THE MALTED MILK MONSTER

From the moment he opened his eyes and saw the color of the sky, the shape of the clouds, the incredible topography, Carter Broun knew exactly where he was. He didn't really have to identify the blandly sweet smell which filled his nostrils, nor did he particularly have to investigate further the river of dark mahogany coursing, with the gentlest of roars, between two small, cone-shaped hills, two hills of exactly the same dimensions and sporting exactly the same vegetation.

There was just no doubt about it. Not after Carter had contemplated, for ten or fifteen awe-struck seconds, the sky of absolutely uniform and brilliant blue--bluey-blue, that was the color, he decided morosely--and those oval, pink-white clouds spaced so evenly across it. Not to mention those birds flapping into the narrowing distance; from here, each looked like a letter V, the arms of which had been carefully curved outward and down.

Only one place in the universe boasted such a landscape, such an atmosphere, such birds. This was The World of The Malted Milk Monster.

God help me, Carter thought, now it's my world, too.

That peculiar, ripping flash inside him, like some sort of lightning of the soul! He'd said goodbye to Lee at the door of her lawn-enclosed home and started down the neat suburban street to where his MG was parked. He'd been rolling the car keys around in his hand and planning the itinerary of his Friday night date with Lee--you either got a girl to your apartment by the second date, he had found, or you flunked out forever--when he'd noticed the Malted Milk Monster watching him unwinkingly from behind a hedge. Probably had followed them all the way from Goldie's Goodie Palace.

Then the flash, the mad sensation of being ripped out of his context and being shoved into another, entirely different place. And opening his eyes here.

It all came, and the knowledge was bitter, of taking your date to an ice cream parlor instead of an honest bar. But a bar didn't seem like the right follow-up to a Sunday afternoon movie in Grenville Acres. Besides, you don't take a schoolteacher to a bar on her home grounds. You pour an inoffensive soda into her, walk her home through the autumn streets, being as gentlemanly charming as possible, you decline the invitation to come in and meet the folks by mentioning the big report you have to prepare for tomorrow's Account Executive conference--a man has his work to do, and that must come first--and back you drive to Manhattan with the pleasant knowledge of a seduction intelligently initiated.

Unfortunately, you don't plan on other factors--unseen powers, for example.

There was not much point in checking but he might as well check. Once he was really certain, he could begin worrying. And working out an escape.

Carter wandered down to the mahogany river across well-cropped grass and past large tinsel-type flowers. He knelt, dipped a finger in the thick liquid and tasted it. Chocolate. Of course.

Just on the off-chance, he pinched himself long and hard, squeezingly and painfully. It hurt enough. No, he'd known he hadn't been dreaming to begin with. For one thing, in a dream you rarely realize you're dreaming.

This was real.

Chocolate syrup to drink. And for food--

The two little hills were covered with dwarf trees bearing lollipops, the cellophane-wrapped fruit varying slightly in color from tree to tree. Here and there on the level ground were bonbon bushes and sharply triangular Christmas-tree affairs from whose twigs dangled small pies, cakes and assorted cookies--most of them chocolate.

The sun beat down rosily, rosily, and none of the chocolate melted. The chocolate river, on the other hand, ran interminably and gurglingly. Whatever its sources, wherever it rose, the river evidently had plenty of reserves.

Carter was struck by an especially ugly thought. Suppose, viewing the river's effluence, suppose it rained chocolate! Really, one could not put anything past the Malted Milk Monster.

--|--

Lee had objected to the name.

"She's just a fat little girl. Rather brilliant, rather neurotic, too. And very curious about the strange, distinguished young man who's buying her teacher a soda."

"All right, but I've been counting," Carter had insisted. "Five chocolate malteds since we came in. Five! And the way she sits there at the end of the counter, never taking her eyes off us, not even when she unwraps a fresh straw!"

"Most of the children in Grenville have more spending money than is good for them. Dorothy's parents are divorced--mother's a big-time buyer, father's a vice-president of a bank--and they use their money to fight for her affections. She spends practically all of her time in Goldie's. You know, Carter, that psychological equation: when I was small and my parents loved me, they gave me food; therefore, food equals love?"

Carter nodded. He knew all about such psychological equations. As a determined and well-sexed young bachelor, he had studied Freud as intently as a second lieutenant in the First World War might have studied von Clausewitz.

"You're so damned feminine," he announced warmly, underlining the points that, with any luck at all, would shortly be at issue. "Only a gal who was woman all the way through would be able to see in that ball of lard, that pimply Malted Milk Monster--"

"She's no such thing, Carter! What a terrible nickname for such a mixed-up little girl! Although," Lee mused, swirling the long spoon about in the residual muddy bubbles of her soda glass, "although it is funny you should think of it. That's what--or something like it--the other kids in the class call her. They tell stories about her--that she can make stones and flowerpots disappear just by staring hard at them. Kids are just like adults, a little more obvious, that's all. They make a witch out of the unpopular one."

