PART FOUR

_Rondo_

1

Paul's "hour" of sleep would last, I felt certain, for the best part of the morning.

I went into my bedroom and looked at him. He had taken off his shirt and his shoes. He lay on his back with his mouth open, his lips nursing the air, his brow creased with wrinkles set there by a life of concentration--and distorted now with sorrow and pain. He was sweating like the inside of a still: the drops welled and ran on his face and his hairy chest and his ribs. Even his feet were bright-sprinkled. As I looked at him he stirred; a murmurous sound of protest and despair came out of the poor guy--a sound tragic and pitiful and weird, for there was nothing human about it. Hurt animals make such noises. Ridiculous--but I remembered how a young man could feel about a girl.

I would like to say that I dressed, girded my spirit, and took some step on Paul's behalf--or even that I sat down at my table with grim and relentless character and put the milk-cart morning to good account by knifing further excess from my serial.

Such was not the case.

I lay on my sitting room couch with the purpose of gathering my forces for both efforts--but I met with failure.

My head ached. Vague pains beset my body--squirting about mysteriously from neck to gut to ankle and back again by way of knee and pelvis and teeth. My tongue burned--dry and yet sticky--inflamed and evil-tasting to itself--the tongue of us millions who sedulously obey the cigarette advertising. (And just possibly the throat of some of us, too, I thought wincingly.) Idiot infantilism, scalding oral eros, obsession, compulsion, tobacco! I smoked on defiantly, wretchedly. The jiffy coffee lay in my stomach like a solid and the heat of it ran from my pores.

I stared at my body--the wens and scars and indurations and red blots--the warts and excrescences and moles--the minor tumors that are our common response to age and attrition--the crinkling paper of my skin--the sun-tan that reflected from a mirror like youth itself but that, at chin-length, lost its satin and was seen to be marched and counter-marched with freckles and a rash of prickly heat. I surveyed the expanded, slack viscera beneath an irreducible fat that slid when I turned, like a hot-water bottle under my flabby epidermis. I noticed the cord inside my bent elbow, standing out like an old man's now, and poorly covered with a crêpy mantle that lacked elasticity--the time-shrunk backs of my hands--my toes, warped out of alignment, marked and marred with the miles and with the leather boxes we wear--their nails, turned in, split, chitinous--small, magenta lace of erupted capillaries--shine and scale on my shins--myself: waxwork--worn battlefield--warrant of decay, incipient cadaver.

I did not need to see my face.

Fatigue dwelt in me always, now. Oh--(barring such incidents in a single one of these tired cells as neoplasm, of course)--I would have exhibited my inordinate energy, my vitality, my apparent arrestation of age for another ten years or twenty or thirty--I might have been an agile old man, supple and good at games (with suitable allowance for the years) whose eyes never clouded, whose hair never fell, diving off tall dolphins to amuse my grandchildren and dancing gracefully with Ricky to the applause of other septagenarians and the infinite boredom of teen-agers. But I was old already--scribbled with the nasty information of years, apprised of slinking hurts, debilities, transient toxicities and nauseas that would increase and increase and increase--or would have done so except for that one, rambunctious cell.

Who wants to be old?

What man, in his so-called prime, fails to note his coming scenery--the bandaged varicosities, the braces, the cut bunions, the scarification and bloodless horn, the smells and tastes of himself, the thickening spectacles, the hearing aids, the pills and petit prostheses, the gouty overpall, the migraine and vertigo, rheum, sour burp, dyspnoeia, heart-kick, cracking, and the myriad painful impediments of urination, defecation, respiration, transpiration, the organic wheeze, the gradual invasion of death?

He wants to be old who accepts it.

But we, the people of the United States of America, have rejected it in toto: there must be some way to keep grandpa a gamin and mom nubile; meantime, let us pretend there is a way.

Millions for senescence and not one cent for sense.

So, okay, I said, it is happening to me with the short and sweet just around the corner and a good thing too, perhaps.

Or a bad thing.

A thing, I realized, of no import.

_Now_ is a sufficient tomorrow for all my yesterdays--if I will see to the circumstance in person.

This summary was a current that carried away the incubus of that early morning and left me sound asleep on the divan.

When I woke up I saw by my watch--which slid on its gold band when I moved my thin, saturate wrist--that it had passed nine o'clock. I budged and yawned and swam up into the room. I felt better--the other side of age having somewhat returned during the nap.

Paul still lay on his back, mouthing and snoring and sweating.

Room service brought cold orange juice and good, hot coffee with a civilized cup to drink from.

I needed assistance--which is to say, Paul needed it. A friend. An attorney. I could hardly spend the whole day with him unless there was no alternative. Yet certainly he should not be alone with his callow impetuosity. And certainly his young colleagues would be too inept for a proper handling of all the potential dilemmas. He needed a Danaos--he had always needed one, a wise older slave to manage his love affairs--a shrewd promoter. Lacking such a companion he had invested the meaningless savings of youth's passion in one whore. Profligate, comical, and a disaster.

I considered Johann Brink.

Women, he would say, do not exist in the laboratory.

When you switch on the cyclotron, you switch off She.

It was too damned bad they _hadn't_ taken women along in there with the atoms--_flame inspiratrice_, man's soul. They might have discovered more concerning the nature of the velocity of light and the behavior of particles and even the essence of packing fractions than they'd learned by the castrate inspection of their micros and macros and milles.

Which other set of barbarian priests was it who emasculated themselves before accepting Holy Orders?

I couldn't remember.

Brink the mental giant and pigmy person would be as much help here as a handful of ice cubes against a forest fire.

I dialed Dave Berne.

His man Veto answered.

"This is Phil Wylie."

"Just a minute."

"Hello, you toothless cobra! What the hell are you doing in town? Waiting for the women to faint?"

"Some of us," I said, "don't have to wait."

He roared. "No kidding! What gives? God, isn't it hot? If I had a human head, I could shrink it right here on my terrace--and it's only nine-twenty, A.M.!"

"Dave, I got trouble."

I told him about Paul.

"I have a ten-thirty conference with some movie moguls," he said when I finished, "so I'll be right over."

He was there in less than a half hour.

David Abraham Lincoln Berne is the most interesting man I know--a statement which covers quite a few interesting men.

A lawyer.

A lawyer, furthermore, whose principal employ is with the movie companies.

He was not always a lawyer....

Dave was born over a delicatessen, in Madison, Wisconsin, of serious minded, musically gifted, orthodox Jewish parents in the winter of 1906, the fourth child of eight, and no culls in the lot. As soon--he says--as he could pound with his porringer, they gave him a violin. But--again, according to him--he swiftly saw that he was going to be only a semiprodigy, so he turned to other fields. He did well in school. One of his playmates, a Milwaukee realtor nowadays, who liked Dave in spite of his personal limitations, long ago told me about that--and succinctly: "Some of those bastard Jews are born with a high school education!"

Dave finished at fifteen--and took an extra year to grow in, working nights at the delicatessen and reading, for entertainment, philosophy.

He has a remarkable memory. He might not be able to recall his laundry mark when he was in Virginia. But no one who knows him well would bet even on that.

A compact guy who--because he is loose-jointed--seems anything but solid. Indeed, his flexibility is such that he could probably learn a yogin's basic postures in one sitting.

Everybody liked him in Madison.

This was not true in Virginia.

He majored in psychology and went out for football. He'd played on his high school team. The backfield coach was impressed equally by the length of his accurate passes and the fact that he mastered the signals in one night's concentrated study. Letter-perfect and reflex-fast. But a pair of racially pure Nordic behemoths from Minnesota, sent proudly to the team by scouting old grads, decided that, although they had nothing personal against the yid, no yid would call their signals. In Dave's first game they managed to break both his legs.

Dave got the idea. He let his uniform hang there, the next year--when he'd got off crutches.

He made the newspaper--but not the fraternity he'd set his heart on.

He made _summa cum laude_.

He went next to Pennsylvania--tutoring, tending furnaces, minding babies, mowing lawns, as usual--and took both an M.A. and a Ph.D. in psychology. He got a job teaching it to pre-med students in Iowa. His thesis on "Formulations of Subjective Sexuality in Man" almost landed him the thing he wanted--a psycho-sociological research position with a big foundation. They wrote him, however, that they felt certain group attitudes (outrageous, but there they are!) would prejudice his fact-gathering efforts.

A Gentile took over the project.

Several of America's brilliant young men in psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis are former students of Dave.

A Dr. Wiswell was put over him in Iowa.

That was when he began to read law.

He took the New York Bar exams in 1935 and went to work for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer that year.

During the war, he was commissioned a captain in the Medical Corps and sent (by a General Muller, a Regular Army doctor who thought Hitler a great man and psychiatry bunk) to Alaska, to study the effects upon mental stamina of cold, isolation, and monotony.

For the first time in his life, and after twenty months of Alaska, Dave pulled strings in his own behalf.

He was assisting the OSS--a major, then--in figuring out methods of hastening the deterioration of Nazi morale--when they came through the Bulge. Dave stayed at a forward subheadquarters to manage the tourniquet on his colonel's bomb-shattered leg.

Hurrying German troops took the colonel prisoner and shot Dave four times, on sight.

Some of Patton's men found him, still alive, in a cellar, three days later. Two of his toes had to be amputated because they'd frozen. He limps when he's weary--but he's still a handball champ.

The Nazis didn't take care of his colonel's tourniquet and the colonel died. Dave has a Purple Heart, plain--but nothing else to bespeak what, in a Gentile, might possibly have been regarded as courage beyond the line of duty.

He had, you will recall, reluctantly decided that there would always be a Dr. Wiswell over him, in the field of psychology. He had also come to the reluctant conclusion that a Jew without money in America was like an unarmed man in a city of quick-draw experts. So he had studied law.

Problems to which he put the lever of his mind usually yielded. The problem of money was one such. He is a completely honest man; he no longer saw any objection to applying his honesty, and talents, in places where money was abundant. He is worth, I should imagine, a quarter of a million, and he has only started.

Dave is the ugliest man I know--or, at least, know well.

A huge but thin hooked nose divides his face vertically. Hitler's trained anti-Semites needed only a look at that to shoot. His large, round ears are set almost at right angles to his head. He has a conspicuous Adam's apple which--in talk, or merely from emotion--rides up and down with the acceleration and quick braking of a humming bird before a hollyhock. His forehead bulges; his mouse-brown eyebrows look as if they had been sprayed on as a random afterthought. He is almost bald. His mouth takes a generous cut into his pale, gaunt cheeks and his chin retreats. Only his eyes contrast with a face they cannot redeem: they are an immortal blue--living proof of compassion, of reflection, and of mirth.

He is a bachelor.

He was in love, once, with a stately girl from Boston--a quiet, brainy brown-eyed girl who wore sensible shoes and braids but sometimes had the look of wanting to lie in the grass with a man, or even of being ready to pull a man down. I had hoped that Dave would be granted this one exception by the unwilling gods. He wasn't. She married an opera singer--and divorced him two years later--and went to live in Milan.

My Campfire Girl, Dave called her, after that.

He meant the part about Camps.

It was in Hollywood that I met Dave.

I was weaving down Sunset Boulevard one night, drunk, desultory, and alone. Very much alone. My first wife had taken my kid back East--and no blame for that. She was sick of the way it was.

I'd spent the afternoon at an address in Beverly Hills where you could do what you pleased.

I'd spent the evening at a gambling place up on the hillside, sprinkling my money around and my IOUs--with a bunch of other writers, directors, junior producers, and picture girls. You'd know their names if I told you and the hell with that.

Up on the hill above the canyon at the Casa Crap.

Up there among the carbolic mountains--the near knees--the far, white peaks with snow on their nasty heads. Down below, the spot where God sat on the seventh day, and--in the big, flat print of His behind--Los Angeles. Ninety square miles of costume jewelry, Technicolor starshine, neon and sodium and all other colored gases, signboards with fifty-foot women in ten-foot brassières and men smoking four-foot pipes, boulevards under the palms and cloverleaf intersections with the billion paired headlights streaming and swirling, bungalow courts and drugstores, pool halls and bingo parlors, buses and trolley cars, acacias and roses and pepper trees, open markets with fruit piled in metaphysical polyhedrons, and the fog rolling in on the thin, chilly, sting-sinus air of California.

You can keep it.

I'd spent all my money and cashed a few IOUs to impress the girls.

The girls.

I'd played Mr. Bones with the bright young writers who go out there for the girls--searching amongst the girls in skirts for the girl that's their soul--Medea, Medusa and Circe, Sappho and daughter Eve, Calliope, Clio, Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene, Polymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia, Urania--and Aglaia and Euphrosyne, too--and Lilith--searching for her on the wrong coast--all evening, a badminton of wisecracks, battledore and shuttlecock with the soulless prizes going to the heads that stayed clear the longest, the pocketbooks that were the deepest, the tallest gold lettering on office doors, and never a Muse or a Grace in the joint.

I hadn't been able to find my car in the sepulcher parking yard.

Too lost, ingrown, ashamed to ask the attendant.

Too penniless to hire a cab.

I walked down that Golconda Golgotha, stopping to puke, with my fists in my pockets holding to wet handkerchiefs.

It was on the Boulevard, with the rich night traffic, the skimmed scarlet scum of the studios and the magnates from Pasadena with their cold, oiled working-model blondes.

The bells rang. The iron hands came down. Stop civilization. Go civilization. Red lights green lights cracking my drunken brain. The acrid flavor of tomorrow in my mouth. Alarm. Headsplitting daylight. How about this? She sees him get out of the ice wagon. She throws a snowball at him. Go sell it to the Eskimos, she says. I've got it!

She throws the snowball. That's good. So okay--her mitten sticks to it and soaks him square in the puss and instead of spitting out the mitten--which he gets in his teeth--he makes like it's a mustache!

Hell! He's a football player, isn't he--not just an ice-man? Going to be a big-shot brain specialist someday, isn't he? Quick thinker. So okay. So he leaps and spears the mitten and the snowball like it's a long forward and he runs at her and tackles her and spills her--not real hard--but hard--and there's how they meet, the both of them lying down in the snow with her on her back and the guy on top. Is that good--or is it terrific?

And there, so help me Christ, after eleven days, and twenty-three thousand dollars, is how they do meet.

Wrong coast for Aglaia, I say? I'm sure I did.

That morning's taste.

The rest of them. The contract. The months.

The arms and the lights and the bells became lost in the prospect and I stepped from the curb and brakes trilled.

"Want a lift? You need one, pal."

That was Dave.

At my apartment, I made some coffee and later we went back together to the address in Beverly Hills--because he didn't know it, and he was a lonely guy, too.

In fact he still is.

The most brokenhearted guy in the world.

You see

nobody told him about the six-pointed star on the box he was shipped in--he had to find out for himself.

