Front matter (continued 2)

She became wild and wanton and responsive. She was avid, insatiable, shameless. She exhausted him, drained him, wore him into incapacity, then invited, teased, coaxed, compelled him into fresh lechery. The element of the perverse, inherent in her size, her captivity, her unveiled loathing, added the final touch to their ecstasy. They came together again and again without concession in a rape of the courtesan, wringing joy out of their enmity.

When he collapsed, exhausted but less than content, she calmly rose and drank thirstily from the gourd. He watched her easy, fluent movements, knowing she was conscious of him and of their embrace, knowing that it signified no intimacy to her, that she was untouched. "Won't you forgive me?" he begged. "Won't you speak, or at least show you hear?"

She combed her long hair with her fingers and twisted it deftly into place. She lifted one leg, bent at the knee, and studied her foot. She sauntered to the columns and stood at the edge of the temple looking out, her back to him.

He made himself get up and go to her, kneeling at her feet. Even in his abjection he could not refrain from embracing her legs, resting his cheek against her flesh. She stood quietly, as though waiting for his next move. When he did nothing beyond implore her pardon, she disengaged herself calmly, turned away, and walked to the opposite row of columns.

It no longer seemed imperative to keep the vines chopped down. He let them grow at will except on the one side he kept cleared. Though he knew no hunger save for her, he fished and fetched water for her to drink and bathe. He thought she must tire of the monotonous diet, remembering the berries he brought her gourdsful. She ate them greedily. When her mouth was stained with the juice he could not control his longing; he took her once more. She responded as before; as before she remained inviolable.

She grew no more, and this pleased him, guaranteeing as it did a continued mutual enslavement. In midcycle between his despair after forcing her and helplessness before doing so again, he gloated over her smallness, her estrangement from everyone but him.

He did not return to the pool. Instead, he made the longer journey to the lake for water. He went back to the poppies by a roundabout route, picked an armful, leaving the gems in which they were rooted undisturbed. She let them lie at her feet where he had placed them.

On his next homecoming to the temple she had made a fire, succeeding where he had failed. It burned swiftly on the mosaic, consuming the dried vines as quickly as she could feed them to it. He took the ax and cut some green boughs, chopping them into convenient lengths. With these and the vines the fire could be kept alive, smoking, not giving out any warmth, but adequate to cook the fish he caught.

She took a portion of whatever he brought her—fish, fruit, flowers—and sacrificed it in the fire. When she was not sleeping, bathing, preening or standing looking out, she sat beside the embers, quiet, absorbed. Though he knew her indifference was unfeigned, this additional withdrawal added to his torment. When it became unendurable—when his lust and pique and desire to master her overcame his submissiveness—he attacked her and met her raging passion.

Otherwise she did not acknowledge his presence directly. She put his portion of cooked food on the table for him, throwing it out indifferently when it was left uneaten. Watching her sleep, tending the fire or brooding, he felt the outrage of her denial. His conquest of her body should have brought submission, escape, revenge, gradual conciliation—change of some sort—not refuge in her unfailing imperviousness. She had gelded him without giving him a eunuch's compensations. Sometimes, tormented by frustration, he took her brutally, more often he approached her with tenderness and deference, only to be frenzied into ruthlessness by her apathy.

Finally he knew she was with child. He became slavish in his anxiety, his solicitude, his devotion. He tried to care for her, to watch over her food, her rest, her exertions. She submitted to his attentions when it was unavoidable, she showed no pleasure or gratitude. Swollen, she moved slowly, lay from meal to meal on the couch with her eyes open.

He stayed close to the temple, hurrying back from his errands, resisting the temptation to explore the island. When the child was born he would bathe it in warmed water, wrap it in soft leaves, cover it with the furs. After the birth some way of reconciling himself to her would be miraculously revealed, she would speak, he would discover a means of communicating with her people and reviving them. He would cherish the child, protect, nourish, develop, teach, encourage it; it would be the means of establishing himself not only with her but with this place.

A somber, thought-cloying dread hung upon his mind. He walked warily, glancing frequently over his shoulder. If she wanted to leave the temple there was nothing to stop her; so soon as she had grown tall enough to get down from the couch by herself she could have walked away. He knew she would not go yet he feared to find her gone; always when he returned it was a shocking relief that she was there. He babbled to her at length of his apprehensions, he prayed her to assure him she would change, would relent after she bore his child, that nothing would part them.

While she slept he put his hand timidly on her belly and felt the life in it. The thought excited him; he was ashamed of his excitement. He knelt beside the couch to touch her knees and thighs in selfless purity. He kissed her hands, her temples, her hair; when she stirred and frowned, he retreated, hoping she would not waken.

She was near to labor when he heard the shouts and the clang of metal against metal. He ran to her, ready to protect her and the child with his life. She moved away, always keeping a space between them. No one coming upon them could imagine she wanted his assistance or that he had established any right to offer it.

The barbarians burst into sight, waving swords, holding their round shields high above their heads. Their crooked teeth flashed, their mouths opened in wild yells, their rough garments flew back to show their coarse, hairy bodies.

He tried to pull her with him, to lift her in his arms and carry her outside. She resisted obstinately, fiercely, desperately, clinging to the couch, to the table, showing to the full the revulsion and hate in her eyes.

The invaders passed the open side of the temple; Lampley could not believe they had failed to see it or that it hadn't excited their curiosity. Yet they did not turn aside; incredible or not, they were saved. The last one was out of sight when the woman screamed.

He clapped his hand over her mouth; the barbarians came from the side he had let the vines overrun again, cleaving their way through, trampling out the fire, smashing the water gourd, scattering the latest gifts he had brought. They saw and came at him, pointing their weapons so that he could see the faint kinks in the crudely forged steel. He tried to stay, willed himself to meet the swords' edge. Only when she threw her arms around the foremost warrior, offering her ripe belly to his blade, casting a triumphant, malignant look in Lampley's direction, did he finally give in and fly.

CHAPTER 5

He ran through the woods, clamor of pursuit close behind. He headed straight for the lake, remembered he had moved the boat, changed direction. He twisted and turned, hoping to deceive them; they stayed on his heels, gaining, gaining. He reached the shore and plunged into the water. He was not a good swimmer but the current carried him to the beach where the boat was while the pursuers had to turn inland to bypass a thick copse.

He splashed inshore, reaching the boat barely ahead of them. They swarmed at him as he stumbled, pushed the boat into the water with a violent shove and clung to the bow's protection against the rocks they hurled. The missiles splashed close but soon the current took him out of range. With immense difficulty he got himself aboard, and rowed to the opposite shore with his eyes fixed on the island.

It occurred to him that he must be headed directly for the swamp where he had seen the yellow swans. He changed direction; after pulling steadily at the oars, the keel grated on something hard and unyielding. He shivered at the coldness of the air and saw he had grounded at the mouth of a small glacier embedded between rocky hills. He dressed; leaving the boat high on the gravel bordering the ice, he began walking along the shore. The island was far, far away, mistily lilac in the distance, lost and irretrievable.

His shoes, so unaccustomed, spurned and slipped on the gravel and the rocks, floundered in the sand. The chilling wind from the glacier slapped at his back. Ahead trees—stunted, thick-growing, crowded by underbrush—came down to the water's edge. He pushed through touching branches into still denser thickets, forcing his way against increasing resistance, being forced in turn further and further inland.

Where the tangled growth ended abruptly there was no grass, only stony shale interrupted by ragged shrubs, scanty snowdrifts, bent, leafless trees. Inconstant winds eddied around him, stinging his face, pulling at his clothes, tearing loose twigs from the trees, dead leaves and chaff from the ground, whirling them upward, driving them before it, allowing them to settle only to scatter them again for new torments. He trudged on, head down, walled from the lake—not a glimpse, a fleeting glimpse of the island—climbing, descending, detouring, making he knew not what scant advance.

Advance to where, to what? In an unknown direction to an unknown destination. Nothing could be more stupid; the intelligent thing to do was stop, refuse to go farther. But stop himself, he couldn't.

He stumbled into a valley between gloomy cliffs. There was no vegetation here save sinewy creepers which seemed to spring directly from the harsh ground, their roots mercifully hidden. They wound and tangled, twisting and untwisting, ever seeking something to climb. He tripped on them, righted himself hastily, fearful that if he fell they would choke him, hold him fast before he could rise. Small dun-colored birds fluttered through them, pecking haphazardly at unseen insects, rose in unsteady, uncertain flight only to settle again a few yards away. He fell; terrified, he scrambled up, shaking himself loose, not really believing the vines had let him go.

He looked up at the far-off peaks. What had they to offer him? Romantic towers, magic fastnesses, mystic havens? Cold, craggy, misery. He trod carefully between the vines; perhaps he could reach the next hill before they tripped him once again.

He heard an angry, outraged, murderous squealing and grunting as a horde of wild boars, tiny eyes half-closed, tusks glinting with saliva, shaggy bristles standing out, charged with pounding hooves. He was directly in their path, there was no shelter he could take, and it was clearly useless to run.

He waited, quaking, as they came closer. The foremost animal, the leader, the most ferocious, became enmeshed in the loose vines and began struggling and jerking. His companions shouldered, shoved, worried and bit him; those behind attacked the ones in front. They fell upon their stupefied leader, tore him to pieces and devoured him. Then those who chanced to be bitten or slashed were treated the same way, finally those who had merely been bloodspattered.

Lampley ran from the scene and splashed through a wide stream he hoped would at least deter the frantic beasts. He climbed over sticky clayish plants with long, tongue-like petals pulling and sucking at his shoes, and bloated grass whose watery blades split apart under his weight, giving out vile fumes to make him sick and giddy. On a rise he looked back at the boars, milling in directionless knots. Far beyond he caught brief, elusive sight of the lake and island. Reluctantly he started up a spur bare of all vegetation, grim and desolate.

The yellowish rock on which he trod was smooth and firm underfoot at first; he climbed over a ridge and began a fairly easy ascent of an escarpment biting into the mountainside. The hard rock gave way to brittle, friable material that broke and crushed underfoot. He came to outcroppings, miniature buttes which crumbled and rolled at a touch. He found himself walking in a mass of shifting stone, loose and unpredictable.

Ahead, the slope became a series of shoulder-high cliffs, mounting like steps. Very carefully he approached the first and put his hands on the edges to pull himself up. The rock disintegrated under his fingers. He stretched his arms forward and tried to lever himself up with his elbows. The entire face broke off to go sliding and tumbling past him.

