It Is not any especial sense of competence on my part which has caused me to resolve that a record of the matter should and must be made. Miss Mothenner, Dame Phillipa's faithful secretary-companion, to say nothing of her cousin, Lord FitzMorris Banstock, would each—under ordinary circumstances, of course—be far more capable than I of delineating the events in question. But the circumstances, of course, are as far from being 'ordinary" as they can possibly be. Miss Mothenner has, for the past six months next Monday fortnight, been in seclusion at Doctor Hardesty's establishment near Sutton Ho; and, whilst I can state quite certainly the falsehood of the rumor that her affairs have been placed in charge of the Master in Lunacy, nevertheless, Doctor Hardesty is adamant that the few visitors she is permitted to receive must make no reference whatsoever to the affairs of last Guy Fawkes Day, the man with the false nose, or the unspeakably evil Eurasian Motilal Smith. As for Lord FitzMorris-Banstock, though I am aware that he has the heart of a lion and nerves of steel, his extreme shyness (in no small measure the result of his unfortunate physical condition) must advertise to all who know him the unlikelihood of his undertaking the task.

It falls to me, therefore, and no one else, to proceed forthwith in setting down the chronicle of those untoward and unhappy events.

Visitors to Argyll Court, which abuts onto Primrose Alley (one of that maze of noisome passages off the Commercial Road which the zeal and conscience of the London County Council cannot much longer suffer to remain untouched), visitors to Argyll Court will have noticed the large signboard affixed to the left-hand door as one enters. Reading, If The Lord Will, His Word Shall Be Preached Here Each Lords Day At Seven (/Clock In The Evening. AH Welcome, it gives notice of the Sabbath activities of Major Bohun, whose weekdays are devoted to his sacred labors with The Strict Baptist Tram-Car and Omnibus Tract Society (the name of which appears on a small brass plate under the sign). Had the major been present that Fifth of November, a different story it would be which I have to tell; but he had gone to attend at an Anti-Papistical sermon given to mark the day at the Putney Tabernacle.

The fetid reek of the Court, which has overwhelmed more than one less delicately bred than Dame Phillipa, bears—besides the effluvia of unwashed beds and bodies emanating from the so-called Seaman's Lodging House of Evan-bach Llewellyn, the rotting refuse of the back part of a cookshop of the lowest sort, bad drains, and the putrid odors of Sampson Stone's woolpullery—tainted breath of the filthy Thames itself, whose clotted waters ebb and flow not far off.

On many an evening when the lowering sun burned dully in the dirty sky and the soiled swans squatted like pigs in the mudbanks of London River, the tall figure of Dame Phillipa would turn (for the time being) from the waterfront, and make her way, by any one of a variety of routes, towards the quickening traffic of the Commercial Road and Goodman Fields; proceeding not infrequently through Salem Yard, Primrose Alley, and Argyll Court The fashionable and sweet-smelling ladies of the West End, as well as their wretched and garishly bedaubed fallen sisters, smelling of cheap "scent" and sweetened gin, just at this hour beginning those peregrinations of the East End's mean and squalid streets for which those less tender than Dame Phillipa might think them dead to all shame; were wearing, with fashion's license, their skirts higher than they had ever been before: but Dame Phillipa (though she never criticized the choice of others) still wore hers long, and sometimes with one hand she would lift them an inch or two to avoid the foul pavements—though she never drew back from contact, neither an inch or an instant with any human being, however filthy or diseased.

Sometimes Miss Mothermer's bird-like little figure was with her friend and employer, perhaps assuming for the moment the burden of the famous Army ldt-bag; sometimes— and such times Dame Phillipa walked more slowly—Lord FitzMorris-Banstock accompanied her; but usually only quite late at night, and along the less-frequented thoroughfares, where such people whom they were likely to meet were too preoccupied with their own unhappy concerns, or too brutalized and too calloused, to stare at the muscular but misshapen peer for more than a second or two.

The kit-bag had been the gift of Piggott, bat-man to Dame Phillipa's brother, the late Lt.-Colonel Sir Chiddiock Garrett, when she had sent him out to the Transvaal in hopes that that Province's wanner and dryer air would be kindlier to his gas-ruined lungs than the filthy fogs and sweats of England. The kit-bag usually contained, to my own knowledge, on an average evening, the following:

Five to ten pounds in coins, as well as several ten-shilling notes folded quite small. Two sets of singlets and drawers, two shirts, and two pairs of stockings—none of them new, but all clean and mended. A dozen slices of bread and margarine, wrapped in packets of two. Ten or twenty copies of a pamphlet-sized edition of the Gospel of St. John in various languages. A brittania-metal pint flask of a good French brandy. A quantity of hard-cooked eggs and an equal supply of salt and pepper in small screws of paper. Four cotton handkerchiefs. First-aid equipment. Two reels of cotton, with needles. A packet of mixed toffees. A Book of Common Prayer. Fifteen packets of five Woodbine cigarettes, into each of which she had thrust six wooden matches. One pocket-mirror. A complete change of infant's clothing. Several small cakes of soap. Several pocket-combs. A pair of scissors.

And three picture-postcards of the Royal Family.

All this arranged with maximum efficiency in minimum space, but not packed so tightly that Dame Phillipa's fingers could not instantly produce the requisite article. It will be observed that she was prepared to deal with a wide variety of occasions.

Tragic, infinitely tragic though it is, not even a person of Dame Phillipa's great experience among what a late American author termed, not infelicitously, The People of the Abyss, could have been prepared either to expect or to deal with such persons as the man wearing the false nose, the woman who offered the antimacassers, and the hideously, the unspeakably evil Eurasian, Motilal Smith.

The night of that Fifth of November found the unfortunates among whom this great lady pursued her noble work no more inclined than in other years to celebrate the delivery from Gunpowder Plot of King James VI and I and his English Parliament. Here and there, to be sure, in the glare of the gin-palaces of the main thoroughfares, a group of grimy and tattered children had gotten up an even more unsavory Guy; for them Dame Phillipa had provided herself with a large supply of pennies. But that night as on most other nights there was little enough evidence of innocent gaiety. There are multitudes, literally multitudes, in this vast labyrinth of London for whom the normal institutions of a human society seem barely to exist. There are physicians in the East End, hospitals, and dispensaries; yet numbers past counting will suffer injury and disease and creep off to die like brutes in their dim comers, or, if they are fortunate, by brute strength survive. There are public baths in every borough, and facilities for washing clothes, yet many never touch water to their skins, and wear their rags unchanged till they rot. Babes are bom without benefit of any human witness to the event save their own wretched mothers, though a word to the great hospital in Whitechapel Road will bring midwife and physician without charge. And while eating-places abound, from quite decent restaurants down to the dirty holes-in-the-wall offering tupenny cups of tea and sixpenny papers of breaded smelts and greasy chips, and while private and public charity arrangements guarantee that no one need quite die of hunger who will ask to be fed, no day goes by without its toll from famine of those who—having their hoards of copper and silver—are disabled by their madness from spending either tuppence or shilling; or who find it much, much easier to die like dogs in their secluded kennels than come forward and declare their needs.

As the pigeons in Trafalgar Square have learned when and where the old man with the bag of breadcrumbs will appear, as the ownerless cats near Billingsgate can tell what time and in what place to scavenge for the scraps of fish the dustmen miss, as the rats in the sewers beneath Smithfield know without error the manner in which "they seek their meet from Cod"; just so, from this stinking alley and from that crumbling tenement, here from underneath a dripping archway and there from a disused warehouse, slinking and creeping and peering fearfully and furtively and sidling with their ragged backs pressed against ragged walls, there appeared by one and by one cast-offs—one must call them "humans," for what other name is theirs?—the self-exiled, the utterly incapable, to take in their quick reptilian grasp the things Dame Phillipa had for them. She knew, knew by instinct and knew by practice, which ones would benefit by a shilling and which by half-a-crown; she knew those to whom money was of no more use than cowry-shells but who would relish the meat of a hard-cooked egg and the savor of the tiny scrap of seasoning which went with it; knew those who would be hopelessly baffled by the labor of cracking the shell but who could manage to rip the paper off a packet of bread and margarine (huddled and crouched in the rank, familiar darkness of their burrows, tearing the soft food with their toothless gums); knew those who would fight, squealing or wordlessly, fight like cornered stoats rather than surrender a single one of the unspeakably filthy rags into which their unspeakably filthy bodies were sewn; and those who would strip by some forgotten water-tap and wash themselves and put on the clean things she provided—but only if provided them, having no longer in many cases the ability to provide either soap or singlets for themselves. She also knew who could be coaxed another foot or two up the path to self-respect by the tempting bait of mirror and comb, the subtie appeal such things made to the ravaged remnants of pride. And she knew when even a handful of toffee or a small picture of the charismatic King and Queen could brighten a dim comer of an eroded mind.

And often (though not always) with her on this humble and saintly mission went her faithful secretary-companion, Miss Mothermer, though by herself Miss Mothermer would have died a thousand dreadful deaths in such places; and sometimes Dame Phillipa was accompanied by her unhappy and unfortunate cousin, Lord FitzMorris-Banstock, though usually he shunned the company of any but his few, familiar servants.

On this particular night, Mawhinney, his chauffeur-footman, had been obliged by a Guy Fawkes bonfire and its attendant crowd to drive the heavily curtained Rolls motorcar by a different and less familiar route; hence he arrived later at the usual place of rendezvous. Miss Mothermer and Dame Phillipa, tall figure and tiny one, picture-hat and turban, had come by and, as was the unspoken understanding, had not tarried. So many considerations affected the presence or absence of Lord FitzMorris-Banstock: was he engaged in a conversation particularly interesting by means of his amateur wireless radio equipment, was he in more pain than a certain degree, was he in less pain than a certain degree, was the moon too bright—for one or more of these reasons the star-curs't noble lord might not come despite his having said he might.

The obedient Mawhinney did not turn his head as his master slowly and awkwardly crept from the vehicle, inch by inch over the black silk upholstery. Nor, well-trained, did he suggest leaving the car in a garage and coming with his master. He waited a few moments after the door closed, then he drove straightway to Banstock House, where he stayed for precisely three hours, taming the Tarot cards over and over again with old Gules, the butler, and Mrs. Ox, the cook. On this Fifth of November night they observed that the Priestess, the Fool, and the Hanged Man turned up with more than their common frequency; and were much exercized to conjecture what, if anything, this might portend: and for whom.

And at the conclusion of three hours he put on his cap and coat and drove back to the place set

Besides those nameless (and all but formless) figures from the silent world, of whom I had spoken above, there were others who awaited and welcomed Dame Phillipa's presence; and among them were women with names like Flossie and Jewel and Our Rose, Clarabel and Princess Mick and Jenny the Hen, Two-Bob Betty and Opaline and Queeny-Kate. She spoke to every one of them, gave them (if they required it, or thought they might: or if Dame Phillipa thought they might) the money needed to make up the sum demanded by their "friends" or "protectors"; the money for rent or food or what it might be, if they had passed the stage where their earnings could possibly be enough to concern the swine who had earlier lived on them. She tended to their cuts and bruises the poor wretches received in the way of business, and which they were too ashamed to bring before the very proper nurses and the young, Iightheartedly cruel, interns.

Sometimes she interceded for them with the police, and sometimes she summoned the police to their assistance; her manner of doing this was to direct Miss Mothermer to blow upon the police whistle she wore upon a lanyard, Dame Phillipa not liking the vibration this made on her lips.

Those to whom Dame Phillipa may have seemed but a gaunt eccentric woman, given to wearing old-fashioned dresses, and hats which ill became her, would do well to recollect that she was among the very first to be honored

with the title of dame; and that His Majesty's Government did not take this step exclusively in recognition of her work prior to her retirement as an educationist, or on behalf of the Woman's Sufferage Movement through entirely legal methods.

It was close to midnight when the two ladies arrived in Primrose Alley and Dame Phillipa rapped lighdy with her walking-stick upon the window of a woman in whose maternity she had interested herself: actually persuading the young woman, who was not over-bright, to accept medical attention, eat something resembling proper food, and have the child christened in the nearby and unfortunately ill-attended Church of St. Gustave Widdershins. She rapped a second time—loud enough (she hoped) to wake the mother, but not loud enough to wake the child. As it happened it was the father she woke, a young man who circulated among three or four women in a sort of tandem polygamy; and who informed the lady that the baby had been sent to its mother's people in Wales, and who begged her, not altogether disdainfully, for sweet Christ's sake to bugger off and let him get back to sleep again.

Dame Phillipa left him to his feculent slumbers in absolute but resigned certainty that this time next year she would again be called upon to swaddle, victual, and renounce by proxy the World, the Flesh, and the Devil, on behalf of another squaling token of his vigor—unless the young woman should perhaps miscarry, as she had done twice before, or carry out her own suggestion of dropping the child in the River, by accident, like.

It was as she turned from the window, then, that Dame Phillipa first clearly observed the man wearing the false nose —as she thought, because of the Guy Fawkes festivities; though it appears Miss Mothermer instandy suspected that he did so by way of disguise—although she had been aware, without giving consideration to the matter, that there had been footsteps behind her. All inquiries as to this man's identfty or motive have failed, but the singularity of his appearance is such that, unless he has been secretly conveyed out of the Kingdom, he cannot long continue to evade the vigilance of the police.

Thinking nothing further of the matter, as we may assume. Dame Phillip a and her companion continued their way into Argyll Court. The sound of voices, and the odor of hot gin and lemon, both proceeding from a bow-window greatly resembling in carving and overhang the forecastle of an ancient sailing-ship, directed her attention to the gas-jet which burned redly in the close air, illuminating the sign of the seaman's lodging-house. In times gone bye, Evan-bach Llewellyn had been a notorious crimp. Board regulations, closely attended to, had almost put a stop to this, as far as vessels of British register were concerned. It was widely said, however, and widely believed, that the masters of foreign vessels putting into London with cargoes of coffee, copra, palm oil, fuel oil, hardwood and pulp wood; and finding members of their crew swallowed up by The Smoke, often appealed to the giant Welshman (he sang bass in the choir of Capel Cymrig) for replacements; and did not appeal in vain. Protests entered by surprised seamen, whose heads cleared of chloral in the Bay of Biscay, when they found themselves on board of strange vessels whose language they often did not recognize, would in the general course of things prove quite bootless.

As Dame Phillipa's attention was distracted to the window, where she saw the familiar-enough silhouette of Sampson Stone, the wool-puller, who was a close crony of the crimp, smoking the churchwarden he affected when at leisure; two men, who must have been huddled silendy at the other side of the court, came suddenly towards the two ladies, reeling and cursing, striking fiercely at one another, and giving off the fumes of that poisonous mixture of methylated spirits and cheap port wine commonly called red biddy. The ladies took a few steps in confusion, not knowing precisely what course to take, nor having much time to consider it: they could not go forward, because of the two men fighting, and it seemed that when they attempted to walk to the side, the bruisers were there, cutting off their way, too.

Dame Fhillipa therefore turned quickly, leading Miss Mothermer in the same direction, but stopped short, as out of Primrose Alley, whence they had just issued, darted the man who had been wearing the false nose. He made a curious sound as he did so; if he spoke words is not certain; what is certain is that he had plucked the false pasteboard from his face—it was hideously pockmarked—and that the flesh underneath was a mere convoluted hollow, like some gross navel, but nothing like a human nose.

Miss Mothermer gave a stifled cry, and drew back, but Dame Phillipa, though certainly no less startled, placed a reassuring hand on her companion's arm, and courteously awaited what this unfortunate might have to say or to ask. He beckoned, he gestured, he mewled and gibbered. Murmuring to Miss Mothermer that he evidently stood in need of some assistance, and that they were bound to endeavor to find what it was, Dame Phillipa stepped forward to follow him. For an instant only Miss Mothermer hesitated—but the two larrikins menaced from behind, she was too shy to demand assistance of Sampson Stone (who seemed unaware of their presence), and she was too fearful for herself and for Dame Phillipa to allow her to go on alone; perforce she followed. She followed into a door which stood open as if waiting.

If her testimony (and if one may give so succinct a name to confused and diffused ramblings noted down by Doctor Hardesty over a period of several months) may be relied on, the door lay but a few paces into Primrose Alley. The facts, however, are that no such door exists. The upper part of the Alley contains the tenements officially designated as Gub-binses' Buildings and called, commonly, "the Jakes"; entrance is through a covered archway twenty feet long which divides into two shallow flights of steps from each of which a hallway leads to the individual apartments. It was in one of these, the window and not the door of which faced the Alley, that the young parents of Dame Phillipa Carreck's godchild were lodging. The lower part of the Alley on the same side is occupied by the blind bulk of the back of the old flour warehouse. The opposite side is lined with the infamous Archways, wherein there are no doors at all. There are, it is true, two doors of sorts in the warehouse itself, but one is bricked up and the other is both rusted shut and locked from the inside. A search of the premises via the main gate failed to show any signs that it had been opened in recent years—or, indeed, that it could have been.

It was shortly after one o'clock on the morning of the sixth of November that Lord FitzMorris-Banstock, toiling painfully through Thirza Street, in the direction of Devon-port Passage, received (or perhaps I should say, became aware of) an impression that he should retrace his steps and then head north. There is no need to suggest telepathy and certainly none to mention the supranormal in conjunction with this impression: Miss Mothermer was blowing the police-whistle, blowing it with lips which trembled in terror, and so weak and feeble was the sound produced that no police constable had heard it. On the conscious level of his mind Lord FitzMorris did not hear it, either. But there are sensual perceptions of which the normal senses are not aware, and it was these, which there can be no doubt that he (perhaps in compensation, perhaps sharpened by suffering, perhaps by both) possesses to an unusual degree, which heard the sound and translated it He obeyed the impulse, walking as fast as he could, and as he walked he was aware of the usual noises and movements in the darkness—rustlings and shufflings and whispers, breathings and mutterings— which betokened the presence of various of Dame Phillipa

Garreck's charges. It seemed to him that they were of a different frequency, as he put it to himself, accustomed to think in wireless terms, this night. That they were uncommonly uneasy. It seemed to him that he could sense their terror.

And as he turned the comer into Salem Yard he saw something gBtter, he saw something flash, and he knew in that instant that it was the famous Negrohead opal, which he had seen that one time before when his lady cousin occasioned the assistance of the Metropolitan Police to rescue the girl Bessie Lovejoy, then in process of being purchased for the Khowadja of Al-Khebur by the ineffably evil Motilal Smith.

It glittered and flashed in the cold and the darkness, and then it was gone.

Fenugreek Close is long and narrow and ill-lit, its western and longest extremity (where the Lascar, Bin-ALL, perished with the cold on the night of St Sylvester) being a cul-de-sac inhabited—when it is inhabited at all—by Oriental seamen who club together and rest the premises whilst they await a ship. But there were none such that night. It was there, pressed against the blank and filthy wall, pressing feebly as if her wren-like little body might obtain entry and safety and sanctuary, sobbing in almost incoherent terror, that Lord FitzMorris-Banstock found the crouching form of Miss Mothenner. The police-whistle was subsequently found in the infamous Archways, and Miss Mothenner has insisted that, although she would have sounded it, she did not, for (she says) she could not find it; although she remembers Dame Phillipa pressing it into her hand. On this point she is quite vehement, yet one is no more apt to credit it than her statement about the open door towards which they were led by the man without a nose: for as Miss Mothenner did not blow upon the whistle, who did?

The noble and misfortunate lord did not waste breath inquiring of his cousin's companion if she were all right, it being patent that she was not. He demanded, instead, what had become of Dame Phillipa; and upon hearing the name, Miss Mothermer became first quite hysterical and then unconscious. Lord FitzMorris lifted her up and carried her to the place of rendezvous where, exactly on time, Mawhinney, his chauffeur-footman, had just arrived with the Rolls motorcar. They drove immediately to Banstock House where she was given brandy and put to bed by Mrs. Ox, the cook, whilst Lord FitzMorris summoned the police.

An alarm had already been given, or, at any rate, an alarm of sorts. One of the wretchedly miserable folk to whose succor Dame Phillipa devoted so much of her time, having somehow learned that she was in danger, had informed Police-Sergeant L. Robinson to this effect This man's name is not known. He is, or at any event was, called by the curious nickname of "Tea and Two Slices," these being the only words which he was usually heard to utter, and then only in a sort of whisper when ordering the only items he was known to eat His age, background, residence, and present whereabouts are equally unknown. He had apparently an absolute horror of well-lighted and much-frequented places and an utter terror of policemen, one cannot tell why, and it may be hard to imagine what agonies and efforts it must have cost him to make his way to the police-station and inform Sergeant Robinson that he must go at once and "help the lady." Unfortunately and for unknown reasons, he chose to make his way to the police-station in Whitechapel instead of to the nearer one in ShadwelL His testimony would be of the utmost importance, but it cannot now be obtained, for, after giving the alarm, he scurried forth into the night again and has not since been seen.

The matter is otherwise with the testimony of the seaman, Creenbriar. It is available, it is copious, it fits in with that of Miss Mothermer, it is unfortunate that it is quite unbelievable. Unbelievable, that it, unless one is willing to cast aside every conceivable limit of credulity and to accept that on the night of Guy Fawkes Day in this year of our sovereign lord King George V the great and ancient city of London was the scene of a visitation more horrible than any in its previous history.

Albert Edward Greenbriar, Abie-Bodied Seaman, is thirty-one years of age, and except for two occasions on which he was fined, respectively, £2 and £2.10, for being drunk and disorderly, has never been in any trouble with the authorities. On the first of November he landed at St Katherine Docks aboard the merchant vessel Salem Tower, from the Straits Settlements with a cargo of rubber, copra, and tinned pine-apples. Neither the Salem Tower nor Greenbriar had been in the United Kingdom for the space of eleven months, and, consequendy, when paid off, he was in possession of a considerable sum of money. In the course of one week he had, with the assistance of several women who are probably prostitutes, dissipated the entire sum. On discovering this, the women, who share a communal flat in Poplar, asked him to leave.

It was Greenbriar's intention to obtain another ship, but in this endeavor he was unsuccessful. He managed to obtain a loan of half-a-crown from a casual acquaintance and spent the night at a bed-and-breakfast place in Ropemakers Fields, Limehouse. The following evening, footsore and hungry, save for a single sixpence, penniless, he found himself in the Commercial Road, where he entered a cookshop whose signboard announced that good tea, bread, smelts and chips were obtainable for that sum. Obtainable they were, good they were not, but he was in no position to object. Having finished, he inquired the way to the convenience, and there retired. On emerging he observed that he was next to the back door which opened onto Argyll Court, although he did not know that was its name, and on looking out he espied a sign.

The sign is still there; in white calligraphy of a fine Spencerian sort up on a black background it reads, Seamen's Lodging House Good Beds E. Llewellyn, Prop.

Albert Edward Greenbriar entered, rang the bell for the governor, and, upon the instant, saw a panel open in the wall, through which a face looked at him. It was the face of a gigantic cherub, white and dimpled and bland, surmounted by a poll of curly hair; in short, it was the face of Evan-bach Llewellyn. Greenbriar in a few words stated his situation and offered to give over his seaman's papers as a surety until such time as he might obtain a ship, in return for bed and board. The governor thrust forth a huge, pale hand, took the documents, slid shut the panel, and presently appeared to beckon Greenbriar down a corridor, at the end of which was a dimly lit dormitory. He gave him a thin blanket which was all in all not quite so filthy as it might have been, informed him that gaming and novel-reading were not permitted on the premises, invited him to take any bed he chose, and forthwith withdrew.

