Front matter (continued 6)

But, then, I always wonder that.

I'm the silly jackass who does.

Look—waiters, busboys, and you over there in the cage with the pointed auburn haircut and the long eyelashes and the tight dress—here we have a handsome young woman who has set about, by means not nearly so rare or unorthodox as you pretend among yourselves—to find one or two universals, or fundamentals, which are not in the book.

What book?

Not in any?

Oh—yes—those banned novels. And those mournful characters who thought only of their pale, poetical brows plunging into the Pit, the lonely well. Or sordid sun-tan oil on Jackson's vulgar beach.

When will the poets get the censors off their backs, too—and write like men, for a change? God's no fairy, or Satan, either.

What foul compulsion is this—that every page of the Tragedy must itself be mournful stuff, sinister, or sick?

Farce, instead!

Does the tragic deer, the beautiful, the doomed, imbue his every poolside hour with dolorous contemplation? Must all the activities of the woodchuck be regarded as dismal? To write the stark terms of our essence on every breath and sentence of the moment is to be the own advocate of death, the white bones himself, and to overlook the splendor with such eyeless concentration that the poem becomes a joke on the poet.

I flirted with Yvonne—told her stories of Paris and Hollywood and Miami Beach—held her hand—all, in chivalrous camouflage.

Paul came at last.

I hardly needed to see the stoop—the broken reach to push open the doors that enclosed our cold air cube—to know that, between us, we had not lifted his oppression. For, when it is succubus that's lost, incubus perforce remains.

He looked disapprovingly at Yvonne. "Mrs. Prentiss, this is my nephew," I said. "Paul Wilson."

"Hello, Mrs. Prentiss." He turned from her. "I'll barge along, Phil. I thought you'd be alone."

"Oh, hell, sit."

"Really—it's not possible!" His ardent features were emphasized by pallor—and shooting about on his face, besides.

"Sit," I said, "and eat—or otherwise you'll force me to leave the lady and go with you. She has a date after dinner, anyhow."

He groaned and sat down—nipping the menu from the waiter's hands roughly. "No news."

"Tough." I turned to Yvonne. "His—fiancée—is lost."

"How awful! What happened?"

Paul glared at me for a moment. "Your friend Dave," he finally said, in a tone more polite than his facial expression, "did all he could. Got an agency looking. Sent a fellow over to stay in my—our—place. We hunted up some more friends of hers—that Dave got track of—and they told us of others. We've been seeing them. It isn't much fun."

"Why not quit, then? Wait for her?"

"If all she did was walk out," Yvonne agreed, "that's absolutely the only thing to do. Sit tight. Have a good time. Suppose she finds out you're apparently raising heaven and earth to locate her? She'll just hide in a safe spot and enjoy things that much more."

Paul turned to her. "Are you serious?"

Yvonne was working on him—signaling interest with her gray eyes (they had come considerably alive)—tossing the organized gold shower of her hair—moving herself about in such a way as to emphasize her sex. "It's a darned good generalization. But what happened?"

I wondered how he'd put it.

"Marcia—" he began, and described her. We were made to see a woman somewhere between Elaine-the-Fair and Florence Nightingale. "I was just about licked when we met! I'm a physicist—work on atomic energy. She made me live—filled me with new feelings—taught me what love could mean to a man like me. Then—we scrapped. Over nearly nothing!" His eyes moved reproachfully to me—then back, confidingly, to the girl. She was listening, nodding with understanding, frowning with sympathy, and keeping her red lips parted the whole time. "We scrapped. She decided we weren't suited to each other. So she left me. That was—yesterday. I'd give everything I own to get her back! Everything I own—and am!"

"What exactly did you fight about?" Yvonne asked.

Paul's expression became vague. "Never mind. It wasn't important."

"Are you sure?"

He gave both of us a dark, defiant stare. "Yes."

"Then," Yvonne said, "I'm right. You mustn't continue this search operation. You should wait. And entertain yourself. Let her do the coming back—since she ran away."

It was the first hope he had felt. "I wish I could believe it would work."

"Take my word for it. I'm a woman."

"And how," he asked scornfully, "do I start this gay, forgetful act?"

"With me," Yvonne said. "I'll break my date. You can escort me to the most conspicuous place in town."

"You?" Paul took his first careful look at her. She undoubtedly satisfied him. But he was not altogether persuaded of the plan. It represented merely a new idea—and, as such, offered a small unexpected degree of optimism.

"I'd like it," Yvonne went on. "For a lot of reasons. I wasn't sure I wanted to keep my date. I think you're nice—even if terribly foolish. And Phil bailed me out of a tizzy the other night—so I could hardly do less for a nephew of his."

"What if I did it—acted blasé as hell—and Marcia was just relieved when she found out?"

"Then, Paul," she said, "nothing would have helped, anyhow."

You could see him grinding his jaw down on that one. He wanted Marcia. He was determined to get her back. Into what he regarded as his love had gone a good deal of unrecognized pride. Furthermore, he had undertaken to recover her by what he thought of as logical steps—ignoring his own hysterical condition—and unaware that his brand of logic did not, would not, could not apply in such a situation.

Yvonne knew that to interest men you talked about them. She started, indirectly. "Is he a good scientist?" she asked me.

"Terrific!"

I told her of his achievements in school; of his appointment. "He didn't quite make Saipan for the first bomb drop. But he was at Bikini. And he commutes to Eniwetok."

"I guess they're born," she said.

Paul took that up. "Born, hell! Made. You have the urge to study something. You happen to get going on math. In the end, you're a physicist."

I argued that. I thought an argument would change the subject from Marcia—on whom he'd concentrated ever since he'd brought up her name on Thursday. "Aptitude's hereditary. You can't take ten kids—even with high IQs—and turn out ten mathematicians."

"I say you can!"

"So does the Soviet. Marx, Lenin, Stalin. Communism depends on the theory that, given the right environment, people will turn out the way you want—since they start with equal possibilities. If that isn't so—communism doesn't make sense."

"It's silly on the face of it," Yvonne said.

"The geneticists think the communist idea is silly," I agreed. "In fact, they know so."

Paul said, "Nuts."

"Do you," I asked, "know anything about genetics? Are you au courant in this particular affair?"

"No. But—"

"Then stay out of it. Good God! Isn't that like a damned scientist?" I turned to Yvonne. "He'd laugh at me if I tried to argue with him about mesons. He's been briefed to the eyeballs on that. But he'll argue with anybody about genes and chromosomes and heredity—because he hasn't bothered to learn the known facts!"

Paul didn't rise. "Okay!" he said. "Okay. So communism is based on that fallacy. Others, too. We have a few fallacies to contend with, in this country."

"Sure," I agreed. "I pointed one out to the Reverend Socker Melton, who called on me today. Old friend of pop's. Pointed out that, if we understood the importance of our celebrated liberty—we'd have been ready and willing to go to war the instant we realized that the Soviet holdout was going to force a restriction of knowledge. So what? Do our faults entitle other people to faults? Or vice versa? That's merely the maudlin attitude of Joe Doaks!"

Paul looked at the girl with a mock sneer. "Phil hates the common man."

"Hate, hell. I'm about the last friend he has left. Nearly the only one who refuses to boost common man exclusively, so as to exploit him—consciously or unconsciously. I'm one of the few who still care enough about poor old common man to criticize him. Everybody else is a planner or a mere booster—presidential candidates—Stalin—Hitler—just rah-rah-for-humanity boys. I'm still trying to save common man from himself."

"You chill me," Paul said sarcastically.

"Chill you?" I would have picked up any lead to keep this bicker alight. It wasn't about Marcia.

He spoke to Yvonne. "Phil is the champion lost-cause defender of them all. Whatever he's for is sure to fail. He has the mildew-touch. My childhood is pockmarked with embarrassments that came from having people read his stuff—or having them barge over to see us and tell my dad that his brother-in-law was off the beam again."

"I can imagine," Yvonne said.

"Phil was out there hollering for rearmament in the thick of the old pacifist days. He was an air-power promoter when the brass was folding 'em in like eggs in puddings. He predicted we'd have to fight the Soviet a dozen years ago—and our boys immediately chummed up with Stalin. He went roaring out for intervention in the last war—bucking isolationists and practically cracking his insides when England and France went in without us. The minute the bomb was shot off—he started battling military control and telling the folks the mess we'd be in—and are in—right now. Once—down in Miami—where he lives—he started a big health crusade. It's a prize pesthole. But that collapsed in his face, too. What he says is usually right—but what happens always makes him look like a louse. If he's championing common man now—well—draw your own conclusion." He winked at me.

"I'm championing the Better Man, these days," I said. "Breeding the Better Common Man. Another noble prospect doomed to fail in our time."

Paul snorted. "I'm for training them better. Education."

"And I'm not against education—either. But you can't polish a brick. You can't make—"

"Watch it! The chemists can make anything out of anything."

"Take me," I said. "All my life, I've hired somebody to give me lessons in something."

Paul grinned a little. "You are a hard case. We admit that."

Yvonne laughed. "If he means dancing lessons—he's done all right."

"People," I plugged along on the new topic, "ought to summarize their professional, postschool lessons and see what they've learned. Consider me. In New York, I once took boxing lessons. Can't box for a damn. In Hollywood, I hired a strong man to live with me and teach me to lift weights. I got all beefed up—and then got sick in Poland—and the beef evaporated. I took lessons on the piano accordion for a year, once. I've also taken piano lessons, saxophone lessons, and mandolin lessons. Ukelele, too, in 1919. Can't play a note. Took golf lessons for years. The last few times I played, I pushed 110. Took tennis lessons. Haven't hit a ball over the net in twenty years. Got a whiz to teach me ping-pong—for five bucks a throw. Can't return the serves of children. Studied a couple of foreign languages, besides the ones in school and college. Can't even say, 'Good morning' and 'Thanks' in 'em, any more. And horses! Great God! Hired cowboys to murder me every day, all day, for six months. Went to a dude ranch in the Carolinas and got briefed in eastern saddles. Hundreds of saddle-hours. And what? Hate to ride. Never do, if I can avoid it. Is that all? I haven't begun! Hired some Olympic champs to give me fancy diving lessons. Got going good—and found out in a couple of years I was slowing up—couldn't snap around any more. Had to quit that. Spent a lot of time in the North Woods. Had an Indian for a guide. Learned to stalk game. Learned to shoot—taught by experts. Can't hit a barn. Don't enjoy hunting. Spent a fortune deep-sea fishing. Don't even rate as an 'Expert' at my club. Bridge lessons—God Almighty, the time I've fussed with that! And what? Some days I'm fair—and some days I can't remember through jacks—which is how I was when I began! Learned once to identify all the flora and fauna in the Adirondacks. Moved away and never seen the region since. Couldn't tell bluebells from burdock. Well, maybe those. But—"

"Is all that the truth?" Yvonne asked doubtfully.

