Introduction The Man On The Mushroom

The arrival in Hollywood was something less than auspicious. It was February, 1962, and I had broken free of the human monster for whom I’d been editing in Chicago. It was one of the worst times in my life. The one time I’d ever felt the need to go to a psychiatrist, that time in Chicago. I had remarried in haste after the four-year anguish of Charlotte and the Army and the hand-to-mouth days in Greenwich Village; now I was living to repent in agonizing leisure.

I had been crazed for two years and hadn’t realized it. Now I was responsible for one of the nicest women in the world, and her son, a winner by any standards, and I found I had messed their lives by entwining them with mine.

There was need for me to run, but I could not. Nice Jewish boys from Ohio don’t cut and abandon. So I began doing berserk things. I committed personal acts of a demeaning and reprehensible nature, involved myself in liaisons that were doomed and purposeless, went steadily more insane as the days wound tighter than a mainspring. Part of it was money. Not really, but I thought it was the major part of the solution to the situation. And I’d banked on selling a book of stories to the very man for whom I was working. He took considerable pleasure in waiting till we were at a business lunch, with several other people, to announce he was not buying the book. (The depth of his sadism is obvious when one learns he subsequently did buy and publish the book.) But at that moment, it was as though someone had split the earth under me and left me hanging by the ragged edge, by my fingertips. I went back to the tiny, empty office he had set up in a downtown Evanston office building, and I sat at my desk staring at the wall. There was a clock on the wall in front of me. When I sat down after that terrible lunch, it was 1:00.... When I looked at the clock a moment later, it was 3:15....

The next time I looked, a moment later, it was 4:45....

Then 5:45...

Then 6:15...

7:00...8:30...

Somehow, I don’t know how, even today, I laid my head on the desk, and when I opened my eyes again I had taken the phone off the hook. It was lying beside my mouth. A long time later, and again I don’t remember doing it, I dialed a friend, Frank M. Robinson, a dear writer friend of many years.

I heard Frank’s voice saying, “Hello...hello...is someone there...?”

“Frank...help me...”

And when my head was lifted off the desk, it was an hour later, the phone was whistling with a disconnect tone, and Frank had made it all the way across from Chicago to Evanston to find me. He held me like a child, and I cried.

Soon after, I left Evanston and Chicago and the human monster, and with my wife and her son began the long trek to the West Coast. We had agreed to divorce, but she had said to me, with a very special wisdom that I never perceived till much later, when I was whole again, “As long as you’re going to leave me, at least take me to where it’s warm.”

But we had no money. So We had to go to Los Angeles by way of New York from Chicago. If I could sell a book. I would have the means to go West, young man, go West. (And that was the core of the problem, not money: I was a young man. I was twenty-eight, but I had never become an adult.) In a broken-down 1957 Ford we limped across to New York during the worst snowstorms in thirty years.

My wife and her son stayed with a friend I’d known in the Village, and I slept on the sofa at the home of Leo & Diane Dillon, the two finest artists I know. Leo & Diane slept on the floor. They are more than merely friends.

It was December of 1961, and amid the tensions and horrors of that eight-week stay in New York, two things happened that brought momentary light, and helped me keep hold: The first was a review by Dorothy Parker in Esquire of a small-printing paperback collection of my stories.

How she had obtained it I do not know. (When I met her, later, in Hollywood, she was unable to remember where the book had come from.) But she raved about it, and said I had talent, and it was the first really substantial affirmative notice from a major critic. It altered the course of my writing career, and provided my ego--which had been nourishing itself cannibalistically on itself--with reason for feeling I could write. The second happening of light was, the sale of this book. Gerry Gross bought it for short money, mostly because he knew I was in a bad way. But it provided the funds to start out for Los Angeles.

We traveled a bard road down through the Southwest, and in Fort Worth we were staved in by a drunken cowboy in a pickup. Rear-ended. He had a carhop on one arm, and a fifth of Teacher’s in the free band. Rammed us on an icy bridge, smashed the car, crushed the rear-end trunk containing our luggage and my typewriter, and I suppose it was that typewriter that saved our lives. The typewriter has paid the rent and put food on the table many times, but that time it physically gave up its life to save me.

We were laid up in Fort Worth for a week, with our money running out. Had it not been for the help of the then-police chief, a man whose name I’ll never forget--Cato Hightower--we would never have gotten out of Texas. He got me a new typewriter, had the car repaired for a fraction of what the garage would have stiffed a tourist just Passing through and be paid off the motel.

I arrived in Los Angeles in January of 1962 with exactly ten cents in my pocket. For the last three hundred miles we had not eaten. There wasn’t enough money for gas and food. All we’d had to keep us alive was a box of pecan pralines we’d bought before the accident and had in the rear seat.

The arrival in Hollywood was something less than auspicious. My almost-ex-wife and her son moved into an apartment, and I took up residence in a fourteen-dollar-aweek room in a bungalow complex that is now an empty lot on Wilshire Boulevard. I tried to get work in television, got some assignments that paid the various rents, and bombed out on all of them. Nobody had bothered to show me how to write a script. And when it looked as though I’d hit the very bottom, ELLISON WONDERLAND was published in June of 1962, the publisher sent me a copy, and the check for the balance of monies due on publication. It was enough to pull me through till I got another assignment--writing Burke’s Law for the Four Star Studios and ABC. It was the very moment my luck changed. I remember the morning the mail arrived, with the book in its little manila envelope. I ripped open the package, and out fell the check. But I didn’t even look at it. I sat in that room smelling of mildew and stared at the cover of Ellison Wonderland. The artist, Sandy Kossin, had taken a photo of me, and he’d drawn me in sitting cross-legged atop a giant mushroom, while all around me danced and capered the characters from the stories in this book. Skidoop and Ithk and Helgorth Labbula and the crocodile-headed woman from “The Silver Corridor” and that little jazzbo gnome with the patois now long-outdated and so unhip.

There I was. And Hollywood became, for the first time since I’d arrived, not a grungy, lonely, frustrating town whose tinsel could strangle you...but a magic town whose sidewalks were paved with gold; a yellow brick road leading to a giant mushroom where I could perch if I simply hung in there.

Now it’s fourteen years later, and ELLISON WONDERLAND is back in print, thanks to the good offices of Michael Seidman and Olga Vezeris of New American Library.

And just to show that fairy tales sometimes do have happy endings, dear readers be advised I’m really okay now. There is a mushroom, and I’m sitting on it, and I’ve been writing better here in magic town than I ever did anywhere else, and I’ll keep on doing it till I run out of mushroom or magic (and that is not a reference, to dope, which I don’t, so I ain’t), and here, like a good penny, is ELLISON WONDERLAND again.

Welcome to my world.

HARLAN ELLISON Los Angeles March, 1974

The trouble with Miniver Cheevy (child of scorn who cursed the day that he was born) was that--aside from the fact he was a bit of a fink, with no understanding of the contemporary image he projected--he was always$ building dream castles, and then trying to move into them. It’s muddy thinking, youth, to expect to do any better in another epoch than the one you’re in. A guy who is a foul ball in one time, must assuredly be so in another...unless his name is da Vinci or Hieronymous Bosch. And the poor soul in this little epic is named neither, which may be the reason he suffers a Commuter’s Problem “Thing” was all I could call it, and it had a million tentacles. It was growing in Da Campo’s garden, and it kept staring at me.

“How’s your garden, John,” said Da Campo behind me, and I spun, afraid he’d see my face was chalk-white and terrified.

“Oh--pretty, pretty good. I was just looking for Jamie’s baseball. It rolled in here.” I tried to laugh gaily, but it got stuck on my pylorus. “Afraid the lad’s getting too strong an arm for his old man. Can’t keep up these days.”

I pretended to be looking for the ball, trying not to catch Da Campo’s eyes. They were steel-grey and disturbing. He pointed to the hardball in my hand, “That it?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah, yeah! I was just going back to the boy. Well, take it easy. I’ll--uh--I’ll see you--uh--at the Civic Center, won’t I?”

“You suspect, don’t you, John?”

“Suspect? Uh--Suspect? Suspect what?”

I didn’t wait to let him clarify the comment. I’m afraid I left hurriedly. I crushed some 0f his rhododendrons.

When I got back to my own front yard I did something I’ve never had occasion to do before. I mopped my brow with my handkerchief. The good monogrammed hankie from my lapel pocket, not the all-purpose one in my hip pocket; the one I use on my glasses. That shows you how unnerved I was.

The hankie came away wet.

“Hey, Dad!”

I jumped four feet, but by the time I came down I realized it was my son, Jamie, not Clark Da Campo coming after me. “Here, Jamie, go on over to the schoolyard and shag a few with the other kids. I have to do some work in the house.”

I tossed him the ball and went up the front steps. Charlotte was running one of those hideous claw-like attachments over the drapes, and the vacuum cleaner was howling at itself. I had a vague urge to run out of the house and go into the woods somewhere to hide--where there weren’t any drapes, or vacuum cleaners, or staring tentacled plants.

“I’m going into the den. I don’t want to be disturbed for about two hours, Char--” She didn’t turn.

I stepped over and kicked the switch on the floor unit. The howling died off and she smiled at me over her shoulder, “Now you’re a saboteur?”

I couldn’t help chuckling, even worried as I was; Charlotte’s like that. “Look, Poison, I’ve got some deep thought to slosh around in for a while. Make sure the kid and the bill collectors don’t get to me, will you.”

She nodded, and added as an afterthought, “Still have to go into the city today?”

“Umm. ‘Fraid so. There’s something,burning in the Gillings Mills account and they dumped the whole brief on my desk.”

She made a face that said, “ Another Saturday shot, “ and shrugged. I gave her a rush-kiss and went into the den, closing and locking the big double doors behind me.

Symmetry and order are tools for me, so I decided to put down on paper my assets and liabilities in this matter. Or, more accurately, just what I was sure of, and what I wasn’t. In the asset column went things like: Name: John Weiler. I work for a trade association. In this case the trade association is made up of paper manufacturers. I’m a commuter--a man in the grey flannel suit, if you would. A family man. One wife, Charlotte; one son, Jamie; one vacuum cleaner, noisy. I own my own home, I have a car and enough money to go up to Grossingers once each Summer mainly on the prodding of Charlotte, who feels I should broaden myself more. We keep up with the Joneses, without too much trouble.

I do my job well, I’m a climbing executive type and I’m well-adjustedly happy. I’m a steady sort of fellow and I keep my nose out of other people’s business primarily because I have enough small ones of my own. I vote regularly, not just talk about it, and I gab a lot with my fellow suburbanites about our gardens--sort of a universal hobby in the sticks.

Forty-seven minutes into town on the train five days a week (and sometimes Saturday, which was happening all too frequently lately) and Lexington Avenue greets me. My health and the family’s is good, except for an occasional twinge in my stomach, so most 0f the agony in the world stays away from me. I don’t get worried easily, because I stay out of other people’s closets.