Greenbriar found an empty pallet, under the head of which he placed his shoes, not so much as a pillow as a precaution, drew the cover about him and fell instantly asleep. He was awakened several times by the entry of other men, some qf whom appeared to have been flung rather than escorted into the room, and once he was awakened by the sound of the proprietor playing upon a small patent organ a hymn of his own composition on the subject of the Priesthood of Melchisedec. Greenbriar gazed at the tiny blue tip of the night-light as it burned tremulously on the twisted jet and on the odd and grotesque shadows cast upon the stained and damp-streaked walls by the tossings and turnings of the lodgers, and listened to the no less odd nor grotesque noises made by them. It was only by the start he gave upon being awakened that he realized that he had gone to sleep again.

Who awakened him he did not know, but, although the light was no brighter, there was a stir in the dormitory and men were getting to their feet and he heard the word "scoff" repeated several times. He dashed water on his face and moved with the others into what was evidently the main kitchen of the establishment. To his surprise he observed that the clock there read eleven o'clock. It was too dark to be morning. Evidendy he had slept only a few hours or else he had slept round the clock and a bit more. It seemed an odd hour for victuals but he was beginning to conceive the idea that this was an odd place.

Broiled bloaters, fried sausage, potatoes, cabbage and sprouts were being turned out of pots and pans and dumped higgeldy-piggeldy onto cracked and not over-clean plates; and tea was steaming in coarse crockery cups. No one ventured to eat or drink, however, until Evan-bach Llwellyn had pronounced a grace in the Cymric tongue and immediately after the Amen imparted a piece of information, videlicet that he had got a ship for them. It was a good ship, too, he said; they would all be very pleased with it; it was not one of their dirty old English tubs but a fine modern vessel: he urged them all to eat hearty of the scoff, or victuals, so that no time need be lost in getting aboard, and he then produced a large bottle of gin and proceeded to pour a generous portion into each cup, with many assurances that it was free and would come out of his own commission.

No sooner had he given the signal, with a wave of his pale and dimpled paw, than the men fell to like so many ravening wolves, cramming the hot food into their mouths and gulping down the gin and lemon tea. Creenbriar con-ceeds that the aliment was savory, and, finding himself hungrier than he had thought, took but a hasty swallow of the drink before addressing himself at length to the solids. A furtive movement at his elbow caused him to cease, abruptly. The man to his right, a hulking fellow with red hair and an exceedingly dirty face, was emptying his mug and looking at him out of the comer of his eye. It took but a second to ascertain that the wretched fellow had all but drained his own supply and then switched cups and was now doing away with Creenbriar's, who contented himself with stealing a link of the man's sausage whilst the latter was elaborately gazing elsewhere. Steeling himself to meet this man's resentment, he was dumbfounded to observe the fellow fall upon his face into the mashed potatoes and sprouts on his plate.

Within a matter of seconds, almost as if it were one of the contagious seizures which takes hold at times of the unfortunate patients of an institution for the epileptic—within a matter of seconds, then, all the others at the table sank down into unconsciousness, and Creenbriar, following suit, knew no more.

He awoke to a scene of more than Gothic horror.

He lay with his head against the silent form of another man; he could feel the weight of another on his legs, and others lay like dead men all about. They were not dead, he knew, for he could hear them breathing. The room where they lay was walled and floored and roofed in stone and at regular intervals were carvings in bas-relief of a strange and totally unfamilar kind. Paraffin lamps were set into niches here and there. There was a humming noise whose origin was not visible to him. Very slowly, so as not to attract attention (for he could hear voices), Greenbriar turned his head. As he did so he felt that there was a rope tied round his neck, and a sudden and quite involuntary convulsive movement which he gave upon this discovery disclosed to him that his hands took a quite long time in shifting his position so as to obtain some intelligence of his surroundings. If what he had seen before was strange and uneasy enough, what he saw now was sufficient to deprive him for the moment of the use of his limbs altogether.

The old fellow peered at them, but It was only a thing he did because it was expected of him; there was nothing wrong with his eyes. Garth had known him for many years, and he was still not sure how many of his mannerisms were real, how many put on. Or for that matter, how much of the antique stuff cluttering up the cabin was actually part of the trapper's life, and how much only there for show. Not that he cared: the trapper's job was as much to be quaint and amusing as to do anything else.

Orel, even before the introductions were over, noticed the cup and saucer on the top shelf of the cabinet, but not till his two elders paused did he comment, "Look, Uncle: earthenware!"

"You've got a sharp eye, young fellow," the trapper said, approvingly. "Yes, it's real pottery. Brought over by my who-knows-how-many-times-removed grandfather from the home planet. . . . Yes, my family, they were.pretty important people on the home planet," he added, inconsequentially. He stood silent for a moment, wanned with pride, then made a series of amiable noises in his throat.

"Well, I'm glad to meet you, young fellow. Knew your uncle before he was councillor, before you were bom." He went to the tiny window, touched the defroster, looked out. "Yes, your machine is safe enough." He turned around. "Ill get the fire started, if there's no objections? And put some meat on to grill? Hm?"

The councillor nodded with slow satisfaction; Orel grinned widely.

The trapper turned off the heating unit and set the fire going. The three men gazed into the flames. The meat turned slowly on the jack. Orel tried to analyze the unfamiliar smells crowding around him—the wood itself, and the fire: no, fire had no smell, it was smoke; the meat, the furs and hides ". . . he couldn't even imagine what they all were. It was different from the cities, that was sure. He turned to ask something, but his uncle Garth and Trapper weren't attending. Then he heard it—a long, drawn-out, faraway sort of noise. Then the trapper grunted and spit in the fire. "What was it?" Orel asked.

The old fellow smiled. "Never heard it before? Not even recorded, in a nature studies course? That's one of the big varmints—the land your uncle and the other big sportsmen come out here to hunt—in season—the kind I trap in any season." Abrupdy, he turned to Councillor Garth. "No talk of their dropping the bounty, is there?" Smilingly, the councillor shook his head. Reassured, the trapper turned his attention to the meat, poked it with a long-pronged fork.

Orel compared the interior of the cabin to pictures and 3-D plays he had observed. Things looked familiar, but less —smooth, if that was the word. There was more disorder, an absence of symmetry. Hides and pelts—not too well cured, if the smell was evidence—were scattered all around, not neatly tacked up or laid in neat heaps. Traps and parts of traps sat where the old man had evidently last worked at mending them.

"Council's not in session, I take it?" the trapper asked. Orel's uncle shook his head. "But—don't tell me school's out, too? Thought they learned right through the winter."

Garth said, "I was able to persuade the Dean that our little trip was a genuine—if small—field expedition, and that Orel's absence wouldn't break the partem of learning."

The trapper grunted. Pattern! Orel thought. The mention of the word annoyed him. Everything was part of a pattern: Partem of learning, pattern of earning, pattern of pleasure. . . . Life in the city went by patterns, deviations were few; people didn't even want to break the patterns. They were afraid to.

But it was obvious that the trapper didn't live by patterns. This . . . disorder.

"Do you have any children, Trapper?" he asked. The old man said he didn't. "Then who will carry on your work?"

The trapper waved his hand to the west. "Fellow in the next valley has two sons. When I get too old—a long time from now," he said, defiantly, "one of them will move in with me. Help me out. Split the bounties with me.

"I was married once." He gazed into the fire. "City woman. She couldn't get used to it out here. The solitude. The dangers. So we moved to the cities. / never got used to that. Got to get up at a certain time. Got to do everything a certain way. Everything has to be put in its place, neatly. All the people would look at you otherwise. Breaking the patterns? They didn't like it. Well, she died. And I moved back here as fast as I could get permission. And here I've stayed."

He took down plates, forks, knives, carved the meat. They ate with relish.

"Tastes better than something out of a factory lab, doesn't it?"

Orel's mind at once supplied him with an answer: that synthetics were seven times more nutrious than the foods they imitated. But his mouth was full and besides, it did taste better. Much better. . . . After the meal there was a sort of lull. The trapper looked at Councillor Garth in an expectant sort of way. The councillor smiled. He reached over into the pocket of his hunting jacket and took out a flask. Orel, as he smelled it (even before: after all, everyone knew that the bounty-hunters drank—the flask was part of every 3-D play about them), framed a polite refusal. But none was offered him.

"The purpose of this two-man field expedition," his uncle said, after wiping his mouth, "is to prepare a term paper for Orel's school showing how, in the disciplined present, the bounty-hunters maintain the free and rugged traditions of the past, on the Home Planet ... let me have another go at the flask, Trapper."

Orel watched, somewhat disturbed. Surely his uncle knew how unhealthy. .. .

"My family, they were pretty important people back on the Home Planet." The Old Trapper, having had another drink, began to repeat himself. Outside—the dusk had begun to set in—that wild, rather frightening, sound came again. The old man put the flask down. "Coming nearer," he said, as if to himself. He got to his feet, took up his weapon. "I won't be gone long . . . they don't generally come so near . . . but it's been a hard winter. This one sounds land of hungry. But don't you be frightened, young fellow," he said to Orel, from the door. "There's no chance of its earing me."

"Uncle . . ." Orel said, after a while. The councillor looked up. "Don't be offended, but . . . does it ever strike you that we lead rather useless lives in the city—compared, I mean, to him?"

The councillor smiled. "Oh, come now. Next you'll be wanting to run away and join the fun. Because that's all it is, really: fun. These beasts—the big Varmints,' as he calls them—are no menace to us any longer. Haven't been since we switched from meat to synthetics. So it's not a truly useful life the old man leads. It's only our traditional reluctance to admit things have changed which keeps us paying the bounty. . . ." He got up and walked a few steps, stretched.

"We could get rid of these creatures once and for all, do it in one season's campaign. Drop poisoned bait every acre through the whole range. Wipe them out"

Orel, puzzled, asked why they didn't.

"And 111 tell you something else—but don't put it in your report. The old fellow, like all the trappers, sometimes cheats. He often releases females and cubs. He takes no chance of having his valley trapped out. 'Why don't wer* you ask—why don't we get rid of the beasts once and for all, instead of paying bounties year after year? Well, the present cost is small. And as for getting an appropriation for an all-out campaign—who'd vote for it? / wouldn't.

"No more hunting—no more 3-D plays about the exciting life in the wild country—no more trappers—why, it would just about take what spirit is left away from us. And we are dispirited enough—tired enough—as it is."

Orel frowned. "But why are we like that? We weren't always. A tired people could never have moved here from the Home Planet, could never have conquered this one. Why are we so—so played out?"

The councillor shrugged. "Do you realize what a tremendous effort it was to move such a mass of people such a distance? The further effort required to subdue a wild, new world? The terrible cost of the struggle against colonialism —and finally, the Civil Wars? We don't even like to think about it—we create our myths instead out of the life out here in the wilds—and all the time, we retreated farther and farther, back into our cities. We are tired. We've spent our energies, we've mortgaged them, in fact. We eat synthetics because it's easier, not because it's healthier."

A gust of cold wind blew in on them. They whirled around. The Old Trapper came in, dragging his kill by the forelimbs. He closed the door. The two city folk came up close. The beast was a huge male, gaunt from the poor hunting which winter meant to the wild creatures.

"See here—" the trapper pointed out. "Lost two toes there. Old wound. Must've gnawed his way out of a trap one time. There—got these scars battling over a mate, I suppose. This here's a bum. Bad one. When was the last big forest fire we had?—one too big to outrun—" He figured with moving lips. "That long ago? How the time does pass. . . . Let me have that knife there, young fellow—" Orel glanced around, located the knife, handed it to him; gazed down in fascination and revulsion. The wild life did not seem so attractive at this moment.

"Watch close, now, and 111 show you how to skin and dress a big varmint," the Old Trapper said. He made the initial incision. "Dangerous creatures, but when you know

profusely illustrated¹ and done in so captivating a style that

even a high school senior, picking it up unwarily in search of nudes, would be unable to extricate himself for hours.)

Mr. God body, the future source of all these goodies, was a skeptic of the old-fashioned sort. "Where did Cain get his wife?" was a favorite cackle, accompanied by a nudge of his bony elbow. "Found any feathers from angels' wings yet?" was another.

There was, at the moment, a minor hitch. Old Mr. God-body affected to be shaken by the recent revelation of scandal in anthropology. From that respectable group of ancestors, whose likenesses were known to every schoolchild, from that jolly little club—judgment falling like a bolt of thunder —Piltdown Man had been expelled for cheating at cards.

If Piltdown Man was a fake, why not all the rest? Java Man, Peiping Man, Australopithecus Africanus—all bone-scraps, plaster of paris, and wishful thinking!

In vain, Turbyfil assured him that competent scholars had been leery of H. Piltdown for years; ugly old Mr. Godbody testily replied: "Then why didn't you say so?"

Having lost one faith in his youth, the merchant prince was reluctant to lose another in his old age. But Dr. Turbyfil trusted his patron's doubt was only a passing phase.

In sum, Dr. Turbyfil was about to reap the rewards of virtue and honest toil, and when he reflected on this (as he often did) it amused him to sing—a trifle off-key—a song from his childhood, called "Bringing in the Sheaves."

That was before the advent of Dr. Sanzmann.

The two men had come to Holden within a few months of one another, Dr. Turbyfil from his two-year stay at the Museum of Natural Philosophy in Boston, and Dr. Sanzmann from a meager living translating in New York, whither he had come as an exile from his native country. Sanzmann was politically quite pure, with no taint of either far right or near left; was, in fact, a Goethe scholar—and what can be purer than a Goethe scholar? He had a post at the local denominational university: Professor of Germanic and Oriental Languages, neatiy slapping the questionable Slavs. Dr. Turbyfil was not an ungenerous man, and he was quite content to see Prof. Sanzmann enjoy the full measure of linguistic success.

But Dr. Philosoph. Ludwig Sanzmann was also an amateur anthropologist, paleontologist, and general antiquarian; and this was enough to chill the blood of any museum director or even curator. Such amateurs are occupational hazards. They bring one smelly cowbones, and do it with a proud air of expectancy, fully anticipating the pronouncement of a new species of megatherium or brontosaurus.

"My dear Dr. Turbyfil! I have looked forward to this our meeting for so longl I cannot tell you—" Sanzmann shook the proffered hand, sat down, holding a cardboard carton as if it contained wedding cake, took out a handkerchief, wiped his rosy face, and panted.

"Dr. TurbyfilI" the name assumed the qualities of an indictment. "What is that which they used always to tell us? Uhrmencsh—Primal Man, that is—he was a stunted little creature, like a chimpanzee, with a molybdenum deficiency, and he—which is to say, tee—grew larger and bigger and more so, until, with the help of the actuarial tables of the insurance companies, we have our present great size attained, and also life expectancy. And we, pres-u-mably, will greater grow yet.

"Butl" (Dr. Turbyfil quivered.) "What then comes to pass? An anthropologist goes into an apotheke—A druck-store, yes?—in Peiping—oh, a bea-u-tiful city, I have been there, I love it with all my heart!—he goes into a native Chinese pharmacy, and there what is it that he finds? He finds—amongst the dried dragon bones, powdered bats, tigers* gall, rhinoceros hom, and pickled serpents—two humanlike gigantic molar teeths! And then, behold, for this is wonderful! The whole picture changes!"

Oh, my, oh myl thought Dr. Turbyfil, suffering.

"Now Primal Man becomes huge, tremendous, like the Sons of Anak In the First Moses Book. We must now posit for him ancestors like the great apes of your Edgar Burroughs Rice, and how it is that we, his children, have shrunken! Pit-i-full Instead of the pigs becoming elephants, the elephants are become pigs!" Dr. Sanzmann clicked his tongue.

"But that is nothing! Nothing at all! Wherefore have I come to you now? To make known to you a something that is so much more startling, I must begin earlier than our own times. Charles the Fifth!"

Dr. Turbyfil quavered, "I beg your pardon?"

"Charles the Fifth of Hapsburg. In fifteen hundred and fifty-five, Charles the Emperor resigns, no retires? Abdicates. His brother Ferdinand succeeds him as sovereign of the Hapsburg dominions, and Charles retreats himself to a monastery.

" 'With age, with cares, with maladies opprest,

"He seeks the refuge of monastic rest—' "

"Ahh, Professor Sanzmann," Dr. Turbyfil began.

"Yes-yes: I dt-gress. Well. Charles and Ferdinand. A medallion is struck, Charles, one side—Ferdinand, the other. And the date, fifteen hundred and fifty-five. Here is the medallion." Dr. Sanzmann reached into an inner pocket and pulled out a fiat little box, such as jewelers use. He opened it.

Inside lay a blackened disk about the size of a silver dollar, and a piece of paper with two rubbings—the profiles of two men, Latin mottoes, and the date: fifteen hundred and fifty-five. Completely at sea, and feeling more and more sorry for himself, Dr. Turbyfil looked at his rosy-faced, and gray-haired caller. He made a small, bewildered gesture.

"Soon, soon, you will understand everything. Nineteen-thirty. My wacations—I am still in Chairmany—I spend at Maldenhausen, a little rural hamlet in a walley. Then things are quiet. Ah, these Chairman walleys! So green, remote, enchanting, full of mysteries! I drink beer and wine, I smoke my pipe, and go on long walks in the countryside. And— since I am a scholar, and ever the dog returns to his vomit— I spend also some time in the willage archives. . . . Many interesting things.... A child named Simon.

"In fifteen hundred and fifty-five a child named Simon is stolen by an ogre."

Dr. Turbyfil pressed a fist to his forehead and moaned faintly. "Is—what?" he said fretfully.

"Please I You see the hole in the medallion? The child wore it about his neck on a thong. They were very reverend, these peasant people. An Imperial medallion, one wears it on one's bosom. A photostatic copy of the testimony." Prof. Sanzmann opened the box, removed papers. Photostatic copies, indeed, were among them, but the language was a monkish Latin, and in Gothic lettering. Dr. Turbyfil felt his eyes begin to hurt; he closed them.

Prof. Sanzmann, dreadful man, spoke on. "There were two witnesses, an old man of the name Sigismund, a boy called Lothar. It was winter. It was snow. The child Simon runs with his dog down the field. He shouts. He is afraid. Out of the snow behind him the ogre comes. He is just as they always knew ogres to be: Huge, hairy, crooked, clad in skins, carrying a cudgel. Terrible.

"Lothar runs for help. The old man cannot run, so he stays. And prays. The ogre seizes up the child Simon and runs away with him, back into the fields, toward the hills, until the snow hides them.

"The people are aroused, they are fearful, but not surprised. This happens. There are wolves, there are bears, there are ogres. Such are the hazards of living on the remote farms."

Dr. Turbyfil shivered. A chill crept into his flesh. He rubbed his fingers to warm them. "Folklore," he said. "Old wives' tales."

Dr. Sanzmann waved his hands, then placed them on the photostats. "This is not the Brothers Grimm," he said. "These

Some wanted to call it McKinley and others held out for Bryan, but the news that Commodore Schley and Admiral Sampson had sunk the Spanish fleet down in Cuba settled that question. Our town isn't a big place no matter how you figure it. From Etienne (Frenchy) Tremblay's gas station to Dora Moriarity's café isn't no more than half a mile. Of course it spreads out a bit on both sides, but no matter how you count the population it still don't add up to much over five hundred people.

Of all the folks in Santiago who welcome the big snows and the chance we have to be all by ourselves and really socialize, I guess Omar Kennicott is the most welcoming. Omar and me always got along good together. For one thing I figure every man's got the right to go his own way and I never try to drench a man with my personal opinion the way you'd drench a sheep for worms.

He is stubborn and 111 be the first to admit that, but that's his affair. So what if he's just about the only citizen in Santiago that doesn't have indoor plumbing? Folks just have to take that into account if they want to go visit with him. And if he never gets a haircut, all I have to say is, the day compulsory haircuts go into effect I'm heading up the Snake River and leaving no forwarding address.

Live and let live, is my motto.

One reason why Omar likes it when the snow settles deep in the Pass and the plows give up forty miles below in the foothills, one reason is that there are no strangers coming through to yell and hoot at him, "Buffalo Bill!" or "General Custer!" or such like that. Another reason is that he builds up a real big old blaze in both of his stoves up there at his place, and he puts his equipment together and he runs off some of the sweetest, smoothest moonshine a man has ever drunk.

But only when he can be sure, you understand, that nobody is sneaking up Route 37 from the Internal Revenue Office in Boise.

Which goes to explain why Just about everybody in town, leave alone me, was so surprised when he turned up at the Firehouse Supper and Dance with those two fellows that nobody'd ever seen before.

Or maybe for a small chicken-coop—but do they have chickens? I tell you, it beats me... .

Not that everybody didn't know exactly what affair was going on in the Grange Hall, but anyway, there was a big banner hanging up reading SANTIAGO VOLUNTEER F. D. BENEFIT BALL. Right under it was that placard with the blue eagle, cog in one claw and arrows in the other (We Do Our Part), that Frenchy Tremblay tacks up at every event. Folks got tired arguing with him long ago. He was naturalized in '33 and I guess that took its effect on him, and besides, he was Fire Chief this year.

The band was tuning up, the coffee was making, the deer meat you could smell it cooking away off, and the soup with dumplings, and in came Omar Kennicott and these two fellows. Each one carrying a gunnysack with what everybody knew right away was a jug in it

As nothing and no one had been up from the outside in days and days, it had to stand to reason that these fellows must of been with Omar all this time. But nobody had ever seen him associating with one stranger, not to speak of two.

"Hi, there, Charley," he says to me. And I says to him, "Hi, there, Omar." And I kind of smiled at the two fellows and then at him, just to let him know I was agreeable to be introduced if he was and they were, but that I wasn't going to press the point. But not everybody has learned tact and politeness, and there was more than one I could mention, and not a million miles away either, that gawped and rubbernecked.

Frenchy Tremblay, I'm not speaking of him, now, he's got these easily excitable ways, he hustled up and said hello and then he asked, "Who your friends, Omar?" And beamed and smiled so you could hardly take offense, not even if your name was Omar Kennicott and a notorious hardnose.

"Oh, hello, Eighteen," he said, calling the Chief by his French name like he always does. "These two fellows come over to my place this morning and we been enjoying ourselves all day so much I figured we'd just come on over here and spread the fun around. I guess their car must of broke down. I loaned'm some clothes, as a matter of fact, they was in their underwear. Excuse me, ladies. I just state the facts. Near's I can make out, their names are Ivan and Nelson. I think they must be Swedes or Dutchmen or something. Can't talk English. Try'm on French."

This Ivan and Nelson were nice enough looking fellows and they had big long mustaches that reminded me of my Uncle Julius, who was one of the miners got blowed up by that Harry Orchard fellow before he was convicted and got religion. Tremblay tried out in his language, and Cleb Peter-kov tried out in his, and Leo Etchevarria tried in both Spanish and Basque. But nobody got through. Ivan and Nelson just smiled and made funny motions with their hands.

Then Lex Muller, who more or less is the American Legion in Santiago, began to make a long face and scratch his head. "Their car broke down, Omar?" he asked. "Now, how could their car break down and they get to your place by this morning?—when you know and / know that no car has been within walking distance of here in a week?"

Omar said, maybe they come up by pogo-stick. But Lex kept right on going. "And how come they were in their underwear, Omar? Now, you and / know that they'd of frozen to death if they went more than a mile or two in this weather in their underwear. Now, it seems to me—"

But nobody was really interested in how it seemed to him, and the band broke into music just then and everybody began dancing. Ivan and Nelson didn't, but by the way they gathered around and looked on, they surely enjoyed it. In fact, after the first dance was over, they put on a little dance of their own for us. Never seen anything like it in my life, and I guess nobody else did, either. Funny? I want to tell you—had us in stitches, all right.

All but Lex Muller. He'd taken a kind of dislike to those two. Ivan and Nelson, somehow. When they got done he said, loud and grumpy. "That's a Russian-type dance, in my opinion, if ever I saw one."

Gleb Peterkov said, "That's because you never saw one."

And Dora Moriarity said, "Shame on you, picking on those poor fellows that are so far from their homes and can't even speak the language." And lots of others said, "Yeah, Lex, get off their backs."