Paul chortled. "The funny thing is, it is! Old Phil's spent his whole life trying to discover something he could learn!"

"I draw myself up," I answered, "with dignity. As a modern gentleman, I am the complete sciolist. The most-smattered man you'll meet in your lifetime. There is almost nothing that I'm not slightly versed in and pretty poor at. Why—I even took archery lessons, once. Got second prize in Palm Springs—"

"Good heavens!" she said.

"I gave him some lessons in quantum theory, myself," Paul continued. "Rotten student. Wants to know the final formulation and what it means—and detests to brush up his calculus first. He can do magic tricks, too—earned his high school pin money that way. He used to spin ropes—jump through 'em. When I was a very small kid, I looked forward to seeing him. Like a one-man circus. Then I caught on—at about four years old. Uncle Phil was in kindergarten in about every subject there was. Never got any farther. Just took different primary courses every year."

"In a minute," I said, "I'll leave you guys to your libel and go back to my serial. Somebody taught me how to write fiction, along there someplace—"

Paul grinned and said, "Touché—a little."

I felt better than I had all weekend. Paul surely would calm down with Yvonne. And she wasn't going to loiter with Gwen that evening.

It left me with nothing to worry about except a no longer very sore spot in my throat—and with no emotion to grapple—except a feeling of being lonelier than God.

I went back to my room and turned the lights on bright and sat down and looked at the roses Dave had sent.

They were my flowers-for-the-living and, being alive, they should be appreciated.

There they stood—with lighter green stems and leaves than most roses and perilous, pale-green thorns. The blooms weren't quite full blown, in spite of the heat, and they were as large as any I'd ever seen—as long as my fingers. The many lamps in the room highlighted the curved outer edges of the flowers and left only the deep, inner shadows. The petals were as voluptuous as a woman's skin; they seemed to glow, like an aniline dye in ultraviolet rays. A slightly sharp perfume filled the room—a mnemonic of things that could not be materialized, of tea roses in childhood gardens and people who had been nice to you and died a long time ago. There they stood—stiff and radiant and hopelessly beautiful.

I let myself feel them—feel them the way you let yourself feel when the concert hall goes dark and the baton makes its first, swift oval.

They came from hothouses.

I thought of gardens.

All the gardens I had made or cared about.

Roses of my own, on carefully pruned canes standing in New England mulch. Rented roses on rose trees in Hollywood. I thought of sweet peas—fragrant rainbows along old fences. Of delphiniums—hybrids taller than my head, rockets frozen at the climax of blue burst. Lilies and phlox and poppies. I thought of annuals—of planting the grains, setting out the frail seedlings—and walking the later carpet—a hundred styles of color: zinnias and marigolds and asters, verbenas and lavender, sweet William and candytuft and pansies, nasturtiums, forget-me-nots and primroses. I thought of foxglove, too, and Canterbury bells. For a long time, of hollyhocks regimented against white clapboard—red, mauve, yellow, pink, purple, orange. Then I thought of sunflowers growing like Jack's beanstalk. Spring flowers and the years I'd spent changing a steep rise of field into a rock garden, plowing, bulldozing, wading in a cold brook to collect the great, flat stones, trucking them home, embedding them one by one in the slope—on aromatic rainy days, in the sweet spring sun, and in the hard dirt of October. A wall here, steps there, an outcrop yonder, and a place for a pool below.

Then the little hill opened into memory's bloom of crocus and narcissus, daffodil, tulip, hyacinth and scilla, the creams and livid whites, pale yellows and money-gold hues, and the many blues of springtime, bright, pastel, lilac. The bells and stars and cups—and the spring scent that is the honeyed promise of summer coming.

Next, I thought of the woodland flowers—flowers before men found them. The precious arbutus, inexhaustible spring beauties, violets, the anemones, the lady-slippers, bloodroot, showy orchis standing in a wet glade beside a moss-shawled log, and pitcher plants—red rubber flowers on the sphagnum belly of weird bog. All summer long the rues and cardinal flowers and gentians; ferns—goldenrod, when the clear air cooled—when night's sky throbbed with wings and carried to earth the enthusiastic, strange twitter of migration.

I, too, migrated.

I came to my other home in Florida—the crashing flowers, the trees bigger than houses and bright as a florist's potted plants: poinciana, bauhinia, spathodia, jacaranda. Extravagant vines—alamanda, yellow as these roses, trumpet flowers as orange as Mexico's sunsets, pandoreas, solandras, and the holy, nepenthic stephanotis. Jasmine. Glade hammocks with orchids blooming on stumps like swarms of sucking butterflies—great white wading birds watching and vultures pinned above in the blue, cloud-dappled sky.

Brief glory of flower-upholstered deserts.

Alpine flowers in the high, thin, whimpering air with near snow.

And trees. Great God, the trees! It was, taken by itself, a many lifetimes. All good. All beautiful.

A great magic given to the modern man who thought of beauty never. Or who thought beauty was a ship's engine, or the line of high ferroconcrete, or the color scheme of a porch, or—adoring Christ forgive us, a new car! Something he made, anyhow.

This was some of my lives.

Ricky had shared a number of them with me—created and divided the hours and days in the years of the flowers.

Why should I wonder concerning anything, who knew and loved flowers like this—why not, in the continual floral celebrations, take all content from marvel itself?

Men missed it, most of them.

Generals detailed insensate GIs to set square borders of ageratum around the headquarters lawn.

Statesmen wore bachelor's-buttons into their deadlocks. Or maybe carnations.

Dowagers and whores—cattleyas: spilled on avid breasts and icy shoulders.

Millionaires decreed. Gardeners dug. Who looked—who saw?

Business executives had something sent up for the office, daily, and never noticed the color or knew the name. Flowers executed and embalmed to add their priceless prestige to dirty bucks.

Schoolboys planted beans and watched the halved cotyledons ascend. Then grew and prospered and spent their lives sawing women in half.

At last, tired relatives recriminated while they embedded melancholy metal pots in the green grittiness of graves.

Who cherished?

Who left them alone in the forest?

Who else—like Ricky—knew each plant to be an individual?

I put a call through.

"Hello, darling," said her clear voice.

Oh, look—love—we've had—centuries together—so beautiful, so various—people, yes—each other, yes—the topaz mornings and the amorous unsleepiness—the vague rainy Thursday afternoons—the incandescent, rose-petal you—the touching—we've had—places—Havana, for instance—this vaulting steel town—but also flowers, dear. I was thinking how long flowers really lasted. Surely, you won't mind, that the end is here? After entire histories of evolution shared by just the two of us? I knew you wouldn't—now.

I said, "How's Rushford?"

"More important—how are you?"

"Sprung-witted. Weary. And pursuing."

"Nearly finished?"

"I should make it—tomorrow. If I hold out tonight."

"Phil! What's wrong?"

The echo—the electrical overtone—that long way.

"Nothing's wrong, dear. Things are picking up. I picked up a blonde, for instance—and Paul's taking her out. So maybe his mental health is improving."

"And maybe you should have taken her out yourself! You sound like somebody playing an ocarina in Mammoth Cave; positively sepulchral."

"The heat. Expanded my sinuses. Gives me that hollow ring. Is it hot up there?"

"Eighty-six tonight. The natives are dying of it."

"It must be a hundred here."

"I read about it in the Buffalo papers. Gee!"

"It's pretty lurid. They had a veterans' parade yesterday—and I went over to Fifth to watch—and it was damn near immobilized in the asphalt. It would have been funny—millions of guys stuck there—blocking traffic all winter—! If you go out just to get a paper, you need asbestos shoes. Any minute, this joint may run like paraffin."

"I think you ought to knock off and go see somebody."

"Town's evacuated. Wouldn't be emptier if Molotov was threatening to A-bomb."

"Do you feel all right?"

"Sure, Tud. As all right as you can when you're standing by to swim up out of your own sweat, any minute. How's mother? What new mess has Popcorn made?"

She gave me the country news.

"Won't be too long now," I said.

"Miss you."

"Miss you. Been thinking about the gardens. See you day after tomorrow—barring acts of God."

"I'd rather wait longer—and have you sounding better."

"You wait till I get there and I'll do my own sounding."

"Good night," she said. "I love you."

When I hung up, I was quivering.

I'd come pretty close:

Well, Ricky, I am worried. I went to Tom's. Of course, it's probably going to turn out to be nothing. But until I know for sure I feel—the hell with it! I'm ashamed of being this way!

I sat there, taking divots out of myself and not getting on the green.

I looked at the roses again.

They were just yellow roses—big ones—in a glass vase. I yanked out the bridge table, batted the bridge lamp around, sat, and bent into it.

6

Yvonne came through the connecting doors about one o'clock. I was still bent—bent enough so it took a moment to turn and straighten after she said, "Hello, Svengali!"

She was drunk. Not happy-drunk, or mean-drunk, either. Nervous-drunk.

"Your pure relation left me," she said.

"Left you how?"

"Left me in this condition. Buy me a Scotch."

I sent the word.

She threw herself on the divan, blew down the front of her rose-pink dress—which was wrinkled now, wet under the armpits, city-smudged at the edges—and fixed her fidgety eyes on me. "We went down to the Palais and danced a bit. He's lousy. We started in having a flock of drinks. He talked. Good God, how Wylies talk! He told me the story of his life—including the full saga of Marcia. He got to that later—at the Club Mauve."

"Nice little spot!"

"He said we were both in a revolting mood and so we should go to some repulsive place."

"Then you told him the story of your life, too?"

"Up to when I met you."

"Is that going to be a date, from now on? Milestone? And millstone, too? Try to bear in mind—it's your life and you're of age."

"So all right, lambie-pie! No hard feelings. The point is—the more he told me about his Marcia—the less he noticed me. We switched to Planter's Punches, in due time, and had a zombie somewhere along the way. For a while I thought the rum was going to do what my gilded fleece couldn't. We necked. It's dark as a bat's groin there, anyhow."

"Pretty metaphor."