He was too far up to retreat and seek a less treacherous way, the best he could do was strike out for the adjoining ridge. He moved cautiously but the strata seemed to shift so that he was faced by a palisade high as his head. He reached up to grasp the ledge. It too split and shattered. He looked in vain for an easier ascent or a crevice where he could work his way up.

Now the cliff towered over him, far above his reach, menacing, sullen. He followed it, searching for a place where it was lower. His feet slipped on the loose stone; it was like walking on marbles. He tried to run, to defeat the restlessness of the rock by speed. His ankle turned; pain and weakness fought each other; he became part of a plunging, toppling, sinking, downward slide, with gravel, debris and boulders crashing around him. The only way he could keep his feet was to run with the avalanche, to embrace the illusion that he was surfboard riding. By a tremendous effort he retained his balance.

He knew it was impossible for him to survive; he must resign himself to being crushed and buried under the landslide. It was pointless to protect his head with his arms as he was doing, it was pointless to run at all. His mind surrendered, only his body continued to fight against destruction. He could not believe his mind didn't really know fear; at a point like this communication was cut off; instincts and reflexes took over.

The roar of the fall became a rumble and then a crackle diminishing into silence as the last fragments rolled and settled. He was almost at the mountain's foot, in a sort of natural quarry hemmed in by palisades on three sides, open only the way he had come down—and this was paved with loose stones in uneasy disarray. It was impossible to scale the sheer cliffs; even at the risk of causing another avalanche he had to go back. Cautiously he began the ascent. Though the rocks turned and shifted under his feet they did not crumble. Picking his way with exaggerated lightness he covered perhaps a hundred, a hundred and fifty feet. He began to hope he might reach a point where he could strike out and away from the incohesive slope.

With a loud report a rock shot from the palisades behind him, arched over his head to crash in front and come bounding down toward him. He jumped aside. It tumbled all the way to the foot of the precipice. From near where it landed another stone discharged itself to fall just behind him. While it was still moving, a ragged bombardment from all three sides began, increasing in intensity till the air was filled with missiles. Fresh slides were started by their impact; the entire mountainside seemed to be converging on him with varying speeds, diving and plunging, lurching and sprawling. He crouched and cowered. An immense chunk shattered nearby, showering particles and dust.

The palisades erupted in staccato explosions, echoed when the projectiles hit the slide and increased its velocity. He was shaken to realize that the rocks were sentient, individually or collectively, and he was their intended target rather than an endangered spectator. He was doomed; though they missed him a hundred, a thousand times, on the hundred and first or the thousand and first, chance would expose him, make him vulnerable, destroy him. Even if the ground held firm he could not climb out of range before he was felled. And the ground was not holding firm.

There was no escape; who could control the unswerving malice of the rocks? Who indeed? Suddenly he stood erect and held up three fingers in the sign of the letter Shin, the initial of the name Shaddai.

Instantly the mountainside became still. Birds soared overhead, grass sprouted through the rubble and in the crevices of the rocks, clear brooks wound sinuously from the mountaintop, lizards basked on flat spaces, insects moved speculatively from object to object, sheep wandered in search of food.

He threw himself down on a bed of ferns, newly sprung into life. The soft, spiraling ends of the fronds touched his cheeks and hands gently. He moved guardedly, unwilling to crush the tender stems. Raising himself on his elbows he peered down at the pale, feathery snails, the stiff, spotted leaves, the hairy stalks. His throat tightened with wonder and gratitude.

He got up, walked slowly over the solid ground. When he had climbed higher than the palisades he struck out for a plateau, bare of vegetation but not desolate. Shallow ponds sparkled, crystal pinnacles glittered, mounds of quartz reflected the light. Snakes and crocodiles, strange and nameless reptiles in bright, jeweled colors moved smoothly out of his path. A tinted mist rose from one of the ponds, taking the shape of Mattie. All the women he had known showed themselves in wisps and shreds of vapor. Some were laughing, some wistful, pleading, tempting; all dissolved as fast as they formed. He fled.

He fled from the plain into a forest where leaves made an umbrella against the light, through fields where grain was turning black, past rutted gray roads and decaying rail fences. He passed clumps of berry bushes, bare of fruit, whose thorns raked his hands and face. He stumbled over plowed furrows where the dried clods were woven together with spiderwebs and made his way through harrowed fields where the exact lines were blurred by rebellious weeds, rooted at random.

The air was cold, colder even than at the glacier, and the light hazier, as though too far from its source. Weeds were persistent, but colorless and sickly. His foot came against something harder than the dry earth; he kicked the weeds aside to reveal a railroad track, crusted and pimpled with rust. There were two tracks, eight, twelve, twenty, an inestimable parallel multitude of them, the steel flaking, the ties rotted, the spikes and plates worked loose. He walked between them.

The skeleton of a model T Ford stood crosswise on the rails. The body was gone, and the hood; the brass radiator, capless, had turned green and brown. A wooden box was athwart the chassis in place of a seat, its ends sticking out over both sides. The tires were flat and shredded.

Lampley lifted the front end and shifted it so that it headed along the right-o-way. He turned the ignition key, pulled down the gas lever, stood in front of the radiator, pulled the choke-wire and twirled the crank several times. Then he went back and sat on the box, but not under the steering wheel.

The motor coughed and started, the engine missed in syncopated rhythm, shaking and rattling the frame, failing and fading, catching again. The car bumped slowly over the ties. The Governor, satisfied, made no move to take the wheel. The tracks came together in a series of multiple switches. The Ford stopped, the motor clanked and quit, steam spouted up from the radiator.

Lampley got out. The surface of the rails was no longer rusty but bright with wear. The ties were new, reeking with fresh creosote. They were too close together for his stride; he walked partly on them, partly on the roadbed.

The single diesel car panted on a siding, its garish paint flecked and peeling. He climbed aboard, walked between the rows of plush-covered seats to the front. The clerk sat in the cab, reading a comic book. He nodded when he saw Lampley. "Board," he shouted. "Aw-a-booooooard!"

The diesel started smoothly. The Governor sat down just behind the clerk and looked out the window. They were running through a petrified forest. Some of the trees were riven down the middle, showing the dark, livid heart, the gleaming saffron sapwood, the red-brown bark. Fallen trunks lay in shallow oil, black, broken by lurid rainbows. The car heeled over slightly as it rounded a curve, then more steeply on the opposite side as it picked up speed and took another.

The clerk said, "The island under the world, ay? Good or bad?"

"You can't simplify like that," protested the Governor.

"Can't I? Some law?"

"I mean...."

"Of course you do, of course you do. Enjoy the fishing?"

Lampley saw again the brilliant creatures he had pulled from the lake. "I only caught what was necessary for food," he muttered defensively.

"Necessity is the mother of convention," sighed the clerk; "necessity is the mother of conception, of prevention. Also correction, election, protection, vivisection, selection and so forth. Never perfection."

"Ah," said the Governor, thinking of the woman.

The clerk swung a handle, pulled a throttle, pushed a button. The coach was filled with whirling sparks and balls of fire. "Necessity is the mother of pretension," he sang operatically. A duststorm gathered outside the window, grit forced its way in. The car gained further momentum, swayed and rocked.

"Do we have to go so fast?" asked Lampley.

"Necessity is the mother of dissension and projection. The faster we go, the less room for argument."

The car seemed to be skimming above the rails. The clerk pressed all the buttons in front of him. A pornographic picture was projected on a three dimensional screen. Lightning flashed all around. The comic book which the clerk had negligently dropped flamed up and was reduced to curling char. The wind outside roared with hurricane velocity. There was nothing to see through the window but the lumps of earth the storm picked up and held in suspension.

The landscape twinkled into a tunnel, black and close and sooty. The tunnel spiralled upward; the diesel slowed, barely kept from slipping back on the grade. The dark sides gave way to illuminated bas-reliefs showing sphynxes and dragons pursued by hunters with spears and bows, pyramids on which victims were sacrificed with obsidian knives, battles between miniature figures in green or red against others in white or blue while their commanders rode back and forth waving microscopic swords, tableaus of unearthly quietness where boats were poled up wide, muddy rivers flowing through empty prairies.

The tunnel became black again; frigid cold swept through the coach. Icicles formed on the ceiling, frost obscured the windows in flat withes woven together. Lampley shivered so hard he became slightly sick to his stomach. He drew his jacket tight, hugging his chest, trying to control his chattering teeth. The clerk left the cab and built a fire in the aisle. He ripped out seats and fed them to the blaze. By the time the coach was bare the frost-ferns were melting from the windows.

The clerk spun a crank; the light inside turned blue. He hauled a lever back, it changed to green. He jabbed a button; the interior became dark. Lampley saw they were moving smoothly into a terminal, with redcaps running alongside on the platforms. "All out," shouted the clerk. "Change here for North and South, East and West. All out!"

Lampley stood on the platform. "Carry your baggage, sir," asked a porter.

"Sorry, I don't have any," apologized the Governor.

The porter's dark face showed his disbelief. "Everyone has baggage."

"But I don't," insisted Lampley.

"You're trying to cheat a poor man," said the porter. "You're trying to cheat society. You're trying to cheat yourself. Even trying to cheat God."

"Believe me, I'm innocent," cried the Governor.

Loudspeakers bellowed, "Innocent! Innocent!" Far-off cold echoes sounded stonily, "... cent ahahaha ... cent ahahaha...." Lights winked on and off. The porter prostrated himself on the platform. An unseen band blared The Stars and Stripes Forever, firecrackers and rockets went off, a phosphorescent display spelled out KISS ME KID, a barrel rolled and bumped to a stop, disgorging clowns who began tumbling, somersaulting, standing on each other's shoulders to form a cluster reaching to the arched roof where the top man wrote in white chalk on the smoky vault, DRINK MOXIE.

Lampley stood undecided, then walked briskly to the waitingroom. Its chrome and plastic benches were empty, the space between them was filled with robots busily burnishing each other's metal, adjusting each other's mechanism, screwing and unscrewing visiplates, audio-systems, sensitizers, olfactometers. He saw no humans. He paused at the unattended newsstand to look over the tattered, smudged periodicals. Journal of Subatomic Medicine. The Martian Monthly. Space News. Androids Review combined with The Magazine for Mechanical Men Astronomer & Astrogator. Time-Travel Tribune. There was nothing here to interest him.