Omar kind of muttered, but he lit on the gunnysacks and his face brightened and he began taking the jugs out and some of the men gathered around to watch. Expectant, you might say, and sort of swallowing. Omar had really thumped those corks in hard and there wasn't enough to give his fingers a grip, so he pulled a jackknife out.

Before he could more than get the blade half-open, one of the strangers, Ivan I think it was, he was a little bit shorter—he sort of stepped in front of Omar and said something cheerful in his own language. He had a thing in his own hand, it looked like a nail file, kind of. He made three swoops with it and it seemed like that nail-file (or whatever it was) just .went through the necks of those jugs without stopping or clicking or anything. He handed Omar three chunks of bottle-necks with corks stuck in them, cut off just as smooth and clean and level as could be.

"Hot damn!" says Fire Chief Tremblay. "You see that? Do it again—"

"Oh, no," Omar protested, kind of huddling over the glassware. "Jugs ain't that easily come by!" He looked land of sour for a minute. Then he remembered he was the host of these two fellows and he said, "Much obliged to you boys. Somebody got some cups?"

And then Lex Muller did a very funny thing. He took off hlj wrist-watch and held it out to Ivan and with his other hand he pointed to the thing like a nail-file. Ivan caught on right away and they swopped then and there. Well, wouldn't you know it, Tremblay said, "Me, I want one too," and he swopped his watch. And in another minute lots of men were saying, "Hey, I bet you them things're valuable," and took off their watches to swop. But Ivan and Nelson just laughed and patted their pockets as if to say, no more: sorry. So a couple of fellows offered to buy them but neither Lex nor Frenchy would sell.

This all left us land of surprised, so we had a drink in silence when the cups came. Almost as if his mind was- on something else, Frenchy Tremblay cut the handle off his cup. He looked at it lying there and he gave a whoop and he yelled, "Look, everybody, come look at this device which I have just traded off the voyageur! Ladies, gentiemens, come look!"

Turned out it could cut through wood, cloth, steel—anything.

Place was in an uproar.

I guess either Nelson wasn't used to Omar's brand of moonshine, or else he'd soaked up a lot of it real quick, because before anybody knew it he'd give out a couple of whoops of his own, and tore off his clothes. I mean he tore off Omar's clothes that he'd borrowed. His own, were on underneath. In a way I guess they did look like underwear, long sleeves and leggings, but you never saw underwear made from any material like that was—whatever that was—nor in such pretty designs.

First Nelson commenced jumping up and down and hollering a song. I guess it was a song. Then he jumped up and began turning tumblesaults and doing contortion tricks. At first everybody applauded and yelled him on. Then, all of a sudden, there wasn't a sound out of us because it had just hit us that it had been quite a few minutes since Nelson jumped up in the air, and he hadn't come down yet ... I

If they want it for a souvenir, it's a doggone funny one, is all I got to say.

The first one to speak was Dora Moriarity. That's what drink will do to you," she said. And then another lady began to scream—"Eee-eee-eeel" and we all turned around and it was Miss Lemack.

Miss Lemack had only been in Santiago a few years. She was an artist-lady and some of the young fellows got real excited when she asked them to pose, but after it turned out that she made them keep their clothes on and you could hardly recognize yourself anyhow in her pictures, the excitement died down. She minded her own business and she ate these health-foods by mail from Los Angeles.

"I see it all nowl" she yelled. They've come at lastl Well have to notify the Federal Government!"

Nobody was used to paying much attention to Miss Lemack anyway, and these last words sure as Hell didn't meet with no enthusiastic reception. Lots of people in town have no great love for the Federal Government. Omar Kennicott was afraid they would smash his little still up. Brigham Kimball had never forgive them for putting his grandpa in jail for having three wives at once. Leo Etchevarria said, "Low tariff on wool" like they were dirty words—which I guess they are, to a sheepman. Tim Newberg and a couple other kids waiting to be drafted—well, not to enumerate, but as I say, nobody was smiling when I asked her. "Just what do you mean, Miss Lemack, that we have to notify the Federal Government because you see it all, that they've come at last? You don't mean these two fellows have come from Washington?"

"No, no: from Outer Space," she yells. 'The clothes they wear—the disintegrator implements—the anti-gravity techniques— What more evidence do you want? Ill let them testify!" And she pulled out a big pad and a sharp pencil and she called Ivan over. Some of us gathered around and the rest (most of the people) just stayed looking at Nelson eight feet off the ground with his head where his head had no business being located.

"Look!" says Miss Lemack, drawing quickly—swish, swish, swish—"Look. Look." Well, I don't understand nothing about such things myself, but it seems she drew some kind of map of the Solar System and Ivan picked out the Earth right away. She gave him the pencil and he drew some kind of map of his own and it seems that—according to him—he and his partner come from somewhere in the bottom-most dribble of the Milky Way.

An antique, maybe? Could that be it? An antique? I just don't know. . . .

Then he turned over a clean sheet of paper and began to draw some more. A big circle. No, it was a globe. Sort of cut away so's you could see the insides. Machinery. Two people, real iddy-biddy but you could see it was him and Nelson, what I mean, clear? Then he starts making a smooth sort of noise. The engines. Then he goes bloong—bloong. Engine trouble. Wobbly motions with his hand. Kei-plunkl The spaceship, I guess you can call it, makes a crash-landing in the snow not far from the outskirts of Santiago, Idaho. And the charming little Omar Kennicott residence.

"So that's where they come from," says Omar. "I thought they was Dutchmen. Or Swedes."

But Ivan isn't finished yet. He draws another spaceship. A great big one. Lots of people inside of it. He calls them up or sends them a radio message, something like that. They get the message. And (here he shows us with the watch) they 11 be along to pick the two of m up in a couple of hours.

"Well, I don't believe a word of it," says Dora Moriarity. "Stands to reason they couldn't mean what you think they mean. My, opinion, they're advertising one of them new foreign moving pictures, is what 7 think."

Some said one thing and some said another, but Lex Muller, he agreed with Miss Lemack a hundred percent. "Only we cant notify the Federal Government. We're cut off here; the phone lines are down like usual, and there isn't even a radio transmitter in the place. . . . And in a few hours they'll be gone."

"Well, gosh, 111 sure miss'm," Omar said. "Even if they did just about ruin three good jugs."

Lex gave a kind of hiss. "We've got to make the most of the time we have," he said. "They may never come this way again in our time," he said. "Why, those, um, disintegrators, they may be mere toys, no more than jack-knives in comparison to what their civilization has invented."

I hated to admit it, but right is right. "Lex, you're right," I said.

"Of course I'm right," he said. "How come they stayed so warm in this freezing weather with those mere tights on? How come this other jay-bird can float in thuh air like that in defiance of the gravitational law? To say nothing of the secret of space travel itself, which you bet those Russkies would never let them escape without divulging."

Well, of course, we don't operate like that in this country, as me and one or two others pointed out to him. He didn't like it, but he put it in his craw when he saw the rest of us wouldn't stand for no rough stuff. Besides which (as Leo Etchevarria pointed out), how'd we know but what they might have some secret weapons stashed away in their pockets—or under their finger-nails, for all we knew?

"I got another plan," Lex said, then. "Primitive as we may be to them, still, we ought to have something they'd like to have. Even if only for a souvenir. The only way we can find out is to show them around. If they seem to like something, well give it to'm—then, when we get back to their outfit, we can ask something for a trade for whatever they got."

It seemed like a good idea. So as soon as Ivan got Nelson sobered up (and I surer than Hell wish I knew how he did that trick!), off we went. No one felt much like dancing anymore, anyhow.

Of course, look at It this way: What good's a Chinese back-scratcher or a kewpie-doll?

Well, we took those boys into one bouse after the other. We opened up all the stores. We showed them the newest things in hardware, automobiles, John Deere tractors, clothing, phonographs and records—they just like smiled politely. It seemed like they didn't want anything we want. Not a blessed thing.

And then there was this funny noise in the air. Like a million little bells ringing. And Ivan and Nelson perked right up and we all rushed out of doors. There it was, like a great big moon come down overhead, with another but smaller little moon—which I guess was the wrecked spaceship—just sticking to the side, sort of. It settled down behind Omar's cabin. And there was a lot of good-byes and handshaking and so on. A big door opened and sucked the small ship inside. A smaller door opened and a couple of men stood there, wearing them funny clothes, too.

They greeted Ivan and Nelson by name. That wasn't just how they said it, but near enough. And, after some quick, last minute business, off they went. And have never been back. At least, not back to Santiago, Idaho.

Lex Muller's scheme fell through, all right. As for the two nail-files, they stopped working after a few days. Ran out of fuel, I guess, or something.

The thing they gave Omar, though, that's still working. "Still" is a pretty good word for it, too. It's about as big as a beer-barrel. Omar opens one end and puts in com, sugar, yeast—whatever he feels like; fruit, maybe—and closes it up again. Right out of th other end, in no time at all, comes the best drinking liquor that has ever been enjoyed on the face of this backward old planet.

If you ask me, Omar has the best of that particular trade. He's made so much money he's put in indoor plumbing. But what gets me is, what on Earth—or anywhere else—did those fellows Ivan and Nelson want with what they took in

funny part of it." (David Mackay said that, in Matinée, when he admitted his wife was an alcoholic.) Sight and sound and touch (kissing was pleasant; no wonder it was so much done) and smell and—and—what was the other? Taste. Keith Kane bawled at him the question of what he was going to do with all his money. David deliberated. What was it that Clem Clooten, on Saddle-Galled, had said, the time he broke the faro bank in Dogie City? Taste . . . yes: "I'm goin' out'n buy m'self a cup o' Java . . The audience went wild.

Java tasted. Taste was as exciting as the other four sensations. And sitting next to him on the counter-stool was Mrs. Ethel-Mae Conar, gazing at his distinguished profile It was clean-cut. He gazed down at her. He was tall, of course.

He searched for the right words It turned out to be singular. "Happy?" he asked

She sighed, nodded Then—"You're a rather strange young man," she said. "Do you know that?"

Certainly he knew it

He leaned closer "This is bigger than both of us," he said huskily. "Let me take you away from all this . . ."

"I certainly will," she said briskly, "right over to my place in the Surrey-Regis on Park Avenue"—that meant she was unhappy despite her money!—"where we can have a decent cup of coffee."

The counterman scowled at the bill David offered him. "Whatsis? Play-money? A five-hunnerd-dolla bill? Whud-dya, wise guy?"

David arose slowly, buttoning his jacket, and leaned over. "If you're looking for trouble, buddy . . ." he said. But the guy chickened out. Anyway, Ethel-Mae had some change in her purse. "Taxi!" David called happily. He helped her in, sank back in the seat, and when the driver asked Where To, David said crisply, "Follow that cab!"

The driver (Herman Bogancz, the license read) halfturned, half-growled. Ethel-Mae laughed. "Oh, if you aren't —never mind, driver: the Surrey-Regis, on Park near—" But H. Bogancz muttered that he knew where the place was.

David gazed out the window excitedly. Everywhere, men and lights and women and automobiles. "Little Old New York," he murmured.

Suddenly she yelped, dug her fingers into his arm.

"Darling I" he exclaimed. "Are you all right? Is anything wrong?"

"No," she said. "Oh, no—"

"Something must be wrong," he insisted. "You can tell me, dear. I trust you. No matter what you've done—"

"What I've done?" she screamed. "I've just won a half-share in $285,000 is what-"

He seized her, turned her facing him. "Are you out of your mind?" he gritted. And then, memory returning, he teleased her. "Yeah . . . Gee . . . that's right. Yeah . . . how about that? Do you know what this means? Ethel-Mae, we're rich! we're rich!"

The driver twisted his chin slighdy to the right. "Do y* mind, mister? Not so loud with the decibels. I gotta near condition."

David said, shocked, "If there's anything I can do—anything at all—if you need money—well get the best surgeon there is—"

Herman Bogancz shrugged. "My cousin Sidney is the best surgeon there is, and he says an operation wouldn't help."

"Then," said David, "there's nothing more that any of us can do—except wait—and pray—"

"—and wash it out three times a day with a boric acid solution," said Herman Bogancz.

David didn't quite understand why Mrs. Conar made him apply for a room at the Surrey-Regis by himself while she went up to her room through the side entrance. In fact, he didn't understand at all. The clerk looked at him rather oddly when he explained this to him, and asked for a room near hers. He looked even odder when he saw the $500 bill. Once again David buttoned his jacket (it had been necessary to unbutton it first) and leaned over. "I hope," he said, "that I'm not going to have any trouble with you."

"Oh, dear me, no," said the clerk. "Not at all . . . my goodness, Mr. Taylor, but you really are tall, aren't you? Suite 516. Mrs. Conar's is Suite 521—that's the best I can do right just this very minute, and—"

Another gentleman materialized at David's elbow. "Good evening, sir," he said suavely. "I am Mr. Feltz, the manager. Is everything all right?"

"The boy's not to blame," David said, gesturing toward the clerk. "Society is to blame—we're all to blame. It's these crazy, mixed-up times we live in."

Behind David's back, the clerk spread open the $500 bill for Mr. Feltz's inspection.

"How right you are, sir," said Mr. Feltz.

"About the gentleman's—Mr. Taylor's change, Mr. Feltz

-r

David turned, put his hand on the clerk's shoulder. The man flushed, sucked in his lower lip. "That's for you, sonny. There is no such thing as a bad boy. I never met a man I didn't like."

"Front!" said the clerk, his voice tremulous.

Mr. Feltz handed the keys to 516 to the bellboy himself, urged Mr. Taylor to make his wants known immediately. As David walked toward the elevator, the manager turned to his subordinate. "The Rich," he said simply. The clerk nodded Solemnly. "We know their ways," said Mr. Feltz. "Eh? Well, that's very generous of you, Robert—but, no, sixty-forty is good enough. He seems to have taken a liking to you. Send up flowers, the morning papers, a split of champagne. And include my card, Robert."

As soon as the bellboy had gone (rather like a satisfied customer on his way out of a high-class opium den, with a

nel was frugal, though never niggardly. He had saved, he had invested, bought and sold. He continued, in his retirement, to do so. He now owned the old brown house on Cheromoya, which was subdivided into apartments; as well as the building occupied by the Chiropractic College and the premises of formerly Reverend Doctor Bemardson, the marriage counselor. He collected stamps and coins and science-fiction magazines and dealt commercially in all three as well, in a small but profitable way. He had thus enough money for his needs and pleasures and was in some hopes of obtaining more through the Tenuis of old films in which he had appeared and which were now appearing on TV, although at too late an hour for Philip Famel to care to watch.

One beautiful June day when the smog had lifted and it was possible from the hills to see as far as Ingelwood or Culver City, Mr. Famel, who had been shopping in the great supermarket on Hollywood Boulevard and was walking home (his one eccentricity), was hailed by a passing motorist whom he recognized with pleasure as Malcolm Morris, an old-time wardrobe man.

"Wait there for me, Phil, will you?" Morris called. "Ill park and come back." Famel replied that he would meet Morris in the coffee-shop nearby, and the latter nodded and drove off.

Over coffee and sweet rolls the two old acquaintances chatted for a while, discussing various friends, living and dead, and then their eyes met full on for a second. Morris dropped his gaze to the tabletop and began to draw circles out of a little puddle there. It always gave Famel a small but definite pleasure to encounter in real life, a cliché out of the movies, and so it was with a certain sober relish that he inquired, "What's on your mind, Mai?"

Mai gave a nervous laugh, hesitated, then said, awkwardly but doggedly, "Couple years ago, Phil, there was an incident in all the papers of a man turned up alive after everybody, including his whole family and the law enforcement agencies, they had all believed him dead. He was out fishing, this man was out fishing and the boat was found overturned and eventually they turned up this body which was identified as his and buried as his and then, after I forget how many years, he turned up alive in another state and he had run off with this woman who worked for him and they were living as man and wife under an assumed name. And the real body belonged to somebody else and had no connection with the incident He had faked the overturned boat so he could run away with the other woman without anyone looking for him."

Famel nodded slowly. "I remember it now. Yes. Didn't the insurance company try to get back the life insurance money they'd paid the legal wife at the time? How did it finally rum out?"

Morris shrugged. "No idea," he said. "I just mentioned it as an example. What I mean is, Phil, do you believe that a similar incident could of been staged here in Hollywood? I mean, it is .. . possible, isn't it?"

Philip Famel considered the question as he sipped his coffee. "Whom did you have in mind?" he asked.

"Ohhh. . . ." Morris hesitated, made some more circles, joined them to form figure-eights, pursed his mouth, and then dropped the dumb-show altogether by lifting his eyes to Famel's and saying, rapidly and defiandy, "S. Maxwell Pierce."

"No," said Famel, at once. "Absolutely not."

"You don't think so?" There was a disappointed, almost pleading tone in Morris's voice. Then, challengingly, he demanded, "Why not? Why is it so impossible? Tell me that Phil? I could tell you-"

Famel cut in. "I don't care what you could tell me, Mai. Ill tell you why not. Sam Pierce didn't disappear on any fishing trip, he dropped dead in his home in Beverly Hills the day before Pearl Harbor. He was pronounced dead of a heart attack by his personal physician who had been attending him for his heart condition and for his ulcers, namely Eh-. William Allen Albine, a man of the utmost integrity; that's why not."

Morris wasn't convinced. "He could of been bribed," he said.

"Dr. Albine? Are you out of your mind? You know better than that! Why, the man is incorruptable. Listen, Mai— you know, and I know, that a certain actress got down on her bended knees and offered him $10,000 to perform an illegal operation, and he refused, and she offered him fifteen and twenty and finally $25,000, because she trusted him and was afraid to trust anybody else—"

"I know, I know—"

"—and he not only refused but he talked with her the whole night long and he talked her out of it and she had the baby, the delight of her life, and she blesses the name of Dr. Albine every day of her life. So—"

Morris said, "But that was a different situation." Famel went on to point out that they had both attended the funeral services and had seen S. Maxwell Pierce laid out in his casket and that he, at least, Philip Famel, had accompanied the body to its cremation. Morris's reply was, "It's possible it was a wax image or something. I don't carel" he concluded, with a defiant cry that was almost a shout.

Famel threw up his hands. "The doctor was bribed, the coroner was bribed, the undertaker was bribed, a wax model was made—Mall For heaven's sake! What's put this extraordinary idea in your mind, the most ridiculous notion I've ever heard, a man of your age—"

Whereupon Malcolm Morris preceded to tell him that on two successive days in the past week he, M.M., had seen S. Maxwell Pierce and that Pierce had spoken to him. What had he said? was Famel's utterly skeptical question. Morris, pale, half-ashamed, half-distraught, looked at him squarely, and quoted, in a flat and hollow voice, "Help. Help. Help. Help, Help."

Much puzzled, and not a little troubled at his old acquaintance's extraordinary and stubborn delusion, Philip Famel resumed his walk home. The day continued beautiful, all the more so for the ever-increasing rarity of such days in and around Los Angeles, and by the time he reached his residence the weight upon his mind was almost lifted. He prepared a roast of beef and put it in the oven, set the temperature low, and then went to his office in the rear of the apartment, intending to deal with the day's commercial correspondence, when, acting upon a sudden impulse, he got into his automobile and drove to Beverly Hills.

At the rear of a spacious estate in that city, attending to the fruit trees espahered against the stone wall, was a small and wiry man in a faded plaid shirt, baggy trousers, and a filthy felt hat. Philip Famel approached him. "Docl" he called. Dr. William Allen Albine turned, squinted, beamed, and advanced to meet him. "Well, well, well—Phil Famel!" he exclaimed, greeting him heartily "This is a surprise. And a very pleasant one, I hasten to add " The two men shook hands and walked along, chatting of this and that, and took seats in the patio, where an Oriental manservant presently brought them drinks. They toasted one another's health, sipped, and then exchanged a silent look

After a moment Dr. Albine spoke. "I'm glad you came, Phil," he said. "A great many of my old friends and patients do drop in to see me, from time to time, even though I'm retired, and of course I keep busy—as, I know, do you. But if I'd been asked to name one individual out of all whom I'd be most glad to see today, I'd have named you, Phil; I'd have named you. And you'll never guess why." He looked at his visitor; and, although Famel smiled his gratitude at the compliment, nonetheless a shiver passed down his spine.

"You knew the individual whom I'm about to name, Phil," Dr. Albine continued. "And you were his friend, just as I had the privilege of being. To us he was more than a mere figure of glamor, although far be it from me to deny the immense value of what he did in bringing that glamor into many otherwise drab lives—the public. But I mustn't make a speech. Anyway, I know you will receive what I'm going to tell you, respectfully.''

He took another swallow of his drink without removing his eyes from the face of the guest, then removed the glass from his lips. "One of the advantages of being retired is that a fellow can catch up on his reading. That's just what I was doing last night, at about ten p.m. I was sitting in my living room with a glass of milk and an apple, and I had some reading matter with me The lamp was on behind my shoulder, and the rest of the room was in darkness I had finished looking through Time Magazine and after that I started browsing a bit in the current number of the Journal of the A.M.A.—man named Harrow has been doing some remarkable research at John Hopkins into those non-specific microorganisms which so often masquerade as—but I don't want to bore you, you're a layman I must have dozed off, and I woke up with a start But—you know how it is, I didn't at first realize that I was dreaming, I thought I was still awake

Dr Albine told Mr Famel that he had looked up, in his dream, and saw S Maxwell Pierce advancing slowly towards him with a perfectly silent tread

"He had that gloomy expression upon his face which I'd seen there so often," the physician continued, sighing, -and shaking his head regretfully "And I was just going to say to him, 'Oh, come on, now, Sam, you old croaker, cheer up — when suddenly it hit me: Great Scottl This man is deadl And at that moment he spoke to me."

Famel said, "Don't tell me what he said, just tell me if I'm right. Okay, Doc?" The doctor, astonished, nodded his head And Famel repeated the words, " 'Help. Help. Help Help Help,' " imitating as he best could the flat and hollow sound of them.

The color ebbed from Dr Albine's face, then slowly it returned. He licked his lips. "My G-d, Phil," he whispered. "How did you know?"

"Because. You're the second person today who's told me the same thing, or almost the same thing. Mai Morris— you remember Mai Morris? A real old-time wardrobe man, used to be with Famous Players, used to be with old Jake Fox, then for years and years he was with C-S—a heavyset man with a ruddy face. One of the first people I got to know when I started work out here." And Farnel recapitulated the circumstances of his meeting with Malcolm Morris on Hollywood Boulevard. Doctor Albine listened, nodding slowly.

"Well, you know, Doc, some outfit has leased the old C-S Studio down on Santa Monica, it's been lying empty for years, and they have some sort of a deal whereby independent TV outfits can sublease parts of it to make their films, and part of the deal is that the people who took it over from C-S supply wardrobe. To the sub-leasers, I mean. Sub-les-sors. Anyway, Mai Morris was bringing some items out of storage for the shooting—it was a jungle serial, and he had a bunch of old-time pith helmets and stuff like that. You probably wouldn't remember, but coming from storage along the south end is an L-shaped corridor and Mai says that he noticed as he went down that the lights were flickering in one arm of the L and when he turned the comer coming back they were almost out and that's where—he says—he saw Sam Pierce. Coming towards him. And saying just what I had said. And the next afternoon the same thing happened, only over by where the old dressing-rooms used to be. So tell me, Doc, what do you think it means?"

At first, all that Doctor Albine, who had been physician, friend, and counselor to the great and near-great among the stars during the Golden Age of Hollywood, could do was shake his head. Then he muttered something to the effect of "extraordinary coincidence;" and then he sat silent for a space of time.

Philip Famel broke the silence. "Doc," he asked, "what did Sam really die of?"

