PART ONE

_Scherzo_

1

It happens to millions.

They sit in doctors' offices trying to hide nervousness in the pages of magazines. Wondering what germs their predecessors have deposited in _Life_ and _Harper's Bazaar_ or _Action Comics_.

The nurse calls:

Mr. So-and-so. Mrs. So-and-so. Miss So-and-so.

They go in.

"Doctor," they say, "just lately I've begun to notice...."

They have begun to notice Death.

And now the doctor notices, too.

Millions of us, in this century, find out before angina curls us like insects in flame. Before the stone is lodged in its screaming cavity. Before the final, involuntary issue of bowel or bladder or foamy lungs.

It is one of the marvels of science.

"Tom," I said, for the doctor is an old friend, "lately I've noticed a feeling of fullness in my nasal passages. And this morning, before I flew down from the country, I looked at the back of my throat. Up behind the uvula. Something is--growing there."

"Let's take a squint."

Tom was calm. He hadn't spent his forenoon staring from an airplane window at the landscapes of New York and New Jersey, but seeing only a reflection in a bathroom mirror. A reflection of his face, yawning unpleasantly in the lavender fluorescence, the vertical tubes of light, and there, on his throat's arch, a foreign tissue like a clot of paint scraped from a bright palette.

He had merely shaved, as the rest of us had shaved on thousands of mornings, thinking of this and that.

Now he switched on a light, tilted the circular reflector above his forehead and removed his gold spectacles. I yawned.

He said, "Hunh."

So I knew.

We'd been friends, after all, for thirty-four years; by the inflection of a syllable, we could make lucid assertions. He thought--what I thought.

"Phil," he said, "we better get a biopsy right away."

"It's in a bad spot."

His instruments gagged me for a minute or two, brought tears in my eyes, probed at revolted mucosae. "Yes, Phil. And there's a lot of it. You didn't notice--anything--?"

"Earlier? Nope. This morning. I was flying down anyhow. I have a serial to correct."

"Of course," Tom said, "I'm not sure. It could be one of those rank lymphoid things. Radium blots them out. X-ray. Radioactive cobalt, these days, perhaps. But--"

But.

We looked at each other for a while. He said a kind thing: "We're both--forty-six."

He meant that we shared the hazards of time together. He also intended to start me thinking of all I had been and done, seen and known, felt and expressed, in four and a half decades of life.

His clock ticked.

His phone rang.

The receiver brought to my age-dulled ears the emery of a woman's voice. And Tom, with the cultivated patience that masks a physician's irritation, told her to take the "pink medicine" every two hours instead of every four.

The elixir alurate, I thought.

That brickbat on the safety valve of America: barbital.

I would soon be on morphine myself....

"How long?" I asked, when Tom hung up.

His pale eyes peered affectionately from behind his spectacles. I felt sorry for him. "Let's get that biopsy, first."

"No fooling, Tom. You're nine-tenths convinced. The learned goons in your profession have told me my number was up, several times, before this. Sooner or later, one of you is bound to be right. And I don't feel lucky today. How long?"

He picked up a letter he had dictated, read it, and put it in a tray. He straightened his prescription pad so it was square with the tooled leather corner of his desk blotter. He glanced at the photograph of Aileen, his wife, Joy and Lee, his daughters. "If it's malignant--it's where you can't operate."

"How long will I be--able to write?"

"Month. Two. Three. Maybe more. No way to tell."

"Radiation--won't slow it down?"

"Can't use strong doses that near your brain, Phil." He grasped his telephone again. He told his nurse to arrange the biopsy. Immediately. He wrote an address.

"I'm busy tonight," he told me. "Can't get out of it. What about tomorrow--for dinner?"

I said, "Swell. When will I have the report?"

"Monday."

"Be quite a long weekend."

He commenced writing a prescription.

I had told him how well he seemed, when the nurse had ushered me in. He didn't seem well any more. The vestige of his White Mountain tan was saffron. In fifteen minutes, circles had come under his eyes. He handed me two little rectangles of paper. "No--pain?"

"Not yet." It was a cruelty.

He flinched minutely. "That's for pb. Quarters. If you spook yourself up. And sodium amytal. Grain and a half. Sleep. You can take the whole bottle, if you want to. Then the biopsy will surely be negative and you'll have thrown away your other six lives." He put his arm around my shoulder. "See you tomorrow--at your hotel--around seven."

I walked through the patients--through people who had nothing more serious than hypertension, or gastric ulcer, or diabetes. Or perhaps they did have fatal afflictions, though. Cancer, for example. You couldn't say what they had--sitting there, tremulously thumbing the magazines. They looked at me. They looked at the fat girl who rose because her turn was next.

I lit a cigarette when I got outdoors.

Coal tar, I thought.

Too late not to light a cigarette.

I stepped down in the gutter--in gum wrappers, glittering bits of cellophane, the blanched drift of horse manure, a swatch of blue cloth, a letter that had been rained on, fresh Pekinese sign, and a little dry mud. All around me midday, midtown Manhattan soaked up August in its brick pores, its limestone pores--flashed back August from glass, from polished granite, and from all its million metal fixtures. The sky was bluely vague. An air-liner shoved up through it from La Guardia--a grinding abnormality.

I hailed a cab.

For the ordeal of biopsy, whatever it might be, I summoned my meager contempt. A long experience of surgery is a poor indoctrination for each new need of it. Ringed about with sadists in white suits, with sterile techniques, with inquisitional steel, I have been too often the Exposed Nerve. I do not hope much, any more--and only defy so long as I am able. This artificial pose, garnished with calm and with smiling, is what some men call courage, and others dignity, but no man in his right mind evokes without cost: _we are the hateful survivors of our sciences_.

It was a little thing.

A needle's prick in an alabastrine clinic. A numb diddling above the tonsil. Some blood to spit out.

The one sharp experience was the slight widening of the surgeon's eyes when first he saw my throat.

Go on, I thought. Tell me that the cure of cancer depends upon its early recognition! Ask me if I haven't read the advertisements of the Society! And ask yourself, you smooth-faced blue-eyed son-of-a-bitch, if you have checked the area behind your own uvula lately!

What I said was, "Just noticed it today."

I came, I meant, as soon as I could. I wasn't a dumbbell. I didn't let that gob grow inside my neck, week after week, in secret fear. I did what you told me to do.

He said, "Well, well," and injected me and clipped off a hunk and told me to come back on Monday at twelve o'clock. I went onto the street again.

It wasn't bothering me any.

Nobody could catch it from me.

Another cab slid to a stop on another pile of metropolitan offal. I got in. The radio was talking about Babe Ruth, who had recently died of throat cancer. And metastases.

I thought of telling the driver to turn off the lush woe.

Life's ironies amuse cynical people--who are, after all, sentimentalists, for only sentimental people would bother themselves to beget so foolish a self-defense as cynicism.

"Terrible loss," the driver said, waiting for the Madison Avenue light.

I chose this better opportunity. "Loss, hell! A baseball player. A tough guy. Somebody with trick reflexes who could bat a ball farther than anybody else, oftener. And the whole damned United States gets choked up and goes into mourning. Double-page spreads in the newspapers. When a really great man dies, he's lucky to get one snapshot and a column." I looked quickly at his framed license. Saul Kaufman. "Will the American people go on a morbid spree when Einstein dies?" I asked.

It got him. He glanced back appreciatively. "You said it!"

If his name had been Angelo Utrillo, I would have suggested Fermi. He wouldn't have known who Fermi was, but my explanation would have filled him with pride. And if it had been Michael Riority, I would have tried De Valera.

"Babe Ruth," I repeated when I paid my fare. "Did the _Mirror_ and the _News_ give Freud a double-page spread? The greatest mind in the twentieth century. Greatest Jew since Jesus. We should be proud to live in the same age. But what are we proud of? Babe Ruth. Baseball's okay--but the way people act about it certainly shows what's wrong with people."

"You're right, Mac."

I tipped him a quarter. Money wasn't going to be useful to me much longer.

Then I felt sick.

The money I possessed--the insurance--the money that might come from my books and perhaps from the posthumous sale of a few stories to the movies--would be all there was

for my wife daughter my wife's mother and some others.

I had two rooms--a bedroom and parlor. Sleep and reading in bed were thus kept separate from work, from the two hundred and eighteen pages of my serial which had to be cut sheet by sheet, line by line, to fit the precise requirements of a weekly magazine. This small suite was on the sixteenth floor. Here, the street sounds became boogie-woogie--set to rhythm by bouncing back and forth between the walls of Madison Avenue. Here the smell of the city was less toxic. And here the eye ranged over rooftops. My draperies, flowered and lined with sateen, moved now against the dark-green embrasures of the window--not in a breeze but in the upward eddy of diurnal heat. The yellow roses with which the management had greeted me dangled in their vase. I wondered whether to cut their stems or throw them out. If Ricky, my wife, had accompanied me, there would have been two dozen roses--and she would have known about the stems. I propped open the door to the hall with a book. Air sucked through the crack.

In a big mirror, over the mantel, over the chunks of topaz glass that represented coals in the artificial fireplace, I could see myself. Strained and pallid, sweat showing at the armpits of my dark-blue gabardine jacket.

I took it off.

My shirt was wet.

I took that off.

The man in the mirror was naked from the waist up. A man with a little fold of belly showing over his belt. A man whose back, when he turned, was well muscled at the shoulders and ridged with parallel sinews that made a valley of the spine. A man whose strength had come through effort and application, rather late. A man who stepped closer to the mirror and opened his mouth to study, inside it, a small, fresh wound.

He sat down on the divan, presently, and took a cigarette from the coffee table. Lighted it. Reached for the telephone.

And identified with himself again.

I wanted to call Ricky--in the country.

To call her from the vegetable garden, where she might be weeding, or from the rock garden, when she might be replanting the daffodil bulbs, to call her from a book, or from washing the cocker pups, or from painting shelves, or from anything that she was doing. I wanted, with overwhelming urgency to tell her to come down to New York and share this weekend. Carry it with me and for me.

She would. She has the grit and the amenability to Nature. Besides, she knows me.

But I sat there, my fingers growing slippery on the phone.

If it proved to be harmless--then the consummate hours, the pain, the anxiety, and the quiet planning would be a mere excess.

If it proved malignant--what purpose would be served by destroying her tranquillity, by adding her dread to my own, until the hour when the fact was established?

She would willingly, wantingly, accept the burden--to ease my share of it.

But why should she?

Monday would be soon enough--win, lose, or get some cursed clinical draw. Radiation. Surgery. Artificial larynx. _Gueules cassées_, I thought. I'd seen friends. Getting their throats cut inchmeal. Burping to make speech. Shedding their chins.

The hell with it! I called the bookstore, instead, and ordered a tome on carcinoma of the throat.

I put the phone back on the table.

Clean shirt. The jacket of a ribbed, cotton suit, blue and white. I hadn't sweated through my trousers--yet. They'd do as slacks.

