3

      Well, did you ever watch the way the future comes out of its jug?
The jug is of smokey glass or rock crystal. Shapes and forms and movements
can be seen in there, and some of the details of it call be guessed. But it
is all distorted and deformed. It is the curvature of the smokey glass that
deforms the images. No future is ever seen undeformed.
      But the globs of the future trying to get out will push each other
back, and there will be clotting at the mouth of the jug. Only thin juice
will roll out for a while. Then it will break loose and big hunk will come
out. But they are never quite as you imagined them to be when you peered
through the smokey glass.
      Can one cheat to catch an earlier look at what is coming out? One
can try. There is a thin leading edge between the devouring present and the
waiting future. What happens if one is too eager and crosses this leading
edge? The world ends, for that person, for that while.
      If this thin line is crossed, then one is out in the narrow interval
of unreality. It's a chancey though flexible place there.
      Melchisedech Duffey and his history had come up to the absolute
present time, and then had gone a thumb's width beyond that, Duffey and his
nimbus had gone into the future then? No, they had gone into the shattering
state of contingency. It was a fracturing of reality. And it was a
fracturing of Melchisedech Duffey.
      There has always been a quantity of unreality leaking out of the
future into the present. Then the unreality has to be negated, and the
reality revived. The reconstructing of reality is what is being talked about
when we talk about reconstructing the world.
      Duffey had been into the future before, spottily, off and on, for
seven years once. And he had returned several times to those same seven
years. And yet it was not strictly speaking into the future. It was a
mixture of future and past and present. It was an interval or series of
intervals removed out of time and held apart. The intervals of Seven Years
did not necessarily count in regular time, which is why they could sometimes
be revisited. They did not fracture reality. They stood on the far side of
reality.
      Melchisedech had been on the fourteenth voyage of the Ship Argo, and
this fourteenth voyage was technically in the future. And his own ashes had
been brought back to him from that future land. Anything brought back from
the future has unreality as a major component. Anyone who ever looked at or
handled Duffey's ashes with seeing eyes and sensing fingers knows something
about their index of unreality. Teresa the Showboat knew about their
unreality, but she believed that she was blowing them into real fire.
      In a misbehaven case like this, when a complex over-runs itself, it
is shattered into a number of apocalypses or possible manifesting futures. A
number seven is often mentioned of these futures. Really, there is no limit
to the number of contingencies: but seven of them, like eager olives of
different sizes, seemed to be disputing the mouth of the jug. And the seven
most jostling ones were these:
      "One". This is called, from a remnaiit of it that has been found
'The Great Day Contingency'. It is characterized by a bewildering
unstructuring or unstructuring of all things. It is further characterized by
the obliterating of boundaries, which results in the obliteration of persons
also. The irony is that Duffey was the one who had first thought of this,
and that as a joke. It would take a lot of misplaced faith on the part of a
faithless world to bring it off, but misplaced faith is the easiest sort to
come by. If on go imagining a trap like that one, you had better imagine
yourself Ieaping out of its jaws pretty nimbly. Duffey hidn't done this, and
he had been caught.
      (This sounds a little bit fimiliar. Yes, the pretty girls who were
putting on the play, and one of them was a prophesing pythoness who hit some
of this imagery pretty close.)
      'This is the clock that stopped at twelf.
      This is the snake that swallowed itself.'
That was the theme of the Great Day Contingency. Wouldn't it be an absurd
ending? Or even an absurd future segment? But one does not say 'Absurd' to a
thing that swallows one up.
      "Two." This is the Goat Contingence. (Whence do I have this partial
understanding of the alternatives,' Duffey asked himself, 'my understanding
of these alternatives offered to me and to the world? Oh, I simply have them
in my prophetic function. Even the little verse-writing prophetess at the
academy had pieces of this understanding.) This contingency was that of the
Promontory Goats or the Scapegoats as passionate motivators of the world and
as receivers of the world and as receivers of the world's bankruptcy. This
contingency involved one of the Prodigious Persons or Splendid Animations,
Casey Szymanski, as cosmos scapegoat and bad-trader of worlds. Nobody could
ever make a bad trade like Cascv. Compassionate goats keep picking up the
tab for the deficiting world. Casey had tried to trade souls with the Devil
to spare that person punishment. Whether that trade was ever consummates, or
whether it was still in the process of being consummated, is not know. Casey
did trade souls (or perhaps it was just one of his old souls that he had
lying around, as Absalom said) with Absalom Stein. Casey and his sort will
trade off everything till there is nothing left to trade. And, when the
debts of all the world fall due and must be collected, they must be
collected from them the scapegoats. They will pay forever in a lower and
more painful hell than the one commonly known, the fearful hell that is
under the name-board "The End of Compassion'. This is a very doubtful
contingency, but it does answer the question 'Who is going to pay for it
all?' Like all the contingencies, it involved the entire world.
      "Three". This is the eschatological resolution presented in the form
of the Petrine Spy Story. In plainer words -- no, there are no plainer words
to lend it. This is about a very special selection and fingering of a man
for a great station. Spy stories are in, especially those on whose outcome
the fate of the world hinges. Count Finnegan is the main person in this
alternate. Finnega's death on the Marianao Coast of Cuba near Havana was a
trick (Oh, certainly he died there), a cover drama to spring him loose for a
great masquerade. His appearance, whether in effigy or in body, was exactly
the same as that of Peter the Second, banana nose and all. When forces move
to kill peter, there will be some very intricate movement and
counter-movement. Dotty Yekouris (dead-undead on the Marianao Coast also)
has an incredible role in this. God knows what!
      Someone will be dead on the Petrine throne, and yet someone will
still reign over that diminished and tottering and holy kingdom. The only
thing preventing this chase-farce-tragic-drama from moving out of
contingency and into certainty is that Finnegan cannot be found, dead or
alive, to play his role. Or he is already playing that role, And this
version of the world is already happening. Once more, the whole world is
involved in this alternative. But it's a pretty chancey thing to try to save
the world on such a shoestringy thing as this is.
      "Four". This is the Fourteenth Voyage of the Ship Argo, and the
Reduction of Melchisedech Duffey. It must happen (this is the only one of
the contingencies that is sure to happen) but it will not preclide other
alternatives from happening. This is in the preter-natural circumstances of
the Seven Lost Years (they are called the Seven Golden Years in their own
context). This is concerned with ongoing beatitudes, and the strong promise
of Final Beatitude. It is concerned with Shipboard Romance in a wider sense
than it is usually understood. It is the 'Quest Accomplished' motif (and
what will you do for an encore now?) The fleece has been found, and the big
moment of that finding abides forever.
      All of the Splendid Animations have sailed on The Argo, are sailing
on it now even though they believe that they are doing other things in the
flatland that is taken for the ordinary world, and they will still sail on
it on the high seas after every shore has stink.
      The splintering contingencies are not, in all cases, exclusive
things.
      The last death of Melchisedech Duffey has to occur on this
Fourteenth Voyage of The Argo, or his ashes could not be brought back from
it.
      We will return to this case again with more massive information.
      "Five". This is called the Thunder Colt Complex, or the Decatur
Street Opera House Presentation of the World. Duffey had once been
frightened to learn that the Decatur Street Opera House had moved into the
realm of the possible to the extent of advertising in the Bark. The
Presentation is an Ending and a Beginning, except that it is some other
species and not ourselves that begins when we end. Were we members of this
gloriotis new species, we would applaud. Being of the old and unregenerate
species, it will stick in our throats.
      To this case also we will return with much more massive information.

      "Six". This is the confrontation of Melchisedech with the Loosed
Devil in a closed place. There are instructions given before the
confrontation. 'You stand for Mankind in this meeting,' someone tells
Melchisedech as he goes to the doom place. 'I will just be damned if I stand
for Mankind, here or anywhere," Melchisedech swore. He never knew whether
these unbodeed voices were those of friend or enemy.
      This was a duel that shook the whole spider web in which the suns
are caught, the web that is called the cosmos. Or else it was not that at
all. It was a fancy that Melchisedech might or might not accept in its
possibilities.
      A covenant is offered there, but there are holes in that covenant.
But what if Melchisedech accepts the covenant, and then lies and tells
Mankind that he did not do it?
      "Seven". This is a wordless repartee between Melchisedech Duffey and
the invisable God in a garden in the afternoon. Everythuing is promised, and
a solution to all problems. The only thing that could go wrong is so minor a
thing that it would have to be sought out in stubborness and confusion. And
even if found and effected, the thing that could go wrong would not mean
final disaster; not to everyone, maybe only to the one at whose hand it
should go wrong would it mean disaster. But that person was Melchisedech
Duffey. At the very least it would mean a reversion to a beginning for that
misbehaving person. This seventh contingency would nullify some, but maybe
not all of the others.

      It wasn't clear whether Melchisedech had any power to choose between
these cases. Anyhow, there wasn't any hurry about making the choices.
Outside of Time, there can be anxiousness, and anxiety, and even hysteria,
but there cannot be hurry for that is tied to time. Melchisedech, hardly
noticing it, had moved out of time and into moment. He had done this when he
had come onto the sign that the girls had printed to advertise their play.
And who else of the Duffey circle was it who was living in moment?
      Yes, Duffey still got a weekly letter from his brother Bascom Bagby.
He didn't, in his fractured state, receive clear communciations from anyone
else. But the Bagby correspondence was longstanding; it was outside of time;
it was allowed.
      "My dear brother," Bagby wrote. "Do not be alarmed over your present
situation. You were in a somewhat similar situation during your 'Seven Lost
Years'. You aren't dead. The people around you do not even notice your
acting much different from your usual. You are skitting. You are in an
adolescence. For some reason, you skipped adolescence in all your previous
courses, going from long childhood to early manhood. Yes, there are often
awkward and spooky accompaniments to an adolescence. There is psychic
dislocation, and there is the familiarity of neutral creatures ('neutral
spirit' we call them here; that's a sort of purgatorial joke). As a
prodigious and special person, you atrract them massively.
      "Seven maids willing to marry you? The most I ever had at one time
was five, but I was a slob. It shows that you are in a greening cycle, old
patriarch.
      "You are a fetish mark, like a crack in the sidewalk or a post by
the road. This is a fetish that the fates and principalities step on or do
not step on, touch or do not touch; since they set great store in this, and
perhaps they determine a course by whether they have touched you or not.
There is nothing lowly about being such a fetish. Even the grand ones cannot
ignore you."
      There was more. There was always more to Bagby's letters. And Dyffey
would have been lost without them.

      Melchisedech met the Loosed Devil in a closed place. This, then, was
at least the ante-room of the Sixth Contingency of the World that
Melchisedech had entered. Would it prevent him from entering some of the
other contingencies. No it wouldn't, not unless Melchisedech Duffey entered
into covenant with this person.
      "There are certain things that my client is always in need of," the
Devil said. "He must always have a Magus or so on hand. At the moment he is
very low on them. The last several of them were vaporized, soul and body.
There was overreaction somewhere. I have heard that you are not the nervous
type, and that you are a top Magus."
      "I didn't know that we were rated, Clootie," Melchisedech said.
"Yes, I am Magus. I do magic. Having known several who worked for you, I can
say that I am better at the trade than they are. But no two of us plow the
same field, and no one can say who is top."
      "Come work for my client, and you can wear diamonds," the Devil said
in the corniest of the very old lines.
      "I already wear diamonds," Melchisedech said, "Finnegan diamonds.
Finnegan, wherever he is, is still in the diamond distributing business with
the Haussa boy named Joseph. All Finnegan's friends wear diamonds? Do all of
yours?"
      "This Finnegan has reaped where he has not sown," the Devil said.
"He is in deep debt to my client, and he will not come out of that house
till all is paid. My client needs a Magus for certain creative work. It
isn't that my client cannot himself create, but --" "It is that you yourself
cannot create, Clootie," Melchisedech said. "You can poison the springs and
roil the land, but you cannot create."
      "The creative fecundity is always at hand," this Devil said. "It
didn't originate with my client, and it didn't originate with any magus. But
sometimes, to awaken a thing to a desired shape or inclination, we must
bring to bear an influence or a secondary intervention."
      "Nah, Clootie, nah, that's not the way I do it," Melchisedech said.
"A cheap-stiot magus may work by secondary intervention, but I do not. I
actually create."
      The Devil's eyes brightened when he heard this, and he rubbed his
hands together. "That is what we want," he said. "We've always been hampered
in the field of primary creation. Now you will work for me with your full
magus powers. I said that you will work for me. I tell you: I do not ask
you. You have no idea what mortgage I hold on you. I'm a canny fellow in all
this, and I hold iron-studded mortgages on you, soul and body. And I'll not
remit anything to you for coming over to me. I have it on your own word that
you are a primary creator, so you will create for me. I compel you to --"
      "Nah, Clootie, nah," said Melchisedech. "You'll not compel me."
Melchisedech had scored a few shots. As to the question whether this was a
minor devil of the Devil himself His Majesty, the fellow was using a tactic
of speaking of his 'client' as if he himself were a mere agent or underling
working for another. But then he would (Duffey could see it coming, what
ham!) reveal that he himself was the client, the high Majesty. He would do
this by a great pyrotechnic display that would be overpowering even if not
convincing. But Duffey, by calling the fellow 'Clootie" (one might call a
minor devil that, but not Himself His Majesty) had kept him a little off
balance.
      It wasn't settled. It's still going on. These out-of-time
confrontations still continue while other things are going on also.
      "But the devil or Devil is way ahead on points," Melchisedech
deplored it in his own place while he was being outhandled by the devil on
the devil's home field. "Why am I responsible? Oh, I suppose that I'm
'charge of quarters' for the world this city, and the highest ranking
non-com about. It might be that we could reverse the trend oil the devils,
if only --
      "-- if only I could shape up another dozen of -- and, with both the
world and myself in a fractured state, it might be possible -- well, since I
have over-run the cutting edge and stand out of context, maybe I could ---
the old bunch does all it can -- but there should be more for me to do than
to wait for plaudits.
      "If I could locate a fecund working area, and not be distracted by
either threats or pleasures, I might be able to make --"

      "To what extent are a potters' dozen of us the Marvelous Animations
of Melchisedech Duffey?
      "To no extent at all. It is more likely that Dtiffey is an animation
of ours. His undistinguished clay hulk was first known to Caisey Szymanski
and Hugo Stone (who was possibly myself) in Chicago, and to Mary Catherine
Carruthers and to Margaret Stone in Chicago also. And before that, the clay
hulk was known to those magicians Sebastian Hilton and Lily Koch. We all
worked on Duffey, to see whether we could not shape him into something
worthwhile. It was a sort of a game. So also did Giulio Solli, the Monster
Forgotten, the Father of Finnegan, work on the Duffey. So did Finnegan
himself, and Henri and Vincent, when they joined our acquaintance during the
war. So did Mary Virginia Schaeffer and Dotty Yekouris and Showboat
Piccojie, though some of them had not yet seen Melchisedech Duffey. We made
him what he is today, a moth-eaten magus who believes that he made us, and
whom we love, for all his unlovely qualities.
      "Such is my belief today, that he proceeds from us and not we from
him. But there are other days when I believe irrationally that this
Melchisedech was our maker, that he evoked our clay and awoke us to live, or
to new life."
      [Absalom Stein. Notes in a Motley Notebook.]

      "Where are you going, dear?" Mary Virginia Schaeffer asked Duffey in
a worried voice one day. "You are so nutty lately that I wonder if you
should be wandering around without a keeper."
      "I'm just going for one of my afternoon walks," Melchisedech said.
      "Bit for you, they are doomsday wilks, Duffey," she said. "From one
of them you won't come back."
      "In that case, have a double care of things, Mary Virginia. Brood
the world like the wonderful hen you are."
      "That man really is a magus," Mary Virginia said wonderingly when he
had left, as if she had just realized it for the first time.

      "The Duff, he is a magus strange.
      Hi! Ho!
      The Duff he is a magus strange,
      A holy magus with the mange!
      Hi! Ho! The gollie wol!" That was Margaret Stone who sang that. They
should not teach the Gadarene Swine Song to irresponsible persons.
      It was not on thit afternoon walk though that Duffey walked over the
edge. It was in a walk the next morning that Duffey stepped into a pothole
and nearly fell, and then found himself in a somewhat changed world.
      Book Seven

       "You, Melchisedech the brambled,
      Deeply weathered, widely rambled,
      Find the World Completely scrambled."
      [Margaret Stone- Tablets of Stone.)

      1

      "In our own Philosophical language we may put the question thus: How
did the real become phenomenal, and how can the phenomenal become real
again... Or, to put it in more familiar language, how was this world
created, and how can it be uncreated again?!
      [P.D. Ouspensky. Tertium Organus.]

      So Clio scribes in manner blurred,
      To sound of crackish gong:
      She writes it down in every word,
      And every word is wrong."
      [Finnegan. Road Songs.]

      What was different about the City all of the sudden?
      The city had been, for some time now, different from any other place
in the world. It was different for its hanging onto a certain stubborn and
malodoruous remnant. And the most stubborn and most malodorous part of that
remnant was Zabotski.
      Zabotski had once been a chemist, a smelly man in a smelly trade. He
had retired from being a regular chemist now, and he had retired from a
dozen trades, but he remained a smelly man. And there was something peculiar
about this. He wasn't smelly to the nose. He was smelly to the eye.

      Zabotski was probably rich. He owned a lot of property around town.
He wasn't an unreasonable landlord. He carried more people that did those
who bad-mouthed him. But he had an abrasive tongue, and he could outshout
even Melchisedch Duffey in a shouting match. And he was in no way elegant.
Likely the only one who loved him, beyond the Christian requirement, was the
Widow Waldo. Or was she Wife Waldo by now?
      On this particular morning he was mumbling to himself, but when
Zabotski mumbled he could be heard for half a block:
      "There's a peculiar little episode hanging over our town. It's like
a misshapen cloud, and it's been raining improper stuff on us for the last
several hours of the night. It's hovering like a big buzzard, like a
fancy-Dan buzzard with three peacock tail feathers tied on it. I think this
dirty-bird episode will be a puzzler, and I may add to the puzzle. I'm going
to claim that have a main hand in it, just out of orneriness."
      Zabotski sometimes waited around and offered his arm and his
protection to Margaret Stone when she had finished her nightly giving of
testimony in the Quarter. He liked to walk her back to the Pelican Press
Building with a flourish.
      Protection for Margaret Stone! Aw, come down from that perch! It was
rather the town and the world that needed protection from Margaret.
      "He's about the last of them," the people would sometimes say about
Zabotski, and they'd shake their heads. The last of what? Ah, to answer that
we must go on a spree of destruction that changed the face of the town and
the country and disturbed some of the underpinning of the world itself.
      So, this morning, Margaret Stone came in from her night in the
Quarter wearing a gaudy button that read: 'Roya] Pop History. Come and Make
History With Us. Are You Splendid Enough?'
      "Wherever did you get that, you splendid person, you?" Mary Virginia
Schaeffer asked her.
      "I made it," Margaret said. "A man was wearing the big button part
of it for his convention name button. I took his name out and put the
message in. A bunch called 'The Society for Creative History', or else the
'Royal Pop Historians' is going to hold a meeting in town. It starts today.
They say that their job is to get rid of a lot of unhistorical remnants in
this town, just as they have gotten rid of them in the rest of the world. I
better go to their thing. They may try to get rid of something that I want
to keep. I suspect that they'll need me."
      "I used to create quite a bit of history myself," Mary Virginia
bragged, "but I don't do nealy as much of it nowadays."
      "I don't think that's quite what the 'Society for Creative History'
means," Margaret rattled in her dubious voice, "but maybe it is. They have
topics listed like 'Get rid of that Stuff', 'History made while you wait',
'It doesn't matter -- they're only human', 'Louts, Liars, and the Uses of
Historical Evidence', 'The Holy Barnacle and the Pearl Beyond Price',
'Wax-Work History and the Ironic Flame', 'The Evidential World',
'Mountain-Building for Fun and Profit', 'History, Hypnotis and Group
Amnesia', 'Whoever Were Those People Who Lived Next Door to You Yesterday?',
'We said to Get Rid of that Stuff!', others that I forget. They're
interesting topics. Oh, by the way, the Black Sea has disappeared and
millions of people have been destroyed. It's all utterly obliterated, now
and forever. The Royal Pop People say that it puts an end to the old
geography."
      "How could a sea be obliterated?" Mary Virginia asked. "Where did
you read the announcement of such an historical meeting, Margaret? They
sound like things that you made up."
      "Read them? Whenever did I ever read anything. I'm not even sure
that I know how to read. I don't remember ever doing it. No, this is just
something that I know. Or it's something that I heard."
      "Please don't go through all that recital again, Margaret, but can't
you just tell me in two words what you're talking about," Mary Virginia
requested. "Absalom says that everything in the world can be described in
two words."
      "I know his two words. But what I'm talking about is Pop History.
People of the Old Kind won't understand it very well, so the Royal Pop
Historians say. The meeting starts today. I don't know where it is, but
somebody said that Duffey might know."
      "I didn't know that you were interested in history, Margaret. It
sure was noisy in town last night. What was happening."
      "Sure I'm interested in history, Mary V. Papa used to have a book
'History of Cook County in the Early Days'. I'm from Chicago, you know."
      "I know, Margaret. Did you read the book about the history of Cook
County?"
      "No. I never read it, but we had it. Papa bought things like that
because he was trying to get used to being an American. Anyhow, I'm real
noetic so I'll be a natural at something like history. What was so noisy
last night was that funny wind blowing down the facades of the buildings and
breaking up the old people and the old animals. It left a lot of trash in
the streets. Not only that, but there's so many parks and courtyards and
places this morning that weren't there yesterday that it causes one to
wonder. They sure are gracious places."
      "What old people and old animals are you talking about, Margaret?
What funny wind? What fronts of buildings being blown down? How did they
break up?"
      "Well, I'll tell you, Mary V., I think that some of that stuff was
from old Mardi Gras floats, or they were planning to be floats next season.
The new people tnd the new winds were breaking up everything that wasn't
splendid enough. There's one dragon that's big enough to load three floats
pretty heavy. It's still alive a little bit."
      "Are you talking about live people and live animals, Margaret? And
what are these new parks and courtyards and places that you're jabbering
about?"
      "Oh, the broken people and animals are mostly papier mache or rubber
or styrofoam or plastic. After they break up and die that's all that's left
of them. But some of them were pretty lively before the end. There was one
fire-drake (or he was half man and half fire-drake) who bit a lady in the
leg and got blood all over the street. Some people took her to Doctor Doyle
with it. 'That's a terrible bite,' he said. 'I think it give you infections
draconitis. You have to show me what bit you.' He went out with the people
to look at it. When he found out that it was just a fire-drake made out of
rubber, and that it was fabulous besides, he didn't know what to think. But
a laboritory has checked what the lady has, and it's infectious draconitis
all right. They think she'll die."
      "Margaret, what sort of convention was going on in town last night?"

      "Oh, just three or four very ordinary ones. No, this is the straight
dope, Mary V. I wasn't cordial on the stuff last night. And the courtyards
and parks and nooks aren't new, except for not being there before. They're
quite old and weathered, and they're full of almost the biggest trees in
town. They're very ingrown and curious. New things aren't usually that
ingrown and pleasant. And the thing that chokes me is that nobody remembers
what was in those place yesterday. 'I live there,' one man said (you know
him, he's that Russian Sarkis Popotov), 'and now there's a place next door
to me named Artaguette Park. It looks unfamiliar to me, but some of those
horsey tourists who are in town say that it'll look familiar by tomorrow.
I've lived there for forty years, and I know that there were some kind of
buildings next to me, but I sure can't remember what they were.' That's what
old Sarkis said. And there are other places like that. The town's full of
them this morning."
      "What were the people in the Quarter drinking last night, Margaret?"

      "Green Ladies mostly," Margaret Stone said. "You know, like
Peppermint Schnapps, except with absinthe instead of the schnapps. That's
what everybody has been drinking all week. Why don't you go with the to the
Pop Histoy meetings today, Mary Virginia?"
      'Margaret was small and intense, with a large voice that was saved
from stridence only by a certain music in it. But it broke at least once a
week, and it wasn't nearly as large. She was Italian and Jew, with possibly
a little bit of the Greek and the Pre-Adamite in her. She would have been
beautiful in repose, but no one had ever seen her so.' So, at least, an old
describer has described her. But he didn't mention the terrible tragedy and
passion that was sometimes in her face. It was because people so seldom
listened to what her musical voice said that there were such stark things in
her face. The passion and tragedy in her face had increased lately. So had a
certain threat that refused to give its name.
      And Mary Virginia, her associate at the Pelican, had everything. Her
kindness was extreme, but lately it had acquired a vacant quality, as though
she could no longer remember just whom or what to be kind to. Her beauty
alone would knock you off your stool forever. That had happened to a number
of fellows. It wasn't true that her beauty had begun to fail in the last
several decades. It had become deeper and fuller.
      "As you know, I seldom get out of this place, Margaret," Mary V.
said. "And the Pop Historians don't sound all as attractive as that. There
are very many things going on this week, if I should go out. Horny Henderson
is on the Trumpet at the Imperial John. They have a new singer at Red
Neck's. Justin says that the Jazz Museum has so much new stuff over there
that it'd take a week to see and hear it all. The Presentation at the
Decatur Street Opera House this week will transcend everything. We have to
go there tonight. There's a big bunch of new painters in the galleries and
around Pirates' Alley, and Duffey says that one of the new ones could almost
be the ghost of Finnegan, the way he uses his oranges. There's a couple of
Dominicans giving a mission at Ste. Katherines. It's full of hell-fire, just
like when we were kids. They say that our world will end, right here this
week. The 'Nostaigia Club' should get hold of them. 'As American as
hell-fire and apple-pie, is Mencken used to write. And you want me to go to
a Pop History Banger? And you don't even know where they're having it?"

      The scene changes to just around the corner, over on Chartres Street
or whatever street it was that Duffey now had his establishment on. Yes,
there had been a new breeze blowing during the night. Well, it was a
retrospective breeze. You remembered it now, hearing it, but you didn't
notice it at the time when it had been happening. But now it was blowing for
real, blowing down the facades, and some of the whole buildings, with a
rattling and crashing. Duffey had been out very early, and had turned his
ankle in a pot hole. Then wild things began to happen, and they began to
have happened for quite a few hours befosre. You wouldn t think that
stepping into a pot hole would make that much difference.
      The scenery, the facades, the false fronts (but they hadn't been
false till right at the time of their destruction) were toppling and
breaking up in the streets outside, and there was the sound of tearing
canvas and scorching rubber and stuttering styrofoam. It wasn't a joke. It
was all straight impression. There really was something noisy and airish
going on outside in the streets. It was like a strong experience of
anthropomorphic colts, a great clatter of them.
      "A Strong Experience of Anthropomorphic Clots!" Duffey howled at his
own half-conscious word train that had been going through his head. "I've
roused up with a mouthful of pretty crocky phrases before, but these
anthropomorphic colts outrace them all."
      Duffey never locked his doors, but sometimes (late at night) he did
close them. He had inventories worth many thousands of dollars. These solid
money items formed the heart of Melchiscdech Duffcy's Walk-In Art Bijou. And
the bijou, the pawn shop, the various other enterprises, his living
quarters, his very body were all members of this one establishment. He would
not lock up any of them.
      Yes, the door was still wide open, as he had left it when he hobbled
in with his slightly twisted ankle. And he had heard a slight noise at that
door, that came to him over the thumping and clattering noises in the
streets. The door opened inward, as did Duffey himself. And there was a
notice nailed to it that hadn't been there when he had re-entered an hour
before. It was on some sort of old, yellowed poster cardboard, and it was
nailed to the door with a long and ancient nail.
      Duffey read the notice or message. It was in the new style of
writing, so it was a non verbatim message. The words 'Pop History' lept out
at him. Then other and more fearsome words came and are up those first
words, and established themselves with an easy arrogance. Slogans like 'We
said to get rid of that stuff', and 'It doesn't matter -- they're only
human' took their places on the scroll, and then other phrases came forward
and these withdrew to less emphatic levels. The whole thing was a
proclamation, but it was a very tricky one.
      Then Duffey again read what he could of it, with unbelief and near
alarm. There was a difficulty about the words. Duffey still had some trouble
with the new style of writing, even though words were one of his trades. But
there didn't seem to be much doubt about the first meaning. Duffey was
sociable: he was hospitable: but the message mentioned numbers that were
overwhelming. It stated that he was favored and selected to lodge two
hundred or more royal persons at his establishment. It stated that these
were serious persons of a scientific sort, persons of blazing beauty and
towcring mentility and perftimed perversion and breath-catching art: all
this in the intensity and scope of the thunder dimension. That sounded like
pretty vaunting stuff. It stated that such splendid persons were used to the
best in accomodations. And it said that Duffey was selected for this honor
because of his great age and erudition. It gave the name of the convening
society. But something was missing from the name and message, something that
can only be called verbatimness. There were very tricky things about the
words of the message refusing to stand fast and be accounted for.
      This Duffey has been called 'a patriarch without seed, a prophet
without lionor, and a high-sounding brawler'. He was a man of uncertain age
(this fact about him had assumed importance lately): and he was a willful
man who was held on peculiar checkrein by forces unknown. But he was a
spacious man and he could be forgiven many inconsistencies.
      Duffey rocked on his feet and lowered at the writing and thought
about it in an effort to make up his mind. It was a ritual sort of thing
that was nailed to his door, and it deserved a ritual answer. Duffey got a
pen and bowl, and he wrote an answer in his hieratic hand at the bottom of
the scroll. It was not old poster cardboard that the scroll was made out of.
It was now seen to be old parchment. Duffey wrote:
      "Royal Pop People, I am honored. And you are welcome. But my
facilities are quite limited, as is my credit. I will be host to as many of
you as I can be. No man can do more. Somehow you will all be taken care of.
Signed, Melchisedech Duffey."
      He paused for a while, and he stirred the ink in the bowl. Then he
wrote a bit more: "if this is a hoax, then it's a howling hoax."