And he wants to be sure, when he checks out, that he kept it bright while he had the use of it.

Dave came in.

"By God," he said, "Wylie! The old, articulate cryptogram in person, nude as a saint's stool!" It might have been a bracing autumn forenoon: "I'm glad to see you! I was saying to a friend only the other night--a jerk named Staunton--Staunton, the town's not the same--Wylie's not here. The old termite has moved to the country--turned himself out to pasture! And Florida in the winter! The son-of-a-bitch is chasing the analema! Where's the patient?"

I pointed.

Dave took a look and came back.

"Shall we wake him up? I can take him to the office and get some of my minions looking for his wench. Private dicks, too. They won't find her. They couldn't find a luminous memorandum in a two-drawer filing cabinet. But it might wear him down a little."

"Let him sleep, for now."

Dave sat down. "This is swell! Send for a barrel of iced tea, will you--with a clear gin on the side? I had a hard night last night. A bunch of the super-big-shots came in on the Super-Chief and the Super-Century last night. Things in Hollywood are so bad that two of them stayed sober the whole damned evening."

I phoned Room Service. "There's a depraved guest of mine up here who wants some neat gin and a lot of iced tea--"

Dave had picked up one of my ashtrays and was looking at it intently. When I hung up he said, "Depraved? Depraved, you say? Me? Don't I detect not just one, but two colors of lipstick here?"

"Callers from the other rooms," I answered. "Came in to consult the oracle."

"Depraved," he repeated. "That's the trouble with you Gentiles. Two rules for everything. 'If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out.' But--'Let not thy left hand know what thy right doeth.' Something of that sort. So you reconcile the pair by going around plucking out other people's right eyes; and not letting your open hand know the other is gouging. Consulting the oracle! What a phrasemaker!"

I told him about Gwen and Yvonne.

He pretended to be still more deeply outraged. "There you are! A perfect Wylie situation. God, what an imposter! Not one lovely girl--but two--are sent on silver salvers. You entertain them. You get all the social opprobrium and none of the benefits. What confidence can youth have in you, after a trick like that? Here you are--the last hope for phallic worship in a dying world. The man with the one message that makes sense. Either the boys get their breeches back--and do things to make the dames respect 'em--or Nature will throw us out of the party. You proclaim it with your foghorn and you play it on your xylophone. But when it gets right down to the bedrocking--what do you do? You personally, Mr. Prophet? Welsh! Walk out on the act!"

"Times are changing," I told him. "Phallic worship? Can you build good rituals around our businessmen? A healthy restoration of phallic worship would ruin the profitable activities of every vested institution in the land, from its banks to its churches. People wouldn't even care if the trains ran on time, any more. Think of that!"

Dave was leering at me pensively. "By God. It might be the thing to revive Hollywood."

"Yeah," I said. "You open with a prologue that shows modern psychology has found the roots of love in our love lives. Then you fade to the American Home, where a Husband is trying to figure out how to arouse or enchant or even slightly interest one Beautiful Blonde Mother. She is rushing about the house swatting her children for bringing home a magazine full of art studies. Her husband tries to slip his arm around her--but she knows he is suffering from neurotic hay fever, makes his living by manufacturing second-rate household appliances which he sells owing to better advertising, is afraid of his stockholders, never had the earning capacity of Joe Benson or Harvey Tekker or Don Oaker, and is scared of her, besides. Great subject for phallic worship! We fade to a contented pagan maiden in the South Sea Isles--ukeleles and moonlight--"

"And the MPPA comes in and tosses out the film! It's a conspiracy!" he said in a Durantean tone.

"You guys have worked out the vein--that's all. There can't be any more very interesting movies till there's a new public attitude about life. You've got to where there's no permissible area that you haven't canvassed a hundred times. The new pictures are all remakes. People get sick of such things. Jam yesterday, today and tomorrow is as bad as none today. All the movies are self-plagiarisms. I even went to one with Ricky this summer."

"We're grateful."

"Remember the _Three Little Pigs_--and the song about the 'Big Bad Wolf' that people sang to kid themselves in the Depression?"

"I remember."

"So all right. We went to see this movie--and we also saw a remake of the Little Pigs. Same story. Same art. Same theme song. At the finale, the new inspiration is this: the wolf pops down the chimney of the little pig in the brick house--hind end first. And the pig fills a caldron with turpentine. The wolf lands in same--and the picture irises down on the wolf roaring away, his hind legs held high, his turpentined anus dragging, his forelegs pulling--like any dog. Now--I was brought up to believe that you can't tell the same joke twice. And I was also taught that putting turps on animals' rears was sadistic. I still think it is. And I think it's too vulgar a way to try for a laugh--cruelty to animals aside. That, my boy, is truly obscene--the dying effort of a perishing industry. Fortunately--television is coming in--and it will be far more vulgar. Television will really speed up the fertile necessity of a great change in this disgraceful Western world. Right?"

"Right," said Dave. "I saw that short. I psychologically snapped my _petits fours_." He looked at me for a while. "Phil--why'd you call me over here, this morning?"

Karl came with the gin and tea. I signed. He went.

Dave's question startled me. I suddenly saw it from his angle. I'd allowed him to skip--or postpone--an important conference because (I'd said) my nephew was on an emotional binge and I needed aid. Dave would know that, all else being equal and normal, I could handle my nephew. He'd know that, barring some editorial crisis, the cutting of a serial wasn't so important I couldn't set it aside for a day or so to row a relative through the waters of a soul-struggle. He'd know, by my cursory attention to Paul--and by the way my talk had slatted around--that I had more on my mind than Paul's problem. So he had realized--and I had not--that I'd decided to call in a friend--for myself.

"I need a good lawyer," I said.

"Oh--oh!"

I looked at him cross-eyed. "What an evil mind you have! I keep my accounts and the tax people are not particularly interested in me. No brunette has letters of mine and is asking for a thousand bucks. Nobody is suing me for plagiarism. I just noticed a little nuisance in the back of my throat the other day and went over to see Tom and had a biopsy--and I want my affairs in order."

I shouldn't have done it that way. He turned sheet-white.

"There isn't any report on the biopsy yet," I said. "Won't be till Monday. Makes quite a long weekend. But I have a hunch--"

"You God-damned dour Scotchmen! Maybe it's nothing."

"Tom thinks it's something."

He looked out the window for a long time--with his shoulders folded forward and the sun beating on his face, reflecting into it from the cement top of the parapet and bouncing at it from the tile terrace between. That ugly, fond mug.

"I suppose," he finally said, "when they have taken everything else and everybody else they come around for you in person."

"I never really expected to get even this old. When I was a kid, I was sure I'd never see thirty. As I recall, I didn't want to. Seemed a stale age."

Dave grinned feebly. "Ricky?"

I shook my head.

"She well now?"

"We think so."

"Get her down here, man!"

I shook it again. "Give her the two more days. And it just might--might--and then--"

"You didn't take a drink?"

Again.

"By God! What a reform!"

"I'm trying to get that serial done--"

"--strictly on Presbyterianism."

I thought that over. "Maybe. They'll need the dough. And it's a favorite old anodyne of mine--rolling up the sleeves."

Dave poured out a second glass of iced tea and gulped it. He nodded his head toward my bedroom. "When he wakes up, tell him to come down to my office. Tell him we're working for him. We'll do what we can think of. I'll keep him stooging around--and sober, if possible--and see you later."

"Going?"

He came across the room and put an arm around my shoulder. "You said you wanted to work. I'll be back."

"Okay."

2

I remember, one day on the way to California, when the Chief stopped at Needles. It was summertime and the thermometer on the station wall in the shade said 125 degrees. I was standing around, dizzy, when I saw a guy pacing up and down the platform as if he enjoyed it. I ventured out in the sunshine to see if he'd lost his mind and he turned around--a dark-skinned character. Royalty, it proved later, from Hyderabad. He liked it.

My apartment, that morning, was something like the Needles station on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe. No baking sand, red-hot rocks, or mountains pitching on the miraged distance, of course. Needles was dry, too, and Manhattan was close to saturate.

I worked along--not minding much.

But after all, even Negroes sunburn--even Papuans get lazy.

Around one o'clock I began to feel--not hungry but empty--and I went in to check on Paul. He was still snoring and sweating.

Four and a half grains of sodium amytal, by itself, wouldn't have knocked him that flat that long. He'd have wakened in six or seven hours, I thought--feeling fuzzy and feeble and maybe a little sick. He still seemed good for more time, to me. It showed just how much sleep he'd left out in the past weeks, past months--worrying about that girl and worrying about making weapons with his beloved mathematics. It was possible, of course, that he'd explode awake any moment--look at his watch--throw an outside loop--and get going like a jet plane.

I wrote him a note saying I was downstairs in the Knight's Bar and that I had a new search in progress. That would bring him.

I got dressed. The gabardine was like wet newsprint.

This time, air conditioning was a relief. I sucked in a lungful and Jay came up.

"Want to sit with Mrs. Prentiss?"

"Sure."

Exactly two days before, she had leaned over the same table, an immaculate grooming operation--hurt, snooty, aloof, reading her disguised book. A Cinderella. Avid and anxious--haughty and pretty hateful--beautiful and not much good. I could say what was different about her now but it would be difficult to convey the true impression of that. Her hair, for one thing. It was just neatly combed--just casual, gold-blonde hair whose owner hadn't taken pains for once, with every single filament. Her dress. Another plain, costly print--but the body inside it was relaxed and not subconsciously trying to avoid creases. It didn't seem to fit quite as perfectly, and yet it suited her better: it made--would make--anybody, any man, look at the girl inside and the clothes after--not the other way around. The Musak was giving out with "Dardanella" and her foot was keeping time under the table.

"Hello, Yvonne."

She glanced up--from the morning paper.

"'Lo, Phil."

"Want company?"

"Love it." She moved over a little. I came around the table and sat down.

"You look right sweet this morning. Noon. Whatever it is."

She folded up the paper.

I ordered some cold salmon and potato salad and iced coffee.

She studied me--gravely for the most part. Once, she showed a dimple. But her voice was placid. "You could be annoyed at me."

"What for?"

"Don't be obvious!"

"Last night? Annoyed? I was tired. In a talky mood. It was my guest's own idea to come down. I said sure--and after she'd been there awhile--I changed my mind."

"That's what Gwen thought." She ate a little of her fruit salad. Maybe her hand shook. Certainly not much. She drew a straight, easy breath. "I imagined I could learn something from her."

"Did you?"

She looked at me with frank, gray eyes. She smiled into herself. "You know I did."

"What?"

"Isn't it strange how much we attach to trifles--love and sex trifles? Set up a whole lifetime for happiness--but fix it so that one little act for a handful of minutes will ruin the whole thing."

"That."

She flicked her head to put back her hair. "It's mad! To imagine such things are so important! To imagine whole lives and people and families can be ruined by anything--so little!"

I gave her the red schoolhouse riposte. "Knocking a person on the head is a little thing that hardly takes even one minute. But it's murder. Slipping a hundred G's out of the cash cage takes only a sec--but it's robbery--"

"And kissing you in a cab the other night," she answered, "took only a couple of blocks and I don't love you in the least. We touched. A moment or two. It was fun. We'll never do it again. Or, say--we do. Is that like murder and robbery? Should it ruin lives?"

"Not to my way of thinking. I don't feel wrecked."

"Neither do I," she said softly. "Neither do I! On the contrary! You have to find out that how you feel is terribly important--terribly. But what you do--unless you make it important--that's such a tiny thing!" She smiled. "When you think that just forty-eight hours ago--I was sitting here shuddering over Rol--"

"It occurred to me."

"It seems--" she sought for the proper words--"sort of--caddish. Unchivalrous. And hideously unsympathetic."

"Aren't you pushing yourself?"

"What do you mean?"

"You could have a reaction."

"I'm having one."

My lunch came.

"I mean," I said, "a reaction to this reaction."

She considered that and her curls moved. "I doubt it. I'm--cured."

"Cured one way. Maybe you're going to suffer in another."

She seemed frightened for a bare moment. "I don't know," she finally said. "How can I tell?"

"Wait and see."

"If I suffer, I suffer," she finally said. And her eyes weren't alarmed.

"Good for you!"

"May I ask a question?"

"Shoot."

I waited while she ate a little and formulated.

"Phil, what would you think of me now if I were your wife?"

It was quite a one. It was the second really tough one she'd put to me. "What would you ask God if He came in?" was the other.

"I hope," I said, "that I'd cherish you more than ever."

"But you might not?"

"I leave room for the possibility. I don't know, after all."

"Why would you cherish me?"

"For at last being honest with yourself about yourself."

"Easy answer. Why might you not?"

"I dunno. You might have found yourself--by that honesty--to be somebody who wouldn't like me. Ergo--how could I go on insisting--?"

"Only that?"

"Only that. It's a lot."

"You sure, Phil? Certain?"

"My-God-yes! A great, great many of the people I know, and am fond of, and admire, would look at your sin as just a sort of timid, dainty experiment. I suppose you're fishing around for rebuke. You'll never get much. Most women learn by doing--some men, by just thinking. What are you doing tonight, for instance?"

"I--I don't know yet." She flushed peach-pink. "I haven't--decided."

"Unh!"

"You sound like Rol. Like Rol--after-- Before I left. Dainty--he talked like that."

"They bring us up--in a desert," I said. "Because that's where they grew up." I thought of Needles and the metallic sunlight and the Moslem prince. "Still--there are other things in life besides sex."

"Not if sex isn't right, there aren't. Not any other things worth living for."

"Back to Freud and the Western neurosis. Yvonne--I have to scram in a moment. Work. And a nephew. Maybe you'd care to meet him?"

"You'll forget to call me."

"Then you call me--later on."

"Probably I will."

I scraped up the last of the salmon and tipped the ice cubes in my coffee glass against my upper lip.

Yvonne reached over and took my left hand. She ran the backs of her fingers slowly through it and shivered with a small ecstasy. "Phil! I'm all new!"

"You certainly let your hair down."

She leaned toward me. "I let down--!" She smiled and shook her head. "Am I so wicked?"

"Nope. If you tried, you might make it. Right now--"

I left her in that subdued, shiny-eyed jizzle.

3

The door slipped out of my somewhat moist palm when I opened it and was slammed not by the day's breeze, for there was no breeze, but by a draft that sucked through the Astolat Hotel--a current of air bearing the odors of food, carpets, paint, luggage, and the scents of rich women--a damp, thermal issue that would have incubated eggs.

Paul sat bolt upright in my bed.

He saw me, first. He stared at the room. He swung his feet to the floor.

"Gotta get going. Any news of her?"

"Take it easy, bo."

"What time is it?"

I told him.

"You've let me waste half the day?" His voice broke.

"Not waste it. Thought the rest would do you good. Bring you back to your senses a little. Seems not."