He kept trying. "They never made one out of you, that's for sure. Anybody who's the slightest bit sensitive just has to look at you to know that love and loving--"

"It's so pathetic, really," she interrupted without knowing it. "I asked them to write a composition about the happiest day they could remember. Do you know what Dorothy wrote about? A day in her dream world, a day that never ever happened. And yet it was beautifully done, for a child her age. Full of affection-symbols like cake and candy. The world was supposed to smell like an ice cream parlor. Imagine! There was a finely written passage--you appreciate good writing, Carter, I know--about two cute little hills all covered with lollipop trees, each tree bearing a different flavor. And between the hills there wound a stream of purest chocolate!"

Carter gave up. He lit a cigarette and stared over Lee's earnest but nonetheless lovely head. At the grossly heavy little girl whose fat overflowed the last stool in the ice cream parlor, her mouth sucking steadily at the chocolate malted milk, her eyes as steadily sucking at his. He found himself forced to drop his glance first.

"--even when we have a drawing lesson," Lee was still on it. "She never does anything else. It's absolutely real to the poor child--so lonely, so starved for companionship! I've learned to expect that flat blue sky full of oval pink clouds, those curved-line birds, that chocolate river and all those bushes filled with goodies. Every single time! For a child of her intelligence, she's somewhat retarded graphically. She draws like a child a year or two younger. But that's to be expected: it's almost purely a verbal, a conceptual intelligence, you might say--"

You might also say the topic had created a highly annoying and useless diversion. Carter bit on the cigarette through his lips, looked up again cautiously. The Malted Milk Monster's eyes were as unwavering as ever. Such pulling power--what was so fascinating about him? Well, her father was a Madison Avenue type: the clothes, probably. Carter was justly proud of his wardrobe. His clothes, he knew, were in almost ostentatious good taste--they screamed restraint and expensive lowness of key.

Yes, that was it. He reminded her of her father. Her rich father.

Carter caught himself preening and stubbed out the cigarette in abrupt harsh disgust. Damn it! That was the trouble with this Madison Avenue music--you laughed at it, you kidded others about it, you even read books satirizing it--and then you found yourself singing to it. He reminded her of her father who was the vice-president of a bank and probably quite well off. Well, so what? Did that say anything good about Carter Broun? Not necessarily at all, at all. Carter Broun was just a well-educated, clever and rather lucky young man who had found his way into a well-paying, clever and extremely luck-flavored business.

A young man who had gotten so deeply involved in the superficialities of the business that when a child as obviously and horrifyingly tormented as this little girl came to his attention, all he could see was a neat gag nickname--the kind of shallow, brilliant thing you'd toss off to a client at a sales conference.

Lee, now. Lee's roots were still wrapped around the compact, squirming mass of the human race. She loved her work but she cared too; she certainly cared. The way she goes on! The way her eyes shine as she talks!

"--the other children were positively stupefied. Or that time I asked them to make up riddles. Do you know what Dorothy asked when her turn came? Just listen to this, Carter. She asked the class: 'Which would you rather be eaten by--a giant caterpillar, or a million tiny little lions?' Now I maintain that a girl with that much imagination--"

"That much maladjustment," he corrected. "She sounds like a very sick kid. But I'd give a lot," he mused, "to see how she'd do on a Rorschach. A giant caterpillar, or a million tiny little lions... and without even ink-blots to go on! Do you know if she's ever had any psychotherapy?"

His companion had smiled grimly. "Her parents are very well off, I told you. I suspect she's had all the advantages. Up to and including protracted legal battles as to whether she's to go to poppa's doctor or momma's doctor. What that girl really needs, no one can give her: a different set of parents, or, at the least, one parent who really cares for her."

Carter had disagreed. "Not so much now, not at her age. I'd say it would be much more helpful at this point to have a couple of kids who like and accept her. If there's one thing that Motivational Research brings home to you, it's what thoroughgoing social animals we humans are. Without a matrix of companionship, without the interest and approval of at least a handful of our contemporaries, we're worse than mixed-up--we aren't even people. Hermits aren't people; I don't know what they are, exactly, but they're not people. And so long as that kid is a psychological hermit, she's not really a human person. She's something else."

Somewhere in the next fifteen minutes, he knew that he had clicked with Lee. But by then he was deep in the problem of how one could help a kid like Dorothy to make friends. It had become an MR problem, dealing with the individual, however, rather than the group; and, like all MR problems, of such obsessing interest to him that nothing else mattered.