      Out of affectation, Duffey wrote all official things with this squid
ink that he kept in a bowl. This was the finest ink ever. It will not
coagulate. Write anything at all in squid ink. Then write something else
beside it in ordinary ink. Come back in three thousand years, or even in ten
years, and notice the difference. The squid ink will have remained true and
unfaded; the other will have paled. But squid ink had gone out of fashion.
The prime message on the parchment, however, was also written in squid ink,
and there weren't many people who used it these last few centuries.
Duffey examined the parchment, and later he would examine it again and
again. "We will come back to you, skin of a horny goat," he said. "Oh, how
we will come back to you!" He turned his attention then to the nail that
held it. It was large, ind it appeared very sharp. It was not, as Duffey had
at first thought, either brass or bronze. It was a copper-iron nail, and it
was of old Macedonian workmanship. Old, but not very.
      For there were in that city many members of the "Society of Creative
Anachronisms", a social and historical and dramatic society. These people
were all friendly to Duffey, and Duffey suspected them of a hoax. They put
great effort in some of their hoaxes.
      Duffey, a widow-man of loose and informal establishment, now made
himself ready for the day and its apparent adventure. He caught again the
whiff of the new breeze blowing, and part of that whiff was made up of
putridity, that emanation of changes working. He dressed, daubed whiting on
his beard and hair (they had both been turning disquietingly black lately),
and went out into the streets to find comradeship and adventure and
breakfast. Yes, there was indeed a new breeze blowing. It wasn't a great
air-mover of a breeze; but it brought a rumbling freshness, a bracing and
reminiscent aroma, a rakish sense of rot, and an altogether vivid accord
with things as they are and as they were becoming.
      And it brought a sudden and happy discord with things as they had
not been before. Certainly there had always been several buildings right
next to Duffey's place, on the left when one comes out. And just as
certainly those structures of whatever kind were not standing there now.
      Just what was there was a little harder to say. One couldn't get a
clear view of the area, or one wouldn't have believed his eyes if he had
gotten a clearer view. The powers shouldn't spring these things on a man so
early in the morning. Something was in the act of being born in that area.
There were bales of greenery. There were bales of shadow. There were other
bright things already there, or arriving. But this pleasant confusion hadn't
quite put itself together yet.
      The streets were trashy, though trash trucks were everywhere working
on the clean-up. Here and there, the sidwalks were slippery with blood, but
it was blood of no great validity. There was a lot of synthetic fiber lying
around, and very little of authentic flesh.
      And there were a few newly homeless cur dogs, and vacant oddity
people, and evil spirits skulking about the sites. They had been dislocated
from their places and from their forms. And their new and unpleasant
confusion was another thing that hadn't been abke to put itself together
yet.
      "It is you who gave destroyed my house and my body," one of the
uncreations hissed at Duffey. Duffey could not determine whether it was a
cur dog or a snake or a spirit or a person. "It is you who have done it with
that rectitude of yours," the thing said. Duffey did have his rectitude, but
these uncreations did not seem to have much of anything.
      "I cannot any way remember who lived next door to me here," Duffey
mumbled into his beard, not to the uncreations but to himself, "or who it
was who transacted business in this place so near to my own. This is a
puzzle. And yet I've lived and worked here for several decades, and various
persons have lived here beside me... I now suspect tgat they were
nothing-people all this time, and that they have descended to their
perdition or oblivion."        Duffey walked a block and noticed a handful
of other disappearances and changes, as well as several pleasant new
arrivals. Some of the broken-up puppets or dummies in the streets reminded
him of persons whom he had known. Some of them opened effigy months and
croaked at him in voices that he had known. The discarded little
abominations were almost in bad taste.
      But not everything nice changed. Duffey entered one of the old old
and gracious places that had remained (considerably chaanged, though, it
seemed, from the day before), and he sat down with a happy sigh. And a
friend of his was sitting with him instantly. In that place, that always
happens.
      "I hear that you are playing host to some sort of historical group,
Duffey," Absalom Stein was saying as they sat together and planned a
breakfast at Giraredeau's Irish Restaurant. Absalom was an Israelite in whom
there was much guile, but he averaged out to a good man, and sometimes he
wrote for the Investigator (that was Duffey's newest journal) as well as for
the Bark. "How long is this convention going to last, Duffey?"
      "I don't know at all," Duffey said. "All I remember are the words
'Pop History'. Then other words came out and gobbled them up and began to
make demands for two hundred or more people. You seem to know something
about it, so I suspect that you're in on the hoax."
      "No I'm not, Duff, but I may get in on it. Why shouldn't I know
about it? We have all become intuitive since (Oh, I guess it's just this
morning), since we began to realize that we belonged to the new plasant
people. But there's a lot of loose stuff floating around town this morning,
and I suspect that your 'Royal Pop History' bunch may be the handle to take
hold of it by. I'm afraid that they're going to make us give up a lot of our
old items as not being splendid enough to keep."
      "No, this man is not in on it," the young lady said to Duffey,
"though I now invite hin to join us. Oh, we never know how long these things
will last. We will be in session until we get certain points settled and
certain remnants rooted out. Your friend here, the Stein, is worried because
a few people have gone away and he can't remember who they were. I say that
if one can't remember them, then it's a good thing that they're gone. If
they were superb and splendid enough, then they would be remembered. Let
them pass out of all memory and be no more."
      This young lady, she had 'Royal Pop People' written all over her.
She was excessively one of them. She was 'The Countess', a teenage archetype
among the Splendid People.
      "But I have a peculiar affection and passion for unmemorable
persons," Absalom Stein said carefully. "I feel that I'm responsible for
some few of them that nobody else would bestow a thought on. I suspect that
it's just that they are swallowed by oblivion if nobody remembers them at
all, and then it would become the case that they had never existed at all. I
can feel a dozen or so of them now, hanging on by the very nails of their
fingers on the rim of oblivion, bawling against extinction, but almost
certainly doomed to that pit or cauldron and be extinguished. So it will be
with them if someone will not give them a thought. I come closest to
remembering them of all the people left in the world; I know that. But I
cannot come close enough. I could bring them back from nothingness if I
could form their faces in my mind. I can't. But I'll still try it."
      "You are playing with very sticky fire, Oh Absalom," the young
countess said. "It may be that you will go with them to the nothingness
where they have gone if you show such an unhealthy interest in them."
      "What is it that you call your society, lady?" Duffey asked. Duffey
couldn't remember just when this young lady had sat down at the table with
them. He couldn't remember whether he knew who she really was. He seemed
very slow at catching onto things this morning.
      "Sometimes we call Ourselves the Thunder Harps," the countess lady
said, "and sometimes we cill ourselves other things. How is it that you have
to ask me the nature of our group? You are a man of very great age and
honor, and you are an affiliate of ours."
      "What? Am I i Thunder Harp?" Duffey cried with breakfast heartiness.
He was dislocated and confused by this new air of change or mutation, but he
would never admit his confusion to the world.
      "Oh, of course," the young lady said. "You've been one of us almost
forever. You're one of the perennial bushes. I suspect that you're thousands
of years old. You have those little green moss marks at the corners of your
eyes, and there are many other signs. Why does it scare you, Duffey, when
people spot you is one of the very old ones? Don't you want to be old and
honored? And why ever should it startle you when you feel the green seasons
returning to you and you know that you'll be appearing younger and younger
for a few decades? You've surely been through these happenings often enough.
How old are you anyhow?"
      A waitress was pouring coffee powder into the urn. The name of the
coffee was 'New Splendor'. Duffey had honestly never heard of the brand
before, and he wasn't sure that he liked it, if that was what he had been
drinking. Oh, it had a lot of new tastes in it, and many of them were
pleasant. And what about the eggs he was eating? What about the sausage? Did
that come from a pleasant hog? But this was one of the new 'with-it' places,
though barely. There was still some of the old showing through, in spite of
signs that read 'Be Splendid', 'Are You Splendid Enough?', 'Be Splendid, or
Perish', 'Be Splendid, and If You Can, Be Noetic'.
      "How old am I?" Duffey mumbled. This young lady had asked the
unsettling question that Duffey had never been able to answer. Well, how old
did that lady think that she was? She looked to be about seventeen years
old. She wore the scent named 'Timeless', but who sould be sure of her? She
was just one of the 'New Royal Pop People' who had taken over the
directorship of everything. And how did she happen to be eating breakfast
with them?
      "Duffey, you've been using waiting on your beard and hair again,"
Stein accused. "Why do you do it? Why not let them turn black again if
you're on that cycle? If you're supposed to be young for a few decades, then
be young. Really, you'd look better young, and I can't think of anyone else
of whom that's the case. You were always very boyish. But just what is this
'green seasons' affair that the lady is talking about? And, yes, just how
old are you anyhow, Duffey?"
      Stein had always been splendid. And he had always been noetic. He
had sure in his youth it least, been a 'Royal Pop Person', in that he had
even been a little bit before his time. But would even he be at his total
ease in this new ambient?
      "I don't know what the young lady is talking about?" Duffey said.
"But I'd wondered for a long time why all of you in our bunch noticed that
I've been growing younger."
      "What is to notice?" Stein asked. "When I was a boy in Chicago, You
were an old man. Quite old, Duffey. When I met you this last timee, thirty
or more years ago, you still seemed several decades older than the rest of
us, but not nearly so old as you had been earlier. Now you seem several
decades younger than the rest of us. That's all there is to it. It's sort of
a silly way you have of getting attention, Duffey, turning younger. And to
notice it would only be to humor you."
      "It isn't as though this hadn't happened to you before,
Melchisedch", the young pop lady said. This lady had an impudent and archaic
grin. She was bright and fundamental, as though several of the duller outer
layers had been lifted off of her. Duffey had terra cotta figurines in his
bijou that were of the same period as this young lady and that very much
resembled her and her grin. Some of them were ancestral to the Etruscan, and
some of them were splendid fakes. The terra cotta process and its finish are
easily faked. The archaic grin is more difficult. But who was to say that
this mysterious young lady was not a fake? She seemed disquietingly genuine
though, on the new terms. Duffey had felt a real chill at the mention of the
anomaly of his own unaging. It had never been mentioned out loud before. And
the new breeze blowing today was not really new. It was an old, old breeze
with its green seasons returning. But was there not (Duffey was trying to
remember how it had been on this point, and he was not remembering well),
was there not something illicit and tainted about that old cyclic thing?
      "What had barnacle-removing to do with history?" Absalom Stein
suddenly asked the young pop lady. He must have seen the prospectus of the
subjects of discussion at the historical meeting: 'The Holy Barnacle, and
the Pearl Beyond Price," and he must have sensed the irony of callihg the
barnacle holy. Duffey recalled that the non-verbatim notice that had been
nailed to his door had mentioned barnacles or barnacle-removing somewhere.
      The young pop countess did not answer. She had the air or supposing
that it would be a little bit infra for her to answer so obvious a question
as Stein had posed.

      "Duffey, you'd better get back to your place," Mary Virginia
Schaeffer said as she came into Girardeau's Irish Restaurant. "Oh, you do
have it splendid here, Girardeau! How could you have changed it so much
since yesterday? Maybe your place won't have to be destroyed at all. Duffey,
those people are crowding around your place, and they look like the lively
that doesn't like being crowded or kept waiting either. If any of us can
help you out, just let us know. What was going on in town during the night
anyhow? Margaret Stone is being very noetic about something, and the town
does have a different look to it this morning. I mean it's so splendid!
Besides the trash, that is. I just don't know what to make of some of that
trash. It wrings my heart the way some of it looks like old friends with
forgotten names, and they try to speak to me. It's as though blinders had
been put on my eyes and on my mind as regards some of those smashed things.
People say that everything that isn't really splendid has got to go. Why
does it have to go? Why?"
      "Do not be asking such unsplendid questions, the young pop countess
said. "That is dangerous for you. It may be that you will be found
unsplendid and will be trashed also."
      Mary Virginia bought a sack of Girardeau's special greaseless
doughnuts (They aren't doughnuts: they are 'Pop Tortuses' now," Girardeau
told her), and some tabouli wheat. Then she went out again. She had a
scattering of gray hairs in that witching halo that framed her face. Duffey
hadn't known that about her before, and he'd known her for more than thirty
years. Perhaps she was acquiring the gray that he was losing. And it was
natural that she should turn from a beautiful young lady to a beautiful
middle-aged lady with the attrition of the years. Those things happen to
everybody.
      To everybody except Duffey. Duffey would need a change of blood if
he kept getting those chilling thoughts. He knew now that he was very old,
and that this business of him getting younger for a few decades was a very
old business indeed.
      "Yes, I'd better get back to my place," he said. "I hadn't expected
guests to arrive so early in the morning. I wonder why they chose me."
      "There is no need for you to hurry, Duffey," the pop countess said.
"We are all perfectly able to make ourselves at home anywhere. I'm sure that
my associates have already taken possession of your things and put them to
use. We aren't it all backward about affairs like that. And we chose you
because we like you, because you were a 'pop person' anciently, because you
are already one of us, and because you are the oldest and most honored
person in this town."
      "Ah, just how many of you pop people are there in town?" Duffey
asked. "I forget."
      "And what did you say was the name of your society and
principality?" Stein asked. "I also forget."
      "Legion," the Pop Countess said. "That is the answer to both of your
questions."
      "I am going down to check some courthouse records and tax rolls,"
Stein said is they were out in the street again. "These disappearing and
unremembered buildings and properties must have left records behind them.
And I will check old city directories also. These disappeared people must
have left records also. I will worry until I find the answers."
      "Oh ancient Stein (hey, that's the same is saying 'Oh, old pot!'),
you'll not find them that way," the Countess chided him. "Those were nothing
buildings and no-count properties, and they were inhibited by
nothing-people. Get that into your whopper-sized head, or you may be
reclassified as a nothing-person yourself. And, no, they will not have left
any traces or records. You are wasting your time, and that is an illicit
luxury now."
      "I must find out," Stein said. "What, am I an ancient one too?"
      "Yes, ancient, archeo, time-soaked, and you were one of the cremen
on the ship which now must become splendid or be scuttled," the young
countess said out of her archaic grin. "Old, old, but not so old as the
Melchisedech here."
      Stein went off to check courthouse records and tax rolls and old
directories. He returned and went again several times. He was nervous to get
to the bottom of the business.

      "Be alogn and get your own piece of this neighborhood straightened
out," Zabotski called to Duffey a little later as Duffey was hurrying home.
"Your place is clear out of order, Duff. Straighten it out, or I'll have the
pack of you assailed for Unlawful Assembly or with Unseemly Crowding in
Countervention of the Fire Laws. Man, what is it over at your place anyhow,
a mob scene from Hades? First, they overflowed your place, and now they're
impinging on mine. I have the feeling that these are the latter days of the
world, for me maybe, not necessarily for everybody. Say, they keep askign
for a shanty ship that they think I have here. 'Where have you hidden it?'
one of them asks. 'It's too big for him to have hidden,' another says.
'Maybe he hasn't built it yet.' Do you know what they're talking about,
Duffey?"
       "Yes, I think I do. I remember it a little bit."
       "Wife Waldo thinks that she remembers it a little bit too, but I
sure don't. Whatever it is, they'll destroy it if they find it. Say, Duffey,
didn't I used to own some buildings that were just next door to you on the
right as I go in? It seems like I did, but I forget."
       "So do I forget it, Zabotski," Duffey said sadly. "But the things
that are disappeared and forgotten were probably owned by some such an
easily forgotten person as yourself."
       "Will yo forget me, Duffey, if I perish this night?" crude Zabotski
asked.
       "Aye, I'll forget you," Duffey said. "It would be easy to say that
I'll remember youy, but I'll not recall the least lump of you."
       "Duffey, thou cladhaire, I'll split the head!" Zabotsky sputtered in
stylized fury.
       "Have a care, Eabhraioch," Duffey bantered him. "Your tongut will
turn black and fall out if you misuse the holy language so. Quiet, Zabotski,
quiet!"
       "That tongue is not holy," a pop person said sharply. "It is not
splendid."
       And Duffey hurried along home. It was just around the corner from
where they talked. But the irritation drained away from him as he neared his
home and got a look at that throng that had taken it over. A mob? Yes.
Unseemly crowding? Perhaps. Unlawful assembly? Oh no, you can't cite folks
of such high quality for unlawful assembly. The mob, oh the essential thing
about this mob was that it was a mob with class. Even the mobish sound of it
was a vivid orchestration. It was a finely done instrumentaiton of happy
thuneder and mountain echoes, with a strong underlay of 'roaring river'
timbre. Evey mob has its own tone. Well, this mob had a pleasant though
challenging tone to it, and it rang like thousands of large gold coins.
       And look at the confabulating people who made up that noisy bunch!
Duffey was reminded of a phrase used by the Lord himself for an earlier mob,
"In the brightness of the saints." He was reminded of the phrase 'The
Splendid People' that these pops used for themselves. And Duffey was
delighted with them even though it was his own place that they were near to
bursting the walls out of it.
       There is much to be said for elegant shooting and brimming banter
when it is used by such really classy folks with their silver tongues and
their bronze lungs. There were something like the sort of people that
Melchisedech had attempted in his own 'Splendid Animations', though he did
not go quite so far in one or two treacherous directions. These were people
with a stunning style and with a rippling and dazzling color and costume.
But how could there be so many of them here? The very presence of such folks
had effected a growth and change in Duffey's buildings. This was a new sort
of calculation that was called 'The Geometry of Shining Space.'
       Duffey's house was now very much larger than he himself remembered
it. He went through the back rooms of it, and through those rooms that were
still farther behind them. There were constructions in Duffey's own intrepid
and inexact carpentry everywhere. As a carpenter, Duffey, was one of the
great originals. He himself had built all the rooms of these buildings
except for the front two tiers which had already been there when he came.
But had he built as many rooms as these? He was like a man encountering
strange things in his own handwriting. "It's my own writing, but when did I
write such things," he might say. "It's my own carpentry, but whenever did I
carpenter such rooms as these," he did say. Many of the back rooms had to
intrude onto a piece of property that belonged to Zabotski. There was no
calculation whatever that would allow them to be on Duffey's own land.
       "Ah, I can't think of any overbearing neighbor that I'd rather
intrude on," Duffey thought with laughter. But the building couldn't have
extended so deeply before today, or Zabotski would have made the howling
trespasss known to the whole town.
      Duffey explored through the bright crowds in his own art bijou,
through those in hiw own book store, through those in his pawn shop, through
those in his auditorium, through his soup kitchen, and through those in his
flop house. Never had the places been so full except for the few times when
he had staged those
'Original-Masterpiece-For-Eighty-Five-Cents-Frame-And-All' Saturday sales..
But these crowds today were made out of extraordinary people, exuberant as
colts, touchy as velours, bright as primary-color-baked terra cotta,
superior in their soundelry and their saintliness, big-bellied with fresh
life and invention, incredibly urbane and sophisticated, adolescent and arty
and archaic all at the same time.
      Oh, Duffey knew some of them, of course. There was the 'Child-Hero',
there was the 'Hoyden', there was the 'Countess' (how had she got there
before him when he had started soonest?), there was the 'Sanctimonious Sam'.
But are these not types? No, they are people. They are the everlasting and
omnipresent people. And, though it seemed as if there were more, there was
only one of each sort of them. Who would ever turn these great originals
into types?
      But beyond these pop oeple who seemed to have come to town from
everywhere, there were the mnore local and less typical folks. There was
Danny Degas who was history professor at Lsuno College there in town, Hugh
de Turenne who was deep in the humanities at Xavier, Sister Mary Susanna of
Ursuline Academy, Robert Darnley who was historical in residence at Dillard.
And there was the dozen of those tome-toting eccentrics from the deep
Quarter who had each been working for thirty years on a thirty volume
history of the world.
      And tehre were the fine experts in the special fields of history:
Berny Cacciatore who was the finest historian in the world on boxing and
other sports; Bulo Belonki who was the non-pareil historian of jazz. There
were high historians from all over the world, some known to Duffey, some
known only to God. There were the flash-wits who were not thought of as
orthodox historians.
      These were all nimble people. History had just made a fundamental
change in itself, with the defeat and obliteration of its old subject matter
and the triumph of the new. Similarly, the art of geometry and the art of
words had just made deep changes in themselves to accommodate the new
conditions.
      There were also present many eniinent persons in the field of hard
science. There were physicists and exophysicists, chemists, and nuclear
nabobs. There were biologists and brainstylers and mathematicians. And there
were also the psychologists and the cultural gestalters and the
transcendental philosophers.
      There were music folks, artist folks, and both grid and linear
narrators. Since history included everything, Duffey supposed that all these
folks belonged to the conclave. And he had found that there were many other
conclaves of other sorts going on all over town. After all, there are such
things as pop biology and pop veterinary medicine and pop theology and pop
open heart surgery. There was pop astronomy and pop aerodynamics. They all
of them had to be nimble folks who were involved, since all of their
sciences were now of the new and fearlessly nimble sort. Everyone here was
clearly highly qualified, of the veriest elite. But even that many highly
qualified persons will take up a lot of room. There must have been a
thousand unassorted persons crowded into Duffey's buildings, and there was
not a doused light or an empty head among them.
      A ram's horn blew a lowering blast. And it was time for the first
sessions to begin. The first speaker had a smiliiig and unhurried
incandescence about him, and he spoke in a high and singing voice that can
only be described as brindled thunder laughing down the valleys that weren't
there yesterday, and as hooves pounding through flame-green grass. But why
put it so fancy? He spoke like a thunder colt. "We are all pleased to see
each other," he began. "We return to our continuing and never really
interrupted sessions now. We ask again (it should be the oldest one of us
present who asks it, but Duffey's tongue hasn't been taught nimbleness yet)
the ritual question: 'What is History?' And the answer comes: 'History is
everything that has happened up till now'. And then we ask (it should be the
youngest one of us here present who asks it, but the 'Child Hero' has let
his attention travel elsewhere): 'What is now?' And so we move into our
pleasant discussions and difficulties. Now is the all-embracing moment, so
our composite answer really is 'History is everything in the Now. Or it
should simply be: 'History is everything.'
      "Our fun and our fascination will always be to track the cubs of the
wild history cat to their lair. It is to winnow the golden dust that we call
historical evidence and to discover that it is really the green dust of
life. And we can track the cubs. We can winnow the dusts to a final arrival
and solution every time. There is nothing that can hide from history, or
from ourselves who are the shapers and pruners of history. Where would
anything hide? Everything is in the momentour now, and we are the lords of
this now."
      The speaker wore a rakish and gaudy turban, and a gaudy and
exuberant gem or eye sparkled and winked from the middle of it. This give
the impression that the real face was up inside the turban, and that it was
a false face that the speaker was talking from. He went on.
      "We now have techniques of research and reconstruction that allow us
to answer any historical question. More, they allow us to sly 'We were
there'. A primitive deity once asked a number of questions of a man who was
not able to answer them. We pose is challenge here and now. Ask those
questions of us! Here are some of them, and our answers.
      'Have you ever in your lifetime commanded the morning and shown the
dawn its place?'
      "Yes we have. We did it this morning, only two hours ago. And the
local scene is still a little bit upset about it."
      'Have you entered into the sources of the sea, or walked about in
the depths of the abyss?'
      "Sure we have. Depth Oceanography his made these things
commonplace."
      'Have you entered into the storehouse of the snow, and seen the
treasury of the hail?'
      "Sure we have. Every weather reconaissance pilot has done it."
      'Is it by your discernment that the hawk soars, that he spreads his
wings towards the South? Does the eagle fly up at your command to pass the
night at his lofty nest?'
      "Yes, and again yes. We are doing considerable ornithological
engineering now, and wre implanting completely new patterns in many of the
birds."
      'Have you fitted a curb to the Pleides, or loosened the bond of
Orion?'
      "No, we haven't, primitive deity, and we don't believe that you have
done it either. But we are working on it. We will bet that we do it before
you do."
      "There are not ghosts of the past that we track down and set right.
Really, there are no ghosts. There are only some persons or things that are
wasted more than others. And there is no 'past'. There are certain times and
incidents that have been misplaced. But we can find them, all of them,
buried in barrows or trapped under the cement of barnacles, and we can free
them from their incrustations. But even we adepts are in danger of thinking
in terms of inimical incrustations and surrogates, in treating some events
as though they were not still happening. What? If a thing is not still
happening, then how will it be revised? It is for the ordering and revision
and cltrific@ition that we come together for these continuing meetings.
That, and to reassure ourselves, and to enjoy ech other's company.
      "When we as a people arrive at our full splendor, then we create a
sparkling history for ourselves, and we devise noetic and sophisticated and
splendid techniques Ah, the tracking down, the digging up, the freeing,
with the finest weapons and tools ever, that's where the fun is. It is the
rich ritual of historical evidence, the formula in our own hands of what was
and is and what shall be. We will keep it all in our hands. A line by an
always contemporary poet reads, 'Here lies one whose name was writ on
water', as though that name might become difficult to read after the water
had grown old and forgetful. But this is not the case. The reading would
never be difficult, not to initiates like ourselves. Even the writing of it
on rapidly running water would make the reading of it just about difficult
enough to be interesting. It's always easy to develop transparencies from
living water.
      "I have heard it said by an erudite man that it would be wonderful
to have placed recording microphones at various spots in the time and place
of history. Oh, but it has been done! We have the recordings of billions of
such microphones, we have the recordings of billions of cameras. We use such
microphones all the time! I have never found a dingle or dell on this earth
in which there were not many such microphones. Stories are the most common
recorders. Everywhere, to a person with informed eyes and cars, these
stories shine and shout their presence. It is in their thin (but not so thin
as a non-historian might imagine) patinas that we can read complete
histories.
      "We commonly live or peel off transparencies at six-second
intervals. Each such transparency will give a detailed and accurate analysis
of the air for its period, the temperature, direction of wind, light
intensity (whether in shade or sunlight or dark night or bright night; even,
from the angle of the shine, the hour of the day and the day of the year),
sulphur content of the air, significant pollen, aroma, and quality
generally. Do you realize that it would take fewer than three hundred
billion such six second intervals, less than three hundred billion such
transparencies to carry us back through the last fifty thousand years of
history, the period in which we are most interested, the period since our
own first appearance. We can go deeper, of course, but frankly we have not
yet the technique to go more thin ten times deeper, or to about half a
million years. Beyond that, we lose accuracy. But why should we go deeper
than our own period? In those murky depths we find only animals and uncouth
creatures and peoples who are not ourselves.
      "But we can slice the transparencies much thinner than six seconds.
We can slice them down to a hundredth of a second for any period we wash to
focus upon. Six second interval is merely cruising speed or hunting speed.
The patinas deposited on good rock surfaces can be lifted down to the
thickness of a single molecule.
      "Complete visual pictures, from any aspect or direction, can be
reconstructed of anything whose light or shadow fell even indirectly on one
of our stones. We can get detailed pictures of animals, of plants, or people
as they lived and moved thousands of years ago. We can reconstruct color
pictures of the clouds moving overhead, and we can read the spectra of those
clouds for trace materials trapped in them. We can reconstruct anything that
was ever visible, that was ever to be discerned by any of the senses, that
was ever subject to any sort of analysis. Give us a dozen tuned stones (they
resonate to each other, and those of the same locale will always know each
other) and we can reconstruct a complete countryside for any period we wish.
We can zero in on an individual grasshopper in that countryside. We can zero
in on a virus infecting that grasshopper, and we can analyse it. We can
prescribe for that virus, but we are not yet able to send medication back to
that ancient grasshopper. If it were important, we would find a way to do
even that. Nor would the various upheavals that might seem to scramble the
rocks and their records make as much difference is you might suppose.
      "We can trap sounds and play them back with perfect fidelity. We can
play the song of the ancestral cicada that had two more chromosomes than its
present descendants have. The old cicada (it is only coincidence) had two
more notes in its song. We can say what the two disappeared chromosomes
were. We can even, by very advinced techniques, duplicate those chromosomes.

