NOW IS FOREVER

BY THOMAS M. DISCH

Charles Archold liked the façade best at twilight. On June evenings like this (Was it June?), the sun would sink into the canyon of Maxwell Street and spotlight the sculptured group in the pediment: a full-breasted Commerce extended an allegorical cornucopia from which tumbled allegorical fruits into the outstretched hands of Industry, Labor, Transportation, Science, and Art. He was idling past (the Cadillac engine was beginning to misfire again, but where could you find a mechanic these days?), abstractedly considering the burning tip of his cigar, when he observed peripherally that Commerce had been beheaded. He stopped.

It was against the law; a defacement, an insult. Maxwell Street echoed the slam of the car door, his cry—”Police!” A swarm of pigeons rose from the feet of Industry, Labor, Transportation, Science, and Art and scattered into the depopulated streets. The bank president achieved a smile of chagrin, although there was no one in sight from whom he would have had to conceal his embarrassment. Archold’s good manners, like his affluent paunch, had been long in forming and were difficult to efface.

Somewhere in the acoustical maze of the streets of the financial district Archold could hear the rumble of a procession of teenage Maenads approaching. Trumpets, drums, and screaming voices. Hurriedly, Archold locked his car and went up the bank steps. The bronze gates were open; the glass doors were unlocked. Drapes were drawn across the windows as they had been on the day, seven months earlier or thereabouts, when he and the three or four remaining staff members had closed the bank. In the gloom, Archold took inventory. The desks and office equipment had been piled into one comer; the carpets had been torn up from the parquet floor; the tellers’ cages had been arranged into a sort of platform against the back walls. Archold flicked on a light switch. A spotlight flooded the platform with a dim blue light. He saw the drums. The bank had been converted into a dancehall.

In the sub-basement, the air-conditioner rumbled into life. Machines seemed to live a life of their own. Archold walked, nervously aware of his footsteps on the naked parquet, to the service elevator behind the jerry-built bandstand. He pressed the UP button and waited. Dead, as a doornail. Well, you couldn’t expect everything to work. He took the stairs up to the third floor. Passing through the still-plush reception room outside his office, he noticed that there were extra couches along the walls. An expensive postermural representing the diversified holding of the New York Exchange Bank had been ripped from the wall; a Gargantuan and ill-drawn pair of nudes reclined where the mural had been. Teenagers!

His office had not been broken into. A thick film of dust covered his bare desk. A spider had constructed (and long ago abandoned) a web across the entire expanse of his bookshelves. The dwarf tree that stood in a pot on the window sill (a present, two Christmases ago, from his secretary) had shriveled into a skeleton where, for a time, the spider had spun other webs. An early model Reprostat (of five years ago) stood beside the desk. Archold had never dared to smash the machine, though, God knew, he had wanted to often enough.

He wondered if it would still work, hoping, of course, that it would not. He pressed the Archtype button for memo-pad. A sign flashed red on the control panel: insufficient carbon. So, it worked. The sign flashed again, insistently. Archold dug into one of his desk drawers for a bar of carbon and fed it into the hopper at the base of the Reprostat. The machine hummed and emitted a memo-pad.

Archold settled back in his own chair, raising a cloud of dust. He needed a drink or, lacking that (he drank too much, he remembered) a cigar. He’d dropped his last cigar in the street. If he were in the car, he could just touch a button, but here …

Of course! His office Reprostat was also set to make his own brand of cigars. He pressed the cigar Archtype button; the machine hummed and emitted one Maduro cigar, evenly burning at its tip. How could you ever be angry with the machines? It wasn’t their fault the world was in a shambles; it was the fault of people that misused the machines—greedy, short-sighted people who didn’t care what happened to the Economy or the Nation as long as they had Maine lobster every day and a full wine cellar and ermine stoles for a theater opening and …

But could you blame them? He had himself spent thirty years of his life to get exactly those things, or their equivalents, for himself—and for Nora. The difference was, he thought as he savored the usual aroma of his cigar (before the Reprostats, he had never been able to afford this brand. They had cost $1.50 apiece, and he was a heavy smoker)— the difference was simply that some people (like Archold) could be trusted to have the best things in life without going haywire, while other people, the majority, in fact, could not be trusted to have things that they couldn’t pay for with their own industry. It was now a case of too many cooks. Authority was disappearing; it had vanished. Morality was now going fast. Young people, he had been informed (when he still knew people who would tell him these things), didn’t even bother to get married anymore—and their elders, who should have set them an example, didn’t bother to get divorced.