"We necked, I said. Back in the old days—last week—I could neck with a boy from the time he cut me out at the prom until bacon and eggs at Child's—and never feel a thing I didn't want to feel. Tonight—though—I lost ground so fast you'd think I was a juvenile delinquent trying her first reefer."

"Poor premise—but I get the idea."

"And what?"

She turned and smiled with excess brightness at George, when he carried in the round, silver tray.

"And what—?" She revived the question. "Just as your cute little Paulie-pie was getting interesting—and I thought, interested—he talked himself right into going on the hunt for his Marcia again!"

"That's too bad."

"It's too bad—and what are you going to do about it?"

"Remember what I said concerning how I don't like girls when they drink too much? Even a little bit too much?"

Yvonne gulped explosively. "All right, then! So I call up Gwen! And that's your fault!"

"Telephone's right beside you."

She looked at it sulkily. Then she grabbed it and gave the number.

"Hello ... this is Mrs. Roland Prentiss ... is Gwen Taylor there?" She stuck out her tongue at me. "Gwen, darling!... dad's gone, at last ... sure ... that would be lovely ... of course!"

"Ace-in-the-hole," I said.

"Don't be—" She shrugged and laughed restlessly. "Oh—all right. It's my life, though, isn't it?"

"That's the idea."

"Phil!"

"Present—and unaccountable." I didn't feel witty.

"You come with me—" She was standing and she finished the highball standing.

I shook my head. "I'm going after Paul."

"Where?"

"Here and there." I had one idea, anyway.

She undid her dress and stepped out of it and threw it over her arm. She looked at me for another moment with eyes both jumpy and expressionless. "You wouldn't regret it."

"Some other time, baby. I got to go find that cluck."

"See you," she said and swept out in her bra and petticoat.

This time, when I heard her shower begin, I locked my door. Then I put on a dry, newly pressed seersucker, a light silk tie, and went out before she decided to try again.

The cab tooled along Fifth Avenue a ways, dove through the Park, and rattled into a semislum section—an area of delicatessens and bowling alleys, dated, disreputable hotels, massage parlors, shrieking truck brakes, trickling electric signs, jaded cafeterias, and a crosshatch of streets narrower than the avenues, darker, lined on both sides with identical brownstones that exuded a smell of senescence and rotted brick tenements upon the façades of which hung rusty fire escapes. On the fire escapes were people, their pets, bedding and potted plants, beer pails and radios, along with their accents of Crete, Sicily and the Balkans, Bohemia and Slovakia and Sudetenland—the wonderful poor, the authority for democracy—they said, the intellectuals who had made gods of them without touching them.

I looked, listened, sniffed attentively.

Last chance.

And I remembered.

Not far away, probably torn down, probably only a greasy ghost sharing the fourth dimension of some new structure with a marquee and a doorman, was a hall bedroom within spitting distance of the curved rails of an extinct elevated railroad where I'd made my abode for a year. Not far away, the loft in which I'd earned my eighteen simoleons a week with the other sweated youths. The counters of that department store where, with the stupendous poor, I'd cut yard goods. Far away, though, the farms I'd labored on and farther still the crewmen of the freighter. In time, however, Rushford was near—the American rustic who will not call himself a peasant because he drives a Ford. Cruel, unwashed, suspicious, insanitary louts and ugly lasses—poor.

Salt of the earth. Savor of dung.

Backbone of the nation. Spineless.

In a properly informed electorate, the majority will make intelligent decisions.

Agreed.

Then, gentlemen,

shall we not inform the electorate that this is the age of knowledge? Shall we not rectify the schizoid discrepancies between these people on the fire escapes, bumpkins, and the inhabitants of penthouses? Give the good-natured fornications of the poor back to the taut middle classes? Inform the poor of the ways of children? Release the entombed libido of them all? Having done that, so they may vote sanely—having revealed the democracy of desire—how shall we set about to teach them advanced algebra, genetics, relativity, and bacteriology—so that their acts will be in some small measure relevant to the exigencies of our times?

Freedom of the mind is immured in the vaults of the Navy and the War Department and the Air Forces.

Freedom of speech is chained in the cellars of the churches.

Freedom of action is spread-eagled on the wheel of business.

There is no information in the electorate.

Instinct only.

It is a fact we had better face unless we are prepared to lose our own selves in the stunted years of an American feudalism.

Liberty, or death, gentlemen.

We who would not fight for liberty because we did not see the involvement of it are staring into the hot barrels of death.

The time for sacrifice is at hand. What have we? Production, instead! And compulsory reproduction.

I went up to Hattie's bagnio because I am a middle-class American male in the higher brackets, of Princeton extraction, who was denied the poor man's access to females during adolescence and early maturity and who (owing probably to that abnormal deprivation) belongs to a distinguished group that makes blah per cent of its sex contacts with prostitutes, blah per cent by unorthodox means, and blah per cent with males. That is evidently why I knew the address. I went, owing to the fact that a member of the generation behind me—a prodigy, similarly conditioned—of superior stature, superior health, superior life expectancy, superior stability (sic), and a superior happiness quotient—far above the average by the tables!—had come a psychological cropper in a tart's arms owing to the fact that the Age of Kinsey is also the Atomic Age and he, briefed in the latter, was emotionally distrait over the conundrum: how to tell the people on the fire escape all about the effect of neutrons on chromosomes—a datum to be regarded as utterly essential for political judgment. And other troubles.

Personally, I was of the opinion the poor could not be told at this late date and would have to learn by doing. Also the rich. And this judgment, while it in no way impaired my faith in democracy, and while it gave me a good assurance of the long future, singularly blighted my assessment of so-called democratic practices in the land during the past century and filled me with a ribald contumely for the poor-doting, poor-blind, wisdom-spurning, technologically blank intellectuals, together with nearly everybody else.

I wanted to get my nephew out of a jam before he got into one.

This is a sentiment I bear toward all humanity.

My successes in its prosecution are, sometimes, trivial.

Besides which

a man who thinks he is soon to die

enjoys kiting around in a city he has cherished all his life, among the people he loves, at night, in a cab.

I rode up through the marble lobby and past the floor-ledges of the building in the gold elevator cage with the colored boy whose face showed no trace of his fascinating, perennial opportunity to look upon (before and after) the persons and countenances of hundreds of the great, the prominent, and the rich, who were not quite satisfied with the legal sex mores of their environment and the permissions of their acquaintances.

I inhaled the many-doored hallway.

"Hattie," said Viola, "is out at a party."

"Is my nephew Paul here?"

She shook her elegant head. "He hasn't been in."

Well, I could have phoned. Why didn't I?

"Miss Taylor's here." The jungle-bright eyes sloped darkly toward me and away.

"Is she? I thought—"

"I'll call her." She led me to the same room—Hattie's parlor.

I sat down. I could stick around a while. Paul might not come here, in his humiliating chase. He probably would. He'd had—no doubt—other leads to check first.

Gwen appeared. She was wearing her hair down, tonight, and a silk dress the color of a new penny. A matching dress. "'Lo, Phil." She walked gracefully to the phonograph, clicked records, turned dials, and filled the room with soft bongoses, maracas, the background thud of a conga drum.

"I thought you were going downtown?"

"Soon. Did you mind—about last night?"

"Tonight—I never mind about last night. Rule of my life. Look, Gwen. How did you know—so quickly—exactly what that gal was like?"

"I told you," she said. "I get feelings."

"I don't. Just surprises."

"You try to think," she said. "Figure. Then you go by the results of that. It's no good. You just—relax—and see what your sensations are."

"We were never allowed to relax about it. From the cradle to the crematory—we have to be either tensely on guard or else proficiently on the job."

"It's a wonder people like you ever have babies."

"We don't have many."

Gwen smiled. "On guard?"

"And proficient."

"Nature's way," she said, "of reducing the number of real dopes! Tell me something."

"Sure."

"If Yvonne hadn't busted in last night—?"

"The answer is no."

"That's what I thought."

"It wasn't you."

She stirred her red-brown hair. "I know that. If it had been me—if I'd thought so—I'd have repressed my own feelings about your blonde roommate."

"What's going to happen to her?"

Gwen curved one shoulder toward me and straightened it—a shrug that dismissed responsibility. "How do you think a girl like me feels—about one like her? She has everything. She's always had it. And thrown herself away."

"Save the tough act for somebody you can fool!"

Gwen came over and put her fingers in my hair and turned my head up and kissed me where it wouldn't show. "She wants to know—that's all. Why shouldn't she? She's been dying all her life from not knowing."

"A hundred and fifty million people—"

"Save out a few million, Phil. Not everybody has the sordid past or no past at all—or none to speak of. Some just grow up naturally."

"I'd like to meet 'em."

"Oh—" she sat down near me—"you'd never know, anyhow. Because if you found out—or anybody found out—they couldn't go on being natural any longer. It's against the law to be a person in this world. Naturalness—that relaxation I spoke of—has to stay in the bootleg department, to stay at all."

"Pity."

"You're telling me!" She thought awhile. "I'll give you some news. I don't know whether Hattie would, or not. Marcia's here."

I waited till a small shock was absorbed. "Yeah?"

"Came in this afternoon."

"What doing?"

"Working."

"Why?"

"Want to talk to her?"

"Yeah."

She kissed me again. "If the unfaithful mood ever comes over you—"

"Don't count on it."

She chuckled. "You're one of the lucky ones. Only—you don't know it. That's the way they are, mostly."

"Some compliment."

She nodded. Her metallic hair swung before my eyes. She got up from the arm of my chair. "So long! Don't worry about—you know who."

Marcia came to the door in a few minutes. She was wearing a black dress—a thin black dress and—nothing else. Her blue eyes were defiant.

"Hi!"

"Paul is apt to barge in here any minute."

"I know. I thought he might." She shut the door.

I went over to the window and squinted through the dark heat at the Jersey rivage. "He might. And you were going to have him sent in. You were going to go through a prepared routine. You were going to disillusion him—but quick—break his heart right now—and get it over with. You were going to tell him about the cute salesman who dropped in around four. The newspaper publisher who stopped by at five. The nice banker who hung around till he was late for dinner. And the college kid who'd just left."

"You read minds," she said.

"Don't."

"Why not?" She walked over to me. "What else? All you had to do the other day was to take one quick look at me and see I was a tramp. Oh—I could feel you paw me. I could see you putting your damned twenty bucks on my bureau. You knew—so you knew how to look. And—sooner or later—everybody would know. And know how to look. And look that way. And where would a good kid's wife be, then?"

"You might have thought of that sooner," I said, ignoring the false charges for the moment.