Albine's benign and wrinkled face turned savage behind his gold-rimmed spectacles. "Ill tell you what he died of," he said, almost snarling. "He died of over-work. Wom outworn out at thirty-nine! Isn't that a fine commentary on our so-called Modern Civilization? He died because he was paying alimony to two ex-wives and the only way he could keep up with the payments was to borrow from his agent and the only way he could pay back his agent was to make one picture after another, as fast as he could, with no time out for rest or recreation or leisure or the finer things in life. No wonder he had a heart affliction. No wonder he had an ulcerated stomach. I tell you, Phil, in California, a husband has no rights which an ex-wife is bound to respect, and in my opinion, it makes a mockery of our fine, old Anglo-Saxon legal system."

With these cutting words ringing in his ears, Philip Famel reflected, not for the first time, upon the unhappy story of Doctor Albine's sole venture into matrimony; and he did not say a single word, but shook his head.

Famel drove back home, pensively, and found that his married sister, Mrs. Edna Carter, had arrived in time to rescue the roast from the oven (where he had completely forgotten about it), and had made sandwiches from it for herself and teen-age daughter, Linda. "You'd forget your head, if it wasn't on your shoulders, Philly," was her greeting to him. He kissed die two women, mumbled an excuse, and sat down to eat, for—truth to tell—the untoward incidents of the day and the walks, as well as the ride through the clear air, had combined to give him an appetite perhaps somewhat keener than usual.

After a while he said, "Edna, you remember Sam Pierce, don't you?"

His sister threw back her head and lifted one hand. "Do

I remember I" she cried, rhetorically. "I will never forget him as long as I live! What a loss! What a tragedy! What a handsome man! One of the greatest actors of our day and age."

"Oh, come on, Mother," said Linda, in a scornful tone. "S. Maxwell Pierce was a ham—and you know it. He wasn't even an honest man, like Uncle Philly."

Mrs. Carter said, "You shut your mouth," and glared venomously at her child. "Just because he doesn't talk with his mouth closed and scratch himself—"

P. Famel swallowed some roast beef. "Why do you call him a ham, honey?" he inquired. "Have you seen any of his pictures in recent years?"

Linda said that she had. The Dark Of The Moon was on the Late, Late Show. "What a bomb," she said. "Not just because he's Pre-Method, as Mommy seems to think I mean. I mean, some of those real old-timey actors, like Frank Sinatra, are a gas. But—S. Maxwell Pierce? Phooey. Stricdy from Hamsville."

It had been many years since Famel had laid eyes on Roger Sherman and he was far from sure that the latter would consent to see him. The ease with which the appointment was made, and the fact that it was set for the following morning, surprised him. Even more of a surprise, and a sad one, was the inactivity he saw on all sides as he entered the offices of Cahan-Sherman Productions in the so-called New Studio in Culver City. He remembered when both the newer and the older C-S studios were hives of industry, and although he had accepted that things were not with the silver screen as they once were, still, it was a surprise.

The second surprise was what the passing years had done to Rog Sherman. The Young Lion of Hollywood, he had been called, once upon a time. The account of how he had wrested control of the studio from Sam Cahan in the days when the latter was still holding back cautiously from total conversion to sound, flying his private biplane across the country and interviewing Mrs. Yetta Meredith—widow of Isidore Meredith, co-founder of the studio—and then immediately flying his biplane back again with her proxy in his pocket: this is the stuff from which legend is made.

But time had wrought many changes in the one-time Young Lion of Hollywood, and he now looked like a very old lion indeed, with hollowed eyes, hollowed cheeks, hollowed throat, and his nice leonine mane more scanty than otherwise. Little as Phil Famel was prepared for this, even less was he prepared for the expression on Roger Sherman's face. The head of Cahan-Sherman Productions glared at him, baleful, menacing, and hostile. Famel felt taken aback.

"I'm waiting," said the movie magnate. "I. Am. Waiting."

Realizing that the man's time was valuable and not to be lightly wasted, Famel plunged right into his narrative. "It's about S. Maxwell Pierce, C.S.," he said.

"Ill bet it is," said Mr. Sherman. "Ill just bet it is." Then a flood of scarlet washed across his face and he all but lunged from his desk, pointing his finger and shaking his hand at the astonished visitor. "Well, let me tell you that you won't get away with it!" he shouted. "I promise you and your rotten friends that!" And then he sank back into his capacious chair and fumbled a capsule, a pill, and two tablets into his mouth, and reached with a trembling grasp for the carafe of water.

Without even recovering from his astonishment, Famel pushed the jug within reach, and waited until the medicine had been swallowed. Then he said, "C.S., I do not understand."

"You understand, you understand all right," the tycoon mumbled. A few drops of water glistened on his chin, and he wiped them off on one of the famous linen handkerchiefs with the monograms woven into them especially for him at a factory in Northern Ireland. "Don't tell me you don't understand. What, you aren't in cahoots with them—the whole rotten bunch of them? Damley Mackenzie, Emile Ungar, Richard Rowe, Stella Smith, Sir Q. Fenton Stock, and all the others? I suppose it's just the powers of my imagination, I merely fancied I saw your name on the letter sent to me by that terrible shyster, Leonardo Del Bello? Hal" A faint glimmering of light came to Philip Famel as he recognized the names of other players more famous in past days than at present. "Please, C.S.," he pleaded. "Don't excite yourself. Why do you take it so personally? It's true, certainly, that I and others have engaged Mr. Del Bello to represent us in discussions—"

'Discussions,' " sneered Mr. Sherman. "On the surface, discussion; yes. And behind my back, what? Extortion! That's what it is and you won't get away with it, and when I find out how you're doing it, believe me, my good man, you and all your fine friends will rot in the common jail. The William J. Bums Agency is on the track of your tricks right now, and so soon as they obtain conclusive evidence—the police! That's what. You forget with whom you have to contend. I wouldn't put up with it when the motion picture business was good and I certainly have no intention of submitting to it without a wink or a blink when the motion picture business is no business at all unless a man of my standing is prepared to become a mere hired lackey or errand boy for the Chase Manhattan Bank, the millions and billions of dollars which the so-called 'stars' they have nowadays are demanding before they'll consent or condescend to shoot a single frame, and then what happens? All the evil diseases of Egypt, from a hangover to a miscarriage, meanwhile the money is eaten up, while these temperamental curies sulk in their tents like Alcibiades and watch television. Twentieth-Century, why they deserve such fortune and me not, I couldn't tell you, they strike oil on their lot, and part of the property goes for a high-class housing development. But does C-S strike oil? Do you strike oil? That's how C-S strikes oil, and who, may I ask, would be crazy enough to start or even to consider a high-class housing development in Culver City? No one. Meanwhile, the costs continue and the debts mount up and the little shtickle income from renting the old studio on Santa Monica wouldn't begin to cover it. So what happens? I rent a few of the old films to television as an experiment and a desperation, they catch on, an offer is made to me by N.B.S. for all the old films in our vaults, an adequate sum of money for the years of service and aggravation which I've given to The Industry, and it would enable me to settle with my creditors for one hundred cents on the dollar and end my career honorably and have a little peace and pleasure in the few years left to me by Our Father in Heaven, so then what happens?"

Barely pausing for breath and a fresh sip of water, the head of Cahan-Sherman continued, "I'll tell you what happens, as if you didn't know, you snake-in-the-grass. What happens. Every surviving motion picture performer who ever played a bit part in a C-S production hires that Leonardo Del Bello, a money-hungry conniver from the word Go, in the hopes that they'll be able to gouge from me a share in the money for the television sales and even the few rentals to the same medium. You know what this means, Mr. Philip Far-neir

Famel lowered his eyes from a photo-portrait of the late S. Maxwell Pierce which, among those of other stars both male and female, adorned the walls of Mr. Sherman's still-lavish office.

"Why, Mr. Sherman," he said, mildly, "it seems to me that all it means is that all of those who helped create a picture will be able to share in the profits. We were paid, true, don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining that we weren't paid well enough. Maybe some of us were really paid too much. But we were paid for moving pictures intended to be shown in moving picture theaters. Television opens up an entirely—"

A dangerous calm descended on the Lion of Hollywood.

A faint smile began its tracings on his distinguished face. "My friend," he said, softly, "let me explain to you. You are proposing to open the dike in order to irrigate certain fields of land. You think the water will flow here, it will flow there, it will flow exactly where you want, and it can be arranged just that way. No. No, my friend. Not so. A flood is a flood. If the actors obtain a share of the proceeds from television sales and rentals, then everybody will obtain a share. The producer." He began to count on his fingers. "The director. The assistants. The cameraman. The music arranger. The costumer. The carpenter. The electrician, the wardrobe man, the make-up man, the script-girl, the salad-cook in the commissary, the guard at the gate. Everybody. Literally, ev-er-y-bod-y. So with everybody obtaining a share, what is left? Bubhis, that's what's left. Goat-droppings, I'm sorry you oblige me to use such a coarse expression. And C-S Productions dissolves into bankruptcy. So you can understand my position. But what," and here he began to shout again, "about your position? Sabotage! Espionage! Extortion! Terrorist tactics! And you have the nerve to come here and tell me that you're here about S. Maxwell Pierce, yet? Shame! Shame! Ghoul! Vampire! To use the form and the voice of your old friend, you're not ashamed?

"I'd just like to know how you did itl Why you did it, that's obvious—to blackmail me and to squeeze your rotten ransom money from our depleted coffers, it's obvious. One single picture we've got in production and it hasn't cost me enough heartache, that bitch, Myffanwydd Evans, no—two million dollars, a modest little sum at today's prices—She Stoops To Conquor, in modem dress—as if you didn't know, you terrible person—" The mogul's phrases came rapidly, abruptly, his chest heaved, "—and into at least half the scenes we've shot—you and your rotten crew—ruined! Ruined!—right over the scenes, like double exposure, that fink you hired to masquerade as S. Maxwell Pierce—comes walkfng, comes walking—and his voice all over the sound-track— 'Help. Help! Help! Help! Help!' "

This rime it was Philip Famel's turn to reach, with trembling fingers, for the carafe of water.

It was Louella Parson's column (confused beyond correction, but mentioning both Pierce and Farnel and spelling their names properly) that brought Doody Michael John to the old brown house on Cheromoya. She sat in thé living-room of his apartment, sun-tanned, healthy, and ill at ease.

"I suppose it's only natural that you were interested," he said, also a bit nervous. "Considering that you and Sam were such good friends—"

"He'd been keeping me for years, as well you know, bless you, Phil," she said. " 'Good friends,' yes, I guess we were. He would've married me, too, if it hadn't been for Irma and Dorothy. ... At least that's what he always said, anyway. I don't know. I just don't know. I never did. However —" Her voice lost its uncertain note and became brisk. "This happened over a month ago . . ." She rummaged in her purse, brought out a piece of paper, unfolded it. ". . . but I didn't understand it at the time. Mrs. Mobery told me at the time—"

"Mrs. Who?" Philip Famel squinted, leaned closer. The burden of the entire affair was now weighing down on him; he would very much have liked to be able to get back to his Burmese airmails, his rixdollars, his complete collection of Gernsback Amazing, his business block in Chatsworth, and the other familiar items which had occupied his time before all this. "Mrs. Who?"

"Mrs. Phyllis Mobery. She's a very well-known Sensitive, Phil. I got to know her at the Spiritual Science Church on Cahuenga Boulevard, in connection with our Friday Night Dutch Suppers, and Phil—I want to tell you—she is marvelous! Simply marvelous! There isn't a thing to which she can't turn her hand, what she's done for the bedridden and the shut-ins, she can sing, she can paint, she has a pilot's license and a black belt, and her work with handwriting has attracted world-wide attention."

Famel felt himself utterly lost. All he could say was, "Go on."

"It was over a month ago, there were only the three of as, Mrs. Mobery, Laura Bender, and me, and it was at my place, Phil, you were never there, I had to give up the bungalow, Phil, it had too many memories. I live in a court in Boyle Heights now. Well, it was about eight o'clock, and suddenly it seemed to've gotten very quiet and I looked at Laura and she looked at me and then we both looked at Mrs. Mobery and we saw right away that she had slipped into Trance. So I very quickly put a pad of paper and two pencils right by her hands, the soft-lead Eberhard Faber Mongol 480, the kind she prefers, you know . . ."

Curious soft noises began to escape from the parted lips of the Sensitive, but her hearers, knowing that they would never develop into coherent speech, wasted no efforts listening to them, but watched her hands, instead—old hands, strong hands, capable with mahl-stick and brush, capable with the organ and the judo-hold, airplane controls and pots and pans—and now, submitting to things utterly removed from any of those others, hands grasping pad and pencils, hands . . . writing.

Famel took the sheet of yellow paper handed to him, put on his glasses and began to read—or to try to read. He looked up. "Doody, are you trying to tell me that one person wrote all this?"

"Do you think I'd lie to you, Phil? Laura and I saw it. Of course, you have to understand that she was just the medium wherebye those who have passed beyond communicated with us ... Go on, Phil—"

"No, I—well, just let me read this . . ." His voice died away.

In a clear Spencerian hand at the top of the paper someone had written, Mother Mother Mother Dearest Mothe— and had broken off abruptly without even a trace of the final r. Immediately succeeding this an entirely different handwriting began—small, cramped, bearing down heavily, quite incomprehensible: Famel, looking at it in dismay, was not even sure that it was English. He was certain only that It was very ugly and that, whatever it meant, it did not mean well. It vanished in a swirl of lines, as if there had been a struggle to seize the pencil. After that was a space of about an inch, followed by an address vigorously written—Mrs H M Stevenson 1327 Franklin Street Reissborough P.A.—and the words, Hi, Pipsqueek. "Hank and Bucky." The bottom of the sheet was subscribed in a large, uneven and faltering script, our Fideral Unon it mus an will be preasarved. And over this, on the slant, was something else which Farnel could not make out.

He looked up, met her eager glance, shook his head. "Means nothing to me," he said. "I'm sorry."

Doodie Michaeljohn gave a wordless exclamation, tapped her finger excitedly on the yellow sheet, then clapped her hands to her forehead. "Oh, of course! Phill Take it—hold it upside down—and hold it up to a mirror. That one over there. Go on, Phil!"

Famel obeyed. He saw reflected his own face, those irregular and ugly features which had been his misfortune as a boy and his fortune as a man. Many thoughts went rapidly through his mind, but he forced his glance down to the reflection of the paper. All the writing was reversed and incomprehensible, and then part of it jumped suddenly into ahnost-clarity. He tilted the paper until the slanting words were straight, then jumped, startled, his breath hissing. The woman came up behind him. "There," she said. "Now do you see?"

"Yes," he said. "I can see it now."

Doodie help help Doodie help help stop them or no peace for me darling D flix no lve got to faed-out hel

His quick and frightened respiration was the only sound for a second or two. Then Doodie said, "We called up, you know, that Mrs. Stevenson? And she said everybody else used to call her husband 'Henry' and she was the only one who called him 'Hank', and 'Bucky' was the name they had for their little child before it was bom, only it didn't live, and she started to cry—"

"Doodie—"

"—but she managed to tell us that his nick-name for her was 'Pip-'

"Doodie-" That the Veil of Oblivion should be lifted to no better end that the exchange of domestic trivia or the proclamation of obsolete political slogans seemed suddenly intolerable to Famel. "Doodie, this is Sam's ftaruiwriringl"

She seemed surprised at his surprise. Very quickly, she said, "Yes, of course it is, Phil. And I've finally figured out what it means, don't you see, Phil? I've figured out what it means. He wouldn't Appear to me, Phil, he wouldn't want to even faintly take a chance of frightening me, so this is what he did, you see." She chuckled, faindy, fondly. "He never was much of a speller. 'F-a-e-d-o-u-t' That's one mistake he always used to make. And he was probably in a hurry this time, too, because who knows how much time he had. If there's any such thing as Time as we know it, There . . . don't you see, Phil, Sam wasn't just a player, a mere mummer, Sam was an artist, Sam was an actor. He had oh such a tremendous talent, and he didn't use it in the movies, he could-rit use it in the movies. He was type-cast and he couldn't escape and he needed money, he always needed money, Irma and Dorothy and their alimony, and so he let the studio push him into one piece of tripe after another and that's the reason—"

She stopped abruptly. Looking away from Famel, she said in a lower tone. "That's not the reason. It's not the whole reason. He loved the rich living and the big house he lived in and the big houses he visited in and the big cars he drove.

laughed, too, though his sallow, sullen face was not that of one who laughed often.

The hand he shook was hard and calloused. "I am called Old Steven," the peasant said. "It used to be Black Steven, but that was a long time ago, even my moustache is white, now—" he stroked its length, affectionately—"except for here, in the middle. I am always smoking tobacco. Smoking and drinking, who can live without them?"

He excused himself, returned almost at once with bottle, glasses, and cigarettes.

"I do not usually—" the young visitor began, with a frown which seemed familiar to his face.

"If you do not smoke, you do not smoke. But I allow only Moslems to refuse a drink, and they do not often do so. One drinks, a mere formality."

They had one drink for formality, a second drink for friendship, and a third drink to show that they did not deny the Trinity.

Steven wiped his moustache between index finger and thumb of each hand, thrust in a cigarette, fit it, and smiled contentedly.

"A good thing, matches," he said. "When I was a boy we had to use tinderboxes—how the world does change. . . . You came for a charm."

The young man seemed relieved, now that the preliminaries of the visit were over. "I did," he said.

"Your name?"

"Gabriel."

Old Steven repeated it, nodding, blowing out smoke. "I am, of course, well-known for my charms," he said, compla-cendy. "I refer to those I make, not those with which Providence endowed me—although, there was a time . . . Well, well. My hair was black in those days. I can make quite a number of charms, although some of them are not in demand any longer. I don't remember the last time I supplied one to keep a woman safe from Turks. Before you were born, I'm sure. But, on the other hand, charms to help barren women conceive are as much called for as ever."

Gabriel said, scowling, that he was not married.

"My charges are really quite reasonable, too. I can guarantee you perfect protection against ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and the evil spirits of the hills and forests—their cloven hoofs and blood-red nails—"

"I am not afraid of those. 1 have my crucifix." His hand went to the neck of his open shirt.

"Very well," said Old Steven, equitably. "I've nothing to say against that

"I also," he said, "prepare an excellent charm for success in the hunt..."

"Ah..."

"And an equally excellent one for success In love." "Yes..."

Old Steven nodded, benignly. "That's it, then, is it? The love-charm?"

Gabriel hesitated, scowled again.

"Which one means most to you? Or, putting it another way, at which are you best? Take the charm for the other."

The young man threw out his hands. "I am good at neither I And it is important to me that I must excell in one of them."

Steven lit another cigarette. "Why only one? Take both. The price—"

But Gabriel shook his head. "It's not the price." He looked out on the wide-spread scene, the deep and dark-green valleys with their forest of oak and beech and pine, the mountains blue with distance, the silvery river. "It's not the price," he repeated.

"As far as you can see on all sides," the old man said, quietly; "in fact farther, my reputation is known. People have come to me from across the frontier. If it is not the price, take both." He saw Gabriel shake his head, but continued to speak. "The hunt. A day like today. You take your gun and go off in the woods with a few friends. The road is dusty, but in the woods, in the shade, it is cool. Your friends want to go to the right, but you, you have the charm, you know that the way to rum is left. They may protest, but you are so certain that they follow. Presently you see something out of the comer of your eye. The others have not noticed it at all, or perhaps assume it is a branch of that dead tree. But you know better, your eye is clear, you turn swiftly, your arm and hand are quick as never before, the bird flushes, you fire I There it is, at your feet—a fine woodcock. Eh?"

Gabriel nodded, eyes gleaming.

"Or it might be a red doe, or a roe-buck. A fine stagl You can hardly count the points I Everyone admires you. . . . Perhaps in the winter the peasants come to you. 'Master, a wolf. No one is such a hunter as you are. Come, save our flocks.' They have not even seen the beast when your shot brings it down. You wait while they fetch it. They drag the creature along, shouting your praise: 'Only one shot, and at that distance, tool' they cry, and loss your hand. 'Brave one, hero/ they call you."

A dreamy smile played on Gabriel's face, and he slowly, slowly nodded.

Old Steven waited a few moments; as his visitor said no
word, he went on. "Then there is love. What can compare
to that? A man who does not enjoy the love of woman is
only half alive—if even so much. No doubt there is a young
woman on whom you have looked, often, with longing, but
who never returns that look. She has long, long black hair.
How it glistens, how it gleams! Her hps are soft and red,
and sometimes she wets them with her red little tongue. In-
side her bodice the young breasts grow, ripe and sweet as
fruit___ "

The young man's eyes seemed glazed. He did not stop the slow nodding of his head.

"You return, the love-charm is in your pocket, against your heart, here. There is a dance, you join in, so does she. Pres-endy you come face to face. She looks at you as if she has never seen you before. How wide her eyes growl Her mouth opens. Her teeth are small and white. You smile at her and instantly she smiles back, then looks away, shyly . . . but only for an instant... and you dance together....

"Soon the stars come out, and the moon rises. The old women are drowsing, the old men are drunk. You take her hand in yours and the two of you slip away. The moment you stop, she throws her arms around you and puts her mouth up to be kissed. The night is warm, the grass is soft The night is dark and deep, and love is sweet"

Gabriel made a sound between a sigh and a groan. Slowly, he reached into his pocket, took out his purse, and began to slide its contents into his hand. "You have made up your mind?" the old man asked. "Which is it to be, then?" There was no answer. Something caught the old man's eye. "This one is a foreign coin," he said, touching it with his finger. "But never mind, I will take it—it is gold."

Gabriel's eyes fell to his hand. He picked up the coin, and an odd look came at once over his face. The dreamy, undecided expression vanished immediately. His eyelids became slits, his hps turned down in an ugly fashion, something like a sneer.

After a moment the old man said, "You have made up your mind?"

"Yes," Gabriel said. "I have made up my mind."

There was only an old woman before him at the ticket-window. He had crossed the river just a few minutes before. The contents of his small suitcase had not engaged the attention of the customs officials for long; and from there it was only a short walk to the railroad station.

The old woman went away, and Gabriel stepped up to the window. On the wall of the tiny office, facing him, were two framed photographs, side by side. The likeness of the

It was on a Sunday night in late February. The family of Dr. Thomas Grew, Professor of Physics at Ryland University, had some hours ago finished a supper consisting of the remains of the previous day's hamburger, bashed with potatoes. The meal had been eaten thoroughly, if not enthusiastically. After doing the dishes, Mrs. Grew and her elder daughter, Juanita, went out baby-sitting—not together—as they did several evenings a week. By this means they contrived to earn enough to buy Juanita's clothes. What Juanita discarded her mother wore, and after that they were cut down and passed into a second avatar for the use of Isabel, the younger Grew daughter. Isabel, an ungainly child with acne, ill-adjusted to her peer-group, objected stridently to this arrangement, which was the best that could be managed on her father's salary.

For some weeks, fortunately, Isabel had contented herself with being merely sullen, and at eight o'clock that evening she joined her brother Dudley, the Grew's only son, in fitting bobby-pins onto fan-shaped cards—an arrangement, in violation of child-labor laws, connived at by a Mr. Caiman, a drugs-and-sundries wholesaler in a small way of business, whose establishment was located on the ground floor of the run-down apartment house in which the Crews lived. Kindly Mr. Caiman paid seventy-five cents per hundred cards, and supplied all materials. The children were allowed by their parents to keep the money in lieu of allowance.

Dr. Grew had recently been replaced in his part-time job as busboy in a chow-mein restaurant, owing to the arrival from Hong Kong (on a fraudulently obtained passport) of the proprietor's third cousin, a former Lt Colonel in the Nationalist Army who had been living very quietly since the fall of Canton. As he had not yet been able to secure other employ, and as he had marked all his class papers that morning dining the hour or so respite afforded by the attendance of his children at an Ethical Society Sunday school, Dr. Thomas Grew found himself momentarily with some spare time. He employed it In tinkering with a piece of electronic equipment he had pieced together for his amusement over a period of years by smuggling out a resistor here, a capacitor there, from the University lab. The fingers of his children dipped mechanically into the box of bobby pins. Their eyes were fixed immovably to the screen of the television set.