In the end, it had been Lee who had changed the subject very forcefully; it had been Lee who had to drop hints about their next date. He'd managed to get a grip on himself and began talking about what they'd do when she came into town to meet him next Friday night. All in all, it had worked out quite well.

But as they left the soda shop, Carter had thrown just one last glance behind him through the plate-glass window. The Malted Milk Monster had turned on her stool, straw still in her mouth, eyes following him like a pair of starving sharks.

And then, of course, shadowing them all the way to Lee's home. What had she done to him? How had she done it? Why?

--|--

He kicked angrily at a loose stone, watched it bounce into the river with a thick brown splash. Was this one of the stones Dorothy had abstracted from the real world? Again, how? Not why, though; it could well have been part of a series of controlled experiments to test the range of her powers.

Powers? Was that the word? Talent, perhaps, or catalytic capacity--that might be more descriptive.

Given a very remarkable mind, given a very strong personality embedded in a child's brain, given unhappiness, unpopularity, and general neurosis to sharpen that mind, to add even more punch to the personality--and what? What would develop?

He suddenly recalled his last thoughts before arriving in this lollipop world. Just after he'd left Lee, his head full of happy thoughts about Friday night, just at the very moment he'd seen the kid staring at him, he'd begun thinking about her problems again. The realization that she had followed them all the way from the soda shop out of sheer murderous loneliness had stimulated him into wondering about her mind.

There had been a sequence. First: Gee, she's hungry for people. Then: Not for people in general, for kids her own age. How would you go about making kids like her? Now there's a motivation problem for you! Then: Well, the first question is what are her motives; what's it like in her mind? Good professional MR unraveling technique.

And then that terrible flash, that mental rip, and he'd opened his eyes here.

In other words, he'd had something to do with it. It hadn't been all her. He'd been wide open psychologically, trying to visualize the inside of her mind, just as she had--as she had done something.

No, it still required something from her, for all this to have happened. And no matter what you called it--talent, powers, catalysis--she had it. And she'd used it on him.

Carter shivered suddenly, remembering the riddle she'd made up.

He was adrift in the fantasy life of that kind of kid. He wished he had paid attention to Lee's earlier discussion in the ice cream parlor instead of forcing the conversation back into more profitable channels. To get out safely, to survive, he could use every scrap of information on Dorothy that had ever existed.

After all, her most meager wishes were now the fixed and immutable natural laws under which he had to operate.

He was no longer alone, he observed. He was surrounded by children. They had seemingly materialized all around him, yelling, playing, scrambling, jumping. And where the yelling was loudest, where the games were thickest, there was Dorothy. The Malted Milk Monster. The children gamboled about her like so many fountains against a central statue.

She stood there, still staring at him. And her stare was as uncomfortable as ever. A little more so, for that matter, than he remembered it. She wore the same blue jeans and yellow cashmere sweater with smudges on it. She was taller than life-size, a bit taller than the other children. She was slenderer, too. Now, in all fairness, you could not call her more than plump.

And she had no pimples.

Carter was irritated at how fast he'd had to drop his eyes. But to keep them open and aimed at her was like looking directly into the beam of an anti-aircraft searchlight.

"Looka me, Dorothy!" the kids yelled. "I'm jumping! Looka how high I can jump!"

"How about playing tag, Dorothy?" they yelled. "Let's play tag! You choose who should be It!"

"Make up a new game, Dorothy! Make up one of the good games you always make up!"

"Let's have a picnic, huh, Dorothy?"

"Dorothy, let's have a relay race!"

"Dorothy, let's play house!"

"Dorothy, let's jump rope!"

"Dorothy--"

"Dorothy--"

"Dorothy--"

When she started to speak, every one of the kids shut up. They stopped running, they stopped yelling, they stopped whatever they were doing and turned to look at her.

"This nice man," she said. "He'll play with us. Won't you, mister?"

"No," Carter said. "I'd like to, but I'm afraid I--"

"He'll play a game of ball with us," she went on imperturbably. "Here, mister. Here's the ball. You're a nice man to play with us."

When she moved toward him, holding out a large striped ball which had suddenly appeared in her hands, the bulk of the children moved with her.

Carter was still searching for words wherewith to explain that, while he had no interest at the moment in playing a game of ball, he was much interested in a private conversation with Dorothy herself, an audience, so to speak--when the ball was thrust into his fingers and he found himself playing.

"You see, I don't usually--" he began as he threw the ball and caught it, threw the ball and caught it.

"Very busy right now, but some other ti--" he continued as he caught the ball and threw it, caught the ball and threw it.

No matter in which direction he threw the ball, no matter how many eager pairs of child hands made a grab for it, it was always Dorothy who received it and threw it back to him.