Outside the waitingroom he came to the subway stairs, gleaming in white and nickel. They led to an underpass; he could hear the trains rumbling and thundering overhead. He followed the passage to the station; the empty tracks emerged, plunged on into darkness. He sat on a bench; no train came.

He got up and walked along the platform. It went deeper and deeper into the tunnel without narrowing to an end. He came to a place where the tracks were boarded over with heavy planks, flush with the concrete on which he walked. On the other side of the boardwalk small shops offered their wares in dusty, ill-lit windows.

The nearest displayed boots and shoes, sandals, clogs, getas, slippers, moccasins, greaves, buskins, gaiters, spats, wellingtons, overlapping damascene plates to protect the feet of the well-shod knight. All were in sets of threes: right, left, interpediate. The Governor entered; the salesman, dressed in black, hurried to him, rubbing his black-gloved hands together. "Why are all your shoes in triples?" Lampley asked.

The salesman opened his eyes in surprise. "How else would they be?"

"In pairs, naturally."

"But my dear sir, there's nothing natural about that. Of course there are poor afflicted creatures with only two feet; for them we recommend a very fine prosthetic craftsman who also supplies artificial ears and natural-looking uvulas. But normal persons will find themselves well-served here, I assure you. Well-served indeed." He pursed his mouth and looked at Lampley with a combination of severity and servility.

"It—it's all relative, then?" faltered the Governor.

The salesman shrieked. "You monster, you fiend, you horror! Begone! Begone, I say!"

Lampley closed the door behind him. The next shop was a tobacconist-stationery-novelty store. In the showcase were giant pipes, twists of burley, packages of latakia and perique, warped boxes of dried-out cigars, false mustaches, lapel flowers to spray water in startled eyes, puzzles, cryptograms, tiny spheres fitting endlessly inside of each other, moldering reams of paper, flyspecked envelopes, faded typewriter ribbons, filing indices in cyrillic. The Governor was not surprised to see the storekeeper was the legless sailor-juggler.

"Come in, lad; a hearty welcome to you," he said. "Been traveling in strange parts, I see. How are the women?"

"Small," said the Governor.

The juggler smacked his thigh with a big hand. He laughed till he coughed. He strapped on a pair of aluminum legs and danced a hornpipe. He took a gallon jug from behind the counter and tilted it against his lips. "Small ay? Small and naked and full of bile?"

The Governor nodded.

"Then you're poisoned, lad," said the juggler heartily. "You'll never be happy with the other kind again. O the lovelies, the darlings, the dainty morsels: they'll cut out your heart, eat your liver, pluck your eyeballs from your skull, bless them."

"But," said Lampley, distressed, "surely it doesn't have to be that way?"

"Surely, surely," said the juggler.

Lampley bit his lip. "How does one get out of here?"

"Hush," cautioned the juggler. "I have a map. It was traced by the seventh son of a seventh son and lent me under the strictest pledge of secrecy, sealed in black goat's blood. Come along with me." He led the way to the back of the store, through a passage papered in bright orange, the sheets curling apart at the edges where the glue had dried. It was barely wide enough to squeeze through sideways.

The room was triangular, with a pile of brass cogwheels in the narrowest corner. A set of bookshelves sagged against one wall. Calf-bound folios leaned on spiral-backed notebooks. In disorder on top was a collection of papers. The juggler reached among them and took out a thick roll tied with withered pink tape. "Here," he whispered. "Read it and memorize it. Never say who showed it to you."

The Governor unrolled the map. It showed an unfamiliar, an unlikely, a visionary coast. Mermaids and dolphins frisked in the seas; the shoreline was blank, labelled Terra incognita inferioris.

"Guess that will fix you up, ay lad?" boomed the juggler. "It's not everybody I'd show it to."

"I'm sure of that," said Lampley. "Thank you."

"Just don't let on to anybody," cautioned the juggler. "Not even if they torture you for it."

"I won't," promised Lampley.

"Think of me," begged the juggler. "Pray for me."

The Governor did not investigate the third shop. He walked past it to the ramp leading to the street. Outside the station the roof of the city pressed down so close buildings of four stories barely cleared it. The street was wide and paved with cobblestones; brilliant copper trolleywires ran overhead.

The city was familiar to Lampley, he had lived in it, knew the names of its quarters and districts. He began walking toward the harbor, the picture of it forming before him, the dark olive water, the black ships suddenly looming up, the tiny figures on the docks, the slowly creaking pilings. The harbor was miles away; miles and miles and miles away.

He passed block after block of gray stone, massive, empty somber buildings. A skeleton came out of one and thrust a dented tin cup before him. The Governor dropped in a coin. It went through the cup and rolled into a gutter running with chaff-flecked dirty water. The skeleton got down on its hands and knee bones to search for it.

A streetcar, royal blue, creaked and whined by. Lampley knew it was headed for the docks also, its passengers stevedores and sailors. A green trolley passed it going in the opposite direction. The motormen saluted each other by clanging their bells in the beat of Old Black Joe.

Lampley passed under a gray stone arch spanning the street from building to building. Atop the arch were severed heads of a bear, camel, dog, elephant, ox, weasel. He dropped a coin in the slot and twirled a prayerwheel set up here to help speed the decapitated creatures to a new incarnation.

Beyond the arch, kleiglights focussed on a supermarket. Like the street, it was deserted. The endless shelves held empty cans, their ragged lids sticking cockily upward. The refrigerators were crowded with milk and pop bottles with nothing in them. Unattended cash registers rang NO SALE over and over. Vegetable bins contained carrot tops, potato peels, orange skins, apple cores, cherry stones, peach pits, bean strings, pea-pods, squash seeds, melon rinds. At the butcher counter cellophane bags of fat, gristle, bones and sinews were neatly stacked between trays of clamshells, fish scales, frogs' heads, chicken beaks. Lampley walked on.

He came to a cross-street with an arc-lamp on each corner—white, violet, gray, reaching into the blackness. He knew it was always night in this city, and he thought of the hundreds of thousands of its inhabitants who worked by day, condemned to a bedridden, insomniac existence. A red streetcar clattered through the intersection, the wires overhead throwing long, shattering sparks as the trolleywheel hit the break, reconnected, glided on.

In the next block there was a cellar with a sign COAL & ICE. The cellar was lit. The Governor peered down at a griffin, its wings folded neatly back, its arrowhead tail tucked away, shoveling crushed ice into a roaring furnace, pausing only to fill a refrigerator with dusty lumps of coal. The building which housed the cellar was divided by a lane which descended in long, shallow, stone-flagged steps. This arcade was lined with booths, small and open. Some contained iron white enameled beds with coverlets thrown back to show wrinkled sheets and indented pillows, barberchairs adjusted for immediate occupancy, office desks with letters and forms lying on them, bar stools drawn cosily up to bamboo counters, mechanical pants-pressers steaming, open and ready to crease a pair of trousers. There were booths of sheepskins and parchments with the laureate's name blank, certifying every known degree and honor. There were others containing family bibles and photograph albums, dining tables set with silver and napery, bathtubs full of hot water on whose surface floated cakes of soap and scrubbing brushes.

He came to the end of the arcade and stood at another wide street, listening to the night noises of the city. A yellow streetcar stopped beside him. The Governor climbed aboard. There was no conductor, no passengers, no motorman. The straw seats were misshapen, cracked and bristly but the brasswork on them and the doors and windows was all fresh and polished. He walked to the front of the car. The sign above his head read .VA TTAW AIV YAWOAT :OWT He jerked the control knob over the graduated notches. The car bucketed along the street.

The street became two streets, encircling a great, round building whose hundreds of mean and mocking windows were heavily barred. In front of the building was an imposing statue, carved in the same gray stone used throughout the city. Inside the prison were thousands of wretches, dirty, scabby, verminous, starving; thousands of convicts pacing, twitching, planning, calculating, remembering; thousands of convicts behind bland walls, condemned to smell their own bodies and the caustic chemicals, to feed on themselves and refuse, on hate, despair, foolish slyness.

The Governor left the car and beat his hands against the prison. He shouted defiance at the warden, the guards, turnkeys, stoolpigeons, trustys within. He picked up a piece of chalk and tried to write on the impervious, rugged stone. The chalk crumbled before he got beyond FR.

Outraged past bearing, he turned away, brushed by the statue. The figure was two stories high. On the base the letters stood out, shadowed by the street lights. GOVERNOR ALMON LAMPLEY. He ran back to the car as though pursued, his heart beating anxiously. He swung the knob; the car rattled between empty warehouses, lonesome flats, deserted homes. The arc-lights here were a deeper violet, the pavingstones took on a greenish tinge.

He entered the quarter where the foreign consulates were, each with its coat-of-arms carefully emblazoned above the doorway, the flagstaffs bare, windowpanes shattered and broken. After them came professional offices in houses hesitating between being homes or not-homes: dentists, pimps, doctors, mediums, occultists, fortune-tellers, literary agents, optometrists, dowsers, narcotics peddlers, osteopaths, contest-promoters, burglars, chiropractors, librarians, counterfeiters, attorneys, tea-tasters, educators, graphologists, architects, lapidaries, phrenologists.

He came to where narrow shops hunched against each other, none with entrances, each with a window for their shop-worn, mildewed goods: the folds of cloth faded and dingy, the hardware corroded and rusty, the books brittle and dogseared, the bottles fallen and crazed. He passed theaters where marquees, caught between changes, spelled out unintelligible attractions, created hermaphrodite stars. He passed filling-stations with hoseless pumps, radio-towers without antennae.

He took the trolley through quiet, quiet streets where all the houses spoke with assurance of sleepers within, of babies fed and diapered, dry and unprotesting, of adolescents on their stomachs and young girls curled into knots, of lovers lying face to face and married couples back to back. He passed shuttered houses, and those with the front door opened in welcome; houses with the porchlight left on for the expected visitor, and houses heavy with gloom and repulse. He passed open spaces: vacant lots, cramped parks, areas being excavated.

The street entered a more modern part of the city. The buildings were still of gray stone but here it was more smoothly, more fashionably dressed. There was not one which didn't reach to the roof of the city or embody the horizontal lines of the currently popular style. He halted the car before the department store which alone thrust its height through the city's enclosing shell and rose, who knew how many stories above it.

It had been remodelled over and over again yet it was still familiar to Lampley as the rest of the city: gray, massive, frowning. Oil lamps with dented reflectors behind them illuminated the show-windows. The Governor reached up and wound the route sign till it read, .HTUOM HTOMMAM-MUTOT XOV :TIAW. He lifted the control handle from its square nut and stuck it in the conductor's coinbox. He swung down the steps and stood under the portico of the store, gazing into each window in turn.