"God damn you--you should have waked me up. I feel horrible."

"Snap out of it! Try to remember what the poet says about rags, bones, hanks of hair--and a good cigar is a smoke." His eyes were so wild that I took pity on him. "Jump in the shower. I've got Dave Berne--an old pal of mine--working on your Marcia. He probably has detectives on the hunt this minute."

Paul heavily rubbed the stubble on his face. "I _thought_ you'd take charge."

While he used my shower and my razor I had his clothes pressed and ordered some breakfast for him.

But he ate the food only because he had to wait for the valet. I couldn't remember having seen anybody in such a tizzy about a girl since the days of my youth--since my own tizzies. And tizzy wasn't the right word for Paul's condition. It was pretty nearly psychopathic.

He ate and ran from my rooms, after I'd made him promise to report back later in the day.

I got into the serial again and the sun moved across the blue-hot sky, driving from Manhattan everybody with the fare.

Ambulances were collecting prostration cases.

Cops were going around shutting off the fire hydrants which wilted citizens were opening with wrenches. Cops trying to save the water supply against fall drought, against fires, against winter snow that could be flushed into the sewers, and in behalf of the thirst, cookery, and cleanliness of the millions.

The heat wave had become big headlines in the papers.

Sometimes I looked out the window at the glaring roofs of the metropolis and tried archmeasures of cortical autohypnosis, imagining the sky gray, snow falling in hushed and steady spirals, shop windows green and red for Christmas, and Salvation Army Santa Clauses ringing handbells beside their tripods and kettles on the main intersections. It wasn't any good. My personal limits of trained tolerance had been exceeded by a great, tormented gob of atomic fire ninety-three million miles away and right here on my windowsill.

Still--I made fair progress.

The light was losing its intensity, though the air was no less fevered, when I got a call.

"Is this Phil Wylie?" It was a man's voice--bland, on the booster side.

"Yo." I was not very enthusiastic about being Phil Wylie.

"This is Socker Melton. Friend of your father. He told me to look you up, here--and I've tried a time or two before now. Glad to catch you in. May I come up?"

What do you do? I told him I was working hard--on a rush operation--but to come up anyhow.

Then I raged around the sitting room for a bit.

Christ badger every old friend of the family!

The oaf's knock was pompous. Bonk and pause, bonk and pause, bonk.

Like the pass-signal to a kid's shanty.

I opened the door, being careful to cling to the knob.

My dimmest view was justified.

Socker Melton was a big chum--sixty-two or -three and about two-hundred and twenty-five. He had a face that would have been square if he'd sacrificed his extra chin--large, blue, eager-beaver eyes--a babyish snub nose--and a rather thick mouth, not very clearly defined; but there was nothing repulsive in the ensemble--he looked like a star Buick salesman. He wore--maybe I should say sported, since he probably thought of it that way--a white flannel suit of a light weight and he carried a panama hat, the sweatband of which was earning its keep. A poor day for those big boys and I felt sorry for him. His clerical collar was doing its best to stand up for Jesus--but there were folds in it and his black dickey was mussed.

I propped the door open.

He inventoried the place after a passing gander at me. You could see that he liked nice things--and the Astolat is well heeled. His eye rested especially on some mirror-backed hanging shelves.

"I hate to intrude like this--"

"Any friend of pop's--" I said.

He gave the panama a scale--to show me he was an informal guy like me--and dropped into one of my chairs. The thing squeaked hard and braced itself. I figured to be charming for about ten minutes.

I'm a sucker for people who get to see me, anyway. I like most people--as individuals, to begin with; and although I do what I can--and the family does what it can--to keep the more extraverted oddities from jimmying doors and peering through bedroom windows, I spend a God-awful amount of time chitchatting with visiting strangers of all sorts.

The chair he'd taken was in reach of my MS, so he reached for it. It is possible that he was trying to adjust to the fact that I was wearing only a pair of shorts.

"Sounds amusing," he said, after reading a few lines.

That was what Gwen had said the night before. I was glad to see the Cloth in agreement with the professionally unclad. Competent magazine fiction should appeal to all tastes.

"Pleased that you think so."

I told myself that I had no right to be irritated at the preacher's patronizing tone, or at his unasking and uninvited reading of my manuscript. After all, when artists paint in public places, people feel free to look over their shoulders.

"I'm the rector of St. Shadows, over on Park," he said. "But don't hold that against me."

I'd heard of the guy. The "Socker" came from intercollegiate boxing--at which he had been champ of his class many long years ago. My old man thought he was a "great personality, a liberal, a true intellectual of the church, and a profound modern philosopher."

"I won't hold it against you if you say not."

He laughed--about four watts too heartily. "Mind if I take this coat off?"

I did mind--because that meant he'd stick around longer. But I'd asked him up. What the hell! I usually give myself a break around four or five, anyhow--for coffee.

I told him that. "I was about to knock off--" and so on. "Would you like something to drink?"

He said he'd have a sloe gin fizz. This was to get across his modernity and liberality.

"Don't drink, myself." I took some trivial pleasure in his visible surprise.

"I thought all authors--?"

"Used to be a lush. Quit." I told Room Service about this new guest and his taste for wild plum juice.

He had said, "Oh," anent my confession. I hung up and he grinned at me. He'd taken off his collar and dickey by that time and was sitting there in a wet undershirt. "In town for long?"

"Nope."

"You're here a good deal, though, your father tells me."

"Sometimes. At the moment--we're building in Florida--and my kid attends school there--so Florida is where we spend most of our time."

"Hot, in the fall and spring, isn't it?"

"Not this hot!"

He thought that was amusing, too. "Hurricanes," he said.

"Yep. Hurricanes."

"You've been in them?"

"Repeatedly." I passed up a grade-A chance to dramatize Wylie, since it would give him equal privileges, when his turn came.

"I'll tell you, frankly, why I'm here," Socker said. "I want you to do me a favor." He gave me that ministerial look--the beaming meekness of a man who is never denied a favor.

"Like what?"

It dashed him a trifle. "Well, Phil--" (old friend of dad, I reminded myself) "I don't suppose you've been in a church for a long time."

"Not to my knowledge."

That got him again. "And I don't suppose you've ever been in a church like mine. Don't get the idea I'm about to ask you over to hear me preach. A preacher like yourself--you see, I've read your books--wouldn't be much interested in the rhetorical efforts of a chap like me." He was a little nervous, now, and actually a shade humble. "What I'm driving at is this. We've got a young people's society that has thrown doctrine out the window--not caring how much stained glass broke--and is trying to get some meaning out of religion by putting some new meaning in it."

"Sounds trenchant."

"I want you to come over, Phil, and talk to my young people. They're readers of yours. We've discussed your books at meetings--gone through them chapter by chapter--had some real battles! It's our feeling that, at bottom, you're as earnest a Believer as any of the rest of us. I've sprung some surprises on my young folks--Phil--but springing you would really rock them."

The Buick salesman touch.

I told him--as nicely as I could--about never making speeches, and why. It's always embarrassing.

He covered up his very annoyed disappointment and decided all I needed was a working-over. He began this by ignoring the invitation--after a little more pressure got him nowhere. He talked about his church and the young people and their outlook:

"You'd be interested in learning what's going on among religious liberals, Phil. In fact, you owe it to yourself to find out! And your writing shows you don't know! Dogma has simply gone overboard--and I mean overboard. We're studying psychology as hard as you are. We take up a book like the late Liebman's _Peace of Mind_--and learn to understand it. Hell-fire and damnation--original sin--that sort of rubbish--is out. We'll listen to a communist over there as attentively as to a priest. We believe Christ would have made the fair distribution of goods His business--if He were alive now. We sit around and air sex problems as frankly as the professors. Use their lingo. We don't believe religion ought to be a lifelong way of pain and hardship and self-torment and sorrow--"

I'd been thinking about the Law of Opposites. What he was saying, I'd said, myself, in some instances. But not all. Some of it made me a little sick. I tried to interrupt but he barged ahead:

"To us, religion is a practical attitude and a source of _joie de vivre_--or it's mistaken. We've got a gymnasium in my church and we hold weekly dances and weekly bingo games there. When we talk about the Master--we talk about a Man who is our Friend--not an Oriental mystic who left His disciples puzzled by contradictory advice. If you can't see your way clear to visiting with us--at this time--you certainly ought to be able to see the value of catching up with the status of modern Christianity--"

"There are a couple of points that worry me," I said.

"Come and thresh them out with us!"

"I don't imagine Jesus would have been interested in communism, for example."

"Because it's antagonistic to orthodox religion? Wasn't He an antagonist of orthodoxy, Himself?"

"The logic escapes me, there. If I'm not mistaken, Jesus was exclusively concerned with the inner world. He was completely antimaterialist. Social systems were superficial to Him. He was agin the obsessive materialism of Near East capitalists two thousand years ago--and I strongly suspect He would see dialectical materialism as a mere spread of that unilateral pall over the conscious minds of the masses."

"Superb! Come over and tell us that!"

"You're supposed to know it, already," I answered. "And to be teaching it. Besides, I am a firm believer in Original Sin."

"_What!_"

The sloe gin and my iced coffee arrived.

He offered to pay--a unique point--clumsy, but pleasant.

George looked him over twice. George had never seen a clergyman in my haunts, except my father, whom he knew.

"I believe in Original Sin," I said, when George went and when the parson had taken a cool, deep pull, "since I believe every religion is the attempt, the compulsive and unconscious attempt, to make a schemata of instincts that will be palpable to the sense perceptions of human personality--and since I also believe that religions have generally failed in that function--causing the sin."

"Failed how?"

"Failed by being turned to the support of the ego."

"But we'd agree with you, there!"

"So I must conclude there is some basic error in the entire religious phenomenon. Believing that religions express a genuine psychological compulsion--a need to discover the inner pattern of behavior, the inner design of consciousness--but observing that the orthodox patterns offered so far have led only to a succession of material advances that ended in social collapse--I must conclude that there is some _human_ error which repeats itself down the millenniums. Some terribly deep perversion of Nature that at first lets man advance a little--then throws him back nearly the whole distance--gets him going once more with a newer, 'truer' religion--and so on, ad infinitum. This perversion is what I call Original Sin."

"Pretty abstract," he said.

"Not at all. Here's the Sin. Religions have been used not so much as formulations for guidance as to convince their various Believers that man is, himself, godlike, wherefore God. Not an animal with a fresh neurological awareness. Not a beast of the field, who knows it and who therefore knows that what goes on inside beasts is nothing to sneer at. But God Almighty, personified according to His self-personifications of Zeus, Amon-Ra, the Prophets, Jehovah, or Who-not. God Almighty--destined to live forever with all the numerous Gods-Almighties--in the Elysian Fields, Nirvana, or Wherever. You follow me?"

"I think so."

"You don't. Let's try it again. Imagine a band of apes that developed self-awareness. Apes that suddenly saw themselves _as selves_. Imagine those apes interpreting the new cortical phenomenon not as a fresh and fascinating development amongst animals--but as evidence of their metamorphosis from the flesh to something Higher. They don't know what, exactly. They work out What in a series of mythologies and religions. 'What' turns out, in our era, to be Sons of God, Brothers in Christ, Redeemed Eternally by Grace. That's where they are today. Not humble animals, carrying on the business of Evolution for species yet unguessed. They feel sure (in Christ) that they are the perfect biology right now. They sit at the end of an age-old endeavor to acquire that seeming. An endeavor which has shucked off or hidden every aspect of animal reality it can."

He was shaking his head. "I feel puzzled--"

"The use of religions, in effect, has been to conceal and deny the animal nature of man. That is perverse. Man eats--a simple, animal activity. How many religious rituals--turned into social functions in how many cases--could you list, all of which were designed to give a nonanimal cast to eating? Hundreds?"

"I suppose you mean feasts and fasts and such?"

"Food taboos, food rituals, food symbols--like your bread and wine--religious dietary laws. Sure. Man--like the beasts--must eat. But he has tried ten thousand tricks to make it seem nonanimal, or 'godlike.' Now. Consider sex--another human function which is exactly like its animal counterpart. Here there is less exigency than in eating--more time-lag for ritual and style. Man went passionately into the business of developing systems which would conceal the animal and instinctual nature of sexuality and lend to it the superior qualities of his various gods, religions, his self-glorifying self-images."

"I think I begin to see--"

"Exactly. By now--we dwell amid a species that is twenty or thirty or forty thousand years away from the contemplation of its instincts as germane to animal instincts. The distance in time is matched by countless steps in illusion. It is hardly possible for a man to think of himself as an animal in the true sense, any more. It is all but impossible for him to feel, to experience, his animal fact. And--since I believe instinct seen locally in time and space is as 'good' as it is 'evil'--and that, in sum, it is _all good_--I find this long attempt to translate natural instincts into ridiculous and unnatural dogmas and god-images--is a very sad mistake. A very great sin--the 'original' sin of assuming a superiority toward terrestrial, psychological, and cosmic Nature.

"Each new religion may be--usually is--an 'improvement' in some way upon its discarded or waning predecessor. But each is, always, founded on the premise that man is 'above' that which works within him and occurs around him. So, in the end, even though intelligent religious premises may benefit humanity in many ways--for instance, the search for truth inspired by Jesus, led haltingly to the birth of the scientific method--the fundamental premise is _always false_ and the benefits are finally fouled by the basic blunder. Instinct frustrated by the delusions of Believers of all sorts _has_ to go into autonomous operation on the multitudes, simply because they deny and repress instinct until this society or that--and all of them--fails to meet their instinctual needs. And instinct, acting in violent fashion, upon such blind, willful repudiators of necessary process--always brings calamity. It _has_ to wipe out or at least reduce each new aggregate of the self-deceived. So another civilization topples. Then another creed arises and we begin again. Until we get straightened out about _what instinct is_--get, so to speak, a real picture of our inner selves, of what it is in us that we have made into all gods and theology--a picture congruent with such truths as we _can_ see and _can_ admit--we're bound to operate in this roller-coaster fashion."

"In other words, your Original Sin is the church itself!" He sounded disturbed.

"It's--any ism. Any person or group with sure-fire dogmas that you have to accept on faith--as offering ends justifying physical means and psychological means that are illogical, unethical, unreasonable, that fail to take into account the innate facts of our animal instinct, that exclude valid opposites to their tenets, and so on."

"And you think God is what might be called the _cause_ in instinct?"