"Yay, Dorothy!" the children yelled. "This is fun!"

"Be glad to play with you kids as soon as I finish my--" Carter panted, finding it fantastically tough exercise.

"Yay, Dorothy! This is a real good game!"

"Such a nice man!"

"So much fun!"

Dorothy threw the ball straight up in the air and it disappeared. "Let's play leapfrog," she said. "Would you like to play leapfrog with us, mister?"

"Sorry," Carter gasped as he bent, his hands on his knees, so that she could leap over his back from behind. "I haven't played leapfrog in years and I don't intend to st--" He ran forward, placed his hands in the small of Dorothy's back, sailed across, bent forward again in expectation of her jump. "Leapfrog is one game that I never--"

They played leapfrog until he was wobbling with dizziness, until every breath felt as if it had been clawed out of his chest.

Dorothy seated herself gracefully on the ground and gathered the children in an adoring cluster. "Now we'd like to hear a story. Please, mister, tell us a story?"

Carter started an agonized protest. It was somehow transformed into the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, told wheezingly and punctuated with heaving gulps for air. Then he told the story of Little Red Riding Hood. Then he told the story of Bluebeard.

Somewhere near the end of that particular work, Dorothy disappeared. But the children remained, and Carter continued the story, willy-nilly. The kids began to look frightened. Some shivered, others moaned and cried.

It had been getting darker for the past few minutes, and just as Carter finished the last lines of Bluebeard and, without stopping, launched into "Once upon a time there was a poor but honest woodcutter who had two children named Hansel and Gretel," a huge black cloud slid across the sky and swooped down at them.

A terrifying scarlet face with an enormous nose and flashing white teeth came out of the cloud and roared till the ground shook. Then it stopped and began to gnash its teeth. This sounded like an explosion in a crockery warehouse.

The children screamed in pure eye-popping terror and ran. "Dorothy!" they shrieked. "Dorothy, save us! The Bad Old Man! Save us, Dorothy, save us! Dorothy, where are you?"

Carter sank to the grass, released and utterly exhausted. He was far too tired to run or even look up, far too upset to care what happened to him any more. It seemed like the first time in hours that his body was his again to command; but his body wasn't worth very much at the moment.

"Hey, Mac," a voice queried sympathetically over his head. "They givin' you a hard time?"

It was the scarlet face from the cloud. It no longer looked terrifying, merely concerned in a friendly fashion. And it was shrinking rapidly in size until it was in correct proportion to the normal human body under it. When it was a rather ordinary red and grizzled face, dirty with a few days' growth of beard around the red and busily veined nose, its owner knelt on the edge of the cloud and leaped to the ground, a distance, by this time, of half a dozen feet.

He was an oldish man of middle height, wearing a pair of solid gray pants, a torn brown shirt which hung outside it down to his hips and, on his bare feet, two frayed and filthy canvas shoes, one of which was split at the sole. He looked familiar, as every bum somehow looks like every other bum. He was archetypically the shambling, sodden derelict, a pure example of absolute human junk, but--

He was an adult.

Carter sprang up and offered his hand joyfully. It was shaken in a flabby, uncertain, half-cringing way, like a newly paroled prisoner taking his farewell of the warden.

"Could you use a drink, Mac?"

"I sure as hell could," Carter told him heartily. "Am I glad to see you!"

The derelict nodded vaguely, reached up and pulled the black cloud even closer. He fumbled inside and pulled a bottle out. It was about half full, but though the fluid it contained was the proper shade of amber, it was clear glass all the way around. No label.

He held out this beggar's choice. "Name's Eddie. What they call me Shirttail. You need a glass to drink from? Ain't no glasses."

Carter shrugged. He sterilized the open top of the bottle with the palm of his hand, put it to his mouth and took a broad gulp.

"Whouch!" he said.

He found himself coughing so hard that he almost dropped the bottle. Shirttail took it away from him solicitously. "Awful, ain't it?" he asked, then proceeded to belt down a third of the stuff.

Awful, Carter decided, was not quite the word for it. It tasted like whiskey, all right, somewhere way down at the bottom, but with an overlay consisting of iodine, ammonia, camphor and dilute hydrochloric acid. His tongue squirmed in his mouth like a trapped snake.

Shirttail removed the bottle from his mouth, shuddered, grimaced, and licked his lips. "That's what she thinks whiskey tastes like."

"Who? Dorothy?"

"Atsit. The kid--whatever she thinks something tastes like, that's what it tastes like. But it's better'n nothing, better'n no booze at all. Wanna come up to the place? We can sit a while."