One displayed a single egg on a pedestal draped in black velvet that had turned green and purple. Another contained burred screws, threadless bolts, spectacles and eyeglasses with important parts lacking. In the next, women washed clothes in galvanized tubs, scrubbing them against metal washboards, ironing them with sadirons. One of them, stringy gray hair lank on fat shoulders, came forward and pressed her open mouth, like a pig's snout, against the glass. Her teeth were long and jagged, her tongue pale and coated, the inside of her lips spotted with sores. She pulled up her draggled skirt to reveal bunion-shaped shoes and wrinkled black stockings, dancing with bumps and grinds.

He moved slowly past the window crammed with foxed lithographs, broken crockery, disabled bedsprings, a garbage can where a banana lolled from under the lid like a dog's tongue, to the window where a dentist, aided by an ingenious arrangement of mirrors, drilled his own teeth. At intervals he paused, drew a hypodermic needle from his pantspocket and squirted at a canvas on an easel. The artist who stood idly beating a mahl-stick against an open palm, leapt to the easel, working furiously until the paint discharged from the syringe was used up, then sank back into lethargy till the act was repeated and he had a fresh batch of color to use. He was painting a picture of Almon Lampley in track clothes, running for office.

Instead of a revolving door at the entrance there was a merry-go-round. The Governor stepped aboard and bestrode one of the horses, thrusting his feet into stirrups which were too short and brought his knees too high. The wooden steed, instead of moving gracefully up and down in time to the music of the calliope, bucked and reared. Lampley was glad to dismount and cling to a brass pole. A figure in motorman's uniform—the Governor knew it was his yellow streetcar he had driven—climbed aboard briskly and began collecting fares. He wore a monocle in his left eye on which was etched the island under the earth as seen from the farther shore.

"I'm only trying to get into the store," explained the Governor, unwilling to pay.

"The store. To be sure," said the motorman, as though he had just realized what was beyond the carrousel. "History, ethics, philology, chemistry, geography, heraldry, propaganda, celestial mechanics? A streamlined, up-to-date, late model, trouble-free, labor-saving philosophers' stone? How about the small, extravagant pocket-size for a willion gold moidores? I'm offered a willion; who'll say a stillion, a crillion—a fillion even? Come now, ladies and gentlemen, horses, giraffes (camelopards, if you prefer), ostriches and zebras, surely a fillion moidores is little enough for a love-magnet, a cap of invisibility, or a bottomless purse? Let me hear a fillion. Going once, going twice, going up?"

The calliope played, In the Good Old Summertime. "Going up," said Lampley firmly.

"Ah," muttered the motorman, hanging his head. "I was afraid of that." He removed the monocle and crushed it under his heel. The eye behind it was glass. The merry-go-round tilted, sliding Lampley off onto a floor of absorbent cotton sprinkled with tinsel flakes. The calliope switched to It Had to Be You. Two Santa Clauses arrived, lugging a barrel. They grasped Lampley under his arms and shoved him into the barrel, jamming his knees against his chest. They rolled the barrel along the floor and up an incline, then they righted it. The staves opened like a flower. Lampley stood erect on the bed of a horse-drawn wagon. The store was full of wax dummies engaged in copulation.

A tophatted, nightshirted man on stilts marched through, carrying a pickaxe over his shoulder. He attacked a section of the wall with the pick. After a few strokes water gushed forth, sweeping the dummies away. The man took a blowtorch from under his hat and froze the water on the floor. A motion-picture projector threw colored images of fleecy blue and pink clouds. An organ played O Promise Me (pianissimo) while handholding couples skated tirelessly over the ice.

The Governor jumped from the wagon, and avoiding the irregular edges of the ice, walked over to the stationery department. A mahout in turban and loincloth pecked at the keys of a typewriter with his goad. Each time the machine came to the end of a line a balloon emerged from the side, inflated slowly, floated up out of sight. Lampley cleared his throat. "Could you tell me the way to the elevators?"

The mahout whacked the typewriter with his goad. Balloons issued like bubbles in an aquarium tank. They clustered together in midair to spell WHATEVER GOES DOWN COMES UP. Lampley spied a floorwalker doing a handstand on a cash register. "Could you—" he began.

The floorwalker sprang down nimbly, folding his arms. He took the carnation from his buttonhole and held it between his teeth. He punched the keys of the register. Three plums appeared. He punched them again; four lemons jumped into sight. He rang up, IOUOI. He handed the receipt slip to the Governor with a low bow. It read, THE AMOUNT OF YOUR PURCHASE IS $00.00. THANK YOU; YOU ARE ENTITLED TO A REFUND. Lampley turned it over. On the other side was printed, YOUR WEIGHT IS 181 POUNDS. YOU WILL BE LUCKY IF YOU AVOID.

The Governor dropped the card and went to the bank of elevators. The doors slammed open, one of the clowns he had seen at the terminal stuck his head out. "Foreign tongues, quartermelons, odd fish, rooter-beggars, soft hearts, hot potatoes, proud flesh, birds of a feather, prime movers, mushrooms, red herrings! Going GUP!"

"Please," said the Governor.

The clown opened his painted mouth and wabbled it. Then he fell out of the elevator on his face. Lampley stepped around him into the cage. The clown picked himself up, his feet slipping from under him again, threatening a pratfall, so that he had to keep his legs whirling to maintain balance. He sneezed. His mask flew off to uncover the clerk's face. "You're keeping the doctor waiting; hurry, hurry, hurry." He closed the door, snapped it open. "Out," he said sternly, threatening the Governor with one of his clown's flapping shoes.

CHAPTER 6

The vaulted ceiling of the windowless waiting room was upheld by romanesque pillars. It was so low Lampley could have touched it without stretching his arms to the full. Dirt had worked its way into every unevenness of the whitewashed surface. Unshaded bulbs stabbed his eyes. A girl sat in an armchair, rolling and unrolling a magazine. A woman in her thirties pulled at her glossy black hair; when a strand came loose she tucked it back under her hat, then pulled at it again. A row of plastic mannequins, smiling, dressed in blouses and hats with veils but skirtless and unshod, were wedged tightly together on a long bench. The Governor looked for a vacant seat; there was none.

The thick whitewash on the ceiling and pillars constantly flaked off, falling in a fine, dusty powder on the limp carpet, to be trodden by nervous feet. Lampley scraped a short semicircle with the toe of his shoe; the layer was very deep. A mouse came out of the wall and stood in the middle of the floor. No one paid any attention. A white cat with black and orange patches prowled past, rubbed itself against the Governor's leg, saw the mouse and crouched, tail lashing. The mouse scuttled for its hole; the cat pounced—too late. It mewed pitifully.

An elderly nurse entered the waiting room. Her cap was perched on hair dyed butter yellow, her hound's cheeks had bull's-eyes of rouge on the bones, her down-turned mouth was unevenly lipsticked in raspberry red. "Doctor will see you now," she announced.

The girl and woman jumped up. The nurse walked past them. "Me?" asked Lampley.

She wheeled about; he followed her. The girl took the woman's seat and began fussing with her hair; the woman sank into the girl's chair and rolled the magazine. The dummies' eyes crinkled and winked behind their veils; they had no mouths.

The nurse led him through a cracked and splintered door, the frame eaten by termites and dry rot. She swished her stiff skirt down a hall smelling of anaesthetics, dried blood, food cooked and forgotten. The plaster was cracked and bulging, seemingly held in place by the thick, greasy paint. The hall opened on a dressing room with triple-mirrored vanity-table. Cotton smocks of varying lengths hung on hooks. "Put on a gown please," she ordered.

"But I...."

She gave him an arch look. "You wouldn't expect Doctor to do your little work while you had your clothes on, now, would you? Come, dear—there's no use being shy at this stage. And let's not keep Doctor waiting; Doctor's a busy man."

She drew the curtain behind her; it was glossy-green with the word PULLMAN stitched to it. The Governor slowly took off his jacket, tie and shirt. There was a calendar on the wall, a calendar for the year he had gone into politics, after he and Mattie had been married for eighteen months. The picture was of an abnormally short-torsoed girl saying, "Let's have fun!"

Lampley selected the longest gown. It was not only too short, the edges were grimed. He put it on and pulled the curtain aside. The nurse said, "Let's not be nervous, dear. If you'd seen as many as I have come in to have their little work done you wouldn't think any more of it than brushing your teeth. I've had it done myself a dozen or two times. This way, please."

She preceded him into a grim office. Blue skies and flowering trees were painted on the glass of closed windows. There was a gray operating table under floodlights, and an oak desk with mustard-colored streaks. A man with a sharp nose, close-clipped gray mustache, large, cloudy spectacles sat behind the desk, looking over pads, pencils, ash-trays and a portable radio. A wilted rose was thrust into a buttonhole of his nylon smock. Two younger nurses leaned their elbows on the table, intent only on their animated conversation.

"Now then," said the doctor, putting his hands behind his head and tilting back. "Let's take a little case history, shall we?"

"There's nothing wrong with me," stated the Governor.

The younger nurses tittered, the older one patted him on the shoulder. "That's the spirit, dear."

The doctor murmured, "It's just a formality, you know."

"But I don't know," argued the Governor.

The doctor looked annoyed. "Let's not waste time." All three nurses agreed in unison, "Let's not waste Doctor's time. There are twenty girls waiting to have their little work done."

The radio played, Take Me Out to the Ball Game.

"Forty," snapped the doctor.

"Forty," echoed the nurses. "Forty girls waiting to have their little work done. If you knew how grateful they were to Doctor, you wouldn't waste Doctor's time."

"But—" began the Governor.

"Enough!" shouted the doctor, standing up. "I can't stand these silly creatures who chop and change."

"Doctor is the only one entitled to chop and change," admonished the elderly nurse.

The doctor came from behind the desk. "Are we ready?"

"Yes, Doctor."

The radio played Anchors Aweigh.

"Then let's get it over with."

They grabbed his wrists and ankles. He did not struggle. They hoisted him on the table; a needle pierced his arm. "Just relax, dear," advised the elderly nurse.

Lampley grew helpless. He tried to raise his arms; he rolled his eyes. The doctor said, "Nice going. Very nice. Now then."