"The cause, the pattern, the existence of it in animals and man, the physical laws and forms of the universe, and the instincts of living things that match those laws and forms. What's the difference between the laws of instinct--the great drives of life taken with the opposed drives that balance them and the harmony possible in a person who understands these--and other laws? The attraction and repulsion of electrical energy, for instance? We do not regard _them_ as 'mutually exclusive.' What are you going to say about a question like Schrodinger's? He shows that one fragment of one atom hitting another atom in a gene will change the nature of the resulting being. I'd add that the instincts may change, too. Schrodinger shows you that what we know of energy lies at the heart of what we know of form. You can also see that form lies at the heart of what we know of behavior and of consciousness. When they understand the laws of the energy in atoms--they'll probably have a brand-new parallel, like that of other natural laws, for instinctual laws. They may even have a potential new insight into instinct. For how can anybody who notices the perfect instinctual pattern that corresponds with every living form, and who sees these forms evolving in awareness down the aeons, doubt that the universe has purpose or wonder what its purpose is? Unfortunately, in this putrid day and age, new discoveries in many fields are military secrets--so we, the people, won't be told them."

"You sound extremely bitter about that."

"Bitter? Yes, I'm bitter, in a way. All my life I've devoted myself to following the inquiry into the nature of Nature. This pursuit has led me--by way of psychology--into finding out a great deal about what is popularly called the nature of God. But now, knowledge at the source is restricted, classified, forbidden, secret--to protect the damned atom bomb. My government, as a security measure, has cut off my inquiry into God, my power to extend my own religion, my equivalent of your faith, my access to truth. Perhaps I'd never even manage to persuade anybody that the time has come to connect instinct and energy by theory. But the _right_ that I hold most valuable has been taken from me. And from you. And from everybody--if they stopped to think. Freedom--that precious necessity--is _actually_ freedom for the mind. There is no other pure liberty. All other freedoms stem from intellectual freedom--but all others are qualified by the material, social, political, and spiritual desires of people. What we call liberty in America is the right to know and to change: to extend or limit this liberty for the sake of that advantage or because of that prejudice--and then to learn better and shift the position once again--and so on forever. That is all there is to liberty insofar as it concerns behavior. But when the behavior of the mind is circumscribed, liberty is dead in its one absolute sense. It is dead today. We live in a midnight imposed by fear--a time like all dark ages. Truth and learning have gone underground. I am forbidden to know any more. What I think might be centuries in advance of what common people are thinking. It is still--at least potentially--obsolete, or inadequate, in relation to what other men may know--that I am not allowed by my government to find out. Wouldn't you be bitter--or sad--if your church were shut up by the Congress, if you were forbidden to learn more about your God, and if you were obliged to confine even your thinking to bootlegged guesses?"

"It's a pretty remote argument," he said.

"Is it? Remote to destroy the source of freedom?"

"Would you have us tell the Soviets how to make a bomb?"

"Is that the question? They know how! You have been told and told and told that they know how and have known since the Smythe Report appeared. And even that's not the point. When it became evident that the people of the United States faced the alternatives of maintaining the freedom of knowledge--at the risk of atomic conflict--or of destroying liberty at the source to gain the dubious advantage of a few years' time--the people chose the phony safety of secrecy for a mere unknowable dozens of months. They were too dumb to see they had sold their birthright."

"What would you have done?"

I shrugged. "The hell with it! If we had understood science and if we had believed in freedom we would have been willing, the minute the problem appeared, to fight for both--because they're one. We would not have permitted any bleak tyranny to interfere with the world-wide course of knowledge and the existence of our freedom."

"You're asking a good deal."

"I ask nothing. I merely point out that the fear of holocaust has been made permanent by our fearful failure to act. Freedom throttled will be difficult to revive. The habit of intellectual tyranny is already seeping into the pores of a world destined to be more panicky each year until either freedom of knowledge is restored or the far more likely chaos ensues. After chaos will come the regimentation, by opportunists, of a world that will have lost its grip on liberty. We bought a little time at the cost of all the values our ancestors piled up for us in the ages. It is a cheapskate civilization."

The Reverend Socker Melton suddenly chuckled. He had, in the midst of at least mild anxiety, hit on some straw, some philosophical prop. "Don't take it so hard! You sound as if you felt responsible for all the woes of man!"

"Don't you?"

"Good Lord! Certainly not!"

"You are a man, though."

"Just one man."

"Just one. But if you had access to instinct, you might realize that each one, to the degree he is aware, is all men."

"A cold, distant, impersonal idea, I must say!"

"The hell it is! The idea I'm putting forward involves being and acting what instinct orders in us--and the constant sense of that process. It relates me to every man--to every king and statesman and politician and movie queen and carpenter and garbage man--to every creature that walks and flies and swims and crawls--and to the sea, the setting sun, the stars. I see them all and I find in them the response that rises from being related to them. I consider them in my cortex--but my God consists also in _feeling_ them. I do not stumble about in schisms and dichotomies. An infinite number of aspects of life which seem antithetical to most people seem merely two manifestations of one awareness to me. You're the kind of fellow, reverend, I bet, who goes around saying, like Will Rogers, that you never met a man you didn't like. I can buy that--and still know, besides, I never met a man I did like altogether, including me. I can say, there was never a moment when I altogether liked myself, or disliked. Warm sentiments pervade my coldest thoughts. Heaven and hell are here in this one room.

"There--you see--we get back to the original sin, again: the static standards that must be maintained if the ego is to be kept intact. _This_ is evil--_that_ is good; he is saved--she is damned; my opinion is right--yours is wrong; my faith makes me perfect and whole--yours, meaning all the other faiths on earth, is imperfect and fragmentary at best. For why? Simply because my faith is mine. Me, me, me. I, I, I. That is what happens--that is the tragifarce--of taking instinct away from the brain and being entire, and investing the gigantic force of it in the little front lobes. From then on--'I have faith--and I, alone, am right. I, alone, am God.'

"Well, in my book, I am God, padre, and so are you, and so are all the people on the street down there, and so is the heat wave, and so are scorpions and rattlesnakes and botuli bacilli, and so are the intergalactic clouds. _One thing._ It is not necessary for me to elevate myself above these--to commit original sin by defining that unity in terms of my fatuous self-admiration. I do not have to give my days, my doings and my dreams to the establishment of the general illusion that I am no animal--whether by fasts or feasts, by fish on Friday or by Easter celebrations, by shutting the door when I tend my body, and especially, dominie, I do not have to pretend the procreative urge in me is superior to that same urge in cosmos--by delimiting it, stylizing it, codifying it, and hiding it wherever and whenever it must have expression. Chastity, celibacy, virginity, purity--these are the lowest terms of original sin. These condemn the animal to a vile psychological and social beastliness by forcing him to pretend he is not the unashamed pure animal that he is."

"You want free love--promiscuity--no moral ethic--"

"Nonsense! I want to build our sex behavior around what is learned to be true nature of man--to establish an aesthetic from instinct--not from the instinct-perverting demands of ego and superego.'

"And what would it be?"

"Loving, for a start."

He moved impatiently. "Spiritual love--"

"I mean the same. What spiritual love has man today? What friendliness toward other men? What regard for Nature? Man fears. Man hates. And as to Nature--he is the hostile parasite on the whole of it, and calls himself its conqueror. Let him conquer his ego--and then--if he should prove to be--in some almost unimaginable era of clean passion--capable of as wide a variety of ways of loving as he is capable of simulating and extending the other faculties of other species--he will have to build his aesthetics around that. Love takes two people. If neither is injured, made less, turned hateful, rendered afraid--if the purposes of instinct, become aware and consciously directed, are not finally frustrated--no specific behavior will offend this dim-seen Nature. Shameless awareness lies far nearer to a way for mankind to grow loving than any so-called love of a Jesus which requires a man to think he is impure, vile, inevitably born a sinner, inferior physically to all other living things in Eden's Garden--and this, so he may publicly proclaim himself and secretly imagine himself to be their 'spiritual' superior. Isn't that clear?"

"Sometimes I follow you--sometimes not."

"Look at it this way. You say you've chucked out heaven and hell--or hell, anyhow--you modern religionists. I say, you cannot do so. I say--if your God is a god of what you consider pure goodness--you have to have a devil to balance Him. I say that all the saints and holy men and all the simple, human people who have managed, by one religion or another, to get some sense of the integration of their instincts, have done it because the religions did give them a semantic for instinct--a heaven-hell formulation of their nonverbal impulses--a yang-and-yin for Christianity, so to speak--or a Jehovah-Satan for Taoism. Take that away--and you take away all opportunity for the religious--the instinctual--experience. You produce a bunch of gassy bounders who--since hellishness is everywhere but since they've discarded hell--confuse the goodness of the species with goods, good health, prosperity, long life--things that may be possible devils for the species. They lose sight of the inwardness of the nongood and see evil as a material fact, entirely. Modern devil-seekers--men like Sheen, like Niebuhr--are closer to the mechanics of human nature than these idiot modern congregations that throw out Satan and his kingdom and as a result are condemned to evil behavior because they have made themselves blind to evil's source. Closer--but still not very damn close."

"What, then, is your criterion of good and evil?"

"I could give you dozens. I give you a sample. When you consider what you are doing, or what any man does, or any group of men--ask yourself whether that particular deed will benefit or injure the chances of future generations to evolve toward increased consciousness."

"Great heavens, man--most _preachers_ wouldn't be able to decide a question like that! Let alone plain folks!"

"Sure. Did I say that preachers--let alone plain folks--or any handful of contemporary men--knew what they were doing? Or why? Or what anybody else was doing? They don't know. So they go on by instinct--the statistical sweep of impulses that lop off nations as readily as the wind lops trees. I said we _could_ know. I said we weren't trying. Instinct is the immortal property--the urge in behalf of the future. Ants are doing what they can for ants, bees for bees, fish for fish--without much individual hesitation. But not men for men. Men today are trying either to get themselves into heaven, or to make a mint, or just to get by, as individuals. The future, to most men, means their own here--or their reward in heaven. To instinct, the future means the future of awareness, and men are but its most conspicuous exponents here and now. If we began to plan life for our progeny--what a world!"

I was getting sick of the guy. Sick, rather, of myself--my endless efforts to put a simple idea in some form that would perfuse skulls hardened against it--sometimes even by what they imagined to be open-mindedness. "Look. You believe, don't you, that you could sit down and write out a mode of behavior satisfactory for man to the end of time?"

"I could take a crack at it," he said.

"Well--I don't. I believe that future men should be left free to make up their minds without consulting any bulls and fiats from me. I get some sense of orientation, a _raison d'être_, from giving thought to the rights of the species now and to come. Not saving adult souls for present bliss--or spiritual cradle-snatching, either--but forwarding the whole, rolling business of biology on this sin-drenched planet, is the fun--for me."

"You are totally pessimistic about the present scene, apparently."

I looked out the window. It was getting on toward sunset. "Excepting for a few physical technologies--are we so different from our human predecessors? Crueler, it may be. And weaker physically, perhaps. Otherwise--not any different. And has there ever been a time in our past history when optimism for even one era or one society was warranted? History says not--the record. It is hardly an encouraging fact."

"No hope, then? No fringe of lining on the cloud--?"

"I didn't say that. The record has at least--continued. I hardly expect mankind to be blotted out. I just don't have a very high opinion of man's present works in relation to what he really is, desperately needs, and someday could be. There are compensations. I give you one. We won't be missed."

He began putting on his dickey. It plastered itself against his sodden undershirt. He ran his thick fingers around his collar.

"You're a hard person, Phil."

"I am a very gentle guy, Socker. The men of the earth are hard. They have confused another instinct here--and think to be hard is estimable."

"Somehow, I believe you're all wrong."

"Of course. So much of what I think is the opposite of what you do. And then--I believe a lot that Jesus said. While you don't believe any of it at all."

He flushed. "I'm not sure I'd want you to talk to my young people."

"You relieve me. And you've been very decent to listen--yourself."

"Oh," he said, fairly jovially, now that he was about to be gone, "I listen to them all. Crackpots, nuts, psychiatrists, anybody--"

"Listen to yourself, once."

Suddenly he was sore. "Who in hell do you think you are?"

"Somebody," I answered, "whose religion doesn't insist it knows all about all truth for all people for all time. Somebody who isn't a stuck-up, luxury-struck, fatuous, patronizing jerk in a black vest who carries around God's credit card in his hip pocket and keeps in the collection-plate business by holding smut sessions in the church gymnasium. Now, for God's sake, get out of here and let me work."

He stood at the door. He smiled again. "I'm sorry for you, Phil. Truly sorry. You're a brave man--in a way--and so arrogantly blind."

"Sure. We all are."

"Do me one favor?"

"Do me one. Cross the hall--poke the bell--"

"Pray."

"You pray. Wear holes in the sky. Tell God you're coming, soon. And tell Him I am, too, while you're at it. See you there!"

When he was gone, I felt washed out.

Why had I bothered to try something that couldn't come off? Didn't I know the work I'd done--the hells I'd gone through to get my Inkling--would never tempt that fat bastard past the first six steps of a million rugged miles?

Houses on sand paper roofs putty pillars no brains

What is conscience but fealty to truth?

What man can have good conscience if his beliefs conceal the smallest truth--or especially if they conceal himself from himself?

With honesty toward science--and toward the inner sciences--man and ethic are one.

Ethos is, indeed, what man has, and is.

Come off it, Wylie! The serial!

4

But I couldn't work, any longer.

I filled my tub, instead, with the coolest water in the tap.

_You_ pray.

He would, too.

A lugubrious joke uttered itself within me.

Father, bring insight to this sincerely mistaken man--

(Taking the words out of my mouth: you right--me wrong)

Or,

Spare us the ineffable harm of the intellectual, the Antichrist--

(All who oppose us oppose Jesus--but didn't He say, In my house are many mansions?)

Prince of Peace! (Peace, in a pig's eye.) A mighty fortress. Onward, Christian soldiers. The Son of God Goes Forth to War. He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword-- All the clayfaces, upturned to the ceramic excellence of the dominie Let us pray: Father, forgive them-- The hypocrites!

Perhaps some--the widow kneeling in the stained-glass effulgence--clutching her mite--debating love against appetite--a possibly hungrier widow against bread and her own belly--she might see God there--

Our organ cost thirty-six thousand dollars and has five keyboards

God,

we migrants, traveling with galaxy, sun, slogging sphere, geological budge of continent, movement of races, American transportation, feet,

we on our journey-forever in time-space are sure as hell, unmistakably, definitely--as the saying goes-- en route. Hence, I deem the status quo of ego unimaginative. Is this a sin? A sin to hunger for more Light? Or is it goodness

to reject the surrounding brilliance--call it The Dark--in order to make personal hay with the pewee flashlight of Episcopalianism.

Judge not that ye be not judged, Wylie, He said. Then shall I sit like a Buchmanite on the john waiting for guidance? And there shall be laughter in heaven They omit that chapter. Anger is their meat: Gabriel's pinfeathers, torn out by handfuls. Pluck yourself a quill, pal. Make yourself a pen from a seraphim. Remind them they should enjoy it. Nature, that's all, simply telling us to fall In love. And that's why Chinks do it-- Japs do it--

I got out of the tub, scattering water, and turned the radio loud.