"I suppose I make the world go around! What did I think about? What would anybody think about? They'd think—this is how a sweet guy treats a nice girl. This is how he talks. This is how he holds your hand. Holds your hand, for God's sake! You'd get a real kick out of that—the realest one you'd had in years. You'd think—maybe. Maybe the life could end. Maybe I could have an apartment someplace and kids and a guy people respected. Maybe I could get into the bridge games and the theater parties and the midnight snacks next door and the church suppers, even, and drive a sedan around a suburb, buying groceries at the chain stores and not forgetting to pick up Junior's shoes."

"Forsaking all others?"

"Yes," she said, "I thought about that, too! I'm human. Feelings come over me. I'm maybe even like a kleptomaniac that can't resist a box of tacks in a hardware store or a pair of cheap earrings on a counter. Maybe I could learn to choke it down. Control it. I did—for months."

"And now?"

"Now it doesn't matter."

"Months isn't years."

Her eyes fixed on mine. They were not defiant now—but speculative. "Sure. So I'm human. So Paul knew that. I told him he couldn't expect a letter-perfect show, forever."

"Did you?"

"Certainly, I did. And what did he say? He said I couldn't expect one from him, either."

"He's being pretty—devoted—right now."

"That's what has to stop. That's why I hope he does come in here. That's why I asked Hattie to let me stay here—instead of just putting me on the phone exchange, the way it used to be. I wanted to go back with a bang. After the way you looked me over the other noon—that's exactly what I wanted to do."

"Funny."

"I see nothing funny."

"I thought—you were looking me over."

She sat down suddenly—folded in the middle and dropped into a chair. "You did?"

"Yes, I did."

"Well—here I am." She spoke in a low tone—not with resignation, not with spite. "All you have to do is say so."

I skipped that. "Marcia, I never needed to consider what sort of person you were. All I needed to think about was what sort of guy Paul is. And I could see—I thought I could—the whole thing coming apart—slowly, painfully, rottenly—"

"Go on. Play God with us poor mortals."

"My opinion—that's all—sure. I know Paul pretty well, though."

"Better than I do?" She grinned sarcastically.

"Better. I know better what he comes from. Then I saw you. I had the impression, Marcia, that your maternal instincts were involved. You were pulling the child to your warm breast and nourishing his starved little body. Feelings like that. No-good feelings, for wives." She had sucked her lips into a point; she glanced at me almost with fear; so I went on. "Maybe you thought about running errands for his kids. But actually you did more thinking about fondling his emotions—taking care of him—working for him. And you even did work. You sat there in the Knight's Bar looking at Paul like a proud female parent—like a doting mother sharing in her son's discussions of his conquests. You were the conquered—but you were the string-pulling mamma, too. Take it or leave it—that's how I felt you felt about him! And then I caught you looking at me—looking at me the way a girl with warm insides looks at a man. So if I didn't give you the impression I was struck silly with the possibilities of the match—that's also why. I'm sorry—but there's the whole answer."

She was breathing evenly—but more deeply than anybody needed to breathe, just sitting. Down the hall, doors opened and shut. Raucous, faintly nervous male laughter echoed. "Some of the boys from the convention," she said, almost reluctantly—as if she found it necessary to explain so I wouldn't stop, and as if she was afraid the explanation would stop me.

I looked at her—at a breathing, beautiful girl—and I thought for a moment about the canoe-hats. Then I shook it off. "If a good gal—a sweethearted dame who had no stomach for the life—had started living with Paul, I'd have objected. In your case—I didn't believe you were even that—"

Feet marched on happy excursions down the hall. Somebody tried the door—opened it, to his surprise—and apologized gruffly without daring to carry the impulse through and look in.

Marcia was staring at me. "So all right," she said. "Paul's just a little kid. He's not even a good boyfriend. Too jittery. I thought I could teach him. He doesn't really want to learn. He thinks a dame is made of soap bubbles and lives on a pedestal a mile high. He thinks sex is something for pack trips in the mountains and spruce boughs. I got sick to death of his pack-trip monologue! Who wouldn't? Lying with a guy on a good inner-spring mattress and listening to him yak about pine needles! Drenching myself in cologne—and hearing him rave about stable smells! I was ready to spring myself, when we had that lunch. And you gave me the excuse. I'd saved up mad enough for six girls—and I let him have it."

"He asked for it."

"Did he!"

"But you gave him the wrong medicine. Why didn't you tell him it wasn't the disapproval of an uncle—the looks to come from men—but—the spruce routine?"

"Haven't you any feelings? That was his dream. Why louse that up, too? Let him dream! Someday, God knows, he may even meet one of those spruce-loving dopes with cute little things in her flannel blouse and her jodhpurs. Let him have her! I got tired of my uptown personality the minute I realized it led straight to the Rocky Mountains—and the farther from camp the better."

"He grew up in the West."

"Pardon my spurs!" Tears filled her eyes. "I'm a sap, too. For a while—I really was in heaven. I really thought—this is love. Ye gods! What can happen to people who should know better is—unfair to humanity! And then I began looking for an out. I worked. Sure. Honest working wife—for a couple of weeks. Then—working wife has lunch with the floor manager—in a hotel room rented for the lunch. One club sandwich—and one good, busy change from Paul. Then the stockboy—a hot-looking wop with long hair—took me out in his department to show me the new materials—and the place was deserted. So I knew I was a sap!"

I thought that over. "I'm glad you told me. I know how it is. I don't mind. It's you—and that's that. But there's one thing I wish you'd do. Write Paul a letter. Don't try to teach him a lesson by letting him see you here. He'd just tear up the place—or maybe hurt you—"

"We've got a boy in the kitchen to take care of rough stuff."

"So Paul would get tossed on the street. And come back. And you'd have to call cops. I'm sure Hattie knows the ones to call. Then I'd get a buzz from jail. And Paul would have that indignity to sweat out—on top of everything else. Don't you see he holds the whole business against me—and he likes me? Against family, friends, the kind of people from whom he comes? Against the people he cares about—and the way of life he's been brought up in? If you'd write him the truth—he could transfer the damage to the place where it belongs. He'd hate you for a while—and what would that mean to you? Nothing. By and by—he'd see that he didn't even hate you—maybe even liked you. Understood. Then he'd be pretty grown up. Enough to hate the way we do on the earth, all of us, if he had to go on hating anything."

Marcia smiled gently. Her eyes were inaccessible. "You're right. I liked you—at lunch."

"Good."

"It could be. I'll tell you what. I'll write—on one condition."

"What?"

She moved quickly. She moved into my lap and put her arms around me. "My room's just three doors from here."

I didn't say a word.

"You'll remember it all your life. And I'll have something to remember, too. Paul's uncle! They all go for Marcia! Then—there's about Gwen—"

"What?"

"She told us this afternoon. I'm jealous of Gwen. I'd like—just for once—to fix her. After all—you're not like Paul; it isn't as if you'd never met a girl in my trade before. What have you got to lose? And I'll write that letter. When he sees it—he'll toss his damned torch in an icebox."

What about this Greater Love stuff? I asked myself.

She was kissing me—giving me, not invitations, but commands.

I got up with her and set her on her feet.

"No, baby. You're something. I don't blame Paul. But I play only for myself. Never mix romance in a deal."

She slapped me and ran out of the room.

My ears ring all the time, anyway—night and day, day and night, as in the song, a sound like spring peepers at a distance, sometimes like a million dinner bells tinkling, tinkling, tinkling, and at other times like a flutenote I'd give a great deal to stop. They rang harder, now. She'd hit with her hand taut and compressed hard air against the shrill, soniferous membrane. It hurt like the dentist. I scrunched myself together and let the sweat roll and looked out the window. The pain calmed down and I kept staring out, hating the earth, afraid, miserable, cheap. I fought back.

Once upon a time, billions of years ago, there was a Knower who is identified these days by the name of God.

He was totally conscious.

He was the Custodian, which is to say the Other Property, of mass-energy and space-time. He was the sublime entropy of the primordial atom, It, the universe, the stable pattern, the All, harmoniously balanced, a fixed ecstasy unmoving and so without Age.

Unfortunately, He-She developed an Ego. (Serpent? Eve? The Old Adam?)

It occurred to Him that the perfection whereof he was the Cognizant Comptroller might be more interesting if set in motion. A slight swirl, perhaps: something gentle, along an elliptical path.

(Such an impulse, of course, expresses a Flaw in God's consciousness, or perhaps only an extra electron in the whole, or—it may be—the infinite tedium of Infinity; most likely of all, the idea that Perfection is predictably unpredictable.)

Anyhow—one deduced that He gave all His electrons and His positrons a twist. Naturally, there followed an explosion. Naturally, this puffed Space into existence, to make room for itself.

(Out went the windows, the doors, and the walls.)

It follows that a fragment was a writer in the pre-Sanskrit tongues, and another was Abbé le Maître.

Of course—we want to be God's Little Helpers, wee bits of Him, and put it back together again so as to become Timeless composites of His Awareness.

Shall we, therefore, on the epochal day when the island universes start homing, be wise enough to rejoice?

When brighter, brighter, brighter glows the firmament?

When night becomes as day, and day as a blast furnace?

(Or—will the infalling clots by then be cold and ourselves so drowned and immobilized at the bottoms of hydrocarbon oceans as to be already avid for one more experimental whirl?)

Think why you fornicate! Is it not to bring together again these thunderous, silent fires? To perform your little, local reassertion of the reburgeoning I-am-so-God-is?

Look at the stars! What suitable illumination shines for love from every pretty pore of heaven!

Look at the city! The noisiest palaver of tenement, of factory and store—the talked-up edifices that speak back anathema—(removed some ways, or in some degree) lose their ugliness. Even they are like the stars which are beauty at a distance and might be beautiful close up—if you knew how to see, there.

Heat's haze—night's dark—snow—the gentle perspectives.

Look at the night!

The infernal Jersey shore battled the oblivion with Mazda bulbs, neon, sizzling arcs, and the globe's shadow eliminated all but beauty. Lights swam on the river. Antediluvian animals with pairs of red-green eyes swam up and down the Hudson. Fish from the abyss—mammoth—with ladders of light along their shining sides surfaced and sloshed in the current, hooting and humming. Ah, Jersey! Fields of phosphorescent flowers and hills set out with lantern-bearing trees! Night-blooming paradise! The magic is our own—collective. What matter that beneath one particular lavender string of streetlights mad boys pitch clinking pennies—curse—push frowsy, young, reluctant girls up alleyways—and mad, obscene old men tipple in bars that reek with millenniums of human hellishness—and mad, subpersonal old women maliciously fling slops in the yards of their neighbors? This is not the one man but his panorama.