He was pointing to the cloud which hung low over them, a dark and misshapen dirigible. Doubtfully, Carter grabbed some of its tenuous material and pulled himself up. It was like swimming through fog that felt solid only at the places your hands touched it.

A soaring black cavern of a room. Off in a corner--a niche, rather, since there were no corners--stood an army cot covered with ragged plaid blankets, a tableful of cracked cups and saucers and three sagging, garbagey-looking easy chairs. An unshaded lightbulb hung from a thin wire over the cot and burned tinily, resentfully, in the piles of gloom. Whether or not the area behind the cot could properly be called a wall, it was covered from top to bottom with glossy pictures of naked women.

"Not my idea--hers," Shirttail explained as he clambered up through the floor. "Everything's hers, every idea, everything. What she once saw the inside of a night-watchman's shack, I figure. What to her I'm the same kinda guy as the night-watchman, so that's the layout I get. But thank God for the bottle. The pictures, far as I'm concerned, you can have, but the bottle--thank God for the bottle."

He offered it to Carter, who shook his head and hand in a no. They sat in two facing easy chairs, each of which immediately settled off to one side in opposite directions. Damn it, Carter thought, I have seen him before. But where?

"Take a slug, Mac, go ahead, take a slug. One good thing she's got here, that kid--the bottle gets full as fast as you kill it. You ain't takin' nothin' from me when you help yourself. And if you don't drink regular, you'll be talkin' to yourself. What you won't talk sense."

Carter considered the point and saw it might well be valid. He took another drink. It was fully as bad as the first, but the effects of the alcohol came through more strongly now and tended to insulate against the flavor. He sighed and swallowed some more. No doubt about it, the world--even Dorothy's world--looked better.

He handed the bottle back and studied his companion. Hardly the right type for this place, when you came right down to it. A bum. A very average old bum. Why him as The Bad Old Man?

"How long have you been here?" Carter asked him.

Shirttail shrugged and stared loose-lipped over the top of the bottle. "A year, maybe. Two years, maybe. What there's no way to figure. Sometimes winter one day, sometimes summer tomorrow. What even my beard don't grow no more after I came. I feel like years and years and years and years. Worsen stir, worsen anything. The things I been through here, Mac, the things I been through!"

"Bad?" Carter asked sympathetically.

"Bad?" Shirttail indicated just how bad by rolling his red eyes in an emphatic upward arc. "Bad don't come near. I got to go out and scare those kids whenever she wants me to. What I'm in the sack, what I got other things on my mind, don't make no difference. Dorothy gives out with a think: 'Come a-runnin' and start a-scarin'.' I got to drop whatever I'm doin'. I'm in the sack, what the hell, I got other things on my mind, I got to drop it and start a-scarin'. I blow up big like you just saw me, I got to scream and bang my choppers, I got to zoom on down. Then the kids yell: 'Dorothy, save us!' and she starts takin' me apart. What I mean apart. The things she's done to me, biff! bam! pow! pam!, slapped me silly, up, down, around, every which way, for a-scarin' those kids! What it wasn't my idea in the first place. I just do it 'cause she gives out with a think and makes me do it."

"Ever try resisting, refusing?" Carter inquired. "I mean what happens if you say no?"

"Mac, you don't say no. You just don't. Everything here goes her way. When she itches, you scratch. When she sneezes, you wipe your nose. What I used to call her all kindsa names to myself, just to pass the time--Mac, I don't remember a single one now. I try to remember one dirty name and I can't, to save my skin. She's just Dorothy. That's all I can call her. You know what I mean? Everything goes her way, even inside your head. The only leeway you get is to stay the kinda guy she sees you as in the first place. But otherwise it's her way, and the longer you stick around, the more her way it is."

Carter remembered with dismay how little he had wanted to play ball or leapfrog and how thoroughly he had played. Worse, how he had told stories when he had intended to protest. And worse yet, he hadn't--even in his own mind--used the phrase The Malted Milk Monster for some time now! He had thought of her, had referred to her, only as Dorothy.

"And the longer you stick around--"

He had to get out of here, had to find some way to smash out of this world--fast.

Shirttail was offering the bottle again. Carter refused it impatiently. Escape, breaking out, that came first. And for that he'd need his mind at its clearest. The alternative was being slowly absorbed, psychologically as well as physically, into Dorothy's dream world, until even his thoughts would be only slightly eccentric versions of her image of him, and he would be caught, like a fly immortalized by amber, in whatever habitation and whatever role she visualized for The Nice Man.

The Nice Man! He shivered. What a way to spend the rest of his life! No, now, while he was still more or less himself, Carter Broun, while his brain still glittered with the edge of a bright young motivational research executive in the real world, now was the time to break through.