Absent-mindedly, he pressed the Reprostat button for another cigar, while the one he had been smoking lay forgotten in the dusty ashtray. He had argued with Nora that morning. They had both been feeling a little under the weather. Maybe they had been drinking again the night before—they had been drinking quite a lot lately—but he could not remember. The argument had taken a bad turn, with Nora poking fun (and her finger) at his flabby belly. He had reminded her that he had got his flabby belly working all those years at the bank to provide her with the house and her clothes and all the other expensive, obsolescing goodies she could not live without.

“Expensive!” she had screamed. “What’s expensive anymore? Not even money is expensive.”

“Is that my fault?”

“You’re fifty years old, Charlie boy, over fifty, and I’m still young,” (she was forty-two, to be exact) “and I don’t have to keep you hanging around my neck like an albatross.”

“The albatross was a symbol of guilt, my dear. Is there something you’re trying to tell me?”

“I wish there was!”

He had slapped her, and she had locked herself in the bathroom. Then he had gone off for a drive, not really intending to come past the bank, but the force of habit had worked upon his absent-minded anger and brought him here. The office door edged open. “Mr. Archold?”

“Who!—oh, Lester, come in. You gave me a start.” Lester Tinburley, the former janitor-in-chief of the Exchange Bank, shambled into the office, mumbling reverent how-do-you-do-sirs and nodding his head with such self-effacing cordiality that he seemed to have palsy. Like his former superior (who wore a conservative gray suit, fresh that morning from the Reprostat), Lester wore the uniform of his old position: white-and-blue striped denim overalls, faded and thin from many launderings. The black peppercorn curls of his hair had been sheared down to shadowy nubbins. Except for some new wrinkles in the brown flesh of his face (scarcely noticed by Archold), Lester appeared to be in no way different from the janitor-in-chief that the bank president had always known.

“What’s happened to the old place, Lester?”

Lester nodded his head sadly. “It’s these kids—you can’t do a thing with them nowadays. All of them gone straight to the devil—dancing and drinking - and some other things I couldn’t tell you, Mr. Archold.”

Archold smiled a knowing smile. “You don’t have to say another word, Lester. It’s all because of the way they were raised. No respect for authority—that’s their problem. You can’t tell them anything they don’t know already.”

“What’s a person going to do, Mr. Archold?”

Archold had the answer even for that. “Discipline!”

Lester’s palsy, as though Archold had given a cue, became more pronounced. “Well, I’ve done what I could to keep things up. I come back every day I can and look after things. Fix up what I can—what those kids don’t smash up for their own fun. All the records are in the basement now.”

“Good work. When things return to normal again, we’ll have a much easier job, thanks to you. And I’ll see that you get your back wages for all the time you’ve put in.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Did you know that someone has broken the statue out in front? The one right over the door? Can’t you fix it somehow, Lester. It looks just terrible.”

“I’ll see what I can do, sir.”

“See that you do.” It was a good feeling for Archold, giving orders again.

“It sure is good to have you back here, sir. After all these years. …”

“Seven months, Lester. That’s all it’s been. It does seem like years.”

Lester glanced away from Archold and fixed his gaze on the skeleton of the dwarf tree. “I’ve been keeping track with the calendars in the basement, Mr. Archold. The ones we stocked for ‘94. It’s been two years and more. We closed April 12, 1993…”

“A day I’ll never forget, Lester.”

“… and this is June 30, 1995.”

Archold looked puzzled. “You’ve gotten confused, boy. It couldn’t be. It’s … it is June, isn’t it? That’s funny. I could swear that yesterday was Oct. … I haven’t been feeling well lately.”

A muffled vibration crept into the room. Lester went to the door.

“Maybe you’d best leave now, Mr. Archold. Things have changed around the old bank. Maybe you wouldn’t be safe here.”

“This is my office, my bank. Don’t tell me what to do!” His voice cracked with authority like a rusted trumpet.

“It’s those kids. They come here every night now. I’ll show you out through the basement.”

“I’ll leave the way I came, Lester. I think you’d better return to your work now. And fix that statue!”

Lester’s palsy underwent a sudden cure, his lips tightened. Without another word or a look back, he left Archold’s office. As soon as he found himself alone, Archold pressed the Beverage, alcoholic Archtype button on the Reprostat. He gulped down the. iced Scotch greedily, threw the glass into the hopper and pressed the button again.

At midnight Jessy Holm was going to die, but at the moment she was deliriously happy. She was the sort of person that lives entirely in the present.