I rang for the elevator.

2

One of the two restaurants in the Astolat Hotel, where we stay whenever we are in New York, is called the Knight's Bar. It has been extended and refurbished recently. King Arthur's retinue, armed, armored, gaudily caparisoned, and mounted on some of the most unlikely steeds in mural art, charge, joust and canter on the walls. The place has indirect lighting, banquettes and chairs upholstered in red leather, and air conditioning. The food is excellent.

A pre-chilled atmosphere enveloped me when I came in and I felt it without gratitude. I like hot weather.

Jay, the headwaiter, saw me, glanced about at the tables--which were by now less than a third occupied--and beckoned me toward a place near the bar with a definitiveness unwarranted by the wide choice. I wondered why as I came forward--obediently, and hardly aware of the trifling inquiry in my mind.

Then I saw, around to the right, a pretty girl, sitting alone, reading a book. On each side of her were empty tables. Did Jay, out of subconscious loyalty to my wife, intend to rush me past this pitfall? Or had the girl asked for solitude? She wasn't one of the Knight's Bar regulars--or one of the hotel residents. I knew all of them, at least by sight.

Ordinarily, I would have meekly followed Jay to the table he had selected. But now I thought--why should I? Rather, I thought, there is very little time left for me on this earth. Why shouldn't I use it as I please?

So I nodded at a table beside the girl. She would be something to look at besides my thoughts.

Jay is an American. But what he did now was European. He smiled slightly in understanding; he raised his eyebrows minutely in coappreciation of the young lady's good looks; and he shrugged one shoulder--in patient recognition of the fact that a male is a male and the firmest marriage vows are warrants of mere intent.

I grinned back--and sat on the bench beside the young lady as soon as Jay pulled out the table. She looked at me--turning her head slowly--and afterward went on reading her book. Her eyes were gray, stained with some unguessable, dark residue of emotion. Her hair was pale blonde, not quite ashen--parted in the middle and clipped at the back like a schoolgirl's--with a wide gold barrette. She had small, smooth hands. She wore a square engagement ring and a wedding ring set with many diamonds. From time to time, too, she sipped a Martini. Her dress was a gray and white print--not fancy but fitted by somebody who knew the tricks. Bonwit's, maybe, or Bergdorf's. Her shoulders were fairly broad, for a girl's. But she had large, firm breasts--or the synthetic equivalent thereof. I noticed, too, that the perfume she used was not right for her appearance--though perhaps it suited the self-estimate of her soul. It was one of the musky varieties--animal, nocturnal, full of erotic business.

In a restaurant where you have enjoyed a thousand meals, you look desultorily at the menu because, as a rule, you know what you are going to order. I took the fried sole, a boiled, parsley potato, and apple sauce.

Then, for a while, I forgot the girl.

I must plan, I thought.

First, the money.

Fifty thousand dollars' worth of insurance. Several thousand dollars in war bonds. I had about ten thousand in the bank. Ricky had a few thousand. We owed a steep mortgage on the house we were building in Florida--in the country south of Miami, among live oaks and cabbage palms. It would be too big a home for Ricky and her mother and Karen, by themselves. Too big--and too expensive to keep up, without my income. They could sell it as soon as it was finished, and undoubtedly make a small profit. Or they could rent it each year for a much larger sum than the interest, amortization and upkeep--thus bringing to my estate an income of one or two annual thousands.

I would be paid twenty-four thousand dollars for the serial upstairs, when I had cut it.

Unfortunately, half of that would be turned over to the government, as income tax. Most of the balance was ear-marked for furniture which Ricky now might or might not buy. I thought about the tax....

Business is the lone God of our Congress. Let a man open a pie factory or begin to mold cement blocks and he becomes Privileged. His property is taxed as a sacred, eternal entity. His costs are deductible. Only the profit he pockets is thought of by our Congress as income; his every barrel of flour or bag of cement is capital. But let a man create books or serials in his head and Congress sees him as a social inferior, a mere wage earner.

The accumulation of intellectual property for a book may require three-quarters of a life. Its sale, for a year or two, may be considerable. After that one book--or after two or three--an author may return to pittances. What he has written may become the mental and emotional capital of his countrymen, or of the world, for generations. Yet Congress does not deem it equal to pies or bricks and sometimes skims away in a year the whole capital of an author--as if it were but annual income. America bounteously provides for the makers of bricks and pies; it short-changes book-makers and the winners of Nobel Prizes. Indeed, such is the unconscious hostility of the mob toward the fruits of intelligence that, not long ago, a group of representatives, commercial he-whores and contumelious morons, endeavored to do away with copyright altogether on the grounds that what a man thought and wrote down, or what he felt and painted, belonged free of charge to the whole people: noneconomic, since it was Art. To such men as these, only junk fabricators, gadgeteers, tram operators, pop bottlers and the like are entitled to the best profit for their contribution to life. History will note the fact when history writes how American avarice held in open contempt all culture and all thought, decerebrated itself and so died headless.

As a man about to perish I could not but think bitterly of this. Had my labors, my work, my business, my investment of skill and thought and sweat been deemed equivalent, by my government, to the activities of a manufacturer of flea powder, I could have left the people I loved far better off.

A relative complaint, under the circumstances and in my case. But when I thought of the "successful" writers I knew who had been taxed into poverty for their genius, and when I thought of the potbellied yuts I'd met who turned up fortunes in sewer pipes, cemetery lots and toilet paper, my sentiments toward the people and their politicians were rude....

They would get along--Karen and Ricky and Ricky's mother and those who would now depend on them. My death might even accelerate the sale of my books for a while. There might be movie sales. Plays. Posthumous editions. Anthologies. If I had led Ricky to be careless and extravagant, she would nonetheless be capable, under necessity, of good management. The hundred-year-old house in the country would continue to fend off the winters and to doze through the summers in its great lawns. Karen would attend Swarthmore. If Ricky wished, she could work again; she was well enough now. Marry again.

The thought jarred and I considered that sensation. Marry? Of course she would. She should. What is wickeder than inhibiting sentiment, than memory turned prison?

I am not a jealous man and even my envies are of an obscure sort. The momentary shock came from the fact that, never before, had I thought of Ricky as married to another man. Romantic about another man--perhaps. (Hadn't I said, in fun and also meaning it, that if, in our seventies, she were to swear she had been faithful, I would regard it as sad? No man desires a wanton for a wife. But a great many men love their wives in such a fashion as to consider them people--human, curious, imaginative, subject to sensations of staleness, capable of discretion, and not intended to be--through every hour of all that is a life--belled, balled and chained, hobbled and kept like cattle. An academic point--now. We might never see those seventies--note the envisaged smiles--or hear the candlelit confidence.) She would marry again. Karen would marry. The bonds I'd bought, the real estate, the insurance I'd purchased down the years--flush or borrowing--would provide a measure of security.

_Come war? Come vast inflation? Costly sickness?_

There is no security on our planet. There is no way, by money, wills, investments, legal instruments, or other means, to carry even the smallest wish or the most minimal responsibility beyond crematory and urn. Such is the aching truth--the irony we try to avoid. No one understands it better than I--but I had done what I could to avoid it, too. Done it--in spite of a national tax philosophy that evaluates authorship as a meaner trade than pawnbroking.

In all America are only five thousand of us who make our whole livelihood by writing, anyway. To Congress--a scattered, inconsequential number--vote-voiceless and therefore impotent. It is a figure--five thousand in one hundred and fifty millions--which the aspiring writer should bear in mind. And some are communists, or leftists, besides--which, in the miserable eyes of Congress these days, no doubt makes our whole profession suspect. Freedom is sick. Freedom is dying.

Why not?

Everything is sick and doomed.

Including me--now, I thought jeeringly.

My plate came--the toast-brown fish, the green-speckled potato, a salad I hadn't ordered, tartar sauce in a dish, and the applesauce in another.

I pushed Congress out of my mind.

More accurately, the girl did.

She cleared her throat. A little sound, with faint annoyance clinging to it.

I had been sitting there, smoking two cigarettes, oblivious to her for ten minutes. She must have assumed that I had chosen to sit beside her because she was attractive--which was true. But now, owing to the absence of sidewise glances, of self-conscious bread-buttering, of any aura of awareness, she had irritatedly cleared her throat. If I had spoken to her forthwith she would, perhaps, have made a short, polite, but discouraging reply. Since, however, I had broken off even the peripheral touching of consciousness, she coughed vexedly, exploringly.

So I glanced at her book. I had already noticed the jacket. It was _Ape and Essence_ by Aldous Huxley. She had been reading with a slight frown. But now I saw that the jacket did not fit the book, which was thicker than Mr. Huxley's post-atomic predictions. The jacket, then, was camouflage--for a larger book with maroon binding. What sort of reading, I wondered, would a glamorous young woman hide behind Aldous Huxley? And, abruptly, I knew: the Kinsey Report.

I leaned back and verified it.

This amused me.

The people of Miami Beach, where I had lived in the winter, and the people of New York, whom I had encountered in the spring, had been busy for both seasons with Dr. Kinsey's refreshing work.

It was, at least, refreshing to me....

I am interested in psychology. For a quarter of a century I have known, by way of Freud, Krafft-Ebing, Stekel, Ellis, and many others, the same facts, in comparable orders of magnitude as those which Dr. Kinsey elicited by his scientific cross-questioning of cross sections. My own experience of life, taken with the confidences of my associates, has merely confirmed what others have noted. I have published such data in my books, years before Kinsey. And all that time I have reflected with a hooting pique upon the unconquerable illusions of Americans. What I have long known to be true, and often written down, they have refused to consider as real. Until the first of the Kinsey Reports, all erotic activity except that mechanical minimum permitted by state legislatures has been regarded, even by most enlightened citizens, either as an accident carefully hidden in their own lives, or else as the perverted behavior of persons who, eventually, would land on the couches of psychiatrists--if not in prison. It is the most depraved truth about us.

Kinsey--with the august reputation of Rockefeller money to give his findings the one sort of credibility acceptable to Americans--had accomplished what hundreds of psychologists and scores of writers like myself had been unable to do: he had convinced multitudes that the sexual behavior of people is mammalian in every respect. He had shown, where we had failed, that erotic activity of some sort is universal, that the earlier and more vigorously such activities are commenced, the more potent and sexually capable its practitioners become--that use, not restraint (as the "pure" have decreed), develops the nerves, capillaries and muscles of the sexual organs precisely as it does those of other organs and that what we call sins and perversions are as ubiquitous as what we call normal sex acts. He had made an ass of the law and a fool of the church and held up an odious society in such a light that its heathen taboos and wholehearted hypocrisies were at long last more visible than the foul rags covering them.