The real world. As good a name for it as any other. Carter was a mystic never and a Freudian only when the occasion suited him. His credo was simple: anything that is is real. So...

Postulate a cosmos sufficiently long in extension and sufficiently broad in possibility, and there has to be room somewhere in all its infinities for every kind of world that Man could imagine.

Or a child dream up.

And suppose a child, out of overpowering longing and loneliness, out of some incredible innate talent, perhaps, is able to break through the folds of cosmic enormities into the one cranny where its dream world exists as a tangible, everyday truth. Not much of a step from there to switching other individuals, adults even, stones and flowerpots certainly, from one universe to the other. The original supposition, Carter decided, was the difficult one. Once that was accepted, the others were easy.

In an unlimited number of parallel worlds, to find the true home of one's mind...

Was that what Dorothy had done? And, in that case, which would be the dream world, which the real? You could probably die in either with equal ease--so that was no criterion.

Well, what difference did it make? The real world, for Carter, was the world from which he had been pulled, the world in which he had standing, individuality and personal purpose. The world he liked and intended to return to. And this, this other world, no matter how substantial unto itself in its peculiar space-time matrix, was the dream world--the world he must flee. The world that he had to prove, against the logic of his very senses, did not exist--by leaving it, or by destroying it somehow.

Destroying...

He stared hard at Shirttail. No wonder the derelict had looked so familiar!

It had been the briefest glimpse, weeks ago, possibly months, but the word brought back the sententious caption under that unforgettable photograph.

A tabloid newspaper on a print-wet, newly arrived pile he'd noticed over his shoulder as he'd been passing the newsstand at 53rd Street, just off Madison. And he'd had to stop and take another look at the photograph spreading its shock value over a sector of the front page. A MAN WHO DESTROYED HIMSELF was the caption's headline.

The caption went on to explain, in the most appalled journalese, that this was what you might expect to look like if you spent the rest of your life not working, sleeping in doorways, and drinking, instead of eating, your meals. "Even hardened interns and nurses at the hospital averted their faces from this terrible thing that had once been a man."

But the photograph did show a terrible thing that had once been a man. He was shown in the alley as he'd been found, shown just as the stretcher was being lifted, and you weren't likely to forget him for a long, long time.

The worst part of it was that he was alive. The eyes stared into the lens of the camera without any pretense of seeing. There was no mark on the face or body, no blood, nothing but dirt, and yet you had the feeling that this was a man who had fallen out of a window ten stories up or been hit by a car speeding at ninety miles an hour--and not been killed. Not completely killed, anyway, just partially killed.

The body lay and the eyes stared and the man was alive, but nothing more than that could be said. Looking at the picture, you suddenly thought of complex organic compounds that were almost living creatures but had not yet made the grade. The flabby, sheer nonconsciousness of this yet-sentient creature made catatonia seem in comparison a rather jolly, extremely active state.

According to the caption, he had been found looking like this in an alley; he had been removed to a large city hospital, and, after ten hours, the doctors had not been able to do a single thing with him. No response at all.

Carter remembered the picture well. It had been a picture of Shirttail.

Somewhere, at this very moment, possibly in a hospital in Grenville Acres, before the eyes of a terrified, a nauseated Lee, there was another body that bore a physical resemblance to one Carter Broun, but that in every important respect looked exactly like that horrible photograph. A body that was barely alive, that would not respond to any stimuli, that could do no more than exist--since its consciousness was elsewhere.

Here, in Dorothy's private chocolate-candy world.

He had to get out of this place. No matter what, he was going to get out of this place.

Only he'd need something close to dynamite. Psychological dynamite.

"--even cut my throat," Shirttail was going on heavily. "Oh, I maybe coulda cut my throat at the beginning, if I'da thoughta it. Too late now: I'm stopped cold any time I try. What I tried starving myself, but no go. Only candy to eat inna first place. Anybody can kick candy--it don't do no good, though. You don't hafta eat here, don't even hafta breathe. You stop breathin', you don't croak. Fact, Mac, fact. I done it. Hours and hours you can hold your breath: nothin' happens. Nothin' happens but what she wants to happen. And that's all. That's it."

Carter suggested, desperately trying to drag an elementary idea out of the concept of parallel universes, "How about the two of us getting together here and talking things over, just as we're doing? If we mapped out some workable sort of plan right now, it would be something she wouldn't like to have happen--but if we did, it would be real--it would have happened."

"Mac, you still don't get it. If you and me are together talkin', then some way or other that's the way she wants it. What she figures we go together, like, and we oughta be talkin' or bein' together. Meanwhile, she's workin' it out. What she's gonna do next. What we ain't gonna like it one damn bit, but so what?--far's she's concerned."