Now, as every light in the old Exchange Bank was doused (except for the blue spot on the drummer), she joined with the dancing crowd in a communal sigh of delight and dug her silvered fingernails into Jude’s bare arm.

“Do you love me?” she whispered.

“Crazy!” Jude replied.

“How much?”

“Kid, I’d die for you.” It was true.

A blat of static sounded from the speakers set into the gilded ceiling of the banking floor. In the blue haze about the bandstand, a figure swayed before the microphone. A voice of ambiguous gender began to sing along to the hard, rocking beat of the music—only noises it first seemed; gradually, a few words emerged:

Now, now, now, now—

Now is forever.

Around and around and around—

Up and down

And around and around—because

Tonight is forever

And love, lo-ove is now.

“I don’t want to stop, ever,” Jessy shouted above the roar of the song and the tread of the dancers.

“It’s never gonna stop, baby,” Jude assured her. “C’mon let’s go upstairs.”

The second floor lobby was already filled with couples. On the third floor they found themselves alone. Jude lit cigarettes for himself and Jessy.

“It’s scary here, Jude. We’re all alone.”

“That’s not gonna last long. It’s getting near ten o’clock.”

“Are you scared—about later, I mean?”

“Nothing to be scared of. It doesn’t hurt—maybe for just a second, then it’s all over.”

“Will you hold my hand?”

Jude smiled. “Sure, baby.”

A shadow stepped out of the shadows. “Young man—it’s me, Lester Tinburley. I helped you fix things downstairs if you remember.”

“Sure, dad, but right now I’m busy.”

“I only wanted to warn you that there’s another man here —” Lester’s voice diminished to a dry, inaudible whisper. “I think he’s going to—” He wet his lips, “—to make some sort of trouble.”

Lester pointed to the crack of light under Archold’s door. “Maybe you’d better get him out of the building.”

“Jude—not now!”

“I’ll only be a minute, baby. This could be fun.” Jude poked at Lester. “Some sort of nut, huh?”

Lester nodded and retreated back into the shadow of the reception desk.

Jude pushed open the door and looked at the man who sat behind the dusty, glass-topped desk. He was old—maybe fifty—and bleary-eyed from drinking. A pushover. Jude smiled, as the man rose unsteadily to his feet.

“Get out of here!” the old man bellowed. “This is my bank. I won’t have a bunch of tramps walking about in my bank.”

“Hey, Jessy!” Jude called. “C’mere and getta look of this.”

“Leave this room immediately. I am the president of this bank. I….”

Jessy giggled. “Is he crazy, or what?”

“Jack,” Jude shouted into the dark reception room, “is this guy on the level? About being bank president?”

“Yessir,” Lester replied.

“Lester! Are you out there? Throw these juvenile delinquents out of my bank. This minute! Do you understand, Lester!”

“Didja hear the man, Lester? Why don’t you answer the bank president?”

“He can open the vault doors. You can make him do it.” Lester came to stand in the door and looked in triumph at Archold. “That’s where all the money is—from the other banks too. He knows the combination. There’s millions of dollars. He would never do it for me, but you can make him.”

“Oh Jude—let’s. It would be fun. I haven’t seen money for just an age.”

“We don’t have the time, baby.”

“So we’d die at two o’clock instead of twelve. What difference would it make? Just think—a bank vault crammed full of money! Please… .”

Archold had retreated to the corner of his office. “You can’t make me. … I won’t… .”

Jude began to seem more interested. He had no interest in money as such, but a contest of wills appealed to his forthright nature. “Yeah, we could toss it around like confetti— that would be something. Or build a bonfire!”

“No!” Lester gasped, then, palliatively—”I’ll show you where the vault is, but a fire would burn down the bank. What would the people do tomorrow night? The vault is downstairs. I’ve got the keys for the cage around the vault, but he’ll tell you the combination.”

“Lester! No!”

“Call me ‘boy’ like you used to, Mr. Archold. Tell me what I’ve got to do.”

Archold grasped at the straw. “Get those two out of here. Right now, Lester.”

Lester laughed. He went up to Archold’s Reprostat and pressed the cigar Archtype button. He gave Jude the burning cigar. “This will make him tell you the combination.” But Jude ignored Lester’s advice, or seemed to. He threw away his cigarette and stuck Archold’s cigar into the comer of his mouth, slightly discomposing his studied grin. Emboldened, Lester took a cigar for himself and followed this up with Scotches for himself, Jessy, and Jude. Jude sipped at his meditatively, examining Archold. When he had finished, he grabbed the bank president by the collar of his jacket and led him down the stairs to the ballroom-banking-floor.