I had seen, that winter, numbers of men relieved (and not always bothering to hide the fact) by the realization that some homosexual experience in their past was not a blot upon their lives without precedent or parallel. And I had seen other numbers of men--older men--stare back at the bereavement of their youth, hating themselves for that which barbaric fear (translated as noble character) had prevented them from doing, knowing, sensing, or enjoying. Often, these had turned their irreversible disappointment into a mockery of Kinsey, thus exposing the near-vacuum in which they had endured their decades--without being aware of the exposure. Americans are not mature enough, intelligent enough, discerning or well enough educated to learn from psychology; but it is evident they are, in many cases, of an adequate spiritual development to learn from a Rockefeller-endorsed zoologist.

It didn't matter to me where the facts came from--so long as people began to perceive they were facts--facts that made a far truer picture of man and sex than all the utterances of priests, preachers, legislators, and other sick-minded slobs put together.

We behave sexually like other mammals--apes, horses, dogs. Centuries of suppression alter us not a jot. It is a sterling proof that instinct, not vanity-calling-itself-reason, is our guide. It is the hardest blow yet struck against the bishops. In our time, they and their sickly minions will prevail. But after us, and them, some decent men may rise in the debris and put to a proper use what we all know and nearly all deny....

She was reading the Kinsey Report.

"What for?" I asked.

The question startled her, although the introduction itself did not. She was obliged to feign a social surprise. Her inward gray eyes met mine and moved away. She drew part of an annoyed breath. She shut the book. She made up her mind to say, "I beg your pardon. Were you speaking to me?"

She had a musical voice, pitched low but not husky.

"I wondered why you were reading the Kinsey Report so avidly--and my curiosity started talking. I usually do ask people things, when I want to know. It's discourteous. But sometimes they tell me."

That made her smile a little. "You might be asking quite a question."

"Any question is quite a question. If I merely asked you how to get to Fifth Avenue, you would be telling me, in answering, where to take my life. I might be run over, doing it. I might get into a street fight. Or meet a blonde. If I asked you why you've been crying so much--that would be quite a question, too. If I were a woman, I might ask, simply--what you wore under what, and where you bought it. The answer to that one would describe dozens of your attitudes toward dozens of important matters."

She didn't say anything. If she nodded, it was the smallest of her nods. She twirled her cocktail glass, sipped the last of the amber drink, and returned to her reading.

She wanted me to know that she didn't flirt. I expressed my apperception by ordering lemon pie, which I didn't want, and coffee, which I did--and further, by leaving my table and the restaurant while my place was being cleared and my dessert brought. I went across the hot street to the newsstand and bought _Time_ magazine--which I used to read for information and read now to keep abreast of the Biases--and the _Telegram_. When I came back to the bar I found the girl had also ordered coffee--and brandy. That settled it.

"My name," I said immediately, "is Philip Wylie. I'm a writer. The waiters will vouch for me. I live here."

The strain left her eyes and they widened slightly. "I've read lots of things you've written! For _heaven's sake_!"

Most Americans who get around have read lots of the things I've written. This is a great instant advantage--though often a present handicap--in picking up strangers. They are at first agreeably surprised; but they generally expect writers to "be like" the characters in their books--from God alone knows what an abysmal lack of imagination--and are therefore eventually disappointed.

Since I said nothing, she went on, "You're the author who hates women!" There was shine in her eyes, then--challenge--amusement. Spite, too.

"Only moms," I answered. "And not 'hate'--deplore."

"And Cinderellas, too!"

"Oh, yes. I'd forgotten the Cinderellas. I deplore them, also."

"Maybe I'm one."

"A superior specimen--if true." I am semigallant.

"What made you hate women so violently? Did your mother beat you? And why do you blame everything that goes wrong on women?" Two hard lines showed the muscles around her teeth. "Don't you realize that for everything you've written against women--you could say the same--and a hundred times as much--against men?"

"Lookie," I said. "Many years ago, when I was younger and foolish, I wrote a book about a few of the more conspicuous and lethal flaws in our fair nation. The book was some three hundred and seventy pages long. I devoted all but about twenty pages to the calamitous follies of males. Men, as you call them. But I did, for some twenty pages of light blast, violate the ironclad altar of femininity and point out mom's big mouth and little brain, her puffed crop and shaky pins. A few things. I hardly thought I had loaded the dice--inasmuch as half the people are female and I gave females only about a fifteenth of my slightly caustic attention. But ever since that book came out, almost every woman I've met has accused me of outrageously laying the blame for a manifestly hell-bound society on females. In the first place, this is not true. In the second place, such statements--the hundreds I've collected--tend to show that American women positively refuse to take any blame for anything whatever. They have no conscience and no sense of responsibility. They believe themselves to be as spotless as United States senators say they are, in campaign orations. They lack the capacity for admitting guilt. They are nearly all--I have thus found--psychologically far, far, far more destitute than I claimed only certain kinds of them to be."

She laughed. "You're _still_ mad! Someday you'll break down and write a wonderful novel about the woman who really poisoned you against them all."

"I'll break down," I agreed. "But I'll never write the novel! One reason is--there's no such novel. Women have always been good to me--with a few exceptions I can tolerate. Women have made love to me and they have been generous with me, and taught me, and they have been sensitive toward me. My daughter--who is sixteen--adores me. My first wife tried every combination she could think of to make me happy--and put up with me for ten years, when I was a drunkard. My second wife has gone even further. Past ten years--for one thing. And I quit drinking altogether, after we'd been married for a while. I--to repeat the most readily understandable expression--adore her. And I adore my daughter. I adore women, as a matter of fact. Such vexation as I have shown represented an aspect of that reverence: a good many women are fundamentally disappointing to anybody who cares much for women. And I resent the general damage such women do. A man"--I looked at her as loftily as I could--"has a curious faculty for resenting human sabotage even when he is not, himself, directly involved in the matter. A woman, as a rule, sees harm in the ruinous excursion of a nitwit only if she sees it as a real or potential menace to herself, loved ones, and assigns. It is a comfortingly personal outlook toward which I am hotly antipathetic."

"You talk like your books," she said.

"Why not? I wrote the damned things!"

She poured her brandy into her coffee and drank a little.

"Men," I went on, "in this century, are deeply imbued with just that personal, feminine attitude. They refuse to meddle with evils that do not immediately threaten them. They have sold out their duty toward the whole species, for local, temporal advantages. They no longer live lives but merely cadge existences. If a guy is successful and well fixed, the ordinary American does not and cannot see that he has the reason or the right--let alone the need!--to take a dim view of anything on earth." I picked up my copy of _Time_ magazine and waved it at her. "Whenever one of my morally indignant volumes appears, this self-righteous periodical, for instance, usually begins its reviews by saying that I own a palatial residence in Florida, earn big money writing commendable hack stories for the magazines, fish all the time, and yet--blackguard!--I have the gall to gripe! The inference is that I am a lunatic. Indeed, it has become more than an inference. This carburetor of the news called my latest effort a 'whiff into midnight.' Who is nearer the witching hour--the well-heeled gent who still sees imperfections in the planet and says so or the editor who unconsciously imagines that prosperity and criticism are incongruent? That is the Ivy League philosophy--suitable to cover the ruins it soon will bring about."

"You're mad at Clare Luce," the girl said.

"There you go! Personal again! See here, ma'am. A man can get as intense feelings from statistical tables as a woman can from Sinatra's brow wave. Vital statistics give them to me. I had such sensations when, after the publication of the Smythe Report, I pensively ran over the Periodic Table. Many other charts and graphs deeply affect me. I hardly know Clare Luce. I had cocktails with her once--though. Very attractive. Very--not bright--ardent. That's the important thing in women, too. We disagreed about everything we discussed. But a woman who enters the field of ideas is obliged, naturally, to follow some man or men. Women have never left any ideas around for men or women to follow. Clare said she follows Monseigneur Fulton Sheen--another glitteringly ardent soul. I'm not mad at Clare Luce. In my situation I find it impossible to be mad at anybody on earth. And it was generally difficult for me, even before now."

"What's happened that made you change?"

"God has sent for me," I said sarcastically.

"You mean--you've been converted?"

"If I am ever converted--in the common sense--it will be the hard way: posthumously and in the Presence. No. The change in me, what little I have so far discovered, probably comes from atrophy. The peace and mellowness that men mistake for wisdom--that is in fact the result of calcium deposits, excess urea in the cells, and so on."

"You're forty!"

"And you're twenty--instead of twenty-six."

"You don't look it."

"You do. And as you well know, it's a damn good age for a woman to look."

She thought awhile. "You meet a lot of woman."

"I meet a few."

"Famous ones, I mean. What's your wife like? Blonde? Brunette?"

"You know a movie actress named Maureen O'Sullivan?"

She nodded.

"Ricky--my wife--gets mistaken for her. We go into night clubs and sometimes they give us a swell table and people begin asking each other who the hell I am--thinking they've identified Ricky."

"She's sweet--Miss O'Sullivan."

"Ricky is, too."

"Who's the most beautiful one you ever met?"

"The most beautiful one--I never met. Hedy Lamarr."

"You could, though. Celebrities can meet each other."

"I'm only about a Class D celebrity."

"Suppose--?" She eyed me speculatively. "Suppose some glamorous dame and you met. Suppose you got a yen for her? What would you do?"

"God knows."

"I'm serious. After all, you've written enough articles and books and stories about it. Do you mean what you say? Or are you just trying to be sensational?"

"Would I, in other words, after meeting the gorgeous Miss or Mrs. So-and-so, invite her to take a long drive in the country--or to picnic on a beach--to look at etchings? Would I, personally? I might. Sure."

"What would Mrs. Wylie say?" The gray eyes were troubled--perhaps afraid.

"Maybe nothing. She would never hear of it. Does marriage have to end privacy entirely--every hour of it in a life? If she did hear--she might still say nothing. She might laugh at me. She might be hurt. She might be angry. It would depend on her mood at the moment."

"Her mood just at the moment!"

"Sure."

"Isn't that--pretty"--she sought a term--"unstable?"

"Extremely stable. It would show that she regarded what we have been led to call infidelity a matter of so superficial a nature as to be colored by a superficial mood. This, in turn, would indicate that her more profound attitude toward me--and my feelings for her--was unshaken. Stable, as you would say. If, on the other hand, I knew she would have only one, single conceivable reaction--whether noncommittal or aggrieved--I could be certain that her feelings for me, and her deepest sense of my feelings, had become absolutist, rigid, probably dominating and demanding, certainly doctrinaire. I could deduce that she was in a most unstable situation--since people resort to the projection of absolutes on other people only when they are torn by uncertainty of themselves. Notice this in religions. The absolutes are defined to a hair--with different sorts of steeples, doorways, fonts and crucifixes marking infinitesimal splits over dogma--but with no commensurate variation in the effect on human conduct whatever. Is a Baptist nobler than a Methodist? Kinder? Wiser? No. So the different absolutes of both, seen detachedly, represent nothing more than the uncertainty, instability, self-doubt, inconfidence, distrust, and lack of magnanimity of both. Their passion to lay down the law, taken with the minuscule variants that ensue, is proof that Christians have no stability whatever. Sex follows the same rule--and so does everything else."