The presence of a television was absolutely against every principle which Dr. Grew held Culturally dear, and its cost was astronomically beyond his own means. But it had been presented to them, second-hand, with much flourish, by the wealthy widow of a master plumber, a friend of his mother-in-law's. Dr. Grew did not wish to offend this woman, a Mrs. Novack, because she turned over to him the boxes of cigars which still came her way as gifts from various plumbing equipment manufacturers (she retained an interest in the business); and these cigars he traded off to Mr. Caiman for a cheaper brand at the rate of one for one-and-a-half, shredding them and smoking them in his pipe. He had been unable to afford pipe tobacco proper since his marriage, which had occurred during the latter part of the vice-presidency of John Nance Garner.

First the children spent half an hour in flaccid delight watching a mixed bag of trained dogs, ventriloquists, acrobats, and fancy roller-skaters; then they watched a patriotic drama concerning the actions of a heroic female Confederate spy against the foul ploys of an evil and lecherous Union general. From time to time Grew said, "Please make that a weeny bit softer, kiddies"; but they paid him no mind, nor did he expect they would. After a while he ceased to notice the noise as he tenderly soldered in place the diode which was his latest acquisition.

And then, finally, it was time for Get It While You Can, a program during which even Dr. Grew attended carefully, only pretending from time to time to make a ritual and face-saving clatter with his wire-stripper.

Last week Robby Rheinhart, the loveable M.C., had faced the cameras with a little girl in a wheel chair, and the week before that it had been a war veteran on crutches. This week, however, he had with him a sturdy old man with a white cane, as the shapely female assistants, beaming vacantly, wheeled out a table on which were two huge bowls filled with large, opaque capsules. After the applause died down, Robby introduced This Week's Guest of Honor, Mr. Edward Palumbo of the Calabrese Home For the Blind. Then there was a commercial. Mr. Palumbo was induced to say a few words and answer a few questions. Then there was another commercial, in which a wistful young man in a bathtowel sprayed his armpits with something from a squeeze bottle. Then they dollied in once more on the oleaginous Rheinhart and on honest, rugged old Palumbo. While the orchestra played the theme music, the old guy took off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, held up both hands. The music played slower, he dipped his hand in the starboard goldfish bowl, and pulled out a capsule.

The music stopped.

"Inside this capsule which our dear old Pal, Eddie Palumbo, has just selected at random," Robby said, breathlessly, "is inscribed the name of one of our wonderful stoodio audience. Every one of their names, as you all know, is inside one of those capsules, but only one at a time can be chosen. And NOW." He broke open the capsule, stared at the slip of paper. The cameras played over the faces in the audience, some tense, some picking their noses, some breaking into shy gestures as they caught their faces in the monitor. Robby milked the moment, then, in a high, breathless voice, declaimed, "Mis-ter . .. Herman ... GRACKL1"

The camera panned in on the name on the slip, then a view of the audience again, finally focussing on someone who had just realized that he was Mr. Herman Grackl. Hesitantly, and in sections, like a telescope, he rose in his seat.

"Mr. Grackl?" burbled Robby, "Well, for gosh sakes, aren't you the lucky onel Come on up here, time's a-wasting, and—Get it while you canl"

The lucky man shambled forward, smirking and blinking and mumbling his jaws, while the music played a rapid tempo. After he had shaken hands with the M.C. and been turned—by main force—away from the shapely female assistants, and towards the audience, he played with the buttons on his shabby coat while Robby asked him a few questions

"Where are you from, Mr Gracklr"

"Uh, I live right here in town."

"Right here in townl And what do you do for a living, Herman?"

"Uh, I'm retired."

"Retired! Well, aren't you the lucky one! I wish I were— What am I saying?" Robby Rheinhart screamed, clutching his own throat with both hands and bulging his eyes "The sponsor may be listeningl" The audience roared. "Well What did you used to do for a living, Herm?"

"I git socia' secundy," said Herm, sucking in his hps and cheeks, then expelling them

The Grew children giggled "Dope," said Isabel. "Dope yourself," Dudley said, promptly Isabel dropped her card of bobby-pins and struck at him Their screams finally attracted the attention of their father, to whom had suddenly occurred a solution to the problem of proper RF shielding. It was a full minute before he succeeded in wedging the kids apart and getting them reasonably quiet again. With a few deft twists of his long-nose pliers he then made the necessary adjustments

"—in nineteen thirty-six?!" Robby Rheinhart was screaming. "And out of oatmeal boxesl Well, isn't that something? Isn't that some-thing?"

"There, see," muttered Isabel petulantly, "and we missed what he said."

Perhaps the possibility again occurred to the M.C that his padrone might be watching—conceivably with a stopwatch—because he suddenly became less strident and more businesslike. Old Mr. Palumbo, in return for $500 which the sponsors (Robby had already announced four times) were going to donate to the Calabrese Home For the Blind, thrust his big, gnarled hand into the other glass bowl and came up with another capsule, which Robby took from him and opened with pinch-lipped concentration. A glance at the contents and he had another fit of convulsions, combined with renewed manifestation of exophthalmia.

"Thirty-three hundred dollars!" he screamed, holding up the slip for the camera. "Every question that you answer correctly will be worth thir-ty three hun-dred do Mars! How about that!"

Professor Grew groaned The butcher who supplied his family with hamburger (the only meat they could afford) was becoming importunate An increase in faculty salaries was, as the President of Ryland had pointed out only a month earlier, quite impossible at this time. Owing to the lousy season at football alumni contributions had dropped to almost zero

Glumly he watched Harm an Gracld, shambling and blinking and mumbling his jaws, being escorted up the thirty-steps to the throne from which he would answer—or fail to answer—the questions A curtain parted on the studio stage, revealing a huge vault Two presidents of well-known banks came forward and, one after the other, concealing the combinations, twirled dials The door swung open, revealing another door. Two presidents of theological seminaries, followed by the national directors of two veterans' organizations, proceeded in turn to open four more doors by means of keys in their possession and in their possession only. Finally, in the innermost recess of the vault was revealed an envelope approximately the length and width of an Ispahani rug, and sealed with seven seals.

"Are you ready, Herm?" Robby, once again serious, asked, Herm sucked in his cheeks, thrust out his lower lip, pulled

it in again, nodded. "Ee-yup. Ready," he said, and gave an imbecile grin.

Robby Rheinhart broke the seven seals solemnly.

"Very well. And here is your first question. For $3300, tell us—Who designed the Brooklyn Bridge?"

Mr. Crackl's grin faded. He rolled his eyes, breathed noisily into the microphone, and wiped his brow on his coat-sleeve.

"You have twenty seconds in which to answer. It's worth three thousand dollars—so-o-o— Get it while you can!"

Professor Grew said, "George Washington Roebling, if I'm not mistaken."

"George Washington Roebling, if I'm not mistaken," said Mr. Grackl.

Professor Grew, hearing his very words repeated, smiled. Deadpan, Robby Rheinhart asked, "Is that your answer?"

"Of course it is. Certainly," said Grew.

"Of course it is. Certainly," said Grackl.

Professor Grew smiled—somewhat uncertainly, this time. Robby Rheinhart leaped into the air, clicked his heels, flung wide his arms, and shrieked, "You're RIGHT! For thir-ty three hundred dol-lars!" The audience burst into applause, and the band into music. Herman Grackl clasped his hands above his head and beamed. ("Silly ass," said Grew. Crackl's face fell. So did his hands.)

"Will you go for a second thirty-three hundred dollars, Herm?" the M.C. asked, when the noise died down. Herm hesitated, gazed all around him, chewed his lips.

"Go ahead," urged Grew. "Youll never get another chance like this."

"I-I think 111 go ahead," said Herman Grackl. A swallowing movement was clearly visible the length of his long neck. "Ill never get another chance like this."

During the applause, and the commercial that followed, Grew bit his fingernails and pondered. Three times—oh, there wasn't any doubt about it—the contestant, Mr. Herman Grackl, had repeated the words of Thomas Grew. Could it be a coincidence? Could (here almost automatically, he laughed scornfully) could that fellow Rhine be right? Tel-epathy? "Well well see," he said. He saw soon enough.

"Our next question," announced Robby, solemn as a Senate investigator, "deals with a man who was a great man in his own right and whose father was also a great man. Now, Herm, for sixty-three hundred dollars: tell us: Who was Secretary of War in the Cabinet of President Garfield, and who was his father?"

The music played. "Oh, Christ," muttered Dr. Grew. "Oh. Oh. Oh. Ahhhl" In a flash, the Paraclete descending, it came to him. History wasn't, never had been, his strong point; after all, he was a physicist, damn itl but this he'd learned somewhere, and—

The music stopped. Robby repeated the question. Determining to play it slow, play it cool, find out for certain-sure, Grew said, "In the cabinet of President James A. Garfield-"

"In the Cabinet of President James A Garfield—" said Herman Grackl.

"James Abram Garfield," Grew said.

"James Abram Garfield," Grackl said. The audience laughed a little bit. The M.C. picked it up, put on a wry grin of admiring surprise.

"The son of the Great Emancipator—" Grew's voice trembled.

"The son of the Great Emancipator—" Grackl's voice didn't. Grew could stand it no longer.

"Robert-Todd-Lincolnl" he said, very rapidly.

"Robert-Todd-Lincolnl" shot out Grackl.

Robby Rheinhart took a quick gander at his paper, then another one off stage, then his face cleared. "Well, you got the middle name slighdy wrong but well accept it—you're RIGHT! For sixty six hun-dred DOL-larsI"

It wasn't till the band stopped its victory blast that Grew found his voice again. "Listen, you better not take any more on tonight," he said. "I don't think I can do it again right now. Tell him you'll come back next week. Ill be in touch with you after the show."

This is just what Herman did. His expression, as the two shapely female assistants led him away, was dazed, pleased, and haunted.

Everbright, the Professor of Zoroastrian Philology, was a small, scrannel man with rufous eyes. For the past twenty odd years (tap-tap on his little bench, like Dr. Manet), he had made and mended not only his only shoes and those of his wife, father, father-in-law, and six children, but in his cellar did clandestine cobbling for a fashionable bootmaker. "A preposterous tale, Grew," said Professor Everbright, now.

Yeoville, Professor of Provencal prose, who (being a bachelor, and feeling he could not spare from his studies the time for an outside job) lived mosdy on canned spaghetti, shook his pale and pendulous cheeks. "Not to be credited, my dear Tom," he said.

Wearing the turtle-neck sweater and puffing the bull-dog pipe, both of which had been obligatory equipment for chaplains at non-denominational colleges when he had first come to Ryland in the choppy wake of the Dayton Monkey Trial, De Wet (Comparative Religion) sighed. His burning eyes and deep pallor were due not so much to ascetic zeal as to his playing a set of skins in various crowded and ill-ventilated jazz joints at non-union rates. "I don't dig this bit," he said. "Where is that cat? I'm buzzed for time, man, I've got a jam session in the Biblical Chaldee in an hour."

There were noises of approval from other Ryland faculty members—English, Chemistry, Teutonic Languages, (Per-Gunnar Maelstrom, the Ibsen expert, trimming his frayed cuffs with a small pair of scissors borrowed from Goldberg of Botany), and all the rest

"Very well," said Grew. "We will demonstrate the fact as any other fact la demonstrated." He opened the door of die Faculty Lounge—cautiously, for it had only one hinge "Herman, will you come in, please?"

Herman Grackl entered, nodding bashfully right and left. "I've told them and they don't believe me," said Professor Grew. "So suppose you tell them."

"Jeeze, maybe I should of taken the money and quit, huh?" said Grackl apprehensively. "Well I land of like don't blame you professors. But it's a fact. Why me? Why not say a hundred other people? I dunno Maybe it's a gift. It comes and it goes. Rudy Vallee, in the old days it use to be Rudy Vallee more than anyone else Sometimes—whatever they had like playing at the old Steel Pier in Atlantic Cidy. Couple a weeks ago it was a drunken woman she was takin' off alia her clothes down at—"

"What m the Hell are you talking about?" demanded Pig-hafetti, the biochemist, the envy of all the rest: kept all his family rosy-cheeked and warmly clad on his after-school hours earnings as a pizza-baker. The strain told, however, in the deep circles under his eyes.

Herman Grackl made haste to oblige. "First of all, as a result of an industrial accident incurred at sea during the Prohibition Erra, I got like a plate in my head and it comes down—" he traced its descent with a large finger, "—in ta the jore, right around here " He paused Dr. Grew nodded encouragement. "But nothing happen as a result a that, except I use to get a head-ache, off and on Until I got this now pyorrhea condition and I lose haffa my teeth. There was a dennis in them days, maybe you heard o him? Dr. Goldpepper? Dr Morris Goldpepper? Well, he made me this plate and he told me it had no less than two different metallic substances in it—"

Professor Everbright raised a thin, semi-transparent hand. "One moment," he said, in a voice like the rustie of falling leaves at Vallambrosa. "Are we to understand that you receive communications through your false teeth via the Marconi waves?"

"Your technical terms are a little archaic, Elmer," said Dr. Grew; "but in substance—well, yes."

"You stick to your Department and 111 stick to mine," Everbright said, with unexpected fire. "I'd like to see how you'd make out on a Pahlevi parlimpsest with Kufic superscriptions all over itl"

Crew hastily signaled to Crackl, who had been listening with mingled incomprehension and respect, to continue. "So that's it," said Herm. "How it happens, Ida know. When it's going to happen, I never use to be able to predick. It'd fade in—'High-ho, everybody'—fade out again. Sometimes a short interlude of organ music. Sometimes, if it's inny immediate neighborhood, I get a police call. Once inna while: TV. But I never got anything as what I mean clear until I got Professor Crew's message the other night. All them creek answers I And then, afterwards, he told me to come over to his house, so I come; he says to come here, so I'm here. And that's it."

There was a silence. Then—"Demonstration, I promised a demonstration," said Dr Grew, bustling around with slips of tomup examinations (the University providing no scrap paper for Faculty use) and pencils which students had from time to time imprudendy left behind in class or lab. Half of the assembled savants he sent outside with Herman Crackl, the other half remained with him. And he then and there proceeded to send such messages and other data (E = MC³, for example), via his little black box, through the dental prosthesis of Mr. Herman Crackl, as demonstrated conclusively the absolute truth of his account thereof

However, there were no shouts of exultation. Dr. Yeoville sighed heavily and said, "Very well, we are convinced. Now what? Is it your intention to attempt to market this curious engine with monies raised from the Ryland Faculty? If so, here is fifty cents: I shall go without lunch for three days."

Crew smiled crookedly. He then spoke (Busztromowicz of the English Department later declared) as never man spoke to man before. With burning words that blazed and crackled in the ambient air he sketched their poverty—deep, of ancient duration, the scars of it beyond cure. He spoke of the utter contempt in which they were held; the vast sums spent annually in the United States on bubble gum, Tom Collins mixer, and pin-ball equipment, he compared with the pittances devoted to higher education

They listened, their eyes burned hotly, they made little growling noises in their throats and chests; shuffled their cracked shoes.

Finally, "All that you say is true," acknowledged Maelstrom. "Painfully, agonizingly true But—as my students too often ask me—'So what?" "

"So this: Colleagues, I but state a simple fact when I say that we have here among us an accumulation of knowledge in no way inferior to that possessed by the sponsors of Get It While You Can. It is impossible that a question should be asked which at least one of our number could not answer. We have been poor long enough. Riches now lie within our grasp "

The University Poet-in-Residence, his lungs weakened by the steamy fumes of the dog-laundry in which he toiled after hours, coughed fitfully. "Your proposal, Dr. Grew," he said in a thin voice, "is quite obvious. It is also dishonest, unethical, and meretricious. I am in favor of accepting it."

When the applause died away one single head was seen to shake. It was gray, and belonged to the Professor of Hellenic Civilization. "I fear me," he muttered. "I fear me. Beware of hubris, the sin of overweening pride, lest it destroy us. Is not poverty as becoming to scholars as a scarlet bridle to a white horse?"

"If Homer said that," roared Professor Maelstrom, "no wonder they threw him off a cliff!"

An unexpected touch of color glowed in the other's cheeks.

"That was Hesiod, you Gothic oaf!" he snapped. Then the fight went out of him and he slumped in his seat, waved his hand in feeble surrender. "Yeypaod, yeypaod," he whispered. "Do what you will. I shall be with you."

The faculty made the acquaintance of Herman's lady-friend, a Mrs. Doll Moomaw, who had accompanied him and had waited in an outer room.

"Well-preserved," conceded Grew, in a whisper.

"And pneumatic," observed Everbright.

"I toll Doll that you professors are, now, trying to find me a job," said Grackl, winking ponderously over her shoulder.

"I be damned and go-to-Hell," said Doll, briskly, "if I can figure out what Herman could do at a college besides sweeping out the can, but listen, as long's he makes some money. I think he's had this same suit on since the six-day bicycle races."

"Aw, now, Doll," said Herman, smirking bashfully.

"The late Mr. Moomaw, rest his soul, was of a short, stocky built; otherwise—"

But here Herman grabbed ahold and pulled her out, still explaining why the deceased's suits were of no use to his successor-apparent.

Professor Yeoville shook his head and dewlaps. "That woman worries me," he said.

But Grew, sanguine, clapped him on the back. "Ho, ho, you old bachelor!" he chuckled. Yeoville winced, fell silent.

The following Sunday night the Faculty of Ryland University (excluding, of course, the Professor of Athletic Science, who was known to be a fink for the Board of Trustees and the Alumni Association, and had therefore been omitted from the cabal) assembled behind the locked doors of their Lounge. Dr. Grew, speaking into his mechanism and gazing at the television set smuggled up, said, "If you receive me okay, Herman, stroke your right cheek twice."

Herman Grackl stroked his right cheek twice. ("Hot diggetyl" exclaimed an excited pedagogue—and was stricken silent by the warning glares of the others.)

That night Herman answered questions involving the tributaries of the Sepik Watershed, the more obscure poems of Fulke Creville, the Eleventh Mihir Yast, and the Presidents of the U.S. Congress under the Articles of the Confederation (in chronological order). He answered them all correctly; after which, by a show of hands, he was advised to retire until the following week. He had won, the previous week's score included, $19,800.

"Oughtn't we to have stopped right there?" the Professor of Hellenic Civilization asked.

"Why, it would come to less than a thosuand dollars apiece," Grew objected.

"A thousand dollars!" repeated the Professor of Zoroas-trian Philology, in tremulous tones.

"We must learn to think big," pointed out the Professor of Provencal prose. "7 think we should wait until we have at least two thousand dollars apiece!"

In the month that followed, Herman Grackl, by naming the Mayors of the Palace, twenty-three dwarf stars in order of magnitude, all the vessels involved in the Battle of Lepanto, the Dodecanese Islands with their principal cities and populations and chief exports, all the steps involved in the Activated Sludge method of sewage disposal and descriptions thereof; by explaining the systems of proportional representation obtaining in four Scandinavian countries and Switzerland, Frenet's formulas for a space curve, the Twenty-Four Traditional Measures of Welsh poetry, and the meaning of thirty-two symbols from the Popel Voh; and by correctly identifying twelve Proto-Etruscan artifacts, paintings by Mur-illo, Winterhalter, and Rembrandt Peale, as well as musical pieces by Ame, Bartok, Pietro Yon, and Henry VIII ... he became a national figure.

He was featured on the covers of Time and Life magazines.

The then President of the United States, being asked in press conference about a clause in the tariff bill he was urging on Congress, replied, "Well, you are informing me of something about which the precise particulars I am not aware of. After all, I am not Herman Grackl." (Laughter.)

It was a merry group of scholars which assembled in the Faculty Lounge the evening of Herman's sixth appearance of Get It While You Can. Dr. Crew passed around the latest box of cigars which Chromo-Bright Tube and Pipe had presented to Mrs. Novack, and she to him; as one who was shortly to cut up a kitty in excess of $957,000 (for all concerned had determined that this would be the last evening), he felt he could well afford the gesture. The Professor of Levantine Archaeology declared that he had been pricing Jaguars. The Poet-in-Residence argued the claims of the Ferrari. Dr. Maelstrom announced a certain method he intended to recommend to the President of the University to relieve his (the President's) prostate condition. And then all conversation died down as they closed in to watch their protege engage in preliminary banter with Robby Rheinhart, the genial M.C. of the program.

"Herm, there seem to be a few changes in your appearance," Robby said.

"Hey, you know, man, he's right," observed the Professor of Comparative Religion. "Like he looks different, somehow."

Herman Grackl smirked. "Well, Robby, when you're in love, it does make a change."

Robby did a double-take. "Did you say—in love?"

Another smirk. "Ee-yup. T'tell the truth—I'm engaged!"

Grew exclaimed, "He didn't say anything to us about— But I suppose it was inevitable—"

Robby inquired, "Well Herm, is your fiancee by any chance here tonight?"

With a dip of his knees and a bob of his head, Herm al-

yes, I'm quite familiar with the phenomenon. It don't mean a thing—except that he hasn't got all his marbles. Which is by no means news."

Judge Peltz's mouth set, then unset, in his horse-long face. "It's a schizoid characteristic," he said, doggedly. "Sullivan points out—"

The doctor waved to a passing workman. Then he said, "Listen. Do I try to teach you law?"

Elmer beamed at them. "Nice day, hey? Nice town, nice sawdust—" He picked up a handful of the stuff (before the burners were installed the sawdust seemed likely to engulf the town); he sifted it lovingly through his fingers, "—nice people. One day—gren-amun-dun." He seemed just the merest bit regretful. The judge cleared his throat.

"Uh—tellus, Elmer—what does 'gren-a-mun-dun' mean? Hmm? Tell us?"

The doctor snorted. Elmer considered, rubbed his chin, raised his eyebrows. "Gren-a-mun-dun? It's like . . . urn . . . cupra. But not for all the time cupra." And he beamed, turned back to his task of burning up sawdust.

"I trust that you are satisfied, Alfred?" the doctor asked. The day was warm, but now and then a cool breeze came up from the bay, and the sound of the seals with it.

The judge said, well, he wasn't. From his pocket he took a small notebook and a pencil.

'Gren-a-mun-dun'," he muttered, writing. "I gottem all down here. And some day I'm writing to a member of the medical profession whose mind isn't closed to all the progress that's been made in recent years . . . Kreelth . . . tal-a-wax-na . . . esterral ... I gottem all noted down here. Sometimes he just repeats the old ones, but today he used two more: Gren-a-mun-dun and cupra."

Damon shook his head. "Elmer is happy," he said. "The company is happy with him. He has not an enemy in the world. What do you want, Alfred?"

Elmer puttered around the base of the tall metal sawdust-bumer with a few tools. "Kreelth," he muttered.

Judge Alfred Peltz said he wanted to know two things. "One: Is there any chance he might ever become dangerous? Two: Is there a chance he can be helped?"

The doctor rubbed his rufous eyes. He groaned. "Never let well enough alone, will you? Just like my damned old uncle, Freddy Damon. Thought the sailingmen were a bad influence on the town. Wouldn't rest until he'd got the railroad in. The day they drove the last spike, what happened? Drunken, gandy-dancer sets fire to a box-car, bums up half the town—including—" he poked his finger in the judge's sternum—"my damned old uncle, Freddy Damon. . . . Ha-pastwo," he said, abrupdy. "I got to get back to my office. You drove me here, now you drive me back."

They started off. Doc half-turned. "Slong, Elmer. Begood."