A frightful stab of pain went through him. Then a worse one, more prolonged, probing, searching. He tried to scream but his mouth wouldn't open, his larynx and diaphragm refused response. The pain was beyond bearing: sharp, hot, slashing, searing through his abdomen, forking through kidneys, lungs, heart, throat.

"Ha-ha, nothing to it," chortled the doctor.

"Not when you do it, Doctor," cried all three nurses together.

"Shall we put it under the microscope and see what it was?" asked the doctor jovially.

"Oh, yes, Doctor, do," responded the nurses.

They left him. Lampley felt the blood gushing from the wound in his body, heard the pulse in his neck grow faint. Weakness didn't diminish his pain, only made him less able to bear it. He judged the anaesthetic was wearing off; he moved dry tongue against cracked lips. If not for the loss of blood and the drag of pain he might be able to raise his arms, or at least turn his head to see what they were doing.

"A boy," said the doctor. "One little assistant less."

The nurses cackled. "Oh, Doctor, you're so witty. You're a regular killer."

The older nurse came over to the table and took the Governor's hand. "How do we feel?" she inquired perfunctorily, "now our little work is all done?"

Lampley groaned.

"Never better, ay? Well, girls will be girls, I always say. Once you've had your little work done you're good as new till next time. Shall we get dressed now?"

"Wa-water," moaned the Governor.

The radio played a medley of Jingle Bells, Tea for Two, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, St. James Infirmary, and April Showers.

"A little water? All right, dear. Just come with me." She helped him off the table without solicitude. The pain came in dull, hard thrusts. His mind crawled in disparate ways, a spider whose legs writhed, though the body had been transfixed. He could move but he had trouble controlling his movements. He put one foot very carefully before the other and leaned on the nurse as she guided him back to the dressing room. "You can rest if you like," she offered brightly. "But not tooooo long, because there are others waiting for their little work. Doctor is a very busy man, you know."

He clutched the edge of the vanity; the face three times reflected in the mirrors was unchanged: the well-groomed, almost handsome, dignified yet twinkling, lightly aged, thoughtful but friendly face of the state's chief executive and first magistrate. He turned away in shame and horror.

Shakily, he got out of the smock, letting it lie in a wrinkled, blood-spotted, ugly pile. He stood, cowering a little, waiting for the agony, the fire inside him, to recede before he slowly, so slowly, put on his clothes. Leaning against the wall, he endured the spasmodic cramps. He saw that the calendar was gone; in its place was the bright cover of a seed catalogue. The curtain was now marked, BOX F.

The hall was a round tunnel pervaded by an overpowering smell. Spiralling ridges, set close together, reflected a dizzying light whose source he could not see. He stooped slightly to avoid the ridges above his head. Walking was awkward but—apart from the pain—not too difficult. He tried to identify the smell, familiar and not unpleasant though strong, but he could not. He put his hand against the grooves, somehow expecting them to be warm and moist; they were dry and cold.

His head brushed the roof, forcing him to crouch. After a short distance he had to stoop still further, then crawl on hands and knees. The peculiar effect of the reflected light—as though he were looking through the inside of a tightly compressed corkscrew—hurt his eyes. He shut them; this only made the pressure against his flesh more noticeable. He opened them again.

He could no longer crawl; he had to wriggle slowly forward. A bright ball of light far ahead dimmed the sinuous windings around him. He was sure it indicated an opening too small for him to get through. He bitterly regretted not having stretched his arms ahead of him while the size of the tunnel still allowed it. He progressed by digging in the toes of his shoes for a forward push, aided by arching his back. His shirt was wet with sweat; jagged flashes shot through his head.

He was exhausted, unable to move farther. The cessation of movement, of effort, did not ease him or recruit his strength to go on. He dared not give up, relax, slacken his will. He was condemned to go on and on, to bruise himself against the ever-narrowing passage. The necessity to complete the journey had been ordained before he was born. There was nothing to do but force himself to shrink even more tightly together, to compress his rebellious body into the prescribed space.

The pipe debouched partway up on a wall; the Governor looked down upon a brightly polished floor of inlaid wood. A large area was enclosed within barbed-wire entanglements, guarded by unmanned machine guns. Beyond this area the normal business of the department store proceeded: customers strolled through aisles of merchandise, salespeople waited on them; between the two societies was bare floor.

Inside the wire enclosure tombstones were displayed, voting machines, parking meters, printing presses, atom bombs, wireless masts, garbage trucks, spaceships, oil derricks, semaphores, gas pumps, power shovels, parachutes, purse seins, burglar tools, cyclotrons, glass eyes, a stuffed whale, medals and orders of chivalry and nobility. Closely shaven men in dark blue, dark gray, dark brown suits, neck microphones resting on their hand-painted ties, traded these things to each other—a truck for a net, a medal for a gravestone.

In the exact center of the enclosure, suspended from the ceiling, an electric signboard offered quotations which moved slowly along from right to left, allowing the slowest reader time to grasp them. BONE TOOLS 37⅛ ... CONSOLIDATED ALCHEMISTS 104 ... INTERSTELLAR DRIVE PREF 66¼ ... CSA BONDS #5 ... UNITED METROPOLITAN HOT CRUMPET & PUNCTUAL DELIVERY LTD 70....

One of the presses began turning, the paper flashing by on the cylinders in an endless stream. As they were spewed out and automatically cut and folded, the headlines were large enough for the Governor to read. LAMPLEY NOMINATED said the top one. A broker seized and stamped on it. GOVERNOR FAILS TO GET NOD read the one below, then in rapid succession, GOVERNOR'S OPPONENTS IN UNITY BID, CONVENTION DEADLOCK, LAMPLEY SWEEPS PRIMARIES, LAMPLEY SWAMPED IN PRIMARIES, THREE-CORNERED NOVEMBER RACE SEEN.

One of the brokers retrieved LAMPLEY NOMINATED and held up the smudged paper. Someone bid the stuffed whale. They slapped each other on the back, they fell into each other's arms helplessly, they rolled on the floor in ungovernable laughter after putting on coveralls to protect their clothes, they drew revolvers from hip-pockets and shot them into the air, stamping and rollicking in mirth. When delight at the jape finally died down, a broker offered, LAMPLEY SWEEPS PRIMARIES. There were no takers.

The illuminated ticker jerked in its hitherto smooth run. LAMPLEY 41½ ... DEHYDRATED AARDVARK 88 ... UNITED ARBALEST & HARQUEBUS 90¼ ... LAMPLEY 40⅞ ... MONTGOLFIER AERONAUTICS 284 ... EAST INDIA CO GE⅜ ... LAMPLEY 39 ... SPACE DOGS & GENERAL MUTANTS 368½ ... ENGLISH CHANNEL TUBE 111 ... LAMPLEY 37 ... HERO'S ALEXANDRIA STEAM POWER DEVELOPMENT 104¼ ... MARTIAN SUBDIVISIONS 208 ... LAMPLEY 35....

A broker pointed his finger at the Governor. He would have shrunk back; the smallness of the tube forbade it. All the traders lined up and stared at him through binoculars. The signboard speeded up: LAMPLEY 32 ... LAMPLEY 29 ... LAMPLEY 21 ... LAMPLEY 14 ... LAMPLEY 9 ... LAMPLEY 1 ... LAMPLEY....

"Yah!" they shouted in chorus. "You'd have to pay us to take you."

"Pay us! Pay us!"

Each put a hand on the shoulder in front. They snake-danced around and between the displays. The signboard began spelling out, BORN IN A HOSPITAL, OF AVERAGE INCOME BUT NOTABLY IMPROVIDENT PARENTS, HE EARLY SHOWED THE APTITUDES CALCULATED TO PUT HIM IN SECOND PLACE AT ALL TIMES. Oil began gushing up through the derricks and splashing on the floor. The smelting furnaces produced gold bricks. The stuffed whale's seams burst to show it was filled with stocks and bonds, promissory notes, mortgages, checks, bankbooks and trust deeds. The signboard read, UNIQUE SPECTACLE: GOVERNOR PUFFED WHEAT WILL NOW BE SHOT FROM THE

He felt the tremendous pressure building up behind him, tried to resist, gave up. The men below stood at attention, their right hands placed reverently against their left breasts. The Governor soared over their heads in a wide arc, above busy departments and dark, still spaces. He found he could control his flight, made a neat immelmann turn, and came gently to rest on a balcony overlooking the florist department. Scent of frangipani, orange blossoms, cereus, honeysuckle, liana floated up to him. Orchids bloomed in midair, lilies blossomed on plants rooted in the grass mats bestrewed over the floor.

The balcony was cluttered with anchor-chains, spools of telephone conduit, cotton bales, spare parts for mechanical chess-players. Lampley trod carefully between them and opened a door marked NO ADMITTANCE, SERVICE ONLY, DO NOT ENTER, THIS MEANS YOU. The room had no proper floor, only closely woven flat steel strips which sagged at every step. Enlarged X-ray photographs lined the walls; light shone through them to show up the deformed bones like parachutes, like plows, like cutlasses. The clerk, wearing an admiral's gold-laced cocked hat and the black robes of a judge over his blue jeans, sat in a porch swing that swayed gently to and fro behind a pulpit. He looked inquiringly at the Governor.

"Why did you take me to that doctor?" demanded Lampley.

The clerk shrugged and took a pinch of snuff. He sneezed. "Why did you go?"

Lampley pondered. "You forced me," he said at last.

The clerk plucked a dry weed from a candlestick on the pulpit and chewed it thoroughly. "You didn't resist."

"I—I was taken by surprise," stammered Lampley.

"There are no accidents."

"But—"

"And there is free will," affirmed the clerk drowsily, the swing almost stopped.

"I didn't go voluntarily."

The clerk opened his eyes wide. "Mmm. Also mmmmm."

"I—" The Governor was unable to say more.

The clerk stood up in the swing, reaching out his arms to the chains and began pumping with his feet. The swing cleared the pulpit, knocked over the candlestick, which bounced on the steel floor. He let go the chain, folded his arms. The swing subsided into gentle motion. The clerk jumped down and brought up a heavy lawbook from under the pulpit. He laid it open on the lectern, riffling through it. Several moths flew out from between the pages. "You plead not guilty?" he asked coldly.

"I don't understand."

"You plead non compos parentis, in loco ignoramus, ab squatulatis feasance, nolo comprendere?"

"That's nonsense," exclaimed the Governor.

"Certainly. Convicted in the thirty-third degree."

"I demand a suspended sentence."