       "And smells! Of course they are even more simple than sounds to life
in the transparencies. We call go back and pick up nearly every scene
complete for the list fifty thousand years. We can do it at ten times that
depth, if there were anything interesting happening there. The patinas and
deposits on stones and other things are only one of the dozens of tools that
we have for such historical reconstruction."
       "If I had a rock in this room, could it tell me the hanky panky that
my husband does when I'm gone?" a woman asked. She was a walk-in from the
street. She wasn't an associate of the pop historians. "If it takes a
special rock, where could I get one?" she asked.
       "Oh, it takes at least a dozen seasons to set patina layers so that
they can be removed as transparencies," the speaker said. "I don't know why
this is so, but it does protect and make privileged all current information
from the hot eyes and gawky ears of suspicious persons. You wouldn't be
interested in hanky panks that are more than a dozen years old, would you?"
       "I sure would," the woman said. "I want to find about them as far
back or as close up as I can go. Where can I find one of these rocks?"
       "Oh,any rock in the vicinity will do. But just any technician wili
not do," the speaker said. "We exercise a certain discretion as to just what
patinas should divulge their information to whom. But many things other than
rocks have secrets."
       "Aye, goat skins have secrets too," Duffey told his beard. He had
been thinking about the parchment that he had found nailed to his door that
morning. Now he was inspired to use his own technique to lift transparencies
and tracings from it. The parchment was still on the door. Duffey realized
that it was a proclamation and that it was intended to remain there for the
stay of the Royal Pop Historians.
       He rolled a violet light thing through the throng and to the door.
Several of the people, the child hero, the hoyden, the countess and others,
were very interested in his doings. They followed him about as he made his
hook-up.
       "Why do you use that obsolete apparatus?" the child hero asked him.
"There is nothing intuitive about it at all, nothing dumbfounding, nothing
splendid. I wouldn't be caught dead with an apparatus that wasn't in some
way dumbfounding." Duffey's violet light wasn't obsolete. He had bought it
that very year. His older violet light had been obsolete but still workable.
But neither of them had very intuitive or dumbfounding in their operation.
       "What is it with you, children?" Duffey demanded. "This does not
make great speeches, but it works. Well, what is the latest thing that you
Pop Historians would use to define the depth and past history of this goat
skin?"
       "For such primary work as that, where the levels are the doings and
undoings of people (some of them probably human), and with so few such
recordings a peach branch would probably be the newest and most
sophisticated device," the child hero said. "It must be a forked branch, and
it must be cut like --"
       "Like a dowscr's forked stick," Duffey finished. "Yes, I have one of
them somewhere. I often use it. And also I often use my violet light here."
In his business of art dealer and pawn broker, Duffey often examined things
by his violet light. It would bring out underlays of paintings. It would
bring out filed-off serial numbers of pawned equipment. And also he often
used his dowser's forked stick which was from a red peach tree. It would
tell whether blood had been shed in the history of an article or artifact.
It would tell particularly whether there was a murder in the history of
ownership of an item (only the forked sticks told all those things
scientifically and not intuitively).
       For this particular job, the violet light was best. The parchment
was a pallimpsest, written over many times and scaped imperfectly. The
latest underlay of it was quickly made manifest under the violet light. It
consisted of some unfamiliar verses of Boethius, but it was in his overly
familiar style.
       "I never cared for his doggerel," Duffey said. "It would be valuable
in a money way, I suppose, but essentially his stuff is completely
worthless. May the weedeater take him!"
       "He was never really one of our group," the child hero said. "There
was just too much of the human element in him."
       The next underlay was a first century copy (or perhaps it was the
original) of the Fourth Gospel. It had marginal notations in the pagona
shorthand that had been secret for so many centuries, and indeed had been
cracked only two centuries before this time. The document had the sweep of
understanding and authority both in its lettering, and in the hen script of
its shorthand.
       "A fine hand," Duffey said. "I wonder if it was his own."
       "Oh, it was, it was," said the hoyden. "If we had realized that it
was on this piece, perhaps we would have used another piece of parchment and
given this one special care. Did you ever know him, Duffey? He was one of
our group. And he was so patient and thoughtful. He once put up more than
two hundred of us in a small-sheep shed. I don't know how he did it, but he
made us feel at home. That was one of the better segments of our
always-continuing meeting. Yes, this is the original. But of course the
thing can be found in print now, so there's no need to save even good hand.
And there is only about a thousand word segment on this."
       The next latest underlay was a spate of priceless drivel of the
classical Greek era. Well, what more can one say about it. It was priceless.
And it was drivel.
       "It's fake, of course," the child hero said. "All of the classical
period was a fake. There wasn't any classical period in reality. You'll hear
more of that. It's a favorite colt-to-ride of Cyrus Roundhead who will be
speaking by and by."
       Then, a bit deeper on the goat skin, there was a highly polished
passage of epic from one of the pre-pre-Homerics.
       "No need to flash that into the light of day," Duffey said. "It's
good and it's important, but it would only excite the scholars."
       "He belonged to us once," the child-hero said, "but then the weed
chopper cut him down. There were a lot of defections among the pre-pre's."
       A bit earlier then, there was all imposing, closely written, clearly
alphabetical screed from the pre-alphabetical time. It might easily
establish itself as the earliest alphabetical writing known. And below this
there were many depths of writings and sciptings. But Duffey, not wishing to
tip his hand, went no deeper at this time.
       "Times are hard," he whispered hoarsely in his shyster voice, for he
had come under the influence of a part of himself that he could never
control, "and I don't know where the devil I'd ever find a buyer for the
thing. But I feel generous today, and I cannot resist the plea in your
entreating eyes. I'll go nine dollars for this worthless old piece of goat
skin."
       There were peals of laughter from the countess and several others of
the people there. The child hero was too choked up with merriment to laugh
out loud. But for the kindliness of it, the laughter would have shriveled
Duffey irreparably. The laughter meant that the parchment was not for sale.
It meant that not nine dollars, or even nine million dollars would touch it.
It meant that Duffey was a perfect clown in this: so he accepted the role.
But he would dearly have loved to have that parchment for nine dollars or
even nine thousand. He put his violet light away. The parchment would never
lodge permanently in Melchisedccli DLiffey's Walk-In Art Bijou.
      Back in the auditorium, the main and largest room of the Duffey
buildings, the opening speaker was still holding forth on stones and their
patinas.
      "We forget that our time scale is purely conventional," he was
saying, "and that all events are pretty much simultaneous. Take the case of
God, and the person who presently holds most persuasive claim to that
position. There was a sort of vacancy several months ago, and the question
was which strong man would seize the opportunity. There was one man (who
almost certainly had suffered a human interval), who had mutated quite
recently (though some maintain that it was his second mutation), and who
learned the total trick of time-dealing while doing so. Then he intruded
himself back into time, into history and history's records, into the oceanic
unconscious mind that is shared by both creatures and uncreatures: and so he
became God. Certainly he is all-powerful and all-knowing and all-present
now... Part of his peculiar mutation was his mastering of the tricks of
power and knowledge and location. And certainly he created the worlds. Or at
least he created the historical evidence that he created the worlds. That's
almost the same thing."
      "How long his he been established in this position?" Duffey asked
from the floor. "I try to keep up with such things."
      "About three weeks," the easy speaker said. "We'll give him another
couple of months and then assay him a little more completely."
      "I'd certainly challenge one who went back no further than that in
his power," Duffey maintained stubbornly, "even if his power includes the
mastery of historical evidence and of simultaneousness."
      "Oh, he is being actively challenged," the speaker said. "There are
at least three main challengers. Back to our subject then, for simultaneity
and backward intrusions remain deep mysteries that are beyond many of us.
Stones of the countryside are not our most important records, as there isn't
very much going on in the country. Transparencies and live tracings may also
be lifted from city stones, whether they are natural or artificial. Several
of our members are at this very moment busy at lifting transparencies from
certain strategic stones that are built into the Decatur Street Opera House
of this very city. Sometimes one hears the expression 'if these stones could
only talk!' People, we initiates know thait these stones can talk.
      "There are several special stones in and around the old opera house
which is our demonstration for today. Know you all that there is a privite
corner in every inspired builder, that this private corner of the person
knows about special stones. It may know about them only while the man is
asleep but it knows. And the man, while the construction of the building was
going on, will convey the command (he may convey it without knowing that he
does so, or he may know that he does it and still wonder at himself), will
convey the command that several special stones are to be built into the
building and around the building. And the building will then become
memorable. It will become resonant and in accord with its town and its
times. It will accumulate living legends, and memories and ghosts. The old
opera house in this city is such a building.
      "Two dozen cheap gem stones or gim cracks on the inside of that
building do hold the tota] record of the short but tumultuous
two-hundred-year history of the building. They not only have the all-sense
record of every performance that has been played on those boards, but they
have the record of every person who has attended each performance. They have
the record of every gesture of every person. They have the record of every
accent and sigh and word and whisper of every person. And also, by highly
scientific extrapolation of every contingent datum, they have the probable
content of the most improbable thoughts of every person who has ever been
there. Minor miracles of intrapolating gestures and expressions into thought
have been wrought. Major miracles in extracting fine transparencies from
stoney patinas have been achieved.
       "The gim crack stones will have the glow of every wax candle or rush
light that ever lighted the performing house. They have the hot wax smell,
and the rush-fat small, even the evocative native rig-wick stench. They have
the glittering and guttering of the bear oil thit was burned in the earlier
days, of the whale oil, of the pig lard lamps. They have the whispering
sound and flicker of old illuminating gas flames, the garishness of the
limelights and the carbide lights, the later and stronger shine of the
electrical chandeliers and of the mercury spotlights. Oh, do any of you
remember the unearthly whiteness of the old sodium lights? The stones will
remember it."
       The speaker had a stone that was apparently set into his turban, but
closer examination would show that it was set into his head. The speaker was
a highbrow in the literal sense. The stone was one of the best, and it had
recorded many scenes in many years.        "And there are some quaint stones
set in the outside of the building, and all in the surface of Decatur Street
itself," the speaker went on. "There is one old dalle or flagstone that
would be recognized as distinguished by any investigators. It was set in the
midst of the random rocks when the road was first laid out. This stone
developed a will of its own, and it has survived a dozen changes. By
accident (but there are no accidents), it was not discarded when the first
random stones were thrown out and the slates and the mud shales were brought
in to give the street a better finish. And the special flagstone survived
when these old slates and nud shales were replaced by ironstone cobbles. It
maintained its place even when the cobbles were replaced by bricks. It
prevailed again when it was buried clear up to its eyes in asphalt. What
things it could tell if it had tongue."
       Duffey, like the good host he was, had rolled in several barrels of
hard cider and had brought out his collection of three hundred cider mugs
and put them to service. The Royal Pop People and walk-ins who had joined
them appreciated it. It was good cider from Arkansas apples.
       "Well, we will give that stone a tongue now," the speaker said in
cider-smacking accept. "That stone remembers the underbellies of thousands
of horses and carriages that stomped and rushed over it. Ah, what great
horse vehicles those were! Who now living, execpt possibly our host Duffey,
remembers them all? The Acme Top and the Acme Open, the Southern Beauty, the
Fulton Road Cart, the Livery Special, the Farmers' Canopy-Top Surrey, the
Johnson's Jump-Seat Buggy, the Imperial Carriage, Dempster's Three-Spring
Handy Wagon (it was a 'wagon' that even swells and dudes drove to the Opera
in), Drexel's Eight-Horse, Dray, Pontiac's Special Milk Wagon, Hallock's
Grocery Cart, the Sears Famous, the Road Runner. Ah, I see brimming eyes at
the memory of these things. The fragrance of old road apples will always be
a primary part of nostalgia."
       "What is the purpose of these rhapsodies, Countess?" Duffey asked
the girl.
       "Actually, we're so new that we don't have much detailed history of
our own," she said, "and we sure don't want to borrow any history from the
second-rate humans. But we can steal some of their memories and things, and
we can claim them for our own. And there was at least a handful of pop
people around here during the old horse carriage days. I'm on a nostalgia
kick myself. Ah, the fragrance of road apples! I wonder what they were
like?"
       "That stone on Decatur Street remembers the quickening snap and bang
of whips," the speaker said, "and their airy swishing. Ah, the Cowles Buggy
Whip, we shan't see its like again! The Jacksonville Drover, the S.R. and
Co's Australian, the Western Mule Skinner, the Milford Quirt, Hodson's
Superior Horse Whip, the San Antonio, the Fancy, the Never-Break Dog Whip,
the Elko. What days do these not bring back! The cursing of wagoneers, the
rattling of whipple trees, the jangle of even chains! Some of these things
still live in the blessed place, and others of them have been cut down by
the weed hacker."
       The speaker had a new mellowness in his voice that only a couple of
mugs of good Arkansas cider will give.
       "That stone remembers the undersides of old street cars," the
speaker said. "It even remembers the round punchings of old street car
transfers wafting down on the easy breeze, blessed confetti! And the odor of
trolley ozone! It remembers the underside of every automobile that ever went
down Decatur Street, and I dare not roll their names off my tongue lest
nostalgic riots might ensue."
       What, if the Royal Pop People had a weakness for nostalgia, Duffey
saw a good thing for himself. In the back rooms of his Walk-In Art Bijou, he
had tons and tons of forgotten nostalgic items.
       "Te stone recalls faithfully every two-legged and four-legged walker
of the street," the turbaned speaker said. "And it remembers, from the
underside also, the jeweled sky of eighty thousand nights. It's a very
talkative old stone, and it is talking to our experts and their instruments
at this instant."
       The speaker had two large and complex shining blue eyes. They may
have had special, small, remembering stones set into their irises. Many of
the Royal Pop people had this double-irised look to their eyes. "What about
the stones that look in the other direction?" asked a person who was not a
full member of the Royal Pop Historians and Flesh Weeders. "Are there any
stones whose patinas have recorded future events?"
       "There are stones whose living surfaces and depths reveal events in
every direction," the speaker said. "There are not any 'future' events.
'Future' is only the name of a putative direction so designated by those who
have lost their directions. Oh certainly, it is quite easy to lift
transparencies and tracings and reproductions of what are commonly called
future events. All common stones will serve for all purposes, but
exceptional stones are needed to give fine and minute service. Those that
record the best from all directions are the half gem or gim crack stones,
the spars, the garnets, the imperfect crystals. But those that focus more
aptly on the direction misnamed 'future' are the hard prismatic crystals,
The small and resonant crystals of the early-day radio had part of this
directional secret. The quartzes and natural rock crystals, the
sphere-formed crystals, all real crystals can see quite cleirly into the
future direction. These sphere-formed rock crystals that are tuned to the
historical future direction are known commercially as 'crystal balls'."
       "Can patinas be peeled from anything except stones?" a non-Pop
asked.
       "Yes, certainly," the speaker said. "Wood, is a short term
storehouse of historical treasures (for no more than four or five
centuries), is often superior to stone. Finished and furnitured woods in
particular will project these recalls at unexpected moments. These are the
ghosts of the last seven centuries, the ghosts of old houses. And the term
'table talk' sometimes has the special meaning of talking tables. Planchette
and ouija are dull forgeries of such talking tables, but they are made out
of genuine remembering and projecting wood. And old tables become accepted
members of old families. What child, playing under an old wooden table, has
not heard old family secrets whispered by the familiar (which is to say
'long in the family') wood?
       "But still better, and more recording, than either stone or wood,
for very short pcriods (a couple of decades), is undisturbed leaf mold."
       "Hey, Duff, let's slip off for a while," a small group of young and
talented members of the Royal Pop People propositioned Melchisedech Duffey.
"They'll not miss you for the host for a while, and they'll not miss us
either."

      2
      "The most dedicated rationalist, if he is honest, must admit that
there are intervals that go against the grain, that go against reason. There
are happenings, usually of quite short duration, that simply are not
acceptable in the rationalist framework. I myself have experienced several
such unaccountable if unbelievable intervals. Two were of such very short
duration that they did not take up any discernable time; they were like
flashes. Of the longer states, one was of three minutes, and one was of five
minutes.
      "And the Most Puzzling of them was for twenty-four hours."
      [Absalom Stein. Notes on the Argo Cycle.]

      "Quick thunder wounds the fatted town
      That Copiously bleeds:
      And fruitless growths come tumbling down
      And even human weeds."
      [Finnegan. Road Songs.]

      "Done", said Duffey to the Younger Pop People. "I always said that
if I could find a better place than mine or better company than my own, I
would join it for as long as I was icceptcd. You look just liku the young
people who could show me wonders in my own town."
      They were out of the buildings and into the streets. And right next
to Duffey's establishments was Bayougoula Park, and it hadn't been there
yesterday. Hell, it hadn't been there an hour ago. There had previously been
some buildings there, but they wouldn't now be called to mind. Zabotski half
believed that the missing buildings had belonged to him, but he couldn't say
for sure. Well, there was a new park there now. It was like a blessing.
      "But it isn't a new park, Duffey," said Absalom Stein who had been
pacing there in edgy thought. "I've just been checking the records, and it's
been here for more than a hundred years. That's what the people at the park
department tell me. There's something nervous about those people. They act
like zombies, and they say things as though somebody were making them say
them. And there's something contrived about the park itself."
      "Don't look a gift colt in the mouth, Absalom," the hoyden told him.

      "Or it'll crop you like a weed," the child hero said. "The thunder
colts can crop the weeds that are too tough for the weed hackers to cut. Are
you a tough one, Duffey?"
      There couldn't ever have been more than two or three narrow
buildings in that place, but the park was not narrow in any sense. It
remembered all the things that a park should remember and it made room for
them.
      There were graceful benches made out of redwood, or perhaps out of
red plum wood. There were tables and standing sideboards, and little
barbecue ovens for the people to use. There were the big trees, liveoaks,
gum tupelos, royal walnuts, red cedar, pop elm trees. There were several
dead and dying animals there, their flesh turning into rubber or plastic or
styrofoam as they expired. There were several dead and dying people there
also, but they lacked conviction and reality.
      "Duffey, Duffey, help me," one of the dying people said. "I'm
Moriarty. Help me."
      "You look a bit like the Moriarty I knew," Duffey admitted, "but you
look more like a bad joke than like a person. Young people, are the
broken-up animals and the broken-up people on the same order?"
      "Oh yes. The broken-up people often collapse into their own
interiors when they die," the child-hero said. "But often they collapse into
their animal totem forms first. So when one of the animals, or one of the
persons, tells you that he is someone you used to know, he is probably
telling you right. But you will notice that none of them has real flesh,
except for a hunk here and there. Most such people were never real, not
authentic or meaningful. They are the first ones that the weed choppers chop
down. We wonder that your city has kept so many of them so long. Every place
else in the world has gotten rid of all of theirs several weeks ago."
       There was a tumbling and noisy fountain in the middle of the park.
It was full of green turtles and bull frogs, whistling blue fish, and carp.
There were conches and oysters. There were alligators that would snap up
alive any child or dog that came too near and had reactions too slow. The
park policed its own. There were horned cattle there. And there were some of
the crazy and splendid thunder colts.
       But natural beauties are not enough for a park. It must have the
amenities also. Some of the new pop persons had the amenities, but most of
the old people were frightened and skittish and had no amenities at all. But
then there came three old (and ever-new) people who were the amenities
themselves: Mary Virginia Schaeffer, Margaret Stone and Salvation Sally.
They came to see what was all this talk about there being a new park right
around the corner from them. These were the ladies from the Pelican Press.
       Also in the park, there were the inanimate or only partly animate
amenities. There were arcades there, gazebos and kiboshes and kiosks,
taverns and tabernacles and all other sorts of tents and pavillions. There
were shops there, news stands and confectioners stands, open-air cafes, a
little bandstand where some fellows drummed and tootied and tinkled.
       "There is a sort of show being staged here," Mary Virginia said.
This is 'Act Two, Scene 1', a Park. People coming and going. Remnants of
people and animals dying. A fountain playing in the sun, laughter and
pleasure everywhere. It is all contrived and set up. I like it, of course. I
like almost all theatrical scenes. It has a bright and flashy face. I don't
understand it, but I know that it isn't quite real."
       "Yes, it is real," the child hero insisted. Really, it was time for
the child hero to leave off being a child. He was old enough to be a man.
"But many things that you thought were real, Mary Virginia, they aren't," he
said. "You're wide open yourself, and it isn't so easy to change your
apperceptions. And your town, here in its old and historic part, was never
quite real. Haven't you ever seen the gaps in its reality?"
       "Not very many gaps, not very big ones," Mary Virginia said. "It's
all real except for these new morning parks, and you new morning people. Are
you real, or will you melt away like the dew in another hour of sunlight?"
       "We are real," the hoyden said. "it is the old people who are
melting away in the sun. You can see remnants of them scattered around. We
are real. You're still on trial."
       "What do you think of these new-old parks and people, Duffey?" Mary
Virginia asked.
       "Oh, they represent the bright and shining obverse side of the
Fortean coin or the Fortean universe," he said. "I've always known that the
coin had two sides. The reverse, the best known side of the Fortean
medallion, was always dingy and dim, poltergeistic and irregular, cheesy,
aye, and stupid. But this new side of it is fine and excitiiig. If things
must be Fortean, let them be bright and shining Fortean. The parks are
misplaced, of course. They do not belong here at all, But let us enjoy
them."
       "Forget about the morning parks," the child hero said. "We've told
you that they're real. Think about this art of your town that is several
hundred years old. Is it real, or his it always been a fraud? Will it stand
the test of historical evidence? Have you ever wondered where the people got
all that iron for the wrought iron work here? They were very prodigal with
it. But this was a pretty primitive Louisiana it the time ascribed for the
constructions... And the workmanship of the old iron balconies is no way
primitive. It's decadent rather. But there was no iron available here.
Hardly any stone; nothing except wood. It isn't real iron." "Oh bedamned
with this jabber!" Mary Virginia exploded. "It's real enough."
       "Have you ever wondered where they got all the stones for the stone
buildings?" the Countess asked. That countess was pert with many generations
of pertness in her. She was quite young. Likely she was still a teenager.
She had the easy cruelty of a member of a very old and very civilized
family. "Really, there was never any stone on these mud flats, and there was
not a quarry within sixteen hundred miles. The stones of these old buildings
around here, they aren't real stones."
      Mary Virginia and the others had to laugh at this line of nonsense
that these Royal Pop People were pushing on them. All of them were drinking
Shining Mountain Beer now. The brewery was right across the street from the
park, but it hadn't been there yesterday. Or, if it had been, it had been
passing itself off as some other kind of building.
      "They've kept the taste," Margaret Stone said. "I recognize the
taste. But maybe they've changed the name of it. Does anybody remember what
the name of it was yesterday? Not Shining Mountain, no."
      "There are two further proofs that your town is mostly unreal," the
hoyden was saying. Zabotski joined them about then. He had a puzzled look,
but he still felt that he was supposed to own the land that Bayougoula Park
was reposing on. "Have you heard about the Black Sea Disasters?" he asked.
He was wearing one of those new badges 'It's a question of your survival:
are you splendid enough?'
      "It has no mountains, and it almost hasn't any thunder," the hoyden
was continuing despite the Zabotski interruption, "and these are two of the
things by which the validity or a locale and a history can be checked. A
place must have mountains and it must have thunder, or it isn't real."
      "Certain tropic lands naive no thunder at all," said the learned
Stein who had arrived to the park and the party of them.
      "Those same tropic lands have no history at all either," the hoyden
said.
      "Who is that very young man who looks so much like Finnegan?"
Salvation Sally asked them as she pointed to a bugle-nosed young man who was
coming dangerously close to the alligators in the fountain. "I'm spooked, I
tell you. I thought that he was Finnegan indeed. I think it is his ghost."
      "It does look like Finnegan, when he was a very young man," Duffey
said. "He is the young painter who paints very like Finnegan in his orange
period. Yes, he could almost be a younger ghost or fetch of Finnegan."
      "Finnegan always did have a lot of fetches," Margaret Stone
remembered.
      "Mountains and thunder, they are the test," the hoyden was
insisting. "Oh, the newness of mountains! Mountains are the most astonishing
happenings in recent history. There weren't any mountains at all until quite
recently. And we hadn't full dimensions on this world until they were raised
up."
      "What are you New Young Royal Pop girls talking about?" Melchisedech
Duffey demanded. "There were always mountains. How would there not be
mountains?"
      "Duffey, you are so old that you have to remember when there weren't
any mountains," the hoyden challenged. "Or maybe there was just one. But it
wasn't a very high mountain, whatever you may have heard to the contrary.
That's why there wasn't really very much water required for the water epic.
It was all a flatlander world then." "Are not all of you young people, the
hoyden, the countess, are you not all in the big Horse Opera at the Street
Opera House tonight?" Mary Virginia said. "the play bills have been up for a
month, but I just recognized you as the people shown on them now."
      "Why, of course," the young countess said. "We are the splendor and
the interest of the horse opera. We are spectacular in it right up till the
slaughter starts. Then we let other people be spectacular for a while."
      "And this mountains and thunder nonsense that you're talking, that's
part of the presentation, isn't it? This is just advertising talk, yes?"
      "Come to the show, lady, come to the show," the child hero said.
"The Horse Opera celebrates the wiping out of a last stronghold of the old
and human way. It represents it, and it is it. But we will not tell it now.
Come to the show. We give away lots of free things here, but we don't give
away everything."
      Black people of the town strode by wearing the new badges 'Are You
Splendid Enough?' They looked more splendid than they usually did, but they
also looked doubtful. Intercoastal Canal People were also wearing the
badges, and splendid people they are not. There were other people of
unspecified sorts, all trying to get behind the badges before it was too
late.
      The dying people and the dying animals were about gone. As the life
left their members, their flesh turned into plastic or plywood or papier
mache, and then they might be regarded as no more than leftover carnival
debris.
      "How does it happen?" Margaret Stone asked.
      "They lost faith in themselves and in their flesh," the countess
said. "That dragon there had the most faith. It was a human, and then it
collapsed into the dragon totem as it died. Most of its flesh is turned now,
but not all."
      Margaret Stone bought a box of crackers at one of the kiboshes. She
fed the crackers to the dying dragon. Most of the body of this biodegradable
dragon had already been transmuted into papier mache. But some flesh
remained.
      "That one low mountain that they had at first was the Mountain of
the Commandments," the hoyden said. "Notice the number ten in all of the
versions. That meant that this god had ten fingers and ten toes. He was an
anthropomorphic god. Had he been a god in the image of the splendid people,
he would have given twelve commands for his twelve fingers. Had he been an
abstract or transcendent god, then he would have given an abstract or
transcendent number of commands.
      "It was the same little mountain that they used in Greece both
earlier and later. They played King-of-the-Mountain on it. They played
Titans and Thunderguns. They played Giants and Jovians. They had small
caliber thunder then, but none of the big stuff.
      "Very often the people put rollers under the mountain and rolled it
around to the different countries, since there was only the one little
mountain in the world. The name of that first mountain was Ziggarat. It was
a prefiguration of Ararat. Now there are more and more mountains. There's
supposed to be a new one appearing this morning."
      "What's the real story, guys?" Salvation Sally asked.
      "Oh these Morning People, these Royal Pop People (we're all turning
into them, you know, and I hate it) were around for a long time," Stein
said, "and they were a nuisance. A demiurge put them all to sleep on a
mountainside and told them that they must sleep till he called them with
thunder of a certain tone. Then, a few millennia later, the demiurge forgot
about that and used that tone of thunder for something else. The Royal Pop
People woke up at the tone of the thunder (it was only the other day) and
the first thing that they saw was the mountain they were on. They thought
that the mountan was their mother and that they were thunder dimension
people. That's all there was to it."
      "Is it possible that you speak truth when you intend to joke?" the
child hero cried. "We are the thunder dimension people. The Mountain is our
mother. It was only the other day that we woke up. We aren't fully awake
yet, but we're in a fever to resolve it all. We're in a hurry to get rid of
the flesh weeds and the remnants and see who are the thunder people and who
are not."
      An alligator was eating a little boy who had come too near to the
fountain. The sight of this nauseated Mary Virginia, and indeed it wasn't a
pleasant thing to watch.
      "I know that it isn't real," she slid, "but who is the illusion
master who puts these things on? Is it possible that there is some meaning
to it? Or is it just a piece of unfortunate clownishness?"
       "Oh, the alligator eating the little boy is real enough," the child
hero said. "And the little boy was real once. But then he failed it. That's
the thing that will happen to at least half of you here present. You'll be
found short, and you'll be destroyed. It's best for all. Some simple persons
who have lost their shine will be eaten by the alligators here, and by other
creatures in other parks. Other people, a bit larger and older, will be
destroyed by the fire drakes when the people prove to be inferior. And then
there arc certain bright and strong, but crookedly talented weeds. Even the
flesh weed eater will not be able to do away with some of them. They must be
destroyed by the thunder colts. Two will be working side by side at the
harvest. And one will be taken and one will be left.
       "But the little boy will be gone for good, just as soon as the --
Yes, there goes the last bit of him down the gullet. And his puzzled parents
will not even remember his name. Look at his mother there. She knows that
she brought something or someone to the park with her, but she can't
remember what or who it was."
       "Come along Stein," Duffey said. "We're too close to it. Let's stand
off from it a little ways where the dazzle won't be in our eyes. We can
solve these puzzles. It comes to my mind that both of us are good at
puzzles, and Zabotski here also. There's a group of master illusionists in
town."
       "I believe that they are a group of master disillusionists," Stein
said. "They destroy the sustaining illusions of the people, and then they
move in and take them over or demolish them. Yes, let us withdraw from their
influence and take a good look at things."
       "Goodbye, you men," Margaret Stone wished them on their way. "Be
splendid!"
       Duffey and Stein and Zabotski all went over to Stein's apartment.
There was always a lot of high-class sanity at Stein's. The three men looked
at each other. They laughed. They set themselves down to solve some doubtful
happenings that had made a shambles of the morning and of the city.
       "We all know that building after building after cluster of buildings
cannot disappear overnight and be replaced by pleasant parks that are
curiously stylized," Stein said. "We must now bring reason to bear. There is
an illusion working in all of this, and we must see through it. They are all
dislocated scenes that we have watched this morning. But they may be only
halves of a binocular vision, and they may come into clear focus if we are
able to find the other halves. These things are something like the
aberration that I describe in my paper on..."