For can they not, all of them, stinking of their sweat and overswarming with diseased intent, look east across their river and see a pattern of illumination that would have made Nero hang himself with envy and Rameses change his gods?

Manhattan!

They look. Great Heaven, they never see!

Directly below, on the sidewalk, a woman went one by one through the circular pools of street light. I could hear her heels crossing my life and every time she reached a new radiant circle I could see she had golden hair. The very beasts in the river ceased boasting to let her print the small, enchanting sound of woman's passage on the attentive dark. Her dress was green.

I soon took my leave.

7

My double bed was a sea and I was its derelict.

I read an article by a steelmaker that tish-pished those who are concerned over the possible exhaustion of America's iron ore. Run out in twenty years? this tycoon asked. Ridiculous! There is iron enough for a century and no corporation is anxious at all, where such extensive futures can be seen.

I gave this oaf a hundred years to come to his senses in the third generation.

It was an insufficient period. The iron ran out and he still foraged—a ghost rummaging in the raped premises of his great-great-grandchildren.

Go rue the deserts man's already made!

Paul didn't come.

I read some poetry I could not understand in Harper's.

I got out the medical book on cancer and looked at throats for a while.

I took the Gideon Bible from the bureau drawer and read the Thirteenth Chapter of First Corinthians.

Then Psalms, awhile.

Then Luke, awhile.

I went into my bathroom and swallowed one of Tom's capsules.

8

It could have been morning; it could have been night; the light on the airfield was such as seeps across the northern pole in winter. Engines hiccupped and caught fire within themselves. Gouts of blue fire streamed from their steel nostrils and human figures warily aimed extinguishers as they crouched under the great wings. One B-29—a special craft—sucked up its ladder.

"Good luck!" a thin voice called.

The slam of a hatch replied. The plane snorted, bellowed, vibrated against its chocks, and lurched about. Like a house on casters—like a house-sized aluminum insect, it moved in the opalescent murk.

There was a pause.

At Flight Control, the ground officers of the Twentieth Air Force made a last check. It was not sergeant's work, or lieutenant's. Brass looked at the weather maps—high brass read the bulletins, squinted into the instruments, followed the meterological balloons, talked through telephones. Anxious brass at the hangar interrogated the mechs—studied the quadruple checks, the four-colored V's ranged after a list of thirteen hundred and eleven critical parts of a very heavy bomber. In the officers' mess, captains, young majors, young lieutenant colonels filled their trays, walked to the tables, sat, listened while the juke box sang—

My mammy done tole me—

Listened not to the song but to the quartet of motors on the gloomy, loud field.

Above the coughing and the clamor, the roar and thump of other engines—came the long run, tightening nerves.

"There she goes!"

"War's over."

"Shut up! And who told you, lieutenant, anyhow? And what?"

The ship—wider than she was long and just under a hundred feet from tailfin to bombardier's glass snout—gained altitude. Below, the island sank in the sea of air—palms, runways, warm, damp tropical odor of mold, hangars and administration buildings, flags.

There was now only the sky and the Pacific....

They would—someday—laugh at the B-29 even while they admired her, and more especially, the men who flew her. Schoolkids in a museum of the far centuries—walking along plush ropes—examining the early aeronautical exhibits. "What a clumsy contraption! How dangerous! They used to explode in the air, you know. They could only fly about five thousand miles—bumped along at three hundred an hour. Hour, mind you! What on earth did they do to pass the time in such tight quarters? They fought with guns—yeah—those tubes. Central fire control, they called it—they could shoot eleven pairs at once. Shoot? A chemical explosion that pushed streamlined bits of metal from the tubes at low velocities—fast enough, though, to kill a man—or bring down such a crazy craft. Who'd think—one just like that—took the first real missile—?"

The bright kids-to-be, perhaps. Their galleons and triremes.

She took off—the then-perfect air-frame, slick and silver —a multiplicity of engineering feats. She climbed. Five thousand. Eight.

"Okay. Pressurize."

The ears, hearts, lungs of sixteen men lost the feel of altitude and swiftly accepted the bubble of air that now flew in a metal skin.

Colonel Calm turned over the controls to Major Waite. The colonel's famous fighting smile flashed upon the proud navigator, the flight engineer, the idle bombardier, and the co-pilot. "You know the course, major."

The course, he meant, to the enemy.

The major had set plenty of cities on fire in his time. His brief time; he was twenty-six. Twenty-six years old and he'd flown courses that had burned out, smothered, smashed, and otherwise eliminated something on the order (he figured, being a man of mathematical bent) of three billion hours of human life. Expunged on that milk run. (You take the average life expectancy in enemy cities, multiply by days in a year and hours in a day, and multiply that by two further factors: average fatalities in a raid and number of raids led by Major Waite. Three billion man-woman-child hours, conservatively).

Colonel Calm glanced at Mr. Learned, the lone journalist permitted to go along—to write the eyewitness account. Mr. Learned sat on a parachute, his spectacles aslant, his hair awry, lost sleep whitewashed on his sharp countenance. His knees made a desk for an aluminum hospital chart board and on this, on yellow paper, using a pencil of a soft sort with which his pockets bulged, he scribbled. Once, he hitched at the collar of his unfamiliar uniform. A moment later, he glanced up. He smiled.

Colonel Calm nodded and scrambled into the tunnel that ran to the rear of his ship.

It was a journey he detested.

The passageway—a straight, metal intestine lined with cloth—traversed the bomb bay and was of a diameter sufficient to contain one crawling man. If a pressurized B-29 were hit badly—or if it blew a blister—a man in the tunnel would be rammed through it by compressed air like a projectile and hurled against a bulkhead—head first, or feet first—at the speed of a hundred and sixty miles an hour.

The colonel crawled—gnawed by claustrophobia. He pushed his chute ahead in the dim tube—because that was regulations. He wished he had chosen to drag it, instead. The thing stuck. He lunged up over it and his ribs came in contact with the curved top of the tunnel. He was half-jammed there. Sweat broke out on him—he tried to breathe—his ribs hurt. He could yell—they could get a rope around his foot and haul him back. He inched clear of the chute—pushed it forward, and went on more slowly, struggling now with the afreets of panic—putting them down like mutineers, savagely.

Now he thought of the bomb bay—the oblong maw atop which he fought his way. Big as a freight car. Big as two garages set end to end. Big enough to hold—how many horses? A dozen? And what did it contain?

His sweat dried up. His skin pimpled. Coldness seemed to flush the tube as coldness flushes a belly into which ice water has been gulped. Was the air here invisibly alive? Did uranium exude invisible, lethal rays—like radium? Or did it lie inert—in uncritical masses of unknown sizes (but not big)—waiting for union?

He went on.

When, at last, his head appeared at the far end of the tunnel he wore, again, his placid fighting smile.

The top CFC man dawdled in his swivel chair. The two blister gunners nodded and looked back into the neutral nothing of their provinces. The third chap smiled softly.

Colonel Calm came down the ladder, stretched, picked up his chute familiarly, and went on to the radar room. It was, he thought, glancing back at the tunnel opening, hardly bigger than a torpedo tube. The craft in many ways resembled a submarine, when you thought about it.

There were four men in the radar room. Two at tables. One squatting, rocking with the plane's slight motion; and one stretched on the Army cot. He saw the colonel.

"'Shun!" he bawled.

"At ease, for God's sake!" Colonel Calm went to an old man who stared into the hood of a scope with the fascinated pleasure of a child seeing his first stereopticon slides. "Well, doctor? How is it going?"

Sopho glanced up—and he smiled, too. That was the thing about the colonel's mouth and eyes: you saw and you also smiled. Even when the kamikaze had connected, when Number 3 engine was on fire—pluming smoke and the CO₂ wasn't making headway, when flak splashed black flowers on the morning, when tracers rose like tennis balls, the deck was slick with gunners' blood, and when the inadequate, high, freezing air whistled through the ship—scaling fast, bits of plexiglass. Even then, he smiled—and you smiled back—and went on.

"Wonderful gadget," Dr. Sopho said, pointing to the hood, within which the colonel could see a scanning light-streak and the radiant wake, following and fading perpetually. "After this trip," the scientist went on, "maybe we can go back to work. Real work. Maybe—" he pointed at the scope—"use that for saving a few lives, instead."

"Hope so." The colonel thought of his tedious wife—of weary years in Washington—desiccated military establishments in Texas—the drain and drag of peacetime. "Hope so," he lied. "Everything set?"

Sopho grinned. "Hope so."

"There's a chance of a dud—?"

"Some. Partial dud, anyhow."

The colonel seemed agitated. "In that case, wouldn't they get the secret?"

The old man had a goatee. He reached for it. "Yes. Yes, they might. And spend the next twenty years trying to put one together."

Colonel Calm continued down a narrow passage and opened a small door. Freckles Mahoney was taking his ease at the breeches of his tail guns—rocked back—staring at the vault where the powdery light was least. Daydreaming of a gum-chewing, short-haired, underbreasted Kalamazoo High School babe—and keeping his eyes peeled.

The door shut.

The colonel nerved himself for the return passage. Worse than being born—so far as he could remember. Dragging a placenta of parachute and harness through an aluminum canal with an atomic bomb beneath. He gave the three gunners his smile and they did not know it was—this time—a smile of fighting himself. At any rate, he thought, after one more crawl through eternity he could stay in the control compartment, forward. Unless Sopho wanted him.

He took hold of the ladder, sighted through the black tube to freedom's eye at the far end—and his blood turned to water.

Three men besides the gunners?

He felt horror between his shoulder blades—gun, knife, and worse. He checked crew and passengers.

He pretended to be untangling his chute straps, preparing to go through the round-eyed hell. Jordan on the top blister. Smith left, here. White right—and the unknown man beside him. No visible rank. Coveralls—insignia worn or torn off. Bearded like a submariner or the men he had relieved on Guadal. Hawk nose, brown eyes—extraordinarily intelligent, too—firm mouth, a gentle, definitely civilian look. Never saw him before.

This, the colonel realized, was obviously impossible.

He'd trained the crew, himself—picked each man, with special help from Headquarters—and met all the passengers weeks ago—old Sopho last—but, still—weeks ago.