"Granted," accorded the clerk, lying on the swing again, face down, so that his voice was muffled. "Now then! You insist the responsibility wasn't yours?"

"What's the use of going into that?"

The clerk sat up and adjusted his hat from the Napoleonic tilt it had assumed when he was prone to the proper fore-and-aft position. "The defendant is instructed that evasion is paramount to tutti-frutti. Answer the question or be incontemptible."

"It wasn't my idea," said the Governor sullenly.

"You consented, however."

"I 'consented'? Was she some chattel who needed dispensation from me?"

The clerk shook his finger.

"I actually tried to persuade her not to do it."

The clerk tore several pages out of the book and constructed an airplane. It flew silently over their heads, dropping leaflets a quarter the size of postage-stamps. The Governor tried to control his nervous shrinking. "It wasn't as if she were a silly girl. I mean, it was a considered decision on her part—nothing frivolous or vain...."

His voice trailed off. The clerk tore out another page and made a cannon. He shot a wing off the plane with it; the machine whirled down lopsidedly and crashed on the pulpit. "If that's the way you want it, that's the way you want it. Let's go."

"Where to?"

"Ah," said the clerk; "If we only knew." He removed the cocked hat and black robe and dropped them in a wastebasket. He pressed a button on the pulpit which immediately swung aside to reveal a manhole. A ladder rose out of the depths in short jerks. As it neared the ceiling a trapdoor fell open. The ladder glided through and stopped. "You first," said the clerk.

Lampley climbed the ladder, feeling he might lose his hold on the rungs at any step. When he was almost to the top he looked down. The clerk had disappeared. Carpenters were laying a wooden floor, erecting partitions. Porters removed the swing and the pulpit. Wiring, air-conditioning, telephones, interoffice communication-systems, were installed rapidly. One of the workers took up an ax and began chopping at the ladder.

Lampley climbed through the floor. He was in a court with squat walls, and gateways wider at the bottom than the top, bearing winged suns. He passed between rows of statues, animal-headed gods, men and women wearing conventionalized wigs and beards in stylized poses. The pale light gave the reds, greens and blues which predominated, a chalky, muffled quality; it threw the looped crosses molded on the frieze into shadowed relief.

The air was dank with the penetrating, pervasive dampness of oozing stone. Lampley was oppressed by thoughts of decay and destruction, of the knowledge without the sensation of pain. He longed for the warmth of the sun outside the hotel or the climate of the island under the earth. He shuddered away from the hidden corners, suggestive of toads and snakes, small animals decomposing and maggoty. This place should have had some measure of sanctity, induced some feelings of reverence or at least contemplation. He was aware only of the sodden air.

He walked moodily from the dusky precincts into the shocking light of a busy office. Girls in tight pink nylon bathing suits, their hair dyed royal blue, wearing blue nail polish, blue lipstick and red eye shadow, sat at transparent plastic desks, inserting thin rectangles of Swiss cheese into tabulating machines. Each desk had a silver champagne ice bucket in which rested a telephone. Beside the machines a row of feather dusters in graduated sizes were arranged in neat holders. Lampley saw pretzels were being used as paper clips.

"Pardon me," he said. "Is this the accounting department?"

The four nearest girls looked up in panic. Alarm bells rang shrilly, rockets popped out of the centers of the feather dusters, fire sprinklers showered down rainbowed sparks. The pretzels unwound limply. The slices of Swiss cheese curled into rolls out of which confetti blew in continuous blasts.

A girl pulled her phone out of the ice bucket and choked herself by winding the cord around and around her throat. The next one reached in her desk for a pair of waterwings, inflated them and began practicing the breast stroke. Others mutely handed him sheaf after sheaf of statements, loading them on his reflexively outstretched arms until the top ones slid off onto the floor. He could see they were made out to him but he had no chance to read the items or prices.

They piled the bills faster and faster; girls came from the farthest desks, staggered under armfuls. He dumped what he was holding and tried to struggle free from the mounting heap but it was already above his waist; he could not get his legs loose. He dug with his hands; the papers slipped down to cram the holes as fast as he dug. They imprisoned him with their weight; first the left, then the right arm was pinned to his side.

Buried to the chin, he filled his lungs with air, foreseeing the covering of his mouth and nose. The pressure was painful now; he felt his ribs slowly caving in. The deluge ceased; the girl who had choked herself wormed her way to him on her belly, creeping up the paper mound, dragging the telephone behind her. She pressed her swollen, twisted, blackened tongue against his lips, looked into his eyes with her protruding glazed ones.

He wrenched his face away. Girls approached with rubber stamps so large they could barely lift the bulbous handles. As they were raised he read DIAP on their dark purple surfaces. The girls hurled and slashed them downward, biting into the bills. With each thump masses of paper vanished. His arms were disengaged, then his legs. He breathed deeply, took a step, leaving only scattered invoices on the floor.

The girls threw themselves at his feet. "Take us," they moaned, "use us, violate us, degrade us. We love you."

The Governor shuddered as he perceived they were all sisters, product of a multiple birth; in each face he saw the features of the strangled girl. The one with the waterwings, using a crawl, swam rapidly between the others and raised her clasped hands imploringly. She was drowning. He rolled her over and began clumsily giving her artificial respiration. Her hair gradually turned white, the blue dye floating in a powdery cloud above her head. He put the valve of the waterwings to her mouth and expressed the air. She opened her eyes.

"Let us go," she said.

The others protested, weeping, clasping and unclasping their hands, tearing at their bathing suits in anguish, clutching their throats in grief, but they did not try to hold him. He helped the white-haired girl to her feet. She drew a key from between her breasts and handed it to him. He put it in his pocket and they left the office. As soon as they were outside her hair changed to brown, the pink bathing suit became white, her nail polish, lipstick and eye-shadow faded. She shivered.

"Are you cold?" She nodded. "We must find something to put around you."

There was no one in sight. This part of the store had an air of neglect, as though it had been used for storage, shut up and forgotten. The showcases looked as though they had been discarded from more enterprising sections; they were of odd sizes, with dull glass, in some cases cracked and repaired. Many were empty, others contained pearls, loose toothpicks, used cartridge cases, false teeth, celluloid collars, oil cans, rare stamps.

They came to an escalator powered by two ponies working a treadmill, and rode to the floor above. A floorwalker in morning clothes, binoculars dangling on his chest from a leather strap, hastened to them. "Customers only, customers only," he barked.

"We're looking for a coat or a cloak," the Governor informed him.

"Nothing but mink or sables here," said the floorwalker coldly, surveying them through the binoculars.

"We'll take either," said Lampley.

The floorwalker knelt and kissed the Governor's shoe. He reached behind him and took the tails of his frockcoat in his fingers and tore it up the back, placing the two halves before their feet. A saleswoman with a diamond collar sparkling on her neck rolled up in a motor scooter. "This way, if you please."

Two grapnels emerged from the scooter and hooked on to the pieces of coat; Lampley and the girl rode them like water skis to a small, shallow auditorium. An old-fashioned carrier system hummed overhead, its wire baskets moving briskly back and forth, disappearing above the proscenium arch of a cramped stage on which models pranced and postured in furs. When they turned rapidly, flirting the cloaks, Lampley saw they wore nothing beneath and that they were all gravid.

"I'll take that one," said the girl, pointing.

The curtain thumped down. The saleswoman pulled a cord on the carrier system. "Madam has excellent taste, for a slut," she complimented the girl. An oversized basket brought the model clutching the cloak tightly about her. She was cowering in terror. The saleswoman pulled the cord again and the basket tipped, tumbling the model out. "Rip it off her back," she ordered.

The model cried out. "Oh, wait. Please wait," she begged.

"You beast," said the saleswoman. "You pretty little female beast. What rights have you? What feelings have you? You were born for this moment."

The model moaned.

"Is there no other way?" asked the Governor.

The saleswoman stared at him. "How could there be? This isn't the place for cheap merchandise or cheap methods." She gave the order again.

The model sank to the floor in a trembling heap. "The poor thing," said the girl in the bathing suit. "Will it hurt her very much?"

"What difference does it make?" asked the saleswoman. "It'll be over before you know it. And there are plenty of other models. All this palaver over a wretched creature! It's disgusting."

"I can't do it," whispered the girl. "I'm too tender-hearted."

"Chicken-hearted, you mean," sneered the woman. "Anyone can see what you are. All right, let him do it then."

"No," said the Governor firmly.

"You'll have to pay just the same," warned the woman.

"Very well." He drew the key from his pocket and handed it to her.

"And take your property with you."

The model walked humbly behind them. "Still cold?" asked Lampley.

"Yes I am. And if you were a gentleman you'd have seen that I got my coat."

He didn't answer. The floorwalker, in a new frockcoat, bowed pleasantly to them and waved them to the elevator. Lampley pressed the button, noting that there was no indicator above, that there never had been indicators over any of the elevator entrances. The thought depressed him.

The doors rolled open. The cage was very large, with wide brown leather benches around three sides, and a padded leather ceiling and walls. The clerk wore a leather jockey cap, and a rawhide vest over his blue jeans. He clasped his hands together over his head as they entered. He closed the doors smartly; the elevator lurched sideways, throwing the girl and model to the benches.

"I hope—" began Lampley.

The clerk nodded. "Excellent, excellent. Where there's hope there's life and where there's life there's despair. A beginning, anyway."

"I meant I hoped—"

"Heard you," said the clerk. "Let's not say the same thing more than once." The car stopped and he opened the doors. Lampley could see nothing clearly through the clouds of steam outside. After a slight hesitation the girl left, followed by the model. The Governor moved after them; the clerk barred his way. "Ladies only," he said politely.

"You weren't so particular at the doctor's office," argued Lampley angrily.

"Yang and Yin," explained the clerk. "Circumstances alter faces."

The elevator shot upward. The noise of airhammers and riveting machines grew loud; it was succeeded by the sounds of distant motors, wind rustling in the trees, surf spuming against rocks, hooves clopping on soft asphalt. "You want out here?" asked the clerk. "Or will you try for a higher number?" Before the Governor could answer, the elevator stopped. Lampley stepped out on linoleum with the pattern worn off, the burlap backing showing through in streaks. A gloomy corridor, warm and fetid, stretched ahead of him. He turned back to the elevator but the doors were shut.