      3

      The revolt of the failing-apart people began about eleven o'clock in
the morning. It hadn't a very strong basis as to tactics and strategy, but
it had a lot of burning resentment banked up.
      But the non-splendid people, the unrevolutionary old-line humans,
had no good starting place. They were being assaulted from the inside and
from the outside, and they could not come at their opponents at all. Most of
the old-liners had iwoken that morning feeling that they were afflicted with
terminal diseises, diseases that would finish them off within short hours,
that would rot them inside and turn them into trash.
      Some leaders tried to come forward and tried to lead them, solid
people with names like Callagy and Fitzherbert and Chastellain and Faucher
and Panebianco and Cassady and Loubet. These were leaders who swore that
they would not change and would not give up while they had a quart of blood
or a pound of styrofoam left in them. But these leiders failed the old
people in two ways.
      Some of them did change greatly, in spite of their swearing that
they would not. They changed greatly and suddenly, they ate fine bread and
went over to the fine people, they became splendid and they joined the
Splendid Royal Pop People. And may the green grass never grow on their fine
graves!
      And others of the leaders died the most withering deaths imaginable,
and their dying came within minutes of their taking leadership. The trash
death came so weirdly that it was as if the victim was shot in the paunch
with an exploding shell. It seemed that this shell laid them open (they were
quickly laid open, that's sure) and filled them with expanding trash that
absorbed their entrails and turned them all into plastic and styrene and
papier mache and pieces of all-purpose willy board. And so in their deaths
they were derided by those they had tried to lead, since it was revealed
that they were full of trash and had likely been full of trash all along. It
was ridiculous that they should die of such ludicrous wounds (whether of
internal or external origin); it was ridiculous that they should turn into
trash. But how is such a thing to be battled?
      Many of the stubborn old humans gathered together and holed up
together in certain strong buildings, swearing that they would defend
themselves and each other from all assaults, human, anti-human, pop-royal,
bodily, phenomena], mental, psycho, ghostly, Fortean, hellish, inexplicable,
unholy.
      They dug themselves in and formed strong pockets of people. They
united their minds and resolves, so that the assaulting influences could not
overpower them individually. So the pop people would hunt them out and break
up their gatherings.
      The hunting out of the holed-up old humans became good sport of the
royal-pops and their recent recruits. Mtry Virginia Schaeffer, Salvauon
Sally, and Margaret Stone joined in these exterminaung hunts, though we'd
have bet that they wouldn't. It came about this way:
      These three persons of the female persuasion had gone around the
park to Duffey's bijou, and through it to his auditorium. They believed this
place of Duffey's to be one of the sources of confusion in the City. The
Pop-Historical sessions were going great. The speaker now was Hugh de
Turenne of Xavier College there in the City. Hugh seemed to be a genuine
member of the Inner Royal Pop Historians. And he was speaking thus: "Yes,
the Black Sea had been obliterated this morning, with all waters and shores
of it, with all people and setungs of it, and soon with all memories of it.
After today we will never mention it again except to say 'What Black Sea?'
if someone is so gauche as to mention it. Himself wanted it destroyed, and
Himself wanted it to be completely forgotten. That this is done is a measure
of the power of Himself. He wanted it obliterated because he had been
imprisoned on its shores, and he washed that distasteful episode to be
expunged completely. And he wanted it obliterated because Colchis was on the
Black Sea shore and had always been a bastion of strength of the Argo
Forces. It was believed that some of the strength of The Argo, and of The
Fleece, would go out of them if their geological base were destroyed.
      "It now becomes the case that the Black Sea never existed, just as
it becomes the else that several cities of renowned names -- Athens,
Jerusalem, Rome -- never existed either."
      "Be noetic," said one person who claimed the floor to speak for a
moment, "but are you sure that those cities never existed?"
      "Of course I'm sure of it," Hugh de T. said. "These were names in
legend, and now they don't serve any further purpose so we won't use them.
Oh, we are not fetish-ridden. The names may still be used in some
connections. Black Sea Sturgeon may still be spoken of, though most of those
sturgeon come from the Muk Muk Sea in Turkestan. 'Black Sea' brand is a
little bit like 'Golden Mountain' brand, or some such. Persons do put what
they consider to be catchy names on commercial products. Perhaps Cyrus
Roundhead here, who is art expert on those old blinking-out legends, would
like to say a few words on the disappearances."
      "Ah yes," Cyrus Roundhead agreed, clicking a second and third lens
into his monocle to give him enough distance vision to see across the room.
"Be noetic, everybody! Ah yes, the Saga of the Sea that never was, the
legend that took on a life of its own. Isostatic analysis had determined
long ago that there had to be a fairly high land there, rather than a low
sea. The world would have known the difference otherwase, by the difference
of sectional weight, if there really had been a sea there. And people
thought that they saw the sea, that they lived upon it and fished in it,
that they sailed on it and had habitations and industries on its shore. But
they were wrong. Now it is gone, and with its going, we are also rid of the
legends of that great Prison and its great prisoner, and also of Colchis and
of the influenual Golden Fleece which was supposed to be there."
      "Oh plague, take the Black Sea and all its caviar!" shouted a
non-pop man who wore a badge that read 'Ride it out: they've got to keep
some of us'. "You are saying that Rome and Athens and Jerusalem do not
exist? I'm aghast."
      "It served the mordant humor of the Etruscans (who were a pop
people) to bandy the name 'Roman' about," Cyrus said. "It referred to a
desutute neighborhood of hillbillies who scratched out (literilly) an
existence in the hounddog hills above the Tiber swamps. But there was
nothing there large enough to be called a town."
      "But what of the famous name Roman emperors?" a man with a nose on
him like the knobbiest Roman of them all asked. "They must have existed."
They were too well-known to be made-up."
      "Some of them were the names of music halls and Vaudeville
performers," Cyrus Roundhead said. "Some of them were the names of mascots
of the army regiments. Some of them were nothing it all."
      "What about Athens?" John the Greek shouted. He was the owner and
operator of 'John the Greek's Famous French Restaurant'. "I come from there.
I lived there till I was thirteen yeirs old."
      "Ancient Greece was made up of a blasted inner core named 'Hellas'
and five concentric rings about it named Aetolia, Thessaly, Epirus,
Macedonia, and Thrace. The only part of it of any importance was Macedonia
which was made up of strong and warlike men who, in consequence of their
being strong and warlike, also became rich. Then, being not quite complete
in their capabiliues, they took one step backwards and became nouveau riche.
So they decided to give themselves a culture, a portfolio of the growth
arts, and a history. They had to make a past for themselves, and they had
nothing but imagination to make it out of. So these prideful Macedonians
created the legend of an old and heroic Greece. And they invented a fanusy
city, Athens (the name is Atlantean originally), and they developed a
fiction form of Athenian Romances and Athenian Novels. But there was never
any Athens in Greece."
      "How about Jerusalem then?" in unsatisfied person asked Roundhead.
      "The name dates only to the first part of the present century or the
last part of the previous one," Roundhead said. "The name was used in a
promtional real estate venture by the Turks, but it never caught on except
in fantasy. It was to be built near various ruined cities: the Jewish city
Jebus, the Greek city Solyma, the Idumaean city Hiero-Solyma or Holy Solyma,
the Roman city Aelia Capitolina, the Syrian city Uris Lem, the Arabian city
El Quds. But there was never any city named Jerusalem, except in the
imagination. Bonds were sold to begin construction, but the builders went
bankrupt before ever beginning it.
      "But where were the Jews?" the now doubly unsatified person roared
out.
      "Oh, most of the Jews were in Babylon. They still are. Even today,
you can dig down in the ruins of old Babylon and you will find the ruins of
old Jews. But we will speak no more about the three imaginary cities. We
will speak no more at all for right now. One hour of talking and then one
hour of action is a good rule. Let us go out and see about the slaughter of
non-splendid remnants. Weapons are available. Take what you wish."
      So Mary Virginia, Salvation Sally, and Margaret Stone took weapons
and went out into the city with splendid and semi-splendid persons. They
took to the roofs and balconies and the iron ladders of the town. The young
royal pop people were very agile, and the new pops from the city there kept
up with them. All the newly splendid townspeople found a sudden competence
and strength and speed in themselves. They found the thunder axe an easy
weapon to master. They quickly learned the trick of hacking fraudlent
persons and structures to death.
      "This is illusion," Mary Virginia said to Margaret Stone and to
Salvation Sally. "Just keep saying to yourself 'This is illusion'." If it
hasn't been illusion, none of them would have been able to climb so wildly.
      "Ah, we've finished with clearing out this building of its nothing
people, have we not?" Cyrus Roundhead asked as they made their rounds.
      "Child hero and myself cleared out the third floor," Salvation Sally
announced. "The other floors should already have been taken care of."
      "Then we remove the structure by deflation," Roundhead said. "We let
the air out of the building, and we deflate it down to nothing. Do not be
surprised, you who are on your first safari of this sort. There wasn't
really any building here; there was only the illusion of one. There wasn't
any iron. There wasn't any stone." The building was quickly deflated down to
absolute trash, old cardboards and old papers. The wind blew the papers
away, and with them it blew away all memories of the building. By and by, in
a couple of hours, a park would begin to grow there.
      Breaking up the faces and bodies of the pseudo-persons in the
buildings was a queasy business. A little blood usually came out of them,
but alwlys more trash and fragments of plaster than blood. Some of the
quasi-persons were even wearing those new 'Are You Splendid Enough?' badges,
but the answer for them was 'No!' No, they weren't. They were not splendid
enough, or they wouldn't have been fingered for obliteration.
      "Some of them don't want to go," Mary Virginia cried from a
crumbling building where she was deflating false people. "Some of them
protest and they fight. Yes, and they bite like hell. If they never existed
at all, where do they get the will to protest so violently when we put and
end to their fictions?"
      "You must insist that they go," said Roundhead, "or we will insist
that you go in their places. It's fair that the persons having the least
reality should go."
      Yes, some few of the persons and creatures and effects that were
being obliterated by the thunder axes and other weapons did not accept their
obliteration willingly. They fought, though they had little to fight with.
They hissed their hatred. From looking like people they came to look like
cur dogs and sick spirits. They were being dislocated from their pieces and
forms. "It's you who are destroying our houses and our bodies," some of
these un-creatures spit at Mary Virginia, and she could not tell whether
they were cur dogs or snakes or persons.
      "Why are we destroying these persons and things whose only fault is
that they are unimportant?" Mary Virginia asked as she destroyed a
half-grown lout or boy of the pseudo-people, the un-splendids.
      "Why? Oh, because we are important and we must be intolerant of
anything that is not," Roundhead said. "We destroy them because they seem to
exist, and so seeming they dilute the whole worth of the world."
      "Come, quickly, quickly!" the Countess was crying as she swooped
down on them from an iron ladder out of the sky. "There are great numbers
of pseudo-people, of human remnants, or morphic dragons, of papier mache
fire lizards who have barricaded themselves in that building there. They say
that they will resist forever. I never heard people make such a fuss about
dying. Bring thunder axes, bring lightning rams. We'll route them out!"
      Many meeungs and conventions do not provide such interesting safaris
for their folks as do the Royal Pop Historians.
      4

      Meanwhile, back in Stcin's apartment:
      "Whatever we do most accord with scientific methods and processes,"
Stein said.
      "Always some of us (you and I, Stein, for example) have known that
we were of the elite," Melchisedech Duffey was saying, "that we were
special, that we were -- well -- splendid. And always others of us (Zabotski
here, for instance) have known that they were not these things. But now it
is presented to us, both inwardly and outwardly, that we have become two
different species. Almost none of this presentation has been on a conscious
level, but now it comes to a point where we must face it consciously."
      "I don't understand you, Duffey. I said scientific methods and
processes," Stein protested, "But not scienufic-accepted content. That would
be to bow too deeply to science. Much has been made about scienufic content
of subject matter, but it's all nonsense. 'Scientific' means simply
'knowing'. And one must knowingly handle the unknown as well as the known.
We go into the unknown, which is to say, the unscientific, waters now."
      "What you're saying, Absalom, is that you don't know what to think
about these tacky things any more than anyone else does," Zabotski
interrupted.
      "No. I, we, don't know what to think about them, not yet. But
perhaps we can know how to think abOut them. Let its see if we can make a
working sketch of that 'how'."
      "Balderdash!" Zabotski shouted. "I could set you straight, but I
won't."
      "It's true that we've changed," Duffey was saying. "We are not the
same sort of people that our fathers (of which I had none) were. But have we
changed so completely as to become a new species? Or were some of us always
of a separate species? Yes, let us investigate this in the tradition of the
great, freewheeling, nontraditional scientists, from the viewpoint of an
O'Connell or a Field or a Watson or a Spraggett."
      "We have first to state our problem," Stein said. "What is our
problem or question?"
      "Our question, our eternai question," said Duffey, "is 'how does the
world get along so well with so many things always going wrong with it?' A
puzzler."
      "You think that the world goes well?" Zabotski asked with a
hang-jawed expression.
      "it goes beautifully, man, beautifully!" Duffey beamed. "It somehow
avoids being choked in its own trash and fatuity. Let us consider whether
the strange things that have been happening in town today are part of what
keeps the world running so well. Or does it run so amazingly well because
there are so many of us amazing people in it? Let us ask this fairly, as
great scientists like Churchward and Pauwels and Senday and Allegro would
ask it."
      "Why not ask whether the strange happenings are happening at all,"
Zabotski asked. "Why not ask whether you are amazing at all, or whether you
are overtaken by an attack of bilious euphoria. I could probably tell the
answer if someone would ask me the question."
      "Zabotski is right," Stein asserted. "Let's find out whether these
things are really happening. I don't believe that they are. They're not
plausible. How's about a large dragon turning into papier mache as he dies,
and still able to eat crackers with his dying head? That's what the kid said
was happening, the kid that just ducked in here for a minuCe the kid that
looks like Finnegan. These happenings are in the balance, but they're not
fixed yet."
      "I believe that all historical happenings must be chemically fixed
like memory fixes. If they are not, then they haven't happened. Encountered
phenomena are first recorded as electrical impulses in the brain. Then,
after a few seconds or even minutes, they receive a chemical fix and they
become permanently acccssible memories. But if the recording does not
receive the chemical fix, then it is forgotten. It will not be subject to
any kind of recall at all. In such cases, it is more than metaphor to say
that the event did not happen.
      "So it may be with certain events that have been 'happening' in our
city today. So it is with contingent events in every place every day. If the
events turn out to be transitory, then they will escape instrumental notice
as well as mental recording. There have been, for me, some very hazy
unhappenings today. They fade, they weaken, they unhappen. Soon, possibly,
they will be gone."
      "They will not be gone before tonight's presentation at the Decatur
Street Opera House," Zabotski stated. "Let them count the dead after that is
over with. Then we may be able to say whether the things happened or not."
      "It's like the poltergeist stuff, like the saucer-riding stuff, like
the hairy-giant stuff," Duffey said. "A dozen times as many of such things
are first observed as will go into permanent report or permanent memory.
With many of them, it is the case that while they are happening it one end
they are unhappening at the other. And if they finally come unhappened, then
they become unremembered also. They are like daytime dreams, like skylarks,
like walkabouts. It is only by accident that a person remembers one out of
many such dreams when he is jarred back into awareness. But with the walking
and talking daytime dreams, our imaginations are outside of our heads; just
as they are all inside of our heads with the nightime dream. If by accident
we happen to remember one of our daytime dreams after we are jirred back to
comparative awareness, then that thing will really have happened. And here
is the point: it will have happened for everyone as well as for ourself.
      "But if we do not remember it, then it did not happen, not for
ourself, not for anybody. What then is the result when one person remembers
it clearly, and all others forget it completely? Or when one person forgets
it clearly and all other persons remenber it completely?"
      "The result is group paranoia," Stein said. "It's common. And such
splitting may be a common cause of it."
      "But I will remember these things just out of orneriness," Zabotski
said. "No one can persuade me to forget any part of them. I will drive the
whole town bugs either way. If other people remember them, then the things
have to have happened: and they will be enough to drive anybody bugs. If the
other people do not remember them, I still will remember. This brings on the
paranoia, and that is another name for bugs. I have you all either way. I do
this because I am an ornery man."
      "I wonder how many of these potential happenings are weighed in the
happening balance every day?" Stein asked. "There may be dozens."
      "There may be millions," Duffey said. "Any daytime dream of any
person could become real and of actual occurrence, if it were sufficiently
insisted upon. I believe that there are unbodied syndromes of possible
events roaming the world like packs of dogs, looking for places to feed and
live. And I believe that a particularly grotesque nexus of such unhappenings
is trying to take up residence in our city today. Ah, how would all those
great and swinging scientists think about this thing? How would Braden? How
would Cayce? How Would Velikovsky? How would Otto?
      "The syndrome has survived for some hours already. People at this
moment are murdering other people by the hundreds in our town, and it is
only because those other people are not splendid enough. It's like an
euphoric dream in which one says 'I'm dreaming, it doesn't count, they're
not real bodies, it isn't real blood'. But what if it is real? The new
species, it we have become a new species in significant numbers, is
essentially euphoric. I know that I've become euphoric beyond all reason.
But is this horrifying stuff that is lurking behind the euphoric veil really
happening? No, not yet. But, at this very moment, it's in the balance
whether it will ]lave happened or not." "Easy, Duffey, easy!" Stein said.
"You'll not give in, Zabotski?"
      "I'll not give in. I'll remember it and I'll make it happen. I'll
teach them to push things like that. And I'll be killed for it, and all of
my sort will be killed. That's all right. What effect will it have on you
when we are gone? A cramping knot in the middle of you that you can't untie,
that's what will happen. Oh, you'll remember us all right. I always wanted
to drive a whole town and a whole world bugs."
      "Zabotski, if what we're thinking is correct, then some one person
in this town, some deformed dreamer, did happen to have this obstreperous
dream first. And he also had the obstreperous desire to make this dream come
true, out of, out of plain --"
      "Out of plain orneriness, Absalom, that's the word," Zabotski said.
      "Zabotski couldn't have done it," Duffey insisted. "He hasn't enough
imagination. He's a wan-wit. He's an old-remnant human."
      "Zabotski could have done it!" Zabotski swore.
      "Was that one person you?" Stein asked with spitting harshness. "Are
you the deformed dreamer?"
      "I'm the one," Zabotski maintained, "or I'm one of them. I have fun
with it. The world-changers have been gnawing on the edges of the world like
rats. I am helping to set out in bright daylight what has been lurking in
their heads and intents. I kill a couple thousand people I don't like maybe.
But no, the ones who will get killed are the ones I do like. No matter. It
has to be done. The business has to be clarified. I draw a picture of the
world and I ask 'Is this the way you want it? All right, I'll fight against
the vile thing, and I won't let it go and hide."
      "There's a man up on Common Street who claims that he started it
all," Finnegan said.
      "Oh then, I suppose he did," Zabotski admitted. "But I got onto the
idea pretty quick, and I joined it with quite a few others who wanted to see
it dragged out into the open."
      So that was that.
      "I wonder why such a thing never happened before," Stein muttered.
      "Take a look back through history," Melchisedech Duffey said.
"Consider the hundreds and hundreds of things that couldn't possibly have
happened, and yet they did happen. Even after the history has been edited
and cleaned up and most carefully phrased, it remains that many of the
unlikely things did happen. There have been deformed dreamers all over the
place. Oh, how would all those tall and talented scientists think their way
out of this one? How would Ouspensky think? How would Patten? I low would
Van Daniker or Ostrander? How would great Fort think about all of this?"
      "Duffey, now that we are on strangge things, just how old are you?"
Stein asked. (The question has come up several times lately.) The Thunder
Colts recognize you as somebody very old. What is the answer? Is Zabotski
here part of the answer?"

      5

      '...It is more of a hope than a promise. For four hundred years we
have gone to the theatre in the hope of a worthy play, and it has not
appeared: and we have gone without even an authoritative promise that it
will come, as we have promises for the larger things like redemption and
salvation. And yet no person cut watch a curtain rise without the hope of
great things. There is no art from which so much is expected after so many
disappoinments.'
      [Patrick Stranahan. Archipelago.]

      'And that twenty-four hour long, not-rationally-acceptible
presentation comprised the last twenty-four hours that I spent in the old
human context. How quickly we have forgotten that context! How quickly we
have forgotten those who refused to forget it!'
      [Absalom Stein. Notes on the Argo Legend.]

      It's woe to tender fishes all
      Who cannot stand the gaff,
      And helpless folks who fail and fall,
      Not splendid by a half.
      [Finnegan. Road Songs.]

      Mary Virginia Schaeffer was caught up in a horror and revulsion. She
had killed a medium-sized child during the skylarking safari. Then came the
abysmal doubt: 'What if this child was real'?' It looked real. It bled
scarlet stuff with the smell of blood. It did not turn into a poltergeist or
an animal or a puppet as it died. It did not break down into piles of ashes
or trish-barrel trash that would indicate (to a euphoric observer or
effector) that it had been worthless or invalid from the beginning. The
child still had warmth to it, and then it turned cold under her hand.
      "It's as though one should play a hand of 'Lizzie Borden' with the
playing cards," she allocated, "and then go home and find one's parents
killed with in axe. It's is though I should jump rope to a child's chant:
      'Boil my mother in a pot!
      Turn the fire up, hot, hot, hot!'
and then go home and find that my mother was indeed boiled to death. What
devil's cards do I play with? Whose rope do I jump to anyhow?"
      She carried the bloody child in her bosom as if it were it doll. She
cried runny teirs. But they were archaic tears from the old time when both
the occan and the human lacrimae were only half is salty as they later
became. But had a newer and more saltless time come over the world quite
recently?
      "Whatever was the name of that hilarious delusion that we were just
now caught up in so delightfully?" She asked blindly.
      "The name of it was Hell," said somebody who was passing by. Why
should she be shocked on hearing that? It was one of the older sort of
people who said that, and they are likely to say anything.

      "Stein, I have no idea how old I am," Duffey said. "And I don't see
how Zabotski can be part of the answer. He belongs to some other groups. I
used to know how old I was, on two different counts. I used to be well
ordered in my sequences and my lives. That's all gone now. I used to
remember my childhood and my early manhood clearly. Now once again, as it
used to happen in my uncertain moments, I remember half a dozen childhoods
for myself, and they all have the marks of my own fictions all over them.
Now I remember half a dozen different young manhoods for myself. Am I really
named 'Melchisedech, without father, wwithout mother, having neither
beginning of days nor end of life', as Paul writes about me in Hebrews? My
name used to be Michael, once, in one of my versions. What is the advantage
of being Melchisedech?"
      "To be Melchisedech is to be a king," Stein said. "I don't know
about your childhood, Duffey, but when I was a young boy, you were a grown
man, and I considered you to be old. That was in Chicago, and it's likely
the valid version. You remember me there. You remember others there."
      "Yes, but Hans remembers me in the Northland in the same years,"
Duffey said, "and I remember him there. Vincent and Teresa remember me in
St. Louis in those years, though it took a while for their memories to work.
And I remember them. Henry and I mutually remember scenes in rural
Louisiana, he a fat young boy, I a fat man. You eat the fat way in that
Cajun Country. Mary Virginia Schaeffer remembers the in Galveston. And I
remember her and her parents."
      "I remember Duffey here in New Orleans," Finnegan said. "Dotty
remembers him here too." There was something peculiar about Finnegan being
there with them it this time.
       "These are things that the different persons told me separately
without telling the others," Duffey said, "and my own recollections come
separately and disturbingly. Could I have lived so many lives at the same
time?"
       "Well, where do you remember Duffey from, Zabotski?" Stein sensed a
rat.
       "Whenever I want to remember him at, that's where I make him to have
been," Zabotski said.
       "How many pots do you have fingers in, Zabotski?" Stein asked.
"Yah. I low many fingers do I got?" Zabotski held up his two big, Polish
hands. But he dazzled his fingers, so there was no way that anyone could
count them.
       "Zabotski could have nothing to do with my simultaneous lives,"
Duffey said. "He is nothing. He is just a poor old-human person, non-noetic,
non-splendid."

