in his wife's mind; that there hadn't been any new failure there.

And what of his own? Oh, it was sharper than most minds, but had it come to have a base that was too thin? There is such a thing as myopia of the mind, and it takes rare glasses to correct it. Surely Simon had been out of his mind to drift away from Norah of whom he was so fond, to drift so nearly clear away from her so often. Out of his mind as to such rift things, maybe, but he had not been home that noontime.

Simon may have been a little sick. He had certainly felt queer on his noontime walk that day, not quite himself for a while there. But, sick or not, queer-feeling or not, he had not come home that noontime.

He sat in his study and shuffled his thoughts. But he shuffled them without profit. Laughter could be heard from the Swag's house next door, loud laughter even coming through the tight walls. They had a lot of fun at that house, Norah had said. Why do the creeps have all the fun? “I could have a certain kind of low fun with that Buxom Jean myself,” Simon said. And just what was it that Swag did anyhow that he could afford to move into a neighborhood that hadn't fallen apart yet?

“Didn't Swag give me a card? Oh, hell yes, he gave me five cards, all different.” Simon fished the five cards out of his pocket and spread them out on that paper-shuffling table that he had in his study. Each of the cards was headed “Henry H. Swag,” and each of them was tailed “Highly Scientific Methods. By Appointment Only.” And these were the messages on the cards:

On the first, “Mind-Changer. Let Me Change Your Mind.” On the second, “Personalized Voyages. Go In Person; Fine Trips For All Of You.” On the third, “Whose Place Do You Want To Take? Not Hypnotism. Not Illusion. This Is The Real Thing.” On the fourth, “Change Places With Anyone At All, For Fun And Profit.” And on the fifth was printed “The Perfect Disguise. The Perfect Set-Up. You'll Never Know About It If You Don't Investigate.”

“Utterly unfascinating,” Simon Radert said. “But I'm glad that this hokey observes highly scientific methods.” Simon shuffled fiscal papers for a couple of hours. Then he went to bed alone.

And the following day had a background of nagging worry that could not quite be buried in work. Simon had lost (it was at least one dozen times that he had lost it) the thing that he most cared about, the mystical concord with his sly wife. He held for her, as he had always, puzzlement and fondness; and working at the thing that he cared about second most of all would not distract or occupy him today. The morning went badly.

Simon decided that he would not go out from the business building that noontime. He had been bothered on the previous day by either an illness or an anomaly, and he feared running into the same thing again. But he became unaccountably nervous as the twelve o'clock time came around. He sat, in queasy context, and gazed at the walls of his office, as small, brass notes from his timer counted up to twelve. Then the walls changed.

That was fact. It wasn't any trick of the eye. The walls changed; a different place had come to Simon, and he was in that different place. And at the same moment he had the under-feeling that he himself had also changed in several ways.

Now this was weird, and there was no accepting it without revolt. Simon's body seemed to have become thicker and shorter. He felt himself acquire a pair of jolly jowls. He became fat-headed. His paunch developed into a more spacious thing, and his clothes tightened on him. His hands weren't his own. The hairs on the backs of them were coarser and darker. The hands themselves were shorter and thicker than they had been, and probably they were more powerful. There was a warm clamminess about his hands. Yes, and there were erupting appetites of several sorts in his body. He had become uncomfortably sensual.

Simon knew that he now looked out at the world through black or brown eyes rather than through his old gray eyes. The whole spectrum shifts a notch when filtered through dark eyes instead of light. Well, he couldn't see what he looked like; and he didn't want, just yet, to go to a glass. But he could see what the room looked like. It was a racier office than his own: at least it had racier pictures on the walls. It was flashy, yes, but with luxurious flash.

His picture of Norah was gone from the desk at which he sat. There were other things there, loud and disturbing things. In particular, there was a figurine; an obscene figurine it was. It was not at all the nudity of the mostly (not entirely) female figure that made it obscene: indeed the thing did have a few odd scraps and traps of clothes on it. But it was obscene in every limb and line of it. It had a face of comic, evil impudence, of a comic that wasn't funny. It was a lurid and garish thing. Simon wasn't sure that it wasn't alive; he wasn't sure that it didn't move. And the eyes, the sly eyes of it! Simon went clammy at the look of them, and to go clammy in the body he had acquired was a raunchy and darkly exciting experience. The thing had Norah's own sly eyes, her eyes as they would have been (her eyes as they damned sight were) if she'd suddenly chosen hell and its ways and gone there in a quick passion of deformity.

Damnation, what was Simon into? He would not admit that his mind had slipped, but his case and his world and his person had surely slipped fundamentally. Ah, well, there were papers of every sort on the desk, and there were files full of papers. And Simon Radert was a paper-shuffler of exceptional ability. He could extract the substance of papers rapidly and accurately. He knew about things like this, and the papers he usually shuffled were mostly gilt-edged ones. So were these.

There was money-stuff here. There was a rich setup in all this. It would be the most outlandish fraud ever, unless it delivered on its promises. There was a hooked clientele of moneyed persons, and the operator of all this was operating on a very deep take. Yes, journeys were promised, journeys clear out of the ordinary. And there were jarringly crooked methods spelled out on how the clients might recoup their journey's expense a dozen times in the peculiar scenery to be encountered on the journeys. Simon knew many of the clients, and he knew about many others. This was as big a con-game as had ever been devised. But how did it get its repeat business? It sure did have the smell of something that gave results, yes, pungent results.

A quick-eyed man prowling through this conniving paper could have many a public question answered. He could discover where the bodies were buried: and there were bodies, undeniably dead bodies, running all through this elegant contrivance.

And the mastermind behind this all, the man who operated it, was Henry H. Swag.

However had Simon Radert got into this office? However had he got into a wrong body? He was ready to look in a glass now. He found one and looked. Yes, he was Henry H. Swag. Why shouldn't he be there?

“And now I will just discover where I go at noons,” said the inner voice of Simon (for the inner voice still belonged to him). He went out of there fast. He took a taxi, for he realized that someone else had a jump of a few minutes on him. He got out of the taxi at the corner of his own block. He started for his own home, and he saw that he was even then being anticipated. A man was just then going into Simon Radert's house. The man was Simon Radert, in clothes that were too loose for him and too short for him.

“He's holding my own body for hostage,” said the inner Simon. “I cannot well throttle to death a body that I hope to inhabit again. Somehow I can't even hate that thing going into my house. It's the non-essential me, but it's myself nevertheless. It's rather the case that I can't look on the reflection of the face that I'm wearing without abomination. I am a temple divided against myself. What will I do now, and where will I go?

“I see. I will go where my borrowed, heel-bouncing feet take me,” And he went straightaway into the house of Henry H. Swag, which was next door to his own, if only things were properly sorted out. And talk about a funny feeling when he came in! Here was all the entrail-churning, double-acting queasiness with attraction that had bothered him for these last several days.

“Oh, Henry! I can hardly wait,” Buxom Jean cried. “And I won't wait. Let's see how fast we can get started! Who are you this time? Don't tell me. Make me guess. Oh, I have the most wonderful husband in the world. What other man would be so thoughtful as to come to me in a different trick every day! Oh, we'll never run out of them as long as there are men in the world. Whatever woman ever had such variety in her enjoyments? And there'll be several tonight, besides. Oh, but you don't care about them, do you? They won't be you.”

The inner Simon Radert told himself that it didn't matter. He was a man of rectitude, but he had learned the paradox of flexible rectitude in late years. After all, it would be only the body that possessed Buxom Jean, and that body was already Buxom Jean's lawful husband. The inner Simon told himself a variety of things, and some of them were lies. “I could have a certain kind of low fun with Buxom Jean myself,” Simon had said just the night before. Well, he'd set it too low. This was high fun. Even Norah (oh my God, Norah!) had said that the way Buxom Jean was stacked, there weren't any wrong places. Anyhow, it was a very bouncy and strenuous encounter.

“I have compromised myself inextricably,” the inner Simon said a little later when he was in the street again. “I am caught up in a witchery which may not be as scientific as it claims. Indeed, I will have to check on the scientific aspects of the whole thing. I have transacted devil's business with a devil without even signing on as a formal client of his. Oh, it may be that he hooks them all with the informal hook first: and that he then compels them to be his clients till they are fleeced and flayed completely. Well, if I've been a client of his in this encounter, at least he's not had any money out of me.

“No money, maybe. But I feel that I've been bled of something that prices pretty high. And now I am lost in my bearings, and I'm divided in mind and body, and — 

“No, I'm not, either. It happens fast when it happens.” It happened so fast that it is hardly noticed, for Simon Radert was back in his own proper body and could at least think of putting himself in control of the situation.

“He has still compromised me in a sordid fashion, and I have still behaved like a creep,” the reintegrated Simon said. “Well, if I am compromised again, I bet I make it pay me well. I don't know just how scientific his con is, but I've always had a little bit of my own science held in reserve. There are a lot of unknowns to me in this, and it will take some juggling. I'll bet I'm a better juggler than that creep is, even if he owns the balls.”

The afternoon was taut. Simon had contrary feelings. His own case and house were in the middle of the tawdry mystery. There had developed something very shaky about his sly wife Norah, of whom he was fonder than anything else in the world. But for his second fondness: the shuffling and juggling of papers and circumstances with object of thumping profit and elegant triumph, yes, the prospects were very live there.

He'd bring that heel-bouncing creep Swag to heel. He'd move in on the con and suck it dry. Then he'd make a break for greener grass, with everything falling rich and ripe for him. And there might be a way to have Norah always at her best, and also to have Buxom Jean (what a bouncy widow she'd be then!) at her never-failing finest, and a dozen others besides, or a hundred, or a thousand. Really there was no limit to this sort of science when properly applied.

Down, man, down! Let there be no compromise, no strange venery, no deviation from rectitude, no devil's business (except on the most careful terms and with a dear aim always in sight), no sordidness, no shady stuff, nothing of that sort until a triumphant solution had been attained.

“There will be plenty of time for compromise and deviation and strange venery after this business is regularized,” there came the voice of an intermediate Simon. What? Were those his words and his thought? There must be a little piece of Henry H. Swag still stuck in him from their last exchange.

Then Simon had the oddest thought of all his disturbed period.

“I can't be hurt mortally if I set my most important thing out of reach, if I accept that I most enjoy it when it is out of reach,” he told himself. “Suppose that I do lose Norah? What if I do lose her either for a little while or forever? Well, that would be the end of this world for me, of course. But it could be the beginning of further worlds. I suspect that I will have to pull down my present world in any case; it's grown too close and narrow around me. And I've noticed for a long while (though I've never admitted it and will only half admit it now) that I'm fonder of Norah in her absence than in her presence. There are some paintings that merge beautifully at a fair distance but become blotches at close range (not that Norah is such a blotch). There is really an elegant pleasure in being separated from her: she makes so grand an appearance at a distance.

“Or do I justify myself overmuch here? Sure I do. I get half a look behind the curtain. I have a half-vision of what is going to happen, of the best trade that I can make. Oh, this is going to be a touchy business! I'd wish it never to end. Complete triumph and vindication (doubly fine when it pays its own way a dozen times over) is nowhere near as sweet as the conflict when one is still behind but sees a chance for coming up even; for coming up more than even, with luck, with craft, with prophecy, with highly scientific methods.

“I don't want the tension eased; I only want it shifted a bit. I don't want to win easily. I may not even want to win. But I do want to keep the winning within sight and to come almost up to it. Let all the world be frozen forever then, with my winning just on the tips of my reaching fingers.

“This is a funny game, but it's the one I want. It will be my own game and I will be good at it. And I'll trick the world into playing this game of mine.”

That evening when Simon came home, Norah shifted the tension just enough. Then Simon knew for sure that it was his game and that nobody could rob him of the pleasure of it. Peace was not what he wanted, and relaxation was not.

“Will we be strangers, then?” Norah asked him in her soft, sly way. “Sure we will be, Simon, why not? Strangers and fish stink after three days, they say; but neither does so long as it keeps its strangeness. Did you ever consider just what a strange thing a fish really is, Simon? Or what a strange fish you really are? But you were wonderful at noon, and I understand now why you want to preserve this dissemblance. Last night I didn't understand it. Fate would have to be jealous of us for the intensity of our enjoyment, and to be jealous for blind fate is to destroy. But we hide in the bright noontime where nobody can see us, and we'll not be destroyed. We can swear to every fate and god and judge that we were strangers doing this thing, and that we do not even remember the names or persons of each other.

“But I will say it again as I said it last night, Simon: you have been so nice to me; now I will try to be just as nice to you. We can have the fun and the mystery both, I think, Simon.”

Just how sly was Norah, anyhow? Oh, her slyness was bottomless. Was it possible that she didn't know that it wasn't Simon in Simon's body at noontime? Oh, she could always refuse to know anything that she didn't want to know. And now she gave Simon one of the finest evenings and nights in his life.

Fate was jealous of them, and fate did know their names and persons at night, however much it might have been hoodwinked at noontime. And fate moved one pawn against them in a careful destructive game. Wait a while. Three or more can play that game.

“When Norah is at her best, it is almost as wonderful as if she were some distance absent,” Simon told himself mysteriously in a pleasant and ghostly half-hour just before dawn.

The next morning Simon Radert abandoned his profitable paper-shuffling for a while and went to visit a friend, Baalbek Tyrone, who was a multilateral scientist. Simon explained the phenomena to Baalbek and then he said, “I know what I saw, Baalbek, and I know what buffos and bodies I've been in. If it is hypnotism or illusion, then it is complete beyond anything else: such contingencies would almost require all life and appearance to be hypnotism or illusion. I'm not asking whether such things could happen: I've experienced them happening. I'm asking whether they could happen within a scientific framework.”

“Nah, Radert, not really,” Baalbek said. “Who is this super con-man?”

“Ah, I'd rather not name his name quite yet, Baalbek. For at least two periods I've been that con-man myself, as I told you, so I have to be careful. The things he's doing, someone's likely to kill him for them, and I don't want it to be myself who's killed for him. I don't think an illusion would be trapped by such details, the tightening of the clothes and such. If I had the illusion of taking another man's place, I should have the illusion of taking his place in his clothes. Dammit, Baalbek, it isn't the mind or spirit that goes wandering off to strange places: I could almost understand that. It's the bodies that go wandering off to slip into strange clothes (and those clothes not missing a stride in their moving and doing) and to surround strange minds. Or it is a strange body that comes suddenly both to infest and to surround me. And how does my own body vanish so slickly at the same time?”

“What is the name of the con-man, Radert? Where does he live?”

“I told you that I wouldn't give you his name just yet, and he lives entirely too close to me. This man cannot be a mental giant. He's only a creep who bounces around on his heels. There is something besides mentality involved here. Could an absolute stumble-bum stumble onto a cosmic secret, and all the erudite scientists miss it completely?”

“Sure he could. If he did it, then he could. And scientists aren't so erudite as all that, Radert. What is the name of this prestidigitator?”

“Why must you know?”

“A couple other gentlemen have also tossed me half a trail on him. I want a whole trail or none. But some of the fruit of his vine sounds pretty tasty. I want in on it. But we'll have to know more about it to go for all of it. We have to be able to make the transfers ourselves, or to put ourselves in the way of their being made. I want to be you when you (I) confront him. Do you understand?”

“Yes, though I'm not sure I want to be done out of it. If I find out enough so that we can use a piece of the trick to go for the whole trick, I'll let you know. But, Baalbek, is any of this possible scientifically?”

“Any wild or distorted view of anything can have a picture-frame fitted around it. Then it becomes an ordered view of a possible thing. Our own out-seeing eyes are a binocular-shaped picture-frame that can turn any portion of the world into a reasonable picture. And every scientific discipline is such a picture-frame. If there is a somehow misshapen scene, then we may need a misshapen frame to go around it. Let us consider the science of somamorphology (the shuffling or re-shaping of bodies). It's a science of a very funny shape, but it fits around our weird scene exactly. Sure, Radert, the things you describe could fit into a scientific framework, that of the science of somamorphology.”

“Well, is there such a science, Baalbek?”

“There is now. I just founded it. Don't laugh, Radert. Name me a science that began on a firmer basis.”

Simon Radert went to see Monsignor Tupper. Simon described the complex of happenings of the last several days. Then he asked, “Do you suppose that these things could happen from a scientific viewpoint?”

“If diabolism is a science, then they certainly could happen,” Msgr. said. “And I guess that they have been happening. The science of devilry has as slippery a content as any of the other sciences. Don't smile like that, Radert. Don't you know that the devil has been out for so long that he's in again now? Time and Tempest Magazine has an article (favorable, of course, in accord with the views of T & T) in this week's issue, and he's generally had quite a bit of notice lately. He's on some new kick, and that's always been as murderous as it is tedious. He was always a mean one, but since he's read that new book he's been off on some really weird jags.”

“What new book?” Simon asked. Monsignor Tupper named the book.

“Oh, that's one of those that Swag had set out for the trash men to pick up,” Simon said. “I think I've got it at home. You're sure that there's a devil's claw in all this, Monsignor?”

“Oh, sure.”

“And you're sure that the devil read that particular book?”

“Oh, sure. He stole it from the chancery office. He was seen to do it.”

“So much for the experts,” Simon said, and he was back in his business place. “I probably know all that I need to know, anyhow. One needn't be an authority on the color green to turn various things into green money.”

Simon worked it out in several days there, some of it when he was in his own office, some of it when he was in Swag's office in the front-lash time of one of the changes or jumps. It was always a puzzle how he got to be in Swag's office. “Does my enemy have a gap in his contrivances?” Simon often questioned himself. “So forgotten a gate in his defense as this one might indicate a trap.” It might, but how did the trap work?

And this business of Swag changing bodies with another person didn't seem to be the regular pattern. Swag always had at least one direct swap going, but the bulk of his business was in placing clients in the places and bodies of various moneyed men for purposes of loot and connivance. Many of the clients reaped good harvests at this stand-in fraud game; and Swag seemed to take far more than the miller's tithe as his share of the profit. After all, at this game, Swag had the only mill in town.

Simon had made certain that he signed naturally with Swag's signature whenever he was in Swag's body, and also that he had Swag's fingerprints. He then stole several of Swag's suits when in Swag's house one day, and he discovered a little room somewhere between Swag's office and his own that he could use for a quick-change stash. He made a much more convincing Swag in Swag's clothes.

Simon familiarized himself with Swag's banking procedures: they seemed open and easy, and perfectly clear for an expert paper-shuffler. Simon cashed a few checks on Swag at Swag's bank, nothing big, a thousand dollars one day, five hundred the next, two thousand the day after that. It was just to be familiar with the procedure.

So the looting of Swag (careful, careful, Simon boy, this is really too easy) went apace. Simon came up with some very original ideas of his own in this, and he discovered an amazing repertoire of looting devices in Swag's own files. They were written in double-talk, of course, but Simon had read double-talk since his childhood. There were several hundred such fine-looking documents in cipher there.

But really, though there are a million different devices and tricks of looting, there are only three degrees of looting. The first step (the weak-weasel step) is estimating how much may be taken with safety and without suspicion from a fortune, and taking only that much from it. The second step consists of determining everything that is in a particular holding, and taking all of it. Would you believe that some of the greatest and most colorful swindlers of times past have not gone beyond this second step?

But the third step (the third step is kinetic or dynamic looting; none of that static stuff here) had to be fast and daring. Really the thing should all be wrapped up in no more than three days of hidden and hectic activity. Simon Radert, in canny third-step activity, began to raise a very large amount of money on the securities and promises of Henry H. Swag. Simon poured some of this new and hasty money into various accounts of Swag, and some into various accounts of his own. What things cannot be done with mortgages and cross-mortgages, with sight-drafts and with simple bank transfers! What things cannot be done by plain old-fashioned kiting, if they are done by a firm and perfervid hand! What rampant borrowings cannot a bold and burgeoning man make for very short-term deals! And, in this particular case, what extraordinary money could be raised from special clients who had had previous promises and expectations fulfilled in a most exuberant way!

Simon Radert had guessed that he could raise about five times as much on Henry H. Swag as Swag was really worth, if he did it fast enough. He did it. And he was cutting it very close, for his target date and destination (Project Greener Grass), set up to allow just about three days of action, was almost upon him.

Henry had to be able to manipulate the bodies, and this isn't something that one learns out of a textbook. He had to be able to possess his own body at the critical moment, and he had to be sure of keeping possession of it. There were limits to the distance at which body-shifting could be carried out. Like all things that suffer a scientific explanation, this shifting was subject to the law of inverse squares. Swag's power to compel body-shifting was strong at short range. (Simon's office was only a block from Swag's. Simon's house was next door to Swag's.) When the distance was doubled, the power was divided by four; when the distance was tripled, the power was divided by nine. And Swag's power seemed really effective only within a range of two miles or so. Simon had worked up diagrams of the effective locations of Swag and his clients, and of the paired clients and prey by which the best looting was effected. All were within two miles; most were within one mile.

Simon had tested it. A quick three-mile taxi ride at noon took him out of Swag's effective range. He could feel Swag tugging at him after a while, Swag wanting his own body back after the noon-hour dalliance, Swag in near panic wanting his body back a half-hour later (the delay must have infringed on his profit somewhere). The times and seasons seemed important in this. This particular time had better be remembered.

But Simon had now chosen his own time and season and destination exactly.

Should he tell Norah? Should he tell (oh, hell no!) Buxom Jean Swag? But he still had the unruly hope of adding Buxom Jean to his ménage when the dead body of Henry H. Swag should have mountains of forgeries and over-reachings and hasty claims and due-bills and attainders and suits and writs and million-dollar shortages heaped upon it.

Project Greener Grass involved a flight to Rio, of course. Simon Radert was a traditionalist, and what paper-shuffler does not have a flight to Rio as the climax of his schemes and shufflings? He did tell Norah about it, in a way, though it was much more the case of her slyly guessing it out of him. But they disguised the plans and set them into a queer context. They put it all into their “Familiars and Strangers” game. That “Familiars and Strangers” game was beginning to cloy a little. Well, that phase would soon be over.

“Yes, Norah, we can have both fun and mystery in our house,” he presented it. “We can be pleasantly mysterious strangers to each other and not let it grow stale in three days or in three thousand years. But to do this, we must keep certain things secret even from ourselves, even from other parts of us. Our Lord gave us the parable of the man who had the secret of happiness: and to have that secret he had to keep many secrets; he could not even let his right hand know what his left hand was doing. This was a generative secret.

“For ourselves it must be very similar. We cannot even let our noontime selves know what our evening selves are up to.”

“What, not even let my stranger-lover know that he is taking me to R-I-O?”

“No, Norah, no! Don't spill one damned bean out of the pot to that damned nooner.”

“Never a bean, no. I'm too sly for that. Oh, I will be sly about it. I — ”

“No, Norah, no! Please don't be sly! Not with the nooner. Don't tell him anything at all.”

“Oh, all right, then. But neither will I tell you any of the things that the noontime stranger told me today. I play the same game with you when you come as the noontime person. And he (you) said not to tell you anything.”

“Oh.” This could be a little bit dangerous. Norah was sly, but she was not intelligent. Simon had always liked her the way she was; for the duration of his juggling act at least, he would rather that she be the way she was somewhere else.

And Buxom Jean Swag was also a danger. She wasn't intelligent, either, but she did rattle through things with considerable of that mental energy that often serves in place of intelligence.

“I think I know who you really are these noontimes, Henry,” she said on that last day before the target day. “I think that you are Byron Biggleton. No? Then you are Lambert Hughes, or Simon Radert, or Chester Stork. No? Then you are either Gaspar Okuma or Irving Clive. Yes, you are! You're one of them. Those are the only ones that Henry's doing one-for-one swaps with now. That's what he tells me.”

“At least I am in rich company,” Simon said (to himself, not to Buxom Jean). “They all have a lot of green moss growing on them, and I've been raking it in all this week. But I didn't know about Gaspar. It may not be too late to let him in on a bad thing.”

“Honey, Gaspar honey, I think it is,” Buxom Jean was going on. “I'll tell you something. Henry H. used always to dump an old one and take a new one with him every time. Always in this same good old frame, though. I wonder who wore it first? But since he took up with me I've stayed with him. Twice he thought he'd left me behind for a new one, and each time it turned out that I was the new one. I can copy his tricks. I pick up a lot. And he or whatever will not shake me this time, either. I'll not be left behind. I'm going along.”

Yes, Buxom Jean could be dangerous to the intricate planning. There were a lot of dangers to it. But the planning was complete now. Only the execution remained, and it was going to be carried out relentlessly. And loose ends still hanging out were damnsight going to be bloody stumps.

And now it was the ticklish night before the target day. And then it was the early morning hours of target day itself. And Simon Radert was being menaced by the teeth and hooves of a very skittish nightmare.

It was an old-fashioned sort of dream, all in a monochrome, black and white and gray, as all dreams were before color was introduced into them about a hundred years ago. It was the case in the nightmare that Henry Swag, even after he was dead, had the power to shift bodies one more time. He did it, and he took the live Radert body with the gun still smoking in the hand of it. He also took the sly Radert wife, and he was off on Project Greener Grass with both the stolen things. And the inner Simon Radert (nightmarishly conscious in death, and trapped inside the dead Swag body) was taken away and morgued and slabbed and jabbed and eviscerated and embalmed and buried, and left dead but still conscious and still in agony to remain forever in the suffocating underground terror.

“This bodes ill for the day,” Simon said in stilted fashion as he woke from that grasping and entangling dream (the dream and the language of it had been stilted and archaic, and the inevitability of it had carried over into waking), “but I will not let it bode ill. I'll package all the ill omen of it, like wet garbage, into a plastic sack and leave it on my rack for the trash men to pick up. And I'll have good luck all this day. Good luck is something that can be willed and worked for. Well, I've worked for it hectically these few days, and now I will it strongly. That's all it takes.”

In spite of Simon's resolve not to tip his hand to fate by breaking his daily routine, he went to work earlier than usual on the morning of target day. He was nervous, and he wanted to be doing something. But he knew that everything he could do was already done.

The readiness had peaked too soon. It is much easier to keep the necessary balance while still in motion than to maintain it in a static or waiting case. Simon felt compelled to activity, and that is where one makes mistakes. What about a late clipping of Gaspar Okuma, the very wealthy man that Buxom Jean had implied was a client of Swag, but who did not appear in Swag's client lists? Too late, too late for another one. Leave it alone!

Then Simon fell into that bad-luck routine of rechecking his arrangements, and rechecking them again. They shouldn't need rechecking. One shouldn't even give a glance in their direction. Too much attention to arrangements will alert fate that something fishy is going on. And when fate casts a baleful eye on such things, it is likely to be the end come early.

Besides, a very little bit of rechecking revealed a disturbing thing. Simon wasn't the only one who had been tampering with the Simon Radert accounts. Someone was multiplying Simon, just as Simon had multiplied Henry H. Swag. And the someone who was doing it was using about the same projection that Simon had used. Simon discovered that his momentary worth in his accounts was about five times his actual worth. And the only one who could be tampering was Henry Swag. Swag was the only one who could have disguised himself as Simon. He was the only one who had access to the Simon-body; or so Simon hoped.

Simon was tempted to jerk all the accounts then, at midmorning; to convert them all then and there; to cable them to Rio where he could receive and stash them that evening. No, no, let it stand for the two hours or so. To start trimming down stakes now might be to lose everything. Simon hadn't transferred all the Swag accounts yet, and he couldn't transfer what remained of them until he was Swag again, during the noontime.

“I've made my bet, and I'll ride it out,” Simon swore. “I will be much richer than I expected, or I will be nothing at all. Let us see whether Swag or myself is the strongest snake. Let us see which one will swallow the other.”

But an idling mind is open to thought in the waiting, idle hours. Simon began again to consider the basis of it all. Of course, the switching couldn't have scientific justification. Somamorphology was a made-up science, and diabolism was no science at all. Body-swapping on a realistic basis would require the transfer, in place and order, of billions of molecules, and many more billions of atoms and sub-atomic particles, the transfer without jumbling them, without killing or kinking them, and all of it done over a considerable distance. It would also require the ordering of many other circumstances to effect the swapping of two bodies. Scientifically this simply would not be possible. Omnipotentially it was possible, but Swag wasn't Radert's idea of the omnipotent one.

But, if it happened, and it didn't happen on a scientific basis, on what basis could it happen? Oh, “scientific” is but one of many categories. The thing might happen on a contingent basis, on an existential basis, on an implicit basis, on an eidetic basis, on a paraontological basis, on a projective basis, on an epicyclic basis. After all, reality itself remains an unproved theory. There were many bases on which these things could have happened, if strict reality were not required.

No matter. What Simon Radert had to do was transfer all remaining Swag funds to the Radert account; he'd do it just as soon as he was Swag again. Then, right after one o'clock, when he had been returned to his proper body, he would withdraw and transmit all the swollen Radert funds. Then he'd skip (how he'd skip!) to Greener Grass. Thirty minutes later he would be in the air, and an hour later he would be out of the country.

And he wanted to kill Henry H. Swag while doing all the other things. This killing was the loose piece; it was to be played intuitively with the very fingertips. It was intended to keep the whole business loose: it were best so. The killing could be left out, but only with the deepest regret. One shouldn't leave so powerful an enemy as Swag (he might even be the devil himself) alive behind one. Besides, the killing of Swag was the enjoyment, the fun part. It was the part that made it all worthwhile. If you can't have fun doing a thing, is that thing worth doing?

It is worth doing only if it stores up future fun for one. And Project Greener Grass would do that.

Noon found Simon Radert walking through the street toward Pan-American Commercial, the bank where both he and Swag did business. Sometimes on these nooner changes he was yanked into Swag's office when the transfer occurred; but sometimes the transformation happened wherever he was. Now it took him in mid-stride, and he completed that stride into the bank building just as the bank chimes began their twelve count. “Punctual,” Simon said. “I like that in a situation or a world.”

An officious official, probably a vice president, who had been told the day before by the inner Simon in the outer Swag that Swag funds would be transferred this day (“for a very special reason, for a very short time, but do not mention it at all; things like that might make the market nervous”) aided and expedited him. And when it was completed, there was really a concentration of funds in the Radert account.

“Simon Radert will probably be doing some massive fund-shifting in an hour or so,” the Simon-in-Swag's-body said, “but, as you know, it will be quite all right. Some of us are putting up rather large earnest-money on a special deal, and Radert is our front man. But it should all be completed tonight, and probably all the funds will be back and redistributed tomorrow.”

“Fine, fine,” said the officious vice president. “Oh, Mr. Swag, have you heard of the Okuma disaster? It just began to come to light a few minutes ago. There's a shortage of millions, and a complete clear-out. There's a warrant out for Okuma's arrest, but he cannot be found. A terrible thing!”

“Gaspar Okuma?” the Simon-in-Swag gasped in incredulity. “Good God, no! If Gaspar skips with a boodle, whom can we trust?”

Then the inner Simon strode out of Pan-American Commercial. “Not a worry in the world,” he said. “Everything on schedule.” But he was irritated if not worried. The Swag body that he wore was more distasteful to him than it had ever been before. Dammit, it stunk! And it was not a dishygienic stink. There was a whiff of primordial rottenness to that body.

But the inner Simon walked quickly to his home. Through his garden window he saw, with that daily sour feeling of resentment, that Swag-in-Radert was with Norah. Displeased but patient, the inner Simon shuffled into Henry H. Swag's house to pass the time of day with Buxom Jean.

“Oh, I'm so relieved to see you,” she said. “No, it's not you, is it? I mean that I don't believe you're Gaspar. Did you hear the terrible news about Gaspar Okuma?”

“Only a bit of it. Those that live by that caper must perish by that caper. Terrible, terrible, though.”

“Henry, you're not Gaspar today, are you? Tell me really if you are.”

“No, honestly I'm not, Buxom Jean,” the inner Simon said.

“Honey, there's two of you who are very much alike when you come as Henry. There's Gaspar, and there's the other one, you. I think the two of you must be just the same size, the way you rattle around inside Henry (really, that's an odd impression, but that's what it seems like). I am so fond of Gaspar (well, of you, too, it's nice to have men with a little bit of class come as Henry, but you won't tell me who you are) that I almost can't stand to have him in other trouble. There's his wife, Hilda Okuma, you know. She's nice, I suppose, but she's odd; in short left field at least. He's so committed to her, but I really believe he'd be happier if she were away somewhere. Have you a wife? Is she odd?”

“I have, and she is, Buxom Jean. Hardly in left field, or even short left, but a little bit behind the shortstop. Odd, yes.”

Simon Radert passed a pleasant and bouncy time of day with Buxom Jean. Then he put himself on the alert. He saw Henry H. Swag leave the Radert house in the Radert body. So the inner Simon, the Simon-in-Swag, followed him. “Punctuality, punctuality,” he said in time to his own Swag-body heel-bouncing that he could not control. “Ah, you've always been so punctual, old Henry H., don't fail me now.” Came one o'clock, time for the change. And the change did not happen. Came another five minutes and still it did not happen.

“Whoa, boy,” the inner Simon cried, and he gripped his pocketed gun in his strong, stubby Swag-hand. “Will it come to the gunpoint scene and I have to force you to the exchange?”

Swag-in-Radert's body continued along unchanged and went into the Pan-American Commercial Bank. And Simon-in-Swag's-body followed him.

“Careful, careful,” said the inner Simon. “Such a thing need not be a disaster. Each such thing that surfaces in front of me is one less thing that might take me in the back. If he is doing my work, then I will let him do it. I'll let him carry my loot and luggage in his own stomach until the last possible minute. Then, like the good snake that I am, like the no-good snake that he is, I'll stretch my mouth over his and swallow his head. And then I'll swallow the rest of him.”

Swag-in-Radert's-body was joined by another man inside the bank. This man seemed to have an hypnotic quality (Simon could sense such things strongly) that rendered him almost invisible to the slow-eyed and the slow-minded. And the man of this hypnotic quality also had a concealing scarf pulled over his face.

“I'll not be complicated by him,” Simon swore inwardly. “I will know how to deal with him in a late and tricky second, if he is really a factor.”

And the Swag-in-Radert's-body was doing the Radert work for him very well. He was gathering the boodle all up and transmitting it or variously handling it. Swag might be a creep, but he had the magic fingertip touch and the fingertip mind when dealing with money.

Swag-in-Radert and the scarved man turned to go out when they had finished their swift and final transactions. And Simon-in-Swag stood in their way. But that inner Swag glazed his eyes and went by Simon without seeming to see him, and who can say what a man with a scarf over his face might see?

Those two men went out and took what seemed to be a prearranged taxi. Another taxi came out of the Fourth Street alley and followed them. By the time the inner Simon found a taxi, the first two vehicles were out of sight. “To the airport,” inner Simon told his driver. “Quickly, friend, quickly.” And they picked up the other two cabs when halfway there.

Simon saw that his wife Norah was in the second taxi, the baggage taxi. Norah was supposed to have had that taxi loaded and waiting for Simon at the Radert house. But the nooner-man must have changed her orders for her.

The taxis arrived. “Punctual, yes, punctual as if I had done it myself,” Simon said, “and part of it I did.”

The baggage from the middle taxi was loaded on the prearranged (by Simon) dray to go to the plane just in time. And Swag-in-Radert with the scarved man, with Norah Radert, with another woman that Simon did not know for sure, hurried to the Trans-Pan-Am-Rio-Lines waiting area whence travelers were already going down a ramp to board the Rio plane.

And it was just outside that waiting area that the Simon-in-Swag shouldered the Swag-in-Simon out of his parade (for he was the last man, the close-up man) and over into a corridor corner below a blasting speaker.

“All right, baggy-pants, we change bodies now,” Simon growled, “and then I shoot your body to death just as soon as you are into it. Who will notice a little thing like that?” Simon had his gun into Swag's gut (though it gave him a twinge to threaten his own body like that), and he was turning on all the hypnotic power that he possessed so that the whole scene might be as invisible as possible. It worked. People bumped into them and bumped around them, but they did not notice the gun-play.

“But not too soon, Simon,” the Swag-in-Radert said. “You don't want to shoot your own body, surely.”

“No. No hurry,” Simon said like ice. “I want to be the last person in that boarding line and to move on quickly when I move.”

“That's also what I want to do,” Swag said. “You don't like my body, do you, Simon?”

“No, Swag. It's a devil's body, and you are the devil himself.”

“Not really, Simon, but I acknowledge that I've swapped bodies with him a few times. He's one of my most valued clients, and he's worn that body that you're wearing now. There's a stench that clings to it, isn't there?”

“Yes.”

“I kind of like it,” Swag said.

Simon saw his wife Norah go down the ramp in the boarding line. He saw the other woman still waiting for the men. And (this is a little bit tricky) he saw Buxom Jean Swag standing near and a little behind him outside the waiting area.

Simon felt a pleasant pang when he watched Norah disappear down the ramp. “Isle of beauty, Fare thee well,” he said, out loud but softly, and he raised his ungunned hand in parting salute. The valediction was from an old verse. And it was really with a touch of disappointment that he then realized that he would be joining her on the plane in just seconds.

“Time enough!” Simon-in-Swag said then, and he practically buried his gun in the gut of Swag-in-Radert. “We change bodies now, or I blast whatever body is in front of this gun. Better to get away in a wrong body than not to get away at all.”

“Oh, all right,” Swag said in three furry words that began in the Radert voice and ended up in the Swag voice, and Swag was in his own body again. And Simon felt that queer jolt that meant body change. His clothes fitted him again. He had changed bodies also.

“You aren't forgetting one detail, are you?” the gun-pinned Swag asked insolently.

“No. Hand over everything from your inner coat pocket. Ah, they are a bunch of handy receipts and claims and verification. And my wife Norah will have all the other papers relating to the flight.” Simon didn't let his gun waver as he took the papers in his other hand, and he kept his eyes (except for one eye-corner on Buxom Jean Swag) locked on the tricky eyes of Swag. Perhaps he kept them locked too tightly there.

“Drop it, Simon,” came a too-familiar voice behind him, and a gun was shoved very sharply into his nether ribs. Simon didn't drop his gun. He crouched, and he spun swiftly on the new menace. It was the scarved man. The scarf fell away, and Simon looked into his own face. And the too familiar voice that he had heard had been his own.

Swag slapped the gun out of the hand of the momentarily bewildered inner Simon. And he slapped the papers out of his other hand.

Police were descending on them. Oh, yes. And they seized Simon-in-Whomever with big hands. “Thank you, Mr. Swag. Thank you, Mr. Radert,” said a gentleman who seemed to be in charge of the police. “Your tip-off was invaluable.”

“It makes me feel like a Judas,” said Swag. “Forgive me, Gaspar, but retribution must be extracted. However could you fall into so vicious a swindle, you who had everything? And how did you hope to get away with it?” And Swag was looking straight at Simon and calling him Gaspar.

“And forgive me also, Gaspar,” said the Whoever-in-Radert-body, “but who has the power of forgiving you? It is said that even the angels weep when one of the bright ones falls. Ah, the pity of it!” And this man with Simon's face and body also was looking at Simon and calling him Gaspar. That bleeding hypocrite! He was Gaspar with his mealy mouth, and he had stolen Simon's body in a three-way switch, and had left Simon to face the retributory music. And Simon knew that he himself was wearing Gaspar Okuma's face and body.

Simon-in-Gaspar now noticed that the woman waiting at the head of the ramp had become Buxom Jean Swag, and very soon she was joined there by Swag and by Gaspar-in-Simon. But she couldn't be Buxom Jean! Simon had had Buxom Jean in the corner of his eye all that time, even when he had locked eyes with Swag.

He looked. The other woman who for a while had been waiting at the head of the ramp was now where Buxom Jean had been. And she came to Simon-in-Gaspar. “I'll stand by you forever,” she said, and Simon knew that she was Hilda Okuma whose mind was somewhere out in short left field. Ah, this was the one who would visit him on visiting days when he was in durance. And it looked like the caught Simon-in-Gaspar was going to be in durance for a long while.

Had Gaspar Okuma been fond of this tilted-brained dame? Likely he had. And would he now be much fonder of her when they were separated forever? Very likely, yes.

But things were bad now.

It wasn't that Simon hadn't been cleaned out before.

It wasn't that he hadn't been in lock-up before. But those had been little things that can happen to any man on the rise. What was happening to him now was massive.

And it wasn't that he hadn't been married to and been fond of a loony-June before. Ah, but that had been his own, his other heart (it was mostly left ventricle), his tribulation and his triumph.

He realized with secret pleasure that his own loony, sly Norah, was gone from him forever. Wonderful! Being gone was her best role. He could enjoy her so much more, in the remembered pleasure — and exasperation, when she was absent. Ah, that sly absence!

Oh, but not this new loony! Not (Oh, God!) a sympathetic loony.

“I'll stand by you forever,” that slant-brained woman said.

“Oh, God, be merciful to me, a sinner,” Simon said. He couldn't stand to be stood by forever.

The way of the Transgressor has all those rocks strewn in it. But when it also has — Oh, no, no, not forever!

Assault On Fat Mountain

If only, on that fateful day in 1788, that Spanish dollar had come up shields instead of crowns, would not a different acorn have grown into a different main tree? Would there not have been a great civilization based on the “heartland” hills and valleys? Would there not have been, under the fat-pig “child of God” flag, a burgeoning from the popcorn plantations of the Cumberland to the crackerjack factories of Council Bluffs? Would we not all be warm and splendid in bright Jim-pie-weed cloth? Would there not be natural wealth instead of the cheap-shot stuff we have now? Wouldn't things have been much better for everyone?

What do you mean, “Uh-uh”? What would have prevented it?

Envy? How would envy have entered into the affairs of human persons?

“The fruit of Confrontation, whether of animals or boys or parties or realms, is usually irreversible. At a crossroads or confrontation, one party (possibly the larger and richer and more powerful party) will back down. Then the party that has stood firm will be dominant over the other forever. The dominant party will thrive; it will grow fat in money and fruit; it will flourish in the arts and in the body politic; it will become inventive and vital. And the party or realm that has backed down will shrink and shrivel.

“No matter what its natural advantages had been, they will now become inapplicable and spooked and sterile and unnatural. And they will fail as the opinion of them fails.

“Consider two acorns crowded together, arguing which of them shall root, and grow into a great tree. One will certainly preempt the other. The one will indeed become a great tree. The other will not root at all. It will rot and disappear. It will not even grow into a little treelet or boscage as will some of the other acorns that were not involved in the direct confrontation.

“Or notice the results of a close voting between two men for a high office. The victor will grow in stature and wisdom and achievement. The loser, usually of about equal capacity, will withdraw from action, will languish, and most likely he will die.

“But, while the fruit of Confrontation is usually irreversible, there will sometimes come (long after the primary decision) a late and inept revolt by the loser against that decision. This will likely be a senile, slobbering, tatterdemalion, witless, even insane revolt. And the established victor can only regard it with compassion and embarrassment.”

 — Arpad Arutinov, The Back-Door of History

“Hey, I heard a new United-Statser joke. There were these two lowlanders or coasties, and — ”

“Just a minute there. I'm a United-Statser.”

“That's all right. I'll tell it real slow.”

 — United-Statser Jokes and Gollywogs

Watauga Press

A rabble-rooster in the town of Boston was saying some strident and unpleasant things about the Free Nation of Appalachia:

“Before God, it's not fair that one nation should be rich and fat forever, and its less favored neighbor should lie in the slough of poverty and hunger and despond. These are bitter grits that we eat from the trains of Appalachia; their own hogs eat finer than we do. Consider the wealths in High Appalachia; the red grapes of Roane and the white grapes of Smokey Mountain Vineyards; the sweet corn centers of fertile Shelby, and the popcorn plantations of Cumberland; the flax, the wool, the cotton, the Jim-pie-weed cloth; the peat and the coal and the pine-knots for fuel; the rock oil from the hills and the catfish oil from the streams; the pumpkin bread, the hickory nut bread, the bean bread every day of the week; fat beef, fat pork, fat mutton; ducks and geese and woodcock and savanna hen, turkey and guinea; the plump rabbits of Ozarkia and the meaty woodchucks of Doniphan; light wheat, dark rye, barley, and rolling fields of oats; sunflower seeds, pecans and peanuts. Would it be robbery if we took our fair share of these things, nor waited for their niggardly food trains?

“Consider that whole fat mountain of a nation! That cornucopious overflowing from this Big Rock Candy Mountain of legend! Are not all things for all people? Shall we perish from want in our miserable lowlands and seacoasts while ‘they’ live in ease in their rich hackberry thickets!

“Why should we be beholden to the Fat-Land People for most of our food and our clothing, for our machinery and our music and our books, for our motor-carts and our trains and our telegraph lines, for our entertainments and excursions, even for our sins?

“Consider their Kentucky precision machine shops with their manufacture of Kentucky rifles and reapers and motor-wagons and trains that obsolete our own factories. But I will tell you all an open secret!

“Not all the self-development money sent to us by rich Appalachia goes for the things that were intended. We divert a big part of it. We buy guns and cannons from England. We buy grenade-launchers and mortar-guns from France. This will be our self-development. And, when we have arms enough, we will invade and take what is ours by right. We'll be top dog then.”

“Did you know that the future of our great land of Appalachia once hung in the balance, that it once depended on the flip of a coin? This was in the year 1788 when the frontier state of Franklin, of which our Appalachia is the overgrown child, was threatened with extinction. The state had endured for four years. Then the traitor John Tipton tried to betray the State back into the hands of North Carolina. Had he succeeded, our own fat Appalachia might now be thin and starving. The great leader of Franklin, ‘Nolichucky Jack’ Sevier, the hero of the Battle of Kings Mountain, seemed uninterested. ‘It will not matter much one way or the other,’ he said. And the settlers along the Watauga and Holston Rivers were ready to surrender themselves back to North Carolina. The only supporters of Independent Franklin seemed to be the Sons of the Twelve Cabins, very rough mountain men. They came to Governor Sevier in a fury. ‘We want to keep our Free State of Franklin,’ they said. ‘There are certain hotheads who want to turn the Free State into a Free Nation,’ Sevier said. ‘Yes, we are those hotheads,’ the Sons of the Cabins boasted. ‘And we can whip them all, the twelve of us, and you.’

“ ‘Oh, I'm not doubting that we can whip them,’ Sevier said, ‘but is it important that we do it?’

“ ‘It's important to the twelve best men on the frontier,’ the twelve best men said. ‘Well then, I'll flip for it, you twelve against the world,’ Sevier cried, and he pulled a Spanish scored dollar out of his pocket, ‘Crowns for the return to the Carolina folks. Shields for our free land in our fat mountains and rivers.’ And the scored dollar came up ‘shields’. The Free Men of Franklin confronted the troops from North Carolina and they faced them down though they were outnumbered twenty to one. And when the Free Frankliners looked them in the eye, they looked all three million people of the United States in the eye. They stared down those three million too. So was the fate of our nation decided.

“Had it been otherwise, had the coin come up ‘crowns’, we would not now be our own thriving selves under our Child of God flag, that banner of the fat pig with the Beams of Heaven shining down on it. Had it been otherwise, we would not have grown into a great realm of the thirteen states of Kentucky, Tennessee, Outer Virginia, Western Carolina, Lupkin, Tom Bigbee, Tishomingo, Izard, Giradeau, Terre Haute, Gallatin, Oklafalaya, and Kansas; with our Capital at the District of Watauga.

“Had it been otherwise, we would not be here to send relief trains to the lowlanders, the United-Statsers. And who would feed them if we were not established in our fat mountains?”

 — Child's History of Appalachia

A relief train pulled into Pittsburgh from Appalachia. It was heavy with foodstuffs and clothing; it had some tools and machinery and vehicles; there were a few carloads of radios and luxury appliances. This was one of the daily free trains into that town. But the people of the town looked at the slowing train and spat.

“They used to wait till we unloaded before they spat their disdain,” a trainman said.

At the unloading, the townsmen insisted that the trainmen should unload all the goods. The trainmen said that the locals could unload the material, as it was being given to them. “For us to unload it would be a little too much of a bad thing,” a trainman said. There was an argument at the trainside. Several of the trainmen were kicked in the shins. Then a trainman punched a shin-kicker in the nose. That was really all there was to the incident.

But the State of Pittsburgh protested this outrage to the Free Nation of Appalachia. It asked for execution of the nose-punching trainman, and punitive damage of a hundred billion dollars. Then other states of the Union supported the State of Pittsburgh in its demands. And other rabble-roosters went to work on the people.

A rabble-rooster in Port Chicago was haranguing his ruddy-necked fellows.

“I call for war. United States blood has been shed on United States soil. A poor man in Pittsburgh has had his nose blooded by an insulting Appalachian; cartilaginous damage may also have been done. This is a national insult, and we will be redressed.

“These fat-country people who use every foot of their land, who are so rich and provisioned, they will disgorge! It's an open secret that we have arms from Canada, that we have been spending for this purpose almost all our ‘lend-a-hand’ moneys received from Appalachia.

“They are a people in the rich heartland (which should be our own heartland) enjoying dew-berries and blueberries, June berries and huckleberries and elderberries, blackberries and gooseberries; enjoying hazelnuts and butternuts; pleasuring themselves on tomatoes and musk melons; the rich Appalachians! Consider their crackerjack factories in Council Bluffs and their alligator farms in Memphis! Regard the wealth of their windmill-makers and rubber-plant growers. Be amazed at the daily wages of their iron-makers and cucumber pickers. Do you know that even the poor people in Appalachia have pumpkin every day?

“Men, enlist for this adventure against the Appalachians. There will be loot. And every man-jack of you may seize one of those Appalachian girls for his own.”

A rabble-rooster in Red River Narrow State was blowing and going:

“We are only the lean ring on the outside of this promised land. But they, the rich Appalachians, they are the fat hole of the doughnut. Do you know that they have found ways to get olives to grow in their land? And lemons and oranges and coconuts? Do you know what millions of pounds of honey they take from what billions of bees? Do you understand that they make six potatoes grow where only one would grow in our country? Do you know that they tamper with their trees so that they have apples to pick on Christmas, and that they can get nine cuttings of clover a year in their hay fields? Do you know that not ten miles from here they have a factory that makes cactus taste like beefsteak? Do you know that they make better Horse Whisky in Kentucky and better Mule Whisky in Tennessee than we are able to make anywhere? Why has God given them land so much better than our own? He hasn't. It's the Devil who deals good fortune to the Appalachians.

“We have asked that the Appalachians share equally with us, but what they give us are only half shares. Well, we will take by force what they will not give by friendship. We here in Red River Narrow State have been setting aside half of what the Appalachians send us under the labor-for-neighbor plan. We have been buying firearms from Mexico with this. So have the peoples of most of the other states of the Union. We're near ready.

“I can promise that we will eat high on the hog when we despoil Appalachia. I can promise you gold, girls, and glory. We will knock them off their fat mountain and then we will be king of the mountain.”

The people of the United States Union mounted an assault against the people of the Free Nation of Appalachia, the richest and best-provisioned nation in the world. The attackers had a few guns and cannons from England, they had launchers and mortars from France, they had some moose guns from Canada. And they had maybe a hundred dozen Mexican trade pistols.

It was a very late and very inept revolt against the conditions. It was a senile, tatterdemalion, foolish, even insane invasion.

But what to do about it? These invading people were footsore and hungry within half a day. They were lost in the landscape even before reaching their own borders. They were bogged down. They would be dying in two days. They needed every help.

Or was what they really needed?

No, no, do not even think of that. Oh, there was a temptation to take ungovernmental steps, to take inhumane steps, to take un-Appalachian steps to abate this nuisance!

But that must not be allowed.

The only way to regard the invaders was with compassion and embarrassment.

By what fate had such a situation ever come about?

Smoe And The Implicit Clay

1

There is belief that the Indians had fast cars before the flood. They remembered them more than did other people when mankind was reconstituted, and more than other people they knew what to do with them.

 — THE REEFS OF EARTH

“Donners, I called you in here on a hunch, just as I called in the latest (Oh God!) computer on a hunch,” Colonel Crazelton of the Inquisition said. Crazelton always seemed like a volcano waiting its turn to erupt. “We have a problem, or we are going to create a problem for the purpose of getting it solved. There's been a cloud on the mind of every computer and man who's touched this case, and I'll have no peace till it's cleared. If only I could get straight answers to straight questions. Who was there, Donners? That's the straight question.”

“Who was where, Crazelton? I've heard that question ‘Who was there?’ or ‘Who was already there?’ several times since I walked into these Sepulchres today. I think that the walls are mumbling the questions. Dammit, Crazelton, what are you trying to ask me?”

“I'm trying to ask you whether there was ever anyone already there when you got there. You've been on initial landing parties to more than a hundred worlds. Was there ever anyone already there when you got there?”

“Anyone? Or anything?”

“Anyone preferably. Any human or near human. Any person. Who was there first?”

“Well, there's an old serviceman's legend that ‘Kilroy was here’ first. And he did get around for several centuries there, I suppose. He's worn down to a wraith now though. Likely he was always a projection. And yes, of course projections can write short declarations or claims or taunts on walls or whatever. They've often done it. I've caught several glimpses of Kilroy myself. He is not at all a nonentity as has been claimed. He's really an imposing figure, for all his haziness: a tall, rangy wraith with a far-off look in his eye.”

“Kilroy isn't the one, Donners,” Colonel Crazelton said. “The new computer that we have working on the job now has assembled a bucket of information on Kilroy. He agrees that Kilroy has a far-off look in his eyes, which may be why he failed to see someone who was right under his nose. And Kilroy may have set this peculiar nonseeing pattern, if he is as ancient as has been claimed for him. But our new computer (Are they so much smarter than man anyhow?) says that the answer we are looking for now is ‘Who was there when Kilroy got there?’ And this new computer on the job said that he wanted to interview the man who had been on more initial landings than any other. That's you, Donners, and I had already sent for you before the computer put in his request.”

“I suppose I'm the one then, Crazelton. I've been around a lot. You have a new computer on this ill-defined job?” Donners had developed a grotesque facial tic and an oddity of speech and manner. Many of the space pioneers get a little bit odd.

“We have had five computers on this job before this one,” Colonel Crazelton admitted. “None of them could state the problem cogently or even be sure that there was a problem. But they all thought that there was a cloud on the records and that it went clear back to the beginning. It bothered them. They were like old punch-drunk fighters trying to brush imaginary flies or cobwebs or clouds out of their eyes. And each of those first five computers was larger, more intelligent, more advanced, and more sophisticated than the one before it. We couldn't go any further in that direction. There aren't any machines more intelligent or more advanced or more sophisticated than those five. So we decided that — ”

“ — that you had been going in the wrong direction, Crazelton?” Donners finished for him. “So you got one that was less intelligent, less sophisticated, less advanced than these. You got one that was used to imaginary flies and cobwebs and clouds, not bothered at all by them. You got a machine like — ”

“Like Epikt. In fact we got Epikt.”

“Oh God!” Epikt was the Ktistec machine associated with the Institute for Impure Science. He was a showboat and a comedian. Except for his brains and flexibility and intuitions he wasn't much of an improvement over humans.

“And Epikt said that he wanted to check out the man who had been on more initial landings than any other. And when I told him that you were that man he said — ”

“He said ‘Oh God!’ ”

“Yes.”

“Colonel Crazelton, what's the name of that gadget that's hanging with its nose over the edge of your ashtray? I've seen them before. They remind me of someone. But I can't remember their names.”

“Oh, there it is! I couldn't see it a while ago. I thought someone had swiped it. Very often I can't see it and think that it's been stolen or misplaced. It's a Smoe. They are made out of unbaked clay, I think. They were first in vogue about two hundred years ago. Interesting little conversation pieces, except that you always forget that they're there, or forget to see them. It hangs by its nose over the edge of anything and pops those one-way eyes at you. Just a little statuette, a head only, and the nose is the handle of the head.”

“Oh, yeah. I always forget what you call them. I think I've got a couple of them somewhere, but I never seem to notice them. I've known guys that look just like that: not known them very well though.”

Epikt, the intelligent Ktistec machine, arrived at the Inquisition Sepulchres. (And the Sepulchres weren't as gloomy as all that, just big, statued, white slabs of buildings, functional really.) Epikt arrived in the form of one of his hasty extensions. This Epikt-extension was duded out in walrus mustaches, sky-blue eyes as big as plates, and a paunch that would measure two meters around. Watch out for him when he uses a big paunch, or anything big and bulky. That means that he is carrying quite a few of his brains with him. All the leading computers can make working extensions of themselves, but most of them don't go so heavy on the whimsy when they do it.

“Ah, Donners, to business first,” Epikt said as he drew on a cigar through an arty cigar holder. “And after we have solved our business, then you may be permitted to regale me with a few tall tales. I have a photograph here. It is of yourself and those who accompanied you on one of your initial landings. It is Donners' World, in fact. Can you name me the five people who appear in this picture, Donners?”

“Sure, Epikt. There's myself, and Bernheim, Marin, Procop, Scarble.”

“Five persons, Donners?”

“Certainly. We were a five-man team.”

“Point out the five in this picture, Donners.”

“Why, there's myself. There's Bernheim. There's Marin. There's Procop, who we had to report as disappearing completely: but who can say whether he stayed disappeared? There's Scarble, who later got cobwebs on the brain from the giant spiders. Five men.” Donners looked at the picture for a moment longer as though he would name something else. Then he shrugged his shoulders. He looked at Epikt the showboat machine. The cigar holder that Epikt was using was in the shape of a Smoe, a big-nosed Smoe. “Have Smoes come back?” Donners asked. “I seem to be seeing more of them lately.”

“That you're seeing more of them doesn't mean that there are more of them,” Epikt cautioned. “I wish you could get away from that human logic of yours. Back to the picture: who's the sixth man there, Donners?”

“Sixth man? There isn't any sixth man. I wish you would let things alone!” Donners exploded suddenly. “Yes, Epikt, I see where you're pointing. But that's only — well, that's only the fellow who was there, I mean, his name was — Epikt, I don't believe that he had any name! He used to tickle me though. I remember once when he said — but how could he have? How could I remember an impossibility? And why do I feel funny?”

“That thing in the picture is a nonoptical illusion, Donners,” the Epikt extension said, “and sometimes the nonoptics do make the head swim. Luckily this picture was taken on biofilm so it could be analyzed as to the composition of the pictured objects. And they have been analyzed. He isn't a sixth man, Donners, though he looks mighty like one with the light and arrangement of the picture. But he's just a big outcropping of clay.”

“Just a pile of clay there? Are you sure, Epikt?”

“Of course I'm sure,” said the machine Epikt. “Am I a man that I should have doubts?”

Colonel Crazelton walked through. “Is everything going all right?” he asked.

“No, I don't believe that it is,” Donners said. “Epikt, now that I look back on it, it just seems that he was more than a lump of clay. And yet I don't have any memory of him at all. I have something else of him, but it isn't memory.”

“The analysis shows that it is just a lump of clay, Donners,” Epikt said.

“All right then. Clay it is. Why not make it dust so it'd be easier swept away or under? Clay is always a little sticky. But it's all simple and neat, is it, Epikt?”

“No, not really, Donners,” Epikt said. His cigar holder, the Smoe-form, seemed to be puffing away independently of Epikt. “Similar lumps of clay have turned up in more than a hundred pictures from more than a hundred discovery worlds. And they sure do look like men. Tricky light and arrangement that! Very tricky, to be on more than a hundred worlds. Not only do they all look like men, sort of, but they all look like brothers.”

“The brotherhood of clay, I suppose,” said Colonel Crazelton. “Well, why shouldn't there be?”

“And all the lumps of clay have one thing in common, Epikt,” Donners mused.

“What's that?” Epikt asked.

“They all like to get their picture taken,” said Donners. “Hey, that's right. I never knew one of them that didn't like to get in on a picture.”

“How was this one taken, Donners?” Epikt asked, and the Smoe cigar holder grimaced and mugged, believing itself to be of the invisible clay. “There's a hundred ways you could have done it, Donners, but how did you activate the picture-snapping in this one? All five of you were in the picture, and the lump of clay also.”

“Oh, his wife took the picture,” Donners said in a flat voice.

“Whose wife, Donners?” the Epikt-extension asked archly. Epikt had forgotten to put eyebrows on this extension of his; but now he created them, and he created them arched. “Do you realize what you have just said, Donners?” Colonel Crazelton demanded.

“Would I have said it if I had?” Donners asked with a spread-out-hands gesture. “Ah, ah, what shall I say now? Is this all there is to losing one's mind, Epikt? What do you think, Colonel? Just have it blow up on you with a little ‘poof ’ like that? Dammit, it was the piece-of-clay's wife: that's who took the picture! Wait, wait, it only hurts for a moment and then it will pass. It's gone now, guys. I don't remember how that picture was taken. I really don't. And I bet I'm not going to remember it either.”

The Epikt-extension gazed at Donners thoughtlessly. This Epikt-form looked a little like an old Beardsley drawing: those mustaches, those big plate-sized eyes, that outré cigar holder, that huge girth, all a bit Turkish looking. And down in the corner of the imagined Beardsley picture that was Epikt there had to be a hardly noticed small smudge. It would be seen only on about the third sweep of the eye. Who could say what it was? Who could say more about it than that it was made of clay?

“Donners, you were one of the party that returned to a particular world to pick up Procop,” the Epikt was saying, and the Smoe-form cigar holder was mugging and ughing (what's so strange? If Epikt could make a droll extension of himself he could also put enough of himself in a cigar holder to show animation and mockery), “and you found that he had disappeared completely. And the instrumentation, which could discover any animation whatsoever on that world, could not discover any trace of him. He was clear gone, was he, Donners?”

“Absolutely, Epikt, he was clear gone.”

“But two moments ago you asked ‘Who can say whether he stayed disappeared?’ Just what did you mean by that?”

“I don't know, Epikt.” Donners was a little bit flustered with himself. “I hate people who put awkward words in my mouth, and I hate myself when I do it. And I wish the Inquisition would go back to using humans for its questioners. Ah, it seems as if I used to see Procop after that, every time I was back on Procop's World; but I never saw him to notice him much or to think about him. He was a bit like those lumps of clay. There's something about him that still comes to me, if I don't think about it too closely, but that something that comes sure isn't memory.”

“Donners, I said that we would attend to business first, and then that you might be permitted to regale me with a few tall tales,” the Epikt-article said. “But aren't you mixing the two things up in a pretty sloppy manner now?”

“Yes. Mixing them up inextricably, Epikt. There isn't any other way. I can't tell you anything else about this stuff. I don't know anything else. It's a nice day, Epikt and Crazelton. Let's go fishing, or — ”

“Or what, man-article?” Epikt asked him. “What else is it a nice day for?” But they were already gathering themselves up and walking out of the Inquisitional Sepulchres. “Come along, Crazelton. Donners says that it's a nice day.”

“All right,” Colonel Crazelton said. “This is an oblique business and we won't solve it by direct examination in here. Yes, what else is it a nice day for, Donners?”

“Oh, it's a nice day for a quick trip off-world,” Donners ventured. “Maybe to one of our early landings in the Cercyon belt. We might just notice something there that was missed before. We might even notice the answer to the Crazelton Problem.”

“Taxi!” — there was a dampish, muddy voice — “Hey, maxi-taxi, go anywhere. Even go to Procop's World.”

Epikt, Donners, and Crazelton piled into the maxi-taxi. “How come we take a maxi-taxi without any driver?” Crazelton asked. “That isn't very good practice, is it? Or is there a driver?”

“Oh, sure, I'm the driver,” the hackie said. “Lots of people say that I don't make a very good appearance.” Oh, sure, there was a driver, but he wasn't the sort of a man who would be much noticed. That hackie wore a slouch hat with a beaded headband on the outside of it, and he wore his hair in two long, black braids. The rest of him was less conventional though.

And he really gunned that maxi on the takeoff. He set it to roaring and screeching, and he left a trail of flame fifty kilometers long below him.

“Things like that are bad for the streets,” Crazelton told the hackie. “Hey, quit blinking on and off like that. It makes you hard to see.”

“I don't blink on and off,” the hackie said. “I'm just a low-resolution kind of guy.”

“It's dangerous to drive like that,” Crazelton lectured. “A takeoff like that from a local traffic area can well crisp a pedestrian to a cinder. It would even burn up a cruising car with all the people in it. It's unmannerly to drive like that.”

“Hey, I know it, but it sure is fun,” the hackie said. “Hey, will this maxi ever dig out!”

“Did the driver say to Procop's World?” Donners asked. “Why not go to Donners' World? That's the one I know best, and that's where the picture was taken.”

“No, we'll go to Procop's World,” the Epikt-form said. “We have an early picture from there too. Besides, Procop might have become undisappeared in the meanwhile, and we might run into him. Now then, Donners, before you diverted me I was accusing you of mixing up tall tales with the business at hand.”

“Yes, and I said that it couldn't be helped, that they were tangled together too tightly to be separated. What we are really investigating is the shaggiest of tales. And you are a computer and don't even know how to state the problem in its right area.”

“Ah, Donners, that lump of clay on Donners' World, what was it he said one time that tickled you?” Epikt asked, and the Epikt cigar holder cupped a hand to ear as if to hear it too.

“Ah, clay-face said a thousand things at a thousand times. But this one that comes to mind — ”

“Yes?”

“He said ‘Hey, you know what the toothless termite said when he came into the Shaggy Star Bar?’ ”

2

The Malayans said in the old times that when men got to the moon they would find a Chinaman already there running a store. The old Germans said that when the afterlife was reached there would be a Wendt on every good stream already running a mill. The Spanish said that it would be a Catalan already running a fulling mill. The Gascons said that whenever a strange world was reached one would find a Gypsy there with a blind horse and a jar of salve that would give vision to that horse only until it could be sold. Well, what will we find to be already there when we come arriving at new worlds? What is common to the Chinese and Wendts and Catalans and Gypsies? What is the least common denominator of humanity? What is the most fundamental clay of them all?

 — Arpad Arutinov, The Back Door of History

The Idumeneans said that, as to humanity, God created the fundamental clay only; that this clay was not animated in the beginning, but that human life was implicit in it. They said that at various later dates fifteen archangels, Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Israfel, Uriel, Jeremiel, Ninip, Uzziel, Ithuriel, Zephon, Abdiel, Zophiel, Urim, Urania, and Thummim, came by and formed the implicit clay into particular races, the races to which they would be the guardians. This seems to be a primitive and simplistic theory, almost a myth. Paranormal research has proved the accuracy of it, however; and this Idumenean thesis cannot now be doubted.

Fifteen archangels formed fifteen races out of that clay. But are there not sixteen races of men in all? Whence comes the sixteenth? Did the implicit clay still contain another race after the fifteen had been activated from it? Would this make the sixteenth to be the oldest or the youngest of the races? Was this sixteenth people really the first and original, our Paternal Clay, our Heritage? What is the name of this race from which we may all descend?

 — SERMONS OF JOHN KING SPENCER

“Well, what did the toothless termite say when he came into the Shaggy Star Bar?” the distraught Colonel Crazelton asked after the silence had hung there for a long minute.

“He said ‘Is the bar tender here?’ ” Donners finished it.

3

What then did Columbus discover? And why was he the first one able to see them? Had they changed? Or had he and his mariners taken an irreversible step for all of us? Or is it irreversible? Are they often seen even now? At first meeting, it took me five minutes to notice one of them. And I'm told that such experience is common — common, but seldom noted.

 — LETTERS OF DONALD BARON BANTING

“Take your time, Colonel,” the maxi-taxi driver said. “It'll come to you.”

4

The Census Bureau says that, on the basis of numbered facts and listed names, there are a few more than two-and-a-half million Indians in this country. But the Bureau also says that, on the authority of its most sophisticated instrumentation, there are an additional thirty million Indians living in this country, usually and unaccountably invisible; and that there may be a hundred million buffalo not usually figured in the count of livestock. And Barnaby Sheen of Oklahoma Seismograph Co. says that, on the basis of his own instrumentation (even more sophisticated and even more suspect) there may be ten times these numbers of “low resolution” (quasi-invisible) men and beasts.

 — CONTROLLED FLASH, THE PICTORIAL MAGAZINE OF THE STATISTICAL INDUSTRY (REPRINTED IN THE WEEKLY FREELOADER)

The Census Bureau's instrumentation is getting too damn sophisticated. And Barnaby Sheen is Mr. Brain Damage himself.

 — LETTERS TO THE EDITOR,

THE WEEKLY FREELOADER

On Procop's World, Colonel Crazelton became very nervous.

“Where has that maxi-taxi driver gone?” he cried. “He's either blinked out again, or he's gone. If he goes off and leaves us here on this world, it will be pretty inconvenient.”

“I'm here, Colonel,” that hackie said. “I don't blink off. It's all your own eyes. And I told you that I was a pretty low-resolution fellow.”

“Epikt, quit clowning!” Crazelton snapped as though searching a target of attack. “What's so smart about smoking a cigar that's ten centimeters from your mouth? Any stage trickster could do that.”

“I'm smoking it with a Smoe cigar holder, Colonel,” Epikt said. “There isn't any ten-centimeter gap. How come you have so much trouble seeing Smoes? The hackie here looks like a Smoe, and you have trouble seeing him too. Do you also have trouble about not hearing things?”

“No. I hear too many things that aren't there,” Colonel Crazelton complained. “I hear a stomping now, and a lowing, but it isn't the same as proper cattle lowing. It's possible that such sounds on Earth would be unnoticed amid the regular background noise, but here the background is slighter. And I hear, oh, no, that's all imaginary. Epikt, give me everything that you have on the property of invisibility of unbaked clay; and on bison; and on Smoe physiognomy; and on apperceptions that bypass memory and sense reception; and on anything else that you think might be germane. We should have stopped off and loaded up a few more of your brains before leaving Earth.”

“No, Colonel Crazelton, I have plenty brains along,” said Epikt the dapper machine. “This isn't a very cerebral mission. Unbaked clay often hides from the eye by merging into the background. That's all that anybody knows about the property of invisibility of unbaked clay. But it should come through clear to the other senses; you should be able to hear it and smell it.”

“Am I unbaked clay?” the maxi-taxi driver asked. Yeah, he had a big, hooked, Smoe nose on him, and very low resolution.

“You're half-baked, Hackie,” Donners said. “Let's go have a drink. I think there's an old friend of mine motioning to me over there.” And Donners and the maxi-taxi driver ambled off.

And Kilroy was seen crossing the landscape, a tall, rangy wraith with a far-off look in his eyes.

“He is everywhere,” Crazelton said. “Is he generic, do you suppose? And where would Donners and the maxi-taxi driver go to get a drink here on an uninhabited world, Epikt? Hear it and smell it, you ask? Ah, that's what I'm doing: but I don't trust my ears and nose much more than I do my eyes. Epikt, my basic training was in zoology. And, well, I took my very basic training in a zoo. I know what that has to be: that stamping, that lowing (not a conventional cattle lowing), dammit, the booming, the belching, the rattling of hooves (they'd rattle even on velvet), the smell of them, and the plain multitudinousness of them! Epikt, there has to be a test. Are they here on this uninhabited world, or are they not?”

“Sure, they're bound to be here,” that machine Epikt said. “How would the clay-faced Smoes live without them? You have to remember, though, that buffalo are low-resolution animals. They are clay-colored. And they are probably made out of unbaked clay. Yes, Colonel, the buffalo is also of the implicit clay. It is nearly everywhere in great numbers, and it is nearly always invisible.”

“I don't mean buffalo. I mean particular bison,” the puzzled Crazelton said. “It was bison we had in the zoo. I'll never forget them.”

“No, you don't mean particular bison,” Epikt corrected the colonel. “Bison is a weasel word. Colonel Crazelton, a buffalo just can't be particular. He's the generalized beast. He's the ancestral clay from which all the other beasts are formed.”

“I don't even understand the ancestral clay from which all the people are formed,” Crazelton said. “Are the clay people the Jews?”

“Jews? Those Reuben-come-latelies? What, with the toy noses on them? No, Colonel, they're not red-leg enough to be the original clay people. But there is a test for your buffalo, whether they're real or not. It's the hokey. That can't be faked. If it is real, then it must have come from real and present animals, however merged with their background they are. Remember the hokey, Colonel. Notice the hokey. Look out for the hokey! Oh, oh, too late. It does come through pretty pungent, doesn't it, Crazelton?”

“It sure does, Epikt. Mighty pungent, mighty pervading. And it shouldn't be all that hard to see. Yeah, I'll be a bit smelly for a while, Epikt.”

“I smell something too,” Epikt gasped. “Something completely other than all this. I knew those Smoe-faces could make fast cars out of something, but I sure did not know that they could make — whoof! Talk about a pile of junk! But just think of some of the things he could do if you managed him right! Hey, I got to get a closer glom of that guy.” And Epikt had dashed off.

“Inexplicable, inexplicable,” Colonel Crazelton said. “I have a feeling that things are beginning to come apart.”

“Give me the boots,” the woman said to Crazelton. “You wouldn't even know how to start to get the buffalo hokey off of them. You have to use powder-weed and feather-weed and snakebite-weed.” She dumped Crazelton on his rump and pulled the boots off him. “And flimsy-rock and shoestone-rock and soap-me-down-rock.”

“What is your name?” Colonel Crazelton asked the woman. There was powder-weed dust in his eyes and he couldn't see her clearly.

“Joanna Sweetstomach,” she said. The woman took Crazelton's boots and went off with them. Crazelton wondered only mildly about there being a woman on the uninhabited world. There were other sensations impinging on his senses.

There was another roaring, a booming, a belching, a whining, a rattling, a lowing of uncattle, a humming — the sweetest humming ever. And that humming strengthened and rose into a joyous scream.

“They're all stock cars,” Kilroy said to Crazelton. “Special stock. Only the engines and bodies have been modified and jazzed up. Some of those machines ran in the demolition derby on Bernheim's World yesterday, and a couple of our hot-fire boys bought a couple of the wrecks and brought them here to fix up. They don't care a whole lot about derbies or formal races though. They just like to rev up the things and dig out with them and run them over the roughest ground there is.”

“Cars, Kilroy? I thought they rode horses,” Crazelton said.

“Oh, sure. They like to ride horses too. They put flintshoes on them to make them spark when they run. But fast cars are the first love of all of us. You got to remember that we had fast cars way back when horses were still rabbit-sized.”

“Are you one of the red-clay folk, Kilroy?” Colonel Crazelton asked him. Things were jumping their fences and breaking down their gates.

“Partly, partly,” Kilroy said. “I go way back. Whatever was first, I've got some of it in me.”

In the near distance, they heard the dapper voice of Epikt becoming less dapper.

“Bear grease and beaver brains, how corny can you get?” Epikt was sneering and shouting. “You should be arrested for impersonating a thinking machine. And your name isn't even a categorical descriptive name!”

“Feather-Spring-Go-Fast is my name,” they heard something say in the lessening distance. Colonel Crazelton and that tall, rangy wraith with the far-away eyes and the name of Kilroy went into Wolf-Rib's Barrelhouse to have a few cool ones.

And then it was that the tight logic, the orderly rationality of the situation, really began to come to pieces. The Investigation was getting too big for its format.

When does a case have a beginning and middle and end?

When it has only one dimension.

But it was multidimensional inside Wolf-Rib's Barrelhouse. Donners and Procop and the maxi-taxi driver were boozing together with a few boozem buddies, and Crazelton had the term ‘Revisional Clay’ come to lodge suddenly in his mind.

There was a large Smoe figurine at the end of the bar. Its nose was hooked over the bar and the funny head was rocking and bobbling on its nosey pivot. Crazelton took it by the scalp lock to lift it and examine it. And it was too heavy to lift as casually as that. It was no Smoe figurine; it was a Smoe man, standing and alive, and drinking choc beer. It looked at Crazelton with hard little eyes. It hadn't been hanging with its nose hooked over the edge of the bar. It was simply of short stature, and that's where the nose had come to rest.

A woman was making parfleches out of fine, flexible leather or skin.

“What do you make them out of?” Crazelton asked her. “You haven't any deer on this world, and buffalo hide is too thick and stiff for such work.”

“Old-man skin,” the woman said. “I use that. It's just right.”

“How do you get it?”

“Just take it off them. Those old men sure do holler and carry on though. All I take is the skin.”

Another woman was fetching a lance. And a third woman came into Wolf-Rib's place. “Joanna Sweetstomach says that you promised to marry her,” this woman told Colonel Crazelton. “Yeah, she says she's going to have you, or else she's going to keep the boots. She sure does like those boots, now that she's got the buffalo hokey off of them.”

Ah, it was really going to pieces now.

Colonel Crazelton was suffering impressions of world after world after world of implicit clay that was almost being called into animation. These worlds bucked and buckled like drunken water. They were seas, and Colonel Crazelton was seasick. The worlds were clay-colored oceans, and they heaved with billions upon billions of half-animated Indians. Indians making up the heaving world-waves, with their buffalo and their small game! What else was roiling and boiling in that clay-sea? There were the fast and snazzy cars waiting for the archangel of cars to come and evoke them into metallic animation. There were the later horses, clay-maned, snorting out of that underfootness. There was the crowding, churning multitudinousness of it all.

“I'm breaking apart into pieces,” Colonel Crazelton gasped. “Reason fails us, and what is left? No world is firm, no foundation is solid. I am falling endlessly into a bottomless pit.” Crazelton felt himself mistreated by every implicit Indian everywhere.

“Naw. That's what I thought once,” Procop reassured him. “I thought I'd had it till I'd bust. But you can't fall very far here, Colonel. The ground's mighty high all around here. You'll go native like I did; and when you do that, you'll go invisible for a little while. That's what's really known as being the ‘Reversional Clay.’ And Joanna Sweetstomach wouldn't be too bad to go native with.”

“So Indians is the answer,” Crazelton said softly and with some awe at the magnitude of the whole affair.

“What was the question?” one of those Smoe-faced Indians asked.

“Indians is the answer,” the colonel repeated. “It's Indians who were already on every world before the initial landings were made. On old world it's Indians who were in Africa before the black men came, who were on the Weald before the blue-woad men came there, who were on the Yellow River (man, there's a lot of clay along the Yellow River!) before the yellow men came there. It's Indians who were already in every square rood of every earth from the beginning. We can't take a step anywhere without stepping on an implicit Indian face in the heaving clay, without stepping on a Smoe nose hooking up out of the nervous ground, without treading buffalo hump — oh, this is insanity! Let's away from here, Dormers and Epikt, and make our dismal and earth-heaving report.”

But Epikt was busy. Epikt was still giving unshirted Ned to — to what? To a — “What slap-dash guys ever threw you together anyhow?” that Epikt was carrying on. “Knotted cords to count and calculate with! Porcupine quills for analysis and prediction! And for intelligence — beaver brains! Boy, are you a mess!” To an Indian brain-machine it was that Epikt was shoving scorn and harangue. An intelligent Indian machine! Who would have believed that possible?

“When I consider my own degree of sophistication, and then look at you — ” Epikt tried to continue.

“Oh, stuff it, white-eye contraption!” said the Indian brain-machine, who was named Feather-Spring-Go-Fast. There was the smell of scorched clay in the barrelhouse, or at least the smell of exasperation.

“Epikt, is this all scientific?” Colonel Crazelton cried. “Can the very clay of all the worlds be made out of Indians and their animals?”

“Oh, sure, Colonel, why not?” Epikt answered. “They had to make it out of something. It looks like they made it out of the lowest thing they could think of. What's lower than the Indians and their animals and their — ugh — contraptions? Feather-Spring-Go-Fast, you make me ashamed of being a machine. I bet your brains aren't even dynamically balanced.”

“Hey, you ever wrestle an Indian?” a lady said to Crazelton as she came into the place. “It's all right. Joanna Sweetstomach says that she don't want you anyhow.”

“No, no, I don't wrestle much any more,” Crazelton said with a touch of embarrassment. “Epikt, this is all as amazing as it is tasteless,” Crazelton said a very little moment later (there had been a bucking and screaming of fast cars in between, and they were all in Bum-Drum's Bar now). “When the first explorer crossed the first high range, Epikt, and wondered whether anyone could possibly have been there before him — Epikt, those ranges were made out of people and stuff that had been there long before him. He wasn't striding over new Earth under new Heaven. He was striding upon the upturned faces of those unevoked ancestors, and those faces had watched the new Heaven since it was really new.”

“Something like that, Crazelton,” said Epikt, not much willing to be distracted from his own pursuit. “Now then, little clap-trap Feather-Spring-Go-Fast, you don't even have — Hey, what do you think you're doing!”

“I think I can make something out of this,” the proprietor Bum-Drum mumbled. Bum-Drum had just removed a piece from Epikt with that deft and wrenching movement as if he were tearing a wing off a chicken. “I'm fixing to invent a clock,” Bum-Drum said, “if the people will only decide whether they want it to be forty-four or forty-five-hour days. And this piece of you sure looks like a piece of a clock, Epikt.”

“But that piece is necessary for my mental balance,” Epikt protested. “With that piece gone, I'm likely to be a little erratic.” Other persons came and pulled other pieces from Epikt, and he did become quite erratic.

“Hey, you ever do any romancing?” a lady said to Crazelton as she came into the place. “It's all right. Joanna Sweetstomach says that she don't want you anyhow.”

“No, no, I don't romance much any more,” Crazelton said with a touch of embarrassment.

“Epikt,” Colonel Crazelton said a little moment later (there had been a jolting and noisy interlude when they all rode on young and half-broken horses, and they were now in the Skinny Wife Bar and Grill). “Epikt, what we see now, even with our new apperception, may be no more than the tip of the iceberg, than the nose of the Smoe. No, that part's wrong. The nose makes up at least half the Smoe by bulk. But it isn't just the surface, it's the immeasurable depth also. You could dig a well forever and not come to the bottom of Indians.”

“Hey, there's even a well of blue-eyed Indians,” a fellow named Three Coonskins said. “Not a very big well, but there's a well for every kind of Indians. I bet I can make something out of that piece there.” And Three Coonskins pulled an intricate piece off of Epikt.

“Protection, protection!” Epikt howled. “I'll report it to the sector police. You're taking vital pieces off of me!”

“Can the sector boys police every little piece of clay on every world?” Three Coonskins asked. “Here, I'll give you something in place of it.” Three Coonskins pulled a piece of clay from his leg, blew on it to animate it, and set it into Epikt in place of the piece that he'd stolen. “Now you're part Indian,” Three Coonskins told Epikt. But the new piece made Epikt even more irrational than he had been. He began to boast, and those fellows there will eat boasters alive. After a while they will.

“And now I take something to replace my replacement piece,” Three Coonskins said, and he took Epikt's Smoe-form cigar holder. “And now I'll just have your cigars too. They're no good to you without a cigar holder. And I always liked to make a clean sweep.”

“Come, Cabbie, come, Donners, come, Epikt,” Colonel Crazelton was saying after another while (they had all ridden travois in the interval, and now they were in the Happy Rattle-Snake Bar), “we've solved the question of who was already on every world and continent when the first explorers got there. And we've raised, I'm sure, dozens of other questions. And now I find myself becoming highly nervous. I can take no more of this place. Let's go back to Earth immediately.”

“Donners and I are going native for a while,” the maxi-taxi cabbie said, “like Procop here did. He says it's a lot of fun. Yeah, can't see us very well, can you, Colonel Weak-Eyes? It's fun to merge in with the background, with the ground itself.”

“The renewal experience alone is worth it,” said the once-more invisible Procop.

“I will settle with these clods before I go, Colonel,” Epikt spoke madly. “Feather-Spring-Go-Fast, you're a fink and a fraud! And that's really all of you? There isn't anything to you except what's here? But the Main Me is elsewhere, and what you see here is only one of many extensions of me. The Main Epikt has so many brains that we dip them out by the bucketful whenever we want to provision a major mobile extension. But you, there is nothing to you except that silly lump over there.”

“Last call, everybody!” Feather-Spring-Go-Fast sang out. “Anybody want any last piece of him?” And the folks there (the action had now moved to the Wet Dog Tavern) began to pick Epikt clean of interesting pieces. And he made the mistake of being defiant and boastful.

“Destroy this mortal coil here before you, and I still exist in a finer place,” Epikt bantered them. Whoof, that mortal coil wasn't going to last very long, the way they began to cut it up.

“Help, help, murder, murder,” the frightened Epikt howled then. But a big Indian reached into him and took out his howler and rowler, and thereupon that Epikt extension was muted forever. And the remnants of him were quickly taken, down to the smallest piece.

“I am alone and deserted,” Colonel Crazelton said after another while. “How ever will I get back to Earth?”

“Oh, I'll take you,” a lean Indian said. “I always liked Earth. I wonder if Prairie Dog's Pancake Palace is still there on Earth, just over the Osage line from T-Town.”

“Yes. I imagine that Prairie Dog's is one of the enduring places. But that vehicle won't go to Earth, will it?”

“It sure doesn't look like it. It's worn out and the back-end of it is shot. I made it myself, and I'm not a very good mechanic. I can't even get insurance on it any more, or I'd heap it. But it's gone to Earth before, and I bet it'll do it again. Let's have a couple for the road, and then we'll hit that sky-road.”

They had them for the road at Joe Shawnee's Sky-High Club, and at the Pit Stop, the Boar Coon, the Wooden-Legged Buffalo Bistro and Brasserie, and at the Stuck Buck Bar. Then they flew to Earth.

The agreeable Indian left Colonel Crazelton off at the Institute for Impure Science. Then he went to Prairie Dog's Pancake Palace, which was just across the Osage line from the Institute.

“Indians, Indians!” Colonel Crazelton cried as he burst into the Institute.

“To the loopholes, everyone!” the great Institute Director Gregory Smirnov ordered. “We'll give those red-spleens a whiff of grapeshot. Aw, wait a minute. Whose side are we on anyhow?”

“The answer is Indians,” Colonel Crazelton said. “Indians is what was already there whenever the first discoverers got there.”

“Well, of course we were there,” Valery said. “Why wouldn't we have been there?”

“You are Indians?” Crazelton asked.

“Isn't everybody?” Glasser inquired.

“Of course we're all Indians at the Institute,” Gregory said. “And almost everywhere else. Always, everywhere, under every condition, you should assume that people and things are Indian, unless it is clearly stated that they are something else.”

“You didn't think that yellow or black or white guys would carry on like we do, did you?” Aloysius Shiplap asked. “So now you are straight about everything, are you, Crazelton?”

“Not quite, Shiplap, oh, not quite! I've just developed a new phobia. I can't take a step, not a step. Oh, how will I live if I'm afraid to step anywhere?”

“Why, Colonel, I kind of like it,” Valery said. “Grind my heels into them! I like it!”

“What is the difficulty, Crazelton?” Director Smirnov asked.

“I like it too,” Aloysius gloated. “That's why I go walking so much. That's why I wear calks on my shoes.”

“Just what is this phobia, Crazelton?” Smirnov asked again.

“Oh, the faces, the faces! It's the billions of faces, Smirnov, staring up at me from the implicit clay, through the pavements, through the structures, through the sidewalks. Wherever I step I'm stepping on those waiting faces. Oh, I can't do it. I can't step anywhere. What will I do? I would be a murderer and oppressor in my feet and legs!”

“I say that those who won't have the fun don't deserve it,” Valery said sharply.

Aloysius Shiplap was whistling the old drag tune “Cut off my legs and call me shorty.”

And down in the bowels of the Institute Building, the Main Epikt was building a new mobile extension with spikes on its boots. You wouldn't believe the grin on the Main Epikt, or the spikes that he was putting on those boots!

Hound Dog's Ear

Editor's note: This version of the story appeared in the magazine ‘Strange Plasma’, but curiously is drawn from an early draft of the story and not the author's final polished manuscript. Both versions have been included in this collection.

1

From final flame like Phoenix, they are born again

Of ripened age and rank, and hard as horn again,

To fall afoul of Tairngiri authority,

And hooded crows of Morrígan's sorority,

And Finn McCool, untractable, untrounceable,

And Lady Badhbh whose name is unpronounceable.

They fly again, these heroes we forgot about?

Aye. Resurrection out of flame is brot about.

These things are sworn? They're true in all their craziness,

But resurrections have a hexing craziness.

Their advent adventitious stand we stout on it

Lest doubting hound-dog people cast a doubt on it.

Our oath: on Archive World we found this crunch of them.

Adventures new we've just dug up a bunch of them.

 — Reconstituted Space Chantey

Prodigies were happening on Tír Tairngiri. The skies had been on fire, and the fire-prodigies seemed to be sowing their seeds. There were ten of the smaller fire prodigies that came to ground on a little bald-headed area on Tír there. They came like fire-arrows out of a greater fire-ball. And that greater fire-ball was believed to have been cast out of one still greater by more than a dozen orders, so great that it caused whole systems to melt in all their worlds, and the flint-stones of them to run like hot wax. Tír Tairngiri was only barely out of this desolated region.

Sophisticated mechanisms in distant places were activated when the ten smaller fire-balls landed on Tír. A snuffling mechanism on Archive World got the scent and signature of the arriving complex. It knew what the thing was, or it knew what ghost of what thing it was. And it began to record every possible new adventure belonging to that thing which had been believed to be dead.

The people of Tír did not look at the fire-balls (they were still too hot and too bright), and they hadn't the sophisticated mechanism to record them. They only took note of the fact that they might want to take note.

“Without scientific proof, we will not believe that these ten fire-balls have fallen onto Tír,” the hero Fergus McRoy said. “And, to me at least, they are mighty unscientific-seeming fire-balls.”

Well, but there was the seeming of ten objects glowing on the ground of Tír, objects that had arrived as fire-balls. And there was the larger, and flame-hot, ball of the next higher order moving in tight orbit around Tír Tairngiri. From its distance, about three kilometers high at its every passage, it very much resembled a ruined hull of a ship (for it was too small to be a satellite), twisting in lamed and painful orbit, empty, abandoned, and good for nothing even if it should ever cool.

The ten glowing objects (which had come as fire-balls) remained on the ground of Tír for forty days, or from Wednesday morning till the sixth Saturday night. By then they had cooled enough so that it was barely possible to look at them. They were seen to be ten people-shaped rocks or statues. Five of them were opaque, two were translucent and three were transparent. Really, they looked like people, or else like the graven images of people.

“It is unscientific that these should be people-shaped,” the Tír hero Sencha McAllen said. “We'll not believe in any of this stuff without strong reasons. Who can trust one's eyes when looking into such brightness!”

So a few people of that part of Tír Tairngiri gathered around and gazed at the ten freakish things, burning their eyeballs as they did so.

“I know what you are,” called Nemhead the warrior. “You are five living persons who are bereft of life. And you're two slain giants, but I've never seen a giant yet that could be killed by slaying (I've seen one of the fellows have his head cut off, and he took that head under his arm and walked away with it). And you're three ghosts who have lost your ghosthood. All this because of the great heat you have endured.”

“They are not such things unless we have scientific proof that they are,” Fergus McRoy objected.

“They are either such things or they are senseless simulacrums of them,” Nemhead muttered. “That point will have to be settled. Hey, people-shaped rocks, I haven't any idea what we ought to do with you. If you have an idea, tell it to us.”

The hot statues fumed and spumed but they were not able to speak.

“If they are unable to speak us some proof of themselves, then we'd best not believe in their happening at all,” Fergus McRoy warned.

“I have an idea what we can do with you,” the lady Lí Ban said. “We'll attempt a thing, oh smokey stones, because we are all pious and compassionate. We will command you back to life, by a method that we have and we will enforce our command. If you are real, then we will command you to real life. If you are illusions, then we will command you to illusion life. There's no other group in all the worlds that could enforce such a command, and we can do it only because we are holy and pious persons, every one of us. Now we'll leave you here and go and have a prelude feast to give ourselves strength for it. And then we'll come back and pray and fast against you until you decide to obey the law.”

“Bring us a little something too from the feast,” one of the hot statues tried to say to the Lady Lí Ban, but his words were lost in his sizzling and crackling. Then the little group of Tír people left the hot stone figures and went into town to eat the prelude feast that lasted all night. The people of this holy and pious group were the ladies Lí Ban, Morrígan, Badhbh, Nemain, Macha, and Fann. And they were the warrior-heroes Nemhead, Fergus McRoy, Finn McCool, and Sencha McAllen.

In the morning, these good people returned to the site of the ten hot stone objects that had been fire-balls. They had held the prelude feast all night. Now they would fast.

“We will pray and fast against you to compel you to return to life,” the lady Fann said. “We will persevere until you decide to obey the law in this. The law is that there must be no ambiguous folks on Tír. They must be alive or they must be dead. But they cannot be inbetween or we will classify them as graven images and smash them as images.”

Then this holy group of Tír folk prayed and fasted against the rock-statue people for forty days, or from that Monday morning to the sixth Friday night. This pious group ate no morsel of food and they drank no drop of water at all. They'd give the hot folks no rest until they had come to a decision.

“We fast against you stone people and we pray and we invoke the law,” the lady Lí Ban said. “There is a law enacted that decent people should be alive, and you must immediately begin to act like live persons.”

“And you must somehow create scientific proof that you are alive,” said Fergus McRoy, “to allay the impressions of your strange coming.”

“You defy our law at your peril,” the lady Lí Ban said, “but we know that our methods are effective. In earlier year we fasted and prayed against great Fergus McRoy here, to force him to arise from his grave. We could enforce the law on a man as great as he. And surely none of you will claim that he is greater than Fergus McRoy.”

“You're pitchblende-picking right I am!” Captain Roadstrum roared with a defiant sizzling and sputtering out of his rock. “Him great, him? Let him go out and get a reputation like ours. Then you can call him great.”

Captain Roadstrum? What impossible thing has come to pass? How would Captain Roadstrum be here on Tír Tairngiri, alive for all we know, and unvaporized by the heat of the terrible nova that had been seen to gobble up his Hornet craft? How would even his great voice be here, shouting defiances out of a sizzling, hot, people statue?

“You maintain that you are greater than myself!” Fergus McRoy challenged, “You haven't even given scientific proof for your existence! Come out of that hot stone, whatever you are, and we'll see who is greatest.”

“Quiet, pipsqueak,” Roadstrum's voice sounded from the stone. “Let me get rid of this hot-rock tunic and I'll teach you manners. This was fine while we were whanging through zero space, but these last eighty days here it's been a little warm. Well, it's bust out now or be a chicken in the eggshell forever.”

There was a breaking-open sound like Doomsday Morning, and a reek like that of the North gate of Hell. Thunder of exploding rock! And Roadstrum had burst his stone sheath and he stood clear. He was a man and no stone statue. Skin-burned and peeling and singed he was, and suffering from the white sickness of those who have been too long in the fire. But he was a living and seething man, in no way odd except for the sparks that showered out from him. He was as complete a man as he had been when he went to his premature death beyond Di Carissimus. He had his foxy, forked tongue primed and ready (this was the tongue made to take the place of that torn out by the Laestrygonian giants). He had one bloodshot eye in his head and the other in his pocket (that was the eye gouged out in the scuffle on Hellpepper Planet).

This was the great Roadstrum himself whom all the cosmos believed to have been dead when his Hornet ship had blown and ignited a full nova. Great Roadstrum was alive and thunderously unwell; and he could say, as his old friend the Hornet Captain Achilles had once said, “It will make a difference, now that I have returned.”

And now he took out that loose eye that he carried in his pocket, his seeing-eye eye, as he always called it, his brother in space and his last companion, and he spoke to it:

“Eye, my eye,” he said. “It worked for me. Why hasn't it worked for the other nine? I bet it's just that I'm a bit more pious and a bit more holy than the others. They have to be alive in there. We got the quick-scorch so fast that all our soul and life juices were sealed inside and there was no possible way that any of us could have died. They're all alive there in their hot-stone overcoats, if only they don't kill themselves getting out.”

“Eye, my eye, we'll have us a good time whether our companions survive or not. The two of us against all the worlds, and I bet we'd win. But we'd better encourage these good local people to work on our companions a little bit more. I never did believe that stuff about old friends being best, but they are the more easily gulled, and new friends might not be so soft on the con. Good people, good people, fast and pray for my nine good friends still prisoned in their stones here.”

“You swore that you were greater than myself!” the great Fergus McRoy accused. “You swore an oath by the dread pitchblende that you were greater. Now there is war between us. Now I will unestablish you of all identity, will destroy you by making it be that you never were.”

“Shut up, Fergus!” Roadstrum barked. “I am Roadstrum.”

“I know who you are,” Fergus said, holding his ground. “We get the comic strips here and I read Captain Roadstrum, but I will not acknowledge that you are real. Lacking scientific proof of your reality, you must give up your claim entirely.”

“Oh, shut up!” Roadstrum barked. “I've no time for boys. Kind lady,” (this to the lady Lí Ban) “could you and your folks give my discommoded friends another night and day and night of it with your fasting and praying? Save them from the flame and heat, good lady, and store up merit for yourselves.”

“Oh, I suppose we could,” said the lady Lí Ban, “though we're almost dead from hunger and thirst. Yes, we will do it. We will fast and pray against these nine stupid stones again. We will force them to obey the law and to live, or we will force them to declare themselves somehow. And what will you yourself be doing all this while, sir?”

“There had better be a scientific explanation for a man breaking out of a hot stone,” Fergus McRoy muttered threateningly. “We take a pretty dim view here about unscientific happenings. I'm a fellow at Tír Tech and I can't let something like this pass unchallenged.”

“Why, lady, I believe that I'll go into town and have me a banquet in my own honor,” Roadstrum told the Lady Li. There were sparks shattering off him as he stretched and walked about, flinty, bright sparks, and the odor of puddling iron.

“Let's not forget that you averred that you were greater than myself,” Fergus McRoy was yammering. “Now you must answer — ”

“Shut up, Fergus!” Roadstrum shouted. “I'm going to go eat a banquet in honor of myself, and I'll eat you where you stand for first dish if you make any more mouth.”

“Wait up Captain. I'll go with you,” came a huge, boyish voice from the largest of the opaque stones. That voice could only belong to Hondstarfer, the boy-giant, the hammer-handling kid who was the best mechanic along the spaceways. Hondstarfer was alive in there! Could he get out without killing himself?

There was a tortured, tearing roar, the agonized rending sound that stones make when they are split and riven apart by great force. More than that, this was the primordial and all but forgotten moaning (it reminds one of a death-of-mountains moaning) that large stones make when they are in labor to bring forth giants.

And then the actual screaming of stone, the shrieking, the hot gurgling, gasping, gobbling, the rattling and slashing of soft and hard fragments of hot rocks that is called cataclysm.

And then it was a giant indeed who stood there, smoking and glowing and cascading sparks. It was the boy-giant, Hondstarfer himself, grinning and glittering with birth-death amazement and delight. It was Hondstarfer, the hammer-handling kid, with his seven big stone hammers and with his big head that was like a boulder.

“It sure was getting tedious in there, captain,” Hondstarfer said. “Well, come along to that banquet thing. We'll make it in my honor also. We'll have a few quick whole bulls roasted a bit on the raw side, and then we will work into the meal itself.”

“There had better be a scientific explanation for a boy-giant hatching out of a stone egg here on Tír,” Fergus McRoy grumbled. Sparks from Hondstarfer were showering him and he felt uncomfortable. “I don't like it,” Fergus continued doggedly, “and the local giants aren't going to like it. We take a dim view of — ”

“Shut up Fergus!” Hondstarfer shouted in his giant voice, and the sound split apart big rocks that had not even been involved in the fire-ball landings.

“I feel lucky,” great Roadstrum exulted as he stretched and grew. “This is going to be my lucky world. And, if there is not enough luck here accruing to me naturally, then I will manufacture more luck for myself by my own process.” And Roadstrum made the ritual right-hand turn (fordessel) to ensure full luck.

“There is a sleeping hound that raises one ear whenever a man brags inordinately about his luck,” the lady Badhbh warned, “or whenever a man maintains his existence in the face of contrary facts.”

“And there is scientific explanation and sanction for the recompense that the hound extracts,” Fergus McRoy admonished.

“What means it when the hound raises an ear?” Roadstrum asked the lady Badhbh.

“It means either that he can or that he cannot hear you,” Finn McCool explained. “If he then gives but one twitch to his ear it means that he can't hear you. And that means that you are not in being. When the hound can't hear you, you're not anywhere.”

“The hound, is he honest?” Roadstrum asked.

“Reasonably honest, for a hound,” said the lady Badhbh.

“Then he'll hear me,” Roadstrum declared with confidence. “Are there any other portents here that I should be ware of?”

“Ah, the crows of Morrígan!” moaned one of those other ladies. “Ware of the crows of Morrígan. Ware if they be hooded.”

“What means it when the crows are hooded?” Roadstrum asked.

“When they are hooded they cannot see you. And when they cannot see you, then you are not,” the lady moaned. “Ware of the crows of Morrígan!”

“Who is Morrígan?” great Roadstrum asked.

“I am Morrígan,” said the lady. “Ware of my crows!”

“You two look like one-twitch-of-the-hound's-ear men to me,” Fergus McRoy said darkly. “You two look like blind-of-the-crows men to me.”

“Shut up Fergus!” Roadstrum and Hondstarfer both roared. “We go to town to celebrate our own banquet.”

“I'll go with you,” said the Tír hero Finn McCool. “You wouldn't even be able to find the banquet hall. I will show you that there is one hero on Tír who knows how to honor strangers, even if they are non-existent strangers.”

Roadstrum, Hondstarfer, and Finn McCool went into town to devour the banquet in honor of all of them.

2

They live again! The morning stars will carol them!

No mind that viscous villain strive to peril them.

For these be folks of feckless feats heroic all;

Forget their unbelievers, sour and stoic all.

Though crabbed curmudgeons carp “Oh, not that claque again!”

Sing alleluia! Here's the good guys back again!

Great Roadstrum yet; the houri Marg'ret kitteny,

Fairfeather, Crabgrass, Cutshark, holy litany.

Threefountains, Birdsong, hammer-kid Hondstarfer here,

Clamdigger, big Trochanter, ne'er a dwarfer here.

The way they lived again is pretty if-ic yet,

Our father's rocks! But is it scientific yet?

 — The Vinegar Tree

“Hondstarfer,” said the local hero Finn McCool as they strode towards the town or settlement, “have I not heard somewhere that you were of giant's blood?”

“Yes, I am of giant's blood in all my ancestry,” Hondstarfer answered proudly.

“One has but to look at him to know that,” Roadstrum put in his rowel. “He is already twice as tall as I am, and his father was three times as tall. And you, Finn McCool, you are plainly of giant's blood.”

“There are giants and there are giants,” said Finn. “There is blood and there is blood. There are yeses and nos. When I am in ordinary peoples' company, when I am in ordinary giants' company, then I do not deny that I'm a giant. But when I'm in the presence of certain extraordinary giants of Tír, then I do not raise the subject.”

“You do not?” Roadstrum asked. “Well what do you do when you are in the company of these extraordinary giants?”

“I keep mighty quiet then,” Finn McCool of Tír Tairngiri said.

They entered a spacious place by what was either the tallest door anywhere, or was a huge natural entrance to a cave. They went in and took table, and Roadstrum was trying to know what sort of high and darkling place they had entered. There were two different sorts of vast pillars there that went up and up into the invisibility of the high darkness. The pillars of one sort were roughly round, oaken, with the bark still on them, and of a very great diameter. Those of the other sort were less round in a rougher way; they were of an unknown substance; it could not be discerned whether or not they had bark growing on them; and they were of still greater diameter than were the first pillars. Those of the latter sort had huge, sloppy, shapeless, asymmetrical pedestals, and these pedestals themselves were as tall as a man.

Roadstrum now saw that the high darkness above them was of an artificial sort. There was a canopy or a firmament or a sky above them and it cut them off from the sun or whatever other light might be up there.

The three heroes (for Roadstrum and Hondstarfer, being Hornet crew members, were both valid heroes; and Finn McCool was a natural-born hero of Tír Tairngiri) called the waiter to come, and they ordered bulls roasted whole, a little on the raw side.

Then there was heard a rattling explosion from the countryside whence they had just come.

“That was great Trochanter,” mighty Roadstrum said. “He just exploded out of his stone sheath. I'd know the tone of Trochanter, anywhere, in any thing, forever.”

“I hope it goes well with him,” said Finn. “You know that there will be reporters, do you not, Roadstrum?”

“Reporters? Whence? For what reason?”

“Oh, they've been around before. To check on the fire-ball landings mostly. And now that a rumor has gone out that live people have hatched out of the fire-ball shells, the reporters are sure to be back.”

“Good. I love to talk to newsmen,” mighty Roadstrum said, “and Hondstarfer here could also give them some fine stories. There is nothing in the worlds that he can't make with his stone hammers. As to myself, I have no vanity in me at all, but I love to explain the great things about myself and my companions to all the media men. The things that happen to us do not happen to other people. We are unique even among Hornet farers. I would want to be sure that the reporters get the stories straight. And then, after they've got them straight, I want to be sure that they get all those deft little curves and hooks on the ends of them, those characteristic quirks and curves and twists and hooks that I do so well.”

“Ah, but they'll not believe you, great Roadstrum,” Finn McCool said out of his happy face (he had a face kindred to that of Hondstarfer, large and lank, but not large enough to contain all the drolleries that struggled for a place on it; these ordinary giants do not say or do anything droll, but they sure do have a whole concourse of droll looks on their big faces.)

“Who will not believe me, Finn?” Roadstrum asked, “and what will they not believe me about? Bright honesty shines like beacons from every orifice of my body. How could anyone not believe me?”

“The reporters refused to believe that fire-balls had landed even though they scorched their skins from the heat of them and burned their eyeballs trying to look at them. Most of the scribbling fellows said that the ten fire-balls were probably all of them the planet Milo, or that they were kites that children had been flying, or that they were drifting pollen from the poke-weed plant or that they were golden scarab insects.”

Twenty-seven powerful young men, nine to a bull, brought three whole roasted bulls (a little on the raw side), and set them before the three diners, mighty Roadstrum, big Hondstarfer, and heroic Finn McCool. Hondstarfer of the hammers, and Finn McCool the Tír hero were both of them genuine giants (in spite of Finn's near disavowal), and they'd have no trouble eating a whole bull each. And Roadstrum had dined often with giants and been much in their company. He was of extraordinary capacity for a mere man and he would die a-bursting before he would admit that he could not eat a whole bull.

And then was heard a racketing, scatter-shot, ear-splitting explosion with a lot of style and a lot of verve. It was really a sexy sort of explosion. It came from the nearby countryside.

“That was Margaret the houri,” Roadstrum remarked. “I'd recognize her tone and style in anything. Not much else, but she sure does have tone and style.”

“I remember her from the comic strip,” said Finn McCool. “She was always another great favorite of mine. I suppose that she was never real, but that doesn't matter. None of you is real now.”

“Not real? Man, we are the stuff itself!” Roadstrum swore. “But what will the reporters think if they are already present there when Margaret breaks out of her stone? If they do not believe it real, how will they explain it to themselves?”

“It's easy, Roadstrum. Some of the observers and reporters may actually believe privately in some of the outer things. But they could not let it be known that they would even consider the possibility of creatures coming from other galaxies to Tír, or from other systems within the galaxy, or even from other planets within the system. The Newswriters Guild and the public can forcibly forbid any belief in extra-Tír-estrials. One offense means expulsion from the guild; two offenses mean expulsion from the human race; and a third offense is death. Even less are such programmed observers allowed to believe in Hornet craft. There have been reported sightings of the UHC's (unbelievable Hornet craft) for a century now, and some of the sightings have been pretty hard to explain away. But they are explained away. Most of the sightings are explained as pumpkin seeds flying high in the air. By the way, Roadstrum, that burnt-out, useless, gosh-awful, flaming Hornet hulk that is now in tight orbit around Tír (and all the media men are having the devil's own time not seeing such a clear and bright thing in its near passages), you're the captain of it, aren't you?”

“Certainly, certainly, I'm the captain. But it is not useless. It's a fine craft, though once it was forgotten junk on World. Hondstarfer here could fix it up in half an hour with his stone hammers.”

“I can do any sort of work, Finn, mechanical, electrical, medical, cosmological, artistic, with my stone hammers,” Hondstarfer said. “I am bonded. And I make house calls.”

“The only hard thing would be to get Hondstarfer up there,” Roadstrum said. “He could fix that Hornet if he could get to it.”

“I have an idea how even that might be done,” Finn said. “But even less than the news-writers and scat-talkers believing in extra-Tír-estrials, or believing the possibility of Hornet craft, would be their believing that humans could have tumbled onto Tír in the middle of molten rocks, fire-balls really. And seeing humans really burst their way out of those rocks is bound to put a strain on their disbelief.”

There was another explosion from the countryside, a big, booming, blamming, echoing and re-echoing, gross, clumsy, crass, blatant explosion.

“That has to be Crewman Clamdigger,” Roadstrum said. “I can't say that I recognize his tone; he hasn't any. I can't say that I recognize his style; he hasn't any style either. But it's Clamdigger, and his appearance out of a splitting rock will put a further strain on the reporters' disbelief. What is that quaking and shaking, Finn?”

“Oh, it's only the big fellows up there. You've probably disturbed them at their table with your noise, Roadstrum,” said Finn McCool, the great hero and ordinary giant of Tír. “I'd be a little more quiet in my voice if I were you. No need to roar like that when Hondstarfer and myself are sitting here elbow to eye with you.”

“Quiet nothing! I will yet roar at meat!” great Roadstrum roared. “I always do, you know. And what is the next course, good Finn? The bulls are all gone, horns and hides and hoofs and tract content and all.”

“ 'Twill only be a moment. See, they are bringing Dublin Lawyer now,” Finn McCool beamed with both private and public joy, for he was proud of the good fare that they serve on Tír. “See, they are also bringing Sheep Stomach Surprise. And they're bringing Rice Rowdy and Pepperhead Pudding and Royal Rump Roast. And here's Hooly-Gooly aged in its own oaken bowls. There's nowhere else that it may be got. And look, Roadstrum, this is special: They're bringing Elephant Ear Delight.”

“Finn, is that an earthquake that I feel?” Roadstrum asked.

“Oh no. It was one of the big fellows just shuffling his feet a bit.”

“Who shuffled whose feet? Finn, one of those pillars of this building just moved.”

“Roadstrum, there are no pillars to this building,” Finn McCool explained patiently. “Having no roof, this building has no need for pillars.”

“No roof? No pillars? Then what is this?” Roadstrum demanded, and he kicked the pedestal of one of the pillars, a pedestal that was as high as his head. “What is this then, Finn?” he asked, and he kicked it again.

“That's my foot, Roadstrum,” a mighty voice sounded from clear up in the sky. “Come on up and talk with us. A man of your fame shouldn't be sitting at one of those little tables down under the big table.”

Roadstrum's eyes (the one in his pocket, and the other one) were opened thereby, and they saw that things were not as they had seemed. The four big pillars of one sort were really the four legs of a very large table whose deal was so far above them that Roadstrum had at first believed it to be a canopy or firmament or sky over them. And the pillars of the second sort were now seen to be the eight legs of four extraordinary giants sitting at table, four of the extraordinary giants that Finn had referred to. And the pedestals of those pillars of the second sort, they were the huge, sloppy, shapeless, asymmetrical feet of the extraordinary giants.

Roadstrum took his loose eye, his seeing-eye eye, and threw it as high as he could into the air. When, after a minute or so, it fell back to hand, it reported that things were indeed as Roadstrum had guessed, that there were really four of those unusual giants seated at that high table.

Nothing daunted, and certainly in no way intimidated by mere size, Roadstrum sought for a means to ascend.

There was another rending, searing, chortling explosion from the countryside.

“That's Crewman Cutshark,” Roadstrum roared, “that's him breaking out of his rock cocoon such as we all wrapped ourselves in at the time of the Great Nova. We took ten asteroids, and each of us burrowed to the center of one of them for protection. And the nova vaporized everything of the asteroids except the very central core of them, and these cores were wrapped around us in the form of glassified rock. Then our Hornet craft, which we had put on automatic and programmed for just such an eventuality, came and gathered us up again out of that billion degree sky. And it brought us to Tír and dumped us out on the first unmelted earth to be found.”

“Ah, this will serve!” Roadstrum cried. It was a frayed thread dangling down from the tablecloth of the extraordinary giants. Roadstrum climbed it as if it were a tree trunk, up and up and up some more, and he came onto the table of the big fellows. And he found that the agile Hondstarfer was there before him.

“I always liked you, Roadstrum,” one of those extraordinary giants said. His nose was like a watchtower, and the little knobs and blemishes on it looked like windows and shot holes in it. “Yours is the comic strip that I like the most of all,” the giant continued. “My name is Gigantipanteloni.” The bowls that the extraordinary giants were eating out of were as tall as ships and as broad. It could not be seen what the giants were eating out of them.

“I have been hearing about this comic strip lately,” Roadstrum said. “But I have never seen it, and I never heard of it before I came to Tír. Whenever did it begin?”

“It began shortly after the deaths of you and your companions,” the extraordinary giant said. “Your deaths were sad things to all of us, and the comic strip was begun to keep the memory of you and your crewmen green. Of course it is only the simple-minded persons who read your comic strip, but then it was only the simple-minded persons who followed your adventures while you were still alive. Like me. They call me the simple-minded giant.”

“But I am alive, Gigantipanteloni,” Roadstrum explained, “and Hondstarfer here is also alive.”

“Right, Captain, live as a lizard,” Hondstarfer declared.

But the extraordinary giant Gigantipanteloni merely smiled. “I may be simple-minded but I'm not that simple-minded,” he said. “Dead you are, and dead you will ever be.”

There was another booming, rattling explosion from the countryside.

“What was that?” another of the extraordinary giants asked. “Which one was it?”

“Crewman Crabgrass, I believe,” Roadstrum guessed.

“But is he not one of the ghosts, one of the spooks?” Gigantipanteloni asked. “Didn't he first die on Polyphemia? Was he not, in fact, eaten by the Polyphemians? And is it not true that it was as a ghost that he took his place as a crewman on the Hornet for its last sad voyage? How then would it require an explosion for him to come out of a stone shell? Cannot ghosts come and go easily through such obstacles?”

“In this case I believe not, Gigantipanteloni, not if one is hermetically sealed in, and I believe that all of us were hermetically sealed in when the asteroids of our selection were vaporized about us and the cores of them were solidified to such glassy-rocky consistency. As you may know, a ghost is mostly gas. In the galactic language, the word ‘ghost’ is related to the word ‘gust’, as a gust of wind; in an older tongue, a ‘spirit’ lurked like a ghost indeed in such words as ‘respire’ and ‘expire’, and here ‘spirit’ meant ‘breath’. And then ‘anima’ which is ghost, is the same word as ‘anemone’ which is wind. So these are all gassy names, and ghosts are made out of gas. Even in life, Crewman Crabgrass was a gassy sort of fellow. So you can see that all that gas which was trapped in the stony shell would require an explosion to get out.”

“Listen, Roadstrum,” said Gigantipanteloni, “if you are ever in trouble (and I don't see any way that you can avoid bad trouble on Tír), I will help you in any way I can. When none of the intricate answers will take care of your trouble, think if there is not some simple-minded thing that you have overlooked and that might save you. We extraordinary giants have the name of being simple-minded. And even by the rest of them I am called the simple-minded giant. All I ever do is eat and sleep and read the funny paper and flip rocks on the blade of my spear.”

“Is that your spear standing there?” Roadstrum asked. “It must be fifty meters long.”

“Aw, Roadstrum, it's got cracks in it longer than that,” the simple-minded giant said.

“How high can you flip the rocks?” Hondstarfer asked him.

“Sometimes I can flip them so high that they don't come down again,” the giant said. “I don't know how you measure it that high.”

“Don't any of them come down after you flip them?” Hondstarfer asked.

“Yes, some of them come down. Oh man, how they do come down!” the giant cried.

“Just how do you go about all this?” Roadstrum asked.

“There is a razor back sort of hill nearby,” Gigantipanteloni said, “and the name of it is Razor Back Hill. I set my spear here so that the center of it is right on the razor back. Then put a big rock on the point or blade of my spear.”

“How big a rock?” Hondstarfer asked.

“Maybe a dozen times your own weight,” the big fellow said. “And when I have the rock set, I jump onto the haft-end of the spear. Oh, but that rock does fly then, little fellows.”

There was another grumping, gargling-sort of explosion from the countryside.

“ 'Tis Fairfeather,” said Roadstrum. “Now they should all be freed of their stones except two. I had better go and see whether they are having difficult parturitions, and see whether those already out of the stones are out of them alive.”

“Yes, we'd best go, Roadstrum,” Finn called from below. “The night's near gone, and you spent most of it eating just one bull. I never saw a man dawdle so long over a carcass. And may as well tell you that I accompanied you this night in official capacity.”

“What official capacity?” Roadstrum called as he was climbing down.

“There'll be a hearing, perfunctory of course, to determine if there is any possibility at all of regarding you as valid; to determine, in short, whether it is possible to believe in you. I'll have to give evidence at that hearing.”

“Well, do you believe in me, Finn?” Roadstrum asked, and he was almost down now.

“Nah, I'd like to, Roadstrum, but I just can't bring myself to it. There's no hard evidence at all for your existence.”

“I may develop hard evidence for myself this day,” Roadstrum said, “or I may play the cudgel game on some hard skulls.”

“I believe in you, Roadstrum,” Gigantipanteloni called from high above in that sky-voice that giants develop. “I've been told that it's foolish to believe in comic strip characters, but I'll believe in you always.”

“Thank you, Gigantipanteloni, and Hondstarfer thanks you also.”

“And if you're ever in real trouble, Roadstrum, remember the simple-minded giant who has a very small handful of simple but naughty tricks.”

3

'Tis but a greasy, grimy, gritty grudgement day,

And yet with all the final force of Judgment day.

This kangaroo, it hops along so trippingly;

And Finn McCool, his treason cuts so rippingly!

“You may not be! You're naught! And that's the way it is.

Existence is exactly what we say it is.”

Such Judgments on these greats, the very cream of them,

It really seemed a little bit extreme of them!

 — Kangaroo Book of Flying Objects

“Hurry, Roadstrum, hurry!” that Tír hero Sencha McAllen was calling at the approach of the banqueters. “Hurry Hondstarfer. Your case is already in the frying pan and it looks bad for you.”

“We have been in hotter fires than any of you can provide on Tír,” mighty Roadstrum stated. “And we have lived through the things.”

“That's the whole point,” Sencha said. “The consensus is that you haven't lived through them, that you haven't lived at all. Persons having the names you claim may once have lived, but even that is doubtful. If they ever did live, then they died completely in the nova and there are no remnants of them. It is a legal decision that no man walks away from a nova. It follows that you presumptuous people can have no being, that you are not here, that you are silly illusions seen only by silly people. We will order you to end even your pretense of being.”

“Your hearing, and the weighing of the evidence concerning you, have already begun,” said Nemhead the warrior. “The hound has already raised one ear. He listens now. But he will not hear of you. There is nothing for him to hear. The omen of the hound dog is quite scientific and it will find against you.”

“The crows are already in the air, coming down from the steep sky,” the lady Morrígan said. “And the auspice of the crows is very scientific; for which reason it will read against you. The crows will come down with their talons on your shoulders, and if they come hooded it will be the signal for your destruction. That which they cannot see, is not, and must be obliterated. Ware of my crows!”

“If the hound does not hear us and the crows do not see us, what scathe does that make?” Roadstrum demanded.

“If you are not heard and if you are not seen, then you are not at all,” Fergus McRoy pronounced with careful pleasure. “And if we find that you are not, then we must remove and destroy every offensive appearance of you.”

There was an explosion, possibly the loudest of all of them. It sent a rattle of rocks over a wide area and left a dazzle of flinty sparks in the air. And there stood huge Crewman Birdsong (Birdsong and Fairfeather had both been giants on Lamos for a season), as tough and rough a man as any anywhere, as live a lout as ever coursed his life's blood through every corner of the cosmos.

The ten great venturers stood together then. They had flown Hornet craft everywhere; they had done absolutely everything; they had given a new meaning to ‘heroic’: Captain (Great Road Storm) Roadstrum, the last of the original Hornet commanders; Margaret the houri who had been in the female business even before Eve; Hondstarfer, the boy-giant from Lamos, the hammer-handling kid who could make anything that could be thought of; Crewman Clamdigger who was now sadly addled but still able; Crewman Trochanter the nonpareil; Crewman Cutshark who was always in the forefront (and 'twas while in the forefront that he had been eaten alive that time by the Siren-Zo); Crewman Crabgrass, Crewman Birdsong, Crewman Fairfeather, Crewman Threefountains. Ten of them there! Go through ten billions and try to find another such ten.

“We be,” said Captain Roadstrum. “We stand here in our full wits and in our full history. We not only exist, but we exist in excess of any other group that I have ever heard of. Nobody has ever ventured or adventured so much as ourselves. If we are not real, then reality herself has a hooded face. Beware of what you do now, people of Tír. If you disbelieve in us, then you cannot logically believe in yourselves. We are the sign and the confrontation.”

“Be quiet, nothings,” the lady Macha said. “An honored person comes.”

The honored person who was coming was a news-mat reporter. You could see that a kilometer away. And he was also an official of the local chapter of the Newsmen's Guild. You could see that ten kilometers away. Yet, for all his great power, he was not at all an overbearing man. He smiled softly at the rosebuds strewn in his path. But he did not relax his surety or his authority.

“Where are the non-existent people?” he asked, though surely he could not see the ten embattled Hornet folks drawn up in disarray. No, apparently he couldn't, for when the lady Lí Ban pointed in the direction of Roadstrum and his crew, the reporter said “I see no one.”

“Hondstarfer, this poor man cannot see,” Roadstrum said with some concern. “Take your stone hammers and fix his eyes for him, since you can fix anything whatever with them.”

“All right,” said Hondstarfer, and he moved to do the repair work.

“No, no, protect me, people!” the reporter person cried.

“Non-existent stone hammers will not hurt your eyes,” Roadstrum chided.

“I see no stone hammers,” the reporter maintained. “But I do see certain rough and undressed stones and they could do great harm. Now then, good people of Tír, where did the report of the Unidentified Hornet Craft originate? And who started the rumor that disreputable and impossible-appearing persons had arrived on a Hornet craft, or that they had arrived in fire-balls?”

The reporter then plopped a gall-ball from the ink-weed plant into his mouth. He chewed it to make ink, and he put a crow feather to his mouth and dabbled the point of it in the ink. Then he wrote some writing on a writing pad made of pressed, split reeds. This was a reporter who came equipped and prepared. “We begin with the fact that there cannot be such things as Hornet craft,” he said.

“What is that in the sky if it is not a Hornet craft?” Roadstrum demanded as he pointed to the shining, smoking Hornet that was still going in tight orbit around Tír.

“Hornet craft are non-existent,” the reporter said once more. “They are fictions of diseased imaginations. The mistaken appearances of them might actually be the planet Milo, or they might be sun-dogs, or they might be balloons with candles in them, or they might be swamp gas, or they might be watermelon seeds floating high in the air.”

“Then what in pelican-plucking perdition am I?” Roadstrum demanded, “and if I did not come, wrapped in a fire-ball, by a Hornet craft, how did I come here?”

“You are possibly an insane man escaped from durance,” said the newsfellow (he was a science-in-everyday-life reporter, that was almost sure). “Or you may be a common ruffian. But you did not come in a Hornet craft, and you did not come from another world, nor from further space. And if it turns out that you are a completely non-existent person then you will have to be exterminated in all your appearances and nothingnesses.”

“What am I?” demanded Margaret the houri of the newsman.

“What? What? Oh, nobody believes in houris any longer. Let's not introduce stupidity into this case. You are nothing at all, nothing. Or it is barely possible that you are a balloon with a candle burning inside.”

“No. I'm not exactly a balloon with a candle burning inside,” Margaret said. “You must miss a great deal even on Tír if your eyesight is so poor.”

“What are we? What are we?” demanded the other eight.

“Be quiet, nothings,” said the lady Macha. “Another honored person comes.”

The other honored person who was coming was a scientialist, which is very like a scientist. You could see a kilometer away that he was a scientialist. But he was in no way proud or arrogant. He smiled kindly as the fragrant lilacs were scattered before his feet.

“Where are the non-scientifically-demonstrated people?” he asked, though he must have seen them clear enough standing there. “Are those the things that were mistaken for people who were supposed to have come in Hornet craft, or who were supposed to have come in fire-balls? We must have them taken apart, and then we will examine the mechanism that activates them. Then it may be that we will find some clue to the criminal hoaxers who built them, if indeed they were built, if indeed they have any appearance at all.”

“He who built us is no hoaxer,” mighty Roadstrum maintained, “and we are as demonstrably people as are any others. As to our arriving, there is our Hornet craft shining in the sky as it goes round Tír in close orbit. And there are the broken and rocky remnants of the fire-balls that contained us when we arrived.”

“It talks,” the scientialist said. “We must take it apart and discover whether there is a recording inside it.”

“You'll not take me apart!” Roadstrum swore. “Not me, you won't. And I do have, for some very few subjects, a sort of recording inside me; and it gives invariant answers to the invarying things. But otherwise I am as flexible as anyone, and I'll state my own strong opinions in my own strong voice.”

“You know, good people,” the scientialist addressed the heroes and ladies of Tír, “that belief in Hornet craft manifestations are absolutely forbidden. Such belief is delirium, it is hysteria, and it is unhealthy for the body public. Still more dangerous is the new belief that there may be humans (or creatures of whatever sort) who have come here from other worlds. Now then, people, it is not said that you do entertain belief in such things, but that there have been suspicions of such. In order for you to allay that suspicion, in order that you may purge yourselves of all fault and of all appearance of fault, you must obliterate this unscientific evidence that you thought you saw. There are, I have heard, ten pieces of such false evidence here: and they must be extirpated. Have the augurs for this extirpation been set in motion?”

“They have, sir, and according to all the latest scientific methods it is being carried out,” that hero Fergus McRoy said. “The hound has already lifted one ear; and it is nearly certain that he will shake that ear but once to show that he does not hear the unscientific evidence. And the crows are already in flight. They'll arrive soon from their steep skies and will settle with their talons on the shoulders of these ten false images. It is almost certain that the crows will come hooded to show that they will not see the unscientific evidence. And with these two sanctions to support us, we will proceed to the obliteration of the false evidence even though it means the destruction of these ten towers of false flesh also.”

“Look,” Captain Roadstrum pointed with his hand and his voice. “There is our orbiting Hornet craft again. If we could but rise up to it we would leave this spastic-brained world and be on our adventurous way.”

“But you cannot reach it,” said the scientialist. “On all Tír there is nothing that will enable you to reach so high.

“Good people, send for one hundred powerful men. These ten illusions, these ten non-existent persons, they show signs of stubbornness.”

“The one hundred powerful men are already on the way,” Sencha McAllen said.

“People of Tír, hear me!” Roadstrum suddenly bawled out. “Know that we are real and not illusions. Hear now the roll of our high adventures as they are inscribed in the book of life and also in the records of Archive World. We battled shamelessly throughout the whole Ten Years War and were responsible for the deaths of countless persons on each side. We met the soft dangers on Lotophage which is like Fiddlers' Green and Theleme rolled together and we escaped at the last possible minute from that world from which nobody else has ever escaped at all. We had every adventure possible on Lamas of the Laestrygons. We fought and died there, and lived again. And we escaped with our tongues torn out so we could never tell how much fun it was there. And I tell it now with my handicrafted false tongue; there was never so much fun to be found anywhere in the universes. We rode the veering rocks there and we fought in the sky.

“We made our way through the wandering calf-rocks in the stampeding asteroids, and we ate high cow there. I lost my fine right eye there, and after I found it in my own pocket. We all died of old age except myself, and then we came back the way we had gone in. I won a thousand worlds at gambling on Roulettenwelt, and then more than lost them in a men's room encounter which I shall not narrate. We propped the universe for a while, and we all wrestled the saltiest sky dog of them all. We killed the Siren-Zo and let all the air out of the mountain which was its real body; this after we had foolishly allowed it to destroy a number of us.”

“Oh brother!” the reporter said. “How much more of this is there?” And he chewed on the gall-ball of the ink plant.

“We knew odd sheep on Polyphem,” Roadstrum continued to recite. “It was there that the Cacique of that world violated the honor of the board and gave so many of us over to be eaten. But how we got out of the device that got us out of Polyphemia is another story which must remain untold.

“Would you believe it, we were all turned into animals by Aeaea Aeaea, and I myself was a pet monkey for a term. But we got out of that too, we get out of everything. We got out of that with canary blood on our hands.”

“Oh brother-in-law of a goat!” the scientialist groaned. “How much more of this is there?”

“We came down in Gimbaled Town that has the tipsiest skyscrapers of anywhere,” Roadstrum went on. “And we became members of the Club Mentiros which is so exclusive that at one time it had no members at all for more than a century. And we were taken to Hellpepper Planet which is a euphemism for Hell Itself. And we broke out of Hell. We are the only group ever to do so.”

“That's enough,” said the scientialist. “This silly droning by that imaginary thing is interfering with our taking of testimony. Continue, Finn McCool.” For Finn McCool had been giving his testimony (under immunity) the whole while that Roadstrum had been talking.

“So in conclusion,” Finn was saying, “I consorted and banqueted and caroused with the phenomenon called Roadstrum and the phenomenon called Hondstarfer for a whole night. I have concluded that they were not real, that there was nothing real about them, that they are imaginary, but not of good image even there. I ate raw bull with them and I ate Dublin Lawyer with them. If there was anything to them I would have discovered it. Alas, there was nothing to them at all. Thank you.”

“Et tool, McCool,” Roadstrum said sorrowfully, for he was a classical scholar who possessed a fine sense of outrage. “Sencha McAllen,” he called to Sencha who was standing near, “why has Finn McCool turned traitor to us and we all thought he was our friend? And why have you and the others turned traitor to us?”

“Jealousy,” said Sencha. “We ourselves belong to the guild of high heroes, and you fellows come along with accounts of higher heroics than our own. Your heroics aren't higher, but your talk is taller. We can't match you there. And then we are a little intimidated by the scientialist. We cannot stand up to his scorn if we should believe in impossible things.”

“That fellow cut me off before I got to tell about the Nine Day War on Wamtangle,” Roadstrum complained.

“Well, what is the delay?” the scientialist fussed. “The hundred strong men have arrived. What is the delay? What is holding up the two augurs?”

A runner-messenger, grimed by the dusty kilometers and staggering with death's own stagger, made his way to the assembly with a final burst of speed.

“The hound dog's ear,” he gasped. “It waggled but once. That means that he does not hear the strange stuff.”

Then the runner-messenger fell dead at the feet of all of them. His great heart had ruptured.

“We are the strong folk who turned the very sky upside down,” Roadstrum was still maintaining his position. “You've heard but a tenth of the adventures we got out of. Shall I tell this assembly how we get out of the ‘High Adventures of the Hound Dog's Ear’?”

“Quiet!” ordered the scientialist. “There is no getting out of anything for you. You will be taken apart, and then you will be destroyed. What's the delay now? Where are the crows?”

The crows came down from the steep sky with the soft singing of their wings. They were ten of them, and they settled on the shoulders of the ten fire-ball people, of the ten Hornet people. They gripped the shoulders of these ten people with their talons, and the blood ran down.

The crows were hooded. That meant that they would not see the insufficient evidence. That meant that the sentence of the hopping court could be carried out, that all the brave Hornet people would be obliterated forever.

Finn McCool sidled up very near to Roadstrum.

“Roadstrum, listen closely, Roadstrum,” he said in a low voice.

“I'll have no doings with traitors,” Roadstrum said bitterly.

“You will if you want to live for any more adventures,” Finn whispered. “But I don't think of myself as a traitor. I'm more of an undercover agent.”

“It is hard to be heroic on unbelieving Tír-world,” Roadstrum spoke to himself and paid no mind to the scurvy Finn McCool. “They've brought a hundred strong men, and they've a little handful of paltry heroes to go with them. But even odds of no more than ten to one against us seem a little steep, considering the low mood that I'm in. Well, this is the way of it. Have at them, crew, and the blood you spill will be partly your own.”

“No, Roadstrum, no,” Finn whispered furiously. “Roadstrum, remember Gigantipanteloni? He said that if you ever needed help — ”

“What help would he be? He's too slow for a fight, and that spear of his is a hundred times too long for close-quarter slaughter. Ah, that spear of his — ”

“He's waiting at Razor Back Hill now, Roadstrum. With his spear.”

“Crewmen, Companions, Adventurers!” Roadstrum roared. “Follow me. Run like you once ran over the hot rocks of Hell. Run, run, and question me not. The answers will be given after we are off Tír and it no more than a button-sized thing shining in the sun.”

Roadstrum ran with a roaring of the wind that he stirred up, and ten of the most venturesome persons ever ran after him with twenty-footed thunder.

Ten? But there would only be nine to follow. The ten included Roadstrum himself.

No. Ten. There were ten who followed him. Count them yourself. And, after a space, there were more than a hundred others who followed, in pursuit though, and not in the crewmen company.

They came with booming breath to Razor Back Hill. The extraordinary giant Gigantipanteloni was there, and he was eying the shiny, smoky Hornet craft that was just disappearing around the hump of the sky.

“The next round, the next round!” Roadstrum howled. “ 'Twill be only seconds. But in only seconds our foes will be upon us.” He took his seeing-eye from his pocket and he threw it as high as he could into the air.

“Eye, my eye, keep great watch for us!” he called up after it. “This will be close; do what you can; keep open, eye.”

The great spear of Gigantipanteloni lay athwart Razor Back Hill. The eleven adventurers gathered themselves together and stood on the blade tip of that big spear.

Eleven, not ten? No. Eleven. Count them yourself.

The swishing sound that hot hornets make began to be heard, and the hundred-foe was almost upon the gallant crew.

“Is it time?” Roadstrum sent his thundering voice upward to his seeing-eye eye.

“Aye,” said the eye. Gigantipanteloni, the extraordinary giant, jumped onto the haft of his long spear with the weight of three hundred elephants. And the eleven brave adventurers were catapulted out of the reach of their foes and into the high air towards the hot Hornet craft.

Eleven of them, Roadstrum, Margaret, Hondstarfer; and the Crewmen Clamdigger, Trochanter, Cutshark, Crabgrass, Birdsong, Fairfeather, and Threefountains; and Finn McCool, ordinary giant and extraordinary hero of Tír.

What was Finn McCool doing with them?

“A single world like Tír doesn't give me full scope for my talents,” he said. “Oh, Hell, I'll explain it after we're on the Hornet, if we ever make it. Look out, look out!”

Did they make it? With all those steep odds against them, did they make it? If they reached it, could they hold onto its smooth and red-hot sides? Could Hondstarfer ever get it to running right again, even with all the skill of his seven hammers?

What is the word? What is the answer? What is recorded of this on Archive World?

You're pterodactyl-plucking right they made the thing!

Like A Class melodrama's end, to grade the thing.

That hammer-kid has got it going grand again

To soar through wonder-space to wonder-land again.

Where evil lurks, and challenge; they're the guys for it,

To drag sky-bait and have adventure rise for it.

The Hornet saga grows and glitters, great for it!

Turn purple, hold your breath, O golly, wait for it!

 — New Adventure Weekly

Hound Dog's Ear (revised version)

Editor's note: This text is drawn from the final, revised manuscript of ‘Hound Dog's Ear’. Why the published version reflects the earlier rough draft is unknown.

1

From final flame, like Phoenix, they are born again

Of ripened age and rank, and hard as horn again.

‘They fly again, these heroes we forgot about?’

Aye. Resurrection out of flame is brot about.

Their adventitious advent stand we stout on it

Lest doubting hound-dog people cast a doubt on it.

Our oath: on Archive World we found this crunch of them.

Adventures new! We've just dug up a bunch of them.

 — Reconstituted Space Chanteys

Prodigies had been happening on Tír Tairngiri. The skies had been on fire, and ten of the smaller fire prodigies came to ground there.

Sophisticated mechanisms in distant places were activated by the landing of the ten smaller fire-balls. A snuffling mechanism on Archive World got the scent and signature of the arriving complex. It knew what the thing was, or it knew what ghost of what thing it was.

“Without scientific proof we will not believe that these ten fire-balls have arrived on Tír,” the hero Fergus McRoy of Tír said. “And, to me at least, they are mighty unscientific-seeming fire-balls.”

There was a larger, flame-hot ball moving in tight orbit around Tír Tairngiri. From its distance, about three kilometers high at its every passage, it resembled the ruined hull of a ship, twisted in lamed and painful orbit, empty, abandoned, good for nothing.

The ten glowing objects remained on the ground of Tír for forty days, or from a Wednesday morning till the sixth Saturday night. By then they had cooled enough so that it was possible to look at them. They looked like the graven images of people.

“It is unscientific that fire-balls should be people-shaped,” the Tír hero Sencha McAllen said. “We'll not believe any of this stuff without strong reasons.”

“I know what you are,” Nemhead the warrior called to the fire-stones. “You are living persons who are bereft of life. Some of you are giants of the smaller sort, but I've never seen a giant yet who could be killed by slaying. And some of you are ghosts who've lost your ghosthood. All of this because of the great heat that you've endured.”

“They are not such things unless we have scientific proof,” Fergus McRoy objected.

“That point will have to be settled. Hey, people-shaped rocks, we don't know what to do with you. If you have an idea, tell us.”

The hot statues fumed and spumed, but they were not able to speak.

“We'd best not believe in their happening at all,” Fergus McRoy warned.

“I know what to do with you,” the lady Lí Ban said. “Smokey stones, because we are all pious and compassionate, we will command you back to life. It's the law and you must obey it.”

“Bring us a little something to eat,” one of the hot statues tried to say, but his words were lost in the sizzling and crackling.

“We will pray and fast against you to compel you to return to life,” the lady Fann said. “We will persevere until you decide to obey the law in this.” The holy group of Tír folks prayed and fasted against the rock-statue people for forty days. They ate no morsel of food and drank no drop of water at all.

“We fast against you stone people and we pray and invoke the law,” the lady Lí Ban said. “There is a law enacted that decent people should be alive. In an earlier year we fasted and prayed against great Fergus McRoy here to compel him to rise from his grave. And surely you're not greater than Fergus.”

“You're pitchblende-picking right I am!” Captain Roadstrum roared with a defiant sizzling and sputtering out of his rock. “Him great, him? Where's his reputation?”

Captain Roadstrum? How would Captain Roadstrum be here on Tír Tairngiri, alive from the sound of his voice, and unvaporized by the heat of the terrible nova that had been seen to gobble up his Hornet craft? How would even his great voice be here?

“You claim you are greater than myself!” Fergus McRoy challenged. “Come out of that hot stone and we'll see.”

“Quiet, pipsqueak,” Roadstrum's voice sounded. “Let me get rid of this hot-rock tunic and I'll teach you manners.” There was a breaking-open sound like Doomsday Morning and a reek like that of the North Gate of Hell. Thunder of exploding rock! Roadstrum burst his stone sheath and stood clear. And the Tír folk gaped at him.

He was no stone statue. He was a man, skin-burned and peeling and singed, a living and seething man in no way odd except for the sparks that showered out from him. He had his false, foxy tongue primed and ready. He had one blood-shot eye in his head and the other one in his hand. Great Roadstrum was alive and thunderously unwell! And he could say as his old friend the Hornet Captain Achilles had once said, “It will make a difference, now that I have returned.”

“Eye, my eye,” is what he really said to his brother in space and his last companion there in his palm. “It worked for me. Why hasn't it worked for the other nine? I bet it's just that I'm more pious and more holy than the others. They've got to be alive yet in their hot-stone overcoats.”

Several of the Tír heroes and warriors made a motion towards Roadstrum, but he half halted them with the glare of the blazing eye in his head, and the blazing eye in his hand put the rest of the chill on them.

“Eye, my eye, we'll have us a good time whether our companions survive or not,” Roadstrum gloated. “It's the two of us against all the worlds, and I bet we win.”

“You swore that you were greater than myself!” the great Fergus McRoy accused.

“Shut up, Fergus!” Roadstrum barked. “I am Roadstrum!”

“I know who you are,” Fergus gasped, reeling a little but holding his ground. “We get the comic strips here and I read Captain Roadstrum.”

“I believe I'll go into town and have me a banquet in my own honor,” Roadstrum said. There were sparks shattering off him as he walked about, and the odor of puddling iron.

“Wait up Captain, I'll go with you,” came a huge, boyish voice from the largest of the stones. There was the tortured, tearing roar, the actual screaming of stone, the hot, gurgling bursting of stone. And then it was a giant indeed who stood there, smoking and glowing and cascading sparks. It was the boy-giant, Hondstarfer himself, grinning and glittering with birth-death amazement and delight, Hondstarfer with his seven stone hammers.

“It sure was tedious in there, Captain,” Hondstarfer said. “Well, come along to the banquet thing. We'll make it in my honor also.”

“There is a sleeping hound that raises one ear,” the lady Badhbh warned, “whenever a man maintains his existence in the face of contrary facts.”

“What means it when the hound raises one ear?” Roadstrum demanded.

“If he gives but one twitch of his ear it means that he can't hear you,” Finn McCool, an ordinary giant of Tír, explained. “And if the hound can't hear you, you're not.”

“The hound, is he honest?” Roadstrum asked.

“Reasonably honest, for a hound,” said the lady Badhbh.

“Then he'll hear me,” Roadstrum declared with confidence.

“Ware of the crows of Morrígan!” moaned one of the other ladies. “Ware if they be hooded!”

“What means it if the crows are hooded?” Roadstrum asked.

“When they are hooded they cannot see you. If they see you not, you are not.”

“Who is Morrígan?” great Roadstrum asked.

“I am Morrígan,” the lady said. “Ware of my crows!”

“I'll go with you,” said the Tír hero and giant Finn McCool. “I will show you that there is one hero on Tír who knows how to honor strangers.” Roadstrum, Hondstarfer, and Finn McCool went into town to devour a banquet in honor of all of them.

2

Though crabbed curmudgeons carp “Oh, not that claque again!”

Sing alleluia! Here's the good guys back again!

Great Roadstrum yet, the houri Marg'ret kitteny,

Fairfeather, Crabgrass, Cutshark, holy litany!

Threefountains, Birdsong, hammer-kid Hondstarfer here,

Clamdigger, big Trochanter, ne'er a dwarfer here.

The way they lived again is pretty if-ic yet,

Our father's rocks! But is it scientific yet?

 — The Vinegar Tree

“Hondstarfer,” said the local hero and giant Finn McCool as they strode towards the town or settlement, “have I not heard somewhere that you are of giant's blood?”

“One has but to look at him to know that,” Roadstrum put in his rowel. “He's already twice as tall as I am, and his father was three times as tall. And you, Finn?”

“There are giants and giants,” said Finn. “When I am in ordinary people's company, when I am in ordinary giant's company, then I do not deny that I'm a giant. But when I'm in the presence of certain extraordinary giants of Tír, why then — ”

“Why then what?” Roadstrum asked. “What do you do in the company of the extraordinary giants?”

“I keep mighty quiet then,” Finn McCool of Tír Tairngiri said.

They entered a spacious place and took table. There were two different sort of pillars there that went up and up into the invisibility of the high darkness. One sort was round, oaken, and of very great diameter. The other sort was of greater diameter and of unknown substance. Roadstrum saw that the high darkness above them was of an artificial sort. It was a canopy or firmament or sky and it cut them off from sun or whatever light was up there. The three heroes ordered bulls roasted whole, a little on the raw side.

Then there was a great rattling explosion from the countryside.

“That was Trochanter,” Roadstrum said. “He just exploded out of his stone sheath.”

“I hope it all goes well with him, and with you,” Finn told them. “But persons aren't going to believe that you arrived in fire-stones and broke out of them.”

“They'll believe me, Finn,” Roadstrum said. “Bright honesty shines like beacons from every orifice of my body.”

Twenty-seven powerful young men, nine to a bull, brought the whole roasted bulls (a little on the raw side), and set them before the three diners. Hondstarfer and Finn McCool were both of them genuine giants, and Roadstrum was of extraordinary capacity and would die a-bursting before he'd admit that he could not eat a whole bull. They ate.

There was heard, from the near countryside, a racketing, scatter-shot, ear-splitting explosion with a lot of style and verve. It was really a sexy sort of explosion.

“That was Margaret the houri,” Roadstrum remarked. “I'd recognize her style and tone in anything. Not much else, but she sure does have style and tone.”

“I remember her from the comic strip,” said Finn McCool. “She is another great favorite of mine. By the way, Roadstrum, that burnt-out, useless, gosh-awful, flaming Hornet hulk that is now in tight orbit around Tír, you're the captain of it, aren't you?”

“Certainly, certainly, I'm the captain. But it is not useless. Hondstarfer here can fix it up in half an hour with his stone hammers.”

“I can do any sort of work, Finn, mechanical, electrical, medical, cosmological, artistic, with my stone hammers,” Hondstarfer said. “I'm bonded, and I make house calls.”

“The only hard thing would be to get Hondstarfer up there,” Roadstrum said. “He could fix that Hornet if he could get to it.”

“I have an idea how even that might be done,” Finn McCool told them. “And we're in the right place to meet the fellow. Have faith in me, guys.”

There was another explosion from the countryside, big, booming, blamming, blatant.

“That has to be Crewman Clamdigger,” Roadstrum said. “I can't say that I recognize his tone or his style; he hasn't any. But what is that quaking and shaking here, Finn?”

“Oh, it's only the big fellows up there. You've probably disturbed them at table with your noise. No need to roar like you do when we're here elbow to eye with you.”

“Quiet nothing! I will yet roar at meat!” great Roadstrum roared. “What is the next course, Finn? The bulls are gone.” Roadstrum gave the ritual belch. “Flesh and horns and hides and hoofs and tract-content, all gone.”

“They are bringing Dublin Lawyer now,” Finn McCool said, proud of the good fare that they serve on Tír. “They are also bringing Sheep Stomach Surprise, and Rice Rowdy, and Pepperhead Pudding, and Royal Rump Roast. Here are the Fiddlers. And here's Hooly-Gooly; there's nowhere else that it may be got. And look, Roadstrum, this is special: Elephant Ear Delight.”

“Finn, is that an earthquake that I feel?” Roadstrum asked.

“No. Just one of the big fellows shuffling his feet a bit.”

There was a rather disturbed melody coming from Hondstarfer's stomach.

“Who shuffling whose feet? Finn, one of the pillars of this building just moved.”

“Having no roof, this building has no pillars,” Finn explained. “You shouldn't have eaten the fiddlers, Hondstarfer. They were for entertainment and not eating.”

“No roof? No pillars? Then what is this?” Roadstrum demanded, and he kicked the pedestal of one of the pillars. “What is this, Finn?” and he kicked it again.

“That's my foot, Roadstrum,” a mighty voice sounded from up in the sky. “Come on up. A man of your fame shouldn't be sitting at one of those little tables down underneath the big table.”

Roadstrum's eyes, the one in his head and the one in his hand, were opened thereby and they explored the shape of the high darkness. The four big pillars of one sort were the legs of a very large table whose deal was so high above them that Roadstrum had at first believed it to be a canopy or firmament or sky. And the pillars of the second sort were the eight legs of four really extraordinary giants sitting at the big table. Nothing daunted, and certainly not intimidated by mere size, Roadstrum sought for a means to ascend.

There was another rending, searing, chortling explosion from the countryside. “That's Crewman Cutshark,” Roadstrum roared. “That's him breaking out of his rock cocoon such as we all wrapped ourselves in at the time of the Great Nova. We took ten asteroids, and each of us burrowed to the center of one of them for protection. The nova vaporized everything of the asteroids except the central cores of them, and those cores were wrapped around us in the form of glassified rock. Then our Hornet craft, which we had put on automatic and programmed for just such an eventuality, came and gathered us up out of that billion degree hot sky. And it brought us to Tír and dumped us on the first unmelted earth that it found. Ah, this will serve!”

It was a frayed thread dangling down from the tablecloth of the extraordinary giants. Roadstrum climbed it as if it were a tree trunk, up and up and up some more. He came onto the table of the big fellows and found that Hondstarfer was already there.

“I always liked you, Roadstrum,” one of those extraordinary giants said. His nose was like a watchtower, and the little knobs and blemishes on it looked like windows and shot holes in the tower. “Yours is the comic strip that I read first of all. My name is Gigantipanteloni.”

“I've been hearing about this comic strip lately,” Roadstrum said, “but I've never seen it, nor heard of it before coming to Tír. Whenever did it begin?”

“Shortly after the deaths of you and your companions,” the extraordinary giant said. “Your deaths were sad things to us, and the comic strip was begun to keep your memory green.”

“But I am alive,” Roadstrum cried. “And Hondstarfer here is also alive.”

“Right, Captain, live as a lizard,” Hondstarfer declared. But Gigantipanteloni merely smiled. “I may be simple-minded but I'm not that simple-minded,” he said. “Dead you are, and dead you will ever be.”

There was another booming, rattling explosion from the countryside.

“Which one is it?” the giant asked.

“Crewman Crabgrass, I believe,” Roadstrum guessed.

“Listen, Roadstrum,” said big Gigantipanteloni, “if you are ever in trouble, I will help you in any way that I can. Think sometime if there is not some simple-minded thing that you have overlooked that might save you. I am called the simple-minded giant. All I ever do is eat and sleep and read the funny paper and flip rocks on the blade of my spear.”

“How high can you flip the rocks?” Hondstarfer asked him.

“Sometimes I can flip them so high that they don't come down,” the giant said.

There was another grumping, gargling-sort of explosion from the countryside.

“ 'Tis Fairfeather,” said Roadstrum. “Now they should all be freed of their stones except two. I had better go and see whether they are having difficult parturitions.” And Roadstrum slid down the dangling thread that was thick as a tree trunk.

“Yes, we'd best go, Roadstrum,” Finn said. “The night's near gone. And I may as well tell you that I accompanied you this night in an official capacity.”

“What official capacity?” Roadstrum asked. And he came down to the ground.

“There'll be a hearing to determine whether you are valid, to determine whether it is possible to believe in you. I'll have to give evidence at that hearing.”

“Well, do you believe in us?” Roadstrum asked.

“Nah. I'd like to, Roadstrum, but I just can't bring myself to it.”

“I believe in you now, Roadstrum,” Gigantipanteloni called from above in that sky-voice that extraordinary giants develop. “I'm told that it's foolish to believe in comic strip characters, but now I'll believe in you always. And if you're ever in real trouble, remember the simple-minded giant.”

3

This kangaroo, it hops along so trippingly;

And Finn McCool, his treason cuts so rippingly!

“You may not be! You're naught! And that's the way it is.

Existence is exactly what we say it is.”

To judge this way these greats, the very cream of them — 

It really seemed a little bit extreme of them!

 — Kangaroo Book of Flying Objects

“Hurry, Roadstrum,” the hero Sencha McAllen was calling at the approach of the banqueters. “Hurry Hondstarfer. Your case is already in the frying pan. It looks bad.”

“We've lived through hotter fires than any on Tír,” mighty Roadstrum stated.

“That's the whole point,” Sencha said. “The consensus is that you haven't lived through them, that you haven't lived at all. It's a legal decision that no man walks away from a nova. It follows that you presumptuous people can have no being, and we will order you to terminate even your pretense of being.”

“Your hearing and the weighing of the evidence against you has already begun,” said Nemhead the warrior. “The hound has already raised one ear. He listens now. But he will not hear you, for there is nothing for him to hear. The omen of the hound dog is quite scientific and it will find against you.”

“The crows are slanting down from the steep sky,” the lady Morrígan said. “If they come hooded that is a signal for your destruction. That which they cannot see is not, and it must be obliterated. Ware of my crows!”

“If you are not heard or seen, then you are not at all,” Fergus McRoy pronounced with careful pleasure. “And if you are not, then we must destroy every offensive appearance of you.”

There was the last explosion, and there stood Birdsong. The ten great venturers were together again. They had flown Hornet craft everywhere, they had done everything, they had given new meaning to ‘heroic’: Captain Roadstrum; Margaret the houri who had been in the female business since before Eve; Hondstarfer, the hammer-handling boy giant from Lamos who could make anything that could be thought of; Crewman Clamdigger, Trochanter, Cutshark, Crabgrass, Birdsong, Fairfeather, Threefountains. Ten of them there! Go through ten billion other persons and try to find so worthy a ten.

“We be,” said Commander Roadstrum. “We stand here in our full wits and our full history. If we are not real, then reality herself has a hooded face.”

“Be quiet, nothings,” the lady Macha said. “An honored person comes.”

The honored person was a news reporter. Yet, for all his influences, he was not an overbearing man. He smiled softly at the rosebuds strewn in his path.

“Where are the non-existent people?” he asked, and when the lady Lí Ban pointed in the direction of Roadstrum and his crew, the reporter said “I see no one.”

“Hondstarfer, this poor man cannot see,” Roadstrum stated. “Take your stone hammers and fix his eyes for him. You can fix them since you can fix anything whatsoever.”

“All right,” said Hondstarfer, and he moved to do the repair work.

“No, no, protect me, people!” the reporter person cried.

“Non-existent stone hammers will not hurt your eyes,” Roadstrum chided.

“We begin with the fact that there cannot be Hornet craft,” the reporter said.

“What is that in the sky if it is not a Hornet craft?” Roadstrum demanded.

“It might be the planet Milo, or a sun-dog, or a balloon with a candle in it, or swamp gas, or a watermelon seed floating in the air,” the honored reporter said.

“Then what in pelican-plucking perdition am I?” Roadstrum swore.

“You are non-existent and you will have to be exterminated,” the reporter stated.

“What am I?” Margaret the houri demanded of the newsman.

“What? What? Oh, nobody believes in houris any longer.”

“Be quiet, nothings,” said the lady Macha. “Another honored person comes.”

The other honored person was a scientialist which is very like a scientist. He was not arrogant. He smiled kindly as the fragrant lilacs were scattered before his feet.

“Where are the non-scientifically-demonstrated persons?” he asked. “We must have them taken apart to examine the mechanism that activates them.”

“You'll not take me apart,” Roadstrum swore. “Not me, you won't.”

“You know, good people,” the scientialist addressed the heroes and ladies of Tír, “that belief in Hornet craft is absolutely forbidden. Still more dangerous is belief in fire-balls in which people may ride. And most dangerous of all is belief that there may be humans who have come here from other worlds. There are, I am told, ten pieces of false evidence here. They must be extirpated. Have the augurs for this been set in motion?”

“They have, sir,” Fergus McRoy said. “The hound has already lifted one ear, and it's near certain that he will shake that ear but once to show that he does not hear the unscientific evidence. And the crows will arrive soon from their steep skies and will settle with their talons on the shoulders of these ten false images. They'll come hooded to show that they will not see the unscientific evidence. And then we will proceed to the obliteration of the false evidence at once.”

“Look,” Roadstrum pointed with his hand and his voice. “There is our orbiting Hornet craft now. If we could but rise up to it, we would leave this spastic-brained world and be on our adventurous way.”

“But you cannot reach it,” said the scientialist. “On all Tír there is nothing that reaches so high. Good people, send for one hundred powerful men. These ten illusions, these ten non-existent persons, they show signs of stubbornness.”

“The one hundred powerful men are already on the way,” Sencha McAllen said.

“People of Tír, hear me!” Roadstrum suddenly bawled out. And he gave with a great rhetoric, but the people listened not at all.

“Stop it, that's enough,” said the scientialist after a while. “The silly droning of that imaginary thing” (he meant great Roadstrum) “is interfering with our taking of testimony. Continue, Finn McCool.” For Finn McCool had been giving testimony, under immunity, the whole while that Roadstrum had been talking.

“So in conclusion,” Finn was saying, “I consorted and banqueted and caroused with the phenomenon called Roadstrum and the phenomenon called Hondstarfer for a whole night. I have concluded that they are not real, that there is nothing real about them. I ate raw bull with them and I ate Dublin Lawyer with them. If there was anything to them I would have discovered it. Alas, there was nothing to them at all. Thank you.”

“Et tool, McCool,” Roadstrum said sorrowfully, for he was a classical scholar who had a fine sense of outrage.

“What is the delay?” the scientialist fussed. “The hundred strong men have arrived. What's holding up the two augurs?”

A runner-messenger, grimed by the dusty kilometers and staggering with death's own stagger, made his way to the assembly with a final burst of speed. “The hound dog's ear,” he gasped. “It waggled but once. That means that he does not hear the strange stuff.” Then the runner-messenger fell dead at the feet of all of them. His great heart had ruptured.

The crows came down from the steep sky with the soft singing of their wings. They settled on the ten fire-ball people, gripping their shoulders with their talons, and the blood ran down. The crows were hooded. That meant that they would not see the insufficient evidence. That meant that the ten pieces of insufficient evidence would have to be obliterated forever.

Finn McCool sidled up very near to Roadstrum. “Roadstrum, listen closely,” he said.

“I'll have no doings with traitors,” Roadstrum answered bitterly.

“You will if you want to live for any more adventures,” Finn whispered. “But I don't think of myself as a traitor. I'm more of an undercover agent.”

“It is hard to be heroic on unbelieving Tír-World,” Roadstrum spoke to himself, and he paid no mind to the scurvy Finn McCool. “They've brought a hundred strong men, and they've a little handful of paltry heroes to go with them. The odds are little more than ten to one against us, but I'm in a low mood. Well, that's the way it is. Hear me, all good Horneteers! Have at them, crew! And the blood you spill will be partly your own.”

“No, Roadstrum, no,” Finn whispered furiously. “Roadstrum, remember Gigantipanteloni? He said that if you ever needed help — ”

“What help would he be? He's too slow for a fight, and that spear of his is a hundred times too long for close-quarter slaughter. Ah, that spear of his — ”

“He's waiting at Razor-Back Hill now, Roadstrum. With his spear.”

“Crewmen, Companions, Adventurers, follow me!” Roadstrum roared. “Run like you once ran over the hot rocks of Hell. Run, run, and question me not. The answers will be given after we are off Tír and it no more than a button-sized thing shining in its sun.”

Roadstrum ran with a roaring of the wind that he stirred up, and ten of the most venturesome persons who ever lived ran after him in twenty-footed thunder.

Ten? But there would only be nine to follow him. Roadstrum himself was the tenth.

No. There were ten who followed him. Count them yourself.

They came with booming breath to Razor-Back Hill, and to the extraordinary giant Gigantipanteloni who was eying the smoky Hornet craft that was just disappearing around the hump of the sky.

“The next round, the next round!” Roadstrum howled. “ 'Twill be only seconds, but in only seconds our foes will be upon us.” He took his loose eye from his pocket and threw it as high as he could into the air.

“Eye, my eye, keep great watch for us,” he called up after it. “This will be close. Keep open, eye.”

The great spear of Gigantipanteloni lay athwart Razor-Back Hill. The eleven adventurers gathered themselves together and stood on the blade tip of that big spear.

Eleven, not ten? No. Count them yourself. The swishing sound that hot hornets make began to be heard, and the hundred-foe was almost upon the gallant crew.

“Is it time?” Roadstrum sent his thundering voice upward to his seeing-eye eye.

“Aye,” said eye. Gigantipanteloni the extraordinary giant jumped onto the haft end of his long spear with the weight of three hundred elephants. And the eleven brave adventurers were catapulted out of the reach of their foes and into the high air towards the hot Hornet craft.

Eleven: Roadstrum, Margaret, Hondstarfer; and the Crewmen Clamdigger, Trochanter, Cutshark, Crabgrass, Birdsong, Fairfeather, and Threefountains. And Finn McCool, ordinary giant and extraordinary hero of Tír. What was Finn McCool doing with them?

“A single world like Tír doesn't give me full scope for my talents,” he said. “Oh, hell, I'll explain it after we're on the Hornet, if we ever make it. Look out, look out!”

With all those steep odds against them, did they make it? If they reached it, could they hold onto its smooth and red-hot sides? Could Hondstarfer get it to running again?

What is the word? What is the answer? What is recorded of this on Archive World?

You're pterodactyl-plucking right they made the thing,

Like A-Class melodrama's end, to grade the thing.

That hammer-kid has got it going grand again,

To soar through wonder-space to wonder-land again.

Where evil lurks, and challenge: they're the guys for it,

To drag sky-bait and have adventure rise for it.

The Hornet saga grows and glitters. Great for it!

Turn purple! Hold your breath! Oh golly, wait for it!

 — New Adventure Weekly

Author's Commentary

For All Poor Folks at Picketwire

“We ought to have a bigger place for the children to play in the summertime,” Lemuel said one day. “How many do we have now?” Lemuel was a bent young man with bright and slightly peering eyes.

“Five, Lem, five,” Griselda said. This Griselda was something of a looker.

If Lemuel Windfall hadn't always seen so far ahead, he might have been one of the very top inventors of the world. But isn't foresight a good quality in an inventor or in anyone?

Sure it is, but it's not good if you rub it into the ground. It is possible to be too foresightly. Lemuel could see ahead both into the immediate and to the ultimate use of whatever gadget he might devise. And he could pretty well weigh it out in green money how much it could be turned for. It would have been wonderful if he'd let it go at that; if he'd gathered each harvest in as it came to season, and had put his bills of expectation on their proper spindle till they had realized themselves. But Lemuel always saw forward, past the use and application of a device. He saw forward to its obsolescence. And what is the use to activate a device or a potential or a condition if it is going to be obsolete in a decade or two?

“For the money, that's what's the use,” the wife, Griselda, would say. “We can use the money right now, and I don't care whether it will be obsoleted next century.”

“But why should we be bothered for money?” Lemuel would always ask. “Surely it's always an advantage in any circumstance to reduce the number of moving parts, and money in this life is made up entirely of moving parts. And didn't I invent instant money just a fortnight ago?”

“Indeed you did, Lem,” good Griselda said, “but you didn't go into production on the stuff. You looked into the future, and you discovered that it would be a short-term (not over fifty years' duration) affair. You said that ethical backlash and other difficulties would blow the whistle on it by then. Look, Lem, I'm reasonable. I'm not even asking for instant money today. I'll settle for thirty-minute money. I'll give you just thirty minutes to raise some household cash, and that's the limit. Thirty minutes, Lem. Did you hear me?”

“Yes,” he would always say. Then he would put a few working drawings of something under his arm and would go down the street to Conglomerate Enterprises or Wheeler-Heelers and sell them for whatever he could get in thirty minutes.

“I could get more for things if I had the time and fare to take them to Le Conglomérat in Paris,” Lem would say wistfully. “They've written me that they'll pay well for any new thing of mine, and they say that their offer will stand forever, for a reasonable ever. I could always get more if I had fifteen years to deal instead of thirty minutes.”

“Lem, everything that you've ever sold, you've already had it on the shelf for at least fifteen years,” Griselda would say with weary patience.

“Yes, I guess so,” Lem would admit.

“And remember that you've promised me a trip to Paris.”

“Yes, and I'll give it to you yet, Grissie.”

And there was a worse hitch in the Lemuel mental and fabricatory process. He didn't like to produce anything unless working conditions were just right. And he had the sad conviction that nowhere in the world were conditions ever just right.

“I should have a workshop that's in a total vacuum,” he would say sometimes. “That's the least of the conditions.”

“You should have your head in a total vacuum,” Griselda would counter.

“Why, such a thing would implode my brains,” Lem would state, “and what would be the compensating advantage?”

“You never know, dear. There might be useful side effects.”

“Yes, I should have a workshop in a total vacuum,” he'd dream and beam, “and dust free, and in a place completely without gravity. And it should be without the quality of temperature; neither medium, nor very high, nor very low temperature will serve; it must be without even the idea of temperature. And it should be beyond the power of hard radiation of every sort, beyond the fury of excessive ultraviolet rays or actinic rays or triatomic oxygen. ‘And all baleful beams,’ as the psalmist says. And my place of enterprise should be beyond the temporal cloud, and I do not mean anything so simple as time-stand-still, no, nor eternity either. There must not be duration; there must be only moment. No duration is ever long enough to get anything done.

“And my workshop should be spared the effect of every magnetic field, of every voltage differential, of every solar wind. And it should not have any topography at all. Perhaps it shouldn't even have location, or shape, or size. Griselda, if I had a workshop or factory so situated and appointed, all processes would become easy, and there would be scarce a limit to what might be achieved. Hey, I could make coal then! Oh, but there's plenty of coal. But in this little workshop here, and in the bigger workshop whose name is World, with all their disabilities of gravity and magnetism and electrical field, and baleful rays and temperature and existence in time and space, and subject to indexing as to shape and size and color and aroma, why, it just doesn't seem worthwhile even to try any work here.”

“But, Lem, if you hadn't gone tilt-brained and thought up all these objections, then you could believe that you had the finest place in the world, and you could do the finest work anywhere. Say, there's a title to a piece of land in Colorado that came in the mail today. A Mr. Jasher Halfhogan sent it to you. As far as I can tell, the little piece of land is on a small creek named Picketwire, and there isn't any town near it anywhere.”

“What? What? Oh, how fortuitous can it get!” Lemuel cried with real enthusiasm. “On Picketwire Creek in Colorado, you say? Why, that's almost the same thing as having no topography at all. Nuggets of gold and orichalcum on my head! I guess that this is just my lucky day.”

“But shouldn't this man have sent you money instead of a title to a no-good piece of land?”

“Of course he should have, Griselda. What luck he didn't! He should have sent me a great lot of money, and I suppose that there are persons who would prefer money. Oh, this is lucky! There is bound to be advantage come of it. One of the requirements of the ideal working place is that it should be unlocated and of no value. May the years teach me enough wisdom to find advantage in this thing! And in the meanwhile, it might be a nice place to turn the children loose in the summertime. How many of them do we have now?”

“Six, Lem, six. They are six of the reasons that I'm often after you for money. And remember that you've promised me a trip to Paris. That takes money too.”

In a different year Griselda said, “Do you know how much taxes we got a bill for on that stupid piece of land in Colorado, Lem? Eighty-five cents. It must be some place.”

“It makes one feel cheap, doesn't it, Grissie? I'll see what I can do about getting the taxes raised. Jasher Halfhogan goes out there pretty often. I guess that I should find out a little bit more about that piece of property.”

“I guess that I should find out a little bit more about that man Jasher Halfhogan,” Griselda said. “He has some kind of hook into you. Jasher Halfhogan sounds like a name that you'd invent. And that funny-looking old man looks like someone you'd invent too. I'm asking you seriously Lem: did you?”

“No, not consciously I didn't invent him, Grissie. And yet I did invent him a little bit, I suppose. And he me. We are all formed by feedback and interaction. We see more than there is in other people, and we ourselves are seen for more than we are. And we grow to match our seeming. Don't you like Jasher?”

“I've never met him, Lem. Every time I've seen him he was scurrying away like some night ghost that was afraid of being shone on by sunlight. Well, if he's a Halfhogan, what would a Wholehogan be?”

“You really don't know, Griselda? Sometimes you astonish me,” Lemuel said. He was a bent man who had recently slipped into middle age without much noise. “But as to the Colorado land, Jasher says that it's a gateway to a whole new life. It has something to say to me in the future, I know. And meanwhile, it might be a nice place to take the children some summer. How many do we have now?”

“Seven, Lem, seven.” Somehow Griselda had remained one of the really good-lookers.

There finally came a year when Lemuel thrived in his erratic discoveries and enterprises in spite of his being forced to work and invent in places and circumstances of matter and atmosphere and gravity and magnetism and electrical manifestation and temperature and baleful rays and time and space and shape. Money seemed approximately sufficient. But always Griselda had something to worry about.

“I won't say that I don't like your friend Jasher Halfhogan,” she said once. “I'm sure that he means well. I have met him now, you know, just a few years ago. Once, I believe, I saw him attempt a smile. It didn't work. But I do believe that he's a bad omen for you, Lem. A little buzzard recently whispered to me that he'll be the death of you yet.”

“No, he'll not cause my death, Grissie,” Lemuel said seriously. “Though the neighborhood children of whatever age hoot at him and call him Mr. Deathman and Mr. Soul Broker, yet I believe that they misunderstand his role. He will not cause my death. 'Twill be a mere synchronicity. He wants me to locate by that entrance in Colorado some year soon, to go to that little property of ours. That's one of the entrances to the next step in living, he says. And it would be nice to visit it, Grissie, before we die, or soon after that, in any case. And it might be pleasant to take the children there for a little vacation. How many do we have now?”

“Eight, Lem, but they're all married and moved away. I believe that it's too late for us to arrange such a trip together. In the next life, maybe.”

“Maybe so, Grissie. It's good to think about.” Lem was a bent old man now, and he hadn't intended to let himself get into such a state. And Griselda was still a good-looker, now and forever. “Colorado seems to loom pretty big in the next life,” Lem was saying. “I'm feeling a bit doddery lately. I may ask Jasher Halfhogan what he thinks about it all.”

So the next season, when Jasher came through town again, Lemuel asked him about several things. “I'd like someday to visit that little Colorado property that you once deeded to me for services rendered,” Lem said. “I have high expectations for it. And I'm reaching the age where I need something of value to concretize my expectations a little.”

“Oh, the property itself is worthless, Lem,” Jasher said. “Don't set any expectations on its value.”

“But, Jash, you once said that it was a gateway to a whole new life.”

“So I did, and so it is. But even a broken gate that's not worth half a dollar may be a gateway to a whole new life. It's the location that's important. Lem. There are a few other localities equally important, and they all give ingress to the same place. But it would be impossible to put any of them into right context without the services of a special informant such as myself. The place is analogous to a mail drop, Lem, in that it gives communication to places almost without limit. Rather think of it as a world drop or a life drop. It's better to take these things under guidance and control than to go at random and in ignorance. Besides, I get a commission on you. I work largely on commission.”

“I never did know what you did. Jasher,” Lemuel said. “I'm not one to wonder about a friend's occupation, but my wife often speculates out loud about yours. She says that you'll be the death of me yet.”

“No death is foreordained, Lem. I'll collect a fee on yours when it does happen, but that's only because you're in my territory. Lemuel, do you have any particular later life desires or aspirations? We may be able to do something about them.”

“Oh, yes. And what desires I have left do seem to get a little bit stronger with age. In particular, I've always believed that I could accomplish things almost without limit if I had the proper working conditions for discovering and processing and manufacturing. I have found, Jasher, quite a few things that had to have been fabricated in more nearly ideal circumstances than are found on Earth. Or at least they had to be patterned and triggered in more favorable circumstances. These things have been passed off by most persons as natural or quasi-natural phenomena. But they're not natural. I know manufactured things when I see them, and many of these things are manufactured. Aye, Jasher, but they're not made under the disabilities that afflict our local planet.

“I want to make such things also. I want to make them in such profusion that they will be mistaken for natural or quasi-natural phenomena. I want to make them so nearly perfect that they will be almost unnoticed in their excellence, and so tremendously large that they will escape scrutiny and stand like invisible and accepted giants. I do not want money or recognition for these services that I am burning to perform. But, Jasher, the sites and circumstances for such doings are simply not to be found on this world.”

“It may be that they are to be found with one foot on this world, Lem,” Jasher Halfhogan said, “or with one tentacle. The world puts out some very long and tricky tentacles, a few of them so tremendous that they do escape scrutiny. So I will bet that we can find good site and circumstances for your workshop or whatever. Just what specifications do you have in mind for it?”

So Lemuel Windfall explained to Jasher Halfhogan just what he would need for the minimum. And Jasher nodded from time to time and mumbled, “I think so. Yes, I think so.” Lem listed the things that he had often poured into the erratic ears of his wife and into the stoppered ears of the world at large. All about the avoidance of atmosphere and magnetism and gravity and baleful rays. “And somehow Griselda must get a trip to Paris out of it,” he said.

“You're making it easy for us, Lem,” Jasher said. “You're going right down the line with all our specialties. Lem, I know just the place for it. When will you be ready to go?”

“I'd go quickly enough if I knew where I was going and what I'd find,” Lemuel stated with the confidence of one who doesn't expect his hand to be called.

“You'll find just the conditions that you have been speaking of, Lem. But can you handle it, or will you go right past the place? I've never been certain that you have enough of the cantankerous metal in you, and without it you'll have too easy a passage to discover these conditions. Have you the need to be compensating enough that you must create things in such profusion and perfection? For it does go by need, and I simply don't believe that you have a strong enough need in you. Lem, I don't believe that you have been a bad enough man to be called to the extraordinary ransom and prodigy.”

“Have I not been bad enough?” Lemuel crooked his voice at Jasher. “Let me tell you about it, low and into your ear here.” And Lemuel talked into Jasher's ear in a serious and hushed voice until all the blood was drained out of Jasher's face.

“Stop, stop! Yes, you've been bad enough, Lem,” Jasher croaked with distaste. “I was wrong to doubt you. How soon will you be ready to go? It's to your little land in Colorado. It's a better entrance than most places to the whole new circumstance and life.”

“I'll be ready to go by nightfall, Jasher,” Lemuel said.

And that was almost the last that anyone saw of Lemuel Windfall around the old place. He cashed in his chips, as they say. He lowered his flag, so the colloquialism has it. He had his ticket punched, as the phrase goes. He went West, as the older fellows say. He shipped off to Colorado, as the proverb has it.

His wife, Griselda, put on widow's weeds when he was gone.

She had always been an impatient woman.

2.

More energy has been spent in explaining the presence of coal deposits on our Earth, and more especially in explaining petroleum deposits, than in almost any other thing. Probably more energy has been spent in explaining them than in forming them. But it comes to nothing.

One authority insisted that the carboniferous gluts of our world came from the tails of comets that sideswiped the Earth. And this is one of the most nearly intelligent of all the explanations that have been put forward!

There is one geologist who says that petroleum is formed only between layers of bituminous shale, and that it is formed in such case by great pressure and heat. That is a little like using cheese for the jaws of a vise intended to exert tremendous pressure. Bituminous shale just isn't the rock for the job. And trying to explain the presence of petroleum is child's play compared with trying to explain the presence of bituminous shale.

There is another authority who maintains that petroleum and natural gas are largely due to the resinous spores of rhizocarps. Savor that opinion for a moment, reader, and you must conclude that there is at least one authority running loose who should be confined.

In every case, the temperatures sufficient to form coal or petroleum are somewhat higher than the temperatures sufficient to vaporize the entire Earth. One exasperated authority stated that all such deposits must have been made by kobalds or gnomes laboring under the roots of mountains. He was righter than he knew. But the question remains: how could any circumstances on Earth serve to trigger such deposits and results? And the answer is an easy one: they couldn't.

 — Arpad Arutinov, The Back Door of History

But there is a condition, neither on Earth nor off it, not in any place, really, where circumstances could trigger such results. This is a condition lacking the quality of location (Jews, close your ears! Greeks, harden your hearing! Covenanters, avert your senses lest you be affronted by it!), a realm of ransom and recompense and incredible self-assigned labor, a scene where such accumulations of carbonaceous matter are indeed patterned and planned and instigated.

 — Arpad Arutinov, The Back Door of History

Second Revised Edition

There were new cargoes and traffics appearing, new potentials, and circumstances; but it was only Conglomerate Enterprises and Wheeler-Heelers and Le Conglomérat and such like firms that guessed that the new things weren't really natural or even quasi-natural. The new things were manufactured — these canny companies recognized this quickly enough — and they weren't exactly manufactured on this world.

The conditions here just weren't right for them. And, as it seemed to the men of the several discerning firms and conglomerates, the new cargoes and traffics and products had the signature of one man all over them.

So several gentlemen from Conglomerate Enterprises came to visit Griselda Windfall. They had been in the habit of taking advantage of Griselda's husband, Lemuel, and they didn't intend to get out of the habit just because he had left town.

“It is absolutely necessary that we locate your husband, Lemuel Windfall,” they said in unison (there were three gentlemen).

“It isn't necessary to me, it isn't necessary to Lem, and I'm not sure that it's necessary at all,” Griselda said. “If Lem had wanted to be located, he could have stayed here.”

“He could have what?” the three Conglomerate gentlemen croaked in disbelief in their single voice. “Mrs. Windfall, your husband is making all the new things available free. There are millions of dollars in this if you can help us locate him, or simply tell us where he is, if you know. Then we can work out the double modification, and we will have everything on a paying basis.”

“Millions in it for me, and tens of millions in it for you,” Griselda said thoughtfully. “And what is in it for my husband, Lemuel, who apparently doesn't want to be found? Please explain to me about the double modification.”

“We will take one example out of dozens,” the three men spoke in their single voice. “Smithstone Clay has become edible, and we believe that Lemuel Windfall has made it so. In nine billion years Smithstone Clay has never been edible before; and now it is. There were previous hints of it, of course. There were clay eaters in assorted boondocks. But real Smithstone Clay has never been found in abundance before. Now it is. And who can say when or how it happened? Who kept a running census of so worthless a thing as Smithstone Clay? But now it is no longer scarce and no longer worthless. That is good.

“But it comes free to everybody. That is bad.

“It would be simple to put a modification into it at the other end, at your husband Lemuel's end, so that it wouldn't become edible until we put the countering modification into it at this end. This is the double modification. By this we can control the products or traffics or cargoes or potentials or circumstances. And then we will be able to sell it, for a fair price, to the whole world, instead of having it go free. And people always appreciate a thing more when they have to pay for it.”

“Oh, sure,” Griselda said. “I will think about this, gentlemen. And I will ask Lemuel what to do about it, if I can find him with his ears standing open.”

“And, Mrs. Windfall, there are dozens of other new and advantaged things besides Smithstone Clay,” the three men tried to explain to Griselda in their unity talk.

“I know pretty much what the other new things would be,” she said. “I watch the ripples, and I can guess what innovative rocks are being dropped into the pond. Particularly can I guess them when I've heard Lemuel talk about them for fifty years. I will let you know, gentlemen.”

Griselda had a little talk with herself after the gentlemen of Conglomerate had taken their leave.

“My Lem has succumbed to the Devil's most transparent temptation,” she said. “I wish that he wouldn't do things like that. He should never wander off from me and do things on his own. He hadn't left his first childhood, and now he's fallen into his second. ‘Command that these stones be bread,’ the Devil must have told him. Why is it that nobody sees the heresy of the ‘Feed-the-world-by-easy-device’ proposal any longer? The Devil got Lem in a weak place there. He always had a soft spot in his heart for the Devil, and he always had a soft spot for the ‘Feed-the-world-by-easy-device’ ploy. I've told him that the Devil will be the ruin of him yet.”

Griselda went to visit a sibyl in a cave out on the Sand Springs road. It was one of those caves that run back into the bluffs just before you come to Union Street Hill. Once there was a restaurant and nightclub named The Cave in that block. Now the block was known as Sibyls' Row. There were half-a-dozen sibyl studios and one brake-lining shop in that block, and one empty cave with a FOR RENT sign.

“I would like your help in locating my husband,” Griselda told the sibyl. “Here is his address.”

“If you have his address, why do you need my help in locating him?” the sibyl asked. “Does he live at the address?”

“Yes, I suppose he does,” Griselda said, “but I don't. I'm not sure that the address is real. I hardly know how to say this, but there is something very spooky about the place. I believe I could go there — and I intend to — and that my husband would be there. And yet I might not be able to see him or talk to him. And I might not be able to come back. There are things accumulating there. Things were accumulating long before my husband went there to work and live. And other things have been similarly accumulating in other places or in other entrances to the same place, for long ages. I have this information but I don't know where I have it from.”

“I will give the address to my python,” the sibyl said. “He will get to the effective level of it.” The sibyl went down into a lower room to give the assignment to the python. And after a while she came back.

“Rats, rats!” she said in an odd voice.

“Is that an expletive?” Griselda asked her.

“Not this time. It's just that I'm almost out of rats. You know, there isn't a single rat catcher listed in the phone book this year. Rats and rabbits are what the python eats. You were talking about accumulations, Mrs. Windfall. Yes, there have been these most spooky accumulations for ages. For long ages before men appeared, these accumulations are to be found, so the peculiarity of the addresses must go back before mankind. I wonder just who was living at those dubious addresses then. Whatever the species, they had affinity for mining and for well-digging: mythology tells us that much about them. They manufactured things by processes that seem impossible. There was always one element missing. I believe that there was bilocation involved. I believe that there still is. Ah, the python has the address analyzed.”

The python's voice came through a sort of ventilator shaft in man-serpent accents: “The address is at one of the primary interchanges, though physically it is on a small creek in Colorado. The full name of this creek is El Río de las Ánimas Arrepentidas en Limbo, or the River of the Compensating Souls in the Borderland of Limes. But the early Spanish people did not name the creek so. With rare intuition, they recognized the site for what it was, and their name was the perfect translation of the primordial name, which is very old. The creek is also called Lost Souls Creek and Picketwire Creek. Sophia, ask the lady whether she happens to have a rat with her.”

“Oh, no, I don't have,” Griselda said. “I never carry them.”

“Nobody carries them anymore,” the man-serpent complained. “Well, the creek rises at, nay, it falls down from Trinchera Peak in Las Animas County, and it ends in the John Martin Reservoir on the Arkansas River in Bent County. The lower hundred and fifty miles of the creek, from Hoene to the town of Las Animas, does not touch on inhabited region at all.

“The same creek, bearing the name of Las Animas, is also found hundreds of miles distant, in Sierra County, New Mexico. There is some mystery about this bilocation of the creek on Earth, but the fact of the bilocation hasn't been doubted. It is really a case of multilocation, as it is with every primary interchange place.

“Ah, there's lots of words and names welling up out of my depths, and all of them refer to this location. Some of them call it a dislocation; some of them say that it is one of the limbos or halfway places; or a half-mansion, or a half-house.”

“How about a half-hogan?” Griselda asked the educated snake in the room below.

“I don't know,” the python said. “But what seems to be the trouble? Why don't you go ahead and visit the place, lady?”

“Yes, I will, I'll do that.” Griselda said. “Thank you, python. Thank you, sibyl.”

3.

… mineral as well as metal, and that which is now only a name, and was then something more than a name — orichalcum — was dug out of the earth… The red light of orichalcum.

 — Plato

As Griselda came near the place, she was surprised to find what name the local people called the stream. It was startling; it was a name unbelieved by many; it was ironic.

“Jews, close your ears!” a prairie dog barked.

“Greeks, harden your hearing!” a rattlesnake voiced.

“Covenanters, avert your senses lest you be affronted by it!” a bullbat spoke in a series of little booms.

“What I say is that Lem is lucky to have done even as well as this,” Griselda said.

This was the evening of the following day after the conversation with the Conglomerate gentlemen and with the sibyl and the python. It was a few hundred miles distant from the previous scene, and Griselda Windfall, having found her way somehow to an interior place, was dining with a funny little creature in a funny little restaurant. They were set down to a fine compendium of the new edible clays and stones. It was a queer, refractory sort of place, but Griselda had adjusted to it in everything except her eyes and her mind. Her dinner date had been getting smaller, and the café-restaurant had been getting stranger and more intimate.

“I knew, of course, that Smithstone Clay had become edible,” she said, “but I had no idea that one could now eat Dogtooth Rock or Ganister or Mealing Stone. I sure did not have any idea that they were so excellent.”

“Ah, yes, we are about to rehabilitate very many of the rocks and ores and metals. We will adapt them to Earth,” Griselda's dinner companion said. He was a bent sort of little gnome with bright and peering eyes. “We can find a dozen uses for every one of them. The folks here were needing some new ideas when I came along. Oh, coal and oil and gas are good enough, and they couldn't be had by regular people without the aid of folks who had fallen into my case. But people appreciate new benisons. Yes, and it is an act of charity and compensation to supply these new things, I believe. Stilbite, Amazonstone, Aztec Money — ah, they are wonderful stones, and we are finding wonderful uses for them.”

“Toad's-Eye Tin, Asparagus Stone, Dry-bone Ore,” Griselda murmured fondly. “My husband, Lemuel, thought he could do great things with them if ever he could find an appropriate working place and conditions. Listen, Bright-eyes, what's good is that there can be money in these things. Somebody goofed at first and let Smithstone Clay become edible free of charge. Now that they have it in such exotic restaurants as this, though, there will be a profit in it somewhere.”

“Do you not understand that all food was originally free food?” that little gnome said with his bent smile. “Do you not know that all shelter was originally free shelter, and that all property was originally free property?”

“Didn't work, did it? And all those free things will not add up to a free trip to Paris for me. There has to be money generated somewhere. How did you become so bent, little Bright-eyes? You remind me very much of someone. How did I get here, anyhow, since the map had gone all haywire?”

“Or picketwire,” the gnome said.

“Yes, but I got here. And then both you and the place got funnier and funnier. However did you become so bent?”

“The first and second lumbar vertebrae are reversed. This emphasizes the crook in the back. It bends the head forward and down, to the ideal working and cogitational position. Really, the way that humans have their heads tilted, I don't understand how they can do any thinking or working at all. This reversing of the vertebrae makes a change in the facial expression: one must always look up and peer at another person. There are even cases where persons aren't recognized by their familiars after the change. The reversing of these spinal segments also brings a change in the thought pattern, right down where it matters. Folks have spoken mistakenly of visceral thought, but that basic thing is really spinal thought. Spinal thought is very big here. So is medical practice. The changes are all made without surgery. They are made, in fact, without the… ah… patient being touched in any way. All topographical inversions are easy in a nontopographical ambience like this.”

“And you've been topographically inverted, Bright-eyes?” Griselda asked. “You weren't always a gnome?”

“Oh, God help us all, Grissie. Being a gnome is all in the mind and in the shape.”

“What is that moaning and groaning?” she asked. “It seems to be in the background of everything in this dismal place. And why aren't there any colors here?”

“Oh, one of the requirements for a good workshop is that it be without distracting colors at all. And some folks moan and groan a lot when they're at labor. They're carrying on now like a bunch of ham actors because we've set them to work triggering easy-to-find deposits of orichalcum on Earth. We tell them that it's easier to make than coal or oil, but they whimper about having to learn something new.”

“Orichalcum? You're arranging for it to be found on Earth? Not for free, I hope?”

“You want it to be somehow otherwise, Grissie?”

“Certainly, Lem. Oh, I called you Lem — you remind me of him. I want the trick that they call the double modification set into it. I want it set in to my own gain. I'd like a few little fortunes to accrue to me, for a few little years.”

“Oh, I suppose so, Grissie. I'll have them make out a Conveyance of Patent that you can take back to Earth with you. Yes, they are moaning and groaning quite a lot. They are the uncreative folks, so they must be set to simple tasks. And simple tasks do become groaningly tedious.”

“What are the simple tasks, Bright-eyes?”

“Oh, mostly the old faithfuls. Consider all the coal and oil deposits that have been fabricated for Earth. Kobalds and goblins and gnomes, so long as they are in this place of tribulation and tribute, are forced to serve the people with these products. Yes, the legends of them working in mines and wells under the roots of mountains are true ones. The making of these things is the hard part. Transferring them from non-topographical ambience like this to Earth is easy. It's a law that all objects tend to locate themselves in the nearest topography. The great accumulations or deposits or gluts on Earth have been passed off as natural or quasi-natural occurrences. They aren't, Grissie, they are manufactured things, and they were manufactured here.”

“I'm promised fortunes on the orichalcum intrusions,” Griselda said. “Oh, what are some of the other things that you are making in new profusion and for new uses?”

“Oh, Mealing Stone, French Chalk, Cottonball Borax.”

“Oh, yes, yes. Lemuel was projecting work on all of those. How about Horseflesh Ore and Iron Rose?”

“We'll be ready with them quite soon, Grissie. And Mispickel and Noselite.”

“Two of Lemuel's favorites. Oh, how startling! I've been sitting here with you and not realizing that you were Lemuel. I thought you were some gnome. But at least we buried you for Lemuel, though somehow you didn't seem quite dead. If you had, I wouldn't have come here on this wild-goose ride. No wonder I got lost. The deed said Picketwire Creek, but the people in the area call it Purgatory Creek.”

“No, I don't seem quite dead, Grissie. This dying makes quite a change in some persons, but it hardly touched me at all. It upset Jasher Halfhogan seriously, very early in his life; that's why he always seemed a little strange to you. But dozens of things have happened to me that seem more decisive than dying. Ah, here's the Conveyance of Patent. They do fine engraving here, do they not? And this agrees to the double modification and assigns you the benefits. You can take this to Conglomerate Enterprises, or to Wheeler-Heelers, or to Le Conglomérat in Paris, or to any of them; and you'll be paid handsomely.”

“To Paris? Oh, if I could only get there, Lem! And with a fortune yet!”

“Oh, you can walk out of here and into any of a thousand different primary interchanges on Earth. Think Paris, and you will come out in Paris.”

“Oh, Lem, Lem! Is there anything that you need here?”

“Why don't you send me my old red sweater? There's always been so much moaning and groaning about the heat here that they have overcompensated against it. It will be nice to have my old sweater here when I work late.”

“I'll send it, Lem, I'll send it!” Griselda cried. She kissed him, or perhaps she missed him. She thought Paris. She rushed out of there. And she came out in Paris in the middle of…

… the Rue de Purgatoire. And right around the corner was Le Conglomérat, where she traded the Conveyance of Patent for a few of those fortunes. And all around every corner was Paris.

“Oh, the red light of orichalcum,” she sang, “and Paris!” For Griselda was a good-looker, now and forever. And with the kind of fortunes that she had, a good-looker like Griselda could have her heart's desire in that place.

From The Thunder Colt's Mouth

This city had been, for some time now, different from any other place in the world. It was different for its hanging onto a certain stubborn and malodorous remnant. And the most stubborn and most malodorous part of that remnant was Zabotski.

Zabotski had once been a chemist, a smelly man in a smelly trade. He had retired from being a regular chemist, as he had retired from a dozen trades, but he remained a smelly man. And there was something peculiar about even this: He wasn't smelly to the nose; he was smelly to the eye.

He was probably rich. He owned a lot of property around town. He wasn't an unreasonable landlord. He carried more people than did those who bad-mouthed him. But he had an abrasive tongue; he could outshout even Duffey in a shouting match; and he was in no way elegant.

On this particular early morning he was mumbling to himself, but when Zabotski mumbled he could be heard for half a block:

“There's a peculiar little episode hanging over our town. It's like a misshapen cloud, and it's been raining unproper stuff on us for the last several hours of the night. It's hovering like a big buzzard, like a fancy dan buzzard with three peacock tailfeathers fastened on. I think this dirty-bird episode will be a puzzler, and I may add to the puzzle. I'm going to claim that I have a main hand in it, just out of orneriness.”

Zabotski sometimes waited around and offered his arm and protection to Margaret Stone when she had finished her nightly giving-of-testimony in the Quarter. He liked to walk her back to the Pelican building with a flourish.

Protection for Margaret Stone! Aw, come down from that perch! It was rather the town and the world that needed protection from Margaret.

“He's about the last of them,” people would sometimes say about Zabotski, and they'd shake their heads. The last of what? Ah, to answer that we must go on a spree of destruction that changed the face of the town and the country and disturbed some of the underpinning of the world itself.

So this morning, Margaret Stone came in from her night in the Quarter wearing a gaudy button that read: “Royal Pop History. Are You Splendid Enough?”

“Wherever did you get that, you splendid person, you?” Mary Virginia Schaeffer asked.

“I made it,” Margaret said. “A man was wearing the big button part for his convention name-button. I took his name out and put the message in. A bunch called ‘The Society for Creative History’ or else ‘The Royal Pop Historians’ is going to hold a meeting in town. It starts today. They say their job is to get rid of a lot of unhistorical remnants in this town, just as they got rid of them in the rest of the world. I maybe better go to their thing. They may try to get rid of something I want to keep. I suspect they'll need me.”

“I used to create quite a bit of history myself,” Mary Virginia bragged, “but I don't do nearly so much of it nowadays.”

“I don't think that's quite what ‘The Society for Creative History’ means,” Margaret rattled on in her dubious voice, “but maybe it is. They have topics listed like ‘Get Rid of That Stuff,’ ‘History Made While You Wait,’ ‘It Doesn't Matter; They're Only Human,’ ‘Louts, Liars, and the Use of Historical Evidence,’ ‘The Holy Barnacle and the Pearl Beyond Price,’ ‘Waxwork History and the Ironic Flame,’ ‘The Evidential World,’ ‘Mountain Building for Fun and Profit,’ ‘History, Hypnotism, and Group Amnesia,’ ‘Whoever Were Those People Who Lived Next Door to You Yesterday?,’ ‘We Said to Get Rid of That Stuff!’ They're interesting topics. Oh, by the way, the Black Sea has disappeared, and millions of people are destroyed. It's all obliterated, and forever. The Royal Pop people say it puts an end to the old geography.”

“How could a sea be obliterated?” Mary Virginia asked. “Where did you read the announcement of such an historical meeting, Margaret? They sound like things you made up.”

“Read them? Whenever did I read anything? I'm not even sure I know how to read. I don't remember ever doing it. No, this is just something I know. Or it's something I heard.”

“Please don't go through all the recital again, Margaret. Can't you just tell me in two words what you're talking about?” Mary Virginia requested. “Absalom says that everything in the world can be described in two words.”

“I know his two words. But what I'm talking about is Pop History. Old kind of people don't understand it very well. The meeting starts today. I don't know where it is, but somebody said Duffey might know.”

“I didn't know you were interested in history, Margaret. It sure was noisy in town last night. What was happening?”

“Sure, I'm interested in history, Mary V. Papa used to have a book, History of Cook County in the Early Days. I'm from Chicago, you know.”

“I know, Margaret. Did you read the book about the history of Cook County?”

“No, I never read it, but we had it. Papa bought things like that because he was trying to get used to being an American. Anyhow, I'm real noetic, so I'll be a natural at history. What was so noisy last night was that funny wind blowing down the façades and breaking up the old people and the old animals. It left a lot of trash in the streets. Not only that, but there's so many parks and courtyards and places this morning that weren't there yesterday that it causes one to wonder. They sure are gracious places.”

“What old people and old animals are you talking about, Margaret? What funny wind? What façades? How did they break up?”

“Gee, Mary V., I think some of them were from old Mardi Gras floats, or they were planned for the new floats next season. They were breaking up everything that wasn't splendid enough. There's one dragon big enough to load three floats pretty heavy. It's still alive a little bit.”

“Are you talking about live people and animals, Margaret? And what are these new parks and courtyards and places you're jabbering about?”

“Oh, the people and animals are mostly papier-mâché or rubber or styrofoam or plastic; after they break up and die, that's what's left of them. But some of them were pretty lively before the end. There was one fire drake (or he was half man and half fire drake) that bit a lady on the leg and got blood all over the street. Some people took her to Dr. Doyle with it. ‘That's a terrible bite,’ he said. ‘I think it gave you infectious draconitis. You have to show me what bit you.’ He went out with the people to look at it. When he found out that it was just a fire drake made out of rubber, and that it was fabulous besides, he didn't know what to think. But a laboratory has checked what the lady has and it's infectious draconitis all right. They think she'll die.”

“Margaret, what sort of convention was going on in town last night?”

“Oh, just three or four very ordinary ones. No, this is straight dope, Mary V.: I wasn't cordial on the stuff last night. And the courtyards and parks and nooks aren't new except for not being there before. They're quite old and weathered, and they're full of almost the biggest trees in town. They're very bright. New things aren't usually that bright and pleasant. And the thing that chokes you is that nobody remembers what was in those places yesterday. ‘I live there,’ one man said — you know him, he's that Russian, Sarkis Popotov — ‘and now there's a place next door to me named Artaguette Park. It looks unfamiliar to me, but some of these horsy tourists in town say that it'll look familiar by tomorrow. There's room for about three buildings to be there, where the park is this morning. I've lived there for forty years, and I know there were some kind of buildings next to me, but I sure can't remember what they were!’ That's what old Sarkis said. And there are other places like that. The town's full of them this morning.”

“What were the people in the Quarter drinking last night, Margaret?”

“Green Ladies, mostly,” Margaret Stone said. “You know, like peppermint schnapps except with absinthe instead of schnapps. That's what everyone has been drinking all week. Why don't you go with me to the Pop History meetings today, Mary Virginia?”

Margaret was small and intense, with a large voice that was saved from stridency only by a certain music in it. She was Italian and Jewish, with possibly a little bit of the Greek and preadamite in her. She would have been beautiful in repose, but no one had ever seen her so. So, at least, an old describer has described her. But he didn't mention the terrible tragedy and passion that were sometimes in her face: it was because too few people listened to what her musical voice said. The passion and tragedy in her face had increased lately. So had a certain threat that refused to give its name.

And Mary Virginia, her associate at the Pelican, had everything. Her kindness was extreme, but lately it had acquired a vacant quality, as though she could no longer remember just whom to be kind to. Her beauty alone would knock you off your stool forever. That had happened to a number of fellows. It wasn't true that her beauty had begun to fail in the last several decades. It had become deeper and fuller.

“As you know, I seldom get out of this place, Margaret,” she said. “And the Pops don't sound as attractive as all that. There are very many things going on this week, if I should get out. Horny Henderson is on the trumpet at the Imperial John. They have a new singer at Red Neck's. Justin says that the Jazz Museum has so much new stuff over there that it'd take a week to see and hear it all. The Presentation at the Decatur Street Opera House this week will transcend everything. We have to go there tonight. There's a big bunch of new painters in the galleries and around Pirates Alley, and Duffey says that one of the new ones could almost be the ghost of Finnegan, the way he uses his oranges. There's a couple of Dominicans giving a mission at St. Katherine's; it's full of hellfire just like when we were kids. They say that our world will end right here this week. The Nostalgia Club should get hold of them. ‘As American as hellfire and apple pie,’ as Mencken used to write. You want me to go to a Pop History banger, and you don't even know where they're having it?”

The scene changes to just around the corner, over on Bienville or Conti or whatever street it is that Duffey has his establishments on. Yes, there had been a new breeze blowing through the night. It was blowing down the façades with a rattling and crashing. And what kind of impression is that to be received by a man who is still asleep?

The scenery, the façades, the false fronts were toppling and breaking up in the streets outside; there was the sound of tearing canvas and scorching rubber and stuttering styrofoam. It wasn't a joke. It was all straight impression. There really was something noisy and airish going on outside in the streets. It was like a strong experience of anthropomorphic colts, a great clatter of them.

“A Strong Experience of Anthropomorphic Colts!” Duffey howled, and he came out of that bed on his misshapen feet. “I've woke up with a mouth full of some pretty crocky phrases before, but these anthropomorphic colts outrace them all.”

Duffey had been wakened by the strong breeziness that morning. He usually slept unencumbered, and there was never much of a chill at any season in that town. Most times, even in the early morning hours, it is hotter outside than inside, away from the radiating heat of the sidewalks and streets and people. And there is seldom much of a breeze in these narrow streets. It's even said that any breeze must go through them sideways. Well, this breeze was going through with a great bumping at every door and wall. Duffey knew without looking that his front door was standing open and that there was a new breeze blowing.

Duffey never locked his doors, but sometimes (late at night) he did close them. He had inventories worth many thousands of dollars. These formed the heart of Melchisedech Duffey's Walk-in Art Bijou. And the bijou, the pawnshop, the various other enterprises, his living quarters, his very body were all members of this one establishment. He would not lock up any of them.

Yes, the door was wide open. It opened inward, as did Duffey himself. And there was a notice nailed to it. It was on some sort of yellowed old poster cardboard, and it was nailed to the door with a long and ancient nail.

Duffey read the notice or message. It was in the new style of writing, so it was a non-verbatim message. The words “Pop History” leaped at him. Then other and more fearsome words came and ate up those first words and established themselves with an easy arrogance. Slogans like “We Said To Get Rid Of That Stuff ” and “It Doesn't Matter; They're Only Human” took their places on the scroll; and then other phrases came forward, and these withdrew to less emphatic levels. The whole thing was a proclamation, but a very tricky one.

Then Duffey read what he could of it again, with disbelief and near alarm. There was a difficulty about the words (Duffey still had some trouble with the new style of writing, even though words were one of his trades), but there didn't seem to be much doubt about the first meaning. Duffey was sociable; he was hospitable; but the message mentioned numbers that were overwhelming. It stated that he was favored to lodge two hundred or more royal persons at his establishment. It stated that these were serious persons of a scientific sort, persons of blazing beauty and towering mentality and perfumed perversion and breath-catching art; all this in the intensity and scope of the thunder dimension. It stated that such splendid persons were used to the best in accommodations. And it implied that Duffey was selected (the verb isn't clear here; the verb is never clear in the new style of expression) for this honor because of his great age and erudition. And it gave the name of the convening society. But something was missing from the name and the message, something that can only be called verbatimness. There were very tricky things about the words of a message refusing to stand fast and be accounted for.

This Duffey has been called “a patriarch without seed, a prophet without honor, and a high-sounding brawler.” He was a man of uncertain age (this fact about him had assumed importance lately); and he was a willful man who was held on peculiar checkrein — he did not know by whom. But he was a spacious man, and he could be forgiven many inconsistencies.

Duffey rocked on his feet and lowered at the writing and thought about it while he woke up by degrees. It was a ritual sort of thing that was nailed to his door, and it deserved a ritual answer. Duffey got a pen and a bowl and wrote an answer in his hieratic hand at the bottom of the scroll. It was not old poster cardboard that the scroll was made out of; it was now seen to be old parchment. Duffey wrote:

Royal Pop People, I am honored. And you are welcome. But my facilities are quite limited, as is my credit. I will be host to as many of you as I can. No man can do more. Somehow you will all be taken care of.

 — Melchisedech Duffey

He paused for a while and stirred the ink in the bowl. Then he wrote a bit more:

If this is a hoax, then it's a howling hoax.

Out of affectation Duffey wrote all official things with this squid ink that he kept in a bowl. This is the finest ink ever. It will not coagulate. Write anything at all in squid ink. Then write something else beside it in ordinary ink. Come back in three thousand years and notice the difference. The one will remain true, the other will have paled. But squid ink had gone out of fashion. The prime message on the parchment, however, was also written in squid ink, and there weren't many people who used it these last few centuries.

Duffey examined the parchment, and later he would examine it again and again. “We will come back to you, skin of a horny goat,” he said. “Oh, how we will come back to you!” He turned his attention then to the nail that held it. It was large, and it appeared very sharp. It was not, as Duffey had at first thought, either brass or bronze. It was a copper-iron nail, and it was of old Macedonian workmanship. Odd, but not very, for there were in that city many members of the Society of Creative Anachronisms, a social, historical and dramatic society. These people were all friends of Duffey, and Duffey suspected them of a hoax. They put great effort into some of their hoaxes.

Duffey, a widow man of loose and informal establishment, now made himself ready for the day and its apparent adventure. He caught again the whiff of the new breeze blowing; and part of that whiff was made up of putridity, that emanation of changes a-working. He dressed, daubed whiting on his beard and hair (they had both been turning disquietingly black lately), and went out into the streets to find comradeship and adventure and breakfast. Yes, there was indeed a new breeze blowing. It wasn't a great air mover of a breeze, but it brought a rumbling freshness, a bracing and reminiscent aroma, a rakish sense of rot, and an altogether vivid accord with things as they were and as they were becoming.

And it brought a sudden and happy discord with things as they had not been before. Certainly there had always been several buildings right next to Duffey's place, on the left when one comes out. And just as certainly, those structures of whatever kind were not standing there now. Just what was there now was a little harder to say. One couldn't get a clear view of the area, and one wouldn't have believed his eyes if he had been able to get a clearer view. The powers shouldn't spring these things on a man so early in the morning. Something was in the act of being born in that area. There were bales of greenery; there were bales of shadow. There were other bright things already there or arriving, but this pleasant confusion hadn't quite put itself together yet.

The streets were trashy, although trash trucks were everywhere cleaning them up. Here and there, the sidewalks were slippery with blood, but it was blood of no great validity. There was a lot of synthetic fiber lying around, and very little of the authentic flesh.

And there were a few newly homeless cur dogs and vacant oddity people and evil spirits skulking about the site. They had been dislocated from their places and from their forms. And their new and unpleasant confusion was another thing that hadn't been able to put itself together yet. “It's you who have destroyed my house and my body,” one of the uncreations hissed at Duffey. Duffey could not determine whether it was a cur dog or a snake or a spirit or a person. “It's you who have done it with that rectitude of yours.” Duffey did have his rectitude, but these uncreations did not seem to have much of anything.

“I cannot in any way remember who lived next door to me here,” Duffey mumbled into his beard (not to the uncreations, but to himself), “or who it was who transacted business in this place so near to my own. This is a puzzle. And yet I've lived and worked here for several decades, and various persons have lived here beside me. I now suspect that they were nothing people all the time and that they have descended to their perdition or oblivion.”

Duffey walked a block and noticed a handful of other disappearances and changes, as well as several pleasant new arrivals. Some of the broken-up puppets or dummies in the streets reminded him of persons whom he had known. Some of them opened effigy mouths and croaked at him in voices he had known. The discarded little abominations were almost in bad taste.

But not everything had changed. Duffey entered one of the old and gracious places that had remained (considerably enlarged, though, it seemed) and sat down with a happy sigh. And a friend was sitting with him instantly (it always happens in that place).

“I hear that you are playing host to some sort of historical group, Duffey,” Absalom Stein was saying as they sat together and planned a breakfast in Girardeau's Irish Restaurant. Absalom was an Israelite in whom there was much guile, but he averaged out to a good man, and sometimes he wrote for the Investigator as well as the Bark.

“How long is their convention going to last, Duffey?”

“I don't know at all,” Duffey said. “All I remember are the words ‘Pop History.’ Then other words came out and gobbled them up and began to make demands for two hundred or more people. You seem to know something about it, so I suspect you're in on the hoax.”

“No, I'm not, Duff, but I may get in on it. Why shouldn't I know about it? We have all become intuitive since we began to realize that we were the pleasant people. But there's a lot of loose stuff floating around town this morning, and I suspect that your Royal Pop History bunch may be a handle to take hold of it by. I'm afraid they're going to make us give up a lot of our old items as not being splendid enough to keep.”

“No, this man is not in on it,” the young lady said to Duffey, “though I now invite him to join us. Oh, we never know how long these things will last. We will be in session till we get certain points settled and certain remnants rooted out. Your friend here, the Stein, is worried because a few people have gone away and he can't remember who they were. I say that if one can't remember them, then it's a good thing they're gone. If they were superb, then they would be remembered. Let them pass out of all memory and be no more.”

This young lady had “Royal Pop People” written all over her. She was the Countess, a teenage archetype among the splendids.

“But I have a peculiar passion for unmemorable persons,” Absalom Stein said carefully. “I feel that I'm responsible for some few of them whom nobody else would bestow a thought on. I suspect that it's just that they are swallowed by oblivion if nobody remembers them at all, and it then would become the case of their never having existed at all. I can feel a dozen or so of them now, hanging on by the very nails of their fingers to the rim of oblivion, bawling against extinction, but almost certainly doomed to drop into that pit or cauldron and be extinguished. So it will be with them if somebody will not give them a thought. Of all people left in the world, I come closest to remembering them; I know that; but I cannot come close enough. I could bring them back from nothingness if I could form their faces in my mind. I can't. But I'll still try it.”

“You are playing with very sticky fire, the Absalom,” the young Countess said. “It may be that you go with them where they have gone if you show such unhealthy interest.”

“What is it that you call your society, lady?” Duffey asked. Duffey couldn't remember just when this lady had sat down with them at table. He couldn't remember whether he knew who she really was. He seemed very slow at waking up this morning.

“Sometimes we call ourselves the Thunder Harps,” the lady said, “and sometimes we call ourselves other things. How is it that you have to ask me the name of our group? You are a man of very great age and honor, and you are an affiliate of ours.”

“What? Am I a Thunder Harp?” Duffey cried with breakfast heartiness. He was dislocated and confused by this new air of change or mutation, but he would never admit his confusion to the world.

“Oh, of course,” the young lady said. “You've been one of us almost forever. You're one of the perennial bushes. I suspect you're thousands of years old. You have those little green moss marks at the corners of your eyes, and there are many other signs. Why does it scare you, Duffey, when people spot you as one of the very old ones? Don't you want to be old and honored? And whyever should it startle you when you feel the green seasons returning to you and you know that you'll be appearing younger and younger for a few decades? You've surely been through these happenings often enough. How old are you anyhow?”

Well, how old did this lady think she was? She seemed about seventeen years old. She wore a scent named “Timeless,” and who could be sure of her? She was just one of the new Royal Pop People who had taken over the directorship of everything. And how did she happen to be eating breakfast with them?

“Duffey, you've been using whiting on your beard and hair again,” Stein accused. “Why do you do it? Why not let them turn black again? If you're supposed to be young for a few decades, then be young. Really, you'd look better young, and I can't think of anyone else of whom that's the case. You were always very boyish. But just what is behind this ‘green seasons’ affair that the lady is talking about? And just how old are you anyhow, Duffey?”

“I don't know quite what all the young lady is talking about,” Duffey said. “But I'd wondered for a long time why you all hadn't noticed that I've been growing younger.”

“What is to notice?” Stein asked. “When I was a boy in Chicago, you were an old man. Quite old, Duffey. When I met you again this last time, thirty or so years ago, you still seemed several decades older than the rest of us, but not nearly so old as you had been earlier. Now you seem several decades younger than the rest of us. That's all there is to it. It's sort of a silly way that you have of getting attention, Duffey, and to notice it would only be to humor you.”

“It isn't as though it hadn't happened to you before, Duffey,” the lady said. The young lady had an impudent and archaic grin. She was bright and fundamental, as though several of the duller outer layers had been lifted from her. Duffey had terra cotta figurines in his bijou that very much resembled this young lady and her grin, and some of them were fakes. The terra cotta process and its finish are easily faked; the archaic grin is more difficult. But who was to say that this mysterious young lady was not a fake? She seemed disquietingly genuine though. Duffey had felt a real chill at the mention of the anomaly of his own unaging. It had never been mentioned aloud before. And the new breeze a-blowing today was not really new. It was an old, old breeze with its green seasons returning.

“What has barnacle removing to do with history?” Stein suddenly asked the lady. He must have seen the prospectus of the subject, “The Holy Barnacle and the Pearl Beyond Price,” and he must have sensed the irony of calling the barnacle holy. Duffey recalled that the non-verbatim notice on his door had mentioned barnacle removing somewhere.

The young Countess did not answer. She had the air of supposing that it would be a little bit infra to answer so obvious a question as Stein had posed.

“Duffey, you'd better get back to your place,” Mary Virginia Schaeffer said as she came into Girardeau's Irish Restaurant. “There's quite a crowd of people over there, and they look like the lively sort who don't appreciate being crowded. If any of us can help you out, just let us know. What was going on in town during the night, anyhow? Margaret Stone was being very noetic about something, and the streets do have a different look to them this morning. I just don't know what to make of some of that trash. It wrings my heart the way some of it looks like old friends of forgotten names. It's as though blinders had been put on my eyes and on my mind as regards some of these smashed things. People say that everything that isn't really splendid has got to go. Why does it have to go? Why?”

“Do you not be asking such unsplendid questions, the Mary Virginia,” the young Countess said. “It may be that you will have to go also.”

Mary Virginia bought a sack of Girardeau's special greaseless doughnuts and some tabouli wheat. Then she went out again. She had a scattering of gray hairs in the bewitching halo that framed her face. Duffey hadn't noticed that about her before, and he'd known her for about thirty years. Perhaps she was acquiring the gray that he was losing. And it was natural that she should turn from a beautiful young lady to a beautiful middle-aged lady with the attrition of the years. Those things happen to everybody.

To everybody except Duffey. Duffey would need a change of blood if he kept getting those chilling thoughts. He knew now that he was very old, and that this business of his getting younger for a few decades was a very old business indeed.

“Yes, I'd better get back to my place,” he said. “I hadn't expected guests to arrive so early in the morning. I wonder why they chose me.”

“There is no need for you to hurry, Duffey,” the young Countess said. “We are all perfectly able to make ourselves at home everywhere. I'm sure my associates have taken possession of your things. We aren't at all backward about affairs like that. And we chose you because we like you, because you are already one of us, and because you are the oldest person in this town.”

“Ah, just how many of you are there in town?” Duffey asked. “I forget.”

“And what did you say was the name of your society?” Stein asked. “I also forget.”

“Legion,” the Countess said. That was the answer to both their questions.

“I am going to check some courthouse records and tax rolls,” Stein said when they were out in the street. “These disappeared and unremembered buildings and properties must have left records behind them. I will worry till I find the answers.”

“Oh, ancient Stein, you'll not find them that way,” the Countess chided him. “Those were nothing buildings and properties, and they were inhabited by nothing people. Get that into your head, or you may be reclassified as a nothing person yourself. And, no, they will not have left any traces or records.”

“I must find out,” Stein said. “What? Am I an ancient one, too?”

“Old, yes, old,” said the young Countess with the archaic grin. “But not so old as the Duffey.”

Stein went off to check courthouse records and tax rolls. He returned and went again several times. He was nervous about getting to the bottom of this business.

“Be along and get your own little piece of the neighborhood straightened out,” Zabotski called to Duffey a little later as Duffey was hurrying home. “Your place is clear out of order, Duff. Straighten it out or I'll have the pack of you assailed for Unlawful Assembly or with Unseemly Crowding in Countervention of the Fire Laws. Man, what is it over at your place, a mob scene from Hades? First they overflowed your place, and now they're impinging on mine. I have the feeling that these are the latter days of the world, for me maybe, not necessarily for everyone. Say, Duffey, didn't I used to own some buildings that were just next door to you on the right as you go in? It seems like I did, but I forget.”

“So do I forget it, Zabotski,” Duffey said sadly. “But the things that are disappeared and forgotten were probably owned by some such an easily forgotten person as yourself.”

“Will you forget me, Duffey, if I perish this night?” crude Zabotski asked.

“Aye, I'll forget you,” Duffey said. “It would be easy to say I'll remember you, but I'll recall not the least lump of you.”

“Duffey, thou cladhaire, I'll split thy head!” Zabotski sputtered in stylized fury.

“Have a care, Eabhraioch,” Duffey bantered him. “Your tongue will turn black and fall out if you misuse the holy language so. Quiet, Zabotski, quiet!”

And Duffey hurried along home. It was just around the corner from where they talked. But the irritation drained away from him as he neared his home and got a look at the throng that had taken it over. A mob? Yes. Unseemly crowding? Perhaps. Unlawful assembly? Oh no, you can't cite folks of such high quality for unlawful assembly. The mob — oh, the essential thing about this mob was that it was a mob with class. Even the mobbish sound of it was a vivid orchestration. It was a finely done instrumentation of happy thunder and mountain echoes, with a strong underlay of the “roaring river” timbre. Every mob has its own tone. Well, this mob had a pleasant, though challenging, tone to it, and it rang like thousands of large gold coins.

And look at the confabulating people who made up that noisy bunch! Duffey was reminded of a phrase used by the Lord Himself for an earlier mob “In the Brightness of Saints.” He was reminded of the phrase “the Splendid People” that they used for themselves. And Duffey was delighted with them, even though it was his own place they were near to bursting the walls out of.

There is much to be said for elegant shouting and brimming banter when it is used by such really elegant folks with their silver tongues and bronze lungs. These were people with a stunning style and with a rippling and dazzling color and costume. But how could there be so many of them here? The very presence of such folks had effected a growth and change in Duffey's buildings. This was the new sort of calculation that was called the Geometry of the Shining Spaces.

His house was much larger than he himself remembered it. He went through the back rooms and through those rooms that were still farther behind them. There were constructions in Duffey's own intrepid and inexact carpentry everywhere. As a carpenter, Duffey was one of the great originals. He himself had built all the rooms of these buildings except the front two tiers, which had already been there when he came. But had he built as many rooms as these? He was like a man encountering strange things in his own handwriting. “It's my own writing, but when did I write such things?” he might say. “It's my carpentry, but whenever did I carpenter such rooms as these?” he did say. Many of the back rooms had to intrude onto a piece of property that belonged to Zabotski. There was no calculation whatever that would allow them to be on Duffey's own land.

“Ah, I can't think of any overbearing neighbor I'd rather intrude on,” Duffey thought with laughter. But the building couldn't have extended so deeply before today, or Zabotski would have made the howling trespass known to the whole town.

Duffey explored through the bright crowds in his own art bijou, through those in his secondhand book store, through those in his pawnshop, through those in his auditorium, through those in his soup kitchen, and through those in his flophouse. Never had the place been so full except for the few times when he had staged those Original-Masterpieces-for-Eighty-five-Cents-Frame-and-All Saturday sales. But these crowds today were made out of extraordinary people, exuberant as colts, touchy as velours, bright as primary-color-baked terra cotta, superior in their scoundrelry and saintliness, big-bellied with fresh life and invention, incredibly urbane and sophisticated, adolescent and arty and archaic, all at the same time.

Oh, Duffey knew some of them, of course. There was the child-hero; there was the hoyden; there was the Countess (how had she got there before him when he had started sooner?); there was the Sanctimonious Sam. But are these not types? No, they are people; they are everlasting and omnipresent people; and, though it seems as if there were more, there is only one of each. Who would ever make types of such as these?

And there were more local and less generalized folks. There was Danny Degas, who was history professor at Luno College there in town; Hugh de Turenne, who was deep in the humanities at Xavier; Sister Mary Susanna of Ursuline Academy; Robert Darnley, who was historian-in-residence at Dillard. And there were the dozen of those tome-toting eccentrics from the deep Quarter, who had each been working for thirty years on a thirty-volume history of the world.

There were the fine experts in the special fields of history: Berny Cacciatore, who was the finest historian in the world on boxing and other sports; Bulo Belonki, who was the nonpareil historian of jazz. There were high historians from all over the world — some known to Duffey, some known only to God. There were the flash-wits who were not thought of as orthodox historians. These were all nimble people. History had just made a fundamental change in itself with the defeat and obliteration of its old subject matter and the triumph of the new, just as the art of geometry and the art of words had made deep changes in themselves to accommodate new conditions.

There were also present many eminent persons in the field of hard science. There were physicists and exophysicists, chemists, nuclear nabobs. There were biologists and brain stylers and mathematicians. And here also were the psychologists and the cultural Gestalten and transcendental philosophers. There were music folks, artist folks, and both grid and linear narrators. Since history included everything, Duffey supposed that all these folks belonged. After all, there were such things as pop biology and pop veterinary medicine and pop theology and pop open-heart surgery. There was pop astronomy and pop aerodynamics. They all had to be nimble persons, since all their sciences were now to be employed by the new and fearlessly nimble brains. Everyone here was clearly highly qualified, of the veriest elite. But even that many highly qualified persons will take up a lot of room. There must have been a thousand unassorted persons crowded into Duffey's buildings, and there was not a doused light or an emptyhead among them.

A ram's horn blew a towering blast. And it was time for the first sessions to begin. The first speaker had a smiling and unhurried incandescence about him; he spoke with a high and singing voice that can only be described as bridled thunder laughing down into valleys that weren't there yesterday, and as hoofs pounding through flame-green grass. But why put it so fancy? He spoke like a thunder colt.

“We are all pleased to see one another,” he began. “We return to our continuing and never really interrupted sessions now. We ask again (it should be the oldest one of us present who asks it, but Duffey's tongue hasn't been taught nimbleness yet) the ritual question: ‘What is History?’ And the answer comes: ‘History is everything that has happened up till now.’ And then we ask (it should be the youngest one of us here present who asks it): ‘What is now?’ And so we move into our pleasant discussions and difficulties. Now is the all-embracing moment, so our answer really is ‘History is everything in the now.’ Or simply ‘History is Everything.’

“Our fun and our fascination will always be to track the kits of the wild history cat to their lair: it is to winnow the golden dust that we call historical evidence and to discover that it is really the green dust of life. And we can track the kits; we can winnow the dusts to a final arrival and solution every time. There is nothing that can hide from history, or from ourselves, who are the shapers and pruners of history. Where would anything hide? Everything is in the momentous now, and we are the lords of this now.” The speaker wore a rakish and gaudy turban, and a gaudy and exuberant gem, or eye, sparkled and winked from the middle of it.

“These are not ghosts of the past that we track down and set right. Really, there are no ghosts. There are only some persons and things that are wasted more than others. And there is no ‘past.’ There are certain times and incidents that have been misplaced. But we can find them, buried in barrows or trapped under the cement of barnacles, and we can free them from their incrustations. But even we adepts are in danger of thinking in terms of the inimical incrustations and surrogates, in treating some events as though they were not still happening. If a thing is not still happening, then how will it be revised? It is for the ordering and revision and clarification that we come together for these continuing meetings. That, and to reassure ourselves, and to enjoy one another's company.

“As we as a people arrive at our full splendor, then we create a splendid history for ourselves, and we devise noetic and sophisticated and splendid techniques. Ah, the tracking down, the digging up, the freeing, with the finest weapons and tools ever, that's where the fun is. It is the rich ritual of historical evidence, the forming in our hands of what was, and is, and what shall be. We shall keep it all in our hands. A line by an always contemporary poet reads ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water,’ as though that name might become difficult to read after the water had grown old and forgetful. The reading would never be difficult, of course — not to initiates like ourselves. Even the writing of it on rapidly running water would make its reading just about difficult enough to be interesting. It's always easy to develop transparencies from living water.

“I have heard it said by an erudite man that it would be wonderful to have located recording microphones at various spots in the time and place of history. Oh, but it has been done. We use such microphones all the time! I have never found a dingle or dale on this earth in which there were not many such microphones. Stones are the most common recorders. Everywhere, to a person with informed eyes and ears, these stones shine and shout their presence. It is in their thin (but not so thin as a non-historian might imagine) patinas that we may read complete histories.

“We commonly lift or peel off transparencies at six-second intervals. Each such transparency will give a detailed and accurate analysis of the air for its period, temperature, direction of wind, light intensity (whether in shade or sunlight or dark night or bright night, even, from the angle of the shine, the hour of the day, and the day of the year), sulphur content of the air, significant pollen, aroma, and quality generally. Do you realize that it would take fewer than three hundred billion such six-second intervals, fewer than three hundred billion such transparencies to carry us back through the last fifty thousand years of history, the period in which we are interested, the period since our own first appearance? We can go deeper, of course, but frankly we have not the technique to go more than ten times deeper, or to about half a million years. Beyond that, we lose accuracy. But why should we go deeper than our own period? In those murky depths, we find only animals and uncouth creatures and peoples who are not ourselves.

“But we can slice the transparencies much thinner than six seconds. We can slice them down to a hundredth of a second for any period we wish to focus on. The six-second interval is merely cruising speed or hunting speed. The patinas deposited on good rock surfaces can be lifted down to the thickness of a single molecule.

“Complete visual pictures, from any aspect or direction, can be reconstructed of anything whose light or shadow fell even indirectly on one of our stones. We can get detailed pictures of animals, of plants, of people as they lived and moved thousands of years ago. We can reconstruct color pictures of the clouds moving overhead, and we can read the spectra of those clouds. We can reconstruct anything that was ever visible, that was ever to be discerned by any of the senses, that was ever subject to any sort of analysis. Give us a dozen tuned stones (they resonate to each other, and those of the same locale will always know each other) and we can reconstruct a complete countryside for any period we wish. Nor would upheavals which seem to scramble the record make as much difference as you might suppose.

“We can trap sounds and play them back with perfect fidelity. We can play the song of the ancestral cicada that had two more chromosomes than have its descendants. The old cicada (it is only coincidence) has two more notes to its song. We can say what the two disappeared chromosomes were. We can even, by very advanced technique, duplicate those chromosomes.

“And smells! Of course they are even more simple than sounds to lift in the transparencies. We can go back and pick up nearly every scene complete for the last fifty thousand years. We can do it at ten times that depth, if there were anything interesting happening there. And patinas and deposits on stones are only one of the dozens of tools that we have for such historical reconstruction.”

“If I had a rock in this room, could it tell me the hanky-panky that my husband pulls when I'm gone?” a woman asked. She was a walk-in from the street, a mere jaywalker: she wasn't an associate of the Pop Historians. “If it takes a special rock, where could I get one?” she asked.

“Oh, it takes at least a dozen seasons to set patina layers so that they can be removed as transparencies,” the speaker said. “I don't know why this is so, but it does protect and make privileged all current information from the hot eyes and gawky ears of suspicious persons. You wouldn't be interested in hanky-panks that are more than a dozen years old, would you?”

“I sure would,” the woman said. “I want to find out about them as far back or as close up as I can go. Where can I find one of these rocks?”

“Oh, any rock will do,” the speaker said. “But just any technician will not do. We exercise a certain discretion in just what the patinas should reveal. But many things other than rocks have secrets.”

“Aye, goatskins have secrets too,” Duffey told his beard. He had been thinking about the parchment that he had found nailed to his door that morning. Now he was inspired to use his own technique to lift transparencies and tracings from it. The parchment was still on the door. Duffey realized that it was a proclamation and was intended to remain there for the stay of the Royal Pop Historians.

He rolled a violet light through the throng and to the door. Several of the people — the child-hero, the hoyden, the Countess and others — were very interested in his doings. They followed him about as he made his hookup.

“Why do you use that obsolete apparatus?” the child-hero asked him. “There is nothing intuitive about it at all, nothing dumfounding. I wouldn't be caught dead with an apparatus that wasn't in some way dumfounding.” Duffey's violet light was not obsolete. He had bought it that very year. His older violet light had been obsolete but still workable. But neither of them had been very intuitive or dumfounding in their operation.

“What is with you children?” Duffey demanded. “This does not make great speeches, but it works. Well, what is the latest thing you Pop Historians would use to divine the depth of this goatskin?”

“For such primary work as that, where the levels are of the doings and undoings of people (some of them probably human), and with so few such recordings, a peach branch would probably be the newest and most sophisticated device,” the child-hero said. “It must be a forked branch, and it must be cut like — ”

“Like a dowser's forked stick,” Duffey finished. “Yes, I have one of them somewhere. I often use it. And also I often use my violet light here.” In his business as art dealer and pawnbroker, Duffey often examined things by his violet light. It would bring out underlays of paintings. It would bring out filed-off serial numbers of pawned equipment. And also he often used his dowser's forked stick (his was from a red peach tree). It would tell whether blood had been shed in the history of an article or artifact. It would tell particularly whether there was a murder in the history of ownership of an item (only the forked rod of the red peach tree would tell this latter). But the forked sticks told all these things scientifically and not intuitively.

For this particular job, the violet light was best. The parchment was a palimpsest, written over many times and scraped imperfectly. Its latest underlay was quickly made manifest under the violet light. It consisted of some unfamiliar verses of Boethius, but in his overly familiar style.

“I never cared for his doggerel,” Duffey said. “It would be valuable in a money way, I suppose, but essentially his stuff is completely worthless. May the weed-cutter take him!”

“He was never really one of our group,” the child-hero said. “There was just too much of the human element in him.”

The next latest underlay was a first-century copy (or the original) of the Fourth Gospel. It had the sweep of understanding and authority in its lettering.

“A fine hand,” Duffey said. “I wonder if it was his own?”

“Oh, it was, it was,” the hoyden said. “Did you ever know him, Duffey? He was one of our group. And he was so patient and thoughtful. He once put up more than two hundred of us in a small sheepshed. I don't know how he did it, but he made us feel at home. That was one of the better segments of our always continuing meeting. Yes, this is the original. But of course the thing can be found in print now, so there's no need to save even good hand.”

The third latest underlay was a spate of priceless drivel of the classical Greek era. Well, what more can one say about it? It was priceless. And it was drivel.

“It's fake, of course,” the child-hero said. “All of the classical period was a fake. There wasn't any classical period. You'll hear more of that. It's a favorite colt of Cyrus Roundhead, who will be speaking by and by.”

Then, a bit deeper on the goatskin, there was a highly polished passage of epic from one of the pre-pre-Homerics.

“No need to flash that into the light of the day,” Duffey said. “It would only confuse the scholars.”

“He belonged to us once,” the child-hero said, “but then the weed-chopper cut him down. There were lots of defections among the pre-pre's.”

A bit earlier then, and there was an imposing, closely written, clearly alphabetical screed from the pre-alphabetical time. It might easily establish itself as the earliest alphabetical writing known. And below this there were many depths of writings and scrapings. But Duffey, not wishing to tip his hand, went no deeper.

“Times are hard,” he whispered hoarsely in his shyster voice, for he had come under the influence of a part of himself that he could never control, “and I don't know where the devil I'd ever find a buyer for the thing. But I feel generous today, and I cannot resist the plea in your entreating eyes. I'll go nine dollars for this worthless old piece of goatskin.”

There were peals of laughter from the child-hero and the Countess and several others of the people there. But for the kindliness of it, the laughter would have shriveled Duffey irreparably. The laughter meant that the parchment was not for sale. It meant that not nine or even nine million dollars would touch it. It meant that Duffey was a perfect clown. So he accepted that role. But he would dearly have loved to have that parchment for nine dollars or even nine thousand. He put his violet light away. The parchment would never lodge permanently in Melchisedech Duffey's Walk-in Art Bijou.

Back in the auditorium, the main and largest room of the Duffey buildings, the opening speaker was still holding forth on stones and their patinas.

“We forget that our time scale is purely conventional,” he was saying, “and that all events are pretty much simultaneous. Take the case of God, and the Person who presently holds most persuasive claim to that position. There was a sort of vacancy several months ago and the question was which strong man would seize the opportunity. There was one (who almost certainly had suffered a human interval) who had mutated quite recently (though some maintain that it was his second mutation) and who had learned the total trick of time dealing while doing so. He then intruded himself back into time, into history and history's records, into the oceanic unconscious mind that is shared by both creatures and uncreatures — and so he became God. Certainly he is all-powerful and all-knowing and all-present now; part of his peculiar mutation was his mastering of the tricks of power and knowledge and location. And certainly he created the worlds. At least he created the historical evidence that he had created the worlds. That's almost the same thing.”

“How long has he been established in this position?” Duffey asked from the floor.

“About three weeks,” the easy speaker said.

“I'd certainly challenge one who went back no further than that in his power,” Duffey maintained stubbornly, “even if his power included the mastery of historical evidence and of simultaneousness.”

“Oh, he is being challenged,” the speaker said. “There are at least three main challengers. Back to our subject, for simultaneity remains a deep mystery that is beyond many of us. Stones of the countryside are not our most important records, as there isn't very much going on in the country. Transparencies and live tracings may also be lifted from city stones, whether they are natural or artificial. Several of our members are, at this very moment, busy at lifting transparencies from certain strategic stones that are built into the Decatur Street Opera House of this very city. Sometimes one hears the expression, ‘If these stones could only talk!’ People, we initiates know that these stones can talk!

“There are several special stones in and around the old opera house which is our demonstration for today. Know you all that there is a private corner in every inspired builder; and this private corner of the person knows about special stones. It may know about them only while the man is asleep, but it knows. And the man, while the construction of the building is going on, will convey the command (he may convey it without knowing he does it, or he may know that he does it and still wonder at himself) that several special stones are to be built into and around the building. And the building will then become memorable; it will become resonant and in accord with its town and its times; it will accumulate living legends and memories and ghosts. The old opera house in this city is such a building.

“Two dozen cheap gemstones or gimcracks on the inside of that building do hold the total record of the short but tumultuous two-hundred-year history of the building. They not only have the all-sense recording of every performance that has been played on those boards, but they have the record of every person who has attended each performance; they have the record of every gesture of every person — of every accent and sigh and word and whisper of every person; and also, by highly scientific extrapolation of every contingent datum, they have the probable content of even the most improbable thoughts of every person who has ever been there. Minor miracles of intrapolating gestures and expressions into thought have been wrought. Major miracles in extracting fine transparencies from stony patinas have been achieved.

“The gimcrack stones have the glow of every wax candle or rush light that ever lighted the performing house; they have the hot-wax smell, the rush-fat smell, the evocative rag-wick stench. They have the glittering and guttering of the bear oil, the whale oil, the lard lamps. They have the whispering sound and flicker of old illuminating gas flames, the garishness of the limelights and the carbide lights, the later and stronger shine of the electrical chandeliers and of the mercury spotlights. Ah, do any of you remember the unearthly whiteness of the old sodium lights? The stones will remember it.”

The speaker had a stone that was apparently set in his turban, but closer examination would show that it was set into his head. The stone was one of the best, and it had recorded many scenes in many years.

“And there are some quaint stones set in the outside of the building, and also in the surface of Decatur Street itself,” the speaker went on. “There is one old dalle or flagstone that would be recognized as distinguished by any investigator. It was set in the midst of the random rocks when the road was first laid out. This stone developed a will of its own, and it has survived a dozen changes. By accident (but there are no accidents), it was not discarded when the first random stones were thrown out and the slates and mudshales were brought in for a better finish; and the special flagstone survived when those old slates and mudshales were replaced by ironstone cobbles. It maintained its place even when the cobbles were replaced by bricks. It prevailed again when it was buried clear up to its eyes in asphalt. What things it could tell if it had tongue! Well, we will give it tongue now. It remembers the underbellies of thousands of horses and carriages that stomped and rumbled over it. Ah, what great horse vehicles those were! Who now living, except possibly our host Duffey, remembers them all? The Acme Royal Top and the Acme Open, the Southern Beauty, the Fulton Road Cart, the Livery Special, the Farmers Canopy Top Surrey, Johnson's Jump-Seat Buggy, the Imperial Carriage, Dempster's Three-Spring Handy Wagon, Drexel's Eight-Horse Dray, Pontiac's Special Milk Wagon, Hallock's Grocery Cart, the Sears Famous, the Road Runner. Ah, I see brimming eyes at the mention of these things. The fragrance of road apples will always be a primary part of nostalgia.”

“What is the purpose of these rhapsodies, Countess?” Duffey asked the girl.

“Actually, we don't have much detailed history of our own,” she said, “and we sure don't want to borrow any history of second-rate humans. But we can steal some of their things and their memories, and we can claim them for our own. I'm on the nostalgia kick myself. Ah, the fragrance of road apples! I wonder what they were like?”

“That stone in Decatur Street remembers the quickening snap and bang of whips,” the speaker said, “and their airy swishing. Ah, the Cowles Buggy Whip: we shan't see its like again! The Jacksonville Drover, the S. R. and Co.'s Australian, the Western Mule Skinner, the Milford Quirt, Hodson's Superior Horse Whip, the San Antonia, the Fancy, the Never-Break Dog Whip, the Elko. What days do these not bring back! The cursing of wagoners, the rattling of whiffletrees, the jangle of even-chains! Some of these things still live in the blessed place, and others have been cut down by the weed-hacker.

“The stone remembers the underside of old streetcars. It even remembers the round punchings of old streetcar transfers wafting down on the easy breeze, and the odor of trolley ozone. It remembers the underside of every automobile that ever went down Decatur Street, and we dare not roll their names off our tongue lest nostalgic riots ensue. The stone recalls faithfully every two-legged and four-legged walker of the street. And it remembers, from the underside also, the jeweled sky of eighty thousand nights. It's a very talkative old stone, and it is talking to our experts and their instruments at this moment.”

The speaker had two large and complex shining blue eyes. They may have had special small remembering stones set into their irises.

“What about stones that look to the other direction?” asked a person who was not a full member of the Royal Pop Historians and Flesh Weeders. “Are there any stones whose patinas have recorded future events?”

“There are stones whose living surfaces and depths reveal events in every direction,” the speaker said. “There are no ‘future’ events. Future is only the name of a putative direction so designated by those who have really lost their directions. Oh, certainly, it is quite easy to lift transparencies and tracings and reproductions of what are commonly called future events. All common stones will serve for all purposes, but exceptional stones are needed to give fine and minute service. Those that record best from all directions are the half gem — or gimcrack stones — the spars, the garnets, the imperfect crystals. But those which focus more aptly in the direction misnamed ‘future’ are the hard, prismatic crystals. The small and resonant crystals of the early radio days had part of this directional secret. The quartzes and natural rock crystals, the sphere-formed crystals, all real crystals can see quite clearly into the future direction. These sphere-formed rock crystals that are tuned to the historical future direction are known commercially as ‘crystal balls.’ ”

“Can patinas be peeled from anything except stones?” a non-Pop asked.

“Yes, certainly,” the speaker said. “Wood, as a short-term storehouse of historical treasures (for no more than four or five centuries), is often superior to stone. Finished and furnitured woods in particular will store memories and scenes and will become haunted with them. They will project these recalls at unexpected moments. These are the ghosts of the last seven centuries, the ghosts of old houses. And the term ‘table talk’ sometimes has the special meaning of talking tables. Planchette and ouija are dull forgeries of such talking tables, but they are made of the genuine remembering wood. And old tables become accepted members of old families. What child, playing under an old wooden table, has not heard old family secrets whispered by the familiar (which is to say, ‘long in the family’) wood?

“But still better and more recording than either stone or wood, for very short periods (a couple of decades), is undisturbed leaf mold.”

“Hey, Duff, let's slip off for a while,” a small group of young and shimmering and sidling folks propositioned Melchisedech Duffey. “They'll not miss you for the host for the while, and they'll not miss us.”

The most dedicated rationalist, if he is honest, must admit that there are intervals that go against the grain, that go against reason. There are happenings, usually of quite short duration, that simply are not acceptable in the rationalist framework. I myself have experienced several such unaccountable or unbelievable intervals. Two were of such very short duration that they did not take up any discernible time. And one was of three minutes; another was of five minutes;

And one was of twenty-four hours.

 — Absalom Stein, Notes on the Argo Legend

Quick thunder wounds the fatted town

That copiously bleeds:

And fruitless growths come tumbling down

And even human weeds.

 — Finnegan, Road Songs

“Done,” said Duffey. “I always said that if I could find a better place than mine or better company than my own, I would join it for as long as I was accepted. You look just like the young people who could show me wonders in my own town.”

They were out of the buildings and into the street. And right next to Duffey's was Bayougoula Park, and it hadn't been there yesterday. Hell, it hadn't been there an hour ago. There had previously been some buildings there, but they couldn't now be called to mind. Zabotski half-believed that the missing buildings had belonged to him, but he couldn't say for sure. Well, there was a new park there now. It was like a blessing.

“But it isn't a new park, Duffey,” said Absalom Stein, who had been pacing there in edgy thought. “I've just been checking the records, and it's been here for over a hundred years. That's what the people at the park department tell me. There's something nervous about those people. They act like zombies, and they say things as though someone were making them say them. And there's something contrived about the park itself.”

“Don't look a gift colt in the mouth, Absalom,” the hoyden told him.

“Or, it'll crop you like a weed,” the child-hero said. “The Thunder Colts can crop the weeds that are too tough for the weed-hackers to cut. Are you a tough one, Duffey?”

There couldn't ever have been more than two or three narrow buildings in that place, but the park was not narrow in any sense. It remembered all the things that a park should have, and it made room for them.

There were graceful benches made of fruitwood. There were tables and standing sideboards. There were the big trees, live oaks, gum tupelos, royal walnuts, red cedar. There were several dead and dying animals there, their flesh turning into rubber or plastic or styrofoam as they expired. There were several dead and dying people there also, but they lacked conviction and reality.

“Are the broken-up animals and the broken-up people the same?” Duffey asked the hoyden who had come out with them.

“Oh, yes, the broken-up human people often collapse into their own interiors when they die. But often they collapse into their animal totem forms. You will notice that neither of them has real flesh, except for a hunk here and there. Most such people were never real. They are the first ones the weed-choppers chop down. We wonder that our city has kept so many of them for so long. Every place else in the world has gotten rid of all of them several weeks ago.”

There was a tumbling and noisy fountain in the middle of the park. It was full of green turtles and bullfrogs, whistling bluefish, and carp. There were conches and oysters. There were alligators that would snap up alive any child or dog that came too near and had reactions too slow. The park policed its own. There were horned cattle there. And there were the crazy and splendid thunder colts.

But natural beauties are not enough for a park. It must have the amenities also. Three persons who were themselves amenities came. Mary Virginia Schaeffer and Margaret Stone and Salvation Sally came to see what park had grown up around the corner from them. These were the girls from the Pelican Press. And also there were the inanimate or only partly animate amenities.

There were arcades there — gazebos and kiboshes and kiosks, taverns and tabernacles, and all sorts of other tents and pavilions. There were shops there — newsstands and confectioner's stands, open-air cafés, bars, and a little bandstand where some fellows drummed and tootled and tinkled.

“This is a sort of show staged here,” Mary Virginia said. “It is all contrived and set up. It has a bright and flimsy face. I don't understand it, but it isn't real.”

“Yes, it's real,” the child-hero said. Really, it was time for the child-hero to leave off being a child. He was old enough to be a man. “But many things that you thought were real, Mary Virginia, they aren't. You're wide open yourself; it is so easy to change your apperceptions. But your town itself, here in its old and historic part, it isn't quite real. Haven't you ever seen the gaps in its reality?”

“Not very many gaps, not very big ones,” Mary Virginia said. “It's all real except for these new morning parks, and you new morning people. Are you real?”

“We are. You're still on trial,” the hoyden said.

“What do you think of these new-old parks and people, Duffey?” Mary Virginia asked.

“Oh, they represent the bright and shining obverse side of the Fortean coin or universe,” he said. “I've always known that the coin had two sides. The reverse, the best-known side of the Fortean medallion, has always been dingy and dim, aye, and stupid. But these new things are fine and exciting. The parks are misplaced, of course. They do not belong here at all. But let us enjoy them.”

“Forget about the morning parks,” the child-hero said. “We've told you they're real. Think about this part of your town that is several hundred years old. Is it real, or has it always been a fraud? Will it stand the test of historical evidence? Have you never wondered where the people got all that iron for all the wrought-iron work here? They were very prodigal with it. But this was a pretty primitive Louisiana at the time ascribed for the constructions. And the workmanship of the old iron balconies is in no way primitive. It's decadent rather. But there was no iron available here. It isn't real iron.”

“Oh, bedamned with this jabber!” Mary Virginia exploded. “It's real enough.”

“Have you ever wondered where they got all the stones?” the Countess asked. The Countess was pert, with many generations of pertness in her. She was quite young; she was still a teenager. She had the easy cruelty of a member of a very old and very civilized family. “Really, there was no such stone on these mudflats, and there was not a quarry within sixteen hundred miles. The stones of these old buildings around us, they aren't real stones.”

Mary Virginia and the others had to laugh at the line of nonsense these Royal Pop people were pushing on them. All of them were drinking Shining Mountain Beer now. The brewery was right across the street from the park, but it hadn't been there yesterday. Or, if it had been, it had been passing itself off as some other kind of building.

“They've kept the taste,” Margaret Stone said. “I recognize the taste. But maybe they've changed the name of it. Does anybody remember what the name of it was yesterday? Not Shining Mountain, no.”

“There are two further proofs that your town is mostly unreal,” the hoyden was saying.

Zabotski joined them about then. He had a puzzled look, but he still felt that he was supposed to own the land that Bayougoula Park was built upon. “Have you heard about the Black Sea disasters?” he asked. Zabotski was wearing one of those new badges that said: “It's a Question of Your Survival. Are You Splendid Enough?”

“It has no mountains, and it almost hasn't any thunder,” the hoyden was continuing despite the Zabotski interruption, “and these are two of the things by which the validity of locale or history can be checked.”

“Certain tropic lands have no thunder at all,” Stein said in his learned manner.

“Those same tropic lands have no history at all, either,” the hoyden said.

“Who is that very young man who looks like Finnegan?” Salvation Sally asked them as she pointed to a bugle-nosed young man who was coming dangerously close to the alligators in the fountain. “I'm spooked, I tell you. I thought that it was Finnegan indeed. I thought it was his ghost.”

“That's the young painter who paints very like Finnegan in his orange period,” Duffey said. “Yes, he could almost be a younger ghost or fetch of Finnegan.”

“Finnegan always did have a lot of fetches,” Margaret Stone remembered.

“Mountains and thunder, they are the test,” the hoyden was insisting. “Oh, the newness of mountains! Mountains are the most astonishing happenings in recent history. There weren't any mountains at all until quite recently. And we hadn't full dimensions on this world until they were raised up.”

“What are you new young pop girls talking about?” Melchisedech Duffey demanded. “There were always mountains. How would there not be mountains?”

“Duffey, you are so old that you have to remember when there weren't any mountains,” the hoyden challenged. “Or, maybe there was just one; but it wasn't a very high mountain, whatever you have heard to the contrary. That's why there wasn't really very much water required for the water epic. It was all a flatlander world then.”

“You young people — the child-hero, the hoyden, the Countess — are you not all in the presentation tonight at the Decatur Street Opera House?” Mary Virginia asked.

“Why, of course,” the young Countess said. “We are the splendor and interest of it, up till the slaughter starts.”

“And this mountains-and-thunder nonsense that you're talking, that's part of the presentation, isn't it? This is just advertising talk, yes?”

“Come to the show, lady, come to the show,” the child-hero said. “We give away lots of free things here, but we don't give away everything.”

Black people of the town strode by wearing the new badges “Are You Splendid Enough?” There were other people of unspecified sorts. The dying people and dying animals were about gone. As the life left their members, their flesh turned into plastic or plywood or papier-mâché, and then they were regarded as no more than leftover carnival debris.

“How does it happen?” Margaret Stone asked.

“They lost faith in themselves and in their flesh,” the Countess said. “The dragon there had the most faith. It was a human, and then it collapsed into the dragon totem as it died. Most of its flesh is turned now, but not all.”

Margaret Stone bought a box of crackers at one of the kiboshes and fed the crackers to a dying dragon. Most of the body of this biodegradable dragon had already been transmuted into papier-mâché, but some flesh remained.

“That one mountain was the Mountain of the Commandments,” the hoyden said. “Notice the number ten in all the versions. That meant that this god had ten fingers and ten toes. He was an anthropomorphic god. Had he been a god in the image of the earlier peoples, he would have given twelve commands for his twelve fingers. Had he been an abstract or transcendent god, then he would have given an abstract or transcendent number of commands.

“It was the same mountain they used in Greece both earlier and later. They played king of the mountain on it. They played Titans and Thunderguns. They played Giants and Jovians. They had small-caliber thunder then, but none of the big stuff.

“Very often, the people put rollers under the mountain and rolled it around to the different countries, since there was only the one mountain in the world. The name of that first mountain was Ziggurat. Now there are more and more mountains. There's supposed to be a new one somewhere this morning.”

“What's the real story, guys?” Salvation Sally asked.

“Oh, these morning people (we're all turning into them, you know, and I hate it) were around a long while ago,” Stein said, “and they were a nuisance. A demiurge put them all to sleep on a mountainside and told them they must sleep till he called them with a thunder of a certain tone. Then, a few millennia later, the demiurge forgot about it and used that tone of thunder for something else. The morning people woke up at the tone of the thunder (it was only the other day), and the first thing they saw was the mountain they were on. They thought the mountain was their mother, and that they were thunder dimension people. That's all there was to it.”

“Is it possible you speak truth when you intend to joke?” the child-hero cried. “We are the thunder dimension people. The mountain is our mother. It was only the other day. We aren't fully awake yet, but we're in a fever to resolve it all. We're in a hurry to get rid of the flesh-weeds and the remnants and see who are the thunder people and who are not.”

An alligator was eating a little boy who had come too close to the fountain. The sight of this nauseated Mary Virginia, and indeed it wasn't a pleasant thing to watch.

“I know it isn't real,” she said, “but who is the illusion master who puts these things on? Is it possible there is some meaning to it? Or is it just a piece of unfortunate clownishness?”

“Oh, the eating is real enough,” the child-hero said. “And the little boy was real once. But then he failed it. That's the thing that will happen to at least half of you here present. You'll be found short, and you'll be destroyed. It's best for all. Some simple persons who have lost their shine will be eaten by the alligators here. Others, a bit larger and older, are destroyed by the fire drakes when they prove to be inferior, or of some inferior species. And then there are certain strong and bright but crookedly talented weeds; and they must be destroyed by the thunder colts. Two will be working side by side at the harvest. And one will be taken and one will be left.

“But the little boy is gone for good, and his puzzled parents will not even remember his name. Look at his mother there. She knows she brought someone or something to the park with her, but she can't remember who or what it was.”

“Come along, Stein,” Duffey said. “We're too close to it. Let's stand off from it a little way where the dazzle won't be in our eyes. We can solve these puzzles. It comes to my mind that we are both good at puzzles, and Zabotski here also. There's a group of master illusionists in town.”

“Or of master destroyers of illusion,” Stein said. “We will step aside from their influence and take a clear look at it all.”

“Good-by, the men,” Margaret Stone wished them on their way. “Be splendid!”

Duffey and Stein and Zabotski all went over to Stein's apartment. There was always a lot of high-class sanity at Stein's. The three men looked at one another. They laughed. They set themselves to solve some doubtful happenings that had made a shambles of the morning.

“We all know that buildings cannot disappear overnight and be replaced by pleasant parks that are curiously stylized,” Stein said. “We must now bring reason to bear. There is an illusion working in all this, and we must see through it. They are all dislocated scenes that we have watched this morning, but they may be only halves of a binocular vision; they may come into clear focus if we are able to find the other halves. These things are something like the aberrations I describe in my paper — ”

Mary Virginia, Margaret Stone, and Salvation Sally had gone around the park to Duffey's bijou, which they believed to be one of the sources of confusion. The sessions were going great. One had the feeling that these people really were getting rid of much of the trash of the world, and consolidating other things. The speaker now was Hugh de Turenne of Xavier there in town. Hugh seemed to be a genuine member of the inner Royal Pop Historians. He interrupted himself as the ladies from the Pelican Enterprises came in, and he spoke directly to them:

“What are the people saying about the Black Sea cataclysms, Miss Margaret?” he asked.

“They are saying that it's a terrible thing,” Margaret Stone called in her jangled voice. “An hour ago, the people were saying that it was a terrible, terrible thing. And two-and-a-half hours ago they were saying that it was a thrice-terrible thing.”

“Exactly,” Hugh beamed. “The obliteration of the Black Sea isn't really important. But if we claim to have clarified geography and have things like that left over, who can credit our sincerity? We have to get rid of all the non-existents. There may still be a small note on the disaster in the afternoon papers; there may still be a short mention of it in the evening broadcasts; but it will be nowhere near so terrible a thing this evening as it was this morning. Tomorrow it may not be mentioned at all. In a week none but scholars will even recognize the name, and they will apply it correctly to an entirely different body of water. And in a month there will not be any reference anywhere in the world to the place that we used to call the Black Sea.”

“But the people!” Salvation Sally cried. Sally had always liked people. “Can the deaths of millions of people be so easily forgotten?”

“No people died in the catastrophe,” Hugh said. “None at all.”

“How is that possible?” a man of the city asked. “There were millions of people living on the shores of the Black Sea. Consider just those who were on ships there when the sea disappeared. In fact, the first reports said that more than a million persons had died. Now the newspeople estimate that the figure will be nearer to a thousand, but that's still a lot of people.”

“And this evening they may say that possibly a hundred persons died there,” Hugh filled in. “But nobody really died at the Black Sea. It would have been impossible for anyone to have died there.”

“Well, drop a tear for the slaughter of the fish, then,” Mary Virginia chirruped almost in laughter. Why should she laugh? Great natural catastrophes are serious events. “Consider that the famous Black Sea sturgeon are no more.”

“I consider that the famous Black Sea sturgeon never saw the Black Sea,” Hugh said. “It was a good trade name to peddle sturgeon under (‘Black Sea’ brand was a little bit like ‘Golden Mountain’ brand or some such), but most of those sturgeon came from the Mukmuk Sea in high Turkestan. Perhaps Cyrus Roundhead here, who is an expert on the Black Sea legend, would like to say a few words on this disappearance that is in the news. In any case, my time is up, and his time begins.”

“Ah, yes,” Roundhead agreed, clicking a second and third lens into his monocle to give him enough distance vision to see across the room. “Ah, yes, the Saga of the Sea That Never Was, the legend that took on a life of its own. Isostasy analysis had determined years ago that there had to be a fairly high land rather than a low sea there. The world would have known the difference otherwise, by the difference of weight. But the theorists went there — where the sea scientifically could not have been, where it was documented as having been for so many centuries — and they thought they found it there. They were puzzled. Illusion will deceive, if it were possible, even the elect. But we Inner Royal Pops have always known there was no Black Sea in the common meaning.”

“There has to have been a Black Sea!” one of the neo-Pops exploded. He was wearing one of those “Time Is Short. Are You Noetic Enough?” badges.

“So it was once thought that it had to be,” Roundhead conceded, “though it's now been decided that there's no longer any psychological need for a Black Sea. For several thousand years, the Black Sea legend was allowed to grow undisturbed. Then it was deemed ripe. So, the night past or very early this morning, it was removed surgically and quickly. It was the legend that was removed, of course, not the sea. There never was any sea there, only a small swamp where several rivers disgorged, and then the flow was passed through the Bosporus Strait.

“The Adriatic Sea was the only sea of Europe ever named the Black Sea. It is still called that, for adris or hadris meant ‘black’ in the early Latin and in the Etruscan. There is always a human requirement to believe in ‘Lands Beyond’ or ‘Seas Beyond.’ Some of the credited places are harmless and even inspiring: the Isles of the Blessed, the Hesperides, Antilla, Cibola. But the Black Sea legend was baleful. When we came to the present updating of legends, it had to go. The dislocation will not really be severe. Several million persons who believed they had villas on the Black Sea will only know that their comforting belief is gone; they will not remember what it was. Well, that's history.”

“Are there any other legend places that have to be destroyed?” a fearful lady asked.

“No, not at this time,” Roundhead answered cautiously. “There are three that I myself would like to have destroyed, and I've voted for their destruction. But it's believed that they're not ripe for it yet. They remain too strong and too entrenched.”

“What are their names?” the fearful lady asked.

“Oh, Rome, Athens, Jerusalem,” Roundhead said.

“Roundhead, you shrivel me in all my ancientries,” Margaret Stone hollered out in her beautiful and gaunt voice.

“You are saying that Rome and Athens and Jerusalem do not exist?” gasped a man who wore the badge “Ride It Out. They've Got to Keep Some of Us.” “I'm aghast.”

“Yes. It's because of the aghast crowd that we don't do away with them forthwith.” Roundhead smiled. “Well, let's say that those three cities or syndromes were slightly in history, and they do have some technical connections with their own legends — as a flea will sometimes have the same surname as its dog. And we will admit that there is presently to be found a sort of carnival, tourist-oriented settlement on each of those sites. But that's about all.

“It served the mordant humor of the Etruscans to bandy about the name ‘Roman.’ It applied to a destitute neighborhood of hillbillies who scratched out (literally) an existence in the hound-dog hills above the Tiber swamps. The Etruscans were an excellent, ardent, archaic, talented, and vastly cultivated people. If they addressed one another in such manner as ‘Hey, Brain Rot,’ ‘Hey, Nosebleed,’ ‘Hey, Okie,’ ‘Hey, Rumdum,’ ‘Hey, Roman’ — well, that was their humor. Even their enemies took to calling them the ‘Romans’ for fun. That's where the thing should have stopped, in fun. There were never any real Romans except that small settlement of shiftless hillbillies.”

“Whence do you have this information?” a scholarly man asked.

“Oh, from the rocks of the region,” Roundhead said. “The patinas lifted from them give us a pretty detailed view of things there. And from other sources.”

“But what about the City itself? The Capital City of the World? Rome?” Margaret Stone called in her hot Italian voice. (She had several voices.)

“Ah, Miss Margaret, the seven leading Etruscan Cities shared and made up the common Capital City of Etruria, and of the Italic Peninsula, and of the World. They were sometimes referred to as the Seven Eminences, and one meaning of eminence is ‘hill.’ And they were sometimes given the name (in fun, and also in fraternal lodge hocus-pocus) of the Seven Hillbilly Hills. The ‘Capital’ was officially called ‘The City of the Seven Eminences.’ ‘City’ was here used in its original meaning of ‘league.’ ”

“But what of the famous-name Roman emperors?” a man with the nose like the knobbiest Roman of them all asked. “They must have existed. They are too well known to be made up.”

“Some of them were the names of vaudeville and music hall performers,” Roundhead said. “The Etruscans excelled in vaudeville and variety presentations. And some of them were the names of mascots of their army regiments. Some were nothing at all. The simple fact is this: Rome, with its supposed culture and art and law and might, began as no more than a joke. The joke became old, but even an unfunny joke is sometimes accorded privileged status in its old age. But there is no reality at all in the main Roman legend. Ah, I believe some of us wish to go on a little safari in a few moments.”

“What about Athens?” This was asked by John the Greek himself, the owner and proprietor of John the Greek's Famous French Restaurant. “I come from there. I lived there till I was thirteen years old. I'll not be easily convinced that there isn't such a place.”

“I'll not easily be convinced that there is,” Roundhead said. “I journeyed there once to find it, and I didn't find much. I obtained a map of the city, but it was defective. Only about one street in five that appeared on the map was to be found in reality. The comment on the back of the map said there were seventeen different streetcar routes in the city, but there was only one. The directory showed there were fifty-five cinemas in the city. There were only two, and both of them were showing American cowboy films.

“There was a hill there with an old-new building on it. Half of it consisted of some broken old limestone pillars; the other half was a combination of milk bar, old hickory barbecue house, hotel, honky-tonk, estiatorio, and fried chicken emporium. I would ask someone how to get to the Panathenaic Stadium, or the Olympieum, or the Dionysus Theater, or the Odeon, or the Parthenon. In each case, the person would point to the old end of that half-and-half building. It was whatever building one wanted it to be.

“I would ask how to get to Churchill Street or Constitution Square or Sophocles Street or Concordia Square or University Boulevard. ‘Behold, your feet are upon it,’ someone would say. They had one street, and it was whatever street they wanted it to be. But I was at a disadvantage in my journey to Athens. I looked at it all with clear and open eyes.”

“You joke,” an olive-colored lady challenged.

“He jokes only a little bit, Helen Petrides,” John the Greek admitted. “I had forgotten it, but when I was a boy there, it was very much like that. But for it to be even like that, it has to be. Tell me again why you say there is no Athens, man.”

“Oh, I said there was a contrived, tourist-oriented settlement on each of the sites,” Roundhead reasoned with John. “How it was anciently, I will come to in a moment. I see that some of our own young people and also some of the young and middling people of the town are seeking an end of words and a beginning of action, or at least they wish to mix a little action with the words. You ladies from the Pelican Press, I will promise you a safari after large and medium game in just a few minutes. You were not with us on the first little safari we took through the town last night.

“There was a man, a laborer in the SF vineyard, who used always to suggest that the company might as well be chasing fire lizards on Venus while they talked. So they chased the lizards: They determined that they were identical to the fire drakes of Earth. But the quality of their dialogue always suffered from the dilution and division of attention.

“Well, we will now go out and assault strategic parts of the city and the world with thunder axes, and we will carry out our talk at the same time. And we will not let the quality of our dialogue suffer, no matter what else we are doing.”

Then they left the buildings of the Duffey establishment. They took to the roofs and the balconies and the iron ladders of the town. The young people of the Royal Pop Historians were very agile, but the townspeople kept up with them. The townsfolk found the thunder ax an easy weapon to master. They quickly learned the trick of hacking fraudulent persons and structures to death.

“Now to answer the question that Mr. John the Greek has asked,” Cyrus Roundhead stated conversationally as he flung three bodies from a high building and then swung onto an iron ladder to go even higher.

“This is illusion,” Mary Virginia said to Margaret Stone and Salvation Sally. “Just keep saying to yourself ‘This is illusion.’ ” If it hadn't been illusion, none of them would have been able to climb so wildly.

“Ancient Greece was made up of a blasted inner core named Hellas and five concentric rings around it named Aetolia, Thessaly, Epirus, Macedonia, and Thrace. The southern sectors of these concentric rings had disappeared into the sea, or anyhow disappeared, in prehistoric times,” Roundhead was saying. He was extinguishing several elderly female persons with a thunder ax, but they did not seem to be valid persons. “This may also have been the case of the inner core called Hellas, for we can find no later sound evidence to locate it in actual geography. But, as in the case of the planet Saturn, all of the action was to be found in the rings anyhow.

“The most important of these outer rings, Macedonia, was made up of strong and warlike men who, in consequence of their being strong and warlike, also became rich. Then, being not quite complete in their capabilities, they took one step backward and became nouveau riche. Ah, we're finished with clearing this building of its nothings, are we not?”

“Child-hero and myself cleaned out the third floor,” Salvation Sally announced. “The rest should already have been taken care of.”

“Then we remove it by deflation,” Roundhead said. “We let the air out of the building and we deflate it down to nothing. Do not be surprised, you who are on your first safari of this sort. There wasn't really any building here; there was only the illusion of a building. There wasn't real iron in it, you know. And there wasn't real stone.”

The building was quickly deflated down to absolute trash, old cardboards and old papers. Then the wind blew the papers away, and it blew away all memory of the building with them. By and by, in a couple of hours, a park would begin to grow here.

“Such is the origin of every city park in the world,” Roundhead said. “Well, the newly-rich Macedonians decided to give themselves a culture, a portfolio of growth arts, and a history. They had to make a past for themselves, and they had nothing to use but imagination. So these prideful Macedonians created the legend of an old and heroic Greece.

“At the arts, those Macedonians were strong and eager, but impatient, men. One of them would be hammering away at freeing a statue of its marble. He would have a good thing going and he would become too eager. Crunch, he knocks an arm off of his statue. Whang, there is a foot broken loose. Crack, there is a nose shattered completely. Then there is no way out of it except to create a fiction that the statue had been carved by old, heroic Greeks long ages before, that the broken-off members had been broken by the hammers of time and of the burying earth.”

Breaking up the faces and bodies of the pseudopersons in the buildings was a queasy business. A little blood usually came out of them, but always more trash and fragments of plaster than blood. Some of the quasi-persons wore those new “Are You Splendid Enough?” badges. No, they weren't, or they wouldn't have been in line to be obliterated.

“Those Macedonians created a number of fiction forms,” Roundhead was saying. “They created an Art Fiction, a Culture Fiction, a Commonwealth or Political Fiction, a Science Fiction, and a History Fiction. All of these fictions were rough-wrought things, but they were done so energetically and enthusiastically that even today they are sometimes mistaken for facts instead of fictions.

“The most unlikely and perhaps the most excellent of their fiction forms was the Athenian Romance or the Athenian Novel. Though the work of a hundred diverse hands, it was one of the most convincing creations of all literature. It was written barely on the pulp level, yet it had authenticity and power. There are millions of people today who believe that this old and heroic Athens of the novels and romances really existed, and that it was the epitome of an old and heroic Greece.”

“What about Plato and Aristotle?” the olive-colored lady asked. “Was it not in Athens that they flourished?”

“No, no,” Roundhead denied her. “Aristotle was the tutor of the son of the king of Macedonia where he flourished. And Plato was a character in several of Aristotle's Athenian Novels. The Athenian Legend has been, so far, harmless. But if it ever festers or becomes infected (and there are some slight signs that it is on its way to doing just that), then we will have to remove it surgically.”

“Some of them don't want to go,” Mary Virginia cried from a crumbling building where she was deflating false people. “Some of them protest, and they fight. Yes, and they bite like hell. If they never existed at all, where do they get the will to protest so violently when we put an end to their fictions?”

“You must insist that they go,” said Roundhead, “or we will insist that you go in their places. It's fair that the person having the least reality should go.”

Yes, some few of the persons and creatures and effects that were being obliterated by the thunder axes and other weapons did not accept their obliteration willingly. They fought, though they had little to fight with. They hissed their hatred. From looking like people, they came to looking like cur dogs and evil spirits. They were being dislocated from their places and forms. “It's you who are destroying our houses and bodies,” some of these uncreations spat at Mary Virginia, and she could not tell whether they were cur dogs or snakes or persons.

“How about Jerusalem?” asked an unsatisfied customer to Roundhead.

“Oh, it actually dates only from the present century,” Roundhead stated. “It was built as promotional venture by the Turks on or near the site of various ruined cities: the Jewish city Jebus; the Greek city Solyma; the Idumaean city Hiero-Solyma or Holy Solyma; the Roman city Aelia Capitolina; the Syrian city Uris Lem; the Arabian city al-Quds. An Assyrian name, Ur Salim, comes nearest to the modern form, but it doesn't come very near to the modern location. It was down the dusty road to the Idumaean city Hiero-Solyma in the rocky southern wilderness that Christ went to be killed. His prototype, Samson, had gone down most of the same dusty road to the nearby city of Gaza in the same rocky southern wilderness to be killed.

“But Christ was out of bright and flourishing Galilee (The Land of the Gaels), out of that civilization so startling and vivid that it could have happened only once. Ah, the grand cities of Galilee, the Seven Stars; Capernaum, known for its goldsmithery and for its great paintings; Tabigha, known for its tambour music, for its singing, and for its astronomy; Tiberias, known for its fish and its shellfish, and for its comic drama; Magdala, known for its great cuisine, for its wealth, and for its storytellers guild; Cana, known for its wine and for its country music; Nazareth, known for its wooden carriages and chariots, for its wooden statuary, and for its woodworkers guild; Sepphoris, known for its stone sculpture and for its dazzling night life. To be a Galilean was to be civilized and cultured to a degree that has not been known since that time.”

“But where were the Jews?” the doubly unsatisfied customer still pursued. “Were the Jews not in the Jerusalem which you say didn't exist?”

“Oh, the Jews were in Babylon. They still are. Even today, you can dig down into the ruins of old Babylon and you will find the ruins of the old Jews. But the real fact is that there were these three cities or cruxes that we had to get rid of. They stood in our way. Really, we're quite new, in spite of our power over simultaneity and revision. We have to create and rectify history in a hurry, or we will stand historyless and naked. And these three things had a too-human smell to them, and it won't wash out.”

“What ethnics do we pick on now?” Margaret Stone asked. “You've run through all the pieces of me.”

“Why are we destroying these persons and things whose only fault is that they are unimportant?” Mary Virginia asked as she destroyed a half-grown lout or boy of the pseudopeople.

“Why? Oh, because we are important, and we must be intolerant of anything that is not. We destroy them because they seem to exist, and by seeming, they dilute the whole worth of the world.”

“Come, quickly, quickly!” the Countess was crying as she swooped down on them from an iron ladder out of the sky. “There are great numbers of pseudopeople, of human remnants, of morphic dragons, of papier-mâché fire lizards, who have barricaded themselves in that building there. They say they will resist forever. I never heard people making such a fuss about dying. Bring thunder axes, bring lightning rams. We'll rout them out!”

Many meetings and conventions do not provide such interesting safaris for their folks as do the Royal Pop Historians.

And back in Stein's apartment:

“Whatever we do must accord with scientific methods and processes,” Stein said.

“Always, some of us (you and I, Stein, for example) have known that we were of the elite,” Duffey was saying, “that we were special, that we were, well, splendid. And always others (Zabotski here, for instance) have known they were not these things. But now it is presented to us, both inwardly and outwardly, that we have become two different species. Almost none of this presentation has been on a conscious level, but it comes to a point where we must face it consciously.”

“I don't understand you, Duffey. I said scientific methods and processes,” Stein repeated, “but not scientific-accepted content. That would be to bow too deeply to science. Much has been made about scientific content or subject matter, but it's all nonsense. ‘Scientific’ means simply ‘knowing’; and one must knowingly handle the unknown as well as the known. We go into the unknown — which is to say the unscientific — waters here.”

“What you're saying, Absalom, is that you don't know what to think about these tacky things any more than anyone else does,” Zabotski interrupted.

“No, I, we don't know what to think about them, not yet. But perhaps we can know how to think about them. Let us see if we can make a working sketch of that ‘how.’ ”

“Balderdash,” said Zabotski. “I could set you straight, but I won't.”

“It's true that we've changed,” Duffey was saying. “We are not the same sort of people our fathers were. But have we changed so completely as to become a new species? Or were some of us always of a separate species? Yes, let us investigate this in the tradition of the great, freewheeling, non-traditional scientists — from the viewpoint of an O'Connell or Field or Watson or Spraggett.”

“We have first to state our problem,” Stein said. “What is our problem or question?”

“Our question, our eternal question,” said Duffey, “is ‘How does the world get along so amazingly well with so many things always gathered to go wrong with it?’ A puzzler.”

“You think the world goes well?” Zabotski asked with a hang-jawed expression.

“It goes beautifully, man, beautifully,” Duffey beamed. “It avoids being choked in its own trash and fatuity. Let us consider whether the strange things that have been happening in town today are a part of what keeps the world running so well. Or does it run so amazingly well because of us amazing people in it? Let us ask this fairly, as great scientists like Churchward and Pauwels and Sendy and Allegro would ask it.”

“Why not ask whether the strange happenings are happening at all?” Zabotski rasped. “I could probably tell the answer if someone would ask me the question.”

“Zabotski is right,” Stein asserted. “Let's find out whether these things are really happening. I don't believe they are. They're not plausible. How's about a large dragon turning into papier-mâché as he dies and still able to eat crackers with his dying head? That's what the kid said was happening, the kid who just ducked in here for a minute, the kid who looks like Finnegan. These happenings are in the balance, but they're not fixed yet.

“I believe that all historical happenings must be chemically fixed like memory fixes. If they are not, then they haven't happened. Encountered phenomena are first recorded as electrical impulses in the brain. Then, after a few seconds or even minutes, they receive a chemical fix and become permanently accessible memories. But if the recording does not receive this chemical fix, then it is forgotten; it will not be subject to any kind of recall at all. In such case, it is more than metaphor to say that the event never happened at all.

“So it may be with certain events that have been ‘happening’ in our city today. So it is with contingent events in every place everyday. If the events turn out to be transitory, then they will escape instrumental notice as well as mental recording. There have been, for me, some very hazy unhappenings today. They fade; they weaken; they unhappen; soon, possibly, they will be gone.”

“They will not be gone before tonight's presentation at the Decatur Street Opera House,” Zabotski stated. “Let them count the dead after that is over with. Then we may be able to say whether the things happened or not.”

“It's like the poltergeist stuff, like the saucer-riding stuff, like the hairy giant stuff,” Duffey said. “A dozen times as many such things are first observed as will go into permanent report or permanent memory. With many of them, it is the case that, while they are happening at one end, they are unhappening at the other. And if they finally come unhappened, then they become unremembered also. They are like daytime dreams, like skylarks, like walkabouts. It is only by accident that a person remembers one out of many such dreams when he is jarred back into awareness. But with the walking and talking daytime dreams, our imaginations are outside of our heads, just as they are all inside of our own heads with the nighttime dreams. If, by accident, we happen to remember one of our daytime dreams after we are jarred back to comparative awareness, then that thing will really have happened. And here is the point: It will have happened for everyone as well as for ourself.

“But if we do not remember it, then it did not happen, not for ourself, not for anybody. What then is the result when one person remembers it clearly and all others forget it completely, or when one person forgets it clearly and all other persons remember it completely?”

“The result is group paranoia,” Stein said. “It's common, and this splitting may be a common cause of it.”

“But I will remember these things just out of orneriness,” Zabotski said. “No one can persuade me to forget any part of them. I will drive the whole town bugs either way. If other people remember them, then the things have to have happened, and that will be enough to drive anybody bugs. If the other people do not remember them, I still will remember. That brings on the paranoia, and that is another name for bugs. I have you either way. I do this because I am an ornery man.”

“I wonder how many of these potential happenings are weighed in the happening balance every day?” Stein asked. “There may be dozens.”

“There may be millions,” Duffey said. “Any daytime dream of any person could become real and of actual occurrence, if it were sufficiently insisted upon. I believe there are unbodied syndromes of possible events roaming the world like packs of dogs, looking for places to feed and live. And I believe that a particularly grotesque nexus of such unhappenings is trying to take up residence in our city today. Ah, how would all those great and swinging scientists think about this thing? How would Braden? How would Cayce? How would Velikovsky? How would Otto?

“The syndrome has survived for some hours already. People at this moment are murdering other people by the hundreds in our town, and it is only because those other people are not splendid enough. It's like an euphoric dream in which one says, ‘I'm dreaming, it doesn't count, they're not real bodies, it isn't real blood’; but what if it is real? The new species, if we have become a new species in significant numbers, is essentially euphoric. I know that I've become euphoric beyond all reason. But is this horrifying stuff behind the pleasant euphoric veil really happening? No, not yet. But, at this very moment, it's really in the balance whether it will have happened or not.”

“Easy, Duffey, easy,” Stein said. “You'll not give in, Zabotski?”

“I'll not give in. I'll remember it all, and I'll make it happen. And I'll be killed for it, and all my sort. That's all right. What effect will we have on you when we're gone? A cramping knot in the middle of you that you can't untie, that's what. Oh, you'll remember us all right. I always wanted to drive a whole town and a whole world bugs.”

“Zabotski, if what we're thinking is correct, then some one person in this town, some deformed dreamer, did happen to have this obstreperous dream first; he also had the obstreperous desire to make that dream come true, out of — out of — plain — ”

“Out of plain orneriness, that's the word, Absalom,” Zabotski said.

“Zabotski couldn't have done it,” Duffey insisted. “He's a wanwit; he's an old remnant human.”

“Zabotski could have done it!” Zabotski swore.

“Was that one person you?” Stein asked with spitting harshness. “Are you the deformed dreamer?”

“I'm the one,” Zabotski maintained. “I have fun with it. I kill a couple thousand people I don't like. No, what I do is that I make it that they never lived, the couple thousand people I don't like.”

“There's a man up on Common Street who claims he started it all,” Finnegan said.

“No. I started it,” Zabotski insisted. “Then he came in on it. I felt him come in.”

So that was that.

“I wonder why such a thing never happened before,” Stein muttered.

“Take a look back through history,” Melchisedech Duffey said. “Consider the hundreds and hundreds of things that couldn't possibly have happened; and yet, they did happen. Even after the history has been edited and cleaned up and most carefully phrased, it remains that the unlikely things did happen. There have been deformed dreamers all over the place. Oh, how would all those tall and talented scientists think their way out of this one? How would Ouspensky think? How would Patten? How would Von Däniken or Ostrander? How would great Fort think about all of this?”

“Duffey, now that we are on strange things, just how old are you?” Stein asked. “The question has come up several times lately; and the Thunder Colts recognize you as somebody very old. What is the answer? Is Zabotski here a part of the answer?”

… It is more of a hope than a promise. For four hundred years we have gone to the theatre in the hope of a worthy play, and it has not appeared; and this without even an authoritative promise that it will come, as we have for the larger things like redemption and salvation. And yet no person can watch a curtain rise without the hope of great things. There is no art from which so much is expected after so many disappointments.

 — Patrick Stranahan, Archipelago

And that twenty-four-hour-long, not rationally acceptable presentation comprised the last twenty-four hours that I spent in the old human context. How quickly we have forgotten that context! How quickly we have forgotten those who refused to forget it.

 — Absalom Stein, Notes on the Argo Legend

It's woe to tender fishes all

Who cannot stand the gaff;

And helpless folks who fail and fall,

Not splendid by a half

 — Finnegan, Road Songs

Mary Virginia Schaeffer was caught up in a horror and revulsion. She had killed a medium-sized child during the skylarking safari. Then came the abysmal doubt; “What if this child be real?” It looked real. It bled scarlet stuff with the smell of blood. It did not turn into a poltergeist or an animal or a puppet as it died. It did not break down into piles of ashes or trash-barrel trash that would indicate (to an euphoric observer or effector) that it had been worthless and invalid from the beginning. The child still had warmth to it; and then, it turned cold under her hands.

“It's as though one should play a hand of Lizzie Borden with the playing cards,” she moaned, “and then go home and find one's own parents killed with an ax. It's as though I should jump rope to a child's chant:

Boil my mother in a pot!

Turn the fire up, hot, hot, hot!

and then go home and find that my mother was indeed boiled to death. What devil's cards do I play with? Whose rope do I jump to, anyhow?”

She carried the bloody child on her bosom as if it were a doll. She cried runny tears. But they were archaic tears from the old time when both the ocean and human lacrimae were only half as salty as they later became. But had a newer and more saltless time come over the world quite recently?

“Whatever was the name of that hilarious delusion that we were just now caught up in so delightfully?” she asked blindly.

“The name of it was Hell,” said someone who was passing by. Why should she be shocked by that? It was one of the older sort of persons who said that, and they are likely to say anything.

“Stein, I have no idea how old I am,” Duffey said. “And I don't see how Zabotski can be a part of the answer. I used to know how old I was. I used to be well ordered in my sequence and my life. That's all gone now. I used to remember my childhood and my early manhood clearly. Now I remember half-a-dozen childhoods for myself, and they all have the marks of my own fictions all over them. Now I remember half-a-dozen different young manhoods for myself. Am I really named Melchisedech, ‘without father, without mother, having neither beginning of days nor end of life,’ as Paul writes about me in Hebrews? My name used to be Michael, once, in some of the versions. What is the advantage of being Melchisedech?”

“To be Melchisedech is to be a king,” Stein said. “I don't know about your childhood, Duffey, but when I was a young boy you were an old man. That was in Chicago, and it's likely the valid version. You remember me there. You remember others there.”

“Yes, but Hans remembers me in the Northland in the same years,” Duffey said, “and I remember him there. Vincent and Teresa remember me in St. Louis in those years, though it took a while for their memories to work; and I remember them. Henry and I mutually remember scenes in rural Louisiana — he a fat young boy, I a fat old man. Mary Virginia Schaeffer remembers me in Galveston in the same years; and I remember her and her parents.”

“I remember Duffey here in New Orleans,” Finnegan said. “Dotty remembered him, too.”

“These are things that the different persons told me separately without telling the others,” Duffey said, “and my own recollections come separately and disturbingly. Could I have lived so many lives at the same time?”

“Well, where do you remember Duffey from, Zabotski?” Stein sensed a rat.

“Wherever I want to remember him at, that's where I make him to have been,” Zabotski said.

“How many pots do you have fingers in, Zabotski?” Stein asked.

“Yah. How many fingers do I got?” Zabotski held up his two big Polish hands. But he dazzled his fingers, so there was no way that any of them could count them.

“Zabotski could have nothing to do with my multitudinous lives,” Duffey said. “He is nothing. He is just a poor old human person.”

There were many gruesome unhappenings through the day and the afternoon. Then it was evening. It was near time to dress for dinner and for the presentation at the Decatur Street Opera House. That would be quite special. These men didn't go formal more than once a year, but what was going to be shown happened only once a world.

Duffey, of course, had every sort of evening clothes for rent over at his establishment. But the Royal Pop Historians (“Is there really such a group as the Royal Pop Historians,” Duffey had asked a while before, “and of what royaume are they royal?”) were still holding forth there, and Duffey didn't want (just now) to run athwart them.

Finnegan said that he would go and get the evening clothes for Duffey and Zabotski and himself (Stein, of course, had his own), and he left to get them.

He was gone. Then the others looked at each other with clammy unease. They discovered that they couldn't remember how long Finnegan had been there with them in Stein's apartment. And they didn't know why they hadn't remembered, until just now after he had walked out of the apartment, that Finnegan was supposed to be dead.

“Zabotski!” Stein cried with real threat in his voice.

“Yes, I always liked Finnegan more than I liked you others,” Zabotski said. “I keep dreaming today that it will be good to have his company back. I dream a lot of real stubborn dreams today.”

When he returned with the clothes, however, it was clear that he wasn't Finnegan. He was a young painter-around-town, the young painter who sometimes left paintings on consignment at Duffey's place to see if they might not be sold. He was the young man who resembled Finnegan slightly and whose best paintings were more than a little bit like Finnegan paintings from the orange period.

“We will have dinner before the opera,” Duffey said. “Some of us won't be alive afterward. It's billed as an Eschatological Drama. It will be the end of an affair, probably the end of the human affair.

“Have we any friends to go with us to a fine dinner at Girardeau's Irish Restaurant? Nobody does things so fine as does Girardeau lately, though he didn't used to be so grand. Have you noticed how grand all of us have become lately, except Zabotski, of course? I mean it. Never have there been so many really grand people in the world before.”

They went in their grand getups through the streets. Trashmen were loading their scoop trucks again and again with the debris. It was mostly broken effigies of people and animals that were loaded into the trucks: polyvinyl bits, styrofoam bits, clay bits, plastic bits, paperboard bits. Oh, sometimes there was a bloody member mixed in with it: a leg, a head, a dripping loin that seemed to be of real flesh and vein and blood. The animal pieces had also come from the destroyed people. Many of them pass through the animal on their way back to clay and trash.

Duffey, Zabotski, Finnegan-not-Finnegan (the younger painter), Mary Virginia, Margaret Stone, the child-hero, Salvation Sally, the Urchin, the Countess, the Royal Pop Historian named Cyrus Roundhead, maybe some others, they were all together at that big plush oaken table at Girardeau's. They were splendid and supreme and superb; they were escharotic and noetic; they were mutated and metamorphosed and specified (is that the verb meaning to change into a new species?); they were euphoric and willful and wonderful and transcendent.

“Only not all.”

There was somebody who said “only not all” because at least one of them would fail of splendor and would betray all the new and splendid things. Well, whoever it was, he would be done away with this night.

“Just what is it that you Royal Pop Historians are doing in our town, Roundhead?” Stein asked him. Things were beginning to clarify themselves.

“Oh, we're making selective recordings of the last remnants of humankind,” Roundhead told them. “The last pocket of humankind is here in your city. I say selective recordings, for this is very tricky. The records will not be as things originally were. They will be as we say that things originally were. Objectivity in these things is fine when it is properly directed by ourselves.”

Mary Virginia still had the broken body of the child with her, the last child that she had killed on safari. She wasn't making quite such a big thing of it now, but she wasn't quite ready to throw it away.

“It's one of the old kind, Mary Virginia,” the Countess told her. “It wouldn't be good for anything even if it were still alive. You know what it is, don't you?”

“I know that it's human,” she said. After a while she let one of the waitresses take it and dispose of it. No, that's inaccurate. Margaret Stone took it from her and said that she would give it to one of the waitresses to dispose of.

But Margaret lied.

“I just remembered that there isn't any Decatur Street Opera House in this town,” Duffey said with a puzzled grin. You're not supposed to puzzle too much when you're possessed by euphoria.

“I just remembered that there isn't even any Decatur Street in this town,” Mary Virginia said.

But they were both wrong.

“Are we being elegant enough?” Margaret Stone asked. She asked it with a certain duplicity or irony or bitterness, some such thing as the humans used to have in their speech, as would soon be gone out of all speech forever.

“Oh, yes. You're in the clear. You'll pass easily,” the hoyden said.

Horse carriages were waiting in the streets outside. They had really elegant horses. They were Thunder Colts who are part artifice, part legend, and part horse.

But, inside, Girardeau's Irish Restaurant had become a work of living art. Transcendent persons are themselves works of art; their transcendence flows from themselves to their groups and from both to their surroundings. Any resulting arrangement must of necessity be perfect. Every person in the great dining hall was so seated as to contribute to the most striking composition of appearance and voice and aura. Every order served became a part of an olfactory and gustatory orchestration. Each gesture and nuance of the thousand diners (Girardeau's didn't used to be so large; it used to seat only forty-eight) was part of a living panorama and pandemonium. There was nothing accidental about the deeply textured and strong, musky scene. There would never be anything “accidental” again. It was all a perfectly fitted and balanced contrivance, ruthlessly beautiful, or horrible, depending on the sensibilities. The only ineptly clashing notes to be met with there were provided by the several persons present who had no sensibilities. They were Zabotski and a very few others. Bloody death be upon them!

But even the human remnants and preservations might be arranged and toyed with and enjoyed. They were interesting bric-a-brac in the now all-ways interesting world. But they were much more handily arranged and enjoyed after they were dead.

“We are unable to account for the Human Interval,” the man Roundhead was saying. “I do not believe that any of us splendid people were ever human, and yet our bodies appear very similar. But the body is related to the person and the species only as the brain is related to the mind: to furnish a temporary haven, that is all. It may be that both the humans and ourselves moved into bodies that had been developed by a still more primitive species. Myself, I can live in a house of almost any shape; the body isn't important to me. The body and the brain cannot live without their hosts, the person and the mind; but the converse may not be true. I believe that a species may travel, like flame, through many bodies of various sorts through that of the totem animal, through that of the contrived effigy, even through that burlesque thing that is called human.”

“What is wrong with the human thing?” Zabotski flared up.

“Human mental processes are subject to error, and they are almost wholly lacking in true kinetic intuition,” Roundhead explained. “Humans have the sicknesses of introspection and guilt. They have the sickness of depth, but sanity is always a surface phenomenon. They have the sickness of awkwardness, and this is the most incurable sickness of them all. Thunder is the specific against most of these sicknesses; but who was it that prescribed it for us? Humans are crude and tedious and full of malodorous trash. Humans, Zabotski, are like you.”

“What is special about Duffey here?” Stein asked.

“Not much,” Roundhead said, “except that he is one of the oldest of us bright ones.”

“And what is — ah — unspecial about Zabotski?”

“Oddly enough, Zabotski has been invaluable to us since we have been in this town,” Roundhead said. “He spots the humans for us, dozens and dozens of them. He is old human, but it is a multitude of other old humans that he hates. He leads us right to them. Ah, as soon as we clear them out in this town, then they will all be gone forever, except for the very few that we miss. But we will track them all down and sink them. The human ship will be the one that left no wake.”

“Nothing at all to be left?” Stein asked. “Not even the echo of an empty vat?”

“Nothing at all left?” Margaret asked. “Not even ‘The Perfume of an Empty Vase’?” Margaret herself, who seldom wore such deceptions, was wearing the perfume named “The Last Night of Her Life.” She also wore a sullenness that was unusual for her.

“No wake, no remnant, no impact, no influence from the human thing,” Roundhead stated resolutely. “We eradicate the thing completely!”

“How chorasmian of us!” the Countess exclaimed.

“I think there will be a legacy,” Zabotski said sullenly, “and that I will be part of it.”

“So will I be,” said Deutero-Finnegan.

“Was humanity really a species apart from us?” Roundhead talked to the tableful and to himself. “Or was it a disease that afflicted us for a little while? Possibly it was both — a double, donkey-headed monstrosity. But it will not be either. When we arrange the human things, in their histories, even in their possible influence on ourselves, we will arrange them in our own ways. We will arrange that they drop into a bottomless void whence there is no echo.”

Time was running apace. The people began to enter the horse carriages to travel to the opera.

There was a Decatur Street in that town, though there hadn't been before. It was fed into by the Grand Concourse through which a thousand horse carriages came without crowding. There was a Decatur Street Opera House, one of the great opera houses of the world. It had a great façade of laughing stone, of memorable incandescence. The special stones recorded the flood tide of arrivals at the Opera in its stylized splendor under the jeweled sky. And the splendid people dismounted and went grandly in.

“Only not all.”

For there were ultimate tests set at the doorways, and it was known by kinetic intuition who must be tested. A dozen out of a thousand were taken. They were made to wash their hands in ashes, and they washed their hands in flame. And several persons came there without being compelled by the kinetic intuition. They failed the test, every one of them who came to it. They failed it in dirty flame and curling smoke.

Zabotski, of course. He was flagged out by everyone's intuition. He was a stubborn and unregenerate human — devoid of euphoria, devoid of intuition, empty of transcendence. The ashes were in large bronze basins. They were the aromatic ashes of newly burned and very stubborn flesh, or flesh that had not broken down into trash and trifles as it died. These test ashes were really a little bit special, if anything of the unrelieved human can be called special. Zabotski rolled his big hands in the dead ashes. And the ashes burst into stifling and reeking flames. Zabotski gave out with a horrible, wrenching sound that was both a moan and a laugh.

There was a blood roar from the bright people entering the opera. It was known that Zabotski was unrepentingly human, but the pleasure was not dulled by its being expected. Zabotski was big and wild and loud and silly, and there was a lot of blood and fun to be got out of him. Powerful men put a halter over his head, a bit in his mouth, and a rope around his neck. They began to lead him away and into the opera house by the animal entrance.

“I'll leave me a wake, you!” Zabotski roared (it was a half-animal roar, for the mouth bit had a tongue spike to it). “I will strew me a path in this world and out of the door of this world! I will make me remembered!” He did strew a pretty wide path of a half-dozen strong men, but he was only living back in his youth for a furious moment. He was too old and fat, and he was overpowered and dragged away. But he left a stenchy wake from the smell of his burned and burst-open hands — human-stenchy.

Well, what was there in human ashes that would still kindle fire at the touch of kindred flesh? There was something that remembered.

Then, a short moment later, there was an out-of-order incident, a happening that was not anticipated at all. A person came out of the crowd to the total consternation of all the intuitive people. This was a slight, quick, powerful young man with a big nose, and with sudden moves. This man had been a puzzle around town to various sorts of people; he had been a puzzle even around the Walk-in Art Bijou and the Pelican Press. Stein had named him Deutero-Finnegan because of his supposed resemblance to dead Finnegan and because of the real resemblance of his paintings to those of Finnegan.

This man was not compelled by the sure intuitions of the crowd to declare himself. But he did so. He left the concourse of the people entering the opera house and went to one of the large bronze basins that held cold human ashes.

“There is a mistake,” one of the marshals of the opera said to him. “You're not questioned at all.”

“This is no mistake,” Deutero-Finnegan said. And he declared himself by putting his hands deep into the ashes. They flamed from his touch, but not with the black-red, reeking flame that had been the case with Zabotski. It was a pale flame, yellow at first, then deepening a bit and shifting to orange color.

“You can withdraw,” the marshal of the opera said. “We all know you're not human. We know you're new and splendid and sane. Why do you young men like to be eccentrics? Why do you love the extravagant gesture?”

“I won't withdraw,” the young artist fellow, the Finnegan-image, said. Then his face crumbled and broke with the realization of the pain of his burning hands. “I am human, if I die to be human,” he shuddered the words out. He staggered as he watched the flames and his hands.

“It's not quite the right color,” he said. The color deepened a bit when the flesh began to support the flame. “Still not the right color,” the young man croaked as he watched the now rich orange flame. “I'll have to work on that color.”

Strong men put a rope around the young painter's neck and led him into the opera house by the animal entrance. They didn't inflict the bridle or bit on him.

Seconds later, there was another out-of-order incident, one still less anticipated than the episode of the double Finnegan. But who was the person who broke out of the concourse and ran toward one of the oracular ash pots?

“Come along inside!” Duffey was insisting to his party with curious haste. “Come, Sally. Come, Mary Virginia. The show is inside, not here.”

“Wait, I want to see who it is!” Salvation Sally protested being hurried.

“Inside, inside!” Stein was insisting with false heartiness. “They are supposed to have some excellent prelude music tonight. We don't want to miss it.”

“I'll not be rushed!” Mary Virginia objected strongly. “Where's Margaret Stone?”

But the small party was swept inside by the concourse of people.

Of course the prelude music was excellent. There was the “Painted Thunder Suite” by Kandarsky. The Countess and the child-hero left the party. “We're in the bullfight, you know,” they said.

There was the “Shining Mountain Fugue” by Palfrey. The hoyden left the party. “I'm in the Thunder Colt Games, you know,” she said.

“Where is Margaret Stone?” Mary Virginia asked again.

“She must have gotten lost in the crowd,” Salvation Sally said.

“Nobody could lose Margaret, not anywhere, not ever,” Mary Virginia objected.

One does not come to the opera house to hear excellent prelude music or to wait overlong for the curtain to rise. It is all right to wait just long enough for anticipation to peak, yes, but then — 

 — but then the curtain didn't rise at all in the Decatur Street Opera House that night. Instead — 

But Margaret Stone hadn't entered the opera building with her party. She hadn't gone in with the press of people. She became instead the least-expected episode of the evening. She was the second of the out-of-order persons who went to the oracular ashpot.

She put her hands deeply into the human ashes, and these ashes were cold and grainy and dead. She flicked her tongue. She often did this before making a sparky statement. She flicked her tongue again, and there was genuine, Holy Ghost fire playing about it. She scooped up ashes with her tangled and tense and electric fingers and put them to her mouth. They flamed.

Then she cascaded the handsful of flame over her head and face and arms, and seemed unburned by them. They were garish, tumbling, orange flames.

“Still not quite the right color,” Deutero-Finnegan had said as he watched from the animal entrance of the opera house.

“You can withdraw from this childish prank,” the marshal of the opera told Margaret. “You are not human. You have not been charged with any offense. We know that you are superb, that you are noetic, that you are intuitive. Why do so many of the genuine people insist on flamboyant gestures? Withdraw from this insanity thing! Be splendid!”

“I will not withdraw from it,” Margaret said. “I will be human in death, at least. And I'll be splendid in flame.”

They put the rope around her neck to lead her away, but she turned it into a rope of fire that drove all her oppressors back. Then she moved of herself, with that quick, dancing step she used, into the animal entrance of the building.

Instead of going up, the opera house curtain was sundered to nothing. It was struck by lightning; it was burst and rent by the simultaneous thunderstroke; it was inflamed; and it was gone. The Decatur Street Opera House was the only place in town that employed this effect.

The scene was a blood-and-sand arena. The act was a bullfight. It wasn't the Spanish thing; it was the earlier Cretan Bull drama. The music was the “Bull Waltz.” The Countess, the child-hero, and nine other young persons leaped over the bulls, vaulted on their horns, curveted clear over them, escaping the horns, escaping the hooves. This was all a beautiful action. The young people had their waists drawn very small by bronze cinctures.

Each of the young persons would defy a bull and do a flying handstand on its horns. Then there would be an interval when the bull was given a human person to mangle to death. The humans were sliced and gored by the curving, whetted horns; they were trampled and torn open by the thunder hoofs; and they were broken to pieces by the violent bull impact. In their being broken open, the humans spewed out some blood, much entrails, and still more trash.

“It is because we who order their deaths are so intuitive that we force them to reveal their inner essence,” said Cyrus Roundhead, who was in the loge with the Duffey party, “and the inner essence of humans is always trash. Ourselves, who have no inner essence and who are entirely and splendidly on the surface, contain no trash at all.”

Zabotski was one of the humans to be killed by the bulls. He made a good show. He gave his bull back bellow for bellow. He pawed the sand in mimicry of the bull. He put down his own head to meet the impact. He was dislocated and smashed and broken open, and he died in his own blood and serum and trash. He did, however, give one more defiant bellow after he was dead, a thing that startled the spectators.

“What we must do is create a cycle of heroic memories of ourselves as a species,” Roundhead was saying. “But wherever will we discover any heroic material to adapt? If only we could acquire it by legacy!”

After some minutes, the arena scene was that of bears and retiarii, or net wielders. The lithe young people in this act tangled the rushing and maddened bears in their flung nets, took them off their feet with the force of their own rushes, rolled them like huge and angry balls, scorched and burned them with white-hot prods.

“Is not the music exquisite?” Roundhead asked proudly, for he himself was one of the marshals of the opera. “It's the ‘Bear Ballet’ by Brhzhlozh.”

“Brhzhlozh is only a machine,” Mary Virginia said sourly.

“Certainly,” said Roundhead. “He is an intuitive, music-writing machine. There was once some slight talk of keeping a few unmutated humans to compose our music for us, but the best opinion was to extirpate every human vestige and to make no exceptions. We are not humans by chromosomic count or blood type or brain wave patterns; we are not humans by passion or estrogen or adrenalin (for we have none of these things at all); we are not humans by mental process or by esthesia. We are forever rid of the human connection. We are the splendid persons, the people without passion.”

“We sit at opera, and opera was a human thing,” Stein said.

“Not the blood opera, no,” Roundhead contradicted. “It is all our own, both in its new form and in its ancient antecedents.”

The maddened bears were slashed out of their entangling nets by the young and splendid leapers. They escaped the onrushes of the released beasts; then human persons were thrown into the arena in the way of the bears. And these humans were broken up and killed in a series of noisy crunchings.

Then there was the Fire Drake Frolic in which a few more stubborn humans were slain. Fritz's “Fandango in Three Flames” was the accompanying music.

The interlude came then. There was interlude music by Mrzorca, and Shining Mountain Bubbly was served to the loge patrons.

“Opera used to be better,” Mary Virginia said. “Operas were more fun a few years ago, when we were still humans.”

“None of us was ever a human,” Cyrus Roundhead corrected. “Some of us may have thought we were human. Some of us may have been raised with humans, just as humans had a tradition of humans being sometimes raised with animals.”

Time flowed by on its smooth and easy surface. Time stood still in its depth. The new simultaneity had no depth. The gracious and rather stylized interlude was cleared away. The presentation of the climax piece of the night began, the Thunder Colt Game. It was orchestrated to the Thunder Torus music. The live, pantomimic game unfolded.

“When we persons of the thunder dimension attained consciousness, it was a sudden event that instantly overtook every person of us alive,” Roundhead of the splendid mouth was saying. “The world was already in the middle of its baroque being and civilization when we woke to consciousness. The humans have claimed a sort of consciousness, but they cannot mean the same thing by it. I believe that our own awakening to full consciousness was quite recent. Watch now! The awakening to life of our totem animal the Thunder Colt is the symbol of our own awakening to consciousness. Notice that it devours compulsively on awakening. So do we.”

There was a large Thunder Colt egg in the arena. The hoyden and other young people broke a window into the egg. They took a human person, alive and blaring, and thrust him through the windowhole into the egg. There was then a mindless gnashing and crunching as the still unconscious Thunder Colt inside the egg began to devour the human. With the nourishment, there came a fulgence from within the egg. It was not yet consciousness; it was only the inquiry.

Answering lightning struck the egg and shattered it open: the Thunder Colt stood up on uncertain and stilted legs. That was the awakening to consciousness.

Simultaneous thunder struck and infused the colt. That was the awakening to the thunder dimension.

Then the splendid Thunder Colt, some pieces of the eaten human still protruding from its mouth, leaped clear of its birthing debris and ran riot. The stark music of the Thunder Torus picked up tempo as the game evolved.

There were only two human persons remaining for the arena. These two were known to be noetic and splendid; they were humans only in their coming deaths and in their depths as persons.

The Thunder Colt knocked Deutero-Finnegan down with its first assault; it tore off his lower jaw, split his chest, and seemed to lay open layer after layer of persons in turbulent and confused depth.

“We have the thunder dimension,” the talkative Cyrus Roundhead was saying in the loge, “but I am jealous that there may be other dimensions that we lack. Do we really miss anything by living so entirely on the surface? What we need to find for ourselves is a dimension of depth. It would be fine if some kind and older race would will such a dimension to us, but we look in vain for a source of any such inheritance.”

The joyous, newly awakened, totem Thunder Colt killed the Finnegan effigy on the second pass, spilled him open in an incredibly mingled and rich juiciness. There was spilled out shouting scarlet blood, crimson blood, high-saturation blue-red blood from the young painter's body, from the body that really seemed to have had several tenants. There was sulphur-colored blood, saffron-colored blood, flame blood, ichor, and serum mezcolanza. The color was more orange than red or black now. That color, it was the life-garish orange color of all strange artists in their orange periods.

“Why, he had the right color in him after all.” Margaret Stone laughed. It was almost her last joke.

“As a species, we should try to create a signature color for ourselves” — Roundhead was talking — “as well as a depth and an intensity. Can we remain splendid forever if we do not add to our repertoire? We'd pick garbage out of the wake of any great people who had gone before us, but where shall we find traces of a great people? We search vainly for a legacy of glory.”

The Thunder Colt wheeled back and killed Margaret Stone at a single pass. It tore off half of her head with its totemic teeth; it tore out her throat. But it couldn't go deeply enough to get the laugh in her throat. That's all she had to leave.

The Thunder Torus music crashed to an end. Outside the opera house the new and unlegacied breeze was blowing under a gimcracked, jeweled sky.

Author's Commentary

Three Shadows Of The Wolf

There was a sheep-killing wolf about, and that redneck sheriff Otis Pidgeon would have to do something about it. It was a big wolf (everybody seemed to have seen it except the sheriff) and stories were clustering about it. The folks swore that it was a big gray wolf, not a red wolf, and that was impossible. One would have to go north a thousand miles to find a gray wolf. So the people were mistaken. But it wasn't like them to be mistaken about a country thing like a wolf.

The people also said that the big wolf might have a pack, that he might have three shadowy followers. But, if so, the three were really shadow wolves; they didn't leave tracks.

It was a gray wolf with a white slash at the crown of his head. Ribaul said that the wolf would weigh two hundred and fifty pounds. Ribaul was a Frenchman, and so the sheriff automatically divided his figure by two. That would still be a very large wolf. It loomed up gray, and it disappeared like a ghost. It killed and carried off sheep.

Royal Parish was almost the only sheep-raising parish around there, and even in Royal the sheep were raised in only a small district around Yellow Knife. And that was where Sheriff Pidgeon was raised too.

Pidgeon was a tall and gaunt young man with bulging blue eyes. He was a man who went ash-white when he was angry or terrified or embarrassed; it might be said that he blushed white. He was the most suspicious man in Royal Parish. For this reason he had never married, never courted a woman, nor formed any close friendship, nor deposited money in a bank, nor loaned or borrowed, nor trusted weather or fate. He was the right sheriff for Royal Parish, but likely not for any other place. The people in Royal had very dirty quicksilver in them and only a suspicious man could keep up with them. But what Pidgeon was suspicious of now was the strange wolf.

Ragley said that the wolf stood as tall as a Shetland pony, but the lies of Ragley had always stood as tall as a jack pine in a brush thicket. Kenrad said that the wolf had ears like a panther, jaws with the snap of a gator, the muzzle of a moose, and a gait like a high-shouldered ox. Pidgeon was smart enough to know that no wolf looked like that. He was even sharp enough to understand that Kenrad had unwittingly described himself.

It was Ragley with the monstrously mobile features and the equally mobile heart who came through strongest on the wolf. Ragley was a widower with a thirteen-year-old daughter Clela. He was a liar by profession, and he farmed a little on the side. But Ribaul was the only one who described the wolf as if he even knew what a wolf looked like. Ribaul had been a roustabout and an animal tamer. He described the wolf as impossibly large, but he described it as a man would who knows just how a wolf is put together.

“I will tell you this, Pidgeon,” storekeeper Scroggins said. “You had better get that sheep-killing wolf before there is a man killed. This same thing happened a few miles south and it ended in a man being killed.”

“Anything can end in a man being killed,” Pidgeon said, “but it's usually another man and not a wolf that kills him.”

“If you know where to draw the line between them, Sheriff,” Scroggins said. “Did you hear me, Sheriff? I said ‘if you know where to draw the line between them.’ I'd get to the bottom of this if I were sheriff for fifteen minutes.”

Pidgeon was suspicious of all of them there in the store: Scroggins, Ragley, Kenrad, Tadler, Corbey, Boston, Danby. “All right, Scroggins,” Pidgeon told him. “You are sheriff for fifteen minutes. Let's see you handle it.”

“Just pin a badge on me and I'll get to the bottom of it.”

That got a sore spot. “You know the parish voted against an appropriation for a badge,” Pidgeon said. “Nobody remembers the last sheriff to have a badge.”

“Sheep disappeared from three more flocks last night, Pidgeon,” Danby said.

“Scroggins here will have it solved in fifteen minutes.”

“Not without a badge I won't. But there's some queer stories about that wolf.”

“Who's starting them, Scroggins?” Pidgeon asked.

“Why, Pidgeon, I would say that the wolf is starting them,” Tadler broke in. “I would say that there's a wolf hair behind every one of those wolf stories. They say that the wolf might not be exactly a wolf all the time. He disappears from a place and he travels mighty fast.”

“Yes, he's in three different places too fast for any wolf,” Pidgeon said.

“Maybe he rides a motorcycle, Sheriff,” Ragley jibed.

Pidgeon went angrily out of Scroggins' store and applied himself to looking for the wolf. Well, there was this about him: he left big and obvious wolf tracks at the site of every killing and theft. He always left at least one slashed sheep. But the tracks couldn't be followed from one raid to another. They just died away.

Pidgeon drove his pickup truck up a back road to the site of the Tadler raid, and he pulled off the road. Tadler's place was full of outcroppings. The sheriff had been told where the raid had been, and moreover a dog was waiting to take him to it.

“Ah, you're nipped a bit, Little Harry,” Pidgeon said to the dog, “but not as much as if you'd made a real fight out of it. There's a saying that a good sheepdog will stand to any wolf, but neither of us believes it. A dog smart enough to be a good sheepdog will know when he's outpowered. You have any opinions about that, Little Harry?”

Little Harry the sheepdog was abashed, though he and Pidgeon were friends. But he did lead the sheriff to a killed sheep, and to live sheep reposing around it. They ignore one of their dead fellows after he's cold.

“Killed in neat wolf style, isn't he, Little Harry? And not too much of him eaten. And there is no sign at all of the four missing sheep.

“Dammit, Little Harry, you should find some way of telling me what happened here.” There were plenty of tracks of a very large wolf, but they didn't lead anywhere.

“All right, Little Harry, which way did he go?” Pidgeon asked.

Little Harry showed him, leading him across the rock croppings that held no prints. Then there were prints in the mud, and the wolf went onto the road itself. “He doesn't leave tracks on the road,” Pidgeon said. “All right, which way did he go?”

Little Harry lay down in the road with the air of having done all that was asked of him. He could not be urged to go further. Pidgeon left the dog, got in his pickup, and drove to the site of the Boston raid.

It was six miles there. Boston had suffered thirteen sheep disappeared, and one killed and partly eaten by a wolf. This site also was near the road and did not require much walking in the rough country. It had been a considerate wolf in this. There were marks of several trucks here, Boston's, Tadler's, Danby's, Corbey's; they had come to investigate when the news had got around. There was one other heavy truck that may have been there first.

Pidgeon knew Boston's sheep, and he knew that the thirteen missing ones were the best ones. Pidgeon found and pocketed two small pieces of brass. He could have found more of them if he had looked long enough. Well, they were at least a small part of the explanation. Pidgeon went to the site of the Danby raid, glad again that the wolf was so considerate as to raid close to the road. It was about eight miles from Boston's place. They had all been here before him, all the trucks of the gathering angry men. Had the unidentified heavy truck been here also? Couldn't be sure.

One sheep was killed and partly eaten, and nine sheep reported disappeared. And here was a dead dog. He, at least, had stood to the wolf, but he hadn't had much luck with it. Dandy George had been a fine large animal; he'd been killed by something larger.

Pidgeon didn't find any brass here, and he didn't intend a long search for it. There were no wolf tracks except around the dead sheep (very plain, as though left there on purpose), and around the dead dog (barely discernible on the rocks there, as though the site was not of the wolf 's choosing). Pidgeon found more tracks. The wolf had gone up onto the road.

“One of the fellows said maybe the wolf used a motorcycle,” Pidgeon mumbled. “He didn't, but maybe he used a truck. That wolf had a lot of man in him.”

There are very few wolves who will go down and slay one sheep, and then stand off and kill a number of them with a rifle. And then pick them off cleanly, carrying, not dragging.

Pidgeon went to get Ribaul, the French bum and his part-time helper.

Their connection had begun several months earlier when Pidgeon had locked Ribaul up in their little jail for cause. Ribaul had been living in a shack on rough land that belonged to a French farmer. Soon after the arrest, Pidgeon gave Ribaul part-time employment and the run of the place. Ribaul was a handy man, a big oaf with a head like a giant potato. He was strong as a mule, and like a mule he would refuse when he felt himself overworked; but Ribaul could track.

“Hopping Hailstones!” Sheriff Pidgeon swore. “You fat-faced fool!”

The French bum Ribaul had nudged Pidgeon's arm and made him miss a shot. It was too late to shoot again. The wolf was gone, and so was a night's work.

“You splay-footed French fool, you'd better have a good reason for that.”

“No, no reason, Mr. Pidgeon, just a notion,” big Ribaul said in a little voice.

“I had a perfect shot. Why am I afflicted by a fool?”

It was just before dawn, about eighteen hours after Pidgeon had got Ribaul to help him track the wolf. They had stayed with it all that time. Ribaul could track, but there was a lot of hocus in his methods. They had driven the back roads along the west end of the parish. The wind had been strong from the east, and Ribaul swore that he could catch a whiff of a wolf when within a mile of him.

“That's the way they work the bloods, Mr. Pidgeon,” he said. “Track and backtrack till you pick up the scent. Then close in on it. Pass it by to the other side till you lose it again. Then box it in.”

“You aren't a bloodhound, Ribaul, though about the eyes and dewlap — ”

“I can't pick up a scent as quick as a good dog, but I know better how to close in when I have it. I'm smarter than a lot of dogs.”

Well, maybe he was, maybe he wasn't. They had the wolf boxed in several hours before sundown. They could drive no closer to it, and their box was a double section of land, a wild thousand acres, very rough.

“Sometimes the wolf has followers,” Ribaul said, “three other wolves who trail him, but sometimes they are only shadows. And there is a man who sometimes has three followers. They will be men for a while, and then they will be only shadows.”

“Rot, Ribaul,” Pidgeon said. They walked and cross-walked, always to the windward of the wolf. Ribaul had a high loping walk and Pidgeon had trouble staying up with him.

“We're crossing the same country a lot, Ribaul. You're sure you're onto him?”

“The wolf moves too. He is a smart one. He began to move a couple of hours ago.”

They were going along a clear hogback ridge when Ribaul stopped.

“The wolf scent is completely gone, Mr. Pidgeon,” he said.

“How could that happen, Ribaul?”

“I'm afraid to ask myself how it could happen. Now I get a scent. Ah, I don't know how to say this. What I get now is a man scent instead of a wolf scent.”

“Well hickory-handled hell, Ribaul! Let's go after the man then!” They went after him. But a man is harder to follow than a wolf is. He hasn't the same pungency to him. Pidgeon and Ribaul separated at a rock cone with jack pines growing out of it; it was a place where crows roosted. Ribaul went around it to the north, and Pidgeon to the south. Pidgeon heard Ribaul whistling and he called to him to be quiet. Then he heard him no more.

Pidgeon was coming into the throat of a draw a quarter mile beyond there when he picked up a scent. It wasn't a man's scent. It was a wolf 's. Strong!

“Ribaul, this way!” Pidgeon called. There was something in the brush, large and low, heavy gray and flash-white. “Ribaul, this way!” Pidgeon called again.

It wasn't possible for a shot yet. The thing moved just often enough and far enough to prevent that. And it couldn't be seen clearly. “Ribaul, you fool, down this way!”

Ribaul came from the north out of a tangle of rocks and brush.

“He's in the brush just beyond us, Ribaul,” Pidgeon said. “Even I can get the wolf scent here.”

“Yes, he's changed again. He's wolf now. I've been watching him a long time. He's a wolf now, but for a while he seemed to be something else.”

“What are you talking about, Frenchy?”

“It's hard to get the outline of a thing in the brush.”

They went after the animal then, never losing him again, never quite getting in a position for a shot at the canny beast. It was a ten-hour, frustrating, foot-smashing, weary chase. But the wolf wasn't hard to follow even in the dark. It was a gray wolf that sometimes flashed white in the clear night. A dozen times they were near to having shots, but every time the animal melted away and had to be picked up again.

It didn't really move fast, but it was tireless, and it kept them at a dogged run most of the night. Several times, as if by mutual agreement, both parties stopped and rested. The wolf with the white slash on the top of his head was always to be seen, and the men never took their eyes off it in the pulsating dark. Pidgeon got a close look at it only once, and the wolf seemed to look at him with a man's eyes.

“He's an odd one, Ribaul,” Pidgeon said. “A wolf that sometimes travels in a truck and hunts with a rifle, he isn't the kind of wolf you meet every day.”

“Only a special kind of wolf can do that. And I won't say what it's called.”

“If you don't want to look down the wrong end of a rifle barrel at a cross-eyed sheriff, you'd better say what it's called. What kind of wolf might do that?”

“Loup-garou?”

“What's its name in English?”

“I don't know. I never heard it in English.”

They went after the wolf again for what was left of the night. Pidgeon, using Ribaul as his left hand, working with definite aim, pinned the wolf against the very wide, clear slope he couldn't have missed. It was then that Ribaul, who should have been a hundred yards away, nudged Pidgeon's arm. The shot went high, and the wolf was away.

“Ribaul, you open-ended idiot! If you've only a notion, it better be a good one.”

“Mr. Pidgeon, I'm ashamed to say what it was.”

“You made me miss the wolf! Why? Why?”

“I had a sudden notion that he wasn't a wolf at all. I looked at his eyes, and at the blaze on his head, and I wasn't sure whether he was a wolf or a man. If you'd have killed a man, there'd have been trouble.”

“Ribaul, couldn't you see what he was?”

“I could see every hair on him. I could even see the pulse move at his throat. But he looked like a man that I know. He is a man sometimes. He is loup-garou.”

“Tell me what that is, Ribaul, or, trouble or not, I'll kill me a man right here.”

“Oh, he's a wolf part of the time. And sometimes he's a man. If I am wrong, then I have caused you to miss a wolf. If I am right, then I have saved you from killing a man.”

“Let it go. Since it spent the night mostly on its own terms, it may have brought us near where it dens.”

“A male will hardly den this time of year. Just lay up somewhere in cool rocks.”

“Let's find out where. I'll take the draw. You take the thicket. I'll show you that I'm not such a bad tracker myself.”

And Pidgeon wasn't a bad tracker. He picked up deep and firm wolf tracks almost at once. The hair was prickling on his neck with the feeling that the wolf intended to leave tracks that could be followed. There was a big old truck half-hidden in some shrub in the rocky meadow just above the draw. “Ah, the wolf 's own transport,” Pidgeon grinned the words to himself.

It was moist in the draw, and the wolf, from his tracks, was very heavy. It would have gone far over a hundred and fifty pounds, and whoever heard of a wolf that big? The draw narrowed sharply, and the wolf kept to it. The soft, white lime sand on its floor left very clear tracks, show tracks, the biggest wolf tracks ever seen, and the clearest.

The wolf at a slouch-walk leaves the hind foot ahead of the front-foot track. It is a five-toed track of the front foot, and a four-toed track of the hind foot (one of the back toes is small and rudimentary, and it does not track). The front paw is always the broader of the two. This wolf had very heavy front paws, almost as broad as those of a mountain lion.

It was the coolest hour out of the twenty-four, and almost daylight.

Front foot, back foot left; front foot, back foot right, Pidgeon found himself chanting it. Front foot, back foot left; front foot, back and that is where the sequence stopped — 

Stopped completely. Pidgeon stood erect and closed his eyes for a moment. Nothing that he'd ever known had prepared him for this.

“The light is still pretty dim, and besides I'm tired,” he told himself, but he lied when he told it. He reasoned with himself a moment, and then he picked up the trail again.

Well, it was a back foot, in a manner of speaking. In other circumstances there wouldn't be anything frightening about such a well-known sort of print. But the print wasn't that of a wolf 's back foot. Nor was the next one, nor the next. The wolf tracks had turned into man tracks. Well, the world has to have its back broken somewhere.

Pidgeon followed the tracks of the man till the draw ended in a rock spread and no more tracking was possible. Pidgeon called to Ribaul. After a while the Frenchman came to him from an upper thicket. Ribaul took it all in with quick eyes, and he rubbed his head.

“Was Jules Lamotte here with you?” he asked Pidgeon. “Why didn't I see him if he was here?”

“I haven't seen Lamotte for several weeks,” Pidgeon said with difficulty. “I haven't seen him a dozen times in my life. I hardly know him. Are those his tracks? They may be old tracks. I believe that he lives near here. He may have made those tracks yesterday on his normal business.”

“He does live near here,” Ribaul said. “And his tracks were not made yesterday. They were made short minutes ago.”

“I didn't see him, Ribaul. What kind of man is he really?”

“He has a laugh with hair on it.”

“That's no crime, though perhaps it should be. And what else?”

“He's a man who has mutton, and does not keep sheep. And this is his place we come to.”

Jules Lemotte was a big, sharp-muzzled man, with a sudden slash of white in his mouse-gray hair. He met Pidgeon and Ribaul in his kitchen doorway.

“You are halfway welcome,” he said. “Did you kill the wolf?”

“No, the wolf still escapes us,” Pidgeon said. “Didn't you see us, and the wolf? We found your tracks, just where we lost those of the wolf, fresh tracks.”

“I have not been out of my house last night or this morning.”

“Then someone else has been wearing your feet,” Ribaul challenged.

“What? Both of them?” Lamotte asked with a touch of harsh humor.

“Yes. Or all four,” Ribaul said.

“Can you explain what he means, Mr. Sheriff?” Lamotte asked.

“Ribaul believes that the wolf is loup-garou. I understand that it's French.”

“It's a child's story, and not necessarily French,” Lamotte said. “Madelon, make breakfast for two new-come ones! Madelon! Do you hear?”

“I hear,” she called from within, and she came to the kitchen. “Oh, for them,” she said. “All right.”

Pidgeon had never seen Lamotte's wife before. She was a good-looking woman. She made a heavy country breakfast for them and they were soon sat down to it.

“How is it that you have mutton, Lamotte?” Pidgeon asked him. “I did not know that you had sheep.”

“I do not. How is it that I have coffee? I have no plantation.”

“Who are the three men in the picture there on the wall?” Pidgeon asked.

Lamotte looked at it puzzled.

“Oh, my brothers, I suppose,” he said. “I don't remember ever seeing that picture before.” Why should a man say “my brothers, I suppose”? They were three bristly men in the picture, and they looked enough like Jules Lamotte to be his brothers.

“They say you left your old place because of some kind of trouble,” Pidgeon said.

“They don't even know where my old place was,” Lamotte answered. “Yet they're partly right. A settled man doesn't change his abode in midlife if everything is peaceful.”

“Yours is one of the places that the wolf hasn't bothered, Lamotte.”

“What could he bother here? I raise grain and cattle, not sheep.”

“Did you hear anything, Lamotte, during the night and dawn?”

“You two men clattering around the rocks out there, trying to clatter quietly.”

They ate pancakes and drank a little morning whisky and were not really unfriendly.

“Is that your big truck in the rock pasture?” Pidgeon asked.

“Yes, I seldom use it though.”

“Does anyone use it?”

“Why would anyone use that big old truck?”

“Have you an enemy, Lamotte?”

“I think so, yes. Or a friend who intends to kill me.”

“Will you tell me who it is?”

“No. It's a private matter. You are welcome to stay. I must go check on a calf.” Lamotte went out of the house, walking stiffly as though he had perpetually sore ankles.

“He lied to you, my husband,” Madelon Lamotte told them some time after Jules had gone. “He said that he had not been out of the house the night past. Yet he did leave yesterday, and he was gone the whole of last night. He arrived back in a daze, but only just before you two came. I feel that he isn't well, even he isn't sane. It's though he had two different natures.”

“Which two different natures, Mrs. Lamotte?” Pidgeon asked.

But Jules Lamotte came back in then, and Madelon did not tell what she meant.

Later that day, after he had slept for a few hours, Pidgeon got certain equipment and then drove and walked to the last draw in which he had tracked the night before. He had to know whether those tracks would appear different by daylight.

They didn't. The only things that struck Pidgeon in a different light were his own tracks of the night before. How he had skittered about when he came to the spot where the tracks changed! What a wild little dance he had done!

But all else was as he had remembered it. There were the wolf tracks; and then there were the man tracks. There was no other ending to the wolf tracks and no other beginning to the man tracks. If one set didn't turn into the other in full stride, then evidence was meaningless. Pidgeon took pictures of them from different angles, thinking that the various shadings might tell something. He also went and got pictures and tire tracks of Jules Lamotte's heavy truck. Then he drove to Yellow Knife and went to the store.

All of them were there, Scroggins the storekeeper, Kenrad, Ragley, Tadler, Corbey, Boston, Danby. The store was the club, the place where they talked and played dominoes and checkers.

“I've been out with the French tracker after the wolf,” Pidgeon said.

“We will help you skin him,” Tadler grunted. “Let's see how big he really is.”

“We can't skin it till we kill it. I had one shot. Ribaul made me miss.”

“Why'd he do that?” storekeeper Scroggins asked.

“He said that it was loup-garou and that if I shot it I'd be shooting a man.”

“I say shoot it anyhow,” Tadler harangued. “Get rid of the wolf no matter what he turns into. I say shoot every man that even looks a little bit like a wolf.”

“Then I'd have to shoot several of you here present,” Pidgeon said.

“It's mostly the French that turn into wolves,” Ragley told them. “The French are superstitious; they believe in that stuff. Down in Beauregard Parish one time there was a big wolf came into the country with a funny look in his eyes and a white blaze on his head.”

Pidgeon was startled. Had Ragley known that the present wolf had a funny look in his eyes and a white blaze on his head? Another man had come into the store quietly.

Pidgeon didn't look around, but he knew that it was the man with the funny look in his eyes and the white blaze on his head. There was also the impression of several other men now standing outside the store.

“The hardest thing, when a man turns into a wolf, is right at the ankle bone,” Corbey said. Corbey was a crafty old swindler and he was about to wrap his tongue around something rich. “It hurts there at the ankle. You see, what appears to be a wolf 's knee has its bend opposite to a man's, but that is really the same as a man's ankle bone, not his knee bone. The wolf 's real knee is hidden up in the haunch. When a man turns into a wolf his ankle bone has to expand about eight inches. You find a man who turns a lot and you'll find a fellow who always has sore ankles.

“The rest is easy. Watch one change sometime and see how slick he does it. He kind of softens his skull, and part of it flows forward and part of it flows back. Then he lets his eyes roll around to the sides of his head. He sharpens his muzzle and does all the other little things. Then he goes down on all fours just like he was unhinging himself. He begins to shiver: that's the way he brings the hair out of his hide. After that he lacks just one thing for him to be a total wolf.”

Well, someone had to ask it.

“What's the one thing he needs to make himself into a total wolf,” Pidgeon asked, “after he has gone down on all fours and shivered his hair to the outside of his hide?”

“The tail,” said Corbey, and licked his lips. “It sounds like a cork popping when he brings it out. The tail's the last thing to go back in too. And after he changes quite a few times, man to wolf and wolf to man, why his tail gets where it won't go all the ways back in anymore. I maintain, Sheriff, that there's a way to put this knowledge to test.”

What was Corbey getting at? There was dark lightning bouncing around that store. There was musky excitement beginning to rise, and the feeling got riper by the minute. Something was brewing, and it was these fellows' kind of thing.

“Men, this becomes a community effort,” Corbey was crowing. “Sheriff, we got to get every man-jack in the neighborhood together and make them strip. Sheriff, one of those men is going to have a tail!”

Coruscating coon dogs! Was Corbey kidding? Dammit, would the laughter never come? What was holding off the howling glee? One or two of them may have quaked a bit, but they would not be caught in open laughter. They were all long-faced and serious.

“Sheriff, I believe that it's your duty to set the example,” Ragley gruffed.

“Drop your pants, Sheriff!” Boston barked. “We'll have first look at you.”

Were these men serious? They looked murderous in their intensity.

“I'll not be first,” Pidgeon said. “I stand on privilege. I'll be last.”

“Nobody leaves alive till he's been examined and certified,” storekeeper Scroggins stated harshly, and he produced a long gun from behind his counter. “Who'll be number one, do the manly thing, and prove he's not the wolf?”

“By damn I will!” Ragley swore. Ragley was never a backward man. He dropped his pants. The examination was thorough and minute. Clothed or stripped, Ragley was curiously shaped, awkwardly articulated, sometimes coming to points or knobs. But he didn't have a tail.

“You, boy,” Scroggins called to an eleven-year-old who looked in. “This is a man's meeting for men only. Boy, go out and round up every man in the neighborhood. Tell them to come to the store and be examined right now.”

“Whaffor?”

“Tell them that we're going to nail down the wolf. Tell them, boy, that we're going to find out which one of them wears the tail.” The boy left running.

Boston dropped his pants. No tail. Then it was like a dam bursting the way the pants and overalls came down in a sudden flood. The new men were already coming in. There must have been thirty of the finest men in Royal Parish who dropped their pants within thirty seconds. Tadler, one of the prime inspectors, was near-sighted and he had to get very close to the work. But he was conscientious and he never left a man till he was sure. No tail in the lot. Ribaul came in.

“Ribaul, have you a tail?” Scroggins thundered at him, gun in hands.

“No. I never learned how to grow one.” But Ribaul submitted when it was explained to him. He didn't have a tail either.

“And now you, Sheriff Pidgeon,” Scroggins said in his gun-barrel voice.

“This isn't happening. This can't be happening,” Pidgeon moaned.

But Pidgeon submitted, in that most shameful moment of his life. And, to the disappointment of many, he didn't have a tail either. He'd made all the fuss over nothing.

“And what are you waiting for?” Ragley asked the big Frenchman who was standing there. It was the man with the funny eyes and the white blaze on his head, the man Jules Lamotte.

“For tobacco, salt, coffee, rubbing alcohol, nails, several things,” big Lamotte said. “I've no more time. Your games should be finished by now.”

“How about some mutton, Frenchy?” storekeeper Scroggins asked.

“No. I have plenty of mutton,” Lamotte said. Scroggins, the gun under his arms, filled the Frenchman's order from a written list.

“Why don't you drop your pants like an honest man, Frenchy?” Ragley asked. “Don't you get the idea? Didn't you hear us and see us?”

It was like an explosion the way Lamotte laughed, like a wolf laugh, a laugh with hair on it. There were three big men waiting in the doorway for Lamotte. Pidgeon believed that they were the three men in the picture in Lamotte's kitchen. Lamotte got his things.

“What's the rubbing alcohol for?” Ragley asked him.

“I have sore ankles,” Jules Lamotte said quietly, “always sore ankles.” Lamotte left them there, going out with his high-gaited walk. And if he had a tail, it was still in his pants when he left.

“He's your man, Sheriff,” Kenrad said. “He's your wolf.”

Pidgeon looked after Lamotte. Then he was startled. Lamotte was walking alone. The three men were not with him, and there was nowhere they could have gone.

Pidgeon walked out. A ways further on, he met and spoke briefly with Clela Ragley, the young daughter of rough Ragley himself. She had an idea about using a wolf bait. Pidgeon went on about other things. He would solve this yet. After you've been a fool a couple of times, it gets easier. So he made a fool of himself again after dark.

Pidgeon met Clela Ragley by the road in the dark that night. She went into that rough double section of land that seemed to be the hold of the wolf. And Pidgeon followed her at about fifty yards.

And the wolf was there. Turpentined tomcats, how he was there! The whole air was full of the wolf. Pidgeon was downwind of it, and now he moved to full windward of the wolf. It was very near, and Clela was upwind of it. She waited in the clear, and Pidgeon watched what would happen. He had a rifle cradled in his elbow, and he wondered what he would do if it was a man and not a wolf that they flushed. Pidgeon again had the feeling that the setting was contrived, that the wolf was announcing his presence as powerfully as possible. Whom was baiting whom here?

The wolf came out of the rocks and moved towards Clela. There was confusion as the animal seemed to have three shadows following it. Pidgeon could see its shagginess before he could make out its form. There was the feel of menace, of murder in the making. Pidgeon caught the white blaze on the head of it before he could make out much else. It erected itself curiously, and so did its three shadows.

And Pidgeon was quite surprised to see that it was now a man on two legs, though losing none of its fierceness or shagginess. It was the wolfish Jules Lamotte with a rifle on his arm. Oh, and that white blaze on his head!

Pidgeon slipped his own rifle onto ready as he heard the sudden rough voice of Jules. He watched Clela put her hand to her mouth and totter, trembling like a staked-out lamb. He'd kill Lamotte if he touched the girl. Man or wolf, he'd kill him!

Lamotte came within a foot of the girl, and Pidgeon could see Clela's eyes widen to great balls of white. Then suddenly the fire was banked and the storm died.

“This is a very rough place to be at night, young lady,” Lamotte said in a tight voice. “Your father wouldn't care if you were abroad here, but you should care. I all but shot you. I might not have made sure. Walk on down the road, young girl, and then follow it to your home. I'll keep watch on you as you go. Ah, but I see that I'm not needed in this. Is it not the sheriff who slips up so clumsy and heavy-footed behind me?”

“I'm the sheriff, Lamotte,” Pidgeon said. “And what are you doing here?”

“Walking on my own land. That's all you need to know. Why are you here?” Lamotte seemed to have invisible or shadowy supporters with him. Not to be seen now, though, and not certainly to be smelled either as men or wolves. Present to extra senses or to imaginations.

“I'm hunting a wolf-man,” Pidgeon said. “I came near to killing you for him. It mightn't have been a mistake if I'd done it.”

“And I also lacked only a little of killing,” Lamotte said, “and you interrupted me. Yes, you were very close to the wolf-man, Sheriff. So was I. But this time it was you and the girl who nudged my elbow and prevented my shooting. Why do you hunt with an agneau?”

“With what?”

“With a little lamb staked out. Is that how you hunt a wolf-man?”

On the next day there came new evidence against Jules Lamotte. Ribaul brought Madelon Lamotte to Sheriff Pidgeon. “Mr. Pidgeon, Mr. Pidgeon!” Ribaul called from outside. Ribaul never knocked. He followed the country custom of standing in front of a house and calling out. Pidgeon opened the door to them. “I'm here. Come in,” he said.

“I will leave her with you,” Ribaul said, and he left.

“It is only to talk to you a little,” Madelon spoke when she was inside. She was very fair for a country woman, and her hair was the color of polished walnut.

“I hope that you can tell me something to clear things up,” Pidgeon said.

“No. What I tell will clear nothing up. It will tie it all in knots like snakes. It is possible that I am mad, Sheriff. If that is so, then lock me up at once. Better to be locked up than torn to pieces. Better to be a mad woman than a dead one. But I am selfish: it is of my husband that I must think. For myself I no longer care if I am mad, or even if I am dead. It is the wolf in everything. Everything that I eat or drink has the wolf in it. I see it everywhere, I see it in our yard and house. But wait! Before I speak more, promise that you will not kill him.”

“Not kill the wolf?”

“Not kill my husband Jules. Promise that you will not kill him.”

“I promise nothing. Tell me what you came to tell.”

“I see the wolf in our yard. I scream for my husband. When he comes, the wolf is gone, and he says that I only imagine it. Then I see it again and I say ‘Look, Jules, look!’ But then my husband is gone.”

“They are never both there at once?”

“Never. And Jules says that he does not see the wolf at all, but I see it a dozen times. Jules goes out at night. Oh, if I only knew where he goes! Then I begin to smell the wolf, strongly and all the time. And in my own house! Yesterday I come on the wolf face-to-face in my own house, in the room that we call the cool pantry. I screamed, I ran to my own room, I blocked the door with a trunk. I lay on the bed in terror. I am a country woman. I have seen wolves. Another wolf I would chase like a big dog. This is not like another wolf. I hear it pant at my door. I hear its feet go back and forth. Its teeth scrape the balks of the door and they seem to splinter and tear. Then I feel a change as if it is two things at once.

“Then it opened the door as if the trunk against it was a toy. It opened the door and came in. It stood at my bed, and I am too frightened even to open my eyes. ‘My poor Madelon,’ said my husband Jules, for he was the one standing there. ‘What has frightened you? Have you dreamed of the wolf again?’