But this time I was worried worse than just,badly.

I drew a line and started writing in the liabilities column: Item: Clark Da Campo has a million-tentacled staring plant in his garden that is definitely not of normal botanical origin.

Item: There has never been a wisp 0f smoke from the Da Campo chimney, even during the coldest days of the Winter.

Item: Though they have been living here for six months, the Da Campos have never made a social call, attended a local function, shown up at a public place.

Item: Charlotte has told me she has never seen Mrs. Da Campo buy any groceries or return any empty bottles or hang out any wash.

Item: There are no lights in the Da Campo household after six o’clock every night, and full-length drapes are drawn at the same time.

Item: I am scared witless.

Then I looked at the sheet. There was a great deal more on the asset side than the other, but somehow, after all the value I’d placed on the entries in that first column, those in the second bad suddenly become more impressive, overpowering, alarming. And they were so nebulous, so inconclusive, I didn’t know what it was about them that scared me. But it looked like I was in Da Campo’s closets whether I wanted to be or not. Three hours later the house had assumed the dead sogginess of a quiet Saturday afternoon, three pages of note-paper were covered with obscure but vaguely ominous doodles, and I was no nearer an answer that made sense than when I’d gone into the den.

I sighed and threw down my pencil.

My back was stiff from sitting at the desk, and I got up to find the pain multiplied along every inch of my spinal cord. I slid the asset-liability evaluation under my blotter and cleaned the cigarette ashes off the desk where I’d missed the ashtray.

Then I dumped the ashtray in the waste basket. It was Saturday and Charlotte frowned on dirty ashtrays left about, even in my private territory.

When I came out the place was still as a tomb, and I imagined Charlotte had gone into the downtown section of our hamlet to gawk at the exclusive shops and their exclusive contents. I went into the kitchen and looked through the window. The car was gone, bearing out my suspicions. My eyes turned themselves heavenward and my mind reeled out bank balances without prompting.

“Want to talk now, John?”

I could have sworn my legs were made of ice and they were melting me down to the kitchen linoleum. I turned around and--that’s right--Da Campo was in the doorway to the dining room.

“What do you want?” I bluffed, stepping forward threateningly.

“I came over to borrow a cup of sugar and talk a little, John,” said Da Campo, smiling. The utter incongruity of it! Borrowing a cup of sugar! It was too funny to equate with weird plants and odd goings-on in the house across the street. It took the edge off my belligerence quite effectively.

“S-sure, I suppose I can find the wife’s sugar.” Then it occurred to me: “How do you know my name?”

“How do you know mine?”

“Why I--I asked the neighbors. Like to know who’s living across the street, that’s all.”

“Well, that’s how I know yours, John. I asked my neighbors.”

“Which ones? The Schwachters? Heffman? Brown?”

He waved his hand absently, “Oh...just the neighbors, that’s all. How about that sugar?”

I opened one of the cabinets and took out the sugar bowl. Da Campo didn’t have a cup, so I took one downone of the old blue set--and filled it for him.

“Thanks,” he said, “feel like that talk now?”

Somehow, I wasn’t frightened of him, as I was by that sheet of items. It was easy to feel friendly toward the big, grey-eyed, grey-haired man in the sport shirt and slacks. Just another typical suburban neighbor.

“Sure, come on into the living room,” I answered, moving past him. When Da Campo had found a reasonably comfortable position in one of Charlotte’s doubly-damned modem chairs, I tried to make small conversation. “I’ve never noticed a TV antenna on your house. Don’t tell me an inside one works over there. No one this far out seems to be able to make one of those gadgets bring in anything decently.”

“We don’t have television.”

“Oh, “ I said.

The silence hauled itself around the room several times, and I tried again. “Uh--how come we never see you at the new Civic Center? Got some sweet bowling alleys down there and the little theatre group is pretty decent. Like to see--”

“Look, John, I thought I might come over and try to explain about myself, about us-Ellie and me.” He seemed so intent, so earnest, I leaned forward.

“What do you mean? You don’t have to--”

“No, no, I mean it,” he cut me off. “I know everyone in the neighborhood has been wondering about us.

Why We don’t go out much, why we don’t invite you over, everything like that.” He held up his hands in fumbling motions, as though he were looking for the words. Then he let his hands fall, as though he knew he would never find the words.

“No, I don’t think anyone has--”

He stopped me again with a shake of the head. His eyes were very deep and very sad and I didn’t quite know what to say. I suddenly realized how far out of touch with real people I’d gotten in my years of commuting.

There’s something cold and impersonal about a nine-to-five job and a ride home with total strangers. Even total strangers that live in the same town. I just looked at Da Campo.

“It’s simple, really,” he said, rubbing his hands together, looking down at them as though they had just grown from the ends of his arms.

“I got mixed up with some pretty strange people a few years ago, and well, I went to jail for a while. When I came out I couldn’t get a job and we had to move. By then Ellie had drawn into a shell and...well, it just hasn’t been easy.”

I didn’t know why he was telling me all this and I found myself embarrassed. I looked around for something to break the tension, and then pulled out a pack of cigarettes. I held them out to him and he looked up from his hands for a second, shaking his head. He went back to staring at them as I lit a cigarette. I was hoping he wouldn’t go on, but he did.

“Reason I’m telling you this is that you must have thought me pretty odd this afternoon. The only thing I have is my garden, and Ellie, and we don’t like living as alone as we do, but it’s better this way. That’s the way we have to do it. At least for a while.”

For a second I got the impression he had skimmed the top of my mind and picked off my wonderment at his telling me the story. Then I shook off the feeling and said, “That’s understandable. If I ever did wonder about you and Mrs. Da Campo, well, it’s something I won’t do any more. And feel free to drop over any time you get the urge.”

He looked thankful, as though I’d offered him the Northern Hemisphere, and stood up., “Thanks a lot, John. I was hoping you’d understand.”

We shook hands, I asked him if he wanted to call up the Missus and come over for dinner, but he said no thanks and we’d certainly get together again soon.

He left, and I wasn’t surprised to see the cup of sugar sitting on an end table where he’d set it down.

Nice guy, I thought to myself.

I Then I thought of that staring plant, which he hadn’t explained at all, and some of the worry returned.

I shrugged it off. After three weeks I forgot it entirely. But Da Campo and I never got together as he’d suggested.

At least not at the Civic Center.

Da Campo kept going to the City on the 7:40 and coming back on the 5:35 every day. But somehow, we never sat together, and never spoke to one another. I made tentative gestures once or twice, but he indicated disinterest, so I stopped.

Ellie Da Campo would always be waiting at the station, parked a few cars down from Charlotte in her station wagon, and Clark Da Campo would pop into it and they’d be off before most of the rest of us were off the train.

I stopped wondering about the absence of light or life or smoke or anything else around the Da Campo house. hold, figuring the guy knew what he was doing. I also took pains to caution Jamie to stay strictly off-limits, with or without baseball.

I also stopped wondering because I had enough headaches from the office to take fulltime precedence on my brain-strain.

Then one morning, something changed my careful hands-off policies. They had to change. My fingers were pushed into the pie forcibly. I was worried sick over the Gillings business. The Gillings Mills were trying to branch over into territory held by another of our Association’s members, trying to buy timber land out from under the other. It looked like a drastic shake-up was in the near offing. The whole miserable mess had been heaped on me, and I’d not only been losing my Saturdays--and a few Sundays to boot--but my hair was, so help me God, whitening, and the oculist said all the paperwork had played Hell with my eyes. I was sick to tears of the thing, but it was me all the way, and if I didn’t play it right mergers might not merge, commitments might not be committed, and John Weiler might find himself on the outside. Mornings on the train were a headache and a nightmare. Faces blurred into one runny grey smear, and the clickety-clack didn’t carry me back. It made my bead throb and my bones ache and it made me bate the universe. Not just the world--the universe! All of it. I unzipped my briefcase and opened it on my lap. The balding $25,000-a-year man sharing the seat harrumphed once and gathered the folds of his Harris tweed about his paunch. He went back to the Times with a nasty side glance at me.

I mentally stuck my tongue out and bent to the paperwork.

I was halfway through an important field agent’s report that might--just barely might-provide the loophole I was seeking to stop the gobbling by the Gillings Mills, and I walked out of the station with my briefcase under my arm, my nose in the report, with a sort of mechanical stride. About halfway down the subway ramp I realized I didn’t know where the bloody Hell I was. Hurrying men and women surrounded me, streaming like salmon heading to spawn. I was somewhere under Grand Central’s teeming passageway labyrinth, heading for an exit that would bring me out into the street somewhere near my building.

But where the devil was this? I’d never seen any of the signs on the tiled walls before. They were all in gibberish, but they seemed to be the usual type thing: women, big bold letters in some foreign language, packaged goods, bright colors.

I lost interest in them and tried to figure out where I was. I’d gone up through the Station and then down again into the subway. Then there’d been a long period of walking while reading that damned report, and thinking my practiced feet knew where they were going.

It dawned on me that for the last few years I’d been letting myself go where my feet led me each morning.

Yeah, but my feet were following the subconscious orders of my head that said follow the rest of the commuters.

This morning I’d just followed the wrong batch.

A string of yellow lights spaced far apart in the ceiling, between the regular lights, indicated the way to a line of some sort. I followed the lights for a while until I looked down at my watch, for perhaps the hundredth time that morning, and realized it was past nine. I was late for the office.

Today of all days!

I started to get panicky and stopped a grey-suited man hurrying past with a sheaf of papers under his arm.

“Say, can you tell me where the exit onto 42nd and Lex--”

“Derlagos-km’ma-sne’ephor-july, esperind,” he drawled out of the comer of his mouth and stalked past.

I was standing there stupidly till the next couple people cast dirty looks at me for being in the way.

Foreigner, I thought, and grabbed a girl who was walking with typical hurried secretarial steps. “Say, I’m trying to get out of here. Where’s the 42nd and Lexington exit?”

She looked at me, amazedly, for a moment, shook my hand loose from her coat-sleeve, and pattered off, looking once over her shoulder. That look was a clear, “Are you nuts, Mac?”

I was getting really worried. I had no idea where the blazes I was, or where I was heading, or how to get out. I hadn’t seen an exit in some time. And still the people continued to stream purposefully by me.

Subways had always scared me, but this was the capper.

Then I recognized the arrows on the wall. They were marked with the same kind of hyphenated, apostrophied anagrams on the billboards, but at least I got the message!

THIS WAY TO SOMEWHERE!

I followed the crowd.

By the time I got to the train, I was in the middle of a swarm of people, all madly pushing to get into the cars. “Hey, hold it! I don’t want to--! Wait a minute!”

I was carried forward, pressed like a rose in a scrapbook, borne protesting through the doors of the car, and squashed up against the opposite door.

If you live in New York you will know this is not an impossibility. If you don’t, take my word for it.