Let me communicate again in the idiom of man-- my conceit has suddenly tired me out. I lay forlornly in the water, the water browned off by rust in the Astolat's pipes, the waters of life, but not much left. Sadness encompassed me. The sadness of little children dying by merely growing up

of mature men turning childish again of American trees of the disinherited the stood-up the disappointed the deserted the uncomprehended of the walking wounded I hate to see that evening sun go down The love songs of the world are sad.

The old English ballads quaintly drone--murder and rue.

Gypsy violins have wet the eyes of European centuries.

Italians shake their opera houses with love's grief.

Don Juan dies young--and Romeo grows old.

The Hindu on his fetid riverbank throbs to the guillotine moon.

The damsel in Xanadu may be different--it doesn't go on to say.

But--

Frankie shot Johnny.

We Americans have had to borrow rue from our slaves; they have enough, and to spare

We call it blues--and the origin's appropriate to us.

The child in his cradle listens to locomotives talking themselves up the long grades, bidding the counties farewell in the night.

Ours is a civilization of pistons, motors turning, electrons peppering filaments into light. We are

a racy people. We got rhythm.

The tempo of our love and the momentum of our woe are one.

Our exultation soars with edifices that scrape the sky--then falters underground where we have iron rivers to carry the people home--and there is no home when they get there but only the percussant streets again, the shooting tabernacles, the radiance, the tumult in time.

We sleep. Morning comes.

In the mammoth sunshine of our cities we remember our blues the way the slaves remember.

No heart, no intellect, but we got rhythm! Look at the towers! Look at the sky--that's blue, too, baby!

The streets are straight, the blocks are square, the intersections regular. The shadows are geometry--they dive one hundred stories. It is a gameboard, ruled and sharp by transit here and plummet there, concrete and rectilinear.

This we call traffic. It is the way we move on the board.

Trucks and taxis playing fast chess to the beat of the Christmas-colored signals. We are a great, free, democratic people whose trains run approximately on time. In this civilization, eight-o'clock children make skip-ropes of rainbows and slide down the balustrades of sunbeams. One contraction of our chamber of commerce ventricle will thrust ten thousand tons of ore from Duluth to Pittsburgh.

We rate fireflies in kilowatts.

But we hate to see the evening sun go down.

Paul Bunyan's ox was blue. So--our hills, the evening in our thoroughfares, our dying lips.

Hence, when we talk about rue in these United States, brother, we do it in brass! We put

pistons and kilowatts in our lament, grief, sorrow, lostness!

We take a breath of our American air and we-the-people burst.

That's blues!

The mood would have led to God knows what charade in the auditorium of my senses--the multitude of watching, listening "mes" reacting in all their various ways at once; it might have become a ululation you could have heard on Mars--or frozen as if the head of Medusa had come on stage--or, by that third unanimity, blazed into laughter, revolted ecstasy at ecstasy itself.

The singing woman stopped. There was a knock.

I yelled, "Come in!" relieved--thinking it might be Paul.

For more than an hour, now, worry over him had cankered me.

(Do you imagine I tell you all that happens, here? I nearly would if I could--it is not that. But the compendium of the eighteen simultaneous trains of consciousness (the intrications and alternations and separate chains that run in a man's mind and that you could see in your own if you tried) would, in a weekend fill up all the books a man might read in his life. I give you hardly the essence, my friend--but only a sample of the aggregate--a biopsy of its own sort.)

A knock, then.

I realized it was the door in the bedroom.

"May I come in?" Yvonne asked.

"Certainly."

"Your radio's positively shaking the building!"

"Turn it down. I hope you won't mind I'm in here--slightly naked."

"Oh!" I couldn't see her, or she, me. The rooms waited because she had stopped. "_Slightly!_"

"Barely, if you prefer. Barely nude. Covered in a meager depth with rusty water. Concealed in soapy murk, besides. And, in addition, protected by scum. It's hard water, you know--Croton."

Presently the radio went down and out--a moron throttled in midspiel. "I'll sit in here," she said.

"Any place you like."

"I'll bet! I'll bet if you heard me coming--you'd grab the shower curtain--"

"Flowers for tonight?"

"You certainly have a long, mean memory, Philip Wylie! So that's just what I do bet!" She was approaching. She exclaimed, "What do you mean--soapsuds?"

"An invention for the Puritan mind. A burlesque. After all--!"

"After all--what?"

"In a better world--but skip it."

She did. "You certainly know how to upset people," she said.

"Now what?"

"After lunch--I phoned Gwen--to come over this evening."

"So?"

"And after that--I began to feel jittery."

"And now?"

"I came over here."

"To ask me how to feel? Ye Gods! I recommended having your own feelings--and I thought you were catching on."

She was wearing a faintly rose-pink frock of some shiny, translucent material. You could see the garments beneath--you were supposed to see. There were two--and the lace hem of the lower one showed below the blush of her dress--as it was supposed to show. She looked like a kid.

"I've got too many feelings at once." She walked toward the window, where I could now see her only by leaning a little. "I almost called Rol this afternoon."

I said nothing.

"Did you hear me?"

"Yeah. Why didn't you?"

"Because I wanted to see Gwen again. Once more, anyway."

"Suppose she couldn't have come?"

"That's unkind of you!"

"Would a friend have done as well?"

She didn't answer for so long that I leaned out again. She was swinging the cord of the window blind. The last debilitated glow in the sky made her look like a flower at twilight--like a single tinted object in a black-and-white photograph of a room. She caught sight of me.

"Maybe even better," she said falteringly. "What sort of person am I!"

"The sort that a person is, when a person begins finding out what sort."

"But not the final discovery?" The turn and set of her head was eager. I couldn't see her eyes.

"Who is?"

"You mean--you think everybody--?"

"Yes," I said, swirling the water around. "Everybody. Most--when they're young. Most grow out of it. Some--hardly notice it. Some have a minor case of it all their lives. To others--it's an intermittent hint--a leftover that crops up as a suggestion, not a fact. Lots--are carried off stage for good by it. The great majority insist they have no such feelings--never could and never did and never will. The result of that--"

"Is what?"

"Look out the window and see the crummy mess yourself, honey! If you'll toss me my dressing gown--from the closet--"

"I'm scared," she said, when I came into the sitting room.

I kissed her once.

She said, "Again."

So I really kissed her.

She stepped away, afterwhile. "I'm not so scared now."

"It's good for you to be."

"Why is it?"

"Because you so seldom knew you were. You spent your time trying to frighten other people--instead of knowing."

"Not frighten. Impress, maybe--"

"Another word for the same dirty deed: convince them of your inherent and cultivated superiority. Whenever people achieve that--they also convince others of their relative inferiority. And when that conviction comes from a false estimate of the situation--believe me, it's upsetting. Frightening is the realer word."

"Which implies that I'm not superior to anybody in any way."

"Check."

She stood there, looking at me through the murk. "Not even--prettier?"

"What's prettiness? The power to attract. If you were a genuine, all-around, Grade-A woman--you'd have the power to attract, without trying to impress a soul. As a pretty girl--you're not superior to a hundred thousand others--and inferior to tens of thousands."

"At least," she murmured, "I'm trying."

"Are you?"

"Am I not?"

"Who can really tell but you? For all I know, Yvonne, you may just be indulging in some new paroxysm of the spoiled rich matron."

"I did want to call Rol, though."

"Sure. When you had the jitters. Flight, maybe."

"Then do you think I ought to wallow in myself?"

"It's your word--wallow."

She was silent for quite a while. Finally she drew a breath and stretched voluptuously. "Did you ever feel as if you'd like to seduce everybody you saw?"

"Just the good-looking women."

"Are you trying to impress me--now?"

I laughed. "Guess so."

"Couldn't I begin with you?"

I shook my head. "You don't know yourself well enough to suit me, at the moment. And--anyway--I'm booked."

"A date!"

"A wife."

She considered that at length, too. "Gwen said last night she knew from the minute she saw you that you wanted company, but not particularly a pretty girl. Just a person. She said she told you all those things about herself, hoping--"

"They had their little effect," I reminded Yvonne.

"Your Ricky," she answered, "must be some gal."

"She's my gal--which makes her some gal to me."

The door knocked again--the front door, this time.

It was a box of flowers--yellow roses, again.

For a minute I thought the manager had slipped up.

There wasn't any card.

Then I knew.

That, I thought, was what it meant: a perception of the nature of other people.

Flowers are for the living, and I'm fond of yellow roses.

They'd be no use to me, dead. So I had these now. To remind me that the idea of flowers for the living, though seldom put in practice, describes the immortal essence.

Except for taking Paul off my back awhile, there wasn't anything else that Dave could do or say. But this, he did and said.

I stood there, rooted with the comprehension.

Yvonne fumbled womanishly through the stems.

"Who sent them?"

"A guy I know."

She gasped. "Guy!"

"It's the grown-up manifestation."

"Manifestation of what?"

"Put them in water while I get dressed," I said. "Of something you might learn--someday."

5

We had dinner together in the Knight's Bar.

She with one white orchid.

Jay received us with just the right look of appreciation for her--just the right glimmer for me. He was sorry such things happened, but he admired my taste.

The hotel staff, I knew, was by now vigorously discussing the matter. The girls who ran the elevators, the telephone girls, the room-service checkers, the cashiers, the waiters, the bellboys. Pros and cons:

He's an artist--and they're different. She's just another of those rich wives on the make. I bet you wish you were one, yourself, you hypocrite! Poor Mrs. Wylie! She's a nice, quiet girl and I'll bet he swept her off her feet--because that's what newspapermen and writers all are: chasers. Those quiet ones knock over more husbands than all the flashy jobs in town! We all do, if we get a chance. I don't blame either of them. I think both of them are stinkers. Whose business is it?

Up with the dishes, down with the cars, in with the stapler, out with the phone plugs--and on and on while typewriters paused and adding machines stood briefly still. Romance or scandal--take your choice. And never a sign to me but Jay's gleam--never a future syllable to Ricky: a conspiracy of employed custom, reinforced by a small world of reciprocal liking.

I wondered what they'd think if they knew the truth.

But, then, I always wonder that.

I'm the silly jackass who does.

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

What book?

Not in any?

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

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

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

Farce, instead!

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

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

Paul came at last.

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

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

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

"Oh, hell, sit."

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

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

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

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

"How awful! What happened?"

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

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

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

Paul turned to her. "Are you serious?"

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

I wondered how he'd put it.

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

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

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

"Are you sure?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Terrific!"

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

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

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

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

"I say you can!"

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

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

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

Paul said, "Nuts."

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

"No. But--"

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

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

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

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

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

"You chill me," Paul said sarcastically.

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

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

"I can imagine," Yvonne said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Good heavens!" she said.

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

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

Paul grinned and said, "_Touché_--a little."

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

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

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

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

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

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

They came from hothouses.

I thought of gardens.

All the gardens I had made or cared about.

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

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

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

I, too, migrated.

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

Brief glory of flower-upholstered deserts.

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

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

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

This was some of my lives.

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

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

Men missed it, most of them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who cherished?

Who left them alone in the forest?

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

I put a call through.

"Hello, darling," said her clear voice.

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

I said, "How's Rushford?"

"More important--how are you?"

"Sprung-witted. Weary. And pursuing."

"Nearly finished?"

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

"Phil! What's wrong?"

The echo--the electrical overtone--that long way.

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

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

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

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

"It must be a hundred here."

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

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

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

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

"Do you feel all right?"

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

She gave me the country news.

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

"Miss you."

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

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

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

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

When I hung up, I was quivering.

I'd come pretty close:

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

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

I looked at the roses again.

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

6

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

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

"Your pure relation left me," she said.

"Left you how?"

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

I sent the word.

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

"Nice little spot!"

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

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

"Up to when I met you."

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

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

"Pretty metaphor."

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

"Poor premise--but I get the idea."

"And what?"

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

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

"That's too bad."

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

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

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

"Telephone's right beside you."

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

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

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

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

"That's the idea."

"Phil!"

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

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

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

"Where?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

I looked, listened, sniffed attentively.

Last chance.

And I remembered.

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

Salt of the earth. Savor of dung.

Backbone of the nation. Spineless.

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

Agreed.

Then, gentlemen,

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

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

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

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

There is no information in the electorate.

Instinct only.

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

Liberty, or death, gentlemen.

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

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

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

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

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

This is a sentiment I bear toward all humanity.

My successes in its prosecution are, sometimes, trivial.

Besides which

a man who thinks he is soon to die

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

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

I inhaled the many-doored hallway.

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

"Is my nephew Paul here?"

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

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

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

"Is she? I thought--"

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

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

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

"I thought you were going downtown?"

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

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

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

"I don't. Just surprises."

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

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

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

"We don't have many."

Gwen smiled. "On guard?"

"And proficient."

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

"Sure."

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

"The answer is no."

"That's what I thought."

"It wasn't you."

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

"What's going to happen to her?"

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

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

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

"A hundred and fifty million people--"

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

"I'd like to meet 'em."

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

"Pity."

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

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

"Came in this afternoon."

"What doing?"

"Working."

"Why?"

"Want to talk to her?"

"Yeah."

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

"Don't count on it."

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

"Some compliment."

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

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

"Hi!"

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

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

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

"You read minds," she said.

"Don't."

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

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

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

"Forsaking all others?"

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

"And now?"

"Now it doesn't matter."

"Months isn't years."

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

"Did you?"

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

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

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

"Funny."

"I see nothing funny."

"I thought--you were looking me over."

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

"Yes, I did."

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

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

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

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

"Better than I do?" She grinned sarcastically.

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

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

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

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

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

"He asked for it."

"Did he!"

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

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

"He grew up in the West."

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

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

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

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

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

"Good."

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

"What?"

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

I didn't say a word.

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

"What?"

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

What about this Greater Love stuff? I asked myself.

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

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

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

She slapped me and ran out of the room.

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

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

He was totally conscious.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When brighter, brighter, brighter glows the firmament?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Look at the night!

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

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

Manhattan!

They look. Great Heaven, they never see!

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

I soon took my leave.

7

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

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

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

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

Go rue the deserts man's already made!

Paul didn't come.

I read some poetry I could not understand in _Harper's_.

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

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

Then Psalms, awhile.

Then Luke, awhile.

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

8

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

"Good luck!" a thin voice called.

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

There was a pause.

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

My mammy done tole me--

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

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

"There she goes!"

"War's over."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Okay. Pressurize."

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

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

The course, he meant, to the enemy.

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

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

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

It was a journey he detested.

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

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

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

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

He went on.

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

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

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

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

"'Shun!" he bawled.

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

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

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

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

Sopho grinned. "Hope so."

"There's a chance of a dud--?"

"Some. Partial dud, anyhow."