He paced along the corridor, past tarnished spittoons, sagging chairs, earthenware umbrella stands. The saffron wallpaper hung in shaggy strips, spiderwebs loaded with the dried chitin of insect victims tied it to the pocked plaster. Tarnished metal signs exhorted, NO SMOKING, DON'T SPIT ON THE FLOOR, SILENCE, NO WOMEN ALLOWED, FIREARMS PROHIBITED, ACT LIKE YOUR MOTHER SAW YOU. The light bulbs were the ancient carbon type; their filaments glowed an angry red through the flawed, smeared glass.

He entered a room whose wooden walls were riddled with holes, the remaining surfaces powdery and fragile, reeking with slime and foul smells. Men lay on the floor in their own filth and vomit, their greasy clothes clutched across thin chests, sagging bellies, protruding Adam's apples. They quivered and twitched, squirmed and tossed, turned on their sides and then on their backs. They moved their arms under their uneasy heads, rolled over on them, jerked them up. They snored, wheezed, gasped, cried out. They burrowed unshaven faces, heavy with sores, scars, bloody cuts, into their elbows or against hunched shoulders. The Governor picked his way between them as best he could, anxious not to stumble, dreading to touch one of them with his foot.

At the end of the room an alabaster basin, perhaps twenty feet across, was full to the brim with sewage. Gorged and sluggish flies hovered, or lit briefly on bobbing orange-peels. He shuddered lest some tremor of the floor, some unseen current of air cause the loathsome bog to overflow and reach him.

He finished his cautious tour and entered a circular anteroom whose sides were completely taken up by divans and easy-chairs upholstered in faded green plush. Gas brackets curved outward from the walls, holding fan-shaped yellow flames like halting palms. A chandelier was suspended from the ceiling, its glass prisms and teardrops reflecting the violet end of the spectrum. Below it was a round settee with a blunted cone of upholstery rising in its center; the seat might have accommodated twenty pairs of buttocks; no more than four shoulders could have found space against the spindling back. This cone supported a cast-iron statuette of an effeminate youth or a mannish girl—it was impossible to tell which because of the chaste metallic drapery. There was no one in the room.

The Governor paused before the halls raying out from the anteroom. They were all precisely alike, shadowed, somber, murky; he chose the center one. The glow of kerosene lamps enshrined in recesses made pale brown half moons on the mud-colored floor. He would not have been surprised had the hall led to some cell from which there was no return, instead it ended in another anteroom. This one was square, with board benches. Fat candles on wooden stands slowly dripped wax; the floor was covered with sawdust and shavings.

There was a row of double-hinged saloon doors reaching from knee to shoulder. Lampley pushed through one. Sleepers were even more numerous here, piled closer together, and their smell was more nauseating. Some of the faces were rigid, lips drawn back in a snarl to uncover noisome caverns. Others were mobile in sleep, grinning, grimacing, teeth-grinding, cheek-puffing. Pale worms crawled out of one open mouth.

He recognized some of the sleepers. Playmates, school fellows, college acquaintances, his first employer, merchants and farmers to whom he had sold tractors or plows, political allies he had left behind, a candidate he had ostensibly supported, a lobbyist to whom he had promised his vote before he changed his mind, a legislator of the same party whom he had disavowed, an office-seeker whom he had praised with calculated faintness—a dozen others. He could remember the names of none. He saw a man he was sure was his uncle, his mother's brother, in whose home he had lived and who had sent him to school. "Uncle—Uncle—" he stammered, but the name would not come. He stooped to rouse the man, to beg him to tell his name, to relieve the burden of forgetfulness. His uncle—if it was—slept on, knees drawn up, jaw slack, fingers fluttering. Lampley's hands fell away from the recumbent figure.

He hooded his eyes against the other faces, heeding only the legs and bodies to keep himself from stumbling. He saw the treasures, tokens, souvenirs, keepsakes the outcasts possessed, spilled from their hands or pockets onto the crowded floor: curling photographs, creased letters, cracked newspaper clippings, locks of lifeless hair, tarnished luckpieces, battered amulets, illegible diplomas, crumpled certificates.

The dormitory was surrounded by bathrooms of lustrous tile, milky porcelain, harsh chrome fixtures. Men slept on the spotless floors, in the immaculate tubs, draped themselves over lavatories and close-stools. The one Lampley entered seemed less crowded than the others. A figure on the floor struggled free of his companions. It was the clerk. He closed the door and twisted the faucet in the bathtub. The elevator shot upward.

"I don't seem to remember any of the names," apologized the Governor.

The clerk smiled tolerantly, then frowned. He turned the faucet hard over; the elevator's speed became frightening. "There's forgetting and forgetting," he said. "Anyway, you'll remember these."

"What?" asked Lampley.

"These," said the clerk. The elevator stopped with a jolt. The clerk waved his hand. "Your floor."

CHAPTER 7

It was a telephone exchange, with minute light-buttons flashing on and off. The switchboards were back-to-back; as the Governor walked slowly along he could see only the operators opposite. They were all girls he remembered poignantly, girls he had loved, whose images had filled his mind, girls he had wanted, courted, thought about through restless nights, girls he had been too timid, too awkward, too shy or inept to have. There was not one whose name or voice or scent he had forgotten. Sheila, whose spare, tanned body tormented his adolescence, smiled up at him with those tantalizing lips, thin but so perfectly, so sweetly curved. Beth, who swam and sailed and rode like a boy but constantly reminded him she was a girl, waved a free hand as she plugged into the board with the other. And there was Marge, Marge of the translucent skin, and hair the silvery gold of a full moon on a hot summer's night, Marge, whose exquisiteness it had been agony not to touch, hold, crush, raven. They were all there: Anne, Louise, Ellen, Charlotte, Gwen, Dot, Jill, Hermina, Belle, Sybil.... All those rewards ironic experience informed him belatedly he could have known. Grief swelled internally; he felt the tears flowing backward from his eyes down to his throat and lungs.

The girls' darting fingers snapped and unsnapped the connections in rapid rhythm. The pointed plugs were rifle bullets growing out of living vines rooted in the switchboards. This was his chance to call Marvin; what if some vital business had come up?

Yet he could not signal to the girls opposite: Connie, whose husband had contributed to his campaign for councilman, Martha, met at some dull affair, who had gotten tight with him. He could not ask them for an impersonal number; he dared not address them familiarly after realizing how fully he had failed them. The telephone exchange was a place where communication was impossible.

His steps slowed; he grudged leaving the women even though he could not reach or touch them, even though he was as helpless to stay as he had been to seduce. His sadness at the implacability of fate merged with a gentler, resigned nostalgia.

The last pair of switchboards was unoccupied. The Governor pulled a plug out from each; the vine-wires were straight and inflexible. They sped through the air, escaping his fingers, growing diagonally upward. Thinner tendrils sprang out from them at intervals and entwined into the rungs of a slanting ladder. Lampley put his foot on the lowest; it was springy but it held his weight without bending too far. He mounted rapidly.

Halfway up he looked back. The vines had sprouted umbrella-sized leaves, making a curtain between him and the exchange. He caught glimpses of blonde, red or brown heads and thought he heard weeping and laughter. Hummingbirds, moths and dragonflies in brilliant colors lit on the foliage; the leaves turned scarlet and orange. Gentle winds rustled them.

The wind on the floor to which he climbed was gray and desolate. Far across the emptiness he saw a twenty-four motored plane being warmed up while the waiting passengers cooled cups of coffee in the wash of the propellers. Equally distant in another direction, an ice-boat turned in narrow circles. Lightning flashed from dark clouds, thunder rolled steadily. Lampley walked to a stairway, iron-railed and steep.

Smell indicated that the floor above was used for chickens. Wire cages reached higher than a man's head, fryers stuck wan beaks through the openings into feed-troughs, pecking in brainless, suicidal intensity: tappetty-tappetty-tappetty tap-tap. Women with arms like thighs and breasts like rumps butchered methodically, wringing necks, cutting throats, chopping heads off. Spattered with blood, the women wiped their eyes with their great forearms, tossing sweaty hair out of their faces, joking, smearing entrails on their filthy aprons. The Governor hastily climbed the shallow wooden stairs ahead.

He was panting a little when he reached the sculptors' studio. Statues towered in impassive marble, porphyry, onyx, granite: men and women, gods and goddesses, dinosaurs, scorpions, dolphins, tortoises, dryads, satyrs, soaring abstractions—multiplaned figures, spheres, subtly out-of-round, curves and ovals in inescapable relationships. He put his hand against the cold stone; the aloof, remote smoothness reassured him.

Obscured—not hidden, but certainly not put out for all to see—were groups in wood, soapstone, chalk, jade, concrete, glass, bone. Mermaids, centaurs, demons, incubi, basilisks, cockatrices, foetuses, were carved in meticulous detail. Monsters, congenitally malformed, crouched next to cyclops, multi-limbed children, hermaphrodites, twins joined chest to chest, mouthless, earless, armless creatures. He shuddered away from them, turned back to the nobler creations; always his eye found another collection of horror for him to gaze at.

He was reluctant to leave this place of quietness and aspiration, of fascinating disgust. The stairway leading up was a continuance. The flight was of chalcedony, wide, sweeping upward in the grand manner, curving outward at the base and dividing in two halfway up; it was covered with slime which bubbled and stank in decay.

He trod fastidiously through the contamination, wiping his feet free of the clinging rot at the top. A bespectacled ape with a stethoscope dangling from the pocket of his white jacket seized Lampley's hand, dug his fingers into the wrist, feeling for the pulse with an unbreakable grip. The jacket was his only garment; it was not quite long enough to cover his genitals.

"Get a stretcher, Nurse," the ape called over his shoulder. He stood on tiptoe to peer first into the Governor's right eye, and then the left, holding the lids open gently.

"There's nothing wrong with me," protested Lampley.

"Let's hope not," murmured the ape soothingly. "We'll soon find out."

Another ape in white cap and starched white skirts pedaled with bare feet a bicycle attached to a gurney. "Just get on this," said the ape-doctor.

"I can walk," contended Lampley.

"We have our rules," insisted the ape-doctor firmly but not unpleasantly. "If you are cooperative it will be easier all around."

The ape-nurse smiled at the Governor, opening her mouth wide to show her fangs. "You can sit, you know; you don't have to lie down."

Lampley seated himself on the edge of the gurney. The ape-nurse pedalled vigorously; the doctor trotted alongside, consulting the bulbous watch on his furry arm. The dial had no hands, numerals or glass, only buttons marked, HOT, RUTTING, COLD, BANANA, JAVA, RESET. "I don't understand," said Lampley.