The doors slid shut with a pneumatic sigh and the train shot forward. Without a jar. That was when I began to sweat full-time.

I had wondered, sure, but in the middle of downtown Manhattan you just don’t expect anything weird or out-of-place unless there’s a press agent behind it. But this was no publicity stunt. Something was wrong. Way off-base wrong, and I was caught in the midst of it. I wasn’t scared, really, because I didn’t know what there was to be afraid of, and there was too much familiarity about it all to hit me fully.

I had been in a million subway crushes just like this one. Had my glasses knocked off and trampled, had my suit wrinkled, had the shine taken off my shoes, too often to think there was anything untoward here.

But the signs had been in a foreign language. No one I’d been able to accost would talk to me in anything but gibberish, and most of them looked at me as though my skin was green. The train was definitely not an ordinary train. It had started without a jerking rasp. If you know New York subways, you know what I mean.

That was unusual. That was fantastic!

I bit my lower lip, elbowed my way into a relatively clear space in the car, and for the second time in my life dragged out my square-folded lapel hankie to mop my face. Then I saw Da Campo. He was sitting in one of the plush seats, reading a newspaper. The headline read: SELFGEMMEN-BARNSNEBBLE J’J’KEL-WOLO-BAGEDTAR!

I blinked. I blinked again. It was Da Campo all right, but that newspaper! What the Hell was it?

I made my way over to him, and tapped him on the shoulder, “Say, Da Campo, how the deuce do I--”

“Good Tilburr all mighty!” he squawked, his eyes bugging, the newspaper falling to the floor. “How thedwid olu--did you follow--Weiler!” He went off in a burst of that strange gibberish, gasped, and finally got out, “What are you doing here, for God’s sake, man?”

“Look, Da Campo, I got lost in the subway. Took a wrong turn or something. All I want is out of here.

Where’s this train’s next stop?”

“Drexwill, you damned fool!”

“Is that anywhere near Westchester?”

“It’s so far away your best telescopes don’t even know it exists!” He was getting red in the face.

“What?”

“The planet Drexwill, you idiot! What the Hell are you doing here?”

I felt suddenly choked, hemmed in, like a fist was tightening around the outside of my head, squeezing it.

“Look, Da Campo, this isn’t funny. I’ve got an appointment this morning, imd the office is waiting for me to--”

“Understand this, Weiler!” he snapped, pointing a finger that seemed to fill the universe for me. “You’ll never make that appointment!”

“But why? I can get off at the next sta--”

“You’ll never make another appointment back there.” His eyes flicked back toward the rear of the car and I found my own drawn in that direction. The fear was crawling around in me like a live thing.

He seemed to be grinding inside. His face was screwed up in an expression of distaste, disbelief and pity.

“Why? Why? Why didn’t you leave well enough alone? Why couldn’t you believe what I told you and not follow me?” His hands made futile gestures, and I saw the people near us suddenly come alive with the same expressions as our conversation reached them.

I was into something horrible, and I didn’t know precisely what!

“Auditor! Auditor! Is there an Auditor in the car?” yelled Da Campo, twisting around in his seat.

“Da Campo, what are you doing? Help me, get me off this train, I don’t know where I’m going, and I have to be at the office!” I was getting hysterical, and Da Campo kept looking from me to the back of the car, screaming for an Auditor, whatever that was.

“I can’t help you, Weiler, I’m just like you. I’m just another commuter like you, only I go a little further to work every day.”

The whole thing started to come to me then, and the idea, the very concept, dried my throat out, made my brain ache “Auditor! Auditor!” Da Campo kept yelling.

A man across the aisle leaned over and said something in that, hyphenated gibberish, and Da Campo’s lips became a thin line. He looked as though he wanted to slap his forehead in frustration.

“There isn’t one on the train. This is the early morning local.” He made fists, rubbed the thumbs over the tightened fingers.

A sign began flashing on and off, on and off, in yellow letters, over the door of the car, and everyone lowered his newspaper with a bored and resigned expression.

The sign blinked HUL-HUBBER on and off.

“Translation,” said Da Campo briefly, and then the car turned inside out. Everything went black and formless and limp in the car and for a split split-second my intestines were sloshing around in the crown of my hat and my shoe soles were stuck to my upper lip. Then the lights came back on, everyone lifted his paper, the sign went dead, and I felt as though I wanted to vomit.

“Good Lord above, what was that?” I gasped, holding onto the back of Da Campo’s seat.

“Translation, “ he said simply, and went back to his paper.

I suddenly became furious. Here I was lost in a subway, going--if I was to believe what I had been told-somewhere called Drexwill. I was late for the office, and this thing had overtones that were only now beginning to shade in with any sort of logic. A mad sort of logic, but logic nonetheless. And the only person I knew here was reading his newspaper as though my presence was a commonplace thing.

“Da Campo!” I screamed, knocking the weird newspaper out of his hands. Heads turned in annoyance. “Do something! Get me off this goddamed thing!”

I grabbed his coat lapel, but he slapped my hand away.

“Look, Weiler, you got yourself into this, you’ll just have to wait till we hit the Depot and we can fish out an Auditor to help you.

“I’m just a lousy businessman; I can’t handle anything as snarled as this. This is government business, and it’s your headache, not mine. I have to be at work...”

I wasn’t listening. It all shaded in properly. I saw the picture. I didn’t know where I was going, or what it was like there, but I knew why Da Campo was on this train, and what he’d been doing in my town.

I wanted to cry out because it was so simple.

I wanted to cry because it was so simply terrifying.

The train slowed, braked, and came to a hissing halt, without lurching. The doors opened and the many commuterly-dressed people who had been crowded into the car began to stream out. The entire trip couldn’t have taken more than twenty minutes.

Then I thought of that “translation” and I wasn’t so sure of my time estimate.

“Come on,” said Da Campo, “I’ll get you to an Auditor.” He glanced down at his wrist, frowning at the dial of a weirdly-numeraled watch. He whistled through his teeth for a moment, as the crowd pushed out. Then he shoved me after them resignedly. “Let’s hurry,” he said, “I haven’t much time.”

He herded me before him, and told me to wait a moment while he took care of something. He stepped to the end of a line of men and women about to enter a small booth, one of about twenty such booths. A dilating opening in the booth admitted one person at a time.

In a few moments the line had diminished, as men went in one side wearing suits like my own grey flannel, and emerged from the other clad in odd, short jackets and skin-tight pants. The women came out in the equivalent, only tailored for the female form. They didn’t look bad at all. Da Campo went in and quickly came out. He stepped to my side, dressed like the others, and began pushing me again.

“Had to change for work,” he commented shortly. “Come on.”

I followed him, confused. My stomach was getting more and more uneasy. I had a feeling that the twinge I’d occasionally felt in my stomach was going to develop into an ulcer. We stepped onto an escalator-like stairway that carried us up through a series of floors where I saw more people--dressed like Da Campo--scurrying back and forth. “Who are they?” I asked. Da Campo looked at me with pity and annoyance and said, “Commuters.”

“Earth is a suburb, isn’t it?” I asked.

He nodded, not looking at me.

I knew what it was all about, then. A fool would be the only one unable to see the picture after all the pieces had been laid out so clearly. It was really quite simple: Earth was being infiltrated. But there wasn’t any sinister invasion or displacement afoot. That was ridiculous. The only reason these aliens were on Earth was to live. When I thought the word “alien” I looked at Da Campo. He appeared to be the same as anyone of Earth.

These “aliens” were obviously exactly like us, physically. Physically. Why were the aliens on Earth to live? Again, simple. Why does a man who works in New York City go out to Westchester after 5:00 every day? Answer: the city is too crowded. He goes to the suburbs to live quietly.

“Is--uh--Drexwill crowded, Da Campo? I mean, are there a lot of people here?”

He nodded again and muttered something about serious over-population and why didn’t the stupid Faenalists use their heads and bring things under control and wasn’t that what he was paying his Allotments for.

The escalator was coming to another floor, and Da Campo made movements toward the exit side. He stepped off, and I followed. He gave me a quick glance to make sure I was following, and strode briskly away.

All around us people were coming and going with quiet purpose.

“Da Campo--” I began, trying to get his attention. His nonchalance and attitude of trying to brush me off were beginning.to terrify me more than all the really strange things going on around me.

“Stop calling me that, you fool! My name is Helgorth Labbula, and if you refer to me again with that idiotic name I’ll leave you here and let you fend for yourself. I’m only taking my time to get you to an Auditor because they might construe it as my fault that you wandered into the Suburb Depot.” He glared at me, and I bit my lip.

We kept walling and I wondered what an Auditor was, and where we were going to find one.

I found out quickly enough. Da Cam--er, Helgorth Labbula spotted a tall, hard-looking man in a deep blue version of the universal short jacket and tight pants, and hailed him. The Auditor walked over and Da Campo talked to him in soft tones for a moment. I watched as the man’s eyes got wider and wider, as Da Campo’s talk progressed.

“Hey!” I yelled. They both looked up, annoyed.

“I hate to say anything,” I said, “but if I’m right, you’re talking about me, and I don’t like this cold-shoulder routine, not one little bit.” I was sick of all this rigamarole, and me stuck somewhere a million miles or more away from my office, and everyone acting as though I’d done it on purpose and I was a nuisance.

“Now talk in English so I can understand, will you?”

The Auditor turned cool grey eyes on me. Stiffly, as though he were unaccustomed to speaking the language, he said, “You have stumbled into something by chance, and though it is not your fault, dispensation must be arranged. Will you please come with. me.”

He stated it, didn’t ask it, and I had no choice.

We took a few steps, and the Auditor turned to stare back at Da Campo who was watching us balefully.

“You, too,” the man in the blue tunic said.

“But I have to be at--”

“You will be needed for a statement. I’m sorry, but it’s official.”

“What am I paying my Allotments for, if you Auditors can’t handle a little thing like this?” He was getting angry, but the Auditor shrugged his shoulders, and Da Campo trudged along behind us. We came up off one of the escalators, into the light of triple suns. Three of them. Burning all at once. Triple shadows. That was when I realized how far away, more than a mere million miles, and how strange, and how lost I was.

“How--how far from Earth are we?” I asked.

The Auditor answered absently, “About 60,000 light-years.”

I gawked, stopped dead in my tracks. “But you toss it off so lightly, as though it were around the block! And you don’t live that differently from us! I don’t understand!”

“Understand? What’s to understand?” snapped Da Campo with annoyance. “It was a fluke that discovered Translation, and allowed us to live off Drexwill. But it didn’t change our culture much. Why shouldn’t we take it for granted? We’ve lived with it all our lives, and there’s nothing odd or marvelous about it.”

“In fact, “ he added, glaring at the Auditor, “it’s a blasted bother sometimes!”

His tossing it off in that manner only made it worse for me. I thought of the distance between me and my office, realizing I hadn’t the faintest idea how far away it was, but knowing it was further than anything I could ever imagine. I tried putting it into mundane terms by remembering that the nearest star to Earth was only four light-years away and then trying something like: If all the chewing-gum wrappers in the world were laid end to end, they’d stretch from Earth toBut it only made things worse.