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

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

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

The door shut.

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

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

Three men besides the gunners?

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

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

This, the colonel realized, was obviously impossible.

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

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

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

Last-minute stuff.

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

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

_See who he is._

The colonel went over to Smith, squatted.

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

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

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

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

"Chris."

"Chris what?"

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

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

_Came through the tunnel._

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

No bearded man.

No--Chris.

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

Should he jump the guy?

Tell Smith to dive in with him?

Go back for a pistol and shoot from the tunnel?

The man smiled pleasantly.

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

"Hi," the colonel said.

"Wonderful--a ship like this!"

"I've forgotten your last name."

"Chris."

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

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

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

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

"I see."

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

"Yeah. White House stuff?"

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

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

"I know your major, yes. Sad."

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

"Cold-blooded."

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

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

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

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

"Then what--? In God's name what--?"

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

"Promised? Promised who--when--?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Return."

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

"I hoped I might persuade you."

"Another would merely follow--!"

"And them."

"But--duty!"

"To whom is duty?"

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

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

"Chris who?"

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

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

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

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

Chris shook his head. "Thanks, Learned."

"Do you mind--"

"Of course not."

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

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

The colonel and the reporter watched.

"My name is Chris, doctor."

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

"No."

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

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

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

"Incredible," he murmured.

"You do not believe me?"

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

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

Sopho looked quickly at Learned--who glanced away.

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

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

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

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

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

"Your world--perhaps."

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

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

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

"_Save_ lives?"

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

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

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

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

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

"It will fear too much, you think?"

"Precisely."

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

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

"But not changed men!"

There ensued a moment without talk.

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

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

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

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

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

Chris said, "Have you that right?"

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

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

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

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

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

"Love one another," Chris said.

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

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

"The rights of nations--" Sopho began.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Irrational emotions! Reason has no place there!"

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

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

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

Sopho said disgustedly, "Metaphysics!"

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

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

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

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

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

"I cannot turn, then."

"Learned?"

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

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

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

"Sopho?"

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

Chris put his arm around the old man. "_You!_"

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

"And that?"

"Prove yourself!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Impossible!"

Chris looked ardently at the old man.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The City of Horror and Shame.

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

9

A scorcher.

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

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

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

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

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

Karl didn't speak.

Saving his strength for the exhaustion of the day.

Ten-fifteen.

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

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

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

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

Nothing much in the papers.

The airlift.

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

The pennant race.

(I remembered Babe Ruth.)

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

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

Well--not for long.

My weary effort would soon peter out.

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

I pondered for a while over those hairy comets.

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

I dialed Dave.

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

When will Monday come?

Never?

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

Not for Joe! No, no, no.

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

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

At noon, the phone screamed.

"Hi, boy!"

"Hey. Thanks."

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

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

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

"Any news of our Paul?" he asked.

"My agent lost the trail around midnight."

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

"Marcia's there," I said.

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

"Yeah."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"How you feeling?"

"About like Utah."

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

I got dressed and went downstairs.

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

Not Yvonne, though. A bit early.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Everything?"

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

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

He didn't believe her.

Then he thought it was--masochistic experiment.

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

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

"No doubt."

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

"And you feel like hurrying?"

She spoke reproachfully. "Wouldn't you?"

"Yes."

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

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

"I'm so--full--so--complete. So--_ready_."

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

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

"Rol would raise hell."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For a moment, her gaze faltered.

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

I thought she would, maybe.

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

"If I don't forget."

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

"Safer."

She said, "Good-bye, Phil."

I kissed her.

10

It didn't seem possible to work.

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

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

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

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

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

I looked at him and compassion melted out of me.

"Eaten?"

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

I said, "Nuts."

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

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

"How _right_ you are!"

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

"Want to quit--going on that way?"

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

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

"What do you mean?"

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

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

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

"For Christ's sake--!"

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

"That fat she-fiend--!"

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

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

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

"Go on--" he said. "Tell me, then."

"Marcia is up at Hattie's--working."

He looked at me dementedly and snatched the phone.

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

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

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

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

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

Then I told him about my séance with his lambent, incorrigible girl friend.

He did listen.

I have to say that.

He listened like a man in the hands of the Gestapo trying to see if, perhaps, keeping quiet and not moving a muscle will help the pain.

When I wound it up, my compassion was coming back:

"I'm sick of it, Paul! Dave's sweating over you when he already has plenty to keep him busy. We've chased around for you the whole damned weekend--both of us with other things to do, and troubles of our own. Why? We think a lot of you. Because you're having the rough end of the rough time, we are, too. You were shot from worrying about the state of the world. A damned good-looking babe moved in on you and made it twice as rough. And you don't understand yourself. But the time has come to shut the book, Paul. The chapter's finished. There's no epilogue. It isn't one of my stories, boy. No happy ending. You couldn't get her back if you were the chief of police. You _could_ get her back if you were Midas--and that way you wouldn't want her. She got a big throb out of you. She was as honest as she's able to be--for a time. Her mother instinct kept her going awhile. But she was soon laying the boys in the back room even though she was doing your cooking, nights. She offered me a deal--and if that doesn't cure you, son--" I racked the brain for a conclusion--"well, go on up and buy a hunk."

He didn't say anything.

I suppose he sat for five minutes.

His face was just--sweaty, like everybody's--and gray, and apparently relaxed.

When he walked over to the window, I thought I'd won, and my nerves gave an inch or two--so I could go on living a little while longer, myself.

But he leaned way down, lifted his long, slatty leg, stepped out on the terrace, and hopped up on the parapet. Sixteen stories of straight wall.

I went after the God-damned fool.

He turned around and sat there.

"Don't come any nearer," he said. His voice was like bad brakes.

So I leaned against the sill.

He saw, quicker than I, that his ankles were in range of a dive. He pulled them up, pivoted, and stretched out on the top of the wall. It was cement--about a foot wide. And baking hot. He rocked and wriggled for a minute, took off his coat, folded it, and stuffed it under himself. While doing that, he almost lost his balance. He caught a fingerhold on the inside edge of the concrete, which stuck out over the bricks a half or three-quarters of an inch.

"Paul," I said, "for God's sake, come in."

"I like it here."

"Okay."

"I want to think."

"Help yourself."

"You wouldn't understand."

I went back through the window and into my apartment. I was quivering like a broken spring and my mind wasn't tracking. I shoved into the bathroom and poured a glass of water. Equal parts of fright and fury--as intense as I'd ever felt--slopped the water. I drank what was left. Then I went back to the window.

"Listen," I said. "I can't stop you, if you want to knock yourself off. But this is my apartment. Jump from somewhere else, will you?"

"I haven't decided."

"Well, then, come on in and make up your mind. I'm high-shy. I don't like to stand on that terrace. And seeing a guy--even you--silhouetted against my skyline makes me sick at the stomach."

"It's the only thing I ever heard of that makes you sick! New experience for you. You like new experiences. Try to get a kick out of it."

"Okay," I said. "Jump, then, you yellow sissy."

He nearly did. He swung around so his legs dangled in the air--all those stories above the sidewalk. His fingers on the concrete rim turned white and his muscles vibrated.

"Paul!" I moaned at the fool.

He pulled back. "I'm not afraid," he said--as if to himself and in a surprised tone. "It's just that--I haven't quite decided."

"Please, cooky!" I put all the begging I have into it.

He shrugged. "Maybe--later."

He let go and fished in his pockets.

"Wait," I said.

I climbed out again with the cigarettes. Possibly--

"Toss 'em!"

I threw one--he reached--and it sailed out of sight, the sun catching it at the top of its arc. I tossed another. He got that one.

"Better go back inside," he said.

He lighted up and commenced to smoke.

I went in.

By then I was beginning to think a little. If I had a rope, I might get it over him. Only I didn't have a rope. And I might fail on the first try--in which case there probably would not be a second chance. If I could distract him for a bit, I still might grab him. Only, if there was any slip-up about that--he'd dive the sixteen floors. Well, then--what did you try to remind them of? How bright they were? How young? Or did you keep taunting them until they either went, or gave up? It looked as if that last wasn't right for Paul.

My phone rang.

"Mr. Wylie? This is Mr. Harrison--at the desk." He sounded upset. He's a nice guy--the assistant manager.

I said, "Yes."

His sigh seemed relieved. "Would you mind looking out your window? A woman has just come into the lobby who says there's a man in shirt sleeves sitting on the parapet."

"There is," I said. "It's my nephew, Paul Wilson."

Mr. Harrison laughed uneasily. "Pretty dangerous--"

I glanced at Paul. He was staring straight down again. "He's on the verge of jumping."

"Jumping!"

"And I can't get near enough to grab him. Whatever you do in a case like this--for God's sake start doing it quick! Only--if anybody tries to snatch him and he knows it--he'll probably go."

"Oh-my-God!"

"It's a mess. I'm sorry. And I need help. Intelligent help--quick."

"Do what I can."

I went back to the window.

"Who was that?" Paul asked. "Another whore?"

"The management," I said. "You're attracting attention."

He grinned acidly. "I know. Quite a few people already."

"Showing off?"

"Not giving a damn."

I sat down in a chair. I needed to sit down. Presently I called out to him, "If I get Marcia on the phone, will you talk to her?"

"No."

"Why?"

"Because things are past that." He looked up Madison Avenue toward nothing. "Way, way past that."

I smoked a couple of cigarettes.

Nothing happened. The sun went down a few more inches. I suppose the top of the parapet got cooler. Big, square shadows began to ride up the buildings across the street.

"Paul, come on in! Let's talk. You're in no condition to be doing what you imagine is thinking--and you know it! Anybody can put a period after his life, any time. What you need is a vacation. A decent one--with jack to spend--maybe at the seashore or up at Lake George. I'll give it to you. I'll persuade Brink you need the time off--"

He laughed--laughed like somebody masticating gravel. "All the dough in the world couldn't buy me off this perch."

"Nobody's trying to buy you. I'm trying to--"

"Oh, shut up. I want to think."

There was a light knock on my door, at that point. I opened it. A cop stood out there and a fireman behind him and Mr. Harrison behind them. The cop had a tough, smart face and he whispered. "Will he jump if we come in?"

"Search me."

"You okay?"

"More or less."

"Can you keep him talking? We're rigging a net in the apartment below there. We've got a couple of experts on the way, besides. Leave this door ajar--so they can get to your bedroom."

I nodded.

They slipped away.

Paul asked, when I came back, "Who was it?"

"The maid."

He accepted that.

"Cigarette?"

"Thanks."

I got outside and sat on my windowsill, about ten feet from him.

"I remember," I said, "the first time it happened to me."

"What happened?"

"The first time I was really in love. Her name was Ruth. She was a little gal. Light-brown hair and the kind of eyes that look up at you. Little breasts and shy, inquisitive hands. I--"

"Save it for the magazines."

"I was crazy about her. But I had to go to college and I couldn't afford to see her often. Couldn't afford to take her to the proms. A Christmas vacation came around and we threw a party at the house of a friend whose folks had gone south. We all got tight. I missed her when I was dancing--and started looking. I found her upstairs--in a bedroom--with a guy in my class. After that--"

"--you knew they were just like trolley cars."

"When I was working on the _New Yorker_--I fell again. A gal from Holyoke--"

"Horse manure to Holyoke."

"Paul. What are we supposed to think--to do--when we spend all the energy and time and dough to make a brilliant adult out of a promising kid? By 'we'--I mean at least a hundred men and women. The kid turns out to be super-good. Everybody chips in to make sure he has every possible opportunity. He is tops in his class. He gets an inside hot spot on the most important project in his nation. Every single person who ever knew him--loves him--and is button-popping proud of him. But one day he has his feelings hurt badly--and there's not one thing we can do for him. We try. But it's no dice. So he climbs out of a window and slams about a billion dollars' worth of brains and the time and energy, and hope of other people, to smithereens, on the curb. We bury what's left of him. And then we sit around asking each other what the use is. Our best wasn't good enough for him or for us. We keep asking ourselves what the hell he did expect of life--and of us--that he didn't get."

Paul at least listened--which was a clue: he'd listen to a piece about himself.

But he said coldly, "Your values are pretty sleazy, Phil. Only a day or two ago, you were telling me that we physicists had sinned. That we deserved to be punished. That all we'd done was evil. Now--because you're in a corner--physics is suddenly the most important thing in the nation. May I repeat--horse manure!"

"Sins of omission," I said. "You guys think of yourselves as honest--and you are, in one way. About science, you don't cheat or lie, ever. It's the solitary triumph of our age. And look at the results. Progress in objectivity accelerates by a factor of hundreds--thousands--in a couple of centuries. I'm for that. But that--alone--isn't enough. You birds look at your objective integrity as if it were all there is to virtue. It's not. Listen, Paulo. There are two functions of virtue: one is to find new truths; the other is to dispel old lies; the whole man practices both, equally."

"Grant that--but don't we educate people as fast as we can?"

I shook my head. "Look at you. The scientific description of your situation on this bloody shelf is known to tens of thousands. But not to you. You're the victim of old lies. You're about to toss yourself into the late afternoon because you were so busy learning new truths in physics that you never bothered to dispel the old lies in your psychology. You're a damned anachronism! A burnt offering to Woman. You're a puppet of a lot of myths and legends and poor child training. You might as well be a pagan male virgin--offered up to some fat, female goddess by your tribe. A man that isn't a man. A scientist from the neck up--and a howling heathen from the waist down. Unaware of the fact. A pretty picture!"

"I suppose," he said with the utmost bitterness, "that I would be sitting in your apartment chortling happily--if I had ideals like yours. The scientific integrity of a whore-master."

"My ideals," I said, "at least keep a mediocre author plugging to the end. Yours, apparently won't save one of the world's top mathematicians from one lousy pair of legs."

"That's all you feel about a woman!"

"That's all _you_ feel! Fate took away your candy and now you won't play. It was public candy, anyhow--and only good for all the boys. You wouldn't face that. But if you want to love women realistically, that's just what you'll have to face, among a lot of other things. Love lies a long way beyond Marcia's behavior." I tried to grin at him. "I'm supposed to be a psychologist, myself. There should be a way by which I could persuade what's left of your senses to stop playing Prometheus and get off your rock."

"Outsmart me?"

"Shouldn't I be able? If my dope's any good?"

"It isn't any good, though. Just a flashy bunch of extrapolation and phony biology. You're no real philosopher, Phil."

"Maybe not. Still--it isn't my product. It's Jung's. He's something of a brain."

"Horse manure."

"There is plenty of it down there in the street," I said. "If you want to add yourself--by a method that will make you indistinguishable from the rest of it--"

He doubled up his fist and smacked the concrete. "Can't you see I'm tormented--?"

I shook my head a few times. "Yeah. Everybody can--for blocks."