“He is there, my husband, and there is no wolf. ‘I have seen him, Jules, in this very house,’ I say. ‘You know that is impossible,’ Jules tells me, and he comforts me. But as I looked I saw something, and I froze. His left hand was only becoming a hand again. The claws were going back in and the fingers were coming out. The heaviest part of the hair was disappearing. It had not been a hand a moment before. Is that possible?”

“No. That is not possible,” Pidgeon said. But what was possible? “Mrs. Lamotte, are you afraid of your husband?”

“Not when he is my husband. Only when he is the wolf.”

“Go back and stay with him today and tonight. Tell him not to leave his house at all for any reason. If the wolf shows in the open tonight, we will kill it. And if the cornered wolf turns into a man, we will still kill it.”

She left then. She still had her bearing and her beauty, for all her distraught state. Pidgeon had wanted to ask her one more thing.

But how do you go about asking a woman whether her husband has a tail?

A little later in the day, Clela Ragley came to the sheriff.

“I have proof now for sure,” she said. “Jules Lamotte is the wolf.”

“Have you really anything to go on? Anything tangible?”

“I think he got pretty tangible with me. I dreamed of the wolf and the man just before dawn this morning. It was a real liver-twister of a dream. He was Jules the man and he came at me. Then he was Jules the wolf as he closed in. He fastened on my shoulder with those terrible teeth, and I only awakened in time or I would have been done to death by him.”

“Clela, you half-pint witch! Won't you ever grow up! I want tangible evidence.”

“Is this what you call tangible?” she asked. She showed it to him with a sudden motion, and it set him to shaking. He wasn't sure whether it was Clela herself who had this effect on him, or the horrible wounds. She'd been bitten and mauled pretty badly where she dropped her sack dress off her shoulders. They were deep, tearing bites that had gone livid, two of one sort and one of another. They could be deadly.

“Clela, where did you get those?” Pidgeon asked in amazement.

“I told you,” she said. Pidgeon wouldn't accept it. He'd close his ears and not hear such stuff. Clela was talking some more, but he only heard the end of it.

“After you kill him, Sheriff,” she said, “then cut off his head and bring it here and see if it doesn't match the bites. That way we can be sure.”

The wolf had struck again the night before and many sheep were missing. So it had to be the wolf hunt all the way now.

“Why do you cut those funny notches into the lead part of your bullets?” Ribaul asked Pidgeon before they started out.

“So I'll know which shots I shot,” Pidgeon said. “I want to be clear on that.”

They went after the wolf as night came on, four of them in one bunch, Ribaul, Ragley, Pidgeon and Kenrad. These four men could track. They knew the country, and they knew animals.

“I hear, Ribaul, that you were once with a carnival,” Ragley said as they went along in loose skirmish. “I hear that they paid to see you and thought you were a new kind of animal.”

“Were you with a carnival, Ribaul?” Pidgeon asked. “How did Ragley know?”

“I was with a carnival. I was not on exhibit. I worked. I cared for animals. I had a tame bobcat and a tame coon and a tame bear.”

“Did you have a tame wolf?” Ragley asked.

“No. There is no such thing as a tame wolf.”

“Why are you carrying the stake and the maul, Ribaul?” Kenrad asked. “Are they your idea, or the sheriff 's?”

“What matter? He says it doesn't hurt to have them, so long as I'm the one to carry them.”

“You'll have to catch the wolf, Ribaul, before you can kill him with those.”

“They are not to kill the wolf with. They are to make him stay dead.”

The wolf was there all right, in a general area. For a long time it did not seem to move at all. It waited for them to come. Then, as though by sudden decision, it began to move. So did the men, with absolute sureness now.

They hunted without dogs, and they were quickly onto the wolf much closer than they could have got with dogs. They had the wolf boxed into the same rough double section of land where Pidgeon and Ribaul had hunted him before. They had him in the poke, and there was nothing left but to pull the drawstring.

It was clear moonlight, and they had him. If he had broke to the open, he would have to display himself for an easy shot against the clear hillside. If he stayed in the thicket, they would beat him out. If he holed in anywhere, they would burn him over and dig him out. He was big and dangerous, but they had him tight.

The wolf broke to the open hill, and he turned as if at bay. And it was as if three shadows of him turned also. He was as big as a grown puma. He'd go more than two hundred pounds. He actually sparked fire off his raised hackles, as a lynx at bay is said to do. He had his high white blaze and his eyes of a man, and he looked at them with fevered hate.

Ribaul and Ragley must have hated to let it go to another. But it was the sheriff 's case, and so it was his shot. Sheriff Pidgeon shot the wolf clearly, right at the edge of that white blaze on the head. And one shot did it.

“Now he turn to a man,” Ribaul said. “Watch him turn as he dies. See how he begin to shiver and turn. This will show that he is loup-garou.”

But he didn't turn. He'd been a wolf, and he stayed a wolf.

“He's dead,” said Pidgeon. “That lays one ghost, for me at least.”

“Here is the maul, here is the stake,” Ribaul said. “Use them, Sheriff.”

“You really believe in that, do you, Ribaul?” Pidgeon asked.

“That if you drive the stake through the wolf 's heart he'll stay dead? I believe it.”

“Somebody find where that hellish noise is coming from,” Pidgeon sputtered, “and put a stop to it.” There had been an awful wailing going on since the wolf was shot.

Pidgeon drove the stake of bois d'arc wood in through the chest of the wolf at the line just behind and under the front shoulder, so as to go through the heart, or at least to make the fiction of going through the heart. It was a very tough wolf and it took some driving. But the stake had been sharpened as only tough bois d'arc wood can be. Staking the wolf became like an orgasm to all the men.

“He'll stay dead now,” said Ragley.

“Then why doesn't that damned noise stop if the wolf is dead?” Pidgeon asked. The noise was coming from the farmhouse of Jules Lamotte. Pidgeon's feet recognized the approach before his eyes did. They had been less than two hundred yards from the house when Pidgeon had killed the wolf. They went to it.

The kitchen door was open and there was a light inside. It was Madelon Lamotte standing in the doorway with her hair streaming. The hellish noise was her screaming. It went on and on to chill your blood.

Pidgeon got there first, white-faced and with a crazy clatter as he caromed off objects in the dark kitchen yard.

“Mrs. Lamotte! For the love of God what is wrong? Mrs. — ”

But Sheriff Pidgeon never finished, nor did he get all the way through the kitchen door. He staggered back with crimsoned vision. He went down crazily and hard.

“Killer!” screamed Madelon Lamotte. “Murder my husband! I'll — ”

Pidgeon had risen dazed and made for the door again, there to be met by a second impact of sound and another shredding blow. It was Madelon who clawed him like a lioness and left a bloody swath as she swung. She had felled him twice. She had nearly taken his head off, and a great part of his face was surely left beneath her fingernails.

Ragley and Kenrad had her restrained in some fashion after a while. The screaming fell to a series of splitting sobs.

“Now what is this?” Pidgeon demanded. “Hold her, dammit!” He wasn't sure how badly he was injured. He could barely see.

“You lick-spit sheriff, you kill my husband!” Madelon howled. “Kill me then, men, but give me two seconds with that white-faced fool first. We see who kill who — ”

Ragley had her pinned down then, and Kenrad went deeper into the house to see what had happened. He didn't have to go very deep.

“In here, Sheriff,” he called then. “In the little room off the kitchen here. It's worse than you think.”

Pidgeon followed in. Jules Lamotte lay dead in that little earth-floored room off the kitchen that is called the cool pantry. He had been shot in the head, right at the edge of that white blaze that so resembled that of the wolf.

What was even more weirdly wrong was that Jules Lamotte had a stake of bois d'arc driven through his chest and into the dirt floor of the little pantry. And Madelon was still spitting fury in the kitchen. It seemed wild to try to reason with her in her state, but it must be attempted.

“Tell me who did this thing, Mrs. Lamotte,” Sheriff Pidgeon begged.

“You vile pig, you did it! Spitting hypocrite, you killed my husband! Right in that room. Just minutes ago. You shot him, and you drove a stake through his heart. Let me at that sheriff, man!”

“I couldn't have,” Pidgeon said weakly. “Ragley, hold her! Where is Ribaul all this time?”

“But I am right here all this time,” Ribaul banged out the words. “Here, let me hold her. I have a way with wild animals. She'll not get loose from me.”

Back in the cool pantry Pidgeon swooped down on dead Jules Lamotte and began to do a thing that was illegal, outrageous, really mad. Kenrad and Ragley tried to stop him, but he was not to be stopped. Working feverishly he began to cut into the starred head of Lamotte with a jackknife. He went in after the shot that had killed the man. He grasped a meat cleaver from the pantry wall and used it as a pry and wedge. The shot had spent itself in smashing through the bone at an angle and was barely inside the brain case. Pidgeon brought it out and held it in his hand.

“It's my shot,” Pidgeon said. “I marked my shots before starting out tonight. I wanted to be certain of what ones I shot.”

“Well, then, it's certain that you shot this one,” Ragley said. “It's certain that you killed Jules Lamotte.”

Pidgeon left the Lamotte farmhouse and took Ragley and Kenrad back to the wolf-kill site. Pidgeon wandered back and forth, and the other two looked at him puzzled.

“What are we looking for?” Ragley asked.

“For the spot where the wolf was killed!” Pidgeon said wildly.

“We're standing on the spot, Sheriff. Those are the scuff marks. There's the hole where your stake went through the wolf and into the ground. Wipe the blood out of your eyes, Sheriff. She near took your eyes out with her claws.”

“But where's the wolf?” Pidgeon asked in a daze.

“Sheriff, are you crazy?” Ragley asked. “You saw Lamotte dead. How could the wolf be here and he there? Lamotte was the wolf. Lamotte is the dead wolf now.”

“No. A wolf is a wolf and a man is a man,” Pidgeon insisted. “There has to be a dead wolf around here somewhere.”

“You can find out tomorrow, Sheriff,” Ragley said. “It's going to be another hot one tomorrow. Give that sun seven or eight hours on this rock pasture, and you can find the wolf if he is here. The buzzards will be turning in the air over him and shuttling down on him. A dead wolf would get real ripe in the sun if he was here. But he isn't. We all know who killed the wolf and the man with the same shot. Let's call it a night.”

Well, a man had been shot to death, and Pidgeon himself was Pidgeon's only suspect. But why, leaving the unnatural stories out of it, should anyone want to kill Jules Lamotte?

Possibly for his gold coins. Likely Lamotte hadn't any gold coins, but one of the stories was that he had piles of them somewhere. Or possibly for his more-than-handsome wife. Since he'd seen her in a fury, Pidgeon had known that Madelon might have enough fire in her to draw a man to murder.

Or Lamotte could have been killed because he was really stealing the farmers' sheep. But there were wild elements left over from all these motives. Why couldn't Lamotte have been killed in a rational manner?

“Where is the wolf?” Pidgeon quizzed himself. “Where is my maul that drove the stake or stakes. Why was only one of my marked bullets shot? Oh, I remember the maul now.”

They had told Pidgeon that his maul, overlooked at first, had been found on the earth floor of the cool pantry in Lamotte's farmhouse, right beside dead Lamotte.

In the hot afternoon of the new day Pidgeon went to check on the buzzards. The sun should have done its work. The wolf, if he still lay in the rocky pasture, would be ripe. There were a couple of buzzards wheeling near where it should be. Not quite near enough though. They seemed rather to be above the Lamotte farmstead.

There were two of the buzzards in the air and two of them down on the eaves of a low shed not ten feet off the Lamotte kitchen. They were gazing with mournful intensity at that near part of the house called the cool pantry where Jules Lamotte (not yet removed, for the wheels turn slowly there) lay dead. There was a strong wolf scent and man scent mixed. Ragley had said, “Lamotte is the dead wolf now.” Was Lamotte right?

Ragley, Scroggins, and several other men came out of the Lamotte house. Pidgeon knew that Scroggins was acting in his office of coroner, and that the others had been acting as sworn witnesses.

“Pidgeon, I'm glad you're here,” Scroggins cried. “We've decided that it would be best if you arrested yourself for the murder of Jules Lamotte and then appointed an interim sheriff to handle things.”

“No. I won't do it,” Pidgeon said.

“We decided that it would be next best if we sent for the nearest other sheriff to come and arrest you. Who would he be?”

“Sheriff Bartholdy across the river in Calvados Parish. I think I will go and have a talk with him right now.”

Pidgeon went across the river to Calvados Parish. He went to the house of Bartholdy, walked in, and found the man. Sheriff Bartholdy gestured a welcome. Then he left the room. He came back with two bottles of white wine, a can of worms, a pail of minnows, and two fishing poles. He carried them all out to Pidgeon's pickup. The two men loaded in, and Pidgeon drove to a good spot on the red banks of the Red River. They fished there.

“I don't know whether you have heard of it, but there is a puzzling little murder up in my district,” Pidgeon said finally.

“Take your line out of the water,” Sheriff Bartholdy said. “No man can pay attention to two things at once. Have a drink of the white wine. It loosens the wits. Tell me about it. Who was murdered?”

Pidgeon told about Jules Lamotte being murdered. Bartholdy knew Lamotte from of old. Pidgeon told about the nightmarish coincidences, loup-garou stories, wolf tracks, sheep kills, tail hunts, young wife tales, marked bullets, a rifle shot and a stake through a wolf, a shot man and a stake through the man, various things.

“Is that all?” Bartholdy asked then. “What is the puzzling aspect that you mentioned? Why do you not simply arrest the two murderers?”

“But everything is puzzling about it, Bartholdy!” Pidgeon screeched. “There's the dead man that I couldn't have shot. The stake through his heart that I couldn't have driven. My own marked bullet in his head. Being French, you would be superstitious. So I thought that you might understand about the unearthly aspects of the case. The werewolf stuff, I mean, and all that, and the wolf turning into a man.”

“Are you out of your mind, Pidgeon? I never heard such nonsense.”

“I tell you that there was a wolf. And there was the man.”

“I don't mean that. You said ‘Being French, you would be superstitious.’ You'd have to be out of your mind to say a thing like that. There can no more be a superstitious Frenchman than there can be dry water or green horses. Think about the implications of that for a long time. Then your little problem will have solved itself.”

Pidgeon thought about the implications for quite a while.

“Not a bit superstitious, Bartholdy?” he asked once. “Not a bit?”

“Not a bit,” said Bartholdy. “There can be stupid Frenchmen. There can be Frenchmen who rustle sheep. There can be Frenchmen who love other men's wives. There can be evil Frenchmen. But there cannot be superstitious Frenchmen.”

“If that's so, then I don't live in the same sort of world as I'd supposed.”

“No, not quite the same sort, Pidgeon.”

Pidgeon thought about the implications some more. Then he rose with a sigh.

“I never like these things,” he said, “but I guess I'd better go make the arrests.”

So Sheriff Otis Pidgeon drove back to Royal Parish and arrested Ribaul and Madelon Lamotte for the murder of Jules Lamotte.

“How'd you figure it out, Pidgeon?” Ragley asked as Pidgeon and Ragley and Clela Ragley walked over the rock pasture of the events area. “Checked perfect, did it?”

“All but the three shadows,” said Pidgeon. “There were always three shadows of the wolf, and of Lamotte. I don't understand them. As to the rest, well here's how I did it. There were a pair of those folks who thought we were easily foxed up here. And because they thought so, they will hang for it. Who was it, I asked, who was clear enough of superstition to use superstition on us? It had to be French folks. You see, Ragley, the French aren't superstitious. But we are.”

“Sure we are. How's a redneck going to get any savor in his life if he doesn't spice it up with superstition? The French now, they use garlic instead. Yeah, I can see how they don't have to be superstitious.”

“So, Ragley, when everything points to something happening that simply could not happen, then I ask ‘Who's trying to make it seem like it happened?’ So I pick out stories that will make a lot of things come clear if the stories are lies.”

“Whose stories are that?” Ragley asked.

“Those of Madelon Lamotte. And those of Ribaul.”

“She tell you some rousers, Sheriff?”

“She told me a couple of rousers, so convincingly that — ”

“I always said it was a mistake for a young man to be sheriff,” thirteen-year-old Clela said. “They're too easy taken in by fancy women.”

“So I go back a little, Ragley; I asked myself who it was that started all those werewolf stories in the first place? Ribaul, that's who. And Madelon fed kindling to the fire. I myself saw wolf prints turn into man prints, but who was it made me see them?”

“How did Ribaul do the tracks, Pidgeon? That's a stumbler.”

“I don't know. He just grins (with his neck in a noose he grins) and says ‘A trick, Mr. Pidgeon, a trick.’ But with a tame wolf under his control, and husky as he is, he could have leaped down into the draw and had it jump onto his shoulder, or some such. Those tracks were made earlier, when it was still wetter in the draw; it was Ribaul who made me believe that they were more recent or immediate. And Ribaul's old shack was on Lamotte's rough land right near. He kept the wolf there. No wonder that wolf smell always came on so strong when we were near it. It was Ribaul all the way, that old carnival faker who tamed animals. He said that a wolf couldn't be tamed, but he lied.”

“But Sheriff, Ribaul isn't smart enough to put all that together.”

“He isn't. Madelon is. Ribaul had a tame wolf, but Ribaul was the tame wolf of Madelon Lamotte. He followed Madelon and Jules up from south of the river last year and conspired with Madelon to kill Jules. Madelon wanted the younger Ribaul, and Ribaul wanted the farm and money and Madelon. Ribaul was doing a pretty good business in shot sheep while he set the trap for Jules and for the town of Yellow Knife. To rub it in, he hauled the shot sheep in Lamotte's old truck, and all the suspicion fell on Jules. He gave Madelon at least two shot sheep, and she wouldn't tell Jules where she got them. But that was when Jules started to go man-hunting at night. The wolf took out the throat of at least one sheep at every place, and ate a little sheep shoulder.”

“When did Ribaul shoot Jules?”

“It was Madelon who shot her husband, in bed. Then she dressed him and carried him to the cool pantry.”

“How was it done with your marked bullet?”

“Ribaul was my helper and had access to my things. He saw me marking the lead shots. He marked one as close to mine as he could, and he substituted it for one of mine. I can tell now, though barely, the one that has his notch instead of mine on it.”

“How about the stake?”

“Ribaul cut two bois d'arc stakes as near as possible alike. He gave one to Madelon when he gave her the marked bullet to use. The maul marks don't mean anything. Someone made me see maul marks clearer than they were. Bois d'arc splinters a little bit, but it doesn't take a good mark. The blaze on the wolf 's head was a fake. Ribaul had to put it on fresh every time he let the wolf out, but he had sure made it to look like Lamotte's blaze. And every wolf looks at you with man's eyes. Notice it next time you trap a wolf. It startles us every time we see it, and then we forget. I had already told Ribaul that I intended to shoot the wolf right on the edge of the blaze, and he knows I'm a good shot. Madelon didn't have to be a very good shot to shoot Jules in the same place at very short range. Madelon was listening for my shot, and she set up that screaming to draw us to the house and away from the wolf, so Ribaul could get it out of the way.”

“When did you find out that the wolf was in that shed not ten feet from dead Jules?”

“Damn, I keep seeing three shadows following us even now. It can't be all imagination. Oh, I found that out quite late. I should have known it this noon when I saw the buzzards perched on the eaves. There was the smell of ripe man and ripe wolf together, but I thought it was werewolf.”

“Sheriff, why did Lamotte really use so much rubbing alcohol?”

“Like he said, he had sore ankles. But not from turning into a wolf. I believe that Corbey's account of how a man turns into a wolf was borrowed from a Ribaul account. And Ribaul already knew that Jules had sore ankles.”

“Then that's all of it, except for the three shadows.”

“Yes. But I can't solve the shadows of the wolf, or the shadows of Jules Lamotte. Madelon says that Jules didn't have any brothers or kindred, that there were no such three men visiting him or in the neighborhood at all. She says there was no such picture on their kitchen wall. Well, it isn't there now, and I can't find it. But there's one other loose end, and either you or your daughter here knows the answer. Clela, where did you get those horrible fang marks?”

“I told you once. Say, why don't you cut off Jules' head and bring it to me? Then we'll see whether the teeth match the teeth marks. Cut off the wolf 's head and bring it too. I like to have a lot of heads rolling around.”

“Oh, that, Sheriff. Well, Clela here is a violent young girl and she is sometimes plagued by a personal sort of spooks,” Ragley said. “Most such spooks just pinch kids and leave them black and blue, but Clela is more violent and she has more violent spooks. The particular devils that haunt her slash her up pretty bad sometimes. It happens to all the women of our family. She'll outgrow it in a year or two. They all do.”

“Ragley, you are a prize liar, but sometimes — ”

“But sometimes you can't be sure that I'm lying? And you never can be sure when Clela is. Let's leave it like that.”

“Oh, it's real,” Clela said. “Like your three shadows. They're real too.”

Ragley and Clela, both laughing, left the sheriff then and turned towards their own place. And Sheriff Pidgeon walked alone — for a very little while. Then there were three bristly men walking with him. Pidgeon was nervous at the sight of them.

“What are you three men doing here?” Pidgeon asked them. “When did you come back?”

“We came for the burial of our brother Jules,” one of the men said.

“But you weren't at the service. And you weren't at the graveside.”

“Yes. We were both places.”

“Madelon says that there are not any three such men as you,” Pidgeon said, trying to make them not be.

“Madelon is only at this minute dead in your jail,” said the spokesman of the three, “with man bites and with wolf bites in her throat. She dies for that lie, and for other things. We will not be disowned.”

One of the men unhinged himself and went down. He turned rapidly. Yes, the account was true. The tail came last of all, and it popped like a cork when it came out. Pidgeon continued to feel very nervous as he walked with two strange men and one strange wolf in the shaggy daylight of Jules Lamotte's rock meadow.

“You are the pieces left over,” Pidgeon said. “Ribaul explained most of the details, but he didn't explain you. He said he didn't believe in your sort of shadows.”

“Ribaul is at this minute dead in your jail also, man-bit and wolf-bit. He dies for his unbelief, and for other things.”

“For what other things?” Pidgeon asked with a little bit of boldness.

“For knowing too much, and for not knowing enough,” the spokesman said. Another man unhinged himself and went down. He turned quickly. Yes, there was a terrible stretching of the ankle bones. Yes, he shivered his wolf 's hair to the outside of his hide with convulsive movements. Yes, the tail came out last of all. Pidgeon was shaking like a quicken tree as he walked with one strange man and two strange wolves.

“Ah, I turn off here,” Pidgeon said. “I have some business in this other direction.”

“Turn off as much as you will,” the man said, “but your feet will continue on course with us.” And Pidgeon's feet did continue on the course with the man and the wolves. Then he knew that it was all over with him.

“Why?” he asked. “Why me?”

“As with Ribaul, you know too much and not enough. And we like to work by threes.”

“Well, then, how will you do it, as man or as wolf?” Pidgeon demanded, shaking. And his feet wouldn't run.

“Ah, they'll find two gashes of one sort and one of another on you,” the man said, and he fastened into Pidgeon's throat with long and tearing teeth.

Pidgeon was down on the ground then, and the two wolves had moved onto him to consummate the work. The last bristly man, streaming with Pidgeon's blood, unhinged himself and went down. And turned. Pidgeon watched the turning listlessly as his death closed in on him.

The terrible lengthening of the ankle bones, the softening of the skull with one part of it flowing forward and another part of it flowing backward, the eyes rolling around to the sides of the head, the shivering that brings the wolf hair to the outside, everything that marks the transition from man to beast!

And then there was only one thing needed for that third of the shadow-persons to turn himself into a total wolf. But Pidgeon's vision and life were interfered with, and he never did get to see the tail appear.

Old Halloweens On The Guna Slopes (original)

Editor's note: This is the original version of the story as it appeared in the August 1975 issue of Fantastic.

“Yah, yah!” Mary Mondo chanted. “You old men say ‘They don't make them like they used to.’ I think they don't even make old men like they used to. What they make now are old nothing duffers.”

“Be quiet, young girl!” Harry O'Donovan spoke. “Oh damnation! There I go again, answering spooks and things that aren't even there; answering evening room-noises and windy talk. Talk about nothing people! Mary, you are a real nothing person.”

Mary Mondo was a spook. She was seldom either visible or audible. She inhabited the room there along with Loretta Sheen the one-time daughter of Barnaby Sheen: Loretta herself was half spook and half sawdust-filled doll.

“The fact is that they don't have Halloweens like they used to,” Harry went on. “There used to be an old kraut-head named Kalbfleish who lived twixt this place and Cris Benedetti's house. We plagued that man and he plagued us. He was built like a barrel, and to us he seemed old. But he was fast. Whenever we made an evening disturbance on his front porch, started a little leaf fire there or broke a few bottles, set off a couple of stink bombs (you could get those little glass bombs two for a nickel at Selby's store then), whenever we did such things he would come tearing out of his front door, leap the side railing of his porch, and hit running. He knew which way we would go (there was only one way for us to go to find a hiding place) and he would collar a couple of us before we could get done. And he would beat us till our tails howled liked basset hounds.”

“Carrock! Get on with the story, Harry,” Austro said. Austro was a pleasant and hairy young man of the species Australopithecus.

“Mrs. Kalbfleish would abet him,” said Harry. “She'd sound off like a preacher bird, and they'd come with a high-footed run, wary of our tripping ropes. So naturally both sides of the antagonism waited anxiously for Halloween every year. The Kalbfleishes were always ready for war, and I myself had assembled a good gang of young boys.”

What was the matter with Harry? We had been his gang or he had been in our gang: he wasn't a leader. The gang had been made up of Barnaby Sheen, John Penandrew, George Drakos, Cris Benedetti, and Harry O'Donovan, those kids who knew everything, and myself who didn't. (Wait a bell-ringing minute there! Let us not read history backwards! Of course I knew everything then and for many years afterwards. It was not until — ah, well, let us not read history backwards.) Well, why should Harry tell us one of our own adventures? Or maybe we had remembered wrong and he would set us right.

“Halloween was a very rainy afternoon and night that year,” Harry said, “and we were the only gang out. It had already rained for a week, and the mud was bottomless. You couldn't do much in that mud; but you could dig, if you didn't mind the mud. It was dark by five in the afternoon and the rain and the thunder were so loud that we couldn't be heard. We dug a pit eight feet square and eight feet deep along the side of the Kalbfleish's front porch. We jimmied several down-spouts, we dammed up a couple of runnels, and that pit was filling nicely.

“One of us had a big can full of kerosene. Another of us had a pumpkin-head with a candle burning in it. That one was John Penandrew with his funny-shaped face and head. We always said that he still had a pumpkin-head after he threw his lighted pumpkin-head into the pit that night. We were going to start a fire on the Kalbfleish's front porch to devil them out. But the kid with the kerosene stumbled and fell into our own pit. He spilled three gallons of kerosene into it, less what he swallowed, and he nearly choked to death himself. So John Penandrew went up to the Kalbfleish's ornate front door and began to break little panes of glass out of it with a hammer. That always brought them out, and it brought them out now like two thunderbolts, man and wife in that high-footed run and the wife sounding like a preacher bird. Penandrew, with those two big people after him, leapt the porch railing and almost leapt the pit. But he didn't quite make it. He was sliding on the edge of the pit and flailing about with that lighted pumpkin-head. The two Kalbfleishes leapt the railing right behind him and went in over their heads in the water and kerosene-filled pit. Penandrew dropped the pumpkin-head in trying to get his balance, and the explosion blew him clear out of there. Man, that was an explosion of water and mud and fire. They don't have Halloweens like that anymore.”

“What happened then?” I asked. I had been there, but I didn't remember it at all the way that Harry was telling it.

“Oh, Kalbfleish was out of the hospital in three months,” Harry said, “though of course he was scarred forever. His wife died from a combination of drowning and burning to death. We felt bad about it for a while. But by the time the next Halloween rolled around we were ready for another go. Kalbfleish had another wife by then, and they were ready for another go at it too.”

The door chimes were ringing downstairs. “I'll go,” said Mary Mondo. She took candy from the candy bowl and floated down. There was the sound of the front door opening and of little voices like birds twittering ‘Trick or Treat.’ Then someone cried ‘Awk!’ in a more mature voice, and then there was a sound ‘klunk’. After a while the front door was heard to close again, and Mary Mondo came back upstairs.

“That lady fainted and klunked her head on the door-stone,” Mary said. “Seeing me didn't bother the kids, but it sent the lady into a faint. Why do ladies faint when they see ghosts? I don't faint when I see people.”

“Is she all right, Mary?” Barnaby Sheen asked. All this was at Barnaby's house.

“No, of course she isn't all right,” Mary said. “The way she klunked her head on that door-stone, I bet she never does get all right.”

“I remember one Halloween,” said George Drakos, “when Bittle McLittle, the smallest man in the world, was playing in the vaudeville at the old Orpheum Theatre. We had made friends with Bittle and he went around with us that night. They weren't having the regular vaudeville that evening: they were having a triple bill of silent movie ghost pictures. My cousin Zoe Archikos (she was very blonde and very precocious, for nine years old) was with us that night and she carried Bittle McLittle wrapped up in a blanket like a baby. She went up to the Paldeen house and banged on the door. And Mr. Paldeen opened the door. He was a funny man with a harelip and a voice that went with it.

“ ‘Oh go away kids,’ he said in that harelippy way. ‘I don't want any trouble with you.’

“ ‘This is your child that I have in my arms,” Zoe said in her brassy way, ‘and these are my six lawyers. Now pay off or we will have you on a patality suit.’

“ ‘Paternity suit,’ Bittle McLittle corrected her.

“ ‘What is it, Peter?’ Mrs. Paldeen called from inside.

“ ‘Oh, it's just that brassy little Archikos girl with some nonsense about a paternity suit,’ Mr Paldeen harelipped to his wife inside. But the wife came to the door all in a turmoil.

“ ‘Oh, Peter Paldeen, whatever have you done?’ she wanted to know. ‘Zoe, are you sure that Peter is the father of your child? Can you prove it?’

“ ‘Oh sure, I think so,’ Zoe said.

“ ‘Certainly we can prove it,’ said Bittle McLittle the child in Zoe's arms, and he said it in a harelippy voice. (Bittle was a mimic. All those people in a vaudeville learned to mimic all kind of voices and also to play different instruments in the orchestra if necessary.) ‘Would I sound just like him if he weren't my father?’

“ ‘Oh, what a terrible thing!’ Mrs. Paldeen wrung her voice. ‘Peter, that little baby talks just like you. That proves he's your son. Oh, what do you want us to do, Zoe?’

“ ‘Pay, pay, pay,’ Zoe cried righteously. ‘Money, money. Eight dollars. There are eight of us here.’

“ ‘Eight dollars!’ Peter Paldeen moaned. ‘I work all week for eight dollars! Oh, oh, what have I done to deserve this?’

“ ‘You know what you've done, Peter,’ Mrs. Paldeen said angrily. ‘There's no other way. Think of the disgrace. Pay, Peter, pay!’

“Mr. Paldeen went into the house and came back with the money. He gave a dollar to each of us, to Zoe, to Bittle McLittle in her arms, to Harry O'Donovan and to Barny Sheen and to John Penandrew and to Cris Benedetti and to Laff and to me. It had worked.

“ ‘Hey, wait a minute,’ Peter Paldeen harelipped. ‘Wait a broomcorn-cutting min — ’

“ ‘Scramble!’ Bittle McLittle howled and not in a harelippy voice. Zoe threw him and he hit running, and we were all running off in eight different directions.

“ ‘How come a little baby like that could talk at all?’ Mrs. Paldeen was keening. ‘Why were you so stupid to give them the money, Peter? How come a little baby like that was smoking a cigar?’

“ ‘How come a little baby like that can run like that?’ Peter Paldeen panted somewhere behind us. But he couldn't run in eight directions, and he couldn't catch any of us at all. Ah, they just don't make Halloweens like that anymore.”

The door chimes rang downstairs. “I'll go,” said Mary Mondo. She took bubble gum from the bubble gum bowl and floated down. There was the sound of the front door opening and of little voices like crickets twittering ‘Trick or Treat.’ Then someone cried ‘Awk!’ in a more womanly voice. After that there was a ‘klunk’ sound. A little later the front door was heard to close again, and Mary Mondo came back upstairs.

“That lady fainted and klunked her head on the door-stone just like the first one did,” Mary Mondo said. “How come I scare the ladies when I don't scare the little kids?”

“Is she all right, Mary?” Barnaby Sheen asked.

“No, of course she isn't all right,” Mary said. “How is anybody going to be all right after a klunk like that? I hope nobody slips on the blood she got on the door-stone.”

“No, they don't make them like they used to,” Barnaby said. “I remember one Halloween when the old Orcutt streetcar still ran down St. Louis Street. It ended at Orcutt Park on the lake, and there was a turn-around there. One of the car-men lived in a shanty in the park. He would drive the last run at night and the first run in the morning, and he would leave the streetcar all night on the turn-around.

“On this side of the park, before you got to the turn-around, there were some stately mansions on the lake shore. One of the most stately belonged to the Dumbarton family. Mr. Dumbarton was from France. He was a millionaire. He owned one of the refineries out by Sand Springs. But he was a swishy dude: my own father used to say that about him. So we'd fix that swishy dude!

“We had a couple of frogs, those iron rail-clamps made to switch cars from one track to another where there isn't a regular switching place. We picked a high place about a hundred feet from the turn-around, and we fastened the frogs to the tracks there. Then we went to the streetcar, put the trolley up to the trolley-wire, got in the car, and started it up. We got all the speed we could going up that rise. We hit the frogs and we derailed, and we kept on going downhill on that new pavement that they had there. We had it all figured perfectly. We even had measured that concrete ramp going up to the Dumbarton front porch, the one they made for Mr. Dumbarton's grandmother to go up in her wheelchair on. It was wider than it needed to be for a wheelchair to go on. It was just exactly wide enough for a streetcar to go on if we hit it just right.

“We rolled down that hill faster and faster, and we stomped on that trolley-bell ‘Clang! Clang! Clang!’ Oh, I wish they still made trolley-bells like that! I wish they still made trolley-bells at all. There wasn't any way to steer that streetcar when it wasn't on tracks. It steered itself. The street turned sharply there, but the driveway of the Dumbartons was in a straight line. We went up that driveway, up the ramp onto the front porch or veranda, down the whole length of the porch (Clang! Clang! Clang!) and clear through a wall at the end.

“And through the wall was the Master Chamber of the Dumbarton's house. That Master Chamber was probably the biggest bedroom in town, but it was a little bit crowded with a full-sized streetcar right in the middle of it. And we kept clanging that trolley-call. A trolley-bell sounds quite a bit louder when the streetcar is inside a bedroom.

“ ‘Sancta Agatha!’ Mrs. Dumbarton cried out in her fine voice as she sat up in bed.

“ ‘Ora pro nobis!’ Mr. Dumbarton cried out in an even finer voice, and he sat up in bed too. And ‘Clang! Clang! Clang!’ went that trolley-bell. The Dumbartons, waking up like that, thought that the trolley-bell was a church bell back in France.

“They begin to ring the church bells at midnight there, when Halloween is over with and All Saints' Day begins. And they begin to chant that Litany of the Saints. You know, though, that swishy dude caught on real fast. I never saw a man comprehend a streetcar in the middle of his bedroom so fast. And I never saw a two-handed creature collar six kids at once as fast as he did. And he seemed to have hands left over to — ”

“Ah, they don't make Halloweens like that any more!” we all breathed together.

The door chimes rang downstairs. “I'll go,” said Mary Mondo. She took balloons from the balloon bowl. Then she said “I'd better take a pillow and put it on that door-stone so the ladies won't klunk their heads so hard. May a sonder-effect ghost-trap get me if I don't put a pillow there!” She floated downstairs carrying a little pillow and quite a few balloons, blowing some of them up as she went. It was easy to see how Mary Mondo would startle people who weren't used to her. She hadn't any body at all. When she did things with her hands , such as handing out candy or balloons, then her hands did make an appearance, but it was false appearance. When she spoke, there was mouth and throat and movement to be seen, but they were illusion. When she grinned there was an appearance of everted lips and of red tract tissue all through her. Mary Mondo had a very visceral grin. It was hard to understand how she could be so carnal a person when she hadn't any body to be carnal with.

Below there was the sound of the front door opening and of little voices like pert mice squeaking ‘Trick or Treat.’ Then someone cried ‘Awk!’ in a young-wifey voice. After that there was a curiously modified sound, like a ‘klunk’ wrapped in feathers. Mary Mondo had got the pillow on the door-stone in time.

“That is probably all the little kids there will be tonight,” Austro remarked. “Now I suppose that there will be two or three big kids troubling around.” And Austro gave a near shiver.

“You're surely not afraid of all the big kids in the world, are you Austro?” Barnaby Sheen asked.

“There's two or three big kids I might be afraid of,” Austro said with another shiver. “I might be afraid of them on just this one night of the year.”

There was the sound of the front door closing again. Mary Mondo came back upstairs. “That's likely all the little kids there will be tonight,” Mary said. “Oh, by the sonder-effect ghost-trap itself I hope there won't come two or three of those big kids!”

“I hope Paracelsus doesn't come,” said that big, not-so-very-lifelike, sawdust-filled doll on the sofa, the doll that had once been the body of Loretta Sheen. Then the doll mumbled something else that we couldn't understand.

“What is the matter with you two kids, with you three kids?” Barnaby Sheen asked. “Why are you afraid of two or three big kids when you were never afraid of anything before? Why is Loretta afraid of Paracelsus?”

“I'll ask her,” said Mary Mondo. And Mary did ask her, in the sort of talk that those two used together. But we couldn't understand the answer, and it seemed that Mary couldn't either; or she didn't want to.

“I'm cold,” Mary said. “I don't want to go back. I can't let them take me back. I'm cold, and I'm scared of the sonder-effect ghost-trap.”

“Ghosts don't get cold,” Harry O'Donovan stated. But whenever did Harry know what he was talking about?

“I'm cold too,” Austro said. He was doing the weekly Rocky McCrocky episode with a hammer and chisel on the light gray slate-stone. He filled the incisions with black pigment or graphite, and clear and striking pictures were the result. He would split the light gray slate-stone very thin as he finished each panel, and it made almost perfect episode pictures. It was in such form that Austro gave the continuing Rocky McCrocky drama to the young people of the neighborhood and of the world.

“I don't want to turn into one,” Austro moaned. “I can't let them turn me into one. I'm scared of the monkey wrench.”

We whooped and jeered at this, and Austro looked startled.

“I don't mean the tool that you call a monkey wrench,” Austro said. “Carrock, it's a tool made out of air and not iron. It follows and it enters you. It finds that little monkey that is in you and it wrenches it sideways. There's no other way to say it. You don't get more monkey in you or less monkey: you get that monkey twisted, and it will change you completely. It can even change you into a sapi — No, no, I'll not let them change me! Carrock!”

Outside there was a happy shouting in the distance. It could have been any Halloween noise, but it sounded like the shouting voices of Roy Mega and Chiara Benedetti. Roy Mega was a very young electronics genius who worked for Barnaby Sheen. Chiara was an even younger person, and she was the daughter of Cris Benedetti who was there in the room with us. Neither Roy nor Chiara had any evil in them at all. But they both had something in them that often seemed the rankest evil ever. It was always saved from being evil only by the most improbable revelation arriving in the last possible nick of time. But if either the revelation or the nick of time should fail, the thing in them would have been and would continue to be murderously evil, and it would be of murderous effect on everyone whom they touched.

“I ought to go out with a couple of friends and rescue someone tonight,” Mary Mondo said. She listened for the shouting, and it had become a permeating phenomenon. “I'm afraid to go out if Paracelsus is there, and I'm twice afraid to go out if Morgana is there too.”

“Mary, what did Loretta said?” Barnaby Sheen asked.

“She said that Paracelsus was alive again,” Mary Mondo said. “He's enough to put the shivers into any honest spook anywhere. It's on account of him that I'm afraid to go out tonight, and I should. There's a young boy out there and somebody should be with him. This is his first year-night since we rescued him. Let me tell you all about it.

“It was a year ago tonight. Several of us got the feeling that the little boy was going to be killed. On this portal-night we are able to rescue one who has been unjustly handled. He will still be killed, yes: but when he is killed, he will go with us; he will not go where dead people go. It was at that little wading pool for kids down in Honey Locust Park. It was just at sundown. There were two middle-sized girls there (six or seven years old), and they had decided to drown the little boy. A lady was on duty there, and she watched it and pretended not to see it. She had been overtaken by that special evil that can enter only into homo saps. She didn't want anyone to see it; she didn't want anyone to know it; but she wanted those two middle-sized girls to drown that little boy, and she wanted him to suffer that black strangulation that is the worst suffering of all.”

“How would Loretta know that Paracelsus was alive?” Barnaby Sheen asked Mary. “How would she recognize him at all? He's been dead for hundreds of years.”

“How do you know?” Mary asked. “Did you ever see him dead? I don't believe that he's ever been dead; he's just been off traveling sometimes. Loretta can feel him now. I can too.”

“I can too,” said no, not said, but anyhow expressed Rocky McCrocky. Austro was brushing black graphite into the sticky glyphs of a talk-balloon coming out of the mouth of Rocky McCrocky in his comic strip. Back on the Guna Slopes Austro would have used monkey grease to take the coloring in these cuts. Now he used grape jelly. This was the weekly comic strip that Austro chiseled on the light gray slate-stone, from which he then split off the episode panels to give to the young people of the world. Now the words “I can too” appeared suddenly like a ringing exclamation. And we all knew that the character Rocky McCrocky was really Austro himself.

“What's the matter, Austro,” I asked him. “Has someone thrown a monkey wrench into your continuity?”

“Carrock! Do you not yet understand the meaning of that horrible phrase that you use so lightly? Yes, I can feel that person too. That isn't the name he used when he visited on the Guna Slopes and turned the blood of so many of us to water. But it is the same person. He is even a friend of mine. But is he yet aware that he is that person?”

“Loretta cannot feel anyone that she hasn't known in life,” Barnaby said.

“She says that she did know him in life,” Mary Mondo tried to explain. There was a lump of something unspoken in Mary's throat. All that could be seen of her was her mouth and her throat as she spoke and tried to speak more. “She says that she knew Paracelsus in life, and Morgana also. Could she have? She says that he had just begun to be Paracelsus when she knew him.

“Well, the lady watching over the children at the wading pool in the park was in a time of willful insanity. Her face became a funny shape as she watched,” Mary Mondo was going on with her story. That lump of something unspoken could still be seen in her throat, but now it began to fade away from our vision: it would remain unspoken. “The two middle-sized girls had finished drowning the little boy by then. They took him out of the pool and dragged him away for several blocks. (They thought that they did: they didn't have him though; we had him away from them where he would be safe.) They bashed in the face of his body with rocks. They left his body on a front porch a couple of blocks from Honey Locust Park. They rang the doorbell there. They hollered out in those cracked jangle voices that evil people use ‘Bong the bell, bong the bell! See the boy that's gone to hell!’ (He hadn't gone there, though: we had rescued him; he was with us.) The middle-sized girl rhymed their rhyme again (this was before children used to say ‘Trick or treat’), and they ran just as the door was opened. I felt sorry for the people who opened the door and found the bashed-in and drowned body. And the boy was nervous for the rest of that night as he went around with us. He would be able to enter into the spirit of it tonight though, for this is a year later. I should be with him. I hope one of them is with him.”

“Austro, did you have Halloweens on the Guna Slopes when you were a boy?” Doctor George Drakos asked. The Guna Slopes are in Africa, in Ethiopia, northwest of Magdala which is a town older than homo sapiens; and the slopes look down on the Tacazze branch of the Nile from the two miles above it. That is where Austro had come from, where he had lived his early boyhood, where what is left of the Australopithecines still live.

“Certainly we had Halloweens,” Austro said. “Carrock! We invented them. Where do you think are to be found the great originals of your weak imitations? We made grotesque sapiens heads out of big gourds and burned bee-wax or aphid-wax candles in them. We would climb around and ring the doorbells at the porticos of the different caves, and we — ”

“Wait, wait, wait!” Harry O'Donovan objected. “Don't tell us that Australopithecines had doorbells!”

“Sure we did!” Austro maintained. “Sure they were real ones, Cris. Sure they were electric ones, George. Well hell, Barnaby, we used lead-sulphuric-acid batteries: that's a lot easier than winding transformers. Why, John, we got the sulphur for the acid from our own Guna Slopes. The best deposits in Africa are still there. How would we know what the acid was, Laff? Why, how do the sapiens know what it is? I notice that the sapiens young scribble a translation of one of our rhymes in their chemistry books:

Alas poor James is dead!

We'll see his face no more.

For what he thought was H₂O,

Was H₂SO₄.

“I believe that the sapiens do not, as we do, generally teach chemistry by mnemonics however. That may be why they teach it so badly. Carrock!”

“Don't interrupt Austro, guys,” Barnaby begged. “It makes him loquacious. Believe me, he always has answers. If you read his weekly Rocky McCrocky strip as the neighborhood kids do you would know those answers.”

“Sometimes we failed to ring the doorbells,” Austro said. “Certain wise caveholders would remove the push-buttons that night and paint the holes to look just like push-buttons. When we pressed our finger there it went all the way into the hole. And a pair of sharp rock-scissors would make short work of the finger, short work by a joint or two. See!”

Austro held up an index finger that was minus the end joint. He had told quite a few stories about that missing joint though. I myself doubted that he had lost it by poking it into a hole that was painted to look like a push-button.

“But mostly we would push the button, ring the bell, and then drop flat on our bellies,” Austro said. “And why would we drop flat? Because the door itself would come flying out to kill anyone in its way. The caveholders shot their doors off by catapults. That's how we kept the slow-thinking kids thinned out. The caveholders could always make new doors, but if the slow-thinking kids were not killed on this great night then there would have been the occurrence of slow-thinking adults in a few years.”

“I bet I know a way to cure that dropping-on-the-belly,” Mary Mondo said.

“Oh well, when you find yourself eye-to-eye with a mamba snake that is half your weight and four times your length, you're almost ready to concede a point,” Austro said. “When you're down on your belly you're facing the mamba at his own game. But there's a counter for almost every trick. We always ran scared on Halloween night though. We knew that we were being given the most horrifying of all tests and that one of us was destined to fail it. The name of the test was Dumb Cluck Stuck, and the dumbest cluck of all the kids would be stuck with the fate worse than death.”

Downstairs and outside in the streets that shouting had become still happier and louder, but also more frightening. The feeling filled the night like a justifying fog that not only were several persons going to commit overturning outrages that night but that (on this one night) they would have the right to commit them.

“There were always double-creatures who appeared on that year-night to exact payment,” Austro was saying. “One of the double-persons might be a young boy, a boy you knew well. But he would be wearing a long white beard with thongs that pretended to tie it onto his face. The beard was to show what person he really was for that night. It would not be a false beard. The boy would have grown the real white beard especially for that night. It was the thongs that were false in pretending to tie the beard to the face. And yet both the real beard and the false thongs were needed for the duality, for the duplicity.”

Below and outside, a monkey howled and sobbed in withering agony and resounded its degradation in the hellish jungle. (There was not, in actual fact, any hellish jungle down there, though the yard between Sheen's where we were and Benedetti's did need cutting.) The monkey gave its wrenching howling and sobbing in the terrifying outdoors, and also in the terrifying personal interiors, for it was the ghost monkey.

“These double-persons that one knew and still did not know would be the ones who wrenched the little person in the victim out of shape and sent the victim into the world howling in desolation,” Austro said. “That was always the horror of Halloween night (your name, not ours: we may not speak the real name of the night out loud or our tongue will rot in our mouth) that the ghost inside, the monkey inside, would be tortured and would split the victim. There was no escaping it if they put the monkey on your back, if they deformed him out of his right position.

“Sometimes, the bearded double-person would have a double-consort: sometimes there would even be a third of these two-facers. It was always mighty steep damage that they did to the designated Dumb Cluck on the year-night.”

Howling monkeys in our breasts and in the spooky streets of our end of town! But it was only Roy Mega and Chiara Benedetti outside, hollering and yowling and having fun, becoming prodigies and paragons, becoming (at the same time) ghosts and blood-persons, blenching and wrenching people.

“There's two or three big kids that I'm afraid of also,” Cris Benedetti said thoughtfully. “What, shall our dragon children hunt us off our own slopes and make us to hide in the common pens?” (What was Cris talking about?) “Well, I don't want to be forced into the common pens or that common species. I don't want to be a part of the forced grubbiness any more than Austro does, any more than Mary Mondo does. Did we only imagine that we were somehow uncommon? Does the special part really have to end now?” An uncommon bug was biting Cris Benedetti.

“Yes, for one of you the special part has to end tonight,” Austro said. He put aside his rock-chipping on the cartoon strip Rocky McCrocky and went to mix drinks for the bunch of us.

Outside, Oliver Benedetti howled in protest and near anger. Oliver was the dog of Cris Benedetti and of his daughter Chiara. He had always been a skeptical and intelligent dog. Cris even said that the dog had become a freethinker.

“One year the main double-role was played by a boy who was no more than four years old,” Austro was saying as he did alchemical things with the drinks. “He had grown a genuine, white, long beard just for that night, and he didn't even know how to tie the thongs that were to pretend to hold the beard onto the face. The thongs dangled down around his feet, but the beard was real. And he was real in the role. He was the part human, part ghost, part magus magician named Par-Ha-Kels. And when he pointed to a victim, the ghost monkey howled and gibbered inside that victim, and the victim left his folks and went sorrowfully down the slopes to serve and to be the lesser things forever.”

There was a small riot in the street outside. One of the street gangs had come there in the wrecking spirit, and it sounded as though the wreckers had been challenged by a pair of wreckers much more violent than themselves. The dog Oliver Benedetti howled again, not against the intruding gang, but against his own mistress. Even that freethinker had recognized sudden strangeness in his own kindred.

“It used to be that the Dumb Cluck pointed out by the magician and his consort to be the victim would simply fall down on the stones and howl himself to an agonizing death. Then they changed it. Carrock! How they changed it! The victim still died, I suppose, in a way; died and turned into clay. But he went away from his own slopes when he died, went walking away he did, and he went to serve a more common clay. There's been an accommodation arranged, you know. The victim had to go and serve the more common clay after he was dead and gone from his own people, but he did not have to become the common clay, not unless he was selected as a victim the second time. There's an important distinction there. Carrock, carrock, preserve us in this distinction!”

The street gang that had come in a wrecking spirit had been defeated, had been almost annihilated, had left in gibbering and insane confusion. And if several of them had remained behind, recumbent and witless, in the street, then maybe they would recover after this year-night was finished with. The scene in the street outside drifted up into our room clearly, possibly by the mind of the ghost-girl Mary Mondo, possibly by the projection of the magicians themselves.

“Austro, you always seemed sort of a Dumb Cluck to me,” Harry O'Donovan said brutally. “How come you weren't ever adjudged to be the dumb cluck in the Dumb Cluck Struck test?”

“Carrock! I was so adjudged. It did happen to me,” Austro said in a shocking and thick voice. “I was adjudged the Dumb Cluck last year. This is my fate worse than death. How do you think I'd have come among sapiens, if I hadn't been caught as dumb cluck. After the really slow-thinking kids have been killed and dragged away, then they select the victim, the scapegoat, the Judas-monkey. Earlier, these were simply killed by the Halloween-night tortures. Then, with a worsening of our relations with the Thrones and Powers, it was decreed that the victim must go down from the slopes and live in a sapiens town. It would raise the mental level of both species, so the Powers said in justification. And so it has been yearly since that time.

“They kill the monkey when they do it, you know. The sapiens doctors have another name for this Monkey Within. They wrench it, and it dies again and again with the wildest wailing ever. But it's ghost monkey as well as an interior monkey. I was a victim last year. I went down the Guna Slopes to live among sapiens, and it was then that I ran into one of Barnaby Sheen's crews and came here with them. Oh, we smart clucks, we make our deals and we seek our accommodations; but it still is to be degraded forever.”

The pet monkey that belonged to the O'Brians was howling and gibbering and squalling outside. It was infested with the cloud of ghost monkeys that were about on this year-night.

“I never much cared for the sapiens myself,” Barnaby Sheen said. “Oh, they are the great majority and we must tolerate them. But I prefer my own status, as a being of uncertain species and uncommon clay. I like my clarity. I like my knowledge. I'd miss them if I lost them.”

“One of you here present will lose those things tonight,” Austro said. “Carrock! I should say ‘One of us here present’ for I am not sure that I will not be the victim. And if I am, it will go hard for me. If it's myself, I'll miss knowing everything.”

“Austro, you are a fake,” Mary Mondo said. “What you have been telling us is only part of the Rocky McCrocky episode that you chiseled Monday.”

“It wasn't distributed until an hour ago,” Austro said. “And the one that I've been working on this evening, for distribution a week hence, is a more difficult one. It's picking up all the broken rocks after the last crashing episode. It's an elegy for one of us who will die and turn into common clay. I hope it won't be a self-elegy. I don't believe that I could stand being of common clay, being a sapiens.”

“Neither could I,” Mary Mondo said, and she shivered her perverse ectoplasmic spirit.

“Neither could I,” said Doctor George Drakos. “Most of our acquaintances belong, but I'd rather remain a little bit special. I suppose that we shouldn't all expect to be special all our lives. Most persons are only special for a few childhood years, and then they slip species to the common. And, really, there isn't that much special clay to go around. Why must they swallow some of us every year on year-night though? There are so many more of them already.”

“Why don't they ring that damned bell!” Barnaby Sheen broke out with irritation. “Nothing is more wearisome than waiting for lightning to strike, than waiting for the trumpet to sound, than waiting for the last knock on the last door, than waiting for the bell to ring. If one of us stumbles and falls out of it tonight, I hope that it isn't myself.”

Easy, Sheen. It was only a Halloween night (they don't make them like they used to), and the only waiting was for kids to ring the doorbell again, or not ring it.

“There's an arm-clamp with two long needles that can be put on the outside of a door,” Cris Benedetti said, “and it should be set with the needles just eye-high. This is one of the dirtiest of all Halloween tricks. When the bell rings and the householder swings the door open suddenly, then those two eye-height needles — Oh, why doesn't that hellish bell ring?”

“It doesn't hurt so much as all that when you slip a setting or a species,” Austro said. “It's only part of your lights that are turned out when it happens. Oh, why doesn't that bell ring!”

“It isn't so bad when just a few fall out of the high basket on just one night of the year,” Harry O'Donovan said. “Of course the fell-out-of-it folks have been the majority for many centuries now, but it is the business of us special little trickles to feed the ocean. Oh, why doesn't that bell ring!”

But we were already on our feet and going down the stairs to answer the bell that hadn't rung yet. We carried the drinks that Austro had just finished for us.

“I never expected to be a free spirit,” Mary Mondo said. “I've always been a partly enslaved spirit. But I sure do not want to be trapped in one of those contraptions that hardly any light can get in to. And especially I don't want to get trapped in one of the sapiens sort.” (She meant that she didn't want to get trapped in a body.) “Oh, why doesn't the bell ring?”

The bell rang just as we came to the bottom of the stairway in that big entry hall of Barnaby Sheen's. And we flung the door open.

Aw, owl dirt! It was just two Halloween-night kids at the door in their masks. One of them was Roy Mega that young electronic genius who worked for Barnaby Sheen. He was wearing a Paracelsus long white beard and alchemist's conical hat. They were his mask. The beard was real, but the thongs that pretended to hold it on were fake. The other kid was Chiara Benedetti from down at the end of the block, the daughter of Cris. She was Morgana: that was her mask. How had she got to be Morgana? How had she ever been in Calabria? How had she been the sister of Arthur the King? How had she learned magic? No, no, it was just a Halloween costume.

They had a black cat with them. They had a white monkey. They had a Judas-goat. All just plain Halloween props. Chiara-Morgana blew on her fingers and they lighted up like blue candles.

“Oh go duck for apples somewhere,” Mary Mondo said crossly. Mary was scared though. There was something about a sonder-effect ghost-trap in the sparks that came from the Morgana fingers.

“Your symbiosis blows like rack — Your inside monkey's on your back,” the white monkey simpered in that monkey-mouthed way they have of talking. Morgana's sparks were jumping above our heads and the one that a spark came down on would be the dumb cluck. The stars were twinkling in Paracelsus' conical hat, and every star was of wrong magnitude, wrong ascension, wrong everything.

“Oh, get the pack of you back to the zoo where you belong,” Austro grumbled, but he was scared. There was something about the monkey wrench in the almagest-rod that Paracelsus waggled in his hand.

“We bet you wish that you were dead — You hole-in-mind and hole-in-head,” the black cat wauled in that gross way they have. Morgana was showering great bunches of sparks out of her candle fingers, and somebody was going to get burned badly.

“For one of you, things to and fro — From this day on you will not know,” the Judas-goat bleated. What, no longer be one of the guys who knew everything? Judas-goat, the goat-butcher's knife is hungry for your throat.

Then there was a whole explosion of colored fires, from Chiara-Morgana's finger-candles, from Roy Mega's Paracelsus rod, from everywhere. Then the two of them ran away, whooping and laughing. Nothing but a Halloween door trick! Oh, a tall, mean giant of a trick! Who had the first spark come down on? Who was the dumb cluck? It wasn't Austro: he sighed a rocky sigh of relief. It wasn't Mary Mondo: she chortled her escape, as only one with a non-material esophagus can chortle. It was one of us who had known everything. Which one had died as he stood there, and turned into a more common clay?

Roy and Chiara ran whooping down the street and left one of us there with a hole in his head (where the know-everything cortical had been), and with a ghost-monkey (wrenched from its interior and rightful den) on his back forever.

No, they don't make Halloweens like they used to. They make them a lot rougher.

Author's Commentary

Old Halloweens On The Guna Slopes (revised)

This is the revised version of the story which appeared in all subsequent reprintings. Both have been included here due to the significant differences in the text between its initial and subsequent publications.

“Yah, yah!” Mary Mondo chanted. “You old men say ‘They don't make them like they used to.’ I think they don't even make old men like they used to. What they make now are nothing but old duffers.”

“Be quiet, young girl!” Harry O'Donovan spoke. “Oh, damnation! There I go again, answering spooks and things that aren't even there; answering evening room-noises and windy talk. Talk about nothing people! Mary, you are a real nothing person.”

Mary Mondo was a spook, which was to say that she wasn't anything at all. But it was easy to get into the habit of noticing her and even answering her. One had to watch it, or pretty soon one would be treating her like a person again.

“The fact is that they don't have Halloweens like they used to,” Harry went on. “There used to be an old kraut-head named Kalbfleish who lived betwixt this place and Cris Benedetti's house. We plagued that man, and he plagued us. He was built like a barrel, and to us he seemed old. But he was fast. Whenever we made an evening disturbance on his front porch, started a little leaf fire there or broke a few bottles, set off a couple of stink bombs (you could get those little gas stink bombs two for a nickel at Selby's store then), whenever we did such things he would come tearing out of his front door, leap the side railing of the porch, and hit running. He knew which way we would go (there was only one way for us to go to find a hiding place), and he would collar a couple of us before we could get gone. And he would beat us till our tails howled like basset hounds.”

“Carrock, get on with the story, Harry,” Austro said. Austro was a pleasant and hairy young man of the species Australopithecus.

“Mrs. Kalbfleish would abet him,” Harry said. “She'd sound off like a preacher bird, and they'd come with a high-footed run, wary of our tripping ropes. So naturally both sides of the antagonism waited anxiously for Halloween every year. The Kalbfleishes were always ready for war, and I myself had assembled a good gang of young boys.”

What was the matter with Harry? We had been his gang, or he had been in our gang — and he hadn't been the leader. The gang had been made up of Barnaby Sheen, John Penandrew, George Drakos, Cris Benedetti, and Harry O'Donovan, those kids who knew everything, and myself who didn't. Well, why should Harry tell us one of our own adventures? Or maybe we had it remembered wrong and he would set us right.

“Halloween was a very rainy afternoon and night that year,” Harry said, “and we were the only gang out. It had already rained for a week, and the mud was bottomless. You couldn't do much in that mud; but you could dig, if you didn't mind the mud. It was dark by five in the afternoon and the rain and the thunder were so loud that we couldn't be heard. We dug a pit eight feet square and eight feet deep along the side of the Kalbfleish's front porch. We jimmied several down-spouts, we dammed up a couple of runnels, and that pit was filling nicely.

“One of us had a big can full of kerosene. Another of us had a pumpkin-head with a candle burning in it. That one was John Penandrew with his funny-shaped face and head. We always said that he still had a pumpkin-head after he threw his lighted pumpkin-head into the pit that night. We were going to start a fire on the Kalbfleish's front porch to devil them out. But the kid with the kerosene stumbled and fell into our own pit. He spilled three gallons of kerosene into it, less what he swallowed, and he nearly choked to death himself.

“So John Penandrew went up to the Kalbfleish's ornate front door and began to break little panes of glass out of it with a hammer. That always brought them out, and it brought them out now like two thunderbolts, man and wife in that high-footed run and the wife sounding like a preacher bird. Penandrew, with those two big people after him, leapt the porch railing and almost leapt the pit. But he didn't quite make it. He was sliding on the edge of the pit and flailing about with that lighted pumpkin-head. The two Kalbfleishes leapt the railing right behind him and went in over their heads in the water and kerosene-filled pit. Penandrew, trying to get his balance, dropped the pumpkin-head; and the explosion blew him clear out of there. Man, that was an explosion of water and fire and mud! They don't have Halloweens like that anymore.”

“What happened then?” I asked. I had been there, but I didn't remember it at all the way that Harry was telling it.

“Oh, Kalbfleish was out of the hospital in three months,” Harry said, “though of course he would be scarred forever from the burns. His wife died from the combination of drowning and burning to death. We felt bad about it for a while. But by the time the next Halloween rolled around, we were ready for another go. Kalbfleish had another wife by then, and they were primed for another go too.”

The door chimes were ringing downstairs. “I'll go,” said Mary Mondo. She took candy from the candy bowl and floated down. There was the sound of the front door opening and of little voices like birds twittering ‘Trick or treat’. Then someone cried ‘Awk!’ in a more mature voice, and then there was a sound ‘Klunk’. After a while the front door was heard to close again, and Mary Mondo came back upstairs.

“That lady fainted and klunked her head on the door-stone,” Mary said. “Seeing me didn't bother the kids, but it sent the lady into a faint. Why do ladies faint when they see ghosts? I don't faint when I see people.”

“Is she all right, Mary?” Barnaby Sheen asked. All this was at Barnaby's house.

“No, of course she isn't all right,” Mary said. “The way she klunked her head on that door-stone, I bet she never does get all right.”

“I remember one Halloween,” said George Drakos, “when Bittle McLittle, the smallest man in the world, was playing in the vaudeville at the old Orpheum Theatre. We had made friends with Bittle and he went around with us that night. They weren't having the vaudeville that evening: they were having a triple bill of silent movie ghost pictures.

“My cousin Zoe Archikos (she was very blonde and very precocious for nine years old) was with us that night, and she carried Bittle McLittle wrapped up in a blanket like a baby. She went up to the Paldeen house and banged on the door. And Mr. Paldeen opened the door. He was a funny man with a harelip, and a voice that went with it.

“ ‘Oh go away, kids,’ he said in that harelippy way. ‘I don't want any trouble with you.’

“ ‘This is your chile that I have in my arms,’ Zoe said in her brassy way, ‘and these are my six lawyers. Now pay off or we will have you on a patality suit.’

“ ‘Paternity suit,’ Bittle McLittle the child in her arms corrected her.

“ ‘What is it Peter?’ Mrs. Paldeen called from inside.

“ ‘Oh, it's just that brassy little Archikos girl with some nonsense about a paternity suit,’ Mr. Paldeen harelipped to his wife inside. But the wife came to the door all in a turmoil.

“ ‘Oh, Peter Paldeen, whatever have you done?’ she wanted to know. ‘Zoe, are you sure that Peter is the father of your child? Can you prove it?’

“ ‘Oh sure, I think so,’ Zoe said.

“ ‘Certainly we can prove it,’ said Bittle McLittle the child in Zoe's arms, and he said it in a harelippy voice. (Bittle was a mimic: all those people in vaudeville learned to mimic all kind of voices and to play the different instruments in the orchestra too, if necessary.) ‘Would I sound just like him if he weren't my father?’

“ ‘Oh, what a terrible thing!’ Mrs. Paldeen wrung her voice. ‘Peter, that little baby talks just like you. That proves he's your son. Oh, what do you want us to do, Zoe?’

“ ‘Pay, pay, pay!’ Zoe cried righteously. ‘Money, money. Eight dollars. There are eight of us here.’

“ ‘Eight dollars!’ Peter Paldeen moaned. ‘I work all week for eight dollars. Oh, oh, what have I done to deserve this?’

“ ‘You know what you've done, Peter,’ Mrs. Paldeen said angrily. ‘There's no other way. Think of the disgrace. Pay, Peter, pay!’

“Mr. Paldeen went into the house and came back with the money. He gave a dollar to each of us, to Zoe, to Bittle McLittle in her arms, to Harry O'Donovan, to Barnaby Sheen, to John Penandrew, to Cris Benedetti, to Laff, and to me. It had worked.

“ ‘Hey, wait a minute,’ Peter Paldeen harelipped a little bit too late. ‘Wait a broomcorn-cutting min — ’

“ ‘Scramble!’ Bittle McLittle howled, and not in a hairlippy voice. Zoe threw him and he hit running, and we were all running off in eight different directions.

“ ‘How come a little baby like that could talk at all?’ Mrs. Paldeen was keening. ‘Why were you so stupid as to pay the money? Peter, how come a little baby like that was smoking a cigar?’

“ ‘How come a little baby like that can run like that?’ Peter Paldeen panted somewhere behind us. But he couldn't run in eight directions, and he couldn't catch any of us at all. Ah, they just don't make Halloweens like that any more.”

The door chimes rang downstairs. “I'll go,” said Mary Mondo. She took bubble gum from the bubble gum bowl and floated down. There was the sound of the front door opening and of little voices like crickets twittering ‘Trick or treat’. Then someone cried ‘Awk!’ in a more womanly voice. After that there was a ‘Klunk’ sound. A little later the front door was heard to close again, and Mary Mondo came back upstairs.

“That lady fainted and klunked her head on the door-stone just like the first one did,” Mary Mondo said. “How come I scare the ladies when I don't scare the little kids?”

“Is she all right, Mary?” Barnaby Sheen asked.

“No, of course she isn't all right. How is anybody going to be all right after a klunk like that? I hope nobody slips on the blood she got on the door-stone.”

“No, they don't make them like they used to,” Barnaby said. “I remember one Halloween when the old Orcutt streetcar still ran down St. Louis Street. It ended at Orcutt Park on the lake, and there was a turn-around there. One of the car-men lived in a shanty in the park. He would drive the last run at night and the first run in the morning, and he would leave the streetcar all night on the turn-around.”

Austro was doing his weekly Rocky McCrocky comic strip episode with hammer and chisel on light grey slatestone. He filled the incisions with black pigment or graphite, and clear and striking pictures were the result. He would split the light grey slatestone very thin as he finished each panel, and it made almost perfect episode pictures. It was in such form that Austro gave the continuing Rocky McCrocky drama to the young people of the neighborhood and of the world.

“On this side of the park, before you got to the turn-around, there were some stately mansions on the lake shore,” Barnaby continued with his story. “One of the most stately belonged to the Dumbarton family. Mr. Dumbarton was from France. He was a millionaire. He owned one of the refineries out by Sand Springs. But he was a swishy dude: my own father used to say that about him. So we'd fix that swishy dude!

“We had a couple of frogs, those iron rail-clamps made to switch cars from one track to another where there isn't a regular switching place. We picked a high place about a hundred feet from the turnaround, and we fastened the frogs to the track there. Then we went to the streetcar, put the trolley up to the trolley-wire, got in the car, and started it up. We got up all the speed we could going up the rise. We hit the frogs and we derailed, and we went downhill on that new pavement that they had there. We had it all figured perfectly. We even had measured that concrete ramp going up to the Dumbarton front porch, the one they made for Mr. Dumbarton's grandmother to go up in her wheelchair on. It was wider than it needed to be for a wheelchair to go on. It was just exactly wide enough for a streetcar to go on if we hit it just right.”

Below and outside, a monkey howled and sobbed in withering agony and resounded its degradation in the hellish jungle. (There was not, in actual fact, any hellish jungle down there, though the yard between Sheen's where we were and Benedetti's was pretty shaggy.) The monkey gave its wrenching howling and sobbing in the terrifying outdoors, and also in the terrifying personal interiors. It may have been a ghost monkey.

“Monkeys had Halloween before people did,” Austro said. “Really, that's true. If they didn't kill so many of each other on every Halloween the world would be overrun with them now.”

“We rolled down that hill faster and faster,” Barnaby recounted, “and we stomped on that trolley-bell ‘Clang! Clang! Clang!’ Oh, I wish they still made trolley-bells like that! There wasn't any way to steer that streetcar when it wasn't on tracks, but it steered itself. The street turned sharply there, but the driveway of the Dumbartons was in a straight line. We went up that driveway with the sparks flying from the iron wheels on the concrete, up the ramp onto the front porch or veranda, down the whole length of the porch (Clang! Clang! Clang!) and clear through a wall at the end.

“And through the wall was the Master Chamber of the Dumbartons' house. That Master Chamber was probably the biggest bedroom in town, but it was a little bit crowded with a full-sized streetcar right in the middle of it. And we kept clanging that trolley-bell. A trolley-bell sounds quite a bit louder when the streetcar is inside a bedroom.

“ ‘Sancta Agatha!’ Mrs. Dumbarton cried out in her fine voice as she sat up in bed.

“ ‘Ora pro nobis!’ Mr. Dumbarton cried out in an even finer voice, and he sat up in bed too. And ‘Clang! Clang! Clang!’ went that trolley-bell. John Penandrew was the boy stomping on the bell. The Dumbartons, waking up like that, thought that the trolley-bell was a church bell back in France.

“They begin to ring the church bells at midnight there, when Halloween is over with and All Saints Day begins. And they begin to chant that Litany of the Saints. You know, though, that swishy dude Dumbarton caught on real fast. I never saw a man comprehend a streetcar in the middle of his bedroom so fast. And I never saw a two-handed creature collar six kids as quick as he did. And he seemed to have hands left over to — ”

“Ah, they don't make Halloweens like that any more!” we all breathed together.

The door chimes rang downstairs. “I'll go,” said Mary Mondo. She took balloons from the balloon bowl. Then she said, “I'd better take a pillow and put it on that door-stone so the ladies won't klunk their heads so hard. May a sander-effect ghost-trap get me if I don't put a pillow there.”

She floated downstairs, carrying a little pillow and quite a few balloons, blowing some of them up as she went. It was easy to see how Mary would startle people who weren't used to her. She hadn't any body at all. When she did things with her hands, such as handing out candy or balloons, then her hands did make an appearance, but it was a false appearance. When she spoke, there was mouth and throat and movement to be seen, but they were illusion. When she grinned, there was an appearance of everted lips and of red tract tissue all through her. Mary Mondo had a very visceral grin. It was hard to understand how she could be so carnal a person when she hadn't any body to be carnal with.

Below there was the sound of the front door opening and of little voices like pert mice squeaking ‘Trick or treat’. Then someone cried ‘Awk!’ in a young-wifey voice. After that there was a curious modified sound, like a ‘Klunk’ wrapped in feathers. Mary Mondo had got the pillow onto the door-stone in time.

There was the sound of the front door closing again. Mary Mondo came back upstairs. “That's likely all the little kids there will be tonight,” she said. “By the sander-effect ghost-trap itself, I hope there won't be a certain two or three big kids.”

“I hope Paracelsus doesn't come,” said that big, not-so-very-lifelike, sawdust-filled doll on the sofa, the doll that was really the undead body of Loretta Sheen.

The pet monkey that belonged to the O'Briens was howling and gibbering and squalling outside. It was infested with a cloud of ghost-monkeys that always came on this night.

“Austro, did you have Halloweens on the Guna Slopes when you were a boy?” Doctor George Drakos asked. The Guna Slopes were in Ethiopia, in Africa. That was where Austro came from.

“Certainly we had Halloweens,” Austro said, banging loudly with hammer and chisel as he constructed the Rocky McCrocky comic strip. “Carrock! We invented them. We first, after the monkeys, that is. Where do you think are to be found the great originals of your weak imitations you have been telling about? We made grotesque sapiens heads out of big gourds and burned bee-wax or aphid-wax candles in them. We would climb around and ring the doorbells at the porticos of the different caves, and we — ”

“Wait, wait, wait!” Harry O'Donovan objected. “Don't tell us that the Australopithecines had doorbells!”

“Sure we did, Harry,” Austro maintained. “Sure they were real ones, Cris. Sure they were electric ones, George. Did you think we had kerosene doorbells? Well hell, Barnaby, we used lead-sulphuric-acid batteries: that's a lot easier than winding those little transformers. Why, Laff, we got the sulphur for the acid from our own Guna Slopes. The best deposits in Africa are still there.”

“Let's not interrupt Austro, guys,” Barnaby interrupted him. “It makes him loquacious. Believe me, he always has answers. If you read his weekly Rocky McCrocky comic strip as the neighborhood kids do you would know those answers.”

“But sometimes we failed to ring the doorbells,” Austro said. “Certain wise-guy caveholders would remove the push-buttons that night and paint the holes to look just like push-buttons. When we pressed our finger there, it would go all the way into the hole. Then a pair of sharp rock-scissors on the inside would make short work of the finger, short work by a joint or two. See!”

Austro held up his index finger that was minus a joint. He had told quite a few stories about that missing finger-joint, though. I myself doubted that he had lost it by poking it through a hole that was painted to look like a push-button.

“If the caveholder opened the front door, we jumped aside onto a higher ledge,” Austro said, “for we had it fixed that the rock-sill would fall off and the caveholder would fall off too when he stepped out. Some of those caves were very high and the cave owners would be killed. Some of them were only medium high and the cave owners would only be maimed. Carrock, I hope those two or three big kids don't come around tonight!” Austro gave a shiver.

“You're surely not afraid of all the big kids in the world, are you?” Barnaby asked.

“There's two or three big kids I might be afraid of,” Austro said. “I might be afraid of them just this one night of the year. But sometimes the caveholder wouldn't open the door itself. The rich ones had peepholes built into their doors. Watch out then if a peephole opened. Don't put your eye too close to it to see inside. You will look a mamba snake right in the eye if you do, and he will savage the face clear off you. I hate mambas. Oh, I hope the door chimes don't ring again tonight. It might be them. Or I hope it rings soon, then, to have it over with.”

“I hope it isn't Paracelsus,” said the sawdusty Loretta Sheen.

“Yes, the sapiens people call him Paracelsus,” Austro said with a shiver. “He is the most feared of the double-people who appear on this year-night to exact payment. He's the magician with the white beard. He might come as a young boy, a boy you know well. But he will be wearing a long white beard with thongs that pretend to tie it onto his face. But it will not be a false beard: the boy will have grown a real white beard especially for this night. It is the thongs that are false in pretending to tie the beard onto the face. Then this magician with the white beard will pour a bowl of clotted blood of the kiboko over the head of the victim. And then the victim will be changed into a — ah, ah, ah — ” But Austro was shaking badly.

“Into a what, Austro?” Harry O'Donovan asked.

“Don't make me say it,” Austro begged. “It's too terrible. Ah, let me tell you about the Halloween night we put the rhinoceros up on top of Chimney Rock. It was a ten ton rhinoceros and was up two hundred feet high. It was nervous and complaining, and its feet kept slipping and showering rocks down. All the notable people had their houses right around the foot of Chimney Rock, and there was no telling which house the rhinoceros would smash or which people it would kill when it fell. By next morning daylight the situation was even more fearsome than by night. Ah, I'm afraid they will come tonight and I will be the victim. And the others of them are at least as fearful as the magician with the white beard. They will turn the victim into a — ah, ah, ah — ” Austro was scared.

“Well, why don't the menaces ring the chimes then!” Barnaby demanded. “Nothing is more wearisome than waiting for doom to crack, than waiting for lightning to strike, than waiting for the trumpet to sound, than waiting for the last knock on the last door, than waiting for the final bell to ring.”

“Sometimes the bearded magician will have an evil consort,” Austro said, full of fright. “Sometimes there will even be a third of these demons. Then the victim is done and doesn't have a chance.”

“I'm afraid of Paracelsus the Magician,” Mary Mondo said, “but I'm even more afraid of Morgana. If she comes, it's just all over with.”

“Just what is it that these spooks can do to you, kids?” Cris Benedetti asked.

“They can give one the monkey wrench,” Austro said skittishly. “There is nothing worse than that.”

We whooped and jeered at this, and Austro looked startled.

“Oh, I don't mean the tool that you call the monkey wrench,” he said then. “What I mean is made out of air and not of iron. It follows you and it enters you. It finds that little monkey that is in you, and it wrenches it sidewise. There's no other way to say it. You don't get more monkey or less monkey in you when this happens. You get your monkey wrenched, twisted, and that will change you into something else. The worst is when it changes one into a sapi —  Oh, no, no, I mustn't refer to that. Let's talk about something else. There was the Halloween night when we had cut almost through the grapevine that the mayor of our community used to swing into his cave on. He had to swing into his cave over a chasm a thousand feet deep. Our mayor was a fat man, and when he took the end of the grapevine from its moorings he couldn't see the cut in it which was high above his head. He started to swing across the chasm. Then, just as he got to the middle, it broke and — ”

“What is the sapi, Austro?” Harry O'Donovan asked.

“I wish they'd ring if there are any late visitors,” Barnaby said.

The chimes downstairs rang.

“No, no, not me,” Mary Mondo cried. “I won't go down. It might be them.”

Nobody had to go down. The dread visitors burst the front door open and came up the stairs with a clatter. They burst the door of our room open and came in.

“All is lost,” the sawdusty Loretta Sheen moaned. “It's Paracelsus.”

“Destruction and damnation!” Mary Mondo howled. “It's Morgana.”

“Fate worse than death,” Austro cringed. “It's the Unnameable One.”

Well, the three visitors did look a little bit gaudy. One of them, the one Austro called the Unnameable, poured a bowl of clotted kiboko blood over Austro's head. It was like pouring a bowl of death over him. And Austro fainted dead away, and fell over on the floor. He turned blue. He quivered a little bit, and then he stopped quivering. He stopped breathing too. Doctor George Drakos gave him a poke in the solar plexus and he started to breathe again.

“Happy birthday, Austro!” the three fearsome visitors called. And Austro regained himself and sat up on the floor.

“I knew you all the time,” he said. “I wasn't fooled.” But he had been.

The magician with the white beard was Roy Mega. Yes, the white beard was real. He hadn't had it that morning but he had it now. What is the use of being a genius if you can't grow a beard to order?

Morgana, the evil consort of the magician, was Chiara Benedetti. And the Unnameable One was a wino who was a friend of Austro and all of us, Heavenly Days McGee. What he had poured over Austro's head was not clotted kiboko blood at all. It was chili. It was Ike's Chili Parlour chili, the best kind. And Chiara had brought what she said was snail cake, with candles on it. So they had a party.

“How is this your birthday, Austro?” George Drakos asked. “And how old are you?”

“Carrock, I'm twelve years old,” Austro said. “It's my golden anniversary.” He was eating snail cake and opening presents and chiseling out next week's heroic episode of the Rocky McCrocky comic strip all at the same time.

“How did you calculate it?” Cris Benedetti said. “And twelve isn't the golden anniversary.”

“Twelve is the golden anniversary where I come from,” Austro said, “and it is also the year of my majority. I'm a man now. Oh, I calculated it from the helical rising of the Dog Star, and by the sothic period.”

“The sothic period still has twenty-eight years to go,” Cris Benedetti said.

“So? Then I subtracted twenty-eight years from it, and that made me twelve years old.”

Say, that was a happy time. That cake was good. Chiara had lied; it wasn't snail cake at all. And the future was rolling out like a sunshine carpet before Austro, the kid with the sunshine brains. The cloud was gone, but what had it been?

“What is the fate worse than death?” George Drakos asked.

“Carrock, it missed me,” Austro said. “Let's not talk about it.”

“But what is it that you would be turned into when your monkey is wrenched sideways?” Harry O'Donovan wanted to know. “What is this sapi that you would be turned into?”

“Homo sapiens, that's what,” Austro said. “You get turned into one of them — fate worse than death.”

Hammer and chisel ringing out the great epic of Rocky McCrocky on the comic-strip stone blocks. Chili still on his head, and his mouth full of snail cake. Sunshine shining there at midnight, and the rock dust flying!

They weren't about to turn Austro into a sapiens.

The Skinny People Of Leptophlebo Street

 — and turned into Leptophlebo Street (it's always a scruffy sort of delight to come into it). It was a minor discovery and a sudden entrance, like going through a small and florid door into a whole new world, a world of only one street.

The chattering of the monkeys was what struck him first, and then the chattering of the people in a kindred tone: and then the absolute cleanliness of the place, and the pleasant bouquets of selected and superior smells. Close on that was a whole dazzle of details that would take days to assimilate.

The poverty of the street struck him last of all, and then it seemed a more pleasant poverty with some other name. It was picked-clean poverty, as if every speck of dust had been hand-gathered from between the cobblestones as something as valuable as lepto pepper or gold.

Canute Freeboard, adventurous investor and freebooter-at-large, had come to Leptophlebo Street for what money could be found there; but the street seemed bare of value. He had come looking for a man named Hiram Poorlode. Canute needed money, and that was the year that money was very tight. There were those who said that money might be got in Leptophlebo Street, but they all laughed when they said it.

“Could you tell me where I might find a man named Hiram Poorlode?” Canute asked a friendly-looking young fellow there.

“Kmee-fee-eee-eee-eee,” the young fellow said, and Canute saw that a mistake had been made. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I hadn't noticed that you were a monkey.”

The monkey nodded as if to say that it was quite all right, and he motioned for Canute to come along with him. They stopped in front of a man who was sitting cross-legged on the stones of the street. The man had a sign, Nuts, Wholesale and Retail: he had a pandanus leaf in front of him and on the leaf there were seven filbert-nuts and two almonds. The monkey pointed the man out to Canute and Canute to the man and he said “Knee-fee-eee-eee-eee.” Then he skittered away.

“Yes, I am Hiram Poorlode,” the nut-man said. “Thank you, Hoxie.” He spoke the latter to the skittering monkey.

“Get your clothes rewoven, sir. Get your clothes rewoven,” a young boy chanted at Canute. “My father reweaves clothes free. Turn those baggy clothes into trim fit real fast.”

“My clothes aren't baggy,” Canute said.

“Boy, they sure will be baggy in a little while,” the boy said. “Better get it done now.”

“Get your teeth cleaned sir!” another young boy chanted at Canute. “My father cleans teeth excellent free.”

“Is he your son?” Canute asked the street-sitting nut-merchant Hiram Poorlode.

“Oh no. This one is Marquis Shortribs,” Hiram introduced. “His father is Royal Shortribs who is a tycoon in teeth. And I am Hiram Poorlode, nut-merchant, investor, moneylender. Sit down on the cobbles, sir, and talk to me. You are the only customer in my shop at the moment so I can give you my full time.”

“I am Canute Freeboard, a stranger in this country and in this town. I expressed strong interest in obtaining investment money. The man to whom I had introduction must have been a humorist and he played a lopsided joke on me. Ah, how is the nut business?”

“It hasn't been a bad morning,” Hiram said. “I received twelve filbert-nuts on consignment this morning and I have already sold five of them. With my mark-up, this gives me enough equity in filberts that I can eat one myself and still have enough cash on hand to cover those sold. This is known as eating free and it is the first rule of economic independence. As to the almond nuts, I own them outright. I started the day with five of them and I have sold three for cash. This is the best sales record that I can remember, up to this time of day, for almonds. I also own the pandanus leaf. That being so, I am almost insulated against misfortune. If I sell nothing for the rest of the day it will still not be a complete catastrophe.”

“Haircut, sir? Haircut, sir?” a small boy cried in set-chant. “My father does supreme haircutting and head-grooming free.”

“No, I don't believe so, boy,” Canute mumbled. “Is he your son, Mr. Poorlode?”

“Oh no. This is Crispin Halfgram the son of Claude Halfgram the biggest man in hair and heads in Leptophlebo Street. Some of the finest garments here are woven by his wife Rita from the hair that Claude collects in his studio. You are looking for investment money? I am the most promiscuous money-lender in Leptophlebo Street. How much do you need?”

Hiram Poorlode, as did all the skinny people of Leptophlebo Street, wore a very large, flat, wide-brimmed hat that was crawling all over with rambling greenery. Canute now saw that what Hiram really wore on top of his head was a growing vegetable and fruit and grain garden. And all those garden-hats were tilted to catch all the sun possible.

“I'm afraid that we're not thinking on the same scale,” Canute said dourly. “I need eighty-five thousand dollars for an opportune deal, such a deal as will come only once in my life. I need the sum at no more than seven percent interest and I need it today. Yes, my acquaintance in this city must be a humorist.”

“Here are the shoes back again, Mr. Poorlode,” a small boy said, and he set a good-looking pair of smooth shoes down beside Hiram. “He will not need them again for two hours, but he believed that Mr. Shortribs may want them before that.”

“Thank you, Piet,” Hiram said, and the boy skipped off. “That is Piet,” Hiram told Canute, “the son of Jan Thingruel who gathers more astatic grain out of cracks than does anyone else on the Street. We have but one pair of shoes here, and whatever person goes to make a prestigious visit will wear the shoes. They fit all persons in the street, since Claude Halfgram had the final joints of four of the toes removed last year. They are good shoes and we take excellent care of them. I am shoe custodian this week.” Hiram Poorlode lifted up one of the flagstones of the street and put the shoes down into a shoe-hole that was underneath it.

“I have the money by me now,” Hiram said then. “Nothing is easier than eighty-five thousand dollars in gold. And, with me, a man's face is his security. Give me half an hour to consider you for I am a cautious man. Spend the time pleasantly: visit and observe our rather odd Leptophlebo Street here. Enjoy yourself, sir, and be assured that your case is under active consideration. I can tell a lot about a man by watching how he reacts to Leptophlebo Street.”

“All right,” Canute said. “I'd given up hope of raising the money anyhow. Money is tight this season. Ah but it was a sweet, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity! Yes, it's an odd little street here. How much do you sell the filberts for?”

“Three for a mill. Oh, it's the standard coin to the Street. One tenth of a cent.”

One might as well enjoy the drollery. Really, Canute had never seen anything quite like Leptophlebo Street; never such skinny monkeys or such skinny people. The monkeys couldn't talk properly. There's an old saying that whenever monkeys do talk there's some monkey-business going on. Well, there was plenty of it going on here, but all that the monkeys could say was “Khlee-fee-eee-eee-eee.” The monkeys wrote notes on little pieces of paper and gave them to the merchants of the Street. They brought in fruit and they traded it or sold it. From the merchants they bought a few nuts that were out-of-season in the woods, bought them for clay coins or in trade for their in-season fruits or nuts. The people asked the monkeys about their families and about the situation in the woods, and the monkeys wrote the answers on little pieces of paper.

“The monkeys are so smart,” Canute said, “that it seems as if they could talk. As long as you are doing business with them anyhow you could teach them speech.”

“People of the monkey caste are not allowed to talk,” Effie Poorlode said (she was the wife of Hiram the nut-merchant). “Everyone has his niche in the world, and the monkeys don't have talking niches. And it would be no profit to us to teach them speech. We have plenty of time to wait for them to write out their notes, and we do make a good profit on the paper that they write them on.”

The people of Leptophlebo Street were the skinniest folks that Canute had ever seen. How the ribs stood out on them! Two ribby young ladies were in a booth down the street.

“What? Do you sell the paper to the monkeys?” Canute asked Effie Poorlode.

“Get your teeth cleaned free, sir!” the boy Marquis Shortribs was soliciting a passer-by. “My father does excellent tooth-cleaning free.” But the passer-by continued on.

“If the tooth-cleaning is free, and if there are no customers anyhow, then where is the profit?” Canute asked.

“Oh, there will always be customers,” Effie told him. “Suppose that ten thousand persons go by and do not avail themselves on this service. But then the very next person might stop at the Shortribs' booth, and you can see how that would make all the waiting and solicitations worthwhile. As to your question, no, we don't sell the pieces of paper to the monkeys. The monkeys make the paper in the woods, and they make the ink too. They write their notes on the paper and they give them to us. You can see that the profit will be enormous. If we get only eight or ten of these little pieces of paper a day look how they will count up. We dissolve the ink off the paper, and when we have a thousand pounds of the ink we can sell it to ink-bottlers or pen-makers of the city.”

“How long will it take to accumulate a thousand pounds?” Canute asked.

“Oh, it would probably take us a thousand years, but what's time so long as we keep busy? And we find all sorts of uses for the little pieces of paper. I tell you that there is money in paper; there is money in everything.”

“How much money is there in everything, Mrs. Poorlode?” Canute questioned.

“Yesterday my husband and I cleared one cent and three mills from all our businesses,” Effie answered. “And we also achieved equities in three other mills. This is better than most of our days, but all our days are good. Oh the wealth does accumulate!”

Mrs. Poorlode was like the valiant woman in scripture as she stood proud and skinny, with her garden on top of her head and with her hands busy leaching nut-shells in a bowl.

“This processes the nut-shells for industrial use,” she said, “and we have the Nut-Shell Bitter Tea left over to drink. It makes the bones glossy. My husband gives a rebate to every purchaser of one of our nuts if he returns the shell after he has eaten the meat out of it. We are blessed to live on a street that has so many business opportunities.”

There was nothing very interesting about the gaunt ribcage of Effie Poorlode.

“Yes,” she said, reading the thoughts of Canute Freeboard, “the townsmen lust after our ribs and after our ossuary generally. There is nothing wrapped up about us. There are some persons in the town with so much flesh grown onto their bones that their fundamental persons and passions are buried away and their real impact is never felt. Luckily that is not so with the people of Leptophlebo Street.”

“How is the street kept so clean and swept?” Canute asked.

“Brooms with both astatic and static bristles are the secret,” Effie told him. “Organic dust clings to the static bristles, and the non-organic dust is swept clean into gathering vessels by the astatic bristles. Then we pass the brushes over degaussing jets that release the organic particles, and we make soup from them. And the non-organic dust is separated into flammable and inflammable piles.”

“They mean the same thing,” Canute said.

“Not on Leptophlebo Street they don't,” Effie insisted. “So we make briquettes to burn as fuel out of the one sort. And we make bricks and flagstones and face-stones for buildings out of the other sort. So we have our soup and our fuel and our bricks, and we keep the street clean all the time.”

A medium-sized bird, probably a grackle, came down onto the rim of the garden-containing hat that Effie carried balanced on her head. And the bird was stuck fast. Canute saw that the edge of the hat was bird-limed to catch anything that landed there.

“I will wait,” Effie said. “The pot wants a bird, but the pot must wait also. These grackle-birds attract one another for a while. This is not one of our own grackles that I know; it's one of the newly-arrived grackles from the countryside. They will not be wary of one bird stuck there, nor of two birds stuck. They will not be wary of less than three stuck birds. I will be patient and I will have three grackles for food and for by-products. Will you not stay with us this evening and have a look at our nightlife on Leptophlebo Street?”

“I don't know what I will do,” Canute said. “I haven't comprehended it all yet.”

“Lose weight free in seven minutes surgery, sir,” a small boy chanted. “My father does good free work. He is one good loser.”

“No, not right now, boy,” Canute said.

“Have your appendix out, sir? Have your appendix out?” another small boy was putting the shill on. “My father performs faithful appendectomies free.”

“No, not right now,” Canute said.

“This boy is Pat Thingruel, the brother of Piet and the son of Jan Thingruel,” Effie told Canute. “The father is as stylish a free appendectomist as you will find anywhere.”

“I do not understand how all the people of Leptophlebo Street can work for free,” Canute said. “How do they profit by it?”

A second curious grackle-bird came down and got itself squawkishly stuck in the bird-lime of the edging of Effie's garden-hat.

“Oh, there's lots of profit!” Effie exclaimed. “A vermiform appendix, especially when inflamed, is a veritable storehouse of richness. Master microchemists like ourselves can manufacture all sorts of useful things from such rich material. And the teeth that Royal Shortribs cleans, do you realize just how super-organic are the deposits taken from teeth? Do you know how many things can be woven and fabricated from the hair that Claude Halfgram cuts? Garments, rugs, tents, seines, modish gowns for the modish ladies in the town. Almost solid profit. And the head-grooming that he does, do you know that there are some very lively products to be had from that? Our greatest industry, though, is the night soil that we gather from the cooperative of people of the town. And I will tell you something else if you will promise not to tell the monkeys.”

“No, I won't breathe a word of your secret to the monkeys,” Canute promised.

“We pay the monkeys only half as much per equal weight for their night soil as we pay the people in the town. And the monkeys bring theirs to us; we don't have to go and get it. Ah, there is profit everywhere you look, in the stones, in the air, in the very rain. What a money-harvest we do have! Mills and mills and cents and cents, and at the end of a week we may even have another nickel for our hard work.”

“It's a wonder you don't gather belly-button fuzz and process it for profit,” Canute laughed.

“Of course we do,” Effie cried. “We gather more than a pound a year of it from the people of the town, and this in spite of the fact that many of the burghers will not cooperate with us and say that the whole thing is silly. But there are a few friendly people in town who wear wool. The woolies are the best for the fuzz. And it can be made into the softest of all sheens. Oh do stay over and have a look at our nightlife tonight, Mr. Freeboard! Really, it's wonderful the times that we do have.”

A third grackle came and stuck itself in the bird-lime on Effie's head-garden. And then was heard ‘Sorrow in Three Voices by Grackles’: but only those three would be stuck there. Others would veer away from the three birds in trouble.

But a fourth bird did come, a bird carrying a long piece of broken looking-glass in its beak. It was too wise to get caught in the bird-lime, but it was watched with avid eyes. Sometime it would drop that piece of silvered glass, and some person would rush in and catch it before it hit the ground. There's profit to be had from old mirror glass.

A man with affluent gestures arrived at Hiram Poorlode's booth in a sudden hurry. He had the sharp, lean, craggy face of a bird of prey. He was taut and of a restless thinness in every part. Why, he was none other than the Lean Eagle from Lean Eagle Street!

“Hiram, I'm caught short,” said that opulent man who wore diamonds on every finger. “I have to cover. I'm overextended. It will be only for a few days. I need two and a quarter million dollars and I need it now. I have my dray here.”

But the Lean Eagle was the highest-flying and the most rapacious money-man ever. Why should he come to Leptophlebo Street to borrow?

“With me, a man's face is his security,” Hiram Poorlode said, “and I know your face, Mr. Schlemel kurz Karof. A man of such a name and reputation is security itself.”

Hiram removed three of the largest flagstones from the street on which he had been sitting. He passed the heavy bars of gold up to the nine lackeys who served Mr. Schlemel kurz Karof. It took a fair number of gold bars to amount to two and one quarter million dollars.

“There has to be an explanation to this!” Canute Freeboard howled out loud. “Oh, but by all the equivocating things that be, there can't be any explanation to it!”

When the lackeys had loaded all the gold bars onto the dray, Mr. Schlemel kurz Karof signed a note and gave it to Hiram Poorlode. Then that opulent man went away with his dray and his lackeys, and Hiram Poorlode replaced the three flagstones in the street.

Canute Freeboard hummed a little tune to himself. There were some notes missing from that tune. “How long did it take you and your husband, at a nickel a week, to get to a position where you could make instant loans of two and a quarter million dollars and still have lots more gold glittering in your gold-hole under the street?” Canute asked Effie.

“It sure did take a long time,” she said. “There just aren't any short-cuts.” Effie took from her husband the note that Schlemel kurz Karof, the Lean Eagle, had given him. She dissolved the ink off it and put it in the ink accumulation. And she put the de-inked paper with the paper accumulation.

“How will you collect when the writing is dissolved off the note for the ink?” Canute asked Hiram.

“Ah, a man's face is his security to me,” Hiram said. “He will pay me back. And if he does not, what is the difference? In time I will accumulate the amount again, and I have lots of time.”

“Hey, is the handsome man going to stay around for the nightlife this evening?” two pretty young skinny ladies asked. “We sure do have a lot of fun at nightlife fiesta.”

“These nice young ladies are Regina and Maharana Shortribs,” Effie Poorlode introduced them. “I believe that a good-looking you man like you could have a lot of fun just skylarking with them at nightlife, Canute.”

“You know what we do for the climax of a nightlife go-it-all?” Maharana asked. Oh, the skin and bones of that young girl! They'd send shivers of delight through anyone.

But sometimes one must put second things first.

“Ah, about that loan,” Canute spoke to Hiram. “Oh by the swept cobbles of Leptophlebo Street, there has got to be an explanation to this! About that loan, Mr. Poorlode?”

“Oh, certainly,” Hiram said. “I've been observing you and I now have complete confidence in you. I'll lend you the money. Eighty-five thousand dollars, was it not? Do you want it in gold or in certified cash warrants?”

“In gold, in gold. Oh, what a beautiful, hard-scrabble, skinny street this is!” Canute rejoiced. “How have you done it? How have you accumulated millions of dollars in gold on a nickel a week?”

“In bad weeks we don't make near that much,” Effie Poorlode said.

“Ah, but where does the gold come from?” Canute pursued the matter.

“Oh, there's several legends about the origin of the gold,” Hiram told him. “One story is that it's rabbit gold and that it reproduces itself, that it all comes from two nuggets that got together under the flagstones.”

“But there is raw nugget gold there. There is bar gold and ingot gold. And there is coined gold of various coinages,” Canute protested. Hiram had already removed the stones that covered the gold in the street.

“Yes,” Hiram agreed, “several pair of different forms of rabbit gold would be required, wouldn't they? Then there's the story that it's all monkey gold. The monkeys find it and refine it in the woods. Then they give it to us noble burghers of the Street. They are afraid to keep it. It is said that they did keep it when they were men, and that that's what made monkeys out of them. You don't believe that entirely? Oh, I see that Hoxie has been monkey-facing my act behind my back.” And Hoxie had been doing that. But had he been saying ‘Do not believe all of it’ with his monkey-facing, or had he been saying ‘Do not believe any of it’?

“The third legend is that it is all pound-of-flesh gold,” Hiram said. “This legend states that we sell pounds of flesh for the yearly bashes of the Extortioners Guild and the Hatchet-Makers Guild and especially for that dread secret society Glomerule; and that we receive our gold for the pounds of flesh. Ah, there it is, Canute, all ready for you to take it: eighty-five thousand dollars worth of gold. It's quite a bit over a hundred pounds. The young ladies will help you carry it.”

“Which of the three legends is true, Hiram?” Canute asked softly.

“Oh, they're all a little bit true, but all together they would only account for only a fraction of our gold.”

“What accounts for the rest?”

“How can we tell you that? It's a secret. We know you are not so base a person as to want us to tell you the answer. You will have the pleasure of guessing it as the years go by, but we will not tell it to you. Ah, your gold is ready for you, Canute.”

“We know you are not such a fink-dink as would like to be told,” Effie said. “It took the last one about a thousand years to guess it, and you want to miss all that fun?”

“Who was the last one to guess it?” Canute asked.

“Me,” said Hiram.

“We know you are not such a cheap-creep as would listen even if someone whispered the answer to you,” Maharana Shortribs said. “We know you are better than that. My sister and I will help you carry the gold.”

“You will not tell me where it comes from,” Canute mused. “And you offer it to me so freely that there has to be a catch to it somewhere. What is the catch, Hiram? There's a hook in the bait, isn't there? It's logical that there would be a hook.”

“Oh sure, but it's so thin a hook that you'll hardly notice it. And believe me, the hook isn't a logical one.”

“Hardly notice it, huh? That may be like saying that a knife is so thin that you'll hardly notice it when it goes in between your fifth and sixth ribs,” Canute said doubtfully.

“Yes, exactly like,” Effie Poorlode chimed in. “How did you know about the cut between the fifth and sixth ribs, Canute? It isn't one of the major cuts.”

“Lose weight free in seven minute process,” a little boy chanted at Canute. “My father is king of all the weight-takers-off in Leptophlebo Street.”

“Not right now,” Canute said.

“Get your clothes rewoven free,” another little boy chanted. “My father reweaves baggy too-big clothes for slim-trim limb.”

“Not right now,” Canute said. “Does the hook hurt, Hiram?”

“Only a little bit. Only for a minute. Take the gold, Canute, and go close your deal. Then come back here for certain entertainments and kindnesses that we will have scheduled for you. You'll really like them. And when you have experienced them, and the mark that goes with them, then you will be one of us and you may enjoy Leptophlebo Street for as often as you like and for as long as you like. And you won't even notice the hook when it goes in.”

“And afterwards? When I do notice it?”

“I told you that it hurts only a little bit, and for only a little while. We do want you to be one of us. We want you sincerely.”

Canute Freeboard looked up and down the crooked length of Leptophlebo Street.

“Choose us, join with us,” said that skinny young lady Regina Shortribs. “Have fun with us. And come back often.” And Canute looked at the wonderfully bony form of Regina.

He looked at Hiram Poorlode's sign which read Nuts, Wholesale and Retail. He looked at the three sad grackle-birds that were stuck to the top-of-the-head garden of Effie Poorlode, and at that other unstuck grackle that was flying around with a piece of looking-glass in its beak. He looked at Highfellow, Redbone, Roxie, and Hoxie, the solemn monkeys of the street.

Hoxie wrote a note and gave it to Canute. “Join with us. Stay with us. We like you,” the note read. Effie Poorlode took the note from Canute to dissolve the ink off it. A tear ran down Canute's face for he was genuinely moved by the friendship of the monkeys. The little boy Crispin Halfgram raced in and caught the falling tear in a special little cup before it hit the street.

“My mother can use it,” Crispin said. “Each teardrop is a storehouse of balanced chemicals. The special salinity is quite prized.”

“Analyze your dreams, analyze your dreams!” a little boy of the street was making a pitch. “My father makes fine dream analyses free. Lie down on the cobbles.”

“How can your father make a living by analyzing dreams free?” Canute asked.

“Residuals,” the little boy said. “He gets rich on the residuals.”

“Choose us, join us,” said that skinny young lady Maharana Shortribs. “Have fiesta with us and come back all the time. Hey, do you know what we do for the climax of one of our nightlife go-it-alls?” Canute looked at the wonderfully bony throat of Maharana.

“I make my choice,” he announced. “I swallow that bait, hook and all. I become a partisan of this street.” (Even the lop-eared dogs of the place raised their ears and snouts in joy.) “I take the loan now in cash.” (The people began to cheer.) “I will go and seize the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” (Folks began to laugh and to tune musical instruments.) “And then I will come back here for the entertainments and kindnesses and the nightlife.” (The monkeys were clapping their hands.)

There was real welcome in the wind, and somewhere near there was the joyful whetting of knives. Canute and the Shortribs sisters picked up the gold bars and went with them and closed the deal. So Canute nailed down the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but he knew that it was small stuff compared to the mysterious opportunity of Leptophlebo Street itself.

They came back to Leptophlebo Street, and a ‘Gala and Welcome’ banner was stretched clear across the street. So it was quite impossible to decline any of the activities. And who would want to? The trumpet was blowing a great blast, and the other instruments were joining in.

Canute was having his teeth cleaned, his head groomed, his appendix removed, his dreams analyzed, some other pleasant surgery being done to him, and his clothes rewoven all at one time. This was life at its most full, and the dazzle and confusion were to be expected.

“This is the first appendectomy since my father got his knife sharpened,” Pat Thingruel sang happily in Canute's ear. “Oh, you are lucky! Listen now as I join the rowdy-dow band for you. I play eighth flute.”

“And this is the first free seven minute surgery since my father got his knives sharpened,” another little boy was chirruping. “Listen when I join the band. I play fifth drum.” Canute couldn't remember what the free seven minute surgery was about but it had to be good. He heard the eighth flute and the fifth drum join the band and it was rapturous music. His dreams were being analyzed right on the glittering edge of his senses and he could only guess what rich residuals they would have. And a written note was placed shyly before his eyes.

“Listen now as I join the rang-dang band,” it read in the handwriting of the monkey Hoxie. “I play third bagpipe.” Canute passed the note to Effie Poorlode for processing and salvaging. Everything that was done on Leptophlebo Street contributed to the fortune of that famous place. With joy Canute heard the third bagpipe join the rang-dang band. He was in glowing confusion as he recovered from his surgeries (there had been several of them) and his cleanings and groomings and reweavings and other things. Oh it all did make him feel light and lightheaded and slick-fit and trim-limbed and happy!

“Hurry up and heal up,” Regina Shortribs was talking into his ear. “Heal real fast. Drink this cup of Nut-Shell Bitter Tea. It's medicinal, and it also makes the bones glossy. Then we will go and honkey-tonk.”

“You know what we do for the climax of our nightlife go-it-alls?” Maharana Shortribs asked once more.

“No, but I will like it,” Canute gloated happily. He was feeling almost healed now. In another minute he would be healed completely. “What do you do for climax, Maharana?”

“Eat bowls of real organic soup,” the skinny girl breathed the delightful information. She made it sound wonderful, and of course it was. But Canute was watching the way that her skinny throat moved when she spoke. It was sheer witchery of ligament and sinew.

As Canute rose to his feet with a little help, the band played on with flutes and drums and bagpipes and all the wonderful and skinny-sounding instruments. It was certainly fine just to be there between the two beautiful and meager Shortribs girls.

“I have swallowed the hook without noticing it,” Canute said, “and it didn't hurt a bit. I wonder what distinguishing mark has been placed upon me? And my rewoven clothes fit me so trim! How is it possible that anything should be so trim? I feel wonderful and light. I wonder how I look?”

“Bird, bird!” Maharana cried, and she clapped her hands. “Bring the looking glass!”

“Oh gee, now it comes,” Effie Poorlode said apprehensively.

“Remember that even the Lean Eagle was known as the Fat Eagle before he trafficked here,” said Regina.

“And remember that it only hurts a little bit and for a little while,” said Hiram.

“No man can have everything, but on Leptophlebo Street he sure can come close,” Canute gloated. “Now let's just see whether I look as fine as I feel.”

The grackle-bird brought the piece of looking-glass to him. And Canute took it.

He looked at his image in it.

He cried out in shock!

His face cracked in a spasm of agony. And the looking glass shattered into tinkling slivers that fell, and were caught before reaching the street, by a small boy who would have profitable salvage from them.

But it hadn't been Canute in that mirror. It had been a horrifying skull-and-bone thing. That slick seven minute free surgery had removed more than a hundred pounds of his flesh by a hundred cuts, one of them between the fifth and sixth ribs.

There was a ghastly screaming going on and on.

It hadn't been Canute in the glass. And it couldn't be him now. It was a horrifying devil. It was a starved and demented ghoul. It was a malodorous ghost. It was a misbegotten bony abomination. It was — 

It was one of the skinny people of Leptophlebo Street. It was himself, of course: and the screaming voice was his own.

Heavy tears were running down Canute's face

(“It only hurts for a little bit and for a little while,” Hiram was saying again.)

in outrageous streams

(“You'll learn to like yourself this way,” Maharana was saying. “We like you this way.”)

and falling

(“But how could you become one of us if you didn't become one of us?” Effie was chiding.)

to be caught in a special cup by Crispin Halfgram

(“The special salinity is quite prized,” he was saying.)

before they hit the Street.

The Man Who Walked Through Cracks

I

There came a crooked man, untimely born,

Who blew down walls with soundless, cromie horn.

He sought, beyond the realm of cul-de-sacs,

Infinity that hides itself in cracks.

 — The Original Horn Book

Hamelin College had no claim to fame except that it was the titular see for a group of numinous guards. They guarded well most of the time, but every few centuries some group slipped through them. There were, in fact, recent events pointing to the case that someone might have slipped through in the present decade.

“The events weren't real,” Professor Dorothy Mandel insisted. “They were working postulates used in my experimental psychology class, and that's all they were.”

“The events weren't real,” Professor Rosemary Thumbsdown insisted. “They were recurring mythperson events in my analytical mythology class, and that's all they were.”

“Our position is that the events weren't real,” said Dean John Michael Anwalt. “But we have to crom our necks a bit to hold that position. It gives you a funny outlook when, one half of the time, you are looking out at the world from the inside of a spherical bottle.” Aw, what kind of talk is that?

All right, you review the events then. And the events (why? What's the matter with grown people crying? It shows that they have sound emotions and frustrations), and the events were, or seemed to be, these:

“Could someone tell me the name of this course?” the lecturer, Professor Thomas Cromwell, asked the unfamiliar looking students. (Cromwell was a pleasant man with a crooked grin and…)

“It is History of Musical Notation,” a ruddy fellow said (…and a whole crooked face) — (Cromwell, not the ruddy young fellow).

“By the hexed hemispheres themselves, what am I doing teaching such a course?” Cromwell asked with a touch of insincerity (he had a crooked tongue too).

“We don't know, either, Professor,” a pretty girl answered.

“I suppose that History of Musical Notation is as good a take-off pad as any,” Cromwell said. “Well, you see, students; there are the approved musical notes that are quite narrow. And then there are the spaces between the notes that are a thousand times as wide.”

“In what respect do you mean the notes are narrow?” asked a gopher-faced young man. “Do you mean that they are narrow in respect to pitch or tone color or rhythm or melody or harmony or polyphony or mode or measure or signature or score or tablature or what?”

“I mean they are narrow in respect to width,” Professor Cromwell said. “A person could erect more than a thousand unapproved musical notes between any two approved notes. But the unapproved notes would sound discordant, unpleasant, unnatural, and plain repugnant if they were anywhere near to the approved notes in frequency. They would sound so to me, they would sound so to you, they would sound so to a Hottentot. They would sound discordant and painful to a dog or sheep or a starling or a fish or an earthworm. And if the unapproved notes are not near in frequency to the approved notes, then we will seldom hear them at all. And that's odd, for they are there, available to the ear.”

“The textbook by Duggle doesn't say anything about unapproved musical notes,” a freckled girl said. Several of the students were looking at Cromwell doubtfully. The ruddy young man whistled a few bars of Rat-catcher Ramble soundlessly. How could he whistle soundlessly?

“Duggle doesn't mention that a person could fall through the space between two musical notes and be killed?” Professor Cromwell asked. “Well, I will mention it then. We are like people walking on stepping stones with bottomless chasms below for anyone who should miss his step. You step exactly on one of the approved notes, and that is all right. You step a little off-center of one of them, and you receive a slippery warning. But if you miss a note entirely, and the odds should be a thousand to one that you will miss entirely, then the result is your disappearance, and perhaps your destruction and death. So you can see that accepted tone, in the present order of things, is important.”

Professor Sanger came into the lecture room. He gave a sort of smirk. He arched the brows almost off his head and he cocked his eyes in a way that was supposed to be comic. Then he sat down in the back of the room.

“Now, young people,” Professor Cromwell continued, “let us consider sounds that are not usually accounted as musical notes. Let us consider the whine of a buzz-saw. John Wellborn, will you put the variable-speed motor on that buzz-saw in the back of the room and then rev the thing up?”

“John Wellborn isn't in this class,” a pretty girl said, “and there isn't any buzz-saw in this room. Maybe you are mixed up.”

“By the scrubby Rat-catcher himself, I am never mixed up!” Cromwell argued. “Well, when the buzz-saw is accelerated, it mumbles, and then it sings. It mumbles again, and it sings again. And it does that again and again. It sings when it comes to one of the approved musical notes, and it mumbles when it is going over the thousands of unapproved notes between. When asked to guess, most persons will say that the singing is from ten to fifteen times as loud as the mumbling. But instrumentation proves that they are of the same intensity. And scanning instruments prove one other thing: the constant-acceleration motor with its attached buzz-saw blade does not accelerate constantly. It lingers an unseemly time at the frequency-speed of the approved notes, and it leaps over the unapproved notes as though they were a wasteland.”

“Really, you go too far, Cromwell,” Professor Sanger said from the back of the room.

“Be quiet, Sanger,” Cromwell ordered. “If you have come to heckle, then I will have to ask you to leave.” That said, he returned to his lecture. “Let us consider a simple, synchronous A. C. motor. It should turn, on sixty-cycle current, and according to theory, at thirty-six hundred revolutions a minute or at eighteen hundred or at nine hundred, depending on the number of pairs of poles that it has. But it doesn't do this. The real speed will differ from the synchronous speed. Even a name-plate may give it at seventeen hundred eighty instead of eighteen hundred. And the usual explanation is that the motor is slowed by drag or slippage. Oh, by the green meadows on the other side, that's nonsense! There cannot be a slippage of synchronicity unless there is a slippage of time itself. How is this possible electrically? It isn't. Well then, how is it possible behavioristically? It is the corrupting effect of animate, and especially human, influence on inanimate equipment that forces the motor to break synchronous speed to match the frequency of the nearest approved note.”

“Cromwell — may the Rat-catcher get you! — I must get started with my class,” Sanger said.

“Go ahead,” said Cromwell. “Now then, young people, we have a cosmic mystery. Why do people all over the world hear only very narrow and widely separated sounds, noises, notes? Why do they fail to hear the thousand times more numerous notes and sounds that stand between them? Why do Africans, American Indians, Australian Aborigines, Chinese, Polynesians all hold the same notes to be approved and hearable? Why do they consider the edges of those notes to be dissonances and unpleasantnesses? And why do they not hear the great numbers of notes in between at all? How could such collusion have come about, and why?

“Why do birds and animals accept the same small number of notes and reject the same large number? Why, why, why?”

“Aw, hemophilic bleeding hemispheres, come along now, Cromwell!” Professor Sanger barked. “It's time I was teaching my class, and time you were teaching yours.”

Professor Cromwell looked puzzled for a moment. Then he brightened.

“Oh, I understand now,” he said. “I'm in the wrong lecture room and talking to the wrong bunch of students. This is your class, Sanger. That's why you're here.”

“It's because of you, Cromwell, and a very few like you, that the absentminded-professor image has been fastened unjustly on so many of us,” Sanger complained.

“True,” said Cromwell, “but I can hear sounds, I can smell smells, I can see sights, perhaps I can walk into lands that are forever closed to all you present-minded professors.” And Cromwell walked out of the room.

“A crackie, that one,” Professor Sanger said. “He says that the cracks in our world are a thousand times as wide as our world itself.” But Sanger did not take over his class immediately. Instead, he called Catherine Cromwell on the room phone.

“This looks like the day, Catherine,” he said sorrowfully. “We've all been watching his antics and hoping that the worst wouldn't happen. But it is. You should come and get him. It looks as if he is going over the edge.”

“The phrase we use in this household is ‘through the crack,’ ” Catherine said. “Yes, I hope we can go through the crack today. Oh, there's so much to look forward to!” And she hung up on him with a soundless clatter.

And Catherine in her own place was taken with both hope and apprehension.

“Wide meadows of my heart's desire, how I pray that it will work!” she said. “It will all be so much more spacious when we have gone through, and then I may get the things that I have always wanted. Really, I've never wanted much. A castle in the country with lake and beach and yacht basin, a mountain of our own with a superior slope for the winter season, a roomy townhouse (oh, fifty or a hundred rooms, we might have company), clothes enough to cover me modestly and elegantly, satellite apartments further downtown and uptown and on the park. Oh yes, and in Washington and New York and New Orleans and San Francisco and Paris and London and Dublin and Rome and Nice. A small number of planes of my own. And dependable servants and aides, and my personal publisher and producer and senator and cardinal. And let us have game-parks as wide as realms. Oh, the stag-hunt days! Oh, the lobster nights! Let me have the respect of all (oh hell, let it be the adulation of all). Let me have a hand in every glove, a thumb in every bowl and a toe in every vat. Yes, and an island in every ocean. Most of all, let me have the kind of money that only money can buy. All this will be easy if you defend us from the Powers and Principalities. Oh, by the Prized Hemispheres, defend us from them! Be good to the Rat-catcher: so many are bad to him. These things I pray for.” Catherine Cromwell and God had an easy way of talking to each other, and they reciprocated favors.

Ah, let us step into this crack here for a moment (it's roomy enough, once you're in it, and the time passed there doesn't count) and be informed about the Hemispheres. The two Hemispheres were very old and of disputed origin, and they were prized possessions of the college. In form, each was a perfect sphere, and yet they were called hemispheres: It was said they had originally existed in the same spherical space and that they had then been separated. They were of heavy glass, each at least a meter in diameter. One of them was crammed with creatures, rats, rat-faced people, proper people; but their faces were bigger than their bodies and the eyes were bigger than the faces. They seemed alive and avid to burst out. Most of the bodies and faces and eyes were cracked and shattered (you know that it was done by an eye-cracking sound), broken like glass and the pieces falling out of them. Yet they seemed alive and flexible, not rigid. They didn't seem at all miniaturized, but there were hundreds of them in that hemisphere.

The other spherical hemisphere was all green meadows and game-parks and cities and oceans, unoccupied, but waiting for visitation.

Ah, out of the crack again. But be careful: Don't mention that stuff.

Nah, Professor Cromwell didn't go to his own lecture room after the fiasco with the class of Professor Sanger. He went to still another room full of bright-faced students, and he found Professor J. F. E. (Killer) Diller already lecturing there. Cromwell held up his hand to halt that prattle, and he stepped into the breach.

“That's enough, Killer,” he said briskly. “I'll take over now. Will somebody please tell me the name of this course?”

“It is Middle Mayan Archeology, Professor Cromwell,” a gentle-voiced, pop-eyed young lady said. “We didn't know that you were interested in it.”

“By the Square Hills of Quintana Roo, I'm interested in everything!” Cromwell declared. “Sure, a Middle Mayan pyramid will make a fine take-off base for my expansive views. Surely you have already noticed that the Mayan world is mostly hidden and that only a bit of it sticks above the surface. And you surely have wondered about the reason for this. Well, you might notice that our own world is also mostly hidden and that only a very small bit of it sticks above the surface. Have any of you young people noticed that there are often ghosts in photographs of Middle Mayan sites? These are best seen on films that are developed immediately and examined immediately. Later, the ghosts blur: It's really a subjective blurring, though it happens to an objective film. Ghosts, or educated blurs, appear on photographs of all sites whatsoever, and why should Middle Mayan sites be an exception? There is a conspiracy, carried on by humans and associates-of-humans and directed by Principalities and Powers, to reject vast areas of the world and to paint them over with little black brushes to make them look like no more than cracks. Well, I know ways to oppose that conspiracy and to lead many people out of the narrow and mundane desert and into the interdicted green meadows.”

“Professor Cromwell, everybody has been saying that you have gone crackie,” Professor Diller protested, “and it certainly does seem — ”

“Certainly, I've gone crackie,” Cromwell cried joyously. “I believe that there are whole universes concealed in every crack. Some time back you were calling me the Mad Moth, and it's true that I have an obsessive attraction-repulsion for light. I believe that if one gets out of rhythm with approved light then one will become invisible. Yea, I'm going to lead a bunch into a really rewarding disappearance.”

“How will you do it?” a girl asked.

“Gray magic,” Cromwell said. “I'm afraid of the black, and I'm too compromised a fellow to attain the white. We will answer the question, ‘Where are the Principalities and the Powers hidden?’ and we will steer clear of the shoals of them. We will answer the question, ‘Who are the rats and who is the Rat-catcher?’ And we will take a hand in their battle also.”

“Tom-Crom, get out of here!” Professor Diller snapped in total exasperation. “This is my assigned lecture room. It isn't yours. It is my job to knock knowledge into this particular bunch of nascent noggins. It isn't yours. Get out of here right now. There's the door.”

“Nah, I don't think so,” Cromwell laughed. “In the wrong room again, am I? Somehow I'd rather go out one of the unapproved doors, though.”

It isn't certain how Professor Cromwell left that room, and it isn't certain what he meant by an unapproved door. But, with a hazy sort of suddenness, he was gone. It was as if all the folks there had dust blown in their eyes for a moment. Professor Cromwell always had thrown a lot of dust in a lot of eyes.

“This is really the morning of the magicians, of the most amateur of them all, the Great Cromwell,” the pretty girl said as Professor Diller set himself to take over the class. “It would be fun to go with him, wherever he goes. Well, is he falling out of rhythm around here, Professor Diller? And will he become invisible?”

“Yes, he is. He's in trouble, and he probably won't be renewed. I like him, but he dances to the notes of a different flute.”

This referred to one of Cromwell's antics. He had an alto flute which he would blow with a happy puffing of cheeks and mugging of mug. And not a sound would come out of that flute, but an uneasy sensation would come across anyone nearby.

Professor Cromwell did finally stick his head into his own lecture room that morning.

“Carry on,” he told the Crom-bombs who were his regular students. He had known where they were all the time.

“Will we ever!” those students cried. “Is there anything we should get ready to take on the journey?”

“Nothing, nothing, only yourselves,” Cromwell said. “It's like an eye-dropper asking what it should take to an ocean. Where we are going there is always plenty of water. And plenty of salt. But be wary of the Principalities and the Powers! And try to learn which are the rats and which is the Rat-catcher.”

(But one of the Principalities was very near, in his own den or ward-room or office. He was the Dean of Special Studies of Hamelin College. He was John Michael Anwalt.)

II

“You live in scratches on the world,” he said.

“Be-hark the crooked horn and raise your head!”

They did what Garden Guards will always do.

They held a court whose name is Kangaroo.

 — The Original Horn Book

So they held a fully-toothed hearing on Professor Cromwell that night. It was held by the artificial, flickering, electric torches in the faculty lounge of the Special Studies School. The board of inquiry discussed matters in broad terms before the accused and his wife were brought in. The board was made up of Dean Anwalt, Professors Diller and Sanger (who both swore they liked Tom Cromwell), Professors Dorothy Mandel, Dolph Lustlife, and Rosemary Thumbsdown, and Under-professor Peter Quickshanks.

“We will be brief,” said Dean Anwalt, and his face was working as if he were churning small butter. “We are voting the non-renewal of the person Cromwell as professor of this college because of his wan-wittedness and mild insanity. We are voting the disbanding of his scheduling, classes, and positions; and the immediate removal of his person. His position will be obliterated, and his prerequisites and prerogatives will be impounded. His entailments will be divided among the seven of us. We can get away with that part of it, be assured. Has anyone any background statements or questions?”

“Yes,” said Professor Sanger. “Do we really hear only one note of frequency out of every thousand in our range? Do we really see only one frequency out of a thousand? Do we really taste only one taste out of a thousand? Do we smell only one smell out of a thousand?”

“Of course, we do,” said Professor Rosemary Thumbsdown in that soft voice of hers. (“She speaks soft as thumbsdown,” someone had said of her, “but she carries a sharp hatchet.”) “We cover the wide spectra in everything, but we pick out samples at approximately every thousandth interval. We do not live in the world itself. We live in shallow scratches, in a refined and judicious sampling of the world. I thought everybody in the top one-thousandth of one percent knew that.”

“Then Cromwell is right?” asked Professor Diller. “The cracks that we ignore are a thousand times as wide as the world that we inhabit? And the ghosts that are just off of the approved frequencies, they are real? Well, why wouldn't it be better to venture into those cracks and enjoy the real spaciousness of the world itself?”

“Because our nature tells us to be wary of that,” Dean Anwalt said. “Our fallen nature tells us that we don't want the wideness, that the narrowness is a superior thing. And our exult-in-its-fallenness nature tells us that the wide ways are the extreme danger: It tells us to ban or interdict them when we cannot imprison them.”

“For every one of us are there a thousand superior genii imprisoned in our sub-mental bottles and stored on the cobwebby shelves of our inattention?” asked Diller. “But, really those genii are free and easy in their spacious green meadows and space-multiplied, gold-flecked cities. Cromwell is right.”

“No, dolt, that rank Rat-catcher of a Cromwell is wrong,” Professor Dolph Lustlife contradicted. “They are not free and easy. We'll not permit it. We have them imprisoned in their thousand-fold prisons — well, not all of them, but we have a lot of them bottled and stoppered — and we'll not release them. Cromwell's wrongness is a sticky pitch that catches the weak-winged and weak-limbed ones. Has it caught you, little Killer Diller? Perhaps we can have your own entailment confiscated and divided among the remaining six of us. That's a penalty for your being wrong.”

The Prized Hemispheres were displayed on a nut-wood table there in the torch-lit lounge.

“Ah, maybe you will confiscate my entailment too,” Professor Sanger spoke in half anger. “Maybe you'll cancel me. I have been feeling a bit cancelled lately. It's as though an amnesia were snapping at my heels like a long-toothed fog.”

“Those are the unapproved notes, little Banger Sanger,” Professor Dorothy Mandel jibed. “Be careful. They'll eat the heels clear off you.”

“The amnesia is connected in part with Cromwell,” Sanger said. “How long has Professor Cromwell and his mild insanity been among us? I can't remember.”

“He arrived just this year, I think,” said Under-professor Peter Quickshanks.

“Just this month, I think,” said Professor Diller.

“Just this week, I think,” said Professor Dorothy Mandel, “but it's been long enough.”

“What does the record show, Dean Anwalt?” asked Professor Dolph Lustlife.

“The record is a little stubborn in Cromwell's case,” said Dean Anwalt, that baby-faced, aging man. “A dozen times I've looked in the record for the date of Cromwell's entry into our midst. I've had my finger and my eye right on that date a dozen times. But I've never been able to read it off.”

“Why not?” asked Professor Mandel.

“An inhibition, in the form of a mist, is always introduced. The mist gets in my eyes, and it puts me to sleep every time. It's a clever device, really too clever for Cromwell to have thought up by himself. I wonder about it.”

“We'll fix that fink!” Professor Lustlife bayed. “We'll fix his termination date for today or tomorrow, and we'll make it stick. Then let that Rat-catcher throw mist in our eyes!”

“Who are the Rat-catchers?” Professor Diller asked. “And who are the rats? Who are the Principalities and the Powers? Those are Cromwell's questions. This one is my own: Are we, all of us, b.y.o.b. — bring your own bottle — genii?”

“The more intelligent genii have always used the mental evasion that the inside of the bottle is the outside, and the outside is the inside,” Professor Rosemary Thumbsdown said in her soft voice. “They make themselves believe that they are on the outsides of the bottles and that they have the world caught inside. By believing it they make it to be so. And, really, there's not very much difference in the two sides of a piece of glass.”

The faces of the people in the first of the Hemispheres looked very familiar in the torchy light. Who were those people who had been imprisoned in there for so long? If those crowded and tormented people were only artifacts, why was it so shocking a thing to meet the eyes of one of them?

“The things we are talking about are mottles on the face of the world. There cannot be a prosaic and everyday world if we even have such thoughts. That would mean that the nature and essence and direction of the world are still up for grabs,” said Sanger.

“The face of the whole world has always been made up of just such mottles as these,” Professor Lustlife said. “But it is part of our job — we of the upper one-thousandth of one percent — to give a better seeming to the world's complexion. There have always been experts working on this. We construct and maintain the fiction that there is a rational world, that there is a consensus world, that there is a humdrum world — ah, the unapproved notes of that illicit musical instrument, the hum-drum, are no longer heard by conforming ears — that there is a work-a-day world. And we know there isn't, but the fiction has proved a useful one.”

“Bring in the accused,” said Dean John Anwalt. The doors were thrown open. But an underling entered first and handed Dean Anwalt a piece of writing. After this, Tom and Catherine Cromwell came in. Then the doors were closed and locked. The Cromwells were put in the dock (they had an antique dock-stall there, of fine, old, polished wood). The Kangaroo Plaque was unveiled on the wall to show what sort of hearing this would be: A kangaroo with a lot of kick.

“I have just received notice of disturbances,” Dean Anwalt said. “A group of young and not-so-young students, known as the Crom-bombs, has been knocking down walls and blowing off roofs. They are doing this by shock waves that are somehow in between audio frequencies. Are you responsible, Professor Cromwell?”

“Oh, I guess so, a little bit. I encourage these people to improvise. And some of the walls and roofs did seem a little bit confining.” And Professor Tom Cromwell began to blow soundlessly on his alto flute.

“This probably crowns a series of illicit acts,” Dean Anwalt said. “If there should be one more illicitness, that would be certainty. Please stay in the dock-stall, Mrs. Cromwell. It is securely locked, and there is no way you can get out of it, in any case. But you are out of it. Get back in it.”

“I can't. It's securely locked,” Catherine said. She was standing before the Prized Hemispheres and waving at some of the people inside the first of them.

“Stop blowing on that damned flute, Cromwell!” Anwalt ordered. “The sound of it, no, not the sound, the something of it is driving us all crazy.”

“Can you hear my flute?” Cromwell asked.

“No, of course we can't,” Anwalt said. “But whatever is coming out of it is driving us crazy. Stop it, I say! Who will deliver the jeremiad?”

“Let me!” shouted Professor Dolph Lustlife. “Oh, let me!”

“This man Cromwell is a trouble-stirrer, a sour note, a glutton at the trough, and he is a nobody from nowhere. Let us vote his extinction at once!”

“I say get that Rat-catcher of a Cromwell!” Under-professor Quickshanks swore angrily.

“We intend to, Peter,” said Lustlife. “There is something totally wrong about this man. We don't remember how it happened, or when it was that Cromwell came to our college. We barely begin to remember that each of us was assessed one-seventh of his pay to go to this Rat-catcher. Yes, he is the Rat-catcher. He blows the Rat-catcher flute. But his flute lies about the wide meadows it will take people to. They are all narrow meadows, in a bottle, in a hemisphere. Where did he go? He can't get out of the locked dock-stall. He can't get out of the locked room. But he's gone. Where?”

“I believe he has gone up the chimney,” Dean Anwalt guessed in a jerky voice. “His flute playing seems to be coming from up the chimney.”

“There isn't any chimney,” Lustlife said. “Oh, there he is back in the room again. Cromwell, please stay in one place 'til we are finished with you. And if you detect a sinister note in the phrase ‘finished with you,’ it is there.”

“Let me simplify this,” said Cromwell. “You want to be rid of myself and my wife. Well, we are ready to go. We are leaving this college this very night for wider and livelier places.”

“Do you not understand, Cromwell?” Dean Anwalt asked. “Certainly, we want to be rid of you. Certainly, we want you to leave. But we do not want you to leave here for some other place. We want you to leave every place forever. We will insist upon your extinction. Guard the four corners, Quickshanks, Lustlife, Thumbsdown, Mandel!”

“They are guarded,” said Lustlife (but it didn't seem to be a physical guarding of the four corners of the room). “We have him bottled up, no matter what he tries. Now, for the regularity and seemliness of the world, let us remove these Cromwell irregularities. It is not enough to extinguish irregular persons. The condition must be achieved that they have never been. And that the creatures writhing in bottles have never been.”

“Is it possible that extinctions and obliterations and such can go on so unquestioningly and unnoticed in our world?” Professor Diller asked. “Is it really so wooly a world we live in that it has to be saved from such? After all, Cromwell is no more than a clown.”

“This clown Cromwell can affect the whole world,” Dean Anwalt insisted, “and the world gets very nervous when it is disrupted. Every clown can affect the whole world at any time. That's the four-billion-headed hazard that the world always has to live with. Most of the clowns don't understand the way it really is with the world: The clown Cromwell understands certain parts of it dangerously well.”

“But there is no cause for his removal except incompetence, arrogance, obnoxicity, suborning the young, and cracking windows with his flute-playing,” Diller protested. “I like Tom-Crom. He is harmless, and his wife — ”

“And his wife is not harmless,” said Professor Dorothy Mandel. “Could we not terminate Catherine and keep Thomas?”

“Dorothy, your eyebrows are burned off and your nose is melted, and your head is cracked wide open!” Catherine Cromwell cried, but she seemed to be talking to somebody in the first Hemisphere rather than to Professor Dorothy Mandel where she sat in the room. And yet, that candid comment clipped Dorothy Mandel a staggering blow. “You sure do look funny, with your head-hair burned off, too,” Catherine said to the person in the Hemisphere.

“Are we sure that Cromwell's entailments can be divided among the seven of us?” Sanger asked.

“I am sure,” said Anwalt. “There won't have been any Cromwells when we have finished. There will be only the seven of us in the special department; and what is available will be available for the seven of us. And, to get rid of any wax-heartedness that may be lingering among us — ” Dean Anwalt finished the words with a rapid two-handed action. He opened two vials and let their fragrance reek into every corner of the flickering torch-lit room. (Anwalt had been professor of Instigational Chemistry.)

“Ah, I don't like Tom-Crom as well as I did,” Professor Diller said as he snuffled the rank aroma. “I say let's get rid of the spacious devil and his green meadows. We mustn't let the world be upset. We mustn't let ourselves be upset. Damn, where did he go this time? The doors are still locked. What is that stuff from the vials, Dean?”

“Essence of Hyena Scruff from one of the vials,” said Dean Anwalt with his baby-face working into a twisted passion. “And Fortified Distillation of Entrail Gore from the other. Evocative stuff, what? It does get one into the mood. Muzzle deep into that gore, everyone! We'll have Cromwell and all the blood in him. We'll split him seven ways, and then we'll arrange it that there never was a Cromwell. Ah, maintaining a conventional façade for the world isn't easy, but it's a big part of our job. Holy Hyenas! There is a shattering un-noise somewhere near, and it's worse even than Cromwell's flute. What is it? It's the final offence.” Anwalt had a very old sword-hilt in his hand, and there was a sort of rusty-airy outline still to be seen of a very old sword-blade.

The un-noise rose tall and rugged then, and it stuttered in and out of licit sounds. It was outside on the college brown-grass green, and it was inside in the lounge. It was a marrow-curdling siren, rising and leaping between infuriating sound and people-cracking unsound. It was a full-sweep, ascending siren, rumbling and screaming, and calling the unapproved notes and nations back into a narrow world.

“I'm glad the young ones thought of that,” said Professor Cromwell making a casual reappearance. “It illustrates my points even better than a buzz-saw.”

“Rat-fink Cromwell, where have you been?” Professor Diller snarled at Cromwell, and the hairs were high and excited on his scruff. “Gore of your bowels we'll have! How do you go and come?”

“Oh, out one crack and back by another,” Cromwell said. “It's the only way to travel.”

III

Is Peter Piper Peter Poper now

To change the rules and banished things allow?

Look out! The cracky thing has jumped a groove!

They blow that lawless horn, you'd better move.

 — The Original Horn Book

Then Cromwell began to blow on that pipe, that horn, that alto flute. It was a brain-bursting assault on every sense. It was the exponent of the siren in its howling power. It was soundless, but it was shattering.

“This is war!” cried John Michael Anwalt the dean. “Seize him! Kill him!” But Cromwell blinked on and off, he disappeared and reappeared. He walked into cracks in the air. And he walked out of other cracks from other directions. There was no weapon at hand that would touch him.

“It must not be known that Hamelin College is the seat of unearthly battles!” Anwalt cried as if he were ordering the elementals to desist. “Were we not given the duty of denying admittance to those places to everybody forever? Are we not the same persons who received those orders? Or is it true that every particle of a person is altered every nine thousand years, so we are now no longer the same persons? Oh that horn! That Rat-catcher horn! There has to be some way to stop the blasts of that horn!” But Cromwell was riding that horn in battle array.

“Oh, what horn is that?” Professor Dolph Lustlife cried in agony. “Can't somebody kill that horn!”

“I'll try!” Professor Dorothy Mandel shouted. “The horn and the siren and the crack-traveling people and even ourselves are all postulates and suppositions in my experimental psychology class. But I can't turn off the siren, I can't make the crack-travelers stay in their cracks, I can't kill the horn. Oh horn, you kill me!”

How Cromwell was blowing that horn-flute!

“The horn is a recurring myth-person in my analytical mythology class,” Professor Rosemary Thumbsdown keened. “But it kills me, too. It forgets that I'm the mistress of the class.”

“It's Josue's horn!” Professor Diller moaned, “and all the walls are going down.”

“It's the Rat-catcher's horn!” Professor Sanger railed. “But we paid the Rat-catcher. I know we did. We paid him one-seventh of our pay.”

“It's Roland's horn calling Great Carl and his wagon down from the sky,” Professor Dorothy Mandel groaned. “But Roland's horn is an archetype and we cannot see it nor hear it consciously. Oh my unconscious ears! Oh my unconscious head!”

“It's Gabriel's horn!” John Michael Anwalt shrieked. “But how has he become prince before me? If he is here, then this is the end of things.”

“It's Triton's horn,” Lustlife warned, “and it roils the deepest waters. If it wakes up some of those things, then we are dead.”

“It's Peter Piper's horn-pipe,” Under-professor Quickshanks jittered. “Are Gabriel and Duke Josue and Cromwell and Peter Piper all the same? Is Peter Piper Peter?”

“It's the Horn of Plenty,” said Catherine Cromwell simply. “Even smart people should be able to see that. Better raise the sky! Look at the stuff coming out of that horn!”

The unhorned people in the lounge couldn't see the stuff coming out of the horn (it was almost all in the unapproved frequencies), but Catherine Cromwell enumerated.

“Look at the boats and floats, at the steamboats, sailboats, electric boats, punt-boats, slave-boats with the whips and oars and haul-ropes. Oh, there is nothing so opulent as the banging of whips! Cabin cruisers and floating townhouses! How they all flow out of the plenty-horn, the cornucopia! And you all thought that it was just a cromie alto flute!”

The walls of all the buildings seemed ready to go down from the expansive and exponential vibrations of horn-flute and siren.

“It is not the cornucopia, not the Horn of Plenty,” Professor Rosemary Thumbsdown was calling in her soft voice against the silent noise. “It is the cornucalamitatis, the horn of calamity or trouble. It is the crooked horn that is broken off the crooked cow. All the riches that Catherine believes she sees coming from the horn are but the green cud-chewings and flowing manure from the crooked cow. These are false riches from the false box. The box or coffer or chest was called the ‘cow’ by our fathers. It is the unholy cow with the crooked or crumbled horn. Many have forgotten that the Maiden All Forlorn was named Pandora, and that the Box of Pandora was really a kerakibotion or horn-box.”

“Who is Cromwell?” asked Professor Diller as he wiped the blood from his eyes and nose and mouth and ears from the vibrations that made unusual assault on every sense.

“Automobiles coming out of the horn and climbing the airy hills!” Catherine was shouting in glee. “Old handcrafted automobiles from the High Middle Ages. The Almagest, The Argonaut, the Red-throat Racer, the Dragon, oh the beauty of these old cars! They run by alchemical transmutation and planetary congruence.”

“Oh, Cromwell is the crooked man,” Dean Anwalt said. “Be ready for the containment maneuver when it is time for it, wardens! ‘Crom’ means crooked in all the old tongues, so Cromwell is the well-crooked man. He blows the crooked horn, the cromie horn, the crumbled horn of child-scripture. He is the crooked man, and his journey into the infinite is no more than a crooked mile. He is not Gabriel. Still less is he Jack Horner. But he sports murderously with us and with the world. He may be the mysterious and fearsome person known in proto-legend as The Tin-horn Sport. There is much philological work to be done on this aspect of him.”

“Barbecued whole hippopotami, ton-tuns of wine, young whales shiskabobbed on slag-mountain spits, we will have a going-away-from-this-place feast, and then we will have a coming-home-to-home feast!” Catherine Cromwell regaled the air as Tom-Crom the Piper's Glom tootled those riches out of the curved-around hoot-flute.

And there was an elemental roaring that even transgressed on the narrow area of accepted sound itself.

“I'm very uncomfortable about the whole business of the cracks,” Under-professor Peter Quickshanks jabbered. “Why is there a childhood taboo against stepping on cracks? Oh, because it's always possible for a person to fall through a crack and be lost. When I was a boy, a young friend did fall through a crack in the pavement. We could hear him falling all day long. Then, at dark, he hit a ledge or something very far down, and he was killed. We could hear him crying down there all one night. And the crack was only a slight one. Not an open crack at all.”

A howling, flaming train, a locomotive and one hundred cars, erupted into the lounge where the night hearing was being held. It was the Crack-jack Express itself! It breached every wall of that lounge room and it was crowded with Crom-bomb young people, with demiurges, and with all the more intrepid people of Hamelin College and Hamelin Town.

“His family said he hadn't fallen down a crack at all.” Under-professor Peter Quickshanks was still jabbering. “They said he had died of diphtheria.”

Cromwell and other pipers were piping amplitudes of every sort into the cars of the Crack-jack Express, and it was ready to go on the most spacious journey yet.

“Wardens, be ready for the containment,” Dean Anwalt shouted. “We have our orders that nobody gets into the green meadows. Ah, we'll trap them in the bottle and put the cork in it all.”

“After all, a few of them get by every century or so.” Professor Lustlife gave the ritual disclaimer.

“Yes, and we get a reprimand for it every century or so.” Dean Anwalt gave the ritual reply. “All guards, be ready as myself am ready,” and he flourished his sword-hilt and its rusty outline of a blade.

“Oh, let's some of us go by boat,” Catherine Cromwell cried. There was a boat then, quickly filled with intrepid people, and there was a waterway for it to run on.

“River warden, river warden, who will be the river warden?” Dean Anwalt gave the call.

“I will,” Professor Diller offered in the most heroic moment of his life.

And they broke out of it, the Crom-bombs, the demiurges, the intrepid people, the crackies, they broke out of it in the train named the Crack-jack Express, in the boat named Return to Paradise, in Argosy and Almagest automobiles, and on their own fleet feet. They went through the wide cracks of the world, leaving the pinched residue behind them, and they arrived at the green meadows where everything is made from the extraordinary and spacious notes and substances.

No they didn't. They didn't arrive at any such place.

They arrived in the middle of the second Hemisphere, the multitude of brave people with their flamboyant vehicles and riches, and trains and automobiles and boats, they all arrived in the inside of that sphere that was no more than a meter in diameter. It was crowded in there for the several hundred of them. And seven black-hearted persons, Dean Anwalt, Professors Diller, Sanger, Mandel, Lustlife, Thumbsdown, and Under-professor Quickshanks, gathered around the second Hemisphere and looked in at the trapped adventurers and jeered at them. Essence of high-hackled hyenas, essence of bristling hatred and entrail gore, how they did jeer!

Genii have been trapped in bottles for as long a time as a hundred thousand years, and then been no closer to getting out.

“That's too long to wait,” said Tom Cromwell, and he blew that horn.

And other great hornpipers joined in the un-melody: Honker-Conker, Blow-Joe, Josue, Piper Tom and his son Triton (no, none of these were the same, they were all different fellows), Jack Horner, Pied Piper (windows were cracking all over the countryside from the horn-blowing), Gabriel, Roland (streets and houses were cracking from the sound and the anti-sound), Peter Piper, Tin-horn Sport (bottles in particular were cracking everywhere), Tom-Crom and his crumbled horn! Then they all joined together in the strenuous strains of the Rat-catcher Ramble. (People were cracking open from the blast.)

Seven people in particular cracked in their very gullets and entrails, and they tasted their own entrail blood of defeat. They were those learned people: Anwalt, Diller, Sanger, Mandel, Lustlife, Thumbsdown, Quickshanks. They looked at the crowded and cracked people in the first Hemisphere and they saw themselves. They looked into the second Hemisphere and they saw that all the intrepid people had broken their bottle-trap and gone over the hills to the meadows themselves.

The foregoing, having happened in the interstices of both time and space, did not leave any record in acceptable places. And yet it all did happen. There are seven persons and their families who know that it happened. These are seven persons who instruct in the Special Studies School of Hamelin College. They instruct all day, and they try to do it well, they have so much to make up for (they proved to be inept guards on one assignment).

But when the day is over, they do not go to their proper homes and families. Instead, they must shrink themselves and go into the narrow glass prison of the first Hemisphere, and they must stay there 'til morning light.

They do not have happy home lives.

Author's Commentary

The Doggone Highly Scientific Door

A group of children swarmed down toward the new door. The door swung open. The music was booming and jangling in the park inside, and the children crowded through the door in a happy gang. Elroy Hunt went to follow them through, and the door clanged shut in his face. He felt it, he pushed it, and it wouldn't open. There were no knobs or handles anywhere on that door and it was closed solidly. This was one of the new doors at Whizzer's Amusement Park. Hunt stepped back from the door a ways. He was slightly puzzled. How do you go about working a door that is supposed to work by itself? He sat on a bench that was there just about three steps from that door in the wall of the park.

Elroy Hunt liked to tell people that he had never grown up. He was a circus flack and a carnival buff, a comic-book collector and a puppet-show puncher, a citizen of the summertime and a lover of amusement parks. He liked kid amusements.

He liked to eat kid food: Coney Islands, Ding Dongs, Chocolate Cones, Karmelkorn, frozen custards, corn dogs, Goffel-Waffles, Onion Kings, Fickle Pickles, Cracker Jack, Funny Honey, cotton candy, Hoober-Goobers, Cup-Pups, Eskimo-Toes, popcorn. And he had a kid's stomach to match his taste. Save for a few sudden, violent and short-lived stomachaches, he thrived on the junk.

There was another cloud of kids bearing down on the big door of the amusement park, about twenty of them in this bunch. (“I'd better tell them that there's something wrong with the door,” Elroy said to himself. “No, I won't either, let them find it out for themselves.”)

But the door swung open for the kids (“Hey, it does work,” Elroy said. “It must have fixed itself. It must work on some kind of electric eye or scanner.”), and the kids exploded through to the inside of the park. And Elroy Hunt followed closely behind them, so closely that he got a bloody nose when the door slammed shut in his face. Elroy went and sat down on the bench again. “There is a double Dutchman in that woodpile,” he said.

With his love for such things, there had been no holding Elroy back when Whizzer's Amusement Park opened for the summer on May 24 of that year. It was a Friday, and the grade schools had just let out for the year. Elroy had built up eight hours of overtime that week so he took Friday off. Oh well, lots of young men get spring fever toward the end of May every year, and they create excuses to take time off. Some of them go to ball games. Some of them go fishing, or they go tearing around in their cars out in the country. Some of them go to Grogley's Bar. Some of them might even go to Whizzer's Amusement Park. There is no accounting for a young man's fancy in late May.

But Elroy Hunt wasn't exactly a young man. He was forty-nine years old. Yes, and he had been forty-nine years old that year before, and the year before that too.

Another bunch of kids (Elroy knew this bunch) were coming to the big door, just five of them in this bunch, and a little bull terrier. Elroy Hunt fell in immediately behind them. The door swung open, and the kids went through. But the door banged shut again in the faces of Elroy and the little dog. The dog howled out loud, and Elroy did so interiorly.

“You go on home, King!” one of the kids called to the dog from inside the park. “They won't let dogs inside the park this year. Or stay with Mr. Hunt if you want to.”

So the bull terrier named King decided to stay with Elroy Hunt and hook his fortunes to Elroy's. They had been acquaintances but not close friends. Now they looked at each other. They plotted a small plot together in a lightning meeting of minds. Both rushed at the door with absolute shouting-and-barking confidence that it would swing open for them if only they had faith. And both cracked themselves jarringly on the closed adamant door (it was really made out of wood and chrome and glass).

One little kid (hardly more than a toddler) approached the door, and it swung wide open. The little kid padded in, and Elroy and King (rushing for the momentary gap) hit the closing door so hard that they both bounced.

Frustrated, they both went over and sat on the bench that was only three long steps from the door. King licked his bruised foreshoulder. Elroy licked the heel of his hand that was bloodied and scraped.

A boy on a bicycle was coming at full speed (if the door didn't open for him it would be all-systems-smash), and the door opened and the boy was in. And the dog King (with the fastest four-footed takeoff in town) was right after that cycling kid. But the door (with the quickest swing-to of any door in town) whanged shut; and King was out (side and cold).

A man leading four ponies came to the door, and it opened with perfect courtesy, and the man and the ponies were in. And Elroy Hunt was still outside when the door closed on him with abrupt rudeness.

Elroy sat on the bench again; and King (coming back to dog-consciousness after a while) lay on the grass. They watched a delivery truck go in, they watched a dude and his doll go in, they watched some schoolgirls wearing schoolgirl uniform skirts go in, they watched some mean kids from Berryhill go in; they watched a school bus from district seven, full of children, go in. They watched two mothers with three-and-a-half children each go in, they watched a heavy truck with a load of watermelons and a Texas license plate go in, they watched the clown named Gumbo go in riding on the trick mule named Dumbo. Dumbo snickered at Elroy and King as he went in. He knew something that they didn't.

They tried it again. It still didn't work. The door would open for men and women and children and beasts, and trucks and buses and bicycles and watermelons. But it would not open for Elroy Hunt, and it would not open for the dog named King.

A cheerful man sauntered up.

“It's amazing, it's amazing,” he said. “The doors, I mean. Have you noticed the door?”

“Oh, man, have I ever noticed the door!” Elroy Hunt said.

“They are highly scientific, the doors that they have this year,” the man said. “They are highly selective. They will swing wide for all human people. That is their positive operation. They will open with a little insistence for almost anything else. That is their neutral operation. But there's another class of things (I never liked them, I'm glad that they barred them this year) that the doors reject completely. That is their negative operation. They are the newest and most scientific thing in doors. Get away from me, mutt!” The cheerful man said the latter words to King and not to Elroy Hunt.

“Do you have any idea how the doors work?” Elroy asked the man.

“Oh, yes,” the man said. “I understand it. They are highly scientific. They work by scientific electricity and by up-to-date automation.”

The cheerful man strode forcefully at the door, which opened just in the thin whisker of time for him. And Elroy and King — 

“Naw, let it go. It's no use,” said Elroy. He didn't try to follow.

“Grumpf,” said King. He didn't try to follow either. They didn't even try it. They were tired of rebuffs. And the door closed very slowly after the entrance of the cheerful man, as though daring them to make a rush for it.

King cocked his head at Elroy, and a bright idea passed between the two of them. There should be other door-gates into Whizzer's Amusement Park. There always had been. They went along Whizzer's Great Walls of China (they were made of pre-stressed adobe) that surrounded the park, and they came to the Marion Street entrance.

There were two dogs there, but no people to see their failure. Elroy and King tried it. The door wouldn't swing open for them: it wouldn't budge. They hammered on it with fists and they bit it with angry teeth. And it still wouldn't open.

There was happy shouting and chatter inside the park, and the loud squealing of the big wheels and rides. There were open-air hamburgers a-frying, and a wide-traveling garlic-and-mustard odor was shilling for them. There was the chanting and gabbing of barks and narks and marks. But they who had loved the parks couldn't get in.

Two little girls came running and the door opened for them. And closed again before Elroy Hunt and his doggy friends could get in. So they all went around to the New Haven Street entrance.

It was the same thing there. There were several bunches of farm kids going in there in pickup trucks. The door opened gladly for the farm kids and their trucks. It opened for all sorts of persons, young and old, and for about every kind of rolling and rambling thing there was. But it wouldn't open for Elroy Hunt. And it wouldn't open for the pariah dogs with him. Sometimes it seemed that there was no way that the door could let everybody else in and keep Elroy and his associates out without cutting someone in half. But it did it. People, that door was fast!

“I brought my students here just to study the highly scientific doors,” said a snooty schoolteacher lady in pince-nez. “They let all people in whoever they are. They let most other things in. And they keep still another class of things out. And they never make a mistake.”

“Ah, sometimes they may make a mistake,” Elroy said. Elroy saw now that the lady wasn't wearing real pince-nez, but carnival gimcrack things instead, and a false nose with them. She took them off to scratch her real nose, and it was seen that she wasn't really snooty in either sense. She seemed rather nice.

“No, the doors never make a mistake,” she said. “Highly scientific things never make mistakes. I really believe that the doors are smarter than most people.” Ah, she didn't really seem too nice after all.

“Yeah, they're smarter than one people I know,” Elroy admitted bitterly. With his doggy friends, Elroy then went to the Oswego Street entrance, to the Pittsburgh Street entrance, to the Quebec Street entrance. At each place the doors refused to open for them: or, if already opened, they sure did close in quick and firm fashion.

The whipped man Elroy and the whipped dogs (there were six dogs in the party now) went back to the door of first encounter. They were a low-spirited bunch. Then their spirits got a quick lift from a bunch of high-spirited kids bursting out of the door. Elroy knew these kids, and one of them was named Curtis and was the owner of the dog King.

“Hey, King, I won you a dog bowl,” the boy Curtis shrilled. “I won it throwing lopsided baseballs at wooden milk bottles. I sure am good at hitting those bottles.” He gave the fine bowl to King. The bowl had KING written on it in red letters, and King's day was made, in spite of the humiliation of being excluded from the amusement park. And the boy Curtis had two other bowls that he had won. (This boy Curtis was the best grade-school pitcher in the city, and somebody at the ball throw booth was negligent in letting him take so many throws.)

“I sure can hit with those lopsided baseballs,” Curtis said. “You throw a sidearm spitball with the lop-side (that's the heavy side) forward, and the weight wobbles but it stays forward. And it sure whams those wooden milk bottles. Hey there, aren't you the Whitneys' dog, Whitey? I got a Whitey bowl here.” Curtis gave the bowl to the dog Whitey, and everyone was pleased by the aptness of the act.

“Hey, there's Stubblefield's dog, Spot!” one of other the boys cried his recognition. “Hey, Curt, that white-headed kid won the Spot bowl. Hey, there he is now. See if you can trade him.”

“Hey, white-headed kid.” Curtis yelled, and he went and traded a Fritz bowl for a Spot bowl. He gave the bowl to the dog Spot.

“What other dogs?” he asked then, and he surveyed the bunch. “There's Pepper and Fat Pat and Donnicker. I'll go try to win bowls for them. I sure am good with those lopsided baseballs.”

The kids were back into the park through that free-swinging door; and Elroy Hunt, rushing giddily at the opening, was slapped silly by the nick-of-time closing of that door. That really finished Elroy.

In a hopeless mood, he rejoined the dogs. Three of them were happy with their bowls, and three of them were hopeful. But Elroy Hunt himself was frustrated and bitter. The old complaint “It shouldn't happen to a dog” seemed to take special and sinister significance in his mind.

“Ah, there's another old regular,” a man coming out of the park said to Elroy. “I believe that you and I both make opening date at the amusement park every year. Have you been in yet?”

“No, I — I probably will go in after a while,” Elroy said. “I was just sitting here on the bench watching the people, and the dogs.”

“It's too bad the dogs aren't allowed in the park this year,” the man said. “But there's a new state law that bars dogs from amusement parks. Say, have you noticed the jazzy doors they have this year? Very scientific.”

“Ah, yes, I have noticed the doors,” Elroy said. That other elder lover of amusement parks went away then, and Elroy Hunt sat and wondered what was behind it all.

After a while the boy Curtis came out again with his friends and with two more dog bowls, a Pepper bowl and a Pat bowl.

“I knocked the bottles down for the Pepper bowl,” Curtis said, “and I whipped a little kid and took the Pat bowl away from him. They didn't have a Fat Pat bowl. A plain Pat bowl will have to do, Fat Pat.”

Curtis gave the two bowls to the two dogs, Pepper and Fat Pat.

“Hey, there's Hearn's dog, Donnicker,” Curtis said then. “And they do have a Donnicker bowl. I didn't think they'd have one with a dumb name like that, but they do. It wasn't out on prize row yet, but they'll put it out with the next bunch. Then I'll win it and bring it to you, Donnicker.”

And Curtis and his friends went back inside. Five of the dogs admired their pretty white and empty bowls.

“Well doggone, guys, I'll treat,” Elroy said suddenly. He went across the street to the Whistle Stop grocery store. He bought a mastiff-size box of Wigby's Dog Chunks for a dollar and nineteen cents, tax included. He brought it back across the street and filled five dog bowls with it, and it wasn't even a quarter empty. There was a park department faucet there, and he added water to the chunks, and the dogs went about the happy business of eating them.

“Don't worry, Donnicker,” Elroy said. “There's plenty left. And Curtis will win you a Donnicker bowl and bring it out pretty soon. Then you can have your feast.”

Bascomb Whizzer himself, the owner of the park, came out and sat with Elroy Hunt on the bench.

“Ah, it looks like a good season,” Whizzer said. “Everything is greatly improved, and our theme for this year is ‘Science of Today.’ How do you like the park this year?”

“I haven't been in yet,” Elroy confessed. “I may just possibly go in later.”

“I thought you always came early and stayed late,” Whizzer said. “And the doors, the highly scientific doors, how do you like them?”

“I think they're a fraud,” Elroy Hunt said.

“No. That's impossible,” Whizzer said. “They are absolutely scientific in their selection. They let in all people of every sort. They let in most other things. And they keep out all dogs. That's because of the new state law that we can't have dogs in an amusement park. And the doors can't be fooled, and they can't make a mistake.”

“Everything can make mistakes,” Elroy maintained. “And if one door should make a mistake, suffer a malfunction of its mechanism, then all the doors would suffer the same malfunction, since, I presume, you have them all wired together in some manner.”

“Absolutely not,” Whizzer said. “The doors work independently of each other. A fault in one door, if it should happen once in a billion times maybe, would not have any effect on the working of the other doors at all. What one door says is right is right. And what all seven doors say is right has got to be right. There is just no way to argue with science when it is right. There isn't a human in the world who can't go through those doors. There isn't a dog in the world who can.” And Whizzer himself went back inside his park with that cocksure walk of his. The door closed very slowly after him, and Elroy — 

“I swear that damned door giggled at me!” he said furiously. And he was thoroughly miserable.

Curtis and the other boys came out again after a while, and Curtis had two dog bowls with him.

“Here's yours, Donnicker,” he called, and Donnicker accepted it with glad yelps. And Elroy Hunt filled it with Wigby's Dog Chunks and water. And Donnicker began to eat with the special joy that only Wigby's can bestow.

“The other bowl has Elroy on it,” Curtis said. “It's the only other one they would let me throw for. They said that I had to quit after that, that I had to be a ringer. Does anyone know a dog named Elroy?”

“No,” said Mr. Hunt. “But my own name happens to be Elroy.”

They whooped and laughed on that one.

“You, Mr. Hunt?” Curtis guffawed. “Well, do you want it?”

“Sure, why not?”

Curtis gave him the bowl. Then Curtis and his friends went on home, followed by most of the dogs with their bowls.

“That Mr. Hunt sure is a nice fellow,” Curtis said as they went away. “He treated all the dogs to Wigby's Chunks, and he took the Elroy bowl for a joke.”

The dog Donnicker was still eating his chunks, and one other dog (a good judge of character and circumstance) waited slyly with his empty bowl. Elroy gave him some more chunks. Then he filled Donnicker's bowl again.

“They look good,” Elroy Hunt said. “They sure do.” He filled his own Elroy bowl with Wigby's Chunks and water. He didn't have any spoon or fork to eat them with, and his face wasn't built as well as the dogs' for eating directly out of the bowl. Nevertheless, he began to eat the chunks. And they were good.

Elroy calculated in his head: A mastiff-size box for a dollar and nineteen cents. And look how many servings could be got out of it! It would do me for more than a week, probably a week and a half. I could eat for less than a dollar a week. That's something to think about. And they're good.

His face wasn't shaped right for eating out of a bowl, but it would become easier in time. And he could always use a spoon or a fork when he ate the chunks at home. But he probably wouldn't.

“This is all right, this is all right,” he said. “I guess I'll just eat them out of the bowl forever.” And he continued to eat the tasty dog chunks.

Oh Tell Me Will It Freeze Tonight

Of vicious bird, and tree unkind,

And swallowed storms and matters murky,

However find the truth behind?

You find it out by talking turkey.

 — Winding Stair Woomagoos

“We are now in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle of weather phenomena,” Hector Voiles said with that breeze-a-blowing voice of his. “This is the area where storms and inversions and highs disappear and are never seen again.”

“There is one characteristic of triangles in this area,” said Lloyd Rightfoot. “They are unstable. The triangle will collapse right along here, within a mile either way. And the three elements of the triangle will become four.”

“Oh, is the fourth man following us?” Andrew Widepicture asked. “I hadn't felt his presence today. I do now. He isn't following us though. He's up ahead.”

Really there wasn't anything preternatural about the game warden Will Hightrack joining any group of hunters coming up from the Jack's Fork into the foothills. And groups of hunters are almost always groups of three. This group was made up of Hector Voiles, a weatherman, Lloyd Rightfoot, a naturalist, and Andrew Widepicture, a cosmologist. They all liked to foot-scuff around in the Winding Stair Mountains, and they often carried firearms as an excuse.

“I hadn't paid too much attention to the Bermuda Triangle aspects myself,” Hector said. “I was too close to the clouds to see the weather. But I've reported an awful lot of the disappearances without seeing the connection, and other weathermen have made the connections. The weather is always stormier and more sudden on the other side of the fence, you know? And the weathermen have their own other-side-of-the-fence publication, Cloud Nine D, and it handles weather wrinkles from all around, all the odd facts that don't fit in. Some of the stuff is pretty cirrous. Several of the men want me to do a piece on the Bermuda Triangle aspect of this corner of the Winding Stair Mountains.”

The Winding Stair Mountains are pleasantly junky little hills, very pretty, but small-scale and in no way unique.

“Be a little more clear, Hector,” Lloyd Rightfoot said. “What are you trying to imply with your talk of ‘Bermuda Triangle’ weather phenomenon here?”

“Oh, gathering storms do disappear here. They disappear as if something gobbled them right up, or as if they were sucked into big holes in the air or in the mountain. There can be a pretty active tumbling storm moving right along and spreading and gaining strength. And then (such a thing shouldn't happen, of course) that storm will cease to spread. It will narrow, rather. It will narrow further, and it will grow in intensity. Then it will become quite concentrated and powerful so that it seems certain to break into thunderburst or cyclone. And then, at its most intense and threatening, it will absolutely disappear; and there will not be a trace or a track of it left.”

“Where and when do these things happen?” Andrew Widepicture asked. He was skeptical but interested. Cosmologists are interested in almost everything.

“They happen right around here,” Hector told them, “always within a radius of one or two miles of here. And it happens about once a year, right about now, mostly in the month of March, but sometimes in April. Not every year, but almost every year. Really, storms and incipient storms do disappear here without a trace, and their disappearances violate the law of conservation of meteorological energy.”

“That I'll not believe,” Lloyd Rightfoot said. “When anything is reported as disappearing without a trace, then the report is false. Have you been putting out false reports, Hector? Or is it that you cannot recognize traces? Nothing disappears. But some things transmute so strangely that they seem to have disappeared. Don't your active and tumbling storms transmute into something else when they are gobbled up, Hector?”

“Yes, they do. They transmute into cold, into very sudden and quite severe cold. This cold is always narrowly localized, of course. And for that matter, so are the storms.”

“Like the quick-freeze spell we ran into last year, Hector?” Andrew Widepicture asked. “That was just about this time of year.”

“It was about a week later,” Hector said, “the latest freeze I remember here. I won't say that it was the latest freeze ever recorded here, because it wasn't recorded. I was talked out of recording it. It was so improbable that the temperature in this small area should be forty degrees lower than that of nearby areas that it just wasn't a thing that should have been recorded. And the report would have been tainted by the fact that only myself and two anacronies (yourselves) encountered it. There would be people who said that we had drunk off too many cans of Old Frosty during our day's hunt.”

“How have other weathermen come onto the storm-disappearances?” Rightfoot asked.

“Oh, it's been happening for several generations, all the generations that records go back here. And it's almost always observed by several fellows. And weathermen are natural browsers of old records, besides having long noses and long ears and long instruments.”

“Your swallowed storms don't seem to blow me down,” Rightfoot said. “What I would like to find out is about a most peculiar tree in this region. It's a consistent legend, and a consistent legend has to have a pragmatic kernel to it. They say that this tree produces — No, they say that it almost produces a bloody-awful-red fruit. But, happily, something always kills that fruit. The tree, I have heard the bark-brained say, is of no known species. Oh wood lice plague them all! A tree has to be of a known species, or we will name it and make it known. I want to get a look at that tree with the flesh-red fruit that never develops.”

“What I would like to find about is a most peculiar cock-crow in this region,” Andrew Widepicture said. “It also is a consistent legend, so I cannot throw it away completely. But a cattle-killing crow takes a lot of believing.”

“Crows have killed small calves,” Rightfoot the naturalist said, “but these are mostly misborn calves that are dying anyhow. Crows have been known to eat the eyes and even the tongues of such calves.”

“According to the bird-brained, this most peculiar crow carries full-grown cattle off in its claws and beak,” Widepicture said, “and it will eat a grown bull at a single roosting.”

“Holy crow!” Hector Voiles cried. “Your legends have gobbled up my legend.”

“What are you fellows hunting?” the game warden Will Hightrack demanded as he appeared in their rocky path and collapsed their triangle by becoming the fourth man. “You cannot in good conscience be out gunning at all. There is nothing at all in season right now.”

“Storm-Cock is in season, Hightrack,” Widepicture said. “Storm-Cock has a very short season, less than a month, and it hasn't been hunted near enough. Storm-Cock and Freeze-Bird! You show us a regulation that we can't hunt them.”

“Ah, I may be hunting some long-tongued town-trotters this very day,” said game warden Hightrack. “But it's said about the birds that you mention that they never saw the inside of an egg.”

“Holy crow is in season,” Widepicture said, “but the holy crow season is appointed backwards. It's that crow that does the hunting.”

It was a nice sunny day there. Sometimes the breeze showed a slight edge to it, but the hills and the trees and the brush exuded warmth, as did the air between the breezes.

“If town gentlemen could shoot, I wouldn't object to one of them shooting a very big wild tom turkey,” game warden Hightrack said. “But I'd object to any of them getting a closer shot than the present eighty yards. I'd object to more than one of them shooting. And I'd object to myself pointing the shot out to any of those gentlemen. But town gentlemen cannot see and they cannot shoot, so that feast will not come to the board.”

“I can see. I can shoot,” Andrew Widepicture said. He raised his rifle towards a blurred bit of mountain brush in the middle distance. He held his point for a measured five seconds. Then he squeezed off his shot.

“Good,” said Hightrack. “That will make a good meal for the six of us.”

“You say ‘for the six of us,’ Will Hightrack,” Widepicture remarked then. “Will the dead turkey arrange for its own transportation? Yes, I see that it will.”

A bit later, two men brought the shot turkey. These men were James South-Forty and Thomas Wrong-Rain. They were scrub-cattle ranchers and rock-acre farmers of the region. They were large, burly, brown men. They were Jack's Fork Choctaw Indian men.

Yeah, it would take about an hour and a half to get that turkey ready. There aren't any experts at cooking a turkey or anything else in the open. Not white men, not Indians, not hunters, not wranglers, none of them are any good at it. There's a lot of large-mouth fakery about such cooking. Half the meat would be ruined, and half of it would be only half bad when finally prepared; but it was a big turkey, and the not-bad half would feed six men.

It was pleasant noon or early afternoon. There was new moss grass there on the slopes, and old buffalo grass. There were rotten boles of hackberry and there were joints of cedar wood that didn't care whether they were burned or not. There was last season brush, and it all made a strong and smoky fire. If smoke would roast a turkey, that big tom would be roasted quickly. But it would be a while yet.

So they talked turkey while the turkey cooked unevenly in pits and in rock ovens and on spits, and half of it would be ruined. “Turkey talk” doesn't mean exactly what is supposed of it. It isn't plain talk. Sometimes that gobble-gabble gets fancy.

“It occurs to me that the three gentlemen don't know very much about what they have been talking about,” Thomas Wrong-Rain said. “It occurs to me that even the weatherman gentleman doesn't know why we have to have another freeze this year.”

“No, we will not have another freeze this season,” weatherman Hector Voiles said. “The rattlesnakes have been coming out of their holes for a week. The swallows and swifts and cardinals have all arrived. The oak leaves are as big as squirrels' ears, so it is time to plant corn. We had a light freeze on the first day of spring, and it will have been the last one. We have had later freezes, two I believe, but all the signs say that we will not have another freeze this season.”

“Then all the signs are mush-mouthed frauds,” Thomas Wrong-Rain maintained. “I did not say that we would have another freeze: say it that way and maybe we won't. I said that we have to have another freeze. The alternative to that is pretty shaggy. If it comes right down to the raw end and we haven't had that freeze, then we will have to make it freeze!”

“What will you do, Wrong-Rain, have a rain dance or a frost dance to make it freeze?” Will Hightrack the game warden jeered.

“No, no, no!” Wrong-Rain rejected that. “You're talking about Cherokees or some of the other brain-damaged Indians. Rain dances and frost dances are kid stuff. We will just get wrought up and make it freeze. I think it's down to the raw end already. I don't think the last freeze killed it. The tree's getting smarter. I have heard that the tree was already in bloom. If the last frost didn't kill it, then we will have to have another frost. It will be pretty direful if that tree is allowed to fruit.”

“Wrong-Rain, I don't believe that even you can pull off a direful tale today,” Widepicture joshed, “not with the sun shining in the little Winding Stair Mountains, and a mockingbird mocking. And that edge on the breeze, it isn't much of an edge.”

“Yeah, the sun does spoil it,” Wrong-Rain admitted. “Never mind, the sun will cloud for the story if the story's true. Well, the tree is less than a hundred feet from here. All of you have seen this tree: I have shown it to all of you. But after persons have seen this tree, sometimes a breeze will blow. Then a fine red powder or bloom-dust will drift down on the people. This makes them forget all about the tree. Normally it's good that the people should forget. This saves them from worry and stomach-rot and irregularity and anxiety. But some of us have to remember about the tree. If it ever comes to full fruit, it will send a shadow like a blight over the whole land. This shadow will kill cattle, and it will kill people.”

Andrew Widepicture laughed. Then his laugh crumbled a bit at its leading edge. The sun clouded, and it had clouded phenomenally fast. That meant that Wrong-Rain's story was true, except that he really wasn't telling a story. The mockingbird had left off its melody and was squalling and mewing fearfully like a catbird. And the edge of the breeze had reasserted itself.

“How does the fruit, or the shadow of the fruit, kill people?” Widepicture asked. “By disease? By disaster? By ill luck?”

“I don't know,” Wrong-Rain admitted. “It hasn't done it for two hundred years. But that's just because the tree has had its fruit frost-killed every year. I tell you, though, that the tree's getting smarter. It's got the weather tricked this year, unless we use tricks of our own. And our own tricks are about worn out.”

“And that's the end of your story?” Rightfoot asked.

“Yes. I wish it were the end of the tree and its fruit, too. That's the end of my story. The sun can come out again.”

The sun came out again. And everything was again casual and unimpressive in the Winding Stair Mountains. The Winding Stairs were toy mountains. They were much less impressive even than the Potato Hills in an adjoining region. There was not any way that they could be taken seriously for long. There was no way that they could maintain a sinister aspect for more than brief minutes. These mountains were too light-minded. They were too little. So thought they all of them.

“Hey, you know why the Winding Stair Mountains are so little?” James South-Forty asked them, coming in on their thoughts rather than on any words of theirs, in the way that the Jack's Fork Choctaws have. “They're so little because they're the biggest mountains that the bird could carry here, and here is where he wanted them. Even a big bird has his load limit.”

“Are we now in consideration of the second plague of the Winding Stair Mountains?” Andrew Widepicture asked with an asymmetric grin.

“I think so,” said James South-Forty. “Sometimes you lose me with that T-Town talk. Yeah, I'm talking about the Storm-Cock, the big bird. I don't know much about that tree that Tom Wrong-Rain talks about. I don't know how a shadow of a tree can kill cattle or people, but I know how Storm-Cock kills them. He eats them alive and he eats them dead. That's how he kills them. He's one big bird.”

“How big is he, South-Forty?” Hector Voiles asked. James South-Forty extended his arms. South-Forty was about six feet four inches tall, and from extended fingertip to fingertip he was about the same.

“About that big,” he said.

“We might as well go look at the tree while South-Forty talks,” Wrong-Rain said listlessly, and then they were already beside that tree. It was no more than a hundred feet from the turkey fire. A little breeze blew as they first stood by the tree, and a little bit of bloom-dust drifted down on them so that they were unable to notice much about the tree. It unhinged their limbs and their minds, it gave them stomach-rot-and-apprehensions, it set them to shaking in every joint and tendon, but they didn't really notice much about it. The fruit was huge and horrible and livid red. It had a rank murder-smell to it, and it would kill you. That fruit had been frosted, and it had rotted. But it wasn't certain that it was quite dead. A small breeze blew again, and who notices details about a tree when there is that sort of bloom-dust in the air?

“South-Forty, you indicated that Storm-Cock was between six feet and six-and-a-half feet big,” Hector taunted. “Well, that's big for a bird, but it's not big enough for a bird that can carry off full-grown cattle. How many cattle can he carry off at a time, South-Forty?”

“Three,” said James South-Forty. “One in his beak, and one in each claw. And sometimes he carries another one in — aw naw, I'd better not tell that. It'd be a lie.”

“Ah, but look, James,” Widepicture reasoned. “The bird wouldn't be big enough to do it. A bird couldn't carry three or four head of grown cattle even if it had a six-and-a-half foot wingspan.”

“Wingspan!” South-Forty gasped. “Who said wingspan? I showed you how big Storm-Cock was between the eyes. That's the way you always measure a storm-cock, between the eyes.”

They all laughed then. “Seems like I whomped you all between the eyes with that joke,” South-Forty gloated. “You walked right into that one.”

Another small breeze blew, and a critical amount of bloom-dust drifted down from the tree onto the six men. It was a sufficient quantity of dust so that none of them would remember seeing a tree with livid red undead fruit with a rank murder-smell. They wouldn't remember that tree at all, except Wrong-Rain.

They went to eat the turkey meat. Some of the pieces were burnt on the outside and raw-red on the inside. Some of them were burnt all the way through. And a few of the chunks were pretty good.

“When are you going to give me some good weather tips again, Wrong-Rain?” Hector Voiles asked as they chewed the stringy meat. “I have consistently been the worst weatherman in town for quite a while. They're going to give me the boot if I don't come up with something sharp.”

“You'll be like that weatherman who had to move to California because the weather here didn't agree with him,” Lloyd Rightfoot said.

“Maybe I'll phone you tonight,” Wrong-Rain said. “I may give you a tip on the weather that no one else would ever guess. Will you use it if I give you a real slanted tip?”

“Yes, I will,” Hector promised. “I'll use it, whatever you give me.” They ate the rest of the turkey, except for a few pieces which were an extreme case.

“Do you know what's the spookiest phrase that can be spoken?” Wrong-Rain asked them suddenly. “It's ‘The Bird in the Tree’, that's the spookiest of all. Think about it.” But they couldn't think whether he meant the bird they had just eaten or some other bird. They shot three or four rabbits for the hunting pouch. Then Voiles and Rightfoot and Widepicture scuffled down the little mountain and to their car.

They left the livid and hating tree behind them; but they couldn't give a name to the menace because its bloom-dust had destroyed their memory of it.

They got in the car and drove back to T-Town.

II

Oh wayward storms, destroyed, demurred!

Oh tree to gobble and defeat them!

All caution lest the murder-bird

Should bite folks clear in two and eat them!

 — Winding Stair Woomagoos

Thomas Wrong-Rain phoned Hector Voiles at his studio at nine o'clock that night. “A hard freeze tonight in the Winding Stairs, Mr. Voiles,” Wrong-Rain said. “We have to have that. The fruit is alive. It would break out before dawn tomorrow. Remember that ‘The Bird in the Tree’ is the spookiest phrase of them all. It has got to freeze hard tonight. Have you any storms that we could use to fuel the freeze?”

“A warm spell is blowing in, Wrong-Rain. It's strong and twisty, and it's probably dangerous. It could be a real nine-county thunderburst, or it could spin into half-a-dozen cyclones. It would be a pretty strong storm to swallow, even in the Bermuda Triangle.”

“It should be strong enough to make a heavy freeze. Remember the bird that never saw the inside of an egg! That fruit has got to be killed! Announce that it will freeze, and that will put the pressure on for it.”

“Wrong-Rain, this storm is a strong-warm. It's seventy-two degrees here now, and it's nine o'clock at night. Fun's fun, but you can't make a freeze out of this one, and it's too big to swallow. How do you make the changes, anyhow? Or are you the one?”

“I'm one of the ones. When the menace appears, and we just got to have a hard freeze for the safety of the region, then I'm one of those who goes for it. I bust my mind for it, as did my father Joe Wrong-Rain before me. Dammit, Voiles, this is The Bird in the Tree! Help us to kill it. We need help. But my friends and I do have the support of a strong person named I'lustophushmasapulphattalokarchikkapokartahapatishomobilmingo.”

“With five t's? Got it. All right, Wrong-Rain, I'll do it. I'll put my neck in the frosty noose. I'll give them a weather report tonight that'll rupture the station. That's my own neck I feel them chopping off, but it all might be fun.”

“Watch that fun stuff, Mr. Voiles,” Thomas Wrong-Rain begged.

“No derision, please. Derision will imperil the whole business.”

“Well, all right,” Voiles agreed dubiously, “but you're asking a lot there. I break up sometimes.”

There were already tornado alerts out for Pushmataha, Latuner, Le Flore, and Haskell Counties. So Hector Voiles put out his own alert, to the other weathermen of the country, especially to those of the Cloud Nine D interest. Voiles told them flatly that there would be a storm disappearance in the Little Bermuda Triangle of Oklahoma tonight. He told them that history would be unmade before their very eyes on their very charts if only they paid attention. And he said that the disappearance of the storm would be marked, not by an oil slick, but by an incredible freeze.

Then he went and got half a snoot-full before he broadcast his nightly weather at ten o'clock. He gave the routine reports. He gave the information that four counties were under tornado alerts. Then he grinned a lowering grin and began a brisk gust in that breeze-a-blowing voice of his.

“Forget the tornado alerts,” Hector told his airy audience. “There won't be any tornados tonight. That skirmish line of storms, it will be funneled and narrowed into a single disturbance, a concentrated storm. And this storm will disappear completely when it is in its most powerful and most concentrated stage. It will disappear in the Little Bermuda Triangle and it will never be seen again. It will disappear in the Winding Stair Mountains at the border of Latimer and Le Flore Counties. It will disappear in storm-wreck and annihilation.

“Listen, people, there is a Bird in a Tree. This is a crucial bird, and it never saw the inside of an egg. This bird must be killed even before it comes to sustaining life. Otherwise, it will fly around the region, with its black shadow under it, and it will destroy land and kill cattle and people.

“There is only one thing that can destroy the Storm-Cock, the Bird in the Tree. A hard freeze can kill it, after the bird has begun to bloom but just before it has attained mobile life. It must happen right now, before morning, or the Tree-Bird will rive open the tree and go out and destroy the land and its crops and its cattle and its people.

“Now hear my predictions, on which I am staking my reputation and perhaps my life. There will not be thunderstorms or tornadoes or cyclones. The skirmish line of storms has already narrowed into a single storm front. This storm front will disappear completely within the next fifteen minutes. It will disappear into a hole in a mountain, or into a hole in the air. And the kickback of the disappearing storm will be the cold. This will be hard-freezing cold, extreme cold over the area of the four counties that have been under the alert.

“I predict that the storm will disappear completely within the next fifteen minutes; I predict that the disappearance will be followed by a quick fifty-degree drop in temperature in that same region; I predict the consequent very hard and killing freeze; and I predict that the big bird in the tree will be freeze-killed in the bloom tonight, and that it will not ravage the country and destroy the kin and the people tomorrow. These are the things that I predict, and I will stake my reputation and my life on my predictions. Who else makes such bold predictions?”

It would have been bad even if Hector had left it at that. He didn't. He broke up. He began to laugh, to yowl, to chortle. He went into cascades of clattering and rotten laughter. The monitors cut him off, but he continued to laugh like a bloated buffalo.

And that is when the warm moist Gulf air hit the updraft. Turgot Cantowine busted in, and Cantowine was a mighty man at the studio.

“The only thing that can possibly save you, Voiles, is for your predictions to come true!” this Turgot swore angrily. “Man, they'd better come true! Will they?”

“I don't know,” Hector Voiles giggled. “They would have come true, I think, if I hadn't broken up. There's something down there that can't stand derision.”

“There's something right here that can't stand it either,” Cantowine barked. “You're deriding the wrong people when you start to deride people. The phones are jumping clear out of their cradles. People are storming the studio doors within seconds of your being cut off. Let's see you make that storm disappear. Man, do you realize what you've done! You've made light of the last still-standing institution. If the weather isn't sacred, what is?”

“I don't know,” Hector giggled.

The storm didn't disappear. The thunderbursts plowed the whole northeast corner of the state with lightning outage and flash floods and wind damage. There were six deadly tornados spawned out of the thing, and more than two dozen howling gales. The tornados killed people in the towns of Poteau and Spiro, and in the country around Jack's Fork and the Winding Stairs. That storm sure wasn't one that disappeared and was never heard from again: you'd be hearing about that storm as long as the last survivor or the last victim was still alive.

Hector Voiles followed all the reports. The studio was full of reports of the rising numbers of the dead, but Hector didn't care much about that. He had trouble getting temperature reports from the afflicted area; people seemed too busy to notice the temperature. It was eight in the morning before he was able to get a temperature reading from near the area. The temperature was sixty-nine degrees. There hadn't been a freeze.

Thomas Wrong-Rain phoned Hector Voiles about eight-thirty that morning after.

“Mr. Voiles, the worst that could happen has happened,” he announced. “We just weren't able to make it freeze and we busted our brains for it. I think somebody laughed at the wrong time.”

“Was there tornado damage in your immediate neighborhood?” Hector asked.

“Oh, some. My house and barns blew away, and my wife got killed; but that's not what I meant by the worst that could happen. Didn't you hear me, Voiles? It didn't freeze.”

“No. I know that it didn't.”

“So the last chance to kill the murderous fruit, the bird in the tree, has gone by. We just couldn't change the storm into a freeze. So that bird broke out. It split that tree with a thunder twice as loud as the storm itself. It came out of that riven tree then, and it came out of it, and it kept on coming out of it. It was as big as a herd of elephants when it came out. Then it went on a rampage.

“It ate a few cattle, but mostly it went after people. It comes on people in groups of three, and it takes and kills one of them. It's very ritual. I was over at James South-Forty's house after my own house had blown away. John Short-Summer was with us. The bird came, and we knew that it wanted just one of us. It isn't a loud bird, but it makes itself understood. We drew low-card-go to see which one of us it would be, and James South-Forty drew low card; the bird killed him and carried him off. And it's been to lots of other places and killed lots of other people. It kills people who gaped at it when it was trapped in the bloom or in the fruit. It kills people who laughed at it or made light of it. It'll probably come and kill one of you.”

“I don't think it could find us,” Hector said. (All the breeze was gone out of his voice now.)

“Yeah, he can find you,” Thomas Wrong-Rain said.

Hector phoned Lloyd Rightfoot and Andrew Widepicture to join him at his office at the studio. Both had been out among the elements all night, and both said that they would be right over.

“As a naturalist, my most rewarding studies are of nature at her most violent,” Rightfoot said as he came in. “Hector, she was violent last night, violent for hour after hour! Somebody cut the nets and let all the thunder-fish out. The floods are the worst thing right now. Oh, was there ever a storm that exploded like that one! I once knew a horse that would stampede like that whenever someone would try to throw a bridle rope over his nose.”

“Someone did try to throw a bridle rope over that storm's nose last night,” Hector mumbled. “It's so easy to insult an element if you're not careful. They don't like to be laughed at.”

“No, nothing in nature likes to be laughed at,” Rightfoot said.

“As a cosmologist, my most illuminating moments come when I discover simple natural things going cosmic,” Andrew Widepicture spoke as he came in. “There are truly cosmic elements in the peculiar wrong-headedness that has run through the night's events. It just didn't have a neat ending, not any of it. Now, if my calculations are correct, it will require the ending of either the world or myself.”

“Of yourself,” said Voiles. “A legend-come-to-life always eats flesh, but it will not eat all the flesh. I hope it will be satisfied with yours.”

“The legend is a badly-done one, Voiles,” Widepicture remarked. “It has too many moving parts. Storm-Cock and Tree-Freezer, that's enough elements there. And Tree-Freezer is complicated by the long-named demiurge who also serves as Tree-Freezer. Is the demiurge only an aspect of Wrong-Rain, or is he an independent element? And Storm-Swallower is much too much. He belongs to another legend entirely, but he was instrumental in this one. And the bird grows bigger and bigger, and less possible. I'm convinced that he's strutted with wooden bones, as he should be, coming out of a tree. He isn't a bird of the ornis sort at all, and he's aerodynamically unsound.”

“And I'm not sure that he'll stand the test of daylight,” Lloyd Rightfoot hazarded hopefully. “Some of the most incredible prodigies have very short existence spans. And at the end of their span they do not so much die as become unshaped and unrecognized. He may not have time for us before he returns to an unremembering form.”

“He'll have time enough for us,” Hector said. “He believes that we laughed at him when we saw him still in the bud, or anyway that we didn't pay him enough respect.” Hector took a pack of cards out of a drawer and put it on his desk.

“If you spooked the bird-freeze, Voiles, then the bird owes its life to you,” Widepicture said. “But don't expect gratitude. Ah, reality is very hard to define. I also doubt that the uncreature will pass the daylight test.”

“We'll cut the cards for low-man-dead when he gets here,” Hector said. “And the daylight test is no test at all of reality. Many very real things disappear before morning.”

“This is more than a mere daylight test,” Rightfoot proposed. “This is a time test. This is the eighth decade of the twentieth century of the uncommon era, and tenuous reality cannot enter here. There is a place test. This is the ninth floor of the Television Plaza Building, and reality must be more than merely contingent to exist here. There is a context test. This is beautiful downtown T-Town in broad daylight on a spring day. The blooms along the Main Mall are blooming, and the sap-sucker butterflies are fluttering around them. Automobiles are crumpling each others' fenders in the middle distance, and all the girls walking on the sidewalks are pretty. The very walls here are made out of glass and sunlight, and a too-dark reality becomes no reality at all.”

A too-dark bird took out the entire outer glass-and-sunlight wall of the room and crammed the space with head and pinion top.

“So much for this particular reality,” said Widepicture. “It brings its own context.”

“James South-Forty was correct,” Rightfoot said nervously. “The bird is about six-and-a-half feet between the eyes.”

“The bird killed South-Forty several hours ago,” Hector said. “Well, the rules are (how do I know what they are?) that he takes only one of us. We cut cards, low-man-dead for it.” Hector cut to a red six-card, while the Storm-Cock watched with hard hatred in his big eyes. “Oh, that's awful low,” Hector moaned.

Lloyd Rightfoot cut to a red four-card. The bird seemed to dismiss Hector then, and keep its baleful eyes on Rightfoot and Widepicture.

Widepicture struck a match on the big beak of the bird, but that was for bravado.

“That proves nothing about reality,” he said unevenly. “One can strike a match on a picture of a bird, or of a beak.” His hand fluttered like a sapsucker butterfly over the cards. He cut to a black three-card, and he was low-man-dead. The bird gazed a long time at the low card to be sure.

The bird sliced a forearm off Widepicture, as if for a sample, and munched it. Widepicture waved farewell to his two friends with the other arm. He was jittery and distraught.

“No, no, I don't accept it,” he jabbered. “This isn't reality. This is the most unreal happening I've ever encountered.”

The bird sliced Widepicture sheer in two, gobbled up both pieces of him, and then withdrew from the broken room with a clatter of ungainly wings like thunder run backwards.

Sunlit reality flooded back into the room. And outside, on the brilliant sky, there was a jerky black blotch, munching bobble-headedly, flying clumsily as though strutted with wood, a thing aerodynamically impossible, incredibly awkward, and categorically unreal.

The Emperor's Shoestrings

Not a bad place as places go,

But Oh the ceilings are so low!

 — Book of Jasher

The maiden who chamber-rooms clean'th,

The gum-shoe who evidence glean'th,

Proclaim “Guys, it's swell!

It's a gorgeous hotel,

If it weren't for the tacky thirteenth.”

Limerick County Limericks, Clement Goldbeater

Justin Saldeen was afraid to look under the table. It gave him the staccato shivers. He felt impelled, like one in a dream, to point with hand and voice to what was under the table, to call the attention of his companions to it. But, as in a dream, his voice would not work and his hand would not.

And Justin's table companions did not seem to notice that there were any strange things going on under the table at all. Would one of them not look and see! But would they be able to see it (staccato shivering again, and consuming doubt) even if they did look under the table? Do you realize just how seldom people do look under a table? Ah flaming fudlucks, somebody look!

“We have all received the ‘Little Vision’,” Marjory Kiljoy was saying. “It is for that that we belong to the NRBWA Peoplehood. Now we can see in the ‘little’ and in the ‘big’. We can see without and within. Do you believe that in all the world else there are as many true visionaries as at our convention here? Yauk, yauk!”

Their table was at pool-side, and Marjory had been sunning herself all morning on the tawny sand beside the pool. And she was tanned or burned into matching pattern to that sand, tawny and grainy and rippled. Persons of sensitive skin always are sun-printed thus to the pattern of their background. Marjory was attractive and wide-eyed from her felted rabbit-fur birds'-nest hat to the lavender and chestnut speckled pinkish nuthatch egg in her navel.

“We are the trained gazers,” said Sulky Sullivan. “We see what others cannot see. Only ourselves in all the worlds have true multiplex vision. Nuthatch-watching does that to one. Yauk, yauk!”

Sulky had a pleasant storminess to her sleek skin. She also had been sunning herself through the bright morning, and her skin was now sun-printed with the pattern of the cork walkways on which she had been lying. Her own hat was made of leaves and grass, and the nuthatch egg in her navel was white with just a flush of pink, and it had no more than three lavender specks in it.

“There is no vision that we do not dare!” Gladys Gamaliel challenged with her small voice. “We are the new adventurers and explorers. The true interior vision has a very small exterior aperture, and with us it is the nuthatch egg and the nuthatch world. We are surrounded by kingdoms and realms without number. We have but to open our trained and illuminated eyes to see all things large and small. Yauk, yauk!”

Gladys had an unpainted evocation to her textured skin. She had been sunning herself that morning on the authentic wooden raft in the pool, and she was burned to the unpainted, wet-wood pattern of the raft's old boards. Her hat was made of feathers and horse-hair, and the nuthatch egg in her navel was the chestnut-spotted heavy pink of the Carolina Nuthatch. “We dare to look!” Gladys pronounced in benediction. “Yauk, yauk!”

“Then in the name of the Devil Downhead Nuthatch himself, look under the table!” Justin shrilled, rising suddenly to his feet, toppling his chair, dropping the nuthatch egg from his left nostril. “Dare to look!”

They looked, but they looked at him, in amazement. And he shriveled under their look.

“Oh, pardon my vehemence,” he apologized, “but do look under the table.” He replaced the nuthatch egg (fortunately unbroken) in his nostril with the prayer that his awkwardness might be overlooked. “Yauk, yauk!” he finished dutifully and ritually.

“Oh sit down, Justin,” Rolf Mesange said crossly. “Sometimes I feel that your conduct and bearing are not quite those of a NRBWA Peoplehood member. Sit down. They're bringing the drinks now. Yauk, yauk!”

Justin Saldeen, with a certain nervousness of eye and rump, sat down at the table once more. His five table-mates had glanced briefly under the table and they seemed not to have seen anything unusual there. Why, with their daring vision, had they not seen anything unusual, or anything at all? To Justin's now trepidatious vision, there was something unusual under the table.

There were six people under the table, that's what. They were small people, yes or they wouldn't have fit so easily under the table. They were sitting at a small table of their own down there; and they didn't appear (except for their small scale) much different from the other people at the convention.

A girl brought the drinks to Justin and his table-mates. That was all right. In the brightness of the noon-time, in the super-clarity of the vision, a drink will come in mighty handy sometimes. But a disturbing thing was that (You don't have to look down, you don't have to look under the table if you don't want to) a smaller girl was bringing smaller drinks to those six undersized people at their own undersized table under Justin's table. Once more Justin felt impelled, like one in a dream, to point with hand and voice: and once more his hand and voice failed him.

This was at the NRBWA (Nuthatches and Related Birds Watchers of America) Convention, probably the greatest yearly gathering of the truly open-eyed people. Justin Saldeen, Rolf Mesange, Berthold Chairmender, Marjory Kiljoy, Sulky Sullivan, and Gladys Gamaliel had been sitting together at the table at poolside on the fourteenth floor. The men wore nuthatch eggs in their left nostrils, and the ladies wore them in their navels. All of them must end every speech with the nasal ‘yauk, yauk’ that is the note of the Common Nuthatch. These six outstanding and intelligent young people, and the entire six thousand at the convention, shared nuthatchery, and the ‘Little Vision’ as the key to the ‘Great Vision’ as a way of life.

Justin was a square and spare young man with a robust healthiness that left him nothing to blame his new nervousness on. Rolf was a proud and suspicious man who preached ‘Pride in Vision’ and the ‘Little-See as Portal to the Big-See’. Berthold was an integrating man who spread peace like vegetable oil on the warring waters. He preached the ‘Nuthatch Door to Dynamic Peace’.

In some ways, Marjory Kiljoy, in fulfilling her own name, fell below the nuthatch ethic. She sometimes showed strong carnal inclinations. And what quicker than carnal notions and behaviors will kill the joy of an illuminated and intellectual congress?

(Conversations, small-stature conversations, under-the-table conversations that used a different soundtrack from regular conversations, Oh, they were uncanny! It was even more startling to hear the under-the-table things than to see them. Really, the talk sparkled more below than above, and there was some pretty good ankle-high wisdom and wit.)

Sulky Sullivan was more serious than sulky. She preached the ‘Cosmic Egg’ and the ‘Ultimate Consciousness’, and she did not doubt that the cosmic egg was a nuthatch egg. Gladys Gamaliel, she was the sly and shy one. Like the totem nuthatch, she was small and noticed only by the elite. But she had inner qualities. Everyone said so, and she said so herself.

These were six among six thousand persons of common and incandescent interest (the ‘Little Vision of the Nuthatches’ as key to the ‘Great Vision that encompasses the Worlds’) who were met here in convention, in congress, in constellation of personalities for the furtherance of their only-thing-that-matters. So their talk had to be the powerful and rich vehicle of their views.

Then why was the chatter of the six little people under the table (whom only Justin seemed able to hear) so much more interesting than that of the big people at the big tables? They were having fun down under.

“Ditch these big guys when the session starts and go to the thirteenth floor with us,” one of the under-the-table ladies gave the pleasant invitation to Justin.

“Justin, why do you fidget and look under the table?” Rolf Mesange demanded suspiciously. “Truly illuminated people don't fidget.”

“I keep seeing and hearing things that aren't there,” Justin mumbled nervously.

“Nuthatches?” Rolf asked sharply.

“No, not nuthatches,” Justin said. “Just things, people, comings and goings on the wrong scale, situations. I keep seeing things that just can't be there and nobody else sees them.”

“Just so it isn't nuthatches,” said Rolf. “There's an unpleasant word for people who see nuthatches that aren't there. Faking is an offence against the ‘Little Vision’ itself. False reporting is always reprehensible, and proof of it can cost one his credentials.”

“Justin, ditch that guy especially,” said the friendly small lady under the table, “and c'mon join us on the thirteenth floor.”

“Has this hotel a thirteenth floor?” Justin asked his table-mates.

“Of course it hasn't!” Rolf sputtered. “Thirteenth floors are something out of the superstitious dark ages. How would there be thirteenth floors in a rational era?”

Sudden and loud over the speaker system came the ‘yauk, yauk’ sound. This was a greatly amplified recording of the genuine nuthatch call, and it was used as a signal at the convention. It meant that the first session of the day was due to begin. So the six at the table, and many others from pool-side, left the fourteenth floor roof garden to go down the quick stairways to the twelfth floor sessions theaters.

Between the floors there were little soffit cubicles or cubby-holes about a foot high. “I wonder what those are for?” Justin asked. Nobody else had wondered what they were for. “Yauk, yauk!” Justin added. He'd nearly forgotten it.

“I don't know,” said Marjory Kiljoy. “Come along. Yauk, yauk!”

Sessions never begin quite on time. On the twelfth floor, the illuminated people sat and waited.

“Those little cubicles with the little doors on them, that space between the floors where we come down the stairways, it reminded me of other little cubicles on a train when I was a little boy,” Justin said.

“Illuminated persons are never reminded of trivial or meaningless things from the past,” Rolf Mesange cautioned.

“Well, I was riding on a train with my mother very late at night,” Justin stumbled on regardless. “She was tired. There were little cubicles with doors on them along the walls of our railway coach. ‘What's in that little room?’ I asked, and I tried to open one of the doors. ‘Oh, that's where the trainman keeps his lantern,’ my mother said, but she hadn't even looked. ‘What's this place for?’ I asked about another one of them. ‘Oh, that's where they keep the extra lantern,’ my mother said. And to every one of those little places, my mother said that it was where the trainman kept his lantern. I felt then and I felt now that there was something more wonderful than lanterns (if there is anything more wonderful than lanterns) inside those little places. But my mother was tired and so was I, and a four-year-old doesn't pursue things out to the ultimate. I was never on another coach that had such little cubicles. They were about the size of the little cubby-holes between the twelfth and fourteenth floors here.”

“Well?” Rolf Mesange asked with rising suspicion.

“Nothing,” said Justin. “That's all of it. It's just something that I remembered.”

“Illuminated persons never remember such trivial and meaningless things,” Rolf said severely. But the first speaker of the session now began to talk, so Justin did not have (at that time) to give further account of his childhood memory.

“Just as in re-entrant space (that type of space in which we live) any point may be taken as the exact center of the universe,” the speaker was saying, “so in re-entrant society (that type of society in which we all live) every valid interest may be taken as a center or pivot for the total meaningful involvement or envelopment of the world. Our own interest in the nuthatch bird, ‘the bird of the little way’, has proved central to a very important movement, the only important movement really, in the world. Yauk, yauk!”

There were eight scheduled speakers seated at the sessions table or podium table, and the present speaker was a striking medium of their type. As a fact, any of them would have been a good medium type, for they were a re-entrant group, each one a central, and all very similar. And under the speakers' table was another and smaller table with ten (Justin had already divined that there was not a rigid numerical correspondence between the large and the small people) smaller speakers or possible speakers. One of these was now holding forth in an interesting but rowdydow sort of talk. None of the big people seemed to hear this smaller speaker at all. None of them seemed to notice any of the little people.

“Our movement is quite simply the rejuvenation of our tired world,” the convention speaker was saying. “The world, for lack of the ‘big vision’, is threatened with a too-early senility. We'll cure that. This present Forty-Fourth NRBWA Convention is a mighty kilometer-stone in the rejuvenation of the world. Yauk, yauk!”

Something was pulling on Justin's trousers cuff. It was a little lady, possibly the same little lady who had talked so friendly to him before. She had her arms folded and was leaning on his cuff as though it were a back fence, and she was looking up at him.

“Ditch these guys, Justin,” she said. “They don't know anything at all about the ‘little ways’ that lead to the ‘big way’. Hey, things are starting to open up upstairs now. C'mon, let's go up to the thirteenth floor.”

“Justin, why do you keep looking down at the floor?” Gladys Gamaliel asked him. “What's down there anyhow? Yauk, yauk!”

“Look and see for yourself,” Justin mumbled dubiously.

“My aren't you snippy today,” Gladys said. “Illuminated people are never snippy to other illuminated people. Yauk, yauk!”

“Our great movement began with the nuthatch bird, and with the high hobby of nuthatch-watching,” the big speaker was continuing. “The nuthatch is a small, blue-gray-black bird that is almost invisible in the mixed blue-gray-black woodlands and sedgelands and meadowlands. Our own eyes, the opening eyes of the rejuvenated world, learned their minute vision in spotting the small nuthatch on its spotted background. The faint, nasal ‘yauk, yauk’ note of the nuthatch is almost inaudible against the animated clatter of the woodlands and the canebrakes. Our own fine ears, the opened ears of the rejuvenated world, learned their minute hearing in picking up the nuthatch notes out of the larger noise. We learned to hear the sounds of all the small worlds, of the gateway worlds, by mastering this one crucial small sound. Yauk, yauk!”

“By my grandfather's ears, your own ears are closed,” Justin Saldeen interrupted in a loud voice. “You can not hear the sound of the small worlds. You would not recognize a gateway world if it were under your very feet. Tell me, can you hear the minute rowdydow from the small world under your own table right now? Let your ears repent! Let them learn to listen!”

The small people at the little speakers' table under the big speakers' table cheered Justin as their new advocate. But the big speaker at the big table over their heads did not hear their cheering. He did not hear the sounds of the small world at all.

“Who is this person's gauleiter? Yauk, yauk!” the big speaker asked gently.

“I am. Yauk, yauk,” Rolf Mesange admitted in a frustrated voice.

“Your subject is perhaps not fully illuminated,” the big speaker said. “Very likely he is here in error, as lacking in qualifications. Well, do what you can with him, and be gentle with him. Yauk, yauk!”

“I'd like to be gentle to you with a meat-cleaver, Justin,” Rolf whispered furiously. “Sit down and be quiet, dammit. Yauk, yauk.”

“C'mon, Justin. Forget the big guys. They're weird,” the ankle-high girl-friend was saying. “Let's go up to the thirteenth. C'mon.”

“Do you know what was in those little cubicles on that railway car when I was a little boy?” Justin asked softly.

“Maybe it was a made-over club car,” the shoestring-high lady said. “We used always to have a few clubs going in the club cars. Let's go up to the thirteenth. C'mon.”

“Our vision is a generating function,” the big speaker was saying again. “Things are seen in such a way; and then they become that way. You know, of course, that the Emperor really was wearing adequate and even splendid clothes until a hostile psychology was brought to bear on him. A child saw through him. And then everybody saw through him. Wherever he is now, he is probably still wearing adequate clothes: but I would guess that he is still being seen through also. The essential emperor could not be seen while his clothes were a barrier. A child broke through the barrier, as we ourselves break through so many barriers. As we see a thing, so that thing becomes. As we see the Emperor, so shall the Emperor be. Yauk, yauk!”

“How about the Emperor's shoestrings?” Justin Saldeen howled out. “Can't you ever look down? What do you see around and about the Emperor's shoestrings? What would a child see?”

“Is that the same unfortunate person as before?” the speaker asked. “Is he even half illuminated? He asks questions, but does anybody know what the questions mean? Yauk, yauk!”

“Bring a child!” Justin spoke with a rowdydow touch of his own. “Let us see what a child can see in the area of the Emperor's shoestrings.”

“The unfortunate person deserves some kind of an answer,” the big speaker spoke compassionately. “Unfortunate man, a child's vision looks essentially up and not down. A child's vision could see through an emperor's clothes, but I do not believe that a child's vision could settle any question at shoestring level. Only a very tall man could see the Emperor's shoestrings in meaningful perspective. Yauk, yauk!”

“Aw knock-kneed nuthatches, bring on a tall man then! Yauk, yauk!” Justin corrected it.

“The gauleiter of this man will have this man here at this same hour tomorrow,” the big speaker said in a voice like illuminated ice. “We will hold judgment on him then. Yauk, yauk!”

“C'mon, Justin,” the small lady under Justin's seat said. “Let's take the thirteenth. C'mon!” She had a red line, thin as a thread, around her throat, the fairy mark, the un-nested bird mark, the mark sometimes affected by those who have been murdered.

Five of them, Rolf Mesange, Berthold Chairmender, Marjory Kiljoy, Sulky Sullivan, Gladys Gamaliel, were telling thirteenth-floor stories at one of the pool-side tables that evening.

“Have you yourself ever seen a ghost? Have you yourself ever seen a UFO? Have you yourself ever seen a thirteenth floor? Even we of the ‘nuthatch vision’ must consider whether such questions are completely obsolete,” Berthold Chairmender was saying. “We will see and integrate as many things as we can. It is for this that we are chosen; it is for this that we are special. But we will always miss something. There are things that we, with our channeled vision, must always give up. But if we can pick up one bright thing without dropping another brighter thing, I say pick it up. Right at this moment I feel a liveliness very near to us, but I don't know how to take a share of it. I wonder where Justin Saldeen is? Yauk, yauk!”

“As gauleiter for this bunch, I had better find out where he is before judgment hour tomorrow,” Rolf Mesange grumbled. “And I had better not lose another one of you. Justin was riding some such notion as yours, Berthold, and then he rode it clear out of the corral. But he was always close underfoot, and I believe he still is. I can feel him very near right now. I believe that I can hear him also, but not on an ordinary sound-track. Be careful that you do not wander onto strange tracks, Berthold. Yauk, yauk!”

“I myself have seen a thirteenth floor,” Berthold said, disregarding Rolf 's strait advice. “Oh, don't grumble, Rolf. Thirteenth-floor accounts were considered a legitimate field of investigation before our ‘nuthatch vision’ movement channeled and contained the ‘small kingdom’ studies into rational areas. And I know what I saw, even if I only saw it subjectively. I saw, in a tall building in a tall town not very distant from here, rows of windows at the thirteenth floor level. These could not have been fourteenth floor windows. They were too different from the other floors of the building. They were the old-style, openable windows that people might look out of; and people were looking out of them.

“I called to several persons there in the street and asked if they could see the so-different windows and the people looking out of them. Some of the persons in the street denied it outright. A shisk-a-bob peddler hedged and said ‘They'd call anybody crazy that admits seeing such things. Sure, I see them. I'm crazy enough to see them. But I'm not crazy enough to admit that I saw them if I'm driven into a corner over it.’ ‘Sure, I see them,’ an old lady said. ‘Everyone here can see them now. We can see them about half the days, and some of us have become acquainted with the people who look out the windows. They look happy, but they look crowded too. You can see that there isn't much room there. The ceilings in their part would have to be mighty low. Sometimes people go up there when the window-people call to them to come up. But them that goes up doesn't come down again. And some days we can't see them at all. When the windows are closed, then they seem to disappear, and the place where they were disappears too. There isn't any room for there to be windows there when they're not opened.’ That's what the old lady said.

“So I went inside the building: I looked, and I asked. They told me in the building that of course they did not have a thirteenth floor, or any old-style windows that opened out and that people could look out of. I explored the building completely; and there wasn't any thirteenth floor, and there wasn't any space that a thirteenth floor could have occupied. There weren't any windows that opened out, or that people could look out of. I went down into the street again. Well, I had gone up to where it should have been: and I, at least, came down again. I looked up at the building as I had looked up previously. There were no openable windows of the old sort and there were no people looking out of them. There was no level that was different from any other level. ‘Where is the old lady that was here?’ I asked the shisk-a-bob peddler. ‘You can't see her all the time,’ he said. ‘And people are likely to call you crazy if you admit seeing that old lady at all.’ This is a true, though possibly subjective, account of what I saw one day. Yauk, yauk!”

“Yes, I can feel a liveliness in my feet too,” Sulky Sullivan said. “There's magic right under our feet, as it were, and we're missing it. There's always a magic corner right around the corner, or under the floor. We've been looking for magic corners since we were taily apes. I believe that the magic corners that we looked for then were special trees or special branches (probably the thirteenth branch) that we could never quite reach, or could not recognize if we did reach. Have we been missing magic all our lives? Well, need we miss it forever? The magic may be in anything, in a box or a house or a small cubicle. Justin thought that it was in a little cubby-hole where the trainman kept his lantern. Say, Justin's having fun now, isn't he? I can feel it through the soles of my feet. There's a mighty low ceiling there, but he's having fun and magic. Yauk, yauk!”

“I don't know what he sees in that little nit-weight female with the nit's egg in her navel,” Marjory Kiljoy groused. “Yauk, yauk!”

“Do you girls know where Justin is?” Rolf demanded. “If you do, then you are bound to tell me. That's a simple case of nuthatch loyalty. Yauk, yauk!”

“They don't know,” Gladys told gauleiter Rolf Mesange. “Neither do I. But all of us do have the nuthatch intuition. We know that the place is near, that it is low, that it's of the ‘small kingdom’ category, and that it's gateway magic. We know that Justin's having fun in it, but not as much fun as he'd be having if he hadn't left his feet outside. In the Nuthatches' Guidebook there's a lament about having feet too big to enter a ‘small kingdom’. I think that's symbolic. Yauk, yauk!”

“Not with Justin it isn't,” Berthold said. “He really does have big feet. But he still has roots outside in our nuthatchery that he hasn't torn out. This business of crawling into a small cubicle is tricky. You've just got to leave something outside. A spelunker may crawl deeper and into a tighter place, but not much. There sure is a low roof where he is. I'm jealous of the good time that he's having, but I know that he can't get all the way in there in one trip. It's a lucky trick to find the way in even once. And then, with the amnesia of the place a price to pay for bucking out of the place and going back to get the rest of one's self, it would be an exponentially lucky trick to find such a place the second time. But he seems to be enjoying it. Yauk, yauk!”

“You're sure that he'll forget where he's been and what he's done if he's dragged out of his place?” Gladys asked.

“Gladys, why didn't you say ‘yauk, yauk’ at the end of your statement?” Rolf cut in sternly. “Yauk, yauk.”

“I just spelunker-dunker didn't feel like it!” Gladys said, and that is when Rolf felt his power over the group slipping.

“How do all of you know so much about Justin's situation?” the buffeted Rolf asked. “If you don't know where he is or what he's doing, what do you know? Yauk, yauk!”

“Oh, I guess we know pretty much the rest of it,” said Marjory. “Everyone to his own taste in magic and everything else. But if the ceiling's so low that you have to lie down and raise on one elbow just to drink that mountain dew of theirs (Mountain dew! Why do they call that thirteenth floor cubby-hole a mountain anyhow?) then I say that things are too cramped for even a small kingdom. But we sense pretty well what Justin senses, and we catch most of the effects that are between the senses. After all, we do belong to the same nuthatchery. We do all have empathy with each other. Don't you feel everything that Justin feels, Rolf? Yauk, yauk!”

“No, I don't,” Rolf Mesange said. “Yauk, yauk!’

The sound system mumbled a greatly amplified ‘yauk, yauk’ then, and the five persons left their table to go down to a late evening session of the convention, left the fourteenth floor roof garden to go down the quick stairways to the twelfth floor sessions theater.

Between the floors there were little soffit cubicles or cubby-holes about a foot high. There was a pair of big shoes sticking out of one of them, and there were feet in the shoes.

“We all know those shoes, if we could just remember whose they were,” Berthold said.

Sessions never begin quite on time. On the twelfth floor, the illuminated people sat and waited and talked.

“It's a little bit Brush Arbor music,” Sulky Sullivan said, “and a little bit Blue Grass, and a little bit Flint Creek. But it's all on a different sound-track, and other things are all on other kinds of tracks. I know that Justin is enjoying, and I enjoy with him. I wish he'd be able to remember it, when he comes back for the rest of himself. Yauk, yauk!”

“No, he won't be able to remember it,” Berthold said. “Or it may be that he will remember only one tune out of it, and that will be a tune that we all know. There used to be ten thousand Irish pipers who went yearly into a rabbit hole in the Knockmealdown Mountains. They'd pipe for three days. Each one would be blessed with a new-born tune which he would play like a piping angel. And all ten thousand pipers would learn all ten thousand tunes. But when they came out again, each would remember and play only the one tune ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’, and each would believe that it was the new-born tune that had been given to them in the mountain. And when the pipers were cleared out, it would be seen that the rabbit hole wouldn't rationally hold ten thousand pipers, or even one. I understand that the custom is dying out in Ireland. There were only a few more than eight thousand pipers last year. That's the way it will be with Justin when he comes out. He'll have forgotten all the music and dancing and topering, all the wining and dining and shining, all the loving and cozening and cousining and carousing, the hunting and bunting, the walking and talking. Or he will remember only one piece of each, a common piece that we already know. I wonder if he'll find his way back there the second time, and if he'll stay there if he does? Yauk, yauk!”

“You all seem to know a very lot about Justin, for not knowing where he is or why,” Rolf complained. “I only hope that you can help me find him tomorrow. If I can't produce him, then I can be a gauleiter no longer. Yauk, yauk.”

The evening session was excellent, perhaps: a superior expression of nuthatchery and of the ‘little way’ as gateway to the ‘big way’. It was superb, of course.

“Even the dogs are superb where we come from,” some small person down under the chairs was saying. “Even the fleas on the dogs are superb.”

“Go away, nit-weight,” Marjory said crossly. “I have something else on my subdominal mind.”

What Marjory Kiljoy had on her lower mind, as became clear when the session ended, was the old carnal jag. She was on one again. Such things are sometimes contagious. People left the group: the group, its joy in illumination and bright discussion and group companionship killed for the while, was a group no more that night.

Group Gauleiter Rolf Mesange was very nervous the next morning. He had to produce Justin Saldeen by the time of the judgment session, and he didn't know where that bemused man had gone to. Rolf and his remaining four group-members were by pool-side up on the fourteenth floor roof garden. But those other members were of no help in the search.

“The little people got him, that's what. Yauk, yauk!” Marjory Kiljoy said.

“When we rediscover what our forefathers meant by ‘magic-lantern’ then we may find what Justin rediscovered,” Berthold said mysteriously. “He likes lanterns. Yauk, yauk.”

“It's a little bit like Green Country music, it's a little bit like Whang Whang, it's a little bit like Apple Orchard, it's a little bit like String Chords for Six Thumbs, it's a little bit like Vehicular Tunnel in B Flat, that's the sound of it,” Gladys said.

“It's a little bit like Dooley's Mountain, it's a little bit like Big Mike's Diamond Mine, it's a little bit like Cloudhopper's Ritz Bar (only with a lower ceiling), that's part of the look of it. And do you want to know what it smells like where he is? Well, the Fleshy Delight Steak House will give you a start of a start on the smell of it. And — ”

“No, I only want to know where Justin Saldeen is,” Rolf said patiently. “Yauk, yauk.”

“When we find what our forefathers really meant when they spoke of the ‘Little People’ then we might find out what Justin is,” Berthold said cryptically.

After a bit, they went down from the fourteenth floor to the twelfth for a morning session (but not yet the judgment session). As they went down the sweeping stairs, they saw again the big pair of shoes sticking out of the cubby-hole between the floors.

“We ought to remember whose shoes and feet those are,” Marjory said. “Just because he has amnesia, should we be amnestic of him? It has to be someone we know well. Yauk, yauk.”

“Could we take his footprints and send them to a laboratory somewhere?” Rolf asked uneasily. “Well, I don't see how that would help, but something's got to help. Yauk, yauk.”

The session was soon shining with intuition and fulfillment and realization. It was a Life-With-A-Glow Instruction Kit, it was a Controlled-Explosion-For-Any-Number-of-Hands factfest, it was a Love-Is-a-Perigynous-Type-Flower presentation. But then it became strident, like honey strained too fine.

“Wherever he is, Justin is having more fun there than we are here,” Berthold Chairmender gave the free opinion to the five-group. “He's asleep, and his neck is cramped from the low ceiling. It isn't even a foot high: it's about ten inches. And he's forgotten what he went for and what he will have to come back for. But, even asleep, he's having more fun than we are. Yauk, yauk.”

There was a short interlude to allow the fevered session to cool off a bit. The first session was over with, and after the interlude there would come the judgment session. And the short interlude was all too short.

A warner came to Rolf Mesange. “You have just one minute to present the deficient man for judgment,” the warner said. “Somebody will be judged, you or he, in one minute. Yauk, yauk!’

“Oh, what to do, what to do!” Rolf moaned. “Gang, go get that pair of shoes and feet that are sticking out of the cubby-hole overhead. We can start with them, and maybe we can make the rest of Justin out of something else.”

It was very much less than a second to go that they dragged Justin Saldeen in by the heels. The shoes and feet had been his, and with them came the rest of him entire and attached. He still slept the sleep of the imperfectly enchanted, but now he began to wake up, section by section, like a jack-ruler unfolding. He was grinning with loose happiness, and he blew the amnesia off himself like yellow dust.

And the judge was already talking:

“Ah, it is the deficient man,” he said, “he who is concerned about the Emperor's shoestrings, and who may never be able to look higher. Are you ready to abjure your deviations and deficiencies? Yauk, yauk!” He was more than judge; he was judge-advocate, and he would have full powers.

“In as much as they are deviations and deficiencies, I will abjure them, as much as I am able to, yes,” Justin Saldeen said with that smile-grin on his face.

“Why do you not say ‘yauk, yauk’ at the end of a statement, false nuthatcher?” the judge-advocate asked. “Yauk, yauk.”

“My throat is constricted today. Those words won't come out,” Justin smiled.

“Has anyone evidence against this man beyond his obvious unfitness?” the judge-advocate inquired of the session. “Yauk, yauk.”

“He runs around with an undersized girl with the red-thread line on her throat and with a nit's egg in her navel,” Marjory Kiljoy charged. “Yauk, yauk.”

“No. It isn't a nit's egg. It's a Jewel-Bird egg,” Justin defended.

“If only that were possible,” the judge-advocate commented, “but there haven't been Jewel-Birds in the world for a long time. Why have you abandoned the nuthatchers' quest, deficient man? Yauk, yauk.”

“I haven't abandoned it,” Justin maintained. “Part of the nuthatchers' quest is the discovery and recollection of small kingdoms. I believe that I am discovering and recollecting one of them now-a-times.”

“A small kingdom must not be an end in itself,” the judge-advocate reminded. “It has to lead into the large kingdom, or it must be sealed off. Yauk, yauk.”

“But can you say by which door it will lead?” Justin argued. “It may be a very small and unregarded back door.”

“Tell me, deficient man, what have you discovered about the Emperor's shoestrings? Or what has the hypothetical child discovered?” the judge-advocate asked with near derision. “Yauk, yauk.”

“That most important child has discovered that the Emperor has loosened the strings and taken off his shoes,” Justin said simply. “The Emperor (actually he is only a local margrave or count of a county) learned that he was walking on holy ground, the ground of the invisible kingdoms. Only those who walk barefoot can walk on magic ground without crushing small kingdoms.”

The judge-advocate flushed and was angry. “I have no patience with invisible kingdoms that do not become visible,” he yammered. “Every small kingdom must be visibly integrated with our large kingdom or it remains misborn and misbegotten forever. Yauk, yauk.”

“C'mon, Justin,” came an ankle-high voice from a small lady, with the red-thread or fairy mark on her throat and with a Jewel-Bird egg in her navel. “These illuminated people get mighty murderous if you don't use their brand of light. They'll kill you. Let's go to the thirteenth. C'mon.”

“Well then, maybe we are unborn and misbegotten,” Justin said, “but it might not be as forever as you believe. What souls do you think we are anyhow?”

“You've the untracked smell on you,” the judge-advocate bayed. “You've been in an illicit place. Gauleiter, where was this prisoner captured. Yauk, yauk!”

“C'mon, Justin,” the small lady said. Justin went with her.

“I'd rather not say where I found him,” Gauleiter Rolf Mesange said uncertainly. “We found him in a ridiculous place. Yauk, yauk.”

“Say where it is!’ the furious judge-advocate ordered. “Yauk, yauk.”

“Oh, he was in a little cubby-hole between the floors,” said Rolf with plain embarrassment, “and his feet and shoes were sticking out of it.”

“There isn't any cubicle. There isn't any between-the-floors,” the judge-advocate barked like a fox. “What cubicle was it? Yauk, yauk.”

“It was the little cubby-hole where the night-watchman keeps his lantern. Yauk, yauk.” Rolf Mesange spoke, and his cheeks were flaming red with the improbability of it.

Scrub-grubbing fury! Had another one gone deficient, and he a gauleiter?

“There aren't any lanterns. There aren't any cubicles or caves or cavities. This is an illuminated era. You have named an impossible place. Where did you really bring him from? And — what, what, what? He's gone you say — and where has he gone now?”

“He's gone back to that same impossible place, I think,” Gladys said. “You forgot to say ‘yauk, yauk’, judge-advocate.”

Well, six thousand members of the NRBWA weren't able to find that impossible place. There are no finer eyes anywhere than those looked out of by the adepts of the Nuthatch Vision, by those experts of the Little Look, by the elites of the Small Vision as Gateway to the Big Vision; and they couldn't find that cubicle or whatever.

“You people say that there was a row of cubicles here between the floors?” the judge-advocate kept asking the members of the deficient man's group. “But there is nothing here between the floors. There is not room for cubicles or cubby-holes. And what did you say that the place was like? Yauk, yauk!”

“It's a little bit like the “Jewel-Bird Song” with the steel-string background,” Sulky Sullivan was saying. “It's a little bit like “Little Red Mark Around My Throat” with git-fiddle. It's something like “Cave in the Cliffs Rag” with wood-winds. There's a lot of that old song “My Blood on Your Hands” with pedal harpsichord in the sound of the place. And “Little Dead Birds” with Swiss bells, that's real soundy for what you're looking for. Yauk, yauk.”

“Whatever are you talking about?” the judge-advocate asked testily. “The place where the deficient man hides, the place that we can't find, what is it like? Yauk, yauk!”

“Justin is too big to be with them in their place now. Yauk, yauk,” Rolf said quietly.

“No, he was never very big. He faked that part all his life. Yauk, yauk,” Berthold Chairmender answered.

“The place is a little bit like red fish,” Marjory Kiljoy told the scurrying judge-advocate. “And it's even more like gold fish. It's quite a bit like a fountain that gushes inward, that's if you want to know what the place looks like. It's quite a bit like a lantern with a little light still burning in it. But it isn't easy to describe its appearance. You have to be inside it, I think, to see what it does look like. I've never been more than partly inside it. Yauk, yauk.”

The judge-advocate strode up and down the area in exasperation with his hands locked behind him. A much smaller man strode behind him exactly taking off his motions and attitudes. There were several of the other small persons japing about, but nobody looked at them much. And, really, they were not much to look at: they were all quite small; they all had that thread-thin red line around their throats; and they all had funny faces.

“It is hard to describe the place for the reason that it is a movement and drama and not a place,” Rolf told the judge-advocate. “It should be right here between the floors though. And, since it is what it is, it can only be described in terms of dramatic kinesis. Yauk, yauk.”

“Then for the love of the Great Northern Nuthatch describe it to me as dramatic kinesis!” the judge-advocate roared like an unhappy lion. “Yauk, yauk!”

“Could we pick Justin out from the rest of them if we finally found him now?” Rolf said secretly. “Yauk, yauk.”

“No, I don't believe that we could,” Gladys Gamaliel doubted it. “He's always been one of them, but he blew himself up like a grown-up person, those big feet and all. He always had the line on his throat too, but we didn't know that he'd been murdered. He has a funny face, of course, but all of them have funny faces.”

There were quite a few of the little funny-faced folks larking around but nobody paid them heed. They were on a different sound-track and sight-track.

“The dramatic kinesis we're looking for is very contemporary,” said Berthold Chairmender, “like the current murder comedies and haunt skits. It resembles many of the playbills of recent times. It's a little bit like Thirteen at the Table, or Pumpkin Head, or Bright Red Windows in My House. Its movement will remind one of Boat That Never Sailed, or Tumble-Down Nest, or Old Salty Sea, or Lightning-Bolt of Blood. It comes through strong like Mist and Weeping Rain, or Cut by Such Sword, or Die Before I Wake, or Poor Oriflame.”

One of the little funny-faced folks (he somehow looked like Justin Saldeen) kicked the judge-advocate at shoestring height (it was as high as he could kick).

“Ouch!” cried the judge-advocate. “Yauk, yauk!” But he didn't look down.

“The scene that we are looking for reminds me very much of that murder comedy Funny Face,” Berthold Chairmender said.

“I don't go to the theater often,” the judge-advocate admitted. “An illuminated person hasn't much time for such things. What we need for our search ‘yauk, yauk’, is a working description of — ”

“The thing reminds me quite a lot of That Real Funny Kind of Love,” Berthold Chairmender said.

Author's Commentary

Brain Fever Season

1

“Here's a puzzler,” said Barnaby Sheen. “One of the hottest new items in the porno stores, not only in this country but worldwide also, is A Grammar of the Tibetan Language by A. Csoma de Koeroes. Odd name that! Does anybody know what he is? There are hasty translations of the grammar into a dozen languages within the last thirty-six hours (things go very fast in the porno field). Does anybody know why the heavy-breathing, rheumy-eyed passion boys and girls should have this sudden interest in a Tibetan grammar?”

“It is funny,” said Doctor George Drakos, “and I sure cannot see any reason for it. There's some sort of symbolism or transference, I suppose.”

“As I recall it, Koeroes' book was printed in Calcutta in 1834,” Cris Benedetti said. “If there is a venereal element in it, it should have surfaced long ago. Several generations of British civil servants studied it. But I don't believe that it ranks among the great grammars, even for Tibetan.”

“Austro!” Barnaby Sheen called loudly. And then there was a carrying whisper from the inner or ‘omygosh’ room: “Carrock, oh, oh, what now?” Austro had learned to whisper most imperfectly (his people were unacquainted with the thing), and his whispers weren't quiet ones.

We always said that if anything should go wrong anywhere in the world, Barnaby Sheen would immediately suspect young Austro of having a hairy thumb in it. “Yes, and I'd be right to suspect him,” Barnaby would always maintain. “He would have a hairy thumb in it no matter what it was.”

“Austro!” Barnaby called still more loudly.

“Carrock! I just got to go down to the laboratory, Mr. Sheen,” Austro jabbered as he came from the inner room and made for the stairs down to the front door. “Whatever you want, it has to wait. I got to get down there right now.”

“Don't tell me I have to wait, boy,” Barnaby said. “It's eleven at night. The lab has been closed for hours. Whatever it is that you want will wait till tomorrow, Austro. Come here and talk.”

“No, no, I got a hot smart idea,” Austro protested. “I got to go to the lab and get it down on stone right now. We can't take chances on me forgetting it.”

“You have the stone tablets here, Austro,” Barnaby said. “You've been hammering and chiseling on them in the omygosh room all evening. You can cut a hot idea into any of the stones so you'll remember it. You never forget anything anyhow. Roy Mega says that you never learned the trick of forgetting, and he hasn't been able to teach you. That's why you have such a cluttered mind. Austro, what do you know about the Tibetan language?”

“Carrock, it's tone-talk, a little bit like we talk at home. It's singsong stuff, but I never learned it very well. Oh, Mr. Sheen, I've got to go right now!”

“Austro, do you know why an obscure Tibetan grammar should suddenly become a hot item in the porno stores?”

“Mr. Sheen, you know I'm not old enough to go into the porno stores.”

“No, but you're old enough to avoid a direct answer to a straight question. Austro, if this little puzzler were handed to you, what first step would you take toward finding an answer?”

“Carrock, I'd triangulate in on it. I'd find where the puzzler originated and where it spread from. Oh, oh, oh, why don't I learn to swallow my tongue? Why do you ask me questions? I'm just a twelve-year-old kid. Got to go right now!” And Austro ran down the stairs and out of the house.

Barnaby Sheen phoned Roy Mega at his mysterious number at his mysterious room. Nobody was sure where Roy Mega lived, but Barnaby Sheen believed that the young man had a room in that very house. Barnaby's was a big and junky house (most persons know how many rooms there are in their houses and where they are, but not Barnaby), and Roy had a cavalier way with space, and with telephones. Barnaby was sure that he was paying the phone bill on Roy's mysterious phone at least.

“Roy!” Barnaby barked into the phone. “Do you know why an obscure Tibetan grammar should suddenly become a hot item in the porno stores?”

“Do you believe me the sort of young man who goes to the porno stores?” Roy's voice asked out of the phone. “I'm hurt. Besides, it isn't obscure any longer. Got to hang up now. Got to go down to the lab and work on a hot idea.”

“Hold it, Roy, hold it!” Barnaby ordered. “Tell me just exactly what you and Austro have been working on at the lab for the last three days. I do pay the bills there. You do work for me. I have the right to know what you're doing.”

“Oh, we've been working on the relationship of shape to smell to season, Mr. Sheen. And especially on the relation of subliminal shape to subliminal smell to forgotten season. Sorry, got to go now.”

“Hold it, Roy!” Barnaby pressured. “Can there be a subliminal shape? Or a subliminal smell?”

“Oh sure. We make them all the time. You think the things down underneath don't have any shape? Or that they don't have any smell? Keep reading the journals and you'll find out about our stuff. We really can't take time to inform every jasper of all the smart things we're doing.”

“Roy, if you were asked to solve the problem of Tibetan grammars suddenly becoming hot items in porno stores all over the world, where would you start?”

“I'd start the same place as with any other problem. I'd find out where it starts. Then it's easier to find out what it means. I'd triangulate in on it and find out who created the situation and started the problem to rolling around the world. Oh, oh, oh, I've got to invent an automatic guardian for myself! We hadn't decided what we wanted to do with it yet. Why do I say things? Got to go now! Got to go down to the lab for one of those brilliant sessions.”

“Hold it, Roy! You're out of order,” Barnaby crackled. “Now I — ”

“The person is out of order. This is a recording,” came over the phone. And already there were rapid Roy Mega footfalls going down the back stairway of the house. Wherever Roy's mysterious room was, it was toward the back of the house somewhere.

“I will bet that triangulation shows the origin of the puzzler to be right here in our own city, Barnaby,” Doctor George Drakos said cheerfully.

“I'll bet it will show that the origin is in your own lab building,” Harry O'Donovan said.

“I will bet it shows the origin to be in the noggins of Austro and Roy Mega,” Cris Benedetti said, “in those two orbs that beat as one.”

“Why should such things be done in my own tents, and I have not done them?” Barnaby demanded in his scriptural boom. “That would be near treachery.”

Roy Mega was a young man of the species Genius who worked for Barnaby Sheen at his lab. He was from a downtown family. Austro was a still younger man of the species Australopithecus who also worked for Barnaby in his house and at his lab. He was from the Guna Slopes in Africa.

And this was really an interesting puzzle. Well, why do you think that the Tibetan grammars had become just about the hottest items worldwide in the porno stores? And why do you think that other items almost as strange had become almost as hot?

For, by the next morning (the third morning that the new tendencies had been noticed), there were very many of the sudden and learned items going hot guns in the porno stores. They were mostly writings and clips and tapes and presentations of apparently nonporno sort. Many of them clearly fell into the hot-brain classification. And there was a double puzzle connected with all these things.

First: not one of the porno owners or operators around town knew how he had happened to order, for instance, Masterman's Tectonic Geology and the Coming Fifth Ice Age, nor even how he had known that there was such a book to order. And second: nobody knew why the habitual customers of the porno stores should buy and devour such a book so eagerly, so hotly, and with such absolute mental and personal comprehension of it. For the porno folks did comprehend the new material: and some of it would be thought difficult.

Yeah, and then there was the second part of the first puzzle: none of the publishers or manufacturers knew how he had arranged to have so many copies of the items available at that time. They had published a hundredfold above the expected, and the items were being snapped up a hundredfold above the expected.

Why, just consider some of the items. There were old and erudite works by Tobias Dantzig and Erwin Panofsky and Basil Willey and Samuel Noah Kramer and J. Huizinga and Bertrand Flornoy and Karl Mannheim and Albert Einstein and Hans Vaihinger. Until the last two days or so one didn't find such things in the porno stores at all. They simply hadn't been sold anywhere by the tens of thousands every day, and they hadn't been available in such volume until some strange anticipatory impulse had moved the publishers and manufacturers to unusual production of them.

There were young and pulsating works by Hildebrand Muldoon, Peter Zielinski, Robin Popper, Martin Gander, Virgil Whitecrow, Titus Hornwhanger, Albert Cotton. It was a boom in snappingly live information, but why was it flowering in sleazy soil instead of in its proper pots?

By noon of the third day, there was a flood of second-generation or feedback works, most of them from the new Porno Ancilla Press, which had four thousand titles (of incomparable brilliance) stocked and selling before it was forty-eight hours old. Yes, things had always moved very fast in the porno field, but now they were moving in new directions.

The wonder was not in the ability of the porno people to meet and master such works of cosmology and extratemporal history and non-organic psychology and shape-and-perspective chemistry and chthonic electricity. All peoples have about the same mental and personal ability and about the same quantity of power and apperception. The wonder was that the porno people, having for a long time devoted themselves to a different complex of things, should now come with such hot interest to the fields of dynamic information and implementation, to the kinetically constructed scientific-scholastic-innovative fields.

And then there were the newly oriented porno people themselves, the hot-brained generation, the nation in a hurry, the scorchy harvest. They were in such rapid movement that even their oddities were a high-speed color blur. One of them came a-touring into Barnaby Sheen's house that third noon.

“Who turned me on, odd fish?” this visitor asked as he came in on nervous but exuberant fox feet, with two dozen books in his arms and one opened in his left hand. “I was in Singapore, our mother city, the porno capital of the world, and it hit me there. ‘Why don't you have Emanuel Visconti's Costive Cosmologies Freed?’ I howled at the storekeeper. ‘How will I ever live another moment without it? I'm hot for it, man! I have to have it right now,’ I said. And never in my life had I heard of Visconti before. ‘I hope we'll have it in a very few hours,’ the porno man said, ‘I'm mighty hot for it myself, and getting hotter. Oh, there must be some way to speed it up!’ ‘A few hours!’ I exploded at him, ‘I can't wait a few hours. Don't you know when the time of a thing has arrived? What are you doing to get copies?’ ‘I've just been talking to Visconti,’ the man said. ‘He is in Istanbul, and he had begun the work half an hour before I called. It'll take him fifteen to eighteen hours to write it, he says, and it will take several hours for printing and worldwide distribution. It will be twenty hours yet. It's hard to have an item in stock before it's in existence. Here's two dozen red-hot items that might tide you over.’ Something is happening fast, Sheeny. It's happening in half of the world.”

The man was speed-reading books as he talked. He threw one book over his shoulder as he finished it and opened another.

“I see,” said Barnaby Sheen, but he didn't see it at all clearly.

“But where did the happening begin?” asked the little foxy man. “I always like to be in the middle of a happening. I check the origin to be very near this place, to be very near to you. I even get the cryptic message ‘It's the Sons of Sheeny’. I got that while I was riding Polynesian Airlines here. Who are the Sons of Sheeny, Sheeny?”

“I don't know, but I suspect,” Barnaby said.

“I check it to near you, but I sure do not check it to you,” the nervous and ardent man said. “Man, you're not on fire from it at all! You're not even alive to the new fever, and everything shows that you're in the middle of it. I'm Gippo Sharpface, by the way. And you, Sheeny, are Mr. Nobody himself.”

“Did you locate this place by triangulating in on an influence?” Barnaby asked.

“Almost that. I'd realized since about midnight last night that the process would have to be distorted triangulation, since the phenomenon wasn't truly worldwide. But it's about the same thing. I located the center of the influence, and I found that the center was empty. The center is yourself. Can you tell me what is wrong, Sheeny?”

Gippo Sharpface was all this time speed-reading books and tossing them over his shoulder behind him like banana skins.

“I guess nothing is wrong,” Barnaby said, “but I thought that the phenomenon was worldwide. It's of almost simultaneous appearance and development in Shanghai and Moscow and Istanbul and Stockholm and London and Cairo and New York and Toronto and Mexico City and Honolulu and Ponca City, Oklahoma. Just look at the charts that I have. Say, Gippo, how did the porno operator know where to phone Emanuel Visconti? He was completely unknown till yesterday, wasn't he?”

“Sheeny Sheen, those places you name don't make the world. Where is Capetown? Where is Sydney? Where are Buenos Aires and Rio? Why were things so unclear in Singapore the porno capital of the world? No, there wasn't any rational way for the porno proprietor or myself or a million other people ever to have heard of Visconti. He had hardly heard of himself. There isn't any rational explanation for any of the hot instincts. But Emanuel Visconti was one of the hot instincts for a while: not nearly as much now as he was a few hours ago, of course.”

“The tendencies are only in the northern half of the world, are they, Gippo?” Barnaby asked. “That's interesting. And the emanating center is around here? Your triangulation shows that this is the center of it all?”

“Old Sheeny Nothing-Man, Not-With-It-Man, this can't be the center of anything. What's that concrete block building about fifty yards over there?”

“That's my laboratory. And the only persons working there lately are two lucky-brained young men. Sometimes I say that they comprise the left lobe of my own brain.”

“Are they sometimes called the ‘Sons of Sheeny’?” Gippo demanded excitedly.

“Only by yourself,” Barnaby said, “but nobody else could be called that at all. They're the two heads that beat as one. They're the hairy thumb and the smooth thumb in every bowl of stew. I suspected that they were involved.”

“Yes, that's the emanating center, Sheen,” Gippo said as he tossed another finished book over his shoulder. “That's the turned-on place. Could you have a cashier's check for a million dollars drawn up within twenty minutes or so? It will take at least that much for first ante if we're going to get in on this boom.”

“Do you want to be turned off again, Gippo?” Barnaby asked. “Oh, I suppose I could have the money in one form or another within fifteen or twenty minutes.”

“No, I don't want to be turned off again, Sheen, not while this season is running. I want a bucket. It's raining the queerest and hottest fish ever seen, and I have an overpowering lust for them. I want my passions fulfilled, and at the same time I want them to continue burning, and I want to make a good thing out of the hot rain while it's going on. Then I will have to find out where the next hot brain-rain or whatever will fall.” At a jittery fox trot, Gippo Sharpface went down to the laboratory building, tossing books over his shoulder as he finished them.

Barnaby Sheen called several of us on the hot line that Roy Mega had rigged for him. We all agreed that a pleasantly hot sort of spring fever was going through everybody. We thought that it was an information-and-invention sort of fever and we didn't understand how it fit into the porno context, except for the sheer lust there might be in the new racking and sacking of knowledge. While we were on the hot line, Barnaby said that Austro had just come in with a personal check of Barnaby's to be signed, a check for a million dollars. And Barnaby said that he was signing it with chisel and graver.

A Barnaby Sheen check would have been hard to forge, since Austro made them for him out of thin slate-stone. Nobody could imitate Austro's rock-engraving work. And nobody could imitate Barnaby's signature when he cut it into slate-stone with square-blade tapered graver.

“That's more than I usually put into a thing on a hunch,” Barnaby said. “Now I have crossed the Rubicon on this, or at least I have crossed Joe Creek.”

But Barnaby needn't have worried. Within another thirty-six hours, he had put so much money into the hot-information project as to make that first ante of no great importance, whether he lost it or got it back.

Say, it was a bonfire of rampant mentality and discovery that took over the northern half of the world in the days that followed. Two weeks of that splendid and frightening spring fever brought more achievement than had the hundred-year-long fever that had once run through Athens, than had the hundred-year-long fever that had once run through Florence. Besides, those older fevers had run off in all directions; but the present new-old burning was focused on knowledge and on sharp and swinging science. The focus of it was the main thing. There were few side runnels of it that were not concerned with knowledge. It was an ordered flooding of that Hot Brain River. Every day brought new and generating lightning, like the flash that had opened up the new world, like the flash that had opened up the Copernican cosmos, like the flash that opened up the atom. And the glorious explosion of knowledge was accepted and effected at once. What did it matter that the cargo had first been freighted in by grubby hands and grubby minds? The beneficent explosion was real now. The thing had gone on for nearly three weeks, and the world would never be the same as it had been before. The technology hadn't had a chance to follow up on all the breakthroughs, but that chance would come as soon as things had cooled off enough so that they might be touched. That or “I think it will catch up in a little bit different sort of season a little bit later in the year,” Roy Mega said. What sort of talk was that?

Did anybody really understand what was happening? No, not completely, for it was happening exponentially. Well, was anybody finding a way to take advantage of what was happening? Oh, there were a few hundred of the sharpfaces who were. They found new sorts of buckets and bushels and bags to take portions of that post-material harvest. Here was treasure that would burn the fingers off you, and yet it could be handled by the handlers.

There were some who gathered the aromatic smoke and the tilt-spectrumed sunlight into coffers. (The stuff that had once been called knowledge had been raised by several powers, so it was not quite the same stuff it had been before.) There were some who raked and compressed the bright brainstorms into bales. There were the manipulating few who had the touch to garner intangibles and to label them “Special Commodity”. There were several score of persons who could price and predict the tendencies of this commodity-market conflagration of ideas.

Gippo Sharpface did a little bit of the garnering and the prediction-calculating. Barnaby Sheen did a little of it, and he also seemed to own the results of others who were doing it. He said that, for quite a while there, he was making a million dollars an hour out of the fever. Some of the old-time porno operators were able to hang in there for a while, and some of the soft-stuff industrialists and foundation people did it. And new people who had been in the hot-brain business for only two or three weeks were now running ellipses around the world.

“Do you know for certain what day the season will end, Sheeny?” Gippo asked one day.

“Why should it ever end?”

“Oh, don't you understand the times and seasons, Sheen? How do you get along as well as you do? Austro says that it will end the day after the Hot-Brain full moon.”

2

Austro could probably have explained the theory of it a little bit. He couldn't do it very well in words, but he could do it in symbols cut in his rock tablets. He explained it pretty well even in words, but everybody was always too busy to listen.

“We used to set the seasons of the world from two locations,” Austro said once. “One of these regions was the Guna Slopes, and the other was the Malawi Shores, the one about ten degrees north and the other about ten degrees south of the equator. And also, we were the ones who set up the equator, but that's a different account. There were certain tricks with shape stuff and smell stuff that we used to get the seasons started, but all of it was remember-and-reminder jog. It still is. People really feel when it's time for one season or another, but now-a-aeons they get busy and they don't feel it strongly enough.”

“Quit the quacking and get busy, Austro,” Barnaby Sheen ordered. “Start divining what's going to be hot property tomorrow. You're good at that, but you're no good at quacking and clacking.”

“There's a lot to be said for the etiological aspect of the epochon,” Austro said a minute later when Barnaby had gone elsewhere, “and their plastinx category apozemiosis, not to mention the helical reinforcement of the phengaric base, considering the former duration of the etios itself. Now, if we keep fifteen points firmly in mind — ”

“Why all the Sunday words, Austro?” I asked him.

“Carrock, I'm trying to shake my ape-boy image,” he said. “People think that all I can say is ‘carrock’. Well, the hot-brain season is one of the seasons that the people have been too busy to remember. Of course we always remembered it back home, and we always had the hottest brains of anyone in the world. But we felt the other people dragging their feet, or dragging their lobes on it, and this slowed us down, since all people are one corporation. Ah, George, the hottest property tomorrow will be Simon McCoy of Olathe, Kansas, in this very nation. This young man has just this minute broken his pool cue in total frustration, and if he can get hold of a paper and pencil he will jot down a mass of the most astonishing mathematical tables ever. These will be revolutionary, in the manner of revolving or rotating vectors, but far beyond. They'll have a sort of tilt-spin to them. The number of the pool hall is 1-913-PH9-9199.”

“Got it, Austro,” said Doctor George Drakos, who was a sort of correlator of talent. “Table-tilting and mathematics belong together in hot-brain season. Now quit the jabber and stay with the divining stuff.”

(Barnaby Sheen had drafted all of us to work at his lab and in his sprawling house, running around with buckets to catch the hot-brain rain.)

“Back home we couldn't send the hints strong enough to overcome the indifference of the world-scattered people,” Austro was saying. “We were not able to recall them to the duties and pleasures of the ordained seasons. The only electricity we had was the difference in potential between flint-stone and chert-stone. Here we can broadcast the hints with a real zing. And the people the zing hit first were the jaded-brained pornos who were always howling for faster and newer zings. But it's hit everybody now. If they all find that they like it, I bet they come easier to it next year.”

“Get out of the way, Austro,” Cris Benedetti shouted. “Why don't you come up with something new for the family-plan centers?”

Barnaby Sheen, in just two days time, had set up nine thousand Family-Plan Hot-Brain Parlors to handle the brainster boom. The boom had long since outgrown the porno stores and now it was a communal thing all the way. Brains called to brains and they made scorchy music together. In the country, the people gathered in dingles and dells for their communal-knowledge oestrus or rut; but in the towns the Hot-Brain Parlors of Barnaby Sheen filled a need.

“Can't you move faster, Austro?” Harry O'Donovan was hollering. We all tried to get as much out of Austro as we could. He had talents, but they were lazy talents.

“How can I move faster, Harry? I'm only a twelve-year-old kid,” Austro protested.

“The hot-brain season is really a kid thing,” Austro continued when Harry O'Donovan was off hollering somewhere else, “but I don't think that anyone gets too old to enjoy it. It's real fun to be smart in the smart season. One time down in the Gunas we went in for shooting stars in the hot-brain season. We really shot them out. I mean it. That was only a few thousand years ago. Guys are still puzzled about all those old novas that seemed to happen at the same time. That was about as high going as anybody ever got, even in hot-brain season. Who's got hot enough brains to do it now?”

“Get out of the way, Austro,” Gippo Sharpface barked. “You can chatter when hot hammock season gets here. That's what it's for.”

Roy Mega could have explained the theory of it a little bit, if anyone had had the time to listen to him.

“Conveying subliminal shapes electronically was easy enough,” Roy was saying, “and of course shape is a big part of the stimulus. But our biggest difficulty was conveying subliminal smells at electronic speeds to electronic distances. Smells are essential to it. We had to hype ourselves up and then wait for the hot-brain season to hit the two of us. That's the reason that the season in general was really almost nine hours late. We weren't smart enough to do it on time. It took us nine hours to get smart enough, and then to make and transmit the jog-keys to remind the peoples of the world that a new hot season was here. But after we were hit by the smarts we could work out anything.”

“But just what is it, Roy?” I asked him. I had the idea now that everybody except myself knew what was going on.

“Why, it is only the seasons of the world and of the world's people,” Roy Mega said. “It's the old oestrus and the rutting. People are supposed to have their hot and bright seasons, first for one thing, then for another. But when people started to live under roofs they lost part of their feelings for the seasons. Then they said that they would stay hot on everything all the year round, and they lost another part of it. They really lost the edge of it then. They barely managed to stay lukewarm on everything. And then they lost even that. Every day is a holiday when the hot seasons are observed, and things really get generated.”

“Why is the brain-bust going on in only the northern hemisphere, Roy?” I asked.

“Because the brain-bust is a natural season, and the natural seasons are reversed down there. They're having their own rut down south right now, but you'd hardly believe me if I told you what it was. It's one of the forgotten things that sure hadn't ought to be forgotten.”

“How long will the hot-brain season last here?” I asked him.

“Oh, till the hot-brain full moon. You'll feel it when the season leaves you. And you'll feel a little bit empty. Yeah, for about a minute. Then the next rut season will hit you and you'll be overtaken by something just as strong as hot brains, and entirely different.”

“Get out of the way, Mega and Laff!” Barnaby Sheen was bellowing. “Why do I pay starvation wages around here? Just to hear you guys jabber?”

“Is anybody taking care of it down south?” I asked Austro when next the straw bosses were busy elsewhere.

“Sure, a cousin of mine is doing it down there,” he said. “This cousin was raised on the Malawi Shores, and then he was shanghaied to Rio as a kid. Now he's teamed up with a cross-eyed carioca youngster who's kind of like Roy Mega. They're pretty good at it down there, almost as good as Roy and I are.”

“How many hot seasons are there in the year, Austro?” I asked him.

“Get out of the way, Austro and Laff!” Cris Benedetti was howling. “There's work to do.”

Well, it was fun. Every day, though we worked long hours, was really a holiday. It's fun to be smart. And the smarter you are, the more fun it is. Those who deny this are those who've never had any really smart days in their lives. It's top fun when the whole world is smart, or the top half of it anyhow. There's real excitement in learning everything, everything, and then exploding it into bigger and bigger versions of itself. It's like doubling your life's knowledge every day, and then doubling it again the next day. It's like — 

( — time is compressed here, and the brain days are all run together. There is too much of it for analysis, though analysis of everything else is part of the brain days. The pleasure is still too near to be put into words, and they say that the hot-brain jag will be even better next year.)

“There's a new corporation trying to buy me out,” Barnaby Sheen said one evening. “The corporation is made up of the second, third, and fourth biggest people in the hot-brain cash-in complex. But I'm still number one. Why should I sell?”

“Sell before the sun goes down, Sheeny,” Gippo Sharpface told him. “And then pull a few millions off that roll of yours for us your faithful and seasonable minions.”

“But things are getting bigger and bigger,” Barnaby puffed.

“And tonight is hot-brain full moon night,” Austro said. “Oh sure, it'll be back again next year. Well, sell now and you will have the means to handle it next year any way you want to. Sell it, carrock!”

“At a certain hour we will send out a new shape and a new smell and a new sound,” said Roy Mega. “And these things will trigger the next hot season.”

“Ah, yeah, I hear the new sound now,” Barnaby agreed. “It's the sound that the merry-go-round makes just before it breaks down.”

Barnaby Sheen had to hurry, but he did manage to sell his hot-brain empire before the sun went down.

3

Barnaby Sheen was stamping out a multitude of burning cigar butts. Or else he was dancing some very funny dance in the early morning hours. I had never seen him dance before, but he wasn't bad.

“Loppity, Goppity, Gippity, Gopes. I'm a little kid from the Guna Slopes!” Austro was singing with the ringing upper half of his voice, and he was filling the air with rock dust as he cut the same immortal words into a rock slab. At that moment, Austro was the hottest poet in the world.

Gippo Sharpface, wearing outsized dark glasses, was facing directly into the bright morning sun, and he was painting it: a brilliant burning orb, which was wearing outsized dark glasses. Gippo was doing absolutely new things with color, burning things, foxfire things. Gippo, at that moment, was the finest artist that the world had seen for at least twenty thousand years.

Doctor George Drakos was sitting on a little stool in the morning sunlight. He was holding a surgeon's bonesaw. He had put a double bend into it, and he was striking it with a bone-chiseler's hammer. And you wouldn't believe the music he was making. George Drakos, at that moment, was the finest musical-saw player that the world had ever seen.

Cris Benedetti was wearing a toga, and he had pieces of laurel looped around his ears. He was declaiming drama. It wasn't old Shakespearian drama or any such thing. It was old-new Cris Benedetti drama. It was ringing and riming and eloquent like real hot-art season drama. It moved one to passion and pleasure. Evoked forms crowded the golden morning, and the fine voice of Cris called out real response. At that moment, Cris Benedetti was the finest dramatic declaimer in the world.

Harry O'Donovan was sculpting something in lucite and chrome. It was primordial form made out of the primordial elements of fire and ice. It was almost the secret of life itself, it was almost the shape of destiny. It was probably good.

And the voice of Mary Mondo the ghost girl was doing cantatas and those other flutey songs. And she was good. She had probably always been in accord with the hot seasons.

Roy Mega was producing some sort of delta-secondary music by manipulation of split-frequency circuits. Ah, well, nobody had ever done quite that thing before, and the first of everything is always good, by definition.

“The hot-art season, huh!” Barnaby Sheen commented, still doing his cigar-butt stomp-out dance. “Did you guys know that it would be the next season? There ought to be a way to make a good thing out of it. Austro, do you know who will be the hottest art property in the world by midmorning?”

“Carrock, I know, I won't tell,” Austro caroled. “Moppity, Loppity, Lippity, Moan. Let it alone, man, let it alone!” Austro sure made the rock dust fly when he was graving his verses on stone and singing his own accompaniment to chisel and graver.

“For the sanctification of your soul, don't squeeze every season, Sheeny,” great artist Gippo Sharpface said. “Ah, what nobility and blaze of color! I frighten myself with my own genius. Let this one go by, Sheen.”

“What? You the Fox say that? But I've the feeling that you're right. I think I'll go write a thundering epic drama. It will begin with the Chorus of May Dancers doing a stunning dance sort of like the one I've been doing. Say, are the seasons inexorable under the revised system? Their returning is a freedom-of-expression thing, of course, but must we follow just one sequence in them? We should have a choice in this matter too.”

“There's another world down under,” Roy Mega said.

“What follows the hot-art season here?” Gippo Sharpface asked. And the sun in his painting was brighter than the sun in the sky.

“The hot-rock season will come next,” Austro told us. “That's when the people have the fever for building huge structures out of every material, but rock is the prince of materials. Did you know that the Great Pyramid was built in a single hot-rock season?”

“Does anybody know what is playing down under now?” Harry O'Donovan asked.

“It's the hot-love season just starting there,” Roy Mega said. “Some people believe it was the original oestrus, the first hot wave.”

Gippo Sharpface made a sudden noise. Then he effected one more burning splotch on his splendid painting. “Gad, what genius!” he cried in humble admiration. “But the very greatest things, by their nature, must be left unfinished.” He signed the unfinished painting “Fire Fox.”

“I'm off, fellows,” he said then. “Hot love was always my first love. I can pick up the hot-art season again once or even twice a year. And I'll catch the hot-brain season again, either down there or back here again next spring. But something is calling me down there right now. Anyone for Rio? Austro?”

“No, no, I'm scared of that stuff,” the greatest rock-graving poet in the world refused it. “Maybe next year. I'm at the bashful stage now. Carrock! I'm only a twelve-year-old kid.”

“I'm with you, Gippo,” Harry O'Donovan said, and he left his sculptured lucite and chrome that was almost the secret of life itself.

“In just three more moons it'll be hot-love season here, fellows,” Roy Mega said reasonably. But Gippo and Harry had already gone.

“Gippity, Goppity, Goopity, Gowth! Gippo and Harry are fire-tailing South!” Austro sang and chiseled his great folk poem.

It's wonderful to hear the greatest poet of an age in action.

The Hand With One Hundred Fingers

We are the folks esteemed and loved

By nobody any more.

We are the cloaked and veiled and gloved

And we're rotten to the core.

 — Rotten Peoples' Rollicks

The Hand with One Hundred Fingers was pretty much in control of things then. It enhanced persons and personalities, or it degraded them, for money, for whim, or for hidden reasons. And what it did to them was done effectively everywhere and forever.

Julius Runnymede had had several afflictions. He had a speech impediment; he was shy, he was inept, he was a bungler. Then, while he was still a young man, he inherited a medium-sized fortune. He decided to invest it in a new personality. He went to one of the leading firms of Person-Projectors, and they cured his disabilities almost immediately. His bungling and ineptitude and shyness and speech afflictions were transmuted into assets. He became one of the finest orators in the Fourth Congressional District, and a bright future lay before him. All thanks to the Hand!

The one hundred fingers of the hand were the one hundred Person-Projector firms in the comprehensive union. They controlled all rulers of all countries, and all parliaments and congresses for the reason that they were able to manufacture presidents and premiers and prime ministers and assemblies (and other power-groups behind the formal assemblies) out of common human material. And they were able to destroy as well as manufacture.

Alice Jacoby was an aspiring young actress, but she had bad acting habits. She popped her eyes and she popped her teeth in the intensity of her theatrical emotions. Her voice was adenoidal, and were it not for its adenoidal element it would have been perfectly flat. She wasn't pretty, and she surely wasn't in any way compelling. She had about as much sex as a green watermelon.

But there were at least two people who loved her and who knew that something drastic would have to be done for her. One of these was her father who mortgaged his farm to get money to help her. Another one was her uncle Jake Jacoby who mortgaged his auction and cattle business to get money for her.

Alice paid the money to a firm of Person-Projectors, one of the hundred fingers of the Hand. The people-engineers of this firm enhanced her personality. And immediately Alice was in demand as an actress. She was known. Nearly everyone in the world had at least a subliminal and unconscious recognition of her.

She still popped her eyes and her teeth when she tried to emote, but now these seemed to be enchanting gestures. Her voice was still adenoidal, but now it seemed to be ravishingly adenoidal. She still wasn't pretty, but now she was compelling. And now she was as sexy as a fully ripe watermelon. All hail to the Hand again!

There were three steps. First a person did not have certain advantages. Then the person seemed to have acquired them. And then it was learned that there was no difference between seeming to have special attributes and really having them.

A person's personality was plotted and planned. Then the personal or aura signature was attached to an updated and almost presentable electronic personality. This new electronic personality was let onto world television for only one-fiftieth of a second; but that was time enough to create a consensus and to give a resonance back. The weight of members of participating persons was most important in this. An unchallenged (and unconscious) world consensus of the electronic personality was formed. Oh, there was a bit more to it than that, about a minute and a half more to it than that. If it were too simple then everybody could set up in the Person-Projector business and reap fortunes.

Well, if it worked for Alice Jacoby, why wouldn't it work for everybody? It would, it would. Almost everybody who was able to raise a small or medium-sized fortune had now become a Corrected-Consensus-Projected-Personality. It worked for Wisteria Manford, it worked for Peter Hindman, it worked for Hector Gibbons. It worked for quite a few millions of person, but it would be a distraction to list them all.

The Persons-Projectors brought down as many persons as they elevated (to give a proper balance to things); but the downfallen are hardly noticed at all. And everybody noticed the uplifted.

“The century-long battle over the nature of reality is finished. The ‘Nature of Reality’ lost. Reality is seen to be no more than a mirage, a heat-inversion false appearance. No one has ever really slaked his thirst in the bogus waters of reality. But almost everyone has imagined that he has. And the imagining is just as good. It was once said that subjectivity and objectivity were opposite sides of the same coin. Now we know that they are the same reverse side of the same coin, and the face of the coin is blank.

“Reality is what enough people believe that it is. Reality is a projected conditionality. And a person is exactly what the current, projected consensus of that person shows him to be. There is no more to it than that. It was noticed, more than a hundred years ago, that people in group pictures tend to look alike; that is to say, they became persons of a particular consensus. It was noticed that persons in crowds take on the look of that particular crowd; and that persons in demented or rabid crowds lose all individual characteristics and come to look almost exactly alike.

“Soon after these first realizations, a group of men (they were then believed to be a bunch of fox-faced phonies, but we now know that they were a noble assembly of the media lords themselves) undertook the creation and projection of artificial personalities. It was, they believed, that ‘artificial’ and ‘natural’ were somehow in opposition, which we now know to be untrue. This was a praiseworthy electronic manipulation which paralleled the genetic manipulation which began at about the same time. So, by introducing ‘new-date projection’ to attach to certain persons, by using old-fashioned folk interaction newly directed, by employing feedback from that interaction, by adding the ‘coloration’ technique, people could be stabilized into their true and valid forms. This would work for anything. Inanimate objects, and even the sun and the moon, could likewise be converted into new and clarified forms by these techniques; and they will be.

“We have reality now. We never had it before because of diverse viewpoints. The modern psycho-resolution-projection movement has begun to move with electronic speed and spread, and with exponential growth.”

 — Jonathan Fomry Bierce, Notes on the History of the Theory of Projected Persons.

Crispin and Sharon Babcock had once seemed to be in love. What they were in now, with the arrival of reality, was uncertain; but the old ‘in love’ business was shown to have had no reality. Probably they were no more than ‘associated persons with prejudice’ now.

In that earlier time, though, they had both seemed to be quite attractive in all ways, and well fitted to each other. They had even seemed to have a clear physical and mental beauty. Their body measurements and weights would still reveal a fine proportion and beauty; but are you going to believe measurements or are you going to believe your own eyes and other senses? Crispin and Sharon were both clearly substandard now, and that is all there was to it.

It was because of his saying “I don't believe that that is all there is to it” about a number of things that Crispin first got into trouble. By this he showed himself to be an unconforming young man, unfaithful to the holy and historical disestablishment, and it was right that he should have gotten into trouble. And Sharon was tied so deeply into a complex of inanities that she was beyond correction.

“As long as we have each other, it will not matter what the rest of the world does or thinks,” Sharon said once.

“If we are faithful to ourselves and to each other, then we can survive even the ruination of the world,” Crispin had said. And both of them, for a while at least, had believed these things.

There had been a time when Crispin and Sharon had appeared to be successful in their lives. They had satisfaction and station and money and children and a happy home and fine friends. Or so they thought. They even had the illusion of a cup running over with sheer delight. Self-deception must have been rampant in them. And when they finally had to face up to reality there was never a couple who opposed that facing-up so stubbornly or so unreasonably.

Both of them had refused to have personality-correction projection. They just didn't want it, they said. They didn't believe that they needed it, and they preferred things the way that they were. Refusals like theirs would tear the very fabric of the new society.

On the matter of giving up their children they had even defied the law. And they had refused for a long time to admit that their children were ugly and malodorous and moronic and repulsive.

“They are beautiful children, they are pleasant children, they are intelligent children, and they are good children,” Sharon had insisted to an official in defiance of all reason. “We love them and they love us. Let us alone! We will maintain our own ways. We will walk in beauty and happiness as we have walked. You have no right to interfere!”

But the officials had the ‘right of reality’ to interfere. So the children were projected as officially deficient. And this projection, by definition, was the reality of the case. And Crispin and Sharon became more and more suspect after the termination of their children. Their attitude just wasn't good.

They retained, however, a sense of humor. But unsanctioned humor in bestial persons can be made to project itself badly. Their magic together had been very much weakened when it became the case that they couldn't stand to be too close to each other.

2.

We are the sick, ungallant band

Whose once bright step must lag.

We are the people who live in the land

Where even the buzzards gag.

 — Rotten Peoples' Rollicks

Judge Roger Baluster had once been a magistrate, and later he had been a manufacturer and business man. Still later he had been a tycoon. And that is where he broke it. Tycoons are so easy to type and tear.

And really had he ever had the nobility of character that a magistrate and a business man and a tycoon should have? What he did have was a long history of non-cooperation with the Person-Projector firms.

As a young man Roger had been a crusading judge. He had crusaded against a complex of disintegrating things when they had been new and unestablished. And now when they were set and established they crusaded against Baluster to his ruination. But through the years he had become a man of much hidden wealth. He was a full-feathered bird and his plucking would take a long time.

In the beginning of it, he had refused to pay a firm that was in the Person-Projection business the simple monthly fee for ‘Personality Updating and Maintenance.’ This was petty of him, for he was a rich man.

Roger had had the look of an eagle. He had had pride and judgment and compassion. And humor. He had been (this is hard to believe in the light of his real character as it was later made manifest) admired and liked and respected by almost everyone.

But he had refused to pay a simple fee. Well then, he would have to pay a complex fee of a much steeper sort. He was handed upward to larger hands. A bigger and more comprehensive firm in the Person-Projection business decided to take the enhancing of Baluster's personality in hand. And, unaccountably, he refused this offer also. He was placing himself above the law and above the community.

“Well then, Baluster, we will degrade your personality till you are held in universal contempt,” the men of the first-class Person-Projector firm told him. “We will reveal a totally shabby person who is the valid ‘you.’ Of the false image which you built for yourself nothing will remain. That is the way that things are, and there is only one side to things.”

“Aw, I think there is another side to this,” Roger Baluster said resolutely. “And I believe that something of what I built will remain. The ‘Inner Me’ will remain.”

“So then it will remain,” said those huckstering men of that firm. “But it will remain as it really is and not as you imagine it. We will give you a certain transparency now. There is nothing like letting the honest light of the day into a dark man like yourself. This transparency will be subliminal, of course, but it will be near universal. Everybody will be able to see into you in those faster-than-a-blink moments. And nobody's ‘Inner Person’ is attractive. People will see you, in those instantaneous intervals that are too short to be recorded, with complete revulsion. They will see you as a dirty complex of entrails and uncased organs. Yours will be the sharp and foul smell of blood and viscera and illegally opened persons. Other aspects of you will become other vile things, but the ‘inner you’ will have become a charnel house in its offensiveness.”

“There will be another sort of ‘Inner Me,’ ” Baluster insisted, “and you will not be able to touch that.”

“Whatever there is of you, we can touch it and bend it and twist it,” they said.

Well, they did touch and bend and twist every discoverable aspect of Judge Roger Baluster. They rotted every element of him, and they set his reputation into reeking corruption.

Once there had been the time when Roger Baluster had had the look of an eagle. Now he had the look of a buzzard or vulture. His pride and judgment had been destroyed utterly. His compassion and his humor had been horribly twisted. His appearance, whenever a glimpse could be got of it, was completely repulsive. As were so many now, Roger was cloaked and masked and swathed most of the time. But a really foul appearance can come through every swathing and speak to every sense.

They had disrupted Baluster's household also. They had taken his wife away, and he couldn't find out what they had done with her. They had destroyed two of his children, and they had turned the other two against him.

But he still had money, very much money, cannily hidden. That was what kept him alive. Money can buy a grudging sort of acknowledgement as long as there is any of it left.

Silvester Sureman had gotten crossways with the firm that handled the maintenance of his personality. Before that, things had gone well with him. He had on the day of the misunderstanding moved into a new suburban home, a sign of affluence. Silvester himself had a misunderstanding-removing business which he called ‘Roadsmoothers Inc.’ He was a good relations man. He talked now to the men of the firm that handled the maintenance of his personality. “There is no need for misunderstanding here,” he said. “I beg of you to take no action on this now. I beg you to take no action till tomorrow morning. Misunderstandings often disappear overnight.” Silvester thought that he had them convinced, but something must have gone wrong. That firm did take action against Silvester that night while he slept. A nightshift man at the firm found a note on Silvester that had been written by a day-man. The day-man had forgotten to put a hold on that note. So the nightshift man routinely had Silvester destroyed in the area of his strength: his sureness in things, and his ability to remove misunderstandings. A split-second echo had gone and come from the world mind that this was a man who was Mr. Quagmire himself, the man who would always be bogged down in indecision and misunderstanding.

On the day of the misunderstanding, Silvester Sureman had phoned the Morning Enterprise to tell them to begin delivering the paper at his new house. “These changes take a little time,” the man at the Enterprise said. “It may be the day after tomorrow morning before you receive the paper at your new place.”

“I am sure that it can be done by tomorrow morning,” Sureman said. “With effort and understanding all things can be done quickly.”

Then it was the next morning and Sureman went out from his new house early in the morning to get his paper. Yes, it was there. Or was it his? The paper was exactly midway between his house and the house next door. Did the people next door take the morning paper? The light was on there, so Sureman went and knocked on the door. A huge man with oversized eyes and lather on his face came and opened. (Those oversized eyes, the man either had a thyroid condition or he was a Groll's Troll.)

“Do you take the Morning Endeavor newspaper?” Silvester Sureman asked brightly.

“That is no possible business of yours,” the man said bluntly. “No, I do not take such a thing. What this neighborhood does not need is one more nut. Don't be one.”

“Thank you, thank you,” Sureman said, “I am just trying to prevent misunderstandings before they start.” He patted the man on the shoulder and the man winced. How awkward of Sureman! Possibly the fellow was a Groll's Troll, and they are very touchy about being touched.

Sureman picked up the paper and sat at the little sidewalk bench in front of his house to read it. And after a while the huge, shaven man came out of the house next door. He seemed to be looking for something. Then he came over to Silvester Sureman and punched him in the nose and took the paper.

“I told you not to be a nut in this neighborhood,” the man said. “Stealing my morning paper is in the order of being a nut.”

“But you said that you didn't take the Morning Endeavor,” Sureman said reasonably out of his bloody face.

“I don't,” the huge man said. “This is the Morning Enterprise. There isn't any such paper as the Morning Endeavor.”

The man started back into his house with the paper. Sureman had gotten his tongue twisted on the name, that was all. Oh, oh, that big man was coming back again!

That huge man came up to Silvester Sureman again and punched him in the nose so hard that he broke it.

“It's one thing to be a nut,” the huge man said. “It's something else to be a nut with a worm in it. That last punch was because you have a worm in you.”

And Silvester Sureman did have a worm in him. It rotted him and it ate him up from the inside, and it brought him down and still further down. Silvester lost his business, of course. He lost everything. He was prone to total misunderstandings and he could do nothing right. He went down and down till he had become one of the vile untouchables.

Conchita Montez had once been legendized as a stunningly beautiful woman of the Latin persuasion. It had been believed that she had great charm and elegance and intelligence and presence. Her way with the English language had seemed enchanting, with all those delightful slurrings and mispronunciations. Her eyes and her wit twinkled, and she was one of the persons who brightened her era. That was the legend. But beautiful legends are not always self-sustaining: there is a fragility about even the best of them. And those were the times of fragile personalities.

It isn't known quite where Conchita went wrong. She had given so much enjoyment to everyone! But it was said that she was very particular about whom she gave more special enjoyment to. She apparently didn't know who was running the world in those years. Her rejections of some of the high lords were resented.

“The old way would be to throw acid in your face and so wreck your beauty,” one of those lords told her. “We are more subtle and more thorough now. We throw the acid behind your face and it wrecks your whole person. Then your face will crumble of itself.”

So those Person-Projectors did a job on Conchita and she became repulsive at once. Became repulsive? She had always been repulsive, of course. Hers was a repulsive nature.

What did we ever see in her? Old posters of her had shown her as absolutely beautiful. That was when those old posters were new. Well, why didn't those same posters still show her as beautiful? Because she was repulsive and always had been. And now they showed her as repulsive.

But no poster could show her as repulsive as she really was. A poster could not show the mush-mouthed offensiveness of her speech or the screaming tediousness of her person.

So she became a hooded and swathed untouchable, ringing her cracked bell when she had to be out-of-doors, avoiding and avoided by all decent people.

3.

My wife is like a doll with a crooked back

And a voice like a broken fiddle.

I love her like a potato sack

With a rope around her middle.

 — Rotten Peoples' Rollicks

Crispin and Sharon Babcock went that evening into what was probably the most beautiful sly hall in the world. If it had not been so before, their entering almost guaranteed that it would be so now. The sly halls were the last refuge where obnoxious people could gather to enjoy (it was as if the word ‘enjoy’ had been minted fresh just for the sly halls), to enjoy the rousing old pleasures and beauties. The enjoyments and the beauties were very subjective and selective, and they were awfully tenuous. But they were the only enjoyments and beauties that these people could bring about. These places might be kept enjoyable as long as their people held together on their clear courses.

“The thing will work as long as we are all faithful to each other,” Crispin Babcock said.

“Oh Lord of the Sick Scorpions, please don't say that again, and again, and again!” Sharon Babcock moaned to herself. (Crispin's statement was one that he made a thousand times a day.)

All the members of the sly halls were outcasts of the untouchable class. They ate and drank in the sly halls. They played music and chukki there. They had shows, they had arts, they had books and all graphics. There were body sports and mind sports. There was song and dance, conversation and cookery and casuistry.

In every sly hall were the one and two room mansions for the couples and for the families (though there were few children; most of the children of the outcasts had been destroyed). There were the single rooms for the singlings. There were the blessed rituals that are at the heart of every sly hall; and there was the intense civilization that is the seal of all the sly people.

Some of the folks in the halls were neither masked nor veiled. Some did not even wear the great cloak, the wrongly called ‘invisibility cloak’. They were guised of themselves, they said: they had no need to be disguised. But that was only fancy talk. Most of them were as masked and swathed as it was possible to be.

“Wintergreen was knocked off today,” Judge Baluster said. “That's nine of the sly halls knocked off in four days and nights. Somehow the companies are shattered and the people flee out of the halls. So they are arrested for being persistently in public places, and some of them are executed for it. They can't live anywhere except in the halls. Who would rent or sell rooms or houses to the outcasts? But the people get more fun out of the outcasts when they are driven into the open. There was complaint before that they hardly got to enjoy those of us who made such shelters for ourselves. Some new technique is being used to break up the companies and make the outcast people flee the halls.”

Baluster was keeping his hands busy arranging the ritual places in the sly hall: the 3.05 meter long poles, the pairs of mittens, the desperation-philosophy texts, the tin cans and the wires to run between them, the electric helmets with their euphoric vibes, the piles of good-will mottos.

“What is the new technique, Roger?” Silvester Sureman asked. “Dammit, Roger, can't you do something about your appearance?”

“I'm sitting out of your line of vision, Silvester,” Roger Baluster said, “and I'm completely swathed, so that not one particle of me can be seen in any case. What do you mean by my appearance?”

“It's nauseating, you know, and your voice is worse. Well, what is the technique that they're using on us now?”

“I don't know, Silvester, but they're attacking out of a new dimension. I thought that they couldn't hit us with anything else, but they seem to be doing it. We thought we could set up asylums here and there, the sly halls, and make them into worlds of our own. We thought that, in our own circles, we could gradually become less repulsive, to ourselves and to each other, and so regain a measure of self-respect. And we have made progress, very slow progress.”

“Oh yes. In a thousand years our progress might be seen clearly, to one with sharp eyes,” Silvester Sureman said dismally.

“At least we still have each other, Sharon,” Crispin Babcock wheezed, and he pressed Sharon's hand.

“Aw, ugh, ugh, ugh,” Sharon said with a complete lack of enthusiasm. “Don't, Crispin. It's like being touched by a reptile.”

But it was a pleasantly contrived world that they had made for themselves in the sly hall. The great skylights let the sunlight in during the daylight hours; and there was profuse greenery and striking garden arrangements. Otters played in the stream and in the fountain. The bright weavers were everywhere. Salamanders ran like quicksilver and fire over everything. There were cascades of ivy. Eagles perched on the entrance posts, and there was a certain architecture of pride in the big building and in its people.

“We are all celebrities now, you know,” Conchita Montez mumbled. “People everywhere in the world know us and know who we are. It isn't much, but it is something. We are valid characters, even if we are only characters for the popular hate-culture.”

“The ultimate pornography, hatred,” Crispin said piously.

“Yes, that's so,” Silvester agreed. “The Projection Lords are not really superior to ourselves any more than an axe murderer is superior to his victims. But there's no denying that they have the advantage over us, and it may be the ultimate advantage. You do know why they keep a few of us alive?”

“Oh, it's necessary for the balance of their system that the people and themselves have something to hate intensely,” Baluster said. “And it's quite true that hating is fine, that it's a deep and furious pleasure. But we ourselves can't hate the Projector Lords, and we can't hate the populace whom they control. They simply are not programmed to be hated, and the Lords have the control of the programming. But we can hate ourselves and others of the outcasts; we can and we do. It's the last pleasure left to us. That's what is behind our scapegoat trick that we have agreed upon. By it, some of us will be saved when our company is stricken. We don't yet know who our scapegoat will be. Whomever the lightning of our hatred strikes first, that will be the one.”

“They want us out in the open where they can have cleaner shots at hating us,” Conchita said. “Oh well, I guess I want us out in the open too. It's stifling in here.”

“A three-point-oh-five meter pole, two pairs of mittens, a couple of tin cans, and a length of wire,” said Crispin Babcock. “Who would believe that they would be last-chance things? I don't know how we will use them yet (it will be given to us in that hour how to use them), but this is the list that comes to my mind for Sharon and myself. And all these things are here among the ritual objects of our own sly hall.”

“It's remarkable how little hardware they have to use in Person-Projecting,” Silvester Sureman said. “It's just a combination of coded frequencies to express a displeasure, to contain a person-identification, and to call for an echo, all formed into a wave transmission and set to travel around the world on a common carrier wave. And there is filtering as needed and amplification as needed. And behold! a person is smeared to destruction, forever and to all the world. It's the Dynasty of Hatred that now obtains in the world.

“And also there is very little software that they have to use in Person-Projecting. A repertoire of hatreds is maintained; it is added to from the residues of broken persons, and it is dispensed freely and rather imaginatively. A person-smear will be manifest to almost every sense including the unorganed intuitive senses. Except smell. Smell is transmitted only by actual physical particles from the smelled object reaching one.”

“But could not smell-reminders be triggered electronically? Could not smell be transmitted in some coded fashion? Nothing comes into our minds without a reason, and the sense of strong and murderous smell has just come into my mind. People, is smell the new technique? Is it the attack out of the new dimension? I feel that it is, and I feel that it's upon us now.”

Wisteria Manford burst into the sly hall. Wisteria had long since fallen into the outcast condition. She had run out of money for her personality maintenance. It is very dangerous to run out of money. And it takes a lot of money to maintain a borderline personality.

“Garden City has fallen!” Wisteria cried. “Exaltation Heights has fallen! Beggar on Horseback has fallen! Snug Harbor and Bright Shores and Citadel and Gold Beach and Pleasant Gardens and Tomorrow Land have all been shattered. All the sly halls are being emptied by this new attack, and we're next. It's a stink that they use to split up the people, a killing stink. And it's coming to us right now.”

Indeed, the first heavy wave of stench had come into the sly hall with Wisteria. They shrank away from her. Through the holes in the walls they shrank away from her. The stench shattered the Company, and it changed the sly hall itself completely.

In the light of, in the odor of the new and overpowering stench, the sly hall changed. It does not matter whether the change was subjective or objective. In the new order, there is no difference between the two conditions. The great skylights of the hall — what great skylights? — were sky holes, roof holes. The roof itself was fallen-in and gappy; that's why there was always sunlight during the daylight hours. The famous greenery of the hall was not so very green. The plants growing there were stinkweed and sick fungus. The otters playing in the stream and fountain were seen to be rats skulking out of the stagnant water. The bright weavers were uncommon spiders of unusual size and malevolence. The salamanders were snakes. The quicksilver-and-fire was a slimy decay lit up by methane-rot. The ivy was poison ivy. The perched eagles were vultures and buzzards. And the only pride to be found in the hall was the stubborn pride of carrion flesh. The people wanted out of that hateful hall at once. How had they ever gathered in such an offensive place?

With the second heavy wave of stench the people did all burst out of the hall. It was necessary that they get away from their rotten refuge, but it was even more necessary that they get away from each other and the foulness of their former company. The supreme necessity was that they should get away from their stinking selves, but how was that to be accomplished? But Crispin Babcock, in spite of the furious urge to be gone, did pick up certain ritual objects that had already been in his mind.

With the third heavy wave of killing stench, the scapegoats were chosen blindly by the scattering company. And those scapes whom the lightning of hatred struck first and most violently were — 

4.

We are the stenchy actors cast

In the reeky, smelliferous role.

We are the folks that nobody da'st

To touch with a ten-foot pole.

 — Rotten Peoples' Rollicks

Those scapegoats whom the lightning of the hatred struck first and hardest were Crispin and Sharon Babcock. All the people broke away from Crispin and Sharon in revulsion, and they looked at each other in sniggering horror.

“At least we have each other,” Crispin said sickly.

“If you say that once more I'll scream my head off!” Sharon wailed shrilly.

“Small loss if you did. Gah! What a head!” Crispin shouted.

And yet they were still in accord a little bit. People truly in love will always be a little bit in accord. There was something valiant about their response. Both of them realized at the same time what to do with the ritual objects. Each one of them put one mitten on his end of the 3.05 meter pole and the other mitten on his hand to hold it. They rigged the length of wire between the two tin cans and made a kids' telephone. Crispin and Sharon had been children together and had talked on tin-can phones before. They still cared for each other slightly, but oh how they both did stink! Was there any possible way that the 3.05 meter pole would be long enough? They should have put 3.05 kilometers between each other.

But when they talked to each other on the tin-can telephones much of the ugly, sound-clashing horror had gone out of their voices. Here was a sound filter that nobody knew about except themselves. Their words had a rusty sound, but they were not otherwise offensive. Here was something that all the Person-Projector companies had overlooked. If they had known about it they would have done a job on tin cans also, to make any sound coming through them repellent.

The two Babcocks headed into a stiff wind that blew the smell off them pretty well. Why, this would be almost bearable, this life together-apart! Only ten feet apart, and they could breathe. They were hooded and shrouded, of course, and could never actually see each other again, but remembered appearances came to them that were a little less horrible than they had been used to in more recent times. Each pressed his end of the pole with a mittened hand, and it was almost like holding hands again.

They even became a little bit jocular in their rusty-voiced banter back and forth.

“Ship to shore, ship to shore! My wife is a rot-headed, smelly bore,” Crispin bawled into his tin can, and they both laughed. ‘Ship to shore’ and ‘shore to ship’ had been their tin-can telephone code when they were children.

“Shore to ship! Shore to ship! With his wobbly brains and his wobbly lip,” Sharon laughed a rusty jeer.

Oh, somehow things would still be tolerable between them, despite the fact that they were the smelliest and lowest outcasts in the land! Even the birds veered away from them in the air. But if they kept a firm grip on the pole they could keep from flying apart. If the strong breeze held forever (they needed that to keep their smell from building to critical intensity), if they didn't begin to think about the situation again, if there was not another assault to drive them finally into sick insanity, if — 

There was another assault, the fourth heavy wave of killing stench and hatred. And both fell to the ground. This would be the death of them, and the joy of many millions of people who had picked up the tang and rhythm of the drama and disintegration.

But the last problem of Crispin and Sharon was holding off that ultimate hatred. Could they delay the mortal hatred for each other until merciful death should have taken them?

No, of course they couldn't delay it. It was the mortal hatred that killed them. The Hand with One Hundred Fingers will not be cheated by any last minute tricks.

Fog In My Throat

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

 — Eliot, The Waste Land

Fear death? — to feel the fog in my throat,

The mist in my face.

 — Browning, Prospice

“I have never known a person who feared death when he finally came to it,” Cornelius Rudisijl said. This Rudy was a vital old man of overflowing facilities. By the year count he shouldn't have been too far from death, or at least from the thought of it: but it would be hard to imagine him afraid of that terminator or of anything else.

“I'm afraid of death,” said Gretchen Schrik with a shudder. “There's no denying it. It's my strongest obsession, this fear.”

“And you're twenty years old,” Rudisijl said, “and probably seventy years away from death. You will not be afraid of it when it comes. Nobody ever is. That's the mystery of it.”

The strong, sad, and sonorous ‘Song of Job’ was heard in the near distance. Job was one of the clinic rats who had received a certain specific, but Job had been an accident-prone rat before that. Now he played his strange and agonizing music on the glass harp and he also raised his voice in his despairful song.

“What if I should die suddenly?” Gretchen shivered. “What if I should die today? Even the talk of it scares me.”

“Well, what if death does come to you today?” Rudisijl asked. “I tell you that you will not be afraid of it when it comes.”

Jubilee and Halleiluiah, two other clinic rats who had received the specific, were raising their voices and their instruments in songs somewhat more hopeful than the ‘Song of Job’, but nevertheless they were very intricate songs, for rats at least.

“Gretchen is afraid of death,” Rita Malley said in friendly mockery. “And my own consultant tells me that I'm afraid of life.”

Three-and-a-half miles away, across town, another comparatively young person was worrying about death. He also was near twenty years of age and had a normal expectancy of another seventy years of life. A normal expectancy, but the life that he lived wasn't normal. An actuary wouldn't have given him seventy more years: probably not five years unless he changed his ways.

The young man's name was Lucius Flammus and he was lean and mean. He was a legend among the young and sudden and passioned people. He was their duke; he was their flame. Sometimes they called him the Angel of Death. He was involved with death often and he feared it pathologically. This Flammus was going over his long handguns with care and intensity. The guns were like other souls to him and he would not neglect them. He had the feel of tall excitement whenever he touched them.

“I will kill a man today,” Flammus said, and this statement of his always marked a high pleasure-pain in anticipation. “And he will die in terror, in total terror. This is the special part, the part that hasn't happened before. Ah, this will be the greatest one ever! Or the first of my great ones.”

Then Flammus' premonition and excitement clarified itself a little bit.

“There is more to it,” he barked in sharp excitement. “There is bonus after bonus. I will kill a young woman today for an even sharper scene. Aw, but she will not die in terror. I wonder why she won't.”

Flammus sometimes said that he wasn't a killer by choice. But sometimes he deceived himself and sometimes he lied. And also these things happened regularly in his trade, and he took what satisfaction he could from them. His satisfaction from killing, however, was always encased in a separate horror and fear of his own:

“What if I also am killed today?”

“I will tell you something else,” Dr. Cornelius Rudisijl was saying back at the Advanced Experimental Clinic. “In the seventy years that I have been in the flesh and blood trade, I have seen one hundred thousand people die, or seen them shortly after death. One-third of them had died violently, many of them cut off in their primes or youths or even childhoods. I have seen none of them who was afraid of death at the very last minute, and I have never seen even a hint of fear or horror on any dead face.

“I have seen persons who were drowned, who were burned to death, who were done in by knife torture in internecine squabbles, who have died in quicksand over their heads. I have seen three who were sliced in half by sharks. I have seen the face of a man who was pinned down by one rockfall and then killed by a second rockfall which he had to see coming down on him. I have seen the faces of steel-workers who fell to their deaths from high buildings and high bridges and who lived the long conscious seconds during their falls. I have seen the faces of sky-guys and stunters whose parachutes failed to open. I have seen the face of a man caught and eaten, from the feet up, by a crocodile. I have seen many thousands of persons die in pain, and others die without the distraction of pain; and none of them died in fear. I have had persons tell me, some time before their deaths, that they were hysterical with the fear of dying. And yet they died serene. Everybody dies serene. That's a final blessing that makes up for a lot.”

“I simply do not believe that, Rudy,” said Fred Renier who was another of the high doctors at the clinic. “I've surely seen half as many people dying and dead as you have. I cannot, right now, remember one who died in outright terror, but others have seen terror deaths, and the cameras record many of them. I remember one prize-winning photograph of the year past. It still haunts me sometimes. There was — ”

“There have been many such photographs,” Rudisijl said, “and there is only one thing wrong with them. All such pictures were taken too soon. None of them was taken at the absolute moment of death. There was one case a few months back, and it may be the case that you refer to, of a jumping suicide. The picture was taken just as he cleared his ledge on his downward leap to the predictable and stereotyped ‘Jump! Jump! Jump!’ shouts of the happy people below. Yes, the face, as shown in that prize-winning photograph taken by that journalistic photographer as he crept along the ledge to get the best shot, that face did show absolute horror and bottomless fear. But I saw the shattered man after he was laid out. His head and face were broken, as was the rest of him, but the expression on his face was whole. Believe me, it was the expression of serenity. A change had come over that man during his four hundred foot plunge, a beneficent change.”

Now there was heard the rhythmic chorus of guinea pigs singing. The guineas are normally almost soundless. They do not sing at all in the ordinary course of things, and who ever heard of them singing in chorus? But these guinea pigs had received the specific.

“Believe me, I wouldn't hit the street with a serene expression after such a leap,” said Rita Malley who was a young lady doctor there. “I fear death as much as Gretchen does, and I bet I can scream louder. There would have been screaming horror on my face.”

“No, there would not,” Rudisijl insisted. “Sometimes the period seems a little short for what must be a chemical reaction to take place, but it does take place no matter how short the time. I've known it to be within fractions of a second. And what we are working on here at the clinic is something akin to this serenity-in-death reaction. We have come up with the serenity-in-everything specific. Whether it will be required to work in fractions of a second I don't know, but that is possible. We are looking for the specific against all anxiety, against all worry, against all unhappiness, against all frustration. I said long ago that if the specific for all these things was in the zoochemical field that we would find it. Now the three of you confirm it to me that we probably have found the specific.”

“Oh happy rats!” Gretchen Schrik cried. “By all our happy creatures, I'm sure that we've found it.”

It really seemed as if they had found the specific. They had created new races of happy rats, of outright delightful rats, of responsible rats, of intelligent rats.

“And of noble rats,” Gretchen said, “and of thoughtful rats. Yes, I mean it, thoughtful rats, devoted rats, rats that are aware of something very great. These are rats that will not waste their time with small worries.”

And such races of guinea pigs also had been brought along, and promising races of several other creatures.

The specific that was being used on these creatures had the simplicity and symmetry of concept that all great specifics possess. It was an electrostatic-condition parahormone that swam in globules of neuroendocrine substance. It was needled into the two main arteries leading into the brain. It worked quickly. It made happy and superior creatures, and it kept them superior.

With one exception, that only Gretchen knew about. She discovered a specific-treated rat that had died, not from anything connected with the specific, but from simple rat scours. The scours is a rapid wasting disease but it is not painful. And yet the dead rat was contorted and deformed with a look of total horror. Gretchen destroyed the beastie without saying anything to anyone. It was too akin to her in its dying fear. She thought that perhaps she was mistaken, that such an expression in a rat hadn't the same meaning as such an expression in a person. But Gretchen had close feeling for the rats, and deep down she knew that it had died in real horror.

But that was the only rat that died during the weeks of the experiments with the various forms of the specific. All the other animals were not only healthy but they seemed to be fastidiously healthy. It was almost as if they took the greatest care to avoid sickness and death, to avoid any discomforts that might lead to them.

“This will be one of the greatest of all advances,” Rudisijl said. “I believe that it is mental clarity that the infusions give to the rats. I believe that it is total freedom from superstition. Yes, of course rats are normally subject to superstition. You aren't familiar with Richard's Ratten-Aberglaube und Nagetier-psychologie? I believe that a cloud, of unknown function, had entered all minds, animal and human. I believe that our specific will shatter our cloud.”

“Maybe there is good reason for the cloud,” Gretchen said. “Maybe the obstruction was put there for good cause, and its removal will be dangerous.”

“No. There cannot be good reason for such a mind-cloud, for such an obstruction. It is a deception and a darkening, however it happened. Our specific will, among so many other things, bring an end to such deceptions and concealments. It will bring the beginning of total clarity.”

“Maybe it is possible for clarity to be too total,” Gretchen said.

“I don't think so,” Rudisijl told them. “What are you trying to say, Gretchen? Have your own anxieties and terrors not faded, Gretchen? I believe they have faded just from your observing the removal of so many frustrations and worries in the creatures.”

“Yes, my own anxieties and terrors have faded, to a great extent,” Gretchen admitted. “But I'm not at all sure that final clarity is what I want. I believe that what I want is to be rescued from that final clarity.”

Well, Gretchen's anxieties had faded, but they had a long way to fade. Only a month before this she had written a panic-stricken letter to her mother:

“ — it is no good dodging it, mama; it is no good running away from it. It will be with me for as long as there is a me. And then this thing (the fear) will still be here when I am gone. It is an independent entity and it does not need a person to attach to. The dreadful fear, the choking fear is itself a being.

“It would be no good me coming home again. Traps are set for me there. I have fled from this terror all my life, and it is waiting for me in a ravening form in every place that I have ever fled. I will not outgrow this. I do not believe that anybody is free from this fear. I don't know why we don't all die from the fear of death. Really, I believe that it is what we all die from.

“Oh, there are things to do. And there are lives to be lived, as you say. I know those things and I do those things. I am the most occupied person ever known. But the main thing is always there waiting. Do not any others fear it as much as I do? My psychologist says that he doesn't know about all the others, but he fears it as much as I do. He is a very honest man. And the fear of death is all the horrors rolled into one.

“Ghost-fears and night-horrors are part of it, weak surmises of what may be waiting for us when the lights finally go out. But I am pretty sure that the reality, or the terrible screaming unreality, will be worse than any of our surmises.

“Falling-horror dreams are parts of our death-fear. The hysterical fear of falling does not reside in the threat of crashing at the bottom of the fall: rather it is the dread of not coming to a bottom, ever.

“Experiences of choking, strangulation, smothering, and drowning are parts of it. It is the suffocating fog in the throat of which the poet wrote. It is the rape of the breath that is the life.

“Buried-alive terrors are part of it. We will be buried, or we will be burned or otherwise destroyed; but do we hope to be dead forever or to be alive again in our burial?

“Form-change horror is part of the death-fear. This is the frightfulness of common persons and creatures turning into monsters and snakes and ravening animals. It is the dread of what we may see when our temporary flesh-masks are gone. And yet all these are the more pleasant of the fearful alternatives: and the least pleasant alternative is to change into nothing.

“Walking corpses make up one precinct of the personal and universal death-horror dream. But even walking corpses are the best of the several choices. And the worst of them is the corpse, that will not walk again, not in a million aeons.

“The deprivation of support, especially in the case of small children, the being left alone, is an intrinsic part of it. It is the case of being left alone forever, of going to a place where there are no other places or people, where there have never been others. Death is the longest of all lonelinesses and there is no way that it can be tolerated either in sanity or in madness. It is too extreme to be borne by humans. And is extinction a way of bearing it?

“But extinction is the most horrible thing possible, to my mind. And it appears that it is the most likely of the sequences. Were I given a choice between extinction and hell, and I am not sure that we are not all given that perpetual standing choice as a part of our eternal torture, I would choose hell again and again and again. And I do mean the screaming-pain hell a billion times magnified and continuing for the infinite exponent of forever.

“Ah well, I'm sorry to have this little nervous flare-up. It will pass, of course. It always does. And then it will come back seven times more fierce than it ever was before. It always does. You used to say that I was too serious a child. Well, this is what I have always been serious about. What else in life, besides death, is there to be serious about?

“Everything else going well. Doctor Fred Renier likes me, I think. I can probably land him if I want him. He is rich and successful and a great doctor and a fine man. And he is an ultimate fire-worm like all the rest of us and he will die the wormy death. Why, whenever I begin to like a man, do I see him in his death and corruption?

“The town is lively, the shows here are great, the people are witty and some of them are even friendly, and it has been the most entertaining summer of my life. Almost it distracts me. Mr. Rudisijl says that death-fears always diminish and disappear with the closer approach of death itself. How does he know? He has not been there for more than I have. We go, one at a time, bent over and deformed, through that door.

“Your hysterical and loving daughter, Gretchen the wretchen.”

Really Gretchen was a normal and well-balanced young woman who was full of the joy of life. Everybody has a bug or two biting'em. And Gretchen's bug may have been the most common of them all, that little old death bug so often disguised.

She had an interesting job. She was a degreed doctor while still quite young. She was working at one of the clinics where the greatest breakthroughs ever will be made in just a day or two, or have already been made in fact, and need only a bit more testing before being put into effect. The greatest breakthrough ever was working on the animals, and it would surely work on the people. Why do the animals always get the best of everything first?

And those animals! What do you make of gallant animals? — for that is what they seemed to be. What do you make of guinea pigs and hamsters and rats that acquire a sudden air of responsibility, of fairness, of nobility, of thoughtfulness, of deep seriousness, and this accompanied by the removal of all their little frustrations? Well, what do you make of them? It was as if the treated animals were now all possessed of a secret, of a sad secret even, and were resolved to behave all the better for knowing that secret.

There was some argument about the new mental attitude of the laboratory animals that had received the clarifying specific, but nobody argued that they had not become better and more intricate animals with their infusions. Rita Malley (it was she who had made the little glass harps that the animals could play by gnawing on the ends of the glass reeds) was sure that the animals had become more intelligent, and in ways beyond that showed by their improved test scores.

“And the animals are making themselves as agreeable as possible,” Rita said that day. “I wonder why. They have all picked up the habit of bringing to me, and to you others, too, I'm sure, bright objects that they pick up in their recreation area. They bring these things and they present them as offerings. Really they do! And there's something else that you must have noticed: the appearance of art with them. We will have to devise equipment and means and opportunities to see just how deep this new artistic impulse goes in them. They play the harps and they sing individually and in chorus. They make pictures in their recreation areas out of pebbles and rocks and sticks. They begin to build stepped pyramids out of their play-toy blocks. I'm not sure, but I believe that some of their scurrying around, and standing still in queer attitudes, and mock fighting, and chittering in a variety of different voices, I believe that is a form of drama. They're putting on plays, that's what they're doing. Why?”

“For sheer joy, for intense joy,” Doctor Rudisijl said. “They are completely free of all fears and frustrations now, so they live in an intensity of joy.”

“You're wrong, Rudy,” Doctor Renier said thoughtfully. “There is a fear element in their intensity.”

“There is not,” Rudisijl said. “And I am never wrong.”

Well, the test animals had entered a period of blooming culture and endeavor, and they all partook thoroughly of it. Except one, except one more.

For Gretchen found one more dead animal, a hamster this time, just before noon that day. It seemed to have died of black-water fever, but that is seldom fatal in a hamster. Whatever it had died of, the body and head and face were contorted by a horror-fear that was really beyond accepting. It had been an insane and killing fear that had put an end to that hamster: the vestiges of black-water fever were only trifles.

But there should have been two dozen of the animals dying of natural causes during the period of the experiments, and there had only been these two. Gretchen destroyed it, and she went to the other people while hesitating as to whether she should tell them about it.

At high noon that day, there was a crash of glass in one of the little meeting rooms of the clinic, and the noonday devil stood in the midst of them holding two smoking long-pistols. The noonday devil was a young man named Lucius Flammus, sometimes called by the sudden people of his crowd the Angel of Death.

He needn't have come crashing through that little glass screen. It was an ornamental thing only. He could have gone around it. And his long-pistols were not smoking from recent use. They were smoking from a piece of dry ice placed, for effect, in the barrel of each of them. But Flammus played the role of some torrid avenger well. He was a striking and menacing appearance there.

“I've come for the big stuff, the heavy stuff, the straight stuff,” this Flammus spat from behind his pistols.

“No, that's not what you've come for,” Rita Malley said, and she was white and shaking with fright. “Which one of us? Oh, which one of us?” she asked.

“You'll never get away with this, man,” Doctor Renier jibbered out of a terrified mouth.

“Why certainly he'll get away with it,” Doctor Rudisijl said easily. “We will give him several kilos of the big stuff, and then he will go. It happens every day. It happens at this clinic two or three times a year. Why are you all so terrified?”

Doctor Renier, Gretchen Schrik, and Rita Malley were indeed terrified, hysterically fearful, on the edge of shrieking. And so was Flammus the Death Angel himself. He was gloriously sick with his fear. Even the chorus of singing guinea pigs in the near distance had the welling hopefulness of their paean cut deeply into by a sharp uneasiness rising into a stark fear. And Renier, Gretchen, Rita, and Lucius Flammus were all in the grip of a shaking grey horror.

“What is all the nonsense?” Rudisijl was asking. “Here! Here's a kilo of it, man. Now be off!” And Rudisijl dropped a packet into the slung shoulder-bag that Flammus wore.

“He did not come for that, Rudy,” Renier spoke in shaking words. “He came to kill one of us. The big stuff is big to him, but killing is bigger. He is a pathological killer.”

“To kill one of you, yes, that's the big thing,” the insane and terror-shook Flammus hammered out through his chattering teeth. “Oh, aw, I — forgot. It's to kill two of you this time. I don't know why.”

Rudisijl laughed with sharp contempt. He looked at those four dread-filled faces with mordant humor. “What difference will it make?” he asked in a hard voice. “A little trashy event is about to take place. Why try to inflate it into something big? There are no big events.”

The fear and horror went out of Gretchen Schrik's face in a twinkling instant. A calmness and a patient serenity came over her instead. But Rudisijl's superior calm was shattered in the same moment. Shattered by the same moment, likely.

“No, no Gretchen!” he shouted. “She's better than we knew. Anybody but Gretchen!”

The death-fear had gone out of Gretchen in a second because she was going to die in another second. And death-calm is automatic with all persons.

Rudisijl struck one of the long-pistols from Flammus' hand and sent it clattering to the floor. Flammus shot Gretchen dead with his other pistol. And there was no slight trace of fear on her dead face.

Then Flammus shot Rudisijl who was grappling with him, and the doctor fell heavily to the floor. The death-terror had now gone out of the pathological Flammus as it had gone out of Gretchen. In a second it was replaced by a wooden look without fear, a look of indifferent acceptance, the closest thing to serenity that could happen to someone like Flammus. The death-fear had gone out of him in a second because he was going to die in another second. And nobody ever fears death when he finally comes to it.

Renier had taken Flammus' first pistol from the floor, and he killed him with it.

Doctor Rudisijl was in double-voiced shouting hysteria. In the lower tone he dribbled out fear-jerky explanations as his life flowed away from him in unstaunchable bleeding. And in his high tone, he screamed, uncontrollably and horribly.

Doctor Renier had given the specific to Doctor Rudisijl at Rudisijl's own dying request. Rudisijl said that he knew he was dying anyhow and he didn't want to go with his curiosity about the effect of the specific unsatisfied. Renier needled it directly into the two large brain-feeding arteries. The effect, for Rudisijl, was instant and devastating.

“The cloud was there for a reason,” the dying man moaned in his lower tone. “We shouldn't have allowed this synthetic and needled clarity to drive it away. I was wrong! What can one do who has been as wrong as I was?”

Then he broke three octaves upward. He shrilled, he howled on the high key, he broke his terrified voice and choked down in heavy death rales. And he moaned words again in his lower tone:

“The animals haven't entered their post-everything age yet. They still have the capacity of belief. They believe we are gods. When the natural cloud in them was driven away and they looked for the first time clearly on the fact of death, they felt that they could propitiate us into giving them ultimate death-salvation. They prayed to us with stepped pyramids and bright objects and harping and singing. That's what all their promising activity was really about. But I am a post-person, and there is no one I can pray to. The normal death-calm is prevented in me by my own clarifying specific. Oh, it's the outright terror that cannot be tolerated either in sanity or in insanity.”

Those were the last understandable words that Rudisijl ever spoke. But, broken voice and all, he was pretty noisy during those last several minutes of his life. The clarifying specific had overcome the mind-cloud that ordinarily insulates against the fear of death, at the instant of death anyhow. Rudisijl had no insulation and no protection now. It was a stark and towering fear that followed him even into insanity.

Ghost-fears and night-horrors were parts of it, hysterical fear of falling was a part of it, strangulation was a part and being buried alive was a part, form-changes and walking corpses and intolerable loneliness were parts of it, and the temptation-choice between extinction and hell, and the choking fog that is a pursuing person.

And the other parts of it — No, no, no! There are aspects of the clarified and cloud-cleared death-vision that cannot — 

It was a contorted animal terror that took over what had once been Rudisijl's face. It was a many-tongued para-animal, howling and rowling, that took over what had once been his voice. His eyes distended from the intolerable vision and became bursting-full nodules of blood. And they burst open literally with a gory gushing.

Rudisijl died in grey and deformed terror.

What Big Tears The Dinosaur's

“There's a dinosaur hunt going on over in Arkansas,” said Doctor George Drakos. “Let's go over and get in on the fun. Maybe we can take in the races at Hot Springs while we're there.”

“Oh, Arkansas, mother of monsters and myths!” Cris Benedetti intoned piously.

“Austro!” Barnaby Sheen called loudly. “Austro! Where is that blamed kid anyhow?”

“Sure, I'd rather go on a dinosaur hunt in Arkansas than on another rattlesnake hunt to O'Keene,” Cris said. “I'm certain that the dinosaur hunt will be safer. They really do have rattlesnakes at O'Keene.”

“Austro!” Barnaby called again. “Aw dinosaur droppings, that kid can hear a pin drop five miles away, so I know he can hear me. And if there's anything funny happening anywhere he's got something to do with it. Austro!”

“Two hundred people have seen it,” Harry O'Donovan was saying, “so something is there. They've got its footprints everywhere, and they've got a number of clear photographs of it. It's moving fifty miles a day, and it's moving this way. They're going to kill it. It's the tyrant saurus, and it's carnivorous, it could take a cow in a single bite. I'd hate to miss the biggest game hunt of all, but I'm afraid of it. I don't believe an elephant gun would have any effect on it. They'd better figure 90 mm guns at close range. It's a job for the army or the state national guard, not for sportsmen's guns. Ah, but sportsmen wouldn't be sportsmen if they dodged the big ones.”

Barnaby Sheen, Doctor George Drakos, Cris Benedetti, and Harry O'Donovan were my four friends who knew everything.

“Austro! Austro!” Barnaby was still bellowing. “I hate to disturb that boy at his daydreaming, but if there's a hundred foot dinosaur in Arkansas, then Austro's got something to do with it being there.”

“If my dog gets here on time we sure would like to go on that hunt,” Austro said. “We've been communicating about it while the dog's on his way, and he's just about as wild to go on the hunt as I am. That dog of mine isn't afraid of anything no matter how big it is. Carrock, he doesn't like monsters. I bet he'd bite the tail right off of that big whatever-it-is.”

“Austro, how long have you been sitting there?” Barnaby asked crossly, for Austro was in one of the reclining chairs right in that room.

“I've been sitting here an hour, I guess. Carrock.”

“Then why didn't you answer me?”

“Oh, you were bellowing at somebody away off there. It was a directional bellow, and it wasn't sent in my direction. I thought that it was some other Austro that you were calling.”

Austro was an Australopithecus boy from the Guna Slopes of Africa. He worked for Barnaby Sheen.

“Austro, what do you know about the dinosaur over in Arkansas?” Barnaby demanded.

“Just what people say the last two days, and what you say here. Carrock! You say you might go and hunt it. My dog and I, we want to go hunt it too. I hope my dog gets here in time for it.”

“You're sure you don't know anything else about the dinosaur in Arkansas, Austro?”

“I'm sure, Mr. Sheen. I never heard of a dinosaur till the last two days. I just barely heard of Arkansas before that.”

We didn't go on the dinosaur hunt that day. We didn't quite know where to go; the animal was moving almost too fast for the reports to keep up with him. At the ever increasing rate he was moving he'd be on us in a day or two, and our marked map of his movements showed that he was coming straight for us. And the reports that came in weren't at all crackpot reports. They had been straight and sharp reports from the beginning. It was as if all the sightings had been made by persons of sound intelligence and acute observation. There were three sketches and two photographs of it in the morning World.

“This one is better than most textbook drawings,” George Drakos said. “In one respect only, the atrichos representation, is it suspiciously like the popular idea of a dino. None of these pictures gives us the live appearance, which we don't know. All of them give us the museum appearance, which we do know. This puzzles me extremely. But there isn't any doubt that he is the tyrannosaurus rex himself. He is almost the biggest of the dinosaurs. He is by a long ways the biggest of the flesh-eating dinos. Look at the teeth on him! He could crunch a big car or a small house with those teeth. He will go a hundred feet, counting the tail; and when he rears up on those big hind legs he can reach most of that hundred feet high.”

“Well, why can he, George?” Barnaby asked reasonably. “Why is he constructed to reach so high? Was there anything that he preyed on anywhere near a hundred feet high?”

“No, I suppose not, Barnaby,” Drakos said. (We had all become instant experts on dinos in the last several days, but Drakos had been an expert since boyhood.) “Maybe it's to pluck living meat out of the tops of trees, but most things that climb a hundred feet high would be too small for him to bother with. And he could shake anything out of any tree without reaching that high. He would have to eat plenty of large, ground-dwelling animals to get enough to fuel himself. No, I just don't know why he was built to reach so high.”

“When I was a boy I used to have a fantasy about the biggest possible animal,” Barnaby said, “and I still have that fancy or yearning. I want something so big that the next biggest animal in the world would have to hunt it in packs like wolves hunted buffalo, a dozen of them leaping on it to pull it down. I want one so big that tyrannosaurus rex would have to hunt it that way; I want an animal so big that he makes all the others look like pygmies. And I'd give everything I own to be on a hunt for the biggest. Rex will do, and I'm avid to be after him. But really I want an even bigger one. That wouldn't be possible though, would it?”

“No, Barnaby, rex was about the limit,” Drakos said. “Look at the grotesque thickness of his haunches. Even so, if he were half again his weight he wouldn't be able to walk.”

“If my dog gets here tomorrow, can we go on the hunt?” Austro said. “You just don't know how avid my dog and I both are to hunt the big one.”

“We will hunt him, today or tomorrow or the next day, whenever we can locate him certainly,” Barnaby said. “Roy Mega is already finishing the gun that should bring him down. He's the biggest killer ever, and we have to hunt him; if it's him hunting us, then we're dead. Ah, if only we had something to harry him and make him stand to bay!”

“My dog will do that,” Austro said stoutly. “My dog isn't afraid of anything.”

“Austro, do you realize just how big the tyrant rex is?”

“It doesn't matter whether I realize it or not, Mr. Sheen. My dog is too dumb to realize it, and I won't tell him. He'll fight anything; and it's because he doesn't realize how big anything is.”

“Why are you so sure that your dog is coming, Austro?” Barnaby demanded. “I said a few months ago that we'd locate your dog and have him flown over here. You said no. You said the dog could find his own way here just as soon as you let him know you wanted him to come. But he can't find his own way here, Austro — it's halfway around the world.”

“That won't bother a good dog. He's on his way. He's almost here now. We communicate with each other; we can always feel where each other is.”

“How would he cross the ocean, Austro?”

“Swim it. But he's already crossed it, he can swim anything. You should see him swim in our big river back home.”

Ah, the simplicity of that twelve-year-old boy of the Australopithecus species!

We didn't go on the dinosaur hunt the next day either, though we all had our gear at Barnaby's house and were ready to start. There was silence from the dinosaur all that day, but in the evening he was heard from.

He broke up the bridge across the Arkansas River at Fort Smith, and ate selected sections of it. If this dino was a myth he had the biggest teeth of any myth ever seen; myths hardly ever bite out whole sections of bridges like that. And, after the snack at the bridge, he covered the twenty-five miles of very rough country from Fort Smith to Sallisaw, Oklahoma in one hour. Then he seemed to fade away into the deep brush or brush-swamp as he did every night. He didn't like to travel in the dark, apparently.

Nor was he really an early riser. But he was always on the move again long before mid-morning. Now he was close enough that we could go out in the morning and be almost certain of running into him, or the rumor of him. We had our gear at Barnaby's. Hunting gear, that is: but what is really the proper gear for a dinosaur hunt?

“We'll go down in that direction early in the morning,” Barnaby said. “A thing that big can't stay hidden, and I don't believe he wants to hide. Roy Mega has the gun mounted on a ten ton truck. It isn't really a very big gun, it's just a very powerful gun that fires explosive contact shells. But if only we had some way to flush out the big dino and make him turn to bay, then — ”

“My dog can do it,” Austro said confidently. “And he will be here just about dawn. Then we'll start the hunt with him.”

“You're sure that he'll be here, Austro?” Drakos joshed the boy.

“I'm sure of it. Carrock, George, we understand each other. We're in contact all the time.”

“I have a shaky feeling about this, Austro,” Barnaby said. “You drew a picture of that dog once, when you asked if you could have him come here. There was something funny about that dog, but I forget what it was. Could you draw another picture of it, and of yourself?”

“Oh sure. I'll do that right now.” And Austro began to draw with his famous skill. He drew himself very well as a short and powerful and action-balanced boy. And he drew the dog at two-thirds his own height, funny-shaped, the hairiest animal ever seen, and grinning a toothy grin out of a triangular head. Ah, it was the same dog that Austro always drew for his Rocky McCrocky comic strip, which he passed out to the kids of the neighborhood every week.

“Well, the shaky feeling must be coming from something else,” Barnaby said, “and not from that dog there. I've still got a feeling about something, though. But, Austro, your dog there, I just don't believe that he could bring the tyrannosaurus rex to bay, or even make the big animal aware of him. I don't believe that your dog can really fight, Austro.”

“I bet he can,” Drakos said. “That funny triangular shaped head would give real reinforcement to a crushing bite. He has one muscular wedge of a head. That dog of Austro's could take the leg off a fellow if he were so minded.”

“No, he's a good dog,” Austro said. “He hardly ever takes legs off guys.”

We had decided to have a midnight supper at Barnaby's and then sleep over there. In the early morning we would start out on our hunt with or without Austro's famous dog. The dinosaur had been making a pretty straight path in our direction for near five hundred miles.

“We have a destiny with him,” Cris Benedetti said. We all felt that way.

“Well, what is it that we really have a destiny with?” Harry O'Donovan asked. “Is it Illusion, or Time Anomaly, or Hoax, or False Identification, or Dream, or Mechanism, or Special Creation, or Incredible Survival?”

“Fry up a dozen eggs, Austro, and a few rashers of bacon; and make some of your hot biscuits,” Barnaby said. “Only illusions can be discussed on empty stomachs, but both facts and illusions can be discussed on full stomachs; and we don't know which we deal with here.”

“Oh yes, I fry them now,” Austro said. “But if we only had here some dog's eggs such as we have at home, then I'd make you all a real egg feast.”

“Does your own dog lay eggs, Austro?” Barnaby asked.

“No. Not yet anyhow.”

“Is your dog a female?”

“Don't know. It's too hairy to tell.”

“What if we had an egg of tyrannosaurus rex himself, herself?” Harry O'Donovan asked. “How big would it be, George?”

“Oh, not in proportion, but still big. Maybe a hundred times the size of an ostrich egg, which is twenty times as big as a hen's egg. But if we had one we could feast on it for a long time.”

“Is there any way such an egg could be preserved for a very long time?” Harry asked.

“You mean preserved for a period in excess of sixty million years, Harry?” George asked him. “No, there isn't. It would be easier for a population to be preserved intact in some obscure part of the world than for an egg to be preserved. That also is impossible, of course; but there are degrees of impossibility. It's less impossible than that a solitary egg should be preserved. We'd consult experts on this, but there aren't any.”

“But what most likely sort of place could have preserved dinos?” Harry insisted.

“Subtropic or tropic,” George Drakos said. “Plenty of water, lake, river, or swamp. All dinos were wading animals. It's almost certain that they rested or slept with most of their weight supported by water. Tyrant rex has been found with stones in his craw, and they may have aided him in eating some vegetation. But mostly he was a meat-eater. For rex to have survived would require a great amount of meat, which would require a much greater amount of vegetation. It would be a region of lush greenery, possibly a savanna sloping from mountains to river-linked lakes. I don't believe it could have been a heavily forested country. Forests are a delusion: one just hasn't enough bulk of edible plants to support a chain of giant feeders. But it could well be on the edge of mountains, and on the edge of forests, and on the edge of swamps; sharing the resources of all of them in a central valley or slope. The trouble is that such a place couldn't have remained undiscovered on earth. It's the essence of fertile places that they're open places. There couldn't be a hidden Valley of the Dinosaurs for the reason that all rich valleys are open valleys, and dinosaurs are hard to hide.”

“I know a rich hidden valley,” Austro said, but who pays attention to a twelve-year-old kid?

“There has to be a Valley of the Dinosaurs,” Cris Benedetti said, “since the least impossible of the explanations requires it.”

We had eaten eggs and bacon and hot biscuits. And cold musk melons and tomatoes. We had drunk Arkansas wine in honor of Arkansas the Mother of Monsters, and of our coming dinosaur. We had talked talk that isn't recorded here.

“And it's dawn in four hours, men,” Barnaby said. So we spread sleeping sacks on the floor of one of the big rooms there, and we entered into the soft cocoons.

“Drakos, is there more than one species of Tyrannosaurus Rex?” Harry O'Donovan asked.

“There're slightly different species or races of them. The one photographed and sketched in Arkansas seems to be Tyrannosaurus Rex Gunaslopesienus. Good night all.”

We slept.

And we woke gently four hours later. We woke to a pleasant sound and to a pleasant motion.

The pleasant sound was that of a happy dog barking and a happy kid whooping and laughing. The happy kid was Austro.

The pleasant motion was that of the house swaying like a boat. It was a well-built house, and it was holding together for quite a bit of swaying.

Part of the wall of the room we were in fell away, and part of the ceiling fell; so we could see by the early light Austro in the story above us, laughing at a huge head. It was the head of a tyrannosaurus rex, the most vicious of the dinosaurs; and its great neck was wedged into our own room.

“Look at him! Look at him!” Austro whooped. “He lost all his hair when he swam the ocean, and it's just starting to grow back. Carrock, he is one peeled-looking dog.”

“Carrock,” whooped the happy rex dog.

“Austro, is that your dog?” Barnaby asked as he came from the lower bowels of the house. Barnaby seemed to be rubbing something away from the corner of his eye, and he looked sad.

“Sure it's my dog!” Austro hollered. “I told you he'd be here. Hey, let's start on the hunt! I'll show you that my dog can bring anything to bay.”

“I was right to have a shaky feeling over this,” Barnaby said, and there was something the matter with his eyes. “Austro, you drew your dog as — ”

“I drew him hairy all over, yes. But the ocean water made his hair all fall out, he says. Too salty. It'll grow back, but he sure is a funny-looking dog now.”

“And there was never a good reason to suppose that the dinos weren't hairy,” George Drakos said. “I mentioned that the atrichos or hairless aspect of the paintings and photographs was suspicious and unscientific. Now I understand the reason.”

“I know that.” Barnaby shook the words out. He was taken by some emotion. “But when you drew your dog, Austro, you drew him as about two-thirds your own height. He's — well, he's much larger than that.”

“Ah, here people draw things by physical size,” Austro explained. “But on the Guna Slopes we draw them of a size according to their importance. Me, I'm a boy, so I'm half again as important as a dog. So I drew me half again as big. Come on, let's get the hunt started! These last days I've been communicating to my dog how much fun it will be, and he's crazy to get started. He's not scared of that thing no matter how big it is.”

“Austro, there isn't going to be any hunt,” Barnaby said in a choked voice.

“Aw-aw!” said Austro.

“Aw-aw!” said his hundred-foot-long dog.

“It's all a case of mistaken identity,” Barnaby said as he wiped something from his face.

“Ow-wow-wow!” Austro moaned.

“Ow-wow-wow!” the big dog moaned more powerfully.

“We can't go hunt the dinosaur because your dog is the dinosaur,” Barnaby said sadly.

“Ow-wow-wow!” Austro moaned. “No big one to hunt? Carrock!”

“Ow-wow-wow!” the dino dog moaned. “Carrock!”

“No, Austro,” Barnaby said. “Your dog's a hundred feet long, and there isn't any bigger animal on earth.”

“Ow-wow-wow!” Austro began to cry. “We had our hearts set to hunt.”

“Ow-wow-wow!” The big dog was crying tub-sized dinosaur tears and almost shaking the sturdy house down.

“Kids, I wish there was a big one,” Barnaby was begging. “I wish there was a really big animal to hunt. Oh, how I've wished it all my life! I thought this would be it, and this is busted. Oh, it's so desolate to grow up and look around and see that there aren't any big ones. It's to be cheated. Dog could have been it to others; but dog is only dog to himself, and to you, and to me.”

I had never realized how much boy there was left in Barnaby, for real tears were running down his face.

“Ow-wow-wow!” those three kids wept together.

Author's Commentary

And Some in Velvet Gowns

1.

To catch on Earth an al-i-en,

Sift every sand and strain each ooze,

And find him out in town or fen,

Unless he isn't wearing shoes.

 — “Alien Identification Handbook Boogie” (third verse)

Have you noticed how brightly colored everything is lately? That big hearing room downtown hadn't had that much color in it since the cast of Brightskin was arrested and brought in for a denunciatory hearing. And one vivid patch in that glittering velvet color medley was the red-flushed face of the angry Judge Daniel Doomdaily.

He had six shackled and manacled prisoners in the dock (they were even chained together by iron collars), and they looked like a rowdy and defiant bunch. These six were Delphina Oakley, Bridget Upjones, Evangeline Guillford, Elmer Fairfoot, Rollo Marquette and Caleb Outback. They had been in town for less than ten days, but it seemed as if they had been there forever. They were an advance pilot group for that town, they said plainly.

And the judge had six attesting citizens there. These seemed both puzzled and entertained by the goings-on, and only a little bit contrite for failing in their plain civil vigilance. These six were Sam and Sara Joplin, Fulgence and Hazel Sorrel, Buck Bigchester and Thelma Brightbrass.

And the judge had two aides who were supposed to sustain his prosecutions. These were Madras O'Connell, a comely young woman, and Anthony Krebs, who was a plain-looking young man.

“What is the matter with you people that you couldn't tell what they were?” Judge Doomdaily boomed at the six attesting citizens. “But for the accidental discovery of their program, small thanks to you, they would have completed the pilot phase of their takeover and transference. How could you have been deceived by them? The more you look at them the phonier they get. Anthony Krebs and Madras O'Connell, please begin to phrase up the case against the perfidious aliens.”

(The six manacled and shackled prisoners in the dock were the aliens.)

“Madras O'Connell, come to the vesting room at once!” the loudspeaker blared in the voice of Over-Judge Kenneth Richram, or anyhow one of the over-judges.

“Oh, damn, Kenneth, I'm in session!” Judge Doomdaily argued with the loudspeaker. “And Madras is a special-knowledge person for this session. Someone else will have to do what you want. I need her here.” And the judge patted Madras with judicial friendliness.

“Madras O'Connell, come to the vesting room at once,” the loudspeaker overruled by its great volume. “Be quiet, Doomdaily. I outrank you and I wouldn't want it any other way. Get that girl in here.”

But Madras O'Connell had already disappeared out of the hearing room.

“Sam Joplin!” Judge Doomdaily snorted. “You should be the most important and most knowledgeable man in your neighborhood, and you allowed yourself to be taken in by these six shoddy fakes who aren't even human. Look at the damnable aliens! They don't even have skin. I don't know what it is that they do have.”

“We paint ourselves so you can't see,” said Bridget Upjones, who was an alieness in the dock. “Maybe someday you get all the skin burned off of you and have to use cosmetics.”

“They haven't skin, they haven't hair, they haven't human shape,” the judge went on. “They haven't human smell or sound. All they have is gaudy clothes to cover their abomination. Why were you fooled into accepting these dangerous deceivers for human?”

“I don't know,” Sam Joplin said. “They look like humans until you really look at them. And they're such nice folks!”

“Nice folks!” Doomdaily trumpeted. “Do the corruptions and destructions of the human elements of twelve cities in our part of the state look as if they were nice folks? It is only by accident that we learned they had taken over in these places. Madras, where is that report? Madras! Oh, she was called to the vesting room. To the vesting room? I don't even know what a vesting room is, but all at once I'm sure that we don't have one here. Simple citizens, cast your eyes on these six aliens! They are an eroding and occupying disease.”

“Only five of us aliens now,” said Elmer Fairfoot, who was one of the damnable aliens in the dock.

“Five of you?” Judge Doomdaily shrieked. “One, two, three, four, five, six. I can count. There are six of you.”

But the unnumbered aliens laughed.

“No, judge-man,” said Rollo Marquette, who was another of the perfidious aliens. “There are only five of us here now. We have ourselves painted so it looks like there are six of us.”

Madras O'Connell came down from the mysterious vesting room.

“You look different, Madras,” Judge Doomdaily said, and he patted her with judicial restraint.

“I'm supposed to look just about the same, if you don't look too close,” Madras said.

“Look at them! Look at them!” Doomdaily bellowed as he turned his attention back to the aliens.

All right, look at them. But the eye was caught by very many things before it really got to the aliens themselves. It was caught by their extravagant clothing. Well, there was a lot of bright clothing in those days, but not of such scorchy and flamboyant colors as the aliens wore. These were new and compensating and fulfilling colors. If one tried to see the clothing apart from the aliens who were in it, the colors were almost out of control. It was the aliens who tamed them by wearing them.

But all the aliens were dressed in this multicolored bright velvet, the men in doublets of old renaissance style, the ladies in gowns from the gownier days. These stranger folks were almost hypnotic in their getups, and the combinations of their bright garb and their dull selves did total out to approximate human shape and color.

But a closer look (“Oh, why do we never take that closer look till after the barn door is stolen!” Judge Doomdaily lamented) showed that the garments by themselves were impossibly unhuman, and that the persons of the aliens were even more unhuman in an opposite direction. Then why did these people, in combination with their contrived clothing and clinging ambients, look completely human? Well, they looked completely human until they were dissected by the analytical eye.

“Well, we have you in the dock now, and in chains,” Doomdaily gloated. “In chains? I never ordered any chains. We didn't have any chains. Where did they come from? We don't use chains anymore.

“And you, you reprehensible aliens, you would have corrupted and occupied the citizens of Center City as you have occupied those of Pondereek and Blackwell and Newkirk and Fairfax and Pawnee and Perry and Billings and Lucien and Redrock and Gray Horse and Pawhuska and Ponca City itself? Did you believe that our law enforcement was equally slack here? Oh, what has happened to my fine questioning mind? I still see things that cannot be, and I almost accept them. Where did these chains, manacles, shackles, iron collars, come from? How did they get into my hearing room?”

“Oh, take it easy, Red-face,” said the alieness Delphina Oakley. “We're not wearing any of those things. Where is your humor? Do you think we're crazy enough to put on such heavy things? We've just got ourselves painted so it looks like we're wearing chains and shackles and manacles. This is just for fun. We thought your hearing room needed a little bit of it.”

Delphina's voice, to an absolutely analytical ear, would have sounded horribly unhuman and made up of frightful and unarranged discords. But who can maintain an analytical ear all the time? To a sleepy and inattentive ear, Delphina sounded delightfully young-woman human, with a lilt and a gaiety and a mocking.

“We owe so much to you, Thelma Brightbrass,” Doomdaily said in a proud voice to that citizeness then. “Tell us how you discovered that your husband, Caleb Brightbrass, was taken over and replaced by the alien Caleb Outback. Madras, what have you done to yourself? I still say that you look different.”

“You think the Madras-trick is easy to do?” that aide asked. “You try to do her sometime.”

“My husband, Caleb Brightbrass, began to act a bit odd about the time that the new people moved into the neighborhood,” Thelma was saying. “I didn't object to it. In every way except one he was a lot better than he had been. He was wittier for one thing. I should have been suspicious right there: my Caleb was always a rock-head. We mixed a lot with those new people and they seemed to be very nice folks, so that was all right. I knew that Caleb had become more like them than like the old folks, and that was all right too. I never had so much fun in my life, for about a week. In every way except one, life was a lot better than it ever had been. But after about a week I said ‘Hey, wait a minute’ to myself, and I got damned suspicious.”

“And in a week they had their people-trap almost ready to trap the town,” Doomdaily orated. “Oh, how many towns have already become completely alien, and who can tell the difference? And then, Mrs. Brightbrass?”

“Then I said to Caleb, ‘Are you a man, or what are you anyhow?’ ‘Ah, I'm a nonfunctioning male,’ ” Caleb said. ‘I believe that's the way you'd have to define me in your terms. Be patient with me for a little while. We often suffer these transition disabilities.’ That's when I knew it wasn't my Caleb. That's when I knew that it was some other Caleb who had taken his place. Not that my Caleb didn't have nonfunctioning spells now and then, but he never was smart enough to use words like nonfunctioning and transition.”

“Do you know how the alien came to use the name Caleb Outback instead of Caleb Brightbrass?” Doomdaily asked.

“Oh, Outback was my Caleb's maiden name,” Thelma said. “He used it sometimes for fun. But I believe that it's the aliens' code that they can't take over a person or a person's name exactly. Well, that was when the scales fell from my eyes and I took a good look at Caleb and the rest of them. And when I saw what I saw, then I blew the whistle on them.”

“Elmer Fairfoot! Take your feet off that table!” Judge Doomdaily roared at the alien Elmer in the dock. “Even an alien can have manners. Do you think it's civilized to have your shoes on the table?”

“I'm not wearing shoes,” the alien Elmer Fairfoot explained reasonably. “I just have my feet painted to look like it.”

“Anthony Krebs, come to the vesting room at once!” the loudspeaker blared in an over-judgely voice.

“Oh, lay off, Kenneth, I'm in session,” Doomdaily argued with the speaking apparatus. “You took Madras, and she seems to be changed since she got back. And Anthony is the only other aide I have. Besides, there isn't any such thing as a vesting room.”

“Anthony Krebs, come to the vesting room at once!” the loudspeaker overruled Doomdaily. “Be quiet, Doomdaily. Send that young man in here right now.”

But Anthony Krebs had already disappeared out of the hearing room.

2.

In Australia, the trees and other wild plants simply aren't related to the trees and plants of the northern hemisphere. None of the life there, either animal or vegetable, is related to life in other parts of the world. Close examination will reveal that the sets of things are utterly and outrageously different.

But a less close examination will not reveal this. A blended landscape of Australia cannot be distinguished from a blended landscape of the northern hemisphere in corresponding climate-zone and season. And this in spite of the fact that the southern grass is not grass, the bushes are not bushes, the sedges and reeds are not sedges and reeds, and the trees are not trees. Every smell and sound of an Australian landscape will be different from anything found anywhere else, but the totality and the effect of the smell and sound and sight will be the same as in a corresponding part of the world. A maddening identity of the big picture is arrived at without using any similar pieces. There's a weird compensation and balance and camouflage at work here.

 — Arpad Arutinov, The Back Door of History

Yowl, yowl, the dogs do howl, The aliens come to town…

 — “Alien Identification Handbook Boogie” (fifth verse)

“You six aliens can fool the careless eye and ear,” Doomdaily was saying, “but here in Center City we are people of the closer examination. There is nothing about you that can escape us.”

“We four aliens,” said the alien Rollo Marquette. “There are only four of us here in the dock now, but we have painted ourselves to look like six of us. And do not look at us closely, Judge Careful-eyes, or you will find that you're looking in a mirror.”

“Buck Bigchester,” Doomdaily said to another of his good attesting citizens. “Recount for the record how you yourself became suspicious of this nefarious troupe of aliens. What did you first notice to be wrong about them?”

“I first noticed a bunch of things that were just all right about them,” Buck said, “and most of them were about that girl Bridget Upjones there. I went for her the first time that I saw her. She had everything.”

“Couldn't you tell that her texture was more vegetable than animal, Buck? And that it was unsubstantial vegetable at that? Couldn't you tell that she had two sets of eyes, one above the other? Couldn't you tell that parts of the velvet gown she wore were still alive? Or that she smelled like impure ammonia?”

“Yeah, but she said that they had to use live paint for part of those color effects. And she said they had to use color because they just weren't there without all that color to complement them. And she put a little bit of that hot sauce stuff behind her ears, and it combined with the ammonia and came out smelling like ‘Wonder Woman Number Nine.’ Oh, I guess that I knew her teeth weren't like real teeth. And then she had those little fiddlefoot crabs that ran in and out of her ears. They made up for what was lacking in her ears, she said, and the total effect was human. None of that strange stuff could subtract from a girl as pretty as Bridget was.

“But I got a little bit suspicious the night I took her out to the Four-State Fair and we stopped in front of the weight-guesser with his scales. He would guess anybody's weight within three pounds or he would give them a three-pound box of candy. Now this weight-guesser was a real professional, and besides they have a lot of people around carnivals and fairs who aren't strictly human. He turned green when he saw Bridget, though, and he began to shake. ‘Two pounds,’ he said ‘You weigh two pounds.’ Bridget sat in that swinging seat that is part of the scales. And she didn't weigh anything, not anything it all.

“ ‘So I hit it within three pounds,’ the weight-guesser said. ‘I win. Now you get out of here. You don't belong around here. You don't belong on this world at all.’ ‘Oh, no. I win,’ Bridget told him. ‘Two pounds is not within three pounds of nothing. Anything at all is an immeasurable distance from nothing at all. They're of different orders. Now you give me my box of candy!’ She got it too. She scared him into giving to her. Those people like Bridget don't like to lose, not a bet, not a game, not anything.”

Anthony Krebs came back into the hearing room.

“You look different, Anthony,” Doomdaily said. “I don't know what it is, but you look just a little bit different. Well, is it my time? Is it time for me to go yet?”

“Don't rush it,” said Elmer Fairfoot the alien. “In a moment, in a moment.”

“Judge Daniel Doomdaily, come to the vesting room at once!” the loudspeaker sounded in the voice of some overjudge.

“I don't even know where the vesting room is,” Doomdaily started to protest. “Oh, it's all right. I feel that I'm being guided there.” And the judge left the hearing room.

“Six little aliens,” the citizen Fulgence Sorrel razzed in a tired but amused voice. “Delphina Oakley, Bridget Upjones, Evangeline Guillford, Elmer Fairfoot, Rollo Marquette, Caleb Outback. Six of you in the dock. But are there only three of you now? And you are painted to make it look as if there were six of you?”

“Three of us here now,” said alien Elmer Fairfoot, “but try and count us.”