"Gren-a-mun-dun," Elmer muttered, absent-mindedly, scraping a bolt

When the lease of Pighafetti the ship-chandler ran out, he didn't even bother to hold a Going Out Of Business sale. What stock was left in the shop stayed there. Most of it still remained when Tom Wong moved in because his lease had run out Shipping and fishing might be shot to hell but folks still had to eat. Knowing the value of the picturesque, Tom had simply redistributed the stuff; and so nets and coils of line and glass globes and ships' lanterns and a lot of similar equipage hung from the walls and ceilings.

"Yeah, I guess that's right, Judge," Tom observed. They were sitting at a table under an eel-trap. "Now when I was a kid, my father used to take me to an old Chinese man who stuck needles into me—gold needles, silver needles. Oh, it worked—but nowadays I see to it that my kids get penicillin, because, like you say, we gotta Move With The Times. . . . How about trying today's Special? Curried shrimp." At the judge's nod, he signaled to his wife.

Judge Peltz put a cigarette in his mouth, groped around for a match. On the table by the ashtray with a pregnant dragon coiled around it was a book of paper matches, imprinted Tom Wong's Waterfront Inn; but the judge liked kitchen matches. He brought out the entire contents of his coatpocket, not being able to disentangle the match, and dumped them on the table: a piece of fishing line, the pencil stubs, a glueless postage stamp, a few matches, and his little notebook. He pulled a match loose, lit his cigarette. The notebook reminded him—

"Now, it's an odd thing, Tom," he said, "how some people can't see the forest for the trees. I suppose you must meet up with people in the restaurant business world who are perfectly content to go right on doing just like they did thirty years ago?"

Tom nodded vigorously. His eyeglasses flashed. "Boy, don't I just!" he agreed. "Judge, those very words describe my wife's Uncle Ong, who's got that lunchroom over at the county seat. When I put in the dishwashing machine the salesman offered me a special price if I'd get two. Well, gee, I mean—so I asked her uncle, How's about it? But no—he's used to having the dishes washed by hand and he didn't see any reason to change. Cet's in these hoboes and winos and odd-ball characters and by and by they leave him, so you'd think—But no. I said, Ah, come on, Uncle Ong, don't be an old stick-in-the-mud. So he started cussing me out in Chinese and yelling not to forget the Eight Virtues and that kind of stuff. . . ."

The judge, who had hoped for a single "Yes" only, listened. The moment Tom stopped he said, "Well, there you are. It's very sad. And how'd it be if the whole country was like that? Now, you take psychiatry, for example. What strides have been made in itl What marvelous recent discoveries!"

Old Ong's nephew said, "Boy, you bet!"

Growing enthusiastic, the Judge went on, "Now, you take for instance, I was reading some while back an article in the Reader's Digest—"

"That's a great magazine. I read it all the time. It's terrific."

"And it was describing the work of the late Dr. Harry Stack Sullivan of whom I'm sure you've heard." Wong made a noncommittal, encouraging noise. "You know much about the schizoid personality, Tom?" the judge asked.

The restauranteur wiggled in a fit of embarrassment. "Well, urn, no, Judge. Y*see. The Business keeps me pretty busy, except for Sunday morning and I like to sleep late then if I get the chance. I was saying to my wife only last week, Judge, Triscilla,' I says, 'Can't you keep those kids quiet just—'"

Pushing the curried shrimp to one side and speaking rather loudly, Judge Alfred Peltz said, "This type of personality suffers from what you call a profound disassociation of ideas, I think. They retreat from Reality. See? They use Neologisms—what I mean, words that nobody knows what they mean, like . . ." He opened the little notebook. "Kreelth."

Tom Wong smiled. He chuckled. "Kreelth," he repeated. "What land of people did you say they were, Judge? I mean, where do they come from? Because that's what this simple-minded guy that washes dishes in my wife's Uncle Ong's lunchroom says all the time. Everytime they bring him a pile of dirty dishes he says it."

Old Mr. Woodrow Ong shook his head and waved his hand when Judge Peltz and Doc Damon came into his lunchroom.

"Closed up," he announced. "Too late. Closed up. Oh. Judge. Hello, Judge." He glanced at the clock, sighed, struggled with his Confucian respect for the figure of the Magistrate. "Sandwich?" he suggested, feebly. "Cup coffee?" He sighed again, surrendered. "Appoo pie, boo-berry, coconut custard, lemon mo-ang—"

The swinging doors of the ldtchen opened and a man about Elmer's age and size came out, rolling down his sleeves. "Dishes finish," he said, and then saw the two newcomers. He took in a deep, resigned breath. "Kreelth," he said softly.

Judge Peltz looked triumphandy at Doc Damon. He consulted his little notebook. "Lololo," he said, tentatively. The dishwasher smiled. He chuckled at "gren-a-mun-dun" and "cupra". When the judge stumbled over "tal-a-wax-na," he corrected him happily.

"Fantasticl" said the judge. "Identical neologisms!" For once the doctor listened without demur.

"All right. Bring him along with us. Let's get the two of them together and see—whatever it is," Doc Damon said.

Old Mr. Ong watched them get into the car. He shrugged. Then he locked up, turned out all fights but one. An unfamiliar clicking noise in the kitchen drew his attention. He traced it to the garbage disposal unit, lifted out the mechanism. Its inward parts were a mystery to him, always had been. The devil-device clicked once again as he looked at it warily. A little parti-colored disk fell out of it, then another. They dropped to the floor. The cat strolled over, sniffed, licked, then began to eat.

Mr. Ong shrugged. He replaced the mechanism. "Let well enough alone" had always been his motto. The garbage disposal unit clicked one last time, then went silent as the last of the garbage emerged in the form of something resembling a Necco wafer, or a poker chip. Mr. Ong took a can of cold beer from the ice-box and went upstairs to watch Charlie Chan on the Late, Late Movie.

Jack Girard, the manager of the lumber yard, was agreeable though puzzled. He leaned out of the car window and said to the watchman, "The four of us are going up to the sawdust-bumer for a while. Tib—in case muh wife calls nasks."

The judge asked, "How come they burn the sawdust, Jack, instead of making a lot of whatchacallits?"

Girard shrugged. "Company Policy is Burn It So that's what we do. We bum it."

The judge's forehead, ridged and bumpy with thought, suddenly cleared.

" 'By-Products I' That's what they call it, the stuff you can make from sawdust. How come your company don't convert all this good sawdust into By-Products, huh, Girard?"

"Such as what?" The doctor took over the task of answering from the foreman who—faced with the fearful thought of questioning Company Policy—shook his head, aghast.

"Ohhhh . . ." The judge, trying to recall what he had in mind, rolled the syllable and his eyes. ". . . stuff with names like Butyn Mephlutyn, or Bophane Hyperstannis, or Something like that. .."

The yellow glare of a single lamp mingled with the red glare of the tall burner itself. Girard hopped out and held the door open for the others. "I still don't know what you intend to try and prove," Doc Damon complained, as he bent his head and slid out.

"I'm not sure, myself," the judge admitted. "Okay, Joe, here we are—" The dishwasher (his Social Security card listed his name as Joe Jones), humming tunelessly to himself, got out and looked around. Girard strolled over to the burner. He examined a piece of piping on the side and frowned.

"What's this?" he asked.

Doc Damon said, indifferently, that it was part of the sawdust-burner.

The manager said the hell it was. "Elmer!" he called. "Hey, Elmer?"

Over their heads a voice called out cheerfully. "Lololo!" Their eyes swung up to see the short figure in overalls coming down the rungs set in the side of the cylinder. In a moment he was on the ground. "I just fix the wagmal," he said. "Takes much kreelth—much kreelth."

The dishwasher stepped forward. He said, "Lololo." He and Elmer exchanged wide smiles, spoke together rapidly. Then Cirard tapped the piping.

"Who put this on here, Elmer?"

"I."

"You? Well, how come?"

"Tal-a-wax-na. Of course, not best land tal-a-wax-na, but —" he shrugged. "It be okay for long enough."

Girard gaped. The doctor said, "Oh, here we go again. Look, now, Jack: the machine still bums sawdust, don't it? So what do you care if old Elmer sticks a hootenanny on it? You'll be as bad as old Judge Peltz here if you keep on-reading the Reader's Digest and all."

Joe Jones, the dishwasher, walked around the base of the burner. Reappearing, he felt the pipe, nodded in a satisfied sort of way.

A sudden thought struck Elmer. "Klommerkaw?" he asked. "You get klommerkaw ready?"

Joe nodded, held up the shopping bag he had brought with him from the kitchen of Ong's Eats. He reached in his other hand, brought it out filled with litde parti-colored disks.

"Some new land of Necco wafers?" hazarded Doc Damon. "Poker chips to while away the hours? Nope—no cards . . . Well, whadda ya know?" His voice faded into a surprised silence as the dishwasher broke one in half, gave part to Elmer. They put the halves in their mouths, chewed nimina-tively, swallowed.

"Very good klommerkaw," said Elmer. "Plenty, too."

"Now, look-a-here," Girard protested, "I'm responsabuD to thuh owners for all this here e-quipment, and I gotta know what is that pipe for?"

Joe Jones looked at him. "Kreelth," he said. There was just a slight touch of reproach in his voice. "Do not be un-kreelth." He put his hand on the piping and directed his next remark to Elmer. "Wagmal fix? Estanrel?"

Elmer said, "Wagmal just now fix good." Jones gave the piping a light twist—a gentle tug, really— his hand moved so quickly, so oddly. "EstanreL" he said. Girard said, "Uh."

The side of the sawdust-bumer opened where no opening had been.

"Obbertaw," said Elmer, firmly, holding back. Joe Jones went inside. So did Elmer. For a moment Jones' face looked at them. He smiled.

"Cupra," he said. "Cupra."

"But not cupra for all the time." Elmer explained. "Only gren-a-mun-dun. We come back. Have a kreelth, you see we come back some time to nice town, nice people, nice sawdust."

And the opening closed. The red glare of the burning sawdust turned yellow. The whoofing noise of the draft turned shrill. A sudden gust of cool wind came from the bay. And then, with a subdued, polite sort of swish, the sawdust burner separated itself from the ground and went up....

They had a rather bad first five minutes of it. Finally, with the help of the spiritus frumenti in Doctor Damon's bag, the three men began slowly to recover.

"The way I see it"—Doc Damon was the first to say anything besides "Jesus", and "Gimme that bottle"—"the way / see it: those two fellas must've been sort of ship-wrecked here. Probably way, way back in the woods there's a twisted mass of metal somebody will come across one of these days."

The judge said, "Ohboyohboyohboy."

Girard said, "Gimme that bottle."

"So they did what any experienced mariner would do— they improvised—fixed up what you might call a jury-rigged vessel ... At least, Elmer did. Guess he was the Chief Engineer. Maybe Joe Jones was the purser or supercargo."

"All I have to say," the judge announced firmly, "is that it never happened and if either of you say it did I'll do my

"In that tone of voice? If it were for my pleasure, I'd say, Nothing. But I see your brother doesn't care if you eat or not. Half a bowl of—"

"I'm finished."

"You are not finished. Finish now." "Ill be late, El. They're waiting for me." "Then they'll wait. Rush out of here with an empty stomach and then fill up on some rubbish? No. Finish the cereaL" "But it's cold."

"Who let it get cold? I'm not too sure at all I ought to let you go. This Harvey is older than you and he pals around with girls older than he is. Or maybe they just fix themselves up to look—eat. Did you hear what I say? Eat. Most disgusting sight I ever saw, lipstick, and the clothes? Don't let me catch you near them. They'll probably be rotten with disease in a few years." Silendy, Queen Esther grated pineapple. "I don't like the idea of your going down to the Museum without adult supervision. Who knows what can happen? Last week a boy your age was crushed to death by a truck. Did you have a.—look at me, young man, when I'm talking to you—did you have a movement?"

"Yes."

"Ugh. If looks could kill. I don't believe you. Co upstairs and-RodNEY/"

But Rodney had burst into tears and threw down his spoon and rushed from the room. Even as Mrs. Raidy, her mouth open with Shock, tried to catch the maid's eye, he slammed the door behind him and ran down the front steps.

The morning was proceeding as usual.

"And his brother leaves it all to me," Mrs. Raidy said, pursuing a piece of pineapple with her tongue. She breathed heavily. "I have you to thank, in part, I may as well say since we are on the subject, for the fact that he wakes up screaming in the middle of the night. I warned you. Didn't I warn you?"

Queen Esther demurred, said she had never spoken of it to the young master since that one time of the warning.

"One time was enough. What was that word? That name? From the superstitious story you were telling him when I interrupted. Guppy?"

"Duppy, mistress." It was simply a tale from the old slave days, Queen Esther reflected. A cruel Creole lady who went to the fields one night to meet she lover, and met a duppy instead. The slaves all heard, but were affrighted to go out; and to this day the pile of stones near Petty Mome is called The Grave of Mistress-Serve-She-Well. Mistress Raidy had suddenly appeared at the door, as Queen Esther finished the tale, startling Master Rodney.

"Why do you tell the child such stories?" she had demanded, very angry. "See, he's scared to death."

"You scared me, EI, sneaking up like that."

Queen Esther hastened to try to distract them. Tis only a fancy of the old people. Me never fear no duppy—"

But she was not allowed to finish. The angry words scalded her. And she knew it was the end of any likelihood (never great) that she might be allowed to move her things into the little attic room, and save the hours of journeying through the cutting, searing cold.

Said the mistress, now, "Even the sound of it is stupid. . . . He didn't eat much breakfast." She glanced casually out the window at the frost-white ground. "You noticed that, I suppose."

Over the sound of the running water Queen Esther said, Yes. She added detergent to the water. He never did eat much breakfast—but she didn't say this out.

"No idea why, I suppose? No? Nobody's been feeding him anything—that you know of? No spicy West Indian messes, no chicken and rice with bay leaves? Yes, yes, I know, not since that one time. All right. A word to the wise is sufficient." Mrs. Raidy arose. A grimace passed over her face.

"Another day. And everything is left to me. Every single thing . . . Don't take all morning with those few dishes."

Chicken and rice, with bay leaves and peppercorns. Queen Esther, thinking about it now, relished the thought Savory, yes. Old woman in the next yard at home in Spanish Man, her cook it in an iron caldron. Gran'dame Hephsibah, who had been bora a slave and still said "witdes" and "vhiskey" . . . Very sage woman. But now, what was wrong with chicken and rice? The boy made a good meal of it too, before he sister-in-law had come back, unexpected and early. Then shouts and tears and then a dash to the bathroom. "You've made him sick with your nasty rubbishl" But for true, it wasn't so.

Queen Esther was preparing to vacuum the rug on the second floor when the mistress appeared at the door of the room. She dabbed at her eyes. "You know, I'm not a religious person," she observed, "but I was just thinking: It's a blessing the Good Lord didn't see fit to give me a child. You know why? Because I would've thrown away my life on it just as I'm throwing it away on my father-in-law's child. Can you imagine such a thing? A man fifty-two years old, a widower, suddenly gets it into his head to take a wife half his age—" She rattled away, winding up, "And' so now they're both dead, and who has to put up with the results of his being a nasty old goat? No . . . Look. See what your fine young gendeman had hidden under the cushion of his bedroom chair."

And she rifled the pages of a magazine. Queen Esther suppressed a smile. It was only natural, she wanted to say. Young gendemen liked young ladies. Even up in this cold and frozen land—true, the boy was young. That's why it was natural he only looked—and only at pictures.

"Oh, there's very litde gets past me, I can assure you. Wait. When he gets back. Museum trips. Dirty pictures. Friends from who knows where. No more/"

Queen Esther finished the hall rugs, dusted, started to go in to vacuum the guest room. Mrs. Raidy, she half observed in the mirror, was going downstairs. Just as the mistress passed out of sight, she threw a glance upward. Queen Esther only barely caught it. She frowned. A moment later a faint jar shook the boards beneath her feet. The cellar door. Bad on its hinges. Queen Esther started the vacuum cleaner; a sudden, thought made her straighten up, reach for the switch. For a moment she stood without moving. Then she propped the cleaner, still buzzing, in a comer, and flitted down the steps.

There was, off the kitchen, a large broom closet, with a crack in the walL Queen Esther peered through the crack. Diagonally below in the cellar was an old victrola and on it the maid had draped her coat and overcoat and scarf; next to it were street shoes, not much less broken than the ones she wore around the house.

Mistress Raidy stood next to the gramophone, her head lifted, listening. The hum of the vacuum cleaner filtered through the house. With a quick nod of her head, tight-lipped in concentration, the mistress began going through the pockets of the worn garments. With little grunts of pleasurable vexation she pulled out a half-pint bottle of fortified wine, some pieces of cassava cake. "That's all we need. A drunken maid. Mice. Roaches. Oh, yes." A smudged hekto-graphed postal card announcing the Grand Annual Festivity of the St. Kitts and Nevis Wesleyan Benevolent Union, a tattered copy of Lucky Tiger Dream Book, a worn envelope

Here she paused to dislodge a comerless photograph of Queen Esther's brother Samuel in his coffin and to comment, "As handsome as his sister." There were receipts for international postal orders to Samuel's daughter Ada—"Send my money to foreign countries." A change purse with little enough in it, and a flat cigarette tin. This she picked at with nervous fingers, chipping a nail. Clicking her tongue, she got it open, found, with loathing large upon her face—

—a tiny dried frog—a frog?—a—surely not!—

"Oh I" she said, in a thin, jerky, disgusted voice. "Uh. Uhl" She threw the tin away from her, but the thing was bound with a scarlet thread and this caught in her chipped fingernail.

"—out of this house!" she raged, flapping her wrist, "and never set foot in it again, with her filthy-ah!" The thread snapped, the thing flew off and landed in a far comer. She turned to go and had one unsteady foot on the first step when she heard the noise behind her.

Later on, when Queen Esther counted them, she reckoned it as twenty-five steps from the broom closet to the bottom of the cellar stairs. At that moment, though, they seemed to last forever as the screams mounted in intensity, each one seeming to overtake the one before it without time or space for breath between. But they ceased as the maid clattered down the steps, almost tripping over the woman crouched at the bottom.

Queen Esther spared she no glance, then, but faced the thing advancing. Her thrust she hand into she bosom. "Pool" her spat. "You ugly old duppyl Me never fear no duppy, no, not me I"

And her pulled out the powerful obeah prepared for she long ago by Gran'dame Hephsibah, that sagest of old women half Ashanti, half Coromanti. The duppy growled and driv-vled and bared its wom-down stumps of filthy teeth, but retreated step by step as her came forward, chanting the words of power; till at last it was shriveled and bound once more in the scarlet thread and stowed safely away in the cigarette tin. Ugly old duppy ... I

Mr. Raidy took the sudden death of his wife with stoical calm. His young brother very seldom has nightmares now, and eats heartily of the savory West Indian messes that Queen Esther prepares for all three of them. Hers is the little room in the attic; her chimney passes through one corner of it, and Queen Esther is warm, warm, warm.

look over their heads. He saw a sort of box, a miniature stage complete with curtains, and a dog who was dancing on it to the music of what sounded like an old-fashioned music box. The music box was nowhere to be seen,.but that was nothing; what held Bunsen's attention was that the dog was on scale with the stage: it must have been about an inch long. While the young women oh'd and ah'A the dog suddenly stopped dancing and faced off stage while it went through the motions of barking. The tiny jaws worked rapidly, but there was no sound from the stage except the tinkle of the music box, even when the animal faced the crowd in front

One of the girls turned around and saw Bunsen there; she tried to assume a deprecating expression, but couldn't keep it up. Breaking into a smile, she said, "Oh, Mr. Bun Sen, just look I It's so cutel"

They all turned around at this, and then the music stopped, abrupdy. He couldn't see the stage anymore because Mrs. Wimpold, the bookkeeper, was wedged in front of it like a piece of Roman siege-machinery, but he heard someone say, "Oh, please, Mr. Stilwell, turn it on again!" Bunsen moved forward and saw the man. He was fiftyish-looking and had a rather pursy jowly sort of face, and on it the look of a man who knows he has said or done something purposely funny, but prefers not to laugh at his own cleverness.

Bunsen felt that he knew—just from that one glance—a lot about Mr. Stilwell. Mr. Stilwell had never joined the I AM, but he had probably been a Rosicrucian. On deciding that the fiscal and social cosmogony of The Saturday Evening Post and The Readers' Digest was not after all, the correct one, Mr. Stilwell had delved—not into Marxism, but into Technocracy and the descendants of the Greenback movement He did not Drink, but when he did drink, he showed his lack of practice. Mr. Stilwell believed that there was A Lot To what was said by the practitioners of Mrs. Eddy's soothing science, but when he felt unwell he bought whatever nostrum was being currentiy touted on the radio because The

Government wouldn't Let Them Get Away With It if They weren't telling the truth. And Mrs. Stilwell was certainly a fine wife to him, but by this time she was perhaps not quite so certain that he was going to Make Good and Show Them All.

Making a quick decision, Bunsen (who was almost never faced with the need for office discipline) decided not to make an issue of the thing. He broke one of his own rules.

"Will you come inside, please, Mr. Stilwell?" he asked. The man appeared to reflect on the matter. He looked as if he were about to say that he Didn't Mind If He Did, but what he actually said was, "Why, yes, sir. Just one moment."

He turned to the women and began to smile and bow in a manner which Bunsen mentally labeled Old Cunnel. By a steady flow of Will you excuse me, miss? and Tm very sorry to bother you, ma'am, and Thank you, thank you very much, he managed to clear away the crowd of women and get his stage back into a container. Then, still smiling and bowing and making courtly gestures with his hat, he followed Bunsen into the inner office.

Dealing as he did more with things than with people, Bunsen seldom found it necessary to be a bastard, but he expected nothing from Mr. Stilwell and was prepared to suggest he go visit the firm which had taken on the mad saddle-soap chemist. He gestured the man to a seat, where he faced Bunsen with the self-conscious pursy smile still on his face.

"Suppose you tell me a little something about your device," Bunsen suggested, sliding out a drawer where a watch lay, face up—drawer-sliding was so much more tactful than clock-watching.

"Well," Mr. Stilwell began—only, as he accompanied it with (so Bunsen thought) a poindess chuckle, it sounded more like "Weh-hell."

"I prefer to let my own work praise me in the gates, so to speak. May I, ah, demonstrate it?" He unpacked the stage and placed it on the desk. It was well-made, certainly. In between attempts to defeat inertia and start a perpetual motion, Stilwell had probably turned out some nifty bird-houses.

Bunsen asked, "What land of wood is this?"

The inventor said, "Mahogany, sir. The best." He touched a stud and the curtain rolled up. The interior of the stage was dark.

"Honduras? - Or British Honduras?" Bunsen cared absolutely nothing about the origin of the mahogany; he was making talk to cover the concentration with which he stared at the darkness onstage. The model theater was standing in full light from the fluorescent fixtures over Bunsen's desk; there was no possible way the interior could be dark . . . but it was. Tentatively he extended a finger, Stilwell making no objection. No, there was no obstruction there to cut off the light. A slight tingling in his finger . . . but he may have imagined it. Across the far comer of his mind the phrase darkness which could be felt came and went before he could ponder it. Stilwell said nothing, had (perhaps) not noticed. He pressed another stud and then a third. The tinkle of the music box started again (probably in the base of the stage, Bunsen thought) and the little dog trotted out and began his dance once more. The tiny figure was outlined as if with a spotlight...

Only there was no spotlight.

Only the office fights and the darkness of the little stage and the minute area of light that accompanied the dog in his none-too-skilled dancings. Abrupdy, Bunsen reached out his hand again. He met with nothing he could feel—unless there really was a tingle—but the image of the dog seemed to blur at the point where it touched his finger. Bunsen shivered a bit and shuddered a bit—the way he did when someone drew a shovel raspingly along a sidewalk. The papers on his desk dealt with a way to reduce the oil content in squeezed citrus juice; it seemed a hell of a long way from what he was now looking at.

"Ahhhh ... Mr. Stilwell.. "Yessir?"