I was lost.

“I want to go home,” I said, and realized I sounded like a little boy. But I couldn’t help it.

The Auditor and Da Campo turned to look at me at the same time. I wished I had been unable to read what was in their eyes.

But I could. I wished I hadn’t been able to, really.

They hurried me down a street, if street it was, and I supposed that was what it was, and into a bubble-like car with a blue insignia, that sat by the curb. It ran on a monorail, and in a few seconds we had left the Depot behind.

We sped through the city, and oddly, I didn’t marvel at the fantastic architecture and evidences of great science, though there were enough of both. From the screaming ships that split the morning sky to the cone-withinhelix buildings rising on all sides.

I didn’t look, because it was so restful for the first time in my life not to have to worry about offices, and commuting, and bills, and Charlotte’s ashtray fetish, or any of the other goddam bothers I had been heir to since I was able to go out and earn a living. No treadmill. No responsibility. It was good to lie back in the padded seat and just close my eyes. Even though I knew I was in deep trouble.

We drove for a while, and then something occurred to me.

“Why don’t we just translate where we’re going?”

The Auditor was looking out the window abstractedly, but he said, “Too short a jump. It only works in lightyear minimums.”

“Oh,” I said, and sank back again.

It was all so logical.

Something else popped into my mind. The sheet of liabilities under my desk blotter.

“Uh--Da Campo,” I began, and shrank back at the scathing look he turned on me.

“The name is Helgorth Labbula, I told your” The Auditor smiled out the window.

“Want to tell me a few things?” I asked, timidly.

Da Campo sighed once, deeply, “Go ahead. You can’t be any more trouble to me than you have already. I’m twenty kil-boros late already.”

“What was that in your garden?”

“ A plant, what do you think?”

“But--”

He seemed about to explode with irritation. “Look, Weiler, you grow those runty little chrysanthemums and roses, don’t you? Well, why shouldn’t I be entitled to grow a native plant in my garden?

Just because I’m living out there in the sticks doesn’t mean I have to act and live like a barbarian.”

The Auditor looked over, “Yes, but you were warned several times about growing native plants in Suburb Territory when you signed the real estate release, weren’t you, Helgorth?”

Da Campo turned red.

“Well, that’s--what I mean is--a man bas to have some--” He stuttered into silence and looked at me with wrath.

“How come we never saw any smoke from your house?”

“We don’t use imbecilic fuels like coal or gas or oil.”

I didn’t understand, but he cleared it up with the answer to my next question. I said, “Why don’t you ever go out, or show lights at night, and why do you pull those drapes?”

“Because the inside of our house isn’t like yours. We have a Drexwillian bungalow in there. A bit cramped for space we are,” he said, casting a nasty look at the Auditor, “but with regulations what they are, we can’t expect much better. We have our own independent heating system’ food supply, lighting system and everything else. We pull the drapes so you won’t see when we turn on all the units at once. We have to inconvenience ourselves, I’ll tell you.

“But at least it’s better than living in this madhouse,” he finished, waving a hand at the bustling city.

“I rather like it, “ I said.

The Auditor glanced over at me again, and for the second time I read his eyes. The message hadn’t changed.

I was still in trouble.

“We’re almost there,” he said.

The car slowed and came to an easy stop before a huge white building, and we got out. Da Campo held back and spoke to the Auditor again in tones that indicated he wanted to leave.

“It will only take a short time. We need your statement, “ the Auditor told him, motioning him out of the car.

We walked up the Wide, resilient steps.

After a wearying progression through the stages of red tape, statements, personnel, and official procedure which reminded me strongly of Earth, we came to an office that seemed to be the end of the road.

Da Campo was uneasy and kept damning me With his eyes when he wasn’t looking at his watch.

We were ushered in, and the Auditor saluted the pale-faced man behind the desk. “The Head Auditor,” said the blue-uniformed man, and left us. I noticed that the official had grey eyes, like Da Campo and the Auditor. Was that a dominant on Drexwill?

“Sit down, won’t you?” he said, amiably enough.

Da Campo blurted, “I really must be going. I’m quite late for my work and if you don’t mind I’d like to--”

“Sit, Helgorth, I have something to say to you, too.”

I was grateful they were speaking English.

The Head Auditor crossed long arms and glared at Da Campo across the desk.

“You know you’re partially to fault here.”

Da Campo was indignant. “Why--why--what do you mean? I gave him a perfectly logical story, but he had to go and stumble into the Suburb Depot. That wasn’t my--”

“Quiet! We leave you commuters pretty much alone. It’s your lives and we try not to meddle. But there are certain regulations we have to keep enforced or the entire system will break down.

“You knew you weren’t to grow any native plants out there. We warned you enough times so that it should have made an impression. Then to boot, you became a recluse out there. We ask you to make certain advances to your neighbors, strictly for purposes of keeping things on a level But you wouldn’t even go shopping!”

Da Campo started to protest, but the Head Auditor snapped his fingers sharply, causing the man to fall silent. “We checked your supply requisitions through Food Central, and we were going to drop you a memo on it, but we didn’t get to it in time.”

The pale-faced man tapped his fingers on the desk. “Now if we have any more trouble out of you, Helgorth, we’re going to yank your Suburb Ticket and get you and your wife back into one of the Community Towers. Is that clear?”

Da Campo, suitably cowed, merely nodded.

I thought of the fantastic system they had devised. All Earth turned into a suburban development. Lord! It was fantastic, yet so simple and so obvious when I thought about it, my opinion of these people went up more and more. This explained all sorts of things I’d wondered about: hermits, bus lines that went nowhere, people disappearing.

“All right, you can go,” I heard the Head Auditor say.

Da Campo got up to leave, and I turned to watch him. “So long, Da Campo, see you at home tonight, “ I said.

He looked at me strangely. The message hadn’t altered. “So long, Weiler. I hope so.” he said, and was gone.

I half-knew what he meant.

They weren’t going to let me go back. That would be foolish. I knew too much. Strangely. I felt no fear.

“You see our predicament, don’t you?” asked the Head Auditor, and I swung back to look at him. I must have looked at him in amazement, because he added, “I couldn’t help knowing w»at you were thinking.”

I nodded, reaching for a way to say what I wanted to say.

“We can’t let you go back.”

“Fine,” I smiled a bit too eagerly. “Let me stay. I’d like to stay here. You can’t imagine how fascinated I am by your planet.”

And it was then, right in that instant, that I recognized the truth in what I’d said. I hated Earth.

I hated the nine-to-five drudgery of the closed office and the boring men and women with whom I did business.

I despised my wife, who wanted More. And Better. And More Expensive. I realized bow I’d been fooled by her flippant and sometimes affectionate attitude. I was a faceless thing to her. A goddam man in a grey flannel suit.

I despised the trains and the vacuum cleaners and the routine. I despised the lousy treadmill!

I loathed, detested, despised, abhorred, abominated and in all hated the miserable system. I didn’t want to go back.

“I don’t want to go back! I want to stay. Let me stay here!”

The Head Auditor was shaking his auditing head. “Why not?” I asked, confused.

“Look, we’re overpopulated now! Why do you think we use the Suburbs out there?

There isn’t room here for anyone like you. We have enough non-working bums on our hands without you. Just because you stumbled into one of our Depots, don’t assume we owe you anything. Because we don’t.

“No, I’m afraid we’ll have to--er--dispense with you, Mr. Weiler. We’re not unpleasant people, but there is a point where we must stand and say. ‘No morel’ I’m sorry.’. He started to push a button. I went white. I could feel myself going white. Oh no, I thought! I’ve got to talk!

So I talked. I talked him away from that button, because I suppose he had a wife and children and didn’t really like killing people. And I talked him away from the killing angle entirely. And I talked and talked and talked till my throat was dry and he threw up his hand and said...

“All right, all right, stop! A trial, then. If you can find work here, if you can fit in, if you can match up, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t stay. But don’t ever expect to go back!”

Expect to go back? Not on your life!

Then he shooed me out of the office, and I set about making a place for myself in this world I’d never made.

Well, I’ve done pretty decently. I’m happy, I have my own apartment, and I have a good job. They’ve said I can stay.

I didn’t realize it, an those years, how much I hated the rush, rush, rush, the getting to the office and poring over those lousy briefs, the quiet nagging of Charlotte about things like the ashtrays, the constant bill collectors, the keeping up with the Joneses.

I didn’t realize how badly I wanted out.

Well, now I’m out, and I’m happy. No more of that stuff for me. Thanks for listening. Thought I’d get it straight, as long as you needed the story to open my charge account.

I’m here and I like it, and I’m out of the suburbanite climbing-executive rush-rush class. At last I’m off that infernal treadmill.

Thanks again for listening. Well, I’ve got to go.

Got to get to work, you know.

Current crazes fascinate me. Though I couldn’t operate one to save my life, the hula hoop was an entrancing little path to dislocation of the spine and ultimate madness, and I watched with not too much lasciviousness as the preadult vixens of my acquaintance shimmied and swirled in the use of same. The telephonebooth-stuffing trend seemed to me abortive, and I was not at all surprised when it faded in lieu of the “limbo”

acrobatics at voodoo calypso parties. Mah-jongg, Scrabble, ouija boards, Lotto, TV quiz shows, pennies in kids’ loafers, bongo boards, snake dances, panty raids, rumble seats, trampoline classes, croquet, Empire-line dresses, dayglo shirts, stuffed tigers in car back windows, Billy Graham and Fabian (no relation)--all of them awed and bemused me, as I watched the world swallow them whole, digest them and infuse them into the daily scene. Trends knock me out, frankly: Whether it be painting by the numbers or making your own full-scale skeleton of a tyrannosaurus, I think the most imaginative, and auctorially-useful fad of recent years has been the one aptly called Do-It-Yourself Madge retina-printed her identity on the receipt, fished in her apron for a coin, and came up with a thirtycenter. It was a bit too much to give the boy, but she already had it in her hand, and there were appearances to keep up, in spite of everything. She handed it across, and took the carton. A migrant tremor of pleasure swept her as she was closing the door; the messenger boy was assaying her figure. It had been years, oh longer than that, since a young man had done that. Perhaps it was the new wash; she closed the door firmly and blanked it, patting her hair. Yes, it was the blonde rinse, that was it.

Abruptly, she realized she had been standing there, staring at the box in her hands, for some time. With mild terror.

Madge Rubichek, she chided herself, you contracted for this, and now it’s here, and it’s paid for, so what are you making faces like that for? Go in and sit down and open it, you silly goose!

She followed her silent instructions. In the kitchen, with the late afternoon operock program from Philly weirdly jangling the background--they were doing the new two-beat La Forza del Destino with alto sax accompaniment--she took a paring knife--my, how infectious that sort of teen-ager’s music was!--to the thick, white scotchseal of the carton.