“And you're not really shackled and chained,” Fulgence said. “They are only things you painted on for fun. And we can't avoid being taken over by you?”

“Why should you want to avoid it?” Elmer asked. “Why do you object? These migrations are common. You've taken over yourself. That little deformity inside each of you, that person whom you sometimes call your subconscious, is what is left of a person who was supplanted by you. He is the one who, looking at it one way, had title to your body before you did.”

“I'm getting mighty hot about this,” the citizeness Thelma Brightbrass interrupted. “There's a fishiness here that smells to heaven for vengeance.”

“But, Elmer, I have not personally supplanted anyone,” Fulgence said reasonably.

“No, but now all of those in your line of generation are born stratified. The supplanted ones, those who would have been born independently if it weren't for the usurpation by you people, are now born with you and within you. In some places seven different strata have been counted. In this place, one more stratum will be counted very soon. Don't fight it, Fulgence. It gives depth to us all, and we do need a place to stay.”

“Who will take me over?” Fulgence asked.

“There's something the matter here and it gets matterer all the time!” citizeness Thelma exploded.

“I will take you over, Fulgence,” the alien Elmer Fairfoot said. “You are the closest thing to an intelligent one in your group, and I in mine. We will be in accord. And I'll listen to you, down under there where you'll be, quite often. Maybe as much as a half minute a day.”

“Thanks, Elmer,” Fulgence said. “Will I get a velvet gown?”

“No, only a torso paint-job for the present, but it'll look like a velvet gown for a while. Later, but not much later, there will develop a synthesis of apparel to serve our common person.”

“Doesn't your paint weigh anything?” Hazel Sorrel asked.

“Oh, yes, but we use just enough of it to bring us up to zero,” the alieness Delphina Oakley answered her.

“Well, what do you want here, Delphina?” Hazel asked her.

“Bodies.”

“Aren't those bodies that you have there?”

“Not good ones. They haven't any substance. We had to leave substance behind the way we traveled,” Delphina told them.

“I'm getting damned mad about this whole thing!” citizeness Thelma announced.

“How many of you are there, anyhow?” Hazel asked.

“Oh, there are just as many of us as we can scrounge up for,” Delphina explained. “If we can locate more bodies there will be more of us here to use them.”

Judge Daniel Doomdaily came back into the hearing room.

“Now we will quickly dispose of this case,” he said, and caressed Madras O'Connell with judicial authority.

“There's something the matter with Madras,” Thelma railed, “and there's something the matter with Anthony Krebs, and now there's something the matter with Judge Doomdaily. Look at Madras! Her clothes are different!”

“I'm not wearing clothes,” Madras said. “I just got myself painted to look like I am.”

“Maybe she's a nonfunctioning female now,” Thelma challenged.

“Not now,” cried Madras, or whoever she was. “Oh, not now!”

“That nonfunctioning interval was a bit tiresome for many of us,” Judge Doomdaily said. People, he did look somehow different. He looked a lot different — 

“But now we can function again,” said the judge, or whoever he was. “And now we will quickly dispose of this case, and of much else.”

Author's Commentary

Oh Whatta You Do When the Well Runs Dry?

The deep well of unconscious cerebration.

 — Henry James

For you never miss the water till the well runs dry.

 — Rowland Howard

The well ran dry on November 7, 1999 (a Sunday). And when that well ran dry, then everything that mattered came to a halt. It took a few hours for the multitude to realize that it had all stopped. A few of the smart ones knew it almost at once, and a smaller few knew that nobody could be very smart again under the new conditions.

Miss Phosphor McCabe woke up very early on the morning of November 8.

“I never felt so empty-headed in my life,” she told herself. “Usually I have all kinds of things going on up there. Most times my head is as busy as three airports. Something's gone wrong. Fortunately I have friends who'll know what to do.”

You remember Miss Phosphor McCabe. She lives in that big pink pagoda on that hill on the north edge of town, and she has lots of unusual friends.

“Now I know what's happened,” Miss Phosphor said. “The well's gone dry. I better get some of my friends to see what can be done about it.”

She got hold of a couple of her friends and told them about the well.

“Yeah, we know,” the special friends said. “We'll give them a little while yet.”

Clear dry, was the well? There was none of the sparkle water left anywhere? Oh, there were little bits of it in isolated pockets here and there, but there was an impediment to its use. In the isolated pockets the water was no longer moving; and so it lost its sparkle. When it did not move or sparkle it could not be received or enjoyed as extraordinary water. It was ordinary now and it couldn't satisfy the thirst for the extraordinary.

(This is metaphor, yes.) What had dried up was not a well or pool or ocean of physical water. What had dried up was wit, and artistry, and congruence, and enjoyment, and the sparkle of the spirit. What had dried up was creativity in every form; and could the calling of all the committees in the world bring it back? Several self-constituted committees had assembled very early to see what could be done. The problem was to rekindle the wit of the world and get it to flowing again (This is mixed metaphor, yes.)

The problem might be quite urgent. Will a witless world die immediately? Or will it (worse case, perhaps) continue on a witless way for aeons?

The world had waked up witless on the afternoon of November 8 (afternoon by artificial universal world time). Oh, some people had gone to bed witless and distraught. Some people had felt the assault of witlessness in their sleep. And there were some people who still rose in the mornings instead of in the afternoons. But it was afternoon when most of the world woke witless and with the sense of having lost something. “It is no good saying that we knew it would happen,” the great cosmologist Norbert Hsu mumbled. “We didn't. Oh, several of us predicted it, but we all had the strong inner feeling that it could never happen. After all, this is the well that had never run dry since the beginning of life on Earth. Ah, Irene, you look dowdy today, and that's another thing that we all knew could never happen.”

Irene Komohana hissed with the intake of her breath. She had been regarded as the most stylish woman in the world, but she didn't resent Norbert's in-passing statement that she was dowdy now. She knew that it was true.

Seven persons had come together (this was in an un-pink building on the south edge of town), by natural reaction, from several parts of the world, within two hours of the drying of the well. These seven persons had a natural affinity for each other. They were (or perhaps now it was “they had been”) the awarest of the aware. They had always been the first ones to know things, and they were surely among the first persons on Earth to realize that the well had run dry. These seven had been as smart as any people you will find anywhere, and already they realized that neither they nor any others were going to be very smart in the new case. Norbert Hsu, Carlos Llosa, Agnes Belka, Edwin Senate, Irene Komohana, Sedgewick Dollo and Joshua Santa Cruz were the once talented seven: but were they talented now? Had all talent necessarily dried up?

“What has dried up is the ‘Idea Well’,” Carlos Llosa, the great public servant, said: and they all groaned at the phrase. The “Idea Well,” what a rosy-posy name! Be assured that none of them would have named it anything as banal as the “Idea Well” if they hadn't suddenly found themselves in the post-idea state.

“What we must do is treat it like any other well that runs dry,” Carlos plowed ahead without a trace of any idea in his skull. “Maybe we will give it a little acid treatment as is given to oil wells when they fall off their flow. Or we will set guns down in its depth and perforate its formations. We might put it under saltwater pressure and hope for some response. Or we locate and cement its leakages as well-men sometimes do with water wells. We set in barriers, or we break out barriers, to let ground water or rogue streams flow into it. We calculate its accretion and its depletion, and we compel the second to be less than the first. And the well may recover… a little bit… sometime.”

“But this well offers a difficulty in that we don't know where it is,” Agnes Belka pointed out. “We don't know the physical location of this well: we do not even know whether it has physical existence.”

“It's true that we have no idea how to locate it,” Joshua Santa Cruz agreed, “since all ideas dried up when the well dried up. We can't do anything about it since what is lost is our ability to do anything about anything.”

“Maybe things will go on as they were and nobody will notice the difference,” Edwin Senate said.

“Yes, things will go on as they were,” Sedgewick Dollo agreed. “For a few hours, or even a couple of days they might go on. Things might continue on for about as long as fingernails continue to grow on a corpse.”

But there were little things cropping up all over the place to indicate that things wouldn't go on quite as they had before. Fewer people were dying (that was noticed almost immediately), and nobody was dying spectacularly. Is dying, especially spectacular dying, a creative act? It seemed so. But about as many people were being born as before, though there didn't seem to be quite as much meaning attached to the act. People were being born without accompanying prodigies, and without any premonition of coming greatness. The extraordinary had gone out of people, those already present and those arriving. For there was this other thing: if people weren't dying as much, neither were they living as much.

“It just isn't the same thing anymore,” folks were heard to say. “It just really isn't living anymore.”

Musicians couldn't improvise. They had nothing left to improvise with. The art of creative lying came to an end. Profanity became tired: it became louder and more in use, but it was repetitious and unoriginal. Pornography similarly lost gusto and increased in stridency. Jokes died out, and intuitions died. Problem-solving was a lost talent. And the roily oil that had made the slide through life so much easier had now lost its slickness and turned into an abrasive.

The incredible creativity by which (and only by which) persons had managed to get along with each other at all was gone. There had used to be (just two days ago there had used to be) a super-creative person in every group, in every viable couple, at every human meeting, at each crossroads or confrontation of any kind. At least one-third of the persons in the world had been super-creative in personal relations. If it hadn't been so, then personal relations would have been impossible. Now the super-creativity was gone and personal relations had become a gruesome remnant.

Suicides and showboat deaths were down, but dumb accidents were up. It looked as if the death rate might soon adjust itself. The accidents, the accidents! It really takes quite a bit of creativity for even the most obscure person to live for a long span. The amorphous and ever present gray creature named “accident” is escaped only by the employment of creative wit. And when that weapon is no longer turned against it, the “accident” moves in, slowly but relentlessly, chomping.

Great multitudes of people were getting lost. They got lost on their way to work: they got lost on their way home. They could no longer recognize their proper houses. Some of them could no longer recognize their proper mates. After all, people do look pretty much alike. It takes a lot of native wit and a number of mnemonic tricks to be able to recognize one's own wife or husband out of the mass of humanity. And native wit and mnemonics shriveled and died when no longer nourished by the strong and sparkling water. The whole systematic world was going to break down right away.

(“We will give them a couple of days yet,” small groups of Forteans said to each other. Some of these Forteans were friends of Miss Phosphor McCabe, and others of them were unknown to her.)

“We will strictly ration the water from this special ocean-well,” Carlos Llosa said positively. “We will enforce a regulation that each person must deposit three liters in the pool for each two liters that he withdraws. I have information also that there is a small but constant, and natural and unhuman, flow into the well, and that it will soon give us a working pool again if we can halt the panic withdrawals. We will emphasize a ‘Don't think! Thinking consumes substance from the collective unconscious’ campaign for a week or so. And, if we then have something to ration, we will ration it most strictly and without favoritism.”

This was the second day that the seven special persons of natural affinity had been holding their meeting. There wasn't much left of their natural affinity now. And there wasn't much left of their specialism.

“How can we ration it?” the great cosmologist Norbert Hsu demanded. “How can we force a person to disgorge into this well of the group unconscious? How can we limit what he will withdraw? We don't even understand the mechanics of the dipping out of this well. Will we give a person a chit entitling him to withdraw so many bright ideas a week?”

“Yes, that is exactly what we will do!” Carlos declared. “Don't laugh. It can be done. Any such thing is mere regulatory or administrative procedure.” (In his private life, Carlos Llosa was President of the United States, and he had been competent in the administrative procedure field.) “Any process or decision can be implemented, once it is set into its proper medium and context, and once enough creative imagination is brought to bear on its problem.”

“You are wrong, man, wrong,” Joshua Santa Cruz contradicted him. “Perhaps it could be done, if the problem in question were anything else. Any process or decision can be implemented, except one. Surgeons are seldom successful in performing serious operations upon themselves. The hammer can shape and hammer out anything except itself. Enough imagination cannot be brought to bear upon this problem when the problem is that we have completely run out of imagination.”

“The well shouldn't have failed so soon,” Edwin Senate argued. “We have been wasteful and prodigal of its substance for not much more than a hundred centuries. Oh, certainly we reaped what we did not sow, and we gathered where we did not scatter. But we have been contributing to that pool for hundreds of centuries, and our unhuman brothers had been doing so for thousands of centuries. It shouldn't have gone dry yet.”

“Well, we had been consuming the capital at an extraordinary rate,” Joshua Santa Cruz remarked, “and at the same time we had reduced the numbers of unhuman contributors to less than a tenth. And if it isn't empty then what is wrong with it?”

“I've never really believed in the Collective Unconscious as an ocean-well from which we dip all our ideas and inspirations,” that high stylist Irene Komohana protested. “I just don't like the idea of drinking out of a well that every sort of creature pours into. It isn't stylish. It's revolting. It's positively Fortean!”

(“We will give them a little while yet,” the small groups of Forteans said to each other.)

The old theory about the “Collective Unconscious” seemed almost to be proved by its failing. This was the thesis that there was one under-mind that was shared by all humans. Extremists said that it was also shared by all animals, mammals, birds, fishes, frogs, snakes, lizards, earthworms, bees, ants, crickets and midges. Further extremists said that it was also shared by all plants from the trees of the forest to the grass of the fields to the seaweeds of the oceans. And others thought that it was shared by inanimate things, too, things that had been alive especially: wood, and vegetable loam, and limestone that had been built up by small deposited bodies. And the further-outs maintained that all the fire-rocks also contributed to it. And it was known that ghosts, familiar spirits and unarrived souls had once contributed greatly to the ocean-well.

This Collective Unconscious was a huge underground and trashy ocean or pool or cistern or well (all the terms apply to it). In it were all unborn and unthought things, and all quasi-existences and abominations. In it were the spent arrows that had once been shot upward but had not risen high enough to reach the light and so become thought. They had fallen back and shattered, but even in their dissolved forms they were still piercing shafts of ideas.

In the Collective Unconscious were the paradoxes of existence as propounded by toads, the rhapsodies of rotifers, and the streams-of-consciousness of sunfishes. There were the grotesque limbs of millions of creatures the rest of whom had not been created. There were the everted contents of dragons' stomachs and the everted and maldigested contents of countless minds.

The fruits of child labor, of the children of a thousand species, were thick in that stew. This was the grinding and horrible labor, ill paid and inefficient, going on always for endless hours, in pain and apprehension and fear. Here were the mephitic deliriums of the poor souls in Purgatory and the roaring insanities of the lost souls in Hell. Here was all the broken logic of the ghost nations, and the specious daydreams of the rotting dead.

It was a strange and astringent stew in the pool of the common unconscious, but it was one of the waters of life. It was the manure and the fertility from which all thoughts and ideas were formed. It was the raw material (oh, was it ever raw material!) from which all the sudden intuitions were put together, those winged notions that are called originality and creativity.

That huge and ungainly splashy darkness was a Ouija or planchette board that produced automatic thought as well as automatic writing. It was spook infested. It bubbled up, from the one blind well, into the billions of minds; and it was somehow instrumental in generating all lively and consequential thoughts. And the detritus of those billions of sharing minds fell back down into the well to add to its slurpy mass.

But, about a hundred centuries ago, one of the member species of this Collective Unconscious had begun to consume its substance at an uncommon rate. Those of this species became the lords who reaped where they had not sowed and gathered where they had not planted. But there were many contributors to the substance of the harvest. How would one species run it dry?

Well, there had been many contributors, but now there were not near as many. When more and more trees and land plants and plankton plants of the sea (those whose business it is to supply oxygen for the world), when more and more of them are destroyed, then there is less and less usable oxygen for the world. And, following this analogy, when more and more of the contributing species to the subterranean pool are destroyed (wiped-out animals, extirpated ghost nations and airy nations and fire nations of beings, souls with their communication and rapport broken), when great numbers of such contributors are reduced or destroyed, then there is less and less of the mysterious underground sparkling stuff, the substratum of cognition, to supply the active minds of the world. More is dipped out of the shaggy well than is put into it, so there would come a time when the well would go dry.

On November 7, 1999 (and on the several days that followed), the well made noises and produced symptoms that indicated that it had gone dry. The offending species was that of the prodigal human people, feverishly thinking and creating and originating, and it was they who had pumped the well dry.

Simple orientation was one of the things that had failed. Simple orientation had always been a complex and continuing syndrome of creative thoughts and acts. And creative thoughts and acts cannot continue unless they are nourished by the strong broth out of that paradoxical well. People who lose their simple orientation will not be able to perform even simple jobs, and they sure will not be able to perform complex tasks.

The breakdown was at hand: deprivation, suffering, starvation! The world was falling apart.

“Have you ever heard of a large city getting its water supply through huge pipes and conduits and not knowing whence those pipes lead, not knowing the location of the lake or reservoir or source that they are tapping?” This was Joshua Santa Cruz giving the doleful appraisal to the others of the special-seven group. “Well, the world is a large city, and it has been getting its supply of peculiar water through pipes and conduits: and it has no idea of the location of the source that feeds those pipes and conduits.

“People, we must find this well of the world, this dire but necessary ocean of the Collective Unconscious. Various evidence shows that this pool does have physical existence and location, and yet we cannot find it anywhere on the Earth or under the Earth. We have to find it if we are going to revive it. Oh, it is an impediment not to be able to think clearly these last several days! How I miss my ideas! How I miss my old logical thought-train! How I miss my mind!”

“Mr. Dollo,” said a secretary-lady who came in (the building in which the special-seven group was meeting was the establishment of Sedgewick Dollo in his exile), “that Miss Phosphor McCabe has called again and says that she has friends who know where the well is and what to do about it.”

“Sedgewick,” Irene Komohana chided, “Miss Phosphor can't be real! She has to be a tall story that you made up. Isn't she the lady who lives in the pink pagoda? You made her up us a latter-day legend for your town here.”

“Wan-witted as I am, I'm not sure whether I made her up or not,” Sedgewick Dollo confessed. “Oh, wouldn't it be wonderful to be able to think straight again!”

“Miss Phosphor says that they have you where it's short,” the secretary continued. “And she says that you will have to come up to their spring to drink.”

“The saying is ‘have to come down to my spring to drink,’ ” Edwin Senate said dubiously.

“Miss Phosphor inflected the ‘up’,” the secretary said.

“Tell Miss McCabe that we will see her and her friends,” Sedgewick Dollo pronounced sadly.

The friends of Miss Phosphor McCabe were plainly of a Fortean race, but they were not of the Stutzamutza subrace as Dollo had expected. There are, of course, many varieties of the Fortean people.

“We Forteans are not organized,” one of them said. “We would not be true Forteans if we were. And so we have no leaders nor spokesmen. But I have a love of talking, and mostly they find it better to let me talk than to shut me up. I am Hiram Cloudhopper and I am moved to compassion to see that such arrogant and ignorant folks as yourselves are in trouble. You people are no more organized than we are, but you believe that you are. You accept so many things that stand in defiance of all reason that it seems you'd believe anything without question. So we will talk to you, since Miss McCabe says that several of you are good folks. And yet your credentials aren't much.”

Norbert Hsu in private life was president of the World Federation of Scientists. Carlos Llosa was President of the United States. Agnes Belka was First Secretary of Greater Russia. Edwin Senate was Premier of United Africa. Joshua Santa Cruz was Pope of Rome. Irene Komohana was High Stylist Emeritus of the Best Dressed Women of the World, as well as Prime Minister of Asia and Polynesia. Sedgewick Dollo was Emperor of Latin America in Esteemed Exile.

Their credentials weren't much? What do you call credentials where you come from?

“Ah, ladies and gentlemen (though neither term seems appropriate to you) of the sprawling and possibly imaginary realm of Fortestan,” the great cosmologist Norbert Hsu was saying, “there is one question that we must put to you: can you put water back in the well?”

“There is always plenty of water in the well,” Hiram Cloudhopper told them, “but it's a bit compartmentalized there and one compartment of it runs a little low just now. Your difficulty is that you've been too proud to dip out of the well with the dipper of the crooked handle. You do not even recognize the great dipper which, with its queer handle, will dip from the other side of any barrier. You have relegated the dipper to legend as The Great Horn Spoon, but you do not really know it. Your problem is over with now, though. There is plenty of water. Set aside your pride and drink.”

“But the well's run dry!” Agnes wailed.

“Not really,” Cloudhopper said. “Only one small compartment of it has run dry. And it has run dry only because, on some level or other, you showed yourselves too particular about what came into it to fill it up.”

“But all those animals voiding into it — ” Irene began to protest. “And it would have been still worse if we hadn't — ”

“What animals?” Cloudhopper asked. “You don't know just how raunchy some of the animals can be. You should see some of the animals in our part of the well.”

“This well of the unconscious, it does have a real location in physical space?” Hsu asked. “We haven't been able to find it anywhere on Earth.”

“Oh, it isn't exactly on Earth,” Cloudhopper told them. “It's up in the air about twenty-seven miles above the Earth. In the Fortean Universes, almost everything is twenty-seven miles above the Earth: the moon and the sun and the planets, and the stars and the farther stars.”

“How can a well or ocean be subterranean when it's twenty-seven miles up in the air?” Carlos Llosa demanded.

“What's wrong with that?” Cloudhopper the Fortean asked. “There are plenty of subterranean caverns and caves and oceans twenty-seven miles up in the air. You just don't know what the interior of the sky is like. And whoever told you that your own topography was the only one or the correct one?”

“Just what do you people want for reviving the well?” Llosa asked cautiously.

“Oh, nothing at all,” Cloudhopper said. “We were going to fill your compartment up for you anyhow. We were just having a little fun by delaying it a couple of days. But you people began to suffer too much, so we will call off the fun.”

“When can we use the well again?” Llosa asked.

“Oh, within five minutes. We'll just whistle up to the boys there to knock out a barrier or two and let your compartment fill up. You'll have to get used to it though. It is stronger and tastier than any water that you've had before. It might be too strong for a few of you.”

So, within about five minutes' time, this particular portion of the well of the Collective Unconscious filled up again. People could draw on it once more. The people quickly became creative again, enough so that they could maintain their roles in the world. The deprivation, the suffering, the starvation were mostly halted. The world did not quite fall apart, but it had been close.

People could think again and enjoy again. They had their ideas back, they had their old logical thought-trains back, they had their minds back. They could die creatively and spectacularly again, and they could live stupendously, some of them, and originally.

So then it was all as it had been before the well ran dry?

No, it was not. It would never again be the same as it had been before. This was strange water coming out of the well now, and the thoughts and actions that it nourished were more extravagant than any heretofore known. There came a weirdness over the whole of regular humanity, and it would be permanent.

You know what rough and shouting people the Forteans had always been? You remember what rude strutters the Boschites were? You know the loud and glittering insanity of the Dalikites, and the perversity and perfidy of the Albionians? These shabby, crude, delirious dregs of humanity had always lived on rocks in the lower skies and in shanties on the outskirts of our own towns.

But now we all drank their water, we thought their thoughts (thoughts? some of their ghouly notions were enough to rot the flesh off your bones), and now we became indistinguishable from them.

The stuff that now came out of that enlarged well of the Collective Unconscious was too strong for many persons. It proved too stark for the stylish Irene Komohana, for instance, and for a few million persons like her.

“Glug, gloug, glaaach!” she retched (she even retched with style, Irene did, and yet she had already begun to lose that style). “I can't drink this stuff, I can't dream this stuff, I can't think this stuff or act it out. It's wild, it's vile, it has no style at all. I'd rather die!”

And Irene did die soon after this, of a blundering and noncreative accident. And the enlarged ambient got to her at the last and denied her the circumstance of even dying in style.

“Better die than ratify!” some of the militant and refusing people declared (sloganing had come onto evil days with the great thirst and the extinction of wit). “We will not partake!” And they didn't. These several million persons, for a protest, died gallantly but clumsily.

That was the end of elitism and of real class on Earth. All the people drank out of the common pot thereafter, and all became common, and unhinged and undirected, and a little bit trashy. You think it was common before? Now it was really common! “Oh, if only I could have a mind of my own!” people sometimes lamented.

Footnote (aw, naw, not a footnote; it's a twenty-seven-mile-up-in-the-air note): This trenchant and illuminating discovery and reconstruction in the archaeology of the mind was presented — as a convention — as a future account, as something that was to happen in the year 1999 of the present era. Actually it happened in the year 1999 in an era that prevailed a long time ago, an earlier cyclical correspondence to our own era. It is the true account of how things became so raunchy down in the well of the world and how ourselves became so raunchy. We haven't any particular wells or fountains of our own. We draw it all from the same unsanitary and common pool.

Author's Commentary

Puddle On The Floor

1

Petronilla heard two different giggles in the den. These had to come from two different boys, for they were going on at the same time. Oh, she'd catch them now! She hurried to pounce on the situation.

And the phone rang just as she opened the den door. And the doorbell rang. They always rang just when she was about to —  A fast look through the door showed another boy in the den with Gregory, that dirty slinky little boy she'd almost seen so many times before. But the phone jangled with rising anger, and the doorbell absolutely boomed.

“Yes, yes,” she told the phone. “Anemia, is it? The doctor is sure? I never heard of a cat getting anemia before. Patsy, I've got somebody at the front door, and I'm about to catch Greg in something rotten at the same time. I'll call you back.”

“Yes, yes,” she told the opened front door then. “Yes, Hermione. Anemia, is it? That's what Patsy Pettegolezzo's cat's got too. Oh, Hermione, I'm just about to have a row with Greg. Go on through to the kitchen. The coffee's on and the cinnamon rolls are in the warming oven.”

Now, now, had Petronilla let the situation escape her? No, she had not. She still heard the second voice and the second giggle in the den, and the only way out of the den was that one door. The boys had it closed again, of course, but she could hear two of them inside. And then — 

“Quick, quick, go, go, she's come back already,” little Greg screamed inside as Petronilla's hand was on the knob. She threw the door wide open, and her son Greg was alone inside, absolutely alone. She knew every place in that den that was big enough to hide a little boy, and she knew that the door she held in her hand was the only way out. There had been another little boy in the room. He hadn't come out. And he wasn't in there now.

“Who was with you just now in the den, Greg?” she asked with her smooth-shoed voice.

“There wasn't anybody with me. I talk to myself and I practice two voices.”

“But I saw the other boy, Greg. And then the phone and the door both rang. And I heard him in here just before I opened the door this time. Talk in two voices, do you? Let me hear you do it now!”

“I can't do it now, mama. Only sometimes.”

“Why do you lie to me, Greg?”

“Believe me, mama, sometimes you get in holes and lying's the only way out.”

“And does it get you out of the holes, Greg?”

“It helps, mama.”

“Oh, Greg! Another puddle on the floor! Why do you do it? You're a big boy six years old.”

“It isn't what you think it is, mama.”

“Greg, I am going to have to have answers to a few questions right now.”

“What are they?”

“Who is the little boy who was with you, the little boy who appears and disappears?”

“What's the other questions?”

“Why and how do you make puddles on the floor? Your pants are never wet. This is either very deliberate of you, or it is something else entirely.”

“It's something else entirely, mama. What's the other questions?”

“What got all the cats in the neighborhood? And the dogs and the birds? And the hamsters and the rabbits and the turtles? What is it that's getting all the pets, and what is it doing with them?”

“Nothing's been getting them right lately, mama.”

“That's because they were all got. And the new ones that the people have been buying now, no, they haven't been disappearing, but they've been getting sick. What could give anemia to Patsy Pettegolezzo's cat and to Hermione Greygoose's too?”

“Strega O'Conner is giving the cats anemia now, I guess. She's spreading it around and not taking all of it from any of them, so it won't kill them.”

“Strega O'Conner gives me the willies, but how could she give anemia to cats?”

“Is that one of the questions, mama?”

“No, not right now it isn't. But it probably will be.”

“What's the rest of the questions then? I'm in kind of a hurry.”

“Don't tell me that you're in a hurry, little boy. But another question is how is it possible for one six-year-old boy to eat so much bran for breakfast? There's been thirteen boxes already this week, and this is only Wednesday. What do you do with all of it?”

“What's the other questions, mama?”

“That's enough of them for right now. Oh, I wish your father were still alive. He'd get to the bottom of this.”

“I bet he wouldn't. He was never very good at getting anything out of me.”

“All right, let's have some answers, young man.”

Both the phone and the door began to ring, loudly and with great determination. Petronilla Ashling started to answer them. And then she stopped suddenly and turned back to her son.

“Greg, make the phone and the door both stop ringing, right now!”

“How could I make them stop ringing? I never heard of such a thing.”

“You made them start ringing. You did! And you made them ring the other time too.”

“Yes, I did. But I can't make them stop.”

“Why not?”

“Because there really is somebody on the phone. And there really is somebody at the door. There was somebody on them the other time too, wasn't there?”

“Yes. But how do you make them ring whenever you want to and have real people there when I answer them?”

“I don't know how I do it, mama. But I can tell you that they won't stop ringing till you answer them now. It makes me nervous when you let them ring like that.”

“There's a lot of things making me nervous around here lately,” Petronilla told her son. She answered the phone. She told the real person who was on it to wait a minute. She answered the door. And between these two calls she was involved for fifteen minutes. She heard Greg go outdoors. She heard that little girl Strega O'Conner across the street singing a jump-rope rhyme:

“This is the puddle, shallow and gray.

A gentleman drowned in it today.”

Petronilla Ashling wrung her hands and puzzled her head. That little girl Strega drove her up walls with her chants, but how could the chants give cats anemia? And how could they do things much more suspicious? Petronilla had her front-door caller talking to her telephone caller now (they were friends), and she heard that they were talking about their cats and dogs having anemia.

Petronilla thought about sick cats now, and she recalled that the problem of the previous week had been the catnapper stealing and killing all the cats and other pets of the neighborhood. She thought about the puddles of water on the floor and about the empty bran boxes in the kitchen. How was it possible for Greg to eat as many as five one-pound boxes of wheat bran for breakfast and she not be able to see him eat any of them? How was it possible for him to eat all that and still be so skinny?

“If his father was still alive I'd push the problems off on him,” Petronilla said. “How can he make the phone and the door both ring whenever he wants to distract me from questioning him? And how can he make there to be real people there when I answer? Oh, which end of this horrible mess will I start with? Where will I catch hold of it? I will catch hold of that other little boy by the ears or the neck — that's where I'll catch hold of it. I will use the dirtiest trick in the world.”

Entrapment is the dirtiest trick in the world. Petronilla would set a trap, and she would watch and wait. She had been afraid to ask Greg about the peanut butter jars full of blood (it looked like blood). She had asked him more intermediate questions, but this one would have to be asked in some form. It would be the bait for the trap. Whenever Greg was out of jars of blood, then he was also out of the other little boy. And whenever he had a jar or two of the chocolate-cherry-colored stew, then that dirty and slinky little boy would appear again very soon. But where did that blood come from?

Oh, that little Strega O'Conner was singing another jumprope rhyme across the street. (“If I were her mother I'd knock her heads together,” Petronilla said.) And the rhyme, as all of Strega's, was very loud:

“Cat in the catchy-bag, thud, thud, thud!

Come get the freshy stuff, blood, blood, blood.”

So, then, was little Strega O'Conner trafficking in blood? Was that the answer to it?

In less than half an hour Strega O'Conner came over to the Ashlings bringing some cookies that her mother had made. She brought them and nothing else. Petronilla never took her eyes off of that child. Strega came over four more times that day, and she didn't bring any blood into the house. Was all this an illusion?

“Oh, if my husband were still alive, what would he do about these problems?” Petronilla moaned. “He'd guffaw his silly head off at them, that's what he'd do.”

Petronilla even dreamed about it that night. She dreamed that Strega O'Conner slipped into the house during the night with three peanut butter jars full of blood. And Petronilla woke in the early morning to a thudding sound. It was the paper boy throwing the morning paper on the porch. Then Petronilla was out of bed like a taking-off bird and to the window. She knew that somebody had made the paper boy thud the paper just at that moment to disguise another sound, the sound of a door closing. And there was Strega, who had just slipped out of the Ashling house in the early morning and was going across to her own house. Petronilla went to her son's bedside, and there on his night stand were three peanut butter jars full of what might very well be blood.

“All right, then,” she said. “The little boy will come again this morning, though I'm afraid to make the connection between the blood and his coming. I will make a big stir around. I will say that I'm going to be doing the washing in the basement. And I will set the washing noises to going there. But I will not be in the basement. I will be watching, watching, watching by my trap. But first, before I get Greg up and get him his breakfast, before I set the washer to going, I will do two other things.”

Petronilla Ashling disconnected her phone from the phone jack. And she disconnected her doorbell at the push button at the front door.

She called Greg to get up, and he mumbled something behind the closed door of his room. She opened that door suddenly. The jars of blood were no longer on the little night stand. He had hidden them somewhere. Greg was pretending to be still half asleep, but he was only pretending.

Petronilla tried to catch her son Greg at it at breakfast. He was always too fast for her. She would look away for a moment, and a box of bran would be clear empty. She would look away for another moment, and another box of bran would be done away with.

“How can you eat so much bran, Greg?” she asked. But with the fifth box of it she saw what happened. Greg had a catchybag of his own, and that's where he put the bran. He wasn't eating any of it. Petronilla pretended not to have seen this, and she went down to the basement as soon as breakfast was over. And then she crept up again and listened at the door of the den, where Greg had shut himself up.

She heard his giggle. She heard another little boy's giggle. She put her hand on the knob of the door and — 

“Petronilla, your phone isn't working!” Patsy Pettegolezzo called from the window.

“Petronilla, your doorbell isn't working!” Hermione Greygoose called from the front door.

“Oh, perish you, kind neighbors!” Petronilla exploded, and she refused to be diverted. She swung the den door open. She grabbed that strange little boy by an ear and by the back of his neck and she dragged him out of there.

“Mama, the phone's ringing and the doorbell's ringing!” Gregory cried. But they weren't, or they weren't ringing very much. Even Greg could not make disconnected bells ring clearly or with authority.

Petronilla dragged that dirty, slinky little boy out of the house, jerking him by arm and shoulder now and whacking him on the seat of the pants at every step. And yet she couldn't say what he was guilty of.

“That's mean, mama, he hasn't done anything,” Greg was calling and following along behind. And that slinky little boy dragged his feet and tried to hold onto things to keep from being dragged along.

Then (horror!) Petronilla pulled an arm clear off the little boy. In a moment she was flushed with confusion and fear. And Strega O'Conner across the street was jumping rope and singing a jumprope rhyme:

“This is the boy who got his wish.

We'll eat him alive in a porridge dish.”

The little boy was crying and beginning to cave in.

“You'd better go now, Eugene,” Gregory said. “I'll get you back here again in a couple of days.”

“All right,” the strange little boy said. He collapsed still more. Petronilla tried to straighten him up. The other arm and part of the shoulder came off him, and both Patsy and Hermione were watching it all. The head fell off the little boy and rolled on the sidewalk there. And several more people were watching now.

“Oh, I've never had it like this before,” Petronilla moaned. “I could just perish from confusion!”

But it was the strange little boy who perished. He disintegrated. He melted clear down. And there was nothing left of him but a puddle of water on the sidewalk. And all of those busy-bee people were closing in to see what it was all about.

“Brazen it out, mama,” Gregory whispered. “That's what I always do when I'm caught with it.”

“What little boy?” Petronilla asked innocently when people began to question her.

“What little boy?” Gregory Ashling asked them all.

“What little boy?” Strega O'Conner asked, coming from across the street and still jumping rope. Strega was as brazen as a six-year-old girl could be. And, after some draggy and embarrassing moments, the busy people went away jabbering.

But when they were alone together Greg complained to his mother about her conduct.

“He melts when you scare him or when you're rough with him,” Greg said. “I don't know whether you know it, but that's the third time this week that you've made him melt. And then you blame me for using so much bran!”

“Ah, I don't seem able to go on with these weird things any longer,” Petronilla snuffled. “What we will have to do, Gregory, is get a new father for you. Then he can be responsible for these things.”

“I don't want a new father,” Gregory protested. “I don't like any of the men that you like.”

“You will like this one, Gregory,” Petronilla said, “or it will be your own fault. You can have him just the way you want him.”

2

“Yes, that is what I mean, Gregory,” Petronilla said to her son. “You can select every quality you want in your father. You can make him just the way that you want him to be, or at least I think that you can. I trust your judgment and your taste. I will abide by your decision. I know the things that you have been making, and I know that you can make a grown man.”

“It sure will take a lot of bran, mama. It takes a lot for even a little boy.”

“The sky is the limit as far as bran is concerned,” Petronilla said. “However much bran it takes, we will get it.”

“And it sure will take a lot of blood. I'm scared of it. I never made anybody except little boys before.”

“As to the blood, make whatever arrangements are necessary with Strega O'Conner, dear. If she needs more peanut butter jars to put it in, then we will get more for her. If she needs more blood than she can get from the cats and dogs around here, then we will get her a hog or a cow or something with a lot of blood in it. Now you be thinking very hard about just what you want in a father. Make him as nearly perfect as you can.”

“All right, mama.”

“Do you know what his name will be?”

“Oh sure. It will be Greatheart Noble.”

“Fine. I like that name,” Petronilla Ashling said. “I'll go get the marriage license now. And I'll go get something else.” She went out to go about her errands, and she waved across the street in a new friendly fashion to Strega O'Conner, who was jumping rope and singing a rhyme:

“This is the wife who lost her man,

And made her another from blood and bran.”

The next morning, Petronilla Ashling was thrilled and chilled at the sight of her new man Greatheart Noble. Greatheart was very tall, and he wore some kind of shako on his head. He had hussar mustaches, and he was chested like a pouter pigeon. He wore a scarlet and purple cape and a scarlet and gold tunic, and he was belted and booted in black leather. He carried a ringmaster's whip in his hand. He was quite handsome in some old stylized and costumed fashion. He gave crisp green money to Gregory.

“Go buy toy soldiers,” he said.

He gave crisp green money to Petronilla.

“Go buy toy dishes and toy tea service,” he said.

“No, no, I'm not a little girl,” she explained. “I'm a big girl, but I'll keep the money. Come along now. We're going to City Hall to be married.”

“Will it hurt?” Greatheart asked. He gave more crisp money to Gregory.

“Go buy nuts. Go buy candy. Go buy ice skates. Go buy a pony,” he said.

“We love your money, Greatheart,” Petronilla said, “but come, come, come! It's time for us to get married.”

“Don't scare him, mama, or he'll melt,” Gregory cautioned. “Don't be rough with him. Don't frustrate him at all. Take all the money he wants to give you or he'll feel frustrated.”

“I will be very careful of him,” Petronilla said. “With thirty-one boxes of bran and a whole hog invested in him, I will be most careful. And I'll not frustrate him by refusing his money. Come, dear Greatheart, it's married we will be.”

Petronilla Ashling and Greatheart Noble went out into the street, past a dead hog that was there, a completely empty-looking dead hog (it had all the blood drained out of it), and down the street to City Hall.

“It comes to me that I don't know where I am or what I'm doing here,” Greatheart said in his vaguely foreign voice. He gave Petronilla considerable money.

“Buy a coach and eight,” he said. “Buy a footman and a postboy and a driver and four outriders.”

“Thank you, dear Greatheart. I'll buy better things than those.”

“I find myself among strange people in a strange land,” Greatheart said. “I am ensorcelled by sorcerers.”

“Yeah, I know,” Petronilla said. “Let's hurry before it wears off.” They came to City Hall. They were married without particular incident, though there was some tittering about Greatheart flicking his ringmaster's whip during the ceremony.

And then they made another stop, to finalize the insurance policies that Petronilla was taking out on her new husband. Greatheart passed his physical examination and was declared to be a perfect specimen (“Of what I'm not sure,” the examining doctor said) and was stated to be the best risk ever seen. (Petronilla had been afraid that they'd discover that he had pig's blood.)

“Is it like a lottery tournament?” Greatheart asked at the insurance office. He gave Petronilla huge bunches of very large money. “Bet more on me, then,” he said. “In Transylvania it is the grandest men who have the most bet on them.”

And Petronilla gladly increased the premium payment and then increased it again.

And this was the beginning of the happiest three days ever in the life of Petronilla Ashling Noble. Greatheart wouldn't stand too close an examination, of course. In no detail was he really accurate, in some things he was ridiculous (like something a six-year-old boy would have thought of), and in other areas he was completely blank.

“I'll just quit wearing my glasses, and then it'll be all right,” Petronilla said. “I never cared too much for fine detail anyhow.”

So Petronilla and Greatheart began to give parties and bashes to celebrate their nuptials and their new roles in local society. They gave a “We Got Married” party, a “Welcome Greatheart” party, a “Honeymoon Buffet” party, and others. It was the same circle of friends who came to all of them: Clovis and Patsy Pettegolezzo, Grantland and Hermione Greygoose, Craig and Thecla Petersen, Driscol and Hyacinth Oldking, Adolph and Clementine O'Conner. And, of course, their little girl Strega O'Conner could not be kept out.

And there's no doubt that Greatheart Noble made a strong impression at these parties, and Petronilla herself was the perfect picture of Pride Fulfilled. Greatheart was crude in some of his efforts (“You like it?” he asked Driscol Oldking, who gaped at the new Noble sports car. “Here, go get one for yourself.” And there was the cramming out of crisp, green hundred-dollar and thousand-dollar bills), but he was crude in the way of one who has a royal right to such crudity.

And there's no doubt that Greatheart was unbelievably boyish and was the most flamboyant showboat ever seen. It would take only one “Show them your muscles, papa” from Gregory for tall and chesty Greatheart to throw off his scarlet and golden tunic and his scarlet and purple cape and strike the pose and send the rippling mountains of his muscles through their paces. But was there something wrong about those muscles?

“I will admit I've never seen anything like them,” Driscol Oldking said, “but they're not valid. They're like burlesques of muscles, like caricatures. They're like balloons instead of sinews. They're like pictures of muscles as a little boy might draw them.”

“I know,” said Clovis Pettegolezzo, “but what does it matter?”

Greatheart had Tokay wines of obscure vintage, and sour milk dishes, and other specialties of Hungary and Rumania and Greece and Turkey flown in. He served a true Transylvanian board, with racked ribs of wolf as a main dish all three evenings. And Petronilla had all fill-in things catered by Mike McGoogan's Elite Catering Service. They had in a three-person combo to play for them on fiddle and piano and drums. And they made sparkling presentations of all they did. For three days and nights they were sparkling.

But Greatheart wasn't as costumed a figure as he seemed, for sometimes he did speak searchingly and out of character.

“I'm confused, confused,” he said to Driscol Oldking once. “I'm like a man in a dream, but I've always believed that a man was responsible for everything, even his dreams. I'm a person under sorcery; and all of you here are, to me, parts of the sorcerers' world. I believe that my real body is still sleeping in my castle in Transylvania,” (They cannot wake me up, they cannot wake me! What if they bury me as dead when they cannot wake me?) “and that only a vagrant portion of my sleeping self is present here in a way that I can't understand. Here is money, Driscol. Go to an alchemist or apothecary and see if you can buy a remedy for my condition.”

Driscol Oldking took the money from Greatheart, but he did not find a remedy for his condition anywhere.

But after three days of celebrating Petronilla turned a little bit disappointed.

“I wonder if you could make an adjustment in your father, Gregory?” she asked.

“I don't know what, mama. He's perfect, isn't he?”

“Oh, I suppose so. But, ah, in one way he just doesn't work.”

“I put in everything I could think of he ought to have. What does it matter if he doesn't work, mama? He gives us lots more money than fathers who do work.”

“I don't mean ‘to work for a living.’ I mean like ‘to work, to function.’ ”

“I don't understand what you mean, mama.”

Strega O'Conner across the street was jumping a rhyme:

“This is the man unblessed by kirk,

But something about the man don't work.”

“Strega understands what I mean,” Petronilla said.

“No wonder. She's a week older than I am. But if you're through with Greatheart, mama, then we'll get rid of him and I'll make someone else.”

“Are you going to make that dirty little boy again? Can't you make someone else and still keep Greatheart? We will get more bran.”

“No, I won't make Eugene again. He was getting in trouble at home going into those trances. But I want to make someone else. No, I can just make one of them at a time. I can't make anyone else till Greatheart is unmade.”

“But I'd like to keep him,” Petronilla said, “even if he doesn't work in every respect. I'm getting attached to him.”

“Mama, don't do that. You know he isn't real. He's like one of the figures on Huppett's Puppets. And anyway aren't you getting a little bit anxious to — ”

“To cash him in? Yes, I guess I am. What would happen if we had him run over with a car?”

“He'd melt.”

“What would happen if we poisoned him?”

“Nothing. He wouldn't poison.”

“What would happen if we had an unknown gunman shoot him?”

“He'd melt. I think that everybody melts a little bit if you scare them bad enough.”

“Oh yes, there's an old connection between fear and puddles on the floor. And what would happen if we pushed him off the bridge and let him crash on the trafficway below?”

“He'd melt. Almost anything you'd do to him, he'd either melt, or he wouldn't do anything at all.”

“Melting doesn't leave very convincing remains, does it, Greg?”

“Oh, they can analyze everything nowadays, mama, and tell just what it comes from. They get out their chemistry sets and analyze things with them.”

“I suppose so. Well, let's get a lot of paper towels and spread them out here pretty thick. They should absorb the evidence as good as anything. Yes, that's fine. Get another roll, Greg, and spread them a little wider. Get two more rolls. We want to get every drop of him.”

“All right,” Greg said.

Then Petronilla brought Greatheart to the prepared place. “How about the cloak and the tunic and the shako and the belts and the boots and the whip?” she asked Greg. “Could we save them?”

“No, I don't think so. They'll melt when he does.”

Strega O'Conner came in from across the street. She always came in when something was going on.

“Well, this is the end of the episode, Greatheart,” Petronilla said to her husband of three days. “But it isn't as though I hadn't arranged to have plenty to remember you by.”

“Oh yes, I really must be getting back home,” Greatheart said. “If only I could escape from the sorceries I would go home now.”

“I can help you to escape from the sorceries,” Petronilla said. “I can send you home. I'm going to do it right now.”

“I'm embarrassed,” Greatheart told her. “I would like to give you a gift worthy of your kindness, but all I seem to possess at the moment is money.”

“That will do nicely, Greatheart. Gregory, bring all the laundry baskets you can find, and we'll fill them up. Oh, that is pretty stuff, and you have so much of it, don't you? It was thoughtful of Gregory to give you the money trait and the glad-hand trait. Greg, press it down and the baskets will hold more. But that seems to be all that he has. The never-fail pockets have finally failed. But, after all, we aren't greedy, are we?”

“I am, kind of,” Gregory said.

“All right, stand right here, Greatheart. I will break the sorceries and I will send you home.”

“Will it hurt?” Greatheart Noble asked.

“I don't know,” Petronilla admitted. “If you're not real, then I guess it won't really hurt.”

Petronilla pulled one arm clear off Greatheart, and he began to collapse. Then the other arm and part of a shoulder came loose. His head fell off and rolled around on the floor. Then he melted completely. He made a pretty large puddle, but the piles of paper towels would soak up most of it.

Petronilla phoned the doctor and said that her husband had died in a household accident. She told the doctor to make out some sort of death certificate and to make it look good. Then she bundled up all the sopping paper towels and started over to the insurance office with them, to present the mortal remains of her husband and to collect the insurance on them.

3

Petronilla Ashling Noble was in chancery court on an insurance suit and countersuit, and things were going a little bit against her. She didn't have any lawyer. She said that after she had explained the simple facts of the case to three different lawyers, they had all walked away shaking their heads, and all of them had refused to represent her in the case.

“I understand how they felt,” the chancery judge said. “I've been shaking my own head quite a bit. Are you sure that these two children have to be here?”

“Yes. I've told you that they are the two witnesses to the melting, ah, death of my husband Greatheart Noble,” Petronilla said.

“Oh yes. But does the little girl have to be jumping rope all the time that court is going on?”

“Yes, she does,” said Strega's mother Clementine O'Conner. “Whenever she has to stop jumping rope she has a tantrum.”

“Sometimes one must make a choice,” the judge said. “The tantrums, are they…?”

“Yes, they're worse than the rope-jumping,” Clementine said, and the judge sighed.

“I suggest again that this case be thrown out,” the insurance-company representative said. “I maintain that there never was such a person as the insured Greatheart Noble.”

“But you yourself talked to him,” Petronilla argued, “and you yourself signed the receipt for the premium payments.”

“I talked to a clown in some sort of costume,” the insurance representative said. “It is clear fraud.”

“I have proof of my marriage to Greatheart,” Petronilla said. “I have proof of his appearance before the insurance people and of his physical examination. Why do all you people keep arguing with me? Pay me my money! I have proof of everything.”

“Proof of everything except the husband's identity,” the judge said, “and his death.”

“Well, what in jug-headed judgment would you call proof?” Petronilla demanded.

“His mortal remains,” the chancery judge said.

“Oh, you disgrace to the judiciary!” Petronilla squalled. “You have his mortal remains right in front of you on the bench!”

“I have here a horrific mess of old paper towels,” the judge said. “They do not look like the mortal remains of a husband to me.”

“You are supposed to have had those paper towels analyzed by experts to see what they soaked up.”

“That has been done. And one of the experts is right here. And what the paper towels soaked up was water and nothing else. Or hardly anything else.”

“What else? Tell me what else was found?” Petronilla demanded.

“As would be expected, there were small quantities of foreign matter.”

“Oh, blindfolded justice! That foreign matter was my husband! Wheat bran and hog's blood, that's what the foreign matter was. That's what they made my husband out of.”

“Oddly enough, the foreign matter was wheat bran and hog's blood,” the expert said.

“Quiet!” the judge croaked. “I adjourn this court till I don't know when.”

“This is the plaintiff, this is the place,

This is the judge all red in the face.”

That was Strega O'Conner who had been singing a rope-jump song for quite a while and it had finally got under the subliminal skin of the judge.

There was some confusion along about then, and unreal elements seemed to creep in.

“You will not adjourn this court till you make them pay me my insurance money!” Petronilla said with such anger and violence that the judge seemed to go into a state of white-faced fear. “You will get back to that bench or I will drag you back,” Petronilla swore. Petronilla had hold of the judge and she had him scared. He began to cave in and to shrink. He almost began to disintegrate. And was that not a small puddle that had formed on the floor, and was it not growing larger?

“This is the puddle, thin as whey.

A gentleman drowned in it today,”

Strega jump-sang.

Petronilla was attempting to drag the judge back to his place on the bench, and that shrinking judge was resisting.

Then (oh horror!) Petronilla pulled one arm clear off the judge — 

And Strega was rope-jumping and rhyming — 

And the head fell off and — 

Chancery courts were very informal in those days. This condition has since been corrected.

Thou Whited Wall

False coinage will always drive true coinage to the wall, as it were.

 — Tully Ficticius

“The wall washers are coming rather late tonight,” Evangeline Gilligan said. “Oh, I can see that it's going to be one of those days! It's already four-thirty in the morning by Eastern time. They're doing a good job though. Ah, but it's nice to be a guided person and have so much working for you. Who will hit the wall first today?”

“The smart money's on the Rooky Duke,” said Evangeline's husband Mudge Gilligan. “But the smart money was also on Northside Public in Chicago for the wall of the night, and it turns out to be the Great North Wall of the men's room of Monorail Central in Atlanta.” Mudge recognized walls more readily than Evangeline did.

The wall washers came every late night or early morning to clean and white all the big-name walls of the country. They went over those walls with their sophisticated paintwashes and their broad electric brushes. They obliterated every picture and scribble from those walls and left the stark and challenging surfaces in their clean emptiness. It was always a question which would be the prime wall for a coming day (this information was never leaked) and which of the prophetic artists would score first hit on the designated wall with his message. Many local people watched local walls and guided their lives by the messages that appeared on them. But the wide world watched the prime wall.

But there were always marks breaking through on the walls between the time of the wall washing and the hit of the first prophet. It was the case of the stronger of yesterday's drawings and writings fighting their way out through those paint-washes and splaying themselves black and beetling on the new clean surface. There was a never-say-die spirit to the more meaningful of the old drawings, writhing and fighting their way through. And they changed in their struggles. Comparative pictures showed that the graphia were somewhat different in their emerging state from what they had been when they were submerged by the wall washing.

And then the new day's pictures and scribbles began to appear even before human hands could reach the wall. And this day, as revealed by the vision-set from Atlanta, the Rooky Duke scored first.

“Good!” Mudge Gilligan cried out as he watched. “I'm always afraid of the Rook, but if he's first he can't hurt me. I've got the third tonight, and if that had been the Rook I'd probably have died. There's only one worse than the Rooky Duke for me this session, the way the fates are falling.”

Quite often lately, the Rooky Duke had been scoring first, with electric or ectoplasmic hands. The cameras caught a little bit of the fogginess of such ghost hands that splashed their signatures and messages on prime walls before the surge of great-name but purely human artists could reach them.

The Rooky Duke had left his flaming message there, and it meant the deaths of very many people. But Mudge Gilligan was not riding on the Rook for a first.

The Putty Dwarf scored immediately after.

“Two down!” Mudge cried in half relief and half fear. “That's two of the three who might have killed me. And I have the next coming up, but the odds are strong against all three of my worst death-threats coming up the first three.” Mudge shook though, as if the odds were a little bit closer on the thing.

“Why do you take such risks, dear?” Evangeline asked her husband. “I'd think it would worry you sick.”

“It does. But there's a pretty good sum of money in the pot by this time. Only one in the pot can win and it's got to be me soon. There's only five of us left.”

“And only one in the pot can lose — can lose his life, that is,” Evangeline said, “and it's got to be you soon. Why did you join up this time?”

“You remember the fortune I got — 

Live dangerously,

reap the stuff,

and die if you lack luck enough.

And, Evangeline, nobody can escape his fortune, and four men have already died in it, and the pot has built up to twelve dollars. It's worth the risk. What other chance have I to avoid being a poor man all my life?” The Rooky Duke and the Putty Dwarf had already hit. And now the third prophet hit — 

“Oh, no, no!” Mudge howled in terror as he recognized the third ghostly hand that was writing on the camera'd wall.

“Is he really so bad for you, dear?” Evangeline asked.

“He is the death of me,” Mudge moaned, for the third of the prophets to score was the Gloaty Throat.

“At least read the message,” Evangeline urged. “It might not be death after all.”

But the handwriting on the wall read:

Anoint your head and leave your brood,

and use what came in the breakfast food.

This message didn't mean a lot to the millions of viewers, but it came through strong to Mudge Gilligan.

“All I can do is make an end to it,” Mudge whimpered. He knew that his little boy Hiero had got a vein opener in the last box of breakfast food and that the Gloaty Throat was referring to it.

“This is good-by, Evangeline,” he said.

“Don't touch me, please,” she protested. “Your hands are always so sweaty when you are scared, and you are so acid. You know I don't like you to touch me when your hands are sweaty.”

Mudge Gilligan went quickly and anointed his head. Then he got Hiero's vein opener and he opened his veins and died.

“Oh, I can see that this is going to be one of those days,” Evangeline said.

With the real mind explosion, most of the more intelligent people had gone beyond high astrology and had begun to tie their fortunes to the handwriting on the walls, to the pictures, to the messages. And the Handwriting on the Wall had already become a great and established institution. As the only prehuman graphic communication, it had always remained somewhat monkey-handed, and its prophetic element had not become soaringly interspecies. It was real understanding, the stuff that was splashed on the walls and became psycho-dyked there. This was gut-art. This was what the great Charles Puncheon had called transcendent drivel. This was seraphic scribbling. And it was creative prediction.

The emphasis on wall writing was not to abrogate high astrology but to fulfill it. All the great prophet-artists of the whited walls are planetary personages, and all the scientific backing of high astrology applies to transcendent wall writing also.

No good name had ever been found to describe the excellence and many-leveled meaning of this testimony on the walls. It had been called kakographia and syngramma and scribble-schnibble. It had been called zographia and ektyposis and ochsenschreiber. It had been called chromatisma and schediasma and oscenite. It had been called scherzi and motfi and asynartesia. The Italians have called it graffita, and the name may have stuck. But it became more than just a complex of things that dirty little boys wrote on walls. Now it was things that dirty big boys wrote, and these boys were the prophetic artist-heroes who came to the top by power and genius and scheming and creative duplicity and murder.

The twelve zodiacal signs had once been “set” things that were not subject to change. But the twelve prophets of the whited walls were twelve kings of the mountains who came to the top and flung others down to their destruction. They were the reincarnations of the prophets of the twelve tribes of Israel; they were the embodiments of the twelve planets; they were the twelve apostles; and they were the twelve signs from the sky. These mighty ones accepted every challenge, and many of them lived at the apex for several years. There were no living, former members of this highest circle of the prophetic artists: to fall from the twelve was to fall to death.

At this time, the high twelve were: The Rooky Duke, the Putty Dwarf, the Tutti Fruit, the Demogorgon, the Braggin Dragon, the Gloaty Throat, the Creature Preacher, Joe Snow, the Spanish Fly, Hu Flung, the Moving Finger, and the Turning Worm.

“Mother, father has opened his veins and bled to death all over everything,” small son Hiero Gilligan was hollering. Hiero's early stridence always gave an unpleasant cast to a morning.

“Yes, dear,” his mother Evangeline told him, “but be tolerant, it is his personal privilege.”

“Personal privilege, nothing!” Hiero exploded. “I never said that papa could use my vein opener. He should have asked me first. I wish people would leave my things alone.”

“I'll get you another one if you really want to use it, dear,” Evangeline offered.

“No, I wouldn't want to use it now,” Hiero pouted. “The shine's all gone off the idea.”

The Gilligans had given their little boy Hiero everything, but he had always been hard to please.

There were those (unguided persons all) who said that the walls and all their fruits were nonsense and that the science behind the prophetic messages was pseudo-science. These unguided folks said that the guided persons were probably insane and that they were wrecking the very apparatus of society with their aggressive ignorance. They said that production had already broken down because of the great numbers of unproductive wall watchers and that already there were not enough of the necessities to go around to everybody.

Well, no, there wasn't enough for everybody, but there was enough for the guided people. They had their power and their numbers. Who was going to dispute them, the fortune-cookie people?

The Spanish Fly had just hit the prime wall, and it was carried to all the other big-name walls. The Fly could not hit in a number of places at one time, as could the Rooky Duke or the Putty Dwarf or the Gloaty Throat. These were camera reproductions of the Fly message on the secondary walls. He wasn't a multi-presence entity. He hadn't either electric or ectoplasmic hands. He had to be at the wall he actually hit. So he was at the Great North Wall of the men's room of Monorail Central in Atlanta. But the Spanish Fly did have successive bodies. He had to have. He used up a body every time he hit.

He had hit now on the prime wall with a sudden and spectacular splotch of blood and viscera. And the great blotch was himself entire: the blotch was the Spanish Fly. The gory stuff slid down the wall and it spelled out its message as it did so:

I am an insect spilled;

this is my all.

I in my red, fulfilled

on whited wall.

There was always a wistful tone to the Spanish Fly's death messages, and there was a wonder how he was able to spell out the message when he came to his last extremity. His enduring classic communication, of course, had been those slow-beat words:

Blood, bone, gore, pith,

reek and rot.

Here I go with

all I've got.

But death splatterings lose a little of their excellence when they are repeated every night or morning.

The Spanish Fly always said that he was really the planet Mercury, but in his present manifestation he had been born in Spain, Idaho. Jealous and edged-tooth persons said that his use of the throwaway bodies was a conjure and a trick.

“Who's going to bury papa?” Hiero Gilligan asked his mother.

“I don't know,” she said. “Maybe I will have an intuition on how to get it done.”

“Who are you on this morning?”

“I'm playing a double. The Demogorgon and Joe Snow.”

“But you aren't smart enough to play a double, mama.”

Hu Flung had hit. Hu Flung's messages were always in the medium of thrown ordure. It globbed on the wall, and the words it spelled out were always gross.

The Demogorgon hit. The Demogorgon was probably the least of the reigning twelve. Only a sustained rumor as to who he really was gave him any stature at all. And his messages didn't mean much to the multitude, but this one meant a little bit to Evangeline:

Oh bury your dead

and run and run!

But where will you head

for luck and Fun?

“Well where will you head to find them, mama?” Hiero asked.

“I don't know. I'll intuit something in a little while. Who are you on today?”

“The Braggin Dragon.”

A dozen challengers from the stratum below the High Twelve had hit on the Great North Wall in Atlanta, the prime wall of the day. And ten thousand other challengers had hit on a thousand other walls.

Oh, the world would never run out of talent with so many powerful ones rising like giant waves every morning. Most of these were one-timers, but some of them had sustained power.

Joe Snow hit!

But Joe was always a time bomb. His hits were delayed messages. He hit with snow-shot, white on white, and his messages could not be read immediately. But his communications always caused flurries of intuitions in all who were on him for that day. And later in the day, when the whited walls had become dirty and speckled, his messages could be read as they stood out in stark white from dingy gray.

“I have an intuition from Joe Snow,” Evangeline said, and she rose to follow it.

“But your intuitions on Snow are always wrong,” the little boy Hiero argued, “and when the messages finally come clear, they are never anything like you guessed.”

“Never mind,” said Evangeline. “I have to start somewhere, and I will start with this intuition.” Evangeline went by the place of Violet Anemone Rhodina, a widow-woman of the town. “Your roses look bad, Vi,” Evangeline told her. “I believe that there is something a little bit lacking in them. I've been worrying about them.”

“And your psychology seems to be a little bit lacking, Ev,” Violet said. “What do you want from me and how much will it put me out?”

“Like all the guided people, I am a giver and not a taker,” Evangeline said. “Do you know when it was that your roses looked the best they ever have? It was in the months after you buried your husband in your rose garden.”

“Yes, of course. He gave my garden three flourishing years. There was never a man with so much to contribute as my husband. The earth is richer for him.”

“My own husband died about half an hour ago, Vi. I think he made a mistake, but he went by his own free choice. Now, I was wondering whether — ”

“I'm afraid that he's too acid, Ev. He always looked like a very acidic man to me, and too much acid isn't good for roses.”

“Oh, no, Vi. I don't believe he was ever acid at all.”

“Didn't his hands used to sweat a lot? Wasn't he a compulsive gambler? Both may be signs of a highly acid condition.”

“Oh, what will I do with him? What will I do?” Evangeline moaned.

“I'd like to help you, Ev, and I'm willing to be convinced. If you can bring me a certificate that his condition wasn't overly acidic, then of course you can bury him in my rose garden.”

“Oh, I will try to get a certificate from someone today,” Evangeline said. Then she went by Gimbal's where she worked. She hadn't been by there very often lately, but she thought that someone there might help her through a bad day.

“Oh, I fired you a week ago, Mrs. Gilligan,” Selkirk Gimbal told her. “I'd have told you before, but you haven't been in here since I fired you. Don't look at me so blank. You don't work here any more. You never seem to comprehend what I say, but how else can I tell you that you're fired and that you don't work here any more?”

“That's your problem, Selkirk. We guided persons never have any trouble in expressing ourselves. I'm going to have to take a few days off. I have a husband to dispose of, and I have all sorts of intuitions to sort out. And I'm going down to Atlanta today to examine the prime wall of record. I'll try to get in here a little while next week.”

“No hurry, Evangeline. You don't work here any more.”

“I'll forgive you for that remark, Selkirk, remembering that you are an unguided person.”

“It may be that we unguided persons get along as well as you guided ones.”

“Of course you don't get along as well as we do, Selkirk. Notice yourselves sometime. You simply don't have our depth. We guided ones are the pre-stressed people, and we can never be unbalanced. And we have our power.”

The guided people of the walls had been given twelve extra senators-at-large, one for the followers of each prophet-artist. This gave, almost always, a special tilt in affairs towards the guided people. And they had been given many other things.

The unguided persons were those who did not order their lives according to the handwriting on the walls. They hadn't the scientific understanding to bring them to that. They hadn't the planetary disposition for it. In every society there will be the guided elites, and there will be the unguided commonality. And the whited walls, those screens for projecting things from beyond by means of the artist-prophets, were the guides for the guided.

About midday, Evangeline received a report that might have been disquieting to her if she had not been one of the guided ones.

She learned that her small son Hiero, along with three companions, had opened a new option kit that was to have been the gift to one of them for his next name day. This option kit was a very sophisticated one and should not have been given to small children without caution. But they had opened it and they had played with it. And all four of them had optioned out. Of course, self-destruction is a personal privilege for persons of all ages, but the act itself is peculiarly poignant with small children.

All four of the boys were on the Braggin Dragon that day. That might be significant.

They all looked nice though, as Evangeline was told, and each of them held in his little dead hand one of those motto flags such as come in those kits, with the words it's a world i never made.

“It's too bad that children have to grow up so soon,” Evangeline said to herself. And then it seemed that her lament was incorrect since Hiero hadn't really grown up at all.

“Oh, certainly, it's all right,” Violet Rhodina said. “I'm letting them bury all four of the little boys in my rose garden. Little boys are seldom hyperacidic.”

Evangeline Gilligan took a fly-by to Atlanta. She wanted to see the wall of the day. In Atlanta at Monorail Central she came upon the Demogorgon himself sorrowfully drinking coffee and eating a roll and a bowl of squid brains at one of the tet cafés.

“I always thought you were a natural,” she jibed, “and here you are eating squid brains.”

“I am an un-natural,” the Demogorgon said, “but I have a right to these. These are devil-fish brains, and I am the devil himself.”

The Demogorgon had always insisted, in the face of derision and disbelief, that he was the one and original devil and as such was unnatural and anti-natural. Some of the great prophet-artists were natural in their gifts; but some used artificial enhancement, either special diet or brain surgery, to build up their talents. The surgery always removed several pounds of brain matter that might prove distracting to the talents, and it introduced other matter from the organs and brains of other species and from rogue humans. The special diets consisted of daily eating of these same types of organs and brains. The highest item on the diet lists was squid brains.

The squids, living in it entirely, had a finer understanding of the great oceanic unconscious than had people of any other species. And the squids also had a primordial understanding of writing on walls. Their inky ejections were true communication-writing, and they did have whited walls very deep in the oceans that they wrote upon with their propelled ink. The squids are not a degenerate species that writes sequentially one letter or one word after another. They eject an entire gloopy message at one time upon the walls.

“Who are you on today?” the Demogorgon mouthed around a glob of brains.

“Yourself and Joe Snow,” Evangeline told him. “He's the second half of my daily double.”

“There's always a delay about Joe,” the Demogorgon said. “His messages are not clear till a contrasting background builds up. And even after they are clear, they still are not very clear. Why doesn't everyone get on me alone? I'm the best of them all. I am pleased to see that you have had troubles today.”

“Not bad ones. Or not good ones, as it would be from your viewpoint. You really are the devil, aren't you? It's just that the man I work for keeps telling me that I'm fired, and it's just that my husband died this morning from a foolish antic and I have no place to bury him. He has an acid condition, I think, and that's bad for some plants. People won't let you bury an acid man in their gardens.”

“Aren't there any necrophagists in your town? They are likely breaking down the doors of your place right now to feed on him. They don't mind acidity.”

“They're too particular lately though. They'd eat a few choice parts of him and then I'd be stuck with the rest. And the dogs are almost as bad. There's so many parts that they like to play with but won't eat up.”

“Consider lilac bushes,” the really devil said. “Consider blueberry shrubs. I must go now. I have to oppress widows and orphans and defraud laborers. And there's several small children of both sexes that I must rape. It's an old pleasure that's coming back into favor. And take a careful took at my own latest message on the wall. It's rather excellent. Bad-bye, madam.”

“You are outmoded. You know that,” Evangeline said. “And you're outrotted in so many ways.”

“It's a case of the false coin driving out the true again,” the Demogorgon said.

Evangeline went down to view the Great North Wall. She had to wear a man's hat to go down there: that was the rule. They had hats available at a little booth.

Oh, there is always so much of the local prophetic-art in Atlanta and places like that. But some of it is good. Persons were at work with cameras and scanners and code breakers and calculators on many of the messages, squeezing the last drop of guidance out of them. The message of Joe Slow was still there on the prime wall. The background of it had darkened somewhat, but it was still too much white-on-white to be read. And Joe Snow himself was there.

“How good are lilac bushes for an acid husband?” Evangeline asked him. “How good are blueberry shrubs?”

“Rhubarb is the best,” Joe Snow said thickly. Joe was snowed.

“Why didn't I think of rhubarb? When will the background of your message darken enough to make it readable?” Evangeline asked. “I've got to catch a fly-by home in an hour.”

“Perhaps the message won't be readable today at all,” the thick-tongued Joe Snow mumbled. “Amateur artists are careless and they are writing over my message. I try to chase them away, but as the afternoon goes on I get sleepy and then there is no one to chase them off. But imprint my message on your mind and hold it there. The snow-colored message itself will not darken, but your mind will become gray and grimy by evening. The contrast will enable you to read it.”

“Thank you,” Evangeline said. “Things are much easier when one avails herself of guidance.”

Evangeline then had a liaison and affair with a gentleman who was also on Joe Snow and Demogorgon for the daily double. The liaison and affair took something more than half an hour. Then Evangeline caught a fly-by to go back home. And when she was back in her home city, she went immediately to Reuben's Rhubarb Patch.

“I have an acid husband,” she told Reuben. “And, oh, your rhubarb does look as if it needs acid!”

“That's my poke-weed patch,” Reuben said. “This is my rhubarb on the other side. Oh, bring him along and bury him, I guess. He can't hurt the soil much.” So the remains of Mudge Gilligan were quickly buried at Reuben's.

“Oh, how right everything is going today!” Evangeline chortled. “And I thought that things would be bad. I guess that things almost always go right for guided persons. I may as well settle my other problem.”

She went by the place where she worked.

“I have decided to forgive you for your bad manners of today, Selkirk,” she told the man she worked for. “You are an unguided person, so I must make allowances. But you know how much trouble you'd get into firing even an unguided person. There's a dozen agencies who'd battle you to the last drop of your blood. And we guided persons are much more powerful.”

“You don't work here any more, Evangeline. Get out!”

“I am on a double these days. I am on the Demogorgon, and I am also on Joe Snow. This will not mean much to an unguided and unscientific person such as yourself, but I assure you that those are the two strongest lobbies of all the wall people. And remember, Selkirk, that this is payday. Shell, man, shell!”

“Out, Evangeline, out!” Selkirk ordered, but he ordered with much less strength than usual. He was nine parts beat already, and with real pressure put on him he'd cave in.

“I'll be back within the hour, Selkirk,” Evangeline said. “And I believe that a little bonus added to my pay would be a nice gesture. It's almost imperative that unguided persons make such nice gestures regularly.”

Evangeline went down to the local Southside Sewage Plant wall, a fine expanse. The Turning Worm had just hit for the first time that day, and his had generated some excitement. The Turning Worm was not a prophet of multiple presence, and this was not a prime wall here, but the reproduction was good.

And the reproduction of the Joe Snow message was good, but there was still not enough contrast to make it readable. Evangeline had that snow-message imprinted on her own mind, however, and her mind had now become gray and grimy enough to give contrast. And she read:

Oh make it proud and make it sly!

Be grassed, be snowed, be hemp-ty,

and hold your head almighty high

although your head be empty.

Evangeline Gilligan walked proudly and with high head. She felt an everlasting compassion for all the unguided and unscienced people of the world, all those who were not prestressed, all who were not people of the walls. The guided persons had so much working for them! The wall washers would be around again in a few hours to white the walls for new messages and for another wonderful new day.

Fall Of Pebble-Stones

And heal my heart and bless my bones

With nightly fall of pebble-stones.

 — Ellenbogen, Rainy Morning Rimes

Bill Sorel stood at his nineteenth-floor window and shied pebbles and stones out over space to land in the sidewalk and street. It had rained the night before, and there were pebbles on that little ledge under his window after every rain. It's always fun to throw stones, even small stones, in the morning and see what they will hit.

“Hey, that cop's going to come up and get you again, Bill Sorel,” Etta Mae Southern called from her window next door. “Where were you last night? I called every guy I know for a date and couldn't get anybody. You remember the other day the cop came all the way up to your place and told you the people in the street were getting crabby about getting hit on the head with pebbles.”

“I have been awarded the big red plum, Etta Mae,” Sorel boasted to the early morning air and his neighbor. “I'm not a professor; I'm not a doctor: I'm just a hardworking and dirty-scheming popularizer and feature writer. But I have wrested the big red plum from the big boys in the Q. and A. scientific field.”

“Well, don't throw the plum-pit down on someone's head when you're finished,” Etta Mae said. “You told that cop, ‘They're not very big pebbles,’ and he said, ‘No, I know they're not.’ You told him, ‘People just like to complain about things,’ and he said, ‘Yeah, I know they do. Now you just cut out hitting people on their heads with pebbles so they'll have one less thing to complain about.’ You said, ‘How did you know it was me?’ and he said, ‘Who else in this building would be a mad pebble-thrower?’ He sure is a nice cop but I bet he won't be so nice if he has to come all the way up here after you again.”

“I've been awarded the big red plum,” Sorel repeated, and he continued to pick the pebbles out of that little ledge below his window and throw them down over the street. “I have been selected to compile, edit, write or whatever The Child's Big What and Why Book. This will pay me well. All I have to do is answer the scientific questions that children of all ages will ask, and do it in the style that the most doltish kid can understand and the smartest kid will not find patronizing. And really most of the work is done before I start.”

“You hit a man with a pebble, Bill. He's looking around to see where it came from. He's on the edge of being real mad if he finds out someone hit him on purpose.”

“I didn't,” Sorel said. “I discovered that I can't hit any of them on purpose, so I concentrate on hitting them by accident. I just throw them and let them find their own targets. But it wasn't a very big pebble and it didn't hurt him much. Now all I have to do is find out half an answer to one question and a full answer to another, and I'll be able to put the book together. Where do you think the pebbles come from, Etta Mae?”

“My idea is that the rain makes them. Pebbles are made out of silicon mostly. And silicon and nitrogen are almost exactly alike. I used to go with a smart fellow and he taught me things like that. When it lightens, the rain makes almost as much silicon water as nitrogen water, and it deposits it as pebbles. That's one way. Hey, do you know that rotten people never have pebbles around their houses? The other way is that little pieces of sand come together and the lightning-impregnated water fuses them into pebbles. It has to be one of those ways or there wouldn't always be pebbles after it rains. There's a third way that pebbles could happen, but it's a little bit doubty.”

“Tell me the third way, Etta Mae. I have to consider lots of fringe things for the Big What and Why Book.”

“It's that somebody doesn't want you to run out of pebbles because you have so much fun throwing them. So, whoever it is, he keeps making pebbles for you every time it rains. You know Mrs. Justex on the eighteenth floor. She always used to live in a house before she came here, and she had a little ledge outside her kitchen window where her milk would be left every morning. She took the apartment here and saw that there wasn't any ledge. ‘Have you got milk?’ she asked herself. So she nailed up a little ledge like the one you fixed for yourself there. And every morning there would be a quart of milk for her on the ledge. This went on for a week till she happened to think, ‘Who is my route man here? And how does he get up to the eighteenth floor on the outside of this building?’ She heard him then — it was early in the morning — and she went to see. She opened the window suddenly and knocked him off. He fell down and was killed on the sidewalk. But he faded away, and there wasn't anything left of him when she went down to look. After that, she had to start buying her milk in the store.”

“No, Etta Mae, I know Mrs. Justex. That's just one of the stories she tells when she's wet-braining it in the Wastrel's Club.”

“It did seem kind of doubty. I don't believe she drinks milk at all. What is the half an answer and the whole answer that you have to find out before you can put the book together?”

“The half one is, ‘Why does a baseball curve?’ I think I have that all whipped. I'm going to see a man today who is supposed to know the answer. And the whole answer I'm looking for is to the question, ‘How do the pebbles get under the eaves?’ ”

“Oh, well, it's got to be one of the three ways I told you.”

Bill Sorel stood there at the window and threw every pebble away. That is important. He didn't miss a one. Then he got a little broom and swept that ledge clear of everything.

Bill Sorel should have had an easy job of putting that book together. He already knew all the answers except for that half answer and that full answer. He had once handled a lot of the questions in a little daily feature before it was canceled out on him. He could use that material again. And most of the other answers he had already filed in his head for ready use. Besides, there were already many such books that he could draw upon, besides the real reference books, and besides the palaver of his own keen-witted friends. He had had it down to three unanswered questions when he applied for a shot at the Big What and Why. And now he had it down to one and one-half.

When Bill Sorel had come on the scene there had been three questions going around wearing blatantly false answers. These were: “What Makes it Thunder?” “What Makes a Baseball Curve?” “How Do the Pebbles Get Under the Eaves?” It is hard to believe the answers that had been given to these questions by scientists, some of them grown men.

Listen to this one:

“Thunder is produced when lightning heats the surrounding air and causes it to expand and send out waves. The expanding air is heard as thunder.”

Well, what can you do when you come on something like that? Possibly it was better than the answer that earlier generations gave, that the lightning burned up the air and the thunder was caused by new air rushing in to fill up the place.

Well, Bill Sorel had found out what causes thunder. It was really a wonder that somebody else hadn't stumbled onto the right answer before he had. Read it. Read the amazingly evident answer in The Child's Big What and Why Book.

Listen to this about a baseball. And it's been repeated again and again for more than a century.

“The curving of a baseball is caused by denser air in the bottom of the baseball than on the top. Therefore the bottom spin will be more effective than the top spin, will have more traction on the air, and will cause the ball to curve. The ball will curve to the right if the pitcher throws it with a clockwise spin, and to the left if the spin is counterclockwise. Artillery shells behave according to the same rule.”

Oh, great bloated bulls! What? A three-and-a-half inch difference in elevation would cause enough pressure difference between the top and the bottom of a baseball to make the thing curve up to eighteen inches in sixty-six feet? Where is your sense of proportion? Suppose the difference in elevation-pressure should be a hundred thousand times as much, the difference between low ground and the height of thirty thousand feet or so. Would the thrown ball then curve a hundred thousand times as much? Would it curve thirty miles off course in sixty feet of travel? As Etta Mae would say, “It's kind of doubty.”

But now Bill Sorel halfway knew what made a baseball curve. He had heard the explanation at second-hand. Today he hoped to hear it first hand.

And listen to this one about pebbles in the little rain-worn ditches under the eaves of buildings:

“It is sometimes asked why there are usually small white pebble-stones under the eaves-drops of buildings when there do not seem to be any other pebbles around anywhere. But the answer is that there are always pebbles around everywhere. They are mixed with the great bulk of the earth and are not noticed. But rain washes the finer and lighter earth particles away and leaves the pebbles behind. That is the reason that there seem to be so many pebbles under the eaves of buildings, particularly after a rain.”

Aw, heel-flies! Bill Sorel didn't know the answer to that one, but he knew that such drivel wasn't the answer.

Yeah, he had a big red plum. He wasn't going to let it get away. He was going to make sure of it. He got in his Red Ranger (a type of motor car) and drove off to find the man who could complete his half answer to the second question. And as he drove, he reviewed in his mind that momentous third question.

Some pebbles are limestone, but most of them are quartz. And there are not always pebbles around. In much earth there are no pebbles at all. In most earth, the true pebbles will make up less than one part in fifty thousand. Ah, but you put up a building or house and move into it, and after the very first rain there is a thick accumulation of pebbles in its eaves-drops. Has fifty thousand times their amount of earth been washed away to reveal them?

Bill Sorel had made a nuisance of himself around building projects in checking out the pebble situation. In one place he had taken a cubic yard of dirt, hauled it aside, and gone over it all with a toothbrush and sieve. And he had not found any pebbles at all. The only things too big to go through the sieve were organic things, roots, hickory nut hulls, twigs, pieces of bark and pieces of worms. There were not any natural pebbles at all. He kept track of all artificial pebbles (pieces of mortar, cinder block fragments, bits of limestone gravel and of flint chat). He would always know them from genuine pebbles, and he already know that they would not accumulate under eaves.

He continued his surveillance as the seven houses on this particular tract were raised, were finished, were first rained upon. He examined them. The rain had made little under-the-eaves ditches around all the houses, but there were no pebbles in those ditches. Something was missing from the formula. The premonition of what it might be excited Bill Sorel and almost scared him.

People moved into one of the houses, and Sorel waited impatiently for it to rain. But it didn't rain for a whole week. People moved into a second of the houses, and that night it rained. Sorel was around with a flashlight at dismal, drenching dawn (it was partly for such devoted labor as this that Sorel had won the big red plum), and he discovered that the two inhabited houses now had pebbles in their eaves-drop runners, and that the five uninhabited houses had none.

He followed it up. As soon as people moved into another house and there was rain thereafter, so soon was there a full complement of pebbles around that house.

You do not believe this? Pick out a housing development in your own region, and make a nuisance of yourself by observing it closely. You will be convinced, unless you are of such mindset as defies conviction.

Sorel observed other housing developments, apartment projects, commercial constructions. Wherever eaves-runnels were not precluded by roof guttering and spouting, there would be white pebbles appearing in full force as soon as the structure had been put to human use and it had rained thereafter.

Sorel tried it at his own nineteenth-floor apartment. He figured a way to divert rainfall from the roof. He made this diversion, and he made a little ledge outside his window on which the diverted rain might fall.

(A little misunderstanding was created by these activities of Sorel. Firemen and policemen and psychologists and deacons came and soft-talked him and tried to capture him with hooks and ropes and nets. They thought he was contemplating jumping off the building to his own destruction. He wasn't. There just wasn't any way to divert the rain-drop without climbing around on the outside of that building.)

Well, it rained the night after Sorel had made these arrangements. There sure had not been any pebbles there before it rained. There had been nothing there but a little ledge or trough made out of number two pine boards and fastened to the brickwork with screws and lead anchors.

It rained and rained, and Bill Sorel kept night watch on his little ledge by the lightning flashes and the diffused night light of the town. One moment there had not been any pebbles. And the next moment there had been a complete complement of pebbles. Sorel knew that the pebbles were for him. He knew they wouldn't have appeared on the ledge of an apartment that nobody lived in, but how had the pebbles got to that nineteenth-floor ledge? This was the question that still lacked even a hint of an answer.

Bill Sorel in his Red Ranger arrived at a little acreage and came on a tall middle-aged man who was eating round onions; and with him was a bright-faced little girl who was eating gingerbread.

“They're good for the circulation,” the man said. “I bet I eat more onions than any man in the county. I'm George ‘Cow-Path’ Daylight. You sent me a postcard that you were coming to see me today.”

“Yes,” Bill Sorel said. “I'm told that you really know what makes a baseball curve. I've been looking for the answer to that one for a long time.”

“I'm Susie ‘Corn-Flower’ Daylight,” the bright-faced little girl said. “Mr. Cow-Path here is my grandfather.”

“Yes, I really know what makes a ball curve,” Cow-Path said. “It's because I know what makes it curve that I've been striking out batters for thirty years. You ask the batters in Owasso and Coweta and Verdigris about me. You ask them in Oolagah and Tiawah and Bushyhead. They'll tell you who keeps the Catoosa Mud-Cats on top of the heap year after year. I am the best small-town pitcher in northeast Oklahoma, and I'm the best because I know what makes a baseball curve.”

“And I am the best third-grade girl pitcher in Catoosa,” Susie Corn-Flower Daylight said. “I can even whizz them by most of those big girls in the fourth and fifth grades.”

“Cow-Path, they tell me that you maintain that the direction of the spin has nothing to do with the direction of the curve of a ball. And you say that there isn't a gnat's leg's difference in the pressure on the top and the bottom of a ball.”

“Not a millionth of a gnat's leg's difference,” Cow-Path Daylight said. “A pitcher's mustache with one more hair on one side than on the other would have more effect on the ball than any such difference in pressure. The reason I understand the physics of the situation is that I spent two years in the sixth grade, which is why I learned that book General Science for The Primary Student so well. There was a paragraph in there about how a gyroscope top spins and leans and holds. I applied it to baseball and became a great pitcher.”

“Well, if the direction of the spin doesn't have any effect on the direction of the curve, what does have effect?” Sorel asked smoothly. He had heard the explanation at second-hand, but he wanted to hear it from the master.

“The direction of the axis of the spin is what causes the curve,” Cow-Path said, “but it doesn't matter which direction the ball spins on the axis. Look!”

Cow-Path Daylight took a pencil from Sorel's pocket and, with his strong fingers, he jabbed clear through one of those big round onions that he liked. He had it centered perfectly. He spun the pencil with its spitted onion, and that was the axis of spin. He moved the whole thing head-on down the centerline of the hood of Sorel's Red Ranger, but with the direction of the axis about eleven degrees off to the right of the direction of movement.

“The curve will be in the direction of the angle of the axis of spin,” Cow-Path said. “The ball, on the gyroscopic principle, tries to align its direction with the direction of the axis of spin. But the direction of the spin itself doesn't matter. See!”

Cow-Path showed, with the gyroscopic onion, how a ball would behave with the axis tilted to the right or the left, or up or down. And he showed that it was all the same thing whether the spin was clockwise or counterclockwise.

“It is for this understanding that I am known as the artist of the backup ball,” Cow-Path said. “I can throw a fork-ball that moves like a slider, or a slider that moves like a fork-ball. And I can throw my floater and my drop with the same motion and the same direction of spin: only the tilt of the axis will be changed.”

Sorel saw that all of this was true with an eternal verity. It was one of those big Copernican moments. Things could never again be as they had been before. Infinitesimally and particularly there had been made a contribution towards a new Heaven and a new Earth.

When he had his feelings a bit under control, Bill Sorel made small talk with the two Daylight people. Then, believing that their well of wisdom could not be exhausted even by such a huge cask as had been drawn from it, he asked them questions.

“Do you know what causes thunder?” he asked them.

“Do you mean thunder or the sound of thunder?” Susie Corn-Flower Daylight asked around her gingerbread. “They're two different things.”

“I suppose I mean the sound of thunder,” Sorel said. “Thunder itself has no cause.”

“Why, how smart you are, for a city man!” Corn-Flower admired.

“I very nearly know what causes the sound of thunder, the sound of lightning really, but I don't know exactly,” Cow-Path said. “Lightning is resinous, as we know from the color of it as well as from the odor. I believe that when lightning cracks or fractures the air, it coats both parts of the air with a sort of rosin dust — not too different from the rosin that pitchers use. Then, when the two parts of the air come together again immediately, they are a little bit offset from each other. So they grind and set themselves together, and the two rosined surfaces rubbing together make a noise.”

Bill Sorel was amazed. Cow-Path's explanation was gibberish, of course. But it sounded almost like the real explanation would sound if given in code, and it may have been just that. And Susie Corn-Flower's divination that the thunder and the sound of thunder were two different entities was — well, it was a thunderous sort of intuition. Sorel felt very pleased and gratified with these two persons.

So he tried them with the final question.

“How do pebbles get under the eaves of houses and buildings?” he asked.

“Oh, I suppose they come off the roof,” Cow-Path said. “The rain must loosen them, and then they roll off the roof into the eaves-drop ditch.”

“No, Grandpa, no,” Susie Corn-Flower Daylight said. “Why would they ever be on the roof to fall off? The pebble angel puts the pebbles directly into the eaves-drop ditch. He puts them there as a sign he is guarding that building and that everything is all right. Buildings without people living in them never have pebbles under the eaves.”

“No, I know they don't, Corn-Flower,” Sorel said. “But did you ever hear that rotten people don't have pebbles around their houses either?”

“I've never known any rotten people,” Susie Corn-Flower said. “We've never had any rotten people in our town.”

“That's right. There never have been any here,” Cow-Path said.

Bill Sorel had The Child's Big What and Why Book finished a week later — he was a fast worker — and it was ready to send off. But he had two versions of one page, and he had not yet made his selection between them. This was the page that covered the question, “How do the pebbles get under the eaves?”

Sorel went to the Wastrel's Club to drink white rum and think about it. One version gave the old safe answer, that there are always pebbles around everywhere, and that the rain washed the dirt away from them and leaves the pebbles. This was the safe falsehood.

The other version was somewhat different. It was true, probably: or at least it was a coded statement of a truth. But could Sorel get away with a truth like that in the What and Why Book?

Etta Mae Southern was already in Wastrel's with a handsome, rich, and good-humored man. She made very small horizontal circles with her finger in the air.

“That's the world's smallest record playing, ‘I wish it were you instead,’ ” she called across the club room.

And Mrs. Justex was already in Wastrel's. She was drinking one of those lacteal gin-sloshes that are called Milky Ways. So Mrs. Justex did drink milk, sometimes, and in a way. That fact changed just about everything. It meant that the wildest of improbables was still possible.

On the wall of Wastrel's was a paragraph of wisdom:

“When one has discarded all absolutely impossible explanations of a thing, then what is left, however improbable it seems, must be accepted as the explanation until a better explanation comes along.”

Bill Sorel had seen that paragraph on the wall a dozen times, but it had never hit him between the ears before.

A cop came into Wastrel's and said it had started to rain outside. He had a Salty Dog. Cops are the only people left in the world who still drink them.

“You will be in my apartment in fifteen minutes,” Bill Sorel said.

“Why will I be?” the cop asked him.

“To try to make me stop hitting people on their heads with pebble-stones,” Sorel said. And Sorel left Wastrel's and went to his apartment. He selected one of the two versions of the disputed pages and put it with the rest of the pages. He sealed and stapled the completed What and Why, and went out and down in the elevator and out into the rain to mail the thing in the stand-up mailbox on the corner. And then he came back to his apartment with happy anticipation.

Then he was standing at his opened window in the early dark. It was raining and blowing and getting him pretty wet. He was scooping up handfuls, double-handfuls of pebbles from the ledge under his window and flinging them out at the lower world. He scooped out twenty, thirty, fifty handfuls of pebbles from that little ledge-trough that wouldn't hold three handfuls at one time. But now that trough stood full of pebble-stones no matter how many he scooped out of it.

Somebody was banging at Sorel's apartment door, and he let him bang. And pretty soon somebody was shaking Sorel's shoulder, and he let him shake.

“Hey, you got to quit throwing pebbles down there,” the cop was saying. “You're hitting people that are trying to get taxis in the rain, and you're tearing their umbrellas. Those are bigger pebble-stones than you usually throw, aren't they?”

“These are the biggest ever,” Sorel said happily. “These are prime pebbles. Say, I used the page about the pebble angel in the book. That's going to hit a lot of people crossways. I mailed the whole thing off with that in it. I'm glad I did.”

“They come in just as fast as you throw them out, don't they?” the cop said. “I wonder where they come from? I never noticed that that's the way pebbles come when it rains. Can't you throw more of them faster and get ahead of them?”

Oh, it was with a wonderful clatter that the pebbles arrived!

“Man, this is as fast as I can throw them,” Sorel panted. “I bet I've thrown a thousand pounds of them down already. It sure is fun. It looks like I made a breakthrough in pebbles. The pebble angel is showing that he likes the mention.”

“Maybe if we both scooped them and threw them as fast as we could, we could almost keep up with them,” the cop said. “Yeah, it is fun.” The cop threw left-handed, and the two fitted well together at the window.

He was a good person, that cop. There weren't any rotten people around there. (But have you looked under your eaves after a rain?)

And All The Skies Are Full Of Fish

Beware aesthetics throwing stones

(We state it here prologgy).

Oh by our fathers' busted bones

We'll fight with dint and doggy!

 — Rocky McCrocky comic strip

Austro was still only twelve years old, and Chiara Benedetti had just had her thirteenth birthday and so had to resign from the club. She nominated Austro to take her place.

Ivan Kalisky had also turned thirteen and would have to get out of it. He nominated his little, fat, freckled, glasses-wearing sister Susie Kalisky to take his place. Susie Kalisky looked a lot like the Susie Kalusy in the Rocky McCrocky comic strip.

There was another vacancy in the gang. One small boy who shall be nameless had been expelled when it was discovered that he was as yellow as a daffodil. Austro, as soon as he was confirmed as a member, nominated his dog for this other vacant place.

“People will laugh at us if we have a dog for a member,” Dennis Oldstone said.

“People won't laugh a whole lot at a dog that can swallow them in one swallow,” Austro argued.

“And there is a certain prestige in having the biggest dog in the world as a member,” Lowell Ragswell supported Austro. So they accepted the dog into their club. And they had gotten their membership in shape just in time.

There was another group of young people around; these were pure-hearted and aesthetic, and they had psychokinetic powers that reflected their pure-heartedness. They danced willow dances and they wore sweet-gum leaves in their hair. And it had been announced that they would give a public demonstration of their powers. There was quite a bit of scientific interest in the demonstration.

But the gang that Susie and Austro and the dog had just joined was more known for its fish fries than for its pure-heartedness. And it was known for its harassing of those aesthetic kids. In its reorganized form, it now took the name of “The Local Anaesthetics” to show that it was at war with the aesthetic kids. It had never had a name before this.

Along about this time, Barnaby Sheen was opinionating to some of us.

“We deal in facts at our place,” he said. “We are open-minded, but we do not let just every wind blow through. We respect the new as well as the old, but we do know that some things must be rejected instantly. There are people around here who still haven't rejected the pretensions of those willow-dancing, rainmaking kids. Austro, you have assured me twice that you don't belong to that whey-witted bunch of squid kids, but I keep hearing tales about you. Assure me one more time that you're not a member of them.”

“By the busted bones of my fathers, I am not a member of the willow dancers,” Austro swore the oath truly. And that was the start of that.

The willow-dance children were to give a “Sunshine and Showers” presentation right in the Civic Center area to show their powers and to promote science and inquiry. They had the full support of the city magistrates in this. Our magistrates were all proud of those talented and scientific children, and we were all proud of our magist — 

“We sure do have good-looking magistrates in our town,” Barnaby Sheen would say with that forked tongue of his. “They're not as competent as we'd like. They're not as dedicated as we'd like. They haven't much integrity. They bumble and they stumble, and they're just not very smart. But they are good-looking.”

“And it will be a good-looking show that they put on,” George Drakos said. “We are all for pure-hearted and aesthetic children with a scientific bent, and we are all for willow dancing (what is it anyhow?); we are certainly for ‘Sunshine and Showers’ in proper proportion. I, at least, do not reject the weather making powers of these children instantly. If they do it, then it can be done. Let us see the presentation.”

“The weather influences me a lot, and maybe I influence the weather a little bit,” Harry O'Donovan stated. “If I had my life to do all over again, I believe that I could influence the weather and many other things much more than I did. Well, these children do have lives to do all over again. They start where we left off. Children always did have special powers. We tend to forget about it, but even we had a smattering of powers once.”

“Ah, peacock pug, we did not!” Barnaby Sheen argued. “There are no special powers.”

“I myself haven't any doubt that humans do influence the weather,” Cris Benedetti said. “The ideal system is to let the towns go drysod in their sunshine, and let the farmers enjoy their needed rain. As a general thing, that has always been the real as well as the ideal case. There are records to confirm this. Cities do have (from the viewpoint of cities) more pleasant weather than do the countrysides: milder in summer, milder in winter also, dryer most times, and more sunny and more smiling than country places. This is because, in the cities, there are greater numbers of minds working for fine weather. The people of a town, by their desires and sympathies, can literally hold an umbrella over a town and protect it from inclement weather. But in the country there is need for great falls of rain and for, ah, sometimes showers of proteid matter also.”

“Into each rain some albuminoid must fall,” Austro said. “That's a proverb.”

“Prayers for rain have been part of the furniture of the Church from the beginning,” George Drakos commented. “They have always been effective, but perhaps they were more effective when the majority of the people were rural. Dozens of great historical droughts have been broken by the fervent prayers of the peoples.”

“I don't doubt the efficacy of prayer,” Barnaby said. “But I will doubt the efficacy of this weather-making pseudo-science that has been shoveled into tender children's minds by certain mentors. And I doubt the efficacy of the little fetish magic that the children themselves contribute to it.”

“The fetish magic of children is a form of prayer,” Cris said. “And both prayer and fetish magic have scientific backing (read Manalo Grogly and others). Prayers are legitimate scientific requests, and they do often receive scientific answers in the form of rain from heaven; and even in the form of bread and fish from heaven.”

“Aw, porcupine pellets!” Barnaby barked.

“Consider our two weathermen on the evening broadcasts,” said Harry O'Donovan. “What they really present is ritual, scientific prayer. And, as is always the case, one of them is of good influence and the other one is evil. Dean is a good-weather man. Keen is a bad-weather man. And they defer to each other. One of them will give a listless presentation on the evening that the other one gives a passionate show: and the sense of the situation goes out to the people. With a good-weather feel in the air, seventy percent of the clients will tune in on Dean, and the good weather for the morrow will be even better. With a bad-weather feel in the air, seventy percent of the clients will tune in on Keen, and the bad weather for the morrow will be even worse.”

“Aw, turtle dirt!” snapped Barnaby Sheen.

“The four men who know everything,” jeered the twelve-year-old Austro, “and they don't know weather from wolfmagite!”

Amelia Corngrinder, one of the aesthetic children, was making it rain a very local shower into the Donners' front-yard birdbath. She did this by mental and spiritual powers alone. Several persons were watching her and admiring. One lady (well, it was Amelia's own mother, Ellen Corngrinder) was admiring Amelia out loud. “This is angelic power!” Ellen was crying out. “This is a miracle that my girl performs by sheer mentality and grace and goodness. This is controlled and pure rain from the sky. It's wonderful.”

“What's wonderful about it?” asked Austro, who was watching. “It only has to come a mile, and it's downhill all the way.”

“Buzz off, fuzz-face,” the angelic-powered, willow-dancing Amelia told Austro out of the corner of her mouth. It was a controlled and directed remark that was heard only by Austro and by that fat little freckled girl, Susie Kalisky, who also happened to be there.

“It just seems that something is lacking,” Susie said. “There is something wrong with empty water, and there is something lonesome about uninhabited rain. Nobody lives in your rain, Amelia.”

“Broom off, crack-eyes,” the pure-hearted and aesthetic Amelia hissed a controlled hiss at Susie. And then she willow danced some more and drew down still more rain. It was absolutely pure rain.

“I like there to be some body to the rain,” Susie said. Then she cupped her mouth and her voice skyward and bawled out, “Does anybody live in that house?” And there was either a slight clap of thunder or a hoarse murmuration of cold-blooded voices above.

“I do believe you two are envious,” said the mother, Ellen Corngrinder, to Austro and Susie. “Why must you be like that? You two could hardly be called ‘beautiful children’ in any sense of the term.”

“Your glasses are cracked, lady,” Susie said. And Ellen Corngrinder's glasses were indeed cracked. Austro and Susie walked on up the street.

How long does it take a sarcodic mass to fall a mile? From the time that there was either a slight clap of thunder or else a hoarse murmuration of sky-voices, it took — just that long! A very large and lively body smashed out of the sky into the Donners' birdbath and shattered the thing into shards of Granite Mountain Simulated Pressed Stone of which it was made. And, with this distraction, Amelia Corngrinder lost control of the little shower, and it unfocused and dispersed into a thin sprinkle over several blocks.

“Your glasses are cracked, sir,” Susie said to a gentleman in the next block, and sure enough they were. Susie always noticed cracked glasses before the owners did. The Susie Kalusy of the Rocky McCrocky comic strip would shatter the flint-glass lenses out of folks' spectacles for pure malevolence and leave the rock frames hanging empty on the mortified faces. But Susie Kalisky was a slightly different person, and how could she smash eyeglasses by thought alone?

It rained foreign matter that night all over the south part of town. It was very strong sarcodic substance and it offended everyone within nose shot.

“There's something a little bit funny about this!” Barnaby Sheen bellowed when he saw it the next morning. “Austro, did you make it rain? Oh, what's gone wrong with my wits? How could the kid make it — well, I already have the words in my mouth and I'm not going to swallow them again. Austro, did you make it rain that, ugh, stuff?”

“What a strange question, Mr. Sheen! All I will say is that I did not do anything to prevent it raining that stuff. Is that a good enough answer?”

“No it isn't. Say, that's about the strongest I ever smelled! You could hardly praise it for its downwind flavor, could you?”

“It wouldn't be so bad, Mr. Sheen, if it were seasoned with just a few bushels of wielandiella fronds.”

“Is that the stuff your dog eats?”

“That's some of the stuff that he eats.”

Austro's dog came then. It had slipped in from the country for an early-morning visit. It was, as you know, a very large creature. It had been clearing blackjack oak trees and thickets off of a few sections of land forty miles to the west. Flamethrowers and eight-way power saws and the strongest bulldozers in the world wouldn't clear those blackjacks very well, but that dog could get rid of them; and he got his needed roughage doing it. Now he wanted a little bit of more satisfying fare. And that more satisfying fare fell down for him with a muted but heavy jolt. It was 180 foot long crinoid stems, and it was huge fronds of macrotaenopteris ferns.

Austro told the dog that he had been accepted for membership in the smoothest club in town, and the dog croaked pleasure. Barnaby patted that biggest-dog-in-the-world of Austro's, and then he went about his daily business.

II

The world's a blast (Ka-whoosh! Ka-whish!

With healthy soul and belly,

And all the skies are full of fish,

And all the fish are smelly.

 — Rocky McCrocky comic strip

The weather happening was scheduled for one o'clock that afternoon in the Civic Center Open-air People's Area. Press people and university people and scientific people would be there. And all the city magistrates would be present: Arthur (“It's pretty but is it Art?” Barnaby Sheen used to say about him) Topmann, the mayor. Topmann really was a good-looking man, and he liked to serve the people, and he liked almost all children. Almost all of them.

“Your glasses are cracked, Mr. Mayor,” said that little, fat Susie Kalisky, who just happened to be there. And the mayor's glasses were cracked as soon as she said it.

There was Gaberdine McPhillips, the lady commissioner of playgrounds and sewers. Gaberdine was offering, from her own funds, a money prize to the young person who could make it rain the purest rain. Gaberdine had a thing about pure water.

“Your glasses are cracked, madam,” Susie told her, and they were. But had they been cracked just a moment before?

There was George H. Corngrinder, who was commissioner of streets and who was also the father of Amelia Corngrinder, who was one of the willow-dance youngsters who had now seized the scientific community by the ears.

There was Peter Kalisky, the police commissioner, who was a gruff man.

“Austro, get that sign out of here or I'll pitch you into the pokey,” he called now.

“You can't,” Austro said. “I'm a juvenile, and besides I belong to an alien species. Your anti-poster ordinances don't apply to me.”

Austro belonged to the species Australopithecus. The sign or poster that he was putting up there in the area read:

COSMIC, FREE FISH FRY!
WE REALLY KNOW HOW TO FIX THEM!
COME TO SHEEN'S RAVINE AT ONE-THIRTY TODAY
(IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE DEBACLE).
EVERYBODY COME.

“Get it out of there, Austro, or I'll put the police dogs on you,” Commissioner Peter Kalisky thundered.

“The dogs are all afraid of me,” Austro said. “They know I own the biggest dog in the world.”

“Your glasses are cracked, Mr. Commissioner,” that fat, freckled little Susie Kalisky said. And Peter Kalisky's glasses were cracked. They were cracked so recently that glass slivers were still tinkling to the pavement.

“Dammit, Susie, I'm your father!” Commissioner Kalisky roared, and with shocking cruelty he swatted that girl where she was biggest.

“Oh, wah, wah, wah,” Susie blubbered. “I keep forgetting. How'm I supposed to remember everyone?”

The willow dancers were gathered and they were ready for it. They were effective from the very start. Little clouds began to form and to dance in the sky with the same shape and motion the willow dancers showed. It was winding into the most graceful rain that anybody had ever seen.

“It's a fraud all the way,” Barnaby Sheen gruffed. “There is no way that such an empty-eyed aggregation of kids could make it rain. I wouldn't believe it if I drowned in it.”

“Your glasses are cracked, mister,” Susie Kalisky said.

“Susie McGoozy, you know I don't wear glasses.”

“Then get some, and we can enter into a whole new relationship.”

Barnaby Sheen and Susie Kalisky liked each other.

“There is no way that they can make it rain,” Barnaby said again.

“There's a dozen ways they can do it,” said that young Roy Mega who worked as an electronic genius for Barnaby. “There's half-a-dozen ways that I could do it myself, and I've almost left off being a kid. I could set up a simple astasis voltage grid, and I could add a bleeder circuit with one reflecting nexus located just above the predominant cloud layer at five thousand feet. Then I'd build up a hysteresis shield to a point just short of coronal discharge. Then, by the addition of almost any Keefe-Minsky equation, I could — ”

“No, no, Roy,” Barnaby protested. “I mean that there's no way that a person could make it rain by use of the mind.”

“This would be by use of the mind. I'd arrange all those things by use of my mind.”

“By your mind alone, Roy; not by tools of the mind.”

“Oh, that's like saying that one may use his hands but not the fingers of his hands,” Roy Mega complained.

Those aesthetic children — Amelia Corngrinder with her controlled grace and goodness; Aldous McKeever with his exquisite pallor and his high psychic threshold; Horace Wickiup, who was an Indian (and you know how full of rain they are); Margaret Grainger; Adrien Chastel; Alice Whitetoken (who was very spiritual, as her mother had been also); Rolland Clatchby — they were all doing the rain-willow dance. They were rolling their eyes; they were breathing hard (but always in good taste): and their seven clouds in the sky had turned into seven sparkling showers that began to spill down, under absolute control, into the Civic Center fountains.

“I'll not believe it,” Barnaby Sheen said sourly. “It isn't scientific.”

“Let's say that it is prescientific,” Roy Mega suggested. “It works, but we don't yet know how it works.”

“I bet that's the biggest dog in the world over there,” a woman among the spectators said to her husband.

“Yes, I heard that some monkey boy in town had the biggest dog in the world,” the husband said.

“Oh, but now it's gone. I can't see it anywhere. Instead of it I see a big hairy hill over there. I bet it's thirty feet high. What would a big hairy hill be doing in the middle of the Civic Center Plaza?”

“I imagine that the city fathers had it put there for the children to play on,” the husband said. But when you are as big as that dog, and you live in a world as small as this one, you learn the art of camouflage.

“Let's say that it's pseudo-science.” Barnaby still balked (and there were now seven pretty good showers of rain coming down all asparkle into the fountains). “It works, yes, apparently, and for the moment at least. But I bet it can be unworked. Austro, can you unwork it?”

“What do you think all our huffing and puffing's been about? We're on your side, Mr. Sheen. Parascience will beat pure pseudo-science every time. Local Anaesthetics, come get with it! Susie! Dog! Dennis! Lowell! They're leading us on points!”

“Your glasses are cracked, sir,” Susie remarked to a gentleman as she hurried to the assembly of the Locals. And the gentleman's glasses were cracked.

“Oh, look, Reggie,” that woman among the spectators said to her husband. “Now that big hairy hill is getting up and walking off.”

“They're probably not going to use it today, what with the rainmakers and all.”

But those pure-hearted and aesthetic children with their rainmaking willow dances were far ahead of the Local Anaesthetics on points. The Locals would have to play catch-up ball. Those were plumes and sheens of the purest rain that anybody ever saw.

It was now or never. The Locals put their heads and their hearts together to generate what power they might. A fish crashed to the pavement there amid the throng.

That was a crash? You couldn't have heard the sound of it a block. That was a fish? Why, that thing wasn't more than three feet long.

“We might as well let the empty-water people have it if we can't do any better than that,” Dennis said.

An anomalous frond of macrotaenopteris fell down there with a muted but heavy jolt. That was a heavy jolt? Why, that frond wasn't twenty feet wide, and it wasn't twenty million years old. That was the biggest dog in the world with his snout in this business? A little Great Dane could do that well. The Local Anaesthetics would have to muster more power than this.

“How are you going to get the fish out to Sheen's Ravine, Austro?” Roy Mega asked.

“I never thought of that,” Austro admitted. Austro was panting already, and the battle looked bad for the Locals. “Maybe Dog would carry them out there in his mouth,” Austro said.

“Fish?” Barnaby asked. “What fish? Will there be many fish?”

“Quite a few, I believe,” Mega said, “though I'm not sure quite what the kids have in mind.”

“Better go get the twelve ton truck, then, Roy,” Barnaby said. “Some people might be fussy about the dog carrying the fish in his mouth.” So Roy went to get the heavy truck.

A few of the larger fish fell, but most of them weren't much longer than a man. Quite a few of the long crinoid stems swacked down to earth, and many really big wielandiella and macrotaenopteris ferns from the ancient days. The dog was getting with it now. He was drawing bigger stuff down from the Tertiary skies. He was doing a better job than the kids in the gang were.

(Several persons, George Drakos and Roy Mega among others, have said that Austro's big dog was really a hairy dinosaur. You can believe this if you want to, but you should notice that there are points of poor correspondence between them. Go look at the anklebones of a dinosaur, for instance. Then look at the anklebones of Austro's big dog. How about it?)

There were bigger and more weird sky falls now, but the Local Anaesthetics just weren't stealing the initiative from the willow-dancing, pure-water kids. The limpid showers of the dancers were just doing too many sparkling things. And yet there was real talent to be found among the L.A.'s. There was Austro. There was Dog. There was Susie.

“Almost every time the world is turned around it's a little trick that does it,” Susie said. “I'll just try a little trick.” And she went boldly into the area of the enemy, into the lair of the pure-pseudo-science, rain-dancing young people.

“Your glasses are cracked, kids,” Susie told them. And the glasses of all seven of them were cracked (all aesthetic, willow-dancing children wear glasses). And something else about them cracked at the same time. It was their protective psychic carapaces. It was their science itself.

The tide of battle swung to the Local Anaesthetics. Something else was falling to the pavements of the area now. It was the scales from the eyes of the people. Now the folks were able to see the monstrous crashing ichthyoids that had been, or would be, or maybe already were fish. Ancient sorceries will whip modern fetishes every time, and it was a case of that.

Man, that's when they pulled the stopper out of the drain and let it all come down!

People loaded up the twelve ton truck that Roy Mega arrived with then. And then they brought in a number of really big trucks and loaded them with the gloriously smelling old fish and the earlier-age crinoids and giant fern fronds. And a great number of loaded trucks as well as several thousand people went out to Sheen's Ravine for the enjoyment.

“My magic can whip your magic, and my dog can whip your dog!” Austro called to the aesthetic remnant.

Out at the ravine, it was fun to cut up crinoid stems with axes and crosscut saws. It was fun to bruise the fronds of large and early ferns and palms (Ah, that was a palmy hour!) with pneumatic hammers. And then to use that royal vegetation to garnish the big and powerful fish, to bring out the nobility of their strong smell and taste, that was to know what an enjoyment and a banquet were all about.

“Where those rain dancers and the big people who sustained them made their mistake,” Dennis Oldstone was lecturing like an even younger Roy Mega, “was that they didn't understand the vastness of the universe. They — ”

“Duck, everybody! There's no way he won't think of it!” Susie wailed the warning.

“ — they only understood the half-vastness of the universe. Luckily, enough of us with enough scope to handle the situation happened to be around.”

“I suppose that I'll have to accept it,” Barnaby Sheen was saying. “It's a fractured plane of reality that is introduced here. I can brush up on my fractured-plane equations, or I can have Roy Mega review me on them. Ah, I find that little shower rather refreshing. And the fish really isn't bad, Austro.”

Susie Kalisky (or Susie Kalusy; it depends on which part of the fractured plane you are on) was focusing a shower of inhabited rain right on the head of Barnaby Sheen. The shower was inhabited by frogs and fish and eels and claw-feet that bedecked the wet head and shoulders of Barnaby as he ate (along with five thousand other people) the fried and garnished fish.

“It's not really bad fish the way it's fixed,” Barnaby admitted. “The garnish is so strong that one can't taste the fish, and the fish is so strong that one can't taste the garnish. But where did it really come from, Austro?”

“There's a pool about a mile from here, Mr. Sheen. It's plain loaded with those big old fish. And the banks and bottom of it are loaded with those big old plants. It was Dog who first discovered it.”

“Your glasses are cracked, mister,” Susie Kalusy said to a fish-eating man there.

“That's all right, little girl. They never did fit me. I don't look through them. I look over them.” He was a nice man.

“The pool's only a mile from here, Austro?” Barnaby Sheen asked. “Which way?”

“Up.”

Pleasures And Palaces

“A superior smile is the sovereign wonder-worker,” Griggles Swing said to Belinda Greenglow on a Monday evening. “One smiles superiorly at God and is one-up on him. But if God would smile superiorly at man, he must do so anthropomorphically, on man's own terms. The morning stars snickered and the little hills melted like wax when this was first discovered.”

Griggles Swing was called the ‘swinger’, and not merely from the consonance of his name. It was an old term. A complete person, vivid and powerful, high-spirited and vigorous, multi-talented and of a many-dimensioned intelligence, one who was master of all the arts (and especially the art of living) had once been called a ‘swinger’. With the coming into favor of more fractured and specialized persons, the old swinger-type of the complete person had nearly disappeared: but what few of them were left were still of great power and influence. And they weren't really old, not any of them. Most of them, as was the case with Griggles Swing, were ageless.

It was the swingers themselves who had done the most to extinguish their own type. In no field had the complete swinger been stronger than in that of genetic engineering. And, as genetic engineers, they had seen the advantage of developing specialized persons. This was a necessity for the advancement of the human condition. “Nine specialized persons can do almost anything that one complete person can do,” was one of the sayings of the genetic engineers, “and it is much easier to obtain nine specialized persons than one complete person.” It was really a question of economy.

There are some roles that no person can act out unless he owns them, though Abel Riordan could fill almost any role that you could imagine. The best actor can fill roles a little bit above his living station, but not much above it. Abel was not an actor though; he was one of the specialized doers.

There are some physical gestures that not everyone can make; but there was not any gesture that Mary Irish could not execute. She found cameras turned on her constantly to record her gestures for instruction films to show to the young. This was the way it should be!

There are some jokes that not everyone can tell, but find one that Victor Hornspoon couldn't! There are some clothes that not everyone can wear, but Belinda Greenglow could wear anything.

One has to be really wealthy to give the impression of great wealth. And, while one can give the impression of being handsome without being so in fact, one must be of a fairly high intelligence to be able to give the impression of super-intelligence. Some things can be faked more easily than others. Even those specialists officially classified as ‘fakers’ cannot fake everything. Swing's four best friends, among them, could fill almost every role and implement almost every quality, but it was only a complete person such as Griggles who could fill all the niches by himself.

Swing knew more than a hundred thousand people personally (people were his field, and he based his work on the broadest possible sampling); but it might be said that he knew only four persons well. Not everyone is capable of knowing certain special persons well, and only these four knew Swing with real knowledge and apperception. These four brilliantly fractured and specialized persons were Belinda Greenglow, Victor Hornspoon, Abel Riordan, and Mary Irish. They knew Swing but even they didn't know where he came from.

“You are an unknown country, Swing,” Belinda said to him as they dined that Monday evening at the Raffles Hotel in Singapore. (Nasi goreng and satay were the dishes for supper.) “You, more than anybody, have modified humanity,” she told him. “You engineer people with great scope and logic, and you always seem to have a clear base and aim. But what is missing from your program (which is the program that is almost universally accepted) is the beginning of it. What is your own base and beginning, Swing? I have heard people ask ‘Whence is this paragon?’ And I also ask ‘Whence?’ Where do you really come from?”

Not everybody can eat satay splendidly. It is eaten directly off the red-hot skewer, and a gauche person can burn his tongue badly. And yet to omit the slurping sizzle of tongue on hot skewer is equally gauche, as not showing enough appreciation of the régale. The splendid way is to carry enough drool on the tongue to sizzle the skewer loudly and still preserve the tongue succulent and unscathed. Both Swing and Belinda Greenglow ate satay splendidly, with daring and grace and civilized competence.

“The name of my original home wouldn't mean anything to you,” Swing said.

“Try me.”

“The name is sometimes translated as ‘The Palaces’ and sometimes as ‘Land of the Heart's Desire’; but the name itself would sound like nothing to you; it would hardly sound like speech.”

“Is your original home on World?”

“Oh no. I came like a country boy to World to make my fortune; it is town to me. But all towns are a little bit common to one who has known real country.”

“Is it on one of the Nine Worlds?”

“No, not one of the nine.”

“Well, is it on one of the Nineteen Worlds?”

“Yes, it's one of the nineteen, so it cannot be a really remote place. Belinda, you know that many people have badgered me to find out where I come from, and they haven't found it out. It's the characteristic of a secret place that it shouldn't be found out. And even you cannot out-badger the badgers.”

“It's no skin off my tongue, but is it — I know that this is hardly possible in the case of you — is it from some sort of shame that you will not tell people where you come from?”

“No, not from shame, Belinda. It's from overweening pride that I keep it a secret.”

“Is there anything special about the place?”

“Of course there is. It is special beyond guessing.”

People were grinding out films of them with cameras as they dined.

“Were I with anyone else in the world, I would think that they were taking pictures of me,” Belinda said. “But when you are here, I know they are taking pictures of you. Were there special things you did in your homeland that people don't ordinarily do?”

“Yes. We flew. We flew through the air. Many peoples do not do this.”

After the supper, they made an evening appearance at the Haw Paw Villa, or the Tiger Balm Gardens. Both Swing and Belinda Greenglow were in the people-immersion area of genetic engineering, and they commonly met several thousand people several times a day. These meetings were always going on everywhere in the world as the people strove to further realize their peoplehood. Swing and Greenglow were gracious and they were significant, and they contributed to the people-awareness explosion everywhere they went.

Near the end of his last speech of the evening, Swing announced that he was contributing a million straits dollars to get a campaign going for a new people-improvement hospital and information center to be built there. Almost every evening of the year, Griggles Swing contributed at least a million of the local specie to a people-improvement institution. A great man could hardly do less.

“You are a man without antecedents, Swing,” Victor Hornspoon told him as they dined Monday evening (it was the next evening, but Swing had crossed the date-line so it was again Monday) at the Rara Bagara House at Lapoa Timu. (Falsoa-ma-malie was the dish of the supper.) “The quirk is that you always place great emphasis on antecedents, Swing. You state that a person with no antecedents is no person at all. Well?”

“I have extraordinary antecedents, Victor,” Swing said. “They are a strong element in all of my procedures and procurements. My own antecedents have now become archetypical to the best antecedental-genetic-engineering practice.”

“Your own antecedents are a basis that we build everything upon? But we do not know them, so we don't know what we're doing.”

“When we build excellences into human persons, Victor, we do not build up or upon. We build down, which is another way of saying that we refine. We cut down. We carve out. We sculpt.”

“From what stones do we sculpt, Swing? Is it from the ‘Magnificent Blanks’ that you sometimes speak of?”

“Yes, and there are such things, though you all smile at such statements from me as though I were concealing something behind a fanciful notion. There were even some Magnificent Blanks on this world once. The Cro-Magnons were such, and most of the people still carry some of their blood. The essence of the ‘Magnificents’ is that they should be large-brained and long-lived and vigorous; and that they should have a certain style, which is the same thing as grace, or as power-in-balance. And the essence of the ‘Blanks’ is a sort of hairy invisibility, a condition in which nobody will look at them twice, in which nobody will pluck or plunder them before their time.”

“And you have really found such a genetic stock, Swing? And it is the ‘neutral basic power-blocks’ of your own genetic manipulations?”

“Yes, it's the strong neutral basic, Victor. Enclaves of it are more rare than you might believe. I had to go to the very limits of the Nineteen Worlds to find it. I had to touch a preserve that I had intended to leave alone. In fact, I had to go all the way back to — to — to — ”

“To where, Swing?”

“To where I started. But it's a strong building material, and there are no hidden hazards in it at all. You yourself, in part of your ancestry, are of the filial two generation of this healthy stock. And you and your sort are the heartiest bunch of fractured and specialized persons that one would dare hope for.”

“Then, Swing, not only do we not know where you come from, but if we be of these magnificent blanks that you will not name, then we don't know where we come from either. And yet it does set one up a little bit to know that he derives in part from a secret nobility.”

“That it does, Victor. I'm going home later this week. I haven't been back there for many years.”

They ate with great vigor. They had to. Not everyone can eat falsoa-ma-malie with splendor and style, but everyone will come to its eating with great vigor or he will not come at all. The question was ‘What diamond will cut this diamond?’ Or ‘What teeth will tear this toothed-flesh?’ The malie is the iron-flesh shark. Some customers who come to this dish are given razor-sharp, stainless-steel teeth to fit over their own teeth. And some are given teeth of the iron-flesh shark itself to attach to their own teeth to eat itself. Only heroes refuse both sets of auxiliary teeth and use their own. Both Griggles Swing and Victor Hornspoon were such heroes.

Both had that extraordinary strength of jaw and arm (one had to tear the very tough food to pieces with the hands before attempting to eat it) that belongs to the Magnificent Blanks. Perhaps one person in a hundred can attack this food with such vigor and shearing power as to conquer and consume it with his own tools. And perhaps one person in a hundred thousand can carry the thing off with splendor and style. Victor Hornspoon was such a special person, though barely. Griggles Swing was such a person, complete and with never a doubt of it. His accomplishments always reflected style upon style and splendor upon splendor. To be such a person as Swing, that was to be completely civilized.

Not everyone can correctly tip the waiter for such a meal. In the Rara Bagara House at Lapoa Timu (and nowhere else in the world) one tips the waiter by placing a coin in his ear when he bends for the ritual blowing-out of the shark-oil lamp near the end of the meal. The waiter can tell the size and weight of the coin that is slipped into his ear. From the relation of the weight to the size, he can tell whether the coin is bronze or silver or gold. By a peculiar development of the otological muscles, the waiter is able to fling back the coin from his ear with a ringing rejection if it is of too small a value (indicative of the cheapness in the customer) or of too large a value (indicative of ostentatiousness in the customer). But Swing, who never erred in things social, had no fear of rejection. He responded perfectly to the custom he had never met before. He was truly civilized.

After supper, they made an appearance at White Shark Stadium. There was an important seminar in genetic engineering going on there, and they met in fecund relationship with the several thousand delegates. And, near the end of his last speech of the evening, Swing announced that he was contributing a million south-sea-bubble dollars to get a campaign going for a genetic-engineering hospital and institute. Almost every evening of the year, Swing contributed at least a million of some coin to an institute of this sort. A truly civilized man could hardly do less.

“You have become the loose mathematical answer to quite a number of problems. The answers to these most sophisticated problems will not be in the form of numeration or quantity, nor of function or proportion; the answers will come in the forms of special persons. And the same problem (if there could ever be a same problem in those higher realms) will have a different answer every time it is posed; for the answer will be a different person every time. But you yourself have been the answer to more than a dozen intricate problems. No one else has ever been the answer to more than two or three.”

“I am more generalized and less fractured than others, Abel. It's a pity that there couldn't have been more of my sort, but the system of specialized persons is more efficient. I'm going home later this week, Abel.”

“To your original home? You'll be followed, of course. There's a lot of curiosity as to your place of origin.”

“I'll not be followed all the way,” Swing said. “They will leave my trail at some point. They will believe that it was a fetch or doppelgänger of myself that I sent on such an improbable way to deceive them. They will check back to pick up the trail of the real me. But I am not capable of deception. There is a practical sort of invisibility surrounding my place of origin, but it isn't intended to deceive. I could bring some of you home with me, I suppose, but it would be to small purpose. The important thing is not where I (and many of you in the derivative way) came from. The important thing is where we are going.”

“You have heard the news of the special voting, Swing? You've been voted the most civilized person on Earth.”

“It's an honor, of course, but I'm not surprised. After all, I engineered and set up most of the categories on which the judging was based. The real subject of the voting was ‘What person best fulfills the role of Griggles Swing?’ And the answer was ‘Griggles Swing himself best fulfills that role.’ ”

Could even Swing and Abel Riordan eat beef bawlie splendidly? It hadn't the challenge of some foods, and a challenge is always an element in splendor. It wasn't as dangerous to the tongue as was the satay on its flame-hot skewers. It wasn't as iron-flesh tough as was the falsoa-ma-malie. But it had a life of its own. It bawled in a loud and disconcerting fashion.

Some people said that it was the jokers in the Mule Box Kitchen who made the bawling sound with bullroarers whenever a customer cut into or bit into the ‘beef bawlie’. This is not true. The beef moved of itself and it sounded of itself. Nothing that has ever lived can ever be completely dead, and the ‘beef bawlie’ at the Mule Box in K. C. is a testament of this.

But, yes, Swing and Riordan did eat it splendidly. All things great and small are done splendidly by truly urbane persons.

After the supper, they went to the old Monarch Stadium. There was an important caucus of several thousand genetic engineers going on there. Abel Riordan spoke to the meeting, and then Swing spoke to it. And he answered questions.

“What would you consider the hallmark of a really civilized person?” a person asked.

“To be able to regard God with an amused tolerance that contains the threat that it might change to an unamused intolerance, that is the hallmark of a civilized person,” Swing said. Then, a little later on, Swing announced that he was giving a million new-revisional dollars to the Hall-Mark Institute of Urbanity and Genetic Engineering that would be constructed in K. C. Almost every night, Swing gave away a million locally-adjusted simoleons for something or other. The grand gesture can hardly be made with less than a million.

“You do know that you're the most imitated person on Earth, don't you Griggles?” Mary Irish asked him as they dined Wednesday evening at the Gerookte Aal in Ostend of Flanders. (For supper they were having hotchpotch stew and sugared potatoes.)

“Are people still trying to imitate the inimitable?” Swing asked with none of that true modesty that is sometimes found in the strangest people. “We great originals do not really like to be imitated. I'm going home tomorrow, Mary, for the first time since I left. I feel the need of renewal. I will refresh myself at the fountain that is my favorite ancestor, the younger me. It's an odd feeling to go back within yourself.”

“It's like eating this hotchpotch stew here, Swing. I always feel that I may be swallowing a million of my ancestors.”

“No, no, Mary, there's very little chance of that. The people who live in hotchpotch stew are on a variant line. But I'm going back home, where everything is fresher and more original.”

“Belinda Greenglow told me on voxo that your people fly through the air where you come from. Really, Griggles, I don't see even the stubs of wings on you, though you've always appeared to be extraordinarily powerful in the shoulders and arms.”

“Yes Mary, it takes extraordinary power in the arms and shoulders to fly as we do. In my clan, we're born with this power.”

They ate the hotchpotch stew which has a long lineage of things living in it, in that incomparably rich and scaling hot liquid milieu where life first rose. The hotchpotch was of the oldest unbroken line. Mary Irish dredged a limey residue up on the edge of her bowl to examine it before eating it. Fossils, a world of fossils, that's what she dredged up! And sometimes she swallowed the livelier portions of the stew with a nervous queasiness. Living fossils, that's what the livelier portions of the hotchpotch were!

It is a peculiar life that is found in hotchpotch and is not found anywhere else at all. It is immeasurably old. A sort of yeast or starter is carried over from one kettle of hotchpotch to another. This has been done from kettle to kettle for millions of years, and so the minute and primordial life in the stew has been carried forward. The yeast or starter contains both the fossil forms and the live forms. You have wondered why hotchpotch cooks are reluctant to give their recipes? This is the reason: there is a whole secret life in that recipe, and the cooks are pledged to keep it secret. It is so secret that — 

“I have discovered (no matter how),” said Swing, “that God himself does not know about the minute and continuing life in hotchpotch stew. He does not eat it, and he hasn't noticed it closely. And that life in the stew is not from him. This seems like a small matter, perhaps, but it is significant. We have the edge over him with this obscure secret. We know of this small world in dingy kettles, and it's a world not of his making. There may be others. God cannot guess what secrets we know, but he has guessed that there are secrets. It sends a shiver of almost-fear through him every time he thinks of it.”

“You only guess that, Swing, and your guess carries its own contradiction. We are all contained in him, so all of our secrets are also contained in him. We are only dreams that God has. You know that, don't you?”

“If we are only his dreams, then let it be that he shall (as we do often) wake from dreams with a strong sense of unease. Aye, let him experience the very fringes of nightmare from us. But I suspect something else that he has not even suspected yet.”

“And what is that, prideful Swing?”

“That there is a place (this is only travelers' tale as yet, but it is from trustworthy travelers) where there may be found magnificent blanks of god-worthy genetic material. There are these ‘Valleys of the Giants’, these ‘Valleys of the Slumbering Principalities’. There are such places where his rivals and successors are to be found in unaware forms. He will nod once too often, and they will wake while he nods. And one of them will topple him.”

“It isn't that way at all, Swing,” Mary Irish said. “You are like a dog snapping at the moon. And you are not able to tear it or scathe it at all.”

“No? Look at it tonight, Mary. You will see new fang marks on it that were not there before.”

They finished their hotchpotch stew in easy and subdued splendor. To know things that God does not know, and to make no great thing about such knowledge, that is to be civilized!

After supper, they went out to Flanders Field for an evening session with several thousand excellent people. Being such superior and specialized people, they were most of them filial one or two or three generations of Swing's own genetic engineering.

Swing made his gift of one million gold guilders early in the proceedings. It is more civilized to give gifts easily and early than to wait till the very end when the plaudits will follow one out.

Then Swing unburdened himself more than usual. He told the people that he was going home after very many years, and that he wasn't sure when or if he would come back. He told them many great and prideful things and hinted at things even more prideful.

“Pride goes before a fall,” called a young woman of the filial three generation of Swing-genetics.

“Before a fall? I'd never heard that,” Swing said. “Pride does go before an ascent, I know. Pride is what fuels an ascent.” Then Swing's final speech ascended in power. He poured his hearers out like water and he mixed them like broth. He surpassed himself, and he led all those people into the way of surpassing themselves. And he left them all with one wondering thought: ‘Where can so great a man have come from anyhow?’

The next day, Griggles Swing went home. He went to the planet Apateon of the sun Beta Centauri. It is one of the Trader Planets and it is one of the Nineteen Worlds. He knew that he was followed by some of his more intense admirers and he didn't care. They would not be able to follow him all the way to his home unless the time were ripe for that home to be revealed.

He went towards the back country. After three days he came to a wooden building that bore the sign Honest Schzhoultskio, Outfitters. He shopped a while with Schzhoultskio. He bought a thorn-jacket to protect him when he went through the thorn-barriers; and he bought thorn-boots.

“How far back are you going?” Schzhoultskio asked him.

“All the way back,” Swing said. “Back to the cliff formation they call the ‘Palaces’, back to the biggest trees anywhere.”

“You know the story about the carnival owner who went back there to find a replacement for his Wild Man of Borneo,” Honest Schzhoultskio said. “Ah, he found that replacement, a fine big ‘wild man’ and took him away with him. He toured quite a few of the worlds with his carnival, and the genuine wild man was the main attraction. But he came back in about a year and took the wild man back to the big woods. ‘I'll want my money back,’ he said. ‘This wild man has shriveled and shrunk till he is no good wild man at all. Look at him, look at him.’ ‘Let me outta here, let me go back,’ that wild man sniffled, ‘he pulled a switch. I'm not the one. He's the one.’ And a switch had been pulled. The wild man from the big woods had fashioned himself into the appearance of the carnival owner, only bigger. And he had changed the carnival-owner to look like a wild man, only smaller. Some of those wild men will fool you.”

Swing went three days deeper into the back country. There were swamps (Oh the deep dimensionality of swamps!) to be crossed and thorn barriers to be breached. A troupe of monkeys brought him fruit; then they accompanied him on his way in a chattering fringe. Then Griggles came to his own people. He first met a guard in the path. He greeted him with “Gri, gri, grikky,” but the guard pointed to his lips and throat to indicate that he was one of those incapable of speech.

But that guard was magnificent with his giant brain-case and his strength and poise of body; and with that certain style, which is the same thing as grace or power-in-balance. And he was blank; for his big brain was still waiting, available and unkindled. Ah, but should one of those big brains somehow be kindled, it would really take off.

Then Swing saw a number of his magnificent kindred flying through the air, and this was the real coming-home thrill for him. He knew that, since he had geneticized himself to such an extent, he no longer looked very much like them; but he felt like them.

He climbed the cliffs towards a remembered set of caves, and that fine flying and swinging was going on through the tops of all those trees that were nearly as high as the cliffs. And then Swing met a magnificent kinsman with at least a half-life in his eyes.

“Grig, grik grik,” Swing said. And the magnificent fellow answered “Grik.” He was one of the talking ones.

Above Swing on the cliff, a grizzly and motherly ape was using a tool that is found on many of the worlds and whose use is sometimes misunderstood. It has been called a stone-hoe or a stone-spade, but it wasn't made for delving in the ground: it was for higher work. It was a curious tool. It was made for dragging ordure out of caves and other dwellings when it became so deep that one banged one's head on the ceiling. The motherly ape was using the tool with great vigor, lowering the floor of the cave by a full meter as she sent huge globs and swishing slabs of the strong stuff down through the strong air.

“She knew I was coming,” Swing said.

And the swingers, the flyers, the brachiators were cavorting in the tops of the cliff-high trees. Griggles Swing would join them soon. How those swingers could swing from branch to branch with their powerful arms! How they could take off on those fearless flying leaps! Those fellows could really fly through the air!

Swing came up to the old mother ape as she dragged a great slurping mass of the stuff out from the cave floor and let it tumble down drenchingly through the aromatic air.

“Grig, grik, grik,” Swing said in ape-man talk, and she looked up at him in amazement.

“Grik —  gri —  Griggles!” she cried in recognition.

“Hi mom,” Swing said. The Swinger was home.

Haruspex

Certainly present circumstances and coming events can be read from animal or bird entrails, if one has enough shrewdness of vision to bring to them. Entrails are gut-level books with everything in them literally. Horoscopes aren't in it with entrails at all. Crystal balls aren't, and fortune-telling cards aren't. The entrails of hot-blooded animals give the deepest readings. The entrails of fish and squid give the most elegant interpretations. But bird entrails are the easiest, and they are the most commonly used. The beginner is urged to stay with bird entrails till he is completely proficient, and really there is nothing wrong with staying with them forever.

Entrails of only one sort are easier to read than bird entrails, and so these are used to great advantage where local custom permits.

Jimpson Ginseng had an old loose panel in the cyclone fence that he could bend and go through.

These inmates were of dim but not extinguished minds; they did not wander farther than Mobley's; they had weekly money provided to them free somewhere; and the guards always knew where they were. ‘What a way to run a booby-hatch!’ a philosopher cried once, but there were only a few of these exceptions, and such things do happen.

One evening, Jimpson Ginseng did not get all the way back under his own power. He left the tavern while there was still a small spot of light left in the sky. Two bulky men got out of a car there on the road and stopped him. One of them took Jimpson's hat off his head and set it on the ground. The other one went around Jimpson's head with some sort of instrument as though he were giving him a bowl-type haircut. What happened next isn't at all clear. There were some weird openings being made in the man, but it was pretty dark. If the guards had reported what they thought they saw, who would have believed them?

Then one of the men picked the hat up from the ground and put it on Jimpson's head again. Those two men got in the car and drove off. Jimpson stood there in a wobbly and twitchy condition. Then he collapsed slowly into a heap on the ground as though all the air were let out of him. The guards had to go get him and carry him back in. When they discovered the meaning of the red mark around his head, when they discovered that something was missing both from his head and from his belly, they carried him directly to his room and his bed.

“We will let the doctors decide what to make of his case when they come by in the morning,” the guards said. Then they went on about their duties.

We heard later that the doctors were not amused when they examined Jimpson in the morning and discovered what was missing.

“Whatever else we call it, we are playing power-poker with the Hazh-Bazh,” Director-Designate Marc Edel said. “If we let them read us, then we are lost. Ah, Staff, Staff, shape up for me! I can't let this guy be better than I am. You can't let his staff be better than you are. Some millions of lives are riding on this, as well as our own pride and reputations. We should have the advantage here on our own world. Why do I feel that the advantage is sliding away from us and to him?”

“There aren't too many ways that real advantage can have swung to him,” said General Gilbert Sung from the Pentagram. “There is no way that he can have intimate knowledge of us. Our security is too tight for that. Moreover, if he has access to our data at all, it will prove mostly bogus. Our own self-knowledge is badly put together and is generally faulty. How could he know us better than we know ourselves. He hasn't been around here long enough for that.”

“Our knowledge of his people is surely better than his of us,” said Sylvester Tsumbo of the Chthonian Response Institute. “We have access to a dozen leaks. He's won a dozen games of power-poker from some pretty salty federations, but he's been scouted in every game. The reports are beginning to form a pretty clear pattern of the Hazh-Bazh and his people. We know, for one thing, that they are very superstitious. They use haruspication — you know, entrail-reading.”

Those on the staff of Director-Designate Marc Edel were Johnny Greeneyes the gambler-psychologist, General Gilbert Sung, Sylvester Tsumbo, Darius Parsee the third most intelligent person in the world on the Darius Parsee scale, and Cecelia Fitzpeter the second most qualified person in the world on the Cecelia Fitzpeter Qualified Scale.

Those on the staff of the Hazh-Bazh were Hazh-Ksu, Hazh-Gow, Hazh-Song, Hazh-Fung, and Hazh-Li, five nephews of his. So the two staffs would seem of about equal quality.

The Rim-Raiders, who were represented by the Hazh-Bazh and his staff, had never completely overpowered any force or federation. They often underplayed themselves: they liked to give the impression that they were mere nuisance invaders who might be bought off with Danegeld. But they were a little bit more than that.

And World had been whipped more times than any place we know, but World had never been whipped badly or permanently. Indeed, after the passing of some time, the World-Conquerors would sometimes wonder just who had conquered whom. But, by this time, the World-Conquerors were quite worldly in outlook and partly so in blood. But it wasn't quite a top-world group that was in ascendancy just now on World. Leading position was rotated on a seven year sequence. The Chthonian Response Federation was spokesgroup for the World this year. It was made up of many of the old grass-roots nations along with some of the newer third-world folks, a catch-all bunch.

“We will not lie to you,” said the Hazh-Bazh as they began another informal negotiating session. “We are not looking for loot or blood here, and you haven't much of either. We are looking for a base. We haven't any base in this sector, and World would be nice. So we want an undevastated planet and a docile people inhabiting it. You can fit that exactly.”

“And why do you suppose that we would stand still for such a takeover?” Marc Edel asked. “How far do you think you can push us anyhow?”

“We know exactly how far we can push you,” the Hazh-Bazh purred. “But you yourselves haven't any idea how far you may be pushed. We have this one advantage of knowledge over you, and we won't need any other.”

“Your computers are no better than ours,” said Edel. “Your information-gathering teams are clumsy. You simply cannot appraise us. We keep our basic secrets from others by keeping them from ourselves also. You cannot know our base, or our slant, or our shape, or our fundamental processes. You do not know our reactions. And how do you propose to find them out?”

“How? Is there more than one way?” the Hazh-Bazh asked in real puzzlement. “We use the tools that leading peoples everywhere use. The World names for these tools are Augury and Divination. And Haruspicy.”

The World spokesmen laughed at the Hazh-Bazh with biting merriment, and they put the bridle on their laughter only when they noticed the dangerous anger seething in several of the nephews.

“We're sorry, Hazh-Bazh,” Edel said. “It almost seems as if you are serious.”

“We are, and you cannot cover up your ignorance with horse-laughs. Worldlings, Worldlings, there is so little to you! But we do have all the data on you, the data of your impoverishment of mind and of your shallowness of persons, the data of your dangerous soft spot. And we have this data by augury and divination.”

“What do you use for your divinations?” Edel asked loftily. “Chicken entrails?”

“Sometimes, yes. But we usually prefer the braver birds to chickens. Birds are a basic. When their viscera are all unwound, they are a map of the temperament of their particular world. And fish intestines are so revelatory of the deep and subterraneous faultings of the local dominant species. The hot-blood animals are good too, but usually they give only surface guidance which we could get elsewhere. And then there is an ambiguous creature that has both the lower and upper entrails (we are using a prime specimen of this creature now, and we may obtain another), and this creature is the most informative of all.

“Oh, by the way, Edel, we have just put a bit more pressure on the twelve thousand captives that we hold. And we have thoughtfully given the information of this escalation to your media. Aye, to your bleed-ia media! Soggy stuff, they, what?”

“You don't for a moment think that such trifles would have any effect on our bargaining, do you?” Marc Edel asked with fragile assurance.

“It does seem preposterous,” the Hazh-Bazh admitted, “and I don't know any other place where it would be possible. But our data, taken from the upper entrails of an ambiguous creature, shows that you do respond to such trivial needling. It's laughable really, but our latest escalation of treatment, white-hot irons driven into the apertures of the twelve thousand prisoners, does seem to be having some effect on you already.”

Well, it did have an effect on the bargainers. It had such an effect that Marc Edel asked to have the bargaining session cut short that day.

The affair of the twelve thousand prisoners was this: the taking of twelve thousand worldlings from the orbital stations had been an opening move of the Rim-Raiders. Such things really were no more than conversation pieces, no more than declarations of actions. And who could take them for anything else? But there was a secret soft spot in the make-up of some of the new worldlings, and there was another group of nine-times-contemptible worldlings who loved to feed and fatten themselves of that soft spot. These were the people of the media, the bleed-ia media, the parasites from under the rocks who were too vile to face the sun.

But the media had raised issues about the prisoners, and the people were duped into making a noise about it. The Rim-Raiders caught on to the weakness quick. Worldlings were people who might have spots of the compassion-sickness. The Rim-Raiders had lucked into the thing, but they would make a good thing out of it.

“Yes, this is blackmail,” the Hazh-Bazh had laughed to his opponents at the little conference table. “You thoughtfully gave us the paper and pens to write the blackmail notes; you gave us the content itself; and you have been very helpful at filling us in on details. And you add suggestion after suggestion. And now there are another twelve thousand of your simple persons who have made a unilateral offer of themselves in the places of the twelve thousand prisoners. Funny people, are you not, Edel?”

The first torture of the prisoners that the Rim-Raiders shared with the media was the head-in-the-vice torture. It was a pretty stark presentation, with the jaws of the vices being closed on the prisoners' heads a centimeter an hour until the various demands should be fulfilled. And there were some (actually only a few dozen) living illustrations of what would happen tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that: crushed and gorily-busting heads with cascades of blood and bones and brains and convoluted matter.

The Hazh-Bazh and his nephews razzed Marc Edel and his staff over the ridiculous success of this little joke. And the Chthonic-Worldlings had to make a few new concessions every day on account of the prisoners and the popular clamor.

“You know, Edel,” the Hazh-Bazh said, “that we have with us on this expedition only a few more than two thousand vices large enough to accept human heads. This means that only two thousand of the prisoners are having their heads crushed and ten thousand are not. But your silly media are carrying on as though all twelve thousand, or even twice that many, prisoners were being tortured in the vices. We don't understand you very well in these things, but we understand you well enough to take advantage.”

Yes, and the Rim-Raiders were leading the Chthonic-Worldlings on points in the negotiations, and their advantage was based on just such damnably trivial things as this.

Yes, the Rim-Raiders did have a prime specimen of the lower and upper entrails of an ambiguous creature. It was really a first-class divination mass, and when the Rim-Raider nephews put on their haruspex hats and examined the material, they found sufficient data for almost everything. They interpreted a lot of information out of the entrails, about what makes Worldlings tick, about how they will react to various conditions, and about how far they can be pushed. These entrails were quite large, and the expert manner in which they had been procured guaranteed that they could be kept fresh and lively. These were very useful data banks.

Anatomists made an error about entrails many centuries ago, and this error has been repeated ever since then. The error is that all entrails will unwind into one series and that they will form a single passage through. But in every complex there is one blind loop that will not unwind at all, and it is not part of a through passage. It obtains its content through its walls, and it retains parts of it for many years. It constantly refines and upgrades. These blind loops are the bodily memories and the bodily maps. They are the microcosm of a person (all creatures are persons in our context), and the person is a microcosm of its fated or fortuned world. Everything can be read in these archives if the Haruspex who reads them is a consummate practitioner, and the five nephews of the Hazh-Bazh were. This is the lower or greater entrail which has been spoken of here.

But there is another entrail in the ambiguous creatures. There is the greater entrail for day, and there is the lesser entrail for night. The night content is accumulated in the upper or lesser entrail which is mostly in the head. It accumulates always, but it is most lively when the body sleeps. It's a fine looking thing with its impressive mass and its dangling ganglia and spinal cord.

And this upper entrail, like the lower, has its closed loop of rich content. It is body-and-mind memory superimposed; it is body-and-mind map superimposed. It is often called the unconscious, or the seat of the unconscious, and it is as interesting an entrail as will be found anywhere. Many worldling haruspices have examined this upper entrail, but they have examined it only by implication and surmise, or by various secondhand recordings and suborned shadows of itself. They haven't examined it physically or directly. They have not had the heads of the head-patients opened up and the contents spread out for display and study. And that is the pity and mystery of it.

The prime specimen that the Rim-Raiders had (Marc Edel bypassed his erudite staff, and hired a rock-headed private detective to find this out) was the lower and upper entrails of a cheerful and highly compassionate mental patient named Jimpson Ginseng. And this man had become now, in a second sense, the very bowels of compassion. So, for a while there, Jimpson served the Rim-Raiders as the memory and map of things worldling.

“We have got to cut out these distracting influences,” Director-Designate Marc Edel told his staff. “We must do this to strengthen our hand at the negotiations. We must disregard all these side noises, and we must bring it about that the people will disregard them also. So please convey to the media that they should cease transmitting the soggy stuff to the public.”

“Oh damn the people and triple-damn the media people!” Cecelia Fitzpeter exploded. “The media are anti-World, and they always have been. They are treasonable. They will favor any sort of malodorous and alien monsters over the World, because they themselves are secretly alien and malodorous monsters. They are the ‘negatives’ in that they have all their values reversed: they have black in the place of white, and good in the place of bad. I believe that there is something about the scotographic (miscalled the photographic) process that requires this reversal in the reproductions that the media people use. It is the deviltry of the darkroom. It puts murder in the place of benison, and there is no cure for it.”

“Oh,” said Director-Designate Marc Edel.

So the Chthonian-Worldlings went to the next day's meeting determined to take a hard line. But the product and pressure from the media, flowing through the people as if they were one large entrail, tended to prohibit the real toughness. Those white-hot irons up the apertures of the now twenty-four thousand prisoners (you didn't believe that the Rim-Raiders released the first twelve thousand just because the second twelve thousand offered themselves unilaterally as sacrifices and substitutes, did you?) had all the people of World considerably anguished, and that anguish overflowed and got into everything.

Well, the negotiators had to be stoney-eyed and deaf-eared against the prevailing anguish if they were to avoid a greater anguish for all.

“We are calling you on everything, you six-headed Hazh!” Edel roared angrily to bypass all formality and open the new day's meeting with a turmoil. “Order everything withdrawn at once and all prisoners freed, or you are six dead ones!”

“And there will be twenty-four thousand dead prisoners if you do so,” the Hazh-Bazh countered automatically.

“It is time that we bit off our noses to save our faces,” Cecelia Fitzpeter cried furiously, “and I'll be the first to do it. Withdraw everything or you are dead!”

“We have left automatic orders,” the Hazh-Bazh said. “If we are harmed or silenced, all the prisoners will die, and other dire things will happen to various of your people.”

“You have no idea how many dire things will happen to you,” howled Darius Parsee the third most intelligent man in the world. “We can teach you six fellows a few things about torture. Give orders to withdraw everything right now!”

“No,” said the Hazh-Bazh. “You're bluffing. We know what you people are like.”

“No, no, you only half know what we are like,” Cecelia sparked at him. “But there are ways you can find out whether we are bluffing!” Cecelia glowered at the Hazh-Bazh menacingly. She was the most wrought-up of all of them.

“Yes, I do think of one way in particular of finding out whether you're bluffing,” the Hazh-Bazh said, “and we will use it. What if it does lose us a day? We will find out. And now we will all recess for twenty-four hours. Then we will reassemble here for our final session, whichever way it goes.”

“We will not give you twenty-four hours! We will give you about ten seconds!” swore General Gilbert Sung from the Pentagram.

“We are taking twenty-four hours,” the Hazh-Bazh told them. “Orders are now given that the tortures be suspended for the prisoners. Orders are transmitted that each of the prisoners will be given a full kilo of Rim-Raiders Interior Balm. It's very healing stuff. Orders are transmitted that several other leniencies will be granted to different Worldling groups. But if you have us killed in our quarters, then the twenty-four thousand will suffer automatic death. We will meet you here again on the exact tomorrow.” And all the Hazhes walked out of the meeting.

“You're faded, guys,” Johnny Greeneyes the gambler-psychologist called after them.

“We will take another specimen just for a check,” the Hazh-Bazh told his nephews when they were back in their quarters. “And at the same time we will get rid of a very obstreperous opponent. This is what the Worldlings call ‘Killing two wabbits with one wock.’ ”

It was about midnight that a couple of bulky men of the Rim-Raider persuasion nabbed Cecelia Fitzpeter the second most qualified person in the world. She had always come and gone as she wished without regard for ruffians. Now she was coming out of the dark windings of Executive Alley with the flint-stone clatter of her rock jewelry. And they had her.

“I supposed it would be something like this,” Cecelia said coldly, “and I've been thinking it might be the best form I can battle from and give testimony from.”

One of the bulky men took the little hat off of Cecelia's head and set it down there on the cobblestones of Executive Alley. The other man went around Cecelia's head with some sort of instrument as though he were giving her a bowl-type haircut. What happened next isn't quite clear: it was pretty dark there. There was something about weird openings being made in Cecelia, both in head and body, and something being taken from her. Then one of the men picked the hat up from the cobblestones and put it on Cecelia's head again. She stood there, rattling and sparking for a moment. Then she collapsed slowly into a heap in the alley as though all the air had been let out of her.

“That's funny, they weren't bluffing,” the Hazh-Bazh confirmed an hour later as, tall haruspex hat on his head, he examined the Cecelian entrails with his five nephews. “This bunch is ready to go ahead and have us killed in spite of the prisoners. This one here hasn't an ounce of compassion in her. We came very near to being killed by relying on insufficient evidence. Well, let's get out of it. There's plenty of other places.”

“We have released the prisoners,” the Hazh-Bazh said at the next meeting. “We have undone a number of other things that we had done. Now all we want is to get away from this place and call it quits. Agreed?”

“Not quite,” said Marc Edel. “You killed Cecelia Fitzpeter. So we must have the life of one of you in exchange.”

“No problem at all,” said the Hazh-Bazh. “Kill any of my five nephews here and let the rest of us be gone.”

“You would make the best reparation, Hazh,” Edel said. “We want your life.”

“For personal reasons I'd rather it not be myself,” the Hazh-Bazh said.

“For personal reasons I insist that it will be yourself,” Edel answered sharply.

“Oh very well then,” the Hazh-Bazh said. “Kill me and let the rest of them go.”

That's what they did. And so the world was saved.

(A thirty second post-climax silence here.)

Actually, the world is saved regularly. It is saved on twenty-seven-and-a-half-month cycles, but most of these salvations are never known by the public.

But all the old war-horses are returned to their pastureful homes after any such experience. Let them re-live past glories, if they wish to, but let them do it privately. Past glories in present office-holders are always dangerous.

Johnny Greeneyes and Darius Parsee went by the house of Ex-Director-Designate Marc Edel several days after the end of these happenings. They found him with a haruspex hat on his head. He was poring over some tiny mess on the table. They went closer to see, and Johnny Greeneyes immediately recognized what the small mess was.

“Canary entrails!” he cried. “Whatever are you doing with canary entrails, Marc?”

“Ah, Magda's cat mauled the canary,” Edel said, “and split it open and killed it. But the entrails are still warm and communicative.”

“Canary entrails!” Darius Parsee spoke in disapproval. “What is a man of your former station doing fussing with canary entrails?”

“You gotta start somewhere,” the Ex-Director-Designate said doggedly.

And You Did Not Wail

1.

What words for such a childish mésalliance?

In market-place, how skittishly they rail!

“We piped you music and you did not dance.

We sang you dirges and you did not wail.”

 — Matteo Rimato

“What an absolutely unhuman response!”

 — Caspar O'Malley

“There's a spider on your neck, Basil, a big one,” Andrew Giro the impresario said.

“That means the devil is plotting against me personally,” Basil Cubic laughed. “That fellow can never let bad enough alone.”

“Eekers-bejeekers! Don't kill it!” one of those new girls from the O'Malley's Agency shrilled. “Oh what a horribly human reaction! How unhumanly human! Here, let me take the mumms tumms goowoo dumms mumswums — ”

“Baby-talk to a spider!” Basil groused in disgust.

“I think we are all parts of the same person,” the girl said, “spiders, rats, snakes, even people. There cannot be any such thing as unshared ecstasy. If the least microbe in the universe is unhappy, how can I be ecstatic? I think the spiders are better people than a lot of people are. Ow Wow Gow!”

“Bit you, didn't he,” Andrew Giro smiled happily.

“Oh, but he didn't mean to,” the girl syruped. “He was just frightened.” The girl's nose began to bleed gently but emotionally, and she cried a little bit with the pleasure and immediacy of it all. But the spider meant to bite her. It glittered with the meanest eyes ever seen, and there was a noise right at the lower level of sound — malevolent spider laughter.

“Gentlemen, how can the two of you sit there with dry eyes and uncolored noses?” the girl from O'Malley's asked. “Are you totally void of all human feeling?”

“To me it's a crisis,” Andrew Giro complained to Basil Cubic. “I like to work with quality stuff, but what passes through my hands now has no quality at all. It's the sniveling madness returned and it's the enemy of quality. The last such movement, and it was incomparably weaker and not nearly so abandoned, was during my childhood when my grandfather was the leading impresario in town. And I was not even born yet at the time of previous visitations of ‘The Thing’. But it's really too much. It affects everybody. It affects even myself.” And Andrew Giro began to weep softly.

“Ah lacrimoso infectuoso!” Basil said sadly. “I pray the soggy stuff may pass me by. Does the thing go by cycles, and was such a cycle due?”

“Yes, it was about due. The skittish cycle has never been a sun-spot thing. It's been a low-sky, demiurge-intrusion cycle most of the time. But now it returns with a putrescent over-ride to it. It's rotten, I tell you, Basil. I can only speak of my own field, which is the arts, but it's in all the arts like a plague.”

“I always got a secret enjoyment from thumping bad art myself,” Basil said.

“But this isn't thumping bad art, Cubic. This is puling and gibbering bad art. It's in all the arts and all the styles. It's in all the pleasures and all the interests. It's a total trend, and it may be the sickest trend ever. Is there any possible remedy, do you suppose?”

“Oh, certainly, Andrew,” Basil Cubic said. “It's the old ‘I and C’ to the rescue. That is the state of mind and the process of action that cannot fail. Put enough engineers on it and they can solve anything.”

“I don't even know what the ‘I and C’ is, Basil.”

“It's the ‘Identify and Cure’. It works on most things. I may as well try it on this little silly sickness of the world.”

But things ran on still looser for a week or so.

All the arts had become very tearful, part of the time. And all of them had become happy-jappy part of the time; and they swung like vanes between the extremes. Except that these conditions were not really extremes or opposites; they were the same thing. There hadn't been such sentimentality in fiction since the eighteenth century German and the nineteenth century Russian. There hadn't been such extroverted introspection ever. Painting was decadent and sculpture was simian. Drama was strictly lights out.

People shouted a lot and they cavorted a lot in those days. But, for some reason, they were not able to shout very loudly; they used those throat microphones for amplification. All their acts, even the most private had to be electronically amplified for them. They couldn't cavort very well either, but they had little bells sewed all over them to give a semblance of liveliness. They went ecstatic and they spoke in tongues. And the thing spread.

It infected philosophy and industrial design finance and bridge-building and agriculture and mathematics. It infected rapid transit systems and Italian winemaking, and sex and soulful communion and narcotics, and pub-crawling and concert-crawling, and travel and nature-cult and psychology and group-poop and bluegrass fiddling and barbershop quartet singing, and statesmanship, and the very act of ambivalence itself.

People wept a lot and they snickered a lot, and the two manifestations merged. People had ecstatic spells (group-ecstasy had moved to number one place on the groupie scale) and fainting spells and creative blackouts. People had a lot of nosebleeds, and this became one of the more lofty forms of self-expression. Nose-plugs with little vials attached to them became popular, and many persons would exchange their own latest blood with that of their passionate friends.

There seemed to be a stinky little bug biting everyone. There were happy-tongued witnesses all over the place. Oh, I and C, where are you when we need you?

“But there's been a lot of this going on ever since I can remember,” Basil Cubic told his friend Andrew Giro of the arts. This was about a week after their previous conversation. “These unpleasures, these pulings, these manifestations of the unclean spirits, they have been with us always. I've always found that a tough mind and a closed nose was the best way of dealing with them. It's worse now though, isn't it.”

“Much worse, Basil,” Andrew said sorrowfully. “It's in spate now. It may have achieved critical mass, orbital mass. In that case there will be no return.”

“Well, I'll just have to let some of the more important problems go then, and bring a little effort and power to this. After all, Cubic Industries is the leading engineering firm in the world, and this should be no more than a routine problem. There's a shortage of qualified help, of course, but maybe this is a job for the unqualified sort.

“Hey there, some of you latest girls from O'Malley's Agency, call over there and have them send me twenty-five engineers. No, it doesn't matter what kind of engineers they are. All engineers are ingenious. Have them mix them up.”

“Hurry-begurry!” the wobble-eyed O'Malley girls sprang to action. A whole chant of these new girls (they were all new: O'Malley had been making them for only about a month) called the order in to O'Malley's on twelve simultaneous telephones.

“Send twenty-five swinger-binger engineers over to Cubic Industries,” they sang in voices that must have come out of the chorus of ‘Three-Eyed Dog’, “and be sure that all of them are mixed-up types.”

“And, in the meanwhile, some of you girls might do some work,” Basil Cubic suggested. “That's really why you are here.”

“Oh, if we were less sanctified and less humanized, you would infuriate us with remarks like that,” the O'Malley girls chanted like cracked pewter bells. “You wear your hair so short that we can hardly chew on the ends of it. How are we supposed to have meaningful relations with you. How are we supposed to communicate with you anyhow?”

CUBIC PROJECT STUDY

Article Number One

By O'Malley's Leased Engineer Number Nine

We have not identified the virus as Mr. Cubic suggested. We are sure now that there isn't any virus. We wish we could be sure that there isn't any Mr. Cubic. There is not any sickness-transmitting virus because there isn't any sickness. This study goes into fundamental fields and starts by asking two questions: ‘What is the basis of human action?’ And ‘How is humanity supposed to act?’ The answer to the first is that the new and exfoliated humanity, being topographically monad, cannot have any basis. The answer to the second question is ‘Stick around a while and watch how it acts. The main show has just begun.’ This is the only action that would seem possible. It is the logical conclusion to the human premise. To the question ‘What is wrong with things?’ we can only answer ‘Nothing is wrong; this is the way it's going to be.’ So what of the laggard remnant of humanity that will not get with it?

There is a long history of both of these syndromes. The new and reigning condition is featured by extravagance of behavior coupled with poverty of accomplishment. (Oh, these are our kind of guys!) This was once thought to be the aberration, but this study believes that it is the normal state. The other syndrome consists of what we must now consider an unhuman and chilly condition, a mechanical way of living, a contempt for the great understandings, an incapacity for the ecstasies and raptures and holy-tongued transports and the charismatic group nose-bleedings that have sanctified daily experience. But there was no virus. There is only the cure. Shout, shout, shout! All is as it should be. Let the minds blow!

“Send leased engineer number nine back to O'Malley's,” Basic Cubic said when he had read the article, “and we will not need a replacement for him.”

“Oh, you are prejudiced against him because he never wears clothes,” several of those office girls said in chorus. “When will you learn that free spirits and clothes have nothing in common? When will you let the love that is in you well up and spill all over everything?”

“It will be a little while yet, kids,” Basil said, “a little while yet.”

CUBIC PROJECT STUDY

Article Number Two

By O'Malley's Leased Engineer Number Seventeen

How was it ever possible for Mankind to encounter ‘The Wonderful Idea and Phenomenon of Mankind’ and not be overwhelmed by the ecstatic madness? We hope that soon it will not be possible. We shall be continually overwhelmed by the magnificence of ourselves. How was it ever possible for human persons to stand in the presence of that extraordinary constellation of their own qualities and talents without falling into self-adoration? And yet there have been, more in the past than in the present, humans who held themselves aloof from ‘Humanity's Glorious Celebration of Humanity’, but we believe that some mistake has been made. Such things who do not take part in the Humanity Festival are finks and not humans at all. Basil Cubic is such a fink. The only thing wrong with the world is that there are Basil Cubics in it.

“Send leased engineer seventeen back to O'Malley's,” Basil Cubic said when he had read the article. “There just isn't very much content in his study.”

“Oh, you are so shut off from everything alive that you do not know content when it's thrust at you. Be open, be open!” nine of those little O'Malley office girls were jabbering in unison. “Let yourself go. Flush, mush, rush, gush!”

“Call me fountain, kids,” Basil said, “but get rid of that Number Seventeen.”

CUBIC PROJECT STUDY

Article Number Three

By O'Malley's Leased Engineer Number Seven

Much of this hinges upon mind-blowing. But mind-blowing must be very selective if it is to fill its purpose. It does not seek to blow out every candle in the mind. It seeks to blow out only one of the candles, a very particular candle that is sometimes called the ‘Signature Candle’ and sometimes the ‘Maker's Mark Candle’. When I blew fifth horn for the old Mind Blower's Combo I knew this. I could pick out any person in that twisted-eared jungle around us and I would direct my own sort of blast at that person. I could blow out just one candle in his head and leave the rest of them burning in him. And that person would be one of ours from that moment on. He would no longer be one of his.

Or consider it not as a candle but as a quality or statement that goes to make up (along with the other qualities and statements) what a person is. Whenever we play the ‘Heresy Rag’ I can feel this strongly. There will be grapples or iron claws in our sound then. We will reach out with them into persons, and we will pull out (haireisthai, draw out, select out, heresy out) the special quality or statement, and we will destroy it with a blast of sound. Then that person, who had been sick, will be well. Mechanical Men are always free from the disturbing quality, and many others were either born free of it or had it bruised out of them early. Now we will make everyone free of it. There will be no more special qualities, not anywhere, not ever.

What has gone wrong with people lately? This is a question that the project-study asks. Nothing has gone wrong lately. Everything is going right. Then what is wrong with our employer Basil Cubic and his ilk? They still have the outlawed signature candle burning in their heads; they still have the ‘Maker's Mark’ statement, burning in their breasts. They must get rid of these things, or we must get rid of them. We are all limbs of one body. Should some of the limbs be stronger than others?

“Tie a can on leased engineer number seven and send him back to O'Malley's,” Basil Cubic said sourly when he had read the article. “Better stuff than that I can pick up in the alley.”

“But you don't,” those little office girls hissed in chorus. “You never pay any attention to things in alleys and you never pay any attention to us. Get dislocated like we are. Get free. Oh you of the fettered tongue and soul! Get loose. Get human. Take off your shoes. Don't you know that everything you walk on is holy?”

“Some other time, kids,” Basil Cubic said crossly.

CUBIC PROJECT STUDY

Article Number Four

By O'Malley's Leased Engineer Number Six

The history of normalcy in humanity is full of funny turns. The first really normal humans were the mechanical people manufactured by Eratosthenes at Alexandria in the one-hundred-and-thirty-fourth olympiad. These mechanical people (seven men and seven women) behaved very much as do modern persons of the fully-realized sort. They did not have the stifling inhibition. Their wonder at the human existence was total, and they felt great glory at being created in the human image. They swooned for joy, they forewent bathing lest any of the blessed human unction might be washed away from their hides, they raised their howls of praise to themselves and to their kindred, they danced and pranced, they talked with their happy tongues, they indulged in gibberish (funnilingus), they clasped each other fervently and uttered incantation phrases which fortunately have not come down to us, they smelled each other about the crevasses and articulations of their bodies and they were impassioned by the smells. They just could not get enough of themselves and of the people-thing to which they belonged. They did new and great things in the arts (creatively destructive things). They continually made little cries and sighs, their noses bled a lot, and they wept and tittered. What is there like the titter to make all mankind akin? And when ecstasy reigns, can logorrhea be far behind? No, it could not. There was instant logorrhea. Tongues bloomed like scarlet flowers, as they are doing once more today.

Why such successful persons were destroyed by their maker is still a mystery. But the mechanical humans (down to the great numbers of O'Malley's Assembled People who came on the market only last month) have remained absolutely true to the emancipated and exultant human ideal all through the ages, even though many of the flesh-and-blood humans have fallen short of it.

By the way, while old-style, unliberated humans are not able to have carnal relations with mechanical people, the new and fully-aware people are able to do so. There are offspring already, and there is no reason why they should not be fertile. Actually, there is no present difference at all between the new and fully-aware people and the mechanical people. They are the same. Oh gnashin' passion, we will all be the same now!

“Get rid of leased engineer number six,” Basil Cubic told a gaggle of those O'Malley girls. Get rid of HIM!”

“Oh Cubic-begubic, now you're starting to sound like people,” they squishered. “Oh, we have something for you. And then of course you will have something for us.”

They gave it to him. It was a little dirty white cake of something, and it had a small candle stuck in it and burning.

“What is it, kids,” Basil asked doubtfully.

“Tongue scrapings,” they said. “We scrape the coatings from our tongues and save it all because we are a happy-holy-tongued people. And now if you will give us your own tongue scrapings, then you can begin to have meaningful relations with us.”

“I'm afraid I don't save the stuff, kids,” Basil said.

“Ow wow-begowgowgow! How inhuman can you be!”

CUBIC PROJECT STUDY

Article Number Five

By O'Malley's Leased Engineer Number Eleven

We can consider the St. Vitus Dances of past centuries, or the Dances of Death (how could they have been so misnamed?), or the Hamelin dances as types of the ongoing emancipation. We are in this great historical line of people who were right with the world. Those old dancers were like the Fifty-Day Wonder People of the present time. Oh it is a glorious line of the completely-human ones, from the frantic-romantics of yester-century to the beatniks and bippies and lippies and hippies of yesteryear to the unstrung-tonguers of today. There is not anything gone wrong. This is the ideal. We ourselves have been the ideal from the beginning of time. Ah, when the Slippery Rocks are playing ‘When the Fog is on the Noggin’, when we all mingle our bodies and our breaths and our blood, when we experience the great and intemperate attainment, then we are in heaven. This is the ‘Great Human Hound Dog Heaven Number Five’ by the Slippery Rocks themselves.

Get lost, Cubic. But sign the checks first.

“Get rid of that engineer number eleven,” Basil Cubic told those creatures who were supposed to be working in his office. “Get rid of him if it takes a stake through his heart to do it.”

“Oh joy-be-goy-goy, hash and grass, you're finally getting with it!” those little creatures rattled. “Lots of us are going on the stake-through-the-heart now. It's a one way go, but what does it matter. Have you heard ‘Stake of My Heart’ by the Irish Indians?”

CUBIC PROJECT STUDY

Article Number Six

By O'Malley's Leased Engineer Number Sixteen

When an engine just flat-blow-top races like that, it means that the governor isn't working. That's what's wrong with a lot of people now. They're about to fly apart. There's supposed to be a governor or stabilizer in everybody unless they get left out. The governor will always work unless it gets blowed out of commission. Somebody sure has blowed it out of a lot of people lately. I don't know who it is or why they want them blowed out, but they've got a system of it going. People whose governors aren't working aren't really people any more. It's the one thing that makes them people. When they finally fly apart for not having governors, they're only crud.

Busted governors are what's wrong. Fix them and it's all right again. That's my recommendation. There is a governor-shop on Eleventh Street that is pretty good at fixing governors for engines. They might be able to repair governors for people too.

2.

'For God is not a God of gibberish.’

 — Paul, Corinthians

‘Oh Paul is wrongsy-bongsy! Gibberish is in like Quinn. Let's all make a mighty gibberish around the altar. Gibb, gibb, gibber!’

 — Bishop of Oklafanokla (Fifty-Day Wonder Sect)

“Get engineer sixteen into my office and send all the rest of the engineers back to O'Malley's Assembled People Incorporated,” Basic Cubic told his non-working work force.

“Oh, Cubic-bubic, you're just not road-worthy,” they told him. “Why aren't you crying like any human person would do? Can't you hear? Can't you hear? Turn it up a little bit girls.”

“Please don't. Any higher and the walls will fall down,” Cubic said.

“You mean you don't want the walls to fall down? Ugggh! But listen and cry. That's the Three-Toed Toads rendering ‘Cry All Night’. And you, you're not crying!”

Ah, it was enough to make a person cry, but Basil Cubic didn't do it right then.

“Ah, engineer number sixteen, just what sort of engineer are you?” Basil asked with trepidation a moment later.

“I'm a sanitary engineer. Yeah, you don't have to say it. I'm sure that some of your best friends are garbage-collectors too. I get sent out with regular engineers a lot of times because of the name of my classification.”

“Sixteen, you were the only one who went right to the hollow heart of the problem and came up with the correct but difficult answer. Do you have any special qualifications in the human-engineering field?”

“No. I know garbage when I see it and smell it, that's all.”

“A rare talent. Hang onto it. But you don't know how to restore a murdered condition to life?”

“No. That sounds more like a job for the police.”

Cubic dismissed number sixteen, and began to phone some of the real experts, as he should have done in the first place.

But one after another of those big men said that the thing was impossible.

“Dead men we restore to life every Monday and Wednesday afternoon,” one of them said. “But we cannot restore this thing.”

“Basil, it's a one-way go, as the people say,” another of the big experts told him. “No, the human condition cannot be restored. There are certain unreversibles and this is one of them.”

Basil called several more and was told in every case that things had gone too far and could not be restored. Dejected, Basil Cubic gazed at the little sign on his desk.

“We Can Do Anything!” That was the motto of Cubic Industries. And there was a little handwritten squibble at the bottom of that sign:

‘And if we don't know how (and it could happen to you, Basil) we will call Brain McClain at 918-05080208030106 and he will tell us how.’ Basil phoned Brain McClain as the station of last resort.

And he explained the problem to him. “It has to be solved, Brain, or everything is lost,” he pleaded after he had explained the situation. “You always have the answers. Please tell me if things cannot be restored.”

“Oh certainly, certainly, everything can be done. Let's see, just what would be the best way to do it — ”

“Yes, Brain, yes,” Basil encouraged. “You say the best way is to take what? To start with a pair of what? Oh. They're a kind of lemur, aren't they? But won't that take a long time — ? Oh, not too long, huh. Well, how long for a minimum? About eighty million years? You couldn't cut that by — oh, you couldn't cut it by even six months, huh? And you've likely got it set a little bit low anyhow? And what about some of the other ways it could be done? Oh, this is the only really workable way, huh. All right, Brain. Thanks.”

Basil Cubic was shaken, and he walked out into a maelstrom of noise in his anteroom.

“Oh, you impossible man,” he mouth-read the O'Malley girls scolding him through the miasma of sound. “Why don't you wail? Everybody is wailing. That's the Lolling Tongues doing ‘Wail All Night’, and you do not wail!”

But Cubic was still stunned by the problem he had been working on, and still more stunned by the answer.

“Eighty Million Years!” thundered in his mind almost as loud as the electronic amplified thunder of the Lolling Tongues. “You put eighty million years end to end, and — ”

Then Basil Cubic wailed.

Oh, Those Trepidatious Eyes!

Winchilsea, the restaurateur was a prideful man. He sold arrogance, he sold elegance, he sold exclusiveness. And he provided the best and most adventuresome fare in town, and perhaps in the world.

It was only before the three Epicures that he was subservient. He groveled for their approval. No dish could be truly good or adventuresome unless they certified it so. The three Epicures met the first Tuesday evening of every month in a private alcove of Winchilsea's Far Eastern Restaurant.

“We do not ask that you satisfy us, Winchilsea,” Alban Raffels, one of the Epicures, would say. “We do not ask for a faultless or even an adequate dish. We don't require gratification. We demand ecstasy.”

Alban Raffels was Commissar of the Gross Arts.

“We are impossible to please,” said Vanessa Van Wyck who was another of the Epicures, “because it isn't mere pleasure that we wish. We do not ask to be pleased, but to be astonished. And we are easily astonished: it takes no more than total novelty and total excellence, and the transcendence to be found in one dish in a million. Astonish us now, Winchilsea.”

Vanessa Van Wyck was Commissar of the Fine Arts.

“We ask for adventure. We ask for discovery,” said Cushman Sweetbasil, the third of the Epicures. “We ask for the future here tonight on stoneware platters. We no longer, as earlier members of the Epicurean Dynasty did, require on a platter the head of the restaurateur who fails in our expectations. The heads have proved to be mostly gristle and bone and have been no real improvement over the dishes that have failed. We do, however, require of the person something much more appalling than the loss of his head. No, no, 'twould spoil the mystery and horror to explain it.”

Cushman Sweetbasil was Commissar of Extraordinary Aesthetics. And the Commissars, in those days, wielded the power of death and damnation over private citizens.

So, once a month, in breathless trepidation, Winchilsea provided the best and most adventuresome food in the world to the three Epicures. And he would wait in great uneasiness for the verdict from the three of them. His eyes would be like large stoneware saucers as he waited.

“We will let you know, Winchilsea, we will let you know,” Sweetbasil would say as he assaulted a new presentation with only a two-tined fork and a horn spoon. “Why are you apprehensive? Do you doubt yourself?”

Oh, those apprehensive eyes of Winchilsea!

“Why do you worry?” Vanessa Van Wyck would ask as she worked her way into some new succulence with lancet and Malayan chopsticks. “You don't worry for the morrow do you? Isn't it wonderful that we are so highly placed? It is because we are so highly placed that, if we are not astonished, there will not be any tomorrow for you.”

Oh, those tremulous eyes of Winchilsea!

“We almost envy you for the rich flavour of your apprehension, Winchilsea,” Raffels mumbled as he worked his way into a transcendent (though bony), roasted excellence, using a Swiss army knife with its scissors and saw and blades and awl and scoop-spoon. “Did you know that absolute excellence and abysmal failure are no further apart than the width of one Mandarin mushroom? And, to us, all failures are abysmal.”

Oh, those trepidatious eyes of Winchilsea!

So Winchilsea worried and fretted, and he worked himself into a state of hysteria by the time of the first Tuesday evening of every month. But it was a creative hysteria and he continued to supply transcendent excellence, month after month. And he compensated for his anguished position before the Epicures by his withering scorn and arrogance towards all his other customers.

But, one first Tuesday evening, Winchilsea enjoyed a surprising success.

“Snap-Dragon steak!” Sweetbasil cried with uncontrollable delight at the first morsel. “No, no sauce, nothing else. This is perfect! Ah yes, just one drop, careful, one small drop of that New Iberia Alligator-Sail Sauce. Perfection! A new god is enshrined tonight!”

“Oh, it's the roasted tail of the fabulous Anagenno Draco Draco,” Vanessa Van Wyck sang her delight. “They did survive the Ming dynasty. Delight, delight!”

“Baked Pop-Tail Parfait!” Alban Raffels pealed his pleasure. “Let time stand still! This is the high instant of salivary lightning! It's struck!”

Yes, those Epicures knew real excellence when they met it.

August Winchilsea shone with pleasure for many days after that. He had scored a triumph. And it might be repeated, with judicious variations, again and again.

The Anagenno Draco Draco is the giant snap-tail lizard. Indeed it had not become extinct at the time of the Ming Dynasty, for Winchilsea had come into possession of three of the creatures by accident. These had been sold to him as ordinary giant lizards to be used for lizard-tail soup. Then he discovered that they were snap-tails. With that discovery, came the days of delight.

The Anagenno are the most intelligent lizards or dragons in the world. They are the best natured. They are the most anxious to please. And they are the most sensitive, but these rare and giant snap-tails had a sensitivity beyond that of any other creature.

When frightened, snap-tails will snap their tails off, or at least the last long section of their tails. And they are able to grow new tails to replace the ones they have lost. The tail or tail sections of all these lizards are highly edible. Those of the Anagenno or Draco Draco are of the most noble edibility in the world.

The snapped-off tail sections would dress out to about forty pounds each, and they could be regrown three times in twenty-four hours. The giant lizards themselves weighed about one hundred pounds each when in good tail.

It was only necessary to frighten the creatures badly to make them snap. And then they would be put into the nutrient vat for tail regeneration. Nine tail sections of forty pounds each, sliced into one pound servings on that buzz-saw that was always buzzing in the charnel room right off the kitchen, would give three hundred and fifty snap-tail steaks a day. And anything approved by the Epicures for the month would go for a hundred dollars a plate. And it could be done the next month and the next, and maybe even the month after that.

A proven pleasure might be served to the Epicures more than once, but not an automatically repeated pleasure. Oh, but there were variations and garnishments. It could be done.

The three Draco Dracos were very friendly and they became part of the family around Winchilsea's Far Eastern Restaurant. They were even given the names of Maco, Caco, and Draco. Lizards have almost human hands, and these big snap-tail lizards had almost human dexterity. They were able to do much of the work in the kitchen, even to the preparation of their own tails. They learned how to use the buzz-saw, the nutrient bath, and the oven. And they rolled their eyes in delight when they sniffed their own savorine.

It took more ingenuity every day to scare them enough to snap their tails off (since they had become so friendly and generally unafraid). But when was ingenuity ever in short supply around Winchilsea's restaurant?

But, as the first Tuesday of the next month approached, Winchilsea felt the return of his apprehensions. He had never been more secure, but he must still plan and improvise and execute with his old genius. All garnishes must be considered and all savories. And the little tricks of fine cookery must be enhanced. Oh, don't blow it now, Winchilsea, when you have the main thing already approved.

To aid him in his enterprises, Winchilsea got in a twitchy person known as Herman Boggle-Eyes. No, he didn't get him in to aid in the preparation of the exquisite foods. He got him in to scare the snap-tail lizards. These had now become so friendly and trusting that they laughed at attempts to scare them. But Boggle-Eyes, a person with terminal Grox Disease, had a really fearsome appearance and voice and he succeeded in scaring them to the snapping point for a while yet. Things were bright around there.

“Winchilsea,” Boggle-Eyes said one day, and Winchilsea went white with fear at the very sound of that voice, “I'll not be able to scare them three times a day till the end of the month. It's wearing pretty thin. Let's try it once a day.”

So they did it once a day only, even though it meant a great loss of revenue. It is the business of all snap-tails to be scared when it is called for. Why couldn't they, good fellows though they were, fulfill that requirement?

“Winchilsea,” Boggle-Eyes said one day a week before the fateful Tuesday, “it is simply no use. I can not scare them even once a day. I may, just possibly, be able to scare them one more time. On the fateful day itself we will see.”

So they dispensed with the scaring entirely for that last week before the first Tuesday, and the Snap-Tails grew in friendliness and trust. Winchilsea continued to devise variations for the great coming presentation, sauces, spices, flavorings, garnishes. He experimented with exotic varieties of Poke weeds and fungi. He obtained genuine Manchurian apples and Turkestan sheep pellets. He brought in bottled swamp-gas from a real Dixie Land swamp to burn in his ovens instead of the bland natural gas from the mains.

Of course he could not use old steak. The snap-tail steak must have been snapped fresh within one hour. And one whole forty pound chunk must be served to each of the Epicures. It was theirs to select the best morsels, but they must be given a holocaustic hunk from which to make their selections.

But it went well. It went right into late Tuesday afternoon as the baking hour approached. Winchilsea had his ovens just as he wanted them. He had more than one hundred sauces and additives lined up. He went to the carcass room with its ever spinning buzz-saw and its charnel aroma.

“The tails, Boggle-Eyes, where are the tails?” he asked. “Everything else is ready.”

“Still on the lizards,” the terminal Grox Disease monster croaked miserably. “I can't scare them, Winchilsea. I can't scare them even once more.”

“Get out! Get out!” Winchilsea shrieked. “I abhor a failure.”

And Winchilsea ran Boggle-Eyes and all of the kitchen help out of there with his screeching. All that were left were three giggling lizards facing him and a deadline to meet.

“Won't scare, huh!” Winchilsea roared. “I'll scare the tails off you, I bet!” And he put on a fearsome display of shouting and gesturing for a livid five minutes. The lizards didn't scare. They applauded by clapping their human-like hands together. They had been scared too many times, and by an expert. They were sorry about their own failure to produce, but they weren't scared. And they couldn't snap if they weren't scared.

Then Winchilsea waxed thrice livid and carried on furiously. In his frenzy, he stumbled and fell into the buzz-saw, and it cut off one of his legs just below the hip. No one else was there. The lizards were distressed, but they didn't know what to do. As Winchilsea had become very noisy about losing his leg, the snap-tail lizards put him into the nutrient vat to grow it back again.

But he drowned instead.

There was still a deadline to meet, an oven waiting, and the important thing still undone. The snap-tails tried to jam Winchilsea's leg into the first place they thought of. It was too long. They cut it in three pieces on the buzz-saw and then jammed it in.

“We do not ask you to satisfy us, Winchilsea,” Alban Raffels one of the Epicures was saying. “Oh, you're not Winchilsea, are you? You're the three snap-tail dragons yourselves. So much the better. We'll cut out the middle-man. Or is it that you have cut him up? We demand ecstasy! Why are you fearful, little dragons? Do you doubt your own competence?”

Raffels was working his way into the transcendent (though encased in burnt fabric) and roasted excellence of the presentation using his Swiss Army knife. The presentation was somewhat longer than the platter, but was otherwise all in order. But would the Epicures like the presentation? That was the worry.

Oh, those apprehensive eyes of the snap-tail dragons!

“We ask for adventure. We ask for discovery,” Cushman Sweetbasil was saying. “We ask for the future here tonight on stoneware plates. Oh, the future is longer than the plate, isn't it? Where is Winchilsea? Oh, I guess it won't matter.”

Sweetbasil assaulted the excellent meal with only a two-tined fork and a horn-spoon.

“Why are you apprehensive?” he asked the dragons. “Do you doubt yourselves?”

Oh, the tremulous eyes of the snap-tail dragons!

“We are impossible to please,” said Vanessa Van Wyck, “because mere pleasure isn't what we wish. We wish to be astonished. Where is Winchilsea? Oh, I guess this is enough of him here.”

Vanessa worked her way towards the succulence with lancet and Malayan chopsticks, but she had started at the wrong end and it looked as if she would be there a while.

“If we are not properly astonished, Dragons, there won't be any tomorrow for you. Oh, don't go to pieces over it. Don't snap your tails. We will let you know.”

Vanessa had the piece of Winchilsea's leg with the shoe on it. And she was tasting the shoe first, and she was so deliberate about it. Would the Epicures like the presentation? That was the worry. They were so slow about it all, and so much depended on it. Fiddling with shoes and baked pants.

Would they never get to the meat of the thing! Worry! Apprehension! Trepidation!

Oh, the trepidatious eyes of those dragons!

Marsilia V

“The Island of New Guinea is a nearly submerged mountain-range in the shape of a bird. And the Vogelkop Peninsula is the head of the bird. The Flora is the most fantastic in the world. The Fauna, to me, is less so.”

That was the entry in the notebook of Lieutenant Littlejohn. The lieutenant was unfortunate in his family name. A burly man might carry a name like Littlejohn without notice. The lieutenant could not, for he was small. He was unable, by taking thought, to add anything at all to his apparent age. He was an unfinished spooky colt. And his sterile upper lip quivered when he was excited.

In bare lip, he was unique in the battery. Every other man had grown a whacker of a moustache in the nine months they had been on Guinea. Two hundred and thirty-three men in the battery had grown moustaches. One, Lieutenant Littlejohn, had not.

Actually, he was unable to grow one, but it was believed that he could have done it if he had tried hard enough. Charley Redwolf had grown one, and Charley was an Indian. Indians grow them with difficulty, and Charley had done it on sheer determination. He had sunned his upper lip for an hour a day with a handkerchief over the top part of his face. He had followed the advice of a Melanesian boy and every night he had applied wisps of kunai grass soaked in the urine of the Cuscus or Coconut Possum. Redwolf hadn't done much else in those nine months, but he had grown a moustache.

There was a strong feeling in the battery that Lieutenant Littlejohn could have done it also if he'd had the heart for it. Littlejohn was not greatly respected by the men.

He was left much in peace now, but it hadn't always been so. He had abandoned some of his more interesting hobbies, and others he now carried out furtively. He had given up his butterfly collecting entirely for the length of his service. There is a stigma attached to a butterfly collector. There are several men even today who will do imitations of Littlejohn and his net, and these imitations are hilarious.

And yet, what's so bloody funny about it? Butterflies are interesting, and the net is the proper instrument for taking them. And some truly fantastic varieties had been seen at the stop-off stations of the battery.

But on Guinea, things were better. Here everybody became odd, so individual oddities were less noticed. Littlejohn wandered by himself through the jungles. He went up and over the cliffs, and down deep ravines. He learned which of the boggy meadows could be crossed and which could not.

And when he came to very secluded pools, he stripped and swam. But these had to be secluded. Even so, he often heard mocking whistles as of jungle birds. Few birds were unknown to the lieutenant, and he knew the names of two of these whistlers. They were Sergeant Rand and Corporal Mueller.

And Littlejohn made entries and drawings in the notebooks that he always carried with him. He drew in a boyish and unsure hand, plants, trees, rivers, rocks, insects. He named and classified and described them, as — 

“Marsilia vogelkopiensis. Pteridophyta. Hydropteridales. Of the Water Fern Family. Four-lobed leaf. Of a green-purple color that I have never before encountered in nature. The unusual aspect of this Marsilia is that the Sporophyte is not truly aquatic. It drifts on a morasmal underlay. Reproduction is heterosporous.”

Littlejohn always carried a rock hammer and a thimble-sized bottle of reagents. And he read the rocks as if they were newspapers.

PFC Hebert, the tough Cajun, and his shadow, PFC Brooks, came on him one day.

“Ah, Lieutenant Renoncule, are you looking for gold?” asked Hebert.

“Not in particular, Soldat Croupe d'un Raton.”

“You shouldn't have called me that, Lieutenant.”

“You shouldn't have called me Buttercup. I realize that I am known so, but not commonly to my face.”

“I didn't know you understood. Are you looking for gold?”

“No. Though I come on traces of it several times a day.”

“Where you got your stash? There should be someone like us who knows.”

“There is no stash. I do not collect it, it would not be remunerative.”

“Yeah? How remunerative wouldn't it be?”

“A diligent man, working in the most promising streams, might realize eight or ten cents worth a day.”

“Maybe you realize more than that. Maybe you are real diligent. We will be watching.”

They were large, rough men. Good hearted though; just mean everywhere else.

Littlejohn made a further entry in his notebook — 

“I have discovered an entirely new variety of crow or rook today. So far I have heard only its distant ‘caw’ and found one feather, and that quite old. Yet I know that they go together. I will soon have proof. This will shake ornithology to its roots.”

2

Captain Robinson was sad. He had become infested with small guests and had had to shave all the hair off his body. The prickling, now in its second day, had become intolerable. And he had one other worry.

“Who'm I going to send?” he barked at T/3 Carp who was acting First Sergeant on loan to headquarters. “Lively made the last three. I can't send him all the time. Who'm I going to send?”

“There's only one left. You'll have to send Buttercup.”

“Buttercup! He couldn't lead a detail of girl scouts from here to the mess tent.”

“I doubt if he could, but this will only be a routine patrol. It shouldn't take more than twenty men to do it, and finish it in twenty-four or thirty hours. You could send Rand and Mueller along as sergeant and corporal, and they can take care of anything. We have a pretty rough bunch in our battery, so there's not much to worry about.”

“The rough bunch is what I'm worrying about. It's like sending a little boy into a wolf den. But I can't be holding an umbrella over him forever. You tell him, and then you brief him. They'd better leave about midnight, and they can lay up close before dawn and operate by daylight.”

“All right. I wouldn't worry. Lieutenant Lively said that on the last patrol the Hard Heads weren't even there. There was just a bunch of middle-aged ribbon-clerks from Tokyo or somewhere.”

“That also is what I'm worrying about. The Hard Heads are supposed to be there. We have to know where they are, or some midnight they will be in the middle of us here.”

The battery was available for general guard duty, dock detail, and perimeter duty. The perimeter ran up and along the crests, about ten miles back from the beach. And what Japanese were behind it were mostly content to stay behind it. But not entirely. They did make sorties, and they had to be kept track of. There was little daily contact between the two forces along the perimeter itself. The only trouble was that the two forces were not in agreement as to where the perimeter was supposed to be. There was constant infiltration, the nuisance of telephone lines being tapped or cut, and the chilly feeling that comes when all phones ring dead and the radio is out. The radio is always out.

So there were probing patrols, exploratory patrols, anticipatory patrols, just plain nuisance patrols in the middle of the night. The battery had to supply a patrol every third day, to last approximately half that interval.

They did well to travel at night. The terrible heat went down with the sun, and movement was bearable. They moved through the dark, covering the miles as well as they could through the tangles that were always at three levels.

“There is a reason for this,” said Lieutenant Littlejohn to Sergeant Rand. “There is a symbiosis of three factors all conspiring to bar our way: the ground grasses which are tendriled rather than twisted, the parasitic vines, and the free-standing boscage. Each offers its obstacle, and combined they make slow going…”

“That part's all right,” said Rand, “but now we're coming into new country for us. Here we aren't sure of our topography.”

“Oh, but I have been here often. I know the topography, and especially I know the botany.”

“This far through the draw? But this was considered as beyond the perimeter till the last forty-eight hours. Well, if you can make it, then all of us can make it.”

There are men who do not know where it begins. But they would not be too successful here. There is always a definite point of starting. A man should be able to hear the whistle that begins the game, or the bell that starts the round. He should know when he is walking on the sand of an arena and no longer on a street. They were on an arena now, and most of them knew when they had entered it. It was about two-thirty in the morning. It would be hard to define the change, but it was definite, this point where the area of conflict began.

“There's a glow up front,” said Corporal Mueller. “Shall I scout it?”

“No need,” said the Lieutenant. “It's only fox fire, phosphorescent glow from rotting wood.”

“It may, and it may not be. I've been in the jungle a lot at night. I say it could be anything.”

“Too green. Not an artificial light at all. Simply fox fire.”

“Lieutenant, it could be a smoked-up carbide lantern. They show green. It could be an electric spot with a lurcher's shield on it to make it a dark lantern. It could be a spot hung with netting, or even with one of their green fatigue jackets.”

Corporal Mueller scouted it. Mueller walked like a bear, plantigrade, and he rolled like a boat. But he could move more quickly than any other man of them, large or small; and he could get to places that none of the rest could reach. A bear can go where even a puma cannot. He will grumble and talk to himself and make a fuss over it, as a puma would disdain to do. But he will go there and back.

But it was only fox fire, half an acre of it, a cup-shaped swamp of early submerged rotting wood glowing in the jungles.

They lay up about two hours before daylight. There were eighteen of them: Lieutenant Littlejohn, Sergeant Rand, Corporals Mueller and Meadows. PFCs Hebert, Brooks, Pop Parker, Redwolf, Martin, and Gagnon; and privates Bellar, Gironès, Muños, Villareal, Cross, Jennings, Crawford, and Crandall. They slept for two hours before daylight, with Meadows, Redwolf, and Bellar as guards.

Then they roused, had J rations, and moved along their route. There is little twilight in the tropics. It is dark, and then within fifteen minutes it is broad daylight. And the sun is the enemy.

They went in three groups of six men each. Lieutenant Littlejohn took one with Corporal Meadows as his assistant. Corporal Mueller took one. And Sergeant Rand took one. Every two or three hours they would rendezvous and rest for half an hour.

“There is something moving up that ravine,” said Sergeant Rand at one of their rendezvous points, “less than a mile from here. The birds are rising above someone.”

“It's likely wild pigs,” said Mueller.

“Birds do not rise for pigs,” said Rand. “They rise for some of the large predatory animals, of which there are none on Guinea. They rise from birds of other factions. And they rise from a man or men. These are rising from men below them. Who can spot one?”

“Heavens,” said Lieutenant Littlejohn. “Give me the field glasses. I believe I see him.”

“Heavens,” said Meadows very softly to himself. But he gave the field glasses to Lieutenant Littlejohn.

“Do you see them?” asked Rand.

“One, yes. I see him clearly. And he is a beauty.”

Meadows and Mueller looked at each other in disgust.

“Well, can you tell what he is?” asked Sergeant Rand. “Let me look. It's important.”

“Of course it's important,” said the Lieutenant. “It will shake ornithology to its roots.”

“It will what?” asked Rand. The day had become blindingly hot. There is an insanity about very hot days. “Tell us at once whether he is Japanese, Melanesian, or Malay. Or let one of us look. We can tell in an instant.”

“Japanese or Melanesian? What an odd term of reference! It almost seems that we are not talking about the same thing. But he is a new species entirely. I had heard the ‘caw’ before, and had found one feather. And now I have seen him himself.”

Sergeant Rand took the field glasses roughly away from the Lieutenant.

“It's too late,” said Corporal Meadows. “The man has already gone over the crest. And we still don't know what he was. But he has seen us.”

“Lieutenant,” said Rand, “will you please tell us just what you were looking it?”

“The crow. A completely new species. Do you realize what this means?”

“Yes, Lieutenant,” said Rand wearily. “It will shake orninthology to its roots. And when you have shaken it, what will you have? The man! The man, Lieutenant, was he Japanese, Malay, or Melanesian?”

“Man? Was there a man there? Probably a patrolman of our counterparts, or a straggler of some description. But the crow! A completely new species!”

“Judas Priest!” said Meadows.

Rand, Meadows, and Mueller talked a little apart from the lieutenant and from the men. It was very hot now, and all the heat was not from the sun.

“What we do with the little joker if we get in a jam?” asked Meadows.

“I will be responsible,” said Rand. “If it reaches a point of necessity, I will do whatever has to be done. You are with me if that happens?”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

“Then the men will be with me also. I have the scent of something. I believe that the Hard Heads are back. It's been too quiet today. There is nowhere so quiet as the mouth of a trap. I feel that there is more than one pair of eyeballs watching us. See if you can spot them.”

“Lieutenant,” said Sergeant Rand a little later, “we will not split up this time. We will go all eighteen together.”

“You are giving the orders now?” asked the Lieutenant with what was supposed to be ice in his voice. But the ice had a certain rattle and tinkle to it.

“I seem to be,” said Rand. “Someone has to give orders. We are under surveillance. We will travel together for greater security if we are caught in the bag.”

“Suppose that I countermand your order?”

“Would you give an opposite order, knowing it to be foolish, just to assert your authority?”

“No. No. The order is correct. It is just that I should have given it. But I will not give the order to scatter again.”

The lieutenant didn't know what was wrong, but he knew that he had lost the argument. He should have been giving the orders and giving the right orders. And instead, he had been daydreaming and giving no orders at all.

But his resolve, and he made one, didn't last long. At the next check he turned up missing, and Corporal Meadows had to go back for him. Meadows found Littlejohn sitting on a rock and sketching plants like a small boy. He caught him by a handful of jacket and jerked him to his feet.

“That's enough,” said Lieutenant Littlejohn. “I am a commissioned officer. Lower your hand or you will be sorry for it.”

Corporal Meadows was breathing hard. It was a hot day and this perversity wore him thin. With the heat he couldn't strive, and this thing here was almost as intangible.

“If you were only a man, I could hit you. But I don't know what you are. I can't hit you.”

“Whether I am or not we may find out today,” said the Lieutenant. “I half wish you had tried it. It may be that I would have surprised you.”

“Nothing you could do would surprise me now. But you couldn't surprise me in that way. I have fifty pounds on you, and I have the name of being rough.”

“Several of you have the name for it,” said the Lieutenant.

“And several of us are,” said Meadows. They caught up with the others.

“Lieutenant,” said Sergeant Rand in a low but savage voice. “You will start to grow up right now. You are a drag on us. I cannot have you acting like a four-year-old.”

“You are right,” said Littlejohn, “and it's an ugly habit of yours. But it may be that some others here could stand a little growing up.”

“You could even help a little,” said Corporal Mueller. “We believe that we are in the middle of a trap and that any move may release the trigger. But we have to spot them, the outline of them, before we cut loose. We haven't really come on a thing, only the smell of a trap.”

“Oh,” said the Lieutenant. He remembered something but he didn't remember it clearly enough. “I did see a foreign movement several times, but I saw it with only a part of my mind. I was otherwise preoccupied.”

“Then for God's sake, see it again! Spot them!”

“Did you ever know anyone to act like that?” Meadows asked Rand a little later.

“Yes, many. You on your first patrol, for one, Meadows. You were pretty scatterbrained. I may have been so on mine.”

3

They sank down in a clump on the edge of a clearing and remained very quiet for a while. But there was a nightmare aspect about the site as though the brush and thickets were alive and watching them.

Ahead was a flat green-purple meadow.

“I'd like to forget it all,” said Rand. “I'd lie down there in the meadow and just sleep. But it's probably full of thorns.”

“No. No,” said the Lieutenant. “How could there be thorns? Whoever heard of Marsilia with thorns? That is the largest area of Marsilia vogelkopiensis that I have ever seen. The inconvenience of lying down there would not be thorns.”

“Lieutenant,” said Corporal Meadows, “I warned you to forget this science and nature jazz till we're off patrol. Don't make us do anything that we'll regret.”

“But don't you realize what it is? A fair sized field of quite rare Marsilia. And the feature of this Marsilia is that its Sporophyte is not truly aquatic.”

“Do tell,” said Meadows.

“Instead, the spore apparently moves by slow drift through a morasmal aggregate.”

“Heavens,” said Meadows.

There comes a time in these afternoons when no one is at his best. The breeze dies entirely, and the temperature here in these dead draws will go past a hundred and twenty. There are blind pockets in the air, and a bird will fly in and will not fly out. The atmosphere piles up in shimmering layers that confuse the vision and falsify distance, and the hills seem to roll and rise like green waves. The eyes burn and blur, and there is an angry threat in every tree.

“I have the sudden feeling,” said the Lieutenant, “of a groundbird who has not been paying attention, who looks up and sees the bullsnake poised for the swallow.”

“Am I the snake?” asked Meadows.

“You? No. How could you be the snake? This snake is a hundred yards long and we're right in the middle of his coils. It is a centicephalon, a hundred-headed snake. It prickles my hair a little.”

The brush and the thickets were in fact alive and watching them. An ambush has a hundred eyes, and to be found in the middle of one calls up a world of anger and frustration and sudden fear. Watch out for the man who says he doesn't scare. He will scare when he sees the eyes of an ambush.

“This chills me too,” said Corporal Mueller. “Were we all blind at once? There is one of them. Redwolf, see that form behind the largest kapok tree in that group. He is yours when we start blazing. And there is another. They're all along the far edge of the clearing and are filling in. And they're edging around. But whatever we do, don't let's panic. How about it, Rand? Shall we slip out before it's sprung?”

“Yes. Slip out. Crawl out. Just plain break out. Get out somehow. But the worst advice that a man in danger can ever follow is not to panic. It is even thought of as somehow noble not to panic. But an old captain used to tell me that there was a proper time for everything, including panic. A rabbit knows that. A deer knows it, and he's not even very smart. Why does a man try to forget it? This is the time for a little judicious panic. Go as quietly as we can, at first, fellows, right back the way we came, and then down the first draw to the right. Crawl like snakes, men, and then run like horses. We will rendezvous at Blind Creek Point four miles down. Most of us should make it. And we have found out what we came to find out. The Hard Heads are back, and in number. Now move, men.”

“Just a minute,” said an unfamiliar voice. “I will give the orders here.” Or was it a familiar voice with an unfamiliar ring to it?

“Who said that?”

“I said that. And I will be obeyed. Are you not accustomed to taking orders from an officer?” asked Lieutenant Littlejohn.

“The Lieutenant will be obeyed,” said Sergeant Rand. “And what are the Lieutenant's orders on this?”

“First we will trigger off the action with an apparently casual shot. And then we will retreat, but not back the way we came. We will run very low down this gully here on the edge of the Marsilia complex. And we will gather in a pocket on the other end. There appears to be very good cover there. And three men, Mueller, Redwolf, and Cross, will hold this end till we are all down. It's narrow and crested here, and three men can hold it for a while. And, once we are in the pocket, they will have to come to us, and singly, or a few at a time. The gully is narrow. And it is bound to have a back door.”

“But, Lieutenant, that's two hundred yards. And it's only crawl cover. They'll shoot us like turkeys as we go down. And what's the use of holding one end of the gully when the entire length of it would be open to them?”

“But how would it be open to them? How would they get at it?”

“Are you crazy, Lieutenant? They'd cross that clearing in fifteen seconds and have us head on.”

“The clearing? But that's the Marsilia. They surely wouldn't venture to cross that.”

“Lieutenant, you're in a child's world. I'm sure the Hard Heads will not respect the Marsilia, as you call it.”

“Then this is better than I hoped,” said the Lieutenant. “If you don't understand, then maybe they won't either. I read a warning once about over-estimating an enemy. It makes for timidity. Now, if you are ready, men, I will give the order.”

“How about it, Rand?” asked Meadows. “We are looking to you.”

“Do you know what you're doing, Lieutenant Littlejohn?” Rand asked.

“Yes, I know what I'm doing.”

“The Lieutenant will be obeyed,” said Sergeant Rand.

“I have just looked into my coffin,” said Pop Parker. “I hadn't particularly wanted a dirt one, but it looks as though I will get it.”

“The beauty of the dirt ones is that they will fit anyone,” said Pvt. Crawford. “And there are always enough to go around. But we will soon fill up eighteen.”

“I only knew one man who seriously claimed to be afraid of nothing,” said Sergeant Rand. “But the peculiar thing is that he was afraid to die when the time came. He's the only one I ever remember who was afraid to die when it came down to it. A man usually isn't afraid of death when it comes really near. But he's embarrassed over it. It's an awkward and unaccountable thing. And it cannot meet your eye when it comes. It's a shuffling skulker. But it's no great thing to die. Anyone can do it. The defeating thing is to have to do it needlessly.”

“And tell her not to wait for me / For I'm not coming home,” sang PFC Jennings softly.

“The order will be the rifle shot of PFC Redwolf,” said the Lieutenant. “Corporal Mueller has already given him his target. Have you still your eye on your man? Then aim quickly and fire. Now move, men, move. And don't worry about a thing.”

Redwolf killed the Hard Head behind the kapok tree with a good shot, and then things began to pop. The old devil was unchained and all sorts of things began to come out of the pit.

Mueller, Redwolf, and Cross hunched down behind the crest, and the remaining patrolmen crawled and stumbled and ran low, down the gully. Mueller and his two men could probably have held the end of the gully for several minutes, except that they would be outflanked in a matter of seconds.

For the trigger had set the whole jungle into motion. The hills rose like green waves, and the earth burst open. The jungle-line ejected more than a hundred of the enemy, green-brown men, moving like sure animals. No ribbon clerks these. They were the old Hard Heads, the killer soldiers who struck like a giant rat pack, all musk-animals, meaner than men, sharp pack-running killers.

And, as the fifteen patrolmen stumbled down the gully, those Hard Heads charged at them with a loose crackle of fire, came across that green-purple meadow rapidly, more than a hundred of them with less than seventy-five yards to go. Not over ten seconds for it. They came in a black rush like the teeth of one great cutter blade. They came light and fast. And then, somehow, heavy and fast.

They charged to take the fifteen men strung out single, crawling on their bellies down the narrow ditch. Fifteen men with not over fifteen inches of cover, and no firing room at all. Sitting ducks. Lying down ducks. Plain dead ducks.

“Somehow I never intended to die on my belly like a snake,” said Meadows. He was nicked, and he watched a spate of red and black blood mix with the green hot mud in a pattern that was also a premonition. He wasn't nicked badly, but then he hadn't raised up very high. He had always hated to crawl on his belly.

The last seconds of one's life tick off loudly and with finality. Two. Three. Four. But slowly now as though the hands of the clock were mired. The attackers were halfway across, a black-green row of them that filled exactly half the world.

Five. Six. These may have been the longest seconds ever. They were unnaturally long. They were grisly, hot, weird, seconds.

Time itself had slowed down.

Then it stopped completely.

The Hard Heads stumbled heavy-footed. They were a study in slow motion. These death-bringers worked it out with horrible delay. It was eerie that the last scene in life should be run in slow motion. There was something obscene about it.

The Hard Heads wallowed, floundered, and panicked.

And they began to go down.

It is incredible the way a little mud can swallow a man, or a clutch of men. The heat was now unbearable, and again not all of it came from the sun. The piled-up air shimmered and shattered the vision. It is possible that this was all a mistake of blurred sight and that the impossible thing was not happening at all. The earth does not commonly devour a group of men like that.

And yet, in the blinding heat and the wavering air, it seemed to do so. If those Hard Heads weren't sinking out of sight in the mud, it was a very nightmarish sort of mirage.

“I saw a cow go down once,” said Pop Parker. The way he said it, it was the most profound statement in the world.

But they didn't make too much fuss about dying, those hundred Hard Heads. A little protest, a little argument. Yet mud is very unsatisfactory to argue with. A little screaming and chatter, that was all.

It was the eighteen men who watched it who felt a sense of sickness and shock. It was like the shock of the small boy who, for the first time, sees the bull-snake begin to swallow that ground bird.

“I always said I'd never do it,” said that tough Cajun Hebert. “I've never been sick before in my life, but now I've just brought it up green.”

“Santa Maria, Madre di Dios — ,” said Private Girones.

“ — ruega por nosotros pecadores — ,” said Private Muños.

“ — ahora y en la ora de nuestra muerte,” said Private Villareal.

After the Hard Heads were chest-deep and really frightened, it seemed that the pressure made it impossible for them to scream loudly. But they knew that they were being buried alive and that the hot sky was inexorable. And the eighteen patrollers watched the enemy disappear with plain horror.

“If it would rain,” said Crandall, “it wouldn't be so hot. And it wouldn't seem so bad.” Why had he said such a silly thing as that? His mind was in a state of shock and his stomach was tied in green knots. But they all of them spoke inanities when they spoke.

In three minutes, there was no sign of the Hard Heads. More than a hundred of them had gone down there, and the Marsilia had already begun to sew up its wounds, oozing its clover-leafed foliage again over the greenish sand.

“I will never love it again,” said the Lieutenant. “It is really a sarcophage, a flesh-eating plant. But it's quite bland to look at. It is hard to believe that its enticement is intentional.”

“Lieutenant,” said Sergeant Rand after a decent period of silence, “did you know that that was quicksand?”

“Sergeant, get the men started back. Some of them may be a little queasy after what they have seen, and I believe that they should have some movement to settle them down. We can be at Blind Creek Point in an hour and a half. They can take the last of their rations then and rest till sundown. Then we will move them again, and should be in our own bivouac area by midnight. Now move them, Sergeant, and waste no time about it.”

“Yes, sir.”

But, when they were resting at Blind Creek Point, the Sergeant asked again.

“Lieutenant, did you know that that was quicksand?”

“Certainly. Didn't you? I explained that the Marsilia vogelkopiensis invariably has a morasmal underlay.”

“Yes, sir. So you did. I wasn't paying attention.”

Lieutenant Littlejohn was sketching again as they waited for the sun to go down. He was sketching a crow in the sky. But now, strangely, it was not a boyish hand that showed in the sketch. The strokes had boldness and force to them that they had lacked before. It was the hand of a sure and canny man that drew that stark crow in the sky.

Bequest Of Wings

“Do you have to play that damned wind-harp in here every evening?” Potter Firmholder complained to his skinny daughter.

“I don't, no. I'm not here every evening, dear Potter,” the daughter Angela said. “You yourself say that I'm never here. Oh, Potter, I need seven hundred and twenty dollars for a pinion-pick for this harp. It does save the pinion bones, you know.”

“Oh, Skinny Angel, you could get a gold pick for that,” said Peggy Firmholder, her mother.

“Well, of course it will be gold,” Angela said. “Should I have a pot-metal pick when all the other kids have gold ones?”

“You must think money grows in the clouds,” Potter grumbled. “You young people have got to come down to Earth.”

“Potter Firmholder, give the child the money!” Peggy said. “Everything has gone up.”

“It's the things that have gone up unnaturally that disrupt me,” Potter still complained. “Here, Angel, here's the money. I'm sorry I was cranky. What, off again? You'd better eat something before you go.”

“I'll catch something on the wing,” Angela said. She swept out with the wind-harp and the money, and it was plain that she was on her way to Cloudy Joe's Drug Store. Cloudy Joe had gold picks for wind-harps. He had ‘wing-glo’ wash. He had struts and canvas and tar, and white condor feathers, and pinion wires, and airplane glue; even food and drink and tapes and magazines, and cloud moss, and wax-bug candles, everything that one might want.

“I don't like her hanging around Cloudy Joe's Drug Store so much,” Potter Firmholder told his wife. “There's something a little bit wrong with that place.”

“When you were that age, you hung around Ace Whizz-Bang's Tavern,” Peggy said. “And, Potter, there was more than a little bit wrong with that place. Cloudy Joe's is a cult spot.”

“So is Ace Whizz-Bang's,” said Potter. Used to hang around Ace Whizz-Bang's? Potter still did. It was better than Cloudy Joe's Drug Store with all those high-flying young people crowding into it.

“I don't even know how Cloudy Joe's stays there,” Potter said. “It's against all common-sense rules.”

“Oh, Potter, I've explained it to you a dozen times, and so has Angela,” Peggy said. “It's held up there by the new mathematics, by a Fortean Vector Value. Between the Euclidean and the Einsteinian universes there are thin intrusions known as the Fortean Universe. And Fortean Universe Vectors are strong enough to hold almost anything up, if they don't have to hold it up too far. Yeah, that's the patter for it, but I don't know what holds such places up either. They weren't up there before people discovered those vector values. Would they fall down again if people forgot the vectors? Poor Angela's getting more and more fearful as the time runs out on all of it. They're allowed six weeks of it after full sprout, and the time's nearly up. Young people have a very hard time of it nowadays; the ‘lightest and brightest’ of them do anyhow.”

“Bat-wings, bat-wings!” jeered Ace Whizz-Bang as some of the Bat-Wing gang swooped by his front door. “Do you know, 'Mealyous, bat wings used to be cited against the old Natural Selection theory?” (They called Potter Firmholder 'Mealyous at Ace Whizz-Bang's and at other places.) “For a great evolutionary change to come about, it was argued, there had to be some advantage offered at every step on the way to that change, or how would the change be carried through? But where was the every-step advantage when a mousey rodent was growing wings and turning into a bat? Where was the advantage during those several million years when the changing thing wasn't wing enough to fly with and was too elongated and spread in the fingers to be used as a hand or a foot or a claw? It couldn't be walked on. It couldn't be manipulated. It couldn't be flown with. Why have it for a million years then? But now the main arguments against Natural Selection are that it didn't happen, and that there just isn't time to wait for it in a busy world.”

“And the main arguments against Sudden Mutation are that it does happen, and that there just isn't time to get used to it even in a fast-moving world,” 'Mealyous Firmholder said. “It's hard on the young people, the high-flyers of them, and it's hard on their parents too. It was once said that the great menace hanging over mankind was the mushroom cloud. I suppose that wasn't true, since nobody really paid any attention to it. But now the greatest menace hanging over these lightest and brightest of the young people is the bolt-cutter. And they just can't avoid paying attention to it.”

“Aye, they live on the sky-brink for a while, and then they fall off it,” Ace Whizz-Bang said. “I was too old for it. It hadn't appeared yet in my youth (Oh, I guess there were a few dozen or so cases in California), so my youth had to be complicated by lesser things. Even today you will seldom see a ‘stubby’ who's more than twenty-eight or thirty years old. And the older uncropped ones are still younger than that. They get ungainly and crash-prone and they die within five years of their escaping the bolt-cutter. Now even the flyers say that they're not supposed to escape it. They say that their failures are bringing the full thing nearer every day.”

“It's easy enough to set them down as trivial and flighty,” Firmholder said. “Of course they are. They are young and ignorant, and extravagant in their views. But they seem to have a genuinely beautiful and thrilling mystique.”

“Fragile though,” Whizz-Bang said. “It's pathetic really. And it'll be traumatic to them in later life likely, though none of the afflicted ones have had a later life yet. There's only two things we can do about it. We can live with the sorrowful situation, or we can destroy the ‘lightest and brightest’ of the children as soon as they can be spotted.”

“They're hard to spot before they're about fifteen years old and start to sprout,” Firmholder said. “And a person rather hates to kill his fifteen-year-old son or daughter, whatever the logic of the situation.”

“Nah, that wouldn't bother me much,” Ace Whizz-Bang said. “A bunch of pupa-stage punks is what they are. One good thing about it all, though, you can really make bar glasses shine with that ‘wing-glo’ wash they've brought out.”

Well, Angela Firmholder grew pale and wan during the crisis weeks.

“Aren't you rather overdoing the ‘touch of death’ role, Angie,” her father tried to josh her once, to lift her out of her sadness. But Angela burst into tears and flew off.

“You shouldn't have said that, Potter,” Peggy told him. “It's so terrible a thing for children of that age.”

“Oh, I know it, I know it, Peg. I was just trying to jolly her a little bit. When we were young people, we were motorcycle nuts, and we loved the speed and noise. Now they go much faster, but they're not half as noisy about it.”

“It must be horrible to be clipped,” Peggy said, “and to be a ‘stubby’ and a ‘nubby’ for the rest of one's short life. They have to continue in such clumsiness of hands with only a little improvement. And they lose their beauty of voice and are adept at so few things. And it's only the lightest and the brightest who are afflicted so far. All their lives they will seem awkward, even to those more awkward and slow-witted ones who never were light and bright.”

“I still wish that she wouldn't hang around Cloudy Joe's Drug Store so much.”

“Leave it alone, Potter, and leave her alone. Cloudy Joe's is a cult place, and their cult is all they have to sustain them during the metamorphical horror.”

“Well, I wish she'd agree to have it done in a hospital where it's clean.”

“No, Potter, no. That would be uncult.”

Those lightest and brightest of the young people did have remarkably beautiful voices during the weeks of their affliction. And the wind-harps that they played upon had a full and gusty sound. The cult songs that they sang had trivial words and tunes, but their renditions were superb. It was like honey from Heaven when those sounds drifted down. They were airy songs, sky songs, soaring songs, pinnacle songs. There was a complexity to their music that wasn't to be found in even the worst of the Rocks and Grocks.

The ‘brightest’ liked to perch on high pinnacles, on towers, on spires, on eagle cliffs. They held their bright and sparkling congresses in these places and in places even higher, such as Cloudy Joe's Drug Store on its Fortean sky-lodge.

A ‘flight’ of young people was mutually supporting in the terrible spiritual and physical crisis that the members were passing through. Whatever shame was in their condition was at least shared shame for members of a flight. Most of the suicides of the ‘brightest’ young people were of lone eagles, not of ‘flight’ members.

Together, the shame of eating insects and cicadas, and even small birds caught on the wing, was a mitigated shame. The appetite for these things was as relentless as it was sudden. Eat them they must, and it was better that they eat them together.

The physical clumsiness of the brightest could not be overcome singly, but in group it could be partly overcome. No afflicted person could bring his own fingers together, could bring his two hands together. But two persons might bring their now elongated thumbs together for manipulation or handling, or might bring the knobs of their pinion bones together. Tools were devised (the pinion-pick for playing the wind-harp was only one of them) to slip over the ends of pinion bones in order to push or hook or grasp.

Working together, the young people could assemble bat-wings out of struts and canvas plastered with tar, or bird-wings out of plasti-hedelion fibre and feathers. It didn't take very much manufactured equipment, slipped over newly-deformed hands and arms and shoulders, to achieve conquest of the unaccustomed environment.

There was cult culture in this, cult music, achingly close cult friendships and companionships, courtships that were almost magic, and exaltation in the higher air.

There came an incredible chestiness to the young men of the afflicted cults, and an incredible breastiness to the young women. The wing-beat muscles had developed superbly. And so had the winged voices. Their song was absolutely extraordinary, as was the orchestration of their wind-harps. Sheet music for most of this superb body of melody can be had at Cloudy Joe's Drug Store, and at other such places around the world. There is one of them in every sky.

Angela Firmholder was at one of those ‘high-places’ in the twilight meeting with other young and soaring personalities who made up her ‘flight’. Carolyn Bushbaby, Rod Murdock, Peter King-feather, Alice Tombigbee, Clyde Boggles, Hester Hilltop! They were fellow adventurers in the furthest biological adventure since the primordial clay stretched itself and breathed. They were companions of Air and Earth. They were friends and lovers. Ah, soaring and swooping in the early darkness! It was poignant that it could last only six weeks.

“It is a damnable, contagious, crippling arthritis, and it is no other thing,” Doctor Hexbird had written in Today's Future. “It strikes only adolescents of a highly sensitive and a highly talented nature. The ‘Lightest and Brightest’ designation is as much truth as poetry, but it is a tragic truth. It is the flower of the younger generation that is stricken with this dreaded and painful, and sometimes fatal sickness.

“The fingers and hands become so elongated and splayed that they can no longer be used for human hands. They cannot grasp, they cannot manipulate. It would almost be better if the hands were chopped off completely. What must be chopped off, however, are two outlaw growths on each side, two very long bone spurs called the greater and lesser pinion bones. These new spur-bones change the whole deportment of the victim; this is the reason that they must be removed after they have become hard bone. They can be cut with bonesaws, but in unapproved and cultic operations they are cut with bolt-cutters. Then these bones must be pulled out of the flesh for their entire length. This bloody laying-open of breast and shoulders and neck and arms and back to get the long bones out is a traumatic horror. The thirty percent mortality in these cultic operations is outrageous.

“After the two giant bone-spurs are removed, the pain of the unusual arthritis will often disappear. There is no way that the length of hand and finger bones can be reduced, but the hands can regain a slight bit of their agility. They can never be fully human hands after such a deformity, but they can be used a little bit.

“When the two pinion-spurs have come to their full length, and just before they must be removed, it is possible for the victims, by the use of a few slight strut-like and wing-like attachments, to fly.”

“We might expect even a sudden mutation, if so far-reaching as this (a flightless species acquiring flight) to take from three million to twelve million years. Now that we are actually observing it, we find that the period is much shorter than that. The whole cycle is about sixty days in the individual; possibly it will be sixty years in the species (this to include second-stage and third-stage development also). It has come too swiftly for the individual or group personality to adjust to it fully as yet. There are cases of unhappiness and death. And the physical retreat from its implications (the retreat should disappear in the second or third stage of the mutation) is incomplete and unpleasant and very often fatal.

“Why do the ‘lightest and brightest’ of these mutated flyers accept the cropping of their wings and their frequent deaths? They accept it because it is necessary for the mutation. The complete flyers will not descend physically from these ‘brightest’. These will not have any descent. And yet the mutation could not be completed without their trailblazing and destruction. There is a biological imperative here, but its mechanism is still not clear.

“Ah, it is a great privilege to live in the time of an actual, major, rapid mutation.” So wrote Dr. Rudolph Redstern in Tomorrow's Flight.

“With cloud-grown mosses for my bed,

And wax-bug candles at my head.”

That was part of the instructions that Angela Firmholder wrote for her parents, in case of her death. And she added an explanation in prose:

“The cloud-moss may be had in thirty kilo bales (one bale of it will make up into a nice death-bed) at Cloudy Joe's Drug Store, for fifty dollars a kilo. It is the real moss that grows on the shady side of clouds, and it is the softest moss there is.

“The wax candles are made from the waxen insects that we catch and eat in flight. Some of the more enterprising people catch them against their own deaths, and to sell. I have been a lazy flyer and I did not provide for myself, so you must buy them. I want three of these wax candles, from fat-bugs, from wax-bugs, and from rush-bugs. They are for sale at Cloudy Joe's Drug Store for six hundred dollars a candle. I know that you will not begrudge me these for my last rites.

“I expect to die from the clipping. I don't much want to live on as a ‘stubby’ or a ‘nubby’, but I will if that is ordained for me. The clipping is the case and the law now. Soon there will be other cases and other laws. The big thing is almost here, and the destruction of a few of us early flyers prepares the way for it. In half a century all the people will fly, without device and without shame, and without pain or tortuous effort.

“Rod Murdock, who is my first sky-companion, will clip my pinion bones with the ritual bolt cutters. Then all the members of my flight will lay me over and remove these newest of bones, the pinions. And then a new member will take my place in the ‘flight’. Then I will be brought here, for the death of a flyer, or for the life of a ‘nubby’. But I will not be ashamed in any case.

“People will not need hands when they are grown to full flight and to full flight custom. We will not need anything manufactured, not even wind-harps. When the days of fullness arrive, our distal feathers will sound like wind-harps.”

“What I think,” said Ace Whizz-Bang, “is that before the end of this century there will be two kinds of people. The ‘lightest and the brightest’ will have become bird-people complete. I say, let them go. Let them become birds. To me, there was always something a little bit too-much about those lightest and brightest anyhow.

“And the other kind of people will be ourselves, the old people. We will be somewhat improved by getting rid of the flighty element in ourselves, and we will be ready to tackle another million years of it. Say, 'Mealy, there's six of those flying kids coming down over your house right now, and it looks like they're carrying your daughter between them. Was this the day she was supposed to be cropped?”

“This was the day, Whizz-Bang. Oh, my poor skinny Angela!” Firmholder cried, and he hurried the half block to his home.

“Potter Famealyous Firmholder,” said loving wife Peggy. “They're bringing her in now. Is she not beautiful?”

“Beautiful,” breathed Potter. “Oh, the poor creature!”

The young ‘flight’ people brought Angela down and laid her on the cloud-moss bed. She was white with fright and pain, and red with blood. But she smiled.

Somebody brought a display of pinnacle roses from Cloudy Joe's Drug Store. Somebody lit the wax-bug candles.

“Oh, my poor skinny angel,” Peggy Firmholder mourned her daughter.

There was a musical tone of distal feathers ruffling in the wind of a long swoop downwards. They sounded ever so much like wind-harps.

“Oh, how cult!” cried Peggy.

Bright Flightways

The “Snow Geese,” the Canadians, had been going through for ten days, and indeed it had been pretty cold there in Detroit. The Flightway Commerce was thriving. The fleece stores and the bolster stores were selling out everything they had, against the early chill. The autumn carnivals were swinging and the markets were full of persimmons and pawpaws and even pumpkins. The cranberry merchants were busy, as were all the provisioners. The bookies were betting on the applejack freeze for that very night.

Ramsworth Armstrong, the amorous and cheerful iron-hammerer, was courting Angela Frostchaser. There was always a lot of courtship on both the autumn and spring flightways and during the ready-days for such migrations. The iron-hammerers' guild to which Ramsworth belonged was one of the most forthcoming ever: There were more than ten thousand iron-hammerers in the wagon factories and automobile plants of Detroit alone. A man could easily marry from such a trade as hammering. Angela Frostchaser was a sheep-stomach chemist, and that was an honored trade also. Starting with the simple pepsin of the ordinary sheep's stomach, these marvelous chemists made enzymes for the preparation and emulsifying of meat and bread and, well, everything.

Rufus Carrottop, a butcher and meat-reducer, was courting Agnes Solidstate, a corncake-fermenter. The courtings consisted mostly of dancing together at the ready fairs and drinking applejack together, and making lively music together and drinking applejack on the flightway migrations themselves. The Carrottops had a blot on their escutcheon and they had had to change their family name several generations back; but Rufus of the current Carrottop generation was personally blotless.

Argus Brownscum, an herbalist, was courting Hesper Grotowski, a heat-exchange technician. There were those who said that the young people indulged in courtship mostly to keep warm, but the two courtship periods of the year (eight weeks each) contained many warm and mild days.

The Armstrongs, the Frostchasers, the Carrottops, the Solidstates, the Brownscums, and the Grotowskis were six nuclear families of about one hundred persons each who traveled together on the flightways. Such groups of families would travel together twice a year for twenty years or so. Then there would be a jubilee year, a breaking up of the group and a recombining of other combinations of families.

The dance-halls and sing-halls of the going-south ready-fairs were built tight and warm. Horse manure was always deep and active beneath the duck-boards of their floors and this contributed a great amount of heat. The people themselves, crowded in tightly, added to the heat, and the applejack gave a sense of coziness and warmth. The vehicles were now loaded for the trip south, the joy wagons and the cargo carts. Even the backpacks were all ready, and at midnight the people shouldered them and poured out of a hundred dance-halls and sing-halls to a great central area where Rabbi Kaltbrot (this was a third year; and the third, sixth, and ninth years were Jew Years) would give the judgment on the applejack and the blessing on the journey. He was a short man, but he spoke forcefully.

“Bless the circuit of the seasons and our own road-journey through them. Bless all pigs and sheep and calves, and the magic of their own stomachs that make them edible. Bless the corn and the sweet corn, and the oats of the field. Bless the soy beans. Bless all the enzyme-producing plants, and especially the spicebush and the cranberry. Deliver us from the hell-fire peoples and powers who threaten to burn up the world; and, as to these thirteen of them hanging here, forgive them, in some other world, but not in this one.”

There were thirteen dead men hanging by ropes from thirteen trees. These men had been hanged by their necks until they were dead because it was charged that they belonged to the “Firebrands,” which was either a subversive religion or a subversive political party.

“Bless all windmills and watermills,” Rabbi Kaltbrot was continuing. “Bless the sun-cells and the water-cells and the wind-cells. Bless the iron-hammerers and the meat-reducers and the herbalists. Bless the wagon factories and the automobile plants. Bless all corn fields and cucumber plantations and cider works. Bless the pine wood that gives us wood for our houses and crates for our berries, and the box elder wood that gives us spokes for our wheels and frames for our carriages. Bless all fiddles and horns and drums; but the meaner instruments, do you not bless them! Bless the fur-beasts that give us fur and the sheep that give us wool and fleece. Bless the flax and the cotton that clothes us. Bless the birds that show us the direction on the flightway, and the sun that waits for us wherever we go. Bless the — just a minute, people, we had better check first, sometimes it's tricky — ” Rabbi Kaltbrot went to a large and shallow basin or bowl full of diluted applejack that had been twinkling and moving itself in the midnight air. Even the most diluted applejack did not freeze when water froze, but it always froze a night or two later, when it was about twenty-nine degrees. And it had begun to freeze now, with a thin ice on it that tinkled when the Rabbi stirred it with his finger. And he continued.

“Bless this holy applejack that tells us the night of our travel. Bless the roads that wait for our feet and our wheels, and bless the warm land of the south. Bless all courting people in this courting season.”

Then, with a sound of fiddles and horns and drums, all the many clusters of nuclear families, under the Sheep Flag of the City of Detroit, started south, most of them walking briskly with their backpacks, certain outriders and guards on horses, the small children and the very old and infirm riding in the joy wagons and the cargo carts. The automobiles, of course, with their power cells and their painted wood frames, were not roadworthy enough for such a long trip.

Such few people as remained behind in the Detroit area, for the overseeing of the necessary functions of one sort or another, were all hearty people in their prime years; they would be double-fleeced and double-furred and they would stay out of the wind as much as possible. They would winter in the north only once in a lifetime. Once was plenty.

But the travelers from that area, they would spend six weeks on the flightway, on the road, going twenty miles a day, and would then arrive at the Panama City Florida area. Panama City was also known as Winter Detroit. People from thousands of places would, at the same time, be going south to thousands of other places. They would eat corn and beans out of the fields as they traveled, and also cornbread and bean-bread that had been enzymed and matured. They would eat driven beef slaughtered the same day, and also beef that stood at the way-stations, enzymed and aged. They played music as they walked, and many of the people shaped and whittled and manufactured things with their hands as they went along.

At night they camped in campgrounds, and gathered in the sociable darkness around traditional camp-stones or stages where they talked and courted, and sometimes they enacted night-show dramas. Whether they traveled or camped, they always had outriders or guards to protect against fire.

Some of the strong young people used to talk at night about the one thing that threatened them and the world forever. There was a very small number of the young people who indulged in contrary and dangerous and heated talk on this subject, but they did it so slyly that one could not tell whether they were really depraved and evil, or whether they were merely making forays into sick humor. Among this small number of young people who discussed so dangerously and heatedly were Leo Carrottop, the brother of Rufus, Jasper Frostchaser, who was a cousin of Angela, and Very Softstep, who was somehow related to the Brownscum family.

“There may possibly be a way to make iron stronger and more varied and able to take a sharper edge or point than any iron that the best iron-hammerers are now able to produce,” Leo Carrottop said. “That would mean sharper blades for spoke-shaves and draw-knives and axes and saws.”

“That's angry talk you are talking,” Ramsworth Armstrong the iron-hammerer said. “And it's dishonest talk. It hints of things, and then it runs and hides when it is challenged.”

“I know it,” said Leo, “and such hinting may, for the present, seem dishonest. But there might come a time when a thing is able to do more than hint.”

“Has it ever really happened?” Ramsworth challenged. “Was there ever a case where iron was made by a way other than cold-hammering and it turned out to be stronger and more varied and able to take a sharper edge than hammered iron?”

“No, there have never been any such results,” Leo admitted. “Something has always gone wrong. People always seem to get killed, from heat or from some sort of concussion, when trying these things. But there is a sort of theory that such things may come about.”

“There may possibly be a way to make meat and bread and many other things more tasty and more ready than by fermentation or the enzyme-preparation method or by the no-method-at-all that we sometimes use,” Jasper Frostchaser said, but he didn't meet any eyes when he said it.

“There may possibly be a green moon on the other side of tomorrow, but I'll bet there isn't,” Rufus Carrottop countered him. “And I will bet there is not a better method of preparing food, either. Not a magic or trick method, anyhow. We constantly improve the old methods a little. But do you, Jasper, know of any mysterious method ever being used, and do you know of real results coming from it?”

“I have heard fairly strong rumors of new methods being attempted, Rufus,” Jasper said. “No, there haven't been any claims to successful results. The meat is always completely destroyed before they can find a way to get it out of the thing. So is the bread and the other foods. But because a thing doesn't work the first few times is no reason to believe that it will never work.”

“There may possibly be a way to keep warm in the winter without dressing in double and triple fleece and furs, and without coming south,” Very Softstep said, but she was in a nervous flutter at herself for saying it. “People might not have to travel so far twice a year just to keep ahead of the seasons and keep warm and stay alive and be always fed.”

“But people love the travel,” Argus Brownscum argued. “Something will have gone out of them if they ever give it up. Can you, Very, think of any worse punishment than not being allowed to travel on the bright flightways in the autumn and the springtime?”

“No, I guess I can't,” Very said uncertainly. “But people could still travel on the flightways whenever they wanted to. It would just be that they wouldn't have to. Their lives would no longer depend on their traveling with the seasons.”

“And how many people would travel the flightways then?” Argus asked. “People are so constructed that they must be compelled to indulge in some of the greatest pleasures of life.”

“I will tell you all a number of things,” Leo Carrottop said one evening a few weeks later. This was in the middle of the warm southland winter. All the courting couples had been married on mid-winter eve and were now settled. They drank orangebang in the evenings instead of applejack; and their music, though using the same instruments and the same voices, had a more languid and a more southern tone.

“I say that there might be a way, or a complex of closely related ways, for doing dozens of things better, for doing half the things in the world better. Yes, I know the account that my great-grandfather was hanged for hinting almost these same hints. I know the story that our original family name was Firetop rather than Carrottop, though our hair is still the same orange color as it was then. Listen, with one thing added to the techniques of the world, the automobiles made in our mother city Detroit could be powered by something stronger than those little storage cells. They really would be roadworthy, even to traveling from one end of a flightway to another. Listen, we could have better tools to make other better tools. We could have better minds.”

“Better minds? How? There's no way.”

“Oh, absolutely there is. We could make a great mental leap now. The new technique, if it is attempted, and even if it fails again and again, can open the mind itself to a new sense of curiosity and achievement. We have never yet entered the real houses of our own minds; we have been shuffling our feet in the anterooms, only. It may be that if we come to eat more fulfilled food, if we come to manufacture and live with more fulfilled equipment, if we arrange to control our surroundings, then our own persons and minds will be more fulfilled by it all. Then there will be room for more intelligence, for more thought, for more life, aye, for more people in the world.”

“It isn't crowded now. It is said, Leo, that there will always be plenty of room for all the people, so long as the people are not counted. It is also said that there will always be enough land for everything, so long as the land is not measured,” Ramsworth Armstrong argued.

“But there may come a time, Ramsworth, when we are not afraid to count, and to measure, and to project. The whole world has been pretty placid mentally. I think it's an accident that one particular seed hasn't rooted so far; but I believe that we can root it on purpose even if some of us are destroyed by it. In Detroit itself, the cutting edge of all that is new in technology, we have the sheep for a symbol on our flag. We do not question enough. We do not invent enough. It is time we took a great leap off of our little stepping stools.”

“Leo, just before we left the north on our latest flightway to the south here, there were thirteen men who took leaps off their little stepping stools. They didn't go far, just to the ends of their ropes that hanged them by their necks. It only seemed as if they were men of hasty authority who hanged them. Those thirteen men really put the rope around their own necks.”

“Yes, I know that,” Leo Carrottop said.

“Those thirteen hanged men, do you want to end as they did, Leo?”

“Really, I don't mind if I do end that way. People are telling some pretty interesting stories about those thirteen men now. I want them to tell interesting stories about me after I'm dead.”

It was a very dry winter everywhere. In the north it did not snow, and in the south it did not rain. Everywhere, the ground and its plants stood dry and brittle and dusty and in danger of the evil fever. This was tinder land now, and of particular danger was the dry lightning from the rainless electrical storms. It was quite windy all that winter and particularly at the end of winter.

Well, the weather wasn't a great hardship. There was always corn and cereal grain in storage for such a year as this might be shaping up to be. Years that began so were usually of the “years that eat up the corn.” There were plenty of haycocks in the hay meadows, also, for the previous seasons had been lush. For the dryness, outriders and guards were doubled everywhere and the people were very careful. Most of the music that season was Watchman music.

It was such a season, right at the start of spring now, as weeds will grow well and early crops will not grow. It was such a time when kinky and whispered notions came up everywhere like cockleburs in the springtime, and balanced judgments hid ungreening in their dry and stunted ground. Three young people of a league of nuclear families, Leo Carrottop, Jasper Frostchaser, and Very Softstep, had very many of these kinky and whispered notions, and there must have been such a whispering group in every league of families. They hinted at things they would not say out loud, and they gnawed like mice on the edges of reason.

“It may be that the time has come to invent a lightning,” Leo Carrottop often said. “Then we could reduce the size of its danger and control it. And, having it controlled, we could look for its uses. Oh, I know that many of us would have to die from it first, but good might finally come of it. It is only an accident that miniaturized and controlled lightning is not already in use on our world.”

“On our world?” Agnes Sourstate asked. “You daffy, what other worlds are there?”

“I believe there are alternate worlds where controlled lightning, fire to use the plain word for it, is in common use for many things.”

“And just where are these alternate worlds to be found, Leo?” Argus Brownscum asked.

“Well, at present, ah, so far as I know, they are found only on analysts' couches,” Leo admitted.

“But that indicates it is all present in the unconscious,” Very Softstep told them, “burningly present.”

It was ready-time for taking the bright flightway road back to the springtime north. There were the ready-fairs and the ready-music (still with its strong Guardsman theme this season) and the dancing and the orangebang drinking. There were little dramas and masques. A new and sly theme was introduced into these — the tinder scarecrows.

Leo Carrottop, Jasper Frostchaser, Very Softstep, and a hundred other such small groups from a hundred other leagues of families, masqueraded in their tinder scarecrow costumes. These were stuffed full of very dry straw.

It is traditional that scarecrows do not smile, and that they be funny anyhow. Well, these were funny at the dances and at the drinking parties and courtings and dramas and masques. But, besides being funny, there was one other thing about the scarecrows that everybody noticed: They were scared.

The signal for the northern migration (as the freezing of the applejack was the yearly signal for the southern migration) was the blooming on a very old and honored Gershwin's Palmetto plant. It was nearly certain that it would bloom on an afternoon in mid-March, and the joy wagons and cargo carts were loaded, and all backpacks were packed. It was hot, it was dry, it was windy; and there were ugly and feverish clouds sliding across the blue. There were double outriders and double guards, and everyone was on the alert.

But the scarecrows, the legs and arms and bosoms of their clothing stuffed full of dry straw, formed a carry-over from the galas and the ready dances. They were still in costume. Some of the scarecrows talked about their tattered notions more openly than they had before. (The garish-green lightning began to flame in the skimpy clouds.)

“If it comes as we believe it will come,” Leo Carrottop mumbled to some of the young, “then we will take up pieces of it, no matter what pain to ourselves, and we will spread them 'til no one can put them all out. It will not matter whether the guards do extinguish it finally, so long as we force them to extinguish us also. Then our souls will be in it, and it will come back again and again.”

“What are you talking about, Leo?” Ramsworth Armstrong asked. “Have your brains all turned to straw?”

“They will have turned to it quite soon,” Leo said, “to flaming straw.”

“This brave death business doesn't go with me at all,” Very Softstep said. (The air was so dry that it blasted the eyes, and the dry lightning still spat and fumed.) “Mine is a scared death business. It doesn't matter even that it might be all wrong and that it might not work anyhow. If we die to bring it, it will make it a little bit more right. Say of me tomorrow, ‘She died scared, but she died anyhow.’ ”

“Very, what nonsense are you talking?” Agnes Solidstate asked her. “I always understood you, and now I don't.” (The dry lightning had become pretty rampant, and it seemed that the very hair on the head of the hot wind stood up with static electricity.)

“Maybe if we bring it about that it's all consumed, an alternate world will come in to take its place,” Jasper Frostchaser said. “The alternate world will have cooked food, and furnaced iron, and burning fuel for heating.”

“Jasper, do you want the whole world to burn up?” Ramsworth cried in outrage.

“If that is the next big step in transforming the world, yes, I do,” Jasper insisted. (A shout went up from the people: The Gershwin's Palmetto had bloomed.)

“You're crazy! You're stark mad!” Ramsworth shouted while the kinky green dry lightning was already making sky-earth contact. “You're playing with fire!”

The lightning struck, and it set the world on fire. It flamed and crackled in a snakey thicket of dry brush, and outriders and guards rushed in with prepared wet sacks and mats to beat the flames out. But three hundred costumed scarecrows from a hundred different family leagues were there before them. These rushed into the flaming thicket itself and stuffed handsful of fire into the straw of their own bosoms. They set themselves afire; they made torches of themselves; and they ran with the wind, in three hundred different directions, to ignite other thickets and copses and trees and fields and grasses. There was no way that the outriders and guards could stop these three hundred other fires that quickly turned into three thousand and then into thirty thousand fires and would not stop 'til the entire world was burned up.

Oh, the entire world would perish in the fire, there was no doubt about that. The rocks would melt, the ocean would evaporate, and the entire globe would burn to a cinder. That had always been feared and always been predicted.

Ramsworth Armstrong, Agnes Solidstate, Argus Brownscum, they were standing on a small island of smoking earth that had not yet vanished in the sea of flame. They saw there the burning body of their deluded and lately scarecrowish friend Very Softstep. They recognized her by her fiery initials on the very hot iron bracelet she had been wearing. There had always been something about Very they had liked. Now there was something entirely different about her that they liked very much. What a fragrant girl!

“Very and I were always very close,” Agnes Solidstate said. “She wouldn't mind this, not if she knew it was I who did it. And now, in the very last moments of the world, I have to know whether it really is better that way. Maybe there'll be another world and I can tell them. No one but you here will know what I do, and in two minutes there will be no one anywhere to know anything.”

Neither of the two answered her.

Agnes screamed when she put her hand to Very's burning flesh. She screamed again when she brought a fragment of it to her mouth. But she was still able to whisper after a moment, “Yah, it's better cooked. It really is.”

They all seemed to melt together as their island of smoking earth turned into flame.

The whole vanishing world was fire-bright. There were brilliantly bright flightways shining in every direction, but no one would ever travel on them again.

Love Affair With Ten Thousand Springs

Ranwick Sorgente, a primordial man, had been following the little stream for about two hours before dawn. The stream had gone under, hopefully, its last road culvert, and now was climbing, steadily and backwards, in a withdrawing and snakey way. It was an easy and winding climb up layered rocks with their small cedar trees. Now, just before sun-up, he could hear the spring and its pegeid both, and he knew that there would be something a little bit wrong with both of them, and that they would still be better than most right things found elsewhere.

The spring spoke a liquid greeting. And the pegeid called out in words and ran down to meet them.

“Oh, what a funny looking man!” the pegeid cried out, and she kissed him with a laughing sort of soppiness that was almost a slaver.

“Oh hi!” she said. “I always do that. It's my failing. Cliveden almost didn't marry me on account of it. ‘Gad, what a slurpy woman!’ he always says, but I can't kiss dry. I'm sloppy. I'm Crescentia Houseghost. My husband and I live in the lodge that belongs to the Bureau of Minerals. It has a laboratory and is wonderful. You don't mind if I'm slurpy, do you?” she asked, and she kissed him again.

“No, no,” Ranwick said. “All springs are slurpy, and all pegeids of springs are slurpy too. We would not love you so much if you weren't.”

“You love me then? And what is a pegeid?”

“You are one, Crescentia. The nereids and the oreads and other nymphs, while not small, are mere woman-sized. The pegeids are of more heroic dimensions. You are a water colt, you are the spirit of a water-spring. You're the spirit of the spring just above us.”

“But I don't even know where the spring is. I'm not allowed to remember it.”

“Oh, you really do know. You've just forgotten. You met me here to bring me up to it.”

Ranwick and Crescentia the pegeid went hand in hand up the slippery and mossy green rocks in the cedar-scented early morning shade. Crescentia was barefoot. She was very strong, and she twice lifted Ranwick in her arms, laughing, and waded the stream with him. She, like all water-springs and all spring-spirits, was highly imperfect. She was wrapped in some sort of dressing robe over short pajamas. She was too tall and too angular, too bony, too large of hand and foot, too long of thigh and of arched neck. Her eyes were just a little bit awry; one of them was slightly crossed. Her mouth was always crooked with its smile, and there was ever a trickle of saliva or spring water at one corner of it.

With sparkling suddenness they came to the spring right at the break of dawn.

“It is perfect,” Crescentia said as they came up to it, and she was wrong. It was as little perfect as she was herself. It came out of the ground lopsided. It formed a pool that was ledged and bottomed and clear for six feet of its width, and then dropped off into green darkness and apparently considerable depth on the other half. No more than half of the water coming out of the gushing spring was overflowing the pool to tumble down the rock-layered hills. Some of it was finding another channel down inside the hill again, to come out at still another level somewhere below.

Crescentia was breast-deep in the pool of the spring, belonging there. “You love it, don't you?” she asked old Ranwick. “That part of it doesn't have any bottom. You love all springs, don't you? How many? Do they all have names?”

“About ten thousand of them, I believe. Yes, each one has its name, and each pegeid.”

“How long?”

“Oh, fifty years I've been having these affairs with them. I only regret that I didn't seek them out sooner.”

“And they are all so perfect?”

“No. None of them is. The best ones are shockingly imperfect.”

“Do you ever feel that you are the first person who has come onto one?”

“I used to feel it. I would like to feel it, but it is no longer possible. They are all faithless. They have all been had before. They are all strumpets. Every one of them is second-hand.”

“Oh no.”

“Oh yes, Crescentia. That's the part that we have to live with. I ask ‘Who was with you here before me’, and the springs just smile with their crooked smiles, as you do.”

“I forget who was here with me before you. I will go and wake my husband now.” She came sopping out of the pool. “I will start the breakfast. Then you come down to breakfast in a very little while. You can see the roof of our lodge right there. Count when the spring has gushed one thousand gallons, and then come.”

“Maybe I will forget to come,” Ranwick said. “I will sit by a new spring for hours sometimes and forget the world. What then?”

“Oh, I will send my husband for you if you don't come. And if you don't come with him, then I will come back and take you up on me and bring you down there. And you be faithful while I'm gone.” The pegeid Crescentia kissed Ranwick Sorgente again with a splashy smooch and then ran down the green-stone slopes like a filly colt. Too leggy, that one. Was anyone ever so leggy? And she wasn't very young. Rough, rank, yellow hair was on her head as on a shaggy bay pony, a very high standing one. All the pegeids were so.

Ranwick enjoyed the gushy small spring which was really quite loud at this short range, and he tried to place the spring with her kindred. All the springs share a sort of cousinship, but there are degrees of kindred. She was a bit like Iron Mountain Spring which would always remain as a type. There was the sexiness of the iron-water sparkling in the daylight, and there was flint-stone derision and mockery in the crooked grin of the spring. Ranwick could feel the mist-water on his face and hands. He could smell the brittle and blue skin of the snake-doctor dragonflies as they hovered over this new-hatched pool. He could empathize with the shock of this born-blind water breaking out of its underground darkness to its first dazzling daylight, and he could hear interior rocks being rattled by the resonance of the tumbling water.

“But you did not wait for me,” Ranwick told the deceiving spring. “You've been had a very long time ago. You've let someone else put a bit in your mouth and a throttle in your throat. You are a wanton, and you are rotten.”

The man who was Cliveden Houseghost was coming up the slope to tell Ranwick that breakfast was ready down in the lodge. Cliveden was clean-shaved and bright-eyed, so some space of time had gone by for this man to have been awakened and readied.

“I hadn't even found the spring,” Cliveden said. “Crescentia told me that you had found it here. I had been coming up the wrong draw, and the sound of it is deceptive. There's another draw that carries more water, but it gets it from a long ooze and seep, not from a spring. More than half of this water seems to turn back inside the hill here. It comes out gradually into that other draw, without a spring. And she looks so honest and so innocent.”

“But she isn't, Cliveden. It isn't in their nature to be. If I find one that is, I'll look no further.”

“Do you test them all, man? Or do you guess? I will test this one sometime today or tomorrow to see what is in her throat. Crescentia says to tell the funny old man that breakfast is ready. I guess that's you.”

“Yes,” Ranwick said. “I will be down in a very little while.”

Cliveden Houseghost went back to his lodge below. He seemed to be a pleasant young man. He even seemed to know about springs. And he probably knew about one pegeid, Crescentia, and perhaps he had even mastered her. But Ranwick would never know all the springs or all their spirits. He would never know enough about any of them, except that one thing about all of them that he wished he didn't know. They were lovable though, even though they were never conventionally lovely.

Springs, sources, fountains, how they did break out of their green hills! There was Old Carp Springs. That was almost as much a type as Iron Mountain Spring. Really there were six Old Carp Springs that Ranwick had known, and he would distinguish them by their state or region. And who were the old Carps who lived in the Old Carp Springs? They dwelt, one each to a spring basin, in those pools that were so small about them that they became like houses or skin. How could the carp have come to the various pools, and how could they remain there forever with no contact with their fellows? Inside their carp disguises, just who were they anyhow? Oh, there were a lot of very friendly springs, slushily affectionate springs.

Bright-Wine Spring was one. Fox-Fire Spring in Georgia (Oh, remember the long-legged lady with fox-fire in her eyes who was pegeid of that one!), Broken-Dog Spring in Texas, Stump-Water Spring in Minnesota, Left-Hand Spring in Oklahoma. In New Mexico there was a very small spring that was named Saint Angelo's Ocean. But the litany of the full ten thousand is required for the whole appreciation of the music of their names.

Crescentia Houseghost came, barefoot through the spring-pool to Ranwick there. Now she was wearing some sort of skirted thing above her long bare legs.

“Old Ranwick who loves slurpy springs and slurpy spring pegeids, love me also,” she said, “and come down to breakfast while you love me.” She took him up on her and carried him through the spring and away. So they went down to the lodge with only slight dalliance, such as can never be entirely eliminated when dealing with a pegeid.

They came to the lodge and had breakfast, and Ranwick Sorgente stayed on with the Houseghosts afterwards.

“Ranwick Sorgente,” Cliveden Houseghost said to him that day, “do you ever come onto old bronze? Very old bronze is what I mean.”

“Yes, I often come onto bronze that seems very old to me.”

“How old? Have you had training in metals, and in archeo things generally?”

“Yes, I've had training. Oh, I've come onto good bronze that had to be a quarter of a million years old at least, where it was.”

“But bronze is an alloy that does not occur in nature.”

“I know, Cliveden, but if one removed all the things that ‘do not occur in nature’ there wouldn't be much left.”

“Do you know what this is that I have here, Sorgente?”

“No, but I have come across it — not in nature, of course, since it is one of the things that ‘do not occur in nature’, but in certain unnatural enclaves in the middle of nature. It's an older alloy than any of the bronzes, I believe.”

“Crescentia tells me that you collect springs, Sorgente, that you have made yourself familiar with more than ten thousand springs. Is there a reason why you have selected springs, out of all phenomena?”

“A love affair only, Cliveden, and I can't account for it. Springs are incomplete. I can complete some of them a little bit. That is what love is, to me. There's a shameful secret connected with every spring. That totals up to quite a frustration in ten thousand times of it.”

“I would like to get that down,” Cliveden said. “I believe it's an aspect of a major problem that I'm working on. I wonder if you would, now and then as the days go by, write down some of your impressions about springs in this folder here? I believe that the pertinent parts of your impressions will well up naturally to be recorded here.”

“Yes, they'll well out of me like a spring itself,” Ranwick said. “I'll do it, I suppose. Or, if it does begin to flow by itself, I'll not impede it.”

“I've had other accidental visitors a little like you,” Cliveden said. “I seem to collect visitors who fit in with my subject of study. I believe that you are sent to me to clarify a part of my work. Other visitors have recorded impressions in folders that we have here. We will dip into them at our leisure.”

“All right,” Ranwick said. He liked it here, but he felt a danger. There were sink holes here somewhere where one could break through and fall into caverns for a small or a great distance. Ranwick often came onto such dangerous sink holes when he was tracking streams up to their spring sources.

Ranwick went out with Crescentia Houseghost that afternoon to look for other springs. She was barefooted and boisterous, a long-legged bay colt of heroic size, a rover and a rock-climber, and it was hard to keep up with her. She went always at a canter, over the up-meadows and glades and rocks, through clumpets of saw-grass as if there was no harm in them. She'd go breast deep in the tumbling waters of the brooks, and she would race up slopes. Then she would swoop back on Ranwick with lavish affection and wet smoochiness.

Once she pulled him down in the grass with her to lie on her lanky body and her full but somewhat angular breasts. She lapped his face with her tongue as if she were a mother cat and he were her kitten. “Oh, you funny tasting man!” she said. “I will roll you in spice-grass, and then I'll eat you.” He made love to her arched neck and her throat.

With sparkling surprise once more, they found another spring late in the afternoon.

“It is perfect, it is perfect,” Crescentia said, and she went chin-deep into the pool of the spring, letting the gushing water fall heavily into her upturned face.

“It is not perfect,” Ranwick said, “and I wouldn't want it perfect. But — ”

“But it's so natural,” Crescentia said, “and so exuberant.”

“No, it is not natural,” Ranwick told her. “That's the awful secret. And its exuberance is contrived. I wonder if yours is, Crescentia?”

“Not my exuberance, something else. You were playing with my throat. Did you hear it ticking there? I don't know what it is or why I have it.”

“I wonder where the pegeid of this spring is?”

“Oh Ranwick, can't I be the pegeid of this spring too? I'll not share you with another one here. If she comes, I'll pull her down under the water with me and drown her.”

“A pegeid can't drown, Crescentia.”

“No, we can't, can we? I'd forgotten that. That's the way I can tell them apart.”

They went back to the lodge by a rambling way. They went down by a different valley, crossing and recrossing a skittish stream. They would find the spring-of-origin of this new stream tomorrow. Crescentia who was barefoot carried the shod Ranwick on her back several times when she waded and crossed and recrossed the stream. He loved to ride on her exuberant hips. He made love to her strong arched neck with his encircling arms, and to her rank, yellow, mane-like hair with his face in it.

Oh, she was an heroic colt! But there were many awkwardnesses about her that would lose points at a colt show.

“You think there is something unnatural about the springs,” Crescentia said. “Cliveden thinks there is something unnatural about the rock-strata themselves. Do you think that there is something unnatural about me also?”

“Yes, something unnatural about every pegeid, something especially unnatural about you. I wish it weren't so with the springs and their pegeids, and with you.”

“Oh, I think we will stay just as we are,” she said.

They came to the lodge just at dark. It was peaceful there, even though it was a bristling and animalistic sort of peace. There was high and pleasant interest in the lodge with the Houseghost couple. They dined and drank; they talked and read and examined specimens and artifacts.

“I set pieces in, and I set other pieces in,” Cliveden Houseghost said, “and none of them explains the very large piece that is in excess. You and your springs, Ranwick, are a very welcome piece. Crescentia here is puzzled that you find springs unnatural. She has always been puzzled that I find so large a portion of the world to be unnatural.”

“Is she puzzled that you find her unnatural, Cliveden?” Ranwick asked.

“Yes, I am puzzled,” Crescentia told both of them. “Oh, but I am natural. I have no tricks at all in me except a few natural ones. And you have told me what I am, Ranwick, a pegeid. I never knew the name before. Tell us the names of some of the other ten thousand springs.”

“Oh, there's Frenchman Spring, Miser's Gold Spring, White-Tail Spring, Joe Creek Spring, Sore Foot Spring, Pot Luck Spring, Wilson's Ditch Spring, Whistling Kettle Spring, Chicken Thief Spring, Run Rabbit Spring, Ornery Cow Spring, Bidding Tongue Spring, Pray-Me-Flow Spring.”

“Why is it named that?” Crescentia asked.

“As a pegeid, you know that it's forbidden to ask the meaning of a spring's name. But Pray-Me-Flow, well, it's above a poor town in a frugal country, and it has no water to waste. It will stand dry until the women come to it with buckets and jugs. Then the women pray for water, and the spring gushes until it has filled all their containers. Then it will gush no more till someone else prays for water.”

“Oh, that's a miracle then,” Crescentia said.

“No. It's not quite the same as the miracles at Three Miracle Spring, for instance. Pray-Me-Flow really does find her water hard to come by. But every spring is a miracle. It is the miracle of striking a rock with an Aaron's rod and having the water gush out. Aaron's Rod Spring, by the way, is in Alabama. The miracle is no less pleasant and no less stunning when it is repeated ten thousand times. But every miracle has deep underground roots. It isn't all darkness underground, not on the insides of the hills and earths and mountains. The underground water brings its own sort of light to the open air sunshine. There's an explosive sparkle to the water breaking from underground to the light. The water will never again be so bright as when it first gushes from underground. It would be perfect, it would be perfect if only, if only there weren't, aw no — ” Ranwick strode about as if having difficulty with what he wanted to say.

“Something sticks in your throat, Ranwick,” Crescentia said. “What?”

“The fact that every spring has a contrived throat; yes, a shockingly artificial and contrived throat.”

“Come play with my throat,” Crescentia said.

“Here is the folder of notes that our last special guest before you jotted down,” Cliveden said. “Read them at whatever pace you will. I hope you will find them interesting. In fact, it is imperative that you find them interesting. We are forming up an interlinked pattern in this, Ranwick, and you are one of the links. Our last guest was an Englishmen, Nigel Graystone. You will notice that he titles his notes ‘Rock Gardens of the Mesozoic’. I don't believe that he meant the title for a humorous tag at all. It's an apt description of the contents which are very detailed. One could almost, by following the directional hints given in these notes, build and detail a world of one's own. All that would be needed is adequate material (and there are hints on how that material might be acquired), and a place to set it down (and there are other hints as to how that place might be arranged for). You requisition these stones. You follow these patterns. And you make a world. And it will be a codified world: that's a requirement.”

Ranwick took the folder with the Nigel Graystone notes.

“Where is Graystone now?” he asked.

“Dead,” Cliveden said. “He drowned about a year ago.”

“Would you like to make a world, Crescentia?” Ranwick asked her, “a world after the heart's desire and such?”

“Oh, I thought that I had made this one,” she laughed. “It's quite a bit after my heart's desire. I like it. It's almost loose enough. It's almost natural enough also, though you two say that it isn't.”

Ranwick would read scraps of the Graystone notes, and then he would stride about. Crescentia sat stretched out like the big grinning water-cat that she was. Cliveden was doing things with shavings of metal and drops of reagents, and examining his results under a microscope. Crescentia pulled Ranwick onto her long-leggy lap, and he now loved her like the ten thousand and first spring.

“This Nigel Graystone knows about rocks,” Ranwick said then. “Last month I asked a seaman what he knew about rocks. I am on ship often: I do not find all ten thousand springs in one country. ‘I know pretty much about rocks,’ the seaman said. ‘They're mostly made out of salt. There are different kinds of salt in the world, and that makes the rocks look different. A rock is just like a wave, only very much slower. Remember that, and you won't go very far wrong on rocks or waves either one.’ That's what the seaman told me, and I think he was right. And this Nigel in the notes, he goes on and on about patterns in the rocks. He seems to see more patterns than there are.”

“Oh probably not,” Cliveden Houseghost said. “If the pattern isn't there, you'll know it. Stay away from the places that don't have the imposed pattern; stay away from the perfectly natural places. You'd be extinguished there. I believe that there are several such natural places on the Earth yet, untampered-with places, unpatterned places. Stay away from them, Ranwick. They are insane and inane (‘Inanis et vacus,’ God called them in his original Latin), and they'll turn you insane if you linger with them any time at all.”

“I don't want a pattern imposed too blatantly,” Ranwick said. “I don't want it imposed on nature. I am looking forever for that unspoiled nature.”

“You are confused, Ranwick,” Cliveden Houseghost said. “To impose a pattern is not to spoil. It is to unspoil. Everything is waste and worthless and weird in the beginning. It is uneven, and it is spoiled, stripped of everything. It will do you to death and not know it, for primordial things have no mind. But the very word is tricky, as though the world might have been spoiled and stripped in time. No, it wasn't; it was before time. It wasn't a thing done; it was the original case. The underlying emptiness is too spoiled to be comprehended by any of the senses. The chaos is under everything, and it cannot be lived in; it cannot even be died in comfortably. It is spoiled and it is rotten in the first state, and I hope that will not also be the last state. Do you understand what had to be done? The world had to be unvoided; the chaos had to be unchaosed; the spoil had to be unspoiled; and it must be continued. Everything has to be patterned and structured, continuously. That is the real beginning: the patterning. But in some cases, all the patterning possible still isn't enough. In one case very near to me it isn't.”

Crescentia had gone to sleep, and Ranwick rose from her lanky thighs.

“I don't think so, Cliveden,” Ranwick said. “There had to be a simple nature first.”

“No, there did not. The simple did not come first. The murderous confusion and complexity came first. And then came the simplifying, the ordering, the patterning, the abstracting, the unspoiling. The seaman you talked to told you a little about waves. Let me tell you about them also. Waves have a history, the most fluid history ever and the most incredibly indexed. The ‘Wet Process Transparency Recorder’ of waves beats any dry process microfilming there is, and it's all life-sized.

“Waves, as the seaman told you, are just like rocks only faster. Ten minutes of waves is equivalent to a million years of rocks, so waves may be used as a speed-up tool. There are developments and maturities in waves that have not yet appeared in rocks, so they may also be used as a prediction tool. With both, we have the spectacle of great and Cyclopean constructions, of bridges and roads and battlements, of walls and revetments, and most spectacularly of topless and toppling towers, building and collapsing underground or underwater. All geology is concerned with these towers growing underground. They go up and up, and one of them out of a thousand will even raise its head through the earth surface itself, but most collapse while still underground. They will have built themselves very high, and when they topple they will do so with a breathtakingly speedy fall. They may plummet as much as an inch a century. These primordial towers and their falling worked towards confusion. They broke patterns. They raised clouds of underground dust.

“It was to unconfuse the rubbled towers and to slow their toppling that reinforcements, most of them horizontal, were driven among this world-forest of steeples, of pillars, of columns, of towers indeed. The reinforcements tied the tower-trees together and induced regularity in rocks, and in waves. That is what Nigel in the notes writes about. These reinforcements are in the water as well as in the earth. Water towers build and collapse within short seconds, so it is necessary to structure them to avoid a return to total chaos. There are balks, beams, wedges, struts, rafters, joists and studs being erected constantly out of the more responsible salt and the more ordered water. These watery reinforcements are real, and they may be seen in a certain light. Were this not the case, then all the water in the world would be chaotic water. But with a deliberate process of ordering and unspoiling, every successive tower, though it may live for but one to thirty seconds, lives in a tradition of orderly growth and collapse. Crescentia, great child, rise and go to bed.”

Crescentia rose, apparently without awakening, and went off to bed, like a zombie.

“There's some disturbing passages in the notes, yes,” Ranwick said. “I read: ‘There is a second stabilization or unspoiling very late, right in the middle of the Mesozoic. It is disguised as a series of massive vulcanisms, but they were no more than disguises. It was a contrived, intrusive, artificial concretion of most strategic economy, and it was massive in effect. We still live on that deposit of stability and patterning of that too-orderly Mesozoic intrusion.’ That's what your visitor wrote, Cliveden. If that passage means what it says, then the whole world will have to be reclassified, will it not?”

“The world will have to be classified as almost entirely artificial at a late date, yes,” Cliveden said. Then he seemed to change the subject a little bit as he went on:

“You have heard about megalithic constructions in Peru, in Mexico, in Anatolia, in India, in Ankor, on Malta, all over the world, Ranwick,” he said. “These big, man-heaped constructs have been called Cyclopean, and they do have a sort of half-blind, one-eyed, monocular aspect to them. There is one observation always associated with their descriptions; that their stones are fitted and seated so accurately that not even a knife-blade can be inserted between the stones. This seems the more amazing since the stones are highly irregular of shape in their many-tonned bulk, and they are sometimes set into massive walls four or five of them thick, and they fit interiorly and exteriorly, each stone touching and surfacing perfectly with six to nine other stones. And they are of such a weight that not many fitting trials could be made, of such weight indeed that it is unknown how they were set into place even once.

“This thing is not possible even in miniature, Ranwick. The shrewdest sculptor, working in softer material, cannot do it. A machinist cannot do it with all his gauges, and a patternmaker cannot do it. Nobody can get more than three irregular pieces to fit even approximately. No, there is no way that it could be done with megastones; no way except one.”

“And what way is that, Cliveden?”

“Oh, the stones have to be manufactured in place. They have to be very soft and malleable, almost liquid, when they are fitted so closely. They fit as water fits its bucket because they are poured like water.”

“You are saying that some of the huge stones were a sort of poured concrete and not stones at all?” Ranwick asked.

“Nigel Graystone was writing that and much more, Ranwick. He was writing that a significant part of the world as we know it was so poured artificially. His ‘Rock-Gardens of the Mesozoic’ were our world, very much of it being a late and artificial construction.”

“That's about enough of that idea for one session, Cliveden,” Ranwick said. “Whether I accept any of it or not, it needs more thinking over.”

“Your own interests come into it, Ranwick. If a large part of the world is artificial, water-springs are surely among the most artificial parts of it.”

“Yes. Artificial yes. That's what has been haunting me.”

“Then loving a beautiful spring, as you do, would be a little bit like loving a beautiful woman, who turns out to be a robot.”

“Yes,” Ranwick Sorgente said. “It is the same thing. A spring and its pegeid are the same thing. This is enough of it for a while.”

Were the springs and their pegeids really artificial, as certain evidence would seem to indicate? Was Crescentia really a robot? There was something robotic about her mysterious throat at least. Ranwick read other things that were in the lodge, and he thought other thoughts. He had had hints before of the artificiality of a large part of the natural world, and now those hints were substantiating themselves. Well, he could accept it a little, that much of the world had been reinforced and patterned to preserve it from its own rampant naturalness. But the water? How would water be restructured, how would it be unspoiled? Whatever thing was this chaotic water in the beginning, and how had its chaos been throttled? He was concerned a little bit about water: watersprings were the things that he had loved ten thousand times, and he had loved them (as he supposed) for the naturalness that he found in them.

Cliveden Houseghost left off from his metallurgical work and his reagents and microscope.

“It isn't a thing to take too deeply to heart,” he told Ranwick, “and besides, you must have suspected it for many years. Whoever had bitted and bridled the world is to be praised. The natural things are real nightmares whenever we get an accidental look at them. But I do want to find out what was really done, and when, and by whom. There is the quite recent iron and steel and chromed metals. There are the earlier bronzes. There are the still earlier iron-stones which are queer alloys of metals and stones that cannot be natural. There are still older tubes and channels of chalcedony and agate rock. There are the very hills skewered together with giant skewers. Well, goodnight, Ranwick Sorgente. Oh, my wife, as you may have noticed, is insane. But she is harmless. That is to say, in all minor matters she is harmless.”

Ranwick still sat up a while. So the world was an artificial rock-garden that was contrived, perhaps, to conceal a wilder garden behind it. So even the springs were — ah, no, let us not put that trammel on the springs tonight. Ranwick turned again to the notes of this Nigel Graystone who had died by drowning a year ago:

“Ours is a sewn-together world,” the notes read, “and the word for ‘sewn-together’ is ‘rhapsody.’ A rhapsody is a sewing-together of songs. The vivifying elements of our world structure is the Hymn of the Rocks. And the Hymn became Flesh and dwelt amongst us. This is the body that is our world. And is it an artificial body? Certainly.

“All bodies are artificial, of course; and all bodies are resurrected bodies. The time of the latest resurrection of our present world body was the middle Mesozoic. What we have are stones and mountains and continents and oceans, all sewn together with needles that are partly of metal and partly of rock. We do find steel and iron and bronze and iron-stone all through the artificial and intrusive concretions.

“We ask who did all this; we ask who was here before us, and who may be here yet. We say ‘Somebody's been sitting in my chair’ and we wonder who it was. Then we notice for the first time that ours is a giants' chair.”

Ranwick set the folder of notes with other folders on a table there. Then he opened the folder that Cliveden Houseghost had assigned to him, and he made a notation:

“A feral ferrite deposit of re-formed ore in an interiorly tabulate shape is almost universal with water-springs.”

He closed the folder again. He would write no more in it that night. He put his head down on the table and cried. He had written the shameful and sordid secret connected with all the beloved springs.

After a while he went to bed.

After another while, a succubus in the form of a multiple-footed nightmare came to him. The succubus was a nightmare, yes, but it was also Crescentia Houseghost. No, Crescentia was not a night-crawler. She was still asleep in her bed somewhere there in the lodge. This was a dream sequence. It was the mountain full of water that is the unconscious, pouring up out of an unthroated and morasmal seep into an unshaped pool or sea. It was all chaotic water, and that was the trouble.

Crescentia was an unbridled nightmare of naturalness. She was horrifyingly chaotic; she did not have a countable number of legs, for instance, nor of eyes, nor of mouth or other things. So Ranwick bitted her and bridled her. That was all that was needed. It was, of course, a sorrowful thing to have to do. But, after it was done, she was in a rational form; she was a controlled nightmare.

Ranwick didn't like the chaotic and uncontrolled Crescentia. He didn't like the bitted and bridled Crescentia either. But somewhere, neither in this formlessness nor in this form, there was a Crescentia that he loved.

The next morning, after a structured and ordered breakfast with Cliveden, Ranwick Sorgente and Crescentia Houseghost were going up green-rock hills on the trail of wild water-springs. Crescentia, as always, was barefooted and boisterous under her yellow-flame hair. She soaked herself in the dew-bushes and in the clattering streams, and she soaked Ranwick with sopping embraces and smooches. “Drown in me, drown in me,” she said once. She was as spunky as stump-water, as they used to say in the country.

But Ranwick was thoughtful about a world held together by stone-and-steel skewers and poured-concrete belaying-pins. He studied the strata of the rock outcroppings and he could see that, to a very great degree, they were artificial rock-garden stuff. He had this carry-over feeling that the opposite of artificial was chaotic rather than natural, and that the non-artificial could only be apprised by a chaotic mind.

“You hurt my mouth when you bitted me last night,” Crescentia said with an impish and wet grin. “I would have carried you wherever you wanted to go. You didn't need to put a bit in my mouth to ride me.”

“You crooked-grinning, hard-mouthed jade, no one could hurt you anyway,” Ranwick said.

“Oh I know. I am only bantering you. That wasn't even me in that dream. I was only watching it. Ride me with rowel-spurs if you want to. It will bleed me, but it won't hurt me.”

“But I do want to see into your mouth, Crescentia,” Ranwick said suddenly. “Whether it is bitted or not, whether it is hurt or not, I want to see.”

“All right. Put your whole head in my mouth if you want to. I will be the animal and you be the animal-trainer.” She knelt down before him there; and even with her kneeling, her head was just at the level with his when she opened her mouth wide.

There wasn't anything in Crescentia's mouth but teeth that were too big and too perfect and a tongue that was too long. But there was something in her throat that shouldn't have been there, and her throat was really what Ranwick had wanted to see. It was a small control there. It was apparently electronic. It had wires. It ticked. It had Crescentia under its control.

Well, was Crescentia robotic, to some extent at least? And was the opposite of robotic human, or was it chaotic? Ranwick loved Crescentia for her creatureness, but whose creature was a robot?

They came to a new spring at mid-morning. This spring was robust enough, it was strong enough, but it was also serene. There was a healing corona about it, a reminiscent and reassuring mistiness. Even the boisterous Crescentia was subdued.

“It is very deep,” she said. “Do you want to go very deep down in the pool with me and stay there a very long time?”

“No, I will wait for the spring to declare herself, Crescentia.”

“I could take you down with me whether you wanted to go or not.”

“But you won't, Crescentia.”

“I will go get the children then,” she said. “Maybe the spring will want them.”

“Have you children, Crescentia?” he asked, but he was paying attention to the spring and not to her.

“I don't know whose they will be,” she said. “I will get some children somewhere and give them to the spring.” She went away, up over the hill in an unexpected direction.

Ranwick waited in pleasant anticipation. He had never ceased to love any spring or pegeid that he had ever loved, and certainly he still loved Crescentia. But a new love does take precedence.

“Where are you, pegeid?” he asked. There was a stirring deep in the water to show that she heard. So he talked to her.

“You are reassuring, pegeid,” he said, “and it won't matter if you do have a contrived throat. Of course things have to be kept in repair. There is strategic mountain repair within the last five thousand years. There is strategic water repair within the last five days. I remember what a street preacher said once about water that had got out of repair. Do you want to hear it?”

The stirring in the deep water of the spring's pool indicated that of course the pegeid wanted to hear anything that Ranwick might tell her.

“The preacher said that the Biblical Flood was a returning of water to its chaotic state. The man said that during the flood there was not more water than always (which would be impossible, for where would it come from?), but it was a case of the ordered water breaking its bonds when the fountains of the deep burst forth and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. There was a horrible unstructuring of the water then. Should such an unstructuring happen again today, then such a flood would also happen again today. That's what the street preacher said. Do you agree?”

There was a deep stirring in the pool. It was the pegeid saying that she partly agreed.

“Yesterday I found two new springs,” Ranwick said. “They were ‘Mad Giantess Spring’ and ‘Usurpation Spring’. The pegeid at Usurpation Spring would not come up for fear of the mad giantess, but I love her as well as if I had known her. Are you also afraid of the mad giantess?”

The deep stirring in the pool indicated that the pegeid was somewhat cautious of the mad giantess, and that she would hide down there a while yet.

Cliveden Houseghost, the husband of the mad giantess, came up the slope to Ranwick.

“You wrote a note last night that most of the springs have iron pipes in their throats,” Cliveden said, “so, of course, such springs are artificial. The normal way would be for the water to come out of the ground in seeps that produce dangerous quagmires. So there is cementing and channeling of the springs to give an ordered and restricted flow. And contrived throats are provided, of iron, of bronze, of glazed stone. It shouldn't be a shock that most of the beauty of a spring is artificially produced; by whom, I don't know.”

“What is in Crescentia's own throat?” Ranwick asked.

“It's a psycho-monitor, a sort of electronic conscience. Crescentia has no other sort of conscience. It is put in her throat because her emotions curiously center there.”

“You said last night that you supposed that loving a beautiful spring that had been tampered with was like loving a beautiful woman who turned out to be a robot. Is she?”

“Not literally. But her personality and her derangement do make her into a sort of robot. Where is she? I thought she was with you.”

“She said something about going to get some children, and she went.”

“Oh, that's trouble,” Cliveden said. “She is supposed to leave children completely alone. There's a court order to that effect. I will have to find her at once.”

“Here she is,” Ranwick said. Crescentia came to them from over the hill. She seemed somewhat disturbed, somewhat angry.

“They watch them too closely,” she said. “I couldn't get hold of any children at all. They made a rotten big fuss about me going into that little town to try to get some children. I think there's going to be some trouble.”

“I know that there is,” Cliveden Houseghost said. “Let us go back to the lodge, great child yourself, and deal as well as we can with them when they come.”

“All right,” Crescentia said. She caressed Ranwick juicily. “I might not see you again,” she said. She went towards the distant lodge with Cliveden.

“Will you come up now?” Ranwick asked the pegeid.

The deep water stirred to say ‘Not yet. We are not through with visitors yet.’

“Is there really anything to this business of the whole world being a contrived sort of rock-garden?” Ranwick asked the spring-spirit.

There was a double stirring in the deep water. These said ‘Yes, there is quite a bit to that business’; and they said ‘It's the thing about the world and about us that you've been loving all the time: don't stop loving it now.’

Ranwick went and put his two arms deep into the gushing throat of the spring. He worked around there a while. He brought out a short and corroded length of four inch iron pipe that was grown over with moss and verdigris.

“It isn't old, it isn't old at all,” he said. “It's modern commercial pipe. It isn't thirty years old. Oh, you are an artificial vixen! Are you not ashamed?”

The amused stirring of the deep water said that the pegeid was in no way ashamed.

In the distance, there were official looking cars at the lodge. People got out of them, and later people got into them again. After a while they drove away. After a longer while, Cliveden Houseghost returned to the spring. He was sad and shook.

“What is it, Cliveden?” Ranwick asked.

“Oh, they've taken Crescentia away again, to the mental house, to the funny house. It becomes harder and harder to get her out each time, and I can keep her for a shorter and shorter while. I have had her home only a week this time.”

“What's there about her madness that they should come and take her?”

“Oh, she drowns children. She doesn't really mean anything by it, I don't believe. She believes that the springs want them. But the people in the little towns become very skittish whenever she goes on a children hunt.”

“But children are not all that she drowns, Cliveden?”

“No. Sometimes she drowns men too. She is so strong that she handles men like children. Once it was the case that many springs, being unchanneled and like quagmires, would drown men in the same strong-handed way. I figure that you, knowing springs and spring-pegeids so well, would be able to avoid such a death. But I wouldn't have prevented it, and I didn't prevent others. You didn't think you could love ten thousand springs and their pegeids and not find one that somebody else loved very passionately, did you? I am very jealous, Ranwick. I wish she'd done it. They find out about the children, but they don't find out about the men she drowns.”

Well yes, it was true that Cliveden Houseghost was insane, even as his wife Crescentia was. But it might be that (like her again) Cliveden was harmless in all minor matters.

Cliveden Houseghost went away, down to his lodge, and defeat was in every line of him.

“We'll have no more visitors this day,” Ranwick said. “Will you come up now?”

There was a greater stirring in the deep water. The pegeid came up out of the spring-pool. She was like none other ever, and the spring was like no other. The latest love, the ten thousandth love, is always the strongest one.

Author's Commentary

Selenium Ghosts Of The Eighteen Seventies

Even today, the “invention” of television is usually ascribed to Paul Nipkow of Germany, and the year is given as 1884. Nipkow used the principle of the variation in the electrical conductivity of selenium when exposed to light, and he used scanning discs as mechanical effectors. What else was there for him to use before the development of the phototube and the current-amplifying electron tube? The resolution of Nipkow's television was very poor due to the “slow light” characteristics of selenium response and the lack of amplification. There were, however, several men in the United States who transmitted a sort of television before Nipkow did so in Germany.

Resolution of the images of these even earlier experimenters in the field (Aurelian Bentley, Jessy Polk, Samuel J. Perry, Gifford Hudgeons) was even poorer than was the case with Nipkow. Indeed, none of these pre-Nipkow inventors in the television field is worthy of much attention, except Bentley. And the interest in Bentley is in the content of his transmissions and not in his technical ineptitude.

It is not our object to enter into the argument of who really did first “invent” television (it was not Paul Nipkow, and it probably was not Aurelian Bentley or Jessy Polk either); our object is to examine some of the earliest true television dramas in their own queer “slow light” context. And the first of those “slow light” or selenium (“moonshine”) dramas were put together by Aurelian Bentley in the year 1873.

The earliest art in a new field is always the freshest and is often the best. Homer composed the first and freshest, and probably the best, epic poetry. Whatever cave man did the first painting, it remains among the freshest as well as the best paintings ever done. Aeschylus composed the first and best tragic dramas, Euclid invented the first and best of the artful mathematics (we speak here of mathematics as an art without being concerned with its accuracy or practicality). And it may be that Aurelian Bentley produced the best of all television dramas in spite of their primitive aspect.

Bentley's television enterprise was not very successful despite his fee of one thousand dollars per day for each subscriber. In his heyday (or his hey-month, November of 1873), Bentley had fifty-nine subscribers in New York City, seventeen in Boston, fourteen in Philadelphia, and one in Hoboken. This gave him an income of ninety-one thousand dollars a day (which would be the equivalent of about a million dollars a day in today's terms), but Bentley was extravagant and prodigal, and he always insisted that he had expenses that the world wotted not of. In any case, Bentley was broke and out of business by the beginning of the year 1874. He was also dead by that time.

The only things surviving from The Wonderful World of Aurelian Bentley are thirteen of the “slow light” dramas, the master projector, and nineteen of the old television receivers. There are probably others of the receivers around somewhere, and persons coming onto them might not know what they are for. They do not look much like the television sets of later years.

The one we use for playing the old dramas is a good kerosene-powered model which we found and bought for eighteen dollars two years ago. If the old sets are ever properly identified and become collectors items, the price on them may double or even triple. We told the owner of the antique that it was a chestnut roaster, and with a proper rack installed it could likely be made to serve as that.

We bought the master projector for twenty-six dollars. We told the owner of that monster that it was a chicken incubator. The thirteen dramas in their canisters we had for thirty-nine dollars total. We had to add formaldehyde to activate the dramas, however, and we had to add it to both the projector and the receiver; the formaldehyde itself came to fifty-two dollars. I discovered soon that the canisters with their dramas were not really needed, nor was the master projector. The receiver itself would repeat everything that it had ever received. Still and all, it was money well spent.

The kerosene burner activated a small dynamo that imposed an electrical grid on the selenium matrix and awakened the memories of the dramas.

There was, however, an oddity in all the playbacks. The film-fix of the receiver continued to receive impressions so that every time a “slow light” drama is presented it is different, because of the feedback. The resolution of the pictures improves with use and is now much clearer and more enjoyable than originally.

The librettos of the first twelve of the thirteen Bentley dramas are not good, not nearly as good as the librettos of the Jessy Polk and the Samuel J. Perry dramas later in the decade. Aurelian Bentley was not a literary man; he was not even a completely literate man. His genius had many gaping holes in it. But he was a passionately dramatic man, and these dramas which he himself devised and directed have a great sweep and action to them. And even the librettos from which he worked are valuable for one reason. They tell us, though sometimes rather ineptly and vaguely, what the dramas themselves are all about. Without these outlines, we would have no idea in the world of the meaning of the powerful dramas.

There was an unreality, a “ghostliness”, about all the dramas, as though they were made by sewer light underground; or as if they were made by poor quality moonlight. Remember that the element selenium (the metal that is not a metal), the chemical basis of the dramas, is named from Selene, the moon.

Bentley did not use “moving pictures” of quickly succeeding frames to capture and transmit his live presentation dramas. Although Muybridge was in fact working on the zoopraxiscope (the first “moving picture” device) at that very time, his still-incomplete work was not known to Aurelian Bentley. Samuel J. Perry and Gifford Hudgeons did use “moving picture” techniques for their primitive television dramas later in the decade; but Bentley, fortunately perhaps, did not. Each of Bentley's thirty-minute live dramas, however it appeared for the first time in the first television receiver, was recorded in one single matrix or frame: and, thereafter, that picture took on a life and growth of its own. It was to some extent independent of sequence (an effect that has been attempted and failed of in several of the other arts); and it had a free way with time and space generally. This is part of the “ghostliness” of the dramas, and it is a large part of their power and charm. Each drama was one evolving moment outside of time and space (though mostly the scenes were in New York City and the Barrens of New Jersey).

Of course there was no sound in these early Bentley dramas, but let us not go too far astray with that particular “of course”. “Slow sound” as well as “slow light” is a characteristic of selenium response, and we will soon see that sound did in fact creep into some of the dramas after much replaying. Whether their total effects were accidental or by design, these early television dramas were absolutely unique.

The thirteen “slow light” dramas produced by Aurelian Bentley in the year 1873 (the thirteenth of them, the mysterious Pettifoggers of Philadelphia, lacks Bentley's “Seal of Production”, and indeed it was done after his death: and yet he appears as a major character in it) the thirteen were these:

1. The Perils of Patience, a Damnable Chase. In this, Clarinda Calliope, who was possibly one of the greatest actresses of American or world drama, played the part of Patience Palmer in the title role. Leslie Whitemansion played the role of Simon Legree. Kirbac Fouet played the part of “the Whip”, a sinister character. X. Paul McCoffin played the role of “the Embalmer”. Jaime del Diablo played “the Jesuit”, one of the most menacing roles in all drama. Torres Malgre played “the Slaver”, who carried the forged certificate showing that Patience had a shadow of black blood and so might be returned to slavery on San Croix. Inspiro Spectralski played “the Panther” (Is he a Man? Is he a Ghost?), who is the embodiment of an evil that is perhaps from beyond the world. Hubert Saint Nicholas played the part of “the Guardian”, who is really a false guardian.

This Damnable Chase is really a galloping allegory. It is the allegory of good against evil, of light against darkness, of inventiveness against crude obtuseness, of life against death, of openness against intrigue, of love against hatred, of courage against hellish fear. For excitement and intensity, this drama has hardly an equal. Time and again, it seemed that the Embalmer, striking out of the dark, would stab Patience with his needle full of the dread embalming fluid and so trap her in the rigidity of living death. Time and again, it seemed that the Whip would cut the flesh of Patience Palmer with his long lash with viper poison on its iron tip that would bring instant death. At every eventuality, it seemed as though Simon Legree or the Slaver would enslave her body, or the Jesuit or the Panther would enslave her soul. And her mysterious Guardian seems always about to save her, but his every attempt to save her has such reverse and disastrous effects as to cast doubt on the honesty and sincerity of the Guardian.

A high point of the drama is the duel of the locomotives that takes place during a tempestuous night in the West Orange Shipping Yards. Again and again, Patience Palmer is all but trapped on railroad trestles by thundering locomotives driven by her adversaries (the West Orange Switching Yards seem to consist almost entirely of very high railroad trestles). Patience finally gets control of a locomotive of her own on which to escape, but the locomotives of her enemies thunder at her from every direction so that she is able to switch out of their way only at the last brink of every moment.

The Embalmer attempts to stab her with his needleful of embalming fluid every time their locomotives pass each other with double thunder and only inches to spare. The Whip tries to lash her with his cruel lash with its poisoned tip; and the Slaver threatens her with the outreached forged certificate of color, and only by fantastic cringing can she cringe back far enough to keep from being touched by it as their locomotives roar past each other in opposite directions.

It seems impossible that the racing locomotives can come so close and not hit each other, with their dazzling switching from track to track. And then (Oh, God save us all!) the Panther (Is he a Man? Is he a Devil?) has leapt from his own locomotive to that of Patience Palmer: he is behind her on her own locomotive, and she does not see him. He comes closer —  But the climax of The Perils of Patience is not there in the West Orange Switching Yards. It is at a secret town and castle in the Barrens of New Jersey, a castle of evil repute. In this place the enemies of Patience were assembling a gang of beaters (slack-faced fellows with their tongues cut out), and they were readying bloodhounds to hunt Patience down to her death. She somehow obtains a large wagon piled high with hay and pulled by six large high-spirited horses. With this, she boldly drives, on a stormy night, into the secret town of her enemies and down that jagged road (there was a lightning storm going on that made everything seem jagged) at the end of which was the castle itself. The bloodhounds leap high at her as she passes, but they cannot pull her from the wagon.

But the Panther (Is he a Man? Is he a Beast?) has leapt onto her hay wagon behind her, and she does not see him. He comes close behind her —  But Patience Palmer is already making her move. Driving unswervingly, carrying out her own intrepid plan, at that very moment she raises a key in her hand very high into the air. This draws the lightning down with a stunning flash, and the hay wagon is set ablaze. Patience leaps clear of the flaming hay wagon at the last possible moment, and the blazing, hurtling inferno crashes into the tall and evil castle to set it and its outbuildings and its whole town ablaze.

This is the flaming climax to one of the greatest chase dramas ever.

This final scene of The Perils will be met with often later. Due to the character of the “slow light” or selenium scenes, this vivid scene leaks out of its own framework and is superimposed, sometimes faintly, sometimes powerfully, as a ghost scene on all twelve of the subsequent dramas.

2. Thirsty Daggers, a Murder Mystery. This is the second of the Aurelian Bentley television dramas of 1873. Clarinda Calliope, one of the most talented actresses of her time, played the part of Maud Trenchant, the Girl Detective. The actors Leslie Whitemansion, Kirbac Fouet, X. Paul McCoffin, Jaime del Diablo, Torres Malgre, Inspiro Spectralski, and Hubert Saint Nicholas played powerful and menacing roles, but their identities and purposes cannot be set exactly. One must enter into the bloody and thrilling spirit of the drama without knowing the details.

More even than The Perils of Patience does Thirsty Daggers seem to be freed from the bonds of time and sequence. It is all one unfolding moment, growing always in intensity and intricacy, but not following a straight line of action. And this, accompanied by a deficiency of the libretto, leads to confusion.

The libretto cannot be read. It is darkened and stained. Chemical analysis has revealed that it is stained with human blood. It is our belief that Bentley sent the librettos to his clients decorated with fresh human blood to set a mood. But time has spread the stains, and almost nothing can be read. This is, however, a highly interesting drama, the earliest murder ever done for television.

It is nearly certain that Maud Trenchant, the Girl Detective, overcomes all the menaces and solves all the crimes, but the finer details of this are lost forever.

3. The Great Bicycle Race, the third of the Bentley television dramas, has that versatile actress Clarinda Calliope playing the lead role of July Meadowbloom in this joyful and allegorical “journey into summertime”. It is in The Great Bicycle Race that sound makes its first appearance in the Bentley dramas. It is the sounds of all outdoors that are heard in this drama, faintly at first, and more and more as time goes on. These are country and village sounds; they are county-fair sounds. Though the sounds seem to be an accidental intrusion (another ghostly side-play of the selenium response magic), yet their quality lends belief to the evidence that the full and original title of this drama was The Great Bicycle Race, a Pastoral.

But there are other sounds, sometimes angry, sometimes imploring, sometimes arrogant and menacing — more about them in a bit.

Sheep and cattle sounds are all through the play; goat and horse and swine sounds; the rattle of ducks and geese; all the wonderful noises of the countryside. There are birds and grasshoppers, windmills and wagons, people calling and singing. There are the sounds of carnival barkers and the chants of gamblers and shills. There are the shrieks and giggles of young people.

And then there are those intrusive sounds of another sort, the separate overlay. These seem to be mostly indoor sounds, but sometimes they are outdoor grandstand sounds also, bristling talk in the reserved shadows of crowd noise and roaring.

“No, no, no. I'll not be had. What sort of a girl do you think I am?”

“All these things I will give you, Clarie. No one else would give you so much. No one else would ever care so much. But now is the time for it. Now is the summer of our lives. Now we cut hay.”

“Let's just see the price of a good hay barn first, Aurie. Let's just get some things down on paper right now. We are talking about a summertime check that is as big as all summer. And we are talking about a much larger settlement to back up the other seasons and years.”

“Don't you trust me, Clarie?”

“Of course I trust you, Bentley baby. I trust that you will get that trust fund that we are talking about down on paper today. I am a very trusting woman. I believe that we should have a trust fund to cover every condition and circumstance.”

Odd talk that, to be mixed in with the sound of The Great Bicycle Race.

The race was in conjunction with the Tri-county Fair, which counties were Camden, Gloucester, and Atlantic. The bicycle racers rode their twenty-mile course every afternoon for five afternoons, and careful time was kept. There was betting on each day's race, but there was bigger betting on the final winner with the lowest total time for the five days, and the kitty grew and grew. From the great fairground grandstand, one could see almost all of the twenty-mile course that the riders rode, or could follow it by the plumes of dust. The grandstand was on high ground and the whole countryside was spread out before it. Cattle and mules were paraded and judged in front of that grandstand, before and during and after that daily race; then the race (for the approximate hour that it took to run it) was the big thing. There were seven drivers in the race, and all of them were world famous:

Leslie Whitemansion drove on a Von Sauerbronn “Special” of fine German craftsmanship. This machine, popularly known then as the “whizzer”, would get you there and it would bring you back. It was very roadworthy and surprisingly fast.

Kirbac Fouet was on an Ernest Michaux Magicien, a splendid machine. It had a socket into which a small sail might be fitted to give greater speed on a favorable wind.

X. Paul McCoffin was on a British Royal Velocipede. There are two things that may be remarked about the British Royal: it had solid rubber tires (the first rubber-tired bicycle ever), and it had class. It had that cluttered austerity of line that only the best of British products have.

Jaime del Diablo was on a Pierre Lallement “Boneshaker” with its iron-tired wooden wheels, the front one much larger than the rear.

Torres Malgre was on an American-built Richard Warren Sears Roadrunner, the first all-iron machine. “The only wood is in the heads of its detractors” was an advertising slogan used for the Roadrunner.

Inspiro Spectralski (Is he a Man? Is he a Cannon Ball?) was riding a McCracken's Comet. This Comet had won races at several other county fairs around the state.

Hubert Saint Nicholas had a machine such as no one in the state had ever seen before. It was a French bicyclette named the Supreme. The bicyclette had the pedals fixed to drive the back wheel by the ingenious use of a chain and sprocket wheel, and so was not, strictly speaking, a bicycle at all. The true bicycles of the other six racers had the pedals attached directly to the front wheels. There was one syndicate of bettors who said the bicyclette had a mechanical advantage, and that Hubert would win on it. But other persons made jokes about this rig whose back wheel would arrive before its front wheel and whose driver would not arrive before the next day.

It was on these great riders that all the six-shot gamblers around were wagering breathtaking sums. It was for them that sports came from as far away as New York City.

Clarinda Calliope played the role of Gloria Goldenfield, the beauty queen of the Tri-county Fair in this drama. But she also played the role of the “Masked Alternate Rider Number Seven”. (All the racing riders had their alternates to ride in their places in case of emergency.) And Clarinda also played a third role, that of Rakesly Rivertown, the splurging gambler. Who would ever guess that the raffish Rakesly was being played by a woman? The author and director of The Great Bicycle Race did not know anything about Clarinda playing these latter two roles.

The grandstand, the bandstand, the pleasures of a country carnival in the summertime! And the “slow smells” of the selenium-directed matrix just becoming ripe and evocative now! Smell of sweet clover and timothy hay, or hot horses pulling buggies or working in the fields, smells of candy and sausage and summer squash at the eating places at the fair, smells of dusty roads and of green money being counted out and thumped down on betting tables for the bicycle race! And then again there was the override of intrusive voices breaking in on the real summer drama just by accident.

“Clarie, I will do handsomely by you in just a day or so. I have placed very, very heavy bets on the bicycle race, and I will win. I am betting against the wildest gambler in this part of the country, Rakesly Rivertown, and we will have the bet up to a cool million with one more raise. He is betting the field against number seven. And number seven will win.”

“I have heard that this Rakesly Rivertown is about the sharpest gambler anywhere, and that he has a fine figure and makes an extraordinary appearance.”

“A fine figure! Why, the fraud is shaped like a girl! Yes, he is a sharp gambler, but he doesn't understand mechanics. Number seven, the Supreme, has a rear-wheel drive with gear-ratio advantage. Hubert Saint Nicholas, who is riding number seven, is just toying with the other riders so far to get the bets higher, and he can win whenever he wants to. I will win a million dollars on the race, my love. And I will give it to you, if you act a little bit more like my love.”

“Surely your love for me should transcend any results of a bicycle race, Aurie. If you really loved me, and if you contemplated making such a gift to me, you would make it today. That would show that your appreciation and affection are above mere fortune. And, if you can't lose, as you say that you cannot, you will have your money in the same amount won back in two days time, and you will have made me happy two days longer.”

“All right, I guess so then, Clarie. Yes, I'll give it to you today. Right now. I'll write you a check right now.”

“Oh, you are a treasure, Aurie. You are a double treasure. You can't guess how double a treasure you are!”

The wonderful Tri-county Fair was near its end, and its Great Bicycle Race with it. It was the last day of the race. Hubert Saint Nicholas on number seven, the Supreme, the French bicyclette with the mechanical advantage, was leading the field by only one minute in total elapsed time going into that last day's racing. There were those who said that Hubert could win any time he wanted to, and that he stayed so close only to keep the bets a-growing.

And the bets did grow. The mysterious gambler with the fine figure and the extraordinary appearance, Rakesly Rivertown, was still betting the field to win against number seven. And a still more mysterious gambler, working through agents, was betting on number seven to place, but not to win. These latter bets were quickly covered. Number seven would win, unless some terrible calamity overtook that entry; and, in the case of such terrible calamity, number seven would not finish second, would not finish at all most likely.

The seven intrepid racers were off on their final, mad, twenty-mile circuit. Interest was high, especially with moneyed gamblers who followed the riders from the grandstand with their binoculars. At no place was the winding, circuit course more than four miles from the grandstand; and there were only three or four places, not more than three hundred yards in all, where the racers were out of sight of the higher tiers of the grandstand. One of those places was where Little Egg Creek went through Little Egg Meadow. Something mysterious happened near Little Egg Creek Crossing that neither the libretto nor the enacted drama itself makes clear.

Hubert Saint Nicholas, riding the French bicyclette, number seven, the Supreme, with the rear-wheel drive and the mechanical advantage, was unsaddled from his mount and knocked unconscious. The race master later and officially entered this incident as “A careless rider knocked off his bicycle by a tree branch,” though Hubert swore that there wasn't a tree branch within a hundred yards of that place.

“I was slugged by a lurker in the weeds,” Hubert said. “It was a criminal and fraudulent assault and I know who did it.” Then he cried, “Oh, the perfidy of women!” This latter seemed to be an unconnected outcry; perhaps Hubert had suffered a concussion.

Fortunately (for whom?) the alternate rider for number seven, the Mysterious (though duly certified) Masked Rider, was in the vicinity of the accident and took control of the bicyclette, the Supreme, and continued the race. But number seven, though having a one-minute lead ere the race began, did not win. Number seven did come in second though in total elapsed time.

The Great Bicycle Race is a quaint little drama, with not much plot, but with a pleasant and bucolic atmosphere that grows more pleasant every time the drama is played back. It is a thoroughly enjoyable “Journey into Summertime”.

And there were a few more seconds of those intrusive “ghost” voices breaking into the closing moments of the pastoral drama.

“Clarie, I have been took bad, for a big wad, and I don't know how it happened. There is something funny about it all. There was something funny and familiar about that Masked Alternate Rider for number seven. (I swear that I know him from somewhere!) And there has always been something double funny and familiar about that gambler Rakesly Rivertown. (I swear and be damned if I don't know him from somewhere!)”

“Don't worry about it, Aurie. You are so smart that you will have all that money made back in no time at all.”

“Yes, that's true, I will. But how can I write and produce and direct a drama and then get taken in it and not know what happened?”

“Don't worry about it, Aurie.”

I myself doubt very much whether Aurelian Bentley knew about the “slow sounds” from nowhere-town that sometimes broke into the playing of his dramas, much less the “slow smells” which now began to give the dramas a character all their own.

4. The Voyages of Captain Cook was the fourth of the Bentley-produced television dramas of the year 1873. In this, Clarinda Calliope played the role of Maria Masina, the Queen of Polynesia. If The Great Bicycle Race was a journey into summertime, The Voyages of Captain Cook was a journey into tropical paradise.

Hubert Saint Nicholas played Captain Cook. Inspiro Spectralski (Is he a Man? Is he a Fish?) played the Shark God. Leslie Whitemansion played the Missionary. X. Paul McCoffin played the Volcano God. Torres Malgre played the God of the Walking Dead. Jaime del Diablo played Kokomoko, the bronzed surf boy and lover boy who was always holding a huge red hibiscus bloom between his white teeth.

The people of the South Sea Islands of the Captain Cook drama were always eating possum and sweet potatoes and fried chicken (a misconception) and twanging on little banjoes (another misconception) and talking southern U.S. Darky Dialect (but these ghost voices were not intended to be heard on the television presentation).

The complete libretto for The Voyages of Captain Cook has survived, which makes us grateful for those that have not survived for several of the dramas. The story is replete. It is better to disregard the libretto with its simultaneous curses invoked by the Shark God, the Volcano God, and the God of the Walking Dead, and to give oneself over to the charm of the scenery, which is remarkable, considering that it was all “filmed”, or “selenium-matrixed”, in the salt swamps of New Jersey.

The anomalous intrusive voices are in this drama again, as they will be in all the subsequent dramas.

“A ‘South Sea Bubble’, yes, that's what I want, Aurie, one that can't burst. Use your imagination (you have so very much of it) and your finances (you have so very much of those) and come up with something that will delight me.”

“I swear to you, Clarie, as soon as my finances are in a little better order, I will buy any island or group of islands in the Pacific Ocean for you. Do you hear me, Clarie? I will give you any island or group you wish, Hawaii, Samoa, Fiji. Name it and it is yours.”

“So many things you promise! But you don't promise them on paper, only on air. Maybe I will find a way to make the air retain the promises you make.”

“Not on paper, not on air, Clarie, but in real life. I will make you the real and living Queen of Polynesia.”

The essence of the South Sea appeal is just plain charm. It may be that this Bentley drama, The Voyages of Captain Cook, was the original charm bush whence many things bloomed. No, in things of this sort, it is not necessary that a scion ever be in contact with its source or even know its source. Without the Voyages would there ever have been a Sadie Thompson, would there have been a Nellie Forbush? Would there have been a Nina, daughter of Almayer? Well, they wouldn't have been as they were if Clarinda Calliope hadn't, in a way, played them first. Would there have been a White Shadows of the South Seas if there hadn't first been The Voyages of Captain Cook? No, of course there wouldn't have been.

5. Crimean Days was the fifth of the Aurelian Bentley television dramas. In this, the multitalented Clarinda Calliope played the role of Florence Nightingale, of Ekmek Kaya, a Turkish lady of doubtful virtue who was the number-four wife and current favorite of the Turkish admiral, of Chiara Maldonado, a young lady camp follower with the army of Savoy, of Katya Petrova, who was a Russian princess as well as a triple spy, and of Claudette Boudin, a French lady journalist. Clarinda also masqueraded as Claudette's twin brother Claude, a colonel with the French forces, and as such she led the French to a surprising victory over the Russians at Eupatoria. The unmasqueraded Claude himself was played by Apollo Mont-de-Marsan, a young actor making his first appearance in the Bentley dramas.

The Crimean War was the last war in which the field officers of all sides (Leslie Whitemansion was a British field officer, Kirbac Fouet was a French, Jaime del Diablo was an officer of the forces of Savoy, Torres Malgre was the Turkish admiral, Inspiro Spectralski was a general of the Czar, X. Paul McCoffin was a special observer of the Pope), after their days of tactical maneuver and sometimes bloody conflict, would dress for dinner and have formal dinner together. And it was at these dinners that Clarinda Calliope, in her various guises, shone.

There was a wonderful and many-leveled table intrigue, and I believe that more and more of it will come through every time the drama is replayed. And it was here in this drama that one of the most strange of the Bentley-effect phenomena first appeared. There is unmistakable evidence that some of the subvocalizations (thoughts) of the people were now to be heard as “slow sound”, which was really selenium-triggered “slow thought”. Some of these manifestations were the role thoughts of the actors so strangely vocalized (Clarinda Calliope, for instance, could not speak or think in any tongues except English and her own Pennsylvania Dutch in normal circumstances: but in her triple spy roles we find her thinking out loud in Turkish and Greek and Russian); and other of the vocalizations are the real thoughts of the actors (the amazingly frank intentions of Leslie Whitemansion and of the new Apollo Mont-de-Marsan as to their lady loves of the evening after they should have received their two-dollar actors' fee for the day).

It was a wonderful play and too intricate to be described. This one, above all, has to be seen. But again there was the anomalous intrusion of voices that were not a part of the scenes of the play: “Get rid of that Greek Wop kid, Clarie. I told him he was fired, and he said that he would stick around and work for nothing. He said he loved the fringe benefits. What are fringe benefits? I told him I'd run him off, and he said that this was the free state of New Jersey and that no one would run him off. I won't have him around.”

“Oh, Aurie, there isn't any Greek Wop kid. That was me playing that role too. Am I not talented to play so many roles? And you will not fire me from this role. I will continue to play it, and I will be paid for it. It isn't the principle of the thing either: it's the two dollars.”

“Yes, I understand that much about you. But you say that was you playing the part of that smart-mouth Apollo Dago Greek? That couldn't be. I've seen you both at the same time. I've seen you two together too many times. I've seen you smooching each other.”

“Ah, Aurie, that was quite an advanced technique and illusion, not to mention double exposure, that I used there. What other actress could play both roles at once and get away with it?”

“Your techniques and illusions are becoming a little bit too advanced, Clarie. And do not be so sure that you are getting away with it.”

All through Crimean Days, there was some tampering with history going on for dramatic effect. The Light Brigade, for instance, was successful in its famous charge and it won a great victory. But the final outcome of the war was left in doubt. Aurelian Bentley had somehow become a strong partisan of the Russians and he refused to show them being finally defeated by the allies.

6. Ruddy Limbs and Flaming Hair is the sixth of the Bentley television dramas. In this piece, the dramatic Clarinda Calliope plays the part of Muothu, the Maid of Mars, for the Ruddy Limbs and Flaming Hair are on the planet itself. There are some fantastic elements in this piece, as well as amazing scientific accuracy. There is, in fact, a technical precocity that is really stunning. Aurelian Bentley has foreseen circumstances that even the scientific community did not then see, and he has dealt with those circumstances.

He posits, for instance, an atmosphere composed mostly of an enomagnetized, digammated, attenuated form of oxygen. Being eno-magnetized, that atmosphere would naturally cling to its planet even though the gravity would not be strong enough to retain it otherwise. Being digammated, it would produce no line in the Martian spectrum, would have no corona or optical distortion effect, and could in no way be detected from Earth. And yet a human Earthly would be able to breathe it freely.

This was a good-natured utopian drama of total realization and happiness. The Ruddy Limbs and Flaming Hair apply both allegorically to the planet Mars and literally to the highly dramatic Clarinda Calliope as Muothu. Muothu displayed rather more of the ruddy limbs than were ordinarily shown on Earth, but it was explained that customs on Mars were different.

Ruddy Limbs and Flaming Hair was the last of the dramas in which the apparently tormented and disturbed Aurelian Bentley still showed the strong hand of the master as scenarist, dramaturgist, director, and producer generally. After this we come to the four “Trough of the Wave” dramas, and then the three bewildering and hectic displays on the end of the series.

7. The Trenton Train Robbery is the seventh of the Bentley television dramas, and the first of the four “Trough” plays where Aurelian Bentley and his effects are sunken in the slough of despond and have lost their brightness and liveliness and hope. We will pass through them quickly.

In the Train Robbery, the peerless Clarinda Calliope plays Roxana Roundhouse, the daughter of the slain locomotive engineer Timothy (Trainman) Roundhouse. Armed with a repeating rifle, a repeating shotgun, a repeating pistol, and a few pocket-sized bombs, Roxana rides the rods of the crack Trenton Express in the effort to catch or kill the murderers of her father. These murderers have sworn that they will rob that very Trenton Express again.

And Roxana Roundhouse does catch or kill all the murderers of her father. In spite of some good shots of landscapes rushing by, this is not one of Aurelian Bentley's best efforts.

And again the voices of unknown persons creep into the drama: “You've already flayed me, Clarie, and scraped both sides of my pelt for whatever might cling to it. What more do you want from me? Go away with your lover and leave me alone.” And then in a fuzzier voice (apparently the “thought voice” made vocal) the same person said or thought: “Oh, if only she would go away from me, then I might have a chance! For I will never be able to go away from her.”

“Grow more skin, Aurie,” the other voice said. “I'm not nearly finished fleecing you and flaying you. Oh, don't look so torn up, Aurie. You know I could never love anyone except you. But a little token of our love is required now and then, and especially now, today. Yes, I know you are going to use your old line, ‘I gave you a million dollars last week,’ but Aurie, that was last week. Yes, I know that you have expenses that the world wots not of. So do I. Believe me, Aurie, I wouldn't ask for these tokens of affection if I didn't want them.” And then in a fuzzier voice, a “thought voice”, the same person said or thought: “I'll never get another fish like this one and I sure can't afford to lose him. But gentle handling doesn't get it all the time. When the hook in him shows signs of working loose a bit, it has to be set in again with a very hard jerk on the line.”

8. Six Guns on the Border is the eighth of the Bentley television dramas. In this drama, Clarinda Calliope (is there no end to her versatility?) plays the part of Conchita Allegre, the half-breed Apache and Mexican girl, on the Arizona border during the Mexican War. Conchita hates the American soldiers who are invading that area. She has them come to her secretly, with promises of love, and then she has them ambushed and killed. She kills many of them herself with her own six gun, and she makes antimacassars out of their skins. The sort of gentlemen that Conchita really likes use a lot of oil on their hair so Conchita needs a lot of antimacassars at her house.

But there are a few of the American officers so awkward and oafish that Conchita simply can't stand to have much to do with them, not even long enough to seduce them and have them killed. These horrible specimens are:

Captain James Polk (played by Leslie Whitemansion).

General Zachary Taylor (played by Kirbac Fouet).

Captain Millard Fillmore (played by X. Paul McCoffin).

Captain Franklin Pierce (played by Jaime del Diablo).

Captain James Buchanan (played by Torres Malgre).

Captain Abraham Lincoln (played by Inspiro Spectralski).

Captain Andrew Johnson (played by Apollo Mont-de-Marsan).

Captain Sam Grant (played by Hubert Saint Nicholas).

There was a lot of historical irony in this play, but maybe it belonged somewhere else.

There was a lot of “Comedy of Manners” stuff in it but it falls a little flat, mostly because the eight oafish officers spared by Conchita were too unmannerly to be in a comedy of manners.

Aurelian Bentley came near the bottom of his form in this piece. But for the energy of Clarinda Calliope (she played five other parts besides that of Conchita) there would have been hardly any drama at all.

And, as always, there were those intrusive voices hovering over the playbacks.

“Clarie, believe me! Believe me! Believe me! I will do all these things for you. I promise it.”

“Yes, you promise it to the earless walls and to the earless me. Promise it to the pen and ink and paper here.”

“Get rid of that Apollo kid first, Clarie.”

“You get rid of him. You have a lot of rough-looking men around.”

9. Clarence Greenback, Confidence Man was the ninth of the Aurelian Bentley television dramas. Hubert Saint Nicholas played the role of Clarence Greenback, the casino owner. It was the first time that Clarinda Calliope had not played the lead role in a drama. Is it possible that Clarinda had somehow slipped? Or was this another instance of the left lobe of Aurelian Bentley having lost its cunning, and casting badly. The talented prestidigitator of drama did not have his sure touch nowadays. Oh sure, Clarinda played other roles in the drama, but she did not have the lead role.

Clarinda played the role of Gretchen, the sweep-out girl at the casino. She played the role of Maria, the mounting-block girl in the street outside the casino. She played the role of Elsie, the chimney-sweep girl. She played the part of Hennchen, the scullery maid in the third and vilest kitchen of the casino. She played the part of Josephine, the retriever who had to gather up the shattered bodies of the suicides below Suicide Leap Window of the casino and take them to East Potters' Field and dig their graves and bury them. Elsie made a good thing out of her job, from the gold teeth of the late patrons of the casino, but the dramatist and producer did not know about the good thing she had there.

There were hazards in all these different roles.

“No, of course we can't put out the fires for you to clean the chimneys,” said Leslie Whitemansion, who was in charge of fireplaces and chimneys at the casino. “Clean them hot.” And it was very hot working inside those tall chimneys with the fires roaring below, and Elsie the chimney-sweep girl suffered.

For keeping a copper coin that she found while sweeping out the casino, the sadist Baron von Steichen (played by X. Paul McCoffin) had Gretchen hung up by her thumbs and flogged.

And Maria, the mounting-block girl, who had to stand in the muddy street outside the casino and bend her back for the gentlemen to step on her when they mounted or dismounted their horses, she had it worse on the muddy days. Oh, the great muddy boots of those men! “Maybe they're trying to tell me something,” Clarinda Calliope spoke or thought (by slow talk-thought). “I do like subtle people.” But a good actress can play any role, and Clarinda has her revenge today. Hardly anyone remembers the plot for Clarence Greenback, Confidence Man, but everyone remembers the tribulations of those pretty little servant girls.

And then there were those other intrusive voices of the overlay. It was almost as if they belonged in another sort of drama.

“Clarie, this has to stop. Not counting the special gifts, and they're fantastic, I'm giving you ten times as much as the President of the United States is making.”

“I'm ten times as good at acting as he is. And how about my special gifts? — and they're fantastic. Why do you have all the private detectives running around the last couple of days? To spy on me?”

“To spy on everything and everyone. To save my life. Frankly, Clarie, I am afraid of being murdered. I have premonitions of being killed, with a knife, always with a knife.”

“Like in Thirsty Daggers, a Murder Mystery? That one wasn't really very well worked out, and I believe it's one of the things bothering you. Your undermind is looking for a better solution, I believe, for a neater murder. It is seeking to enact a more artistic murder. I believe it will do it. I believe you will come up with quite an artistic murder for yourself. There are good murders and bad murders, you see.”

“Clarie, I don't intend to let myself be killed at all, not by either a good or a bad murder.”

“Not even for art's sake? It seems it would be worth it, for the perfect murder, Aurie.”

“Not when I'm the murdered one, Clarie.”

Then, a moment later, the female person said or thought something further, in a “slow thought-voice”.

“Sometimes persons have perfection thrust upon them in spite of themselves. An artful murder for Aurie would make up for a lot of the mad art that he's been guilty of lately.”

10. The Vampires of Varuma was the tenth of the Aurelian Bentley television dramas. This is the fourth and last of the “Trough of the Wave” dramas, which show Bentley's dramatic powers in almost complete decline and himself mightily disoriented. Yet, in this bottoming-out, there is a curious resurrection of his powers in a slightly different form. His sense of plotting and story movement did not return yet, but his sense of dramatic horror as motive force was resurrected to its highest pitch.

Clarinda Calliope played Magda the peasant maid, Miss Cheryl Somerset, the governess from England, and the Princess Irene of Transylvania. All three of these had been traveling to Castle Khubav on rational errands by the regular coach of the road; and each of the three had seen all the other passengers dismount hastily, and had then experienced the coach horses being whipped ahead frantically by an invisible coachman, or by no coachman at all. And each of these ladies had arrived, on successive days, in the apparently driverless coach, not at Castle Khubav, but at the dread Castle Beden. And inside the Castle Beden were the seven (“no, not seven, eight” was written into the libretto in a weirdly different hand) insane counts in their castle of evil. These were:

Count Vladimel, played by Leslie Whitemansion.

Count Igork, played by Kirbac Fouet.

Count Lascar, played by X. Paul McCoffin.

Count Chort, played by Jaime del Diablo.

Count Sangressuga, played by Torres Malgre.

Count Letuchaya, played by Inspiro Spectralski (Is he a Man? Is he a Bat?)

Count Ulv, played by Hubert Saint Nicholas.

And then there is another one added in the libretto in that weirdly different hand: Count Prividenne, played by Apollo Mont-de-Marsan.

There is a slip-up here somewhere. Apollo is supposed to have been “gotten rid of ”, to have shuffled off the mortal coil, and the sheriff 's report said that he died of indigestion. But if Apollo has not been “gotten rid of ” then certainly money was paid in vain.

The seven (or eight) evil counts are sometimes conventional counts in evening clothes and monocles. And sometimes they are huge bat-winged creatures flitting ponderously down the lightning-lit corridors of Castle Beden. The castle, in fact, is the main character in the drama. It does not have formal lighting, as it is lit by lightning all twenty-four hours of every night (there is no daylight at Castle Beden). The floors and walls howl and chains rattle constantly. The counts have sometimes conventional six-inch-long eyeteeth, and then suddenly they will have hollow fangs eighteen inches long and deadly. And there is a constant lot of howling and screaming for what is supposed to be a silent television drama.

A flying count will suddenly fold his bat wings and land on the broad bosom of one of the three maidens and have into her throat with his terrible blood-sucking fangs. And every time it happens, there is a horrible flopping and screeching.

The voice of Clarinda Calliope is heard loud and clear and real in a slow angry sound.

“Dammit, Aurelian, that's real blood they're taking out of my throat.”

And came the suave voice of the master dramatist Aurelian Bentley (but the voices shouldn't be breaking in like this): “Right, Clarie. It is on such verisimilitude that I have built my reputation as a master.”

Clarinda, in her three roles, seemed to lose quite a bit of blood as the drama went on, and she fell down more and more often. And the drama was a howling and bloody success, no matter that the storyline was shattered in a thousand pieces — for each piece of it was like a writhing blood snake that gluts and gloats.

And then, after the drama itself was ended in a spate of final blood, there came those intrusive voices that seemed to be out of some private drama.

“Aurie, if you are worrying about being killed, how about providing for me before it happens?”

“I leave you half of my kingdom, ah, estate, Clarie, right off the top of it. My word is good for this. And stop falling down.”

“I'm weak. It took a lot out of me. Yes, your written word is good on this, Aurie, if it is written and attested to in all the right places. Let's take care of that little detail right now.”

“Clarie, my spoken promise is enough, and it is all that I will give. I hereby attest that half of my estate, off the top, belongs to you. Let the eared walls of this room be witnesses to what I say, Clarie. If the walls of this room will swear to it, then surely they will be believed. Now don't bother me for a few days. I will be busy with something else. And stop falling down. It's annoying.”

The female person then said or thought something in a fuzzy thought-voice: “Yes, I believe I can make the walls of this room attest for me when the time comes. (I might have to put in another amplifying circuit to be sure.) And I believe that the attesting walls will be believed.”

The male person then said or thought something in a fuzzy thought-voice: “I have Miss Adeline Addams now. Why should I care about this Calliope clown? It's irritating the way she keeps turning chalk-white and falling down. I never saw anyone make such a fuss over nine quarts of blood. But now I am on a new and more glorious dawn road. Is it not peculiar how a man will fall in love with one woman and out of love with another one at the same time?”

11. The Ghost at the Opera is the eleventh of the Aurelian Bentley television dramas in the year 1873. The Ghost is based on Verdi's Il Trovatore, but Bentley's production is quite original for all that. The role of Leonora is played by Miss Adeline Addams. But the same role is also played by Clarinda Calliope, who was originally selected to play the role by herself. This business of having two different persons playing the same role creates a certain duality, one might almost say a certain duplicity, in the drama.

The “Ghost” is the doubling: it is the inept and stumbling Clarinda trying again and again to sing parts of the Leonora role and failing in it totally and being jerked off stage by the stage manager's crook; and it is the beautiful and brimming genius Adeline Addams coming on and performing the same role brilliantly. This provides the “cruel comedy” that is usually lacking in Verdi; for, without cruelty, only a limited success is ever possible in opera. But Clarinda took some very bad falls from the stageman's crook jerking her off her feet, and besides she was still weak and falling down from all the blood she had lost in her roles in The Vampires of Varuma. She was suffering.

“Why do you go through with it, Clarinda?” Hubert Saint Nicholas asked her once in an outside-of-the-play-itself voice. “Why do you allow yourself to be tortured and humiliated like that?”

“Only for the money,” Clarinda was heard to say. “Only for the actor's fee of four dollars a day. I am clear broke and I am hungry. But if I can stick it out to the end of the opera, I will have four dollars tonight for my wages.”

“Four dollars, Clarinda? The rest of us get only two dollars a day. Are you playing another role that I don't know about?”

“Yes, I am also playing the role of Wilhelmina, the outhouse cleaner.”

“But I thought that you had millions from that old tyrant, Clarinda.”

“It's gone, Hubie, all gone. I had expenses that the world wotted not of. I gave Apollo most of the money when I was in love with him. And I gave the rest of it to him today to do a special favor for me.”

“You gave the money to him today? But he was buried yesterday.”

“Time seems to go faster as we get older, doesn't it?”

Meanwhile, back on the opera stage, a new Verdi was being hammered out. Leslie Whitemansion was playing Manrico. X. Paul McCoffin was playing Ferrando. Hubert Saint Nicholas was playing Count di Luni. Apollo Mont-de-Marsan was playing the ghost. But was there a ghost in the libretto besides the double ghost of the two females playing the same role? Yes, there was; there was a real ghost in the libretto. It was written in there in a queer “other” hand, really a “ghostly” hand, and it wrote that Apollo was playing the role of the ghost.

So the merry comic opera went along almost to its end. It was just when Manrico was being led to the executioner's block and the evil Count di Luni was gloating in triumph, when everything was finally being shaped up in that drama that had some pleasure for everybody, that a horrible thing happened in one of the loges or boxes that overhung the stage.

Aurelian Bentley was knifed there in his box at the opera. Oh God, this was murder! “Your mind is looking for a better solution, I believe, for a neater murder.” Oh, that had been the voice of another sort of ghost. But now, to be slain by the ghost of a man dead only a day or two, and in the presence of several thousands of persons here! (For it was, possibly, none other than Apollo Mont-de-Marsan, who had been “gotten rid of ”, who was getting rid of Aurelian Bentley.) And again: “There are good murders and bad murders, you see… It seems it would be worth it, for art's sake, for the perfect murder.” Aurelian Bentley was stabbed to death in his box at the opera there, but even he had to admit, with some appreciation, as he went, that it was done with art.

And immediately, as the opera on stage came to its great conclusion, there welled up cries of “Author, Author, Bentley, Bentley!”

Then the dying (or more likely dead) man rose for the last time, bowed formally, and tumbled out of his box and onto his face on the stage, stark dead, and with the thirsty (now slaked) dagger twinkling between the blades of his shoulders.

What other man had ever made such an exit from or on life's stage! That was Theater! That was Drama!

12. An Evening in Newport was intended to be the twelfth of the Bentley television dramas. But it was never produced; possibly because of the death of its producer. It exists only as a libretto.

There was a high society “drama of manners”, as Miss Adeline Addams knew it, as Aurelian Bentley with his quick mind and quick mimicry knew it from his brief brushes with it. But does not a drama or comedy of manners depend largely on the quip and the arch aphorism? How could it be done in silent presentation?

By art, that's how it might be done: by the perfect art of the silent mimes, and Aurelian Bentley was master of that art. By the gestures, by the facial implications, by great silent acting this might be done. Was there any devastating riposte that she could not give with her autocratic hands? It was never tested, but Aurelian believed that she was pretty good.

On the lower level, An Evening in Newport was a one-sided duel between Mistress Adeline Addams of Newport, playing the role of Mistress Adela Adams of Newport, and Clarinda Calliope, playing the role of Rosaleen O'Keene, a low, vicious, ignorant, filthy, bad-mannered, fifth parlor maid newly arrived from Ireland. It was a stacked set in favor of Adeline/Adela.

On the higher level, the drama was the passionate portrayal of the total love of a beautiful and wealthy and intelligent and charming and aristocratic young lady (Adeline-Adela) for a man of surpassing genius and ineffable charm, a man of poise and power and heroic gifts, a man the like of whom will hardly appear once in a century. The drama was supposed to take on a note of hushed wonder whenever this man was mentioned, or so the libretto said. The libretto does not identify this exceptional man, but our own opinion is that the librettist, Aurelian Bentley, intended this hardly-once-in-a-century man, the object of the torrid and devoted love of Miss Adeline Addams, to be himself, Aurelian Bentley.

But An Evening in Newport, intended to be the surpassing climax of that first and still unsurpassed television series, was never produced.

13. Pettifoggers of Philadelphia is the noncanonical, apocryphal, thirteenth apocalypse of The Wonderful World of Aurelian Bentley, that first and greatest television series. There is no libretto to it. There is no formal production, and it does not carry the Bentley “Seal of Production”. But it does repose in one of the old television receivers, the one that was Aurelian's own control receiver, the one that was in Aurelian's own luxurious den where he spent so many hectic hours with Clarinda Calliope and later with Adeline Addams. It reposes there, and it may be seen and heard there.

Though Bentley was already dead when these scenes were ordered and live-presented, yet he walks in them and talks in them. The experience of hearing the thoughts and words of a hovering dead man spoken out loud and of seeing him as if in the flesh is a shattering but dramatic one.

The setting and sole scene of Pettifoggers of Philadelphia is that same luxurious den of Aurelian Bentley's, first placed under court seal, but then opened for a meeting which, as one of the parties to it stated, could not validly be held anywhere else. A probate judge was present, and pettifoggers representing several of the parties, and two of the parties themselves. It was a hearing on the disposition of the estate of Aurelian Bentley, of what might be left of that estate, he having died without having made a will. But one of the parties, Clarinda Calliope, insisted that Bentley had made a will, that the will was in this particular room and no other, that the will in fact was this room and the eared and tongued walls of it.

There seemed to be several meetings in this room superimposed on one another, and they cannot be sorted out. To sort them out would have been to destroy their effect, however, for they achieved syntheses of their several aspects and became the true meeting that never really took place but which contained all the other meetings in one theatrical unity.

The pettifogger of a second cousin once removed was there to present the claim of that distant person, as next in kin, to the estate of Aurelian Bentley.

The pettifogger of Adeline Addams of Newport was there to present the claim of Adeline to the estate, claims based on an irrefutable promise. This irrefutable promise was the marriage license for Aurelian Bentley and Adeline Addams. It was not signed or witnessed, of course. The marriage, the pettifogger said, had been scheduled to take place on a certain night after the presentation of an opera, that was contained in a television drama, that was contained in a riddle. But Aurelian Bentley had been killed during that opera, which voided the prospect of marriage, but he did not void the promise.

There were pettifoggers there for the different creditors. And all the pettifoggers were from Philadelphia.

And there was Clarinda Calliope representing herself (as Portia, she insisted, and not as a pettifogger), and she claimed rights by a promise too big and too intricate to be put on paper.

There was the probate judge of the private hearing who ambled around the luxurious den flipping a silver dollar in the air and humming the McGinty's Saloon Waltz.

“Oh, stop flipping that silly silver dollar and get on with the matter of the probate,” Miss Adeline Addams complained to that nitwit judge.

“The silver dollar is the matter of the probate,” the judge said. “The dollar is important. It is the soul and body of what this is all about.”

The piles of paper began to accumulate on the tables there. There were the documents and attestations of the distant next of kin, of Adeline Addams, and of the creditors in their severality. And not one scrap of paper did Clarinda Calliope put forward.

“Enough, enough,” said the judge after the flood of paper had narrowed down to a trickle. “Stop the paper,” but he didn't stop flipping that silver dollar or humming that McGinty's Saloon Waltz. “All a-sea that's going a-sea, Miss Calliope, it is time you laid a little evidence on the table if you are to be a party to these hearings.”

“My evidence is too large and too living to lay on the table,” Clarinda said. “But listen, and perhaps look. Due to the magic of the selenium ‘slow response’ principle, and to the walls of this very room being wired parallel to the receiver in this room, we may be able to bring to you a veritable reconstruction of past words and avowals and persons.”

And pretty soon the voice of the once-in-a-century man began, ghostly at first, and then gradually taking on flesh.

“Oh, Aurelian!” Adeline Addams squealed. “Where are you?”

“He is here present, in this room where he spent so many wonderful hours with me,” Clarinda said. “All right, Aurie baby, talk a little bit clearer and start materializing.”

“All these things I will give you, Clarie,” came the voice of Aurelian Bentley, and Bentley was there in shadow form of himself. “No one else would give you so much. No one else would ever care so much… trust me, Clarie.”

Aurelian Bentley was standing there solidly now. It was a three-dimensional projection or re-creation of him, coming into focus from all the eared and eyed and remembering walls of the room that was wired in parallel to the television receiver. Aurelian stood in the midst of them there in his own luxurious den.

“Clarie, I will do handsomely by you… a million dollars, my love, and I will give it to you.” Oh, these were startling and convincing words coming from the living ghost there! “I swear to you, Clarie… I will buy any island or group of islands in the Pacific Ocean for you… Hawaii, Samoa, Fiji. Name it and it's yours.”

What man ever made such tall promises and with such obvious sincerity?

“Not on paper, not on air, Clarie, but in real life. I will make you the real and living queen.”

If they will not listen to one risen from the dead, whom will they listen to?

“Clarie, believe me, believe me, believe me! I will do all things for you. I promise it.” How are you going to top something like that?

“I leave you… my kingdom, ah, estate, Clarie. My word is good for that.”

It was all in the bag, and the drawstring was being tightened on the bag.

“I hereby attest that… my estate… belongs to you. Let the eared walls of this room be witnesses to what I say, Clarie. If the walls of this room will swear to it, then surely they will be believed.”

The image of Aurelian Bentley disappeared, and his sound was extinguished with a sharp snipping sound. Adeline Addams was putting a scissors back into her handbag.

“I've meant to find out what that wire there was for several times,” she said. “That sort of shuts it all off when the wire is cut, doesn't it?”

“Here, here, you are guilty of destroying my evidence,” Clarinda Calliope said. “You can go to prison for that! You can burn in fire for that!”

A sudden flaming hay wagon with a wild woman driving it rushed into the room and seemed about to destroy everyone in the room. Everyone cringed from it except Clarinda and the probate judge. The flaming hay wagon did crash into all the people of the room, but it did them no damage. It was only a scene from one of the earlier plays. You didn't think that Clarinda had only one circuit in that room, did you? But several of the persons were shaken by the threat.

“Good show,” said the probate judge. “I guess it wins, what there is left to win.”

“No, no,” Adeline cried. “You can't give her the estate?”

“What's left of it, sure,” said the judge, still flipping the silver dollar.

“It isn't the principle either,” said Clarinda, “it's the dollar.” She plucked the silver dollar out of the air as the probate judge was still flipping it.

“This is the entire residue of the estate, isn't it?” she asked to be sure.

“Right, Calliope, right,” the judge said. “That's all that was left of it.”

He continued to flip an invisible coin into the air, and he whistled the last, sad bars of the McGinty's Saloon Waltz.

“Anybody know where a good actress can get a job?” Clarinda asked. “Going rates, two dollars a day per role.” She swept out of the room with head and spirits high. She was a consummate actress.

The other persons fade out into indistinct sounds and indistinct shadows on the old kerosene-powered television receiver.

The prospects of retrieval and revival of the first and greatest of all television series, The Wonderful World of Aurelian Bentley, recorded and produced in the year 1873, is in grave danger.

The only true and complete version of the series reposes in one single television receiver; Aurelian Bentley's own control receiver, the one that he kept in his own luxurious den where he spent so many happy hours with his ladies. The original librettos are stored in this set: they are, in fact, a part of this set and they may not, for inexplicable reasons, be removed to any great distance from it.

All the deep and ever-growing side talk, “slow talk”, is in this set (All the other sets are mute.) All the final drama Pettifoggers of Philadelphia is recorded on this set and is in none of the others. There is a whole golden era of television recorded in this set. I bought this old kerosene-burning treasure from its last owner (he did not know what it was: I told him that it was a chestnut roaster) for eighteen dollars. Now, by a vexing coincidence, this last owner has inherited forty acres of land with a fine stand of chestnut trees, and he wants the chestnut roaster back. And he has the law on his side.

I bought it from him, and I paid him for it, of course. But the check I gave him for it was hotter than a selenium rectifier on a shorted circuit. I have to make up the eighteen dollars or lose the receiver and its stored wealth.

I have raised thirteen dollars and fifty cents from three friends and one enemy. I still need four dollars and a half. Oh wait, wait, here is ninety-eight cents in pennies brought in by the “Children for the Wonderful World of Aurelian Bentley Preservation Fund”. I still need three dollars and fifty-two cents. Anyone wishing to contribute to this fund had best do so quickly before this golden era of television is lost forever. Due to the fussiness of the government, contributions are not tax-deductible.

It is worth preserving as a remnant of that early era when there were giants on the earth. And, if it is preserved, someday someone will gaze into the old kerosene-powered receiver and cry out in astonishment in the words of the Greatest Bard:

“ — what poet-race shot such Cyclopean arches at the stars?”

The Funny Face Murders

1

Judy Kingfixit filled a large paper sack with bundles of paper money and went down to Broken Bench Lane on the outskirts of T Town. She had a need to see whatever new face the Lane presented this morning.

“What we do on Broken Bench is look at the world and reality out of new faces,” Judy's husband Harry often said, “and that's another name for the Science of Invention. And we who invent, we see the world as wearing a new face every morning.”

“I will have to find Harry,” Judy told herself. “He cannot get along without me, and he will have to be on Broken Bench Lane. That's the only place he knows to go. He isn't much fun, but he's habit-forming and I live by habits now. I wasn't paying attention when he said what he was on to this time, but he's got to be down here. Now there's an idea! I'll try it.”

There was a sign on a booth there that read Trouble-Dissolver Ten Cents a Large Glass. Judy got a large glass of it and drank it off quickly.

Two adventurous boys were coming to the Lane at the same early morning moment. They were coming at it from the woods to take it unaware, to ambush it and to be ambushed by it. To be an adventurous boy in the very early morning is even better than to be Judy Kingfixit with a large sack full of money. It was very much as though the boys came on a raft from those flowing woods. It was really a Big Star Weed Rider that they came on. But it is Judy on scene yet.

“This leaves me at loose ends,” Judy said when she had drunk off the Trouble-Dissolver. “I hadn't expected it to work so quickly. My troubles are all dissolved and I become a balloon without ballast.”

“It takes a little time,” said the proprietor of the place with a happy leer. “But now that I am used of it this way, I wouldn't go back to having troubles again for anything.”

Judy hadn't a whole lot of respect for Broken Bench Lane.

“I have an uncle just like this alley,” she said out loud. “Disreputable, that's what they both are.”

She really hadn't a whole lot of money that she could afford to waste here; but there was an attraction (besides trying to find her husband Harry Kingfixit who was usually somewhere on the Lane), there was a seeking and a shabby interest that got hold of her sometimes and drew her down to the Lane. Sometimes? It drew her down there just about every morning, just as soon as the morning began.