"I would have been furious, though."

She referred, still, to my hypothetical infidelity. And her reference was interesting. Without thinking, she had used the past perfect subjunctive. If, that is to say, her husband--the apparent supplier of the opulent rings--had trifled with a strange brunette at some lodge convention, this young lady's reaction _would have been_ fury. It apparently would not be, now. The assured presumption was, therefore, a rift between herself and her spouse. Coupled with her way of drinking cocktails while eating a sandwich, the brandy in her coffee, her reading matter, and, particularly, the blur of suffering I had seen in her eyes, this presumption led to further inference: the rift was recent and she was in flight from it, while yet attempting to understand its causes.

She was, that is to say, no habitual Martini drinker; these do not mix their cocktails with their viands. She was reading Kinsey not from the starved cupidity of hundreds of thousands of other women (for if she had been even that uninhibited she would have read it sooner) but in the effort to discover something. She was drinking not to drown her sorrow but to take away its edge: she had mixed her latest drink with the antidote of coffee. And, inasmuch as I had never seen her with her husband at the Astolat, it was a good guess, at least, that she was here as part of an act of abandonment rather than as a result of being abandoned by him. Her accent was vaguely eastern--but eastern rubbed against, and somewhat eradicated by, the flatter tones of the West. Like numberless other such women, she had fled to New York for refuge--and from a considerable distance. Texas, perhaps, or Arizona. And probably she had lived in Manhattan before now: the Knight's Bar was unknown to tourists--with the exception of Europeans visiting America.

"You would have been furious," I finally said. "Think that over. Here we are, engaged in a favorite national pastime--imagining flirtations with handsome persons in the public eye. I often reflect that picture stars--male and female--are lucky to have so little imagination, on the average. If you can kill a person by sticking pins into a statue of him--which you cannot, unless he believes it--think of the possible result on a star of the lurid, lewd fantasies poured upon his photographs, or hers, by millions and millions of people. Grant any validity in the pin-sticking process and you have, in the photo-doting parallel, a curious possible explanation of what the press knows as Hollywood high jinks. Psychogenic. The effect, on the poor individual, of mass assault, mob lechery. But skip all that. The point I want to make is this: some ladies we have hypothesized are married. You can see yourself as enraged, if any husband of yours had his head turned--to continue the euphemisms--by one such. But it does not seem to occur to you that any possible husbands of the ladies also might feel themselves involved in the matter--and even experience traces of pain?"

"Men!" she said. "Why should anyone care what they feel?"

"O-h-h-h, because they're so plentiful."

She smiled a little--and poured plain coffee. "You haven't asked me my name."

"Naturally."

"Naturally?"

"You've been wondering when I would. In such a case, the obvious thing to do is to let a girl go on wondering. Besides--my inquisitiveness is never casual. It might be a convenience to know your name. But very little else. A clue, maybe, to the good taste of your parents--or lack of it--and to the national strain of your husband's paternal line."

"It's Yvonne Prentiss."

"See what I mean? A handy--but otherwise irrelevant fact."

She laughed. "Do you live here?"

"I'm staying here--on the sixteenth floor. For a few days."

"I am, too."

"You got mad at Mr. Prentiss," I said then, "and fled from your sprawling mansion out in the golden West to the sidewalks of New York--familiar to you in your girlhood. Your problem was not 'other women'--so what was it? Neglect? Brutality? Obsession? Bestiality? Stamp collecting? What?"

Her eyes filled with tears.

Just then, Fred came by. He's a waiter I know pretty well. "Look, Fred," I said, "I've made her cry. Bring another brandy."

She was struggling. "Shouldn't it be a beer?"

"If you go on crying."

"I really don't want another drink--"

"Then bring her some ice cream."

"--but I'll have one more." Fred nodded and went. "How did you know all that?"

I told her.

"It's Pasadena," she said. She shivered a little.

So I talked. "Pasadena. How well I know it! Caltech, where people think the troubles of the world began. The peeling eucalyptus trees and the long shadows on the long sidewalk. Way back in the dear, dead beryllium days--"

"I haven't the faintest idea what you mean!"

"Dr. Einstein," I said, "walking around under his hair. Thinking so hard he never noticed the earthquake. It was the spring of nineteen-thirty-three. Perhaps I should explain that, in those days, when they wanted to split an atom, they generally used beryllium. A common element--half as heavy as aluminum and twice as strong--but difficult to recover. Poor Dr. E! Like all the reasonable men, seemingly he cannot perceive that what he thinks of as irrational is the force that governs human destiny! He assumes it's just a matter of enlightening the politicians. The deification of reason--the worship of common logic--cuts off human personality from natural truth exactly as idolatry destroys the faculty of rational analysis. And for the same reason. The intellectual paragon is as blind as any pagan--in the opposite direction. But we were talking about Pasadena--"

"Vaguely," she said.

"I'll be more explicit, then. I was working for Paramount in that blessed era when nothing upset the world worse than a depression. A curable malady--that. Anyhow, I had a producer who lived in Pasadena. A big, reddish house on one of those irrigated buttocks that grow out of the lower mountains. Completely surrounded by thornbushes--except for the entrance gate. The first time I went there was Sunday--a nine A.M. conference--and my producer's butler served highballs right away to myself and the other writers. I shall never forget it--or ever recall a word that we said there that day. I was an animal-horror man, at the time--"

"A what?"

"Animal-horror man. That's what the studio boss called me. In fact, he said I was pretty young to be an animal-horror man, the first time we met."

She drank some of her brandy and then did a disturbing thing.

She took her pale, wavy hair in both hands and bent it back up over her head so that the curly ends fell everywhere around her face. When she did it, she looked at me in a certain way. We were both supposed to understand the gesture perfectly--and not to notice it at all. Wild horses weren't supposed to be able to drag out of us an admission of what it meant.

"Those were not only the beryllium days, but the days of animal pictures and horror pictures. Frank Buck and Osa Johnson and Tarzan. Frankenstein. Paramount was trying to combine the grisliest features of all of them. They were making Wells's _Island of Dr. Moreau_--for instance. And I was doing some of the writing. Hence I was an animal-horror man--and young for it, too. Precociously animalistic and horrible. Remember? Cobras fought mongooses? Tigers fought pythons and other unnatural antagonists? Zebus fought gnus? My producer wanted to throw a half dozen lions into a school of big sharks--and get some red-hot close shots of the fights that would then ensue. That--I stopped. Even we ogres draw the line somewhere--and I know a good deal about sharks. The lions, if you once got the sharks hitting them, would not be fighting, as my producer imagined, but dying by mouthfuls."

"How awful!"

"Pasadena, it was," I reminded her. "Another conference at that big house amongst the thorns. I know the place like a book. I know the spirit of the place. You lived there?"

She stared at the room, empty now of all but waiters and two or three pairs of murmuring people. Full, however, of Musak. Light operettas.

"Somehow it's easier to talk to strangers," she said, "than to people you've known all your life."

"Of course!" I replied in sober agreement--although I thought the idea was rubbish.

"And besides," she went on, immediately contradicting herself, "I've read your articles and books and I feel as if I knew you better than you knew yourself."

Unlikely, I figured. But this was important to her, so I nodded. "Maybe you do--in some ways."

She had shown a certain economy of speech--owing possibly to the fact that I had given her little opportunity to show anything else. But her biography was fairly terse:

"I was born in Boston--and the family moved here when I was a baby. My dad graduated from Princeton in 1921. He's a very intelligent, strong-willed, wonderful guy. My mother's a chronic invalid--of her own making. I have one sister--older--and no brothers. I'm very fond of my sister--but I was always jealous of her when I was young. Dad tried to make her a substitute for a son--took her everywhere, taught her sports and games--and I wanted to be the one. She's married and lives in Chicago. I went to school in Westchester--Rosehall--and came out here. At a mass début. Dad's in real estate. After I came out, I fiddled around awhile--Junior League, and Red Cross, and Bar Harbor in the summers--and then I met Rol."

She took a breath that quavered like a musical saw. "He's handsome. He has manners--buckets and barrels of manners. And money." She looked angrily at her rings. "I tried to make something out of him. To put ambition in him. I got him to work for dad--and he quit. He wanted to go to California because he likes flowers. My God, how he likes flowers! We had greenhouses full. He thought he could become a botanist--or hybridize something--and he dawdled away his time with paintbrushes and pollen. I persuaded him to go into real estate out there--and he made a lot more money--but he gave it up. He began collecting a library of old books on botany--and writing a history of botany--and I was bottled up in botany. It got so he would hardly even dress up. Or shave. Overalls all day. I'd want to go places and see people and do things--and we'd be home, instead, with some French professor, maybe, for dinner, complete with beard, accent, ribboned glasses, and knee-patting under the table. Half the time, these professors and Rol--for Roland--talked Latin. I flunked it, three straight semesters, myself. Well--I took to going out alone--and he didn't care. I even tried to make him jealous--and he positively seemed to approve. He told me I needed outside interests and that he was a dull fellow for me! I--" She bit her lip.

"--love the guy."

"Not now. I did. What finally happened was--"

"Should I get that beer ready?"

She shook her head. For a while she was silent. Then she touched the book. "I heard--I knew--I suppose I shouldn't even have been surprised--let alone driven out of my mind--but there's so much that's nice about him. Used to be, anyhow. Too nice--and that should have prepared me--"

I got it, then. "Not--other women, Yvonne. Men, huh?"

She shuddered. You don't see people shudder very often--in restaurants, anyway. She shuddered because that was how it made her feel. She couldn't help it. And when the spasm passed, her hands went on trembling--like glassware vibrating after a certain right note has been struck. "He hired an assistant--a young college graduate--that I liked, at first. Then--one day--I got so bored and lonely I went into the greenhouses, which I hated, looking for them. And I found them, all right."

She began to cry again--and to talk through the tears. "It was only--two weeks ago. Rol was dreadfully upset. He promised--everything on earth he could think of. And I stayed a week more--but it was simply too awful. I finally bought tickets. I--I don't like living at home--mother's such a sobby mess all the time. I wanted to see dad--and of course he was about ready to go out and kill Rol. Somebody--somebody--" her voice sank--"told me that if I read the Kinsey Report I'd see that what happened to Rol happened to maybe a third of the men like Rol. I guess it does. What difference does that make?"

Children, I thought. No. Not even children. Children is just what they weren't--just what they'd never been--or just what, if they'd ever been, they refused to let themselves remember. These angel-pusses, growing up everywhere in America, psychologically hamstrung or maybe wingstrung in their cribs. Turned into demons by their right-thinking, practical, realistic, common-sense, hard-headed fathers and mothers. Marrying, in no better condition for marriage than nuns and eunuchs. Phooie.