The dancers, most of whom were shortly to die like Jude and Jessy, were desperately, giddily gay. A sixteen-year-old girl lay unconscious at the foot of the bandstand. Jude dragged Archold up the steps and into the hazy blue light. Archold noticed that Mrs. Desmond’s name placard still hung on the grill of the teller’s window which now formed a balustrade for the bandstand.

Jude grabbed the mike. “Stop the action. The entertainment committee has something new for all of us.” The band stopped, the dancers turned to look at Jude and Archold. “Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to introduce the president of this fine bank, Mr.—what-did-you-say-your-name-was?”

“Archold,” Lester volunteered from the dance floor. “Charlie Archold.”

“Mr. Archold is going to open up the bank vault special for tonight’s little party, and we’re going to decorate the walls with good, old-fashioned dollar bills. We’re going to roll in money—isn’t that so, Charlie?”

Archold struggled to get loose from Jude’s grip. The crowd began to laugh. “You’ll pay for the damage you’ve done here,” he moaned into the mike. “There are still laws for your kind. You can’t… .”

“Hey, Jude,” a girl yelled, “lemme dance with the old fellow. You only live once and I’m going to try everything.” The laughter swelled. Archold could not make out any faces in the crowd below. The laughter seemed to issue from the walls and the floor, disembodied and unreal. The band began a slow, mocking fox trot. Archold felt himself gripped by a new set of hands. Jude let go of his collar.

“Move your feet, stupid. You can’t dance standing still.”

“Turn on the dizzy lights,” Jessy shouted.

“You’re forgetting the vaults,” Lester whined at her. She took the old janitor in hand and led him up to the bandstand, where they watched Archold floundering in the arms of his tormentor.

The blue spotlight blanked out. The bank was suddenly filled with a swarm of bright red flashes, like the revolving lights mounted on police cars. That, in fact, had been their source. Klaxons sounded—someone had triggered the bank’s own alarm system. A trumpet, then the drums, took up the klaxon’s theme.

“Let me lead,” the girl was shouting in Archold’s ear. He saw her face in a brief flash of red light, cruel and avid, strangely reminiscent of Nora—but Nora was his wife and loved him—then felt himself being pushed back, his knees crumbling, over the grill, and down. The girl lying on the floor broke his fall.

There were gunshots. The police, he thought. Of course, there were no police. The boys were aiming at the spinning lights.

Archold felt himself lifted by dozens of hands. Lights spun around him overhead, and there was a brief explosion when one of the marksmen made a bull’s-eye. The hands that bore him aloft began to pull in different directions, revolving him, cart-wheel-fashion, in time to the klaxon’s deafening music, faster and faster. He felt the back of his jacket begin to rip, then a wrenching pain in his shoulder. Another explosion of light.

He fell to the floor with a shuddering pain through his whole body. He was drenched with water, lying at the door of the vault.

“Open it, dad,” someone—not Jude—said.

Archold saw Lester in the forefront of the group. He raised his arm to strike at him, but the pain stopped him. He stood up and looked at the ring of adolescent faces around him. “I won’t open it. That money does not belong to me. I’m responsible to the people who left it here; it’s their money. I can’t… .”

“Man, nobody is going to use that money anymore. Open it.”

A girl stepped out from the crowd and crossed over to Archold. She wiped his forehead where it was bleeding. “You better do what they say,” she said gently. “Almost all of them are going to kill themselves tonight, and they don’t care what they do or who they hurt. Life is cheap—a couple bars of carbon and a few quarts of water—and the pieces of paper behind that door don’t mean a thing. In one day, you could Reprostat a million dollars.”

“No. I can’t. I won’t do it.”

“Everybody—you too, Darline—get back here. Well make him open it up.” The main body of the crowd had already retreated behind the cage that fenced in the vault. Lester, of course, had had the keys to get them into the cage. Darline shrugged and joined the rest of them.

“Now, Mr. President, either you open that door or we’ll start using you for a target.”

“No!” Archold rushed to the combination lock. “I’ll do it,” he was screaming when one of the boys shot the glass-faced regulator above the lock.

“You hit him.”

“I did not.”

Darline went to look. “It was a heart attack, I guess. He’s dead.”

They left Lester alone in the outer room of the vault with Archold’s body. He stared bleakly at the corpse. “I’ll do it again,” he said. “Again and again.”