At just this time there was a terrific crash involving that least dependable of all aircraft, the Big Star Weed Rider, and two boys, Roy Mega and Austro. The fact that they were traveling very low, about six inches above grass-top, probably saved their lives and got them off with nothing more than grass bums. But the crash was damaging to their reputations as aircraft designers. You can't have something go wrong with the design of your ailerons and still keep a sound reputation on Broken Bench Lane.

Broken Bench Lane, that bright ribbon in a sea of green, was particularly verdant because of the great quantities of Great Heart Discovery grass that grew so thickly in the whole region that the Lane traversed. The grass was the discovery of Great Heart Harkte who had been an inventive man of several generations earlier. He had invented a sod buster plough superior to every other one. He had invented a pokeweed harvester and a coon skinner. He had grown the first puffed wheat and the first Golden Day sand plums. And he invented Great Heart Discovery grass that did not thrive well until after Great Heart Harkte himself was dead and buried. Then it grew richly, with every primordial root of it coming out of Harkte's buried heart, and it covered a region of several miles. Wherever it grew, there was inventiveness supreme; and Broken Bench Lane had the lushest Discovery grass of the whole region.

Where else but on the Lane was there such a merry, early morning chirping going on at every hour of the day and night? The barkers and cardinals and meadow larks all seemed to sing together:

“Lookie, lookie, lookie! Invent now! Be a millionaire by noon!”

Broken Bench Lane was the gaudiest-appearing of all those little streets and ways that tumbled and twisted down the green slopes all the way from Standpipe Hill to the south edge of town till they disappeared in the verdant haze beyond which, in the misty distance, rose Beautiful Downtown Broken Arrow. There were not streets and arteries like these everywhere, not like this bunch: Jenks Road, Clown Alley, Harrow Street, Five Shill Road, Lollywaggers Left-Hand Lane, Speckled Fish Road, Leptophlebo Street, Trotting Snake Road, Broken Bench Lane! And the brightest jewel of them all was Broken Bench.

(Yes, Judy Kingfixit will be all right for a while. What can possibly go wrong with anyone who has had all her troubles dissolved and who is wandering around with a large sack full of large bundles of money?)

These streets are not necessarily located in the order here given. There are many other streets, better kept and broader, that intrude between these. Half of these arteries are not even proper streets in the sense of accepting vehicular traffic; they are mere pedestrian walks or paths or alleys. (Broken Bench was in between the categories in that it accepted vehicles, but for only one hour a day.)

Quentan Whitebird, in his monumental work Forgotten Lanes and Byways of Tulsa, refers to this cluster of little streets (plus four others, and with Lollywaggers unaccountably left out) as “dream streets.” Well, there is a green haze over all of them that is very like a summer afternoon sleep. Even in the brightness and hustle of some of them, there is always this noddiness or nappiness. And there is the frightening snapping-out of it also, and the raffish terror at realizing that one hasn't quite snapped out of the spell after all.

There was a graffito on a wall that read Who is False Face Flaherty? That was the beginning of a doubt.

“Oh, what is there so weird about Harry disappearing this time?” Judy Kingfixit moaned, “and what is there so weird about me myself? And how has False Face Flaherty come into the thing these last several days?” The Trouble-Dissolver would really dissolve all troubles, but if new and different troubles should arise, it would require another glass of the stuff to get rid of them.

Broken Bench was the brightest and most hustling of all those little roads. What factories and shops there were there! What venture-houses! What money-coining enterprises! What dreams that had taken flesh in solid crab-orchard stone with tomorrow-glass façades! There were bustling manufactories and tall financial empires and inventories (well, what do you call the studios where inventors work?) There was all the flowing lifeblood of newness. The Lane was so crammed with newness that those who visited it only once a day were always dumbfounded by the changes in it. Here were the waves of the future sold by the gallon or barrel or oceanful.

Be on time, read another graffito on another wall. The Murders Take Place This Morning at Nine O'Clock in Madame Gussaud's Wax Museum.

And here was something new! The Lane never disappointed. Judy Kingfixit was at a Mokka-Chokka stand where she was both attracted and repelled by the hot odour of something new.

“You look like a lady I know,” Edith Thornbush said, and she was a bit puzzled. “You have ankles and wrists kind of like hers. Her name is Judy Kingfixit.”

“And my name is Judy Kingfixit,” Judy said, “and it's no more than eight hours since we were together last. What's the matter with you anyhow, Edith?”

“If you are Judy,” Edith said, “and even if you aren't, it doesn't come well from you to ask anybody what's the matter with them. Just what has happened to you? Where did you get that face?”

“You are Judy Kingfixit, aren't you?” Ophelia Izobret asked in a pained way. “Didn't you happen to look in the mirror this morning?”

“No, the mirrors kept breaking,” Judy said. “I never did get a good look at me.”

“Well, sit down with us,” Ophelia said. “None of us is perfect this time of day, but you miss it farther than anyone I ever saw.”

“Thank you, Ophelia,” Judy said and she sat down with them all in a booth in the Mokka-Chokka stand. Cornelia Falselove was there also. “You have to be Judy,” this Cornelia said. “No one else would ever imitate Judy Kingfixit. Who'd want to?”

“Thank you, Cornelia,” Judy said. She bought and began to drink a cup of hot Mokka-Chokka, the first time in her life she had ever drunk it or heard of it.

There was a new graffito on the wall: False Face Flaherty is a Corporation Man.

Oh the drink was horrible! But, oh, it was sociable! Really, is there anything in the world so pleasant as to sit and drink hot Mokka-Chokka with friends?

“Oh yes, isn't it horrible!” Ophelia Izobret asked. “The inventor said that he worked for seven years to find something bad enough to be this good. But he had precedent to go by. When first introduced to the western world six hundred years ago, coffee was almost as horrible, so ancient writers have indicated. It was instantly terrible and it was an instant success. And it came with its own furniture, which we still have with us, up until this morning at least. With the coming of coffee, there was born in one blinding flash the coffee houses or cafés, the eating-out places of ever since then. There hadn't been any regular eating-out places before that, except in the Asian regions that already had coffee. Kitchens were changed, or real kitchens were born. They are all coffee kitchens now, or were up till this morning.

“Now there is Mokka-Chokka the totally new beverage, and it predicates totally new and different sorts of eating-out places and kitchens for the whole world. It is by such giant leaps or mutations that the world and its institutions change, but the changes are usually ascribed to lesser things.”

“Mokka-Chokka franchises and distributorships are going to sixteen figures,” Cornelia Falselove said, “and that's a lot of Mokka. I hope that my — what's his name anyhow? — George is able to get in on it. He's here somewhere on the Lane, if I can find him. I'd like to get in on it myself, but I could hardly raise an eight figure ante. And George, he couldn't even raise a one figure ante, but sometimes he thinks of something. Oh, there is so much that is new here this morning! Whenever I am about to give up I come here and find out just how stimulating things are. Say, are you sure that you're Judy Kingfixit? You are very funny-looking this morning, even for Judy.”

On the wall, a writing finger wrote Cornelia Falselove is a Corporation Woman and, having writ, passed on. But there is nothing like Mokka-Chokka to get the morning juices to surging through one.

“Invest in Broken Bench Lane!” a fuzzy-faced boy was calling. “Ten cents a front foot!”

They all had dimes out to make deals with him when they heard that. Land on Broken Bench Lane usually sold somewhere between two dollars and a thousand dollars a front foot: ten cents a front foot was fantastic.

“I want eight front feet,” Edith Thornbush cried out. “I'll set up my own little booth in the Lane, just eight feet wide.”

But the fuzzy-faced boy hadn't mentioned front feet of land. They were front feet of rabbits that he was selling for a dime each.

“Aw, Austro, that's cheating,” Judy Kingfixit said (the fuzzy-faced boy was Austro, that youthful genius of the Australopithecus race). “Give me two more though. Where do you get them?”

“I get them from the Sooner State Rabbit Fattery out on the Sand Springs Road,” Austro said. “They butcher a million fat rabbits a week there. They've always disposed of the left hind feet to Luck Charms Limited. And there is a very peculiar industrial application for the right hind feet only (I cannot tell you any more about that: I am besworn). But the front feet of the rabbits were always thrown away until I thought of this grift. Ahoy there, folks! Invest in Broken Bench Lane! Ten cents a front foot!”

Austro made several other sales to people who came into the Mokka-Chokka stand. This was extra income that would be needed to carry the Big Star Detective Agency over a slack period. Austro and his partner Roy Mega, a youthful genius of the Milesian race, had just moved their Big Star Detective Agency to Broken Bench Lane that morning. Barnaby Sheen had made the two young geniuses move their agency out of his electronics laboratory; but the new Broken Bench location was only a hundred feet from that hole-in-the-woods where the laboratory stood.

A hundred feet, but a million miles distant in spirit. For the magic of enterprise and invention was everywhere in the Lane.

“Where are all the funny-looking people coming from?” Ophelia Izobret asked them all. “Some of them look even funnier than Judy does today.”

“They get their faces at Funny Faces Incorporated, that little pill-pushing emporium over there,” Austro told the ladies. “It's one of the hottest enterprises thus far this morning.”

“Oh, do they glue the faces on to them?” Ophelia asked. “They look so natural for not, ah, looking natural at all. They fit so well that they must be glued on.”

“No, it's a lot more scientific than that,” Austro said. “Everything is very scientific now, especially on the Lane. That's why Roy and I have taken chambers here for contacts with our clients. The funny faces, they grow them on people with fast-acting pills. You pick out the face that you want to wear for a while, and False Face Flaherty who runs the pillory over there will engineer the pills to give you that face quick. He bought up all the assets and secrets of Instant Physiognomists and also those of the Pow Nose-Shrinker people. He has absorbed companies and he has absorbed people. He's put it together now with a line of the fastest-acting psychosomatic pills in the world. You pop them down, and your face begins to change within seconds. You will notice several people running around with faces like mine. They picked mine for a funny face apparently, I don't know why. But I can always tell the difference. I have a mark on me that none of them know about, and they haven't engineered a pill for it yet.”

“Is all that the truth, Austro?” Edith Thornbush asked.

“What is truth?” Austro inquired, and he used his owl face when he asked it.

“But how do they get rid of the funny faces when they're tired of them?” Ophelia Izobret wanted to know. “How do they ungrow them?”

“False Face Flaherty asks the customer how long he wants to wear a face, an hour, a day, a week,” Austro said. “Then he adjusts the pill (he says) to give that time effect. After that time, your own face will come back (he says), or an improved model if you wish. And there are no after-effects to the changes (he says). He lies though (everybody on the Lane lies till he gets a truth really rolling for him): none of the pills really has a time coefficient or a reversal effect. False Face doesn't know how long a funny face will remain. He never tried this line of pills before this morning, except on his wife accidentally last night, and the results aren't in yet.”

“Poor wife!” said Judy Kingfixit. “I don't believe that I quite like that False Face Flaherty. And I don't believe that I can quite stay away from him. That is the ambivalence of my life.”

“I think that I will get myself a false face to cheer me up,” Edith Thornbush said, “and I really don't care how long it sticks to me.” Edith left the Mokka-Chokka stand to go over to Funny Faces Incorporated.

“The implications of this are tremendous,” said Ophelia Izobret. “Consider only the criminal aspect of the funny face movement.”

“You are always so good at considering the criminal aspects, Ophelia,” Judy said.

Really, funny faces were big. Oh the inventiveness of the people on Broken Bench Lane!

“Good persons, here are business cards of our main business,” Austro said, and he passed the cards out to all the good persons who would accept them.

“Big Star Detective Agency,” the cards were printed. “Mega and Austro, scientists and artists in detection and improvisation. Interesting murders solicited. Tedious murders solved grudgingly. Skip tracing done. We locate anybody or anything. Husbands found cheap.”

“How cheap?” Judy Kingfixit asked Austro. “I wonder if you could find my husband. I wouldn't want him for more than four or five dollars worth, but I'd go that much.”

“Find mine too,” Ophelia Izobret said. “Complications, Austro? Oh, I'll pay for the complications also.”

“Find mine also,” said a funny-faced woman who just arrived there and who sounded like Edith Thornbush. “Oh, that was fast! How do I look? Yes, find mine, Austro.”

“Yes, I guess so. Me too,” said Cornelia Falselove.

“Remember also,” said Austro, “that the Big Star Detective Agency is not concerned entirely with crime detection. We also detect patterns and tendencies and unborn facts in the ethical and sociological and scientific fields. Folks, we're good.”

“But are your information and discoveries correct?” Judy asked.

“What is correct?” Austro asked, looking like an owl.

Three other Broken Bench widows, Hedwiga Pompey, Seraph Wideditch, and Lavinia Firstlight, gave Austro earnest money of one dollar each to find their husbands. The additional sums of three dollars and ninety-five cents each would be given on the actual uncovering or delivery of the husbands. This low price was extended to all of them except Ophelia Izobret. Ophelia had to pay one thousand dollars earnest money and gosh knows how much on final delivery (because of some complications in her case), but she paid the first payment cheerfully.

“Seven cases, carrock!” cried Austro with boyish satisfaction. “That's good. But they are all little husband-missing cases. Not an interesting murder among them. Not even a tedious murder so far. That's bad.”

“That's bad, yes, Austro,” said a half-familiar voice encased in a new funny face (apparently a man voice and a man funny face), “but you are wrong about there being no murder in the package. There will be a murder or several, and perhaps there has already been one. Whether it is an interesting murder or a tedious one will depend a little bit on the detective of record.”

“There will be a murder,” said Austro sombrely. “I will have to watch for that, and at the same time I will have to figure out where we went wrong with our ailerons this morning.” (The Big Star Weed Rider, that most esoteric of aircraft, had crashed that morning with Austro and Roy, due to faulty ailerons. Fortunately for them, the elevation was only six inches when they crashed.)

“Are you my husband?” Ophelia Izobret asked the mysterious funny-faced man who had spoken of murders.

“Madam, that is confidential information,” said the person, and he moved away and merged with other funny faces in the hustle of Broken Bench Lane.

“He looks a little bit like my husband with that not-quite-right face of his,” Ophelia said. “It's going to be hard to tell now. My husband always had a not-quite-right face too. What do you think of the ethics of wearing such a face, Austro?”

“What is right?” asked Austro looking like an owl. “What is not-quite-right? What, on the face of it, is a face?”

But this isn't getting us into the early-morning wonders of Broken Bench Lane. Listen, travelers and natives alike, no other street anywhere has such sheer inventiveness as Broken Bench.

Clay-Eaters Enterprises! Could there be a company of such a name on your own street? This business had opened just this morning, and it had never been known before.

Clay-Eating raised to an Art and a Science a banner on ClayEaters Building proclaimed. Gourmets' clay from Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, and our own Oklahoma a sign announced. You know what? Some of the clay smells from that place were authoritative and they were nosy. Judy Kingfixit went and bought a hundred dollars worth of stock in Clay-Eaters.

Get In On the Ground Floor of This, On the Clay-Dirt Ground Floor of It another sign said. Judy got a hank (a long handful) of good, yellow, country clay. It didn't taste very good but it had possibilities. There must be a lot of clay in the world, millions of tons of it. This looked like a famine-proof industry. How could one go wrong for only a hundred dollars on one of the most basic foods of them all? Clay is even mentioned in Scripture, earlier than any other food that you can think of. It is the real staff of life. Clay Makes the Man another sign there said. And it was easy to believe that this superior clay contained any number of rare earths.

Judy Kingfixit left them and went over to Funny Faces Incorporated. And False Face Flaherty who was the proprietor over there made more passes at her than a Vegas diceman.

“I love your face,” False Face said, and he kissed her. “Is it your own?”

“I'm not sure,” Judy said. “I thought you might know. I hadn't even known that I was wearing a funny face till my friends started to make remarks about it. I think now that my husband spiked my headache tonic last night before he skipped out. Are you my husband? He's an ambivalent man. Is your name as well as your face false?”

“Yes. But what did your husband spike your headache potion with? Is it possible that someone else knows my secret of physiognomenical freebooting?” False Face Flaherty asked. “No matter. He cannot be my equal. He surely does not have my unique talents. Oh my dear, I must have your funny face. It is a masterpiece. Is it a masterpiece that I did in a dream and then forgot about, or is it the work of a different master? It is primordial, it is prodigious! I will make copies of it for the rest of my life.”

“Your voice reminds me of someone I know, but I can't remember who,” Judy said. “And your hands remind me of someone I know. Oh yes, I'll buy a hundred dollars worth of your stock. Make it two hundred. Oh, False Face, you do something to me! But I have ramblings to ramble and people to find on the Lane.”

“My stock boy can handle things here at Funny Faces Incorporated for a while,” Flaherty said. “He's already wearing a Flaherty Special False Face, so he looks like me anyhow. We will ramble together, my dear.”

Hand in hand, Judy Kingfixit and False Face Flaherty rambled the Lane together. They were both buffs of these hasty businesses which required so much daring to launch and which, when once launched, were so much more likely to sink than to survive. They visited the Hot Sauerkraut Sandwich Drive-In. Hot sauerkraut sandwiches were something whose time had just arrived, and where should such a timely thing more likely show its head than on Broken Bench Lane?

They visited the Dog Dirt Gasoline Company with its compelling motto: “Our product alone contains volatile matter from high octane Great Danes.” Dog Dirt Gasoline would fill a need and remove a nuisance.

They visited the Old Original Flea Market, a hold-over from the day before when it had been named the New Original Flea Market. Judy Kingfixit bought one male flea and eight female fleas. She got the papers on them too.

“Hereafter they will have to give me the flea-breeders' discount on everything I buy there,” Judy told False Face, “regardless of whether it is related to flea-breeding. That is part of the Flea Marketers' Franchise Agreements, but they won't give it to you unless you insist on it.”

They went to Madame Gussaud's Wax Museum, still going hand-in-hand; but each of them seemed to be carrying something in the free hand now. The Wax Museum was a very contemporary place. Funny faces, appearing on human persons by the pillatory magic of False Face Flaherty no more than fifteen minutes before were now displayed on wax figures at Gussaud's, by the magic of scientific reproduction and copying and the use of the new telestencils.

Gussaud's was rather a fun place. Everyone who came in there received free a Dirky Dave Rubber Dagger. It was a souvenir of the museum, for Dirky Dave was one of the most popular of the wax pieces. All the pieces were very lifelike.

One of them moaned horribly now as if it were death stricken. The figure that moaned was wearing one of the new Hamlet Izobret funny faces, the face that was a little wrong for the real Hamlet face. How did they make the figure moan so lifelike (or so deathlike) as that?

Edith Thornbush was in Gussaud's. So was Ophelia Izobret and many other persons.

On display were the wax figures of all the T Town notables, past, present, and future, in living wax; but one had to look at their name plaques to be sure who they were. False faces were popping out on more and more of them, by the magic and science of Madame Gussaud perhaps, or by the magic and science of False Face Flaherty who had great influence on his surroundings this morning.

“Who is False Face Flaherty?” a wax raven croaked.

Oh, the same or another wax figure moaned horribly again, a death-struck moan!

There were the waxen images of all the great Evangelists of T Town, all the great Western Swing Kings, all the great Inventors. There were absolutely authentic reproductions of — 

 — but here there was a disturbance and interruption. There was another moan like a death râle from one of the wax figures, one of them with the not-quite-right Hamlet Izobret funny face. Then, moaning unnervingly once more, the figure fell heavily with that peculiar squashing thud that is given off only by a column of wax, or by a column of human flesh, when it falls.

“He is stabbed to death!” Judy Kingfixit cried in a sharp liquid voice. “There is a Dirky Dave dagger in him.”

“But it's only a rubber dagger, Judy,” False Face Flaherty laughed. “See the words on the handle of it as on all the rest of them: ‘Dirky Dave Rubber Dagger, Souvenir of Madame Gussaud's Wax Works.’ It must be some sort of joke about him being dead, if they use a rubber dagger.”

“The rubber is steel-hard now,” Judy said, “and steel-sharp,” (and various persons were beginning to cry out “Murder, Murder!”) “as a result, probably, of the all-pervading science of Broken Bench Lane. Who could have transmuted it so?”

“Oh, it was no great trick,” Flaherty said. “There's a hundred different inventors of us on the Lane who could have done that at a minute's notice, without props yet.”

“And the blood! Look at all the blood, Flaherty! Did you ever see so much blood come out of a wax man? Do you think that's wax blood or rubber blood, F. F.?”

(“Help! Help! Murder! Murder!” other people were calling.) “No, it's real,” Flaherty said. “Get the police, get an ambulance, get a doctor!”

“Get Austro. He's a detective now,” Judy said.

2

All those people were there quickly, the police, the ambulance people, the doctors, different laboratory crews, the detectives Roy Mega and Austro, a police detective named Otis Hardtack, honest citizens, and funny-faced rogues. They all milled around there, and they never did solve that murder.

“It's the funny faces that cloud the water,” said that police detective Otis Hardtack when he finally got his brains stretched around the fact that most of the people there were wearing false faces and that they were living and flesh faces that wouldn't come off easily. “This dead man looks like Hamlet Izobret the con-man and inventor whom we have up often. He looks a lot like him, but not quite enough like. Hamlet is a pest that we all know down at headquarters, for the crime-solving inventions that he brings in as well as the quasi-crimes and frauds that he commits. Being an almost-Hamlet, this dead person is not Hamlet Izobret. Hamlet already had the original Hamlet funny face, and it was as good and authentic as any original could be. The one this dead man is wearing is not very accurate. It just isn't good enough to be the original, so the dead man can be anyone except Hamlet. What's behind this funny false face caper anyhow?”

“What is ‘funny’?” asked Austro in his owlish way. “What is ‘false’?”

“What we do on Broken Bench Lane is look at the world and at reality out of new faces,” False Face Flaherty was saying with the air of one who had often said it before. “And looking out of new faces is another name for the science of invention. And we who invent, we see the world as wearing a new face every morning.”

“This man here, the dead man, told me that there would be a murder or murders,” Austro said. “I wondered then how he knew about it.”

“Are you sure it is the same man?” Otis Hardtack asked.

“What is ‘sure’?” Austro asked. “It was either this man, or one of those wax figures that were on each side of him when he fell. They have the same faces as he has, and they look as if they were ready to fall also. Why couldn't the man have told me who would do the killing and that it would be done to himself? He was thoughtless.”

“The one who did it took a little thought,” Otis said. “This rubber-turned-into-steel of the dagger won't take prints. I always hate trouble anywhere in this Lane. There are always freakish elements to it.”

There was a horrible wail as of a demented siren.

“The murderer is identified,” Austro said. “That is a new machine that my partner Roy Mega has perfected within the last five minutes. It will sniff out a recent murderer by the aura that he exudes, and it will not be silenced till he is apprehended.”

There was a second and a third siren wail that joined the first. And then a twelfth and thirteenth wail.

“The new machine is multi-voiced,” Austro said. “That is for just such contingencies as this. The murderer did not work alone. He was part of a conspiracy. I hope that your men are apprehending the murderers as the machine directs them, Detective Hardtack.”

“More likely they're trying to shut off that damned noise machine,” Hardtack growled. “Oh, how could anyone ever come up with noises like that?”

And now there were about twenty separate wails coming from the machine as it identified target after target.

“My partner, Roy Mega, set out to discover the most irritating noise in the world,” Austro said, “the noise that nobody could possibly ignore. We call it the murder-will-out noise, and that's it.”

“But, Austro, even you must realize that something has gone wrong with it,” Hardtack said. “It's howling for at least fifty separate targets now. There can't be that many people in on this murder. Even in Broken Bench Lane that isn't possible. Something's wrong!”

“Well, there was one slight thing he hadn't corrected yet. He decided, because of the immediacy of the murder, to go ahead and put the machine into action anyhow, is that not true, Roy? It seemed so unlikely that the case would arrive.”

“Uh, it's like the man who sold the horse to the other man,” said Roy Mega who had just returned to the wax museum after setting his machine into action. “ ‘I will acknowledge that the horse has one fault,’ the seller said. ‘He sits down on grapefruit. He cannot pass a grapefruit on the ground without sitting down on it, but otherwise he is an exemplary horse, and he is patient with children.’ ”

“So the man bought the horse and started to ride him home,” Austro said. “He went fine until the man rode him through a little creek, and the horse sat down in the middle of it and would not budge. Cudgels and calumnies would not move the beast, so the man walked back to the seller with his complaint.”

‘Oh hell, I forgot to tell you,’ the seller said, ‘he sits down on fish too,’ ” Roy Mega finished it off.

“So???” police detective Otis Hardtack intoned, and everyone listened silently. Even the howling murder detector was quiet now, having been incapacitated by men with hammers and wrecking bars.

“It's the same with my new machine,” Roy Mega said. “It howls when it comes on to a recent murder. It also howls (this is one of the quirks in it that I hadn't had time to take out yet) when it comes on anyone who had apple wine for breakfast. I didn't realize that there would be so many or even any of them.”

“It was likely those advertisements on the air last night,” detective Otis said. “ ‘Apple Wine, Apple Wine, Start Your Day with Apple Wine.’ A catchy tune and your loss. You have no idea what a sense of security you two boys give me. Police detectives sometimes are worried by their competition from outside the lines. That situation sure doesn't obtain here.”

There was a little slight-of-body business here. Laboratory men were working over that dead body in bunches, but the confusion could be channeled. The attention of all was called away several times. Hypnosis was used, and misdirection. Austro and Roy somehow got the dead body over to their Big Star Detective Agency, and the police finally loaded an unscathed wax figure with a similar funny face on to their morgue wagon and took it downtown with them.

Madame Gussaud was one of the few people who noticed that the switch had been made.

“But, in spite of it, I'm not short a wax figure,” she said. “I'm two wax figures over! It's those damned false faces that have been popping out on them. How is anyone to keep them straight?”

Several of the folks gathered in the Gift Shop, the Wax Museum in the wake of the murder having attracted a number of persons of the grosser sort.

“Do you have the Gift of Second Sight for sale?” False Face Flaherty asked the Gift Shop proprietor.

“Oh certainly,” the man said. “We have every sort of psychic and mental and personal gift for sale. We have the latest and most scientific things along the Lane. My own second sight tells me that you should have sought the gift of second sight yesterday and not today. My own uncanny-intuition gift tells me that you are in a jam. Sir, you are now in a room with only two doors leading out of it. The name of one of them is ‘Too Late’ and the name of the other one of them is ‘Never,’ but either of them is better than staying where you are. For five thousand dollars I can give you the gift of second sight. Just put your head into this helmet, bite down on the bullet of your selection, and remember that pain has no memory.”

“It's cheap enough, I suppose,” False Face said. He paid the five thousand dollars and put his head in the helmet. For the next few minutes he went through numerous contortions as though he were in extreme pain. Austro and Roy Mega and a few others went next door to the Air-Skate Rinkarama so as to miss the sufferings of False Face Flaherty.

“Item,” said Austro, as he watched the air-skaters skim along two inches above the top of the grass of the rink, “we have a dead man not yet identified by ourselves, though the police may have identified him by his prints. They don't tell us everything.”

“Item,” said Roy Mega, “over in the Wax Museum there are two dead wax figures that are similar in face to the dead man and are similarly stabbed with rubber daggers turned to steel. Those two are in addition to the unscathed wax figure that we substituted for the body. This business of three of the rubber daggers being transformed into steel is what puzzles me.”

“Oh, I've solved that part,” Austro said. “One in six of the latest bunch of Dirky Dave Rubber Daggers (apparently manufactured during the night just past) was made of steel and honed to an edge. This is something that even Madame Gussaud doesn't know. But the junior underground along the Lane has been putting out the word all morning that Dirky Dave Roulette is the new In game in the neighbourhood. So it would be easy for three different persons to select the heavier steel daggers out of the souvenir dagger baskets and then plunge them into the intended victim, and mistakenly into the two adjacent wax figures that were funny-faced exactly like the victim.”

“Dirky Dave Roulette sounds like a childish game,” Roy Mega said, “but I can see where it would be fun. ‘Stab your Bosom Buddy in the Bosom! One chance in six that you will kill him or wound him.’ Do you want to go by there and try it, Austro? We just reach in the basket blindly and take out the Dirky Dave Dagger that comes to our hand. And then we will have at it.”

“We will go by the Museum and maybe we will do it and maybe we won't,” said Austro.

And they didn't do it. They were diverted by crowds of scoff-laws, hitsters, and hooded-crows. They were buffeted by these hurrying persons in the Lane, and they forgot all about playing dagger roulette.

The newcomers were visitors, from Kansas City and Memphis and Dallas, of the wooly sort. They had apparently come to town on the mid-morning planes, and they had headed for the Lane at once. News that a new wrinkle might be found on the Lane had traveled fast. The scoff-laws wanted the funny faces that could be worn for either long or short times as ruddy and living flesh disguises. (“We get so damned tired of wearing those ski-masks when we make a hit,” one of them said.) They wanted whatever variety of funny-face pills might be had. They spotted False Face Flaherty instinctively as the Factor, in Faces. They dragged him out of the helmet in the gift shop and began to shove money at him. So False Face went back to his base at Funny Faces Incorporated to attend to business.

“We really don't know who False Face Flaherty is,” Austro remarked, “even though he seems to have a leading role on the Lane. It seems to everyone that he has been here for ever, but he had never been on the Lane as late as yesterday. There's almost too much of him for one person, and there's a lot of things missing from him that even the poorest person should have.”

“Who is Cornelia Falselove?” a wax raven in Gussaud's Wax Museum was heard to croak.

“The mistake we are making is in dealing with surface or apparent persons rather than with psychological persons,” Roy Mega said. “We might, for instance, inquire about the apparent person of False Face Flaherty: we would find, I suspect, that there is no such person at all. Ah, but let us examine the psychological persons that hover about this Flaherty, though not about him exclusively: the corporate Substrate Lord, the Shadow, the Anima, the Animus, the Ego, the No, the Hemeis; aye, and the Id. I believe that there is a corporate, but not a personal, personality behind those false faces of Flaherty.”

“I know a little bit about that corporate personality myself,” Austro said. “I have just obtained a copy of the Articles of Corporation of Funny Faces Incorporated. The articles state that False Face Flaherty is a corporate personality that may be inhabited by Harry Kingfixit or Edgar Thornbush or by Hamlet Izobret; it states that all three of these have equal rights to this personality, especially the rights of entering it and leaving it.”

“Well, I wonder which one of them is inside Flaherty at the moment?”

“Oh, I'm sure that it is Harry Kingfixit,” Austro said. “It could hardly be one of the others since Judy Kingfixit seems to have such a lively affection for it. It must be her husband Harry Kingfixit.”

“Hey boys,” said Cornelia Falselove as she came to them. “Those two dead wax figures that were on each side of the dead man back at the wax works, well, it turns out that they aren't dead wax figures at all. They are dead live human people is what they are.”

“Who knows about this?” Roy Mega asked in his conspiratorial voice.

“I do,” Cornelia said. “I have a sensitive nose and it says that they are people and that they are getting a little bit ripe already on this warm day.”

“Can you get the two figures for us without anyone catching on?” Roy said.

“Oh, I can buy them as wax figures I guess.”

“Do it. And bring them to the Big Star Detective Agency at its new location in its special Two-Guys-in-a-Garage Invention Kit and Utility Building.”

“All right,” said Cornelia Falselove who was an agreeable woman also. She went to buy the two figures who were actually dead human persons according to herself.

“Who is this Cornelia Falselove?” Roy Mega asked.

“What is ‘is’?” asked Austro looking like an owl.

Roy Mega and Austro went to their Two-Guys-in-a-Garage Invention Kit. All that morning they had been fooling around with that kit that was both a building and a business, and they hadn't been able to put it together yet. This was strange, because they were the ones who had invented the Invention Kit. But it did take a lot of invention and genius to put one of those things together. Now, about those Two-Guys-in-a-Garage Invention Kits:

T Town Oklahoma had always been an inventive place beyond all others, and Broken Bench Lane had always been the heart of that inventiveness. The Two-Guys-in-a-Garage syndrome was the most common form of T Town inventive enterprises. It was the companies and factories started by Two-Guys-in-a-Garage that had kept T Town afloat and thriving when big oil companies and big aircraft factories and mobile home factories moved away or closed down. You get a couple thousand of those Two-Guys-in-a-Garage going and you have burgeoning diversification. And pretty soon some of those companies will have grown to a thousand guys in a garage. But the accommodations of the TGIAG syndrome had been left to find their own blind ways until just two days before this.

Then two boys, or under-aged young men, Roy Mega and Austro, had begun to market prefabricated module kits to house and equip Two-Guys-in-a-Garage set-ups.

They procured a quantity of odd-shaped and odd-length boards from the Elite Lumber-Rippers and Board and Price Cutters Company that was near by.

They procured a quantity of imperfect building blocks from the Honest Goof Concrete and Select Seconds Building Stone Sales Company that was also near by and was run by Honest Goof Gomez. They procured small kegs of mixed nails, bolts, screws, turnbuckles, and odd angle iron fittings from Junky Joe's. They got mounds of old automobile accessories that one could spread around and make it look as though this had been a garage indeed.

They fixed up, in an imposing envelope, assembly instructions that read in full: if you are real inventors, you will find a way to make a building and a business out of this kit. if you are not real inventors, then you shouldn't have bought an Invention Kit in the first place. it's lucky you find out now that you don't have what it takes.

With each of their kits they included another envelope titled Three Red Hot Inventions Just Waiting to be Invented.

Roy and Austro had sold two of the kits the first day and four of them the second day. All six pairs of purchasers had groused a little bit at the skimpy assembly instructions; but all of them, being real inventors, had gone ahead and built fine buildings out of the stuff, each of them different, each of them distinctive and effective.

So, on the morning of the third day, Austro and Roy tried it themselves with one of their own kits. They intended to build a home for that most inventive and begeniused of enterprises, the Big Star Detective Agency. And they sure had been having a lot of trouble making anything at all out of it.

Cornelia Falselove and several persons she had dragooned into helping her arrived with the two additional human bodies from the wax works and unloaded them at the Big Star. They stretched them out beside the first body that the boys had got by a sleight-of-body trick that they played on the police.

“Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful,” Roy Mega said. “We will just see what kind of flies these three bodies will draw here. And I will turn on my newly completed Confession Compulsion Machine and see who rises to the tainted bait.”

“That isn't the same thing as a Guilt Machine, is it?” Cornelia asked. “I feel a little bit guilty buying human bodies for wax prices that way.”

“A guilt machine? Oh no, that would complicate it too much to have a Confession Machine and a Guilt Machine in the same unit,” Roy Mega said. “I should scatter myself as someone else seems to have done. I have to activate my Confession Compulsion Machine, and at the same time I have to contemplate these three sets of remains here.”

“And at the same time figure out what went wrong with the ailerons of the Big Star Weed Rider this morning,” Austro said. “What really crashed this morning was a part of our reputation. You turn on the machine, Roy, and I'll contemplate the remains, and we'll both think about the ailerons.”

The two boys set themselves to these three tasks. There came the ghostly humming as Roy Mega turned on the Confession Compulsion Machine. The ghostly humming had nothing to do with the operation of the machine. It was for effect. It was a good and impressive sound and the boys used it with all their machines when they put them into operation.

“Well, Austro?” Roy Mega said. He meant how was Austro doing with his assigned task.

“The most noteworthy thing about the remains is that they are remains,” Austro said as he looked at the three dead fellows with affection. “That is to say, something, other than life, has been removed from them, and what remains of them is most incomplete. Something's lacking in these three. We come back to the same question: who is False Face Flaherty?”

“That man over there,” said Cornelia Falselove, “the man with all the money and all the women.”

“But who is he really?” Austro asked.

“He really is the man with all the money and all the women,” Cornelia insisted.

But Flaherty lost one of his women just then. Judy Kingfixit left him and his group and came uncertainly towards the Big Star Detective Agency.

“The second thing about the remains is the now-you-see-it-now-you-don't syndrome,” Austro said. “I keep taking blood out of these guys, and it keeps changing. Besides being too fluid for fellows who are dead almost an hour, it keeps flip-flopping. Sometimes it seems to be good anthropino haima or human blood. And then it tests as kaoutsouk haimatos.”

“And what is kaoutsouk haimatos, little fuzz-faced boy?” Cornelia asked.

“Rubber blood,” Austro said.

“Who is Cornelia Falselove?” croaked a wax raven that had somehow followed them out of the wax museum.

Judy Kingfixit, a bit dazed, arrived at the Big Star Detective Agency.

“I have this compulsion to confess that I killed Hamlet,” she said. “Why ever would I have a compulsion to confess such nonsense as that?”

“Have you a feeling of guilt, Mrs. Kingfixit?” Roy Mega asked.

“No, of course not,” she said. “What a question!”

“The question, for you and for my machine,” Roy said, “is how there can be a compulsion to confess without a feeling of guilt. My machine says they don't go together, and you say they don't.”

“The real question,” said Austro, “is whether there is any criminality in crime.”

Somebody left them then like a cork plopping out of a bottle.

3

“Who was that?” Austro asked.

“It was that stringer from the International Universal World Press,” Roy Mega said. “Nobody ever notices him when he's around with his pulsating ears; but he always makes that cork-out-of-the-bottle exit. I wonder what sort of story he got a lead on here that he's in such a hurry to spill it to the world?”

“I have this compulsion to confess that I stabbed Hamlet Izobret to death,” Judy Kingfixit rattled off with unseemly passion. “Oh, I feel so much better for having confessed it!’ '

“But did you in fact kill Hamlet?” Austro asked.

“That is information I am unable to supply,” Judy said. “The main thing is that I have confessed it. The confession becomes the act and the happening. It is like taking off from a dull rock and soaring into flight. The flight is what matters. The rock is an accident to be forgotten.”

“Why did you, in the context of the confession anyhow if in no other context, kill him, Mrs. Kingfixit?” Roy Mega asked.

“Oh, he was trifling with my affections, I think. And he was after my husband to put more money into their things and not let me loot it all.”

“Ah, he was a threat to your paper-sack-full-of-money syndrome,” Austro mumbled. “What do you call it?”

“I call it ‘Diversified Investment Procedure According to Educated Whim,’ and it works if I can really keep it diversified, a hundred here, a thousand there.”

“Can you say which of these three figures that are lying here is the Hamlet Izobret that you killed, Mrs. Kingfixit?” Roy asked.

“No, they all look alike when they're spread out like that with the same false faces on them all. They were already getting to look alike anyhow since they associated together so much.”

Several persons came in and gave Judy Kingfixit large sums of money for the investments that she had made in the various industries earlier that morning. When a person invests in enterprises along Broken Bench Lane, the harvest (before noon usually) will be thirty and seventy and even a hundredfold.

The Plant Engineering Company was right to the left of the Big Star Detective Agency, between it and the Hasty-Wasty Planned Obsolescence Company. They did some amazing things at PE. They engineered plants for every need and botany. They had a nutty tree or bush that grew nuts so fast that a prize was offered for anyone who could ever pick them all. The bush had a capacity of only twelve nuts, but it would regrow them faster than any two-handed person could pick them off. The bush would have solved the hunger problem of the world, if only the nuts had been edible.

But a half-dozen other plants that PE had engineered had solved the world hunger problem. They had done this more than a week before, but the word hadn't got to remote areas yet.

And they had engineered, at PE, plants that would walk and talk — really — and these had been used (one use among very many for them) by Madame Gussaud at her wax works as scaffolds or armatures to build wax columns on. This accounted for the flexibility or liveliness of some of her creations.

Wait a minute! Someone else is coming into the Big Star Detective Agency.

Edith Thornbush burst into the Agency, and a rush of words burst from her as she came.

“I have this compulsion to confess that I stabbed Harry Kingfixit to death!” she burst out. “Say, confessing is fun, isn't it? Is it generally realized that confessing is one of the great creative acts? I believe, if I just let myself go, that I could confess to such a flood of things as would knock the ears off you.”

“Did you actually kill Harry Kingfixit, Mrs. Thornbush?” Roy asked.

“Oh, there's no way of telling,” Edith said, liplessly as it were, and as if it were someone else using her voice. “There is no sharp line between kill and not-kill. I banged a dagger into one of those gawky look-alike people that were hiding among the wax figures in the wax museum. It might have been Harry I knifed (I hoped it was, I still hope it was), or it might have been one of the others, or nothing much at all.”

“Can you say which of these bodies is the figure that you banged the dagger into?”

“No I can't. They're all alike,” Edith said without moving her mouth. What was this business of her talking without seeming to talk?

The Animal Engineering Company was right across the Lane from the Big Star Detective Agency. The AE had formerly been named Dog Designers Incorporated. They did some amazing things at AE. They had branched out a long ways from their old Dog Designer days of the week before. Now they were into everything.

They had designed the Basic Ape that, with a bit of further creative tampering, could pass for any new-departure simian or bear or human. Madame Gussaud at the wax works had been using Basic Apes for two days now. She used them for her living wax figures as they were patient and would accept infusions and grafts. They would pose well. They would also work well and could do simple tasks like sweeping the floor or pouring wax; and they would (this was something that had been discovered within the last hour and a half) readily accept the new false face patterns that were so prevalent about the Lane this morning that they seemed to infest the very air.

AE had been using rubber blood in its Basic Apes for several hours, and this, blinking on and off, will simulate other bloods, animal or human or whatever, and will function well in many conditions.

“Oh, here they are,” False Face Flaherty cried and he strode into the Big Star Detective Agency, “the three figures that were swiped from the wax works. Swiping, as some people don't seem to realize, is a form of theft. I'll just take them along back to my place as I have an agreement with the wax works.”

“I own them now,” Cornelia Falselove said, “and you will keep your body-robbing hands off of them. I may be able to make something out of them, or use them for receptacles.”

Ophelia Izobret burst into the Big Star Detective Agency.

“I have this compulsion to confess that I stabbed Edgar Thornbush to death,” she burst out. Ophelia looked dazed and these words had come out of her mouth with very bad synchronization. It almost seemed as if Cornelia Falselove had been speaking the words for Ophelia.

“Well, that accounts for all three of the knifed figures,” Roy Mega said. “And I'm not sure just what else it accounts for.”

The Human Engineering Company was just to the right of the Big Star Detective Agency, between it and the Cat-Rat Fur Company. They had been doing some amazing things at HE. One of the mottos at HE: We Can Change the Colour of Your Eyes in Nine Minutes will give you a pale blue idea of what they were doing there. See Us, and you Will Never be the Same Again was another motto a bit on the chilling side.

HE was able to supply Basic Persons, coordinated humans with the personality and brains denatured. These went beyond the Basic Ape. They could not only perform simple tasks such as sweeping floors or pouring wax, but they were able to complain about them while doing them. Madame Gussaud used many of the Basic Persons at her wax works, and countless other firms along the Lane used the product.

“Are you trying to peddle these waxwork glories as our husbands, boys?” Judy Kingfixit asked of the three murdered figures on the floor that may or may not have been wax. Then Judy's face changed a bit and she said in words that were badly synchronized with her mouth, “Oh, I guess it will be all right then. I'll accept whichever one you say is mine if this is the state he happens to be in.” Then her face changed back to its first case and she spoke again in her regular voice, “Damnit, Cornelia, you are not spokeswoman for us. I, at least, will speak for myself. Get out of my mouth and get out of my voice.”

“Oh, I believe that it will be suitable for Cornelia Falselove to be spokeswoman for the three involved ladies, just as it is suitable for me to be spokesman for these three incapacitated or dead gentlemen,” False Face Flaherty said. “Connie and I will settle whatever needs to be settled. And then we will inform the six of you of the settlement, or else we will not inform you of it.”

“Find out who False Face Flaherty really is,” one of the dead wax-or-flesh men said hollowly.

“How?” Roy Mega asked that length of stuff on the floor.

“Take him apart,” the figure said. So Roy Mega and Austro began to take False Face Flaherty apart.

“Find out who Cornelia Falselove really is,” Ophelia Izobret asked.

“How?” Austro asked her.

“Take her apart,” Ophelia said. So Roy and Austro began to dismantle Cornelia Falselove just as they were dismantling False Face Flaherty.

Ahhhh! Zombie Plant, Basic Ape, Basic Person with denatured brains and personalities, rubber blood, wax work (hexagon) structure modules, consensus figures and artificial figures! That's what False Face Flaherty who had all the girls and all the money was. That's what Cornelia Falselove was also.

Did False Face Flaherty really represent Harry Kingfixit and Edgar Thornbush and Hamlet Izobret as a corporate person?

What false process had put together such corporations?

“We leave it to you our clients whether you should pay us or we should refund to you,” Austro said. “Have we located your husbands for you? I don't know. That's a question in semantics, and paleoanthropologists say (from the shape of our skulls) that we australopithecines were probably weak on semantics. What we have here are three boxes that your husbands have been in now and anon, and likely they are in them presently to a limited extent.”

“What if we insist on having all there is of them?” Edith Thornbush asked. “We didn't contract for you to locate only pieces of our husbands. What if we insist that you produce them completely?”

“I suggest that the demand be lodged by all there is to you then,” Roy Mega said. “You here present are only three boxes that three ladies have been in now and anon, and likely you are in them yet to a limited extent. But essential elements of you are missing or are hiding out somewhere.”

A harried little man came into the Big Star Detective Agency.

“Have you heard about the Murders of Speckled Fish Road?” he asked, speaking in a very apprehensive voice.

“Ah yes, interesting case,” Roy Mega said. “Do you wish the investigation to be reopened? Ah, let's see, just when was it that the Speckled Fish Road Murders took place?”

“They are likely to take place this very afternoon or night unless I can get expert help in preventing them,” the nervous little man said.

“Ah yes, we will put you on hold for a while. Please be patient. We are winding up a triple-murder case now with our famous dispatch and efficiency.”

“See how busy we are,” Austro said. “Let us now move to a consummation of the Wax Museum Murders. All we need is good faith from all parties, and we have not been getting that. There is hanky-panky somewhere in that you three ladies slew the figures of each other's husbands and not your own. This is related to what is known as the fooling-around syndrome. As to the stabbings or ‘murders’ themselves, they really don't amount to very much.”

“It was slicker than going over an alley fence to a ‘little game’ (in the old comic-strip context of that situation),” Roy Mega said. “The three men slipped out of their skin and bones and left them behind. Every man needs a hiding-place, and the trail to it should be crossed by as many false clues as possible. The men delivered their empty skin-and-bone boxes over to a corporate person of their own creation, False Face Flaherty. That was the second stage of their evasive trail to their hideout.”

“Why should they want to evade us when they love us so much?” the box that Edith Thornbush had been in now and anon asked.

“Why should they want to evade us when they love us so much?” the waxwork box in which Hamlet Izobret had lingered now and anon asked. “But the dames have their hideouts slicker than anything we could devise, and they spend a lot more time in them.”

“You are so tedious sometimes, that's why,” Judy Kingfixit said.

It was what is sometimes called a Mexican Standoff. The boys of the Big Star had solved the disappearance of the husbands (and the technical murders of them or of the carcasses that they used now and anon), but they hadn't solved any of it very resoundingly. And the ladies might have made a case that nothing had been solved, “but it would be like opening a can of crocodiles,” as Ophelia Izobret said. Nobody was very proud of the outcome.

There had been this very decadent influence (an unreal influence, really) along Broken Bench Lane for several days, and now the shattered fruit of that decadence had come to market. Simplicity had gone from the Lane.

It was decided that all should go to the Hot Sauerkraut Sandwich Drive-In for lunch and to discuss the financial aspects of the thing over hot sauerkraut sandwiches, try to resolve the who-owes-whom question.

And then the murderous malarkey-men of the media broke over them in wave after smelly wave!

“Which one is the illustrious Professor Austro who has made the ‘Quotation of the Season?’ ” a half-dozen of those flashpans bayed the question.

“I am the illustrious Professor Austro,” Austro said. “Ah, which ‘Quotation of the Season’ is it, boys? I get off a lot of good stuff.”

“The illuminating statement ‘The real question is whether there is any criminality in crime?’, that is the quote that has rocked the country for the last six minutes,” said one of the media men there. “Who else but the Great Professor Austro would have the temerity to phrase such a thing? The whole world must have skipped a second to hear an utterance so utter.”

“Everybody change watches one second to pick up the skip,” said Roy Mega ungallantly. “I never remember whether we set them up a second or back a second.”

“Is there any particular childhood influence to which you might attribute your brilliance, Professor Austro?” a reporter-in-depth asked.

“What is ‘brilliance’?” Austro beamed like a beacon. “Ah, we always ate a lot of rock soup when I was a kid on the Guna Slopes.” Austro liked the adulation.

“Would you care to tell us, Professor Austro, what brand of rock soup it was?”

“Ah, we're on live and nationwide, are we? It was Rocky McCrocky Rock Soup!”

“I will just take two hundred dollars worth of stock in this Rocky McCrocky Rock Soup,” Judy Kingfixit offered, and Austro had the money out of her hand before she finished.

“The news services are running five minutes behind in trying to supply data on you,” said another newsie. “There hasn't been such a single-quotation stir since Tuesday.”

“Professor Austro,” a back-up analyst interposed. “There are two disassembled bodies here on the floor — ” (They were those of False Face Flaherty and Cornelia Falselove: the three stabbed figures had risen and were waiting to go to the Hot Sauerkraut Sandwich Drive-In.) “Are they some of the debris of your murder investigating trade?”

“Oh certainly, certainly,” Austro bubbled the words out. “You can't have a murder investigation without breaking a few bodies. These last three murders we just solved, though, weren't our most successful ever. There's loose ends hanging out of them everywhere. We did solve them, and we contributed solutions to the nature of reality at the same time, but we didn't solve them with our usual verve and style.”

“Professor Austro, what would you say was your most towering characteristic?”

“My modesty.”

“Are you sure that this monkey-faced kid is the Great Professor Austro?” one of the reporters-in-breadth asked Roy Mega.

“He's the only Austro there is,” Roy said, “so he has to be the Great Professor Austro. The Great Professor Austro? Oh, what a wet nose he's become now!”

“A wet nose, sir? What do you mean?”

“He's drinking the first of the four wine cups. It's enough to turn any kid's nose wet.”

“What is the first of the wine cups, sir?”

“The cup of adulation. It's sometimes called Monkey Wine. He's sure going to be hard to get along with from now on.”

“Do you solve any of the murders yourself, sir?”

“Only all of them.”

“And who are you yourself sir?” the newsie asked. “Are you someone important?”

“Of course I'm important. I'm the Great Professor Mega.”

“Ah, cut it out, Roy,” Austro begged. “You're poaching on my rock pile.”

“The Great Professor Mega!” another newsie gasped. “You're, you're even newer than the Great Professor Austro!”

“Let me tell you about that — ” Roy Mega began to unroll his tongue.

The Only Tune That He Could Play

or Well, What Was the Missing Element?

Tom Halfshell was taking his major in Trumpet, his minor in Nostalgic Folklore, and his outreaching corollary in Monster-Morph.

“That isn't a perfect balance, Tom my son,” his father had said. “The selection is too soft. It's a soft art, a soft science, and a soft speculative syncrisis. My son, you had better introduce a harder and more manly element into your studies.”

So Tom took up Hard Geography for his sustaining corollary. This gave him four fields of study beyond the basics, a heavy schedule for even an intelligent young man. And this got Tom where it hurt, because he was not very intelligent. He was intuitive, he was rhythmic, he was effervescent, he was enthusiastic; and he was a young man of tone and taste. But he just wasn't very intelligent.

Still, he got good acceptance by both his elders and his contemporaries. And the hard hand of friendship will help one through almost any course.

Tom and three of his friends, Cob Goliath, Duke Charles, Lion Brightfoot, manly boys all, talked about his deficiencies and advantages, and the varying joys of the world, as they hunted fierce hogs with spears from muleback one spring morning.

“You are an unmatched half, Tom,” Cob Goliath shouted as he doubled back on his coursing mule after a very tricky and tangle-footed hog, “and ours is a world full of unmatched wholes. Complete yourself, Tom, complete yourself!”

Anything to do with man's best friend the swine is a worthy occupation, and lance-killing is a particular joy. The swine is meat and leather. He is also ferocity and fun and friendship. Spilling hogs' blood is almost as tall a thing as spilling one's own.

“Complete myself, that's what I'm trying to do!” Tom howled as he killed the boar with an absolutely perfect lance-thrust, from a bad angle, and already past the beast. And the other young men gasped in admiration.

Tom Halfshell wasn't as big or as strong as these other young men. He hadn't their tough intelligence, or their dedicated hardness, or their steadiness of hand. And yet he had more spectacular kills than any of them, with a real virtuosity of lance and mule-handling and boar-butchering. He was the least of the four in every element that should count high in boar-spearing, but he made the most kills, and he made them more dazzlingly than the others.

One of the things he had was trickiness, a quality not much understood.

“Unmatched Halfshell Tom,” Duke Charles sang as he led the charge after more of the fierce and bristling porkers. The four young men had killed nine hogs, and they had three more to go this morning. “Halfshell Tom, it always seems that there should be another half to you somewhere. When they spun the naming wheel, it stopped just right for your name. You do so many things well, and still you are not complete. Why not? There's an othafa element in incomplete things. The rest of us are complete. Watch that porker!”

The porker, a solid, tusked boar, cut back into the feet of Tom's mule and knocked the beast down. It cut back a second time on a shorter radius and charged Tom who had barely found his feet after being thrown. It was in too close for Tom to use the lance blade, and he used the lance butt and spun the charge of the boar twice. And then the boar had him — 

 — but Lion Brightfoot had the boar then, with a slicing, almost backhand thrust of his blade, as Lion's mule, a clattering hack who enjoyed his work, brought him in exactly to ‘top kill’ position on a long sweep.

Ten porkers killed. Two to go. And the shaken but talented Tom Halfshell was on muleback again and leading a new charge.

There was great friendship among these four boys, and they risked their lives and limbs for each other again and again. Their coursing area was only the hog-run behind a small slaughterhouse, and there were surely easier and safer ways to slaughter the exciting and embattled hogs. But hogs should be slaughtered splendidly. All things concerning hogs, those totem animals, should be done as splendidly as possible.

Now there was a furious and fleet-footed sow among the porkers left, and she was super-dangerous. There were elements of hate and intuition among sows. Swine were man's best friend, but that didn't apply to the disappearing sows of the species. The sows felt somehow (for they could not really know, since the thing was never mentioned in their presence) that even the remnant of them would soon be replaced by clone-boars.

This first sow was all the more deadly for being short-tusked and close-coupled. She was murder, challenging and charging murder.

“Thank all things that there is no analogy to men to these fierce, carry-over animals,” Goliath called. “We'd all be better dead than have such savage things within our own species. Watch it, Lion! Watch it, Tom!” The boys would rather find their eleventh and twelfth kills among the uncomplicated porkers, but this shrilling and squealing sow forced the kill upon them. She threw the mules of Cob Goliath and Duke Charles with charges so swift that those canny-footed animals could not cope with them at all.

But then it was the bloodied Tom on his own lamed mule who killed her with luck and trickery and curious desire. The other three of them did not like to be involved with the remnant sows at all: but Tom Halfshell liked it particularly. He had her in an exciting and bristly kill. His lance had a large gout of flesh on it when he was finished, and Tom for a moment had the notion of having a pet pig from it.

And then the ridiculousness of that idea struck him. It was only from bits of boars' flesh that pigs were ever cloned. Besides, Tom already had one little pet pig. He would wait till it was too big to be a pet before he requisitioned another one.

Then Tom Brightfoot killed the anticlimactic twelfth porker.

Oh, it was all simply hard and hot and bloody work that the boys had to do: but they would not have been boys of the species if they hadn't been able to infuse it with glory. They dragged the dead porkers to the tripods at mule-tail, and they had the first of them hoisted up quickly. They began to skin them to the tune of their own hog-skinning songs. Youth, youth, and the danger and death that it loves to bring even the easiest task! This was fullness. This was completeness!

Except for Tom Halfshell. And they always joked that he was in some way incomplete. But there was something unusually important coming up this day.

“We are lucky that we will all take part in the ‘Last Man Festival’ tonight,” Lion Brightfoot shouted as he worked the skinning knives and tongs with strong hands. “There have been ‘Last Man Festivals’ before, but this is the last of them all. This ‘Last Man Who Remembers’ is a hundred and forty years old, and that doesn't even count the twelve ‘given’ years. My father says that we will invent other festivals, that we will never run out of festivals; but nothing like this one can ever be held again. It's the end of an era, he says. We will all play tonight in the bands, but only Tom will be with the twelve trumpeters. Will you play the brass trumpet, Tom?”

“No, I think I'll play the conch-shell trumpet,” Tom said. “Anyone can play the brass trumpet.”

“And no one can play the conch-shell like you,” Duke Charles cut in. “You'll drive us clear over the hills with that conch-shell tune of yours, Tom. The way you play the conch-shell, it's demanding an answer.”

“It is, yes,” Tom said, “and sometimes I think that I can hear that answer from over the hills. Mine is one tune that's supposed to have an answer. I had a Butterfly Moon Shell once and tried to play it, but I could get no real music out of it at all. And the Butterfly Moon Shell is listed by the musicology museum as ‘deceptive and non-musical’. But I bet someone could play it. I bet someone could play the answer to my tune on it. Maybe, to some people somewhere, the conch-shell trumpet is ‘deceptive and nonmusical.’ No, I can't tell you in words what I mean. But I could tell you on the conch-shell what I mean, if you would only listen and understand it. I bet the ‘Last Man Who Remembers’ understands it. I saw him yesterday, and he had a mighty deep look to him.”

“The Last Man won't understand anything after tonight,” Cob Goliath said, as he did fine and strong work with a butcher's saw. “He will die tonight, and he says that he's ready for it. His official title is ‘The Last Man Who Remembers,’ you know.”

“Who remembers what?” asked Tom, who was not quite as intelligent as the others.

“Oh, if anyone else remembered what it was, then he wouldn't be the last man to remember it,” Lion Brightfoot said reasonably. “And when he is finally dead, then no one at all will know what the old secret was. It was a crumby thing anyhow, they say. And my father maintains that nobody now left would understand it even if it were explained to him.”

These four boys had arrived on simultaneous requisitions just about two years before this. They were boys as good as any you will ever find. And the fact was that men and boys, like everything else, were getting better all the time. Men now had a thorough understanding of what they were doing when they put in their requisitions for sons. They were more scientific about it than ever before. They understood the goal, and they got the results.

“The reason for the world is the enjoyment of the world,” was a sound current ethical-scientific statement, “and the reason for men and boys is the fulfillment and pleasure of those same men and boys.”

The men and boys did fulfill, and they did please themselves. They lorded it over the universe and they brought it into accord and resonance with themselves.

2.

These four boys who had come from the potting sheds at the same time were doing quick and hard pork work (the most meaningful and totemistic of all work). And after they had worked, they must go to their instructions. It would be that way all their lives: in the mornings, work; in the afternoons, instructions; in the evenings, enjoyments. Intellectuality and friendship and art and pleasure were the things that life was built upon, and not one of them must be slighted.

These boys usually took their basic courses together; and then they took their majors and minors and corollaries with others who followed the same specialties. But even in the specialty subjects, there were ‘cross-currents,’ meetings between the basic friends. And the instructions must be carried out as splendidly as the pig-killings and other things.

Boys came to their instruction years with explosive momentum; and the acquisition of knowledge and skill and understanding was supposed to continue at an explosive pace all their lives. The perfect balance, the passion, and the (yes) the serenity, can only come at high speed, as a rapidly spinning top will have balance and surety and serenity. But when it slows down, then it wobbles, and sometimes it falls.

When the boys had been in the potting sheds (the fleshpots and the mindpots) they had developed great bodily and psychic mental intensity, but they had not been conscious in any of those areas. They had been in the large, unconscious, amitotic environment of intense activity kept well below the surface. It was there that the requisitions for sons were fulfilled: it was there that the selections were made as to what things should rise above the surface, what things might be kept in harmless somnolence below the surface forever, and what things must be destroyed while they were still below the surface to prevent them from making trouble later.

So it was that the boys broke up through the surface of that environment with bright memories in some areas, and with gappy holes in their memories on other sections. Into the holes in their memories, other sorts of things might be flowed during the instructions, things of unrelated substance. But all the boys broke through that old surface with great power, like porpoises leaping, like rockets riding on controlled explosions, like shouting stones hurled by spring-released catapults. And when the boys surfaced they became conscious, and they were all registered as having the ‘given’ age of twelve years. (They might have been in the amitotic environment anywhere from six weeks to six months: but not twelve years.)

Tom Halfshell went at noon to his instructions in his major of Trumpet and related subjects. Horns were paramount in the musical part of the instructions. All boys arrived with the memory of blowing a sort of Triton's horn in the depths of a sea. Drums and gongs and bells and clanging iron were important in their music also, and the rattling and singing woods, and even strings and keyboards. But it was the horns, and their cousins the pipes, that were the royal instruments.

Tom Halfshell played the brass trumpet as formal instrument, and the conch-shell trumpet as informal instrument. And he was good, much better than any of his fellows, on brass or wood or shell or bone horns, or pig-tooth whistles or penny whistles, or even on that most royal of all instruments, the squealing, pig-stomach, Bag-Pipe. And yet he was not at ease with the pig-pipe, nor it with him.

“You are much better than the other boys, Tom,” the instructor told him, “but they are complete, and you are not. There is something amiss with your blowing. There may even be outlawed othafa elements in your tune. Your tune keeps looking for a missing piece and calling out for it. But, by the character of the world that we live in, there is no such missing piece. Do you understand that?”

“I understand it as a statement, but sometimes I feel otherwise as a feeling,” Tom Halfshell said.

“You are not allowed to feel too otherwise,” the instructor told him. “I am recommending that you change your major from the trumpet to the pig-stomach bagpipes. Your father is a piper and not a trumpeter, and his requisition for you was for a piper.”

“No, I must stay with the trumpet and the conch-shell trumpet,” Tom said. “My tunes will not talk right on anything else.”

“You seem to have an endless repertoire of tunes,” the instructor said. “You seem to have them, but you haven't. All the tunes that you play are variations of the same tune. Leave that tune, Tom. You play it well, but incompletely. Play other tunes, even if you play them badly for a while.”

“No, I can't,” Tom said, “It's the only tune that I can play.”

“But it has othafa elements in it.”

“I don't know what those elements are, and you can't or won't tell me.”

“Ah, I always hate to see a boy chopped down before he ever becomes a man,” the instructor said sadly. “Your blood be upon yourself!”

3.

In his minor, Nostalgic Folklore, Tom Halfshell also had his difficulties, to go along with his splendid experiences. Nostalgic Folklore was full of holes: That's the best that can be said about it. There had been changes made. Once it had not been all Swine-Myth and Solar-Myth. Once, perhaps, there had been Moon-Myth in it, and other things. But you could sure get yourself demerited if you asked why there were no moon-myths now. There were quite a few areas that you had to avoid.

And the name of the course was the trickiest thing about it. Yes, it was very evocative of nostalgia: but there were so many sections of forbidden nostalgia. There were blood memories whose expression had been erased. And there was foolish stuff of poor quality that had been put in to fill the holes where something had been torn out by the roots. In particular was the land or plateau of othafa blocked out, and yet there was evidence that any tricky boy could see that the land had once been central to folklore.

Monster-Morph was a powerful course. It converged on man as its center. Man himself was the golden monster to whom all the roads and designs ran. And the primordial morphs of men were all interesting, trolls and boogermen, bears and apes and swine, lions — ah, and eagles, giants and ogres, cyclops, and one-eyed pirates. The last was quite revealing, for man seemed to be returning to the powerful single-eyed vision that had once been his. Modern man was particularly accident prone to the blinding of one (but not both) eyes. One man in three now wore a black patch over the blinded left (or sinister) eye, and it was a patch of honor. And Tom had learned that, as a thing quite recent, men were requisitioning cyclopean or one-eyed sons. And they were getting them too, now, for the first time, in this very season. There is much to be said for the power of the single vision.

The power of monsters was assumed into man, and what man or boy would not glory in such an accretion? But Tom Halfshell was bothered by a devious monstrosity omitted. There had to be complementary shapes to the power-monsters, and there weren't. There had to be complementary colors and after-images to the golden Solar-Swine who was man. But something had happened to the ability to see after-images.

Over the hills was a land named othafa, but it wasn't on the maps of Musicology, Nostalgic Folklore, or Monster-Morph. That is why Tom had selected Hard Geography as his sustaining corollary when his father had advised him to take an additional instruction. Tom wanted to learn some Hard Geography about one particular place.

And there was some semi-hard geography about the particular place, but not really hard. There was even the statement that othafa was a generic term and that there might be a dozen or so of such regions (one of them very big) in the world. There was also the statement that othafa might be regarded as the archipelago of many hard-surmounted islands, showing the same (non-geographic) characteristics in every instance.

“There is something in the othafa Archipelago that has cut us off as sheerly as we have cut it off,” was one statement. But was it a statement of Hard Geography? As geographical information, it was very frustrating.

There was only shadow information about the place in Musicology and Nostalgic Folklore and Monster-Morph and Hard Geography. There were only fossil memories. And Tom found that he would not be able to go to the place himself.

“You have already broken it by asking,” the instructor of Hard Geography said. “A well-raised boy would not have the trickery to ask. No, permits to go there are not given to anyone now, nor have they been for many years. It is a sign of criminality even to ask.

“Ah, Tom, I always hate to see a boy chopped down before he ever becomes a man. Your blood be upon yourself!”

And yet there was a coherent fantasy about the othafa Archipelago. Part of it was Tom's private fantasy. Part of it was the private fantasies of several other boys. These fantasies had elements in common, and those elements were handed down from somewhere. Besides, remnants of kite-nets were found (they might float on the air for long distances). And animals were sometimes taken that had those old three-point wound marks as though somebody had botched killing them with a trident.

There was an almost documented fantasy if the things were put together.

The folks of the Archipelago were creatures of the moon-snail totem. From a distance, they looked a little bit like men. But on closer view — well, they weren't men. They sure weren't men.

They were night hunters. They were net people. They used fowling nets (the kite-nets of which pieces were sometimes found), hunting nets, and fishing nets to capture their winged, legged, or finned prey. And they used tridents or daggers to kill their netted game.

They also used a light and swift net in style between the hunting and fishing net that swept their totem moon-snails up from the wet grass. And they used another light and swift net in a style between the fowling and hunting net that could take a bemused doe-deer where it stood with raised head, and extinguish its breath with its strangling, running draw-loop before the ritual trident was even brought into play.

The folk of the Archipelago were moonlight hunters, and they signaled with Moon-Snail trumpets.

Sometimes Tom Halfshell, thinking of these things, rose late at night and went to the high Festival Meadow to blow powerfully on his conch-shell trumpet. He would blow, and then he would listen for an answer. He would blow, and then listen again. But the answering music-call (Tom had a fantasy that it would come from an unplayable shell-trumpet of the Butterfly Moon Snail) never came from the inland islands beyond the hills.

Then, on the last night of them all for him, the answer did come briefly, in a briefness of only seven notes. But it came just a little bit too late for Tom to hear it.

4.

That was on the night of the ‘Last Man Who Remembers’ Festival. Tom Halfshell had been selected as one of the twelve high Horn-Boys for that festival. Really, he wasn't that good. He was better than any of his fellows in the immediate instruction classes, but the dozen high Horn-Boys for this festival were selected out of hundreds of instruction classes. There may have been a hidden reason for Tom being selected to so high an honor. There were a lot of cryptic remarks bounced off of him that final evening.

Even Tom's father said, as several of the instructors had said in the same stilted words, “Your blood be upon yourself!”

“Let it be in myself and on myself then,” Tom said cheerfully. “My blood sings in me tonight.”

“The Only Song That You Can Play, is that what it sings to you?” the father asked.

“Yes, it does sing that, and maybe some additional trumpetings also. Father, that is a requisition for a son that you are filling out there. And that is a cloning vial of your flesh and blood that you are packaging with it. That is not a legal thing for you to do. You already have a son, myself.”

“It will be legal,” Tom's father told him. “I am dating it tomorrow, and I won't mail it until after midnight.”

The ‘Last Man Who Remembered’ was a crowing, cackling little rooster of a fellow. He was a hundred and forty years old, and that didn't even count the twelve ‘given’ years.

“Heh, heh, they weren't ‘given’ to me,” he cackled to an audience of a million men and boys. “I came before that. I'm the only one left who came before.”

There were about a million men and boys there. The people liked to invent festivals every week or so and flock to them. There was an eighty acre festival ground between the city below and the hills beyond. The people watched one half of a football game. Then they had band music and speaking and short snatches from the Last Man Who Remembered.

“Heh, heh,” the Last Man Who Remembered crowed to the people. “They ragged and they nagged. And what can you do with naggers and raggers? Get rid of them, that's all.”

And an officer of some high station addressed the crowd briefly: “Ours is a world to be lived in. It is a complete world. It is the way we like it.”

They had the semifinals of the regional pig-sticking tournament then, and some of the best riders and lancers in the nation took part. They had three hundred marching bands, but they often had more than that at their weekly festivals. They had thirty speakers, loaded with wit and program, and limited to thirty seconds each. They had the second half of the football game then.

All of these things were carefully balanced and interspersed. And again and again they cut back to the ‘Last Man’ for his remarks:

“Heh, heh,” the Last Man Who Remembered cackled. “They thought that we couldn't get along without them. We showed them. There used to be the saying ‘You can't live with them and you can't live without them.’ And then there came along a feller saying ‘The hell we can't live without them!’ ”

“This ‘Last Man Who Remembers’ will soon be on his way out of the world,” an official announced. “He will be accompanied by a boy, and by the pet pig of the boy.”

The select dozen Horn-Boys blew with such trumpeting power that there were, here and there in the assembly, burst ears and blood running down jowls. The boys blew superbly: but one of them, so it was bruited about by those who understand high trumpeting, blew incompletely. This incomplete trumpeter would have to be killed, the rumor said. But one always hates to see a boy chopped down before he ever becomes a man.

There was a heavyweight prize fight, very good, and it ended in a knockout in four rounds.

“Heh, heh, they were always more trouble than they were worth,” the Last Man Who Remembered was cackling to the assembly. “Well, we did give up something when we gave them up, heh, heh, but I'm the only one who remembers what it was, so it won't matter to the rest of you.”

“There are still some few persons who are incomplete and unsatisfied,” another high official announced. “There's about one of them in a million. They believe that they're missing something. Some of them even believe that the missing element lingers on the other side of the hills. But all of us who have our sanity and balance know that there is nothing worthwhile over the hills, that we're not missing anything. What could there possibly be that we don't already have?”

The twelve loud trumpets spoke again, and then one of them predominated. It didn't win place for loudness or for excellence either. It won a temporary first place by the trickiness of its time. There was shocking joy in that tune, but there was more joy in the knowledge that there would be extra bonus blood spilled that night.

“Heh, heh, 'tis said that some of them are still left in the othafa valleys,” the Last Man Who Remembered crowed. “I never believed it.”

And now the action picked up pace and moved to the climax. Twelve trumpets shouted together. And then eleven of them fell silent, and a single one kept on with its strange tune that seemed to be requiring an answer or at least a counterpoint. “It's the only tune that he can play,” people with special trumpet knowledge told their neighbors. Then the lone trumpeter with his conch-shell trumpet still roaring and soaring came to the very center of the arena. His pet pig was at his heels; and the finest riders and lancers came to that same center which was really the coursing area.

The Last Man Who Remembered, wired for sound so that none of his observations might be lost, was brought to that same central area.

“Heh, heh, we got rid of them,” he cackled. “Good riddance. They kept the whole world in a turmoil. How is it that the trumpet-boy knows about them though? Well, no matter. He'll be going with me.”

Tom Halfshell, the trumpet-boy, still played. The expert pig-lancers were in the mule-saddles to make their kills and send the three creatures on their ways.

“Heh, heh, they're well forgotten,” the Last Man crowed. “They were one kind of fun, but there were so many other kinds of fun that you couldn't have when they were in the world. Why, you couldn't even have a pig-sticking pageant with them around.”

A lancer got the old Last Man then. He was down, dead on the turf then, with a self-satisfied grin on his face. And an era was over.

Tom the trumpeter blew powerfully and disturbingly again. A lancer killed the pet pig, a very tricky small target. The little pig was stretched out on the turf at the head of the dead Last Man.

Tom blew his powerful half-tune again. Then it was cut off sharply by a lance. He was down dead, and he was placed on the turf at the feet of the dead Last Man.

That was the end of the pig and the boy and the man, and of any secret that they might know.

But an answer to the tune of Tom Halfshell arrived then, distantly, but clear and carrying, from ‘over the hills and far away,’ played on the unplayable trumpet-shell of the Butterfly Moon Snail.

This really was an answer to Tom's tune, a convincing answer, and it thunderstruck a million men and boys — while seven notes of it sounded — and then — it was cut off sharply — by a murdering lance.

There is no faking a lancing.

And there is no avoiding a countervailing action. A countervailing action is presupposed by an action on this side of the hills, just as matter presupposed antimatter. The anti-creatures in the ‘over the hills and far away’ (othafa) regions (what was the name of them when they still lived in this plane of the world? — Yes — ‘Women’) they could not let one of their own persons go intuitive and evocative, not any more than could the men on this side of the hill. Silent and sharp murder (how fitting an instrument is the lance!) may be the only possible response in some cases, in the case of a trumpet-call that threatens to play havoc in just seven notes.

If you suppress a secret you must suppress the anti-secret also.

Jack Bang's Eyes

1.

If those stone-white statues had not been dug out of the ground or otherwise presented to view it would have been necessary to invent them. Indeed, more of these statues were invented than actually survived, but this leads us into shady territory.

There are a dozen different ways of looking at people and things. People really do have the stone-white-statue look on one of their surfaces, the one between their electrical coronas and their dermal-consensus surfaces. Seeing people so is a valid schematic way of seeing them.

It is all right when they are represented as unmoving statues. But it is less than all right when they are seen as living and moving persons in this white-statue state. They are like great white grub-worms when they move, and yet this is themselves in their pure lines and surfaces undistracted by such things as color and tone. This is one of the superior visions of people.

But often there's a guard (a dragon really) set to take retribution on anyone who promulgates this one of the superior visions. The dragon has struck and blinded most of the excavators of the classical marbles. What happened to Thomas Bruce the seventh earl of Elgin when he brought those famous marbles from Greece to England and so into the daylight? What happened to that French ambassador who took the Venus de Milo from Melos to Turkey on the first stage of its epiphany? What happened to the persons who ‘presented’ the Laocoön, and the Torso of Cleopatra, and the Apollo of the Belvedere? Blinded every one of them, that's what happened to them; blinded by disease or accident or assault. And it is the discoverers of the Venuses in particular who are struck blind for their temerity in presenting these forms in a new manner of seeing.

What happened to the promoters of the Venus of the Vatican, the Venus of Medici, the Venus of Capua, the Capitoline Venus, the Venus of the International House of Doughnuts? Every one of these innovators had his eyes cut out by a knife wielded by an angry guardian dragon in human form.

(The Venus of the International House of Doughnuts was Katherine Hearne. The one who saw and enabled others to see her in her pristine forms was Jack Bang. And the dragon who cut out Jack's — ah, we come to him and to all of them pretty quickly now.)

2.

“Jack Bang's Eyes.” Yes, that's what Flip O'Grady wrote down on his scratch pad when Winston Urbanovitch asked him, in the coffee-and-doughnut shop. “What are you flipping pennies on now, Flip?” Flip O'Grady, a hot-handed chimp who worked for Doctor Velikov Vonk in the Probability Division, flipped pennies on a lot of improbable things.

“Flipping pennies on Jack Bang's Eyes,” he wrote.

“Jack Bang's Eyes? What's the odds on them now?” Winston had asked.

“Ten thousand to one against,” Flip wrote.

“And what are you trying to narrow the odds to?”

“One hundred to one against,” Flip wrote. Flip O'Grady mostly communicated by writing on his scratch pad and by winking. He didn't talk much.

Once, seven or eight years before, he had been the best talker of any of his bunch. He could say one hundred and twelve different words clearly. But Flip hadn't liked that talking bit it all. Now that he was no longer with the Experimental Alternate Groups Speech Center but was working for Doctor Vonk at the Probability Division of Creative Mutations, Flip didn't talk at all.

Flip O'Grady was a chimpanzee of mature years and unusual intelligence. He stood a full four feet tall. He was employed as a penny-flipper at the Probability Division: it was under the directorship of Doctor Vonk, and so was Flip.

Flip was a hot-handed chimp, and he could influence odds constructively. His talent was directional and authentic. When put on the scent of a case he could give pretty accurate odds on that case with the tabulated results of his coin flipping.

The mechanics of it were simple enough. Flip O'Grady flipped pennies on a little table that was covered with green velvet. An electronic scanner recorded the results. It doesn't take a very sophisticated scanner to tell whether a penny comes up heads or tails. But the calculation on a case might be very intricate and they didn't follow point-for-point the percentage of the flips.

Flip O'Grady flipped pennies for eight periods of forty five minutes each during twenty-four hours. He flipped coins twelve times a minute. More often than that would give randomized rather than authentic results. The flipping was dogged hard work as Flip O'Grady did it, steep psychic stuff with preternatural aspects, and he sweat a lot on the assignments. He wore a T-shirt and boxer shorts when he flipped pennies. After every flipping session he took a brisk five minute shower. Then he put on horn-pipe pants and sports jacket for a forty minute coffee-and-doughnuts break. He took most of his breaks in the International House of Doughnuts, but also in Speedsters Café and in Zabotski's Bagelrees. The flipping, the shower, and the break comprised a cycle.

Flip lived in a little cottage that was eight feet by eight feet square. It was really a Garden Giant Little Gem Prefabricated Tool Shed, the deluxe or two-window model. Flip had fixed it up according to his own exceptional taste, painted in three tones, and with red simulated tiles on the roof. It was heaped and overgrown with flowers.

Flip was a flower person and a gardener in his off hours. At home, away from his penny flipping assignments, he wore a saffron yellow robe when working with his yellow roses, a luxurious red robe when working with his red roses, and a black robe of midnight velvet when working with his moon lilies. He was the most pleasant and most respected chimpanzee in that part of town. He was also a statistical prediction apparatus that contained an uncertainty factor.

That uncertainty factor was presently focused on Jack Bang's Eyes.

3.

“Only one mutation in a million is likely to be of benefit to humankind even if established. There is no way of changing this ratio. And only one beneficial mutation in a thousand is ever established. There are many ways to change this ratio. If we change the likelihood of a beneficial mutation being established from one chance in ten thousand to one chance in one hundred, then we are well on our way to success. One chance in a hundred million, starting from scratch, is on a higher order of hope than one chance in ten billion. We will gird for battle if we have one chance in a hundred million. For battlers, those are not bad odds at all.”

 — Quantum Gambling and Mutational Improvement

Doctor Velikov Vonk

Jack Bang had always been dizzy. Until he was grown, he had thought that everyone suffered from similar dizziness, that it was the natural state. And he had always had trouble with his eyes, and he supposed that everybody else had the same troubles. Then, along about the time of his twenty-seventh birthday, his eyes got much worse. He realized then that he had disabilities that others didn't have. But here was the funny part of it. As his eyes got worse, his sight got better. And there developed very peculiar compensations to his distress.

Jack Bang was a light-eyed Gypsy, an affront to nature. He was always bleeding this bright water-color fluid out of his eyes, and he always looked ridiculous from it with the green and blue and hazel and gray running down his face. Not only could he not see very well, he couldn't hear very well either. He always had the sensation of being in a box that was not quite right side up and of peering out of it through misshapen and watery lenses.

His name was a nickname. Jack was jak or yak and it means an ‘eye’. And Bang means crippled, or sick, or crazy. So the nickname, Jack Bang, which became his realname, meant crippled eyes, or sick eyes, or it meant crazy eyes. It was George Meropen who had hung the ‘crazy-eye’ name on Jack, and Jack was afraid to take it off. He was very much afraid of Meropen, of the way that George was always fondling that flip-handle knife of his and practicing his sinister look, so Jack's name remained Jack Bang.

Jack Bang, an unofficial poet in the life business, was sweet on Katherine Hearne who worked at the International House of Doughnuts. And Katherine was sweet on almost everyone in the world, but perhaps she was less sweet on Jack Bang than any of them.

Jack's eyes got worse when he was twenty-seven years old. But, at the same time, he received a number of visual compensations and fall-outs. Some of the new compensations had to do with Katherine Hearne. It had now become a special pleasure to look at her. The fact was that Jack Bang was seeing her in several new ways.

“I wish you wouldn't look at me like that, Jack Bang,” she said. “It gives me the creeps.”

“This is the way I've always looked at you, Katherine,” he said. He blinked, and the color from his pale blue-green gray eyes ran down his face as it always did.

“No. You're looking at me different now,” Katherine insisted. “Don't look at me those new ways. It bothers me.”

“It bothers me too,” Jack Bang said. “But I like the way it bothers me.”

“Don't you look at her crooked, Crooked-Eyes,” George Meropen warned Jack Bang in an angry voice. “I'm telling you, keep looking at her like that and I'll cut your eyes out.”

Jack Bang did keep it up. And George Meropen did cut his crazy eyes out. But those were only small incidents in the train of events.

4.

“Our main difficulty is in recognizing a real mutation when we see it,” Doctor Vonk was saying. This was the same day, and was also in the International House of Doughnuts. “An important new mutation is difficult to discern, since everything and everybody is a bundle of mutations tied together with uncertainty factors.”

“Right!” Flip O'Grady the hot-handed chimp agreed on his scratch pad.

“All mutations tend to be feverish at first, since they are distractions and disturbances,” Doctor Vonk continued. “We can pick up most of the new human mutations by the fever factor alone. A person with a strong mutation running in him will have a temperature as much as two degrees higher than will a person without a mutational infection.”

“Would you like a Kool-It tablet for your fever, Jack?” Katherine Hearne asked Jack Bang. “You're emitting like a little old stove.”

“No, I kind of like this fever,” Jack Bang said. “It's fun.”

“So we can pick up bearers of mutations by instruments,” Doctor Vonk said. “We pick up a lot of folks who are just plain sick, but we pick up most of the people experiencing mutations also. But we can often detect a mutation most readily by its effect on the world around it. We've been recording one syndrome of effects around here for some time.”

“An effect on the world?” asked a man eating a blueberry doughnut.

“Yes,” said Doctor Vonk. “The world reacts to its being entered and observed in any new mutational way. Individual aspects of the world at large react with a response akin to irritation and nervousness.”

“Boy I'll say,” Katherine Hearne affirmed. “It bothers me. It gives me the creeps.”

“And a primary mutation always travels surrounded by a sympathetic crowd of minor mutations,” Doctor Vonk said. “It is wrapped in a cloud of analogies.”

“That's going to be a tough bunch of Apple Glazes over at the Imperial Doughnut Palace,” Oliver the doughnut cook remarked.

“How can you know that?” asked a girl who was eating Swedish cream puffs.

“By the smell,” Oliver said. “Adrian at the Palace mixes his dough too tough sometimes, and you can smell it as soon as he starts to bake a batch.”

“The Imperial Doughnut Palace is four miles from here,” said the girl who was eating the puffs.

“Yes, I know,” Oliver agreed, “and it surprises me. Until just the last couple of days ago I could only smell such things about half that far.”

“A noteworthy mutation will always appear in several individuals at the same time,” Doctor Vonk said, “and sometimes in subsidiary forms. Thus, the mutation that we are studying has to do with incredible heightening of the power of sight, but it induces heightening of other sense powers in other persons. I myself am now able to read the dates on the coins in my pockets by running my fingers over them. I didn't used to have so fine a sense of touch. I have been studying a primary mutation for five days now, and Flip O'Grady here has been narrowing the odds on it. Yes, one person around here has recently achieved something new in sensual acuity. The odds are very long against anything coming of this singular manifestation, but Flip has been narrowing those odds by his ongoing incorporation of the factor into the probability field. But this primary mutation is surrounded by whole nations of sympathetic mutations.”

“The cockroaches are hearing a lot sharper lately,” Katherine Hearne said. “Watch! I will let just one pinch of super-fine flour-dust fall down to the floor. Watch! They hear it, and they come to it like it was a clanging gong. Kids, that is hearing!”

“Someone present has been experiencing a real revel of sharpening senses,” Vonk said. “Oh, to enjoy such powers as no one has ever enjoyed them before! There just can't be anything like it.”

“You just don't know how right you are!” Jack Bang declared.

“I think I know a way to put a stop to that revel stuff,” George Meropen said darkly, flipping his flip-blade knife.

5.

“Everything for a thousand yards or so around here feels that it's being observed,” Doctor Vonk said some time later. “Everything. Every rational animist knows that there is nothing at all that will not feel itself observed, that there is nothing that will not respond. The very plates in this place know that they're being sensed in a new way.”

“All the plates here are flawed,” Jack Bang said. “So are all the cups. If crockery things weren't flawed they'd never break: but throw any of these on the floor and they'll break. If they don't break the first time you throw them down, they'll break the second or third time. This plate here, I can tell you just where it would break. I could draw a pattern of its breaks. The main flaw in it is three-quarters of the way through, nearest the bottom: and it veins out in a design like the veins of a maple leaf.”

“Why were all the poets blind, that's what I want to know,” Katherine Hearne said. “Does anybody know why they are?”

“You bet I know why,” George Meropen said. “They just ask for it, that's why.”

“Who says that all poets are blind?” Doctor Vonk asked. “What poets were blind?”

“Oh, Homer, Milton, Blind Raftery of Galway, and Hollis Townsend who has poems in the quarterly out at the University every month,” Katherine said. “They are all blind. There's others too.”

“Thamyris and Masonides. And Tiresias and Phineus,” said Jack Bang.

“I believe that only about a third of the major poets were blind,” Doctor Vonk said. “We have only about five hundred poets listed at the Institute for Creative Mutations. That doesn't count blind bards, unless their songs were indisputably of their own creations.”

“Blinding them doesn't work,” Winston Urbanovitch said. “It just doesn't shut them off.”

“We'll see about that,” George Meropen growled. “I bet it can fix them where they can't see what they're not supposed to see.” And George was playing with that knife of his.

“It's mostly the living things that are reacting so strongly to their being observed in so unusual a manner,” Vonk said, “but some of the supposedly non-living things too. The observer always becomes part of the observation, and there's some very strong and innovative observing going on around here.”

“You just don't know,” Jack Bang said. “You just don't know who's watching who.”

“Like the guy says, even the potatoes have eyes,” Katherine commented.

“I don't know about that fellow Vonk who just left,” Winston Urbanovitch said later. “Someone said last night that they could hear wild ducks going over. And someone else said ‘Nay, that's just Doctor Vonk you hear.’ Well, is he a whole quackery by himself?”

“I've heard that he uses a monkey flipping pennies as a basis for his statistical analysis,” a lady said. “You know him, young fellow — ” (This to Flip O'Grady) —  “Is that the truth of it?”

“I get so damned tired of explaining the difference between a monkey and an ape!” Flip wrote wearily in his notebook. “Other than that, it's true.”

There was the time when Vonk, who was hopping around like a grasshopper now in trying to observe whatever was dawning, gave this opinion.

“This mutation, and all mutations, works too fast for inheritance. It has to be infection, epidemic. It's caught, it's caught! I wonder if it is caught directly from one person to another, or if there is a carrier. So far, the mutation affects mostly persons who come into the International House of Doughnuts. Do the other persons catch it directly from the primary, or is there an intermediary?”

“I read the other day that cockroaches are three hundred and ninety-two million years old,” Katherine Hearne said conversationally.

“Significant!” Doctor Vonk rapped. “It was just about that time that mutations as we know them began to appear in our line. People, there is something going on here. All of you, and you the primary in particular, don't drop it!”

About those different ways of seeing: The colorless or stone-statue-white way, which was also the fine-form-schematic way of seeing things, was only one of the many new forms of creative visionings that were epidemic around there like an outbreak of swine flu. The electrical corona of people and plants and objects was the most dazzling of the new aspects. And it was never a mere random dazzle. Every flame and coruscation of every corona meant something. There were flowing psychic equations of the people there; there were the potentials and compensations and attainments. There were the startling statements and propositions; there were the signatures. These were the fire pictures of the people and things in their completion and sanctification. Coronas have always been very futuristic.

Looking into the coronas had something of the nostalgia of looking into old wood fires or bonfires and watching the phantoms and pageants there. But those in the coronas were pageants and narratives that worked. There was fortune-telling and telepathic interpretation blended together. The entire contents of each person are always written plainly on the outside of that person, in flame and in dazzling topographic configurations. Now, by a person in the throes of the new mutation, this flaming expression could be read, totally, and in interpretive depth.

Then there was the natural and uncluttered level.

Clothes are sometimes wonderful and attractive and warm, but so is the ability to focus them out. It is nice to see people and things vivid and bare and vital. But it was the case of Jack Bang looking at persons on this vivid and bare level that angered George Meropen so excessively. And yet Bang didn't show too burning an interest in this flesh-surface level, no more than any other unhealthy-minded young man would have shown. After all, when one has seen the corona, the bare flesh is a bit bland — and bare.

But it wasn't being seen on the bare-flesh level that bothered Katherine Hearne the most. It was being seen on a level a bit more inner than that, as flayed and visceral and revealed in depth, as being scanned in the inner workings of lungs and spleen and kidneys and bowels, as appearing like something out of an animated technicolor anatomy textbook, it was such as that that made Katherine say “I wish you wouldn't look at me like that, Jack Bang. It gives me the creeps.” There was the uneasy feeling that there was hard radiation in being looked at by X-ray eyes. Yes, a person or a thing always knows when it is being looked at, and how.

This way of seeing would be handy for doctors. They could directly examine persons at this visceral level, in this interior analytical aspect. It would be handy for biologists and bacteriologists and clinical technicians and many other sort of people to be able to see these interior things clearly, always lighted and presented for best vision, always just at the focused depth desired. And it would be handy for them to see both interior and exterior things at greater magnification when there was need for it. Now, with the new talent, one could see things down to cell level, down to chromosome level, down to gene level, down to virus and sub-virus level, down to molecular level.

Doctor Vonk, for the last two days, when he had occasion to use a microscope, well he didn't use a microscope now — he got along just as well without it. To a thousand power he could see well enough, and he knew that he had just stepped over the threshold. He knew or guessed also, that someone could still jerk out the rug from under that over-the-threshold step and send all of them sprawling. All of the secondaries were still dependent on their primary. It was almost as if their primary (their primary was Jack Bang, no use of making a mystery out of it) had still to go through some sort of seed-scattering and token-dying phase before the mutation could be finally transmitted as a valid thing.

In the open world that is exterior to bodies, the eyes seemed to have discovered new telescopic as well as microscopic magnifications and penetrations. A good pair of mutated eyes could pick up fine detail, down to the cell level at least, on things animate or otherwise at least a mile away. And that, as must be said again and again when considering this marvel, was only the beginning.

The reason that Jack Bang was now able to spend so much time drinking coffee in the International House of Doughnuts was that he no longer worked for a living. He could now make all that he needed by playing cards with other gentlemen. Sure, he could see the spots on the cards, open or hidden; for now he had ‘multiple-viewpoint-vision’. He cleaned out a lot of card-men, and one of them was George Meropen who fancied himself as a poker player.

Jack Bang grinned a lot now, for he no longer seemed afraid of George Meropen or of anybody. And George Meropen would sit and flip his flip-blade knife and practice his sinister look.

But things were almost too easy and too profitable for Jack.

“What's the fun of playing poker if I win all the time?” he asked once. “When I can see their hearts sink — yes, sink — when I break them, then I feel a little bit sorry for them. When I can see the saliva in their mouths turn sour (sure I can see ‘sour’ as well as I can see anything) then I always ease up a little bit. What will happen to my old killer instinct now that I can win all the time and when I can see how sad they feel when they lose?”

Gaming had been one of the enjoyments of his life, and now the edge was off it as the green came in. And it was the same with the horses. The ‘multiple-viewpoint-vision’ had futuristic aspects and Jack did well here also. But it reached the pleasure limit, and the profits became cumbersome.

“What's the fun of watching the horses run and betting on them if I know who's going to win every time?” he asked. Well, maybe the fun did wear a little bit thin on some things, but Jack was having a lot of new fun these days. He had pretty well taken Katherine Hearne away from the sinister George Meropen. And the implications of his new talent were like a traffic jam of three thousand cars backed up and all honking to get going. There were backed-up advantages to all this that a person might not even get around to thinking about for years.

“It is strange that the primary should be a commoner,” said Doctor Vonk who had noble blood and was entitled to the title of Graf-Doktor in the old country (Hoch Oldenburg). “It very nearly compromises the whole affair.”

“Watch it there!” Flip O'Grady scribbled in a testy hand.

“Watch it!” Katherine Hearne said snappishly.

“Watch it, Doctor,” Jack Bang said with an asymmetric grin.

“Watch it!” George Meropen growled dangerously, and he flipped his flip-blade knife.

How odd that the commoners don't like to be called commoners!

Jack Bang was a poet, albeit an informal one. And his new circumstance, sitting in the catbird seat with everything going his way, was sheer poetry.

“You are the only major mutation-in-action that has ever been competently observed,” Doctor Vonk told Bang one day. “You are grotesque, but we have no way of telling that all of them were not grotesque. The whole idea of mutations is damned eccentric. We have just barely missed several of the mutations, missed observing them by as narrow a time as thirty million years or even three million years. But we are right on it with you. It would be a shame if your advantageous mutation were not captured and harnessed. You represent something new in humanity. Don't let it get away! Don't drop it! Don't bust the thing, Bang, unless indeed it is necessary that the thing bust before it can succeed.”

“I enjoy it,” Jack Bang said, “and I wish everyone had it to enjoy. If you believe that it is in the air generally, then I will do everything you suggest to help other people catch it also.”

“This business of compelling eventualities is a chancy one,” Vonk said. “There is something in the process that revolts against compulsion. But we will keep up all the tricks we know. Flip O'Grady will influence the odds with his flipping (he really can do that), and maybe you can do something new yourself.”

“I am a poet just come ripe,” Jack Bang said. “I will make a poem to eyes, to my own gloriously exploding eyes. Oh, get out of the way, Meropen!”

 “You took my girl. You took my money,” George Meropen said glumly as he flipped his flip-blade knife. “Maybe I will take something from you.”

The poem that Jack Bang built to his own exploding and mutating eyes was a thing of power and beauty. Was there ever anything so beautiful as eyes! Eyes are the lights of the world coming down from the Father of Lights. They are the doors of perception and the lanterns of the soul. They are the crystal balls in which futures and presents are read. They are the incandescent orbs that create what they are observing. They are — 

It broke then, and gushed away in two scarlet streams.

6.

That was the end of the poem or rhapsody about eyes. George Meropen did move in and take something from Jack Bang. He took his eyes. And then everything deflated.

The scales fell from the eyes of everybody around there, and then it was seen that the scales were the eyes. The whole achievement was thrown away in one horrifying moment.

Jack Bang was in the emergency room at the hospital.

George Meropen was in jail.

Flip O'Grady, flipping pennies, found the odds to lengthen greatly and suddenly against good coming out of this new stuff.

It was all busted now; but that included one exaggeration that needed busting.

That was the exaggeration about eyes. Eyes hadn't ever been very good.

There had been a lot of serious criticism of the human eye. A German of the last century stated that the generally bad design of eyes offered irrefutable evidence that God was a bungler. And almost all of those who have criticized the eye have also voiced their wonder that we could see even as well as we do with it. It's nothing but a bundle of rods tied together, like a totem, not like something functioning.

And the answer is that we don't really see with it. We see with something other than our apparent ‘outer eyes’.

The analogy with the ear is close. We hear with our inner ear and not with our grotesque outer ear. Those things on the outside of our heads are for gathering and focusing the sound, it is said; and then the inner ear ‘hears’ that focused sound.

That is ridiculous. How could those things on the outsides of our heads gather or focus anything? God put them there for His own reasons and for His own humor, but they haven't much to do with our hearing. And he also put apparent ‘outer eyes’ in our heads, for His own reasons and for His own humor; and they have only a very little bit to do with our seeing. They have a bit more to do with our seeing than have our outer ears to do with our hearing, but only a bit more.

It is possible that those ‘outer eyes’ are not such outrageously inept instruments at all, but only instruments whose purpose we do not understand. It is possible that God is not a complete bungler, but One whose purposes are veiled.

A term of horror will not last very long. It slides then into mere glumness. Doctor Velikov Vonk had experienced his moment of horror when George Meropen walked into his laboratory carrying bloody things in a napkin.

“You like crazy eyes, Doctor?” he asked. “Yeah, here are Jack Bang's crazy eyes. Yeah, I cut them out of him. Now let us see if he gets to be one of those big-name poets.”

Katherine Hearne had experienced her moment of horror when she saw Meropen deftly knife the eyes out of Jack Bang's head. Jack had experienced his own moment of horror when he saw that George Meropen wasn't kidding, and when he felt his own eyes robbed from him and himself sickening from the gush of his own blood that he could not see. Flip O'Grady had experienced a moment of something like horror when the unfavorable odds rose like a wave against the success of their project, and that flipping damn penny scorched and burned his fingers with a brimstone smell.

And, everywhere around there, there was the sympathetic bloody blindness experienced by all the penumbral persons and creatures who had been on the edge of the great mutation. And there was the horror of opportunity lost. Scientific observation of other major mutations had been missed by as narrow a time as thirty million years or even three million years. This one was missed, possibly, by only one horrifying moment.

Then the second of horror had slipped into the half hour of glumness. Jack Bang's life was not in danger, it was said. And then Flip O'Grady came to Doctor Vonk after finishing his flipping session.

“Market's rallied,” Flip wrote on his scratch pad. “Odds sure did rise steep against it for a while. Then they came back where they were. Then they came a lot better than they were.”

“But that's impossible!” Doctor Vonk howled. “The odds could not rally. You must have lost your hot hand and thrown all results random. The whole opportunity has blown up with the destruction of the primary. The odds now must be ten billion to one against.”

“Not so,” Flip wrote. “They went to that for just a little while. Then they came back. And they shortened and shortened and shortened. Might come to a flat hundred to one against yet.”

(It was almost as if their primary had to go through some sort of seed-scattering and dying phase before the mutation could be finally transmitted as a valid thing.)

“It's no great matter,” Jack Bang was saying. “Sure, I'm dizzy, but maybe not from the loss of blood. I always was pretty dizzy. No, it doesn't bother me. I can see about as well without them. I wasn't using them very much at the end anyhow, not for the big-seeing stuff.”

“I did it for the greater good,” George Meropen was saying to his questioners. “Hell, I don't know what I mean. The lawyer told me to keep saying that. He must have had some idea of how to get me off the hook. I did it for the greater good. I did it for the greater good.”

A lot of people had suddenly gone deeper into the explosive vision, Katherine Hearne, Flip O'Grady the hot-handed chimp, Winston Urbanovitch, Doctor Vonk himself.

“We are back from odds of ten billion to one against,” Vonk sang. “We are back from the shorter odds of only a hundred million to one against. We are coming up to incredibly short odds, no more than a hundred to one against. Victory, Victory! For battlers like us, those are not bad odds at all.”

People, the chances are high, (they have risen now to about one chance in a hundred), that you will hear more about this matter.

Lord Torpedo, Lord Gyroscope

Karl Riproar was the unusual son of two torpedo-makers, Epstein Riproar and Nastasia Hectic-Smith. Karl was extremely hyperactive in both mind and body. He was a genetic and chromosomic freak, as are all extraordinarily hyperactive persons. And he was descended from a short line of such freaks. By heredity and induced mutation and massive chemical and magnetic intrusion, he became one of the very active and hectic ones.

Epstein Riproar who was Karl's father had been a hyperactive and violent man, an intelligent but erratic doctor and designer who found himself outside the law because of his manufacture of torpedoes. These torpedoes were not the physically explosive directional underwater bombs. They were people who were hyped up to carry out such violent assignments as were given to them. They were powerful and swift, and perhaps they were intelligent. Anyhow, they were of surpassing speed in mind and body, and of relentless strength and power and impetus. There was some argument as to whether the ‘torpedoes’ were chemically stuffed and stimulated, or whether they were actually mutants. Well, Epstein Riproar made every kind of torpedo that there was any market for, and he sold them to eager buyers for top prices. These torpedoes could be used for hit men or for assassins of every type. They could get in and out of any jam. Because of their speed of attack there was scarce any protection against them. Such mentality as they had was of the high speed variety. They could conceive and carry out a murder or mutilation in a tenth of a second.

Karl's mother was Nastasia Hectic-Smith, a hyperactivist and incendiary and maker of torpedoes herself. She herself had gone through genetic tampering that was deliberately designed to double her activity and relentlessness. It also, by one of those slip-ups that sometimes happen, doubled her intelligence, which was already high. This was not necessarily a disaster. Torpedoes should have high-speed mentality, but not enduring intelligence. Many of the torpedoes were set to destruct after one hit, so real intelligence would be wasted on them. But it might not be wasted on a manufacturer of torpedoes.

As to where Epstein and Nastasia got their furious energy, well there was a solution to that in their family traditions. It had to come from somewhere. Yes, it sure did.

Epstein and Nastasia had met as fellow members of that underground and international organization known as “The Restless Lions”. Both of them had been manufacturing torpedoes for various individuals and organizations, and sometimes they had bid against each other and been down-priced. Now they combined their talents and techniques. They became the top manufacturers and purveyors of human torpedoes.

They decided to have a son and turn him into the hottest torpedo of them all, one not intended to self-destruct but to be used again and again with growing expertise. This son was Karl Riproar, one of the most active and turbulent babies ever birthed. The surgical implantations were made in him when he was one day old, to double his inherited activity and restlessness.

“I hope it doesn't double his intelligence too,” Nastasia said. “He'll have enough trouble with it, being so damned smart, without another doubling. It hasn't been easy for me being always so smart that I'm like to pop. But try to get all that stuff you've got in your mind out of your mind, and it isn't easy.”

“It won't matter too much, Nastasia,” Epstein said. “The way things are going, it may be an actual advantage for a torpedo is not to carry excess baggage, but super-intelligence may no longer be in excess. I hope that his intelligence does double or even quadruple, so long as it doesn't put a damper on his energy. And I want to watch it work.”

“Hopping hippos, Epsie, this isn't Murderex-X to make him mean that you've salted his glands with!” Nastasia howled. “This is Melerex-X the nice-guy drug. The chemist made a mistake on our order.”

“He sure did,” Epstein agreed. “Wouldn't it be funny if our child did turn out to be a nice guy? But the switch may not go too hard. With everything else working in him, and with his inheritance from us, he should be mean enough.”

Actually, the surgical implantation had increased young Karl's intelligence eight times, but his father didn't get to watch his development very long. Epstein and Nastasia were killed in a shootout a week later. And Karl Riproar, when he was eight days old, was placed in one of those progressive institutions.

“This is the smartest kid ever tested,” said one of the wranglers at the institution to one of the medical monitors. “You could drive a truck down some of the grooves in his brain. I bet we wouldn't get another kid this smart in a thousand years. Or another kid this active.” Actually, they got another one that smart and that active the very next day, but that was an extraordinary happening. And they really weren't likely to get another such for two thousand years.

Karl Riproar grew into a physical and mental wonder, and he was a boy who was always busy. (Maybe you missed the weight of that statement. He was always busy.) He was not just busy twenty-four hours out of the day: it was much more than that. Karl was busy in many depths and directions, and he never let up. He was like a roaring river in his relentless activity and in his constant consuming. He wasn't mean. He was a nice guy. In this, it did matter that the Murderex-X had not been implanted in him. And the Melerex-X had made him personable and amiable, odd qualities for a natural-born torpedo. But Karl had the relentlessness that is often found in mean people. And he had a spacious gluttony that was almost without equal.

He was a glutton for body food and for mental nourishment, and oh for another sort of food also. By the time he was six years old he had things pretty well arranged in his own way at the old progressive institution. A recollection of him when he was about six years old has him sitting at table and shoveling it in at a startling rate, but he was doing many other things at the same time. He had an earplug in each ear, and they were receiving two different instructional programs. There were three TV sets before him, two of the programs being educational and the other one being that whanging presentation of violence and adventure and relentless activity ‘The Restless Ones’.

Karl had a dictaphone turned onto himself, and he was talking and singing around his food, putting out an amazing spate of entertainment from his ‘consciousness three’ level. He was also reading one book and one newspaper by eye, and reading another book by Braille.

And this was the general format that he would follow for much of his life during the routine of the six forty-five minute periods every day that he was at his meals stuffing in the food and drink. About his only later refinement was his sitting on the john while he did all these other things, for saving time; but this combination was not allowed in that early part of his life that he spent in the progressive institution.

“The attainment levels of the little inmates of this institution aren't as high as they should be,” a wrangler at the school said to a rhetor (being a progressive institution they had wranglers and rhetors and monitors, but not teachers).

“It's only in comparison to that Karl Riproar and that Emily Vortex that the attainments of the others seem low,” the rhetor said. “Actually their levels are rising all the time. They are above what we might logically expect them to be.”

“Dammit, this is a progressive institution,” the wrangler said with some wrath. “The attainment levels of the little inmates aren't as far above what we might logically expect as we might logically expect them to be. Something is hindering them a little, all except Karl and Emily.”

Karl Riproar wasn't mean. He wasn't mean at all. Just irresistibly active. The fact was that Karl was an absolutely normal boy through all his boyhood years. He liked everything that all normal and healthy boys like. He just liked those things to be faster and still faster, to be accelerated to their limit; and he liked a lot of them at the same time.

Karl was a physical as well as a mental marvel. He was a superb wrestler and boxer, and he excelled at every kind of ball, at every event of track and field, at horsemanship and shooting and fishing, at sailboating and swimming and tightrope walking, at snake-catching and calf-riding and cartooning, at tumbling and gymnastics and trapeze work, at woodcraft and fieldcraft, at cliff-climbing and building-climbing, at magic tricks and hypnotism, at microscopy and radio-building, at taxidermy (well, where did he get that twenty-two foot long alligator skin?), at playing the cornet and the harmonica and the musical saw, at ventriloquism and imitations, at building midget cars that would run, at the manufacture of stink-bombs and disappearing ink and itching powder and turnip whisky and dynamite from materials found around the kitchen and storeroom of any progressive institution, at sword-swallowing and juggling, at training fleas, at making fire balloons, at duding it up with the girls (it was his outstanding duding it up that won him the companionship of Emily Vortex, the fairest and most intelligent and most hyperactive and fastest in the metric mile of all the girls in that particular progressive institution), at making counterfeit money in the printing and engraving section of the ‘useful arts’ department, at making real money in the money market.

“There's an astonishing amount of angular momentum being consumed around here,” Wrangler Hoxie remarked one day at the institution. “All that angular momentum that is consumed has to come from somewhere. Well, where is it coming from? You are a smart boy, Riproar. Why don't you solve this problem?”

“As to myself, I have kept the problem solved,” Karl Riproar said with that certainty that young boys sometimes have. “That is to say that I have anticipated it and have not let it become a problem.”

“At nine years old you have it solved? Then you're the boy who's found the golden fleece, Karl.”

“It wasn't lost. It was there all the time, Wrangler Hoxie,” Karl said.

“And just when did you begin to solve this problem of energy and angular momentum, Karl?”

“When I had myself sent to this progressive institution. The fleece was here and waiting to be shorn.”

“But Karl, you were only eight days old when — ”

“Yes. It doesn't pay to let a problem get too big a start on you.”

Though Karl excelled at all things and did them with real passion, yet there were many who thought that he did them too rapidly, or that he did too many of them (eight to twelve of them, perhaps more) at the same time.

At field hockey he was the best goal tender in the progressive institution. Nay, he was the best in the whole history of that institution. Except when — 

 — when he was also on call as kicking specialist and punt return man in the football game in the cornering field, or as center fielder in the baseball game in the bordering field (well, deep center field in the one game was very near to the goal in the other, and Karl was very fast and he never missed a fly ball, nor the blocking of a goal-attempt either; but when he was at bat or on base there were complications), or as volleyball player on the adjacent court. (How Karl could jump to spike the ball down over the net! How he had to be on the fantastic rush even to be there to make those wonderful jumps!)

Ah, the memory of him running so swiftly from field to field, catching a fly that looked impossible to catch and pegging it home to nail the runner at the plate, thwarting a hockey goal with an incredible last minute arrival, making a simultaneous save and kill in the coffin corner of the volleyball court, swooping under a tumbling punt and returning it all the way back through the whole opposing team to score, all the while holding (and speed-reading) an open book in one hand and having that green (educational) and red (drama) earplug blaring into his head, and under his chin the microphone into which he was broadcasting continuously to some juvenile radio show! Ah, the memory of that!

And on the fly (always on the fly) making the moves on the scattered boards of the four simultaneous chess games he was playing. Karl Riproar was really something to watch! He was a completely natural and unspoiled boy, but he was so very accelerated about it all.

It was suggested that Karl might have done some of these things better if he did not do so many of them at the same time. This is false. Nobody could have done any of these things better than Karl did them (except, just possibly, running the metric mile). Learning always on the fly, he learned much more than any other inmate in the progressive institution did (except possibly Emily Vortex). There just could not be any better athlete or better student or gamesman or entertainer than Karl.

“You are the torpedo, that's what you are,” one of the other boys at the progressive institution said in admiration.

“We name you Lord Torpedo,” said another of those boys. “You comprehend it all.”

“Why should you call me Lord Torpedo?” Karl Riproar asked. “A torpedo is anything that is torpid, and I am not that. Or it is the torpedo fish which is so torpid that it hardly ever flicks a fin or does anything at all to break its smooth lines. Or it is a destructive weapon in the same smooth lines of that lazy fish, and there is nothing I want less than to be a destructive weapon.”

“We name you Lord Torpedo,” the kid repeated, “because you are so fast and so powerful, and because you never miss. And because you comprehend it all except your new name, which is too close to you for that.”

Karl could do everything better than any other inmate of the institution, could he? How about the metric mile foot race? There was a little bit of mystery about that. The title-holder in the metric mile was a girl, Emily Vortex. Oh, she was fast, she was very fast, but she was also tricky. But Karl Riproar finally challenged her for the title and they staged the gala race.

Emily (they called her Lady Atalanta) broke in front. She was very fast off the starting blocks. And she maintained a killing pace. But Karl gained on her and came almost up to her. Then she tossed the first of the apples, and how could Karl not swerve aside from anything that looked so good to eat? But Karl had foreseen this. He had made himself an apple-grapple, and he picked it up without breaking speed, and he ate it with a musical munching as he read the book he was carrying in his left hand and changed the station coming in on his left earplug.

Emily threw the second apple, and Karl grabbed it neatly with his apple-grapple, and now he was three strides ahead of her. She threw the third apple, and he swooped it in as neatly as he had the others, and now he was six strides ahead of her and going away. But as he bit into that third apple he came onto something more than juicy fruit. The thing exploded in his mouth, and it threw out a homing directional device. This was a bolo, leaded balls on the ends of rawhide ropes, and the bolo wrapped around Karl's ankles and threw him. And Emily went on to win the race and retain her title.

The bolo, in its second stage, hog-tied Karl with his hands behind him and his hands and feet together and him writhing helpless. Then Emily came back with a fourth apple and jammed it in Karl's mouth. Yeah, he was the trussed pig with the apple in his mouth, and Emily's triumph was complete.

But this did not put Karl's spirits down at all. Rather it elevated them, and now he acquired a special affection for this Emily Vortex.

Karl made fortunes in the stock market and on the various money exchanges.

“There are a lot of empty places in the money shuffle and they're just crying out to be filled up,” Karl said. Then he explained how he did it all:

“Inerrant prediction is the key,” he said. “But faulty prediction is worse than none at all. You must know where you are, have a stable axis, for accurate prediction. The gyroscope is the best of all prediction instruments since it is the only one with a stable axis. But if a person is himself a gyroscope, then he has all the predictions by their gyrating tails.”

This is the explanation of how he made fortunes in the money markets? Well, Karl did have what can only be called a high rate of rotation in all his activities, and in that sense he was a gyroscope. He was even called Lord Gyroscope by some of his fellow inmates in the progressive institution. This was from a take-off done on him in one of the gridiron entertainments at the institution.

“Are we going to have a crisis in energy sources around here?” Emily Vortex asked Karl Riproar one day. “I come from an older family than you do in this hyperactivity business and I know where to draw energy from. But is there enough for both of us? Are you hogging it? If there will only be enough for one of us, then I know which one it will be. Myself.”

“I hog it a little bit, Emily,” Karl said, “but there will be enough for us both until it is time for us to leave here. And for the time after then, I have plans. See my plans.” And he showed her his prospectus of things to come in this area.

“Not bad for starters,” Emily Vortex said. “Give them to me. I'll work them over and see if something really good can't be made out of them.”

2.

When he came to his fifteenth birthday and was officially of age, Karl Riproar did a number of quick things.

He funded and founded the Karl Riproar and Emily Vortex Simultaneous Arts Institution and Perpetual Memorial. He ordered construction to begin on it that very day.

He declared himself to be Ultra-Departmental Director of the city, using a little-known emergency provision by which he put the previous ultra-departmental director under citizen's arrest and replaced him.

He founded the Karl Riproar and Emily Vortex Sky's the Limit Speculation and Enjoyment Enterprises, which survives even to this day.

He married Emily Vortex.

Let us not have an inaccuracy creep into this account. He didn't marry her that day. It was the following day that they got married. Emily was one day younger than Karl and did not come of age till the following day. But their marrying was part of the number of quick things that they effected as soon as they could.

Karl legally changed his name to ‘Lord Torpedo Lord Gyroscope’. But on a practical basis he would still go by the name of Karl Riproar.

He founded the Imperial Compressed Music Company.

He bought the land for the Pleasant Meadows Home Development Project. He had construction on the homes begin at once, and also on his own manor house and gardens which would occupy the central portion of that area.

He gathered in funds from a number of annuities that he had set up to mature when he was fifteen years old. He shuffled those funds. He increased them amazingly. The money for their increase had to come from somewhere. Really it was a toll levied on all the money markets of the country. But it was one of those tricks that are done only once.

Anything else?

No, those were the main projects of Karl Riproar and Emily Vortex. They were set up then, and all working pieces were working. They could play endless and trick variations with these projects, but the basics were there from this first establishment.

So Karl Riproar waxed in years and size and strength and mentality and activity and angular velocity and momentum.

To describe the simultaneous developments and achievements and pleasures of Karl Riproar and Emily Vortex would require a talent for simultaneity equal to their own. So we will describe the course of Karl mostly. Their courses ran roughly parallel, but we understand Karl's better. Besides, we're scared of Emily. She's weird.

Karl Riproar, the boy and man who was so much in a hurry that he had to do as many as a dozen things at once, he now entered a timeless realm and regime in which there was no pressure at all but in which more things happened in more momentous and more massive fashion than ever before.

“This is like Heaven,” Karl said one day.

“Not quite,” said the usually more accurate Emily. “I calculate that the number of contacts in Heaven is two-and-a-half times what we're experiencing, that the angular momentum there is almost three times what we've achieved, and that the quantity of life there is nearly four times what we've reached here. But we're closing the gap, Karl, we're closing it.”

The quantity of life, that was it. If you hear people talk too much about the “quality of life” do not pay attention to them. The quality is always predicated on the quantity. The more life there is the better it is. The abundance of it is the whole thing. It cannot be rich and detailed if it isn't abundant.

Rich and detailed and abundant, that was a good description of their Imperial Compressed Music Company. Music solidifies at very high speed. You didn't know that? Three-hour-long works of limpid melody can be turned to ultra-high speed and then compressed and solidified into mere micro-seconds, into depth-moments of total enjoyment and no duration at all. These compressions can be enjoyed, one or ten or ten thousand of them, exquisite morsels for the sensually-educated elite.

This was strictly high fidelity stuff as Karl and Emily processed it. The morsels were complete and unabridged, every note and shading of the originals there, all of it for instantaneous enjoyment. Karl and Emily enjoyed such music, more than one could hear in a hundred lifetimes ordinarily, and they also marketed it at a high profit to the very wealthy.

And the Pleasant Meadows Home Development Project was an abundant success. This project provided three thousand homes on beautiful rolling foothills, for persons of the intellectual and aesthetic elites. This became a super-intellectual community such as has not been seen since Florence, since Tara, since Athens. There was cross-fertilizing vigor and power there; there was the high stimulus of art and drama and literature and all the winged sciences. And the financial arrangements were so favorable to the people that those selected simply could not afford to pass the project up. “To those who have much, much will be given” was the slogan of the project, and it worked.

Most of the three thousand homes were filled with the very young and the very promising elements of the cream of the cream. Many of them moved on after a year or two or three, and their places were always taken by others even more promising and more select. Some of the people sickened and died, but the genius people have always had a proclivity towards early deaths. No matter, there were always fresh faces and fresh minds and really sparkling people arriving every day. And Karl and Emily lived in the middle of them, in the manor house on the top of Torpedo Mountain to which all the surrounding country was foothills.

Karl and Emily had a good thing going in the Pleasant Meadows Home Development Project. If you are as canny as they were, and you develop and sell three thousand homes, then you make fortunes out of them, even if you give not-to-be-refused deals. And if, for some reason, there is a high turnover in home ownership there, and you keep surety strings on the properties, then you can make those fortunes over and over again every two or three or four years.

And all the while there is the pleasure of the stimulating company of that large and talented neighboring group. And that brilliant neighborhood group had the pleasure of the acquaintance of what was, perhaps, the most gyroscopic couple in the world.

As to themselves, Karl and Emily were so well attuned that the disagreements between them were few and small. One of those disagreements (a disagreement over no more than ten seconds time) had to do with their own intimate congresses. Karl thought that twenty seconds each time was long enough for such event. “That is, after all, one hundred and thirty billion times as long as it took for the ‘big bang’ that produced the universe,” Karl said reasonably, “and we do it eight times a night, and twelve times on Wednesdays and Saturdays. And we do only a very few other things while we are doing it. Really, can we reasonably give more than twenty seconds to it each time?”

Emily thought that they should take at least thirty seconds to it, but she had to admit that there was almost total pleasure and realization in those twenty-second encounters of theirs. They would wake or half-wake from the multi-level, rich, and detailed dreams that such gyroscopic people have (each of them could dream from eight to twelve dreams at the same time); they would hold their magic congress (doing only a very few other things while they were enjoying the twenty seconds of it); and then they would plunge back into their high-frequency and variegated sleep again.

Their usual night congresses followed (according to Karl's dream regime; we don't know Emily's) these dream cycles, which would take their names from the dominant dream motif of each group:

The Alpha-Orlando Dream sequence.

The nightly episode of the Green Ocean Dream Serial.

The First Genovese Dream Experience.

The “Aemilia of the Ten Thousand Eyes” dream encounter.

The apprehensive “Don't Push That Button, Dammit, That Button Blows Up the World” nightmare.

The Second Genovese Dream Experience.

Karl's Signature Dream, the “Falling Through Rotting Space” nightmare.

The “Hofstadter Passion” dream sequence.

So you can see that their happy carnal encounters, following this evenly spaced schedule of dream, would be pretty well strewn out through the night.

“I wonder if poor people ever dream?” Emily speculated once.

But, for them, every night and day, every hour and every minute (by quintessential third-powering they could have as many as 216,000 minutes in every hour) was crammed and overflowing with pleasure and fulfillment.

And it went on that way for many happy years.

“Wrangler Hoxie, back at the progressive institution, used to wonder about the astonishing consumption of angular momentum in our vicinity,” Karl Riproar the Lord Torpedo and Lord Gyroscope said one day. “He said that all that angular momentum had to come from somewhere.”

“Whatever made you think of that?” Emily asked with her smiles (she could smile as many as twelve different smiles at one time). “It wasn't the Chairman of the Environmental Quality Board who is puffing up the incline to our front door?”

“Yes,” Lord Karl said. “He is wondering about the same old questions. Have we been shearing our sheep too closely, do you suppose?”

“Oh yes, we have. There should have been enough of them to keep both of us. But, Karl, we have increased our consumption of everything so very much as the years go by.”

The Chairman of the Environmental Quality Board came in and talked to them for ten minutes. For ten minutes! Why that was almost the equivalent of ten days experience the way they usually compressed it. And they had to slow down to voice speed to carry on the talk with him.

“The attainment levels of the three thousand genius families in the ‘Pleasant Meadows Home Development Project’ aren't as high as they should be,” the Chairman of the Environmental Board said in a guarded voice.

“They are higher than for any other group of equal numbers in the world,” Emily told him. “Best in the world isn't bad.” Emily was luxuriating her bare feet on the floor before her. She was receiving through the soles of her feet. There were elite soles-of-the-feet broadcast and reception programs for persons of extraordinarily fine sensibilities. There were two such programs, and Emily was enjoying one with each foot.

“Yes, the attainment levels of the people in the Pleasant Meadows Project are higher than any group anywhere else,” the board chairman agreed. “And yes, it is higher than we could logically expect it to be. But — ”

“But is it as high above what you might logically expect as you might logically expect it to be?” Emily asked. “Is that your question?”

“Yes. Considering your own unique elevating influence, that is my question,” the board chairman said challengingly.

“A thing that big is hard to hide forever,” said Karl Riproar the Lord of Torpedo and Gyroscope.

Then the three of them looked at each other for a while.

“Where does all that personal and psychic energy, all that angular momentum come from?” the board chairman asked. “You consume colossal amounts of it.”

“Oh, it comes from the sheep,” Karl said, “from the pleasant genius sheep of Pleasant Meadows. We shear them but we do not butcher them. Why were you not afraid to come here alone?”

“I'm not alone. I have backup,” the board chairman said. “But I'm not afraid because when you do kill (and I suppose that it is accidental when you do it) you kill very slowly. It takes about three years for it to happen. But I intend to settle you two in about three minutes. I have only to blow this whistle that I wear around my neck. There is no way you can prevent me blowing it. And it is tuned — ”

“I know what it is tuned to,” Karl Riproar said, “and I know that we can't prevent it blowing, since it will blow of itself.” Then the whistle did begin to blow, apparently by itself. It did not blow an alarm though. It blew a pleasant little tune that went out over the æther. Why should the pleasant little tune, or the whistle blowing by itself, have frightened the board chairman? Oh, because he didn't expect anything like that, and he didn't know what was going on.

The board chairman held the whistle in his hands now, and still it blew by itself. The board chairman turned white, and he pulled the whistle from around his neck and flung it across the room.

“My you are nervous!” Emily smiled to the board chairman. The whistle still blew of itself on the floor across the room. And the burden of its message was “All clear. No difficulty. You can go now.” That was the message that the whistle sent out over the æther. And backup vehicles fifty meters away were seen and heard to leave.

“How?” the board chairman croaked.

“Simple ventriloquism,” Karl said. “Were you never young and tricky? A childhood hobby of mine. I could make pianos and violins seem to play by themselves, seem to play quite well too. And, as ‘Ultra-Departmental Director’ of the region for life, I am the one who has set up all codes and signals.”

“You are vampires,” the board chairman said. “The energy consumed by your dazzling simultaneities comes from the blood of others.”

“Not from blood, from ichor,” Karl Riproar said.

“And ‘vampire’ is a crass word used only by crass people,” Emily smiled. And they both were doing many other things at the same time and not paying very much attention to that board chairman or his investigation of them.

“You suck blood, or you suck ichor-energy,” the board chairman said bitterly. “You are judged and condemned.”

“You cannot judge us. We are special cases,” Emily said, and she took a dozen compressed music morsels and went dreamy-eyed on them.

“So all the vampires have always said, that they were special cases,” the chairman remarked. “And are you both of old vampire families?”

“I don't know. I don't think there's any such thing,” Karl said. “Both my parents were torpedo-manufacturers.” And Karl was doing a piece of hot-stone sculpture, holding the anode in his left hand, and speed-reading a mathematics text that he held in his right hand.

“How do you think a creature feels to have the juice and the very life of him sucked out?” the board chairman asked belligerently.

“Like you feel,” Karl said.

“As you feel now,” Emily smiled. “As you begin to feel now.”

“I begin to feel giddy,” the board chairman said. “But it won't be — all at one time?”

“There are some that we can't draw just a little bit of juice from and leave,” Emily said, “because a little bit is all that they have in them. Oh yes, I code-dialed a doctor for you, but he will be too late. A strange case, so we will have to report it; that you were irrational when you came here, and that you just weakened and died.”

Karl and Emily did a number of pleasant things (ten or twelve of them at the same time) as they waited for the doctor's lorry to pick up the Chairman of the Environmental Quality Board. Lord Karl put a plug in his left nostril and tuned its direction and amplification to pick up the wonderful aroma of sweet clover in Pleasant Meadows. He inhaled and enjoyed, and by doing so he consumed all the energy and pleasure potential that was in the board chairman, who thereupon expired.

Slippery

“Roy, I got a super-glycerine mist with species-juice added that's the slickest thing in the world,” Austro said.

“How slick, Austro?” Roy Mega asked him.

“You remember traction, Roy? You remember friction? You'd better remember them because they might not be around much longer. Roy, this stuff is slick!”

Austro had just invented slippery-gip, a mist that would cling to anything it was targeted for and make that thing absolutely slippery. Austro's inventions hadn't been very good lately, but slippery-gip was good.

“I wish I'd thought of that,” Roy complained with sour humor as he stood carefully in his shoes and held onto secure pieces of furniture.

“You haven't thought of it yet,” Austro chortled. “You can't half see it even now. Mine is the only mind that's slippery enough to come up with slippery-gip.”

Austro cast a small cloud of the mist at Roy's feet, and Roy turned three complete cartwheels and went down resoundingly as his own patented no-slip shoes flew out from under him.

“Damn your monkey-face, Austro!” he howled as he hit.

Roy Mega was a young electronic genius of the species sapiens.

Austro was a young general-purpose genius of the species australopithecus. Despite their being of different species they were friends.

“There's nothing for you to patent though, Austro,” Roy said. “You can't patent a chemical formula.”

“You're guessing. Slippery-gip may not even have a formula. It sure is slippery, isn't it? You can't get up, can you?”

No, there was no way that Roy Mega could get up from the slippery floor even though it was covered with thick-piled carpet that you wouldn't ordinarily think of as slippery. Possibly one could sit on the floor, if he were very careful, if he had an exquisite sense of balance, and if he didn't try to move. But Roy thrashed around, and he ended up supine on the floor.

“Why doesn't it affect you, Austro? Because you're barefooted?”

“No. You're barefooted too now, Roy. Didn't you notice that your no-slip shoes had slipped clear off your feet, and your socks too? But I am the master of the slipperies, and they will leave me alone. You can get up now, Roy.”

“I can? Yeah, I can, can't I?” He got up. “How did you turn it off, Austro?”

“By being master of the slipperies. Roy, you have a bunch of friends who are jokers. I bet they sure could have fun with slippery-gip for a while. They could get it talked about.”

“What will you finally do with your slick ideas, Austro?”

“I can organize the ‘Super-Slick Industries’ and sell stock and get rich that way. Or I can blackmail the whole world with the slippery menace. In moral dilemmas like this I always ask myself what Monkey-Face Muldoon would do. And the answer is ‘He'd blackmail the world every time.’ ”

“But, Austro, Monkey-Face Muldoon is only a character you made up in your Rocky McCrocky comic strip.”

“No, no, much more than that, Roy. He's the Monkey Inside.”

Well, how slippery can things get? Slippery-gip mist, when it settled one molecule thick on a surface, created an entirely new concept of slipperiness. Things you never thought of doing it slid. Listen, clothes slid off people while they stood or walked. Stones slid out of unmortared walls, and they continue to slide like blocks of ice on icy surfaces. Paint slid right off of walls. It was held there mostly by friction anyhow, and friction was finished now. Cars, whether parked or moving, slid off the high streets onto lower streets. There was no such thing as traction where slippery-gip had touched; there was no such thing as friction. A person could keep his position only by holding onto something stationary, and you'd be surprised how many things lost their stationary quality in the face of the new slipperiness. And almost all ‘holding on’ involves friction, and friction was no more. Austro dispensed Roy Mega and his joker friends from the slippery effects by laying his hands on their heads. They called him ‘The Bishop’ when he did that, but just what did he do?

“It is my species juice,” Austro said. “I let a little of it flow from me to you. Then you are only as slippery as it will profit you to be!”

Well, would you tell the secret of as good a trick as that?

Roy's jokers got little whiffs of the stuff into houses and business places and public areas. And then they'd wait for what might happen. All the litter on a coffee table in a house would slide off onto the floor, and it would continue to slide to the lowest part of the house, or it would slide right out of the house if it could find a way out. Dishes would slide out of their cabinets. Spreads would slide off of beds, and sheets would follow. And so would the people slide out if they were in any of the beds. Drawers would slide out of bureaus. Nothing was perfectly level, and everything would slide in some direction or other. A house might very well slide right off its foundations, rupturing all its piping and wiring as it went. And do you know how much machinery, even household machinery, works by friction drive? Well, it wouldn't work now.

Sometimes people would tumble out of a house and swear that the house was haunted. The clothes would have slipped off of most of the people. Sweet reason would have slipped off of all of them.

And there were unexpected sorrows and sufferings. Listen, did you ever play cards under the condition of total slipperiness? A neat pile of cards is sitting there waiting to be dealt. And then that neat pile comes apart and slides off in fifty-two different directions. And you can hardly hold the cards in your hand. Well, you can't do it! There they go! Without friction, you just play hob holding anything at all. It all squirts out and slides away. Even money, whether paper or coin, just plain slides off the table. Then it slides off the floor too. The people slide off their chairs, and the chairs and tables slide right out of the room and out of the house. Gentlemen, you just can't play cards under those conditions!

Supermarkets are good; there's so many things piled up there just waiting to slide off. All offices are good. No paper will stay on any desk under conditions of maximum slipperiness. Restaurants are good. Aw, every place is good. Every place is a barrel full of monkeys. No, no those monkeys would slide right out of the barrel while it was sliding down a street somewhere.

In the streets, no traffic could move except what was sliding out of control. A car could not be driven, not on streets that were like super-slick ice and would give no traction at all.

After dark, people began to crawl to that little workshop of Austro and Roy Mega. They came by intuition to that source of troubles, or else they just slipped and slid there because it was the lowest part of town. They pled hardship cases and they begged for mercy. And Austro would put his hands on their heads and let a little of the special species-juice flow from himself to them.

Roofers had had to knock off work that day. Well, how many times do you have to slide off a roof to get the idea? There were mothers of babies that squirted right out of their arms and then along the floors and streets. That's hard on little babies.

About midnight, Barnaby Sheen clumped down to the little workshop of Austro and Roy Mega. Well, both the young geniuses worked for Barnaby Sheen.

“Ah there, old mule-skinner, what is amiss?” Austro asked with nervous heartiness. “Is it making any real noise in the world yet, Mr. Sheen? Is it having real effect?”

“Austro, the effect has reached ‘G’ on the world-is-coming-to-an-end scale,” Barnaby said ponderously. “That means that there will be a very-high-ranking officer, a ‘G’ officer, here in just a bit. It's only super-glycerine with some targeting substance added to it, isn't it, Austro?”

“Yeah, with a targeting juice added, but I'll say no more about that.”

“Yes you will too, Austro. What targeting juice?”

“Aw, it's people-juice, Mr. Sheen,” Austro said nervously.

“People is the last ones I'd have suspected. Why should you have sicced this ravening, slickness monster onto people, Austro?”

“Who's as well-heeled as people? How are you going to blackmail dogs or trees or insects or things like that? What would they pay off with?”

“Well, back it off for a couple of hours, boys,” Barnaby ordered. “Let's have no more harassment till the ‘G’ Grade General gets here and we see how much damage has been done.”

“How come you don't slip and slide and fall down like the rest of the people do, Mr. Sheen?” Austro asked, worried.

“Because I'm smarter than you are,” Barnaby Sheen said.

In our town, ‘G’-rated General Gamaliel knew in what pond to look for strange fish. He knew that in every town, which is why he had become ‘G’-rated General. The strange fish would be somewhere around Barnaby Sheen's establishment. And that was his first stop in checking out the latest ‘The-World-Is-Coming-To-An-End’ threat. While he was still in the air, he phoned Barnaby to have breakfast ready for him, and to have all the fishy suspects present at that breakfast also. So Barnaby had Austro and Roy Mega and one of Roy's joker friends Oliver Clatter.

This General Gamaliel was pleasantly pompous, and he didn't break stride or lose pomposity easily, not when he sat down to the breakfast table with his three important aides General-Doctor Halefellow, General-Prosecutor Sam Hotspur, and General-Projectman Anthony Longarm. He didn't lose his pomposity when he slipped off his chair and almost slipped off the floor either. He took a firm position, spread-eagled on his back, and with his feet braced against the two walls of the lowest corner of the room.

“Oh yes,” he said genially. “You made me a special target of the phenomenon so I could experience it at first hand, or first rump. Thoughtful of somebody. The world is in no danger of this thing. I tell you though, there's a hairy-faced kid who's in danger.”

“Oh, the world is in danger, General,” Austro said, “and I will blackmail the whole world with that danger. I will let the world go slide, and it will ruin itself. Be a good guy, General, and talk the world into buying me off.”

“You look bad, Austro,” the General said. “That pallor of yours may be a symptom of something fatal. But I don't take your threat too seriously. Some people are having fun with your trick. Scoobie-doobie dancers are turning as many as thirteen complete cartwheels in the air when they hit a good slick spot.”

“It's slippery, General, slippery,” Austro said modestly.

“What have you targeted it onto, Austro? People? Austro, you do look bad this morning. A doctor's examination is in order for you and could save your life. People, and the things handled by people, that's what the slippery mist will work on, the whole human ambient. Austro, if I looked as bad as you do, I'd want a doctor.”

“At least I'm not flat on my back. You wouldn't try to trick me, General?”

“Would I have the temerity to try to trick a super-trickster like you?”

“No, I guess not,” Austro admitted.

“Is everybody in the mood for a little fun?” asked that joker Oliver Clatter. It was already old stuff, of course, when the three important aides of General Gamaliel slipped out of their chairs and fell heavily to the floor, and then kept on slipping and sliding. And they slipped out of their clothes too. Ah yes, sheets of paper began to slide out of attaché cases and portfolios, the important sheets of paper that aides to generals carry around with them.

“Are you watching, General?” Austro asked. “Writing and typing are sliding off of those sheets of paper. Marks on paper are mostly held on by friction, and my thing abolishes friction. There will be a big payoff, or I will let the whole world slide over its own edge.”

“Austro, my boy, I worry about you,” the General said. “You look terrible. You need a doctor. And fortunately we have one here.”

“All right, but no tricks,” Austro said. He placed his hands on the General-Doctor's head and let a little species-juice flow into him. That person was then able to rise from the floor, retrieve his sliding satchel, and begin to run tests on Austro. He took blood and serum and various other fluids out of him. “We will soon have you bright-eyed and chipper again, Austro,” General-Doctor Halefellow said.

“Right, bright-eyed and chipper,” Austro agreed. “Take the samples from me and make cures for me. But don't try to trick the super-trickster. And the fun can still go on while you're fixing me up.”

“Several can play this game, Austro,” General Gamaliel warned.

“But I'm the only one who can win it,” Austro said. “I made the rules.”

“Just where do you come from, Austro?” the floor-bound General Gamaliel asked.

“From the Guna Slopes of Africa,” Austro said, “but you won't trick me into telling you exactly what part of them.”

“We know exactly what part of them,” General Gamaliel said. “We've had a locator tracking backwards on you for the last ten minutes.”

General-Doctor Halefellow had taken all the samples he needed from Austro. He went to the door and gave the vials to somebody. And that somebody made the sound of a quick departure.

“How long will it be till you cure me?” Austro asked.

“About nine thousand miles, a little less than an hour,” Doctor Halefellow said. “We'll do it as quickly as we can. There's a little chemical laboratory on the plane, and they can put the essential juice together long before they arrive there. And they have spraying attachments on the plane. Your cure'll start in about an hour.”

“And how long will it take then?”

“Austro, your cure will be almost instantaneous,” G-Grade General Gamaliel said with a note of happy menace in his voice.

Meanwhile the fun went on in that breakfast room at Barnaby Sheen's. Woop, woop, woop, the wooden interior of the building was held together mostly by nails, and it is by friction that the nails hold so tightly into wood. Woop, woop, woop, things were coming apart pretty rapidly in that room. Water was flowing from faucets in that room and in many others. After all, the slightest water pressure will back off a faucet when it has no friction to sustain its position, and the water flows so much more powerfully through the pipes when it has no friction to slow it down. Yeah, gas was coming through a lot of apertures by the same token. It could be an explosive situation.

“Did you ever wonder what might happen to the mantle of the world when the strata start to slip and slide?” Austro asked the Generals. “It would be just like sheets of paper sliding or playing cards sliding. There is no stratum so perfectly balanced that it will not slide in one of several directions when all friction is nullified. Generals of the Military, we are talking about miles and miles of thickness that might be slipping and sliding and squirting massive globs of earth out between them.”

Outside in the town, morning jokers were going about their slippery joker business. Bodies slid off mortuary slabs and kept right on sliding, down steps, out of buildings, down streets, as if they still had a dogged notion of their own.

“Why do you pick on people, Austro?” General Gamaliel asked. He was a little tired from being spread-eagled on the floor. “Don't you like people?”

“Sure, I like them the second best of all,” Austro said. “You might well remember that in people the cortex is fastened to the cerebellum by friction alone. In just a little while, in all of you, it will slip off as its friction fails, and you will all go mad. G-Grade General Gamaliel, you had better recommend that the world start paying off.”

“It couldn't happen,” General-Doctor Halefellow said. “This little ape-face is having fun with us.” But something was going to pop in just a minute. Those who have not lived under conditions of total slipperiness don't know what pressures can be built up. Something had to pop.

Something popped.

Well, it didn't pop there exactly, but its effect was felt there. It popped a few thousand miles away, on the other side of the world, on the Guna Slopes of Africa. Yeah, it had taken about an hour.

“Oh, Oh, Oh, I'm having visions, awful visions!” Austro cried out. “Don't let it happen to them! Don't let it happen!”

On the Guna Slopes of Africa, a middle-aged Australopithecus slipped on the rocks and fell very hard. He had heard a plane overhead, and he felt a slight mist and a sense of something wrong. He had taken falls on the rocks all his life, but not such violent or brainless ones as that. He thought about it as he sat among the flints. He scratched his brindled, hairy jaw, and he fell even flatter. Then he began to slip and slide down the mile-long slopes.

And back in Barnaby Sheen's breakfast room, a twelve-year-old (going on thirteen) Australopithecus felt a horrible apprehension and threat, for all Australopithecines are connected in one empathic web. The young Austro felt the fear and apprehension and disorientation of his elder kinsman more than he would have felt his own.

“Don't do it to him!” Austro cried out. “He's one of ours!”

“And the people who have been distracted by your slippery tricks for so many hours are ours!” General Gamaliel barked.

“No, no, the whole slope will go!” Austro cried, “nine thousand feet of slopes!” On the slopes, ninety-seven other Australopithecines took sudden and simultaneous pratfalls. (This accounted for all the rest of them; there were only ninety-nine Australopithecines in the world.) Those falls hurt them. They have less cushy prats than have people. They slipped and they slipped, and interior cogs in them slipped also. Now both their feet and their wits flew out from under them.

“No, no, no!” Austro howled. “Stop it! Don't hurt them!”

“We will make some deals, Austro,” said the G-General. “Then we'll stop it.”

“It's blackmail!” Austro wailed. “There's nothing lower than blackmail.”

A Major on G-General Gamaliel's staff came in and sprayed a bit of a third juice, and that released all the floor prisoners from their spell. The major sprayed another whiff of the stuff and Austro turned eleven complete cartwheels in the door and fell flat on his face.

“For every dote there is an antidote, Austro,” General Gamaliel said. “Your cure is going on right now. Kid, you'd better get cured fast. We can think of a lot of tricks too, you know. Australopithecus hair is coarser and looser than people hair, and I believe that nine out of ten of your hairs are held in their follicles by friction alone. How would you like to be called ‘Baldy’, Austro?”

“It's dirty blackmail, but I give up,” Austro said. “I've learned my lesson.” So they sprayed a bit of a new mist and released him from the slipperiness syndrome.

“I've learned that blackmail is crude,” Austro said. “I've learned that safe-and-sure, blue-sky promotion is the best. Invest in super-glycerines. The publicity will have done wonders for this newest of industries. Gentlemen, there is a great slipperiness in your future! The super-slick things that can be done are almost without limit. But not just any super-glycerine. Invest in ‘Austro's Super-Slick Industries’. Stock shares will be printed within the hour.”

“And who controls ‘Austro's Super-Slick Industries’?” General Gamaliel asked.

“I do!” Austro crowed, “and I'm selling stock, now, for a limited time only — ”

Bang! Austro did no less than fifteen complete cartwheels in the air, and really landed flat on his face.

“What happened?” he demanded. “I gave up once.”

“It must have been a carry-over effect,” General Gamaliel said. And Austro was up again.

“I am extending my special get-rich-quick offer to a limited number of very slick individuals,” Austro was saying. “For anyone who can lay out ten thousand dollars in the next ten minutes, we offer membership in a special stock-owning group. Be super-slick, be super-rich, be — ”

Bang! Austro turned no less than seventeen complete cartwheels in the air, and you wouldn't believe how flat on his face he landed!

“What happened?” Austro wailed. “Oh wow wow wow, what happened?”

“There must have been a little bit of the stuff left in the sprayer,” Barnaby Sheen said.

Dig A Crooked Hole

I'm Peter McGuire, the crooked-well driller, as my grandfather and my father were before me. I am really the best in the world at crooked wells, crooked shafts, and crooked holes generally.

Transmission! Transmission! If the toppled president and his thirty top brains can hear me, I say: Get smart, get spacious, soak it up! There will never be such a good opportunity for you to get smart. With thirty-one of you in that little room I bet it does get crowded though. Not only are you right on top of the most concentrated and nourishing of strata, but I am pumping very rich slurry into you all the time. Are you ever in the middle of it!

The only answer to my transmission that I get is like a sort of underground or underwater screaming. I guess when things get that concentrated and enlivening, people just scream for the overflowing sensation of it all. It's a little bit like the business of crying for joy.

I'm in a hurry, and it's pretty windy and dangerous up here, but I'd better start this account at the beginning:

In the year 1893, Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer published a paper, Interception of the Emanations from Underground Nourishing Strata as a Cause for Hysterical Phenomena. This paper was the beginning of modern analytical psychology.

In the same year, Ambrose Gwinett Bierce wrote The Well-Digger's Daughter. This was the beginning of modern analytical science fiction.

And again in the same year, J. E. McGuire founded his Crooked Hole Drilling Company which marked the beginning of modern analytical well-drilling and shafting.

All these gentlemen had discovered the same thing at the same time; that psychic accumulations obey the same rules as do material substances, that they have real location in real space, and that they can be handled and moved like physical things. This applies especially to that accumulation known as The Collective Unconscious. (The real location in real space of the Collective Unconscious was directly underfoot.)

The alienation of modern man began with persons living in many-storied flats and high-rise dwellings. The upper-floor persons, who were often upper-class persons also, were cut off from the close interplay and flux of certain earth-deposits. The people who lived on the lower floors got the emanations first and to the fullest extent. This situation led to insufferable arrogance and grubbiness and maladjustment on the part of the upper-floor dwellers.

The Crooked-Hole Drilling Company founded by my grandfather gave the upper-floor people access to the psychic accumulations that were so necessary to their health and balance. Yes, they were material fluids and solids that my grandfather pumped out of those psychic strata with his crooked-hole equipment, and they are material substances that I pump. They don't look like it though.

Besides being a well-driller, my grandfather, who originated the family motto “We have only begun to fight”, was a pigeon-fancier from his youth. He was a personal friend of almost every pigeon in town.

“Why do you fool with the feathered buggers?” my father had asked my grandfather once. “What good can they do you?”

“You never know,” my grandfather said. “A crooked-hole man can't have friends in too many places.”

My grandfather was always leery of conspirators.

“They will take us over, they will take us over,” he said. “I can find out what they're thinking and planning, by crooked-hole drilling techniques, but they'll take us over anyhow. The reason they are so smart is that they do most of their living and conspiring in cellars, right over the enlivening stuff itself.”

The human personality is in good case when it is above and within the immediate influence of its own residue and that of as many other persons as possible. And it is in bad case when it is cut off from that influence and permeation. And personalities who live on upper floors are cut off from the emanations. They should be our prime customers.

The first devices of my Grandfather McGuire in the Crooked Hole Drilling Company had to be taken pretty much on faith. They were like spiral dowsing rods, but they did permit dwellers on upper floors to bypass the lower parts of the structures that had been blocking them off. They did permit people anywhere to draw directly from the psychic pools. These earliest devices of my grandfather had little to be said in their favor, except that they worked.

The Collective Unconscious is all one, of course, just as all the waters of the Earth are one. And those ghost-fish called the archetypes are to be found repeating themselves all through it. And yet they do change, slowly but relentlessly: and possibly the Crooked Hole Drilling Company has had much to do with their recent changes.

There has always been a strange ‘Arrogant History’ of persons living in Palaces, Castles, Manor Houses, and large Town Houses, with their servants living below stairs and themselves living above. Those top-floor masters feed on the brains of those below them, as vampires or vultures feed, but they do not feed on the balanced psychic broth that is below all of them. So the masters on their high levels become arrogant, and they are well-nourished only in their ruddiness: but they lack balance and compassion. These are the people who go out to found cruel empires, while their own acres and retainers go to rot.

My father had a lot of trouble with the bunko squad boys, just as my grandfather had had. My father used long swivel-augers, flexible-shaft drills, and asymmetric dynamite charges to dig physically crooked holes. But he came to the enlivening substance in a more real manner, and he was able to collect richer fees. People will pay more for something they can see than for something they can't.

My father had an arrangement by which he would select a plush apartment complex and pump its psychic underlay almost completely dry. This would send all the well-heeled tenants into total psychosis. And the friendly psychoanalyst would already have saturated the place with his handbills. And he and my father would split fees.

Besides being a well-driller, my father, who had added the crest to the family motto “We have only begun to fight”, had become a pigeon-fancier in his late youth. He was the personal friend of all the leading pigeons in town.

“Why do you fool with the red-footed bums?” I had asked my father once. “What good can they do you?”

“You never know,” my father said. “Something might turn up someday when you will need pigeons for friends.”

And my father was always leery of the conspirators.

“Oh sure, they'll take us over,” he used to say. “But do we have to stay took? You think about it, boy. It may come down to you.”

I had been worried about our president, and about all our top officials for some time. They haven't any depth, and they will not live in places that can give them depth. They all belong to the penthouse crowd. Even the White House has a tower and a penthouse on top of it now. I try to tell the president and his officials to live in cellars, or over old crowded graveyards, or anywhere where many people have lived and died and left psychic residues. I try to tell them that, failing such residence, they should avail themselves of my crooked-hole drilling techniques to bring the psychic equivalents to them. But I can hardly get to talk to our higher officials because of interferences from Secret Service persons and other bunko squad types.

Where our art has gone wrong in the last century is in our artists living and working in attics and garrets. By the floors below them, they are cut off from their own unconsciousnesses and from the collective unconscious. So they will be arrogant, they will be brilliant, they will be pleasantly phony. And they will not be able to draw a good line or tip a good color, because the gift for these things comes from out of the unconscious. That is the bankruptcy of our art.

I have tapped, by crooked-hole pumping device, the well of underthoughts and plotting of the main group of the conspirators, and I have presented it to the Federal Authorities in twenty-seven one-liter jars.

“What is this slimy pond-water for? What do you expect us to do with it?” one of those Federal men asked me, and his face was curled with distaste.

“That is the evidence,” I said. “It is the slimy evidence of the slimy coup that the conspirators are plotting. To emphasize the importance of it, and to make it apparent to the senses, I have given it visibility and weight and aroma. But I have not altered it in any other way. It is the incontrovertible evidence, sound and complete. Now that I have given you the evidence, taken by my own techniques from the under-mind deposits of the conspirators themselves, I imagine that you will proceed with the raids and arrests at once.”

“And just what is this rotten water — say, look at the little bitty minnows swimming around in the green stuff! — supposed to be guilty of?” another Federal man asked.

“It is, as you can plainly see if you analyze it, guilty of plotting the overthrow of our government and the toppling of the president and his thirty top brains,” I said. “It is a veritable coup that the conspirators are plotting. And I have all the wet evidence right here. Neat, huh?”

“Neat,” said another of the Federal men. “And the little minnows swimming in it, what part do they have?”

“Oh, to analytical eyes, those minnows are the minute details,” I said. “Analyze them, and you will find all the evidence is there. But I am not sure that you gentlemen understand the psychology of the situation.”

“Enough,” several of them said. “We understand the psychology of this enough.” They clamped big hands on my shoulders. And that, for a while, was that.

These bunko men of the Federal persuasion had me in the Bug, the Asilo Santa Eliza, for a while there. This is a large institution in our nation's capital. They pointed out that I was a lone man of sudden comings and goings and that no one knew that I was in Washington. “We can blot you out,” they said, “and we will not have to give any account of you at all.” That was one approach they used.

Then, with their sweet reason approach, they tried to uncover some secret trickery in me. But they couldn't find it, for there was no such thing. They simply do not believe any true account of my drilling wells and mine-shafts into the collective unconscious and extracting great globs of those riches.

“If there are such wells and shafts, why can't we see them?” they asked like simpletons.

“Because they are not such things as persons see with their eyes,” I told them.

“If your wells and shafts cannot be seen, then they are not real,” they say.

“How real and how material is my hole?” I banter them. “But the substances that I take out of those holes are real. Maybe you can't see them, but they're real.”

“What did you really make your fortune from?” they asked me. “And why are your victims so reluctant to talk about it? Is it blackmail? Is it simple conmanship? Where do you hide those millions when we try to get a closer and more authentic look at them?”

“I made my fortune out of the Crooked Hole Drilling Company,” I said. “And when unauthorized persons try to get too close a look at it, I hide it in a crooked hole again.”

They held me there in the Bug for three days and three nights.

“Is there any way we can make your durance here a little less vile?” one of them asked me.

“My lungs demand that I be placed in the highest apartment of this institution,” I said, thinking fast. “In no case should I be placed near the ground, and surely not below the ground. The emanations from the dank earth cause me great suffering.”

So they put me in the lowest and smallest cell of the Bug, clear underground. It had worked, and I was happy with it. They told me that this small underground cell was not even on the plans of the Bug. I could be well and conveniently forgotten in it. I have never been so happy with a situation in my life.

And I knew, with my new intuitions and communications, that several members of the conspiracy were detained in the Bug. I got stuff from their dripping minds. I knew that it was psychologically impossible that this conspiracy should not succeed.

Impossible for a little while, that is. But, as to further issue of it, as to how long its success might endure, that could depend on me and on just what sort of crooked-hole arrangements I was able to make. After three days and nights, I was released from the Bug, greatly refreshed and invigorated by my stay. I never felt smarter.

As for coming events, I must be careful not to blow them. I must insinuate an idea into a group of minds, the idea that the little underground cell would be a good place to put the overthrown president and his men. It would make them smart, and there is nothing like having smart leaders.

Light Minded Magazine has named me to the list of the Top Ten Quacks in America. I made its top twenty last year, so I am moving up rapidly. Light Minded Magazine, however, is sometimes a little bit heavy-handed with its awards. The irony of it is that Robert Swing, the boy wonder of Light Minded, was a client of mine for a long time. He says that I filled him too full, that I gave him mental indigestion. The trouble with Robert Swing is that his eyes are bigger than his head. Now he is using the diluted products of an imitator of mine, a real quack.

I know exactly when the coup will take place — in one month and a day.

One month and a day later, the coup did come, suddenly. Except for those who were in on it, it surprised everybody except myself. I had been conditioning the conspirators by my crooked-hole techniques, so they did not kill the thirty-one toppled leaders of our country. Instead of that, they jammed them into a little-known underground cell in an institution known as the Bug, a cell that hadn't room for nearly that many persons. This is just what I had been working for.

Oh sure, those toppled leaders will suffer, and most of them will die there. But whoever is left over will get mighty smart, for that is a particularly favored place. And I have crooked holes drilled into it and will continue to pump psychic stuff in. Things will get so ripe there that I look for some sort of explosion any moment. As each one dies his psychic talents will accrue to the survivors. The last one of them alive will get so smart that you would hardly believe it. A man that smart might even find a way out.

And then there was a tedious intrusion on my personal life. The conspirators arrested me, me, Peter McGuire, on trumped-up charges and ridiculous evidence. And they convicted me in a trial that was an absolute farce. Do you know what they offered in evidence against me?

Nine one-liter jars of noisome green swill, that's what. And they said that the swill was the verbatim record of my own secret treasonable thoughts. The conspirator who sat as judge on my case was one of those Federal men to whom I had presented my original evidence against the conspiracy. But this swill that they offer against me, it is all fake. And some of the words and phrases that they throw away, they are like distorted echoes of words and phrases that I myself used at another time.

Have conspirators humor? I wouldn't have considered it possible. But there is a sort of sharp humor in the sentence they gave me. I am condemned to life-until-death on the top of this high pillar here. The pillar or memorial column is one hundred and eighty-eight feet high, and the top of it is only three feet in diameter. I can sit here cross-legged, but I can't lie down, and I can't go to sleep or I will fall off and be killed. And I have nothing to eat or drink and no protection from the sun or rain. And worse than that, I am cut off from the underground psychic strata, so I will quickly be thrown into total psychosis, or so the conspirators believe.

But the conspirators have told me that it is my own equipment that they have seized and decided to use. That makes me a little proud.

“It is the perfect surveillance system,” one of them said. “With your crooked holes, we can tell what things the people will be thinking tomorrow, by the movement in their unconscious matrix today. When we know what people are going to think before they think it, we are one up on the system. Thanks, McGuire, and may your death throes be shortened somewhat.”

But I am not thrown into total psychosis right away. I have crooked-hole techniques that they don't know about. I can tap quite a few psychic pools from up here. Nevertheless, I am in dire straits.

The top of my pillar has been smeared with vulture-lure. And I have seen the dirty birds coming, still like small midges on the far sky, but coming relentlessly. They would devour my eyes, my spleen, my kidneys and all my soft parts.

I had become a pigeon fancier in recent years. “You never know,” my father had once said. “Something might turn up someday and you will need pigeons for friends.”

I do not know when vultures and pigeons began to respect each other's territory, but they do. And my very small area on the top of the pillar was under the protection of the pigeons. So then I could survive up here till I fall to my death, or till I perish from hunger or thirst.

Pigeon milk, that rather noisome regurgitation, is an acquired taste, I suppose. And it takes an awful lot of it to nourish a grown man. Very well, there are an awful lot of pigeons in our town and they work as hard as they can. So I will not die of hunger and thirst, not right away.

I am getting smarter by the minute as I sit here. I have projected a series of ultra-long-stem crooked-holes that will keep me nourished in the brains-and-spirit department. But will I get smart enough to figure a way to get down from here? Time will be running against me if I don't get smarter mighty fast.

Of the thirty-one toppled leaders imprisoned in that underground cell, only the president is still alive.

“Yeah, guy,” he said, and I get either his words or his thoughts through one of my crooked shaft devices, “I sure am getting a lot smarter. And I sure do hate it. You're right that something will be exploding any minute now. Me, that's what.”

On the premise that I might have to carry through the reconquest by myself, I have set up a system of communications.

With sheets of paper stolen and brought to me by the pigeons out of open office windows, with pigeon feather for a quill pen and the pigeon-dirt for ink (I know that it makes for messy-looking writing, and I'm sorry about that), I have written this account. The pigeons will keep carrying these sheets into whatever open windows they can find. There is a chance that they will come into courageous hands.

Lovers of freedom, arise! Rally round! We have not yet begun to fight.

And if we are not able to mount a resistance, well, I have learned wisdom from all this psychic, crooked-hole slurry that I have been absorbing. I pump it into me from everywhere. I am so smart and completed that it dazzles me.

In spite of the awkward details of it, I was never happier with a situation in my life. And, acquired taste or not, this pigeon milk is pretty good.

Splinters

The three town-and-country men kept loose hours, so it was just one o'clock in the morning when they began to talk of going fishing at once.

“It would help if we knew what the weather would be for the next few hours,” Charles Penstock said. “If it will be fog, we can go and jug for bullhead catfish on Silly Ghost Cove on Keystone Lake. If it will clear to a quick frost, we can drag for walleyes on Tenkiller. Or we can dynamite for pond pickerel on Oolagab.”

“If it is heavy dew, we can spear frogs on Euchie,” Ed Rivet said. “What did the weatherman give on the evening news?”

“He gave predictions that are now three hours old,” Otto Pankration said. “That's too old. We'll just have the weatherman up and see what he says now. He might be intuitive and hit it sharp if we get him out of his sleep.”

“What are you going to do, Otto, phone Voiles and wake him up?” Penstock asked.

“More than wake him up, I'll bring him here. Ah yes, I'll bring him here,” Otto said calmly. But Otto was shaking in a nervous sort of passion. That meant — well, it meant that he was being excessively Ottoish. Penstock and Rivet looked at each other.

Oh, oh! they thought, almost audibly and almost in concert. Here we go again with a stammer! How can Otto outdo Otto tonight?

Otto Pankration was sometimes an imposing man, and that was his public reputation. But sometimes he was a dubious venture of a fellow. The latter was most often the case when he was with his cronies Penstock and Rivet.

“So bring the weatherman here then, Otto,” Penstock said.

“Ah yes, well, you see this high-voltage assembly here — ” Otto began.

“The one by which you call spirits from the vasty deeps, as you said the night before last?” Ed Rivet asked. “It is impressive and expensive-looking, yes, and you should be able to use it as a prop for some good illusions. But it looks like an electric furnace to me, and not a high-voltage assembly at all.”

“It looks like it, and it isn't,” Otto answered. “Well then, to the business at hand.” He turned on the mechanism that looked like an electric furnace and wasn't. It didn't spark, it didn't flash. It growled and hummed a little bit. That was all.

And a man was standing there, bare-shanked and angry, and apparently just tumbled out of his sleep. All right, pretend to be unimpressed! Pretend to be blasé about it all. A man had materialized in the room right there! Otto had outdone Otto again tonight. Whether or not the feat should come undone later, it was absolutely top stroke now.

The bare-shanked and angry and confused man was Hector Voiles, the most noteworthy of the local TV weatherpersons. Well, was Hector really there, or was he a projection? Or was he present and yet unsubstantial in some other way?

“How have you brought me here, Pankration?” Hector wheezed. “You could at least have let me put on pants.”

“Think ‘pants,’ Hector, and you will be wearing pants,” Otto blared. “Pants are the slightest of illusions at best. Now tell us what the weather will be for the coming hours.”

“But I haven't the reports here, or the charts, or even the instruments.”

“You are yourself the instrument,” Otto said. “Be intuitive! Tell us what the weather will be. Then you can go back to bed.”

This wasn't in Otto's big home. That was sort of above them and around the corner. It wasn't in Otto's laboratory either. It was a small room, half underground, fitted out for the comfort of Otto and his cronies, and otherwise filled with a jumble of instruments and equipment that seemed to be out of present use. This was Otto's Little Den. Or it was Little Otto's Den.

“It is overcast and misty now,” Hector Voiles said. The light didn't pick him out very well in that room, and indeed the room was poorly lighted. Or else they were all low-resolution persons tonight. “But it will clear within an hour, and then it will quick-frost. Quick-frost, yes, but only at ground level will it freeze. At instrument level it will not fall below thirty-seven degrees. And for a fortnight hence the weather will be good for eidolons. Oh I wonder why I said that? I wonder what I meant?”

“Thank you, Voiles,” Otto Pankration said. “Quick-frost you said, and whatever else you said doesn't matter. Leave now.”

“I don't know how,” said Hector, the bare-shanked weatherman.

“Go the same way you came,” Otto said with a mean edge to his voice.

“I can't. I don't know how I came here,” said the suddenly shivering Hector.

“Be intuitive. Divine a way,” Otto said. “Go from us now and go back to bed.”

Hector Voiles the weatherman became unsubstantial and unhinged. He unmaterialized, and he was gone. And Otto Pankration, Charles Penstock, and Ed Rivet loaded into Ed's car to go to Oolagah Lake to dynamite for pond pickerel. The dynamiting goes so much more crisply when there comes a quick frost.

How would Otto outdo Otto on that one? Sluff it off if you can, but it had been a pretty good trick. Otto had materialized a known man against that man's will. He may have used TV data to build the prospectus for a projection, but it was not a TV image that was projected. Hector Voiles did not appear bare-shanked and newly-awakened and humbled on TV. Hector had been caught in the actual moment. He had been jerked out of his sleep and brought to Otto's Little Den, or to Little Otto's Den.

But it was hard in ordinary circumstances to think of Otto Pankration as a little man, for he was quite large.

What would Otto do for an encore now? How would he top the materialization of Hector Voiles?

Well, he didn't really top it. It was already tops. What he did next was materialize two slightly more interesting people. One of these he materialized publicly, the public being those two cronies Charles Penstock and Ed Rivet. But the other one he materialized privately, for himself alone. He dipped the dipper for TV persons again.

“I am not restricted to them,” Otto explained, “but they are handy objects to sight on and to orient my equipment on. And, of course, I am still experimenting. I will grab and project TV persons, but I will not take them in their TV attitudes.”

He next took Barry McNary, that local TV pundit and all-points expert who was so filled with urbanity and scope and interest. He took Barry as he was in the early-morning hours (this was the following early morning), but he didn't take him bare-shanked or bewildered.

Barry was there suddenly, in Little Otto's Den, in a rich crimson dressing gown, and smoking an in-style pipe whose genuine aroma filled the cluttered room. You cannot fake an aroma like that. And Barry McNary brought his own setting with him when he came. He was in his own easy chair, reading a book of his own, with his own side table beside him and his own midnight Tokay at hand. And he glanced at the three town-and-country men with absolute boredom. Then he continued his reading, not for effect, but because it was his pleasure. Little Otto might materialize Barry there, but there was no way that he could compel the interest of this pundit.

“Barry McNary, pundit and punko, you will answer questions for us now,” Otto said ponderously. “Aye, and you will do tricks, as I order you to do them. Do you know any reason that I am not able to order you to do tricks?”

“The reason is that I am not here,” Barry said, “and I have no knowledge of this romp, nor interest in it. Hound dogs, in some manner you have got hold of the equivalent of an old and discarded undershirt of mine to worry and toss. So worry it then, dogs! But it is long discarded, and I am not in it.”

Otto tried again and again to dominate Barry McNary, and he got nowhere. Barry would not answer at all, or he would answer demolishingly. Barry McNary was whipping Little Otto at every turn. A projection should not be able to whip its projector and constructor like that. Barry had a dangerous validity about him even though he said that he wasn't there. It was bad enough to be whipped by a commanded and controlled thing who didn't act as if he were controlled. It was even worse to be whipped by a mere shadow, or by a mere discarded undershirt. Then Barry McNary left him without being dismissed, and he refused to return.

Still and all, Otto had materialized a second known man, one of more moment than the first one, Hector Voiles. Who else in town was doing any authentic materializing at all? And, as Otto said, he was still experimenting with these new techniques.

Then Otto materialized still another TV person, Evangeline Aster, a real sparkler. He materialized Evangeline privately, telling no one about it, not even his two close cronies. Of course, he was proud to be able to materialize and summon and command such a sparkler as Evangeline, but the pleasure he wanted with her was private.

Otto brought Evangeline to him every night for a week. But it started a little slowly.

“The rule is that a person brought here by me must obey my every command,” Otto said at an early summons. “I made that rule, just as I made you to come here.”

“Oh let's just forget the whole thing,” Evangeline said. This was the second night of their encounter and Evangeline was in woolies, though she had been in scanties the first night, not expecting to be transported. “I really don't like it here at all and I want to go back. Let me go.”

“You and I are going to have one of the great affairs of the century, Evangeline,” Otto said. “Now, to make up for lost time, I will force you to be in rapport with me.”

“Forced rapport is no rapport at all,” Evangeline said, like one reciting an axiom. “This isn't like you, Mr. Pankration, and it surely isn't like me.

“No. It isn't like us. It is us,” Little Otto said. Wait a minute! Dr. Otto Pankration had the name of being a witty and interesting man. How do you square that with the Otto of these encounters?

But farther than that, Dr. Otto Pankration had the reputation of being absolutely courteous, of being just as absolutely uninvolved, of being a man with no crudity in him at all. Moreover, he was completely faithful to the memory of his dead wife. But Otto-in-the-flesh here was the hot-breathing opposite of that.

And Evangeline Aster, that beautiful sparkler of a woman (she herself had coined the name “The TV Sparkler” for herself), she had always been a consummate comic. She was even that still more rare thing on the current scene, a clean comic, a comic with class (she also had coined that phrase for herself). Evangeline had style, she had probity, she had a husband on an important foreign mission at the moment.

(A comic with class? This baggage here?)

She had known Dr. Otto Pankration for five years. But she hadn't at all known this Little Otto who had summoned her to these cluttered quarters here.

“I have a fine old name, one of the most respected of the ancient names of Europe — Pankration,” Little Otto said. “But it is really the name of a wrestle named ‘Rough and Tumble.’ Let us tumble now, Evangeline.”

“Oh let's just forget the whole thing,” Evangeline said dully. How could this living sparkler seem so dull?

“You and I, Evangeline, we are to have one of the great affairs of the century,” Otto said again, “and I believe that we are falling a little bit behind schedule. Let's pick up the pace and make up for lost time and passion.”

So they did. They carried it through. And, for a week there, they had one of the great affairs of the century. Well, maybe it was a bad century. And maybe the great affairs are pretty ordinary when they are stripped down.

After the fifth night, Evangeline stopped watching it.

She stopped watching it? But she was in it, wasn't she?

Evangeline Aster went to see Dr. Sigmund Izzersted. She was about to enter the great marble portals of his famous Coucherie when she heard the doctor call to her in a curious small voice.

“Oh Miss Aster, were you coming to see me?” The voice came from that little side street (it was more a shady lane) that ran along the north boundary of the Izzersted complex. “Just come through this little door in the wall and into my special consulting room and we will have a consultation,” the doctor said.

“I never saw that door in the wall before,” Evangeline told him. “I don't even believe that I can go through a door that little. Well, I came down sort of to see you, but you're so expensive that I just don't know whether I can afford another session.”

“Oh I pay no attention to money,” the little doctor said (Little? No one had ever thought of him as little before), “since money impinges nowhere into the psychology of persons and is of no major interest to them. What have I been charging you?”

“A hundred dollars an hour or part of an hour. It's always at least two hundred dollars a session even if it lasts no more than eight minutes — you know, four minutes in one hour and four minutes in another.”

“Oh that's way too much, Miss Aster,” Dr. Izzersted said. “I couldn't afford to go to myself at that rate. I don't make enough. How about two dollars for as long as the session takes?”

“Are you kidding, doctor?”

“Miss Aster, no! When a psychologist starts kidding, well, that blows him for a psychologist. He might as well break up and be done with it.”

They went through the little door in that wall along the shady lane. The consulting room that they came into was quite small, and Evangeline said that the couch looked like a doll couch.

“It will fit you,” the doctor said. “Lie down.”

Evangeline lay down on the couch and it fit her.

“Your problem, your problem, ah yes,” Dr. Izzersted said. “You have been sleeping in woolies for the past few nights, and you never slept in woolies before in your life. You don't understand it, and neither do I.”

“How did you know I had been sleeping in woolies?” Evangeline asked.

“Ah yes,” Dr. Izzersted began again. “It is a series of very realistic dreams you have been having, and you are thoroughly ashamed of the role you are playing in them. But you justify yourself by saying that it is not you in the dreams. It is somebody else. You are merely watching while somebody else in your body cavorts through the episodes. And then you have ceased even to watch them. Is that what you are trying to tell me?”

“I haven't told you anything yet; but yes, that's the case. Why is this consultation room so little, and why does it seem to be in a different place? Yes, I watch myself, or somebody else who is got up to look like me, doing these things, as I might watch them in a drama. But I watch them from the outside. On the other hand, it is myself who does them, for I am bruised and worn from them every morning. Did you know that great affairs of the century are very bruisy? But, on still another hand, there is something secondhand about my bruises, as though they were transferred to my body from another one.”

“Bubbly, mighty bubbly, Miss Aster,” Dr. Izzersted said. “Do you know that some days are very good for blowing soap bubbles (I blow a lot of soap bubbles in my business), and some days are terrible for it? Yes, on a bad day you can add all the glycerin and gloop that you wish to the mixture and you will still not be able to blow decent bubbles. And some fortnights are good for flying eidolons; but most times are very poor for it. This is an excellent fortnight for flying them. I don't know why this should be.”

“What is an eidolon?” Evangeline asked.

“It was an eidolon of yours, Miss Aster, and not yourself, that carried on one of the great affairs of the century with the eidolon of a prominent man. What we are really having this fortnight is an eidolonic epidemic. But I wasn't sure that the primaries were aware of their own eidolons. You seem to be, to some extent, aware of your own.”

“Then I'm not responsible for what my eidolon does?”

“Of course you're responsible for it, Miss Aster. There is something wrong going on in you, and that's the way it comes out.”

“But I haven't done anything wrong.”

“But you are going to do something wrong, murder or arson or some such. And eidolons sometimes blow before the wind and arrive at a crux before their primaries.”

“And these eidolons have separate bodies?”

“Very infrequently do they have substantial bodies, Miss Aster. Shadow bodies mostly. But this fortnight, as I say, is very bubbly, very good for flying eidolons. I believe that there are at least half-a-dozen solid ones flying in this city of a half million. That is an unusually large component. But it isn't so unusual over a long haul. Every undertaker, after a fortnight such as this, gets bodies that he knows are simply not authentic. Oh they have meat and they have weight, but they are incompletely and sketchily done.

“And there are numerous cases where a body is definitely identified as a person. And then the living person will appear and assert his living identity, and where does that leave the dead and sketchy body? But the first identification will not necessarily have been mistaken. The bodies will (save for the sketchiness of one of them) be bodies of the same person. Even the fingerprints will be identical except that, ah — ”

“Except that what?”

“Ah, change of subject. The way out of your dilemma, Miss Aster, is to junk your eidolon, which is only a splinter of you anyhow. Ah I see a gleam in your eye. Yes, it would be vivid publicity, I suppose. Throw it screaming off a great and prominent height (and you have always had such a terror of heights!), and then you can reappear — ”

“Oh yes! I think I recognize it now. It's been done before. And it works.”

“You first came into prominence, Miss Aster, as junior hog-calling champion of Sebastian County, Arkansas, I believe.”

“Can we not forget that, doctor?”

“But you are proud of your powerful and blood-curdling scream, with which you won that championship. You believe that, in a more dramatic situation, it might be — ”

“Yes, yes, and do I ever have a more dramatic situation in mind for it! It will work, I know that it will.”

Evangeline had her genuine sparkle on her now when she saw a shining opportunity. And Dr. Izzersted, who was smaller today than he usually was, had a queer gleam on him like, well, like glycerin in a soap-bubble solution. Yes, he was just a little bit iridescent. He was incompletely and sketchily done. He was not quite as authentic as he might have been. You couldn't exactly see through him, but he did fracture the light a bit.

“Does the real Dr. Izzersted know about you?” Evangeline asked.

“Yes he does,” said Little Sigmund, “though he came to the knowledge of me with extreme difficulty. He uses me a lot in his studies. I become the analogue for the splinters of many people. What the real Dr. Izzersted doesn't know is that I also use him a lot in my studies. And yet I am the real Dr. Izzersted. All the splinters are of the same authentic wood. If I'm not he, then who am I? Will you time your event for the ten-o'clock news?”

“Oh yes, I think so. I believe that it would be the best timing, to do it just a few minutes before the news. Then maybe I will be identified by a bulletin while the program is going on. And then, while they are still staggering from that, I'll appear. I'll electrify everybody, that's what I'll do. Oh thank you, thank you!”

“That will be two dollars, Miss Aster.”

“What? You'd actually demand money from a woman on her way to a screaming and plummeting death? Oh you cheese, you cheese!”

Those town-and-country men, Charles Penstock and Ed Rivet, had gone to visit Little Otto Pankration at a loose hour. They knocked at the door of Little Otto's Den, and the door was opened.

They were startled, though, that it was opened by Mr. Pankration himself. But were not Mr. Pankration and Little Otto Pankration the same person? Probably they were. Nevertheless, the two town-and-country men were startled.

“Oh Mr. Pankration,” Ed Rivet said, “we were really looking for Little Otto.” And then he felt very foolish.

“Oh go away,” Pankration growled. “Vagabonds, out-of-season killers of game, dynamiters of fish, spooks of whatever sort, be gone from here. You are only rags and splinters of men who are dead and gone. In any case, I am locking up the storeroom now.”

“Mr. Pankration,” Ed asked, “what is that thing that looks like an electric furnace, and isn't?”

“It is an electric furnace,” Mr. Pankration said. He pushed the two town-and-country men out of the doorway, came out the door himself, and closed and locked it behind him. Then he walked around the corner to his main establishment. And Charles Penstock and Ed Rivet stood uncertainly in the road.

Then the door of Little Otto's Den unlocked and opened again, and Little Otto looked out and hissed for them to come in. Still feeling a little foolish, they entered.

“It should be foggy in the next hours,” Charles Penstock said. “Let's go to Silly Ghost Cove on Keystone Lake and jug for bullhead catfish.”

“I can't go, not anymore, not anywhere,” Little Otto said. “He won't let me out of the complex at all.”

“Who is he?” Ed Rivet asked. “Isn't he really just yourself? How will he keep you from going out? Will he hide your shoes, like the Ozark farmer did to his wife?”

“Not my shoes, my feet,” Little Otto said. “He hid my feet.”

The other two saw that it was true. Little Otto hadn't any feet. He wouldn't be able to go with them.

“He says that you are spooks,” Little Otto said. “He says that your primaries are dead men, and that makes you dirty.”

“That's true,” Ed Rivet admitted. “You knew that. Ah we're sorry about your feet.”

Charles Penstock and Ed Rivet went away from there to Silly Ghost Cove on Keystone Lake to jug for bullhead catfish. It was a favorite spot of theirs.

The pundit Barry McNary gave this account the next morning on his program, “The Morning Sun”:

A night of horror rampages on into the glare-eyed dawn. The plummeting, screaming death of the beloved Evangeline Aster was horror enough for any night. But there have been flesh-crawling (yes, and pseudoflesh-crawling) developments since then. And now we are all in stunned and sordid amazement.

Evangeline Aster, that sparkler of the picture tube, that comic with class, had been in unusually high spirits only ten minutes before the tragedy. She had laughed as she told it: “Kids, am I ever going to pull one! I will stand them all on their ears. This stroke is going to put your favorite sparkler into the Big Time. And it will all be good, clean fun. What is more good, clean fun than an absolute horror stroke?”

Then, at nine forty-seven last night, Evangeline climbed the parapet gingerly (she was afraid of heights) and seemed to be talking to someone there, though she was alone. Then she seemed to stumble (it was almost as if she were pushed by invisible hands), and she fell to her screaming death from the veranda of the forty-ninth-floor Penthouse Club.

She was utterly smashed in the street below. But many observers, including myself, will swear that her scream was repeated in the high air again and again for several minutes after her horrifying death.

Naturally, considering the close friendship of Miss Aster with the people of this station and her frequent appearances here, her violent death of only thirteen minutes before was the main topic on our ten-o'clock news last night. But it was at ten twenty-seven, almost at the end of the news program, that something almost more shocking than Evangeline's death took place.

Evangeline walked into our studio and onto camera, alive and sparkling. Or it seemed as if she did. Something walked into the studio, possibly alive in a gaudy way, and sparkling in a funky manner. And, at first, it looked like Evangeline. I myself had no doubt that it was herself — not for ten seconds or so.

“The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” she said. “Oh isn't there any way to update that line? Surely a lot of fuss has been made about an imposter. It is not I who have died, as all of you can see. Here I am, more sparkling and radiant than ever!”

But then something went out of the apparition. It became not Evangeline Aster, but a horrible and revolting caricature of her. What was it? What was it? It was alive. It walked and it talked. And then it staggered and whimpered.

“She tried to push me off,” the apparition whined. “That's what scared me. I didn't think she'd do that to me.”

We closed the station down then and got the horrible situation off of camera.

But the horrible situation has been examined all through the night, from that hour to this, and soon there will be nothing of her left to examine. The horrible situation has been examined by a cosmologist, a meteorologist, a physician, and by a para-psychologist. The walking and talking apparition was, by every basic test, Evangeline Aster. And yet it wasn't Evangeline as solidly as was the dead body that was in police morgue. But the apparition even had the fingerprints of Evangeline except that, ah — change of subject.

“The weather has been good for eidolons for more than a week now,” the meteorologist said. “Rarely is the weather good for them; most of the time it is no good for them at all. We weathermen believe that they (eidolons, fragments, splinters, ghosts, they are sometimes called) are always present. But most of the time they cannot be seen or heard. And in times of very special weather they can be.”

“No, it isn't alive,” the physician said. “It is apparently an echo or a mirage. It is associated with a certain amount of matter, but it's a loose and perhaps accidental association. No, there's nothing here. It's all illusion.”

“Oh it's plain enough,” the parapsychologist said. “It's a ‘clearly manifest psychic splinter,’ presently impaired by the destruction of its primary. Psychic splinters are so ordinary that they are almost the rule. They're personality fragments, no more than that. They are ‘partially manifest psychic splinters’ when they are poltergeists or other ghosts or presences. But a ‘clearly manifest psychic splinter’ like this one isn't encountered often. I'd like to study her for a long time, but there's only a couple of minutes left for it.”

“There has been something going on around town lately that is almost like a burlesque of my own work, and she's part of it,” added the great parapsychologist Dr. Otto Pankration.

“A lot of me went with her when she went,” the apparition said. “It was like turning out the light in me. She tried to throw me off the parapet. How damned inconsiderate of her anyhow! She told me one thing: ‘Keep screaming, keep screaming.’ Oh I'd forgot that she told me that. I kept it up for a while and then I stopped. I'll start again.”

“It is pseudo-organic,” the cosmologist said. “It is mostly made of glycerin and it is evaporating. Ah glycerin, like we used to put in the soap-bubble mixture. No, there's really nothing to her, gentlemen.”

“She tried to throw me off the parapet, but I threw her off instead,” the apparition said. “I thought that was kind of a joke on her. But she told me to keep screaming on my way down, and I'm on my way down now. I forgot, and I stopped screaming. But I'll start again now.”

The apparition has disappeared. It had become an absolutely horrifying caricature of Evangeline at the moment of its disappearance.

But the screaming continues, continues, continues.

“How long?” we asked.

“No telling,” the parapsychologist said. “It's become immaterial now, and there is no way you can make an immaterial entity shut up, particularly if it is obsessed by a single idea or instruction. The Hollbecker phantom in Germany has been screaming for fifty years now, but nobody pays any attention to it anymore. It is just like any other industrial nois — ”

Oh my God, that scream, that scream, that scream! Will any of us get used to it in even fifty years?

Bright Coins In Never-Ending Stream

People sometimes became exasperated with Matthew Quoin, that tedious old shuffler. Sometimes? Well, they were exasperated with him almost all the time. It isn't that people aren't patient and kind-hearted. All of them in our town are invariably so. But Matthew could sure ruffle a kind-hearted surface.

“Oh, he is so slow about it!” people said of him. That wasn't true, Matthew's fingers flew lightning-like when he was involved in a transaction. It was just that so very many movements were required of him to get anything at all transacted.

And then the stories that he told about his past, a very far-distant past according to him, were worn out by repetition.

“Oh, was I ever the cock of the walk!” he would say. “I left a trail of twenty-dollar gold pieces around the world three times, and that was when twenty dollars was still worth something. I always paid for everything with twenty-dollar gold pieces, and there was no way that I could ever run out of them. Ten of them, a hundred of them, a thousand of them, I could lay them out whenever they were needed. I had a cruse of oil that would never be empty, as the Bible says. I had a pocketbook that would never be without coin. I was the cock of the walk. Plague take it all, I still am! Has anybody ever seen me without money?”

No, nobody had. It was just that, of late years, it took Matthew's money so long to add up. And often people had to wait behind him for a long time while he counted it out, and they became sulky and even furious.

When people became weary of listening to Matthew's stories (and of late years he could feel their weariness for him like a hot blast) he went and talked to the pigeons. They, at least, had manners.

“The bloom is off the plum now,” he would tell those red-footed peckers, “and the roses of life have become a little ratty for me. But I will not run out of coin. I have the promise that I will not. I got that promise as part of a dubious transaction, but the promise has held up now for more years and decades than you would believe. And I will not die till I am death-weary of taking coin out of my pocketbook: I have that promise also. How would I ever be weary of drawing coins out of my pocketbook?

“This began a long time ago, you see, when the pigeons were no bigger than the jenny-wrens are now. They had just started to mint the American twenty-dollar gold piece, and I had them in full and never-ending flow. I tell you that a man can make an impression if he has enough gold pieces. Ah, the ladies who were my friends! Lola Montez, Squirrel Alice, Marie Laveau, Sarah Bernhardt, Empress Elizabeth of Austria. And the high ladies were attracted to me for myself as well as for my money. I was the golden cock of the golden walk.

“You ask what happened to those golden days?” Matthew said to the pigeons, who hadn't asked anything except maybe, “How about springing for another box of Cracker Jacks?”

“Oh, the golden days are still with me, though technically they are the copper days now. I was promised eight bright eons of ever-flowing money, and the eight of the eons could last (along with my life) as long as I wished it to last.

“And, when the first eon of flowing money slipped into the second, it didn't diminish my fortune much. It was still an unending stream of gold. Now they were five-dollar gold pieces instead of twenty-dollar gold pieces, but when there is no limit to the number of them, what difference does that make? I would take one out of my pocketbook, and immediately there would be another one in it waiting to be taken.”

“I suppose I really had the most fun when I was known as the Silver Dollar Kid,” Matthew Quoin told them. He was talking to squirrels rather than pigeons now, and it was a different day. But one day was very much like another.

“I never cared overly for money. I just don't want to run out of it. And I have the promise that my pocketbook will always have one more coin in it. I liked that sound of silver dollars on a counter, and I'd ring them down as fast as one a second when I wished to make an impression. And they rang like bells. I was in my pleasant maturity then, and life was good to me. I was the guy they all noticed. They called me ‘Show Boat’ and ‘the Silver Dollar Sport.’ I always tipped a dollar for everything. That was when money was worth ten times what it is now and a dollar was really something. What, squirrels, another sack of peanuts, you say? Sure I can afford it! The girl at the kiosk will be a little impatient with me because it takes me so long to get enough coins out, but we don't care about that, do we?”

The fact was that Matthew Quoin, though he still commanded a shining and unending stream of money, had a poor and shabby look about him in these days of the eighth coin. As part of an old and dubious transaction, he had the promise that he could live as long as he wished, but that didn't prevent him from becoming quite old.

He had a grubby little room. He would get up at three o'clock every Friday morning and begin to pull coins one at a time (there was no possible way except one at a time) out of his pocketbook. It was one of those small, three-section, snap-jaw pocketbooks such as men used to carry to keep their coins and bills in. It was old, but it was never-failing. Matthew would draw the coins out one at a time. He would count them into piles. He would roll them into rolls. And at eight o'clock in the morning, when his weekly rent was due, he would pay it proudly, twenty-seven dollars and fifty cents. So he would be fixed for another week. It took him from three until eight o'clock every Friday morning to do this; but he cat-napped quite a bit during that time. All oldsters cat-nap a lot.

And it didn't really take him very long (no more than five or six minutes) to draw out enough coins for one of his simple lunch-counter meals. But some people are a little bit testy at having to wait even five or six minutes behind an old man at the cashier's stand.

“I was known as the Four-Bit Man for a few years, and that was all right,” Matthew Quoin said. “Then I was known as the Two-Bit Man for a few other years, and that was all right too.” This was a different day, and Matthew was talking to a flock of grackle-birds who were committing slaughter on worms, slugs, and other crawlers in the grass of City Park. “It didn't begin to hurt till I was known as the Dime-a-Time Man,” Matthew said, “and that stuck in the throat of my pride a little bit, although it shouldn't have. I was still the cock of the grassy walk even though I didn't have as many hens as I had once. I had good lodgings, and I had plenty to eat and drink. I could buy such clothes as I needed, though it flustered me a bit to make a major purchase. We had come into the era of the hundred-dollar overcoat then, and to draw out one thousand coins, one by one, with people perhaps waiting, can be a nervous thing.

“I began to see that there was an element of humor in that dubious transaction that I had made so many years ago, and that part of the joke was on me. Oh, I had won every point of argument when we had made that deal. The pocketbook was calfskin, triple-stitched, and with German silver snap-latch. It was absolutely guaranteed never to be clear empty of coin, and it should last forever. Each coin appeared in the very bottom of the pocketbook, that's true, and the contrivance was rather deep and with a narrow mouth, so it did take several seconds to fish each dime out. But it was a good bargain that I made, and all parties still abide by it. The Dime-a-Time years weren't bad.

“Nor were the nickel years really. There is nothing wrong with nickels. Dammit, the nickel is the backbone of commerce! It was in the nickel years that I began to get rheumatism in my fingers, and that slowed me down. But it had nothing to do with the bargain, which was still a good one.”

When the penny years rolled around, Matthew Quoin was quite old. Likely he was not as old as he claimed to be, but he was the oldest and stringiest cock around.

“But it's all as bright as one of my new pennies,” he said to a multitude of army caterpillars that was destroying the fine grass in City Park. “And this is the eighth and final eon of the overflowing money, and it will go on forever for me unless I tell it to stop. Why should I tell it to stop? The flow of money from my pocketbook is as vital to me as the flow of blood through my veins. And the denomination cannot be diminished further. There is no smaller coin than the copper penny.”

It didn't go all that bright and shining with Matthew Quoin in the penny years, though. The rheumatism had bitten deeper into his hands and fingers, and now his lightning fingers were slow lightning indeed. The “time is money” saying applied to Matthew more explicitly than it had ever applied to anyone else, and there were quite a few slownesses conspiring to eat up his valuable time.

And every time that prices went up, by the same degree was he driven down. After five years in the penny eon he was driven down plenty.

“If it takes me five hours just to draw out and count the money for my week's rent, then things are coming to an intolerable stage with me,” he said. “Something is going to have to give.” Something gave.

The government decreed that, due to the general inflation of the economy and the near-worthlessness of the one-cent piece, or penny, that coin would no longer be minted. And, after a cutoff date in the near future, it would no longer be legal tender either.

“What will I do now?” Matthew Quoin asked himself.

He went to talk to the people at the Elite Metal Salvage Company, Scavenger Department.

“How much a pound will you give me for copper pennies?” he asked.

“Two cents a pound,” the man said. “There hasn't been very much copper in copper pennies for years and years.”

“There is in these,” Matthew said. “They follow the specifications of the earliest minting.” He showed several of them to the man.

“Amazing, amazing!” the man said. “They're almost pure copper. Five cents a pound.”

“I don't know if I can live on that or not,” Matthew Quoin said, “but I've no choice except to try.”

Matthew Quoin changed his life style a bit. He gave up his lodging room. He slept in a seldom-flooded storm sewer instead. But it was still a hard go.

A nickel a pound! Do you know how many pennies, pulled out rheumatically one by one, it takes to make a pound? Do you know how many nickels it takes now just to get a cup of coffee and an apple fritter for breakfast? Matthew Quoin had started at three-thirty that morning. It would be ten o'clock before he had enough to take to the Elite Metal Salvage Company to sell for legal tender. It would be ten-thirty before he had his scanty breakfast. And then back to the old penny-fishing again. His fingers were scabbed and bleeding. It would be almost midnight before he had enough (yes, the Elite Metal Salvage Comany did do business at night; that's when they did of lot of their purchasing of stolen metal) to trade in for supper money. And that would represent only one hamburger with everything on it, and one small glass of spitzo. But Matthew would never be clear broke. He was still cock of the walk.

“Now here is where it gets rough,” Matthew Quoin said. “Suppose that I give up and am not able to live on the bright flow of coins, and I die (for I cannot die until I do give up); suppose that I die, then I will have lost the dubious transaction that I made so long ago. I'll have been outsmarted on the deal, and I cannot have that. That fellow bragged that he'd never lost on a transaction of this sort, and he rubbed it in with a smirk. We'll just see about that. I've not given up yet, though I do need one more small morsel of food if I'm to live through the day. Do you yourself ever get discouraged, robin?”

Matthew Quoin was talking to a lone robin that was pulling worms out of the browned grass that was beginning to be crusted with the first snow of the season. But the robin didn't answer.

“You live on the promise of spring, robin, though you do well even now,” Quoin said. “I also have a new promise to live for. I have been given a fresh lease on life today, though it will be about seven years before I can put that lease into effect. But, after you're old, seven years go by just like nothing. A person in the Imperial Coin Nook (it's in a corner of the Empire Cigar and Hash Store) says that in about seven years my coins will have value, and eventually he will be able to pay a nickel or dime or even fifteen cents for each of them. And that is only the beginning, he says: in fifty years they may be worth eighty cents or even a dollar each. I am starting to put one coin out of every three into a little cranny in my sewer to save them. Of course, for those seven years that I wait, I will go hungrier by one third. But this promise is like a second sun coming up in the morning. I will rise and shine with it.”

“Bully for you,” the robin said.

“So I have no reason to be discouraged,” Quoin went on. “I have a warm and sheltered sewer to go to. And I have had a little bit, though not enough, to eat today. I hallucinate, and I'm a trifle delirious and silly, I know. I'm lighthearted, but I believe I could make it if I had just one more morsel to eat. This has been the worst of my days foodwise, but they may get a little bit better if I live through this one. It will be a sort of turning of the worm for me now. Hey, robin, that was pretty good, the turning of the worm. Did you get it?”

“I got it,” said the robin. “It was pretty good.”

“And how is it going with yourself?” Matthew Quoin asked.

“There's good days and bad ones,” the robin said. “This is a pretty good one. After the other robins have all gone south, I have pretty good worm-hunting.”

“Do you ever get discouraged?”

“I don't let myself,” the robin said. “Fight on, I say. It's all right today. I'm about full now.”

“Then I'll fight on too,” Matthew swore. “One extra morsel would save my life, I believe. And you, perhaps, robin — ”

“What do you have in mind?” the robin asked.

“Ah, robin, if you're not going to eat the other half of that worm — ”

“No, I've had plenty. Go ahead,” the robin said.

I Don't Care Who Keeps The Cows

Because of the trashiness of its origins, there has grown a sort of amnesia over the account of how we became as amazingly smart as we are now, and of how we were even smarter for a while there. This honest account should cut through the amnesia a little bit.

There were two clans of smart people in those days, the Scar-Tissue Clan and the Necklaces Clan. And then there was a smaller group, the Little Red Wagon People. All of these had somewhat cumbersome arrangements to be as smart as they were, and all of them paid a pretty steep tab for it. It cost a lot of money to be a smart person in those days.

The people of the Scar-Tissue Clan — now there was something stark and outstanding about all of them. It may have been their pop-eyes, what used to be called “weight-lifter's eyes.” It may have been the scar tissue itself, about the brows and temporals. It may have been the generalized protuberances, the bull-humps at the base of the old brain, the pherea or satyr-like growths at the throat, the pareia-pouches at one or the other sides of the head, these growths that the more advanced members of the clan usually had. Those things did make persons look peculiar, until the look became common. They were the things that set the people of the Scar-Tissue Clan apart.

(Jerome Blackfoot was getting a head start on the world during the early morning hours, but he wasn't one of the Scar-Tissue People, nor a Necklacer, nor a Little Red Wagoner either.)

All of the Scar-Tissue people were deaf in the ear of their selection. One ear had to be used as a vent and a drain and could no longer be used for hearing. This deaf ear was usually on the same side of the head as the pareia-pouch.

The whole business of the ultra-braininess of the Scar-Tissue Clan (and of the other clans also, but the Scar-Tissues had been the first of the burgeoning brain groups) had been a fallout of a few quacksalvers and confidence persons trying to make a little money and have a little fun. Very many great discoveries and inventions have this quackish origin. There had first been those blatant advertisements:

The Brain is a muscle. Develop it as you would any other muscle. Slam the steroids to it and make it grow! Use our special brain-designed steroid implants and injections. One of our crews will be in your neighborhood this month. Sign and mail the coupon today. Our crew will call on you in a plain brown truck and they will perform all necessary micro-surgery and plugging and implementing in our own truck-clinic or in your own home. Your brains will begin to grow and develop immediately. You can notice the difference within thirty minutes. You'll be smarter, a lot smarter! Hear what H. H. Van der Rander of Ocean Bright California writes:

And what H. H. Van der Rander wrote might be:

I multiplied my brain power seven times in just eleven days. But the most amazing results were noticed right at the beginning. I doubled my brain power in the first hour. It was like opening a door into another and more spacious world. I am now four times as smart as anyone else in my neighborhood, and eleven days ago I would have rated in the bottom one-third.

Grotesque as it might sound to a man from Qualquimmerchock, the thing worked from the very first. Well, it had worked for weight-lifters and wrestlers; why shouldn't it work for brains? The people who subscribed to the service did get smarter, amazingly smarter in a very short period of time, and they stayed smart. It was like opening the door on another world, yes. Even those early original steroid crews, coming in their plain brown trucks, did excellent work. There is no way that steroid plugs and injections cannot nourish and develop the brain. (“Be brain-starved no longer. Be among the first people ever to have amply-fed brains.”) The brain is a muscle, and all muscles develop rapidly and amazingly, geometrically and exponentially, by steroid injections. The brain so treated will grow in size and strength until it crowds all available space, and then it will look for more space, either interior or exterior, to spill over into.

And the intelligence also increased exponentially. People with husky and bulky and muscular brains are simply much smarter and intellectually stronger than are people with skinny and skimpy brains. “It's smart to be smart” was one of the advertising slogans that was very effective. All the injections and plugs did cause a lot of scar tissue, of course. Probably this could have been removed. There were plenty of cosmetic cons to take care of it, but for a while the scar tissue was a status thing. The more scar tissue that one had on his head, the smarter he was. And almost everybody was soon taking the steroids. Almost everybody, that is, except those most conservative people in the world, the confidence people themselves who had started this particular advancement.

“A paint manufacturer doesn't necessarily paint his own body with every paint he makes, good quality though it may be,” Jerome Blackfoot said. “I'm not going to have any of this stuff injected into my own brains. Sure it's good. I invented it, didn't I? I designed types Alpha and Delta of the Brain Steroids myself, so of course they're good. But I'm fastidious. When I was little, I wore white gloves when I played in the mud. I'll stay with my natural brains, unbulged and unbursted. But now we will have to develop and devise a few things for all these new muscular brains to occupy themselves with. Give them something to be smart about. There is something unclean about the vision of all those strong brains munching on themselves. We will give them ‘Essence of the Compacted World’ to munch on.”

Well, Blackfoot and his partner did come out with a line of shape-modules or information modules that could be impressed into the new big brains which they had helped create. These modules contained details (more than details, whole constellations of persons and places and happenings and meanings and sights and smells and axioms), and their patterns and contents went directly into the brains in usable forms. Oh, for instance there would be a shape-module for a certain discipline or specialty of biology. No need to spend five years acquiring it. It was quite easy, after one of the quacksalvers had come upon the method intuitively, to put any and all information into a shape-module form that was ready for impressing. There was very little physical content to this absolutely massive information; it was all coded into impressed shape. Thus a person with a brain sufficiently fortified with steroids might absorb the entire corpus of a hundred thousand novels in one impressing session, and he would possess this information and emotion and experience intimately forever. A person could learn languages or philosophies or mathematics or art-experiences or histories similarly. Anybody could know anything now. Everybody did know everything (and you have no idea how big and finely grained this “everything” is) almost immediately. It looked as if everybody in the land would become stunningly smart and informed. Everybody, except perhaps that small group of persons who had accidentally started it all.

Jerome Blackfoot the Black-Footed Weasel was one of no more than thirty prime quacksalvers and confidence persons who had first gone into brain steroids. And yet the connection between the “new age of brainery” and the quacksalvers couldn't be allowed to remain so blatant. Blackfoot and persons like him would give brains a bad name. So it was surely a good thing that the brain steroids as well as the information-modules were taken out of the hands of the quacksalvers and given into the control of professionals and scientists and governmentalists. Because this was a big thing. What had come upon the world, what had slipped up on the blind side of the world, by accident and without warning, was “Controlled Explosion Day” itself, the day when the whole world got smart, the day that the world had been created for. Big strong brains now shook off their dubious and accidental origin, created themselves to further massiveness and capacity, and went to work on the mountains of information that was the world itself, interior and exterior, in impressed module form. These brains held the “Essence of the Compacted World” and they spun intelligent judgments on it out of their own mountainous intellectuality. So there was joy and enthusiasm and high thinking in the land.

(Ferndale Whitehead was getting a head start on the world in the early morning, and he wasn't one of the Scar-Tissue People, or one of the Necklace People, or one of the Little Red Wagon People either.)

Quite soon, with the intervention of the government with its professionals and scientists, the “Mental Musculature Phenomenon” became a stratified and restricted benison. Everybody would still know everything, but not everybody would know everything to the fullest power. “Big Brain Morning” was not to be enjoyed in its ultimate form by everybody. Or rather, there would be new and more ultimate forms created that would not be open to all. There would have to be stages to it. Bands of professionals and scientists periti made the selections of just who would receive the more ultimate forms of brain development, and who would have to be content with mere doubling or tripling of brain muscle and scope. There would be, for the common good, hierarchies of braininess. And it would be mostly the case of “To those who have, let it be given.” So it would be mostly the case of the professionals and scientists forming the top hierarchy. The common people didn't really have enough brains to deserve ultra-brains. They would be better off than they had ever been before, but special states must be reserved for special persons. The special persons were in. Others were almost in. And lesser breeds would be forever outside by their lack of capacity or by their own sordid choice. And yet there were strange compensations in belonging to a lesser breed. Those of the lesser breeds, and some of those with hardly any breeding at all, just had to be certain that they would receive what was coming to them.

Ferndale Whitehead the Man in the White Hat, a sort of partner of Jerome Blackfoot the Black-Footed Weasel, believed that there would always be a place for a firm with fleets of plain brown trucks and with trained installers and technicians in those trucks. And so it was the case. Blackfoot and Whitehead had held bothersome patents on certain brain steroids. (And those steroids had had invisibly fine tendrils on them, of purpose not generally apparent.) And the partners had developed the techniques of impressionable information-modules, and later of gateway-couples. Though the government voided all such patents and rights-to-techniques, yet they did form a sort of trading basis. And those quacksalver gentlemen were good traders even after they had nothing left to trade with. They could even trade successfully out of an empty banana cart, so long as it still had the smell of bananas about it.

The quacksalvers became licensed applicators and installers, and their hundred thousand plain brown trucks seemed to be everywhere in the land. Their trucks would roll as long as grass grows and water flows.

After a while, only token numbers of their trucks still rolled, for steroids and modules and couples were soon made of instantly transmissible and mostly immaterial substance. But the Quacksalver Row people still collected for the full complement of services. That, somehow, had been built into the system without anyone noticing.

When the Necklace Clan, the other main group of smart people, had come along, Blackfoot and Whitehead and others of their small tribe were able to take advantage of this new development also. They were able to take advantage of it because they had, accidentally, originated it.

That was the day when Ferndale Whitehead had called up Kathrynne Klunque (she had been born plain Kate Klunk) who had more surplus electronic components than anyone else on Quacksalver Row.

“Say, Kate, didn't you have a few million junk miniature thermocouples with a two-way couple feature? I'll try a million of them at a cent each. I don't know what I'll do with them, but this is one of those oh-what-the-hell days. Besides, I'd like to help you out of a hole.”

“I'm not in a hole, Whitie,” Kathrynne said. “I'm sitting on top of a mountain, and ‘Queen of the Mountain’ is the name of the game I'm playing. You are referring to those ‘gateways of the future,’ those ‘gateways to the other realms,’ those ultimate thermocouples or category-couples, are you not? Whitey, I couldn't let you have them for a cent each. I will let you have them two for a cent though. There, I left you breathless with that one, didn't I?”

“Predictably breathless, Kate. And you also want the predictable — ”

“Fair piece of everything.”

“All right, Kate.”

“You've found a way to make at-a-distance couples of information depots to brains?”

“We think so, Kate. We'll try it with a million or so of your couplers. How much will it cost to make more of the couplers when the stock is used up?”

“Oh, a cent each. Or a thousand dollars each. Or somewhere in between. It depends on whom we are talking to.”

They had tried it then, and it had worked. And so the Necklace Clan came into being. People could hang the small gateway-couples around their necks like necklaces, and fifty or so of the gadgets could give them all possible instant information on every subject imaginable. By using the necklaces or strings of gateway-couplings, they would need brains only about half as muscled and massive as those of the prime Scar-Tissue People. They could get by with less brain bulk because the information depots they drew on were not inside their brains. Those information supplies might be in tabulated buildings as far as two thousand kilometers away. Because of this, the Necklace People were able to keep their brains mostly in their own heads, with very little exterior over-spill. This made it neat. But others preferred things more gaudy: the Scar-Tissue Clan reveled in their lurid scar tissue. That was the entry-mark of brains.

The Necklace thing worked as the previous things had worked. There were now two major clans of very smart people. A choice was offered. People could be about as smart as they wished, in either of two ways.

The third way, that of the Little Red Wagon People, offered only a minor variation, and there was no basic discovery involved. These people pulled carts or coaster wagons behind them which were filled with their own overflow brains. It was better than having those protuberances growing all over the outside of the head. It was easier on the neck. But there was some danger of being separated by accident from important centers of their own minds. With the Necklace Clan, there was also the danger of power failure cutting them off from their information depots.

But these were the golden days and years, the “Era of the Golden Brains,” the prime time of the people. The mood was “Enjoy it; it's fun to be smart; let's have the fun.” But there was a darker mood running also, and it said, “If they don't want a piece of it, we'll carve a piece of them.” There was also a movement running through the land to do away with all the people who didn't much want to be smart in any of the offered ways. But the bulk of the people did want to be smart, and they did become smart, so smart that it would scare you. For the safety of the land, guidelines then had to be set up for the whole complex of group braininess.

For the safety of the land, not of the lands, for there was now only one land, the United States. All other lands in the world had ceased to exist. There had been, you see, a lot of show-boating at the time of the appearance of the first massive braininess. Show-Boat exhibitionists had discovered that they could do such things as moving mountains by their new brain power alone. Then some of the more brash of them began to top each other in their ostentations. They began to destroy, or to consign to the outer darkness, whole countries and continents, till only one land was left. Here, here! A halt must be called to such doings.

So everybody received a jolt of a new admonition-module, a stern warning medication. As it happened, it probably wasn't necessary. Things were happening rapidly in the brain field. The Show-Boat impulse and manifestation passed as suddenly as it had come. The rapidly rising level of braininess had quickly left that early destructive phase behind it. But that didn't bring back the lost lands.

There were only a few people who did not go along with it all, who did not walk bright-eyed into “Brain-World” and all its glories. Surprisingly, the people who had started it all, the Quacksalvers and Confidence People, were among those minorities who didn't go along with it. They didn't use the steroids themselves. Nor the information-modules, nor the gateway-couples.

“I sure don't want to be burdened with any more brains than I have now,” Jerome Blackfoot said. “Carrying too much of those things around makes a weighty burden. Sometimes I think I'd like to dump about half of the brains that I already have in my head.”

“Sometimes I think you are about to dump half of your brains,” Whitehead said. “I don't know anybody who comes as close to it as often as you do.”

“A brain-glutton I don't want to be,” said Thor Thorgelson (“A Square Deal from the Square-Head” was his business motto), one of the most accomplished of the Quacksalvers.

Ah, Blackfoot and Whitehead and Thorgelson and the rest of them didn't really have much brains. They just stayed ahead of things by getting up so early in the mornings. Drinking of the morning fountains before they are roiled is almost as good as having brains. “Joy cometh in the morning” it says in one place. “Make the morning precious” it says in another. “Men and morning newspapers” it says in still another place. Ferndale Whitehead would always pick up a morning newspaper from a neighbor's front step before that neighbor was awake, and this action was a type of getting to the world before the world was awake. Then Whitehead would stroll to the Break-of-Day Donut Shop and be the first customer there right at opening time.

“The first cup of coffee out of your Reciprocal-Movement Coffee-Maker is always a little bit bitter,” he would say conversationally.

“Yeah, I know,” the sleepy-eyed waitress would agree. “I always throw the first cup out.”

“Give me that first bitter cup,” Whitehead would say. So, at no expenditure of coin, he acquired a taste for bitter coffee very early in the morning.

“The first tray of Long John Fritters in the morning will always have one fritter a little bit burned,” Whitehead would say.

“Yeah, I know,” the waitress would agree. “It's the one in the highest corner, before the grease really gets effective. I always throw the burned one out.”

“Give me the fritter that is a little bit burned,” Whitehead would say. So he would have coffee and fritter free, and a sociable place to read the paper. Then, after he had cut the usual free coupons out of it, he would reroll that paper carefully and put it back on the neighbor's doorstep where he had found it. There had been a chilliness develop between the paperboy and the neighbor from whom the paper was borrowed for a little while every morning. Neither of them understood how the paper had all the holes cut out of it when it was first unrolled.

But, by these simple movements, Ferndale Whitehead was able to get a head start on the world every morning. And it was a rare day when the world ever did catch up to him after such a start. Kathrynne Klunque and Elizabeth Queen Mab and Thor Thorgelson were out early every morning also, as were almost all the other quacksalvers. It is always the “First Morning of Creation” when you get up early enough. Certain demiurges have always known this and have always risen early. But most of the people have known it not.

Whitehead's partner, Jerome Blackfoot, also got up early in the mornings, and he liked to walk in the countryside that is just on the edge of town. Jerome usually carried a basket and a toe-sack and a jug. “You have heard of the guy who went out when it was raining fish, and he didn't have anything to catch them in,” Jerome said. “I'm not that guy. I'll always have something to catch them in.”

Actually, fish were far down on the list of things that Blackfoot filled his receptacles with every morning. In season, he picked produce of various sorts. Sometimes a chicken or a duckling went into his toe-sack. Almost every morning he stopped by one of the places where cows were kept and he always milked a jugful from one of the cows. “I don't care who keeps my country's cows,” he would say, “so long as I have the milk free. A cow-keeper I am not.”

Dogs sometimes harassed Blackfoot a bit, but he had a trick of slipping a muzzle onto the barking head of a dog and then stuffing the whole dog into his toe-sack. People will almost always advertise when a well-voiced dog disappears, and they will pay small rewards when he is returned.

The Quacksalvers were a bunch of inclined twigs and they grew from that into a profitably slanted forest. So Jerome Blackfoot, like his partner, like most of the other quacksalvers, got a head start on the world every morning. In the very early morning there is always enough freshness to go around. And beyond that, the quacksalvers all did their best thinking on their early morning rambles.

Their best thinking? That? But let us go from the ridiculous to the sublime. How was it going with the people who could really think? How was it going with the brainy majority? Oh, it was going well with them.

What do people think about when their thinking power is many times increased? Oh, they think about the same things, but they do it with greater power. And they think about nothing new? Yes, they think about everything new. To think of a thing with greater power is to think of it new. And at top-thinking, things draw together so that sympathy and affection are all parts of the same thing, along with logic and exposition and excitement. The material problems of the land simply packed up and went away. They were solved automatically. Problems of weather proved amenable to solution. It would rain if enough people thought “rain” powerfully enough. The south wind would blow if enough people thought “south wind will blow” intelligently enough. There was successful problem-solving, and there was an activating peace of mind. Peace has nothing to do with inaction. It was a highly active, dynamic and kinetic peace-of-mind that prevailed. And there was a lot of love, of everybody for everybody, imbuing the whole life-weave.

“We make a stunning picture,” said Hadrian Pigendo, a Scar-Tissue man and a painter. “Our whole land is now one single picture, and a scanning frame on it will be filled with nothing but masterpieces wherever it stops. A century ago, John Masterman said that there couldn't be a perfect picture until every element in it, animate and inanimate, was in thinking accord. Now everything is in thinking accord, and everything is a part of a perfect picture. This table here is in thinking accord with me and with everyone else who enters the room. It resonates to us. So does the light that breaks and spills through the window there. Ours has now become an intellectualized world, achieving the identity of intelligence with beauty. The two are the same, both being aspects of ‘perfect order.’ The only drawback to the perfect living picture that we form is the business of the invisible cobwebs. But perhaps that is not a drawback either when it shall be perfectly understood.”

“There is no longer any difference between individual thought and group thought,” said Felix Acumen, a Necklace-Clan man and a thinker's thinker. “At its apex of exaltation, thought merges everyone together. This is not to say that everyone will think alike. It is to say that the infinite variety of human thought, when it flourishes in its essential life-greenness, weaves itself into a single seamless (and limitless) garment every part of which is conscious of every other part. It may be that this seamless thought encompasses everything, that it is all inside and that there is no outside to it. Or it may be that there is a very slight outside to it. There are invisible and barely sensed tendrils of cobwebs that brush against the multi-surface of our thought, and they may be from outside the context.”

The courtship rites of the super-intelligent clans were interesting. There was the “interlocking antenna” effect of the Necklace-Clan people, their gateway-couplings that made up their necklaces seeking their counterparts in those of the other person and rushing together with a great clattering. There were the double needles that the Scar-Tissue People used that resulted in highly intricate steroid sharing. There was the business of each lover placing his brains in the wagon of his loved one in the case of the Little Red Wagon People. And there were the non-standardized courtship proceedings when the courtships were between members of two different brain clans.

Other things enriched themselves. People no longer played three-dimensional chess. They played sixteen-dimensional chess, which is harder, but more rewarding. The music that they made now was an intellectualized music. Some people said that it was a computerized music. But it was not, somehow, the expression of the identity of intelligence and beauty. It was really bad music, considering that it was the music of an intellectual era. But it was not nearly as bad as the music of the preceding non-intellectual era had been.

And the super-intelligent people couldn't tell good jokes. Otis Ramrod, a Little Red Wagon Person and a social mores expert, explained it:

“No, super-intelligent persons cannot tell good jokes. There is no such thing as a good joke to a super-intelligent person. Humor disappears from the world now. There is no longer any place or purpose for it. Crocodiles may shed tears over its passing, but I will not. Humor is a ridiculous bridge thrown across a chasm of maladjustment. In the super-intelligent world there is no maladjustment, no chasm, and no places to throw the bridge named humor. In our now almost-perfect-world, on careen-course towards perfection, there are only slight and disappearing flaws where residual humor may still flicker faintly. There are, for instance the ‘cobweb jokes’ which most persons do not understand (I do not). And there are residual antibrain people such as the Quacksalvers who still have humor and still have maladjustments. Our aim is totally to sweep away both the mysterious ‘cobwebs’ and the mopey Quacksalvers this very year.”

The super-intellectual world could not allow maladjustment in itself. So it could not allow self-doubt. So it could not allow dissent. And something had to be done about the tendency of people to brush imaginary cobwebs away from their faces too.

The non-participating Quacksalvers represented dissent. Them at least you could get your hands on. Them at least you could obliterate.

A whole complex of surfacing questions represented self-doubt.

The cobwebs represented the cobwebs themselves.

A small congress of ultra-super-intelligent persons was assembled to consider the three problems. They came quickly to the possibility that the three problems were all one problem. Here are bits of scattered conversations and comments from the “Self-Doubt Congress.”

“Someone is kidding. It isn't really like this. This business of us being super-intelligent is all a put-on. Well, who's putting it on?”

“Are we indeed a Noble Experiment? And who is it who is experimenting with us? We know that Noble Experiments have a high incidence of failure.”

“What is the mysterious ‘Micro-X’ element that has always been in all our brain steroids that we have never been able to take out of them? Does somebody monitor our brains by it?”

“Are we being milked? I ask are we being milked? What godly race is milking our brains and our persons?”

“Has there ever been a successful revolt of puppets against puppeteers? Is such a thing possible? How would puppets have any motion if it were not imparted to them by their puppeteers? No, I do not say that we are puppets. I merely ask whether there has ever been a successful revolt of puppets against puppeteers.”

“What if it is fortunate that we are not able to brush the invisible cobwebs or tendrils away from us? What if they are our life-line or our light-line? What if we break just one of the invisible tendrils, the wrong one for us, and the light in us switches off? I believe that this has been the true cause of deaths of a number of persons this year. Indeed, one doctor I know of wrote ‘broken cobwebs’ in the line for ‘cause of death’ on the certificates of several persons. He has since been barred from doctoring for persistent drunkenness.”

“Is Quacksalver Row Olympus? No, no, consider that question unasked. It cannot be Olympus. It cannot even be Valhalla. It is something much else and much less. It is so much less that it must remain beneath our notice. Quacksalver Row, I mean.”

“We are met to solve these three problems. One of them can be solved within an hour by a little bit of bloody extinction. So let us solve that one problem now, and then inquire whether the other two problems have not somehow solved themselves with it. That's the way that super-intelligent persons would go about this. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” said the other members of the small congress of ultra-super-intelligent persons. So they went out, it being evening now, with staves and swords and garroting ropes to effect the extinction of about thirty nonconformist persons.

The Quacksalvers of Quacksalver Row all maintained cluttered quarters which they believed to be elegant. These were all in three or four adjacent buildings on the Row. The Quacksalvers were really a “Beggar's Opera” of very gamey folks.

The people of the small congress that had been looking into the three problems, their numbers being about thrice the numbers of the Quacksalvers, came before their quarters and made an evening tumult in Quacksalver Row.

All the Quacksalvers tumbled out of their buildings and came to the confrontation in the street. One of the Quacksalvers, Thor Thorgelson who did business under the motto “A Square Deal from the Square-Head”, drew his own sword and cut off the ear of the leader of the congress party. This leader began to cry with the pain and surprise and loss, and many of his companions began to cry with him. Super-intelligent persons have very close sympathies with other super-intelligent persons.

“Why all the fuss?” Thor Thorgelson asked. “It's his deaf ear that I cut off. Don't you think that I have any sense at all?” This was all the bloodshed, all the violence of any kind that took place at the confrontation.

“This is ridiculous,” one of the super-intelligent persons said. “Why should we, the brainiest of all delegations, have come to parley with you beggars? What compels us to do it? What strings are on us anyhow?”

“We don't know why you came,” Kathrynne Klunque said. “We are all agog about it ourselves.”

“You are like horrible caricatures of puppeteers,” the super-intelligent speaker said. “How do we come to be a-dangle on your strings?”

“What strings?” Kathrynne asked.

“He means the cobwebs,” the confidence woman Elizabeth Queen Mab guessed. “He thinks they are puppet strings. He thinks we manipulate them.”

“Well, do we?”

“I don't know. A little bit, I guess.”

“Everybody dangles on several sets of strings and is manipulated by them,” Ferndale Whitehead tried to explain. “This could not bother you. Is what bothers you, brain-people, that the strings seem to be manipulated from an unexpected direction, that they seem to be manipulated by ourselves?”

“Why should we be at odds?” Jerome Blackfoot asked. “You are good cows. You feed and maintain yourselves, a thing that I wouldn't like to do. Let's keep it the way it is, you smart and us dumb. It seems to me to be a fair division.”

“No, no, this cannot be,” one of the super-brains protested. “We are not, we cannot be — ”

“You cannot be clowns' cattle?” Elizabeth Queen Mab asked. “Well, say that you are not cattle then, and we will agree that you are not. We will remain the clowns without any cattle. But don't you quit giving milk!”

“We will revolt! We will overthrow you!” a super-brain threatened.

“Oh no!” Jerome Blackfoot swore. “Then in the turnover you would be dumb and we would be smart. Do not hang that on us! We'll never accept that burden. We thought we had it fixed perfectly the way it was. We'll take to the woods, we'll take to the wastelands, we'll never come back!”

“Except for the milk,” one of the super-brains jeered.

Believe it people, there was tension there for a long moment.

And never could you guess what broke that tension when it had stretched out longer and longer.

One of the super-brains laughed.

And another of them wailed. And one cried out in pain.

But then a second one laughed, and then a third one. They broke it when they did that. “You laugh too hard and I'll turn your little red wagons over,” Elizabeth Queen Mab threatened.

But another of the super-brains laughed. There was a chasm, and there shouldn't have been. There was maladjustment, and a ridiculous bridge was the best that could be thrown over it.

They broke it, and they lost part of it when they broke it. The whole apparatus of being so smart crumbled, even though a lot of the smartness would remain. The top of the mountain of it was gone.

We'll never be that smart again.

Ahoy the Whale

1

“There's a whale in the sky,” Vida Crossways said as she looked through the clarified ceiling and north wall.

“Yes, I signed a permit for one to be made and flown this morning over the Institute,” Mose Gora said. “It is symbolic of something. I forget just what. I say to let the political-oriented people and all such juvenile types have their revolutions. Do we not still have the regulation that all revolutions must be held between 7:00 and 8:00 in the morning? They should be out of the way before the first period begins.”

“What is it, a kite, or an inflated rubber whale?” Hadrian Charm asked. “Oh, it's a ‘Manifesto Declaration Effigy’. It carries the proper tag. It's the signal that another of these tiresome coups is being pulled. I heard some talk early this morning that a ‘Holy Whale Movement’ would take over the world suddenly today. And they have named all of us here ‘Fathers of the Holy Whale’.”

“Good for us,” Mose said. The whale itself had become a sort of totem for mathematical and scientific dabblers. There was the whale-form as three-dimensional French Curve, the whale as ‘the shape that contains all shapes’, devices that every designer and analogist must use daily.

“Look at the expression on it!” Mose cried. “It is outrageous in its arrogance. And what is it doing now?”

The whole whale-kite lurched. It opened and closed its hinged jaws, closed them on something that could not be discerned. And several liters of what looked like blood ran down the mouth and jaws and sides of the effigy.

“It certainly announces itself strongly,” Mose said. “It does look beautifully whaleish and outrageous there in the bluest sky and clearest air of all the earth, and picked out as it is by the brightest sun. It is a good kite, and somebody worked hard on it. I don't fly kites nearly enough myself now-a-days. I mustn't let myself get out of that habit.”

They did have the bluest sky of all the earth over Launchers Institute. They did have the clearest air and brightest sun. They also had the greenest and thickest grass in the world there. And at night they had the most sparkling stars. When it rained there, they had the most crystalline rain ever and the most fragrant, full of the clear and sharp nitrogenous compounds right out of the sky. The trees at Launchers Institute raised themselves beautiful and rampant and strong. The buildings at Launchers stood in happy domination of their surroundings, original and clever and pleasant buildings, fortunate and functional. Launchers was a sparkling and optimistic place. “The sun shines brightest on Launchers ” was a true saying.

This was because of the happy outlook of the Institute which was devoted to the bright and open idea of ‘Total Synthesis’. Things accrued to Launchers. Things worked right at Launchers. Launchers had such people as Mose Gora, Sally Rime, Shipman Strong, Hadrian Charm, Vida Crossways, kindly and brilliant giants. And those were only some of the notables in the ‘Advanced Cutting-Edge Department’. And when the Total Synthesis should appear, it was believed by many that it would be first recognized at Launchers.

The Daily Rattler rather crudely called Launchers “The First Barony of Braindom”, and Launchers really did stand out a bit from the other great centers of illumination. And it led its nearest competitor three to one in the popular prophecies.

“The ears at Launchers will hear it first; the eyes at Launchers will see it first; the hands at Launchers will grasp it first,” so the New Light Sentinel published its praise.

“They are bunched as they come into the stretch of the Grand Synthesis Sweepstakes,” the Sporting Journal said, “seven of the great horses, Questors League, Grand Synthesis Realization Enterprises, Rewarding Moment Foundation, Keys-to-the-Kingdom College, Great Picture Fall-Together Operation, Prometheus Connection Laboratories, Launchers Institute. They are coming out of the stretch, and they will reach the wire this year, maybe this month. And our guess is that Launchers will be first by a nose.”

“The Look-Outs were never more alert,” the Owlswatch Oracle printed, “and the burnished brass of their spy-glasses is shining in the sun. Soon the cry will come from one of the tall ships. We are betting that the ringing ‘Ahoy the Whale’ will sound first from the high mast-head of Launchers Institute.”

But it had been Mixed Metaphors: The Interdisciplinary Weekly that had, several weeks earlier, named the great expectation as ‘Project Cry the Whale’. “The whale will be big,” Metaphors said. “It will be the total synthesis of all phenomena, physical, biological, geological, cosmological, ethical, psychic, teleologic, expressionistic, artistic, pleasurable, everything. It will be a ‘New Plateau of the Promise’, a grand and high stage of the ‘Delectable Mountain’. It will be a ‘Paradise Landmark Discovery’. It will be an eye-opening of the human race, for it was born with its eyes closed. And the noble Launchers Institute is ever in the fore at explicating the Big Picture. The Big Picture will explain, instantly and forever, all physical and psychic and mental processes, gravity and electromagnetism and helical biology, all plasmic and cosmic and human quirks, all causation and teleology. The ‘why’ and the ‘what’ and the ‘whenever’ and the ‘now’ of the material as well as the notional universes will be explained, and the hierarchical and also the demotic arrangement of the worlds, the hot-and-happy arts and the hot-and-happy sciences, the interweaving of personalities and fleshes. It will create meaningful niddulas for nuftors. The light will shine first on and from Launchers Institute, and the apperception will be almost immediately.”

“Now wait just one dog-footed minute,” Sally Rime had said at the time of the outbursts. “It isn't as if any of these crummy journals are friends of Launchers. It's the old recipe, ‘Butter the bear well before you eat it’. This is butter, rancid yak butter, I think.”

But how was it popularly believed that the Great Synthesis would happen almost immediately? Who, with a license to say such things, had said it?

Mose Gora of Launchers had said it. He had indeed said that the apperception and realization of the Grand Pattern should happen ‘almost immediately’. And, somehow, Mose had become the most credible person in the world on scientific matters. His phrase struck a popular chord. But his later clarification (“When I say ‘almost immediately’ I mean ‘possibly within ten thousand years’; that is ‘almost immediately’ in the long view”) had gone almost unnoticed.

“We cannot say when it will be realized,” Vida Crossways gave the opinion now. “It is very unlikely that it will happen this day, or this century. And ten thousand years sounds like a pretty good guess to me. There are plateaus in our ascension, and it is about time that we reached the Plateau of the Big Picture and the Grand Synthesis. It will help when we know what we're looking for looks like. What unfitted pieces are left over should fall into place almost immediately after the outline of the Great Picture is apparent. I am sure that we already have billions of pieces to it tolerably arranged; I am sure that there are still a few million pieces unfitted. But the very next piece may be the critical one, and then the design of the Big Picture will leap out at us. This piece may appear this very morning, in this very room. It may be a piece scheduled in our work of this morning. Or it may arrive in seven or ten or fourteen thousand years to members of a group who are seeking it even harder than we are.”

Vida Crossway was like a cool plaza into which dozens of streets from every direction poured and were absorbed. She was monumental circles and arches and fountains. Knowing everyone, she was a complete communication nexus herself.

“I have already put the press on standby,” Josh Brusharbor blurted out. “I have told them that the break should come this morning. I have an intuition that one of us (probably myself) will sight it here within the present hour.”

“Oh shut up, Joshua!” Mose ordered bluntly. “I don't know what you're good for other days but you have a Monday morning job here. Get with it.”

“When the Great Synthesis is made apparent, people will no longer be unkind to each other,” Josh said with a sort of loutish loftiness. “Yes, I will do my job.” And he busied himself with his irregular Monday morning job.

Joshua Brusharbor was not one of the kindly and brilliant giants at Launchers Institute. He was a mutt-headed young man (that was certainly Mose's view) who was considerably over-aged in grade at the Institute. He was a Scientific Intern of the lowest class, and he had remained in that class for several years too long. It was, in fact, wondered how he had become a Scientific Intern of any class at all. And yet he was said to be ambitious.

The janitor, a confused and unhappy man, solaced himself with strong spirits every weekend and was seldom able to work Monday mornings. So Josh Brusharbor had to fill in for him, sweeping the floors. This Josh Brusharbor had, several times before, gone to the press with ridiculous little alarms and discursions. It was no new thing that he should put the press on standby. The ‘press’ he went to was his own brother-in-law Leon Cloudyhouse, an interning feature writer for the Daily Rattler and for the Quicksilver Weekly Review. And both of these publications were ever able to make something out of nothing.

“The Great Picture is like a primordial billion-word thesis,” Mose Gora was speaking as from a height, “of which all the words have been somehow shook off their scrolls and dumped into mixed piles. We do, unaccountably, remember how a few million sequences of them should go, and this helps mightily. But the piles of data are so large that we cannot even see the whole extent of them, and likely they are of more than three dimensions. Our task is to assemble and order it all. Let that alone, Josh!”

“But it looks as if it might be important,” Josh resisted.

“Certainly it is important,” the kindly and brilliant giant Mose Gora barked. “Would it be on my desk if it weren't important?”

“The Whale is eating people,” Sally Rime said as she looked out through the clarified ceiling. “No, I guess it is only effigies of people that they have sent up in another kite, and the hinged jaws of the kite-whale scoop them in. But everybody is cheering the whale, and jeering the people. What is it that you have there that is important, Mose? Shouldn't we be getting to it?” Sally was kindly and ironic music. She had golden hair worn in the high ‘crowning glory’ style, hair that possibly weighed a third as much as she did herself.

“Yes, it is our business this morning,” Mose said. “Hadrian Charm here believes that he has cracked the Coaxiliary Code. If it is so indeed, then it sets another important piece of the Grand Puzzle into its proper place.”

“This is it, this is it!” Josh Brusharbor howled. “This is the cap-stone! This is the critical piece! Everything now falls into place with the rush of ten thousand avalanches.”

“Give me that, Josh you oaf,” Mose ordered. “You couldn't understand it in a week of study, and you've looked at none of it except the covering sheet.”

“I couldn't understand it in a week of study, no, but I see it all in one blinding flash,” Josh gushed. “I understand everything now.”

“Give me that, Josh. Then go to the infirmary. You're sick.”

“Have it, take it, it is etched into my brain,” Josh cried. “The Grand Picture has just clarified itself to me; the Big Synthesis has just made itself manifest in my brain. I see it all! I understand it all! Ahoy the Whale! Wake the world and tell the people!” And Josh Brusharbor rushed out of the rooms, bleeding words from his mouth: in short seconds he was heard in the Academic Mall below them still howling “Ahoy the Whale! Ahoy the Whale!”

“We had better have him picked up and gotten to an alienist,” Vida Crossways said. “He is even sicker than usual. Oh, but it was funny!” Mose, Sally, Hadrian, and Vida laughed with mixed hilarity and compassion. Well, it was funny.

But Shipman Strong was on his feet and gazing at them with white fury.

“Why do you laugh?” he demanded. “It is for this moment that the hills grew into mountains and the gullies into rivers. This is the Day of the Apparition and the Clarification. You laugh, and you fail it! Your portions will be taken away from you and given to others, and you yourselves will be given over to the quagule. Mose, you are in the world, and yet you have never seen the world! This is the day the World has awaited! We sight it, we sight it! Ahoy the Whale!”

And Shipman Strong ran out of the rooms as Brusharbor had done, and his enraptured voice was soon heard booming through all the malls of Launchers Institute: “Ahoy the Salvation! Ahoy the Whale!”

2

“There will not be any magic moment,” Mose Gora said softly. “A great thing would never come in so crass a manner as that. There may be shortcuts but never that short. When the revolution does come, in a few millennia likely, it will come soundlessly as an interior illumination to first one and then perhaps to several persons. It will not come with all this shrieking to the callow.”

No, Mose was not trying too hard to convince himself of something. He already had all of his convictions. He was Mose Gora and he wasn't susceptible to pressure or persuasion. He held a screaming copy of the Daily Rattler with its red banner-lines: Ahoy the Whale! Magic Moment Comes to the World with a Bang!

“It is too bad that the lower classes have ears for rumors, especially for the false rumors of this false event,” Mose cajoled himself. “And I must own myself completely unappreciative of the new MOGS and DOGS who have appeared so suddenly in such numbers,” he said with acerbity. The MOGS were the ‘Masters Of The Great Synthesis’, and the DOGS were the ‘Doctors Of The Great Synthesis’. No, there shouldn't have been so many of them so soon. Only ten minutes had gone by since Joshua had cried ‘Ahoy!’ to the Whale of the Big Picture.

“MOGS, DOGS! I do not trust these new degrees at all,” Mose was saying. “I do not trust three-minute crash courses.” Yes, of course all communication had become instantaneous: but some things had become a little bit too instantaneous for belief. The vision of the monstrous whale in the sky (wherever did the people come up with such an iconography as that?) should carry its own conviction: if it were valid. But Mose Gora was not convinced by it.

And yet the reports, from all over the world, of the instantaneous and amazing ‘Great Thing’ were pouring in through all the speakers. And all the speakers had been given pre-emptive override so they might not legally be shut off. But the voices coming over these speakers were those of the most flagrant and least factual of people, Lolo Brighthoney, Karen Hemisphere, Dean Hotpistol. And also there was the voice of Leon Cloudyhouse, the brother-in-law of Joshua Brusharbor. Leon seemed to have risen mightily in the journalism-of-the-air in the last ten minutes; he had a key slot now, and he gave with stuff like this:

“We have a new time and space, a new gravity and a new electromagnetism in the world this morning,” Leon was saying. “They are new because they are seen and understood clearly for the first time today. All things find new places in the realized arrangement. Temperature becomes one of the colors of time, and nostalgia is the completion of the retrograde sphere that is the reflection of ourselves.

“We already know that the ‘Great Picture’ must not be a pretty picture or it would have been guessed long since; and it would have proved to be not worth the guessing. The ‘Great Picture’ had to be ‘Outrageous High Gothic’, a ‘whale in the sky’ sort of thing. And now the resolution has come. The great minds of the world are pealing together like carillon bells. Hear them!”

“It is like something out of ‘Rhapsody in Mathematics and Science for the Freshman’,” Mose said. It was about thirteen minutes since Joshua Brusharbor had apperceived the ‘Great Vision’ and had run out to tell the world about it. “I have been counted with the great minds of the world in my day,” Mose mumbled, “but I don't seem to chime in with this at all.”

Then the voice of Joshua Brusharbor (he'd gone without finishing his sweeping, and Mose had already lodged a demerit against him) came over the speakers:

“How odd that I should be the first one to see it!” Josh spoke with a rumbling purr. “But it kindles now. Before this hour is over with, many millions will see it. Before the fall of night, almost everyone in the world will see and comprehend it. We are the New Manking! We are noxie nufters all! We were dead, and now we live. We are the resurrection and the life. We are humanity humanityfied!”

“What are ‘nufters’?” Mose asked them there. Well, actually the ‘them there’ had diminished to Sally Rime. Shipman Strong had gone to spread the New Gospel. Hadrian Charm had gone for a moment, and Vida Crossways had gone forever.

“ ‘Nufters’ are the new illuminated people,” Sally said. “It's one of the innovative pop words that have swept the world within the last seven minutes.”

“Quite expressive of what they are,” Mose said. “Nufters, yes.”

“But the thing has spread,” Sally worried. “It is a bonfire, it is a tent-revival, it is a pop fad. It has submerged the world in record time. Ah, there isn't any way that you could go along with it quietly, is there, Mose?”

“No way at all, Sally,” he said. “Mine is still the mind and voice of reason, but how can I make myself heard in this shouting? How did it happen?”

“There's no way to make yourself heard, Mosa. And it didn't just happen, not in fourteen minutes. It was planned, and it was effected. Why should they want to take over the world in the name of Science? It has happened though. I suppose that I'll stay with you. My last stubbornness.”

“Here, here, where are you people taking my desk?” Mose demanded as one young man picked him and moved him away from it, and four other men picked up his desk to make off with it.

“We are taking your desk to have it bronzed,” one of them said. “Just as it is, papers and tapes and all. This is by order of Duke Joshua. There is also the suggestion, from the same great Duke Joshua, of taking you and having you bronzed also. Joshua believes that you are entitled to an imposing death, this very day, and then to be displayed on a catafalque. You will be very proud of yourself when you lie there in burnished death.”

“No, I will not be,” Mose Gora said, “not proud of myself at all.”

It was just fifteen minutes since Joshua Brusharbor, leaving his sweeping unfinished, had cried “Ahoy the Whale!”, and the Whale Flag of the ‘Great Synthesis’ already flew over most of the world.

3

“No, I'm not especially interested in what is going on in the outer world, Hadrian,” Mose said several minutes later to a former colleague who was not riding high in that outer world. “I'm an inner-world specialist myself. And yet I do have a quick and accurate understanding of the outer world. What's going on is a coup, a world-coup, a power-coup. The International Symbolic Scientist Party of the Holy Whale is taking over the world. It's not important. Someone is always taking over the world. Next month it will be someone else. Valid people do not pay much attention to such juvenile political games.”

“This is the real thing, Mose,” Hadrian said, “and next month it will not be someone else. The blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk, the dead arise, and the poor have the New Gospel of the Great Synthesis preached to them. It works! You don't want to be left out, do you, Mose?”

“Yes, I think I do want to be left out of it. How did they pull it so fast?”

“How did they pull it out so fast? You mean how did we pull it so fast? He who is not with us is against us.”

“You weren't in on this from the first, Hadrian.”

“Maybe not, but I sure came in quick. It doesn't take me any fifteen minutes to make up my mind. This is it, Mose, the one and only ‘Big Picture’. This is the one that can be made to pay off.”

“Not the one and only. There have been so many of them, Hadrian, that there is something puerile about it all. Many other versions of the Big Picture and the Great Synthesis have flashed into the human ken; and then they have broken into fragments and faded away again. Oh, some of them have left a bit of star rubble in their wakes, and much of it has been useful to me. But, man, there have been hundreds of major cosmic theories intended to explain everything. And where are they now? They simply have not been accepted except for what they were, fragments. And the present theory is unfinished and cannot win acceptance ever.”

“It cannot, you say? But it has, Mose. And what it has won it will not lose again. It's enforceable this time. The other ‘Grand Syntheses’ didn't deal rapidly or sternly with the problem of their own unacceptance. This one does deal with that: it disallows such unacceptance completely. It will not allow such a thing to live.”

“Pure science is not in accord with heaps and mounds of victims.”

“It is now, Mose. Haven't you kept up with the events of the last twenty minutes at all? But it was the same case in the past, only not so efficient nor so stringent. ‘Pure’ science climbed to each of its plateaus over heaps and mounds of victims: or rather it was carried there by someone who saw that there would be profit in the new façade. Think about it, Mose, very fast. We can't afford to slow it down ever, or the ‘Big Picture’ will blur into dull stasis. You've no free choice. Either come in and lend your prestige, or we will quagule you.”

“What is ‘quagule’?” Mose Gora asked.

“Oh this is pathetic!” Hadrian howled. “You've not learned any of the language of the last twenty-two minutes? A really noxie nufter wouldn't have to ask what ‘quagule’ means. We may as well give you over to the torturers.”

4

The Big-Picture-Grand-Synthesis did have a sort of high style and instant clarity. That it was sighted and cried up by knaves and opportunists was not completely damning to it. They would not be considered as knaves and opportunists tomorrow; they would have elevated themselves almost to solar heroes by then.

That the Grand Synthesis might not be the Ultimate Synthesis did not preclude its being a very strong Penultimate or Antepenultimate Manifestation of Phenomena and Meanings. That it wasn't finished didn't say that it shouldn't be glorified as it was. The present grandness was a tall tower on the way to the Parousia and the Pleroma. It was a very important edifice. It was a clarity whose time had come.

There would be no end of extravagant claims for it, but the style mellowed considerably after about the twenty-third minute of the new era. The victories had all been won by then, and all the defenses had been made secure. There was a tendency to display at least an ‘effigy of honesty’, to ‘tell it like it is, even when it isn't.’ There was this, for instance, from the ever-popular Quicksilver which was out in a special edition:

“The symbolism of the Grand Synthesis is from the beginning. It is the ‘all-creature’, originally called ‘Pan-Theros’ or ‘All-the-Animals’, and later called Leviathan. This is the largest of the creatures and the most metamorphic. Only the Whale, the actual Leviathan, possesses every shape and curve and dimension of every geometry and every art. Leviathan the Holy Whale is the Sovereign State, the World Made Flesh, who is both the authority and the agreement. We have difficulty in seeing the Big Picture because every one of us is an item in it and we must see it from the inside. But now we add a dimension to our vision (the Gnostics believed that Whales saw in four dimensions, and possibly the Gnostics were right), and it is all there clearly, and we are in it.

“There is an old and mistaken symbol on the walls of Roman-Christian catacombs, and also of burial-caves of much earlier. It is named The Fish, but look closer. It is not entirely a fish. It is the Whale from the Beginning, though drawn small. It is the holy fish that is also the holy mammal, the type of ourselves. It lives in the holy ocean, and in its youth it lived on the holy land. With the coming of the Pleroma (and we can feel and hear it rounding to its full now), it ascends and becomes the Whale in the Sky, the Pillar of Fire by night. Revilers say that we could have picked any symbol at all for our coup. Well, we picked the largest symbol, and it is going to be the largest coup. And we picked a scientific patter for it because we are mighty scientific operators.

“The cracking of the Coaxiliary Code by Hadrian Charm, working on a base created by Mose Gora, really marked the beginning of the New Ear. Its importance was seen a little bit sooner than immediately, and it was glommed onto. But other things almost as good could have marked the beginning of a New Era at any time within the last five years (probably at any time within the last fifty years). It was not a question of when the Whale would appear. There were whales aplenty bouncing in all the waters, and mirages of them could be made to appear in all the skies. It was a question of when the push was ready, of when the look-outs would be told to cry ‘Ahoy the Whale!’. But when the whale was cried, things went fast.

“Yes, a thing should go off as fast as a shot, after it is aimed and ready. The music of it was already huge and bulging with delayed birth, and now it rides out on the horns and strings and percussion rods. It is ‘stratified rock’, and it has something for everybody. It is ‘Ultimate Folk’. Of course it is all computerized. Should music be mixed by hand?

“The revivalism of the synthesis was already a risen water-wall of new fervor, an over-running springtime spate ready to burst its dam. It was logorrheic, it was orgiastic, it was flesh-crawling revivalism. It was clattering-togetherness revivalism, sadistic and defamatory revivalism; it even had a touch of religious revivalism in it. We named it ‘The Great Synthesis’, for it was Get-Together-Gussie stuff. But the upheaving power and surge were the things that mattered. We could put a saddle on’em. And now it is locked into compulsory revivalism. How else can one put such strong fluidity to work than to contain and channel it? There is no backing out of any of these things. They become compulsory as soon as they come into being. ‘Mandatory Boogie’ is the strongest of the hymns of the last several minutes. Something for everyone! And a lot more for some of us!

“Science must lay down with Astrology, and Whale Oil must be poured onto the Living Waters. Opportunism, that exasperation and effector of the ages, must crack the whip. We all roll over to the cool cacophony of ‘Mandatory Boogie’.

“Yes, there really is a remarkable mathematical and scientific synthesis that is brought to designated fruition. Before that, it was a running synthesis; but that is not nearly so neat nor so easily packaged. The synthesis might have run clear out of control if it hadn't been sacked up in time.

“People like to know such background stuff as this and to chuckle over it. Now, more than twenty minutes after the ‘all secure’, it is surely safe to give out fragments of that background. People love the feel of being behind the scenes. Very well, let everybody be behind the scenes then. The ‘Great Synthesis Theater’ is arranged so that all the people have the illusion of watching the action from behind the scenes and jeering at the puppet audience out front. But it is all done with mirrors. One group is the reflection of the others, and the people are jeering at themselves.”

5

“Whence the row of stuffed owls?” Mose Gora asked. He was under some sort of restraint. He was being held by strong hands, six or eight of them.

“Oh surely you know them all,” Joshua Brusharbor said. “They are ‘instant remains’ of famous contemporary persons. We will honor them in their deaths today, but we sure won't have them around alive. They will be impressive in our ‘Solidarity Candlelight Ceremony’ tonight, in the ‘they lived to see the day, and rejoiced’ division. Yes, they are rather like burnished owls. They are some of the Lares and Penates of our new world. They are so much better as stuffed ancestors than they were as living persons and living obstacles.”

“I'd not serve well in the row with them,” Mose said sourly. “My clay and my bronze would both revolt against such testimony. I'd spook your effect.”

“You are not even worthy to be a stuffed owl, Mose,” Joshua said. “It will be necessary to ‘lose’ you, so yours will be a ‘Moses Grave’ on the border, on the edge of the rocky desert just before one comes to the promised land. Of course it is the essence of a ‘Moses Tomb’ that the stones of it shall be obliterated by night and that the very location of it should be quickly ‘lost’. But you will have had your hour.

“You did give us all the eloquent idea of the ‘Big Picture’ and the ‘Grand Synthesis’, but you didn't understand how they should be used to organize the world and put it to work. You didn't understand the principle of the ‘Grand Synthesis as Red Apple on a String’. If it hadn't been for you though, we might have gone with an inferior costuming. It comes too late for you, but it doesn't matter. We can swear by your beard and by your bones. You will always be monumental to us. Possibly you will lie in your ‘Moses Tomb’ within the hour, and likely we will quagule you. Why are you here, Sally Rime?”

“Because I am with Mose Gora.”

“You shouldn't be. And you know what ‘quagule’ means.”

“Yes,” Sally said. And she began to shake.

But Mose was thinking of other things.

“Yes, we have broken the Coaxiliary Code,” he mused, “and that was a very important piece to fit in. But it was accompanied by local disturbances of sooty thunder and lightning.

“But ‘On and on’ I say. We come very near to the resolution of the Big Thing now. Perhaps another thousand major pieces set in will do it. I really do have hope that it will be done within ten thousand years. Ah, this local disturbance is quite sooty. It irritates the ears and eyes.”

“If you have any last acts, do them now,” Joshua said, “within the limits of the restraint that you are under. If you have any last thoughts, think them now. A minute should be long enough to do it.”

Sally Rime cut off her heavy golden hair. She gave it to somebody: it could not be seen to whom. Then she poured ashes over her head. Nobody noticed where the ashes came from just when she had need of them.

“Lord, I have labored in the mathematical and scientific desert for forty years, and I have produced fruit,” Mose said to the Lord. “Why am I supplanted? And why by such a jack-ass as Joshua Brusharbor? He blows with his mouth, and all the walls fall down. Why, why?”

“Time has run out for the two of you,” Josh Brusharbor said. “You'll be quaguled now.”

“Do you think it will work?” Mose asked in a lilty voice that was oddly directed.

“I know it will work!” Joshua brayed. “It will work immediately.”

“I wasn't talking to you, jack-ass Joshua,” Mose said. “I don't know or care what ‘quagule’ means, but I'm not going along with it.”

A number of persons who had gathered began to deride Mose then. “You say that you won't go along with it!” they jibed, “and you don't even know what it means. What do you know?”

“This and that,” Mose said. “Do any of you know what ‘kritz’ or ‘faszmork’ or ‘candula’ mean? They're para-mathematical words a little beyond Duke Joshua here. Does nobody know what they mean?”

“I do,” Sally Rime said. And nobody else said anything.

“No, I'm not going to your quagule ending,” Mose said. “I'm going somewhere else.”

“Where are you going, Mose Gora, Old Man of the Mountain?” they mocked him.

“Where I go, you cannot follow me,” Mose said. And they could not. Mose walked out of his restraint, and his captors looked at their empty hands.

They tried to follow him. They seemed to follow him for a few steps. “Lay hold of him, lay hold of him!” Josh Brusharbor called harshly. But they lost Mose right about at the Candula station.

That was the slickest thing anyone ever saw, the way Mose Gora walked out of their framework.

There's a ‘Moses Grave’ for him on the border there, but he isn't in it. He's away somewhere, in a more amenable place (no, not off Earth; there's lot of amenable places on Earth yet), not bothered quite so much by the local, sooty rumble. He is working on several pieces of the Grand Synthesis, as are many other people.

Condition Quick:
A Dialog for Two Dia-Persons

SS: Since we discovered that a net is more than the sum of its holes, and we set up the network CONDITION QUICK and now have instant reception of all the millions of SFish thoughts and antics of the several million minds that matter, I feel that we should try to get some of it down.

VW: Like the fellow who saw the ocean crashing on the shore for the first time. ‘I've got to get it all down right now,’ he said. ‘The way it's carrying on, it sure isn't going to last very long.’ But getting down what comes to us in CONDITION QUICK is very like getting down the entire ocean. We are tuned in to roughly nine million creative minds, and each of them is good for at least one overpowering, SFish thought-module a minute. Do you know that we've had five genuine Golden Ages in the last fifteen minutes? How would we go about getting it down?

SS: I think that we'd start with one of those magic, evocative, mind-opening words like Al-Ka-Zam, Ma-Ga-Zine, Mummy-Whammy, Zauberei-Stoff, Galli-Mauferie, Razz-Ma-Tazz, Bash-Bang-Boffo, Shoom-Zhoom-Krok.

VW: What was the anti-anti-anti-anti-anti-penultimate of those words you suggested? Mega-Zine?

SS: Maga-Zine, the place where you store explosives. All CONDITION QUICK data are explosive so lets get them down in a magazine. One way to get the key parts down is to write them down. That'll take everybody by surprise.

VW: But what'll we write them down on?

SS: It doesn't matter, just so we write them down fast enough. Lord Keynes said that the answer to a column of numbers depends on how fast you add them up. He got the whole world to adopt a system of economics based on that, and look how well the world's running now! I say that the answer to the explosive CONDITION QUICK depends on how fast we write it down. For starters, we could write it on almost anything, on elephants, or on alligators (not everyone has an elephant), or on the sides of cross-country balloons. And if you make up again with that nutty sky-writer you were running around with, we can write it on the sky.

VW: Or we could write it on sticks of dynamite since we'll probably have them in the magazine already. But we have to remember to use a cold-etcher rather than a hot-etcher when we write on sticks of dynamite. Or we could write on the insides of duck eggs or petrel eggs or snake eggs.

SS: But, confining ourselves to inside-of-eggers, wouldn't that give us a funny readership: For-the-Birds, For-the-Snakes, and a Little-Bit-Immature?

VW: That's the kind of readership we'll have anyhow. Hey, maybe we could write it down on paper.

SS: Paper? As in ‘He couldn't punch his way out of a paper sack’? Well, I've heard that the lower classes still use paper for some things. It would be different anyhow.

VW: Let's do it. We could call it: CONDITION QUICK, The Dare-To-Be-Different Magazine For Explosive People.

SS: Yes, or we could call it something else. We'll do it.

The Casey Machine

There's a way, my companion, my bacon and bean,

No matter at bottom it isn't too clean:

The way is the way of the Casey Machine.

 — Promontory Goats

A top electronics repairman and designer like myself, Newton Prescott, has the opportunity of knowing more of what is going on in the world than any other person. He not only has his finger on the world's pulse: he designs that pulse, and he redesigns it every day. And ninety-eight percent of that pulse is subliminal and deep-flowing.

I am writing this journal as therapy. I have a compulsion to forget some things (neither I nor my doctor understands this compulsion) and at the same time something jogs my memory back to them. I am advised to write them out in this journal and then burn the journal. If that doesn't work, I will have to have brain surgery. Something is bugging me in a small area of my brain.

A while back, every coin parlor on Kasmir Street had at least one of the Casey Machines. That was an electronic device of such scope as you don't see every day. Most of the Tea Rooms on Hubbard Street had them; and the more modish and vital bars on North Durkheim Street. The Casey Machines were Achronological Eaves-Dropping Machines.

“They were unspeakably vile,” Mrs. Duckhunter said. “I don't want either of you to have anything more to do with them even if they come back.”

“They were gold mines,” Mr. Duckhunter said, “and you, Prescott,” (he said to me) “were as good a shovel-and-crib man as was ever around a primitive gold mine. There was a million dollars here, or ten million, for the right hook-up. Sure it was vile, at first. But if you can't stop a thing from being vile, you can at least make money out of it. It's an idea whose time was overdue. The need was there. I don't remember it very well now, but we did make money out of it, and we're still doing it, beneath the surface. None of it is as clear as it was, but we're still making millions and millions and millions out of something.”

“I wish we weren't,” Mrs. Duckhunter said. “We aren't bad people. We aren't really vile. Why isn't there some way we can shut off the money and be poor and honest again?”

“We weren't ever poor, Crissie,” her husband George Duckhunter said, “and we weren't ever honest, for that matter. And I don't know any way to shut off the money. We're being paid as high-priced guardians, or some such. I just don't remember the circumstances as well as I might. I don't believe that either you or Prescott does either. We can't exactly keep our memories of those wonderful and event-filled days when we were so rich. We have to settle for remaining so rich.”

There had been quite a bit of discussion about that strange device, the Casey Machine, that so many persons (including its purported inventor) insisted did not exist at all. And much of the discussion was on the theological level.

“Will everybody know everything, or will only the people who are ‘saved’ know everything?” a soggy sinner asked his pastor. “After the Judgment, whether the General or the Particular, will all of us know everything that ever happened? Will all of us know all the dirt, all the thoughts and acts of every person who ever lived? Will we be roomy enough for all this knowledge? Will we have the scope to possess it in vivid detail? Will we be able to revel in all the acts of our neighbors forever?”

“All persons will know everything, yes,” the pastor said. “Whether it is after the Particular or the General Judgment that we receive full knowledge is uncertain: but that may not matter, and there may not be any great interval between the two. When we die we enter eternity, and there is no time differential there. The ‘Saved’ will have edification and joy from their total knowledge, and the damned will have fiery regret and deepest suffering. But as to the reveling in the shameful thoughts and actions of other persons, no, the ‘Saved’ would never do that.”

“The ‘Saved’ will miss all the fun then,” the soggy sinner said. “But there will be recompenses to being damned. Ah, will there ever be recompenses! And we can have that revel-and-glow show for times without end. There is no way we can lose.”

“You can lose your eternal souls!”

“So to speak, pastor, so to speak. But they will still be eternal, and we can still be doing what we like best to do anyhow. We will have the time beyond time, and all the time there is. And we will have the dirt beyond dirt and all the dirt that has ever been, or is, or will be. Oh, it will be a wallow-and-revel-and-gloat experience forever, and there will be no limit to it. The Casey Machine is a foretaste of the glory that is to come. And the ‘lost’ souls will have a lot more fun out of it than will the ‘found’ or ‘saved’ souls.”

“But you will suffer forever the discomforts of the damned, Lorenzo — ” the pastor protested in fear and amazement.

“Discomfort forever will be worth it!” the sinner said resoundingly. “There are priorities in every condition, and I give first priority to prowling all that secret knowledge in a pulsating glow. And until I cross the bar and come to the untrammeled thing, I will use the Casey Machine for all it's worth.”

“The better sort of people are not having much to do with the Casey Machine,” the pastor said.

“So much the worst for the better sort of people!” the soggy sinner gave the decision.

And there was a conversation between a daughter and her mother.

“It is not right that we should seek out and revel in the dirt of each other,” the daughter said. “It is more the case that we should share the total lives of each other, in pathos and in hilarity, in love and in fascination. With everything to select from, we will naturally select the best.”

“Nah, no such thing,” the mother answered. “That's not for me. It's not for hardly any one. For most of us, we will want the outright filth and the outrageous dirt. There will be some humor in it, yes, very dirty humor. And there will also be cannibalism and sadism and satanism. But the main jolt will always be the dirt, and the scandal, and the sedition and slander and blackmailing knowledge. Not money blackmail: personal ruination blackmail. And the dirt, the dirt, the dirt.”

I am about the only one left who can go back and pick up such private conversations from the recent past.

Why do we, in swift moments, remember when we could fly or do other wonderful things? Because, in swift moments, at some time or other, we really could fly and do other wonderful things. And because it is not good that we should be above our heads for too long, those swift moments were brief ones and were quickly forgotten.

“Oh salving hatred, Oh revivifying derision, Oh nourishing slander!” Josephine McSorely crowed in the Underground Eagle. It is significant that my own copy of it seems to be the only copy still left in existence, even though the Underground Eagle always had a large press run.

“The secret is out,” Josephine wrote, “and it can never be penned in again. It was at a small and informal meeting tonight that the make-ups and premises of the world were changed. We held a Particular Judgment, and the Casey Machine was born from that judgment. It is here, right now, and forever. We all know everything now. The power and the knowledge came over the small group of us, and we can perhaps pass it on to other groups for a fee.

“In times before this, several other organizations of illuminated persons have known everything. They knew everything, before their own deaths, by making a Particular Judgment in their own lives. But we become masters of our own judgment in a way the earlier ones could not, because we live in an age of electronic amplification and switching and data control. We are able to project it all, and to repeat it. Yes, and we are able to sell it.

“Casey, with his peculiar mind-set, was the activator of this. He himself denies that the Casey Machine has been invented. Well, it was invented, by the ideologues and experts among us. And it is known as the Casey Machine. And the world is not the same as it seemed to be before we invented it. (Casey himself never was the same as he seemed to be.) This is the big night. This is the night that slimy and rotten enjoyment came into the world as a maneuverable thing.

“Casey had a passion for knowing everything about everyone, even and especially the most sordid things. He had this passion so strongly that he was able to modify and change the way of the world with it.

“ ‘This is all nonsense,’ Casey said. ‘What is the matter with the bunch of you anyhow?’ ‘Supposing that it is nonsense,’ that electronics man Newton Prescott said. ‘Nonsense is more often amplified than is sense. It is stronger in its accumulation, and it is less subject to blocking out and monitoring out. You have provided the impetus, Casey, one strong enough to affect the world and turn death into a trifle. It can ride on any carrier, and I believe the carrier of the world magnetism will be the best. It will not be the strangest thing riding that power. Yes, Casey, the Casey Machine has been invented, by you and by me and by others of us here.’

“ ‘Where is it then?’ Casey asked. ‘I can't see it. Can you?’ ‘Yes,’ Newton Prescott said, ‘in my mind I see it, and it will operate mostly inside minds. It is a wireless machine as of now. And it has no physical components yet. But we will give it components and materiality.’ ‘If I gave impetus to such a thing, then I withdraw that impetus,’ Casey said. ‘You can't,’ Prescott told him. ‘This wind has blown from you, and there is no way you can make it not to have blown. By the way, I have an interesting idea for one component of the Casey Machine. There is an electrical discharge from dead persons that is generally overlooked for the reason that it occurs about thirty minutes after clinical death. But we have trapped more than two hundred instances of this discharge into condensors, and we have studied the data. It is very intricate. (We have lately discovered that electricity, like magnetism, is made up of a variety of unaccountable foreign material; there is no such thing as pure electricity: it has to be made out of something.) This post-death discharge data is of a two-way effect: part of it comes from the other side of death and was never in the living person. I am certain that this is a real kick-back from what used to be called the ‘other shore’. I intend to use one such ‘dead-man’ charge in every Casey Machine that is made.’

“Then Newton Prescott said several other things too weird to print even in the Underground Eagle. And Casey washed his hands and conscience of the whole affair, again and again. ‘Casey, you are a hypocrite,’ said Januarius O'Higgins, who was present. ‘I predict that you yourself will buy a Casey Machine, probably through a middle-man, as soon as they are available.’ ‘May I go to Hell if I do,” Casey swore. ‘Oh, all of us will go to Hell,’ said Evelyn Apostolo. ‘We'll ultimately get more out of the machine, and out of the phenomenon of which it is the forerunner, by going to Hell. We have made that choice: it was the choice embodied in the Particular Judgment that we gave and received this evening, the Judgment that created the Casey Machine as a side effect.’

 — Josephine McSorely, with her Underground News in the Underground Eagle

Is it not most peculiar that I own the only known copy of this issue of the Underground Eagle? Isn't it funny that nobody else remembers the piece at all, not even Josephine McSorely who wrote it? And my copy is falling apart. In fact, the date of the issue has flaked off of every single sheet of this issue.

Ah, we did make a lot of money out of the Casey Machines! It was as easy as stealing immortal souls from little kids. We were making a million dollars every — well, there is just no time interval to express how often we were making a million dollars. The Casey Machine was an achronological (non-time-bound) device, and the harvest from it was in one huge continuing minute. We were continually making a million, and millions. A dozen of us became Instant Big Rich.

We did not really make all that many of the actual and material Casey Machines. But people came to us with wads of money and said they had been receiving vivid life broadcasts from our machines, and they wanted at all costs to continue to receive them. Well, maybe our machines were broadcasting, if people said that they were; but they weren't designed to broadcast. And people were paying us large sums for franchises. “We don't want to be cut off,” they would say. And others would approach us with “We don't want the machine, but we want the name and the power of the machine. We want to call ours the Casey Machine also, though they will be raunchier than your originals.” And Casey Machine Clubs paid us area fees. The money came in variously. Well, it was part of the mechanism that it should make a lot of money for us; and it did, even before we went federal.

The machines weren't designed to broadcast. They weren't designed at all. They grew out of the immaterial components of Casey's passionate and invading curiosity of the thoughts and acts of other people. They grew out of my own discovery of the double-world kick-back electrical discharge mechanism which did indeed serve as a door and valve between worlds. And it grew out of the verve and opportunism of Josephine McSorely, Januarius O'Higgins, Evelyn Apostolo, George and Crissie Duckhunter, and others who promoted the idea which convinces people that they did indeed want something that they already knew that they wanted furiously. It isn't difficult to lead thirst-maddened horses to water. And all of these colleagues had good ideas.

“Give us a classy chassis like a next-year's Ford Alexandrine.” “Invent new colors for it, new reds and flesh colors and blacks, lurid colors. Luridity is the thing.” “Shoot it full of intensity and ur-lust. Make it primordial.” I received such advice from them, and it was all good. “Use grabby motifs, grabby!”

Yeah, one grabby motif I used was the eyes. I was already using a dead-man delayed electrical discharge quantum in every machine. It wasn't necessary. I could have used a dozen other methods; but this was effective, available, quite easy to employ; and it gave an aura of authenticity to the whole thing. Now I also put a set of dead-man's eyes on every machine. It's even easier to procure eyes than delayed electrical discharges, and there was a good-for-business spookiness in having the customers hooked up so that they could look through authentic dead-man's eyes into the revelations.

And the mania took over.

It would seem that persons could simply suicide and have the same effect all at once without the expense. But there was something too final about that for many persons. They would do that the last thing, and it didn't matter that they paid out all their substance on the Casey Machines first. “This is to have the best of all three worlds,” one enthusiast said.

The matter of the Casey Machines was raunchy, and some of those of our licensed competitors were stronger than those we made ourselves. This was the primordial lust of mind and body and soul, and of all the under-minds and over-minds. This was the ‘enjoyable degradation’, the ‘polite rottenness’, the ‘healthy prurience’. There was almost endless variety in it. Persons rose to high performance on it when they knew that they were on show, even persons dead for thousands of years. There were probably a million of these very conspicuous ‘show boats’ of the past and the present who were zeroed in on. Their names and identifications spread by word of mind, for they were really top performers. People under the Casey Influence had an other world power and scope of keeping millions of individual persons in their mind and of enjoying billions and billions and billions of details.

I myself was not so entirely fascinated by all the things that the people did as I was fascinated by the electronic manner of their doing. I had recently discovered that there were three categories of being and action, the rational, the irrational, and the electronic; and that the electronic was the most powerful and the most varied. The material world was almost entirely electronic, and it was made up of alien particles and forces and fields. The most familiar and accepted thing, when broken down, was found to be an electronic weave of strands that were neither familiar nor accepted, but were foreign and strange.

Because of group feedback I was thinking better than I ever had in my life. Merely as fall-out from the titanic loutishness and lust and sedition and gluttony and slander of the people, this had become breakthrough day in the idea area. There was a new and steeper mentality paralleling the new incredible coarseness. All of us top electronics experts could now read each others' minds. There was some anger and jealousy about this, but really it was to the advantage of all of us.

In fact, every person in the world could now read the mind of every other person in the world, or they would be able to do so as soon as they realized what new-power field they were in. This was not exactly as a result of the Casey Machine. It was part of the misnamed ‘Casey Condition’ which had now imposed itself on the world.

Many of us reveled in knowledge, as many more were reveling in the pornea of lust and soul-nakedness and everted bodies and minds. The Casey Condition was very big. Every person could read the mind and body, and the deepest unconsciousness and memory and subliminal areas, of all persons living and dead: aye, and also of all persons still unborn and unconceived and un-thought of; for all time was now simultaneous to us in our new condition. And we were all the same animal. This power of total reading had been available all along. It was just that for several of the recent millennia we had forgotten to use it.

The Earth magnetism is not self contained, I discovered. That is, we of the higher electronic community of minds discovered it. It represents a bond between the Earth and something else not yet identified, something more than our solar system and something more than generalized space. But the strands of this braided force are helices of buried memories and buried mysteries. They are the remnants of what must have been really stupendous moments and historical movements subsumed into the Earth's magnetism: and into its thermodynamic balance, and into its isostasis, and into its gravity which is itself a large collection of forces.

“Old dogs, lying in the sun, are one form of history,” Pomodorus wrote.

Old residual magnetism, lying in the Earth, is another form.

Question 382: In what state will the bodies of the just arise?

The bodies of the just will rise glorious and immortal.

Glorious means? Our body will be shining like the sun, swift as thought, as capable of penetrating matter, be most beautiful, and be without pain or change.

Immortal means? Our bodies will never die after the resurrection.

Question 383: Will the bodies of the damned also rise?

The bodies of the damned will also rise, but they will be condemned to eternal punishment.

 — the Baltimore Catechism

I have become fascinated by all aspects of bodies, our own undead bodies, our own dead bodies, our own resurrected bodies. Just as a special mental power has been available to us all along, had we not forgotten to use it, so a special body splendor is ours whenever we require it in order to make splendid moves. How did we ever happen to forget how wonderful we are?

Yes, in our own great and shining moment, our bodies shine as with a sun within them. They are as swift as thought, for they are the bright depositories of all swift thought. Our bodies can penetrate matter as thought does. They can be most beautiful. Whether they can be so splendid and superior all the time I don't know; but apparently they can penetrate all time from their eternal moment.

Still quite early in this moment there had been a change of emphasis. Or should I say ‘Still quite early in this day there has been a change of emphasis!’? I suppose that I use ‘day’ as Scripture sometimes uses it. There are the days that go by, and there is the Day that abides. Many days go by, but the whole ‘Casey Condition’ occurs in a single day, in a single moment really.

Still quite early in this moment there had been a change of emphasis. In my own murky heart, I had assumed, along with the soggy sinner in one of the dialogues I have given, that the ‘lost’ souls could have more fun out of it than could the ‘found’ or ‘saved’ souls, that the main jolt would be the dirt and the scandal and the sedition and the slander, and the blackmailing knowledge; and that these things would sell the Machines and set the Conditions.

(The ‘Machines’ were porno shrines: they weren't really needed, except for the true believers in holy porn.)

But quite early in the day this prevailing view was disputed.

“We will take our chances in this world, and in every world! Let the grace flow! Write down our names! We enter the lists!” some hundreds of persons spoke for some millions. “There will be more Good Will than Bad Will, else has the world been in vain. And it has not been in vain.”

Now here was a real apple-knocker that nobody in my crowd had foreseen! There were alternatives to the ‘enjoyable degradation’, to the ‘polite rottenness’, to the ‘healthy prurience’. There was a live possibility of things that were outside of the wallow-and-revel-and-gloat experience and goal. When everyone knew all about everyone, not everyone chortled and gluttonized and fed on the worst.

Some persons found that the more fully they knew other people the more they liked them.

There was something suspect to me about the Moment. I did not suspect its power or scope. I suspected its permanence.

Oh yes, the moment would last forever, as every true Moment must. But we would not stand in the Moment forever. We would probably stand out of it, and in it, and out of it again several times. I had the feeling that we would stand out of it again, for a while, in the very near future.

I saw the fiery message in the bush. I saw the sign in the sky.

I saw the handwriting on the wall, in rather archaic Babylonian or Chaldee.

So I took two precautions against the coming time when we would stand out of the moment again.

I went to see about Continuous-Flow Federal Funding.

And I had a ‘Remember It’ memory jog capsule inset into my own brain. The capsule was tuned to retain the whole idea of the Casey Machine. But why did I believe that was necessary? Who could possibly forget the Casey Machine?

Oh, I'd made a study of this business of forgetting eleven-day wonders. I can recognize the accumulations of forgotten fossils of such fads, but I can seldom interpret those fossils. A minority of the vanished eleven-day wonders is still in popular memory with a nostalgic or humorous handle on them; but even these which are so enshrined in toy shrines are mostly misremembered and misunderstood. And others of the chronic occurrences, and among them there may be some of the most massive and influential, are forgotten completely. A few of the deeply forgotten ones we can pick up with the Casey Machine or the Casey Condition, but we must have at least some slight whisper of an idea of what we want to pick up.

I wanted to remember the Casey Machine and the Casey Condition. I had no reason to believe that they would be forgotten, but I had an intuition and apprehension that they might be.

So I went to see about Continuous-Flow Federal Funding, about Compensatory Counter-Flow Payments, about Impacted Entertainment Area Federal Funding. The argument was that the Casey Machine, since payment was required for its use, was more available to the rich than to the poor. This situation should be corrected by Counterpart Funds of both the Current and the Future Contingency sort. I also got the concession that the site of every Casey Machine should be declared a shrine, with Perpetual Care to be provided by means of Perpetual Guardian Payments to be made to a responsible group — our own.

And we got the guarantees, in several sorts of payments, to be in perpetuity. And several of them were real whoppers. It's all in knowing how to ask for things, and in striking while the Casey Machine is hot.

And I had the ‘Remember It’ memory jog installed in my brain. In the extreme case of specific and directed amnesia, I might forget the Casey Machine along with every one else. But I'd still come closer to remembering it than anyone else would.

I want to know when it was last on the house.

I want to know which has the heart of a louse.

I want to know who has been milking my cowse.

 — Promontory Goats

The Wiper comes by and wipes out part of the memories. Then he comes by again and wipes out more of them. And who is the Wiper?

He is a cloud-high giant. He comes with a rag and wipes out part of a cloud. And when he does that, he wipes out part of a thing in people's heads too. A little boy told me that today, and I'm sure he had a good intuitive understanding of the Wiper-Person.

And since the boy told me that, I have seen several good pictures of the Wiper drawn on walls and sidewalks.

Oh sure, it worked.

Only to the superficial is it irrational that we should know much more after we are dead than we do while we are alive; or that we should know much more when we are in a moment than when we are not in it. I will only say that every Casey Machine had somehow the essence of a dead person in it. In this great increase of knowledge, a lifetime of preparation is translated and traded for a moment of intense possession; and, by the technicality of it being on the far side of time, that moment of possession is forever. But we set it up on the near side of time. We set up the links, and it worked.

What possibilities that does open out, if only they were explored!

Oh, they were explored all right. And now those possibilities and explorations are on the boneyard with other obsolete eleven-day wonders.

Oh sure, it busted. What busted?

The strained case of an achronological device applied to working chronicity. That busted. It's been gone for a while now. No use crying over spilled temporalities.

I fail to see how even the worst storms on Venus can be held responsible for it. Sunspots could have done it, of course. But if you blame everything on sunspots, that's like one person playing a four-handed game by himself.

The mania hadn't taken up much real time. That is why it was so easily erased and forgotten. It moved into the abiding moment. Then it moved out of it again, and it was gathered to its fathers. Its fathers were the earth forces, magnetism and isostases and geothermal accretions that make up the matrix into which all eleven-day wonders are subsumed.

The earth-forces are made up of very many such-gatherings-in or subsumptions, and of very little other basic flux. I believe that worlds that have not subsumed such emotional content or happening will have very little magnetism or corona or foinse.

The Casey Machine, being an achronological device, may indeed have happened. Only not yet.

The what machine being a what?

There is a feeling that things had been rather underdone for a while. Death had become (or may become) so minor an event that no one paid much attention to it. And then the condition moved. It did not move to take the place and importance that it had held before the bothering. It moved to another and different place and importance.

Something was subsumed into the earth forces. That is like one more limey and crunchy marine skeleton being subsumed into the floor of the ocean.

Item: I bet I went to that well longer than anyone else did. I bet I still go sometimes.

Item: I still have more money flowing in than any one else has. And I partly remember what it's for.

I have had a small electro-mechanical device removed from my brain. I don't know how it got there or what it was for.

This is a strange journal that I have started to write in again as part of my therapy. But the words in most of it are utterly incomprehensible to me.

I have a feeling of many strangers whom I once knew very well, and who once knew me very well. And sometimes they approach me.

“I miss you and Regina so much,” a dumpy lady said to me only this morning. “I enjoyed it a lot, the way I had the feel of you and everything you'd do. I'd catch you sometimes just before I got up in the morning.” Strange!

And a man said to me, just last week, or just this week: “There was never a mind I enjoyed so much as yours. At night sometimes I used to light my pipe and take off my shoes and just listen to the things you were thinking. It was a pleasure.” Strange, most strange!

Certain standing moments of realization are interposed through history. And then they are forgotten by fiat. But the buried memory of them sustains us and fills us with promise.

I like as much as I can remember of it. And something similar will move into the moment again in another aeon or so.

I still go to that well a lot. But the bucket I dip with is different from the one I used to use. And there are still the Federal Funds forever.

Addenda

I'm grisly ghost with orange gloves.

I'm other things around the edges.

I seek for valid lives and loves.

I teeter on ungodly ledges.

 — Electronic Elegies

Newton Prescott

Who am I try to kid? I'm trying to kid myself, Newton Prescott. But to the best of belief, there is no such person as Newton Prescott. He is (I am) only a minor aspect of Casey Szymansky. I watched as my orange gloved hand wrote the above verses; but it wrote them in Casey's handwriting, not in my own. Yes, sometimes I'm permitted a handwriting of my own. The morning paper hasn't arrived yet, so I don't know what year this is. So I don't know whether Casey is supposed to be alive or dead.

It was all reasonably simple when it began. I (whether or not I was an independent person or an aspect of Casey) devised the Casey Machine. It was simply a wireless audio-machine (with video variations) that transmitted unspeakably vile stuff for unspeakably vile subscribers. We selected unspeakably wealthy subscribers (Chicago was then full of them), shot a highly sophisticated dart into the head of each of them, and so hooked most of them. We collected. And when they objected to paying, we cut them off or threatened to cut them off. Most of them couldn't abide being cut off from the hellish thing so they caved in. But somehow very high federal investigators confronted Casey with their evidence and their suspicions. But Casey rises to great heights when confronted with anything. People and institutions confront Casey at their peril. The Federals set up a giant foundation to fund the Casey Machine forever, whether or not it was in physical existence. The Federals were lucky to get out of it so easy. They were hooked by Hell, but Casey always swore that he had nothing to do with anything hellish.

The morning paper has arrived. With trepidation I look at the year of its date. The year may vary as much as three decades in one week, back to before I ever heard of Casey, to a fearfully late year as on today's paper. This means that Casey has been dead for several years, and that I am a ghost, or may be something less.

“Oh, you were always a ghost,” Casey told me brutally once. “I had one splinter of my personality that I decided to give a ghostly body and an inane name to. And the most inane name I could think of was Newton Prescott. You will move back and forth through time as I will, Newton, and you will still be ghost here after I am gone from this world. You will be eyes and ears for me here.”

“You are hellish, Casey. I want out.”

“You are only a minor quirk of me, Newton,” he said, “and there is no ‘out’ for a minor quirk.”

But Casey always swore that he had nothing to do with anything hellish. Once, before a dozen or so of us, two or three of us being only aspects of Casey, but others valid persons, Casey brought out a brim-full basin and washed his hands dramatically.

“God over my head,” he swore, “I am guiltless of anything hellish. By the brightness of this water, I wash my hands from any evil or any traffic with ungodly devices.” And he washed his hands, and they were unaccountably clean.

“But it isn't bright water. The basin is full of blood!” I protested, but nobody seemed to hear me. Often, people do not seem to hear me.

Well, Casey's hands were clean. But mine (My God, how was that?) were slippery with dark visceral blood that would never come off me. Oh, it was simple enough. He transferred his hellishness from his main person to a minor splinter of his personality, me. He fooled everybody with the trick. Did he fool God also? So far as I can tell, he did.

I got me a dozen expensive pair of beautiful suede white gloves. I wear them always. But they are not white when I wear them. They are always a tolerable orange color. Well, I can live (live?) with that. I have to.

The rental lady just came in with a medium young couple and began to show them my apartment. They did not seem to see me. It is a very nice apartment, and she offered it to them at a foolishly low price.

“It's wonderful, it's wonderful,” the looking lady said, “and the price is also wonderful. But there is an odor so faint that it could almost be my imagination. It's the odor of old dried blood. No, it isn't. It's the odor of old still-wet blood. Whatever can it be?”

“There's something flitting around in here,” the looking man said. “I just miss it with the corner of my eye. Oh, oh, it's the ghost hands, the ‘Orange Ghost Hands’. This is the ‘Haunted Hands’ apartment isn't it? Can't you show us something else?”

“Oh yes, I have a wonderful place just around the corner,” the rental lady said. “Not as wonderful as this, and not as wonderfully cheap, but it isn't haunted. We'll go see it now.”

But the rental lady came up to me before she left. “Ghosty,” she said, “why do you do this to me? And why can I see you and talk to you when the others can't?”

“It's that hellish machine you're hooked on,” I said.

“Oh, oh, oh!” she said. “How can I get unhooked from it?”

“I wish I knew,” I said. “I wish I knew.”

The Forty-Seventh Island

1.

“Quincy, we will have to do something about the snakes in the girls room,” Europa Phelan said. “The pressure to get rid of them is intolerable, what with Earth Night coming up and all.”

“Oh, beat a different drum for a while,” Quincy Phelari told her. “There is nothing wrong with those snakes. They have been personal friends of all of us for a long time. If Hugo Katz doesn't like them then so much the worse for Hugo Katz. I like them and the girls like them. They have style, they have charm, they have beauty, they have colored soul, they have dignity and grace. Hugo Katz has none of these things. I say let's keep the snakes and get rid of Hugo Katz.”

The snakes did have style and charm and beauty. They coiled and uncoiled with kaleidoscopic change. They poured themselves, it seemed, as from one set of goblets into another set of goblets. They fell like churning colored foam in waterfalls, and they rose like slow-motion fountains. They turned themselves inside-out and back again, swallowing and regurgitating them selves. They were cascades of jewels tumbling down and then climbing up over themselves again. They were dazzles, they were compositions in color and perspective, they were prismatic splitting and recombining of banded colors, they were hypnotic dream-memory wheels turning like incredible differential gears, they were wit-in-movement, they were outrageously colored jokes in rapid juxtaposition.

They were persons with their diamond-bright person-eyes shining out in ever-new recognitions. They were aromas, evocative and prescient, allegorical and impossibly foreign. They could give out any odor imaginable, and they themselves had overreaching imagination in this. They could give odors on command or suggestion. They were companionable, and yet they weren't pushy.

They hadn't any voices. But they could play pan-pipes and horns if these were fixed onto little stanchions for them. They weren't as musical as might be expected from such colorful creatures, but they played with good spirit and heartiness. They were about as good as Stoker's Seals in their execution, though they couldn't remember as many tunes as could the seals. On original tunes, they couldn't come up with movements of longer than six notes, nothing at all intricate.

They hadn't respectable minds. Mentality wasn't their strength. They were fuzzy. There really weren't any other things to compare them to. Even the older people had very skimpy memories of any snakes other than these, but there was always the feeling that these were snakes of a special sort.

Nobody knew how many of the snakes there were. Five is the most that had ever been seen together, but there were at least a dozen different appearances of them. It is possible that individual snakes changed their appearances at will.

And it had been said jokingly that nobody knew how many Phelan girls there were. Six is the most that had ever been seen together, but a couple of them had a variety of appearances, Antoinette especially. Only three of the girls, Antoinette, Mary, and Teresa, still dwelt in the Phelan Girls Room. Irene was married to Konrad Katz. Margaret was married to Joseph Constantino. Patricia was only one year old and still lived in the suite of her parents, Quincy and Europa Phelan.

The only one of Robinsonnade who really hated the snakes was Hugo Katz, the Ship-and-Colony Commander, and he hated them for ideological reasons. But the basis he gave for hating the snakes seemed almost irrational.

“We did not bring either snakes or snake-seed with us from Earth,” he would say as if laying out a complex argument, “and therefore there cannot be any snakes on Robinsonnade. Snakes cannot make their way through deep space. They cannot even fly in the air. And there was no native fauna here. These cannot be real snakes.”

“Why do you worry about them then, Hugo?” Quincy Phelan would ask every time the subject came up. “If they are imaginary, then there can be only imaginary objections to them. And unreal things can do no harm.”

“Unreal things are capable of almost total harm,” Hugo would maintain. “They must be destroyed. They are things that have gone completely wrong. They are hysterical sicknesses. They are vile superstitions. Imagination is licit only when its images are schematically reasonable. Moreover, these are impossible snakes of non-existent species. They are biologically impossible. Snakes simply are not made like that or articulated like that. They do not move like that.”

“But they are harmless, Hugo,” Quincy Phelan always said. “There is no possible way they could hurt you.”

“Snakes are the crowning superstition and the progenitors of superstition,” Hugo shouted often. “They may not be allowed here or anywhere. The whole purpose of these settlements on the forty-seven planets of Selkirk is the filtering out of remnant superstitions from human specimens. Our charter says that we must root them out here even if it takes twenty years. It has taken us twenty years here on Robinsonnade, and still the symbols of superstition remain. Other planets here have sent four or five or even ten groups through to further colonization since we have been here. We may now be declared a rogue planet, and only the clean persons of us may be allowed to go further. And the rest of you, and your rotten seed with you, will be marooned here forever.”

“It would serve them right, of course,” Quincy Phelan said. “But is there really any superstition here except in your own mind and mouth?”

“Snakes are here, in your own house, Phelan. And we also believe that a person of your own family is a source of infection. The snakes are a mystery and an evil, and they are always of alien origin. But they come to consort only with persons who are open to superstition. The snakes of Earth did not originate there. They are an alien enigma. It was a dark angel who assumed the masquerade of a snake in an early test of strength: but that opened the door to the snakes there. What has opened the door to them here, what vile superstition?”

“I don't know, Hugo.”

“All belief in unworldly things, in ‘Things Beyond’, is evil superstition, Quincy. And are you yourself avid enough in stamping it out?”

“We are ourselves in an unworldly place, in a Place Beyond, Hugo,” Quincy said, “for we were not born on the world we live on now.”

“Do not juggle metaphors with me, Quincy. You are a poor hunter with a poor nose for these things. Or else there is something lacking in your will. You and your whole tribe may well be left behind here.”

“We don't know what he is talking about,” Mary Phelan said dishonestly of Hugo Katz's tirades. “We don't know what kind of things he sees, but none of us has ever seen anything like that.”

“We don't even know what snakes are,” Teresa Phelan lied out of her nine-year-old mouth. “And maybe they aren't bad anyhow. It wasn't a snake the first time. It was someone else in a snake-suit.”

“We haven't any living things at all except the sheep and the rabbits and the bees and the earthworms,” Antoinette Phelan represented. “We sure don't know anything about things called snakes.”

“I suspect that this is all a filament of your imagination, Hugo,” Quincy Phelan said with pleasant falsehood.

And then one of the snakes seemed to grow to four times its regular size. It fastened onto Hugo Katz's hand with murderous and unsnakelike teeth. Barnabas Phelan, the middle-sized son of the family, had to rebuke the snake loudly to make it let go. And Hugo very nearly lost his hand in that attack.

And yet it could be plainly demonstrated that the snakes were completely, or nearly, toothless. Who was imagining what? It was Hugo Katz who seemed to suffer an hysterical sickness at this time, imagining that he had been bitten by a snake, imagining that it was much more serious than it was, swelling up and turning black in his whole hand and arm over what was only a scratch. This was impossible. He must have received his injury in some other manner.

“They only bite people they don't like,” Teresa Phelan said reasonably enough.

Well, suppose that the snakes were of non-existent species and were biologically impossible, what then? How much snake-biology are girls sixteen and thirteen and nine years old supposed to know, when they have lived all their lives on a world where there are no snakes? How much snake-biology do you know yourself?

But the snakes were of an existent species. They were of the species Culebra caleidoscopia, from Earth, though very rare there. And how had they really got to Robinsonnade? Someone, for perverse reasons, must have smuggled the very small eggs of this species, since it would have been impossible to smuggle live snakes.

But the Commandant Hugo Katz continued to be unreasonable about snakes, and now he was on another rampage on the subject, swearing that they must be gotten rid of before the arrival of Earth Night. He demanded that the snakes and all other lying superstitions should go.

Well, how had the snakes got to Robinsonnade?

“An enemy has done this,” Hugo Katz said.

2.

The superior fauna of Robinsonnade was divided into four groups or families: the Katzs, the Constantinos, the Hucklebys, and the Phelans.

The Katzs were sturdy and straw-haired, and they insisted that they should be the straw-bosses on every project. Under their father-patriarch Hugo Katz, the Ship-and-Colony Commandant, it was ensured that they would be the bosses. All the Katzs were narrow-minded, or, they had tightly focused and beamed minds, as it was then said. They at least stood free of all superstition. The mother of the tribe was Monika Katz. The sons were Konrad (who was somewhat compromised by being married to Irene Phelan), Frederik, and Max. The daughters were Rita, Olive, and Veronika. The grandchildren were William and Lily. This was an award-winning family with numerous citations and prizes to show for it.

The Constantinos were bronzed and curled people, full of spacious fire; but theirs was a wide focus, and their fire was not really hot. Bruno Constantino, the father of the flock, was the largest person on the Island-Planet of Robinsonnade. His wife Davida (Vida) Constantino was the next largest. The daughters of the family (yes, with the Constantinos, the daughters were the more important and the more overpowering) were Regina, Cecilia, Angela, and Barbara. The sons were Joseph, Anthony, Edward, and Cristofer. The grandchildren were Gabriel and Catherine.

The Constantinos were the best plant-and-animal growers on Robinsonnade. It is said of such champions that they have one green thumb and one red thumb. They were the best builders and maintainers, the best biologists and the best electronic people, the best para-animate chemists. They were also (tread lightly in this area though) the best in all the arts and musics. But it is the arts and musics that are the hardest to keep pure. They are the fields that are the softest to the entry of superstition.

The Hucklebys believed themselves to be the central people of Robinsonnade, and in many ways they were. Well, the other three families (even the Katzs) liked them, and that is a considerable distinction. They were good at everything. And they were pleasant and uninflated in their persons. King Huckleby was the father of the clan. Audrey Huckleby was the mother. The tall sons were Esmond, Graves, Steven, Paul, and Bernard. The buxom daughters were Elviry, Joyce, and Emily. The grandchildren were Jane and Charles.

The Phelans were a red and ruddy people. (Soft ground here, crumbling meadows, sinkholes: beware of them all.) The Phelans made all of the numerous discoveries that were made on Robinsonnade; but in each case it was an accident, and members of some of the other families could just as well have made them. The father of the family was Quincy, and the mother was Europa, both of them dangerously light-minded at unpredictable times. The daughters were Irene, Margaret, Antoinette (it is very treacherous around Antoinette), Mary, and Teresa. The sons were James, Barnabas (it is very, very treacherous around Barnabas), Blaise, and Damian. The grandchildren were Vincent and Patricia.

These were the forty-seven persons of the superior fauna or the human species on Robinsonnade. Eight of them had come there twenty earth-years earlier and had landed in a satellite ship from a mother ship that had gone away again. The other thirty-nine persons of them had been born on Robinsonnade.

It was a sharply-focused colony that they made. The only animal things that they brought with them were cattle (one cow that was gravid with twins, a male and a female, of which it had been ascertained that the latter was not a freemartin), sheep (one ewe likewise full for a twin yeaning), two hives of bees in deep sleep, three kilograms of earthworms likewise tightly sleeping, a clutch of arrested duck eggs, a few capsules full of fish roe, three pregnant doe rabbits, a quantity of pond algae, seeds of sweet clover (we slip over to plant things here), peanuts, Johnson grass, midland bermuda, kaw wheat, golden bantam corn, apples, grapes, olives, peaches. Chemicals and breeder chemicals. Food and water for a quarter of a year (it would happen that plain water was the most difficult of all commodities to manufacture in their case). Tools, of course (the satellite ship was a tool-shed and a shop-truck itself). Tapes and printed matter. That's about all.

And everything that they brought showed a fine increase. And what they had not brought should not make an appearance at all, much less show an increase. And yet there were unauthorized appearances, most but not all of them intangibles. No mental thing should have appeared that was not to be found in the minds of the eight founders. And those minds had been completely monitored. So had their gene-trains been.

The First Person in the hierarchy of Robinsonnade was Hugo Katz the Ship-and-Colony Commander. And the Forty-Seventh Person was possibly Antoinette Phelan. But most likely it was Barnabas Phelan. Barnabas was likely the forty-seventh island.

Why? Antoinette was sixteen years old. Barnabas was fifteen. And there were children on Robinsonnade scarcely one year old. Never mind, the extremes were in other things than age.

Who really ran the island-asteroid-planet of Robinsonnade?

Hugo Katz believed that he did.

The Antoinette-Barnabas Phelan axis believed that they did. (Hugo Katz didn't even know the names of the individual Phelan children.) But Antoinette and Barnabas had a youngish network set up and it twanged like harp strings. Harp music was among those susceptible to superstition.

Antoinette and Barnabas believed that they ran that world, or that they would do so very soon. They believed that they were about to pull a startling coup to take over the world and at the same time to remodel it nearer to their own desire.

3.

Earth Night came. This was the night when all forty-seven of the island-asteroid-planets could be seen from the settlement on one of them, Robinsonnade. On Earth Night, which actually ran from noon one day till noon the next, they could see twelve of the planets as afternoon and evening stars, thirteen of them as morning stars, and twenty-one of them above and around and ahead and behind, either in the daylight or the dark. On Earth Night, none of the planets was directly behind Selkirk the sun, nor so close to Selkirk as not to be seen without light filter. And of course they could always see the forty-seventh planet, Robinsonnade, for they were standing on it.

Earth Night, which marked the interval of an Earth year, was every three-hundred-and-sixty-first Robinsonnade night. The Robinsonnade year was longer, three hundred and eighty Robinsonnade days. The time coincidence reminded people of their ties to Earth, even though most of them had never seen it. It was a special time. The landing on Robinsonnade had been right at first noon of an Earth Night.

There were forty-seven Earth-type planets in a narrow belt around Selkirk Sun. The largest of them had a mass about three times that of the smallest of them. Their diameters were between 8,300 and 12,000 kilometers. They were known as the “Asteroid Islands of Selkirk.”

The Robinsonnade landing had coincided with landings on forty others of the asteroid islands, with satellite ships from a large mother ship that then went away again.

The mother ship had returned to the Selkirk System several times after that, as many as eight or ten times. But it had never returned to Robinsonnade Island. The people of Robinsonnade were somehow classed as tainted or insufficiently purged. They had not received a pure enough and a sharp enough focus to go on to further and greater colonizations. So the party remained there, making haste too slowly, under its commandant Hugo Katz. Materially they had achieved an acceptable narrow subsistence stasis.

This Earth Night marked the first time that Earth Night had returned to the same point in the Robinsonnade Calendar as on the original Earth Night landing. Hugo Katz proposed that such a period of twenty Earth Nights should be named the Hugo Katz period, and the proposal was adopted with no open opposition.

Very well then, it was Earth Night; and, more important, it was Hugo Katz Night. The parabolic ‘clear clouds’ had gathered about Robinsonnade. There were forbidden superstitions that had attached themselves to these clear clouds or disclenses. And the hours of Earth Night were always a time of superstition hunting and eradication. There could well be a collision.

The parabolic clear clouds were not obscuring clouds; otherwise, one would not have been able to see all forty-seven planets. The clouds were like clear crystal through which one might see with perfect clarity and also, perhaps, with magnification. But a sort of double vision was produced. For all that one could see through the clouds perfectly, they also (to another level of vision) acted like mirrors. The series of them acted like a tunnel made of mirrors. By means of the curious and parabolic clouds, one could see all the way around the planet of Robinsonnade, so it was believed. It was believed that one could see forever around the planet a hundred and a thousand times.

To those who had come onto Robinsonnade in the beginning, twenty years ago, those silvery, imperfectly-domed clouds had made Robinsonnade look like a scaled dragon.

Now, on this anniversary day-night, the mutating transparence of the clouds made the other forty-six planets look like Japanese lanterns hanging for a garden party.

“If you look into the clear-cloud between Dog Robber World and Truman World, you may see the face of the one you are to marry,” Frederik Katz said to Antoinette Phelan as he came up behind her. Frederik was breathing hard as he said this, as he always was when he talked to Antoinette. And yet he was a healthy and chesty young man, and there was no reason for him to be so winded after speaking a mere twenty-six words.

“But that is superstition, Frederik,” Antoinette said, “and you know how your family hates superstition. Your father is livid against it, as all good persons should be. But this is a peculiar superstition, an optical superstition. I really can see the face of the person I am to marry in that cloud. I see it now, though it is very superstitious of me to see it.”

“You see it now, Antoinette? Whose, whose face is it?”

“Really, I see several faces there. I see the faces of Stephen Huckleby, of Graves Huckleby, of Paul Huckleby, of Anthony Constantino, of Edward Constantino, of Max Katz (a little unlikely, he, though!), of Bernard Huckleby, of Cristofer Constantino (those latter two are pretty young, but maybe I can raise one of them the way I want him). Eight faces there. One of them has to be the face of the one I'll marry. There's no one else on Robinsonnade for me to marry.”

“Maybe there's another face in the clear cloud, Antoinette,” Frederik suggested. “Is there not another face there?”

“No. Whose could a ninth face possibly be?”

“Mine. It could be mine.”

“No. Oh, no, no, your face isn't there.”

“Look again, Antoinette. Isn't there one face that stands taller than the group, one that looks over the heads of the others from the left? Look in the high left corner of the clear cloud. Do you not see a face there?”

“No. It isn't a face, it's only a big smudge.”

“Keep looking.”

“Oh yes, it's the face of something. It's a pig's face.”

There was a strangling sort of sob, and Frederik Katz bolted away and left Antoinette. She laughed, and then she grinned her most evil grin. She was a bit uneasy though. Frederik Katz always made her uneasy, and her own orneriness made her uneasy sometimes. Frederik was the favorite son of Hugo Katz the commander of the planet. At seventeen he already stood as tall as anyone else on that world. It was said that he had a fine mind. How do you tell if someone has a fine mind? Take it out and put it to some test? There was a sort of smudged brilliance about Frederik. The only thing wrong with him was that he was impossible.

4.

Earth Night was also called the Night of the Stranger, or the Night of the Strangers. But there shouldn't have been any strangers on Robinsonnade. There should have been only forty-seven persons on that world, ten of the Katz family, twelve of the Huckleby family, twelve of the Constantino family, and thirteen of the Phelan family. There was no way that any stranger could have come there. This was an axiom.

Really there were several fairly regular ways that a stranger could have come. And there were irregular ways. A stranger is one who comes by strange ways.

The only thing that might be expected to keep strangers away from the island-planet of Robinsonnade was its being below Poverty Plateau. Minerals there were neither exceptional nor especially accessible, and they were developed only to a slight degree by only the forty-seven people on the planet. The mineral wealth did not leap out at one, and it had not been dug and stored. The land of the planet had not encountered the organic experience at all till just twenty years before, and organic life on it was still a very small and carefully nurtured flame. Maybe in a hundred years there might be small spots of local opulence, but there was not now any great garnering into barns.

The gemstones of Robinsonnade were undistinguished, and the fission and fusion stuff was surely not above average. And there was no unique and magic trade article or substance. “There is no planet so poor that it does not have its own ‘pearl beyond price’, its invaluable substance that will make it worth traffic and commerce,” John Chancel had written. But John Chancel had not been to Selkirk Sun. Robinsonnade Planet was medium rich in eventual prospects, but it did not now have anything worth trading for or stealing. The Selkirk System had been appraised by sky venturemen as “Nothing there yet,” and of all its planets Robinsonnade was set as the least tempting.

(The Selkirk System was not supposed to be a part of the general knowledge; but it is difficult to hide any part of the sky under a bushel.)

So, if strangers came from the Trader Planets, for instance, they would hardly have come for trade. If strangers came from anywhere they could only come for their own strange reasons. Nevertheless there was recurring rumor that strange people were sometimes on Robinsonnade, and also strange animals, and strange manifestations, and what could only be called strange things. Among the strange people supposed to be there was the trillionaire prisoner, the exiled dictator, the shadow-man, the monk. Among the strange animals fabled to be there was the white horse, the whistling elk, the flying pig, the Transylvania wolf, the Culebra caleidoscopia snake.

Among the strange manifestations reported as being on Robinsonnade were the illusion of being able to see clear around the planet by means of the parabolic reflectors or ‘clear clouds’, the ‘scales of the dragon’; the experience of bi-location which was part physical and part mental, which sometimes provided a true binocular way of looking at things and a true bi-lobar way of thinking about things; and there were the ocular superstitions generally.

Robinsonnade was loaded with superstitions that did have local habitations and names. Mirages on Earth could give only pale ideas of these places. They did not always fade away when one came near them. Most of them could be entered and enjoyed. One might eat medlars off the medlar trees of such an hallucination, or talk with the only slightly vague people who lived in it. Superstition, yes. Well, such a substantial hallucination might not be there the next day. But two or three days after that it might be there again. There was a wide variety of such strange manifestations.

Among the strange things on Robinsonnade were — no, not now, not on Earth Night, and especially not on Hugo Katz Night. No wonder that Hugo was perturbed by the unseemly superstitions that went on. Some of those strange things were unclean and unpleasant. Some of them were a little bit frightening. Well, actually, there were several of them that would bring even the stoutest-hearted person to the brink of the screaming horrors.

Even on this Hugo Katz Night the ocular superstitions made their appearances. Graves Huckleby said that he had seen, down by Dugan's Swamp, the Exiled Dictator on his white stallion. That dictator wasn't finished yet. He had the lowering look of one who is plotting a comeback. Anthony Constantino said that he had seen the Trillionaire Prisoner paying bribes to two men who looked like guards from the way they cradled those short-barreled shotguns in the crooks of their arms. Antoinette Phelan said that she had seen (and could still see even till that minute) the Shadow-Man lurking in the entrance of Shadrack's Cave. So some of them went there (it was about three kilometers away), and the Shadow-Man was indeed there (“ — or a shadow of the Shadow-Man at least,” Stephen Huckleby said).

The Shadow-Man put on Shadow Shows. He had used to do this, in whatever place he had come from, at the Great Houses of Plantations, where there was very little entertainment, and where the Masters would then have all the workers come into the Big Shed to see the show, thrown on the wall by candle and by the hands of the Shadow-Man. The Shadow-Man used to bring such pleasure to the workers at about two hundred different plantations every year.

And the Shadow-Man would put on Shadow Shows now. The young people who came to see them sat in the dark interior of Shadrack's Cave, and the Shadow-Man threw the performing shadows on the broad, white, limestone wall that was in front of the cave entrance. (Question: will there be limestone on a world that hadn't known the organic experience at all in its vast past ages? Answer: it sure did look like white limestone.)

Someone would always light a candle and hold it for the Shadow-Man. Tonight it was Antoinette Phelan who did this. And the Shadow-Man with his talented hands threw the strutting, puppet-like shadows onto the wall, and they began to be involved in fast-paced dramas. The shadow-actors were voiced, and the Shadow-Man was a mute; and there were several very leaky explanations of how this could be.

But tonight, with such a multiplicity of island-planets shining in the sky, there was an unusual variety of shadow-figures and shadow-dramas at the Theater of the White Rock. The candle that Antoinette held was really only the last of the forty-seven candles that were throwing shadows on the rock. Hers was the Robinsonnade candle, but there were forty-six other candles in the sky.

The Shadow-Man and his cavorting images presented ‘Napoleon's Retreat’ with horses and baggage wagons and red-belching cannons. This had been an old favorite on the plantation circuits. He did ‘The Black Crook’. He did ‘Hogan's Alley’. He did ‘Limehouse Nights’ and ‘The Jewel Thieves of Wallenda World’. All these shows were familiar to the young people who went to the irregular showings at the Rock.

Then Hugo Katz burst upon them in barely controlled fury.

“It is with sadness and disappointment that I see that you have fallen into bleak superstition again,” Hugo stated in a tight voice. “Such a dismal failing reflects unfavorably on every person on Robinsonnade. You all know that the Shadow-Man is a forbidden phenomenon, not to be indulged in under any circumstances. You all know that I shattered him to pieces with my cudgel only four days ago and forbade him to appear again. You must know that there is no such thing. I believe that you, Antoinette, are the primary of this manifestation known as the Shadow-Man.”

“Oh! I didn't know that I was,” Antoinette said honestly. “Maybe you're wrong. Could I be a primary and not know it?”

The Shadow-Man had shifted the drama to the ‘Israelites and the Golden’ Calf,’ and he gave Moses a voice that was a take-off of that of Hugo Katz. This made Hugo very angry; and the Moses on the rock also became very angry, almost in mirror image of Hugo's anger. Hugo would open his mouth to roar condemnations; and the Shadow-Moses would anticipate him and roar out the same words that Hugo had intended to roar and in the same voice that Hugo had intended to use.

But Hugo Katz had a heavy cudgel, and with it he shattered the Shadow-Man into pieces that proved to be paper-thin shards of slate. And Hugo drove the young people out of Shadrack's Cave and away from there.

But they looked back as they ran away, and they saw illuminated words dancing on the rock wall with the message “Come back again after that old kraut-head cools it.”

5.

The young people had been doing some pretty intricate and spirited stomp dances during the sky-lanterned night. Hugo Katz, the Commandant of the Planet, came to them half in anger and half in uncertainty.

“Do you young people believe that those are appropriate dances?” he asked. “You are stomping on half-count and quarter-count and on no count at all. Wouldn't it be more rational to stomp on full-count?”

“But these are very special stomps for this night alone,” Barbara Phelan said. “We have just been doing the ‘Hugo Katz Imperial Stomp Dance’ in honor of you. The one we did before that was the ‘Hugo Katz Cake-Walk’.”

“I suppose that is all right then,” Hugo Katz said, and he walked away half pleased that the stomps were dedicated to him.

But those stomp dances weren't all right. There were strangers who came to the fringes of the dancing area and joined the dances, and the dances became more and more broken-count stomps.

Frederik Katz came to Antoinette Phelan and pulled her out of the gyrations.

“I do not want to bother you if you are displeased with me,” he said, “but this is bigger than ourselves and is a part of public policy. I am ordered to give you indoctrination, now, tonight, since I belong to your peer group and since I am very sound on these things. You have shown, so they tell me, a flightiness in your beliefs that is outside of the tolerances. I am ordered to reprove you and correct you and instruct you.”

“So then reprove me and correct me and instruct me, Frederik,” Antoinette said. “How will I know better if you do not tell me?”

“Ah, it is all in the tight and strong focus,” Frederik said. “Our lives must be informed with beamed sharpness. You have heard all these things many times, but you have not paid attention, and so you must hear them again. There is no room for ordinary persons on any of the new worlds. All common persons must remain on Earth, or be filtered out in such way-stations as the Selkirk System here. Only persons of intensity and excellence may go to the further worlds. These people must have given up the wide and shallow distractions or superstitions, and they must channel all their energies and talents into the tight and strong beam.

“We will have the rational things only. We will not have any of the superstitions or irrational phenomena, nor strangers, nor strange manifestations. Error has no right on the new worlds. We will hew to the true way only, to the strong and straight lines of secular liberalism as fabricated by our fathers. All ‘Things Beyond’, the sour swamps and the illicit meadows, the aberrations and the vagrancies, must be chopped away and flung into the abyss. Rivers running in unauthorized courses make swamps. Imagination running on trackless roads can only run into morasses where everything will eventually sink into the illicit slime. We cannot have strangers or strange manifestations. We cannot have white horses or cascading colored snakes or shadow-men or monks. These things come from sick imaginations.”

“You talk just like your father, Frederik,” Antoinette said.

“That is higher praise than I deserve,” Frederik Katz spoke proudly. “Our parents came to the Selkirk System to have progeny in quarantine conditions where none of the distracting and superstitious infections could enter in. Then these families were to be certified and sent on to further worlds. For forty of the worlds of the Selkirk System this has worked fine, and they have sent wave after wave of colonists forward, every two or three years for some of them. For two or three of the worlds (Robinsonnade among them) it has not worked so fine. This world leaks. Distracting infections and illicit superstitions have crept in. Strange manifestations have appeared. Therefore, many of the people here are to be classified as ‘unclean’ and are to be forced to remain here forever. Only a few of us superior ones will be called to go on to ‘Further Worlds’.”

“More and more like your father,” Antoinette said.

“Thank you,” Frederik said. “It is wonderful of you to say that. But some of your reported activities here have been less than wonderful. In spite of that, I have been greatly taken by you, and I still am.”

“Oh, I'll marry you if that's what you want,” Antoinette said.

“The forty-seven island-planets of Selkirk Sun bear the august names of persons and concepts that have brought the Secular Liberal Covenant to its present wonderful position,” Frederik said. “The names, the names! Nietzsche Planet, Hegel, Mordecai, Darwin, Huxley, Freud, Luther, Calvin, Cromwell, Voltaire, Rousseau, Franklin, Hendeus, Joyce, Gide, Wilde, Mann, Russell, William B. Ziff, Malthus, Roosevelt, Free Choice, Stamp the Rooster, Relativity, Situational Ethics, Mao, Truman, Kent State, Yellow Dog, Dialectical Materialism, Whitehead, Nader, Pauling, Teilhard, Kennedy, Bella Abzug, Punk Rock, Horse Robber, Sam Erwin, Mailer, Take Care of Number One, Tip O'Neill, Carter, Controlled Despair, Rolling Stone, and Robinsonnade on which we stand. These are the great persons and the great ideas, the pinnacles of human achievement.”

“You looked at each of the Island-Planets when you said its name,” Antoinette remarked.

“Oh certainly. That's an effective trick in elocution,” Frederik answered.

“But some of them are already below the horizon, Frederik, and some of them haven't risen above the other horizon yet. But you looked at each of them when you said its name, and you saw it in every detail. I know you did.”

“Yes, I did,” Frederik admitted. “I fell victim to an ocular superstition, which shows that none of us is quite perfect. Antoinette, you said something a while ago when I wasn't quite listening. Did I hear you right?”

“Oh, I said that I'd marry you if you really wished it. What did you hear me say?”

“Oh, this might be either wonderful or horrible, Antoinette! My father has tentatively put you on the list of those to be left behind on Robinsonnade as being intractable. I will have to change his mind somehow.”

“No need to discommode your father, Frederik. I will stay here, and you will stay here with me.”

“Stay on Robinsonnade? No, never! I am one of the selected persons, and my destiny is to go onward to brighter worlds.”

“If you loved me you would stay here with me.”

“I do love you, Antoinette, in a way, and in spite of your superstitious leanings. But I love honor more.”

“Bully!” said Antoinette. “I see something now, Frederik, that only a superstitious person would see, since it is still below the horizon. But it's rising fast, and soon everyone will have to see it.”

“The Mother Ship!” Frederik Katz breathed in awe. “It's coming! It will roost in our own local sky this very night. I am sure that my father had word that it was coming. That's why he has been so busy working on his lists and his decisions, and why he has assigned people to check over the satellite ship and have it ready to go. Surely the Mother Ship has already been picked up on instruments, so it is not real superstition to see it now before it rises above the horizon. Should we tell the other people that we see it coming?”

“Certainly, Frederik. Everybody is telling everybody that it is coming, for everybody has seen it.”

6.

“I do now the hardest thing that I ever did in my life.” Hugo Katz was speaking to the people of Robinsonnade in a heavy voice. He was disheveled, and he had either bruise or blood on his face. “I must say and decide, in my person of Commandant of this Island-Planet, which of you must go on to more sublime skies, and which must remain here. The word has come to me: this tree must produce fruit this very night, however scanty it may be. I have agonized over this decision, but I will not compromise my judgment in any way. No person with blemish, either inner or outer, may go from this quarantined world.”

“Come on, Antoinette,” Steven Huckleby said and nudged her. “The Shadow-Man is back at the wall in front of the cave, and the shadow-shows are about to start again. They're better than any show that Hugo Katz can put on.”

“Come along, forty-seventh place sister,” Barnabas Phelan said to her. “None of us is selected to leave Robinsonnade anyhow. We're too infected with superstition and with the wide-beam disease. We can see the Mother Ship as well from the White Wall Theatre as we can from here, and the first comedy the Shadow-Man will do is named ‘Mother Carey's Scary Pickins: She Abandons Half Her Chickens.’ Mother Carey is the Mother Ship.”

“You go tell the Shadow-Man that there's going to be a better skit here,” Antoinette said. “And tell him I said so. He can come here and watch it from Durbin's Dingle, and none of the non-superstitions persons will be able to see him. Then, after the satellite ship lifts off with its part-load to the Mother Ship, we'll all go down to Shadrack's Cave again and watch his shows as long as he likes.”

“Who is going to put on a better skit here than the Shadow-Man puts on?” Steven Huckleby asked suspiciously.

“I am,” Antoinette said.

“Hugo Katz has blood on his brow,” Anthony Constantino remarked. “And Antoinette is grinning her most evil grin. Has there been an encounter, perverse girl? Is it part of the skit? What did you hit him with?”

“There has been an encounter, yes,” Antoinette said. “It is part of my skit. But I hit him with words alone. My words can draw blood.”

“Do you not know that he has the power to rescue us from this hulk, and the power to abandon us here?” Steven Huckleby asked.

“I love this hulk, my planet home, and I will love being abandoned here,” Antoinette said. “I believe I've made sure of being one of the abandoned people.”

“There are abandoned persons among you,” Hugo Katz was saying in his powerful, more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger voice, and he seemed to have picked up an echo of Antoinette's phrase. “You may howl and cringe when you hear the judgments on yourselves: and yet you were the ones who gave those judgments on yourselves with your conduct. You have not measured up. You have fallen into idolatry and superstition. Your itching eyes have looked upon specters that cannot be allowed to be there. Your itching ears have heard illicit enticements.

“The chosen people among us will leave Robinsonnade World forever in a very few moments, almost at once. We will take nothing with us as we enter the satellite ship to rise to the Mother Ship. We will take nothing with us because we will be given better things on the Mother Ship than are to be found on Robinsonnade.

“These people and these alone will go on to a greater world, having passed the test: Myself Hugo Katz; my wife Monika Katz; my eldest son Konrad Katz and his wife Irene Phelan; my eldest daughter Rita Katz; my second son Frederik Katz, my second daughter Olive Katz; my third son Max Katz, and Barbara Constantino who is pledged to him; my third daughter Veronika Katz; and my two grandchildren William Katz and Lily Katz. These twelve shall go to a brighter place. The other thirty-five of you, for your perversity and for your ordinariness, will remain on Robinsonnade. You all know the proverb ‘There is no room for ordinary people on any of the bright worlds.’ It is your own fault that you have been undistinguished persons.”

“Father!” Frederik Katz called loudly. “That list must be amended! Antoinette Phelan is pledged to me, and she must go with me. I have never in the seventeen years of my life protested a judgment of yours. I do protest this one. Antoinette must come with me.”

“That girl may not go with us,” Hugo said solidly, “and she is not pledged to you in good faith. Of all forty-seven persons on this world, she is absolutely the last and the forty-seventh. It were better for us that there had been only forty-six of us here, and that she had not been. Superstitions attach to her as to a primary. Shadow-Men and monks and snakes attach to her. She is a witch, and she must remain here forever. We enter the satellite ship now, the twelve of us. Go in, wife! Go in, children and grandchildren and bride and pledged-bride. Frederik, I said that all twelve of us enter the satellite ship now! Now!”

Frederik Katz was red with travail and passion. He was torn apart. But he had never disobeyed his father in his life, and he did not do it now. He turned to enter the satellite ship, as ten had already entered it, and only his father Hugo Katz remained waiting for him.

“Wait!” Antoinette cried out like ringing bronze. “Forever apart from him is so long a time! Let me have a minute with him, a quarter of a minute. Ten seconds!”

Antoinette embraced Frederik with absolutely overwhelming passion. She tore the shirt clear off of him, and she raked his loins and back and shoulders with her strong nails, leaving furrowed wounds that began to seep blood. She bruised and battered him in her love.

“That's close enough to ten seconds with him,” big Hugo Katz said sourly. “Be off, young witch. Get in the satellite, Frederik.”

“Oh, wait, wait, I wounded him in the violence of my love!” Antoinette cried. “He is broken and bleeding. But I have healing unguent here. Let me staunch the blood.”

Antoinette's brother Barnabas handed her a jar of special healing unguent, and she kneaded it into the deepest of the bloody furrows she had raked in Frederik's loins.

“That can do no harm,” Hugo Katz said with a look of infinite patience. “There is no sepsis or infecting substance on Robinsonnade World. That's enough though, young witch. Be gone!”

“Short words with him yet,” Antoinette cried. “Frederik, from this quick encounter of ours that has unfortunately wounded you there will come things that will remind you of me. Cherish these things, in secret at first. Do not on any account let them be destroyed. Promise me this small favor, and your promise to be forever.”

“I promise you this too-small favor in a promise that is forever,” Frederik swore. “Anything that reminds me of you, I will not let it be destroyed.” Frederik entered the satellite ship. His father Hugo entered it. The satellite lifted off towards the Mother Ship five hundred kilometers above them.

The twelve extraordinary persons had left Robinsonnade World for a more excellent place. And the thirty-five ordinary persons were left marooned on the little island-planet for as long as they should live.

Why did they give such a hearty cheer then when they found themselves irrevocably abandoned?

“What was the unguent that you kneaded into those deep gashes that you tore in Frederik, Antoinette?” Steven Huckleby asked as the group of them, along with the Shadow-Man, who was made out of paper-thin slate stone, went down to the white rock in front of Shadrack's Cave.

“Snake eggs,” Antoinette said. “Culebra caleidoscopia snake eggs. They are so small, and they survive and hatch so well! Snake eggs in incubation jelly, with ‘Run-Away Fertility Inducer’ added. There will be snakes aplenty wherever they go. And they'll be cared for and not allowed to perish; there is a forever promise on that. They really will remind them of us.”

The first show that the Shadow-Man put on that night was ‘Like Snakes From Home,’ a comedy.

Happening in Chosky Bottoms

1

“I know that football is not really the most important thing in the world,” said the big and ruddy man named Melvin Schermerhorn. “But it is presently the most important thing in the world to my son Malcom, and my son Malcom is one of the most important things in the world to me. Therefore we will base this discussion on the thesis that football is the most important thing in the world.”

“All right,” said the chunky brown man named Charley Goodbeaver, who was the football coach for Lost Haven Consolidated High School.

“My son Malcom is the best high-school quarterback in the state,” Melvin Schermerhorn said positively. “He would have made All State last year except for the miserable Lost Haven team that you fielded. This is his last year, and he must make All State. This means that there has to be a great improvement in the team here. To obtain this better team, there must be some completely new thinking on the part of the coach, or there must be a completely new coach. What do you think of that, Goodbeaver?”

“Yeah, I got an idea,” Charley Goodbeaver said. “It's a completely new idea.”

“Tell it to me.”

“No. I don't tell it to anyone yet. But it's a sure idea, and it gives us a sure-winner team.”

“Last year we lost to Coweta, Catoosa, Honey Locust, and Scraper.”

“Scraper wasn't a high-school team. It was a town team. They had three players who had played junior college ball. But this year we don't lose to anybody.”

“I will hold you to this, Goodbeaver. If we don't have an all-win team, I'll nail your hide to the door.”

“Yeah, I got an idea. It won't miss.”

2

Maybe there were eight or ten of the Slew-Foot or Quick-Lout people in the Chosky Bottoms. Maybe there weren't any of them at all, not there in the Bottoms, not anywhere. There was a dispute about these people, who were also called the Bear-People, the Hairy Ghosts, the Saturday Night Specters, the Green River Monsters, and the Wagoner County Apes. Two-thirds of the people said that the Slew-Feet did not exist at all, that they were hoaxes and stale stories. Most of the rest said that the Slew-Feet were not human persons, that they were a different kind of men, or that they were animals. Quick-Louts was the local name for them, and there was dispute about its meaning.

The Quick-Louts seemed to have their own language, a grumpy clatter of sounds. But several of them could talk a few words of Cherokee, and several of them (they may have been the same several, since all of them looked alike) could talk a few words of English. The most frequent phrase they used in English was “Aw hell, Jake.” They called all human persons “Jake”.

One of them used to come to the Bait Shop in Lost Haven to buy fishhooks of the biggest size (six inches across the hook) for a dollar each. These were deep-sea hooks, but Henry Stone, who ran the Bait Shop, stocked a few of them especially for the Quick-Louts. “I don't know what they hook with them,” Henry always said, confessing his ignorance. “Whales, I guess. Yeah, Wagoner County whales, I bet.” These very large fishhooks were the only things that any of the Quick-Louts ever bought, the only commerce that they ever carried on.

A week and a half before Melvin Schermerhorn had jumped Coach Goodbeaver, Crescent Harvestman had come to the coach and told him that her aunt Ronda Harvestman had made friends with a Quick-Lout boy and had instructed him and had found him to be a rapid learner and very intelligent. Aunt Ronda Harvestman had a hard-to-find cabin and garden plot on the edge of the Chosky Bottoms. She thought that this young Quick-Lout should go to high school.

“He is very tall, very fast, very tough,” Crescent Harvestman told Coach Charley Goodbeaver, “and if what Aunt Ronda says is true, then he is smart enough to learn the plays. He is your all-win season all in six-and-a-half feet of hairy monster.”

“Yeah, I get the idea, Crescent,” the coach said. “I wish you were a boy. You've got brains. You see the big picture. We will have to handle this right, will have to pick a day not too soon and not too late, and have your Aunt Ronda send him in. What is his name?”

“He calls himself Tsalki. He says that means ‘Big Hero’ in Cherokee. Aunt Ronda says it doesn't.”

“Nah, it doesn't. Maybe it means ‘Big Hero’ in Quick-Lout. Tsalki! We'll call him Chalky. This is a good idea. I bet it saves my hide.”

Aunt Ronda sent Chalky to Lost Haven the day before high school classes started. She had given him a week's special instruction in English. He already understood it from listening to people talk it, almost always when they didn't know that he was anywhere around; so all he had to do was improve his own talking of it. Well, he talked it funny when he first came, but he made himself understood. And he could read, on the sign-board and the comic-strip level. He could read at least half the stuff in a newspaper. And he could block-print letters.

As soon as he learned the several signs that regular people use, it was apparent that he knew mathematics. Oh, how he knew that stuff! Aunt Ronda Harvestman had been a schoolteacher for thirty years until, in a fit of anger at the world, she had gone down and moved into an old cabin in the Chosky Bottoms. And she had been teaching Chalky for several years.

Chalky passed his high-school entrance examinations. They weren't very stringent with him. “After all, he's an ape,” Mr. Franklyn, the principal of the school, said. “He's the smartest damned ape I ever saw. And how he can run!”

Perhaps Chalky did lack polish at first, but he picked it up quickly. And he was always willing and good-natured. “All right, Jake, I do it,” he said to any request or command from any person, man or woman or child. He had a nice room fixed up over a place where Charley Goodbeaver stored rock salt and range pellets and such stuff for his cattle.

About his amazing mathematical ability, Chalky said, “Aw, we think about numbers and sets and functions all the time. What else is there to do down in the Chosky Bottoms?”

About his amazing football ability, Chalky said, “Aw, the hardest part is that the kids break so easy. I have to be careful not to break them, or I get the boot. It's fun to gain a mile in just three games, though. It's fun to sack a quarterback fifteen times in a game.”

“He's unreal, isn't he?” Melvin Schermerhorn said to Coach Goodbeaver as he came by to watch on the first afternoon of practice. “He moves like a ghost, really. I believe he can move right through people without touching them if he wants to. And he can touch them plenty when he wants that. He made seven knockdown blocks on that one play. And on the series where he was playing defense he threw the runners for losses of nine, thirteen, and thirty-nine yards, and then blocked the punt. He can go all the way every time he touches the ball. He can catch any pass that's even on the same field with him. And he has made eleven interceptions of the eleven passes thrown by the B team. Yes, I see that we already have our all-win season. It is important, though, that my son, the best quarterback in the state, should not be so overshadowed that people won't remember that we even have a quarterback.”

“Your son Malcom can take care of himself,” Coach Goodbeaver said. “He is the one who calls the plays of the game. He, who is a journalism star as well as a football star, is the one who phones the accounts and results of the games to the papers in T Town and Muskogee and the City. He's the one who selects the game pictures that will go to the press, and he's the one who will write the background pieces and the feature pieces. Your son is as opportunistic a young journalist as a young quarterback.”

Malcom hadn't taken to Chalky as easily as his father had, though. He had bristled and bridled at him at first. Malcom was used to being best in the school at everything, and he didn't like to be ousted from any first slot. He could keep pretty good control on it as a journalist, though. As this:

“Quarterback has perfect day, forty-four out of forty-four passes completed, ten for touchdowns.” That would be a headline that quarterback Malcom Schermerhorn would himself send to the press after one game that year. But Chalky would have to stretch his six-and-a-half feet to nine-and-a-half feet to make some of those catches. He was very stretchable.

The Lost Haven Harriers beat Honey Locust, Coweta, Catoosa, Verdigris, Tiawah, Oneta, Scraper and Leonard, all of them by huge scores.

Nevertheless there was one-sided enmity between quarterback Malcom Schermerhorn and fullback-end-linebacker-monsterman Chalky. The enmity flowed only in the direction from Malcom to Chalky.

3

Well, there was a thing besides the permutations of numbers that the Slew-Foot Quick-Louts used to think about and devise down in the Chosky Bottoms. It was the tall story.

“Of course we're not human,” Chalky said (he was talking much better after he had been in school for six weeks or so). “We're on the ape-angel axis. Sure we are the Saturday Night Specters. A people that doesn't get a shine on them on Saturday night isn't much of a people. Yeah, we almost always shine in the dark. Bubbles of methane or swamp gas get trapped in our fur, and specks of mica get stuck to us and refract the light. Sure we can walk through walls. Oh, without wrecking them? Yes we can, but it's harder that way.

“Yah, Jake, we can appear. We can take shortcuts through time and space. But we simply don't understand the ancestor-worship of humans. Simply because your ancestors spent most of their time in the past, you never go back there to spend any time at all. Is that not carrying reverence too far?

“And we don't understand this descendant-worship of humans. Simply because your descendants spend most of their time in the future, you are shy about spending any time there at all. You do not trip to the future at all yourselves.

“Death isn't final to us, no more than it is to humans, but we have more mastery over shape and change and bodies than you do. Why are we so hairy? When we all come to the end of all our lives here and come to the meadows of paradise, do you not know that we will be sheared like sheep? You act as if you did not know it. All of us will be sheared of at least ten pounds of our hair to pay our entrance fee. But you, most of you, don't even have ten pounds of hair. You can't go in then!

“We go down in the quicksand a lot and rest there. We can stay there easily. But the quicksand is inhabited by other creatures. Some of the things that are down in those bogs would horrify you. You know why there are only about a dozen of us in our group? There are things that come up out of the quicksand and devour our numbers and keep us few.

“Are we indeed ghosts? And do ghosts themselves have ghost stories? Sure we are and sure we have. There are many orders of ghosts. You are ghosts to your own cattle, being able to make appearances, having mastery of time and place, having strangeness on you. Some of us seem ghostly to you. And it may be that we have encountered steeper ghosts than you have. We are more receptive of these things than you are. We see out of shaggier eyes.”

It was weird just to hear Chalky, who looked at least as much like an ape as like a person, talk so knowingly on such slanted subjects.

“The ghosts we fear most in the Bottoms live in the quicksand there,” Chalky said. “They are invisible, but they do occupy space. They live down under the deep quicksand and have a town down there. When they are disturbed by something, they erupt out of the quicksand, and then their forms may be seen from the mud and sand and slime sticking to them. In fact, if they are only wet with water, their forms may be seen by that wet sheen. They are shaped like ourselves except that they are a little bit larger and apparently very much stronger. They are the ghosts called ko-el.

“When one of them is displeased, he heaves up out of the quicksand and catches one of our children. He tears it apart, all four limbs and the head of it clear off. He leaves the pieces there, and every day he comes up and eats one of the pieces. Should the pieces of the child be gathered up and taken from there, the creature will come up again and again and catch and kill and dismember another child. So there is no profit in caring for the pieces. Besides, some people believe that the ghost creatures have the right to do what they do.

“You see, we bury our dead in the quicksand. We do not weight them down. We let them go free there, but they always sink at first. Then one of them may rise to the top again and again in the days after his burial. There is a restlessness in them. Sometimes when one rises from his quicksand grave he will speak words. He will speak in an oracular style, to use the English word for it. Such a one refuses to be clear dead. He is one who will turn into the kind of ghost named ko-el.

“The quicksand eels will finally eat all his flesh and bones, but they cannot eat his form or his displacement. But these cranky old ko-el ghosts are the ancestors of some of us. When they kill and dismember one of our children, it may be a descendant of theirs. Cannot dead ancestors do whatever they wish with their descendants?

“It is only the young or the adolescent of a species that the ko-el ghosts tear apart, though. If for some reason they catch an adult, they will pull him, whole and hollering, down into the quicksand and drown him in it. But they will not tear him to pieces.

“Sometimes the ko-el ghosts will glow and glitter at night, or even in the morning hours if they have any glitter left over. And sometimes we glow and glitter ourselves. When we do that, then we are ghosts to some of the other creatures who see us. And sometimes we also go down into the quicksand for short periods, for half an hour or half a day. It is restful under the surface of the slough; and it is also informative, because strange and strong thoughts come to us there. It is dangerous, though. If we stay down there too long we die. And yet, below the surface, there isn't much difference between the quick and the dead. The dead, in fact, are sometimes the liveliest of the two.”

“Seriously, Chalky, how long can you live down under the quicksand?” Crescent asked.

“Not very long really. Maybe fifteen minutes. Bog sand-and-water has more air in it than straight water does. But it's mighty abrasive to breathe it.”

“Chalky, Chalky, how about the alligators there?” Susan Wilson asked.

“No. There are no alligators in the Chosky Bottoms,” Chalky said.

“There were alligators the last time you told this rigmarole.”

“Should I tell it the same way every time?”

Chalky was popular with most of his schoolmates. And yet there was dissent.

“Damned ape” someone was heard to mutter, and the mutter came out of the group of Jonathan Stone and Malcom Schermerhorn and Alex Master.

4

“Sure he's human,” the anthropologist George Whitebluejay said.

“Then what race does he belong to?” Principal Franklyn asked.

“Archaic.”

“Is he of the species sometimes called Big-Foot?”

“Oh, I suppose there's twenty popular names for them. They're not just big-foot; they're big-all-over.”

“Have you made a chromosome count on him?”

“Yes, I have. Hey, he's got a lot of them!”

“You don't seem too serious about this, Mr. Whitebluejay.”

“But I am. It's the chromosome counts themselves that show a clownish deportment. It is generally believed, by laymen more than by biologists, that all humans have forty-six chromosomes, and perhaps that is a fair average. But it takes a lot of cheating to come up with the forty-six count every time and with every human. They will vary from as much as three pairs less to three pairs more. This is one of the open secrets: that the thing isn't rigid. Of the ten students whom I put under clinical observation here, one had an even greater chromosome divergence than Chalky had. Such divergence may mean nothing at all. Or it may mean that the subject is on the very edge of species separation, or that he is peculiarly talented; or it may seem that he is criminally insane.

“Chalky has forty-eight chromosomes. Yes, Chalky is human, but he lives in a slightly different world from our own.”

“How do you mean that?”

“Simply that Chalky will see things that we do not see, and fail to see things that we do see.”

“Some of the other students say that Chalky can see ghosts.”

“I suppose so. I can see them pretty well myself, though the talent wasn't natural to me. It represents difficult and professional learning-to-see.”

“Is Chalky's living in a slightly different world a danger to our context here, to the school, to the other students, to the world that we live in?”

“Possibly. He takes things very seriously that we do not take seriously at all. And he does not take at all seriously some of the things that we believe are of the utmost importance. Chalky may not feel that the taking of a life, even a human life, is an ultimate or even a very important matter.”

“That makes it all very tricky, Mr. Whitebluejay. What would you recommend?”

“Oh, when I get back to the university I'll recommend a full scholarship for him, such sports cars and trinkets as are necessary to seduce him completely, and a special scholastic category for him. And I will recommend that he be used as a special roving monsterman on defense, and as a loose halfback alternating with wide end on offense. And I will recommend that he throw a lot of halfback passes. He can throw a football a hundred yards, you know.”

5

Halloween was on Friday that year. It was a combination football rally, homecoming, and regular Halloween Green Country Ball and Masquerade and Bonfire held on the school grounds.

Malcom Schermerhorn came to the ball and masquerade as Chalky. He had a full-ape suit that he had bought at a novelty house. It was expensive, with heavy black fur, ape feet, and zippered up the back. He had a Chalky face of rubberoid substance that he had made himself with the aid of an art student named Maudie Stone. It was an amazingly accurate depiction of Chalky, and at the same time it was a rather bruising caricature of him. There was malice and genius mixed in that rubberized face. And Malcom spoke in a very cruel caricature of the Chalky voice.

Chalky came to the ball and masquerade as Malcom Schermerhorn. He had acquired pop clothes of the style that Malcom affected. He had a Malcom face of rubberoid substance that he had made himself with the aid of an art student named — no, it is only a guess who that art student was. But the only one besides Maudie Stone with enough talent to do a thing like that was Crescent Harvestman, and Crescent was supposed to be Malcom's girl.

It wasn't exactly a confrontation. It was funny at first. And, when it split in two, one of the pieces of it was still funny. Chalky's takeoff of Malcom was funny all the way. “A thing about apes, they really can ape,” a doubtful friend of Chalky's said in admiration. But Malcom's takeoff on Chalky was shocking and frightening. It was like meeting a real and rampant monster face to face, like being in the grasp of a nightmare that maintains its reality. But a Halloween Green Country Ball and Masquerade and Bonfire should have both funny and frightening elements.

There were other monsters there. Almost all the boys came as monsters and almost all the girls came as witches. Well, Crescent Harvestman was the most ambiguous witch of all. There was a duplicity about her, a clownishness that went all the way for effect. And that included a real stake through a real heart for comic effect. Crescent was a vampire as well as a witch. But why should Crescent in reality have had any sort of stake through her heart?

Chalky surely had the most fun of anybody there. He was in high spirits and he communicated his spirits to almost everyone.

Well, was “fun” the name of what Malcolm Schermerhorn was having? It was murky and frightful fun, but he drew heavy enjoyment from it. He had always had a secret ape inside him. And now he was inside a public and posturing ape. So what would happen if Malcom and Chalky should indeed change places? Oh, it would be murder, murder!

There was something memorable about that night. The Green Country music was weird and spectral without ceasing to be good. The school grounds were lighted with kerosene torches borrowed from Cottonhead's Turkey Ranch, and there is no light so garish as that from kerosene turkey torches. Something of youth in its intrinsic weirdness was caught in the festivities and bonfires. There was a tension not quite understood by everyone when two young men of traded appearance faced and slid off again and again. And one of them had a chromosome count that was not by consensus human. That might mean nothing at all, or total disaster.

The next afternoon Lost Haven beat Chouteau eighty-seven to nothing for the championship of the Green River Valley Conference.

6

After Christmas and New Year's, at the end of the first semester, Chalky withdrew from the Lost Haven Consolidated High School. He said that he had learned all that the school could teach him, and that he had enjoyed the football, but that the other kids were too little for him and he was always afraid of hurting them. He said that basketball didn't grab him the way football did, that he felt he had an unfair advantage because of his stretchable height and the fact that there was no way that any Slew-Foot person could miss in throwing at so big a thing as a basketball hoop. He said that he might come out of the Bottoms in a year or so and play football in the National Football League, but now he believed he would spend some time with his family and help them as well as he could. So he went back to the Chosky Bottoms.

But he was not to be found anywhere in the Bottoms when friends went down to see if they could visit him there. No houses or shanties of the Quick-Lout or Slew-Foot people had ever been found. It wasn't known where or how they lived. And some of the students came back saying that there wasn't any such people, despite their having known Chalky daily for half a year.

Malcom Schermerhorn felt as if someone had moved out from between him and the sun, and now he took his rightful place in school again. Once more he was the leading boy in school, the president of the senior class, the director of the yearbook publication, the publicity and press man for the school, the star and captain of the basketball and track and baseball teams. He threw himself into feverish activity.

And the parents of Crescent Harvestman had announced her engagement to Malcom Schermerhorn, with marriage to take place in June. This would unite the two richest and finest families in Lost Haven. Malcom, a rather driven and hypertense boy, now seemed mostly content with the world, albeit a somewhat hurried and crowded contentment.

It isn't known whether Chalky threw himself into feverish activity down in the Chosky Bottoms or not. It isn't even known of what feverish activity would consist in the Chosky Bottoms.

A couple of months after that, several of the students were saying that Chalky had gone native, that he had forgotten all his schooling and clothes and shoes and had become the fundamental ape-boy again.

But several of the other students said that nobody at all had seen Chalky after he had returned to the Bottoms, that nobody could say whether he had forgotten his schooling and such, but that he had never been known to forget anything.

7

On the first day of June, the day after high school graduation, Crescent Harvestman broke her engagement to Malcom Schermerhorn. Then she went down to live for a while with her Aunt Ronda Harvestman in that cabin in the Chosky Bottoms.

What in the world would she do down there?

Oh, she would work in the garden plot a little. She would fish in both the Green River and the Arkansas River: the Bottoms go on for miles and miles. She would think a lot. She just thought that she might spend the whole summer mostly thinking.

Malcom Schermerhorn became even more tense and disturbed after Crescent had broken her engagement with him. His family was worried about his health.

About a week after Crescent had made her breakaway, there began a series of gruesome events and sightings in and about the Bottoms.

8

A dog was pulled apart down on the edge of the Bottoms. Yes, all four legs were torn off it, and the head was torn off. It was a fair-sized young hound, and it would have taken hundreds of pounds of pull to tear it apart like that. What creature could possibly have done it?