"Don't worry," advised the doctor. "None of us understand. Just remember there's nothing to worry about. We're here only to help you."

"But I don't need help."

The two apes exchanged significant glances and the nurse picked a flea off the doctor's thigh. "That's what they all say," commented the doctor pityingly. "It's nothing to be ashamed of. The tempo of uncivilized life is such it's a wonder more don't break under it."

"I—" began the Governor, and stopped. He could deny nothing.

They entered a white-floored room shaped like a tepee, with white walls leaning together, coming to a point at an incandescent light above. The nurse pedalled the gurney under the cone and rested her head on her arms. Five other ape-doctors came through the shining walls which closed unbroken behind them. "Good-day, Doctor," they greeted in unison.

"Good-day, Doctor," replied the ape-doctor. "We have a most uninteresting case here."

A short ape plucked at his lower lip and grinned at the Governor. "Lucky you," he wheezed in a stage whisper. "He never discharges the interesting ones."

The other apes laughed; even the head doctor had trouble suppressing his smile. "Now, gentle-pithecanthropes," he said, "I'd like to have your opinions."

An emaciated ape with a hearing-aid adjusted an ophthalmoscope and squinted at the Governor. "What's its case-history?" he asked gruffly.

"The usual thing: congenital logophilia, the ordinary childhood disorders—inflammation of the gizzard, febrile larynx, minor pyromania, swollen presence—distention of the id, a liberal murmur, optical inversion, pathological increment of the epidermis, cancer of the body politic. Nothing to corruscate a clinician."

"Mmmmm," muttered a muscular ape, balancing himself on his knuckles and shaking his head soberly. "I don't dig these non-arboreal climbers. Smacks of delusion."

"Now Doctor," admonished the head physician, "are you making a diagnosis before all the returns are in? We haven't even started to count the ballots."

"The polls aren't closed yet," the nurse raised her head to point out. "That's a joke, see?"

A fat ape-doctor removed her cap and stuck it on one side of his head. "How's his colostrum?"

"What about his colophon?" inquired an old, stooped, graying ape.

"I'm more interested in his collyrium," said the short ape.

"You're a card, Doctor," cried the fat ape and the muscular ape together.

"Well, well," said the head physician tolerantly. "Fun is fun, but we must consider the patient."

"Consider the patient," ordered the nurse sternly, retrieving her cap.

"Patients are a virtue, get them while you can, hyster in a woman, prostate in a man," chanted the thin ape. "Let's get on with it."

"I see definite signs of softening of the hardening," remarked the old ape.

"Pardon me, Doctor," protested the thin ape, "surely these are classic symptoms of hardening of the softening."

"Weakening of the perspicates," muttered the muscular ape.

"Inversion of the fluctuates," amended the fat ape.

"Disconvection of the interregnum with complicated indications of pronobis-paxvobiscum," said the jovial ape, scratching between his shoulderblades.

"Are we in complete disagreement?" questioned the head doctor cheerfully.

"Apesolutely, Doctor," confirmed the old consultant. "Apesculapius and Hippocrapes confirm our capabilities."

The nurse whipped a corncob pipe with a long curved stem from under her skirts and stuck it in the fat ape's mouth. The muscular ape rubbed two sticks together till they burst into flame. The thin ape handed over a pair of goggles. When the glasses were adjusted and the pipe going to his satisfaction, the fat ape said, "Let the diagnosis continue. Silence in the court!"

The jovial ape produced a compass and rested it on Lampley's knee. "Shoot the works, cousin," he commanded.

The nurse sang in a growly voice, "The one shines least, the none shines nest, but I know where the run shines in your vest—"

"Silence in the court!" repeated the fat ape. "Spin, cousin."

Lampley looked down at the compass, saw it had no glass. The points were marked, FORTH, Forth Forth-Least, Forth Least by Forth, Forth-Least; Least Forth Least, Forth Least by Least, LEAST; Least by Mouth Least by Least, Mouth Least; Mouth _Mouth_ Least, Mouth Least by Mouth, MOUTH; Mouth by Mouth-Best, Mouth-Best by Mouth, Best Mouth, Mouth-Best by Best, Best-Mouth by Best, BEST; Best by Forth-Best, Forth-Best by Best, Forth-Best; Forth-Best by Forth, Forth by Forth-Best, FORTH. The magnetic needle wobbled loosely. Lampley spun it clumsily. The head physician pressed the studs on his watch. All the apes crowded in front of the Governor so he could not see the compass. He knew when the needle stopped, however.

"Incredible!" cried the old ape.

"Beautiful!" cried the fat ape.

"Scientific!" cried the jovial ape.

"On the button!" cried the thin ape.

"Haven't seen anything like it since I was an interne!" cried the muscular ape.

"Very nice," said the head physician. "I take it we are agreed?"

"Unequivocally," said the nurse. "Wow! Let's go!"

"Acute epistemology," said the thin ape tonelessly.

"Chronic voracity," said the fat ape satisfiedly.

"Inflamed igloosensesisty," said the jesting ape happily.

"Dubious proneity," said the old ape solemnly.

"Delusions of humanity," said the muscular ape sadly.

"Delusions of humanity," repeated the whole college mournfully.

"Good, very good indeed," observed the head physician, swinging from a trapeze and playing a xylophone with his toes. "Hold him temporarily under observation—"

"No sedation, Doctor," warned the old ape.

"No medication, Doctor," enjoined the muscular ape.

"No inflation, Doctor," suggested the thin ape.

"No castration, Doctor," put in the jovial ape.

"No vindication, Doctor," added the fat ape.

"—pending release and discharge," concluded the head doctor.

"What about infection?" asked the nurse.

"Humanity is not contagious," they all reminded her together.

The practitioners took pomegranates, figs, dates, mangoes and papayas from their jacket pockets and began munching them earnestly. The nurse pedalled Lampley through the white walls. "Are you ever lucky," she informed him chattily. "They might have put you in a strait-jacket and fed you orally."

"But there's nothing wrong with me."

"Get tired," advised the nurse. "Your needle is stuck." She dismounted. "Stay where you are," she said when he started to get off too. "So long, cousin—don't take any wooden colonics."

The gurney moved on by itself, picking up speed. It careened through dazzling corridors, down ramps, up inclines, through wards, at such a dizzying pace he could see only the footrails of the beds with their clipboards of charts. Doors flipped open at his coming and swung back after him. Finally the gurney stopped so suddenly he slid forward smoothly onto the floor. When he picked himself up the vehicle was whizzing around a corner.

He was on a turntable, so nicely fitted into the floor that only a hairline crack defined it. It revolved slowly past curious scenes of men and women being cupped and leeched, poulticed with manure or steaming tripes, packed in snow, offered acrid inhalents or foul broths; of madmen worshipped or chained and beaten, of babies deformed for beauty's sake and old people eaten for economy's.

When he stepped off the turntable he was in a pleasant but definitely institutionalized room. An elderly man, derby hatted, blew patiently into a mute saxophone. A woman with waist-long white hair, lips drawn in sharply over empty gums, passed an unthreaded shuttle across a loom. A girl, rocking evenly back and forth, smiled knowingly, secretively. A bald man with dirty cheeks and smudged scalp, his tongue caught intently between his teeth, lay prone before a collection of posters, carefully painting mustaches on the faces of women, blotting out the faces of men.

At the other end of the room the Governor saw his mother. She was knitting slowly, diligently. Her arthritis, he thought sympathetically. He went to her. "Hello Mother." He kissed her cheek.

She finished two more stitches before she spoke. "How are you, Almon?" she asked placidly. "Isn't this a charming place?"

"You like it here, Mother?"

"Well, it isn't like being in one's own home. And of course they do serve lambchops without the paper frills," she complained. "I suppose it's all right, but I must say they look rather naked."

"But you're all right otherwise?"

"My eyes bother me, there's something wrong with the lights. The food hurts my gums and I'm short of breath and I never can seem to get comfortable clothes that aren't dowdy. And the newspapers are full of horrors—"

"Yes, yes," he interrupted impatiently. "But they treat you well, don't they?"

She put down her knitting. "It depends entirely what you mean by that, Almon. If your poor father had lived no one would ever have hustled me around the way they do here."

"Are they rude to you, Mother?"

"They certainly don't act as I should expect persons to act toward a lady."

"They don't—they don't ... handle you roughly?"

"My dear boy! What a question. They wouldn't dare."

He sank into a chair. "That's good. It's all right then."

"I shouldn't go as far as to say that." She resumed her knitting. "They read my letters," she announced in a loud whisper.

"What letters?" he asked.

"Now Almon, don't pry."

"I'm sorry, Mother. I only thought there might be something I could do about it."

"Don't be ridiculous, Almon. What could a boy do about such things?"

He was silent, despondent. "Oh, Mother...." He wanted to say that it was too easy to dismiss all questions as having too many answers or none at all—to say that the simplest questions, the ones apparently most irrelevant or meaningless were least susceptible of reply. What he wanted to say was true enough—or rather, it was true, but not enough. There were no answers, yet everything was an answer of sorts. "Oh, Mother," he said, "I don't know."

"Of course you don't," she agreed sharply. "Here, wind my wool for me."

Obediently he picked up the strand lying on her lap and began looping it around her outstretched hands. The yarn was kinked and lusterless. "Where do you get your wool?" he asked conversationally.

She cackled. "Now dear boy, don't try to catch me on one as old as that. I simply will not say from the sheep I count when I'm going to sleep. I just won't."

"I'm sorry, Mother."

"Are you really? Truly contrite? Genuinely humble?"

"I—I suppose so."

"Oh, suppositions. Theories. Vapors. Hopes. Pooh. Gracious, can't you wind faster?"

"Something seems to be holding the wool back."

"Nonsense! Oh, see what you've done, you clumsy boy! You're unravelling my cushion."

"I'm sorry, Mother."

She hurled her knitting in his face. "Take him away," she screamed. "He's a monster—can't you see?"

The other inmates threw up their heads and howled in unison. One sufferer, naked to the waist, his distorted face set in a dreadful smile, his hands stiffened into claws, ran into the room and danced around the Governor. Two women, their streaming hair starched with dirt, shrieked, "He did it, he did it. He's the peeping tom." A man shambled in a circle, head down, muttering, "Womb, tomb, boom; boom, womb, tomb; tomb, boom, womb."

Two sternly expressionless attendants led the Governor to the elevator. "You are discharged for conduct unbecoming a patient and a gentle."