Carter frowned, not at Shirttail's last remarks, but at an unexpected and highly uncomfortable corroboration. He had suddenly felt an enormous tugging sensation in both his mind and body. Something was pulling at him to leave the cloud and descend to the candied surface.

Dorothy was coming back. She wanted him on the spot once more. She had a new sequence. Carter fought the tug grimly. He began to perspire.

The tug grew stronger. And stronger.

He squeezed his hands into tight, painful fists. "The Malted Milk Monster," he forced himself to say between clenched teeth. "Remember--The Malted Milk Monster."

Shirttail looked up, intrigued. "Hey," he said. "Do me a favor, Mac--cuss her out. It'll do me good, honest, to hear a coupla good, first-class cuss words. Even if I won't remember them worth a damn, I'd still like to hear them again, just for old time's sake. Hey, Mac?"

Carter, threshing about in the chair, elbows digging into his sides, immersed in his own private struggle, shook his head. "No," he gasped. "Can't. Not now."

"I know. It's tough. What I mean, tough. Like when I first come, I used to battle it out the same way, every time I feel her give out with a think. I battle and I battle, and it's no go. I been moochin' all day, see, up and down the East Fifties, Sutton Place, all like that. I been moochin' for the price of a flop, for the price of a shot, but not a chance. What it's so cold, my back's draggin' the sidewalk, but the whole goddam world's got its pocket buttoned. Comes night, no flop. The whole night, I carry the banner. I stay awake, I keep walkin', what I don't wanna freeze. Five, six o'clock in the mornin', there's this can, there's half a fifth right on top in a bagfulla garbage. I hit it, oh, I hit it good."

Against his most determined mental opposition, Carter found himself getting to his feet. He knew his face was turning purple with the effort. He had to stop her now. He had to. It was the only way to invalidate her world.

But the Malt--Dorothy was calling him.

Shirttail rubbed a trembling filthy forefinger up and down the neck of the bottle. "And then I see this little alleyway between the buildings, what there's supposed to be a gate locking it off but it's been left open. I go in, it's dark, but there's a grating, hot air coming up from a basement, and I'm outa the wind. Sack time. What I think I'm one lucky old bum, but it's the last time I think about luck. I wake up, it's light, there's this kid, this Dorothy lookin' at me. Lookin', lookin'. She's got a big ball in her hands and she's standin' there lookin' at me. She points to the bottle.

"'That's my daddy's bottle,' she says. 'He threw it out last night, after the party. But it's his bottle.' I don't want no trouble with kids in this neighborhood, and I don't like the way it feels the way she looks. 'Scat, kid,' I say, and I sack out again. What I wake up next, here I am. I got the bottle and that's all I got. Mac, from that time on, it's rough. What I mean, rough. She had things here then, big things, things with legs and all kindsa--"

As if he were willing and even desirous of doing it, Carter turned his back on The Bad Old Man and began walking down through black fog. Behind him, the words continued to splash out like liquid from a steadily shaken glass. Carter's legs walked in direct contradiction to the nerve impulses they were receiving.

He couldn't refuse, couldn't resist. That much was obvious. As well try to refuse, to resist, the flood of forty days and forty nights, or the sun that Joshua made to stand still. Another way. He must find another way to fight. Meanwhile, he had to come as she demanded.

Dorothy was waiting for him on a patch of well-mown grass near a pink and green bonbon bush. As he came down beside her, she glanced away from him for a moment and at the dark cloud.

It disappeared.

What happened to Shirttail, Carter wondered--had he been wiped out for good? Or temporarily relegated to some sort of Limbo of reverie?

And then he really saw Dorothy--and the changes she had made.

She was still wearing the blue jeans, but the cashmere sweater was clean, perfectly clean. A bright, brand-new yellow. And she was taller. And she was even more slender than she had been before.

But that yellow cashmere sweater!

It was filled with two impossibly protruding breasts that belonged on a poster in front of a cheap movie house announcing the triumphant attributes of a Hollywood love goddess.

The rest of her body was still childlike, seemingly even more so than when he had first seen her, but this was due to the caricature effect of that incredible bosom.

Except--

Yes, except for the smear of red across her lip, the lumps of mascara at the tips of the eyelashes and the clashing, smashing colors on her fingernails. Did this mean--

He shook his head uncertainly, irritably. He hadn't counted on anything like this. Whatever it was.

"So," Dorothy simpered at last. "We meet again."

"It was meant to be," Carter found himself breathing. "We two have a common destiny. We live under the same strange star."

Talk about your precocious kids! But where did she get the dialogue, he wondered frantically--movies? Television drama? Books? Or out of her own neurosis-crammed head? And what did he represent in it? Her role was obvious: she was blatantly competing with Lee.