Each member of the company—cleared, checked, quadruple-checked, traced by G2 back through every childhood peccadillo, back through generations. Truman himself couldn't have got a man on board without the colonel's okay—his invitation and acquaintance.

He felt sick and feeble; he clung to the ladder under the tunnel mouth and staggered as the B-29 dived ponderously through a downdraft. Some last-minute thing, he decided; certainly the impossible passenger did not appear to be dangerous. One could not look at him and think of sabotage at the same time. These bloody, accursed, God-damned scientists! Very Important Person—he looked every inch a VIP—a VIP in science, not military affairs. No bearing to speak of—and that kindly smile at the corners of that mouth.

Last-minute stuff.

It would be assumed the colonel knew—but his four-way check had slipped.

When he returned to base—chevrons would fall. Lieutenants, captains, majors would drop back a grade.

See who he is.

The colonel went over to Smith, squatted.

"Skipper!" Smith said, returning the smile, the Air Force treasure.

The ship thrummed. Buzzed. Hummed. Ate air. Hurried toward the enemy islands.

Colonel Calm feigned to look from the blister. He supposed he saw, in the gray below, the corrugations of the Pacific, and above, the pearly heavens, the solid stretch of wing, the streamlined engine-housing. They were there, at least.

"The man with White. His name. Can't think of it."

"Chris."

"Chris what?"

Smith seemed embarrassed. "All I know. He came through the tunnel half an hour ago. 'Call me Chris,' he said. And he said, 'Mind if I sit?'"

The smile was a mask. He could keep it on his face even now. Eyes lighted up by the battery of will, corners crinkled, lips relaxed, a human twitch of the nose—man-loving, disdainful of blood and death, enemy and calamity. He could.

Came through the tunnel.

The man had not been in the control cabin, to begin with.

No bearded man.

No—Chris.

The colonel turned on his bent toes, the stranger watching.

Should he jump the guy?

Tell Smith to dive in with him?

Go back for a pistol and shoot from the tunnel?

The man smiled pleasantly.

Colonel Calm stood up, went round the post and track—the high barber's chair—and the gear and machinery that subtended the gunner in the top blister.

"Hi," the colonel said.

"Wonderful—a ship like this!"

"I've forgotten your last name."

"Chris."

"Oh. I don't believe I've had the pleasure—?"

The man held out his hand. "We've met. It was long ago, though."

Colonel Calm had the momentary sensation of remembering. Seen him somewhere—that's a fact.

Chris was smiling. "My being along was arranged late."

"I see."

"You'll want to look over my papers, perhaps? My orders, I should say."

"Yeah. White House stuff?"

The man shrugged. "Pretty high up, I'll admit." He began unbuttoning his coveralls.

The colonel wished the man would stop looking so directly at him. Powerful eyes—like a lot of those scientific birds. They could, with a glance, give you an impotent sensation—a feeling that you weren't in command at all. A feeling that they commanded a force which could outlast you and would defeat you in the end. They made you feel—Christ bite them!—like a tin soldier, sometimes. And yet—high up. VIP. This was a trick mission—the trickiest of the war. You couldn't afford to make a fool of yourself. "Never mind," the colonel said. "My major probably checked you in—and forgot to mention it. The strain—"

"I know your major, yes. Sad."

"Sad? Greatest flying officer who ever took a plane off a base!"

"Cold-blooded."

"Right! Veins full of liquid helium. Have to be!"

"Have to be? Perhaps. I always hesitated—though—to think of men as numbers."

The colonel felt relieved. Major Waite's discussion of flight plans—his harangues in the briefing rooms—sometimes left the colonel a little chilled. Emptied-out. Obviously this Chris knew the major. He wasn't—fantastically—impossibly—an agent of the enemy. Now the colonel gestured toward the bomb bay—the radioactive uterus of the plane. "You—helped put it together?"

The man seemed to grow pale. His smile disappeared. "No."

"Then what—? In God's name what—?"

"I am here," Chris said in so low a tone his voice scarcely carried through the pulsing air, "because I promised."

"Promised? Promised who—when—?"

"Because I said it. Lo, I shall be with you always, even unto the end of the world."

The colonel stared—and remembered. He turned the color of ashes. His right hand, ungoverned, made upon brow, shoulders and chest the sign of the Cross. His knees bent tremblingly.

But before he could genuflect the man called Chris touched his arm. "Don't, colonel!"

The officer, in his distraction, was muttering a woman's name, over and over.

Chris smiled painfully. "I am here." He glanced, then, at the watching gunners.

The colonel looked that way, too, and recovered something of his fighting smile. They were—after all—his command. It wouldn't do to let them see him prostrate. The gunners responded to the direct glance—and the return of the smile—by a brightening of their eyes and a faint curving of the corners of their mouths; their attention went back to duty—the duty of scanning the void outside the domes of plexiglass.

"My Lord—" the colonel all but whispered—"what shall we do?"

"Return."

The soldier's eyes faltered. "Abort the mission!"

"I hoped I might persuade you."

"Another would merely follow—!"

"And them."

"But—duty!"

"To whom is duty?"

A head appeared in the round mouth of the tunnel. Learned, the journalist, grinned like an imp. "Nasty crawl," he yelled. "Hope they've got that thing well insulated. Otherwise—I'm unsexed—or hotter than radium myself!" He saw the stranger, and halfway down on the ladder stood still. His eyes, ordinarily shrewd and compassionate, showed first a little amazement—and then twinkled. "A ringer! You would pull one like that, colonel! The American press wants to know who he is!" Learned chuckled and dropped to the metal floor. Strode the two steps forward. Gave his name. Held out his hand. Explained himself. "You're a physicist, I take it?"

"My name is Chris." The dark eyes were luminous and kind.

"Chris who?"

The colonel took the journalist's arm in a hand like steel and whispered.

Learned, also, grew pale. He stared first at the colonel and then, uneasily, he eyed the stranger. Twice, the gleam of sardonic doubt shone. And twice, with all his will and concentration, he endeavored to make some satirical reply: to say, skeptically, that this would be the greatest interview in two millenniums.

Or to ask how things were in the Blue Up Yonder.

He failed. He—too—abruptly knew. The resources of his training abandoned him—left but the residue of naked personality. His tongue circled his lips. He gave the stranger another uncertain glance, a hopeful glance—and suddenly, on the impulse, took out his cigarettes and offered them.

Chris shook his head. "Thanks, Learned."

"Do you mind—"

"Of course not."

Now the journalist and the colonel shakily fumbled with cigarettes and the wavering flame of a match.

Chris had turned. He was looking expectantly toward the narrow door that led to the radar room and from it, presently, Sopho came. "Thought I'd run a counter through the tunnel," he began. "Check things." He saw Chris. "Hello! Didn't realize I hadn't met the ship's full complement."

The colonel and the reporter watched.

"My name is Chris, doctor."

"Can't place you. The Chicago Group, perhaps. I didn't meet them all."

"No."

"Army, then? White House? OSS? I'm a physicist. Sopho's the name."

"This man," said Learned, in a hoarse, uneven voice his ears had never heard before, "comes from—another place." He told the physicist.

Dr. Sopho's right thumb and forefinger touched his small beard. Across the back of his hand—tanned to leather by his long residence in the desert—skin pimpled and the reddish hairs rose. The tiny phenomenon passed—passed like the eddy of air that dimples still water and disappears. His great head with the thin nose and the straight, exaggerate brow bent forward attentively. He was searching the stranger for obvious signs of madness. It became apparent that he found none.

"Incredible," he murmured.

"You do not believe me?"

The scientist shook his head. "My dear fellow—I do not even believe in you. So—naturally—" He turned with abruptness to the colonel. "How did he get aboard? His papers?" He now saw the colonel's frantic, imploring eyes. "Great God, man—you don't accept—?"

"It's the truth," Colonel Calm responded.

Sopho looked quickly at Learned—who glanced away.

The scientist seemed, for the first time, alarmed. Not alarmed at the statement made by the man but at its effect upon two persons whom he had considered impervious to wild suggestion. Obviously, it was up to him to break the lunatic's spell. Some fabulous stowaway—and the journalist and the soldier—drawn overfine by the magnitude of this mission—had become prey to imagination.

One humors the mad—at any rate, to begin with. "I see," said Sopho.

He now faced the stranger—who stood in their midst. "Tell me. Just why did you decide to accompany this particular raid?"

Chris, still smiling, repeated his words about his promise—and after that, the promise.

"End of the world, eh?" Sopho chuckled. "You sure?"

"Your world—perhaps."

"You want us to give it up? The mission?" Sopho pointed at the bomb bay. "That?"

Chris looked steadily at him. "If I remember rightly, doctor, you began the preparation of—that—" he, also, pointed—"not to use against men, but to have on hand if your other enemy employed such instruments. He did not. He lies defeated."

Sopho nodded. "Right. Now we are using it to shorten the war. Save lives."

"Save lives?"

"By shortening the war, man! Simple arithmetic—!"

"What about—the next war? And the next? The wars beyond that?"

"This weapon should—and in my opinion will—put an end to war."

Slowly, Chris shook his head. "Strange reasoning. A weapon will put an end to war."

"An absolute weapon, man! The world will never again risk going to war. Never again dare take the risk!"

"It will fear too much, you think?"

"Precisely."

"But isn't it fear, doctor, that has always caused men to wage war? Fear in this form today—tomorrow in that form—?"

"Can you think of a better means of ending wars—foolish wastes!—than an absolute weapon? We have changed the whole picture of war!"

"But not changed men!"

There ensued a moment without talk.

Chris presently said, "This weapon. Where it falls, the genes of men will be broken. Perhaps their children—perhaps their grandchildren—will carry the heritage. Headless bodies. Eyeless faces. There—teeth everywhere. And yonder—no voice. Generation after generation, for a thousand years—this great invention will go on waging your present war, doctor, against the unborn."

The colonel grabbed the scientist's arm. "Is that true?"

Sopho shrugged. "In a certain per cent of cases, where radiation is extreme but not fatal—naturally, the reproductive capacity will display unpredictable, permanent damage. Recessive damage. When, however, two persons mate who exhibit matching gene deterioriation—then—as this man says—"

The colonel's hand dropped. "I didn't know," he murmured. "Not certainly. I didn't even know that you men were sure."

Learned spoke. "War against the generations! Good—!" He checked himself.

Chris said, "Have you that right?"

Sopho replied angrily, "That's a right implicit in any war! If you kill a soldier—you destroy all his potential progeny—not simply endanger a few of them. The same fact applies to civilians."