I slid my wrist in my cuff. It was after three. "Yvonne," I said, "are you busy tonight?"

"I was going to have dinner with dad--as usual. He bucks me up."

"Maybe you could do with a substitute bucker-upper, for a change."

"Dad told me I ought to go out--call up old friends--"

"The hell with what dad told you. And I haven't asked you, yet. I'm fussy, myself. Can you dance?"

She nodded.

"Rumba?"

"Rol was a swell dancer. And we used to have a teacher come to the house--in the days before he lost interest in--me."

"Well, I'll pick you up, around eight. The valet keeps my dinner things here--so put on a long dress."

"I don't need to be rescued, Mr. Wylie. It's sweet of you. But I'd detest to go out feeling as if I was the object of a missionary project."

"Then think of yourself as a missionary to me. I have no date. And I am very uninterested in spending this particular evening alone."

"Why?"

"Because I'm a writer. I put my heart and brain and libido into the composition of gay, mad, happy stories. Then I have to pay for it--in compensatory funk. Nothing psychological is free. The illusion that it is amounts merely to a passing human fancy--about fifty thousand years old. Surely you're familiar with the fact that humorous authors are melancholy babies, in the flesh? Well, I just miss being a humorous author--so I just miss being a one hundred per cent sourball."

"What are you going to do now?"

"That's a very possessive question," I said, "in view of the shortness of our acquaintance. However, I am going to cut a serial from two hundred and eighteen pages to one hundred and seventy-eight pages."

"_Exactly?_"

"Well--within a few lines. And not just this afternoon. It takes days. My wife is up in the country. We were having the house repapered and repainted. Every time I found a quiet corner and started to cut bleeding syllables from my precious prose, some damned craftsman with a mustache like a character in _Midsummer Night's Dream_ spilled paste on my back. So, finally, I scrammed down here. If my wife had known I would have to put in more days on the serial--she'd have postponed the rural clowns. But, not knowing, and with artisans so touchy about their schedules--"

"Don't tell me!" she exclaimed. "We just had the house in Pasadena done over!" Her eyes faded. "For what?" She murked about inside herself briefly. "I'd like very much to go out with you--if you really want me to. On one condition."

"I know."

She turned quickly, unbelievingly. "You do not!"

"Bet?"

"Bet you flowers for me tonight."

"Generous wager, I must say. Indecently feminine! Okay. Promise to admit it--if I have the right answer? No hedging?"

"Promise."

"You'll go out--on condition I won't make a pass at you."

She flushed a faint peach color. "I thought you were going to guess I wanted to go Dutch."

"I know you did."

"How?"

"I know how women think, as they term it."

"You're right, though."

I picked up her check and signed it and signed my own and signed the two sets of bar checks and gave Fred--who was loitering about in the background with overt patience--a sound tip.

"Buy yourself," I said to her, "some dandy flowers. I like gardenias. I hate orchid-colored orchids. On second thought, if flowers remind you of Roland--"

"He never grew them to wear--or for bouquets. Just to breed."

"See you. And thanks for the indiscreet lunch."

3

It was, as they say, sweltering in my suite. Sweltering, like every term, is comparative and relative and also tentative. I like to swelter, as a rule. To work stripped and sweating, with a vasomotor system engaged in cooling me, rather than the opposite, which others prefer--a pumping system busy stoking the body against cold air. This--like most events and experiences--is more a matter of mental climate than physical. Such attitudes are self-taught, people-taught, or environment-taught.

One's frontal lobes are liable--unless trained in every particular at autocriticism--to hypnotize the rest of the brain into compliance with the ego's demand. Suggestion rises at some spot in the throbbing cerebral tissues, or from without, and is snatched up by the cortex to be delivered back as ultimate gospel to the whole human establishment: great balance of the brain and all the instincts in it, spinal cord, nerves, organs and muscles. These, then, like a converted Christian, are compelled by one fallible new layer of the organism to adjust to the command. When the whole man cannot, the cortex founders in neurosis or psychosis. Usually, however, the adjustment, farfetched or absurd though it may be, is sufficient so that the mechanism goes on with at least a semblance of effectiveness. Its nutty operator is allowed to live; people aren't very critical--or even observant.

Only in human aggregates is the effectiveness shown to be mere semblance. Men seen locally in time and space appear purposeful enough, reasonable, even charitable. Seen whole, they are clearly insane. And only one in a thousand sees that this collective madness is but the sum of little acts of hypnosis performed by his own cortex on his whole man.

Thus, in trifling example, where you might have been sweltering, I was sweating without psychic trauma. You may have taught yourself, been taught, or may have decided from observation that ninety degrees is an insufferable temperature. I have concluded it is pleasant. My constitution is no different from yours. The concept of thin blood is mythical--mine, indeed, is probably "thicker" than yours, for it contains a very high number of red cells. But the opinion my cortex holds of hot weather permits the rest of me to function in a hot room without the added burden of psychic pain. Your synthetic dread of hot weather may send you rushing to the seaside, where you then spend the day in a sun temperature of a hundred and twenty-five. You burn your skin. Or you exhaust yourself getting to the top of a mountain--where the unfamiliar and unseasonable coolness sets you sneezing with a cold.

I have observed that millions of people who are obliged to live in temperatures of ninety seem to do so with tranquillity and this is the message my cortex has delivered, not as gospel--not as the authority for a trance--but as submitted opinion. I have sent my brains the opposite message, in North Dakota, in the winter, with similarly good result.

The latitudes of tolerance are immense. The uses people make of them are meager. They pant too much on hot days, shiver too much on cold. About God and science, sex and business, they have hypnotized themselves to the great benefit, they think, of that bright, running dot of conscious vanity called "I." Even asleep, they finally hear little but the repetition of their own opinion. It becomes the one voice on earth--God's, of course.

The point here is--I liked the warm day.

But liking is another poor, irrelevant expression. What did it matter, now, whether I liked, disliked, or snored with apathy?

The elevator gnashed its teeth.

I entered the green-walled room and took off all my clothes but my shorts. I unpacked the typewriter-paper box that held the pages of my serial. I set up a card table and put my portable machine on a corner of it. I gathered up cigarettes, an ashtray, Kleenex for my spectacles, pencils, and my pen.

I had used the soft hair, high breasts and haunted eyes of--of what in hell was her name?--Yvonne Prentiss--as a barricade. Now, it dissipated. The sad look in her eyes was gone; her smile, like the Cheshire Cat's--that was gone. And the Ghoul came out from where it had been.

I had expected it would.

I said hello to the Ghoul.

I knew the bastard.

George T. Death.

The analgesia was absorbing, or it had been absorbed. My throat felt as if a tack were stuck in it. A stinging sensation--hardly noticeable (to the properly-hypnotizing cortex). One could scarcely expect a lavish use of clinical techniques for blocking off the mere prick of a biopsy. Still--it would be inconvenient to be reminded by my own flesh, prematurely, of what it had fallen heir to. There was stir enough in my gray matter on the topic, already; no additional goad was needed.

We death-dreaders--we victims of the marvels of science--souped up to the last ganglion by every advertisement, billboard, radio commercial, lecture, and editorial--by damned near every syllable we read or hear--to live to enjoy things (rather than to stand ready to die for the sake of ideas) are poorly prepared for carcinoma--for whatever your equivalent may be.

Or--was I afraid, not so much of dying as of the manner?

Get busy, I said to myself; you'll have plenty of time to savor these notions.

Or--was I even afraid? Shocked, rather?

Work.

There's the drug you need, boy.

I lay back on the divan, smoking.

George T. Death. I knew him of old.

In several guises.

I remembered the year I was ten, the year I had appendicitis, then peritonitis, then general blood poisoning. Sometimes, at night, the pain of my body, the pain of my tube-filled, pus-lathered guts will come back to me. And the smell. The fever. The thirst. They didn't believe in giving you liquids, then--not any--and I know what it's like to be on the Sahara without a drop to drink--and your viscera opened up, in the bargain.

I know.

Father came to the hospital during one of the spells of consciousness. His eyes were desperately gentle. "How's the fight, son?"

"Am I going to die?"

"You're pretty sick, son."

I laughed a little with my curdled belly. Too soon to answer, _You're telling me._ Nineteen-twelve. That was what I meant.

"But--will I die?"

His tender passion became tenderer still. "Would you be afraid to, son?"

"No."

"Do you believe in God?"

"Of course."

"Want to live--still?"

_Still_, he had said. He could see--what I could only feel.

"Yes."

"Then--fight."

That time I looked right smack into George T. Death's eye sockets and fought. But I was a kid then--and kids are brave if they have brave parents.

In some ways, my father is the bravest man I've ever known; in others, a coward. Who's different?

Who's different without being more coward?

There was the time in Warsaw.

My half brother Ted and I had finished our tour of Russia and come shaken across the Polish frontier--like two unconvinced readers of Dante who had gone there ourselves to be sure which part was poetry and which was accurate reporting. We found out. Our Dante was a good journalist.

In Tiflis, after too much vodka, in the biggest, best restaurant where the rats were so bold they would sit under your table and nibble your crumbs and run off a little way if you took the trouble to skid your feet at them--in Tiflis, where every kind of man goes by on the street, Negro and Turk, redhead and ash-blond, because every kind of man has poured through the Caucasus for thousands of years on the way to conquer Europe or the way back in conquest of Asia--in purple-walled Tiflis where the archeological strata are as clear as the story of the stones in a cross-cut syncline and bare human feet have drilled deep paths in the rock floor of the old Roman baths--in Tiflis where Persians still sit cross-legged on tables and play what Ted called snake-charmer music on bulbous pipes--we talked too much.

We drank too much and talked too much--to a dozen tourists who sat about the big table, waiting for their late dinner--waiting an hour or two, as you do in Russia. Tourists who, for the most part, had come from France, Germany, England, and the United States so pre-entranced with communism, so ignorant of farming and industrial process, so self-blinded to horror and despair as to imagine, even after seeing some of it, that the Soviet Experiment offered hope to any man. Not being blind--being noncommittal at the outset--we had seen better.

Wait till we get home, Ted and I told them.

We'll put the truth in America's magazines.

Police state. Prison. Human abattoir. Endless steppes of horror. Perversion of the mind. Destruction of the spirit. A factory of torture to keep the factories running. Hunger and helpless hatred. Dirt.

The old, old, old abomination in new clothes: tyranny.

We'll tell them.

It began, after that.

The GPU men everywhere we went--pretending they spoke no English and reddening when Ted and I blasphemed and insulted them in their hearing. The trip to the tea plantation in Batum--on a bus that deposited its other passengers and started up a series of hairpin turns--with a driver and Ted and myself on board. The slide--the driver jumping out. Ted and I jumped, too--but the bus didn't go over the cliff. It merely caught on the edge and hung there. (Was the driver chagrined because it failed to go over--or because we jumped also--or because he had steered so incompetently? How could you tell?)