      There were many gruesome happenings into the afternoon and through
the day. There were battles and massacres. But it always ended up with more
disintegrating trash in the streets and lots and shops. Then it was evening.
It was near time to dress for dinner and for the presentation at the Decatur
Street Opera House. That would be quite special. Of course they would have
to go formal. It was that kind of thing. These men didn't go formal more
than once a year. But what was going to be shown happened only once a world.

      Duffey, of course, had every sort of evening clothes for rent over
at his establishments. His 'Imperial Tuxedo Rentals and Gentlemanly
Appointments' had always been a money maker. But the Royal Pop Historians
("Is there really such a group as the Royal Pop Historians?" Duffey had
asked awhile before, "and of what are they royal?") were still holding forth
there, and Duffey didn't want, just now, to run athwart them.
      Finnegan said that he would go and get the evening clothes for
Duffey and Zabotski and himself (Stein, of course, had his own at hand), and
he left to get them.
      He was gone. Then the others looked at each other with clammy
unease. They discovered that they couldn't remember how long Finnegan had
been with them in Stein's apartment. And they didn't know why they hadn't
remembered, until just now when he had walked out of the apartment, that
Finnegan was supposed to be dead. So that couldn't have been Finnegan,
however much like him he seemed.
      "Zabotski!" Stein cried with a real threat in his voice. What could
Zab have to do with this?
      "Yes, I always liked Finnegan more than I liked you others,"
Zabotski said. "I keep dreaming all today that it will be good to have his
company back. Then he is with us and I hardly notice that there's something
oblique about it. I dream a lot of real stubborn dreams today."

      When the man returned with the clothes, however, it was clear that
he wasn't Finnegan. He was the young man whom Stein had dubbed
'Deutero-Finnegan'. He was the young painter around town, the young painter
who sometimes left paintings on consignment at Duffey's place to see if they
might not be sold. He was the young man who resembled Finnegan slightly, and
whose best paintings were more than a little bit like Finnegan paintings
from his orange period.
      But he had spoken somehow as if he were Finnegan. And he had
mentioned Dotty. Dotty had disappeared some years before this young man had
been around there. There was surely something of Finnegan clinging to him.
Finnegan haunted many people with his pervading presence. Could this be
Finnegan's son? No. Finnegan had no sons in the flesh.

      "We will have dinner before the opera," Duffey said. "Some of us
won't be alive afterwards. The Presentation at the Decatur Street Opera
House is billed as an eschatological dram. It will be the end of an affair,
probably the end of the affair.
      "Have we any friends to go with us to a fine dinner at Girardeau's
Irish Restaurant? Nobody does tracings so fine as does Girardeau lately,
though he didn't used to be so grand. Have you noticed how grand all of us
have become since, well, just these last few hours. Except Zabotski, of
course. I mean it. Never have there been so many really grand people in the
world, or in our city, before."
      They walked in their grand get-ups through the streets. Trash men
were loading their scoop trucks again and again with the debris. It was
mostly broken effigics of people and animals that was being loaded into the
trucks: polyvinyl bits, styrofoam bits, clay bits, plastic bits, paperboard
bits, even fleshy and bloody bits. These latter showed signs of twitchy
life. 'Duffey, Duffey, it's me. Alexi Ravel. Help me, help me,' one of the
bloody bits said. Things like that were weird. And sometimes there were
severed fleshy pieces mixed with the general trash -- a leg, a head, a
dripping loin that seemed to be of real flesh and vein and blood. The animal
pieces also came from the destroyed people, it was said. Many of these
disappearing people pass through the animal form on their way back to clay
and trash.
      Duffey, Zabotski, Finnegan-not-Finnegan (the young painter, his real
name was Jacob Sothe), Mary Virginia, Margaret Stone, the Child Hero,
Salvation Sally, the Urchin, the Countess, Absalom Stein, the Royal Pop
Historian named Cyrus Roundhead, maybe some others. They were all together
at that big, plush, oaken table at Girardeau's. This was the number one
table in the front window. They were all splendid and supreme and superb.
They were escharotic and noetic. They were mutated and metamorphosed and
specified (is 'specify' not the word that means to change into a new
species?): they were euphoric and willful and wonderful and transcendent.
      "Only not all."
      There was somebody who said "Only not all", and this indicated that
at least one of them would fail of splendor and would betray all the new and
splendid things and fall back to the old dullness. Well, whoever it was, he
would be done away with this night. "Just what is it that you Royal Pop
Historians are doing to our town, Roundhead?" Stein asked him. "Mostly I
like the effect, but I do have reservations." Things and attitudes were
beginning to clarify themselves.
      "Oh, we're making selective recordings of the last remnants of
mankind, at the same time that we terminate those remnants," Roundhead told
them. "The last pocket of humanity is here in your city. I say 'selective
recordings' for this is very tricky. The records may not be as things
originally were. They will be as we say that things were. Objectivity in
these things is fine, when it is properly directed by ourselves."
      Mary Virginia still had the broken body of the child with her, the
last child that she had killed on safari. She wasn't making quite such a big
thing of it now, but she wasn't quite ready to throw it away either.
      "It's one of the old kind, Mary Virginia," the countess told her.
"It isn't good for anything. Wouldn't be good for anything even if it were
alive. You know what it is, don't you?"
      "I know that it's human," Mary Virginia said. After a while, one of
the waitresses took it from her to throw it on a trash truck. "It's not nice
to have something like that at table," the waitress said. No, that's not
accurate. Mary Virginia refused to give it to the waitress. Margaret Stone
took it from her and said that she would have it thrown away.
      But Margirct lied. She gave it to somebody to bury it.

      "I just remembered that there isn't any Decatur Street Opera House
in this city," Duffey slid with a puzzled grin. "How do I know where it is
then." But you're not supposed to puzzle too much when you're possessed by
Euphoria.
      "I just remembered that there isn't even any Decatur Street in this
town," Mary Virginia Schaeffer said. But they were both wrong.    "Are we
being elegant enough?" Margaret Stone asked. She asked it with a certain
duplicity or irony or bitterness, some such things as the humans used to
have in their speech, things that would soon be gone out of all speech
forever. Duplicity and irony and bitterness are things that simply have no
place in splendid speech.
      "Oh yes. You're in the clear. You're splendid and elegant enough,
Margaret. You'll pass easily," the hoyden said.
      Horse carriages were waiting in the streets outside. They had really
elegant horses on somc of those carriages. They were thunder colts who are
part artifice, part legend, and part horse.
      But inside, Girardeau's Irish Restaurant had become a work of living
art. Transcendent persons are themselves works of art, and their
transcendence flows from themselves to their groups, and from both to the
surroundings. Any resulting arrangement must of necessity be perfect. Every
person in this great dining hall was so seated as to contribute to the most
striking composition of appearance and voice and aura. Every order that was
served became a part of an olfactory and gustatory orchestration. Each
gesture and nuance of the thousand diners (Girardeau's didn't used to be so
large: only yesterday it could seat only forty-eight persons) was part of a
living panorama and pandemonium. There was nothing accidental about the
deeply textured and strong, musky scene. There would never be anything
'accidental' again. It was all a perfectly-fitted and balanced contrivance,
ruthlessly beautiful... or horrible, depending on the sensibilities. The
only ineptly clashing notes to be met there were provided by the several
persons present who were lacking in the finer sensibilities. There were
Zabotski and a few others. Bloody death be upon them!
      But even the human remnants and preservations might be arranged and
toyed with and enjoyed. They were interesting bric-a-brac in the now
all-ways interesting world. But the human remnants could be much more
handily arranged and enjoyed after they were dead.
      "We are unable to account for the human interval," the man named
Roundhead was saying. "It's like one of those flimsy visions that sometimes
come to one in the moment of waking up, and that then vanish, with full
wakefulnesss. I do not believe that any of us splendid people were ever
human, and yet our bodies appear very similar to the human. But the body is
related to the person and to the species only as the brain is related to the
mind: it is a temporary place for it to live, that is all. It may be that
both humans and ourselves moved into bodies that had been developed by a
still more primitive species. Myself, I can live in a house of almost any
shape. The body isn't important to me. The body and the brain cannot live
without their visitors, the person and the mind. But the converse may not be
true. I believe that a species may travel, like father through many bodies
of various sorts: through that of the totem animal, through that of the
contrived effigy, even through that burlesque thing that is called human."
      "What is wrong with the human thing?" Zabotski flared up.
      "Human mental processes are subject to error, and they are almost
wholly lacking in true kinetic intiotion," Roundhead explained. "Humans have
the sickness of introspection and guilt. They have the sickness of depth,
but sanity is always a surface phenomenon. They have the sickness of
awkwardness, and that is the most incurable sickness of them all. Thunder is
the specific against most of these sicknesses, but who is it who prescribed
it for us? Humans are crude and tedious and full of malodorous trash.
Humans, Zabotski, are like you."
      "What is special about Duffey here?" Stein asked. "I keep feeling
that he had a foot in both of the worlds."
      "So he did. So have you. There is no salvation for those who haven't
it. But there's not much special about him," Roundhead said, "except that he
is the oldest of us bright ones who are here present." "You speak sometimes,
Roundhead, as if you were all very old yourselves, and yet you speak as if
you awoke very recently."
      "Aye, so we did, but from an ancient sleep," Roundhead said. "And we
found that, as in the case of bears, many of us cubs were born during that
sleep. I don't know whether I'm new born or new awakened."
      "And what is, all, unspecial, about Zabotski here?" Stein asked.
      "Oddly enough, Zabotski has been invaluable to us since we have been
in this city," Roundhead said. "He's so damned human! He spots the old
humans for us, dozens and dozens of them. He leads us right to them. Ah, as
soon as we clear out this city, then the old humans will be gone forever,
except for the very few who escape us for a while. But we will track them
all down and sink them. The human ship will be the one that left no wake."
      "Nothing at all to be left?" Stein asked. "Not even the echo of an
empty vain?"
      "Nothing it all left?" Margaret asked. "Not even the perfume of an
empty vase?"
      "Nothing it all left?" Deutero-Finnegan asked. "Not even the guffaw
of an empty gag?"
      Margaret herself, who seldom wore such deceptions, was wearing the
perfume named 'The Last Night of Her Life'. She also wore a sullenness that
was unusual for her. "No wake, no remnant, no impact, no influence, we will
have none of these from the human thing," Roundhead stated resolutely. "We
eradicate the thing completely."
      "How chorasmian of us!" the Countess exclaimed.
      "I think there will be a legacy," Zabotski said sullenly. "I think
that I will be a part of it."
      "So will I be," slid Deutero-Finnegan, the young painter who had
some of the memories and aspects of Finnegan clinging to him.
      "Was humanity really a species apirt from us?" Roundhead talked to
the tableful and to himself. "Or was it a disease that afflicted the world
for a little while? Possibly it was both, a double, donkey-headed
monstrosity. But now it will not be either. When we arrange the human
things, in their histories, even in their possible influence on ourselves,
we will arrange them in our own ways. We will arrange that they drop into
the bottomless void from whence there is no echo."
      Time was running apace. The people begin to enter their horse
carriages to travel to the opera.

      6

      There was a Decatur Street in that city, though there hadn't been
before. It had used to be called Magazine Street, or perhaps Peters Street.
It was fed into by the Grand Concourse through which a thousand horse
carriages came without crowding. There was a Decatur Street Opera House in
that city, one of the memorable opera houses of the world, though the people
there who had been living in New Orleans didn't remember it being there
before. It had a great facade of laughing stone. The special stones set in
that facade recorded the flood tide of arrivals at the Opera. Everything was
of a stylized splendor under the jeweled night sky, and the splendid people
dismounted and went grandly in.
      "Only not all."
      Somebody said "Only not all" because their were tests that would
winnow out a few of those who sought entrance. There were tests to discern
the stubborn old humanness of people going in. Perhaps a dozen out of every
thousand seeking entrance were flagged out by the Kinetic Intuition
Indicators. These flagged-out persons were made to wash their hands in
ashes. If they were persons they would be washing their hands in flame. And
several persons came there of their own will without being compelled by the
Kinetic Intention Indicator.
      Of those first ones who took the test, they failed it every one of
them. They failed it in dirty flames and curling smoke.
      Zabotski, of course! It didn't take the Indicators to spot him. He
was flagged out by everybody's intuition. He was unregenerate, old-line
human, and this was apparent to everybody. He was stubborn and unchanging,
devoid of easy euphoria, devoid of intuition, empty of transcence, and of
cloggy depths.
      The ashes of the tests were in large, bronze basins. They were
recent human ashes, of that very day. They were the strong-smell ashes of
newly burned and very stubborn flesh, of flesh that refused to break down
into trash and trifles is it died. These test ashes were really a little bit
special, if anything of the relieved human can be called special.
      Zabotski rolled his his hands in the deadl ashes. And the ashes
burst into stifling and reeking flames. Old human flesh recognized other old
human flesh. Zabotski, from the pain of the flame, give out with a horrible,
wrenching sound that was both a moan and a laugh.
      There was a blood roar against this Zabotski from all the bright
people entering the Opera. It had been known that Zabotski was unrepentantly
human, but the pleasure of catching him was not dulled by its being
expected. Zabotski was big and wild and loud and silly, and there was a lot
of blood and fun to be got out of him. Powerful men put a halter over his
head, a bit in his mouth, and a rope around his neck. They begin to lead him
off, into the Opera House by the animal entrance.
      "I'll leave me a wake behind me!" Zabotski roared (it was a deformed
half animal roar, for the month bit had a tongue spike in it). "I will strew
me a path in this world and out of the door of this world! I will make me be
remembered!" He did strew a pretty wide path made out of half a dozen felled
strong men. But he was only back into his youth for one furious moment
there. He was too old and too fat, and he was overpowered again and dragged
away. But he left a stenchy wake from the smell of his burnt and broke-open
hands, human stenchy.
      Well, what was there in human ashes that would still kindle fire at
the touch of kindred flesh? There was something in the ashes that
remembered.
      Then, a short moment after Zabotski had been dragged along, there
was an out-of-order incident, a happening that was not anticipated at all. A
person came out of the crowd to the total consternation of all the
initiative people. This was a slight, quick, powerful young man, with a big
nosc and with sudden moves. He was certified splendid and noetic. He was an
intuitive, with-it person. This young man had been a puzzle around town to
various sorts of people. He had been a puzzle even around the Walk-ln Art
Bijou and the Pelican Press. Stein had called him Deutero-Finnegan because
of his supposed resemblance to dead Finnegan and because of the real
resemblance of his paintings to those of Finnegan. This man was not
compelled either by the intuitions of the crowd or by those of the
Instruments to declare himself. But he did. He left the concourse of the
people entering the Opera House, and he went to one of the large, bronze
basins that held cold human ashes.
      "This is a mistake," one of the Marshals of the Opera said to him.
"You are not suspect. You have not been questioned at all."
      "This is no mistake," the Deutero-Finnegan said. Then he declared
himself by putting his hands deep into the ashes. They flamed to his touch.
But it was not the black-red, reeking flame that had been the case with
Zabotski. It was a paler flame, yellow at first, then deepening a bit and
shifting to orange color.
      "You can withdraw from this," trle marshal of the opera said. "This
is some sort of a technical error. We all know that you're not human, that
you are one of us. We know that you're new and splendid and sane. Why do you
young men like to be eccentrics? You are causing a false flame for an antic.
It isn't even the right color of flame. Why do you love the extravagant
gestures?"
      "I won't withdraw," the young fellow, the Finnegan Image said. Then
his face crumbled and broke with the realization of the flame of his burning
hands. "I am human if I die to be human," he shuddered the words out. "Where
I am it human, it is not in your direction." He staggered, and he watched
the flames on his hands.
      "No, it's not quite the right color," he said. The color deepened a
bit when the flesh begin to support the flame. "Still not quite the right
color," the young man croaked as he watched the flame turning to a richer
orange. "I'll have to work on that color." Strong men put a rope about the
young painter's neck, and they led him into the opera house by the animal
entrance. But they didn't inflict the bridle or bit on him.
      Seconds later, there was another out-of-order incident, one still
less anticipated than the episode of the Double Finnegan. But who was the
person who broke out of the concourse and ran towards one of the oracular
ash pots?
      "Come along inside," Duffey was insisting to his party with curious
haste. "Come, Sally. Come, Mary Virginia. The show is inside, not here."
      "Wait, I want to see who it is," Salvation Sally protested being
hurried.
      "Inside, inside," Stein was insisting with false heartiness. "We are
supposed to have some excellent prelude music tonight. We don't want to miss
it."
      "I'll not be rushed," Mary Virginia objected strongly. "Where's
Margaret?"
      But the small party was swept inside by the concourse of people.
      Of course the prelude music was excellent. There was the Painted
Thunder Suite bv Kandarsky. The Countess and the Child Hero left the party.
"We're in the bullfight sequence, you know," they said.
      There was the Shining Mountain Fugue by Palfrey. The Hoyden left the
party. "I'm in the Thunder Cold Games, you know," she said.
      "Where is Margaret Stone?" Mary Virginia asked again.
      "She must have gotten lost in the crowd," Salvation Sally said.
      "Nobody could lose Margaret, not anywhere, not ever," Mary Virginia
objected.
      One does not come to the Opera House to hear excellent prelude
music, nor to wait overlong for the curtain to rise. It is all right to wait
just long enough for anticipation to peak, yes, but then...
      ...but then the curtain didn't rise at all in the Decatur Street
Opera House that night. Instead of rising...

      But Margaret Stone hadn't entered the Opera building with her party.
She hadn't gone in with the press of people. Instead of that, she became the
least expected episode of the evening. She was the second of the
out-of-order persons who went to the oracular ash pot. She put her li@inds
deeply into the human ashes, but these ashes were cold and grainy and dead
and remained so. So then, of course, Margaret was not old and unregenerate
human. She belonged with the splendids and noetics. But wait!
      She flicked her tongue. She often did this before making a sparky
statement. She flicked her tongue again, and there was genuine holy ghost
fire flying about it. She scooped up the ashes in her tangled and tense and
electric fingers, and put them into her mouth. They flamed.
      Then she cascaded handsful of flame over her head and face and arms,
and she seemed unburnt by them. They were garish, tumbling, orange flames.
      "Oh, that is the right color!" the Deutero-Finnegan said as he
watched from the animal entrance of the opera house. "Perfect, perfect."
      "You can withdraw from this childish prank," the marshal of the
opera told Margaret. "You are not human. You have not been charged with any
offense. We know that you are splendid, that you are noetic, that you are
intuitive. This is false fire you have made here for a joke. Why do so many
of the genuine people insist on flamboyant gestures? Withdraw from this
insane thing! Be splendid!" "I will not withdraw from it," Margaret said. "I
will be human in death at least. It is not false flame. It is true flame.
Sure I'm splendid. I will be splendid in flame."
      They put a rope around her neck to lead her away. But she turned it
into a rope of fire and drove all her oppressors back. Then she moved of
herself, with that quick dancing step that she used, into the animal
entrance of the building.

      Instead of going up, the Opera House curtain was sundered to
nothing. It was struck by lightning. It was burst and rent by a simultaneous
thunder stroke. It was in flames, and then it was gone. The Decatur Street
Opera House was the only place in town that employed this effect.
      The scene was a blood-and-sand arena. The act was a bullfight. It
wasn't a Spanish thing, It was the earlier Cretan Bull Drama. The music was
the heavy Bull Waltz. The Countess, the Child Hero, and nine other young
persons lept over the bulls, vaulted on their horns, curvetted clear over
them, escaping the horns, escaping the hooves. This was all a beautiful
action. The young people had their waists drawn very small by bronze
cinctures.
      Each of the young persons would defy a bull and do a flying hand
stand on its horns. Then there would be an interval when the bull was given
a human person to mangle and maul to death. The humans were sliced and gored
by the curving, whetted horns, and they were trampled and torn open by the
thunder hooves. They were broken to pieces by the violent bull impact. In
their being broken open, the humans spewed uut some blood, much entrail, and
still more trash.
      "it is because we who order their deaths are so intuitive that we
force them to reveal their inner essence," said Cyrus Roundhead who was in
the loge with the Duffey party, "and the inner essence of humans is always
trash. Ourselves, who have no inner essence and who are entirely and
splendidly on the surface, contain no trash at all."
      Zabotski was one of the humans to be killed by the bulls. He made a
good show. He gave the bull back bellow for bellow. He pawed the sand in
mimicry of the bull. He put down his own head to meet the impact He was
dislocated and smashed and broken open, and he died in his own blood and
serum and trash. He did, however, give one more defiant bellow after he was
dead, a thing that startled the spectators. He got what is cilled 'The Ugly
Ovation', that given to things that the splendid people hate but also
admire.
      "What we must do is create a cycle of heroic memories of ourselves
as a species," Cyrtis Roundhead was saying. "Likely we must borrow or adapt
such material. But wherever will be discover any heroic material to adapt?
If only we could acquire it by legacy from some other species. Does any of
you know of a heroic species?"
      After some minutes, the arena scene was that of bears and retiarii
or net wielders. The little young people in this act tangled the rushing and
maddened bears in their flung nets, took them off their feet with the force
of their own rushes, rolled them like huge and angry balls, scorched and
burned them with white-hot prods. Then they had mad bears indeed.
      "Is not the music exquisite?" Roundhead asked proudly, for he was
himself one of the marshalls of the opera. "It's the Bear Ballet by
Brhzhlozh."
      "Brhzhlozh is only a machine," Mary Virginia said sourly.
      "Certainly," Roundhead answered. "He is an intuitive, music-writing
machine. There wis once some slight talk of keeping a few unmutated humans
to compose our music for us, but the best opinion was to extirpate every
human vestige and to make no exceptions. We ourselves are not humans by
chromosomic count or by blood type or brainwave pattern. We are not humans
by passion or estrogen or adrenalin (for we have none of these things in its
at all). We are not humans by mental process or by esthesia. We are forever
rid of the human connection. And so are you our recruits, though you may
once have believed yourselves to be human. We are the splendid persons, the
final persons."
      "We sit at Opera, and Opera was a human thing," Stein said.
      "Not such blood opera, no," Roundhead contradicted. "It is all our
own, both in its new form and in its ancient antecedents."
      The maddened bears were slashed out of their entangling nets by the
young and splendid net people. They escaped the on-rushes of the released
beasts. Then human persons were thrown into the arena in the way of the
bears. And these humans were broken up and killed in a series of noisy
crunchings.

       Then there was the Fire-Drake Frolic in which a few more stubborn
humans were slain. Fritz's Fandango in Three Flames was the accompanying
music.

      The Interlude came then. There was interlude music by Mrzorca, and
Shining Mountain Bubbly was served to all the loge patrons.
      "Opera used to be better," Mary Virginia said. "Operas were more fun
a few years ago, when we were still human."
      "None of us was ever a human," Cyrus Roundhead corrected. "Some of
us may have thought that we were. Some of us may have been raised by humans,
just as humans had the tradition of human children sometimes raised by
animals."
      Time flowed by on its smooth and easy surface. Time stood still in
its depth. But the new simultaneity had no depth. Then the gracious and
rather stylized interlude scenery was cleared away. The presentation of the
climax piece of the night would now begin. It was the Thunder Colt Game. It
was orchestrated to the Thunder Torus music. The live and pantomimic game
unfolded.
      "When we persons of the thunder dimension attained consciousness, it
was a sudden event that instantly overtook every person of us," Roundhead of
the splendid mouth was saying. "The world was already in the middle of its
baroque phase when we woke to consciousness. The humans have claimed a sort
of consciousness, but they cannot mean the same thing by it. I believe that
our own wakening to full consciousness is quite recent. Watch now! The
awakening of life of our own totem animal, the Thunder Colt, is the symbol
of our awakening. Notice that it devours compulsively on awakening. So do
we."
      There was a large thunder colt egg in the arena. The Hoyden and
other young people broke a window into the egg. They took a human person,
alive and blaring, and thrust him through the window hole into the egg. Then
there was a mindless gnashing and crunching as the still-unconscious thunder
colt inside the egg began to devour the human. With the nourishment, there
came a fulgence from within the egg. It was not yet consciousness. It was
only inquiry.
      Lightning answered the inquiry, struck the egg, and shattered it
open. The thunder colt stood up on uncertain and stilted legs. That was the
awakening to consciousness.
      Simultaneous thunder struck and suffused the colt. That was the
awakening to the thunder dimensions. Then the splendid thunder colt, some
pieces of the eaten human still protruding from its mouth, lept clear of its
birthing debris and ran riot. The stark music of the Thunder Torus picked up
the tempo as the game evolved.      There were only two human persons
remaining
in the arena. These two were known to be noetic and splendid. They were
humans only in their coming deaths and in their depths as persons.
      The thunder colt knocked the Deutero-Finnegan down with its first
assault. It tore off his lower jaw, split his chest, and seemed to lay open
layer after layer of person in turbulent and confused depth.
      "We have the thunder dimensions," the talkative Cyrus Roundhead was
saying, in the loge, "but I am jealous that there may be other dimensions
that we lack. Do we really miss anything by living so entirely on the
surface? What we need to find for ourselves is a dimension of depth. It
would be fine if some older and kinder race would give such a dimension to
us, but we look in vain for a source of such an inheritance."
      The joyous, newly-awakened, totem thunder colt killed the Finnegan
effigy on the second press, splitting him open in an incredibly rich and
mingled juiciness. There was spilled out shouting scarlet blood, crimson
blood, high saturation sulphur-colored blood, saffron-colored blood, flame
blood, ichor and serum mezcolanza. The color was more orange than red and
thick now. That color... it was the life garish orange color of all strange
artists in their orange period.
      "Why, he had the right color in him after all," Margaret Stone
laughed. It was almost her last joke.
      "As a species, we should try to create a signature color for
ourselves," Roundhead was saying in the loge, "as well as a depth and an
intensity. Can we remain splendid forever if we do not add to our
repertoire? We'll pick garbage out of the wake of any great people who'd
gone before us, but where shall we find traces of a great people? We search
vainly for a legacy of glory."

      The thunder colt wheeled back and killed Margiret Stone at a single
pass. It tore off half of her head with its totemic teeth. It tore out her
throat. But it could't go deeply enough to get the laugh in her throat.
That's all she had to leave.

      The Thunder Torus music crashed to an end. Outside the Opera House,
the new and unlegacied breeze was blowing under the gimcrack, jeweled sky.
      Book Eight

      "You, Metchisedech pathetic,
      Not descending, not beget-ic,
      Duff, you'd better be noetic.
      [Crissie Cristofero.]