"You do not," Chris answered, "corrupt the children of the survivors for centuries to come. No." He meditated a moment. "If the salt of the earth shall lose its savor, wherewith shall ye resavor it?"

Sopho said, "If changing man's environment will not change the evil of war—"

"Evil?" Chris repeated questioningly. "But does not man always believe his wars are just? Whatever cause—whichever side?"

Sopho ignored the inquiry. "—how do we change man?"

"Love one another," Chris said.

A slow smile came upon the physicist's face. "We should have loved the Nazis? And love the Jap who lies ahead?"

"Of course." Chris nodded soberly. "If you had loved them, you would never have let them sink into the pit of their despair—arm—turn upon yourselves. Had you loved them, you would have assisted them—before you were compelled to restrain them by such violence."

"The rights of nations—" Sopho began.

"—exist in the minds of men. You did not love them. You loved yourselves. You saw torment born in them all, and saw it grow, and feared it—and stood, like any Pharisee, reciting your virtues but not lifting a finger to assist them."

"He's right." Learned shook his head ruefully. "How right he is!"

"Love!" Sopho said the word scornfully. "Little you know of Nature. Little of love you'll see there!"

"It's strange," Chris answered, "that I see in Nature nothing else but love. Pain—yes. Sorrow—yes. Tragedy—yes. To every individual. Yet—in the sum of Nature—only love."

Sopho's eyebrows arched skeptically. "Do you really believe that the primitive phrases of a man who possibly existed—some two thousand years ago—could fix the attention of a modern scientist?"

"Evidently they do not." Chris bent and peered through the round, bowed window of the ship as if he could orient himself even among the traceless clouds. He looked at them again. "I talked in very simple words, doctor, to very simple people. The extreme simplicity of the formulations should—I thought—make the concepts increasingly understandable, as men pursued truth. I advised them, remember, to know the truth. I meant all of truth. I warned them that an excessive fascination with worldly goods—to the exclusion of inner goodness—would undo all peace of mind—"

Sopho chuckled. "Surely—we've pursued truth? What we carry today represents a great accumulation of truth! And I'll also agree that most men who merely amass worldly goods—the rich—aren't greatly interested in science. In truth. In anything but money. Still—"

Chris had raised his hand. "This ship—the bomb it carries—all the equipment and paraphernalia of the universities which lie behind it—the projects undertaken and achieved there—what are they, too, doctor—if not worldly goods?"

"Then you would have us put science aside? Stop seeking such truth—?"

"Seek truth in two ways, doctor. Within—and without." He drew a breath, frowned and spoke again. "Love—in man—takes various forms. Love of self. Love of woman. Love of other men. Love of cosmos. Each is an altruism so designed that, through love, man shall preserve himself in dignity, procreate, and preserve all others even at the cost of his own life. Greater love hath no man than this last. Not one of these altruisms can be peacefully maintained unless the others also are given their proportionate due. The conscience of a man rises from the relatedness of these loves and is his power to interpret how valuable, relatively, each one is—not to him alone, but to all men, as each man is beholden to all. To reason only in the mind is to express the love of worldly goods, alone. Have you ever reasoned in your heart, doctor?"

"Irrational emotions! Reason has no place there!"

"But it has. As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. You scientists refuse to study how your hearts think. Repent, I said. Confess, the churches say—and worldliness encompasses them! Join, they say. But I say, when you have yielded up your vanity you will contain the immortal love. My time is short, gentlemen. I thought to remind you."

"I remember—!" the colonel's lips pronounced the inaudible words.

Learned looked at the floor. "How do you tell them—now?"

Sopho said disgustedly, "Metaphysics!"

"Light was the symbol I tried to give them," Chris went on gently. "The Cross was the symbol they adopted. The pain of self-sacrifice was obvious to them. The subjective reward—incomprehensible. Thus they changed it all. I told them of many mansions. They chose this mansion or that—and scoured each other off the earth, to set one heaven in place of the heaven of those they defeated. Holy wars! Is such a thing conceivable to God as a holy war? Alas. The words—the images—the effort is still uncomprehended. I said Light. I said Truth. I said Freedom. I meant enlightenment. Yet nearly every church that uses my name is a wall against light and a rampart against enlightenment, using fear, not love, to chain the generations in terror and pain and ignorance." He pointed again. "And now—this is called civilization, and in my name, also! Enlightenment! Knowledge!" He fell silent; but at last, smiled a little. "A few knew. A few will always know. Francis of Assisi—he guessed. Thomas à Kempis. Most who knew were church heretics in their day—as I was in mine. And what I say is still heresy."

He became silent again. He looked from face to face. "Colonel. You are a soldier. You are ready by your profession to die for other men. It is a noble readiness. Will you turn back?"

The colonel retreated a step and leaned against the riveted bulkhead. Sweat once more broke upon his countenance, poured down; he crossed himself again and Chris sadly shook his head.

Finally the colonel could speak. "You ask me to be disloyal."

"I ask you—only to decide in your own self—what loyalty is."

"I cannot turn, then."

"Learned?"

The journalist's eyes were steady—and tragic. "Nothing would be gained. Others would merely follow in place of us."

"I but asked you to decide for yourself—not for them."

The journalist flushed. "In my profession we do not even agree to stand ready to die for other men. I am here not to determine, but merely to report."

"Sopho?"

The physicist's eyes blazed suddenly. "Yes," he said. "I'll go back! I was never certain. I am always ready to re-study a problem!"

Chris put his arm around the old man. "You!"

But the scientist pulled away. "On one condition."

"And that?"

"Prove yourself!"

"But, doctor, it is you who must provide the testimony—!"

"Empirical evidence is my condition. Something measurable. Suspend, for one moment, one natural principle—"

Ruefuly, Chris laughed. "To simple men—fishermen, farmers, tax collectors—the power of any genuine conviction seemed miraculous because of its accomplishments. I healed the neurotics of my day. By suggestion, I added to the innocent gaiety of many a gathering. But even that poor, positive procedure is inverted now; many churches find their miracles in the hysterics of their own sick—bleeding, stigmata, fits!" He sighed. "Surely you, doctor, a miracle-maker in reality—are not naïve enough to ask that the very heart of truth be magically violated so you may accept truth? The evidence is—within you. I never said more. Find it there, man!"

"I thought so," the doctor replied in a cold voice.

Chris spoke persuasively. "You could work a miracle of transformation within yourself. But—even if I should suspend the very forces upon which that possibility depends—you would exert the last resource of your ingenuity to find out by what mechanical trick I achieved your illusion, as you'd call it! Prove, doctor, that you would not!"

"Let's see the experiment." Sopho's eyes were hard.

The stranger thought a moment and presently chuckled to himself. "The unsolved riddle of the cause—the source—the nature—of the energy in your atoms, doctor! Would you like to understand that next step in your science?"

"Impossible!"

Chris looked ardently at the old man.

A moment later, the scientist's eyes shut. An expression of immense concentration came upon his features. Perspiration welled and trickled on his countenance—as on the colonel's. Suddenly his eyes opened again. He grabbed the colonel's arm. "Great God, man! I've cracked the toughest problem in physics! The thing just came to me this moment! Why! With this equation—we'll be able to make bombs that will assure American domination for a century! I'll win my second Nobel Prize! Every nuclear physicist's head will swim with envy! The financial possibilities—billions!—trillions! I'll just get it on paper—!" He broke off. "Wasn't there—somebody else—standing here?" he said perplexedly. "Never mind! Lend me a pencil, Learned!"

"Somebody else?" The colonel shook his head. "Nobody but the three of us. And the gunners. Jesus, I wish this mission was ended! I've been having a terrible struggle in my conscience about it!"

Learned said, "Have you? Me—too. I kind of hate humanity today. I kept wishing—something would break down, and stop the whole thing. I get a choked-up feeling when I think of those people."

The scientist was crouching, now—gazing at the streaming gray desolation beyond the windows. "Funny," he said to the gunner at his side. "A minute ago—I was sure I'd got a new insight into a very complex problem. Now—I can't even remember my approach."

The gunner, who held palaver of the brass and all VIPs to be but one more nuisance of war, said, "Yeah?"

The B-29 flew on toward its as yet unspecified destination.

The City of Horror and Shame.

Back at the base, the brass was laying plans for a second run—to the City of Naked Sorrow.

9

A scorcher.

It was my father's phrase and came back to me as familiarly, when I opened my eyes, as the heard reveille of my childhood. The sun glared on the dark window-blinds, penetrating them at myriad pinpoints. I remembered summer mornings in Massachusetts, Ohio, North Dakota, Jersey, and on the cool, bright shores of Lake George.

"Rise and shine, everybody! It's a scorcher!"

The buoyant baritone of a man of God, excited by his life, frustrated in every excitement by his Faith; a man in there, as we used to say, trying.

The room was a fumarole—its atmosphere spent by my breathing and stained with the carbonic reek of yesterday's cigarettes. Nothing came through the windows; they were open to the eye—but invisibly walled by the heat. A stratum of smoke and dust lay across a sunbeam; the light pierced it, struck the corner of a mirror, broke, and rebounded to the ceiling in a prismatic dazzle: red, green, blue, yellow, purple.

The little awl had ceased pecking my throat. I swallowed—without unnatural sensation—reached for the phone, ordered coffee, and sat up naked on the bed's edge, leaving a damp plaster cast of myself in the sheet. I took a short shower and picked up the Sunday papers cautiously.

Karl didn't speak.

Saving his strength for the exhaustion of the day.

Ten-fifteen.

The coffee set my nerves dancing like a swarm of gnats, without bringing relief from the deadness, the ache, the recollection of sleep in every cell—fatiguing sleep—and the yearn for youth's restful slumber.

I dialed Paul's Brooklyn number on the private line.

The phone rattled in his heat-trap and not even a ghost took it up to listen.

Lint on the divan—lint and threads—and I began to pick compulsively.

Nothing much in the papers.

The airlift.

(How could we, the American people, take pride in our freight flights when we had permitted ourselves to be euchered into the extravagance—only to meet force again in sillier forms? The effort was without dignity, without principle, without understanding, without sense.)

The pennant race.

(I remembered Babe Ruth.)

A call girl had been arrested, after the cops had tapped her telephone and listened. I viewed her attractive face in the tabloids and read the elaborate report of her dialogue with her clients.