Bunsen wanted a drink from the water cooler, decided to skip it. He said, "Mmm ... is there anything else? Or just the dog?"

Mr. Stilwell said, "Oh . . . anything can be arranged. Just anything: like, urn, lions and lion-tamers, elephants, the U.S. Marine Corps Band, opera, plays, tales of romance and revenge"—again, his silly chuckle—"only, as my means are rather, uh, limited right just now . . . weh-hell . . ."

"Just so. . . . All right, Mr. Stilwell, I've seen enough."

Mr. Stilwell pressed studs. The music stopped. The light went out. The curtain went down with a tiny rustle. The two men looked at one another; Stilwell pleased and pompous, Bunsen poker-faced.

"What do you have in mind for your invention? For its uses, I mean?"

Mr. Stilwell pursed his ample lips, considered. "Weh-hell . . . home entertainment, for one thing; and store-window advertisement, maybe . . . You take this television they've been talking about, oh, for years, now"—he leaned over and became patronizingly confidential—"they haven't got it yet. And who knows when or if they will? Now, you take the Ancients, Mr. Bunsen—" Bunsen's face displayed uncertainty as to which ancients he was supposed to take, or where he was supposed to take them. Smiling blandly, Stilwell said, "That is to say, the Wisdom of the Ancients. Mu. Atlantis, Lemuria. The old legends of the talking mirror. Weh-hell. I'd better not digreh-hess. Any way: A chimera, is what 1 think this television is. But my stage is as good as any television could be, and it's here. A bird in the hand, you know," he said, with ponderous archness.

Bunsen nodded slowly. He said, "... I don't want to ask you just yet to explain the principle involved, or to show me any plans . . . but the decision as to whether I.E.C. takes this up or not doesn't depend entirely on me."

Stilwell rapidly bobbed his head. "I understand, sir. You have to consult with your associates, your principals. I understand, I expected nothing else. Now—suppose I leave this with you? To show them? And 111 inquire back in, oh, about a week? All right. Oh, about these buttons or switches. Ver-y simple: top to bottom: music, curtain, performance, end performance, down curtain, end music. Clear? All right."

Bunsen ran through them all, and Stilwell showed him how to pack the little stage away in its container. Then he bowed and weaved himself out. Before the door had closed Bunsen had begun to make up for lost time. The thing was to get the last drop of sweet juice out without releasing the first drop of bitter oil. The rind ...

Finally the day at the office closed. Bunsen had dinner at his usual small restaurant. Then he got in his car and began the ride up to Westchester. Nicholas Black lived there, the famous Nicky Black of years ago and Prohibition, that Experiment Noble In Purpose. Black was now "retired," richer than ever, respectable as any Federal government could wish, though his personal habits were in no way diminished by his retired way of life or advancing age. Nicholas Black was I.E.C.'s principal stockholder, and a good thing he had in it, too.

Driving through the Bronx, Bunsen idled with the idea of picking up Stilwell and taking him along. On impulse, he took a left turn and drove to the address given on the form filled out by the receptionist. It was a two-and-a-half-story wooden house in a street filled with such houses, all wooden and all shabby, and all long since divided up into flats. Some had store fronts built into them. Stilwell's house had a defeated-looking tree in the front yard and on it was a sign reading mrs mungo, corsets. Bunsen ran his finger over the name plates at the door. Mungo, Goldberg, Mc-Cooey, Hart, and one was blank but in the frame was wedged a scrap of paper: Joey—Gone to Aunt Irma's. Ma.

Mr. Stilwell's name was Edgar. But this was the address. Perhaps he was only a roomer. Bunsen shrugged, rang the lowest bell, that of Mrs. Mungo. Since she was, in a way, a public character, she must expect the consequences.

As the answering buzz came, he pushed through the door, and saw another one open in the hallway inside. A smell of bacon smoke and boiling cabbage came out, followed by the head of a woman who was chewing something. "I'm looking for Mr. Stilwell, please." The head (it appeared to have been fashioned by an apprentice doll-maker; Bunsen caught himself looking closely at the hairline for signs of glue) was followed by a body. Mrs. Mungo evidendy did not use her own products.

"Why he don't live here no more," she said, frowning and swallowing and coming forward.

Bunsen shrugged. "This is the address I was given." He was set to go; it didn't matter if Stilwell had given an old address, they weren't going to bond the man. People had their odd ways. But Mrs. Mungo was not anxious to withdraw. Doing some hasty dental work with her tongue, she surged up to the front door.

"No, they moved right after Louise had all that trouble." Again Bunsen started to leave. He was not particularly interested in the Stilwell's domestic difficulties, but Mrs. Mungo had somehow wedged herself between him and the door. Short of trying a judo hold there seemed no alternative but to stay and listen.

"I presume you know them, so I'm not reveab'ng anything, but—Wasn't that a terrible thing? He took it like a gende-man, though, I must say. 'I forgive you, Louise,' he hollered —I could hear him, right-through-the-walll" She pumped her head up and down. " T forgive you, Louise,' he hollered. 'It's my fault I cou'n't give you the things you deserve,' he said. Oh, he admitted that all right. He says, 'I forgive you' and she says back to him, oh, crying something awful, 'But I can't forgive myself,' she says. Sobbing, you know. And crying? . . . I'm sorry that I can't teD you where they went, but they didn't tell me." An aggrieved note came into her voice. "Although I sh'd think they might of, Louise and me being so close. After all, it was me who found her with her head by the gas oven, Me." She thumped the place where her bosom had once been. "I heard the lil dog whimpering and I climbed right-through-the-window and if 1 hadn't—" But thk was too much, far too much. Mrs. Mungo unwisely moved just enough to give him clearance, and Bun-sen slithered through. "I'm very sorry to have bothered you," he said, sincerely enough, over his shoulder, and walked rapidly away, half-fearful that Mrs. Mungo would come pounding after and drag him back. What had Louise done? Dropped a half-pound of supermarket sliced bacon in her reticule, no doubt, and been picked up by the Pinkertons. Well, it wasn't any of his business. He drove off.

Nicholas Black lived in a large well-kept house like any other, in a village full of large well-kept houses. An unobtrusive couple who performed all the domestic duties lived there with him. Black had no immediate family.

"Hello, Ed," he greeted Bunsen, and looked at the case he was carrying. "Should've had Carl give you a hand with that. Something to show me?"

"After the usual business, yes." Bunsen noticed, with some relief, as he looked around the well-fumished room, that tonight there were no traces of female guests he was not intended to meet. No long gloves on the couch, no expensive handbag on the chair, no fur stole. Once, some months before, he had been rather surprised to see a cheap brown pair of women's houseshoes somewhere about. Nicholas Black wasn't the sort to entertain women who wore cheap, brown houseshoes. Anyway, they weren't there when he had gotten ready to leave.

An hour passed, devoted to talk of figures and sums. Finally Bunsen packed away the papers and Black said, "Well, now for a drink and a look at whatever-it-is in the case here." Black never drank while there was talk of money. The drink was made and accepted and Bunsen drank half of it before he began to unpack the stage.

"This was made by some odd character who thinks that television is a chimera."

Black grunted. "I just wish we'd put some money into that chimera," he said. "It will be on the market before a lot of people expect it to."

He looked like a turtle from whose jaws a fish had just escaped. Bunsen had the stage ready. "What interests. me most in this is the fighting." He pressed the up curtain stud. "Or rather, the darkening . . . here, turn that lamp full on it . . . you see? Stage remains dark. Can't you imagine what uses might be made of a method of fighting just part of an area while the rest stays dark?"

Black nodded slowly and looked intently at the stage. Bunsen started the music and then pressed the third stud for the performance. "Never mind that dog," he said.

"What dog?" Black asked; but Bunsen didn't answer at once because he saw that there was no dog on the stage. Instead, a tiny man, dressed in green, was dancing—or rather, capering. Not a very young man, to judge from the figure. The face was masked.

"Robin Hood, I suppose that's what he's meant to be." A feathered cap was cocked on the man's head, he had a bow and quiver slung about him. "That's funny—there was a dog the last time. . . . Well, he said it could show anything. ... Now watch that lighting; d'you see?" _N Black waved him aside impatiently, said, "Yeah, yeah." Suddenly, two figures were on the little stage.

"If that's Maid Marian, she's land of pudgy for the role."

Solemnly and awkwardly the two figures performed the dance. They bowed towards each other, removed their masks, and then bowed down stage. Bunsen leaned close, suddenly noticed that the woman was wearing a tiny pair of what seemed to be brown houseshoes. Then he looked up at their faces.

The words formed in Bunsen's mind, Why, that's him—the pursy jowly self-consciously clever smile was almost absent, though, from the tiny features: the face was taut with fear or hate, an edge of teeth gleamed—all in a second Bunsen turned from the stage to Black, but before he could say the words his mind had formed, he saw Black lunge forward in his chair, face scarlet.

"Louise!" cried Nicholas Black.

Everything happened so quickly. The tiny figure in the green dress covered her face with a tiny hand, and the man whipped off his bow and fitted it with an arrow he had plucked from over his shoulder. Bunsen afterwards was never sure if the arrow had been shot or not, because he dashed his hand at the stage and knocked it to the ground. Even before he heard it strike the floor he turned around and Black was slumped in the chair, eyes open, mouth open. . . .

"I told him, I don't know how many times, that he couldn't keep on, carry on, like he did—like he was a twenty-year-old," the doctor said, later, putting his stethoscope away. "But he'd laugh at me, or snarl at me as his mood might be, and he'd say, T take what I want and I do what I want.' Well, well . . . he went quickly, want to or not. Just fell over in his chair, you say? I'm not surprised."

It was morning before Bunsen finally got away. At his home, he set up the stage and pressed the studs. Nothing happened. Finally, he took a knife and a screwdriver and forced the base open. There was nothing in it—nothing, that is, that could have made it work. Nothing that could give any hint or explanation of how it had worked. There was a piece of amber, a crystal which might have come from an old radio set, a vial of quicksilver which must have shattered when he knocked the stage over, some long strands of faded blonde

(he had been thinking) that he stood no chance after all of being offered the vice-presidential nomination; instead they had asked him to allow his name to go forward for the presidency. And there was the third time, in between the other two, when he had first met the woman to whom he had earli-ier this afternoon spoken to on the teleview. She doesn't like me, was his instant thought then. But she had become his mistress after all.

She could not become his wife.

"Mr. President," said Anderson, "we have come to ask you to accept our felicitations on your selection as Chief Magistrate of the Republic, and to assure you that we stand, as always, ready to assist you in maintaining the integrity of our national confederation."

In the silence which followed this declaration Smith had time to reflect that it all seemed damned odd. He started to say, "Thank you," but Anderson was already speaking.

"We'll be as brief as we can, sir," he said. "We've made this same declaration to other presidents, in happier times, in unhappier times, and in times equally unhappy. I've done it on five occasions—I'm acting as spokesman because of seniority in office— Lovel and Cabrielli have done it four times each."

The President of the United States said, "I don't really know—"

"You don't really know what this is all about, sir, do you?" Roger David Smith shook his head. The Federal Armorer nodded, unsurprised. "Except—well, I remember now, just before we left for the inauguration, President Byers told me . . . let's see ... he did tell me you would come here today to tell me something. And he said, "You'd better believe them, too.' I remember now. I was a little surprised, but there were so many other things on my mind right then. . . . And besides that, only what I've seen in the newspapers and 3D: very little." This was all damned odd, he thought. He thought also of his appointments schedule—the Ambassador of the great (and sole remaining) neutral power of the Nether Orient, two western state governors eager to see what they could do about mustering regional support for the president's program (and even more eager to see what they could do about mustering presidential support for their own putative senatorial campaigns), the American Representative to the U.N.—who, of course, should have been scheduled before the governors, but politics had to go on as usual, no matter what. Even if the "what" be the ever-shaky Condominium of the Moon, the threat of the South American Civil War spreading into Central America, the looming rocketry strike, and—not once and again, but again and again— the matter of the asteroids. . . . Still, his appointments secretary had allotted fifteen minutes to these three men. So—

"As I understand it, this tradition began when the first three men to hold your office saved George Washington from an assassination attempt," said President Smith. "And that he promised them that they would have the power to nominate their own successors and to greet every new president On the third day of his term. Isn't that—?"

Anderson asked, "Correct? Not quite, Mr. President."

Smith caught a fleeting resemblance, in the older man's face, to his own father's. Quickly,' the thought brought others: his father's insistence, gentle but insistent, when young Dave Smith had failed to make the Space Academy, that he go to law school rather than Paris; then Sumatra, cutting short his legal career before it had really begun; the entry into politics via a local "reform" club; Sarra—

For ten years, almost, everything had been Sarra. Jim, too, of course, but mainly Sarra. The state legislature, the race for the House seat, getting Jim's father to use his great popularity and influence . . . And how had he, Roger David Smith, repaid the old man? By putting horns on his son. Fortunately, the old man never knew. But Jim knew—Jim must know. He just didn't care. So—Roger David ("Dave") Smith, here he was: the high school teacher's son, the youngest man ever to sit in the White House. Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, the two Roosevelts . . . Kennedy and now Dave Smith. And it was all Sarra. She would have made a damned vigorous president herself, he thought, not for the first time. Only she would never do it, even if it were possible; she'd rather have Jim be elected, had the chance existed, and rule through him. Rule? Reign!

And, sighing, without being aware that he was sighing, his eye fell on the new asteroid chart they had installed only this morning. White lights for the U.N., blue for the U.S.A. red for the U.S.S.R., and yellow for the disputed ones—ones which were, in American eyes, disputed: the Russians, of course, had a different listing.

His eyes came back to Anderson, his mind recalled Anderson's last comment. " 'Not quite correct?" Your jobs aren't civil service and they're not on the patronage list, either. So

Lovel said nothing, bent his long gaunt face a few inches toward his senior, who caught the movement, nodded, and said, "That's true enough, sir, about our being traditionally allowed to nominate our successors. Not exactiy true about the assassination thing. Not the whole truth."

The whole" truth, Anderson went on to say, standing on the rug which a Persian ambassador had given Mrs. Grover Cleveland; the whole truth was that during Washington's first Administration, at a time when New York was still the Capital, a great danger towards the nation had arisen, arisen in secret—a cabal, as it was then called.- A plot to seize power, to force the new president to follow the direction of a group of men who, alarmed by the radical ideas then emanating from France, intended a more rigorous system of government.

There was evidence, oh, there was evidence in plenty. But it was not evidence that you could bring to court, on which you could base a hope that the matter would be setded swiftly and peacefully.

Delay meant either a successful coup d'etat and an oligarchy like that of the Venetian Republic—rule by the heads of the great families, secret police, dungeons, and everything hateful and dangerous to liberty-loving Americans—or else full civil war. The nation was new, the nation was young and weak, operating under a constitution barely tried and largely suspect. British troops still maintained bases on American soil, Spanish armies ringed our Southern and Western borders, French navies were on the seas; and the Indians, still powerful, were everywhere. ...

"I've never heard a word of it," Smith declared. "I'm not sure I believe it. Although—" memory flashed—"is this what President Byers meant when he said I'd better believe you? Because—"

"It's all true, sir," Anderson said. "Great names were involved. Conway's Cabal was nothing in comparison to it. Three men came and brought the evidence before President Washington—they'd served under him in the War of the Revolution—they presented him with the evidence on his third day in office. One was the Federal Armorer, William Dickensheet."

"One was the Sergeant-Secretary of the cabinet, Richard Main," said Lovel.

'The third was Simon Stavers, Civil Provost of the Capital," Gabrielli said.

President Smith stared at them. It hardly seemed possible to remain in doubt of these three men, known to be honorable career men, sober, stable and loyal. But surely they had not come to give him a history lesson? "Go on," he said.

Those three, Anderson continued, discussed the matter a whole night through with President Washington. They debated as to what the right course would be. Speed—as it was counted in those days of slow and difficult transport and communication—speed was essential, if the country was to be spared either a tyranny whose end no man could foresee, or a bloody domestic war. Wars, perhaps, and perhaps ending in invasion and conquest and an end to national independence.

Despite the teleview, the luminescents, the model on his desk of the latest moonship, Roger Smith felt something of that evening so far back—he believed it now, he did believe; it was impossible to doubt those three good men any longer: the archaic formula of their greeting to him (" . . . our felicitations on your selection as Chief Magistrate . . . we stand, as always, ready to assist you in maintaining the integrity of our national confederation) —that long-distant night when the Father of his Country, no doubt with his wig set aside and perhaps his famous painful and ill-fitting false teeth as well, debated what move to make and make fast . . . and the candles guttered in the dimness. President Smith had his own problems, the United States of America under the First Administration of President Roger David Smith had its own problems. They were heavy, grave and great, and no one now spoke of or scarcely dared dream of any "return to normalcy." (The Harding note againl)

He leaned forward, caught up in this account (unaccountably, till now, concealed from him) of the Nation's first crisis under its Constitution. "What did they decide to do?" he asked.

"Immediate contact was made," Anderson said, in the same steady tones he had used throughout, "with those members of the Government who were then in town." He paused. His colleagues nodded slowly, gazing steadfastly at the President. "The leader of the cabal was known, his whereabouts were known. It was also known that if he were removed, the scheme would collapse. It was agreed that the welfare of the Nation depended upon—demanded—his removal.

"He was, accordingly, removed."

"How?"

"The decision was, by pistoling."

Smith half-turned his back and struck his fist on his desk. "Are you trying to tell me," he cried, "that George Washmgton ordered the murder of a man he couldn't convict on a fair trial?" And swung around to face them again.

But they wouldn't admit the word, murder. Execution was not murder. The slaying of an enemy was not murder in time of war. Nor did "war" depend upon a formal declaration. The welfare of the Nation had to be the paramount thing in the eyes of its Chief. The enjoyment of private scruples was a luxury with which he had no right to indulge himself in his official capacity.

"Go on," said Smith.

Could anyone looking back, Anderson went on, doubt that the original decision was the best one? It was obvious beyond doubt even at the time. It had been obvious also that similar situations would arise again—and again and again. It was inevitable. So there grew up a law, he said— and the nods of his colleagues' assents confirmed his words, a law unwritten, but, unlike the so-called "Unwritten law" justifying a husband's killing his wife's lover, it was an unknown law—unknown except to the fewest possible people— the men who held these three offices, their predecessors, the President, and the ex-Presidents—but a law, nonetheless, authorizing a President to order the death of any person in the country whose existence constituted what was later to be called a "clear and present danger" to the welfare of the Nation.

"My G-dl" said Roger Smith. Then—a sudden rush of interest overcoming his shock—he asked, "How in the Hell did they miss Aaron Burr?"

"He skipped the country too soon. And by the time he came back he wasn't dangerous."

"I see. Well—"

"There have to be limits, of course, Mr. President," the Federal Armorer explained. "The President has to declare his intention to us. And he can only do it once. Once in each term of office, that is. Because there have to be limits. There have to be—" His voice, for the first time, rose just a trifle.

After a moment, "I see," said the President. "How often

-r

"In the country's history? Seventeen times. 'Who carries out the decision? One of us. How chosen? By lot. Is there any danger of detection? Almost none. Over the course of almost two hundred years," said Anderson, "certain techniques have been developed. Effective ones. How often during our own tenures of office? Once."

President Smith swallowed. "Who is the man who was ... killed?"

"That question, sir, is not answered."

"I see. I'm sorry. Of course not. Well, which one of you—"

"And that question, sir, is not even asked."

There was silence, "you'd better believe them," the ex-President Byers had said. Was there something of a deeper, personal knowledge in Byers' voice when saying it? Smith could not now remember, the Inauguration, only moments away, had driven anything but bare reception of the words from his mind. He searched his memory; who had died— suddenly—during the previous Administration, whose death might have . . . ? No name occurred to him. He glanced at the clock set into his desk-top at a slant. The fifteen minutes were up. During that fifteen minutes anything might have occurred. Panama invaded by the Continentalists ("South America ends at the northern boundary of Mexico," Lopez-Cardoso was said to have said; he was dead now, could neither confirm nor deny it; but his slogan of "One Continent, One People, One Faith, One Destiny" was certainly very much alive), the friendly but unstable Colored government of the Free Cape State overthrown by either Black or White intransigents, another "incident" unfavorably affecting 'the Lunar Condominium—nothing, it seemed, could affect it favorably any more, further troubles in the still-vex'd Asteroids: any or even all of these could have occurred in the quarter-hour he'd just spent chittering over ancient history.

"Have you anything else to tell me?" he asked, starting forward.

"Only that at least one of us will remain in the District at all times, in case of, well, immediate need, let's say. . . . No, sir, nothing else to tell you."

Smith nodded. Anderson glanced at his colleagues. Ga-brielli, the most junior of the three in office, spoke for the first time. "Mr. President, we tender you our renewed assurances that we stand, as always, ready to assist you in maintaining the integrity of our national confederation. And we ask your permission to withdraw." He was elf-small and some people found his voice amusing, but the President knew that he held the Congressional Medal of Honor for his part in the assault on Telukbetung.

After those three came the ambassador of the great neutral power of the Nether Orient, equally full of his grave misgivings about American space policy and his grave insistence upon increased American financial aid to his own country, both couched in the most mellifluous English, and after him came one of the Western American state governors, slyly awtward or awkwardly sly, not even knowing the name of the diplomat who had preceded him but knowing just what to offer and just what to demand in the way of political horse-trading. Neither of these two were present in person, of course. And after him—

"What are you doing here, Jim?" the President demanded, frowning. "Governor Millard was supposed to be next; you're not down for an appointment until tomorrow afternoon." He was brusque, not so much because he gave a damn about that as because he had been wondering—tired, disgusted, knowing that his impending interview with the American representative to the U.N. would bring new problems which neither weariness nor disgust could ignore—had been wondering if there were any chance of his being with Sarra that night. There was, he had finally realized, no chance at all. A

President of the United States might sell his country down the river or let it drift down by incompetence, but he could never under any circumstances let it be hinted that he had a mistress. Perhaps ten years ago he might have gotten away with it, so far had the pendulum swung from the old morality. But there had been one, or perhaps two, scandals too many; now the pendulum was on the far swing again.

James Thackeray Macdonald smiled, waved his hand; Smith fancied he could smell the familiar odor of the man's cigar, but of course it was only fancy—the 3D hadn't gotten that far yet, despite continual efforts. There was not the slightest chance in the world of Jim's being any sort of menace in his physical person, but—protocol was protocol. The day I can't persuade Millard or a thousand yokels like him to trade appointments with me, that's the day I'll close the store and go fishing," Jim said, his ruddy face glowing and cheerful as usual.

"What did you promise him? Off-shore oil rights on the Moon?"

Macdonald leaned back in the chair which he had taken, unbidden, and laughed. It was the famous Macdonald laugh, with rich echoes of his famous father, and, despite everything, Roger Smith found himself smiling faindy. Jim had charm, if nothing else. And there was damned little else between the charm and the nothing else.

"Well, come on, Jim, what the Hell do you want?"

J.T. Macdonald smiled indulgendy. "Yes, I know, Rog: okay, 111 make it brief, and then you can let Nick Mason tell you his latest hardluck story about the Rooshians and the Prooshians. Okay. I spoke to Harley Gordon just a few minutes ago, and he told me that he definitely will not stay in office more than three months, not if you offered him Manhattan Island for a nickel. So what I want to know is, how about my taking an undersecretariat now, so 111 be able to step into his shoes without any trouble when he quits?"

The faint smile on the President's face had slipped easily into a frown. Macdonaid's appointment to a Cabinet position had been suggested—once, and not by the President, either. J.T.'s name had been, was being frequently mentioned by the media in this connection, however; but speculation of this sort was too common for the President to think it seemed worth even an unofficial denial. He had assumed it would die down. But Jim seemed to be taking it seriously.