On the floor above them, the klaxons were quieted and the music began again, sweetly at first, then faster and louder. It was nearing midnight.

Nora Archold, wife of Charles, was embarrassed by her red hair. Although it was her natural color, she suspected that people thought she dyed it. She was forty-two, after all, and so many older women decided to be redheads.

“I like it just the way it is, honey,” Dewey told her. “You’re being silly.”

“Oh, Dewey, I’m so worried.”

“There isn’t anything to worry about. It’s not as though you were leaving him—you know that.”

“But it seems wrong.”

Dewey laughed. Nora pouted, knowing that she looked becoming in a pout. He tried to kiss her, but she pushed him away and went on with her packing—one of a kind of everything she liked. The suitcase was more of a ceremonial gesture than a practical necessity: in one afternoon at the stores, she could have an entire wardrobe Reprostated if she wanted to take the trouble (a kind of trouble she enjoyed taking). But she liked her old clothes—many of which were “originals.” The difference between an original and a Reprostated copy was undetectable even under an electron microscope, but Nora, nonetheless, felt a vague mistrust of the copies—as though they were somehow transparent to other eyes and shabbier.

“We were married twenty years ago, Charlie and me. You must have been just a little kid when I was already a married woman.” Nora shook her head at woman’s frailty. “And I don’t even know your last name.” This time she let Dewey kiss her.

“Hurry up now,” he whispered. “The old boy will be back any minute.”

“It’s not fair to her,” Nora complained. “She’ll have to put up with all the horrible things I have all these years.”

“Make up your mind. First you worry about him; now it isn’t fair for her. I’ll tell you what—when I get home, I’ll Reprostat another Galahad to rescue her from the old dragon.”

Nora observed him suspiciously. “Is that your last name-Galahad?”

“Hurry up now,” he commanded.

“I want you out of the house while I do it I don’t want you to see—the other one.”

Dewey guffawed. “I’ll bet not!” He carried the suitcase to the car and waited, while Nora watched him from the picture window. She looked about the living room once more regretfully. It was a beautiful house in one of the best suburbs. For twenty years it had been a part of her, rather the greater, part. She didn’t have any idea where Dewey wanted to take her. She was thrilled by her own infidelity, realizing at the same time that it made no difference. As Dewey had pointed out to her, life was cheap—a couple bars of carbon and a few quarts of water.

The clock on the wall read 12:30. She had to hurry.

In the Reprostating room, she unlocked the Personal panel on the control board. It was meant only for emergencies, but it could be argued that this was an emergency. It had been Charles’ idea to have his own body Archtyped by the Reprostat. His heart was bad; it could give out at any time, and a personal Archtype was better than life insurance. It was, in a way, almost immortality. Nora, naturally, had been Archtyped at the same time. That had been in October, seven months after the bank had closed, but it seemed like only yesterday. It was June already! With Dewey around, she’d be able to cut down on her drinking.

Nora pressed the button reading “Nora Archold.” The sign on the control panel flashed: insufficient phosphorous. Nora went to the kitchen, dug into the cupboard drawers for the right jar, and deposited it in the hopper that had been set into the floor. The Reprostat whirred and clicked to a stop. Timidly, Nora opened the door of the materializer.

Nora Archold—herself—lay on the floor of the chamber in an insensible heap, in the same state that Nora (the older, unfaithful Nora) had been in when—that day in October —she had been archtyped. The elder Nora dragged her freshly Reprostated double into the bedroom. She considered leaving a note that would explain what had happened—why Nora was leaving with a stranger she had met only that afternoon. But, outside the house, Dewey was honking. Tenderly, she kissed the insensible woman who lay in her own bed and left the house where she had felt, for twenty years, a prisoner.

Fair youth, beneath the trees,

thou canst not leave

Thy song, nor even can those

trees be bare.

“Afraid?”

“No. Are you?”

“Not if you hold my hand.” Jude began to embrace her again. “No, just hold my hand. We could go on like this forever, and then everything would be spoiled. We’d grow old, quarrel, stop caring for each other. I don’t want that to happen. Do you think it will be the same for them as it was for us?”

“It couldn’t be any different.”

“It was beautiful,” Jessy said.

“Now?” Jude asked.

“Now,” she consented.