(Since when had freedom stooped to tap the phones of prostitutes? What excellence of police was this, in a world community where hardly an honest man or woman remained, where half a billion people slowly starved, where thieves and cheats were commoner than spots of oil or horse-dung in streets? And how the cops enwhored Lady Liberty when they invaded the life of that busy lass! Truly dirty deeds bought their own big privacies: corporations burned their books and politicians lost their records. Mere tarts, however, had their phones tapped and their words recorded. What a splendid free nation I had come to live in! With what marvels of detective science!)

Well—not for long.

My weary effort would soon peter out.

Maybe then I could go and watch Kipling splash on his big-league canvas with brushes of comet's hair.

I pondered for a while over those hairy comets.

Well. All of us had short arms. We all reached too far.

I dialed Dave.

Veto said he was asleep and would call me when he woke.

When will Monday come?

Never?

Why be impatient? Isn't it better to not-know?

Not for Joe! No, no, no.

Finally, I got my chassis, frame, machine, chemical factory, over to the bridge table and, though my pilot was still missing, I began to fly better on my iron mike.

(Isn't it great to be up-to-date?)

At noon, the phone screamed.

"Hi, boy!"

"Hey. Thanks."

(I should have used those roses in my crise. They were there. I wasn't.)

Dave took a fraction of a second to decide not to say what he had been about to say. Perhaps that he was afraid I'd think him foolish.

I looked at the flowers and the pilot was sitting amongst them.

"Any news of our Paul?" he asked.

"My agent lost the trail around midnight."

"I've got bulletins up to three A.M.—last time he called. He'd been to Madam Blaine's—and she'd given him the runaround."

"Marcia's there," I said.

"I know. I called after that and Hattie put her on. Rough gal."

"Yeah."

"In a bad mood. Wanted me to come up."

"I went there and caught her act, personally."

Dave said, "I honest-to-God didn't think there was any need of putting a tail on the lad. Maybe I should have. Now what?"

"Now we wait till he gets hungry, sleepy, or runs out of dough."

"I'll keep you posted from my end. I'll send Charlie over to Paul's apartment again. Do a couple of other things. And stop by later."

"If he checks with me, I'll let you know."

"Good. I've got a meeting with my moguls right after lunch. They are trying to dream up a cycle. Yesterday—they ran through the Frankenstein possibilities and then got in your territory—animal horror. You should have been there! You would have yorked parade floats."

"You might suggest phallic worship. Remember? They could put it in the past. You know, Mu, Atlantis, Lemuria, Ancient Rome. I doubt if the censors would gather what it was. Think it was educational. How about a documentary of Pompeii?"

"I'll enter it on my agenda." Dave whistled down the scale. "Some weather! I took in my human head. It had stopped shrinking. I was afraid it might explode."

"You better pack a little dry ice in your own hat!"

"How you feeling?"

"About like Utah."

He considered that. "Jesus," he said. "Take it easy! Be over by and by."

I got dressed and went downstairs.

There were people—maybe two dozen—in the Knight's Bar, for lunch, resuscitation, or the pelt of the dog that bit them.

Not Yvonne, though. A bit early.

The city was shockingly quiet. When the traffic lights changed, sometimes, nothing else did. You could hear one car pass on the street. Even the buses seemed enfeebled: their special arrangements for traumatizing man roared, ground, and hammered only at long intervals.

The Musak was trying hymns, or an unreasonable facsimile thereof.

With twenty-one cold shrimps, a couple of ounces of mayonnaise, some lettuce, and a few gills of iced coffee inside me, I felt better.

When I got out on the sixteenth soaking pit I discovered Yvonne knocking on my door—my hall door, for a wonder. After a little bickering, I went back to the cold restaurant with her. Not too much bickering.

It was the New Yvonne. Anybody could see that. She was dressed up in dark-blue linen and she ordered crustaceans, too, on my recommendation. Then she began to talk.

"I'm going back to Pasadena on the afternoon plane," she said. "I've been talking to Rol about half the morning. I talked away a fortune. But it was worth it. I told him—everything."

"Everything?"

She nodded. Her gray eyes were gentle, inaccessible, fixed on a plane-landing a couple of thousand miles away, and night in the lamplit, lower hills of California, where the eucalyptus trees grow. She repeated the opening gambit on Long Distance:

It's me, Rol. I want to come back.... I know you want me to.... But I don't know if you will when.... Look! Think of why I went.... Don't apologize! Don't be like that! Because—Rol—me, too!

He didn't believe her.

Then he thought it was—masochistic experiment.

Don't you see, darling, that's why I was so extra frantic? So weirdly angry? I had to find that out.

"Then he was jealous!" Yvonne laughed softly—happily. "I think that was good for him."

"No doubt."

"In the end—all he could say was, 'Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!'"

"And you feel like hurrying?"

She spoke reproachfully. "Wouldn't you?"

"Yes."

"I want to have eighteen kids," she said. "And I want them all to grow up florists and nurserymen and horticulturists. I understand me. Us. He had to spend all his time in the greenhouses because I spoiled the whole rest of his world. I'll get him out oftener, now. Not too much. Enough."

I looked at her—the clear amethyst irises, the gilded cascade of her hair, the expectation of her body. "You sure will."

"I'm so—full—so—complete. So—ready."

"There are other girls like Gwen," I said. "Some."

"I'll be busy. Don't you think? The children, for one thing. And my libido will be preoccupied, I imagine. Don't you? And suppose I had a small emotional accident some foggy afternoon at Malibu?"

"Rol would raise hell."

Her dimples showed. "I would try to make certain he never found out about it. My privacy. And I am quoting you, Dr. Wylie! Oh, I could hug you right here and now! And anyway—it isn't so much something you do. It's something to know is unlocked, that's all. When you can—you probably never do; when you can't—you hardly do anything but yearn; and never know for what. You know that—don't you? That's why Gwen—?"

I picked up her hand and looked at the big, square diamond.

"Pin none of your flowers on me, cooky. It was a dangerous prescription. I tried to weasel out of the charge that I'd compounded it. But I did. Mr. Wylie's toxic monologue."

"Mr. Wylie's elixir for the self-righteous."

"America," I said, "is the wrong climate for taking a capsule of that so-called sin and expecting a cure. In some other country—or age—"

"Don't orate today. I couldn't listen." She ate a shrimp. "I wish I knew more about you."

"Me, too." I went on, "Be good to Rol. Remember—these high tides run out. And remember—they always come in again."

"You going?" She said it almost without interest. She didn't need company any more.

I nodded. "The last installment is passing through the chopper. Here's another item, cooky. People who live in greenhouses mustn't cast the first stone."

For a moment, her gaze faltered.

I watched delicate changes of her color; she had beautiful skin. I watched the old stain reappear in her eyes. Her chin thrust out a little and shook a little and was firm. Her eyes turned amethyst again. "I'll remember," she said.

I thought she would, maybe.

"Do me a favor?" She was opening her handbag. "I haven't told dad I was flying back. I don't want to go through all the argument. Will you call him—after five-thirty?"

"If I don't forget."

She closed the bag. "I bet you would! So thanks anyhow. I can wire him—from La Guardia."

"Safer."

She said, "Good-bye, Phil."

I kissed her.

10

It didn't seem possible to work.

For half an hour I fussed around—trying to feel cooler—looking at my throat in the living room mirror and then the mirror on the medicine chest in the bathroom—hunting for a sunless spot in the forest-green sitting room—shunting the bridge table about.

I condensed the opening of Part Six in my mind, then tapped out the result on the portable. I thought Durfree would like it. Editors are fond—overfond of brevity. I took a shower and tried to write wet, but it ran down me, and my tail itched on the turkish towel. Finally, I got cutting again.

Paul showed up around four—when I had about ten pages—an hour—left to go.

He looked like an adolescent registering despair in an amateur play.

"Nothing," he said, and he sat down listlessly in an over-stuffed easy chair that was covered with chintz in full leaf. He didn't bother even to loosen his tie.

I looked at him and compassion melted out of me.

"Eaten?"

He nodded. "Had to. Have to keep going."

I said, "Nuts."

It was time, I thought, for Dr. Wylie to reverse the field. We had been running with sympathy too long.

Tears filled his eyes. "I hate to make such a spectacle of myself!"

"How right you are!"

"Phil—I'm caving in! I can't think of another thing to do. My guts are full of ground glass. All I see—is Marcia—in my mind. I can't go on this way—"

"Want to quit—going on that way?"

"How can I?" It sounded as if he didn't want to quit.

I said, "Listen, Paul, if you care to go to the cleaner, the dentist and down a gantlet all at once—you can quit."

"What do you mean?"

"Want a look at the real score? Or do you prefer to carry the torch of your slap-happy illusions forever?"

He stared. "You know something you've kept from me!"

"Certainly. I know a lot I couldn't tell you if I tried."

"For Christ's sake—!"

"All right. And remember, you asked. You went up to Hattie's last night—"

"That fat she-fiend—!"

"—and they said Marcia wasn't there. But she was."

He leaped to his feet. "I'll grab a cab—"

I got to my feet, too—not by leaping, and stood in front of him. "You'll grab no cab, Paul. Sit down—or shall I sit you down?"

"Go on—" he said. "Tell me, then."

"Marcia is up at Hattie's—working."

He looked at me dementedly and snatched the phone.

"You won't get them to put her on," I said. "She doesn't want to talk to you."

"I'm calling the cops," he answered. "I'll bust that joint wide open and get her out, if it's the last thing—!"

I hung up his telephone by reaching out with my foot. "Listen, Paulo. Listen good, once. You've made a lot of mistakes. Some, you admit. Some, you haven't caught on to—in spite of the infallible, scientific mind. And others—you haven't the empirical data to guess."

"For the love of God, say what you're going to say!"

"Marcia is a whore. Was, is, and always will be. Sit still. I am giving you the advantage of a certain amount of background. And I am not the kind of guy who says that a girl who sells her body always sells her soul. You know it! The trouble with you isn't Marcia—it's neurotic stubbornness. Trying with all your might to make a cheesy setup turn beautiful. Chopping yourself down at the knees. Then—when you're on your knees—chopping off the stump where your manhood ought to be. And so on up—through the guts and the heart. All that's left is a crazed beezer. I had a long talk with your Marcia yesterday. If you'll try to stay in one piece, I'll tell you about it, in a sec. But—meanwhile—somebody ought to brief you on the fact that there may be only one kind of love in the folklore of the U.S.A.—but there are five thousand kinds in people. Marcia had a kind for you that didn't match your sentiments for her. Look at it that way."