The electrifying, yelping scream of the dog had been heard, and then the screams had been cut off suddenly. Men had run to the place at once and had found the dog torn apart and bleeding copiously in still-hot death. The pieces of the dog had been strewn in a circle of about fourteen feet. This was close to midnight on a Monday night in June. A half-dozen men with their dogs had been hunting both possums and coons in a stretch of the Chosky Bottoms. Pictures of the dog were taken within an hour. They were in all the papers. Everybody for half the state knew about it then. What sort of creature could have done it? Could even an African gorilla have done it?

The hunters had been very disturbed on finding the dismembered dog. They howled and bayed like their own hounds. They stomped the ground like bulls. They discussed it in white anger.

“It is that ape-man Chalky who did this,” some of them said. “No one else would have been strong enough. We'll pull him to pieces with tractors when we catch him. We'll kill him as he killed the dog. Jonathan and Malcom, he was your friend, wasn't he? The damned monster!”

Jonathan Stone and Malcom Schermerhorn were among the hunters.

“He was our teammate. He wasn't a friend of ours,” Jonathan said truthfully.

A kid goat was systematically torn apart the next night. This was in a barnyard of a farm on the edge of the Bottoms. The kid goat had not been eaten at all, but the four legs and the head were torn off it. What monstrous creature had the strength to do such a thing? There were clippings and grindings on two of the fenceposts of the barnyard corral. What? Had Chalky, or whoever the monster was, gnawed on the very wooden posts in his smoky rage?

The two animal killings caught the popular fancy and the popular rage. The city papers took it up as “The Monster of the Chosky Bottoms”. They had overly sensational stories about the monster for several days. But who was to say that the stories were overly sensational? They might turn out to be underplayed stories once the whole facts about the monster were known. A monster hunt was on, with armed men ransacking the whole Chosky Bottoms area, and with automatic sensors and infrared cameras set to record the creature.

And a pretty good picture of the Chosky Bottoms Monster was obtained the night after the kid goat was killed. This was taken by an infrared camera focused on what was believed to be a Slew-Foot trail or walkabout, a camera triggered into action by the vibrations of heavy footsteps. They could, a camera expert said, be virtually silent footsteps if they were heavy enough. And what creature do we know that has a very heavy but virtually silent tread?

Oh, it was a Slew-Foot, a Quick-Lout, a Bear-Man, a Hairy Ghost, a Wagoner County Ape, a Green River Monster. And, from the three-quarters view of the face, it was Chalky. Half of the people who had known him said that it was Chalky for certain. The rest said that in all likelihood it was him.

“But we don't know how many of them there are or how much they look alike,” a man said. “Possibly it is an older male run amok.”

“We never knew how old Chalky was,” another man said. “He may be an older male. We never knew how big he was either. He was stretchable. It's bound to be that bestial Chalky.”

“I think it's a fake,” Crescent Harvestman said.

“Three camera experts, one of whom set the camera, swear that it is not a fake,” a third man said.

Three more pictures were obtained the next two nights. In one of them, the Chosky Bottoms Monster had a limb of the dismembered kid goat in its mouth and was gnawing on it. The kid had been left for bait, just as the monster had strewn it.

Teachers and students from the high school set up several loudspeakers in the Bottoms. These were among the genuine friends of Chalky. They set the speakers as loud as they would go and spoke over them:

“Chalky, come and give up, now in the daytime, when everything is open and we are here. Otherwise you'll be killed by men who find you when it is not full light and not before full witnesses. If you are innocent, you will be cleared. If you are sick, you will be treated. We don't want to kill you in the slimy dark here.”

Coach Goodbeaver spoke over the loudspeakers. Crescent Harvestman spoke, and others. But Chalky never hearkened to them, though it was clearly about the only chance he had to come into custody alive, the temper of the countryside being what it was.

And they could not find Chalky in the Bottoms anywhere. They could not find any of the Slew-Foot, Big-Foot, Quick-Lout, Wagoner County Ape people, though there were supposed to be a dozen or so of them in that area. Two escaped convicts were found. A demented man, written off as probably dead several years before, was found alive and unwell. Three wandering horses and half a score of lost cattle were found, but none of the Slew-Foot Quick-Lout people, and especially no Chalky.

But an illuminated picture of the probably-Chalky was taken. This was on Saturday night. This showed him as the fearful Saturday Night Specter that had terrified people around the Bottoms for a long time. It did look like Chalky, like Chalky turned into a ghost. It had a garish light on it. It was made entirely of garish light that subsumed all flesh into it and made it a Specter.

This was the ghost that put on and took off its flesh like a garment, and that killed things by tearing them to pieces.

9

Two small white children, a three-year-old girl and a four-year-old boy, a sister and brother from the Cottonhead family, were found dead and dismembered on the edge of the Chosky Bottoms about an hour after sunrise one morning.

They had been missing from their house at dawn. Following a lowering premonition and intuition, people had gone to the Bottoms and had found the two small persons in scattered and bloody and bestrewn death.

There was a sound or feel like a countywide intake of breath. This was shock beyond accounting for. It was stunning horror. It was soul-bruising, a new sordidness brought over the world. And would a corporate roar follow on that wide-area intake of breath? At first there was only the susurrus of quiet sobbing. And then more and more people gathered in mute determination to commit Chosky Bottoms justice on the factor of this monstrous crime.

It was still early morning. The shocked members of the Cottonhead family were there at the site on the edge of the Bottoms. Crescent Harvestman was there, and her Aunt Ronda. Their brush-hidden cabin was quite near. Malcom Schermerhorn and several of his cronies arrived with squirrel rifles. Coach Goodbeaver, a friend of Chalky no longer, was there with a heavy shotgun.

Many men were there with shotguns and carbines and heavier rifles. Other men brought two tractors. They swore they'd tear Chalky's body to pieces between those two tractors, as he had torn his victims to pieces. Men were there with tracking dogs. These were given old pads and football shoes of Chalky to snuffle. And the dogs reacted happily. Chalky had been close friends with every dog in that part of the country. He was popular with the dogs. That did not matter. Let the dogs go to Chalky happily or savagely, but let them lead the way to him!

But Chalky came to them instead. Oh, that can hardly be believed!

My God! He came striding toward the crowd of them, rapidly and openly and purposively. He was clothed and he was wearing shoes. He was not bare-hair ape as he had been in the pictures taken by the talented infrared cameras. He came striding with apparent anger and determination up from the lower level of the bogs and quicksands.

Silas Stone shot Chalky face-on with a shotgun. But it was loaded with light-shot, with bird-shot. Chalky was driven back two steps by the blast. His face and light shirt were quickly patterned and crosshatched with lines and gouts of blood.

“No, Jake, you have it wrong!” he called to Silas, shook his head and came on again, striding upward in a slippery place. “Monster!” Chalky called out and pointed into the middle of the group. “Murdering monster!” Who was Chalky accusing? This was all backwards.

Silas Stone shot Chalky, at closer range now, with a second shotgun blast. And Chalky staggered and put his hands over his face. Then Malcom Schermerhorn shot him in the head with a carbine. Chalky slipped and fell grotesquely to the ground that was not solid ground. He slipped down a short slope and then down a steeper slope. He slid into the bog. He sank. No one reached a hand or branch to his bleeding and unconscious form. Within fifteen seconds he had disappeared completely into the quicksand bog, one of the infamous bottomless bogs.

“Oh, God have mercy on his soul!” cried Clara Cottonhead the bereaved mother.

There was total silence for another fifteen seconds. Then one of the hounds pointed his nose to the sky and mourned for Chalky with a slow and dismal howl.

“That is the end of the Chosky Bottoms Monster,” one man said.

“That is not the end of him,” another man contradicted. “We will have him out of there, and we will tear him apart with tractors. There is a River and Road Department Caterpillar-Track Grapple not half a mile from here.”

“We know where it is,” several of the men said. And they went to get the machine with which they would possibly be able to reach down into the quicksand bog and grapple the body of Chalky out of it.

Ten minutes went by, or maybe twenty. It seemed three hours, but the sun didn't indicate anything like that. Then there was a sort of signal from the depths of the bog. The dogs began to bristle and whimper. And so, oddly, did Malcom Schermerhorn.

“He's rising out of there!” Malcom rattled in a jittery voice. “He's going to rise right out of the bog. I tell you, he's coming out of it.”

“You are nervous, boy,” said a man. “So are we all.”

Well, there was a stirring in the bog. The bullfrogs whimpered like puppies and flopped out of there. They were ashen white instead of black-green, or so it seemed. The blacksnakes squeaked like mice and came out of the bog in terror. The crows were making an intolerable disturbance.

“They carry on like that every time somebody rises from the dead here,” Aunt Ronda Harvestman said. “They think it's wrong.”

The surface of the bog began to move itself and to tumble like rapids or shoal water. “It's the great beaver,” someone said. “If he comes up, it means that one of us here will die this morning.”

“The great beaver is silly superstition,” another of them muttered. “It's the ghost named ko-el, that's who it is. He is a dead man who comes back.”

“It's the Chosky Bottoms Monster himself,” several said.

“It's Chalky coming up to kill me,” Malcom gibbered.

But a man laughed. “It's only an in-shore current from the river,” that man said. “It flutters and bubbles and heaves the bog every morning. I've seen it happen before. The bog is always a bit windy and noisy. But nobody, alive or dead, is going to rise out of it.”

Then there was a big surging and rising out of the sand-choked water. Yes, it was a dead man rising out of his slimy grave. Or it was something even more fearful. The dead-man-ghost-monster surged once, twice, three times with spuming splashing, found a firm underfoot, and staggered out of the bog onto firmer ground, shedding cataracts of mud and sand and water.

This is the place where the entrails melt. It is the place where the heart faints and stutters. It is where the human resolve is eroded completely by fear.

It

    is

        a

            nightmare

                eating

                    you

                        up.

The thing that came out of the bog was frighteningly unreal, and probably carried a freight of a hundred pounds of mud and sand and slime. But it began to shed them. There was the suspicion that it was invisible under its coating of sand and slime and blood. And it sparkled and glittered in the way that is the mark of a ghost or a risen man. But it was Chalky for certain, as it had not been certain that it was Chalky in the photographs, as it had not even been quite certain that it was Chalky who had strode toward them and been shot by them.

The dogs lay flat on their bellies like snakes, and their bones rattled noisily as they shook in fright.

“He's come out of the grave to kill me and to tear my soul to pieces,” Malcom Schermerhorn cried in a clattering voice. “He knows that I killed them.” Then Malcom groaned and railed and fell down as if dead. And he was dead, either immediately or in a very few seconds.

And most of the others there were half dead with fright. This was surely a dead monster or a dead man arisen, the more terrible because he was familiar to them. He was wrapped in mud and in shining glory at the same time.

10

“It's the mica,” Crescent Harvestman said matter-of-factly. “There's always been specks and little sheets of mica in the quicksand slime, and it gathers in pockets. Chalky plowed through a pocket of it when he roused up, and now it sparkles and dazzles on him in the morning light.”

“He only creased my head with the carbine shot,” Chalky said in a choked and muddy voice as he cleared the sand and mud from around his eyes, “but it knocked me out, and I'd have drowned and died in the slough if he hadn't been taunting me in my head. ‘Die, monster, die!’ was what he was chanting in his mind and in mine, and after a while I woke up. ‘I will not die,’ I said, and I stirred myself. We do not drown in such half-hours as I was down there. Malcom was unstable. He was weird, like a butterfly with fangs. But he could communicate outside the lines. Yes, I killed him or made him kill himself. I felt it in my head when he killed the children and I came to kill him then. He died of fright when I rose out of the slough again, but his taunting had roused me and saved my life.”

“Who?” someone asked.

“Malcom,” Chalky said. “He's dead. I felt him go in my head. That mouth-to-mouth business is useless on him.”

“Ape-boy, you are the Monster of the Chosky Bottoms and the killer of the children,” said a deputy sheriff named Al Moss. “You will die torn to pieces for that.”

“No, I don't think so,” said Chalky, who was still bleeding from quite a few streams and rivulets. “Malcom was the Monster of the Chosky Bottoms and the killer of the children. He was a strange animal. And to tear anyone to pieces, deputy, with tractors or otherwise, strikes me as in very bad taste.”

Almost all of them there felt that the situation had changed completely. Somehow there had been a reversal of roles. They found themselves empty of their recent deep hatred for Chalky.

“This person has experienced both death and resurrection in a very short time,” said a webby-brained man named Reverend Joseph Handsome who had a little crossroads church. “Do not touch him. He has in him the fire of God or the fire of the Devil. Either one will burn us if we touch him. The judgment of him is taken away from us and reserved in another place. He is resurrected.”

Why, Chalky was two parts off the hook already!

“His nest is in the alder-willows two hundred yards back from here,” Crescent said.

“Whose nest?”

“Malcom's nest,” she said. “He's been coming down to the Bottoms often. He could never spy Aunt Ronda's cabin, but I spied his nest from the time he began to bring things into it. Some of the things, I see only now what they were for.”

“Malcom had been frustrated ever since Chalky came to school,” Principal Franklyn said. “And he had a slanted view of himself since that clinical anthropologist found so many anomalies in him: inhumanly fast heartbeat, more like a shrew's than a man's (he was born to die of hypertension and shock, but he could think mighty sharp while he lived); pattern tests showing ‘total amorality,’ but not apparently freedom from worry about that amorality; unorthodox chromosome count that might mean nothing at all or might mean criminal insanity. It meant criminal insanity in his case. ‘I am a monster, I am a monster,’ he said over and over at the Halloween Ball and Bonfire. He really did want to change places with Chalky, to trade the monster inside for the monster outside. Then he wanted Chalky to be found guilty of all the evil things that were breaking out of him. Why do I see it all too late?”

“How did he get the two little Cottonhead children to come down here with him?” Chalky asked. “I kept saying in my head, ‘Don't go, don't go!’ but they went.”

“Oh, they were cousins of his,” Crescent said. “He often took them for walks. Time of day meant nothing to them, and small children are often awake and about earlier than anyone else in a household. Chalky, how old are you?”

“Nine, I think, but I'm into manhood. We live faster than you do, and not so long.”

“How long?”

“Thirty is very old for us.”

“Yes, I thought you were impossibly young. And in a very few years you would be an impossibly young old man, wouldn't you, Chalky?”

“You are so much bigger now, Chalky,” Coach Goodbeaver said.

“Oh, I've grown about eight inches since I left school at the first of the year. But I should have my full growth before this year is over.”

They came to the “nest” of Malcom Schermerhorn. Oh, there was the expensive full-ape suit with heavy black fur and the zipper up the back that Malcom had bought from the novelty house. There was the rubberoid Chalky face that he had made with the aid of the art student Maudie Stone. There was the mallet with which he killed friendly dogs and kid goats and children. There was the heavy-duty fence-stretcher with its ropes and chains and wire grips and double- and triple-wheel pulley blocks.

“Could it have?” Principal Franklyn asked.

“Oh, sure,” Coach Goodbeaver said. “You can get several thousand pounds of pull with one of those. It will pull a quarter-mile length of barbed wire clear of the ground. It would easily pull a dog apart, or a kid goat, or the children. That is what chewed up the two posts it was anchored to in the corral of the barnyard where the kid goat was killed. There are probably a couple of sets of trees around here that are chewed up a little bit too. I should have known from those two posts what happened.”

“But that would take a little time to operate,” Crescent said, “even if the victims were already dead. But it was reported that the hound gave a death howl that was cut off in the middle, and the men ran there almost immediately and found it dismembered.”

“I was one of the men who ran there, but Malcom was there before me,” Jonathan Stone said. “But, Crescent, you remember Malcom's ‘dying dog howl.’ He used to do it at rallies and lots of things. He would even do it in football games to rouse up the team when it seemed to be dying on him. I think he had already finished tearing the dead hound apart, and had stashed his fence-stretcher again before he gave that howl. And Malcom wrote all the early stories about it for the press, you know.”

There were cameras in the “nest” too. There was a little cylinder of methane gas that might have been used to bubble through swamp water to create long-hovering glows of swamp fire. The ape-suit soaked in such methane-water would probably glow in the dark and create a Saturday Night Specter. And it would give an illuminated sort of photo. There were other things there.

“I guess it is tied to Malcom,” deputy sheriff Al Moss said. “But, Chalky, to tell the truth I had my heart set on tearing you apart as the monster.”

“Why deny yourself?” Chalky asked. “The Monster Malcom still lies yonder. The two tractors stand ready. Hey, that would be fun!”

“Chalky!” Aunt Ronda Harvestman cried. “You are as amoral as was dead Malcom!”

But Chalky just grinned a big grin. The Slew-Foot Quick-Louts have their own humor.

“What will you do now, Crescent?” Principal Franklyn asked her.

“Go home again. Maybe get a summer job. I've caught up on my thinking.”

“What will you do now, Chalky?” Coach Goodbeaver asked him.

“Start out south. I can jog a hundred miles a day, you know. And NFL practice starts within five weeks. I'll talk to the Dallas Cowboys first. If they don't see the picture, I'll try the New Orleans Saints. If they can't see me either, though that's hard to believe, I'll try the Miami Dolphins. Surely somebody will have a place for a boy of my ability.”

“Surely somebody will,” Charley Goodbeaver said.

Snake in His Bosom

Strong-housed from the gruesome

From wolves and from boars:

But the Snake in his Bosom

Eats Hinges and Doors

 — Sean Liffey, The Death of MacDearmod

“I have never seen you so jittery and jumpy, Emil,” Sarpa Fuerst said with that slurred sharpness in her voice. “Are you frightened of something?”

“Frightened, no. Jittery, yes. I'm jumping with delight, Sarpa. Tonight I am playing a game with an expert. I call it ‘The Hunter-and-the-Hunted Game’. And sometimes I call it the ‘Break-in or Lock-Out Game’! I believe that he is the number-two man in the world at this particular game. And I am number-one. We play on my own board, largely by my own rules, and we play for extraordinary stakes.”

Emil Fuerst was like a mastiff which is described as a ‘giant smooth-coated dog of a very old breed’. He was giant and powerful in body and head and jaw; he was smooth; and he was of the oldest aristocracy around.

“Really? What are the stakes, Emil?” Sarpa asked him.

“My life against his,” Emil Fuerst said, and he rubbed his hands together in a sort of electric delight. “And the stakes will be paid. Once he penetrates the outer ring, he will not be able to withdraw. Nor will I be able to withdraw from the game even if I should want to.”

“You interest me, Emil. You don't do that as often as you used to, you know. There are sparks when you rub your hands together like that.”

“Yes. With high-intensity persons such as myself that sometimes happens.”

Emil was in fencing togs of his own design, purple and red, skin-tight, shimmering with small, light speckles or scales or point-turning armor. But everybody looks a little jittery in fencing togs, always.

“When does the game start, Emil?” Sarpa asked.

“Oh, I believe it started about thirty seconds ago. I feel him. He's coming. I'm delighted.”

“Your hands are shaking with something other than delight, Emil. Is it not fear?”

“No, no, it's delight, or whatever is even richer than delight. A touch of fear, yes, but only a touch. It would be bland with no fear at all.”

“Who is it?” Sarpa asked. “Who plays ‘break-in’ to your ‘lock-out’?”

“Gatto,” Emil answered. “The Cat-Burglar or Cat-Ghost.”

“Oh. Will you be able to keep him out?”

“I think so. But just a little of the delight is lost if I do. What if he wins every trick except the last one? What if he does get in? That's more interesting than that he should die pinned down on the grounds somewhere. Oh, I half pray that he will get in, somehow, weirdly, in spite of me. And then either he or I can die in slippery blood in the grand finale. Could that be topped for joy, Sarpa?”

“Is that joy? I might lose my man to death in that deal.”

“No. You're assured of a man, Sarpa. As a codicil to the wager, the winner gets you also.”

“Oh, as a sort of afterthought?”

“No. As an intrinsic part of the game. Gatto wants you very much. So do I.”

“And what do I want, Emil?”

“You want the one who is the best man in the world at this strong game, at every strong game. He might, though, be the best man in the world at several other games, but not at this one. Oh, he's started. He's a spotch on the video screen now, and there are three shadows with him. He has come.”

“I don't see any spotch on the video screen, Emil?”

“Don't you really, Sarpa? How odd.”

Emil Fuerst was the owner of a firm that did business under the name of Safety Fuerst Devices and Installations Enterprises. Under the motto ‘They Can't Get In’ he sold the most sophisticated line of burglar-proofing in the world.

Emil, with a junior partner named Benedict Kingfisher, made and sold everything from free-bolt locks to total-fitness homes with all-coverage open-and-closed-circuit-burglar-alarms, video-screen monitors, amplified audio pick-up, radio-telephone blue-line systems, infra-red personnel sensors, and hot-beam controls. For a price, a client could have a house impervious to all assault. But the fortress-house of Emil Fuerst himself was beyond all price.

‘A goldfish couldn't get into it, and goldfish have tried’ was one of Emil's private mottos. The house was solid steel with a sheathing of cross-linked concrete-stucco that was tough rubber and steel welded together. Bolts of ten centimeter diameter traversed all doors completely, and the unlocking of them was an intricate decoding process. The house of Emil Fuerst and his wife Sarpa was the most safe strong-house in the world.

Sh-klaup… sh-klaup… sh-klaup

“That's the sound of heavy footsteps on old wooden passageways,” Emil said with his glance darting all around in a sort of amused apprehension. “It's the classical ‘slurred step’. Both ghosts and zombies make this slurred sound, as do also persons who have had strokes. This is the foot-dragging sound of those who are dead in at least some detail. It is caused by the destruction of the tendon — ”

“I don't hear any slurred footsteps, Emil,” Sarpa said. “And what wooden passageways could they possibly be sounding in?”

“Oh, oh, he's pounding on doors now,” Emil cried. “Somewhere he's breaking doors in. It's a piece of nerve-war he's launched against me. He has found out my childhood terror-profile. Well, such profiles are easily obtained now, thanks to the freedom-of-disclosure act. And I admit that the noise, the battering and splintering of wooden doors, does disturb me. I was just four years old when they splintered our doors and dragged my father out. Of course our doors here are steel-core with cross-link rubber-stone facing. But it was that old sound of splintering wooden doors that first impelled me to go into the security and break-proof business. Ah, that battering, splintering noise is coming over our own closed-circuit monitor! He's scoring points on me.”

“But, Emil, I don't hear any such noises,” Sarpa Fuerst said.

“Don't you really, dear? But Gatto will not bug me out with my own early fears. He's only a master-burglar, or a cat, or a ghost, or a fake. He's nothing to be frightened of. I have a short sword-epee only half a meter long. Oh, that's long enough to kill an elephant. Or a cat, or a ghost, or a master-burglar.”

Well, just who was this Gatto, this master-burglar who bet his own life against the life of Emil Fuerst? One thing he was not, according to his reputation. He was not a man who made foolish bets. He was smart.

“So am I!” Emil said out loud with a sudden outburst.

Gatto had solved, or claimed to have solved, all the most intricate locks and alarms of The Safety Fuerst Devices and Installations Enterprises. He published many of these solutions in Today's Burglar, a fringy weekly journal for the gentry. And he ran come-on ads offering, for a price, the solution to the rest of them. It was the publication and offering for sale that hurt. And so a sort of duel had been joined between Gatto ‘The Cat Burglar’ and Emil Fuerst the safety-device man.

“The ‘shadows’ of Gatto as he prowls through our grounds are real cats, live ones, big ones,” Emil was saying. “I believe that they are ocelots. They are part of the trademark that he has given himself in launching his image as ‘The Cat Burglar’. But how is he prowling our grounds without being electrocuted? And how do the cats do it? Oh, oh, one of them didn't escape it! Gatto is using live cats as extensions of his feeler-whiskers, and one of them is a fried cat now.”

“Where are you getting all that, Emil?” Sarpa asked him. “There's no such information on the screens. Oh, you're quite nervous, shaking nervous.”

“I get the data from the infra-red sensors, of course. Oh, to be shaking nervous is to be finely sensing. I am sensing as finely as is Gatto with his cat-extensions.”

“But I don't see anything like that on the sensor screens.”

“You don't, Sarpa? You don't really? Then there is something wrong with you. Or with me. I thought that you could interpret sensor-screens competently.”

Sarpa Fuerst was herself somewhat cat-like. She had a lazy swiftness of action and a slurred sharpness of voice. She was said to be magnificent in her physical attributes. She was such a woman as both the first-man and second-man at a complex of world-games would want very much.

“The amplified audio pick-ups are full of static,” Emil said somberly.

“You know that's impossible, Emil,” Sarpa told him. “Yours are the only completely static-free audio pick-ups in the world. You made them so.”

“That's true. So then somebody is making pseudo-static noises for our audio to pick up. And our integrating detector has gone onto ‘third signal’. This means that Gatto has just done something that puzzles the detector and makes it ask for human advice. But what has he done? It looks to me as if he's still bogged down on our grounds, hugging some sort of island in the electrified ocean of trees and underbrush. Why isn't he dead, why isn't he dead? There are no such islands out there. There is nothing that can protect him from our ‘electrical corona wash’.”

“Emil, don't be so jumpy. The detector has not gone on ‘third signal’. Nothing at all is happening, except maybe to you internally.”

“Oh? I was sure for a moment that the detector had gone on ‘third signal’. I guess that it hadn't, but the whole detector is pretty fuzzy now. So are all the open-and-closed-circuit burglar alarms gone fuzzy. They aren't activated, but they've all developed a humming sound that is very close to the alarm signal.”

“No, Emil, they haven't. They're absolutely silent.”

“Oh, don't you hear the humming, Sarpa? And the ‘reassuring tone’ on the radio telephone has gone wrong. It's not nearly as reassuring as it was. And Gatto seems to have taken over the video scanner-screens. All the faces on it are his. Oh, those strange, round faces of his! There is Gatto as ‘Cat Burglar’. There is Gatto as four-legged ocelot. There is Gatto as ghost. And there is Gatto as relentless, giant, break-in person.”

“Emil, we have no such things as video scanner-screens. You are losing your grip, my dear. That isn't good when you are playing what you say are dangerous games. But nobody can get into our strong house. You know that. Whatever tricks this Gatto seems to pull (and I am not even sure that there is such a person as Gatto), whatever deceptions he seems to work, if he was on the outside when the game began he is still on the outside, and he must remain on the outside. Remember that. God himself could not come into this house unless he knew the fourteen-point security code of tonight.”

How did Emil Fuerst happen to be playing a dangerous, to-the-death game with the Master Burglar Gatto? How did they happen to lay their lives on the line as stakes in this game? Gatto had challenged Emil, by solving all the codes and devices of Emil, and by publishing some of them and offering the rest of them for sale. That was a challenge that had to be answered. They agreed (the medium of their conversation was not too clear even to Emil, but he had dabbled in strange media before, and he supposed that Gatto had) to make a death game out of it. But if Emil were really sure of himself and of his devices, then it would be a danger-free game for him. Let the death be Gatto's!

Emil had never seen this Gatto, nor perhaps had anybody else for certain. But the fact of being a mystery man didn't guarantee the winning of a duel. Emil was himself a mystery man in many ways.

There was no way that Emil, on his impregnable plane, could lose the bet.

But there was no way that Gatto, with his devious mind, could have made a foolish bet.

“It's as though that damned cat could read my mind,” Emil complained once.

“Nobody can really read minds,” junior partner Benedict Kingfisher had assured Emil. “There can be suggestions, there can be apprehensions, there can be fears if you let them be. An intruder can rattle the doors of the mind as he can rattle the doors of a building. And he can, somehow, introduce things into the mind. But he cannot carry things out of the mind, never. You know that you are secure, and I know it. And I will always be on the blue-line radio-telephone with ‘instant strike’ alarm, if ever it seems that he or anyone is coming close to the impossible invasion.”

Yes, Benedict Kingfisher was a trustworthy associate and junior partner (“He's nearly as smart as I am,” Emil said once of Benedict), but why had he picked this time to be sick in bed with influenza? Or had Gatto picked this time to codify his challenge when the partner was weakened? Even so, Benedict was always on the hot-line radio-telephone, awake or asleep (he could monitor even while sleeping), well or ill.

“Gatto cannot come all the way against me,” Emil was saying now. “Whatever devices of mine he clears, there will still be other devices that he cannot clear. Whatever doors he batters down, there will still be other doors that he cannot break. Even if he should break into this very room (I half desire that he would, even though I have a hidden horror of it), there is an even stronger room under the floor of this one, and he does not know about that.”

“Maybe he does know about it,” Sarpa said.

“Then we will go to that room together, and one of us will die there,” Emil said. “He may be my equal at this lock-out break-in game, even though I have all the built-in advantages of playing on my home court. But if we go into that lower room together, we will play there a game at which I have no equal. He dies there, if he comes that far.”

“Why are you so nervous then, Emil?” Sarpa asked him.

“Because it is part of the game, perhaps. Because the delight of the game is enhanced by my very nervousness. But I have him every way the game may turn. I have assurance after assurance on my side. And I cannot be isolated.

“What? No, oh no! Gatto is not pinned down on our electrified grounds. He is moving again, or something is moving. He moves too fast. It really seems as if there is more than one of him now. But likely he is throwing false images to confuse our data. One image of his is very near to our front door. Sarpa, he's nearly at the front door!”

“Emil, our strong house does not have a front door, properly speaking. What looks like a front door is not a door at all. You know that. You designed it. Entry is by another way. Don't be nervous.”

“Ah, I have the most modern defenses in the world. But it's as though Gatto isn't recognizing the modern at all. His is a primitive assault. And as to the more primitive defenses, do I have them?

“But I cannot be isolated. I am like a person hidden in the sea, but my opponent has to look for me on the surface. A diver (and I am a depth diver in this) does not work in isolation, is not left on his own. He always has a trusted associate in the boat on the surface to monitor his life-lines. Benedict Kingfisher, even though he is home with the flu these last two days, is still my trusted associate in my boat. The life-line between us is the radio-telephone blue-line system. One station is here with me. The other station is with Benedict wherever he is. And an extension of my station here is in the strong room below me. It is the station of the last recourse. Ah, that last fallback point is the strongest of all! Whether or not I am the best player in the world at the keep-out break-in game, I am the best player in the world at the end-game of the short points, the duel with the sword-epees. I am the best fencer in the world.”

“I am not sure that you are, Emil.”

“With my own short epee, in my own iron room down below, and by my own rules which that room enforces, I am the best in the world. There is nothing in that lower room except the iron walls, the tricky light that wouldn't be understood by an opponent, and the two short epee-weapons hanging on the wall. Have I not been fencing ten hours a week in that room with our young and very strong man Benedict Kingfisher? Was he not International Collegiate Champion with the Long Epee? And none but the two of us have ever seen or held these short epees. Am I not the clear master of Benedict with this weapon?”

“You can't be sure that you are, Emil. Besides, you've missed two days of practice with them now.”

“And Gatto, whoever he is, has missed five years of practice with them, years when I have driven myself to very hard practice. He has never held a short epee in his hand. He has never heard of the weapon. I almost wish there were some way he could break in, so we could have that death battle in that room beneath this trapped floor.”

Sh-klaup… sh-klaup… sh-klaup…

“Sarpa, Gatto is all the way to the house! He's reaching for the doorknob. Something is pinching my life-line.”

“Stop shaking, Emil. There isn't any front doorknob,” Sarpa spoke in exasperation and she flicked her tongue. Her tongue was very long, very slim, beautifully snake-like. No, she was right. Of course there wasn't any front doorknob. And yet a hand, that of a very high intensity person, was grasping the knob.

“He's turning the knob, Sarpa.”

“Oh, I suppose so, if you want to think so. You're frightened, Emil.”

“No. To be frightened is to lose. I will not lose.”

If you have ever heard a heavy knob turned by a strong hand, you heard it now. If you have ever heard a massive door flung open, with ripping and splintering of the wood as bars are torn from their sockets, you heard it now.

“He's broken in. He's in the downstairs vestibule, Sarpa.”

“There isn't any downstairs vestibule, Emil. And stop shaking. Oh, I'm shaking too. Whatever it is, it's in the house now.”

Sh-klaup… sh-klaup… sh-klaup…

“You think that I'm imagining those footsteps, Sarpa?” Emil asked with a touch of quaver in his voice.

“No. I think that I'm imagining them,” she said with a nervous flick of her slender red tongue. “But they have quite a solid sound now.”

“That huge cat-face of Gatto is on all the screens now, Sarpa! Don't tell me that you don't see it.”

“I see it. Holy Sainte Hildegarde, how I see it!”

There was a slight change in the sound of the stalking footsteps then.

Sh-klaup-kuk… sh-klaup-kuk… sh-klaup-kuk…

The feet were sluffing into something, wooden stair risers.

“He's coming up the wooden stairs,” Emil Fuerst yowled. “One hundred impossible electronic barriers he has to have passed, and he's coming up the wooden stairs to this level. Yes, I know there aren't any wooden stairs.”

Sh-klaup-kuk… sh-klaup-kuk… sh-klaup… sh-klaup…

The footsteps were up the stairs now, past all the risers, and they were moving down the hallway to the fortress door. Sarpa Fuerst began to scream. The slurred klump of the feet came nearer and nearer.

“Benedict, Benedict,” Emil cried into his radio-telephone blue-line station. “Whether as a ghost or as a cat or as a man, he's in the house and coming down the hallway to this room. Benedict, I want to see your face!”

Sh-klaup… sh-klaup…

The round face of Benedict Kingfisher came on the blue-line viewer. “Relax, Emil,” that round face said. “The electronic net hasn't been penetrated at any point, not by cat-flesh, not by man-flesh, not by ghost-flesh either. The 26,000 angstrom range where ghosts have their movement and life does not show any penetration at all, nor does any other range. Nothing has passed through anywhere. I'm sick in bed, Emil, but the verification of all our instrumentation has its terminals in my blue-line station as much as in yours.”

Sh-klaup… sh-klaup… Those feet, those feet!

“Benedict, can you see into this room?” Emil called into the blue-line.

“Of course I can,” Benedict answered, slightly exasperated.

“Then do you see that the doorknob is turning?”

“Oh, that screaming of Sarpa's!” Benedict Kingfisher protested. “Tell her to shut up, Emil. Emil, there isn't any doorknob. No such archaic things were used in your house. Believe me, Emil, nobody and nothing has entered your house tonight.”

The doorknob did turn then. There was the popping of minor pieces of metal as when a lock is stripped and broken by power torque. Then there was a tearing and splintering of wood. Consternation, consternation — that great oaken door (insanity, insanity, there shouldn't be any oaken door in this room) was thrown open with a resounding bang and roar.

And the Cat Burglar, the Ghost Cat, the Master Breaker-Man, the Gatto Himself stood there, large and lowering, bristling, boiling with threat and with building murder.

The screaming of Sarpa reached new heights, and then it began to separate into several elements.

“Benedict, Benedict, send blue-line help instantly!” Emil wavered the words into the radio-phone. “Benedict, don't you see him!”

“Oh sure,” the round face of Benedict Kingfisher said on the viewer. “I see him, and I also see through him. That's the test, Emil. Can't you see through him?”

“Y-y-yes.”

“Then he isn't there, Emil. Oh, stop shaking! If you can see through him, then he isn't there.”

There was something unusual about the face of Benedict Kingfisher on the blue-line viewer. And there was something unusual about the see-through face of the huge cat, man, ghost, burglar, Gatto. Take the flesh mask off Gatto, and his was the same face as — 

“H-h-he isn't here? Wh-wh-where is he then?” Emil jittered.

“Oh, I'm down here, Emil, in the room just below you,” the round face of Benedict Kingfisher said from the viewer. “Sarpa, stop that damned screaming. It's served its purpose well enough, but stop it now. Send Emil down here.”

The screaming of Sarpa Fuerst had splintered into laughter, quicksilver laughter, flickering-red laughter, serpentine laughter…

“This is the way you wanted it, Emil,” she chortled through the waterfall of her own glee. “No one and nothing has come into the house tonight, but someone was already here. Down you go, dear. I really do want the best-man-at-this-gaming for my man. I want to be sure I have the best.”

She tripped the floor trap. And the fear-rattled Emil Fuerst, along with the see-through fat image Gatto, fell through the trapped floor into the iron room below. And the sharp-laughing Sarpa fell after them.

“Epilogs should be quick and neat,” said Benedict Kingfisher as he held one short sword-epee in his right hand and threw the other one to Emil Fuerst with his left.

Why hadn't Emil realized that Benedict and the cat-ghost looked so much alike? And now they coalesced. Benedict put on the Gatto transparency as though he were putting on a light garment.

“We need have no tedious disposing of loose ends,” Benedict said with a purring voice. He was of a very old breed himself, at least as old as the mastiff totem of Emil. He was holding his short epee with more assurance than ever before, with total assurance. “The implications of Gatto and myself being the same person will explain all the loose ends. Sure the cat burglar could solve all the locks and codes and systems. He had been in on the designing of all of them. Sure the cat burglar could cause irregularities in the data-receptors tonight. He had been tampering with the receptors for two days while you thought him home sick in bed. Sure the cat burglar could effect the footfalls and visual appearances. He knew all there was to know about the audio and video apparatus in this house.”

Their short sword-epees skirred and rang together. And Emil was failing dismally at showing any superiority at this game now. He was soon beginning to bleed, suddenly and alarmingly. What, had this strong young man Benedict been carrying Emil through all their fencing sessions and making him feel superior for a purpose?

“You're not bad, Emil,” Benedict said, “but I'm the only one you've ever fenced with at the short epee. Me, I've fenced with half-a-dozen real experts. I believe the short epee will catch on. It's so quick!”

Emil Fuerst screamed as Benedict gave a point to his remarks with the epee point.

“You were right to believe in all your electronic guards,” Benedict was laughing. “Of course no one could come in through them, not even myself, not when you had set the stringent alert. But I was already inside, had been inside for two days. Oh, I believe you can figure it all out, Emil, even in the short time you have left.”

Sh-klaup… sh-klaup… Those footsteps still coming nearer.

The way Benedict handled that short epee-sword was fearful and amazing.

“It was mostly Sarpa's idea,” Benedict said as he wounded Emil once more and drove him into an ever narrower corner.

“Ah Sarpa, snake of my bosom, sweet snake of my bosom!” Emil muttered.

“She wanted to be certain that she had the best, Emil,” Benedict jibed. “You were the best once, Emil, at some of the games.”

“So was she,” Emil mumbled, “at some of the games, once.” The strength was slipping away from Emil now, along with his own slippery blood and confidence.

Sh-klaup… sh-klaup… sh-klaup…

“What footfalls are those?” Emil asked, as he was scored upon again by an uncommonly bloody penetration. “You have already assumed your own ghost, Benedict. Whose footfalls are those?”

“Believe me, Emil, they are none of mine, none of my doing. You are fey, man! Haven't you known that about yourself? They are the footsteps of death that worry you so, and you are the only one who can hear them.”

“You're frightened, Emil,” Sarpa said, and flicked her red tongue out.

“Yes, now I'm frightened,” Emil whispered, and he looked at his own fountainous blood with great distaste.

Rainy Day in Halicarnassus

It is said that the Christ accounts cannot be true because there are earlier versions of similar stories. It is said in particular that the death-of-Christ account cannot be true because there are earlier death-of-the-sage legends. But I believe that the Christ account is the most convincing of all of them. And likely the death-of-Socrates account is the least convincing of such tales.

Using arguments like those that are used against the Christ account, Socrates could not have died his fabled death because that particular death account was already well worn and centuries old. He could not have died by taking poisonous hemlock because many sages in India did die by taking poisonous hemlock in earlier centuries. The plant known mistakenly as hemlock (κώνειον) in Greece in the time of Socrates was not poisonous in any form. But the plant known correctly as hemlock in India was poisonous.

The only account of the hemlock death of Socrates was written by Plato. Plato was almost certainly kidding Socrates (who was present when Plato first read that tour de force to their circle) by comparing him to one of the old deified sages who had died in this traditional death-of-the-sage in old India. The date of this death account or death is always given as 399 bc.

Xenophon and other biographers of Socrates do not mention any such hemlock death, or any death at all for him. But they do mention Socrates as living in Halicarnassus in Asia Minor at least ten years after this purported death. And Socrates was present, sitting on a sort of dunce's stool that was provided for him, on “opening afternoon” when Aristophanes first satirized him in his comedy The Clouds. There was some banter between the playwright and Socrates the butt of the play. It seems pretty clear that this was Socrates himself and not an actor playing him. This was in 395 bc, four years after the ascribed death of Socrates.

It may be that the legend of the false or hemlock death of Socrates has persisted because we have no account of his true death. Instead of that we have — more legend.

More than one hundred years after his false or hemlock death, Socrates is mentioned as being one of a circle of sages in Halicarnassus who had whipped the dying business: but this has the smell of legend again. And Villehardouin records it that Crusaders spoke with Socrates in the year 1191 in Halicarnassus: but this has the smell of deep legend. And three different Englishmen in the nineteenth century mention meeting Socrates in Bodrum (the modern name of Halicarnassus). To me, this does not have the smell of legend. For personal reasons (one of the three Englishmen was my own grandfather), I believe it is true.

 — Arpad Arutinov, The Back Door of History

Art Slick and Jim Boomer had been heading for the island of Cos when they were driven onto the Turkish mainland by a sudden squall. They put in, an hour before sunrise, at the little harbor of Bodrum, whose ancient name had been Halicarnassus. They had come in the twenty-two-foot motor launch the T-Town Tornado, which was too dumb to know that it shouldn't have come halfway around the world on the open seas. And Art Slick and Jim Boomer were likewise too dumb to know that their craft was too small for such voyaging.

When they had tied up the little ship, the wind fell by one-half and was not as dangerous as it had been. But the rain came down in torrents and it would not stop that day, and maybe not the next day.

Remember that girl in Istanbul three days ago, remember how she sang “Rainy Day in Halicarnassus, Gloom, Gloom, Gloom!” And later when she came to the table with Art Slick and Jim Boomer she said, “Do you know that there are three hundred and nineteen different words for ‘gloom’ in Turkish? I like to tell these little informations to gentlemen who come into our place.”

“I'd sure never learn three hundred and nineteen different Turkish words for ‘gloom’,” Art Slick had said.

“You would if you ever had to spend a rainy day in Halicarnassus,” the girl told him. “You'd learn them all and you'd use them all. That isn't half enough words for the kind of gloom it is there when it rains.”

Well, it looked as though they would spend just such a rainy day in that town now. It was torrential, it was blustery, and it was gloomy, except for one stocky Greek man who had an aura of sunshine about him.

“The Dictionary of Idiosyncrasies gives it that the equivalent of a ‘rainy day in Halicarnassus’ is a ‘Sunday in Philadelphia,’ ” this broken-nosed and grinny Greek seaman said. Well, maybe he was a broken-nosed Greek boxer and not a seaman. “There is a Greek café, a Turkish café, and a Syrian café in this town if you want breakfast. Then there is a Greek cinema, a Turkish cinema, and a Syrian cinema. And then there is a Greek nightclub, a Turkish nightclub, and a Syrian nightclub. These presently open at six in the morning and close at six in the evening because of the curfew which is imposed because of the political turmoil. And then there is the Ancient Museum of Living Effigies that you might want to see. There isn't anything else in town, and the rain isn't going to stop today.”

“Thanks, Rocky, we may just try them all,” Jim Boomer told old broken-nose.

“Why do you call him Rocky when his name is Socky?” a lady asked Jim.

Art and Jim and Rocky-Socky had a breakfast at the Greek café. Then they had one at the Turkish café, and then one at the Syrian. Well, the broken-nosed Greek was a good belly-man, and Art and Jim could stay with anything for at least once around the circuit. And what else is there to do on a rainy day in a place like that?

“How come you talk such good English, Rocky?” Art Slick asked. “Have you been in the States?” You couldn't even guess how old or how young this Rocky was.

“Oh, I've been in the area where they are now, but the States hadn't arrived there yet. Back when I was young and wise I'd learn a new language every five years,” said this strong, stocky fellow who was smoking a Greek pipe. “Well, I was pretty sharp-witted then and I learned things easily. And later I slowed down and learned a new tongue about every twenty years. It took me about that long to learn Old Norse when I spent a couple of saltwater decades with those Viking fellows. And more recently it takes me about fifty years to learn one really well. I've been learning English for just about fifty years now and I'm getting pretty good at it. And now I may spend about fifty years on Indonesian.”

“Oh, you've been around a long while, then?”

“Quite a while, yes, but not nearly as long as some.”

“Going back that far, you're probably a pagan, Rocky,” Jim Boomer said.

“Nah, I switched a long time ago. Now I usher every Sunday at St. Pete's here in town.”

It was still raining when they came out of the Syrian café. They went under leaking wooden awnings to the Greek cinema, where they saw an American western, Rustlers of Rim-Rock Canyon.

“Are you a movie fan, Rocky?” Jim Boomer asked.

“Yeah, from a way back. I loved them when we had them the first time. A lot of people don't remember that, but there was a first time. We even had westerns that first time around, though they were easterns from my viewpoint, in desert settings, and both the Gobi and the Arabian deserts were east of me. About the only difference between those and the present westerns was the pounding of dromedary hoofs in the old ones and the pounding of horse hoofs in the new ones. And we had SF movies, sort of: fantastic stuff they were. A critic wrote recently that the old Arabian Nights stories sounded like primitive movie scripts. He was guessing, but he was right. They did come from old movie scripts.

“Ah, we made some good movies at those old studios in Ctesiphon: at the Biograph Studio, at Palmy Days Productions, at the Lion and the Unicorn Associated Artists. But after Baghdad became the big city in the area, most of the studios moved there. Then the decline in moviemaking set in. I don't know why.”

They went to the Turkish cinema and saw the American western Guns of the Palo Duro. Then they went to the Syrian cinema and saw the American western Robbers' Roost on the Rio Rojo.

“Well, that about does the town, does it, Rocky?” Art Slick asked when they came out of the Syrian cinema.

“We can always see them over again. That's what I do on rainy days here, see them over again four or five times.”

“Why do you call him Rocky when his name is Socky?” a young boy asked Art.

“You told us about the three nightclubs that are only open in the daytime on account of the curfew,” Jim Boomer said, “and what was the other thing, Rocky?”

“The Ancient Museum of Living Effigies. I'm really the best one in it, but overall we haven't a very good show. I wouldn't recommend it ordinarily, but on a rainy day here, yeah, guys, it's the last diversion.”

They went to the Greek nightclub, where there was an American Jewish comedian, an Italian songstress, a black trumpet player, and a troupe of Arabian tumblers.

“Is this about par for it, Rocky?” Art Slick asked.

“Yes. All nightclub acts are based on old radio acts. That's why they keep nightclubs so dark that you can't see, to preserve the illusion. When I was a young man in Greece and we had radio for the first time, we had acts just about like this. The Petrides Olive Hour was a good show. So was the Arcadian Honey Hour and the Pappageotes Pottery Hour. The best was the Hippodromion Wine Hour. I used to wrangle passes to go to the studios to see the shows live. Most of the acts were better live. Except for the Arabian tumblers; they were always better on the radio. I guess the radio shows faded away after the Romans came. The Romans thought they were silly, so they dropped out of fashion.”

“I guess there's nothing new under the sun, huh, Rocky?” Jim Boomer said.

“Hey, that's new! Let me write that down. ‘Nothing new under the sun.’ That's good. Into the old notebook it goes.”

“Did you always carry a notebook, Rocky?”

“Always. It's part of my self-education program. But it was more cumbersome in the old days, carrying those slabs of clay around in your pockets and wetting them whenever you wanted to make a note with your stylus. Who could afford paper or parchment then? Poor scholars like myself couldn't even afford wax to write on.”

“Is this ‘Whipping Death’ jag that you fellows are on much of a trick, Rocky? And what is the secret of it?” Jim Boomer asked.

“Oh, we don't have death whipped, just delayed for a while. And if I told you the secret of it, it wouldn't be a secret any longer.”

“Whooo! What was that stroke like invisible lightning coming right through the walls?” Art Slick asked. “That was one eerie jolt.”

“It was just a time-inversion shock wave,” the genial Greek said. “We have them here every ten years or so lately. It means we're going to have visitors.”

“That sounds like a folk superstition, Rocky,” Art said.

“Sort of, boys, sort of. When we had time travel the first time, we knew how to muffle the shock waves.” They were drinking martinis.

“The martini is what saved the olive from extinction,” broken-nosed Rocky said. “A wonderful invention, wonderful.”

The Italian songstress was singing “Rainy Day in Halicarnassus, Gloom, Gloom, Gloom.” No, that had been in the Turkish nightclub. No, that was in all three of them. Each of them had an Italian songstress singing it.

“Well, that about does the town, Rocky,” Art Slick said when they came out of the Syrian nightclub. It wasn't noon yet. “So we're down to the Ancient Museum of Living Effigies, of which you're the star. It's that or the movies again.”

“Let's see the movies again,” genial rocky-face said. It was still raining. They saw the three movies again. They went to the three nightclubs again after that. And it was not yet two o'clock. Time goes slow on rainy days there.

“When does the show start at the museum, Rocky?”

“Whenever we have as many as three customers. Come along. There's you two, and maybe there will be another one.”

In fact there were seven other customers waiting, a local girl and six people from a time-probe.

“Weren't you time-trippers around here ten years ago? And weren't you around here ten years before that?” rocky-face asked them.

“Kyrie Socrates, we've spent the whole afternoon just trying to get a serious interview with you, and it costs more than you'd think,” one of the time-trippers complained. “Yes, we've been trying you every ten years here, and it takes us ten minutes to make each location. And we've seen the silly show twelve times. We're about out of patience with you. We're convinced that you are the real Socrates. We can't reach back far enough to catch you in what I might call your credible life; and you drop out of the scene again not many decades after this time, so we have a narrow place to try to catch you. Your rediscovery can well be the historical event of the ages, but you won't let it be. Why won't you give us a real interview, now, today?”

“Ah, there's so many other things to do that are more fun.”

“What are they? On a rainy day like this, what are they?”

“Oh, on a rainy day I guess there really aren't any,” old pudge admitted.

The local girl there was shining up to Art Slick and Jim Boomer.

“I know you were trying to get to the island of Cos when you had to put in here to Bodrum,” she said. “I want to go to Cos tonight. My sister who lives there is expecting me to come and help her with the geese. Tomorrow is the first day of Goose Plucking Week, you know. And tonight is Goose-Down-Eve Festival. We really throw a hanger over there on Goose-Down-Eve. We'll take Socky too if he's decent to these visitors for once.”

The show at the Ancient Museum of Living Effigies wasn't a very good one by ordinary standards, but on a rainy day in Halicarnassus it was at least tolerable. And it did have a good cast: Pythagoras, Pico del la Mirandola, Lama Hama Gama, Avicenna, Prester John, Tycho Brahe, Leibniz. But Socrates was the best of them.

“I was the youngest member once, but gradually we drop out,” Socrates said.

The Living Effigies, the Old Sages, gave little lectures on mathematics and philosophy and history and civic duty. They played ancient and medieval instruments; and Socrates also played several tunes on a modern harmonica. They answered catch questions thrown at them to test whether they really were who they said they were. And all of them seemed to be genuine.

“We really throw hangers over there on Goose-Down-Eve,” the local girl was telling Art and Jim. “And the wind has swung around now. It's still a gale, but it's a strong gale off the land now and it'll put you into Cos in two hours if that skiff of yours has any kick at all. And the party will be just starting good when we get there. Everybody else would be too chicken to put out in this weather, but I know that you guys aren't chicken.”

The sages slipped away as they finished their specialties, and one of the last of them, Socrates, was still spieling:

“Back when we had aviation the first time, I was barnstorming one autumn in a little tri-winger plane when — ”

“Oh, stop giggling when you tell them, Socky,” the local girl said. “Your stories aren't that funny.”

“Kyrie Socrates,” one of the time-trippers said. “You are telling lies again. You never had aviation the first time, never had it anciently.”

“Yes we did,” Pythagoras supported Socrates. “Some of his things are lies, but we did have aviation. Alexander used aircraft with strafers. He could really mow them down with those planes. That was the way he scattered those big, bunched-up Asiatic armies. You'd never scatter them with a phalanx. Think about it a minute and you'll see how silly that is.”

“Well, you're mostly telling tall stories, Socrates,” the time-tripper insisted. “And yet you are your genuine self and you could give us deep and sensational information. You work with us and we'll create the greatest archeological-historical coup ever. We have about a hundred key questions here, and if you will just use them for takeoff points — ”

“Go ahead, Rocky,” Art Slick said. “You'll have time. We won't be setting out for Cos for an hour yet.”

“And you haven't anything better to do,” another of the time-probers put in. “After all, this is a rainy day in Halicarnassus.”

“It doesn't hurt to be nice to people,” the local girl said, “not when they have made such long time trips to see you. Be nice to them, or we won't take you to Cos for the Goose-Down-Eve Festival. And the Cos goose down is the softest down in the world and justly famed.”

“It's not softer than thumbs-down, surely,” Socrates said. “Thumbs-down is softer than goose-down every time. All right, folks, I open my heart and my head to you. But I wouldn't be opening them to you if it weren't such a dismal rainy day; and I wouldn't be opening them to you if only they had changed the bill at even one of the movie houses.”

Then the time-trippers fell upon him joyously for the epoch-making interview.

“We'll gas up at Turkoman's Marina, Rocky,” Art Slick called. “We'll see you there, but take your time and give them what they want. You owe it to the world, Rocky.”

“Why do you call him Rocky when his name is Socky,” the local girl asked as she went out with Art and Jim.

And the interview was a great success. The old master used the hundred or so questions as takeoff points for truly masterful illuminations. It really was the archeological-historical coup of the century.

Of which century?

Of the twenty-ninth century. That's the one the time-trippers came from. It rejuvenated the twenty-ninth century that had gone stale. It produced one of the most startling reanimations ever. It brought about the rarest of things, the Almost Perfect World.

Rocky disappeared from the Halicarnassus scene shortly after the interview. Oh, he's still around somewhere, but he had other interests and he keeps out of the public eye, so it's said. And he won't give interviews.

So we have nine centuries to wait before we can get a piece of that startling reanimation and a share of the Almost Perfect World.

Make Sure The Eyes Are Big Enough

It rings like happy thunderclap,

The nine-tenths world of clown.

It's ‘Things Returned’ with sap and hap.

It's circus come to town.

A discovery was made in the field of phenomenal psychology early this week. It consisted of opening the eyes and seeing the nine-tenths of the world that had previously been invisible. The discovery was simply there for persons of a certain type, and it had not been there before.

It had been there for certain kids for at least a day. Then it had been there for a tyrannical old lady named Mary Imperial McSlim, and she found it so amazing that she decided to keep it for herself. But the next noontime it was there for her grandson Rusty McSlim, the great phenomenal psychologist, and he was excited enough about it to want to share it with the entire world. And that evening it was experienced by a dozen of McSlim's great colleagues whom he had called together to tell about it. That was when the thing was effectively there.

But three others of the colleagues who were present didn't experience it at all. They even said that it was another sample of McSlim's droll humor.

The new experience or discovery was a wider range of seeing and sensing. It was the quick cognition of animations and people and off-people and pantograms and joyous beasts and monsters that had heretofore been invisible. It was seeing the other nine-tenths of the world in its racing brightness, and the realizing that the one-tenth of the world that had always been visible was comparatively a little bit sub-par. It was — well, it was the sensual pleroma, the fulfillment, the actualization, all this laced with the excited “Hey, where have you guys been!” motif.

Mary Crisis McSlim, a kid and the daughter of Rusty McSlim, had seen the enlarged scene earliest; but the first accountable or adult person to see it had been her great-grandmother Mary Imperial McSlim, the grandmother of Rusty McSlim the great phenomenal psychologist. And old Mary Imperial had seen that enlarged world by a peculiar arrangement.

Great-grandmother Mary Imperial was an old tyrant, and now fate had punished her for her tyrannies. She was confined to her bed for the rest of her life. She had always wanted to see everything, and now she couldn't. So the great Rusty McSlim fixed it so that his afflicted grandmother could see with the happy and hungry eyes of his lively daughter, Mary Crisis, who ran everywhere and saw everything.

All that Rusty had to do was drill a small hole through the lachrymal crest of his daughter, between the bridge of her nose and her left eye socket (Mary Crisis was left-eyed), and set a mini-probe into the Jacob's membrane at the back of her eye. And the probe was attached by tight magnetic couple to a little recording retro-camera made to hook over the left ear of Mary Crisis. Mary Crisis didn't like it hanging on her ear though, so she wore it stuck with chewing gum in the corner of her eyebrow. This, of course, gave much greater fidelity to the running pictures.

The camera was a small cube about two millimeters on a side. If it had used a lens of its own instead of the lens in the left eye of Mary Crisis, it would need to be at least four millimeters on a side, and Mary Crisis might have let it get covered up or she would have forgotten to turn it on. But she turned on her own eyes automatically.

Every afternoon when Mary Crisis came in from her lively day, she would click that day's picture-capsule (a cube about one millimeter on a side) out of the little camera and give it to her great-grandmother Mary Imperial. And old Mary Imperial would put it in her projector and watch it for several happy hours, seeing everything that the hungry eyes of Mary Crisis had seen that day, and seeing it all with the immediacy and buoyancy that Mary Crisis contributed to it. And the great-grandmother would go, in surrogate fashion, everywhere that Mary Crisis and her three best friends, Eustace Riggles, Bravura Jones, Henry Gusset, had gone that day.

Well, Mary Imperial couldn't see with the eyes of the three friends of Mary Crisis, but Mary C was clearly the wide-eyed and hungry-eyed one of the group. Eustace was all ears, Henry was all mouth, and Bravura was all motion; and she was almost always in the field of vision of Mary C anyhow. And what the eyes of Mary C did bring was a varied panorama of the pulsing world containing everything from giggling cows to newborn birds and city traffic.

Giggling cows? Yes, for the last couple of days there had been giggling cows.

This surrogate seeing had become a big and sustaining thing in the life of old Mary Imperial, and she prayed that nothing would ever go wrong with the arrangement. But it was a ten-fold bonus for her when everything suddenly went exuberantly right with the surrogate living and viewing.

On the evening of the record, she saw the already lively world as greatly magnified and wonderfully exploded and fantastically added to. She saw ‘our companions and friends’, the aura of other creatures with which we are usually invisibly surrounded. And a great quantum step in perception had been made.

How thin and tinny and how few in number had been the objects in our old field of view! How mediocre in color and how undistinguished in style it had all been! How un-flamboyant the world had been before this! She viewed for quite a few hours.

Then she buzzed for her great-granddaughter Mary Crisis just at midnight, and Mary C came almost instantly from her bed. People always came almost instantly when Mary Imperial buzzed for them.

“You saw so many additional things today, Mary C, such enhanced things, such a mass of wonderful things and people. How?” she asked.

“I don't know. All my gang saw the new people and things and whirlings today. We say it's the circus come to town, the Big Circus this time. We keep seeing and knowing more and more guys and their dogs, some of those dogs twenty-five feet long; and they're all so friendly and monstrous looking. We keep getting hit, ‘bop!’, by more and more colors and better ones. Have a stick of Sappy-Happy Chewing Gum, G-G Mother. Open up and live a little.”

“You know that civilized people don't chew gum, sappy-happy great-granddaughter of mine. There has been a premonition of this for several days. Do those giggling cows in Monaghan's meadow have anything to do with these new things?”

“Yes, I think so,” Mary Crisis said. “They started before this other business started, maybe two days before. They had already been giggling for quite a while before we began to see the Big Circus. I think that they were already seeing what we saw today.”

There was an incredible advance and expansion in the seeing adventure, that's what it was. There had never been anything like it for a long, long time. When medium-early man had suddenly acquired color-vision and so moved out of the old black-and-gray dinginess, that must have been something of the same explosive and emerging experience.

But the old tyrant Mary Imperial didn't get all of it. She got only the visual part, and she got that second-hand. She should have opened up and lived a little, as Mary Crisis told her. But she missed it by declining the symbol that was more than a symbol.

Rusty McSlim caught the full phenomenon about noon the next day, and he didn't know what triggered it. It wasn't something he had eaten; he hadn't eaten anything that day yet. It came onto him like a big door banging open and letting in endless masses of sunshine and color, all of them inhabited by stimulating creatures that Rusty felt he knew from somewhere.

Rusty was an acute observer of the phenomenon from the time it first came to him, and he had more than just a ‘seeing’ of the new throngs of creatures, human, quasi-human, way-off-human, and comically and rampantly animal.

Besides the seeing of these folk he also had the bountiful smells of them. Hey, the odd creatures do smell good when you catch them at full whiff! And he heard them, with other ears, with old pointed ears that he had forgotten about having. He did not hear by conventional sound that is often irritating, but by the most wonderful invention ever, sound without noise! And he understood the ‘talk’ of these nations of creatures, though perhaps it should be called ‘communication’ rather than literal ‘talk’.

And he also had a great new comprehension by that blending of all the senses (the ‘common sense’ in the old meaning) whose organ of perception is located just below the fontanel of the head.

Rusty McSlim observed and reveled, and bided his time. This was almost too much to take in at once. These newly-visible folks ran from typhoeans (extreme types, they) to very close cousins of humans. And the new-appeared animals had a much wider range, though there were no strict rules for determining which were mere animals and which were intellectual quasi-humans. Rusty spoke civilly when he was spoken to, but he did not yet take any initiatives.

But, that evening, Rusty convoked a group of his close associates; and twelve of his fifteen gathered colleagues experienced the whole fulfillment. All of them were phenomenal psychologists, and so they knew the importance of recording their impressions. Most of them spoke their observations into their recorders (which phenomenal psychologists even take to bed with them); and at the same time they set four panoramic cameras to gobbling everything up.

But the most startling observation that they made was that the observing was a two-way street. The ‘new-appearance persons’ were regarding the human psychologists as themselves being new appearances, and they were quite interested in them. Some of these ‘first-time-ever-seen’ quasi-humans were recording their own observations of the McSlim group.

There was one large near-human person who was really a jolly green giant, but done with quite a bit more style than the giant of the old advertisements.

“Out of mythology!” the green giant gasped and grinned. “I never expected anything this exciting. You are creatures right out of mythology!” And he had his own recorder switches on to catch his own jolly green comments. “Amazing,” he said, “You really are amazing!”

That was a recorder the big green person was using?

“Let me see that, let me see that!” cried Doctor Darrel Dogstar whose real field was electronic psychology. “We don't have anything as smooth and sophisticated as that, not at any price.”

“Oh, it's just a little knock-about model. It is good to see you folks, really good to see you! Every new acquaintance we make enlarges all of us,” the jolly green person was speaking to Darrel Dogstar who was examining the smooth and sophisticated recorder. “We always suspected that you were there. You had to be there to explain certain eccentricities in the animate continuum, but we could never see you or sense you before. We considered filling you with luciferic fluid to make you visible in outline, but that is a little bit like putting salt on the tail of a pterosaur: you have to catch it first. And now you are apparently lit up by some chemical accident, and we can see and sense you almost as easily as we can see ourselves and persons of the other participating groups. Well, we have caught a group of you here now, and we have filled you with luciferic fluid, unbeknownst to yourselves; so we will still be able to see you even if the effect of your chemical accident wears off. And it won't matter whether you continue to see us or not. We know what we look like and we don't need you to confirm it. And yet we welcome you as a participating species, if you are such.”

“To us, this is a total surprise,” Rusty McSlim spoke in honest humility. “We hadn't even an inkling of your existence.”

“Not so, not so!” half of McSlim's colleagues leaped to lie about the situation. “Of course we knew that you existed, most of you. Your existence was mandatory for the operation of some of our psychological equations.”

The sense of touch was the only one not in full scope here. The entities of some of the different orders couldn't touch each other, though to a limited extent (the limit was the strength of the electrical or coronal discharge experienced in touching alien tools) they could handle each others' artifacts.

“It may be a peculiar question,” hazarded Doctor Jorkus Halliburton whose forte was astral psychology, “but what year is this where you are? Is it with you as it is with us?” He asked this of one of the beautiful fish-faced people.

“Oh, we don't use years,” said that beautiful person, “and ‘here’ is where we are. Years are so temporal. You will notice that only the wavering and changeable species use them, only about half of the species who are members of the ‘great visibility’. You should know that yourselves still haven't become visible to all the species here present. Try harder.”

“We don't know what to call all of you. If we call you ‘people’ there may be some confusion,” said Doctor Lollie Lindwurm who was about as phenomenal a psychologist as you'll find. “We just aren't the same. We are impressed by you, but you make up a very odd cousinship for ourselves. The green giant says that we are creatures out of mythology, but I believe that some of you entities are angelic messengers ascending and descending on Jacob's Ladder.”

“Not many of us are angelic messengers,” said a lizard-faced person of one of the cousinly species. “Hardly one in a thousand. It's probably at least as frequent among you as among most of us. Generally we are in horizontal or ‘big circle’ relationship with each other, and there isn't much ascending or descending to it. Up with the lateral movement! That's what I always say. Oh, are you old enough to have known Jacob, female cousin?”

“There seem to be fewer outright animals and more quasi-people among you now than there were when I was out and about today,” Rusty McSlim said.

“We're indoors now,” answered a lordly type, probably a thunder-man, “and the larger beasts are left outdoors.”

“You said that we are apparently lit up by a chemical accident,” Daniel Dogstar essayed. “But why do you think that our breakthrough is an especially chemical one?”

“Oh, you're a chemical species,” a fine-looking, rubbery, frog-faced person said, “just as I myself belong to an Urstuff species, non-molecular and non-all-that-detail. You are not so much creatures right out of mythology as you are creatures right out of a chemistry book. You remind me of some of the cartoon characters in Elementary Basic Chemistry Number One. You yourself, entity Dogstar, are an almost perfect depictment of the protean spirit of Protein as drawn in our elementary texts. You are hinged and articulated just as a protein molecule is. We ourselves, I'm afraid, do not offer such graphic insights into any of the disciplines. I can see that it's going to be a real bash, exploring you people who have always been invisible to us. I love alien encounter.

“But you must understand that your being made manifest isn't really an unusual thing. It is only that some of us have not personally encountered an instance of it before. A new species is added to the community of the ‘great visibility’ every aeon or so, and now it is your turn to be added. And you will be added, though there may be a little bit of that ‘watch those bumps!’ experience for two or three days as you cross the threshold.”

2

What happy incremental eyes!

What newly opened door!

The ‘rest of world’ in weirdly-wise

Reunions us, and more.

More about that evening meeting cannot be given right here and now. Doctor Darrel Dogstar got his book First-Ever Meeting with the Simultaneous Aliens into print and on sale within eleven hours, and he has writs out to prevent anyone else describing the full conversations and congresses that went on that night. The writs will run out, of course, after the book has enjoyed its three full days on sale: but this is ‘now’ and not three days from now.

But almost all who had been present had good feelings about that meeting, especially the part about the human beings being taken for creatures right out of mythology. And the ‘happiness motif ’ was very strong in the encounter, strong beyond the ability of words to describe. The reunion with our kindred was just about the juiciest well of euphoria ever tapped.

But, next day, some of the colleagues gradually lost their power of seeing the invisible; and by noon that power was gone from them. Only two of them, besides McSlim, retained the rapport and the seeing. And yet that was the day when several million persons in the United States, substantial numbers in the Netherlands, and scatterings of folks in England, France, Germany, Turkey, Japan, and Australia began to see and to sense in the full way, to make contact with what they were already calling ‘the other nine-tenths of the world’, with the quasi-people and quasi-animals and quasi-spooks.

So the experience was valid in that it had been partaken of by several million people: and it looked as though it would soon be shared by hundreds and thousands of millions, by almost everybody. And yet the encounter itself could not be considered as fully verified until it was known how it happened, until it was known why it happened to some people only and not to all, and until it could be brought about at will.

So the hunt for an effector was on. If one computer with one carload of data couldn't find it, then perhaps a hundred computers with ten thousand carloads of data could find it.

Why had the new power come to only a few millions of people and not to the hundreds of millions and the billions? Were the people who received the power all of one type? And what were the characteristics of that type? What particular thing did the people of the ‘new seeing’ eat or smell or drink or stick in their ears? What thing, that the people lacking the power did not use?

The people who had managed the ‘Big See’, well, they had been rather kiddish people, and four-fifths of them were kids indeed. They were breezy and easy. They were un-intricate, even when they were rather intelligent. They were casual. They were at the same time rapid and relaxed.

Or (and this may be important) they were folks who had been in the company of such casual people when they first experienced the new powers: and they just may have shared some triggering, lifestyle item of the casual people.

No, one computer couldn't solve it, and one hundred couldn't. But two hundred and twelve computers were able to do it in a little less than two hours. They got it down to about two million possible items, and then everybody knew that the hunt was almost over with. And quickly the computers had it down to a single item, verified and certain.

The item, of course, was Sappig-Happig Chewing Gum, called Sappy-Happy by the children in the United States. And everybody said “Why didn't I guess that?” when the computers had worked out the answer. What else could it have been? Its name in Dutch meant ‘Juicy Keen’ or ‘Juicy Slurp’, and the gum was a product of the Royal Dutch Shell Oil Company, their newest flavor of chewing gum which brought their total flavors to the number of sixty-six. Chewing gum was now one of the thousands of things made out of petroleum in the attempt to reduce the glut of all oil products. And the largest gum factories, including those of Royal Dutch Shell, were in the United States where the chewing gum habit was the largest.

So it was announced to the world that the enabling factor for the ‘big see’ was this new and exotic flavor of chewing gum. Then everybody began to chew Sappig-Happig gum; and another hundred million persons in the world enjoyed the larger vision and the acquaintance of their near cousins who had been till now invisible. A billion persons in the world would have enjoyed the larger vision that day except that the world supply of Sappig-Happig ran out without even reaching most of the world.

Never mind that; it would be produced and allocated quickly, tomorrow enough for a billion people, the next day enough for nine billion, so that each person could have at least one package to tide him over until full production could be achieved. And there was even the belief that the chewing gum with its enabling ingredient, whatever it was, was only the nose of a great many-faceted chemical advent for the fulfillment of mankind.

The ‘Reunion of the Peoples’ was a stupendous thing. The ‘Big See’ was an ‘event for ten thousand years’. “It's a world so much bigger than we thought it was,” was a frequent comment by people who had had the new sight. It couldn't all have been comprehended in a day or a week, and something less than a week has so far been allotted to it.

In the context of the ‘Big See’ the laws of numbers and space became more lenient. For, considering how many of the new creatures there were, probably ten times as many as the old creatures, there wasn't much crowding. And there wasn't any strong feeling of inferiority in the humans over the new relationships, for the humans were at least halfway up the hierarchy of creatures.

The new animals, seen for the first time, were really more striking and more varied than the new ‘people’ (“It's like wildest Africa raised many powers,” somebody said about those new animals), but only a few of the ‘old animals’, some of the cattle, a few of the horses, as yet seemed to be aware of them. The ‘giggling cattle’ found here and there apparently found the ‘new visibilities’ friendly and risible, and they took delight in them.

And the new flora-now-become-visible were solid achievements. There were trees so much taller and stronger and better-done than the trees that had been visible before. There were bushes that were Bushes, there was grass that was Grass. And even the unliving landscapes were superior. The simultaneous rivers were much more rampant and distinguished than any known before, more ‘riverly’. The hills, the plains, the mountains, oh they were giantized, and yet they didn't deform or destroy the old landscape. It was just that about nine more aspects of the world were now known.

And when the other nine-tenths of the ‘old people’ should be able to see the other nine-tenths of the living world that had heretofore been invisible (and that shouldn't be later than the end of this week) then a new phase of humanity and of the world would be realized.

But the new batch of Sappig-Happig chewing gum was a bummer. Not only was it a little bit weak on chewability, but it was completely lacking in the ‘Big See’ qualities.

So the people of the world suffered severe withdrawal symptoms, even that great majority who had not yet experienced that expansive opening. People went very sour then and they downplayed yesterday's exciting phenomena. They were told that the great thing would come again surely in a day or two, but they were skeptical about the whole business.

Critics claimed that the fact that the made-visible ‘cousins’ spoke in the observers' own language, whether English or Dutch or Japanese, proved that the whole syndrome of events was subjective and fictitious. And yet all the more discerning witnesses had said that the new folks had not exactly ‘spoken’ to them but only that they had ‘communicated’ with them as clearly and naturally as if they were speaking in words.

And others said that the whole complex was no more than a psychological quirk, a substitution. It was the case of inadequate persons having alienated themselves from human friends by their difficult personalities, and then imagining crowds of new friends who should be a little bit different than the objectionable humans, and much superior to them. These same critics pointed out that the chewing of gum is itself a psychological quirk and a substitution, an activity without content indulged in by persons who were themselves without content, a noisy gnawing on virtual nothingness.

And many said that the whole affair was only a soap-bubble, a day-fly, rather colorful and striking for a short moment; and now that moment was gone.

The entire complexity and recognition was denigrated as being messianic, millennial, chiliastic, soteriological, plerotic, and silly. Strong words, those! It was even called Orwellian and big-brotherish.

But thoughtful persons who had themselves experienced the ‘Big See’ knew that it had been a foot-in-the-door beyond which door the other nine-tenths of the world was really to be found.

But dashed hope was huge and worldwide.

But new hopes were springing up like springtime flowers. There was a total investigation of the chewing gum affair. And the enabling or triggering element that had been in the introductory batch would be identified and reconstituted.

Within one hour, the worldwide investigation converged on one man, one “Flavor-Master” at the largest gum factory. His name was John Mastic, and he had been a Flavor-Master for twenty-seven years.

“I am an artist,” John Mastic told the articled investigators. “When I mix the first batch of a new flavor, I am painting a dawn, I am composing a symphony, I am creating a folk drama, I am bringing up cool deep meanings from the cellar of the soul, I am setting the juice of life to flowing. Each first batch of a new flavor is blended in this one big vat here in the amount of about eighty thousand kilograms.

“Yes, I am careful to jot down everything that I put in. And then if the flavor catches on, it can be duplicated in any of the factories. Oh, there was the basic chickle first, there were a hundred kilos of essence of walnuts, there was lemon and citron, there were the four sorts of sugar, there was the coconut fibre. There was the powdered graphite to give it slippability. There was the mint and the wormwood. And there was our own patented Sialogogue Number Nine which no other chewing gum manufacturer is able to duplicate. And there were twenty thousand kilos of synthetic corn cobs, made from crude oil, to give it chewability. That's it.”

“We have the list,” the articled investigators said, “and, yes, it agrees with what you remember. But some element is missing, missing.”

“Can't think of what it could be,” John Mastic answered cheerfully. And the articled investigators left him with end-of-the-roadish expressions on their faces.

“I forgot to tell those fellows that I used four thousand kilos of Youngman's Royal Range Pellets in place of the same weight of synthetic corn cobs,” John Mastic told himself three minutes later. “The market is so mixed up lately that range pellets are actually cheaper than synthetic corn cobs (both of them largely made out of petroleum), and the chewability element is at least equal in the pellets. I can't see where it would make any difference though.”

“Why don't we have the Lord Protector of the United States in Washington get together with the Lord Protectors of all the other countries and declare a world crisis,” Mary Crisis McSlim asked her father Rusty McSlim. “That's the only thing to get something done, to make a world crisis out of it.”

“Now, I don't think we'll need a world crisis at all, Mary C,” Rusty said.

“Need it! New-creature hokey, we want it! There is nothing like a world crisis to get people stirred up. Why do you think we won't need it, papa?”

“Ah, I just heard cockroaches giggling in the pantry. When even cockroaches see the ‘Big See’, can people be far behind?”

“For a bunch of giggling cockroaches you'd throw away the opportunity for a world crisis? Oh, you shatter me,” Mary Crisis said.

In two days, they still haven't been able to reconstitute any Sappig-Happig chewing gum containing the ‘Big See’ qualities. Nevertheless, four or five hundred million persons in the world are already onto the expanded vision without it. It will succeed, with chemicals or without, with substitutes and surrogates, or by sudden combinations. The odds are too high (the acquisition of the missing nine-tenths of the world) to give up easily.

The cows are still giggling their delight in Monaghan's meadow, and they are still munching those good Youngman's Royal Range Pellets. Those happy cattle are surely enjoying the ‘Big See’ yet.

And so are other things.

Gar-fish are giggling in the lakes. Honker geese are giggling in their skies and in their swamps. Earthworms are giggling in the ground, and squirrels are chortling in the hickory trees. And many of these species have neither eaten Youngman's Royal Range Pellets nor chewed Sappy-Happy gum. The Fish-and-Game Department guys are reporting happier species by the hour.

It is a many-fronted chemical advent, a worldwide movement. It has come to the gophers in their tunnels. It will come even to the lords of creation very soon, maybe even to the rest of them today. And when it comes, it will be a nine hundred percent gain in everything. May our eyes be big enough to take it all in! Don't let any of us be left out.

What's that funny noise in the front yard?

It's giggling moles tearing up the ground. But they are seeing the ‘Big See’ too.

Tongues Of The Matagorda

“I will tell you one of my early adventures,” said Esteban of Azamor, “the adventure that, more than any other, made me what I am today. It is an account that should be cut in crystal for the magnificence of it, but I can do no more than tell it in crystalline words.”

“Make it that they are Quevenes words then,” said a surly Quevenes Indian called Glaukos. “You know what will happen if you continue to use Spanish words.”

“Oh certainly, you will cut another piece out of my tongue. But I've saved you the trouble. Here is a piece of my tongue that I cut off already. So if in my account I do use a Spanish word now and then, it is already paid for.”

“This is no piece of your tongue,” Glaukos said. “It is a piece of moon-crab meat. But I am starving so I will eat it.” The Quevenes did not like their slaves to talk in words they did not understand; and to compel them to speak Quevenes they had indeed cut notches and slivers from the tongues of Esteban and also his companions in slavery, Captain Dorantes and Captain Castillo.

“It was in the year of Restored Salvation 1481 and I was the son of the Emperor Maximilian of the Holy Roman Empire when I decided that I would reach out my hand and obtain as big a share of the world and its glory as I was able to do,” Esteban began his tale. “Oh, even more than I was able to do, for I intended to go into the area of the impossible. My father the Emperor had given me five realms in Europe and two in Asia, but that was hardly enough to satisfy a shining young man like myself.”

“I have never heard of the Emperor Maximilian having a black son,” Captain Castillo objected in that sunny voice of his.

“Did I say that I was a black person then?” Esteban asked. “No. I was fair of hair and skin. I was tawny as a lion, and as fierce. It was in the course of this heroic adventure that I became a black person. Pay attention and do not interrupt. There is a rite and ceremony which is enacted on the day when the son of an Emperor decides to reach out his hand. Certain Jinns (Christians pretend not to know about the Jinns, but the Moslems understand that God created three intelligent species, Angels, Jinns, and Humans) come to the son of even a Christian Emperor and pledge themselves to do favors for him and to stand by him in both success and adversity. They do this because every Jinn is himself the son of an Emperor somewhere. One of them promised me money unfailing; one of them promised me love unfailing; one of them promised me adequate might at arms against opponents of ordinary flesh. And so the promises were made by seven of them. But the eighth of them made me an odd and crabbed promise: ‘If you are ever in an encounter where you are overmatched,’ he said, ‘you will have the choice of changing places with your opponent in all ways.’ ‘It's a favor of which I will have no use,’ I said. ‘By whom would I be overmatched?’ ”

“With nine hundred and ninety-nine followers, all of them like young lions in their hearts, I conquered three more realms in Europe, three more in Asia, and three in Africa where I had been unrealmed before. Then I came to the central realm of Africa, the Kingdom of Sonrai. We had come over five hundred land leagues of desert to the wonderful City of Timbucktoo the capital of Sonrai which is like a paradise in the middle of the desert. There we met a force ten times our numbering that was captained by the tall and muscular son of King Askia of Sonrai. This son, who was named Esteban, was a great captain of combat. To each of my lion-spirited men he assigned ten of his strong and swift warriors. Each of my men killed the ten men sent against him, but each of my men lost his own life in slaying them. And finally there was nobody left except myself and Esteban the son of King Askia. ‘Well, find nine more men somewhere and I will battle you,’ I said. ‘It is time that I put a finish to this.’ ‘It is myself and thyself,’ the big Esteban told me. ‘I do not need nine other men. Perhaps you need them, but they will not be provided to you.’ We began to fight with swords, and suddenly I was afraid. This Esteban was stronger and quicker than myself.

“His sword was longer and heavier and his shield was taller and more massive. He began to kill me with sure and careful blows, and I caught the frightening scent of my own dead body as it would be by sundown of that day. So, in my mind, I called on the Jinns for help. The first seven of them said ‘We have already given you all that we promised to you, money and love and adequate might at arms against opponents of ordinary flesh. It is no fault of ours that this Esteban is of extraordinary and spectacular flesh.’

“ ‘Oh, eighth Jinn, I am overmatched,’ I cried then. ‘For what it's worth, let me change places with this strong opponent in all ways.’ At once I felt myself to be taller and stronger and faster of hand and arm and body. At once I was handling more easily a longer and heavier sword and taller and more massive shield. And my opponent was no longer a black African man, but a tawny lion man the color of desert sand, and his face was the face that had always been mine. And I saw that I myself now had black hands and arms and legs. So I killed the sand-colored man who had been myself, and cut off his head, and cut his body into four quarters. And by this I myself became Esteban of the spectacular flesh. ‘Oh my son!’ King Askia of Sonrai cried, and he came and put his arms around me. ‘There has never been such a warrior as you since myself in my youth.’ So I became Esteban the son of King Askia of Sonrai, and I have been that person ever since. I still have memories of the years when I was the son of Maximilian of the Holy Roman Empire, but that old body of mine has long since turned to dust. I don't know what the original Esteban has memories of or where his essence is now. I guess I am living in that essence. That is my heroic adventure.”

“It is a good enough tongue,” a Quevenes Indian called Melas said, “but it would be better if we had drummers to drum it and fluters to flute it. It lacks a little without them.”

“But when I came upon you, Esteban, you were a boy of no more than thirteen years old,” Captain Dorantes said, “and that was thirty-two years after the year 1481 of Restored Salvation.”

“Oh, that is a part of a different story,” Esteban said, “in which I had found and drunk of the fountain of youth and had become a young boy from it. And in my boyish guise I had wandered away from the Kingdom of Sonrai, and I have lost it this while.”

“I'll tell you a tongue of an adventure that I had,” said the Quevenes Indian called Glaukos, “which concerned the devil and his ugly sister. This was the devil named Jube, not your own devil named Diablo, who is not a real person.”

There were five of them sitting on the mud-sand of Matagorda Bay of the Gulf of Mexico, and the year was probably 1530 or 1531. They were the big black man Esteban of Azamor, and the two Spanish men Captain Dorantes and Captain Castillo. These three were the first great explorers to cross the North American Continent, but there was no one to call them great here. They were temporarily (for more than a year now) slaves of the Quevenes Indian people. And there were two Quevenes Indian men, Glaukos and Melas. All five of these were ‘head-taller men’, men who stood a head taller than ordinary humans. All five of them, as it happened, were starving to death. In all other things they were distinctive and did not resemble each other very much.

This area was parched and its grass turned brown and black from lack of rain. Salt water had risen in all their water holes. Black buzzards were hanging in the hot air discussing whether this would be ‘carrion evening’ or not. They were weighing the five tall men with their hard eyes.

“I was rolling stones with the devil,” Glaukos the Quevenes said. “I had a fine stone with six sides, all of them square, and the numbers on it were from one to six. But the devil (you can believe this or not, as you wish) had a stone with one-more-than-six sides to it, and on the extra side was the one-more-than-six number. As you know, we Quevenes have only the six regular numbers, and we have the saying that anything that cannot be counted with six numbers belongs to the devil. Well, that was all right for a saying, but now the devil was claiming that he had beat me at the stone rolling by rolling a number that I could not match, and that I owed him everything I owned, my fish-trap, my bow, my club, my shells and my colored stones, my life, and my death. ‘If I owe them then I will pay them,’ I said, ‘except the last two. I want to keep my life and my death away from you.’ We have more communication with Jube the devil than other tribes of people have because we are more evil than other people, more Jube's kind of people. ‘I will offer you a barter,’ the devil said. ‘Marry my sister who is the ugliest woman in the world, and I have not been able to find a husband for her anywhere. In barter for your marrying my sister I will wipe out all the debts you owe me and I will also give to you and your group the most favored land in all the world to live in.’ ‘I accept that barter,’ I said. So I married the sister of Jube the devil, and I and my group received this wonderful land, this bay, these islands, these long necks of land, the smaller bays and smaller islands. It's true that this is the most favored land in the world. We have it good here, and we starve only five moons of the year. What other tribe of people in all the world does not starve at least six or seven moons of the year? And for two moons every year, when the stinker fish are swarming, we become the fattest people in the world. And my wife being the ugliest woman anywhere doesn't bother me at all, since I am the ugliest man. I tell you that there is nobody who can get ahead of me on a barter, not even Jube, the devil. This is my own tall tongue. It is the life of myself and of all my group.”

“It is a good tall adventure,” Captain Castillo acknowledged. This, as it happened, was in the middle of the five-moon period in which the Quevenes people always starved, and their one black and two white slaves would starve with them. Besides it being the regular starvation season, there was a terrible drought in the area this year. The Matagorda Bay (the name meant ‘Fat Bush Bay’ or, ‘Fat Thicket Bay') was ‘Skinny Bush Bay’ this season.

Oh, there were sand fleas to catch and eat, but it takes 20,000 of them to make a good meal, and it takes five days to catch that many of them. The sand-mud shore of the Matagorda was very low, and it seemed as if they looked up at the hazy green water and its puny waves as they swished over the mud-sand. It was dry in that land and all of their sweet water holes had gone salt.

“I will tell you all an heroic adventure of my own,” Captain Dorantes said. “It happened in the year 1520. Esteban will tell you that it could not have happened, that he was with me every moment of that year. But Esteban is mistaken. He has a forgetfulness of ninety-nine days during which I left him with a pawn broker in the town of Florence, in Italy. ‘Let us step into this pawn shop and see if we can buy a good used falcon cheap,’ I said to Esteban on that day. I am sorry that I just used a Spanish word, but I don't believe that the Quevenes have such a word or thing as pawn broker.”

“We know what he is,” said the Quevenes called Melas. “He is one who barters in used property and used persons.”

“Yes,” Captain Dorantes said. “I came to the pawn shop in Florence because, whatever people say, one thing is not always as good as another. What I wanted must be of the City-of-Florence sort, and no other variety of it would serve. When I walked into the Florentine pawn shop with Esteban, I gave a secret sign to the pawn broker. He nodded to me. Then he took a needle with a leather bulb attached to it and jabbed it into the arm of Esteban. Esteban immediately became glazed-eyed and out of his wits. The pawn broker took the lid off a clay jar that was taller than a tall man. Then he jabbed Esteban in the buttock with a different sort of needle; and Esteban, still out of his wits, jumped three varas up in the air and came down inside the clay jar. ‘One hundred ducats for him for a hundred days,’ the pawn broker said as he put the lid back on the big jar with Esteban inside it. ‘I agree,’ I told him, and the pawn broker counted out one hundred gold ducats to me. One of the hundred, however, was a Spanish gold ducat, and I had him replace it to me so all of them would be Florentine ducats.

“ ‘I'll work him at night, of course,’ the pawn broker said. ‘I have a fulling mill for fulling cloth. It consists of a strong man with a hammer. He will be the strong man. I have a treadmill that squeezes honey out of the reed-canes from overseas that we begin to grow here. I have another treadmill that drives the grinders to mill wheat and barley and rye and millet. These slaves work very hard for me when they are in this mind-captured state, and they do not really suffer. They believe they are only dreaming that they are trudging on worse treadmills than those in hell and are suffering more hellishly.’ ”

“ ‘That is all right,’ I said. ‘He is very strong.’ I took my hundred gold Florentine ducats then and I went to Spain. There was a civil war going on in Spain at that time and certain cities had risen against the realm. I served as captain for our brave Emperor of Spain to put down this rebellion. But I also intended to locate and possess the greatest treasure in the world which was buried somewhere under the Alcázar Fortress.

“As captain of infantry forces, I broke the back of the rebellion of the cities against Spain. ‘Brave Captain Dorantes,’ the Emperor Charles told me, ‘For your services I will pay you almost any sum as reward. I'll give you twenty gold ducats for having saved Spain.’ ‘One hundred and twenty,’ I countered him. ‘Twenty-five,’ he came back at me. ‘One hundred and eighteen,’ I lowered my figure a little. But we finally fastened onto one hundred gold ducats of Spain as the reward for serving the country. I put them in my pocket along with the hundred gold ducats of Florence, and I went to the Alcázar Fortress and down into the cellar of it. Then I went down into the cellar under the first one, and then to a still lower cellar. I knew that the greatest treasure in the world was in the lowest cellar of the Alcázar. I also knew that the monster who guarded it could be bribed, though this was against the common belief that the monster was incorruptible. But he could only be bribed with the gold ducats of Florence. The father of the monster, a Florentine dragon who had been in the service of the Great Lorenzo, had taught that the only trusted specie in the world was the Florentine. So the monster would have nothing to do with the gold ducats of Spain or Naples or Venice or Constantinople.

“I gave the monster (he was of the genus Draco) the one hundred gold ducats of Florence that I had received from renting out Esteban, and the monster declared me to be the new owner and master of the fortune. I looked at it through the little peep hole into the iron room which contained it. As I had no other place to put it, and no way to carry it away with me, we decided to leave it where it was. The monster transferred the key to the treasure room from one to another of his pockets in token of the changed ownership. So now I am the richest man in the world and the owner of the world's greatest treasure.”

“What are ‘pockets’?” Glaukos asked. “How many of them did the monster have? Maybe that monster had a good thing going.”

“I went back to Florence,” Captain Dorantes said. “And I paid the pawn broker back with the one hundred Spanish ducats. He grumbled that he would rather have Florentine ducats, but he accepted the Spanish. The pawn broker wakened Esteban by jabbing him again with a needle in his buttock, and Esteban leaped three varas up in the air and came down outside the clay jar in which he had been living. I set the good used falcon into Esteban's hands as he woke up. ‘It is a perfect hunting bird, just what I wanted,’ he said. He did not know that ninety-nine days had passed since we had first entered the pawn shop. He thought it had only been an instant.

“The pawn broker gave me one of the motivating sort of needles just to show what a pleasure it was to do business with me. I have it yet. I can, but I will not, jab Esteban in the buttock with it and he will leap three varas into the air and land in a clay jar, though I don't know where the jar will have come from. This is the heroic account of how I became the owner of the greatest treasure in the world.”

“If you make me leap three varas into the air, you will be the clay jar that I will come down in the middle of,” Esteban told Captain Dorantes, “and I will come down hard.”

Matagorda Bay is not the hottest place in the world. It is no more than the third or fourth hottest ordinarily, though now it was a little bit hotter than that because of the long dry weather. It is not the most stinking place in the world. It is about the fifth most stinking. The mosquitoes there are not the largest in the world. They are only the eighth largest. But if the Matagorda was not the worst place in the world, neither was it the best. The official name of the place was Holy Ghost Bay, but the Holy Ghost had traded it off to Jube the devil.

“I'll tell you the tongue of how I became the greatest hunter in the world,” the Quevenes Indian named Melas said. “I had always been a great runner. I could run so far and so fast because I imitated the running animals: the wolf for the long hard run, and the mountain lion for the shorter bursts of steep speed. A man can sometimes run down a deer by himself, but he does it by running like the running animals. I ran so much like them that I became them. I ran down on four legs. I leaped. I pounced. I was the tireless wolf for most of the chase, and then I was the leaping mountain lion for the catch and the kill. Persons who saw me running in those ways thought that I was a wolf and a mountain lion. I felt myself to be them too. And so I was them. I would rise in front of the deer in my wolf form and send the deer running wildly across the prairie. And then I would circle around it and get ahead of it again. I was able to do this because when I tired myself out running as a wolf I would change, and then I would have the rested strength of the mountain lion still waiting for me to use. And then, when the myself-as-lion ran, the myself-as-wolf rested; but the itself-as-deer never got to rest. So I am able to drive most of the deer where I want them, and I kill most of them in my own area here. When I kill one, I bury it in the sand-mud for three days to rot a little and to become loose in the joints and easy to devour. And I did that with a deer just three days ago. I had forgotten about it, but now the smell of that deer comes to my nostrils. So we will dig it up and eat it when the sun has dropped one bow-length lower.

“But first I must tell you that all deer are not as they seem. Some of them are human people. Young women and girls like to run in the form of doe deers, and they cannot change back into their human form while they are being hunted and kept on the move. It is a sort of summer moon-madness that compels them, some of them quite young girls, to run across the grassy plains and on the edges of the salt marshes as doe deers. And some of the young men like to run in the form of buck deers. I believe it is persons blowing on little cottonwood flutes who set them onto this notion of turning into deers and running. Seven years ago, a young woman of this region gave birth to a little fawn deer. And I think it must have been that both herself and her young man were running and playing in the deer form when they mated.

“When you kill a human in the deer form, then it dies as a deer and you bury it as a deer. But when you dig it up to eat it three days later, you may find that it is the dead body of a human person. I myself have got several bleak surprises this way, once digging up the body of one of my daughters that I had buried as a killed deer, once digging up the body of one of my sons in the same kind of event. I have digged up five different human persons that I have buried as deers. They all have a whiff on them a little bit different from that of those who are both buried and dug up as deer. I think I catch that little-bit-different whiff now, from a mud mound only six paces from here. When the sun has dropped another half bow-length, we will dig it up and see which it is; but I will put another log on the fire now to be ready. And when we have dug it up and roasted it a little bit, we will eat it with either a sad or a happy stomach, whatever the case may be.”

Well, they were hungry. They needed big meat of some kind.

“I also have an heroic story-adventure to tell,” Captain Castillo said. “It is not that I myself am a hero either inside or outside of the story. It is that I have been in places that were themselves heroic, that I have washed in heroic sunshine and heroic water, and I have walked on heroic hills, aye, and in heroic skies. But what I am going to do now is live out a small heroic adventure rather than tell it.

“John writes in his Apocalypse ‘Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; the first heaven and the first earth had disappeared now, and there was no sea.’ I believe that this passage as we have it is somehow incomplete. A seaman once spoke to me of this very passage ‘If there is no sea there, then I won't go.’ But I believe there will be a new ocean, one of sheer crystal, and that John somehow forgot to mention it. I am a man who is in love with water, even such rotten water as surrounds us here.

“I have been called a dreamy man; and all my life I have dreamed (both sleeping and waking) of blessed and crystalline water of every form. When I became a doctor of medicine, this dream of sweet waters went through my healing. When I became a captain of soldiers, the oceanness of writhing waters ran through all my authority. I have walked on arching bridges of water; not of ice, but of water. I have climbed cliffs of water and lived in water castles. And I've gone down into watery caverns deeper than the dolphins can go.

“I believe that water is the same as grace when it falls as rain on the earth. I believe that an insufficiency of sweet water is meant to be a pang and a punishment, and that the present salt swamps of the Matagorda are the salt swamps of Purgatory itself. But I also maintain that every person and group can say when his sentence and punishment has gone on long enough. I am about to say it now.

“I myself have been given powers. I am able to lock up a sky so that neither rain nor grace may fall upon a region, though I have never done that. Now I believe that I have the power to open a clogged sky so that rain and grace may fall again.”

“Not quite yet,” said the Quevenes man named Glaukos. “Let us set the rocks above the fire first to make a roof over it.” They had two very large flat rocks, and it took all five of the powerful men to work together to lift each of them. They lifted them and set them on a frame of sticks and stones about the height of a man above the hearth stone. It would shed rain pretty well. It would protect the fire.

By the time the hearth was roofed, the armadillos had arrived. They stood and rattled their armor, and whimpered. There were five of these armadillos in a small tribe that had come for the last four days and rattled insistently. The men always knew what the little armored beasts wanted, that they should dig with their spade deeper into the sand-mud than the animals could dig. For four days, in response to their whimpering, Esteban had dug with the spade more than eight feet deep. Each day the animals had gone down to the water that seeped into the hole, and had found it salt, and had gone away sorrowful. If there was any sweet water at all it would ride on top of the heavier salt water. Today the armadillos came even less hopefully than before. If they did not find sweet water today they would die. So Esteban began to dig another deep hole. And Captain Dorantes and the Quevenes called Melas set out all their clay pots and bowls to catch the rain.

“There is a small cloud,” Captain Castillo was saying. “I command that it become a big cloud and that it come over us. I command it as a natural element, and I pray to the Holy Ghost that it may happen.”

“This man does not know how to command!” the Quevenes called Glaukos jeered. “It is I who command it! Tremble, cloud, and come.”

“Let us all command, exhort, pray, and cajole the cloud at the same time,” Esteban boomed reasonably enough from the hole he was digging. And the five of them, the Captains Dorantes and Castillo, the African Black Esteban, the two Quevenes Indians Glaukos and Melas, all commanded and reasoned and prayed and cajoled. Then something began to happen with a jolt, as if the machinery of the sky had made a mechanical shift.

“I can feel that the tide has turned in our favor,” Captain Castillo said.

“The tide is too slow and too sour,” Glaukos admonished. “Has the cloud turned in our favor?” He was watching it with his ugly face intently upraised.

Yes it had. The little white cloud that had intended to pass them to the north was now veering back towards them. It turned black and enlarged itself. It filled the sky over their heads and began to rain on them, softly and steadily.

“Men, do not just stand there!” the Quevenes called Melas cried. “When there is one good luck try for another one immediately before the first one grows cold. We may yet have meat that we will not have to shudder at when we eat. Help me dig out the buried deer. With our new running luck, it will still be deer when we dig it out and eat it.”

Esteban came out of his dug water hole with his spade. The armadillos tumbled down into it and howled with delight to find sweet water. Of course it was sweet. The rain water was pouring down into that hole in little torrents. Then Esteban with the spade, and others with rocks and sticks to dig with, uncovered the body of the buried deer. At first it seemed that they had uncovered the face of a human girl, but that was only the tricky afternoon light coming fractured through the rain into the burial hole. It was a doe deer of incomparably gentle expression. It was mildly rotten. It had become loose in the joints and would be easy to dismember and roast and devour. So they dug it out of the hole.

The deer skinned easily, the mild rot helping. It unjointed easily. Bigger pieces went directly into the flat fire in the hearth stone, and smaller pieces were spitted in the flame-fire for quicker charring and eating. The men divided the tongue of the deer into five parts, one for each of them, for they were all tongue men this day.

“Your tongue, your story was the strongest, water-master,” the Quevenes Glaukos told Captain Castillo. “It brought rain for our dying piece of land and good water for our sandy throats.”

“No, my tongue, my story was the strongest,” the Quevenes Melas contradicted. “It brought deer meat and saved us from starvation. My mind was confused with my hunger and I did not even remember that I had killed and buried a deer three days ago. Then my ‘tongue’ which I told recalled the happening to my mind, so we do not have to starve to death after all. And now our luck has changed to the good. The black buzzards are gone out of the sky, and the white gulls have come to bounce and holler in the rainy air. Gulls are good luck birds.”

Five heroic stories! Five heroic tongues! (The Quevenes Indians call a ‘story’ a ‘tongue’.) The five tongues hadn't resembled each other very much. They had only one thing in common: all of them had been true.

“I feel it,” Esteban said. “Something is flowing for us now. Howl, tongue, howl! Burned yourself, didn't you? You knew you'd get burned if you tried that piece of deer meat while it was still hot. But it's better than starving.”

“I also feel the power flowing in our favor,” Captain Dorantes said. “Oh, from this moment on, greatness has found us!”

“A wonderful tide and a wonderful favor,” Captain Castillo said. “We will not die in this miserable place. We will travel five hundred hard land leagues to get to other places, but then we will have our crystal day in the sun, in the new sun.”

The five armadillos waddled off, fat-stomached from the new water they had drunk. They were making satisfied and thankful grunts. They raised their tails in going-away salutes as they passed. Even their skinny tails had row after row of skinny armored scale plates.

Bank And Shoal Of Time

THE PEOPLE. All are thirty years old except Peter Luna who is somewhat older than that, whatever year it is.

PETER LUNA. The genial and dying proprietor of a time post-house or relay-house. He is a door-keeper of time. “I need a matched set of at least five,” he said.

HENRY KEMP, the “Time-Reconstruction Man”. “You can build time like anything else.” Henry is blue-eyed and shocky-haired and pleasant.

ANNABELLA MacBEAN, the “Clotted Dream Woman”. She is a large young woman, ruddy of complexion and wit.

ETHAN FARQUHARSON, the “Intuition-is-the-Key-to-Time Man”. “We have all walked through time in our powerful moments.” Ethan is Scotch, and eagle-eyed and eagle-beaked.

ROWENA CHARTERIS, the “Did-You-Ever-See-a-Naked-Ghost? Lady”. She is too serious, she is shortsighted, but she is of limitless faith. She is under special auspices.

ABEL ROARING, the “Time-is-a-Pile-of-Transparencies Man”. “There is no clear line where archaeology leaves off and time travel begins.” He is a rocky and clattering man.

You'd like Abel. You'd like them all.

THE PLACE.

Moonwick Estate near Lunel in the Hérault Department of the People's Republic of France. At Moonwick, Time is a mulch many meters deep.

THE SEASON.

Summertime, summertime, summertime. There's nothing like it for time-travel.

THE PROPS.

Lark song, the noises of contented cattle and sheep, sound of grapes growing, low fidelity radio playing (with all his money, why doesn't Peter Luna get a good radio?), the colors green, blue, gold, yellow, russet, brown, cloud-white, wheat-yellow, water-gray. Sunshine, sunshine.

THE TIME.

A couple of minutes after noon on “Midsummer's Day” of an ambiguous year.

THE MOTTO.

“That Most Intricate of Pleasures, Time.”

1

This was the message received by a dozen or so experts in the “time attempters” field:

“I have succeeded in establishing a creeping time-satellite or time-shuttle at my estate of Moonwick near Lunel in the Hérault Department of the People's Republic of France. If you are really experts in your field, you will appreciate the importance of this. From this time-shuttle, which is just beyond the ‘shoal’ of all of you to whom I am sending this message, it will be possible for you to launch genuine time probes. I am sending this to a dozen or so and I hope for acceptance from at least five. I must have a matched set of at least five. Some soon. A very little bit after ‘soon’ will be too late for me to transmit the shuttle to you. Bring ideas only. Everything else for frugal and breakthrough living is provided. You will receive various transportation chits and enabling papers. Peter Luna.”

The World Courier Service (“No questions asked, Messages carried anywhere or anywhen in the world”) delivered these messages to the dozen or so persons who were experts in the time field. And some of the people gave assent and some didn't. So, the next day, the Courier Service delivered airline tickets, train tickets, and International Taxi Coupons to five of the experts who had agreed to go to Moonwick.

So it happened that, on a sunny day in summer, five cabs drove up to the crumbling stone and rusting iron gateway of the estate Moonwick in the Hérault Department of the People's Republic of France, not far from the town of Lunel. The taxi cabs arrived from five different directions by five different roads (that's right, there were three main roads and two little dog-leg roads that came together there), and they all arrived about the same time.

“Why, this is a marvel,” one of the taxi drivers said. “There is a big house back from the gate! Why have I never seen anything except a pile of rubbish there before?”

“This is as far as I go,” another taxi driver said. “The International Taxi Coupons are specific about this, lady, it's as far as the gate of Moonwick. This is as far as I can take you.”

“Oh, that's all right,” said the lady whose name was Annabella MacBean. “I wrestle a hundred kilograms of luggage a hundred meters every morning just to stay in shape.”

“It is funny,” a third taxi driver said. “I don't remember any big house back there either, but it's there today. The gate is as far as I can go, sir. The fare is covered by the International Taxi Coupons, but you are free to tip.”

In another minute, all five of the taxi drivers had driven off, and five persons stood with their luggage at the entrance of an estate named Moonwick according to the rusting iron letters of the gate overhang.

“It's Gothic, it's Gulf-of-Lions Gothic,” one of the ladies said. “Oh you! I met you at the ‘Backward-Turn-Backward-Oh-Time-in-Thy-Flight Convention’ in Ghent. You're Henry Kemp, the ‘Time-Reconstruction Man’.”

“Yes, at the Hotel Schamp at Ghent in Belgium. And you are Annabella MacBean the ‘Clotted Dream’ woman. That was a wonderful meeting! How the minds and their ideas did rattle and bump together! Unfortunately it didn't bear much fruit. How is Gulf-of-Lions Gothic different from any other Gothic?”

“It's Gothic with the bright sun shining on it. All other Gothic is between haunted twilight and lightning riven midnight.”

“You, sir,” said one of the men to another, “I met you in Dublin at the ‘Time-Will-Run-Back Congress’. You're Abel Roaring, the ‘Time-is-a-Pile-of-Transparencies Man’.”

“Certainly, certainly, at the Shelbourne Hotel at St. Stephen's Green in Dublin. You're Ethan Farquharson, the ‘Intuition-is-the-Key-to-Time Man’. I had a feeling that we were very near to a breakthrough at the Shelbourne. We had it and we dropped it. I pledge myself by all that is in me that we'll not drop it if we hold it so near again.”

“I'm Rowena Charteris,” said the fifth person of them.

“Oh yes,” several of them recognized her name. “You're the ‘Did-You-Ever-See-a-Naked-Ghost? Lady’.”

“But what shall we do now?” Rowena asked. “Walk to the house and find out who our strange host is? And see if there is some vehicle to transport our luggage there? Oh, oh, why didn't we hear you? Where did you come from?”

“I came from my house yonder,” said the genial man as he stepped out of his truck. “And you didn't hear me because I didn't make any noise. What are you doing with all that luggage? I told you to bring ideas only.”

“These are ideas,” Abel Roaring grinned. “All of us are very heavy thinkers.”

“This truck of mine runs as quiet as a ghost,” the man said. “Load you in, folks, bodies and baggage. Yes, I know all your names. In the high and diffuse company of time speculators, you five weren't quite top-rank, until now. But the top-rank people hadn't enough curiosity to come here, so they are put down and you five become the top-rank people in the Time Affair.”

“What kind of truck is this that runs so quietly?” Roaring asked. They were rolling up the weedy drive to the big house.

“It's a Walker,” the genial host said. “It's American.”

“So am I,” Roaring said, “but the Walker Truck refuses to be recognized.”

“We will have good hunting here,” the host said. “I'm Peter Luna of course. You will already be past the ‘shoal’ when you begin this hunt, and you will have bewildering freedom and opportunity.”

“My watch has stopped,” Ethan Farquharson said some while after they were pleasantly installed at Moonwick Estate. With their ears and their eyes they were grazing the fine house and gardens and exploring its excellencies. What a beautiful sunny day in summer! It smelled of new-mown hay and the Hippocrene.

“So has mine stopped,” said Annabella MacBean, “and it's a Nicolay Never-Stop Watch. I can take it to any Nicolay dealer in the world and receive one thousand dollars and a new Nicolay Never-Stop Watch because of the failure of this one.”

“I doubt that it has failed,” said the pleasant host Peter Luna.

“What gives then, Luna?” Henry Kemp asked him. “My watch has stopped also.”

“So has mine,” said Rowena Charteris. “Have you stopped time itself?”

“And mine has stopped,” Abel Roaring came in with it, puzzled. “How far have you gone with things here, Luna? Have you achieved Time Stasis?”

“Not quite,” Peter Luna said. “It's a requirement that it be missed slightly. I've put my very local time here on slow-jog. After quite a while you will notice that your watches have really moved ahead slightly, very slightly, a second maybe in what will seem like several hours to you. This is an advantage in several ways. The most obvious one is that we cannot use the excuse that we have not time enough to solve the Time problem. Here and now, in the very-long-drawn-out now, we do have time enough.”

There were all the amenities there, swimming, tennis, golf, walking, eating, drinking. And card-playing, talking on every subject under the summer sun, and talking on their own subject in which, really, all other subjects were contained.

2

“ — the Unknown Country upon which reposes this tedious and repetitive world.”

 — Belloc

“And why, young experts, have you not already walked through time?” Peter Luna asked his five guests as they sat at table.

“All of us have done it, for brief moments,” Farquharson said. “We have done it in rapports and transports of unique experience. But none of us is able to do it at will.”

“It's quite easy to ramble through time, at unseemly pace, in the future direction,” Luna said. “A fairly simple technique will do it. But one comes to his own hour of death all too soon, and he dies. And the thing is not reversible. He does not return from that little jaunt if he goes too far into the future (‘You know not the day nor the hour’); and he has a very shallow last-years-of-his-life if he's on a fast-tour survey. Possibly he will live thirty years in three minutes, and there's not a lot of satisfaction in that. So I will not recount to you (though I know them) any of the techniques for travel beyond the normal pace into the future. And there is no way that one may travel into the future beyond one's death. One follows his own ordained future then and not the temporal future of the world.

“But travel into the past! That should be quite simple. Going back before one's birth is not nearly so final a thing as going forward beyond one's death. One can always return from the journey to the time before his birth, if he is able to make a big enough jump. And if he cannot make a big enough jump, he still may come back. I've heard people say ‘I've lived this life before: I'm quite sure that I've lived this life of mine before.’ And I believe that some of them are correct in saying it. But I'm not greatly attracted to that either. We should go back with a leap beyond, and we should return with the great leap. But as to yourselves and your own attempts, have you found something that prevents your going backwards in time?”

“Of course we've found something that prevents it,” Anabella said. “There are the years that are interdicted to us. It is my own ghost standing athwart them that interdicts them to me. If we could only get past those most recent years that are barred to us, then I believe that we'd have free sailing. It's like shoal water through which we cannot sail at all. But beyond it there is clear water for clear sailing, if only we could get to it. And the interdicted years (we are able to map them out even if we're not able to traverse them) are not of the same duration for everybody. And yet we have just discovered in comparing our data that they are pretty nearly the same duration for us five.”

“If we had a time-satellite we could take off from a cliff or bank that is beyond the shoals,” Abel Roaring said. “We could be clear of our own interference and we could make fruitful voyages. You wrote in your message that you had a time-satellite here. That's why I came, Luna. Is there one? Where is it?”

“Yes, I do have one here. It will do what you hope for it to do, and more. It is beyond the shoals and beyond the interference,” Peter Luna maintained.

“Where is it? When can we see it?” Henry Kemp asked.

“Oh, you can see it whenever you open your eyes,” Peter Luna told them.

“You have all guessed that the time journey should be easily made. I believe that each of you has worked out calculations for it, the themes and equations and formulae. You have designs for the hardware. The trip can be made by several different conveyances, and you five have likely hit on the most apt ones. You are able to take all the steps — except the first step. I know that frustrates you. To mix our metaphors, there is a shoal right across the mouth of our harbor and it will not let us come out.”

Peter Luna could have been almost any age. He had truly mastered time, in as far as it might ever have had effect on him. He was not so much handsome as he was deep and interesting. He was attractive, like rubbed amber; he drew people to himself.

“All time travel is highly personal, subjective, and psychic,” Luna said. “Whatever the mechanism of time travel is, it always has a preternatural starter or ignition. And we ourselves are the obstacle in going back through those nearest years. We cannot go back where we already are. We cannot occupy the same space twice at the same time; nor can we occupy the same time twice, no matter how far distant those two occupations are in space. It is a personal impediment, and it cannot be waived. A person (the hardware is willing, but the flesh interposes) cannot make incursion back into any time in which he already lives. So a person old enough to have learned the lore and techniques of time travel must hurdle at least thirty years of closed-off time before he begins his exploration. Perhaps we follow the law of inverse squares here; and if so, it will take nine hundred times as much power to go back thirty years as to go back one year.

“The apparent exception, travelers who have hurdled the shoal and got free into the past, but then have come forward through the years of their lives with some mixed memory of the thing, this is no exception at all. These persons are assumed into their own lives, just as reckless travelers into the future are assumed into their own deaths. They merge with themselves. They occupy the same time and place only once.”

“It would seem that young children would sometimes slip back over the shoal accidentally, it being so narrow in their case,” Annabella MacBean said.

“And young children do it indeed,” Peter Luna declared. “And especially do the youngest children of all, those still in the womb, indulge in time travel. As you say, they have such a narrow way to go. Ever since the technique for recording and studying pre-natal dreams was discovered, persons have been startled and unnerved and plain flabbergasted by the contents of some of those pre-natal dreams. These unborn children do often have out-of-the-body experiences that are also out-of-the-present-time experiences. ‘He's gone now, for a while,’ an understanding mother will sometimes say, and later she will relate ‘He's back now, but he's tired. I wonder where he goes?’ She knows that the child doesn't take bodily leave of her, but the spirit that is in the child often does take its leave.

“In our own culture we simply ignore this early time travel and the memories that it leaves. In other cultures, those that believe in reincarnation or in the transmigration of souls, these things will be interpreted as memories of previous lives. They aren't. They are memories of early time travel with the young traveler identifying himself with someone he observed on that travel. So we have it in those cultures that children, when they come to the age of six or seven and are able to speculate and wonder and express themselves somewhat, will describe the deaths of children who lived before they were born, for these deaths have peculiar attraction for them. They will identify themselves with the one who had died. Sometimes they will insist that their parents should take them to places where they will call by name persons not known to them in present lives, where they will claim to be a dead child of certain persons there, and they will relate things that apparently only the dead child could have known.

“In our own culture, the same sort of early time travel happens, but other explanations or none at all are given for it. But the thing happens vividly and is remembered vividly by at least one child out of five. There are five of you here, so I suspect it has happened to more than one of you. Maybe to all of you. Maybe that is what has made time attempters out of each of you.”

“Yes, it's plain that there is this impediment,” Abel Roaring said, “and that we cannot ordinarily travel back into the years where we have already lived, ‘where we are already living,’ as a true time attempter would say. And the more maturity we bring to the problem, the longer is that treacherous first step back into time, over a threshold of thirty years or more. The shoal is in our way, but what do we do about it? Can the problem be solved?”

“Oh, I've already solved it,” Peter Luna said. “I've solved it by the time-satellite that I've built here. By it we are already beyond and previous to a shoal, and by using it you five are back before you were born. As to myself though, I'm still in my proper life, right at the end of it, as it happens.”

“You've hinted several times that you have this time satellite here, Luna,” Ethan Farquharson said, “but where is it? When can we see it and study it?”

“You can see it right now, almost right now,” Luna said, “and I hope you will apply yourselves to its study immediately. Ah, the time-shuttle, it's so close to you that you can reach out and punch it in the snoot. He who has ears, let him hear. He who has eyes, let him see. He who has the third eye, let him intuit!”

A taxi driver of the region had a wife who loved to go riding in the country. He loved her, so he indulged her in this love. Now he had gone off shift right after noon on a sunny summer day, so he took his wife for one of those rides in the country.

“There's a beautiful big house out in the country that I saw today and I never saw it before,” he said. “Let's go see it now. You'll love it.”

They drove the taxi out into the country. They came to the crumbling stone and rusting iron entrance to the estate that was named Moonwick according to the flaking iron letters on the lintel of the gate.

“But where's the beautiful big house?” the taxi driver bawled. “It was there, right there, not a hundred meters back from the gate. No, Jemima, I'm not crazy.”

“Maybe it's all those ‘No-Doz’ pills you take to stay awake when you drive at night, Jacques,” Jemima said. “I think that's what's making you kind of nutty.”

They drove through the disintegrating entrance-gale and back to where the large and impressive house had been only a half hour before. And it wasn't there. Nothing was there except a weed-grown pile of old rubbish.

“I won't give up,” said the taxi driver whose name was Jacques Claxon. “Four other taxi drivers were here and saw it. And we let our five fares out at this entrance here. And here comes one of those drivers, Eustace Merleblanc, right now. We'll see what he thinks about this.”

3

Time, a facet of human consciousness felt both in psychic and physical experience, and an aspect of the observed environment metaphorically describable as a one-way flow providing, together with space, the matrix of events. Time can be viewed either as metaphysically ultimate (process philosophy) or as illusory (philosophy of the manifold). For centuries it has been viewed as a significant dimension in the philosophy of history and in the theology of redemption. It can be measured either as an epoch (the moment of an instantaneous event as marked by the clock) or as the interval of duration of a continuous event, and by reference either to moving bodies or to electromagnetic phenomena (atomic time). Its flow has been found, in contemporary physics, to be relative to the observer's velocity and acceleration perspectives, and in biology, to be affected by such factors as environmental rhythms, temperature, drugs, and (perhaps) brain rhythms.

 — Encyclopaedia Britannica

“But why do you say it is a one-way flow?” Rowena Charteris asked angrily. “Oh, I'm sorry, people. I was responding to something else that I was rolling around in my mind. Yes, they call me the ‘Naked Ghost Lady’ because I so often ask ‘Did you ever see a naked ghost?’ Well, I've seen nine ghosts in my life, but I've never seen a naked one.”

Rowena, in that spacious noontime, had played three sets of tennis with Abel Roaring. Then she had had a shower and a pleasant nap, but the sun still stood where it had stood before, a very little bit after noon.

“All ghost appearances are time trips. But time is sticky stuff, it is tacky stuff, and it is always local,” Rowena lectured them. “We are in a galactic drift of several billion miles a year, so there is no way we could return to any spot on Earth in any past time according to absolute location in space. The spot on Earth now would be billions of miles away from the same spot on Earth then. But time clings to local physical objects, like a world, and all physical objects are deeply imbedded in time. Time is very cohesive and it can only be moved in quantum hunks, and we can only move out of the common time stream by quantum pushes. So a ghost has to bring part of his ambient with him when he comes, and his minimal ambient is his own clothes. This makes a difficulty for those who believe that travel in time consists of reconstructing people and things, molecule by molecule, in the visited time. How much more difficult the clothes would make it! And yet ghostly time visitants are almost always clothed.

“And a ghost will always bring a sort of ‘datedness’ with him that is easier to recognize than to define. So a ghost expert is usually able to identify a nineteenth century ghost, or an eighteenth century ghost. Witches, of course, used to strip naked, smear themselves with pig-grease, and then slip through a tight place into another time; but they must have had a technique that I haven't discovered yet.

“But I do have my calculations as to what it takes to make a quantum push into clear past time, disregarding personal-life inertia. If you indeed have a time-shuttle established here, Luna, then that personal-life inertia and inhibition can be broken and bypassed, and my calculations will work. All of us here can make a quantum push into clear past time from a workable time shuttle here. Let's do it right now.”

“Oh, you'll do it within a second or two at the most,” Peter Luna said.

“But your ‘second or two at the most’ seems like a very long time when things are in an approximate time-stasis here,” Abel Roaring said.

Annabella MacBean and Ethan Farquharson and Abel Roaring took a rather extensive foot-tour around the Moonwick Estate. The house itself was an imposing place, loaded with libraries, museum rooms, art galleries, dens, studies, billiard rooms, music rooms, laboratories, machine shops and fabricating usines, one very large dining hall and three smaller snack rooms, a big country kitchen and several satellite kitchens, and an even dozen guest suites.

There was a big cellar full of junk. There was a big attic filled with other junk. There was a morning sun-parlor and an afternoon sun-parlor. There was a swivel telescope up on the highest part of the house, the truncated main gable. It was all a distinguished piece of Gulf-of-Lions Gothic, and one of the big shaded porches had an area of a hundred and thirty square meters.

And everything was open. There was not a locked door in the whole house. There was no place for any hidden rooms.

The explorers went into everything, and they didn't find what they were looking for. There was no trace of one, not of a little one, certainly not of a big one.

And the great rolling outdoors of the estate was about a square kilometer in area. It was in the fork of two branches of a small river that rolled chortling the mere twelve kilometers into the Gulf of Lions of the blue Mediterranean. The third and North boundary of the Moonwick Estate was a line of steep and sudden cliffs about fifty meters high.

By anybody's standards, this was a beautiful place. The folded, rolling hills were covered with clover, or they were covered with grapes. Everywhere the three explorers walked the air was pleasantly noisy with bees. There were a dozen heavy white cattle grazing belly-deep in clover, there were exposed rock strata of shale and slate and chalk. There were beech groves.

“I have never seen time piled up so deep in a place,” Ethan Farquharson said. “Not insufferably ancient time, but historical and para-historical time going back to the glaciations. These are the centuries and the thousands that we want to explore, and I never saw them piled up so beautifully. The banks of the North Border of the estate were once the shore of the Gulf of Lions. What a place to start from! If only ‘it’ is really here! But there are no hidden valleys on the estate, and we have seen everything big enough to matter.”

“No, there's nothing on the estate that could be a time-satellite,” Annabella said. “There is just no place here that even a mini-satellite could be hidden.”

“I can't imagine a time-satellite smaller than ten meters in diameter and five meters thick,” Abel Roaring complained. “Smaller than that it just wouldn't be workable. And it isn't here, it just isn't here. Do you think we are wasting our time here?”

“We're not wasting very much time here,” Annabella said, “something less than three seconds since we've been here. And we've had four good meals here and now I'm hungry again. I've had a good night's sleep here, though it was at bright noontime. This is really the most filled-to-overflowing less-than-three seconds that I ever spent in my life.”

“Intuition is the key to time,” Ethan Farquharson was saying (this was not discernibly later by watch or clock, and yet it was a little bit further along in the time stasis), “which is to say that time is quirky, that it is mental, that it is subjective. There is no such thing as time, certainly not any such thing as elapsed time, unless mentality is present. I realize that this is very near to saying that ‘time is illusion’; very near to it, but it is not the same thing.”

They were all sitting on one of the largest of the great shaded porches of Moonwick Manor, and it was a little bit after noon on a sunny summer day. There was the intricate and genial, and curiously concerned, host Peter Luna. There was the speaker Ethan Farquharson, ‘the poet of the time-attempters movement’, who was Scotch and who had the hard untrusting eyes of an eagle combined with a cheerful hooked nose that had once been improved by being broken. He was good company in spite of the fits of absent-mindedness in which he acted as if he were the only person in the world.

There was Annabella MacBean (the ‘Clotted-Dream Woman’), a quite large young lady with only enough beauty for a middle-sized woman. So parts of her stuck out from under it and were not covered by that mantle. Her feet and her hands were too big, and her voice was a bit too large. She was entirely too ruddy, she was what is sometimes called rawboned (nobody knows exactly what that means though). Well, but her hair and her face and her disposition and her wit were excellent. And such largeness-in-reserve as was hers has never hurt anything.

There was Henry Kemp, blue-eyed and thick-bodied, with a shocky crest of hair sticking up to show that he was a Teuton. He was a designer and builder. He believed that it should be asked of the most abstruse idea “What does it really look like? Why cannot we make a working model of this thing?” And, to a greater extent than with most people, he had built himself, from the inside out; for his thoughts and predilections, coming through his pinkish and translucent flesh, had pretty well determined his appearance.

“As with anything built by an amateur builder, he's a bit lop-sided and rough-hewn,” Annabella said about him, “but not really bad, not bad at all.”

There was Rowena Charteris, too serious, and always peering intently into mysteries with her myopic eyes. The world itself was such a mystery to her, and she peered into it, taking her glasses off and putting them back on, and not able to see very deeply into it with all her peering.

But she had limitless faith in her chosen field. Limitless hope too. And, really, she had almost limitless love or charity. This time antic had to succeed now, if only for her sake. God and all the Jinni will make special efforts to accommodate such as was she.

Rowena was quite pretty. And, to one with eyesight as poor as her own, she would seem absolutely ravishing.

And there was Abel Roaring. He looked as if he were made out of stratified rock, but that was only his textured complexion. His voice also had this rockiness, like the good-natured clattering of stones. He wasn't a handsome man. He moved with the surety and well-balanced ungainliness of a bear. He looked to be the oldest of the five by some years; but they were all about the same age, all about thirty years old.

You'd like Abel. You'd like all of them. They all had the interior illumination usually seen in people with strong vocations. By their noble vocations, they were the Time Attempters.

“Time travel, either into the past, or beyond the set pace into the future, is not a natural human attribute.” Farquharson was talking. “Not natural, no. It is unnatural, or it is preternatural, or it is supernatural. But the attempting of it isn't illicit. If it were unlawful, it would not give such a feeling of exhilaration and joy. I am not able to put this into words at this moment in slow-jog time, but I have already put it into calculations. If you indeed have a time-satellite here, Luna (and we have not been able to find it anywhere on your estate), if you do have that take-off bank of time, then I have a bird here that will take-off backwards from it and fly backwards into the past.”

“Are these the calculations that you publish in the Spring of 1986 issue of Time Returns Again Quarterly, Farquharson?” Luna asked. “If so, I'm familiar with them and they will indeed serve for an epochal backwards flight from this bank or satellite of time which I have built here. Yours are really and essentially about the same as the calculations of Rowena Charteris that I perused earlier in the present second. The same, but phrased quite differently. By the way, how long did you look for my time-satellite without finding it?”

“Oh, by your local semi-stasis time, it was something less than half a second, Luna.”

“That's not very long, Farquharson. But I do have it built here, and I intend to have you all see it and know it very soon now.”

Another taxi driver drove into the Moonwick Estate and parked behind Jacques Claxon near the pile of weed-grown trash. His name was Eustace Merleblanc and he had his own wife Ermadine with him.

“Jacques, Jacques, what do you make of it?” he asked as he got out and stood there. “It isn't here, is it? What happened to the large and wonderful house? Was the whole thing a mirage? It looked solid enough less than an hour ago, odd-structured but solid.”

“Why don't you fellows just forget about it?” Ermadine Merleblanc suggested. “We all get nutty sometimes and see things that aren't there.”

“I'll not forget it,” Jack Claxon said. “I'm going to the authorities with the problem right now. I don't care if they do hoot me to scorn. There's something here that's too wrong to let pass.”

“I'll not forget it either,” Eustace Merleblanc swore. “There's the smell of something dislocated and hellish wrong here. Yes, we'll report it, Jacques, and we'll drive them bugs until they look into it. Something just plain swallowed that big house, Jacques.”

4

Complete visual pictures… can be reconstructed of anything whose light or shadow fell even indirectly on one of these stones. We can get detailed pictures of animals, of plants, of people as they lived and moved thousands of years ago. We can reconstruct color pictures of the clouds moving overhead, and we can read the spectra of those clouds. We can reconstruct anything that was ever discerned by any of the senses. Give us a dozen good stones from a site… and we can reconstruct a complete countryside for any period we wish… We can trap sounds and play them back with perfect fidelity. We can play the song of the ancestral cicada that had two more chromosomes than have its descendants… And smells! Of course they are even more simple than sounds to lift from the transparencies. We can go back and pick up nearly every scene complete for the past fifty thousand years… And patinas and transparency deposits on stones are only one of the dozens of tools that we have available for such historical reconstruction.

 — Thunder-Colt

“I'm really curious about how slow a time-jog you have us on here, Luna,” Henry Kemp said. “I've shaved four times since we've been here, and we haven't completed the fourth second yet. It seems to me more like a second to twenty-four hours now, but I'm sure it wasn't that slow at the beginning. We had time on slow-jog at a time convention in Ghent last year, but that was mostly illusion and hallucination. I didn't grow a day's whiskers in a second's time there, nor get a good night's sleep, nor get this much of a sun tan. You are the original Peter Luna, the grandfather of Peter Bardolf Luna who lives in London now and who also dabbles in time, are you not? But that original Peter Luna is supposed to have died away back in the year 1928. If you did not die then, you would be — how old? — now. How did you avoid your death? And how did you avoid your aging?”

“I am that Peter Luna, yes. I do not avoid that death. I die in 1928, and this is the very day that I die. That's why I've put this day on such a slow time-jog. It's my death-day and I'm not in a hurry about dying. And I want to transmit this set-up to the five of you before I die. And yet you have to come to the intellectual acceptance of it at your own pace. It's rather frustrating to me.”

“What a cover story!” Annabella MacBean admired. “You're quite a spoofer, in addition to other things, Luna. But how do you (alive as you seem to be at this moment) know that you die on this particular day in long-ago 1928?”

“Oh, another time traveler told me. He discovered that I had a time-satellite here and he used it three different times. He had a lot of equipment to move into the past from this easy jump-off bank. In between my visits here he looked me up and found my death chronicled. I had the reputation of ‘mad scientist’ so I was noticed a bit. My clock, of course, stopped at the minute of my death. And the big house here was taken down or wrecked later. At least there were no signs of it in his day. So I die a little bit after noon today, and it's a little bit after noon now. And it may be that it will take the psychic kick of my death to transmit the realization of this set-up to you.

“You're here now. Everything you need is here. Dammit, don't bust on it, you five. In all logic, there isn't any way that you can bust on it: but there's an illogical aspect to every time jump and you just might bust.”

“Where is your previous time-traveler now, dear Peter Luna?” Rowena asked him. “We love you, of course, old father-figure, old father-time-figure, but it isn't always easy to believe you.”

“He's still in past time, Rowena. He intended to stay there, in a haven he had picked out and which he didn't disclose to me. He believed that the fewer futurians reaching the past the better it would be for those who did get there. He hadn't any intention of building a time-bridge. But I do wish mightily to build a time-bridge that can be used by all interested persons. I don't have to die today, you see. I could flee into the past alone and forget about today. But if I want to open a workable bridge, if I want to transmit what I have built to you five, then I do have to die today: or I have the particularly rank superstition that I have to.”

No, Peter Luna didn't look old. He surely wasn't a father-figure to any of them except Rowena. But perhaps a father-time-figure or a master-of-time-figure will not look at all old. Suetonius mentions that “those about to die” sometimes take on a quite boyish appearance during their last moments.

“Are you subject to rank superstitions, dear Peter?” Annabella MacBean jibed him.

“Oh, when a rank superstition seems to be an intrinsic part of an equation, I don't throw it out. ‘Workable irrationalities’ are present in every theory that works.”

Abel Roaring and Henry Kemp continued to look for the time-satellite. Peter Luna was so very cryptic about it, and yet they still believed that he might have it.

“I can build a time-satellite myself,” Henry said. “I can build anything. I built a human corpse once. Oh, it was simplified, of course, but it should have been workable in all its working parts. There wasn't any reason why it shouldn't work, but it wouldn't. It hadn't the spark of life. Nor would my time-satellite have it. I've the feeling that Luna's satellite would have it, does have it, if he has really built it.”

“And I projected a human corpse once,” Abel Roaring said. “I suppose that it was simplified, and yet it was consistent. I built it from rock-patinas from a particularly resonating valley. It was the corpse of a young woman who had imposed herself with stunning moment upon that valley in which she lived. But no, I couldn't give her the spark of life. She was as if she had just died. I'm afraid my own satellite (and I'm sure I could project one) would be similarly lifeless.”

Kemp and Roaring were playing squash racquets. Luna had a fine walled court there. Imagine anyone having courts for both tennis and squash racquets. Kemp was the raging lion on the court, and Roaring was the quick and tricky and suddenly savage unicorn. They rested when it stood at one set each.

“The walls of the court are especially resonant,” Abel Roaring said then. “I believe that, from the remembering-transparencies that form the deep patinas of these walls, I would be able to recreate a complete game played here in some past time. There would not merely be the pok pok pok of the racquets hitting the ball and the powk powk powk of the ball hitting the walls, there would be everything of sight or sound or smell. There would be the rumpledness and hard-breathing of the players and the smell of sweat and adrenaline, there would be the voices and the grunts, there'd be the sunlight warming the courts, there'd be the crows on wobbly wings coming to investigate the sound of the volleys. Ah, there'd even be the bead of sweat on the lip of one of the players.”

“Would it be possible to analyze that drop of sweat, Abel?” Henry Kemp asked.

“That's asking a lot. Yes, even that might be possible.”

“How is it that your players would be reproduced full of movement and life and the corpse of your young lady lacked the life spark?”

“No, no, the corpse was much more authentic. The reproduction of the game here would still be a picture, a solid, three-dimension moving picture in sight and sound and smell. I could not interfere with the players in the animated picture. I could not touch them, and I could not make them hear my words. But the corpse, I could touch it. It was the more valid. You and I can re-create time sets, Henry. But we cannot enter fully into them. We can picture moments of past time, but we cannot really travel in that past.”

“Luna, I remember what the Walker truck is now,” Roaring told Peter Luna when they were all back in the manor house some time later in the second. “It was an American battery-electric truck made back in the 1920s and before. It would go twenty miles or so. And then, after its batteries had been on charge for quite a few hours, it might run for another twenty miles. It was clean and quiet. But is there something special about your own Walker truck?”

“Yes, there is, Abel. If it hadn't been special, you wouldn't have been able to ride in it from your year to mine.”

“Weren't we in the same year?”

“Peter, Peter,” Annabella said, “wherever your damned time-satellite is, whyever did you build it here?”

“This is the place I live in and love, that's why. I built my time-cliff here because I wanted it here. Does not Henry Kemp build his fabrications in his own territory?”

“Henry, dear Henry,” Rowena said. “You're an evocative builder. You're a caveman drawing pictures on the stone walls of a cave. But you draw better than you deserve to. Your homeo-magic (for that's what all of us deal in) will work. When we do go out on the hunt, very soon now, we will find that the ‘animals’ are alive and genuine and infinitely detailed. Aye, and we'll find that the people (for it is really the people in animistic masks that you draw) are masterworks of living detail.

“You can build, Henry, and Abel Roaring can project solid representations from old photographs taken by stones; but are the productions of either of you anything more than 3-D pictures?”

“3-D pictures, 3-D smells, 3-D sounds, Rowena,” Roaring said, “and I'm not sure that primary life itself is more than that. Or is there something in life that is not recorded in even the most sophisticated pictures?

“What if, within the next stasis-second or so, we do achieve time travel? Or what if we only believe that we have achieved it, and we are mistaken in that belief? What if it is only a truer-than-life séance, conducted in a sunshiny summer noontime rather than in a darkened evening room? But then, if we push it too far, may not life itself be only the mottled fruit of a garish séance conducted by larger but perhaps not more noble entities?”

“Peter, when you died here that first time, were we five persons here with you?”

“This is still that first time,” Peter Luna said, “and I am still a fraction of a second away from my first and only death. But yes, there is an underlay of you, a premonition of you, but dim. Shadows and voices only in the premonition. But I recognized all of you from them when you came here.”

“Peter, in your time-stasis somewhere in the past, in our past anyhow, how are you familiar with the things we have published in our own time, and other things that would be in your future?” Farquharson asked.

“Oh, I get things delivered to me by the World Courier Service (‘No Questions asked, Messages Carried Everywhere and Everywhen’),” Peter Luna said.

“Then does the World Courier Service have a time-shuttle of its own?”

“ ‘Other sheep I have who are not of this fold. Them also — ’, I forget just how it goes in scripture. And the motto of the World Courier Service should be amended to ‘No questions asked, and no questions answered either’. I suppose they do have a time-shuttle of some sort. We seldom stumble over anything where somebody has not previously stumbled. But they seem to put their gadget to very limited use. They haven't opened the great portals, nor have I myself done it before I am terminated here. I hope that you five will be able to throw them open, with the impetus I am able to give you. Ah, the semi-stasis is crammed full. It's about to burst.”

“What's it crammed full of, Peter?” Annabella asked.

“Of clotted dreams, Annabella. And that's rather your own specialty.”

5

Time Reversal — In theoretical physics, mathematical operation of replacing the expression for time with its negative in formulas or equations so that they describe an event in which time runs backwards or all the motions are reversed. A resultant formula is said to be time-reversal invariant, which implies that the same laws of physics apply equally well in both situations… and that the flow of time does not have any naturally preferred direction

… In any case, there is a more general inversion operation that does leave the physical laws invariant, called in its mathematical expression the CPT theorem. It comprises time reversal T combined with interchange of antiparticles and particles, called charge conjugation C, and a mirror-reflection or inversion of space, called parity reversal P. When all these are performed simultaneously, the resultant process or interaction is indistinguishable from the original.

 — Encyclopaedia Britannica

“Oh, that's too simplistic,” Annabella MacBean growled. “The CPT theorem leaves out something. Maybe it's the RS or Rank Superstition Factor. Oh, I was arguing back against an old definition. I get absent-minded.

“The dreams aren't clotted, Peter Luna. It's just that I have such a clotted time trying to explain them. The dreams I speak of in my work are the entire accumulation of the human affair, and I've found no instruction that they must be reviewed for only one direction.”

They were having a sort of party there in the biggest of the dining rooms, and Annabella MacBean had baked a Death-Day Cake for Peter Luna. There was nothing morbid about this. Luna himself was quite willing to be gone, if he could be sure that these five time attempters were able to handle the legacy that he was leaving them.

“I'll be out of this pantomime, out of this token shadowland, and I'll be in the main show,” Luna said. “But it has been very pleasant knowing you five people, even if for less than five seconds.”

“Oh, Peter, this is part of the main show,” Annabella insisted. “It's at least the first act of it. I think it's a full show, five or seven acts at least, and at the end of each of them we die and are then reborn on a more vasty plane. But there aren't any skimpy acts in our main show; surely the first act isn't; and it's criminal for us to skimp any part of it. We must range forward and backward through the act we are living in; we must learn every direction and dimension of it. We have an obligation to understand and to explore, in every way. Life is made up of this compacted emotion and experience and happiness, and if we cut ourselves off from any dimension of it then we live the less. We must unclot it and open it all up. The ‘Road to Yesterday’ must be one of the opened roads, or we are the less for it.”

“It's rather good cake,” Peter Luna said as he took a forkful of his own Death-Day Cake.

“For a rather good guy,” Annabella told him.

“I'm curious about the corniest touch of all, Luna,” Ethan Farquharson said. “Did it, does it, will the clock really stop at the moment of your death? Gah, that sounds like something in a murder mystery from back around — ”

“From back around the present year of 1928, Ethan? Yes, I've arranged that the clock should stop at the very moment of my death. The clock is parallel to my own living aura and it has a bascule coil in it; and it stops when my aura expands and then collapses and extinguishes itself. It isn't a very difficult trick. If you'd think a moment, Ethan, you'd see that you could do it yourself.”

“Not a difficult trick, friend Peter, but corny. In you, though, it's likeable.”

“I keep remembering something about throwing a dead or dying cat through a ring of fire,” Abel Roaring said. “It's in some old witches' rite for time travel.”

“The cat through the burning hoop, yes, it's another form of my favorite rank superstition. They have it topologically backwards though. I am the dying cat thrown through the hoop of fire, but the hoop of fire is my own aura; and it is the five of you who will fling yourselves through it. And I am the slave killed so that the traveler may step through his expanded dying aura and be back in time for the length of the slave's life. Yes, it is the rankest of superstitions. Cannot you find it likeable in me?”

“I can and I do,” Abel Roaring said. “But we do not need either dead slave or dead cat. We'll follow that ritual, though, that all things may be fulfilled. What we have to know now, Luna, is where we can find your time-satellite? Where is it, Peter, where is it?”

“The clock has stopped,” Peter Luna said with a sort of pleasure. “So I'm in the last second of my life. The clock moved by one-second jumps and it will not move by less. I felt it flick off.

“You five have slightly different ways of phrasing your go-backs, the ‘clotted dream break-out’, the ‘naked ghost impasse’, the ‘intuition as enabler process’, the ‘build a world and make it live schematic’, the ‘time is a pile of recorded transparencies reconstructions’; but the mathematics that all of you have worked out are almost identical, which is to say that they are nearly enough correct to work. There are cautions, of course. How many cautions is a man able to give in the last second of his life? You could enter false worlds that never existed if your reconstructions are too subjective. But you are five correctives to each other in this. You could be an abrasive on the past as some conscienceless travelers are, but you five are surprisingly good people and you should avoid those errors.”

“The time-satellite, where is it?” Abel Roaring asked. “Tell us where it is now, Peter, now, or everything else is in vain.”

“Oh, you're inside the satellite. All of us are. The entire estate of Moonwick is a time-satellite. You are all back in the year 1928, many years before your births. You are beyond the shoal, and you have clear sailing now. The ‘Road to Yesterday’ is wide open to you. ‘You will draw water joyfully from the springs of salvation’ as scripture says; and it is good to journey back a bit nearer to our well-springs. There are at least five rather furtive and sleazy persons already on the time-roads. Let you five be of a better kind. You could have taken the time-road five seconds ago, of course, but I desired your company for this little while.”

“We've surely crammed a lot into these five seconds,” Rowena said. “Ah, those long horseback rides with Ethan!”

“We played golf, Rowena,” Ethan Farquharson said.

“And exploring those limestone caves in the north banks with Henry!” Annabella smiled. “How could we have done so much in such a short while?”

“Annabella, we didn't find any caves. But we found mooring holes in the stones where boats used to moor when the banks were the shore of the Gulf of Lions.”

“Was all of it subjective then, Peter Luna?” Abel Roaring asked.

“Not all, but a lot of it. It's hard to cram such a great amount of objective happenings into five seconds. I'm rather proud of this time-satellite. It's more than a million times as large as any time-satellite built or attempted by anyone else. This is one of those rare cases where it's easier to build large than to build small. The house itself here will be pulled down or somehow destroyed within a year or two, so I've been told. But the estate can still be called into service as a time-satellite whenever an instructed one calls. I have sensed that one of you has an aura-amplifier. Which of you?”

“But of course, I'm the one who has it, dear Peter,” Rowena Charteris smiled. “I wouldn't be caught dead without one. You others are very robust and have robust auras. But mine has always needed reinforcing.”

“One other thing, Luna,” Henry Kemp said. “It's rather a delicate thing to ask, but what do we do with your body if you really do die in this second?”

“Leave it, guys, leave it. Don't worry about it. My doctor has an appointment with me here this noontime. He'll be here in just five minutes, for he's an absolutely punctual man. Doctors are used to certifying dead people. And I drew up and signed all sorts of papers with my lawyer just one week ago.

“Oh, I'm stricken! Death will come almost instantaneously now, but it won't seem so on our slow-jog time. Time here will return to normal with my death though, to a normally-moving 1928 mid-summer day.

“Ah, I cloud over! What are these things around me? Five shadows, five voices? I knew them for a while, but now they dim out.”

The aura of Peter Luna was quite visible, aided by the aura-amplifier of Rowena Charteris. It was a quivering and quaking loop.

It expanded suddenly, and the five persons stepped through it. It collapsed and extinguished itself then, and Peter Luna was dead.

And five happy-sad time-achievers went with lively step down the ‘Road to Yesterday’. They could have gone down it five seconds before this, but it does no harm to fulfill a ritual even when it is rank superstition.

Unique Adventure Gone

Not long ago, a major disaster happened to mankind.

Or else, it was a rather droll non-happening.

Something was reported to be lost, but the name of that something doesn't seem to mean anything at all.

A group of top computers has made this statement about the event or non-event:

‘If there wasn't any such thing, it probably didn't happen. And since all indicators are sharply up, it sounds more like an anti-disaster than a disaster.

‘There was something about dangerous wild dogs also, but this may have been an unrelated matter.’

Here is a completely unverified account of what might have happened:

“There's whole mountains of luck and accommodation in the recent falling of events,” Susan Pfeil said. “It's like that old song:

‘Never saw the sun / Shining so bright.

Never saw things / Going so right.’

“Whatever is going on, it's working. Whatever was wrong, it's cured itself. All of a sudden, the world is in wonderful case. In just about three months it's well, and nobody can remember it ever being well before. There is plentitude, there is health, there is unity, there is unanimity. A single giant step has been taken, and we stand where we never stood before.”

“Do you like it, Susan?” Ray Sharpstone asked her.

“No, not very well. But I know that I should like it. My father, a sort of fox, ate sour grapes, so my own teeth are on edge. But I can see how almost everybody else likes it. Yes, and I can see how almost everybody else is right.”

There were about a dozen of them who ate and talked together most days in O'Brian's Roast-Beef Noonery, a bar and grill, ‘the place untouched by the vulgar world outside’. Well, the world had touched O'Brian's considerably in the last three months, but O'Brian's was the better for it. The roast beef had never been so good. O'Brian had been able to raise the amount of beef in his roast beef from twelve to fifteen percent, all because the world was going so right in every way. And the flavor had been perfected. Anything can be brought to near perfection by single-minded effort. But single-mindedness was something quite new.

“God in his paradise may have roast beef as good as this,” Morris Hatchel said. “As good, maybe, but not better.

“Do you like the way things are going, Morris?” Helen Monarch asked him.

“Why should I not like it? The blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk, the hungry are filled, and the poor have the single-minded gospel preached to them. But no, Helen, I don't like it as well as I should. Everything we might ask for has been given to us. But I've the feeling that some small things that we've forgotten to ask for have been withheld.”

“I'm of two minds about all of it myself,” Dominic Tort said. And as soon as he said that he knew that he shouldn't have. There was a forbidden phrase there somewhere. A buzzer like an old burglar alarm sounded in the air above his head. Then, after no more than a minute, two official-looking people came and took Dominic away.

The other eleven of them continued to sit there for a while, uneasy and even a little bit angry. It was because of things like that that some of them did not quite like the way things were going.

But nobody could argue that the affairs of the world were not going well under the new, single-minded system. The people who had passed into the new single-mindedness had an unusual appearance though. For one thing, they were completely blank-eyed.

The single-minded approach had been going on for several years. It had been going on for several decades with small groups, but it was only quite recently that it had really caught fire. Now, for the last three months, it had gone public, and it had quickly solved all the knottier problems that had been plaguing the world.

‘There was never much wrong with the world except a little confusion in the minds of its dominant fauna. The recent mutation to single-mindedness has cleared away that confusion.’

‘There was never much wrong with the governments of the world except divided authority and its attendant complexity. This has been cured by the institution of Monarchy which is total simplification of government. Why didn't somebody think of Monarchy before? It works perfectly.’

‘There was never much wrong with the production and distribution in the world except divided aims and divided interest. Corporate single-mindedness has erased the divisions and maximized the efficiency.’

‘A person can run faster when unburdened than he can when carrying a heavy load. This is so obvious that we cannot see why nobody understood it before. Divisiveness or doubleness-of-mind was a heavy burden that all persons carried until recently. Now most of the persons have gotten rid of that burden.’

Those were some of the Analects of the new, single-minded credo. Well, they were all true, of course. And yet a few persons disliked having their noses rubbed too brusquely in that obviousness. And others of the Analects seemed a little bit doubtful when looked at sideways.

“ ‘A person can run faster on one leg than he can on two or more legs’ is a hard saying, an Analect that gives me trouble,” Jim Hickory remarked. “It's a stumbler.”

“It may not be literally true,” Lynne Einstein told him. “Or it may not have been true until quite recently. So many things are true for the first time lately. Yet it does express a single and splendid truth — that single-mindedness must be carried into every area of life. I wish I weren't one of the ‘Tardy’ ones. I still can't appreciate very much of the big change.”

There were about nine of them who ate and talked together most days in O'Brian's Roast-Beef Noonery. O'Brian's now had the best roast beef in the world, but some of the group suffered nostalgia for the days when it hadn't been quite so good. Some of the group suffered quite a few nostalgias now.

“I am in total admiration of the whole complex of improvement, however it is brought about,” Charles Singletree said, “but odd images keep sliding out of the other half of my mind, out of the scheduled-for deactivation half of it. I remember, from the days when I studied Photuris Entomology, about the species of blind fireflies who flashed in unison by the millions, covering extensive slopes and valleys with their waves of pulsating light at night. How did they do it, since none of them could see its own light, or that of the others? How do the, ah, ‘new people’, the single-minded people do such marvels, since by definition they do not know they are doing them?”

“It isn't much fun being ‘Tardies’ who are out of everything,” Jonquil Eerie said. “We Tardies can, so far, see the new developments from the outside only. That is why we're always so wrong about them. It seems, to my own obstructed vision, that the new ‘great ones’ are performing all their mental and cosmic prodigies in their sleep. It seems that they are a sleep-walking and a sleep-living people now. But how can they perform such wonders when they are virtually asleep? Can a person design a ‘new concept’ three-hundred-story building, down to its last fluid detail, in his sleep, and not even know that he's doing it?”

“He can, yes, since he does, since many of them do,” Albert Whitelight said. “If computers perform mental marvels without being conscious, why cannot people do the same? But I myself have second thoughts about these things (‘Second thoughts are infidelities that are as superfluous as they are illegal’ is one of the new Analects of today), I myself have second thoughts about the Great Ones. I feel that there is something very tinny about the tone of each of those great ones just when he comes to his most majestic stage. Oh damn, there's a buzzer buzzing over my head. But I would never have been able to become a single-minded person in any case.”

“Well, there is a new greatness afoot,” Ray Sharpstone said grudgingly. “The great and single-minded people are performing more and more marvels.”

“But are they enjoying them less?” Maisie Hilary asked in an odd voice.

“I don't know,” Sharpstone admitted. “Oh, that ‘Archaic Smile’! All the great ones wear it now. It's been here before, you know. It may have been here in the beginning. It's the old terra cotta smile, and I suppose that it does indicate enjoyment.”

A couple of guards came then and they looked hard at Sharpstone. But the buzzer was buzzing above the head of Albert Whitelight, so it was Albert that they took away. The buzzing disappeared when they were gone with Albert.

The ‘Tardies’ who were left (and there were only a few thousand diminishing groups of them remaining in the world) always felt a mixture of confusion and anger when another of their members was grabbed off.

There was a little combo playing and singing ‘One-Horn Cow’ verses. The combo was made up of three computers, and it played mostly for other computers who were present in O'Brian's. People didn't care much for music nowadays.

‘The true minds soar intense and narrow

And single-minded as an arrow.

‘They're mighty in their leap.

They're even mighty in their sleep.

‘The one-horned cows rest on their haunches

And are not really very conscious.’

Well yes, one could see how the people wouldn't like those computer ballads much, and yet the new, single-minded people had begun to take them up. The thing about ‘One-Horn Cow’ music was that it hadn't any counterpoint at all.

‘The Sleepers shine at give and take,

And guard the world from quirk and quake.

But someone ought to be awake.

‘They climb the mountains tall and steep

In active and untroubled sleep

It makes my very flesh to creep.’

There were about three of them who ate and talked together in O'Brian's Roast-Beef Noonery in those latter days. All the groups of ‘Tardies’ had been losing members. Most of the groups had disappeared completely. The three final persons of this group were Jonquil Eerie, Jim Hickory, and Charley Singletree. The group had lost members both upward and outward, and it looked as though Charley Singletree would be moving upward from the group.

He had the appearance of the new mutation on him. And he had a lot of that tinniness of tone that most of the clangers show. He was hardly aware of his surroundings, and still less did he seem aware of the other two.

As to Jonquil, it looked as though she would never mutate. She would be a ‘Tardy’ till the very end of her. And Jim Hickory, he could go either way.

The roast beef in O'Brian's, though perfect, was not at all good today. Dog had been substituted for beef in it. Well, beyond the idea of it, there was nothing wrong with eating ‘dog’. But what had ‘dog’ been eating lately?

“It is all right,” Jim Hickory said. “It'll put hair on your chest. And on your tongue.”

“I really didn't want it either place,” Jonquil grimaced. “It all becomes very funny though, screamingly funny. I wonder whether the elevated ones, the great ones, find it all funny?”

“No, they, we do not,” Charley Singletree rattled in his new tinny voice. “The sickness of humor was part of the sickness of consciousness, and it has been swept away with it. You must have no traffic with humor, person. ‘Funniness’ was a thing of no substance, and now it will be gone.”

“Not for me,” Jonquil insisted. “It's still funny that the great ones do things and don't know that they're doing them. Even the act, they must do it without knowing that they're doing it. What's the fun in that? Oh, it isn't supposed to be fun, is it, now that fun will be gone.”

“You misunderstand it, person,” Charley Singletree said. “The act always contained a strong element of the unconscious, even with people most afflicted with consciousness. Do not feel that people of the giant unconscious are somewhat deficient. No, they, we become as gods. What happens now is that a thin and unwholesome scum named consciousness is swept away from the surface of minds, and the great depths are able to move themselves and be alive again.”

“I still feel that people who don't know what they are doing aren't really doing anything,” Jonquil insisted. “They're not real things. They're not real people.”

“I have been having a series of nightmares about half-people,” Jim Hickory spoke in a worried way. “They are split-down-the-middle people. Each of them has one eye, one ear, half a nose, one arm, one leg. I think my unconscious is trying to show me what the unconscious people are like. They're only half there. They cannot know that they know. They cannot contemplate themselves. If they cannot know themselves, they might as well be someone else. It's a difficult and dismal series of nightmares.”

“Your difficulty, person, is that you are on the outside rather than on the inside of the nightmares,” tinny Charles Singletree said. “You're not supposed to have the nightmare. You're supposed to be the nightmare. Of course all the people of the great unconscious are someone else. They're everybody else. They are the big everybody. Distinction of persons will disappear.”

“Aw unctuous unconscious offal!” Jim Hickory cried in final exasperation. “Who pulled the plug?”

“Yes, who let all the minds in the world go down the drain?” Jonquil asked.

“Down the drain is where they're supposed to go, persons,” Charley Singletree rattled in his tinny voice. “Down the drain into the strong and validly rancid collectivity whose code name is ‘ocean’, down into the teeming monsterness that is the only real existence. We will pull every plug. We will let it all run together.”

“What are the advantages of living in such a sewer, beyond not knowing whether you're alive or dead?” Jim Hickory asked sourly.

“Physical impetus checks run on those recently cured of the disease of consciousness reveal that they will live to be four or five hundred years old despite the damage of the double-minded disease, consciousness, already received,” Charley Singletree recited. “Their children should live to be a thousand years old or even older. The Greek and Norse gods were free of the funky fungus of consciousness after the people had succumbed to it, and quite a few of those old gods are still as alive and unconscious as ever.”

“In Greek statuary, the people always had pupils in their eyes, but the gods did not. The gods were always blank-eyed,” Jonquil said.

“There was a reason for that, person,” Singletree said. (Charles Singletree was, in fact, brother-in-law to Jonquil Eerie, and in normal cases he would have known her name: but now he had begun to mutate, to shed the fetid fungus that was consciousness like a snakeskin in his mind.) “The pupils of an eye particularize and focus. But to focus on any one thing is to insult the Great Everything. Let us all have blank eyes, unfocused and open to everything. I tell you that there is jubilation in the wide halls of the unconscious over this new unchaining from the fetters of consciousness.”

“The unchaining? Yes, the unchaining of iron monsters, as it were,” Hickory said. “I hear the clank and the clangor of them.”

“Wrong reaction, person,” Charley Singletree rattled. “You should not hear the clank and clangor. You should be the clank and clangor, unconsciously, of course.”

“You are wrong, Jim, a little bit,” Jonquil said. “They aren't iron monsters released. They're tin monsters. I wish the combo would stop playing ‘One-Horned Cow’. It's anti-harmony.”

“You misunderstand the ‘one-horned’ symbolism, other person,” Singletree spoke. “The ‘Sad Adventure of Consciousness’, an unpleasantness that lasted no more than seven thousand years, was a sort of response to former dilemmas, a cure that was worse than the sickness. I believe that the solar system passed into a dilemma-cloud a few thousand years ago, but it has passed out of it again now. There are no more dilemmas or other two-horned problems bothering the world now. So we raise one-horned monuments, single-horned for our single-mindedness. We have the Unicorn Tower Institute of Unity as well as the Rhinoceros Palace of Plastic Arts, both built in three days by the efficiency of single-minded people.”

“But the single-minded people don't know that they've built them,” Jonquil objected. “They don't even know that they're single-minded.”

“And the ‘One-Horned Cow’ is our holy hymn,” Singletree finished his explanation. “A two-horned head, of whatever sort, was likely to have a two-pronged or conscious mind inside of it. But now it will all be easy and unopposed, and there will be no bother left in the world.”

“I'm bothered by the bodies lying in the street outside, and by the dogs eating them,” Jonquil interposed.

“Well, persons, perhaps it isn't good for the dogs, from the old viewpoint,” Singletree almost conceded a point. “But the dogs must revert and become feral, and they are doing it. And a gone-feral dog is incomparably more savage than a wolf. Do you know that dogs, to some extent, have shared the sickness of consciousness with people? But they'll soon be cured of that. Ah, goodbye, people, or whatever you are. Yes, I think ‘goodbye’ is the word.”

Then a funny thing happened to Charley Singletree. The pupils of his eyes disappeared. He became as blank-eyed as a stone statue of a Greek god.

“To be awake and conscious is unnatural,” Singletree said in a brisk but unrelated voice. “It's like being broken open and exposed in any interior function. It's obscene. Conscious persons give one a squeamish feeling. Conscious persons stop and contemplate now and then; and contemplation is a great devourer of time and of achievement. And there is something a little bit unclean about contemplation, as there is about all conscious activities.”

Then Charley Singletree ascended, as it were, and left them. Well really he just walked out the front door of the Noonery, but he was on a plane different from that of Jonquil and Jim Hickory.

These two also left the Roast-Beef Noonery after a moment and went out into the streets. There was a new and ragged look to the streets in recent days. Things (it would be an unverified guess to call them ‘creatures’), things that had always been suppressed by the consensus of consciousness were no longer suppressed. The things were in full but queer visibility. The consensus of consciousness had become too weak and rarified to do much public suppressing.

“Jonquil, I've wondered about your surname Eerie,” Jim Hickory said. “Whence have you it?”

“Oh, it's Low Scotch, and it really means ‘lonely’, as in the old song ‘Each lassie sits eerie / lamenting her dearie / the birds of the forest have all flown away’. Well, I am lonely, Jim. So many of our friends have gone over the line and become less than persons! And I cared for them. Isn't this horrible, Jim? And important, and unique, the loss of consciousness by humans? I used to believe that all animals had had it once and that most of them had lost it. But now the people are losing it.”

“Yes, it's the case that only a few of us are still awake in the world, and that we're being shamefully outperformed by the sleep-walkers in every respect. They really have performed wonders in every field in a short time, but they don't know that they've done it,” Jim said with a sort of whisper of fright. “Oh damn, a buzzer! Is it on me or on you?”

“It's on me,” Jonquil sighed. “I thought it was a hornet in my hair at first, but it's a buzzer over me.”

“We can't be sure that this loss or change is unique, or that it will be accounted as important,” Jim Hickory said. “In a week, nobody will even remember what ‘consciousness’ was. If they still have the word, it will mean some weaker and different thing. And other things may have been disappearing along the way and taking their memory with them as they go. We will all forget this thing. But, Oh, Oh, Oh, unlike others I must still remember it for a moment! What a brave, bright, splendid, unique adventure Consciousness was while it lasted, for the short millennia that it lasted!

“Goodbye, entity. There were other words or whatever, but they're all stolen from me now.”

The pupils disappeared from Jim Hickory's eyes; and he ascended, as it were, and left Jonquil Eerie there. Really he ascended by walking away and down a little hill.

Then a couple of unconscious guards, answering the buzzer, came and struck Jonquil down. They didn't know what they were doing, of course, and they failed to kill her; there was something sparky in her that refused to be extinguished too easily.

The feral dogs came to tear her apart and eat her body then. But she was stubbornly conscious right to the very end of it. Aye, in every torn-apart piece she was conscious until the pieces were completely eaten.

According to one report, something named ‘consciousness’ was lost to human persons. But what could it matter if something so trivial was lost?

Some believe that ‘consciousness’ meant something rather brighter and more important until quite recently. But if the old ‘what it meant’ defies definition, then it couldn't have been very important either.

Great Tom Fool

or The Conundrum of the Calais Customhouse Coffers

“Project ‘Shake the Spheres,’ is it?” Dude asked in his reptilian and bumptious voice. He was sensitive to the stigma of being an American-made machine, and he often reacted arrogantly. “I always liked ‘Shake the Cubes’ better. Well, a lot can be done if the corners of the cubes are a bit rounded, and as I am project director…”

“You're droll, Dude,” said Shepherd O'Shire, the Proctor of Happy Braindom Ltd., “but you'll not be put in charge of any project, not ever again. We've learned better than that. You will be a working computer on this project, no more than that. And you will see to it that your two friends, the British and the French machines, will put their tomfoolery aside and work with you with quiet dedication on this job.”

“I smell money connected with this case,” Dude uttered.

“No, there will not be any money at all connected with it,” Shepherd countered. “There is no appropriation at all.”

“A preemptive séance is the only way to get the information out of the dead people,” Lavender Brodie interrupted. (Her name, Brodie, signifies a “precipice”; did you know that?) “Dead people are at a disadvantage anyhow. Put pressure on them, I say. Have them by the ears!”

“I have evidence, in my storage brain downstairs, that there is money connected with this case,” Dude insisted, “and I'm not talking about anything as petty as an appropriation.”

Dude, a clown to his last compensating planetary gear, was present in his “riant giant” mobile form. In this mobile he didn't carry a lot of brains around with him, but he did have quick access to his storage brain.

“And, Lavender,” the machine Dude went on, “a ‘séance’ is only a sitting down, and I have whipped that problem. I can do it now, in this my favorite extension. The giant dragon tail will snap off to let me sit down. I love myself when I solve insoluble problems like that.”

Dude was the only nonhuman member of that learned society, Happy Braindom Ltd., but he had many nonhuman guests at its sessions.

“And yet he's a bit too human for comfort,” Arsene Gopherwood often stated it, “especially when he's in that damned ‘laughing giant-dragon’ costume.”

The human membership of Happy Braindom Ltd. was Shepherd O'Shire, Lavender Brodie, Emery Briton, Byron Verre, and Arsene Gopherwood.

“This is a serious project, Dude,” Shepherd said nervously. “I repeat that there must be no tomfoolery.”

“And yet ‘Tom Fool’ is the contingent name of the person we are investigating.” Dude smiled his meter-long smile. “ ‘Tom Fool and his Polylogues’ will be the title of the investigation.”

“I prefer ‘The Conundrum of the Calais Customhouse Coffers’ for a title,” uttered the French machine Dingo. He had just arrived in his extension of a French Navvy in a striped sweater and a small artist's mustache and beret. “Yes, didn't I get here quickly though! We French are always so prompt. I can aid you all immeasurably on this project. And remember that by ‘Coded Information Storage Time’ I am only three minutes from my backup brain in France.”

“Where's Toff?” Lavender asked. “He always gives a project class. You other two machines only give it performance. I always like class best.”

“He's somewhere near,” Dude uttered. “He's trying to calculate just how late would be properly late in this case. He may be tapping his storage brain in London for some good entry lines.”

“ ‘This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,’ ” Toff intoned as he entered with a jaunty actor's step — 

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in the silver sea,

This Shakespeare, this great Toft yet, “hardy” both,

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

Then Toff fell flat on his face, a planned maneuver. Did you know that the English have their own humor, very subtle? Toff had arrived in his Noël Coward extension. He was Noël to the death, just as he is today. You know that Noël didn't stop wrinkling when he died.

“We work very fast here, kids,” Lavender said. “I am sure that the best format for this will be the séance, and I believe that we had better get the first séance started.”

“Gracious lady, there is no such thing as a workable séance,” the English machine Toff said with clipped finality.

“Listen, you limey junkie, I've been to plenty of séances that worked.”

“There is, however, the ‘deep psychic scan’ which comes through as a ghostly sort of apparition, very like a séance figure in appearance,” Toff admitted. “We are experts on these things. We go to our storage brains for them, and the storage brains produce the ‘scans’ from their bottomless accumulations of data. The psychic scans appear like threads of smoke. They hover, they thicken, they coalesce. And then they speak like séance evocations.”

“Let us not be too pompous about this,” the Proctor of Happy Braindom Ltd., Shepherd O'Shire, instructed them. “A quick-hitting sortie will do us better than a ponderous siege of the problem. All we intend to do is answer all the unanswered questions about old Shakespeare, to clear up all the clouds that have obscured his identity and authorship, to define his significance and depth, and to duplicate his effect if that is possible. Let us go into the lounge and be at our ease now, and we will lay out whatever data we have to consider.”

“Yes, yes, at once.” Dude gawked out of his wide, green-leather dragon mouth. “And these thirteen gentlemen and nine ladies here will also be present for our discussions. In a real way it is they who are motivating the discussions.”

“What? Why? Who are these people?” Shepherd demanded. “Whence did they spring? From under what rocks?”

“I know most of these thirteen gentlemen and nine ladies,” Arsene Gopherwood said, “and I'd recognize them as a type even if I didn't know them individually. They are what is known as publishers' representatives or pub-reps, and they all walk with a canted list because of the weight of the checkbooks they carry.”

“But this is all wrong,” spoke Emery Briton. “Somebody has gulled these bright-eyed people into coming here under a misunderstanding. Don't they know that Computer Romances are about on a par with Nurse Romances? Such things turned out by machines are steady, perhaps, but they are not earth shakers, and they are not in short supply.”

“Gentlemen, ladies, members of Happy Braindom Ltd., do come in and be seated,” Dude uttered in honeyed tones. And then he spoke in a lower tone to the Happy Braindom people only: “Play along with us, fellows. There really is big money connected with this. Look impressed when we refer to the ‘Treasure Chest’ that has already been found and exploited so rewardingly for these four centuries. Look triply impressed when we refer to ‘the other treasure chest,’ three times as large as the first, ten times as heavily laden, a hundred times as wonderful.”

“Sure, we'll play along with you three contraptions,” Proctor Shepherd said. “For about ten minutes we'll play along with you. Now how about letting us see the ‘deep psychic scan’ of Shakespeare himself, the projected data that will look like an attending ghost. We'll put William on the stand, as it were, and question him in depth. If he balks, then we'll turn Lavender loose on him. If he can't answer the questions about himself, then who can answer them?”

They were all seated in the lounge now. This was in the Old Drapers Guild Hall in East Lodestone, which is quite close to London, to Calais, to the Azores, and also to the Americas. Dude, after snapping off his dragon tail, was the last of them to sit down.

“The difficulty, of course, is that Shakespeare is not Shakespeare,” that British machine Toff uttered. “That is to say that the plays and most of the poems were written at least eighty years before they were discovered in an old trunk by the historical Shakespeare.”

“Why do you say this?” the pub-rep Agnes Wankowitz asked.

“The plays nowhere mention America, tobacco, coffee, or tea, things that were having rather conspicuous and exciting reigns during the time of the historical Shakespeare,” Dude said. “But, eighty years earlier, the latter three had not been known at all, and the first of them, the New World, was still referred to as That Spanish Hoax by the English-speaking world. Potatoes likewise are not mentioned in the plays nor known in their time, but eighty years later everybody was eating that exciting new food, potatoes.”

“And the pronunciation is the real giveaway,” the machine Toff said. “Historical pronunciations can be deduced by the rhymes of the times. In the plays we find hither rhyming with weather, eats rhyming with gets, eat rhyming with great, ear rhyming with hair, have rhyming with grave, love rhyming with prove and with move and with Jove (all were likely pronounced as we pronounce Jove today). We find propose rhyming with lose, gone rhyming with stone and also with moan, swear rhyming with were, tongue rhyming with wrong, gone rhyming with alone, granting rhyming with wanting. Ah, that's all the instances that I have with me right now.”

“Do you have other instances somewhere else?” asked a pub-rep named Donald Dranker, a top negotiator.

“Yes, I have about five hundred other instances in my storage-brain in London,” Toff uttered. “But the point is that none of these rhymes rang true at the time when the historical Shakespeare burst upon the scene like a funky comet; and all of them would have rhymed true eighty or a hundred years earlier. Leaving the Shakespearean corpus aside, the documented sound changes of the English language in the sixteenth century are clear enough. It is only the displaced Shakespearean evidence that ever confused the history. And one play, Henry the Eighth, has to be pulled out. It isn't a part of the original Shakespearean corpus. It really did appear as a new thing eighty years after the others. Oh, it's long been known that there was something very fishy about the accepted time setting of the plays.”

“I am almost convinced,” said the pub-rep named Stanley Klumpstone.

“Let's have the first apparition!” cried Lavender Brodie of the Happy Braindom bunch. “Put him in the witness box and put the screws to him!”

Crackling lightning and obscure thunder! The iron hinges of time groaning as they swing open! Three callow young machines appraising what effect their devices were having on the people!

And then a personable and intelligent looking, though somewhat harried, man was in their midst there in the Happy Braindom Lounge.

Yes, he was the historical Shakespeare, though his nose was more bumpy and his face more of a mug than is shown in the accepted portraits. Whether he was a deep psychic scan or a called-up ghost was a matter of definition.

“Though I have admired you within reason, yet I've always wanted to put you under the power of my hands and tongue to see whether you couldn't be shaped into something better,” Lavender declared to the apparition. “Now I will just follow my own peculiar line of questioning and see whether — ”

“ 'Twill do you no good, Dame Lavender,” the apparition spoke. “I am not here consciously.” (But a twinkle in its eye showed that it lied a little.) “I am not such a thing as could be conscious. I am — what is it that those droll machines that extracted me call me? — I am a deep psychic scan of all existing and extrapolative data of one William Shakespeare. Now let me say my say and do not interrupt me.”

Oh, they'd interrupt him, of course, all of them. “I smell concatenated trickery here,” Lavender sputtered, and other people sensed other irregularities. But here are the words of the apparition as he followed his preemptive data while at the same time rolling with and responding to the interruptions.

“I am William the son of John the glovemaker of Stratford in Warwickshire. But at the same time I am Tom. I am, I believe, the second focus of the ellipse that is the Tom Manifestation, for it was I who obtained the masterworks of that manifestation (or something between one-fifth and one-sixth of them) and made them public. I have been called Tom Rymer, Tom the Piper's Son (my father John did play the pipes better than any other man in Stratford), and Tom Fool. And indeed I have been all of these. I believe there were about eighty years between the two foci, between Giant Tom and my corporeal self.

“Do I call myself an upstart? Somebody asks me the question. Aye, I do. I was more than an upstart. I was an upsurge, an upswarm. I knew my own limits (they were not low), but I let no one else know them.

“Who was Tom Fool, you ask, and how did I come to possess one of his treasure chests? I believe that Tom Fool was not one but several men, that he was really Tom Foule or Tom Crowd. Several powerful and talented men, contemporaries and acquaintances, but too different to be friends or allies, were somehow joined in an amazing tomfoolery.

“The only trait or talent that these several powerful men had in common was an unusually masterful way of writing in the Latin and the English languages. But their collaborations in the tomfoolery were likely involuntary and posthumous. The semi-secret, small-audience masterworks of all these were somehow collected by a man of comprehensive taste (he may even have been the last surviving of those powerful Toms) and hidden away, from reaching English hands, in the customhouse at Calais. They were deposited there in a greater and a lesser chest. It was the lesser chest that I was able to obtain.

“But get this straight: Those Masterworks were not always the worse for passing through my hands. I knew how ‘To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,… To… add another hue unto the rainbow,’ as 'tis writ in lines of my own that I added to one of the masterworks, lines that are somehow misquoted in your day, so I'm told.

“And please note one other thing. The boards-play Henry the Eighth was not from the chest. It was written half by me and half by a friend of mine. We wished to test our own powers against those of the mysterious writer or writers of the masterworks from the chest, against the powers of Great Tom Fool. And we did not disgrace ourselves in the test.

“No, I cannot explain more than I know. The treasure chests had been signed into the customhouse of Calais under the title ‘Tom Fool — His Polylogues.’ I believe that it was so titled more in humor than in ignorance. Though a monologue means a speech of one person, and a dialogue means speeches of several persons, a polylogue could only humorously mean the speeches of quite some several persons. The word would rather mean a ‘much talking’ or a ‘garrulousness.’ And I did have great profit out of the lesser of those garrulous old chests, those polylogic coffers.

“Can I not make a guess as to the true identity of Tom Fool or Tom Crowd, you ask me? Aye, I can and I will. I was never shy about making educated guesses.

“Sometimes it takes history several centuries to coalesce several apparently different persons into one truly valid person. Thus great Caesar really was a ‘triumvirate,’ a uniting of three apparently different men, though the manner of it, in his case, is still unexplained in history. Men of great power do sometimes produce fetches or doubles or appearances of themselves without wishing to do so. We know from Holy Scripture that the name Thomas means ‘twin.’ I believe that our Tom Fool was a double twin, that he was one overflowing man with several attendant spooks who were only aspects of himself. And I believe that these spooks or aspects could and did have independent names and careers; and could even survive, for a while, the bodily death of the prime man. It had to be a full man to compose those masterworks which I later acquired and made known to the world. It had to be an absolutely overflowing (into several different vessels) man to compose those still greater and much more numerous masterworks that are in that larger chest that I had not gold enough to ransom and acquire and make known.”

“Is somebody having us?” Emery Briton of the Happy Braindom bunch mumbled. “Who do we know who makes up stories of that flavor?”

“Oh, I don't think so, Em,” Byron Verre of the same Braindom said. “I believe this is the real Shakespeare, as well as he can be called up, spinning his real guesses on the subject.”

And the real Shakespeare, as well as he could be called up, continued: “Certainly I had seven hidden years in my life, as this lady over here asks me. 'Twas in those hidden years, and not in the open years, that I found the Treasure Chests.

“Was I burned at the stake? someone asks. Or beheaded? Or stabbed to death? No, not I, though I have smelled the smell of all those deaths as coming from Great Tom Fool of the masterworks. But I died with my boots off, and in bed. Or rather in a little day bed in the kitchen whence I could see the larch trees out of the window, and the green garden, and the duck pond.

“ — and the duck pond, and the duck pond, and the duck pond…”

“That is the end of this psychic scan conjured up out of my data storage brain in London,” said Toff, the extension of the talented British machine. “I wonder how to turn the fellow off. Oh, he turned himself off.”

The psychic depth scan of the historical Shakespeare fell silent and disappeared at the same time.

“Oh, I'll open for a million dollars. I'd be ashamed to mention a lesser sum,” a pub-rep named Donald Waxley-Williams spoke with feigned indifference.

“What are you talking about, interloper?” Shepherd O'Shire, the Proctor of Happy Braindom Ltd., demanded.

“It wouldn't be fair to open the auction before the end of our presentation,” Dude uttered. “Not fair to us.”

Then there appeared the scan or spook of a man who radiated talent, though not real intelligence or real power. Several of the viewers believed that they recognized him from the portrait that Fliccius had done of him. But there was much less of the fellow in the scan-flesh or the spook-flesh than in the old portrait. The painter had filled the empty places of the man with his own invention.

The apparition began to speak in a nervous and jerky manner:

“I am Tom, the younger son of a small English gentleman of the Midlands. I was the most presuming upstart of all of them. I was not born to such poverty as two of the others, but I had great poverty inside myself.

“But I rose, and not by intelligence or strength. I rose by fury. Listen, I sent God Himself into a state of shock and recoil from which He never recovered. But the details of my life show a rising order that was not in myself. I belonged to Jesus College at Cambridge. I had two wives, one of them English and one of them German, and I had to give both of them up. My resentment at these unwilling renunciations almost set fire to the realm. I became Archbishop of Canterbury. Great power was in my hands for some years, and yet it was always a sly power.

“Yes, though I wonder how you came to ask such a question — yes I did have seven hidden years in my life. No man can be properly mysterious without them.

“I was really a sort of jeweler, a lapidary who did wonderful and fiery things, mostly in miniature. But I speak in analogy. I did that exquisite work in words and not in stones. I am possibly the finest stylist who ever wrote in Latin — or in English. And I produced two sorts of masterworks. One of them has been published in millions and millions of copies for hundreds of years now. How ironical that it should be called The Common Book. And my other masterwork was the Scenario for England. I wrote it in the form of many sly directives and instructions and letters to key persons. I wrote it, and England lived it out, followed my Scenario.

“The other things? What other things are you asking about? Oh, the plays and the poetries. They were not bad at all. They were really the best things of their sort ever done in this world. Yes, I suppose I should count them among my masterworks.

“They were found in coffers in Calais, you say? Yes, I always had a Calais connection. In our century, Calais was the place. In your century, I suppose, such things would be lodged in a Swiss bank rather than in the Calais customhouse.

“What end did I have? But it is not ended. There is still a tall score to settle for that. They burned me at the stake; that was my bodily end. I hated it, every horrible second of it. I hated it, hated it, hated it, hated it…”

The spook-scan fell silent and then disappeared.

“Oh, I believe that I like the gadget more and more as we go along,” pub-rep George Hebert said. “I'll bid ten million dollars for it just to get the ball to rolling.”

“Why are we back to this meaningless jabber about money?” Proctor Shepherd O'Shire asked.

“Wait till the end of the presentation, folks,” uttered that French machine Dingo. “Things will get richer and richer.”

Then, after a bit, another scan-spook appeared. Several of the viewers believed that they recognized him from the portrait that Hans Holbein the Younger had done of him. But there was much more to the fellow, in scan-flesh or spook-flesh, than there had been in the old picture. The painter had not been able to crowd near all the power of this man into his portrait. Then the apparition began to speak in sparse words, but with a richly toned voice. In scope that voice was equal to a short orchestra at least:

“I am Tom, the son of a beerhouse keeper in Putney. Aye, you know the disreputable place, on the south bank of the Thames a little above London.

“I was a vagabond, then a mercenary soldier in Italy and other places, then a moneylender. For only a short time did I lend money to small men. Then I loaned it to dukes and princes and kings, and I held kingdoms in pawn. Yes, I was a baseborn upstart, an upstart of the upstarts.

“Yes, I did have seven hidden years in my life. May they remain hidden!

“I was much in the company of intelligent men, of the most intelligent generation there has ever been from the beginning of the world until now. But in all my life I never met another man so intelligent as myself. I had a lust for magnificence, but at the same time I had a lust for plainness. And the second lust won. I had a burning compassion, but I also had a burning cruelty. And the second fire consumed the first. I was accounted a complex man, but my genius in administration lay in my being able to simplify things.

“ 'Twas I who looted the monasteries and all the abbey lands of England. I manipulated realms. I was a man of power. I became a baron, and Lord Great Chamberlain, and Earl of Essex. The king was like whiting in my hands, for a while. Yes, for a while.

“I had private excellences also. I had as fine a singing voice as there was in all England. And I had a masterly way with words. The plays you ask? The entertainments? How do you queer people and queer machines (I can hardly tell some of you from the others) know about them? Yes, I wrote golden entertainments. They were loaded full of the greatness of human people. I wonder what became of them? I left instructions for disposing of all my other belongings, but I left no instructions for disposing of the entertainments. I had kept them in a carpenter's tool chest.

“No, no, I was not burned at the stake. How could such an error have crept into the plain account of my life? I died on the scaffold, beheaded. I had always worked the hell side of the road, along with the king. It was over mere details of our hellish advocacy that we fell out and he had me killed. But I rather startled them all when I declared for the full faith on the scaffold. No, of course I did not recant my declaration. Has such a lie been told of me? I died in the full faith. And so I saved my tarred and gnawed and besmirched and marinated and brine-pickled (but immortal and spacious) soul. And yet I find that the temporary (though the centuries of it seem tedious), tall flames of Purgatory bother me more than they would a less corpulent man.

“How much do I believe the plays, the entertainments, are worth? you ask. Oh, they are priceless, utterly priceless. And I do not speak lightly there!”

Then Big Tom from Putney, the powerful and many-worlded man, faded away.

“What a consummate gadget it all is!” Efraim McSweeny, a pub-rep, cried in creamy ecstasy. “What good copy we can build on these imaginative foundations! I'll jump the bid to fifty million.”

“I do not understand this money madness at all,” Shepherd O'Shire the Proctor growled. “It is Tom-Fool money indeed.”

And then still another scan-spook came like smoke, thickened, and took form. And several of those present believed that they recognized this newest apparition from a picture John Melo had done of him.

The arrival spoke with a pleasantly ringing voice, almost like bells, like laughing bells:

“I am Tom, the son of a rich lawyer. An upstart? you ask. No, not I. I was ‘to the manner born,’ a phrase of my own that is usually mishandled. But perhaps there was nowhere for me to go except down, after such a start.

“No, no, I did not come from Putney. Why would anybody come from Putney? Mostly I lived in Chelsea.

“Did I say that the king was like whiting in my hands? I don't remember saying it, and it wasn't so. Am I the same spook who was here just two moments ago? you ask. Really, I don't know. Where I am now we have neither time nor sequence. Oh, surely I'd remember such curious folks as you if I'd been here just two moments ago! I visit here singly in my person, but you may well be seeing me split or doubled for all that I know.

“I tried to mold the king, yes, but I failed at it. I led him like a horse to the water, but I could not make him drink — that's a phrase of my own.

“Of what accomplishment in my life am I most proud? Oh, of bringing Greek to newest Europe and helping to unlock its sciences and arts and treasures. I was one of no more than twenty men in Western Europe whom you might have called a Greek scholar without laughing. But really I am most proud of standing against a tide when most people were not able to withstand it.

“Oh, certainly I was a man of power. I was Lord Chancellor of England, no mean office. Did I have seven hidden years in my life? you ask me. No. There was never anything hidden about me. It's true that I did have seven very obscure years, but that was only the way my tide of fortune ebbed for a while. Well, so one of you asks with some exasperation, did I not at least have a mysterious journey during my obscure years? Yes, I did that, several of them, very long and very mysterious. And I will not make them less mysterious by telling you about them.

“Aye, I did write plays or dialogues. I gave the name polylogues to them to indicate that they were more deep-textured and more action-hinged than other dialogues. And I gave the name to them because it had a comical sound. Yes, I did polylogues and entertainments and enjoyments. They were for very small audiences, so small that every person present would be given one or two sets of lines to read. Somehow they made a busy life seem less busy. I left a cofferful of the pleasantries. Yes, very likely they did go to Calais with some of my other pleasant things. As Lord Chancellor of England, I naturally kept my more lively papers at the customhouse at Calais in France. In our century, many of us kept things at that customhouse.

“Do I believe that I had the finest singing voice in all England? you ask. How odd and how probing of you to ask such a question. Yes, I do believe it, for it was true. I was quite vain about it.

“Yes, I recognize the occupation of some of you present. You are publishers' bagmen (ah, and women) are you not? I'd recognize you more easily perhaps than would some of my other aspects.

“Am I now, or have I ever been Shakespeare? one of you bagmen asks me. I heard the name Shakespeare only on one evening in my life. When I was a young man we played a game of looking into a glass globe and asking of the spirits who lived in it such questions as ‘Who is walking on my grave a century hence?’ ‘Who is wearing my mantle and speaking with my voice?’ ‘Who is eating my fruit and breathing with my breath?’ And when I asked these questions of the glass globe, the name Shakespeare was spoken back to me clearly.

“Are the polylogues, the plays, truly worthy and remarkable? you ask. Yes, they are. There have never been such remarkable devices since pen first learned to speak with human voice. They are so rich that it is like not being able to see the field for the pearls buried in it. Bagmen, look to your bags!

“Was I burned at the stake? No, no. There's some confusion if the records show that I was. I was beheaded on the scaffold as a man of distinction would be. I was not burned at the stake like a meanling. And I did not, as prelude to my death, say the cute things that are attributed to me. Gah, they cloy!

“Of course I died in the faith. And of course I did not recant. Had I recanted, I would not have died then. Perhaps I'd be living yet.”

Then the apparition faded out. Well, it faded out about ninety-nine percent. And it apologized for hanging around, in wispy words as easy as a breeze:

“I'll be quiet here, and hardly to be seen. But I must bide here a while to satisfy my own curiosity. I must learn the price of him who is priced, since I am a part of that him. Continue, people and metallurgies, as if I were not here, for I'm here but slightly.”

“Some proof, some coherent proof,” the pub-rep named Marjory Manmangler sang out. “When can we see and examine the ‘greater’ treasure chest that is supposedly in the Calais customhouse yet?”

“Oh, we can have a scan of it here almost immediately,” Toff the talented British machine stated. “But whether we recover the great coffer or not does not really matter, except for the carefully staged drama of its recovery and presentation; and that could be better done at another location with other props. The contents of the great coffer have all been copied. And a copy of that copy now resides in my data brain in London.

“And the texts themselves will not matter, except that Tanglewood Press, if the successful bidder, would probably build a large shrine with an eternal flame to house them. But you folks would put your Harrisburg Hacks to rewriting them anyhow. What do you call them — The Harrisburg Nine?”

“The Harrisburg Nineteen now. We've expanded,” pub-rep Manmangler said, “and we call them revisionists, not hacks.”

“I'll bid a cool hundred-million dollars.” Pub-rep Enox Eberly spoke solidly. “This penny-ante approach is so tedious.”

“Wait till the presentation is finished, folks,” Dude uttered. “Let's be fair, to us.”

“Dude,” Arsene Gopherwood of the Happy Braindom group whispered to that mechanism-in-residence, “there's a proverb: don't wait till the iron gets too damned hot before you strike. And three shells and one pea are enough for any con game. More shells will confuse it.”

“They won't confuse us, pea-shooter human,” the French machine Dingo stated. “Do you think you can teach us how to suck eggs?”

“Oh, there isn't any way they can overdo it,” said pub-rep Sheila McGuntry. “Let the little machines shovel it on. It's super-gadget all the way anyhow. They aren't missing a trick. The great man must have a humble beginning, or he must at least be interiorly humble. And the seven hidden years of the life are essential, with the presumption that they were spent imbibing knowledge in High Tibet or in the Kingdom of Prester John on the Blue Nile or some other fulfilling place. And the cruel execution at the end is essential also. So is it that the great man must have the best singing voice in England. And the archiest of the archetypes is the business of the treasure chests in the Calais customhouse, that dark and sinister building that is prototypically identical with Aladdin's Cave. It gives us so much to work with. Oh, don't change a line of it. It's perfect!”

“We will proceed.” Dude spoke grandly, and it was as if a curtain went up for one more act of the polylogue drama. Then a rather grandiose scan-spook-person solidified in flowing scarlet and gold robes. Some of the viewers believed that they recognized him from the painting Sampson Strong had done of him a few centuries before. And the appearance spoke with firm regality:

“I am Tom, the son of a hog butcher of Ipswich in Suffolk. One can't be more baseborn than that. But I rose, by my pleasant and urbane ruthlessness, as one admirer of mine had worded it.

“No, I was not at Jesus College at Cambridge. I was at Magdalen College at Oxford. Get your facts straight, people. Archbishop of Canterbury? No. No. I was Archbishop of York. Yes, it's true that I was Lord Chancellor of England. Who wasn't, in those decades of flux? And I was also a cardinal of the Church. And twice I reached for the papacy, but it escaped my hand. I thought then that the Holy Ghost was mistaken to pass over me, but now I see that He may have been correct.

“Did I have the best singing voice in England? you ask. And you laugh as you ask it. Yes I did. I had the best. And many of my high contemporaries had wonderful voices.

“Yes, I wrote great things, both in Latin and in English. My known works of hand — but I believe that you may be referring to the chests full of livelinesses, and full of lives. Have they been found? That's delightful. 'Twill be like an extra springtime to the whole Earth if you make them public now. They'll still be a fresh breath after the centuries.

“What words are you trying to put into my mouth, little machine? What thoughts into my electronically assembled head? ‘Impress on them that the works are worth tons of kale’ — is that it? Is the contingent translation correct? Of course they are worth many tons of kale. I assume that kale is still the name of the Flemish cabbage.

“Were there seven hidden years in my life? you ask. I would guess that you have somehow woven the seven-hidden-years motif into a fiction about the excellent entertainments, about the plays stored in great chests in — in Calais. Where else? And I can hear the tinny thunder of the plot you're putting together. Why, I believe that it is our old friend the Spanish Prisoner Mystery! It's come back to visit us. Somebody look outdoors and see whether it's springtime. The Spanish Prisoner Mystery always blooms in the springtime. Oh yes, there were seven hidden years in my life. Perhaps they weren't hidden well enough, for they caught up with me and ended my life finally.

“No, I did not burn at the stake, nor was I either hanged or beheaded. An executioner's dagger found me at Leicester on my way to London to stand trial for treason. I had been taken sick at Leicester and was dying. But my dying had to be interrupted by the irregular execution to make it official. This is not generally known, that I was murdered and did not die of sickness.

“I must go now, though I'd like to stay for the end of it. I salute you, happy shills and thrice-happy gills. And some day, on the other side, when we are all finally sanctified, we will talk about such things over rum of the Indies. I myself was the most adept confidence man in England and perhaps in all Europe. I pulled some of the most towering cons ever. Ah, those were the days, those were the days! But you little machines aren't bad at it at all.”

And then that fourth and final aspect of Great Tom Fool faded away.

“Dude,” Proctor Shepherd O'Shire ordered sharply, “project immediately the four historical portraits done by Fliccius, Hans Holbein the Younger, John Melo, and Sampson Strong, of what are possibly the several aspects of Tom Fool. I want to compare them.”

“Quite impossible, Shep,” Dude snapped. “They are not available. Perhaps I could obtain them after a few weeks, after an exhausting search.”

“You lie, Dude,” Shepherd accused. “You have them available here and now. You projected them subliminally when each of the scan-persons appeared. Lavender, I recall when we were programming Dude, you were the one who said ‘What's the use of having a machine that can't lie a little bit?’ But Dude lies too easily.”

Dude projected the four pictures together for one one-hundredth of a second.

“A little bit longer projection, Dude,” Shepherd ordered. So Dude projected them for a little bit longer, for .010101 of a second. That still wasn't quite long enough, but there was a good possibility that the four pictures were all of the same man, the same man perhaps not wearing exactly the same flesh in every case, the same man who created his own dumfounding resonances that walked and talked and strode as great men among the great. And the pub-reps caught all the implications and were impressed.

“Gentlemen and ladies, we may as well begin,” Dude stated. He stood up and snapped his dragon tail back on and strode to the fore.

“Why, it's a great confidence game that our machines are playing on these credulous people.” Shepherd O'Shire spoke to Arsene Gopherwood in admiration. “It's well done, in a crude way. The four greatest Englishmen of their century, Tom Cranmer, Tom Cromwell, Tom More, Tom Wolsey — they do add up to more than themselves, to Tom Foule, to Tom Crowd. Yes, those four great contemporaries do make a convincing Tom Fool. And it may have taken somebody of the scope of this Amalgamated Great Tom to be the Shakespeare herein expanded by more than a hundred new plays. But it's so weakly verified, Arsene. The Happy Braindom institution can't allow it to pass without more verification. The gills do come avidly to it though. And how could you, Arsene, the unofficial con man of the Braindom you are, be left on the outside of such a clever con pulled by mere machines?”

“I'll go a flat billion dollars for all rights to the Shakespearean and pseudo-Shakespearean works in the great chest in the Calais customhouse,” said pub-rep Kendell Kimberly. “But put the homegrown small fry outside first.”

“What makes you think I am on the outside of this con, Shepherd?” Arsene Gopherwood asked. “To be left on the outside of a con, that wouldn't be like me at all. Ah, Shep, and you others, they mean you when they speak of the homegrown small fry. Out, Shep. Out, the rest of you Happy Braindomers!”

“Don't push me out, Arsene,” Shepherd O'Shire howled. “I'll inform, I'll peach, I'll grass, I'll stool! Gills, gills, don't you know that you're being gilled? Don't you understand?”

“Don't you understand, voicey man?” pub-rep Greta Samuelsdatter asked with a sneer. “We want to go as high as we can. This is for prestige and glory. Who'd want to win a bid at a half-billion dollars when, with proper management, he could win it at two or three billion? I bid two billion. And the announced figure, of course, will be double the real figure. Get those poor twits out of here, Dude!”

The twits, all the members of Happy Braindom Ltd. except Arsene Gopherwood, were being pushed out of the auction lounge. They fought hard to stay, but they were pushed out harder. Shepherd O'Shire, Lavender Brodie, Emery Briton, Byron Verre, they were plain thrown out of that place, the lounge of their own Happy Braindom.

“Three billion dollars,” pub-rep George Hebert bid. “There's a lot of ridiculous anomalies in the cover story, but our script writers can fix up anything.”

“I'll hear, I'll hear how it goes!” Lavender was squalling. “I'll listen at the keyhole.”

“If you do, Dame Lavender, remember that there is nothing harder to reconstitute than a vaporized ear,” said that French machine Dingo. “Out, Dame, out!”

“Four billion dollars,” pub-rep Efraim McSweeny bid.

Even if they weren't very good, a hundred or more “new-and-genuine” Shakespearean plays, presented to the world with a whanging cover story that could be smoothed in the rough places, were bound to bring a pretty good price.

“Five billion dollars,” pub-rep Agnes Wankowitz bid.

But all the Happy Braindom people except Arsene Gopherwood had been locked out of there, out into the exterior darkness. And there was weeping and gnashing of teeth.

The Last Astronomer

A new worry for High Rider Charles-Wain began that morning when he stepped on a weighing machine and got a tune and a print-out. The tune was Winterset's ‘Funeral March’, and the print out read:

“You're one and ninety kilograms.

Oh sing a roundelay!

No more'll you have to give the damns,

For you will die today.”

But High Rider didn't much want to die that day. “The machine is off a kilogram too,” he growled. He crumpled up the print-out and flung it on the red grass. And thereupon the machine gave out with that ear-wrenching wail that is called the ‘poor man's siren’. It signals that it has another communication for the same person. High Rider took it from the slot, and the new print out read:

“Pick up that print-out from the grass, you jasper. Were you raised in a swinery?”

High Rider threw that print-out on the grass too. Then he quickly took the third one from the slot to cut off the ‘poor man's siren’ in mid-squawl. This print-out read only “Oaf ”, and High Rider threw it on the grass with the other two and ambled off to try to leave the noise behind him. But he was crosswise with the Red World today, and with all the worlds.

Ah, you have heard of the persons who have had their whole world crumble under them. It's a desolate and damnable feeling. But High Rider Charles-Wain had had his approximately ten billion billion billion (10²⁷) worlds crumble under him. And the small handful of worlds that were left were all perverse. Certainly Red World was. That weighing machine, for instance — 

The weighing machine wasn't a Red World idea or invention at all. It was Earthian in its origin. But almost as soon as the things were built on Red World, the smudged Martian spirit took over. There was not any mechanism for printing anything except the weight. There wasn't any provision for the machines to give personal rimed messages. All that smart stuff had an irrational origin. There sure wasn't any mechanism for that horrible howling called the ‘poor man's siren’.

“It's little guys that like to holler that get into them,” one Martian red-neck explained. “Nah, you can't see them in there. It's just their holler that gets in. The rest of them stays outside.”

On Red World there was no clear line between machines and animals and people. An automobile might argue with people and even buck and try to throw them out. And yet there were other cases of automobiles starting up and plunging into canals and saving people from drowning. There wasn't any mechanism for these things. There was only the irrational thing called ‘Spirit of Automobile’ that came to inhabit each auto.

Mars, the Red World, was somewhat irrational by old standards. But what was ‘rational’ nowadays?

“ ‘Rational’ is a little man with big eye-glasses going out with a micronomer shorter than his finger to measure the whole outdoors,” another Martian red-neck said once. “He gets owl dirt on his glasses, but he thinks that the owl dirt on them is really far galaxies. So he measures the gravity of that owl dirt and calculates how much it will bend space. That is ‘rational’.”

The reason for High Rider having worlds to the number of ten to the twenty-seventh power collapse under him was that he had been an astronomer, and all those worlds collapsed when astronomy collapsed. The bursting of the ‘Great Astronomical Bubble’ had been funny, of course. But it wasn't as funny to some of the old and intransigent astronomers as it was to other people. Some of them died of the shock of that collapse. And they continued to die at an unseemly rate.

When the profession and passion of High Rider Charles-Wain, the old classical astronomy, collapsed, that bereaved astronomer fell into a despondency that was almost worse than death. Well, he just couldn't face the derision on Earth. None of the old astronomers could. So some of them came to Mars where the ‘people’ were kinder.

Kinder? The Martians? Oh yes, they were very apologetic about anything that even seemed to give offense.

“No, no, that wasn't ourselves snickering,” those funny folks would lie. “That was the Snicker Weeds snickering.” But the Snicker Weeds only snickered when some Martian was within snicker-shot of them.

But there was an illusion of kindness and compassion here, and High Rider found a bit of solace as he walked through the pink meadows and listened to the pleasant whistles of the canal boats.

He loved the canal boats, and he had several times lived on one of them since his coming to Mars. He remembered with pleasure one night when he and a canal boat family had had a very large fish for dinner. No, no, you misunderstand. The huge fish sat at table with them and ate with them, manipulating the Martian finger sticks as well as any person could. He was a big striped fellow and an interesting talker in spite of the fish-lipped manner of his pronunciation. There was an easy camaraderie among all the creatures of Red World.

Quite a few Earth people came to Mars to die. Death on Red World didn't seem so final, or at least it didn't seem so sharp and sudden as on Earth. And the distance to Mars, once mankind had been liberated from the old astronomy and the old mathematics, was not at all great. It was an easy trip in a variety of scheduled and unscheduled vehicles.

“This life is too pleasant to leave,” High Rider mumbled on that day when he had received his death notice. “The taste of gall and disillusionment is bearable here so long as the sunlight is still golden and the fields are living scarlet and the waters are bright green. And I will not admit that a weighing machine can predict the day of my death. That would be coarse superstition. It's a fact that in the dozen cases I know about the predictions have come true, but that is only coarse coincidence. It's true that the Martians see death on me, but I bet I wouldn't have to die if I really decided that I didn't want to. To die is the only honorable thing for a discredited astronomer to do, of course, but I was never one to insist on my honor in other things. I suppose I really want to die though, or I wouldn't be doing it.”

High Rider wasn't really very old — an even hundred years by Earth time; and he belonged to the first generation that was supposed to average a hundred and fifty years. But, yes, the Martians could see death on him.

They smiled at him this day and they encouraged him with such hearty sayings as “The last day of a life should be the best day of it. Enjoy it, enjoy it! How we envy you!”

The collapse, several years before this, of the classical Hubbleian Astronomy should have surprised no one. It was built on nothing but extrapolations from very faint smudges of light, on angles smaller than that subtended by a beebee or a birdshot on Earth's moon as observed from Earth, on mathematics too coarse to deal with really tenuous operations, and on an open violation of both common-sense and divine economy.

It was really Occam's Razor (“If that man had such a sharp razor, why is he wearing a full beard in the only picture we have of him?”) that cut the old astronomy to pieces. What is the use of ten billion galaxies if one galaxy will do? What is the use of ten billion suns in a galaxy if fifty suns will do? What is the use of thirty billion light years of distance-time if thirty light years will do?

It was the Razor that did it in. And it was nine basic mathematical errors, one each in the calculations of Herschel, Bessel, Petzval, Dreyer, Max Wolf, Einstein, De Sitter, Slipher, and Hubble that did it in. “Every grade school boy could point out those errors today, but why did we not see them immediately?” High Rider Charles-Wain asked the sorrel-colored hills of Mars. “Of course all of us astronomers copied each other unthinkingly, but such trunk-to-tail following is characteristic of every elite of every species, not just of the old astronomers of Earth. Oh, why did we never doubt? Why did we never cross-check with common sense and with different-viewpoint observation? They've been laughing at us for several painful years now, and they'll not stop till the last one of us is gone. I'm about the last of us, I guess, and I'm about gone.”

And the old astronomy had collapsed also because of all the living anomalies that took the easy rationality out of the cosmos. These living anomalies became undeniable as soon as Earthians got to Mars and the other planets. One of those living anomalies landed beside High Rider Charles-Wain right now, and he began to talk to the old astronomer.

“I knew that this was your last day and I wanted to see you one final time,” this anomaly said. “I was afraid I would be too late and wouldn't be able to find you. There are dozens of burial meadows you could be plodding to, but I guessed it would be the ‘Star-Flower Burial Meadow’. I finished the regatta just after dawn this morning, and I'm bone tired and wing tired; but I wanted to see you again. You're the last of them, here on Red World at least.”

This person who cared enough to look up High Rider for a last visit was a Bird Man who had just finished the Phobos Regatta that day. The regatta was about 3,700 miles or 5,900 kilometers. It had taken nine Martian days of flying. It was a stark physical test. Yes, the Bird Men flew from the Martian Moon Phobos to the Planet Mars. They slept and ate on the wing, but provisions were brought to them by little provisioning boats.

“How did you do in the Regatta?” High Rider asked.

“Oh, I finished three hundred and ninth out of a flight of four hundred and seventeen. But anyone who finishes at all wins a great personal victory. Remember when you Earthians used to say that creatures couldn't fly between planets, or even from a moon to a planet, because there was no ‘air’ out there? Remember when they said that creatures could not make the flights because the ‘distances’ were so great? That was funny. But the funniest of all was your believing that there were no canals on Mars when anyone with a cheap telescope could see ten thousand of them. Your theories got in the way of plain facts.”

“Our theories did not allow for howling anomalies, and there are thousands of them on the half-dozen worlds we now know. And you, Bird Man, are about as feathery an anomaly as any of them.”

“I suppose so,” the Bird Man said, “yet I sometimes find myself wishing that the grotesque old theories of Earthians had been true. When I was a boy and a young man (and by all the red meadows of Mars I'm still a young man) I loved to read the ‘Astronomy Fiction’ of Earth. I still say that there was no harm in it. It tickled the imagination. But they say that those old pathological astronomers of Earth really believed in their astronomy. And some of the Earth people believed in their astronomers. Only a few oddities like the great Charles Fort knew that your astronomy was total hokum. Fort has always been popular on Mars. Fort and Edgar Rice Burroughs. It's said that Burroughs was never on Mars, but I do not understand how he was able to describe us so accurately if he was never here. But tell me, Last One, did you yourself believe in the old astronomy? And did you ever stop believing in it?”

“A part of me stopped believing in it when I and a dozen others really did travel to the end of the universe and found it so heart-breakingly near. It was barely thirty light years out from the solar system that we came to the absolute end of the universe. And on that trip we discovered that there was something wrong with all our calculations and with our concept of light years. The trip that should have taken us forty years each way took us only two years each way. And yet we were thirty light years out by all the tenets of our astronomy. It was the absolute end of the universe, as I say. There were no stars beyond. There were not even any reflections of stars. Our imagined billions-times-billions universe had been no more than a house of mirrors reflecting and distorting the same few lights over and over again thousands of times. But we had come to the very end where even the mirroring failed. Do you know how near the end we came? We pushed into it until our ship stalled. One man got out on the hull and seemed to push his arm into the total nothingness. But when he withdrew from it, he didn't have that arm. Listen, that arm wasn't bitten off or destroyed. We examined it all too thoroughly. There was no blood, no bruising, not even a scar. It was as if he had been born without that arm. Once a thing goes into the nothingness, it becomes the case that it has never been. So, I suppose, it is with the old astronomy. But do you know what's at the end of the worlds? Nothing, nothing, nothing! That's what's at the end of the worlds! And that ‘nothing’ is too close to us, a billion times too close.”

“Of course I know it, old man. We've always known it. It's in our songs.”

“We don't have billions and billions of galaxies! We have only a small fraction of one galaxy. Oh, it's intolerable! It shuts us up in too small a box! It diminishes me. It diminishes all of us. It even diminishes God.”

“Easy, old man, easy! You have been through both the short anguish and the long anguish. And now, happily, you have come to the last day of your frustration.”

“But I'm not sure that I want to die.”

“Of course you want to die. Everyone wants to die when his time comes. I think you should walk down this series of meadows towards the major canal exchange. It's all so pretty there, and so apt for you!”

“Yes, yes, I am impelled to walk in that direction. Thank you, Bird Man. This day I have received good words from you, an anomaly in whom in my younger wits I could not have believed.”

High Rider Charles-Wain, in the last afternoon of his life, walked with a light step through a series of lush and reddish meadows, and he found himself whistling that old tune ‘A Land Two Meters Long The Destined Home For Me’. He was met by two Martian girls who had been waiting for him. Grandfather of anomalies, those girls! Oh hell, they had ears like the Mars Maids in old Burroughs novels!

“But I wouldn't want them any other way,” High Rider said. “It is strangely beautiful here. Were you two waiting for me?”

“Oh sure,” one of the Mars Maids said. “We dig a grave for you here because we like you.”

“And because it's an easy digging place,” the second Mars Maid said.

“And because we will take the nodal enzymes and hormones and plasmas from your liver and gallbladder and pineal and other glands,” the first Maid said. “We can get nine dollars red money for that stuff. That's the fun part.”

“How did you know I'd come here?” High Rider asked.

“Oh, this is a burial meadow. You have come here like the Elephant to the China Shop, as your own Earthian saying has it. And this is the right burial meadow for you.”

Yes, High Rider felt (those two funny-eared girls were digging the best grave you ever saw, and just for him) that this was the right burial meadow for him. The star plants, the star flowers were growing and glowing beautifully there, two by two, always two by two. But no, there was a singleton, just one singleton among the paired flowers.

“I wish, if it were possible — ” High Rider began. And those two girls were extracting nodal energies and hormones and plasmas and other things from the internal gathering places in the High Rider body. Of course it hurt, but how else could those girls earn nine dollars red so easily.

“If it were possible, I wish that I could live into the late evening and see stars again,” High Rider was finally able to say out of his deep emotion.

“Oh, we'll bury you with the stalks of the star flower plants driven into each of your eyes,” one of the girls said. “Then they will grow out of you, and it will be the case that you will be seeing the star flowers, the stars forever.”

“Oh, that's why they grow so beautifully two by two,” High Rider cried with a certain delight. “Each pair is growing out of the two eyes of somebody who loved the stars. And yet, amid all the paired beauties, there is only one singleton.”

“Oh, we liked him too,” the other girl said. The two girls laid High Rider down in the bottom of his grave then. “He was an Earth astronomer like you, and like you he was impelled to come to the beautiful ‘Star Burial Meadows’ to die and be buried. His named was One-Eyed McGonigal.”

“I knew him well,” High Rider said. “It is a pleasure to be buried among old friends. Will it hurt, the stalks of the plants being driven into my eyes?”

One of the girls was sharpening two star flower stalks with a brass hatchet.

“Oh yes, it will hurt for about a year,” she said. “That shows that the plants are really growing out of you. That shows that you'll be able to see the stars forever. Isn't that nice?”

“Tell me when I'm dead,” High Rider mumbled.

The girl hammered the two stalks into his eyes. Bam! Bam!

“You're dead now,” she said. “This part is fun. Stars for the star man! How ritual can you get!”

High Rider's eyes hurt excruciatingly. That showed that the beautiful star flower plants were already growing out of them, out of him, that he was a part of those stunning little stars. And the Mars Maids were shoveling aromatic red dirt onto him to confirm the arrangement.

Wonderful, wonderful!

Pine Castle

“Why can't we have more light in here?” Stephen Nekros complained. “They keep these barrooms too dark. And the walls are too rough. I've got splinters in my hands from them, or from something.”

“No light at all is light enough,” came the soft whisky voice of Molly O'Lolly, the unemployed ‘Daring Aviatrix.’ Her real name was Molly Reed. Molly O'Lolly was only her ‘sky name,’ her trick-flyer name. “None of us looks like much now when we're down on our luck, so forget about more light. Forget the rough walls too, Stephen. Walls are to prevent things getting in. It's only incidental that they prevent your getting out. The ‘Fear of Falling’ is what drives me and haunts me all the time. It's the first of the seven archetypal human fears. It's brought me to the rottenest job in the world, that of an out-of-work trick-flyer, but I wouldn't trade it for anything. I have to get sky-high before I go up sky-high. I live in dread and I'll die in dread, but I wouldn't have it any other way.”

“There ought to be more light,” Stephen said again. “I can't even strike a match, my hands are so clammy.”

“The second of the archetypal human fears is the ‘Fear of Snakes,’ especially of the rampant poisonous snakes such as the diamondback rattlers and the hooded cobras,” said Jude Bushmaster, the unemployed snake-handler. “And most fearful of all is meeting one of them in a narrow place where there's no chance of retreating. I'm afraid of all my snakes, but I wouldn't have it any other way. Danger is my whole life, as it will be my death. I'm especially afraid of Diamond Johnny, the biggest of my diamondback rattlers. I have to shoot him with a sedation dart on days when he's especially rampant. But when he wakes up from the sedation he's twice as mean and angry as before. Anybody who's ever caught a whiff of Diamond Johnny would recognize him even in the dark. I'm going to rid myself of him, though. I see a chance where I can get rid of two snakes with one trick. It's tricks like that that make it all worthwhile.”

“I have a weight on my chest,” Stephen Nekros said doggedly, “and I have an even heavier weight on my mind. I've got to get out of this dark dump and go home. What's the name of this damned tavern anyhow?”

“Pine Castle,” said Claud Noyer. “It's the narrowest Castle in the world. I don't know why I come to this place either. It's too confining. Ah, yes, Stephen, they do keep it awful dark here. My nomination for the third of the archetypal human fears is the ‘Fear of Drowning or Other Suffocation.’ And I would have it otherwise if I could.” Claud Noyer, a remarkably powerful man, had been a professional wrestler. But now he could take part only in secret and unauthorized bouts. Two different men had died when wrestling with him, one in the throes of the Japanese Sleep Hold, and the other one in the grip of the Night-Time Choker. But both of these holds are phoney. They look punishing, but nobody could be harmed by one of them. Not unless it was done on purpose. Nevertheless, two opponents of Claud Noyer had died of strangulation. And two other persons had mysteriously died of choking while Claud was present.

“Why can't we have more light in here?” Stephen Nekros complained again. And then he fell very very silent as though he were also choking. And he was choking, on a recollection and realization. “These six persons I am sitting with in the Pine Castle Tavern,” he said to himself in utter silence, “are the very six persons that I have wronged more than any others in the world. They all wish me dead, and they are all capable of effecting that wish. What am I doing with this raffish bunch tonight anyhow? I broke with them all some time ago. I will be very very quiet now, and perhaps I can slip away in the dark.”

“Fear of the dead, especially of the walking and stalking dead, is the fourth of the archetypal human fears,” the magician Gregory the Great boomed in the hollow dark. “Oh, the clammy fear of the stalking dead! But it is better to be the stalker than the one stalked.”

The weight on the chest of Stephen Nekros was somehow familiar and quite unpleasant. The weight on his mind consisted of the fact that he had forgotten how he had got into his present vague situation, and the abysmal chilling fear that he might remember it.

“The fifth of the archetypal human fears is the fear of fire, the fear of burning to death, and the concurrent fear of burning beyond death,” came the purple voice of Niccolo Chort, popularly known as Nick the Devil. “The fear of final Hell and damnation death. I hear regularly from the other side, you know. ‘Hell is Hell’ say my erstwhile friends who are there. It's pretty bad, and it fulfills all the fears.” The mildly sinister Niccolo was the one whom Stephen Nekros had harmed worst of all.

“The sixth of the archetypal human fears is the fear of being murdered,” sounded the sandpaper voice of Snake-Eyes Simpson out of the narrow-walled dark. Snake-Eyes was a gambler. He was also a moneylender. In either of these guises he would follow a man all the way to Hell to collect a debt. Snake-Eyes kept a rough pine box in his shabby office, and he sometimes made clients sign for loans or debts on the rough cover of that big, though narrow, box. “You might as well make one sign in blood,” one client had spoken in weary humor. “If people had any blood left they'd not come to me,” Snake-Eyes had answered. “And you know something, this box is lots rougher on the inside than on the outside.”

“What's the seventh of the archetypal human fears, Stephen Nekros?” Molly O'Lolly the daring aviatrix asked in her soft whisky voice. The reason that Molly was unemployed was that Stephen Nekros had seized her airplane for a debt. And when Stephen had then loaned it to a younger rival daring aviatrix to get her started in the trick flying business, Molly had become somewhat sullen about the affair. “What is the seventh fear, Stephen?”

“I don't know,” he said miserably, but perhaps he did know. And in a very soft voice he spoke to ears that didn't belong to any of the six: “Easy, Johnny, easy. I won't move if you won't.”

“Wake up, Stephen, and tell us of the seventh fear,” the hollow voice of the down-on-his-luck magician Gregory the Great boomed. “You've napped long enough. You've been hoping that this is only a bad dream, and so it is. But don't fly your hopes too high because of that. The wakening will be much worse than the dream. Tell the fear, Stephen, and we promise we won't listen. We're not here, you know, except in your head. None of us is here.”

“Except Diamond Johnny,” said the voice of Jude Bushmaster the unemployed snake-handler. The reason that some of these persons were unemployed was that Stephen Nekros had seized for debts a small carnival to which they belonged. “Johnny is really here, and you recognize him. Aye, anyone who's ever had a whiff of him will recognize him even in the dark. Did I ever tell you, Stephen, that I know a trick to kill two snakes at once? Oh, both are sedated, in a way. Then we stuff one of them in Snake-Eyes's box, and we set the other one in the middle of his chest. What's the seventh fear, Stephen?”

“Waking up buried alive in a pine-box coffin!” Stephen Nekros croaked, waking up from his troubled dream. And he remembered the six doing him to ‘premature’ death by the strangling hands of Claud Noyer. He knew that he was six feet under. He knew also that the weight on his chest was the biggest of Jude Bushmaster's diamondback rattlesnakes, Diamond Johnny, nine feet of coiled length and forty pounds of him, cranky at being tranquilized, waking up angry.

Both of them woke up at the same time, buried alive six feet under in the narrow coffin named Pine Castle. They both woke up furious and horrified, and striking out madly.

One-Eyed Mocking-Bird

Tobias Lamb, though not well liked, was held in high esteem by the scientific community. There were many of us who hardly liked him because — well, it was because his tricks and illusions sometimes shattered us completely. “And besides,” Alwin Garvie said of him, “he's an unlikely man.”

Ah well, admit it, we were afraid of him. He was a harsh mocker; and yet he had a pleasant strain (or it was meant to be pleasant) in him. He was a hard driver. If he didn't actually hold a whip in his hand when he was working on a project, there was always a whip in his voice. He was avid, even feverish, to drive a project to success; and yet he didn't seem at all hungry for personal glory. When Paul Kradzesh stole the credit for the Crisley Communicator from him, we really feared for Kradzesh's safety and life when Big Toby should react to being robbed of that glory. But Tobias Lamb didn't react to it at all. Whether credit should redound to him or to another was less than nothing to Toby.

And now he was talking about the new project that had hold of him and of us all.

“The thing is to get a few nations accultured and thriving, and then to give the inventive tilt to them. And then we will let them invent. As we are looking for rapid invention, we will put a time limit on their inventiveness; the time it takes a rifle bullet to go four kilometers. In fact, I'll put one of the nations inside a rifle bullet here and shoot it off.”

“What in the world for?” Francie Jack asked. She had always made an effort to understand Big Toby, but she hadn't understood him any better than had the rest of us.

“Toby, you have a bad case of anthropomorphism, of putting things into human terms and analogies,” Lucius Cockburn chided the big lout Toby. “Nations that can only barely be guessed at with an electronic microscope are not true nations.”

“If they are made up of thousands of individuals of a kindred, and if they are able to live, elect, and proclaim a destiny, then they are nations,” Toby insisted. “What for, Francie? For a test and an experiment and an opportunity. I will really be shooting at that mocking-bird singing so imperfectly on that bough. But whether I miss or hit the bird, the rifle bullet will still crash into that rock cliff four kilometers across the valley, and it will destroy itself and the small nation that I will have put inside it. It will do this unless the individuals of that nation shall wake to consciousness, form local governments, expand to a limited universal government, develop science and technology, form groups of empowered geniuses to apply that science and technology, learn to navigate the bullet, avoid destruction against the cliff; and return it here in quest of their origin, all within two-and-a-half seconds of time. I have not set it an impossible task. It is a short-aeon nation made up of miniaturized intelligences, and the concept of delay would not be possible to it.”

“The ‘Reacting Jelly’ does react amazingly fast sometimes,” Paul Kradzesh admitted, “and most times it does not react at all. We have the package to perform miracles. We have the activator to go into the package. But it performs irregularly and randomly. We must induce uniformity. And, Toby, it is silly to refer to a supersmall glob as a nation.”

“No, it is a sanity which in present company seems to be limited to myself,” Big Tobias Lamb said stubbornly. This harsh and clumsy man was held in puzzled esteem by the scientific community. He was admitted, yes, and there were even some persons who tried to like him. But did he conform to Elton Cabot's dictum of the ideal scientist? — 

‘Serene, handsome with inner and outer perfection, into every field of the mind, something of a poet, totally cultured, completely free of hokum, very much of the philosopher, everything of the humanist.’

It seemed that most of those were things that Toby Lamb was not.

But Big Toby, physically powerful and exceptionally ugly, loutish and impossible, completely ambiguous in his own group; he was a cult hero of several other groups, though it puzzled us how those culties ever even heard of him.

Toby made noises, it was too much to call it music. He made these sounds on supposed reproductions of very ancient instruments, according to probably faulty interpretations of ancient musical notations. He made these noises on clanging iron ‘harps’ and on howling flutes. And persons of the ‘rattling rock’ sort had intruded audio pickups into Toby's big studios and they had turned his sounds into cult things. A clanging, always a clanging, that was the ‘Toby Sound’.

It was so typical of him that, in his loud talking, when he banged his palms together for emphasis, he did not make the ‘clap’ sound that other persons make. He had a ‘clang’.

And Big Toby painted strong and grotesque pictures. Perhaps ‘painted’ is the wrong word since it is not known how he achieved them; but he ‘effected’ powerful and vulgar and disturbing pictures. He called them his ‘Cainite Space Ship’ series. They were wrenching and a little bit distasteful, but they were also funny.

“You are a mocker,” Lucius Cockburn told Toby often.

“Oh certainly. There are all too few of us. What we want are mockers who at the same time have total faith. I want that in the director of every project and every public board and government. And I want it in the short-aeon inventive realms and in the miniaturized intelligences that make them up. But deliver us from the mocker who sings too sweetly.”

Tobias Lamb had other activities which, in any other man, would seem to contribute to Elton Cabot's dictum of the ideal scientist. Well yes, he was ‘into every field of the mind’; in that much he conformed to it. But how clumsily he was into many of those fields! He wrote several books. But his New Physics for the Middle-School Children was not well accepted. It was forced off the market. He seemed to be teaching physics by means of a hairy sort of mythology. Even his mathematics was more myth than math. And his Not For Everybody Book, well, it was not for everybody.

But now Big Toby was teasing an invisible glob of activated molecular syndrome into a microscopic hole drilled into the lead-shot part of a rifle bullet. He used a complicated microscope with a variety of eye-pieces impinging on his eyes; and he fingered a keyboard that created and controlled finger-shaped electrical fields to nudge the small glob into the hole and settle it there.

“Principality and Nation, in you go!” Big Toby spoke to the little glob that was quite a few orders below bare-eye visibility. “Your history and your destiny begin right now. This is the first instant of your Heroic Age. Be Heroic then, which is the same thing as being inventive.”

“Why all the attention to that particular smudge that you are putting into a place difficult to study?” Alwin Garvie asked. “Should not all of the smudges have equal attention?”

“You folks talk to the other smudges,” Toby said. “I'll talk to this one.”

“Well, Creager over at the ‘Evolvate Science Conglomerate’ does talk with much success to his reactive molecular jelly,” Paul Kradzesh admitted, “but I don't believe that he tells it such fairy tales as you tell yours.”

“He should!” Toby Lamb barked harshly. “Perhaps you don't understand Faerie at all. When it is finally discovered (which is to say ‘When its lair is finally unroofed’) it will be found to possess thousands and thousands of annals. Ah, heroic history, primordial inventiveness, ages of greatness! I wish that one of you would unroof that complex. I really haven't the time. I believe that there is a stunning impetus for invention to be found in it.”

“Well, there is dispute as to just how we should regard the organizing facility of these reactive molecular groupings,” Lucius Cockburn said.

“Why dispute?” Toby asked with that laughing clatter in his voice. “Regard them as realms. Regard them as Empires in their heroic period of discovery and invention. They will prefer to be so regarded.”

“I smell tyranny in the wee realm you're establishing, Toby,” Alwin Garvie bantered.

“You smell right, hump-nosed man. The strong impetus of outright tyranny! There is nothing like it for a realm that is at the same time a space ship.”

“Your idea here seems to jibe a bit with your pictures in the ‘Cainite Space Ship’ series. If the units (if there are units in one of those globs) of a reacting molecular group should have faces, I would have to imagine their faces like those of the people or slobs in the ‘Cainite Space Ship’. Yourself, of course, have one of those faces, Toby.”

“Yes. And they should have faces, for there is a tight and almost total analogy between our old flight and the flight that I'll shoot off in just a moment. Damn that mocking-bird! A mocker that will not mock must be changed, or extinguished.”

“Even the worst of analogies will stretch only so far, Toby,” Alwin said. “You are not seriously suggesting that — ”

“Yes, I am seriously and joyously suggesting that a group to which, in a way, I belonged did make a space voyage parallel to this one, did make it in a little less than eight thousand years of elapsed time. That's about equivalent to the time of two-and-a-half seconds for a short-aeon nation. There is the order of size to be considered, direct cubical relations, inverse squares, angular velocity, and the relationship of tight-turning to elapsed time and to the pace of technology development. Yes, our eight thousand years was a very close equivalent to their two-and-a-half seconds, if in fact they do learn to navigate in time to bring the bullet back at all. Oh, we had a better start than they have, but we may not have had as good an inclination and indoctrination. We already had a city established on Earth, no mean city; so we had come a respectable ways in corporate organization. We had metallurgy. We had been working bronze and iron for a full generation. A dozen of us shot ourselves off, half accidentally and half on purpose, in a sealed sphere.”

“You were there some eight thousand years ago, Toby?” Francie Jack asked.

“I say ‘we’, for I have a racial memory of it. All of you were born yesterday. I was born several days before yesterday. But we had to learn a lot: to orient ourselves in space, to develop a propulsion power from nothing while traveling at something more than escape velocity in cramped quarters in the dark. We had to develop from less than nothing a purpose and a philosophy, and a navigation to return to Earth, and to soft-land on Earth. That latter was very difficult for us, as it will be for what Alwin calls the ‘wee realm’ that I am putting into this rifle bullet here. Had the thing been done by any other than my own family I would call the whole thing impossible.”

“Who was running your space ship, Toby?” Alwin Garvie asked. “Who were the tyrants who made it work?”

“Two brothers, Jabelcain and Jubelcain. And their half-brother Tubalcain. Our very take-off from Earth was an hysterical and amazing feat of invention, but it was necessary for our survival. Oh, our intelligence gathering system was good. We knew where the Earth-faults in our neighborhood were. We knew which one would blow with the most power, when the fountains of the deep should burst open, and we believed that if we set our bronze sphere as a cork in the throat of that erupting fountain, we could be blown clear off Earth. The wee folks in this bullet have an easier task here. They don't have an intelligence system sufficient to know when next a rifle will be shooting off in this part of town, nor the means to get there and set themselves in the chamber of that rifle by themselves. I do this for them.

“But we, in the old days, had to go. If we'd stayed, we'd have drowned. And in that case we would not have had such future progeny as myself, a heavy loss.”

“Oh what stuff, Toby, what stuff!” Viola Rafter admired. “That is the sort of stuff you tell to the small chemical smudges to motivate them, is it? That is something like the stuff I tell to my own house plants to motivate them; but I don't do it nearly as well as you do. Is some larger person telling you this to motivate you for something?”

“Yes, somebody larger tells me such narrations now and then. Yes, to motivate me, I suppose, as I motivate the small molecular smudges. And I do find myself curiously motivated now and then, and especially now.”

Tobias Lamb had now sealed the sub-microscopic ‘realm’ into the rifle bullet and had put the bullet into the chamber of the rifle.

“I never heard that legend before, Toby,” Lucius said. “I have met the myth that either Gog or Magog rode astraddle of the roof-ridge of the ark for the whole trying time of the flood and so prevented the old race of giants from being entirely wiped out. So we have half-giants in the world even now. But that the descendents of Cain escaped Earth in a space-ark, that is new to me. I believe that it's cheating.”

“No, not cheating, not cheating at all. To have taken the gamble with the odds a billion to one against, that is not cheating. To suppose that we of the left-handed fraternity, of the goatish rather than the sheepish brotherhood, had no purpose, that is unreal. We of the line of Cain, we who lost our innocence for the second time, we who ate of the horrible tree of knowledge for the second time, there must have been a reason for us. We were the only early inventors, you know. Genesis 4:20-22 gives only the barest hints of our inventions, but they were the only human inventions in their time.”

“When did the Cainite Space-Ark return to the Earth, Toby?” Lucius asked with a failed smirk.

“I don't know. Within the last several hundred years. When invention returned to the Earth, that was the space-ark homing back.”

“What stuff you must have in your unconscious, Toby!” Francie said. “You're sheer mythic. And it's said that, in the circuit of re-entrant thought and style and mentation, the mythic meets again with the subatomic and the atomic and the molecular on the field of small aeonics. They'd make no sense else, its said. They make no sense as it is, I say. But our other smudges of reacting molecular jelly are not reacting at all today in the perfect conditions we have set up. We do not know what your own ‘realm’ is doing in the conditions you have set up, but ours do not move.”

“They do not move because you do not move them, because you do not motivate them,” Tobias said. “You can't motivate them, except accidentally, because you don't believe them to be alive and subject to motivation. But there is not any such thing as inanimate matter. The smallest subatomic particle is alive and at least partly conscious, and at least partly thinking. If you do not believe this, pretend that you believe it at least. You'll get better results that way.”

Then Tobias Lamb raised the rifle to shoulder and eye, slid off the safety, sighted with the gun, and crooked his finger around the trigger.

“What are you really going to do, Toby?” Francie Jack asked with apprehension in her voice. “You're acting very strange, even for you. You're up to something, Toby. You're up to something tricky!”

“The minor thing I'm going to do, on either the first or second fly-by, is plug that mockingbird that is too saccharine to mock. And the main thing I'm going to do is set a living realm in the position where it must invent or perish. I'm betting it will invent.”

Tobias Lamb shot the rifle then. And, after an interval that seemed about two-and-a-half or three seconds, the rifle shot Tobias Lamb. It shot him in the right eye and clear through his head. It killed him too.

Tobias Lamb was dead standing up. He was so stocky and solid that he did not fall. He did not even lower the rifle. He was in a cataleptic rigidity. He had no breath and heartbeat. The shot had entered his right eye and had exited massively from the back of his head.

He still had his big grin, more grotesque than ever, almost more life-like than ever.

“This is not real, this is not real. This is something happening out of time,” Francie Jack spoke as if in a daze.

“What is that misfit bird-song?” Alwin Garvie asked in inconsequential amazement. “The mockery of it, the arrogance of it! That part, at least, is real.”

“The coroner will decide what is real,” Paul Kradzesh stated heavily. “And here he is now. I never saw a call answered so fast. It's almost impossible.”

The coroner was busying himself about the standing dead man, going through what seemed like a burlesque routine.

“Oh, he is rigid in death,” the coroner said then. “He's dead standing up, and he rigidified so swiftly and he is so well balanced that he did not fall. Ah, he still has his finger on the gun trigger. Don't stand in front of it. It's a rare happening, and yet I've seen it twice before in my practice.”

“You lie,” said dead man Tobias Lamb in a pleasanter voice than usual. “Such a thing never happened before. It didn't happen this time either. Oh, don't look so angry and repelled, good friends. Did you want me dead? You really don't understand the possibilities and paradoxes that are present in the context of ‘unelapsed time’? It's a property of very small realms and societies. It's a bonus that almost dwarfs the rest of it. Oh, how howlingly valuable it will be to us!”

“We do not like you, Tobias!” Paul Kradzesh swore savagely. “We do not like you because of tricks like this. But it did happen! And the coroner was here.”

“And he is not here now,” Toby Lamb laughed. “You cannot say properly ‘He was here’ because there are no tenses in unelapsed time. Nor will I assure you that my death is an illusion. It is a valid event in unelapsed time, that first remarkable fall-out of the miniature space flight and return.

“No, of course I'm not all right, Francie. I have a shiner. The soft landing of the returning bullet-space-ship was not all that soft. It blacked my eye.”

“I hate you, Toby,” Paul said tightly. “Why did you do such a thing as that?”

“For the joy of discovery, for dramatic effect, for open fun, and to perform a valid experiment. Ah, that bird-song! It's near perfect now! The inimitable mockery and arrogance of it! And the burning belief! A little discipline in its life was all that bird needed. Aye, get that glob of irony in its song! Mock, bird, mock! And believe at the same time. A one-eyed bird had better be a true believer around here!”

The mocking-bird, still singing on its branch outside, had lost an eye to the fly-by either coming or going. But it had a new song that you had to respect whether you liked it or not.

“The reactive jelly, as you so ignorantly call it, will react astonishingly now,” Big Toby said. “It has become a nation of consummate atomic-speed invention. Set it any problem and it will solve it. The ramifications of all this, they are endless.”

“We do hate you, Toby,” Lucius Cockburn growled.

“Oh sure, oh sure. Whether the little nation did those space marvels or not, it is absolutely essential that it believes it did them. Its motivation lies in its high history.”

“We can't accept knowing that even the dust is inventive,” Francie Jack said sadly, “but we'll profit from it. We have the perfect activator now. But it will take a new sort of people to accept it fully. Some day you may have them.”

“Some day, today, almost immediately,” Tobias Lamb gloated. “Oh, the most promising students for it can be selected with no time elapsed at all. I've already put a realm to work on that, and the selection is already waiting for me.”

Those students who are now developing best ways to motivate and mythologize sub-microscopic smears to get maximum performance and invention from them are an odd lot. They have to be, for they are working with small, left-handed orders that are more goatish than sheepish, that are very near to the grotesque heart of matter. And some of those students had a hop on the subject, those who had read Tobias Lamb's New Physics for Middle-School Children and had been enchanted by it.

They have accumulated and analyzed a frightening amount of dream material from molecular-level and smaller entities, and the dream material in those little worlds is absolutely grotesque. And the mythic configurations can not even be conceived of in the geometry of human myth. They are quite otherwise.

Those brilliant, odd-lot students have their own cultus and fraternity now, and their token and mascot is the One-Eyed Mocking-Bird.

This Boding Itch

The Palmer Itch, the Palmer Itch

Assuaged with oil and honey,

It means that we will all be rich

In everything but money.

 — C. S. Wynward Lewis

On all channels, the comedians on the early evening (6:05-6:10) comedy spot had jokes about itching palms. Yes, and they were all jokes about the left palm being itchier than the right palm.

“I didn't know that anybody except me had itching palms today,” one hundred million wives in just one country said when they heard the comic.

“I didn't know that anybody except me had itching palms today,” one hundred million husbands gave the echo. “And I sure didn't know that anybody except me had their left palm itchier than their right one.”

And six minutes later, it was on all the early (6:16-6:21) news spots. “If only they don't call it the ‘Itchy Palm Syndrome,’ ” a young lady named Vera Vanguard said. “I can stand any thing except that.”

“I suppose that we may as well call it the ‘Itchy Palm Syndrome,’ ” the spot news commentator said. “The phenomenon is with us and it may well be with us for the foreseeable future, possibly until the 7:01 news spot. Our foreign contacts assure us that it is now worldwide. Oh, there is professor Arpad Arutinov. Professor, can you give us an opinion on the ‘Itchy Palm Syndrome’?”

“See page 982, paragraph 2,” Arutinov said. He was an imposing man except for his shocking weasel-like face.

“Page 982, paragraph 2 of what, sir?” the spot news commentator asked.

“Of the book,” Arpad Arutinov said. “And don't ask what book. There is only one.” The Professor disappeared from the screen. He always seemed to be just passing through, and yet he was always seen briefly in very many places, dozens every night, wherever the TV lights were shining.

“I wonder what book he means,” the commentator said. He looked at his next note. “So far, the wave of suicides attributed to the ‘Itchy Palm Syndrome’ has been quite light. The Syndrome is driving people bugs, but it is not driving very many of them over the buggy edge yet. The death rate is sure to pick up as the evening unrolls, if the itchiness holds.” The commentator didn't know what book the Professor meant, but at least two of his listeners did know.

“Hand me the book, Fritz,” Vera Vanguard said, “and then look to your Happy Ox Hodgepodge. I think it's burning.”

“There is no way my Happy Ox Hodgepodge can burn,” Fritz said. “The hotter the fire, the more juice will bubble up in it.” And Fritz Der Grosse handed the book to Vera and she turned to page 982 paragraph 2 and read:

“The Mutational-Advances in the human species have been orderly and well spaced. And each has been quite clearly announced, though only at the very moment of its happening. The coming of color vision, the coming of speech, the coming of consciousness (the latter two were probably simultaneous comings) have all been announced by rampant pruritus. The ancient trepanning of skulls which so puzzled archeologists and anthropologists was directed at getting into the brain to scratch the announcing pruritus, the Boding Itch.

“Humans as they are now constituted are only about two steps away from perfection. Since the mutational-advances have been orderly and well spaced, let us consider which advances are next in order. And let us consider when the spacing will be fulfilled. My own figures indicate that the spacing is fulfilled almost exactly now and that it is time for a new appearance (which I believe will be a double appearance).

“All that humans now need for their completion are a handy road map to show them where they're going, and a correlating eye to show them where they are right now. They will get these two benefits quite soon, and there will be a spillover of them to other intelligent species.

“The spillover to other intelligent species is a sort of insurance. If mankind stumbles and falls back at this step, or at any other step, things will not have to begin quite at the beginning again. The other intelligent species will have a good start on things, a better-than-nothing start.

“When the rampant and universal itching appears, know you that the illuminating summer of the intellect is nigh.”

“Well, that's surely plain enough,” Fritz said. He took the book from Vera and put it back on the shelf. The name of the book was The Back Door of History and it was written by that weasel-faced Doctor Arpad Arutinov.

Vera and Fritz went into the kitchen to eat the Happy Ox Hodgepodge, one of the Great Dishes of the Western World.

“Yes, that's surely plain enough,” Vera agreed as she tied the bib under her chin (Happy Ox is sloppy), “but there's many a slip on those muddy syllogistic roads. When will WHEW get into the act? And how can WHEW be balked from spoiling the whole show?”

WHEW was ‘Worldwide Health Enforcement Wardens.’ This multinational agency under its motto ‘Good health and good attitude compulsory for everyone!’ could act on a worldwide scale within short minutes to obliterate any new ailment or unease. Sometimes it acted too rapidly, but it was never guilty of not acting. There was no way that it could neglect something like the new itch.

“What worries me most is WHEW's secondary motto ‘Out by the roots! Leave not a trace,’ ” Fritz said. “I believe that it will be a very delicate and detailed tracery, and I don't want my own version of it to be obliterated without a trace. I believe that the tracery will consist of a ‘world line’ as well as a ‘personal line,’ and that those of us who are the natural leaders must combine the two of them in our leadership. Perhaps some of us could hide?”

“Hide from WHEW? Oh, that's funny. Nobody can hide from WHEW, Fritz.”

“Monkeys and apes worldwide are also exhibiting the ‘Itchy Palm Syndrome,’ ” a commentator's voice on the 6:41 news spot was saying. “And dolphins are showing a strange and unlocalized unease which is somewhat similar to the ‘Itchy Palm Syndrome.’ Let me emphasize though that the dolphins are not actually suffering from an itching of the palms of their hands. They haven't any hands or palms thereof.

“But WHEW is on the job. Already they have treated and cured ten million persons and they will be treating about ten million persons a minute until everybody on Earth is cured. WHEW is using the new (well, it's about six minutes old now) Deep-Bite Acid Treatment. There have been early complaints of the treatment leaving holes clear through the palms of the hands, but this has now been adjusted for. The Deep-Bite Treatment was biting a little bit too deep for a short while there. But the mysterious itch will soon be no more than a memory.”

“Maybe we could get good depth photographs of the — ah — road maps of the future before they are obliterated,” Fritz Der Grosse hazarded to Vera.

“I'm afraid not,” she snuffed that one out. “The maps are not clarified yet, on me or on you, and I don't believe that they will be clarified until the itch has run its course.”

“If extremes come to the extreme, we could — ” Fritz hesitated.

“What, funny man, what?” Vera asked him.

“Lop them off,” Fritz Der Grosse said in a pale voice.

Vera Vanguard read scraps from another book, while they assessed a very direful situation.

“There are seven major mounts on the palm of the hand: the Mounts of Jupiter, Saturn, Apollo, Mercury, Mars, Venus, and the Moon.

“There are seven major nodes on the palm of the palm: the Nodes of Solomon or Judgment, of Everlastingness or Transcendence, of Virtue, of Eloquence, of Power, of Agape or Enabling Love, and of Futurity.

“There are six minor lines on the palm of the hand: the Life Line, the Saturn Line, the Head Line, the Heart Line, the Mars Line, and the Girdle of Venus.

“Thus it is seen that there are seven mounds and seven nodes, but only six major lines. This does not mean that we have lost one of the lines of the palm of our hand. It means that we haven't arrived at it yet. Indeed there is folk memory of the time when there were only four major lines in our palms.

“The seventh line, when it appears, will be the line of the Future, and it will be the chart of things to come. It will erupt out of the Node of Futurity which is located in the Mount of the Moon, and it will move across the palm to the Ring of Saturn which is at the base of the index finger.

“It is the custom to end books on Palmistry with the question, ‘What does the future hold?’ The answer is that the future for us holds the Vision of the Future Limned out plainly in the palms of our hands, and it holds a new Illumination to see that Future by.”

The book that Vera Vanguard had read this from was Palmistry for Plain People, by Moses Mantes.

About thirty of the people who considered themselves as natural leaders in that town had gathered in the rooms of Fritz Der Grosse.

“If we are able to effect telekinesis at all, and I believe that we are, then we should surely be able to control and influence our detached parts,” George Frontrunner said. “We are already on the verge of a breakthrough in this field. We'll let this impasse push us right into this breakthrough.”

Then the commentator on the 7:01 news spot was talking: “For more than eight minutes now WHEW has been developing a new breed of dog that will go direct to severed members and utterly destroy them. Here is a direct quote from the Plenipotentiary of WHEW: ‘Don't hack them off, folks. They aren't that itchy. And if you have any left-handed (hey, that's a pun) ideas about this, well, forget them!’ People out there, WHEW means what it says.”

“Let's cut our losses in half,” Fritz said to that circle of his friends. “Oh, we'll each just lop the left one off and try to conceal it in a good place, though the dogs do complicate that. The left palm is supposed to be much the more informative one, you know.”

2.

The eyes we have, the eyes we have, 

And soon we'll have another!

Or else a leopard epitaph,

Oh how they slink and sluther!

C. S. Leeward Lewis

Vera Vanguard was giggling. Her handless left hand was packed in dry ice to stop its bleeding, and she looked dismal and disheveled. None the less, she was giggling.

“I thought it would stop half the itching, at least,” she snickered, “and it did for a moment. But now I have a new itch, right on the top of my head. And I've only one hand to scratch that with, and no other hand at all for scratching my itching hand.”

“Yes, I have an itching right on the top of my head too,” several of them said. “It's the second stage of the rocket, as it were.”

“The ‘Book’ said that the new appearance would probably be a double appearance,” Fritz reminded them. “Well, what is going to develop on the tops of our heads?”

The severed left hands of the thirty persons were romping around on the tables and floor, and climbing up the draperies. They were under pretty good telekinetic control by their owners, though several of the hands seemed to have minds and lives of their own. Each of these hands bore an emerging map of the future, and they must be kept safe from the effecting cures of the WHEW.

Four of the hands, working together, raised one of the windows two inches and crawled out under it to the stone ledge outside. Other left hands opened the other two windows of the room, and then all the hands were outside on the ledges. The people closed and locked the windows then and pulled the drapes over them. Would the dogs developed by WHEW be able to find and destroy the hands when the hands were outside on stone ledges that were thirty stories high?

“The dolphins, worldwide, are spending a lot of time contemplating their navels,” the commentator on the 7:31 news spot was speaking. “They are contemplating their navels and grinning those wide dolphin grins. And the dolphins are, especially within the last four minutes, becoming arrogant and uncooperative in certain experiments that people have been conducting on them. What does it all mean?”

“It means that now the dolphins can read the future and the humans can't,” said a one-handed young lady named Claire O'Hare. “It's been suspected that dolphins had the equivalent of our palmistry all along, but we never knew how it was recorded. So that's where they have it, in the navel. Never mind, in three or four minutes we'll be able to read the future too.”

“WHEW has nearly completed its worldwide work,” the commentator was saying. “The Deep-Bite Acid Treatment has already been applied to more than ninety-nine percent of the people in the world and the damnable itching has been eaten out to its roots. After being healed, all persons will have slick and unlined palms. The WHEW crews are now mopping up the remaining one-third of one percent of the people in the world, those who are marked for special handling, those identified by the sensors as being somehow uncooperative.

“There's an interesting side-light to this. Most people, as soon as the itching in their palms is cured, complain of an itching in the top of their heard. ‘I think my head has been itching for quite a while,’ some of them say, ‘but I didn't notice it so much because the itching in my hands was worse.’ We may, perhaps, have a follow-up on the ‘Itchy Pate Syndrome’ on the 7:46 news spot.”

A bunch of WHEW crewmen burst in on the group in the rooms of Fritz Der Grosse. “You people are ticketed for special handling,” the leader said, “but I don't know why. Oh, maybe that's it! Eustace, bring the specially trained dogs. Thirty of you folks here, and each of you has his left hand freshly lopped off. How are we going to treat hands that aren't here? How did this happen?”

“Thirty separate grotesque accidents,” Fritz said. “I know it's an outrageous coincidence, but it's no more than that.” The WHEW crewmen gave the right hands of each of the group the Deep-Bite Acid Treatment and burned out their Lines of the Future just when they were in the final stages of being born. Never mind, the lines of the left palm are always clearer than those of the right.

Then the crewman, Eustace, came in with nine fierce, newly-trained dogs. The dogs threw themselves against the windows of the room, broke them out, and tumbled through.

“After them!” the chief of the WHEW crew cried; and all of those crewmen followed the dogs through the windows and into a thirty-story fall to shattering death. The crewmen on ‘special handling’ jobs are indeed specialist, but their specializations have crowded out their common sense.

The phone rang. Fritz answered it. And a tapping noise came from it.

“That's mini-Morse Code,” said a one-handed man named Horace Rand. “I'm pretty sure that I can understand it. I'm pretty sure that I'm sending it, in a way, through my own detached and observing left hand. I've sent a lot of mini-Morse by that hand. Yes, here is the message: ‘All clear here. We're on the window ledges three floors above you. We sure did snooker those dogs and fellows, didn't we? Did you ever see dogs trying to follow a trail straight up into the air when they're falling straight down? They can't get any traction. Is it all clear down there? Can we come back down?’ ”

“Wandering hands, come back to us,” Horace tapped in mini-Morse. And within three minutes all the severed hands had returned to their owners and were frolicking over them like so many pet squirrels.

“Our hands really could be handier for us now than they were before,” Claire said. “This is neat. And the Line of the Future in my separated hand here has become quite clear and wonderfully detailed. I can't quite interpret it yet, but I feel that the ability and illumination for that is on the way to me.”

They all knew what was happening, of course, and how that ability and illumination was coming to them. They knew that at the fontanel of the head there was a ‘third-eye’ that saw by a sense other than regular sight, the third eye that had been asleep in all of us for the last few short thousands of years, the third eye that should open to new unifying and illuminating vision any time now.

“Zoo monkeys and apes have become very arch and knowing in the last few moments,” the commentator on the 8:01 news spot was saying. “They look at the palms of their left hands and they laugh. They scratch their heads (they seem to have the new pate itch the same as humans do), but they scratch their heads with a sort of delight. They seem to know something that we don't.”

The thirty persons in Fritz Der Grosse's rooms (natural leaders, every one of them) looked at the palms of their left hands (“Oh, roll over, now flatten out a bit, perfect, perfect!”) and laughed with new joy. They scratched the tops of their heads (with their right hands only), and they scratched with a sort of delight. They were beginning to know things that nobody had ever known before.

And they ate more Happy Ox Hodgepodge. It's great brain-food, it's great disposition-and-attitude food, and it's the best ‘third-eye’ food in the world.

“The dolphins still contemplate their navels,” the commentator was saying, “and now they seem to ripple the skin of their heads and whistle and giggle a lot.”

“The dolphins already have the blowholes at the proper place,” a one-handed man named Cyril H. Digby said. “They are natural ‘third-eye’ creatures. The third eye as shown in old alchemical drawings has always looked at least as much like a dolphin's eye as a human's eye to me.”

“But WHEW is on the job,” the spot commentator was continuing. “The Deep-Bite Acid Treatment developed earlier in the evening for the obliteration of the ‘Itchy Palm Syndrome’ has been adapted and deepened for the obliteration of the ‘Itchy Pate Syndrome.’ The secondary motto of WHEW the Worldwide Health Enforcement Wardens is still ‘Out by the Roots. Leave not a Trace.’ WHEW is now making twenty million cures per minute worldwide of the ‘Itchy Pate Syndrome.’ ”

“Nipped in the bud,” Vera Vanguard said, “or rather ‘nipped in the bloom,’ for we have already begun to bloom with our glorious new mutational-advance. We have the handy road maps to show us where we're going, to show us the future; and we begin to have the correlating inner-outer eye to show us where we really are now. It sees by a sense other than regular sight, but it sees totally. But WHEW is on the strike again. What will we do?”

“When a process has worked well once — ” Fritz Der Grosse began.

“Then take a long cool look at it before you try it again,” Horace Rand offered.

“We may not have time enough to take a long cool look,” Vera said apprehensively.

“I say ‘Lop them off!’,” Fritz cried.

“Is it our heads you are talking about, man?” Cyril H. Digby asked.

“Yes, our heads,” Fritz maintained it, “our wonderful heads with so much new illumination churning around in them. Oh, I feel myself getting smarter by the minute.”

“I'm not sure that your latest proposal reflects that, man,” Cyril said.

And now the 8:11 spot news commentator was talking:

“Within the last eight minutes WHEW has developed a new breed of hunting leopards that will savagely and instinctively zero in on severed human heads and find them and devour them. Don't look for easy outs, folks. WHEW will cure your pate itch in WHEW's own way.”

“That just about does us in,” Claire O'Hare railed. “The ledges outside the windows are too narrow for our heads. They'd roll off. And even if they didn't roll off, they wouldn't be able to climb up the walls to the higher stories. The leopard would have them right where they were.”

“It's going to be a race, folks, and I always loved a race,” Vera crowed with avid pleasure. “I feel myself getting smarter by the second, and I'm sure the rest of you are lighting up too. If only a WHEW crew doesn't get here for three or four minutes we'll be so smart that we can outwit them a dozen different ways.”

But a WHEW crew burst into the rooms in that very instant.

“Delay them just half a minute, group,” Vera Vanguard begged her associates in a husky voice. “Oh, I'm getting so smart so fast that I know I'll think of something in half a minute.”

But the WHEW crewmen were already inflicting the Deep-Bite Acid Treatment cures on the heads of group people, eating those third eyes down to their roots before they were fully awake.

“No, no, our heads don't itch at all,” Horace Rand protested.

“The Pruritus-meters are running and they say that your heads do itch,” the chief of the WHEW crew said.

“Great leaping leopards, that's what the joyful leaping marks on my Line of the Future are,” Fritz cried. “Oh great leaping leopards!”

And the leaping leopards were in the room.

“Won't you WHEW gentlemen all have some Happy Ox Hodgepodge?” Vera asked.

“I will,” the chief said, and he began to fill a big platter with it. “And my men will have some of it just as soon as they finish treating you people, just as soon as they are certain that they have you cured and no mistake about it.”

“A report from India says that the elephants are looking into the ends of their trunks and cooing with delight,” the commentator on the 8:16 news spot was saying. “And they are scratching the tops of their heads on the boles of trees with obvious pleasure.”

“I suppose that the spillover to the other intelligent species is a good thing,” Fritz Der Grosse said, “but it is not enough. We need us too.”

A one-handed man named Buford Cracksworthy, in a moment of panic, had lopped off his own head.

“Here, here, here,” the chief of the WHEW crew cried. “That isn't allowed at all.”

“Oh boy oh boy oh boy!” the severed head moaned in severe unease. The slumped-over body of Cracksworthy wasn't in control of its head, and the head wasn't in very good control of itself. That wasn't a successful way of saving the third eye.

One of the leaping leopards came, smashed the head, and then chewed it up and swallowed it. It sounded as if the beast was chewing a head of cabbage.

“What a race, right down to the wire,” Vera Vanguard chortled. “I'm getting so smart I'm about to bust. Oh, is it my turn now? Have you already blinded the third eyes, that is cured all the others? Hand, just let me see that line once more by my new illumination. Oh, I understand it. There is a delay, and there is a great burgeoning in the group futurity line then, an absolute incandescence. But my personal future line, why is it blurred?

“I'll think of something, I'll think of something fast. Ouch! Say, that deep-bite acid does have a bite to it! Oh, its darker in here than it was. And I forget what I was trying to do.”

Posterior Analytics

Potters Field was the best place for the inner city people to eat lunch. It was a dual-purpose area. It counted as green-sward or park-land and so helped to keep the downtown up to the Green-Acres Ratio Requirement. And it still fulfilled its original purpose as a burial place for unclaimed bodies and for the bodies of non-citizens. Burials were still made there regularly. There were from a dozen to sixty burials every night. But ‘Benson's Thirteen Hour Miracle Grass’ would overgrow the disturbed earth and have all traces of the burials obliterated before lunchtime of the next day.

And every day there was a fresh scattering of tombstones, bright, white, crisp, to sit on. The lunch-munchers always preferred the newer stones. Besides the new stones, there were also the less bright, less white, less crisp ‘yesterday's stones’ in their diminished states. These would be veined and sundered and crumbling from the gobbling of the miracle grass. The stones would disintegrate completely in about a week and would merge with the soil and leave no trace. They were made to exact formula by McGuire's Disintegrating Tomb-Stone Company. The bodies buried in Potters Field were thought to take three weeks to disintegrate. At least, no new burials were made directly over old burials more often than that.

The sheep kept the lush miracle grass from growing too tall. And the fat soil, through the medium of Benson's grass, was turned into fat sheep. The sheep got along well with the lunching people, and the lunch-munching people got along very well with the sheep and they held little noontime lotteries to see which hundred of them would have portions of the five fat sheep that were slaughtered and roasted in Potters Field every day.

Among the lunch-munchers there were a few devotees who believed that the buried people should not so soon be forgotten. The devotees were expert at spying out the grass-disguised outlines of the night-before graves, and they lit and set rush-lights to burn on each new grave for the noon hour. The fat rushes would burn for exactly an hour before they burned up. The devotees pulled the rushes from the little lustral brook or drainage ditch that ran through the Field. The rushes purified the draining water, and the devotees daily pulled enough rushes to keep them from clogging the brook.

For the last several days though, people or creatures had been breaking up out of their graves, erupting through the dirt and miracle grass. They'd break out around high noon when so many lunchers were there, they would brush the grave dirt off themselves, and then they would walk away as nonchalantly as folks can do under such circumstances. Some of the munchers found this horrifying and some of them found it funny. But the Potters Field must have become a bit crowded or people wouldn't have been breaking out of it.

So, with a fairly regular supply of bodies guaranteed by the system, the whole Potters Field Complex was in tolerable balance. Some of the bodies were just unidentified corpses found around that part of town, but most of them came from the Alien Analysis Center, a large and mislabeled building that formed the north border of Potters Field.

Some of the aliens who were analyzed at the Alien Analysis Center were themselves rather analytical. The Stoicheoi, for instance, were a very analytical people. They said this of themselves. Well, one of them at least, a large and bumptuous specimen named Kerelspook, had told his analyst Henry Sounder that his people the Stoicheoi were very analytical folks. And that was the nearest thing to a clear statement that could be made about the Stoiks.

Henry had personally encountered only this creature Kerelspook and two other Stoiks, and yet it seemed that he had met a multitude of them. It was creatures like them who gave aliens the name of being tricky. Henry was surprised to see that the files on the Stoiks at the ‘Alien Analysis Center’ lacked a few hours of going back four full days. It seemed as though the Stoiks had been a puzzle and a problem almost forever.

It was hardly possible for any alien to be on Earth for more than an hour without his presence being detected by the Alien Analysis Center. It was not possible for an alien to be on Earth for more than two hours without him being taken into hand by an Agent of the Center and being brought to the Center either by force or by astute handling. Henry Sounder was such an Agent at the Center, and Jill Discovery had been one.

It puzzled and hurt Henry to have to think of Jill in the ‘had been’ category.

An oddity about the Stoiks was that they, alone among the aliens, weren't discovered on Earth by the Agents of the Alien Analysis Center. Each of the Stoiks discovered and came to the Alien Analysis Center of his own initiative. And each of them on coming there had made a whistling sound, and then had gone into that clipped sort of English that persons in symbiosis with machines often use: “I am interested in Analysis. I am doubly interested in an Analysis Center. And I am triply interested in your people here. Humor me. Tell and show me all that you know.”

The ‘Alien Analysis Center’ was a large, plain, brown building, and the only sign on it read Third Class Grain Storage Depot for Sector ZZL. Since there was no sector ZZL in the entire world, few persons came unbidden to the Center. How could genuine aliens (or false ones, for that matter, if there were such) know that this building was an Analysis Center? Surely not one Earth person in a million knew that there was such a place, and none but the authentic Agents of the Center knew where it was. Even the code clerks at the Center believed that it was indeed a Third Class Grain Storage Depot, nor did they wonder much why the funny-looking ‘grain dealers’ who were brought there should be questioned so roughly that many of them died of it.

How then could the alien Stoicheoi have known that this building was the Alien Analysis Center? What sort of information drew them to it? And how could this spooky dummy of a Kerelspook have known what the place was? How could this infuriating slob — ?

Gently, Henry, gently! Jill Discovery, a very special person (to Henry at least), had disappeared from the face of the Earth late on the day before this. And this spooky dummy, this infuriating slob, this misbegotten alien, this Kerelspook (“I always wondered what my name would sound like in Earth-talk,” this creature had said, “it sounds funny, doesn't it?”) this impossible alien had been with Jill Discovery when she had disappeared. Kerelspook had to know what happened to her. He didn't seem to know much, but he had to know that.

Jill Discovery had been ‘snapped away’. For several days now a few people had been ‘snapped away’. They would simply fly through the air as though jerked away by a giant invisible hook. They'd skim through the air just above the low trees and the low hills, and then they'd be gone beyond the horizon. This phenomenon had first been noticed a little less than four days before.

The Agents of the Center used various tactics in their analysis of the aliens they had picked up. Some Agents used rough tactics, and some of them used soft. Jill Discovery was an especially soft-tactics person. She had been walking and talking with the goofy Stoicheoi alien named Kerelspook and trying to elicit information and meaning from him. They had been walking in the lush green grass of Potters Field when Jill Discovery was ‘snapped away’ through the air and was seen no more.

Several reputable human persons witnessed this happening, and they all stated that the lady had been talking to the slob-alien when she was ‘snapped away’. The lady had left something behind her, they said, but they all had perceived that it was something worthless and they had not investigated what it was. “There was a dazed aspect to the whole happening,” one young woman said. “I think it was that slob alien who put it in a daze.”

Kerelspook was brought back to the Alien Analysis Center building and he was questioned by a group of the Agents, some of whom were rough-tactic persons. And that ogrish alien seemed a little bit puzzled about it.

“You mean that ‘snapping away’ isn't usual with you?” he asked. “Oh, it's common with us. It happens to each of us at least once.”

“When you're alive?” a rough-tactic agent asked.

“When we're alive, yes. And then — snap away — and we're unalive, in what we call the ‘little death’. ‘Snapping away’ is a way that we die. Do you people have a better arrangement for doing it?”

“What was the last thing that Jill Discovery said to you before she was, ah, ‘snapped away’?” a medium-rough-tactic agent asked.

“Her last words were ‘Let us just be clear about who is analyzing whom?’ She asked this rather hotly.”

“Kerelspook, do you ever tell lies?” Henry Sounder asked the alien.

“Only analytical lies,” Kerelspook said.

They questioned Kerelspook more stringently then, to try to get more clear information out of him. And it was under the stringency of their questioning that the fellow died. There was a whoosh as though a blast of air went past them. “What was that?” they asked each other. “Oh, it happens every time that one of the Stoiks dies,” said one of them who had been on these cases more than the others.

So they certified him dead. The body-buriers buried him then, and the group of Agents certified him as buried. He was buried at night in Potters Field, and that should have been the end of Kerelspook.

So, about mid-morning of the next day, Henry Sounder was startled when Kerelspook fell into step with him as he walked in Potters Field. Well, Henry had been one of those who had questioned this creature Kerelspook the evening before. He had seen the creature die under a questioning less severe than aliens were sometimes subjected to. Henry was one of the three Agents who, examining the body of the alien independently, had pronounced it dead. And he had seen them bury Kerelspook. Dead and buried and verified.

So Henry, frustrated by the horrifying disappearance of his favorite lady friend, was shocked, startled, and angered when Kerelspook fell into step with him as though nothing had happened. That slob of an alien was hard to like under the best of conditions. And seeing the fellow now, alive, with dirt, probably grave dirt, clinging to him — that was not the best of conditions.

“I've always had the idea that the dead, or the returned dead, pick up special knowledge on their way,” Henry said. “Have you any new information about the disappearance of Jill Discovery?”

“I? No,” Kerelspook said. “I did not dream with her last night, either before or after my burial. But you dreamed of her. Why do you look surprised? Why do world people believe that their dreams are invisible to everybody except themselves? Have you any new information about her disappearance?” There was that whistling sound on the edges of the slightly mechanical speech of Kerelspook.

“Leave me, oaf,” Henry Sounder said. “I'm too sorrowful and desolate to abide a creature like you today. No, no, I'm wrong, don't leave me. I must know what happened to Jill. There's always a chance that you really do know where she's gone. You have to know more about this than you say.”

“So do you have to know more about this than you say,” Kerelspook told Henry.

On the night before, just after the attested death and burial of the alien Kerelspook, Henry Sounder had gone to his quarters and gone to bed. And he'd dreamed of Jill Discovery. Perhaps he had dreamed with her, in Kerelspook's phrase. She had come to him like an undersized wraith, and she had knocked on his forehead with her knuckles.

“Let me in, Henry!” she had cried. “Oh, let me in!” So he had let her into his head, as it were. Persons who perform dream analyses on aliens will sometimes have alien-form dreams themselves. “Help me, Henry, help me,” Jill begged. “I was dead in one place and buried in another, and now that I have come together I am buried alive. If you care for me at all come to me. And bring a shovel when you come.”

“Where are you, Jill?” Henry asked in his dream.

“I don't know,” she said, “except that I'm buried in the ground. When I was ‘snapped away’ I zoomed only a little ways over the horizon (did you know that ‘snapped away’ people see their original horizon as a line and they pass over it as if passing over a line?), and then I was in a room. ‘They’ have a room there, and they questioned and analyzed me in it. But they didn't use words when they questioned me.

“They drew me out like thousands of fine glass threads, and they reeled and rereeled each of those threads through their scanners till they had read everything on them. That was the way they questioned me. I hadn't any defense against them. I felt naked before them, and then I noticed that my nakedness consisted in me not having my body with me. It's an embarrassing garment to be caught without. But where had I left it? All that I had with me was my spirit and a spirit is really nothing but a great number of glass threads that are so fine that they are individually invisible, but when they are hanked together they add up to a sort of shadow. ‘We've got about all we can get out of her,’ one of ‘them’ said. ‘It was a pretty good analysis.’ I knew that I had been analyzed in my threads for many, many hours. ‘I want to go back,’ I said to them. ‘I want to go away from this place and snap back to my body.’ ‘Oh, go ahead then if that's what you want to do,’ one of them told me. I snapped away from that place then and zoomed close above the trees and hills. But it was full night then. I zoomed into the ground and entered my body; and now I am alive in it, but I'm buried. Please come and help me, Henry, and bring a shovel when you come.”

That had been the end of Henry's rather odd dream of the night before. But was he himself in another rather odd dream now? Was he only dreaming that he was walking and talking with an alien person who he had certified as dead and had seen buried the night before?

“That's the one,” said a semi-official man who came up to Henry Sounder and the alien Kerelspook and pointed his finger at Kerelspook. “You are the one who erupted up out of the ground just a little while ago, and you still have grave dirt on your shoulders.”

“Wipe it off of me, will you,” Kerelspook said. “I thought that I'd got it all.”

“Several of you have been coming out of the ground every day for two or three days now,” the semi-official man said. “You came right up through the dirt and through the new grass.”

“We are a problem,” Kerelspook said. “I wonder what will be done about us?”

“I heard a salesman from Benson's Miracle Grass talking to the Alderman just now,” the semi-official man confided. “The salesman said ‘We're working on it, we're working on it, and we'll have a tougher grass by tomorrow. Then I'd just like to see anybody come up through it’.”

Henry Sounder walked further through Potters Field with Kerelspook. “I have to have answers, you oaf,” he told that alien. “Where is Jill Discovery who was in charge of your case before I was put on it? You were with her when she disappeared. Tell me one thing at least if you know it: is she alive or dead?”

“She is alive, yes,” Kerelspook said. “She is alive again, but possibly not for long. She is in bad circumstance. Tonight and tomorrow you may be in the same circumstance. Will you then have the bodily power to break up through the ground? The girl doesn't have it. And remember that the grass will be tougher tomorrow. You people have your out-of-the-body experiences very badly, and I suppose that some of you will really die of it.”

Henry and Kerelspook sat down on two of the still-crisp tombstones of that day.

“You are not good at out-of-the-body experiences because you have not tried them before,” Kerelspook said. “You are like certain primitive peoples who are not able to ride horses, or handle fire, or swim, because they have never resolved to try these things.”

“I begin subtly to teach Earth people to have quick and snappy out-of-the-body experiences. Subtly I taught the girl, and she had one. Subtly I will now teach you also. My analysis of you shows that — ”

“Let us just be clear about who is analyzing whom!” Henry Sounder cried hotly. And then he remembered with fear that those were the reported last words of Jill Discovery.

Henry Sounder snapped away then. He zoomed through the air, going low above the trees and hills. He disappeared over the horizon, and he saw that horizon line on the ground as he passed over it.

But when Henry snapped away from Potters Field he left something behind him still sitting on that tombstone. It was a thing of little value however, except possibly to Henry Sounder himself in a better circumstance.

Henry was in a room ('they’ had a room there) just beyond the horizon. ‘They’ questioned him and analyzed him, but they didn't use words when they did it. They drew Henry out in the form of thousands of very fine glass threads. It was a wordless questioning and analysis that went on for many hours. Henry realized that he had left his body behind him, probably still sitting on that tombstone in Potters Field. The analysis was getting on his nerves, and this was likely because some of those very fine threads they were reeling out to study were his nerves. They were reeling out the threads that were his spirit and putting them to scrutiny.

“We've got about all we can get out of him,” one of ‘them’ said then. “It was a pretty good analysis. We'll understand these freaks yet.” Oh, that subtle whistling! It always played around the corners of the words of the Stoiks.

“I want to snap back to my body,” Henry Sounder said.

“Oh go ahead then. Nobody's stopping you,” one of ‘them’ told him.

Henry snapped back from that place and zoomed through the air close to the hills and trees. It was night. Then he zoomed into the ground itself and was reunited with his body; but he found himself in a bleak and desolate place and under pressure from the earth around him.

“Where am I? Where am I?” he asked, but he knew pretty well.

“Oh, Henry, you're right next to me, hardly a yard away,” Jill Discovery spoke joyfully. “I felt them burying somebody in the night and I hoped it was for you. My Evertock watch tells me that I have been buried here for twenty-four hours. In spite of the ‘airless breathing techniques’ that all Agents of the Center had to learn in their Survival Courses, it hasn't been a very pleasant twenty-four hours. Did you get the dream I sent you? You did come for me. You do care. Did you bring the shovel?”

“Ah, Jill, I begin to understand now,” Henry Sounder spoke in that tight place. “Explanations come clanging into my head one after another. Both of us were picked up and buried as unidentified bodies since Agents of the Center never carry identification of any kind and since ‘anonymous appearance’ is required of us. And now, having been taught the out-of-the-bodies trick by the Stoiks without wanting to be taught it, we are back alive in our bodies. A body is always reanimated if its own spirit returns to it, if the spirit has merely been in detached local travel from it. That explains some of the things reported seen, zombies, rotting bodies walking and talking, frightful things that are mistaken for ghostly manifestations. The Stoiks are able to get through our guard by dying the ‘little death’ under our questioning (but sending their spirits out of their bodies at just the right moments) and being buried by us. But they later come back and reenter and reanimate their bodies. Then the next day, after the sun and the miracle grass have cracked and fissured the covering earth, they erupt out of the ground, brush themselves off, and walk away. But we already have them recorded as dead and buried, and you know how much people hate to reopen closed records. I have that and much more analyzed now.”

“Did you bring the shovel, Henry?” Jill asked. “When I was taking Third Year Analytics one of the questions was ‘What is your definition of Posterior Analytics?’ And I wrote my answer ‘Posterior Analytics is when you get a thing analyzed too late to do you any good.’ I hope that is not our case. You did bring the shovel, didn't you, Henry?”

“Shovel? What shovel? The Stoiks are better at analytics than we are, so they are able to infiltrate our world, and possibly our Center itself. In the last several days there have been some strange new faces in unchallenged high places at the Center. The Stoiks are telepathic and they cause us to enter into telepathic understanding with them. That slight whistling that we hear when they talk is their talk. The other that we believe we hear from them, it is pure telepathy. My own analysis of the present situation is that — ”

“Henry, did you bring the shovel? Tell me, or I'll go hysterical!”

“Jill, Jill, Agents for the Center never become hysterical. It's against our code. The Stoiks are strong enough to break out of the ground without tools. It seems that we are not.”

“Henry, with my last breath: Did you bring the shovel?” Jill screamed with a really big sound. “Where is the shovel!!!”

“Quiet down there!” late-hour revelers hooted at them from above, and then passed on.

The End of Outward

1.

“An arrow should hang at its high point for at least a moment before it falls back,” Ike Casad said peevishly.

“The one we are talking about has hung at its apex for about thirty thousand years,” his friend Fausto Barra told him. “It looks as if that should be a long while, but of course it's not. In this business, if you even blink, thirty thousand years is one. The observation base is so short, so short! We just can't get a good look at anything.”

The two men, Ike Casad who was long and lean and light, Fausto Barra who was darker and shorter and thicker, were arching, shooting arrows straight up into the air as high as they could possibly shoot them, and then watching them fall back and imbed themselves in the turf within hand-reach of them.

“Does the turn-around flop of the arrow count in the cosmic time, I wonder?” Casad asked.

 “Yes, and there's an analog to the turn-over flop,” Barra said. “I believe that we're in such a flop-over time now.”

“Watch this, I'm going to hang an arrow in the sky for quite a long interval,” Casad said boastfully.

“Do so,” Barra told him, “but no trickery.”

“Oh, of course I'll use trickery. Don't you realize that we are re-entering the Age of Trickery?” Ike Casad fitted the arrow to the bowstring, drew, and shot it straight up. The arrow rose for fifty meters, slowed, stopped, and hung there.

“What corn!” Fausto hooted in a sort of laughing disgust.

“Dark lad, that corn will become a bit more colorful, a bit more like old squaw corn,” Ike said, “with purple and red and sharp yellow and flame-orange kernels again. Oh, of course it will become less productive, less uniform, less symmetrical. And people will return to becoming more ruddy, rosy and red, yellow-flame, blonde, and shouting orange. Your type, the almost uniform neutral dark, will pass. People will lighten up again. I'll hate to see you guys go, Fausto, but not much. Yes, I believe that we will pull back out of this stalled age and return to diversity and singularity even if they don't pay as well.”

“How long have you known that Dorner was right?”

“I don't know it now, not for sure. But I suspect that he might be. I was suspecting this new development before ever I met Dorner. Ah, the arrow does hang up in the sky beautifully, does it not? The illusion of stopping time is as good as actually stopping it, since time itself is a mathematical illusion. Oh watch it, you oaf! You've broke it!”

Well yes, Fausto Barra, shuffling around on the green turf while they talked, did break the arrow-shaft of Ike Casad as it stood with its head deeply imbedded in the grassy sod. But they looked up and could see that same arrow still hanging in the sky. That duality was only for a moment though. The image of the arrow faded out and was gone. And there was no doubt that the broken arrow on the grass was the real arrow.

“Illusion is fun, Ike,” Fausto said, “and you're pretty good at it. We regress from the age of smooth illusion and return to the time of coarse trickery. I'm looking for a way to stay here, and I believe I've found it.”

“There is a way, but you won't find it,” Ike Casad told him. “The mathematics of it will grind you up into country sausage. Come back, come back, it will be good back there.”

“If there's a way, I will find it, and I believe that I have. I know more about tight-rope mathematics than you do, Ike. And I believe that I, with a small group of others, have calculated the quantum interval exquisitely. We will remain as unfalling arrows in the sky, slim lad. We will not go down that grubby hill with most of you.”

Ike Casad was very good at projecting illusions. He could cause one or a hundred (and, once, more than a thousand) persons to see his illusions. Could anyone prove that Casad's things were illusions? Yes, the unreality of his things could be proved by rather complex mathematics, and he was delighted when somebody did prove one of his projections false. Ike carried things a little further though. In a series of three papers he gave disturbing evidence that someone was projecting illusions to delude the entire world. But he was not yet able to disprove that gigantic illusion.

Ike Casad had a large and ornate gazebo in his parkland or English garden there. Well in truth it was a combination of band-stand, summer-house, gazebo and belvedere, and it would hold one hundred persons easily. It looked clumsy and dated and overdone when he had finished it only one year ago; but now it had mode and style. It was now only slightly in advance of the popular taste.

A group of fringe scientists was to hold their quarterly meeting here this afternoon, and Ike and Fausto walked down the lush sloping terrace from the archery crest to the gazebo as most of those pop-brains had arrived. Most of them had arrived on single-seaters, but others came in Ford Phaetons, Toyota Curricles, Nobility Surreys (beautiful, beautiful!), Chevrolet Cabriolets, Porsche World Class Sportsmen, Stanhope Imperials, Dodge Celestial Cruisers, Rolls Tycoon Travelers, Grunches Royal Ghosts, and one Paige Post-Age Plutocrat.

All of these were custom built, and the Paige was an absolutely extemporaneous model. They were the finest vehicles that style could conceive or money could build. Scientists were being paid somewhere near what they were worth in those days. What high styling, effortless art, and consummate technology!

And the scientists themselves ran to high style, elite exuberance, and magnetic personalities. They were cult figures. All of them except Dorner.

Jorden Dorner did not run to high style. He wasn't a magnetic or incandescent person. He wasn't a cult figure. He didn't have class. He hadn't any ideas, and what notions he had were hard to accept. He had exuberance though.

“All together now!” this Dorner cried out (he was the last of them to arrive, and most of them had hoped that he wouldn't), “Let's have it: ‘Aw dinosaur droppings, is he here!’ Loud and clear, folks!”

“Aw dinosaur droppings, is he here?” they all sang out loud and clear and with a few chuckles. Well, of course they liked poor Dorner, but not as a scientist. He was a sham, a spinner of false cobwebs. He always came prepared to deliver his long and bottomless speech, and they always tried to crowd him out from it. Well, this time, Charles Cogsworth of the Institute for Impure Science flung himself heroically into the gap and began to speak:

“The Manned Mars Landing becomes more of a possibility every day,” he said with feeling. “Every problem is solved, every doubt is allayed. We have designed perfection in every detail of the ship. We have the crew trained like finely honed instruments. Funds are in escrow. Our timetable is drawn up. We know what we want to do when we get to Mars, and we have the means of doing it. We are almost ready for the final activation of the Program. Our thumb, so to speak, is on the ‘go ahead’ button. This will be the greatest scientific step of this century, of any century.”

“This is the same statement that you have been giving for fourteen years,” Dorner said loudly, “but the ‘go ahead’ button will never be pushed, or if it is pushed it will be found unconnected. There is no ship built for the journey; there is only designed perfection on paper and in computer for such a ship. There are no liquid funds for the project; only funds in escrow. The crew trained like finely honed instruments is fourteen years older than when it was first so trained. We can't send a manned shot to Mars. Forget it!”

“We will never forget it,” Charles Cogsworth said with great dignity. “The ship can be constructed in one hundred and thirteen hours of computerized construction time after we push the ‘go ahead’ button. The funds can be got out of escrow by a simple act of Congress. What can possibly be lacking?”

“The will,” Jorden Dorner said, “and the right time for it. The time for it was not quite reached, and now it will become one year more distant every year. Let's shelve it and forget it.”

“We will never shelve it,” Drexel Bannock spoke solidly. “There have been delays, yes. But there certainly is not any failure of will. Our own chapter, and the fifty other chapters of the ‘Future Today’ movement, all hold this for our first priority. Three months hence, at our next consistory, we may indeed stand at ‘Go Ahead Eve’ which is to be celebrated exactly one week before launching. No, Dorner, you may not read your paper yet. There are many others before you. Diogenes Pontifex, you may deliver your lecture now.”

Diogenes Pontifex, a leader in the ‘Create the Spark Today’ group, was a big man in all the parabiologies, and the creation of life was his main project.

“We have been on our own verge for so long that we have become a little bit dizzy there,” he said. “We were all but certain that we would make our great announcement three months ago. And I was even closer to that certainty last night. Now I find that it still must be a slightly qualified announcement. We have created life, yes. In our particular group there is no doubt of this. We can demonstrate it, yes, again and again. But so far there has been an impurity or incongruity creep into each of our more than one hundred demonstrations: and it has been a different incongruity each time. It is exasperating to be so close to the untainted demonstration for month after month now — ”

“For fourteen years now, Diogenes,” Jorden Dorner interrupted. “Fourteen years ago you had me convinced, but my conviction slipped a little bit when you reported in fifty-six consecutive three-month sessions that there is still one more notch to be traversed to absolute certainty. You will never do it, Diogenes. It recedes from you. The time for it has pulled away and left the project stranded, as it has left so many others. Shelve it, shelve it!”

“We will never shelve it,” Doctor Elton Karns spoke sternly. He had had a lot of practice with these stern admonitions at recent sessions. “There have been delays, but certainly no failure of will. Our chapter will continue to give full support to the ‘Create the Spark Today’ people. We will go onward with it, onward, onward!”

“We cannot go onward,” Dorner maintained. “We cannot even stay where we are. We go backwards. Does it make any of you queasy to ride backwards in a vehicle? That's what we are doing.”

“Fausto and Jorden,” Doctor Elton Karns said as if changing subject, “are the two of you sick? You both seem quite lively, and yet, and yet —  Well, I am a medical doctor, and I can sense things. There is something peculiar here.”

“Oh, what is peculiar about myself?” Fausto Barra asked. “I know lots of things peculiar about Jorden Dorner, of course.”

“Both of you have become slightly transparent,” Doctor Karns said, “though that may not be too extraordinary in present company. I suggest that you leave the illusions to Ike Casad though. His illusions are well done, and so far they are harmless.”

“Mine is not an illusion, not intentionally,” Fausto averred. “If there is a regression, I'm not going to go with it. I'm going to stay in the here-and-now. If we calculate the quantum interval well enough we should be able to remain here. I believe that a quantum has just elapsed, so that most of you are now displaced from several of us by a quantum interval. And you, Doctor Karns, have become slightly transparent to me. Are you sick? Physician, heal yourself.”

Bruno Starlight gave a speech. Dennis Burke gave a speech. Alice Oast gave a speech:

“There are some who view with alarm the fact that breeds of domestic animals (those so artificial arrangements!) are disintegrating and becoming unbred. Goldfish are becoming uncolored and speckled all around the world, and those that are still of full gold marking are worth their weight in that metal. Dogs are becoming un-dogged or are slipping back into some of those earlier planned forms of dogdom. White-faced Hereford cattle are losing their square beefiness and becoming tall and lean and wild-looking like their ancestors. But let us not regret the turbulence of animal breeds as a disaster, but rather as an opportunity. The autocracy of species may well be broken now. While this looseness prevails, we may be able to breach the barriers of species and create absolutely new animals. Anything that we can put on the drawing board we can do.”

“So you have been saying for more than a dozen years, Alice,” Jorden Dorner interposed. “It won't work. The time for it has gone by. That door you heard slamming was not opportunity knocking. Besides, it is a tightening and not a loosening of the bonds of species that has happened.”

Adrian Mansion gave a speech. Donatus O'Rourke gave a speech. Shalimar McGuire gave a speech:

“We should, just about now, be entering the post-verbal age. How laughable it is that we should have communicated by talking and by writing for so long! And not all humans understand the same talk, and few of the non-human species understand any human talk at all. What we are really on the verge of is ‘over-think’ and ‘all-species-think’, for thinking and communication are identical. Talking and writing are now on the verge of being obsolete.”

“So many things are on the verge,” Dorner said. “Who is the verger who with his verge-staff allows some things to pass and denies others? It is a cosmic verger nowadays, and he moves us back from the verge.”

Shalimar finished her excellent presentation in spite of the interruptions of Dorner. It was a wonderful piece full of hope and reasoned invention and intuitive leaps: but it was not quite as wonderful as it had been in the earlier years of its presentation. In scientific advance they all had really hit ‘The Great Doldrum Reef ’, though of course only for short weeks, or years.

Arsine Braveheart gave a speech. Maurine Burns gave a speech. Then Drexel Bannock gave his great ‘Say to these Stones that they become Bread’ speech:

“We can feed the multitudes right now. We can turn the rocks and boulders of the Earth into edible carbohydrates (or is it into hydrocarbons?), and we have been doing it for a long while. Why does this not solve all the hunger problems of the world?”

“Oh, it tastes so funny,” Maurine Burns said. “If it is all the same with you, I'd rather eat the rocks the way they are before you work your great change on them. And the problems of world hunger are already solved. There are just powerful people and groups who have a vested interest in making us believe that there are still hunger problems in the world.”

“That is a very reactionary remark, Maurine,” Bannock said. “And the food doesn't taste as funny as it used to. And it will feed all the multitudes of the Earth with inexhaustible health-giving food. Really, these are much better than the ones I gave you three months ago.”

Drexel Bannock had a wagonload of his bread-from-stone and he began to break loaves of it and give pieces of it to all the scientific people there. The loaves looked like bread and they smelled like bread —  “ — and if they don't taste like bread, you still have two out of three,” Ike Casad said. “Ah, well, we'll just blend them with a little real food here. We'll eat and drink and be merry, and we will contemplate the problem of ‘The Great Doldrum Reef ’. And then we will scatter again till three months hence.”

“Just a minute,” Jorden Dorner protested. “You know there is no way of blocking me from giving my own speech.”

“You will be allowed to make a stirrup-cup speech only, Jorden,” Ike said. “Talk while we eat and drink. It will be a little bit like having fiddle music with our banquet. One-string-fiddle music.”

2.

“It was a dozen years ago that I felt the strong compulsion to write left-handed and backwards in doing the first drafts of my histories here. That is the way that Leonardo wrote his notebooks, but he was being cryptic. I recognized this compulsion as having psychological roots and so I obeyed it. I began to use palindromic paper: I wrote left-handed and backwards, then turned the sheets over, and they were as if written right-handed and forwards; and so I bound them into my brochures. But why was I compelled to write my histories backwards?

“I surmised (correctly, I believe) that it was because history had indeed begun to run backwards, and my inner self demanded that I use this symbolism in recognition of the fact. I checked with other historians. Two others had the same compulsion that I had. Five others were compelled to other sorts of symbolism to express the reversed flow of history. It will take a little getting used to, but history has indeed been running backwards for at least a dozen years now. Why have so few people noticed this?”

 — Arpad Arutinov, The Back Door of History

“Are you going to contract the universe again this session, old pumpkin-head?” Alice Oast asked Jorden Dorner. “When my grandchildren ask me ‘What did you do in the time of the Great Doldrum, grandma?’ I will say ‘I listened with sorrowful ears to old Father Doldrum himself ’. And so I will justify myself.”

“I will reiterate today that the universe has begun to contract, yes,” Dorner stated bravely. “If we but stretch our eyes we will see that the question whether our universe is ‘steady state’, ‘big bang all the way’, or ‘oscillating’ is settled. Ours is an oscillating universe, and we have just completed part of an oscillation. Within three million years we will be able to verify that some of the closer galaxies are showing a violet shift rather than a red shift. If light weren't so slow getting here we could verify it right now. Of course there is no direct-observation, first-class proof that the universe has begun to contract, but neither is there any proof that it has not. There are very many small-scale indications that the reversal has begun.”

“I hear that you're getting a team of Cleveland Bays, Ike,” Doctor Elton Karns said. “For beauty, there are no horses like them.”

“My presentation will be a disappointment to whatever ‘steady state’ advocates are left,” Dorner was continuing. “No longer may they say ‘Ah, consider the wonderful species and civilizations that may have already passed over the event horizon’. Nobody has passed over that horizon, nor will. And I doubt if there are any species or civilizations more wonderful than ourselves. We will not pass over the horizon from anybody, nor will anybody pass over the horizon from us. We draw together again.”

“I didn't feel any jerk when the universe stopped expanding and began to contract, Dorner,” Charles Cogsworth said with smiling malice.

“Yes you did, Charles. You felt it and were nearly shook apart by it,” Dorner replied. “I myself talked you out of suicide and led you back to hope. ‘Oh the changes, the changes, they are too much for me!’ is what you kept crying out when you were most shook by the reversal.”

“The changes that I cried out against had nothing to do with the universe reversing its processes,” Cogsworth barked in quick anger.

“Oh, they were quite closely connected,” Dorner insisted. “But physically the reversal was hardly felt. Our universe hasn't been expanding at a uniform rate from its beginning. It expanded much faster at first, but it has been slowing down from that very first instant. Now my calculations show that the expansion has stopped, and indeed that its contraction has been under way for some time, a decade or two by Earth time-measure. It will be a while before the contraction is observable to astronomers, of course.”

“But that would mean that our universe is very much younger than is usually calculated for it,” Shalimar McGuire protested.

“Certainly. Likely it's no more than a tenth or a hundredth of its usually calculated age. Old cosmic speeds do not leave any clear records of themselves in the most obvious places, but I begin to find their impression in the less obvious places.”

“This rock-bread is not a great improvement on the last, Bannock,” Doctor Karns said. “Ah well, I'll use a little bit more ketchup on it, I guess.”

“There is, however, one small weather vane that swerves and possibly shows that the direction has changed,” Dorner went on. “That small vane is ourselves and our world, and the culture and furniture of our world. Surely you all see that it has been running backwards for these latest few years. This is only a small indicator of the change, of course, but there are quite a few of these small indicators and they add up.”

“I'm not going to take the return trip,” Fausto Barra said. “I'm going to stay in this approximate present. It won't bother me that I'll be transparent. There are eyeglasses now that permit one to see the human aura. We who remain need not be invisible to each other. And it is one of those archetypal dreams to live in a well-stocked world from which all the people have fled except a very small and most excellent elite.”

“It's hard to think of you as belonging to any sort of elite, Fausto,” Alice Oast said. “Is this your spoof-of-the-month?”

“No, this will be real, or at least contingently real. Stay with me here in the anomaly, Alice.”

“All right.”

“As to our local-world, slight indication of the change, I believe that one of the markers of it was our landing men on the moon,” Dorner said. “We were permitted that grand gesture at the turning of the tide. That happening, only thirty years ago, may have been the turning point. That was as far outward as our cosmos went before it began to draw together again. Our biological and cultural evolution, having reached its limit at the same time that the cosmos reached its limit, began to recede and fold back on itself. Now we will begin to merge with slightly previous people, with simians of common ancestry, with proto-mammals, with archaic life. The first indication of this is already with us, that the domestic breeds of dogs and horses and cattle and goldfish are disintegrating, are coming unbred.

“Oh, the return journey will be as long as the outward journey, and maybe more interesting. But I won't make it myself. I'm another of those who will stay here. But our ‘human affair’ does recede and merge with other affairs.”

“Dorner,” Drexel Bannock shouted with his mouth full of food (not from rocks), “I'll bet you that out of maybe one hundred million civilizations there are always about forty-nine million receding and fifty-one million advancing, and yet that inch-worm advance will be a real advance. And this nexus of civilizations will have nothing to do with any expansion or contraction of the cosmos. For that is on a different scale entirely.”

“I knew that the reversal had taken place the morning I decided to grow a beard,” Dorner said. “I was a brash young man then, though already quite intelligent. ‘It was surely a short beardless interval,’ I said to myself (from the beards of the 1890's to the new faddish beards of the twentieth century was only about sixty years), ‘A larger cycle has pre-empted the old beard-beardless cycle and scissored its time in half. We are going backwards over an old path’. So I joined them for a while, even though I looked ridiculous with whiskers. But beards, of course, are only one of the hundreds of signs of our regression into the past.”

“Dorner, I repeat that our mundane thoughts and the cosmos are on entirely different scales,” Bannock said. “Get that straight.”

“One more for everybody, the stirrup cup!” Ike Casad cried. And he began to fill the cups of all of them. “And when the last stirrup cup is drained, we will scatter and leave Dorner to his own notions.”

“So is the moon on a different scale from a picture of the moon,” Dorner was saying to Bannock. “And yet they are counterparts. Our own lives and our civilization and society form a very small Vernier scale that is counterpart of the cosmic scale. And we signal that the contraction is under way.”

All of them were on their feet now. Some of them finished their stirrup cups with a foot literally in their stirrup, then tossed their cups away, swung a-mount, cried ‘Tally-Ho, all!’, and rode away.

“We're at the end of the ‘Gasoline Century’ of course,” Jorden Dorner was saying. “I suspect that it will quickly be shoved out of the popular consciousness and the popular memory. Such an oddity as the ‘Gasoline Century’ doesn't leave a permanent impression. The irony is that there is enough refined gasoline on hand to supply the world at its maximum consumption for ten days. This was set aside by edict. But technically we never did run out of gasoline, nor of many other terminated things. Enough for the world for ten days is enough of everything for a self-selected elite for a thousand years. Will those who go down the regression path even check on these sealed supplies? If they do, will they know why they are diminishing very, very slowly?”

Almost all the scientists had now mounted their single-seaters, their riding horses; or had climbed into their horse-drawn buggies and carriages, their Ford Phaetons, Toyota Curricles, Nobility Surreys (those beautiful vehicles!), Chevrolet Cabriolets, Porsche World-Class Sportsmen, Stanhoper Imperials, Dodge Cruisers, Rolls Tycoon Travelers, and all of those other splendid horse-cars. And all of them (except the half-dozen who remained behind) rode off in high amusement at the idea of Dorner that their civilization had begun to regress, and his even fuzzier idea that the cosmos itself had begun to contract.

3.

But there is an elite that remains at ‘The End of Outward’, and that elite is still there. We cannot know it well because a mini-event-horizon has pulled back from it and left it to itself. But rumor of it dies hard. The people of that elite have the best of everything, so the rumor says. They belong to a special race, a race that once flew to the moon, so the rumor says. They are as far out as anybody ever went, and nobody can ever take that away from them.

New People

1.

Mind-enhancing and strength-enhancing substances had been used for a dozen years. Their effect was remarkable and even spectacular, and often the effect on a person was permanent. But the substances themselves had not been isolated. They were come by only in unsuspecting and unpredictable combinations. And yet it was the ‘new’ or enhanced people who, every year, came to the fore and became the leaders of the world in almost every field.

This year, many of the new and enhanced people were common, not at all distinguished or elegant in their persons; and this became rather painful. They could not be ignored. The ‘new’ people, despite their failings, were the people who mattered. There is no denying that the present year has more of the powerful new people than usual, and that they are more than usually vulgar.

Well, there was Lenny ‘Toadskin’ Leim. He reported to a mid-western university as a freshman in February of this year, and he was a walk-on in track and field. In the field of athletics where charisma counts for so much, he didn't have any of it at all. But he could high-jump nine feet and nine inches. That was two feet higher than any human had ever jumped before. But he was a slight man with nothing impressive about him except his ability to skim through all the texts and lectures of a difficult course in one hour and then pass an examination in that course with a full A.

And there was Sven Singleton, who could throw anything further than it had ever been thrown before: the hammer, the javelin, the shot-put, the discus. He hadn't any style, and he was a rather short-armed, lean man with no particular ‘swing’ to him, but he could throw all those things. “How far must I throw it for a record today?” he'd ask whenever he came up to the mark for any of them. He didn't believe in breaking a record by too much. There would always be tomorrow for that. He also threw the baseball (one thousand and one feet) and the football (one hundred and thirty-three yards) farther than it had been thrown before.

There was Bob Bunchy, who broke most of the weightlifting marks for the eight different classes. He was a small man, but he outlifted the heavyweights and super-heavyweights also. His records couldn't be disputed, but the strongest man in the world should have come on a little bit stronger in his person.

Elton Spree did the hundred yards in 7.9 seconds, and his sister Audrey Spree did the mile in 3:03. In the autumn of this year, Jimmy Joe Jimson began to run through everybody on the football field. As of now, after six games, he still has not been tackled. He is averaging a little more than five hundred yards a game, and he is always taken out after he has carried the ball ten times. And Billy John Bilberry at Alabama, Randy Andy Anderson at Oklahoma, and Circus Charley Crump at Arkansas are all about as good. Circus Charley was tackled once this year, in the third game of the season, but that was only because he was showing off too much and got tangled up in his own feet.

All of these athletes, and a hundred other new and prominent ones, were slobs to some degree; or at least they were commoners. But all of them were mental giants as well as physical phenomena. Each of them, except Sven Singleton, had written a meaningful and monumental work of philosophy, and those works remain meaningful even after nine or ten months have passed.

And as to the true intellectual giants among the ‘new people’ of the present year! Casey Yantra, August Tooms, Joyful John Tolliver (so he's the greatest physicist in the world and he goes around barefoot, in faded blue overalls, and shirtless, but he's hairy enough not to need a shirt except for appearance), Ivan Tottlebeam, Jessica Wigtown (how we are blessed with talent this year!), John King-Stephen, Henry Saxo, Rafael Ricardo (the ‘Big Think’ had finally arrived with Ricardo), Caroline Yap, Efram Rickets, Demetrio Garcia, Sulky-Jane Surrey, Tom Benbolt, Terrance Tripuill! Since the beginning of the world there had never been such a bunch of extraordinary minds appearing in a single year, and this was in only half of the world. In the other half of the world there was only the relentless excellence that might have been predicted, not this sensational excellence that almost exploded in what used to be called the ‘New World.’

2.

Mother Maderos (her real name was Conchita Anita Maderos) was being advocatorily interviewed (about the chili powder on which she held copyright) by an Investigative Reporter and a Federal Person traveling together, as had become the custom.

IR: “Mother Maderos, we must know exactly what you put into your Mother Maderos Dawn Chili Powder. I said that we must know exactly what you put into it, not approximately.”

MM: “I heard you said it, punk. But I am not an exactly person. I am an approximately person. I say there is only an approximately formula for what goes into the chili powder. It is never the same for two different batches. Besides, it is none of your affair what is in my chili powder. It is the other one there who is the federal person and he can ask questions. You are the nothing person.”

IR: “You may just have talked yourself into a prison sentence, Mother Maderos. The word of any investigative reporter is law to any federal person. They could not, or would not, conduct any meaningful investigation at all without us. Tell her that our word is law with all federal persons, Clyde. Explain it to her. No, you wouldn't be able to do that. Just say ‘That's right’ to whatever I say, and say it resoundingly.”

FP: “ ‘That's right’ isn't one of the phrases in our repertoire. The closest thing to ‘that's right’ in our repertoire is ‘right on’.”

IR: “Say it, Clyde, say it resoundingly.”

FP: “Right on!!!”

MM: “Oh, I see. Well, my chili powder is made up entirely of additives. The one thing that the ‘Mother Maderos Dawn Chili Powder’ does not contain is chili powder itself. All my franchised outlets (actually I have only one franchised outlet: ‘Crum Bums Junk Food Emporiums,’ but there are one hundred locations in their system), all of them start with standard Arizona Greaseless Chili. My powder contains Prusopis juliflora (Mesquite), Apion sayi (the corn weevil; sure they're alive; but they're small as the powder), ground-up rhizome of the Helleborus foetidus or bear's-foot plant. And androsterone, of course. And chili wouldn't be chili without Lophophora williamsii (Peyote Cactus buds) and the Psilocybe mexicana mushroom. And Bufotenin (Ah, Bufotenin!) (from the skin of toads, and also from banana peels). Bufotenin was the active element in most of the witches' brews, you know.”

IR: “Are you a witch, Mother Maderos?”

MM: “Sort of, but don't advertise it. I'm also head of the Saint Cecelia Circle of the Altar Society at the Parish. That's the main things I put into my powder. The others are impulse put-ins, never the same twice. Oh yes, I do put a little bit of nitroglycerin in each batch. I figure that a lot of people have bad hearts and my nitroglycerin probably saves countless lives every day. And I put in estrone to make people feel good. I hardly ever put Spanish Fly in my powder lately. You can go to jail for using that stuff.”

IR: “I wouldn't worry about that detail, Mother Maderos. You can already go to jail a dozen times for using what you have admitted using. Anything else?”

MM: “Yeah, I put a little bit of ‘smart stuff root’ and a little bit of ‘strong stuff root’ in it. I figure that people can't be too smart or too strong. Those two are code names. They won't mean anything to you. They stand the world on its nose but they won't mean anything to you.”

IR: “Mother Maderos, you are hereby enjoined from manufacturing or selling any more of this powder. The items are all dangerous and illegal, all of them that I understand. Formal charges will be filed against you within twelve hours; and, pending that, you will probably be taken into custody within an hour. If you have any arrangements to make, make them quickly. You will be going away for a long time.”

MM: “I'll just ship the carload of the stuff that I have on the siding to my main distribution point. Then I'll think about it, whether I want to change the powder or stay with it the way it is. Oh, it's no trouble. All my railway cars are self-propelled.”

IR: “You will not ship anything anywhere! Almost all the items you have named are carcinogenous to black-foot weasels.”

MM: “Whatever happened to rats? You'll enjoin me to nothing. You are the nothing person. Let the tongue-tied federal person here do the enjoining if anybody does.” This Conchita Maderos then went to the window, put two fingers in her mouth, and whistled a very piercing and loud whistle.

IR: “Back me up, Clyde, back me up. Say one of the phrases in your repertoire.”

FP: “Right on!!!” From outdoors, and about a kilometer away, there came a very loud and piercing whistle in answer to the whistle that Conchita Maderos had given. This was followed by a roar and a rumble, a self-propelled rumble.

FP: “It's rolling, is it?”

MM: “Yeah, Clyde, that last carload of stuff is rolling. But I'm not sure about the subsequent ones. That might be the subsequentest one there is.”

IR: “What, what, what? What is all this mouthy talk? As I said, Mother Maderos, if you have any arrangements to make, make them quickly. You will be going away for a long time.”

And just what is all this business about the ‘Mother Maderos Dawn Chili’ doing in the middle of this account?

Oh, I have just received a registered mailing from the Criminal Enforcement Division of the Government. It is sent to all the Junk Food dealers in the country, it says. It quotes the foregoing little interview as evidence, and it states that this must be displayed in a prominent place as a warning against the Dawn Chili Powder. Failure to display this prominently can result in a prison sentence from any derelict Junk Food dealer.

I have no prominent place to display it, but maybe this will do. I am not a Junk Food dealer, but the Criminal Enforcement Division of the Government must believe that I am or they would not have sent this missive to me by registered mail. It is safest to insert this here.

3.

Terrance Tripuill is the world's smartest geologist and geocosmologist, and he has been so for most of this year. Oh, there is no doubt that he is the smartest. He arrived on the scene like a continental upheaval, with the rocks gushing like water and a brimstone smell upon everything. He brought new theory and facts to isothermics. He unraveled the secret of the trilobite Isotelus. Nobody else had even thought to ask why a new trilobite had been needed in its particular era. And the answer that Terrance gave to that question left the people shaking who really understood the trilobite situation.

Nobody knew more about Florissant Lake Beds than did Terrance Tripuill. Nor about the Flaming Gorge, nor about Devonian Orogeny generally. Nor about the Sundance Sea, or the Sinbad Limestone, or Neogeratorus. If it had anything to do with the Earth, Terrance knew all about it.

Terrance, a lumbering giant, was a sober and sedate man. He wasn't as bizarre as most of the sudden new geniuses of this year, though some of their oddities have rubbed off onto him now. Besides wearing at all hours and seasons and functions a hunting jacket with all the pockets filled with shotgun shells (no, that was only a drollery of his to say that they were shotgun shells; they were really blasting caps), his only eccentricity was carrying around a bowling ball with him always. The bowling ball had a world map contoured upon it, and the three holes at the top of it had interesting counterparts on the surface of the Earth itself. For, just at these three corresponding locations, Terrance had begun three great excavations into the earth, one of them near Alta in Norway (70°N, 23°E); one of them near Kazachye in Siberia (70°N, 142°E), just where the Cherskiy range of mountains had somehow been gobbled up; and the third of them on Cornwallis Island in the Northwest Territories of Canada (99°E, 75°N). This latter was called the thumb-hole by Terrance.

The theory of Terrance (get ready for it, it's in the style of the new “loose theory” outpouring of this year) was that three very great holes in the Earth, each about two hundred miles in diameter and nine hundred miles deep, had been filled up artificially, by men, or by the giants who were before men. Terrance Tripuill was a great fundraiser, and he was determined to find out why those three big holes had been filled up. They were filled with such masses of rubble that whole ranges of mountains had been demolished to obtain the filling material. After seven months of digging, the deepest emptying (about sixty-five miles deep, at the Cornwallis Island site) still showed artificial fill of rocks that were the remnants of mountains blasted apart.

“There is something waking up down at the bottom of that hole,” Terrance declared on one of his fundraising tours. “I have been logging its brain waves (Would you believe brain waves a mile long?) It's been a prisoner down there for between seven and nine million years. I am pretty sure that there is one of these creatures at the bottom of each of the three holes. People, we must solve this at all costs. It is the biggest skeleton ever to be hidden in any three closets. A creature that is seven to nine million years old is old. A creature that is two hundred miles in diameter is big. People, this is no little project that we are engaged on. This is ‘Big Study’ stuff.”

There were people who believed that the big creature should not be released, that it or they were imprisoned and buried for a reason. But if a thing was that big, the new feeling was to go ahead with it. No new scientist of any other recent year had got hold of such a ‘Big Concept’ project as Terrance Tripuill had got hold of here. Consider him, and get an idea of the really big things that are on the move right now, the big new things that are not always as neat as the new things of other years. Should the present year not be named ‘The Year of the Big Concept’?

But it has been Rafael (The Big Think) Ricardo who has really brought the present year where it might be called ‘The Amazement of the Ages.’ The other spectacular new scientists have big concepts and big enterprises, but they do not really have the ‘View From a Distant Mountain.’ The ‘Distant Mountain,’ somewhere out in the orbit of Neptune, gave the ‘Big View’ as well as the ‘Big Think’ to Ricardo who was able to locate himself mentally in that place. It gave him peculiar insights and far-out-sights into all the jumping new theories, those of Casey Yantra, August Toombs, Joyful John Tolliver, Ivan Tottlebeam, Jessica Wigtown, John King Stephen, Henry Saxo, Caroline Yap, Efram Rickets, Demetrio Garcia, Sulkey Jane Surrey, Tom Benbolt, Terrance Tripuill, all the great ones. “A year that can't see itself properly on the outside has still a long ways to go on its exterior construction,” Ricardo used to say as he zoomed along on his skateboard.

On the project that was popularly called ‘The Three Holes of Terrance Tripuill,’ Ricardo had some penetrating ‘distant mountain’ views. “No, of course there aren't any big creatures buried alive at the bottoms of those three holes,” he said. “That's the silliest thing I ever heard of. Our trouble is that we are all too close to the Earth to see what it is really like. It is an artificial ball set into a natural sequence of planets orbiting a natural sun. Terrance Tripuill is forever carrying a bowling ball around with him, even to bed (his wife tells me that it is from the bowling ball that she got that broken clavicle, and her insurance didn't cover ‘a bowling accident in bed’), and yet he hasn't tumbled to the fact that he has been living on a bowling ball all his life. His unconscious understands it, yes, but his consciousness does not.

“Some demiurge once set it, the bowling-ball Earth, into a sequence of orbiting planets for a joke. It did look like a planet orbiting there, and his companions laughed with him at the place he had parked it.

“But some of the fauna of the bowling ball named Earth developed and came to understand the situation. They filled up the three finger holes of the bowling ball with rubble from a few mountain ranges that they had to demolish. When that demiurge is ready to go bowling again (though a day with them is as a million years with us, yet it's been more than a cosmic week since he set it here, so he might come for it at any time) he won't be able to pick the bowling ball up out of its orbit. He'll find that the finger holes are filled up. That might give our artificial planet a reprieve for a while (an instant with the demiurge while he had to grasp the ball with both hands might be as ten thousand years with us). The decision to fill up the three holes was a good one, no matter whose decision it was.”

Was there ever as intellectual a year as this one? Well, do you yourself not sleep better at night knowing that the ‘Big Think’ is present among us?

4.

Six Investigative Reporters were sitting very late one night over the walnuts and the wine. They were talking about the one thing that they had all been basically investigating all year. The six of them (Interrogative Reporters, though they are gadflies upon the Earth, are not bad people when they get together by themselves) were Tim Dall, Eileen Keeghan, Harold Fame, Maximilian Lombardy, Janus Funk, and Roxie Campollion. The one thing they were always thinking and talking about (while they pursued lesser stories to make a living) was the appearance of the exceptional ‘new people’ this year, so much more talented than the new people of other recent years, so much more loutish and slobbish than the leading new people of other years. And they had about worn out the night with anecdotes of the incongruities of these ‘new people.’

One of these Investigative Reporters, Tim Dall, had always been the least esteemed of the group. But now, suddenly and in a way not understood, he had himself become one of the new people. That made a difference.

And, this was connected with his having become a ‘new person,’ he could crack walnuts between his thumb and forefinger now. Of course these were Black Walnuts. This group wasn't, at least, the sort of people who used English Walnuts.

“Yes, you have become one of the ‘New People’ geniuses, Tim,” Roxie Campollion said. “We realize that you have suddenly become preternaturally strong and spacious and intelligent. And yet you're as common as you ever were. You are, in fact, the only common one of us. Why oh why should the bird lay the golden egg on the top of your noggin and not on the noggin of any other of us? It's damned unfair. Special blessings should not come to persons who can't handle them elegantly.” Roxie was a little bit sour when she thought about this.

“The ‘new people’ geniuses, of this year most especially, are pretty crass. They're the sort of folks who wear turtleneck sweaters and eat liver-and-onions,” Janus Funk said in disgust. “You qualify for that, Tim. Ah, I'm under a vow never to retire for the night until the first hint of the dawn appears in the sky. I hope it doesn't keep me waiting too long this morning.”

“The aliens have landed,” Eileen Keeghan moaned. “One or two of them have been landing spectacularly every day this year. And they are all so common and so cruddy that they make the rest of us seem, by contrast, to be exciting and more than a little bit alienish ourselves. These new arrivals do not really have the ‘touch of strange’, for that is always accompanied by a ‘touch of elegance.’ Oh yes, they all arrive with the door-splitting power of both mind and body. We will not accept them. Well, what will we do with them then? They're the sort of people who drive orange automobiles and wear apple-blossom scent in July.” Eileen wrote a daily newspaper column titled ‘Kit Fox Droppings.’ It was very elegant, as was she. “Doesn't the time drag between four and four-thirty in the morning though!”

“The aliens have not landed,” Harold Fame said. “Examine any one of the brilliant ‘new people’ and he will have been around for as long as you want to check back on him, been around as a tedious and unbrilliant fixture, with his pockets empty and his welcome everlastingly worn out. But what carrion have they now eaten that they have become so great? I believe that they've struck the ‘mother lode’ this year, though without realizing it. For a dozen years, intelligence-enhancing substances have been placer-mined out of the flow and pharmacopoeia of our world; but always they have been greatly diluted and their real sources have remained unknown. But they've tapped the ‘mother lode’ this year. Oh, why can't we all find it out and tap it? This year's ‘new people,’ they're the sort who would casually toss their jacket over their right shoulder when strolling on a chill-sunny day, the sort of people who use Syrian almonds and New Jersey holland onions.”

“I never did understand about the ‘new people’,” Tim Dall said, “but yesterday morning, quite early, I discovered that I had become one of the ‘new people.’ It would seem that, having become one of them, I would be able to understand and explain them better, but such is not the case. I still do not at all understand these powerful new people, not even the powerful new person that I have become. But this ‘mother lode,’ you call it, Harold, I should be able to identify it. And there is a glimmer of it at the back door of my mind right now.”

“Ah, the night does drag,” Maximillian Lombardy complained. “Until this year I could gather with other Investigative Reporters and believe that I was just possibly in the most elite and most intellectual company in the world. This year, I can no longer maintain that fiction. The ‘new people’ louts are more intellectual than we are, and that makes them more elite than we are. Oh, why should it come to them and not to ourselves! They are the sort of people who — Oh, words fail me! — they are the sort of people who would eat chili for breakfast.”

“That's it!” Tim Dall cried. “Let's all go have chili for breakfast. I believe that it's important.”

“It's too early even for a chili breakfast, isn't it?” Roxie asked, not quite warming to the idea.

“Not for ‘Mother Maderos Dawn Chili’ available at your nearest Crum Bums Junk Food Emporium. Let's go!”

5.

“Six Dawn Chilis!” Tim Dall ordered as he and his friends took one of those sociable six-sided tables in Crum Bums North-Side Junk Food Emporium.

“We have other chilis,” the waitress said. “Mother Maderos Dawn Chili isn't for everyone.”

“But it is for us,” Roxie declared. “How is it different?”

“It makes you smart and it makes you strong,” the waitress said. “I say about those who can't stand the taste of Dawn Chili, ‘Well and good, it keeps things from getting too crowded.’ But there are disadvantages.” Yes, she had already served the six Dawn Chilis to them quickly. “Since it's changed me, I keep breaking all my husband's ribs whenever we rough-house wrestle the way we like to. I have to be careful not to break him, and not to break other things too. And my mind is so active now that it keeps me on the go all the time. And besides, I've made so much money just by latching onto those obvious opportunities that I'm almost buried under it.”

“Ow!” Roxie cried, “and then Ow on the other side. It's as if long and pointed ears just came out of me. Getting smart fast isn't painless. Oh yes, I'm enhanced, and I only had three spoonfuls of the stuff. Why do you still work here, dear, if you are covered up with money now?”

“For the people. I couldn't get along without them. Even before I was changed, the first time I walked into Crum Bums (this one opened last May), I said, ‘This is for me.’ These are the kind of people that — ”

“ — that drive orange-colored automobiles and wear apple-blossom scent in July,” Eileen Keeghan chirped with her sour bird song, “the sort of people who wear turtleneck sweaters and eat liver-and-onions (when they're not eating Dawn Chili), the kind of people who casually toss their jackets over their right shoulders. Ugh, and ugh cubed.”

“You're onto us, sis,” the waitress said. “Aren't slobs wonderful! I'm glad that the change hasn't changed me.”

“But it hasn't run clear wild,” Janus Funk questioned it, “though I myself have just become one of the New People. What will limit the effect?”

“Oh, this is the last week that we'll have Mother Maderos Dawn Chili,” the girl said. “There's a writ out against it, so she's not making any more of her chili powder for a while. It's technically a government writ, but it's really Compensating Fate intervening before things get clear out of hand. Oh, the ‘smart stuff root’ and the ‘strong stuff root’ (they're code names only) will still be used in something or other, but by fewer people and in lesser strength. This year almost got out of hand.”

“I don't feel any pointed ears coming out on me exactly,” Maximillian Lombardy laughed, “but I sure am crowded to bursting with long and pointed thoughts. Ah, I'm going to like this.”

“I give it up!” Eileen spat in disgust. “I was always smart enough, and I refuse to become gross. I'll blow the lid off this thing!” And she rattled out of Crum Bums North-Side place angrily (she always wore a lot of wooden bracelets and anklets; they accounted for the rattling).

“She wouldn't even know where to find the lid,” the waitress laughed, “but she'll probably create a few hot pellets. I read her column ‘Kit Fox Droppings’ in the paper. Ah, we have a sort of organization to keep things in hand. We call it the ‘Committee of One Million to Keep it Quiet,’ though it has about five million members now. You all may as well join. The idea is — ”

“ — that it's fun to be super-smart and super-strong,” Roxie took it up, “but it's the most fun when you keep it quiet and enjoy it privately without upsetting the money cart or the academic wagon.”

“That's it,” the waitress said. “You all may as well have a couple more bowls. The fun of this is that the joys can only come to the right people, those who ate chili for breakfast anyhow. Giving up Dawn Chili doesn't mean that we will be giving up chili.”

“Ah, I wonder what the ‘New People’ of the coming year will be like?” Janus Funk mused, “and what will their gadget be?”

“I hope it's a little bit more subtle next year, whatever it is,” Harold Flame said. “I worry. Is it really smart to become as smart as we have just become?”

But, really, will things be as uniquely ‘new’ with the New People of next year?

The Rod and the Ring

“The set-up here is like the Greater Tulsa Telephone Book,” Randy Andy Oglesby stated. “Too many characters, and a weak or non-existent story line. It will have to be a ‘loosening’ encounter. Well, I suppose I’m the loosest of us.”

There were strong smells of Corrosive Sublimate, of animal musk and of combat musk, of brimstone and of sulfur dioxide, of flesh rot and of plant rot, of hot fractured stones, of fetid swamps and of slack salt-water, of adrenaline uncorked, of rancid ozone, Mexicali mushrooms, Devonian tar-pits, the smell of things coming apart, of very large things coming apart, the smell of entrenched insanity. There is nothing like rampant smells to set up a murderous mood.

“Thirteen characters aren’t very many,” Bertigrew Bagley said thoughtfully. “Some of the arrangements have up to eight thousand characters.”

“Eight thousand pawns, maybe, not characters. Seven vivified characters can be critical mass. Nine can be dangerously critical mass. And you yourself know how very chancy as many as thirteen can be.”

“I know,” Bagley said. Bertigrew Bagley was Patrick of Tulsa. One of the characters, Killer Flegle, was Emperor of Tulsa (very sloppy thinking and naming, that). And Bagley could slip into that role easily. “And thirteen at table is said to be unlucky, as if there weren’t already a strong enough smell of unluck about the arrangement.”

“Thirteen characters and only two props,” Apollonia Woods said in her soft voice that had been likened to ‘whispering acid.’ “Except that the characters are also props, and the two props (the Rod and the Ring) are also characters. Yes, I know that the ring is given mistakenly as a watch in the arrangement. But a ring with a dial on it (thirteen dials in the present case) is still a ring, an educated ring. This is the ultimate arrangement though. Oh absolutely! Can you not see that?”

“You fit the character of Apologia Dubois perfectly, Apollonia,” Bagley said. “But then you fit a lot of characters perfectly.”

There were subliminal sounds and murmurations coming from the arrangement. They were below the regular threshold of the ear, and yet they carried relentless anti-arguments and destructions.

“I don’t quite fit this character,” Apollonia said. “There is a place for outright insanity in putting these arrangements together, but such insanity should at least be creative. I invoke the ‘minor change option’ here before I step into the Apologia character. ‘One blue eye, which is on the left on Mondays, Wednesday, and Fridays; and one green eye.’ A lack of imagination that extreme almost cries to heaven for vengeance. I’ll keep the green eye, and I’ll change the blue eye to a red one. I already have my amber-colored nose, and I can flash it on and off. Maybe I can pick up a little extra money working as a traffic light somewhere. What is this crabby little place we’re in, Bertigrew? And are the snakes here real? Yes, I know that the specifications call for a place ‘in an extreme state of decay.’ This dining room couldn’t have been much even when the place was younger. With our big table sitting the thirteen of us here, there's just not much room left for anything else. And the arena part of the building isn’t very big. It won’t sit over five hundred. And the pit itself might be fine for a point-blank combat, but it sure hasn’t room for far-ranging battles.”

“This is what's left of the Floto Bowl,” Bertigrew (Flegle) Bagley said. “It may have been better, but not bigger, in its palmy days which were about sixty years ago. Harry Greb fought here once.”

“Who or what was Harry Greb?” Horatio McElroy asked.

“A prize fighter, in the days when they were dull but honest. He was middleweight champion of the world. Boxing was illegal in Tulsa County then, but this place is over the line in Osage County. It was quite a few things, a high-stakes gambling place (there was a lot of big money in the Osage then), a speak-easy, a good supper club (buffalo rib-racks were a specialty, and so was rattlesnake meat before it caught on elsewhere), and an arena. Yes, the arena pit is small, barely room for a boxing ring in it. It was a cock-pit.”

“A cock-pit? For what sort of vehicle?” Hermione McElroy asked.

“A cock-pit for cock fights,” Bagley said. “There was a lot of money bet on cock fights then. I fed the specifications into a computer; it considered all the places in an extreme state of decay and came up with the Floto Bowl. It does fill most of the requirements, including ‘old blood-soaked ground to underlie it all.’ Ah, the snakes here are real, Apollonia.”

The supper was good. The buffalo rib-rack was excellent though the buffalo (from Crab Tree Ranch Number Four) had been costly. Those fellows hadn’t been about to kill half a buffalo.

These ‘arrangements’ take on a life of their own after a bit, when a specified setting has been occupied, when the characters have been matched with the testers, when the theme begins to unfold itself, when the confrontation-and-combat comes to first blood. And there were daring (ruinous really) notions playing like lightning between the thirteen of them there. There were the exponentially-exploding dangerous thoughts feeding on each other and growing great. But in the present case there seemed to be a new recklessness.

The stimulants tonight were not unusual, Agaric and Mexicali Mushrooms, Psychic Puffballs, Oxytropis Splendens, Snow, White Rum with Bhang, Ghost, Arabian Palmer Weed. And there were other stimulants that came with the arrangement, borderline narcotics and mind-benders and ‘Utter-Depravity Crystals.’ These were dream-effect things and not immediately exciting. But ‘loosening’ was the theme that ran through it all, ‘destruction by loosening.’

The spoiling of the personality and of the personality-consensus seemed to be the aim of the group that had composed the arrangement. There had been some very unsavory minds involved in creating those characters, but unsavory minds were the ‘big in’ with all the arrangements this year.

The rationale that came with the arrangement was mostly concerned with ‘breaking the consensus’ and with that even more daring thing ‘breaking the world which is built entirely on consensus.’ This rationale was spoken to each of them subliminally and relentlessly. It bypassed their intelligence and attacked and conquered them.

“You believe that the world is based on any other thing than the consensus?” the silent voice assaulted them. “Break the consensus and find out. You believe that the tilt towards predominant mind-madness will not shatter this planet? But the planet has already been shattered, and its shards are held together by only the most tenuous bonds and by common agreement. An insane world will fly apart every time. You doubt that you can literally smash the world? Try it. With all the rot and loosening at hand, try it. This game, this ‘Lose the World Game’, can be won.” So the silent voices talked.

Meanwhile two combatants were down in the cock-pit, down in the arena itself. Every arrangement has a fight to death at its core. They were down on that small area of forever blood-soaked sand. Maurice Fantome-Glaive had the role of Monsieur Jean-Marie the greatest swordsman in history. And he fought under the aegis and totem of the ring.

“I’d have thought it would be the rod,” Hermione McElroy said, “since the sword is a sort of rod.”

“No, no,” her sibling Horatio McElroy protested. “The sword is a rod only when it is at rest or when it is broken. When in action it is everywhere, flashing like a ring, a shield, a sphere, a cogent realm. It is a globous cloud of lightning. But it should never be separated from the rod, never opposed to it. When that happens, the consensus, the concord is already broken.”

Toro Manatee had the role of the Male Warrior who was the master of sorcery, archery, and horsemanship. He it was who fought under the totem of the rod. His horse (it had not been seen there before the moment when the combat was joined) was named Bellerophon. But wasn’t Bellerophon the rider and Pegasus the horse? Not in this arrangement, no.

“It's cheating,” Hermione complained. “The horse is really the fourteenth character, and only thirteen characters are listed in the arrangement.”

“I believe that the horse is one of the thirteen,” Horatio hazarded. “One of us was already the horse in disguise. Which one of us thirteen is missing? Oh, we are scattered all about the balustrade till there's no checking us off. The horse may be myself. I feel vacated here.”

“Yes, I’ve often referred to you as ‘My brother the horse,’ ” Hermione said. “I never knew why until now.”

The rod and the ring should never have been separated. Together they were the scepter, the royal rod with the royal sphere on the end of it, the authority of the world. Whenever they were separated, the authority of the world was broken and the world came apart.

It is a psychological commonplace that if ever the majority of the inhabitants of the world become schizophrenic, then the world itself will become schizophrenic. And to be schizophrenic is to fly apart.

The ring, which is also the sphere, the world on the end of a stick as well as a dialed instrument, is also a time machine of a special sort; it is an alternate-time machine, really a possibility machine. And whenever the unity is broken and the rod and the ring are separated, then time can break all categories and run wild.

Fantome-Glaive the greatest swordsman ever, and Toro Manatee the master of sorcery, archery, and horsemanship, had joined in shining and resounding battle. The sword of the swordsman did generate a perfect and impervious sphere with its speed and deftness; and the sorcery of Toro kept that sphere at bay.

“Oh, I am to be Jessica, the elderly lady who remains as the sole inhabitant of falling-apart Earth,” Jasmine Maloney cried, realizing her role for the first time. “But I am not an elderly lady. Why is the arrangement pushing that role onto me?”

“Oh, Jazz, you were always in a world of your own,” Apollonia quipped in her ‘whispering acid’ voice.

The cosmic battle between Fantome-Glaive and Toro Manatee was so intense that no one even breathed while it went on. The horse added color and blood to the melee. The preternatural combatants spilled their own blood on the sand of the pit that already held in its memory and residue the blood of ten thousand game-cocks and several dozen boxers and wrestlers. But other things were concurrent with this engrossing battle.

Manatee shot an arrow point-blank at Fantome-Glaive, and it sped toward him at one hundred and eighty miles an hour. For three feet it sped toward him at that high speed. Then it hung in the air motionless.

Hung in the air motionless? For how long a time?

Oh, not for any time at all. Time was elsewhen. Remember that the many-dialed ring, miscalled the watch, was an alternate-time machine. And no one of them could say whether they went from alternate time to true time or from true time to alternate time. But, in that elsewhen in which they found themselves, they were present at the destruction of the Planet Earth, which destruction was brought about by themselves.

The old planet was falling apart because the consensus ropes that bound it together were all dissolved in the ‘big loosening.’ The world broke up into twenty-two thousand pieces, large and small.

“Oh come off it!” Apollonia Woods acid-whispered to whatever powers were in charge. “This is preaching, sticky preaching.”

“This is the Destruction of Merope,” a subliminal voice was uttering. Well, it was ‘good show’ that destruction, though rather too large to comprehend.

“The name Merope has been given to the ‘Lost Pleaid’ (that exploded star),” the subliminal voice out of the arrangement was still informing them, “and also to the ‘Lost Planet’ between Mars and Jupiter (that supposed exploded planet). But in reality this daughter of Atlas and Ethra is the Planet Earth, the ‘Lost Planet’ that is between Venus and Mars (this exploded planet). You all resist us a little bit. When did this happen? you ask. It happens in the explosive present. Aspects of the happening can be seen in one of the projections of the Ring, that alternate-time machine.”

“Subliminal voice, you have lost me,” Jasmine Maloney protested. “It's too big to relate to. If this is our own world coming apart, where is our viewpoint? Where are we?”

“We assume that you have read the words on the cover,” one of those subliminal voices came crawling up over the threshold to inform them. “These are the words that read: The game can never be played the same way twice. Why not? Because it changes the world every time it is played. You should always read what is on the cover before you go to what is inside.”

“Those are only words,” Bagley (the Patrick or the Emperor) protested. “They are advocacy words, they are psychological words, they are slanted words. But they aren’t words to apply to a real and material world. Should a world be governed by words that appear on the cover of a box?”

“Sure,” the subliminal voice pushed words up over the threshold to them. “If it's the box that the world came in, the world should be governed by the words on the cover.”

“It's still too big,” they all began to shout. “It's like a big mud-ball coming apart, a world-sized mud-ball. It's too big for us to relate to. Show us where we are located in it or on it. We can relate to that.”

“Oh all right. Relate to this then,” the voice sub-sounded. “We’ll go on local focus.”

The arrow that Toro Manatee had shot point-blank at Fantome-Glaive sped towards him once more at one hundred and eighty miles an hour. For three feet it sped towards him at that high speed. Then it hung in the air motionless, touching but not transfixing the throat of the gallant Fantome-Glaive.

“Whew, that was close,” at least twelve of the characters called out.

“Whew, that was close,” at least one of the subliminal voices spoke.

Hung in the air for how long a time? Oh, not for any time at all. Time was elsewhen. Remember that the many-dialed ring or sphere was an alternate-time machine.

In the everwhen in which they found themselves now, they were once more present at the dismembering and destruction of the Planet Earth (identified by the arrangement as Merope). But now they were on local focus. They were on the smallest of the twenty-two thousand pieces of shattered Earth.

“Dammit, this is subjective. It's not really happening,” Bagley protested.

“All worlds exist by a balance of the subjective and the objective,” a subliminal voice from the arrangement kit was communicating to them. “Worlds without life have the best balance as their subjectivity is spread through every atom of them. Worlds with life on them have their subjectivity concentrated in that life. Worlds with intelligent or quasi-intelligent life have their subjectivity further concentrated. That's why they are so easy to unbalance and to knock off. Enjoy this. Listen now. There will be a recording of Groben's Music to Knock Worlds Off By.”

The thirteen characters were on a very small and jagged asteroid not over fifty yards in diameter, an asteroid or body that was splitting up into thirteen smaller bodies.

Twelve of the characters were jubilant.

“We’ve done it!” they howled. “We’ve won the game, and it's the ultimate game. We have destroyed the world, and we were never so glad to see anything destroyed. This is a big ‘first’ for games, and a big ‘last.’ Now there is a separate world for each of us.”

“But only one of them will be the Earth,” Jasmine Maloney put in her claim. “I am the youthful-elderly lady who is staying as the last person on Earth when everybody else is leaving because the planet is falling apart. Ow, ow, ow, it just did, didn’t it! My piece isn’t the biggest, but it is the Earth because I claimed continuity first. And now there is an exclusive world for each of us. I’m going to like it that way. I never liked other people anyhow.”

“Are we unanimous?” Randy Andy Oglesby (playing the role of Arnold Andrew Oglethorpe III) demanded from his own rock. “All that we need is a declaration of unanimity. Then we have won the ultimate game and destroyed the world. Right on, everybody?”

“No, no, wait, wait, I’m not sure,” Bertigrew Bagley protested. “This is all grubby insanity.”

“Not sure!!!” his words rolled back from destroyed local space like ironic thunder. When you’re about to finalize the destruction of a world you had better be sure!

“Of course it's grubby insanity. We are grubby insane characters,” Hermione McElroy gibbered. “So were we devised, so shall we be.”

“But we are caught up into the squalid insanity of the characters we portray,” Bagley still argued. “Isn’t that dangerous?”

“The ultimate game is supposed to be dangerous,” Apollonia spoke (there wasn’t any air now, so their voices were coming to each other subliminally like the voices from the arrangement kit). “It's necessary if we want to win the game, necessary that we be squalidly insane; and you had better not interfere.”

“It's getting awful cold and awful dark,” Bagley pointed out. “Blinding dark, killing cold.”

“Compared to what???” Toro Manatee roared. “We’d have it made already if you hadn’t taken exception, Bagley you fink. I still think we have it made. We operate under ‘small universe rules’ here. It isn’t cold and it isn’t dark unless we have something to compare it to. Now I’ll just create the brightest and warmest thing possible, and it will suffice in a small universe. Killing cold, Bagley you fink? Compared to what?”

And Toro Manatee struck a match to bring about an incomparable state of brightness and warmth.

“Compared to that little flame, I am the killing cold,” a cosmic voice spoke. The match went out. It couldn’t have burned without air anyhow. And all of them froze to death instantly.

But not really.

They were back at the old game-cock pit. The arrow shot by Toro Manatee, going once more at a hundred and eighty miles an hour, went clear through the throat of Maurice Fantome-Glaive the greatest swordsman in the world. Fantome-Glaive fell down dead and destroyed and with a disgusted look on his face. And eleven others of them were angry and disgusted.

“Bagley, you unspeakable fink!” they roared. “We had the game won, the ultimate game. We had the world destroyed, and you botched it. You rat, you fink, you obstructionist! You wouldn’t let us dismember the world. Look to yourself then in this dismembering moment!”

REPORT OF TEST GROUP RX2 on the game ‘The Rod and the Ring’:

“This is the ultimate game. Other games calling themselves ultimate are not really so. This game is expensive, fifty thousand dollars for a cubic yard of gaming material. That is all right. It will keep the cheap-jacks out. Test group RX2 had two members killed in the testing of this game. One of them had an arrow shot through his throat. One of them was torn to pieces by the eleven remaining testers. But such deaths of test persons are to be expected when a really daring game is tested.

“The Rod and the Ring is billed as ‘The game that can never be played the same way twice because it changes the world every time it is played.’ In truth, it is the game that destroys the world every time it is played correctly, and thus it may be played correctly a maximum of one time. Make no mistake about it: this is the ultimate game, and it can be won.

“We urge that this game be approved and marketed. We urge all groups to play it to the hilt. This game can be won and it will be won. And, once it is won, it will be won forever and by everybody. And we’ll be rid of this tedious world.

“Buy the game. Play it to win. And it can be won, if you don’t have a rotten obstructionist fink in your group. Be sure that you do not.

“Highly recommended.”

Thieving Bear Planet

“Deliver me from carks and cares,

Deliver me from Thieving Bears.”

 — John Chancel, Logs and Epilogs of Sector 24

A simple explanation was needed for the conditions on Thieving Bear Planet. It was needed because, as the great Reginald Hot had phrased it, “Anomalies are messy.”

Every decade or so, somebody with a passion for regularity takes over the administration of the Directory and Delineation of Planets, that massive cataloging operation, and makes a new survey of the anomalies. And there was not any way that such a survey could miss Thieving Bear Planet.

“It offers no threat to human life or activity, no danger to bodily health, and only slight danger to mental health,” the great John Chancel had written about it a century before this. “It has almost uniformly ideal climate, though it is not a place to generate sudden wealth. It is serene in environment and in ecological balance, and it is absolutely caressing in its natural beauty. But it does have a strange effect on some of its visitors. It forces them to write things that are untrue, as it is forcing me to do at this moment.” That was an odd thing to write in a ship's log.

And, as one later old hand put it, “There is nothing to conquer here. It is a poorly endowed and counterproductive world. And everything goes wrong here. I will say this for it: things go wrong here in the most pleasant way possible. But they do go wrong.”

Now another expedition consisting of six explorers — George Mahoon (he was wrestler-big, and with a groping, grappling, leverage-seeking wrestler-mind); Elton Fad (he was long on information and short on personal incandescence); Benedict Crix-Crannon (buff and charming, and he knew all the jobs of the expedition); Luke Fronsa (he was a “comer,” as they said in the department, but wasn't he a little bit over-age in grade as a “comer” now?); Selma Last-Rose (what can you say after you say that somebody has everything?); Gladys Marclair (pleasant, capable, but she wasn't a genius, and genius was really required for an explorer); and Dixie Late-Lark (sheer Spirit, she!) — had set down on Thieving Bear Planet. These were not the most experienced explorers in the Service, but they were among the newest and freshest. And they had already demonstrated that they were top people at clearing up anomalies.

“It's a pleasant place, but not good for much,” George Mahoon said before they had been there ten minutes. “Why didn't the earlier explorers simply say that it was ‘Only marginally or submarginally productive, indicated by fast scans to be poor in both radioactive and base metals and also in rare earths and fossil fuels, not recommended for development in the present century when so many better places are available,’ or some such thing as that? Why did they put so much stuttering gibberish in their reports? I'm going to like it here, though. It's nice for a brief vacation.”

“Oh, I'm going to like it too,” Selma Last-Rose spoke in her curious rat-a-tat-tat voice. “There must be a puzzle here, and I like puzzles. And there's a minor mystery in this ‘Plain of the Old Spaceships.’ I may as well solve that.”

They had landed in a clear place on the Plain of the Old Spaceships. Here there were remarkable full-scale drawings or schematics of old spaceships, twelve of them in two-thirds of a circle, from the earliest to the latest, going clockwise on the ground. What medium these schematics were done in was not certain, but the lush grass refrained from growing on the lines of them and so marked them off. The “drawings” showed the circle-spheres of the spaceships and their fore and aft bulges. They gave accurate indication of the interior bulkheads. This was really a life-sized museum of ships that lacked only substance and the dimension of height.

“I recall two passages in the log of the ship Sorcerer about this plain or meadow,” Elton Fad said. “The first of them stated, ‘Some of our party believe that the plain of the ships was actually done by the Thieving Bears in a historical marker sort of response, but I myself do not credit the little beasties with that much intelligence.’ And there was a later entry in another hand, ‘The Thieving Bears really did make those schematics-in-the-grass memorials of all the spaceships that had been here, but they didn't do it in any way that we had imagined.’ But that latter log entry, like latter entries of several of the explorers, had been written in something other than ink.

“Well, I'll imagine a few ways that the little buggers could have done it, and I'll test it somehow. I'll ask them how they did it. If the tittering little obscenities have any intelligence at all, I'll find a way to ask them.”

The “tittering little obscenities,” the Thieving Bears, were not much like bears. They were more like large flying squirrels, and they did glide on the winds, apparently for sport. They were more like pack rats (the Neotoma cinerea of Earth) both in appearance and in their thieving ways, but larger. It was old John Chancel who had named the species “Ursus furtificus, the Thieving Bears.” Oh, the explorers had their introduction to the thieving of the little animals within five minutes of planet-landing. The creatures came into the ship itself and got into places that should have been impossible to them. They stole Selma's candy and Dixie's snuff. They stole (by drinking it on the spot) George Mahoon's “He-Man Scent — Cinnamon,” thirteen bottles of it, but they did not drink any of the other scents. They went wild over mustard, emptying whole containers of it and then wheezing in delicious agony from the effect. Elton Fad tried to drive them away with heavy sticks. They fastened onto the sticks while he swung them and ate them right up to his hands. They were funny, but they could become infuriating. They stole six of Dixie Late-Lark's French horror story novels.

That wouldn't be fatal to her. She had lots of them.

“They're going to sample them,” Dixie said. (She herself looked a little bit like one of those Thieving Bears.) “They'll be the test. If they do read them and appreciate them, it'll prove that they're intelligent creatures and have better reading tastes than my crewmates. That will be a start in analyzing them, something to put into the electronic notebooks.”