The box was secured around the edges, and she inserted the paring knife as she would have with a carton of soda crackers. She slit it open down one side, up the next.

Except this was not a carton of soda crackers.

This was--oh, how odd--a do-it-yourself kit. A modern marvel like all the new do-ityourself marvels. Do-ityourself house painting setups, and do-it-yourself baked Alaska mix, and do-it-yourself this and that and the other thing. There were even advertisements for do-it-yourself brain surgery kits and swamp digging kits, for chassis aligning kits and pruning kits. But this was no longer something offered in an advertisement; once it had been, but now it was a reality, and she held it in her hands. As much of that advertised breed as any do-it-yourself bookcaseconstruction kit, outfitted to the last set screw. This was a particular kind of kit Madge had purchased: To be precise, a do-it-yourself murder kit.

Idly, as though without conscious direction, her eyes strayed to the magazine spindle where DO-ITYOURSELF MONTHLY was canned up against Carl’s FLIKPIX and her own mundane BEST HOUSEKEEPING.

Her eyes lingered for an instant, drank in through the impeding plastic of the container and the other spools the classified advertisement near the end of the mag-reel... and passed on around the room. It was a nice room. A solid room, furnished in tasteful period furniture without too many curlicues and just enough modem angles. But it was mediocrity, and what else was there to say of it but that it typified her life with Carl. Mediocrity disturbed Madge Rubichek, as did the slovenly day-to-day existence of her husband.

For Madge Rubichek was a methodical woman.

She sighed resignedly, and busied herself lifting the top from the carton. It was a long, moderately-thin package, of typical brown box-plastboard. Her name had been neatly stated on the address label, and there was no return address.

“Well, impractical, but necessary,” she mused, aloud, “but what a lot of merchandise they must lose,” she added. Then it dawned on her that she had signed a return receipt, and that meant the boy who had come to the door must have gotten the carton from a central delivery robotic miller, or else... Oh, it was too deep for her to worry about. They must have some way of insuring delivery. She set the box top beside her chair, and pulled away the tissue paper double-folded over the carton’s contents.

What odd-looking mechanisms. Even for 1977, which Madge had always called--in the sanctum of her mind, where profanity was permitted--”too damned machiney for its own good!” these were strange.

There was a long, thin, coiled sticky-looking tube of grey something-or-other with a valve at one end, and a blow-nozzle attached. Was it one of those dragon balloons that you blew up so big? But what did that have to do withShe would not think of what this kit had been invented to do. She would look at it as though it were some laborsaving household appliance, like her Dinner Dialer (that did not dial at all, but was punched, instead) or her Dustomat. Well, and she giggled, wasn’t it?

Do-it-by-golly-yourself!

Beside the coil of grey tubing, hooked to it by soft wire and wrapped in tissue paper like a Christmas necklace, was another small parcel. She lifted it out, surprised at its heaviness, and stripped away the tissue.

It was a small glass square, obviously a bottle of some sort, filled with a murky, mercurial-seeming liquid that moved rapidly as she turned the container, sending up no air bubbles as it roiled in the bottle. It had a tiny, pinlike protuberance at one corner, with a boot fastened down on it, easily snapped off to open the vial. Quicksilver?

She found this item as mystifying as the preceding one. She stared at it a moment longer, with no apparent function coming to mind, and then she laid it aside.

It slipped down behind the chair’s pillow, and she retrieved it at once, without examining the carton further.

Madge Rubichek was a methodical woman.

The next was a layer in itself; rather thick and quite black, it was almost of the consistency of an old beach ball, or a fish skin without scales, or What?

Rotten flesh...perhaps. Though she had no conception of what rotten flesh felt like. Or something.

She pulled it free, and almost immediately let it drop into the leaning carton top beside her chair. She just didn’t want to touch it. Mental images of dead babies and salamanders and polyethylene bags filled with vomit came to mind when her fingers touched that night-black stuff.

She dropped it free, and found beneath.it a pamphlet without a title, and a small glass globe with all the attributes of a snowstorm paperweight, the kind her Grandfather had had on his desk in the old law offices in Prestonsburg. It was on an onyx stand of some cheap material, and the globe itself swirled and frothed with the artificial whateveritwas inside. But there was no little town once the snow settled, and no large-thoraxed snowman with anthracite eyes, and no church. There was nothing in there but the lacy swirlingness. The snow just continued to whirl about, no matter how long it lay in one position. It would not settle. She put it beside her on the chair, and nudged the carton, now empty, off her lap. She took the pamphlet in her hands, and opened it to the first page.

“Hello,” it said.

It did not read hello, it said hello. In a rich baritone, vaguely reminiscent of oldfashioned styrene records she had heard of pressings taken off even older platters made by Peter Ustinov, a mimic comedian of the Fifties. It was in many ways a comforting voice, and one that was subtly reassuring, as well as inviting attention and forthrightness of manner, clarity of thinking, boldness of approach. It was a mellow and warm voice.

It was, apparently, the voice of murder.

“Hello,” it said again, and this time there was a tinge of apprehension in its voice, as though it was not certain there was anyone on the holding end of the pamphlet.

“Uh, hello,” she replied, not at all certain it was good taste to be conversing with a pamphlet. There was, in fact, a sense of Carrollian madness about it. Had a Dormouse erupted from the delicate Chinese teapot on the coffee table before the sofa, clearly enunciating Twinkle, twinkle, little bat...she would not have been overly surprised; it would have fitted in nicely.

“This is your own Do-It-Yourself Murder Kit,” the pamphlet broke her literary reverie with harsh reality.

“The new guaranteed Murder Kit, with the double-your-money-back warranty, for your protection.”

Well, she thought, frugally, that’s nice, anyway. That double-your-money-back thing. She shivered a little with suppressed anticipation. There was going to be profit... one way...or the other.

“Uh, where are you?” Madge asked nervously.

“Where am I where?” the pamphlet responded in confusion.

“Yes, precisely,” she concurred.

“Dear Purchaser, you are perplexing me,” cried the pamphlet. “If you wish to carry forward smartly to the objective for which this Kit was designed, please do not strain my conversational and analytical faculties.”

“But I only--”

“Madam, if you desire success, you must put yourself wholly in my--er--hands. Do I make myself clear?”

Madge drew herself up, and an expression of haughty resignation suffused her face. “I understand quite well, thank you.” After all, Grandfather Tabakow on her mother’s side had been Southern aristocracy, well hadn’t he? She felt imposed upon, this mere. booklet talking to her that way. And a booklet without even the common self-respect of having a title. After all, a titleless pamphlet. And wasn’t the customer always supposed to be right?

It didn’t seem so with this Kit.

The phrase nouveau-riche flitted across Madge’s mind, with ill-concealed contempt.

“This guaranteed Murder Kit,” the voice continued, “was shipped to you by our robotic mailer. There is no record of its sale in our hands. So in case you wish to exercise the warranty you must return the numbered warranty sheet on the last page of this pamphlet. To return the numbered warranty sheet to our files, merely bum same in a non-chemical fire; this will automatically cancel the sympathetic-sheet in our files, and your money will be doubly, cheerfully refunded.

“This Kit contains three sure, clean and undetectable, I repeat, undetectable, ways to commit murder. No two kits are the same, through repetition occasionally occurs where the subjects to be murdered have common character traits. Again, though, no two kits are the same. Each of the three modus operandi is designed for you according to the application blank you sent us when you contracted for this Kit. Now. To prepare yourself for your murder--”

She snapped the pamphlet shut with quick, suddenly-sweating hands. Do I hate him that much?

Where had their marriage gone wrong...somewhere in the eleven years? Where? An infinite sadness stole over her as she remembered Carl the way be had been when they first met. She remembered his ways, that had seemed rough and yet gentle, masculine yet graceful. And she recalled her own aristocratic nature, the fine background, and the womanly ways. But how bad it changed? How was it now?

She conjured up visions of it now. The ashes on the carpets and the smell of musty cigar smoke that stayed in the curtains and chair coverings no matter bow much she aired and cleaned. She remembered the fat, nasty belly of the man while he sat pouring bock down his dribble-chinned throat, the clothes rank with sweat strewn across her immaculate bedroom, the rings in the bathtub, his rotten teeth and the odor when he kissed her...

And of course the quick animal urges all panting and grunting that were as nothing to her. Nothing but revulsion.

She answered her question firmly: Yes, yes, I hate him that much. And morel She opened the pamphlet again. Her hands had become dry and almost cool again.

“The first method of murder we have prepared for you,” the pamphlet’s voice continued, undaunted, “is the rabid dog method. You will notice a coil of grey substance. This is your Animaux Tube. Warning is issued at this point that instructions throughout the use of this Kit must be specifically followed, or failure will result. There is no mechanical failure possible with this Kit, only human failure through inefficiency and disregard of stated operating procedures. Is this understood?”

“Yes, I suppose so,” Madge answered, surlily.

“With your Animaux Tube, attached by wire, is a vial of Essence, a specially-produced, copyrighted substance to be used only with the Animaux Tube. Again warning is issued to preclude any ill-use of materials included in your Kit. Unspecified use of the Essence included in your Kit will prove most unpleasant. In the human digestive tract it reacts violently, causing almost immediate convulsions and death. Care should be exercised to keep the vial away from children and pets.”

She lifted the coil of stuff and it was sticky. After spreading a sheet of newsfax on the rug, she allowed the grey tubing to unroll itself out onto the fax sheet. There was no sense ruining a good rug with any odd chemicals from this Kit. She had always been a methodically neat woman, and just because she was doing what she was doing, was no reason to become a crude slob-like Carl The coil unrolled and it had queer blotches on it, almost like military camouflage canvas. What it was, she still could not ascertain.

“Take some article of clothing belonging to the intended victim,” the pamphlet voice continued, startling her, “and place a small piece of it firmly against the Animaux Tube, on the orange blotch near its front. Press it, and it will adhere. Then inflate the Tube by blowing gently and evenly into the nozzle. Only after the Animaux Tube has been inflated should the Essence then be added. Screw the vial of Essence onto the air valve and allow it to drain completely into the Animaux Tube. Make certain that every drop enters. You will then have your Animaux rabid dog. Set the dog loose when the intended victim is near and it will inflict a bite wound that cannot be cured by regular methods; a bite wound that will cause violent death within a matter of minutes.”

She used one of his socks, holding it as far away from her as possible. It was hideously pungent and ripe after only one wearing. The dog itself took shape quickly. The Tube seemed to retain the air blown into it; there was no blowback.

The surge of anticipation turned her hands clumsy when she hooked the Essence to the blown-up Tube and a few drops spilled onto the newsfax underneath it.

The thing moved softly. It looked for all the world like a medium-sized mongrel dog of no apparent lineage.

It limped toward the door and stood there whining, its jaws slavering hideously.