      1

       "How chorasmian of us!" Becky Stein cried, and she grinned at
Duffey.
       "What, Countess?" Duffcy asked her.
       "How noetic of us!" Cleo Mahoney cried, and she smiled proudly.
       "What, Hoyden?" Duffey asked. "What are you children going on
about?"
       "We have strengthened the 'Fifth Road' part in the play," Cleo
Mihoney said. "You know, that's the one where Crissie had the introductory
verse:
       'A shattered world, and an end to fuss.
       A new folk comes. And it isn't us.'
We have made the 'Fifth Alternative' rather more important and more
powerful, and we will give you your new lines that you say in it. But you
have already called us 'Countess' and 'Hoyden', and those are the roles that
the two of us play in the 'Fifth Road' part of the play. You're amazing. How
do you do it? Here is the script with your new lines. Here, read them. I
hope you learn them as wonderfully fast as you learned the others."
       "All right," Duffey said, "I'll read them. But didn't we already put
the play on the night before last?"
       "No, no, of course not," Becky said. "You are exasperating.
Sometimes you catch onto things so quickly that it amazes me. And sometimes
you are so slow and confused. That was the rehearsal, but you didn't even
come to it, and I had to read your lines. The play is tomorrow night.
There's been no change in the date of it."
      "Oh, that's... well, that's reassuring, I guess," Duffey said. he
looked at the script with the revised more important and more powerful
'Fifth Alternative' part. And he tried to orient himself at the same time.
      Duffey had been in a place and with people who were too fast for
him. Things had been happening there that were beyond all reason, and he had
been accepting them as though he were hypnotised. With the 'too fast'
people, Duffey had sinned in pride and superbity, and he had leagued himself
with those people who were, for all he knew, no more than splendid devils.
      Then he had attempted to withdraw from the situation to clarify his
mind. He had called on all his magic and trickery. He had reminded himself
that he had a qualified lordship over time and place. When younger, he had
had the power of moving back and forth through time easily, the power of
backing out of a time that had gone wrong and taking another alternative
forward then. As he got older it became a little harder for him to do this,
but it should still be possible in an extremity. He attempted it; he
challenged it. And it began to movr. But now he had to tear across acres and
acres of fabric to back out of the situation, and there were living people
imbedded in that fabric.
      Duffey, having just come out of a shocking and splendid Opera House,
trembling yet at the magnitude and splendor and outrage of what he has seen
and heard, had been standing under a gimcrack, jeweled, night-time sky in a
splendid devildom. But the devildom was wearing the false face of his own
city New Orleans. He had marshalled all his power to break out of it. Then
he lost his bearings and his consciousness.
      Then, after a while, or before a while, he had come to himself in a
pleasant plce, and there were several teenage girls with him, girls whose
names he would remember after a bit.
      "A totem animal plays a bit part in that 'Fifth Road Alternative',"
Cleo Mahoney was saying. "We have given it the tentative name of the
'Clattering Pony'."
      "The Thunder Colt," Duffey said.
      "Oh, that's better," Becky Stein cricd. "You've hit it right, Duff.
The Thunder Colt it will be."
      This pleasant place, in fact, was a teenage milk bar and ice cream
restaurant, and Duffey was attacking a Golden Gate Sundae. He suspected that
Becky Stein, who was chubby, had suggested it to him.
      So Duffey was back out of the bright devildom (otherwise known as
the 'Fifth Contingency' or the 'Fifth Road'), but had he brought anything
back with him? He hadn't liked that sound and feel of tearing fabric as he
had returned. He had done violence to time and to the people living in it.
How badly had he torn the fabric of the two worlds? Had he injured people,
or even killed them?
      "They say that you can do magic tricks, Mr. Duffey," Crissie
Cristofero said. "Would you do some of them during the intermission? That
would be better than your playing your banjo, I believe, or even playing
your recorder flute. A touch of magic is what our play needs, at the
intermission, right before the sequence where there has got to be a belief
in magic."
      "I don't do magic tricks," Duffey said. "But I do magic. It's nearly
as effective."
      "If it weren't for working on the play now, I think I'd go crazy,"
Becky Stein was siying. "Aunt Margaret's sudden death tore me up so much!
She's the only one of you Romans I ever loved, except you now, Duff. And to
be killed by a rabid horse! Whoever heard of a rabid horse before?"
      Duffey was sick. Margaret Stone (for Margaret was a sort of aunt of
Rebeka Stein) had been killed by a horse. Duffey had brought at least part
of the Fifth Alternative back with him.
      "And the funeral mass, Duffey, what have they done to it?" Becky
moaned. "They've ruincd it. I made a Crissie verse about it:
      'Ain't we glad that she is dead!
      All be happy! Don't be sad!'
All I can say is that the new funeral mass sure is in bad taste at a
funeral. It cloys, it cloys! What's the matter with you Romans anyhow? I
wish Aunt Margaret were back so she could make a Gadarene S@vine verse about
her own funeral. You people don't believe that mass is inspired, do you?"
      "The Holy Ghost has bad days, even as I and thou, Becky," Duffey
said miserably, "I tell you now though that there are dangerous things in
that 'Road Five' of the play."
      "Are there ever!" Cleo Mahoney cried in shocked delight. "It is all
so horrible and so murderous and so splendid. I pray that it may never
happen in the real world. And, as a codicil to my prayer, I pray that if it
does happen, I want to have a front place where I can see and take part in
everything. I wouldn't miss it for the world! But it is the world, and which
way it will roll, that's the subject matter of that 'Fifth Contingency'."
      "What are you going to do with the Jacob Soule pictures now that he
is dead, Mr. Duffey?" Crissie Cristofero asked him. "There's one of his that
you have over at your Walk-In Art Bijou that I just love. I'd give anything
I have in the world for it, but everything I have in the world is just a
little over nineteen dollars."
      "I don't know what I'll do with them, Crissie," Duffey said. "There
will probably be an administrator appointed for his estate. I never knew
many details about him, whether he has any kindred or not. He comes and
goes, just like Finnegan did, ah -- just like another painter did."
      Duffey wis trembling. Margaret Stone killed by a rapid horse and
already buried! Jacob Soule, the Deutero-Finnegan also dead! The ripped
fabric of Duffey's coming back from the splendid Devildom had displaced
events and people, in time and in space. And Duffey had brought at least two
deaths back with him.
      How about Zabotski! Zab had also been killed in the Devildom.
      "Have any of you -- I'm almost afraid to ask this -- seen Zabotski
lately?" Duff asked the young girls. "I -- ah -- wonder if he is all right."

      "I haven't seen him," Becky said, "and the others wouldn't know him.
Duffey, I'm worried tbout my father. He's grown grand and splendid lately,
and he's using it for all it's worth. He's signed to do a series of reviews
for 'Gentleman Rounder', and that's the magazine with the built-in sneer for
the common people. "Abba Absalom really believes that he's become superior
to the common crowd. 'Reilly, those of us who are truly aware, we form a
species quite apart from the commoners,' he said. 'It's no use pretending
that we don't.' Really, he's impossible."
      "It is a phase that a middle-aged man sometimes pass through,"
Duffey said. "I hope that it will pass." So Stein was back from the
Devildom, but he had brought some of its baggage with him. What, Absalom
grand and splendid! Well perhaps he had always been, but he should not be
aware of it in himself.
      Duffey took the script for the play with him and left the giris and
went over to Zabotski's old place. This was the first look he had had of his
city since his return from his 'Fifth Road' excursion. When he had returned
to awareness he had already been in conversation with the girls. The city
looked pretty much as it always had, and yet Duffey looked it it with a
jaundiced eye. The jaundiced eye was one of the things he had brought back
from his mingling with the splendid people.
      At least the Bayougoula Park was no longer there, as it had been
there in the Fifth Contingency. And some of Zabotski's buildings were back
there again, as they had not been there in the Contingency.
      "Is Zabotski around the place?" Duffey asked a fellow who rented
from Zab in one of the apartment buildings. "I'm almost afraid to ask."
      "He just left," said the renter (his name was Alexi Ravel). "He just
came by to collect the rents. That's all he comes by for now. He spends all
his time on the lake in that big, freakish boat with Wife Waldo and all the
kids and animals. He says that when catastrophe strikes, they'll have a
better chance than most of riding it out."
      "Ah, does Zab seem to be all right?"
      "All right? No, of course not, Duffey. When was he ever all right?
He's as nutty as Pecan Prairie. By the way, I'm more than a bit angry with
you, Duff. I had a dream that I was dying and that you passed me by and let
me die. I wouldn't have done that to you. I'd have tried to save you."
      "But Alexi, if it was only a dream --" Duffey tried to defend
himself with hand-flopping gestures. But he did remember the incident. That
bit of trash that had seemed to call to him, it had been Alexi Revel in
mortal agony. Duffey hadn't stopped because it would be an unsplendid thing
to notice a pile of trash. But now he was ashamed.
      "No, it was only only a dream, Duffey," Ravel said bitingly. "I
don't know what it was, but you knew it was me in it. You left me there to
die, and I wouldn't have done that to a dog."
      Alexi Ravel turned away from Duffey, spat on the sidewalk in
disgust, and went into the Zabotski-owned apartment building where he lived.

      Well anyhow, Zabotski was back in the well-a-day world, in as much
as he had ever been in it. And his watertight contraption, the large boat or
barge, was apparently back also. In the world of the splendid Devildom,
Zabotski hadn't seemed to remember anything about building the boat.
      Duffey went into his own place that was quite near (Bayougoula Park
was no longer between his place and Zabotski's buildings). He saw by his
automatic clock that it was Monday, a Monday that he had lived once before.
The Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday of that week he had already lived once,
before he found himself in the situation of the Fifth Case.
      It being Monday, there was a letter from his quasi-brother Bagby. It
was not, however, the same Bagby letter that had been there the previous
time that Duffey had lived this Monday.
      "My dear brother and most egregious ass," the letter began. "It is
with disgust verging on loathing that I view some of your recent conduct. An
ordinary person, not very smart, might have been taken in by some of the
pretensions of the Royal Pop People, for a very little while. But you, who
are supposed to be an extraordinary person, were taken in by them all one
day and far into the hellish night. You are supposed to be better than that.
You have proved yourself, in this, to be a cad and a coward and a crawler, a
total goof, and not at all manly. But you could just as well have been a
good man in the episode. You have the equipment to be so.
      "For a little pride, you denied your people, and you went with the
Royal Freaks. And now you have withdrawn from it, though not till the
twenty-third hour. That much is good. But you have not withdrawn from it in
all ways clean.
      "Now you must go into the wilderness and gather your strength. If
you cannot gather it now, under disadvantaged conditions and beset with
obstacles, then you will never be able to gither it at all. Wherevcr you go,
whatever you do, for a while, it will be a wilderness where you are. You
will make your own wilderness. And you will be an old bear in the woods of
it.
      "Ah well, we bet on you here. We bet clay coins that we make
ourselves, for we use no other money here. Because of your peculiar
attributes and circumstances, many persons are watching how it will go with
you, and I am watching also. 'He cannot die,' some people say 'or at least
he cannot have an end.' So, what will happen to you? There are several
theories about this, and we bet on them."
      "But I have died," Duffey told himself and Bagby if he could hear
him, "and I have my ashes somewhere to prove it. Do not say that I can't
die. I will have no end, it says? It seems, at the moment, that I will have
no end in the sense that I will have no purpose. I hope that is not the true
case of it."
      "My brother, be a little more steadfast in your unique career. It is
absolutely necessary that you should be. It only begins to get rough for you
so far."

      Oh, it was nice to have one faithful correspondent like this
stepbrother Bagby.

      Duffey was walking through that part of his wilderness that is
called Dumaine Street. That sign "The Future Begins Right Here" was still
standing in the pedestrian way. It must have been some time since Crissie
Cristofero had first painted it. It's paint must long since be dry. The
message of it was really directed to Duffey personally, which may have been
the reason that he seemed to be the only one who noticed it.
      The sign stood in the pedestrian way, but it wasn't an obstacle to
the people. They didn't walk around it. They walked through it. Duffey also
attempted to walk through it, but he stumbled into it violently, for it was
solid and substintial to him. He tangled himself up, and he fell backwards
with a resounding clatter. It was an obstacle to him, if not to others.
      "What's with you, man?" a young fellow asked sharply. "You were
walking along in the clear when all at once you started to fall all over
yourself. Then you stumbled backwards and fell flat." The young fellow
helped Duffey to his feet. "Are you all right?" he asked. "You are the
clumsiest old bear I ever saw in my life."
      Yes, there are pitfalls and obstacles in the wilderness, and a man
falls several times a day.
      "I know it's rough a second or two beyond that sign, or a day or two
beyond it," Duffey said. "But naybe that is only the breakers breaking on
the rocks. Will there not be clear water a little bit beyond them? How will
it be a year beyond the barrier? I will see?
      "I and my giants will crash through! Power, power, lend me power! I
have the modified lordship of time is a promise. I must make use of that
now. I go through. Why is it so much harder than it used to be?"
      Melchiscdech went through the barrier and through the breakers that
are just beyond it. And he found clear and nearly smooth water.

      2

      There should not be any awkward confrontations. Melchisedech had
jumped one year into the future, but so had the world. To be sure that there
would be no clashing of irreconcilables, Melchisedech walked to the Pelican
Press which was the least awkward place that he knew. The memories of the
jumped year should accrue to him flow and supply him with all the background
he needed. After all, this was himself, and these would be his memories. He
was jumping that year completely, and he should have arrived with every
impression of that year complete within him.
      But they were a very clotted bunch of impressions, very many for
some months, hardly any for others. They would take some sorting out, and
his own memories should be in him naturally.
      He swung open the ornate door, bronzed by Finnegan, with the Holy
Pelican so vivid on it, so alive that you wanted to throw it a fish. He
entered, and he found Mary Virginia Schaeffer inside.
      Few people have ever realized how complex a person was the open and
intelligent and always kind Mary Virginia. And Duffey had not really
realized it until he saw the look on her face now. Complex! Oh complex! She
kept a gently burning look on him for a long time. She ran her hand over his
face. "Ugh, my dear, ugh," she said. "That is my word on the subject. "If I
did not love you I could not stand you so at all. How have you come to
this?"
      That look of hers would have melted tin or brass. Well, Duffey was a
tin horn sport loaded with brass, and it melted him completely.
      "Oh Melchisedech, whatever will I do with you?" she said then. "You
are the most exasperating person that I have ever known." But Duffey, for
the life of him, couldn't think of anything exasperating he had done lately.
His memories of the 'lately' were completely blank.
      "What have I done wrong, Mary V.?" he asked. "You almost sound as if
you weren't glad to see me this day. Fake it, sis, fake it. Pretend that
you're glad to see me."
      "I love you, Duff, but you shouldn't be here. Have any of the others
seen you? They'll be frightened if they do see you."
      "Why should anyone ever be frightened of me? Have I given you my
review column for this week's Bark yet? Somehow I don't remember whether I
have or not. If I haven't, I'll sit right down and do it now."
      "Go ahead," Mary Virginia said. "No, you haven't done one for this
week yet. Do it now if you wish, yes. It will certainly be a 'First'."
      Duffey sat down it the little desk there and began to type quite
rapidly. He wrote a very long and absolutely excellent review column, about
three thousand words in a little more than an hour. His fingers and his mind
had wings on them. It was an outstanding piece, loaded with insights and
breakthrough stuff. Good! It was thumping good. Nobody around there, not
even Stein, had ever marshalled such in array of crashing and illuminating
ideas before.     Salvation Sally started into the room. She looked at Duffey
rattling away at the typewriter. Then she gave an odd 'squawk; and bolted
out of the room again. And Mary Virginia went out after her. Odd!
      But it was not nearly so odd as the super-odd things that were
flooding through Duffey and being transformed into thoughty words by his
magic fingers. How they did rattle out of that hardline! "It's as though I
had acquired bi-mentality and bi-local vision," he told himself. "Never have
I been able to see things from so many sides." Mary Virginia came back into
the room after a while. She was smiling in seven-level arrangement and
compression. And Duffey continued with his excellent piece.
      Then the splendid and noetic Absalom Stein strode into the room.
Yes, he was superb and splendid, and yes he knew it all. His daughter Becky
was correct that he now suffered with overweening     superbity. What, did
he still have it? He had been suffering from it for more than a year then.
      Stein looked at Melchisedech in an obscure way, not startled really,
but not absolutely unstartlcd either. He shook his head that seemed to be
even bigger than it used to be. He grinned a grifi that was even wider than
his previous record.
      "I'll not believe it," he cried. "Whoop, I'll not believe it!" he
howled. His rising howl broke into a roaring laugh, a grandfather guffaw,
and he reeled out of the room overcome by something that went beyond
merriment. And he could be heard with his echoing laughter filling afl the
streets outside.
      "That man sure can laugh long," Melchisedech said. "I wonder why?
What was so funny? They should barrel up laughter like that in casks and
seal it. That was extraordinary."
      And Duffey rattled along and finished his astonishing review
article.
      "Here it is, Mary Virginia," he said, "and it's good."
      "I'm sure it is, I'm sure it is," she said. "We permit nothing that
isn't good here. And now hadn't you better go?"
      "What for? I like it here. It's my favorite place, after my own, of
course. And besides, I am one-third owner of this place and its
publications. Why are you angry with me? Or disappointed? Why are you
whatever it is?"
      "Have you done something bad, Melchisedech?" she asked. "Worse than
usual, I mean."
      "I don't think so. Not worse than usual, no."
      "Then why are you wandering? Wily haven't you found peace?"
      "I'm not wandering, Mary Virginia. I'm not even in the mood to
wander.
      "And I am looking for peace, and for pattern and for purpose, and
all such things. Why is there a misunderstanding between us today?"
      "Well, why are you so ambiguous then?"
      "Ambiguous? I? Never."
      "Yes, ambiguous. Ghosts are always ambiguous. That's all that they
are. They are the essence of ambiguity. What ? Don't you really understand
what it is, dear? You're dead all these months. You're a ghost. And properly
disposed persons have no need to wander as ghosts. At least I don't believe
that they do.
      "Ah, you fade out! Good, good. Then you're not really wandering
lost. Then I only saw you because I was tired, and your spector was part of
my tiredness. But how did Salvation Sally and Absalom Stein see you then?
      "Whatever it is, bless you, my friend."

      Yes, Duffey faded out of there. But he didn't go away from there,
only from them. So he would die within the year, the year less 'all these
months'. Was that the death breathing its cold breath down his neck even
now? But his death was already ordained in another place and time. Was there
not a canonical impediment against dying twice?
      Duffey withdrew from that crash year, and in doing so, he set it
into the future once more. And then he was once again (it should be 'and
then he was once before', but may grammar not perturb us) sitting in the
all-things room at the Pelican press and trying to write a review column for
the Bark.
      "You've been fiddling away a lot of your time with that play that
the Ursuline Academy girls are putting on," Mary Virginia was saying to him,
"and then yesterday you were no good at all. It's as though you were in a
daze all day long. Now you just finish that piece up! I need it this
afteriloon absolutely."
      So Duffey worked away at the review column with sincere application.
But it didn't come so easy, nor was it nearly so excellent, as the review
that he had just done, a year ahead of now, as a ghost.
      Absalom Stein came in with his excellent and splendid stride.
Superbity, Superbity, thy name is Stein.
      "What was so damned funny, Stein?" Duffey asked in a rasping voice.
And Stein was a little taken aback.
      Then Duffey howled. His rising howl broke into a roaring laugh, a
primordial guffaw. This laughing filled the whole room. It was horse laugh,
it was hoodoo hootiiig, it was gelasmus.
      "Ah, the bubbly water people ought to bottle that stuff and sell
it," Stein said. "It's good." Nobocly could laugh so outlandishly as Duffey,
unless it was Stein himself.

      Duffey went out to the unsinkable boat-castle to have dinner with
Zabotski and Wife Waldo. They had been asking him for years, it seemed, and
he had been promising to come for years. Duffey went out there in a taxi,
but the taxi cab stopped three hundred yards from Zabotski Flats where the
big castle-boat rode at kedge anchor.     Zabotski Flats was about two hundred
acres on Lake Borgne that Zabotski had bought. About two thirds of it was
sweet, and one third of it salt meadows. All of it was incomparably lush,
though the flats on each side of it were sparse of growth and worthless. So
had Zabotski Flats been worthless when Zabotski had bought the spread at a
low price. But then God and his sun has shined down on it, and God and his
water had watered it and blessed it (such was Zabotski's explanation of the
rich verdure of the place), all because Zabotski was a just man and selected
for a special role.
      You wouldn't believe the things that were grazing in the tall
greenery of Zabotski Flats. You wouldn't believe that the lions and leopards
had abjured flesh and were eating grass there, would you? Well, it wasn't
grass they were eating, but it was vegetation. It was the Nimrod Flesh
Plant, which is very rare in most parts of the earth but which was growing
abundantly in the Flats.
      Hippopatami and leviathan were grazing in the salt water meadows,
belly-deep in the reed grass and the water, and happy with rumbling stomach
song. Whales came up to the deeper part of the meadows and visited and
joined their wisdom. Water buffaloes grazed in both the salt and the sweet
portions. Zebras with all asses and cattle and sheep and goats, grazed in
the sweet water parts of the fruits, with all rabbits and coneys and small
game animals also.
      There was a little skiff there on the mixed water and grass shore.
Duffey stood in it and pushed his way out to the big contraption boat castle
barge by using its single steering car. And there on the big floating craft
it was all domestic festivity and family revel. Wife Waldo had a pot as big
as Duffey's own slumgullion pot (indeed the pots were twins) which she kept
at an eternal simmer or low boil.
      "You come without wife or without hopes of offspring, Melchisedech,"
Zabotski said. "What is there about you that is worth serving then? We take
no sterile thing with us when we go on our grand float." Zabotski talked
funny today.
      "I come here to dinner by invitation," Duffey said. "I do not come
here to be saved. Nevertheless, it is always a welcome side benefit when
salvation falls to one. And you will not be going on your grand float
today."
      "Aye, today it will be," Zabotski swore in his sore-tongued voice.
      "Every day, for nine years now, Zab has sworn 'Aye, today it will
be,'" Wife Waldo put in her tupelo-wood car. "But we still drift here on the
light anchor. Zab had his tongue butchered by the lynchers, and I tell that
now he should talk a little bit less for a while and let me talk a little
bit more. But there's no way that Zab could talk less."
      They were seated at a very long table now, and several of the salt
water oriented children were saying grace: "We thank thee for the
hippopotamus steak and the rhinoceros steak and the behemoth steak and the
leviathan steak and the alligator steak and the buffalo steak and the
elephant steak and the green turtle steak. Amen."
      "We eat a lot of steak here," Wife Waldo said. "We pan fry it in
those deep pans over there." The deep pans were as big as airplane wheels.
      "Aye, it was down by the Opera House last night that the low
lynchers took me and tried to dishonor me and to kill me," Zabotski said.
"Was that only last night? It seems longer. They put a halter over my head,
a bit in my mouth, and a rope around my neck. They began to hang me. I
roared for help, but the mouth bit had a tongue spike in it and I could not
roar properly. Nevertheless, certain poor people of the neighborhood came to
my aid, and I myself erupted like a volcano with hiorns and hoofs on it. The
poor people saved me, and I saved myself. We scattered those lynchcrs like
chaff. But my tongue is mangled and so is my disposition. I tell you,
Duffey, it isn't safe to be around that Opera House after dark."
      There is nothing so homey as an ark. There was music and
conversation, and all of it was home made. There were flutes there (the
first ones made by Zabotski, the others by the various children) for every
child and ape and seal in the establishment, and there was no prohibition
against playing at table. This made for a musical meal. All houseboats are
homey, but none so homey as this ark. You do not get such numbers of animals
on most houseboats, nor such numbers of children.
      "There are fifty-two kids," Zabotski said, "all of them unrelated,
and all of them of superior quality. This gives a strong genetic base. We
will get our first crop from the kids this year. Wife Waldo says that we
have been here for nine years (it doesn't seem like that long to me) so the
oldest of the children will be fruiting this year.
      "Melchisedech, these are smart kids. They know all the sciences and
all the technologies. They even top me in a few fields. They are pious and
imaginative and good-natured and loaded with understanding and scope. They
take smart pills which they have invented themselves. They are splendid, but
I told them this morning not to use the word 'splendid' any more. It's
picked up distasteful connotations for me since last night. These kids do
new things, with music (especially on the alligator skin drums). They do new
things with mathematics. They do new things with metamorphics. They build
the finest instruments in the world, and they build them for fun. They
extract all one hundred and twenty elements out of the water of this
open-mouthed salt lake, and then they change them from one to another. With
such improvising kids, we need never run short of anything. They're the best
kids that I ever saw."
      There were many practical little tricks used there on the ark. Every
person had a little hatchet with the other table implements beside his
plate. Some of those rhinoceros and behemoth steaks are tough, but a good
hacker can hack them into pieces, And the plates were of unbreakable
Zabotski metal.
      And each person had a small bow with arrows beside hisplace. This
was to combine the sports of hunting and fishing with the sport of eating.
Some of these those bowls of slumgullian were pretty lively, you see. A
variety of small creatures had mutated there, under the guidance of some of
the biologically minded kids, and now they were able to live and thrive in
boiling water and boiling slu,. There were small, fierce, fanged sea
creatures among them who disputed the contents of the bowls with the people.
Oh, they struck like lightning when they struck, up out of the depths of the
bowls of slum. But they could be shot with arrows just before they lept.
      "But it was loaded in our favor to begin with," one of the kids
siid. "It isn't really fair. We could kill them with arrows. But all they
could do to us was snap off a lip or a nose sometimes. So I have been
redressing the balance."
      "How have you been doing that?" Duffey asked warily. Zabotski was a
jokcr, and even Wife Wildo was something of a joker. How would children
raised by them not be jokers?
      "I've taught two dozen of the midget octopoess to shoot little bows
and arro\vs," the child said. (This was a female kid, and tricky.) "And I've
made midget bows and arrows for them. I've also installed the shoot-to-kill
instinct in them. The poison sepia concoctions for tipping the arrows was
their own intention. A person shot by one of those poison tipped arrows will
turn black and die within thirty seconds."
      "Ah, and whre are they now?" Duffey asked. "What did you do with the
little biglhers after you'd educated them and armed them?" "I put them
in the big pot," the child said. "And they had already settled on the
go-for-the-open-spiggot, go-for-the-bowls strategy'. I imagine that they are
in the bowls now, the very bowls we are starting in on. I think it's better
sport when things are more evenly matched, don't you? How are your own
reactions, Mr. Duffcy? Are your arrows handy enough for quick notching and
your bow handy enough for quick drawing? Will you be able to spot an overt
move in your slumgullion quickly enough? Remember, you have to shoot first,
or you will die."
      "I will shoot first," Duffey said.
      "But if you should miss with your shot --"
      "I won't miss," Duffey said.
      That was one of the best and most homey and most wholesome dinners
and visits that Duffey had ever experienced. If the world were destroyed and
only this bright establishment saved, that would be better than if this
bright establishment were destroyed and only the world saved. This group
surviving would have to be entered on the gain side.
      Duffey taught the children to make banjos that afternoon. They were
good workers in all the mateirals, as their foster father was. And this
would give a new note to the lively orchestration of the place. There would
be some blessed plunking added to all the other blessings ot the place.
      If Duffey hadn't had an important appointment in town that evening,
he might not have been able to tear himself away from the ark and its
animalls and people at all.
      And the next evening, or maybe it was the evening after that, there
was presented the play 'Seven Roads' in the Ursuline Academy's auditorium.
Melchisedech Duffey acted his own role excellently. And in the intermission
he performed magic. Not magic acts, but real magic. And he also played on
his banjo and on his recorder flute. The presentation was an overwhelming
success.