Odessa.

The bartender offered us a bottle of Scotch--the first we'd seen in the long, grim way from Leningrad. We drank some and gave the rest away. And took the night train for Shepatovka, exulting in the thought that we would never see the UCCP again, come the morrow.

There was no water on the train.

All night, we turned on the hard boards.

In the blazing forenoon our car was shunted onto a siding and the Red Army soldiers--its only other occupants--marched away. Nothing was in sight but the sparse wheat of the Ukraine and its scalding mirages. We waited--with our thirst. Hung-over, desperate. Another train finally picked up our car and we went on--at the galling pace of communist transportation.

I found the carafe of water in the toilet--where no water had been before. Recklessly, tremblingly, we drank it--equally dividing the thankful drops. And late that day, without further ado, we crossed the border to the relaxation, the seeming luxury, the comparative freedom of Poland.

It was some days later, in the Palace Polonia Hotel, in Warsaw, when I woke with the cramps in my belly and legs. With a climbing fever.

Time spun--hours commingled in the familiar wastes of pain. I knew belly-fire. I did not know my legs could hurt so hideously or curl up against my will. I lay vomiting, fainting, crawling to the bathroom and there, too weak to lift myself, pouring out rice water. Areas of my skin turned purple.

Ted, untouched by an affliction neither of us recognized, took care of me. On the fourth day he brought a doctor and a nurse. On the fifth, I was briefly better.

That evening, on my insistence, he left me for the first time since I'd fallen sick.

He came back to the hotel alone, late, and sober--for he talked awhile with the concierge. He went to his room--beside the one where I lay ill--and opened the French windows, apparently to stare at Warsaw in the vermilion dawn. They found him on the sidewalk five floors below--dead.

When the consul came to see me, and the pleasant young men from the embassy, we were unable to make out what had happened. Had he stepped too far out? Climbed up on the roof for a better view? Had the concierge mistaken his condition and had he lost his balance? Jumped? Or had he been pushed--in the fashion of political assassins who pursue their foes into other nations so as to conceal their bloody reach?

We can never know.

The embassy and the consulate thought he was murdered.

And when I told Tom, my friend and doctor, the step-by-step progress of the first phase of my sudden sickness--when I remembered the thirst and the miraculous appearance of a carafe of water--Tom said, "I think you had cholera. It could have been in the water. Some people are immune to it. Maybe Ted was."

Maybe.

He was not immune to a five-story fall onto a cement sidewalk.

What matter?

Ted was dead.

I sent the cables.

And the second phase of my illness began. The swelling joints, the atrophy of muscles, the inflammation of nerves, the--why go into it? They sent to the largest institute for the best specialist in whatever this sequel might be.

And there was G.T. Death again.

The specialist seemed seven feet tall--a skinny man--who wore such a mustache as only the Poles can grow. He sat on my bed after the torturesome examination and told me about it, in French.

"I am afraid, my American friend, that I have bad news for you. You are a man. You will want the truth. It is a progressive malady. Your foot--your arm--already crippled. When it reaches the heart--"

He went away.

My nurse wept.

Ted was the one we counted on to be the great man. The strong, the good-humored, the precocious, the gifted, the good, the young Paul Bunyan of the family. Dead.

And now I had a turn at it.

I, the elder brother.

I, who had taken Ted on his first trip abroad.

I, who had led him to miserable accident, to foul execution, or to horrible impulse--bred, perhaps, in the vile durances of the vast nation we had traversed.

Abrupt hate of life.

I lay in that hotel bedroom--they had told me that a Warsaw hospital was to be avoided--and rehearsed the placid, polite syllables of the specialist.

He had been interested, as one foreigner inspecting another, to observe reactions.

I had therefore been careful to exhibit none.

Alone, I could react.

As now, I thought of my wife and my daughter and the insurance and the banks.

And having finished with that, I turned to rue.

Feeble fool. Wretched clot!

How little of what you felt and thought did you take the trouble to express!

When your corpse follows your brother's to the crematory in Gdynia, what epitaph?

Here lies a minor author--an excessive curiosity and a penchant for investigation--who never bothered to write up his reports.

So every artist and would-be artist makes this same phrase.

_I knew: I never got it said._

Isn't it true of you, also?

Didn't you know--and weren't you always on the verge of saying so--when you had to go to the movies, lunch, the bathroom, bed, or the jute mill in quest of new shoes for baby?

Yanh-yanh.

Each generation learns enough too late to pass it to the next, for when the learning's accomplished the newcomers have always been educated ahead of the achievement--in ignorance.

So when will cradles be rocked by wise men and good women?

They never know it will take a thousand years, and perhaps a thousand times a thousand years; they think it will be tomorrow; that is the trouble with them--it is the trouble with them all.

I lay in the Palace Polonia, with the European cars blatting in the sacrificial street and the trains hooting across the moribund way and it vividly occurred to me that in a few more years Hitler's men would blow down these corridors and blow up those cobblestones. I lay in Jericho.

I thought, finally, about a palm frond.

There was a day in Florida when, in a mood of black despair, I stretched out beside the sea with all the cabanas of the Roney Plaza and all the dollars lying round about, reciting to myself the abhorrent antics of my compatriots and my own repulsive participation. The beach boys laughed; the handsome harlots splashed; and the purple sea came meaninglessly ashore. My eye, tired of the drenched blue firmament, came to rest on the frond of a coconut. It was a young leaf, very green, and it glistened in the sun like lacquered metal.

While I regarded it, the leaf had a sudden meaning--the meaning of life and growth and Evolution. Not the idea--but the felt significance. (You would say, doctor, that some biochemical process completed itself in that instant--a change came in the endocrines. Or you, doctor, that the individual unit shares with the group the Toynbean shift-to-the-opposite--the yin-yang--and hence, sometimes, joy-through-funk.) Anyhow, I looked at the damned palm frond and a great peace came over me, followed by an excitement. I decided to leave the American scene and make a personal inquiry of Hitler's Germany and Mr. Stalin's Russia and to take my brother along.

I got up and said so. The purple sea also took back its meaning, then, and all its other meanings. And that was that.

I flew with gulls once more, skittered with flying fish, and bathed in the limpid, tepid surf with every sand flea.

That is what I remembered, exactly, in Warsaw where I lay dying, as usual.

Remembering, I determined to go back to that sea.

My shoulder was disjointed and full of slime. Certainly. My left leg was also paralyzed. I was ankylosed and calcified and atrophied. But of course. Agony--_sic_. What was left of me might be a stumblebum but the outside part could somewhat swim still and the inside part could fly.

My brother was dead.

There was work to do.

To hell with Dr. Jerkski, great man of the Institute.

I would frustrate every specialist in Poland.

Take up your bed and totter, Wylie.

It required a year for the doing--in Warsaw and Paris, Manhattan, Connecticut, and California.

Then I had entirely recovered.

Trauma excepted.

Now that is what I thought of in the space of time it took to smoke a cigarette on my divan at the Astolat--that, and several thousand more items.

That is why, so to speak, I had nodded courteously at the Ghoul.

He is always hanging around.

One has only to turn one's head fast enough--and there he is.

Most people, by the cortico-schizoid mechanism I have described a few pages back, partition him off.

He is not behind me, they convince themselves.

But he is.

There are always exactly enough Ghouls to go round. Billions of people apply the blindfold technique in another way:

He is not a Ghoul, they say, but the God of Heaven.

The Eternal Grocer, who will dole out milk and honey forever.

The Great Conductor whose baton will direct my Everlasting Harp.

The Keeper on the Inexhaustible Preserves who will set infinite game before my arrow in the Happy Hunting.

Chairman of the Greens Committee of the Elysian Fields.

The Sublime Pander who will fit an houri to me on the hour, each hour, and I shall be the Paramour of Paradise.

The Universal Usher who will take the stub of my ticket and lead me to my seat in the Reserved Section at the Right Hand.

What asinine measurements of man are furnished by his Heavens!

My own opinion of the Functions of the Ghoul is different, as I am gradually trying to imply here. And I am certain, furthermore, no one really believes, in his heart, that such heavens be. His mouth says it, his cortex confirms it, and his heart gives him the lie; so he has his Hell.

For how could Nature come to as tawdry an end as Heaven?

Even human nature?

I told the Ghoul, after this sweating, to get behind me, like Satan, while I cut my serial.

4

This is the way of it.

You take out an adjective here, an adverb there, a prepositional phrase yonder--and so gain a line.

You make the first mark on a tally sheet. When you have four marks set parallel, you cross them with the fifth. When you have a row of twenty-eight marks, you have removed one page. When you have forty of these, you have completed the task--provided they are distributed through the installments in such a fashion that each part will be tailored to the desired length.

It was a story of manners--a light thing, with a plot.

I had enjoyed writing it.

I did not enjoy the cutting.

Every syllable scratched out is likely to take away some quality of a character upon which a subsequent event will turn. It is necessary to remember to the last detail what is removed and what remains. The elimination of a noun in the first installment may reduce the impact of a scene in the last. The contraction of a scenic description may ruin the comprehensibility of the hero's actions later on in the tale. And, when the most careful economy has been achieved, the goal of decimation may still be at a distance so that the writer is obliged to select this situation, that dialogue, yonder tender scene, and recast the whole in briefer compass, the while omitting no cogent phrase or fact, however trifling.

It is a big puzzle and a hard job.

It took me, I should think, another quarter of an hour to stow away my Ghoul completely, divert attention from the prick in my throat, and become immersed in the running words.

My editors say I am a good professional.

And that, my liberal-intellectual critics add, is all: a capable hack.

O liberals.

O cognoscenti.

O critics.

I give you my death-wish--and the atom bomb for its consummation.

Why didn't you study it sooner?

You copied into your literature whatever you saw on washroom walls--and little else--while brighter boys copied Bohr's equations from blackboards.

Both were true.

Both were real.

One was old.

The other new.

And where are you tomorrow?

Anyway, as I was suggesting, I write for money, usually.

I enjoy it--the writing and the dough. If writing isn't fun, I give it up. And I spend the money.

Here today and marlin fishing tomorrow.

Here today and at the couturiers with Ricky tomorrow.

Night club today and novelette tomorrow.

Serial today, book, movie, play.

Sarcophagous tomorrow.

I am at least one two-billion-three-hundred-millionth responsible for the contemporary world and bear the burden gamely. Why not take up my burden and follow me as I, too, follow? The burden of Light.

Or why not take up, better than I have, the same burden and improve upon my shambling progress?