"Have you talked about this with Sarra?" Smith asked.

Now the frown was Macdonald's, as faint as the President's smile had been. "Dammit, Rog, I don't have to talk over every littie thing with Sarra. I have a mind of my own, you know."

"A Cabinet appointment is no little thing, Jim. I never— no, don't interrupt me—I never promised it to you, I never even suggested it. I know Sarra did mention it, but I never thought you'd think she meant it seriously. Who it was that leaked the fact of your name having been proposed at all I don't know, but I can't be committed by a leak, dammitl You have no right, none whatsoever, to treat a lighthearted remark of Sarra's as if it were a promise from me. I am not to be cornered that way. The Secretariat is out. And that means, so is an undersecretariat." Macdonald was still trying to speak, but the President swept on over him. "Besides, as far as I'm concerned, it's been definite for some time now that you would take a position on my personal staff here. Hasn't it? I value your talents, Jim, especially with meeting people face to face, and—"

But Jim wasn't taking the compliment. Thanks for nothing, was his attitude. He had no intention of becoming the Presidential Grover Whalen, he said, pinning carnations on visiting dignitaries' wives, and glad-handing prominent Rotarians and Exempt Spacemen from the Middle West, taking them on personally conducted tours of the White House.

"I deserve better than that," he said, stormily. "If you hadn't won in the Southeast you wouldn't be here—"

"Yes, you're a good man for smoke-filled rooms and rostrums, Jim, just as I've just told you: the personal touch. But listen—the Southeast? Don't let's kid ourselves. The strategy there wasn't yours anymore than it was mine. It was Sarra's, all the way."

Macdonald uttered a short, ugly word. Roger Smith's head snapped back. "You're talking to the President of the United States," he said.

Macdonald laughed. "No, I'm not I'm talking to the guy who sleeps with my wife."

Smith stared at him, bleakly.

Then he said, Tm turning you off. You get out of here."

But Macdonald shook his head. "You talk to me or I talk to the press. Okay?" Smith said nothing, continued staring at him. "Okay," Macdonald muttered. What he was going to do, he said, leaning back, and taking out a cigar, was to give Rog a little history lesson, free. . . . His expression, as he lit his cigar, raised his eyebrows, darted little glances at the grim-faced man viewing him, and gazed at the smoke as it came swirling from his own pursed hps, was that of an actor in a classical "B movie"—a heavy, who has just announced that he is "going to enjoy this, very much."

"Co ahead," Smith said. "But just remember that while you are getting this off your chest or wherever the hell you've been keeping it that the job I have is the most difficult one in the world, and that the world isn't going to stand still for either of us. Now, go ahead."

Jim, who had waved his hand, lighdy, at mention of difficulty, now nodded, puffed at his cigar. After a moment he said, "You've heard, I suppose, of Charles Stewart PamelL"

"Pamell? Pamell? The Irish-"

"That's the one. Home rule for dear old Ireland. The 1880's, 90's. Well, Pamell had a friend named Captain O'-Shea—Willie O'Shea. Ever heard of him? No? Doesn't matter. O'Shea, you see, was useful to Pamell, acted as his confidential agent, took care of difficult matters for him, let his own political career languish in order to help Pamell's.

. . . And Pameli appreciated it. In fact, he appreciated it so much that he determined to keep O'Shea happy. That is, not exactly Captain O'Shea, but Mrs. O'Shea. The beautiful Kitty O'Shea. Willie wasn't good enough for her, it would seem. Whether he lacked looks, or glamour, or whether she couldn't twist him quite so far around her finger as she'd've liked to, who knows. Anyway, whatever it was that Willie didn't have, Smith—oops, sorry—Pamell had it."

He grinned, lifting his upper hp in front, and glancing sideways at the other man.

"Did Willie know about it? Oh, you bet your life Willie knew about it. He was nobody's fool. Of course he knew about it. Almost right from the start. Why didn't he do anything?" Jim considered his own question, shrugged. "Might be any one of a number of reasons. Maybe Willie didn't think that something was necessarily wrong just because an old book said it was. Maybe Willie liked Pamell—maybe he even loved Pamell, hmm?—so much that he just didn't care. Or . . . maybe even . . . maybe Kitty was the kind of woman that no one man could satisfy, hey? Oh, I don't just mean sexually. Maybe she had other desires—power, say. A lust for intrigue, for action, for— And maybe Willie figured that, if there had to be another man, well he'd rather it was Pamell than anyone else. Could've been any of those reasons. Or all of them. Hey, Rog?"

Roger David Smith continued to stare at him, said nothing. Now and then he raised a hand and stroked the tiny scars on his face. Macdonald took another fleeting look at him, resumed.

"Well, where were we? Oh, yes— 'And the song he sang/ Was, "Old Ireland free." ' Well, Home Rule. It was almost all wrapped up, you see. Gladstone was all for it. Ireland was to have its own government at last, with Pamell as Prime Minister. Now, Willie had worked as hard for the cause as any man. And he felt it was time that he had his reward. It was a modest one—a place in PameU's Cabinet."

After all, what difference did it make who held what Cabinet post? The actual work was always done by underlings, career men, drudges who delighted in details and red tape and hard work....

"Do you see the point, Rog?"

The President nodded. "I see it. And the answer is still •No.'"

For the first time something like uncertainty flickered across Macdonald's face. "Ah, come on, Rog," he said, almost pleadingly. "You know something? I wouldn't make the worst Space Secretary in the world. I've followed things closely, damned closely. I've read up on it very, ver-ry carefully. I've got ideas which go beyond re-organizing the bookkeeping system, which is about all that Harley Cordon has in mind, or just sitting tight and hoping that the bogeymen will go away, which is all that Salem Smith has in mind."

"You've got ideas?"

Evidently stung by the tone of the questioning voice, Mac-donald went from ruddy to red. "Yes, Tve got ideas," he said. "And a lot of other important people have the same ideas—people whose support you'll damned well be needing." His eyes left the President's face and rested on something in the White House room behind the President; met the President's eyes as he returned his gaze; for an instant, fell; then faced him squarely and defiantly. Smith turned his head. There it was—the white, blue, red and yellow fights of the newly-installed Asteroid chart.

The President snorted. What would Macdonald do? he demanded. Occupy the Asteroids? Was that one of his ideas?

Yes, it was. It certainly was. The USA was tied hand and foot in one big Cordian knot, he said. The Condominium of the Moon, just look at it? The Russians did just as they damned well pleased, and in return for being let alone they raised every kind of hell imaginable with what the United States was doing. Whenever the United States did anything, that is; which was damned seldom . . . too damned seldom. And Mars? The U.S. had one station on Mars, count them, one; the British had one; the U.N. had two; and the Russians had four! The same as everyone else put together. And yet there were people claiming that the single American Mars station was costing too much.

"In a way they're right, Rog," Jim said, confidendy now, almost cocldly. "For a weather bureau, which is about all we use it for, it is costing too much. But Rog, if we occupied the Asteroids, then Mars Station could be busier than New Yorkl And—rocketry strike? Hell, there'd be so much doing, we could double, triple their pay—the 'teers would be so busy making money they wouldn't have time to strike I"

"Uh-huh. And which ones would you occupy? Just the ones we claim? The ones the Russians claim, too? Any unclaimed ones we fancy? Or the whole works, maybe?"

For a moment Macdonald's face hung askew. Then something hateful and ugly entered it. Then he caught control of himself once more.

"How much longer are the American people going to sit still and let the Russians get away with insisting that everything they've already claimed is theirs and that everything they haven't claimed belongs to the U.N.? 'Where does that leave us? The American people—"

Smith got up abruptly, so abrupdy that Macdonald jumped.

"I don't know who put you up to this—" "Nobody put me—"

"I could make a good guess. You can tell them that they picked the wrong cat to try the chestnut game. The American people?' Listen, little Jimmy, the American people showed last November what they wanted in the way of leadership, and it wasn't your hand that went on the Bible three days ago."

"You-"

"Me. That's right. And 111 tell you something else, 111 give it to you right between the eyes, fellow—even if you didn't have these dangerous ideas you still wouldn't stand a chance at the job. Not a pip in a snow-hole. Because without Sarra you're not worth a—"

Scarlet, his cigar fallen unnoticed from his hand, Mac-donald on his feet gestured and yammered in incoherent rage.

"My appointing you, if you hadn't so obviously sold yourself out, would have meant that she'd be the brains of the post And I don't need her there, I don't want her there."

Now silence fell. Outside, the wet gray afternoon vanished as the exterior lights went on.

"Then it's 'No,' " Macdonald said, very softly. He looked older, he looked genuinely stricken, he looked a little sick.

"It's 'No,' Jim."

Jim nodded. "Ill wait ... Ill wait until tomorrow. Just the same. Because . . . Tiistory lesson.' Pamell said 'No' to Captain Willie O'Shea, too, you see. And then Willie sued Kitty for divorce, naming Pamell as correspondent. He got the divorce. And Pamell got the axe. His party kicked him out. Gladstone backed off on Home Rule. Pamell died of a broken heart. And Ireland drowned in blood."

He paused in turning to go, did not look back.

"But I'll wait till tomorrow, anyway," he said.

Nicholas Mason, the American Representative to the U.N., his face noble and haggard, thanked the President again for having asked him to continue in office. Then, in a low voice, he told his latest tale of defeats, struggles, major setbacks, and minor victories.

Smith interrupted him, "What in your opinion, Mr. Ambassador—in your personal and confidential opinion—would be the effect of a scandal, an open and notorious and unsavory scandal, concerning the personal life of the President?"

Mason brought his mind to bear upon this abrupt question with visible difficulty. Slowly he raised his eyes and looked at Smith. Then a tremor ran over his face. "I can hardly suppose . . . that this question is hypothetical, Mr. President?" The President shook his head. In a voice still lower, Mason asked, "Could this . . . scandal of which you speak be averted? Is it possible? Then—"

"Averted only at great cost to the welfare of the Nation, and possibly, probably, involving dangers to its prestige, its proper functioning, and perhaps even its peace."

Mason slowly raised his hand and laid the palm against his face. "I may at least hope that the danger could not be that great. Even so, it would then be a matter of balancing dangers . . . costs. I need hardly tell you—I need hardly tell you—at this juncture, anything which would divide the country might well destroy the country. And then—you spoke of our prestige—it's none too high as it now is. . . . I . . . His voice died into a whisper.

Smith muttered, "I could resign, I suppose."

Mason snapped straight. "No President of the United States has ever resigned! Mr. President! Had you forgotten who would succeed you? If the present Vice-President were put in charge of a chickenyard, my money would be on the hawks and the weasels I"

Smith's face twisted.

"You have been a soldier, Mr. President," Mason continued. "I have not. But I know, and you surely know, that there is more than one way to win a battie. It is up to you to decide which way it has to be now. And . . . need I say ... if I can in any way ... ?"

The President shook his head.

Left alone, he got up and went to the windows. It was miserable weather. Only three days ago he had been inaugurated, on a crisp and sparkling afternoon. Despite all he knew of the world scene, the day had seemed flecked with gold. He had caught sight of Sarra, face shining with triumph, dressed in a gray robe which had appeared to his eyes then as brighter than scarlet or crimson. Now the dying sun broke through the clouds briefly and turned the wet walks and puddles red: yet his mood was gray, grayer than it had ever been before in his life. Sarra's voice rang in his ears, her face was before his eyes, and for the first time he failed to draw comfort from either. Could she deal with Jim at this late stage? Persuade him to do nothing? Could he be trusted to remain persuaded?

Or should he, the President, give the man the office he coveted, oblige him to live up to his own first picture of it, a sinecure in which the actual work was done by others? And depend upon the tight reign of the President from there on?

But would Jim remain content? Might he not have more "ideas"? His own, or others, it might not even matter—ideas, policies, plans, purposes, ambitions? Where would it stop? James Thackeray Macdonald, red-faced little politician, the Secret President of the United States I

But where, where had he gotten the nerve? Why—and how—after all these years, had he brought himself to defy his wife? Except in those easy cajoleries which came so naturally to him, and which had made politics his natural field; except in these shallows he had scarcely ever seemed to have a mind of his own or an ambition which was not Sarra's. Why, after all these years, had the worm turned?

For a long time, in the lowering dusk, the President of the United States stayed at the window, deep in thought. Then he drew the curtains and went to the teleview.

He had thought that the three men might ask many questions—or, rather, bring forth cautions and disagreements disguised as questions—but they asked only two, after all.

Anderson, this time, was silent. It was Lovel who spoke first.

"Mr. President," he began, "have you concluded that in

The ceremonies proceeded without any untowardness. The Supreme Justice of the Chief Court placed on the President's head the sacred beaver with the star-spangled band and declared that "Regardless of rape, crude, choler, or national ore or gin, any resemblance is purely coincidental." The Chairman of the Board of Augurs of the Federal Reserve System pronounced a curse in weirdmane and in worn-rath on anyone who should presume to send gold o'er the white-waved seas. The new Veep, wearing the ritual ten-gallon hat, and mounted on a palomino, cantered up and down before the Selectoral College and uttered the prescribed challenge: "Whosoever doth deny that the Honorable John V Fitz-Kenneth is the rightful Chief Executive of Thiscountry lies, and is an S.O.B." The out-going Jester raised the liturgian hwyl of We want Wilkie, and was smitten twice with a slapstick and thrice with a bladder, both wielded by his successor. The Fall River Chamber of Commerce and Horror presented the ceremonial breakfast of cold mutton soup, sliced bananas, and an axe: it was ceremoniously refused. A Boston Brahmin, clad in cutaway, dhoti, and sacred thread, offered a salver bearing two curried codfish balls; the new President ate both whilst the Brahmin intoned,

Eat it up, wear it out, Make it do, or do without;

after which he, the B.B., hurried to wash himself in sacred 6% Charles water to remove the impurity of feeding with a lower caste.

George Laine and his fellows of the alchemists and other guilds were not forgotten even afterwards; for Prex Jax (as the news-guild had already termed him in parvo) sent them out great smoking helpings of buffalo hump, bear paws, caponized peacocks, pemmican, ptarmigan, succotash, and syllabub, from the high table where he was dining with his notables, including Surgeon-General Doctor Caligari, who had just been raised to Cabinet rank.

It was during these moments of revelry and mirth that George choked on a quartern of orange in an Old Fashioned Cocktail, all went black before his face, and, on awakening to find himself bound with silken cords in a hovel on an alley off of Eye Street, knew that he had been ensoroeled.

There was a bim looking bemused at him with a bodkin in her bosom, and he wotted well it were for lack of wit an-ent her that he bode bound: for who was she but Yancey-Courtney Bellergarde, a Drum Majorette 1/c, who had been sitting in his lap that time he raised the dram-glass to his lips.

"I say, that bodkin must hurt something dreadful," he said (not having attended the N.Y. High School of Callan-terie Trades in vain): "untie me and 111 have it out for you in a trice: there's a good gel, do."

The bim smiled scornfully. Her lips were as red as the chassis of a new-model Jaguar of the first enameling. "Not on your tin-type, Cully," she said. "Rats. Nit." She spoke in the Archaic tongue of the bim-folk, which is akin to elf-talk, and cognate with 23 Skiddoo (unlawful for a man to know until he has passed his finals in The Deep School, and been awarded the right to wear the Navel Plug, with two Pips).

"Nix on the soft-soap, Charlie," she said; "I only keep the bodkin there because these, now, sorcelsacquets don't have any pockets in them, as if you didn't know. Oh you Iddl" she concluded, archly. And with this she withdrew the bodkin, dipped its prickle into a pot labeled Poyson Moste Foule, and approached the supine young industrial alchemist with the tip of her tongue held between her teeth.

"Slip me the Formula for the Transmutation of Borox Without the Use of Cockatrice-egg," she said (speaking with some difficulty, her tongue, as we have already noted, you clod, being l>etween her teeth), "and we'll be back in the Grand Ballroom of the Mayflower in lots of time to see Ed

Finnegan made a K.T.V.; afterwards we can tiptoe up to any of the thirty-odd double rooms which my Company keeps rented at all times, and you may have your wicked will o' me without fearing the House-Dick, because 111 put a Cheese-it spell on the door, see, which it's proof against Force, Force-Fields, Stealth, Mori-Main, Nigromancy, Mop-ery, and Gawk: so give, Cully, give."

A cold sneer crossed George's hot lips. "I say, what an absolutely rotten proposal!" he exclaimed. "You know perfectly well that I have sworn by the most frightful oaths to remain true in mind and deed to Alchymy, Ltd. of Canada, and to keep myself physically clean, mentally straight, and morally pure! I suppose you're one of these simply awful party girls which one hears that General Semantics, Inc., of Delaware, keeps on their payrolls to entrap, ensorceL envie-gal, enchant, anduce, endive, and endamage clean-living young chaps into betraying secrets. Well, I shan't, do you hear? Better I should die. So therer

But the bim, far from being one whit abashed by this manly defiance, laughed as coarsely as the position of her tongue would permit. "WelL if that don't take the cake," she snickered. "Gee, what a simp!" and made feint as though she would withdraw George's Plug, two Pips or no two Pips.

"No, really, don't touch me, do you hear?" George said, stoudy, trying to roll over on his stomach. "I'm really most frightflie ticklish, and besides, without the Plug I should swell up with lint in simply no-time; funny thing about me, I'm very susceptible to navel lint, always was, from a child."

But the silken cords held him fast.

"The Formula for the Transmutation of Borax Without the Use of Cockatrice-egg," she said, inexorably, making little jabs at him with the bodkin dip't in Venom.

George mimicked her: "-Uthe of Cockatwithe-eggl" Unguardedly she laughed, releasing the tip of her tongue from between her teeth, and thus . . . Those who are Cupboard Certified Auditors of The Deep School will understand thus, and those who are not needn't imagine for one minute that we are going to reveal for free, secrets for which others have paid good money, no siree. Suffice it, then, to say that in a trice George had leapt out of his bonds, flung the bodkin from the bim's hands with such force that it pierced the door and hung quivering. This produced a startled cry from behind the door, which George flung open, revealing a man, a tape-recorder, and a flash-camera. The man first cringed, then assumed an expression combining both defiance and a falsely hearty air of good wilL "Weh-hell, Laine," he birbled.

"What," demanded George, sternly, "is the Assistant Director of Research for the Middle Atlantic States Division of Alchymy, Ltd., of Canada, doing cowering behind the door of a hovel on an alley off of Eye Street, with a tape-recorder and a flash-camera; what?" A question which, put like that, might make any man pause before answering.

Mr. Marcantonio Paracelcus (for such was his name) paused before answering. He swallowed. "It was a Test, you see, George."

"I fail to see."

"Well, it was a test. The Company is considering you for an important new job. In order to find out how you would shape up under pressure, we have tested you. I am, urn, happy, to say that you have passed the Test,"

George said, "Oh, good. Then I get the job. What job?"

Mr. Marcantonio Paracelcus seemed to find some difficulty m answering this question. Whilst he stood there, came a buzz and a clatter, and that which George had hithertofore considered to be merely a tallboy-sized TV set opened up, revealing itself to be an Observation Armoire containing a microphone, two tape-recorders, an automatic closed-circuit television camera, and Dr. Roger Bacon Buxbaum, Chief Director of Research for the Middle Atlantic States Division of Alchymy, Ltd. of Canada. Marcantonio Paracelcus, on perceiving his superior, turned ashen, livid, and pale, in that order.

'The job in question, George," said Dr. Buxbaum, "is that which until a moment ago was held by the gentleman you now see cowering behind the door; but which is no longer so held. On realizing that you were being considered for his position, he determined on this unworthy method of discrediting you: hence, the tape-recorder, on which he hoped to capture the sound of your voice as you revealed the Formula for the Transmutation of Borox without the Use of Cockatrice-egg; hence, the flash-camera with which he hoped to capture the sight of you in a" and here the benign, balding Buxbaum blushed a bit, "compromising position with this young female person here. Little did he know," the urbane researcher winked, and placed his right forefinger by the right side of his nose, "that we were onto his jazz from the word Go. ...

"And to think that he would sully the semi-sacred season of the Coronation by his meretricious machinations: fie, sir, do you call yourself a Thicountrean? But I forbear harshness; modem science has taught us that such a one as you is really sick, and needs help. Come along now—George! Expect to see you for lunch, day after tomorrow, at the Alembic, one sharp!"

George went pink with pleasure, for what was the Alembic but the most expensive eatery favored by the upper echeloms of the M.A.S.D. of Alchymy, Ltd. (Canada); and this invite betokened his full acceptance into the post previously held by his unfortunate predecessor, who even now, sniveling miserably, was being firmly guided out by the elbow. George's feelings of sorrow, which did him credit, were tempered by the reflection that, after suitable treatment at the Company's Rehabilitation Farm in North Baffin Land, the man might still prove capable of many years of devoted service; though, of course, in a minor capacity.

For a moment all was silent in the hovel on the alley off of

Eye Street. George eyed the bim. The bun eyed the floor. After a while she spoke. "I suppose you hate me," she said. "No, I-"

"I suppose you think I'm miserable and treacherous." "No, I-"

"I suppose you think I would really have stuck you with a poysoned bodkin, don't you? Well, the jar only contained a Sophronia Finkelstein preparation for the treatment of tired skin and subcutaneous tissues; so there."

George said, "No, I fully realize that as a bim, and as a sorceress under contract to General Semantics, Inc. of Delaware, you were only carrying out your duty. And now, if you don't mind, I wonder if I might use your phone to call a taxi?"

Fancy his astonishment when she burst into tears.

"We have no phone," she wept. "I'm not a bim. I never worked for General Semantics. My parents couldn't afford to send me to Sorcery School. How I put you under that spell and brought you here, my old Auntie Eglantine was a white witch, and I picked up some litde piddly old spells from her, is all. I am really just a Drum Majorette, 1/c. Oh, I wish I were dead! A hoo, hoo, hool"

George, at first with awkwardness, then with growing appreciation for the task, patted her hands, her shoulders, and the general area of the small of her back. "To tell you the truth, Miss Yancey-Courtney," he said, "I would just purely hate it if you were to be a bim. I mean, like those hairy feet? And their toe-nails glow in the dark? Why, a man couldn't hardly relish his victuals, let alone keep his mind on his Transmutations. ... Of course, I'm just speaking speculatively, I mean, having always kept myself physically pure, mentally clean, and morally square, according to the terms of my Triune Oath to the Company, which I have never regretted," he said, regretfully.

"Of course," she murmured, wiping her eyes on his shirt-tail.

"Listen," she said. "Do you know when it was that I first felt a revulsion I was barely able to conquer at the infamous Marcantonio Paracelcus' proposal? It was when the Veep rode in. When he gave out the Challenge I could see you clench your fists until your knuckles went what I mean white; as if you were just daring any old Recounter to challenge the Selection!"

"Hm," said George, grimly.

"Ill bet you must be awfully strong."

George, modestly, said, well, shoving all that lead and gold around, you know. She said that she could well imagine. There was a pause. Then he asked what time it was. She said it was 7:45, why? He said that if they hurried, they could still get to see Ed Finnegan dubbed a K.T.V. She said, yes, they could, couldn't they? She asked if he was very fond of Ed Finnegan. There was a pause. He said that as a matter of fact he couldn't stand Ed Finnegan.

"Neither can I!"

"All those trained wombats!"

"And that incessant, hearty laugh I"

There was another pause. Then, "My those are handsome galoshes!" she said.

"Gift of the President."

"Pipe the silvern buckles, will yuh?"

"Mmm."

"But don't you think you'd be more comfortable if you took them off?" "The buckles?" "Oh, you silly! The galoshes!" "I might at that." And he did. And he was.

Outside, the Northern Lights hissed and crackled (or, again, it might have been the dragons, which were so bad that year); outside, the noise of revelry continually rose and fell in the streets; but inside, all was quiet in the hovel on the alley off of Eye Street.