He began to sob. I inched up from the sill and braced myself. All it would take was about one tear-blinded second--

He must have heard something on the floor below because he stopped gasping, suddenly, and leaned way out. Then he began hitching along the wall. He hitched right past me--his eyes on mine the whole way--and I have never seen any eyes exactly like that, before. They knew what was going on behind them--and didn't know. They weren't maniacal--but they were not sane, either.

When he was well beyond my reach, he looked down again and then hitched some more. He passed the corner of my apartment and came to the end of the parapet. A flat brick wall, rising for fifteen feet, made a backstop for him. He was in a corner. And there weren't any windows below him--because that was how the architect had designed the building. The net idea was out. And so, I thought, was the idea of some sort of expert jump at him from an unexpected angle. Unless the roof offered possibilities. I'd never been up there.

I walked down the terrace.

"That's near enough," Paul said.

I leaned on the hot parapet and looked down. About a thousand people had gathered in Madison Avenue--though it had been almost empty an hour before. In spite of the heat wave, in spite of the desertedness of the whole city, there they were--like bugs spilled out of a tin can. Cops among them--hollering and waving traffic through.

Every insect was white on top where the neck had craned the face up toward us.

I let myself absorb the vertical drop until I was weak.

Vertigo gets to me fast. My psychiatrist said he thought it was a symbol--in my case--for striving. I spent too much effort trying to get to some summit where skill, not effort, alone could take anybody. And the struggle was reflected as a physical horror of high places. There must have been something in it, because after assimilating the idea, I was at least able to live in high rooms without feeling queasy. But there may be even more in it--since I still get sick, hanging around the edge of sixteen-story walls.

Paul also was looking down at all the people and the people constantly arriving.

"I'm going in," I said.

He hardly paid any attention.

Such clothes as I had on were soaked clear through again. I was thinking about changing when the door knocked and the cop stood there with some other men--in and out of uniforms.

"He's moved."

"I know."

"We can't get at him good, there. A net won't be possible. We've got some guys looking over the picture on the roof. But it's risky. Twice, that squad has gotten a line around somebody--and had them get loose and go. One bird threw the rope off before they could pull it tight. And a woman cut it while she was hanging over the street. Can we come in?"

I opened the door. They looked at me. "My name's Black," one said. "Captain--your precinct." He introduced the rest the way an undertaker presents pallbearers to each other. They all went over near the windows and knelt and peeked furtively at Paul.

"Should I stay out there?" I asked.

The tough, bright-looking cop gave me the once-over. "High-shy?"

"Some."

"Do you think he's likely to go?"

"Christ knows! I'm not an expert in this sort of thing."

"Still--you do know him. Mr. Harrison, here, says he works on the atom bomb."

"That's right."

Black swore. "Make dandy headlines. Police allow suicide of scientist."

The younger cop said, "What sort of kid is he? Determined? Gutty? He looks that way."

"Yeah. And a little spoiled."

The cop whistled without making any sound. "Girl?"

I nodded.

"Where's she?"

"Hattie Blaine's," I replied, after thinking it over.

He looked out the window and shook his head. "Jesus!"

I sketched in a little. The men listened.

Black said, "I could send a cruise car up for her--and get her back here--"

I shook my head. "I suspect--he'd bail out for sure, then. His life plan was based on the idea that what she had been--would be rubbed out. Forgotten. If you understand. But she went back to work."

"The higher they are the harder they fall!" Black was grimly amused at the accuracy of the cliché.

And the younger cop said, "It isn't possible to be smart all ways at once, is it?"

"What do we do?" I asked.

He looked at me some more. "Take a shower and put on dry clothes, Mr. Wylie. We'll figure for a while. These things can last hours."

I did that.

They didn't figure much.

"The best we can do," Black informed me, "is to get set up there on the roof. The angle's bad--but we have two good men. If he shows signs of definitely going, we'll take a chance and try to rope him."

They'd been out on the narrow terrace, talking to him. The young cop was fascinated. "He told us that he was working out a personal problem against a background germane to the problem and equivalent to the other stresses of his life. Something like that. What the hell does 'germane' mean?"

"Appropriate," I said. It was near enough.

"When those double-domes go nuts--they still keep talking in their double-dome lingo."

"The nut," I said, "never realizes he's nutty. He thinks you are. That's why there're so many of them."

The cop nodded. "I'd say--the majority of people, sometimes." He shrugged. "I guess when you get into the atom-bomb class of brains, you get pretty chinchy everywhere else."

I shook my head. "The fact is otherwise. The brighter they are--the less likely they are to pull one like this. Only--they still do, occasionally."

Captain Black absently tossed his smoking cigar butt into the artificial fireplace and stepped over the windowsill. We could hear him, down the terrace, talking to Paul--but not the words.

"He got a family we could send for? Anything like that?" the young cop asked.

I shook my head. "His mother died--not by what's called suicide, but by the psychological means that amounted to the same thing. He's a case of a dame-starved kid growing up with too much emphasis on dames and too little knowledge about what they're really like."

The cop gazed at me with a different speculation. "Tough for you."

"I can stand it. I like him. It makes me angry. And it's--embarrassing."

"I'll say."

Time passed.

"They ought to have a gadget!" I talked to pass more time. "Something that they could shoot at a man on such a spot. A light, large net discharged by a Very pistol--maybe--that went too fast to duck and tangled you all up."

The cop wiggled his chin affirmatively. "The number of good, practical ideas buried in Headquarters runs to thousands."

Captain Black came in. "No dice."

Then Dave Berne arrived.

His eyes were the same faithful blue, but unnaturally vivid. He patted my back and shook hands with Black, whom he knew. He stood in the room a moment, peeling off a light-weight jacket and looking at the yellow roses. Then he went over and leaned out the window.

"Hi, Paul!"

"Et tu?" Paul called back.

Dave chuckled. "You've got quite a crowd down there. Had trouble pushing through!" He pulled his head back and said to us, "What gives?"

We told him such plans as existed.

Dave listened and smelled the flowers and moved his eyes to whoever was talking. Finally we'd finished and he grinned. "Well," he said, sighing a little, "let's go and get the damned fool in."

He went and I went after him and the others stayed, peering into the fading light.

Dave whispered to me to hang back a little and I did and he moved on along the parapet till he came to a point just out of range. Paul was watching him with a wary, scornful expression. Dave leaned over the parapet and looked down--and Paul took a look, too.

"Funny," Dave said. "All those yokels. I suppose most of 'em will go along home pretty soon. Suppertime. And soon be too dark to see the fun, anyhow. But some of 'em would hang around all night--even though the street is a God-damned stove-top. Waiting. Waiting and hoping. Hoping. Imagine it! Hoping to see a human being come sixteen stories in slow somersaults. Hoping to see him hit and spatter. Hoping his feet will burst and his shoes will fly off--the way they do, sometimes. Hoping they'll be a Christ-to-be-Jesus big puddle of blood to tell the family about--and blood spattered up to the second story. And a dent in the sidewalk. What the hell is wrong with a bunch of yahoos that'll stand around for hours on account of a hope like that?"

"Very graphic," Paul said.

Dave took a long look, then, at the surrounding roofs--the vertical rows of windows, some now electrically lighted, and some flared with the last copper rays of a sun that was going down in Jersey behind the Orange Mountains where I used to make field maps when I was a Boy Scout. He took still another look at the blue-powder sky, drew one deep breath, and hopped lightly up astride the parapet.

Paul was startled.

So was I.

And so were the cops. They yelled, "Hey!"

Dave made a "cease-fire" gesture behind his back. He inched along the parapet toward Paul, a ways. "You're going inside in a bit, son," he said quietly.

"I haven't decided. And don't rush me."

"But you will. Look, Paul. You know me--pretty well. And you know a good deal about me. From Phil. So listen. I'm a no-account yid bastard who never got--and will never get--a fair shot at using the ability he thinks he has. All I can do is outsmart other corporation lawyers--and get paid big dough for it."

Paul said sneeringly, "If you want to start a self-pity contest--"

"Nope. I was thinking about something else. Pride. Real pride. Things to be proud of. One's you. You weren't born behind any eight-ball. You've got ten times the brains of Phil, here, and me put together. You're in there fighting. And you're a guy--one of the guys who run about three in a hundred--who can look at a yid like me and not see that two thousand year old, imaginary eight-ball. I appreciate that. I'm proud some people can be like that."

"Don't be childish."

"I'm not. I'm just pointing out that--potentially--you're valuable. I have no value. You--and the guys like you--can probably figure out the stuff we need to go on fighting for freedom. You can probably lick the new tyranny, and maybe even without carving holes in the country and paying out the best young blood. And then we'll have a chance to go on with the liberty scrap. That's what you can do. It means a lot to guys like me--who never had a chance to draw one free-and-equal breath in his life. Not you as a person. You as ideas. So all right. That's that. Maybe you hate your job. Maybe it's a wrong thing. Maybe all the world has left, for now, is a choice among wrong ways. Personally--if that's so--I take our choice. America's. I'm no Stephen Decatur--but that's how my feelings go."

"If you don't mind," Paul said, "I'd just as soon be spared the patriotic harangue."

"Sure. I'm through. And you're coming in, soon, now." Dave let go of the ledge, pulled back his shirt sleeve, and peered at his wrist watch. "You're coming in--or I'm bailing out. In five minutes, Paul, my son, if you don't get off--I take off."

I was listening to Dave's voice and a terrible fear possessed me. But Paul heard only the shouting of agony within himself. "Wiseguy," he said.

Dave smiled a slow, gentle smile. "Wiseguy? Maybe so. But how long this wiseguy lives--is up to you, now."

"Do you think I believe you? Do you think I'm so stupid?"

"I mean it." Dave looked up from his watch and his eyes fixed on Paul. "I'm not kidding, son."

I could see the color change in Paul's cheeks. He'd been pale. He became ghostly. He locked eyes with Dave Berne.

The slightest stir moved the hot, early-evening air.

People sat at windows and on roofs; people stood in penthouse gardens with highballs and binoculars, enjoying the sensation, making a new ritual of it. A flashbulb blazed up and died in the instant, on a setback, across and down the street, where some news cameraman with a telephoto lens was getting a shot for his tabloid.

"I have," Dave said quietly, "about two hundred seconds left."

"What a cheap thing to do!" Paul spoke harshly.

Dave smiled even more and he nodded. "It's all I have--my life. Cheap--I said so."

Paul stood up.

It was horrifying. He'd been sitting that long while. His arms were cramped. His legs must have been asleep. He tottered to his feet, rocked on the near-motionless air, careened his arms, stamped, glanced down with a round and dreadful focus of his eyes, caught his balance, and looked triumphantly at Dave.

"You're kind of forcing my hand," he said.

Dave stood up, too, then--very quickly, and without tottering. Stood up--and looked at his watch. "I mean, too, of course, Paul, that if you go--I'll also go. I'll try for you--and standing, like this--we'll go together. You see--you have no choice but to go in, or take me along. And there's only about a minute left."

I went closer. "Dave, for the love of God!" My voice was a cackle. "If this thing has to be gone through with--I'm the guy. After all, Dave--I've only got a little bit left anyhow! Get down, for Christ's sake--and let me get up--"

Dave hardly glanced at me. "Be quiet, Phil. Stay where you are." He turned again to look at Paul.

And there they stood, swaying slightly, their eyes, their wills fastened together in conflict over the simple stake of life and of death. They defied each other--against the pale-blue heat of the evening sky. A murmur came up from the street, a muddled sob, as the watchers noted the change of position, the new precariousness, and sensed the imminence of climax. The sound boiled and grew and beat the bricks all the way up from the infested thoroughfare.

"Half a minute," Dave said, above the susurration.

I couldn't move.

Paul couldn't tear away his eyes from Dave: each instant stood alone and almost still.

"Ten seconds," Dave said. And he turned around--facing nothing--to jump.

A great cry escaped Paul.

He toppled on the terrace--and passed out.

Dave about-faced and stepped down lightly.

11

It was twenty-one o'clock, which is to say, nine that evening.

Dave had eaten dinner with me and gone off to another meeting of his maestros. To look, he said, for the silver lining of the silver screen.

Not even mentioning Paul.

Not seeming to be affected....

Paul was in a hospital.

A private hospital. The cops had wanted to send him to Bellevue for observation. But Dave had persuaded them and arranged to have my nephew taken on a stretcher down the service elevator and transported by ambulance to a safe place.

I'd called Ricky and told her about it. Told her again that I'd be back in Buffalo by the following evening, in all likelihood.

And I'd called Karen, my daughter, and warned her of what she would see and read when the morning papers reached her country doorstep in Connecticut.

Nine o'clock.

The next day would be Monday.

I waited.

Dr. Adams was late. The charred cigarettes piled up.

At last, he phoned from the lobby.

Come up.

One of those psychiatrists about whom interviewers write:

... nothing of the abnormal about him; he would be mistaken anywhere for a successful businessman....

Because Dr. Adams took considerable pains to look exactly like a successful American businessman who would be mistaken anywhere.

dark, chalk-striped suit, polished brown brogues, foulard tie, fifty-one years old, seventy-one inches high, a hundred and seventy-one pounds, heavy horn-rims in his breast pocket with the Parker 51, smoothly brushed iron-gray hair, smoothly brushed iron-gray eyebrows, smoothly unbrushed iron-gray eyes, the outdoor complexion that is imperative for indoor men of distinction, and the prize already awarded for filling in the last line of the limerick:

Healthy, wealthy and wise.

You couldn't help liking him if you tried, and believe me, I tried. I tried because Adams (Hargrave H.P.) was the head of the private hospital where Dave had sent Paul and I wouldn't have one of those top-notch third-rate psychiatrists fooling with my nephew.

He said he'd always wanted to meet me and I said I'd never heard of him and he laughed because he was amused, not because he laughed when he didn't know what else to do, like an American businessman.

He sat down in one of my chairs and refused a drink and said, "Tell me all you think I ought to know about Paul."

Three hours and several hundred questions later he left.

Paul was going to be all right.

Not soon--but someday when he'd learned the masochisms, sadisms, castration complexes, repressed homosexual feelings, mistaken anima identification, archetypal possessions, and other data not shown by the meters in his laboratory.

Hargrave H.P. Adams had plenty of what it would take. I wouldn't have minded asking him some of my own questions. He had come up with a few suggestions and formulations unknown to me....

That brought the evening up past midnight.

I felt wretched.

You are apt to, when you think they're going to stand you against the stone wall the next morning.

There were, of course, Tom's pills.

I rolled them out in my hand and just looking at them gave me a fuzzy taste in my mouth so I rolled them back.

It was one to think yourself out of.

I went into the living room and climbed through the window and peered down into the glittering slot of Madison Avenue until, all of a sudden, I began to shake. I almost threw up before I could scramble back into the apartment.

I sat down and stared at the sky.