I am the occasionally somewhat rich man who finds the Kingdom of Heaven at hand this day--and the next, discovers in his private concerns and small affluence that the door has narrowed down and his camel is balked by its load. The little acre I have dedicated stays where it is but wants, sometimes, for cultivation. I have sinned; that is why I understand sin. Men have made enough things for me to last fifty lifetimes; I have given them away for newer, more expedient things. Enough substance has been dug out of the earth and grown upon it and sold to me to support a tenementful of more intent philosophers. And I cannot compare myself favorably with other men: perhaps they lacked my environmental opportunities--a Princeton education, for instance--or a youth's experience of Montclair, New Jersey. (What grim lessons!). If, furthermore, my assigns perish with the yuts and their barbarous impedimenta, they will have no reason to remember me kindly.

But these are my problems.

And these are your problems, too.

Do you repent at all?

Or ever act?

Or merely join another lunch club and boost your voice loose? What fagins brought _you_ up?

Old Bob Durfree, editor of the magazine for which I'd written so many yarns about Cynthia Davis and Cynthia's silly mother and Cynthia's patient pop would welcome this one. My short stories, my serials, were a branded feature of Bob's magazine. Struggling years! A hundred serials--froth composed of my blood and sweat and tears--were written for nothing. And then, at last, Success. Chimes in the mercantile establishments! Fiesta for salesmen! Orgasms in banks! The Cynthia stories belonged more to Bob Durfree's magazine than to me--and nearly as much to the taste of millions as to my taste, although I sometimes put spices in the meringue that offended the flaccid palate of Mrs. America and the lovely abscess she rears as a daughter.

At any rate, I poured it out on Bob Durfree's yarn because of the dignities I have referred to--and in light scorn of those critics who can never tell if silver is alloyed in gold since they do not know what gold is. They will follow their wrong guesses into oblivion. Every time they cried Eureka another true prophet went flat on his face.

It was about five o'clock when my phone rang.

I was surprised it hadn't rung sooner.

People are always calling me up. They want me to talk to Lions, Elk, Moose, and other quadrupeds. I never do. They want me to go on Information Please, or Town Hall, or Breakfast at Sardis. I never go. They want to know what boat to charter for a day's fishing. I always tell them. They want to argue. Me, too.

I thought, friends, relatives. Max, maybe--my brother. I thought, We, the People, asking me to appear as a Voice.

"Sorry--I'm all booked up. Busy. Going to die in a few weeks. Yes--exactly. Keeps you jumping."

"Phil! This is Paul! I'm down in the lobby!"

"Well, come up." I gave him the room number.

Paul is the eldest of my nephews--twenty-five now, or perhaps only twenty-four. His last name's Wilson. He is my older sister's only son and he reminds me of myself at that age, sometimes. Gaunt and hectic--continually outraged by the course of human events and continually upset by his own doings as well as his failures to do. Erudite in many things. Phenomenally naïve, all but unteachable, in others. (Maybe I haven't changed as much as I think.) And there is a difference between us of great magnitude. Where I was an interested but lazy mathematician, Paul is a genius; where I was captivated by every discovery of every science and adept at none, Paul was captured in earliest childhood by physics. We are temperamentally alike, to some degree. But he concentrated and achieved where I dispersed my attention and mastered nothing. He has--as I have--the familial facility for expression; this is the common property of so many of my relations that when any of them turns out to be inarticulate he is regarded as a sport.

Paul's mother, Georgianna Wylie, was such. Born two years before me, still more years before my brother, sister, half brother and half sister, and dispatched to an aunt after the death of my mother--which occurred when I was small--she was always a nebulous member of the family. A cumbersome, religious woman who wore plain-colored dresses--brown, as a rule--and rolled her hair in tight coils, like rusty screendoor springs. An introvert. She sang in the choir somewhere and studied for the missionary field. She never made it. Some remote Wylie cousin fell ill and Georgianna was drafted to take care of her. The illness turned chronic and young Georgianna's assignment became penal servitude. She spent twenty years or so as a peon in a prairie village that straddled a State border. What was never bloom, faded gradually; but it did not quite die out. One night in Minnesota at a camp meeting she met a chemistry professor who had gone to the service for a lark. He had it. He got Georgianna pregnant on the spot--or within harmonium-shot of it--and she died giving birth to Paul.

Wilson, the professor, meantime had done the right thing by her; they were married by an uncle of mine.

"Georgianna," my aunt used to say, "was the most docile, uncomplaining human being on earth. A true Christian. If she hadn't met that vile seducer--that atheist, Willy Wilson--she'd be serving her Lord in some distant land to this very day. She expiated her sin, believe me. The night she died, she said so. 'I'm going, Effie,' she told me. 'Bring up the boy in the Master's steps.' I failed her! Willy Wilson insisted on taking the boy--and brought him up a nonbeliever, like himself. Poor Georgianna!

"'I know He has forgiven me!' Those were her last words--excepting for what she said after the delirium set in."

My aunt would frown and shake her head at that point. "Two more mortal hours she lay there, twisting and trying to sit up--with me holding her. And the whole time she cursed the name of Wylie with words you wouldn't believe a girl like that would know. Of course--she meant Wilson--it's a common befuddlement. But whenever I think of the language she heaped on that evil man, I know what human torture is!"

It was one of our favorite family stories.

And, needless to say, Georgianna didn't mean Wilson at all. He's still a good chemistry prof--a husky, redheaded guy whom everybody likes. Georgianna was cursing her own blood the way people curse the day they were born--and for sufficient reasons. She had glimpsed--all but too late--the hypocrisy implicit in Scotch Presbyterianism. The strong, lucid mind that burned in silence beneath her clumsy exterior had finally cut through that wall between reason and instinct which men call Faith. Just before her "delirium" Georgianna had realized that Willy, not Jesus, had forgiven her (or would forgive her) for deserting him after their marriage, for working as a farm cook, and (as the result of over-fatigue) for falling down a back stairs in the ninth month of her pregnancy, thus bringing about her own demise through stubbornness and vanity. She had figured out the family--and Willy too. She got at least one moment of transcendent understanding, and followed it with two sound hours of profanity--crowding into the racing moments as many repressed sensations of her life as she had time for. Not a bad job, on the whole.

After Willy had explained it to me, I'd always wished I'd investigated Georgianna more attentively.

There hadn't been much chance.

Paul--her son--came in. The one we were so proud of.

Pushed the door open, kicked the book away, and let the automatic closer snap the lock. He took off a seersucker jacket that had flapped around his slatty shoulders. He picked up the book and said, "Jesus Christ. I thought I explained quantum mechanics to you ten years ago!" He went through my bedroom to the bathroom. A firm, pounding stream. He kicked the toilet handle, missed, kicked again--and it flushed resentfully. His jacket had fallen to the floor. When he returned, he kicked that. It rose in the air and he caught it. He whipped off his shirt.

"Buy me a drink," he said.

"What?"

"Scotch and soda."

"Order it yourself--and order me a coffee."

He went to the phone. I cut one more line, and then tidied up the bridge table, stacking things so I could start in quickly where I had left off.

"I didn't know you were in town," I said.

"I didn't know you were. Took a chance. I had to see a gook who lives near here--so I stopped in. How's Ricky? Recovered now?"

"Swell."

"What you down for? Cheating?"

"Work."

He considered that, pinching the flared nostrils of a long nose, peering luminously over his fist, wrinkling his forehead. "It's possible, anyhow. You're getting pretty old."

"I'm not too old to take you on, Spare-ribs."

His dark eyes twinkled. "No. You're getting oaken, Phil. Late maturing and frost resistant. Someday, though, I'll be like that myself--and then you'll be a wizzled shard who goes around feeling young girls. I'll bring over a pretty one to bait you up, and when you reach for her, I'll wallop you till they have to put you in an iron lung."

"By God, I believe you will!" I was laughing. "How's physics?"

His face became taut. "Don't you know Congress will crucify you for merely asking?"

Paul worked for Johann Brink, at the Belleau Lab. For the Atomic Energy Commission. Brink had picked him from a prepared slate of geniuses at M.I.T., Caltech, and several other schools. Paul was that good.

I said, "Congress has got one of my arms pinned down already and a hole in my foot, besides. If you don't want to tell me how physics is--I'll tell you. Put it this way. There was an atmosphere at Eniwetok you didn't like--"

"What do you know about that?" he said swiftly.

"I just listen to what Truman says," I answered, "and then I extrapolate." I shook my head. "It's funny. As soon as anybody has a dose of military security, he gets the soldier's creed--assumes people stop thinking because certain thoughts are classified. Everything about atomic energy is secret, hunh? Well--who has Brink been seeing, lately? Who was he photographed with? Old man heavy water. So now you come in here--looking like an underfed caribou with the wind up--and what must I think? That your little cadre of nuclear physicists is fooling with the hydrogen-helium cycle and getting hotter than the rotor in a turbo-jet. You're scared you'll figure out that one-thousand-times-more-powerful-than-Nagasaki bomb. The atomic cloudmaker. The continental broom. The universal gene-mangler. Or crack light metals or separate isotopes by heat. Don't tell me if I've read your mind, doctor. I would rather be calm in my surmises than fearful I might say something in my sleep that could be checked. Do you guys really think it is smart to cause officials to go around positively announcing that the number of bombs we have in our beloved stockpile is smaller than anybody who knew the prewar radium production could figure out? When you discuss atomic 'weapons' in the press--without specifying--doesn't it seep into the dull heads of us laymen that, for instance, hot isotopes would make a nifty charge for ordinary high-explosive bombs--against warships, for example? And can't anybody make a pile, now--and start the isotopes flowing? Crop-dust cities? And don't you incessantly talk too much about how long it will be before you can do thisa and thata? Remember when your spokesmen were telling us of the inutility of thorium? Cannot we, the plain people, add and subtract neutrons in our heads? Aren't you protesting too much now about how long it will be before you can push a couple of hydrogen atoms into one helium, with great and beneficial new release of energy?"

Paul was unamused. "Someday G2 is going to walk in here and walk out with you."

"Thought control," I said. "Never worked. Never will. Whenever a nation uses it, you can know that nation's washed up." The coffee came in--and the highball. I signed the check and tipped Karl. "Danke schoen," I said, and turned to Paul again. "G2 came after me long ago. I wrote a story before the war about uranium bombs and how they would be made and what they'd do--and it wasn't accepted until 1945. It went to censorship automatically--and when the censors read it--they hit the ceiling. Thought there was a leak in the Manhattan District. The only leak was in their heads. They sent a major out after me--like the hounds on the tail of Uncle Tom--"

"I recall the escapade," Paul said wearily. "You lead such a harrowing life, Mr. Wylie. And tell about it over and over."

Nobody likes that one. I said, "Sorry," and carried Paul his drink. He was sitting in one of my chairs; he had his legs on another; his elbow rested on my coffee table. I saw in my mirror that I was flushing a little: I felt embarrassed.

But Paul had already forgotten chiding me. "Phil," he said, jiggling his glass to cool his psyche with the ice-clink, "it gets worse and worse. It is beyond horrible. Past hideous. More than unthinkable. And it surpasses the unbearable."

"How about--tiresome?"