“Not for a few more minutes,” she told it soothingly, afraid of it herself, yet exhilarated by what she was doing, what was to be done soon enough. “He won’t be getting off the slipway for a few minutes.” She spent the time neatly hiding the rest of the Kit and the now-silent pamphlet in her clothes closet, at the bottom of a moth-proof garment safette. Then, when it was time, she let the dog out. Carl came gruffily into the house, cursing foully, and her heart sank. The hairy arms surrounded her like a scratching womb, and she stood passively hoping for a blast of lightning that would char him on the spot, and damn the rug damage! She could smell his teeth rotting in his bead.

“Damn dog tried t’bite me when I got offa the expresswalk. Thing musta been sick.” He nodded proudly, “Kicked it an’ the sonofabitch died right there. Real soggy mess,” and he laughed imbecilically. “Never even touched me.”

The next morning, as soon as he had slipped to work, as soon as she had watched the slipway carry him out of sight over the horizon to the Bactericidal Dome, she went to get the Do-It-Yourself Murder Kit. She took the Kit from its hiding place at the bottom of the moth-proof garment safette, and carried it into the dining nook. She was really annoyed; this Kit had not cost a pittance, and she wanted value for her money. She punched herself a second cup of coffee--black with Saccha--and opened the pamphlet again.

“If you failed,” the booklet began, as though anticipating her anger, “it was, as I warned you, through human error, and not on the part of this Kit. Was your murder a success?”

“No!” she answered, in a consummate pique.

The pamphlet was silent for an instant, as though refraining from taking offense. Then it began: “If you have not succeeded, attribute your failure to one of the following: “One. You snagged your Animaux Tube and it was not fully inflated, or later lost air.

“Two. You did not allow the Essence to fill the Tube completely. Perhaps you spilled a portion.

“Three. You prepared your rabid dog for the scent improperly.

“Four. You did not attach your Essence vial properly, causing irreparable damage from leakage.

“Well, does one of these fit your case?”

The pamphlet waited, and she remembered the few drops of substance that had trickled free in her eagerness to set the dog loose on Carl. She mumbled something.

“What?” asked the pamphlet.

“I said: I spilled some!” she confessed loudly, shamefacedly, toying with the sip-tip of her coffee bulb.

“Ah so,” the pamphlet agreed. “Undoubtedly, certain vital organs were not properly formed and stabilized, thus causing a malfunction of the pseudo-beast.”

Recollections formed of the evening before, and she saw the rabid animal again, froth dripping from its viciously-spiked jaws...limping and whining. So that was it. Well, it wouldn’t happen again. She would follow the instructions more carefully in the future.

Madge Rubichek was a methodical woman.

“What do I do now?” she asked.

The pamphlet seemed to make a snickering sound, as if it were acknowledging her loss of annoyance at it, and her own recognized sense of failure, her inferiority. It might be said the pamphlet was its own brand of snob.

Then its snideness disappeared, and the booklet advised, “Remove the Deadly Nightshade from your Kit.

Be careful not to spread it out. Repeat, do not unfold it!”

She knew at once what was meant. The black sheet with the horrible feeling of dead flesh.

She hesitated to touch it, so repulsive was the tactile impression it offered; nonetheless, she reached into the Kit and brought out the layer of softly-folded, unbelievably black, ghastly-feeling material. She dropped it at her feet.

“Are you ready?” asked the pamphlet.

She started violently. It was uncanny the way that thing knew what and when and how and oh well...it was supposed to, wasn’t it? But so creepy/ “Yes, thank you.”

“Excellent. Now this second method allows less room for Human error. However, it is more dangerous, and more complex. Your three methods of murder are offered in order of increasing effort and danger. Sequentially, they are held so the simplest can be allowed to work first, thus denying the element of failure and discovery as much as possible.

“Your Deadly Nightshade is nearly flawless. If you follow my instructions to the exact letter precisely--and I cannot stress this enough--you will have accomplished your desire by morning.

“Your Deadly Nightshade is a copyrighted, patented--” and it reeled off, in a bored voice, a string of Guatemalan Patent Authority designates, “--exclusive with the Do-It-Yourself Murder Kit.” She realized at once that the voice was huckstering out of necessity, that it found such commercialism odious, vulgar and tedious.

“It will provide night,” the pamphlet said. “Night for the purpose you seek. Here is how it is used: “Place it in the bedroom of the one you wish to eliminate. It is very important that this be done precisely as directed. On no account should you, after placing the Deadly Nightshade in the bedroom, re-enter it before the intended victim. The Deadly Nightshade acts as a controlled form of narcolepsy, by the release of hypnotically-keyed visual and mental depressants. The intended victim is cast into a hypnotic spell of long night. In three days he or she will sleep all life away. The room will be a place of perpetual darkness to him or her and slowly the vital bodily functions will fail and cease, beginning with the flow of blood to the brain.

“However, it is very important that you place the Nightshade in the intended’s room evenly and without wrinkles, stretching it out under the bed or somewhere else where it will escape observation. And...you must not reenter the room once you have placed the Deadly Nightshade. Exposure begins once the sheet is spread.”

She shook it out like a chenille bedspread and laid it out neatly, placing it very carefully under the bed, once again precautionarily laying out newsfax to avoid any later unpleasantness to the floor. She tidied the bed, tucking nicely, the blankets as tight as those on the bunk of an army King/Sgt. She spread the Deadly Nightshade in a tight, wrinkle-free sheet.

She missed seeing the socks, somehow.

They were on the floor, just peeping out from under the bed, half-under the Deadly Nightshade.

She caught them out of the comer of her eye, just as she pulled the door to behind herself.

Carl’s filthy, filthy socks. A pang of hysteria went through her. He always left them where they fen. She could not understand how she had failed to see them when she had tidied that morning, nor more important, when she had stretched out the Deadly Nightshade. Per,. haps the excitement of the night before, and the fervor of now.

She remembered the instructions clearly.

“...you must not re-enter the room once you have placed the Deadly Nightshade. Exposure begins once the sheet is spread...”

Well! She certainly wasn’t going to chance that.

As it was, she would have to invent a reason for coming to bed after he had retired. Perhaps the Midnight Movie on tri-V.

Nor was she going to foul it up as she had with the Animaux Tube. But just the same...those stinking socks.

On a level far deeper than any conscious urge to murder Carl, the training of a lifetime, the murmured words of her Mother, and the huge distaste of her Father for litter, sent her to the broom closet.

She re-opened the door, and yes...just by holding the broom tightly at the sucker-straws, by keeping her wrist flexed and tight to maintain rigid balanced control, she was able to snag the socks, one by one.

--and withdraw them.

--without entering the room.

--and close the door again.

Madge congratulated herself, once she had slung the stench-filled socks into the dispop. She busied herself in the kitchen, punching out a scrumptious frappe dessert for Carl’s dinner. His last dinner on this Earth. Or anywhere.

Not that he’d notice, the big boob, not that he’d notice.

Nor did she notice the great wrinkle in one end of the Deadly Nightshade. Caused by the prodding of the broom handle.

He was yawning, and it looked like the eroded south forty getting friendly.

“Jeezus, Madge honey, I nearly overslept. Whyn’tcha wake me? I’ll be late for my shift.

”

She gawked, stricken. Twice!

“I ain’t never seen nothin’ like it, honey. I was enjoyin’ the best sleep of my life, but this here bright, real bright streak of light was in my dreams, y’know? An’ I couldn’t rest easy, y’know. I kept squintin’ and tossin’ and finally hadda get up, cause I mean, Jeezus, it was painful. Piercin’, y’know? So I got up, an’ a lucky thing, too, or I’d’a missed my shift. Whyn’tcha wake me, huh?”

She mumbled a reply, her face hot and her hands constantly at her mouth; she had the urge to clamp down hard with her teeth, to keep from shrieking.

She continued to mumble, punched-out a hurried breakfast, and summarily ushered him off to his expressway.

Then she sank into a chair and had a good, deep cry.

Later, when she was certain she had control of herself, she got out the pamphlet again. This time there was no mistaking the annoyance in the pamphlet’s voice.

“You failed again. I can tell from your emanations. Very seldom does anyone need two of the methods provided by our Kits...you are the first one in nearly eight thousand Kits that has needed all three. We hope you are proud of yourself.”

“His dirty socks,” she began, “I had to get them out. I just couldn’t stand the thought...”

“I do not wish apologies. I want attention! The third method is very simple--even a dunce--”

“There’s no need to get nasty about it!” she interrupted.

“--even a dunce cannot fail with it,” the booklet plowed on ruthlessly. “Take out the last article contained in the Kit. The heart-globe. Do not agitate it as it is a sympathetic stimulator of the heartbeat--”

Then the sound came to Madge, and the knowledge that someone was near. Listening. She flipped the pamphlet closed, but it was too late.

Much too late.

Carl stood at the door. He showed his decaying teeth in a brown smile without humor. “I came back,” he said. “Felt so damn tired ‘n beat I just couldn’t go to work...”

She fluttered a little. She could feel the tiny muscles jumping all through her body. Muscles she had never known she had.

“So that’s what’s been goin’ on, huh Madge? I shoulda guessed you’d get up the gut one day soon. I’ll haveta think back an’ see if I can figger out what this Kit included. It’ll be fun. My three was real wowzers, y’know.”

She stared at him, uncomprehending. Had he found her Kit, and had she not noticed?

“I rekcanize the pamphlet,” he explained with a wave of his meaty hand. “I sent for one of them things over three months ago.” His voice altered with incredible swiftness. Now casual and defacing, now harsh and bitter as sump water. “But how’n a hen could I of used it around someone like you...you’d of noticed the first lousy little trap that I’d’a set...you’d of vacuumed an’ swept an’ pried an’ found it.

“I know you’ve hated me--but Gawd A’mighty, how I’ve hated you/ You straighten an’ pick an’ fuss till...”

he summed it an up, and ended it all, eleven years of it, “...till a guy can’t even come home an’ enjoy a belch!”

He smiled again...this time with dirty mirth. ‘.your goddam floor’s gonna get filthy today, Madge.” He drew out the long, shiny knife. “Had one of the guys in Steel Molding make this for me...a real do-it-yourself.”

Then there was pain and a feeling of incompleteness and she saw the blood begin to drip on the rug that she had kept so immaculate. A great deal of blood, a sea of blood, so much blood. Madge Rubichek had been a methodical woman...

So she could not check the dying statement that came bubbling to her lips: “There’s...a...double...money...back...”

His voice came from far away. “I know,” he said.