      3

       In his finite wisdom, Melchisedech knew that whatever time he would
take for visiting and private communications would be time he would have to
steal. The night of the little play, and it was late that night after the
play had been given, seemed to be the last normal night of his life. The
recent, last time that this night had been lived through, it had been
followed by a weird morning when the whole town was turned awry and a new
people had come in and taken control. This same morning would hardly follow
again, but there might be a morning equally spooky. In any case, Duffey
might not have full freedom of action on the morrow.
       And Duffey had decided on a series of visits, that he wished to
make. And as soon as he hall decided on them, the fulfilling of them seemed
imperative.
       Duffey, retreating and retracing and using the same days and weeks
and months several times over, made visits to most of his 'animations'. He
feared this would be the last time he would ever see them in the normal
flesh.
       To a person who was not Duffey, it seemed as if there were lively
doings in Duffey's diggings that night. Duffey went and returned close to a
dozen times that night. He left in a hurry every time, and he returned in a
hurry only minutes or hours later. And yet he might have spent a week or a
month on several of his journeys of that night. He was playing fast and
loose with time and space, before his powers in those directions should be
taken away from him.
       Duffey had decided to go to Havana Cuba on his first journey. Then
he would go to the Marianao Coast a few miles from Havana to search for the
place where Finnegan was said to have been killed. The death of Finnegan was
supposed to have been many years before this. But Duffey was not at all sure
that Finnegan was dead. He intended to find out about it.
       "I mean to talk to Finnegan," Duffey said. "Be he alive or be he
dead, I intend to talk to him and to have answers to my questions. I don't
believe that Finnegan ever meant to be mysterious or to leave a mystery
behind him. It was quite by accident that it fell out so. His body was not
found there. But no further traces of him were ever found either. He will be
glad to see me. Dead or alive, he will always be glad to see me. We were
close, though our actual time together did not number very many days. I have
a great affection for him, and I have never gotten over the shock of his
possible death. He was the most masterly of my 'Animations'."
       Duffey had a few clues. He had one always startling clue, the
picture of Finnegan's grave. And this most mysterious picture had most
likely been painted by Finnegan himself.
       That Painting hung in Duffey's Walk-in Art Bijou in New Orleans. It
had been hanging there for more thin thirty years. The name of it was 'The
Resurrection of Count Finnegan'.
       "Of what was Count Finnegan a Count?" asked Carmelo Mondoza, the
private detective who would accompany Duffey on the Cuban investigation.
      "Possibly he was Count of nothing," Duffey said. "But he has titled
this picture in his own hand, and he would not claim a title for himself
that he didn't possess. One not-to-be-depended on source says that
Fiiiiiegiii was a Papal Count, that he was an In Petto Papal Count, so named
by a Pope now dead."
      "If he were named In Petto, In Secret, then we could hardly know
about it," Carmelo said. "Who is this not-to-be-depended on source?"
      "He calls himself Mr. X."
      "Oh him. I know him. And are not some of your other clues from this
Mr. X. also?"
      "They are, yes," Duffey said. "Oh, X., be there something in your
information this time!"
      Duffey and the detective Carmelo Mendoza studied the picture again.
Their luggage had already gone to the dock, and they would go there in a
moment. And the detective had already taken photographs of the picture and
extracted much information from it. But, ah, the picture itself!

      "The painting was twelve feet by eight feet, and Count Finnegan...
[was] shown as life-sized. The painting was really two paintings separated
by a schizo-gash. In the larger portion, the burial crypt seemed to be an
ocean cave under a rock shelf; but now there was a fissure in the rock roof
of the cave, and air and sunshine were pouring in. The half-risen Count
Finnegan was partly in the dark-green water and partly in the bright-green
air. There was a stark and horrible riseness about him. There were places on
him where the flesh had fallen away from his bones as will sometimes happen
when a person in either death or time-stasis is subject to an abrasion; and
the under-the-rock-shelf water had apparently been abrasive. Count Finnegan
was setting back into place one long strip of flesh that had fallen away
from it's bone, and he showed sure intent of repairing other flesh damage
and decay. He was identified by a latin scroll there, as the Papal Count
Finnegan. Finnegan-Solli had always been good at reproducing Latin scrolls.
      "The Count Finnegan in the picture seemed about thirty years older
than the John Solli Finnegan would have been at the time of his reported
death, which had been between two and three years before the time of the
arrival of the painting at Melchesedech Duffey's New Orleans place. So it
was a self-painting of Finnegan as it would appear twenty-five to
thirty-five years in the future...
      "Solli-Finnegan's big banana nose had acquired nobility and
distinction on the Count in the picture. The flesh-mending hands of the
pictured Count were even more intricate and talented than Finnegan's recent
artist's hands which would be remembered by all who had ever known him.
There was still the outrageous humor mixed with the warping pain and torture
in the eyes. There was still the loose strength and speed of a yearling
bullock... on the Count in the picture. There was still the mouth in motion,
and one had the feeling of soon being able to hear the multi-dialected words
and spatting phrases from the painted Count. But there was an added
texturing of the whole person that appears mostly in those who have risen
from the dead. The flesh had suffered simultaneous transfiguration and
corruption and was now in a state of violent incompleteness. There was a
locality about the flesh change; partly it was the sea change of un-coffined
dead... Count Finnegan was in the rags and tatters of what may have been a
winding sheet. But there were solid but old clothes there for him to put on,
travellers clothes.
            [How Many Miles To Babylon.]

      'How Many Miles To Babylon' wsas a fictional piece written by a
member of the old Finnegan outer circle. But it described the painting well,
and so it is given here. It is one of the clues that Duffey turned over to
the detective Carmelo Mendoza. But Mondoza had now absorbed the painting
itself, and he would never forget it.     Mendoza stowed the other clues, in
his mind or in his cases and foldcrs, and they went down to the docks to
take the Cuban boat.
      This man Carmelo Mendoza, he was a happy-looking and wistful-looking
clown. He was a small and lively man, but he seemed about as old as Duffey.
He rolled his r's in the Austrian manner, and he had the palest eyes and
hair that anyone ever saw. He seemed to know everything instantly, and he
came well recommended by many people.
      By whom? By what people? Well, by Teresa Showboat Piccone Stranahan
of St. Louis. And by anyone else? Oh, by no one else. No one else was
needed. Teresa herself was many people, and her recommendations were tops.
      "Duff, this Carmelo is right all the way," Teresa wrote. "Since you
are now starting out on a series of very tricky trips that will scrape both
sides of the tunnel, I believe you should have Carmelo with you. He
understands high trickery. He is only a so-so private detective, but he is a
superb companion and friend.
      "My love to the diminishing 'All of You'."
      Oh, Teresa was all-understanding, that's why she knew that
Melcilisedech was starting out on a series of trips that would scrape both
sides of the tunnel. One side of the tunnel was 'world' and the other side
of it was 'time'. She knew that Melchisedech would have to leave and return
to both of these on his journeys and do it again and again.

      It would have been quicker to fly to Cuba, but perhaps they wouldn't
have been allowed to disembark there. There was still a prevailing fussiness
against Americans there.
      Carmelo had provided seaman's pipers for both himself and Duffey,
and they traveled is working seamen. Duffey's name was 'Mike Duffey' on the
paprs, and he was given is a citizen of the Irish Free State. ("You should
able to remember 'Mike'," Carmelo said, 'and you sure should be able to
remember 'Duffey'.) And Carmelo Mondoza himself was Karl Metz, and he was
given as a West German. But who was he really? Duffey quickly understood
that Carmelo was in love with disguises and with plots.
      So they sailed for six sunny days and starry nights. Both of them
were competent seamen and had clearly sailed as seamen many times before.
Well then, they were nearly sure to meet someone that they had sailed with
before.
      "What is your real life history behind your surface life history?"
Carmelo asked him one day. "If I am to serve and lead you through your
puzzles, I think I should know this. It is clear that this lifetime is only
an episode in your existence, but how did you come into it? How did your
present phase of existence come to be?"
      "Ah yes, I had been on the Holy Ship," Melchisedech said in a dreamy
voice. "I had been doing high gestes that I am not allowed to remember in
normal circumstance. Then I left the ship and came ashore. Well, I was given
a short shore leave on the shore of my choice. That is what my present
lifetime is. I came ashore swimming and then wading through turbulent water.
It was early morning. The shore was muddy, with engendering mud, and full of
promise. It was the year 1923, and I was a young man of no more than a
quarter of a century of physical years. I went up that muddy shore and
entered into the green and burgeoning years of a life.
      "I tell you, there is no pleasure like starting a new life at age of
less than twenty-five years. And I seem to remember that I had a choice of
shores, and of green and burgeoning years. And I remember that I will always
have that choice, again and again and again. I will have it if I only
remember that I have it. That's the trick to it, if I only remember that I
have it."
      "Oh, I'll remind you," Carmelo said. "I'll make it a point of being
there in your extremity, and reminding you that you have choices left."
      But how odd it was that Duffey should tell such things to a
comparative stranger like Carmelo.
      As it happened, Duffey did meet a seaman he knew. This was about mid
morning of their first day at sea. It was a gnarled and cheerful oldster
named Horace Pie, a Scotchman. He had sailed with Duffey once in years gone
by, on quite a long voyage, and he had met Duffey on several shores since
then. And he had known Finnegan.    "You are going to find what you can
of his death and entombment, Duffey? I will be ashore in Havana for three
days. I'll go with you. I'm curious about the thing myself. I've heard
stories about him. He's one of the legends now. I don't know where he's
entombed, but there are people who do know. I say entombed, not buried.
There's a difference. And entombment isn't such a tight fit.
      "They call Finnegan 'The Sleeping Man'. Did you know that? So there
are others who don't believe that he's dead for sure. You're traveling with
Eggs, heh?"
      "With eggs, Horace?"
      "Ya, Mr. Eggs. And now he calls himself Metz. He is all right.
Harmless. And he does tell some tall ones."
      "Oh," said Duffey. "Oh, and again Oh. How unperceptive of me! But he
always did love disguises. Yes, I've known him before also, so it's odd that
I didn't know him this time."
      "Can you still rub your hands and make gold coins, Duffey?" Horace
Pie askcd him.
      "Yes, yes, I suppose that I can still do it."
      "That talent will come in handy when you try to get information
about Finnegan in Cuba. In Cuba, they don't say 'What's that?' when they see
a bit of gold. They circulate a lot of it and it will buy a lot there."
      "Then I will circulate a lot of it, if it will buy information about
Finnegan."
      "Did you know, Duffey," Pie said, "that several men once plotted to
chop off your hands. They believed that the coining power was in your hands
and not in yourself. They believed that they could keep your severed hands
and rub them together whenever they wanted, and set up a rain of gold coins.
But you were too canny for us. We never had the chance to lop your hands. I
was one of the men who plotted against your hands. I was younger then. They
grew us pretty green in the green hills of Scotland."

      "I have information already," X. said to Duffey on the second day.
"There are about a hundred of those tide-water caves that are two thirds
under water and have their entrances under water; these are in about a seven
mile stretch along the Marinanao Coast. All we have to do is find the right
one. How are you at under water swimming?"
      "Good enough, Mr. Eggs," Duffey said. "But it will be very choppy
water along a shelf like that. Nobody will be very good at it. I could go
down. I could enter half a dozen of the caves. But I could never enter a
hundred."
      "When did you tumble that I was Mr. X., Mr. Duffey," X. asked, for
he was Carmelo Mondoza and he was also Karl Metz. X., the old friend and
dealer of doubtful information.
      "You think I would not always know my own handiwork, X.? I made you,
or at least I evoked your clay."
      "Then Signora Stranahan in St. Louis won her bet," X. said. "She bet
that you would know me in whatever disguise I used. But I bet not one person
in a million would have known me. Have you still your facility for coining
gold, Mr. Duffey?"
      "I hope that I have it yet."
      "It will go well in Cuba. Golden tips get information."

      There was still the testiness about Americans in Cuba, but Duffey
and X. got in all right. An Irishman like Duffey can always pass for all
Irishmen. And X. was one quarter German and had but to speak in the way that
his maternal grandfather had spoken.
      Then Duffey and X. and Horace Pie were down along the coast, telling
people that they were looking for the sea level tomb of the 'Sleeping Man'
and that they would give one gold coin or even two for real information.
      "He is not here," said a man full of ancient integrity. "He was
there for thirty years, and no one came to see what his problem was. And
just yesterday he went away. And today you come. Bad luck that."
      "How did he go away?" Duffey asked.
      "I don't know how," the man said, "but I'm sure that he went away.
More than thirty years ago, the wooman said that he was sleeping and not
dead. She had him put in a tomb cave with a sea door to it. "Let him not be
disturbed," she said. "Let him be forgot. In his own time he will wake up."
And so it was. The woman, La Dorotea, she was here for about three weeks
after that. Then she died. She had been wounded by gunshot and her strength
never came back to her. She is buried in the San Francisco cemetery on the
other side of the city. She is buried there because she had a medallion
showing that she belonged to the Third Order of St. Francis. But the
sleeping man his waked and gone yesterday."
      "No, he is not gone. He is still there," several young boys said.
"Give us gold coins, and then give us hanf an hour, and we will take you to
the 'Sleeping Man' in his hole under the sea shelf."
      "Are you sure that he is the same 'Sleeping Man'?" Horace Pie asked
suspiciously.
      "Oh sure. There is only one of them," the ringleader of the boys
slid. "We call him the Long-Sleep Man and we even make a song about him."
The boy sang a little snatch of song that had words such as 'hombre' and
'durmiendo' in it. "Hell, it even has an English chorus to it," he said
then.
      Long-Sleep MAN, in sweet repose.
      Long-Sleep MANNNN, with banana nose!"
      "Yes, that's Finnegan," Duffey said. He rubbed his hands together
and brought forth three gold pieces and gave one to each boy.
      "We need two more of them," the ringleader boy said. "He won't do it
for less than two gold pieces. I don't think he will."
      "Who won't do what?" Duffey asked.
      "Ah, a confederate of ours. He can find the cave better than we can.
But he has to have two gold pieces."
      Duffey rubbed his hands together and produced two more gold pieces.
The ringleader boy took them and ran off, apparently to find the
confederate.
      Duffey struck another gold piece and gave it to the man full of
ancient integrity who still insisted that the Sleeping Man had left the
burial cave the day before. And Duffey had a suspicion that he was right.
      Then the three men, Duffey and X and Horace Pie, went with the two
remaining boys and entered three of the caves with underwater entracnes.
None of them was the right one, and the underwater swims were rathe
strenuous.
      After that, the ringleader boy returend. He led them into another
cave by another submarine 'set door'. They came up into a space that was
slightly above the water and that had sunlight seeping down through the
cracks in its rocky beech roof.
      And there was a sleeping man there. He was a portly Cuban man, lying
nude on a rock shelf. And his workman's clothes were piled beside him. But
he wasn't Finnegan and he hadn't been there for thirty years, nor even for
thirty minutes. The sleeping opened one eye and looked at them.
      "O...?" he asked.
      "O.K. I supposed," Duffey said, "but you're not the man we're
looking for."
      "The other, original 'Sleeping Man' really did go away yesterday,"
the ringleader boy said. "But we will not give you back your gold. We've
hidden it."
      "All right," Duffey said, "But take us to the cave of the real
'Sleeping Man'."
      "We take you there, but he himself is gone," the ringleader boy
said.

      They came to it, out of the drippoing sea and into its half darkness
touched with sunlight. Yes, it was Finnegan's tomb. He was not there, but
things that had touched him were still tehre. Fragments of his aura still
hung there, discernible. And tehre wre a few carvings in low round on the
walls that had unmistakenly been done by Finnegan. Like a hibernating bear,
he had brief moments of wakeflness during his long sleep.
      And this was clearly the cave that had been shown in that painting
'The Resurrection of Count Finnegan'. But Finnegan was nto there.
      "The old man spoke true," Horace Pie commented. "Finnegan was here
yesterday and he has left."
      "If he was here yesterday, then I will go to yesterday and see him
before he leaves," Melchisedech said. Pie and X laughed, but Duffey cast a
deep sleep on them, cutting across their laughter.
      It was yesterday in the burial cave then. Pie and X. were not there,
but Finnegan and Melchisedech were there. And a murderous white stiirk was
there also, full in the sea door or underwater entrance to the cive, avid to
prevent anyone leaving alive. The white shark intended to kill the awakened
Count Finnegan should he attempt to leave by sea.
      And there was an unfriendly man standing on the flat shore over
their heads, intending to kill Count Finnegan if he should find a way up
through the fissured roof of the cave to come out to full day. The word of
the Resurrection had reached the Enemies, and they would prevent it by every
way possible. Count Finnegan knew that the man was there, and Melchisedech
knew that he was.
      Count Finnegan seemed to leave passed through extreme agony only the
moment before, but now he was alive and awake and intense. He had been
speaking when Duffey broke into his yesterday, and he continued to speak, or
to pray.
      "My rock, be not deaf to me," Finnegan said, but not exactly to
Melchisedech, though he saw him.
      "Lest if thou hear me not, I become like untl them who go down unto
the pit," Melchisedech spoke in the same psalm prayer.
      Finnegan: "Though war should rise against me, even then will I
trust."
      Melchisedech: "One thing I ask. This do I seek: that I may dwell in
the house of the Lord all the days of my life."
      Finnegan: "He makes Lebanon skip like a calf, and Sharion like a
Young buffalo."
      Melchisedech: "The Lord shakes the desert of Cades."
      Finnegan: "He rises in the darkness, as a light to the upright."
      Melchisedech: "He shall not fear bad news."
      Finnegan: "I am shut in and cannot go out."
      Melchisedech: "They surround me like water all day long."
      Finnegan: "I lie down among the dead, like the slain who lie in the
grave."
      Melchisedech: "Your youth is renewed like the eagle's."
      Finnegan: "He has shaken the earth, he has torn it apart."
      Melchisedech: "Heal its branches, for it quakes."
      Finnegan: "They howl like dogs and prowl about the city."
      Melchisedech: "Rise up."
      Finnegan: "My tears were kept in thy water skin."
      Melchiscdech: "Are they not recorded in thy book?"
      Finnegan: "Therefore we do not fear, though the earth be
overthrown."
      Melchisedech: "And the mountains crash into the midst of the sea."
      Finnegan: "I lay down and slept."
      Melchisedech: "You arose."
      Finnegan: "He waits in ambush near the villages. He lurks in secret
places like a lion in his lair. There are traps for my feet. I must find my
way among them."
      Melchisedech: "There will be light for your feet. He has called you
to rise from the sea."
      Finnegan: "Have I found out the secret of the darkness? Have I found
the kindling of the light?"
      Melchisedech: "He has savcd you for this latter time."       Finnegan:
"Here are my hands, if it should pass into them. What if I should hold the
crown and raise it above the teeth of the dogs?"
      Melchisedech: "Ascend into the city. There are doings that only you
can do."
      Finnegan: "The lines have failed for me in pleasant places. I am
greatly pleased with my inheritance."
      Melchisedech: "Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy
Ghost. And now that we have prayed together, Finn of my heart, tell me what
mission you go on. It's a violent one, I know, to call you out of death
sleep for it."
      Finnegan: "It's a violent one, yes. It will be a sort of spy
thriller, Duffey, if you must know the category of it. And, like all good
spy thrillers, the fate of the world will depend on its resolution. You cast
two friends of mine into a deep sleep about this time tomorrow, did you
not?"
      Melchisedech: "Yes, Finnegan, I did. And now if you will let me...
or tell me what your great mission is... or at least let me see whether you
escape the man and the shark. Let me see how you do it, or if you do."
      Finnegan: "It sure will be tricky, Duffey. But I haven't been in
abeyance for thirty yeirs to blink out now. You put my friends to sleep
tomorrow. I put you to sleep now."
      Melchisedech: "Wait, Finnegan, wait --"
      But Duffey was into deep sleep. And woke up when X and Pie woke up.
It was the day that it should have been. And Finnegan had risen the day
before and gone on his journey.
      "That white shark, thirty yards off the breakers there," Duffey said
after they had surfaced outside of the cave, and then they were getting onto
the high shore fast. "That white shark, does he look fed?"
      "He does not," Horace Pie said. "He is hungry. And he is frustrated
and furious. I do not want any congress with that embittered shark."

      4

      Duffey and X. went to Chicago. X. was complaining of time lag which
is of much more effect than jet lag caused by having one's time of day
disrupted by fast travel. Duffey had gone several weeks into the past, and
he had taken X. with him. X. did not look well, but he looked more himself.
He had not yet lightened his hair nor (by special process known only to
himself) lightened his eyes to give himself a disguise.
      "This is awkward. It is even outrageous," X. fumed. "Why is it
necessary that we traverse time contrary-wise?"
      "To avoid my own death," Duffey said. "My death would impose a
special set of conditions on my travel. I have it pretty well narrowed down
when I will die, on a certain night or on the night after that, and we were
coming too close to them. I like a very short leeway. I believe that it
deepens my piety to know that I am always within two weeks of my death."
      "Your set is already ordained, man," X. said. "You know in what
future it will be. I brought your ashes back from that time. You will not
die within two weeks."
      "There are paradoxes about me that you know not of," Duffey said. "I
will go when I will go, but first I want to see all of my nation once more
in the normal flesh."
      "But is Casey in the normal flesh now?" X. asked. "There is some
doubt about that, Casey has become -- ah --"
      "Casey has become a cult figure," Mary Catherine Carutners told them
fifteen minutes later when they had gone to see her. "And as such he makes
more than thirty thousand dollars a week. There is big money in being a cult
figure. I don't know whether you'll be able to see him or not. Hardly
anybody gets to see him now. And when you do see him, you haven't seen much.
He's clear off the world, in another world of his own. There is even good
physical evidence that he is clear off the world when he is in one of his
raptures.
      "'That fish, Prince Casimir!' is what Bascom Bagby always called
him. Well, but Casey says that he is one of the two Zodiacal Fish. Christ is
the other one. Cult leaders aren't known for their modesty. I have always
wondered how Casey hooked people, but he has always had me hooked worse than
any of them. Take me out on the town tonight, fellows! I don't go out nearly
enough. The Casey sickness is pretty awkward, and I can't shake it. He
really is a total phoney, granted. Well then, that means, that one of the
two Zodiacal Fish is a total phoney, for Casey is indeed in the Zodiac. He
his painted a remarkable painting of the curile chair on which he sits in
the Zodiac. It's loaded with living and crawling symbolism. Casey is nearly,
for very short spurts, as good a painter as Fiiinegan was, is. Sometimes
Casey says that he's the Antichrist. I don't know whether he believes it or
not, but countless of his followers say it and believe it. 'It is the
highest status ever attained by any human,' they say. 'It should be a matter
of pride to every human that one of us has risen to give the highest
challenge.' His followers, ugh! But I am generally accounted as one of his
leading followers, and those who so account me are the ones who say 'That
Carruthers woman, ugh!' No. I'm sure he won't see you. But Hilary Hilton has
just come in and he will be overjoyed to see you."
      Mary Catherine Carruthers worked for Hilary Hilton, that dynamically
lazy young tycoon who liked to gather in money and power.
      "The enormously spoiled brat, Rolo Danovitz, the Antichrist of a
current cycle of quasi-fiction, is Casey exactly," Hilary Hilton was saying
two minutes later. Hilary was nephew to Duffey's dead best friend Sebastian
Hilton, and Hilton and Duffey had become very good friends in the middle and
later years. "Casey is the spoiled brat who squawled for the stars so loudly
and stridently that they had to be given to him. The dark stars, that is:
ah, the dark stars belong to Casey now, and they're at least half the stars.
Does Casey really believe that he's Antichrist? That's a question that's
often asked. Why shouldn't he believe it? That's who he is, Certainly I mean
it. I spent several million dollars establishing his identity, and it has
been established. Not one of the top five minds in the world doubts the
identity now. But I've known who it is since we were both small boys.
      "Casey makes much ado about his sacrificing himself for humanity,
and for the 'larger humanity', and especially for those most unfortunate and
most abused creatures in all creation, the demons. But Casey misleads here.
He never sacrificed in his life. He's incapable of sacrifice. But he demands
sacrifice to himself by all. He gets it most of the time too. He's
insatiable in his demands.
      "No, Duffey, I don't believe he's into the cultishness for the
money. He's low, but he isn't that low. And I don't believe that being even
a top cult figure pays all that well. Oh, maybe he clears forty or fifty
thousand dollars a week. I make more money than that myself, and Casey's at
least as smart as I am. He could be making more than that in some honest
line of business. He would have done better to marry Mary Catherine here and
prosper legitimately. So would I have done better to marry Mary Catherine
here. But my wife Mary Jean preempted both Casey and myself. No, I don't
think that Casey will see you. He believes that he can out-measure you,
Duffey, but not without a bruising psychic battle, and he wants to avoid
that. The only two persons he does not believe that he can out-measure are
Finnegin and Bishop Salvatore. He's afraid to go to the test with either of
them. Casey has always insisted that Finnegan is still alive. And now my own
very high priced investigators have told me that Finnegan is indeed alive,
that he is wakening from his deathlike sleep right now, and that he will
leave his tomb within the next ten or twelve days. He is destined for some
tricky doings. Finnegan has come to look exactly like Josef Cardinal Hedayat
of Antioch. Cardinal Joseph is the other person, separated off by the schizo
gash from Count Finnegan, in that remarkable painting 'The Resurrection of
Count Finnegan' which painting belongs to me and is kept by you in your
Walk-In Art Bijou in New Orleans. You must know that Cardinal Josef is the
best bet to be next Pope. But some of those who see into the future,
imperfectly and in rough hunks though they see, say that by a contrived
mix-up Count Finnegan will be the one who actually assumes the Crown, though
he will be known as Josef Cardinal Hedayat until he is known as Peter the
Second."
      "That is a large order, Hilary," Duffey said.
      "True, but I have the most penetrating investigators in the world,
and many of them move easily beyond the world to gather their data. One of
the (not the best of them) most outre of them is X. here."
      "You blow my cover!" X. said with open exasperation.
      "Duffey, I know that Casey will refuse to see you," Hilary said.
"But he can be manipulated. We will make him want to come to you. How about
my getting a hundred or so of your best remaining friends together for a
little intimate party tonight? I will bet you that Casey crashes it. He
hates to be left out. 'Highest status ever attained by a human or not'.
Casey doesn't like to be passed over. He will come, if he knows that I am
throwing the party, and that I refused to invite him."
      "All right," Duffey said.

      "This Casey has never impressed me a lot," said that mendacious
midget Charlotte Garfield. "Yes, I know who he is. He really is the
Antichrist. But that's only a high-sounding title. It carries very little
prestige with the real inner circle people.
      "As a confidence man, he breaks the basic code. He does prey on
widows and orphans, on the helplcss, and on the inept. His whole fellowship
is among such. He seldom pitches to persons of intelligence and canniness,
unless they have an extreme tilt that makes them vulnerable. He is not an
honest hunter. He has no conception of conmanship as high hunting of tough
and resourceful game.
      "Oh, he has learned a big hatful of tricks, patiently and
thoroughly. But he uses them mostly on gravid females and on children of all
ages. Yes, he does have a foot in each world, or in each of several worlds.
So have I, so have you Duffey, so have you X.; that isn't a great thing. He
is a cheap shotter to his heart.
      "As to the eschatological aspects of his activities, those are the
last things I want to think about."
      "Hilary Hilton is giving a small and intimate party for myself and a
hundred or so of my old friends tonight, Charlotte," Duffey said.
      "Yes, he's called me. I'll be there," the damnable midget agreed.

      But in the early evening, in hour or so before the small gathering
of the hundred or so ultimate friends, Duffey called Casey. He did not call
on phone or on Intimo. He knew that he wouldn't get through to him if Casey
was on the high hobby. But he called him in a direct abd undeviced way.
      And Casey talked to Duffey in saying that he would not talk to him.
This was one of the direct conversations that did not come over any of the
approved channels.
      "I will not see you," Casey said, "and I will not permit you to see
me. On no account will we meet again. Be gone, clown."
      "You will see me, if I have to have your head brought here and set
before me, with your eyes sewn open, youi will see me," Duffey swore. "And
you will see me in the seeing of many millions of people. On early prime
time television we will have you, Casey."
      "I know power, Duffey, and I know that you have not the power to
compel me to any such silliness," Casey said. "Oh, I swore that I would not
talk to you, and I will not. Nor see you. Nor hear you."
      Casey scrambled the very air and aether, and Duffey could not reach
to him again. But Duffey believed that he could project him.
      This trick of protecting persons and situations and pitches on
television was one of Casey's own strong tricks, though he always denied any
complicity or intent in it. But Ciscy had projected his idealized face and
his eerie-toned voice in superposition on hundreds of programs. That is
really how he became so well known as the Anti-Christus. This projection too
difficult for one who is a genius at electronics and a giant in psyche.