Jude helped her to sit down at the edge of the hopper, then took a seat beside her. The opening was barely big enough for their two bodies. Jessy’s hand tightened around Jude’s fingers: the signal. Together, they slid into the machine. There was no pain, only a cessation of consciousness. Atoms slid loose from their chemical bonds instantaneously; what had been Jude and Jessy was now only increments of elementary matter in the storage chamber of the Reprostat. From those atoms, anything could be reassembled: food, clothing, a pet canary—anything that the machine possessed an Archtype of—even another Jude and Jessy.

In the next room, Jude and Jessy slept next to each other. The sodium pentothal was beginning to wear off. Jude’s arm lay across Jessy’s shoulder, where the newly-disintegrated Jessy had lain before leaving them.

Jessy stirred. Jude moved his hand. “Do you know what day it is?” she whispered. “Hmm?”

“It’s starting,” she said. “This is our last day.”

“It will always be that day, honey.”

She began to hum a song: Now, now, now, now—Now is forever.

For ever wilt thou love,

and she be fair!

At one o’clock, the last of the revelers having departed from the bank, Lester Tinburley dragged Archold’s body to the Cadillac in the street outside. He found the ignition key in Archold’s pocket. It was an hour’s drive to the president’s suburban home—or a little longer than it took to smoke one of the cigars from the Reprostat on the dashboard.

Lester Tinburley had come to work at the New York Exchange Bank in 1953, immediately upon his release from the Armed Services. He had seen Charles Archold rise from the bond window to a loan consultant’s desk to the accounting office on the second floor and eventually to the presidency, a rise that paralleled Lester’s own ascension through the ranks to the lieutenantcy of the janitorial staff. The two men, each surrounded by the symbols of his authority, had had a common interest in the preservation of order—that is to say, bureaucracy. They had been allies in conservatism. The advent of the Reprostat, however, changed all that.

The Reprostat could be programmed to reproduce from its supply of elementary particles (some sub-atomic) any given mechanical, molecular or atomic structure; any thing, in short. The Reprostat could even reprostat smaller Reprostats. As soon as such a Machine became available to even a few, it would inevitably become available to anyone—and when anyone possessed a Reprostat he needed very little else. The marvellous machines could not provide Charles Archold with pleasant sensations of self-justification in the performance of his work and the exercise of his authority, but only the vanishing breed of the inner-directed required such intangible pleasures. The new order of society, as evidenced in Jude and Jessy, were content to take their pleasures where they found them—in the Reprostat. They lived in an eternal present which came very close to being an earthly paradise.

Lester Tinburley could not share either attitude perfectly. While Charles Archold’s way of life was only affected adversely by the new abundance (he had been able, as a bank president, to afford most of the things he really desired) and Jessy and Jude indulged themselves in Arcady, Lester was torn between the new facts of life and his old habits. He had learned, in fifty years of menial work and mean living, to take a certain pleasure and a considerable amount of pride in the very meanness of his circumstances. He preferred beer to cognac, overalls to a silk lounging robe. Affluence had come too late in his life for him to do it justice, especially an affluence so divested of the symbols with which he (like Archold) had always associated it: power, the recognition of authority, and, above all else, money. Avarice is an absurd vice in the earthly paradise, but Lester’s mind had been formed at an earlier time when it was still possible to be a miser.

Lester parked the Cadillac in the Archolds’ two-car garage and wrestled the stiff body of the bank president into the house. Through the bedroom door he could see Nora Archold sprawled on the bed, sleeping or drunk. Lester shoved Archold’s body into the hopper of the Reprostat. The Personal panel on the control board had been left unlocked. Lester opened the door of the materializer. If he had been partly responsible for Archold’s death earlier that evening, this was a perfect atonement. He felt no guilt.

He laid the dragged body of the bank president on the bed beside Nora’s and watched them breathing lightly. Archold would probably be a little confused in the morning, as Lester had noticed he had been in the office. But calendar time was beginning to be less and less meaningful, when one was no longer obliged to punch a time clock or meet deadlines.

“See you tomorrow,” he said to his old boss. One of these days, he was convinced, Archold would open the vault before his heart failed him. In the meantime, he sort of enjoyed seeing his old employer dropping in at the bank every day. It was like old times.

*

Charles Archold liked the façade best at twilight. On June evenings like this (or was it July?), the sun would sink into the canyon of Maxwell Street and spotlight the sculptured group in the pediment: a full-breasted Commerce extended an allegorical cornucopia from which tumbled allegorical fruits into the outstretched hands of Industry, Labor, Transportation, Science, and Art. He was idling past (the Cadillac engine was definitely getting worse), abstractedly considering the burning tip of his cigar, when he observed peripherally that Commerce had been beheaded. He stopped.

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