And in the electronically-keyed mechfiles of the Guatemalan Patent Authority, deep in the heart-banks, three assigned designates were cancelled out. Three patents drawn on a firm called simply DoMur Products, Inc A firm that had only a few seconds before filed bankruptcy proceedings with the Midwestern Commercial Amalgum. A firm called simply DoMur Products, Inc A firm that had unfortunately operated on a very, very narrow margin of profit. Simply put, an adventure. A fable of futurity. A pastiche of men in conflict, in another time, another place, where the strength of the inner man counts for more than the bone and muscle and cartilage of the outer man. A swashbuckler and a fantasy, perhaps, but in the final analysis, when all the geegaws, foofaraws and flummery are cleared away, don’t we all fight our own particular, contemporary, pressing problems in a kind of halfworld of thought and phantasmagoric perception like The Silver Corridor “We can’t be responsible for death or disfigurement, you know,” reminded the Duelmaster.

He toyed with the Company emblem on his ceremonial robe absently, waiting Marmorth’s answer. Behind him, across the onyx and crystal expanse of the preparation chamber, the gaping maw of the Silver Corridor opened into blackness.

“Yes, yes, I know all that,” snapped Marmorth impatiently. “Has Krane entered his end?” he asked, casting a glance at the dilation-segment leading to the adjoining preparation room. There was fear and apprehension in the look, only thinly hidden.

“Not quite yet,” the Duelmaster told him. “By now he has signed the release, and they are briefing him, as I’m about to brief you, if you’ll kindly sign yours.” He indicated the printed form in the trough, and the stylus on the desk.

Marmorth licked his lips, mumbled something half-heard, and flourished his signature on the blank line.

The signing was done hurriedly, as though he was afraid he might forget his name, should he hesitate.

The Duelmaster glanced quickly at the signature, then pressed the stud on the desk top. The blank slipped out of sight in the trough. He carefully took the stylus from Marmorth’s unfeeling fingers, placed it in his pouch.

They waited patiently for a minute. A soft clucking came up through a slot in the side of the desk, and a second later a punched plastic plate dropped into a basket beneath it.

“This is your variation-range card,” explained the Duelmaster, lifting the plate from the basket. “With this we can gauge the extent of your imagination, set up the illusions, send you through the Corridor at your own mental pace.”

“I understand perfectly, Duelsman,” snapped Marmorth. “Do you mind getting me in there! I’m freezing in this breechclout!”

“Mr. Marmorth, I realize this is annoying, but we are required both by statute of law and rule of the Company to explain thoroughly the entire sequence, before entrance.” He stood up behind the desk, reached into a cabinet that dilated at the approach of his hand.

“Here,” he said, handing Marmorth a wraparound, “put this on till we’ve finished here.”

Marmorth let breath whistle between his teeth in irritation, but donned the robe and sat back down in front of the desk. Marmorth was a man of medium height, hair graying slightly at the temples and forelock, a middle-aged stomach bulge. He had dark, not-quite-piercing eyes, and straight plain features. An undistinguished man, yet one who seemed to have a touch of authority and determination about him. An undistinguished man, a middle-aged man, a man about to enter a duel.

“As you know--” began the Duelmaster.

“Yes, yes, confound it! I know, I know! Why must you people prolong the agony of this thing?” Marmorth cut him off, rising again.

“Mr. Marmorth,” resumed the Duelmaster patiently but doggedly, “if you don’t settle yourself, we will call this Affair off. Do you understand?”

Marmorth chuckled ruefully, deep in his throat. “ After the tolls Krane and I laid out?

You won’t cancel.”

“We will if you aren’t prepared for combat. It’s for your own survival, Mr. Marmorth. Now if you’ll be silent a minute, I’ll brief you and you can enter the Corridor.”

Marmorth waved his hand negligently, grudging the Duelsman his explanation. He stared in boredom at the high crystal ceiling of the preparation chamber.

“The Corridor, as you know,” went on the Duelsman, adding the last phrase with sarcasm, “is a supersensitive receptor. When you enter it, seven billion scanning elements pick up your thoughts, down to the very subconscious, filter them through the banks, correlating them with your variation-range card, and feed back illusions.

These illusions are matched with those of your opponent, as checked with his variationrange card. The illusion is always the same for both of you.

“Since you are in the field of the Corridor, these are substantial illusions, and they affect you as though they were real. In other words, to illustrate the extreme--you can die at any moment. They are not dreams, I assure you.

All too often combatants find an illusion so strange they feel it must be unreal. May I caution you, Mr. Marmorth, that is the quickest way to lose an Affair. Take everything you see at face value. It is real!”

He paused for a moment, wiping his forehead. He had begun to perspire freely. Marmorth wondered at this, but remained silent.

“Your handicap,” the Duelmaster resumed, “is that when an illusion is formed from a larger segment of your opponent’s imagination than from yours, he will be more familiar with it, and will be more able to get to you.

The same holds true for him, of course.

“The illusions will strengthen for the combatant who is dominating. In other words, if Krane’s outlook is firmer than yours, he will have a more familiar illusion. If you begin to dominate him, the illusion will change to one more of your making.

“Do you understand?”

Marmorth had found himself listening more intently than he had thought he would. Now he had questions.

“Aren’t there any weapons we begin with? I’d always thought we could choose our dueling weapons.”

The Duelmaster shook his head. “No. There will be sufficient weapons in your illusions. Anything else would be superfluous.”

“How can an illusion kill me?”

“You are in the Corridor’s field. Through a process of--well, actually, Mr. Marmorth, that is a Company secret, and I doubt if it could be explained in lay terms so that you would know any more now than you did before.

Just accept that the Corridor converts your thought-impressions into tangibles.”

“How long will we be in there?”

“Time is subjective in the Corridor. You may be there for an hour or a month or a year. Out here the time will seem as an instant. You will go in, both of you, then a moment later--one of you will come out.”

Marmorth licked his lips again. “Have there been duels where a stalemate was reached; where both combatants came back?” He was nervous, and the question trembled as if it was made with metallic filaments.

“We’ve never had one that I can recall,” answered the Duelmaster simply.

“Oh,” said Marmorth quietly, looking down at his hands.

“Are you ready now?”

Marmorth nodded. He slipped out of the wraparound and laid it across the back of the chair. Together they walked toward the Silver Corridor. “Remember,” said the Duelmaster, “the combatant who has the strongest convictions will win. This is a constant, and your only real weapon.”

The Duelmaster stepped to the end of the Corridor, removing a thin tube from his pouch. A beam of light flashed thinly from the end, and he shone it at an aperture in the wall next to the Corridor’s opening.

The light flashed twice, then he said, “I’ve signaled the Duelsman on the other side. Krane has been placed inside.”

The Duelmaster slipped the variation-range card into a slot in the blank wall, then indicated Marmorth should step into the Corridor.

The middle-aged duelist stepped forward, smoothing the short breechclout against his thighs as he walked.

He took one step, two, three. The perfectly round mouth of the Silver Corridor gaped before him, black and impenetrable.

He stepped forward once more. His bare foot touched the edge of the metal, and he drew back hesitantly. He looked back over his shoulder at the Duelsman. “Couldn’t I--”

“Step in, Mr. Marmorth,” said the Duelmaster firmly. There was a granite tone in his voice.

Marmorth walked forward into the darkness. It closed over his head and seeped behind his eyes. He felt nothing! Marmorth...

...blinked twice. The first time he saw the throne room and the tier-mounted pages, longstemmed trumpets at their sides. He saw the assembled nobles bowing low before him, their ermine capes sweeping the floor. The floor was a rich, inlaid mosaic, the walls dripped color and rich tapestry, the ceiling was higharched and studded with crystal chandeliers.

The second time he opened them, hoping his senses had cleared, he saw precisely the same thing. Then he saw Krane--High Lord Krane--in the front ranks.

The man’s hair had been swept back to form a tight knot at the base of his skull. It was the knot of the triumphant warrior. The garb was different--tight suit of chain-mail in blued-steel, ornamental decorations across the breastplate, a ruby-hilted sword in a scabbard at his waist, full, flowing cape of bloodred velvet--but the face was no different from the one Marmorth had seen in the Council Chamber, before they had agreed to duel.

The face was thin; a V that swept past a high, white forehead and thick, black brows, past the high cheekbones and needle-thin nose, down to the slash mouth and pointed black beard. A study in coal and chalk.

Marmorth’s blood churned at sight of the despised Krane! If he hadn’t challenged Marmorth’s Theorem in the Council Chamber, with his duel-inciting slanders, neither of them would be here. Here!

Marmorth stiffened. He sat more erect. The knowledge swept away his momentary forgetfulness; this was the Silver Corridor. This was illusion. They were dueling--now, at this instant! He had to kill Krane.

But whose illusion was this? His own, or the dark-bearded scoundrel’s before him? It might be suicide to attempt killing Krane in his own illusion. He would have to wait a bit and gauge what the situation represented in his own mind.

Whatever it was, he seemed to be of higher rank than Krane, who bowed before him. Almost magically, before he realized the words were emerging from his mouth, he heard himself saying, “Lord Krane, rise!”

Krane stood up, and the other nobles followed suit, the precedent having been set. By choosing Krane to rise first, Marmorth the King had chosen whom he wanted to speak first in the Star Chamber.

“May it please your Illustriousness,” boomed Krane, extending his arms in salute, “I have a disposition on the prisoners from Quorth. I should beg your Eminence’s verdict on my proposal.”

He bowed his head and waited Marmorth’s reply.

Had there been a tone of mockery in the man’s voice? Marmorth could not be sure. But he now knew that it was his own illusion. If Krane was coming to him for disposition, then he must be in the ascendant in this creation.

“What is your proposal, High Lord Krane?” asked Marmorth.

Krane took a step forward, bringing him to the bottom of the dais upon which Marmorth’s throne rested.

“These things are of a totally alien culture, Your Highness,” began Krane. “How can we, as humans, even tolerate their existence in our way of life? The very sight of them makes the gorge rise!

They are evil-smelling and accursedly-formed! They must all be destroyed, Your Highness! We must ignore the guileful offers of a prisoner-forprisoner exchange! We will have our fleet in Quorth City within months, then we can rescue our own captured without submitting to the demands of foul monsters! In the meantime, why feed these beasts of another world?

“I say, destroy them! Launch all-out attack now! Rescue our people from the alien’s slave camps on Quorth and Fetsa!”

He had been speaking smoothly and forcefully. The nods of assent and agreement from the assembled nobles made Marmorth wary. A complete knowledge of the Quorth-Human war was in his mind, and the plan of Krane sounded clear and fine. Yet superimposed over it, was his knowledge that this was all merely illusion and that somewhere in the illusion was a chink in which his errors might lodge. The plan sounded good, but...

“No, Krane!” he decided, thinking quietly. “This would be what the aliens want! They want us to destroy our prisoners. That would whip their people at home into such a frenzy of patriotism--we would be engulfed in a month!

“We will consider the alien proposal of prisoner-for-prisoner exchange.” The rumbles from the massed nobles rose into the cavern of the Star Chamber. There was unrest here. He had to demonstrate that he was right. “Let them bring in the chain of aliens!” he commanded, clapping his hands. A page went out to summon them.

While the hall waited, Marmorth thought quickly: had he made the proper decision?