      The intimate part was at Randal's. Duffey told them there that an
interesting over-picture would appear that evening on the channels, one
worth minute study. So a three-meter set was brought into the Cenacle or
supper room.
      And the over-picture came while that suppertime family comedy,
Goldfarb's Alley, was on the tube.
      Violence was only used for clownish effect on Goldfarb's Alley; so
when the horrible screaming begin, many of the watchers thought that it was
supposed to be funny. Others knew at once that something was very very
wrong, that the sceaming didn't belong there at all. Some thousands
recognized that beloved voice, and knew that the person was in agony. They
begin to pour out into the streets within seconds. They would kill for their
cult hero. They would tear the town apart to extricate him from danger. All
they needed was direction.
      For others, the surface fun was quickly milked out of the comedy,
and the sound became grizzly. And yet there might be a deeper and darker fun
in it. The over-picture appeared to reinforce the sound. There were four
black giants of demiurgic appearance. They were carrying a livid object by
its hair.
      The horrifying object was the head only of Kasimir Szmansky, Casey
of the Zodiac, the fantastic cult figure. It was not shown as severed. It
was shown as a head-only person, grimacing horribly, and cursing. It would
shiver anybody just to watch it.
      "Not bad, Duffey," Hilary Hilton said. "How do you do it?"
      "I take it from a picture that Adam Scanlon once painted of Casey,
unbeknownst to Casey himself. Scanlon had no use at all for Casey, though
Scanlon was a close friend of Finnegan and Finnegan was of the inner world
with Casey. The animation and presentation of it? Oh, that's a little
harder. lt's taking a lot out of me," Melchisedech Duffey said. "These
things don't come as easy for me as they used to. The power is just not what
it once was."
      "I want the original of that Scanlon painting," Hilary said. "I lust
for it."
      "I'll send it to you," Duffey said.
      "I will not see! I will not see!" the lolling mouth of the atrocious
head was rattling out in jerky anger. "I will not see you at all, mangy
magus."
      But the eyes of the head were sewn open and there was no way that
the livid head could close them. The head groaned and sweat profusely.
      All of the people on the 'Goldfarb's Alley' Comedy Show had
adandoned the screen to the grotesque head and the black giants that still
held it. The alley people had fled away in terror. But they were just
pictures, and were not present on the individual screens in person. Maybe
not, but still they fled away in terror. They did not want any part of that
livid head. The apparition was building up to a point of vivid horror.
      But then a tensely cool voice broke over the screen, broke over
millions of screens on all channels, attempting to override the visibility
and the strident sound.
      "This presentation is a fraud!" the cool but tense voice announced.
"It is projected by a fraud. I am Casey of the Zodiac, the Anti-Christus,
and I say that this livid head is not mine. It is only a sick dream. I am
not captured. I am not compelled to look at trash. I beg you, people who
believe in me, do not riot in the streets. I am not captured. I am not
harmed. I am not threatened. This picture is sheer fraud."
      But the mouth and the voice of the living head cried out, "This is
no fraud."
      The head rolled its eyes inward till only the bloodshot whites of
them could be seen, and they could not be compelled to see anything except
the head's own interior darktness. "I will not meet this magus, I will not
look upon him," the head said.
      But one of the black giants made cuts at the corners of the head's
eyes with a surgical instrument. Then he went deeper with another
instrument, and snipped. He did this to the region behind each eye. He cut
the optic nerves and muscles so that the eyes came to the front again and
could not be rolled back into the head.
      "I will not see this monster!" the head roared. And yet its eyes
were sewn open and it had to see him. The eyes did see Melchisedcch. In
malevolence they saw him.
      "There is rioting in the streets," an official of Randal's said as
he came to them in the Cenacle Room. "It's broken out everywhere just in
seconds. This Zodiac Person has millions of intense followers and
defenders."
      "Street riots in Chicago have always had an amateurish quality,"
Duffey said. "They don't do much real damage."
      "These are doing real damage," the official said. "I believe the
picture that has set them off is originating right here. I ask you to
terminate it."
      "Wait a minute," Duffey said. "He's caving in. I can feel him cave."

      And Casey, watching the bloated caricature of his own head, hearing
the croking burlesque of his own voice in its agony-humor, did cave in.
Casey was a bit fastidious. Stark things offended him.      "You win,
Melchisedech," the Casey voice came, cool and with a touch of venom, both on
the big T.V. set and independent of it. "Turn it off. I'll be down to the
party immediately. Such things as these pass for humor with the Duffeyites."

      Casey arrived there in about seven minutes. He had climbed down from
his Curile Chair in the Zodiac, and he showed quite a bit of the old Casey
in him, only about half covered up by the cult figure. The old Casey had
always been a fair sort of party man, sometimes setting aside his pride for
hours on an end for enjoyment in the company of old acquaintances. For
everyone here was an acquaintance of Casey as well as of Melchisedech
Duffey.
      It was a good party. It was five hours of the most urbane
festivities ever. There have not been so many bright people in one room,
actually four rooms of the suite that they overflowed, cince Olympus was
torn down to build a 'Look-Out Lodge and Leisure Hostel' up there.
      Hilary Hilton and Mary Jean (she was the onlu one in the world who
had ever really set Casey's heart to howling and baying), Demetrio Glauch,
Clarence Schrade, Silas and Maude Whiterice, the Countess Margaret
Hochfelsen (only next week you will be a Royal Pop Person, Countess, and
much younger than you are now: do you know that?), Lily Koch (Oh Lily, Lily,
Lily!), Mary Frances Rattigan (Gompers), Mary Catherine Carruthers, Ethyl
Ellenberger and her husband John Ryan, Nathan and Shirley Stone (Duffey was
pretty sure that Nathan was a brother, and less abrasive person, than
Absalom Stein), Elena O'Higgins, d'Alesandro, Charlotte Garfield and her son
Michael, Enos Dorn, Angelo Cato, Ira and Rebecca Spain, Homer and Evangeline
Durbin, Mike and Peggy Conner, Isaac and Mary Lightfoot, Judley and Pauline
Peacock, Mary Carmel Hooligan, Mother Mary Aurora, Enniscorthy and Mary
Margaret Sweeny, Tony and Evelyn Apostolo, Cletus Kenealy, Cassius and Mary
Greatheart, Leo Ring, Martin and Katherine Redwine, Nemo Cobb, Fred and
Helen Batavia, X., Melchisedech Dtiffey, many, many others were there. So
many of the old friends were still there, and so many others were sleeping
in the Lord. And Casey of the Zodiac, what could you make of him?
      On this night, Melchisedech saw these good friends of his for the
last time in the normal flesh. He reveled in the company of almost all of
them, and in particular in that of one of his Splendid Animations, Mary
Catherine Carruthers.
      But he did not solve the riddle of the other one of his Splendid
Animations here: Kasimir Szymansky, Casey of the Zodiac, the self-proclaimed
Anti-Christus. Cisey was wrapped in several thicknesses of riddles, and he
would not be penetrated in a day or a week now. But it was a good party, and
one that would be remembered in this world and in the next.

      5

      'It's NOLA for all Quirks and Quips,
      Havana for rum graves and rum,
      Chicago for Companionships,
      St. Louis for Symposium.

      [Count Finnegan. Road Songs.]

      Duffey and X went to St. Louis. There was a concentration of his
Animated Marvels there, Hans Schultz and wife Marie Monahan, Vincent
Stranahan and his wife Teressa Piccone. Four of them was almost critical
mass. And a fifth one was there that Duffey didn't know was there. This was
critical mass, considering that X. was also an Animated Marvel.
      The one of them that DLiffey did not expect to find in St. Louis was
Henri Cardinal Salvatore of New Orleans.
      "Whatever are you doing here in St. Louis, friend and elevated
person," Duffey asked. "I waw saving you for the last. I intended to see you
in New Orleans before my skein quite runs out."
      "I came to St. Louis to see you," Cardinal Salvatore said. "You will
not return to New Orleans. Your skein runs out here."
      "You are sure of that, your tallness?"
      "Was I ever sure of anything? I was just talking to Dame Bagby about
the situation. She believes that you should be buried here. There is a lot
for you in their plot. You can be beside your quasi-brother Bagby, and
perhaps you will be with him in person also. He's presently residing on the
north slope of Purgatory, if you need guidance to find him. And after a bit
the Dame will join you there."
      The Cardinal was referring to Duffey's sister as Dame Bagby, and
indeed she had become something of it dame, weighty and ponderous, but merry
yet.
      "You have it all figured out," Duffey said. "Could you tell me what
day my obsequies would be?"
      "No point in telling you," the Cardinal said. "Figure you have it
almost through this weekend. Then we can bury you Monday or Tuesday. Yes,
neat, Melchiscdech. The world will be a bit lonesome without you."
      They were in the old Stranahan residence, the Cat Castle. Patrick
Stranahan was dead. Charley Murray was dead. Papa Piccone was dead. Father
McGuigan was dead. "I should have come two years ago," Melchiscdech said,
"and seen them a last time in their worn-out mortal coils. Marry me, Monica.
You should have come into a good inheritance."
       "Oh, you would only give it away," Monica said. Duffey had given
away his half-ownership in the 'Rounders' Club' just that day. Well, Charley
Murray, in his will, had left his half interest in the club to his nephew
Vincent Stranahan. So Duffey now deeded his half interest to Teresa Showboat
Piccone Stranahan. Now those two were running it. It would continue to be a
fine club in the old tradition.
       "You haven't delayed your own death one moment by your scurrying
around through time," the Cardinal Salvatore said. "This is the day it is
supposed to be. You will die when you are supposed to die. And another good
man will be gone to the greater thing."
       "Yes, the calendar did jump ten days when I wasn't paying
attention," Duffey said. "But I can always make it jump back again."
       "No, you cannot," the Cardinal said. "Never again. The gears and the
activating rods of that device have rusted fast now, and they'll never work
for you again. It was only boyishness, and it's taken away from you now."
       "There is always the Argo," X. said.
       "What is the Argo?" Melchisedech Duffey asked him. Probably they
were talking in the Bread and Wine Room at Rounders' Club now, or at
Cabramatta Castle which was the home of Hans and Marie, or in the Burlesque
Buffet Room in the house of Vincent and Teresa, or at Dame Bagby's Place.
Probably those present were Dame Bagby, Hans and Marie and Cecelia Schultz
(Cecilia was one of the daughters-in-law), Vincent and Teresa and their
three younger children Chiara and Rafadio and Theresa Anna who were born so
many years after their older children, Monica Murray Stranahan, Philip
Stranahan the oldest brother of Vincent, Duffey, X., Henri Cardinal
Salvatore. It was a pleasant continuing conversation or symposium that went
on for several days, the last several days of Duffey's normal life.
       "Do you not remember the Argo, Melchiscdech?" Teresa asked. "We are
not supposed to remember that grand ship when we are not actually sailing on
her. There is an amnestic mechanism that insures that we do not remember,
but I myself cheat a little bit on it, and I believe that you others do
also."
       "The only Argo I have heard of is in Bulfinch's Mythology. What is
this grand ship and what flag does she sail under?"
       "That of the Kingdom of Colchis," Henri Cardinal Salvatore said.
"No, we do not ordinarily remember the Argo except when we are sailing on
her. And if, during our land tenure, we do remember a little bit about it,
we feel that it is more symbolic than real. And yet it's a grand thing to
ship as an Angel before the Mast, as an Ancient Salt-Water Shepherd who
smells strongly of sheep, as a person who may sail over the edge of the
world again and again and again. I believe that I myself have been sailing
on her quite recently. I feel the sustaining salt-wind of an Argo voyage
sustaining me in all that I do. But the days and years spent on the Argo are
not deducted from the days and years of life. They are outside of that. And
of the mariners on the Argo, some are in the flesh and some are out of it,
and sonic are of a fishy flesh. But one cannot play tricks with the Argo."
       "I can," X said. "I do it constantly."
       "Should Duffey, in the last minute of his life, decide to sail on
the Argo, then very likely he would be able to do so. He might sail on her
and perform gestes from her for what seems like three or five or seven
years, which is those years according to the chronometer of the Argo. But
they will not shorten the last minute of his life. They are not contained in
that minutes though they may accompany that minute. The minute will still be
gone in sixty seconds, and the earthly life will be gone with it. There is
no way to play tricks with the Voyages."
       "There is a way, right at the end of the voyage," X. said. "One has,
if he remembers to have, a selection of shores on which to land from the
voyage. And one has, if he remembers to have, a selection of years in which
to land."
      "But he will not remember," the Cardinal said.
      "If I remember to remind him, then he will," X. maintained.
      "No, you will not remember to renind him, and he will not remember
to remember," the Cardinal insisted. "It will end when it is supposed to
end."
      "I remember it now," Duffey said, "how I begin the present phase of
my life. Ah yes, I had been on the Holy Ship and doing high gestes there.
Then my tour of duty was ended there, and I remembered what I might do. I
left the ship and cattle ashore. Well, I was given a short leave (sixty
years it was, as it happened) on the shore of my choice. That is what my
present lifetime is. It seems is if I have told this same thing in these
same words to somebody very recently."
      "Not to me," said the Cardinal Salvatore.
      "I came ashore, swimming and wading through turbulent water. It was
early morning. The shore was muddy, with engendering mud, and full of
promise. It was the year 1923, and I was a young man of no more than a
quarter of a century of physical years. I went up that muddy shore and
entered into the green and burgeoning years of my life. If I remember to do
it, I can come back to that amme shore, and to that same year, and have
another sixty green and burgeoning years to my life. If I remember, I call
land on that shore again and once more be a young man of only a quarter of a
century of physical years."
      "Melchisedech, Melchisedech, if you keep coming back to the same
shore, how will you ever reach the other shore where all blessing is?"
Cardinal Henri asked. "But if you do relive the sixty green and burgeoning
years again, it will still all be in that final minute of your life, and it
will not shorten that minute by a second."
      "It may be that I am not quite prepared to face that other shore
just yet," Melchisedech said.
      "I believe that I have been on the Argo quite recently," Hans said.
      "I know that I have," Marie maintained. "That is why I always wake
so refreshed lately."
      "One of the latter-day prophetic books, referring to a conclave to
be held in the middling near future, dismisses the me as being already
dead," Cardinal Henri told them. "'Daniel Jean Boule who was the double of
the dead Cardinal Salvatore of New Orleans, was coming up from along the
Mexican coast in a tramp steamer' it records briefly. That is the only time
that I appear in this prophetic piece, and I thought 1 would play a large
part in the conclave.
      "For I do not intend to be dead. I intend to be ny double's double.
I will travel for a while as the double of the dead Dan Boule (he's my
cousin, by the way). I will attend the conclave. And I will be a candidate."

      "There's another passage in one of the latter-day prophetic books,"
Teresa said. "And it is (pay attention please, Melchisedech and all) this:
      'He also predicted three cargoes that Melchisedech Duffey, in
ghostly and bony form, and with a crew of wraiths, would transport on the
last voyige of the ship Argo, which has had other names.
      One of these cargoes would be Count Finnegan whom Melchisedech
woould transport to an obscure place in the Indies where he would be elected
and crowned. One of these cargoes would be Prince Casimir whom Dufeyy would
transport to the coast nearest the Vale of Armageddon where this Prince
Casimir would reign for a while as Anti-Christ. And the third of the cargoes
would be the Parousia Himself, Christ of the Second Corning.' Have you
knowledge of these things that you will do, Melchisedech?"
      "I have it not", Melchisedech Duffey said.

      Everything was a bonus in those last days in St. Louis. It was
superflous in the correct old sense of the word which is 'overflowing'.
There were extra snails on the thorn, there were extra pidgeons in the
parks. The years that the cows had eaten were returned green and whole.
There was gravy on the goose and huckleberries on the biscuits. MeIchisedech
had almost forgotten what good people were these several of his Blessed
Animations, Teresa and Vincent, Hans and Marie, Henry: were there ever five
such genuinely good persons in the world? Had they not rebuilt the world
from its sorry state? Was it not better for their having been in it? Did the
cranky details matter at all when these larger persons were --"

      Oh, Duffey had a seizure then, on the third or fourth da of the St.
Louis visitation. And he was into the last minute of his normal life. But he
was happy to have such pleasant friends at his sudden leave-taking. They
would bid him right.
      "Remember to ask for the Argo again," X. said to him.
      "On, don't bother his dying," Dame Bagby said. "We will see each
other again in shorter time than it has been between our visits last years,
Melky."
      "It been fun with you," Teresa said, "and it will be even more fun
the next time."

      6

       Melchisedech was strongly into the seventh contingency now. He had
been almost here before, again and again. It had been a recurring dream and
a recurring speculation of his. It had had the shape of the final
expectation.
       But it had always been "thus far and no farther". There had always
been a wall between, or a mist is obscuring as a wall. Or it had always been
a waking up, or a forgetting, or a complete destruction of mood with a
plunging back into hopelessness. But now Melchisedech began at the high
point of pleasure and excitement where before he had always broken off.
       Melchisedech was walking with the Invisible God in a Garden in the
afternoon. There was quite a few thousand other people also walking in that
pleasant place, but there was no possibility of crowding, and there was no
possibility of any one of them being supplanted or failing out of the
Attention. Every one was in special favor here. It was a high fellowship of
special favor.
       There was total appeal to all fifty-and-five senses, so Melchisedech
knew that the scene was genuine. And yet the old senses still held
precedence over the new and unpracticcd senses.
       "You are a special person, Melchiscdech," the Invisible God said,
but not in words. "The Melchisedech Paradoxes are at least as wonderful as
the Zeno Paradoxes. But every one of my persons is absolutely special and
absolutely unique, and every one of them is wrapped in a cluster of
wonderful paradoxes. There is no precedence as to particularity among my
special persons."
       No, this was not the finality. This was only the anteroom of it.
That last second of life still had some while to go. This was dying vision,
but not death yet. Here and there, one might see gaps in the green-mantled
earth on which they walked, and there was open sky below them, through the
gaps. But there was no uneasiness of footing nor fear of falling. Anyone who
can walk on water can walk on either caving green earth or on sky with short
practice. It was as easy to walk on the flowing sky as on the flowering
earth.
       Duffey had for mentor Patrick PIunket, that great Irish saint and
magician and medical doctor.
       "This is mostly Adam Scanlon sod that we are walking over now,"
Melchisedech told Plunket to show his erudition. "Nobody else could do the
muscular greens of sedge grass and fern flower as well as Scanlon, not even
Finnegan. I didn't know that he had gone in for landscape animations. For a
fact, I didn't know that there was such a field."
      "No, Duffey, this is real," Plunket said.
      "And I never saw such textured symbolism," Melchisedech Duffey
mumbled happily. "There's a very old Arcadian motif here. Then there is
glorious sixteenth century Spanish stuff, Teresa, and John of the Cross. And
there is twentieth century Jungian influence, transfigured and outdoing
itself. The audio components of this mystical symbolism are to be found in
the music of --"
      "Easy, easy. It's real, Duffey man, it's real," Plunket insisted.
"You've a weakness to correct here. You're in love with the contrived. It is
for that reason that you have animated various clays, that you have wakened
certain quick-earths. You put a lot of symbolism in your marvels, and you're
good at it. But in spite of yourself, they turned real on you. And that is
over with for you now. Look up from it, man! You're in the Presence of the
Real Thing."
      "Yes, yes, I know, and it's hard for me to comprehend it all, Pat,"
Duffey said. "Now it's as though we were ascending a mountain, pleasantly
and without great effort. But there is no particular elevation to be seen in
this place. But I can feel the elevation, Patrick, and I can taste it."
      "It's the invisible Mountain, Melky. It's the interior mountain. We
ascend in intensity. We are in the Presence."
      "I know we are in the Presence. I have walked in grace three days
out of four of my life. Do you think me a stranger to the Presence? But this
is a blooming richness that increases in every way. There's a hundred people
here that I know and love. And then there are a hundred thousand of them
with no lessening of the knowing and loving, and certainly no lessening of
the personal acquaintance. How long can it grow better and better?"
      "Forever, Duffey. It grows exponiently better forever."
      "There's no danger of our losing it, or of it going wrong, is there,
Pat?"
      "So slight a danger, Duffey, that we will put it out of mind."     "You
don't know my mind. There are still uncleansed corners of it, and
disoriented curiosities. Ah, here's a pitch of perfect clay, Plunket. I
believe that I will just try to make a model of -- to try to catch a
fraction of this dazzling animation -- to imprison a piece of this
transitory loveliness in a more permanent..."
      "Duffey, thou clod! This is the Permanence Itself that we walk with!
There's no need to mould idols."
      "You're right, Patrick, you're right. It's an old habit that I find
hard to reak. A little while ago, I made a dozen splendid animations..."
      "No, no, you wokr them up only, Duffey. You did not make them. There
has been criticism of your attempts to make these things. You did good work,
but you thought it other than it was. There is a place for persistent and
unrepentant makers. It's a dankish and mud-colored place where the addicted
persons form things, and form them, and form them again and again. It's
about the shoddiest section of Purgatory."
      "It doesn't sound bad to me at all, Pat. It is far from here? Could
we go there now?" "Duffey, you're walking in the Delectable Place Itself,and
our Delectation walks with us! The Potter's Place is on a low and broken
way, and it's full of lamentations."
      "I suppose so. That's the test of good work. I lament qyite a bit
myself when I'm in the labor and passion of making. Ah, let's just cut
through these thorn hedges!"
      "The thorn hedges are out of the direct way, Duffey. They are an
obstacle that has to be sought out. They are the only rough going here, and
they make us go the long way around to go through them."
      "Sometimes I like the rough going and the long way around, Patrick.
Just solong as there's no danger of things going wrong, I love the wrong
way. You said there was so slight a danger of things going wrong, Patrick,
that we could put itout of ourminds, but I've not been able to do that. Just
how great are the odds against things going wrong?"
       "Not nearly as great as they were a while ago, Melchisedech. But
come into the green way again, and the odds will increase once more."
       "What a curious deformity that branch in the middle of the thorn
thicket is! I must..."
       "No, you must not, man! Leave it alone. It was put in the middle of
the thorn thicket so that it would be left alone. There's a billion better
and more formly branches in the holy boscage around us. Oh why was I ever
assiened to be mentor and guide to a snake-bit Irishman?"
       "Look, Pat, it'sa mechanical lever of some sort. And the handle of
it..."
       "No, Duffey, no! Don't touch it!"
       "I'll touch what I please, good friend. It sets one a-tingle, it
does, just to grip it like this. And now I look at it all, at the fine
detail of it. It's seductive, it's beautiful, it's soul-satisfying, and it's
symbolically enriching. But is it real?"
       "It is Melchisedech, and it will continue to be. And you were real,
till you touched that handle. Untouch it, man, and be real again."
       "Ah, there's a curious deformity about the handle of this lever.
Howeer is that gnarled effect achieved? Fine carving that. It's made of
fruit wood, you see. I wonder what the handle activates if I just..."
       "Man, don't try to find out! There were a billion billion chances to
one against anyone going thorugh those tearing thorn hedges and discovering
that handle, and you did it. Let it alone now."
       "Well, I have to find out of all of this is real."
       "Turn that handle, you lame-brianed Irishm,an, and you'llfind out
all too late what's real."
       "Too soon or too late, I want to find out. Caneven the Presence
Itself be a form of temptation to trickme away from the wonderful hewing and
moulding place. Tell me, Pat Plunkett, what does happen if I turn this
handle?"
       "The whole bottom falls out from under you!"
       Melchisedech Duffey turned the handle, and the whole bottom fell out
of things.
       "Pat, I'm falling forever!" Melchisedech wailed, and he fell like a
scorcehd rock through the afternoon sky.
       "I'll miss you, Melky, but some like it one place and some like it
another," Pat Plunkett said.
       (No, the last moment of life wasn't over. The last moment of life
was hardly begun, barely dinted yet. There might have been as much as fifty
seconds of it left.) Melchisedech Duffey was sitting in a dung heap, pretty
deep in it. His legs and hips had been smashed by the fall, and likelymany
more bones had been broken. He was in a fetid and half liquid place of
miasmas and mists, and storms were brginning to bumble out of the putrid sky
above it. And Melchisedech found himself assaulted interiorly and exteriorly
and medially (on and in the covering hide of him) by angry small creatures.
       Blister beetles were afflicting him, and horse leeches, and latrine
snakes. He was stung by scorpions and infested by midges and crab cooties.
Moreover, he suffered from the body flux.
       "It's a big change from the beautiful and green sky meadows,: he
said, "and the end of the fall was a real shocker. Well, well, let's see
what can be done about it right now."
       Melchisedech banged his hands together, and he groaned in pain. One
of his hands was shattered worse than the otehr, but the best one was not
good. A storm churned around him, and whirl winds were the inhabited fingers
of that storm. The sky was garish, gaunt, gray-orange, Gothic.
       "It's a Finnegan sky," Duffey said. "I always wondered where he'd
gotten it. He's been here, that's what."
       Duffey's skin wasthat of sick and leprous snakes. it wailed and
itched wretchedly, and burned like thermite. "I will have to get out of this
skin," he said. He took pieces of broken bottles, shards they were, and tore
his skin and flesh to rake out the devouring and itching worms.
       From far away, a voice was calling "The Argo. Remember The Argo. You
can go to it if you remember that you can go."
       "What is The Argo?" Melchisedech asked out loud. And then he called
more loudly. "What? What? What is it that you're saying?"
       Dung rats took savage slices from Duffey, and buzzards plundered him
with their knifie beaks. Blood snakes came like arrows to the scent of his
blood.
       "I've always lked these little jogs to the ingenuity," Duffey said.
"A man is hard put to do his best work without them." And the livid sky spun
and spoke.
       "Ah, the whirlwinds, the whirlwinds!" Duffey cried. "That' is my
kind of talk. And the lightning!"
       The whirlwinds were sky-high cyclones. And the lightning split the
sky, relentlessly, shriekingly, destroyingly, totally. The thunder was
sky-explosive, divinely clattering, rolling, rocking blasts of...
       ...laughter. No, not maniac laughter, total-sanity laughter.
       "Why, I'm not out of favor at all," Duffey cried. "God in the
whirlwind and tempest is not less present than God in the afternoon breeze.
I am still in the Presence. I have th best of all worlds."
       "The Argo, remember The Argo," the voice was crying. Not the grat
voice, a small and mortal voice. "You can go to it if you remembe that you
can go."
       "Why? Will things be better if I go to this Argo?" Duffey cried the
question.
       The broken Melchisedech hands were moving and working now. "It
reminds me a lot of that Finnegan picture 'Potting Shed in a Storm'!" the
happy magician said.
       (Those who beliee that this is only adjunct to the seventh
congruency and is not reality are the same people who believed that
Melchisedech could not really create. Abjure them.)
       "He remembered that I am a magus and that making is what I am best
at," Melchisedech gloated. "Why, I have everything here that I need to work
with. And worldly distractions are blotted out. Gloria in Tempestis Deo!"
       There were pieces of broken bottles and jagged metal on this trashy
dung heap. The most shapely of them would serve as talismans, and Duffey
selected them with his creator's eye. These would work. And the lightning --
       "Ah, a million volts should be about right for the infusing," Duffey
cried in his joyful labor. "Here's the Muck of Animation. Here's good blood,
my own. Here are shapes and forms of all of it dancing in the sky, if I
should forget. Bless this lightning! Bless this dungheap! This is the worl
that I love."
       Well, what do youthink is maintainign the world on even its wobbly
ways if it is not the extraordinary work and workmanship of such prodigious
and special and creative people?
       "Remember The Argo!" the voice was calling again. "You can go to it
now. And you can leave it for any destination you prefer, if only you
remember that you can leave it."
       "Yes, I remember The Argo now," Melchisedech said. "I love it, and I
love this work here also. Is there not some way I can have both?"
       (No, the last minute of his life wasn't over. The last minute of his
life had but a very small hunk taken out of it as yet. There might be as
many as forty-nine seconds of it left.)
       Melchisedech was reching out and moulding the rich dung in which he
was half-buried. He was moulding it into forms, into marvels (soon they
would be Animated Marvels), with his own blood as integument, burning to
make, and making -- "another dozen even better than the first..."
       And the million-volted lightning came down like giant hands to help
in the happy making.
      Yes, all this was happenign. And Melchisedech wouldn't have had it
unhappen for anything. But what if he should go around to another thing and
then come back to this.
      "This happy work will still be here," he said, "and I suspect that
it will be even happier and better when the irrittions are removed after I
have been tested. This is here forever, but The Argo has only one more
voyage. I can have both of my delight. I can sail. I can have my intervals
of delight on sea and on shore. And I can return to this for my final
delight.
      "Lord, I am enraptured with this work. Lord I will do this work
forever. But not yet."