There was a struggling wisp of uncombed thought: Lee and who else? But over and around it was the horrified knowledge that he was saying things he would never say of his own volition. How soon before he'd be thinking such cliches?

And there was a memory at the back of his mind--he had a name for her that was very much his own creation, very hard to remember, but he had to remember it, something like, rather like, let's see now--Dorothy. The only name for her there was.

But that hadn't been it. No.

He thought in pitiful, despairing wing-flaps, like an ostrich trying to fly. Awful, awful. He had to touch his own real personality somehow. He had to break through.

Shatter--

"Is your love then so strong, so truly true?" she demanded. "You have not forgotten me after all this time? Look into my eyes and tell me so. Tell me that your heart still belongs to me alone."

No, I won't, he groaned. He looked into her eyes. I can't! Not such absolute baloney. And she's a kid--a little girl!

"Do you doubt me, my darling?" he said softly, the sentences coming out of him in so many punched-out breaths. "Don't ever, ever doubt me. You are the only one for me, forever and always, as long as there is a sky overhead and an earth beneath. You and I, forever and always."

He had to stop. She was getting complete control over him. He said whatever she wanted him to say. And he was going to think it, too. But he couldn't prevent the words from flowing out of his mouth, once it was his turn, once she had finished and was waiting--

Dorothy looked off into the distance toward the two hills of equal height. Her eyes were misty, and, in spite of himself, Carter felt a catch in his throat. Ridiculous! And yet how sad...

"I almost feared your love," she mused. "I grew lonely and came to believe--"

Now. While she was doing the talking. While the full force of her mind was not turned compellingly upon him. Make it real. That's the way to bust this dream world. Make it real.

He reached for her.

"--that you had forgotten and found another. How was I to know--"

He grabbed at her.

He made it real.

There was an instant when the ground shook under his feet, when there was ripping sound from one end to another of the solid blue sky. There was just one instant when he exulted.

Then Dorothy turned wide, terror-stricken eyes at him. And screamed!

Her scream was the loudest thing in the universe. It went on and on and on, deafeningly. Yet he wasn't deafened, because he heard it all, every bit of it from the beginning, in each and every note of its immense range, all of its skull-powdering volume, all of its volcanic fear.

Not only Dorothy screamed. The candy trees screamed. The cookie bushes screamed. The two hills screamed. The chocolate river stood up between its screaming banks and screamed. The stones, the very air screamed.

And the ground fell apart and Carter Broun dropped into it. He dropped for centuries, he dropped for eons, he dropped for galactic eternities. Then he stopped dropping, stopped screaming himself, took his hands from his ears and looked around.

He was inside a dull gray, perfectly spherical, perfectly featureless vault. There were no doors and no windows, no seams and no cracks anywhere in the curving surface all about him. It was absolutely impenetrable and absolutely soundproof.

It had to be, he began to realize, as he scuttled dizzily around and around inside it. It had to be impenetrable and soundproof. It had to be at the bottommost bottom of the dream world, so that no sight and no sound from it should ever reach Dorothy's consciousness.

It was a total repression, this chamber of her mind, built to hide the deadly dangerous memory that was himself--built to last as long as Dorothy lasted.

AFTERWORD

One way to explain this story is to point out that, as Picasso had his blue period, I had my Bronx-school-teacher period. For about two years of my life, I seemed to be involved only with females who were elementary-school teachers and who lived in the farthest yay Bronx. The late-evening trips I took with them from my apartment in lower Manhattan's Greenwich Village! The long, well-nigh interminable, rattling subway rides to their clifflike apartment-houses and back! I dreamed of meeting at least one young woman who lived in a suburb--but, unlike my protagonist here, I never did.

And then, of course, there was the fat little girl who came up to my chair one evening, at a dinner party, and asked me the question about a giant caterpillar and a million tiny little lions. Her parents were so proud.

I put it together in a pure fantasy tale aimed at Beyond, the sister magazine to Horace Gold's Galaxy. But Horace told me he needed it as science fiction for Galaxy; he was overstocked on fantasy for Beyond. I poked at it and pried at it, discontentedly, finally putting it aside to work on something else.

On a summer evening in 1958, on one of his rare trips to New York, I showed the piece to Fredric Brown, who immediately suggested that I use the science-fiction rationale of his own delightful What Mad Universe. I did, and Horace bought the story.

All right--isn't that an explanation? Now here's another, absolutely equally true:

I read Florence Becker Lennon's Victoria Through the Looking Glass, and was deeply impressed by that Freudian investigation into Lewis Carroll.

Then I sat down immediately and reread all of Alice. I reread it all three separate times in a single session. I decided that I hated Freud.

Then I started writing "The Malted Milk Monster."