You could still see a few stars in the haze. The night was as close as a pressure cooker.

My nausea left slowly; my shakes subsided.

In states of this sort I usually try, if possible, to make a list of Things to Do.

Things to Do on Sunday Night in the Big City, after the witching hour.

One can walk the streets. Go to the Park. Read. Eat. (But not sleep.) One can take a sightseeing bus to Chinatown. The taxi dance halls are open. The all-night movies. Any of numerous friends-- or my brother-- would sit up and talk till morning. I could by simply lifting the telephone and dialing a number fill my apartment with assorted pretty girls. Or just Gwen. Why not? The image appeared the woman-lines, the dry-martini taste of a woman's libido Gwen's cuprous hair; and it was not Gwen at all but an image in myself. Who she was, I had no idea. But I knew I'd had enough of the Gwens in this world to last until my next reincarnation or, possibly, the second coming of Christ in Anno Double-Domini. (Tomorrow, I thought, begins another reincarnation) It was enough of a list.

I had now collected sufficient Things to Do so as to go on sitting in my chair, which was all I desired to do: I had somewhat collected myself.

The sky belched light.

I leaned forward, looked, and half of the hazy stars were erased, gone, done for, hidden behind an invisible tumble of nimbus.

My nerves let themselves down another degree.

I went around the room, emptying an ashtray the night maid had overlooked, fixing myself a glass of hot, powdered coffee.

And back to my chair.

Now, across the parapet, across the well-learned silhouette of buildings opposite, the undersides of clouds were heated up. Their contours showed in brief, stammering flashes of lavender, as if they were gigantic lamps which some celestial electrician was trying to connect with a frayed cord.

At my side, the exhausted curtain came to momentary life--then perished again in the swelter of the room.

Gwen was an image. Whoever she was, I saw what I saw, looking from within to what lay within. Another item for Forbisher-Laroche: Why visit the fille de joie? Because she is more I than She.

Yvonne, then?

I gave the matter my consideration--and half an eye to the approaching weather.

"Blow, blow, thou bitter wind Thou art not so unkind In this man's latitude." Hark ye, Sir Bughouse: You don't know anything.

All you know about Yvonne is what you read in the newspaper advertisements.

She is a collection of costly, streamlined surfaces.

An accumulation from high-class department store counters.

And a statistic from a book that has not yet been published owing, doubtless, to pressures from the Neo-Christian-Centrist-Totalitarian Renaissance.

Did you think she was a woman?

She was a dream.

An arrangement of electrons, a mess of mesons, in your cranium, Sir Spatterwit.

There must be blah-diddie-blah-blah (statistics, pal) happy homosexual hours for housewives and houris

ergo we, Wylie, have witnessed Onesuch. What a premise! What a casual conclusion. O Lydian ease! O languorous Lesbos! (O legislators! You left out the ladies!

And our legally innocent Yvonne has homed to Pasadena's passes, also

Healthy, wealthy and wise.)

Must it not be assumed that blah people are happy and blah people are given to such excursions, wherefore blah per centum of the excursionists are happy?

Certainly. But Yvonne? What is she?

Sir Psychologist, Lord Hack, Keeper of the Happy Ending, can you not also hypothesize a hundred different valid denouements?

Certainly.

When the poor, unknown child returns, what Weltschmerz may not seize hold upon her? What nostalgia? What fantasy or recollections? What esoteric envies? What odd curiosities? What cooling after the confidences? What illogical new distastes? What unexpected spousely piques? What dither? What clandestine or common experiment with all what unsweet ensuite?

Never congratulate the Fates, emir;

it makes them self-conscious ... undependable.

A point to remember should you ever set down a hundred hours of pseudo-autobiography:

_Lessons in Light Lycanthropy_: seven essays by Philip Gordon Prismaggot.

Now came thunder, like sounds in the intestines of distant elephant herds; now, my curtain rose as eerily as a medium's table and flopped back to lank alignment with the wall.

I saw the point:

In the quest for the woman-in-skirts, some of us fail to notice that the woman-within may be partly and helplessly a perverse wench, attesting by default to all the oversights of her masculine lord: us.

It was a remarkable discovery and explained occasional tendencies of numbers of my gentlemen companions.

Given another five years, caliph, and you could resolve this situation--this exotic act of the inner She who rules whatever crannies her master shuns in conscious male conceit.

If you happen to be the kind of person who, out of mere idleness, or from scientific motive, or in our poor common cause, is willing to trephine his own soul for a better look, you will find such dances going on there, such images and integers of the complicated flesh.

If you announce the results, however, you are liable to go to Hecate. Hecate County, I mean.

Unless you do so, that is, in plain wrapper and with a Ph.D. Cf.:

"The inner natures of all men and women partake of the natures of the opposite sex--a psychological phenomenon in some forms openly expressed by modern society (O moms, O Mummers!), but in other forms suppressed with the full force of public opinion. What public opinion suppresses, the individual endeavors to conceal both from himself and from society. Nevertheless, were the individual _not_ equipped with the psychological elements of the opposite sex, comprehension and sympathy between the two would be impossible. And this 'feminine' quality of a man--for example--may even project on real women, in inverted form, those universal, adolescent feelings toward his own sex which the conscious adult man repudiates. Hence, as Cadwallader, Pratt and Razzle say, in their lucid monograph--"

But if you express the results in terms of palpable feelings and acts--rather than in this lack-life lingo of pedagogy--the very gents and gals who share the same sensations will rise as one (owing to the general habit of suppression) and breathe down your neck with a blowtorch.

When you see them coming you will know what troubles them that they do not know.

It is, always, their responses to your perceptions.

Themselves--not you.

Yvonne, to put it in the terse form, like Gwen,

was also in a sense a shimmering fragment of a dislocated inner me.

If you are distressed by her,

the time has come to bore a hole in the thick skull of your own soul and see the remarkable tittup going on there.

Lightning struck a graph on the sky.

I sat learning about myself.

If, indeed, the Final Report was due, I might as well review my material. At God's Great Judgment Seat, witnesses who did not bother to notice what was really happening inside themselves--and, of course, prejudiced or dishonest witnesses--will undoubtedly go to the Hotter Hecate.

I thought about Paul for a while and decided it was time for Paul to think about himself.

I thought of Socker Melton and perceived there was no reason, any more, for a single soul to go to any church, save instinct--

which the churches denied thrice whenever they opened their sanctimonious mouths three times.

I thought lovingly of my country

and lovingly of the whole world.

I sent greetings to the Chinese and the Hindus and the Africans.

I wished that I might live to see if the bombs fell

and what the people did afterward.

Then I appreciated that, following any resolution of such affairs--

of bombs or none, airborne plagues or none--

I would wish in this same fashion to live to see

what they did

when a billion starved

when four or five billions, produced in the uncontrolled birthorgies of the devout and the innocent, over-horded this little globe

what they did when the metals ran thin--in a century or so

when idiotic breeding decayed the human line to a rabble incapable of sustaining liberty or order or technology

when the last water under the earth dried up

when the sea thickened

when the moon approached.

Indeed, there is no limit to wishing one might assist at meeting challenges old Toynbee may never have thought of--

inevitabilities that only man can avoid and that, as yet, he does not even consider as Necessary Works. They are denied by _Time_ magazine.

Aortas of lightning and branched arteries of electric fire now diagrammed the clouds. Across the roofs, thunder ricocheted; it rolled like tumbrils in the avenues.

A steady press of air flapped the curtains and I moved my chair a little to escape their nervous abrasion.

This fetid wind depressed me.

My thoughts settled in a muddy ooze and lived beneath the riffled surface enviously, for that it seemed alive.

And in this separation I saw more views.

The intellectual, I deplore--scholar, economist, sociologist, big literary man. The sorry lot have spent half the twentieth century admiring the engines of their minds and not bothering to feed knowledge into them or raw materials; now, with the gauges falling, they have nothing to say excepting only to repeat their proud, intellectual admission of obsolescence.

The critic, I deplore; he sits upon his flagpole with his radio, his sandwiches and his displayed latrine, handing down opinions of what is happening under the earth, from which he sees an occasional man emerge whom he invariably deduces to be a Troglodyte or a Morlock.

The philosopher of modern times is my favorite joke; he stands at the head of the Faculty--without faculties of his own; he sums up the wisdom of the mind without appreciating he no longer understands what his own mind is. Were he even as honest as the psychiatrist he disdains, he would get his psyche analyzed before he undertook to forward the discussion of awareness. But what philosopher ever consented to an effort at learning something of himself before pontificating upon the All of everybody else? That still, small science of psychology, which he elbows behind his panoply of classic names, has turned him into a quack--an astrologer among astronomers and the barker for a medicine show at a convention of true physicians.

The preacher--dressed in the anonymous odds and ends of all the instincts of the animal kingdom and holding this shoddy surplice to be a white and spotless raiment--the one, true robe for Ascension--is my jester, for being mad and comical and also for speaking so much wisdom and for his good heart, when he has one.

This is what I believe about them--

and they are what I am:

Intellectual, critic, philosopher, and preacher.

Hoist by my own plutonium petard.

For all my data have, still, an inadequate access to my heart. It laughs and weeps too often without consulting the encyclopedia in my head or the new Book of Rules I have commenced there.

I saw Excalibur and could not wrench it from the sea,

Touched the Grail--and could not swallow,

Wandered the far mountains, came upon a new Decalogue, and could not lift the tablets to bring them down.

Prophet, maybe. Pilgrim, perhaps. But only in the intellectual, critical, philosophical, evangelical senses.... Happy? The ego was often happy--his big ego. At Peace?

He had tranquillity where other men did not and joy where they were only confused; but, in their simple pleasures, it was he who felt confusion, he who too frequently was but a spectator, he who failed with his blood to pursue the truth his brain so lucidly, so uselessly delineated.

Human nature, he decreed, need not be dishonest or dishonorable; let us throw off this old-church myth, this pew-filler, that men are by their very substance evil and undependable. Having said his say he daily marched into the humanities and acted with a good deal less than integrity complete. Like a very ass.

Still he believed it. The truth shall make ye free. Still he cried out that men are born for freedom. And he died, a prophet without particular honor in the home town of himself. He shouted: Forever learn the new Down with everything as is Seek God beyond his Holy Names Behold yourself (Intellectual, critic, philosopher, preacher) The while, he beheld but morsels of himself, and--like other men--admired them as if they were the fabric of reality and not the gingerly scissored swatches of one awareness. Well, go away now, Wylie. It is the time, as you so intellectually predicted, for an improved you or a better somebody to take over the problem. Good night, sweet hypocrite. Dauntless disappointment. Oaf. Of course, I argued with myself against self-condemnation. I am a contemporary man, I insisted.

Too conditioned by father and mother, school, church, America, the common law, and this and that, and you, and you, to expect in a single lifetime (not too long, either) that I could, by whatever authenticity of effort, penetrate thousands, thousands, thousands of years of the unpenetrated stuff in my superego and discover the true whole of me beyond: the conveniently overlooked, the misrepresented, the tabooed, the forgotten, the unfrocked, the submerged structure of humanity itself.

And I argued: Even if I did this, it would be nothing. What I said was reason, they would say was sacrilege. What I said was love, they would call obscene. What I said was truth, they would call nonsense. My hope would bring them but despair. My laughter would wring their panicky tears. My God would also be their Devil. And some of my ideals would seem un-American. They would call my route to understanding a blind labyrinth. Their scientists would find me emotional. Their priests--cold, analytical, and heartless.

Every instinct of my society would belabor me whenever I pointed out its valid opposite. And when I said, These are but local, temporal contradictions--seen together, they can be transcended, understood, contained by a man who rises above them to look down upon them, or by a man who shoulders them, why!!! All who live by the exploitation of one side of any paradox, all the mighty engineers and all the honored men of God, would jump at me.

And they would finally corner me somewhere, breaking my own rules.

The storm was upon the city, now. The oncoming cold front had won the battle of the isobars. Lightning hissed and hit some nearby edifice, accompanied by a blast of thunder. The hammer of Thor, the flashbulbs of Zeus flooded the metropolis with pale, stroboscopic light. Buildings quivered under the cannonade. Inside them the millions cowered and crossed themselves or stood admiring at their windows, each, according to his nature, responding to the grandeur of liberation.

The first drops splashed upon my parapet. My curtain stretched like a flag. Papers blew. I shut the window and ran about in the pleasant excitement of the arriving storm, making fast my small interior. The world beyond churned in ecstasies of rain, din, and colored light that showed no more than light's existence. My lamps glowed for a moment a sinister red, and came up again.

I sat there after finishing my little errands, preoccupied with the loud allegory in the street.

The psyche has its climate.

Every burning drought serves by its precise degree to lift the waters of the earth for rains--and floods, too. Every deluge brings fertile substance to the spirit's plains and exposes the rich minerals on its crags. In the cold, the plants rest; in summer, they make ready the ice-resistant seeds. The trick is not--as men believe--to become but a willful rain-maker--endeavoring by rites, fasts, dances, or sleets of solid carbon dioxide to alter the immutable for some hour's advantage. This is failure; whatever such methods steal here must be repaid elsewhere. The great accomplishment of man is to understand the relationships of climate, appreciate them all, adapt his soul to every temporal vicissitude--in the knowledge that whoever is free from pride in this one good or prejudice against that special evil cannot be engulfed, or eroded, or burned alive, or frozen into the sparse tundra of intellect, of asceticism.

He--and he alone--conveys the mutations of consciousness who tends his green valley undismayed by knowing it is the valley of winter shadow. And could he own all the reasoning power of man--could his soul present within him all that women know but cannot say--he would be as God.

After a time the storm somewhat diminished. The city hissed like the embers of a great fire that resists hose and bucket.

Now, I was invaded by that projection of self-pity which Catholics think is love and Protestants believe is duty. I saw Ricky and Karen and my family, all my fond, patient friends--in sorrow. Great tears glistened inside me and their tiny counterparts ran on my cheeks.

No, I cried. Spare me not for myself--I am reconciled; but for them.

I investigated such intricate delicacies in Ricky as I have not attempted to describe here and I saw how sorrow would run through them all; I watched the infinite loyalty of a daughter turned by the slab of a tomb; I saw my family lifting up the load of their one more bereavement and my friends kicking stones, not selfishly, but for the world they hoped I might someday somehow bring my jot of meaning to.

I paced the muggy flat and cursed.

And more.

I shall not tell you for you already know the sentiments whereby love, and duty, too, are transferred. Only at long, long last I realized how much I, who own nothing but my inner self, had imagined I owned them.

It was an injury I'd done them.

And so one more illusion set aside its mask, at least for that while, that now.

How many there were!

How often I saw them on other countenances; how rarely I lifted them from my own.

Finally, I fell asleep.

An old, old man--sitting in a chair.