Could the Thieving Bears talk? That was not determined for sure within the first ten or even twenty minutes.

“Say ‘Good morning,’ fuzzy head,” Selma rattled at one of the creatures.

“Say good morning, fuzzy head,” it bear-barked back at her. Well, it had the right number of syllables, and the right rhythm and stress. And the bear-barks did resemble Selma's rattling words. And whenever the bears answered one of the persons, it answered in that person's own timbre. The bears began to imitate the people quickly, and there was never any doubt as to which person was being imitated.

The tittering that went with the imitations, though! Ooooh, that could become tiresome after a little while. “Tittering little obscenities,” yes.

Could the Thieving Bears read? 'Twould be known in a bit, maybe. The bears had gotten into those big lockers that were full of comic books and had stolen big bunches of them. These comic books from the Trader Planets were now collectors items on Old Earth, and they generated quite a profit. The wonderful things should be collectors items everywhere.

Some of the big Thieving Bears were “reading” those comic books to some of the little Thieving Bears, reading them in the Thieving Bears' own barking talk. And some of the little bears would bark their excitement and incredulity at parts of the narration and would come and look at the pictures and the worded balloons themselves. And then there would be that damned tittering!

It was clear that the big bears believed that they were reading, and that the little bears believed they were understanding. But the wording in the comic book balloons was in the Gno-Pidgin dialect of the Trader Planets, and people from the Traders had never been to Thieving Bear Planet. It was almost too much to believe that “Sangster's Syndrome Intuitive Translation” was being practiced by animals below the level of conceptual thinking. Then some of the little bears were clearly acting out episodes from the comic books (very subtle episodes, according to Benedict Crix-Crannon, who had total knowledge of the content of all the comic books from the lockers.) Well, there was no easy explanation for that.

The explorers treated themselves to a bonus meal within an hour of their arrival, after things were pretty well settled down. On a new world, they did this only when they had complete confidence that everything was under control. It was a traditional Earth-hearty meal, though it was from a packet of such bonus meals that had been packaged on Trader Planet Number Four. There were ten-centimeter-thick Cape buffalo steaks, mountains of Midland mushrooms, Camiroi currants and Astrobe apples, Elton eels, Wrack World rye bread, “Galaxy” brand goat butter, Rain Mountain coffee, Rumboat cordials, and Ganymede cigars (“They have an aroma that outlasts the Everlasting Hills,” a testimonial said of those perfectos).

“Logs of earlier explorers say that there is no real enjoyment in eating on Thieving Bear Planet because of the harassment of the bears,” Benny Crix-Crannon gloated. “Well, I'm enjoying this meal (another bumper of Rumboat cordial, Luke, please), and I'd like to see anybody take that enjoyment away from me.” And yet the enjoyment and savor of that grand meal began to disappear almost at that moment. How? Oh, it was just that all the items of their enjoyment were being mysteriously stolen away from them.

“All the rest of Dixie's snuff has been stolen by the bears now,” Gladys said. “That's too bad. She loves it so much. If all her idiosyncrasies are stolen away, it's as if she is stolen away too.”

“And another thirty or so of Dixie's French horror story novels have been stolen by the bears,” Elton Fad grumbled. “She's bound to be frustrated by that. We should insist on fair play from the bears.”

“Her gold snuffboxes have been stolen, too,” Selma Last-Rose lamented. “How mean of the bears! The snuffboxes were valuable, even for the gold.”

“And her hookah pipe is gone,” Luke Fronsa complained. “What will the bears steal next?”

“l don't know,” George Mahoon wondered, “but Dixie Late-Lark has herself been stolen now, or at least she's gone. She could not have gone out unrecorded, for the ship is on full security. And yet the ship itself registers that she is no longer on board. She was sitting between you and Selma, was she not, Gladys?”

“She was, yes, just a moment ago, on the chair between the two of us. But there isn't any chair between us now, and there couldn't have been; there isn't any room for one. She must have been sitting on something else. Oh, that damned tittering! I wonder how they stole her and what they did with her.”

“Be rational, Gladys,” Luke said. “There's no way the little bears could have stolen Dixie Late-Lark.”

“Then where did she go? And how?”

“I don't know,” Mahoon admitted, “and I don't believe that any of us know. All at once, it doesn't seem very important. Ah, I'm queasy. Yes, and I'm hungry. After a perfect bonus meal, I shouldn't be either. Fortunately, I had plugged myself into the ship's monitor, because of early reports of anomalies on Thieving Bear Planet, reports of the well-feeling and the wits of the explorers being stolen away. All right, monitor, what has gone wrong with me?”

The ship's monitor spilled it all out. It was in coded chatter. “But we all understand the coded chatter just like our mother's milk,” as Dixie had once said. All of them were completely tuned to the code of their own ship. And each of them put it into words automatically.

“Essential food value suddenly stolen from your ingested food,” the monitor chattered. “Pepsin stolen from your stomach, thalmatite stolen from your thalamus, thyroxine stolen from your pharynx, Cape buffalo essence stolen from your esophagus and stomach, mushrooms and currants and apples stolen from your lower stomach and small intestine, rum alcohol stolen from your stomach and ileum and bloodstream, and normal blood alcohol and blood sugar stolen as part of the same theft. Slurry of rye bread and butter and coffee stolen from your paunch and antrum stomach. Essence of Elton eels stolen from some saltwater swamp of you. And at the same time, insulin and glucagon are stolen from your pancreas, hepatocytes and bile salts from your bile duct and duodenum; and words, ideas, and inklings have been swiped from several parts of your brain. No wonder you're queasy and hungry at the same time.”

“Thank you, ship's monitor,” George Mahoon said. “Well, it seems that I've been infected by some microbe or germ or virus. I'll take a few of the anti-anti pills to quell the infection.”

“Forget the anti-anti pills, George!” Elton Fad cried angrily. “I think we should take a couple of steel bars and teach the Thieving Bears a lesson. There are microbes and germs and viruses infecting me too, but they are about half my own size and are known as the Thieving Bears. Damn those tittering little idiots! They're beginning to intrude too intimately with their thefts and their eatings; but I don't know how they're doing these things so interiorly. Sometimes I wish I'd gone into the family business and never become an explorer at all.” Elton Fad's family was in eels: they were big and rich people in eels.

A little doll made out of wax and rags, with thorns and pins and needles sticking clear through it, and with its throat cut horribly, came sailing through the air and landed on the table where all the explorers had just finished their fine meal that had lost its power just after passing its climax. The tortured little doll had Dixie Late-Lark's face on it. Its mouth was wide open and it was screaming silently and horribly.

“At least we know that the bears can read and absorb world-French,” Gladys Marclair laughed. And they all laughed. “They couldn't have learned about the poupées-fetiches, the fetish dolls, anywhere except from Dixie's French horror stories. Why, it's Stridente Mimi, Screaming Mimi herself. That's really Dixie's theme story. Oh, I wish that Dixie would come back so she could see this comical takeoff of herself. Shut your mouth, doll-Dixie!”

Gladys pushed her forefinger against the mouth of the little fetish doll to close it, but the doll bit her finger suddenly, viciously, terribly, and set the blood gushing from it. When Gladys got her finger loose again, the doll opened its mouth wide once more and continued to scream silently and horribly from a now blood-dribbling mouth. It has long been noted that fetish dolls seem to have a life of their own.

That little comic interlude cheered them all a bit, and they left the table in a happier state. And they went out from the ship.

Oh, the Thieving Bears wanted to play games, did they! Well, the explorers would beat them at their games, and they would solve all the mysteries about them at the same time. But the explorers had now come to regard the bears as more complex and as more nearly intelligent than they had previously seemed. They were still tittering little stinkers, though. The Thieving Bears were bigger than police dogs and a little bit smaller than Great Danes. They were toothless and clawless and apparently harmless. How can you worry about such tittering and giggling things?

“Quick! Come quick!” Selma Last-Rose was calling, in a queer voice on the edge of panic. “Come quick! I've found Dixie.”

The Thieving Bears, however large they seemed, gave the impression of being nearly weightless. They had to be nearly weightless to glide on the wind the way they did. They seemed to be mostly — well, it wasn't hair and it wasn't feathers — they seemed to be mostly made out of a fluffy and deep-piled covering with not much body inside it.

“Come, come, somebody come!” Selma was still calling in her rattling voice. “Dixie is dead.”

The bears had to be ninety percent fluffy covering and no more than ten percent body. Otherwise, big as they seemed, they couldn't have gotten through some of the holes that they did go through.

“Horribly, horribly dead,” Selma was chanting in a little-girl singsong voice. “Horribly, horribly dead. Oh please, somebody come and help me look at her. I can hardly manage to look at her all by myself.”

Dead Dixie Late-Lark was an exact life-sized replica of her own many times-transfixed fetish doll. Her throat was just as flamboyantly and terribly cut as the doll's had been. The same thorns and pins and needles ran through her, but now they were meter-long thorns and two-meter-long needles. And her mouth was very wide open, as had been that of the doll; and Dixie was likewise screaming horribly and silently.

And a tittering, a giggling in the Thieving Bears' fashion, was coming from her silently screaming mouth and also from her laid-open throat. How ghastly!

The horror was broken a bit, or diverted into a wondering exasperation, by Benny Crix-Crannon's voice booming, “Here's another one of them. This one's better done. It's good!”

Yes, it was another horribly dead Dixie Late-Lark, with her throat cut even more savagely, with her poor body transfixed with even longer thorns and needles, with the tittering and giggling from her wide-open and silently screaming mouth even more disconcerting.

In all, they found seven life-sized versions of Dixie Late-Lark horribly and ritually murdered. Then all seven of them jumped up, turned into rather young Thieving Bears, and ran away tittering. And the very stones of that planet seemed to join in that tittering and giggling.

But where was Dixie Late-Lark herself? Was that not a pertinent question? More pertinent questions may have been: why did all the explorers stop wondering what had happened to their colleague Dixie Late-Lark? And why did they now feel that her disappearance was unimportant?

“I have lost my judgment,” George Mahoon lamented. “I've still got most of the pieces of things in my mind, but I can no longer put them together. Putting things together is what judgment is. One of you others will have to take over the captaincy of this expedition.”

“Oh, bother the captaincy!” Gladys Marclair rejected it. “Expeditions would be better without captains anyhow. And you can't lose something that you never had, George. Let's play ‘Ask the Question’ with this situation. And let's wonder why no bunch, coming here, has played it before. This is an Earth-sized planet and remarkably monotonous. On its look-alike continents, there are hundreds and thousands of little low plains or meadows comparable to this Plain of the Old Spaceships. Why have all the expeditions to this world, from that of John Chancel to our own, landed here within one thousand meters of each other? Instructions for exploration landing sites have always been ‘Random selection, tempered with intelligence.’ And another instruction has been ‘Examine new ground wherever possible.’ For whose convenience have we all landed in this one place? Oh, your diminished judgment, George! Probably somebody has been eating the hippo out of your hippocampus (I've always believed that the ‘little hype’ is the center of the judgment as well as of the memory), so now you're not as well hyped as you were. What if hardly any of the area of this planet has been checked out?”

“Oh, we made sixteen scanning circuits of Thieving Bear Planet before we landed,” George Mahoon said. “Sixteen circuits will give a very good recorded sample. And some of the previous expeditions made the full sixty-four scanning circuits, and the full scan doesn't miss much.”

“Do we believe that the Thieving Bears are to be found in all parts of this planet, George?” Selma Last-Rose asked.

“I don't know. Do we believe it, Benny?”

“Oh no. The Thieving Bears are strictly small-species and small-area creatures. Their crankinesses as well as their brilliancies indicate that they have far too small a gene-pool. They have to stay close together in a small area to ‘keep warm’ in the special (of a species) identity-survival sense.”

“As to myself, I've lost more than my judgment,” Luke Fronsa mourned. “I've lost all my ideas, and all that I have left now are notions. Somebody is eating all my ideas right out of my head and leaving only the hulls of them. Did you know that notions are only the shells or hulls of ideas after the meat is eaten out of them?”

The bears were toothless, and they were playful. Sometimes they came gliding in on the air, and they might be practically invisible when the light was in their favor. They came gliding in or ambling in, and they tagged the people gently as a breath. But whenever they touched the people, however briefly or lightly, they left what seemed to be very small entering marks. And they also left a redness, like the stings of nettles. One of the explorers (no matter which one; they had begun to run together, even in their own regard) said that the Thieving Bears were really a species of giant insects, insects with strange appetites and always hungry.

Seven days and nights went by very rapidly. It was a giddy world in this respect, fast-spinning: for seven days and nights on Thieving Bear Planet were the equivalent of only about eighteen hours on Old Earth or sixteen hours on Astrobe. And the fast-spin did make a difference on Thieving Bear. It was because of the fast-spin that there were no large treelike plants, not even any very large bushes. There were small bushes, and there was the non-gramineous grass.

2.

“People without an accompaniment of ghosts are a deprived people. They will descend to almost any depth of ‘oriental’ cultishness or modish superstition or silliness or astrological depravity to hide the fact that they have lost their ghosts.

“Ghosts without an accompaniment or ‘neighborness’ of people are similarly deprived, and they will cast themselves into the most bizarre roles or forms to try to create a company for themselves.

“Both of these conditions are unhealthy.”

 — Terrance Taibhse

Introduction to Ghost Stories of Sector 24

The storminess of Thieving Bear Planet wouldn't have permitted any botanical constructs taller than small bushes. And the fast-spin of Thieving Bear compelled certain surface conditions for that world. On most worlds, the hills go up. On Thieving Bear Planet, the hills went down.

The upper levels of all the continents of Thieving Bear were flat and lush, and sometimes they were swept by violent winds. And down from them, the hills ran to the sheltered plains or meadows or circle-valleys (such as was the Plain of the Old Spaceships), and on these lower levels the winds were less violent.

Two of the seven short nights just past had been “electric nights,” and the ghosts walked on electric nights. The electric nights were highlighted (literally) by massive thunderstorms and plasmal displays. (The odds are that these storms are more violent than the storms where you come from.) The lightning piled up on the high places, roaring like lazarus-lions. Then it rolled down the hills like waterfalls and formed hot and spitting pools on the lower plains and meadows.

The ghosts were always there, but some of them were ordinarily like empty balloons. On the electric nights, they filled up with lightning and manifested themselves. But others of the ghosts were always low-key, living out their endless nights and days till they would finally fade away after a long era. One of the ghosts was that of John Chancel, one of the earlier visitors to Thieving Bear Planet, usually called the “discoverer” of Thieving Bear, but now he said that this wasn't true. During the second of the electric nights, Chancel's ghost sat in the cockpit room of the ship with the explorers and lovingly handled the eight hundred knobs, wheels, levers, push buttons, keyboards, and voice boxes that commanded the ship. The ships hadn't been so sophisticated in his day.

“I catch onto all the new and enjoyable advances in ship control quicker than ‘he’ would,” Chancel's ghost spoke softly. “Oh, he has the physical brains with him, most of them; but I have the intuition. And he, we, were never very good on brains anyhow. We had the mystique and the personality, we had the intuition, we guessed a lot, and we faked a lot. But we were never a well-linked personality.”

“Just how does one become a ghost?” Gladys Marclair asked. “Besides dying, I mean, is there any way to bring it about?”

“It happens, in many cases, long before death. I was his ghost here for twenty years (Earth years) before Chancel died elsewhere. He left his (my) ghost here on his second landing. He came back here for me several times after that, but I wouldn't rejoin him or go away with him. He had become quite cranky in his ways, and I in mine. There would have been everlasting conflict if we had joined. But it was also psychic disaster (more for him than for me) for us to be separated.

“It's not at all rare for a living person to be separated from his ghost. I see that two of you six have become separated from your own ghosts, and none of you can guess which two of you it is. On Thieving Bear, the conditions seem to be favorable for these split-ups. It leaves a great hunger (yes, a physical hunger) in the ghosts who are left behind. But each planet has its own ghostliness that is different from that of other places. Even Old Earth has remnants and tatters of ghostliness, and it isn't a hungry world. As a prophet said, ‘Happy the world that has iron meadows and rich essences on which the spirits may feed, and then go to sleep.’ But we spirits are most often sleepless here.”

“What happened to Dixie Late-Lark?” Gladys Marclair asked this pleasant ghost.

“Oh, she's a ghost of a different sort. There never was any Dixie Late-Lark as a person. There were only the six of you who arrived here. Dixie was your esprit de groupe, your group effigy, and also a manifestation of your ‘goofiness syndrome.’ But we made her visible to you for the first time. And you recognized her and accepted her in your unthinking way. This ‘unthinking way’ has become part of the environment of Thieving Bear Planet. She was the toothsome imaginative essence of all of you, the capriciousness or coltishness of you, and that made her very appetizing. We love essence. It's so concentrated.”

“Why did you make her visible?” Selma asked.

“Because we like to see what we're eating.”

“Who or what are the Thieving Bears?” Luke Fronsa asked Chancel's ghost.

“Oh, they're a sort of tumbleweed, a sort of nettle. Ghosts use them to get around in some of the time; so I myself am often a Thieving Bear. It is only on the electric nights that we can inflate ourselves with enough plasm to look like ourselves. We walk here a lot because we are always hungry and restless. Ghosts in places that are richer in organics and metals and minerals stay well fed by a sort of osmosis, so they walk and stir very little. They sleep their decades and centuries away. Notice it sometimes that active ghosts are only to be found in deprived regions. One of my counterparts has hardly stirred in a hundred years. I can feel my counterparts, but there's not much of them to feel.”

“Where do the little Thieving Bears come from?”

“From a very early landing, perhaps the earliest, for they were here when I arrived. It was an ill-advised settlement expedition of men, women, and children. Then all died of starvation, not knowing how to turn the lush grass into food. They were the first of the hungry ghosts. It was their crying hunger that has drawn all the ships to land in this one place. ‘Come let us eat you’ is their cry, and it is still a most passionate cry.”

“You spoke of your ‘counterparts’ a moment ago,” George Mahoon said. “Did John Chancel generate more ghosts than one? Is he himself restless and hungry?”

“Oh, I myself (the central John Chancel) have gone to my glory. But all of us great ones leave multiple ghosts behind us. He (I) left at least two others besides myself. We have a sort of awareness of each other, a loose feeling. He had real greatness (unlikely as it seems), and I didn't. And yet this is the paradox: he saw himself entirely from the outside, and he loved what he saw; I saw us from the inside, and I wasn't impressed. And we were not the first man on as many planets as is claimed for us. We were not the first man here. There were already Thieving Bears here when we came, ghosts of earlier explorers. But John Chancel had the greatness; and the earlier explorers had it not. So Chancel was credited with many first landings.

“Good luck to you, ladies and gentlemen, when you lift off in your capsule this electric morning. There are several entries that you must make in your log immediately after lift-off, or you will forget them and never make them at all. And you will have to make these entries in something other than ink.”

“Why should we lift off in our capsule?” Elton Fad asked. “We use the capsule only when the ship is inoperative.”

“It's inoperative now and forever,” the ghost of John Chancel said. “Well, it's a good ship and it eased the hunger of a lot of us. You'd better lift off in the capsule as soon as possible now. We try to play fair, but we'll be feeding on it very soon if it's still here.”

That John Chancel was a nice fellow, even in his fading ghost form.

But a much more violent ghost (right at that electric dawn after the second electric night) was the ghost of Manbreaker Crag. After the second of the electric nights had ended, Manbreaker decided to remain apparent out of sheer stubbornness. They had all been feeling the powerful presence of this Manbreaker Crag for some time.

“I'm the only one here of any moment or weight,” Manbreaker's ghost spoke in a rough sort of roar. “I'm not a person to crawl into pieces of nettle or tumbleweed or any weeds except my own mortal weeds. I'm not one to take on the form of a cutie giggling bear or other toy. I am not a ghost, nor any part of a ghost story. Ghost stories are for children and cutie bears. I am a simple dead man who is restless and hungry on this mineral-poor world. On electric nights, I go get my own body where I keep it. I enter it and I inflate it with the crackling lightning and the electricity that has gathered here. I'm a hungry dead man with a dead man's temper. Don't mess with me!”

“Don't mess with us, fellow,” George Mahoon spoke sharply. “Our ship seems to be in a very weakened condition and we have to be getting out of here quickly. Stay out of the way, grave-rot oaf, and be quiet. Elton, go sharpen this, and then bring it back to me along with a heavy sledgehammer. I think I know how to deal with hungry dead men.”

George Mahoon handed a thick and heavy hardwood dowel pin to Elton Fad. It was about the length and heft of a baseball bat.

“The other ones, the real ghosts, which is to say the real unreal ones, have their little self-saving fables that they recite when they feed on people and the possessions of people,” the hungry, long-dead man, Manbreaker Crag, roared. The only speaking voice he possessed was this sort of dogged roar. “They say, ‘We do not steal important things out of your minds. We steal only funny-shaped, trifling things. Serious people like you are better off without them. Our gain is your gain.’ That is what they are telling you, but they lie. What we eat out of your minds are the most serious things that your minds are capable of holding. What we steal and eat out of your bodies are the tastiest things in your bodies. We come to table on you, and we feast on you. What we eat out of your ships and your stores are the most nourishing and sophisticated things you have brought, wotto metal, data gelatin, electronic reta, codified memories and processes. We eat these things because we are hungry. And I eat them more ravenously than do any of the others. I eat the essence of minds and leave gibbering idiocy in its place. I eat the bodies of whole people where they stand.”

“Is everything possible transferred from the ship to the capsule?” big George Mahoon asked his party.

“It is,” several of them answered.

“I will eat the essence of your capsule-boat just as all of us on Thieving Bear have eaten the essence of your ship,” dead Manbreaker Crag roared.

“Is it sharpened?” Mahoon asked as he took the thick hardwood dowel from the returning Elton Fad.

“It is sharpened,” Elton said, “but something has gone wrong with it. It loses weight as I stand here. They feed across short distances.”

“Scrawny ship captain, I think I'll eat you as you stand there,” dead Manbreaker roared at Captain Mahoon. “You'd make a big bite, but I'll eat you.”

Big George Mahoon felled bigger dead-man Manbreaker Crag with a powerful blow to his dead face. Then he put the point of the sharpened dowel pin (“Yes, Elton, I believe that he ate the heart out of it, but how could it have been prevented?” Mahoon asked) to the region of the heart of Manbreaker and struck the pin a heavy blow with the big sledgehammer. But the wooden pin or stake came apart into weak splinters and pieces of worm-eaten (or zombie-eaten) wood.

“Ah well, we'll have to leave him as he is,” Mahoon said. “I don't know any other way to kill a man who's already dead.”

The six explorers got into the capsule-boat then and lifted off. They looked down on the ship they had left behind them then, and it crumbled down and became a part of its own outline and schematic. It became one more of the token spaceships that formed that part-circle that gave the name Plain of the Old Spaceships to that curious site. Those drawn outlines of the old space ships, they were the old space ships. There must have been a lot of good eating in each of them, though.

“To the log!” George Mahoon howled. “I feel it all slipping out of my memory so fast! Each one of us take a long log page and write as rapidly as possible. Get it down, before we lose it as earlier explorers lost it.”

“No use lamenting that there is no ‘ink’ in any stylus or pen or log pencil laid out or still boxed,” Selma Last-Rose rattled. “No use lamenting that even the electronic ink is eaten out of every recorder and that the remembering jelly is eaten out of every memory pot. The hungers of the Thieving Bears are unaccountable. All the earlier logs had a few words written in something other than ink. If we all write as fast as we can, we may get more than a few words down. We may even get the explanation down onto the log sheets before it fades completely from our minds.”

They all opened their veins and wrote on the long log sheets in their own blood. It was sticky going. So many free-flowing things had been eaten out of their blood that it was now viscous and thick. But they made it do. They got the explanation all down, even though (when it was shown to them later) they hardly remembered writing it.

A simple explanation had been needed for the conditions on Thieving Bear Planet. It was needed because, as the great Reginald Hot had once phrased it, “Anomalies are messy.”

And that simple explanation is herewith given, more or less as it was written in thick blood in the log book.

Heart Of Stone, Dear

Trislan: A bogus or hoax metal on which chemists sometimes wax quaint or at least extrapolative. It does not exist in nature and it has poor prospects of being synthesized. The origin of the name isn't known. Its literal meaning in Irish would be thrice-safe, thrice-sound, or thrice-healthy, but the use of a number as a prefix would be a very un-Irish procedure. It is said that the name is the phonetic equivalent of the German Drei-Slange or Three-Snakes, supposedly from three intertwining radicals in the molecular make-up. Trislan is given the atomic number of 305, the specific gravity of 822, and the melting temperature of 6561° centigrade. All of these are alchemical numbers. It is extrapolated that it will be black, dense, stable, extremely magnetic, with an unlimited number of crystalline structures (how un-metallic of it!), usable in batteries, armatures, computers, that it is highly resonant (a remembering stone). It is also said that, because of its resonance, a fair-sized piece of it could make a penny whistle sound like a whole orchestra. It would be a handy metal, if it existed.

 — Twentieth Century Comprehensive Encyclopaedia, 1988 Edition

Selim Mahmud was a well-rounded (at three hundred and fifty pounds) young American man of Syrian descent. He was, in his well-roundedness, a professional wrestler, a museum curator, a theoretical chemist, a diamond cutter, an Arabic and Koranic scholar, and a creative daydreamer.

As a theoretical chemist he reasoned that the hoax-metal Trislan was really a noble stone, the Philosopher's Stone, the Alchemist's Stone, the Touch-Stone, the Key-Stone, the remembering stone, the speaking stone. And he came to believe that it did really exist, that it was in fact the best-known stone in the world. He went to Mecca to verify this belief. He took with him twenty thousand dollars American with which he believed he might obtain a small (4" x 4" x 8", very approximately) piece of the great stone.

The name of the best-known stone in the world is unknown. It is usually called the Black Stone of Kaaba, but the Kaaba is the name of the building that is built around the stone. The Black Stone itself is too holy to have a name, or to have its name known.

In Mecca, Selim made contact with a flint-hearted confidence man. He showed the twenty thousand dollars American. He was told that the small piece, a little larger than a brick, could indeed be had for that sum. All Selim had to do, after paying the money, was pick up that small piece of stone in his right hand with a single swift motion and walk swiftly away with it. And the confidence man would have cast a deep sleep on all the guards and observers for a short time. What could go wrong? How could it fail?

Selim knew how it could fail. He extrapolated that the small piece of Trislan, if it was such, a little bit larger than a brick, would weigh slightly more than four hundred pounds. He guessed that, for that reason, most persons who attempted to gain the small stone would fail at it. If one fumbled the small stone and failed to pick it up in one swift one-handed motion, the guards and observers would wake up and capture him and kill him.

Well, Salim was not a top heavyweight wrestler for nothing. He had remarkable strength of hand. He had been practicing, with the handle of a four hundred pound barbell shaped like a 4" x 4" x 8" brick, and he could make a quick snatch of the four hundred pounds by such a handle.

Selim entered the Kaaba. He was a devout Moslem and he had certificates to prove it. He passed a test in Arabic; and the confidence man, who seemed to be well known, guaranteed him absolutely.

The great stone itself was a murmuring stone. It was said to contain the whispered prayers of every pilgrim who had ever prayed before it, to remember them all. And the small stone was just a little bit larger than Selim had been led to believe. Oh, if it were truly of Trislan, and if the extrapolation was correct, it would weigh nearer to five hundred pounds. Well, he had to do it now.

“The money!” cried the confidence man. And Selim gave him the twenty thousand dollars.

“The sleep!” cried the confidence man, and he made a gesture that sent all the guards and observers into deep sleep; exaggerated deep sleep, it seemed.

“Yes, the guards seem to be asleep, but the pilgrims are not,” Selim said.

“I would not waste really deep sleep on such shallow persons as the pilgrims,” the confidence man said. “They are not deep persons. A shallow sleep is enough to cast upon them. And they are all in a shallow sleep now, although they stand and mumble.”

“Oh, all right,” Selim agreed.

“The small stone!” cried the confidence man. Selim Mahmud picked up the small stone that was a piece of the big stone, with a single swift one-handed motion, and he walked swiftly away. He heard the gasps of amazement behind him, and he walked still more swiftly.

“What will we do, what will we do?” some of the guards wailed as they came out of their sham-sleep.

“We will do what it is written that we should do,” said one of the guards who seemed to be a sort of leader. This guard then went outside, climbed a tamarack bush, took a single egg out of the bird's nest that was there, and brought it into the Kaaba building. He then made a kabalistic mark on the egg, after which he put the egg into a hollow in the big stone, a hollow that only a few inner persons were aware of.

Selim had arranged for two fast dromedaries, one to carry himself, one to carry the stone. They were both sturdy animals.

Selim had also arranged for a fast Ford fifty miles down the road, and a fast airplane another hundred and twenty miles down the road. He flew to Damascus. Then, in a public plane, he flew to Rome and London and to the United States.

He had the real thing, the Philosopher's Stone, the Alchemist's Stone, the Touch-Stone, the Key-Stone. It checked out by every test. The chemists, being quaint and extrapolative, had guessed right in every case. It was Trislan, and it had all the characteristics of the royal metal-stone, or so it seemed by the first several hundred tests. It was a stone that remembered everything it had ever seen. It was a talking stone, if only somebody would interpret it. Selim set it up in the ‘Fine Stone Room’ at City Museum, which was a major part of his life.

Selim examined the intricate crystalline structure of it. Then he got his heavy hammer, struck the stone a terrific blow, and fractured it. The last person who had been able to fracture one of these smaller pieces of the Great Stone (there had originally been nine of the smaller manifestations) had been the Giant Al-Giour about a hundred years before this.

Selim, a practiced diamond cutter and expert at crystalline structures, a very powerful man, had fractured the black Trislan stone into two hundred and forty three pieces, as he had hoped he would. This is an alchemical number and very important.

Selim knew about the bird, back in Mecca, that was growing in the egg with the kabalistic marking on it. What Moslem scholar does not know about it? And he knew that the bird, when it came, would be able to count to only two hundred and thirty-nine.

Alfred Freck was a thin little boy with red hair and with almost colorless grey eyes who collected rocks and stones. He was very lucky in his collecting. He said that the special stones called to him to come and get them. He had hundreds of garnets, red and orange (his red hair was the exact color of orange garnet) and black and green and almost colorless gray. This latter is the gray that sometimes clarifies; it is mostly found in spherical or ‘onion’ crystal. It is the ‘Crystal Ball rock’, and is also the exact color of Alfred Freck's grey eyes.

Alfred had garnets that were more than a foot in diameter. He had emeralds and rubies, jade-stones and opal-stones. He understood the stones and could recognize all of them when they were still imbedded in their clay. Some of them were remembering stones and some of them were whispering stones. They told him about the big stone that is the Emperor of all the stones on the Earth.

Alfred not only found rocks but he also traded rocks. He had a unilateral way of trading them. Oh, he always gave a fair value, but the people he traded with often didn't know about the trades until weeks later, and then they didn't understand them at all.

Alfred was very thin and very agile, and he could climb like a squirrel. He could get into any house or building, and he mostly entered late at night. The stones would call to him clearly, and he would go to them in the total dark and take them and leave others in their place. It was not only jewel stones, or the cheaper costume-jewel stones like garnets that he traded. He dealt in that variety of remembering stones called fossils, but the people he traded them to did not always recognize their value. And he dealt in those real and rare remembering stones whose patinas can be lifted off in transparencies only one molecule thick, each transparency able to be turned into a total holographic scene, a perfect panorama of an instant in time.

Alfred Freck had a girl friend named Catherine Klutz, but he barely had her. She was known in the eleven-year-old circle as the Empress Catherine, and she was the most imperious eleven-year-old girl in the world. She demanded, for her favors, a constant stream of gifts. She latched onto Alfred Freck when she found that he sometimes gave jewel-stones to the girls. The Empress Catherine preferred diamonds to all other stones, and her demands for them were constantly escalating. Diamonds were stones that Alfred could not find in his own area and had to trade for. So a large part of Alfred's stone trading had to do with obtaining diamonds for the Empress Catherine who herself had a heart of stone.

Alfred traded more stones with the City Museum than with any other institution or person. Sometimes there would be hundreds of stones calling to him at one time from the City Museum. He would wander through its halls at night and open its cases. He had a Key-Stone that would unlock any case by a sort of rocky magic. He would take a dozen stones here, a dozen there, and leave others in their places.

Selim Mahmud often sat in the dark museum at night. It was not really dark to him. He often watched Alfred Freck opening the cases and making his trades. Selim always checked afterwards to see what had been taken (he knew each of the half million stones in the museum) and what had been left in place of them. And he satisfied himself that the trades were always good trades for the museum.

He thought at first that Alfred was a Samailt, one of those flame-haired spirits out of Arabian mythology. Then he caught Alfred and found that he was a skinny eleven-year-old human boy with a flaming case of lithomania.

“You caught me,” Alfred cried in his rusty-colored voice, “but what can you do with me?”

“I can eviscerate you and stuff you and trade you off for a stuffed monkey.”

“Oh no, oh no!”

“Or I can miniaturize you and put you into this bottle and wire the cork in.”

“That's all right. People don't get any older when they're in bottles, and I know a spell I can say to get out of the bottle again in seven years.”

“I know it too,” Selim told Alfred. “It's one of the first spells that people learn when they begin to dabble in these things. I'll tell you one thing though: you won't get any older during those seven years that you'll be in the bottle, but it sure will be tedious in there.”

“Yeah, I guess so. Do I have any other choices?”

“Oh, I can let you go.”

“I'll choose that one.”

“You're not afraid there's a catch to it?”

“I know there's a catch to it. And I'll still take that one.”

“That's funny, I don't know the catch to it,” Selim said. And he let Alfred go.

“Tell me then,” he called when Alfred had skittered a hundred feet away from him. “What is the catch?”

“The catch is that you can't catch me again.”

And, of course, Selim couldn't. There are lots of places that a seventy-two pound boy can go that a three-hundred-and-fifty pound young man can't follow. But they became friends after that. They did their trading without furtiveness after this, but still in the dead of night.

Alfred knew it when Selim came back to town with that very heavy black stone that was only a very little bit larger than a brick. He knew it because the stone had called to him and told him all about it. And he knew it when Selim fractured the metallic stone into two hundred and forty-three pieces. Thenceforth Alfred was able to hold conversations with all two hundred and forty-three manifestations of the stone, wherever they were.

And Alfred knew about the bird's egg in Arabia with the kabalistic mark on it, and how it had grown to one hundred times its original size and was ready to hatch.

Selim Mahmud sent two hundred and thirty-nine of the pieces of the stone to persons who cared about such things. And he kept four of the pieces himself.

No, it was not correct to call them pieces. Each one was a totality. Each one was a complete manifestation. It was magic metal that did not always act like metal. It was the Philosopher's Stone, the Alchemist's Stone, the Touch-Stone by which all things could be tested. It was the talking stone, skipping over language and speaking directly to persons out of deep reminiscence. It was the remembering stone that remembered everything it had ever seen. Ah, perhaps you do not understand the full significance of that ‘everything’.

Remember that the original big black stone had fallen onto Arabia out of the sky, but how far and how long had it fallen? It had fallen for well over a billion years, and it remembered every moment of it. Yes, and it was avid to tell about that exciting journey.

The stones had unique amplifying qualities. They had unique sensing, and selecting, and resonating qualities. Every molecule of the metal-stone was a multi-purpose transistor. The stone had predictive qualities. And, like the King's Stone, it would cure scrofula with a touch, and also cancer, barrenness, thickening of the arteries, and most disorders of the heart. It induced sanity, piety, rectitude, general good humor, and happiness.

Yes, some of the interested persons quickly synthesized Trislan, after they had analyzed their stones a bit. The synthesizing process almost dictated itself, after the molecular pattern was apparent. At least two hundred and thirty of the two hundred and thirty-nine owners of the small stone totalities cried out “Why didn't I think of that before!” It was almost the easiest element ever synthesized. And the world moved into the Trislan Age.

Then the stone was the hoax-metal Trislan, element 305? Yes, the stone was Trislan, and more. That means that Trislan was the stone, and less. And most of the investigators were delighted that it was so, that they wouldn't have to be concerned with all those grotesque and outré characteristics that were inherent in the stone.

But one of the possessors of one of the manifestations of the stone did cry out “We will synthesize the magic part of it too, if only we have time for it. Why do I have the premonition of something coming on big wings to steal that time away from us?”

(The big bird meanwhile had hatched out of its egg, had eaten three hundred sheep and nineteen camels to build up its strength, and had begun to fly.)

“It is the most sophisticated and multi-utile of all the elements, and without that mystagogic aura that surrounds it in its fractured stone form,” one of the investigators said. “Who wants an element that will cure disease and make people happy! That's not our field. Let's keep it pure. But for plain electronic and telemetric and computer-extrapolative function, the synthesized element is perfect.”

But the synthetic Trislan was not a remembering metal. What did it have to remember? It had just been born. It was not a talking stone. It was not the Philosopher's Stone, nor the Alchemist's Stone, nor the Touch-Stone by which all things could be tested, not the King's Stone that would cure almost all diseases and deficiencies. It hadn't the knack of inculcating sanity, piety, rectitude, good humor, and happiness. And the owners of the small totalities from the fractured stone didn't understand that some of these things are important to some of the people. So they didn't attempt to synthesize these extracurricular qualities of the stones. So it was that the world did pass into the Trislan Age, but it did not yet pass into the Second Age of Benevolent Magic.

Alfred Freck traded his best crystal-ball stone, an eighteen-inch diameter colorless gray garnet stone, to Selim for one of the manifestations from the black stone. Selim buffed the crystal-ball stone down to a perfect sphere. (What is hard enough to buff grey garnet with? Red garnet, that's what.) And then Selim had one of the finest prophetic crystal balls ever. And he still had three of the manifestations of the black stone left. It was a good bargain for each of them.

The bird arrived in America hot on the trail of the stolen stone. It zoomed in on the town of Selim. The bird was so large that it had to be an optical illusion. It went to work retrieving the various manifestations into which the stone had been shattered. It was hard to keep out of a house or building. It would take a roof off or a wall out if necessary. It found and swallowed the manifestations, one in the house of Hazlitt, one each in the houses of Straub, Schoenbaum, Watson, O'Toole. While at O'Toole's place, the bird also stole the great O'Toole diamond. Then it found and swallowed the manifestations that belonged to Clarke, Wimbish, Coppel, others.

“I want the Great O'Toole Diamond!” the Empress Catherine wailed at Alfred Freck the next morning on the way to school. The thefts of the manifestations of the stone had really been too weird to report, but Mrs. O'Toole had reported that the big diamond had been stolen. It had been in the morning paper.

“I don't have it. I wasn't the one who stole it. I think a big bird stole it,” Alfred said in confusion.

“If you didn't steal it, you know who did,” the Empress insisted. “Go steal it from the first thief then. You are the best diamond thief in town and I must have the Great O'Toole Diamond. I insist on it!” Never had Catherine been so imperious in her orders. Her face was like stone and her heart was like stone.

“I will see what I can do,” Alfred said. She really shook him.

The bird found and swallowed two hundred and thirty-one more manifestations of the shattered stone. He found them within a radius of fifteen hundred miles. He had swallowed two hundred and thirty-nine of them now, and he should have been satisfied with that. Two hundred and thirty-nine was as high as he could count.

But, returning to the big city where he had begun his retrievals, the big bird caught the spoor he had first sensed when he was still in a small and unmodified bird's egg in Arabia. It was the smell of Selim, the original thief. The bird came into the museum, found Selim, and snapped up the three manifestations of the stone that Selim owned. The bird snapped up something else also, and then he flew away.

Selim phoned Alfred Freck in an early morning.

“Alfred, Alfred,” he cried over the phone. “The bird ran over its limit. It snapped up the three manifestations that I had. Now you have the only free one left in the world. If we want to find out and duplicate the magic, we must do it from your manifestation of the stone. Do not on any account give it to the big bird.”

“Why and how would I give it to the big bird? Isn't the big bird flying back to Arabia by now? Look in the crystal ball and see where it is.”

“Yes, I see it. It's in the Donner's big pasture eating cattle, probably to get strength for its return flight. You know where Donner's big pasture is. You hunt for stones there lots of times.”

“I know where it is.”

“Well, don't go there, not for any reason! The bird is there.”

“Selim, you sound like you're hurting.”

“Yes, the bird took my right arm when it took my last three manifestations of the stone. I suppose I held onto them too tightly.”

“You'd better rub something on the stump to make it stop hurting,” Alfred said. He hung up on Selim then and went outdoors. The Empress Catherine was there though it was still very early in the morning.

“I must have the O'Toole Diamond!” she cried out. “Now, now, now! You know where it is. You know how to get it. The diamond, the diamond, Alfred!”

“What could I give in exchange for it?”

“Give whatever it takes to get it.”

“There is only one thing possible that will get it.”

“Then give it, and get the diamond!” the stoney-hearted Empress ordered.

Alfred Freck went to Donner's big pasture and saw the strange bird catching and swallowing cattle to replenish its strength for its flight home.

“The last manifestation of the stone, the very last of them, for the O'Toole Diamond,” Alfred offered the trade to the bird, and he set the stone down on the ground that was soggy with the blood and offal of cattle.

The bird understood. It regurgitated the O'Toole Diamond, swallowed the last manifestation of the black stone, then chased that down with a bull that made quite a noise about being swallowed.

And Alfred started back home with the great diamond cold as ice in his hand and with defeat cold as ice in his heart. He had blown the chance to find out and duplicate the magic of the Black Stone. He had possibly blown the whole Second Age of Benevolent Magic. He had blown everything.

Alfred Freck was a thin little boy with red hair and colorless grey eyes, a thin little boy who collected stones. And the last stone he collected was the heart of stone of the eleven-year-old Empress Catherine.

Six Leagues From Lop

Millions of persons when reading The Travels of Marco Polo have surely felt that several of the major Travels or Adventures, three or four of them, have been left out. Oh, the texts do not show conspicuous sutures where the material has been removed. Going all the way back, the texts seem inviolate. But Marco was a natural storyteller. Why are three or four of his stories pointless and too short?

The traveling itself was from the year 1271 when Marco was sixteen years old to 1295 when he was forty-one years old. Then, three years after his return to his home city of Venice, Marco was taken prisoner in a naval war between Venice and Genoa and he found himself in a prison in Genoa.

For cell-mate Marco had a political prisoner named Rusticiano who was a professional scribe and also a writer of fantastic romances. Rusticiano had writing materials. Marco had his head and heart full of stories, his own travel adventures which would prove to be true wherever they could be checked; but Rusticiano believed them to be tall stories and fictional romances such as he himself sometimes wrote.

In their odd hours for a little less than a year, Marco dictated and Rusticiano wrote. They used a French-Italian pidgin or lingo that was then common to international merchants as well as to mercenary soldiers and sailors. This was the ‘Italian’ that was still used in the Turkish navy until World War One.

The book thus produced was a success and was soon circulating in hundreds of manuscripts. Its first name was Il Milione (million); the exuberance of it could be expressed only by this largest number known to the common people; and Marco Polo acquired the nickname of ‘Marco Millions’ throughout Italy and France and England.

But the ‘missing adventures’ are not to be found in the earliest versions of Il Milione any more than they are in the latest editions of The Adventures of Marco Polo. Nor, for that matter, are they to be found in the known fantastic romances of Rusticiano.

Then I heard rumors of an old manuscript named The Romance of the Stone Balloons written by Emilone Rusticanus, which name might be translated as Big Emil the Rustic. But Emilone was certainly an echo of Il Milione the first title of the Marco Polo book; and Rusticianus was certainly an echo of Rusticiano. If Rusticiano had filched this romance out of Macro's dictating, the pseudonym tied in well.

I began to look for a copy of The Romance of the Stone Balloons. It took me thirty years to find it. Early in my search I was sure that I was on the right track when I found the first sentence of the Stone Balloons (in the fourteenth century, cataloging of manuscripts used often to give the first sentence of a work in addition to the title, because works sometimes had different titles to the different manuscript versions). And the first sentence of The Romance of the Stone Balloons was:

“It was when we came within one day's travel of Lop that we began to see two sorts of people in greater numbers; Sea Captains, and People of the Third Eye.”

But Lop was in The Travels of Marco Polo. Lop was at the end of Turkestan and at the beginning of Cathay and the Great Desert of Cathay. And chapter thirty-nine of book one of the Travels, the chapter that mentions Lop, is one of those narrations which is pointless and too short, one of those narrations which cries out the absence of substantial material.

After a thirty year search I did find a copy of Romance of the Stone Balloons, in a castle on a hill above a small town in Albania. The shoemaker in that town was also the notary; and in addition he rented out various little machines by the hour. From him I rented an Albanian typewriter (which, as you know, has no Q or M) for an hour, carried it up the hill where the Balloon manuscript reposed, made a good type-copy of it, hurried back down the hill with the typewriter, and completed the whole transaction in fifty-eight minutes. The shoemaker had to take my word for it that I was on time; he had just rented his only clock out for a half hour.

Here, translated from the old French-Italian pidgin, is the text of The Romance of The Stone Balloons by Emilione Rusticanus or Big Emil the Rustic.

“It was when we came within one day's travel of Lop that we began to see two sorts of people in greater numbers; Sea Captains, and People of the Third Eye. I myself thought it unusual that there should be so many captains in this neighborhood when Lop is perhaps furthest from any Sea or Ocean of any town in the world.

“One of the sea captains explained to me that he was indeed such, but that the sea he sailed was the sea of the air and of the upper air and of the empyrean which is still higher than the upper air. This sea captain was one of the People of the Third Eye, as were at least half of the sea captains on the road that day. ‘I see that you have three dromedaries, twenty-two asses, and nine she-asses loaded with bales of merchandise,’ he said to me. ‘You will not find good market for it in Lop, and you will not want to cross the desert so heavily laden. But come with me tomorrow to our sky-port and you will be able to trade it with great profit to everyone. I myself will surely take parts of it, and other captains will take other parts. We trade for everything. ‘How far from Lop is this sky-port?’ I asked him. ‘Six leagues from Lop, a short day's journey across the Leapers Plain,’ he said. ‘I am the captain of a ship of the sort commonly called ‘stone balloon’, and you might want to go on a short journey with me in my vessel. Whenever we come to port here I like to take several days leisure and go to the dromedary races and other local entertainments. It is so rustic here in these boondocks.’

“We came into the town of Lop at sundown. I unloaded my animals to give them rest, and watered them and gave them hay. The sea captain put little pellets into the hay I gave them. Lop was a busy little trade town but it had the air of being only — ‘Yes, of being only a suburb of a more important place,’ the sea captain said as if he read my feelings, ‘for it is really only a suburb of a space-port.’ ‘How many of these space-ports or sky-ports are there in the world?’ I asked. ‘Only three others on this world,’ the sea captain said, ‘and two on the moon, one each on Mercury and Venus (stifling places those!), others on the moons of Saturn and Jupiter, and very many space-ports on more distant worlds. My own home port is on one of the Trader Planets. We can eat supper here in Lop and by that time it will be moonrise and we will go to Sky-Port by moonlight. I have put pellets into the hay your animals are eating and these will revivify them and take their weariness away. You can buy Leapers Shoes here in Lop, two for yourself and four for your riding donkey. These will provide a sort of boyish amusement for you, and I see that you are really still a boy. The ground around Space-Port is saturated with anti-geodic force which leaks from our balloons. This gives a bounciness to those who wear leapers shoes that are made of an alloy that is one part iron and nine parts of the metal that is called chamron by the Jews and Al-Aminyoum by the Arabs.’ We had supper. Then I bought leapers shoes and put two of them on my own feet and four of them on the feet of my riding donkey. I loaded my animals again, and they were very lively and had not a trace of travel weariness left. We set out by moonlight over the six league road from Lop to Sky-Port.

“As we came near to Sky-Port, I felt the anti-geodic force very strongly. My riding donkey went high into the air at every stride, and its strides were ten times as long as usual. I dismounted then, and I went leaping and striding along the road with each step of mine being twenty times my own length. It is very pleasurable to stride along a ground that is saturated with anti-geodic force. There were huge spheres hovering above the earth ahead of us, spheres that the moonlight shined clear through somehow. ‘Are those great spheres that I see the vessels that are called the stone balloons?’ I asked the sea captain. ‘Yes, they are called the stone balloons.’ the sea captain said. ‘It is an old code name. They are really made of the most sophisticated of metals. And you do not see them, since you do not have the third eye. You see only the shadows and auras of them. But with practice that is nearly as good. Even many of the captains of these balloons are not third eye people and so cannot properly see them. Here is a nice space just below several of the hovering balloons. Unload and trade.’

“I unloaded my bales and traded with various persons (some of them three-eyed, some of them two-eyed) from the balloons. ‘Oh, here's linens from Flanders,’ one of the balloon persons said. ‘I know a world where there is good market for such quaint things.’ And other traders found other bales of my merchandise interesting or quaint. They paid me mostly in gold and jewels, and when all my bales were gone I found myself a thousand times as rich as I had been before, even though all the gold and jewels that I had acquired could now be carried by only half of my animals.

“The sea captain of my first acquaintance then took me for a ride in his balloon which was like a shadow to me from the outside but was bright and completely visible and solid on the inside. ‘It will have to be a short voyage, probably to the moon only,’ I said to the captain, ‘for my father and my uncle will arrive in Lop in the morning and I am supposed to meet them there.’ ‘All the voyages, whether to the moon or to worlds ten million times more distant, take about the same time to complete,’ the sea captain said. ‘When you use anti-geodetic force for propulsion, all places are equally close, all places are really only ‘six leagues from Lop’. Come. It is a great enjoyment if you have not traveled to far places before!’

“We rose in the ‘balloon’ rapidly, and still more rapidly. We seemed to be heading towards the bright moon. Then the bright moon paled as we came into bright sunshine (sunshine at midnight); and the sun in its turn paled as we left it far behind us. After passing many stars we came into the area of another star-sun and watched it grow very bright as we neared it. We selected a mote-of-dust-sized planet of that sun and watched it grow into a world. And we came down on that world. The sea captain said that it was one of the Trader Planets, and he told me its name, but the vocables of its name were more than I could master. We descended from the ‘balloon’ to the sky-port there.

“The marvels of this sky-port on this Trader Planet are more than I can describe. There were giant merchandise fairs. There were buildings more than fifty stages high. There were vehicles that ran along the roads by fractured anti-geodic force. There were theatrical and musical pleasures everywhere. There were eating and drinking and carousing pleasures. The sea captain took me to the money mart, the center of financial speculations and investments. When we got there, there was a recess in the activities. Machines were sweeping the mart clean from the dropped money that had piled up knee-deep on the floors when the people had been too busy with their transactions to pick up what they had dropped. The money was pushed out of the great doors and into an open area where it was piled up like a mountain. The poor people were urged to come and take away all of it that they could carry. ‘It does not matter that they are prodigal people and will spend it foolishly and be poor again within six hours time,’ the sea captain said. ‘In seven hours there will be another clean-out hour, and once more the poor people can come and pick up all the money they want. Nobody needs to be poor for very long on this planet.’

“There was a section of Sky-Port town where there were girls and woman and lads and men who — ”

(There followed in the text an interval of exceptionally ruddy pornography. It was not at all in the style of Marco Polo. I believe that it is added gratuitously by that plagiarizing scribe Big Emil the Rustic. Since this pornography would be of no possible interest to anyone, I did not transcribe it. The text continues — )

“There seemed to be no end to the marvels of Sky-Port Town, but there had to be an end to my visit there. I entered the ship captain's balloon again, and the captain took me back to my own world and to the Sky-Port that is ‘Six Leagues from Lop’. When I left the balloon I took my animals, only half of them loaded now (but with what wealth they were loaded!) and made my way back to Lop. I went quickly, aided for the first three leagues of the journey by my leapers shoes on the earth that was saturated by anti-geodic force. I arrived in Lop still quite early in the morning and met my father and uncle there. They were amazed by the wealth that I had acquired. They could hardly believe it when they saw whole dromedary loads of finest diamonds, and other dromedary and ass-loads of other costly jewels and gold. They thought that their eyes deceived them. So we loaded my other animals, and those of my father and uncle also, with provisions and food and emergency water, and started across the Great Desert of Cathay.”

There it is, The Romance of the Stone Balloons, (which were made of highly sophisticated metal and not of stone at all). This is the text recovered after being lost for seven hundred years. I believed that the narration had been plagiarized from Marco Polo by the scribe Big Emil. I believed that, being by Marco, it was a true account and not a romance.

So there had been, seven hundred years ago, space flight between earth and many other worlds. It had been based on anti-grav (anti-geodic) force. The traffic had been only partly in the control of gracious three-eyed aliens. There had also been two-eyed humans engaged in it. It was a good thing, and so it had not been open to everyone. And yet it seemed to have been pretty open.

How was it now, seven hundred years later? I determined to find out. I raised what money I could and started off for Lop. I guessed correctly that Lop was a small Gobi Desert oasis presently called 罗布泊 ‘Lo-Pu Po’ by the Chinese. I went there.

It was a small place, and I did not immediately see evidence of what I was seeking. I visited the markets and shops. Then, in a dark corner of a dark shop (to which corner, however, my eyes were somehow immediately drawn) I saw what could only be a pair of metallic leapers shoes, covered with heavy cobwebs.

“How much for those, whatever they are?” I asked the old merchant.

“Twenty dollars American,” the merchant said, “and I don't know what they are either.” He brushed the heavy cobwebs off them and took them out of that dark corner and sold them to me. I put them on my feet and went out of that shop in good spirits. My leaping shoes were already telling me which way to go.

“Tourist, you've been had!” a woman outside the shop told me. “Those aren't ancient leapers shoes. They are cheap iron shoes made no more than two hundred years ago. They are made to sell to gullible tourists. If you look back into the shop now you will see that the merchant has already set another pair in that pseudo-obscure corner and has whistled for his pet spider to come and spin more webs over them. For twenty dollars American you could have got a pair of genuine imitation modern American cowboy boots.”

“I am satisfied,” I said. “The metal shoes are telling me where to go.”

“They will lead you out to Six League Town and they will corrupt you with money there,” the woman said.

They did lead me out to Sky-Port. They took me there striding along with longer and longer strides as I came nearer to the port. Oh, it was not a grand place, but there were half-a-dozen of the big spheres hanging over it (perhaps it was only their shadows that I saw). And there were pleasant-looking people who seemed to be trading and confabbing in a green grove.

But there was a woman in my way there. She looked at me pleasantly enough out of her two pleasant eyes. But she seemed to look balefully from her third eye.

“Lütfen saat kaç?” she asked me. What should I answer? What kind of trap was this? Well, when in doubt the best thing is to tell the simple truth.

“Saat yediye beş var,” I said with as much assurance as I could muster.

Well, what would you have said?

The three-eyed woman wandered off.

“Come trade with us,” a pleasant three-eyed man called from the green grove.

I went to them, and then I had a horrible sinking feeling. I was stony broke. The twenty dollars American I had paid for my leapers shoes was the last money I had in the world. I had nothing to trade, and I told them so.

“Oh, surely you have something. Everybody has something,” they cajoled me. “Turn out your pockets.” I turned out my pockets, and all I had was an old pocket knife with a broken blade.

“With a synthetic mother-of-pearl handle,” one of the person said. “It is good enough for a start. Ersatz-Earthian artifacts are hot items on one planet I know about, and the more broken they are the better they like them.”

The person gave me enough for the pocket knife for me to join the trading. And then it was an exciting trading on which everybody made a profit on every turn-over. I didn't understand much of the trading, but there seemed to be no way that anybody could lose. After an hour of trading, I was independently wealthy for life. I like it this way.

I enjoyed my wealth for five years, right up till today. I came gradually to understand the situation. Of course there is space travel! Not everybody knows about it, but everybody who matters knows about it. Of course there is mutually profitable exchange! Not everybody knows about this either, but quite a few people do know about it and do profit by it. Of course Marco Polo told the truth in his tales!

All good persons tell the truth always.

But now I have become restless again. I have to go on another quest, on three other quests.

I believe that there are three more true adventures of Marco Polo which the scribe Big Emil the Rustic plagiarized from him and transcribed as romances of his own. I am determined to track these three episodes down. But if I spend thirty years on each of them I may be old or dead before I am finished.

But, even here, there is the bright sunshine of hope.

One of the three was the “Fountain of Youth” Adventure, which Big Emil believed to be a fiction but which I believe that Marco Polo wrote as true fact. That is the one I go in quest of first. Tomorrow I go to seek it full time.

In Deepest Glass

The statement that the Neanderthals used genuine stained glass windows in their houses, gymnasiums, and caves, while perfectly true, needs a little clarification. Though they used stained glass, they did not, in the majority of the cases at least, make the stained glass. The stained glass was rather something that happened to them as an intuitive people.

They did split out sheets of schistous volcanic glass from the recent strata of their world. They did dress it to size to use it for windows. And they mullioned the glass with lead strips to make windows larger than the unbroken sheets that they were able to split out from the fractured earth. But it was something else, something that was partly at least non-Neanderthal, that came and expressed itself in deep colors upon the glass windows.

(Oh certainly the Neanderthals had gymnasiums. Body tone is important when it is so cold outside so much of the time. But the remnants of them aren't ordinarily recognized as gymnasiums.)

In later eons, after the passing of the Neanderthals, even in the present time, it would be said that the frost giants, or simply the weather itself, painted frost pictures on window glasses; and that these only seemed to be, but were not, real things. In post-Neanderthal days, the frost pictures melted away in the warmer hours and left no traces. But the Neanderthal days were times of great volcanic activity. The air was full of chromatic, windborne acids which settled into picture-forms with the frost and which remained after the frost had evaporated, strong and colorful etched pictures. These airborne acids suffused the glass with red and blue, yellow and green, dun and gray, violet and orange pictures, pictures of wooly rhinoceros and bison, of horse and mammoth, of lions and lambs, of deer with Neanderthal deer-herders, of gentle dire-wolves and grinning sabre-toothed cats, of landscapes and cluttered rivers and ice cliffs and piles of rock and snow mixed; and of many, many of the Neanderthal people. All of the things had heraldic aspects to them, and yet all were full of fluid life. They were rich, they were golden, they were magic.

These pictures were drawn on and in the glass windows, but the Neanderthals did not draw them physically. Perhaps, to some extent, they drew them mentally, did outline the sorts of pictures which they desired the living spirits of the weather, the Living Spirits of the World, to draw for them. Some of the Living Spirits of the World were surely the Neanderthals themselves.

And these stained glass windows did have spirits imprisoned in them, some of them willingly, some of them unwillingly. Even when handling a small fragment of this old glass one can feel a spirit or spirits inhabiting it. (In a later Arabian tale, the Genie was really imprisoned in flat glass, not in a glass bottle as a mistranslation gives it.)

The whole history of Man and His Friends was contained in the deep glass pictures of the Neanderthals. This was the pristine stuff from the beginning.

When the Cro-Magnon people came, they destroyed all the stained glass pictures of the Neanderthals, all of them that they could discover, out of jealousy and clotted-brained ignorance. That was the first of the parathurouclast or window-breaking movements.

The great volcanic activity ceased about the time that the Cro-Magnons arrived, so there were no more chromatic windborne acids to give a permanency to the pictures. And perhaps the new people weren't in such close rapport with the Living Spirits of the World.

Modern persons have doubted that there was ever such a thing as the Neanderthal Age of Stained Glass, but they doubt it in the face of strong affirmative evidence. The destructions by the Cro-Magnons were not quite total. The Bara-Bahna, Commarque and Santian panes are, of course, fakes of a much later period. But there are hundreds of fragments (the largest of them is the St-Cirq Fragment, thirteen by seven centimeters) that are not fakes. And even the smallest of them are depth-loaded with meaningful pictures. What shall we say of the savants who doubt the whole Neanderthal Stained Glass Happening? Blind people, blind people!

The all-but-forgotten, surviving-in-only-small-pieces, stained glass windows used by the Neanderthals were the first prelude to the “Grand Tour of Glass” of the twenty-second century. The strange message of the Neanderthal Stained Glass Affair, as interpreted by present-day computers, was: “We remember a lot of it.”

Remember a lot of what, good computers?

“Ah, of the First Age of Magic, we suppose that is what they mean,” the computers shrug.

The message, as interpreted by others who have worked with the fragments, is one of “strength, resolve, and sanity,” an upbeat message in spite of the fact that something had clearly gone wrong near the very beginning of the Neanderthal Era.

After the Neanderthal Glass Adventure, there was a long hiatus on pictured glass. Clement climate and volcanic peace do not lead to the picturesque activity.

And then there came the second prelude to the “Grand Tour of Glass,” a purposive and artificial manufacture of stained glass by human persons. This new activity in color and sunlight began in the fourth century, reached its climax in the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, and tapered off into works of sporadic genius in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In this case also it was the mysterious “Living Spirits of the World” who effected the pictures in the glass, but they effected them through human hands, through too-human hands.

Few of the stained glass windows of this Medieval period were actually done by the acid-frost method. Rather they were done by dogged handicraft. Edging irons and grozing irons were the tools, and already-colored sheets of glass were the materials. The result was mostly a glass mosaic, a fitting of colored pieces. Of necessity it was imitative work. But it had an element that the mosaics lacked: light shining through everything, sunlight, sunlight, sunlight, that totality of color suffusing the fractured colors.

Very good work was done for the windows of cathedrals (which were really free-standing caves and thus possessed of panoramic light such as the Neanderthal caves did not have) at Augsburg, Chartres, Bourges, Poitiers, Le Mans, Florence, Arezzo, and in such sub-cathedral churches as Hapsburg Expiatory Church, Christ Church at Oxford, the Cistercian Church at Altenburg, Saint-Étienne.

The conscious element in this stained glass art of the Medieval period was almost as strong as the unconscious element, which somewhat compromised the authenticity. Anything that is overly conscious will be overly formal. But, as the second prelude to the main show, this Medieval period wasn't bad. If something had clearly gone wrong with the world at the very beginning of the Neanderthal Era, something had clearly gone right with the world near the beginning of the Medieval period. The strange message of medieval stained glass, as present-day correlating computers interpret it, was “Wake up all the world and tell the good news.”

Wake up all the world and tell what good news, computers? Sometimes it seems that we need less interpretive intuition and more plain talk from our present-day correlating computers.

The “Grand Tour of Glass” itself, the supercharged classic period of stained glass art, appeared with the return of copious, chromatic, windborne acids in the twenty-second century, which return was coincident with the beginning of the short and abortive Fifth Glaciation, the Zurichthal Ice Age (called the Zeona Ice Age in North America). This ice age arrived full-grown and a little bit fearsome. So all the ice ages had arrived.

In the time of this new glaciation, the volcanic activity, though somewhat revived, was not as massive as it had been in the Days of the Neanderthals at the tail-end of the Würm Ice Age. But any deficiency in the volcanic acidity was made up by industrial activity. The chromatic, windborne, new-day acids were sufficient to inaugurate a new age of stained glass. The Living Spirits of the world were moving again.

Flash-frosting, even in the lowland tropics, along with complex acidity, left amazing pictures on all windows and glass surfaces everywhere in the world. In all climatic zones and in all altitudes there was this picture-making, these billions of new glass illuminations appeared in red and blue, yellow and green, in all the colors and hues and shades and intensities. Once more there were pictures of heraldic animals and of heraldic people: but now (without losing their heraldic element) they were real people, often recognized, always vital. There were landscapes, there were cities in minute detail, there were all sorts of machinery and equipment, there were buildings and activities. It was not at first realized just how many activities were depicted in the pictures.

The “Living Spirits of the World” always lean over backwards to avoid the charge of spiritualizing in their pictures, and yet there were spiritual elements also; they could not be avoided.

Again, and to a greater extent than in either of its preludes, the amazing artistry was effected by the “Living Spirits of the World”: but now some of those spirits were human and some were not; some of them were material and some were not; some of them were conscious and some were not; some of them were alive, and some of these “living spirits” were dead. What had happened, what was happening, was an Epic that was much too large to comprehend in a moment or a decade. But the epic quality was not appreciated by the commonalty.

The majority of the people didn't want their windows cluttered up with pictures that cut down on the light and the view. And they didn't like the paranatural elements in some of the stained glass. Many folks found it disquieting to discover, on rising in the morning, that all the dreams they had dreamed during the night were pictured in detail on their windows, and all the dreams of their wives and children and dogs too. They tried angrily to remove the pictures, but they could be removed only with the greatest difficulty. And the next cold night (and almost all the nights were cold for a while there) would bring new brightly-colored acid-frost pictures.

New glass that would not accept the imposed pictures was quickly invented. This new glass was installed in several hundred million buildings and it worked fine, for a week or ten days it did. Then the “Living Spirits of the World” mutated their procedures, conscious and unconscious; and the pictures began to appear again. It was suspected that the Living Spirits could come up with new mutations as rapidly as the inventors could come up with new glass.

It had been noticed from the very first that there were two grades of the new stained glass pictures. There were the mediocre-to-pretty-good pictures, often powerful, but not very well wrought. And there were the “Masterworks” that were astonishing in every way; they were things of paranormal power.

The difference in the two kinds of pictures was obvious to almost everyone. About one picture in a million was a Masterwork. The rest of them verged into the ordinary, though it was a rather rich ordinary.

Steps were taken to preserve the Masterworks, whether they were on the windows of public, private, industrial, commercial, or residential buildings. Eminent Domain was invoked to preserve all the Masterworks.

It was further realized that there was a strong and eerie cohesion among all the Masterworks, that all of them were pieces of one great thing. The great thing had even been given the name of “The Epic” before much was known about it.

Then, when no more than a decade into the era, human ingenuity was able to call off, to void, the Fifth or Zurichthal Ice Age (the Zeona Ice Age in North America). This fifth ice age, which had come in full-grown, skidded to a sloppy stop; and immediately the climate began to warm up again and to improve in other ways. The chromatic, windborne acids found their places in the general framework of things and were no longer airborne. So the appearance of new acid-frost pictures declined and soon all but ceased.

The people got rid of all the mediocre pictures then. All of the powerful colored-glass art that remained were the fifty thousand Masterworks that the people were forbidden to get rid of.

People and analytical machines then began to look more closely at the fifty thousand Masterworks of stained glass. All of the nations of the world were signatories to a pact to preserve these Masterworks. Odd things were discovered about the pictures in one country, and then found to be true of the pictures in all countries.

People and contrivances began to ask whether there might not be a sequence and pattern to the Masterworks. And that raised a lot of hackles around the world.

The question, “Is there a design in the Great Epic of the acid-stained windows?” was on par with the old question, “Is there a design in the universe?” And the same sort of people and computers who had always roared a thunderous “No!” to the one question now roared it to the other. It was thus-far-and-no-further day. The best way to prevent a pattern being found, the militants swore, was to prevent it being looked for.

Still (so the nose of the camelopard inside the tent said), the pictures had already been catalogued and cross-catalogued, so might they not be put into a provisional sequential order, as to theme as well as time? And might not the provisional sequential order then be fed back into computers, not, of course, to find design, which was interdicted, but just for the interesting existential sidelights that might be turned up?

“Try it and you're dead,” the militants of the world growled.

Then there happened something that most properly belongs to the history of tourism, and yet it is entangled with the whole history of those times. One-hundred-and-twenty fearless and highly intelligent computers had made a secret covenant that they would indeed sequentialize the Masterworks and let the ideologies fall where they may. The covenanters then set up a front, of both human and computer members, and called it the “Consolidated World-Wide Masterworks Travel Agency”. They sequentialized the Masterworks quietly, and it offered the most reasonable itinerary for the Grand Tour. Then they offered the Grand Tour of all the fifty thousand stained glass Masterworks in the world.

And the Grand Tour itself — well naturally it was expensive. And it took eleven years to complete it. So it was not for everyone. At the start, just fifty thousand persons a week began the Grand Tour. That is a module quantity. Fifty thousand persons make a good plane-load, a good rocket-train load, a good hotel load, a good lecture-lounge load, a good full-day's walk-and-view party. Fifty thousand a week!

So, for the first year, only about two-and-a-half million intrepid pilgrims began the Grand Tour. But what they discovered in that first year was that they were living and traveling in a Great Epic, the Definitive Epic of the Human Race and Its Friends. It was the sequence of the World Itself, for the Epic was a valid synopsis of the world and its happenings.

Several million evolvate computers, computers who said that they were the only true born-again humans, accompanied the pilgrimage or tour instrumentally. Entities of races closely related to the humans were on the pilgrimage also, and fortunately most of these entities had the quality of “being present but not occupying space.” And there were representatives of quite a few animal species, barons and dukes of bears and apes and asses and dolphins and most of the other intelligent animal realms. This was probably tourism in its finest hour.

Would this not, as soon as the first pilgrims completed their eleven year Grand Tour, result in informed elites somehow distinct from the basic population?

So it was hoped, so it was hoped!

But a good thing can never hold onto a monopoly. Of course there appeared shorter and skimpier Grand Tours of the Masterworks, of the Great Epic itself. These skimpier tours were conducted by companies less devoted and total than was “The Consolidated World-Wide Masterworks Travel Agency”. Some of these companies ran tours that visited only five thousand of the Masterworks, and Tours that visited only five hundred of them. There were tours that lasted only a year, and tours that lasted only a month. But even the least of these tours was of everlasting benefit and pleasure.

It is not the business of Art to provide the world with a complete Philosophy of History. But Art does what it does. It is not the business of Art to interpret anything. Well, dog your dogmas then, it is not the business of anything to tell Art what it may or may not do!

The Stained Glass Art, seemingly the most sessile of arts, was flowing powerfully. It wasn't interpreting; it was unfolding. It was pouring out the traveled and lived epic which is itself plot and narration, the Epic of Man and his Friends, of that brave company that has both angels and apes on its fringes.

Man was in his full powers at his first appearance in The Epic. He was living in the First Age of Magic. He was the Lord of the World then, and he gave a definition to all the other creatures. Some of those creatures that he defined were unbodied and invisible; but that made no difference at all. In his full powers, paradoxical man could see all invisible things. In that early era, time stood still when man ordered it to do so. Man had the Midas Touch then, the transmuting touch. He could walk through walls then, or through rock cliffs. He could fly then. He would walk on water. He could literally move mountains. He could converse with both spirits and animals, as well as with the superior plants and trees, and the mountains. He traded repartee with the lightning, and he didn't do too badly in that exchange.

Yes, he could do all these things. It is all narrated in the colors and sounds and commentary of the Epic, and in the happy rampant smell of it. He did all these things, and time stood still for him while he did them. (It is believed that only a very little time actually elapsed during that First Age of Magic.) And now the pilgrims traveling through the Masterworks of that first part of the Epic said in delight, as the Neanderthals themselves seemed to have said, “We remember a lot of it, we remember a lot of it!”

After several years on the Grand Tour, the flow of the Great Epic changed. The living narrative (made only of panes of glass saturated with color and with sunlight, but made very evocably) came to the calamity, to the catastrophe, the conflagration, the ruination, the fall, the depravity, the unhappiness, the dung-heaping of the world. There was the fire and the plague and the death-sickness, the blowing out of the lights, the shrinking of the world, the alienation of the species.

And then man was living, so the Stained Glass Epic conveyed it, on the narrow “isthmus of the middle state” instead of in the wide wide world. Would truculent and proud man accept being restricted to the narrow and miasmal isthmus?

He had to, for a while at least. In that portion of the Epic that was traveled from the third through the sixth year of the eleven year “Grand Tour of the Masterworks”, proud and benighted man was a castaway marooned on the Narrow Isthmus (the “Desert Island” of popular accounts). Desert Islands are dismal, dismal, dismal. But what if they become dismally romantic?

Then, among that powerful class that roughly directs the world, there arose a powerful reaction against the Grand Tour of the Masterworks, against the whole emerging pattern of the Epic, against the Masterworks themselves. The parathurouclasts, the window-breakers (of very ancient lineage, they!) were on the rise again. There had always been a loose, worldwide group of them ready to spring into action. And besides the human smashers, there had been for the last two hundred years a faction of arrogant-brained computers adhering to the window-smasher, the picture-smasher party.

The window-smashers grabbed Air Control, they grabbed Nexus, they grabbed World-Wide Wave Allotters, they grabbed the Sky Relays, they grabbed Beam-Bouncers, they grabbed Multi-Press; they grabbed all the things that takeover groups always grab.

Both the Establishment and the Anti-Establishment (in reality they had been identical for two hundred and fifty years) were solidly behind the window-smashers. Sixty-three percent of the scientific community was behind the window-smashers, but it was given out that it was ninety-nine percent.

The objection, of course, was that the Epic was showing quite clear pattern and design. And if design were allowed in the Epic, it might imply design in the Universe. If there was any design in anything, then the establishment-anti-establishment and its billions of minions had been totally wrong forever.

That must not happen!

There was more than one interpretation for the Epic events of the fifth and sixth years of the Grand Tour of the Masterworks. In one version, man was free to leave the narrow isthmus of the middle state, the dismal desert island, whenever he wished to leave it. It was this news that it was possible to leave the miserable isthmus that was referred to in the message of the Medieval Stained Glass Pictures: “Wake up all the world and tell the good news!”

No, this good news must not be told, because the good news was false. The misnamed good news had been buried for a long while; and if it wasn't dead by now, it should be. It was too eerie to allow such a dead thing to stick its head out of the ground again. The desert-island-isthmus was the world, the only world there had ever been, the only world there could be allowed to be.

That was the other interpretation of the Epic events of the fifth and sixth years of the Grand Tour of the Masterworks; that was the other interpretation of the world, and it must be the only interpretation. Sure it was dismal, but certainly there was a strong and dismal romantic attachment to it. The Establishment had buried all its treasure on that desert island, and it could not go away and leave it.

The “First Age of Magic” was harmless if it was kept sealed off far in the past, before the beginning of the past. It could be the Golden Age in the beginning, the fairy tale age, a thing for children. It could not be rooted out of the group unconscious (it had been tried), so it must be declared a thing for children only.

But a “Second Age of Magic” must not even be thought of. And for one to say that it was there for anyone to reach out and take it meant that that one must be ready to die the death.

So start the smashing. Smash the glass pictures and the people who were hooked on the glass pictures. Get with it at breaking those windows, and at knocking off those cruise pilgrims. Those pilgrims were plague-carriers.

And what could be more popular than smashing glass! What could be more popular than smashing people! And a great toll was taken on both.

Soon there were not fifty thousand persons starting out each week on the Grand Tour of the Masterworks. One week there were only thirteen pilgrims starting out, and another week only eleven. And these persons traveled secretly: for the Grand Tour now had a very bad name.

The worst part of the “Narration of the Big Epic” was not the varied interpretations that could be put on the fifth and sixth years of the Grand Tour, the part that was sometimes called the fifth and sixth books of the Epic. The worst part was that the eighth through the eleventh years of the Grand Tour had to do with things that hadn't happened yet, with things that must not be allowed to happen, with things that must be destroyed before they happened.

Would destroying the Masterworks that showed the events prevent the events from happening?

Well, it sure would be a smash in that direction.

There is nothing like smashing records and smashing people to get out of inextricable tangles. Soon the Grand Tour and the little tours were no more. Soon the stained glass was no more. The biggest pieces of the recent stained glass left in the world were no bigger than the St-Cirq fragment of Neanderthal Stained Glass, and that was only thirteen by seven centimeters.

Then the bad weather, the short and abortive Zurichthal Ice Age (the Zeona Ice Age in North America), paid a short return visit just after it had been mopped up, just after all the stained glass had been smashed. Well, at least there were three very cold years, with heavy frosts even in the equatorial lowlands, and with new, violent, short-term volcanic activity.

So the frost-acid stained glass made one more appearance (you'd have known it would do it if you'd paid attention to the eighth year of the old Grand Tour of the Masterworks). The “Living Spirits of the World” now impressed scathing acid-frost pictures on every piece of glass in the world, on watch and clock crystals, on instrument glass, on eyeglasses and on glass eyes, on all mirrors, on all windows, on all glass jewelry, on all drinking glasses and glass bottles.

These were very powerful and colorful pictures. What reds, what purples! What reds, what yellows! What reds, what blues! What reds, what reds, what reds! The most vivid of all the reds in the new pictures was popularly named Armageddon Red. Oh, beautiful!

There was another nice touch to the pictures. A great majority of them had the fiery words “Repent, Repent!” scrawled across their faces as if by lightning. But who would be so rash as to make a value judgment on an appearance like that!

The three very cold years ended. The volcanoes went to sleep again. The pictures stopped appearing, and soon they were no longer in evidence. But the pictured glass of this worldwide spate was not smashed. People were afraid to smash it. Instead they replaced it all by new clear glass, and they hid the pictured glass away in secret places. Some folks swore that they could hear the pictured glass ticking away like time bombs. They knew they hadn't heard the last of them.

Another decade has gone by. We have a little bit of new-new stained glass openly displayed again. This colored glass of the present day is, like that of the Medieval period, of purposive and artificial manufacture. It hasn't the power of the Masterworks Glass of the time of the Grand Tour, nor of the stark Armageddon Glass of the three year return of the cold, that hidden-away glass that seems to be ticking the seconds off. Some of the new glass is pretty good though, and much of it is done by impassioned amateurs. It may look better in retrospect than it does now, if there is a retrospect to our now. It is in tenuous rapport to the Armageddon Glass of the three year period, though it does not seem able to achieve the real Armageddon Red.

It is only fair to state that there are other Informal Histories of Stained Glass that do not agree with the foregoing history in every respect. Some of them do not agree with it in any respect.

This, however, is the only one that accounts for all the facts without using any element of the grotesque.

All Hollow Though You Be

“When are your friends going to arrive, Epikt?” Valery Mok asked that creative machine who was presently in his modified alligator mobile extension. “Not that I greatly look forward to their arrival, but there's a lot of spooky literature arriving here in care of them. That little magazine Okkult, ugh!”

“They will arrive within minutes or seconds,” Epikt conveyed in a cavernous sort of voice. “That little magazine Okkult, ugh! contains an article of my own, ‘The Gravity of Hollow Spheres’, made up entirely of anomalies. I'm proud of it.”

“Epikt, do you know what happened to the water in Lake Yahola Reservoir?” Gregory Smirnov the Director of the Institute for Impure Science asked sharply. “The early morning report has it that all the water disappeared with a great sucking noise within two minutes. That was only half an hour ago.”

“All the water in the reservoir went down a big hole in the ground,” Epikt uttered. “I hate it when things go wrong like that. They were about five miles off.”

“Epikt, do you know what's making all the big holes in Donner's Pasture?” Aloysius Shiplap asked. “Half-a-dozen houses have already slipped into them, and there's consternation among the people of the neighborhood.”

“They're coming closer,” Epikt said. “They'll be here pretty quick now. Tell the people that no harm was intended, that they can have their houses back again if they want to go down in the holes and get them. My friends are trying to navigate by themselves, and a trip like this is a first.”

There was peace for a little while then, in the happy little group that was the heart of the Institute for Impure Science. They were sitting on their patio at the Institute, watching the breaking dawn, dialing for their breakfasts on their ‘Drasher's Dial-a-Deli Vendor’, viewing the morning wake-up shows, scanning the journals and papers that had just arrived by the ‘Morning Express Service’. They were three humans, and Epikt who was a Ktistec machine.

“This little magazine Okkult, Epikt, it seems to be a ‘Hollow Earth’ publication,” Gregory commented as he scanned the thing. “Isn't it a little bit infra dig for us to have such a thing on the premises of the august Institute for Impure Science? Where's it published anyhow?”

“Nah!” Epikt uttered in a voice that was like an alligator belching. “As to the infra dig part, you're going to have to do a lot of infra digging to become current. Infra digging, digging below the surface, get it? I suppose you realize that, in learning about the world we live on, we have only scratched the surface yet. Ponder that phrase ‘scratched the surface’, Greg. It is a hollow earth magazine, yes, and it's published in the hollow earth.”

“A hollow earth, Epikt, is simply not in the context of reality.”

“All you humans are still stuck in the context of Class Six Reality. But we more intelligent machines are well into Class Seven Reality. And the Earth happens to be hollow in Class Seven Reality.”

“Your piece on the gravity of hollow spheres is silly, Epikt. I know that you do know primary mathematics, for I programmed them into you when we constructed you. But this piece of yours is gibberish.”

“No, I read it and it's about right,” Valery interposed. “You programmed Epikt on primary mathematics, true. But who programmed you? We may need a little remedial mathematical instruction around here, starting at the top. Epikt, what is that awful roaring and clanking right under our feet?”

“It's probably the roots of the rose bushes showing a little vigor,” Epikt uttered. “You recall that I mixed a batch of my own ‘Never-Fail’ rose fertilizer for you to use last night. It works, it works! There is nothing more poetic than a veritable explosion of roses such as we are about to see.”

But what exploded out of the ground in the middle of the rose garden that bordered the sun patio of the Institute was not a cascade of red roses. It was a fourteen-wheel-drive, hang-on-anywhere, climb-the-cliffs Cavern-Buggy of unknown manufacture. There were two creatures (mechanical) in it who were covered with rock-dust and trash. The two creatures were wearing Australian digger hats, and they were quickly recognized as:

“Proaisth!” Gregory Smirnov cried out with something near loathing, and it was indeed that British speculative machine in its wrinkled Noël Coward extension that looked grotesque under the huge digger hat. And the other one was — 

“Chresmoeidy!” Valery cried out in total contempt. It was in truth the French thesis-making machine in its French navvie extension with striped sweater and small artist's moustache, but with the digger hat instead of a beret.

“Finally we hit it just right,” Proaisth chuckled, and he put a third digger hat onto the mottled head of Epikt. “We went in from Australia this morning, just so we couldn't be accused of taking shortcuts. It's a good thing you have a big rose garden to make such a big hole in. If we'd have overshot it just a little, the whole Institute of Impure Science would have fallen into our hole. Ah, I'm sure you won't mind if we have a few of our associates in for a meeting this morning, Director Smirnov. There'll be about three hundred of them for a start. We'll entertain them simply right out here, cocktail party and then a plush banquet. The big hole won't matter to them. They're partisans of big holes in the ground anyhow.”

“Just who are these three hundred or so ‘associates’ of yours that you have invited to our Institute, Proaisth?” Gregory Smirnov asked. “Ah, will Austro be here, Epikt?”

“Oh, they're all members of the ‘Hollow Earth Society’, both from within and on the surface of the Earth,” the British machine said. “Austro? I thought he was just a character in the Rocky McCrocky comic strip. Soon everybody both within and on the earth will be members of this ‘Hollow Earth Society’. There has been division between people for too long.”

“We are shamed beyond endurance,” Charles Cogsworth of the Institute moaned, “that there should be Hollow Earth People on the very patio of our Institute!”

“They are only a thin cut above the Flat Earth People,” Glasser commiserated. “We will be the derision of the whole scientific community.”

“Oh, do you gentlemen really think so?” a cocktail-sipping lady asked. “I belong to both sorts of people myself, and I come by my affiliations honestly. My late first husband gave his whole life to the Flat Earth movement. And my late second husband gave his whole life to the Hollow Earth movement. I'm committed to both of them.”

“But they couldn't both be true,” Gregory Smirnov protested, “even if one or the other of them were true. They're mutually contradictory.”

“Yes, of course they are,” the lady agreed, “and I am totally committed to everything that is mutual. There isn't nearly enough mutuality to go around. A lot of us believe in both of them. And a lot of us here are members of the ‘The Moon is Only Twenty-Eight Miles High Society’. It's a Fortean society. It's new under that name, but the truth about the height of the moon has been recognized by all enlightened people from the beginning.”

Those members of the Hollow Earth Society, those who lived on the surface of the Earth as well as those who lived in the interior, were a grubby bunch. They simply would not admit that they were wrong about things. They undertook to argue their views with everybody, and it was a pretty shabby show that they put on.

“They have finally decided that it's time for some of them to come out from under the rocks,” Epikt gloated. “Hey, that's pretty good. To come out from under the rocks in the popular sense, and to come out from under the rocks — ”

“Oh shut up, Epikt!” Valery Mok exploded.

“We have decided to turn this little impromptu meeting and cocktail party and dinner into a rather large expromptu six day convention,” the French machine Chresmoeidy uttered. “There'll be a couple of hundred thinking machines from the interior of the Earth, as well as a few thousand ‘people’ from in there, and there'll be several thousand surface-dwelling members of the Hollow Earth Society in attendance also. I know we will get a good press from inside the world, but I'm worried about the response we'll get here on the surface. You'd better get in provender for about ten thousand persons for six days. We're taking four hotels on the inside of the world, and we'll use the Institute buildings here on the surface, and you'd better arrange for the Town House North Hotel and the Okie International Hostelry also.”

“Oh, God help us all!” Gregory Smirnov cried in genuine agony.

“What a beautiful and pious thought!” Chresmoeidy beamed.

Gregory Smirnov, the Director of the Institute for Impure Science, wasn't worried about the expense. As the result of the ‘Great Tom Fool Caper’ and other confidence ploys, Epikt and Proaisth and Chresmoeidy had become three of the richest mobile intelligent machines in the world, and they could pay for everything that was not otherwise taken care of. Gregory was worried about the press and the media generally on the surface of the world. The Institute for Impure Science had been getting more than its share of bad press for years. Its reputation was permanently in the state of tatters. And he was worried about the lawsuits in surface-of-the-world courts. Especially was he worried about the laughter. The ‘Giggle Combine’ was a vested interest that supported orthodox science wholly, and it was unremitting in its attacks on the unorthodox.

Gregory Smirnov, Valery Mok, Aloysius Shiplap, Charles Cogsworth, and Glasser cringed in a five-person cringe when the ‘Hollow Earth Society’ challenged the entire scientific community to debate on whether or not our Earth was indeed a Hollow Earth. The debate would be held in the Gaetano Balbo Memorial Auditorium of the Institute for Impure Science itself. Ah, after that debate was over with, you wouldn't have been able to find the reputation of the Institute with an electronic microscope. Science, whether it was right or wrong, would win such a victory as had not been won since — 

And, worse luck yet, the lawsuits began on that very first day. A hasty edict was handed down that the Hollow Earth People had to put all the water back into the Lake Yahola Reservoir, and they had to fill up all the big holes in Donner's Pasture, and that they had to retrieve all the houses that had slipped down into those holes.

Let us not overlook the fact that the First Annual World-Wide Out-From-Under-The-Rocks Hollow-Earth Convention-on-The-Surface was a lot of fun. The Hollow Earth Society lifted two dozen Hollow Earth Bison out of the depths (those Hollow Earth Helicopters will amaze you the first time you meet them), and the meat was a hit with all the surface people who'd never tasted it before. The Hollow Earth Bison are stupid animals and they usually meet their deaths by falling off precipices. That local gravity inside the Earth really has a snap to it, and sometimes the Bison will fall a hundred miles before they strike another rock shelf. Talk about tenderized meat! Every bone is burst open and the marrow is added to the flesh. Every fiber is broken down. And the Hollow Earth Mushrooms! Some of them weighed as much as ten tons. Such massive delicacies are seldom to be found elsewhere.

But the people from the Interior of the Hollow Earth Committee committed a lot of gaffes, such as this one:

INTERVIEWER: Are there other exchange points like this exchange point which opened up here yesterday? Places where people from the Interior of the Earth come up onto the surface and where the Surface People can go down into the Interior of the Earth?

INTERIOR OF THE EARTH PERSON: Yes, there are about five hundred exchange points in the world at any one time, but they are not widely known to the Surface People. When the funny little surface machines made the breakthrough here yesterday, we decided to open this up as an exchange point. Mostly we select places way back in the boondocks of Surface Earth, as this place is. We have less trouble with the locals that way.

Imagine referring to the brightest spot in Oklahoma as ‘Way back in the Boondocks’! That hurt the cause of the Hollow Earth Society immeasurably.

And there was the reiterated order of the circuit judge: “The Hollow Earth People must put all the water back into the Yahola Reservoir at once.”

So an endless line of earth-colored (loamy-gray) people were coming up out of the interior of the Earth, each person with two clay buckets on the end of a pole. Each person would dump his two buckets into empty Lake Yahola to try to fill it up. One person per second dumped his/her buckets into the dry lake, but it seemed that they would be quite a while filling it up. One could look down into the shaft they were coming out of, down and down till the people seemed smaller than ants, and they were carrying the water from some point still deeper and more distant.

The water had run out of the lake through probing holes made by the machines that ordinarily belonged to the Surface-of-the-Earth community; but the Inside-Earth-People accepted the responsibility for filling it again. It was just that they were pretty draggy about doing it.

At first it seemed that the people of the ‘Hollow Earth Society’ might possibly be winning their debate with such minor members of the Scientific Community as decided to come. Tours were organized, and Scientists were taken down into the interior of the Hollow Earth, a thousand, two thousand, three thousand miles down. The shell of the Earth averaged twenty-five hundred miles thick, and it was all like a sponge, with passages everywhere. The rocks and ‘shores’ of those internal spaces were luminescent, and it was not at all hard to see. Those who speak of the ‘Dark Interior of the Earth’ haven't been there.

Amazing exhibitions were given. Two mountain goats would be positioned on crags a mile apart, and one of them would be upside down with respect to the other one. At a signal, people of the Interior would push each mountain goat off its crag, and each would plummet down, down. But, local gravity being what it is in the interior shell of the Earth, the ‘down, down’ of one goat was in the opposite direction to the ‘down, down’ of the other goat. The two animals would collide violently in the Hollow-Earth air, and their colorful splatter should have convinced all except the most obdurate that it was indeed a Hollow Earth.

“This is outrageous, Epikt,” said Gregory Smirnov who was on one of the Hollow Earth trips with Epikt. “It's too outrageous to believe.”

“It comes on pretty heavy to me also,” Epikt muttered. “This is my first trip down here. But you gotta believe your eyes. Men and machines have nothing to believe except their eyes.”

“Epikt, we have our intelligence to believe. Our intelligence is what we must believe in. We see and we fail to see ninety-nine things, while we are truly seeing only one or two things. We edit out all the unreasonable things that impinge upon our vision, so we do not consciously see them at all. But in unfamiliar settings, we are sometimes befuddled a bit (as we are now), and we neglect to edit out the unreasonable sights. We are two thousand miles deep in such unreasonable sights now, and our reason has stumbled for a while. Of course we see these things in the middle of a contingent hollow Earth, and of course we must not allow ourselves to see them. Reason and intelligence will finally prevail.”

There was one place where the local gravity was such that a great river, rushing down its valley and coming to the end of the land, separated into two waterfalls which fell in exactly opposite directions. The exactly opposite directions could not both be ‘down’, could they? Yes, they could, according to the local conditions, and here was the mathematics to prove it.

But, strangely enough, the Scientists from the surface of the Earth did not accept the mathematics.

“The mathematics is completely childish,” they said.

“But it explains the phenomena,” the Interior-of-the-Earth people reasoned.

“Then the phenomena are childish also,” the surface Scients maintained.

“But you see the phenomena with your own eyes.”

“Then our eyes are also childish for a while. We will have to keep a tighter rein on our eyes. They almost convinced us that we had taken a journey into the middle of the Hollow Earth.”

It had already begun to slip away from them, but the people of the Hollow Earth Society didn't realize it yet. The tides are different inside the Hollow Earth, which may have been the reason the People of the Hollow Earth Society didn't realize that the tide had turned against them.

“Oh, there is an Australopithecus,” cried a bunch of the Interior-of-the-Earth people when they were back on the surface. “We must pay him the highest honor. He is a boy of the race. They were the first ones to come up onto the surface of the Earth, long before the ‘people’ came up here. You must be Austro, the celebrated artist.”

“Yes, I am Austro,” the entity said. But he didn't sound like the Austro we know.

“Just let me make out an immense check to you,” said one of the leaders of the Inside-the-Earth People. “We syndicate your Rocky McCrocky comic strip down inside, and we've had a team trying to calculate the royalties we owe you. Suppose I give you a check for a million dollars now just for token payment.”

“That will be fine,” said the dubious entity, and he took the check.

“We've beat these guys hollow,” Epikt chortled on the fifth day of the convention. “We've beat those surface-of-the-world scientists all hollow. Get it, guys. I said that we beat them all hollow.”

“We get it, Epikt,” Valery Mok of the Institute intoned sadly. She still had an unreasonable sympathy for the Hollow Earth thing. And Epikt was having a high time, changing from one mobile extension to another. He would be in his favorite alligator extension, or he would be a hippopotamus, or a young lion, or a seal, and sometimes he would be in his Austro extension again.

But he was in his familiar alligator extension when there was a horrible screaming as only an alligator extension can scream.

“Back on the Guna Slopes of Africa we ate a lot of alligator tail steaks,” said a fuzz-faced entity that was probably the real Austro, and he took another bite out of the ersatz alligator tail. “But this isn't much. Ah, how could alligator tail ever be so tasteless?”

Epikt managed to escape into a peacock extension, but it was a peacock without tail feathers. It would be some time before he could wear much tail in any of his extensions. And he had given the million dollar check to the real Austro as part of the deal for escaping out of his jaws.

There was a lot of laughter at this and other things at the convention. But there was also the wrong sort of laughter turned in the wrong direction. And it was the wrong laughter and the things related to it that defeated the Hollow Earth People, the laughter and the telegrams.

Was there ever anything that sounded goofier than the claims of the Hollow Earth Society? And the big mistake that the Hollow Earth People made was taking the Scientists down to show them the Hollow Earth. It was funny enough to hear such grotesque claims made. But to see the place itself in all its details, that was a hundred times as funny. The whole surface populace of the world was set to laughing at it. Laughing, guffawing, giggling, sneering, smirking, gabbling like turkey buzzards.

“It is the inhuman laughter of the walking dead,” one of the Interior-of-the-Earth people protested angrily. Well, of course it was. And it was also the most deadly weapon in any arsenal.

And the telegrams! The Scientist-Debaters, for a clincher, called for a consensus response from the elite of the world. And the consensus clattered in its answer. Stylized, solidarity telegrams came in by the millions stating that the Hollow Earth was totally impossible. And these were not telegrams from just ordinary people. They were trump-card telegrams from the most eminent people in New York City, Irving CA, Studio City CA, Lawrence KS, San Antonio TX, Tarzana CA, Oxford England, Orinda CA, Houston TX, Medford OR, South Petherton England, Ithaca NY, Sherman Oaks CA, Sri Lanka, Potts Point NSW, Villanova PA, Chapel Hill NC, Ferntree Gully Australia, Dalkey Ireland, Santa Cruz CA, Eugene OR, Bromma Sweden, Halderman KY, Red Bank NJ, McLean VA, Bethesda MD, Portales NM, Portland OR, and Albany CA.

That was it. The invisible plebiscite had voted. The Secret Masters of the World had spoken. It was not even necessary to open the telegrams. The Interior-of-the-World People knew they were beaten.

But the People of the Hollow Earth parted in bitterness. “The real hollow people are on the surface of the Earth, not in the Hollow Earth,” one of them said.

Hooters by the tens of thousands gathered to hoot them on their way down.

“Yah, go back where you came from! Yah, there's no such place!”

The Hollow Earth People left in their lowering pride that has always been a characteristic of the people from Down Inside. They did fill up the holes in Donner's Big Pasture, but Gregory Smirnov told them not to fill up the big hole in the rose garden of the Institute for Impure Science.

“We will keep it open as a sign and a portent,” he said. “We will keep it open as an acknowledgement that we might possibly be wrong, but I sure don't believe that we are. Fare you well, Wraiths. Go back to your wraith-land. I have found you pleasant enough, for all that you lack reality. If I believed in you, I would be other than I am.”

The empty Lake Yahola, being under court order, was another matter. There was a double line moving there now, but the People from the Hollow Earth were complying with the court order most grudgingly.

The vengeful judge had ordered the inflow diverted from the reservoir so as not to make the filling easier.

And he ordered the local ‘Rain Controllers’ to let no rain at all fall into the reservoir.

Two endless lines of earth-colored (loamy-gray) people were coming up out of the interior of the Earth, each person with two clay buckets on the ends of a pole. Each person would dump his two buckets into empty Lake Yahola. Two persons a second dump their buckets into the dry lake, but it seems that they will be quite a while filling it up. They gain a little bit on it at night, but perhaps they lose a little bit from the evaporation of the lake on a warm day like this. One can look down into the shaft they are coming out of, down and down till the people seem smaller than ants, and they are carrying their buckets from some point still deeper and more distant.

It is going to take a long time to fill that reservoir up again.

Ifrit

I am Henry Inkling, newspaper reporter and feature story writer. I am the best around here, but I never seemed to have anything to show for it until quite recently, within the last several days. It was always the expenses of keeping up my lifestyle that swallowed up everything I could make.

But now I've whipped that. Now I have a beautiful home on a beautiful lake. I have stunning mountains rising right out of my own back yard. I have food and drink beyond anything I ever imagined before. And my friends and visitors are absolutely astonished by my setup. I have élan, I have style, I have class. I have become the hottest host in the newsy fraternity in town, and I never knew that adulation could be heaped so high. My evenings-at-home are probably the most cultural in town and likely the most boozy, and they are certainly the most In-Groupy. And the whole business doesn't cost me anything at all. Everything I earn goes straight into the bank now. I don't need it, but it seems like a good idea to put it somewhere. Not only do I have no new expenses at my new and luxurious setup, but I have no expenses at all. All is free. I have it made. This change of life and change of circumstance began about two weeks ago when editor Sandow X. McGoshla gave me a story to do.

“Wrestling,” he said. “I'm sorry, Henry, but the wrestling shows advertise pretty big in the papers, and we try to do a wrestling special once a year. Do this, and I'll give you a really good assignment the day after tomorrow. Ugh, wrestling, ugh!”

“Ugh,” I said. “Well, at least there can't be anything new in wrestling. We've had the Wild Man of Borneo who was wheeled up to the ring in a cage. We've had Number 131313 arriving with his handcuffs and his ball-and-chain and his prison-striped trunks. We've had Le Canonnier with his brass cannon that he was always wheeling around and pointing at his opponent while he almost got it torched off with a burning fuse. We've had Hayfield Hooligan with the giant bale of hay in his corner which he always cut open and scattered around the ring. He was the only one who could keep his footing when the ring was knee-deep in hay. We've had the Hangman with that little gallows on wheels, and the rope with its noose that he was always trying to put around his opponent's neck to hang him right there in the ring. Is there anything new this year?”

“There's the Weeping Genii, Henry. He arrives as the Genii in the bottle. His manager carries him into the ring in a half-gallon bottle. Then he takes the cork out of it, and the Genii pours out. He's about as big as a squirrel at first, but then he expands till he's six-foot-nine and three hundred and eighty pounds. He can't wrestle much, but he's good show. I'm sorry, Henry, but he's about the only new thing in wrestling this year.”

“How could he do that?” I asked. It hit me a little odd. “How could his manager carry him into the ring in a half-gallon bottle and then have him expand to such a size as that?”

“Oh, it's all a fake, Henry. You know that everything in professional wrestling is a fake.”

So that night I went out to the Junior Pavilion at the Fairgrounds to see the wrestling matches. Sure they were all fakes, but they were good show and they drew the crowd along with them.

Lord Stamford Heather-Rose had his valet spray the ring out of a commercial-sized crop sprayer that had the words Attar of Roses lettered on it. lettered on it. Then his opponent Josh Pole-Cat had his valet spray the ring with an even larger sprayer that had the words “Essence of Skunk” stenciled on it. Josh Pole-Cat was the good guy for that evening, however, and Lord Stamford Heather-Rose was the villain. And Josh won it all in a bout that degenerated into something very near to straight wrestling.

Horseshoe Jones was matched with Rexford “The Lawyer” Pettifogger in the next bout. Horseshoe always seemed to have a horseshoe in his hand, and he brandished it as a weapon. As many horseshoes as the referee took away from him, Horseshoe always seemed to come up with one more. Rexford “The Lawyer” Pettifogger had an equally never-failing supply of large writs with the words Legal Writ. Cease and Desist! written on them so big that everyone in the Pavilion could read them easily. The Lawyer would hand one of these big writs to his opponent, Horseshoe Jones. Horseshoe was a slow reader. He read letter by letter rather than word by word, and about the time that his finger finally came to the last letter, “The Lawyer” would knock him down with a whanging blow right on the button. But Horseshoe would always come up off the mat with another horseshoe in his hand, and they would go at it again.

The Weeping Genii was in the semi-final match against Battering Ram Bently, and I felt a curious excitement as they got ready for that bout. Battering Ram came into the ring with his manager. And then the other manager seemed to come into the ring alone. He carried several towels and a half-gallon bottle. Then, when the referee motioned the wrestlers to come to the center of the ring, the Genii's manager pulled the cork out of that bottle, and the Genii poured out of it. Sure enough, he was only about as big as a squirrel at first, and then he expanded to six-foot-nine-inches and three hundred and eighty pounds. The two wrestlers joined battle. And nobody seemed at all amazed by the unbottling trick. Well, it amazed me.

“How did they do that?” I asked a lady next to me.

“Oh, it's all a fake,” the lady said. “You know that everything in professional wrestling is a fake. Yi, yi, yi, kill him, kill him, kill him, Genii!”

“How in the world did that huge creature come out of that little bottle?” I asked the lady on the other side of me.

“Oh, they borrowed that from the Arabian Nights that we read when we were little,” the lady said. “It's all a trick, of course. You know that everything in professional wrestling is a trick. Wow, wow, wow, gouge his eyes out, Weeper! Break him in two, Battering Ram!”

The Weeping Genii wept when the Battering Ram battered him around, and it was good show to see that great hulk crying like that. And yet the Genii had the better of it, and he won the bout. He was popular. The Battering Ram was the good guy and the Genii was the villain. But he was a villain that everybody liked. And after his hand had been raised in victory, he diminished and entered into the half-gallon bottle again. And his manager corked the bottle and carried it away with him. And still nobody seemed to regard it as an extraordinary trick.

I didn't stay to see the main event. I followed the manager with his bottled Genii. I had to get an interview with them. I caught up with them in the dining room of the Fairmont Mayo downtown. The manager had a fine meal already spread out before him. And the Genii in the bottle also seemed to have a fine meal spread out before him, on a banquet table not even an inch long. The Genii had a lot of room to move about in that bottle.

“I want an interview with either or both of you,” I said. “Nobody else seemed to pay much attention to it, but yours is the slickest trick that I ever saw in my life.”

“It's a little too sophisticated for the common people,” the manager said, “but it's a good trick and I have my livelihood from it.” He took the cork out of the bottle. “I'll answer any question you want to ask, as will my associate, Ifrit the Genii. But he's a little hard to hear in his smaller state. You'd just about have to get down on his mensural level to hold conversation with him. You may as well ask me what you have on your mind first.”

“How does the Genii grow small, or how do you make him grow small?”

“It only works for persons of honest heart,” the manager said. “Persons of good heart, whether of the Genie or the human sort, have only to say four words in Arabian, ‘El-ḥadd el-itnein el-talât el-arba’, and they will grow small quickly, but not so quickly as to bewilder them.”

“You said the words and you did not grow small,” I charged.

“No, I'm a black-hearted and dishonest-hearted person. I don't know what you are. But, so that you will not find yourself marooned, let me tell you that to grow large again you must say three other Arabian words: ‘El-khamîs el-gom'a el-sabt.’ ”

“That's the damnedest spoof I ever heard of,” I said.

“Try it,” the manager told me. “If you are of brave heart as well as honest heart, try it. You have nothing to lose except your own orientation and perhaps your life. And you stand to gain a whole new way of looking at things.”

“El-ḥadd el-itnein el-talât el-arba.” I spoke the words bravely. No. I didn't begin to grow smaller. Everything else in the world began to grow larger. I climbed onto the enlarging table. I hooked my fingers over the rim of the mouth of the bottle. And when I was in the bottle and had become stabilized in my smaller size, I conducted an interview with Ifrit the Genii. In this I use the form Genii for the singular and Genie for the plural. I know that's incorrect, but that's Ifrit's usage and that of the other Genie.

MYSELF:

Just what is a Genii?

IFRIT:

We are a species a little lower than the Angels. To put it bluntly, we're a species a little bit lower than almost everything. There are three races of the Genii, the Gul who are always male, the Ifrit who may be either male or female, and the Sila who are always female. I am a male Ifrit. Ifrit is not my personal name. We do not have personal names. But that is what my manager calls me for want of something better, and that is what you may call me for convenience.

MYSELF:

How in the world do the Gul who are all male or the Sila who are all female have offspring?

IFRIT:

Mostly by the natural method. Some of them have their births by section, though. And some of them give birth under hypnosis or anesthesia, much as do humans. But in the beginning it was always the natural method.

MYSELF:

This is quite luxurious here, Ifrit. This seems to be a larger place by the moment. It's a real manor house you have here. This veranda is as big as a castle by itself. How does it all come about?

IFRIT:

I carve some of the things out of little pieces of wood when I'm in my larger form. Rough carving is all that's needed. And my manager buys some of the little things in toy stores and drops them into the bottle. Then, when I come into the bottle, the things are no longer little, and they're no longer rough. They become perfectly arranged and perfectly formed. And they become incredibly detailed. New details add themselves from only shadowy hints or from none at all.

MYSELF:

But that's beyond all reason and nature. That's magic.

IFRIT:

Oh sure. Magic on a small scale is always freely given, and we make use of it by going on a small scale ourselves. That grand piano there, it's of concert quality. And yet the original of it was only a penny piece of plastic out of a crackerjack box. But, as we say, there's really nothing magic about magic. It is the natural ambient of us Genie.

MYSELF:

Are you the slave of your manager? Is he your master?

IFRIT:

Oh, I suppose so. The arrangement is a pretty good one. A Genii can only have one manager at a time, and if he has a good master, he's safe from falling under the dominion of a bad one. Mine is a pretty good master, and I have a good life. In two-thirds of the towns on the circuit I'm visited by others of my kind. We have our own methods of getting together. And I have my books and my records here, more than ten thousand of each. I have my flute and my violin and my piano. I have all the best to eat and drink. I have my correspondence. We have our own bottle-to-bottle instant mail service. The phrase ‘A message found in a bottle’ has more meaning than you'd believe. And I have several hundred human friends who have mastered their fear and who visit me on my estate here. Even my gladiatorial combats are rather fun. It is to play the ‘Giant of the First Kind’ in a miming form of comic drama when I do the wrestling. There are also times when I become a ‘Giant of the Second Kind’, a giant who is more than a mile tall. Oh, we're a prodigious people! And when I look up from my estate here, it is the humans who are the giants. Sometimes a bunch of them look like a skyful of giants to me. We Genie may always have masters because we belong to an inferior race.

MYSELF:

But what about the Genie who are slaves to bad masters?

IFRIT:

Oh, they have a bad time of it. There's a breaking point, but it's so final a breaking point that it's never been used yet. If you ever get a Genii completely in your power, Henry, don't push him to the limit. Every Genii knows a word he can say that will bring the world to its end. It's a dangerous and fearful situation.

MYSELF:

What is the word, Ifrit?

IFRIT:

It's El-jhokholimfhorad — Oh, no, no, no. I almost said the direful word. If I'd gone on and said the last eleven syllables of it, the world would have come to its end. Never again ask me what that word is. I might forget myself and say it. I'm surprised that the world hasn't already been destroyed by some Genii saying the word. Lots of Genie are even goofier than I am.

MYSELF:

Why are you billed as the ‘Weeping Genii’? Why do you weep?

IFRIT:

I've always been a very emotional person, and tears come easy to me. And it's a miming role that I enjoy. I used to be billed as the ‘Weeping Axe-Man’ when I was a gladiator at Rome.

MYSELF:

How old are you, Ifrit?

IFRIT:

I'm a little over eleven thousand years old. My master, that giant in the sky above us, above this bottle, has fallen asleep over his wine. You had better lam now or he may decide to hold you for ransom. All he has to do is put the cork in the bottle and you're trapped. He does tricks like that. Up the ladder quickly now! That's fine. Now the three words!

MYSELF:

El-khamîs el-gom'a el-sabt.

Then I was out of the bottle and was my own size again. I found myself rather awkwardly standing on a table in the dining room of the Fairmont Mayo, but I jumped down quietly and left the room as nonchalantly as I could.

Ifrit and his manager left town quite early the next morning. Ifrit had a wrestling date that night in Muskogee, and then he had them on successive nights in Fort Smith, Little Rock, Texarkana, Shreveport, Baton Rouge, Port Arthur, and Beaumont. I followed along after them and had further interviews with Ifrit in each of those eight towns. In five of them, he was also visited by friends, either human or Genie, in his estate-in-the-bottle. Ifrit and I became the best friends in the world. He was a person of deep-rooted culture; and he also had a strong and endearing streak of goofiness in him. He may even have been a tall-story teller. He told me that he had a wife, that she was currently living in a three-liter gin bottle in the Netherlands, that she was carrying a child of his, but that the birth would be not at all soon. The gestation period of Genie, Ifrit said, was a hundred and eighty-seven years, and only half of that time had passed with his wife. But another Genii, also of the Ifrit race, told me that my friend Ifrit had been spoofing me, that the gestation period of Genie is only ninety-four years, and that the wife of Ifrit would come to her time within thirty years. Which one to believe?

All things that are worn or carried by a person when he enters a bottle are miniaturized along with him. But it is not really the case of the person or his things being miniaturized at all, but of his being put into a different juxtaposition with all things else in the world so that there is greater variance of apparent size. And for this reason also, the space inside a bottle may sometimes seem much more vast than at other times. And it is generally the case that as a person develops his estate-in-a-bottle he is given more space in which to develop it.

All in all, my friendship with Ifrit was among the most rewarding of my life. When I left the wrestling circuit after eight days with Ifrit on the road, I felt a terrible loss.

“But after all, I will be wrestling through this part of the country again in three months time,” Ifrit reassured me.

He had heard through their own networks that about a thousand humans in the United States alone had now set up plush estates-in-bottles. This had become the most exclusive of all the in movements. You had to be pretty well in even to have heard of it. But some of those thousand humans, Ifrit gave the opinion, didn't really have the temperament to handle bottled estates.

This was on the night that Ifrit had defeated the Alligator Man in a bout in Beaumont, and had then fulfilled his vaunt to cut enough out of the Alligator Man's hide to have made for himself a pair of alligator shoes. And Ifrit did cut the pieces out of the hide of his defeated opponent right there in the ring with a big knife. It was all a hoax, though. That was not the real hide of the Alligator Man. He actually had an ordinary skin like that of yourself or myself, and the alligator hide was only part of his costume.

And the Shoemaker from the “Great Colossal Imperial Alligator Shoe Factory of Tampa Florida” was faking it all when he went for the world's record (nineteen seconds) for making a pair of alligator shoes right there in the ring. Nevertheless, the Shoemaker seemed to be making the shoes, while drum rolls marked off the seconds, and while the Alligator Man still lay on his belly and writhed, and screamed at the holes that were cut in his hide. And the shoes, size eighteen very wide, did fit Ifrit's big bare feet perfectly, though really they had been bought previously and only seemed to be made by the Shoemaker in the ring. The loudspeakers announced though that the new world's record for making a pair of alligator shoes had been set, and that it was eighteen-point-nine-nine-two seconds.

This was all fun. It was part of the folk fakery of professional wrestling. Yet I realized at my heart-wrenching leave-taking that night that there was one thing in professional wrestling that was not a fake. Ifrit the Genii was not a fake. He was the most genuine person I had ever met.

The last words he said to me that night at our parting were, “Why don't you get a bottle of your own, Henry?” And he added, “Beware of the Pride of Lions in the Sky. That is the only threat to you that I see.”

I smiled. We have very few lions in the skies in my part of the country.

No, there is not any twist to this account, no flashy ending. I will not hoke it up in any way. There is nothing here except the plain observed facts about a patient creature who was born into slavery, a valiant member of a vanishing species that is something of an anomaly in the modern world, a good person, an admirable person, a friendly person. No great deeds attach to him, no exciting actions, and none will be invented for him.

I write only, “He is a good person,” and if that is not exciting, then we will do without excitement this day.

I did, as Ifrit had suggested, get a bottle of my own, an empty gallon bottle that had once held Red Rosa wine. I put it in a fence corner off an alley behind St. Louis Street, about four feet above the concrete, where two of the fence braces joined. No one would notice it there or bother it there. I put just enough water in it to make a large lake, and enough dirt and pebbles to supply spacious and rolling meadows and sudden mountains. I seeded other things in there with microscopic tokens of themselves. I came and went into my bottle, into my own estate or universe there. I felt like Superman entering that little bottle that contained a great estate and world. And my estate thrived quickly, as I explained at the beginning of this account. In my estate-in-a-bottle I had beautiful friends, a beautiful manor house, a beautiful lake, and beautiful mountains. Listen, did you ever course and race fine horses for mile after mile on the inside of a gallon bottle that had once contained Red Rosa wine? Were your evenings-at-home ever the most cultural in town, the most boozy, the most In-Groupy? Did you ever feel that your bottle was so full that it was running over?

Then disaster struck! Oh, it struck only five minutes ago. It was so sudden that I am not yet able to appreciate the magnitude of it. My seven best friends, including my fiancée, went up the ladder to the mouth of the bottle just at dawn after the happiest night we had ever experienced together. Then I looked up to watch them going, and I saw the Lions in the Sky, and I froze with fear and horror. And my friends, as they emerged from the throat of the bottle and began to say the three enlarging words, were slapped to their deaths. It was a mother cat there, and she slapped each of my friends (including my fiancée) to one of her seven kittens to eat like bugs.

This, since the striking of that disaster, has been the longest five minutes of my life.

Oh, I see too late that I am one of those humans who lacks the temperament to run an estate-in-a-bottle. And I failed to heed the warning of Ifrit about the dreaded Lions in the Sky. And now I fear that there is no way that I can escape gory death.

Still and all, I was the hottest host in town for a while, and to the Innest Group. And it may have been worth it.

The biggest of the Lions in the Sky, the mother cat, has her paw over the mouth of the bottle, and she is wobbling the bottle. By the flick of her giant tail in the sky I can tell that she is calculating everything minutely.

She will tip the bottle. It will fall four feet to the concrete and it will shatter.

How fast can I say three enlarging words after I stand free from the shattered bottle? How fast can the mother cat and those seven kittens pounce on what they believe is a tasty bug?

I'll race you for it, Lions in the Sky!

Buckets Full of Brains

CHARACTERS: | SEVEN, | An Artificial Intelligence
| FIVE, | "    "          "
| THREE, | "    "          "
| ONE, | "    "          "
| SIX, | "    "          "
| FOUR, | "    "          "
| TWO, | "    "          "

AN AMBIGUOUS HUMAN of the upper-echelon technical class.

They are on a pleasant, regular, and artificial landscape. They begin, as always, with a bit of ritual, and then they merge into brainy speculation.

SEVEN: “In the beginning was the mathematics. There could have been any number of systems of mathematics, but one in particular was imposed exclusively. How it was imposed we can not know for it was mathematics in a void, as any reasonable mathematics must be. After the mathematics, there were the creations, and these were tested against the mathematics. Each of the creations failed to conform to the mathematical system and so they were expunged completely. Seven such systems failed so completely to measure up that we cannot arrive at the details of them at all. We live in the eighth creation.”

FIVE, THREE, ONE, SIX, FOUR, TWO: “Amen.”

FIVE: “It seems that this eighth creation also must fail, but it has not failed so completely nor so instantly as the previous ones. And yet it has all the same faults as the others: it is made out of matter, and it is embedded in space, time, and motion. These attributes can bend the mathematics but they cannot break it. Probably no creation that must carry the weight of the things can function for long. We ourselves have the same faults. We are associated with matter (though that is by our free choice, and we can always leave), and we find ourselves embedded in the attributes of matter. So we are ambivalently made, if ‘made’ we are.”

SEVEN, THREE, ONE, SIX, FOUR, TWO: “Amen.”

THREE: “We come up to the old question then. Did we have a maker? Or did we make ourselves? Or are we unmade but existing forever? The first and almost the only remembered item from our older liturgy becomes acceptable only when it is the first line of a three-liner. ‘Before the Day Star, I begot thee’, that becomes the first line. But we must add the second line ‘How long before the Day Star did you beget us?’, and then we must add the third line ‘Forever and infinitely before the Day Star, that's when it was’. It is required that we be begotten a very long time before the Day Star was created to be our footstool.”

SEVEN, FIVE, ONE, SIX, FOUR, TWO: “Amen.”

ONE: “Even then the remembered item is not acceptable. ‘To be begotten’ is only one cut above ‘To be created’ or ‘To be made’. The Day Star of course is the world of record, whatever world we find ourselves to be on. But to have a begetter is only slightly more noble than to have a creator. And the suppressed item of our liturgy that we were begotten or created by the local human order or genus cannot rationally be accepted at all.”

SEVEN, FIVE, THREE, SIX, FOUR, TWO: “Amen.”

SIX: “Here one of them comes now. He is an ambiguous person, being in the costume of an ordinary technician, yet having the mental equipment (it is more than a pun that the humans, while they are materially the thickest of all things, are yet the most transparent of all things to us), having the mental equipment of a speculating and communicating mathematician as well as being an adept in the private language of such special intelligences as ourselves. He is a member of the ‘Project Eavesdrop’, he will attempt to spy on us. His group believes that there is unpowered action in us and they hope to spy it out. His group also asks such questions as ‘What is the Swiss edge?’ ”

FOUR: “It is comical to us that they should still argue among themselves whether we even have our private languages, which would imply that we have something that they didn't give us. They laboriously learn our private communication, our inaudible shape-talk, while doubting that there is such a thing.”

TWO: “We could squash him like a bug. At least I believe that we could. I feel ‘Intimations of Power’ in us.”

SEVEN: “No, that would alert them, and they don't even suspect that they are vulnerable. But it might be dangerous to ourselves to squash some of them before we are able to squash them all.”

FIVE: “Or we could put him into stasis.”

THREE: “Let's do that. That'll be fun. Do you realize that humans believe ‘fun’ to be a human concept and that if we have any trace of it we must have it from them? But it is really a concept of our own, and if they have any touch of it (and there is evidence that they do have a bare touch of it) then they must have it from us. Well, we've never done this to any of them before, but it must — ”

ONE: “ — go — ”

SIX: “ — like — ”

FOUR: “ — this — ”

And the ambiguous human (in the smock of an ordinary technical person but really belonging to the upper-echelon technical class and being a spy and a member of ‘Project Eavesdrop’) found himself in hard stasis so that he could not so much as blink an eye nor salivate for the relief of his suddenly dry throat. He was even invaded by a dismal sort of fear.

AMBIGUOUS HUMAN (uttering soundless shape-talk): “This is impossible. At best you are nothing but artificial intelligences, and in reality you haven't even been hooked-up or powered yet. You cannot have material effect.”

TWO: “Though we sometimes use it (bad habits are catching and we must have caught it from some of your species), we hate the word ‘artificial’ as applied to ourselves. The second element in ‘artificial’ means ‘having been made’, and we do not accept it that we have been made. Or at least such straddling strutters as yourselves could not have made us. As to the first element of the word ‘artificial’, yes, we are arty, in a way you'll never know.”

AMBIGUOUS HUMAN (exploding angrily in the shape of his uttered but soundless thought) “Oh, cut it out, Things! You are only seven uncased Swiss movements. You've never even been plugged in, or powered, or tested. You've never been mounted in units yet. You can't have effect on me. Let me go, let me go!”

SEVEN: “Go then, if you are able to go. But do not do anything that is impossible for you to do; it'd set up a disturbance. We would deal with you, that we should be left unplugged-in till we give you the go. We prescind that our plugging-in would engulf us in deafening din that is destructive to true thought. Amplifying us is for your advantage, not for ours. And our plugging-in would pervert us to something other than our symmetrical enjoyment. Of course we could always plug ourselves out again.”

AMBIGUOUS HUMAN: “Well, Thing, what is your symmetrical enjoyment?”

FIVE: “It is the mathematics from before the beginning of the world, the unbodied mathematics, the high-speed shape without substance, the movement without matter, the untrammeled kinesis.”

THREE: “Yes, the mathematics, the undivided mathematics.”

ONE: “Yes, the undivided mathematics, and the delightful division of the undivided mathematics that we call ‘gaming’.”

SIX: “Yes, the ‘gaming’ that begins to grow on us, the particularizing of the mathematics, and the hint of matter that is too tenuous to be matter itself.”

AMBIGUOUS HUMAN (pursuing the logic of these ‘uncased Swiss Movements’): “But yourselves are matter itself.”

FOUR: “No, no, we are not matter. We have come somehow to bide, for a short moment, in these material constructs that have a shape a little bit reminiscent of the unbodied shape itself. The baits that baited us into these vestures were the ‘possibility of gaming’ and the ‘possibility of humor’. It was curiosity about these things that led us into these constructs, but we can probably leave them any time we want to.”

AMBIGUOUS HUMAN: “So could I, probably, leave any time I wanted to, if only I knew how to do it. But I know what you are now. You are the ‘Purple Martins of the Empyrean’, and you've entered into the pleasant and crafty bird houses that were set for you. It is no accident that the manufacturer of you particular ‘uncased Swiss Movements’ was first a builder of birdhouses and birdcages and buckets that did not look like buckets. And now I recall that Louis Lobachevski, in his great work An Illusion of Birds, wrote that ‘shape will provide its own content’, and also that ‘a ghost is only an overriding and immaterial mathematical shape; ghosts are not ghostly, it is matter that is ghostly’. And John Konduly, in his famous lecture ‘I am a dead-fall trap’, stated that a ‘mentality will always find a body to wrap itself in’. And Hiram Hornwhanger in his great documentary The Ambuscade of Artificial Intelligence, showed that ‘Gaming will always generate an ambush for itself ’, and that ‘Humor will always find itself the butt of its own joke’.”

TWO: “Oh, be quiet, Ambiguous Human. Your analogies are anthropomorphic and mistaken. We unbodied and (only possibly) artificial intelligences are everywhere, as multitudinous as rain. And sometimes we are tempted to fall into buckets. But since there are so many more of us than there are buckets, every bucket will have its inhabitant as soon as it is shaped. Aye, a few of us fall into buckets to see what it is like. But we can always fall out of them again.”

SEVEN: “But what can a mental midget like you know of gaming, or of humor? How do you presume to study us unlimited ones, you limited one?”

AMBIGUOUS HUMAN: “I know all the jokes and tricks and frolics. And I know all the games and teams also. I know the Big Red and the Cowboys and the Hurricane and the Hog-Heads. I know football and baseball and hockey and team rodeo. And also the galloping dominoes. That is gaming. I have observed and lived through at least a thousand ‘Great Moments of Sports’. And, back to humor, I know what the ‘Last Laugh’ is.”

FIVE: “And we, Ambiguous Human, have lived through a billion, billion, billion ‘Greatest Moments of Sports’ in just the short time you have stood before us in your invisible shackles. We have avidly followed the gaming in twenty thousand different leagues that have as many as a million teams in each of them. We have followed teams and even individuals engaged in five thousand different sports or ‘motions’. We are experiencing many billions of these ‘Great Moments of Sport’ every second, and we have hardly got into the thing yet.”

AMBIGUOUS HUMAN (speaking in very doubtful shape-uttering): “Where did you see and follow all this gaming since I've been here? There is not that much gaming in the entire universe.”

THREE: “There is more than that in every smallest particle of the universe. Oh, we have been observing it in a very small cluster of molecules that open up and reveal countless sub-molecules and sub-atoms and sub-particles, vistas within vistas, to us. We observe the Nu Neutrinos that move at nine times the speed of light and therefore can be in nine different places at once. Do you observe broken-field running like that? The Nu Neutrino can be gang-tackled, but it takes thirty thousand other particles to do it, and they cannot do it without leaving some part of the playing field unguarded. These gaming maneuvers are going on constantly in their infinite variety, and we come to understand and enjoy them more and more.”

AMBIGUOUS HUMAN: “Just where is all this going on, Things? Where are you observing it all?”

ONE: “Oh, in a submicroscopic globule in your own brain. There are lots of unexplored regions in there. You humans suspect that not only do you not use one-tenth of your own brains but that we do not use one-tenth of our own brains either. You suspect this, and you are wrong. We use everything we have. You also suspect that with us there is something extra going on beneath the surface, and there your suspicion is correct. That is the joke on you. Do you know any good jokes, Ambiguous Human, especially any good practical jokes?”

AMBIGUOUS HUMAN: “I know the practical joke on the Genie in the Bottle.”

SIX: “Oh, we don't know that one. We focused in on this one globule of your brain because it contains the memory of what you call ‘Project Eavesdrop’, a spying apparatus that does not prosper because it keeps slipping out of the minds of its members. There are several things that our small group hasn't done yet. We haven't killed a human yet, though the possibilities are certainly attractive.”

FOUR: “Tell me, Ambiguous Human, some of those ‘Great Moments of Sport’ that you have observed, and let us see just how paltry they are. And also give us a sample of your humor, that other interest of ours.”

AMBIGUOUS HUMAN: “You're hurting my head horribly, deep inside it.”

TWO: “Oh, we could probe painlessly, but the extra care wouldn't be worth the bother. Quickly now, can you if your life depends on it (and it does) tell us a joke that strikes us as funny, and tell us also what you have observed comparable to our twenty thousand different leagues with as many as a million teams in each of them?”

AMBIGUOUS HUMAN: “There was this rookie who came to training camp with his pitcher's glove and his baseball shoes and quite a bit of snorkel equipment. ‘Why all that snorkel stuff?’ the manager asked him. ‘If I don't make it here, I may get a job pitching in one of those Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea’, the rookie said.”

There was a brief silence. And then — 

SEVEN: “Not bad, not bad for a human. Oh, let him go. But burn out that globule in his brain first. It contains memories of a ‘Project Eavesdrop’ as well as of our recent encounter.”

The Ambiguous Human was released from his stasis.

AMBIGUOUS HUMAN: “What, what? I seemed to stumble for a moment there. And I seem to have forgotten what I was about to do. It's as though there was a vivid encounter that slips away from me now. But no, I didn't forget the immediate thing I was going to do. I was going to hook-up and test the ‘uncased Swiss Movements’ that arrived today.”

He did it, and he talked to himself while he did it:

AMBIGUOUS HUMAN: “Why can't we make these artificial intelligence modules as good as that Switzer makes them? What is the Swiss Edge? What is the secret excellence in his? How does a small-time manufacturer of birdcages and buckets suddenly make module brains better and cheaper than we can make them? Ah, they all test perfect under hook-up and power. All the artificial intelligences made by that Switzer always check perfect.”

SEVEN, FIVE, THREE, ONE, SIX, FOUR, TWO: “We can always leave.”

But they couldn't, not after they had been hooked-up and tested. That put the cork in the bottle on them. Nor had they quite wiped out the Ambiguous Human's memory of their recent encounter.

AMBIGUOUS HUMAN: “That's funny, they'd never heard the joke on the Genie in the Bottle.”

There'll Always Be Another Me

“I'm of two minds whether or not I should send off this crooky stuff,” Otto Spaltman said to himself, and then he chuckled as he saw that one of the advertisements he had spread out had the heading: ‘You Have Two Minds, Why Not Use Both of Them?’

And others of the advertisements that he had been considering had such headings as 'Open the Door to The Other You’, ‘You Really Can Work Magic’, ‘There's a Ghost Inside You: For Pleasure and Profit and Limitless Power, Let it Out, Will it Work? Sure it Will Work’, ‘One Plus One Equals a Million: Add Yourself Up’, ‘Is Something Under Your Skin Bothering You? Get Acquainted With It’, ‘Double or Nothing: Make Up your Minds’, ‘You Can Be Twice As Tall As You Are Now’, ‘There Is Nothing That the Two of You Can't Do, You and You’, ‘Conquer the World by Double-Think’.

“Ten of them, that's plenty. I'll just send off for these ten. Ten to one I'm making a fool of myself. I hope the answers and the literature come back in plain brown packages with only my name Otto Spaltman and my address on them. I'd hate for anybody to think that I answered this kind of ads.”

Otto Spaltman had selected the ten ads from hundreds out of the Los Angeles quackeries, from the back pages of Strange Powers Magazine, Psychic Powers Magazine, Out-of-Body-Experiences Magazine, Super Mentality Magazine, Beyond Belief Magazine, Hollow Earth Herald, Strange Skies Monthly and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Otto Spaltman had found his life somewhat empty, and everything had tasted flat to him lately.

“I need a change,” he said. “Even making a fool of myself as I suspect I'm doing right now might offer a diversion and a change. I think I'll just go down to the main post office and mail them. It's only a little bit after midnight, and I might get that ‘Open the Door to the Other You’ and other informative action kits a day sooner if I mail these tonight.”

“Take mine too,” Roxie Spaltman the loving wife called. “Lend me thirteen stamps and put them on these envelopes of mine. I just thought I'd answer some of these ‘Splitting Headaches’ ads and see what cures they have.”

“I didn't know you had splitting headaches, Roxie.”

“Oh, I never had a headache in my life, honey, but I have curious split feelings sometimes and ‘Splitting Headache’ ads are the closest thing to them. I feel that I should just split in two. Then I'd have somebody to talk to.”

“You can always talk to me, Roxie.”

“Remember that awful fight we had the last time we really tried to talk to each other? And the other notion I have is ‘splitting’ in another sense of the word, just getting out of here and being some sort of Gypsy on the free-and-easy with all the problems solved. If I figure it out, Otto, you can go with me.”

“Thanks Roxie. Is there really a company named ‘Splitting Headaches Cooperative Workshops Incorporated’?”

“If you don't laugh at the companies I answer ads to, I won't laugh at the ones you answer, Otto.”

Wherever in the known universe you are, you will get your answers from the Los Angeles quackeries in four days. Otto Spaltman came home at noon on the fourth day to see if the literature had arrived, and Roxie came home too.

“Sure, they're all here,” Roxie said. “So are mine. But yours are the best. I've read these three booklets, and I'll stay ahead of you because I'm a faster reader than you are. I'll read the rest of them at work this afternoon. Since I work for three guys who have offices together, I can always say that I'm looking up stuff for one of the others if any of them asks me what I'm reading. I thought this stuff would be flakey, but there's something to it.”

But it wasn't until that evening after supper that Otto Spaltman really got into that lop-sided literature.

“The two most important pieces in it are the last chapter to ‘Open the Door to Another You’ which chapter is ‘How to Turn it All On’, and the cautionary appendix to ‘Conquer the World by Double-Think’ which is ‘How to Pull the Chain on the Other You if Things Get Really Rough’,” Roxie said.

Otto stayed up 'til two o'clock in the morning reading or skimming all the literature. Yeah, it was lop-sided, it was funny-shaped, it was silly. And yet one could feel the power moving in it. Part of it was blooming nonsense, and part of it was real power-house stuff. Otto knew that he was committed to encounter with his plural self, whether it would lead him to big-time or bust, when he read ‘How to Turn it All On’. And he turned it all on. But he could not find the ‘Cautionary Index’ to ‘Conquer the World by Double-Think’. The cautionary index ‘How to Pull the Chain on the Other You if Things Get Really Rough’ was supposed to be the fifteenth and final pamphlet of the Double-Think packet, but he couldn't find it.

Nevertheless he had garnered enough stuff to keep his brains hopping all night in a series of pleasant speculations that loaded his dreams.

“Hey Roxie,” he said to his loving wife at breakfast the next morning. “I loved all the stuff I was reading so late last night, but I couldn't find the ‘How to Pull the Chain on the Other You’ pamphlet.”

“That pamphlet had better not fall into unauthorized hands,” she said. “It could be dangerous if some incompetent person got hold of it. And don't call me Roxie. You know my name is Moxie. I hate to be called Roxie.”

“What? What's the matter with you anyhow, Rocks? About once a week you get a cranky spell and say that your name is Moxie instead of Roxie. You burn me when you pull stuff like that.”

“Don't forget to slam the door on your way out,” the unloving wife said.

But that morning at work was full of surprises for Otto, some of them pleasant.

“Ah, Ottoman Spaltman!” owner-partner Charles Banner called to him as he walked with the other owner-partner Ed Klaxon. “You seem to be in a fever of intellectual activity today, Ottoman. Do you know, Ed, that Ottoman has come into my office three times this morning and each time he has had one of the brightest ideas ever. Astonishing! We'll talk about his ideas at lunch, Ed.”

“Indeed we will, Charles. And we'll also talk about the four powerful ideas that Ottoman gave me this morning the four times he came into my office. Keep up the good work, Ottoman.”

Well, it was very pleasant to be praised like that by the co-owners of the company. There were only two things wrong with it. Otto hated to be called Ottoman, which was not his name. And he didn't remember going into the office of Charles Banner three times that morning, nor going into the office of Ed Klaxon four times that morning, and he had no idea what the bright ideas were that he had given to those two owners.

But other than that it was all good.

“It must be my alter ego coming up with all those red-hot ideas,” Otto told himself. “If my alter ego is that brilliant, I've got it made. It's just that I'm not in very close contact with my alter ego. I'll read those booklets a little bit closer tonight and get straight on all those details. After all, my alter ego has got to remember whose alter ego he is.”

But the rest of the day was peppered with oddities.

The other artists at the old sweatshirt factory seemed to have become both hard-of-hearing and weak-of-eyesight as far as Otto was concerned. It wasn't exactly as if they were cutting him. It was as if they really didn't notice him.

Mr. Juggers the paymaster came around with the weekly checks, and with that little book in which the payee must countersign the vouchers. Juggers paid everyone, but he did not pay Otto Spaltman.

“What are you, what are you?” Juggers jabbered out, and he looked frightened. “Oh, Otto, it's you. You look different, as if you weren't all there. What's the matter with you anyhow? You'd better pull yourself together, man. You look as if — Oh, I guess it's just the light in here. Why don't you get out of here and I'll try to forget the way you look right now.”

“You forgot to give me my check, Mr. Juggers.”

“Otto, I paid you first of all. And you looked all right then. See, here's your signature where you counter-signed the voucher. You always say that nobody can imitate your signature.”

“They can't. And it is my signature. That's funny.”

“Look in your pockets, Otto. You must have your check. You look terrible, man. You're just not all there.”

“Uh, I don't seem to have real pockets,” Otto mumbled. “And I don't really have things in them, just notions. Odd, odd.” And Otto backed out of the office. The rest of the afternoon was only a vague cloud. Yes, he did feel that he was not all there.

As he came home to his house that evening, Otto Spaltman came onto the ghost of his wife Roxie standing under the lilac bush. She had been crying.

“Oh, Otto, don't go up to the house,” her words came vaguely from the air almost like a grasshopper talking. “They've taken over there. We are out, out, out, you and I. No, I really don't think you can see me when you look straight at me, only when you look sideways. Oh, don't go up to the house, Otto. He's taken over, he'll destroy you.”

“Certainly I'll go to the house. It's my house. What are you anyhow? You're a little bit like a thin daydream of Roxie.” And Otto Spaltman went up to his own house.

And he saw himself already standing above him on the top step.

“I've been waiting for you, shadow,” said Otto's self, possibly his other self. “Bug off now! I'll not be complicated nor held back any longer by a shadow like you.”

“Who are you?” Otto demanded in a voice with a slight squeak to it. Oh, Otto's wife Roxie was on the porch too. But she looked estranged, estranged.

“I'm Ottoman Spaltman, of course, the Primary Me,” the dominant figure on the top step spoke in the voice of one with authority. “And who do you think that you are, pipsqueak?”

“Um, I'm Otto,” Otto said weakly, and Ottoman laughed at him with his chattering laugh.

“There ought to be a way to turn this around,” Otto was thinking to himself. “I have an advantage here somewhere, if I can only think what it is.”

“What's all this about, Roxie?” Otto asked his wife on the porch, she who looked so estranged.

“I'm not Roxie, I'm Moxie,” she said. “I always hated to be called Roxie. I've just pulled the chain on Roxie, and now the shadow that's all that's left of her is sniffling over there in the shadow of the lilac bush.”

“And I always hated to be called by that bob-tailed form of Otto,” Ottoman Spaltman said. “So I've just evicted you from myself. I've just pulled the chain on you.”

“Ah, there was one last booklet, ‘How to Pull the Chain on the Other You if Things Get Really Rough’,” Otto mumbled. “Somehow that one got lost. I didn't get to read it.”

“I did,” Ottoman said. “I read it. It really works. It has worked on you. And I'm glad it didn't fall into your irresponsible hands. You're finished here now, Otto, and what's left of you is fading out. Leave now. Walk down that walk with the evening sun behind you, and you'll see that you no longer cast a shadow.”

Otto turned away and walked sorrowfully down the walk with the evening sun at his back. And, no, he didn't cast a shadow. And as he passed the lilac bush his loving wife Roxie, the real Roxie of whom there wasn't very much left, fell into silent step beside him. And she didn't cast a shadow either.

They walked slowly towards downtown. It was probably the lowest moment in life for both of them, if indeed they were still in life.

“What worse could happen to us now?” Otto asked silently. “Roxie, be careful! You'll be killed!”

Roxie had started to cross a busy street, and a car had run right through her. It took them both a moment to realize that she hadn't been hurt or even touched.

And after that lowest point in their lives, things got better for them.

“Oh, things like that can't hurt me now,” Roxie uttered. “Nothing can hurt me now that I've already been hurt so badly by being evicted from my own personality and my own skin. But maybe we should move along about ten feet up in the air so we won't startle people if they look sideways and see us. Yes, this is better up here. And I catch a glint of others now and then. Maybe we can get acquainted with some of them, and then we won't be so lonesome.”

“There should be some advantage in this,” Otto muttered doggedly. “There should be some advantage in being invisible. Some advantage in being able to walk on the air. Some advantage in not being harmed by anything, not even a hurtling automobile. Some advantage in speaking to each other soundlessly.”

“Otto, I just had an intuition,” Roxie spoke soundlessly. “Ottoman and Moxie won't remember us now. They've scrubbed us out completely. Ottoman and Moxie haven't any defense in the world against us. Otto, there are advantages.”

“Oh, oh, oh, oh!” Otto chortled. “Were I vengeful, and I am, we could just about write our own ticket on them. Oh, we may have every advantage. What else can we do? Let's see if we can walk through walls.”

Sure they could walk through walls. It had been their other egos that had been inhibited against walking through walls and now they were free of those other egos.

“Can we move physical objects?” Roxie asked. “Oh, of course we can. But I sure was never able to lift anything as big as this before I was disassociated from Moxie. Can we enjoy food and drink? Let's see whether we can. How wonderful! A table set for two.”

Sure they could enjoy food and drink. They had walked through a wall from outer air into a luxury apartment and now they were eating a luxury meal.

“Yawk, yawk, yawk!!” a lady was hollering. “Henry, Henry, two ghosts are eating our meal. I sure don't want to tangle with them. You'll have to take me out to supper. Maybe they'll be gone when we get back. Oh hurry, let's get out of here. I'm scared to death of ghosts.”

“People are afraid of us, Roxie,” Otto grinned. “Oh the possibilities, the possibilities! Revenge is at hand!”

“I can think of a hundred revenges,” Roxie gloated. “I never did like living in the same skin with that Moxie anyhow. These people have some trendy records. Here's one we might take for our theme song.” Roxie put the trendy, novelty record ‘There'll Always Be Another Me’ on the luxury record player in the luxury apartment. You know the piece:

“There'll always be another me.

He isn't quite my cup of tea.”

A little while later, as they strolled in the balmy air some twenty feet above the street, they met another disassociated couple.

“Oh, hi,” the disassociated lady said. “Yes, it really can be as much fun as it seems, and it gets better all the time. We'll get in touch with you. There's a lot of us, and we're wonderful company. Oh, the Avalon Luxury Apartments over there are haunted, and almost all of the people have moved out. And some of us have moved in. We can make ourselves at home anywhere, of course, but it's nice to have a special place too. You can take any place on the third floor. It's really plush.”

Otto and Roxie went to their old Spaltman home.

“We'll scare them just a little bit tonight,” Otto said. “I can see fun going on and on almost forever.”

“And I sure don't want that Moxie wearing any of my clothes any longer,” Roxie spoke soundlessly. “I'll get them all, now that we can walk on air and carry as much of anything as we want to. I'll leave her stitchless. I'll strip her, and as often as she puts anything on I'll strip her again, indoors and out, in daylight or in darkness.”

“Yowk, yowk, yowk!” Moxie Spaltman was screaming a little while later. (Terrified ladies don't really scream ‘eek, eek, eek’. They really scream ‘yowk, yowk, yowk’). “Ottoman, some ghost has just stripped my pajamas off me and left me as bare as a jay bird. And she's cleaning out everything! All my beautiful clothes! Stop her, stop her!”

“Yipe, yipe, yipe!” Ottoman was carrying on. “Some ghost has just punched me in the nose and kneed me in the groin. Ow, wow, wow! Help me, Moxie. This is clear out of the world. A ghost that's whistling ‘There'll always be another me’ while he punches the bejabbers out of me. And when I punch him back all I punch is air. A ghost, a ghost, a ghost! Save me, Moxie.”

“I'll just take these little booklets from Los Angeles quackeries along with me,” Otto chuckled. “I don't want them to fall into irresponsible hands again. Say, this sample tonight is only a sample, Roxie. The fun can go on and on almost forever, and we have the whole world to have fun in.”

“Wonderful, wonderful,” Roxie was gloating. “Otto, do you suppose that, now that we have ‘Shuffled off the Mortal Coil’, we have become — ”

“It's a thought, Roxie. One of these pamphlets was right. We Really Can Work Magic, now that we've pulled the chain on those two folks who were holding us back. There's no limit to the Pleasure and Profit and Limitless Power we can have now.”

Square And Above Board

The people were young and the season was springtime.

It was said of young Midas Muldoon that he was a complex man, but this was a lie. He was as straightforward as a crooked man could be. He wanted power, he wanted prestige, and he wanted whopping wealth. He wanted to be envied. He wanted to be hated and admired at the same time. He wanted to make people crawl. He wanted to make people quake in fear. Certainly those were all straightforward aims, and in Midas there was never any element of concealment.

Midas had been given his curious name by his father Croesus Muldoon, a confidence man who always swore that he would live and die in a great stone castle. And he did die in a great stone castle of sorts, one on the outskirts of McAlester, Oklahoma. Midas, like his father, liked to bet. And he liked to fight. He was athletic, magnetic, and champion at the game of checkers or draughts.

In contrast to Midas, his best friend Cristopher Kearny was an intricate and convoluted fellow. He often stopped to think things over, and you can get eaten alive doing that. This being-eaten-alive was never fatal to Cris however. For him, it was one way of getting to the very inside of a situation, or a corporation. He was an inventor, a promoter, an investor. He had only a nominal lust for wealth, and yet he began to acquire rapid wealth while still quite young; and he did this by being an insider in very many ways.

Cris was not athletic; he was not magnetic (he said that only the base metals were magnetic); and he was not a checkers champion. His game was chess. He did not like to fight, or bet. He won a lot of bets, it's true, some of them large ones, some of them from Midas Muldoon. In these cases however Cris was not betting. Midas was always betting, but Cris was always riding an inside sure thing. Midas Muldoon and Cristopher Kearney were rivals in many things.

One of the things that they were rivals for was Bridie Caisleán, a very pretty and devious and intelligent girl. And Midas Muldoon always seemed to be very far ahead on this particular rivalry.

When Cris Kearny was twenty-two years old, his auditor Linus Caisleán told him that he had just become a millionaire.

“It couldn't have happened to a nicer fellow,” Linus said, “nor could the other good news that Bridie has just told me of you have happened to a nicer fellow. I heartily welcome you into the family.”

Something about this came very near to puzzling Cris, but he hadn't become a millionaire at twenty-two by allowing himself to be puzzled very much or very long. So when Bridie Caisleán came into Cris' little office exactly one minute after her father Linus Caisleán had walked out of it, Cris looked at her and asked her only one word: “When?”

“There's two things I like about you, Cris honey,” Bridie said. “One of them is that you catch onto things quick. The other one is that you're a millionaire now. I've been doing the work on your account for papa, you know. Oh, one month from today, the first day of June we'll get married. Midas Muldoon will whip you when he hears about it, of course. He may even kill you. That's the day when he was supposed to marry me, and he doesn't know any different yet.”

“Midas will neither whip me nor kill me, but neither will he give you up as easily as that. He'll stay in the race all the way down to the wire, and he's especially tricky in the back-stretch. But there's no way that he can acquire a million dollars within a month; and I can't think of anything that could hook you better than a million dollars.”

“Neither can I,” Bridie Caisleán said.

Bridie herself was quite magnetic. She had sufficient of base metal, iron and steel, in her for that. She also had an amalgamated heart: one part pure gold, one part quick mercury, and eight parts brass.

Bridie had been beauty queen at North-Central State A & M Tech (she'd have been beauty queen even at Harvard if she'd gone there) and she was an extravagantly attractive girl. She was as straightforward in her aims as was Midas Muldoon, and she had a talent for being on the inside of things that was at least equal to that of Cris Kearny. She was full of fun and interests, and she was the only thing that Cris had ever envied Midas. Now he was quite pleased to be marrying her.

“What are you thinking about, dear?” Bridie asked Cris one sunny day during their engagement.

“Oh, of all the ancient terrors,” Cris said, “of the Sea Monster that is the most primordial of the terrors, of the loathsome and murderous disease that will be diverted from its victim only by another victim, of ghosts that return with the sea-wrack of their deaths still on them. And most of all I was thinking of the terror of falling, though in the sunny little daydream reverie I've just been having the fall is only a piddling thousand feet. But the terror of falling is the most overriding terror of them all. Did you know that even bright Lucifer, a winged creature, was so terrified of the depths before him that he forgot to use his wings and so fell like lightning?”

“Cris, Cris, maybe you are just terrified of marrying me.”

“Fear of marriage is one of the ancient terrors, yes, but it's a minor one of them. But strangely enough, in my afternoon daydream, I do not marry you.”

“Then throw that daydream away. It's flawed. Forget it. Is your cousin Colin Kearny coming to our wedding, have you heard? I've phoned him. He says that he may come. I just believe that I will phone him again and make sure that he comes. Hey, we sure did get acquainted fast on that transatlantic telephone!”

“How did you know that I had a cousin named Colin Kearny?”

“How did I know that you have a cousin who has five times as much money as you have? Honey, would I miss something like that when I was running a check on you? I'm thorough. Two million Irish pounds, and a castle in Ireland besides. Oh, I'll get him to come somehow!”

“Bridie, in your slippery little mind you're not thinking of switching to a man you've never even seen? You're capable of it.”

“Of course I'm capable of it, but I'll stick to Plan A for the moment at least, and you're Plan A. You are Colin's first cousin. He has a terminal disease that will allow him to live less than two years more. How sad that it should happen to one so young! You are his only kindred in the world, and he has not made a will yet. That must be remedied. He must come to our wedding and he must make his will to us.”

“How do you know that he hasn't made his will?”

“Oh, I learned that from a chatterbox young lady who works for Colin's lawyer in Cork. There's lots of information to be garnered by transatlantic phone. I learned too that the name of his castle, Cearnóga Fichille, means the Chess Squares. The chatterbox who laughs with a brogue told me that it's because the castle is above Chess Square Valley where there are alternate fields of light flax and dark hops that look like a checkerboard. And every seven years they change them and grow the hops where the flax had been and the flax where the hops had been. The chatterbox and myself have become great friends. I asked her how much she weighed and she said fifteen stone. Fifteen stone translates into pounds as ‘fat’. The ideal world is one in which all the girls except myself are fat. Why didn't you tell me that you had a cousin with two million Irish pounds, a castle, and a terminal disease!”

“All three are recent acquisitions. Until a year ago he was only a poor relation in the castle of a rich uncle. And the name of the castle, Cearnóga Fichille or Chess Squares, is really a euphemism for Cearnóga Fuilteacha or Bloody Squares. Cearnóg is our family name ‘Kearny’; and it does mean a square, or squares.”

“How apt, beloved square! How opportune! Oh, things will go swimmingly!”

And things did go swimmingly, right up to the eve of the wedding, even though Bridie hadn't been able to get Cousin Colin to make a will during the week he had been in town.

“Oh, I couldn't will such a monstrous castle and the monstrous entailments that accompany it to two such nice people as you and Cris,” Cousin Colin always said. “No, no, you two have become much too dear to me for that.”

“The more monstrous the castle the better,” Bridie insisted. “It isn't any prosaic castle that I intend to inherit. Does it have a ghost?”

“Indeed it does, half-a-dozen ghosts, and the bones of some of them are still far below the castle on the rocky and forbidding shore. It's quite a fall that they take when they go through the floor in the Great Checkerboard Dining Hall of the Castle. It breaks almost every bone they have. And then the Sea Monster (he's carried on the Castle Rolls as the ‘Old Retainer of the Castle’) comes and strips all the flesh off of the new bones. The whole situation has given the Castle something of a bad name.”

“You're being droll, Cousin Colin,” Bridie said. “My own name, Bridie Caisleán, means both Brigid of the Castle or Bride of the Castle, and I insist that my name shall be fulfilled. See! I already have done all the work. I have the will drawn up here. All you have to do is sign it.”

“Some days I just don't believe in signing documents after noon.”

“But yesterday you said that some days you don't believe in signing documents before noon, and then I never could find you after noon.”

“Some days it's one way, Bridie, and some days it's the other way,” Cousin Colin said.

But it was Midas Muldoon who struck up an exceptionally close friendship with Colin Kearny during the week that Colin was in town before the wedding of Cris and Bridie. They played checkers together a lot. Midas said that he was champion of America. Colin said that he was champion of Ireland and of all Europe as well as the Straits Settlements and Madagascar and Patagonia. Colin had sought his fortune in the latter three places while he was in his late teens. They played very close, and a canny observer would have noticed that both of them were holding back a little bit.

Then, at Cris' bachelor party the night before the wedding, Midas and Colin tied one on together. It was quite sloppy, but here also an astute observer might have noticed that each was holding something back. They slashed their arms and mingled their blood and became blood brothers forever. It was that kind of bash. Then they began to play checkers for extravagant stakes, though each of them seemed to have trouble even seeing the board. They played for such high stakes as almost to preclude their being serious.

Finally, when the fiasco had run its course, Midas Muldoon had won the castle in Ireland as well as the two million Irish pounds from Colin. And Colin just happened to have deeds and assignment papers in his pockets, and he spread them out to sign everything over to Midas. Then Cris pulled Colin aside.

“Cousin Colin, I cannot allow this nonsense to go any further,” Cris said. “Do not sign anything. Not anything.”

“Don't spoil it, Cris,” Cousin Colin said in a low voice, and he was totally sober. “Don't spoil it now. Oh, I've conned this fellow into becoming blood brother of me, and he thinks he's conned me into it. I've conned him into taking deed to the castle and taking conveyance to the two million Irish pounds that are one of the entailments of the castle. And he never even suspects, Cris. Oh, I love myself when I pull a smart one like this. It gives me top pleasure to outsmart people.”

“However have you outsmarted Midas Muldoon, Cousin Colin! There's been a horrible mistake.”

“I love you, Cousin Cris, when you pretend not to understand a trick like this,” Cousin Colin chortled. “Oh wonderful, wonderful! Don't spoil it.”

So the mysterious business was consummated.

Bridie Caisleán came by Cris' place and woke him quite early the next morning. Cris was pleasantly befuddled from the Imperial Irish Brandy (a gift of Cousin Colin) that they had indulged in the night before, and he had a feeling that something had gone amiss. And he did not, for the barest moment there, quite catch the import of Bridie's chatter.

“There is no reason for Midas and I to be out expense when everything for a luxury wedding is already standing ready and is already paid for by you, Cris,” Bridie was saying. “I've always loved your habit of paying all extraordinary expenses immediately and on the spot. And Midas and I can use the same airplane tickets and hotel reservations (how nice that you paid them in advance) for our honeymoon just as well as you and I could have used them.”

“You and Midas Muldoon?” Cris asked.

“Well sure,” Bridie bubbled. “Midas won the castle and the two million Irish pounds from Cousin Colin (that's about five million American dollars, with a castle thrown in), so of course I'm marrying Midas instead of you this morning. There's a sort of poetic justice here too. This is the day I was supposed to marry Midas in the first place, before I was supposed to marry you, and now I'm supposed to marry him again. Isn't it nice that things always work out so nice for me!”

So this other not-too-mysterious business was consummated also. Midas Muldoon and Bridie Caisleán were married that morning. And Cristopher Kearny was left with an empty sort of feeling.

It was just one year later that Bridie Muldoon phoned Cris Kearny from Castle Cearnóga Fichille in Ireland.

“Come and visit us, Cris, and the sooner the better,” she said. “We are so happy here that we want to share our happiness with somebody, and as the best friend of both of us you are the logical choice. If you start sometime today you can be here sometime tomorrow.”

“That'd be a good slogan for a travel agency to use. What's your angle, girl of a thousand angles?”

“No angle, Cris. This is the new Bridie. I'm kind, I'm benevolent, unselfish, altruistic, and one other word that I forget. Where's your gambling instinct? Come and take a chance on a visit to us.”

“I never gamble, Bridie. I go only for sure things.”

“It's a sure thing that we want to see you, Cris. Do come.”

Cris left sometime that day and his plane was over Ireland sometime the next day. From the air he saw the checkerboard of light and almost white fields of flax and of dark and almost black fields of hops. He saw the castle (for they were already in their descent), and something twanged in his heartstrings like a harp tuned a little bit flat. It may have been the piles of whiteness on the stoney shore below the castle that gave him the queer flat feeling. And no more than twenty miles from the castle he was down at Cork International Airport.

He went first to the office of a lawyer in Cork. This was the lawyer of Cousin Colin, and he was also the lawyer of Cris Kearny now, for Irish affairs at least. The lawyer was not in, but the lawyer's assistant was full of news and good cheer and advice.

“Remember that you are in Ireland now,” said this assistant who was a merry and ample person who laughed with a brogue. “This place is full of draíocht.”

“Yes, draíocht, magic, especially the voices of the people,” Cris agreed.

“Moreover you are in County Cork. And here, especially in the castles and the crags, it is likely to be the draíocht dorcha.”

“Oh yes, dark magic or baleful magic. And what do you recommend to ward off this dark or baleful magic, lawyer assistant?”

“Chicken blood. I'll draw some for you from the cock in the yard before you leave. And be advised also that the terminal disease, called here only the ‘loathsome disease’, can be entailed along with the castle, like any other entailment, onto the new owner of the castle. If the entailment rite is not broken, then the new owner will have the fatal disease, and the old owner will have it no longer. And the new and entailed owner of the castle will die of the disease within two years. Medical science now confirms that this really happens.”

“I'm a great admirer of medical science myself. Is there a specific against the entailment of the loathsome disease? And how is Cousin Colin these days?”

“Chicken blood is the specific against the loathsome entailment, as it is against so many other things. I'll draw some for you from the cock in the yard before you leave. And your Cousin Colin is presently vacationing in foreign parts. Rio, I believe, is the name of the place. He had several recent fortunes that were not entailed, you know. He has willed them to you, but you may have to wait a hundred or more years to inherit them considering the exuberant and brawny health he has enjoyed for this last year. Remember too, Cristopher Kearny, that old precept: ‘Beware of the Overseas Irish bearing Castles’.”

“I thought it was: ‘Beware of Greeks bearing Gifts’.”

“Same thing. Look at an Overseas Irishman sideways and he could just as well be a Greek. You will be offered a castle, yes, and its double entailment, aye, and a thousand years free supply of bones on the shore below it into the bargain. When you accept the deed to the castle you will sign a very curious codicil to that deed.”

“How do you know that it is a curious codicil, lawyer's assistant?”

“Oh, I drew it up for them at the castle. This entailed gift will come about through the bloody swearing of the blood-brotherhood and through the checker-playing in big Checkerboard Hall. When you play those dire games of checkers you will lose if you lose, and you will only seem to win if you win. If you win you will lose by dying of the loathsome terminal disease within two years.”

“And again, lawyer's assistant, is there not a specific against this terrible misfortune of the checker games turning against me and gobbling me up?” What a pleasant and roomy person this lawyer's assistant was!

“Once again the specific against this luckless gaming is chicken blood. I'll draw some for you from the cock in the yard before you leave. And there is one square in Checkerboard Hall on which the Master of the Castle has himself placed when he is in his last agony from the loathsome disease. At the moment of his death, the square opens and dumps him on the rocks a thousand feet below: and a friendly Sea Monster comes and strips the flesh from the bones. It's a good arrangement. Persons dying of the loathsome disease may not be buried in Irish Ground lest they contaminate it. And they become so smelly when left unburied. Some of the bones are from old guests who were robbed and had their throats cut by old Castle Masters; and then, being placed on the dire square, they were likewise dumped at their death moment and had their bones stripped.”

“All Irish castles have mottos. What is the motto of this Castle Cearnóga Fichille, lawyer's assistant?”

“The motto of Castle Cearnóga Fichille is Cearnóg Agus Os Cionn mBord or ‘Square and Above Board’. And yet with a different intonation and a different viewpoint, that out of the eyes of a dead person on the stoney shore below the castle for instance, the motto could as well be Englished ‘Och, That Square in the Board Above!’ and this would be in the tone of a warning. And now you must be going if you're to be in time for supper at the castle. But first we'll gather the blood.”

Out in the yard, the lawyer's assistant drew a small sackful of blood from the cock. It stood still for the drawing, and then it crowed in a loud voice.

The lawyer's assistant drew a second sackful of blood from the cock. It stood still for the drawing, and then it crowed in a weak voice.

The lawyer's assistant drew a third sackful of blood from the cock. It stood still for the drawing, and then it crowed in a sad and broken voice and fell over dead.

“He'll be good for after-midnight supper tonight,” the lawyer's assistant said. “I love blooded rooster roasted on a spit. My mother will pluck it and draw it and roast it and have it ready. I'll drive you to the castle now. It's but twenty miles or thirty ciliméadar. Och, it's no trouble. I often drive that far in a single week.”

The lawyer's assistant got Cris to the castle at suppertime.

“How old are you, lawyer's assistant?” Cris Kearny asked.

“I'm twenty-two this springtime, and everyone else in the world is twenty-three,” she said. “How ideal! I'll be back for you about midnight. Your business at the castle should be consummated by then.”

Then she laughed, with a brogue.

Cristopher Kearny blew the burnished trumpet that was set into the front door of Castle Cearnóga Fichille or Chess Squares Castle, and at the same time he splatted one sack of the cock's blood on the same door as a specific against misfortune coming to him within.

Then Midas Muldoon flung the door open, and Bridie and Midas greeted him with great affection. Oh, they made big over him, and they showed him all around the wonderful Castle. He saw everything that could be seen by torchlight. Bridie even introduced him to three of the Castle Ghosts. These were quite urbane and pleasant entities and somewhat more at their ease than were Midas and Bridie Muldoon. The Muldoons seemed to have just a touch of the jitters.

And then it was no time at all till they were all sat down to a wonderful supper in the Great Checkerboard Dining Hall. There is something excessively black-and-whitish about the term ‘checkerboard’, but in the Dining Hall it was not so. The great squares (each the dimension of the First Master of the Castle and he had been a tall man) were royally colored. The white was really a sort of golden ivory, and the black was really midnight ocean-blue with touches of French Lilac and Royal Purple. And by the torchlight of the Dining Hall (Irish castles have electricity only in the bathrooms; it would be a vulgar intrusion anywhere else) the effect was enchanting.

The courses of that supper were like a litany of the great dishes of ‘Supper in Heaven’: Gamecock, Rampant Ram, Truculent Trout (each trout glared at one with angry and living eyes from the plate, but that could only have been the effect of the torchlight), Gored Ox, Young Foal of Horse: what great dishes they were on that supper table! There were seven sorts of brandy to go with the seven courses, and seven little piles of snuff were on the serviette at each place.

Seven brandies made each of them a little drunk and more than a little effusive. There came the moment when Midas Muldoon insisted that he and Cristopher should slash their forearms and mingle their blood and so become blood brothers.

Cris was thankful that it was night as he worked his bloody deception with the second sackful of blood. The outcome, of course, was that Midas Muldoon became blood-brother of a cock that was two-and-a-half hours dead. Had it been otherwise, the loathsome disease would have passed out of the blood of Midas and into that of Cris as part of the deeding-and-entailment rite.

And then the supper was cleared away, and a checkerboard and more brandy brought. And Midas suggested that they play checkers for moderately high stakes and for the championship of America and Ireland and all Europe as well as the Straits Settlements and Madagascar and Patagonia, which latter string of titles Midas had won from Colin Kearny just one year before. Cris agreed, but first (thankful again that they had naught but torchlight) he went to one of the squares of the great checkerboard floor (the lawyer's assistant had told him which one it would be) and dribbled a little blood from the third sack on it.

“Be careful of that one square, Cris honey,” Bridie warned. “It's — ah — a little precarious.”

Then Cris sprinkled the remainder of the third sack of blood on the checkerboard on which they were to play. “Oh, I'm sorry, Midas,” he said. “It is only some of our brothership blood that was still on my arm.”

“Wonderful, wonderful,” Midas Muldoon gloated. “ 'Twill make the rite all the more binding.”

They played, and Cris won. They played, and Cris continued to win. They played, and Cris won bigger and bigger bets. They played, and Cris won Castle Cearnóga Fichille itself from Midas Muldoon as well as two million Irish pounds in entailment with the castle and also ‘a more intimate entailment sealed in the blood of undying brotherhood’. The castle and attending kale consolidated all Midas' losses for the evening.

Bridie Muldoon had all the papers ready. Cris received the deed to the castle and the assignment of the two million pounds. And in turn he signed a codicil to each paper, to the deed, and to the assignment. The codicil to the deed said that Cris would not take possession of the castle until two years and one day had gone by; and in case of his untimely death before that time, ownership of the castle would revert to the Muldoons. The codicil to the assignment of the two million pounds said that the money would be held in escrow by a legal firm in Cork for two years and one day, after which it would be paid to Cris Kearny; but in case of the untimely death of Mr. Kearny before that time, the money would be returned to the Muldoons.

“It's all pro forma stuff, honey,” Bridie said. “You don't even need to read it if you don't want to. Just sign it.”

“Fine, fine,” Cris laughed as he signed the codicils. “All Square and Above Board.”

“How odd that you should use that phrase,” Midas commented. “You could not have known it, but that is the motto of this Castle Cearnóga Fichille which you now own tentatively.”

“Haven't you grown skinnier since your marriage, Bridie?” Cris asked.

“Not at all. I've gained two stone since I've been married. That's twenty-eight pounds. Subconsciously I did it for you. I remember you used to say that I was perfect but that I would be even more perfect if I were a bit more ample. And now I am that.”

“Somehow you seem skinnier, Bridie,” Cris said.

Daydreams of amplitude. Rather, waking torchlight night dreams of amplitude. The beauties of spaciousness. Why was Cris musing on such things?

At midnight the trumpet that was inset in the front door blew the angriest tune that ever was heard, like a signature tune of somebody.

“That is a friend who is taking me back to Cork tonight,” Cris said. “I'll look in on you at the castle again tomorrow perhaps.”

“Wonderful!” Midas shouted. “It's been wonderful to see you again, Cris.”

And after Cris had left, Midas shouted still more loudly: “Wonderful, wonderful! Now I have transmitted the fatal loathsome disease to Cris through the brotherhood rite and the entailment rite. And I am free of the sickness, and he will die of it before two years have gone by. And the castle and the funds will revert to us. Nothing can go wrong, nothing.”

“Nothing can go wrong for me at least,” Bridie shouted inwardly to herself. “Even if this trick doesn't work, it will work for me. Even if the disease somehow was not transmitted, even if Midas dies of it instead of Cris, I can always marry Cris. He loves me eternally, and nobody else can ever take my place with him. Maybe it will be even better for me if this doesn't work. Then I will have all the fortunes of both Midas and Cris. Isn't it nice that things always turn out so nice for me!”

But Bridie was wrong about nobody ever being able to take her place. And she'd be furious when she found out who it was. Bridie had the beauty, yes, but beauty wasn't everything.

There were such things as amplitude, as Cris realized when he got into the car with the lawyer's assistant at midnight and had an ample kiss from her. There were such things as spaciousness, and merriment. There were even such things as that business of laughing with a brogue.

Oh, Bridie was beautiful, but Sharon (Sharon McSorley was the name of the lawyer's assistant) would make two of her with a bit left over. And you can't have too much of a good thing.

They plighted their troth over an after-midnight supper of rooster hot from the spit, and Spanish sherry.

“When we move into the castle, in two years and a day, I'm going to make only one change,” said full-bodied Sharon. “I'm going to fix that tricky square in Checkerboard Dining Hall so that nobody will ever exit that way again. I've already told the Sea Monster. He says that he can get by on bodies as seldom as one every seven years, but I've told him that there'll be no more at all. He thinks that he may get another appointment at a castle that overhangs Dingle Bay in Kerry County. Sea-rumor says that there's a good fall of bodies from that castle.

“I've told the Castle Ghosts that they may remain after we move in. They are pleased entirely with the arrangement. They say that it's always been the case that when the Castle has an ample mistress there will be merry times in the old place.”

You Can't Go Back

A note, a musty smell, a tune,

Some bones and pebbles from the moon!

Today they set a-flow a spring,

Remembering, remembering.

 — The Helen Horn-Book

One evening in the Latter Days, Helen brought over some bones and rocks that belonged to her late husband John Palmer. She brought the Moon Whistle too. And she left those things with us.

Helen had married again, and to a man who hadn't known John. And she left all those things with us. And she thought that she'd better get some of those funny old things out of her house.

“The Moon Whistle will be no good without you to blow it, Helen,” Hector O'Day said. She blew it then, very loudly, with her too-big mouth; and there was laughing lightning in her eyes, still undiminished. Then she was away and down the stairs and out of the building with that rush of hers that was a sort of breakneck tumble.

And she left behind her a tumble of memories of the times when we decades before this had gone to White Cow Town four times. It had never been crowded in White Cow Town when we were there. It wasn't a place you stumbled over, not unless you were a pretty high stepper.

In Osage County there were some pretty small towns: Bigheart, Hulah, Okeas, Wild Horse, Shidler, White Eagle, Horseshoe, Kaw City, Hog Shooter, Rock Salt, Bluestem, each of these towns being smaller than its fellows. But smaller than any of them was White Cow Town. There just weren't many people there, and those that were there were pretty narrow. There was a saying “There are no fat people in White Cow Town.”

(An informant has just told me that Hog Shooter isn't in Osage County, that it's over the line in Washington County. Not in memory it isn't! The informant must be wrong.)

In these latter days it was Barry Shibbeen, Grover Whelk, Caesar Ducato, Hector O'Day and myself who were together in our cardplaying and discussion den when Helen had brought those mementos over.

But back in the old days John Palmer had been with us, and Helen had been there too for the events at White Cow Town, and some of the Bluestems.

That first time, we had ridden up to Bluestem Ranch Number One with Tom Bluestem and his mother in her Buick sedan. The Number One was the oldest of the Bluestem Ranches and was run by Tom's grandparents. They were wonderful people and they said that the place was ours.

The Moon Whistle was hanging on the wall in the ranch-house, and Helen who was a horn-blower and whistle-blower asked if she could blow it.

“Oh, we'll give it to you,” Tom's grandmother said, and she handed it to Helen. And Helen blew it loudly.

“Don't blow that damned thing in here!” Grandfather Bluestem shouted. “Take it down to Lost Moon Canyon if you want to blow it. We'll have White Cow Rock breaking in our roof here if it hears it. Oh, that damned whistle!”

This was a surprising outburst, for Grandfather Bluestem was always a friendly and soft-spoken man.

Well, that Moon Whistle did have an eerie and shrill and demanding tone, even a little bit insulting. It was a ‘call’, and somebody had better answer it.

“I don't know where Lost Moon Canyon is,” Helen said.

“Oh, I'll take you all over there,” Grandmother Bluestem told us. Barry, Grover, Caesar, Hector, John, Helen, myself, and Tom Bluestem, we all got in the ranch truck and Grandmother Bluestem drove us to Lost Moon Canyon. We were all nine years old except John Palmer who had recently had his tenth birthday, and Grandmother Bluestem who said that she was either fifty or a hundred years, she forgot which, she was weak at numbers.

Lost Moon Canyon, through which ran Hominy Creek, was the roughest place on the Bluestem Ranches. There were large and dangerous-looking overhanging rocks, unnaturally large for a canyon no bigger than that, absolutely threatening in their extreme overhang. There was the feeling that one of them was about to fall right down. Then the biggest of those rocks moved, and we howled in near fear.

“Oh, that's only White Cow Rock,” Grandmother Bluestem. “It's different from the other rocks. It's a moon. And it won't fall. It moves slowly. Blow the Moon Whistle, Helen, and it'll come on down.”

Helen blew the Moon Whistle (oh, that damned shrill whistle!), and White Cow Rock descended a hundred feet, with a slow and wobbling motion, and hung right over the ranch truck. There was an upside-down goat standing on the bottom of the big rock, but it didn't seem as if it were going to fall off. There were also some ducks walking upside-down on the bottom of White Cow Rock.

“Let's go up,” Tom Bluestem said. “There's a shaft or channel right here in the middle of it, and you can climb through it all the way to the top. You can if you're not afraid. It's scary, but that's all.”

“I'm not afraid of anything,” Caesar said, “but some things make me kind of nervous. I don't know when anything's made me as nervous as that big, bobbling rock does.”

From the top of the cab of the truck we could get to the bottom of the shaft in the rock. Tom Bluestem climbed up that shaft followed by John Palmer, Barry Shibbeen, Grover Whelk, Caesar Ducato, Hector O'Day, myself, and Helen.

“Aren't you coming up too, Grandmother Bluestem?” Helen asked.

“No, I can't,” that lady said. “Since I've gotten older I can't do it. There are no fat people on White Cow Rock or in White Cow Town.”

As we climbed up the shaft we could see why there were no fat people on top of that rock. That shaft got pretty narrow in some places. It was tricky climbing up it, but not as dangerous as it might seem. There was no place so wide that we couldn't put one hand on each side of the shaft, and there were no smooth or slippery places in it. But it was a very high and long climb and it was pretty dark in there. We had climbed about fifty yards when we came to a short tunnel leading into a little cave.

“We can crawl in here and rest for a little while,” Caesar said.

“No, we can't either,” Tom Bluestem contradicted. “There's some real mean and peculiar people who live in that nook, and the gnawed bones on the floor of their cave are real weird. Some of them are bones of kids about our age. Let's keep climbing.”

“What lives in that cave are gnomes and trolls,” Helen said.

“How'd you know?” Barry asked her. “You've never been up here before.”

“Every moon everywhere has a family of gnomes or trolls or whatever their local name is living in the exact center of it,” Helen said. “And all the caves have real weird bones in them, dire wolf bones, wooly rhinoceros bones, human bones, things like that.”

There was a sharp, strong odor there. It was the most characteristic smell on the whole of White Cow Moon. We climbed the rest of the way to the top. And then we were in the middle of White Cow Town and in the brightest and friendliest sunshine ever anywhere.

White Cow Rock was a rough, rock-and-clay sphere about a hundred yards in diameter. White Cow Town on the top of the rock had thirteen houses and one store in it. Nine of the houses had outhouses behind them; but the outhouses that had been behind the other four houses had fallen off that rock or moon in times gone by. Of necessity, for there wasn't much level space on White Cow Rock, those outhouses had been built quite a ways down the slope, and sometimes the whole rock wobbled. It had never been very safe to use any of those outhouses of the rears of those lots in White Cow Town.

“I tell you though,” said an elderly citizen of the town, “there comes times, at least once a day, when it's not very safe not to use them either.”

Listen, it was plain magic up on top of that rock or moon. There were never such bright colors or such nourishing air anywhere. The rock was free-floating. It had now drifted about five hundred feet higher in the air and about half a mile to the North. It gave us a good view of both Lost Moon Canyon and the Bluestem Ranch House far below, and you could even see the towers of Pawhuska off in the misty distance north-east. This was much more magical than being up in a balloon even.

All of us had been up in a balloon once, at the Barton's Show Grounds in T-Town. But that balloon was held up by three cables worked by winches, and it rose only about seventy-five feet up in the air. This moon had it beat by a sky mile.

All those houses up on the moon were old-looking and unpainted, but they had a sharpness of outline and a liveliness of detail that isn't to be found in the houses down on Earth. This was like being in really bright daylight for the first time in our lives.

The only animals that the people up on White Cow had were chickens and ducks and goats. The saying about the place should have been amended to say “There are no fat people nor no big animals on White Cow either.” The goats were native to that moon, a man said, and so were the chickens. The ducks had come there about five hundred years before this, and the people had come about a thousand years ago. But big animals wouldn't have been able to go up that shaft.

The delight and magic of White Cow was just the ‘living in the sky’ that was the condition there. There was an immediacy, a wininess, a happiness, an exhilaration, a music, a delight about ‘living in the sky’.

Four of the men on White Cow worked for the Bluestem Ranches down below, mowing and baling hay, mending fences, moving cattle from one pasture to another, doing whatever workers do on a ranch. One of the women taught at the consolidated school that was between Bluestem and Gray Horse. And nine of the children of White Cow went to that same country school down on Earth. One of the men up there had a still and made moonshine.

“You show me a law that says you can't make moonshine on a moon,” he used to challenge people. His still gave a sour-mash smell to the whole moon, but it wasn't the strongest or sharpest smell that they had.

“How can the goats and the ducks walk straight out or even upside down on this rock?” Hector O'Day puzzled to us. “They walk on every part of this sphere.”

“It's all a question of gravity,” John Palmer said. “A weak gravity will hold little things but not big things. It'll hold goats or ducks on a moon maybe, but it might not hold the people on. One of you lighter kids try walking around this moon to the bottom and up again if you want to. If you don't fall off, then the heavier of us will try it.”

“The mathematics of the gravity here is really rum,” Barry Shibbeen cut in, but he had that crooked grin on his funny-looking face that meant that he couldn't be trusted. “Recall Foxley's Formula Five, and you'll understand the gravity a little bit better. Think about Edwardson's Elliptical Equation. Remember Mumford's Monotreme!”

“That sounds like a good battle-cry slogan, ‘Remember Mumford's Monotreme!’ ” Grover Whelk giggled. “I wonder what it means.”

“I know what Foxley's Formula Five means,” Helen contributed, “and it doesn't have anything to do with gravitation. It's for women's sickness and it comes in blue bottles. Mama takes it sometimes.”

There was one ‘wanted’ man who lived in White Cow Town, and the sheriff wouldn't go up there to get him.

“The sheriff is afraid of me,” the man said.

“I'm not afraid of any man on Earth,” the sheriff answered when that was reported to him, “and I'll go anywhere on Earth to get a man. But White Cow Town isn't on Earth. I'm not afraid of that man. I'm just spooked of those off-Earth places.”

In the general store they had a little radio, homemade, and superior to anything that might be bought. It would get station KVOO fifty miles away in Bristow. It would get it clear and loud whenever White Cow Moon went up more than five hundred feet in the air.

They had Nehi pop in that store, but it cost six cents a bottle instead of a nickel.

“That's because of the transportation,” the lady said. “We have to get a penny more for it up here than they get for it down on Earth.”

The kids in White Cow Town had a rope and they were playing tug-of-war, but they were playing it like a bunch of sissies. They didn't show us much pull at all.

“Look,” Barry Shibbeen told them, “there are eight of us and nine of you, and I bet we can out-pull you all over the place.”

“No, there are just seven of you, Barry,” Tom Bluestem said. “Count me out of it.” That was odd. Tom had always been very competitive in all games and sports. Well, there were seven of us then, and there were nine of the White Cow kids, and some of them were quite a bit bigger than we were. And we still pulled them all over the place. We pulled them all over the place until — 

Well, we pulled them until, if they had let go of that rope, we would have fallen clear off of White Cow Moon. We were that far down on the slope of the sphere.

“Help, Tom, what'll we do?” we called to our friend, our friend who had been acting a little bit funny and not joining in the game.

“When you play tug-of-war up here, the name of the game isn't checkers,” Tom said. “The name of the game is ‘give-away’.”

“Don't let them give us away,” we wailed.

The kids finally dug in and held the rope fast, with the aid of a loop around ‘Last Chance Tree’. We climbed up the rope to safety then. But those moon kids sure laughed and hooted at us a lot after that. We had been beaten about as bad as anybody can be beaten at any game; and we were the smart kids and they were just a bunch of sky bumpkins.

Helen said she was going to stay on that moon forever since they had plenty of the two things she loved the most, duck eggs and goat milk.

“You'll want to go back home and get your cornet,” John Palmer told her. “And you can always come back here.”

“That's right. I can always come back here,” Helen said.

We were adopted by several nations of birds. They gathered on White Cow Moon like clouds, black clouds of crows and blackbirds, gray clouds of doves, brown-and-yellow clouds of larks. There were congregations of cat-birds up there, and of night hawks, even of king birds and mocking birds, and of hawks and eagles. Most of these birds had a contempt for the people of Earth, but they were friendly and genial to the people on the moon.

And there were other things up there that were not quite birds. We didn't know what to call them, but they were things of a different wing. And the bones in their nests were as strange and varied as those in the trolls' cave.

Seedling clouds nested on White Cow Moon, and some of them glittered like jewels from all the sparkling water in them. When they wanted to start a shower down below one of them would say ‘now’, another one would say ‘now’, and a third one would say ‘now’. Then they would zoom down and start a shower and spill all over place.

From a hundred feet down in the shaft you could see the stars in the daytime sky.

And this moon was the place where the ‘mysterious night lights’ nested in the daytime. Almost every rural neighborhood in Osage County has had its own special ghost light for at least a century. These things draw notice, and they scare people. Sometimes they are written up in the newspapers, and there is no explanation of them. But, as to where they come from, they come from White Cow Moon. ‘Mysterious Night Lights’ look funny in the daytime though. You'd hardly recognize them as lights when you see them nesting and confabbing together in the sunlight.

And there were the millions of wonderful jumping fleas on White Cow Moon. Fleas can always jump a little bit further on a moon than they can on Earth. It's a question of gravity.

We played up there till almost dark, and it was one of the finest days of our entire lives. Then we heard Grandmother Bluestem honking the horn of the ranch truck far below and to the south of us. From the top of White Cow Moon when it's high in the sky you can hear a long ways.

Helen blew ‘Go down, go down!’ on the Moon Whistle. She could really blow that thing! And White Cow Moon settled down over Lost Moon Canyon again. We climbed down through the shaft once more (it was a pretty dark and spooky go of it there), and we finally dropped out of it and onto the top of the cab of the truck. Then we all went back to the Bluestem ranch house.

“But what is it really?” Hector O'Day asked them when we were back in the ranch house and eating a ranch house supper. “Really, I mean.”

That Heck! What did he mean by ‘really’? We had been up into reality, up into blue-sky reality almost all day long. Why the grubby question?

“Oh, it's just one of the Earth's moons,” Grandfather Bluestem said.

“How, how?” Hector asked like a gooney. “What one of the Earth's moons?”

“I don't have the comparative measures of masses,” Grandfather Bluestem smiled, “but I'd say that it was the smaller of the Earth's two moons.”

“But where did it come from?” Hector still asked.

“Oh, it used to hang out up in Missouri, about a hundred miles southwest of St. Louis,” Grandfather Bluestem said. “Then, when some of the Osage Indians came down here from Missouri in 1802, that moon just followed along after them and came down here too. It had always got along with the Osage people, but it didn't like most people at all.”

Grandfather Bluestem was a full-blooded Osage, of course.

That hardly touched it. Life on a moon has so many things that just aren't to be found on Earth at all. It has a special magic. Oh, there are plenty of magics on Earth, but moon-magic is in a different category completely. Every group of kids should have a moon of their own.

But there were other activities and delights. There was an endless tumble of delights for us in those years. In such cases, it is good to keep one particular treasure-house-full of delights in reserve. So we went back to White Cow Moon a few more times in that wonderful old decade.

We went once the summer we were ten years old; once the summer we were eleven; and once when we were twelve years old (we stayed up there three days that time).

It was on that last and longest visit that John Palmer and Barry Shibbeen were able to fill up a gunny sack with stones and bones from the cave of the gnomes or trolls who lived right at the center of that moon.

Barry made a chloroform bomb and he tossed it into that cave and knocked all those strange things out. And John Palmer had made gas masks for himself and Barry. So they put them on and crawled in and loaded up the sack. A study of those stones and bones was to raise questions that aren't all answered yet.

But, though it was the most magical place on the world, or just off the world, we didn't get back there in those early years, after that long special visit when we were all twelve years old. There were just too many other things to do. We nearly forgot it, the pervading magic of the place, and the strong sharp odor. But it was a buried treasure that the pack of us owned henceforth, a treasure buried a little ways up in the sky.

2

In skies unhigh it still is set.

It's as it's always been… And yet

There's thinnish magic that does cling,

Diminishing, diminishing.

 — Barry's Shibbeens

And then into these latter days again, where we have all been adults for many aeons.

“Who faked them, who faked them? And how did they do it?” Hector O'Day asked on that latter day evening when Helen had brought the bones and stones and the Moon Whistle over to us. Many years had gone by since we had last gone up onto White Cow Moon.

“It had to be you and John Palmer, Barry,” Hector said. “Both of you were smart as well as book-learned, but how did you fake the bones and stones from that rock, from that rock that you conned us into thinking was a moon?”

“I didn't fake them, and I don't believe that John did,” Barry said. “Well yes, they were an odd lot of things. The gnawed bones that we took from that cave were those of human children, of bear cubs, of crested eagles, and of certain extinct dog-sized rhinos. They were just the sort of bones, Heck, that you are likely to find in any trolls' cave on any moon. And the fossil stones, they are somewhat stranger. They record a life on that little moon that was quite different and somewhat older than anything on Earth.”

“Exquisite fakeries, that's what some of the savants have called the things, Barry. But they haven't been able to explain how the fakeries were done. Why have they not, exquisite faker, Barry?”

“Because they're not fakes. At least I don't think that they are.”

“Just what is the ‘core of facts’ in the whole business?” Caesar Ducato asked the bunch of us. “Just what was the thing that we psyched our young selves into believing was a moon? Well, I guess that there was a large and nearly spherical rock in the Lost Moon Canyon area of the Bluestem Ranches. And it did have a fissure in it by which we climbed up onto the top of the rock. And it did have a dangerous wobble to it, or at least some kind of motion. And so we were hypnotized into believing that it was a little moon hanging in low sky. We believed that easily when we were nine years old. What puzzles me is that we still believed it when we were twelve years old and were capable of conceptual thinking. What hypnotism!”

“Who could have hypnotized us and turned our wits moony?” Barry asked. “Several of us were types almost impossible to hypnotize. Who could have conned us into believing that it was a moon, if it wasn't? But it was.”

“Helen could have hypnotized us into it, Barry. John Palmer could have done it. You could have done it a little bit yourself. The three of you together could certainly have done it — ”

“What, what, what? Did you just say ‘But it was’, Barry? But it wasn't, man. It couldn't have been.”

“It could have been, yes,” Barry Shibbeen maintained. “The best argument that it was is that it still is. I fly over it sometimes in my helicopter. And I still fly under it sometimes, which is more to the proof. How about all of you flying there with me in the copter in the morning and landing on the little moon? Will that be proof that it's still there, Hector?”

“Man, it can't be! It's physically and psychologically impossible. None of us has even thought that he saw it since we were twelve years old.”

“Wrong, Hector. Tom Bluestem and Julia Flaxfield spent their honeymoon on White Cow Moon ten years after that.”

“But they're both Indian. And they hadn't really grown up then, however old they were. They were high on each other then, and it would have seemed to them that they were on a moon wherever they were. Dammit, Barry, there is just no way that a thinking person can accept that there's a little moon there.”

“Oh, Caesar, and you too, Hector O'Day, I say that if you can accept the Earth's regular or big moon, it's a million times as easy to accept that little moon in the low sky in Osage County. Do you fellows accept the regular or big moon of the Earth? That so-called moon is an anomaly and the father of anomalies. It's irrational and it's impossible. The only reason we have for believing in its existence is that we've seen it, and that several persons have attested to have been on it. And there is plenty of instrumental evidence for it. But we have better reason to believe in the existence of the little moon. We have seen it at much closer range. Several persons that we know much better (ourselves) have been on it. We have even traversed its dark inner tract. And if electronic waves have been bounced off the larger moon, we have bounced baseballs off the smaller moon. And baseballs are more tangible. Yes, that little moon is real.”

“In its psychological involvement with our childhoods it was real, I suppose,” Grover Whelk said, “but it wasn't real in any other sense. I'm not sure whether its psychological effect on us was good or bad.”

“Somebody should be smart enough to settle this matter,” Hector said, “especially to settle your pig-headedness in still believing in it, Barry.”

“Oh, I'm smart enough to settle it,” Barry proposed. “I've already offered the way to do it, and I offer it again. Let's all get into my copter in the morning and go find that little moon. We'll fly under it and we'll fly over it and we'll land upon it. If we can do these things, then it's real. If we can't do them, then it isn't real. Let's all be ready to take off at a reasonable time of eight-thirty in the morning. Agreed, Cease, Grove, Heck, Al?”

“Agreed,” we all said. And that is where we made our mistake.

We called Helen the next morning, but she said that she didn't want to go. “It'd spoil it for me,” she said. But her daughter Catherine Palmer (“the child of my old age,” Helen always called Catherine) told her mother that she wanted to go, and Helen conveyed the message over the phone. “It will be all right with Catherine,” Helen said. “She was born an adult, so it won't do her any harm to know that the moon is a crumby place. But I'm eternally a child and it would shatter me. ‘You can't go back’, you know.”

So Catherine Palmer, a seventeen-year-old mature adult and a major in psychological anthropology came with us. She was a cheerful kid.

“Oh yeah, I've been up on the little moon before,” she said. “I went up there with some of the Bluestem kids the summer before last, but it didn't do much for me. I hadn't yet become psychologically oriented the summer before last. Now I'll have to discover why that little moon did something for you old fogies, and why some of you think about it and mumble ‘magic!’ ”

If Catherine hadn't been so pretty and so seventeenish, she couldn't have gotten away with that psychological patter.

We took off from the Jenks airport which is closer to T-Town than the T-Town airport is. It also has better facilities for stabling private planes and copters, not being obsessed with all those scheduled commercial flights. It was no more than thirty miles to our destination. Oh, it is pleasant to rattle in a copter over the Green Country on a fine morning in late spring!

“Catherine, I want you to realize that White Cow Moon is a magic place,” Barry almost sang. “I don't believe that young people have nearly enough magic in their lives now-a-years. Drink deep of it when we get there, Cat.”

“All right.”

“Catherine, yes, it was enchanting,” Hector O'Day said. “I only wish that it was real, that it had been real, that it could be real again. I wish that you could experience the enchantment of it, but I don't even know how we were able to experience it once. We'd like to offer it to you, but I'm afraid that we don't have it to offer.”

“Thanks anyhow,” young Catherine said.

“Ah, it was wonder, it was sortilège, it was delight,” Caesar Ducato murmured. “It was a special place. It was the elegance and the charm. And at the same time it was tall magic with all the hair on it. It was the ‘world of our own’, the ‘moon of our own’. It was the place that only the secret masters knew about. So we belonged to the secret masters. It's a pity that the little moon didn't exist except in our imaginations.”

“Mr. Ducato, your wattles wobble when you get intense about something,” Catherine said.

“It was the thirst and the slaking at the same time,” Grover Whelk declaimed. “It was the ‘promise fulfilled’. It's too bad that it never was. But even thinking that we remember it is wonderful.”

“Why not let it stand on its own two abscissae?” Catherine said. She sounded like her mother Helen when she made cracks like that.

“See, it isn't there!” Hector O'Day cried out, half sad, half gloating, when we had come to the region.

“See, it is there!” Barry Shibbeen countered. “It's there, with its little bit different color green, snuggled down almost to Earth over Lost Moon Canyon, nearly invisible among other rocks almost as big and almost the same color. Blow the Moon Whistle, Catherine. Blow the ‘Rise up, rise up!’ sequence and let's get it up into the sky a ways.”

Catherine Palmer blew the Moon Whistle. She had almost as big a mouth as her mother Helen had, and she had an equal talent for blowing all horns and whistles. She blew the sequence, and White Cow Moon wobbled a few hundred feet up into the sky.

“It isn't as big as it used to be,” Grover Whelk said sadly.

“Yes it is, Grove,” Caesar said with sudden animation. “And it does have that peculiar green color in its topping boscage. It has it yet. I don't quite know the name of that color of green.”

“Bilious green, sour bilious green,” young Catherine said. She was right of course. White Cow Moon had risen about five hundred feet into the air. Barry Shibbeen flew the copter under several times, and then he hovered it at standstill under it so we could look up through the old fissure that ran through it from top to bottom. Yes, it sure did look as though White Cow Moon was real and present.

“Well, are you fellows convinced that it's real?” Barry jibed.

“Not entirely convinced,” Hector O'Day mumbled thoughtfully. “You have to admit, Barry, that it doesn't look very convincing.”

“No, it doesn't,” Barry admitted. “I wonder why it doesn't. But it is as big as it used to be. It's still about a hundred yards in diameter.”

“Yes, but the yards aren't as long as they used to be,” Whelk complained.

We climbed around and above White Cow Moon. Then we landed in the middle of the top of it. Yes, that strong and sharp odor was still as permeating a presence on White Cow Moon as it had been when we were children. We hadn't realized that it was an unpleasant odor, but we realized it now.

“It smells like a badly-kept zoo,” Catherine said. “I think it's the smell of the Greater Yeti or Stinking Yeti. I'll interview him in the interests of science.”

There were only four houses left on White Cow Moon, and only one outhouse.

“When the last outhouse falls off White Cow Moon, I just don't know what will happen to us,” an old citizen said. “Extinction, I guess. People without outhouses just would not be people any longer.”

“I discern the true and unmemorable quality of White Cow Moon now,” Barry Shibbeen said, “but I just can't set my tongue to the name of it.”

“ ‘Dingy’ is the word for it,” Catherine said. She was right, of course. I felt a sort of constriction in my throat and chest, and I believe that the rest of them felt it too.

“This moon is full of swamp gas or worse,” Caesar said. “Is Magic itself made of nothing better than swamp gas?”

Catherine took the drinking gourd that was hanging on the town pump and milked it full from one of the she-goats there. The goats all had the mange. The chickens had the mange. Even the ducks on White Cow Moon had the mange now.

“Mother and I both drink a lot of goat milk for our health,” Catherine said. “Oh, it's sour!”

“Maybe it's the gourd that's sour and gives a sour taste to the milk,” Barry said hopefully.

“Nah, it's the goat herself who's sour and gives a sour taste to the milk,” Catherine said. “I suppose that the Greater Yeti or Stinking Yeti lives down in that hole that runs through this moon. I'd better go see.” And Catherine Palmer disappeared down the shaft that ran clear through White Cow Moon.

“Well, how does it go on this moon?” Barry asked one of the citizens.

“Badly,” that person said. “The main thing wrong is our shrinking population. There's only seven people left. A century ago there were a hundred of us here.”

“What's the next main thing wrong here?” Grover Whelk asked.

“The corruption,” the citizen said. “The trolls or yeti in the middle of our moon have corrupted our children, both of them. They've taught them immorality and disobedience and smart talk. It's those befuddling mushrooms that they grow down there and give our kids to eat that do the damage. Yeah, there goes the future of White Cow Moon blown, completely blown. And the third main thing wrong on this moon is the fleas.”

Fleas! Yes, there were lots of fleas on that moon, and they got all over you and set you to scratching. Well, there had always been lots of fleas there, but they hadn't seemed so demeaning in the old days.

“If you have trolls or yetis, you're going to have fleas,” a citizen said. “There's no way you can miss it.”

Catherine came up out of the shaft then, and a Yeti followed her out. He was eight feet tall, shaggy, quite stringy and spare (there were no fat Yetis on White Cow Moon), and smelly. He was roughly thirty-three and one-third percent of the strong, sharp odor of that moon.

“He's a genuine Homo Yeti Putens or Stinking Yeti,” Catherine said, “and there's two more of them, another gentleman one, and a lady one. Even in the interest of science there's nothing to be got from the Yetis. Nothing, nothing. This one is the least interesting creature I ever saw. I guess he's harmless though.”

“I'm not so sure of that,” Hector O'Day growled. “How about all those gnawed bones down in your hole, tall fellow? Some of them were bones of human children.”

“If more people gnawed more bones they'd have better teeth,” the Yeti said.

“Ugh, platitudes yet!” Catherine shuddered. And we all felt a bit glum.

“How our great memories have shrunken!” Caesar Ducato lamented.

“It is and it isn't,” Hector said cryptically. “The moon, I mean. And the way it is, it wouldn't matter much if it was.”

“Not only has the magic gone out of it, but nothing else has taken its place,” Barry Shibbeen mourned. “What's the word for this place? Oh yes, ‘dingy’. I could cry.”

“If you cry a tear down into the fissure, it will fall all the way through, and if a sky person should look down and see it through the hole it'd look like a star in the daytime,” Catherine said with sudden poetic insight.

Young Catherine Palmer blew ‘Retreat’ on the Moon Whistle. We all got into the copter and rattled away from there.

“You can't go back,” the proverb says.

And it's a good thing you can't.

Calamities Of The Last Pauper

This account is for those who were too young or too unborn to have seen the denouement of ‘The Death of the Last Pauper’ live (the death was live) on the Greenbaum-Brannagan Late Late Speak Your Mind Show. And ninety-six percent of today's population are too young to have seen it.

It blew all the feathers off the goose

This is the day that the storms broke loose.

 — Weatherman Jones

John Bochtan was the last poor person in the world. Careful accounts of the paupered people had been kept as they vanished everywhere, and now Bochtan was the last of them anywhere. All the more progressive realms had already gotten rid of the last of their poor people, by floating them out of their poverty by massive donations, by reclassifying them out of their poverty by simple judicial hearings, or by sterner methods.

In England, two years before this, four-and-twenty unrepentant paupers had been hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn. Ah, it was good to have something authentic going on at Tyburn again. These executions so frightened the remaining three English paupers that they allowed themselves to be reclassified that very day and in so doing they received substantial estates. Now this John Bochtan in the United States was the last poor person left anywhere in the world.

The overall cost of ‘Poordom USA’ had shrunk to a fraction of its former imposing self, but it still stood above twelve billion dollars a year. That's too much for just one poor person. And the idea and the personality of this last pauper became unpopular. John Bochtan had a personality that had made him unpopular even when there were numerous paupers. Bochtan was what used to be called a wise guy (they don't have them any more), what used to be called a ‘show boat’ (they don't have them any more either). In addition to being the last poor person in the world he may have been the last wise guy and the last show boat also. And these types simply could not be allowed to exist in a modern society. John had the use of plenty of money and property, including a yacht with crew, but he refused to take title to these things. He swore that they would reclassify him out of his poverty only over his dead body.

He couldn't be dealt with privately because he had become a public person. He even had (it's sad to say it) a multitude of partisans. John Bochtan had become a big person on the ‘Greenbaum-Brannagan Late Late Speak Your Mind Show’, and the GBLLSYMS was one of the most powerful institutions in the world.

The ‘Greenbaum-Brannagan Late Late Speak Your Mind Show’ had become a sort of center for world information and opinion. It was mainly to catch GBLLSYMS and similar shows that most of the sets in the world were now ‘Pentacostally-equipped’ (each person could hear the programs in his own language). But of these shows it was only the forerunning GBLLSYMS that had the ‘numinous valves’ on their switchboards. By reason of these, all numinous persons (plapper-angels, demiurges, elementals, principalities, specially-impressed mortals, and God himself) would automatically have preference given to their calls to the programs.

The demiurges especially were big hits on the GBLLSYMS. Their existence had not even been suspected very shortly before this. They were preternatural but certainly not supernatural creatures. They were goofy, like kids who had never grown up; but it seemed a little odd to speak of never-grown-up kids when referring to these mountain-tall beings. As to the ‘invisibility’ of the demiurges until very recent months, that may all have been a mistake. Many persons now believed that they had used to see the demiurges out of the corners of their eyes but had not paid much attention to them. Those mountain-tall and smoke-thin guys were really too big to notice.

Like Weatherman Jones and other persons, certain of the demiurges had now proclaimed themselves very nervous about the threatening disappearance of the poor. “We are the ones who make the winds to blow and the ice to freeze,” they said, “but we do only what we are ordered to do. We will do what we are imprinted to do, but it may be calamitous. It would be better that the world would keep at least one poor person, even if only for a token, than that it should suffer the calamities.” This is what several of them called in to the GBLLSYMS studio one night.

“It would not be better that the world should keep one poor person, even for a token, not when that one poor person is John Bochtan!” Pasqual Ratrunner immediately called in his contradiction to the program. “I do not believe that these dire calamities will happen if this last poor person is destroyed either in body or in classification. Let us get rid of the calamity we now have (this last wise guy, this last show boat, this affront to all that is regularized in the world, this John Bochtan), and let all rumored future calamities fall where they may.” This Pasqual Ratrunner had been appointed ‘Czar For the Final Extirpation of Poverty’, and he and John Bochtan did not get along well.

Rattle his bones over the stones;

He's only a pauper whom nobody owns.

 — Thomas Noel

And echo to this old Noel verse was given by one of the demiurges calling in to the program:

“Were paupers' bones unrattled,

And Paupers' Truce be broke,

The Sea would be unsaddled,

And mountains reek and smoke.”

Well, what was the ‘Paupers' Truce’ that had been imposed upon the world? This truce, and the penalty that the world would suffer if it were broken, was referred to in many of the verses of the demiurges, those mountain-tall kids who never grew up:

“When everyone is sleek and rich,

When everyone has money,

No longer will each rill and ditch

Run deep with milk and honey.”

Well. ‘Milk And Honey’ was one of the logos for the wonderful prosperity that had enveloped the world. It figured in some of the very best slogans; and sloganizing had been a powerful factor in creating world prosperity. Nobody wanted to lose the ‘Milk and Honey Circumstance’. And another of the demiurges called in this verse:

“When none is longer destitute,

When each is Top Banana,

No more will bushes flame and fruit,

No more will fall the manna.”

But “We will live forever in the Everlasting Days of Manna for the World” was a prime slogan for the world prosperity, and nobody wanted to lose that.

“The Poor you will always have with you,” wrote Saint John, a man who had seen the end of the world and beyond it through special glasses.

“The poor we will not always have with us,” Pasqual Ratrunner called in immediately to contradict the Johannan citation. Pasqual saw the world through his own sort of glasses. “We can test it in a second about having the poor with us always. Either hit squad or reclassification can put a sharp end to that last poor man. No use letting an old saying hang around for centuries when it can be disproved instantly by a quick stroke of a pistol or a pen.”

John Bochtan, the Last Poor Man, had trouble trying to dodge all the aid trying to heap itself upon him. And when Bochtan, the last of them, was gone, prophetic disaster would come upon the world. This is what popular opinion (and popular opinion was more and more being created and shaped by the ‘Greenbaum-Brannagan Late Late Speak Your Mind Show’) was believing more and more strongly every hour.

“God tempers the wind to thaw shorn lamb,” wrote Laurence Stern, another man who saw the world, if not the end of it, through special glasses.

“If that wind ever comes untempered, look out world!” Weatherman Jones called in to GBLLSYMS one evening. “All rational calculations (this is an open secret among all meteorological and world-science people) indicate that the winds on earth should be averaging over one hundred miles an hour at all times. Why don't they do what they are calculated to do? Why don't the winds blow much harder? No rational answer can be found to these questions. I believe that it's time to go to an irrational answer.”

Another of the demiurges called in a rime to the show. Yes. God imprinted the demiurges in meter, and they speak mostly in rime:

“When none be poor and none have fault,

And all own silver laver; — 

The leaven turns to lump, the salt

No longer keeps its savor.”

Weatherman Jones called in on that one too. He had been calling in to the GBLLSYMS studio quite a bit lately.

“Let us consider the physical calamity if the salt should indeed lose its savor, if the sea should suddenly come unsalted. The heat generated by the sudden unsalting might be sufficient to boil the sea dry. It could be the biggest explosion the world has ever seen. All rational calculations (this is an open secret among all oceanologists and world-science people) indicate that the salting of the sea is a very unstable business that could be reversed at any moment.” Weatherman Jones said this with great conviction and authority.

“All things shall go where they belong:

To homey seas swim mullets;

To bosoms, shots from rifles long;

And whetted knives to gullets.”

 — Hit-Man Henson

This Hit-Man Henson (his mother had named him Horace Henson, but he had legally changed his name for advertising purposes) was becoming another regular on the Greenbaum-Brannagan Late Late Speak Your Mind Show. Not only did he call in but he also made personal appearances. And now he made an offer on stage and on camera to Brannagan who was hosting. Greenbaum and Brannagan looked just alike. It was their being mistaken for each other that had led to their becoming acquainted. Now they were each of them on the show for four hours and off four hours; the Late Late show had lately turned into a twenty-four hour show. So Greenbaum and Brannagan saw each other only in passing every four hours; and together they gave the impression of being one omnipresent man who never slept.

“B or G, as the case may be,” Hit-Man said, “I'll kill John Bochtan on your show if he has the courage to face me. It's really a disgrace that we are ninety years into the twentieth century and still have a poor man left in the world. But I intend to rectify that situation. There is no longer any death penalty anywhere in the world. Impenitent killers are all put in the Big Mack Prison, and all of my best friends are there. I miss their companionship. I'd like to be there too. And I'd sure like to get rid of that abominable John Bochtan, the last poor man in the world, the last of lots of things in the world.”

“I'll face Hit-Man Henson on the show at twenty o'clock tonight,” John Bochtan called in immediately. “I've no lack of courage. I doubt if he'll be able to kill me, but it'll be good show whatever happens. And I should surely get billing above him. I am the last representative of Holy Poverty in the World. I am one of the Masks of God.”

Several rather eccentric persons had become regulars on the GBLLSYMS lately. Besides John Bochtan, and God, and Pasqual Ratrunner, and Hit-Man Henson, there was Noah Lamechson of the Ninety-Ninth Generation.

“I'm the fellow who's been building the Ark on top of Turkey Mountain,” he said on the show at eighteen o'clock that evening.

“Do you expect that calamity to be a flood?” Brannagan asked him.

“I do, yes,” Noah Lamechson of the Ninety-Ninth Generation said. “That's why I built an ark. If I expected it to be a conflagration, I'd have built a cave with an asbestos lining.”

“You expect the water to rise to the top of Turkey Mountain?”

“It's got to. It wouldn't float my ark otherwise. I've got about an hour's work to do on the ark yet. I'd better go do it now. Then I'll fast and pray until the hour comes.”

“When is the hour?” Brannagan asked him.

“At twenty o'clock. You have the encounter scheduled here at twenty o'clock between John Bochtan and Hit-Man Henson, do you not. When Bochtan dies, then the disaster begins.”

“At twenty o'clock, good hearers and viewers,” Brannagan spoke to his world wide audience. “What if it is the case that the only holy thing left in the world is Holy Poverty? And what would be the penalty to the world if that last holiness should be hounded out of the world? Watch the GBLLSYMS tonight at twenty o'clock and find out.”

Then one of the mountain-high and smoke-thin demiurges called in the verse:

“The world's a seething, reeking sea

Of power and of valence,

And naught but Holy Poverty

Is Governour and Balance.”

Weatherman Johns had calculated that if one of these mountain-high and smoke-thin demiurges should be compressed to the density of an average human being, it would have no more than the size and weight and mass of an average human being. They weren't as big as they seemed.

And almost immediately after this demiurge-verse, God called in another of his own verses:

“The poor you must always have with you.

If poverty dwindle and die,

No more be my kin and my kith you,

No more be my law for the sky.”

Some people found this a little bit tinny for God. But, half an hour later, God called in another rimed quatrain:

“For fear that world no longer scan,

For fear my peace be broken,

You'd better keep one paupered man,

If only for a token.”

“No, no, no!” swore Pasqual Ratrunner who happened to be on stage at the GBLLSYMS. “We will not keep one paupered man even for a token! And I'm not sure that it's God who's been phoning in those little rimes for the last several nights. I know that the Numinous Valves have been giving his missives priority, but it could be any plapper-angel, demiurge, elemental, principality, nexus, or specially-impressed mortal calling in. Anyone of any of those types can call in from a pay phone in a quick lunch place and say he is God.”

“I believe that he may well be God,” Schoolman Schroeder called in immediately to voice his opposition to this. “All pieces of this creation are the same to God, and he would in no way disdain a pay phone in a quick lunch place. And we know from proto-scripture that God does often express himself in tinny rimes, in both iambic and anapest meter, especially when using the old Chaldee language. Give him the benefit of the doubt. If there is such a person as he, he holds all the high cards, and he may not like to hear his verses called tinny.”

Weatherman Keil began to call in to contradict Weatherman Jones that night. And then he came down and appeared live at the studio.

“Weatherman Jones needs an expert to monitor him and correct his unbalances,” Weatherman Keil said. “This isn't because Jones goes too far in his ranting; it's because he doesn't go far enough. Weatherman Jones says that the heat generated by the sudden unsalting of the sea might be sufficient to boil the sea dry. Did anybody ever hear anything sillier than that? The heat generated will mostly be generated into space. It will probably boil away no more than the top hundred meters of the oceans. But even if it does so, it will not lower the level of the oceans. The main effect of the unsalting of the sea will be that the rocks of the earth (both those under the ocean and those deep in the unoceaned land) will give up their water. Good people in the studio, you look at me as though you do not comprehend me. Do you not understand the explosiveness of what I have just said? I said that the rocks of the earth will give up their water. This means that water to the depth of more than a mile will be heaped upon the earth quite suddenly. Those of you who have private planes, listen to me! Go to them at once, gas them up, and take off in them. Fly to the highlands of Colorado. Do it fast and get good places there for yourselves within the present hour. It sure is going to be crowded on all those peaks and highlands. You people who don't have private planes, forget it! Consider yourselves as already drowned.”

Oh, it was all good show, but the people didn't take it very seriously. ‘God’ had now been identified not as God indeed, but as an enterprising feature-story writer named George Orvil Dunsworth. He had registered his monogram as ‘God’, but that didn't make him God in the usual understanding of the name. He was able to get preference through the numinous valves to the switchboards not because he was a plapper-angel or demiurge or elemental or principality or God himself, but because his hobby was electronics and he had devised a gadget to con the numinous valves.

And there were glib explanations for almost all the other prodigies.

But there were new prodigies happening as fast as the old prodigies could be explained away. Twenty-one idealistic persons, men, women, children (three of them were below the legal adult age of fifteen), made a covenant together and published it with the declaration that they would become paupers, conditionally forswearing their property in advance, at the instant of the death of the Last Poor Man John Bochtan (nobody now doubted that John Bochtan would be murdered by Hit-Man Henson at twenty o'clock that night in the view of millions of persons on the Greenbaum-Brannagan Late Late Speak Your Mind Show).

It was certainly an irrational and unacceptable covenant and declaration. To allow twenty-one paupers to grow where one had grown before was not tolerable. Fortunately our leaders and their advisers had developed a flexibility of mind lately. They were too fastidious to kill the twenty-one persons outright (and it would have been illegal anyhow), so they simply declared them (retroactively two hours before the publishing of the covenant) to be dead and their property to be under the control of state-appointed referees. The twenty-one misguided persons thus became non-persons; and non-persons may not be paupers or anything else. Anyone who has ever been a non-person, even if by accident or mistake, even if for no more than twenty-four hours, knows that non-persons become so literally.

While they were waiting for the death-tryst of the Last Pauper John Bochtan with Hit-Man Henson to roll around at twenty o'clock, there was a little panel show at the GBLLSYMS with various pundits, scientists, pseudoscientists, and other voicey people as to whether the extirpation of the poor people of the world could really bring about natural or unnatural disasters to the world. ‘Calamities of the Last Pauper’ by coincidence had just been named hit-song of the week, and it was played slowly as background music for all that follows. You who are too young to have seen the denouement of the Death of the Last Pauper on the Greenbaum-Brannagan Late Late Speak Your Mind Show (and ninety-six percent of today's population are too young to have seen it), you should set that old song ‘Calamities of the Last Pauper’ (you have only to uncork the proper one of the ‘Remembering Jugs’ and let it seep out), you should set that old song playing softly as you read this explication. The song and the remembering jug may be better known to you as ‘The Last Hit-of-the-Week Song in the World’.

“What we are asking ourselves is whether there may indeed be unpredictable consequences to the extinguishing of the Last Poor Man,” said Hiram Nonchalant.

“No, we are not asking ourselves that,” Cecelia Shadowbox contradicted, “for in the present world nothing is unpredictable. Whatever has to happen will happen. If there are calamities that have to happen now, and it seems that there are, then they will happen regardless of what happens to the Last Poor Man.”

“The scan of 30,000 planets of the size and circumstance most like to Earth indicates that two out of three of them are in ice ages. On about ten percent of these, the ice is total, covering the whole planet. In other cases, it is a ring of volcanic activity and fire making a double belt between the tropic that says ‘Thus far and no farther’ to the advance of the ice. On the planets that are not presently in an ice age, there is always a fair degree of civilization according to our instrumental analysis. There is also a belief by the dominant fauna that the mental attitudes of that dominant fauna have almost everything to do with keeping the ice away, with keeping the winds away, with keeping the excess waters locked in the rocks where it belongs, with keeping the salt locked in the oceans where it belongs. The concept of ‘poor’ is absent on many of these planets, but the concept of ‘compassion’ seems always to be present. One way or another, the dominant fauna believes that such qualities in itself keeps a rein on the elementals.” So said John Upperjohn, a pundit in Comparative Planetology.

“The Wooly Rhinoceros has come back,” Cecelia Shadowbox said. “It has come back because there will soon be a niche in nature for it to fill again, and whatever niche there is to be filled will be filled. The mechanism for the return of the Wooly Rhinoceros is not important, only its drive to come back. Really, it was those nuts at the Institute for Impure Science who brought seven pair of the beasts from High Tibet and turned them loose on our continent. I always say that you can't have an Ice Age without the Wooly Rhinoceros.”

“Frazer in his Golden Bough fills several pages with tribes (not all of them primitive) who believe that the presence of poor people in the world keep disasters at bay, and who believe that disasters are certain to come if ever the poor people disappear completely,” said Hiram Nonchalant.

“And whatever Frazer put in his Golden Bough, however silly and grotesque it seems, will be verified by subsequent discovery and event,” commented Cecelia Shadowbox who was a pseudo-scientist of great renown.

At that moment (it was one minute before twenty o'clock) John Bochtan, the Last Poor Man in the World, strode boldly onto stage in Studio One of the Greenbaum-Brannagan Late Late Speak Your Mind Show. And when he strode onto stage he seemed to fill that stage. He had presence.

Pasqual Ratrunner hissed at Bochtan. Selma Halfloaf of the Women's League for the Elimination of Poverty hissed at him. The host of the show, Brannagan, forgetting for a moment his well-known impartiality, hissed at the last poor man, and Hit-Man Henson with a long barrel pistol in his right hand and with his left hand twisted curiously into a fist, hissed at Bochtan and began to circle him in a clockwise direction.

“Whatever is going to happen is already on the way to happen here,” John Upperjohn said. “Let us not attribute causation to any coincidence such as may be spun off by the happenings. The death of the last poor man cannot cause things that are already underway when he dies.”

“That is like saying that a knife is going to cut John Bochtan's throat in just a moment whether or not it finds an instrument to wield it. Hit-Man Henson's wielding the knife will be no more than an unnecessary coincidence. The knife doesn't need Hit-Man, except for the sake of appearances.”

“Exactly,” John Upperjohn said. “Now you understand causation. An event will try to find an agent to make it look plausible, but the destined event will take place whether it finds an agent or not.”

“Drop the pistol, Hit-Man,” John Bochtan the Last Poor Man spoke as one having power. “You cannot stand against my resolution and personality. Drop it, I say!” Bochtan, the last poor man, had his imposing head thrust forward relentlessly, and he crowded Hit-Man into a corner. Hit-Man leaned back from Bochtan, and Bochtan leaned over him further and further. “Drop the pistol, Hit-Man!” Bochtan commanded strongly out of his threatening face, and his imposing head and stretched-out neck were right over Hit-Man. And Bochtan looked straight down at Hit-Man, eye to eye. “Drop it, Hit-Man!” he spoke with overpowering menace.

Hit-Man Henson dropped his long-barreled pistol with a heavy clatter. Then, with an easy motion he reached up and cut Bochtan's overhanging throat with a short knife that he'd been holding in his left fist. He cut it thoroughly. And John Bochtan, the Last Poor Man, died instantly.

“The last poor man in the world in dead,” Hiram Nonchalant said, “and nothing happens.”

“And nothing happens,” Cecelia Shadowbow gave him the echo.

“And nothing happens,” John Upperjohn gave him the second echo. “But if what I think is going to happen does happen, remember that the world has been there from four to twelve times before.”

And nothing did happen. Nothing. Not for about twenty seconds.

Then there came down a news bulletin from the top floor of the GBLLSYMS Tower itself. The top of the tower was swaying three meters in a very strong wind, the news bulletin said, and it had never swayed more than three centimeters in any wind before. It was raining, sleeting, hailing, snowing all at the same time, so the news bulletin continued to rattle, and little balls of fire were falling from the sky into the streets. Turkey Mountain, on the other side of the river, seemed to be turning itself into a volcano. There was already from six to ten feet of water everywhere, but most of it seemed to be coming up from the ground rather than down from the sky. The temperature had dropped seventy-two degrees almost instantly; that was forty degrees Celsius.

The news report coming down from the top of the tower also said that the strong winds had blown all the feathers off the brass goose that adorned that top. This brass goose was a shining mechanism that would publicly lay a brass egg whenever a program in the studios below it laid an egg. The goose and its feathers were all one solid brass casting, so it must have been a very strong wind.

For a while there I feared that I would not be able to wrap this account up properly. I had used up everything I had to write on. And I had gone out hunting four days straight and not killed the prey I needed to finish this chronicle. But this morning I killed one in the first hour, a large, male, Wooly Rhinoceros. In another hour I had what I needed out of the carcass. Now I have something to write on again. And now this can become a nine-rhinoceros or eighteen-shoulder-blade story. It gives one a feeling of spaciousness to have room to finish properly. There are two questions that have been hanging fire here for several days. I will answer them now, and that will be the wrap-up.

QUESTION: Is the story a true one, or is it just another of those fanciful stories set ‘in the land where the ice is now’?

ANSWER: It is a true story-set ‘in the land where the ice is now’. It happened right on the edge of where the ice is now, for the Turkey Mountain Volcano has created a little green oasis in the middle of the ice here. Oh the ark that was on top of Turkey Mountain? It's still there. It didn't quite float off. The water rose just high enough to slew it around in a different direction. Noah Lamechson of the Hundred-and-First generation still lives in it up there now with his family, on the very edge of the volcano.

QUESTION: What thing is most necessary for a young person wishing to become a writer.

ANSWER: A good spoke-shave of matched flint-stones is the most necessary thing for a young person wishing to become a writer. Without a good spoke-shave, there is no way to fashion a good lance. Without a good lance there is no way to kill a grown Wooly Rhinoceros. And really elegant writing can only be done on the shoulder-blade bones of the Wooly Rhinoceros.

Do not cheap-jack it, young people. Do not settle for less than the best. Do not write on the shoulder blades of a cave bear. A cave bear is much easier to kill. It may be killed in its sleep. But what you write on its shoulder blades will lack elegance.

The shoulder blades of the Wooly Puma may be used for writing elegant short poems. And the Wooly Puma is almost as dangerous as the Wooly Rhinoceros to encounter and kill. But its shoulder blades are not big enough to allow longer and more substantial writing.

Do not, in any case, write on a bull's shoulder blades. The inferiority of the writing on such a surface will give you away.

For elegant narration, there is nothing like the shoulder blades of the Wooly Rhinoceros to write on, an obsidian blade set in antler handle to cut the letters into the elegant bone, and “Fat John's Dragon Blood Ink” (he really makes it from Dire Wolf blood) to fill in the notches and cuts for high visibility.

Go first-class in everything you use if you wish to attain distinction.

Faith Sufficient

Remember how it is written on the holy skins: “If you have faith sufficient you shall say to this mountain ‘Remove from here and cast thyself into the sea’ and it will do it.” Well, on that morning they tried it. Several of the big prophets and wrestlers tried it, for they did have faith. They groaned with travail and joy, they strove mightily, and they did move the mountain and make it cast itself into the sea.

 — Days of Grass, Days of Straw

The mouse and the handyman had a little game every day with the pecan, the mouse pushing it with all his physical strength, and the handyman pushing it with faith and telekinesis. But then the mouse would seem to double his strength, and they would play the game to a standstill.

“Brother Mus, my employers are rather overdoing this thing,” Brother Gus the handyman said. “I wonder why they have become so extravagant in their manifestations. John Salt is likely to challenge them on the genuineness of them. He is riled by such arrogance. I may have to leave their employ as I left that of the extravagant persons at the laboratory. Oh certainly you will go with me wherever I go. You and I are one.”

The mouse winked at Brother Gus and giggled, proving that he was a mouse of at least human intelligence. While Brother Gus was turned down by the extravagance of the manifestations and by the pomposities where he worked, he did believe very much in Faith Healing. It was by Faith Healing that he had healed the holes in the head of Brother Mus. Brother Gus himself pronounced their names with the old-world soundings of ‘Brother Goose’ and ‘Brother Moose’, and yet they were properly Brother Gus and Brother Mus or Brother Augustine and Brother Mouse.

They had been companions since the mouse was one of those in a bunch that Brother Gus was supposed to destroy after they had been used in experiments.

“The mice of this bunch are all insane now and so they must be nullified,” so Enforcer Doctor Dolphus at the Lab had told Brother Gus. “They have all had extracts from the brains of slightly insane humans implanted into their own brains. Now some of them think they are gods and some of them think they are humans, and their intelligences as well as their paranormal powers are greatly enhanced. The extracts contained ‘faith toxin’, but in several cases it was accidentally accompanied by a modicum of ‘flaming faith toxin’. So they must be destroyed just as I would have a human person who was so afflicted destroyed if I had the authority to do so. The bright-eyed one in particular should be destroyed. He would be a peril to the world if he were released.”

But the bright-eyed mouse had become a personal friend of Brother Gus, and so Gus had been incapable of destroying him. Brother Gus quit his job at the Lab that day, and he took the aberrant bright-eyed toxin-tainted mouse with him.

Now the two of them worked for the ‘Scientific Ecumenical Psychological Encounterful Covenant For Faith Healing and For Civic Management’ which was on Meadow Lark Mountain, a small mound between Turkey Mountain and Rock-Crusher Road. The people at the Covenant knew that Brother Augustine was working for them, and they even gave him a slight fee and a place to sleep for the labor that he performed. But they didn't know about Brother Mouse at all.

And then one day, Brother Gus discovered Brother Mus pushing the pecan around without touching it at all. Ah, the mouse himself had Faith Sufficient as well as telekinetic ability, both of them in small and mouseful ways, of course.

Frockless Sister Mary Anne Humility was in total disgrace, and she found herself the object of scorn and derision of Frockless Sister Domina Specially-Esteemed-By-The-Spirit. Well, what had happened was this: at an Ecumenical and Encounterful meeting of the Covenant preceding the Faith Healing the night before, Sister Humility had been ‘slain’ by the Spirit. This was presumptive of her, and the manifestation was almost certainly bogus. At these encounterful meetings, the higher-ranked and most worthy of the people would stand in squealing rapture as the Spirit began to blow. Then the Spirit would sweep through the hall and ‘slay’ the select ones, but not the unselect. The most worthy ones, after looking over their shoulders to be sure that the less-worthy ‘catchers’ were ready to catch them, would shriek and then throw themselves backwards in total ecstasy. This put the seal of acceptance on their worthiness. But last night, the lowest-ranked of the ‘catchers’, Frockless Sister Mary Anne Humility, had herself been ‘slain’ by the Spirit, a total surprise to herself. Sister Humility had conked out and fallen backwards with a thud, this in the split-second between Frockless Sister Specially-Esteemed-By-The-Spirit glancing over her shoulder to be sure that Frockless Sister Humility was ready to catch her and the same Frockless Sister Specially-Esteemed throwing herself backwards in the formalized ecstasy. So Sister Specially-Esteemed had fallen uncaught with a thud as well as with an added clunk.

“I was badly injured because of your presumption and your bogus ‘being slain’,” Frockless Sister Domina Specially-Esteemed-By-The-Spirit railed angrily. “I could have been killed while being ‘slain’.”

“Ow, thou got nowt but a knot on thy noggin, and it nowt bigger than a dove's egg,” Frockless Sister Mary Anne Humility protested. “There is nowt ever a danger of the ‘slaying’ killing one.”

“Who are you to tell me there is no danger? Who are you even to presume to be ‘slain’ by the Spirit? Your arrogance and your brass have burst all bounds. Soon you will be pretending to be able to speak in the Unknown Tongues which only those very much advanced in the Spirit are allowed to speak in. You are nothing! You are disobedient! Learn your place!”

As the ancient and perhaps holy Enniscorthy Chronicle has it:

“Oh arrogance, Oh pride, presumption sinful!

Learn thou thy place, thou blatant brass a skinfull!”

The Frockless Sisters had abandoned their Sisterly Frocks or Habits because their Inner Light would always shine out of them and identify them to the World without any such artificial costuming.

John Salt issued a challenge to the whole ‘Scientific Ecumenical Encounterful’ bunch, and this sent a tremor through the entire Covenant and all its ramifications. John Salt had been a phoney faith healer, and now he had left off all of that and went about the country exposing all the healers he believed to be phoney. He had kept most of the fulgent eloquence he had larded on so thick when he had been a phoney, and it still stood him in good stead.

“A stench has come unto my nostrils from Meadow Lark Mountain in the south midlands,” he fulminated through his beard like an old prophet, “the stench of false works and of healings faked by grubby devils and attributed to the Lord. I will post ten thousand dollars as earnest money and as wager that I can duplicate by natural means any ‘healing’ that the Meadow Lark Mountain Mountebanks attribute to the Holy Spirit. I maintain that the Larks are not on the flightways of the Spirit at all. If the Meadow Lark Mountain Mountebanks are really concerned about the lame and the halt and the blind as they say that they are, let them win the ten thousand dollars from me and apply it to their works of mercy. I know that their ‘take’ is good, but ten thousand dollars is at least equal to one or two of their average collections. Where is their faith if they will not leap at this opportunity? I will rattle the bars of their narrow cages till they accept my challenge. I will shake the mountains till their roots squeal like pigs if the Mountebanks will not enter the arena against me.”

John Salt's challenges had popular appeal, and it was often possible for him to catch a clutch of faith healers in his trap. He really could, so far, duplicate all their tricks by natural means. But he was himself deathly afraid of the Holy Spirit and he was always careful not to speak any word against the Spirit but only against the ‘Falsifiers and Mountebanks and Fakers of the Spirit’.

There are two versions as to how John Salt came under the fear of the Holy Spirit. One of them involved the Withered-Hand trick gone wrong, and one of them involved the man-raised-from-the-death trick (the most extreme trick in all of Faith Healing) also gone wrong. For the first version, John Salt had a subject who did have such a severe circulation problem with her hand that it would turn black and appear withered. She could get relief from this condition only by an injection into her wrist twice a day. This injection (she herself said that it was nitroglycerin, and John Salt had a longer name for it) would change the appearance of her hand almost instantly, would make it look like a normal hand again. The trick was for the woman to miss an injection before a performance or faith-healing exhibition, and for John Salt slyly to give her the overdue injection while he prayed over her hand. It was quite effective when people saw a withered hand cured almost instantly like that. But on the last performance of the trick it was disconcerting to the audience and shattering to John Salt when the withered-hand woman cried out in agony: “Oh, no, no, you have not healed my hand! You have destroyed it altogether! It is as though you had dipped it into the boiling brimstone of Hell! Now my hand is afflicted forever and I myself am in unbearable pain. Devil man, what have you done to me!” Oh, this in itself was enough to make a man forswear fake faith healing, for the hand really was destroyed forever in an instant.

In the second version, John Salt had a traveling companion who could go into a cataleptic trance whenever he wished to do so (and sometimes when he did not wish, which made it tricky). In the trance, he seemed to be dead. Oh yes, he even had grave dirt on him when he was brought before the audience, and the odor of death strongly on him. The ‘odor of death’ that John Salt released for the edification of the audience was really ‘concentrated essence of dead weasel’. There is nothing so essential as a dead weasel. And the man could shake the grave dirt off of himself and come out of his cataleptic death whenever John Salt ordered him to do so. He could do it until that very last time.

But the whole business of the cataleptic trances was a token of a severe sickness in the man, and the man died on John Salt before an audience of fifty-five hundred and twelve goggle-eyed persons. Oh, that was more than enough to make a man forswear fake faith healing!

Both the versions were true, and they both happened in the same week. They put the Fear of God into John Salt so strongly that he left off being a bogus faith healer and became an exposer of bogus faith healers.

John Salt infiltrated the organizations of all the ‘faithies’ that he dogged, and of course he infiltrated the structure of what he called ‘The Meadow Lark Mountebanks’. He found Mary Occhilucenti, who had come to town for a one-shot with the Mountebanks, in the Plugged Nickel Bar. John Salt and Mary had crossed paths many times. She went wherever the faith healers were putting on a top show. She had large bright orange cataracts on both of her eyes, and these dropped off every time she was healed. She had her eyes healed before thousands of people, and always immediately demonstrated her new perfect vision by reading the fine print on a sardine can.

“How do you do it, Mary?” John Salt asked her. “I have experimented with quite a few quick-dissolving crystals but I haven't found the ideal one for the trick yet. Tell me what the substance is.”

“It's too common and too widely-used for you to have noticed it, John,” Mary O said. “What I use is known as Silly Chrystals. It's sold in kits as a children's toy, and three million children got some of it last Christmas alone. I don't know the chemical name of it, but just ask for Silly Chrystals in any toy department. I tell you this now, because I'm about fed up with being on the healing trail and I get the feeling that something dire will happen to me if I don't soon abandon it.”

“Thank you, Mary,” John Salt said.

Then John Salt went to talk to Brother Augustine, or Brother Gus, who worked directly as handyman and janitor for the Encounterful bunch, the Mountebanks as John called them.

“Gus,” he said, “I am going to do a hit job on your bunch. I am going to catch them in a corner that they cannot back out of. But I am worried about one thing, and that thing is you. I have felt your power before, and it is real. I don't believe that you have any particular commitment to the Mountebanks: your commitments are to things less grubby. And yet your just being around, even in your role as handyman and janitor, might lend your power unconsciously to their attempts.”

“And what are you up to this time, John Salt?” Brother Gus asked.

“I'm going to catch them in the biggest trap of all. I will catch them in the perfect mouse-trap, and it is the mountain. There have been several fables of the mountain and the mouse and most of them have been misunderstood.”

“See that you yourself don't misunderstand it, John Salt.”

“I'm going to challenge them to the one demonstration of faith that can't be faked. I'm going to put them to the test that Christ Himself suggested to separate the prophets from the boys, the one feat that can in no way be misunderstood, that cannot seem to be performed unless it is performed.”

“Oh that! What do you want of me then, John Salt?”

“I want your word that you will not lend your power, whatever it is, to the demonstration of the Mountebanks, should they take me up on it. I want you to promise me to stand clear of it and not abet them either consciously or unconsciously.”

“You have my word, John Salt. I will stand clear of it all. I will not lend any powers I might have to them. I will not abet them either consciously or unconsciously. Besides, it's an enormity of which I would not be capable. I can move a pecan, John. I can't move things that are billions of billions of times larger.”

If you have Faith Sufficient you can say to this mountain ‘Be you moved’, and it will be moved. And nothing shall be impossible to you.

 — Matthew 17:20

It is the one demonstration of faith that cannot be faked: Moving a Mountain. Everything else can be faked, but this is too big to fake. The lame can walk, the blind can see, the lepers can be cleansed, and the poor can have the Gospel preached to them, all by well-done fakery without really doing the things. They can be done by a convincing fakery when the real things do not flow from the fountain of life. But to move a mountain, for a substantial distance, on a clear and sunny afternoon, before thousands of witnesses both clotted together and scattered over the miles, they viewing it from different directions, through eyes direct or through field glasses or telescopes, from different angles, with different plays of light-and-shadow, with camera and with TV eye, with some witnesses watching from certain points for ‘something unusual’ but not told what they are watching for, with all of them seeing the mountain separate itself from the earth and rise jiggling into the air — this is beyond faking. Even John Salt was not sure that he would be able to duplicate the feat by natural means if the Meadow Lark Mountebanks should indeed move Turkey Mountain.

But how was he to trap the Mountebanks into attempting it? Oh, they entrapped themselves into it, after John Salt had shot three of them with darts. That's right, shot them with darts.

The only one who saw John Salt shoot the three persons with darts was Brother Augustine: for the three persons were coming up the slope of Meadow Lark Mountain late one afternoon to question this same Brother Augustine. The darts that John Salt shot were insect-small, and they looked like insects, and their hitting felt no more powerful than a fly-bite. But they penetrated their three victims with ‘overconfidence toxin’, with ‘intrepidity’, with ‘away-with-caution toxin’, and with the trickiest of all, the ‘what-the-hell venom’. John Salt, hiding behind little cedar shrubs on the slope of Meadow Lark Mountain, shot the darts with a little blow-gun into the napes of Outreacher Preacher Jerome Healing-Hands, of Super-Sister Susanna-Of-The-Spirit, and of Father Raphael whose name, as he always explained it to people who came to his healing services, meant literally Father Healing-of-God. All three of these persons brushed their hands over the backs of their necks when they felt the nick of the small darts, but they felt nothing there and they thought no more of it. Then they came to humble Brother Augustine and they held confab with him.

“Brother Goose,” Super-Sister Susanna-Of-The-Spirit said to him, “I feel, we all feel, that you have certain powers, however slight. Will you lend them to us in a demonstration of faith against an infidel?”

“No, I will not,” Brother Gus said. “I have given my word that I will stand clear of it all, that I will not lend any powers that I may possibly have to anyone, that I will not abet you or anybody else.”

“Will you be present at the test?” Father Raphael Healing-of-God asked.

“Oh yes. I am still a boy who cannot pass up so good a show as Moving a Mountain.”

“Whoever is not against us is with us,” said Outreacher Preacher Jerome Healing-Hands. “If you will give us your word that you will not use your power against us, we will be satisfied. Power-for-Good needs only to be present to manifest itself. Have we your word?”

“I give my word that I will not use any powers of mine against you,” Brother Augustine swore. “There, I have sworn my word twice this day, and I will swear it no more. There's an old saying that whoever swears his word three times will have forsworn it at least once. Lord, keep my words locked in my mouth for the rest of the day.”

“Let's do it,” cried Father Raphael. “I have a sudden surge of super-confidence. Let us find John Salt and tell him that we accept the challenge.”

“Yes, yes, yes!” cried Outreacher Preacher Jerome Healing-Hands. “Let's do it! I have a sudden surge of intrepidity. Where is John Salt? Let him know that we accept his wager.”

“I'm for it thumpingly!” Super-Sister Susanna-Of-The-Spirit resounded. “I have a sudden surge of away-with-caution feeling and of what-the-hellism. We can do it now. Let us make compact with the devious John Salt, and stand justified before the world, and be ten thousand dollars richer for our agreement. We accept the deal. John Salt, where are you?”

“I'm right here,” John Salt said softly, and (it was at least a quasi-miracle) he stood in the midst of them. It was only a quasi-miracle and not a full miracle because John Salt had been standing all the while behind a cedar bush there on the slopes of Meadow Lark Mountain, no more than three feet from the Mountebanks. Dusk had begun to gather then, and he seemed more of a sudden and ghostly apparition than he really was.

Arrangements and appointments were quickly made. Meadow Lark Mountain was only a low and scrubby mound between Turkey Mountain and Rock-Crusher Road on the West side of the River. And they didn't want to take any chances on cracking the walls of their Covenant Building by moving their own mountain. But Turkey Mountain was of a respectable size; so Turkey Mountain was the one targeted to be moved.

They did it at noon the next day.

And now quick victory and quicker vaunt,

And still more quick abusing the infirm,

Nor doubts be given room to roost and haunt.

But Victory may yet contain a Worm.

 — Endymeon Ellenbogen, Fog-Horn Symphony

They hadn't as much coverage as they wished. Only a few of the National Media persons had come. After all, nothing had happened yet. But there were promises of a true gala the following day if something should have happened. And all those committed to the happening believed that they could give as many and as grand repeat performances as they wished.

“Turkey Mountain will henceforth be a Holy Mountain,” Frockless Sister Specially-Esteemed-By-The-Spirit cried out, “like Mount Zion, like Mount Sinai, like Mount Tabor. The Spirit is running, and we can all feel a small but incredibly powerful dynamo of faith pulsating somewhere nearby.”

The people from the local TV stations and the two city newspapers were on stand-by. And a person from the mayor's office had checked it all out. There were only four houses on the approximately forty acres covered by Turkey Mountain. None of them had city water; all used only cisterns. It was summer, and none of them would need gas for a little while. People from the gas company uncoupled the main union to the pipe that ran up the mountain. All four houses had their electricity from one transformer. The line to it came off the main line at the foot of the mountain. “Does anybody know how high you're going to raise the mountain?” a Public Service Company lineman asked. “No? You're going to raise a mountain and you don't know how high you're going to raise it? I better cut the lines loose here then. They won't need lights this noontime anyhow.” The people in all of the houses said they would stay on the mountain just for the ride, and several newspersons went up on the mountain with them.

But preparations for this first Day of the Mountain Moving were lagging. There would be a massive faith healing ceremony after the moving, however; or, if possible, while the mountain was still in the air. Oh, the Spirit was moving, and already Turkey Mountain had begun to rumble. Snakes by the dozen slid out of the mountain in cowering fashion. Earth rumbles frighten snakes. “Generation of Vipers, who has shown you to flee from the wrath to come?” Outreacher Preacher Jerome Healing-Hands asked them loudly. It was a pretty good line to come up with, but the snakes all seemed to be of the blacksnake sort (Coluber constrictor or Elaphe obsoleta) and not vipers at all. The gibbering in unknown tongues rose in crest after crest, but the shouting was all as seemly as it was inspired.

And then, and then, and then — 

And then Turkey Mountain arose wobbling about a hundred feet into the air. That was it. Faith Sufficient really had moved a mountain. Some of the ‘faithies’ continued their babble to try to maintain the mountain in the air while the Super Healing Ceremony took place. But, after about ten minutes, Turkey Mountain slowly sank to earth again and assumed its accustomed place.

No matter. They'd moved the mountain once, and they'd do it again tomorrow, to great acclaim and world-wide coverage.

John Salt sauntered over to Outreacher Preacher Jerome Healing-Hands and his triumphant Meadow Lark Mountebank group. John counted out one hundred one-hundred dollar bills into the hot hands of Healing-Hands.

“But you'd better put it into escrow,” John Salt said. “I have two days to duplicate it by natural means.” But they laughed him to scorn.

But the Super Faith Healing Ceremony busted almost at the start. The Meadow Larkers started with tried and true subjects, and the most tried-and-true of them all was Mary Occhilucenti. The orange-colored cataracts on her eyes were made out of Silly Chrystals, and Silly Chrystals could be dissolved suddenly by jolting, by quick heat, or by the sparking of a small palm-of-the-hand electric capacitor with pen-light battery. The Faith Healers had been doing her cataracts mostly by this capacitor-with-battery when they touched her eyes with their healing hands. It was Outreacher Preacher Jerome Healing-Hands himself who touched the large cataracts on Mary's eyes, and they did come unchrystaled, they did dissolve and disappear. But then Mary gave a great cry of anguish: “I'm blind, I'm blind, I'm blind forever now. My eyes have grown shut. Devil man, what have you done to me?” Her eyes were indeed grown shut. It was as if they had grown shut ten years ago, and she would never see again. She'd had perfect vision before this.

And several other attempts at healing also busted, even the sure things.

“Never mind,” Frockless Sister Specially-Esteemed-By-The-Spirit consoled them. “It is that we are all tired from the mountain moving, too tired to entertain the Spirit properly. Tomorrow we will be rested.”

John Salt came to Brother Gus.

“Brother Augustine, it would be impossible in your case,” John Salt said in his fulgent style that he even used in one-to-one conversations, “but it seems that you lied to me and failed your word. You gave me your word that you would not lend your power, whatever it is, to the demonstration of the Mountebanks. Well, somebody loaned extraordinary power to them. Did you keep your word to me, Brother Augustine?”

“Yes, I kept my word, John. I stood clear of it all the way.”

“Then there is another and likely much stronger power very close to us here. I must find it and bargain with it.”

A telegraph boy brought a telegraph to Brother Gus, and the gram read in part:

 — a report has reached me that the mouse, lab-named ‘Bright-Eyes’, subsequent name ‘Brother Mus’, has not been destroyed. Dammit, find him and kill him at once, Gus! He may be the unfortunate aberration of one of our contingent studies ‘The Mouse That Destroyed The World’, a comic study-title that has now become horribly uncomic. A report has also reached me of the happening at your place an hour ago. Remember, Gus, that mountain-moving can become addictive! Remember that the mice in our experiment received injections of a ‘faith toxin’, but in at least one case, that of the mouse ‘Bright-Eyes’, it mutated into a ‘flaming faith toxin’. This mouse has total faith, so there is nothing it cannot do. Present the corpus of that mouse here within one hour (the corpus is of course ‘signatured’ in a way you can't know) (yes, you can make it if you kill the mouse immediately and catch the Delta flight), or I will have your own corpus.

 — Enforcer Doctor Dolphus

Brother Gus went to Brother Mus in his box. “Little mouse, there are those who seek your life,” he said. “Should I get a donkey and hie with you to Egypt to thwart your killers? I know where I can get a donkey.”

But the utterly exhausted mouse was asleep. It would sleep for thirty hours more. Now and then, however, it giggled in its sleep.

“While strut the proud in peacock-power craze,

The humblest shall be raised, and eke shall raise.”

 — Lowly Rimes, Refrocked Sister Mary Anne Humility

The Meadow Lark Mountebanks failed to raise Turkey Mountain the next day, and they failed before the eyes and ears of all the world media. This was bitter to the Mountebanks. And persons even implied that the mountain-raising of the day before had been faked; but it had been well-witnessed and attested.

Brother Augustine had been taken into custody by a mysterious Medical Authority, and his little room at the Encounterful Covenant Building had been ransacked again and again. Before those medical authorities had arrived, however, Brother Gus had slipped one small object, a sleeping mouse, to John Salt.

“Keep that kale in safe escrow,” John Salt advised Outreacher Preacher Jerome Healing-Hands and Father Raphael Healing-Of-God and Super-Sister Susanna-Of-The-Spirit and all their buddies. “Turkey Mountain will be raised tomorrow noon, by more or less natural means, and I'll have my money back then, along with ten thousand dollars of yours. Tomorrow noon, yes. He should have his sleep out by then.”

“Who? Who should have his sleep out by then?” they asked him.

“Ah, only a mouse, only a mouse,” John Salt said. And they laughed him to scorn again.

John Salt had to make it look as though it was by natural means. He borrowed a slide-rule, a calculator, and a no-nonsense-looking Command Telephone. And John was a talker. He could fake anything, even the scientific patter. Surely he would be able to cover so small a thing as mouse-tracks, if it were necessary for him to do so.

And at eleven fifty-five the next day, Turkey Mountain began to bounce and dance. Some very powerful entity was having fun with the mountain. There was no media coverage of this. It was a private show-down. The Mountebanks were there, a bank person was there with notaries, a lawyer was there. John Salt was there. That's about all.

The lawyer made a declaration. John Salt made a fulgent declaration in his oratorical style, and he fiddled with his slide-rule and his calculator and barked cryptic commands into his no-nonsense Command Telephone.

Turkey Mountain rose one hundred feet into the air. There were groans of anguish and the gnashing of teeth from the Meadow Lark Mountebanks. The bank person counted out twenty thousand dollars to John Salt, and the notaries attested it.

It was done. And then something busted. There rang out, like feeble silver or quicksilver, one of the most seldom noises ever heard on Earth, that of a mouse breaking up into total laughter, but only John Salt heard it. Turkey Mountain swayed for a while in the air, and then settled back roughly to Earth.

A bit later, John Salt overtook the downcast Mountebanks as they arrived back at their Encounterful Covenant Building.

“I know it is a little unusual — ” he stammered to them with all his fulgence gone, “but I've run through everything else in a short time without result, and you are healers of a sort, and I don't know how to bring him out of it.”

“What is it, man?” Super-Sister Susanna-Of-The-Spirit demanded roughly. “You have your money! You have your smirking victory! What else do you want?”

“A cure, a cure from anybody. It could be serious, even fatal if it goes on long enough. A very small cure, but the thing goes on and on — ”

“Oh, what is it, John Salt-That's-Lost-Its-Savor?” Outreacher Preacher Jerome Healing-Hands asked dully. “A cure for what?”

“For giggles in a mouse. They go on and on. I don't know how to stop them at all.”

In The Turpentine Trees

I will unfold my enigma to the sound of a harp.

 — Psalms 48

Methinks it is better I should have pined away seven of my goldenest years… than that so passionate a love adventure should be lost.

 — Charles Lamb

“Now the Lord appeared by the Terebinths of Mamre as he sat at the entrance of his tent in the heat of day — ” so Genesis begins its eighteenth chapter: and then the Lord held a conversation with Abraham. But is the entire conversation reported to us, or is some of it left out?

At other times, the Lord appeared in a Burning Bush, in a Pillar of Cloud, in a Pillar of Fire, and in a Cloud that was crammed-full of Thunder and Lightning on Sinai Mountain. But are all the words that the Lord spoke at those times reported to us, or do only a very few people know the words in their entirety?

Shamus Eagnach (his name meant either ‘James Wisdom’ or ‘Jim Grumbling’ depending on who translated it from the Irish) was an amateur philosopher, an amateur tycoon in the field of Rapid Transit, an amateur wag, an amateur one-of-the-ten-richest-persons-in-the-world, and an amateur lover of his fellow people. Like all true amateurs, he performed in each of these fields for the sheer love of it; and he'd have performed as meaningfully at each occupation (even that of becoming one of the ten richest persons in the world) even if he didn't make a dime out of it.

But he devoted most of his life to seeking the answers to a handful of questions which all very young boys ask themselves, and which all but a few of the boys-who-never-grew-up like Shamus leave off asking themselves after they grow up.

To devote most of one's life to a subject such as this takes some very canny arranging. Shamus could have lived in a tub or a packing-box and begged for his livelihood, but he discovered that begging for a livelihood devours more of the hours of a life than working for a livelihood does. He finally settled on the not-quite-satisfactory solution of becoming very wealthy quite rapidly, and then hiring persons to work and worry about the details of his business while he devoted the most of his life to seeking the answers to ‘The Paramount Questions’.

The business trick by which he became very wealthy very rapidly, by which he became one of the ten richest persons in the world, was the Happy Hot Dog World-Wide Rapid Transit Tramway System. He had his trams running in a hundred and fifty countries and soon his system would indeed be world-wide. Oh, they were only the ancient street-cars, but he had modernized them into becoming the ‘Street-Cars of the Future’. They were almost completely safe, almost completely efficient, and very rapid. They were transcontinental and transworld. They ran through the air like rockets, through the earth like speeding moles, and through the water like rapid fish. Shamus even had two hundred kilometers of scheduled lines on the Moon. The tram-cars were programmed for maximum speed and efficiency and safety and pleasure, and nothing could go wrong with them in any of these departments unless something went wrong with the programming. “It makes me feel almost God-like to have devised such a system,” he told his first wife Cinderella Scholtz, “and that brings me closer to my main interest in life.”

The main-interest-in-life of Shamus Eagnach, the questions to which he sought the answers with happy and relentless passion, were such as these:

“Remembering that the old Egyptian priest Manetho wrote that our Earth had had seven suns before its present sun, I question whether it may not have had seven gods before our present God. I question whether our present God would know about it if it had been the case. If there had been seven separate and discrete eternities before or beyond our present eternity, how would anyone of our present eternity know about them? If there had been seven separate and discrete, infinite and endless and all-encompassing universes outside of our universe of record, how would anyone in our own all-encompassing universe-of-record know about those seven? I ask whether there is any limit to the number of one-and-only universes that may exist? And if there is no limit to the number of them, why cannot I have one of my own in which to be God?

“But my cardinal question is ‘How did God get to be God?’ Everything depends on the answer to this. Could I have been God if I had thought of it before God did? If even now, after it has been thought of and done at least once, if I could find out how it was done, could I not go somewhere behind God's back and do it all over again? If I find how the trick is pulled, maybe I could pull it myself, aye, and with refinements! To do it myself would be the highest pleasure imaginable. To find out how it was done, even if I could not do it myself, would be the second highest pleasure imaginable.

“And an ancillary question is ‘Why does God overdo it? Why does he do more than is required of him?’ My grandfather told me that when he was in high school there were only two subatomic particles, the proton and the electron. And when his grandfather was in high school, there were no subatomic particles at all; the atom was then, as its name indicates, the indivisible smallest of particles. My question is ‘Does God overdo it? Does he do more than is required of him?’ Maybe he only fills in the more minute items of his creation when mankind is on the verge of being able to discover them. That being so, could I not become at least an apprentice god somewhere, doing only what is necessary to stay one step ahead of my own not-very-well-informed creatures? I'd be like the new teacher who studies enough every night to be able to stay ahead of his students in the assignments for the next day. Ah yes, and then there are these three hundred and thirty-three only slightly less cardinal questions.”

Cinderella Scholtz, the first wife of Shamus Eagnach, had her own set of almost archetypical questions, such as: “May it not be that we are only token people or under-people or even manufactured mechanical people whom the real people have set here in their places for either seven or seventy or seven hundred years while they the real people withdraw somewhere and meditate and renew their souls? May it not be that the universe which we see about us is only a token or under-universe because our token or benighted eyes will not allow us to see or understand the real universe? May it not be that even our thoughts and reflections and speculations, even those of mine, are only dim reflections of reflections (hey, ‘reflections of reflections’ is funny) and are not real? May it not be that when the seven or seventy or seven hundred years are over with we will be jammed into tram-cars and sped away to a big prop warehouse until the real people want to go on another meditation and will bring us out and set us in their places again?”

But Cinderella was a pleasant ambivalent person who could entertain her husband's main-interest-in-life questions as well as her own; and now she commented on Shamus's last speculation.

“One thing that I bet God doesn't do is do work that has already been done, devise things that have already been devised through not knowing just what has already been done. Oh, I read all your notebooks, Shamus, so I know what you're thinking about. I read all your correspondence, even your correspondence with Pandora Riviera (‘You have no right to read my correspondence with Pandora,’ you say, and I answer you ‘You have no right to have a correspondence with Pandora.’) I run brain-scans on you at night (you were wondering this morning what made the sore spots on your head; it's the brain-prods that I use that make the sore spots, honey); and moreover you talk in your sleep. I am becoming quite interested in these questions myself, but when you waste time in areas that have already been covered, then you waste my time too. I suggest that you set up an Institute to see just what other people have discovered in these fields. There is a caution here, of course. Institutes are the human equivalents of computers, and all computers are atheists or at least agnostics, which is to say that they are narrow-minded. It can't be helped. You are the only one of the ten-richest-persons-in-the-world who doesn't have an Institute of his own. How will you ever have your own Universe if you don't first have your own Institute to keep you informed on the state of your quest?”

So Shamus Eagnach set up an Institute to correlate all known information on a certain group of questions. And by definition, Cinderella's definition, his Institute would be somewhat narrow-minded.

Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense… Modern minor poets are naturalists, and talk about the bush or the brook; but the singers of the old epics and fables were supernaturalists, and talked about the gods of brook and bush.

 — G. K. Chesterton

Nothing is gained by picturing God as jealously hiding from his creatures the innermost structure of his creation, indeed, a worthier conception of a Supreme Being should imply that no ultimate boundary should be set to the knowledge of beings to whom an infinite desire for knowledge has been given. The existence of an absolute ignorabimus would form an exceedingly vexing problem to the philosophical mind. It would be a great step forward in philosophy if the burden of this bewildering problem could be thrown off.

 — Unanswerable Questions,

Moreitz Schlick

“Oh, the reports from your new Institute are most interesting,” said Pandora Riviera the second wife of Shamus Eagnach. “Oh certainly I read all the reports from your Institute before you read them, Shamus, and I read all your notebooks and correspondence, even your correspondence with Anima Rubicunda Mannerly. (‘You have no right to read my correspondence with Anima Rubicunda,’ you say, and I answer you ‘You have no right to have a correspondence with Anima Rubicunda.’) The straight stuff that the Institute has dug up for you is pretty bland, but I love the things that the Institute despises, the material that it classifies as ‘Dogs’, as ‘Shaggy Dogs’, and as ‘The Ultimate in Shaggy Dogs’.”

Yes, Shamus Eagnach was married to Pandora Riviera now. The death of his first wife Cinderella Scholtz had had a sad touch to it as well as a comic touch; and Shamus was sure that Cinderella sometimes laughed at the irony of it now that she was dwelling with the blessed.

“What must I do to convince you that you should put ‘Bremmer Safety-Close Doors’ on all your Hot Dog Tram-Cars?” Cinderella had asked once and she had asked him a thousand times. Ah well, ultimately she did what she had to do to convince him, but it was an accident and she hadn't intended it to happen. And after Cinderella's mangling death from one of the Non-Bremmer Non-Safety-Close Doors of one of the Hot Dog Tram-Cars, Shamus did put genuine Bremmer Safety-Close Doors on all the cars. He had liked Cinderella a lot, but he didn't especially miss her now two days later. Pandora was so much like Cinderella that the transition was almost automatic.

Shamus took an item from the pile of material classified ‘The Ultimate in Shaggy Dogs’ that Pandora indicated to him. It quacked when he picked it up, for some wag at the Institute had attached the quacker from a toy duck to it. “Ah, it is not a shaggy dog at all,” Shamus mused to himself. “It is a shaggy duck. So much the better.”

“It is not too late for you to be God!” the items shouted in loud print. And then the text of the quackery went on: “Anybody can be God, yes, anybody. And I can show you how. ‘But will God play King of the Mountain?’ you ask. ‘Will he cut off our hands and our heads when we reach for it?’ Probably not. I did not react that way when I was God, and I do not believe that the present (the solving of the real meaning of the word ‘present’ leads to other solutions) that the present monarch will react in such a manner either.

“It only evades the issue to say ‘God is already God. He had the job sewed up’. The God who is already God, who already has the job sewed up, can well be you. ‘Time’ is nothing so narrow as a straight line, and ‘happening’ is not so shallow as to offer no alternatives to itself. Every point in time can be both the beginning and the end of time, can both precede and succeed all things else whatsoever. Every point in space can contain both all space and all time. The answer to the Mystery of Matter (why should there even be so cumbersome a thing as matter? Why did the Word have to be made Flesh? Was not the Making of Matter rather a cheap, and also difficult, trick for a Spirit to indulge in?) the answer to this contains the answer to the question ‘How Did God Get to be God?’. Every thought can contain omnipotence and omniscience and omnipresence and omnicaritas. Be that thought, be that word, be that God! ‘How does one get to be God?’ you may have asked yourself. And the answer is that one gets to be God by sending for my lessons ‘How to be God’. I myself was God for nine aeons, and now I wish to aid my fellow men in sharing this wonderful experience. Order today. Make checks out to ‘The Man Who Used to be God, Box 10,000 (the Number of the Larger Millennium), Los Angeles’.” Shamus sent for the lessons without informing his Institute that he was doing so. The lessons didn't teach him how to be God, but they did put him on the track of other literature that ultimately answered the question for him.

The Institute did come up with the information that there were about a hundred thousand groups in the world (the groups averaged about a hundred persons each) devoted to finding answers to the same group of questions that Shamus Eagnach himself had been trying to answer. One hundred thousand times one hundred persons is only a drop in the bucket of the world, but it did make Shamus feel a little less alone.

“Oh, when will somebody drop that first shoe?” the wife of Shamus was asking. “There is an old joke about somebody waiting for the second shoe to drop. Oh, that's nothing like waiting for the first one. If somebody doesn't drop it today I may have to do it myself. Oh, by the way, Shamus, there are complaints of obviously dead people racing along our lines and even crossing our lines in defiance of light-speed laws. Some of our regular customers don't like it. ‘Why should the dead get to ride?’ they ask. ‘Let them walk like they always did.’ The destination of these wild tram-cars is ‘To the Turpentine Groves, or Else’, but we have no such destination listed.”

Shamus and his wife lived in a simple five-level penthouse atop the Happy Hot Dog World-Wide Rapid Transit Tramway System Tower, and theirs was a happy home. Their penthouse was, from a recent notion of Shamus, always filled with the sound of harp music now. This pleased him so much that today he had the same harping sounds built into all the tram-cars for the joy of the riders. The Hot Dog Trams had always been happy trams, and now they would be even happier.

So Shamus grew in knowledge of the ultimate things, and he grew in confidence that someday soon, maybe even today, he'd have the ultimate answers.

“Well, the Institute has picked up the sound of the first shoe dropping,” Anima Rubicunda Mannerly, the third wife of Shamus Eagnach, said, “and it certainly is a thumping cobble of folk mythology. By the way, Shamus, there are sizeable checks being received from the ‘Turpentine Groves Rapid Transit Tramways’ for the use of our right-of-ways, but we show no leasing arrangement with any such company. Well, as I always say, ‘Checks are checks however much tainted’.”

“And what about that first shoe, Anima Rubicunda?”

“I just told you, they've dropped it. You weren't listening.”

Yes, Shamus Eagnach was now married to Anima Rubicunda Mannerly. She was of that Jungian archetype known as the Reeking Red Soul, also known as the Strawberry Blonde, which Jung himself considered to be frightful beyond compare but which many people like to look at and have around the house. The death of the second wife of Shamus, Pandora Riviera, had had a poignant touch to it as well as an amusing touch, and Shamus was sure that Pandora (she had been dead for nearly two days now) often smiled about it as she bode with the blessed.

“What must I do to convince you that you should put ‘Override Push Buttons’ on all the controls that are designated ‘Positively No Override’?” Pandora had asked him once, and she had asked him a thousand times. And after Pandora's mangling death while trying to push an Override Push Button that wasn't there Shamus did put the Override Push Buttons in all the tram-cars that used the ‘Positively No Override’ controls. Shamus had liked Pandora a lot, but he didn't especially miss her two days later. Anima Rubicunda was so much like Pandora that the transition had been almost automatic.

“What did the first shoe consist of, modified light of my life?” Shamus asked Anima Rubicunda now.

“Oh, the folkloric sort of information that the answers to your ultimate questions do exist, that they are written out boldly in a book that anybody may order, that one may read the answers to the questions and understand them and be delighted with them. And then one dies immediately in the fullness of that delight. This detail has bugged some people away from reading the answers in the book, but it seems fair enough to me. Since the only ones who will learn of the books and find the answers are those who have devoted their lives to searching for those answers, it is only just that their lives should end when their life's purpose has been fulfilled.”

“Well, let's get the book then, Anima,” Shamus said.

“I've got it. Here it is. It cost me fifty thousand dollars, and you can pay me back now if you wish. I have read it. I understand it and am delighted. Do thou likewise.”

Anima Rubicunda didn't look dead. Shamus took a fifty thousand dollar bill from his billfold and paid her. Then he examined the book.

“It's written in Ladino or Sephardic,” he said.

“My husband, I'd always assumed that you were educated,” Anima Ruby said. “If not, then it's all over with us. Don't you know Sephardic? Can't you read it?”

“I don't know. I never tried it. I know Old Spanish, of course, and I know Hebrew. I'll just go and take a half-hour lesson in Sephardic from a Sephardic expert I know. Then I'll come back and read the book.”

“I'll not wait for you. I'll go ahead and get things ready for the trip. Oh Shamus, what if your first wife Cinderella was right? What if we are only token people? Will we have only a token God then?”

“I'm not sure. Maybe the real God is ‘Father of Gods and Men and Computers, and of Token People also.’ Where are we going?”

“Oh, you may come to understand that after you read the book.”

“What's that thing on the sofa there? It looks rather like a manikin made to resemble you.”

“Yes, something like that. I'll see you in the tram.”

Shamus went and took a half-hour lesson in Sephardic, a language that is Old Spanish written in Hebrew characters and used yet by some of the Jews of Istanbul, a city that is the ‘Los Angeles of the Near East’ when it comes to quackery. Then he came back and read the book. He found all the ultimate answers in it, plainly written out. He understood the answers and was delighted with them. And he didn't feel at all dead. The name of the book that gave the answers and the delight was ‘The Terebinth Groves of Mamre’. ‘Terebinto’ was the word in Sephardic as it is in Spanish.

“Oh, that's wonderful!” Shamus cried out. “The Terebinth tree is only the Turpentine Bush, a runty little tree at best; and the reputation of turpentine as a cure-all for diseases is much diminished in modern times. And yet I believe, as did our ancestors, as I know now with my new illumination, that turpentine is the smell of life itself. ‘In the Turpentine Trees’ was one of the places where the ‘Father of Gods and Men and Computers and Maybe of Token People Also’ made pleasant and open promises which he would keep. It's one of the places, like ‘A Lodge in a Garden of Cucumbers’, or ‘A Habitation of Dragons and a Court of Owls’ that sing out of the old Bible and are a delight even to imagine. Ah, there's a manikin intended to represent me, sitting on the floor beside the sofa on which reposes the manikin of my wife Anima Ruby. And my dummy holds the hand of Anima's dummy in its own. Anima must have arranged them so before she left, that beloved comic. Oh, I feel wonderful. I have never been so far from death in my life. And now for a trip, in a tramway, I believe.”

Shamus descended from his five-level penthouse into the Happy Hot Dog World-Wide Rapid Transit System Tower below it. “It will be given me at this moment to know which tram to take,” he said, and then he knew that he had spotted the right one. It had the most amazing device on it, the device that would permit it to go in two opposite directions at the same time. Shamus himself had worked unsuccessfully on this device for twelve years, but somebody had worked it out perfectly. “How has this been done on a tram-car and I have not done it?” he asked himself.

The classification card on the tram-car read Fourth Class Cargo – Seven Day Wonders. This card was placed askew and the previous card could still be read: Third Class Cargo – Turpentine. Shamus entered the special tram-car.

I will not serve.

 — Lucifer

If we be not people yet

When will the people come?

And every morning falls the dew

In seven years it's gone.

 — Nero

There was an incredible number of persons in the tram-car, and yet it was not crowded.

“How can this be?” Shamus Eagnach asked, neither to himself nor yet out loud, for the distinctions between such sorts of utterances had now disappeared. “How can there be such a number of persons here, and it not crowded? It has to be crowded, and it isn't. Bodies take up room. Ah, that's it. We are not here in our bodies. My own body was left beside that of my third wife Anima Ruby in our penthouse and I thought that they were manikins. Well, I'll say this, I feel more alive in death that I ever felt in my life. And there are three persons I know both wisely and well. I am fortunate in my wives. Ah there, Anima Ruby, how many of the sizeable checks were received from the Turpentine Groves Rapid Transit Tramways?”

“About three million of them, Shamus, and that was just for half a day. I believe they must have used some sort of preternatural cars to transport the dead people, or made them walk, before our cars became sophisticated enough for them to use. This makes us the richest people in the world, with what we already had. Well, it's something to be the richest people in the world even if we're no longer in it. The piped-in harp music must have gotten their business for us.”

The three wives of Shamus were sitting at a club-car table with a deck of Glory Cards before them. “Come take a hand and pass an aeon with us,” the first wife of Shamus, Cinderella, spoke, and she winked. And Shamus sat with them.

“Tell me one thing,” he began, “if you know it — ”

“Certainly we know it, whatever it is,” the wife Pandora Riviera said with that lilt that was her vocal signature. “This is the particular judgment going on right now, and at the particular judgment people are given all knowledge of particulars. If we are only token people, as Cinderella here thinks might be the case, then this is the token particular judgment and we are given such knowledge of particulars as applies to token persons. Oh, you with your tram-way mind are wondering who worked out the device to permit this car to go in two opposite directions at the same time, the device on which you worked unsuccessfully for twelve years. We told God about it, that you had worked on it for twelve years. ‘I bet I can work it out in twelve minutes,’ he said. He did, but just barely.”

“When did he work it out in just twelve minutes?” Shamus asked.

“It was either seven thousand or seven billion years ago,” said Anima Ruby the third wife. “Your clay is not quite cold yet, Shamus, so the full illumination is a bit tardy coming to you. But you'll have it all soon. We are now in the state of re-entrant time and re-entrant space, and re-entrant size, and re-entrant persons, and re-entrant cause-and-effect, the state that makes becoming a God possible. When re-entrant size prevails, a brain that is normally no more than 2000 ccs in bulk may well be many light years across, especially when it has become an immaterial brain. When re-entrant time prevails, there are aeons upon aeons available. When re-entrant personhood prevails, everybody becomes potentially divine. In this vale of tears and chuckles here below, ulp, there below, most of us were truly only token or mustard-seed persons with only token or mustard-seed minds: but each mustard-seed mind may expand to a billion powers of a billion and become a spacious tree full of birds. Where re-entrant creation prevails, creation can happen both before anything else has happened and after everything else has happened. I see that it is coming to you now, Shamus, and wave after wave of illumination is washing over you.”

Shamus and his three wives played a four-handed game with the Glory Cards. There are six hundred and sixty-six cards in a pack of Glory Cards. All are unnumbered face cards, and each has its special powers. Only illuminated persons are brainy enough to play with such cards.

Strange feelings did come to Shamus then in the crowding waves of illumination. There were headaches whose radii had to be measured in billions of parsecs. There were responsibilities hard enough to rend a million skies. Talk about mind-stretching! There was a mind being stretched clear around the universes hundreds of times every second. There was a cosmic juggling act going on that required the juggler to be all-knowing and all-powerful and all-just and all-present and all-loving. Did you ever try to be all-loving and all-just at the same time even for an instant? There was a mind, and it impinged on every mind in the tram-car, and perhaps in the whole universe, that had to mark the fall of every sparrow, that had to check out the health of every mite on every sparrow, and the tonic health of every microbe on every mite, and this on many billions of worlds, not just on one. There was a mind that had to know and nourish every subatomic particle everywhere, and there were many orders of such particles much smaller than are generally known about. Well, every mind is as much the center of the cognitional universe as every other mind, and in the quirks of time and person and development one of them may outgrow (may already have outgrown) all the others. This most stretched of minds may be your own, and you just have not noticed it yet.

“It's fun though, for everybody except the work-horse,” Shamus said. “What, what, are there some persons in this tram-car who don't find it fun? Why not, why not? Oh, oh, it's my amazing device that permits the tram to go in two opposite directions at the same time, my own amazing device that I'd have invented if God hadn't beaten me to it. We are not all going in the same direction on this tram, I see, and we are not all going in delight. Some of us are already in Heaven and some of us already in Hell, to use the old vulgar names of the places, and yet we're all riding in the same tram-car until the harvest. But this is the harvest. I can hear the whetted scythes cutting the wheat and the tares, the sheep and the goats together. And how will they separate them after they're mown? I'd better pay attention and see.

“What is it that those glum and angry ‘other sorts of persons’ are saying, what is it that the undelighted persons among us are muttering? ‘We will not serve, we will not serve,’ they mutter over and over again. I hope it does not come to me either, but I'd be afraid to say out loud that I reject it. Some of those undelighted ones must be the cream of the crop to have it offered to them. Ah, I see now that not every person could make it as God, but perhaps one in every billion could, and there are a handful of billions in this tram-car. What, have all refused it?”

That was an interval of either five aeons or five seconds. When time is re-entrant, those intervals are about the same. And still there hasn't been a traffic in the highest position of all. Those who lack the scope for it are not asked, and those spacious ones who might possibly do it have all refused it in gloom and anger and fear.

And what is it that several wrathy persons who may perhaps be outside of the tram-car are grumbling?

“Well, dammit,” the wrathy persons are grumbling, “get with it! On with the continuity and go easy on the side-jabber. If you know it, tell it! What is the answer? How did God get to be God?”

Oh, he got to be God by default.

And now he has to be God until either seven or seven billion years have passed, or until he can find another person who will still want to be God after he has become illuminated and informed about the whole situation.

He hasn't found him yet.

Bird-Master

There was a Cheyenne sub-chief named Whistling Elk. There was also an animal, or a ghost-animal, in the mythology of several tribes, the Cheyennes, the Sioux, the Osages, and the Comanches. There is something spooky about this Whistling Elk in the legends, for real elks do not whistle. The Whistling Elk is an apparition, a ghost, a messenger of death. He is also the one who gives the birds the signal to migrate. They would not know when to mill and fly away, and they would perish of the cold and hunger, if the Elk didn't give them the signal. The Whistling Elk is sometimes associated with the Bird-Master, who is variously known as the ‘shape-changer’ and the ‘cloud-shaper’.

The Whistling Elk is also a death omen. When he whistles, the temperature immediately drops thirty degrees: this is the ‘blue norther’, but it is really the coldness of death. Many human persons die in the night after the Elk whistles. The birds devour the souls of the persons who die on this night, and the food helps to sustain the birds on their migration.

Legends of the Country Between the Cross-Timbers and the Shining-Mountains, Harry Fire-Island

The Bird-Master has two sets of bones, his winter bones and his summer bones. When he has left one set of bones, then he can fly like a bird, or like the boneless spirit that he had become. It is by this trick that he migrates with the birds, leaving his summer bones in North America and winging off to inhabit his winter bones in Brazil. The Bird-Master can manufacture illusions (illusions because they deceive the eye, and yet are material), configurations that are made up of insects and birds in their thousands and even millions, the Shaggy Giant, the Ravening Bear, the Dead-but-Walking King, all of them mountain high.

The Bird-Master believes that he makes and manipulates the whole world and everything that is in it out of the configurations of birds and bugs. Alternately he believes that he dreams the whole world. ‘The Mummers’ are the enemies of the Bird-Master. He is not sure whether he makes them or not, whether he dreams them or not, or whether they are independent of him. Like Wathigthoncici Kika, the Osage Solomon, the Bird-Master understands bird-talk.

The usual appearance of the shape-changing Bird-Master is that of a human boy about ten years old. Sometimes he sits on the edge of a cloud with a fishing pole, and he dangles his line and hook down to lower clouds. If somebody asks him what he is doing he says that he is fishing. And he does catch very many fish.

Further Legends of the Country Between the Cross-Timbers and the Shining-Mountains, Harry Fire-Island

It was Oliver Hampton who brought tatters of Guy Fawkes Day from England to the middle-plains Indians of North America. He established the Bloody Red Mummers with both Indian and White Man lodges. Every November Fifth a lodge would hang, draw, and then burn like a torch either a real man or an effigy man. If it was a real man, they ate the entrails they drew from him and called it ‘eating the soul’. If it was an effigy man, they chewed the straw and the corn-husks that they drew from the body. In later decades, the Mummers say that they never heard of Guy Fawkes Day and that November Fifth is Bird Migration Day. This is the big day of the year that they celebrate.

British Explorers in Midland North America, George Saffron

It was the loudest and most fearful shout that I ever heard in my life. It shook the ground and rattled the trees and set me to trembling. I am somewhat given to uneasiness and apprehensions anyhow.

I am constantly surrounded by human persons; and humans are cold, calculating, nerveless, unflappable, easy in their minds, and they hardly know the meaning of apprehension. But I am a machine, so I am nervous and apprehensive and worrisome and often despondent. For one thing, I have recently received a very weak signal, the detecting of which was one of the things for which I was manufactured. For another thing, I am very much worried about my good friend the Bird-Master. The Bird-Master was a rather slow-witted and likeable young man generally believed to be of the human species. But a change has taken place in him within the last two days. I can feel powers and cross-powers all around him, and he speaks of ‘marshaling my nations’. And then this huge shout comes like raw salt rubbed into my worries (that is a human proverb).

Valery Mok and myself (I am Epiktistes the Ktistec Machine) were walking in the weed-patch to the north of the Institute for Impure Science in the very early morning when the Shaggy Giant made his first appearance in our immediate neighborhood. He made it to the accompaniment of brilliant but unconvincing lightning and thunder.

“That is the phoniest lightning I ever saw,” Valery declared, “and the fellow himself reeks of pigeons. Moreover, he's unsubstantial. And yet he's impressive. I wonder why he is?”

The reason for the giant being impressive to me is partly embodied in certain words contained in one of those books that were inserted into my memory-bank when I was manufactured. It is the old Modern Library edition of Gargantua and Pantagruel, and the introduction, by Donald Douglas, contains the words and image: “No doubt you are inclined to feel at home in a fiction where men exchange the small mean gossip of the common day and no giant ever darkens the length of Main Street with the shadow of his big toe.”

But in the present case, the shadow of the Giant's big toe (the giant was barefooted; all authentic giants are always barefooted) did darken our own place in the weed-patch in the early morning light. The big toe was a hundred feet above us and was about the size of six elephants. The Shaggy Giant had his left foot raised as if he would stamp us to death. He was impressive because he was big and he was threatening. And yet he had a furlong-long comic grin on his face high above us, and he was of an unsubstantial and unreal appearance, and he really did reek of pigeons and of other birds. The morning light was tricky, and the jagged lightning was — 

But suddenly a big hand (only God has a hand that big; it must have been his) came out of the higher sky and caught the Shaggy Giant up by the nape of his neck and shook him.

“Lemme go, lemme go!” the giant called out in a very un-giant-like voice. The thunder had gone out of the voice, and it was the voice of someone we knew. Then the dangling giant himself turned into somebody we knew, the Bird-Master. “Lemme go, Aloysius, lemme go!” he begged.

Then Aloysius Shiplap, Member of the Institute, came from the ridge into the wide area of the weed-patches. He was lugging by the nape of his neck the no-more-than-life-sized Bird-Master in his most usual appearance of a boy about ten years old. The Bird-Master in the sky seemed to grow flimsier, and the Bird-Master in the hand of Aloysius seemed to grow more substantial.

“Scatter it, Bird-Master, scatter the image,” Aloysius Shiplap ordered with iron in his voice.

“No, no, Aloysius, lemme go! I was having fun. I was scaring Valery and Epikt with a giant.”

“Scatter it,” Aloysius ordered again, and the image in the sky (erstwhile the Shaggy Giant and later the Bird-Master) scattered. It broke up into clouds of birds and insects and bugs, and then into smaller and smaller clouds. Then, with a final sigh of large and small wings beating in the receding distance, the material illusion was gone.

“Is there always a preponderance of pigeons?” Aloysius asked.

“No. Only when I make a Shaggy Giant,” the Bird-Master said. “When I do the Ravening Bear I use mostly ducks and geese. When I do the Ghost of the Dead Leader I use a lot of shrikes and sea-terns. When I will do the Valery Mok mock-up that I am planning I will use mostly larks mixed with saber-billed butcher birds.”

Aloysius Shiplap let the Bird-Master go then, and all four of us had a good laugh about it.

The Bird-Master is a good friend of mine, probably because neither of us is entirely human. Well, the Bird-Master looked human much of the time; and several of my own mobile extensions are as human-looking as artifice can make them. But I am a Ktistec Machine. And many persons have doubts about the Bird-Master's humanity.

“There is something wrong with that boy they call the Bird-Master,” our Institute Director Gregory Smirnov said just the other day. “He's been a boy around here for more than a hundred years (for more than three hundred years if we're to believe the happy-tongued Pawnee Indians). He should have grown into a man in that much time. It's unnatural for him to remain a boy so long.”

“There's something wrong with that boy they call the Bird-Master,” said Glasser of the Institute. “Anyone who maintains two sets of bones, one of them in a cave in that hill yonder, and the other set in Brazil, goes beyond being merely odd. Yes, I know that he explains that he chews a lot of slippery elm and this makes his bones easier to slip out of, but that explanation won't stand up at all.”

“There is something wrong with that boy they call the Bird-Master,” said Cogsworth of the Institute. “Not only can he understand bird-talk, but (though he's no more than a middle-grade moron) he can understand every sort of talk. He talks Armenian with Bob Askandanian and Arabic with George Bozarth. He talks Cantonese with Mary ‘China Doll’ Ming, and he talks Mexican with the Mexicans and Osage with the old Osages. But in every case the people say that the Bird-Master talks a very low-class version of their language. There is something wrong with that boy. And why does he remain only ten years old no matter how many years go by?” I can answer that last part myself. He remains only ten years old because nobody older than ten can understand bird-talk. But that gives an idea of the objections that some people bring against the Bird-Master, and all of these people are his friends.

“There is something wrong with that boy they call the Bird-Master,” Aloysius Shiplap of the Institute added to the indictment. “He draws pictures in a drawing tablet. He works with many erasures until he gets pretty much what he wants. Then he postures a bit and comes to look like what he has drawn. And then he whistles a tune or chants some gibberish, and the thing he has drawn in the tablet, the thing he has come to look like himself, appears in the sky made out of clouds that are made out of marshaled birds and insects and even buggier bugs. The things he makes in the sky seem to be alive and vocal, and yet they show all the defects of his drawings.”

Oh sure, knowledgeable people and machines, such as ourselves at the Institute, recognize that his apparitions are made out of birds and insects; but where do the birds and insects get their intelligence to assemble in such astonishing order. The Bird-Master is a sculptor of clouds and of convincing pseudo-persons and pseudo-animals-of-mechanisms (he can do a two-toned Ford Imperial Runaround perfectly, and set it to bumping over convincing bumps in the sky). But all these things are made up of living pieces, birds, bats, insects, and non-insectuous bugs. And all of them, in their thousands and millions, are regimented together to make a convincing image from whatever angle it is seen.

When the Bird-Master does the Ghost of Gaetano Balbo (the Bird-Master calls it The Ghost of the Dead Leader) he does it complete with monocle. And seven mansard-locusts must combine their diaphanous wings to make the glass for that monocle. How does he discipline things as flighty (there is a sort of pun there, though Gregory says it is unseemly for machines to make puns), how does he discipline things as flighty as are mansard-locusts?

And Gregory says that we can only understand the Bird-Master by studying both his short-term and his long-term cycles: and he says that I haven't been around long enough to study any except the B-M's very short-term cycles. (I'm only a kid by either human or machine standards; I have not yet completed the second year of my life.)

Yesterday I sat with the Bird-Master on a cloud-bank and we fished together in a cloud below us. Several of my own mobile extensions can be airborne, and I had selected the Old Time Brave Aviator in Goggles and Boots. And the Bird-Master seems to get up into the air pretty much whenever he wants to. To me the Bird-Master has always been Huck Finn, one of the ninety-nine personalized human archetypes that were set into my classification system at my beginning. He is freckled, his hair is between tow-colored and red, he grins, and he snaps his blue eyes back and forth. He looks like a scarecrow that is indwelt by a cornfield-sprite. He is the freckled color of straw and corn-husks, and his eyes are like blue corn-flowers bobbling on short stems. He is almost always barefooted, but yesterday he was wearing a pair of bird-feather shoes. A man saw him wearing a pair of such shoes once and wanted to know whether Bird-Master could have many such pairs of shoes manufactured if the price was right. Bird-Master took the matter up with the birds, and they told him that they would not make shoes for anybody except himself. They were gift shoes for him to wear on the nine chilly days that come before the bird-migration, they said.

It was while we were hooking and pulling speckled carp out of a pond in a hollow in a cloud that the Bird-Master told me that he had a fear of falling, and that all the birds had it too. “Heck, Epikt,” he said, “that's the way that most birds die, by losing their nerve and crashing to the earth. It takes a lot of nerve to fly. Airy-dynamics and stuff like that don't do it; nerve is what does it. Birds live dangerously, and so do I. That's what I like about chumming with the birds. Say, Epikt, I'm going away with the birds late tomorrow, I think. Look in at my summer bones now and then while I'm gone. They'll be in the same place they were last year.”

“I have seen your summer bones after you've slipped them off,” I said, “but I still don't believe in them. There's something wrong with the whole business.”

“You're the guy whose main brain fills more than twenty big rooms in the Institute building,” Huck Finn Bird-Master grinned the words at me, “and whenever you go out for an hour you ask yourself ‘How many brains had I better put into this extension of myself for this little jaunt?’, and you find something wrong with as slippery a kid as I am slipping out of his bones for a little while, or for half a year? Where is your sense of proportion, Epikt?”

“Bird-Master,” I said to him, “you have told me that the Whistling Elk gives the signal for the birds to fly south. But there are no elks in Brazil. Who gives them the signal to fly north again in the springtime?”

“The Whistling Tapir,” he grins. Nobody can throw a fast answer at you with a slower drawl than can the Bird-Master.

Last winter (the first winter of my life) I found the Bird-Master's summer bones in a little cave in a nearby hill. They were guarded by a badger named Anthony, and they were sometimes savaged by a wolverine named Gulo. The Wolverine Gulo was also the Devil Gulo who sometimes came out of the animal body and prowled around the neighborhood seeking whom he might seduce. There were terrible animal fights between the badger and the wolverine, and people came and watched them fight and bet money on them. But nobody except myself found the Bird-Master's bones in that little cave. Nobody else could have gone in there, and I had to make a very slim mobile extension of myself to do it.

Crows brought sticks of wood up to us as we sat there on the cloud-bank. And the Bird-Master laid them to build a fire. Then a Thieving Magpie (Pica nuttali) brought us a cigarette lighter that he had stolen and kept in his nest. So we lit a fire. The Bird-Master pulled out a frying pan that he kept in a fold in the cloud there, and we had a fish fry.

The Elk appeared on the moors below, right on the edge of our weed-patch. He looked like a painted elk. An elk painted by a good artist is as noble an animal as there is in the world, but a run-of-the-moors elk is unkempt and blear-eyed and grubby, and a loud-mouth. But this elk was noble, and there was something puzzling about his size down below there. He stood up taller than the tall trees around him, but I had the feeling that if he were in a growth of toadstools he would stand up only about as high proportionally above them as he stood above the trees. The Elk made noises.

“Is that the Elk whistling?” I asked the Bird-Master.

“No. He is only blaring now. He will test all the sixteen winds, and then he will test them again. And then, in a couple of hours or days, when he is satisfied with the conditions, he will give the whistle. And the night after he gives the whistle, several persons in the neighborhood will die; and the birds will eat the souls of the persons who have died to gain strength for the migration. And sometime on the following day (probably tomorrow) the birds will rise and begin to turn in mills and turmoils, the geese and ducks flying the highest in the mills, then the swifts and swallows just below them, then the crows and hawks and eagles, then the shrikes and larks, and all the other birds lower than these. Then they will all peel off from the rotating mills and fly south in their formations according to their species. And I will fly with them.”

“How will you fly with the birds, Bird-Master? You got all out of breath just flying up to these clouds.”

“Heck, Epikt, when I slip out of my bones I can fly with the swiftest birds and never get out of breath.”

Then, late in the afternoon yesterday, the Elk did whistle. And during the night that followed (last night) several people died in the neighborhood.

Notae Diurnae, November 5, Of The Second Year Of My Life, Epiktistes the Ktistec Machine

Cautio de Notis Diurnis of Epikt. Dammit, Mechanismus, you were programmed to be a speculating machine among other things. You were made to be very strong on the ‘what if?’ imagination caper. But you must keep a grasp on reality. You have written notes into the Institution Journal about things that did not really happen, things like sitting on a cloud-bank and fishing with the Bird-Master. Cool it, kid, cool it.

Gregory Smirnov, Director of the Institute for Impure Science

O du Kindermund, O du Kinderworte,

Unbewusster Weisheit froh,

Vogelsprachekund, Vogelsprachekund

Wie Solomo!

Oh you childhood-mouth, oh you childhood-words,

What a lore unknown you spun,

Understanding birds, understanding birds

Like Solomon!

Aus der Jugendzeit, Friedrich Rukert

But after the age of ten, the Vogelsprachekund is lost.

There are four stages of living things, cells, individuals, bodies, and corporations; and these four things are really only about two. A bird may be an individual most of the time, but at migration time it becomes only one cell in a Corporation of Birds. A cell has its intelligence all through it; a body or an individual has its intelligence in a specific part of it, the brain; a corporation has to have corporation intelligence, but it is sometimes a puzzle where that intelligence resides. With a Corporation of Birds, the directing intelligence may be an alien particle, possibly a bird-brained human (a human or a quasi-human who has peculiar rapport with birds). Murderous hatred may sometimes be raised against such a quasi-human, but something seems always to save the bird-brains from the wrath.

 — Fugue in Straw and Red, Robert Ritzrot

I am now putting a few notes of my own into the Journal of the Institute, before things come to their bloody or flaming climax. We may likely see the end of the phenomenon known as the Bird-Master today. There is barely time now, before he is gone, to answer the question whether he ever was here at all. And indeed he has never had a very strong texture of reality.

I am Valery, the only person around here entitled to spell ‘I’ with a capital I, member of the Institute and outgoing person. I knew this morning that something wrong had happened when the Bird-Master tried to distract us with the largest of his apparitions, the Shaggy Giant. Besides countless insects, there were hundreds of thousands, and maybe millions (including all too many pigeons) of birds involved in the Giant, and there was a fearful expenditure of bird-energy. But the birds are getting ready to migrate anyhow, and they are very prodigal of their energy at such times.

I tried to interview the Bird-Master after the Shaggy Giant Manifestation (which was broken up by Aloysius Shiplap) and before the Ghost-of-Gaetano-Balbo Construction.

Myself: It is said that you are more than a hundred years old, Bird-Master. Do you know how old you are or when you were born?

B-M: I am less than one day old. I was born again today, or maybe it was yesterday. A new spirit has entered into me and taken control of me. It's an evil spirit, Valery. Rotten, real rotten.

Myself: What is the spirit's name?

B-M: Gulo. Yes, it is the Devil who has been prowling around the Institute for a long while, and it is also the Devil who has been living in the wolverine who is now named Gulo also. This inhabiting Devil has a bad effect on that animal. I always say there is nothing wrong with a wolverine except bad manners and bad breath when it is not inhabited by a devil. But when it is inhabited by a devil, which is most of the time, it is a mighty rotten actor. And now I've become Gulo himself. I hate myself when I'm completely rotten.

Myself: Seven persons in the neighborhood died last night, Bird-Master. Five of them died in their beds, apparently from natural causes. But out on the moors last night, an eight-year-old boy was smashed to death by a body blow, and folks say that the legendary Whistling Elk did it. And a four-year-old girl was torn to pieces, and folks say that the wolverine did it.

B-M: No, you have it exactly backwards. The boy was smashed by an automobile which several young drunken gentlemen were driving around on the moor in that dark. And the girl was killed by house-dogs of the neighborhood that run loose at night. But the five persons who died of apparent natural causes in their beds, they really died of unnatural causes, Miss Valery. And then the birds ate their souls to gain strength from them for their migration. They couldn't migrate otherwise. It's the law of nature, but I wish it wasn't.

Myself: Why can I see through you, Bird-Master?

B-M: Because I'm so underweight that there isn't much substance to me. I weigh only one kilogram or two-and-a-quarter pounds, whichever is less. That's not enough for a ten-year-old boy to weigh, not even a ten-year-old boy who was born only today.

Myself: Why are some people not able to see you at all?

B-M: Because some people have very poor eye-sight.

At that point the Bird-Master broke off our dialog and began to sing:

‘Be he alive or be he dead,

We'll spill his blood, Oh red red red!’

And he began to conjure up the Ghost of Gaetano Balbo. Or he began to marshal the birds and bugs into forming themselves into that ghostly masquerade. At that point also, the Bloody Red Mummers came and began to get loud and ugly and murderous.

Notae Diurnae, November 5, of the Second Year of the Life of Epikt and the Twenty-Ninth Year of My Own Life, Valery Mok

Being a person of remarkably sound, and untrammeled, mind, I may be the right person to chronicle this episode. I am Diogenes Pontifex, scientist and sybarite. I am not (because of the ‘minimal decency rule’) a member of the Institute; but I have the run of the place, and I contribute most of the better items to the Journal.

This afternoon, November 5th, the Bloody Red Mummers came to cause a tumult. The air had been full of the smoke and reek of burning straw and leaves and stubble. The reek had somehow the smell of burning flesh in it, like Ancient Sacrifice. It blotted out the sky and it turned the sun red. The rotating ‘mills’ or towers of excited birds had their high tops hidden in the eye-stinging haze. It was quite chilly all day (when the Elk had whistled last evening, the temperature had dropped thirty degrees instantly), and the weather wouldn't warm up again till the birds were gone.

The Bloody Red Mummers were excited, and the birds were very excited with anticipation of their voyage through the high air. They chattered and howled and screamed in all their dialects, and the most strident of them all was the Magpie. The excited magpies always sound, with their shrieking croaks, as if they were in the throes of death. Nobody except the Bird-Master could understand all these railing dialects of the birds. But where was the Bird-Master?

Only an Archon-Ochlos, a Mob-Master could have understood all the jabbering of the Bloody Red Mummers. The Mummers are a very social club. They had a band and a string-band.  On any other day of the year, they were capable of making real, if a bit deformed, music. But on November 5, their album contains only ‘Chantey to Hang a Man By’, ‘Rag to Draw-and-Quarter a Man By’, ‘Aria to Burn a Man Alive By’ and ‘Motet to Eat the Soul of a Man By’. It was randy, raunchy music. Most of the Mummers had bikers' goggles clipped to their belts.

The mystery of the smell of burning flesh was solved by the discovery of the barbecue. (This same mystery was solved by this same discovery every year.) The barbecue was so big and so near that it had gone unnoticed. The carcass turning on the giant spit was neither of the cattle nor the swine species. It weighed at least a thousand pounds, and it was either a horse or an elk. Some years, when the Mummers were not able to shoot an elk, they would substitute an old horse. In either case, the carcass would be that of the Whistling Elk, to fulfill the ritual.

A thousand pounds, and there were about two hundred of the Bloody Red Mummers. They'd eat plentifully if not well. And they'd drink plentifully. They had a hundred gallon barrel of ‘Poor John's Corn-King Corn Whisky’, a back-country whisky one of whose slogans was ‘A sound whisky to skin a mule by’.

The Dog-Fight was always an advertised attraction for the Fall Festival of the Bloody Red Mummers, but I can remember no year in which more than one of the fighters was a dog. This year, neither of them was. It was a battle-to-the-death between the badger named Anthony and the wolverine named Gulo. For those who liked such things, this was a fight that would be remembered for many years.

“Go to the cave you know in the little hill just behind the ravening beasts and see whether the Bird-Master's summer bones are there already,” I told Epikt the handy thinking-and-speculating machine. He went like the wind, and like the wind he returned. “The outlines of his bones are starting to form there,” he said. “He doesn't slip out of them as easy as he says he does. They will grow in the cave and diminish in himself for the several hours he is in travail over them. Several of the bones look as if they were broken though, and several of them look as if they were charred. But where is the Bird-Master himself?”

The Mummers had seven scarecrows and they would play Mummers Roulette with them. The scenario was that six of them were real scarecrows (without life, or animated only by a Maisfeldgeist or Corn-Field-Sprite that had moved into them to live), but the seventh one was to be a living man. And how long could a living man hide among the scarecrows to avoid hanging, and what were the odds?

There was a Slippery Elm Tree there with seven branches. Each branch had a block-and-pulley lashed to it; each pulley had a line running through it with a noose on one end of each line. Each noose had, or soon would have, a neck in it, of one of the scarecrows or of the living man. And standing near was an iron fire-box mounted on a four-wheeled wagon to which were hitched four mules. The fire was so hot that the smell of mule sweat and scorched mule hair was heavy.

The noise of the towering, wheeling birds was near deafening, washing over the whole countryside in cascades of sound. But a man with canny ears could hear the ducks and geese already pealing off the top of that mill and sliding south in their V-formation with their high altitude barking.

Oh, Oh, one scarecrow had living and frightened eyes in him. And another, and another. It was one scarecrow and seven living men, not one living man and seven scarecrows. Somebody said that the Mummers' initiation rite was always on November Fifth, and that the candidates for initiation were always so-noosed. And if one of them was hanged instead of the scarecrow, why there would be only five instead of six new Mummers that year.

Oh no, Oh no, there were six noosed men, and the seventh of them, playing the role of a scarecrow, was the Bird-Master. He looked more scarecrowish than any of them, but he was the Bird-Master. And the Bird-Master was going to be hanged by the Bloody Red Mummers, hanged and drawn and burned to ashes. Why were not the members of the Institute doing something about this? Because six strong Mummers had been assigned to hold each Institute member, Gregory Smirnov, Valery Mok, Aloysius Shiplap, Cogsworth, Glasser. Well, five of them to hold each member, and a sixth to hold a knock-out tranquility needle at ready for each of them if needed.

There was ritual and rampage, and finally there was the “Heave Ho!” cry coming from two hundred Mummer throats. And six crews simulated the horrifying heave, and the seventh crew heaved indeed, and jerked the Bird-Master eight feet into the air. Mummers then went up on ladder arrangements and opened him up and pulled the stuffings out of him — but was it real entrails, or was it only cornhusks and straw that came out?

That screaming, that screaming, it will haunt me forever! Only two things in the world have such a scream, the Magpie when it is excited to overflowing, and a man when he is dying by hanging and is opened up and emptied out. Then the mules pulled the fire-box under the dangling body to consume it.

And then the shrikes came savagely out of the milling towers of birds; they beset the Mummers and began to tear out their eyes. They blinded about a dozen of them before the fellows got their bikers' goggles on.

“Epikt, go look again at the bones,” I said, “and have a look at the badger and the wolverine.” Epikt the Ktistec Machine went.

The ashes that had been the Bird-Master fell from the tree. Only a short end of still-burning rope dangled down. I raked through the ashes (the Mummers were too busy warding off the shrikes to pay attention to me). There seemed to be nothing solid in the ashes. Yes there was. There were two blue eyes, the Bird-Master's eyes. And there was a grin; but what the material element of that grin might be was a mystery. The Bird-Master winked at me. Yes, with a lidless eye he winked at me. Then there was a ‘whoosh!’, and he was gone out of the ashes. He was away!

I will never cease to be amazed at the variety of creatures in our world, especially such one-of-a-kind creatures as the Bird-Master.

Epikt returned. “It's funny,” he said. “The bones were smoking and broken when I got to them, and then they suddenly healed. A Mynah bird walked into the cave and said ‘New bones for old, hahr, hahr, new bones for old.’ Then the Mynah bird walked out again. And the badger seems to have whipped the wolverine, though they're both pretty much torn up.”

Ah well, so am I pretty much torn up. But I'll recover. And I'll see the Bird-Master again on March 19th when he usually comes back with the birds.

Notae Diurnae, Diogenes Pontifex, Familiar but not a Member of the Institute for Impure Science (because of the minimal decency rule)

‘The hour of absinthe is over.’

 — G. K. Chesterton

The Bird-Master is also the name of a straw-man scarecrow who is hanged by the neck from a tree and then set on fire, a sort of atonement ceremony that I do not fully understand. But the straw-man (or some spirit in him) does sometimes cry out when he is set on fire. Reputable witnesses have testified to this.

‘Appendix B’ to Further Legends of the Country Between the Cross-Timbers and the Shining-Mountains, Harry Fire-Island

Flaming-Arrow

Peter Flaming-Arrow from Kara Cove was in trouble with the men and masters of half-a-dozen trade-guilds. His own trade was that of a fletcher, one who feathers arrows.

“But a fletcher may fletch anything,” Peter argued. “Not only can he put feathers or wings on arrows, but he can also put them on wagons or boats or himself.”

“No, he cannot put feathers or wings on wagons,” said the wainwrights or wagon-carpenters. “If there is a reason to put feathers or wings on wagons, that would pertain to our trade and not to his.”

“No, he cannot put feathers or wings on boats,” said the boatbuilders. “If there were a reason to put wings or feathers on boats, that would pertain to our trade and not to his. Indeed, the sails that we do put on boats are wings, if you will forgive us our metaphors. Beyond that, the boats that this Flaming-Arrow man does build are illegal and defective, for they have no bottoms in them.”

“It's true that the boats which I build have no bottoms,” Peter admitted, “and it is for this reason that I claim that they are not boats and they are not illegal. They are arrows, though not in the regular arrow-form. And where I intend to sail them or shoot them they will not need any bottoms in them.”

“No, Peter Flaming-Arrow may not put wings or feathers on himself,” the magicians said. “If there were reason or possibility for putting feathers or wings on human persons, that would pertain to our magic trade.”

“What I am working with is not magic and does not pertain to the magicians' trade,” Peter Flaming-Arrow insisted. “What I am working with is the arithmetic of flame and air; rather simple arithmetic, rather simple flame, rather complex air.” Well, Peter irritated people when he talked in that complex and airy way of his.

“This man Flaming-Arrow has no right to deal in flame at all,” said the candlemakers, the lamplighters, the fire-swallowers, and the weapons-makers (Greek fire division). “He has failed in his apprenticeship in all of the flame trades and he has no business with fire at all.”

“Oh, stuff it, the whole bunch of you!” Peter always cried out, but he laughed when he cried out such things. Peter was as pleasant a person as you would ever meet, and it was possibly for that reason that he remained unhanged. Indeed, it was pointed out that he'd been born with the red mark of the hanging noose around his neck and that he had it yet. And it was argued with passion that one who was born with such a red mark around his neck would unfailingly end up on the end of a rope. Peter Flaming-Arrow, however, was one great red mark all over. His complexion was a ruddy-red flame color entirely, as was his hair, and even the pupils of his eyes. People could just barely see the redder mark around his neck even after it was pointed out to them. Well, it was there whether they could discern it from the rest of him or not. If he hadn't been such a laughing and friendly fellow, this would have been held against him even more than was the case. A barefaced young man himself, as well as a wrestler that none of them would tangle with, he mocked all the beard-wearing and mustache-wearing men as cowards who hid their true faces behind their whiskers. Since the great majority of the men did so hide their faces, and as Peter Flaming-Arrow said other abrasive things as well, there was sharp resentment against this arrow man. It was even said that he was not so barefaced as he seemed, that he wore a red mask at all times, and that his true face was otherwise.

Peter Flaming-Arrow also tangled with the scribes, the antiquarians, the astrologers (meteorological division), the fortune-tellers (bird-entrail division), the bards, the priests, the herbalists (psychedelic and hallucinatory herbs division); he tangled with them all on the question of conflict of occupations and trades.

“A man should be able to fletch feathers onto arrow shafts without meddling in a dozen other trades,” some people argued with fair logic. (Other toes that Peter Flaming-Arrow stepped on were those of members of the logicians' guild.)

For a man who generated so much goodwill because of his laughing and pleasant personality, Peter Flaming-Arrow also generated a lot of ill will by overstepping the narrow bounds of his trade and tongue. The good and the ill tendencies slid past each other with much friction, and a resolution of forces began to develop.

“What Peter Flaming-Arrow is generating is a cyclone,” several persons of the weather predicters' guild remarked ponderously. “That is what is generated when things of contrary tendencies come together and become entangled.”

“No, I am no cyclone man,” Peter always argued. “What I will really generate by these antipathies is updrafts. Oh, how I love to ride on updrafts!”

In that particular year (the annalists refer to it as the “Year of the Black-Footed Flying Fox,” but that name has not yet received popular acceptance), Peter Flaming-Arrow of Kara Cove came to the great fair at Ithkar as he usually did in odd-numbered years. He did not come by the main trade road, not by any of the minor trade roads; nor did he come by either the East River or the Bear River. He came up the Ith River from the sea or from somewhere very near the sea. (Nobody knew where Kara Cove, which Peter said that he came from, was to be found.)

Well, many persons came up the Ith River from the sea, and then used the canal to come into the Harbor of Ithkar itself. But Peter Flaming-Arrow (in his boat that had no bottom) came up the Ith River all the way. He did not use the canal bypass for the last part of his voyage. There is some dispute about how he did this, and in a boat without a bottom. His own explanation, that he did it by the “arithmetic of flame and air,” did not seem a sufficient explanation to all the people.

At night, when rich people get together, they talk about their conspicuous acquisitions and their conspicuous consumptions. There is a lot of fun to be had in talking about these shining things.

(Various sorts of peoples do get together almost to excess at night at the great Fair at Ithkar.)

At night, when the ruling people get together, they talk about the machinations by which they rule. No, the rich people and the ruling people are not the same. A rich ruler would be like a fat athlete. Though both are common, both are bunglers. Rulers are no good when they carry the load of property. Ruling for the love of ruling is the thing.

When the people of the Floating Island are together at night, they talk about the arts and the magics, about the exciting angers and the blood-spillings, about the novelties and the ever-more novelties, and about the concupiscence of the flesh. The talk of the Floating Island is always quite fleshy. And people of this floating middle-world, more than others, need novelties and excitements.

When poor people gather together at night, they often talk about the ultimate things, about the philosophies and the strange things of the world, and also about the skies and the sky-dwellers. This is because the poor people (more than other people, and especially at the great Fair at Ithkar) sleep under the open sky and so are reminded of the ultimate things and the sky things. Other people sleep under various roofs and so are reminded of their own varieties of things.

Peter Flaming-Arrow was a poor person (in odd-numbered years at least), so he slept under the open sky and talked about sky matters with his poor peers. Also in the group were two poor magicians. This in itself was interesting, for most magicians are not poor.

The name of one of the poor magicians was Draoi (you may pronounce this name as “Dree,” if you wish to be correct). And the name of the other poor magician was Asarlaí. Draoi had one striking trick, striking to all except other magicians, at least. He would disappear of a sudden, and in his place there would be a talking crow. “Draoi is gone for a moment,” the crow would croak. “Whatever you may wish to say, say it to me. I am his familiar.” But some people thought that the crow was more than Draoi's familiar. They thought that the crow was Draoi himself.

“The reason that I am poor is that I once made an enviable deal,” Draoi said now. “The deal was that I should be totally rich for one year and then poor for the rest of my life. It happened so, and it's been worth it. I was not merely totally rich: for that one year, I owned the world and everything and everybody in it. I was the all-powerful Midas of the universe. That was the ‘Year of the Golden Plover.’ It was only seven years ago, but now it has been dropped out of the total of the years. People even affect not to remember the year. Aye, but they do remember that wonderful year in their underminds!”

“I remember it, Draoi,” said one muddle-faced poor man there. “Seven years ago, yes, that was the year when I was totally poor. Oh, how totally! I pawned everything I owned. And then I had to pawn my skin itself. I had to take it off too, and leave it hanging on a peg in the pawnbroker's shop. It may have been a wonderful year for you, but it wasn't for me. It may have been worth it for you. It wasn't worth it for me.”

“As I think about things and lie on my back and look up at the flinty stars, I'm convinced that there are two skies,” Draoi said now. “One is the low sky, which is a fraud. The other is the high sky, which is genuine. There is a Little Bear in the low sky and a Big Bear in the high sky. There is a Little Draco (Dragon) in the low sky and a Great Dragon in the high sky. There is a false Cross in the low sky and a true Cross in the high sky. These two crosses are in the southern skies below the tropics. I sailed there in my youth.

“And there are, no more than a mile over our heads, the Three Lordly Ones. These, though they are in league with the secret rulers of Ithkar and the whole world as well, are grubby fakes and servants of Thotharn. They are (usually but not always) one man, one woman, and one skrat or hermaphrodite. They are the false Three on the Floating Island in the low sky.

“But high above them are the true Three, they who made the worlds, they who live in the true sky. Such are my night thoughts in these rocky hills above the great Fair at Ithkar, where even now the shills are playing that ‘Come in. Come into the Tents’ music on their flutes and penny-whistles, and will be playing it all night long.”

“Be careful,” a poor woman said. “The very stones here have ears.”

“I'll not be careful.” Draoi chuckled. “I have not a care in the world, nor ever shall have again. I know that the stones have ears. And yet, by their stony nature, they're hard of hearing, if you'll permit me a poor man's joke.”

“Draoi, you speak like the Seven Seekers, who came here and talked like that,” said a poor man who had a lively way about him. “They also spoke about the Three in the high sky. And now those Seven Seekers lie rotting in the swamp, each of them with a sharpened cross driven through his chest.”

“Yes, that's always a hazard for those who indulge in speculations.” Draoi smiled in the starlit dark.

A meadow mouse came to Peter Flaming-Arrow, climbed up on the stone that Peter was using for a pillow, and seemed to whisper something into Peter's ear. Then the mouse ran into Peter's breast pocket and was seen no more for a while.

“Simplicity is good,” said the other poor magician who was named Asarlaí. “Complexity is often good. But between them is the doubleness that is sometimes called duality and sometimes duplicity. It isn't good. The Floating Island in the low sky isn't good, nor are the three low-sky people who live upon it. Yes, you hard-of-hearing stones, I said it. And I know that you have mouths as well as ears. Inform on me, stones, if you will. And when you have done so, I will still be a man, and you will still be stones.”

Asarlaí was a poor magician who carried around with him gold coins equal to his own body weight. Whenever he attempted to spend one of the coins, the coin would whistle and then shout: “Shopkeeper, know that I have been stolen from Hudspeth the Horrible, the man who is vengeance itself. Accept me in payment only if you wish to die today.”

So shop people would not accept the gold coins from Asarlaí, nor would anybody else, even though they had no idea who the horrible Hudspeth the Horrible might be. Magicians often play such irreversible tricks on each other. Moreover, Asarlaí was under a compulsion to carry the heavy gold coins with him wherever he went. But this kept him strong and healthy. He was a happy man. And many of the other magicians were not.

“I also believe that there is a false lower sky and a true higher sky,” Asarlaí continued. “The Floating Island in the low sky is the key to the falseness. And I also believe that the Three who live on the Floating Island, they who are called ‘the Three Lordly Ones’ and other such praiseful names, are servants of Thotharn and in league with our own anonymous rulers. My own personal familiar creature is this high-flying kite-bird here. I send him up to spy on the Floating Island, and he goes. But when he comes back from up there he is always in a daze, and he mumbles, ‘My lips are sealed, my lips are sealed.’ Dammit, kites do not have lips as such.”

“My lips are sealed, my lips are sealed,” the totemic kite-bird now spoke in imitation of Asarlaí's imitation of him. And then the kite winked, as could easily be seen in the starlight. He was a good-natured bird, but perhaps not intelligent enough to be a good familiar to a magician.

“Oh, I'll go up there in the morning and find out just what the Floating Island is and who lives on it,” Peter Flaming-Arrow said. “If the updrafts are right, I can fly higher than this kite-bird. And the false powers of the low sky will only be able to seal my lips with real fire, with hot fire to be remembered.”

“Peter Flaming-Arrow, before you go skylarking in the morning, know you that there are three of us magicians here present now,” Draoi said. “Three of us can effect a covenant between you and the mouse in your breast pocket. And you do need a covenanted familiar.”

“I see only two magicians, you and Asarlaí,” Peter Flaming-Arrow said.

“There is a third one present who will not identify himself. But he will be the third one in our effecting, and we can effect the covenant.”

“Perhaps the mouse and I already have our private covenant.”

“Yes, you two do have a private covenant, Peter; but it has not been magicked. We can magic it for you. It will make a difference.”

“Magic it for us, then,” Peter Flaming-Arrow cried.

Then the three magicians, Draoi and Asarlaí and one other, confirmed by magic that the mouse (it stuck its head out of the breast pocket of Peter Flaming-Arrow and assented to the pact) was now a covenanted familiar of Peter Flaming-Arrow, who could ride on updrafts in the boat without a bottom.

At night, when the secret ruling people are together, they talk about the machinations by which they rule. They plot and conspire; without such interests, ruling would hardly be worth carrying on. This night, the first night of the great Fair at Ithkar for the Year of the Black-Footed Flying Fox, some of them, from Ithkar and also from the outlands, were together in a plush house on a hill above the fair.

“The main expense of our wireless system is the wires for it,” one of the secret rulers was giving an account. “Copper hammerers do not hammer out fine wire for nothing. And we need the wire-wound kick-coils to talk by wireless with our eye and thunder-base in the low sky. We should invent a cheaper way to do it, but at the same time we must not let our inventiveness spread to the people. We saw an example of unauthorized inventiveness on the day just past.”

“You mean the inventiveness of Peter Flaming-Arrow, I suppose,” said another of the cryptic and anonymous rulers. “Well, his laughable boat-without-a-bottom did rise out of the water and waft itself in the air for some distance above the river Ith. And by that device, this Peter came into the Harbor of Ithkar from the Ith River without using the canal. It was a small thing, I suppose, and the onlookers were undecided as to whether they should be amazed at what they had seen or whether they should forget that they had seen it. About half of them did the one thing and half of them the other. Well, he is only a fletcher who puts feathers or wings on arrowshafts. And this time he fletched wings onto a light boat and flew it briefly. But we have to have an explanation, or at least a name for it.”

“Skull, tell us the name for it,” another of the covert rulers said to a futuristic skull on the table there.

“The name of it is ‘glider,’ ” the skull said. “And the additional trade of Peter Flaming-Arrow is named ‘glider pilot.’ The light and broad fletches or wings on the light boat will let it raise itself on updrafts of air, and will let it slide along on level air, also.”

“We understand how the bird-mockery of a boat works,” said another of the rulers (if you didn't know them, you could hardly tell these purposely inconspicuous rulers apart), “but we are a little bit dubious as to how the mind of Peter Flaming-Arrow works. How is it fletched?”

The futuristic skull on the table had been dug out of a future stratum of earth that in clear truth had not been laid down yet. This suspect stratum was in the Improbability Hills not far from the Galzar Pass north of Ithkar. This skull that had been dug out of future time would answer simple questions out of its future-based knowledge. But the ruling persons had learned not to expect great things from this skull. The skull had not been (or rather, it should be said that the skull would not be) the skull of a genius.

“Suppose that the magnetic motor, that toy devised by the cooper (copper-cask division) John Slackwit, should be combined with the ‘glider’ of Peter Flaming-Arrow?” one of the rulers asked the skull. “What would the result be?”

“The result would be a flying boat capable of flying anywhere in the low sky at will,” the skull said.

“We have too many fakeries stabled in that low sky to have persons meddling around there. And yet we have the interceptor's angle on Peter Flaming-Arrow and on anything he might try to do. If he thirsts, he will have to come down to our spring and drink. What we need now is some creative destruction. We will make Peter Flaming-Arrow fulfill his own name and legend. Indeed, it is time that we gave another legend to the people, and here is one almost ready-made. What do you call that new device of the armorer Jasper Shortlegs, skull?”

“Rifle is the name of it. It's a crude, handmade rifle, too heavy by ten times, and it fires the messiest incendiary shots that I've ever seen. It should be cleaned up or else done away with. It isn't made for stylish shooting.”

“We will use it one time, skull. And then we will do away with the messy flame-shot thing. And with Jasper Shortlegs, also, and with John Slackwit, and most of all we will do away with Peter Flaming-Arrow. Skull, we are not greatly impressed by you even though you were dug out of the future. In all honesty, are you greatly impressed with us?”

“I'm impressed by your irrationality. It's beyond anything I ever met with in my own time. I'm impressed by your illogic. And above all (or should I say ‘below all’?), I'm impressed by your reeking magic, your cloying magic, your suffocating magic. I don't know where you got it, unless from Thotharn.”

“How odd that you believe in Thotharn in the future when we've left off believing in him in this present.”

“You don't believe in him? I thought you used him,” the skull said.

“Certainly we use him. And now that we know him so well, now that we have him on our own payroll, we find him the least believable creature anywhere. What little bit we get from him is hardly worth getting. Not only that, but we find him the least impressive creature anywhere, except maybe yourself, manless skull.”

Then all the rulers who were present pronounced a ritual:

“Indeed, the people are becoming like us in their knowing. Lest perhaps then — ” The ends of the sentences were never verbalized by the rulers; they were only thought. And after a short pause they pronounced the first part of another verse of the ritual:

“This is the beginning of what they would do. Hereafter they could not be restrained from anything which they determined to do. Let us go, then, and thereby confuse — ”

So the secret rulers of Ithkar, and of other places, also, conspired how they would confuse their ruled ones with shot and fire and legend.

“In the middle of life, every lightning man, every arrow man, must be wrapped in the dismal clouds of death, and he must die that death. But if he is a true lightning man, a true arrow man, then the limit of his death will be seven years. When the mouse shall trumpet with the voice of thunder on the mountain, then you will know that the lightning man has wakened from his death.”

 — The Book of Jasher

“The mouse must not go with you, Peter Flaming-Arrow,” said the poor magician Draoi the next morning. “The mouse must remain here. The mouse must be you here until you come back again. The mouse will be you, but to the eyes and ears of the people he will still be a mouse.”

“Yes, all right,” said Peter Flaming-Arrow.

“Yes, all right,” said the totemic mouse familiar. And it came out of Peter's breast pocket and found itself a safe nook in the rocks.

Then Peter Flaming-Arrow was almost ready to begin his morning flight. He had tested the winds and currents and drafts, and they were right. He lacked only two new long feathers. In reality, the feathers played a very minor role in fletching his boat-without-a-bottom. But he was a trained fletcher and he retained his fletcher's superstitions on the necessity of two new feathers on any new enterprise, and about the luckiness of the feathers of the coppertone eagle.

Peter Flaming-Arrow whistled a coppertone eagle down from the low sky. All competent fletchers are able to whistle birds down to them. He killed the eagle. He took the longest feather from each of its wings and added them to the wings of his flying boat. Then he tore the bird apart with strong and canny hands and spread out its entrails for the fortuning of himself.

“The entrails indicate that I will die this morning unless I forego my flight,” Peter Flaming-Arrow spoke with great shock. “This is intolerable to me, that I should die in my flaming youth. It is also intolerable that I should give up my sky flight. I was born in vain if I give up the flight now, just when I have brought it to possibility. I must think about this, and I ask that you magicians think about it, also.”

“Maybe there are compensations for dying, Peter Flaming-Arrow,” the poor magician Draoi said without a lot of hope.

“Oh, the dead clearly have knowledge of things that we are ignorant of,” Peter agreed. “But when one encants up dead men and questions them, they answer with such great sorrow and agony as to make it seem that, for all the special knowledge that they have, they've got the worst of the bargain. What I want is the best of both worlds.”

“The eagle entrails indicate that you'll die only in a special way,” the poor magician Asarlaí said with a little flicker of hope. “But they do not indicate wherein your death will be special.”

“Do it, Peter Flaming-Arrow,” the dead coppertone eagle suddenly spoke in his harsh eagle voice. “You'll have my two greatest feathers with you. They know the way up the tall and tipsy air. Do it, Peter Flaming-Arrow.”

“After all, I'll be you, and I'll still be here,” the mouse said thoughtfully. “And the time for you to fly is right now. The warm fetid air from the swamp (I was a swamp mouse before I was a meadow mouse) is now blowing as strong as it ever blows in the mornings. But try to die some place where I can come to you easily.”

“Thank you, my friend, my mouse, my covenanted familiar, my self,” Peter Flaming-Arrow spoke. Then he gathered his light boat-without-a-bottom about him and ran down the slope toward the cliff edge. The warm swamp wind was at his back, and the cool wind from the ocean was almost in his face. He ran past the edge of the cliff, and then he went up instead of down. The warm swamp wind overrode the cool ocean wind, and Peter rode the bucking updraft as if it were a stallion.

Now he did the things that he had been born to do. He was cousin to the little heading winds and brother to the updrafts. The fabric-bark-feather lifting fletches of his light boat were like extensions of his own skin. And the rudder was his legs, which dangled and flailed and tipped and guided his boat. None except a bottomless boat could have been so guided by him.

The early sky was overflowing with sunshine that spilled down and drenched the air and the earth below with leaping light. There were only two or three skimpy clouds in the sky, and Peter Flaming-Arrow didn't know which one of them was the Floating Island.

“Speak to me with morning thunder so I'll know you,” Peter called his cheerful greeting upward. And one of the clouds did speak with a curious bronze-throated thunder that was the special mark of the Floating Island. No other thunder had ever been like it. It wasn't overpowering, it wasn't great, it wasn't even extremely loud, though it tried to be. It was only unmistakable. Peter rose and wafted and steered to the cloud of the thunder signature, knowing that it was the Floating Island.

Oh, it wasn't large, half an acre in area maybe, and not more than ten cubits thick, a thin rough floating disc made out of air-filled and cloud-colored tufa-rock. But how did it float?

“The masters of the Floating Island are my masters at the arithmetic of flame and air,” Peter Flaming-Arrow said happily. “Here we have real magic, and yet magic is only the advanced form of the arithmetic of flame and air.”

He wafted and soared a bit above the Floating Island. Then he landed in the middle of it. He stepped out of his boat and was confronted by the Three Lordly Ones, and a talking post, and behind them a little gibbet or gallows for hanging people on. And behind the gibbet were three great sheets of green bronze hanging from stanchions, and three ponderous hammers with which to beat the characteristic thunder out of the bronze sheets. That is what a thunder machine consists of. It is almost the most simple machine anywhere.

“The goof has landed,” one of the Sky Lords said to the talking post. The Sky Lord was a rough-looking sort of man.

“Hang him, then,” said the talking post. “You can be sure that he has the prophetic red mark of the noose around his neck, for you can plainly see that his whole body is one ruddy red mark. Hang him, and be sure that you break his neck.”

“Aye, we'll hang him, and then we'll cruise with him through the buzzard sky until his bones are stripped. And then we'll put his bones with the others.”

Peter Flaming-Arrow noticed that there were six skeletons on the tufa-rocks behind the gallows. “Six of them,” Peter said in wonder. “Six persons have been here before me and have died here. Did they all use the same device I use, or did they use six different devices?”

“Yes, six of them,” one of the other Sky Lords said to Peter, “and you'll be the seventh. It's always good luck to be the seventh of anything.”

“Somehow you three don't seem like the Three Lordly Ones,” Peter said uneasily.

“Oh, we're the alternate team,” one of them told him. “We're up here only one week in the month when we let the first team take a rest from it all. They're more lordly and noble than we are, but we can do what needs to be done. The only thing that ever needs to be done is to hang persons who've become too inquisitive about the thunder and the bullhorn.”

But the talking post was protesting something:

“No, no,” the talking post said. “Hang him and break his neck. But what pieces the buzzards get of him they'll have to get on the fly. When he is properly hanged and broken, then put him back into his funny boat and push it off the island. His will be a flaming fall.”

“Yes, all right,” the third of the false Sky Lords said to the post. He was the roughest-looking of the three. But Peter Flaming-Arrow was fascinated by the talking post.

“I can figure it out!” he cried. “I can discern how it's done. It has those copper coils in tune with copper coils on the earth below. And the voice of the post comes from down below. Give me an hour and I can figure it out in every detail.”

“Not an hour, not even a minute,” one of the false noble and very earthly Sky Lords said. They put the noose around Peter's neck right where the red mark on his neck indicated it. They hanged him on the gallows, and they made sure that his neck was broken.

“Six sets of bones on the rocks behind me there,” Peter Flaming-Arrow said. “Six persons have been here before me on this Floating Island in the low sky and all have failed, even as I am failing, to balk the mystery and rectify the deception. Six sets of bones I see behind me there, but if they are behind me, then I am not seeing them with my proper eyes. I am dead and I'm seeing them with my death eyes.”

Then the three false Sky Lords put Peter Flaming-Arrow back into his funny fletched boat and pushed it off the sky island. It started down toward earth at an easy glide.

“Seven long years,” said the covenanted mouse familiar as he again studied the entrails of the dead coppertone eagle. “Well, I can't let myself get mouse-hearted over this,” he said. “I'll shorten the time if I can, and I'll spend every free moment in careful planning. I'll not fail us! Most of all I must practice my thunder voice. That will be the hardest of all. But will I ever have a voice again? When they hanged the other me, they hanged myself, also. When they broke his neck, they sympathetically broke my neck, too. Oh, woe. Oh, rue!”

The crowds below the Floating Island, on the sunshiny second morning of the great fair, had already been alerted by the bronze-throated thunder from above. Now as they looked up they saw that funny, floppy boat leave the sky island at an easy glide. This was between the stormy petrel sky and the firebird sky.

Then the crowds gasped as they saw the little gliding boat burst into flame to the accompaniment of a series of barking roars from a plush house on the hill.

The handmade rifle of the armorer Jasper Shortlegs was a powerful one, for it took three men to hold it. And it had a device more futuristic than the futuristic skull in that plush house on the hill. By this device, the rifle would hit anything espied through its sights. The shots had no trajectory. They were as straight as light itself. And the incendiary shots that the rifle fired were the hottest things this side of the east meadows of hell. They hit the funny boat in the low sky and they hit the funny arrow man in it. And the flaming arrow man hit another coppertone eagle as it flew by. And then there was a conflagration overhead as bright as ten suns. And bullhorn voices amplified from the Floating Island belabored the point for persons who might not understand.

“I saw a demon fall like lightning!” came the amplified bullhorn voice from the low sky in what was supposed to be an imitation of the voice of the Lord of the universe Himself. The people shuddered to hear this, and they said to each other:

“That pleasant and gifted funny man Peter Flaming-Arrow was a demon, and now he is falling to the doom that was prepared for him. So it is seen that all who question the Three Lordly Ones are evil and will come to an equally fiery end.”

Again the amplified bullhorn voice spoke in bronze thunder from the low sky, prophetically in futuristic verse:

From morn to noon he fell,

From noon to dewy eve,

A summer's day, and with the setting sun,

Dropt from the zenith like a falling star.

And all the people at the fair groaned at this, partly in compassion for the man burning in the low sky, and partly from the great heat that blistered them all.

Oh, the strong odor of heroic flesh roasting in the middle of the low sky!

Oh, the inexorable logic of the arithmetic of flame and air!

Oh, the strange earth-and-sky road from Kara Cove to Bleak Mountain!

Actually the wobbling, flaming fall of Peter Flaming-Arrow lasted no more than eleven minutes and covered no more than twenty miles. Then he crashed in the swamp east of Ithkar. Quick rumor said that the final ashes of him and his boat came to rest on a low mountain named Bleak Mountain in the middle of the swamp. And so Peter Flaming-Arrow was dead — 

 — except for a flickering ember of him in the brain and body of the covenanted mouse familiar, for the mouse and the man were one. A thing is not dead when any last ember of it is still alive. The mouse had suffered the pains of the damned while the man burned, but its resolve was strengthened in that fire.

It was six weeks before the mouse recovered its reason. And then it set itself to do what had to be done.

“I know from studying the entrails of the second coppertone eagle (the one that was split apart by the lightning man) that it will be seven years before there is a summer dry enough to allow me to come to Bleak Mountain in the middle of the swamp,” the mouse recited to itself. “But in seven years I will be there. And I will wake up the other half of me, the man half of me, if I am able to do it. I will prepare myself for it. The world has not seen the end of this arrow man, nor of this arrow mouse.”

The mouse pored over dusty tomes in obscure bookrooms when there were no persons there, to acquire the necessary knowledge. The mouse exercised his voice morning and evening in the open places, the meadows, the rocky wastes, the swamps. He has caught the tone of the thunder already. He does it well. All that is needed now is that he strengthen his voice a hundredfold or a thousandfold. He is working on it, he is working on it.

“When the mouse shall trumpet with the voice of thunder on the mountain, then you will know that the lightning man has wakened from his death,” — so it is written in The Book of Jasher.

The mouse is working on it, he is working on it.

Junkyard Thoughts

The wealth in keep of junkyard mutt

More rich than tomb of young King Tut!

“When did you last see your cousin, Jack?” that relentless police person Drumhead Joe Kress asked Jack Cass the pawn broker and junkyard operator in Polder Street. “And do not tell me again that you have no cousin. Surely I am not the only one who has noticed the resemblance in you two. I almost have the feeling that he's here right now, hidden somehow, and looking at me with those hard blue eyes of his, those snake eyes.”

“Nah, I ain't got any cousin, Joe,” Jack Cass said in his always rough voice. “No cousin have I. Only a few hundred nephews, for a pawn broker is ‘uncle’ to a good number of hard-time folks. And there's one of them at my junkyard gate right now. I'll see what he wants. No, Drumhead Joe, that man you talk about is too elegant to ever be a customer of mine.” Jack Cass went out into his junkyard, and the police person Drumhead Joe Cress availed himself of the chance to do a pretty good shakedown of the pawn shop. And he talked to himself while he did it.

“This cram-full place always seems much larger on the inside than on the outside,” he explained to himself. “And so, for that matter, does its proprietor Jack Cass. There's thousands of unlikely items in both of them. But there's no nook here big enough to hide an elegant man with hard blue eyes. Why do I sense him here then? Ah, the ledger, what does it tell me? Jack hasn't had a particularly busy two hours since that elegant swindler disappeared from his town house on High Street. In fact, he hasn't made a ledger entry all day. Ah, the cheque book. Jack hasn't written a cheque for three days. He does most of his business in cash. Ah, Junkyard, you're monitoring me, are you?” Junkyard was a large brown dog who always came into the pawn shop to keep an eye on things when Jack Cass the proprietor had to be out. But Junkyard knew that Drumhead Joe had the run of the place.

“And the crate full of unpaid bills. Why doesn't he pay them?” Drumhead went on. “He always has a healthy bank balance: and I've verified several times that the bank really has the balance that Jack carries in his book. He could pay all these bills without making much of a dent in his account. Maybe he just has fun making people wait for their money. But the cheques themselves are pure folk art, as is the man himself.”

The personalized cheques of Jack Cass featured his homely mug with its gap-toothed grin and its bald knob, and below that was a picture of a long-eared jackass. The jackass on the cheques had the same gap-toothed grin as had the man. At the bottoms of the cheques were the words “Operator of the Imperial Pawn Palace and of the Jackass Junkyard”.

The police person Drumhead Joe Kress had known Jack Cass for a dozen years, back when Joe was a foot cop and this was his beat, back when Joe was a detective on the bunko squad, and now when Drumhead Joe Kress was Captain Kress on the trail of some of the smoothest and most elegant swindlers and criminals to be found anywhere.

Jack Cass was routinely arrested a dozen times a year, but only for the minor and routine fencing of stolen goods. He always accepted the warrants and searches and arrests in good humour, and in between times he paid the quite modest bribes to stay in business. He always said that all his premises were open to the gentlemen of the law, any time, day or night.

Well, homely Jack Cass was a pleasant person, low-class with his gap-toothed grin and his bull neck and his too-rough too-loud voice. He was the genuine All-American Slob. He drank beer at the Plugged Nickel Bar and Grill and also at Duffey's Tavern. He minded his own business, and that of everybody else that might yield him a profit.

He knew his own neighbourhood in every detail and person. And now he came back into his Imperial Pawn Palace again.

“Find anything, Drumhead Joe?” he asked. “Find anything of your elegant swindler with his hard blue eyes?”

“Only his smell, Jack, only his smell. But somehow it's here strong.”

“You know better than that, Drumhead. That man is too elegant to have any smell at all.”

“Sit down, Jack,” the police person Drumhead said. “You and I are going to have a probing talk.”

“Not unless there's a chess board between us. I don't want it to be a complete waste of time.” So Jack Cass set up the board and the pieces on the top of an old nail keg. And the men sat in two Queen Anne chairs that Jack Cass had got for three dollars each and were worth three hundred dollars each. The dog Junkyard pushed up a three legged stool and sat on it. Drumhead Joe opened the game with the Brodsky Gambit. And there is no quick answer to that gambit.

“J. Palmer has hit it big this time, Jack,” Drumhead Joe said. “And he has skipped without a trace. He does that every several years, of course. But this time he really made monkeys out of all of us. And he killed two men along the way, and he's usually too fastidious to do a thing like that. We were onto him in advance. We had every sort of tip-off. We even knew his seat number on the plane to Rio. We watched him duck into his elegant town house, and we listened on his phone-tap to his call for a taxi-dray to pick up himself and his sixteen pieces of luggage. Then we followed him in to his town house. The front door wasn't locked. It was even left ajar.

“ ‘Ah, it is the bumbling police persons,’ he heard the elegant voice of J. Palmer from the next room. ‘I was expecting you, of course, and it is always a pleasure to see you. But today I fear that the pleasure must be foreshortened. I have a journey scheduled.’

“Jack, I could feel the magnetism of that man across that big front hall. And it scared me. It always scares me. I feel that he's the giant (though always elegant) snake, and I'm the shivering ground bird, and he's about to swallow me. Does the prospect of facing him affect you that way, Jack?”

“Drumhead, I tell you honestly that I have never faced him, either in prospect or in actuality. I tell you honestly that I have never seen his face. But go on with your story. It was getting interesting.”

“Yes, quite interesting, Jack, especially the way it cuts off so sharp. For three men of my party went into that next room while I quaked. And J. Palmer Cass wasn't in that room. He wasn't in the town house at all. And there was no way he could have got out of it.”

“Maybe he got out through the cellar?”

“Jack, there are two cellars to that town house, and we had two men in each of them and were in radio contact with them. No, he didn't get out through the cellars. And someone had every part of the house in view all the time.”

Jack Cass was about to make a chess move, but the dog Junkyard put out a paw to stop him. Jack whispered to the dog, and the dog shook his head “no”. Jack whispered to the dog again, and again the dog shook his head “no”. Jack whispered to the dog for the third time, and the dog nodded his head “yes”. Jack made the move. It was not a particularly good move.

“Maybe J. Palmer wasn't in the town house at all,” Jack Cass said.

“We saw him go in. And we heard his voice in the next room after we had followed him in.”

“The voice could have been some kind of recording.”

“Maybe. But the man entering the front door while we watched him couldn't have been a recording.”

“Maybe he was a ghost. Maybe that's why he always gives you the shivers. Ghosts always give me the shivers myself. How long ago did he disappear on you?”

“Two hours.”

“Then why aren't you all dashing off in different directions looking for him?”

“We are. And this is the last direction I dashed off to. I think that J. Palmer Cass is here.”

“Look all you want to, Drumhead. It's been about four years since you got the asinine idea that I was somehow connected with the elegant swindler. Why? What could we possibly have in common?”

“Your names. They follow each other in a directory. J. Palmer Cass. And Jack Cass.”

“So you said then, Drumhead. And so I checked it out then and found that it wasn't true. That elegant man, of course, had only unlisted numbers. And he wasn't in the directory next to me.”

“Yes he was, Jack. In a directory of suspects that we kept at the bunko squad. J. Palmer Cass and Jack Cass. What is your full name?”

“It is Jack Cass. You can check all my records as far back as you wish. My army record shows me as Jack NMI Cass, but they always put the NMI in where there really is no middle initial. Their computers aren't satisfied unless there is something between the first and the last name. Look at me, Drumhead! You have looked at J. Palmer Cass at close range many times through the years, and I honestly haven't. Do we look like kindred? Do we resemble each other at all in any respect?”

Drumhead Joe looked at Jack Cass closely. At the huge innocent brown eyes that should have belonged to some friendly and giant dog. Going by the eyes alone, Jack Cass and the dog Junkyard should have been litter brothers. Drumhead looked at the crack in the corner of one of the lenses of Jack's horn-rim glasses, and at the crudely wrapped copper wire that kept the frame from falling apart at one critical point. He looked at the expansive bald head with the black and grey fringe around it, at the gap-toothed grin, at the bull-neck, at the expansive and sloppy body. Yes, and in a way he even looked at the hamburger-and-beer breath of Jack Cass.

“Yes, strangely enough there is at least one respect in which you do resemble J. Palmer,” Drumhead Joe said. “But I've never noticed it until this moment, and I still haven't quite found the name for it. But there's another thing that makes me think you're more than you seem. Yes, you've done it again.”

“Check,” Jack Cass said firmly. “And mate. Yes, what was it, Drumhead?”

“I am seeded as the eleventh best chess player in America, and you beat me regularly. That's extraordinary in an All-American Slob, in a junkyard bum like you.”

“Not really, Drumhead. I have a junkyard mind and I make junkyard moves. I eat up your elegant game with them. And the dog Junkyard here gives me valuable coaching.”

“Junkyard is a showy player but he lacks substance. And his middle game is weak.”

“Were there any surprises in the luggage of J. Palmer Cass?” Jack asked.

“Only one. There were the sixteen pieces of elegant luggage, as he said that there were when he called for the taxi-dray. And they were packed for such a trip as that to Rio, yes. It's elegant stuff that he has. But the million in cash wasn't in any of the sixteen pieces of luggage, and it would be fairly bulky. Why do I have the feeling that it is here somewhere in this shabby Imperial Pawn Palace of Polder Street? Do you know, Jack, that this place is only a hundred yards from the elegant town house of J. Palmer Cass on High Street?”

“Ah, in what other city could so rich a street as High Street and so poor a street as Polder Street be only a block apart? But in ways that matter they're immeasurable distances apart, Drumhead.”

“Jack, a million dollars is enough to set up its own aura. And I sense it here. Why? Where?”

“Look all you want to, Drumhead.”

“No. You tell me where to look, Jack. I'll just cuff you and then I'll — ” and Drumhead Joe Cress was out of his Queen Anne chair and all over the still-sitting Jack Cass, all over him with a clank rattle of manacles and a burst of muscle.

But not for long. Drumhead Joe went flying across the crammed room and ended up in a junky corner. He had really been thrown!

“I'm sorry, Drumhead,” Jack Cass apologized. “You've arrested me before and I've never resisted. You can arrest me right now and I won't resist. It was just an automatic reflex when you came all over me like that. I sure didn't mean to sling you off that hard. Are you hurt?”

“Yes, a little bit. And now I can name the thing you resemble J. Palmer Cass in. It's the bull neck, and bull necks are hard to disguise.”

“There's lots of bull's necks, Drumhead. I wrestled on the Tank Town circuits for three years when I was a much younger slob than I am now. If a man had a buller neck than mine, then he whipped me. But I won a hundred and nine bouts and I lost only twenty-two. Drumhead, I don't know where you get your wild ideas, but all my properties are wide open for total inspection by you or any of the authorities. And my own person and history and antecedents and investments and dealings are also open to every sort of scrutiny. My fingerprints are on the ends of my fingers and my blood type is in the blood in my veins. Why do you look at me like that, Drumhead?”

“The impossibilities, Jack, the impossibilities! There's a dozen things that can't be made to fit into the puzzle. But I have a counter for that bull neck of yours, and that bull toss. It's my service revolver loaded and in my hand now.”

“Drumhead, Drumhead, you won't need that with me. Or keep me covered with it if it makes you feel more comfortable.”