He remembered again--and grinned. "Quid pro quo? Okay. What do you want to talk about?"

"It," I said. "You. Any damned thing you please."

Paul sipped his highball. And that was another difference. At his age, I hadn't sipped. I had guzzled. He appeared to be thinking over what he would like to discuss--as if it were a scientific problem. Finally he said, "Phil, what's the matter with us?"

"Us who?"

"Physicists."

"Religion," I said.

"The faith of skepticism?" He leered at me. "If all you've got on it is that old chapter about the law of opposites, never mind."

"Lack of skepticism," I answered.

Paul chuckled. "Goody! Go ahead."

"The religion of a physicist is his belief in pure reason. He has done so well with it that he regards it as the whole of consciousness. He is like a man who has discovered the shovel. It digs so much better than his hands that he never looks for--"

"--the steam shovel?"

"Dynamite."

"Ouch!"

I laughed. "Take the _Bulletin_ of the Atomic Scientists. This journal has been coming to me ever since you guys got frightened by What-Hath-God-Wrought-Now. I've been reading it for so long that I maybe ought to carry a pocket radiation meter to be sure I don't read it too much. What is this noble publication? An inquiry, it claims, into the means for controlling atomic energy and assuring world peace."

"And a pretty complete, exhaustive inquiry, too."

"Is it? Is it even a scientific inquiry? The atomic bomb will never go to war by itself. Men will drop, toss, or convey it."

"Sure. And the _Bulletin_ has taken up every known means by which people can be told what atomic energy is, and why it must be controlled, and how to do that. Every step of the debate in the House and the Senate--and the debates in the United Nations--has been followed. Every idea my fellow physicists could hit on has been aired--"

"With no result."

"No result, my eye! If we hadn't ganged up to make Congress see that atomic energy was more than a military matter--soldiers would control the whole business right now."

"Grant that. You did get the AEC appointed. The brass doesn't run the whole domestic show. But the world show is run entirely from the viewpoint of possible war."

"Do you expect the physicists to be able to do anything about Russia and the Iron Curtain--when all the statesmen of all the nations can't drive a pinhole in it?"

"Look. There are too many places where you lads aren't really scientific at all. You run a magazine to investigate ways for avoiding atomic war. Men make war. But never in your _Bulletin_ did I once see an article about human motivations. An article by a top-notch psychologist. A digest, even, of the existing science of human personality--and how that might apply to war, to atomic bombs, to international relations."

"Psychology isn't our business. We're specialists."

I slightly sneered at him. "Son, when you are trying to stop wars, psychology is the only business you're in! You're in the business of trying to answer the questions about what makes men tick--including the tick they make these days that sounds so much like an infernal machine. But you think that's still the reason--business."

"A lot of big shots," Paul answered, "have called on the psychologists to contribute. Asked them to speed the work on their science and the science of sociology--so we'll have a solid technical basis for establishing peace."

"Yeah. They have. And not one God-damned super-brain in the barrel has stopped to note for a moment--so far as I'm aware--that the psychologists are 'way ahead of them. The science of personality--of behavior--of consciousness and instinct--is well along. The psychologists could tell them why men fight. They could tell them why--so far as present evidence indicates--men are going to go right ahead having wars--atomic bombs, germs, and all--into the far, foreseeable future."

"Why?" he asked mildly.

"Oh--because they exploit individualism and never take any responsibility for it. Their hostilities and aggressions, frustrations and fears--add up, inside their groups, and burst out, since they're never even noticed, let alone dealt with, on the personal and private level, where they originate."

"So you have written," he grinned. "So what? Should we pure scientists simply say that peace is hopeless? Quit cold? Or try for peace with what we do know?"

"You and your pure science! Pure is a word that should be forbidden all of you. What's pure in a science that deals exclusively with the object and rules out the subject doing the dealing?"

"Just," Paul answered, "the result. If we hadn't ruled man out of man's investigations, we'd still believe the earth was flat, the sky was a cup, and the stars were holes in it. We'd still be premedieval--"

"Yet--when you did establish the objective facts to a considerable degree--set up physics and chemistry and biology--did you boys then turn that knowledge and that method upon yourselves?"

"You claim," Paul answered airily, "that the psychologists have done so."

"Yes. And you needn't pretend I have no right to make the claim. You scientists, self-styled, let a few doctors--ridiculed by the public and unassisted by you--do the investigating of the consciousness you were applying to electrons and protons. They used your method--the empirical method. They have announced their results steadily for the past half century. You never even looked them over. So now what are you? Big cheeses in the high-tension labs. Mere mice, around the psychological clinics. Hunting in your _Bulletin_ for a way to stop war when, really, you haven't a good kindergarten knowledge of what war is and how it comes about."

"If there were enough psychiatrists, then--we wouldn't have to worry?"

"Be sarcastic!" I said. "All you birds need a good psychiatrist." He winced at that, rather sharply, I thought. But I didn't let up on him. "Guys like you are aware enough to see that perhaps Hitler could have used a psychoanalysis. You are not aware enough to see that any president of any big engineering school could use it, too. Why? Because you think pretty much as he thinks. And neither of you can see that your thinking is largely emotion and only somewhat logic. The great blunder of science was to imagine that science could be indefinitely developed for the physical benefit of man and never concurrently applied to his subjective needs, states, motives."

"It was hard enough for the early scientists to get across the simple truth about objects. If they'd tampered with man's beliefs--they'd all have been burned to death."

"What about you later scientists, then? Would anybody burn old Johann Brink to death, today, say for studying Freud?"

Paul chuckled. "The picture is beyond imagining."

"Yeah. And I'm sick of it. All your eminent predecessors rushed ahead investigating stars and bugs and drugs and air currents and left any inquiry into man himself to philosophers--who were usually ignorant even of physical science--or to James and Wundt and a few trying, solitary people. You didn't ever really apply science. Not all science to all reality. You just promulgated pure science along exactly half of its possible lines--and called it a job. Looking forever at the light outside--and never at the interior dark. Justifiable in a sense. But not bright. And not really scientific at all."

"Hear, hear!"

"If the Greeks had worked out math and aerodynamics and built flyable air frames--without bothering to study the problem of engines, we would regard them as remarkably skillful imbeciles. They would have littered old Attica with the fusilages of Piper Cubs and maybe B-29's that couldn't get off the ground. In a sense, that's what they did do: they pushed knowledge ahead along certain lines a certain distance--and never followed through. You goons are still doing the same half-baked job."

"You want us to quit studying physics and start picking up stuff about the Oedipus complex and sibling rivalry?"

"It's too late. That's the assignment for the next civilization."

He just looked at me.

After a while, I went on. "You birds say that knowledge is power--yet all your knowledge turns into impotence when you want it used for human harmony and peace. What is the power, then?"

"Let me guess. Instinct. You see--as an old Wylie reader--"

I heaved a cushion at him and enjoyed a little of my second cup of coffee. "Instinct. You dumb bastards! If you were really dedicated to science, as you say, the last war would never have happened. And the next one wouldn't be forever imminent. You say you believe that scientific knowledge should be free to all. Freedom of knowledge, you say, to put it backwards, is essential to science. But every time the nations get miffed at each other--you lice lock yourselves up in the national labs and go to war against each other as much as any soldier. The old herd instinct. The old ego. Intellectual fealty to scientific principles? You have none!"

"I kind of resent that," Paul said slowly.

"You resent the accusation. We who are about to die of the fact resent your behavior. Or should. If you pure scientists were pure guys purely devoted to science, Hitler could never have hired a dozen of the lot of you in Germany, or Stalin coerced six. If you had insisted on keeping science free--the Wehrmacht could never have been armed. If you had been scientific men, not men practicing science--even granting you felt it necessary to wipe out the Axis--when the deed was done, you could simply have published all the atomic facts and be damned to the politicians and the so-called patriots. Left mankind to work out its destinies in a climate where knowledge was still free. As it is--Russia knows enough to wipe up America in a few more years--the patriots and politicians are living in a fool's paradise--your _Bulletin_ sweats monthly to explain that sinister fact--and all you gained by assenting to the current lockup of freedom of knowledge is a bureaucratic sweatbox to do your work in--and a terrible endless case of jitters. You don't understand behavior well enough to predict the results of your own. Others do. And by far the most probable result of the failure of pure scientists to behave purely toward science will be the end of the possibility of further top-level scientific investigation for a century or two."

"You think I should sit down and write out all the atomic secrets I know and print them and scatter them from a plane?"

"I do not. I think you should sit down and face the fact that science is precisely as hypocritical as religion--essentially no different from it--hamstrung in the opposite tendon by the same egotistical means. Sinful--call it. Guilty. The scientist can see the lack of logic in religion--so he rules it out. He doesn't see the import of its universal existence. The religious man can see that physical science offers precisely nothing of value to his inner sensibilities--but fails to see the meaning of logic. So he neglects to learn science and applies logic only when it flushes his toilet or eradicates his foes. You're both apes."

Paul swallowed the last of his ice. For a moment he sat without speaking, the reflected sunlight softening his sharp features. Then he said, "I hate to think anybody understands anything I don't. And I strongly suspect you do."

"I strongly know I damned well do."

There was another pause. Paul pulled his nose. He drew a breath to speak--and gave up the impulse. His eyes turned inward. Little by little, his limbs sagged. An expression of the utmost melancholy passed like a shadow over his face and was followed by lines of resolution--lines I did not like because, visible in them, was conflict--unacknowledged discontent mixed with unknown resolve.

"I'm in a terrible mess, Phil."

"Aren't we--and so forth?"

"I want to quit."

"The Lab?"

He nodded. "There is something positively bestial--in the worst sense--about going any further with schemes to turn physical theory into mere implements of death."

"Instinct coming to your rescue. I thought you liked the work?"

"I did. As long as it was a series of problems. Now--it's getting to be a cold choice of means for engineering murder. That's no fun. It's like spending all your time figuring out how to destroy your own home--after you've already hit on half a dozen nifty ways."

"Why not quit, then?"

"Brink--for one. I like the old guy. I'm indispensable to him--I at least pretend. And I feel loyal."

"Talk it over with him."

"No use. He's got the idea that he's engaged in some sort of holy mission--a personal war against all tyranny, right or left. That he, and we, and guys like us, must keep out in front--from the weapons standpoint--until every tyrant's done for."

"Tyranny, Paul, isn't a gent. It's something inside everybody."

He drew a long, sighing breath and abandoned the subject. Soon, he grinned at me. "Phil, I came as near praying you'd be in town today as I get to prayer. When the telephone operator put me through--I like to fainted with gratitude."

"How much," I asked caustically, "do you want to borrow?" Then I wondered if I ought to lend anybody more money.

He laughed. "Money, a guy like me can always use. Someday, though, I'll take time out and invent a quicker way to make ice cubes, or a better zipper, and get rich and pay you back. I keep a record of the debt on a