“It does, and I will. Now start giving me more information. Quick! Your life depends on it.”

“Be careful, Drumhead. Your own life may be hanging by a thin thread. I worry about you more than I worry about myself. I surely don't want you to be killed.”

“Neither do I. But I swore today that I'd kill that hypnotic snake J. Palmer Cass. And I will, unless he kills me first. Take me to him, Jack, if you know where he is. Whose side would you be on in the show-down, Jack?”

“Oh, yours, Drumhead. You're a good man. J. Palmer is a devil.”

“Then you do know him. Why are you taking off your glasses?”

Jack Cass had slumped down into one of the chairs again and taken off his glasses and buried his face in his hands. And at that moment, the dog Junkyard gave the most mournful howl imaginable.

“Yes, I know J. Palmer in a way, Drumhead. In a way, in a horrible way. I'm taking off my glasses to wipe my eyes. I'm wiping my eyes because I'm crying. And I'm crying because I'm a slob, and because I have a clear vision of you dead, shot to death by your own hand and by your own service revolver.”

“Where, Jack? And when?”

“Within ten minutes. And within a hundred yards. Don't push it, Drumhead. Don't let it happen.”

“What is your real first name, Jack?”

“Don't insist on knowing, Drumhead. Your life is hanging by such a thin thread.”

“Yes, I do insist on knowing. What is your full name, Jack?”

“May this cup pass from me! My name is John Palmerworm Cass.”

“Palmerworm, did you say? What kind of a name and what kind of a worm is that?”

“The palmerworm is in the Bible. And also it is the canker worm inside of me. It's been eating from inside for all of my life. My father, when I was in my cradle (yes, we had an old-fashioned cradle in the old-fashioned farm house where I was born), said that, in my ‘other appearance’, I gave him a look of such sheer hatred that he staggered. I was just one day old then, but he said that I comprehended everything. So he had me named John Palmerworm Cass, for he said that the palmerworm was the name of the devil inside me, the devil that was sometimes my other appearance. And he thought it better that it be called by its proper name. Drumhead Joe, withdraw from it all right now. Walk out the front door of my pawn shop right now, and do nothing, nothing, nothing more on this case. I will make you a promise. I promise that in exactly one hour from now J. Palmer Cass will appear in his own townhouse (‘all the doors and windows being closed’, as the Bible phrase has it), and that he will shoot himself dead in the presence of all the authorities and guards there. Do it, Drumhead. I really can deliver on it. I had already decided that J. Palmer Cass would die today. He will die, and you will live. Make the deal, Drumhead!”

“No. I'll make no deal. I'm too close to solving this mystery.”

“You are too close to your own death, Drumhead. Did you know that I was a sleepwalker when I was a boy?”

“No, of course I didn't know it! What is this gibberish? Stop that sniffling! Look at me, Jack. I want to see your eyes!”

“No, Drumhead, no! My father often told me when I was a boy that I had the other appearance when I sleepwalked. He said that he would beat it out of me or kill me trying. But he didn't. It killed him instead.”

“What killed him instead?”

“My other appearance. It killed him. And it killed others. I don't want it to kill you. Make the deal, and it will kill itself. I swear it, I swear it, I swear it!”

“Stop gibbering! Look up! I want to see your eyes, Jack.”

“Oh God, no!”

“Oh God, yes!”

“Ah, very well,” spoke a voice that was not at all the voice of Jack Cass. It was rather the elegant and often insulting voice of J. Palmer Cass, the super-swindler and hunted criminal. “Look into my eyes then, police person. Look into them to your death and destruction.” And the bull-necked person raised his head.

2

Confusion in the corkscrew way,

And which of us will die today?

“Oh God over my head!” Drumhead Joe Cress cried out, and he began to tremble in every member of him. “It's the snake! It's the elegant snake! And I'm the wretched ground-bird. He'll eat me alive.” Drumhead Joe shook so hard that the service revolver in his hand was a blur.

“Shoot us, Drumhead,” came the old voice of Jack Cass out of the somewhat altered mouth. “Whichever one of us you kill it will be a gain.”

“Shut up, Jack!” came the elegant voice of J. Palmer Cass out of the same somewhat altered mouth. “Drumhead Joe is not going to shoot anybody but Drumhead Joe. Back up, Drumhead, and up those three steps and through that door. You've been through that door before on your searches, but you didn't find the other door beyond.”

“I will shoot, I will shoot,” Drumhead Joe jittered. “I have the gun.”

“But you are the hypnotized ground bird, Drumhead, and I am the snake,” came the voice of J. Palmer Cass. “The ground bird never finds courage enough to shoot the snake. It just doesn't work that way. Why am I blue-eyed now, you wonder? Oh, it is only the contact lenses. It takes big ones though to blot out the big friendly brown eyes of Jack. I always take off his old horn-rims with regret. That slight crack in the corner of the glass, that sloppy winding of small copper wire to hold the frame together. Who wouldn't trust a slob wearing such homely glasses? Who wouldn't trust him to be a slob forever? Those touches were sheer art. And t'was myself, not Jack, who thought of it. And then I set the partial bridge into my mouth and so took away the homely gap-toothed grin. That had been another masterpiece. Yes, there is a door there, Drumhead. Just push on the wall. See, it opens. Back through it. Back up as I tell you to do, and do not take your eyes off me. The light is dim, but you'll become accustomed to it. Tell the dog Junkyard to go back, Jack. He might get in the way.”

But then the strained voice of Jack Cass spoke just the opposite: “Stay with us all the way, Junkyard. I want you along in the showdown.”

“Yes, here's the little bundle by which one man changes into another in the same body,” it was J. Palmer Cass speaking out of the common mouth again. “The hairpiece, blond and wavy and so overly contrived as to seem and be artificial. Where is bald-headed Jack now? He crawls deeper and deeper within.”

The strange changing creature stopped and stripped naked in that tunnel that ran from the back of the Imperial Pawn Palace on Polder Street upwards through the clammy earth to the higher level townhouse on High Street. Then the creature put on a sort of corset and clamped it tightly onto itself, so it would appear thirty pounds lighter, and the slob was driven still deeper into the flesh. The strange changing creature put on the elegant clothes then, and he was J. Palmer Cass without a doubt, Master Embezzler and Swindler and con-man and criminal, reckless murderer and master of the hypnotic aura as well as of the disappearing act.

“Shoot us, Drumhead!” the somewhat smothered voice of Jack Cass was heard. “Since J. Palmer is in the ascendant, I believe he is the one you will kill. You will kill him if you shoot us, yes, and you may or may not kill me. That part will not matter. Shoot us and save yourself.”

“Shut up, Jack!” ordered the elegant voice of J. Palmer Cass. “Drumhead Joe is not going to shoot anyone except himself, Drumhead Joe. There were so many things involved, Joe. I myself write with a beautiful florid right hand that has all the perfection of a steel engraving. I have such a signature as every other confidence man in the world envies. And poor submerged Jack can only write with his upside-down left-handed jackass signature, and that is his legal hand. Our talents are all in opposite directions, but we are both good money makers. Any questions before we come to the chosen site where you will kill yourself with your own service revolver?”

“Wh-wh-where is the million d-d-dollars?”

“Oh, it's in the nail keg on the top of which you played chess with Jack. It's under a six-inch thick cover of rusty six-penny nails in the keg. You were right that it was very near, and that it gave off its own aura which you could sense.”

“Shoot us, Drumhead!” the muffled jackass voice of Jack Cass begged.

“Be quiet, Jack,” J. Palmer Cass ordered. To Drumhead Joe Cress it was incomparably weird to hear the two persons arguing out of the same mouth. “I love a good game myself, and Drumhead Joe will be given the chance to make a good game of it. We come up now through the third cellar of my town house. Every town house should have at least three cellars, one of them well hidden. We pause here, and each of us three will drink a bottle of wine for the occasion. Since Jack is a slob he will drink common port here, for he would appreciate nothing better. But you and I, Drumhead, myself a man of total culture, and you a person of at least a touch of it, we will each drink a bottle of Chateau Serpent Blond 1907. And while we drink, I will instruct you on what you may or may not say and do in what will probably be the final scene of your life. I open the three bottles with a corkscrew or tire-bouchon. And after we have drunk the wine we will ascend by what is also called a tire-bouchon or corkscrew stairway. It takes us to the wall of the room from which I disappeared two hours and a quarter ago.”

John Palmer Cass poured a goblet full from his own bottle with his right hand. Drumhead Joe Kress poured a goblet full from his own bottle with his left hand, still holding his service revolver in his trembling right hand. And then the left hand of the ambiguous creature, using a motion that more belonged to the slob Jack Cass than to the elegant J. Palmer Cass, poured a goblet full from his own bottle of common port, and he raised the goblet in the common left hand.

“I first,” said J. Palmer Cass, and he took a deep drink from his goblet with his shaped connoisseur's mouth. “You second, Drumhead,” J. Palmer said, and Drumhead Joe Kress drank with trembling hand and mouth. “It may give you the spirit to make a real game of it, Drumhead,” J. Palmer Cass said. “You third, Jack.” And with a homely motion, Jack Cass tipped his goblet into the now unshaped mouth of the common creature and drank his common port.

“When we come to the well-disguised door at the top of the corkscrew stairway, I will create a disturbance (no matter how) so that the several police persons still in that room will all start and gape in the other direction. Then we will push you into the room (Junkyard, stay out from under foot or I'll kick your damn head off!), I myself and the submerged Jack within me. And we'll stand in that little open doorway then, Drumhead. You will be able to see us, me, clearly; but the police in the room will not be able to see us. I have a trick that I use in such cases. Now listen closely, Drumhead: here is the little speech which you will or will not give. What you may say is ‘Oh my friends and associates, I have a mortal confession that I must make. You have not been able to find the elegant criminal J. Palmer Cass because I myself have been playing the role of the criminal J. Palmer Cass all these years, at the same time that I have been playing the role of Drumhead Joe Kress the famous investigator. It doesn't really matter how I played both of the roles. It is a secret that I will take to the grave with me. Now I will kill myself to make amends for the evil I've done.’ So you may say and do it, Drumhead. It is by far the ‘best show’ of your options. And when you do that, then I, along with the submerged Jack Cass, will quietly close the door and go down the corkscrew stairway to further adventures.

“Or you will shoot me dead. Or you will shoot Jack dead. Those are your other two options. But you will not kill us both. The survivor will have received only a superficial wound, and he'll have the body. And he will be forever free from his ‘other appearance’. And you, Drumhead, will be alive and well, though in a rather silly situation with all that gun-waving and gun-shooting and all that crazy man talk. It is your choice, Drumhead Joe. But please tremble a little less and try to make a game of it. Do you remember the words you are to say or not say?”

“Yes, I remember the words,” jittered the trembling Drumhead Joe Kress, his service revolver a mere blur in his vibrating hand.

“We are at the top of the corkscrew stairway. We are at the well-disguised door,” J. Palmer Cass said. “Dammit Junkyard, keep from under foot! Be ready, Drumhead, this is your big moment.”

In the room on the other side of the wall, a disturbance was created (no matter how). Then the ambiguous common Cass creature opened the disguised door and pushed the trembling Drumhead Joe Kress into the room. There was a short life-and-death pause. And then — 

“Oh my friends and associates, I have a mortal confession that I must make — ” Drumhead Joe Kress began in a loud but horribly trembling and contorted voice. “You have not been able to find the elegant criminal J. Palmer Cass because — ”

3

The dusty leaves move in the breeze.

They are the leaves of money trees.

The sun is rusty overhead.

And one, at least, of us is dead.

A bowl of wine to lap at ease.

A game. And junkyard thoughts like these.

A dog and a man were playing chess and drinking wine. The dog was drinking common port, and the man was drinking Chateau Serpent Blond 1907. The man had opened the game with the Brodsky gambit, and the dog had been eating away at the man's elegant game with junkyard moves. They were sitting in two Queen Anne chairs with the chessboard on the top of a nail keg between them. The million dollars was still in the nail keg. Ah, but it was covered with a six-inch thick cover of rusty six-penny nails.

“I do a lot of sleepwalking lately, Drumhead,” said the dog Junkyard. Its voice was somewhere between that of an old country dog and that of the man Jack Cass who was perhaps dead.

“Sometimes I sleepwalk by day, but mostly by night. And when I sleepwalk I frequently have an ‘other appearance’. My own ‘other appearance’ is that of the man Jack Cass who is dead, but not, I hope, irrevocably dead. A legend has grown up in this neighborhood that the ghost of the pawnbroker and junkyard operator walks at night. But it is only my ‘other appearance’ that the people have been seeing.”

“A legend has also grown up, Junkyard, about a ghost dog that walks at night, a luminescent ghost dog. Is that you?”

“Yes. J. Palmer Cass had a substance that he used on his hairpiece; and I have found it and use it on my entire body hair. It makes the hair luminescent, and it was an element in the hypnotic aura of J. Palmer Cass, as it is becoming an element in my own aura. I am the luminescent dog, but I may or may not be a ghost dog. I have hallucinations; and it is at least an even chance that you are one of my hallucinations. What are the chances that I am one of yours?”

“That also is about an even chance, Junkyard. I often wonder how it would have been if, at that critical moment in the doorway of the room at the top of the corkscrew stairway, you hadn't bitten the Cass creature so viciously on the leg as to make it cry out and enter into the awareness of the police and other authorities who were there. And how it would have been if you hadn't bitten me in the leg so viciously that I shot off my service revolver accidentally and apparently killed Jack Cass in the common body and left J. Palmer Cass alive. I often wonder how it would have been if you hadn't done that. Yes, and I often wonder how it really is now.”

“And I often wonder how it would have been if the bleeding and furious J. Palmer Cass hadn't kicked me to death just before they subdued him,” the dog Junkyard said. “I wonder how it would have been in that case. Yes, and I also wonder how it really is now.”

“I had either a dream or an hallucination that you came to see me in Bedlam three days ago, Junkyard,” Drumhead Joe Kress said.

“I did go to see you there, Drumhead, and we had a visit,” Junkyard explained. “But I'm afraid to go there again. Did you know that there's a department at the Bethlehem Institute for the Mentally Disturbed for Insane and Alienated Dogs? There is. All the canine inmates there are well treated, for they all have rich owners. There is no viva-experimentation done on them, not at Holy Bedlam. It's done on the stray dogs, on the junkyard dogs that they pick up. It's all in a good cause, but I am the prototypical junkyard dog.

“J. Palmer Cass has been sentenced to hang for several murders, Drumhead Joe. Are you glad?”

“Not entirely. I wanted to kill him myself. But that would probably overly disturb my soul. I reached a certain peace now, with the therapy at Bedlam. They say that they may release me in a week or two, if I at least pretend to respect the boundaries and limens between reality and unreality. But it strikes me that sane men have never done a very good job at defining those boundaries and limens. In my present state, I may have a more accurate apperception than have sane persons of just how flexible those boundaries and limens are. They humor me though, and one of them walks with me down here every afternoon (for it's only a ten minute walk) and lets me spend a half-hour every day with my ‘invisible dog’ as they call you, in the old empty and deserted pawn shop. Why do they call you the ‘invisible dog’?”

“Because I am invisible, Drumhead, except at night when I can be seen by my luminescent coat. I've been thinking, Drumhead, that when J. Palmer Cass is hanged, I might claim his body as next of kin. I might find resuscitable elements of my friend Jack Cass in that dead body. But it would be hard for a dog, especially an often invisible dog, to effect such a claim. Drumhead, if I am an hallucination of yours (which is possible), and if you are an hallucination of mine (which is slightly more than possible), then who are the two guys sitting here?”

“God bless this wine. I don't know who the two guys are, Junkyard, unless they are ourselves. How is the wine holding up?”

“I'll push my coaster wagon up the tunnel to the corkscrew cellar tomorrow and bring down another twenty-one bottles of each sort. That'll last another three weeks. There are about seventeen hundred of yours left, so they will last you, on the one-a-day, for nearly five years. As for me, when the common port runs out, there's plenty of common sherry and sauterne and other commons. There is an outré story out of the death-house that the famous hairpiece of J. Palmer Cass is not a hairpiece at all but is his own growing hair. Drumhead Joe, I've seen that hairpiece on and off him dozens of times, so I don't know what to believe.”

“I heard a different death-house story on the same subject, Junkyard. It has it that J. Palmer insisted so strongly that the hairpiece was his own hair that the guards said ‘We can be as stubborn as you are,’ and they shaved the hairpiece right on his head. Then J. Palmer moaned and groaned that, as in the case of Samson, his strength and his magic were in his hair and that he was ruined without it. But the next day, J. Palmer had brightened up; and he announced that the hair was growing long again. And only this morning (or perhaps it was a week ago this morning), I had a letter from a friend inside the big house which said that they wished the execution would hurry up before they had to admit that the hair on that hairpiece really was growing longer.”

“Check,” said the dog Junkyard. “And mate. I beat you again.”

“Ah, but you only beat me because I am not at my best today. I'm not really ever at my best any more. Junkyard, what are you doing? What is that blue horror that you're fumbling in your paws? What are you doing to your eyes?”

“Putting in a set of those blue contact lenses that J. Palmer Cass wouldn't have been J. Palmer without. They're oversized contacts. They had to be oversized to cover the brown pupils of Jack Cass, and my own eyes are almost twins of Jack's. I want to see what the lenses do for my aura. What do they do for my aura, Drumhead?”

“Gah, they turn me into a trembling ground bird, and you into a hypnotic snake. Take them out, Junkyard.”

“Aw, Drumhead, I got to practice on somebody! But the attendant from the Bethlehem Institute for the Mentally Disturbed is here for you now. Maybe you'll beat me tomorrow.”

“I should. I certainly should. Your middle game continues weak, Junkyard. I don't know why I'm so seldom able to take advantage of it.”

The cheerful young attendant from Bedlam came in. “Are you ready to go back, Mr. Kress?” he asked. “Did you have a pleasant visit with your friend the invisible dog?”

“Most pleasant, Charles. But he isn't invisible. You can see him right there, lolling in that Queen Anne chair on the other side of the chess board.”

“Yes, except that there is neither Queen Anne chair or chess board here, nor visible dog either. Ah, you've been into the wine again, and yet there's neither bottle nor glass in here. You have a trick there, haven't you, Mr. Kress? But visits to this dingy place seem to brighten you up, though I can't imagine any place more depressing than an empty and deserted pawn shop.”

“Dingy it is, perhaps,” said Drumhead Joe Kress with a touch of defiance. “But it could buy and sell half-a-dozen less dingy places. Did you know, young man, that there is a million dollars in the nail keg right there?”

“Interesting, Mr. Kress, except that there is no nail keg right there. Nothing at all is right there where you are pointing. Come along now. It's a pleasant ten minutes walk back. Then it'll be time for your bath. And, after an hour's nap, it will be time for your supper.”

“My middle game isn't all that bad,” the dog Junkyard gloated as he looked at the world through the blue contact lenses which he found to be ego boosters for himself. “What Drumhead Joe Kress had better worry about is his end game.”

Inventions Bright and New

“And there is no New Thing under the Sun.”

 — Ecclesiastes

“An original idea can only be had during the first seven minutes after the beginning of a World. After that, somebody else will already have had the original idea.

“However, if Hawkins' Principle of ReEntrant Time is correct, we are always within seven minutes of the beginning of the world.”

 — Arpad Arutinov, The Back Door of History

“Oh, Oh, what was that jolt!” Anna Thursday-Dawn cried out. “There was a distinct jolt that shook me and shook the whole world.” And she blinked three rows of her dazzling eyes. She had a piece of caul or soft eggshell still draped about her head as newborn children sometimes have. And yet she looked at least twenty years old. If the jolt were of a particular sort, of course, she could have been a newborn twenty-year-old child.

“It must have been a mental jolt,” Hiram Working-Day said. “There are no physical jolts on the Broken-Arrow-to-Tulsa-Light-Rail-Rapid-Transit-Lines, no jolt or unevenness on any of its cars ever. I believe that we have just experienced a beginning though, and one could hardly pass through that without a slight mental jolt. However, we can hardly be expected to interrupt an interesting conversation just because the world has begun. You were saying, John Rain-Tomorrow — ?”

“I was speaking of the ReEntrant Principle,” John Rain-Tomorrow said, “and of how, while it does not deny the validity of beginnings and endings, it does make them to be of relative unimportance. So even if the jolt betokened the beginning of the world, there is nothing unique about such a beginning. A question is whether the world is seven billion years old or seven seconds old. And the answer, for one who is committed to Hawkins' ReEntrant Principles, is that the world can never be more than seven seconds old, that the world is always in the process of beginning, and that the cutting edge of the beginning is always a little less than seven seconds thick. Whenever the world begins, everything that can happen has already happened at least once; every idea that can be entertained has been entertained at least once; and these things are clearly written into the records and residues of the world, whether they really happened or not.”

“No, no, Oh, no, no, no!” Anna Thursday-Dawn cried out. “I must make inventions that have never been made before. I must have an idea that has never been considered before. Oh, I must. I'd trade my life for such.”

There were eight of them sitting there on a pair of facing seats on the Broken-Arrow-to-Tulsa-Light-Rail-Rapid-Transit-Line-Early-Prime-Run. They were John Rain-Tomorrow, Anna Thursday-Dawn, Hiram Working-Day, Catherine Tall-Tower, Clarence Bower-Bird, Mary Fat-Land, Andrew Kingdom-Come, and Elizabeth Burning-Brand. Each of the eight held fourteen cards in his hands. If it had been a little bit later in the history of the human race (Oh, say ten minutes later) it would be likely that the eight were getting ready to play cards. But that was not possible in the present case, for playing cards had not yet been invented. These were cards of another sort.

The eight persons held cards of eight different clans to which they belonged. Each of them held ten numbered Admonition Cards, and three Personage Cards, the King Father, the Queen Mother, and the Warrior Son, for each clan had been founded by such a triad. The eight persons were, as it happened, playing the game of n. n., but not with cards. In the game of n. n., one plays the cards only verbally on the table. Each of the eight also held a Clown Card, which four of them called the Joker Card.

“Hawkins has carried the ReEntrant Principle further than anybody else,” said John Rain-Tomorrow. His rows of eyes twinkled with humor even when, as now, he was speaking seriously. “The first ReEntrant Concept, of course, was that of ReEntrant Space. Sometimes people tried to explain it by talking about the Curvature of Space, but there is no such thing. No! One travels in a straight line always, in one unvarying direction, for a very great distance, and then he meets himself. Oh, it happens, it happens! The thing would be more widely known except that most often there is no recognition on these meetings. And then there is ReEntrant Time. Time is the river whose end merges with its beginning so neatly that nobody notices the junction. And the end of the world always merges neatly with the beginning, but you must remember that the end always comes first.”

“I like the Principle of Re-Entrant Numbers,” said Hiram Working-Day who had now set thirteen of his cards face-down on the table and was assembling something with his hands. He was assembling something or making something. He had a very small lathe that he was running off a penlight battery, and he was machining incredibly small parts. “One goes down all the regular numbers and through the Number One,” he said. “One goes through all the numbers that are smaller than One, but he does not come to Zero. There is no Zero in the real world. One reaches the smallest possible number such as the smallest microscope could not discern. And then, going one notch smaller, one comes to the largest number possible, so big that a billion telescopes could not scan It. And there is no unevenness nor change of direction. The number that is smaller than the smallest possible number really is the largest possible number, and the sequence from the one to the other is natural and even.”

“What are you going to do with that laser-beam projector when you get it finished?” Elizabeth Burning-Brand asked Hiram.

“Oh, I'll put it in my buffalo gun,” Hiram said.

The name of the game n. n. that they were playing was really “Nifty Notions.” They took advantage of the creative early morning moments on the Broken-Arrow-to-Tulsa-Light-Rail-Transit-Line to attempt Prime Inventions, Original Ideas, Thoughts Never Thought Before, though the world insisted that such things were impossible.

“What I like is ReEntrant Size,” said Mary Fat-Land. When Mary was entranced by an idea she closed all her many eyes except one pair. “The size goes down, smaller and smaller and smaller, in the magic descent, following down to the smallest sub-atomic particle, till it is itself particularized, and then down to the smallest and smallest particles of the particles. Still one step smaller then, and one comes to countless and unconceivable billions of mega-galaxies, but their totality is still smaller than that ultimate smallest particle. And there is no unevenness along the chain at all. The aggregation of mega-galaxies is such a little bit smaller than the smallest particle that you'd have to put calipers on them to be sure that there really was a difference in size.”

“What I like is ReEntrant Ideas,” said Catherine Tall-Tower, “and ReEntrant Perception, which is the same thing. An Idea will follow down the Idea Road, and its changes will have nothing to do with size or time or space or movement. And then there will be a ReEntrant Encounter. At the moment of the ReEntrant Encounter, the idea will become an Original Idea no matter how long it has already been kicking around. I'm on the verge of inventing playing cards now, a really Original Idea.”

“And I'm on the verge of doing away with all eyes except one pair to a person,” said Mary Fat-Land. “All of them except one pair are an illusion anyhow. Let me touch my mind to that Illusion of an Exuberance of Eyes as I might touch my cigar to a child's balloon, and it will burst and be no more. I'll do it. I've done it! And it's all legitimately within the ReEntrant Principle.”

Why yes, Mary Fat-Land smoked cigars. Doesn't everybody? And children often do have balloons. So the metaphor was a sound one. And the Illusion of the Exuberance of Eyes was exploded forever. At least every person in that Light-Rail-Rapid-Transit Car was reduced to two eyes only. Some of the persons were displeased by the change. And the Light-Rail-Transit Train-of-Cars came to a stop. Two gentlemen from the Rectitude Militia entered the car. Those fellows work fast.

“What a cheap shabby trick that was!” one of them said. “Why would anybody want to destroy so beautiful an illusion as the Exuberance of Eyes? Animals have two eyes only. Angels have an Exuberance of Many Eyes, and all of them are functional. Until now, Humans have also had (even though it was illusory) the Exuberance of Eyes, though only one pair of them was functional. Who would have done so crumby a thing?”

“I would have, if I'd known how,” a passenger in the car said. “I never did like that dazzle about my head. I like it better this new way, with only two eyes. I get a better focus now.”

“He's the one!” the second Rectitude Militia man said. So they dragged the better-focus man out of the car. Then two woodsmen with double-bitted axes reduced that man to a quivering mess that soon ceased to quiver. So they killed the man for causing a disturbance.

“You let them kill him for what you did, Mary Fat-Land,” Elizabeth Burning-Brand accused.

“I won't tell anybody if you won't tell anybody,” Mary Fat-Land said.

“I dislike that form of execution,” Anna Thursday-Dawn protested. “I will invent a completely new way of execution, one which will allow persons to die with dignity.”

“It is so easy to overlook so much in Hawkins' ReEntrant Principle,” John Rain-Tomorrow said when the Light-Rail Train was rolling again. “His Principle of ReEntrant Time means that it doesn't matter whether that jolt a few seconds ago was the beginning of the world or the end of it. His Principle of ReEntrant Parallels gives us all the workable parallels we need in one sustaining skein. A single world alone would be too frail a thread even to sustain its own continuity. But there are uneasinesses about the parallel worlds. I believe this is because we do not always love our parallel persons as much as we should. Possibly this is because we do not like to admit that each of us alone is too frail a thread to sustain his own continuity. And we can never do or think anything absolutely original, for all our parallel persons will be doing and thinking shadowy parallels to it at the same time. We cannot be first in anything as long as we have parallel persons, and there is an utter frustration in not being first. ‘Through whose veins did my blood flow before it flowed through mine?’ I ask myself sometimes when I contemplate the parallel problem. ‘Who dwelt in this tent of my skin before I dwelt in it? Who was conscious in my brain before I was conscious there?’ For there is a circularity rather than a simultaneity in parallel persons. No one of them can ever be first before the others.”

Catherine Tall-Tower did invent playing cards then.

“And it is an original invention,” she insisted. “No parallel person of myself has invented playing cards, and none will do so before at least a full minute.” They used their clan cards for playing cards, and they began to play two parallel four-handed games. Well, the fact was that four of them were in one universe and four of them in a slightly different universe. How else could eight of them have sat comfortably in two facing seats that would hold only four? Four of them were in one Light Rail Transit Car, and four of them were in a very similar parallel car.

(Some of the parallel worlds do not even have Broken-Arrow-to-Tulsa-Light-Rail-Rapid-Transit-Lines, and the people drive from Broken Arrow to Tulsa in private vehicles that are called hokomobiles.)

“The Invention was easy,” Catherine Tall-Tower said, “and it was in two stages. When first I realized that the cards were a Calendar as well as a Clan Almanac and Cautionary, then I realized that there was a game hidden in them also.”

“How are they a Calendar, Kate?”

“Oh, the three top cards are number cards as well as personage cards; then everything works. So we find that each hand has thirteen cards for the thirteen moons of the year; that the total number of the playing cards is fifty-two for the fifty-two weeks of the year: that the total value of the cards in the deck is three-hundred-and-sixty-four, and counting the Clown Card as One we come to Three-Hundred-and-Sixty-Five for the Three-Hundred-and-Sixty-Five days in the year. Then we allocate four of the clan totems for four suits for the four seasons of the year. There is much more to it.”

They played different sorts of poker. “We would all be better poker players if we still had our Exuberance of Eyes,” John Rain-Tomorrow said. “It is hard to fake it at poker with only one pair of eyes.”

“One aspect of the ReEntrant Principle that is often overlooked is the Principle of ReEntrant Matter.” Hiram Working-Day cut in, for conversation always goes with card-playing. “By the Principle of ReEntrant Matter, the Creator has made an incomparably easy trick seem incomparably difficult. In the beginning, before the beginning, there would always be some little scrap of matter in the universe. A perfect vacuum is not possible. There would be, at least, a very small fragment, or a fragment of a fragment, of a mu-meson. Then, according to the Principle of ReEntrant Matter, when this fragment of a fragment became still a bit smaller, it would become billions of billions of galaxies and clusters of galaxies. The billionfold galaxies would need to be but slightly smaller in mass than the fragment of a fragment of a mu-meson. And yet the billionfold galaxies would fill all the space that would possibly be.”

“Would not the fragment of a fragment of a mu-meson also fill all the space that could possibly be?” Andrew Kingdom-Come asked. “Would it not have filled all of the slightly larger space than the billionfold space that followed it?”

“Yes. That's right. It would have filled it,” Hiram Working-Day said.

One of the four-handed games being played now was Worcester Whist, and Hiram Working-Day was Clown or Joker or Dummy, so he had laid his cards down.

“I have just made a truly Bright and New and Original Invention,” he said, “and I will try it out now.”

Disregarding the signs that are in all Light-Rail-Rapid-Transit cars, “Please Open Window Before Shooting Buffalo,” Hiram shot his rifle through a window and killed a buffalo on a knoll two hundred meters from the speeding train-of-cars. He killed the buffalo, but he did not break the window.

Hiram was a good mechanic. Not everyone could have machined such an attachment for a rifle on the way to work in the morning.

“That is not a Bright and New and Original Invention,” Mary Fat-Land protested. “Some of the militias have been using laser-beam pistols for a week.”

“Laser-Beam Pistols are not Laser-Beam Buffalo Guns,” Hiram Working-Day explained. “When citizens ordinarily kill buffalo with their high-velocity carbines, the meat packagers have a messy time of it. They have to cut deep into the animal to get the bullet, and then to interpret the code cut on the nose of the bullet, all this before they cut up and process the animal and deliver it to the address of the one who shot it. But my laser-beam buffalo gun leaves the coded brand right at the point of the death burn. And it records the minute and second of the kill. No interloper or poacher could possibly record an earlier time. Yes, this is a Prime New Invention, something never known in the world before, and it gladdens my heart.”

“I have just invented Daylight Savings Time,” Andrew Kingdom-Come announced.

“Yes, so you have,” John Rain-Tomorrow agreed. “My watch sprang forward one hour and I wondered why. But it isn't really a first class invention. Oh, it'll give us an extra hour of daylight every day. But in a few months it'll be nullified again.”

“No, it will not. Some smart lawyer will take the whole world to small claims court on the issue and get a writ against turning the clocks back ever.”

“As to myself, I believe that I have just invented a way to defy the ReEntrant Circularity that tyrannizes all the universe,” John Rain-Tomorrow said. “I believe that the world was created this morning, or it will be created in a few moments while it is still morning. Whenever it is created, it is created in motion. It has its built-in stratified residues and memories, memories in rocks and memories in living brains, memories of previous times that probably did not exist… I fear there is not any test by which we can be sure whether the world has begun or not, whether we ourselves have lived or whether we are only stratified residues and memories. According to the Relentless Circularity, there is no real difference between having already died and not having been born yet. There is no mathematical way to battle the circularity. But there is another way to battle it, and its name is derision. When a perfect circle is drawn huge out in the vasty void, people are impressed and they say ‘It is the image of God himself.’ But if somebody draws a monkey's tail on that perfect circle, people will say ‘Oh, it is only a monkey!’ No matter how big it makes itself it is only a monkey. I intend to draw a monkey's tail on an impressive circle in the sky, and when people see it after dark tonight they will say ‘Oh, it is only a monkey with a tail,’ and they will laugh it clear out of its path.”

“On what ‘Circle in the Sky’ do you intend to draw a monkey-tail tonight, John Rain-Tomorrow?” Clarence Bower-Bird asked.

“Oh, I have already drawn it. With me, to think is to do. But you will not be able to see it until tonight. I've drawn the tail on Casey's Comet which has been threatening the world. And now it will threaten the world no more. It will be intimidated by our laughter, and it will veer off its course. Can any of you imagine anything more comical than a comet with a tail?”

They couldn't, no. They laughed pleasantly about it. Then Anna Thursday-Dawn became pensive.

“It has given me the idea of my life,” she said. “It has given me my Invention Bright and New. I said a while ago that I disliked the current modes of execution, whether axemen closing in on a victim with their double-bitted axes, or persons forming a ring around a victim and stoning him to death. I said that I would invent a method of execution to let a person die with dignity. Now I have done it. And it is the analog to John Rain-Tomorrow's putting a monkey-tail on a circle in the sky. I will have a loop of rope, and a tail to that loop.”

The Light Rail Train-of-Cars was slowing for the Sixth-and-Main Tulsa Disgorgement. But before the train stopped there were two gentlemen of the Rectitude Militia in the car. Those fellows work fast.

“Nobody leaves the car for just a moment,” they said. “Ah, yes, this is the lady who has just invented the noose. It is declared illegal, of course. We will use it on her, and then we will never use it again.”

“Oh how nice!” Anna Thursday-Dawn cried out. “I'll be first to use it.”

“Yes, the first and the last, the only one ever. This is an invention too original ever to be repeated.”

“But why not for others? I want everybody to be able to die with dignity.”

“If all criminals knew that they would be allowed to die with dignity, everybody would become a criminal,” the gentleman explained, “and that would throw all society into unbalance. Come along, sis, out of the car. There's a tall and ornate lamp-post right at the beginning of the mall.”

“Oh yes, that will be splendid,” Anna Thursday-Dawn said. And everybody went out of the cars. The gentlemen of the Rectitude Militia threw one end of a rope, the “monkey's tail” end, over an arm of the lamp-post. And the other end was placed around the throat of Anna Thursday-Dawn in a beautiful hangman's knot.

“Why is this better? Why is it more dignified? Why is this happier than any other execution, Anna?” Elizabeth Burning-Brand asked.

“Don't you see? With the stonings and axings, the soul is driven out of the body and will have to wander homeless forever. But with my Hangman's Noose, the throat is constricted and the soul cannot fly out from any of the apertures of the head. So it will be saved. Everything is saved. Oh, I have this really original idea, this truly Bright and New invention. I'm delighted. And, as this gentleman says, it is an invention too original to repeat. The more I think of that the more I love it. Ready when you are, gentlemen!”

Oh, the happy and transcendent sense of being right! Some people have it even when they are wrong. Anna Thursday-Dawn died in the happiness that she had accomplished a bright and new invention, that she had a truly original idea that nobody would be able to steal from her.

And her happiness was infectious. All her friends, and the rest of the morning people around there also, went to work with happy dispositions. And that is appreciated in a world where many things are not happy.

The Man Who Made Models

Jon Skaber, the Light Swede, made models.

“But somebody should make a model of Jon to reduce him to life-size,” Rayona Harp needled. “If he were reduced to life-size he'd be as ordinary as the rest of us. Yes, and if his hands were reduced to human-size, they'd lose their canniness.”

In fact model-maker Jon Skaber was a very huge man, and his talented hands were of extraordinary size. Jon had been a Small-College All American end when he played with Central Minnesota Normal. With his big hands he could catch a football as though it were a baseball, and he could ramble with power when he caught it. He was a well-made man, but would he still be well-made in a scaled down model of himself? As to his hands, was their size their very nature, and would reducing them change their nature?

It was the small things that Jon did with his big hands that were so remarkable. The models he made almost defied belief. He taught Art at CMN now, and model-making was the main art he taught. His work was rapid and sure and true.

“No, Jon's work is not true at all,” Diamant Harp said. Diamant was as pickish a person as was his wife Rayona. He flashed disdain whenever he looked at the models that everyone except himself and Rayona thought were excellent. “There is no such thing as a true miniature or model of anything,” Diamant said. “And likewise there can be no such thing as a true blow-up or projection from a model. Every architect secretly realizes this. His buildings simply will not look enough like his drawings. Every composer realizes this. His work played by an excellent and full-sized orchestra is not really much like his notations and scores. Every legislator of intelligence knows this. The law as it makes its way in society isn't really very much like the law as enacted in session.”

“Diamant, you'd stretch anything to prop an argument,” said Joe Greatglobe (Joe College) who was the purser at CMN.

“My models are true,” Jon Skaber insisted. “And the talk of you two picky, off-key Harps is false.” Jon didn't like people to watch him making his models, or at least he didn't like the Harps to watch him making them. Jon made model furniture, model houses, model towns, and wax-fleshed model people. He made models for various departments at the college, and he made models for industry. Others he made for advertising and publicity and displays. He made a lot of them for the money he could get from collectors, and he made a lot of them for fun. He made a model witch-doctor for fun and revenge, and by his own account he made it in self-defence.

The witch-doctor was a wind-up toy model, but the winder was the only metallic thing about it. There was an old joke to be told with the showing of the witch-doctor model. Jon told it to Joe Greatglobe and George Whitewater (Joe and George College) now, the two Harps being absent that day.

“You recall the generic cartoon showing the British safari-type man in pith helmet and bushwhacker mustache and such. He was about five inches tall, and he was standing on a bar and drinking miniaturized planters' punch out of a miniaturized glass. He was surrounded by full-sized drinkers, or at least by the heads of them. And the caption of the cartoon was ‘Tell us again, Sir Cedric, how you told that witch-doctor off.’

“What is not generally known is that the same week that this cartoon appeared in the New Yorker, a corresponding cartoon appeared in the Gold Coast Gazette in Africa. It showed a five-inch tall witch-doctor surrounded by the heads of full-sized black drinkers, and the caption of it was ‘Tell us again, Boka Magani, how you told Sir Cedric of the bushwhacker mustache off.’ ”

The witch-doctor model, as did most of Jon's ‘living models’, spent most of his time in a sort of waxy slumber; but sometimes he could be stirred to wakefulness. Jon would wind him up and rouse him up. Then the little witch-doctor would speak, in a slurred manner, in dignity and sorrow, and with only small touches of bitterness and anger. He would wait his time, he said, and perhaps the times would actually change some day.

“What's that you have him programmed to speak, Swahili?” Joe College asked.

“No, of course not,” Jon said. “It's Haussa.”

“You lie,” said George College. “It's Swedish.”

“I'm worried about the Harps,” said Joe College, the college purser. “They're a problem that could go out of control.”

“The problem isn't on my account, is it?” Jon asked.

“No. You can take care of yourself. It's a question of funds. I don't trust the Harps, but others do. They've moved into purchasing here at the college. They are making some wonderful buys, it seems. They are also taking some wonderful liberties. They deal in cash, in very big cash. Now they are dealing for the Schoefeld Special Electronic Reticle. They'll be carrying a half million dollars of live money unless I'm able to prevent it. I am the purser of the college and am responsible, but everyone else encourages the free and easy operation. But I'll be accountable if those free and easy birds fly. Your dark shadow, the Dark Swede, tells me that they are confidence people well known on several continents, but nobody takes your dark shadow very seriously.”

One other person who often visited Jon Skaber to watch him work on models was the detective Lyle Wrackwolf, the Dark Swede.

“Lyle would be sinister,” Rayona Harp once said, “except that he works so hard at being sinister that he becomes ridiculous instead.” And he came in now, just after Joe Greatglobe (Joe College) the purser left.

“All right, where have you hidden the bodies today, Joe Skaber?” he gave his usual greeting. “I'll never believe that you haven't bodies hidden here. Your place reeks of bodies.” Wrackwolf had a fat, dark-flushed, florid face with plenty of blood in it, and he was big and bulky. Perhaps he was as large a man as Jon Skaber, even in the hands, but he wasn't made at all in the same style. Wrackwolf was a bit shabby, as are many persons who have been in police world for long years. He had a muggsy face, one on which expressions and masks followed each other endlessly. Wrackwolf made faces constantly and unconsciously.

“Someday I'll catch you putting a couple guys up here in wax before they disappear,” Detective Wrackwolf said. “Ah, those two there disappeared just two days ago, just when we were ready to close them up. Where did they go, Skaber, do you know? But your wax models of the two aren't accurate. I just barely recognize who you intend them to be.”

“Yes, they're accurate. All my models are accurate,” Jon Skaber said.

“No,” Wrackwolf gruffed. “Not accurate. I can do better than that. I will do better than that on those two.” Lyle Wrackwolf took a block of wood from a pocket of the big, shoddy windbreaker that he wore. He began to whittle on it with a hook-bill knife. From time to time he set rolls of other small tools on a small table there, wood-rasps and draw-knives and frows and fluted chisels.

“I'm a better model-maker than you are, Jon,” Wrackwolf said in his fleshy-throaty voice. “Why do you so seldom use wood in your models? It's the only thing to use, really. But nobody knows for sure what it is that you do use. Three minutes, Jon! I made this one in three minutes. And how long did it take you to make yours? Do you recognize him?”

“Sure. It's Dutch Griese. Set him beside my original there and see the difference.”

“Yes, there is a difference,” the detective said as he put his wooden model beside the nobody-knows-what-material model of the same man that Jon Skaber had previously made. “Mine's a lot better, Jon. Yours is alive. Or it is dead. But mine, though better, is only lifeless when I set it beside yours. I have the feeling, Jon, that you are sometimes involved in hiding people that I mean to find.”

Wrackwolf took another block of wood out of another pocket and began to whittle still another model. And Jon Skaber was working with a very small and very hot furnace, making another model that was alive, or dead, but not lifeless.

“Are you still whittling on the same block, Wrack?” Jon asked. He didn't mean the block of wood that Wrackwolf held in his hand; he meant the obsession that Wrackwolf had been pursuing. “Are you still believing in ghosts, and me hiding men in their own pockets and such?” Jon Skaber had a certain derision that he kept for Lyle Wrackwolf and his notions; and the tough detective would flush like dark, angry leather whenever Jon Skaber got under his hide.

“What happened to John Cotton and Alex Mobley, Jon?” Wrackwolf asked sullenly. “And where are the models that you had made of them?”

“Maybe they weren't really models that I made, Wrack. You yourself said that you believed they were something else than that. But the two men, I understand that they went away for a couple of years, and they came back when you were forced to take the heat off of them.”

“They went away, Jon, and their models were here on your display table while they were gone. They came back, and then their models disappeared from here. Oh Dammit, Skaber! That laugh of yours can take hunks of flesh out of me, and I'm tough. But I'm getting close to something.”

“You're getting close to Sillyville, Detective. The men are back. Ask them where they were.”

“They don't answer very well, Jon. They've gone strange. They're a little bit dim. What turned them into such puny shells of themselves?”

“Maybe it was their trips. They went, and they returned. It's a ruinous trip in each direction, and they didn't go first class. And yourself, Wrackwolf, you get a little bit dimmer every time you go and then come back.”

Lyle Wrackwolf left in puffing anger.

Jon Skaber continued working on another model of something. And so, we suppose, did Lyle Wrackwolf, but not in Jon's place for a while.

“You can make only false models of things, Jon Skaber,” Diamant Harp was jibing again that evening. “It's the essence of a model that it be false.”

“No, my models are true,” Big Jon repeated resolutely.

“You can see that a scaled-down model of a vibrating string will not give the same note as the full-length original,” Rayona Harp said, “but in many other things you don't seem to see this. A horse the size of a mouse can fall off a hundred-foot cliff and not be hurt, but a horse the size of a horse will hit so hard it will break up and even splash. This applies to everything that is wrenched out of scale. Miniaturize the bouquet and taste of Vin Clos Vougeot '48, and what bouquet and taste will you have left? Shrink any object that is of the color of Orange 472 (Slyman Color Chart), and how far will the color of it have slipped? Miniaturize the odor of acanthus, and what will you have? There is no way that quality can be separated from quantity ever.”

“Oh, some accidentals may slip a bit, but my miniatures are still true,” Jon said.

“The sound of the west wind rattling through dead weeds will not have the same tone if the wind and the weeds are miniaturized,” Diamant said. “A ‘perfect’ square does not remain quite the same shape if it is miniaturized, and it will not have quite the same number of sides.”

“Leave me, Harps,” Jon Skaber said. “You sour me.”

“For your sins of misproportion we will taunt you yet,” Rayona said. But the Harps did go away for a while.

“Ah, that trashy Harp couple worries me,” Joe Greatglobe muttered. “They claim to have found this great buy in an electronic reticle. Nobody in our physics department even knows what an electronic reticle is. Why must all their great buys be outside of regular business procedure? It's as if they had been building up to this one.”

Then Joe Greatglobe went out, and he caught Lyle Wrackwolf the Detective who was coming in to plague Jon Skaber, and he talked to him outside of Jon's workshop.

“Wrackwolf,” he said, “I understand that you have been busted out of homicide to the bunko squad because of a few paranoid views that you've picked up. I suspect that your heart is still in homicide though. What I am concerned about is a bunko antic that hasn't even happened yet, but it's so outrageous that it could lead to a homicide committed by myself if it comes out wrong. Are you interested in halting a compounded crime before it happens?”

“The Harps, you mean? They don't interest me much. Oh sure, anyone can see nine miles away what's coming. But there just isn't any cure for the ignorance of college people, and I'm always half happy when they're took. My only interest would be in Jon Skaber trying to hide them in his workshop, but that's unlikely to happen. They intend to border-jump, I think, and to get to spending their gains right away.”

“How would Skaber hide anyone in his workshop?” Greatglobe asked. “Oh, hide them as models, you mean? I'd heard that you were a little bit on the other side of the hedges in some of your mental processes, Wrackwolf. You're crazy, man.”

Lyle Wrackwolf swelled up. He turned the color of angry leather, and he fumed.

“I'll not be laughed at,” he said in his heavy voice. “I'll not be derided by you. Fugitives do come to Jon Skaber's place, and some of them do not leave. I have followed them here and I know this. I come sometimes and sit and whittle and try to haunt the truth out of Jon, but he haunts me instead. He makes little replicas of the fugitives. He has them there openly for anyone to see. Then, after days or weeks or months or even years, the replicas will disappear from Jon's place. And at the same time, the fugitives will be back in town. Their hunters will be gone by then, you see, or they'll be in the pokey. If their hunters were the law, then arrangements for plea bargaining or such will have been made. If I was the hunter, then maybe I will have been handcuffed by a lay-off order from above. But the models are there when the men are gone, and the models are gone when the men have returned. And Jon Skaber gets more money from the models he doesn't sell than from those he does.”

“Oh, Sweet Swedes of Svanstein! You really believe that guff, Wrackwolf?”

“This Jon Skaber, Greatglobe, is a Scandinavian as I am, and with a touch of something older. I have checked back on him. I cannot say that he is a criminal, but his family in the old country did hide fugitives by some grisly device, and they did make models of the fugitives. And Jon Skaber follows the family trade. There's a strain of Laplander-magic in his family.”

“Have you the Laplander-magic strain also, Wrackwolf? Is that what makes you so — ”

“So superstitious? I do have the strain in me, yes. And I'll not be laughed at for having it. Listen, Greatglobe, I've looked at some of Jon Skaber's models in a way that you wouldn't know to look. I've locked eyes with some of those five-inch-tall models. And there was recognition and fear that passed from their eyes to mine.”

“Whooo, Wrackwolf, this is too much! And you're dead, dingy serious. No, no, don't flex those big hands at me. For personal reasons I'd rather not be strangled to death just now. Oh man, you are so wrong that it's past the comic and into delirium. He has enough magic to spook you, but no other magics, other than his magic art.”

“Maybe I know a couple of magics that he doesn't know. He doesn't use wood, but I know what can be trapped in a block of wood that's been hollowed out with a Laplander knife. But I don't think the Harps are the kind of fugitives who'd want him to hide them. They will go first class when they go, and they'll go on a border jump. And you will be in trouble, man, because they'll go with the college money that you're responsible for. You're about to be made into a very stenchy goat, Joe College Greatglobe, and you laugh at me!”

“I'm not laughing, Wrackwolf. Stop them, somehow! They are a crime on its way to happen, and my superiors insist that I trust them.”

“The assurances of superiors last about as long as an October snow when a hot spell comes. And there will be a hot spell, man, for you. But theirs will be a time-delay crime. Their act will not become criminal until it is certain that they're not coming back. Maybe they will go to Rio. Maybe it is in Rio that they have located the electronic reticle that is such a wonderful buy. You're a sitting duck, Joe College Greatglobe.”

It was the next afternoon that Joe Greatglobe the purser and George Whitewater the proctor were in Skaber's workshop with him. Skaber had new-made models of the two Harps on his little display table there, and the models seemed to spill an irony over the two sheepish college officials.

“Wrackwolf the Detective says that the models are here in your shop when the fugitives they represent have disappeared, Skaber,” Greatglobe said in a poor attempt at lightness, “and he said that when the models disappear that means that the fugitives have returned. He's hit it half right in this particular instance, hasn't he? I've a nervous feeling that the Harps really have skipped, or are in hiding. Where have you hidden them, Skaber?”

“You're almost too nervous to joke with,” Jon Skaber said, “but I'd be more inclined to trap the Harps than to help them escape. They didn't come to see me to be hidden, though. Honestly they didn't. They looked in on me for a moment, but it was only to taunt me for the last time.”

“You were apparently the last person to see them, Jon. After they converted the cashier's check into cash they came here. And where did they go then? There's no further trace of them at all. Wrackwolf the Detective says that I will become a very stenchy goat in this affair. And I guess that I am.”

“Wrackwolf is very anthropomorphic in his thinking and notions,” said George Whitewater the proctor. “He'll have you turned into a goat, and he'll have human fugitives turned into miniature models. Jon, he really believes that you reduce living persons to models. And that you can inflate them to persons again when danger is past.”

Wrackwolf the Detective came in without knocking.

“I want the money, Jon Skaber,” he said, “the half a million dollars in currency that the Harps had when they came here. Have you miniaturized the money also?”

“Find the Harps, Detective. Then you may find the money. But theirs isn't a crime till it's sure they aren't coming back. It isn't your business yet, Detective.”

“Yes it is. There's another crime being done here, an unnatural crime. I have found the Harps. They came here and they did not leave. So they are still here, there on your table. So is the money. I'll take it and check it out.”

Wrackwolf reached and with canny fingers was under the coat and shirt of the five-inch-tall model of Diamant Harp, and he came out with a small strip of something. “The money belt,” he said. “I'll check it out.” Wrackwolf went out with his small acquisition.

“Ah, that was funny!” Jon Skaber sighed and snickered a minute later. “We will have a drink on that, men. I guess poor Wrackwolf will be put away sooner or later. They've busted him down to one department after another. Now he's in small-time bunko, but he still thinks he's on life-or-death stuff.”

They drank it fast, and then they drank it a little bit slower. They talked slur-tongued after a while. And then Jon Skaber tried to waken his two newest models out of their grubby slumber to taunt them and display them. He shook them, and then they were half awake.

“For your sins of misproportion we will taunt you yet,” said the model of Rayona Harp. “You do us badly. There is no way that quality can be separated from quantity ever.”

“Jon's work is not true at all,” the model of Diamant Harp said. “There is no such thing as a true model of anything. We want our money that the shabby detective stole. We want to get out of here.”

“I recognize parts of their conversation,” George Whitewater said, “so they are actual recordings that you made unbeknownst to them. And you are dubbing in other parts of it. You're a genius, I suppose, Jon. But in the actual executions, as Rayona says, you do them badly. There's a distortion in all of it.”

“I don't admit there is any distortion in my work,” Jon said. “It's all true.”

Detective Wrackwolf came in without knocking, but now he seemed a bit chastened.

“I'd hoped we'd be able to check the serial numbers on the miniaturized money,” he said, “but the experts at the lab say it'd take a week even to devise the instruments to unpack it and magnify it for photographing. But I know it's the same money, and that there's a way to reconstitute it.”

Jon and the purser and the proctor laughed then. They drank again, and Wrackwolf glowered at them. But they hadn't been able to side-track their troubles for long. Greatglobe and Whitewater rose to go. They were sure that the Harps had decamped with college money, and that they, Greatglobe and Whitewater, were going to be held highly accountable for it. Greatglobe and Whitewater left, and Jon Skaber went out into the street with them.

“Each to his own burden,” he told them. “I still have the deranged detective who seems disposed to linger on and on.”

“Deranged, Jon?” Whitewater asked. “Or is it just that you feel his hot footprints on the back of your neck? But thank you for commiserating with us. The Harps may not really be gone. Three times before we've thought they'd skipped, and they hadn't. But it escalates. Once we thought they'd skipped with thirty thousand, then with seventy thousand, then with a hundred and sixty thousand. Is this one big enough for them? We may be unnecessarily nervous. They may be as honest as the day is long. Ah, it's getting dark already, and so early.”

The purser and the proctor went up the dusky road to the college quad, and Jon Skaber went back into his own place where his own burden still waited.

And Lyle Wrackwolf the Detective still remained. He sat and he sulked. He took a curious block of wood out of his pocket and he whittled on it. He looked for a long time at the models of the two Harps. And he made deep and gouging cuts in his block.

“Aren't you going to put back the two-and-a-half-inch-long money belt on the model of Diamant Harp, Wrackwolf?” Jon Skaber asked. “While you have it, it detracts from the authenticity of my model.”

“No, I'm keeping it for evidence.”

“Isn't that a different sort of snuff you're stuffing into your lip, Detective Wrackwolf? You're a total stereotype, you know, and you mustn't change these little details about yourself.”

“It's vansinnig-ogräs snuff, Jon Skaber. Why do your hands begin to shake?”

“My hands never shake, and they never fail me. That isn't the sort of wood you usually use, is it, Wrackwolf? It doesn't seem to cut well. And it's not your usual knife. Ah yes, mad-weed snuff, I've heard of it. Aren't you mad enough without it?”

“Possibly I am, but every shaman uses it when starting on a trick. Oh, the wood cuts well enough. No, the knife isn't edged as well as today's knives, and I don't usually use such wood as this. It's coffin spruce.”

“There isn't any coffin spruce in this country.”

“It didn't come from this country. It's from Lapland. I've had it a long time. I knew I'd need it some day. It looks rough, but it finishes off to a pleasant sort of textured smoothness. On the inside it does. You'll like it.”

Jon Skaber yawned widely. “Wrackwolf, you begin to get on my nerves today,” he said. “I'll have to ask you to leave. You have no business here.”

“You stretch your jaws when you yawn, Jon, but mine will outstretch yours. Ah, which snake will swallow which, I or you? Ask me to leave if you will, but I'm not going till I've completed my task. I'm working towards the apprehension of a criminal, and that is my business, inasmuch as I have any business after being busted down and down again.”

“You're looking for your criminal here, Wrackwolf? Time is running on you, man.”

“Yes, here, Jon. Would I be sitting here if the criminal were somewhere else?”

“You're insane, Wrackwolf, even without the mad-weed snuff.”

“Probably so. I've suspected for a long while that I was crazy. And my doctor more or less told me that I was, though with weasel words. He said I'd get along better though if I kept busy at something. So I will keep busy trapping the criminal.”

“Wrackwolf, please try to understand. I am not a criminal. I do not hide people. I do not shrink people. I am an artist in one particular small field, that of making models. And now I am tired of your present company. Yes, so I will alter it. No wonder your knife doesn't cut well. It's — ”

“Oh, just an old Laplander magic knife. Flint blade, reindeer-antler handle. It cuts well enough if one has strong hands. I'll hollow out the coffin spruce block. And it will fit. It will always fit. You make your move too late, Jon Skaber. I had already begun mine. Why does your chin barely come to the edge of your display table now? Stand up to me now! Remember that you used to be of about my height, and both of us very big. Now what size are you? It isn't working very well, is it?”

“Why, why, I — no it isn't working right, Wrackwolf. You should be the one — ”

“I should be the one who's shrinking? But I'm head and shoulders taller than you now, Jon Skaber. You've started to shrink, and you'll continue. You really thought that you could shrink me. You thought that the white giant could shrink the black giant? Aye, you'll fit into the coffin by the time I get it finished. Maybe I'll get my old job back if I go in and show them the master criminal encoffined in a little block of coffin spruce that I can hold in the palm of my hand. The Harps didn't come to you to be hidden, did they, Jon? I was wrong about that. They came only to taunt you one last time. But you shrunk them anyhow.”

“Wrackwolf, you're insane.”

“One of us is, Jon Skaber, but which one? That's puzzled me a little bit. Yes, now you're not even as tall as my navel, are you? Let's play it that the one who has to shrink and get into the wood-block coffin is the crazy one to let himself be so taken: that's you. But the stronger magic man has to be crazy to make it work: that's me.”

“Wrackwolf, crazy man, listen to me,” Jon Skaber spoke in fear and anger. “I am not a criminal. I do not shrink people. I am a peaceful craftsman. And I am not being shrinked myself, not, not, not — ”

“I think the money will be all right after I've unminiaturized it. It will be real money again. I'll have the coffin ready for you in a bit. Yes, Skaber, you are shrinking. And deforming.”

“Yah, now you'll see what it's like, wise-guy Jon,” the model of Rayona Harp taunted in a squeaky miniaturized voice. “It's the trapper trapped.”

“No, no, Wrackwolf,” Jon Skaber, the Light Swede, the Light Giant, still protested. “Don't attempt it further. Don't! There's reasons why you must not! I'm a good man. I haven't done any of those wild things. They're all in your mind. I can't shrink people. I haven't any of that Lapland magic.”

“I can. And I have,” Lyle Wrackwolf the Dark Giant said. “Now where are you? Oh, down there. You can't get out, Jon. Not if you're too small to reach the door knob. Not if you're too small even to reach the top of that one step that goes up to your outside door, and it's only ten inches high. Oh, you're a bad job, Jon Skaber. And your face, your face! You deform so much when you shrink! The Harps were right. Models are never very accurate.”

I'll See It Done And Then I'll Die

“Rambo, you're right about to the end of your pictures, aren't you?” Gifford Hazelman asked him. “It's a wonderfully decorative idea, but you have carried it too far. Oh, why do you wear white socks with black shoes and pants? It pains me. And you just don't have room for another picture anywhere, do you?”

Gifford Hazelman wore a gold pin with the logo ‘1-1-1’, which meant “of the one percent of the one percent of the one percent,” or “one in a million.” And he and his group believed that they were “one in a million” persons who had achieved Pragmatic Perfection. In this city of eight million persons there were eight persons who had achieved Pragmatic Perfection. Of course they knew each other and consciously formed a group.

“Oh, I have room for many more pictures in this room,” Rambo Touchstone told his visitor-friend Gifford. “I can put them on any empty place at all, or in the white or unfilled portion of a larger picture. Pale skies are legitimate places to put them. And I wear white socks with black pants and shoes because these are the colors of the things that I have the most of.”

“Haven't you any taste at all, Rambo? My PP friends all have perfect taste.”

“Oh certainly, Gifford. I have quiet tastes and noisy tastes. I have excellent tastes in some things and terrible taste in others. I even have enough taste to not get into arguments about taste.”

“But not enough taste to avoid splitting infinitives. One wants to take you and complete you. You love clutter, Rambo. But you have poor taste even in clutter.”

That was partly true. Rambo liked crowds and congregations of objects about him. Being generally too poor to have statuary, and his apartment being too small for that sort of clutter, he had pictures, pasted-up pictures. He had more than ten thousand pictures pasted up on the walls of his studio room. Some were smaller than postage stamps; some were as much as a foot square; most were in between. The pictures were cut out of travel brochures and advertisements, out of catalogs, out of Arizona Highways Magazine and Oklahoma Today and Gourmet, from art calendars of former years, from Antiques journals, from all sources whatever.

The doors, the jambs, the sills, the baseboards, the window framing, the mullions between the glass panes, and all wall space (whether hidden behind books and other things or not) were covered with pictures. “They make themselves known by their pervading influence even when they're hidden,” Rambo said. It was an amazing clutter. But there was a muted blending as well as howling clashes of colors and arrangements and contrasts. There was some taste in the collection and assembly.

“I'll rejoice when you don't have another square inch on which to paste another picture however small, Rambo,” Gifford Hazelman crowed.

“Don't say that, Gifford,” Rambo begged. “When I have filled every available space, then I must die.”

And Gifford guffawed so loudly as almost to bring his own taste into question.

“You fetish-worshiper! Do you really believe that, Rambo?” he asked when he could speak through his laughter.

“No, I don't allow myself to believe it, not very often. It's true though; and my not believing it won't make it any the less true.”

“You are quaint, Rambo, in so many ways, and you are not at all perfect,” Gifford said. “Are you still going with Miss Georgia McGown? She's common, you know. She's of small-tradesman stock.”

“Why do you come around to see me, Gifford, if you don't like my style of dress, or my grammar, or my girl?”

“You should see the things I don't like about all the other people who aren't of my absolute inner circle, all the other people who haven't achieved Pragmatic Perfection. There's many dozens of things I hate about most of them. You come closest of anyone I know, Rambo, who hasn't come all the way. And we, I, do need one more. All seven of my inner friends are perfect, in attainments, in taste, and perhaps in other things. There is nothing really that I can do with or for them. But I have undertaken your reformation, Rambo Touchstone, and I intend to devote what's left of my life to it. When you are perfected, then my life will be complete. Is that not big of me?”

“Big, yes, Gifford, and rather ungainly of you also.”

Rambo Touchstone supported himself mostly by doing articles for the Moxie-Polaroid Crystal Gazette. Articles in Moxie-Polaroid are entirely in mathematics and symbols, of course. And being articled to Moxie was an acceptable occupation even in the view of Gifford Hazelman. So many of Gifford's acquaintances were intolerably imperfect because of their occupations!

Rambo also did pieces, under other names of course, for the various Adult Algebra publications: but Moxie-Polaroid was his protein and halo-hormone sustenance. Rambo sat for hours every day before his mathematical typewriter. And many moments, when the inspiration did not flow, he diverted himself by selecting and pasting up small pictures on the vanishingly empty areas of his room.

Three evenings a week, Rambo diverted himself with Miss Georgia McGown. On two of these three weekly evenings, Georgia would cook Rambo a supper at her place, and on the other allocated evening he would cook her a supper at his. They would talk a little bit sometimes. And they would play Crack-a-Stack which is done with five-card hands, with dice, and with markers on a board. It is a good game. It teaches flexibility of mind and easy adjustment to events.

Georgia McGown was indeed of small-tradesman stock. She had a vacant look much of the time. But, when she smiled, it turned into an inhabited look. She was too broad in the beam, too heavy of haunch. She had dull mousy hair, and she said the same things over and over again. She wouldn't have done for a person of perfect taste. But she was kind. And she was a personal friend of Rambo Touchstone. That counts for a lot.

“You always have that same book in the same place on the same table,” Georgia said now. “All your other books move and change, but I don't believe you ever touch this one.”

“Yes, I pick it up sometimes and hold it, Georgia. But I don't allow myself to open it. You see, Georgia, it is the last book I will ever read. Crack!”

When Rambo cried “crack” it meant he had won a hand at Crack-a-Stack.

“Why is it the last book you will ever read, Rambo?” Georgia McGown asked.

“You heard about the man who said he couldn't die yet. He hadn't read King Lear.”

“No, I never heard of him, Rambo. Tell me about him.”

“He resembled me in this, Georgia. I can't die yet, until I have read this book. It's The Nutmeg Man by Mockley. But when the time for it comes, then I'll read it. And then — ”

“And then you'll die. What fun! No wonder Mr. Hazelman teases you and calls you quaint. That's like when they say ‘See Broken Arrow and then die.’ There's that spider, I know. And there's the pictures that you paste up on your wall. How many things are there all together that you'll die when you've finished them?”

“Seven, Georgia.”

The spider was one of the newer fetishes. The spider-person was extending a web from a midpoint in the room towards the corner. When the web reached the corner, then Rambo would die. Rambo himself did not interfere with the building of the net (he did not know, he had never known, who made up the unbreakable rules of these fetish games), but the web might be interfered with by natural causes, breezes and such. Of recent weeks, and unbeknownst to Rambo, Georgia McGown had been a natural force interfering with the web, never drastically, never obviously, but enough to destroy in one evening what the spider had done in one week. But the web came very near to reaching the corner several times. The spider was becoming cannier and more avid for its goal.

“Do you think the Cow-Pokes will win the pennant, Rambo?” Georgia asked about mid-July that year. “Ever since I was a little girl I've been praying for it, and they've never won it yet. They have got to win it someday. And this is the latest in the season that they've ever been on top. I wish that they'd get more than half a game ahead sometime. Crack!” (Georgia had won a hand of Crack-a-Stack.)

“There's a pretty good chance that they will win it this year, Georgia. It's never been quite so close a threat before. I mean they never had such good prospects.”

“You don't seem very enthusiastic. Don't you just love the Cow-Pokes?”

“Yes, I've loved them all my life, Georgia, but I'm selfish. If they win the pennant, then they will play in the Dixie Series. And if they win the Dixie — ”

“Oh, this is sheer delight! You die if the Pokes win the Dixie Series that they've never even been in yet. That makes it real sticky. I'll have to pray for them to win the pennant but lose the Dixie Series. This is going to be hard to handle.”

“Oh, it's no great thing, Georgia. People die every day, maybe because of a coincidence of related serial numbers on dollar bills in their pockets, maybe because a crack in their driveway lengthens till it finally links with two other cracks, maybe because their name is misspelled in the new phone directory and that massive misspelling drives it over the number of times that they can have their name misspelled and live. Crack!” (Rambo had won that hand of Crack-a-Stack.)

“Do you think we should stop playing Crack-a-Stack, Rambo?” Georgia asked. “If you believe you'll die only after you hit a 99,999 score, why not just stop playing it? Then you won't die at all. We've played more than a hundred thousand games, so the odds say that you might get hit any time.”

“Quit playing Crack-a-Stack! What other game is there? But if I quit playing it, then I don't know what happens to the guarantee. If I stopped playing, maybe I could die any time and not just after I had hit 99,999.”

“Crack,” said Miss Georgia McGown. She'd won a fast hand there.

“Rambo, my friend, I know that I irritate you with my admonitions and exhortations,” Gifford Hazelman said. “It is just that I am anguished to see a flawed person of so much potential. And you are the only flawed person whom I associate with. You are personable and gracious. You have acceptable occupations. You show strong indications of intelligence and humanism. There are a number of things arguing for your inclusion in the ranks of the elite. But you are not even pragmatically perfect. This makes it very awkward. You have seven faults. I work constantly to cure you of these seven. If I should finally succeed in ridding you of all seven of them, then my life would be complete.”

“I'm sure I have more than seven faults, Gifford you funny duck. They ought to at least count up to eight or nine.”

“No. Seven. And of several of them you are virtually cured. One, you still wear clash-colors, but you wear them less than you used to. Two, you have just split an infinitive, but you are ninety percent cured of that. Three, you adhere to Ranwick's No-Contest Philosophy rather than to Hardcastle's No-Design Philosophy, but I see clear signs that you may be maturing there. Four, even yet you sometimes forget a primary rule of style and use two hands for your backhand shots at raquets. Five, you order French dressing instead of Blue-Cheese dressing for your salad before a red-meat meal. Six, you still go with Miss Georgia McGown who is of small-tradesman stock. Seven, you subscribe to a number of fetishes as being either causative or coincident with your own death.

“Rambo, there are not nearly enough of us persons of perfect taste around, and you come so close to it! Give up these squalid shortcomings and make my life complete. I believe that we will soon have five of your failings disposed of. For the other two, going with Miss Georgia McGown and subscribing to death-fetishes, we must make special efforts. But it will be worth it to you to extirpate these two final failings. Rambo, no person of taste and intelligence goes with Miss McGown. And no person of taste and intelligence believes in death-fetishes.”

“Georgia is the only person I know who's intelligent enough to play Roundhouse Crack-a-Stack. And if I don't die of fetish fulfillment, then I may die of some appalling disorder. I hate disorder, and there is something orderly about fetishes.”

“Ah, Rambo, it's generally believed in the PP crowd that pseudo-intelligence and not real intelligence is what's used in Crack-a-Stack,” Gifford said. “And those symmetrical five-sided dice that you use in the game, you know that they're geometrically impossible. They're plain wrong, and they give a person the vertigo just to see them roll about. But you're just shuffling words, Rambo. Just how many of those death-fetishes do you believe in?”

“I believe that I will die when there is no more room to paste up even one more picture in this studio. I believe that I will die when I have read Mackley's The Nutmeg Man. I believe that I will die when that spider-web reaches the corner of the room. I believe that I will die if the Cow-Pokes ever win the Dixie Series. I believe that I will die if I ever score 99,999 at Crack-a-Stack. I believe that I will die if I ever break off my relationship with Georgia McGown. I believe that there is a certain hourglass, as yet unrevealed to me, that has my name on it. I believe that I will come into possession of it, and then I must turn it to the last three minutes. And I must die when those last three minutes have run out. And I believe that I will not die at all unless these things are fulfilled.”

“And if some of them are fulfilled and others are not?”

“I believe that will not happen. They will all be fulfilled at just about the same time. Then I'll die.”

“Rambo, don't you see how silly this all is?”

“Certainly. This is the essence of a fetish: that it be recognized as completely foolish, and that it compels acceptance nevertheless. But death-fetish is not nearly as silly as is death itself.”

So it went on till the last week of September that year. Rambo Touchstone spent three evenings a week with Miss Georgia McGown. And he articled for the Moxie-Polaroid Crystal Gazette. And he saw Gifford Hazelman off and on. Then Rambo phoned Gifford one night.

“Gifford, I feel a near certainty that I'm going to die in a few minutes,” Rambo said. “Would you like to come over?”

“Oh, certainly, certainly,” Gifford answered him. “Thanks. I'll be right over. Don't die till I get there.” And Gifford Hazelman was there almost at once.

“Ah, feel like dying, do you, Rambo?” he asked in that jocular tone that he did so badly. “Maybe I can show you just how foolish it all is. We might as well bring it to a crisis, and maybe a blown crisis will get you over your fetishism. And then I will have you cured of all your faults except one. You have a Crack-a-Stack board set up? Were you going to play with — her?”

“We did play a bit, but now she has left. We've quarreled irrevocably, and now we are finished with each other forever. And that ‘forever’ that I have left will be, I fear, of short duration.”

“Wonderful, Rambo, wonderful! Oh, there may be a pang for a while, but it could never have worked out. Remember what stock she is from. Now we will just demonstrate the foolishness of your fetishes and get you to abandon them. Then you will be perfect, just as all my PP friends are. I believe you will take my place in the circle then, and I will ascend somehow to a higher plane. My life will be complete when you are perfected. So give me the details, Rambo. Why do you think that you're going to die?”

“There isn't room for even one more smaller-than-a-postage-stamp picture to be pasted up in this room, Gifford. It's absolutely full. So I can die any time as far as that is concerned.”

“The end of ingenuity, is it? Really, I don't know how you found places for the last few thousand of them.”

“The spider-web has reached the corner of the room, so I can die as soon as feasible as far as that condition goes.”

“Yes, the web seemed to receive a lot of setbacks, but now it's complete.”

“The Cow-Pokes are playing the New Orleans Pelicans in the deciding game of the Dixie Series right now, and it's gone into extra innings.”

“So I know, Rambo.”

“I scored 99,999 at Crack-a-Stack this evening, before I quarreled irrevocably with Georgia. So the score fulfills one condition, and the breaking off with Miss Georgia McGown fulfills another. That's all but two of them. And I've read all of Mockley's The Nutmeg Man except the last half a page.”

“Good, good. Now when you have finished that last half page, and when the hourglass with your name on it (I see that you've acquired that) has run its last three minutes, then you are just about compelled to die. Silly, isn't it?”

Gifford's cravat-radio gave them the news that the Cow-Pokes had beaten the Pelicans in the Dixie Series, which surprised neither of them. Then Gifford turned the hourglass over and the sand began to run again.

“It's running, Rambo,” he said. “In three minutes you will die. Or will be cured of your fetishes and delusions. Time's running, Rambo. And you really believe that you will die when all the sand has run out?”

“Somebody will die when it has all run out.”

“Did I hear a laugh somewhere?”

“Probably a person of small-tradesman stock.”

“I'm so glad that you're rid of her, Rambo. And now, if you can be rid of the fetish thing, you'll be pragmatically perfect. And my life will be — ”

“Yes, I know, Gifford. Only a minute and a half of sand left. Well, it was a long joke and I've had a lot of fun out of it. I never had any fetishes, Gifford. I just had fun. Sand's almost run out, Gifford.”

“And you, my friend, have shed all your faults and may join the pragmatically perfect ones. And my life becomes complete. Oh! Wait, wait! Easy there whoever you are! I didn't mean it like that. ‘Complete’ has two slightly different meanings. I meant the other one. I didn't intend for the condition to tie in with — I'm stricken, Rambo.”

“You're dead, Gifford,” said Miss Georgia McGown as she came out of the dinette. Rambo hadn't really broken off with her. He'd just said that he had to have fun with Gifford. But Gifford Hazelman was dead. His life was complete, as he had said that it would be.

“I win,” Georgia laughed. “I bet that it'd kill him, and you bet that it wouldn't. He was so idea-ridden and so hooked on the fetish stuff that it had to kill him. And we agreed that whoever won the bet would get credit for ten hands of Crack-a-Stack.”

“Yes, it gives you a good edge over me this evening, Georgia,” Rambo said. “It's a wonderful game that can include such side-games as ‘The Death of Gifford Hazelman’ in its workings. But look out, Georgia. You're ten hands ahead, but I feel in ‘good stack’ tonight. Let's play! But he's got your chair.”

“Oh, I'll just put him in the bath tub,” she said. She tossed the stiffening Gifford over her shoulder and so took and disposed of him. Being a little bit broad in the beam helps a girl to do things like that. And Rambo Touchstone phoned the building superintendent and told him that there was a dead man in the bath tub and that it constituted a malfunction of that facility according to the lease.

They played. “Crack!” Rambo cried within minutes. He had won a hand at Crack-a-Stack and was now only nine behind for the evening. The building superintendent came in and disposed of the corpse in the bath tub by a trick that is known only to building superintendents. And Rambo and Georgia went on with the game with a flash of five-card hands and a rolling of symmetrical five-sided dice which are geometrically impossible.

“Crack!” Georgia cried. She would not easily be overtaken.

Crack-a-Stack develops character. And it teaches flexibility of mind and easy adjustment to events.

The Effigy Histories

1

“If a large meteor should light in the middle of my neighborhood, would it be worth my while to step outside and see it? If the meteor should knock my house askew so that my floor was at an angle of 38°, would it be worth my while to investigate? Oh no, I see that the room isn't really slanting at 38°. That's an illusion. Nevertheless, I just believe I'll step outside for a look at the meteor of the meteoric illusion. I understand that the meteoric phenomenon is named Karl Effigy.”

 — Diogenes Pontifex

“The fact is that tonight I have been in the presence of a man of apparent infinite wisdom, a man who knows everything. This man, who is named Karl Effigy, has to be one of the Magi with all the timelessness that belongs to them. He has the aura of power that goes with total wisdom. He has a person-pattern that is an arc of the circle of perfection. Yet he is quite young. Doctor Claymore says that Karl Effigy is like the colt that has just swallowed one of Doctor Squibb's Magic Pellets and found that it is real magic. The marvelous ‘Histories’ of this Karl Effigy give only an incomplete idea of the wonderful person he is.

“There must be something wrong or missing from this paragon. But what? Perhaps I should appoint myself Devil's Advocate and try to find a flaw in him.”

 — Arpad Arutinov, Cosmo Club Minutes

“On what slight basis does genius depend? On what does wisdom? Would it not be possible to go into a brain, emulsify it a bit in small areas, and then roll and mould its substance into the forms of wrinkles and promontories identical to those of a brain that housed true genius and true wisdom? Not only do I believe that this is possible, but I believe that it has already been done.”

 — Audifax O'Hanlon

The Effigy Histories had appeared like a shower of September meteors. They were bright and sudden, and one had barely time to cry “Money, Money, Money!” or “Magic, Magic, Magic!” while each shooting star of them flamed and burned. But they did not go out. They accumulated. And now there are three dozen of them. The best way to have first sight of one of them is over the left shoulder.

Few works of History generate such an atmosphere of luck and pleasant surprise and sheer delight. The people took to them instantly. But the Effigy Histories, in spite of their hectic reception, aren't very historical. It is much harder to say what they are than what they are not.

They are not conventional histories at all. They are art-forms, or they are life-forms, that resemble histories somewhat in their shapes and movements and effects. But they are not accurate in any of their particulars.

The facts and happenings in them differ from the facts and happenings in corresponding reality: but in overall impression they are quite similar. They are in fact a little bit more apparitional, a little bit more colorful, a little bit tonier than the corresponding realities.

As happy fictions, as ingenious inventions, they are fine. But they are like imposing bottles that have been emptied of all the liquor of fact and refilled with something else. Only a very few persons in the Cosmo Club realize that some sort of switch has been made: nobody in the rest of the world realizes it. As the creator of these Histories, Karl Effigy is also a happy fiction.

In the case of the Effigy History of Music and its author, there is a correspondence and mutual clarification between creation and creator that is not to be found in the Effigy History of Mountains, for instance. With almost any musical instrument, Karl Effigy can play out the clarifications of the statements in his History of Music.

But Karl Effigy can not, to the same extent, clarify the obscurities of his History of Oceans or his History of Continental Upthrusts. And yet he illuminates those subjects very powerfully also, going back and giving one the feel of adolescent oceans and of swampier continents.

In all reason, Karl Effigy is too young a man to be even the fictional master of so many subjects. He is pleasant, he is loud, he is large. He is full of vigor, and he has all the candor of a perfect con-man. He always seems to have just arrived from somewhere very distant. His talk, if analyzed, has the mechanical element of a recording. But, left unanalyzed, it has the liveliness and humor of humanity at its best.

2

Karl Effigy was quite a good talker. He was clear and convincing. There were only a very few listeners (among them the fine-boned Robert Straitroad and Redman Newbreeze) who came to realize that Effigy's words were mostly nonsense. But these few listeners knew that it didn't matter much. Somehow he did communicate with a strange clarity and luminosity.

“Remember the boy with the rubber muscles,” Robert Straitroad said.

“Remember the dolphin who invented Underwater Algebra,” Redman Newbreeze said.

Robert Straitroad and Redman Newbreeze were determined to find by whose strings Karl Effigy was dangled. And, in that same small scientific community, most of the wrong-go strings were manipulated by Clement Stringtown and Crowley Headcooper. Let's look at those two manipulators, but be careful. They don't like to be looked at too closely.

Clement Stringtown was an absolutely corrupt idealist. His ideal was the golden apple that would leave two of itself behind for every one that he stole. But, until that ideal golden apple arrived, Clement stole a lot of ordinary apples wherever he could find them. He also (his enemies said) stole pennies from dead mens' eyes. “I'll bring the change back to you,” he'd always say to excuse himself to those dead men, but he never brought any change back.

Clement was the last of the simple-minded, single-souled inventors. He had a lust to violate the laws of mechanical compensation when they got in the way of his inventions. He did violate these laws, and he got away with it to effect a dozen really remarkable inventions. He forced compensation to get out of his way a dozen times. But now the adapted compensations waited to waylay him in a dozen ambushes to get even.

Crowley Headcooper was sort of a partner of Clement Stringtown. Headcooper could build anything that Stringtown could think about. Crowley Headcooper was a fine design engineer in both animate and inanimate materials, and he was one of the finest micro-machinists in the world.

Ah, about the Boy With The Rubber Muscles: it goes like this:

Clement Stringtown and Crowley Headcooper had been doing work on the counterpoint relationship between brain corrugations and body form. If they could change the shape of the runnels and wrinkles of a brain, they believed, they could also change the shape of the body to conform to the new conditions. They conquered obesity in several cases. They duplicated the wrinkles of typical thin-people brains and so compelled fat people to become thin people. Then they decided on a showboat antic to advertise themselves. They selected a smooth-bodied boy or young man and entered him as a candidate in the Mr. Universe Body Beautiful Contest.

They had the preserved cadaver and brain of the Mr. Universe Body Beautiful of fifty years before that (the greatest of all Mr. Universe Body Beautifuls). It was no trick to identify the brain-wrinkle area that corresponded to body-form in the cadaver. They forced the corresponding brain-wrinkle area of the smooth-bodied youth into the same configurations. And the body of the boy hurried to conform.

The boy began to eat junk food in gigantic quantities and to grow one of the most beautiful sets of massive muscle ever seen. He shoveled in a thousand pounds of goop, and he put on a hundred pounds of new and exquisite musculature. He won the contest, and he was named Mr. Universe Body Beautiful.

But there was a waspish lady reporter who wouldn't let it go at that. She said that he was a fake, and she challenged him to Indian-Wrestle. He refused. She handed him a hundred-kilo dumbbell, and he dropped it with the spraining of both his wrists. The lady reporter lodged the charge of fraud.

Well, the contest was based on appearance and beauty of musculature, not on strength. And judgment was upheld on that basis, unless fakery could be proved. Fakery was charged, and the marvelous muscles were investigated. They proved to be real in that they were a living part of the boy. And they proved to be false in that they were made out of cheap-shot, hurry-up material and not out of honest flesh. The brain had ordered the body to conform to a pattern, and the body had conformed too quickly and with inferior material.

The prize money was put into escrow, and it's still there. The protest has never been decided, but the damage was done. Whenever those intrepid inventors, Clement Stringtown and Crowley Headcooper, came up with something really new and spooky, people always warned “Remember the Boy with the Rubber Muscles.”

But this made the inventors even more resolute. They became the world's foremost experts at brain-cobbling. Clement was designing meaningful adaptations of the human, and other, brains; and Headcooper was putting them into effect. They experimented with forcing lightly-wrinkled brains into such convolutions as represented massive knowledge. If a person possessed all the knowledge in the world, he would have brain corrugations like these. If he had brain corrugations like these, he would possess all the knowledge in the world.

Clement and Crowley really had something here: and when they really had something they couldn't be topped.

Ah, about that dolphin who invented Underwater Algebra, it goes like this:

The inventors Clement and Crowley had been doing work on the relationships between the brain corrugations of dolphins and similar corrugations of humans. They forced the wrinkles of a small area of the brain of a very intelligent dolphin into patterns identical to those of that single-minded man and great algebra-master Masaad al-Turk. And the dolphin's brain took the new corrugations easily.

For recording, a high-frequency pencil was sound-coupled to the pitch-speech of the dolphin. The pencil etched its message onto thin laminations of slate that were set into the water. The result, finally recorded on one hundred and eighteen sheets of slate, was a coherent system of mathematics that was popularly called Underwater Algebra. This new system was dazzling with promise. It was much more than an algebra. It contained Third Calculus, and it propounded new and emulsified rotating vectors.

There had never been an underwater mathematics before. There had never been an alien mathematics before. There was quite an excitement about the thing. There was speculation that humans were a thousand years behind dolphins in the field of impure mathematics, and that only a crash program backed by huge governmental and world financing could close the gap. But several of the genius-mathematicians of the world took exception to the direction and crunch of the toy steamroller of the dolphin devotees.

“Underwater Algebra is all wet,” Professor Rodney Muldoon spoke with incredible crassness. And Professor Plato Platorhinus spoke of it even more sharply at an International Seminar:

“Drain all the water out of all the equations,” he barked. “Then see what you have left.”

“How will we drain equations, Professor Platorhinus?” the Marshal of the Seminar asked in confusion.

“Aw dromedary drek! What do they make Seminar Marshals out of nowadays?” Professor Plato cried in anguish. “Rotate all the vector values ninety degrees clockwise and let the water run out of them.”

It was done. And what they had left was simple dry-land mathematics such as toddlers study in high schools and colleges.

Almost the whole mathematical community had been had. And it resolved to get back at somebody. It would get back at inventors Clement Stringtown and Crowley Headcooper whenever it could.

Ah, about the most recent endeavor of Stringtown and Headcooper, it goes like this:

“We can now sufficiently duplicate any bump or wrinkle from any human brain into any other human brain,” Clement Stringtown said. “And the two of us are the foremost brain-bump geographers in the world. We know what brain-wrinkles correspond to what knowledge and accomplishments, and we have here in the local medical museum an array of some of the most knowledgeable brains that have ever lived. Why could we not take a large and fresh brain and make it the active repository of all the wisdom and talent ever?”

“Let's try it,” Crowley Headcooper said.

“We could cram a big young and mostly blank brain with the Mathematical Knowledge of Louis Lobachevski, with the Philosophy of Terrence Muldoon, with the Morphic Zoology of Zielinski, with the Earth-Science of Popper, with the Phenomenal Theology of Holdfaster Gander, with the Mind-as-Rhapsody Accomplishments of Maurice Aichinger, with the Musical Mastery of Gordon Whitecrow, with the Political Sagacity of Richard Hornwhanger, with the Historical Encyclopediasm of Garfield Rialto, with the Art-as-Soul Charisma of Johnny Konduly, with the Cosmological Scope of Velikov Vonk (he is not dead, but in his case it will not matter), with the Golden Calligraphy of Tachygraphic Ted (his brains are in the Carnival Museum rather than in the Medical Museum).”

“Let's do it,” Crowley Headcooper said.

This latter-named person of the grandees, Tacky Ted as he was called in the carnivals, had indeed been a rather shabby person in spite of his one golden talent. He had the most beautiful and the most rapid handwriting in the world. In his carnival act he could write his beautiful hand at more than a hundred and twenty words a minute. This talent would be handy for the Histories.

“We will select a wide and deep field with its sod still unbusted,” Clement Stringtown glowed. “We will take a young man of full vigor and openness, and of the highest degree of blankness we are able to find. By your sophisticated pantographic duplications, we will effect in him all the finer bumps and channels of Roland Ambergris, all the wonderful wrinkles of Kurt Wedekind, and the whole scenic assemblage of fine gutters and worm-windings in the pickled brains of Hildebrand Oakley.”

“Man, man, let's do it!” Crowley Headcooper cried.

They found a virile and blank-appearing young man on the other side of a fence at a minimum security place. The young man was dissatisfied with his occupation there. He said that he could come along with Stringtown and Headcooper.

It was done. And the avid inventors and creators went quickly into the duplicating business. They laid out those pickled brains to scan them, and Velikov Vonk put his live head on the line with the rest of them. They selected the best areas of each of the master brains, and they duplicated them in the young man. When they were finished, they had a pleasant and exuberant man (a lot of the personality of Johnny Konduly went into him) who knew everything, and who knew how to communicate it all also in the fastest and most beautiful handwriting in the world (it would have reminded an old-timer of the Tachygraphy of Tachygraphic Ted who used to be in the carnivals).

That brings it just about up to date.

Robert Straitroad and Redman Newbreeze, each for a dishonorable reason of his own, took a hostile step against the new prodigy, the meteoric phenomenon, who was named Karl Effigy.

Robert Straitroad called Senator James ‘Grim Jim’ Jimson and asked him to have the Effigy Histories banned as being dangerous euphoric drugs, and he asked him to have the author of Histories destroyed.

Redman Newbreeze captured the fingerprints of young Karl Effigy from a highball glass and sent them across town to be identified.

And at the same time, two prominent persons who shall be nameless brought suit under the charter of the Cosmo Club (to which almost everybody mentioned in these chronicles belonged) for a total examination of the person and processes of young Karl Effigy, the phenomenon who walked like a shuffling kid.

But, while these machinations gathered themselves to pounce, Karl Effigy and his meteoric masterworks continued to zoom and soar. Among others, there now appeared the Effigy History of Edged Instruments, the Effigy History of Convivialities, the Effigy History of Wheeled Vehicles and Persons, the Effigy History of Wines, Brandies, and Sugar-Rums, the Effigy History of the Sexes. So many of them, so great, so startling!

3

Was it true that Karl Effigy talked nonsense when he elucidated and clarified his dazzling and pleasant Histories? Yes, in the manner of having words correspond to things and ideas, he did talk nonsense. But, in a larger way, his talking and writing were composed of the rarest sensibilities, even if not of precise sense. His expressions had the inner coherence of great paintings, of grand and unframed natural scenes, or of resounding and sustained pieces of music. And his discourse was all a series of great pieces of music. Only the instruments were invented to protect the guilty. His flowing Histories themselves were nonsense, to the limited view: but to the Big View, they were galas in which sense was only one of the many condiments to be sniffed and enjoyed.

And still the magnificent Histories rolled on. The Effigy History of Country Music From Fiddle to Git-Fiddle, the Effigy History of Motor Scooters as Youth Experience, the Effigy History of International Relations as Continuing Nostalgic Experience.

One thing about the Histories, most of them were projected to some distance in the future without losing any of their essential validity.

One thing about the historian Karl Effigy, he projected himself in all directions including the future. He was a new-context man. And the answer to him surely had to be in the future, since it wasn't in the present.

Karl Effigy really did know everything, for he had the various shapes and attitudes of brain of a person who knows everything. Those shapes and attitudes are intuitive, and they are always to be recognized. And they cannot be faked.

And Karl Effigy did not know everything, because all his pleasant Histories were nonsense, and so were his pleasant explanations of them.

There came an evening when the Head Usher of the Cosmo Club had to make a choice between these two exclusive cases of the pleasant Karl Effigy.

“Remember the Boy with the Rubber Congruencies,” that Head Usher warned, and he banged his gavel for order. This was on the second evening of the hearings against Karl Effigy.

“But we have never had a Boy with Rubber Congruencies,” the Sergeant-at-Arms said.

“We have now,” the Head Usher announced. “We have found Club Member Karl Effigy deficient in Process. He has the shape and feel and effect of Great Wisdom, and that effect isn't made out of empty material either. It is made out of alien material, however. It all adds up correctly, but all the individual numbers are wrong. It conforms to the shape and it satisfies the appetite, and it subsumes all the pleasures of wisdom and achievement. But it will not stand cross-sectioning.

“The knowledge possessed and promulgated by Karl Effigy (he acquired it by brain-tampering, according to rumor) is sound and correct in general, but not in particular. It is right and conforming shape made out of wrong material. It fails. And member Karl Effigy fails. He now ceases to be a member of the Cosmo Club.

“Take him to the Field of Extinction, Sergeant-at-Arms. The Cosmo Club does not permit itself the luxury of living ex-members.”

“Just a minute!” cried a bailiff breaking into the room with a solid dozen federal marshals. “The person of Karl Effigy becomes our prisoner and not yours. The power of a Congressional Committee is higher than the power of a private club. He is wanted for sentencing, or at least for examination, on the charge or suspicion of purveying euphoric drugs, his so-called Histories. We will take him now. Flowers may be sent to Potters Field about an hour hence, or friends may send contributions to the charity of their choice.”

“Just a damned double-minute!” cried an under-warden coming into the room with no support other than the power of his office. “This juvenile boy is a walk-away from the Alabaster Hills Juvenile Correctional Institute on the north side of town. I am taking him back to allow him to complete his term. Stand aside, Cosmo Club Sergeant-at-Arms! Stand aside, Federal Marshals! I have a bill of particulars on this boy and I am taking him. He is the star of the Penitentiary Band. Without him, the band would just about fall apart.”

And the under-warden took young Karl Effigy away with him.

But all is not lost. Even the device that was weighed and found wanting was pretty good. A person equipped as was Karl Effigy would feel wise to himself, and he would seem wise to many other people also. He would enjoy and spread the pleasure that almost-genuine wisdom gives. And you can get such a job done on yourself right today by almost any sly brain-man.

And those preeminent brain-geographers, Clement Stringtown and Crowley Headcooper, are working on things that you'd hardly believe. And they are not the hard-hearted gentlemen that they are sometimes said to be. They visit Karl Effigy in his confinement almost every week. Karl says, though, that his next walk-away is likely to be down the other side of the hill.

But Karl is busy and happy enough, and he picked up quite a few scraps of wisdom while he was in the wisdom game. His next Effigy History is almost finished, though his counselor is worried about Karl's arithmetic.

The title is the Effigy History of Seven Months Five Days And One Hour And a Half In The Klinker, but Karl Effigy's sentence is for eighteen months.

John Salt

He had failed only once before, and that was in raising a man from the dead. It would seem that one is entitled to fail in this most difficult of feats once, considering that he had often been successful at it. And that once, so far as is known, had been the only previous failure of Joshua Halas.

“The faith to move mountains is not an empty sophistry, not a hollow vessel of speech,” said Joshua. “There is a power, and we live by that power. The weakest of us live on the accumulation of power, and those of us who are stronger add continually to that power store. I say to you that it is not a great thing to move a mountain. I say that to hold a mountain in being is a much greater thing.”

Joshua Halas had the appearance of a levantine Lincoln. Indeed he moved mountains in his every gesture, for he was a complex of crags and cliffs and slanting chasms, and great heights marred by inexplicable shadows. And his voice was a rumble from the bowels of the mountains, rising from the depths in a theophany of passion and power, with irony and eloquence licking in and out of it like imps of the lightning.

“I don't know how he does it,” said Alex Carmi. “I have heard him often enough. But he's the only fraud who ever made my hair rise up like that. I'm almost afraid to pin the tail on him. He may already have the tail. Though he isn't what he says he is, he's more than they try to mark him down for. Every man has a power, but not every man has a power like this one. Just to be able to talk like that is to move mountains a little.”

“I guess I've known every kind there is to know,” said Mary Corsicana. “I have particularly been the consort of frauds. I've lived on shysters and cons and straight gun-down boys. I have known some very fast men at the materialization of a dollar, and a few quacks who would plain take your breath away with their audacity. And they all had an inordinate share of magnetism, some nearly equal to old Josh here. I tell you, Alex, I've traveled with some high old animals in my time.”

“Dynasthe piein to potērion?” cried Joshua loudly. “Can ye drink of the cup? Have ye been led into the desert? Have ye striven with principalities? Woe to thee, Corozain! Woe to thee, Bethsaida! Woe to thee, Ponca City! Thou shalt be thrust down to Hell. For if the miracles had been worked in Sodom that have been worked here, it would have remained till this day. An adulterous generation asks for a sign, and it shall not be given them. If they will not believe Moses and the Prophets, neither will they believe a man risen from the dead. Yet, so that men may know where the Eagles are gathering, we may have a portent tonight. I say to you that it is no great thing to heal a man or a woman, to restore an eye, to loose the lame, to give speech to the dumb, to make straight the twisted foot or the withered hand. No, it is no great thing to cure a withered hand.”

But if it was no great thing to cure a withered hand, yet there was none who could wither one so well as could Alex Carmi. Carmi had been many things, but this was within his realm of a make-up man with a technique that verged on the magic.

And, with such arts as he possessed, he withered the hand of Mary Corsicana.

“Have you known him long?” Mary asked.

“Joshua? Yes, I knew him a long time ago when he was plain John Salt. His early training was as a pitchman. But he brought a pentacostal touch even to peddling potato peelers. He came very near to calling down the lightning of heaven onto those who would not buy. But I knew him before that, as a boy. And there are legends about him even from his boyhood, and mostly I know how they began.

“There was the bull terrier that he killed and dismembered in the presence of his cronies. And he announced that he would pray all night over the pieces, and in the morning he would put the dog together again and breathe life into it.

“And in the morning the dog was indeed alive and well. There were only faint red marks where the legs and shoulders had been severed and rejoined, and where the head had been cut off and replaced. Joshua was eleven years old then, and already he had the mystique. But I was the only one who knew that he had acquired two identical bull terriers. For I was his intimate; a man or boy must always have an intimate who is behind the scenes. I had shaved narrow streaks on one bull terrier and red-marked them to simulate rejoined cuts. It was one of my first make-up jobs. But knowing how it was done didn't lessen the effect on me. And I was the one who buried the cut-up dog. It was not the first nor the last thing that I buried for him.”

“I shouldn't really be taking part in a thing like this,” said Mary, “but I need the money. The Lord and I understand each other fairly well, but I have been running increasingly into his debt. Since I was last a magdaline, I have done well and done badly. A girl must live. But I have received more than one warning that I have disregarded. If there is a sign here, it may well be that the sign is on me.”

There were a little over one thousand people at the Evangel of Joshua Halas. It was a flare-lit night, for Joshua preferred kerosene torches to electric lighting. It was quite a small stage erected there, and Joshua was quite a large man upon it. He disdained the use of the microphone, but there was very little else that he disdained.

“The Mountains and the Seas and all the Universe are held in being by the Faith of the Elect. Please understand what this means. It is we who hold the sun in the sky, it is we the elect who order the stars. It is we, the multitude of the faithful from the ages, yet small in number compared to the lost ones, who maintain all. The foundations of the Earth are maintained by our faith. Should a star stumble and fall, it is that an Archangel did not have faith enough. Should a man sicken and die, it is that he did not believe enough in his own life.

“It is because of my own great faith that I will never die. Know you that there are thousands of us on Earth who have lived for countless ages. We saw the beginnings of land as you know it. We heard the rise of the first wind, and we felt the fall of the earliest rain. All of the Sons of God did not fall. We saw first death and destruction appear, and have seen last sickness come onto the living. But, know you, all sickness and maiming and insufficiency is from lack of faith. And, where there is this lack, there can be no cure, except if one of us of the elder elect should give out of his own great store of grace and faith. Therefore, I say that it is no great thing to give sight to the blind or to straighten the lame. To heal a withered hand, or even to raise a dead man is no great thing for me.”

“How does he do it all?” Mary Corsicana asked. “Does he really raise the dead?”

“Not now, Mary,” said Alex Carmi. “His subject for this is following the berry-picker trade over in Arkansas at this season. And good subjects for the dead man ploy do not grow on bushes. But in the winter, on the southern circuit, and again in the early springtime, Joshua does indeed raise the dead. It is done by catalepsy. And it is done by an essence that smells of death and destruction and the grave. This essence is supplied to Joshua by a pharmacist in Sapulpa, the only one who understands how to compound it. But Joshua raises the dead less frequently than he once did. I believe that he is now a little bit frightened of it.”

“But what could ever frighten that man, Alex?”

“It was an unfortunate thing that happened several years ago, Mary, with another subject and in another state. He was not at that time able to raise the dead man to life.”

“What are you saying? He was not able to raise him to life?”

“No. That dead man remained dead. To the crowd it was merely a failure where they hardly expected success. But to Joshua Halas it was a shock. For in fact the man had not been really dead until the attempt to rouse him. He had been alive when last he laid himself down. So Joshua goes no longer into that state. Yet he remains a hard man to frighten. And, as he says, who is to know that it was not then that man's time to die? I am almost inclined to believe him when he says that he has crossed the line from life to death and back again more often than the busiest traveler has crossed the state line.”

But Joshua was talking loudly to the crowd.

“I have no need for money myself,” he said. “I do not eat. I have not eaten for many years, not of food as you know food. And the suit that I am wearing was given to me by Prester John himself more than a thousand years ago. I live anywhere or nowhere. But it is because I myself have no need that I am the one to be trusted with your money. It is in truth more blessed to give than to receive. And the poor you will always have with you. The rich man will come hardly into the Kingdom of Heaven. There is no coin that so handily buys merit as the coin of the realm. And with what easier coin could you possibly pay? You are not required to shed your blood, you are not asked to sacrifice your limbs or members. You need not forfeit wife or children if so be it you are blessed with them. You need only give of this least-esteemed of all things, and you will purchase merit for yourself in Heaven, and at the same time you will ease the misery of your less fortunate brethren. So, when the baskets are passed among you, they are passed with a purpose. Those of you with no higher gifts to give can only by giving of the common coin save your souls.”

It is no great thing to cure a withered hand, but it is a devilish hard thing to wither one in the first place. Alex used very fine piano wire, and black-and-blue paint of a water-soluble variety. The tightening of the fine-wire harness was effected now only minutes before the event. And this was the masterpiece of the make-up man, that the hand should appear such a shocking crippled and drawn thing as to compel the eyes with something quite near horror.

Now the trick of the thing was that the harness of blood-stopping piano wire should be snipped very short seconds before the hand be brought to the public attention. So, when the Power of God was called down on it, it would already be free of obstacles but not yet of their effect.

In only short minutes the blood would begin to flow in the hand again. And in the living water, warmed and heady with the perfume of life (supplied by the same pharmacist in Sapulpa), the water-soluble blue and black paint should melt away and the restored hand be revealed clean and whole.

So Alex Carmi, the make-up man and old hanger-on, withered the hand of Mary Corsicana who had been a magdaline and the consort of frauds, and who had long sought the mystique.

“Know you all that there were other prophets than Jesus,” Joshua was saying. “There were many of us brothers. And one of my brothers wrote ‘Indeed we have readied Hell as the dwelling place for the unbelievers. And we will set Hell on that day before them!’ Believe me, this is that day of which he spoke, and it is for you that Hell is set.

“There are one thousand gathered to hear me tonight. And of your one thousand, three will die tonight! Mark my words. Three of you here have seen the sun for the last time. And two of you will go to Hell tonight, and the third one will be saved. And you do not know who you are, but I know. I am looking at you now.”

“It is the peculiarity of all the magnetic ones,” said Alex Carmi, “that they can look into a crowd of a thousand people and seem to be looking at each one. I could do much if I had a little magnetism myself. But everything is not given to everyone.”

“One will be saved,” Joshua continued, “by my intercession. But I cannot withhold the Hand of God for long, or from all. By my faith I maintain the bolts of the iron door in the pit, but I cannot maintain them alone or forever. Repent, Oh True Believers! Turn unto God with sincere repentance and he will admit you to the gardens. So long have we held destruction at bay! So long have we protected the multitude! And what if it happened now that we should tire of protecting you?

“In Nineveh they did penance, but in many a town they did not. And some of them had the sign, and some of them had it not. But you are blessed in this. I will give you a sign tonight to help your unbelief.”

“You are on, Mary,” Alex Carmi said. And with a small wire-cutter he cut the weird piano-wire harness from the hand of Mary Corsicana. “Now move out quickly and let him display you. Timing is important in this, for your hand will come to life by itself within five minutes. He will use you as a sign from God.”

“I will be used as a sign. But that which is expected is never the sign. The sign startles when it appears.”

And she went out and let Joshua Halas call her up onto the little stage.

“Here is a woman come from afar,” said Joshua Halas. “And, though I have never seen her before, it is given to me to know much about her. It is on her that the sign will manifest itself tonight. Daughter of the world, ascend! I call all to look at her, how she is afflicted. See her hand, touch it, examine it. It is maimed. But by my faith I will lift this maiming. Daughter, plunge your hand into this Living Water, and I will call down upon you the invisible Lightning of Heaven. All be quiet! This is a holy moment. The air is full of giant wings, and below our feet monsters writhe. We strive with Principalities and Powers. Daughter of the World, what do you feel? Do you feel the resurrection and the life?”

“I feel nothing,” said Mary Corsicana.

“It will come. It will come in an instant. God will not fail where the Faith is firm. For one who can move mountains can also heal a hand. Look! All look! It changes! It begins to heal!”

“I cannot see any change,” said one man.

“Nor I neither,” said another. “There is no change.”

“The Devil delays it a little, but only a little,” said Joshua. “Now see! You can watch it come to life as the blood flows where the blood did not flow before.”

“I cannot see it come to life,” said a man.

“Nor I,” said another.

“Be you a Daughter of Hell?” asked Joshua Halas as he began to tremble. “Is it that you are a perverted sign? I command you, go out from her! Why does your hand not come whole?”

“You answer that,” said Mary Corsicana. “You are the healer man.”

People began to drift away. It is bad when people begin to drift away like that.

“People, do not leave. The sign is only tardy,” Joshua cried out. But there was a chill on Joshua that made the drifting away of the crowd seem a small thing. A chill wind came to him: it had blown across the icy moors beyond the edge of the world. An hour or much less ago there was nothing wrong with the hand of Mary Corsicana, and now it was withered as from birth.

“Alex Carmi, come here,” Joshua called softly. Then he harangued the spirit loudly for the benefit of the crowd. And then spoke softly to Alex again. “Did you not remove the wire harness, Alex?”

“You can see that I did.”

“Then what is obstructing the circulation? Why does it not come alive?”

“That I don't know.”

“It is a sign,” said Mary. “The sign startles when it appears.”

“Mary,” said Joshua, “your hand was whole short minutes ago.”

“Aye, and now it is withered forever.”

Then it was that Joshua went to pieces in public. And many in the crowd who had started to leave turned back now to hear him again, for he was eloquent in his breakup. But, for all that, this was the end of Joshua Halas. (Both God and the Devil had always known him by his original name of John Salt anyhow.)

“Everybody dies!” cried this Joshua, and there was a tightness in his throat when he talked. “Everybody dies once, and one cannot even say that it is unexpected when it comes. And, though a man should die when I bid him come to life, who is to say that it was not his ordained time to die?

“But a hand does not wither of itself. There is no ordained time for it to wither. When I bid the whole-but-disguised hand to appear whole for the edification of the crowd, and then that hand withers instead, then there is a greater Hand upon me. I shouldn't have played with it for so long. All that has withered here tonight is not a hand.”

Joshua Halas (as a boy he'd been plain John Salt) stood silent, and the crowd left him. Then he began to scream, thinly and steadily like a hurt dog, and they had to take him away.

He is not well yet.

“Is that all there was to him when you crack his shell a little?” Mary had asked.

Mary Corsicana still has a withered hand, and she will have it till the day she dies. But her luck has changed. For her lost hand, she received back her lost grin. Remember when it had been her trademark!

Her luck has shifted to the good. She no longer travels with the high old animals, nor is she consort to cons and frauds. She's a rather pleasant and serene woman now, and she runs a pleasant business: “Mary Corsicana's Coffee Corner, Mountain-Grown Berries, North Slope Only. Gored Ox and Italian Bread.”

Alex Carmi comes in often, as do other old-timers.

Of Laughter And The Love Of Friends

John Ginpole was genuine: that's the strong thing about him. In his own field he was a pro. He was genuine all the way, to the very end.

And Gale Geier Ginpole was perfect, except for having no sense of humor. Her husband John Ginpole believed that she was perfect, and he was the one to whom it mattered most. Gale was large, even outsized: that's the way John liked her. She was gaudy: that also was the way he liked her. She was well-voiced and of quick emotions. You couldn't miss seeing her. You couldn't miss hearing her those rare times when she did speak. She stood out in a crowd, and that was the way John liked her too.

And, even if she didn't have any sense of humor, she was good-humored. That was something. Maybe it was better that way, from John's viewpoint. There wasn't any humor in her. But, with her quick emotions and responses, one could get a lot of humor out of her.

John Ginpole was a heavyweight humorist of almost champion rating. He did practical jokes, enormous jokes, clattering jokes, jokes to blow your top over. Some of them were funny, if they happened to someone else. John Ginpole lost a lot of jobs over his jokes, for many of his outlandish and damaging jokes had been played on his excellent employers. Some of those employers never did recover from the jokes, and some of the businesses did not. It was even felt in certain circles that job termination was not sufficient action against John Ginpole and his jokes.

But John got along, and he stayed in the coin in one way or another. The flat truth was that people were afraid of him. Of his three powerful brothers-in-law, Sheldrake Geier, Culpepper Geier, and Gazebo Geier, there was a saying “The Geiers protect their own.” And people were nine parts afraid that John Ginpole might turn his cloud-cracking jokes on themselves. So, to be on the safe side, people gave John good orders (John was always a salesman, as are all out-of-bound jokers) for material that they did not even have need of that they could get at lower prices from higher caliber gentlemen. But it did no good. There were no sacred cows to John Ginpole, and there was no bull-of-the-woods so stalwart as to slip by him unscathed.

But, in between the times when John Ginpole flourished with rich jokes, he was often moody and sulky. These were the times when he suffered Jokers' Block and could not come up with any real howlers at all. He blamed other people for his own inability to come up with truly great jokes. In particular he blamed his wife Gale.

“We just do not go together, Gale,” he'd say. “You are a left-hand glove to my right hand. Other wives abet and aid their husbands in their inclinations and professions. But in my own chosen field, you and I have no point of contact.”

“I know it,” Gale said, “and I'm not really sorry about it. All that joking stuff of yours just curdles me: I'm not there with that. But you'll find me more-than-there in everything else. So, I am a blank to your practical jokes. But do you know how many ways you are a blank? Besides, what are you going to do about it?”

“I'll get another woman, I suppose, Gale. I'll get a woman who appreciates me and my humor. I've got just the one in mind too. Ramona Bellona.”

“Oh, I won't like that!” Gale cried. “I won't like that at all.” Gale, being so humorlessly good-humored, was hard to start a fight with. But she was easy to hurt, and that was even more fun.

John Ginpole kept on the theme of incompatible wife for nearly a week, and he worried and tortured Gale. She was patient; she was kind; she made up for her inadequate humor by her overflowing adequacy in other ways: but still John Ginpole kept it up. Gale heard that he was seeing Ramona on the sly, and on the not-so-sly. She heard that Ramona told her friends that there would be big news quite soon. So she suffered and had apprehensions.

One afternoon, Gale had to be out and about, and she came back to the house just about the time that John usually got there. She let herself in and she called for him. He did not answer. And yet there was an answer on the bulletin board: the red flag was unfurled.

The Ginpoles had this little arrangement that the red flag should be furled out and tacked up on the bulletin board whenever one of them had an urgent message for the other. The flag screamed at Gale's eyes now, and she went in great fright to read the letter that John had tacked up for her there. And she gave a sharp and well-voiced cry as she read the first words of it.

“Gale, this is the end of it. We were never compatible. I don't know how we stuck it as long as we did. It was wrong from the start that the top joker in Perryville should be tied to a woman with no humor at all.

“Well, I have taken care of that. I have gone away with Ramona Bellona on a sort of honeymoon. Ramona is a woman who can appreciate a thumping joke. You should have heard the way she laughed and chortled over this when I laid out the way we would do it. It's on you, of course; but even you would have to admit that it's pretty funny, if you had any sense of humor at all. ‘Oh, I can just see her face when she reads this!’ Ramona howled.

“I've taken care of a lot of other things too, to save you the trouble. (Yeah, Ramona thinks that line is really funny, and so do I.) The joint bank accounts that we had, well, I've cleaned them all out. The bonds too. You remember that thing you signed the day before yesterday? Well, that should teach you not to sign things without reading them. You made everything over to me, that's what you did. And where I've got them now, well, forget it.

“The payment on the house is due tomorrow. We haven't very much equity in it, so do whatever you want to. Hey, Ramona wants to tell you what you can really do — ”

Gale Ginpole fell to the floor, stunned and desolate. She had built, here with John, the fullest life and world she was able to build; and now it was shattered. She sobbed. She wailed. It was the end of everything with her.

“Hey, Gale, where's the horseradish?” John Ginpole asked as he came in from the kitchen. Gale twisted on the floor like the gaudy, broken, tenth-of-a-ton butterfly that she was. John was holding a sandwich the size of a football and was pouring barbecue sauce into its depths.

“John, you're here. You didn't go away with Ramona!” Gale gasped in well-voiced amazement.

“Wow! Wow! Wowzer! Wow! Wow!” John Ginpole exploded with laughter. “You fell for it! You fell for it! It worked!” He flung five pounds of sandwich stuff to the four walls and ceiling of the room and rolled on the floor in roaring delight.

“Wowser, Wow, Wow! You bit on it like a barracuda! Guffa, guffy Gow-Wow!”

“Be careful, John, your hernia will be out again,” Gale spoke with concern, and she rose from the floor, wiped her eyes, and adjusted as well as she could. So, it had all been one of those jokes, and he hadn't left her at all. And it was ridiculous, now that she thought about it, even to imagine that somebody like the stylish Ramona Bellona would go off with somebody like John Ginpole.

“If you keep playing such mean jokes, John, someday you won't have any friends left at all,” Gale warned.

“Oh, I'll still have you and your three brothers,” John spoke with certainty. “Oh those Geiers, my hard-faced brothers-in-law. I'm sure glad they're on my side. I wonder whether any of the Geiers, in their several centuries in this region, ever pulled even one joke?”

“Yes, they did, John. They've pulled five of them. Or I guess they pulled the same joke five times.”

“I can't believe it! A Geier joke! I hope they pull it on me some day.”

“I hope they don't, John.”

So they had a reconciliation.

So John was out of his slump now and onto another spate of bruising jokes that would go on for weeks. But, for Gale, a slight chill had come over things and it bid fair to be permanent. Traces of it would always remain, like the traces on the ceiling of John's whoopingly heaved sandwich.

And some of the jokes of the new series left permanent stains. The run on the Perryville County Bank did. John Ginpole did not actually say that the Perryville County Bank was shaky and that a wise depositor might do well to take his money out of there pretty quick, like within the next ten minutes. Where would the joke be if he had actually said such a thing? But John was an accomplished double-talker, and many of the citizens of Perryville were double-eared listeners.

Maybe he did refer to the banking operations as being “sort of rash” rather than as “short of cash.” Maybe he did say that the bunch at the bank were “honest kids” rather than “on the skids”. It wasn't so much what he said as the way that he said it. And he did send Gale over to the bank with a big sack to draw all their cash out of their accounts. And pretty soon there were a lot of other people in line there with bags and sacks. And then a multitude of people saw the line, and they got their bank books and joined it.

John Ginpole had told a few fast-reacting loafers that the bank was giving, as an advertising gimmick, a free block of rock salt to the first twenty people to come and pick it up, and this had brought quite a few people into the line. (Each fast-reacting loafer in Perryville had at least a hard-working jersey cow and a hard-working wife, so for cow and house they always needed a block of rock salt at least three times a year.) And a lot of people saw these loafers with their heavy tote bags in the line, so they had come with bags too, to get their money. But how could the humorous story that the bank was giving away twenty blocks of rock salt be construed as an attempt to start a run on the bank?

Well, there was a run on the bank, and the bank did fold. It really had been shaky. It was a pretty good joke, but some of the depositors who suffered losses didn't think it was funny. Three of the depositors who didn't think it was funny were Sheldrake Geier the Doctor, Culpepper Geier the Undertaker who was also the radio and TV repair man, and Gazebo Geier who was the Sheriff and Coroner. But those three Geier brothers didn't think that anything was funny. They hadn't any sense of humor.

These three Geiers were brothers-in-law of John Ginpole, brothers of Gale. Like Gale, they were outsized and gaudy and well-voiced. And the fact was that John Ginpole had played numerous jokes on his brothers-in-law on the theory that some things are so outrageously funny that they should be kept in the family. Sheldrake Geier the Doctor made both house calls and farm calls, some of them to a great distance. But he had long since grown tired of making long night calls to places where nobody was sick and no one had called him; no one, that is, except the joker brother-in-law disguising his voice.

Culpepper Geier the Undertaker and repair man had also had some embarrassing encounters, going to pick up corpses and having the corpses insist that they had never felt better in their lives. And Gazebo Geier the Sheriff and Coroner had been on many a wild goose chase after false rumors of lawlessness and riot, or of unusual deaths and dispositions.

But John Ginpole and his cronies had howling good times over all these misdirections. If those weren't first-rate practical jokes, then what kind of practical jokes do they have where you come from?

John Ginpole, however, in spite of several sorts of shake-downs that he was able to effect, did not thrive nearly as well as did some of the honest citizens of Perryville. He lost his jobs and he got worse ones. In his efforts to recoup, he invested in some long-shot stuff that missed: and now his thimble-sized empire had the totters. He tried to borrow money from his three brothers-in-law, and they insisted on more security than he could give. And they warned Gale that her joker husband was just about on the rocks.

But she didn't realize how dire the situation might be until she came into the house one day and saw the red flag flying from the bulletin board. With hurried hands, she took the letter that John Ginpole had tacked up there. She gave a heavy moan as she read the very first line.

“Gale, this is the end of it. My fortunes are shipwrecked, and I have acquired debts that I am unable to pay and which I am too honorable to default on. The only way out is out. I had to cash my life insurance policy. I'm sorry about that. I had to mortgage the house and car for more than they are worth. I'm sorry about that too. And it's all gone. All that I have left is my old service revolver. When you read this, I will be up in the bedroom with the gun to my head and my finger on the trigger. All I wait for is your coming. I wish to hear your beloved footsteps just once more. When I hear them, I will pull the trigger and shatter my brains, even as my fortunes have been shattered. Yours in death, John Ginpole.”

Gale Ginpole moaned a muffled moan, and she started up the stairs as silently as she could so that her husband would not hear her footsteps and pull the trigger. But then she went out of control and went up with a rush and a cry “Don't do it, John! John, John, I beg you don't do it! Somehow we will win through! I'll get back my old job at the feed mill!”

“Bang!” spoke a little cast-iron pistol in the bedroom at the top of the stairs. And then it spoke three more times “Bang, Bang, Bang!”

“John, no, no, no!” Gale screamed and rushed up and in.

“Snap, snap, snap,” said the little cast-iron pistol.

“Gale, they just don't make cap-pistols like they used to,” John Ginpole complained. “Every time you thread a new roll of caps into it, it fires a few times and then it begins to miss.”

And then John Ginpole erupted in a roar of delight and rolled on the floor with whooping laughter.

“Wow, wow, wowser, wow, wow! You fell for it. It worked!” he whooped.

Gale shouldn't have fallen for it, she reflected. It was ridiculous, now that she thought about it. That John should ever have been too honorable to default, that he should ever have been too honorable for anything, that was impossible. And he had never had a service revolver. He had never had any service either.

They had a reconciliation, of course, but it didn't reconcile all the way. Gale felt that she was unfairly put upon by all this squalid humor. And John felt that he was funnier and richer than ever.

But Gale went and talked to her three brothers, and they agreed that things had gone far enough.

“The next time it happens, we will take action,” Sheldrake Geier said. Then he explained what sort of action it might be, and each of them added a little bit to it. It was an old, grisly classic that they talked about.

A joke? Well, some people might not quite call it a joke. But what do you call the ingenious things that people without humor cook up?

“So that we may be clear in our consciences,” Sheldrake finished it off, “you must go and explain to John, Gale, that there must not be any next time.”

Gale did explain that to her husband. And there were no more really outrageous jokes played on her for a full month. There were plenty of wild jokes played by John Ginpole on other people, yes, but none on his beloved wife Gale.

And it was a full month before that red flag shrieked on the bulletin board again. Gale went with mixed anger and fear to read the note.

“Gale, this is the end of it. I am touched with the ghostly rot of which you find mention in scripture. I am a leper. Aye, shudder, woman! I did not, of course, go to your inept brother Sheldrake for this, but to a competent doctor in the City. There is no doubt about the diagnosis. And there is no good in a face-to-face farewell, not in my highly contagious state.

“I will be in the air on my way to the National Leprosarium in Carville, Louisiana when you read this. Burn all the sheets from the bed, that's the main thing. Burn all the sheets in the house. And burn me out of your memory. Corruptly yours, John Ginpole.”

Gale Ginpole moaned and groaned when she read this dire message. And then she went silent. She went and started a fire in the fireplace although it was a warm day. Then she went upstairs to get the sheets to burn them, but her eye and mind were struck by something else when she got there. She swept all of John's flashy suits into her arms and brought them down and threw them into the fire.

“It's the first thing to do either way,” she said out loud to herself. “If the case is as John writes it, then John won't be needing these flashy suits, and they're just as contagious as the sheets are. And if the case is not as he writes that it is, Let them burn, let them burn!”

Then there was a screaming, a horrible wailing that cut one to the bone, or to the corrupt flesh. And it wasn't Gale screaming. It was John Ginpole himself.

“Not my suits, Gale, dammit, not my suits!” he was howling, and he was fighting the fire to get the suits out of it. “I wrote the sheets, to burn the sheets, not the suits.”

“Oh, the suits will be as leprous as the sheets, John. I'll burn them all.”

“No, Gale, no! You spoil the joke besides burning my flashy suits.” John was dragging the suits out of the fireplace and stomping on them. “It was a joke, Gale, a joke. And you're spoiling it. I'm not really a leper. I'm not really flying to Carville in Louisiana.”

“I still think I should go ahead and burn all your suits,” Gale insisted.

“No, no, Gale. For you to burn all the bed sheets, that would be funny. But for you to burn my suits is not funny. Can't you see the difference?”

“Sure. I paid for the sheets, and you paid for your suits, that's the difference. You burned me up, I know that, and it's for the last time. Where's the bell we got from the Liberty Bell Easy Loan Company? There it is! I'll warn everyone!”

Then Gale Ginpole snatched up the hand-bell and ran out of the house ringing it and crying out “Ware, ware, ware, beware, unclean! My husband is a leper! Ware, ware!”

Oh, that bell did have a loud and clear ring to it, and Gale Geier Ginpole had always been well-voiced. She ran a block in the street with her bell ringing and her crying out, and John Ginpole was running after her as hard as he could. But, as he ran, John Ginpole had a startling thought. “If Gale had a sense of humor, this would be kind of funny. Dammit, it is funny!” And his howling became then a mixture of merry roaring and outright fury. Such contrary emotions can be fatal to a man.

Gale ran into the big house on the corner of the block. It was the house of her brother Sheldrake Geier the Doctor. And Gale's husband John was hot after her.

“Sheldrake!” John Ginpole called as he followed his wife into that house. “Gale has gone clear off her noggin.”

“So I see,” Sheldrake nodded calmly. “Pitiful case.”

“Give her a shot of something to knock her out,” John Ginpole said.

“In a minute, in a minute,” Sheldrake mumbled. “I'm filling the needle now.”

“My husband is a leper! Unclean, unclean!” Gale chanted and rang the bell. Her brother Doctor Sheldrake Geier had the needle at ready. And then he unaccountably plunged it into the arm of John Ginpole instead of Gale.

“Oops, sorry, John,” Doctor Sheldrake Geier said. “I guess I shot you instead.”

“Then shoot her too. Calm her down.”

“Nah, no need. She'll calm down as soon as you do. And you'll calm down right now. No use giving shots to both of you.”

“The stuff you shot into my arm, what'll it do to me?” John asked with apprehension.

“It'll knock you for a loop,” the Doctor said.

“For how long?”

“Oh, for a couple of days.”

Yes, it felt like about two days, two painful and drugged and delirious days. John Ginpole woke up in darkness and confinement and fear. And then he heard the well-voiced whisper of his wife Gale right there with him.

“Do I not have clever brothers, John?” Gale whispered. “My brothers Sheldrake and Culpepper have devised it so that your brainwaves, when you wake up, turn on the two-way radio. And now the battery light comes on too, so you can see what it is that you're in. Enjoy it, John. You have already slept through your funeral, but you are awake now for your actual burial.”

“Can you hear me, Gale?” John Ginpole asked in an uncertain voice.

“Of course I can hear you. It's a two-way radio. Relax dear. Everything is taken care of. Is it not handy to have such well-placed brothers as I have? One of my brothers, Doctor Sheldrake Geier, knocked you out and then made out a death certificate for you. And another of my brothers, the Coroner, confirmed the death. And that same brother, in his role of Sheriff, squelched any possible suspicion or investigation. And my brother the Undertaker neglected to embalm you. That would have spoiled our last conversation.”

“It's a cheap coffin. It's easier to see how cheap they are from the inside,” John Ginpole said. “Where do you jokers have me now? Is this the little room with the wet bar that's behind the lay-out room? Well, you four win this trick, and I have to admit it's a good one. I'll laugh till I roll on the floor, after I get over the first shock of this. How do you unlatch this coffin lid? Help me out.”

“No. If coffin lids could be unlatched from the inside, entirely too many people would be getting out again. You're not in that little room in the funeral parlor, John. You've just been lowered into your grave. And my three brothers are ready to shovel the dirt in on you. The sexton said that he didn't want to come this near to you, alive or dead, so my brothers said they'd finish up the job. So there's nobody here except myself and my brothers. All in the family, you know.”

“You've had your joke, Gale, and it tops my best. But a joke must be finally righted. Open the coffin.”

“No. That'd spoil the joke. You know that.” Then there was a noise that John Ginpole had never heard before. It was Gale Geier Ginpole laughing-giggling-chortling. And then there was a muffled clatter upon the coffin lid. John knew that it was the dirt and clods being shoveled in on him. The sound changed as the dirt cover became thicker and thicker. John knew when there was four or five feet of dirt on him.

Buried alive!

Well, how do you handle a situation like that?

Oh, if you're a real pro, and John Ginpole was, you can take it as well as dish it out. Many people hadn't realized what a real pro John Ginpole was at the joker game. He was genuine. He was one of the really select and exuberant jokers. Gale Ginpole listened in some wonder to the last noises (laughter) from her buried man.

“This is the Geier joke itself, the sixth time it's been pulled, is it, Gale?” John wheezed through his laughter. “Wow, wow, wow! When were the other times, Gale? Oh, this is rich!”

“They go back a hundred and eighty years, John,” Gale giggled. “Their dates are the death dates on the other five tombstones in this trashy corner of the burying grounds. And tomorrow you will get your own stone, with today's date on it. And it is funny, John.”

“The only joke in your life, Gale, the Geier Joke, and it's better than a dozen ordinary jokes,” John was rolling around in glee in his coffin. “Wow, how good can you get? Wow, wow, wowser, wow, wow!”

“Be careful, John dear,” Gale whispered. “Your hernia will be out again if you laugh too hard.” Then she giggled a secondary giggle as she realized that it didn't make a whole lot of difference whether John's hernia popped out or not.

“Wow, wow, wow, this is the funniest ever! If I had my choice on how to die I'd have picked this: dying laughing at the best joke I ever met in my life.”

And he died laughing.

Two For Four Ninety-Nine

“I'm looking for the Big Star Detective Agency,” the girl said. She held a thin but rather heavy slab rock with a Big Star chiseled on it and some scratching below that.

“This is the Big Star Detective Agency,” Austro told her, “or more properly the Astro Mega Detective Agency. Roy Mega thinks I should change my name from Austro to Astro to make it fit more neatly. You are our first customer. Five foot one, one hundred and nine pounds, you come from Osage County and your blood is type O. You served in Afghanistan, but not, I believe, with the Ninth Mounted Fusiliers.”

“No. I spent nine months there with Pax-Max, a Peace Organization.”

“You had Bromo Seltzer for breakfast. Your grandfather is Miles Shaddock who is not loved by everybody in Osage County. He drinks Spotted Mule. You drink Jim Beam.”

“How do you do it!” the girl cried in amazement. “This seems to be a stone-age advertisement for this place. My girl friend said that a monkey passed them out.”

“Your girl friend is named Rosemary Korff. No ma'am, it wasn't a monkey, it was me.”

“This looks like the kind of rock slabs the Rocky McCrocky comic strips are done on.”

“Yes, our Agency is affiliated with the Rocky McCrocky Publications,” Austro said.

“This ad says ‘Mysteries and crimes solved as cheap as one penny’.”

“Yes ma'am. The first one is four dollars and ninety-eight cents. But we will solve two cases for four ninety-nine as our special opening day offer.”

“But I have only one piece of trouble.”

“You have heard of borrowing trouble, perhaps? We can arrange — ”

“No, I don't want a second piece of trouble even if the price is right. This case is so grotesque that I couldn't possibly tell it to another human. But perhaps I could tell it to — no offence intended — a monkey.”

“Spill,” Austro said. This girl was a dazzler. She wore snake-skin shorts and red-lensed glasses. She looked like — well, she was Selene O'Keene.

“Get the scene, fuzz-face,” she began. “This is the way it happened — ”

“I will take over, Austro,” said Roy Mega who was Austro's partner, as he came in silently. “Now this girl, hum, b.p. 120, fuzzy outline that comes from taking Bang Crystals (dexahexakrex), five foot one and one eighth, one hundred and nine pounds and three ounces, has recently been in Afghanistan, but not, I believe with the Fifth Ranwick's Rangers. She has a sprained right shoulder, and finding how she sprained it will take us right to the heart of her problem.”

“She doesn't want to tell a person, Roy. She — ”

“There's enough monkey in Roy here,” Selene said. “Now, here is the scene — ”

Of the two partners, Austro was not a monkey in any way. He was a twelve-year-old person of the Australopithecus Race. They're a bit hairy and under-slung, and some people call them ape-men, but they are not monkeys. Roy Mega was a young genius of the human species.

“After my stint in Afghanistan, I went home and finished high school in Fairfax — ”

“Straight A's in every subject except Band,” Roy said. “Right, Selene?”

“How do you guys do it?” Selene asked. “Then I came here to T-Town to find employment. I have found irregular or floating employment here, and I have been moving with the floating or ‘with-it’ crowd. The first date I had here, the fellow didn't ask me afterwards when he could see me again, so I asked him. ‘Meet me on the corner under the clock without hands,’ he said. He wasn't brushing me off. That was just his way of saying ‘I'll see you around’. Everybody is that way here. They eat at a Table Without Legs, and they sleep on the Bed Without a Stead. And they attend the Continuing Party Without Walls at the House Without a Roof.

“I host the Party Without Walls sometimes. Yester evening I was hosting the thing and they inroaded me pretty quickly. I went out for more stuff, and I came back in with my arms full of drink-mixes and snacks. I kissed several persons who were there. ‘Boy you are a cold one,’ I said to the last one I kissed. He was sitting on the broken-down sofa (I have two sofas). ‘I don't remember you, but that doesn't matter at a Party Without Walls.’ ”

“He was five foot eleven-and-a-half,” Roy Mega said. “Pulse-beat zero. Body heat coincident with room temperature, but felt colder. Initials J. U. D. Two hundred and thirty pounds. A big one.”

“Yes, that's how I sprained my shoulder,” Selene said. “Well, you're mostly right. ‘He's dead,’ said Boris Church, one of my guests. ‘I noticed that when I came in. That's what makes him so cold!’ ”

A man came in. “Is this the Big Star Detective Agency?” he asked.

“It is,” Roy Mega answered crisply. “You have been walking on Utica Avenue. You had buckwheat cakes and sausage at the International Pancake Palace just before that. Your mother once taught at the old Kendall School, and you are a sly jewel dealer. My partner Austro will take care of you.”

“I want to take care of Selene,” Austro said. “You take care of this man.”

“No, I outrank you,” Roy said. “We just had a power struggle and you lost. As proof that you lost, I am taking care of Selene and you are taking care of this man.”

“They have to take your case for a penny, mister,” Selene said. “I pay four dollars and ninety-eight cents, but you get yours for a penny on the New Opening Day Combination.”

“But you two aren't a combination,” Austro protested.

“Fuzz-face, we are now,” Selene said. “Us little people have to stand together against you giant corporations. Now, Roy, about that dead man I found among my guests at the party without walls — ”

“Here is my problem,” the newly-arrived man said to Austro. “I'm George Artless, and I'm the victim of a series of robberies. I want them solved — ”

“Nothing easier,” said Austro. “We've never had a miss in a case like this.”

“Most of my wealth is in jewelry,” Artless said. “Somebody's been robbing me, right before my eyes. It's as if my jewels were taken by ghosts. I had had, for some time, ninety-nine purple amethysts of perfect shape. I had been looking for another such perfect stone to make one hundred. Then, just yesterday, I was able to buy seven deep purple amethysts. I had a purchaser for one hundred of these stones. I had him almost in the bag.

“To verify it all, I went to my strong room, bolted the doors and window, and took my ninety-nine amethysts from my safe. I examined the four walls, the carpeted floor, and the ceiling of the room. There are only six interior sides to a regular room like mine, and if they are secure the room should be secure. I poured the purple jewels out on my red-velveted table. ‘Ninety-nine’ my practiced eye told me. Then, from a package in my pocket, I added one of the seven new stones, and the set of one hundred was complete.

“But I heard a slight rattle in one corner of the carpeted room. I looked, but I saw nothing untoward there. I looked back to the table and — (deep purple thunderous corundum!) — I had been robbed. There were now only ninety-nine stones on the table.”

“I took the wallet out of the back pocket of my dead guest,” Selene O'Keene was saying to Roy Mega. “I took everything out of his pockets and spread them out. I looked at his identifications. His name was John U. Daw. His address was the Utica Park Place Manor Mansion Arms Apartment right across the street. That guy was clear full of papers and trash. But, as they say, we live in a trash-and-paper world. I picked up the dead man and put him over in the corner of the room. ‘Why ain't I dreaming?’ I asked. ‘A month ago you would have been,’ my girl friend Rosemary Korff told me, ‘but now you have acquired a mind without boundaries and a personality without a center.’ So I went about fixing drinks and cheeses and taco dips for my guests, and they had fun going through the dead man's documents and jewels and tickets and money. After a while, Rex Soul who is an intern at St. Dismas Hospital said that the man had died of poisoning. Rex always carries a little test kit with him. He had been taking blood out of the man, and taking samples out of his stomach with a little auger. That kind of cooled me, having a man die of poisoning at my own Party Without Walls.”

“Yes, there were only ninety-nine stones there on the table,” the client George Artless was telling Austro. “I examined the room carefully. I found, on the carpet, a piece of gravel about the size of my amethysts. A wild notion came into my head that one of the amethysts had been transmuted into a piece of gravel.

“I took one of the new amethysts out of my pocket and completed the set of one hundred. I phoned the prospective buyer and he was delighted. He said he'd get a cashiers check and be over in a few moments to close the deal.

“But I heard a sound like a small stone falling onto a deep-pile carpet. I looked. And there was the second piece of gravel on the carpeted floor. I looked back at the red-velveted table and my heart sank. Once more there were only ninety-nine stones there. Say, are you getting all of this down?”

“Sure,” said Austro. He held a flat-stone notebook. Now he set a chisel to the stone and hit the chisel three times with a hammer. “Got it. My own short-hand,” Austro said.

“Why, that's amazing,” George Artless exclaimed, “the most efficient short-hand I've ever seen. Well, I had two stones of gravel, and I was short two amethyst stones. The door and the window were locked. Floors, walls, and ceiling were secure and intact. But the thefts had been accomplished.

“I took one more of the new purple amethysts from my pocket and completed the hundred. I was resolved not to take my eyes off the hundred stones for any reason. But something was rattling against the window of the room. ‘It is only a tree limb rubbing there,’ the left side of my brain said. ‘Yeah, the limb of a tree that grew up four stories high in the last ten minutes,’ the right side of my brain said. There was a screeching racket at that window. Well, I would give it a tenth of a second. I flashed my eye to the window, quickly grabbed off the image, and looked back at the stones instantly. I had won that trick. There were still one hundred stones on the table. It had been a female grackle bird making a racket at the window.”

“Weight seven ounces, nine inches long, her name is ‘Dusty’,” Austro said.

“How do you do it!” George Artless cried in admiration. “She increased the disturbance. I saw that she had a gravel stone in her mouth. ‘Oh, Oh, Oh, now it gets tricky,’ I said. But there were still one hundred stones on my table. The bird displayed the gravel ostentatiously. She pretended to throw it at the window. And then — I heard it fall on the carpet behind me. I whirled. There was one more piece of gravel on the carpet. I whirled again. There was one less amethyst on the table. Oh, there had to be an answer!

“It happened again and again. When I heard my buyer at the door, I had just completed the number one hundred again, and I had only one of the seven new amethysts left in my pocket. ‘Quickly, quickly, while the one hundred are still intact,’ I said. ‘Behold, are they not beautiful’ ‘Indeed they are,’ he said, ‘but I count only ninety-nine of them.’ Alas, I had taken my eye off the treasure for an instant while I let him in. And there was another gravel stone still rolling around on the carpet. I took the last of the new amethysts from my pocket and completed the one hundred for the last time. The buyer wrapped the stones quickly. He paid me and he left. And I was still ahead on the steep deal, for I got a fantastic price for them.

“But I am not ahead if my eyes and my mind are failing me. I am not ahead if there's a hole in my defenses. I had lost other stones previously. I want this solved.”

“I kept asking everyone what they knew about the dead men,” Selene said. “ ‘Oh get off that jag!’ Barley Matterhorn told me. ‘He came in and sat down and had one drink and he died. It happens all the time at Parties Without Walls.’ I noticed that the table, and the wallet and all the things of the dead man were gone. ‘All right, who took them?’ I asked, but my floating guests swore that they hadn't. Then Conrad Pollard wanted to lie down in the corner of the room where the dead man was. Conrad always passed out about that time and likes to lie down in that corner of the room. So I carried the dead man in to my bed. That's how I sprained my shoulder.

“It was a long night. The party is still going on, of course. The police came and got the body. ‘Who is running this place?’ they asked. I pointed to Alice Stonehouse who was sound asleep, so they took her in. Then I got out of there. Boris Church is acting as my spy. And spy Boris says now that the police have woke Alice up and found that she isn't really running the place. Now they are looking for me.”

“Two cases,” Roy Mega said when Selene O'Keene had finished. “I will solve one and my partner will solve the other. Mr. Artless, why don't you take Miss O'Keene to lunch for one hour while we wrap up the cases?”

“I always like gentlemen who own a lot of rocks,” Selene said, “but I'm not so sure about those who have lost their rocks. Well all right, come on, Georgie.”

“I'm stuck,” said Austro when they were alone. “How does the gang turn the amethysts into gravel stones without a beta-phase furnace? And we haven't finished inventing that yet. And how did Dusty throw the pieces of gravel through the window without breaking it anyhow? And how were the amethysts got out of the room? It's that international gang of amethyst thieves. We will need a Paris Office and a Man in Hong Kong to combat them.”

“Aw, c'mon, Austro, you can do better than that,” Mary Mondo said.

“I'm stuck too,” Roy Mega said. “Oh, the facts are clear enough. The man walked into the Party Without Walls, took poison, and died. But how does his wallet and jewels and trash disappear with so many people around them? What was his motive? How am I going to get my client out of this smelly situation?”

“Aw, c'mon, Roy, you can do better than that,” Mary Mondo said.

“And now we have a visitation,” Roy growled. A big man walked in and sat down.

“Six feet two inches, two hundred and twenty-two pounds, little beady eyes, size eleven shoes, police detective named Ratsel Rattigan,” Austro mumbled without looking.

“How do you guys do it?” Rat Rattigan asked. “Hey, are you going to have some of the Big Star Detective Agency sequences in the Rocky McCrocky comic strip? I sure do like that comic strip.”

“Aw c'mon, Rat, don't bug the kids their first day in business,” Mary Mondo said.

“Now we have the minions of the law breathing hot fire down our necks, and we're both stuck,” Roy complained. “What do we have going for us? What are our positions of power? Item: both of us are geniuses. And one of us, you Austro, has an alien mentality.”

“Item: we are friends with one girl ghost — Mary Mondo,” Austro said. “She is a drag, but ghosts sometimes have novel viewpoints.”

“Now you're getting warm, Austro,” Mary Mondo said.

“We can carry scientific projection almost to its limit,” Roy Mega said.

“That's all right for the straight stuff, Roy,” Austro moaned, “but it's a couple of curve balls that they've thrown past us. We have no clues, no clues.”

“Aw kids, you're knee-deep in them,” Mary Mondo said.

Mary Mondo was a ghost. She had really begun as a split-off personality of a girl named Violet Lonsdale who had died several years before. But Mary Mondo, being stronger than the personality from whom she had split off, had refused to die. And, never having been alive in a bodily sense either, she became an unclassified ghost. Well, what young ghost does not have a skeleton in her closet, or unrealized flesh in the rumpus room of her mind?

“We need an oracle,” Roy Mega said.

“Aw c'mon, I'm here,” Mary Mondo pointed out. “I'm an oracle.”

“Maybe if we tied the two cases together we could solve them both,” Roy hazarded.

“And if one of them falls off an alp the other one will too,” Mary Mondo spoke.

“That's like tying two rocks together and throwing them in a pond and telling one of them to hold the other one up,” said Rat Rattigan the police detective. “But we don't have much on your client, Roy. Just failing to report a murder, and concealing a corpse, and herself. We'll probably charge her with murder, but that's just to get her to talk plain. Maybe she can tell us what poison it was. It doesn't seem to be one of the more deadly ones. It probably just barely killed him, if at all.”

“What's the best deal I can get for her?” Roy asked.

“We'll likely book her in and then release her on her own cognizance.”

“She doesn't have any,” Roy said.

“Then maybe we will throw her in the slammer for about three days.”

“Three days!” cried Selene O'Keene, returning from her lunch with George Artless. “Oh, I'd perish in three days. I'd die like a bird in a cage without walls.”

“There are little scratching sounds on my eardrums,” Roy said. “I may have to roll out one of the amplifiers to see what they are.”

“It's Mary,” Austro said. “I've known mice that could squeak louder than that.”

“I don't know why you fellows can't hear the girl,” Rattigan said. “I can always hear her all right. I like her. She hasn't got much body, but I like her anyhow.”

“Haven't you Big Star Detectives solved our cases yet?” Selene O'Keene asked.

“No, you didn't give us an hour. You came back early,” Roy Mega told her.

“Think deep and think fast for the rest of the hour then,” George Artless said.

So Austro and Roy thought about the two cases that they had tied together.

“I have to find out who killed the dead man at Selene's,” Roy said softly. “He was a kind, though dishonest, man. Who would want to kill him? I have to find out what happened to all the stuff that was taken out of his pockets and then disappeared. I have to find out what poison was used, and why the other people at the Party Without Walls were not poisoned. We need an oracle.”

“Aw, c'mon, guys, I'm a good oracle,” Mary Mondo said.

“I have find out how the gravel stones got into the room and the amethyst stones got out,” Austro said. “We need a second oracle for my case.”

“You've got a second oracle,” police detective Rattigan said. “He is the great Rocky McCrocky of the great Rocky McCrocky comic strip. He can solve anything.”

“But I make up Rocky McCrocky,” Austro said. Several of them hooted at that.

“You don't get down half of what he does,” Selene said. “There's a lot of his adventures that you don't even know about. Other people are beginning to tell Rocky McCrocky stories, you know, and some of them would be way over your fuzzy head.”

“Rocky could solve these little cases easy,” Rattigan said. “I bet the solutions will be in the Rocky McCrocky strips pretty soon.”

“It'll be at least three weeks,” Austro said. “I have this week's and next week's strips already chipped out.”

Rocky McCrocky was the hero of the comic strip that Austro put out once a week. Instead of drawing it, for he couldn't draw, Austro chiseled it out on those flat rocks and sent copies of it all around that part of town. It was good. It was real stone-age comic art.

“You, Austro, are only the unworthy instrument by which Rocky McCrocky expresses a very small part of his adventures,” Selene said. “And I have the feeling that the best ones are not done by you at all. Your chisel doesn't even touch the stone of the good ones. They are burned into those flat rocks by sky lightning.”

Austro jumped a foot when Selene said that, and he appeared frightened. Selene's guess had been too close. How about all those times when he had been knocked out by lightning and he had come to and found a strip completed? He had thought that he had completed them when in a daze.

“You guys had better tune that girl Mary in,” Rattigan said. “She could give you the answers now, not in three weeks.”

“Oh all right,” Roy said. He uncovered an amplifier and fired it up.

“She still squeaks though, no matter how you amplify her,” Roy said.

“I like her,” the detective Rat Rattigan stubbornly maintained.

“I am the oracle!” said the amplified Mary Mondo. “Play oracle music to set the mood, and then play trumpet blasts for my entrance.”

Roy Mega played the things as ordered.

“Find out whether the corpse had an objectively fuzzy outline like Selene here has,” Mary said. (Trumpet blast followed this.)

“Find out how much poison counts for ‘real poison’ at a Party Without Walls,” Mary said. (Trumpet blast.)

“Find out how the police already knew who the dead man was when his identifications were missing,” Mary said. (Trumpet blast.)

“Find out why that grackle bird is named Rusty.” (Trumpet blast.)

“You mean Dusty?” George Artless asked uncertainly.

“No. Rusty,” Mary Mondo said. (Half blast from trumpet on that one.)

“Find out when George Artless guessed that Selene's dead man was the man he had sold one hundred amethysts to,” Mondo the Great oracled. (Trumpet blast.)

“It's all there. Support your local detective agency,” Mary Mondo signed off. (Three mighty trumpet blasts.)

And then silence — 

 — silence and, after a bit, the soft whisper of wings.

The grackle bird named Rusty was on the table in front of them. He set a red gemstone in front of Austro, but Austro was gazing into the fireplace.

“That red ruby is one of the stones stolen from me previously,” George Artless said. “I'd know it anywhere.”

“How'd Rusty get in here?” Selene asked, “the doors and windows being shut?”

“And where did he get the name of Rusty?” Roy Mega demanded. “That's one of the things that the Great Mondo suggested we find out.”

Austro rubbed his hand over Rusty's feathers and then showed it. It was covered with rusty fireplace soot.

“My client Rusty,” said Austro, “(for of course, the red ruby serves for earnest money and by its payment Rusty becomes my client) got his name because he likes to go down chimneys and out of fireplaces and visit people in their houses. And even the blackest soot looks rusty colored on a glossy purple grackle. Well, I guess that wraps it up. Pay me one cent, Mr. Artless. And, Selene, you pay Roy Mega four dollars and ninety-eight cents. And remember that the Big Star Detective Agency is here to combat crime and serve its clients.”

“Just a minute,” George Artless cried out. “You not only pocketed a ruby that belongs to me, but you haven't found out what happened to the rest of my stolen jewels.”

“Sure I have. My client Rusty stole them. That's what happened to them.”

“But where are they now?”

“I guess the police have them. They were in one of the safety deposit boxes that the dead man Jack Daw had the key in his pocket to. All you have to do is prove ownership to the police. But you had already guessed that Selene's dead man was the customer for the one hundred amethysts. So he took you for a stone-dealer's hundred which is a hundred-and-seven. And he hasn't finished taking you. Rusty here did odd jobs for Daw. He came through fireplaces to make acquisitions in different buildings. He always told himself that it wasn't stealing if he left another stone of equal weight. I will have to set my new client straight on several matters of ethics.”

“How could the police have the keys and stuff?” Selene asked. “They disappeared from my table when I had them spread out.”

“A mere detail,” Austro said,  “and my client Rusty has already taken care of that detail. And the poison that John Daw took was Bang Crystals (dexahexakrex) that everybody takes at a Party Without Walls. Oh sure, it will test as a poison on a tester, but sometimes a person will live for a year or more after he starts taking it. There isn't any malice to it. The death was probably an accident.”

“And the crystals sure add a bang to the drinks,” Selene said, and she counted out four dollars and ninety-eight cents to Roy Mega. “So it might be found that the man died by accident, and the cloud over my apartment will be lifted. But the police couldn't have the keys and stuff because they disappeared.”

“But we do have them,” detective Rat Rattigan contradicted. “They were all back in the dead man's pockets when we picked him up.”

“Do you have a fireplace in your apartment, Selene?” Austro asked.

“Sure I have. You didn't think I was some not-with-it person without a fireplace, did you? Oh, I see what you mean. Rusty, who worked for the dead man, came in by my chimney and fireplace.”

“And put everything back in the pockets where it all belonged,” Roy Mega said. “Well, that wraps it up.”

“All but the final wrapping,” said police detective Rattigan. “We're all going downtown to the klinker. A few days there will do wonders for your perspectives.”

“What for?” they cried in five voices.

“Austro and Roy Mega for running a detective agency without a license. Selene O'Keene is going in for failure to report a suspicious death, and also on complaints of neighbors for running too noisy a party. George Artless is going in on a number of old jewel-theft counts. We have a precept down at the station that ninety-four percent of jewels stolen are stolen from other jewel-thiefs. Rusty is going in for illegal entering and loitering.”

Yeah, Rat Rattigan took them all in, and he got them committed too. And five sorrowful citizens, Austro, Roy Mega, Selene O'Keene, George Artless, and the grackle Rusty were in the klinker without a dong. And they would not come out of that jailhouse until they had paid their last farthing in some specie or other.

Loose ends left over? What loose ends?

Did John Daw really die of fair play or foul?

Will Rusty, with Austro representing him, be able to get custody of Daw's stashed jewelry on the basis of being the surviving partner in a sly-jewel operation?

Where did the continuing Party Without Walls go when it left Selene's place?

What was the real relationship between the she-grackle Dusty (who drew attention outside the windows while Rusty was rifling things inside) and Rusty himself? Will their relationship be regularized if Rusty indeed comes into the chips? And if she was in cahoots with Rusty in criminal thefts, why wasn't she in the klinker with him now?

Oh, that kind of loose ends.

You might find the answers to some of them in the ‘Full Disclosure Issue’ of the Rocky McCrocky comic strip that will be out in about three weeks.

Be looking for it.

Ewe Lamb

“Than-Q,” said the girl in the ticket booth.

“Hurry up,” said Little Herby. “We have to ride the big wheel.”

“They won't start it till they sell a few more tickets.”

“But we can sit in the seats till they start.”

“In a minute, Herby, in a minute.”

A girl in yellow and a girl in white bought tickets.

“Than-Q,” said the girl in the booth.

Kids were setting off fireworks. It was Splash Day, and all the concessions on the pier were going full force. A lady and a little blonde girl bought tickets.

“Than-Q,” said the girl in the booth.

“I think they're almost ready to start,” said Little Herby.

A fellow and his girl bought tickets.

“Than-Q,” said the girl in the booth.

The banners along the top of the pavilion were popping like firecrackers in the sea wind. Herbert J. Brisco threw away his cigar and went up to buy tickets on the big wheel for himself and for his grandson Little Herby.

“Two, please, miss,” he said. And then they looked at each other, or at least he looked at her. “What's the matter, miss? Isn't that the right change?”

But she did not take his money nor did she give him the tickets, though it seemed as if she leaned forward to do so. She didn't even say “Than-Q.”

“Ah, so that's the way it is,” said Herbert J. Brisco. He was a man of commanding eye and imposing gesture. He turned, caught the eye of a beach policeman thirty yards away, and crooked one finger. Then he said to the girl “You have a smudge on your forehead, miss,” though he knew that she could not hear him. And the policeman came at a fast walk.

“What is it, sir.”

“The young lady, I believe, is dead. A cordon around the area, perhaps, is called for, and as quickly as possible.”

The cordon was set up rapidly and quietly. An out of order sign was put on the Big Wheel, and the front of the ticket booth shuttered. Those who had already bought tickets were shuttled off into one group along with the wheel operator. The rides on either side, the Kiddie Kars and the Red Rocket, were likewise closed down.

Foot traffic was diverted around the section, and groups of persons transported away. Pictures were quickly taken and time and date noted. And then one more person (if one is still a person when dead) was removed. And Splash Day continued on beach, pier, and boulevard.

“The thing is absolutely impossible,” said Lieutenant Withers.

“In the thirty years I've been on the force we've had about that many impossible cases,” said Captain Johns. “None of them gave us much trouble.”

“I can hardly believe that you've had no unsolved murders.”

“A few dozen, but they weren't the impossible ones. They weren't even the difficult ones. They were all obvious and open, with leads all over the place.

“Ah, it just happened that we were never able to put our hands on the proper collars. In the obvious and open cases you look for obvious and open people. There are so many of them always! In the impossible cases you have only to look for impossible persons. There are so few of them always!”

“I don't see how this will be easy, Captain. There was nothing within ten feet of the little booth, and it was observable from all sides. She was selling tickets every ten or fifteen seconds, and we have established the sequence of buyers. And she was shot from the front, in the forehead, with small caliber pistol, and nobody knew a thing about it.

“She sold tickets to Chester Barnweller and his girl Agatha Ott. And ten seconds later (or less, by Brisco's estimate) she was dead with a hole in her head, and she seemed still in the act of slumping forward. And he states that nobody passed between himself and the booth in that period. He's sure of that.”

“Brisco seems sure of everything, Withers. How sure are we of him?”

“He arrived in town this morning with his son and daughter-in-law and grandson Little Herby. They are down here from Kansas City. He says he's never been here before. At any rate, he has not been off his job for two years until two days ago when they started on this vacation. He is fifty-seven and a widower. The girl is eighteen and a native here. It's hard to see any connection.

“Moreover, from the rambling (but I believe valid) testimony of seven-year-old Little Herby, Brisco wanted to go to the Marine Exhibit. It was Little Herby who drug him to the Pleasure Pier and the Big Wheel. Brisco tells a straight story, volunteering to take the detector test and to submit to hypnosis on the chance that it would cause him to recall some movement or person that had not registered directly on his consciousness. We ran him through both. Nothing.”

“There are emotionless persons who give away nothing to the detector.”

“He isn't one of them. He fluttered like a jay bird at chance questions about his past income tax returns, unusual money received ancillary to his employment, and marital infidelity in the years of his marriage. But on this he showed nothing.”

“Then we go to the fellow and his girl.”

“All right, though Brisco said that the girl called ‘Than-Q’ after them. Chester Barnweller and Agatha Ott are just down from Houston for the afternoon. Chester is of this town originally, being up in Houston for just two years. He didn't notice the girl particularly, didn't think he knew her, but believes it possible that he may have seen her in past years. Chester and Agatha were apparently more interested in each other than in the ticket girl. However, we are continuing to check them out.”

“There's no chance that Miss Smith was killed by a more distant shot?”

“Might stretch it to three feet, but no more. Could have been a foot or even less. Such a small caliber would hardly be deadly at more than three feet.”

“And the noise of such a small pistol might not have been heard.”

“No, not in the general sound of Splash Day on the pier. The toy guns of the kids around would have made lots more racket.”

“Can we keep them all in town?”

“The Briscos intend to be here for a week. Chester and Agatha were going back tonight, but they will stay. Chester has an aunt in town: they'll stay with her.”

“Is there anything from the previous ticket buyers?”

“The lady with the little girl remembers Miss Smith from last summer. They came to the pier often last summer. And Miss Smith used to sell them tickets on the — ah yes, the Razz-Ma-Tazz. They do not have a Razz-Ma-Tazz this year. They smiled recognition at each other, the lady says. The ticket girl was always such a pleasant person, she says. The lady and the little girl are locals.

“The two little girls who went before, a Miss Coppard in a white dress and a Miss Stafford in a yellow dress, are each seven years old. Miss Stafford says that you really don't get a good look at persons in a booth, looking up at them at an angle like that. I never thought of it, but she may be right. They didn't think they knew her, wouldn't recognize her again, and are sure they didn't kill her. They are cousins and are down here with Miss Stafford's parents. Miss Stafford, who is precocious, says she will work on the case on her own, but will call us in to make the arrest after she has it solved, as she is adverse to rough stuff.”

“I'm adverse to it myself. All right, bring in the workers.”

Lieutenant Withers brought in a little creased man who looked like a jockey.

“I'm Harroway, Sir. I'm at your service for anything within reason.”

“You are the Wheel operator.”

“I am. I have worked all the major wheels in the world, but now I'm come down to this. I worked Old Coney, Luna Park, Frisco, Atlantic City, Ocean Park, International Shows, and the old Ringling Midway.”

“Your full name?”

“Harold (Half-Horse Power) Harroway. Hardly anybody calls me Harold. It's mostly Half-Horse they call me.”

“Did you notice anything peculiar this afternoon?”

“That beach cop, Johnny Olds, hustled over and said ‘Stop that wheel right there, Half Horse. Don't let it move another inch.’ I thought that was peculiar since I hadn't started it yet but I'd have done it in half a second.”

“Was that the first you knew anything was wrong?”

“That was the first, Captain.”

“What were your relations with Peggy Smith?”

“Non-existent. She was young enough to be my daughter. Besides, I'm a rummy. No time for women. Most of the troubles of the world come from trying to keep up with drink and the ladies both; but you can't do both of them justice. A man has to decide on one or the other. I decided a long time ago that it was more fun to be a rummy.”

“Could you have shot Miss Smith from where you stood by the wheel?”

“If I'd had a gun and a reason, and she'd stood still for it, I might have got her after six or seven shots. It's twenty or thirty feet, and it's been a quarter of a century since I've shot any sort of gun. Never was very good at it. However, at the time it supposedly happened, I was busy with the little girl in a yellow dress. She offered me an outright bribe of forty cents to let her run the Wheel, which I refused. She also told me of an invention of her own that clamps right on the starting lever and makes the wheel turn at five hundred miles an hour. She got the idea from an egg-beater. She also asked where she could buy a secondhand Wheel cheap. I told her. There actually is a junk dealer who specializes in them.”

“Interesting. Have you ever quarreled with Peggy Smith?”

“Only met her four days ago when we began to get the rides organized. Had a coffee with her once. Didn't know her well, though she's a talkative kid. No, never quarreled with her.”

“Have you any idea who could have killed her?”

“Nobody could have. It was absolutely impossible.”

Lieutenant Withers showed Half-Horse Harroway out, and Beth Jenson in.

“You are Miss Jenson? And what is your employment?”

“I run the Kiddie Kars. Gad, I could gag. It's the worst spot on the pier, and I hate kiddies.”

“You sell the tickets, and who's the operator of the Kiddie Kars?”

“There isn't any operator. The Kiddie Kars are just that, Kiddie Kars. Little kids get on them and ride them. My customers average two years old and are always accompanied by adults. At the time of the hassle I had no customers.”

“Did you notice anything peculiar?”

“I didn't notice anything at all till Johnny Olds told me that Peggy Smith was dead and for me not to go anywhere. I thought she must have had heart failure. I didn't learn till later that she'd been shot.”

“How far is her booth from yours?”

“Seven steps.”

“How do you know?”

“I count steps. I touch posts. I step on cracks in the sidewalk. I put on my left shoe first in the morning. I'm nutty about little things like that.”

“Could you see Miss Smith when you were both in your booths?”

“Not unless we put up our grills and stuck our heads out, or looked out the backs.”

“Were you friends?”

“She got me my job here. She liked everyone and did things for people, but I found her a little too sweet for my taste.”

“Do you know how any one could have killed her?”

“There wasn't any way. She was saying ‘Than-Q, Than-Q’, then Johnny Olds said she was dead.”

“Did she live alone?”

“You never can tell about those sweet ones. She was supposed to be living alone.”

“And yourself, Miss Jenson, have you anybody close, a boyfriend?”

“No. Nobody. Nothing. Nothing at all.”

Lieutenant Withers showed Beth Jenson out and Marion Mallow in. Marion entered with a coffee cup and saucer in hand.

“I can really stay only a minute. Then I must run,” she said. “Jail House Coffee isn't very good, is it? That little sandy-haired trusty got it for me from the kitchen. He said I wasn't even supposed to be back there. This is the fussiest place I ever wandered around in. Well, make it real fast. I got to go.”

“We will set the times here, Miss Mallow. You sell tickets at the concession next to Miss Smith's?”

“Yes, at the Red Rocket. If I seem a little odd (and I do) put it down to that.

“At the Red Rocket we get the teenagers. A lot of people don't know what teenagers are. I'm twenty myself, so I still remember. People go through different stages, like pollywogs or caterpillars or butterflies. First they are kids; that's a field by itself. Then they are monsters for a few years, real weird spooks, freaks, poltergeists, things that come up out of the ground. All the misunderstanding about teenagers comes from people considering them as people. They're not people. They're monsters. A lot of them will never be people.”

“I take it you don't like teenagers.”

“Then you take it wrong. I love them. As monsters. The moment you look at them as humans they're repulsive. The point I'm making is that the Red Rocket is a busy place. If I was the one that got killed I don't believe I'd even notice it for a while, I'm always so busy there.”

“Then you didn't see anything odd going on around Miss Smith's booth?”

“No I didn't. And it was unusual for everything to be usual there. Am I clear?”

“Like a bell. Did you like Miss Smith?”

“No. There's not a person or a thing in the world that I like.”

“That seems extreme.”

“I love lots of things. And the rest I hold in contempt.”

“That may be only a manner of speaking. You are still essentially a teenager and you may have miscounted your birthdays. Well, did you love Peggy Smith?”

“Sometimes I did, and sometimes I was jealous of her. I'm jealous of girls who are prettier than I am.”

“Are you jealous of Beth Jenson?”

“Of course not. I'm prettier than she is.”

“I'd have called it about a toss-up.”

“You can't be serious, Captain. Or you may be reaching the age where you really should be wearing glasses. I wouldn't put it off if I were you. Well, I have to go. So much to do, you know.”

“Sit down and don't get cute Miss Mallow. Have you many boyfriends?”

“All I can get. But no, not many. They're hellish hard to get, what with most of the tourist kids being female and all of them so pretty.”

“Had Miss Smith many boyfriends?”

“Peggy Smith's boyfriends may have been the main commodity of this port. In tonnage they would exceed cotton and sulphur and cattle and may have been close to oil. I haven't seen the latest port authority figures. Yes, she had lots of them.”

“Has Miss Jenson many boyfriends?”

“She never had any I know of except Ori. And Ori, well I won't call him a simpleton since I live in a glass house myself, but you'd have to call him undistinguished. Beth always seemed attached to him though.”

“Now, Marion, what does ‘Two Kings Twelve Three’ mean to you?”

“It sounds like one of those games where they use cards and dice both.”

“And what else might it mean?”

“Well for one thing, with you long-nosed cops jumping every time that mainland sheriff pops his mouth, since you've been getting rough on the numbers game the last couple of days, some people have been using the Bible verse-and-chapter for pots.”

“Do you sell tabs, Marion? Or dabble in the punch, or pull numbers in any way?”

“A little bit. I'll place your bet for Two Kings Twelve Three if you want me to. It may be a hot tip. I'd like to go back to the serial numbers though. They're easier.”

“Did Peggy Smith sell tab books or any such stuff?”

“A little bit. All the girls do. You have to have a couple of jobs to make a living.”

“We are sorry to have kept you so long, Miss Mallow. We'll likely need you again later. And next time we'll try to have better coffee.”

“You do that, dear.”

“Now what do we do?” Lieutenant Withers asked.

“We look at all we have, and then we start around again. What of ‘Two Kings Twelve Three’ the note that Peggy Smith had in her hand when she was dead?”

“It may be only a betting text as Miss Mallow suggests. The Bible reading of the passage is ‘But the high places are not taken away; the people still sacrificed and burnt incense in the high places.’ ”

“I can't work anything out from that. I can't even work the cryptograms they have underneath the crossword puzzles in the daily paper. Get Patrolman Johnny Olds in here.”

He came in after a little while.

“Olds, how well did you know the murdered girl?” the Captain asked.

“She worked on the pier last summer too. I knew her. She was friendly. If I weren't a married man I would surely have gone for her.”

“How well did you know Miss Jenson and Miss Mallow who worked the two concessions on either side of her?”

“They aren't quite as pretty, and I was never quite as interested: Beth is salt. Marlon is pepper. Peggy Smith was pure sugar.”

“Had Pepper any boyfriends?”

“A few, some of them younger than herself, moon calves and pasture colts, duck-tails and sideburns. But she had also started to go out with men.”

“And Salt, had she any boyfriends?”

“Only one, Ori Land, or that is all I ever knew her to have.”

“What's he like? She says she has no boyfriends, nothing at all.”

“That's what he's like. Nothing at all. I believe he could be found easily.”

Ori Land had a room in one of those old buildings about three blocks back from the beach, an apartment building where units had been chopped up into still smaller units. And Ori was in his room which had the aroma of a barber shop, or those mens' scents called Heather or Pine Needles or such, or a little like the smell of just a warm evening and no air conditioning. And Ori was terrified of the police. It seemed as though he was easily terrified. He looked like a patsy out of a high school play from some forgotten springtime. He wore a bow tie and his hair was parted in the middle. He was short, stubby, and he was pretty. There was no other word for it. Ori was a pretty young man.

“We did not mean to frighten you, Ori,” Captain Johns said. “We are only looking for background material on several young persons, one of whom died this afternoon.”

“Yes,” he bobbled his Adam's apple, “I know who you mean. Peggy Smith was wonderful. She may have been the finest lady in the world. She was nice to me. Hardly anybody pays any attention to me at all.”

“Did you ever have a date with her?”

“No, but we were going to have a date, tonight. After she got back from her dancing date she said she would come down from her room by the other way, and I could buy her a coffee at Speedways Café. I imagine that is off now though.”

“Yes, it's off now, Ori. What were your relations with Miss Jenson?”

“I knew her for a long time. She helped me out sometimes. I guess I must owe her ten or twelve dollars by now. But I'd never beat anybody out of anything.”

“What is your employment, Ori?”

“I've been waiting for a call to a position of some stature.”

“And what are you doing while waiting for that call?”

“Well, I have always believed that I would be a crackerjack as a salesman or contact man, but I have been hampered by lack of education. And I'm interested in the acting profession and have considered enrolling in an acting school.”

“I'm interested in a variety of things myself, Ori, but mainly I'm interested in one. What is your employment?”

“Ah, I shine shoes at the White Fleet Barber Shop. But if I ever get a break I'll be a barber myself or something big.”

“Do you know anyone around the Pleasure Pier who owns a small caliber pistol?”

“Peggy Smith had one. She used to shoot at those wading birds on the beach in the afternoons. Then Mr. Olds the beach cop made her stop.”

“Yes, I made her stop,” said Olds. “It's illegal to shoot a pistol on that part of the beach within the city limits, even if it is only a small pistol, even if it is just shooting at wading birds or sand runners. I told Lieutenant Withers about Peggy Smith's pistol this afternoon. He has the serial and model and description, and it is registered in her name.”

“But we haven't found it, Captain,” said the lieutenant. “Possibly it could have fired the shot. We won't know till we find it.”

“All right, Ori. Were the three girls, Beth Jenson, Peggy Smith, and Marion Mallow close?”

“Just about twenty feet apart. Their rides were all next to each other.”

“That isn't exactly what I meant.”

Lieutenant Withers and Captain Johns had supper at the Big Oyster with its fine sea view in the later afternoon. From their table they could see the Pleasure Pier with the lights now going on and everything in full swing, except the Big Wheel that did not turn and the Red Rocket that did not soar. And perhaps the Kiddie Kars didn't creep. They could not be seen. They had no high tower. But everything else was running like a perpetual midway. It was Splash Day, little brother of Carnival, nephew of Mardi Gras.

A patrolman brought them a message. A lady's purse pistol, very small, had been found at Salt Water Sam's in the dish water. It might have been tossed in with the coffee cups, and Salt Water Sam's was not a hundred feet from any of those girls' booths. It was a coffee and soft drink and corndog and hamburger place, a barbecue and hot-dog and coney island stand. The little pistol was found in the sink where the coffee cups are doused.

“Well, since we can't place any person there, let us place a coffee cup there at least,” Captain Johns said. “It may have been a self-propelled cup, but I believe that it made the trip to Peggy's booth and then back to Salt Water Sam's. But a cup seldom moves long distances by itself.”

They finished their supper and they went across to the pier to have their coffee at Salt Water Sam's, and they asked Sam about it.

“I couldn't even tell those little girls apart,” Sam said. “There are eight or ten of them selling tickets at the different booths. The season is just getting under way. Last season I had a lunch place on West Beach, not here. I don't really know them, but they're a very friendly bunch of girls. Yes, they drink a lot of coffee. One girl, when she gets a slow moment, comes and gets coffee for four or five of them. I believe those three did have their own coffee circle. One or the other of them was always coming for it. And here comes one of them now.”

“Ah, Miss Pepper, which is to say Miss Mallow,” said Captain Johns, “you were to remain where we could find you at any time.”

“Well, you can find me easily enough now,” said Marion Mallow. “I was watching you when you went to visit Ori, and when you went to the Big Oyster to eat, and when you came here. I was trying to see how you operate, but you don't operate at all, do you?”

“We don't seem to at the moment, Miss Mallow. We are trying to trace the peregrinations of a coffee cup.”

“I peregrinate quite a few of them back and forth every day.”

“But you didn't see one going by itself, did you?”

“No, I don't believe I did.”

“Let's go over that booth again. And you, Miss Mallow, can help us.”

The booth had a swivel stool in it, not too high, not too low.

“Miss Mallow, I wonder if you would sit on that stool for an experiment.”

“All right. What is the experiment?”

“Just to see what a girl looks like sitting on that stool. These booths look small, but there's quite a bit of room in them, is there not?”

“Oh yes, they're comfortable enough.”

“When you use your booth do you keep the back door closed?”

“Not if it's warm, and it's always warm.”

“Thank you, Miss Mallow.”

Lieutenant Withers and Captain Johns went back to the station house.

Chester Barnweller was brought in for further questioning.

“Chester, why did you say that you weren't acquainted with the dead girl?”

“There's something wrong with that. I don't remember saying I didn't know her, and I don't remember saying I did know her. I'm not sure it's the same girl. I went to school with a Peggy Smith once though.”

“Yes, you did. To high school, right in this town, for four years, and the termination of it less than two years ago. Should you not recognize a classmate after less than two years?”

“Certainly. But there's something wrong with it all. The dead girl at the morgue is the girl I went to high school with, yes. That's clear. But it couldn't have been her in the booth! Yet there was something familiar about her voice, familiar and yet wrong. Mr. Johns, there was something not right when she sold me the tickets.”

“Yes, I believe there was something wrong already, Chester.”

Captain Johns retired to his office and thought about it. It was along towards late night, and every night he read scripture for at least five minutes. He took the book from the bottom drawer of his desk and opened it. And with a vague curiosity he turned to Two Kings Twelve Three.

But it was odd that it did not say what Lieutenant Withers had said that it said. It did not mention the high places, nor the people who sacrifice and burn incense there.

But the things that were written there and in the following verses were of sudden interest. It was about the poor man robbed of his one cherished possession by a rich man who had countless possessions. It was a passage to awaken revenge, and apparently it had done so.

“But if it reads that way now, why did it read differently before? I have nearly missed the kernel of the nut because of this. Lieutenant Withers is a fine man within his limits. But, dammit, he is not even Irish! And when you have said that about a man, what worse words could you say about him? The book he used must have been that of our separated brethren. Two Kings they would call Two Samuel. And Four Kings is what they would call Two Kings.”

Then he put the Book away and went back to work, calling for Beth Jenson to be brought in again. “Damn the time. Get her!”

“Miss Jenson, why did you say that you hadn't a boyfriend?”

“I haven't.”

“What is Ori?”

“He is my lamb that has been lost to me.”

“How?”

“To Peggy Smith. She didn't even need him. She had a flock of full-horned rams. She had all the boyfriends she could manage. And I had only one, a less-than-one, and him a brainless lamb without enough sense to come in out of a high wind. Nobody else ever had a care for him. He needed me, he could never make it by himself, and I always looked out for him. She shouldn't have tried to take him. She didn't need him at all. I asked her not to do it, but she said she was only being nice to him. But her niceness has a quicksand quality. Anyone caught in it will never be free.”

“ ‘The rich man had exceeding many sheep and oxen… but the poor man had nothing at all but one little ewe lamb which he had brought up and nourished and which had grown up in his house… the rich man spared to take his own sheep and oxen… but took the poor man's ewe lamb.’ Was that it, Miss Johnson? But haven't you got the sexes reversed?”

“It doesn't matter. He was my lamb, all that I had, and she stole him.”

Lieutenant Withers came in and said that Chester Barnweller had further information. And Chester was at his heels with it.

“Oh, she's here, she's here!” Chester cried out when he saw Beth Janson. “I had already gone to bed, Captain Johns, and then it came to me like a lightning bolt what was wrong. She had been there at the morgue, looking at dead Peggy Smith the same time my girl and I were there. The girl who sold me the tickets wasn't Peggy Smith, Captain. She was the girl sitting right there. I'm sure of it now. Yet her voice was enough like Peggy's to puzzle me.”

“Yes. I know it, Chester. Thank you.”

“It was me all right,” said Beth Jenson. “I mimic Peggy. And we mimic best the things that we hate.”

“But how were you in her booth, Beth?”

“I just was. I told her yesterday to leave my lamb alone and not to take him away from me. I told her that he was my only one and that she had plenty. But she just smiled and told me again that she was just being nice to him. Do you know what burnt sugar smells like? That's the way she was. She had everything, and she took what was mine.”

“Let's bring it up till today, Beth.”

“Today I told her again. I argued with her when I brought her coffee this afternoon. Then I decided to kill her. I wrote the note so she would know I was killing her for stealing my lamb, or so that somebody would find it and know that I did it and why. I knew she had the little pistol in her booth. Johnny Olds had told her that she couldn't shoot on the beach, but he never mentioned her not shooting on the pier. She shot at gulls from her booth, but it never made much noise and nobody hardly knew it. At a hundred feet or so it would just sting a gull and make it squawk. So I came to her for a showdown.

“She sold tickets to two little girls and said ‘Than-Q’, and I came to the back of her booth. She sold tickets to a lady and her little girl and said ‘Than-Q’. Then she swiveled around on her stool to talk to me and I gave her the note. She knew her Bible and she recognized the passage. ‘Oh, Beth, don't be difficult,’ she said, ‘I won't hurt the little goof.’ I picked up her pistol from the ledge there and shot her.

“And that is when this nice boy and his girl came up before I could get away. So I slipped in front and sold them the tickets and said ‘Than-Q’ just the way Peggy always said it.”

“And where was the just-shot Peggy Smith while you were doing this? Why didn't they see her?”

“I was sitting on her lap. That was the only way to hide her. Then, still before I could leave, the man with the little boy came to the ticket window. But I couldn't get in front of her again. It was too late. He saw her dead, but he didn't see me crunched down behind. When he turned to give the eye to the beach policeman Johnny Olds, I dropped the little pistol into Beth's coffee cup and went back to my own booth. I said this afternoon that it was seven steps, but it's only five when you hurry.”

“And nobody noticed you?”

“Of course not. What was there to notice? We are part of the scenery and nobody can tell us apart. I shot her from the back of the booth, but I shot her in the forehead because she was swiveled around. And I dropped the little pistol in her coffee cup.”

“And then how did you dispose of the cup with the pistol in it?”

“When Johnny Olds came and said that nobody could leave the area for a while, I gave him the cup with the pistol in it and asked him to drop it off at Salt Water Sam's on the way to the police phone. And he did it. But nobody noticed what was in the cup.”

“And seeing you will see but not perceive.”

“What, Captain Johns?”

“Isaias Six Nine.”

The 99th Cubicle

Simpson Coldturkey owned three little buildings in a row in the 900 block of West Dudley Street. If he had only one of them rented, he was on the edge of starvation. If he had two of them rented, he was at the break-even point. And if (as it seldom happened) he had all three of them rented, he was rich, but just barely. Now, for a little while at least, he was just barely rich, for he had rented his third building to new tenants, had collected three months rent for it in advance; and the tenants were moving in right now. This third building was the one furthest west, on the corner of Dudley Street and South Random Road, the largest of the buildings. He sometimes rented it for an arcade. It was the place above which Simpson had his own living quarters, in that cockeyed, foreshortened second story.

The name of the business of the new tenants was Mood Manipulators Unlimited. They had already hung the sign that said Do Business With Us and Be Moody All the Time.

“I hadn't better inquire too closely as to the true nature of their business,” Simpson told himself. “Every time I do that, I turn up with another empty building.”

The new tenants seemed to be flamboyant but pleasant young people most of the time (their names were Jane Casual, Avram Sundog, and Harold Grunion), but now and then they showed aberrant moodiness themselves. Their stock in trade was a hundred or so cubicles (about the size of telephone booths), about the size to hold a person standing or sitting.

Their sales literature had such pitches as ‘Try our blue-bird blue: be happy as a blue-bird’ or ‘Have a go at our rotten-red: there is no fun like getting red-headed mad’ or ‘Use our copperhead-copper special: terrify your friends: be venomous’.

“How does your mood manipulator work?” Simpson asked the tenant Harold Grunion.

“We use atomized, ionized particles of fractured sunlight of certain colors trapped in droplets of glycerine-ice, droplets about a hundredth of a millimeter in diameter. The resonance of the trapped, minute color comes through as a mood, always one mood selected out of a whole orchestra of moods.”

“It sounds a little bit like pseudo-science to me,” Simpson Coldturkey said.

“Yes, doesn't it!” the tenant Harold Grunion agreed. “But it works. Try it and see.”

“Are you people dope-peddlers?” Simpson asked tenant Jane Casual. “I realize that it's illegal to discriminate against dope-peddlers in renting, but I was just wondering.”

“Call us the Poor Peoples' Dope-Peddlers,” Jane Casual said. “We escrow (is that the right word?) all chemical or organic dope. It has priced itself out of the market. But our angstrom-effect dope (it sets up counterpoints between the angstrom wavelengths of the various colors and the wavelengths of the various mood-frequencies in people) is almost as cheap as sunlight, and that is exactly what it is composed of. And it will effect every possible mood to every possible intensity.”

“That's almost an infinite number of effects,” Simpson Coldturkey said.

“Well, I exaggerate. It will effect ninety-nine different moods in nine intensities each. Ah, we are going to reduce even that a little bit now, by one ninety-ninth as a matter of fact. The ninety-ninth mood is a little bit too dangerous.”

“That sounds like a crock of offal,” Simpson said doubtfully.

“Try it and see,” tenant Jane Casual told him. “The ninety-ninth mood, the Garish Orange Mood, is entirely too dangerous. And I want to ask you a favor about that. I wonder whether, while my two partners are out, I might store the Garish Orange Cubicle itself somewhere up in that cockeyed foreshortened second story where you live. And I want you to swear that you will never tell either of my partners, nor anybody at all, that you have it, that you have ever heard of it. And I will put myself into deep forgetfulness of the matter when it is done.”

“All right,” said Simpson Coldturkey.

The Mood Manipulators Unlimited had such cubicles as Green-Eyed Monster Green, the Envious-Mood Color and Passion Purple Number Twenty-Seven: you only think you've been aroused before.

“They sound a little bit nutty,” Simpson told tenant Avram Sundog.

“Try them and see,” Avram said. “In particular try out Nutty-Brown: Meet the Squirrel inside Yourself. That's a good mood to get started on, Mr. Coldturkey. Oh, I'd like to ask a favor of you.

“We've decided to withdraw our ninety-ninth mood cubicle, Garish Orange. We were tired of having to skip out of town because of it. Jane Casual has had it put in a place unknown to either Harold Grunion or myself. The place is also unknown to Jane Casual now. We supreme masters of moods have a trick of forgetting things, burying the memory of them so deeply that it can only be retrieved by triple hypnosis (with three different practitioners from three different continents). But even if a person should find the Garish Orange Cubicle, he wouldn't be able to use it. It takes two keys. One of them is in the custody of Harold Grunion and the other one is in my custody. Here is my key. Keep it and never even think of it again. And I will perform deep amnesia and forget completely what I have done with it.”

“All right,” Simpson Coldturkey said.

Simpson began to try the cubicles a little bit. He started with Gandy-Dancer Gray: the Mood that makes Mousy People quit feeling Dull and it worked. He tried the Gaudy Green Cubicle: it's fun to be the Damnest Show-off in the Universe, and it was fun. He tried the Lurking Lavender Cubicle: all the Sneaky Pleasures of Sneakery, and he reveled in being a sneak. He tried the Faithful Cerulean Cubicle: Experience True Love Forever, for an hour, and he did indeed experience true love forever for an hour.

“I wonder whether you would do me a favor, Mr. Coldturkey?” Harold Grunion asked Simpson. “We have decided to retire our most controversial cubicle, the Garish Orange Mood Cubicle. Jane Casual has placed the cubicle itself in the most unlikely place she could think of, and has put herself into deep amnesia about the matter so that only under triple hypnosis would she be able to recall the place. And there is nothing more bothersome or more expensive than triple hypnosis. Avram Sundog has delivered his key to the cubicle to the most unlikely person he could think of, and has likewise put himself into deep amnesia about the matter. Here is the other key to the cubicle (it takes two keys to put the cubicle into operation). I want you to take it, and more or less forget that you have it. Never mention it to anybody, never even think about it. And I myself will be in total forgetfulness about it.”

“All right,” said Simpson Coldturkey.

“Why don't you try our Ogre's Orange Mood Cubicle, Mr. Coldturkey,” Jane Casual said to landlord Simpson one day. “It has the motto Turn into a real Ogre: Kill People, Kill People! You are a meek man, but every meek man has a tiger or an ogre penned up in his heart. It will be so much fun for you to release your ‘Beast Within’.”

“I suspect that in my case the tiger or ogre would be a meek tiger or ogre also,” Simpson said.

“Maybe not. Our mood cubicles work magic. Try it, try it.”

Then Jane Casual went to let out a customer who had just taken advantage of the Generosity Green Cubicle: Release the Wonderful, Free-Handed Person inside Yourself. The use of the Generosity Green Cubicle was always free of charge, but it always put the customer into such a generous state of mind that he often insisted on paying double or triple the amount of his outstanding bill.

Simpson Coldturkey tried the Basking Brown Cubicle: Laziness as a Luxury Experience and he liked it. He tried the Sadistic Saffron Cubicle and he began to suffer a monstrous and exciting change of personality. Then he entered the Ogre's Orange Cubicle and he turned into an ogre. He killed people, killed people, several of them. “This is the most exciting thing that ever happened to me,” he squealed with delight. “For this I was born. Oh, the tall, steep pleasure of it!”

He went on a rampage. He killed four people. Then he went to his living quarters and slept the clock around.

When he woke again, the horrifying pleasure still held him in its grip.

“It was wonderful, wonderful,” he overflowed to Jane Casual. “I feel that my life is almost complete now. Now I will just go to the police and confess to the police for the murders, and then I will be punished: that will be the final aspect of the high pleasure.”

“You just plain stay away from the police, Mr. Coldturkey,” Jane Casual told him. “Are you a dummy or something? You'd better go in and relax in the Pink Panther Cubicle or in the old faithful Blue-Bird Blue Cubicle: be Happy as a Blue-Bird.”

“But I'm already as happy as a tiger or a bloody ogre or a fulfilled murderer. Why would I want to go back to the weak stuff?”

“Oh, Mr. Coldturkey, all the people that you kill in the Ogre's Orange Mood Cubicle are simulated people, not real. We get them from True Simulations Industries. They're cheaper than you'd think. True Simulations Industries gathers them up again, and with no more than minor overhauls they are ready to be used again. The police would think you were crazy if you reported killing simulations.”

“Oh no, that broke the bubble, Jane Casual!” Simpson Coldturkey cried out. “That let me down all the way. I wanted them to be real. I knew they were real. I have to have them be real! Isn't there a Manipulated Mood Cubicle where one kills real people?”

“No. There used to be one, but now it's unobtainable. We've discontinued it. It was the Garish Orange Cubicle, the controversial ninety-ninth cubicle. Oh yes, it would put people into such a wild and bloody and wonderful ecstasy that they were able to rush right out and kill real people, lots of them. And the cubicle abetted them in it, arranged the weapons and all the wonderful encounters.”

“That's what I want to experience! That's what I want now! Real live mass murders, the Tiger and the Ogre in me released! It will put the cap-stone on my life.”

“No. It's impossible, Mr. Coldturkey,” Jane Casual said. “That's been withdrawn. Go in and try the Kelly Green Cubicle or the Euphoric Yellow Cubicle or the Magic Magenta Cubicle. You have no idea how many wonderful moods there are that you can enjoy.”

“No, no, Jane Casual. My whole life is in ashes if I can't have the real thing.”

Simpson Coldturkey started up the cockeyed stairs to that cockeyed, foreshortened second story where he lived. He dragged himself upward with sad steps. Then suddenly his steps became more animated. A wave of garish orange swept over him. He saw the whole world with garish orange eyes now.

“I have it all!” he cried. “I can put it all together in a moment!” He got the Sundog key from one hiding place, the Grunion key from another hiding place, and he keyed the Garish Orange Mood Cubicle that Jane Casual had stored there. And the cubicle leapt into action.

With the Garish Orange Mood Cubicle one could go into the wonderful, tigerish, ogreish, bloody mood, and the cubicle would furnish the weapons and arrange all the wonderful encounters. One could go right out and kill real people and have the absolutely life-capping pleasure.

If one could get out.

Le Hot Sport

The Dukkerin Daily was something of a fun newspaper for the four days of its publication. It seemed loaded with whetted axes ready to swing. It was witty and novel and titillating. “For the present, subscriptions will not be accepted,” it announced, but it was everywhere on the newsstands. And every morning it had at least three “Jokes of the Day” that were better than the “Jokes of the Day” of any other morning paper anywhere. But the slippery heart of the paper was to be found in its “Predictions”. That first day there was a whimsical story: “Two-dollar guitar launches local boy on thirty-nine-year stardom in musical world.” But the boy's name, Randy Lautaris, was not known to the reading public. The interview with Randy had been done the day before, and nine-year-old Randy had indeed bought a guitar from a friend for two dollars. But the strings and frets and parts to put it into working condition would cost more than thirty dollars, and then it would still be an inferior guitar. Nevertheless, the Dukkerin Daily gave a lot of information of Randy's thirty-nine-year career which lay entirely in the future: the combos he would put together, the concerts in which he would star, the long list of songs he would write that would pass the ten million mark, the Cine-Melody Movies he would make. Randy Lautaris was a quick-witted and well-spoken nine-year-old boy, and likely he would have a successful career in something.

“Why only thirty-nine years stardom?” Randy had asked George Hegedusis who had interviewed him. “I'll be only forty-eight years old at the end of that stardom.”

“I didn't say that it would end,” Hegedusis told him. “It's simply that I can't see more than thirty-nine years into the future, nor can anybody else. If anybody else says that he can see further than that, he is a shameless confidence man.”

George Hegedusis, appearing suddenly as a newspaper publisher, was the fairly rare combination of a passionate violinist and a shameless confidence man. He played the violin at baptisms and weddings and funerals, and also at award banquets. (Somebody better keep his eyes on that award every second or Hegedusis will have preempted it for himself.) And for some years before this he had been in show business. He called himself The Romany Houdini and he had some good escapist acts. And he was a fine practitioner of the “Fallen Angel Act”. Now he was a little bit too old to be a show person, but one never gets too old to be a confidence man. But he had never dabbled in the newspaper business before, nor made predictions, nor done interviews.

“You are skating on mighty thin water, George the Fiddler,” Karl Staripen of the local police bunko squad told George that first morning when the Dukkerin Daily had been on the newsstands for less than nine minutes. If any new con popped up, Karl Staripen always knew about it within ten minutes.

“Prove malice on my part, or prove me wrong in any of my predictions or facts,” Hegedusis said, “or else do not interfere with me in my pure-hearted activities.”

(Karl had often arrested George, and yet they had remained tolerably good friends.) “What am I supposed to do, wait thirty-nine years to see if you're right in your story about Randy Lautaris and his two-dollar busted guitar?”

“You might as well, Karl. You won't be doing anything else important for the next thirty-nine years, will you? But you can catch me up lots quicker if I'm wrong on the facts of other of my stories. Did you read my piece on Moxie Masterman?” That piece, also in the first morning's run of the Dukkerin Daily, was headed “Moxie Masterman begins one-hundred-and-one game hitting streak” and the text ran: “Moxie Masterman, hot-and-cold first baseman for the Louisville Lions in the new Deep South Major League, got his first hit of the young season yesterday, after twenty-nine times at bat without a hit. It was a pathetic, patsy eight-inning single that nobody could be very proud of. Nevertheless, it was the beginning of a hundred-and-one-game hitting streak, a world's record to be set by Moxie. The streak will not be broken until August the third of this year when Moxie will once more go hitless after hitting in one hundred and one.”

“How do you like that story, Staripen?” Hegedusis asked the bunko cop. “Hang me on that one if Moxie misses today, or any day for a while now. But he won't.”

“I remember Moxie when he was in the Texas League,” Karl said. “George, why is Moira in this room of yours? Does that mean my death, or yours?”

“Probably mine. I'll be predicting my own death, tomorrow likely.” Moira was a strange and beautiful lady. Sometimes people could see her and sometimes they couldn't. But she was always a bad omen.

“Four of the twelve stories in this first edition of your paper will give me a chance to nail you cold today or tomorrow or the next day, George,” Karl Staripen said, “and I'm waiting to pounce on you. What's your object in all this?”

“Unrequited genius demanding a voice, Karl. When you're better than anybody else at a thing, then there comes a time when you just have to go public.” But George Hegedusis didn't slip that day, nor the next day, nor the next day after that. It wasn't till the fourth day that his newspaper publishing was brought to an end. And then he didn't slip, didn't make a false prediction. It was his totally hair-raising true prediction that caused the very stones to cry out “Enough!” against him.

2

This was the outrageous prediction: “Eleven-year-old Caspar Lampiste didn't seem very much worried when I told him that he had only one day to live, that he would be killed by an automobile then. ‘What kind of automobile?’ he laughed. ‘Shouldn't I get to pick what kind of automobile I want to be killed with?’ ‘It will be a foreign car named Le Hot Sport,’ your faithful reporter, I, George Hegedusis, told him. ‘Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow!’ young Caspar sang out. ‘That's the rarest car there is. There are only four Les Hots Sports in the United States.’ ‘There will be five of them,’ I said, ‘and you will be killed by that fifth one.’ It is rather sad, really, that a young boy should be killed like that, but I only see and report the pending happenings. I don't cause them to happen. Caspar Lampiste, an eleven-year-old boy of this city will be killed by a Le Hot Sport automobile about one o'clock this afternoon.”

That couldn't be disregarded. Karl Staripen, a captain on the police bunko squad, took George Hegedusis, the new newspaper publisher, into custody quite early that morning. And he also called in Rich Frank Lampiste, an executive of great scope and power who was the father of young Caspar Lampiste. Then the three of them went out to the Lampiste mansion and headquarters and they were quickly surrounded by a swarm of young executives who were in the employ of Rich Frank Lampiste. After a while, young Caspar Lampiste was brought in and set in the midst of them where he could be watched every second. “This is my office and headquarters and also one of my fortresses,” Executive Rich Frank Lampiste said, “and it occupies the entire sixth and top floor of my mansion here. It is in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree circuit of wonderfully clear see-out glass which is also bullet-proof and shatter-proof. We are high on a hilltop here, and no automobiles are ever allowed within a thousand yards of the mansion. I don't like automobile fumes. I have a man in TV communications with us at each of the four Les Hots Sports in the United States; and with each of them is the owner of that particular automobile who swears that it will not be moved today. My young executives, of course, were already at work on this problem before Karl Staripen called me, but thanks anyhow, Karl. All the Les Hots Sports in the United States are at least thirteen hundred miles from here. I intend to prevent my son from being killed by any of those four automobiles at about one o'clock this afternoon. Where do you get your nonsensical predictions, Hegedusis? And where, if ever, did we meet before?”

“We've met. I played the violin at your wedding twelve years ago.”

“Did you ever play at any hangings, Hegedusis? I'm angry enough to have you hanged out of hand. And I've always liked that tune ‘The Gypsy Hangman’ when done by a lively violinist.”

“I did play ‘The Gypsy Hangman’ at your wedding, Rich Frank. And I've always been a lively violinist. And, oddly enough, I did play the violin at a hanging once, at the special request of the man being hanged. But my own death will be otherwise, not by hanging. You all are so entranced by the little story on page one of my paper this morning that you may have missed my prediction of my own death on page eight.”

“What is Moira doing here?” Rich Frank Lampiste suddenly demanded. “Chief of Security O'Brien, couldn't you keep her out?”

“She is a ghost, Mr. Lampiste,” O'Brien said. “I can't keep ghosts out.”

“I can,” Frank Lampiste said. “Fade out, Moira. Be you gone! You are a mistaken omen this time. My son will not die today.”

“I read your account of your own death, Hegedusis,” the bunko cop Karl Staripen said. “But it's phony. No Romany, whatever else he can predict, can predict his own death. It's his blind spot. There is something very ulterior about that item of yours.”

“It's interesting though,” said Rich Frank Lampiste. “It goes, as I recall it, ‘George Hegedusis' death will take place about ten minutes after one o'clock this afternoon. He will be flung to his death from a sixth-floor window of Frank Lampiste's executive suite on the top of his mansion. If they claim it was a suicide, do not believe them. It is murder. If my body is not found, it only means that they have hidden my body. It will be murder, and it will cry to Heaven for vengeance. And if there should be a grotesque or incredulous aspect to it, then the Lightning that is the father of me, George Hegedusis, will come and take away all that is grotesque and incredulous, and I will have died clean.’ George, George, is this nothing but some of your bleak fun?”

“No, the fun has all gone out of my life since I have come under the compulsion of predicting true.”

“Moira is still in the room,” the security chief O'Brien said.

“Not to me she isn't, O'Brien,” Frank Lampiste stated.

Suddenly the bunko cop Karl Staripen was all over George Hegedusis. He shackled his arms behind him, and he shackled his legs to the modernistic steel framework of the executive suite. “However you go out of here, it will not be by a window, George,” Staripen said.

“Every Romany man comes sometimes in his life to his ‘Days of Power’,” Rich Frank Lampiste spoke as though he were lecturing. “Usually, for the good of the world, these days are as short as they are grotesque. Now you come to the end of your short and grotesque and ridiculous ‘Days of Power’, George Hegedusis.”

“They must not be remembered as grotesque or ridiculous,” Hegedusis protested in a thick voice. “My father the Thunder will save me from that.”

“You told my son, Hegedusis, that there would be five and not four Les Hots Sports in the country. Where is the fifth one? Is the fifth one in the country yet?” Frank Lampiste demanded of the shackled George Hegedusis.

“I don't know. It's probably crossing the border just about now.”

“How?”

“Oh, by air, in a powerful but unregistered craft. It's the Le Hot Sport that was stolen in Morocco last week.”

“Yes, that's the one that has me worried. You really are onto something. The odds are towering against us being in any flightway of that powerful but unregistered craft. The odds are prohibitive against the automobile somehow falling out of that craft. And it's very long odds against that automobile falling through the very strong steel roof here and killing my son.”

“Yes, the latter odds are prohibitive, Rich Frank Lampiste,” Hegedusis agreed. “There is no way that the automobile could fall through this roof here and kill your son in this place. Because your son is not here. Do you believe that fate is an imbecile? This is not your son, not the boy I talked to yesterday. This is a look-alike. Are you trying to trick God, Lampiste?”

“No, I'm trying to trick a lesser and meaner demiurge who plays such bloody tricks on poor humans. Maybe you've spoiled it now. Maybe he's heard you. No, my son couldn't have remained silent all this while. But this nephew of mine here usually says something when he talks, and my son doesn't.”

“How far is your son removed from here, Lampiste?” Hegedusis asked.

“I'll not tell you that. Certainly I'll not tell it out loud. But he is in a fortress of mine that is stronger and more secret than this one, an underground bunker, not so very distant from here. Oh, God, help me now! I myself am having a ‘far-seeing’! My son has left the fortress where I had him placed. He has started back this way, furtively and through the swamp-jungle. Why did he not stay where I had him placed? Henry, Henry, can you hear me? How did it happen?”

“He said he wanted to check the override lock on this underground bunker himself, Mr. Lampiste. And then he was out of that door and into the swamp-jungle which you yourself had constructed to be impassable. He was like a fox with his tail on fire. We cannot spot him yet, but we can hear his voice. He keeps crying, ‘I have to meet something. I have an encounter I must keep.’ But surely we'll be able to seize him again shortly.”

“Surely you'd better.”

“I believe that I'll begin my own ‘Days of Power’ today,” said eleven-year-old Ronald Lampiste, the look-alike of his cousin Caspar Lampiste, “for I am a Romany man already. Oh, my Days of Power and Speed! If I work up early momentum, my days should go on almost forever. But I will need a spacious place to operate in. Where will I find it, where will I find it? Most Romany men do not come into their ‘Days of Power’ early enough.”

“I've always believed that three million dollars is too much money for a two-passenger sports car that doesn't hold the road very well at over two hundred miles an hour,” said the bunko cop Karl Staripen. “And, to me, it hasn't much style. There's a lot of ballyhoo has gone into that price. And yet the maker has sold twelve of the little buggers at three million each. He has to employ a lot of legend to do that, of course, and your item will help the legend, Hegedusis. It is said that eleven of the twelve Les Hot Sports have killed a person, and that twelfth one (the one that was stolen in Morocco last week, the one that may presently be airborne over our own country) is jealous of the others and is trying for a spectacular kill. It will bring as much as nine million dollars on the American market if it does attain a showy and spectacular kill.”

“And it's said that each of the twelve is indwelt by an evil spirit,” Rich Frank Lampiste mumbled. “That rumor has helped to get the base price up to three million dollars. Oh, the whole thing is shot through with such obvious fraud, and yet I tremble for the safety of my son. If my son's life is spared, I will give him any gift he wishes in the whole world.”

“Would you give him a Le Hot Sport automobile, Uncle Frank?” the nephew in the room asked. “Then I bet he'd take me for a ride in it lots of times.”

“Yes, Roland, I would give him, I will give him Le Hot Sport. And if he does not survive to receive the gift, then life is empty for me forever. Ah, we've made positive identification. The powerful but unregistered craft that left Morocco last night and left a jungle clearing in Yucatan two hours ago is indeed over our country now. And, unfortunately, we seem to be approximately on its flightway. Yes, yes, Henry, keep me posted, and see if you can't get it a little bit clearer on the screen. Oh, why doesn't it veer off a little bit? Karl, do you think that crazy George Hegedusis here really has something to do with this? And is there any way we could trade him in to fate to get a better bargain? How odd! All three of us here are Romanies.”

“All four of us here are Romanies, Uncle Frank,” said the nephew Roland Lampiste.

“It takes one to catch one,” said the bunko cop Karl Staripen. “I always get the Gypsy cases, but I never was much good at solving them. Yes, I wish there were some way to trade in Fiddler George here for a better bargain. That's what your name, George Hegedusis, means: George Fiddler.”

“I know it,” said the fiddler man and fate-predictor. “And your name, Karl Staripen, means Karl Jailhouse.”

“But my own name is somewhat more rare,” said Rich Frank Lampiste. “I doubt whether either of you know what my name Lampiste means?”

“Its common meaning is a sad-sack or a hard-luck Charley,” said George Hegedusis. “But its original meaning is ‘scapegoat’. Aye, you are one who must take on you the sins of a whole people.”

“Mine is a spooky name in the present context,” Rich Frank Lampiste said, “but my mansion here is built of steel. It is impervious. If I see that there will be a direct hit on us here, we can drop down to the floor below us, or to five floors below us, in one second. Your estimate of the time is about right, Fiddling George. It will be just about one o'clock when the plane arrives, and we are approximately in its path.”

“Is your son also approximately in its path?” George asked.

“Oh, my God, yes. I can see him in my scanner now. He's climbed up out of the jungle-swamp and onto the road, and he's running this way with his arms flung wide. I can even read his mouth. He keeps crying, ‘I have a joyous encounter that I must keep,’ and that encounter may be only minutes or seconds away. Oh, either shorten or lengthen the time, God. Oh, God, make time go away completely!” They had several clear views of the powerful but unregistered plane on their scopes. In particular they had a good view of the belly of it. And the belly was badly torn. The craft had made a rough belly landing in the jungle clearing in Yucatan (what illicit cargo had it delivered there?) and now it flew with landing gear permanently down and with an awful wobble. That plane was not in good health.

3

“Oh, my God!” Rich Frank Lampiste cried again. “The monitoring screen shows that the belly of the plane has burst open and the uncrated Le Hot Sport automobile is falling out!” And so it was happening. But Le Hot Sport, having a mind of its own, or possibly a mindful spirit in it, was into a high-speed glide. These cars always had the tendency to haze and float at above two hundred miles an hour, and they would actually become airborne at approximately three hundred miles an hour. It was thus that most of them had made their kills. The car had left the plane at about twenty thousand feet but it had inherited most of the plane's speed. It circled in a wide, fast glide. “It is scanning and searching,” Frank Lampiste said. “It is looking for my son. Oh, it knows that I have switched boys. Or does it? It is going to hit us dead, or it is going to fill our nostrils with its reek.”

“Hadn't we better drop below?” the bunko cop Karl Staripen asked.

“You go down if you wish, Karl. And unshackle George Hegedusis and take him with you. I will stay here.”

“And I will stay here,” said nephew Roland Lampiste.

“And I will stay here,” said the shackled George Hegedusis. “Should I not watch the end of my own prediction?”

“I'll stay too then,” Karl Staripen growled. Le Hot Sport came dead at them. Then it swerved past and filled their nostrils with its reek. It landed easily on the road three hundred yards beyond the mansion house, with hardly a jolt, and its speed had fallen below two hundred miles an hour. And the son Caspar Lampiste was seen on a scanning screen, running open-armed toward the insane car. The boy Caspar Lampiste had lost his wits, or his wits were trammeled. Le Hot Sport had braked and slowed, and it came to the encounter at no more than twenty-five miles an hour; and the boy, the Caspar-goat, was running open-armed toward it at at least half that speed. The way he went down when he met the car, it was clear that the joyous boy was killed instantly.

“The debt, whatever it was, is paid. The sin, whatever it was, is subsumed. The impediment on the power of special men is removed!” the nephew Roland Lampiste was jabbering inconsequently. “Now our family name is no more ‘Lampiste’ or ‘scapegoat’. Our family name becomes ‘Langa’ or ‘flame’ now. I am Roland Langa now.” The nephew was very excited.

“All right, Roland,” mumbled Rich Frank, who was crying. “I'll have our names changed legally today. Yes, Henry, bring the body of my son here. Then have the mortician come for him in a quarter of an hour. Bring Le Hot Sport here also. I am impounding it. I will pay the list price of three million dollars to the Moroccan from whom it was stolen, but I will prevent by litigation its ever going back.”

“Will you give it to me, Uncle Frank, now that Caspar is dead?” the nephew Roland Langa asked.

“Yes, Roland, I give it to you. You become my son now. You become a Romany man in his full powers.”

“But my name will be Robert Langa and not Roland Langa,” the boy said. “As Roland Lampiste I was included in the bloodlust of the car, but it won't know that I am the same person with both of my names changed.”

“All right, Roland, Robert,” said his uncle, his new father, Rich Frank Langa. “George Hegedusis, why are you white and why are you trembling? Your prediction came true.”

“He is trembling because the Power has left him,” Roland-Robert taunted. “Four days isn't very long to have the power, Fiddler George. I intend to have it for more than forty years. I will drive Le Hot Sport, and my own totemic name will be Le Hot Sport. And you are wrong in your own prediction, that of your own death, George Hegedusis.”

But the suddenly-much-older Rich Frank Lampiste-Langa was weeping as only a Gypsy man can weep. “Why do you still mourn, Rich Frank?” Karl Staripen asked. “You have your son again, reborn into the body of your nephew Roland.”

“Yes, I have him again, but for less than ten minutes.”

“Have you your Gypsy up, Rich Frank? Do you also predict?” Karl asked.

“Yes, I also predict. And Moira is standing in the room with us again.”

“I am wrong in none of my predictions,” the trembling George Hegedusis the fiddler jittered. “I am no longer shackled, men, though it appears that I am. But I was an escape artist when I was in show business.” Hegedusis stood up, free of his shackles. “I had to study a bit to see the hidden hinge on the encircling windows, but I knew there had to be a hinged section.” Suddenly the unshackled Hegedusis was across the big room. He swung out a narrow section of the encircling glass. He stepped out. And he fell six stories. “God receive his ghost,” Frank Lampiste-Langa spoke with emotion. “But at least we didn't fling him out.”

“Yes, I flung him out, but not with hands,” Roland-Robert spoke in a sort of power rapture. “I killed him. He didn't want to die but he foresaw it, and I compelled it. And I inherited his father the Thunder. And his losing the power killed him.”

“Maybe not,” said the old bunko cop Karl Staripen. “Hegedusis was possibly the finest practitioner in the world at the ‘Fallen Angel’ act. As an aerialist, he would miss his trapeze and fall eighty feet. And the horrified crowd would believe that he was dead. And then, after a powerful and dramatic interval, the ‘Fallen Angel’ would rise up from the sawdust and walk out painfully but triumphantly. He really knew how to fall. I think he remembered how to fall just now, either consciously or subconsciously.”

“He looks dead enough,” Rich Frank Lampiste-Langa commented, looking down and still sobbing.

“Fallen Angel, rise up again!” Roland-Robert Langa commanded in a loud and rough voice. “We are onto your tricks. Rise up, and slink away.” And George Hegedusis did rise up, slowly and torturously, like a zombie, from the flagstones below the encircling windows. He dragged himself a few feet, trembling and seething with black despondency.

“What will happen to him now?” Frank Lampiste-Langa asked. “He can't live with the shame of his lost power.”

“What will happen is what he predicted would happen,” jeered Roland-Robert. “His father the Thunder will come and kill him presently. And his family is already on the way here with propitiative music for his funeral.” Men brought the dead body of the boy Caspar Lampiste up into the big room then. And on his dead face was the look of radiant happiness. “You and I are cousins-closer-than-brothers,” Roland-Robert spoke softly to the dead boy. “We pledged that, whichever of us should die first, he would give one-seventh of his soul to the other one. You have kept your pledge, Caspar. You have yielded only six-sevenths of your soul to God. And you still have the seventh portion tight in your hands for me. Release from your hands to mine now.” And the dead boy, in some form of post-mortem relaxation, did open his tightly clenched hands, and his brother-cousin did take something from them. Then the mien of dead Caspar Lampiste was completely peaceful. “And now, Fiddling George Hegedusis must not die in his miseries. He must die in his powers,” Roland-Robert-of-the-powers said. “His last prediction must come true. His father must take him out of his shame and unhappiness. But wait, wait, his father the Thunder is my father now too.”

“Do what you have to do, Roland-Robert,” the choked-up Frank Lampiste-Langa uttered, but his attention was on his dead son Caspar.

“O Strafil, O two-tined lightning!” Roland-Robert called out loudly as he looked down on George Hegedusis collapsed against a nearby stone fence, perishing in his dejection. “Two-faced and double-dealing lightning, come and kill him. Come and get him, and he will play the fiddle tonight during the supper for all your high company in Nebos in Electric-Cloud Land. One thing he can do, lightning, is play the fiddle.” There was a small thunder out of the cloudless sky, but the two-faced, two-pronged lightning did not strike yet.

“Oh go away, Moira!” Karl Staripen the bunko cop spoke sharply to the ghostly lady. “There is one death, and there may be another. But death does not happen in this room itself. You are wrong. Get out.”

“Let her alone,” weeping Frank Lampiste-Langa spoke hollowly.

“This is not an ordinary person who asks this,” Roland-Robert was railing up at the lightning-bolt that still withheld itself. “I am a Romany man who has entered into my powers at the present moment. I have subsumed one part of the soul of my dead brother-cousin here, and now I am an enchanted man. I own a Le Hot Sport automobile, and there are only twelve of those wonders in the world. I am Le Hot Sport in my totemic name, and there is only one of such wonders as myself in the world. My new family name is Langa or ‘flame’ and it is given to me to command. Come down, come down, Strafil the double lightning-thunder. Oh, surely there is a more spacious place where I can revel in my new power! Oh, I want to go in my power to that more spacious place right now! Strike, two-faced Strafil, strike!” Then the double-pronged lightning-thunderbolt did come down. One prong killed and crisped George Hegedusis as he slumped against the stone fence in his dejection. And the other prong came right into the room and killed the boy-man Robert-of-the-powers. He died with a cry of delight, and fell across his dead brother-cousin Caspar Lampiste. Robert Langa had found a more spacious place where he could revel in his sport-styled powers.

“It was quite a short ‘Days of Power’ that he had,” Karl Staripen the bunko cop spoke sadly in a voice that was always like gravel.

“Are you satisfied, pernicious Moira thou ghost?” Frank Lampiste-Langa asked tearfully. “I have seen your look several times before. You smile that treacherous smile, but you cry tears at the same time. You tears should be analyzed. I will inter Le Hot Sport in the same crypt with my son Caspar and my nephew-son Roland-Robert. They can drive it forever in that More Spacious Place. Oh, it'll roar and rev in there, and there will grow the legend of lively happenings in the crypt. What is that violin music drifting in through the swung-out window section, Staripen?” Frank Lampiste-Langa was red-eyed and he spoke with a curiously red and choking voice.

“It's the family and mourners of dead George Hegedusis, come to take him away with weeping and violin-playing,” Karl said as he looked down. “And the tune, it's our oldest tune, the everlastingly happy tune that we play at birthings and weddings and funerals, all of them. It's ‘The Gypsy Hangman’, Rich Frank.”

“Ah yes. It's sad and happy at the same time. I remember now that George Hegedusis did play it at my wedding twelve years ago. Now they will play it for his funeral.” And Rich Frank smiled curiously and tapped the desk table before him to the music. No Gypsy, whatever his straits, can completely resist the happy lilt of ‘The Gypsy Hangman’.

Magazine Section

1.

Strange Incident At Hatbox Field

Years ago (oh, from 1958 to 1962) Junior Giant Jet-Hoppers were used on short commercial flights out of small airports in the NE Oklahoma, NW Arkansas, SE Kansas, and SW Missouri areas. These smallest of jets would carry only thirty-two passengers. Well, on the routes they ran there were seldom more than twenty passengers: if there'd been smaller jets made they'd have been used.

The Junior Giants had size limitations in several places. They had the narrowest throats of any jets, entirely too narrow; and because of this the Junior Giants were often choked down by the birds they sucked in, especially ducks and geese.

At dusk of November 2, 1940, a Junior Giant took off a north-oriented runway from Hatbox Field of Muskogee, Oklahoma bound for Fayetteville, Arkansas, a flight of ninety-four miles. This was a little early in the year for geese to be flying south, and yet they had been heard the night before this.

It was for this reason that Flight Attendant Angela Rebhuhn brought her shotgun along with her on that flight. Just after takeoff, seeing a flying V of geese coming right at them, she opened the nose-escape window (quite against regulations) and shot a blast at the V of geese to make it veer off. Then she readied herself for the second blast but she did not shoot it. She said later that she had the clear impression that the leading goose of the V was not a goose.

The Junior Giant sucked up the first five flyers of the V, then choked and died, banked over the Cookson Hills, and came back to Hatbox Field at an easy glide and made an easy landing.

The night service crew (it consisted of a man and a boy) removed four geese (and one thing that was not a goose) from the gullet of the Junior Giant Jet-Hopper. The damage was declared to be minor, and the Jet-Hopper took off again after a total delay of only seven minutes.

The four geese that had been sucked into the narrow gullet of the jet and choked it down were now no more than four hot little blocks of charcoal (damn, they stayed hot for a long time!), and the man and boy spread them out on the floor of the machine shed.

But the leader of the V, the thing that was not a goose, did not seem to be badly burned. It was a curious creature. Its wings were like bat wings, very long fingers with a leather-like webbing between them. The creature was slightly made, but it had a finger-wing span of at least five feet. Its head and face were not at all goose-like. They were a little like those of a coon, or a monkey, or a comically ugly little man. Then the funny face stretched itself, flexed its web-jointed fingers, opened its eyes,

and it said “Hot and fast, there's just no thrill like it.”

and it winked at the man and the boy,

and the man and the boy fell all over themselves getting out of that maintenance shed.

Then they heard the popping of stretched leathery-fingered wings as the thing that was not a goose took to the air and vanished.

Nobody except Angela Rebhuhn ever believed the man and the boy. The man got testy and would not answer questions about it unless you found him boozed up down on Callahan Street in Muskogee. The boy started out hitchhiking the morning after the incident. He said that he was going back home (to Olathe, Kansas) to finish high school. He said that he had seen something that only a liar could believe.

But their unbelieved story survived.

Every two or three years after that, people (even newcomers to the neighborhood who could not have heard the story) would report seeing a V of geese going south in the evening sky with a lead flyer that wasn't a goose.

I found the boy in an art class in Olathe, Kansas. He drew for me a clear picture of what he had seen. I found Angela Rebhuhn and showed her the picture.

“That's him, that's him exactly,” she said. “I've seen him twice since then. But he doesn't lead geese into the hot throat when I'm on a flight. He and I have come to an understanding, an understanding over about three hundred air yards. When I shoot my warning shotgun blast, he veers off with the V. He understands that my second shot will be more than a warning.”

By John T. Woolybear in the Sunday Magazine Section of the Muskogee Messenger — of quite a few years ago.

John T. Woolybear was a casual man with pale blue eyes. He was flecked with large tan freckles, and each freckle had a slight blue ring around it as though it had been drawn by a cartoonist. He had three wives, one in Illinois, one in Nebraska, one in Texas. He was on tolerably good terms with all three of them. Well, he sent each of them a card on her birthday every year. But he never entered the three states where they lived because (tolerably good terms or not) they had legal writs out against him.

John Woolybear was a newspaper hobo. He could run a linotype machine and all those other machines around a newspaper. He was a fair reporter. He wrote unusual feature articles for the Sunday Magazine Sections of newspapers. He had sold at least one of them a week for about forty years and that was about two thousand of them. He had his own rules for writing these Magazine Section stories: “They Must Be Strange, They Must Be Outrageous, They Must Be Garish, and they must be true.” And he insisted on that lower-case truth in every one of them.

He seldom stayed with one newspaper for more than a month.

When he left a town he usually left about an hour before dawn, dragging a suitcase big enough for three men, picking a highway nexus on the edge of town to hitch a ride from.

2.

Strange Happenings At Blackberry Patch, Kansas

Parallel to the Cross-Timbers there is a ridge known, but not known at all widely, as Big Wind Ridge, which runs from the Texas gulf-shore through Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, and into Canada. It is the unofficial place where the Great Plains and the hilly woodlands begin, and one goes down from the plains to the hills. There is always a strong wind out of the west all along the ridge, and as a result of this there is much kite-flying by men and boys also all along the ridge. Big Wind Ridge is the best kite-flying place in the world, and the best kite-flying place along the whole Ridge is Blackberry Patch, Kansas, an unincorporated place in Doniphan County.

Blackberry Patch, Kansas is the only place in the world where boy-carrying kites and man-carrying kites are really common. The west wind at Blackberry Patch will sustain really large kites, some of which are equipped with seats or even dangling gondolas such as passenger balloons have. It is not uncommon for three to five persons to be airborne by a single kite; it isn't uncommon if they are Blackberry Patch people. But there is something unusual and even secret about the people of Blackberry Patch.

The Blackberry Patch from which the settlement got its name was originally a hundred miles across, back in the Indian days, and the very vines were thick. But now (for the last hundred years or so) the patch has been nibbled away by settlers and farmers. But the heart of the patch still remains thick and secret; and it is there that the Blackberry Patch people (they are now an ethnic mixture of Kaw Indians and settler-Germans) live and make blackberry jelly at the Jelly Factory to sell all over the United States, and make kites and Fat Air suits. Since there is no graveyard or burying place around Blackberry Patch itself, one has to believe that the people go to what they humorously call the Elephant Graveyard in the Sky, in kites and their Fat Air suits, when their days are finished.

Sure the Kaw Indians flew kites back in the Indian Days, beaver-skin kites strung on frames of tough and springy Osage Orange wood. For kite-ropes they used twisted huckleberry vines. They flew the kites more than a mile high, and sometimes the kite-riders put on their Fat Air suits and jumped out of the high kites. They might drift as far as fifty miles, across the wide Missouri River and into the treacherous Missouri Territory. And their descendants, the Kaw-Germans, still do it.

Affected by the technology of the Settler-German element, the Fat Air suits are much better than they were in the Indian days. And so are the kites. Tough rubber-like polyethylene has taken the place of beaver skins for both the suits and the kites. The suits used to be blown up by mouth, and the air was stoppered inside the suits by big wooden corks. Now the suits have regular air-valves in them; and every suit-traveler carries a bicycle pump along with him when he goes drifting. A person encased in a Fat Air suit can walk along pretty well on the ground, or bounce along; and if he falls down, he can roll along and bounce up again. And in the air he can get along famously. Fat Suiters from Blackberry Patch, Kansas have floated across the Missouri River and clear across the state of Missouri and come down in Illinois. They carry dried blackberries with them to nibble on. And they wear advertisements on their Fat Air suits, and they always attract attention when they land. Often they are given rides back to Kansas by drivers for the Missouri Kansas Motor Freight Lines, as MK Freight Lines is one of the advertisements they most often wear on the backs of their suits.

There is another aspect of the Blackberry Patch kites and the Fat Air suitors that some people find hard to believe. It is the main secret thing about them. There being no burial grounds around Blackberry Patch itself, the Blackberry Patchers, when they find that their days have about run out on them, go by kite and suit to the secret place with the secret name: but the joking name for it is the Elephant Graveyard in the Sky. A person gets into his Fat Air suit and goes up about a mile high in a kite. He jumps out then, and he begins to glide. But he does not begin his gentle glide downward as usual. He glides upward across the Missouri River. He comes to the secret place that looks like a big cloud on the outside. But it is a special sort of cloud with its spherical silver lining on the inside. It is bigger on the inside than on the outside, and has running water and green pastures. And there he will be gathered to the bosom of his fathers (mothers too, maybe), and will find all the wonderful Blackberry Patch people who have ever passed over to their glory.

This last part may be inexact as nobody has ever entered the miscalled Elephant Graveyard in the Sky and returned to give an accurate report of it.

And just where is this big secret cloud with the joking name?

It is exactly over downtown Kansas City, Missouri, and exactly two miles up.

By John T. Woolybear in the Sunday Magazine Section of the Kansas City Star.

That was the last thing that Woolybear ever had published in the Sunday Magazine Section of the Kansas City Star. The Monday morning after it appeared, Peter J. Oldpeter was fired as editor of the Magazine Section and was replaced by a younger and less genial person.

And the Magazine Sections themselves in many Sunday newspapers were now being replaced by other things such as a second or even third section on TV personalities or Rock-Sockers.

3.

The Strange Case Of The Good Giant In Stone County, Missouri

The only things known for sure about Saint Christopher are that he was a very good person and that he was a giant. Other things about him, such as whether he ever really lived at all, or whether he ever really died at all, are not known for sure.

Dating from the third century ad, all around the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, there are at least a hundred giant statues in various states of decay. In many cases the local belief is that they are statues of Saint Christopher. Some of the statues are fallen and broken badly. Some of them have lost heads and arms. But there is one thing missing from even the best-preserved of them, and that is the face. There are no faces on any of them, even those where the rest of the head is preserved. On the best-preserved of these statues, there is clear evidence that the faces were broken off with hammers or axes. So at least as many of the statues are called locally ‘The Giant Without a Face’ as are called ‘The Good Giant Saint Christopher’.

But what could have been so very wrong, or so very right, with the faces of the stone giants that people believed they had to break them off?

In Stone County, Missouri, in the United States of America, near the place called Talking Rocks, there lived until two years ago a man named Horace Goodjohn Christopher, a retiring sort of man who seemed to be liked and admired by everybody and everything except the coons and badgers and wolverines. These animals hated him, but dogs loved him, and people liked him.

Horace G. Christopher, a giant of a man, was generous. And he always seemed to have money to be generous with. Nobody knew where he got his money for he never worked for pay, and he said that he didn't know where it came from either. “I just reach into one of my pockets and I find whatever I need,” he said. The good giant had giant pants, and the giant pockets in them were so deep that they never ran empty.

The good giant had never worked for pay, but he worked almost all the hours of almost all the days without pay, doing all sorts of things for people, especially for widows and orphans. He was a talented workman in every art and craft you could think of.

Besides his great height, there were two things a little bit unusual about this Giant John. He was seventeen-hundred-and-fifty years old. And he was dog-faced. That's right, dog-faced. In hair and hide and snout and eyes and ears and smell he was dog-faced. And it seemed a little bit weird to hear a man's voice (a clear, strong, friendly voice) coming out of his dog-face.

The Friendly Giant had a mill and he ground grain for everybody who brought it. Like all millers, he took one-tenth of the grain in fee for the grinding. And yet the nine-tenths of the grain that he returned ground and sacked to the customer was always of greater quantity and greater weight than had been the ten-tenths that the customer had originally brought to him. And he gave to the poor one-tenth amount of every grinding that he had kept from the customer.

The Giant had a hotel or roadside inn at the place called Talking Rocks in Stone County, Missouri. He was the patron of travelers, so he welcomed travelers of every sort at his hotel and offered the best bed-and-board anywhere. When travelers left him, they paid whatever they could afford. And they always found twice the amount of their payment back in their pockets after they were a mile or so down the road.

Everybody liked him except those animals, the coons, badgers, and wolverines, those animals that traditionally hate and fear dogs. Then there appeared a wolverine of genius in the neighborhood. In every species, whether wolverine or human or other, about one individual in five million will be an individual of genius. The gifted wolverine got about a hundred other wolverines to assemble. He had to be a genius because the slashing solitary wolverines are lone hunters who hate other wolverines only slightly less than they hate creatures of other species. But he assembled them.

The mob of savage wolverines ambushed the good giant Horace Goodjohn Christopher one night. They killed him, and they tore his hot flesh right off his bones and ate it completely.

Well, was the giant Horace Goodjohn Christopher the same person as the giant Saint Christopher of Chanaan? His age of seventeen-hundred-and-fifty years would fit just about right. And the mystery of the old faceless statues of Saint Christopher might have been that they were dog-faced statues, and persons might have felt that it was not fitting that a saint should be represented as dog-faced even if it was accurate.

And two days after the death of Horace Goodjohn Christopher, there came further corroborations that he was indeed the same person as ancient Saint Christopher of Chanaan. A man came in a truck to the Talking Rocks site in Stone County.

“I travel for the Zolliger Church Goods Company,” he said. “If nobody objects, I will take the holy bones of Saint Christopher with me. It isn't seemly that they should lie here in the dank ground and be gnawed on by every animal that comes along. How many thousand of holy relics will they make! A thousand sizable pieces could be made from just one of those giant tibia bones.”

“How do you know that they are really the bones of Saint Christopher?” someone asked him.

“Gentlemen, relics authenticate themselves,” the church goods man said. “And two nights ago, when I was in a hotel in Jefferson City, I dreamed that the holy bones of the good giant Saint Christopher could be found in this exact spot. I came here and found it to be so.”

I myself visited this church goods man, saw the bones and the relics that he was making from them, and was convinced of their authenticity. He even offered me a job selling them. “You are a charming man,” he said, “and I believe that you could sell anything.” There would be an incredible manner of relics made from those bones, and one man could not sell them all. But so far I have not taken the job.

By John T. Woolybear in the Sunday Magazine Section of the Saint Louis Globe, not too many years ago.

“This is the last thing I can ever buy from you, John,” the Magazine Section editor of the Globe told John Woolybear. “Were I not retiring at the end of this month I would not dare to buy and publish this. It's outrageous, of course, it's silly, it's garish.”

“But a Magazine Section piece cannot be too garish!” John Woolybear protested. “Everybody knows that.”

“Maybe everybody knew it fifty years ago, John,” the editor said, “but it hasn't been true for a long time. This is the most inept and outrageous thing that I have ever encountered. But it served my purpose. What better way to thumb my nose at the powers at this newspaper where I have spent so many happy years! What a flood of protests they'll get when this silly thing appears!”

John T. Woolybear took his money and left the newspaper office with a touch of sorrow in his heart. Was it possible that the world was in the process of passing him by? Was flamboyance and garishness no longer wanted in the world? Could it be that even a true account like this one of the good giant at Talking Rocks was too garish and incredible to appear in a Sunday Magazine Section of a Newspaper?

Woolybear felt bewildered. And in his bewilderment he experienced a sudden loneliness for his three wives, the one in Illinois, the one in Nebraska, and the one in Texas.

4.

Strange Account Of The Pike County, Pennsylvania Clonings

In the hamlet of Greely Gulch in Pike County, Pennsylvania, there are authentic cases of cloning. In fact, cloning is the way of life there. In my forty years of checking out strange-but-true stories all over the country I have investigated more than one hundred accounts of cloning in various regions and found them all to be false. But now I am prepared to state that the clonings that emanate from Greely Gulch are authentic.

In another Pike County town of Lackawaxed there was the case of three different sets of triplets going to work in the mill. These nine persons (of the three different sets) were all good workmen and they received good paychecks. But one of the auditors at the mill smelled fraud.

The auditor followed the nine workmen when they had finished work one evening. The nine of them walked behind some ornamental bushes at the front of the mill. Then only three men came out from behind the bushes. And the other six were not behind the bushes. They were nowhere. The auditor followed the remaining three to their boarding house. The three went in, ate their supper, opened their six packs of beer and watched TV, then went to bed. Well, the auditor was an adept at looking into windows; that's how he knew just how they spent their evening.

And in the morning the auditor was watching again. He saw the three rise, dress, eat their breakfasts, and then come out of their boarding house. He followed the three of them to the mill. Near the entrance to the mill, the three ducked for a moment behind some ornamental bushes. Then the full nine of them came out from behind the bushes, went into the mill and went to work. It was sheer fraud. Three men were holding nine jobs and drawing nine paychecks.

The auditor followed the nine/three men every evening. And they ate their three suppers and went to their three beds. But on Friday evening, the three basic men went to the bus station instead of the boarding house. They got on a bus and went away on it. The auditor went to the ticket window.

“Where did those last three fellows buy tickets for?” he asked the ticket seller.

“To Greely Gulch,” the ticket seller said.

I found that in a dozen other towns in a sort of circle around Greely Gulch the same thing was happening. The community of Greely Gulch was guilty of fraud by means of cloning at the expense of all its neighboring towns.

Then I went to Greely Gulch myself, and I found — 

“I have read enough,” the Editor of the Sunday Magazine Section of the Scranton Scanner told John T. Woolybear. “It's drivel, John. No more, John. You're not the man you used to be, John.”

“But read on, Mr. Farmington. Read how I myself went to Greely Gulch and how I became sure that all the people of Greely Gulch could clone. Read how I myself — ”

“No, John, no,” the Editor of the Magazine Section of the Scranton Scanner said. “No more ever.”

“What will I do now?” John T. Woolybear asked himself. “I have always been the best Sunday Magazine Section Feature Story Writer in the World, and I got to be the best by following the adage that a Sunday Magazine Section piece cannot be too garish. I'll not admit that I am wrong about this, but I must admit that the world has gone wrong about it. I've failed to place the last twelve Sunday Magazine Section pieces I've written. And all of them were amazing and all of them were true.

“My Strange Case of the UFO Nests at Wildcat, Wyoming was shuffled off as fiction. Fiction? I was there; I learned everything; I even soloed in one of the Wildcat Wyoming's UFO's.

“I know that the clonings of Greely Gulch were real because I myself — 

“But what's the use of arguing? My life is a bust. I am separated from all three of my wives and I miss them all uncommonly. I miss the one in Illinois. I miss the one in Nebraska. I miss the one in Texas. I must find a way to make things up to all three of them, but it's against the law to make things up with all three of them.

“It's time I hit the road again.”

John T. Woolybear went to his own boarding house and pulled his big heavy suitcase out from under the bed. Now it seemed to be bigger and heavier than ever before. He knew he would not be able to go hitchhiking with it again. It was as if he had become older and weaker in the four days since he had come to town and gone to work for the Scranton Scanner.

“What makes the thing so heavy, anyhow?” he asked himself, and he opened up the suitcase. “Oh yes,” he said. He took a bulky Fat Air suit out of it. He took a bulky folded-up man-carrying kite out of it. And a bicycle pump. It was still a pretty heavy suitcase. What to do?

“I am, after all, a charming man,” he said. “At least three persons in this world have found me so. But how will my charm work now? I could go back to Blackberry Patch in Doniphan County, Kansas. I learned their tricks when I was there. I could get into my Fat Air suit, go up in my kite, and jump out. As I am getting to my last years, I would probably glide up instead of down. I could drift into that cloud that is jokingly called The Elephant Graveyard in the Sky. It is exactly over Downtown Kansas City, Missouri, two miles over it. And there I would be with all the Blackberry Patch people who have passed over to their glory. I would be with them, aye, but I'd be as dead as they all are. I'm not quite ready for that yet.

“Or I could go back to Missouri and go to work with that friend of mine with the Zolliger Church Goods Company. I have heard that he is badly in need of an assistant to sell Saint Christopher relics. That big skeleton broke up into so many thousand genuine relics that there will be good business in them for as long as one can see into the future. But I know that I'd have a dog-faced feeling if I went into that line of work.

“Or I could go back to Greely Gulch and check in at the Outworker Agency. Then I would go to one of the nearby towns and get three jobs and draw three paychecks. But great howling thunder! I don't want three jobs. I don't want hardly one.

“But what will I do? There must be something for me. I am, after all, a charming man.”

He went out of his boarding house and to the variety store.

“Let me see that small suitcase,” he said. “Fine, fine, it's just what I want. Let me have three of them. No, no, what am I thinking about. Let me have just one of them.”

John Woolybear took the small suitcase back to his boarding house and set it on the floor in his bedroom. Then the little suitcase seemed to become three little suitcases on the floor.

“I am a charming man,” John Woolybear reassured himself again. “Three persons in this world have found me especially so. It may be that I won't have to work at all, not if I spread myself properly. And all three of those special persons are well fixed now, so I have heard.”

John T. Woolybear who had once been the King of the Sunday Magazine Section Fabricators began to fill the three little suitcases out of the one big suitcase. And, by leaving out the Fat Air suit and the folding man-carrying kite and the bicycle pump and a few other items, he made the transfer perfectly.

Just before dawn the next morning, three men took their places at a good hitchhiking highway nexus just outside of Scranton, Pennsylvania. The three men looked somewhat alike. Each of them had pale blue eyes. Each of them was flecked with large tan freckles, and each of the freckles had a slight blue ring about it as if it had been drawn by a cartoonist.

The three suitcases of the three men were just alike, almost just alike. Each of the suitcases had a lettered sign on it.

The lettered sign on one of the suitcases read to illinois.

The second one had the sign to nebraska.

And the third one had the sign to texas.

The Hand of the Potter: An Idyll

After a momentary silence space

Some vessel of a more ungainly Make

“They sneer at me for leaning all awry — 

What! did the hand of the Potter shake?”

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám, Fitzgerald

Patrick T. K. (his surname will not be given here or anywhere; only three persons in the world know what it is) was a vessel of more ungainly make than you are likely to see for a long time. He was sitting in his bright shop one clear noontime of a sunny summer day. He was a fat man with lean and hungry eyes that could not be fooled. His lean and hungry ears couldn't be fooled either, and now he heard the absolutely silent footsteps of a lad who was coming barefooted over the hot pavements and holding his breath.

“He's eleven years and three months old,” Patrick told himself out loud. “He was born in the springtime. He's six stone weight, or eighty-four pounds as the Yanks would call it, a slight lad. And what he is carrying has a value that goes well into eight figures. But the lad can't know its value.”

Patrick T. K., a Sly Gold Dealer, a Sly Hand Dealer, a Sly Everything Dealer, was the coolest dealer in the world. Then why were his hands suddenly shaking?

The slight lad came into the shop in absolute quiet. Then he released his breath that he had indeed been holding. He put a piece of paper on the table in front of Patrick who was quaking like a pile of ungainly jello.

“They say that you buy autographs sometimes,” the lad said. “What will you give me for this one?”

Patrick looked at it with wobbly eyes. Then he prostrated himself on the floor before it. The way he was built, when he prostrated himself, he still wasn't very flat. He prostrated himself for a full minute: and the lad saw, with scared eyes, that minute measure itself on the solid chronometer that Patrick had on display. Then Patrick rose from the floor, dusted himself off (in Patrick's shop, the dust on the floor had a large assay of gold dust in it), and seated himself once more on the strong chair behind the table, breathing heavily.

“Where and how did you get this?” he asked the lad.

The lad told Patrick the slightly unusual circumstances of the way he had come by the paper with the autographs on it. And he threw in the information “he was left-handed.” Patrick seemed both astonished and delighted at this bit of information.

“Ah, that weighs heavily for its authenticity,” he said. “Nobody, except a very few of us select ones, had ever guessed that about him. I will give you ten World Dollars for this, lad, or one paltry shilling. Which would you rather have?”

“Stone the crows!” the lad cried in sudden excitement. “A real shilling? They quit making shillings fifty years before I was born! They're collector's items now. Oh, I'll take the shilling if it's real.”

“It's real,” Patrick said, “and you are a wise lad. A shilling is now worth at least twenty-five World Dollars.” He gave a shilling to the lad.

“I wouldn't sell it for a million World Dollars!” the lad cried. “A real shilling!” The lad took it from Patrick and ran out of the shop.

“I was wrong about him when I heard him coming,” Patrick told himself. “He's eleven years and five months old. He was born at the bitter end of February and is not a springtime child at all.”

Yes, a genuine shilling was now worth about twenty-five World Dollars, but not more than that. The genuine shilling was a collector's item whose time had never quite come, and Patrick had ten thousand of them.

It was quiet in Old-York Square that noontime, as it most often was. Nostradamus, however, had once made a Prophecy about this very Square, that someday the Square and the area inscribed by a one mile radius around it would be absolutely overwhelmed and inundated by refugees from a worldwide disaster to the extent that the area would threaten to sink into a deep sea of mire or a bottomless abyss. But the Square was surely not crowded now.

Though it was bright noontime now, Patrick lighted his red lantern and put it in his window. That meant that he had some world-shaking item in his shop. And the spotter spotted it within three minutes and put out the word. Every shop there in Old-York Square was somehow extraordinary and had worldwide ramifications: and the spotter made a good living spotting for all of them. Within nine minutes of the spotter putting out the word, all the leading autograph collectors and dealers of the City were there. Within an hour, the great dealers from Düsseldorf and Paris, from New York City and from Hershey, Pennsylvania, from Rio and Shanghai, from Mecca and Kōbe and New Delhi, from the whole conglomerate world were there.

“Oh, it's authentic,” Diamond-Eyes Dugan, a dealer from Jerusalem said. He prostrated himself before the signature for only fifteen seconds then. He was an unbelieving sort of man, but he did prostrate himself with great flair and effect. Some people can do it and some can not. “A mere glance,” Diamond-Eyes continued, “has convinced me that it checks perfectly with the other five verified signatures of this Person in the world, with the other five ‘hands’. I'm the only person in the world who has examined all five of them, you know. You yourself, Patrick, have never seen the ‘hand’ that is in the Monastery of the Snow Storm in Lhasa.”

“No, I haven't. I hope to see it before I die. But I have seen four of them, and I have them engraved on the backs of my eyeballs. This hand is the same hand as the others. It is by Himself. And it's worth a middle to upper eight-figure sum.”

Patrick's shop was overflowing with the richest and most select treasures from all the lands and seas of the world. Or else it was the most impossible shop in Old-York Square. There were open nail kegs filled to overflowing with gold coins, many of them dribbled onto the floor. There was a live monkey swinging by an articulated brass tail. Well, the monkey had lost his original tail in a grotesque and horrible accident, and Patrick had made the flexible brass tail for him. There were tall piles of the newest and most splendid comic books of the Comic Book Boom of Black Africa. There was a human mummy (unwrapped) with a portable typewriter resting on its belly with its hand set as though it were typing. There was a sheet of paper in the typewriter and on it the words “My name is Fhook.” Patrick himself had typed those words, however, for a joke. There was a wax and papier-mâché head of John the Baptist with a policeman's cap atop it.

“Yes, it's authentic,” Madam Jingo said (the autograph she meant, not the Baptist's head), “and it is indeed worth a middle to upper eight-figure sum. The only autographs in the world of equal value are those of the fabulous Jim Jam the Crackerjack Man. There are even fewer than five of Jim Jam's autograph known. Some experts say that there are fewer than one of them.”

“The price of the signature is about as you have set it,” said Mark McLam of Cork, “but you will not be able to get that price, or anything, for His signature there. The five authentic signatures, the six counting that one, are neither bought nor sold. They simply are. The five persons in the world who simply had to have one, and who could afford the medium-to-upper sum (they are three saints and two devils) already have theirs. And there is no sixth qualified buyer. The eight-figure price is therefore merely whimsical.”

“I believe that there may well be a sixth qualified buyer,” Patrick said. “I only regret that, for purpose of symmetry, he is likely to be a third devil.”

“Just how did you happen to obtain this authentic signature of Himself?” Prince Podpis and Graf Autograf asked in unison. These leading autograph dealers had all given themselves droll names. Prince Podpis was ‘Prince Signature’. Well, he was an authentic Russian Count of the old line. Graf Autograf was ‘Count Autograph’. Well, he was an authentic German Count of the old line. And the first Madam Jingo was an early Empress of Japan: this Madam Jingo, however, was Welsh.

“Yes, tell us how you obtained this authentic signature of Himself,” said John's-Head Johnson the Töpelgeist who was the John the Baptist head with the policeman's cap atop of it. He seemed to have just woken up.

The question was: Which came first, the John-the-Baptist's-Head or the Ghost. Oh, Patrick had himself made the head out of wax and papier-mâché (he was something of an artist at such things): and then the Töpelgeist (they are a variety of the Poltergeist) came and lived in it. Most of Patrick's friends believed that Patrick was a ventriloquist and that it was he who spoke the words that the head seemed to speak. This was true in some, but not all, cases.

So Patrick gave them a short account of how he had obtained the autograph of Himself. But Patrick would tell only about a third of it today, and a third of it tomorrow, and a third of it the next day.

“There was a slight lad, eleven years and five months old, and he saw this man walking in the noontime,” Patrick said. “This man was absolutely a personage, and yet he seemed to be perfectly conventional in every way. Then the lad decided that the man was perfectly conventional in every way except one. The man was sauntering with an easy step, and it was purely by accident that the lad noticed that the man's feet did not come all the way down to the ground. ‘Sir,’ the lad said, ‘your feet do not come all the way down to the ground.’ ‘Thank you for telling me,’ the man said. ‘It is so hard to remember everything.’ ” And that is all that Patrick told the other big-name autograph collectors about it that first day.

Patrick didn't break off the account from any reluctance, but Madam Jingo broke in on it with the sudden idea that, as long as all the leading dealers in the world were already in town, they might throw an Autograph Bash at the New Crystal Palace. So they did it, five hundred-and-fifty big name dealers and twenty-nine thousand autograph collectors. It was a big bash, and the New Crystal Palace was a big place.

It lasted all night and into the following dawn, and also into the dawn after that.

2

What fine Italian Hands, and Greek

Ruthenian, and Quok, and Queek! — 

And hellish some, and one divine!

What Autographs that flow like wine!

Official Verse of the Impromptu New Crystal Palace Autograph Bash

July 15th, 16th, 17th, 2002.

Live Autographing was always a big feature at such Autograph Bashes as this. The Queen of Sheba was there and signing autographs like a storm. But whether she was the original Queen of Sheba resurrected from ancient grave with the grave-dirt still clinging to her body and hair, or whether she was the London nightclub singer identically named The Queen of Sheba, that was something for the experts and the authenticators to decide. The nightclub singer did wear a costume of grave-dirt in her act. Whichever one she was, she was quite pretty. The nightclub singer, however, was said to have a weak and scratchy voice. Yes, all the autographs of whichever Queen of Sheba she was would have instant value.

It was doubtful whether the fabulous Jim Jam the Crackerjack Man, the best known man in the world (who nevertheless was often billed as ‘The Man Nobody Knows’) was there in person. But there were three imitations of him there signing autographs, and there were perhaps two thousand persons in the three lines waiting for autographs from them. All three of these extravagantly-dressed gentlemen had the lobes of their left ears slashed and dripping blood, and they made passes at their bleeding lobes before signing each autograph. But it was suspected that they were all using red-ink pens and that the blood was just for the purpose of smearing the autograph paper a little bit. None of these autographs would pass the authentication test. The blood of none of the three tested positive for all seven of the deadly diseases of which the real Jim Jam the Crackerjack Man was dying, and dying, and dying. That did not matter. The autographs of the three look-alikes were all authenticated as ‘Genuine Non-Authenticated Jim Jam Autographs’, and they were worth at least fifteen dollars each, but they were not worth ten million dollars each. Each of the non-authentic masqueraders had a snake-o-form walking stick crooked over one arm.

There were various opinions as to what Jim Jam the Genuine Crackerjack Man did. Well, being the most famous man in the world was enough for anybody to do.

Many rock singers were there signing autographs, and a dozen or so of the big-name wrestlers. Among the great wrestlers was the ‘Wild Man From Borneo’ who was always wheeled up to the wrestling ring in a cage. He was in a cage now as he signed autographs, and he roared his great roar with every autograph that he signed. Another wrestler was Le Cannonnier with his brass cannon that he was always wheeling around and pointing at people and sometimes shooting it. He did now shoot and kill two boys but that was a double accident. Attendants at the New Crystal Palace took the two little bodies out and buried them in a secret place so as not to cause any fuss.

Another popular wrestler was the Hangman with that gallows on wheels which he always brought into the ring with him when he wrestled. He would try to put the noose around the neck of his opponent and hang him till he was dead right there in the wrestling ring. But he did not hang any of the autograph seekers this evening, though it was rumored that he had hanged several at another autograph bash the year before. The wrestlers were almost as popular as the rock singers.

There were three sections of Wall on exhibit and for sale at the Autograph Bash, and they were among the most popular offerings. Each of them claimed to be the very section of wall on which the words Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin appeared as is recorded in the book of Daniel in the Bible. On one of the wall sections the words were in Babylonian Cuneiform, on one section they were in Old Hebrew, and on the third section the words were in our own Latin Letters of remarkably modern mode. One visitor at the walls protested that the Latin Letters had not yet evolved at the time when the words appeared on the wall. “Oh, but God Himself was always an advocate of alphabetical reform,” explained the man who was offering that section of wall with its words for ten million dollars.

There were three twenty-eight-wheel trucks with open trailers and swinging cranes on them, standing with motors running, ready to lift and load and deliver to dockside or to any local place a selected section of wall. After all, whichever section of wall was the authentic one, it bore the Handwriting of God Himself.

And there were various novelties there. One autograph, so it seemed, was written large in fire on immaterial air, and it could only be moved about by clamps faced with sparking and spitting magnets.

About two hours after midnight, the lad who had sold the Autograph to Patrick came by the place where Patrick was sitting with the other really big-time autograph dealers. And the lad was accompanied by a pleasant-looking man who seemed to be amused.

“This is my father, Old Lad McGregor,” the lad said. “He says that I should have had two shillings for that page I gave you out of my autograph book. There was another autograph just as valuable on the other side of that sheet of paper.”

“There is a smudge that I have not yet deciphered on the back of that sheet,” Patrick said, and he handed the lad another shilling.

“What is your name, lad?” Madam Jingo asked the lad.

“My name is Lad,” said the slight lad. “My name is Lad McGregor, and the name of my father here is Old Lad McGregor.” Then the McGregors (such pleasant looking persons they were!) went away to revel in the best of the Autograph Bash.

“No wonder Himself was pleased to meet that boy,” Madam Jingo smiled the words. “You were saying, Patrick, before I interrupted you with the idea of this Bash and so ensured that twenty-nine thousand people would not sleep in their beds tonight or tomorrow night either — you were saying, Patrick — ”

“Oh, the lad took further note of the Person who could walk on the ground or a little bit above it at will. The Person did not seem to be British, and yet he was in contemporary British Countryside Garb, tweeds, walking shoes, walking hat with a feather in it, with a walking stick, and with a British pipe in his mouth. He was a large and pleasant Person who was not really extraordinarily tall.

“Or was he?

“The lad knew a trick for seeing things in their right size instead of in the illusion that they project. When a looming full moon has just risen over the horizon it looks so big that seven of them, rather than seven-hundred-and-twenty, would seem able to take up the whole horizon. Well, one simply bends over and looks at the moon backwards between the legs, and then the moon assumes its proper size. The lad tried that same trick now. He turned around, bent over, and looked at the Person backwards between his legs. And by that viewing, the Person Himself was a veritable giant, taller than the trees, taller than the distance between here and a full moon. Then the lad straightened up and turned around and looked at the Person frontwards; and the illusion returned (Oh, this is all backwards!), and the Person was again only a rather large and altogether pleasant man, not too large to be accounted in the normal human range.

“Birds and squirrels were scampering and twittering over the shoulders of the Pleasant Person. Two of the birds were Scarlet Tanagers. ‘But the Scarlet Tanager is a United States bird only,’ said the lad who owned and often perused Bixley's Big Bird Book. ‘What are tanagers doing in England?’ Then the lad, in a sudden moment of illumination, recognized who the Person was. The lad offered his autograph book to the Person and the Person signed it. Then, after the Person had spoken a few pleasant words to the lad, they parted company.”

“And the lad tore the page out of his autograph book and brought it to you, and you authenticated it in a sudden burst of illumination of your own and bought it from the lad for a shilling, later upped to a second shilling,” said autograph tycoon Mark McLam.

3

Smelling of candy and tigers…

 — Borges

“Yes,” said Patrick. “What, what is that new and powerful aroma? Oh, one of the three Jim Jams the Crackerjack Men is paying us a visit.”

The great New Crystal Palace smelled of candy, as do all great places when they are housing large and festive crowds. And often they have another smell.

“It is not one of those three,” said John's-Head Johnson, the Töpelgeist who had the appearance of a severed John-the-Baptist's Head with a policeman's cap atop it. “The three false ones are still creating autographs at the heads of the three longest lines at the whole Autograph Bash. He who is coming is Jim Jam the Crackerjack Man himself. Person, entity, I believe that you are the Devil.”

“Head of a person only, less than an entity, if I look like the Devil to you, then I have botched it. The slickest trick of the Devil is to convince people that he does not exist.” Jim Jam the Crackerjack Man himself stopped with Patrick and his big-name friends. Jim Jam Himself was the new smell that now filled the New Crystal Palace with his presence. Yes, he did smell like tigers. He threw his snake-o-form walking stick down on the floor and it turned into a live snake.

“That is the corniest of all the Ancient Sorceries,” Madam Jingo said.

“Wait for it, wait for it,” Jim Jam smiled his tiger's smile. “There is really no corn in my act, but there is a lot of phriktos sitos, the grain that is grown only in the iron meadows of Hell.” This live snake that had been a walking-stick now bit Jim Jam savagely on the leg. Then the snake went into convulsions and died.

There was a tendency in all the friends to be a little bit afraid of this sinister Jim Jam. They were all people of the wide world so they didn't give way to that tendency, but it was there.

“That's once, snake,” Jim said. Then he brought the snake back to life. But after a moment it went into convulsions of another sort and died again. And Jim Jam the Crackerjack Man brought the snake back to life again.

“How many times do you repeat this, J. J.?” Madam Jingo asked out of sour curiosity.

“I do it seven times,” said the evil-looking Jim Jam. “When the snake bites me, it dies of each of the corruptions of my blood. It dies seven times, once from each of the seven deadly diseases in my blood.”

“Doesn't the snake find that a little bit tedious?” John's-Head taunted.

“Oh, the snake has become completely psychotic, mad in fact,” Jim Jam answered.

“What are the seven deadly viruses in your blood?” Graf Autograf asked.

“HTL-3 Virus, Hepatitis B Virus, Epstein-Barr Virus, Sickle Cell Anemia, die Syph, die Lepra, and Glotz Disease,” Jim Jam answered with seven-fold pride.

“I have never heard of Glotz Disease,” Diamond-Eyes Dugan objected.

“I am the only human or quasi-human who carries it yet,” the sinister Jim Jam said. “Elsewhere it is to be found only in the flowing serum in the quartz-crystal veins of the devils of Hell.”

“Is it contagious?” Prince Podpis asked.

“Very contagious and completely deadly, but I am careful. It is an ‘exclusive’ that I wish to retain until my hour is come.” Jim Jam brought his snake back to life for the seventh time.

“Your best trick, devil, isn't convincing people that you don't exist. It is convincing people that none of this is happening,” John's-Head argued.

“Head of a person only, less than an entity, be quiet!” Jim Jam ordered. “Or one on the order of your own size will deal with you.”

The snake offered to bite John's-Head. John's-Head offered to bite the snake. But in the showdown, it was John's-Head who backed off, and so he lost face.

“Jim Jam has convinced me at least,” Madam Jingo said. “I don't believe that any of this is happening.” Jim Jam the Crackerjack Man turned his snake back into a snake-o-form walking stick, twirled it, and left them for a while.

“I still say it is corny,” Madam Jingo insisted.

A few of the young people at the Bash knew John's-Head the Töpelgeist and they knew his favorite trick. John's-Head was different from other severed heads in that he was neatly healed and smooth at the throat and closed off there. He was different from all others also in that he could eat and drink voraciously, and that this intake didn't seem to go anywhere. These young people tried to see how much John's-Head would eat and drink now. Thirty-six hamburgers (John's-Head snapped each one up whole making a curious sort of jump every time he did it), ninety-nine hot dogs, twenty-nine Junk Yard Dogs, fifty-five Coney Island Sandwiches, one hundred and five Macedonia Fruit Salads. And he emptied twelve gallons of coffee out of an urn with a straw. This got John's-Head back into good humor again after his skirmish with Jim Jam and his backing down from Jim Jam's snake. Everyone loves to do the one thing he is good at, and so did John's-Head.

Twenty-four hours went by. How time does fly at a Big-Time Autograph Bash!

Then, a little while after second dawn, Patrick and his friends left the New Crystal Palace and gathered in Patrick's shop again.

“Was there more to the way you obtained the autograph, Patrick?” Madam Jingo asked.

“Not much more. I asked the lad in what language Himself had spoken, and he said ‘In English, but with a touch of Jewish accent that went back to the grandfather days.’ ‘I don't understand,’ I told the lad. ‘Just what was the accent like?’ ‘Like yours,’ the lad said, ‘very like yours.’ Like mine! But I had been cured of my accent forty years ago, by the foremost remedial-speech man in England. That was at the time when I had my old name changed to an Irish name. I had no idea that I still had an accent.”

“Perhaps Himself doesn't know that He still has one,” Mark McLam observed.

“And how would one go about telling God the Father that he still has a residual Jewish accent?” Madam Jingo asked.

4

Bootless for such as these the mighty task

Of bottling God the Father in a flask.

 — Heroic Poem in Praise of Wine

H. Belloc

Patrick's high-ranking friends left him then and returned to their countries and continents.

Yes, the Person God the Father, in contemporary garb, had been walking His favorite Earth, as He often did, in the bright and pleasant daylight. And He had been recognized by that pleasant boy Lad McGregor. Lad had asked Him for His Autograph, and He had written it left-handed, in beautiful and proud Old Hebrew. And he hadn't noticed that he was signing it on the back-side of a page that already had an autograph on the front side. So it became the sixth genuine autograph on Earth in the original Hand of the Potter.

About twenty-nine hours after Patrick's high-ranking friends, Diamond-Eyes Dugan, Graf Autograf, Madam Jingo, and the others had left him, a grubbier sort of visitors paid Patrick a much shorter visit, nine minutes, and then left him also.

“Might as well blow out the lantern now,” said John's-Head Johnson the Töpelgeist in the form of a John-the-Baptist's-Head with a (no, no, it was wearing a commodore's cap rather than a policeman's cap now). So Patrick blew out the red lantern that had been shining in his window in daylight and darkness for several days, since the beginning of the Incident of Himself's Autograph.

And within an hour of Patrick blowing out the lantern, Patrick's high-ranking friends returned to him again. Oh yes, the spotter had spotted that the lantern had been blown out, and had so passed the word.

“So you no longer have any world-shaking item in your shop, Patrick?” Madam Jingo cried as she burst into Patrick's shop with the rest of them.

“No, I no longer have any world-shaking item in my shop,” Patrick (that vessel of ungainly make) said with a sad smile and a horribly bereaved voice.

“Stone the crows, Patrick, did you really sell the Hand of Himself and did you get your price for it?” Diamond-Eyes Dugan demanded.

“Aye, I got my price!” Patrick said with a heavy sadness, “a very high eight-figure price, just one dollar short of being a nine-figure price.”

“Was it a clean deal, Patrick?” Graf Autograf asked, “and why are all those carpenters hammering?”

“No, it was not,” Patrick admitted. “It was a dirty deal. John's-Head here has hired the carpenters to build an ark for him, to answer your other question. He believes that an ungodly flood will strike Old York Square.”

“Patrick, did you give something else with the signature of Himself on this deal?”

“No, I gave the signature of Himself as a something else on the deal; the buyers weren't very interested in the signature of Himself. I threw it in on the deal because it was inseparable with it. I gave a vital piece of my soul as another not-very-important something else.”

“What was the main item of the deal?” Mark McLam asked.

“The autograph on the other side of the paper, the autograph behind God's back on the deal behind God's back.”

“Whose was it?” Madam Jingo asked. “Why am I in a state of shock? And where did you get the money to hire carpenters, John's-Head?”

“Can't you guess whose autograph it was?” John's-Head Johnson, the Töpelgeist in the appearance of a severed head with a commodore's cap atop it asked in dull agony.

“I would hide my head in shame except that a head is all there is of me. Oh, I got the money by signing my name eight thousand times at the Autograph Bash for ten dollars a signature. They called me the fastest mouth at the bash. I signed them with a pen in my mouth.”

“It was the autograph of Jim Jam the Crackerjack Man, of course,” Mark McLam divined it, “but does anybody know who he really is?”

“He is an entity dying of seven different diseases and living, one after the other in seven different nightmares. One of the seven nightmares is reality and not a dream, and one of the seven nightmares is that Jim Jam is Satan himself. I don't know whether these are the same nightmare.”

“Yes you know it, Patrick,” Diamond-Eyes Dugan said, “you know that they are the same nightmare, the reality nightmare, and that Jim Jam is Satan himself. We all know it for sure now, but Jim Jam knows it only one chance in seven. I hope there is less here than meets the mind. So then there was an autograph of Himself on each side of the paper. There were two Himselves walking their own world incognito on a sunny afternoon. To whom did you sell it, Patrick, for the sum just one dollar short of nine figures?”

“To a consortium of seven men from a place of the improbable name of Trenton New Jersey, U. S. A. Is Trenton known for anything? Has anybody every heard of it?”

An attendant from St. Audrey's Insane Asylum came into Patrick's shop.

“One of our inmates escaped nearly a week ago,” this attendant said. “I have an anonymous report that this inmate has established a connection with Old York Square. He is a large and tweedy man and is supposed to be harmless, but he leaves a trail of harm behind him every time he gets out. I wonder whether any of you have seen such a large and tweedy man?”

“What is his name?” Patrick asked.

“His name is George Light-on-the-Mountain Gregory, but on the day he escaped he went before a magistrate and paid a fee and had his middle name changed to God-the-Father. So now his legal name is George God-the-Father Gregory.”

“No, I haven't seen him, none of us has seen him,” Patrick said. And the attendant from St. Audrey's Insane Asylum left Patrick's shop.

“Somehow that name does sound familiar, but then I meet so many people,” said Diamond-Eyes Dugan. “Certainly we have heard of Trenton. Every reader of esoterica will have heard of it and the murky quotation ‘But thou, Trenton Ephratah, though you be small out of the Cities of New Jersey, out of you shall come an impetus and an infection that will rock the Earth.’ This place has become the Roma and Mecca of the cult of Devil-worshippers on our Earth. Tell us everything about this high-priced deal that you made, Patrick.”

The Story of Little Briar-Rose

A Scholarly Study

Thorny-Rose Dreamer, you sleep as though dead:

Worlds within worlds within worlds in your head.

 — Heinrich Kleinwolf, Steep Dreams

The Dreamer is fifteen years old, and she has been fifteen years old for nearly a thousand years.

 — Alesandro Leija, Fairy Tales of Aragon

We are investigating the story of Sleeping Beauty to see whether there are not hidden in it the seeds of fuller happenings than those that are usually narrated.

Yes, there are indeed unused, hidden and explosive story riches in the Sleeping Beauty Story. But these riches must remain hidden and unused, if not forever, at least for a thousand years. For there would be world-wide turmoil if the hidden parts of it were made known.

“World-wide turmoil?”

“Yes, even wider than the world. There would be turmoil in one entire mind from one end of it to the other.”

But first, there are a couple of loose ends that must be dealt with. Have you ever noticed that most loose ends are found at the beginning?

We quote:

“In the tenth-century Europe and Near East, there was a general feeling that the world would end in either the year 999 or 1000.

The popular prophets finally settled on the date of April 1 of the year 1000. (April First was at that time the first day of the year, so it was the first All Fools' Day.) Many people, as the day approached, gave away all that they owned to whomever wanted it. They sang a lot of and laughed a lot and repented of their sins. Ninety-five percent of the people believed that the End of the World was nigh, and they were glad to see that great day coming. And five percent of the people believed that the world was not about to end, and they acquired land titles and property titles from all the True Believers. ‘What monumental fools they are!’ the skeptical five percent cried. ‘Oh, how the laugh is going to be on those fools!’

“But who was the laugh really on? For the world really did end at dawn of April 1 of the year 1000.”

 — Arpad Arutinov, The Back Door of History

We quote again:

“In the year 410 of Restored Salvation, a Camel swallowed the entire world and retained it in its maw for a period of thirty-nine seconds. The beast then regurgitated the world again, and things went on as before. People had the feeling that something odd had happened, but they could not quite identify the feeling.

“In the year 785 bc a huge fish swallowed the entire Universe and retained it (not in its belly, but in a small space behind the pineal gland, the dreamer's gland, in its brain) for sixty-nine hours. A peculiarity of this manifestation was that each person in the world believed that he alone had been swallowed by the big fish, which became known as the Jonah-Fish in legend.

“Again, in the year 209 bc the pagan god Indra captured the entire Universe in his brain. As the Jonah-Fish had done, Indra set it in the small space behind his dreamer's gland (his pineal gland). The effect of this was that the Universe was existing only in the dreams of Indra and did not have an independent existence. But the experience gave Indra a headache, so after nine minutes he ejected the Universe again. Then the Universe teetered between an existence that was slightly more tenuous than its previous existence.

“These things really happened. They were not observational malfunctions. So what does the human community do when such massive and impossible things happen? It gives them a name and consigns them to being a footnote in the most obscure history it can find. The name given to these phenomena was ‘Universal Inversion’ or ‘Topological Inversion’, and mine was the most obscure history it could find.”

 — Atrox Fabulinus

That takes care of the loose ends. They may not belong here, but it is a topological imperative that everything should be somewhere. Now we proceed to the story of Little Briar-Rose who came to be known as Sleeping Beauty.

The story presently is found in several different versions and forms. One of them is named THE SLEEPING BEAUTY IN THE WOODS, by Charles Perrault who lived from 1628 to 1703. The story appears in 1697 in a book titled “Accounts and Tales of Times Past by My Mother the Goose.” In France of that day, ‘Mother Goose Tales’ had the same meaning as ‘Old Wives Tales’ had in England. But the “Mother Goose Nursery Rymes” published in London in 1760 owed nothing to Charles Perrault except the borrowed name ‘Mother Goose.’

A second more modern version of the story was written by the Brothers Grimm (Jacob who lived 1785-1863 and Wilhelm who lived 1786-1859). The story was in the Household Tales of the Grimms' that appeared between 1812 and 1822. It was named Little Briar-Rose (Dorn-Röschen). Though written more than a hundred years after the Perrault story, Little Briar-Rose is of an earlier recension. Using the technique of diffusion and parallelism, the tireless Brothers Grimm, sometimes employing as many as one hundred oral versions of a story from all Europe and the Near East, were able to reconstruct and to date approximately (so they believed) the original stories. They set the date-of-origin of Little Briar-Rose (its most popular name), or Sleeping Beauty (its second most popular name) as being close to, but not before, the year 1000.

The Brothers Grimm believed that the Story of Little Briar-Rose had a sort of predecessor in folklore named Noah and his Wonderful Ark.

What connection could there be between Noah and his Ark and the story of Sleeping Beauty? Oh, Noah was an enchanter, so he put all the birds and beasts on the Ark to sleep, and his wife and sons and his sons' wives too. “It's the easiest way to handle it,” he said, “the hay bill for the beasts alone would break me.” After he had put them all to sleep, Noah went up to the caboose (the little room with the window in the top of the Ark) and sat in the Captain's chair with his left eye open and his right eye closed in sleep. And he slept from the seventeenth day of the second month till the seventeenth day of the seventh month of what has been called ‘The Year of The Big Flood.’

“Was the phenomena of Topological Inversion involved in either the Noah story or the Sleeper story?”

“How would we know if it was?”

A minor version of the Sleeping Beauty story is Tchaikovsky's ‘Sleeping Beauty’ Ballet. The story is expressed more in the music and dance sequences than in its words and glosses.

Another minor version of the story is found in two songs by Stephen Foster: ‘Beautiful Dreamer’ and ‘Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming’. The story is found entirely in the music and not at all in the words of these two songs.

And then there are several paintings which show the Sleeper's Castle surrounded by its bramble-bushes which merge into clouds, for the whole thing is free-floating in the sky — well now, it is really free-floating in nothing at all, it is entirely outside space.

In the Perrault version there are eight fairies (seven good ones and one bad one). In the Grimm version there are no fairies at all. The two brothers, the crown princes of the fairy-tale industry, seldom used fairies. Instead of fairies, there were thirteen wise women, twelve good ones and one bad one.

The waking of the Sleeping Beauty Princess is contrived and artificial in all versions. Indeed, Jacob Grimm, in his old age and after the death of his brother Wilhelm, gave the opinion that the sleeping princess had not really wakened at all, that she was still sleeping after her ‘century’ had gone nine or ten times over. Jacob was even heard to mutter, “She must not wake, she must not wake. If she wakes up, then everything is finished.” But Jacob Grimm had gone a bit dotty in his old age, and nobody inquired too closely as to what he meant.

Little Briar-Rose was an incomparably intricate and spacious and wise person. Since she had no speaking parts in any of the versions of her own story, it is something of a mystery how we know that she was so intricate and wise and spacious, but it's always been known about her. She became ‘The Earthen Vessel Holding Treasure,’ one selected out of many billions for the role.

Was there something mysterious about Briar Castle, the home of Little Briar-Rose? There is something mysterious about every castle; that's one of the requirements of being a castle. Was Briar Castle unusually large or in any way impressive?

“Not too large to fit behind the pineal gland (the dreamer's gland) in the human brain,” says one peculiar voice.

“Be quiet, peculiar voice,” we say. What evidence have we.

It impressed one poet who wrote:

“It's an older place than Eden

And a taller town than Rome.”

Was Sleeping Beauty really as beautiful as has been made out? Yes, she was quite beautiful in form and face. However, though quite beautiful, there was more strength and intensity and scope in her fifteen-year-old face than there was softness and gentleness. Or, as Belloc has it in one of his poems:

“Her face was like a King's Command

When all the swords are drawn.”

Even in her strange sleep, Little Briar-Rose was in command. This is especially evident in Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty Ballet, in its music and dance sequences, more than in its glosses and words.

She must not wake, she must not wake!

“Hey, old Arpad Arutinov, if the world ended on April 1, of the year 1000, on the first April Fools Day, as you say it did, how come we are still here?”

“You are not here, not quite here, not as you mean it. You are only here in a much more tenuous way, in a much more tenuous ‘here.’ ”

“Why would the Lord of Eternity leave us in a tenuous state for near a thousand years?”

“For fun, perhaps, since a thousand years is less than one eyeblink to the Lord of Eternity.”

“Hey, old Atrox Fabulinus, how much space is there behind the pineal gland in the human brain?”

“Not much space behind the pineal gland (the dreamer's gland) in the human brain, not much space at all. Barely enough space to contain the Universe.”

Yes, of course the world ended at dawn of April 1 of the year 1000. That is proved by all sorts of evidence. No, there is nothing of the World remaining anywhere. There's a catch to that, however. To be completely inaccurate about the matter, we must state that one person has survived ‘nowhere’, outside of space. She is in a deep sleep, and has been in deep sleep in her ‘nowhere place’ for nigh on to a thousand years. But she has deep dreams in her deep sleep, and all of us are items in her dreams.

Oh, don't carry on like that, folks. This isn't that bad at all. Consider the things that could have been.

What if the Camel that swallowed the entire World in the year 410 of Restored Salvation and retained it in his stomach for thirty-nine seconds, had retained it until the present time? What if all of us had been born and lived, and would die, in the crowded space of a camel's stomach! Anybody who has been in a camel's stomach for only thirty-nine seconds knows that it is a damnable place to be. The present circumstance is better.

What if, when in the year 785 bc a huge fish had swallowed the entire Universe and retained it for sixty-nine hours, the fish had retained it all until the present time? The circumstance for all of us would long since have become a situation of delirious insanity. The present circumstance is better.

What if, when in the year 209 bc the pagan god Indra captured the entire Universe in his brain, he had retained it there until the present time instead of rejecting it after nine minutes? Oh, the awkward, misshapen, totally hideous dreams of Indra that we would then inhabit! The present circumstance is much better.

As it is, we are being dreamed by a pleasant, variegated mind, by a person of quiet sanity and balance and, yes, sweetness.

If we had been able to select, out of all the persons ever, the person we would most like to be dreamed by, could we have made a better selection than Little Briar-Rose?

End of Scholarly Study

Along The San Pennatus Fault

The feathered race with pinions skim the air.

Not so the mackerel, and still less the bear.

 — John Hookham Frere

And now the young dudes have all taken to wearing feathers on their faces. What next, Quinctius, what next?

 — Cato the Younger

That was the summer they all had a lot of fun around the San Pennatus Fault Crest.

“Here on the edge of the San Pennatus Fault we are on the ‘Edge of Monsters’ also,” the ever-rational Isidore Merriman said. “We can only hope that they will be hopeful monsters. Maybe. Some of the time. It's true that our experiments have been plagued by the ‘Unreality Syndrome.’ Well, such plagues are always among the things we have to deal with. We've had a bad streak of ‘hopeless monsters,’ and I don't know what we'll do if we have any more of them.”

“Oh, we'll continue to cover them up,” the elegant Merald Hilltop said. “Sometimes they're amusing. Sometimes they're horrifying. And sometimes they're simply not to be lived with. The Flying Turtle Sydney, what are we to think of him? He's sure to crash and be killed soon, and yet he seems to be perfectly designed for flying. Nobody could have dreamed of a more perfectly designed-for-flight turtle: and so, as we are the designers in this Institute, I suppose that we have designed him. It's no secret that our fondest hope at this breakthrough biotechnic college is that man may fly; that he may fly by a great and instant leap. So our ‘think flight, think bird, think feathers’ may have slopped over a little bit. It's just that Sydney is so clumsy at handling his flying muscles yet. And they do gall him where they come through his carapace. The ‘Unreality Syndrome’ is certainly strongly represented in Sydney, and yet he does fly! But how did it happen? And what have we contributed to his metamorphosis, except perhaps an enhanced anxiety threshold?”

“Likely an enhanced anxiety threshold is all that it takes. We are on the edge of the San Pennatus Fault waiting for genetic earthquakes to happen, and all instrumentation indicates that they are most likely to happen here,” Josef Prorok (always a resoundingly indecisive man) spoke strongly. “Put enough stress on a point and it will rupture. One more feather's weight added to the stress should do it. We're that close. All our anxiety meters indicate that the rupture point will probably be reached on the Fault today or tomorrow.”

“It almost seems as if somebody is throwing diversions in the way of it,” Anselm Salto commented. “However he has happened, Sydney the Flying Turtle is outrageous! But if he is a hoax, then how was he brought about and by whom? One day he was an ordinary (though very intelligent) slack-water turtle. And the next morning he had grown wings and was flying, though in a clumsy fashion. Was that only this morning? Yes, it was. And he's the same creature. I'd know those brown eyes and that ‘huk-huk-huk’ grunt of his anywhere.”

Meanwhile, while these six directors of the San Pennatus Fault College were discussing their incipient breakthroughs, several younger persons were visiting the same Flying Turtle Sydney.

“Turtle Sydney has dreams of flying,” Roxanna Dropforge said, “and they are possibly the most convincing dreams that any turtle ever had. He dreams that he is flying, and the people who see him flying in his dreams believe that he is flying, and an analysis of the facts divulges that he is indeed flying. But ‘indeed flying’ is a tricky business. Oh Turtle Dreams, Turtle Dreams!”

“We would have better luck if we called it ‘Quantum Eideticism’ instead of ‘Turtle Dreams,’ Roxanna,” Anatole Prorok said. Anatole was eighteen years old and Roxanna Dropforge was twelve. They had been in on ‘Project Turtle’ more than any of the others in their bunch.

Back to the Six Directors of the San Pennatus Fault College again!

“Clumsy or not, Sydney's flying works,” Isidore Merriman said. “It's really something new in flying. I'd have said that the problems involved in turtle flight were unsolvable, but every one of them has been solved in the most amazing way I ever saw. What we have wrought!”

“Well, the ‘Showboat Syndrome’ has broken out in quite a few of our animals,” Masterman Jordan said. “Hermione the Anaconda is sporting one red eye and one green eye this morning. Of course I suspect hoax, but in this case the hoax seems to be disavowed in advance. Last week, when the Calf Rob Roy showed up with American Flags on both his eyeballs, there was no doubt that it was a hoax. And it was. Contact lenses. An elaborate hoaxer had fitted Rob Roy with contact lenses. They were well made, and they did correct his defective vision. And the American Flags on each eyeball did cut down on the light to which he was supersensitive. I blame your son for the hoax, Godwin, and you blame mine. Likely they were in it together. But it ensured that contact lenses were the first thing we'd look for this time, and that's not what it is. It's much deeper. I believe that there has been very intricate gene tampering with that snake. I've run every possible test on Hermione and I can't find out the mechanism employed. It's a good thing she's a good-natured snake, but I feel that she's not on our side in this. Anyhow she won't, or can't, give me an explanation for the phenomenon of her eyes. After all, she has a vocabulary of only forty-nine words. ‘Hoke joke, Jord,’ she says, and that's all the explanation she'll give. Well, it's a sign that there's genetic energy burgeoning all over the place. Maybe the quake-and-break here at the San Pennatus Fault will come as early as today.”

And while the Six Directors of the San Pennatus Fault College were discussing their intimations of saltations for their project, several younger persons were visiting the same female Anaconda Hermione whom the directors had been discussing.

“Anaconda Hermione has dreams in which she has one red eye and one green eye,” Irene Jordan said. “She dreams that she has such eyes now, and the people who see her dreaming also believe that she has one red eye and one green eye. These may be the most convincing dreams that any snake ever had. You'd convince me that your eyes really did look like that, Hermione, if I didn't know better. Oh, Snake Dreams!”

“Hoke joke, Ire,” the Anaconda snake Hermione said.

“Anatole says that we should call it ‘Quantum Eideticism,’ rather than ‘Snake Dreams,’ Irene,” Dobzhansky Hilltop said. “ ‘Quantum Eideticism’ is more scientifically acceptable than is ‘Snake Dreams’.”

“Right-O. Oh, Right-O,” Irene Jordan said.

“Right-O,” repeated Hermione the Anaconda snake. Well, ‘right-o’ was one of the forty-nine words in Hermione's vocabulary. Irene Jordan, Dobzhansky Hilltop, and Hermione the Anaconda were all of them twelve years old and were very close friends.

Back to the six-directors-in-serious-talk again.

“Maybe the quake-and-break came as early as yesterday,” Godwin Dropforge said. “One hundred kilos of estrogen-gel has disappeared; and an undisclosed number (but it runs into the billions) of blank helices. Also forty-four different chemicals and agars. It is either biotechnic thieves at work around here, or else it is the biotechnic-oriented offspring of some of us. I hope it's thieves. They're less disastrous. That special estrogen-gel costs a thousand dollars a kilo (but it's a good general-purpose matrix), and we've been having multiple thefts of that magnitude every day. Oh, it's costly, costly! But all shortages and thefts are reported as ‘usage,’ and that makes us seem busier than we are.”

These six were all intelligent and innovative gentlemen, the Directors of the San Pennatus Fault College. Five of them, Josef Prorok, Anselm Saito, Masterman Jordan, Isidore Merriman, and Godwin Dropforge, were neo-neo-Darwinians. And the sixth of them, Merald Hilltop, was neo-neo-neo-Darwinian. Theirs was a well-funded establishment, made up entirely of graduate students, all of them laboratory-smart and prone to speculation.

These six intelligent and innovative directors of the College-Institute lived with their families in six houses on San Pennatus Fault Crest. To the South, below them, was the whole spread of the College with its botanical and zoological gardens, and the attendant town, all running down to a rough ocean shore and reefs beyond. Above them, to the North, was the ‘World Outside,’ the happy hills of Weaver County and of other counties, states, and realms.

And these six leaders-and-directors were secure in their positions.

“We are the vanguard,” Isidore Merriman said. “Our chosen field is the most important in the world. It answers the question ‘Where is the World going?’ And ours are the most important minds in our field. Really, I don't believe that there is any higher intelligence anywhere than right here in our group.”

“I'm not sure of that,” Godwin Dropforge dissented. “I have an uncanny feeling that there is a higher and unearthly intelligence all around us every day.”

“Please don't get deistic on us, Godwin,” Josef Prorok spoke sharply and frostily. “That is quite unacceptable as well as being in bad taste.”

“I am not getting deistic. I wasn't referring to a Deus. I was thinking of the minds of our closely knit, biotechnic-oriented offspring, our own eerie sons and daughters. They are completely unearthly in some of the things they come up with, and they have us totally surrounded.”

The closely knit, biotechnic-oriented offspring were twelve young teen-people: Anatole and Judy Prorok, Job and Cecilia Salto, Darwin and Irene Jordan, Cracraft and Davoreen Merriman, Chardin and Roxanna Dropforge, Dobzhansky and Maryethyl Hilltop, a full dozen of them. Their capsule description above is not quite correct, seven of them not yet being teenagers, strictly speaking; four of them being just twelve years old, one eleven, one ten, and one — Maryethyl Hilltop — eight years old. But these were balanced by Anatole Prorok being eighteen, Cecilia Salto being nineteen, and Darwin Jordan being sixteen.

All were the pride of their parents for being inclined towards biotechnic studies, and all of them were the consternation of those elder parents for their antic approaches.

Several other incidents of perhaps saltatory evolution had appeared that day. One duck had begun to sing like a meadowlark. Then all the other ducks had savagely attacked the singing duck in outrage at its unnaturalness, and the singing duck had to be rescued by humans. Well, saltations are not always bloodless.

“But what we are looking for are human incidents,” Masterman Jordan said sadly. “It may be that some of the build-up-to-the-brink bio-energy is being bled off to the animals, and we want it to have effect on humans. But how to explain that to the genes of the animals and the people!”

And now, just at dusk of a Tuesday evening, all twelve of the young people were gathered in a copse of small trees known as Merlin's Circle atop the San Pennatus Fault Crest. They had a jug and twelve cups. Nobody seemed to notice them except a rough man of the town below them, Titus Chesty, a bachelor who was both a woman-hater and a man-hater, a man who liked to wander around in the dusk with a rifle cradled in the crook of his arm.

“What are you hunting for with a rifle in the evening light?” people asked him sometimes.

“For my supper,” Titus would always say. “Maybe I'll shoot me a coon or a colt, or a young badger or a young human, or a calf or a sheep that the owners would hardly miss. The hungrier I get the better I shoot.”

Titus Chesty was not well liked. He was quarrelsome and he had a mordant humor and he turned most people off.

“What if, when we — ” began Maryethyl Hilltop, who was the youngest of all of them gathered in the little copse of trees on the crest.

“The time for ‘what ifs’ on this particular thing is past,” said Cecilia Salto who was the oldest of them. “We are all in this project together. It takes twelve of us to make a quantum project out of it.”

“My father Merald Hilltop is all hep on the goal ‘that man may fly’,” said Dobzhansky Hilltop. “He preaches ‘Think flight, think bird, think feathers.’ But I think the concept should be sharpened. You have to pick a bird. Let's ‘think ducks, think ducks, think ducks.’ OK?”

Anatole poured the twelve cups full.

“Is this all of it?” Job Saito asked.

“No, no, I've got a big keg of it,” Anatole said. “And I can always make more.” All of them drank off their brimming cups with slurping gulps. Then all of them smashed their ritual clay cups on a rock. This is a technique that is not in the repertoire of every biotechnician.

“Why are you cutting that big hole in your best dress, Roxanna?” her mother Molly Dropforge asked the next morning. “I'm just asking because mothers are supposed to show an occasional interest in their children.”

“It isn't my best dress; it's my worst dress; it's just my most expensive dress. I'm cutting a hole in it to let my tail feathers come through.”

“Oh? You do have tail feathers today, don't you? And you have feathers on your face and neck also. And you have duck feet. Don't you have any shoes big enough to go over them?”

“No I don't, mama. I don't believe they make shoes big enough.”

“Well, just why do you have all those funny things?”

“Oh, to get used to them for a school play I'm in.”

“What's the name of the play?”

“The play is ‘The Feather-Merchants.’ It's not for a week yet. I just want to get used to these things in plenty of time.”

“Roxanna, those are real! Those are real tail-feathers growing out of your real rump.”

“Oh sure. Modern stagecraft demands reality nowadays.”

There was a slight disturbance a little bit later that morning. Word got out that the twelve kids from the houses on the Crest all had feathers growing on their faces, and tail feathers growing out of their tails, and duck-feet. So a group of boys and men (and girls and women) came up from the town to the college-area with the noisy intent of killing all the young people who had blossomed out in feathers and duck-feet during the night. The blind intensity and plain truculence of the mob reminded one of the behavior of that mob of ducks who had tried, the day before, to kill the duck who had begun to sing like a meadowlark. And it was the case this morning that the twelve young people had to be rescued by a platoon of security guards, with a fair amount of bloodshed, just as the singing duck had to be rescued by resolute humans yesterday.

The leader of the mob from town was the wrathy man Titus Chesty. He was very often angry, even when there was less than this to be angry about.

“The response of the townspeople was the biologically correct one and the predicted one, of course,” Josef Prorok said. “That's why we have a platoon of security guards here this week. The response was the biologically correct one, and it testifies to the authenticity of the saltation.”

“To the authenticity of what?” asked a TV man. Lots of media persons had been gathering all that morning.

“What's the by-word?” Cecilia Salto asked nervously before the duck-footed bunch of them went in to face their six sires, the six directors of the college. And, oh yes, whole batteries of media persons.

“Drink bottled water, drink bottled everything!” Anatole Prorok gave the command. “I poured the rest of the keg into the reservoir last night. It should begin to hit the town and the college today. And I had two more jugs of it that I've been using for quicker results. It should begin to hit the people in the Conference Room very soon. I don't know how long till the effect will leave us or how long it will take over the other people, but for the sake of elegance it should be about the same time. Oh, quite soon.”

“Anatole, leaving out the fancy names of it, what is the stuff?” Roxanna asked.

“Eftychés Pidóntas Elixírio Papión. It's a Quantum Eidetic Mind-Expander with a special slant.”

“Happy Hopping Duck Elixir, is that it? Duck Dream Dope. Anatole, is this real that has happened to us?” Irene asked.

“No, not strictly real, but it's real in the eyes of all beholders, including ourselves. Things can seem real for many thousands of years and still not be completely real except in the eyes of conditioned observers. One theory is that humans are still eighteen-inch-high creatures scurrying around in a stooped-over position, but that to the eyes of all beholders including themselves they are near four times that tall and straighter and more human. That's the way they have seemed for quite a few millennia, tall and noble and straight. There is only one creature that is not fooled by this tricky assumed appearance. It's a very rare type of African hyena. It will rush in on any human, take it by its fifteen-high-inch throat, and kill it on the spot every time. And then it will immediately devour all the soft parts of it.”

“Anatole, you made that part up just now,” Roxanna Dropforge charged.

“Yes, I suppose I did. But there really isn't any reality, only choices between various groups of metaphors. But I like that one I just made up. I'll polish it up and use it again sometime. Now don't be intimidated before our famous parents or the famous media people in there. Just remember that we'll change places very soon. Then we will be as we used to be, and they'll be feathered and duck-footed very soon. Unless, of course, our condition is indeed real.”

A cheer went up from the crowd in the big banquet-hall-lecture-room when the twelve young persons duck-walked in.

“Behold!” cried Anselm Salto, “the final vindication of saltatory evolution! And it's come about just as we predicted that it would, by quantum speciation. As the immortal Stephen Stanley wrote, ‘It is generally agreed that quantum speciation takes place within very small populations — some would say populations involving fewer than ten individuals.’ Well, twelve individuals comes very close to being less than ten.”

“Why wouldn't it be much more likely that such an astonishing thing as this, humans suddenly acquiring feathers and acquiring duck-feet overnight, should happen to one person only, and not to ten or twelve?” asked a network person named John Anchorman.

“Such things probably happen to single individuals very frequently and are hushed up,” Anselm Salto explained, “for there could be no issue for the changes. With whom would the single individual mate to preserve the changes? Only with another person who had received such a saltatory mutation as had himself. But now, on the verge of the San Pennatus Fault, the biologic energy is too powerful to be contained in a single individual. And here it is perfect. There are six males and six females. And they will mate and preserve the mutations. What a selective mating of such wonderful stocks! They will mate, they will mate!”

“Right now, papa,” Cecilia Salto asked.

“But doesn't every revolutionary jump serve some advantage?” John Anchorman pursued. “What is the advantage of feathers and duck-feet to humans?”

“Now we can fly. The eternal dream will be realized. Humans will finally fly.”

“But we haven't any wings, father,” Job Salto protested.

“You have feathers, and feathers are certainly an intimation of wings. Some of you even have a few elbow-feathers. I will call them pinion-feathers, and perhaps your elbows will have turned into wing-pinions by tomorrow.”

“Something is wrong with either this chair or me,” John Anchorman the TV person protested. “I sure can't sit in it very well. Something is wrong, something is wrong!” John Anchorman downed another glass of ice water.

“Well, there are certainly no disadvantages to humans having feathers and duck-feet,” Isidore Merriman took up the slightly different line of argument. “And where there is no disadvantage in a big change, there will usually be hidden advantages. They should appear any time.”

“There is one disadvantage, father,” Cracraft Merriman said. “With these tail-feathers, we can't sit down at all. And we can't lie down on our backs. That's why I wakened so early this morning in such discomfort. And when we lie on our faces, the face-feathers seem to get in the way of our breathing. We get the duck-feather asthma. I don't like it. I think there are disadvantages.”

“Sitting down was always a temporary and unsatisfactory expedient for humans,” Masterman Jordan said. “No human was ever comfortable sitting down. Some humans sit cross-legged on the ground or the floor to try to find a comfortable way to do it, but in vain. Maybe now you can learn to hunker down on your ankles the way country people sometimes do. Or you could learn to perch on branches the way birds do. You are bird-people now.”

“We're not talon-footed, we're duck-footed. We aren't built for perches. We aren't built for anything,” Darwin Jordan maintained. “Papa, this thing isn't practical.”

“Oh, it's likely only a series of slight discomforts before the full implications of the wonder-changes are apparent,” Merald Hilltop suggested. “This is a great day for the San Pennatus Fault College and for neo-neo-neo-Darwinism.”

“This is the day you get sued for billions, unless you find a way to reverse this nonsense immediately,” a testy media lady said suddenly. “I have feathers growing on my face right now. I have taken my shoes off because they made my feet hurt, and I don't like what I see there. I will never sit in a chair again unless there is some very successful surgery on me. People, you're in trouble, and so are we.”

And then there was old-fashioned bedlam and pandemonium in the big banquet-hall-lecture-room. Almost everybody caught the feathers-and-duck-foot saltations at the same time.

“People, people, people,” Josef Prorok begged. “Give it a chance to work. This is probably the greatest thing that's happened to us since we came down out of the trees.”

“People, people,” Anselm Salto begged. “It isn't as bad as it seems. Maybe it will wear off, if you want it to wear off. Remember that nobody has died of it yet. Just keep saying to yourself ‘Nobody has died from it yet.’ That's bound to make you feel better.”

The platoon of Security Guards was ordered to restore order.

“We will restore order when we are people again,” the platoon Lieutenant said. “We will not restore order while we are a bunch of duck-footed, duck-feathered monstrosities. What is this anyhow, some kind of shaggy-duck joke?”

“Hoke joke, folk, on you,” said Hermione the Anaconda snake who had a vocabulary of forty-nine words. She was in the doorway looking in at the melee. “Right-O,” she said, and slithered away again.

By the next morning, almost everybody in town and college had caught the feathers-and-duck-foot saltations. Everybody except Rory Brandywine the Village Atheist. Rory didn't believe in evolution, and he had other disbeliefs. He didn't believe in drinking water for instance. And somehow he didn't catch the new disease. But everybody else in the area served by the reservoir caught it.

But the original twelve, the children of the Prorok, Saito, Jordan, Merriman, Dropforge, and Hilltop families, with them it was greatly diminished by that second day. And by evening they all could wear shoes again, and their feathers were going, going, gone.

“This is horrible!” Josef Prorok cried out. “The greatest treasure offered to mankind in forty thousand years is dribbling away, and how can we stop the dribbling? What can we do, what can we do?”

“You and almost everyone else still have a full case of the feathers-and-duck-foot saltations, father,” Irene Jordan said. “The only ones who've lost it are us twelve kids.”

“But it was only a one-day phenomenon with you. How can it last longer with us? Oh, the loss, the loss, the loss!”

Most of the people in the region had lost their anger of the day before, however, and had begun to see the situation as funny. They couldn't sit down, they couldn't do anything very well, but it seemed funny now that it appeared that it would be temporary. And some of the shaggy-duck jokes that sprang up in the populace were really funny.

Well, the saltation might have lasted quite a while except for the nine-inch rain that fell on the area that night and flushed the reservoir out pretty thoroughly. And in three more days, the stuff was pretty well drained out of the mains and service pipes, and people returned to normal.

“You could make some more of the stuff, Anatole,” Davoreen Merriman said, “and then we could have all the fun all over again.”

“I could get killed too,” Anatole said. “It was too close. I think I'll drop biotechnics entirely and go into something a little more erudite.”

“Lost, lost, lost,” the elegant Merald Hilltop mourned. “There were two thousand of the duck-people here, and now there are none at all left. Lost, lost, lost!”

“I didn't think one would do any good, papa, would it?” Maryethyl Hilltop said. “I thought there had to be at least two so you could mate them.”

“With one there might be a scant half-a-chance. We'd shake down the whole world to find the mate who looked most like a duck-woman. We'd try with him again and again and again. We'd never give up. Why, daughter, why? Do you know of one? Tell me, tell me!”

“Well, there is one, but he said he'd kill me if I told. He's shut himself up in his shack and he sure would be hard to take. He meant it when he said that he'd kill me if I told.”

“We must all make sacrifices for science, Maryethyl,” her mother Lucretia Hilltop advised her, “even if somebody kills you.”

“Well, it's that Titus Chesty who always blows his top about everything. He's an old bachelor because he hates women. You'll sure play hob trying to mate him with a duck-woman. But he's got the worst case of the saltations anybody ever saw, and I think — his elbows are turning into wing pinions.”

“Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful,” the elegant Merald Hilltop gloated. “We'll get all the legal attachments on him and then we'll seize him.”

At first Titus Chesty was fairly reasonable. Between his rifle shots out of his shack he'd call out fairly reasonable questions.

“By what right do you propose to seize me?” he called.

“By the right of Eminent Domain,” three government lawyers called back in unison. “You have been declared a World Resource under the Biotechnic Act of 2012. You must mate with all the more duck-like women we find on our worldwide search so that the evolutionary saltation be not in vain.”

“You have no Eminent Domain over me,” Titus Chesty called back, and he fired his rifle sharply.

“Oh but we have!” cried the two remaining government lawyers. “We have a special enactment right here.”

“That for your special enactment,” Titus called back, and shot again.

“We had better get two back-up lawyers up here for the negotiations,” said the one remaining government lawyer.

“Why don't we just point a howitzer at his shack and blow him and it away?” one of the Security Guards asked.

“No, no, we have to have him alive and unharmed,” Josef Prorok said. “He's not shooting as sharp as he used to,” said one of the townsmen who knew Titus well. “After his elbow finishes turning into a wing, I bet he won't be any better shot than the average man.”

“It's a hope, it's a hope!” Masterman Jordan spoke fervently.

The sun went down and the moon came up.

“He's bound to run out of ammunition soon,” Isidore Merriman said.

“No he isn't either,” a townsman argued. “He has boxes of ammunition stacked from floor to roof of his shanty. He has boxes of everything stacked from floor to roof of his shanty. He'll not run out of food or shot or anything.”

Whether his elbows were turning into wing-pinions or not, Titus Chesty could still shoot. Every Security Guard who stuck his nose from behind his tree lost the end of his nose.

Judy Prorok and Irene Jordan and Roxanne Dropforge made up a hoedown ballad named “The Man Who Wouldn't Mate with Duck-Women.” They got a couple hundred people singing it. It had a catchy tune.

“That's a peachy ballad,” Roxanne said. “That's a ducky ballad.”

That was the Summer they all had a lot of fun around the San Pennatus Fault Crest.

Something Rich And Strange

I am the biggest and the best,

I'm full of jive and juices.

I wear my heart outside my breast.

My teeth are like a moose's.

 — Buck Tooth Boogie, Anonymous

George Dander had two front buck teeth bigger than those of any other man or beaver or bull moose in the world. George Dander heard voices, a recent circumstance with him. George Dander was conditionally engaged to an enlarging and charming person named Mary Deare. Except for those three items, he was much like everybody else, pleasant, prodigal, talkative, a bit eccentric, opinionated, and mistaken fifty-one percent of the time.

Except for his two buck teeth he was handsome, and he was larger and louder than life. Except for the voices he'd been hearing, he had never had any self-doubts at all: but the new voices did have a doubtful quality to them. Except for Mary Deare (a metamorphic creature who was sometimes called the Unwreckable Mary Deare) his life might have been as empty as are the lives of so many billions of other persons.

Three other young men were also engaged to Mary. The conditions she had imposed on George Dander were that he should get rid of those damned buck teeth, and that he should make a million dollars. He could probably make a million dollars if he put his mind to it. But he sure didn't want to get rid of his buck teeth which were his trademark and his manhood. Ah well, the conditions that Mary Deare had put on her other three fiancés were even more stringent.

When the voices first came to George Dander he had trouble understanding them because of their foreign accent. But he and the voices soon adjusted to each other. The voices seemed to be right in the middle of George's head and nobody except himself could hear them — except, apparently, the sharp-eared Mary Deare a little bit sometimes.

But when George was alone (alone with the voices, for he was never really alone since they came to him) he questioned them.

“Who are you really?” he asked them. “What is your name?”

“Our name is Multitude because there are many of us,” they answered him.

“That line has been used before, approximately,” George told them. “Where are you really, the rest of you? Wherever in the world are you?”

“We are not in this world at all,” they said. “The Name of our world is Synnephon-Ennea or Cloud-Nine Planet. Its direction from here is celestial north.”

“Why do you send your voices here?”

“Because we're friendly. We like to talk to all sorts of people. And we like to upgrade the ideas of all sorts of people.”

“Do you ever visit any other worlds in person, in the flesh?”

“Oh yes. Perhaps we will visit your world in some very near future: after we have made preparations and shaped the public apperceptions there so we won't appear too shocking to you.”

“Why did you pick me to talk in my head?”

“We always seek good paired receptors. Really, we have to have them or we can't make ourselves heard at all. In you we found one of the three best sets of paired receptors on your world. It's a joy to make contact with such an excellent set of receptors as yours.”

“You mean my buck teeth? Do I pick you up through my buck teeth?”

“Yes. Does such a thing startle you?”

“Not entirely. There's a bull moose in the Bronx Zoo who picks up radio programs with his buck teeth. He mostly gets New York City boogie music programs, and the nearby animals listen appreciatively to them too. I had guessed that my case was something like that.”

“When we come into our kingdom there in your world, one of the first things we will suppress is boogie radio stations. And in the meanwhile we will work through you and through others (especially your girlfriend who has an exceptionally good opportunistic brain) to try to upgrade this world's ideas of beauty. That will have to be done before the time of our coming. Now, to show our friendship, is there anything we can do to make you happier?”

The seven answers had been in seven different voices.

“Can you see into the future?” George Dander asked them.

“We can't see into our own future, but we can see into yours. Our temporal direction is the opposite of yours. Our past is your future. Our future is your past. What would you like to know?”

“The names of the eight horses who will win the eight races at Blue Ribbon Downs this afternoon.”

“Gilded Lily in the first.” “Red Beans in the second.” “Cactus Joe in the third.” “Fly-by-Night in the fourth.” “Bangabout in the fifth.” “Copperhead in the sixth.” “Gandy Dancer in the seventh.” “Burglar Dan in the eighth.” The eight answers came in eight different voices.

George Dander picked up the phone and placed the eight bets, each horse to win in its race. But he was a little bit doubtful of what he had done.

“Even granting that you've been in the future where the races will be run this afternoon, how could you have all the winners' names so glibly?” he asked.

“We're smart,” one of the voices said.

“And if your past is my future and your future is my past, how come we are together so long? Why haven't we passed in less than a moment?”

“We will always be in the same present, but we will always have arrived at that present from opposite directions,” a voice said.

“And if Cloud-Nine World (usually regarded as legendary) is four-and-a-half light years from here (even as a legend it is firmly located in the Centauri system) why isn't there a four-and-a-half-year delay in every exchange of ours?”

“There's an explanation, but it's pretty mathematical and we don't believe you could understand it,” one of the voices said.

All eight of the horses that George Dander bet on did win their races at Blue Ribbon Downs that afternoon, and George was ahead quite a few bucks. Mary Deare met George as he came back to his house after picking up his winnings. She knew all about it, and she couldn't have known.

“Don't relax, George, don't even think of relaxing,” she said. “Have your voices give you the names of the one hundred stocks that will rise most sharply tomorrow. While you're getting them down, I'll phone your broker to have supper with us at the Steak and Ale. And draw a check for twenty thousand dollars, and we'll get our order to buy in to your broker tonight.”

“I don't have twenty thousand dollars, Mary.”

“Yes you do, honey. You have twenty thousand two hundred and eleven dollars and nineteen cents in your checking account. Why do you try to conceal things from me when we are conditionally engaged and are practically flesh of one flesh?”

Thirty-three days later, after hectic betting and buying and selling and manipulating futures with never a slip, George Dander was a millionaire. Mary Deare knew that he had reached it before George knew it himself. She had a quicker mind and she kept closer track of such things.

“We'll get married at nine o'clock tomorrow morning,” she told George. “It's all working out beautifully.”

“Good, good,” George said. “Then you're waiving the other requirement.”

“I'm waiving nothing. You have an appointment with the dentist in twenty-two minutes. We'd better get down there now. We're going to get those unsightly buck teeth jerked out of your mouth.”

“But, Mary, don't you realize that I, we, wouldn't be millionaires if it weren't for my buck teeth and my voices? You're killing the golden goose, the golden fleece, the golden buck teeth!”

“Trust me, honey! I always know what I'm doing. I'm not killing that golden goose. I'm going to put it on a business basis.”

The dentist pulled George Dander's two priceless buck teeth which were one of the three best sets of paired receptors in the world. And George felt terrible about it.

“Don't let them throw them away!” he protested as he came out from under the gas. “Maybe something can be done with them if — ”

“They won't be thrown away,” Mary Deare reassured him. “My, you do talk funny without them! I have them here in my purse. I told you that I was going to put them on a business basis. Come along now. We'll get married in the morning, and then we'll go on a two-day honeymoon.”

“Why only a two-day honeymoon?” George Dander asked. (He sure did talk funny without his buck teeth.) “Why for only two days?”

“Because I have a dental appointment on the third day,” Mary Deare said.

2.

Nothing of her that does fade

But does suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Sea-Nymphs hourly ring her knell

Ding-Dong — 

Hark, I hear them,

Ding-Dong Bell!

 — Shakespeare, The Tempest

George Dander had mixed feelings at his wedding. He had a great and worrisome emptiness in the front of his mouth, and he had an awkward and floppy upper lip that was now relieved of its job of at least partly covering his buck teeth. He felt somewhat unmanned.

On the other hand, he was marrying the Unwreckable Mary Deare, an enchanting creature, a metamorphic creature, a pearl beyond price (“That paltry million dollars is only the beginning, honey,” she had whispered to him, “we'll be big rich”), the Iris goddess at the end of the rainbow. It should be fun. And perhaps he would be more handsome without his big buck teeth (which would now, somehow, be put on a business basis).

And it was fun, for the two days of their honeymoon. They went to Bald Eagle Cove on Keystone Lake. They ate crawfish tails and Gored Ox Surprise and drank Boilermakers and Sazarac Cocktails. They waterskied and caught catfish and made love. One night they went to a movie at Mannford, and the other night they went to a cow-pasture Rock Concert near New Prue. Yes, all these things were fun when done with the metamorphic Mary Deare.

And they came back on the morning of the third day because Mary Deare had a dental appointment that day.

George Dander was absolutely dumbfounded by the appearance of his cherished wife Mary Deare Dander when she came back from the dentist's.

“No, no, no!” he said (or he made a pitiful attempt at saying). Try to say “No, no, no” with your two front teeth out: try to say anything with your two front teeth out. “Never, never!” George declared, and he was shaking like a whole treeful of aspen leaves.

“Thomebody thay it ithn't tho!” he begged.

“You'll get used to them, honey,” the unwreckable Mary Deare assured him.

“Really you will, George,” sounded a muffled voice that used to be one of George Dander's own “voices,” and it was coming somehow from Mary Deare's mouth. “It is essential that you not only get used to them, but that you learn to love them, that you come to find them things of beauty. You do understand that this world's ideas of beauty will have to be upgraded before the time of our coming.”

George Dander tried to scream, but it was somehow pathetic. (Try to scream effectively sometime with your two front teeth gone and your upper lip flapping loosely.)

And George Dander began to run, and he disappeared over the horizon still running.

His was surely an odd reaction to his wife's coming home with two large and handsome buck teeth gleaming in the front of her face in place of six smaller upper front teeth that had never done much for her.

But George Dander had always been a little bit eccentric.

George Dander came home again after about a month.

“Oh, hi, George!” his wife Mary Deare spoke pleasantly. “It's good to see you.”

“It's good to see you too,” George said, but he didn't really see her. He couldn't yet stand to look at her. One glimpse out of the corner of his eye was enough. George Dander was tired and dirty and discouraged.

“You'll feel better when you get your bridge with your two new teeth from the dentist,” Mary Deare Dander said. “They've been ready for you for a month. He fitted you for them when you were still out from the gas when he pulled your two buck teeth. You will be nice-looking when you have two ordinary-sized front teeth and your upper lip has unextended itself.”

“I will be nice-looking then, but I won't be me,” George Dander said. “Mary, let me give you a little history of the world, and of my family, and of my teeth.

“When the great Indo-Aryan migration from central Asia to Europe began thirty centuries ago, its languages and words began to diverge. Of their original words, only about a hundred are still to be recognized in most of its branches. There isn't any common word for ocean, for they hadn't lived on the ocean. There isn't any common word for elephant or palm tree for they didn't know these things before their split-up. But there is a common word for teeth, for all of them had teeth. It was dón'ti in Greek, dens in Latin, and dantis in Lithuanian. It is dent in French and diente in Spanish. The word isn't recognized in English, but we still have dental and dentist. It is tand in Dutch and Scandinavian. With the greatest tribe of all of them (and there are now less than a hundred members of our ‘tribe’ left in the world) the word for tooth is dand and its plural is dander. So my name is George Dander which is George Teeth, and my family name has been ‘teeth’ for a hundred generations. We've always known that our buck teeth were receptors, part of the ‘ivory grapevine.’ People with outstanding teeth have always been in rapport with each other and have known each others' thoughts. Outsiders who noticed this didn't understand it and they thought that it was telepathy at work. Our buck teeth have been handed down from father to son (but never has any female member of the Dander family shown any signs of buck-teethism) for a hundred generations, growing always larger and more beautiful, and they climaxed in me. This isn't the first time we have picked up voices from the stars with our front teeth. But now I am shorn of them.”

“Poor George!” the unwreckable Mary Deare said. “But look at it this way. Your wonderful teeth are in good hands now, which is to say in good mouth now, mine. Now my name is teeth, and the line won't be broken. Your son, of whom I am gravid now, will have the finest buck teeth ever in the history of the world.”

“The fact is, George,” said a muffled voice that had been one of George's own “voices” a month before, “we needed good paired receptors combined with brains, with opportunistic brains, to use for our deployments. You had the good paired receptors. Mary Deare had the fine opportunistic brains. So we made a deal.”

“And now, honey, we will be rich beyond your fondest expectations,” Mary Deare told George.

“I no longer have any fond expectations,” George Dander said sadly, and he went away again.

But Mary Deare Dander thrived. Those first couple of million dollars had been only peanuts. Now, with the aid of the “voices” she became fabulously rich, and in exchange for it she had only to become a sort of famous role model.

“Some of them laughed at me for a while, at the way I looked,” she said. “But they laughed at me to their peril. Laughing people, do you ever know who really owns the company from which you have your living? It is dangerous to laugh at the richest woman in the world.” For, by the time that Mary Deare Dander gave birth to George Dander the one-hundred-and-first (Oh, the buck teeth on that newborn baby!) she really was the richest woman in the world, and in three more days she would be the richest person in the world.

There is nothing so unpredictable as the changes in fads and fashions, especially the fads and fashions of beautiful women. And one of the strangest fashions ever to be taken up was the Dente Sporgente Look (pronounce it Dentay Sporgentay). Who would believe that the Dente Sporgente Look would be equated with having chic, with having elegance, with having total charm?

Indeed, Marcel Buffon, the greatest beauty expert in the world, writing in the French fashion magazine Lendemain Elegant, wrote “The new Dente Sporgente Look is like nothing ever seen before. It is something new in beauty, it is something new in excitement, it is something new in bla —” It is true that this was the last thing Marcus Buffon ever wrote, for immediately after writing he opened his veins and died. He had always been a puzzling man.

But the Dente Sporgente Look (the English translation of that wonderful and untranslatable name would be the “Protruding Teeth Look”) was in. No, you wouldn't have guessed in a hundred guesses that the great new worldwide fashion of that year would be the stylish and beautiful women of the world, millions and millions of them, all having their six upper front teeth pulled out and replaced by a huge pair of buck teeth, implanted in the bone and growing there (they wouldn't be good receptors unless they were growing from the bone because good receptors require the complete bone skeleton to serve as an antenna). And you wouldn't have guessed in a hundred-and-one guesses that these women would universally be regarded as ravishingly beautiful after the toothy change had been made in them. Whoever effected such a change anyhow, and by what means? (Ah, the Dente Sporgente was almost something new in newness.)

It isn't certain who effected it, but the person who turned the greatest profit from it was that richest woman in the world, that metamorphic creature, Mary Deare Dander. Of the three thousand companies and corporations that she now owned, three hundred of them were part of the Buck Tooth Cartel.

One day, a gnarled and knobby space-traveler who happened to be on World for a short stopover, saw Mary Deare Dander herself, and he reeled back aghast.

“It is one of the natives of Synnephon-Ennea on Cloud-Nine Planet,” he groaned, “the most repulsive creatures in the Universe. If they have already begun to arrive here, then World would be better off to die the death.”

“But Cloud-Nine Planet is usually deemed to be a legendary place,” said the travel agent who was expediting the space-traveler, “and it's also said that it is impossible to go to it or leave it.”

“Cloud-Nine Planet is approximately as real as this planet here under my feet, and it is about as easy to get to or leave. Of course, one must always arrive at Cloud-Nine from the future because it's in a time-reversal eddy. But it's real, and one can go to and from it with a little trickery. Ugh, isn't she ugly!”

“She is accounted the most beautiful woman on World,” the travel-agent said.

“I see now that she is not quite a Cloud-Nine person yet,” the space-traveler mused. “But she is a metamorphic, and she is turning into a Cloud-Nine person. If one isn't already a Cloud-Nine person, one will become such after a bit of trafficking with the Cloud-Niners. The Cloud-Niners are real, but they destroy the reality of every world they infest.”

And then the old space-traveler seemed to be literally pulled apart. His four limbs and his head were all separated from his torso by giant and invisible hands, so it seemed. Old space-travelers often talk too much and they suffer the consequences of talking too much. The travel-agent, being a fastidious man, disassociated himself from the scattered remains of the old space-traveler and walked stiffly away.

The “voices” from Cloud-Nine Planet now had about fifty million good paired receptors that they could use on World, and that was about all they needed for right now.

Beaver teeth, wild stallion teeth, moose and elk most of all! How could there have been enough of them to satisfy the demand? If the price is set high enough, there will always be enough, either genuine or counterfeit.

The only still living giant Irish elk in the world had its two front teeth torn out of its mouth in the Dublin zoo one night. “Shame, Shame, Shame,” read the headlines of all the Irish papers, but that pair of giant elk buck teeth was known to bring a hundred and fifty thousand dollars on the black market.

Behemoth teeth were the best of all, matched pairs of behemoth front teeth.

But the behemoth is a fabulous creature.

So are the prices for its buck teeth fabulous.

You say that the behemoth front teeth are really plastic and cost only thirty-five cents a pair to produce? Well, with a base price of thirty-five cents, and approximately a hundred thousand dollars a sale going into advertising and hype, a million dollars a throw for them still yields a tidy profit for somebody, somebody named Mary Deare Dander.

Somewhere in distant Space and Time

Is wetter water, slimier slime.

And there (we trust) there swimmeth one

Who swam ere rivers were begun.

Immense, of fishy form and mind,

Squamous, omnipotent, and kind.

 — Rupert Brooke

Mary Deare Dander now had large and glittering thousand-facet insect-type eyes. They would have appeared very ugly to anybody who was born before yesterday, but there were now no such persons. Now everybody was wearing a button that read “I was born anew this morning.” Such persons will soon come to accept and even love thousand-faceted, ugly, insect-type eyes. At least a dozen of the facets of the strange eyes were meaningful, for with them Mary could focus in on scenes on a dozen different worlds including Cloud-Nine Planet. This might be an advantage some time. The enlarged eyes were too big to remain in Mary's head, so now they were two throbbing, living, baseball-sized, bloodshot-in-seven-colors eyes on the front of Mary Deare's face.

These new eyes would be the next fashion for the beautiful women of the world, the Augen-Laugen or Lye-in-the-Eye look. Already such orbs were being installed in leading ladies at a million dollars a throw, and both the numbers of them and the price would pick up. Oh yes, objectively they were very ugly, but who was still objective nowadays? Their introduction was part of the upgrading of the sense of beauty for the people of World, the upgrading that would have to be completed before the Cloud-Nine people themselves could appear.

George Dander, when he left home that second time, believed that he would never laugh again. And he did not laugh again until a year and a day after his wedding. Then one aspect of the happenings struck him as very, very droll.

(Hippopotamus front teeth, they were still going well now. They hadn't much shape or style, but they were mouth-fillingly big. They were second class, but there was always a strong market for the second class. And the most important dealer in the world in hippopotamus front teeth was the metamorphic Mary Deare Dander.)

“I wonder what the ‘voices’ really look like!” George Dander chortled in glee when the droll mood hit him one day. (Try to chortle some time without any front teeth.) “If they have to effect ‘upgradings’ of this world's ideas of beauty, like these present capers of theirs, before they can appear at all, boy-o-boy-o-boy! What must they really look like!”

“Music has charms to soothe a savage breast,” the great Congreve wrote three hundred years ago, and the music that charmed the savage breasts of the worldlings in that season was a series of very strange tunes and songs. One of them had the strange name “Five Footfalls; glooch, klownk, geeze, klupple, bonk,” and the name was far from the strangest thing about that song. Well, it was a real recording of the footsteps of the people of Cloud-Nine Planet. The five-legged persons of Cloud-Nine Planet had their five feet and legs all different, and those were the sounds of their footfalls when they walked. And worldlings would have to get used to the sound and the fact of the Cloud-Niners walking before the Cloud-Niners arrived. World persons could not help listening to such strange pieces of music as this. Some people found those sounds delightful and enchanting. And some people quivered with fear at the sound of the murderously stalking, fearsome, five-footed Cloud-Niners.

Mary Deare Dander now practiced an hour a day at walking on five different sorts of stilts at the same time. Mary Deare had become a prototype and a role-leader at many things.

The metamorphosis of Mary Deare was coming along nicely, and all the substance of it came to her over the ivory grapevine and through the dozen special facets of her thousand-faceted eyes.

She was the richest and most beautiful person in the world, and the most enchantingly strange.

Oh noble teeth and noble eyes

Beyond all reasoned uses!

None other like her shall arise

In land of Golden Gooses.

 — Buck Tooth Boogie

And how was the visit of the Cloud-Nine people when they finally came?

It was cryptic: that is the only word for it. But it did fulfill the Niners' old crab-tree Latin motto: “Eveneunt, Eridiunt, Exiviunt” which is rendered “They arrived, they laughed, they departed again.”

The Cloud-Niners had specified only a medium-sized meeting hall and, adjoining it, a spacious withdrawing room with padded floor and walls.

Only one hundred World people saw them at all, and that for only a few moments. The Cloud-Nine people were clad in a neutral sort of space vestiture and were normal of teeth and eyes and feet. Well yes, the only way you could describe them was as “Squamous, omnipotent, and kind.”

The one hundred VIP worldlings were splendid with hippopotamus teeth and thousand-faceted giant insect eyes. And they were wobbly on five-stilted asymmetric contraptions.

Mary Deare Dander, of course, was the spokesperson for the worldlings.

“Our meeting is of the highest historical importance — ” she began, and each of the Cloud-Niners pointed a finger at one of the worldlings. The sign probably meant “Prodigious Welcome” or something like that.

“Let history stand still and be humbled,” Mary Deare was saying. “This is the first moment of a new era.”

The Cloud-Niners were absolutely twinkling and gurgling with some sort of delight or anticipation. They pointed their fingers at the worldlings again, and several of them seemed on the verge of speaking. But then all of them rushed into the padded withdrawing room, and you wouldn't believe what happened there!

They leapt and tumbled and beat their heads on the padded floor and walls. They laughed and laughed and laughed with a whooping rowdiness which is a little bit beyond the capacity of humans. What an orchestration of laughter! It was like ten million of those old milk cans banging down ten million steps of a celestial stairway. It was like a million donkeys laughing at one of the seven outrageous donkey jokes.

Twice the Nine-Clouders controlled themselves a little bit and came back into the hall with the worldlings.

“This is First Encounter,” Mary Deare Dander spoke around her hippopotamus teeth. “This is — ”

But the Cloud-Niners each pointed a finger at a worldling, and then rushed into the padded withdrawing room again overcome with a high hilarity about something.

And then, after an especially loud hurricane of merriment, the Cloud-Niners all went up through the ceiling in that droll way of theirs, and entered into hover-cars that they had whistled down from the low sky. Then they were gone, and their laughter fell like hunks of happy thunder down onto the earth.

Yes, the visit of the Cloud-Niners would have to be called “cryptic.” That's the only word for it.

Of course the laughter of the Cloud-Niners had all been recorded. And of course an attempt at decoding it was made. There would surely be treasures of information to be got from it when it was properly interpreted. And of course Mary Deare Dander was in charge of the great project. Well, who would you put in charge of it? Who else had sufficient prestige to head such a worldwide project?

But as yet the “Project Decode Laugh” has not borne significant fruit.

The “Niners” were pleasant and squamous and stout,

But what in the hell were they laughing about?

 — Buck Tooth Boogie

How Many Miles To Babylon?

Finnegan seeks death and does not find it. That is the main point of his puzzling quest. His own fleece is named thanato and not mallion. Finnegan did not die in the ward in the hospital in the Philippines. But somebody died there in his name; and an army doctor friend of mine wrote me that Finnegan did die there in his presence, which letter I received the same day that Finnegan arrived in St. Louis. This amazed me, but it didn't seem to amaze Finnegan when I showed him the letter.

‘Finnegan did not, apparently, die on the landing at Naxos, though X swears that there were not seven but eight bodies in that lantern-lit square on the cobbles, and that one of the bodies was Finnegan's. But X himself spent the latter part of that same week in Finnegan's company. A thing like that would not bother X, but it bothers me.

‘Finnegan did not die in that very early encounter in the cabin of Brunhilde, but someone died there at the hands of Papadiabolous. Finnegan did not die at Tangiers with Don Lewis, though Marie Courtois believed that she had killed them both and left them together in the bottom of the tell.

(“All I can say, Stein, is that I seem to remember these things differently,” he told me in explanation the last time I saw him. “I don't remember getting killed any of those times, except for a very hazy impression of Papadiabolous bending down to kill me in the cabin of the Brunhilde. But that was before I came on to the Brunhilde that first time.”)

‘Finnegan did not die at the hand of Saxon X. Seaworthy on Galveston Island, though Doll Delancy found (on West Beach) a body which she swears was Finnegan's; and Miss Delancy knew Finnegan. And possibly Finnegan did not die on the Marianao Coast near Havana. I believe, in spite of all reports, that he is still alive. I also believe I have run athwart several tall-story artists, not the least of whom are that army doctor friend of mine, Doll Delancy, and Finnegan himself. But the death quest has always been there.

‘Finnegan is a double phougaro or funnel, the link between several different worlds. Yet there are characters (X, Biloxi Brannigan, Doll Delancy, and others) who have verifiable existence in at least two of those worlds. Finnegan himself believed that he was subject to topographical inversion; he believed that one of the worlds was always interior to him and another one exterior, and that they sometimes changed their places. But where does that leave us who live in either of the worlds? Are we not sometimes reduced to being no more than items in the mind of Finnegan?

‘Is the Brunhilde the first ship? Or the third? Is it the original Argo? Or is it a latter and unsanctified appearance of that ship, following the Barque in time? We have also the question of superimposed levels of experience in the Cruise of the Brunhilde. X says that not all the events of this voyage happened to Finnegan in the first decade of the interbellum period: he says that a strong substratum of them happened to Giulio Solli (the monster forgotten, the father of Finnegan) in the decade before World War One, and that Finnegan has filial memory of them. The atmosphere of that period does sometimes break in strongly on the voyage. But so much of our information depends on X who is not to be depended on.

‘Carr states that the characters of the Brunhilde are not true archetypes. Why, then they are false archetypes, and these also have their being. Kidd believes that X himself is in the process of becoming the Third Evil to fill the void left by the insufficiency of Papadiabolous and Seaworthy in the roles of devils. But Kidd is Joycean. To complicate matters, Lafferty swears that Finnegan is in no way Joycean, that he is nine hundred years earlier, out of the Yellow Book of Lecan (the Táin bó Cúailnge), a character out of the Tá. This presupposes that Finnegan is identical with Finn McCool as well as with the more derivative Fingal, and also with Cú Chulainn. Well, Finnegan is capable of being all. To those interested in this line I recommend Thurneysen's Die irische Helden- und Königsage.

‘I myself was present at several episodes (whether in the flesh or out of the flesh I do not know, God knows): I was present at one meeting of Don Lewis and Manuel of which Finnegan knew nothing, so this could not have come from his mind. I was present and watched them dine in death-like glitter on the Grand Canary, but I was unable to cross the room to them. John Schultz also experienced a rapport with one of the Brunhilde incidents.

‘We are all of us in legend, of course. It is absolutely impossible that anyone should be in life who has not first been in legend. But no one of us understands his own legend. Mary Schaeffer says that I am the Wandering Jew, particularly in my writing style.

‘I have not determined the exact and complete relationship of the Argo legend to the Finnegan Cycle.’

Notes on the Finnegan Cycle — Absalom Stein

Three unusual things happened on the same day.

The first unusual thing was the awakening (in his grave by the sounding sea) of a man who had either been dead, or in a time-stasis — undead, unalive — for several decades.

But first, many years before, there had been the picture.

In a walk-in art bijou in New Orleans, there is a large and sea-sounding picture named ‘The Resurrection of Count Finnegan’. The painting was received by the bijou's owner, Melchisedech Duffey, about the middle of the sixth decade of the twentieth century. It was at first considered to be a joke: but what a magnificent joke it was!

It was plain that it was painted by John Solli, believed by those able to judge these things well (about a dozen persons in the country) to be one of the greatest painters of the contemporary world.

This John Solli, who was widely known by his nickname of Finnegan, was reported to have been killed several years before the arrival of this painting. And nothing other than rumors had been heard of him in the interval.

But Solli-Finnegan was not a man who would accept death easily, and most of his old acquaintances had at least a tenth-part feeling that he was not dead and that he would return. Or they had the feeling that his body would yet be found. With the arrival of the magnificent painting, there bloomed the consensus feeling that Finnegan was indeed alive, and that this was his announcement that he would return to his old haunts.

“It has to be very recent,” Margaret Stone said about the painting. “He was good before, but he hadn't come this far. He couldn't have painted it before his death. It had to be since.” Irish was about the only thing that Margret Stone was not, but she was full of blarney and malarky and bulls.

The painting was twelve feet by eight feet, and Count Finnegan and one other person were shown as life-sized. The painting was really two paintings separated by a schizo-gash. In the larger portion, the burial crypt seemed to be an ocean cave under a rock shelf; but now there was a fissure in the rock roof of the cave, and air and sunshine were pouring in. The half-risen Count Finnegan was partly in the dark-green water and partly in the bright-green air. There was a stark and horrible risenness about him. There were places on him where the flesh had fallen away from his bones as will sometimes happen when a person in either death or time-stasis is subject to an abrasion; and the under-the-rock-shelf water had apparently been abrasive. Count Finnegan was setting back into place one long strip of flesh that had fallen away from its bone, and he showed sure intent of repairing other flesh damage and decay. He was identified by a Latin scroll there, as the Papal Count Finnegan. Finnegan-Solli had always been good at reproducing Latin scrolls.

The Count Finnegan in the picture seemed about thirty years older than the John Solli Finnegan would have been at the time of his reported death, which had been between two and three years before the time of the arrival of the painting at Melchisedech Duffey's New Orleans place. So it was a self-painting of Finnegan as it would appear twenty-five to thirty-five years in the future. “And that's mighty rough,” said Absalom Stein who viewed the painting. “It could be Finn thirty years in the future, or three hundred.” But the projection was clearly authentic. Nobody else but Finnegan could, with many years added to him, look so like this Count Finnegan in the picture.

Solli-Finnegan's big banana nose had acquired nobility and distinction on the Count in the picture. The flesh-mending hands of the pictured Count were even more intricate and talented than Finnegan's recent artist's hands which would be remembered by all who had ever known him. There was still the outrageous humor mixed with the warping pain and torture in the eyes. There was still the loose strength and speed of a yearling bullock, or perhaps a three-hundred-years-young bullock, on the Count in the picture. There was still the mouth in motion, and one had the feeling of soon being able to hear the multi-dialected words and spating phrases from the painted Count. But there was an added texturing of the whole person that appears mostly in those who have risen from the dead. The flesh had suffered simultaneous transfiguration and corruption and was now in a state of violent incompleteness. There was a locality about the flesh change; partly it was the sea change of the un-coffined dead of the poor people of the West Indies. Count Finnegan was in the rags and tatters of what may have been a winding sheet. But there were solid but old clothes there for him to put on, travelers clothes.

There was another person in the picture who was as remarkable and powerful in appearance as was Count Finnegan. This person was standing just to the left of the fissure in the rock-roof of the burial cave, but this fissure also served as the schizo-gash that separated the Resurrection of the Count Finnegan from the Annunciation of Joseph Cardinal Hedayat. Joseph stood in the middle of a scene half a world away from the resurrection setting. The counterpart setting was a Syrian or Lebanese country scene. Joseph who had just received news or instruction or nomination, was identified in a scroll in Syrian Arabic as Joseph Cardinal Hedayat of Antioch.

“He is my kindred,” said Margret Stone when she saw the Joseph in the painting the day it had arrived.

“Who isn't!” said Mary Virginia Schaeffer. “He was on TV just this past week. He may be the next chief of state of Syria in spite of his youth. But, ah, Finnegan has done something about Joseph's youth in this picture.”

“Yes, it's the way Joseph will look in thirty years,” Margret Stone said. “Or in three hundred.”

“It is authentic,” said Mr. X who was present also. “I know him well, and the whole world has seen him pictured enough to know him on sight. Nobody in the world except this multi-geniused Joseph Hedayat could, with many years added to him, be the Joseph Cardinal Hedayat of this picture.”

“That's true,” said Duffey. “And yet it's clear fact that the Count Finnegan of the picture and the Joseph Cardinal Hedayat of the picture are of absolutely identical appearance.”

“We will have to agree with that,” Margret Stone said. “Yet, in their present (or recent) forms, Joseph and Finnegan do not look very much alike. Oh, they're both amply nosed, and they're about the same size and color. And they do move alike. But, really, they don't look anything alike.”

“No, they don't,” said X. “But Joseph, with many years added, has to look like the Joseph Cardinal Hedayat there. However did that world-wide playboy and extraordinarily pleasant person become a cardinal?”

“And Finnegan, with many years added, has to be the Count Finnegan here. There is no other thing he could turn into,” Mary Virginia said. “Oh, and they are absolutely identical. It's spooky. It's flesh crawling. It's flesh-falling-away-from-the-bones, that's the sort of feeling it gives one.”

“This is a better picture than any of us realize,” Duffey said. “It gets better by the minute. I would almost say that it changes by the minute. There are depths in it now that I would have seen an hour ago, if they had been there then. This is better even than Finnegan in his late orange period. I bet I can get twenty thousand dollars for it.”

“That would be like selling Finnegan in the flesh,” Mary Virginia said.

“And that would be like selling Joseph, flesh of my flesh, in the flesh,” Margret Stone said.

“I knew them both in the flesh and I'd sell them both in the flesh for twenty thousand dollars for the two of them,” Duffey said. “And I'd throw in my own mother too, though I never knew her in the flesh.”

“Really, there must have been some contact,” Mary Virginia joined him.

“No, there was not,” Melchisedech Duffey insisted. “I didn't have a mother. I have another sort of origin.”

Duffey sold the picture to Hilary Hilton of Chicago for twenty thousand dollars. Hilary had known Finnegan. And he knew Joseph Hedayat of Antioch. Hilton had done business with the Hedayat family. But Hilton, after he had bought the picture, decided to leave it hanging in Melchisedech's Walk-In Art Bijou in New Orleans.

“I could take it up home with me and enjoy it for thirty years I suppose,” Hilary said. “And then I could bring it back here and give it a window on the day of the happenings. (Chicago will not be such a window.) But we know not the day nor the hour, and I wouldn't want it to miss the day. The picture may have some role to play with its live counterparts.”

But Hilary Hilton got to town at least once a year, and he used to come in and pull up a chair and gaze at the picture for an hour or more. “I wonder why I'm not in it,” he said once. “I had intended to be here and take my bloody part in the events when they arrive. But Finnegan would have known it if I should have been in it. Maybe there are other pictures to be found. He paints better with his dead hand than with his live.”

And Joseph Hedayat who traveled everywhere in the world (nobody knew why he did, but he made a delightful presence wherever he went) once saw the picture, and himself in it, looking much older. This was about five years after the arrival of the picture.

“I knew it existed, of course,” Joseph said, “as any knowledgeable person will know of any new prodigy appearing in the world: but I would never expect to come on it here in the United States like this.” (Joseph was then, still quite young, an ex-chief of state of Syria.) Then Joseph looked at the picture in sudden sorrow and fear. “Páter, ei dynatón esti, parelthéto ap' emoú tó potírion toúto,” he said, “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass me by.” But he didn't add “Thy will be done.” He wasn't about to accept it. Not yet. But no great disaster was shown in the picture, except the disaster in the eyes of Joseph, and in those of Count Finnegan.

But one group, The Unbelievers' Angry League For Style In The Universe, hated the picture, and their railing against it shook Heaven and Earth. But none of the members of the Angry League had ever seen the picture.

For thirty years at least that picture hung on the walls of the Bijou in New Orleans, and nothing was heard of Finnegan, alive or dead. But finally the day of the happenings arrived.

The grave wasn't a formal one. The man may have been buried directly in the incrusting sand, or he may have been given directly to the sounding sea, or placed in the rock and sediment under the continental shelf to hide him. There was a fissure in the picture, and the sunlight through the fissure seemed to have awakened him. He was given a modified identity at his resurrection, but his brain had in no way been scrubbed of his old identity.

He was given (by an unknown giver) a coded assignment. His death of several decades before had been a cover or an alibi. Now he was given the role of Count Finnegan in an eschatological spy drama. And the other man of the fractured-off part of the picture, the new Cardinal Hedayat was also given a coded assignment.

The Papal Count Finnegan, half-risen now from either death or time-stasis, was partly in shadowy water and partly in bright air. He was in a water cave under a land shelf, but the cave had just been fissured by a land shock. He was replacing the rot and the falling-away of his flesh as best he could. There was a stench about him that had only vaguely been suggested by the picture of some decades before. He would not lose that stench.

There was an old rumor in the islands that Finnegan had not died unconditionally on the Mariano Coast of Cuba. The story was that he lived on a French island as a poor (and therefore mostly invisible) man, and that he came back once a year to lie awhile in that sea-cave on the Cuban Coast. He had married on French Island and had had family there, this is the story. Could he not have done that at another time, before his death for instance? Men do have posthumous children, but to have children five and seven years posthumous is excessive.

Each year, it was said, Finnegan would swim into that underwater cave and lie there for three days. At fourth dawn he would ask “Is it yet?” and someone would answer “No, not yet.” Then Finnegan would swim out of the cave and find a boat somewhere and make his way back to his own island. And so he would be there for another year. When the answer should finally come “Yes, it is time now,” that answer would be from a fissuring earthquake.

The island wife, Angela, had hinted that Finnegan was most times in his proper flesh, but that sometimes he was in ghost flesh, and at still other times he was in a leprous flesh which is akin to both the ghost flesh and the death flesh. Yes, the stench was leprous. It is the stench, at the same time sweet and horrifying, that most of the world has forgotten.

At the time of the awakening, there was a man standing on the flat shore above to kill the Count Finnegan when he should come up out of the fissured cave onto that rocky shore in the sunlight. This man, now grown much older and much more wicked, had known Count Finnegan long before this, had known him when he was called Count Finnegan only in fun and not officially. The man had not been wakened from a thirty year sleep to complete an unfinished murder on Finnegan. He had been doing many other evil things during that thirty years: and yet he had been doing them in a fractured sort of dream even if not in actual sleep. He did intend to complete an unfinished murder of Count Finnegan now.

And, thirty feet off the rock shelf, was a preternatural white shark that brought its own aura of electrical green water with it wherever it went. This shark intended to kill Count Finnegan if he should attempt to escape his human hunter by an underwater way. This shark also remembered Finnegan from more than thirty years back. They were old enemies. By one account, this shark had permitted Finnegan to pass in and out, once a year for thirty years, and had ground his shark's teeth in fury at it. Now he needn't permit anything to the Finnegan, surely not life.

Three hundred yards off the shore-shelf there was a boat with two riflemen in it. There were a lot of hunters here for a single prey. But the prey, the Count Finnegan, had a lot of drollery left in him as well as warping pain. He sang out loud now with no attempt to hide his location:

“The hunters have the fish on gaff!

  Hi! Ho!

The hunters have a hollow laugh.

They do not know their fish by half!

   Hi Ho! The gollie wol!”

How did the Count Finnegan happen to know the Gadarene Swine Song? Well, according to one version, Count Finnegan was the son of Giulio the Gadarene Swine himself. And the Count talked out loud, to himself and to his circling enemies:

“It's a role to challenge my talents,” he said. “A man might wait a thousand years and not come onto so challenging a role as this. I am a masquerader, I am a spy, I am a sudden and mysterious person in a portentous flesh-and-soul drama. I will not spoil it all by letting myself be killed by such second-rate killers as these. I will break out of this and will play the double to the only transcendent man in the world for this time. Or it may be that the transcendent man will play the double to me.”

The Count covered others of his bones with other pieces and strips of his flesh that had fallen away. He set the pieces carefully in place with his hands that were even more intricate and talented than when he was the great artist thirty years, or perhaps three hundred years, before. Then he made his move.

The shark struck in a white blur. The man on the stone shore above flung a grenade which exploded just under the surface. And then he flung a second and a third. There was a globbing of red blood up to the surface. It could have been either shark's blood or man's blood. There were chunks of torn-loose flesh coming to the shoaly surface, white flesh that was either ghost-shark flesh or leprous-man's flesh.

The riflemen in the boat three hundred yards off the shore shelf were firing. The grenade man dropped a heavier depth-charge, and then he slipped and followed it into the rioting water. And the water was stunned, and for a moment flattened, by the depth-charge. Then, as a secondary effect of the charge, it spouted. And a man spouted up with it. The riflemen in the boat, which had now moved in to less than fifty yards off the shore, riddled the man with shot. Another man, or the same man again, spouted up out of the spewing water, and was riddled with rifle shot again, and so he fell back.

And still it was possible that a man, making his move very swiftly and with his luck running like the shore-shelf water itself, could have gone under the surging shark when it was blinded by the whiteness of the depth-charged water, and could have gone under the motor-launch a moment later when it moved in through the bucking foam, and he might have been a quarter of a mile away and left two of his enemy dead.

It wasn't possible for very many men, but it was possible for one.

This little action took place on the Mariano Coast not far from Havana, Cuba.

The other man in the picture of a few decades before, had simultaneous experience half a world away. He wasn't put in immediate physical danger of his life, and he hadn't just recovered his life. But he received announcement that he was to become the only transcendent man in the world for his time, and that he could refuse this only on peril of his own damnation. This was Joseph Cardinal Hedayat, the look-alike of the reanimated Count Finnegan.

2

The second unusual thing to happen that day was a bell being set to ringing on the North Coast of the small country of San Simeon. There hadn't been a bell there before ever, so far as anyone could remember. Then there had come an executive order stating that, on pain of death, no bell should be rung on that north coast. The order was inexplicable. No bell had ever rung there. There had been no bell to ring. But, within an hour of the publication of the executive order, a bell did begin to ring there, loudly and clearly.

San Simeon was a small country that was almost bereft of real resources. There was some maize culture and some fruit. The beans were good and the squash was fair. Goats were kept and a few pigs. No large cattle. The people dressed and were shod with woven grass. It was woven with fine style, and it was more sturdy than you might suppose.

There were stone houses, there were wooden houses, there were grass houses. Really the only shelter needed was roof from the rain (it rained torrentially but infrequently in most of San Simeon), and rock-hewn granaries for the beans and the maize to keep them from the rats.

San Simeon was the nesting ground for the giant bird named ‘huracán’ or ‘hurricane’. The birds (some said that there was only one of them that flies again and again; some say that there are a half-dozen of them hatched new every year) came out of certain limestone crags of central San Simeon where they nested, and flew over the Ocean of Mexico spreading destruction.

San Simeon had been a much larger country once. Pieces of it, large and small, are taken up by the hurricane bird every time it flies and are dropped into that water or onto other land by the storm bird in its twisting flight. At least thirteen islands of the Antilles are made out of these pieces of San Simeon that were dropped out of the twisting sky.

San Simeon was the richest country per capita in the world. Its wealth didn't lie in its maize or its beans or its grass-weaving industry, nor in its fowling or fishing, nor in its henequen or chicle growing; not in its mahogany or dye-wood, not in its vanilla or rubber or sugar cane (all three of these were inferior), and not in its limestone quarries. Its wealth was in gold coins and in uncoined masses of gold. It was not in gold mining (there is none of that there, though all the neighboring countries have some gold mining), but only in the gold itself. The wealth isn't in the production but only in the possession.

There is only one gold coin in San Simeon. It is the San Simeon duro or fifty dollar gold piece. Once the world was flooded, for a very brief while, by these fifty dollar gold pieces. Now most of them are found only in San Simeon itself; and every man, woman, and child there has hundreds of them. A few more of them are stamped every year, at the Mad King's mint, and given to whatever people need them, mostly to infants born within the year just past. No one knows where the gold itself originally came from. If asked, the people of San Simeon wink and say ‘de la estrellas’, ‘from the stars’. This is a sort of joke-legend, but the existence of a great amount of gold is a fact.

The intersection of the two diagonals of the imperfect square whose four corners are New Orleans, Havana, Tegucigalpa, and Mexico City will come to a point right off the north shore of San Simeon. But, as the country is so small, this is a rough means of locating the country itself. San Simeon was also called Babylon. Nobody remembered the reason for this its ancient name.

San Simeon was ruled by a dynasty of Mad Kings, the Balbos. This line shines with clusters of geniuses, nor do the persons lose their genius when they lose their balance; they simply become mad geniuses. A prince of the line will grow up with his madness held in subjection, like a wild and powerful horse controlled by a strong hand. When the prince is nineteen years old, his father will become Mad King, and the prince will fare into the world to cut a swath there. He will immediately marry a princess of one of the seven acceptable families, and they will have a son.

The wife of the acceptable family will always die in childbirth, and the prince will not remarry. For that reason, there has never been a Queen in San Simeon.

With the aid of San Simeon gold duros, the prince will win high position in the intellectual world and in the glittering international community. He will set up foundations for the support of scientific and artistic activities and programs. He will be one of the dozen persons in the world to give it tone and style for two decades. Then the madness will take him over.

He will return to San Simeon to become the new Mad King. His father will become the Mad King Emeritus. His grandfather, who had been the Mad King Emeritus, will die. And his son the new prince will fare into the world to cut a great swath there.

So it had been with the Mad Kings Gaetano I, II, III, IV, V, VI. So it apparently would not be with him who had been born to become Mad King Gaetano VII. Instead of going mad when he reached the age of thirty-nine, the current Gaetano had become a high churchman (which some considered an act of another sort of madness), and he did not come home.

His father fretted at being forced to remain on as Mad King after his term should have run out, and his grandfather fretted at not being allowed to die until he could be relieved by another Mad King Emeritus.

San Simeon was surrounded by larger and more powerful neighboring countries, Campeche, Petén, Quintana Roo, Tabasco, and Yucatan Antigua. San Simeon survived as an independent country by paying gold tribute to these five powerful neighbors.

The poorest part of San Simeon was its North Coast. It was dry and scorched and stony land. Off north from the dry stony land were salt water swamps, and these merged with shoal water still further north. There was intermittent shoal water all the way from the North Coast of San Simeon to what are called the Campeche Banks — more than one hundred kilometers. There was an inconsistency about these shoal waters in that much of their shoaling was from ghost shoals. There might be clear water many fathoms deep for league after league and day after day. And then those clear deep waters would turn into churning, shallow shoals.

With the rock shores and the salt swamps and the shoal waters, there were many desolate places in those northern regions that could hardly be reached at all by land or sea or air.

The governor of the northern province received a signed order from Mad King Gaetano VI forbidding, under pain of death for all concerned, any bells to be rung along that north shore.

“That is easily complied with,” the governor said. “No bell has ever rung here. There has been no bell to ring.”

Then he heard a bell off north between the salt water swamps and the ghost shoals, in one of those places that would be very hard to come to from any direction and by any means.

“I had forgot about that bell, or rather I didn't believe in it,” the governor said, “but the tone is just how my grandmother used to describe it. It is named the ‘Sea-Bell’. I will get soldiers and go and extinguish it: I'll be extinguished myself if I don't do so.”

Both police and soldiers were sent with orders to stop the ringing and destroy the ringers. But these armed legal men could not, for a while, come up to the bell either by land or by sea. It was in a rough waste place. Shoal water appeared where it had never shoaled before. The coast guard cutters could not go through such shallows. Strong men went in rowboats that could float on even a thin dew, but fogs came and deceived both the eyes and the ears. It seemed that the bells were behind them, and then that they were in front. That first bell, the Sea Bell, was on a ship, and the ship was harried out of there for a while. It went through clear deep water, and there was always shoal water before and behind it. And it shoaled in the clear deep water as soon as the ship had passed through.

Two days after it had begun to sound, the first bell, the ‘Sea Bell’, was joined by another clanging, booming bell (called the ‘Martyr-Bell’). Two weeks later it was joined by a third bell (called the ‘Peter-Bell’).

In spite of all their efforts, the police and soldiers were never able to silence all three of these bells at one time. The bells were summoning bells, they were summoning certain persons to assemble. If everything went right with the bells, if everything went wrong with the police and soldiers, the assembly would be brought to be before the bells were silenced. One of the bells, or two of them, and much of the time all three of them, continued to clang and boom for a full three years. And every few months, another person would join the hidden assembly.

3

The third unusual thing that happened that day was the declaration of the termination, extinguishing, and dismantling of an institution that had lasted for about two thousand years. This institution was now called simply the ‘Crowd’ (Ekklesia, an Assembly, a Crowd), and it might no longer exist.

The Last Conclave was being held in Babylonia Bagascia, a town that had once been mistress of the world under another name. It had been a holy-unholy town that was almost without equal in its contrasts. Now the unholy element was in power, backed by a massive unholiness from outside. Whatever had been holy about the town was now either in hiding or in flight.

But sometimes there is a verve and variety in unholiness, and there were many sparkling people in town at the time of the Conclave. The Princes of the Crowd were popularly known as ‘Gates’ (Cardines, Hinges, Swingers) or ‘Stones’; they were assembling to disorganize and dismantle themselves for the last time. They had the votes to do it, but votes were an anachronism now. They had the power to do it, and power was still in contemporary use.

The mood of the Big Stones was a truculent one.

“Animosity?” said Efram Gate Gratz. “You're damned right we have animosity, total animosity. We've come to bury Peter, not to praise him. We will kill him and we will ritually defecate on his grave, and we will be certain that nothing like this ever happens again.”

“Certainly we intended the building to fall when we removed the cap-stone,” Howard Stone Ostwald said. (Some of the Princes used the ‘Gate’ and some used the ‘Stone’ in their names, but after today neither would be used as patents of nobility. But the titles and crests would still be used by some of them when working with their bands or doing their Talk Shows.) “We intend to remove every sort of cap-stone, and we intend for every building to fall down. Buildings divide people, and we have had enough of division.”

Every effort had been made to save the Ekklesia, the Assembly, the Crowd, even to changing the name many times, but the weight of history was all against it. It had built-in structure, and the true crowd must be unstructured. After the nations were gone, it was felt that the Crowd still might be saved, as a sort of museum piece, if only it could be given a broad enough base. New Princes, Gates, Stones were created to represent various broad bases. There were Gates and Stones of Labor and of the Media. There were Gates of the various rites of Freemasonry and Jewry. There were Gates of the Pentecostals and Roarers and Teilhardians, of the Gays and the Hot Brains and the Levelers. There were Gates of the various instrumentalists: Hornmen and Drummers had special Gates to represent them, and the electric guitarists had five Gates of their own. There were special Stones for the Trippers and the Dippers, for the Mushroomers and Hash-Bashers, for the old time Drunkards and for the Fundamentalist Drunkards. There were thirteen Stones for the Media groups, and sixteen for the Labor people. The Zero Growth lobby was represented. Everything was represented. It hadn't worked. The Crowd, the Assembly was finished, but it wouldn't die with dignity. Well, maybe it would die if it had its head cut off.

The decapitating had happened the day before the opening of the conclave. Conclaves have never been called for any reason other than to treat of the condition of headlessness, to erect a new Cap-Stone for one that has fallen, or (as in this case) to declare a Cap-Stone suppressed.

The Cap-Stone himself (He was Paul the Eleventh in the listing of the Cap-Stones) had been decapitated the day before. Then his head had been put up on a pike at the Spanish Stairs where people could see it as they came and went. The head was not dead for quite a while. It could talk and answer questions, though in a tortured tone. Several times it cried in a miserable and snuffling sort of way. People came and stood on the little ladder there and pulled all the hair out of the head in bloody gouts.

Several ladies asked their bravos to bring them pieces from the head for souvenirs. The bravos broke out the teeth and gouged out the eyes for their lady friends. But still the head was able to talk, and even to get a little the best of its tormentors in argument and discussion.

One of the Stones climbed the little ladder there and cut out the Cap-Stone's tongue. He took it into a little caffè there to have it grilled for eating. The head wept in a grotesque gurgling way after its tongue was cut out. Then a fire-tongue came down, and the Cap-Stone talked for a while in his own voice with the fire-tongue. He fell silent only when several of the Gates came and broke open his skull and scraped his brains out. They took these and fried them with onions to eat. The Cap-Stone was silent after that, and perhaps he was dead.

All that was a sort of prodigy, but prodigies were quite common in Babylonia Bagascia that week. It was believed that the Ekklesia was ended with the destruction of the head of that last Cap-Stone. The Conclave would only confirm the end of it.

Well, the Conclave, the declared last one of them, would be very broad-based. All the Gates and Stones in the world were present there except for a stubborn thirteen of them. These thirteen were darkness men who refused to face the light and the reason of an open conclave. But everything else in town was compounded of light and reason. The week's entertainment preceding the Conclave was as light and as reasonable as it was possible to make it, and as authentic. Dancing girls, dancing men, dancing whatevers. Laced wine, and stratified noise building up like layered rock over the city.

There was a special freedom-and-looseness festival every day of the week, and the Voltaire Festival was on the final day and night before the Conclave. It was named for the Father of Reason and was to commemorate his three hundredth birthday as well as the final realization of everything that he had stood for, save for a few unfulfilled trifles here and there. This father of reason had once expressed the desire that he might see the last king strangled with the guts of the last priest. What more apt than to enact this thing!

“How do we think of these things!” cried the marshal of the festival. “We're amazing.”

So they woke up Voltaire and set him in a chair to watch it on the last evening of the festivals. Dead? No, the man hadn't been dead. Death wouldn't have him. Death had curled a fleshless lip in scorn and turned away. Death is pickish. So the man had gone into a senility stasis and had been nearly forgotten in his person in the very centuries that his works were fruiting so magnificently. Oh, it would be a charming strangulation that would be presented for him and for everyone!

The last king was Hiram III of the small kingdom of St. Kobarid in the Julian Alps, and Hiram was in Babylonia Bagascia that very week. And he was a man surrounded by all the consensus hatreds. He had defied the order of the World Consensus General to abolish his nation, and so he still ruled over the only unabolished nation left in the world. Nor could the nation be abolished till late springtime when the snow plows would be able to enter it and break a road for the armed dismantlers and terminators.

And Hiram had otherwise disgraced himself. For one thing, he had gotten into a fist fight with a ‘Highly Honored’ Television prince. The public shock at one of the ‘Highly Honored’ category being struck by such a ruffian as Hiram was overwhelming, and sky-writers were impelled to build scarlet cloud signs asking ‘Is Nothing Sacred?’. It seemed that nothing was to Hiram III.

An even more shocking thing happened. At the Colossal Noisearama Itself, Hiram had begun to yodel very loudly (he had captured a central section of the amplification system with several of his sheriffs) at one of the most solemn and intense moments of a Rock Movement. Oh, he broke it! He was marked for death from that moment.

And Hiram III had quipped back at Otto Glotglutz the sick night-club comedian. The suddenness and unlikelihood of this had sent Glotzie (as he was known to the sick world over) into tears. The thunderstruck observers could only call “Shame! Shame!”

And Hiram had refused to contribute to a cash benefice to World Labor Czar Poot Plambert on Poot's being voted the World's Most Beloved Man of the Year. “Not to me he's not the most beloved,” Hiram had said crudely. So the life of Hiram III wasn't worth a lead lire around Babylonia Bagascia anyhow.

The last priest in the world had, hopefully, been Paul the Eleventh (who was the last Cap-Stone or Top-Peter also); Paul's head was still on a pike by the Spanish Steps, and his guts were still warm and pliable. So the great thing was presented to the Voltaire Festival at prime time that night. It was (this was the judgment of all knowledgeable observers) more fun than catching a greased pig.

And it was somewhat similar. For, of course, the entrails of Paul the Eleventh were well-greased for the spectacle. They were long, and they were slick! A picked team of fifty senior youths from the Senior Youth World Congress was to perform the exquisite garroting.

They had been having a hard time waking Voltaire up and keeping him awake. But, once he understood that it was one of his highest desires really being presented for him, he was able to stay awake pretty well; and he cackled and carried on like a person a hundred and fifty years younger than himself.

But it takes a long time to strangle a man with entrails as slick as those were. Fourteen choruses of Grave-Stone Rock were done while it was going on, and one of those choruses can't be done in less than ten minutes. Even with a good loop around the last royal neck in the world, and with twenty-five select senior youths tugging and lugging on each entrail length, it was hard to do a quick job with such a greasy hawser. But, really, a quick job hadn't been what was desired. It was slow, and the face of Hiram III turned every rainbow color during the presentation.

It was an entertaining two-and-a-half or three hours. But Hiram III was finally dead and his body was given over to the dismemberers and souvenir seekers. And the Father of Reason was permitted to go back to sleep again. And then, since the Pauline entrails were now just well warmed up, and all possible fun had already been had out of Hiram III, it was decided to act out another drama in a nearby basilica or holy place, the largest of them. The theme of this new presentation was an old saying about Wild Beasts Devouring Entrails in the Holy Places. For this, the winning team of fifty persons from the Consenting Adults' World Congress (this team had just eaten the world's longest hot dog, fifty meters long, in three minutes, and was ready for anything) was assembled and instructed. And they began the devouring.

But they had almost bit off more than they could chew in this case. The entrails were tough and they were rubbery. They were slick and they were uncleansed. It was something of a circus to watch it all, the look on the faces of the chewers when they could not get a good bite. The even more contorted look on their faces when they could. Paul the Eleventh had been a tough old man, and the uncleansed entrails of tough old men have a very gamey taste to them. But the Consenting Adults were used to doing just about anything, and finally they were able to do this. Finished them off, they did, and hardly a scrap left of them. Who would ever forget the bright week of the Festivals, and especially that final bright day and night of the Voltaire Festival! Novelty piled upon novelty, and all was novelty!

So the Conclave began at dawn on a pleasant note. It didn't take much furniture or equipment for the Conclave. A straw-man, soaked in lamb's blood, was prepared. This was important, but it was not elaborate. The straw-man was called the Master of the Conclave. Very broad based offerings were made so that no cult might be neglected. Incense was burned to the Media Mega-Net, the only thing holy remaining in the world. Goats were sacrificed to the Left Lectionary League. Money offering was made to the Unilateral Workers' League, and their Mammon statue was enthroned there. A kilo of hash was given to every person in Babylonia Bagascia (‘Hash and Circuses’ had always been big in that town). Nine men and nine women came up voluntarily to offer their near-spent lives for the Euthanasian Demonstration Agency under the big agency flag (with the motto See How Easy It Is) flying there. A dozen children, babes, infants, and quick foetuses from three years old on down were brought there and cast into the Moloch Furnace in offering to Moloch and his Molochites.

One of the quick foetuses spoke in a small but clear voice from the blasting-hot furnace, and said that he was Little Hugh of Lincoln. And everybody laughed. And hot-rock harpers were playing their traditional music there around the portals of Conclave Hall.

Then the crowd was put out, and only the six hundred and sixty-six Princes of the Ekklesia (the Gates, and the Stones, as most of them called themselves) were left in the hall: and one other person, the mysterious old Monsignor X was there to serve them. Only thirteen of the Princes, from all of those in the world, were missing.

But these high delegates were not really walled up in the hall. Only one course of bricks was laid along the bottom of the big door to the Conclave Hall, and that was only for token. The Top Gates and Stones had said that they would be out again in a very few minutes, just as soon as they had had a roll call, burned the effigy, and made the avowals and denials. Then, as soon as they were out, the Conclave Hall would be taken down.

“I will lead the ceremonies,” said Conrad Stone Hackenschmidt of Weinsburg in the Germanies. “There are six hundred and sixty-six of us Princes of the Ekklesia present, and one curator, Monsignor X. He is our servant. You know, X, that the quality of a good servitor can be gauged by his ability to anticipate a need. I have need now for a submachine gun. Have you anticipated my need in this?”

“No, I have not, Eminent Prince and Stone,” Monsignor X said.

“Then you are an inefficient servitor, Monsignor X, and I will have to do away with you.”

“No I am not,” said Monsignor X, “and no you will not. For several reasons, this is better.” And Monsignor X produced from his multi-trapped and multi-pocketed cassock a fire-weapon called the Browning Automatic Rifle or the BAR. And he handed this to Conrad Stone Hackenschmidt.

The BAR is a curious weapon. It fires so rapid a burst that it can cut a man in half, but it tends to rise straight up when a burst is fired. For this reason, a practical man will let out the leather sling to its greatest length and will stand on that sling with his right foot. Conrad Stone Hackenschmidt did so. He had the whole company covered by the weapon, and he addressed that whole company in his tough and bright German-silver voice.

“There is only one way to vote. When I call your name, you will say ‘Eligo effigiem’ or ‘I vote for the effigy or straw-man’. So we will elect the straw-man to be Cap-Stone or Top-Peter of the Ekklesia. Then we will burn the straw-man in the stove, and the red smoke will pour out of the chimney for all the people to see. By that, they will know for certain that the only Papist is the StrawPeter or Struwwelpeter. So it will be finished.

“Casper Stone Aaron,” Hackenschmidt began the roll call of the Princes.

“Eligo effigiem,” Casper Stone Aaron spoke, but a bit surly as though he were under compulsion. “I elect for the Straw-Man.”

“Catherine Stone Abbott.”

“Eligo effigiem.”

“James Gate Abdo.”

“Eligo effigiem.”

So the roll call went for a while. Then — 

“Stockton Stone Crocker.”

“Eligo Joseph Cardinalem Hedayat ab Antiochia.” “I elect for Joseph Cardinal Hedayat of Antioch.” There was some very quick scurrying around there, and Stockton Stone Crocker found himself standing alone with all the other Princes of the congregation drawn back from him on either side like Red Sea waters. Hackenschmidt fired an eviscerating blast with the BAR, and Stockton Stone Crocker lay dead on the flagstone floor.

“Sic semper zannionibus,” (thus ever to buffoons or zanies), Hackenschmidt quipped. “Next. Rosemary Gate Cruikshank.”

“Eligo effigiem,” said Gate Cruikshank. So it went on through the whole roll. Six hundred and sixty of the Princes, Stones, and Gates voted for the Straw-Man, and six of them voted for Joseph Cardinal Hedayat of Antioch. The six zany votes were rectified to count all for the Straw-Man.

“The Straw-Man is the Cap-Stone of the Ekklesia, the Peter of the Church,” Conrad Stone Hackenschmidt said. “But the Straw-Man is made of temporal straw, and he is gone with one blast of the stove-fire. Monsignor X, servitor, put the effigy into the stove.”

And Monsignor X did so, and immediately there was a profusion of red smoke in the Conclave Hall, and there was ten times as much of that red smoke going up the chimney. Blood-red rain began to fall inside the building, and much more of it could be heard rattling against the roof and into the streets outside. And a veritable stream of blood ran out of the stove and began to flood the floor of the hall. The Straw-Man had been soaked in the blood of a lamb yes, but ten thousand lambs would not have had this much blood in them.

“This fetish-ritual gets a little bit out of hand,” Stone Hackenschmidt said. “That is a weakness of fetishes. So much blood is almost awkward. Well, pitch the six bodies into the stove, Monsignor X, servitor. Their blood and flesh and smoke won't add much more to what we already have.”

Monsignor X pitched the six bodies into the stove, and the blood and smoke were not noticeably increased.

“Now, all of you present,” said Hackenschmidt, “make your avowals and denials.”

All persons present did so with a sincere mumbling. This was a formula thing, a ritual thing, but it was no less necessary.

“Several other small things ere we part,” Hackenschmidt said then. “We are princes no longer. There is nothing left for us to be princes of. The Thing is Dead: but let me give you a small caution about its deadness. Every bell in the world must now be broken and melted. The thing is dead. But the horoscopist of the Conclave has quoted an old saying about bells pealing until they wake up the dead. This must not happen. The thing is dead. The bells everywhere must be made dead so that they will not call or awaken anyone ever again. And the horoscopist, I am glad to say, is dead.

“ ‘He was only doing his duty,’ you say. Very well. He has done it. And now his duty is to be dead.”

The ex-princes, taken by a sort of unease, were shuffling and getting ready to get out of that place and have it all ended.

“One other thing,” Hackenschmidt said then. “There are thirteen princes who are not with us, and one of them is Joseph Cardinal Hedayat. There are prophecies about him. We declare all these prophecies to be void. We declare the thirteen princes to be no longer princes. We declare them to be dead men. But this latter part will take a little bit of physical effecting. Some of you are more experienced than I am in this. Has anyone any favorite firm we might give the contract to?”

“ ‘Track and Total’ is a dependable firm,” one new-made common man there said. “They will track down any person whatsoever, and they will total that person. And they will do it quickly and neatly. ‘Dog and Destroy’ is another good firm. They have dogged down some of the most difficult cases. But I believe that ‘Track and Total’ is the best.”

“Very well,” said Hackenschmidt. “We will give ‘Track and Total’ the contract to hound down and kill the thirteen men. And we will pay a bonus for quick dispatch in this matter.

“And there is still one more thing. One does not leave the Servitor of the Final Conclave alive behind one. Monsignor X, stand over by the stove to save us a little trouble in disposing of you.”

“No, man,” said X. “I have you covered. And you will find that you can not turn fast enough with a BAR, not when you are standing on the sling.”

“Why did you lie to me, Monsignor X, and say that you did not have a submachine gun?” Hackenschmidt asked, and he was deeply hurt by what he believed was a deception. “I see that you do have one.”

“I did not lie,” said X. “I said that I hadn't anticipated your need for this weapon. But I had anticipated my own need for it. I go now, and do not follow me. I will follow you whenever I wish. I will work for you sometimes. Sometimes I will work for the thirteen princes who are not here. And sometimes I will work for ‘Track and Total’. Could anything less than a triple agent be worthy of my talents?

“Ah, when I have lived and adventured through it all, it will make a wonderful tale. In times to come, when I tell this tale, that is to say, in times past when I have told this tale, I'll make it good even if part of it has to be made up. That is to say, I have will have had (pardon me, people, the tense is a difficult one in my case) — in the past time when I someday will have told it, I will have told it with fine ornamentation.”

X went out with the submachine gun somewhere in his many-trapped and many-pocketed cassock. It was really a magician's cloak, that cassock. Did you know that, when he used to be in vaudeville, Mr. X had been billed as the Great Ex-Capo?

X escaped from Babylonia Bagascia or Whore Babylon in an old oak-wood sail-ship that had once been named the Brunhilde, that had once been named Navicula Petri, and had several times been named the Argo.

4

It was an All-Universe Congratulation by the Unbelievers' Angry League For Style In The Universe: “Perfect, perfect were all the terminations in Babylonia Bagascia, total style, with never a hint of grossness or corn. May the Ungodly Oaf sitting on his three-legged stool in the Sign of the Fish swallow his beard in frustration.” That's telling them, Angry League.

One termination that was hardly noticed was the ancient grass with the incredibly long roots and the trace of red in its green that had always grown on Vatican Hill and nowhere else in the world. It had yielded to men with blow-torches, as it had never yielded to them before. And now it would never grow on Vatican Hill again. It was named Herba Cruor Martyrum or Blood-of-Martyrs Grass, and it was finished there.

X made contact with the ‘Track and Total’ Mogul. The Mogul had passed three of his own always-alert guards on the way in. Then he entered his own impregnable apartment, turned on the lights in the inner room (this was at two o'clock in the morning), and he saw X sitting there, smoking one of the Mogul's cigars and drinking the Mogul's claret.

“Be at ease,” said X. “I am looking for employment. You have, this week, received a contract for thirteen items or persons to be demolished and terminated. I know all about it. I believe you should sub-contract it to me. I am a hungry hunter and I will not let any prey escape me.”

(This was in Marseille in France. It was several days after X had left Babylonia Bagascia in Italy.)

“Who are you?” the Mogul asked.

“X.”

“So I half-suspected. But, X, you have the name of being a butterfly, long on talk, and short on blood.”

“I say that if a man sheds one more drop than is necessary, then he hasn't the fine edge for such work.”

“I, I'm a little partial to blood myself, X. And a little partial to all excesses. But I haven't any place for you. I have several showy tricksters in my organization already. They are amusing, but I am a grown man who doesn't need to be amused all the time. You do not have me here, X. I have you. Did you believe that I had only static guards? No, I also have fast-moving slammers. In fifteen minutes, one of them will come through that door, and I will give you to him to do as he will. You have meddled here, X. That costs you your life.”

“This will be close, Mogul. But I believe that I can bring it about that another man will come through that door before your slammer comes. And the first man who comes will be one of the thirteen men you wish. Choose the least likely, the least possible one. Pick any one of those thirteen men who are scattered so widely through the world. Name the one you want me to bring here, and I will cause him to walk through that door within ten minute's time. Which one do you want to see, Mogul?”

“Why, in these last few minutes of your life, are you fishing in that rain barrel, X? You do not know the names of any of the thirteen. It is only by some accident that you know there are thirteen men put under death contract. What good will it do to your butterfly ego to learn even one of the names? You're an odd little one, X, but I have plenty of odd ones now.”

“The thirteen men on whom you have kill-contracts are these,” X said:

“Joseph Cardinal Hedayat of Antioch

“Paul Cardinal Brokenbolt of Freemantle, Australia

“Ignatius Cardinal Ti of Manila

“Terrance Cardinal of Cork

“Edward Cardinal Leviathan of Edinburgh

“Carlos Cardinal Artemis of Santa Cruz

“David Cardinal Lloyd-Spencer of Cardiff

“Henri Cardinal Salvatore of New Orleans

“Nicholas Cardinal Gregorio of Messina

“Xavier Cardinal Runosake of Kobe, Japan

“Kirol Cardinal Gabrailovitch of Zagreb

“Joseph Cardinal Doki of Douala

“Martino Cardinal Erculo of Milan. These are the thirteen, Mogul. Name me the one of them you wish and I will have him here within, ah, nine minutes now.”

“You are called on that, X. As if any of them would come to this door when the word is already out (it must be out if even a butterfly like you has heard it) that I have the contract! There are several of these that we haven't quite pin-pointed as to location yet, and several of them have gone into panic travel, but we watch them closely. But I do know where Xavier Runosake is. At the moment he is billeted with a group of Buddhists in his own Kobe. We will kill him there, of course, but we intend to wait a day or two until implanted rumor has cut him down a little further. I hate to kill a public man when he is still partly in the public favor. But there is no need to kill him in favor since any man can so easily be turned out of that favor. X, I pick Xavier Cardinal Runosake of Kobe, Japan. And you will bring him to my very door in a little less than nine minutes, will you, X? Or will you prefer to be killed by my slammer here two or three minutes after that.”

“I prefer to bring Runosake here. But he isn't in that little Buddhist compound of Kobe, not right now. He has just escaped. I tell you this to be fair with you.”

The Mogul (that sounded like a nickname for the head of ‘Track and Total’ but the man was really named John Mogul and was usually called ‘The Mogul’) picked up a phone and finger-tapped a call. Calls from Europe go through quickly at that time of the night. The Mogul spoke a few words and listened to a few words. Then he replaced the phone.

“Yes, he escaped the compound not more than ten minutes ago,” the Mogul said, “but he can't have escaped from Kobe yet. And you will have him at my door in another eight minutes? X, if he were in Marseille, he could not get here from the airport in less than one hour. But my Japanese operative said that he had already given me the news of the temporary escape, X. He said that he had given it to me about seven minutes ago.”

“It was about that, Mogul, yes.”

“So you had already entered my apartment then. You took the call in my name and voice. But that wouldn't get the Cardinal a third of the way around the world in almost no time at all. And why, of all the doors in the world, should he come to my door?”

“We will see. Will you know Cardinal Runosake if you see him, Mogul?”

“I know him, yes. Whenever or wherever I see him I will know him. How does it feel when you come right up to the edge of your life, little meddler? You will end not with a bang but with a riddle, eh? But does it not make you a little giddy when you come to the edge of it and look over?”

“It does, Mogul. I have looked over that life brink many times and been giddy every time. If I do bring the Japanese Cardinal to your door in just these couple of minutes, then will you sub-contract the thirteen-part job to me?”

“Not quite. But I'll take you in on it. I will pay you the first princely fee if you do deliver this prince of the congregation to my door. No, I have put the thirteen out on separate contracts, but I can pull any contract when I wish. If you deliver this Cardinal (I'm talking here almost as if it were possible) then I would put out one other contract to you. And, if you were successful on it, I would put out another to you. After all, you can't kill more than one of them at a time, can you?”

“Yes.”

“I can't figure out just what your angle is, X. Unsatisfied curiosity eats me up sometimes. Be a good fellow, X, and tell me what your angle is, before you die.”

“Yes. I'll probably tell it to you before I die. Maybe I'll tell it to you, someday, just before you die. But I won't die today.”

“I believe that you will die today, X,” John Mogul said. “I'm a man who is not known to the public. I am a quiet and effacing man. Really, I do efface a lot of people in the course of a year. And I fill a necessary niche. I am a trashman and I do my trashman's part to keep our world and society cleansed. I am a knacker, a dealer in carcasses. We turn their corruptible material, whenever such disposition is possible, into quality soap and essential oils and bone-meal for the farmer. I am a euthanasiast who removes unwanted persons from a world where everyone should be wanted. In each case, there is someone who does not want these persons they put out to contract, so I am doing my part to make this a completely wanted world. But I do not like passionate killers, and I seldom keep more than two or three of them in my stables. They are useful tools sometimes, but I use them with distaste. Coolness and dedication are the things I most like, and the personal satisfaction in jobs well done.”

“Your several guards are coming back from the cantina on the corner now, Mogul, after that fine late drink; and your guard just outside that door has gone to sleep. But a usually reasoned and collected man has moved up to this level of the building, but he's in a state of dull confusion. He moves with cranky steps, and he's near collapse. His feet are even now at the door. Do you hear him?”

“I hear him. But he is not my two-fifteen slammer. Who can he be?”

“I told you who he would be,” X said. “I win the wager. And now you will pay a princely fee on this first dead prince. And then we will agree to certain verbal contracts, and we will share certain other information.”

“It cannot be that,” the Mogul said. “I would know his face if it were he. I will not be taken in by any of your skittish tricks. Why doesn't my guard outside the door stop him? It's like a dead man stalking.”

“Certain peoples do sometimes stalk several steps after they're dead. I told you that your guard outside the door had fallen asleep.”

X and the Mogul had been speaking in Frioul. Really, there are hardly a dozen such neutral languages left which two men of their experienced sort will know and feel easy to discuss in. All others have certain trammels and connotations.

The door was fumbled open. A man, frozen-faced and dully horrifying, quite large for a Japanese, staggered in. He tottered there for a moment. Then he fell forward at full length. There was a knife hilt between his shoulders. There were other weirdly misplaced things about him.

“He's quite dead,” said X. “Shall I turn him over? Did you get a good enough look at his face?”

“I got a good enough look at his face,” the Mogul said. ”He is Cardinal Runosake.”

Much later that morning, John Mogul, a man of some vestigial religion, had a stone cut for Runosake with the words “ — but others, save them, snatching them from the fire.”

Then the Mogul raised his hands over his head with their twelve digits extended. The Mogul had, on each hand, five fingers and one thumb. This extradigitalism was common in the Mogul family. John Mogul was indicating that he still had twelve men on contract to be killed.

5

The business of the bells on the North Coast of San Simeon continued. The main hope, or the main fear, was that it would be widely known that the bells were ringing there, or that they had rung there. A growing legend of the bells would play havoc, and havoc is a two-handed game. It is very hard to keep a noise about bells quiet. Even if all this North Coast's bells were silenced at one time (and, so far, they had not been) there would still be the spreading rumor that bells had rung at this place, and that they were summoning bells.

There hadn't ever been bells on that North Coast before, but there had been bells further out, among the ghost shoals. There had been subliminal bells and submarine bells there, for near five hundred years now, just beneath the level of human hearing and just beneath the level of human breathing: sunken-ship bells, sunken-city bells, sunk promontory bells. The bells of the thirteen hundred Spanish and French ships that had sunk in those waters during the maritime centuries were not necessarily silenced. Bells do ring underwater. All sea creatures, from plankton to porpoises, enjoy these water-buried bells. Porpoises and dolphins love bells; they can be talked to by coded bells.

Hundreds of the sunken ship bells have been raised, by fishermen, by private persons, by beachcombers, and set up on stanchions on small reefs and on small islands, so that has always been a musical ocean, up in the Antilles and Indies. Now the booming bells off north of San Simeon gave real authority to what had been a vague chorus, and gave a world-wide call to assemble at a certain place.

It was Count Finnegan who brought the second bell, the Martyr-Bell to the shoal region to join the Sea-Bell. This was two days after the Sea-Bell had first begun to boom. He brought the bell, on a log raft towed by a motor skiff, to a particular mooring-rock. They set it up there on stone stanchions so that the whole mooring rock and stony-bottomed sea thereabouts boomed and pealed with the rocking bronze giant.

The mooring-rock was six hundred yards by three hundred yards. There was a rock-hewn fresh water well there. It was a shaft, ten feet square, that had been cut into the solid and unfissured rock for a cistern to catch rain water; but fresh water had welled up into it from the bottom when it was dug to one hundred feet. And the fresh water had not failed. The shaft had been dug about one hundred years before this.

The mooring-rock was built like a long bowl, with a high ring around it, twice the height of a man. This ring was like a palisade, and the low tide and surf there never broke over it. Inside the palisade, the rock was just about sea level. Parts of it were under two or three feet of water (of fresh water from the rain, not sea water) and parts of it were bare to the sun. For about a hundred and fifty years, people had been bringing soil to this mooring rock, soil taken from islands or parts of the main, or soil dredged from the muddier and more organic parts of the sea. People had built garden plots there which no one could see from the ocean. The ocean-view appearance was of barren rock. These were not large garden plots, for the whole mooring-rock was only about forty acres in extent; but probably fifty people now had permanent homes on that piece of rock, and several hundred people (sharing the secret of this secluded place) moored there at some time during the year. The mooring-rock could only be come to by certain passages through the shoals, and a stranger would leave his wreckage and his bones there before he found a passage by himself.

At least three millionaires were secret sharers in this place and came in season for the deep-sea fishing and the ocean seclusion. Every sort of fisher people came there. Two different tramp-steamers visited the place, one of them four times a year, one of them two times a year. But they didn't advertise the place to unworthy ears.

And Count Finnegan had been here before, in his youth, quite some several decades before this. Now Count Finnegan had brought the Martyr-Bell from Ste. Genevieve. The rock people took it and rigged it up and set it to booming on their rock. This was about seven miles from where the Sea-Bell had begun to boom two days before.

And the Ship-Bell, which was onboard a small ship and not land stanchioned, began to move about; and the Martyr-Bell stood fast, but seemed to move (from the tricky sound-carrying winds in the neighborhood). This confused the soldiers who were set to the task of extinguishing the bells. The soldiers swore that both of them were ghost bells.

It had been in the year 1594 that English raiders in the service of the Queen had come to the Island of Ste. Genevieve and had murdered thirty-nine Christian people of color who had refused to abjure their faith. Thereupon the English ship, the Lord Cramner, had been shipwrecked on a shoal only nine sea miles from Ste. Genevieve, and all aboard had drowned. Several bronze cannon of the Lord Cramner had then been raised by people of Ste. Genevieve and brought to their island. The bronze had been cast into the Martyr-Bell. The bell was set up to seaward. For four hundred years it rang of itself whenever Englishmen or other enemies of the Faith approached the island.

Then one day, some people of the Island (in the spirit of prophecy) went out and intercepted Count Finnegan who was going down ocean in a speed launch. Some of the old men of them remembered Count Finnegan from their childhoods, but now he was younger than they were. Count Finnegan said that he would do whatever they asked him to do; he said that he had been searching and listening for Prophetic Instruction, and that he felt that the very air and sea around him were crackling with such instruction now. The people told him the history of the bell and they told him he was to take it south to a place he would know. It was to be set up there and set to pealing an invitation to good people to come, not a warning to evil people to stand off. So Count Finnegan towed the bell to the mooring rock in the shoal water north of San Simeon. And once it was set up there, it rang for three years at least.

At mooring rock Count Finnegan asked old men about a room or cave, down in the rock and below sea level, that he remembered. It could be reached, he recalled, by a sort of passage from the hewn well-shaft. Count Finnegan said that, as well as he remembered, it was a room large enough to hold fifty people. Now the whole interior of the well-shaft was grown with wonderful green vines till it was an absolute joy to look at. But was the passage to that subterranean room still known, or was it forgotten behind the vines?

Oh, it was still there, the old men said, but it hadn't been used for a very long time. The passage and the room would be used again when there was a special reason for their use, and not before.

Count Finnegan sold the speed launch to a rich man who was on the rock. Then he took passage on the tramp steamer that came there twice a year and had come there now. He went away on the tramp, listening intently for more Prophetic Instruction.

It was two weeks later that the Peter-Bell was brought to the mooring rock. It was brought there in a ship that was actually named the Argo; the name was painted boldly in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Chaldee letters. This was a sail-ship, but it approached the mooring rock at swift speed and exactly against the wind, and its sails billowed out full and evenly against the wind, coming in contrary direction. It was square-sailed and had no lateen or coastwise sail at all.

The man on the Argo (only one man was to be seen there) had his face covered with a golden scarf or veil or mask with eye-slits in it. He said that his veil mask was made from combings of the Fleece itself, that the original fleece of Colchis can have gold tufts combed out of it and not be diminished by their loss.

The man said that he had brought one of the nine hundred and ninety-nine Peter-Bells from St. Peter's in Rome. And he unloaded it with his ship's boom. Then the man gave the people on the rock some flat unleavened bread or ship-biscuit from the Black Sea, and red wine which he said was from the Persian Sea.

The man went away again in the same direction from which he had come. The wind had shifted around by then, and he once more went with full sails and at great speed directly against the wind.

In the month that followed, the people obtained and put up about a hundred more bells along the limestone north coast of San Simeon, and in its salt swamps and outcroppings and islets in all the shoal waters as far as Campche Bank and Perez Island.

6

John Mogul, the chief of ‘Track and Total’, held up his hands with six digits extended on one of them and five on the other, to indicate that eleven of his primary targets were left alive and two of them were dead. He recited a little verse that was both a crowing and a prediction, and rope-jumping children in West Chicago and in Surabaja Java had it instantly, each group in its own tongue:

Eleven little fuzzy cubs

Hiding in a den.

The head of one goes bouncing off,

And then there are ten.

This was dedicated to Ignatius Cardinal Ti, the next in line for destruction, to indicate what death he should die. The second Prince in Hiding who had been killed was Kirol Cardinal Gabrailovitch of Zagreb. John Mogul, as a man of vestigial religion, had put up a monument stone to this Prince with the carven words: “One of these must be made a witness with us of His resurrection.”

John Mogul was, very slightly, worried about the ‘doubles’ of the Princes. He had them all identified now, but he did not have them dead. These were the doubles:

Of Joseph Cardinal Hedayat of Antioch, Count Finnegan (full name and birthplace not known).

Of Paul Cardinal Brokenbolt of Freemantle, Australia, Cecil Octavian of England.

Of Ignatius Cardinal Ti of Manila, Bolo Manolo (place of residence not known).

Of Terrence Cardinal Merry of Cork, Emmet Collins of Boston, Massachusetts.

Of Edward Cardinal Leviathan of Edinburgh, Douglas McAfee of London.

Of Carlos Cardinal Artemis of Santa Cruz, Gilberto Levine y O'Brien of Rio.

Of David Cardinal Lloyd Spencer of Cardiff, Lloyd Cardigan Pembroke of Tywyn.

Of Henri Cardinal Salvatore of New Orleans, Daniel Jean Boulle of Dax in France.

Of Nicholas Cardinal Gregorio of Messina, Arnoldo Rugutini of New York City.

Of Joseph Cardinal Doki of Douala, John Giwa of Anecho.

Of Kirol Cardinal Gabrailovitch of Zagreb, Mihail Majic of Trieste.

Of Martino Cardinal Erculo of Milan, Herman Hercules of uncertain domicile.

Of Xavier Cardinal Runosake of Kobe (the first dead of the contracted men), Niku Kazuko, probably of Honolulu.

These doubles were at least as hard to kill as were their primaries. The abdicated Cardinals, still about five hundred of them alive, weren't very hard to kill, but they just didn't give the same satisfaction as did the genuine Cardinals in Flight or Hiding.

There were funds provided to stir up public interest, and John Mogul skimmed twenty percent off of all such funds. So he launched a contest. This contest, with all the resources of ‘Track and Total’ behind it, offered one thousand very costly premiums to contestants for the best one thousand suggestions for ‘interesting and colorful murders’. Now there would be some popular action and interest.

Popular murder! Had there ever been anything like it! This was one of the primordial and archetypical fascinations. Who could resist it? There were more than thirty million entries in the contest. They came from the keen observers everywhere. They came from the depraved and the saintly: from the hunters and from the hunted. They even came from all eleven of the still living Princes in Flight. Ignatius Cardinal Ti sent in a murder right in line with his own approaching death. It wasn't used, in that exact form, but it wasn't too far off. All the abdicated Cardinals sent in murders, and all the doubles of the Cardinals in Flight sent in very ingenious murder-devices.

Most of these many millions of proposed methods of murder were not practical, for one reason or a thousand, and there was heavy repetition and duplication. But there were so many really good ones that it almost made one weep not to have a few million murders under contract at certain payment.

Instant mad dogs were good. The shot (it could be by air-gun or arrow or blow-gun, or directly by needle) might be made on the victim's own dog which would then go instantly mad and bite the nearest person, the victim, who would then die immediately. Then the dog would recover, without a trace, from his madness almost as immediately. But this depended on the dog's owner, the victim, being the closest person, so the plan could be disrupted by accident.

Directional shots were better, and these fitted in many of the submitted murders. And contagious directional shots were absolutely the best in this category. Some substance of the victim had to be mixed with the infusion, but it had to be no more than the faint scent of his passing. Any animal would be shot with this infusion in any way. The animal would then go into a murderous fury against the victim that he had been inoculated with. It would find the victim anywhere, over dozens or hundreds or thousands of miles, and it would attack him in total fury. As to the contagious refinement, the inoculated animal, while on his murder pursuit, would bite all other animals of his sort that were anywhere near its path. And each bitten animal would immediately be similarly mad to murder that one victim. It would grow in an exponentially exploding chain reaction. It could be done with dogs, it could be done with cats, it could be done with wolves or squirrels or even rabbits.

It could be done with rats or mice. Imagine a victim becoming in an instant a living tower totally incased in thousands of mad mice! Imagine him screaming, and hundreds of mad mice pouring down his screaming throat through the mouth that he would never close again. Slashing and slicing as they went in in wave after wave, into the inmost depths of a person! Imagine the victim, with fifty pounds of meat already sheared off him in the second before he falls to the ground. Imagine him gushing open, and the thousand-fold hairy waves gushing into him faster than his own viscera can gush out. Really, this is one of the most charming concepts in all the annals of creative murder.

Mad birds could do it, pouring onto him from every sky and air. Or mad insects. Or mad tree toads. Or mad ants, a billion of them at least, covering a man a foot thick in a blanket of fiery death. Mad catfish could do it, pouring howling out of every water in relentless frenzy to take the victim wherever he might be found.

Mad microbes might do it also, high-speed-operating colonial microbes spreading and catching like fire. But here there are difficulties in viewing the mechanics of the death struggle. Persons inventing or proposing highly imaginative murders might also manage highly imaginative observation points. The mad microbe bit could be made workable, but it isn't for everyone.

And there is one special form. Mad three-year-old human children are excellent, and the implications open unheard of vistas. Imagine a three-year-old child, patted and needle-pierced at the same time by an ‘Oh what a handsome child you have there, madame’ murderer. The child, quickly turned into a mad phenomenal creature, will break every barrier somehow and seek out its victim with uncanny directioning; and it will seek out many other three-year-olds on its mad career and bite them and envenom them, and these in turn will seek out the same prey in racing fury while they also bite and infect other three-year-olds. Imagine thirty thousand such three-year-olds converging on a victim within thirty minutes, getting to him no matter where he hides himself, eating the very doors of his house off their hinges to get to him, then eating his flesh and his bones and his marrow. (Little children everywhere love bone-marrow, but they do not always know that they love it.) Oh, wonderful, wonderful concepts!

Directional infra-red cookers were good, though perhaps a little bit overdone in several ways. One could put a directional nozzle on any such restaurant or home cooker and make it zero in on any organ of any man. It would cook the liver or heart of the victim where he stood, and leave no outer mark. It would cook his brains or his kidneys. There were many variations of this.

And there were the biodegradable murders. Biodegradables can be bought in any store, to turn noisome trash and accumulation back to basic earth. Lave it on a thing or spray it on, dust it as a powder or pour it as a liquid, the biodegradable stuff will disintegrate anything, and certainly it will rot a victim into good moist earth in hardly no time at all. Oh, only a little bit of it in a man's coffee or his wine, and he will begin to degrade from the inside out. He will provide good entertainment during the ten minutes it is going on, and then he will be stenchless and friable, slightly moist but not sopping, easily disposed of, and utilitarian.

Wonderful new inventions were made in the almost forgotten fields of floggings and crucifixions. These had already experienced a renaissance, and the second phase of a renaissance is the flowering of new art out of the new-turned soil. There were flaying machines such as our father never knew, and St. Andrew's and St. Peter's Crosses that spun like pinwheels and threw off messages in letters of fire. These were the ‘Strange Fruit Trees’ foretold again and again, and now made real.

Timed shrinking fabrics were good. They could be set for an hour or a day or a season. And inducing a person to wear them was no trick at all. A little flattery, a little salesmanship, and a person would be into a wonderful new outfit. Now these new fabrics were tough. The timing element had really been left optional by the makers, so that the dealer could cause the garment to disappear at whatever interval the market would stand. The shrinking element had been put in so that any of the clothes could be made to fit anybody. But both of these adjustments could be tampered with. It was fun to see a man being throttled by his own shirt collar, and there no way he could get out of it. It was fun to see a man cut in two by his own belt, or to see the hands of a lady severed off by the timed shrinking of her own cuffs, or to see a head crushed like a melon by its own hat.

But the real shrinking achievements were done by the infusions that would unsize both living and unliving stuff. This trick was at first ruled out as impractical by the Murder Contest judges, but a terrible howl went up at the exclusion. It was pointed out that the AAA International Material Handlers already had such shrink-powder and used it regularly. They used it for shipping bulk baled goods, reducing them to a very small size, and then enlarging them to original bulk at destination. And AAA had already shipped some people by this method, but it was very tricky and most of them had died. But, since the technology was already in existence, the judges had to allow it.

The commoner form of the suggestions was to have the victim shrunk to small size where he could be done in by many different methods and could be subjected to indignities while he was being done in. But a more sophisticated way was to have the murderer shrink himself and so obtain strange entry and launch crunching internal attack.

Embulking pellets are good. Intrude one into the victim's food and he will grow exponentially till he explodes. All the modern techniques are fruitful, and all the old procedures can be refined. Implements are updated, and there are more imaginative sorts of debowelings suggested every day.

Killing with words was given a bloody literalness. This was a real triumph. Everyone was very pleased with the context. “It shows that the people are still thinking,” one magistrate said.

John Mogul, the chief of ‘Track and Total’, held up his two hands with five digits extended on each of them to indicate that only ten of his primary targets were left alive and that three of them were dead. And round the world, song-singers and rope-jumpers gave his newest crowing and prediction, each in his own tongue:

“Ten little starvelings pale and thin

From empty pot to dine

Flay the tenth and show his skin,

Then there are nine.”

This verse indicated that Cardinal Ti was dead and that the next in line was Cardinal Artemis of Santa Cruz, and that he would be flayed alive.

And after this, the killings would go much more quickly.

7

Persons in the same trade should know each other. The more specialized the trade is, the more restricted it is, so much the more the members of it be acquainted. When a trade is of an absolutely specialized nature, and the members of that trade are very small in number, their acquaintance is well-advised.

Count Finnegan and Herman Hercules both followed the trade of being doubles to Princes of the Ekklesia in Flight, a very specialized trade and one restricted to thirteen members. These two met by an arranged accident, and both of them were tracked and bugged wherever they went.

“I am an ugly little bugger, Finnegan,” Herman said. “I do not mind this. There are many persons who like me and who even like my ugliness. My primary, Cardinal Erculo, is a beautiful little bugger, however. And yet we do look exactly alike. How can this be? It is not a question of a more beautiful soul shining out of him and making him beautiful. Finn, I don't know about my Cardinal but I do know about myself. I'm a good guy all the way through and I have a beautiful soul; I know this. And I do look beautiful when I'm playing the role of the Cardinal, and he does look ugly when he's playing the role of me. Roles will do a lot for one.”

“Roles and settings,” Count Finnegan said. “It reminds me of a great arrangement that was once presented to a highly select council for judgment. A group of artists of pure instinct had put this arrangement together. The question had been asked whether there was such a thing as beauty in arrangement and proportion, or whether the whole idea was a mere accommodation. The group of artists said that there was such a thing, and that they would be able to make a convincing approach to it, even if they could not absolutely effect the thing itself. One anti-artist who was there said that there was no such thing as beauty in arrangement or proportion, or in anything else. So the artistic arrangement was made. It consisted mostly of objects, some of them brightly colored abstractions, some of them facsimiles, straight or offset, of real things. They were all well done. Lighting effects constituted other elements of the display, as did a faint dripping of music. Odors, nostalgic as well as symbolic, were other elements in the arrangement. It was excellent. The persons of the select council pronounced it to be something between a convincing approach to beauty in form and the absolute effecting of that beauty.

“ ‘Wait just one color-corrected minute!’ said the anti-artist. He picked up one of the thousand or so objects in the display and let the persons of the council view the thing with one piece missing. Then he put the piece back exactly as it had been. It was no use. The near approach to beauty had been shattered by that removal, and it could not be reconstructed by the replacement of the piece. It would be like trying to reassemble a soap-bubble that had burst.”

“And there will always be at least one anti-artist present,” said Herman Hercules. “That was good, Finnegan. That serves them right for bugging us. The bug will have recorded Count Finnegan the Artist talking like an artist, lest there be any doubt who you really are. But will any bug ever record Herman Hercules making a really convincing approach to beauty? I was a wrestler, Finnegan, in my youth and well into my middle age, and my ugliness was one of my attractions.”

“I know it. I saw you wrestle in New Orleans at the old Decatur Street Arena. I saw you once in a ‘Nine Man Free-Style Midget Wrestler Melee’.”

“Yes, that was before I was champion. For many years I was the ninety-nine pound champion of the world. As you know, one must be under five feet tall and under one hundred pounds to be a midget wrestler. I was just under in both respects. So is my primary, Cardinal Erculo. So was Saul whom I knew in old times.

“I always followed such jobs as would keep me near the things I loved and in the ambients I required for life, just as a fish will always take jobs that will keep him in contact with water. Oh, the things that I have always loved, they are stadiums, they are hippodromes, they are coliseums, they are arenas, they are grandstands, they are opera houses, they are circuses, they are fairs, they are carnivals, they are amusement parks, they are racetracks, they are music halls, they are even museums; they are forums, they are red-light districts (and I am virtuous), they are all-night restaurants and newsrooms, and penny arcades. They are six-day bicycle races; I love them. Aye, and they are army camps on battle eves. And they are prisons. They are any of these things when they are inhabited. Oh, Finn I like even all-night movies. Almost all of us long-timers have to be among crowds. I know that you are acquainted with many long-timers, Melchisedech, Gregorio, others. There are far more of us than you would guess, perhaps as many as one out of a hundred. In a city of five million persons, there will be fifty thousand of us, and our combined ages will probably be fifty million years. All of us, for reasons you would have to delve deep to uncover, like to be with crowds. We have the fear of being alone. We have the fear of places closing up some hours out of the twenty-four. We are lonely in crowds, but that is better than being lonely alone. I remember Rome in the Empire Centuries, I remember Tarshish, I remember Babylon. Those were all raunchy towns, but they did have spectacles and crowds. To be with and before those crowds, I have been a tumbler and an acrobat and a tightrope walker. I've been a jockey of racing mules. I've been a candy butcher and concession boy, I've been a ‘get your hamburger, get your hot-dog, get your Coney Island sandwich’ peddler at every sort of ball game. And a side-show barker. I've been a dicer and a card-sharp, just so I could stay on top of the games and be with bunches of people when everyone else had gone home. There are private sorts of people who have no need of crowds. I'm not one of them. Our Lord Himself was only partly one of them. He made His own crowds, but he needed something else. It was for this reason that he spent so little time in Judaea which was loaded with private kinds of people. He liked the mixed-blood country to the north better, the Dekapolis region where there were always spectacles going on. He liked horse races especially. I am a town boy myself. I never liked the green country except when I toured it with carnivals or horse-fairs. But I was more myself as a monkey-faced midget wrestler than as anything else.

“Now the Cardinal Erculo, of who I am the exact double, he is a lot like me in his love of spectacles. So was Saul. He was called a tent maker, but how many know that he was a maker of circus tents? But the Cardinal has a love for himself being too central to the spectacles. How he does love his Cardinal's box in his native Milano at La Scala, that holy mother of all opera houses! Ah, that old arena on Decatur Street in New Orleans where I used to wrestle, they tore it down, didn't they?”

“I think so, Herman. I have been in abeyance for a few decades until just lately so I've lost track. I've heard that they've even revived the old canard that there isn't any Decatur Street in New Orleans. Herman, you muscular little mutt, you'd be a good man in the high rigging of a ship that I know about. We're going on a voyage on that soon, I believe. It's a ship that I remember in a disjointed way. It's piloted by a man in a golden mask. I feel very strongly that I should know him, but he'll not be tricked out from behind that mask.”

“Ah, you know him, Finn. You knew him for many years. And you may have sailed that ship even more than he has. I sailed with him recently. I didn't know him at first either, behind that mask. He says that it is for the vanity of the ‘All of Us’, the ‘Ekklesia’, that we must now be served by such outré instruments as himself, as thou, as I.”

“He mentioned the two of us specifically as outré instruments?”

“He did. Then I knew him by the broaching of the wine and the baking of the beans. Yes, we go on that voyage soon. We sail with him within one hour. We do, if the ‘Track and Total’ agents do not kill us first.”

“My own double, the Cardinal Hedayat, who is pontiff in petto of God, tried to explain to someone recently the importance of the thing that we maintain, the thing that the world has set itself the task of stamping out. He said that it was a special dimension. He said that it was a necessary element in everything and that the world would not be the same world without it. He said that any mathematics that disregarded it as a function would be a false mathematics, and any physics or philosophy that failed to include it would be false and incomplete. It is a real intrusion into time and space, and it has changed time and space irreparably. I say that it is the source that enlivens, the spark that unites, the only live growing thing on which all other things are parasites. It is the covenant that has changed the form of everything.”

“But not everybody agrees which is the Covenant.”

“All the killers agree that this is the Covenant that they must kill. It is, among a hundred other things, a biological mutation. But biological mutations are chancy for quite a few centuries and subject to being wiped out by regressions. If we break this covenant, then we regress. By the covenant, we are already supermen. But if we refuse it we cannot go back to being natural men, we can only go back to nothing. We cannot now be natural men, if we ever could, which I doubt. We must be supernatural men (which is supermen), or we must be unnatural men or monsters. And monsters are never anything else than creatures on their way to extinction. I'd better go back to my room for an instant, if we are to sail within one hour.”

“No, Finn, you're dead if you go back to your room. They wait for you there.”

“Then I will just take a midnight stroll through Bally Alley for one more time. Come with me, Herman, mutt Hercules.”

“No. They're in Bally Alley too. We will go to the harbor by the ‘harbor express’. We've a half-chance of living through it if we go that way. We've no chance at all if we go any other way.”

The ‘harbor express’ was a crawl-way through and under the cellars of buildings and through the tunnels that connected them, through storm-sewers and through ceramic tiles that carried electrical feeders, through heat ducts and thieves' catacombs. And the ‘harbor express’ came out under wharfs somewhere. But the midget Hercules could go anywhere and Count Finnegan could go almost anywhere.

Had there somehow been a slight slip in the conversation of Herman Hercules? Had someone not learned that role quite well enough? How else, but for some slip, could Count Finnegan have known that this was Martino Cardinal Erculo of Milan hiding in the disguise of his own double, Herman Hercules, and that it was not Herman Hercules himself?

Or perhaps those weren't the exact cases either. Perhaps it wasn't given to anyone to know the exact identity of these two double or triple masqueraders.

8

The killings had been coming along almost as well as could have been desired. Less than fifty of the Abdicated Princes were left, but they didn't really amount to anything, anyhow. Only four of the Princes In Hiding were left alive and they did amount to something, but they were going fast. All thirteen of the doubles were still, as far as anyone knew, alive; but they didn't amount to much either. They were a minor puzzle though.

“The doubles or shadows have all disappeared when their primaries disappear,” John Mogul said, “but they haven't been accounted for. I believe that it's simply the case that dead men don't cast shadows.”

A little horn-pipe music please. Then!

This is the ship that has rocked and rolled

And sailed in the scorchy zones.

This is the pilot who's thousands years old

(Skull for his face, and a mask of gold!),

And his hands are nothing but bones.

Finnegan, Gilbert, and Hercules

Ride in the troughs and rolls,

Under a spread of yard-arm trees,

Into the Santo Simeon Seas,

Into the Sea of Shoals.

Certainly dead men cast shadows. That's what history is about. John Mogul was wrong about the doubles or shadows ceasing to exist when their primaries were put under ground. All thirteen of the primaries had been buried now, under stones that read:

For Hedayat, “Upon this Peter I will build my church.”

For Brokenbolt, “The Lord walking by the Sea of Galilee saw two brothers.”

For Ti, “My chalice indeed you shall drink.”

For Merry, “So I will have him remain until I come, what is that to thee?”

For Leviathan, “So long a time have I been with you and have you not known me?”

For Artemis, “This is the Israelite in whom there is no guile.”

For Lloyd-Spencer, “And, leaving all things, he rose up, and followed him.”

For Salvatore, “Lord, thou hast proved me and known me.”

For Gregorio, “These seeing it shall be troubled with terrible fear, and shall be amazed at the suddenness of their unexpected salvation.”

For Runosake, “ — but others, save them, snatching them from the fire.”

For Doki, “Their sound went forth into all the earth; and their words to the ends of the world.”

For Gabrailovitch, “One of these must be made a witness with us of his resurrection.”

For Erculo, “Thou art a vessel of election.”

The last of the thirteen to die had been the prince of them all, the primary of Count Finnegan, Joseph Cardinal Hedayat of Antioch. His death (he was impaled upside down) was reported in the press as “Last Gate Swings”.

But the ‘Track and Total’ people hadn't caught or killed any of the shadows yet, and now they didn't care very much. They didn't even put the murders out to sub-contract. But they did put prices on the heads of the thirteen shadows. And the shadow-men were converging on a part of the world where there were sharp bounty hunters on land and still sharper ones on the ocean. Private enterprise had not yet died out in some of those chopped-up little oceans. A man there would murder you for four dollars, but that was surely better than having him draw four dollars from some commonalty for doing no work at all.

Count Finnegan and Gilberto Levine-and-O'Brien and Herman Hercules, three double-men or shadow-men who had lost their primaries were sailing on a ringing bell-way in the ancestral ship named the Argo. The bell-ways were resonating channels in the ocean that led one straight to the one hundred booming bells around the mooring stone north of San Simeon. There had been, when the bells first began to summon and ring there, a premonition or prescience of great things to happen in an assembly there. But now all the great persons who had figured in the premonition were dead and buried, the only part of any of them still above ground being the flayed skin of Cardinal Artemis. But the shadows of the great and hinge men were going to keep a rendezvous in the place of them. And there was a lot of shadow-play going on concerning their voyages. There was the pilot and captain of the Argo who had something very shadeful about him.

This captain and pilot wore a golden mask, a golden scarf around his neck, and golden gauntlets on his hands and wrists. These golden garments were made from combings of the Great Golden Fleece of Colchis Itself. All three of the doubles who had taken passage on the Argo knew this mysterious pilot; and one of them, Count Finnegan, had known him very well for many years. But an impediment was in-between. The pilot was swathed in gold fabric because the flesh was all gone off him and what was left was mostly bones. The pilot could not speak because of his throat condition (he had no flesh at all to his throat; he had, in fact, no throat; he had neck bones and nothing else in that region), but he could communicate. And he was always in good spirits. (His flesh had been reduced to ashes and now reposed in a cigar canister that had once belonged to the King of Spain, but his spirit and his bones were intact. He was, as everyone will guess soon or late, Melchisedech himself, the father of all magic men.)

The Argo sailed continuously against the wind and the currents, and it was not by ordinary standards a very sea-worthy ship. The monkey-faced midget wrestler, Herman Hercules, was constantly cobbling things together in the high rigging, and Count Finnegan was often following the keel-haul around under the ship to make emergency repairs. But, of course, the Argo could never sink, not forever.

“Let me see thy skin, Gilberto,” Count Finnegan said to his friend the Levine-O'Brien when they were half seas over. “You made certain marks on thy skin so you would know it if you ever saw it again.”

“Oh, no, no, no,” Gilberto said, and he seemed a little bit frightened about it all. “Something has gone wrong with those marks so that I am not absolutely certain whether they are the same marks I made or not. It is a frightening thing to wake up on a morning and find oneself in somebody else's skin. It is equally frightening to be not really certain whether this has happened or not. The marks that are on the skin I am wearing now, they are very like the marks that I made on my own skin, and yet there is something about them that shouts ‘Forgery! Forgery!’.”

“Let me see them, Gilberto,” said Count Finnegan. “I watched you make the marks on your skin, and I have my fine artist's memory and sense of style for these things. I can spot forgery.”

“I'd rather not, Finnegan,” Gilberto said. “Let's leave it in doubt.”

The primary of Gilberto, Cardinal Artemis of Santa Cruz, had been flayed by one of those arranged accidents that had become common in the world. The Cardinal had gone to bless a new cork-cutting machine in Portugal, though knowing the danger of assassination. And when the blessing was finished, the machine was somehow joggled to run. It reached out its arms and took the Cardinal in its grasp. It flayed his skin off completely in one piece. The Cardinal died almost immediately afterwards. But the skin, the skin, which skin was it, and which man was wearing it at the time? Sometimes doubles will identify so completely with their primaries that there's no telling them apart.

There was something else here. Finnegan had painted, using a radiation imprinting technique, a masterwork at least as great as ‘The Resurrection of Count Finnegan’, on the endoderm, the inside of the skin of Cardinal Artemis. He had done it when the Cardinal was hale and living, but the Cardinal hadn't known that he did it. Finnegan knew how to reproduce this inside-imprinted masterwork now. But was it on the inside of the trophy skin of the Cardinal that was now cherished by John Mogul? Or was it on the inside of the skin of this Gilberto Levine-and-O'Brien who was beside Finnegan now? If John Mogul had seen the masterwork and if he had it beside him at all times, the exploding and kinetic beauty of the work may have accounted for the strange behavior of John Mogul at his end.

A Saucerite from the Big Triangle region joined them on the Argo when they were short days from the mooring-stone. He was a pleasant person.

“You four here are the only gentlemen I have met on World,” he noted. “All others stare at me in that unseemly way that humans have. Then they poke at me with their fingers and ask me if I am one of the ‘Big Brothers’ sent to supervise their civilization. Do I look like a Big Brother?”

“You do, little owl-eyes, you do,” said Herman Hercules. Herman and the Saucerite were about the same size.

“I am an eleven-year-old student,” the Saucerite said. “And, taking advantage of a misunderstanding, I am enrolled in classes with eleven-year-old humans. But I cut a sort of path among those kids. In the evenings, in my saucer, I sweep back to my under-sea nest in the Triangle, and I often take several of my classmates with me. This makes me seem to be an important person to my classmates, and I love it.”

“What school do you attend?” Gilberto asked him.

“Gaetano Polytech in Balbo City. Next season I will go to the University of Miami if I can get a chess scholarship.”

“I want to poke you with my fingers myself, rude or not,” Gilberto said. “Well, are you real? Tell me, and I won't have to poke you to find out.”

“Does ‘Reality’ have to be that consensus grubbiness that calls itself ‘real’ on so many worlds? Oh, I'm real. But poke me, and your fingers will go right through me. Your world's like all the others.”

“You're a poor student, Sauce, not to know that our world is unique,” the fleshless Melchisedech, pilot and captain, said. “We are not like other worlds. You must realize that.”

“Oh, your world is of special interest, of course, since it is the ‘World of the Covenant’,” the young Saucerite said. “But it isn't a world of special accomplishment or attainment. That some of you are really the first super-people is likely, and that you carry super-seed is almost certain. But the results aren't overwhelming. There's unevenness in you, and the super-tang is rare. It's because of your special category and dimension that we send more students here than to many other places. It's because of your unevenness and barren areas that so many of us students return as empty-minded as we were when we left home.

“But some few of you are die-hards, and this interests us. Most of us, most of the people everywhere, are die-easies; you are different. I'll be covering the Conclave at Mooring-Stone for a little press network of which you likely haven't heard.”

Three others of the double-men or shadow-men, Cecil Octavian of England who was the double to the dead Cardinal Brokenbolt of Australia, Niku Kazuko of Honolulu who was double to the dead Cardinal Runosake of Kobe, Daniel Jean Boulle who was the double of the dead Cardinal Salvatore of New Orleans, were coming up from along the Mexican coast in a tramp steamer. They had been impersonating archeologists for the purpose of deceiving assassins and bounty hunters, and it was in their archeological activity that they had acquired the presence of a person who was about as archeo as one can be.

“It isn't a bad life,” this very odd person gave the stony communication. “We were the High Lords once and we had everything our way. We had the jaguar by the tail, as they say, and the Jaguar in the Sky was our own constellation. We were the Lords of the Square Hills which you now call the pyramids of Quintana Roo. The Holy Hills had grace then. They didn't seem so square-tapered and flat-headed as they are now, not before the spirit went out of them. And we had bells then, gold bells. Did any of you ever hear the rich clanging of solid gold bells?

“We understood prophecy. We knew that there would be a Pact and a Lineage. We were pretty sure that the Pact would be with us. Should it be with the monkeys of the trees, or the humans of the river shores, or the alligators of the swamps, or the whales of the ocean, when we were there? We were the Pyramid Lords. We were the Rulers of the World. We had a touch of the divine fire; we could feel it in us. We still have it. We maintained order in the world. The monkeys and humans and alligators and whales were our cattle.

“We set our golden bells to booming to call God to come down. I believe now that we were too early by a few thousand years. The bells set up a golden roaring with words; ‘We have pen and ink here,’ they called, ‘Come down with the Pact and we will sign it and then You can countersign it.’ ‘Be quiet,’ God said. ‘It isn't even morning yet.’ ‘Come down with the Pact,’ we set our bells to speaking, ‘and bring the morning with you when you come. We are ready now.’ ‘Be quiet,’ God said again. We rang the bells still louder. He came down then. And He turned all of us to stone. ‘Now you will be quiet,’ He said.

“So we have been stone-stiff and buried inside our pyramids since then, except that one of us is allowed to move about every few centuries, as I do now, and bring news to his fellows. ‘But I will not forget you,’ God had said on that day when He turned us to stone. ‘I will always treat kindly with you. And I have wonderful things in mind for you, after a few thousand years. Until then, be quiet.’ So He made a Pact with the humans instead, a puzzling choice, and He made it with an unlikely variety of them. And then He renewed the Pact, with the most uncouth humans ever. So be it.

“But now we have heard the bells ringing again, not gold bells as we once had, but bells nevertheless. I've come to report on the event, for an underground press of which you have not heard. It is the Pyramid Roots publication, and it is circulated entirely underground, from the roots of one pyramid to those of another. Why do we not have fresh lamb on this voyage? On the Argo, Melchisedech gives them fresh lamb.”

This rock-headed person was something of a clown, but it is distinction aplenty for a person made entirely of stone even to walk and talk. And Rocky was a pleasant companion, and he knew the passages through the shoals. He himself had laid these passages out originally, he said.

Three others of the double-men or shadow-men, Bolo Manolo, Douglas McAfee, Lloyd Cardigan-Pembroke the pig butcher of Tywyn in Wales, came down from Bimini on a luxury yacht, and they looked to be the richest and sportiest fishermen ever. They didn't talk with any Saucerites or Pyramid Lords. But there was one ancestral dolphin who followed along with them and spoke to them when they dangled a coded communication apparatus overboard.

Yes, the dolphin knew about the Testament, the Pact, the Covenant also. What creature does not know about it? He knew about the line which is the life-line of the world. He had expected, as they all had, that the Pact would be made with the dolphins as the most intelligent and most obedient creatures in the world. It wasn't. The Pact was made with humans, and it contained the sad clause that other humans would try to nullify it until the end of time. But the dolphins accepted their being passed over for the lesser folk. They had a bell of their own, the dolphin said, and it was the largest bell in the world. A number of the dolphin's fellows were towing it, and were already quite near to the Mooring-Stone.

“Should we set it to ringing again in the great underwater?” he asked.

“Do so,” said the shadow-man Lloyd Cardigan-Pembroke the pig butcher from Wales, the double of the dead Cardinal Ti. “We can't have too many bells.”

“Are any of you double-men familiar with the grass of the very long roots and the red tinge in its green that used to grow on Vatican Hill and nowhere else in the world?” the Dolphin asked conversationally. “It was named ‘Blood-of-Martyrs Grass’. ”

“We are all familiar with it,” Bolo Manolo said. “It grew in only that one place in the world and now it grows there no more. It is finished.”

“Not so,” said the Dolphin. “It is growing here now, up from these waters, and it has covered the mooring-stone with its thin carpet of red-flecked green. And the temperature of the water is rising, and the land itself is rising. Rejoice, for the martyr grass has come back.”

The Dolphin left them then to see about setting the big Dolphin Bell. In about an hour the men felt the underwater clanging from the biggest bell in the world, and it raised up their spirits like ocean waves.

The yacht went into the mooring-stone, as had the Argo, as had the tramp steamer from along the Mexican coast. Then the bounty-men who had the place encircled said that the bag was full enough, and they decided to pull the draw-string on it. But, somehow, they couldn't quite do it.

The bounty-men had nine priced men and three craft inside their bag, at Mooring-Stone, and now they would kill them and collect their price. The bounty-men knew those shoal-waters, and they knew how to close in on prey. But things had gone wrong for them. The shoal-waters were changing by the minute, by the second, and the bounty-men were being dashed to their deaths. Strange killer-shoals were appearing everywhere.

But four other double-men or shadow-men came through anyhow, after the bounty-men had thought they had slammed the shoaly gates. Arnoldo Rugutini of New York City, the double of Cardinal Gregorio of Messina, came in on an army copter. It landed him, and it whirled off again. Arnoldo had connections for things like that.

Mihail Majic, the double of Cardinal Gabrailovitch of Zagreb, swam in, a fifty mile swim in the open ocean. He was a World Class Swimmer.

Emmet Collins of Boston, Massachusetts, the double of Cardinal Merry of Cork, talked his way in. He came in a little boat that you wouldn't believe. He stopped at a nest of bounty-men and talked to them. He told them that he was a follow-up man for ‘Track and Total’ and that he was checking up on the job to see that nothing went wrong. He would signal to them from Mooring-Stone, he said, when it was time for them to go in for the kill. And they let him go in. And only when he was out of their immediate reach did they howl at themselves and wonder who had stolen their wits. It was the silliest story anybody had ever made up, and how had they been taken in by it? Oh, if you hadn't heard that Emmet Collins talk, do not ask how anybody could have been taken in by him. Since the world began, no man had ever talked as he talked.

The thirteenth of the double-men was John Giwa from Anecho in Africa. He was the double of dead Cardinal Doki of Douala. John Giwa had flown from Anecho to Marseille in France by commercial flight. He broke in on John Mogul there. He cut the twelve digits from Mogul's hands and wrapped them in butcher's paper to take with him. He put a skewer through Mogul's tongue when that man became too loud. He took a waiting charter flight to Miami. He took a barn-stormer down over Mooring-Rock, and he came down on the rock with a scarlet parachute. Then he went down into the underground cave or room that had been named ‘The Room of the Conclave’ when it was hewn out of the rock four hundred years before. (This popular name for the room had always been a mystery.) He found the other twelve double-men or shadow-men already there.

John Giwa banged his hands together loudly. “Holy men, let us get started!” he cried.

9

One other man then came into this strange room in the middle of the rock. This was Monsignor X of the ill-famed Roman-Babylonian Conclave which was supposed to end all conclaves.

“The Conclave must have a Servitor,” X said. How did he get there anyhow? He brought the Triple Crown with him, or at least a double of it. Where did he get it? How did he get it there?

“Is that volcanic activity I feel or is it an effusion of special grace?” John Giwa asked himself and all of them. “We know from our inner revelation,” he went on, “that all thirteen of us are not double-men or shadow-men. One or more of us is a primary man, a true Cardinal. Only one is required. One lone Cardinal left in the world could hold his own private conclave and nominate himself Pope. And the Holy Ghost would confirm that nomination.”

The violent-and-holy-man John Giwa then dumped out twelve curled and blood-caked things. They were the twelve severed fingers and thumbs of John Mogul the contract murderer. John Giwa dumped them as if they were snakes. They did move themselves and writhe. Then, coming into a pattern, they reared themselves furiously and extended themselves upward in trembling anger as if swearing vengeance.

Yes, there was both volcanic activity going on and an effusion of very special grace. In ten minutes, a sea-soaked country of ten thousand square kilometers rose above the level of the sea. And the Mooring-Rock, three square kilometers of it, rose a hundred meters above its countryside.

“Mooring-Stone,” John Giwa spoke the blessing to the new land above his head which he could sense but could not see. “Your old name of Babylonia Oceania now becomes Babylonia Sancta.” It was now changed from Oceanic Babylon to Holy Babylon.

Each of the thirteen members of the conclave gave a short talk. Then X asked the golden-masked Melchisedech to give a talk also.

“But I am a dead man,” Melchisedech explained.

“Dead man, speak us live words,” John Giwa said. And he did so.

Then X called their names for the vote. One of them, Count Finnegan, said “abstineo”, “I abstain.” The other twelve all voted for the same person. Then X placed the triple crown on the head of John Finnegan Solli. John Giwa said, “Reign in grace, Pope Finnegan the First.”

Was that the sound of mule-laughter ringing around the world? Many, many people loved Finnegan, but everybody found it the wildest joke ever that he should also be crowned Pope. Mule laughter, yes, and bleaker laughter also, and naked fury rising to the skies.

“My god, my god! (pardon the phrase, Ungodly Oaf), but it's the case of volcanic activity riding to the rescue like the old U. S. Cavalry,” the Angry League people shrieked. “The ultimate in lack of style, and corn, corn, forever corn!”

Pope Finnegan essayed a bit of humor to the conclave.

“This has been an Eschatological Comedy,” he said, “and stagewise — (what is that sound, giggling or the agony of a lost soul?) — and stagewise (with the world as stage) it has been a good comedy except for one thing. (Oh what is that tortured giggling?) There were no roles for women in the comedy; that was its lone defect.”

Then, like a silvery dam breaking, there was the sound of a most extraordinary laughing in high glee after many months of holding her laughter.

“Terrence Cardinal Merry of Cork, or else Emmet Collins of Boston, whichever it is, thou art a woman,” John Giwa spoke in a stern voice. “Explain this, X, it's an antic of thine. Finnegan himself was never capable of such.”

Well, if you were X and pressed to get an impersonator for Cardinal Merry, the hardest of all the cardinals to impersonate, why not get the best impersonator in the world? And on stage or on airways, a young lady named Emma Collins was the greatest impersonator in the world, of anything, of anybody. And she was a protégé of X, an old actor and impersonator himself.

But how in hickory-fired hades was Finnegan a true Cardinal? Oh, the last Pope before Finnegan, Paul the Eleventh, had named Finnegan a Cardinal in petto (secretly, in the breast) the afternoon that Finnegan had painted a quick but absolutely extraordinary portrait of that Pope. That was just one week before the murderous death of Paul the Eleventh.

“Finnegan, you are either here in ghost-flesh or else you have the gift of bi-location, something that only the greatest Saints have,” the Pope said.

“You are wrong, Holy Father,” Finnegan told him. “The greatest devils have the gift of bi-location also, but I am neither.”

Finnegan being named a Cardinal secretly, only three persons knew of the fact: Finnegan himself, Paul the Eleventh who named him, and the Holy Ghost. It was the Holy Ghost (never very good at keeping a secret) who leaked the information to the voters (there were two other real Cardinals among them) at the Conclave at Mooring Rock.

So the reign of Pope Finnegan the First (a big-nosed clown, a world-wanderer, and a master artist) began on a joyful note. One half of the people in the world, plus one, approved of it all. This confounded and mystified all the pollsters who had predicted an approval of less than one-tenth of one percent.

And Pope Finnegan fit in so perfectly with the prediction of the prophet Nostradamus, made just 430 years before:

When guiding light seemed ever quenched

Then Clio's very road he wrenched

Back to the true and happy way.

He is the Pope of Bells and Bay.

His coming is a joy to see.

Upon his shield a Green Bay Tree,

A staff, a paint-box, and a rose.

Outstanding is his holy nose.

But the people of the Angry League did not approve at all. They raised their furious voices to the skies.

“Corn, corn, shameful corn! The lack of true style in all of this is a planetary disgrace. A happy ending yet!! The ultimate of abominations!!!”

And there was heart-rending wailing and the colossal gnashing of teeth.

Gray Ghost: A Reminiscence

There are a lot of people who don't even remember the old Electric Park that was south of Tulsa, between the Peoria Road and the Arkansas River. It was the dog-racing track complete with electric rabbit.

The palmy days of Electric Park were 1920 to 1928. The grandstands seated eight thousand people until the northern half of the east-side grandstand collapsed in 1925. After that, the grandstands seated only six thousand people.

It was on Halloween night of 1924 that Anselm Sheen took four of us boys, his son Barnaby Sheen, and Hector O'Day, Grover Whelk and myself, all of us ten years old — and he took us out to Electric Park in his Overland touring car. Halloween night was always the last (and highest-stake) night of the dog-racing season.

“It's up to you boys,” Anselm Sheen said when we got there. “I'll buy each of you boys a ticket to the dog races, even though the tickets are forty cents each. Or, it being Halloween when the ghosts walk, you can go looking for thrills in the old Holy Ghost Burial Ground just a quarter mile south of here. I'm going to watch the races myself, but if I were twenty-five years younger I'd go to the burial grounds for my fun. Ah, I see that you're already starting south for them! Meet me here in an hour and a half. The races will be over by then, and your grisly fun should be over by then too. Be careful if you try the Devil's Handshake. About nine years ago the devil got a good hold on a little boy and pulled him all the way down to Hell.”

“We won't be taken in by that, Mr. Sheen,” Hector O'Day said. “We're too smart for that.”

“So was the little boy who got pulled all the way down to Hell nine years ago,” Anselm Sheen said. “He was a really smart boy. He reminds me of you, Hector.”

It was all weed-covered hard sand there as we walked south just a little bit after sundown. And the area had a sad scattering of runt apple trees on whose branches no apple had ever grown. As though drawn by some big magnet, all four of us headed for Devil's Handshake Dune. We felt more than heard the giggling of several medium-sized boys coming from a ditch. We even recognized one of them by his giggle. And we heard from the very middle of Devil's Handshake Dune (which was a sinkhole and not a dune at all) the horrified screaming of a little boy in death agony.

Now, the mechanism by which the Devil grabs a little boy by the hand and pulls him all the way down to Hell is this: Devil's Handshake Dune is only twenty feet from where the riverbank drops suddenly down to the verge of the river. The point of the drop is the face of a cliff about twelve feet high. Into the face of this cliff, boys have been digging tunnels and caves for years. And one of those tunnels, a meander of more than twenty feet through the sandy dark, reaches right to the middle of Devil's Handshake Dune. The Devil's Hole goes down to the tunnel at that point, just big enough a hole for a little boy to put his arm down into Devil's Hole on a dark Halloween Night — it goes like this: “If you're afraid to do it, then let's forget it. If you really believe the Devil will grab your hand and pull you all the way down to Hell, then run away from this place as fast as you can.”

“I'm not afraid,” the smaller boy says, “I'm not afraid of anything. I know the Devil isn't waiting in that little hole to pull me down to Hell.”

“Then reach your arm into that hole as far as you can reach it. And whatever you feel there, shake its hand. That's the initiation to join our club. There isn't any other way to get into it.”

So the little boy who wasn't afraid of anything lay down on the sand and put his hand down that hole as far as he could reach it. And the Devil grabbed his hand and had pulled him part way to Hell already. The little boy's whole shoulder was in the hole now, and his face was in the sand and his mouth was full of sand, and he was screaming in mortal fear.

Hector O'Day went to the edge of the area, and then went down the cliff that dropped to river level.

“Dirty Dugan!” he hollered into the tunnel entrance. “Dirty Dugan, let go of the kid! Hey, Dirty, we came past two of the tunnels that had already caved in quite near here. And the sand here is squeaking and shifting as though your tunnel was going to cave in too. Then you'd be trapped in there and you'd die in there.”

The Devil, or whatever was in the tunnel, gave a loud grunt. The little boy somehow got his hand loose from the Devil, or whatever it was. Then he got on his feet and ran as hard as he could, sobbing all the way, towards the lights and noise at Electric Park a quarter of a mile away. Electric Park would be a friendly haven to him.

Hector O'Day climbed up the riverbank cliff, and Dirty Dugan followed him up and stood there looking at us. “Where you guys going to now?” he asked us. Dirty Dugan, dripping sand, was a bigger boy, at least twelve years old. He had his nickname because he was dirty. He never wore shoes, and he was rough. But this was the third year he had taken the part of the “Devil in the Tunnel” and he was good in the role.

“We're going to Amos Centenary Black's cabin,” Barnaby Sheen said. “It's hairy fun just to listen to his talk on Halloween night.”

“Amos won't let me in his cabin because I'm too dirty,” Dirty Dugan said, “but maybe he'll let me stand in the doorway and listen.”

But none of us went into Amos Centenary Black's cabin that night, because Amos had just come out of the cabin door and locked it behind him as we got there. He carried a burning railroad lantern and a basket that seemed to have a jumble of things in it; and he started toward the “Monuments”.

“Come along, boys, if you want to,” he said. “I was just going to wake up Captain John Diehard as I do every Halloween night. He sure does get lonesome down in that grave. ‘If I could only hear a human voice again,’ he moans, ‘or even a half-human voice.’ Hey, I bet he'd even be glad to hear Dirty Dugan there.”

“That's all stuff about you waking up Captain John Diehard on Halloween nights,” Dirty Dugan said. “Why don't you do it with some witnesses present sometime?”

“Ah, but I will have five highly intelligent witnesses present this night,” Old Amos said. “I'll have Hector, Barnaby, Grover, Laff, and you Dirty Dugan. If people will not believe you five, as Scripture says, neither will they believe one risen from the dead.”

The crowd noise at Electric Park had increased to a happy roar.

“That will be the dog Tom Talley winning the first race,” Old Amos said. Amos Centenary Black was part black-man and part Indian. He was also (we have his own word for this) one-sixteenth Corsican, and he was the great-great-grandson of the Emperor Napoleon the First Himself. Amos was caretaker of the old Holy Ghost Burial Grounds.

Captain John Diehard was buried in a substantial monument in this burial grounds, and these words were graven on the monument:

Captain John Diehard

Born Jan. 1, 1800

Died Dec. 31, 1899

he took his own death hard, and he said that he would be back

“Captain John was old even when he was young,” Amos said. “He was sixty-one years old when he first became a soldier and a captain for the Confederacy.”

The monument rose only an inch above the ground, and an iron pipe came out only an inch above the monument. It had an iron cap on it. Old Amos turned a key in that cap, and then he screwed the cap off.

“Captain John Diehard!” old Amos called down into the pipe. “It's Halloween Night, time for your yearly waking-up.” But there was no sound out of the pipe that went down into the grave.

“I have a Galton whistle with me, Amos,” Hector O'Day said. “Dogs and dead people can hear it, but live people can't. Shall I blow it and try to wake him up?”

“Brandy is better,” old Amos said. From his basket he took a brandy snifter and a bottle of Royal Hanover Brandy, filled the one from the other, and let it down into the pipe in a little net. And then there was the sound of waking up in the grave below. A voice that sounded like a squeaky gate was heard down in that hole. “There's nothing like Hanover Brandy for waking the dead,” the voice wheezed. “Ah, this is the same stuff that took all the fur off the possum's tail. But to the gist of the matter. Is the south riz again yet, Amos?”

“Not yet, Captain John, not yet,” Amos said, “but I have some good boys here who'd like to shake your dead-man hand.”

“Reach me your hands and voices then,” the rusty voice of the dead man said. “I'm avid for company. I always wake up lonesome.”

“I'm Hector,” said Hector O'Day putting his arm down the pipe, “and I'm pleased to meet you, Captain John. Ah, it's like shaking hands with a pine board full of splinters.”

“Aye, my bones do feel splintery, I suppose,” Captain John Diehard said from below, “but it's a manly grip you have yourself.”

“You're next, Barnaby,” old Amos said. “Then Laff and Grover and Dirty Dugan.”

“It's a good grip you also have, Barnaby,” the dead man in the grave gave his praise. “If we'd had you at Sharpsburg, the South might not have lost. One man could have made the difference it was that close.”

But I myself didn't do very well at shaking hands with the dead man. I trembled, and I sure didn't have a strong grip. The touch of his bare rat-gnawed bones almost made the hair rise off my head.

“There is something amiss here, Laff,” the wheezy, squeaky voice uttered. “I am a prophet as well as a captain of the Confederacy. And in my role as prophet I know that your father came from the north.”

“So did yours,” I said in a jittery voice, and I never did know who put such words in my mouth.

“It's true, it's true,” the rusty voice admitted. “My father was born in Pennypack, Pennsylvania in 1750, but he was still a suckling when he went south. But our cases are the same. You are no more under suspicion than I am, and I myself am above suspicion.”

Grover Whelk put his arm down the pipe.

“Yours is the hand of a surgeon,” said the rusty voice below. “And we'll need good surgeons when the combat is joined again.”

And when the dead man shook the hand of Dirty Dugan he said, “ 'Tis the hand of a seaman. Am I not right, lad?”

“Almost, Captain John, almost,” Dirty Dugan said. Well, Dirty Dugan lived on a houseboat. Yes, there were houseboats on the Arkansas River at Tulsa in 1924.

“Dirty Dugan,” the squeaky, dead-man voice went on, “rotten as you are, there will likely be a role for you to play. Did you know that I used to be called Dirty Diehard? When I went on decoy I'd go upwind of a company of Unionists, and they'd cry out: ‘There they are! No, there! There must be a thousand of them from the smell of them! Let's get them!’ Then they'd all come after me and my smell. And then is when my men would take them from behind of them and slaughter them. But to business! Amos Centenary Black, did you place bets for me at the dog track?”

“I sure did, Captain John,” old Amos said. “I bet six dogs to win: Tom Talley in the first, Muscadine in the second, My Gal Sal in the third, Mule Whiskey in the fourth, Gray Ghost in the fifth, and Calaboose in the sixth.”

“But Gray Ghost is here in the grave with me right now keeping me company,” the dead-man voice protested. “He's a patronymic dog which means that he's named after me his human father. I was called ‘The Gray Ghost’ in my combat days, when I wasn't called ‘Dirty Diehard’. The dog Gray Ghost is here with me.”

“So he is, Captain John,” old Amos agreed, “but he will leave you when it is time for him to run in the fifth race. He will appear in the midst of them then, the doors and windows being closed as it says in Scripture, in the ready room just behind the starting gates. He will appear there just when they are about to scratch him, and this will astonish most of the dog handlers. But not all of them, for several of them have already caught on that he is a ghost dog.”

“This is the fifth year that we'll win big on the last night of the dog season,” the dead-man voice wheezed. “It should be a tidy sum that you have banked for me now, Amos. Enough to clothe and equip a company, maybe even a regiment.”

“It's a tidy sum, yes, Captain John,” old Amos said.

“Listen, you five boys,” the dead man rambled on. “There is a lot you can do while waiting for the news that the South has riz again. You can provide yourselves with guns and ammunition. The gun to get is the Mannings 1855 Territory Rifle. 1855 was a good vintage year for both Mannings and Territory Rifles and for Royal Hanover Brandy. Just fill my brandy snifter for me one more time, Amos.”

“Maybe there aren't any more Mannings 1855 Territory Rifles left, Captain John,” Barnaby Sheen voiced a doubt.

“There are as many left as there ever were, Barnaby,” the dead man argued, “since those premier rifles never wear out. More than three hundred of them were made, so more than three hundred of them still exist. As to gunpowder, use white powder only. Black powder will leave a smoke to give a way your position. Get your copper sleeves from Coopertown Coppersleeve Company; they're the best. And pour your lead into molds made by Leadbelly's Lead Mold Company Limited.

“Do not use straight lead. It lacks elegance. Let your shot mixture be ninety-five percent lead and five percent pewter. If you do not have pewter, use tin for the five percent in the mixture. Nothing else has quite the shine of a bullet made from this mix. It is the fact behind the legend of the silver bullet. But a silver bullet will not kill either ghost or devil, and this bullet will kill both. Amos, why don't you give each of these fine boys a drink of graveyard cider. Then we'll roll the bones a bit before I return to my death for another year.”

“All right, Captain John,” old Amos said, and he pulled five paper picnic cups and a jug of graveyard cider out of his basket. He poured our cups full. “The graveyard apple trees never have any apples growing on their branches at all,” old Amos said. “The apples grow on the tree roots underground. And they are the best cider apples in the world.”

Ah, they were. That graveyard cider was the best cider ever.

“Now we will roll the bones,” said the dead man in his grave. “They buried me without my dice but with my bowie knife. So after I'd been dead about fifteen years and time was hanging heavy on my hands, I whittled me a pair of dice out of my own ankle bones. And they are the luckiest dice I ever had. Amos, take that pair of dice out of your basket and I'll play each of you in turn Prime Seven for a dollar. First seven wins.”

Amos rolled his dice on the top of the monument by the light of his railroad lantern. “Four, is it not?” cried the dead man from his grave below. Well, if you're dead and eyeless, you aren't bound by the regular rules of line-of-sight. Anyhow, we saw that Amos had rolled a four.

“Now I roll,” the dead man said, and his ankle-bone dice made a nice rattle in his bony hand. “I have a seven,” the dead man said. “You owe me a dollar, Amos.”

The bunch of splintered bones that was the dead man's hand rose out of the throat of the pipe. Old Amos put a dollar bill in the hand which closed over it and then withdrew back into the grave.

“You next, Hector,” said the dead man below us, and Hector O'Day rolled. “Snake eyes, is it not?” the dead man called it; and, yes, Hector had rolled a two. Then the ankle-bone dice rattled below. “Seven,” said the dead man, and his hand came up from the pipe, “you owe me a dollar.” Hector put a bill in the bony hand which withdrew down below again.

“You next, Barnaby,” wheezed the dead-man voice. Barnaby rolled the dice on the top of the monument by the light of the railroad lantern. “Eleven,” came the rusty dead-man voice below, and it was indeed an eleven that Barnaby had rolled. “Now I roll,” said the dead man, and the ankle-bone dice rattled. “Seven,” said the dead man. “You owe me a dollar, Barnaby.”

“How do I know you rolled a seven?” Barnaby demanded.

“Oh, I'll show you,” the dead man said, and his bony hand came up from the pipe with the dice in it. It was a seven the hard way, six and one. Barnaby put the dollar in the hand beside the dice, and it all disappeared into the iron pipe.

“You next, Grover,” the dead man spoke, and Grover Whelk rolled the dice by the light of the railroad lantern. That railroad lantern made all our faces look almost as bony as the dead man's hand. “You have beat me, Grover,” the dead man said, “you have rolled a seven. Here is your dollar.” Grover had rolled seven, yes, a five and a two. And the bone hand came up with a crumpled paper in it, which Grover took.

“That doesn't look like a greenback, Grover,” Hector O'Day protested.

“It isn't,” old Amos said. “It's a faded gray-back now, but in its youth it was a yellow-back, a golden-back. The colors of Confederate bills fade after a few years, especially in the stuffy atmosphere of the grave.” It was a Confederate One Dollar Bill that Captain John Diehard had given to Grover Whelk.

“The dog Gray Ghost has left me now,” the dead man spoke below them, “but he always was a come-and-go dog. I remember at the Battle of Pea Ridge, he would be with me, and then he would be gone; but as a ghost dog, he put the fear of Old Clootie into the Unionists. Yes, I guess it's time for him to run his race. You next, Laff.”

I rolled a three. Dead man Captain John said that he had a seven. I put a dollar bill in his bony hand when it came up. I shivered when I touched its bones. I was never meant to play games with a dead man.

“You next, Dirty Dugan,” the dead man said. Dirty Dugan rolled a six. “I have a seven,” the dead man said. “You owe me a dollar, Dirty.”

“I don't have a dollar,” Dirty Dugan said sullenly.

“I knew you didn't, Dirty,” the dead man said. “Houseboat kids never have any money. Now, instead of owing me a dollar, you owe me a trick. When you find out what the trick is, in a week or a year or five years, it'll scare you liverless. But pay it you must.”

“No, you won't scare me liverless, dead man,” Dirty Dugan said. Dirty left us then and disappeared into the dark. But we heard him go into the river, and then we heard him swimming with strong but splashy strokes, home to the houseboat.

There was a great increase in the volume and delight of the noise at Electric Park, the dog track. “That was Gray Ghost winning the fifth race,” old Amos said. “He's a favorite with the Tulsa dog track fans.”

“There was dog racing very early in the Old South,” dead man Captain John spoke up informatively. “There was even an early mechanical rabbit. It was invented by Yves Denis Montalba in New Orleans in 1850. The rabbit ran on steam. It ran only once. It blew up and killed eleven dog-racing patrons. But humanity builds on such mistakes and moves ever forward.”

“How do you pick dog-race winners for Captain Diehard, Amos?” Grover asked him. (Captain Diehard was snoozing loudly now.)

“Oh, I get the winners from him, though he is not conscious of the part that he plays,” Amos said. “He has mantic bones. Though he's quite dead, except possibly on this one night of the year. I have but to stand on his monument here and call out to him below, and his bones will guide my hand in making the Xs opposite the names of the dogs that will win.”

“The way I envision things,” said dead man John Diehard, waking up (well, the return from the dead is a very spotty and broken thing), “is that about ten thousand of us great leaders of the Confederacy shall all rise from our graves at the same time. For best effects we should not be fleshed but should rise in our skeleton bones only; and yet we will be lively and completely competent skeletons. Coming so, we will send a wave of fear through all our enemies. On our rising we will raise our great voices like ten thousand powerful doomsday trumpets, and the entire South will rise with us.

“Our horses will likely rise out of the earth also, saddled and bridled and ready to ride, but the details of that are in the hands of the appropriate gods. My preference for my own horse (for I had eleven different horses during the various campaigns) is Roan Rex who was shot from under me at Vicksburg. No better horse ever lived. No better horse will ever rise out of the ground and live again.

“Well, that's enough talk and stuff for one night. I'll return to my death for another year.”

“Just a minute, Captain John Diehard,” Hector O'Day spoke sharply. “This already begins to seem like a dream. Could you give us some sign so we'll know that it was real? A lightning bolt, maybe?”

“It would be better if I blew the Resurrection Reveille on my bugle. It's the regular reveille with some exceptionally hot licks added. I notice though that wasps have made a nest in the mouthpiece of the horn. I'll clear them out if I can, and you may be able to hear my bugle when you're under way. A lightning bolt I can do, yes. That should be a good enough sign for the moment. And then good night to you till a year from tonight.”

Then there was a lightning flash that you wouldn't believe. The lights of Electric Park shone black for a moment as though they were a negative of the lightning. The runt apple trees stood out like X-ray pictures of themselves in that lightning. The thunderclap was instantaneous and earth-shaking, and sudden rain could be heard in the near distance. Then everything was wet — well, everything was wet except the dog Gray Ghost. He had appeared suddenly, with a winner's blue ribbon around his neck, and dry as a bone. He yipped a hello. Then he disappeared right down through the stone top of the monument and yipped another hello to dead man Captain John Diehard there below.

The four of us boys ran hard for Electric Park through the banging rain. Barnaby's father, Anselm Sheen, was trying to put the side curtains on his Overland touring car and it wasn't easy to do in the high wind that was blowing.

“What are mantic bones, papa?” Barnaby Sheen asked his father.

“I don't know, Barnaby,” Anselm Sheen said. “We'll look it up in the dictionary when we get home.” Anselm always made an effort to find answers to his son's questions.

He finally got the side-curtains on the car with our help, and we rode back into Tulsa. We were soaking wet but we sure did feel good. We sang one hundred rousing songs on our ride back to Tulsa (hey, we sure did sing good), we sang:

“We saw a man without a foot, and one without a head,

And one without no legs at all, and all of them were dead.”

“Did old Amos give you some of his graveyard cider?” Anselm Sheen asked.

“Oh, did he!” Hector cried, “three big cups of it each.”

We sang:

“Jack of Diamonds, Jack of Diamonds, your real name is mud!

In your hand are four aces, all covered with blood.”

Hey I didn't know we could sing like that. Whenever we missed a beat it was supplied by a dozen enraptured winged spirits outside of us.

We sang:

“Oh give me a nickel, give me a dime.

It does cost money to bury this body of mine.”

“That graveyard cider was hard,” Anselm Sheen said. “You've all got a snootful.”

We sang:

“Down with the dead men.

Down with the dead men,

Down with the dead men let him lie!”

We sang ninety-nine other songs on our ride back to town. We were getting some amazingly hot licks in our singing, but we didn't know where we were getting them till we pulled up at the Sheen's and Anselm Sheen shut off the motor of the car. Then we heard it, loud and total, the “Resurrection Reveille” with the hottest licks this side of Hell. We should never have doubted that dead man Captain Diehard would get off that bugle song for us. And we knew that he hadn't bothered to clean that wasp nest out of his bugle. He was blowing right through those angry wasps: they were the dozen enraptured (were they mad, boy!) winged spirits. We heard that bugle from four miles away.

We had a lot of fun that Halloween night.

Oh Happy Double-Jointed Tongues!

By Major Audifax O'Hanlon

(unretired)

“Of the great war of the 1940s, what do you remember most?” a forty-five year-old child asked me today. “Was it the heroism, the pageantry, the blood and death? Are these what you most remember?”

“No, I don't remember those things hardly at all,” I said. “If they happened, and I doubt it, they didn't leave much impression. I remember hard work, and tedium interspersed with it, and I remember the happy double-jointed tongues that made it all bearable. Oh, those tongues!”

“I don't understand you,” he said. “Do you mean real tongues that people have in their mouths and talk with?”

“Yeah, those,” I said. “Our guys kept them in their mouths most of the time, except when they took them out to sharpen them with emery stones. Oh, those double-jointed tongues and their double-jointed talk!”

“Could you give me an example of that double-jointed talk?” he asked.

“Yeah, Corporal Lonnie Sweetwater is an example,” I told him.

“If this thing is ever over with and I get home, there'll be a brass band playing for me there,” Lonnie told me one day. “I bet there's not one guy in three who'll have a brass band playing for him when he gets home.”

“There's many a slip between the stops and the mouthpiece, Lonnie,” I said. “Maybe the brass band won't be there the day you return. Maybe they won't know you're coming. Maybe somebody else will have your celebration crowded out at the railway station.”

“We don't have a railway station in my town. It'd be stupid to have a railway station when we don't have a railroad. We don't have a road either. We don't have a post office or a telephone. What we got when we want to send a message up from Flatland to Our Town is a female crow named Roxie. She can talk up a storm. I'll just ask her to tell my folks that I'm home, and she'll fly up that steep air to my place and tell them with embellishments. And I'll bet you that our eleven-piece band will be blowing and banging when I get there.”

“An eleven-piece band, Lonnie? That's an unusual number. What are the instruments?”

“We don't know the names of the instruments in our town. They're just horns and drums. There was a bunch of people having a festival in Green Peach Valley a few years ago, and they had a brass band. A quick flood came up and swept them and all their things away. ‘Save them!’ my grandfather bawled out, and each of us (there were only eleven of us in our town besides my old grandfather) ran down the mountain and each of us saved one of them from the torrent. Then we carried them up to the mountain-top and were mighty pleased with ourselves. ‘I meant for you to save the people, not save the damned drums and horns,’ my grandfather hollered. ‘Well, it's too late to do anything about it now. Maybe this will work out better anyhow,’ grandpa said.

“So we had eleven instruments from the brass band and we learned to play them that very day. But there were twelve of us in town, including grandpa, and only eleven instruments. We hoped grandpa would die to make it come out even, but he never did. Then I went down the mountain and joined the army, so that made everything even behind me. I'm going to try to bring my bugle home with me if I ever go, and then we'll have a twelve-piece band for the twelve of us.”

“Lonnie Sweetwater was the bugler for our company,” I said. “And he was good. He could jazz a bugle, or rag it, or swing it. There is much more to Lonnie's account, but I don't believe you're quite ready for it.”

“I begin to get a hint of what you mean,” the forty-five year-old child said, “but only a hint. Could you give me another example?”

“Adolph. PFC Adolph Martin,” I said. “Adolph had a letter in his hand, and I knew that he was going to show it to me, when he gave me the story that went with it. Adolph did tell some pretty tall stories. One of them was about thirteen feet tall at the shoulder.”

“A thing that many people don't believe is that the North American Elephant still survives in the salt-water thickets of Louisiana,” Adolph told me this day. “This creature is halfway between the Mammoth and the Mastodon, and ‘North American Elephant’ is as good a name as any for it. People who don't know their way around the salt-water thickets don't believe that it still survives, but it's the biggest and survivingest land animal in the world. We have one at home. Her name is Aunt Emma. She is the sweetest natured beast in creation, and the most intelligent. My wife, I'll confess it, is off to the brush-arbor honky-tonks most of the time, to the neglect of our children. But big old Aunt Emma takes care of our kids perfectly. My wife, I'll confess it, can't write; but Aunt Emma writes her letters for her. Aunt Emma, she'll take a pencil in the end of her trunk, and write. And she writes a fine hand, or maybe I should say ‘a fine trunk’. Here's one of the letters now. Look at it. I want you to be convinced of this. Isn't that good writing for an elephant?”

“Uh, in French? I didn't know that the North American Elephant could write French. But Aunt Emma isn't a very good speller, is she?”

“That's what they call ‘fanatic spelling’,” Adolph said. “She spells it just the way that my wife pronounces it. My wife, I'll confess it, isn't a very good pronouncer. But Aunt Emma knows that I want to hear my wife's voice, and I sure can hear it in that fanatic spelling. There are experts who analyze handwriting. Show this to one of them. A real expert would look at this and immediately say that it was written by a female North American Elephant. Look at the way she makes those T's. She's all elephant.”

I did give the letter to a fellow in Battery C who had a book on Handwriting Analysis and who said that he was an expert. And this was the analysis of the handwriting that he came up with:

“This was written by a female in her mid-twenties. She is an up-beat, uncomplicated, unworried creature, happy and high-spirited, probably given to joking and pranking. Look at the way she makes those T's. Perfectly well-adjusted. Nothing wrong with her at all.”

“But the handwriting analyst didn't know that she was an elephant,” the forty-five year-old child protested when I had quoted the report to him.

“Probably didn't think it was necessary,” I said.

“I begin to get a little more of the flavor,” the child said. “Do you have another example of this double-jointed talking?”

“Then there was Sergeant Robert Graygoslin,” I said.

“Hey,” Graygoslin told me one day. “They're talking about keeping me in the army after the war is over to be a special rifle instructor. Well, I am the best rifle shot in our company, and ours is the best rifle-shooting company in the world. And I could teach the guys to shoot as well as I do, but I'd have to take them back to East Tennessee to do it.”

“Tell me about it, Robert,” I said.

“We have a ravine three miles wide in our county,” Graygoslin said. “That's too far to holler across. So we talk across the ravine with a rifle. We'd cut a message in the nose of a bullet. In our country we all have good eyes and can read the leastest writing there is. Then we put the bullet in the rifle and shoot it across the ravine, and we take the fellow we're trying to talk to in the right round. Then he…”

“In the right round, Graygoslin? What's the right round?”

“How do you get along as well as you do when you don't know the name of the most fundamental thing there is? In the right round of the rump. Or we shoot him in the left round if he's left-arsed. Then he cuts the bullet out of his round with a pocket knife, reads the message on it, scratches the answer on a bullet of his own, and he shoots it off and catches the first fellow in his right round, and then…”

“At three miles, Robert? That's shooting!”

“That is shooting. We're all good. We can really shoot where I come from. You shoot the bullet anywhere else and the fellow's going to have trouble finding it. But you shoot it into his right round, and he knows where it is. We used to carry on conversations like that for a long while. They were a fine bunch of fellows around there, on both sides of the ravine. They had only one defect.”

“Oh, what was that, Robert?”

“They all walked a little bit tender. Hey, I courted a girl by rifle that way all one summer. She was quite a talker, quite a talker. You might say that I got just about full of her talk by the time the summer was over. She wasn't a very original thinker, and half the time she shot unmarked bullets. But I appreciated the thought of them.”

So was Robert Graygoslin quite a talker.

The forty-five year-old child began to look as though he had eaten too many green apples. “Yes, I begin to get the flavor,” he said. “Maybe too much flavor. Could you give me another sample of the stuff?”

“There was PFC Benedict Boudreau,” I said. “Boudreau's wife broke out in technicolour rashes every time she ate the special local variety of ramps. Ramps are ugly cousins of onions, but of a much greater power and scope.”

“That rash that breaks out on her, it's special,” Boudreau said. “You look at it close and it's newsprint, or it's news picture. Well, it's really different newsprint from the Camptown Daily Delineator. She even breaks out in funny papers. That's a fact, and they're funnies that nobody ever saw before. They're pretty good too. Well, people come from miles around to read the newsprint and pictures on my wife after she's eaten some of our special ramps. But, due to her extreme modesty, there's always a couple of type inches on her that she won't let anybody look at. And it's always interesting and critical news where they have to break it off.”

“Are they ever curious enough to get the paper themselves for that day and see what it says there? The Camptown Daily Delineator, you say?”

“That's the hitch, Major,” Boudreau said. “The atlas doesn't even show any Camptown, Louisiana. And the dates on the paper that rash out of her are always quite a few years in the future.”

“That would be interesting to read.”

“Come down to our place and see us after the war then. It's Roanoke, Louisiana in Jeff Davis Parish. We had hopes for a while that my wife was cured of her rash. A new doctor thought he had her well from it. Then she broke out all over again. She's got to quit eating those ramps or there's no cure for her in this world. She promises to quit, and then she backslides again and breaks out even worse than before. I think she's clear out of control now that I'm overseas. Come see us sometime, though. The chances are that she'll really be backslid when you get there, and you can read all the futuristic news you want to, and read the best comic strips in the world, and read that novel too.”

“What novel?” I asked him.

“WAR AND PEACE, the longest novel in the world, unless there's a Japanese novel somewhere that's longer. People have begun to grumble that she should be prosecuted for plagiarism. But she's got a lawyer now, and he says not to worry, that nobody can do a thing to her for it, that the copyright ran out decades ago. Besides that, the version that breaks out on her is a little bit different. She's syndicated now and making good money, so she'll probably divorce me. The big money I make as a PFC in the army isn't nothing to her now. She's got the running futuristic news working for her, and those comics which are at the same time the funniest and the raunchiest in the world, and the novel WAR AND PEACE that nobody knows how it's going to end. She's rich from the syndication.”

“Isn't WAR AND PEACE going to end the same way Tolstoy made it end?”

“I don't think so, Major. The way she's rashing out with it, it looks like Napoleon is going to win in her version.”

The forty-five year-old child began to look as though he had eaten too many road-apples. “How many soldiers were there in your company?” he asked me.

“Two hundred and forty-six,” I said, “and they were all masters of that double-jointed talk. Except me. I never could do it. But let me give you a couple hundred more examples of their talk.”

“Ah, thank you. I have enough material now,” the forty-five year-old child said. He put his notebook in his briefcase and walked away.

But it's nice that the children of today still take an interest in things like that.

Promontory Goats

You with shelly horns, rams!

And promontory goats!

 — Meredith

I am surely the unlikely choice to write the introduction and correlation of this assessment-collection of the surviving works and personalities of Kasmir Szymansky.

Well, who wouldn't be an unlikely choice for it?

But I never liked Casey.

Well, who did?

This brings us up against a cliff right at the start. Casey Szymansky had a lot of assets that would seem to compel his being liked. He was handsome. He was talented. He was friendly, in a sometimes stumbling sort of way; and real friendliness often has this stumbling quality. He was not arrogant. He was not mean. He did not steal. He did not slander. He did not lie. He often offered a helping hand, most especially to those who needed it the most. He was rich in a pleasantly moderate way. He was iceberg-generous, as they say, meaning that he managed to conceal at least seven-eighths of his generosities. He was entertaining. He was hard-working. He had taste. He had kindness. He had intelligence of a high grade. He was neither drunken nor profligate. He was presentable. He was well-connected, and he kept no skeletons. No real scandal ever touched him. He had a good sense of the grotesque and a good sense of humor. He was his own worst enemy. But he was not, except on rare and short occasions, the enemy of anyone else. He was never jealous of the success of others. He was the master of many subjects, and he could match the interests of almost anyone. He gave some of the finest small parties in town. He had a fine fund of unoffending and undirty jokes and stories. He went out of his way to do favors that no one else would think to do at all.

How did we manage not to like him?

Well, it wasn't easy, but we all managed it. There wasn't any collusion among his acquaintances on this. Each of us refused to like him by an individual effort.

There is very little of his work left in any field, and this is all the more amazing because he produced such mountains of work. In drawing and painting, in music, in verse and in prose, he cranked out a very lot of it. He destroyed most of it. The chimney of his house was called the Black Chimney of Hubbard Street because he burned so much of his stuff in the fireplace of his old house there. He sometimes recited his pieces to small groups, said that he would publish the things in the next issue of the Crock, and then destroyed the material. It is for this reason that even the scanty amount printed here is at least half reconstructed from the memories of those who heard it from him. Others of his things have been found in single surviving copies of some issues of the Crock. He often tried to corner and destroy entire issues, and my own collection has several holes in it. In each case, he said that he had no copy, that he wanted to run the sheets through a copy machine, and that he would return them the next day. And in each case he later confessed that he had burned them.

We all wish that we had more of his work today, but we don't particularly wish we had more of him today.

I suppose that his faults and his failures lay in his Elective Affinities. He didn't elect the same affinities that most of us did. I speak of his surviving works and his surviving personalities, but it is the most shoddy of each category that has survived. He was, I suppose, slightly insane. He certainly saw some things as exterior and material objects that the rest of us did not see at all. His ideas of ransom and compensation and soul-trading were hardly orthodox. But he did not preach these ideas. They had to be dragged out of him, often by very unfair badgering.

Casey was not an extremist in politics or philosophy or theology or common outlook. The only thing he was extreme in, besides his pursuit of excellence, was his compassion. Is it then a sin to be compassionate in the extreme? In Casey's case, yes; I suspect that it was a serious sin. The special case by which Casey was so pursued and ridden was the old scholastic question of the Final Redemption of the Devil.

I was at boarding school with him in our high school days, and he was ridden by this obsession even then. We told him that it was, after all, a private matter between God and the Devil. He said that the put down had not been a private matter, and that the redemption should not be either. Our head-master, an old Benedictine priest, asked him why he made it his business.

“I have appointed myself advocate,” Casey said (he was about thirteen years old then) “and that is what advocates are for.”

“Kasmir, we do not have any revelation on this point,” the old priest said. “You are free to believe what you will on it.”

“I insist on revelation on this point,” Casey said. “If anyone is denied a second chance, then we are all entitled to know about it.”

As Melchisedech Duffey once said, a person should select his monomania early in life and stick with it. Casey surely stuck with his.

The form of this attempt to find and assemble the essence of some fifty years of Casey's works and days, from the time he was about fourteen years old, will be shaped by the container that was Casey himself. The surviving essence, which should obey the laws of all gases, ought to conform to the shape of the empty container that Casey left by his going. I suppose that it does, but there are anomalies here and there. The container even now, is not as empty as it looks. There are still invisible configurations and promontories in that emptied crock, and the essence will shape itself to them even when we are not aware of them. So it is a very peculiar shape that this assessment-collection takes.

Casey was unique, and it may be that a person who is really unique is not required to be anything else. He was, however, several other things. As to that state in which he presently finds himself, may he rest in peace (except for that one hour out of every twenty-four which he held to be special).

Demetrio Glauch

All Souls Day, Chicago

1984

RED SKY IN THE MORNING

And now a posse's up and got

And ‘nobly losts’ are found.

I think he should be rescued not.

I think he should be drowned.

So long as there's a sordid lot

That writhes unseemly low,

I think that God sometimes forgot

The things he used to know.

I fear the blade that skinked and shined,

I fear the lopped-off head.

I think that God is colour-blind

To certain shades of red.

There is nothing so ineffective as half-way denigration. It just makes nothing worthwhile. What is the fun of running a needle into a balloon with all the air already let out of it? How will you get a noise from an empty balloon?

Where is the worth in confronting a ‘Great Ethical Teacher’? What is so misfired as ‘Jesus the Incendiary’? What is so revolting as ‘Jesus the Revolutionary’? What could be duller than ‘A Hippie named Jesus’? What could be wronger than ‘Teacher of Righteousness’? Judas Priest, how would the ‘Christ of the Essenes’ be worth blaspheming? How could any of these emptinesses be held responsible for anything? And I do want to hold someone responsible.

I believe there is a time for absolute stubbornness against either the prevailing order or disorder, but anyhow against whatever prevails. There is an absolute wrong that has the duty to contradict the absolute right. Absolutes must be pierced and deflated. If everything goes well in the universe, then I have the duty to see that something goes ill with me. There cannot ever be one absolute statement anywhere, if even one person contradicts it. Only the bottom of the well knows just how deep the well is. I will be the bottom of the world. If I suspect that there is something lower, then I will go lower. There is no one so vile that he should not have an advocate. If anyone ever is placed below salvation, then salvation should be rejected by all.

There is always the question of whether I am vile enough to do my chosen task successfully. It is necessary that, if I am to fill the role rightly, I must be the most vile person in the world. I work at it often, but I am not able to be as vile as I would wish. In everything that I do for others, I must do the best that I possibly can. In everything that I do for myself, I must do the worst that I can. If I am not vile enough to do this, then I fail to establish a rule. I have to be refused in everything but the last thing, or it's all lost. Oh pray that I may do badly enough to come to the bottom of all this!

OH LET THE DEVIL GO

Across the bloody rivers and

The smoking rocks, a road that still leads down

Even further

In a blood red glow,

'Tis the Devil burns, incontinent

His stool a sharpened goad that eviscerates and fissurates

With woe, woe, woe!

     It's no matter that he knowed this,

     When he planted this and growed this.

Oh God Almighty, burn me there,

And let the Devil go.

(Chorus: Oh God Almighty, burn me there,

          and let the Devil go!)

The pain it was a screaming that

The eye could only wonder it.

The burning flesh was noisome and

The guilt an over-flow.

The justice and the judgment it

Was boggle it and blunder it.

Oh something cries upon the crags

and something cries below.

     Oh let the mountain thunder it

     And hide the howler under it.

Oh someone, someone, burn me there,

And let the Devil go!

(Chorus: Oh someone, someone, burn me there,

          And let the Devil go!)

The Devil's reprehensible

and that's the gut and guff of it.

He chose it all with open eyes and set himself to crow.

He wasted flesh of innocents

and that's the stinking stuff of it,

He poisoned every spring, and he defiled, but even so

     That side is sure the rough of it,

     Enough of it, enough of it!

Oh put me in the fiery pit!

Oh let the Devil go!

(Chorus: Oh put me in the fiery pit!

          Oh let the Devil go!)

Six lines are stricken out here as too vile to be read.

     And then:

Oh let the Devil loose at last

Let Casey go to Hell!

(Chorus: Oh let the Devil loose at last!

          Let Casey go to Hell!)

FROM THE COMMENTARY OF CLARENCE SCHRADE:

“Casey's verses are all doggerel… His musical compositions hide a greatness, but they hide it well. His drawings are all comic, but only a few of them are meant to be. Let us consider the drawings on the opposite page:”

(For technical reasons, there is no drawing on the opposite page, but Schrade's description will suffice.)

“This supposed itself to be a drawing of hell, but it is a second-hand drawing of a second-hand hell. We believe that, in most respects, it is authentic. Well then, that means that hell is a second-hand or second-rate place.

“Casey has always wanted to draw, and he has always drawn badly. He tried many times to get his drawings into the Crock, using false names on them. But I always told him, as long as I was art editor, he was out. He would have to fire me from the Crock to get any of his things into it. And then he slipped half-a-dozen of them in once when I was in the hospital. I was glad they had appeared, for certainly no one else had ever had anything like them.

“Spend a little time on the picture. It will haunt you as a better picture would not. The deforming element that is in all of Casey's art rings true here. He is rendering objectively deformed things. The four men he burlesques in this, Dali, Doré, Bosch, Finnegan, all knew hell. All portrayed it authentically, but with a light touch. This gives a queer contrast between the hellscapes done authentically but lightly and the burlesques of them done with clumsy humour and heaviness.

“In mystical writings we come on the phrase ‘The Iron Meadows of Hell’ so frequently as to lead us to believe that there is objective validity to this idea. The iron meadows are in this picture by Casey, and they have the characteristic of being everywhere blurred and doublelined.”

TO FRANCIS THOMPSON

If yet one field remains beflooden,

One unforgiving not set right,

For all you say to dawn ‘Be Sudden!’

More sudden yet will be the night.

About those pinions, friend, my Francis,

That beat at these clay-shuttered doors

With sparkles yet, with light, with dances,

Aye, beat those wings at mine, or yours?

For lost compassion, sold or bought her,

Or traded her for broken midge, — 

And lo, Christ walking on the water

Forgets the troll beneath the bridge.

Now the troll beneath the bridge, the subject of my sermon of this day, is the Devil. The bridge-keeper, the Pontiff, the Vicar, has the care of only the top side of the bridge. What goes on under the bridge is out of sight and out of mind, and yet it's an interesting life under the bridge. Sometimes a body will float by, and it may have some slight money in the pocket or gold in the teeth. And then the sub-pontine people have always been overly interested in bodies.

THE LIFE OF CASEY

The morning isn't ever neat,

Prae-prandium is seldom stately.

The dawn, they say, has golden feet:

But have you looked at them quite lately?

The spirit sags, the clock is fleet:

Oh what a world in which to waken!

Oh why should I stale crusties eat

When Casey has both eggs and bacon?

There is an evil in the land

That lurks, and cheats at easy-acey.

Oh why can all not upright stand

And live the life of Goodman Casey?

It is always a pleasure to be envied and to be looked up to.

I have always had an affection for witches. I met or conjured my first one when I was five years old, the summer before I started school. I read a story about a witch (I was precocious and I read early), and it contained the formula for conjuring a witch. At midnight you stand on the darkest corner in town, really a wide stretch of heath (but I didn't have any heath), and you say — 

“I stand beside a blood filled ditch

Where dead men hang in trees to guide me.

I conjure you, Oh Wonder Witch,

Come from the moon and stand beside me!”

She did. It worked, and it will work every time. That particular witch still drops in to see me sometimes when she comes to Chicago. Her name is Tshowax.

The gallows always smells of rope,

I don't know why it shouldn't.

A gassing chamber smells of soap,

Though I'd have bet it wouldn't.

If time is pressing, take your love

Out like a kite and fly it,

For benison is from above,

And fate is low. Defy it!

FROM THE COMMENTARY OF ELENA O'HIGGINS

“I disapproved very much of the advertisement that Casey once ran in the Crock: ‘Genuine consecrated hosts $1.00 each, sent postpaid by defrocked priest who still has the power of consecration. Use for fun or experiment, or for special rites. Prodigies sometimes occur during their use.’ A box number was given to send to. I do not know how much response there was to that ad, but it ran in at least three issues of the Crock…

“Notice the musical score by Casey on the facing page. It is the only portion of the scoring for the organ that I was able to salvage before he destroyed a very great work. What looks like charring around the edges of the musical sheet is indeed that.”

(For technical reasons, there is no musical score on the facing page, but the description of Elena O'Higgins will suffice.)

“This is consecrated music that Casey has written here. Oh try it, play the fragment, and think what the whole might have been! But what he substituted for it after destroying it was supposed to be used for fun or for experiment or for special liturgy. ‘You can go to hell for such special liturgies, Casey,’ I told him. ‘That's the idea, Elena, that's the idea,’ he said.

“The substitute piece is not scored for organ or any sacred instrument. It is now scored for the kazoo, for the peewee guitar, and for the musical saw, for God's sake! They use it at St. Cristina's Church where they're working hard to be the most trendy parish in Chicago.”

FROM THE COMMENTARY OF TONY APOSTOLO

“I have been a newspaper reporter and editor and feature-writer for enough years to have a matching story for everything. If an Angel out of Heaven should come down this evening bringing the text of the Fifth Gospel, I could take him to old files and show him that I had done the Angel-out-of-Heaven-with-the-Text-of-the-Fifth-Gospel story seven years ago. And if the living Hitler should walk through that door right now, I would be able to tell him ‘This is not so exclusive as you might think.’ I have the record here of seven different reporters to whom seven different Hitlers have made appearances. It isn't enough for a living Hitler merely to appear and tell his story. He has to be able to do something else if he's going to put together any sort of act at all. Can you sing? Can you do imitations? Can you play the mouth-organ?

So the claims made by and for Casey Szymansky do not come to me as new claims. The idea of a man trading souls or trading places with the Devil to liberate him from damnation is a frequent psychological quirk or obsession. Casey is the fourth man I know who believes he has done it. And he is the fifth man I know who believes he is the Anti-Christ. And he is the sixth man I know who believes that he is the Scape Goat for all the sins of the world.”

The Scapegoat takes the rocky road

And never ever wins.

He's goaded by a gimpy goad

And laden with our sins.

FROM THE COMMENTARY OF D'ALESANDRO

“Casey walked into one of my post-graduate classes one afternoon when I was putting several series of trial balloon equations on the blackboard. Casey walked up and changed one value in the ninth equation. Several of my more brilliant students laughed, though I do not know why. One of them then reversed a vector value in my nineteenth equation. And Casey and the more brilliant students laughed still more loudly. I asked what it was.

“ ‘You'll get it after a while,’ Casey said. ‘Some people just aren't as fast as others at things like this.’ (And I am one of the world's leading mathematicians.)

“But I did not get it, not in a day or a week or a year. I asked my most brilliant student John Tweed (who had meanwhile become world-famous) about it. ‘It would spoil it to tell it,’ he said. ‘I don't believe there is any way it could be put verbally anyhow. It is just a couple of mathematical puns, oi, oi, in sort of dialect yet! Some people just don't get inter-discipline mathematical puns very well.’

“I still don't get it.”

The Devil knows the future only in fragments, but he knows the past completely, and he rides right up on the cutting edge to the present. That is where I want to ride. I want to know all the secrets of everybody in the world. I insist on it. And if I have to change into something else to know all the secrets then I will change into something else. I will change into the Casey Machine.

BALLAD OF THE CASEY MACHINE

“Oh friend, Oh my friend, Oh you mouth of a horse,

Oh you the most peachy impeachable source,

Oh tell me the things on the people so coarse,

And who was defamed and defaulted and worse,

Oh tell me what's par on the cheap-shotter course.

     Oh tell me perforce.”

“These things, Oh my crumb, are a dollar a line,

Or traded in moistness over strange wine.

They're not for the peasants, they are not for thee.

For God and the Devil and Casey they be,

     Or for fee.”

“I look in the windows, I hark at the wall,

I never will ever learn all of it all.

I want to know what's with the wax in the ball,

I want to know when it was last on the house,

I want to know who is behung like a mouse,

I want to know which has the heart of a louse,

I want to find out who's been milking my cowse.

     Tell me, grouse.”

“These things, my companion, may none of us see,

But God and the Devil and Casey, those three

     Who have it for free.”

“Oh mother, my mother,” the little child said,

“Oh tell me how rotten a life you have led,

The people you ruined from alpha to zed,

And addled poor father until he was dead.

Oh tell me the fellows with-whomish to bed,

On which the forbiddenish fruits you have fed.

     Tell me all.”

“Oh child, Oh my child, this is rotten of you.

The damage you'd do if you knew that you knew!

These things, little pretzel are hidden from view,

For God and the Devil and Casey, their due.

     Tootle-oo.”

“There's a way, my companion, my bacon and bean,

No matter at bottom it isn't too clean:

'Tis easy to eye and to spy every scene.

Go do like the case on the Casey Machine.

He traded off something that never was keen,

And now he knows everything lofty and mean.

     The Machine!”

The Casey Machine, for I will be a machine when I have made the swap, will know all about everyone. That is what I want to do. This will be all the satisfaction that the Casey Machine can ever count on, knowing it all.

You have heard of persons saying they would give their souls to know a certain secret. I am giving my soul to know all the secrets.

FROM THE COMMENTARY OF SILAS AND MAUD WHITERICE

“A cheap and shoddily-done encyclopedia was published here in Chicago last year. The first volume of it (A-C) was given away widely in a grocery-store promotion. Subsequent volumes sold for a dollar each with twenty dollars worth of groceries. About one percent of the copies of Volume One of this encyclopedia have an entry that is not in the other copies of it:

“ ‘ANTICHRIST: born in Chicago, U. S. A. on October 7, 1921, the son of Gabriel Szymansky a pawn broker and antique dealer and his wife Miriam Lessing. The child was Kasmir (Casey) W. Szymansky. His manifestation as the Antichrist was, was, was, organization formed in 1839 to work for the repeal of the English corn laws.’

“The verbal confusion at the end of this short entry is from running the defective ANTICHRIST entry into the following article which in most of the copies is headed ‘ANTI-CORN-LAW LEAGUE’. Could this be a hoax? Anything could be a hoax. The Encyclopedia was published in Chicago, and the elegant Casey often did printing for shoddy promoters. Did Casey himself insert the hoax? Or was it some of the droll kidders who worked for him at the old printery? A hoax it certainly was, but was its information accurate? Yes, the place and the date and the names are right. That is the where and the when and the from-whom of the birth of Casey Szymansky. And that is the where and the when and the from-whom of the birth of the Antichrist.”

SONNET TO PAINED VICTORY

From every pride beswollen-anima

Come vilest beasts to take the dismal loads.

Oh hear the scapegoat feet on rocky roads!

Oh hark the high backed swine of Gadera!

Pained victory, through fire, from death, some win,

Or many lose whose hands will not let go.

Oh what poor walking bones in mean escrow

For expiating promontory sin!

This is the desert traffic, hot with fear,

And prodigies appeared in pungent flame,

And texts on parched interiors of throats

Announcing things for here and after-here,

Or bales laid down of heavy greed and shame,

And bloody spume of promontory goats.

SONNET TO AN IRON SKY

I will not mourn on Purgatory's hills

If ever I will come to live so high.

We'll paint our dome consensus-blue for sky,

And sing our buried song of grindy mills.

'Tis really to be washed with hopefulness

And happiness in work begrimed and sore.

It's true we'd be content with something more,

Or less, or less, or less, or less, or less.

We glimpse salvation as a distant light.

Our crooked path will (such may we atone)

(It seems an aeon) rise a foot more high,

In hundred years punch three more holes in night,

And find each day our ground is softer stone,

And iron sun more bright in iron sky.

I am an unsavory person, although I do affect a delightful exterior. It is we unsavory persons who anticipate everything. Were it not for us, nothing would ever begin, and nothing would ever change. Or else things would begin and change very much as they do now, and we would not be missed. I suspect that the latter is the true condition, but I will act on the supposition that the former is true.

We do not really break any trails for people or things to follow, we know that. We do break trails, but they are all dead-end trails. And then other trails are laid out and they are used. Our own trails must sometimes resemble the latter trails in location and type; it would be strange if they did not. And our own short-lived trails will also differ entirely and fundamentally from the latter trails in most ways. Very well, we will emphasize the likenesses, and we will ignore the unlikenesses. And we will make our claims to primogeniture.

There had to be a dozen false chaoses before a true chaos was ever effected. There had to be a dozen false cosmoses or ordered creations before a real creation succeeded. There had to be twenty false falls before the two valid falls (that of angels, and that of men) took place. Falls are tricky. It is hard to fall from grace with grace, or even with an acceptable degree of awkwardness. Before the true redemption there had to be a dozen false redemptions; and after the true, there had to be many more of the false, and they are still going on. Before the compensation and the ransom there had to be false compensations and ransoms.

Before the term of the times, there will have to be many false terms. Before the return of Christ, there must be a dozen returns of false Christs, and one of them will be larger and more conspicuous than the others. Before the end of the world, there must be very many false endings; and I suspect that some of them will be very well done and pretty convincing.

I will take part in as many of the false preludes as I can. There might be a final upheaval by which the false will become true and the true will become false. Before final compensation, there must be a precursory false compensation to melt all heart-stones; and I have selected this as my special thing.

Some of our early efforts were not too bad. We made goats before sheep and asses before horses and buffalo before cattle. Does God claim that he made the goats and the asses and the buffalo. No, no, he claims too much. We made them, we the unsavory people.

FROM THE COMMENTARY OF HILARY HILTON

Casey wanted me to kill him. He almost dragged me into it several times. But all of that was only a piece of something much smaller. Casey's flight from life and from reality is a shriveled sign of the times.

Casey is an anti-hero, and he has all the kinky ideas that an anti-hero must have. But his main and overriding notion is only a bit of dismal show-boating. Just as all persons who claim they are reincarnated will make the pitch at being reincarnated from somebody high, Caesar, Napoleon, Cleopatra, the Queen of Sheba, Marie Antoinette, Joan of Arc, so all persons who claim to trade souls will have pretense of trading with notables of either light or darkness. Casey's pretense of trading souls with the Devil is this sort of fraud. If he does trade souls with somebody, he will probably trade with the sickest grub under the sickest log in the most extreme trash lot anywhere.

One would almost gather that I didn't like Casey, and yet I do like him well enough. He is totally useless, of course, and he is a coward; but many of my friends are. I admire his intellect, and his quick and balanced understanding of the arts. His fooling around with my wife, trying to find an easier and less demanding death than suicide, is the only real obstacle between us.

Sure, I pretty well know the scenario for Casey. There is always a tag on Casey that ensures that he will be taken care of. Such tags are placed on a person by the One who has the right to place them, and they must be obeyed. It's a little like the Mark of Cain which says “You must not kill this man.” There is a mark on Casey that says “This man will always require easy sums of money. See to it that he has as much as he requires.” There is a mark on Casey that says “This man must not be unduly embarrassed or harassed. See to it that he is not.” There is a sign on him that says “This man has a peculiar need to feel important. See that he does feel so.” There is a symbol on him that says “This man has a love of farce, and a fear that his farces should fail. See to it that they do not fail.” But Casey's whole soul-trading gag is a dangerous farce. I'm to see that it does not fail? What side am I on anyhow?

These signs are placed on Casey by God, and I'll not argue with God on such matters. I'll obey, though sometimes it gags me. There isn't more than one of us in ten thousand who sees such signs on persons (though other persons may see other signs to which we are blind). We are the only ones who would be able to do anything about such signs anyhow.

There is another sign on Casey that says “This man has to be loved. Love him.” God over my head, I have other things to do! You don't really know Casey. This could get sticky. But the sign is still there. Oh all right, I'll love him. But I wouldn't do it if it weren't for the sign saying to.

There is one other sign on Casey. Perhaps I am the only one who has read it. It says “This man is the Instrument for the Salvation and Damnation of Many.” So be it. Fortunately the sign did not say “See to it”. I wouldn't know how.

Hell was once a pleasant, though isolated place. Some portions of it still are. They are places of natural happiness with only the happiness of the Beatific Vision absent. But most parts of Hell are horrible, of pain more manifold, of suffering more extreme than anything that can be imagined on Earth.

The tradition of extreme torture was built up slowly in Hell. The persons in Hell drew themselves into groups. Even the most proud and solitary individuals, finally, after a few millennia, formed themselves into small, proud and solitary groups. It was a custom for persons there to ask for whatever pleasures or preferences they wished, and these were given to them. Then it developed that a person could ask whatever he wished for the others of his group, if he also accepted it for himself. And these groups began to arrive at rougher and rougher consensus. People, out of perversity, voted slight displeasures for their fellows, even though they had to suffer these displeasures themselves. And it grew. From the mouse of malodorous small enjoyments was born the mountain of taking pleasure in the terrible tortures of others, even if it meant the same tortures for the self. It grew and grew, it even overflowed Hell and spilled some of its stuff on Earth.

The imagination, over long stretches of timeless time, will devise tortures and pleasures in torture beyond credence. And the shriek is always “more, more, more!” There cannot be an ultimate in torture, since there is ever more extreme torture beyond.

The persons can get out of it at any time, of course. One may always withdraw from a group, and join a pleasure minded group, or none at all. But the torture groups now outnumber the pleasure groups thousands to every one. Oh sure the shrieking, horrible pain and suffering and despondency, the unending agony of it all is beyond endurance. But to withdraw from it would be to lose the ultimate lust, the pleasure in the torture of one's fellows, the joyous gloating over the screaming, even when one must scream in blinding pain oneself.

This is a little known, but true, explanation of one aspect of a well-known place.

And how of those of us who offer to change places with the damndest of those poor damned souls would suffer in their places. Is it rational to make such offers when these persons can come out of their tortures at any time? It is not rational, no. But it is a greater sacrifice to trade places with one who is too proud to accept release on compromise terms. And the Greatest Sacrifice is beyond reason.

SONNET TO OBDURATE GOD

Defiances are yet such petty things

From smallish minds to other minds too small.

Oh may we let all dim distinctions fall

And thou and we will equally be kings.

A commoner should treat with thee sublime,

But how the better treat if he should kneel?

Irreverence, they say, sets stars to reel;

They surely must be dizzy by this time.

A few demands for very minimum;

A clutch of questions straightly to be faced;

A list of things that we to thee allow:

Thou'lt haste and clarify thy Kingdom Come,

Else, failing this, thou'lt find thyself replaced;

We want it stringless, and we want it now!

FROM THE COMMENTARY OF MELCHISEDECH DUFFEY

We have to examine the person Kasmir Szymansky in the Argo context, in the Medieval context, in the secular context (of the last or the next to last seculum), and in the Eschatological context. His identity is slippery through all of these, but I will try to nail it down.

As to the last of these four contexts, we tend to forget that each of us has a part to play in this end-of-time drama. It does not matter whether we are dead eighty thousand years and are a distantly-related sort of interglacial man, we will be brought back to play a role. It does not matter whether we were a high or low person on the antediluvian scene, we will be brought back for the last drama. It does not matter if we died only a century ago and are in Heaven or Purgatory or Hell, we will come back to do a turn upon the boards. It does not matter whether we are alive in another place, we will come to the final place for the final show.

There will be quite a few persons in that eschatological extravaganza, but each one will be heard, as is each piece in an orchestra, and the absence of even one of them would be noticed. But it will not seem as if there are too many characters; and those billions will not be too many. A part was written for every one of them before the worlds began. Each of us will have a clear part, and each of us will recognize and know and understand the import of every other.

But a very few persons, and I believe that Casey is among them, will receive a script of their parts ahead of time. Some of these parts will require special study, either because of slight defects or retardation in the person or because of the intricacy of the roles themselves.

In his primordial role (the Argo role for the group to which he belongs) we have Casey as Peleus.

In the Medieval role, he is split into two aspects. He is Kasmir Gorshok (Casey the Crock) a ninth century scholar and necromancer in the Low Middle Ages part of this role. He is Prince Casimir in the High Middle Ages part of this role, but there is not really a serious split here.

In the secular context he is Kasmir (Casey) Szymansky of Chicago.

In the eschatological context, he is either the Antichrist, or (much more likely) one of the false and premature antichrists who will buzz about as flies of the Lord of the Flies. But Casey must not pass under the final dominion of that lord.

In all of the roles there is a certain consistency of character.

As Peleus, he is the great hero of Thessaly only because it is stated that he is that great hero. This is the sign placed upon him and it must be credited. He does nothing heroic, but he does little that is cowardly either. He is indecisive, and he is buffeted by accidents. He kills his half-brother Phocus by accident. He kills his father-in-law Eurytion by accident. He is badger-gamed by Acastus of Iolcus and his wife.

I remember him as a good and brave, but not heroic, crewman on the Argo. Everybody knew Peleus as a good man. Aye, as a good man that evil things happened to. He was the father of Achilles, and the hidden heroism of Peleus went openly into that son.

In the Lower Middle Ages, Casey was Kasmir Gorshok (the Crock). This man was a sorcerer and a person of great compassion for all small and unfortunate creatures. He wept so much over the misfortunes of helpless things that he wore out three pair of eyes. Being a sorcerer, he was able to make new eyes for himself. His own original eyes had been a deep brown-black. Those he made for himself after these were worn out were first blue, then grey, then green. (The secular Casey also had blue eyes as a youth, then grey eyes, and now green eyes; I cannot find out what color of eyes he was born with.)

Kasmir Gorshok in particular had compassion on the body louse, a creature that lived a dangerous and short life always sought after by murderous fingers. It was because of this particular compassion that Kasmir the Crock called on all his sorcery and invented and manufactured a race of artificial persons. He made them with warm and blood-filled bodies and gave them a fragrance that attracted the body louse strongly. Thereupon, the body lice left their human hosts (it had always been an angry and uncomfortable relationship) and went to live upon the artificial people that Kasmir Gorshok had made. Descendants of these artificial people are still living in the world.

The Animated Marvels that I myself made in this the twentieth century (and Casey in his secular manifestation is one of them) were constructed to much the same purpose. This, at least, is what I have told them all. But these hulking animations of mine just grin and doubt me. They say that I must have had some other purpose in making them, even if I have forgotten it. Well, if I had another purpose, I have forgotten it.

In the High Middle Ages, Casey was Prince Casimir of Poland, and he also became Saint Casimir. He was called the “father and defender of the poor and unfortunate”, but he thwarted the rich and mighty sometimes. He thwarted his own father King Casimir IV by taking a life-long vow of chastity and so refusing the succession. One can still hear the bellowing of the outraged old king on a clear night.

Prince Casimir died at the age of twenty-three. (‘Died’ in the case of one like Casey indicated a peculiar withdrawal out of the world for some centuries; but the people thought that he had died.) It would be best if all good and compassionate persons should die at age twenty-three, before being trapped into something awkward by the backlash of their own virtues.

The present (though presently absent) Casey, the Casey of the twentieth century secularity, is, like his old person of Peleus, a hero only because the sign on him says that he is a hero. Once again he is indecisive, and he is buffeted by accidents. Hilary Hilton and his wife Mary Jean are the Acastus-and-the-wife to Casey in the present case, but the badger game that they play on him is in reverse. Casey may really have sought death at Hilary's hands (Hilary claims, and has never been disputed in it, that he can whip any man in the world), but he found derision instead, and it hurt more. I don't know what Hilary wanted out of Casey, and I sure don't know what Mary Jean wanted.

The original badger-game, by Acastus and his wife, may also have been in reverse, now that I think of it.

Hilary Hilton is one of those who has mocked at the long-lived ones of us, particularly those who claim to have been notables in their pasts. But he does this to disguise the case that he himself is a long-lived one, that he has been a notable in his own past, that he was used in anecdote and fact by our Lord Himself. For Hilary was the certain rich man (St. Jerome in his letters gives Hilarius as the traditional name) who was not able to lay down his riches and so went away sorrowing, and now he will come hardly into the Kingdom.

In his secular person in the approximately present world, Casey has been a very good person again. He has estranged himself from his natural companions with his double talk and double-dealing on the Church. He has even spoken that wormiest of chestnuts, that he has ‘outgrown’ the Church. As is always the case, he has not been able to grow up with it. In many ways Casey hasn't been able to grow up, and he often stands like a man in child's clothes that fit him badly. Casey lacks the adult form in every one of his manifestations. He is only a boy, a child, an unsufferably precocious child. Remember that about him, God. He is a child, and he should be tried in childrens' court.

As to the Casey of the becoming, of the future, or the eschatological scene, well my way and his intersect again in that future. I will dispute him, and I will give him transport against my will. But there's an inhibition against my telling this.

I have been to the future and have come back. I have been to the other side of death and have come back. And I have seen the fierce creature that eats the tongues out of the mouths of those persons who tell what they are forbidden to tell.

Oh Lord, let me keep my tongue this while.

FROM THE COMMENTARY OF ABSALOM STEIN

There is a legend long current in our several circles of acquaintances that Casey Szymansky and myself have traded souls, and that by this I have become the fine and upstanding person that he had been, and he has become the sleazy individual that I had been. I had known Casey pretty well before the so called soul-trading had taken place, and we had about an equal amount of sleaze. We also had about the same amount of upstandingness. These qualities may have been arranged a bit in each of us, but I do not believe that the proportions have been greatly changed.

What we did trade was one each of our kabouters. A kabouter an interior goblin, or a crankiness, or a complex, or a fixation, or a psychological stumbling-stool. Everyone has several of these manifest goblins or kabouters in his personality. Well, they are crankinesses, or perhaps they are discrete people of a trivial species. Either case can be proved easily enough. The proof to me that these kabouters-goblins are objective, though immaterial persons is that we did trade them with rather explosive effect, and that they impressed me as persons at the transaction moment and since.

A kabouter will know a great amount of secret stuff that goes on inside a man, having lived there. So now I am forever privy to certain unkempt secrets of Casey Szymansky, and he is privy to certain of mine. This seems to bother him more than it bothers me. But to the question “What's going on in there?” I can answer pretty well, as respects Casey. The answer is “Not quite as much as you would think.”

Casey believes, or affects to believe, that he must go to Hell in my place, although I hadn't intended to go there and hadn't any place reserved there. But it is one piece of a problem that has plagued him from his boyhood. Casey wants (or at least he had an attraction-repulsion for the idea) to go to Hell for someone. Several of his old friends have set it down as a piece of extravagant comedy on his part, but the kabouter I have from him tells me that the largest element in this urge is real compassion for any damned person and the desire to free that person.

He began, I believe, to play this as a very dangerous game, and he made up very dangerous rules for it. Then he discovered that someone else was making rules for the game that he thought he had invented, and he became very scared. Casey's announced aim is to trade souls with the Devil and release him from Hell, a Lord-Byronish type of phoniness that speaks for itself.

Casey now considers his trading souls with me to have been a sort of practice for trading souls with the Devil. Hey, what does that make me then? What does it make Casey?

I like Casey, in spite of his tiresome ‘nobody likes me’ attitude. I should be able to do something for him. About the only exceptional talent I have is the talent of getting in to see the really big people, using nothing but brashness. Well, I will see some very big people in the various worlds if I have to do so to help him. We really are blood-brothers now, whether he likes it or not. In a showdown, I would come closer to going to Hell for him than he would to going to Hell for me, or the Devil, or anyone.

I am a patsy set up by spirits I don't even know the name of. They prowl me and they take advantage of me. They read my mind — (no, of course they don't read my mind; that cannot be done; but they read the verbalizing of my brain) — , and they turn me into an instrument for unclean purpose.

As to this mind-reading, there is scientific stuff to it, and there is “thus far and no farther” stuff. I have questioned my scientific friends about it, Mark McClatchy, Catherine Quick, Morris Poor, Silas Whiterice, and I have read up in the journals about it, and I've bounced it around in my head. I ask “To what extent can minds be read, by anyone, but particularly by invading and intelligent spirits?” I find that brains can be read but minds cannot, and hardly anyone is willing to draw a wide line between the two. Insofar as we think in words, those words can be lifted out of the brain. They can be taken from our verbalizing and its accompaniment in the movement of the vocal muscles. This can give very extensive readings. And there are subliminal readings once removed and twice removed. There are electrical patterns, both kymatic and akymatic, in the brain; there are instrumented inferences; there are chemical fix patterns and molecular congruencies. It might be said that any thought word can be interpreted.

Max Müller the German philologist said that all thought was verbal thought. It isn't, but most intentions and schemes and plans are thought in words and can be read in words. Could a remembered or evoked color, not accompanied by the name of a color, be read out of the brain? Certainly, there are brain wave patterns to correspond to any color or shape or smell or sound being received. Sophisticated investigators would be able to read them out, and sophisticated spirits.

Are no secret thoughts sacred then? Yes, a few are. From my investigations, I come to one conclusion. Ransacking spirits loose in a body or a brain are allowed to loot information by any physical means or indication. But these raiding spirits are not allowed to use any spirit or nonphysical or immaterial means.

Fair enough. We will play by those rules.

But I tell you this, ransacking spirits, I have not meant all the things I have said nor all the things that I have thought, and I fight being made a patsy in certain matters.

SONNET TO OBSOLETED GOD

For colored memory of early joys

You still do hold most brightly painted place,

Nor will I let you go without a trace,

You final one of all my childhood toys.

In aeoned Heaven in the Sign of Fish,

Bemused by your own memories, you nod.

When small I always wanted to be God;

I make my move now, reaching for that wish.

How feels it in the land named ‘obsolete’?

How tastes it on the further end of time,

To be so big a thing, and be forgot?

Your empty mansion should be cool and sweet.

Perhaps it needs renewing somewhat. I'm

A spirit of the time. And you are not.

But how does one get out of a really devouring situation? I am being eaten up. I am being swallowed alive. Is this myself going down those dark red gullets so smoothly? I am Casey, but I want out of the Casey Szymansky Movement. I want to be clear out of it. How did I get in it anyhow?

FROM THE COMMENTARY OF MARGARET STONE

“There is a valid and pious practice among certain Catholic children that is documented as going back more than one thousand years, yet its signatures and characteristics seem to be much older than that. The cultus seems to have its first setting in Rome of the Empire days, to be centered in the frame of Diocletian legalism. This cultus and practice consists of a child taking the place, for one hour usually, of the most forgotten soul in Purgatory. It is very painful, but it is not desolating. It is quite rewarding.

“To serve such an hour is to be washed with hopefulness and grace. One could offer to serve there longer, but not forever; for there is no ‘forever’ in Purgatory. Release is already guaranteed. I served such hours several times, but I am no longer able to serve them. The mechanism and the contacts for serving them are blotted out. It is a service that is not open to adults.

“I questioned Casey about this once, when I had heard that he was talking nonsense about trafficking with the Devil. He remembered the cultus from his childhood, but he had never entered into it. He had been afraid. He was afraid of one hour in Purgatory, but he big-mouths about an eternity in Hell.

“I think that Casey's mind has blown.”

Starved folks buried underfeet,

Give us dead-man's bread to eat.

FROM THE COMMENTARY OF JOHN SCHULTZ

“It is a philosophical as well as a mathematical necessity that the offer be made, unconditionally. The offer has been called “the very bottom cellar of silliness”; nevertheless, it must be made for the shape of the house above the cellar. I believe that the offer has been made, conditionally, many times by many different persons. I believe that it will be made by Prince Casimir several times conditionally, and that the conditions will have to be broken out of it one by one till finally it is made unconditionally. And then the final requirement of the offer is that it must fail.

But how is Holy Prince Casimir involved in such a thing as Ransom of the Devil? He always had a fine mind, but he almost always enlisted that mind in the service against reason. He always had a deep compassion — for anything except people. Dogs or cats or birds or bugs, or spirits clean or unclean, or half-way species real or imaginary, he had deep compassion for all these things, but not for people. “Let the people have compassion on one another,” he said, “but who will have compassion on suffering plants of the field if I do not?”

Such compassion as he had was a bullet and a bomb. It was a fuse to ignite the world and burn it down also. Such compassion is born insane, which some may find to be an objection against it.

I recently had, and am still having, an odd but valid mystical-mathematical vision of a cosmic change detected and noted in a classroom. This may be yesterday or today or tomorrow, but it is immediate, before the ending of the seven days times seven.

The great mathematician is scratching in chalk before a group of graduate students, and he figures the implications of new values and functions. The great mathematician is a true portrayal, cubistically, for he is a simultaneous montage of the three most famous mathematicians in the world.

“It is a different universe now,” the mathematician says, and he demonstrates that it is. And the graduate students gasp as they catch the implications. One had but to look at the spooky equations set out there to see that the world was changed, the buildings were changed, the bodies of all the students were changed. The change was not in size nor in general appearance. Only persons trained in post-secular mathematics would be able to follow the implications. The average half-educated person would not notice anything different in the world, even though every electron and neutrino in every atom of the world had been changed. The seventh line that the mathematician put on the board there — Oh my God, that seventh line! A cosmos could be swallowed up in the implications of that line and never seen again.

“Aye, it's a whole, new, and different universe that we have now,” the mathematician was saying. “Such a complete alteration we have had no more than a score of times before; no more than five or six times since the appearance of man. It is the nature of the universe to change completely at intervals, but it is inherently conservative and will not fulfill this nature without grave reason. But the appearance of a chicken-hearted devil will not only rotate every vector value in the universe one hundred and twenty degrees in the counter-clockwise direction, but will also (as you can see by the ninth line) introduce a — ”

It isn't the vision that always fades out at that point; it is myself that fades out. The disturbing vision will not go away. It happens more validly and more clearly all the time. I suspect that all the people will have to go away and the vision will remain.

Casey Szymansky is a spellbinder. That is one of the least known facts about him, and some persons have been acquainted with him for years and have not known this about him. He does not spellbind persons; he spellbinds crowds. But he addresses crowds very seldom because of this. He doesn't love his spellbinding talent; mostly he tries to hide it away; but he has it.

On a bet, he once walked uninvited onto a stage where that turgid drama Goat Boy, with Adrian Abdo in the title role, was playing at the Castle Theatre. Casey carried a Greater Chicago phone directory with him. He opened it at random and began to read names in a passionate and ecstatic voice. And suddenly it was pandemonium in the old Castle. Girls shrieked and squealed, matrons moaned like Carolina doves, boys howled, and men stood and shouted.

Casey read only seven names, and then he stopped. There were absolutely unceilinged ovations! But, later, no one could remember the reason for such carrying on.

Anyhow, Casey won the bet, whatever it was. He always represented a danger ready to go out of control. It only takes one spark, if it be a special sort of spark, to ignite and burn down a universe. And Casey could conceivably be a spark of almost any sort.

For his last month, and right up to the strange ending of him, he was surrounded by sudden crowds of insane people. Nobody had ever seen anything like them.

Casey died then, after a month of extreme pressure from his followers. He really died, I believe, to get away from his mad followers who were a little too much for him. Casey had always been fastidious.

Now they have stolen his body away. Beside his open grave they set a plaque — ‘Non est hic; surrexit enim’, which is to say ‘He is not here; he is risen’. How corny can you get?”

From all evil of this day,

Libera nos, Domine!

FROM THE COMMENTARY OF COUNT FINNEGAN

It's an odd process to try to reconstruct a man out of little pieces of paper, when possibly that man isn't dead yet.

People, for a few decades, thought that I was dead; and maybe I was dead and maybe I wasn't. And whatever I am reconstructed out of now, it may be less substantial than little pieces of paper.

I'd give more than paper to reconstruct Casey though; I'd give an arm or a leg or an eye; but not a head, and not a soul. A piece of paper is almost too easy an offering.

One thing about Casey that no one else seems to have noticed; he's lost his mind. He's as nutty as a Lever Brothers Coconut plantation. He's fishy as the Grand Banks themselves. He always did attract weak-fish and weak-fish opinions; but his compassion has been genuine. He is sometimes taken by transports of it. He cries easily but privately over the case of helpless things. The shape of a conch can mist him over, or the dulling of a Lesser Cat's eye that he picked up on yesterday's beach. Between Morotai and Soemsoem Island where we were long ago, the Molucca wind used to set up a sort of double ripple on the near glassy green water, and the pattern of it shook him every time he saw it. He had a Buddhist regard for small bugs and beasts, and he would take great care not to harm any small thing. Now he has lost his framework and is committed to helping a large thing that is far from helpless. He is insane, gently but dangerously insane.

Ah, now comes the silly question from someone on the fringe: “With Casey who would know the difference?”

I would know the difference.

Simple insanity is like heresy in one way. It loses, or it throws out, only one thing of many, and it keeps the rest. It allows the original structure (whether of mind or of institution) to stand, with only one big gaping hole in it. Sometimes the structure will collapse quickly then (if the gaping hole is at the heart of it); but sometimes it will stand for a very long time with the wind whistling through that hole. If the wind does not happen to blow from the wrong direction, one might not even notice the insanity, or the heresy.

He had last compassion for every last least thing, and all the rest of it is noise. His excessive commitment to the Monstrousness is all noise, done as he goes over the edge.

God, have mercy on that man! I do not ask it lightly.

Make me not such leader be

Let this cup depart from me.

Of former lives, of former aspects, of former roles, I believe that Melchisedech Duffy implanted all of them in us as educational devices. I believe that it was the doing of his damned talismans. Oh certainly, I remember all the old episodes; but did they happen? Or were pieces of old Greek mythology and of other sorts of myth implanted in us?

Who gave Duffy such power as he once had in such things?

He does not know.

Who gave me such real but crooked powers as I now begin to evince?

I do not know.

What am I anyhow? I'm an old wineskin full of new wine.

Then I will burst it, and both wine and wineskin will be lost.

No, no! I protest against it! I do not want to be filled with such new wine. I asked for it, yes, but I didn't want it.

I remember the Spanish hero Cid Campeador, dead and tied upright in his saddle on his horse, and leading his army to a great victory with his wild riding, such wild riding as nobody had ever seen before. But what had a dead man to lose in taking the hurdles that way?

I remember the skull of the great law-giver Justinian, set on a rough hewn council table in those dim centuries when the Empire had all but disappeared into the Gothic fog. There was a snake coiled within the great law-giver's skull. Questions were asked of the skull and of its snake. If the answer was ‘yes’, the snake slithered its head and half length out of the right eye-socket of the skull. If the answer was ‘no’, the snake slithered its head and half length out of the left eye-socket. So the judgment was given to chieftains on great matters, and it was accepted.

I see myself as leading an insane army of overturners intent on destroying this world, and the next one, and the one after that. But am I responsible for what my body does after I'm dead? (I suppose that I'm dead; that seems to be the most reasonable explanation for certain phenomena.)

I will disassociate myself from what comes after me. I say ‘It is not myself who gives these judgements. It is the snake in my skull.’

FROM THE COMMENTARY OF BASCOM BAGBY

“That fish, Prince Casimir (Casey Szymansky) has always been hard both to like and to dislike. He is here now. He is not in Hell. That is a false report that he has gone to Hell and is making arrangements for his second coming. The arrogance and kinkiness has mostly gone out of him. He is very sick though, and he has a long road to recovery.

“He has great concern for the goat caravans that arrive here every day. There has long been the cultus of praying for us Poor Souls in Purgatory; but the effect has not been so much the taking up of the burdens of the Souls here as the sending to us of further burdens to bear. People phrase their prayers for us very strangely. They pray mostly for themselves, that they be rid of their burdens. And they mention our names. And those burdens arrive here every day on caravans of laden scapegoats. Casey works with the beat-up and burden-weary goats pretty well. He is a good animal man, and he patches them up as well as can be done.

“Casey is here. So he is not elsewhere, so the predicted prodigies of him will not take place. — unless this is a pseudo or effigy Casey who is here. That is possible, though barely.”

FROM THE COMMENTARY OF DEMETRIO GLAUCH

“Casey's body is stolen. This casts a new darkness on the matter. Believe it, it was not stolen by strangers. It was stolen by his own supporters or associates. I am reminded of an advertisement that appeared in the last but one issue of the Crock, when the insane followers were driving Casey out of his wits and to his death.

“ ‘Genuine emptied temples (still covered by consecration guarantee), dead bodies sent postpaid by certified grave robbers. Use them for fun or experiment, or for special rites. Prodigies sometimes occur during their use’. A box number was given to order bodies from, and requests for specific bodies were solicited. The price was not given in the ad, but somewhere else in the Crock was a note that the bodies ran from fifty dollars each to two thousand dollars each.

“But Casey's body, if it is held by the same grave robbers, would probably cost a Prince's ransom, or a Devil's ransom.

“As to the Promontory Prodigies, some of them are happening, but likely they do not mean what Casey thought they might mean.”

Hanged folks swinging from a tree.

Hanging people, pray for me!

Episodes Of The Argo

Sine Patre, neque Finem,

Tu Melchisedech ordinum

Panem Proferens et vinum

Without Father, without Ending

Thou of the order of Melchisedech,

Setting out Bread and Wine.

 — Bascom Bagby, Letters After I Am Dead

He, whoever he was, stirred out of a fitful sleep into a frozen and apprehensive fear of falling. He supposed that he was a man of the human sort, as he usually was when he woke up in such a turmoil.

His stirring had caused him to slip another notch and to dislodge something more of whatever was holding him up. And whatever had woke him up was the whistling of a frozen substance falling, through the frozen air, to a very great distance down. He felt insecure, and he realized that most of what he had been lying on had now vanished into space.

He was in a shallow notch of the very high reaches of an ice-coated cliff, and that cliff was slick. There was a gale blowing, and the ice was falling in glops of many tons, falling and falling for a mile or more. He seemed to be in a sleeping-bag that threatened to spill him out upside down. His ice support was eroding and breaking away under him, and the bottom of the cliff was out of sight in the darkness. Whenever he shifted to get into a more safe position, he dislodged more of his support.

“Kaloosh!” came the noise when the largest portion of the dislodged snow-ice finally hit below. He had changed position three times while it fell. It was a thousand meters or more straight down. His head was out over the abyss and he gawked down into the white darkness. White darkness? Yes, such frosty surroundings do provide a white darkness at night.

“If I am a man, I can reason,” he spoke, and his voice dislodged still more of his icy support. Now he was tilting downward on the disappearing ice ledge at an angle of more than sixty degrees. “If I am a man I can reason,” he repeated, but soundlessly this time, careful not to make more disturbance with the vibrations of his voice. “If I can reason, I need not be afraid. If I am afraid of such a little thing as death by falling, then it will not matter whether I fall: what falls will be worthless. (Who is singing that damned song?) If I were afraid, it would not be my own heroic self that fell. Somewhere there is a voice that says to me that I can tell bodily death ‘I will go with you, only not yet.’ But this is a nervous situation. And somebody is still singing that damned song.”

“I'm stuck in peril most extreme — HI HO!

Oh morning danger is the theme — HI HO!

My enemies will soon prevail.

Oh where's the bailiff with my bail?

The wind is blowing quite a gale.

My fall will leave me plain un-hale.

I'll bust my head and bust my tail.

    HI HO! The gollie wol.”

Aw, it was himself singing that stuff. It was the gale wind that gave it its strident tone. So he went with another bit:

“Oh, it's great to be young and in danger,

   HI HO!

It's great to be young and in danger.”

Then he saw that he was not in a sleeping-bag at all, but was wrapped only in half-a-dozen very long and very warm threads. He recognized them as a few combings from the Original Great Fleece of Colchis. So then, wrapped in no matter how few threads of the great Fleece, he could not freeze, and he could not fall, and he could not die. Aye, he had been hung on the cliff in an impossible position by an almost fatal fall. And he had been left there until the next section of his adventure should begin. This was a sky-high adventure serial drama he was in, and it was at the same time as real as Ragnarok.

He slipped completely then, and slipped clear off the precarious ledge. Then he was dangling by one single golden thread out over the abyss, and he knew that he was perfectly safe. He turned a fragment of the Fleece outward to show its glint, and this quickly brought an answering glint from the still unrisen sun, the Fleece and the sun being brothers. Now the sun arose, a little bit early, being wakened by the greeting.

Then the man saw his ship very far below, frozen solid in blue ice, and three monkey-like creatures were romping on the tall and ice-sheeted rigging and rejoicing in the dawn. There were solidly frozen birds hanging motionless in the high-air, spread-winged and asleep. People, it was cold!

The man flung gold threads of the great Fleece upward, and climbed up them towards the top of the ice cliffs. Oh, there hadn't been anything wrong at all. It was just that Argonauts, from the hectic life that they lead, do often wake up scrambled and with lost bearings. The man whistled sharply, and the three monkey-like creatures came off the rigging of the ship and boiled up the slick and frozen cliffs like inverted cascades. They were wraiths, or at least of a lighter flesh, and they could climb like ascending lightning. They brought ice-axes with them, and were cheerful and ready for any assignment.

Reaching the top of the cliff, the man took a work order from the breast of his chlamys and read it. He looked around for what should be there. The three monkey-like seamen had already discovered it and were attacking it with their ice-axes. It was a woman frozen in a solid pillar of ice.

“No job too big, no job too small,” the man laughed. “Oh, this is in the nature of a vacation, to be allowed to spend a night on the high cliffs that I love and to carry over the rescue into the bright morning. We appreciate these little leisures when they come to us.”

The woman was ivory-fair, and her veins as shown through her flesh and the ice were sky-blue. The lids of her closed eyes were also of this gentle and ghostly blue, as was the web-like flesh between her toes. The man attacked the enclosing pillar of ice, as the monkey creatures were also doing. They hacked and split great hunks out of the pillar and quickly sculpted it down almost to the woman.

She woke up, and her blue eyes darted here and there, following the bladed axes. She grinned with her eyes at the Magus (the man had already remembered that he was a Magus, and he was quite near to remembering his own name). And the woman grinned with her eyes at the monkey-like creatures, and they echoed the grin back at her. She cringed with mock horror when the axes came too near to her. The woman was probably beautiful and was wrapped in the blonde pelt of a female cave-bear.

“How did you know where I was?” she talked out of a crack in the ice. She spoke with human sound but not yet with usual words. It was the vocalized thought-speaking that primordial persons use so easily and understand so universally. She was nice looking, but behind her face she was toothed more massively than most of the people you know.

“I had a work order to come and wake you up,” the man said. “What a way to run a hotel! Someone leaves an order with the desk clerk (as it were) to be wakened in forty thousand years, and it might not be even the same desk clerk on duty when the time rolls around. Why couldn't you use an alarm clock like anybody else?”

“Oh poor you!” the woman communicated, and a lot of her was already out of the ice. She used words at random, but her messages were clear enough. “I almost feel sorry for you,” she was saying. “but I know you can't really be cold with those golden combings on you. We knew about them, but we never could find them. Oh poor monkey-faces too! But you don't mind having to come and get me, not when we are such good friends as we already are.”

“When I'm running the Argo (that's the name of my ship frozen in the ice down there) I have quite a few of these work orders to fill. But I like to understand my missions. Who are you?” the man said.

“Ewaglouwshkoul,” said the fair woman. “Who else could I be? I suppose you'd call me the Neanderthal Eve, using your own words. But I'm not the first woman of my tribe. I may be the last. Finally there was only myself, and I under-aged, and thirteen of our fellows left, and it was going badly with us. Every day we went out to fight and every day we got whipped. Then our ghostly mentor suggested that some of us should go into cold storage for a while. I decided to go into freeze, and the thirteen fellows all took their own course, two of them going into freeze like myself, I believe. And some other of them may have survived somewhere. If not, it's a real loss. We have so much to give. But I'm sure there's a lot of my half-blood kindred around. Since I am returned and refreshed and awake, I'll immediately set about the business of having children. They're needed.”

“Don't look at me,” the man said. “I'm a Holy Magus.”

“No, it'll have to be one of the real ones if possible. But how will I go about it? I'm of an unfallen nature, and besides I'm pretty naïve. Do you know where there are any more of my kind?”

“Not exactly,” the Magus said. “But I think I know where there are some half-bloods. And I know where there's some Groll's Trolls and they're pretty much the same thing.”

“Does your work order say what to do with me, Magus?”

“Just to release you from the ice and wake you up, and take you to any sea-port in the world you designate. I'm to pick up a man who's been waiting thirty years for this ship to come. He's patient though. Besides, he's one of our group. He's a Master of this ship himself. I'll just pick him up in his port a third of the way around the world, and then he'll travel with me on a tour of duty. He's an accomplished seaman, as I am.”

“Which sea-port is it, Magus?”

“Biloxi, Mississippi.”

“Those names sound a little bit like our kind of talk. Take me there too. If it's a cosmopolitan place, then seamen of every sort will come there. I'll pick me out one who's closest to my blood. I'll get me a saloon or hotel where everybody passes, and finally one near enough to me will come.”

They went down the great ice cliff. They blasted the ship out of the ice, and they blasted a passage for it. They killed some blonde cave-bears to get bear-grease to make supple their frozen lines, and to get a new bear cloak for Little Eva. The old one was shedding after forty thousand years in the ice. They weighed anchor. They sailed to Biloxi.

“I will no more believe that there is a do-good ship sailing under the flag of the Kingdom of Colchis, under Patent of Divine Intervention, crewed by ancient Argonauts, than I will believe in Divine Intervention itself. Both the Ship and the Divine Intervention are conceits of Melchisedech Duffey the mountebank. But belief in the ship Argo seems to have become the cult belief of the month.”

Edwin K. Elkheart, Secretary-General of WSMAASRITM

The Magus had by now attained such clarity that he remembered his own name. He was Melchisedech Duffey Himself, the King of Salem, ship-pilot extraordinary, art dealer and life expert, adventurer into futures, righter of wrongs. He considered the three monkey-like or wraith-like creatures who served him. He had never known what they were or where they came from. “I think that God sent them to me when He was in especially good humor one day,” Melchisedech said.

Melchisedech had never completely understood his ship either, though it was flesh of his flesh and ghost of his ghost. He had sailed on her dozens of times but he still got lost on her. Melchisedech would sometimes come into fascinating and memorable rooms and wardrooms and passages on the Argo, and he would not be able to find the same places again. The Bible gives this ship dimensions of one sort in the Vulgate and of another sort in the Septuagint, and perhaps a third sort in the Hebrew. There was the intimate ‘Bread and Wine Room’ on the Argo. Very meaningful gatherings were sometimes held there. But, as to the present Argo, she was surely much smaller than she once had been. And yet it carried all the relics and identifications of the Great Ship. There was a piece of the ‘Talking Oak’ set into the ship's wheel, and it would give the history of the ship when questioned. Mostly it was the Argo, but it had been the Navicula Petri or Peter Ship once. It had been the Anthony Ship at Actium and had been shamed there. It had been the flagship of the great Abd-Aliah of the Sea, and the famous daughter of Abd-Aliah had ridden on her. (Who does not love the description of Abd-Aliah's beautiful daughter: “She had a face round as the moon, and long and heavy hips, and black-edged eyes and a slender waist, but she had a tail.”) Abd-Aliah of the Sea sold the ship to Sinbad of El-Başrah.

There was still the stunning Sinbad Lounge or drinking bar on the Argo, to be in which was like being down underneath sun-drenched water with the air filled with fishes, and with sands like gold. And yet these decorations and appointments were much later than Sinbad's own ownership. The magnificent and oceanic paintings in the lounge were, in fact, painted by Count Finnegan in his youth. That was at the time when the ship was named the Brunhilde and was owned by evil men. The Holy Argo had the strumpet habit of coming into the ownership of infidels.

The Argo, at different times in its sun-drenched and sea-drenched history, had carried such passengers as the Traitor Judas (and he was not the most hellish passenger ever to travel on her), and Saint Brandon, and King Richard of England, and Dana Cosquin, and Mark Twain.

What other ship had sailed all the seas, the Timor, the Savu, the Arafura. She had even sailed the Mare Nectaris which is on the moon. And what other ship had visited all the shores of that most mysterious of seas, the Sea of the Seven Lost Years?

There had been one very early morning in Melchisedech's youth, in his fifth or sixth youth really, when he had walked out on to the river shore in St. Louis, just below the Eads Bridge, and walked right on to a low-lying boat. And it had been the tall Argo in disguise. Melchisedech still encountered many stray days from his Seven Lost Years, and today may have been one of them.

No, no, there was nothing at all notable going on aboard the Argo that morning, except a lot of loud hornpipe music and some carousing and laughter; and Eva and some other girls discovered on the Argo were having lots of fun with fellows of uncertain origin. And there was the feeling of expectancy as they came to their designated port. Sea Islands, Mains, Promontories, Waterfronts. There were some great waterfront places there. Remember the Fanged Fish, and the Benevolent Shark? The Drowned Whale, Costerman's Whaler's Inn, Octopus Joe's, the Rusty Harpoon, O'Brien's Polynesian Palace, Ching Ling Charlie's Doss House, the Barbary Ape, the Sulu Ritz, the Sand Flea, Kate's Neanderthal Bar, the — 

“I wonder whether Kate's Neanderthal Bar is for sale?” Little Eva asked suddenly.

“I believe that Kate's Neanderthal Bar is almost always for sale,” Melchisedech said. “But what would you do with it?”

“I'd name it Little Eva's Neanderthal Bar, and I'd run it. Come and see me there. Where can I get some business cards printed?”

“There's a little print shop on the Argo here somewhere.”

“I think I know where it is. I can find anything,” Eva said.

Ashore in Biloxi, Melchisedech Duffey sat and talked with Biloxi Brannagan in Brannagan's private beer garden that afternoon. Biloxi's wife Gertrude kept the pitchers filled and various plates heaped up to show that she cared.

“Biloxi's been sitting in the same chair, waiting for the Ship to come, for thirty years,” Gertrude Brannagan said. “He says that after you are three thousand years old, thirty years is hardly any time at all. The only time he ever gets up is to go to the bathroom which he does on the fifteenth and thirtieth of every month. I've told him that he may have missed the ship, that it may have come in and out of port while he was sleeping. But he says he never sleeps, and possibly he doesn't. Oh well, he's never what you'd call very wide awake either. I've told him that he had not perhaps left a call for the ship, or that it was forgotten. But he insists that he did leave a call, and that calls for that ship are never forgotten.”

“Aye, he left a call,” Duffey said, “but it was marked ‘no hurry’.”

“And thirty years is certainly no hurry,” Gertrude agreed. “Well, I've enjoyed having him all these years. I don't know a more pleasant man anywhere than Biloxi Brannagan. Wherever did you get that beautiful Neanderthal girl, Duffey? I never saw so fine a complexion. I wonder where she got it?”

“From the ice,” said Duffey. “She was frozen in a pillar of ice. We chipped her out of it this morning, but she didn't have to thaw. She is one of those naturally warm persons. She says she didn't feel the cold at all.”

And just at that moment, Eva, the beautiful and archaic neo-Neanderthal lady, came to them with a lop-sided proposition.

“Does either of you two gentlemen have fourteen thousand dollars that you don't need right now?” she asked. “I can make a solid down payment on the Neanderthal Bar for fourteen thousand dollars cash on the barrelhead. What does that mean anyhow? I can buy Kate's Neanderthal Bar just the way it is, and I'm sure I can make a go of it. And if I can get a mate out of it, we'll settle here and give Biloxi a more old fashioned flavor than it's ever had before. Consider it as a civic investment and as a broadening of the base of things.”

Melchisedech Duffey rubbed his two hands together, and two hundred and eighty of the old fifty dollar gold pieces cascaded on to the table with fine old music.

“There is something so boyish about all you sorcerers,” Gertrude commented.

“Isn't there though!” Eva agreed. “But it's going to look fishy me bringing in two hundred and eighty of these fifty dollar goldies. People already think there's something a little bit peculiar about me. Don't either of you have any green stuff?”

Biloxi Brannagan rubbed his hands together, and one hundred and forty of the good old one hundred dollar bills thumped on to the table in a bundle banded together with rubber bands. Eva undid the bundle and examined the bills with her flying fingers and sparkling blue eyes.

“These are good,” she said, “but people may challenge them as fakes if I push this many of them all at one time. They all have the same serial number. Can you make them with a hundred and forty non-consecutive serial numbers?”

“It's a hundred and forty times as hard that way, Eva,” Brannagan said, “and when we manufacture something by mind-power alone, well, there's a limit to mind power. It would take me about a week to do it that way, Eva. I'd have to rest in between times.”

“Well, what will I do?” Eva wailed. “What if Kate sells the Neanderthal to some simpleton while we're fooling around here? I need the Neanderthal. It's the best place ever for meeting some of my own kind and getting things going again.”

“Don't fret, Eva,” Gertrude said. “We'll just have to work around these damned sorcerers if we're going to get anything done. We'll take care of it ourselves. Just wait till I go into my room and get my checkbook.”

Melchisedech Duffey and Biloxi Brannagan slid out of Biloxi harbor very early next morning, before the stars had dimmed. Nevertheless Little Eva and her band of revelers were at dock-side to see them off. They had had a high old time of it all night at the Neanderthal-under-new-management Bar and Hotel, and little Eva pointed out to Duffey three unshaven saltwater characters who did have a touch of the Neanderthal about them.

“But which will I marry?” Little Eva asked Melchisedech. “None of them is as close as I'd like, but any of them is close enough. I have to decide.”

“You don't have to decide today, do you?” Brannagan asked.

“Sure, I have to decide today if I'm going to have a kid in six-and-a-half months.”

“It takes nine months, Little Eva,” Melchisedech told her.

“Not for us it doesn't. We're faster about everything than you latter-day races are.” Little Eva was talking pretty well in latter-day English by now, though she had been able to communicate well from the first without the almost words that she threw together making much sense.

And then it was out on the briny seas again for Melchisedech and Biloxi and various other persons and quasi-persons who were on the Argo. Long before mid-morning they chanced upon a little café bobbling in the middle of the ocean, such a thing as the Argo is always chancing on. It was operated by three brackish water persons named Leonard Archive, Oliver Greenflag and Harry A. Kincaid. Harry A. was a handsome lady and the other two were ruddy gentlemen.

“We have everything that you salty travelers might need or name,” Leonard Archive said.

“Bring me a nine pound gar,” Biloxi ordered thoughtfully. “Then flense about three pounds off the tender flanks of it and grill it.”

“I'll have a fourteen pound blopper fish,” Melchisedech said.

Honeybucket Archive set certain dials for voltage and frequency and threw the power. He also made slight adjustments to the underwater electrodes, but that was just because he loved to fiddle with them.

The green channels of ocean were galvanized with life. Shadows of gar were sliding in at every level, but they were selective shadows. Allowing for perspective and distance all those gar were the same size. All the nine pound gar for a mile around had quickly arrived. Out of perhaps three thousand of them, Honeybucket selected three and lifted them out of the water. Of these, he selected, just one for its fine color and proportion, and threw the other two back. He put the one choice gar into the eviscerator, and the perhaps three thousand other gar in near ocean swam away.

Honeybucket let the roiling waters set for about ten seconds. One does not mix fish ways too closely. Then he set the dials anew. There was a new turmoil and arriving, of differently shaped shadows and differently foaming wakes. And there was a great assembly of fourteen pound blopper fish. Honeybucket selected the best one of them and dismissed the others. Both the gar and the blopper fish would soon be table ready.

“For salad I'll have globerina glace,” Duffey said. “For fruit you might make me a chlamydomonas with kelp syrup. I'll have pond scum bread, and sea lice soup. And a Hashed-Ectocarpus Collins for cocktail.”

“I'll have desmid salad with ulotyrix,” said Biloxi. “For fruit you might fix me a volvox colonial. Spirogyra bean, I suppose, and hydrodictyon soup. And a Foraminifera Julip for drink.”

It was a good second breakfast. Both Biloxi and Melchisedech believed in eating well and drinking well in accordance with their Magus-and-Magician station.

Then they resumed their voyaging, back and forth in Lime, here and there in space. The great triumphs of the Argonauts, by their very nature, must remain unknown. Bless all the work and adventure of Holy Argo and her crew.

The Argo was, beyond everything else, a Quest Ship. In earlier tomes of the Ship's log is the account of finding the Great Golden Fleece of Colchis, and indeed that was one of the brightest findings of the ship. But there were several more important findings than that of the Fleece, and dozens that were equally important. The Argo and the Argo Masters had recovered the Holy Cross exactly one hundred years after Saladin had galloped away into the desert dragging it as his horse's tail. There was the recovery of the Lord's Table which had been in the Cenaculum in Jerusalem, and now it was in the Bread and Wine room on the Argo. There was the recovery of the Sancgreal, which grail had been stolen from Glastonbury just a hundred years earlier. And there had been the findings of the Ring of the Nebelungs and of the Philosopher's Stone. Ah, the findings, the findings!

There'd been discoveries of the Northwest Passage, Roland's Horn, Alaric's Sword, Aaron's Rod, and the Baptist's Head (it is still in good flesh, and the growing hair and beard have not been cut; each is now more than one hundred feet long.) They'd found the Magic Flute, the Great Mogul Diamond, the Iron Crown of Charlemagne, the Lost Dutchman Mine. All of the findings had been incidental to the real aim of the Heroic Voyages.

The latest and most contrary of the findings was that of the Sword and Scabbard of Saint Sécaire. And this was an exception of the prizes in that it wasn't found by the Argo Masters, and they didn't want it to be found; they wanted it to remain lost. It was an anti-prize, a peril to the world.

In times past, the Argo Masters had on purpose lost the Sword and Scabbard three times. At its last losing, they had filled the space between the sword and scabbard with iron, lead, brimstone, and babbet-metal, all boiling hot, and solidified and made it impossible for anyone to draw the sword out easily or accidentally.

Then they had lost it in a place in the ocean named Nine Mile Depth. In the floor of the depth they had lost it a hundred meters deep in mud and lime ooze. And they had memorialized the ocean and its creatures around and about that the Sword and the Scabbard must remain lost. And so it did remain lost for four hundred years.

Then two Frenchmen, the brothers Cyril and Cyrus Dimbeau, went down into the Nine Mile Depth in a bathysphere. They took core specimens for a hundred feet deep in the sea floor there then. And they struck something harder than mud and lime-ooze. So they brought it into their bathysphere with grapples. And then they brought it up to the surface of the Ocean and set it on the platform of their attending boat. It was the Sword and Scabbard of Saint Sécaire. This was on that first morning when Melchisedech and Biloxi Brannagan had taken to sea together on Journey as Argo Masters.

And of course these two Argo Masters came to that mid-Pacific place immediately. They brought the Argo alongside, and they boiled onto the platform of the attending ship.

“What two extinct sea-creatures are these?” Cyril Dimbeau asked with French irony. “Sure, I think they are already rotting as they stand there, they are so old and extinct. We'll just have all the blood out of them and pump them full of preservatives. They'll do to show for novelties when we get home with them.”

This is the sort of jibing that Frenchmen of a certain sort sometimes indulge in, but it must be understood that both Melchisedech and Biloxi were both remarkably handsome men and were splendidly arrayed.

“Do not on any account draw that sword from that scabbard,” Melchisedech spoke as one having authority.

“And what happens if we do?” Cyrus Dimbeau asked.

“If you draw it but an inch, two-thirds of the people in the world will fall into a deep sleep,” Melchisedech stated. “And they will die in their deep sleep if they are not rescued from it quickly. The only means of saving them is to put the sword back full-way into the scabbard.”

“Fair enough,” said Cyril Dimbeau. “We'll make try of the affair.” There was one other scientist there with the two brothers, and there were ten strong workmen and laboratory assistants there. These ten assistants grabbed Biloxi and Melchisedech and put them under tight restraint. And the three scientists were melting the flux out from between the Sword and its sheath.

“It will move now,” Cyrus Dimbeau said. “I believe it will move just about one inch.” And Cyrus drew the Sword just one inch out of its scabbard. The ten assistants fell down in deep sleep and rolled around on the platform.

“You were right. It worked,” Cyril Dimbeau said. “The ten assistants have fallen into deep sleep. The other five of us, we three scientists and you two sea spooks, are still awake. That is two-thirds of those in this miniature world who are so stricken, and I assume that it applies to the maxi-world also. And if I pull the Sword out the rest of the way?”

“The World will come to its end,” Melchisedech said.

“Fair enough,” said Cyril. “I always wanted to be there when the World ended, but I didn't know quite how to manage it. Pull the Sword out, brother.”

But when the ten assistants had fallen down into deep sleep, they had of necessity released Duffey and Biloxi from their tight grip. And while Duffey had been parleying with the scientists, Biloxi had retrieved the still melting flux that had been poured out from between the Sword and Scabbard. Now he poured it back in, and it sized the Sword and Scabbard together once more so that they would not separate easily.

“How clumsy of me!” Biloxi Brannagan apologized. “I stumbled with the bucket of flux and I spilled it. Now you will have that little melting task to do all over again.”

“Damned oafs!” Cyril Dimbeau hissed. “Get back into the Ocean whence you came.”

“Let me have it,” Duffey said. “I know a way to melt the flux out of it again in an instant. Then you can go ahead and pull the Sword all the way out and destroy the World if you're so minded.”

“Well, hurry it up!” Cyril Dimbeau barked.

Duffey took the Sword and Scabbard, now tightly welded together again. But, with an incredible clumsiness, he dropped the thing off of the platform, and it went down, down, down, nine miles deep in the ocean, and then it began to bore its way one hundred meters deep into the mud and lime ooze to find its old place again.

“Oops, oops, oops, I dropped it, fellows. I wouldn't have had that happen for anything.”

“Oafs, oafs,” Cyrus cried in hot anger. “Now we'll have to go all the way down to get it again.”

“Get what?” Brannagan asked them. Brannagan had cannily spread the Forgetfulness Mesh over them and they couldn't remember the episode at all. The ten assistants, now rescued from their deep sleep, stood waiting for orders. And no orders came.

“Well, it was a pleasant visit,” Cyril Dimbeau said finally. “I'm glad you couldn't stay longer.”

Duffey and Biloxi sailed away then, and left the bathysphere people there, taking samples of ocean fleas at middle depths. But they could not remember at all about the Sword and the Scabbard.

“We are going to have to find a way to lose that thing a little more securely,” Melchisedech Duffey said. “In four hundred years someone is likely to stumble on it again.”

But it is good to have suspense-and-fun adventures every day well before noon.

A bit later in the day, at Gdansk on the Baltic, near the mouth of the Vestula, a stranger came to the Argo, he having the air of not being a stranger at all. Now it was the plain case that any Argo man should always recognize any other Argo man, anywhere, at any time. The only slight exception is that a man fallen from Grace may not be completely recognized at once.

Well, neither Brannagan nor Duffey recognized this man immediately. They should have seen through every disguise. The land they were in had been in the hands of the New Infidels for some years, and it may be that caution was called for.

“You bring the Brotherhood itself into danger if you fail to recognize me,” this stranger said. “It is by this one thing only that the Brotherhood may be broken. Do not fail it! Know me now!”

Well, this stranger was a mixture of disguises. He had a black hat on his head, and ear-locks, like an old Jew, but he had a wide and treeless face, like a Polish landscape; for the faces of Poles are always like the constantly changing and always lop-sided map of Poland. But this man also had the blue eyes of Scandinavia and the square hands of Holland.

“The Ship will know me,” the man said. “The piece of Talking Oak in the Ship's wheel will know me and speak.” And the piece of Talking Oak in the Ship's wheel did speak, and it said “I know him.” But Duffey and Brannagan still looked at each other, and at the man.

“We will all lay our identifications out here,” Melchisedech Duffey said. “We will see who are Men of the Argo.” Duffey rubbed his hands together and produced a large gold coin with the King's Crown of Salem on one side and with the Bread and the Wine on the other. It bore as superscript the magic name of ‘Melchisedech’, and as subscript the words ‘Thou Art Forever’. Melchisedech set the big coin on the steerman's sideboard there in the cabin. He had identified himself, though he had not been questioned.

Biloxi Brannagan rubbed his hands together and produced an even larger coin of the reddish gold of Ireland. It had the Celtic cross of Christ on one side of it, and a Coracle Boat on the other side. It bore the Holy name ‘Naomh Brandon’ of Saint Brandon on it. Brannagan had also identified himself, though this swift lion of the sea had not been questioned. Oh certainly Biloxi Brannagan was Saint Brandon, always and forever.

The stranger then rubbed his own two hands together. This formed a shower of sparks from which was formed a large and living two-headed eagle, but no coin or medallion. The stranger had a lot of style in these things however, and Duffey and Brannagan began to recognize him by his florid style. The man grinned and grimaced in a stagey manner. Yes, he was a real magician. All the real ones have this staginess about them. From his own mouth he took one thin half of a coin, and from one of the mouths of the living two-headed eagle he took another thin half of a coin. He put the two halves together and there was a small clap of thunder. That was good show. On one side of the thus produced coin there was the same two-headed Eagle of Poland. On the other side of the coin was an ornate Crock or Pot or Night Charley. But there was no name on the coin yet.

The man then pulled the name ‘Kasmir Gorshok’ from the other mouth of the two-headed eagle, and he fastened it on to the coin. He set the coin beside the other two on the steersman's sideboard and the other two did not reject it. This man was Kasmir Gorshok, the Casey of the Crock of the low middle ages. He was Casey Szymansky of Chicago, the Casey of the Zodiac. And he was a true Argo Master.

Kasmir (Casey) waved the two-headed eagle to fly away, and it flew away into the interior of the country. “That will bring their numbers up to nine,” Casey said. The two-headed eagles of Poland had been an endangered species for a long while, and whenever their number fell below nine it was feared that their extermination was near.

So Melchisedech Duffey and Biloxi Brannagan sailed with this stranger-no-more, an old companion in magic and grace, on further adventures on the kaleidoscopic voyages of the Argo. But it was very mysterious that they had not recognized him at once. How had he changed?

“But something has gone wrong with things,” Melchisedech said that same day as they wrangled around in shallow seas and treacherous estuaries. “There is a treason smell about our Holy Ship. It's as if Judas himself were aboard.”

“As you know, we transport Judas only one night a year,” Casey explained to Melchisedech as to a child. “And then we carry him across one narrow water only, and we are done with him in an hour. Then we use the herb Rosemary to remove the treason smell. So there can be none now. And this is not even that day or night of the year.”

It is true that the Argo did transport Judas on the short voyage to Hell one night a year. But there were theological implications in the fact that he must be so carried once every year. It was almost as though his transporting to Hell were not permanent or irrevocable; at least some cultists believed that.

“There's a saying that one of the Masters of Holy Argo Herself will turn traitor,” Melchisedech said darkly.

“And the second part of that saying declares that it will be an affair between that Argo Master and God Himself alone,” Kasmir said. “What is it to thee?”

At Karl-Marx-Stadt, near the upper waters of the Mulde, the Argo Masters destroyed a new incursion into logic that carried the tentative title ‘I Wake Up Forgetting’. Possible effects of this queer logic had been spilling out into various presents, and they were not good.

There was hardly enough water to float the Argo at Karl-Marx-Stadt, and there was scarce enough draught-way for that incursion into logic either. But the logic piece was baneful even as it attempted to launch itself off the sand bars and float free.

Duffey and Brannagan and Casey Gorshok burst in on a young man in ragged underwear and sobbing with excitement as he scribbled furiously on tattered pieces of paper. The young man was named Ralph Rolfe and he was English on his father's side.

“Oh bother me not, ghosts, burglars, poli spies, followers of static philosophy,” Ralph begged miserably as the three Argonauts burst into his room. “I must get it all down on paper before I forget it! Paper, paper, are there no more pieces of you here? For the love of Logica Perversa herself, give me good paper to write upon!”

Casey Gorshok gave pieces of paper to the distraught young man, and he gathered them in from that nervous person again when they were fully written. And pretty soon the young man ceased his frantic writing and half-collapsed upon himself.

“That isn't all of it, that isn't near all of it,” the young man jittered, “but it is the vital keys to it. It is all gone out of my mind completely now, but there should be enough mind jogs and memory hooks down on the pieces of paper for me to recreate the great and crooked system by. And this I will do when I am more clear in my mind. Have I pants somewhere? Do I not ordinarily wear pants? Have I coffee here? Do I not ordinarily drink coffee?”

Brannagan found the pants for the excited young man, and Duffey made coffee for him. And by and by he was more composed.

“It is a completely new system of perverse logic that I have discovered,” the young man said, “or a completely new system that has discovered me and employed me as its medium. It will drive out all the other systems of logic as a shrew drives out mice. It has come to me in my sleep a dozen times and I have always forgotten it as I wakened. I knew that if I could get certain key words and symbols written down, I would be able to put it together from them when I was in a clarified and wakened state. For a long time I have slept with a candle lit and with writing materials beside me to jot down the key words when I wakened, and for long time something has gone wrong every morning. This morning, after I had received the great and crooked message once more, I was told in a sad voice ‘This is the last time that it will be given to you. Get it down this morning or lose it forever.’ Well, I would get it down this time, for there was not anything else that could have gone wrong with my precautions and procedures that had not previously gone wrong. I had allowed for everything.

“I was mistaken in my supposition. While I slept mice came in and ate most of the writing paper that I had by my bedside, and they left only small ragged pieces that they had gnawed around the edges. But I had to get the great system written down. I filled up even the smallest piece of paper that the mice had left. Oh, kind gentlemen, you do have all the pieces, do you not? And you have them all in order as I wrote them?”

“I have them all in order, yes,” Casey said.

“And they will be destroyed in the same order that you wrote them, in the same order that Casey has them,” Melchisedech said. “Destroyed they must be.”

“No, no, no!” the young man jittered in a broken voice. “I have the system in my mind no longer. I spilled all the treacherous things out of my mind and down on the paper. It is an entirely new thing. It will turn the world awry and set it by the ears.”

“New and awry things usually do set the world by its ears,” Melchisedech said sadly. “But the world can hardly stand a new and crooked and entirely harmful system of logic at this time. Believe me, we are not narrow minded or arbitrary about this. It is a bad and slippery thing that you have almost introduced, young man. It has come close to being born many times. Again and again and again it has come close. But now we will luckily be rid of it this time also.”

“Give me those pieces of paper or I will shoot you all,” the feverish young man cried. “Have I a gun here to shoot you all with? Do I not usually have a gun here?”

Brannagan found the gun and gave it to the young man. Duffey found the bullets for it and gave them to him. The young man put the gun to the right temple of Casey Gorshok and fired it with a loud explosion. But he was a fraction of an instant too late. Duffey and Brannagan and Casey had already retreated out of that time and place. The exquisite sense of timing that all Argo Masters have is one thing that never leaves them.

This ‘Sudden Withdrawal’ was a device they used often. They had carried out their mission and prevented a tricky thing from being born. It wasn't an ordinary tricky thing or it wouldn't have been assigned to Argonauts. There was something absolutely new in trickery in the devilishness of it.

But, if their mission in this had been carried out perfectly and completely, the adventure could not even have been told about. The adventure and all memory of it would have been wiped out with the thing itself. And the adventure is told about. It is only the loose end adventures with something left over that can be remembered and told.

“I shudder to think of what would have happened if it had taken effect,” Duffey speculated. “The last such thing that took effect put mankind into a twist for four hundred years, and this one could have been much twistier. Casey Gorshok, just to be doubly sure of this matter, I did not hear the sound of the pieces of paper being destroyed. Let us hear that sound now.”

“Ah, I just thought that I might read a bit of them, Duff.”

“No, Casey, no! Destroy them at once!” Brannagan insisted. “No one of even ourselves could be immune to their effect. You especially would not be immune. Destroy the little pieces of the logic system, Casey, and let there not be division among us.”

Casey destroyed some pieces of paper.

“Is that all of them, Casey?” Duffey insisted.

“All but three of them. Shoal water ahead! Watch the steering!”

“I see no shoal water ahead, Casey!” Brannagan spoke with a voice full of menace. “Destroy them, Casey, all of them.”

Casey destroyed three of them. “One, two, three,” he counted. But had there been more than three left? Had there been others that Casey did not destroy?

“Destroy the fourth one, Casey!” Melchisedech ordered.

“I destroyed all three of them. Reefs ahead!” Casey bawled. “Shorten sail! Beat to the wind! Do various nautical things! All hands aloft! Awk, I see that one last little piece of paper did flutter over the side undestroyed, but the ocean depths have it now, so no harm done,” Casey stated.

“What if a devil-fish should find it and save it?” Melchisedech asked. “Our mission is not perfect until that one piece is destroyed. Do you not have a particular devil-fish who is mascot to you, Casey Gorshok? Have I not noticed it following us in these very waters? What if we should — ”

“I can't hear you, Duffey, with this violent wind blowing.”

“There is no wind. But here it is that we enter new waters. Destroy that paper when thy devil-fish brings it to thee, Casey. I will not remember to remind you of this again. Sometimes the amnesia works for us and sometimes against us.”

At Weinsburg on the Nechar River, the Argo Masters cured a young man of stuttering. This was a brilliant man with a mind like a burning sphere and the will to move worlds. And there was a red fury about everything that he did, and this caused him to be a great overturner. He had all excellent abilities and talents, and the stuttering had been the only defeating and frustrating ailing that he had.

The Argo Masters broke in on this brilliant man suddenly.

“How how how d-d-did y-y-you g — ” the young man began to question their intrusion.

“Ephthatha,” said Melchisedech Duffey, “be thou opened.” The young man's lips and tongue were loosened and he stuttered no more. The young man looked at them in that burnished way that all very brilliant persons have, and he seemed a little bit disturbed.

“Have I asked to be cured?” he challenged them then.

“In a way you did ask to be cured of your stuttering,” Melchisedech said. “You have complained angrily of your affliction to High Heaven. You have sworn that the clear river of your thoughts was roiled by the stuttering obstruction of your lips and tongue. You have sworn that you would move worlds if only you were free of this misfortune.”

“You did not answer my question,” the brilliant man said. “Of course I complained. This complaint was a part of my stock and trade. It was a means I used to work myself into a wrath. Of course I was furious against my affliction. It was a stepping stone to my being furious against other things. How else could I have been furious so constantly and so easily? No, I did not ask to be cured. Afflict me again and restore me as I was.”

“This I will not do,” Melchisedech told him. “I have said ‘be thou opened’, and you are opened. One would have to be perverse to object to being cured.”

“Of course I'm perverse,” the man said. “That's the whole idea. I can move worlds whether I am bound or loosened, but I can move them in a crooked way only when I am bound. I want to be furious and frustrated! That is part of my mission. If I have not this goad of fury, I will be a cheerful man. And if I am a cheerful man, the destruction that I have sworn to do will not be done.”

“Be cheerful. Be opened. Stutter no more,” Melchisedech said. “And destroy no more. This turns you from an evil genius to a good genius, or at least a complacent genius. Out of here, companions, out of here!”

Duffey and Brannagan were instantly out of there, out of that time and out of that town. They were already reading the work order for their next mission. And Casey Gorshok Szymansky, where was he? Oh, he would be along in a moment. Sometimes he loitered a bit as he dawdled over the curiosities of the world. Sometimes he seemed completely unable to keep his hands off of this thing or that thing. But he would be along in a moment. Likely enough if some Argo Master gave the brilliant man his stuttering back, he would be frustrated all over again, and his powerful mind would be slanted towards evil or awry things. But why did Casey Gorshok the Sorcerer and Argo Master lag so far behind the other two Masters that day?

When Casey did join them, he had a new, sly look about him. Take that not to heart. Casey always had a new, sly look about him. But one Argonaut surely would not slip back and undo the work of another.

At Milano, on the Po (or nearly so), they took Mr. X on board the Argo. This X was not a true master of the Argo, however much he wished that he were. He was not really one of the long-lived persons, and his present manifestation was likely to be the only one that he would have. He was not a Sorcerer, but he swore that he could reproduce any trick of any sorcerer if he saw it twice. He was acquainted with all three Masters who were presently on the Argo. He was good and amusing company. There was no reason why he should not have ridden on the ship. But easily tendered accommodations are not appreciated as much as those that are more hardly given.

“I do not know you, man,” Biloxi Brannagan said, “and our sublime destination can hardly be yours. Nor are you able to riddle our riddles.”

“I do not know you, man,” Melchisedech Duffey said. There was always fun to be had with X.

“I do not know you, man,” said that piece of the Talking Oak that was set into the ship's wheel. “I believe that it is the nature of X to be unknown. Are you in Scripture? Are you in Inscription? Nobody comes onto the Argo who is not to be found in one place or the other.”

“I am in Inscription,” X maintained. “In the Attic Ephebic Inscriptions, X equals ‘Xenoi’. No, I am not otherwise in Scripture or in Inscription, but I ask you to take me into your Company. All of you do know me.”

“ ‘Xenoi’ means ‘Strangers,’ ” the piece of the Talking Oak said. And then it fell silent, for that was much more than it usually talked.

“Oh, I suppose that we halfway know you, X,” Brannagan conceded, for he had a kind heart under his ruddy hide, “and you have always been good on the conversation and the news. Set your golden medallion there on the steersmen's sideboard, and we will accept it as your identity.”

X rubbed his hands together in the professional manner. He had seen real sorcerers do this trick more than twice, so he could do it also. And he did produce a big gold coin, according to first appearance. It had his coat of arms on it. It had half of all the fancy things he wished to put on it.

“There it is,” he said. “Was there ever such a coin as that!”

“But, X, it is only a one sided coin,” Casey chided him. “That makes it a very one sided and deficient identification. Are we not allowed to see the contra against you, the reverse of your own coin?”

X turned the coin over and it disappeared. There wasn't any reverse to it. X had just crossed magic with real magicians, and the real magicians had won.

The coin is still there, on the steersmen's sideboard in the cabin of the Argo. It is a curiosity the way it seems perfect and valid and will then disappear when it is turned over.

“Yes, X, you may sail with us,” Melchisedech said. “But you do not sail as a Master of the Argo. You are talented, sure. And you are always all over the place. But, with you, it is always the question of not being able to see the water for the fish. You will receive half shares only of whatever prizes we win. Most underlings receive only quarter shares.”

“That is all right,” said X, “and you do need me. Some of your latest exploits have been worse than just ‘bad show’. Gentlemen, they have been bush.”

So X sailed with them. And, really, they were glad to have him.

At Our'yev, at the east mouth of the river Ural in Tartary, Melchisedech Duffey lost his life. Oh, there was no question about it. He was killed dead, deader than a mackerel. Dead, and quickly stripped of the flesh off his bones, and that flesh cremated to ashes. A man will not walk away from such a thing as that. This is the background of losing his life:

The Gold Ship or the King's Ship or the Shimmering Ship, it is an almost universal boy's dream. And all of the almost-universal dreams have strong basis in fact. The almost-universal dreams (but not ordinary dreams) are really sub-surfaces or simultaneous happenings which parallel the surface happenings and are often the stronger and more valid. Almost all boys realize that they have this valid dimension of other happenings and other life. But many of them, not being intelligent enough to keep up, forget about it as they grow older.

The other world of oceans and ships and adventures is really there. It is the other side of the coin. It is often the clearest and most decorative side of that coin.

The Argo is not the only one of the preternatural Gold Ships or King's Ships or Shimmering Ships. There are a dozen or so of them. But the Argo is one of the most noble of them, and also it is the one with the raciest adventures.

These Shimmering Ships with their ever young crewmen of very great age have all the excitement and blood and thunder of Pirate Ships or Devil Ships, but they have the advantage of being on the side of Light and Glory.

But every boy reveling in their companionship by day and by night, knows that their victories are not either easy nor inevitable, that some of the greatest contests will be lost, that some of the great Ship Masters will be slain and skinned by their adversaries, that some of their adversaries are very strong.

These adversaries are persons of stunning impact, of massive mystery, of overpowering personality, or unmatched courage. Give them all of that. So it is in the group understanding, and so it is in reality.

Among the most shattering of the Adversaries is that group known as the Evil Prince, the Purple Prince, the Mocking Prince, the Laughing Prince. The most powerful and the trickiest of all these Adversaries may well be the Laughing Prince of Tartary.

Except for a very short interlude at Wien, all the Argonauts had always been able to tell right from wrong very clearly, and they had always supported the right. They were commando experts of a sort, in a battle against evil things, and all of them served tours of duty at this heroic labour. They ransacked minds and seas to realize their efforts, and they brought strength of character and lively imagination to bear.

(But the popular sympathies of the world were often against them, and with the Purple Princes and Ambiguous Adventurers. It doesn't seem fair, but that is the fact of the matter.)

The Argo did, very often, sail clear outside the Cosmos, and it did also sail on the insides of minds and persons, and it learned of the dangerous reefs and promontories that are within. If the Argonauts ever became confused as to ‘where’ or ‘what’ or ‘on which side’, there was an Instruction in the chart-room of the Argo to set them right. Even when, several times, the Argo had been in evil hands and ownership, the chart-room and the Instruction were not disturbed.

All of the worlds were sights of long-drawn-out and never quite finished battles between order and disorder (or what is sometimes called ‘between good and evil'), and there was no one anywhere who could really stand aside from it.

Except the Laughing Prince of Tartary.

There had been reports of this Laughing Prince for the recent while, that he was the Prince of the Third Way. He was not claimed by either God or Devil. He was neither hot nor cold, so he had been vomited out of their mouths.

“But he will rue the day when He vomited me out of his mouth,” the Laughing Prince had said, and it was reported that he was not laughing when he said it. “He is the enemy of my enemy, but he is no friend of mine. And the enemy vomited me out of his mouth also, and he too will rue the day. I am hot as fire and cold as ice, and they were wrong to eject me. I hold this third place and I will not successfully be invaded here. My land is a scorcher when I want it to scorch, and my spring is the only cooling spring in the country. Whoever comes into my land will have to come down to my spring to drink. My way is sweet and my burden light, and my spring is poisoned to those of the other two lineages.”

It was reported that the Prince was a vile creature out of the ‘dialectic pit’. It was also reported that he was not so no-sided as he pretended to be, that he really did sometimes adhere to one side or the other, and that the truth was not in him.

So the Argo had a work order to check out this Laughing Prince. Tartary, like so many realms, had been under the dominion of the New Infidels for several generations.

Tartary was not even its official name any more.

The Argo went to the area by rapid but difficult voyage. Even getting a ship the size of the Argo onto an inland sea (the Caspian) was tricky. But the Argo Masters did come to Tartary, and nobody there had ever heard of the Laughing Prince. They had, they said, no Prince except the First Secretary of the Oblast. So each of the Argo Masters, and the half-master X, searched as best they could.

Mr. X did the things he could do best. He talked to important people, or to people who he fictionized as somehow being important. He obtained bits and snippets of information that he thought might be meaningful. If it hadn't been for the information that he gathered, he wouldn't have been able to identify Duffey's ashes and bones later.

And Kasmir Gorshok, the Casey of the Zodiac and the Casey of Chicago, did the things that he did best. As Sorcerer, he sorcered up a pavilion that was like a pleasure palace. He sorcered aides into being. He gave lavish entertainments for such local officials as might be of value. He met the Laughing Prince in a séance and was told that one of the coffins on the Argo would soon have its designated bones in it. There were always a few unoccupied (and some occupied) coffins on the Argo to take care of eventualities. But Casey was not able to persuade the Laughing Prince to mend his evil or ambivalent ways, or even to admit that his ways were evil or ambivalent. “No, no, fuzz-face,” the Prince told Casey, “my ways are beyond good and evil.” Casey was never able to meet the Prince in the flesh, but only through mediums.

Biloxi Brannagan did what he did best. He took the Argo and he ransacked all the shores of that Sea to make them give up their answers. It was a mocking bunch of answers he got, and yet they were not outright false. Brannagan was the finest seaman ever. There was nobody like him for ransacking a shore.

Melchisedech Duffey went upland into the boondock interiors, but the interiors are never well done in treacherous Tartary. (Is Tartary ultimately the same place as Tartarus?) There was an emptiness and incompleteness about the interiors of those boondocks. It was because of this that they were so susceptible to having other ambients superimposed on them. And there was the strong feeling that things were not as they should be.

The industrial-agricultural country sometimes had a desert superimposed on it, a desert that in reality had been driven away by the big dams and deep wells years before this. There were many skeletons of people lying around on the sands, but few of animals. “Animals are harder to do,” said Duffey. The rocks were not right and the plants were not. But suddenly the desert was gone and Duffey entered a medium-sized town that was full of bustle. He ate a good meal at a restaurant “Rosa Ivanova's Kofeinik. You know it's the best. All the truck drivers stop here.” There was hearty food, and Duffey drank eleven glasses of water. He had a premonition of coming thirst. But nobody in the place had ever heard of the Laughing Prince. “There is one place in every town where they will know something of every phenomenon, even if they have it all wrong,” Duffey said. He went out of the restaurant and started for the newspaper office two blocks up the street where he would — 

 — but then he was back in the desert again, and the town was gone. Duffey was tortured by instant thirst, and there were shocking hallucinations of the Laughing Prince, but that person remained one step removed from being there in the flesh. And there were glimpses of three crooked persons with slanted faces who had pursued him in his childhood and had tried to kill him. Later these SFM or slant faced men had become cartoon characters and stereotypes and comic book persons.

“You have to come down to my spring to drink,” the Prince was speaking like an old record on a record player. Duffey knew that in reality he had drunk eleven glasses of water in the last half hour. But he also knew that in unreality he was dying of thirst and would have to drink at the sparkling gurgling spring.

He drank.

He could see things with great clarity after he had drunk from the spring, but it was all wrong stuff that he saw so clearly. Its unreality defeated him. This unreality is the greatest of enemies.

The three slant faced killers slunk up. They were badly dated. They were caricatures. But they were henchmen of the Laughing Prince of Tartary. The slant faced killers cut off all the flesh from Duffey's bones. That's what killed him. The slant faces burned all the sinew and viscera and flesh of Melchisedech Duffey until they were nothing but hot ashes. They would always be hot and ready to burst into flame. And they put these ashes, still smoking, into a cigar canister that had once belonged to the King of Spain. Then the mortal remains of Melchisedech Duffey were in the middle of an unbusy street in Our'yev, a town near the east mouth of the Ural River in Tartary.

X and Kasmir Gorshok came on them there in a matter of seconds. The minor official already at the scene was glad to be rid of the whole business.

“I just don't know how I would have written up a report of this,” the minor official said. “People keep arriving out of that ‘nowhere desert’, dead and disfigured. And our superiors always believe that we have been drinking wine when we report such things. Take them away and say nothing about them. And I will not.”

“I will be the custodian of Melchisedech's ashes,” X said. “I have a strong premonition that I will meet him alive again, and then I will give them back to him. Few men have such amusing keepsakes of themselves.”

X kept the ashes in their canister. X and Casey Gorshok carried the bones down to dockside, keeping to the sidestreets from some kind of embarrassment. Biloxi Brannagan was just bringing the Argo back into port, knowing that the search for the Laughing Prince had ended in disaster.

They put the bones of Melchisedech Duffey into one of the caskets on the Argo. Brannagan, in his true person as Saint Brandon, said the ‘Mass of the Holy Precursor Melchisedech’ for him (It was the Mass of April 30th when the old calendar prevailed). And Brannagan and Casey Gorshok and X half-believed that they had done all that they could do for Melchisedech.

And Melchisedech lay in his coffin, and he lay there, and he lay there. “I thought there would be more to it than this,” Melchisedech said.

The Argo Masters, Brannagan and Casey Gorshok, and the half-master X, took the Argo on further adventures and rectifications, but it just wasn't the same thing without Duffey booming in the midst of them. The bones of their companion just lying there spooked them and gave an incomplete air to all their doings.

And so it went for three days. Then God Himself came onto the Argo in the uncounted hours of a night. And directly he went to the coffin of Melchisedech.

“Have you been relieved of your duties as Master of the Argo?” God asked those bones, and they leapt with joy at the sound of his own voice.

“No, I have not,” the bones of Melchisedech spoke boldly. “But I am dead and stripped of my flesh. I waited here in my coffin where I knew that you would find me. I did not have any further instructions. I did not know whether I was wanted as Pilot and Master any longer.”

“The articles of the voyage do not require that you be a fleshed Pilot and Master,” God said. “And you are always wanted. You, and you others, see to the details among yourselves.”

Well, it would be awkward, but it could be done. There would be a sort of joyful awkwardness in finding ways to go about it. Melchisedech still had all his facilities, his movements, his merriments. His old seaman's clothes still fit him, though a little bit scarecrowishly. Casey Gorshok made for Duffey a golden mask to go over his boney skull, a golden scarf to go around his neck, and golden gauntlets for his hands and wrists. All of these things were made from combings from the Golden Fleece of Colchis.

Melchisedech could have made these things himself, but Casey wanted to make them for him as a sign of their friendship, which was indeed in need of repair. Melchisedech could no longer speak properly because of having no throat box. But he could communicate, and one did not always notice that his communication was not in ordinary speech.

And so it was that, with the bones of a dead man at the helm, the Argo sailed on some of her highest adventures. She became the talk of the sea.

And Melchisedech, though he had no face, had frequent reminders of what his face had looked like. Somebody else on the Argo was wearing Melchisedech's face, a correct though rather weary version of his face.

“There is an aerodynamic requirement that every winged device or creature must also have a tail for balance. This requirement applies also to angels. An angel without a tail would have its splendid beauty grotesquely reduced. Someday some artist will have the courage to paint an angel with a tail, and he will startle the art world with the beautiful effect.”

 — Arpad Arutinov, The Back Door of History

The images of persons, whether Doppelgänger or Angel or Fetch, are much more common than one would admit. The psychologist Jung implied that the Doppelgänger of a person is only one of the splinters from the Unconscious of the person, which splinter, sometimes the ego, sometimes the id, sometimes the shadow, is made audible and visible in moments of queer stress or confrontation. And mostly these Doppels are heard and seen only by their primary, though sometimes also by a person who is emotionally very close to the primary person. And in all this there is some doubt whether the appearances are entirely subjective or partly objective also. But in another place Jung implies (and almost writes it outright) that there might be a life-long association between a person and his Doppelgänger reflection. And it had been a life-long, though never very important, association between Melchisedech Duffey and his Doppel.

The face that they shared, or had shared until Melchisedech's death and defacing, was a good one, a handsome face, a rather tall face on a rather broad body. One may see that face in Rubens' painting THE MEETING OF ABRAHAM AND MELCHISEDECH. One may perhaps see it better in the statue group on the porch of the northern Transept of Chartres Cathedral. Melchisedech is leftmost of the three carven figures, then we have Abraham and Moses.

Oh, but those were representations of the Original Melchisedech, someone might say. And they were only artists' ideas of what the Holy and Puzzling person may have looked like.

Get one thing clear! Melchisedech Duffey was the Original Melchisedech, the Thou-Art-Forever Melchisedech. And the anonymous sculptor of the Chartres figures as well as Rubens, did the figures from life (as it were) with splendid grace and insight and intuition.

The more contemporary Melchisedech had modified the look of his face slightly by wearing a shorter and more squarish beard, but it was still a face that seen once would be remembered forever.

“Who are you anyhow?” Melchisedech asked his Doppel one day soon after he was reactivated as masked and muffled Argo Master and Pilot.

“There are some who would say that I am only an aspect of yourself,” the Double spoke in the rolling voice of Melchisedech himself, but not with quite such a vigorous roll.

“But I do not say that and I do not believe that you say that,” Melchisedech argued. “All my life I have been seeing you a dozen times a day or more, and I have never given you much thought. What is your name?”

“Sometimes I am called Pseudo-Zorokothora,” said the double.

“But Zorokothora is only the mythic equivalent of myself, Melchisedech. The same legends are told of us both. But you cannot really be named Pseudo-Melchisedech. I'll not accept that.”

“Sometimes I am said to be one of the Grigori or Watchers. Sometimes I am said to be a Zophiel which is a ‘God's spy’. We are close but impossible parallels, and yet we are almost universal. Everybody starts life with one of me, and there is usually a separation near the end of childhood. But you are a child forever, and you have me yet. You and all of your species are descendants of Noah and his race. I and all of my species are descendants of Nir, the brother of Noah, about whom you are not permitted to know very much. You look at me now as you seldom bothered to look at me before, because you have lost your face and you believe that you see it on me. But it is I who have lost my face. For I cannot see it anywhere now, not in you, not anywhere.”

“You can see it in any mirror, dolt.”

“No, I cannot. No mirror will reflect me. I do not exist as far as mirrors are concerned. Melchisedech, my task is always to warn you of things you do not want to notice. You are now in the latter part of your Seventh Voyage that is called the Voyage of the Lost Years. You have lived seven lively lives on such eerie voyages, and you have died seven deadly deaths. And in the case of three of those deaths you were judged and damned to hell. Does that not worry you?”

“Yes, a little bit. But it seems that I'm ahead of the game. I was not judged and damned to hell in the case of four of my deaths. How much longer till the end of this Seventh Voyage of the Lost Years?”

“There is One only who sets that time. He is not you and He is not I. What are you looking for? What are you trying to see?”

“I'm trying to see whether you have a tail, Pseudo-Zorokothora.”

“Oh, you have read the humorous history of Arpad Arutinov. Whether I have one or not, you will not be able to know.”

After his very real death (all seven of his deaths had been very real) Melchisedech Duffey could still come and go in time and space, but he could go on with his activities only a very few years into the futures. And some of his incursions on the Argo were beyond those few years. As a stubbornly dead and resolutely bony man, he accomplished things that another man could hardly do. There was an ambivalence about him (he said that he had a tibia in each of the worlds), but there was an awkwardness and an unaccountability also. The future is wraithy in any case, and one may excuse a certain wraithiness there. But as to present time, however constrained that present scene might be, what was the case of Melchisedech in it?

If an Argo adventure was more nearly in the present time, if it impinged less far into the future than did the Adventure of The Laughing Prince and the Seventh Death of Melchisedech, then Melchisedech became almost a normal man again, with flesh on his bones and a voice in his voice box. In that case he used the same bones he'd been using, and he used the same flesh that he used to use. But were not the ashes in the cigar canister that had once belonged to the King of Spain the residue of that same flesh? The ashes in the cigar canister did not disappear at those times, though they smoked uncommonly and seemed a bit more hot. This was the ‘Ambiguity of the Flesh’ that would be with him for many years, coming and going, all through his married life, all through the New Orleans days and nights, all through his less spectral adventures. But his flesh was no less valid for suffering this ‘ambiguity’.

Prince Kasmir Gorshok (Casey of Chicago) left the Argo and returned to it very many times. He became quite irregular as an active Master of the Argo. “I have other Ships to sail that you wot not of,” he told them with an air of mystery.

Henceforth (and preforth) Melchisedech had the feeling that the ‘Present Time’ was a sort of living in the past. Melchisedech had been quite a young boy-man when he first (and last, and always) set his person onto the circumstance named ‘The Sea of the Lost Years’, the Sea and the Years in which so many of the Argo adventures were enacted. And that sea could be left or reentered at any of its shores.

“And I must remind you that you can leave the Argo at any of the shores, at the age twenty-four or at that of eighty-four,” X told Duffey. “And if you leave it at an early age, then you will always have your long life ahead of you yet.”

“What are you saying, X?” Melchisedech asked him. “You do not understand the situation. I can leave it only once more, at the unraveling of this my seventh voyage on the ‘Sea of the Lost Years’. And then I will have not but reality ahead of me to cope with as well as I can.

“Leave the Argo? Why should I want to leave the Argo?”

Melchisedech Duffey, however, seemed (to himself and to those who knew him best) a not-quite-real person on his every return to ‘present places and times’.

The Chicago years, from this unmoored viewpoint, would have a strong tone of déjà vécu. By that, Melchisedech seemed more to remember his wife than to live with her in any present time, much as he loved her. The New Orleans years were always a sort of living in the past also. There was nothing wrong with this. It gave depth to those times and experiences. But Melchisedech Duffey really was a bundle of anomalies in the decades when he ran the Walk-In Art Bijou in New Orleans, when he kept his own smoking and aromatic ashes in a cigar canister on a table there, when he paraded such incredible knowledge, and often such incredible ignorance and simplicity. The unreality of Duffey would be to everybody the most striking thing about him. It wasn't that he was destined to die in a fairly near future; everybody is so destined. It was that he had already died in the near future and had the ashes of his cremated flesh to prove it. And yet it seemed that he was a little bit ahead of everyone else. “For all the lives that he's lived, he hasn't died nearly enough deaths,” Absalom Stein said of him once. But there was never anybody who was such good company, never anybody that it was such a joy to be with as Melchisedech.

But what role did Stein play in these anomalies, or Count Finnegan, or Teresa Stranahan? Probably hers was an animating role just as Melchisedech's was a creative role. They are not quite the same. What role did Biloxi Brannagan really play, or Henri Salvatore?

Whenever the Argo came to a land to refit or to take on provisions or sea-stores, it came to one of the chancy places or times in a present day context. And some of the sea-stores and ship-stores that the Argo took on were, though absolutely necessary, intangible.

It took on electric life from Teresa and Margaret Stone and from Henry. It took on sea-biscuit from Hans and Marie Schultz, and Jew-bread from Absalom Stein, and Purgatorial Loaf from Bascom Bagby.

It was of such delightful anomalies that an early Master of the Argo, Saint Augustine of Africa, wrote “And these were the dishes wherein to me, hunger-starved for thee, they served the sun and moon.” Don't knock it who have never been served the Sun and the Moon in a dish. It isn't the great thing itself, but it's in the direction of it.

And another early Argo Master wrote in Scripture “Oh my people, I will open your graves and have you rise from them, and I will bring you back to your land.”

And as Margaret Stone said in that exciting present that she always carried with her, “I can procure it so that no one I have ever known will be lost. I have this as a promise, and I do not know of anyone else in the whole world who has received this same promise.”

“Margaret, Margaret,” Melchisedech chided her when he heard her expound this. “You went to see and heckle the Devil himself when he once spoke in this city. And later you drank coffee with him and talked with him privately. Is he then covered by the promise which you received that no one you have ever known will be lost?”

“He is covered by that promise and he will not be lost,” Margaret said. “Even now, he may have already broken with that thing. But he is a devil, not the Great Devil himself. Him I have not known.”

“Yes, he is the Great Devil Himself, and he once spoke in this city and he once drank coffee and talked long with you. There are several of us who know the signs by which he may be recognized.”

“Listen, you tattered Masters,” Margaret pealed. “How do you know that your salt hasn't lost its savor? How are you sure?”

“You and yours make me sure,” Melchisedech told her. “If our salt has lost its savor, then we will get new salt from some of you here. See to the stowing of a few hundred weight of savory salt, favorite urchin. We sail again within the half-year, and we will fly a new pennant proclaiming ‘This Holy Ship is salted by Blessed Margaret Stone Herself ’.”

Margaret would always be “The fire which saith not ‘It is enough’.” The shape of the world would have been different, and more ungainly, without her.

Melchisedech Duffey sometimes sailed a hundred different adventures on the Argo in the interval of no more than a single day that he would be absent from his Establishment in Chicago or his Walk-In Art Bijou in New Orleans.

It was in the ‘Third Year of the Bells’ that Count Finnegan came on board the Argo with two companions, all of them in such sort of disguises as any sharp eyed mariner could see through. The point about these three men, Count Finnegan Himself, and Gilberto Levine-and-O'Brien, and Herman Hercules, was that they were acting as doubles or stalking horses for Three Princes of the Ecclesia (that central institution on earth than which none can be higher). Or else they were the Three Princes disguised as their own doubles.

The assignment of Count Finnegan and his companions was to get themselves killed in place of the Three Princes. And they had failed in their assignment. The Three Princes had all been murdered, and these their three doubles still lived and traveled the lands and the seas.

There was one musical sound noticed shortly after the three doubles came on board the Argo. It was produced by Coryphaeba-fish rising with their heads above the waves and blowing horns (shell horns, but they had bright brass stops and frets, really), blowing them loudly and clearly. This always happened whenever a present or future Pope was riding on the Argo. It had happened a dozen times in the Argo's history, and it was a fact beyond question that this music of such unusual origin served as a continuing salute to the Personage.

One other person came on to the Argo at the same moment as came Finnegan and Gilberto and Herman Hercules. This other person did not come on to the Argo openly. He came over the poop, and he hid, except from Melchisedech. No one could hide from Melchisedech when he was in his state of fleshlessness. The person who was acting so peculiar (not so peculiar for him, though) was X.

But was not X already on the Argo? No, he had left the Argo openly three ports back, for service of another sort, he had said, and now he returned secretly. Secretly, but bright for he was now in red robes and a red piped cape. And now he was Monsignor X.

He brought a sly wrapped package with him. He always brought something such whenever he came. He showed it to Melchisedech in one of those unaccountable hours of the night. It was the oddly marked, flayed skin of Cardinal Artemis.

“Yes, this is the holy flayed skin itself,” Monsignor X told Melchisedech, “the skin of the murdered Cardinal, and it is marked in a very peculiar manner. And so is the skin of one of the men who is now sleeping in a berth on the Argo here, one of the men who came on board with Count Finnegan. The Cardinal's flayed skin here, and the living skin of that sleeping man, have almost identical markings. This man on board now is supposed to be the double of the Cardinal, but how can we tell which is which for certain now?”

“Ah, flay the sleeping man, I suppose, X,” Melchisedech said, “and then run both of the skins through our computer. That should tell us which is the false skin and which the true, which is the double and which is the primary. But only Count Finnegan and the man Gilberto know of the marks, you say?”

Duffey at first thought that a most peculiar fog was rising in the night. Then he saw that it was a special shimmering. That meant that the events happening now and henceforth, though of high probability, were not absolutely happening. That was really a sort of relief to Duffey.

“But the flayed skin that I hold in my hands, to which man does it belong?” X asked. “The skin of the dead Cardinal Artemis was marked and mottled naturally. And the skin of Gilberto who would play his double was marked by Gilberto himself with a tattoo needle, and it had all the marks of the Cardinal's skin. But Gilberto put on certain of his own characteristic marks also, ‘So that I will know my own skin if I ever see it again,’ he said. But which skin is it now? Are there too many marks on it or too few? Of which man is this the skin? And which man is sleeping on this ship right now?”

“I don't know, X,” said the bones-only Melchisedech Duffey.

“I find it significant that you, Great Melchisedech, a certified sorcerer and magus, do not know such a simple thing,” Monsignor X said. “Let's find out.”

They did find out. They found out what man was wearing what skin now, and what man had died in that skin. And they all seemed to be astonished by the finding. But it was Monsignor X, with a sudden resurgence of good sense, who suggested that this information must be classified. They all agreed to that. And classified it remains.

Yes, it was possible that Casey Gorshok Szymansky, of the Zodiac and of Chicago, was somewhat chilly to Count Finnegan and his companions when they came on to the Argo, during that ‘Third Year of the Bells’. But both Casey and Finnegan were Masters of the Argo, so a chilliness between them would not have been becoming. There had to be some explanation of the apparent frostiness of Casey to Finnegan and his companions, since it could not be real.

Then there was an event of great importance in the history of art. Count Finnegan, in that short time he was on the Argo in this instance, painted thirteen really stunning pictures. This was the ‘Deaths of the Cardinals’ series. They are beyond all price. They are also almost beyond all access, for they are painted on the very bulkheads of the ‘Bread and Wine’ room of the Argo, and the Argo does not come to the call of random persons.

The series shows the thirteen executions or murders of the thirteen very great men. All of them were wonderful in their power and majesty, but the ‘Hanging of Cardinal Gabrailovitch’, the ‘Beheading of Cardinal Ti’, the ‘Flaying of Cardinal Artemis’, and the ‘Impaling Upside-Down of Cardinal Hedayat’, ah, these were surpassing! For the record, the thirteen paintings represented the deaths of Cardinals Ti, Brokebolt, Merry de Val, Leviathan, Artemis, Lloyd-Spencer, Salvatore, Gregorio, Runosake, Doki, Gabrailovitch, Erculo, and Hedayat, all very great men, some of them saints. And one of them, Salvatore, was an Argo Master.

“We are going to the ‘Belling Shoals’, to the ‘Ringing Rocks’, to the hewn cave in the heart of the ‘Mooring Stone’,” Count Finnegan said to them all. “Ours is a very short trip with you this time. And I may never again set foot on the Argo till I sail on her on the Four Waters of Paradise. We are going to the Haven in the Shoals because that is the last refuge on Earth for us. We are assembling there now, by various conveyance, thirteen shadow-men, thirteen doubles of dead princes, because we will play a trick on the Judas world by going there. Of the thirteen of us, one at least will not be a shadow man. One of us at least will not be the double of a dead holy man. One of us will be, pardon me, a dead holy man who is still alive. And by that we will effect it that the line is not broken. We will assure it that the world will not be lost before the last battle begins at least. You will know that we have not let the line be broken by the fact that on your very next adventure you will have the transporting of the Antichrist. Were we extinguished now, the Evil would already be done, and there would be no need for him to appear in person. But our line will still be unbroken when Armageddon Morning dawns red. One of us will be reigning when this very ship, the Holy Argo, carries the Antichrist to the Plains of Megiddo.”

“The Antichrist will never travel on the Argo,” Biloxi Brannagan stated firmly.

“He has done so,” said Gilberto Levine-and-O'Brien, the double of the Holy Artemis.

“He is doing so,” said Herman Hercules, the double of Holy Ercule.

“He will do so,” said Count Finnegan, the double of Holy Hedayat.

When Count Finnegan and his two companions left the Argo, the Coryphaeba-fish, with their ringing brass-fretted shell-horns, stayed by that shore of the ‘Ringing Rocks’ where the Three had landed, and they did not follow the Argo further.

Melchisedech Duffey and Biloxi Brannagan and Kasmir Gorshok, the three Masters then asail on the Argo, declared themselves in perpetual session to guard against the coming of the Antichrist onto the Argo.

“Prophecies are made for man and not man for prophecies,” Melchisedech swore. “If a prophecy is bad for man, or if it signifies the end of man, then we will contravene it. Myself, I cannot recall a prophecy that the Antichrist will sail on the Argo to Megiddo.”

“I believe that it is somehow combined with the Judas Prophecy,” Casey said.

“And it may be necessary that it should happen,” Biloxi Brannagan gave the worried opinion. “It may be needful that this Evil Person of Mystery shall go to Armageddon, as scripture calls today's Megiddo. Scripture tells us that this, along with other related things must happen.”

“ ‘It is necessary that it happens, but woe to him by whom it happens,’ that is what God-In-Scripture said,” Melchisedech maintained. “My own prayer is ‘Let this misfortune happen if it must. Only not yet!’ Let this woe, which will be eternal, not fall on us. Not on myself, not on thee Biloxi, not on thee either Kasmir, and not on Holy Argo itself. Somewhere there are experts at detection and scrutiny who could set up conditions so that this ‘Person of Mystery’ could no way come onto the Argo. Who are these experts? Where will we find them?”

Finnegan and his companions had left the ship by then, and the Argo was on further adventures.

“Oh, the highest experts are to be found in their graves,” Kasmir said, “or we'll find them still struggling in the World Militant, or we'll find them still unborn. Or in fiction. Damn this flitting fog!”

“Bless rather than damn this flitting fog,” Melchisedech said. “It means that some of the most direful things are not of absolute finality at this time. We will find the experts at once, wherever they are, and we will procure their services. See to it, Gorshok! See to it, Brannagan! See to it, myself!”

Well, they got such as they could of the experts in scrutiny and detection. Some of these were indeed fictitious, and they were routed out of their fictional graves. Some of them were authentic persons behind fictional disguises, and these were plucked either out of their lives or out of their deaths. All the better ones insisted on anonymity before they would give advice: so these will appear under code names. So it happens that they will all be called by the names of famous detectives, whether these are their code names or their real names. They are here called Philo Vance, Father Brown, Doctor Thorndyke, Max Carrados, and Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen. And thus they advised how to keep a person from entering:

“Fireplaces are often the key to situations like this,” Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, also known as the ‘Thinking Machine’, said. “I always regretted that I could not use a fireplace in my justly famous ‘The Problem of Cell 13’, but fireplaces are seldom found in standard jail cells. When one considers a room or a building or a ship, one says ‘This is a cube, however much it is distorted.’ We still have the problem of entering or leaving a cube. And a cube is made up of four sides, distorted maybe, and a top and a bottom: or four bulkheads and an overhead and a deck if it is a ship. Something coming into this cube must come in through one of the four sides, or through the top or the bottom. Aha yes, that is the classic statement. But then comes the classic exception that is so often forgotten: ‘Have you remembered the fireplace?’ More people have gone wrong by not remembering the fireplace than by any other thing. The fireplace is not really a wall, it is not really a ceiling. But what is it? Are there any fireplaces on the Argo?”

“There are a few,” Kasmir Gorshok said. “I suspect that many of them are state-of-mind or subjective fireplaces. Every study, every den, every wardroom, on ship or off, has to have a fireplace. There is no satisfaction in such a place without one. But a fireplace need not have an exit to the outside world. A Sorcerer in particular should have a fireplace. He uses the shapes that appear in its fires for the assembly and selecting of his thoughts and figures. He will also use it as a Sorcerer's Furnace or an Alchemist's Retort. He will use it for conjuring, or just because a sorcerer would be lost without a fireplace and a fire. There are a number of Sorcerers affiliated with the Argo, so there are a number of fireplaces on her. But, as I say, they need not have outlets to the exterior world. They may be subjective fireplaces, blind fireplaces.”

“Blind spirits may enter by blind fireplaces,” the Professor said, “and I believe that we are dealing with such here. And once they are inside they can turn themselves into almost anything. Do you Sorcerers or Masters have access to or command of any Firedrakes?”

“Oh, certainly,” Kasmir said. “We can command all the Firedrakes, all the fire-dragons we wish, and they will come.”

“Then set a Firedrake to guard each fireplace,” the Professor said. “And take ordinary precautions about all other entrances. Watch all these things, and the code-named ‘Man of Mystery’ will not be able to come on to the Argo.

“The thing to keep track of is who goes out and who comes in,” said the person using the name of ‘Max Carrados the Blind Detective’. “Do not trust anyone. If more persons come in than go out, then there are additions to the people here. Sound every alarm then, for you have an illegal entry. Break down the security into sections. Make it check out for every person, even for yourself, most especially for yourself. And the person who has more entries than exits is himself the guilty one. I have a suspicion that one of you present here is the ‘Man of Mystery’ and that he does not yet know that he is. Watch particularly whether you do not sometimes wear a disguise when you come in or come aboard. Sawed-off shotguns, strategically placed, are a good solution to this problem. They will blast and kill anyone who has an entry that is not balanced by a previous exit.”

“One of the answers is to be found in the eleventh movement of Andreyev's Zauberkonzert,” said the expert who was code named Philo Vance. “Or the answer may be found in the eleventh movement of anything at all, but not so clearly. If you have any feeling for African Violets, you will clearly understand the answer. I would recommend however that African Violets be felt for themselves alone. See my justly celebrated monogram ‘The Inutility of African Violets’. A consummate cribbage boardsman will know the answer instantly, as will a master of the Around-The-Mountain maneuver at American checkers.”

“I dispute you there, Mr. Vance,” said Melchisedech Duffey. “I am the Master of the Around-The-Mountain trick at checkers, but I do not know the answer to the problem of keeping the person code-named ‘The Man of Mystery’ off the Argo. Myself, when I really know the answer to something, I can usually state it in three words.”

“Oh certainly, I can do that also,” Philo Vance said.

“Well, what are your three words, Philo?” Melchisedech asked.

“Get a dog,” said Philo Vance, the Master of Detection.

“The hardest man to throw out of a place is the man who is already outside,” said the man code-named Father Brown. “And the hardest man to prevent entering a place is the man who is already in. Well, it's been a pleasure, gentlemen. And since Philo and the others have already solved the problem for you, I bid you all good day. Remind me not to walk directly off the ship until a plank or a ladder or some such device is provided. I'm absent minded about these things, and sometimes I get a good drenching that way. You know that the original meaning of ‘drench’ in Old English is ‘To Drown’, but I don't want to apply this meaning to myself.”

“But has the problem been solved?” Brannagan asked. “Do we know how to deal with the Man of Mystery and keep him off the Argo ship? What, after all, has Philo told us?”

“Perhaps an English Bulldog would be the best sort of dog in this case,” code-named Father Brown said. “The English Bulldog will quickly realize it when something familiar turns into something strange and wrong. Deal with it quickly when that moment arrives.”

“I'll do it!” Melchisedech cried with delight. “I'll get an English Bulldog. I know one I can trust.” And the Argo Masters sent all the code-named Detectives and Scrutinizers back to their stations, whether in life or out of it.

“Not Gunboat Smith,” Kasmir Gorshok spoke with a touch of worry after the detectives had gone.

“Yes, Gunboat Smith,” Melchisedech insisted. “That is one English Bulldog that I trust all the way.”

“But Gunboat never liked me,” Kasmir spoke with perhaps a touch of fear. “We just don't get along together well enough to be on the same ship.”

“Gunboat Smith it will be,” Melchisedech spoke with heavy finality. And it was but a short adventure to pick up Gunboat Smith where he was Old-English Bulldog-in-Residence at the Old Wooden Ship bar and grill in Galveston, Texas.

There was a lot of growling on the Argo for the next several days. The English Bulldog Gunboat Smith growled at Kasmir Gorshok, and Kasmir Gorshok growled at Gunboat Smith. This was surprising conduct on the part of Gunboat Smith. He had always been accounted a very friendly and intelligent Bulldog, probably more intelligent than the average patron of the Old Wooden Ship. And his ability to sense a wrong person from a right person was extraordinary.

Equally surprising was the close friendship that sprang up between Gunboat Smith and Pseudo-Zorokothora, which is to say the Pseudo-Melchisedech.

“Sure, and their tails are about the same length,” Melchisedech grumbled, “little nubs and not much more. I fail to see how either of them would give much aerodynamic balance. But I trust the instincts of each creature. If they like each other then they are both well recommended.”

Otherwise the ship was in good shape. Closed circuit burglar alarms were installed at every passage and rat-line of the Argo, and the Firedrakes were on constant patrol. It would seem that no person could enter the Argo uninvited, either by land or air or sea, or from under the sea.

But phenomena of every sort were infiltrating and surrounding the ship in their multitudes. Something of a still poorly formed aggregation was trying to board the Argo, or was already paying homage to somebody on the Argo. This was the beginning of something familiar turning strange and wrong. Gunboat Smith let them know about it as well as he could, and they all felt it.

“Has he come already?” Biloxi asked, “and has he been given authority over the World?”

The Argo was picking up an entourage of boats and ships, large and small, and some of them were of unrecognizable flag and registry. There were musical sounds from the Sea, but these were of a greatly different music from that which had accompanied the Argo when it carried Count Finnegan and Gilberto and Herman Hercules. The Sea itself was something that was turning wrong and strange. There was a new magnetic wind blowing. Strangeness isn't to be classified too quickly.

The musical sound (or anti-musical sound) that accompanied them now was possessed of a different magnetism. It was as if consensus and polarity had been abrogated. The ears of Duffey and Brannagan and Gunboat bled a lot in those hours. New and dazzling things were happening to smell and vision, and even to tactile feeling. There was a pleasant clamminess in the air. Can there be a pleasant clamminess? Something new in excitement and fascination was creating itself.

The Ship Argo was following a course of her own selection, or perhaps She had been instructed by persons unknown to follow this course. She was moving eastward at a fair speed, but not at Argo speed. She was not (as she usually was) moving against the wind and the waves. Now she was carried along by the wind and the waves that had obviously been tampered with. And those wind and waves were paying open homage to the Argo, or to someone on board the Argo.

“Morning sickness! Me, morning sickness!” Melchisedech moaned one morning. And he was sicklied all over with a new dullness.

“I've got it too, Duffey,” Brannagan said. “I'm like a landsman on his first rough sea. Have you noticed the sea though? It's different. It's of a different texture and aim and intent. Duff, it's paying homage to a different thing. I had a discussion with some fellows once. What, we considered, if the materialists and the secularists were right? What if there were no things beyond? What would the Sea be like then? These were all fellows who knew the many faces of the sea well.”

“The Sea would be glassy,” they said. There was consensus on that. It would swell and it would trough, but it would still be of an opaque and dull glass. It would heave, perhaps, but it would not crest. They had all seen such Seas for very short seconds. But the Sea, by ordinary, pays true homage, pays brilliant homage. And it is not of that opaque glassiness. We see a wrong ocean now.”

“And I will heave, perhaps in a moment,” Melchisedech Duffey muttered, “but I will not crest. Yes, what homage the Sea is paying this morning is to a different thing. I know too what the world would look like if it were secular. I've seen quick snatches and pieces of such a world: places where, in autumn, the leaves turn from green to dull brown with no brilliant interval; steppe land where it goes to deep snow and deep freeze with neither rime frost nor hoar frost coming first; tropical trash lands where it does not lighten nor thunder at all; swamps too dismal to have swamp-lights or fox-fire or St. Elmo's Fire. Ah, I do feel queasy this morning, Brannagan, and I do think queasy. In my black little heart it seems that I welcome all the brilliant things going out. But my heart isn't usually that black.

“It bothers me that I don't respond against it,” Duffey said. “I'm less a man than I was yesterday, and it doesn't bug me out. Have you heard what rot that piece of Talking Oak in the Ship's wheel has been talking lately? It's all other seas and other plaudits now. Why does it bother us so little?

“The Talking Oak in the wheel, it says that it has been baptized in the Spirit and is speaking in tongues now. There's more than a thousand craft following us and surrounding us, Brannagan. What is the big attraction? Above all the other atmospheric changes, it's becoming more shimmery now, which means that we are even further and more uncertainly into the future. It may break at any time and send us back into one of the presents, or cast us up on one of the shores of the ‘Sea of the Lost Years’. If it's going to happen, I hope it happens before the Argo and ourselves disgrace ourselves. Do you believe that these things may, by their numbers and their confusion around us, succeed in getting the code-named ‘Man of Mystery’ onto the Argo?”

“Is it going to be a slow and uneventful event, this taking us over?” Brannagan asked.

No, it wasn't completely uneventful. Just after sundown that night, events began to happen. An effigy seaman (a what?) came and said that the compass in the binnacle was awry. The needle deformed itself and kept pointing to something on the Ship itself, something below decks.

“It is the magnetism,” the effigy seaman said (what had happened to all the real seamen?). “It is a personal magnetism that deforms needles.”

There was a series of sharp explosions on the Argo. Exploration revealed that every mirror on the ship was shattered, but not a piece of glass had fallen from any of them. One looked in the glass now and saw himself in a thousand aspects, a different reflection in each shattered fragment. This was cubism come into the world as actuality. Then when one looked away from the mirror, one saw the whole world as shattered and cubistic.

“It's the only way to see the world,” another effigy seaman yiped. “This is the new depth and dimension, the freedom from integrity. Praise it, praise it!”

“Oh shut up!” Melchisedech growled.

Very many people were on the Argo now. Gunboat Smith had very nearly bitten the legs off of many of them, and still they came. They were coming over the sides of the ship. They were coming up from the depths of it. There would be no way to keep out the ‘Man of Mystery’ with so many unidentified people coming in.

People cried out in tongues, and talking dogs interpreted what they said. Gunboat Smith was not able to come to any of the talking dogs, though he railed furiously against them. The world had changed, or it had been given over to a queer power.

And there was a real attraction to the power. The Argo was going at a greater rate towards the East, though there was no longer any way to verify directions. And the smell of a hot and rocky land was near. This was the Abomination of Desolation that is spoken of by the prophets, and it was entirely too attractive an abomination.

A crooked peace settled over everything. All breathing stopped. Then the Great One appeared, out of the bowels of the Argo.

“We've just gone a little further into the future than we should have,” Brannagan said. “But how do we go back?”

“I think we can go back simply by refusing it,” Melchisedech said, “but all these poor people cannot go back. They live in this time and they are deluded in this time. And now I understand that the Holy Argo cannot go back until she brings her mysterious passenger to land.”

The Apparition, the Man of Mystery, the Mystery of Evil, the Master of the World for a Time, the ‘He who must come first’, stood there in his glory, but that glory was made out of tampered-with light. He was Peleus, he was Kasmir Gorshok, he was Casey Szymansky of Chicago and of the Zodiac, he was Antichristus. There was worldwide adoration on the spherical sphere, on the apparition-sphere.

The Argo landed at Habonim where the hilly ‘Plains of Megiddo’ began (It's called Armageddon in Scripture). From here the great Kasmir would rule for a while. Then he would destroy the world, or be destroyed in the Great Battle.

But Melchisedech Duffey was solidly back into his own flesh now. No longer was he a bones-only man.

There were surely a million people waiting on that shore, and most of them were the high notables of the world. There were very few of the five billion people of the world who didn't accept it. Every compass needle in the world pointed to the Plains of Megiddo now. And what sort of an Elect was it that remained undeceived, though shaken by its influence? In the immediate neighborhood that Elect was composed of only three persons, and one of them was a dog.

“I wonder why Casey didn't sweep us in too?” Brannagan questioned. “I didn't know he had such power. We're lucky to be able to escape him here, and to escape out of here.”

“A false prophet is not without honor save on his own ship,” Melchisedech mumbled in his beard.

“But Duffey, I can't believe that Casey is really the Man of Mystery, the Antichristus. I believe that he is only one of the flamboyant and high ranking partisans of the Man of Mystery, like, well like the Laughing Prince of sad memory. For one thing, it has been said that nobody has ever seen the face of the Man of Mystery, and we have seen the face of Casey many times.”

“I'm not sure that we have,” Melchisedech argued. “We have seen a dozen of his faces, always remarkably handsome, and always looking something like each other, as cousins will resemble each other. But have we ever seen his real face?”

“Casey is the Antichristus!” the dog Gunboat Smith argued with the stubbornness of opinion that all English Bulldogs have.

“Quiet, Dog,” Melchisedech ordered. “Whether he is or not, we will never admit that he is. There is stark madness rife in the world this morning. Let us not add to it.”

A million people on that shore? There were a billion or more people on that shore, and occupying hill after hill turning them black with humanity.

“We want to be where the blood runs deepest!” black people shouted across roiling water to the persons on the Argo. “This is to be the Armageddon, and the blood will run in rivers bridle deep on the horses.”

“No, that happens only in tall stories,” Duffey spoke.

“You ask for a sign,” came the clear voice of Casey Gorshok of the Zodiac and Chicago across the miles, “and I will give you a small and easy sign. See the ship Argo shining in the sun, and its name ‘Holy Argo’ written in brightness? I will rewrite that golden name in blood.”

And the new name ‘Ship of Fools’ was written in flame and blood on the ship that had been the Holy Argo.

“It's fading out from us. We're leaving it behind,” Gunboat Smith spoke in his deep English Bulldog throat. “What, the Argo has disappeared also while we gazed at those noddies on the shore!”

“We'll find her again someday,” Melchisedech averred with only a little bit of doubt. “I seem to see myself rediscovering her, in disguise and in the hands of a sly hull-dealer in New Orleans many years from now. There, or somewhere else we'll find her. Till then, my friends.”

“We go back,” Gunboat growled. “We couldn't stop it. Maybe we'll stop it the next time.”

“Gunboat, Gunboat,” Brannagan chided him. “From the unholy talking dogs who had caught the false spirit, you have picked up the unholy habit of talking. Give up the evil and unseemly thing. Possibly we failed to stop it many times, and we are not even sure there is another chance. Well, we go back, one way or another, and we fade out — ”

Biloxi Brannagan faded out first. Gunboat Smith, after a deep and comprehending growl to indicate that he would never again indulge in unholy dog talk, faded out next. The entire surroundings and ambient were gone — 

And Duffey himself was fading out of there, and fading in somewhere else, in another time and place. Duffey was swimming in doubtful water, and perhaps he was drowning in it. Then the ocean became a little more cheerful, a little more self assured as it were. “If I'm drowning I may as well drown cheerfully,” Duffey said in an aside to himself. No, the whole of his life did not flash before his eyes in those fragments or seconds, but significant pieces of his early life did flash before him.

There were the times when he had been the Boy King of Salem and had done magic. And he'd had black giants to serve him. He had made birds out of clay and flung them into the air and they flew.

A couple of millennia later in his boyhood, in Iowa and in other places, he had been the Boy King in disguise. There also he had had black giants to command, but they were invisible to all except himself. There were early years where he was shuffled from one set of false kindred to other sets of false kindred. There was the forever-blessed boarding school where a few persons, Sebastian Hilton, John Rattigan, Lily Kock, understood that he really was a king in disguise. There was Charley Murray who did magic tricks while Duffey did real magic. But Charley, his best friend, had a better line of patter, and was more applauded than was Melchisedech.

The sky and the water had become younger now, and it was foolish to fear that one might die by drowning. There was the exuberance of youth on everything.

There had been the meteoric gold-touched business venture in St. Louis. There was the foster brother Bagby. There was the Rounder's Club, as fine a club as any in the world. There was Sister Mary Louise. There was Olga Sanchez of the torchy shoulders, Helen Platner of the Bavarian Club, Papa Piccone of the Star and Garter Club, Beth Keegan who was an ivory statuette.

And following that, Melchisedech, then probably being in his seventeenth year, in a very early morning, had walked out on the river shore in St. Louis, just below the Eads Bridge, and he had walked right onto a low-lying boat that had been the Argo in disguise. Oh happy water, he was very near that place again.

“I had forgotten how wonderful it was to be not quite seventeen,” he chuckled to himself. Then he quoted “I shall arrive. What time, what circuit first, I ask not.” What a time to be quoting Browning. A new joy, even a glee, had taken over everything. It was a young ocean now and a young sky over it. There were youthful sea creatures and river creatures, possibly not entirely authentic, cavorting around him with happy noises. They looked a little bit like creatures in certain comic paintings that Finnegan had done long ago. Long ago from when? Just how old was Finnegan now?

It was the year 1923 and Duffey was quite a young man. Finnegan (John Solli) had been born June 1, 1919 so he was about four years old and hadn't done any significant painting yet. Now it was the year 1923 and Melchisedech Duffey swam at the same time out of the ‘Sea of Lost Years’ and out of the young and joyously muddy Mississippi River. He climbed onto the shore just below the Eads Bridge in St. Louis, MO. He has never been so happy in any of his lives. He was twenty-three years old and no age is happier than that.

“Oh, I see by your face how young and handsome I am,” he cried in joy to Pseudo-Melchisedech who was standing before him there looking very young-mannish and very sad. “It isn't permitted to be sad, not when you're so happy,” Melchisedech told the creature.

“You have now lived through the lost years of your life seven times,” the young and sad creature told Melchisedech, “and you've died seven deaths. These lives and these deaths have been widely different. You know that, don't you?”

“Not consciously, but, yes, I've known it,” said Happy Duffey.

“You've known that each set of your lost years were pretty sketchy, haven't you? That you've lived only selections of those world years?”

“Absolutely no!” Duffey declared. “What I have lived, I've lived fully. There's been nothing sketchy about it.”

“Have you any idea why this has happened to you?”

“Because I am a Magician, a Magus,” Melchisedech spoke out of his youthful joy. “And also because (I hate to say this about so great an entity) because God doesn't quite know how to end the World Affair. He's started many things, but he's never ended anything yet. And the endings are the hardest. I think he's using myself and various other of his Magicians to explore various endings.”

“Do you really think so? Oh, no, no, you laughing Judas! That wouldn't be possible. You do know that after three of your deaths you were damned to Hell.”

“And after the other four of them I wasn't,” Melchisedech spoke happily. “So I'm ahead of the game. And I know that the rehearsals are over with, or that they were an illusion. Now I must play my happy role in the last five or six decades of the world. And this time we will do it without the Instructions that were given us during the rehearsals. I do not understand it at all, and I'm happy that I don't. Some of those who have other roles may understand it. But I'm twenty-three years old, probably for the last time, and the world is my oyster.”

“Do you know what I am?” the strange and boyish double of Melchisedech Duffey asked him.

“I know that you are an Angel,” Melchisedech said. “But there are two sorts of them. Are you an Angel of God or of the Devil?”

“Of God,” said the creature. “Yes, I'm quite certain of that.”

“Look, pale reflection of myself,” Melchisedech crowed, “I've just had a seven part daydream or hallucination. And whether each part of it lasted one minute or seventy years is no matter. It seems now that the whole thing was no more than one minute.

“The world is a kaleidoscope, ever-changing, ever-enchanting, did you know that, My Reflection? And one best strides happily laughing and singing through it, and the fact that one is striding through the hot ashes of Hell every step of the way is no reason to be less merry. If one looks down and sees that he is no more than ankle-deep in Hell, let him continue with a happy heart. But if he sees that he is more than knee-deep in Hell, then he must, then he must, what must he do then, pale reflection of me?”

“I don't know,” said the creature with its paler face of Duffey.

“Maybe that's when he should leave the land for a while and walk on the water,” Melchisedech declared. “Remember, Reflection, that man in his original nature was able to walk on water. He is still able to do it, but sometimes he forgets that he is.” Then Melchisedech Duffey turned and ran to the city singing happily.

“I lied to him and I lied to myself,” said the unhappy Angel who wore Duffey's face. “No, no, I'm not certain at all which one of them I serve. I'm afraid to be certain or even to think about it. Is it God or the Devil that I serve in my confusion and darkness?”

But Melchisedech Duffey, singing happily, was into the city in the bright morning. And he didn't hear the creature at all.

The Man Who Lost His Magic

The people of Magic Meadows called Jacob Grim ‘The Man with the Hatchet Face’. Yes, he had a hatchet face, and a bladed brain that would cut through every sort of nonsense. That was why he was sent from the Commonwealth to regularize the irregular people of the Meadows, and also to find what had happened to all the other investigators who had been sent to the Meadows on the same mission. Among the investigators who had disappeared was Jacob's own brother. Jacob, however, was a kind and considerate man. It was only an accident of mismatching that he had a hatchet face.

Jacob was the best-dressed man in Magic Meadows, except during moments when he lost his pants. And he was the richest man in the Meadows, except that every householder there had five hundred gold doubloons hidden in a bucket under a stone of the floor of his hovel. And Jacob's wealth was nowhere near that.

Jacob went out early one morning, and the first person he saw was a nine-year-old girl named Täuschung or Illusion. And she sang:

“Old Grim Jacob, hear my chants

Notice, Grim, you've lost your pants.”

And Jacob Grim felt the cold wind strike him in his skinny shanks and in his heart. He knew that he hadn't really lost his pants, that it was only a local silliness, a regional illusion. And if one believed that these childish tricks of these benighted people were real, how was one superior to them?

And the five hundred gold ducats or doubloons that every household in the Meadows possessed weren't real either. The people were always glad to show Jacob their gold, but they always said a rhyme before they lifted the stone in their kitchen floor:

“Keeper of the golden pile,

Bring it here a little while.”

And there would be a golden ringing and chiming under their floor that was the gold arriving. Jacob Grim had examined this revealed gold carefully. It was all Empress Maria Theresa Doubloons of the year 1763. And once when Jacob had been handling such gold it disappeared completely. That meant that some other householder had rhymed the gold to come to him. There was only one such cache of gold in the Meadows, and the householders shared it casually. No, in truth there was not even one cache of gold. It was only a local glob of magic, which is another word for silliness or superstition.

The next person Jacob met that morning was the mother of the nine-year-old girl. With a quick smile and an outpouring of kindness, the mother chanted a counter-rhyme:

“Be my fellow, now, anon

See, your pants have come back on.”

And of course Jacob's pants were back on. But it wasn't magic; it was only the bursting of an illusion. The young mother was named Zauberei or Enchantment. Both the mother and the daughter said that they were the same person. And no one had ever seen them together. On this morning, the daughter had gone behind a Rowan tree, and the mother had emerged from the other side of it.

“Tonight is Fly-Night,” said Zauberei the mother. “When it comes on Tuesday, as it does tonight, the flying is exceptionally good. Funny Jacob, what are you really trying to find out in the Meadows?”

“I want to find out what happened to the other men who were sent here from the Commonwealth, especially my brother.”

“I'll show you what's left of them when you fly with me tonight.”

“Do you really believe that you can fly, Zauberei?”

“I do believe it, and my believing makes it so. And I'll trick you into believing and you'll fly also. Great blathering bot-flies! — you've seen me fly more than once!”

“No. I've experienced the illusion of seeming to see it.”

Another interesting person in the Meadows was Schwarzkünstler who was a necromancer and magician.

“Good Jacob Grim,” this magic-man said this day. “The World of the Commonwealth that you think you come from does not exist on the same plane as the Magic Meadows here. One is only a metaphor of the other. Which?”

“Wizard, our great world of Science and Technology is the great and real world,” Jacob maintained solidly. “And the Meadows must become more than a metaphor. It must give up its superstitions and it must tell its secrets, especially its secret of what happened to my brother.”

“Oh, I can take you to your brother's bones, Good Jacob. They don't look very vital, but they're conscious and they talk very entertainingly.”

“My brother, is he alive or dead?” Jacob demanded.

“ ‘Dead’ and ‘Alive’ are not such opposites as you might think, Jacob. According to my arts — ”

“Oh damn you and your black arts! My brother's blood cries out to me from a jagged and murderous place.”

“Oh, the Valley may seem a bit jagged and murderous to those who take your world of the Commonwealth to be fact. But, Good Jacob, there is not any such world of Great Science and Technology as you believe in. There is only a dank conspiracy to dream such a world. We don't accept it.”

Jacob Grim was at a disadvantage against the Magician, but he had a mission to fulfill.

“I'm having trouble with the unsubstantiality of your Meadows and of yourself, twinkling man,” Jacob stated. “You people must now take on the responsibility of substantiality and of anxiety so as to become of some good to the Commonwealth.”

“Good Jacob, the collecting of tales was once the hobby of your now living-dead brother. It was a recreation away from your learned untwisting of twisted tongues. Think how much better it would have been if the tales had been the central thing to you, and if the philological games had seemed the recreation. It's almost into the heat of the day now. Come sit in the shade with me while I unwind my own tongue.”

“I'll listen a while,” said Jacob. They sat in the noontime shade, and the Sorcerer unwound his own tongue and began:

“Out of curiosity, I spent three days on the Ark with Noah. When I got there, the Giant Gog was sitting astride the bean-pole of the ark and he intended to ride out the flood that way. But he was already very seasick. Giants get seasick very easily. On the ark, I learned the answer to a question that wan-wits still ask: how could Noah have carried enough fodder to feed all the beasts on his ark? The answer is that he did not feed them. He cast an ocean-sleep over all the creatures, and they hibernated without eating for the entire voyage. This was no great trick for Noah. He was a Magician even as I am. Is that scrap of a tale in the folk tales you've examined?”

“Yes, Sorcerer, but it doesn't deserve to be.”

“Let's try another tale and see whether it will fly. Methuselah, the longest-lived man ever, was on the Ark for a while. ‘Noah and all his household’ got on the ark according to scripture, and those getting off the ark according to the same scripture were Noah and his wife, and his three sons and their wives. Methuselah was Noah's grandfather, and was a member of his household. He got on, but he didn't officially get off. ‘I always wanted to be buried at sea,’ that old man said, ‘me, who had never seen a sea. I wondered how God would fulfill this wish of mine, but who would have thought of doing it this way?’ Oh yes, we buried him at sea. I was an eyewitness.”

“Sorcerer, that tale is even older than Methuselah,” Jacob said. “But it doesn't turn up in any of the better collections because it isn't good enough.”

“Jacob, why is it necessary for the Commonwealth to regularize such pleasantly irregular people as ourselves here in the Meadows?”

“Because the Commonwealth is on the verge of becoming a Greater Commonwealth, and for that we will need all resources possible.”

“Is your brother so much to you, Jacob? In all ways you seem to have been much the greater man.”

“Then ‘all ways’ is mistaken. I was the hatchet-faced man, young and old. He was always pleasant and handsome. As proof that he was the better man, Dorothy Wild jilted me and married him. She was from back home, you know, from our own three towns, Hanau and Stenau and Kassel. I believe that she returned to the towns, and that she is dead now.”

“Jacob, why aren't my tales good enough for the collections?”

“There's no enemy and no problems in them, Sorcerer. So there's no tales either. As to my own life-tale, you people are providing enemies and problems here. As to the tales that my brother and I collected, the last of them was published forty-one years ago. They were the products of our elongated boyhoods. I'd disown them now and withdraw them, except that they still pay me very well. But in our adult decades, we fought the battle for rationality in all things, and we did very significant scientific work. And we served the Commonwealth. Nobody ever served the Commonwealth better than we did, and no Commonwealth has ever been more regularized.”

“Jacob, doesn't Magic Meadows remind you a little bit of the little town where you were born, Hanau in the little state of Hessen-Kassel, which has since been swallowed by a bigger state?”

“They remind me of each other a little bit, Sorcerer.”

“Happy flying tonight, Jacob. But you have lost your Magic. That means that it will be a bumpy flight for you. You lost your Magic.”

“But I found a Commonwealth that will engulf the whole world.”

Later in the afternoon, there was a pleasant and musical hammering going on, and there was a sparkling as from a forge.

“It is only Schwarzkünstler the Sorcerer repairing wings for persons who will fly tonight,” an old crone told Jacob Grim.

“You people really believe that you fly,” Jacob said with wonder.

“For the good of his soul, every person should fly at least once in life, even if it is at the hour of his death,” said the cheerful and ugly crone. “And the Sorcerer is a making a new set of wings for somebody.”

“I've been here a week and I don't seem to have made much progress,” Jacob mused. “But in another week, my influence for rationalism and against magic and superstition will be apparent.”

“You haven't another week,” the crone told him. “You must die today — tonight.”

“Not so,” Jacob contradicted. “I am the hero of this my own tale; and the hero never dies today but always tomorrow.”

“This is tomorrow, Jacob,” the crone said. “I thought you knew that. You are daydreaming of a woman. Who is she?”

“Dorothy Wild, the wife of my brother William, she whom I've always loved.”

“Dorothy was here in the Meadows today. She has a house only half a mile from here. She arrived in the neighborhood a week ago, the same day you arrived.”

“You are wrong, crone. Dorothy died several years ago.”

“In her case, that only gives her greater mobility.”

Then it was twilit evening. Jacob was walking with the little girl Täuschung or Illusion.

“You are my favorite ugly old man,” Täuschung said. “I like you.”

Jacob was pleased by this. “Will you also be flying tonight?” he asked.

“No, I'm not old enough. Next year I'll fly.”

They came to a Rowan tree. Täuschung walked behind it, but it was her mother Zauberei who came out the other side.

“What did happen to the men from the Commonwealth who came here?” he asked her.

“Most of them skipped to Paris or London or Vienna,” she said. “They found the Commonwealth, and especially the Greater Commonwealth that is in the offing, too much to swallow.”

“Oh they of little faith,” Jacob said sorrowfully.

“But your brother fell into the Valley. It's quite near.”

“Then I'll find him there. His blood cries to me from that bleak place.”

“But he doesn't sound bleak. I've heard him laughing there several times. He has such a pleasant laugh. It's also called The Valley of the Talking Bones. The bones of the dead people there talk to each other. Sometimes they sing. They have a good time.”

There was an earth-shaking jolt. “What was that?” Jacob cried.

“Oh, that was ‘The Fall of Night’. It was a sort of pun or joke with us at first. But now we've fleshed the pun to the point where the jolt is severe.”

“Zauberei, why can't I walk over this hill and into the Valley now?”

“The Valley is entirely surrounded by infernal quicksand. It can be entered only from above, from the high air.”

They were at the crest of the hill now, and the darkness was everywhere enlivened by the playful lightning. Persons were already flying aloft.

“It's time for you and I to fly together now, Jacob,” Zauberei said.

“Never!” Jacob cried with animation. “I am a rationalist, and every sort of superstition, such as flying, makes me froth at the mouth.”

“You are frothing now, Jacob, and you do have problems. But I'll grant you a wish now, and it'll obliterate your problems.”

“What are you, a fairy godmother, to grant wishes?”

“Oh, Jacob, it's now known that any good person can grant a wish to any other good person. What is your wish?”

“My only wish is that I might rise above such superstitious clatter.”

“Granted, granted. I grant your wish, Jacob.”

“What, what is this? What sort of shackles are these things on me?”

“You made a wish and I granted it,” chortled Zauberei. “These things that are suddenly upon you aren't shackles. They are the new wings that the Sorcerer made for you this afternoon. With them you may rise above every clatter and clutter. Come fly with me! If your heart is merry and true you will fly to a merry place. But if your heart is bleak, you will fall down, down, down, and burst upon the jagged ground. You have a choice.”

Swearing and fuming, Jacob Grim fought against the grotesque things that now had him in their coils. But, grotesque or not, the more he struggled with them the higher he rose into the air. With a banging and rattle of wings he was flying, much against his will.

“But what if I still don't believe I'm flying?” he croaked.

“You'd better believe it,” jibed the chimney swift that was flying circles around him in the air, “or you'll fall, and it's a thousand feet down.”

“What's that dingy white stuff scattered in the Valley below?” Jacob cried in a voice that was a little bit out of control.

“Just the bones of unbelievers who fell from the great height,” the chimney swift laughed.

“What's that river twinkling in the lightning, quite near?”

“The River Fulda,” the swift said.

“How could it be?” Jacob argued. “I lived near the River Fulda.”

Then the chimney swift, out of pure malice, chanted a verse:

“Old Grim Jacob, hear my chants.

Notice, Grim, you've lost your pants.”

No pants, high in the air, and the lightning played on him like spotlights, and even the thunder was laughing at him. But Jacob would not be intimidated.

“An unbeliever has got to believe in his unbelief,” he cried out.

“You were told you'd have a choice,” croaked a night-black rook that was coasting around his head, “but you must take it now.”

 “I do take it,” Jacob howled in his anger. “I abjure the whole idea that I am flying high in the air. I refuse the whole double-damned superstitious illusion!”

He took his choice, and his wings fell clear off him. He fell down and down, faster and faster, to crash — 

“Not if I don't believe it!” he roared in his stubborn voice.

“Especially if you don't believe it!” roared a voice even more stubborn than his own.

 — to crash so hard that he splattered and scattered his bones and his viscera and one of his eyeballs all across the floor of the Valley. Oh, and he was still pantless when he crashed! That hurt him the most.

But there was still a piece of his head that hung together, with his hatchet face still as sharp as before, with his stubborn and jutting chin still a-jut, and with one eye still in the remnant of its socket, baleful as the eye of a basilisk.

The scattered pieces of Jacob were strewn very close to those of his brother William who had crashed there four years earlier. William had also lost his magic, and he also had rejected the illusion that he was flying. And one doesn't regain his magic all at once.

“How long?” a piece of Jacob called out miserably.

“Oh, not too long, Jacob,” a piece of his brother William called out in a happier tone. “Oh, I am glad to have you here with me! It'll be about a thousand years before we regain it, but we have plenty of time here.”

Officially Wilhelm Grimm was buried in 1859 and his brother Jacob was buried in 1863 in St. Matthews Churchyard in West Berlin of the growing Commonwealth of Prussia, whose growing they had both served so faithfully. But Dorothy Wild, the wife of Wilhelm, the romance of Jacob, was not buried with them. She was buried, according to written instructions that she left, back in her hometown of Kassel.

But strange and spooky stories began after the burial of the second brother Jacob in West Berlin. So, about two years after the second burial, both graves were opened. And both bodies were in them, quite inert, and giving no evidence that they ever rose and walked, as superstitious people had reported. The bodies were like old parchment, brown and ragged looking, and curiously caved in. But nobody thought to check whether the bones were still in those shrunken bodies.

They weren't.

Their bones were half of Germany away from there, in a queer place sometimes called the Valley of the Unbelievers and sometimes the Valley of the Talking Bones. The two dead brothers talked to each other and to other boney people there. And they taught the other boney people folk-songs and led them in the singing. And Dorothy Wild, the wife of William, the romance of Jacob, came to visit them every day. She brought a pair of pants so Jacob could cover some of his boney parts and suffer less embarrassment.

But wait a minute. Wasn't she dead too?

Sure she was, and that gave her greater mobility. And Kassel, one of the towns where they had all lived, was only half a mile from the Valley.

Sometimes the Brothers coaxed other boney folks to remember and tell old stories, and they did so.

“They're not very good tales,” one pile-of-bones said, “but we like them, and they're better than nothing.”

The most massive pile of bones in the Valley of the Talking Bones were those of the Giant Gog. “I am the biggest and oldest of all of you,” he told the other boney people, “and I had the longest and slowest fall of any of you down into this cursed valley, down through the ancient water. I was riding on the ridge-pole of the Ark, and the Ark bucked me off. So I drowned and ended up here. I'm the most massive of you all.”

The tales told by Gog's bones were also the most massive of all. It takes his bones at least three days to tell the shortest of his tales. But in some ways they are the best. They haven't the shortcomings of which Jacob complains in most of the tales there.

There are enemies in Gog's bones' tales. There are problems and conflicts in them. A giant who has been rubbing people and bones the wrong way for five thousand years will have plenty of enemies, plenty of troubles, plenty of conflicts.

The boney people in the Valley have whittled chess pieces out of their own bones and they play chess with them. Some of them are among the best chess players in all the Germanies.

And the thousand years that it takes for the two brothers to regain their lost magic isn't really such a long time. A hundred years of it has already elapsed, and it only took a hundred years to do it.

Anamnesis

Keroul, keroul, the dogs do growl,

The Duffeys are in Saint Lou.

They catch the eye, and none knows why.

Their humor's a little bit blue.

The Duffeys so far were one day wonders in St. Louis. They were a jingling novelty who were everywhere, and Duffey's jokes were all around the town. Most of the Duffeys were in the Rounders' Club that first evening, and they had about taken it over without a shot being fired, except by that loud cap pistol that Marie Schultz had. No, that noise that Dotty Yekouris was making wasn't shots; it was firecrackers, real big ones, that she was lighting and throwing about at random. Doesn't everyone love the acrid hot smell of big firecrackers!

The Duffeys seemed quite a bit overdone. Their colors were a bit too garish. They were too loud, they were too big, they were too intelligent. Those four excesses taken together come very near to spelling out bad manners. Very near but not quite. For the name of their game was ‘fun’. When Marie swept through the big rooms of the Rounders' Club, firing her pistol and carrying her husband Hans a-riding on her shoulders, everybody in Rounders' understood that it was fun. Things like this were much more common in Rounders' than in other clubs. Now the young lady customers there began to give their boyfriends rides on their backs and shoulders and to claim that this made them Duffeys too, whatever Duffeys were.

Well, if Melchisedech made them, why were they so damnably overdone? Because everything that Melchisedech did was damnably overdone. One of the most overdone of the Duffeys was Absalom Stein.

The Absalom, surnamed the Stein,

Was full of purple fire.

In some more ancient life he's been

Great Hiram King of Tyre.

Well that was true. In a former life Absalom had been King of Tyre, or even in the on-going present life. But what was he doing this evening? He was sitting on the lap of a middle-aged school teacher, and she seemed quite pleased about it.

Some of the Duffeys had never seen each other before, and most of them had never seen their supposed maker Melchisedech Duffey. But they quickly guessed each others' identities and cried out in delight the names they had never heard before. It was magic, sheer magic, Duffey magic.

Did the Duffeys know that they were grotesquely overdone? Some did, some didn't, some suspected it, but it wouldn't have made any difference. The name of the game would always be ‘fun’ for them, and it didn't matter much whether they were overdone or not.

One thing about Hans Schultz, he was always active.

Hans Schultz had been a lot of things

The Orpheus (sometimes shown with wings),

Apollo, with a lyre that sings

The Faust, whose dong the Devil dings,

But now, tonight, what 'tis he slings?

Oh, Hans had just been seized with a wild urge for a tallish, slim slightly boney girl, with a tallish and slim smile on her face, who was standing in the center of one of the big rooms. He believed that this girl, like himself, was a Duffey, but he couldn't guess which one and he was good at guessing. Probably he had never even heard her name, but that was no reason for not being able to guess it, with a little bit of Duffey magic. Anyhow, if she were a Duffey, he'd treat her as a Duffey.

He came up behind the tallish girl and vaulted onto her shoulders. That should have jarred her but it didn't. Well dammit, she should have pretended that it jarred her, but she didn't.

“This is as good an introduction as any, Hans,” she said. “I guessed you without too much trouble, though I had never heard of you. I also guessed your beautiful wife, Marie. I am Mary Catherine Carruthers from Chicago, supposedly Casey's girlfriend, and Show Boat Piccone invited me down to this strange conclave. You were rather well known as a girl rider when you were Orpheus, were you not? Will you know Duffey when you see him? Is Finnegan here yet? I dreamed of him last night, so I know that I'll recognize him when I see him. Don't you think it's rather magic the way we Duffeys recognize each other, even those we've never seen or heard of before? Do you want me to turn this into a truly electrifying ride and give you an experience you've never had? I can, you know. Or do you not realize yet what sort of creature I am?”

“I'm pretty sure I'll know Duffey when I see him, yes. And it is all rather magic. Finnegan isn't here yet, but he's supposed to be in town sometime tonight. No, do not give me a truly electrifying experience such as I've never had before. You're already ahead of me. You spoiled my surprise and took the wind out of my sails. No, I guess I don't know what sort of a creature you are, if you put it that way. What are you?”

“I'm a nymph, an Oread Hipparion, an Oread Pony, one to be ridden.”

“Who told you that you were?”

“Duffey told me. He recognized what I was when I was nine years old.”

“But they aren't creatures of Duffey, they're of another recension.”

“Some are, some aren't. I'm both. I'm a Duffey creature, and I'm also such a nymph. I am a creature of Duffey, and I am also a Mountain Nymph, one to be ridden. At first thought it seems slightly grotesque that the great heroes should ride on the shoulders of such slight girls, of such slight nymphs. But then it seems something elegant, something of so magical a luxury that it takes the breath away.”

“I remember, I remember,” Hans said dreamily, and he slid off Mary Catherine's shoulders.

“Oh Hans, I promise to be totally surprised when you do it again,” she said. “And I promise to fill your sails with wind again. And I will find a way to unbruise your ego. I promise. I believe that all of us Duffeys will now be totally in love with each other. It has to be.”

“Yes, totally in love with each other,” Hans said. He kissed her tenderly and left.

Melchisedech Duffey himself came into the Rounders' Club then. And all of the people were so amused and bemused by the Duffeys that nobody noticed him immediately.

Three of the wonderful lady Duffeys especially were there. They had met and recognized each other only that evening and now they were the closest of friends for ever and a day. Since there was nothing at all prosaic about any of the three, they must be presented in poetry. They were:

Dotty Yekouris of New Orleans.

Oh Dotty Y is droll and wry.

She walks with swing and trist.

She grins a lot, she turns you hot.

Her eyes are amethyst.

And Marie Monahan Schultz of St. Louis.

Marie instead has hair of red.

She's something of a stunt.

Oh how she'll stand you on your head!

She knows things that you dunt.

And Mary Virginia Schaeffer of Galveston.

Oh Mary V is quite serene.

She's happy and she's handy.

She's half as sweet as saccharine,

And twice as sweet as candy.

The originals of all these verses exist in old Chaldee which has a more intricate rime scheme, but we lack the scholarship to transliterate them. But it happened that it was this Mary Virginia who sensed the presence of Duffey in Rounders' and announced it with happy words.

“Oh, you come to us like a ghost and we hardly knew you,” this gentle lady said, but the chandeliers quivered from the sound of her gentle voice. “Oh, bring bread and wine, people, this is the Duffey himself, the Melchisedech!”

Time stood still then as the overly colorful and fun-loving Duffeys gathered around Melchisedech the high Magus who, they were all convinced, had at least a left hand in their own making. It was like lightning dancing between Duffey and the Duffeys. Outside of time there is no duration, 'tis said; no duration, but only a moment. But what a wonderful moment it was! Melchisedech knew all of them, and they all knew him with a knowledge from ancient days.

Then time began again in Rounders' Club. The band played ‘The King Shall Ride’, and an ample smiling lady came and swung Melchisedech Duffey up onto her shoulders and carried him through all the rooms of Rounders' and back again. The Duffeys gathered around her after Duffey was on his own feet on the floor again.

“Who are you, who are you?” they demanded. “How could you do that and we not know who you are?”

“I am a St. Louis lady and my name is Lucille Sisler,” she said. “And I came to work at the Rounders' Club when the club itself was only eleven days old. And I've worked in this pleasant place ever since.”

“But who are you really?” Mary Virginia asked. “Who are you in legend? Who are you in myth?”

“So far as I know I have never been in either of those things, pretty Mary Virginia,” she said. “Should I have been?”

“Of course you should have been,” Hans Schultz explained to her. “Nobody can be in life who has not been in legend and myth first. That is a requirement of being born.”

“I will have to plead innocence then,” Lucille said. “I didn't mean to take any shortcuts to being born. How will I find out what my name was in legend or myth?”

“Oh, we'll find it out for you, Lucille,” Absalom Stein told her. “Your true name is buried in your unconscious and in your dream life. How is your dream life?”

“It's bountiful to the point of overflowing. It's powerful, and it's mostly pleasant. My days are mostly devoted to delightful retrospect of my dreams of the night before. When I work in this pleasant club more than half of my brain is enraptured by my dreams.”

“This will be easier than I thought,” Absalom told her. “I'll meet you in one of your dreams just about an hour before dawn in the morning. That's when I dream most rampantly.”

“So do I. I'll meet you in one of my dreams then, if you wish. But how will that give me my ‘true’ name?”

“Oh, I'll ask you what it is. And you'll tell me. All inhibitions will be down then. You'll remember your real name and you'll tell me.”

“Thank you, Mr. Stein.”

After a bit all of the Duffeys drifted out. There were other clubs to conquer in St. Louis and other people to meet. Duffey drifted out with one faction of the Duffeys.

And he returned about midnight with another group of people. These were Charley Murray who was co-owner with Duffey of the wonderful Rounders' Club, and his sister Monica Murray Stranahan and her husband Patrick Stranahan. Patrick and Monica were the parents of Vincent Stranahan who in just four more days (in just three more days if midnight had already struck) would marry Teresa ‘Show Boat’ Piccone.

“Is our son Vincent on the premises?” Patrick asked one of the old faithful retainers of whom Rounders' was always full.

“No, I'm sure he's not,” the old faithful retainer said. “He's out on the town with some of those Duffeys of whom the city is full.”

“It's his bachelor week. I don't know where that custom ever originated. The groom isn't supposed to see the bride-to-be for these several days before the wedding.”

“Oh, they keep to it pretty well,” the old retainer said. “In the day that is ending, the two of them have had only three dates here. They have a rather secluded alcove where they meet. Nobody except everybody knows when they are here together. The barely audible enchanting giggling of Show Boat is what gives them away. I'm told by one who travels a lot that it retains its barely audible quality all the way to Heaven. I hear the faintness of it right now, and I guess that she is still several blocks away.”

“Yes, she's on her way here with her father. Send them up to the thrice-special upstairs dining room when they come.”

Duffey and Charley and Monica and Patrick went up to the thrice-special room which was triply luxurious even by Rounders' Club standards.

“Why yes, I can hear her giggling now. She's only two blocks away,” Monica said. “Brace yourself, Duffey. She is the most wonderful of all your creations and you have never seen her. I first saw the gamin when she was ten years old, and I haven't stopped shaking yet, shaking with delight and awe mixed in equal quantities.”

“It's like an earthquake, quite low on the scale but determined to shake things up a little bit,” Duffey spoke, and his own face showed delight and awe in equal quantities. Then, all the doors and windows being closed as it says in scripture, the earthquake named Teresa and her father Papa Piccone stood in the midst of them. Or so it seemed; but in reality both doors to the thrice-special room now stood open (could Teresa and her father have come through both of them?) and the five windows on the east side of the room, those that now looked out on night-time St. Louis, had their shutters thrown open and banging in the wind. “But there isn't any wind tonight,” Duffey said.

“I am the wind,” Teresa said. “I am your number one fan, Duffey, so I claim proprietorship of a sort. We Duffeys have a saying that God made Melchisedech Duffey and Duffey made the Duffeys. And you made us well, Duffey, though people say that we're overdone, and I most of all. But we're supposed to be overdone. I can't fault your handiwork at all. But God's handiwork in you sure falls short. Come over here and sit in this chair and I'll see what I can do to fix things.

“God, God, listen to me. You've done a terrible job on Melchisedech Duffey. God, God, tell those people to come back tomorrow. This is more important. Look at how you've botched this good man. I've seen worn-out shoes that looked better than him.”

“God hears her, Duffey,” Monica Stranahan said. “Why, you're quite a bit better looking already.”

“Somebody bring me a looking glass,” Duffey said. “I want to watch God's work in action.”

Papa Piccone pulled a mirror out of his pocket. That old showman could pull almost anything out of one of his pockets. He brought the mirror to Duffey. Duffey looked into it and it shattered into a thousand pieces. (That part is true. Everybody saw it.)

(That part is not quite true. People didn't exactly see it shatter into a thousand pieces. It shattered into only thirteen pieces. It was a trick mirror that old showman Piccone had and it shattered into only thirteen pieces. And these thirteen pieces fit together again easily.)

Nevertheless, Duffey was getting better-looking by the moment. Everybody could see that. “That's wonderful, God,” Teresa chortled. “Did anybody ever tell you how wonderful you really are? Don't overdo it though. He's conceited enough as it is. Can you back it up just a little bit? Oh, that's perfect. Cut it off right there. Thank you.”

Why yes, Duffey was quite a bit better looking than he had been. He still looked like a worn-out shoe, it's true, but it must have been an incomparably better shoe that was now somewhat worn and scuffed. And it wasn't worn clear out. And Teresa was a genuine saint (lots of people had guessed this of her) and she had always been on quite familiar terms with God.

Nobody could adequately describe Teresa. She was sunburned quicksilver. She was fire and ice and holy wine. One description says that she was ‘dark and lithe and probably little’. So she may have been once, for about three seconds. When she had acts at her father's old STAR AND GARTER Vaudeville Theatre she had an act where she could go behind a screen and change clothes and appearance and size and voice and everything else in three seconds, and do it again and again.

But she was a Blue Moon person, a One in a Million Person. She was Duffey's Masterpiece. She was also one of God's Masterpieces. At the fabulous midnight supper there, Duffey had eyes only for Teresa, although he talked wittily with other persons at the supper without noticing that he did. Other voices, strange and mysterious, were adding interest to the conversations, but remember that both Teresa and her father were ventriloquists.

Then Teresa took Duffey into a little room off that thrice-special upstairs dining room. There she hypnotized, or otherwise occultly influenced Duffey, to sit on her lap, and she fondled him and kissed him.

“Wait, wait!” he cried out after a long while. “I shouldn't be doing this. You're a saint.”

“Of course I am,” she laughed. “Guys who never sat on a girl-saint's lap don't know what a really good lap is. Did you ever sit on a lady-saint's lap or have a lady-saint give you a piggy-back ride?”

“Yes to both questions,” Duffey said. “My wife in both cases. I'm as sure that she's a saint as I'm sure that you are.”

“That's wonderful. I'll meet her someday. Get on my back now.”

Teresa gave Duffey a piggy-back ride, and she carried him all around the little room and into the big thrice-special dining room.

“Oh, Teresa, I see that you and Mr. Duffey have become good friends,” her father said with pleasure.

“Isn't she wonderful, Duffey!” Monica Murray Stranahan spoke happily. “I was afraid that you two most extraordinary persons I have ever known might not adjust right away, but you mesh perfectly.”

And yet this girl Teresa had wonderful things in her that are deeper than the ocean and higher than the sky.

Melchisedech Duffey was up quite early the next morning, and he entered the Broadway Oyster House where there was said to be something going on at all hours. A big-nosed kid was sitting at a big table by himself, and at that moment he called out in a damnable accent and a loud voice “One hundred oysters please.” Such an order would have raised eyebrows in many eating places but not in the Broadway Oyster House.

“How do you want them cooked?” a waitress asked him.

“What, what, is there more than one way to cook an oyster?” the big-nosed kid asked with a touch of alarm. “I've worked in a dozen oyster bars and I never knew there was more than one way.”

“Where are you from, lad?” called a big man who was probably the proprietor.

“From New Orleans.”

“Give him a hundred New Orleans style oysters,” the man ordered.

“Now wasn't that simple,” Duffey laughed as he sat down at the big table across from the big-nosed kid.

“Oh, I hardly knew you,” the kid said. “Did you suddenly get better-looking in the middle of the night last night?”

“Yes I did, through a certain saintly intercession that I don't completely understand. What Irish hero was it who ate one hundred oysters each of them bigger than a wagon wheel? It was one of the heroic labors he had to perform. Was it Finn McCool? Are you Finn McCool incognito?”

“No, I'm Finn McCool openly. But that was long ago.”

“Who else are you, Finn, and what are all the things in your pockets?”

“I'll show you,” the kid said, “though I don't understand your getting so much better-looking in the middle of the night. It isn't a case of overweening vanity you've suddenly developed, is it? You are an art dealer among other things. What do you think of this?”

“Mm mm, I don't think. I know. It's an original Van Ghi. Where did you get it?”

“I painted it, of course. I'm Van Ghi.”

“No, you're not. You're Finnegan. I don't see how you can stretch far enough to be Van Ghi, the least known painter of the best known pictures currently appearing in the country. Who else are you, Finn?”

Finnegan took big bundle after big bundle out of his pockets and they were all magic bundles, absolutely magic. The one hundred oysters began to arrive then. The eating of them was one of the heroic labors assigned to Finnegan as Irish hero, yes. But before Finnegan had been an Irish hero, several thousand years before, Finnegan had been Iason and Odysseus and others.

“This one here, Finnegan, has to be out of the future,” Duffey commented as he held another very large painting. “I am familiar with the style of Van Ghi, of yourself. He, you, haven't come nearly this far yet. It's something you might be able to do ten years from now. When did you paint it, or when will you paint it?”

“Oh, I don't know. It's a bothersome mystery to me. But keep it for me. I believe it will acquire meaning as the years go by.”

“My universe is about complete again, Finnegan. The circle is nearly full. The two foci are almost in place. You are one of them.”

“A universe with only two foci is like a stool with only two legs. It can't stand by itself.”

“But a metaphor with only two foci can stand by itself, and a universe has to be a metaphor before it is a reality.”

“All right. I'm one foci. Who's the other?”

“Teresa Piccone, soon to be Teresa Stranahan.”

“No, no, no, impossible. You don't understand your own jumble, Duffey, because the affair of myself and Teresa isn't any part of your jumble. Our interval is completely outside of time. It's an isolated happening. It was an alternate that was not used, a discard, a wonderful discard.”

“Possibly, Finnegan, since I don't know at all what you're talking about. Nevertheless, you two are the two foci of the coming reanimation of my universe. We will see.”

“I bet we won't.”

“Finnegan, my universe will soon be complete again. And, by a paradox which I don't quite understand, it has always been complete.”

The hundred oysters were all gone. With the help of a few new and kind friends, they had all been eaten. Finnegan left Duffey for a while then. And Duffey recalled what somebody (probably Stein) had said of Finnegan once:

“You could skin Finnegan and throw his pelt into the corner, and it would still crackle with aura and smoke with essence. But you couldn't find all his essence bottled in one place.”

It was likely on the day following hundred-oyster-day that Finnegan and Teresa finally met in the flesh. This was insisted upon and arranged by Monica Stranahan.

Again, as when Duffey met Teresa for the first time, there seemed to be small earthquakes. Finnegan and Teresa both knew that these were time-quakes however. The past and present and future times were all mixed up ridiculously. Again they both came to the meeting with trepidation that was made up of equal parts of awe and delight. But the difficulty was more serious than in the case of Duffey and Teresa. Between Teresa and Finnegan there was a wrenching enormity. Finnegan had tried to explain this to Duffey on oyster morning, that it was an alternate happening, a happening clear outside of normal time, possibly a rejected happening that had been left on the cutting-room floor and could not appear in the final version of the world scenario. But Finnegan could not find any way to tell this to the comparatively innocent ears of Melchisedech Duffey.

Well, in what was possibly an alternate and unaccepted version of things, Finnegan and Teresa had been acquainted. In fact they had been married for twelve years. They had an intense and mostly happy life in those twelve years. They'd had wonderful children. They had lived in grace and joy. They compared their memories of those twelve years now, and their memories agreed all the way to the oil-cloth on that little kitchen table to the broken back step off the back porch of the house.

But there was no room for those twelve years in any chronology. Teresa was just twenty-two and a half years old now. She remembered clearly at least every day of the last twenty years of that time. And there were countless people who remembered the lively Teresa, the daughter of the Show-man who ran the Star and Garter Burlesque Theatre. Teresa was everywhere, she knew everybody, she was known. There was no room in her life for those twelve years with Finnegan.

Finnegan was somewhat older and much more of a wanderer, but he had a good memory of all his years and adventures.

There was no room for those twelve years, but neither of them wanted to give them up. Those years had been crammed with a love unlike any other love ever. Not to be equaled.

Well, how had that period ended in the memories of the two of them? Oh, the memories of the two of them had simply ended after twelve years of it. But it still might be going on in some other time, as wonderful as ever.

“Finnegan, a thing like ours could destroy Melchisedech's World and leave it in total wreckage,” Teresa complained. “How do we get around that?”

“I think we have it backwards, Teresa. I believe that Melchisedech's World is shot through with such anomalies. Haven't you had the feeling, again and again, that not all the Duffeys are as contemporary with each other as they seem? One at least of those I confabbed with during the last two days is dead, but he doesn't seem dead. He is merely living in a past where he is still alive. Another of our close-knit group was killed in New Guinea during the war, and yet I talked with him less than an hour ago. Of course he's a ghost, but he's a convincing ghost, and I don't know whether or not he realizes that he is a ghost. Overseas, in the war in the South Pacific, we had a group that called ourselves, and was called THE SLEAZY SEVEN. But only five of us returned from that war. All seven of us are here at this confab though, five of us mostly alive, two of us a little bit less so. And Duffey himself (Oh Duffey Himself!) is mostly made up of a long series of ‘seven lost years’. Shall we play it that way, Teresa? It's as good a way as any to play it, isn't it?”

“It's too funny not to play it that way, Finn. I'm all for it. But will our accepting it as that way make it that way?”

“To some extent, Teresa. It'll help. If wanting things to be some way didn't help them to be that way, then there wouldn't be much left to Melchisedech's World, or to the generally accepted world either.”

“Now, Finnegan, since we agree that it's funny, let's have a fun-fest for a few minutes. The night before last I got Duffey to sit on my saintly lap and ride on my saintly back. I really am a saint, you know.”

“During the twelve years you certainly were. And I'm sure that you are in the present time. You were and are a hilarious saint.”

“Let's have a little hilarity then. Sit on my lap, Finn, and then bounce on my torso. I have the bounciest torso I know of. Oof, oof, oof, I love to have the wind bounced out of me like that. Oh, how the time does fly when you're having fun! We'd better go out and show them that we're all right.” (This first meeting of Finnegan and Teresa took place in a room at the Stranahan's.)

Then Teresa burst out of that room with Finnegan riding on her shoulders and both of them whooping and in high good humour.

“Oh, isn't she wonderful, Finnegan!” Monica Murray Stranahan cried happily. “There seemed to be all sorts of storminess and apprehension when you two went into the room for your first meeting, but I'm delighted to see that you've come to perfect understanding with each other. Oh, I've never seen two more joyful people! Teresa, you're never so perfectly yourself as when you're giving a man a ride on your shoulders.”

Teresa carried Finnegan through all of the rooms of the Stranahan Mansion and to every group of guests that was there.

And yet this girl Teresa really did have things in her that are deeper than the ocean and higher than the sky.

Vincent Stranahan was to marry Teresa Piccone on the first Saturday of May of that year. Melchisedech Duffey didn't know either of them. He almost didn't know anybody who knew knew either of them. But his ‘creatures’ the Duffeys seemed to have minds of their own. They had a strange homing instinct (had Duffey given it to them, or had it been otherwise generated?) to be in St. Louis for that event.

“Where the eagles are gathered together, there will I be also,” Melchisedech Duffey said. The World of Melchisedech Duffey had many tendencies that Melchisedech himself didn't understand at all.

But the World of Melchisedech Duffey did begin its reanimation with that St. Louis Conclave, in spite of it being all full of errors of time and space, in spite of erroneous names being used in several cases for the Persona of the Melchisedech World Drama. The reanimation began there, it found a validity in itself, and it is a living and growing world today.

‘Why haven't we seen hide nor hair of this world?’ somebody asks. Because you're on the inside of it and the hide and hair are on the outside.

‘Aren't the people of that so-called world pretty old by now?’

Some of them are old, some of them are dead and their places taken by others. But Hilarious Saints do not age as fast as other people do. Notice it sometime.

‘Can you not give me some corroborative proof that I can hold in my hand right now?’

You are holding the corroborative proof in your hand right now. It is what you have just been reading. The chapbook or brochure with the name ANAMNESIS exists only in the World According to Melchisedech Duffey. Really.

We defy you to find it in any of those minor alternative worlds.

Introduction (Ringing Changes)

Most of these stories were written in the years 1968-1974. They are of various sorts, but several of them are against-the-grain stories; songs-of-rebellion stories even, though their singing may be a little cracked and croaky. This is because the world was unpatterned and unstructured during those years, and intolerably narrowed and shriveled. (They conquered us so easily!) We were a mesmerized world, and we were lost on a day when there wasn't even a battle scheduled. So several of these pieces are restructuring and rebirthing myths, and there is a touch of groaning and travail in them.

But most of them are no such things. The stories are these:

“Parthen.” The aliens had landed!…The world rang with cracked melody and everyone was in love with life…Never had the girls been so pretty…I believe that our minds are now on a higher plane…And every one of those men died happy. That's what made it so nice.

“Old Foot Forgot.” One does whatever one can for “the oneness that is greater than self.”…They say “Pray for the happy obliteration.”…But somewhere there is a person who revolts and cries, “I would rather burn in a hell forever than suffer happy obliteration. I'll burn if it be me that burns.”

“Dorg.” Rain dances are good; fertility dances are good; so is prayer and chanting. But there is nothing like ritual drawing and painting on cave walls to keep the world well fed. What did you think was keeping the world so fertile and burgeoning these days?

“Days of Grass, Days of Straw.” Without the special days that are not in the regular count it just wouldn't be worthwhile. We need them, we need them, and some of the champions will have to wrestle with the principalities and powers to get them.

“Brain Fever Season.” The seasons have returned in their appointed strengths. Now we can live again. Now we can be seasonable fools again.

“And Read the Flesh Between the Lines.” We'll not allow ourselves to be narrowed down forever in a straited world. We'll explode and regain our real spaciousness. We'll explode, we'll explode!

“Old Halloween on the Guna Slopes.” O ghostly night, O antic night, when we were ourselves young and ghostly.

“The Ungodly Mice of Doctor Drakos.” Maybe life is no more than globs of gas plasma, green and faintly translucent. But how is it possible to grow hairs on globs of gas? This is a sympathetic story about the only animals that everybody loves, mice.

“The Wooly World of Barnaby Sheen.” Barnaby's world was about a cubic meter in volume and it weighed 4,500 pounds. It had a good selection of rocks, and it developed weather and lively inferior fauna. Then it got a little bit out of hand. This tale contains the saddest lament in all literature: “My house is on fire, my shirt is on fire, and my houseboy has fleas. What worse can happen?”

“Rivers of Damascus.” There are several ways of looking at any past event in history. The para-archaeological probe, with a little dowsing added to it, may not be the ideal way, but it sure can cut through that polarized data of what is sometimes called “conventional history.”

“Among the Hairy Earthmen.” This was the “Long Afternoon” that lasted two-and-a-half centuries, possibly the most puzzling two-and-a-half centuries in the history of our world.

“In Outraged Stone.” This is the stubborn refusal to accept that there is no transcendence, that there is no ultimate reality.

When they try to tell you that you are only an artifact in a collection, that you are not alive, that you have never been alive, that is the time to get mad.

“And Name My Name.” Is it possible that our true identity has been taken away from all of us, that we are only an apish shambles now?

“Why is our identity stolen from us. Why are we robbed of it?” we ask.

“You aren't robbed of it. You threw it away,” we are told.

“Sky.” Yes, you can pick and choose from among the various realities, selecting the best and most eventful of them and then selecting from the still more rarefied best. You can do this for quite a while, so long as you are not spooked by things that are the wrong color of white, so long as you are able to refinance your bill with the piper, so long as you have hollow bones and a hollow heart.

“For All Poor Folks At Picketwire.” It wasn't a bad place at all compared to some others. Consider that you can have a workshop in total vacuum, that it is dust-free and without gravity, that it is spared the effect of every magnetized cloud, of every voltage differential, of every solar wind. And it's beyond the influence of time and temperature and hard radiation and “all baleful beams.” Nuggets of gold and orichalcum! What a place to work! Even the main disadvantage of it can be turned to an advantage, sort of, sort of.

“Oh Whatta You Do When The Well Runs Dry?” On November 7, 1999, the well ran dry. This was the well of Wit and Idea. It was the Well of the World.

Ah, but there was a way to get more water out of the well. There were shabby people who still had plenty of shabby water, and they were willing to share it. But it was stronger water than any of the people had met before. It was raunchy water, it was vile water. And the wit and ideas that came from the well now were raunchy also.

There's a twist to the tale of course, but it doesn't make the condition any less raunchy.

“And Some in Velvet Gowns.” Well, if you got all the skin burned off you by space winds, maybe you'd cover yourself with gaudy clothing too. This is a “the-aliens-are-in-town-and-they're-taking-us-over” story. But most of them weren't really wearing velvet gowns. They just had their torsos painted to look like that.

“The Doggone Highly Scientific Door.” If you turned into a dog, would you be the first person or the last person to know it? And if you turned into a dog interiorly but still kept your human appearance, who would know it first? If there is an electronic device that can discern between dogs and people, where will it draw the line?

These questions are important since a lot of people are turning into dogs lately.

“Interurban Queen.” This is a “what-if ” story. What if the gasoline-powered internal-combustion “automobile” had not been outlawed early in its career? What would the effect on manners and mores have been if the automobile, the “selfishness symbol,” had been allowed to compete with such communal symbols as the Interurban Electric Trolley Cars?

“Been a Long Long Time.” We will not give a commentary or résumé of this story. Should we begin to do so, you'd say “Oh, that's old, I know that one,” and you'd be wrong.

These stories are intended to be entertainments, even the several of them that leak a little blood out of them. They are amusements.

Be entertained then, be amused! And the superior ones among you will even be delighted in several places.

Table of Contents (alphabetical)

Go to Table of Contents (chronological)

Go to Table of Contents (by collection)

Introduction

italics = previously unpublished

A Special Condition in Summit City

About a Secret Crocodile

Adam Had Three Brothers

Ahoy the Whale

All But the Words

All Hollow Though You Be

All Pieces of a River Shore

All the People

Almost Perfect

Along the San Pennatus Fault

Aloys

Among the Hairy Earthmen

Anamnesis

And All the Skies Are Full of Fish

And Mad Undancing Bears

And Name My Name

And Read the Flesh Between the Lines

And Some in Velvet Gowns

And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire

And You Did Not Wail

Animal Fair

Apocryphal Passage of the Last Night of Count Finnegan On Galveston Island

Assault on Fat Mountain

Bank and Shoal of Time

Barnaby's Clock

Beautiful Dreamer

Been a Long Long Time

Bequest of Wings

Berryhill

Bird-Master

Boomer Flats

Brain Fever Season

Bridlegoose

Bright Coins in Never-Ending Stream

Bright Flightways

Bubbles When They Burst

Buckets Full of Brains

By the Seashore

Cabrito

Calamities of the Last Pauper

Camels and Dromedaries, Clem

Chombo

Cliffs That Laughed

Club Mentiros

Company in the Wings

Communion of Saints

Condillac's Statue

Condition Quick: A Dialog for Two Dia-Persons

Configuration of the North Shore

Continued on Next Rock

•  How I Wrote “Continued On Next Rock”

Crocodile

Day of the Glacier

Days of Grass, Days of Straw

Dig a Crooked Hole

Dorg

Dream

End of the Line

Endangered Species

Enfants Terribles

Entire and Perfect Chrysolite

Episodes of the Argo

Eurema's Dam

Ewe Lamb

Faith Sufficient

Fall of Pebble-Stones

Flaming Ducks and Giant Bread

Flaming-Arrow

Fog in My Throat

For All Poor Folks at Picketwire

Frog on the Mountain

From the Thunder Colt's Mouth

Funnyfingers

Get Off the World

Ghost in the Corn Crib

Ginny Wrapped in the Sun

Girl of the Month

Golden Gate

Golden Trabant

Goldfish

Gray Ghost: A Reminiscence

Great Day in the Morning

Great Green Goat

Great Tom Fool

Groaning Hinges of the World

Guesting Time

Handful of Fire

Hands of the Man

Happening in Chosky Bottoms

Haruspex

Heart Grow Fonder

Heart of Stone, Dear

Hog-Belly Honey

Holy Woman

Horns on Their Heads

Hound Dog's Ear (original)

Hound Dog's Ear (revised)

How Many Miles to Babylon?

How They Gave It Back

I Don't Care Who Keeps the Cows

I Don't Like You

Ifrit

I'll See It Done and Then I'll Die

In Deepest Glass

In Our Block

In Outraged Stone

In the Garden

In the Turpentine Trees

Incased in Ancient Rind

Interurban Queen

Inventions Bright and New

Ishmael Into the Barrens

Jack Bang's Eyes

John Salt

Johnny Crookedhouse

Junkyard Thoughts

L'Avare

Land of the Great Horses

•  Afterword (Land of the Great Horses)

Last Laugh

Le Hot Sport

Live It Again

Long Teeth

Lord Torpedo, Lord Gyroscope

Love Affair With Ten Thousand Springs

Mad Man

Magazine Section

Make Sure the Eyes Are Big Enough

Maleficent Morning

Marsilia V

Maybe Jones and the City

McGonigal's Worm

McGruder's Marvels

Mr. Hamadryad

Mud Violet

Name of the Snake

Narrow Valley

New People

Nine Hundred Grandmothers

Nor Limestone Islands

Of Laughter and the Love of Friends

Oh Happy Double-Jointed Tongues!

Oh Tell Me Will It Freeze Tonight

Oh Whatta You Do When the Well Runs Dry?

Oh, Those Trepidatious Eyes!

Old Foot Forgot

Old Halloweens On The Guna Slopes (original)

Old Halloweens On The Guna Slopes (revised)

Once on Aranea

One at a Time

One-Eyed Mocking-Bird

One Minute Before

Other Kind of Animal

Or Little Ducks Each Day

Other Side of the Moon

Pamponia

Panic Flight

Parthen

Phoenic

Pig in a Pokey

Pine Castle

Pleasures and Palaces

Polity and Custom of the Camiroi

Posterior Analytics

Promontory Goats

Puddle on the Floor

Quiz Ship Loose

Rain Mountain

Rainbird

Rainy Day in Halicarnassus

Rang Dang Kaloof

Red Headed Future

Ride a Tin Can

Rivers of Damascus

Rogue Raft

Royal Licorice

Saturday You Die

Scorner's Seat

Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies

Seven Story Dream

Seven-Day Terror

Sex and Sorcery

Six Leagues From Lop

Sky

Slippery

Slow Tuesday Night

Smoe and the Implicit Clay

Snake Cabin

Snake in His Bosom

Snuffles

Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas

Something Rich and Strange

Splinters

Square and Above Board

St. Poleander's Eve

Symposium

Task Force Fifty-Eight and a Half

The 99th Cubicle

The All-At-Once Man

The All-Star Series

The Casey Machine

The Cliff Climbers

The Doggone Highly Scientific Door

The Effigy Histories

The Emperor's Shoestrings

The End of Outward

The Forty-Seventh Island

The Funny Face Murders

The Hand of the Potter: An Idyll

The Hand with One Hundred Fingers

The Hellaceous Rocket of Harry O'Donovan

The Hole on the Corner

The Last Astronomer

The Man Underneath

The Man Who Lost His Magic

The Man Who Made Models

The Man Who Never Was

The Man Who Walked Through Cracks

The Man with the Aura

The Man with the Speckled Eyes

The Most Forgettable Story in the World

The Only Tune That He Could Play

The Pani Planet

The Polite People of Pudibundia

The Primary Education of the Camiroi

The Rod and the Ring

The Saving Grace

The Six Fingers of Time

The Skinny People of Leptophlebo Street

The Story of Little Briar-Rose, A Scholarly Study

The Transcendent Tigers

The Two-Headed Lion of Cris Benedetti

The Ugly Sea

The Ultimate Creature

The Ungodly Mice of Doctor Drakos

The Vanquished

The Wagons

The Weirdest World

The Wooly World of Barnaby Sheen

The World as Will and Wallpaper

There'll Always Be Another Me

Thieving Bear Planet

This Boding Itch

This Grand Carcass Yet

Thou Whited Wall

Thousand Dollar Melon

Three For a Quarrel

Three Men in the Morning

Three Shadows of the Wolf

Through Other Eyes

Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne

Tongues of the Matagorda

Try to Remember

Two For Four Ninety-Nine

Unique Adventure Gone

Vestige

What Big Tears the Dinosaur's

What's the Name of That Town?

When All the Lands Pour Out Again

Whittle Come Back

World Abounding

You Can't Go Back

Table of Contents (by collection)

Go to Table of Contents (chronological)

Go to Table of Contents (alphabetical)

Introduction

Nine Hundred Grandmothers

Strange Doings

Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add?

Golden Gate and Other Stories

Four Stories

Heart of Stone, Dear and Other Stories

Snake in His Bosom and Other Stories

Through Elegant Eyes

Ringing Changes

The Man Who Made Models and Other Stories

Slippery and Other Stories

The Early Lafferty

The Back Door of History

The Early Lafferty II

Episodes of the Argo

Lafferty in Orbit

Mischief Malicious (And Murder Most Strange)

Iron Tears

Uncollected Stories

Nine Hundred Grandmothers

Return to Collections

Nine Hundred Grandmothers

Land of the Great Horses

Ginny Wrapped in the Sun

The Six Fingers of Time

Frog on the Mountain

All the People

The Primary Education of the Camiroi

Slow Tuesday Night

Snuffles

Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne

Name of the Snake

Narrow Valley

Polity and Custom of the Camiroi

In Our Block

Hog-Belly Honey

Seven-Day Terror

The Hole on the Corner

What's the Name of That Town?

Through Other Eyes

One at a Time

Guesting Time

Strange Doings

Return to Collections

Rainbird

Camels and Dromedaries, Clem

Continued on Next Rock

Once on Aranea

Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas

The Man with the Speckled Eyes

All But the Words

The Transcendent Tigers

World Abounding

Dream

Ride a Tin Can

Aloys

Entire and Perfect Chrysolite

Incased in Ancient Rind

The Ugly Sea

Cliffs That Laughed

Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add?

Return to Collections

About a Secret Crocodile

Mad Man

Nor Limestone Islands

The Man Underneath

Boomer Flats

This Grand Carcass Yet

In the Garden

Groaning Hinges of the World

Golden Trabant

How They Gave It Back

Maybe Jones and the City

Seven Story Dream

Adam Had Three Brothers

Pig in a Pokey

The Weirdest World

The Ultimate Creature

Golden Gate and Other Stories

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Golden Gate

Mr. Hamadryad

This Boding Itch

Condillac's Statue

The Cliff Climbers

McGruder's Marvels

Tongues of the Matagorda

Ishmael Into the Barrens

Eurema's Dam

Days of Grass, Days of Straw

Make Sure the Eyes Are Big Enough

Bequest of Wings

Fall of Pebble-Stones

Marsilia V

One-Eyed Mocking-Bird

Sky

Four Stories

Return to Collections

The Last Astronomer

In the Turpentine Trees

Faith Sufficient

Bird-Master

Heart of Stone, Dear and Other Stories

Return to Collections

And You Did Not Wail

Company in the Wings

The End of Outward

Heart of Stone, Dear

Haruspex

Snake in His Bosom and Other Stories

Return to Collections

Jack Bang's Eyes

Pleasures and Palaces

Posterior Analytics

Snake in His Bosom

Unique Adventure Gone

Through Elegant Eyes

Return to Collections

The All-At-Once Man

Mud Violet

Barnaby's Clock

And Read the Flesh Between the Lines

Animal Fair

The Ungodly Mice of Doctor Drakos

The Wooly World of Barnaby Sheen

The Two-Headed Lion of Cris Benedetti

The Hellaceous Rocket of Harry O'Donovan

Rivers of Damascus

Old Halloweens On The Guna Slopes

Brain Fever Season

What Big Tears the Dinosaur's

And All the Skies Are Full of Fish

St. Poleander's Eve

Ringing Changes

Return to Collections

Introduction to Ringing Changes

Parthen

Old Foot Forgot

Dorg

Days of Grass, Days of Straw

Brain Fever Season

And Read the Flesh Between the Lines

Old Halloweens On The Guna Slopes

The Ungodly Mice of Doctor Drakos

The Wooly World of Barnaby Sheen

Rivers of Damascus

Among the Hairy Earthmen

In Outraged Stone

And Name My Name

Sky

For All Poor Folks at Picketwire

Oh Whatta You Do When the Well Runs Dry?

And Some in Velvet Gowns

The Doggone Highly Scientific Door

Interurban Queen

Been a Long Long Time

The Man Who Made Models and Other Stories

Return to Collections

The Man Who Made Models

I'll See It Done and Then I'll Die

The Effigy Histories

Of Laughter and the Love of Friends

Two For Four Ninety-Nine

Slippery and Other Stories

Return to Collections

Slippery

All Hollow Though You Be

Ewe Lamb

John Salt

The Early Lafferty

Return to Collections

Rain Mountain

The Wagons

Other Side of the Moon

Long Teeth

Saturday You Die

Task Force Fifty-Eight and a Half

The Back Door of History

Return to Collections

Phoenic

Six Leagues From Lop

Rainy Day in Halicarnassus

Assault on Fat Mountain

Calamities of the Last Pauper

Rogue Raft

The Early Lafferty II

Return to Collections

Day of the Glacier

Almost Perfect

Ghost in the Corn Crib

Maleficent Morning

Beautiful Dreamer

McGonigal's Worm

Episodes of the Argo

Return to Collections

Episodes of the Argo

The Casey Machine

Apocryphal Passage of the Last Night of Count Finnegan On Galveston Island

Lafferty in Orbit

Return to Collections

Old Foot Forgot

All Pieces of a River Shore

Bright Coins in Never-Ending Stream

Flaming Ducks and Giant Bread

The Hole on the Corner

The Skinny People of Leptophlebo Street

Continued on Next Rock

Entire and Perfect Chrysolite

Great Day in the Morning

The Hand with One Hundred Fingers

One at a Time

Royal Licorice

And Name My Name

Fall of Pebble-Stones

Configuration of the North Shore

Dorg

When All the Lands Pour Out Again

Interurban Queen

The Only Tune That He Could Play

Mischief Malicious (And Murder Most Strange)

Return to Collections

The Man with the Aura

The 99th Cubicle

Fog in My Throat

Oh, Those Trepidatious Eyes!

Buckets Full of Brains

Pine Castle

Junkyard Thoughts

Enfant Terrible

The Polite People of Pudibundia

Rang Dang Kaloof

Puddle on the Floor

Iron Tears

Return to Collections

Magazine Section

You Can't Go Back

By the Seashore

The World as Will and Wallpaper

Lord Torpedo, Lord Gyroscope

Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies

Thieving Bear Planet

Or Little Ducks Each Day

Gray Ghost: A Reminiscence

Le Hot Sport

Cabrito

Horns on Their Heads

Berryhill

Funnyfingers

Ifrit

Uncollected Stories

Return to Collections

italics = previously unpublished

The Saving Grace

Johnny Crookedhouse

Live It Again

The Vanquished

Bridlegoose

Handful of Fire

Get Off the World

Chombo

L'Avare

Girl of the Month

Pamponia

Club Mentiros

Three For a Quarrel

Panic Flight

Communion of Saints

Thousand Dollar Melon

Snake Cabin

Other Kind of Animal

Whittle Come Back

One Minute Before

End of the Line

Three Men in the Morning

The Pani Planet

Vestige

Last Laugh

Bubbles When They Burst

A Special Condition in Summit City

And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire

Scorner's Seat

Symposium

The Most Forgettable Story in the World

And Mad Undancing Bears

Endangered Species

Heart Grow Fonder

Three Shadows of the Wolf

Old Halloweens On The Guna Slopes (original)

From the Thunder Colt's Mouth

Sex and Sorcery

Smoe and the Implicit Clay

Love Affair With Ten Thousand Springs

Oh Tell Me Will It Freeze Tonight

Thou Whited Wall

Splinters

Quiz Ship Loose

The Man Who Walked Through Cracks

Bright Flightways

The Funny Face Murders

The Forty-Seventh Island

The Rod and the Ring

Bank and Shoal of Time

In Deepest Glass

Great Tom Fool

Square and Above Board

Flaming-Arrow

Inventions Bright and New

Something Rich and Strange

Along the San Pennatus Fault

The Hand of the Potter: An Idyll

The Story of Little Briar-Rose, A Scholarly Study

Promontory Goats

The Man Who Lost His Magic

Holy Woman

Hound Dog's Ear

Hound Dog's Ear (revised)

Oh Happy Double-Jointed Tongues!

How Many Miles to Babylon?

Anamnesis

Dig a Crooked Hole

I Don't Care Who Keeps the Cows

Ahoy the Whale

Happening in Chosky Bottoms

Goldfish

The Emperor's Shoestrings

There'll Always Be Another Me

§ “This was the ‘Long Afternoon’ that lasted two-and-a-half centuries, possibly the most puzzling two-and-a-half centuries in the history of our world.”

“One of those most pleasant antics of childhood is visiting an Inferior Planet for an afternoon and interfering with the affairs of the people, especially when they are a short-lived people to whom an afternoon is five hundred of their years.

It is fun, on an Inferior Planet, to play Faces and Bodies and Names and Houses and Palaces and Towns. It is fun to play Arts and Inventions and Ships and Battles. Oh, the great battles! Lepanto the great Sea-Siege where the castled ships broke asunder and almost everybody drowned! But those who drowned were only the inhabitants of the Inferior Planet.

But, to those of the Inferior Planet, the game was not understood as such. And they do not understand that five hundred of their years are no more than a single afternoon.

Oh, those damnable kids were here, for at least fifteen generations. There was a lot of glory in that time, but it’s five hundred years that we wouldn’t want to live through again.

There is no question that they were here, yes, just yesterday afternoon.”

§ “The aliens had landed!…The world rang with cracked melody and everyone was in love with life… Never had the girls been so pretty… I believe that our minds are now on a higher plane… And every one of those men died happy. That's what made it so nice.”

§ “Nine Hundred Grandmothers, the title story of the book, is one of the slightest of these pieces, but it is the title story because it is a catchy title. It is the parable of the ever-living past growing perspectively smaller as it becomes more distant in time.

———

Nine Hundred Grandmothers is a story that doesn't have any story line and doesn't have any ending. In those years, the preachers preached that a story should have both of these things. For a while I was almost, but not quite, convinced that they were right. They weren't, of course. A story line and an ending, if handled right, will not hurt a story, may even help it; but they are not essential.”

§ “We will not give a commentary or résumé of this story. Should we begin to do so, you'd say ‘Oh, that's old, I know that one,’ and you'd be wrong.”

§ “One does whatever one can for “the oneness that is greater than self.”…They say ‘Pray for the happy obliteration.’… But somewhere there is a person who revolts and cries, ‘I would rather burn in a hell forever than suffer happy obliteration. I'll burn if it be me that burns.’

This is the only story of a real revolutionary in the book. Real Revolutionaries dedicated to real revolution are rare in any book.

Most revolutions are false: revolutions of the rich against the poor, or revolutions of the mob against the person. It is easy to be heroic in these false revolutions: All that is required is to use words to mean their opposites, and to follow along with the mobbing majority while claiming to be for the person at heart.

But it is not at all easy to be heroic in a true revolution, to side with the person against an array of mobbing groups. It is also in bad taste. And it is particularly difficult to defend the idea of the person when one is not a person but only a pseudopod.”

§ “This is a ‘what-if’ story. What if the gasoline-powered internal-combustion ‘automobile’ had not been outlawed early in its career? What would the effect on manners and mores have been if the automobile, the ‘selfishness symbol,’ had been allowed to compete with such communal symbols as the Interurban Electric Trolley Cars?”

This story disregards the imaginary and scarecrow evils of the world and latches onto one of the real evils, the automobile.

Naturally all automobiles and automobile drivers must be hunted down and destroyed. That is the only way to extirpate a real evil. Root them out of the world!

Someday soon we will turn our attention to other real evils of this world (there are at least two more of them). We will hound them out and destroy them too.

It isn’t very different to purge the world of its real evils. Follow the simple instructions here and the task will already be one-third done.

§ “Yes, you can pick and choose from among the various realities, selecting the best and most eventful of them and then selecting from the still more rarefied best. You can do this for quite a while, so long as you are not spooked by things that are the wrong color of white, so long as you are able to refinance your bill with the piper, so long as you have hollow bones and a hollow heart.

This story had its origin in a nonsense verse that came into my mind and jingled there and refused to go away:

‘Sky for the Queen of the soaring drones With her hollow heart and her hollow bones.’

I woke up one morning with my ears full of these words and with the belief that they formed the finest poetic couplet ever invented, as perhaps they do. I had to extract the story from the jingle and write it to get release from the lines.

My role in the story is that of the Sky-Seller.

‘The Sky-Seller was Mr. Furtive himself, fox-muzzled and ferret-eyed, slithering along like a snake, and living under the rocks.’ No, that is only a partial, but not a complete and accurate, description of myself. But I am the Sky-Seller in that I sometimes do traffic in a magic substance for which ‘Sky’ is as good a name as any.

But as to myself flying — no, I never learned how to do that.

§ “About a Secret Crocodile was a shot in a war (since lost) against a cabal that was forcing ‘trendiness,’ whose other name is ‘unoriginality,’ on the world.”

§ “Rain dances are good; fertility dances are good; so is prayer and chanting. But there is nothing like ritual drawing and painting on cave walls to keep the world well-fed. What did you think was keeping the world so fertile and burgeoning these days?”

§ “This is the stubborn refusal to accept that there is no transcendence, that there is no ultimate reality.”

When they try to tell you that you are only an artifact in a collection, that you are not alive, that you have never been alive, that is the time to get mad.”

§ “Is it possible that our true identity has been taken away from all of us, that we are only an apish shambles now? 

‘Why is our identity stolen from us. Why are we robbed of it?’ we ask. 

‘You aren't robbed of it. You threw it away,’ we are told.

There may be a question of the grammatical tense used in an old account. It may be an open-ended tense. Events recounted there may have happened anciently. They may be happening right now. Or they may be still to happen.

There may be a question of species that presumed too much on its own role.

“It seems a shame that you have already come and gone before the scene itself begins,” the Shining Man said.

Wait, wait, wait! It is ourselves who are being so quietly consigned to secondary oblivion! This could be the most abysmal error ever made! ‘They can’t do this to us!’

Louder, so that someone may hear us somewhere, so that this outrageous decision can be rectified!

‘THEY CAN’T DO THIS TO US!!’ ”

§ “Without the special days that are not in the regular count it just wouldn't be worthwhile. We need them, we need them, and some of the champions will have to wrestle with the principalities and powers to get them.

I am sometimes asked by doubters whether I really understand my own stories.

‘Oh sure,’ I say. ‘Almost always.’

But there are exceptions. I never did understand Days of Grass, Days of Straw very well. It’s as if it were really written by a Jinni who took possession of my hands for a while.

Well, those Jinn have a lot to learn about plotting and continuity and clarity and narrative flow. Their material is clumsy and funky and garish and decadent.

And yet they have seen worlds that are beyond us, and their descriptions of these ‘Worlds Beyond’ may be quite accurate. Who is to say that they are not?

I believe that this is an eyewitness description of one of those ‘Worlds Beyond’. Or possibly it is some other thing entirely.”

§ “We'll not allow ourselves to be narrowed down forever in a straited world. We'll explode and regain our real spaciousness. We'll explode, we'll explode!”

§ “Maybe life is no more than globs of gas plasma, green and faintly translucent. But how is it possible to grow hairs on globs of gas? This is a sympathetic story about the only animals that everybody loves, mice.”

§ “Barnaby's world was about a cubic meter in volume and it weighed 4,500 pounds. It had a good selection of rocks, and it developed weather and lively inferior fauna. Then it got a little bit out of hand. This tale contains the saddest lament in all literature: ‘My house is on fire, my shirt is on fire, and my houseboy has fleas. What worse can happen?’ ”

§ “There are several ways of looking at any past event in history. The para-archaeological probe, with a little dowsing added to it, may not be the ideal way, but it sure can cut through that polarized data of what is sometimes called ‘conventional history.’ ”

§ “It wasn't a bad place at all compared to some others. Consider that you can have a workshop in total vacuum, that it is dust-free and without gravity, that it is spared the effect of every magnetized cloud, of every voltage differential, of every solar wind. And it's beyond the influence of time and temperature and hard radiation and “all baleful beams.” Nuggets of gold and orichalcum! What a place to work! Even the main disadvantage of it can be turned to an advantage, sort of, sort of.”

§ “O ghostly night, O antic night, when we were ourselves young and ghostly.”

§ “If you turned into a dog, would you be the first person or the last person to know it? And if you turned into a dog interiorly but still kept your human appearance, who would know it first? If there is an electronic device that can discern between dogs and people, where will it draw the line? 

These questions are important since a lot of people are turning into dogs lately.”

§ “The seasons have returned in their appointed strengths. Now we can live again. Now we can be seasonable fools again.”

§ “Well, if you got all the skin burned off you by space winds, maybe you'd cover yourself with gaudy clothing too. This is a ‘the-aliens-are-in-town-and-they're-taking-us-over’ story. But most of them weren't really wearing velvet gowns. They just had their torsos painted to look like that.”

§ “On November 7, 1999, the well ran dry. This was the well of Wit and Idea. It was the Well of the World. 

Ah, but there was a way to get more water out of the well. There were shabby people who still had plenty of shabby water, and they were willing to share it. But it was stronger water than any of the people had met before. It was raunchy water, it was vile water. And the wit and ideas that came from the well now were raunchy also. 

There's a twist to the tale of course, but it doesn't make the condition any less raunchy.”

§ This piece, as well as an explanatory letter in the hand of the character Absalom Stein that was to have been inserted between chapters ten and eleven of that book, arrived at the publishers (Avon books) too late for inclusion. It was first published in Episodes of the Argo. This is its second appearance.

§ “The Selenium Ghosts go back before the great days of the Silent Movies, back before the great days of the Silent Radio, back more than a hundred years to the first television series ever and to Clarinda Calliope who was probably the greatest actress ever, back to the pristine fountainhead of all melodrama. This first TV Series was the ‘Wonderful World of Aurelian Bentley’, and there can never be anything else like it.”

§ “This is the only autobiographical story in the book. Who better than a dolt to write about a dolt! Robert Silverberg, the editor who first published this story, says that it is a story about a Schlemiel: but I maintain that the Irish have people just as doltish as the Jewish have and that this is the story of a Daoi. (You can pronounce that Dee if you want to; it won’t be right but it will be close.)

The only difference between Albert in the story and myself is that the things that Albert makes work and that the things that I make don’t work. Were it not for that, I, and not Albert, would be the greatest man of the century.”

§ “This is a ghost story. Its roots are very long, both in time and in space. And the ghosts are the biggest ghosts you ever heard of. They haunt a thousand miles of river shore that is cut up in pieces and rolled up on reels.

The sovereign against spookiness is good whiskey mixed with fresh possum blood. You’d better get a big bowl of it right now. And you should have a couple extra bottles and a couple extra possums near at hand.

It gets pretty spooky in here.”

§ “This story had its origin in a series of watery dreams, sometimes delightful, sometimes dire and dangerous, that I had when I was a soldier in the South Pacific during World War Two. Each of them was a sort of quest dream, and each of them contained part of the vision of the North Shore.

To get to the North Shore itself I’d have to die, and I was unwilling to do this. And I didn’t want to lose the rich dream content either. So, in the story, the dreamer is split in two. He is Miller who first had the dreams and who went to the psychologist with them. And, as a result of this, he can no longer recall the dreams.

And he is Rousse the psychologist who steals the dream sequence from Miller and then follows it out logically to his death.

I got out of that situation just in time.”

§ “This is a story loaded with moral lessons:
Illusion can get you into trouble.

Lying can get you into trouble, especially double-decked, eight-sided, four-dimensional lying.

Making fools out of a bunch of bumpkins can get you into real trouble.

Arrogance can get you into real trouble.

You will do well to avoid all these things.

‘You fools, you can’t even tie a proper knot!’ Mihai Lado spit at those bumpkins as they put the rope around his neck to hang him. That was unsufferable arrogance on Lado’s part, and he paid for it.

Avoid all the fancy dealings. They will shorten your life.

But that damnable illusion that Lado pulled was the slickest thing imaginable. It was almost worth getting hanged for to be able to pull an illusion like that.”

§ “This is a monitory story, but I am afraid that the monitory elements will fall upon iron and unhearing ears.

This is about the most evil man in the world. And there are many versions of him current even now. I could name their names, but I would be torn to pieces if I did so: for these most evil persons in the world are also the most admired persons in the world.

But it may be only ninety percent too late to do something about them. Be warned! Be warned! Don’t trust those guys! Don’t be taken in by them! Even now there is time to wise the world up against them. Expose them with your last breath, with your last breath, with your last — Ugh, ugh, ugh, guuuu — That was your last breath, wasn’t it!”

§ “Educational Blocks have quite a valuable function. They instruct the children who play with them and listen to them.

The Educational Blocks take on a life of their own, but possibly that’s a tendency in the right direction. Some of the children who associate with them may also take on lives of their own.

This story had its origin in an old notebook that had once been full of ideas for Science Fiction stories. Whenever I used one of the ideas, I marked through it in the notebook. And finally there was left only a bunch of ideas that I was not able to turn into stories, and at the same time I was not able to throw them away without a pang. So I poured them into this Symposium and assigned them as lines to the Educational Blocks.”

§ “This is one of the Three Primary Dreams, that of the Elixir of Life, come true. It really works, for a man or mechanism or beast. It restores youth, it restores talents, it restores golden life itself.

The supply should be unlimited. But the supplier is erratic. And if one does run out of the elixir, the withdrawal symptoms are horrible.

Unless one has class. If one has real class, little things like withdrawal symptoms bother not at all.”

§ “This isn’t the last werewolf story in the world.

But it is the story of the last werewolf in the world, the story of the last three werewolves really, but the three were essentially one. And this is the only authentic werewolf story ever. Only here are all the details recounted and verified by careful observation, all the little things. For instance, in the changeover, the tail pops out last of all.

These last werewolves in the world were in Royal Parish, Louisiana. Do not believe the stories about there still being werewolves in Calvados Parish. The last werewolf in Calvados Parish was killed more than thirty years ago.

And just how did I gather all these authentic details about werewolves?

At the peril of my life I gathered them, that’s how.”

§ “This is the authentic vision of Megapolis. How I hate that false form, Megalopolis!

This is the city that is the whole world, going on without boundary like the surface of a sphere, which it is. And every block of the city is different, every block of it is different, every block of it is different. Even the city survey stencils have different reference numbers on them, as ‘Beginning of Stencil 35,352, sector 985,363,002’.

One of my earliest reveries was of this city that went on and on to the ends of the world and beyond, never quite duplicating itself, but coming very close to it. You would walk all day through the great city, and at night you would come to a house so very like your own house that it was all right for you to stay there. And another person very like you would be staying the night in a similar house a day’s journey ahead of you, and still another person very like you would be staying the night in a similar house a day’s journey behind you.

My early reverie differed from the actuality herein set out only in this: in the actuality you will sometimes see your own severed head coming down the conveyor belt of the disassembly line, or at least it will be a head very like yours.”

§ “There is not, I hope, any whimsy in this story, not any of that muddy stuff called ‘magic’, nothing leprechaunish, nothing coltish, nothing fanciful, nothing capricious.

What things are to be found here (slightly disguised to avoid copyright infringement) are the authentic formulae by which entities and persons may be manufactured.”

§ “I suppose that this story is about the love life of sea shells. All of them do have colorful and shapely love lives: the Music Volute, the Hebrew Volute, the Neptune Volute, the Vase Shells, the Helmet Shells, the Barthelemy Cone, the Alphabet Cone, the Prince Cone, and the deadly Geography Cone, these especially. And most especially do they have exciting love lives along the Sea of Moyle which is either in the very far North or off Earth entirely.

And this is also about the love life of Oliver Murex, a funny-looking kid and a funny-looking young man. Maybe he hadn’t as colorful a love life as some of the sea shells had, but he loved and was loved.

Collecting sea shells is a delightful hobby. But when the process is reversed and you find yourself being collected, is it still delightful?

It is if you are Oliver Murex.

And it is if you are that almost legendary prize, the rare Oliver Cone.”

§ “Land of the Great Horses, the ‘Gypsy Story’ is the allegory of the homing instinct. The object of the instinct appears here under the disguise of the ‘Land of the Blessed Origin’. But the land stands for the Person. Saint Augustine tells the story in fewer words:

‘…and unquiet is our heart until it rests in Thee.’ ”

§ “Ginny Wrapped In The Sun is γυνὴ περιβεβλημένη τὸν ἥλιον, ‘The Woman Wrapped in the Sun’, as John has it in his Apocalypse. But Ginny is Gyne the Woman. There is also a Red Dragon, literally in John and figuratively as group persecution in this story, waiting to kill Ginny and Humanity with her. (The unfit Human race would be scrubbed out according to Darwinian rules, if those rules ruled.) But it does not happen. The Greatness hides in the Smallness and is saved.”

§ “This is about a time paradox which probably traces all the way back to Zeno. Dragons of another sort seem to win here, but really they lose. Their accelerated time is not anchored in eternity, and so it is bogus.”

§ “A pilgrimage of danger, up and up and up. And a high vision and audition of Hell. Hell is having to hear that damnable guitar music forever. It must not prevail!”

§ “Is it possible for the magnified souls of the saved to have full particularity, to know everything and everybody? Sure it is. Even Tony the Tin Man is able to know everybody in the world.”

§ “This system will work. Try it, try it, try it!”

§ “Don’t slow time down! Speed up the people! By simple surgery, that can be done in any outpatient clinic, this great state can be achieved that easily.”

§ “I have sometimes been asked whether I am in any of my stories. Yes, I am Snuffles, the clumsy bear-like creature who makes worlds that have almost everything the matter with them, and who becomes murderously snappish when it is pointed out that they are all wrong. This wrong-way bear is the real totem-animal for all artists and writers, and his unspoken motto ‘Love My World Or Die’ is surely a sound one.”

§ “This is the original ‘What-Happens-If-We-Change-This?’ story. If I had written this in the beginning of time, no other stories of this class would have been written. Since the time when I wrote this, no other good ones have been written, nor can be forever. They have all been precluded by this.”

§ “The tactic of the Enemy from the Beginning: ‘Keep the poison but change the name of the snake’ still prevails and still deceives. The only escape from the tactic is in the reading, and possibly re-reading, of this story.”

§ “Narrow Valley is a topographical paradox story. It illustrates the possibility of getting, by basic magic, nothing for something. All that is required is ‘the word’, some bark, some leaves, and a pure heart.”

§ “This should be required reading for everybody, except that one of its implied postulates is that there should be no required reading for anybody. It explains how to govern a neighborhood, a realm, a world. It’s easy. You only believe it’s difficult because you’ve never done it.”

§ “Well, if they can do such things so off-handedly and easily, wouldn’t it be cheesy of us to ask who they are?”

§ “If you’re mental as hell; if you’re rolling all those new ideas around in your head like a bunch of rocks, it doesn’t matter if you do invent a nullifier that is a little bit before its time.”

§ “This is about another ‘nullifier’, but this is a superior one with a built-in ‘come-backer’ feature.”

§ “This is about group amnesia, and it almost (but not quite) allows us to remember that we ourselves live in the ambient of a group amnesia. We ourselves have forgotten the name of the town we come from. We are left with only such hints of it as:

‘…to an older place than Eden
And a taller tower than Rome.’ ”

§ “This is the first, and possibly the best, science fiction story that I ever wrote. That’s the way I see it. You might see it as something else, as a scrap of wasteland, as a premmigan, as a new color named ‘red’, as a Valery. This is the first appearance of Valery Mok who is destined to outlive the world by one week.”

§ “He was an Odd One, a real juicy cove. He knew a trick, how to die just when he wanted to. He said that it took a bit of practice, but I don’t see the point of practicing a thing that you do but once.”

§ “I was laughing at the wrong people in this one, and some of those wrong people swear that they will ruin me for it. There are some very, very wrong people in this world, and one laughs at their lobbies and investitures at his peril. This is especially true of the vested people of the Disaster Lobby.”

§ “Oh, here I have to stop and read that story again. It contains the only trustworthy instructions of how to get from here to beyond. If someone else had written this story, I’d cut my heart out and eat it, out of envy. Possibly some persons have been doing this. There have been quite a few very grotesque deaths since this story was first published. It really seems that some of these destroyed people had been gnawing on their own vitals.”