There seemed to be a correlation between Krane’s challenging of his Theorem of Government in the Council-back in the world outside the Corridor--and this proposal he had just defeated.

There was a correlation! He saw it suddenly!

Both his proposal of the Theorem in the Council and his decision here in the illusion had been based on his personal concept of government. Krane’s refutation out there and his proposal here were the opposite. Once again they had clashed.

And this time Marmorth had won!

But had he?

Even as he let the thought After, the chained aliens were dragged between the massed nobles and cast on their triple-jointed knees before Marmorth’s dais. “Here are the loathsome beings!” cried Krane, flinging his arms high and apart.

It had been a grandstand gesture, and the frog-faced, many-footed beings on the Star Chamber’s floor realized it.

Suddenly, almost as though they were made of paper, the chains that had joined the aliens snapped, and they leaped on the nobles.

Marmorth caught the smile on Krane’s lips. He had been behind this; probably had the chains weakened in the corridor outside by his loyal personal guard.

Hardly with thought, Marmorth was off his throne and down the stepped dais, his sword free from its scabbard, and arcing viciously.

A hideously warted alien face rose before him and he thrust with all his might! The blade pierced between the double-lidded eyes, and thick ochre blood spurted across his tunic. He yanked the blade free, kicking the dead but still quivering alien from its length. He leaped into the horde, howling a battlecry from his youth.

Even as he leaped, he saw Krane’s slash-mouthed smile, and the Lord’s sword swinging toward him!

So it hadn’t been his illusion! It had been Krane’s! He hadn’t chosen the proper course. Krane’s belief at the moment was stronger than his own.

He fended off a double-handed smash from the black-bearded noble and fell back. They parried and countered, thrust and slashed all around the dais. The other nobles were too deeply involved fighting off the screaming aliens to witness this battle between their King and his Lord. Krane beat Marmorth back, back!

Why did I choose as I did? Marmorth wailed mentally, berating himself. Suddenly he slipped, toppling backward onto the steps. The sword flew from his hand as it cracked against the edge of a step. He saw Krane bearing down on him, the sword double-fisted as his opponent raised it like a stake above his head.

In desperation, Marmorth summed up all his belief. “]t was the right decision!”

screamed Marmorth with the conviction of a man about to die. He saw the sword plunge toward his breast as...

...he gathered the light about him, sweeping his hands through the dripping colors, making them shift and flow for him. He saw the figure of Krane, standing haughtily in the bank of yellow, and he gathered the blue to himself in a coruscating ball.

Fearsomely he bellowed his challenge, “This is my illusion, Krane, and watch as I kill you!”

He balled the blue in his hand and sent it flying, dripping spark and color as it shot toward the blackbearded man.

They both stood tall and spraddle-legged in the immensity of they knew-not-where. The colors dripped from the air, making weird patterns as they mixed and ran.

The blue ball struck in front of Krane and exploded, cascading a rich flood of chromatic brilliance into the air. Krane laughed at the failure.

He gathered the black to him, wadding it in strong and supple fingers. He wound up, almost as though it was a sport, and flung the wadded black at Marmorth.

The older man knew he had not enough belief yet built to withstand this onslaught. Marmorth knew if the black enfolded him he would die in the never-ending limbo of nothingness. He thrust hands up before his face to stop the onrush of the black, but it struck him and he fell, clutching feebly at a washy stringer of white.

He fell into the black as it surrounded him, and in a moment knew he was in the limbo. This was not his illusion! It could not be, for he was vanquished! Yet he was not dead, as he had felt sure he would be. He lay there, thinking.

He remembered all the effort he had put in on the Political Theorem. The Theorem he had proposed in the Council. It had represented years of work--the culmination of all his adult thought and effort; and, he had to admit it, the Theorem was soundly based on his own view of the Universe. Then the presumptuous Krane had offended him by restating the Theorem. Before the very faces of the Council!

Krane had, of course, twisted it to his own evil and malicious ends--basing it anew on his conception of the All.

Oh, there had been a verbal battle. There had been the accusations, the clanging of the electric gavel, the remonstrances of the Compjudge, the shocked expressions of the other Councilors! Till finally Marmorth had been goaded by the younger man into the Duel. Then into the Silver Corridor. From which only one of them would emerge. The one who did would force his Theorem on the Council.

To be accepted, of course. The Theorem was so basic, the view would be recognized and accepted.

It all revolved, then, around whose view of the Universe, whose Theorem, was the right one. It could be either Krane’s or Marmorth’s.

Marmorth struck out at the black! Mine, mine, mine! He shouted soundlessly. He lashed into the nothingness. My Theorem is the proper one! I believe it! I do!

Then he saw the stringer of white in his hand. So this was Krane in the ascendant, was it! Now came the moment of retaliation.

He whipped the stringer around his invisible head, swaying as he was, there in the depthless black. The stringer thickened. He cupped it to him, washing it with his hands, strengthening it, shaping and molding it.

In a moment it had grown. In a moment more the white had burst forth like a ripe blossom and flooded all.

Revealing Krane standing there, in his breechclout, massaging the plae pink between his fingers.

“Mine, Krane, mine!” he screamed, flinging the orange-green!

Krane blanched and tried to duck. The orange-green came on like a sliver of Forever, streaking and burning as it rode currents that did not exist. Then the light shattered, and fired, and spat. As Marmorth realized they had nullified each other again, that the illusion was dissolving around them, he heard Krane bellow, even as loud as he had, “Mine, Marmorth, mine!”

Then the colors ran. They flowed, they merged, they sucked at his body, while he...

...shrank up against the glass wall next to Krane. They both stared in fascinated horror as the huge, ichordripping spider-thing advanced on them, mandibles clicking.

“My God in Heaven!” Marmorth heard Krane bellow. “What is it?” Krane scrabbled at the glass wall behind them, trying to get out. They were trapped.

The glass walls circled them, wide; just the spider-thing and each other, trapped in the tiny tomb!

Marmorth was petrified. He could neither move nor speak --he could hardly sense anything but terror.

Spiders were his personal fear. He found his legs were quivering at the knees, though he had not sensed it a moment before. The very sight of the hairy beasts had always sent shudders through him. Now he knew this was his illusion.

He was in the ascendant!

But how hideously in the ascendant.

The spider-thing advanced on them, the soft plush pads of its hundred feet leaving dampness where it stopped.

Krane fell to his knees, moaning and scratching at the glass floor. “Out, out, out, out..,” he mumbled, froth dripping from his lips.

Marmorth knew this was his chance. This fear was a product of his own mind; he had lived with it all his life. He knew it more familiarly than Krane--he could not cancel it, certainly, but he could utilize it more easily than the other.

Here was where he killed Krane. He pulled himself tightly to the wall, sweating palms flat to the glass, the valley of his backbone against the cool surface. “I’m right! The Theorem as I stated it iis c-correct!” He said it triumphantly, though the note of terror quavered undisguised in his voice. The spider-thing paused in its march, swung its clicking, ghastly head about as though confused, and altered direction by an inch. Away from Marmorth. It descended on Krane. The black-bearded man looked up, saw it coming toward him, heard Marmorth’s words. Even on the floor, half-sunk in shock, he shouted, pounding his fists against the floor of glass, “Wrong, wrong, wrong! You’re wrong! I can prove my Theorem is correct! The basic formation of the Judiciary should be planned in an ever-decreasing system of--”

Marmorth didn’t even listen. He knew it was drivel! He knew the man was wrong! But the spider-thing had stopped once more. Now it paused between the two of them, its bulk shivering as though caught in a draft.

Krane saw the hesitation on the monster’s part, and rose, the old confidence and impudence regained. He wiped his balled fists across his eyes, clearing them of tears. He continued speaking, steadily, and to Marmorth’s ears, in the voice of a fanatic. The man just could not recognize that he was wrong.

“You’re insane, man!” Marmorth interjected, waving his hands with fervor. “The setup must be balanced between a code of fair practices with a Guild system blocking efforts on the part of the Genres to rise into control of the gross planetary product!” He went on and on, outlining the Theorem. Krane, too, shouted and gesticulated, both of them suddenly oblivious to the monstrous, black spider-thing which had stopped completely between them, vacillating.

When Marmorth stopped for an instant to regain his breath, the beast twisted its neckless head toward him.

Marmorth then speeded up his speech, spewing out detail upon detail, and the beast slowly sank back into uncertainty.

It was obviously a battle of belief. Whichever combatant had more conviction--that one would win.

They stood and shouted, screamed, outlined, explained and delineated for what seemed hours. Finally, as though in exasperation, the spider-thing began to turn. They both watched it, their mouths working, words pouring forth in twin streams of absolute sincere belief.

They watched even though...

...the starships fired at each other mercilessly. Blast after blast exploded soundlessly into the vault of space.

Marmorth found his fingers twisted in the epaulet at his right shoulder. As he watched Krane’s Magnificent-class destroyer wheel in the control-room screens, a half-naked, blood-soaked and perspiring crewman burst into the cabin’s entrance-well.

“Captain! Captain, sir!”

Marmorth looked over the plastic rail, down into the well.

“What?” His voice snapped with brittleness.

“Cap’n, the port side is riddled! We’re losing pressure from thirteen compartments. The Reclamation Mile is completely lost! The engineers’ group was in one of the compartments along that mile, Cap’n! They’re all bloated and blue and dead in there! We can see them floating around without any...”

“Get the Hell out of here!” Marmorth turned, lifting a spacetant from his chart-board, and flinging it with all his strength at the crewman. The man ducked and the spacetant bounced off the bulkhead, snapping pieces from its intricate bulk.

“You maniac!” he yowled, leaping back out of the well, through the exit port, as Marmorth reached for another missile.

Marmorth shut his eyes tight, blanking out the shuddering ship, space, the screens, everything.

“Right, right, right, right, right! I’m right!” he shouted, lifting clenched fists. The explosion came in two parts, as though two torpedoes had been struck almost simultaneously. The ship rocked and heeled. Bits of metal sheared through the outer bulkheads, crashed against the opposite wall.

As the lights went dead, and the screams drove into his brain, Marmorth shouted his credo once more, with all the force of his conviction, with all the power of his lungs, with all the strength in his gasping body.

“I’m right! May God strike me dead if I’m not right! I know I’m right, I made an inexhaustible...”

...check!” he finished, opening his eyes and looking back down at the chessboard. The pieces, happily, had not moved. He still had Krane blocked off.

“I say check,” he repeated, smiling, steepling his fingers.

Krane’s black-bearded face broke into a wry grimace.

“Most clever, my dear Marmorth,” he congratulated the other with sarcasm. “You have forced me to touch a pawn.”

Marmorth watched as Krane, with trembling fingers, reached down to the jet pawn. It was carved from stone; carved with such care and intricacy that its edges were precisely as they had been desired by the master craftsman. They were razor sharp.

The pieces were all cut the same. Both the blanched alabaster pieces before Marmorth, and the ebony-stone players under Krane’s hand. The game had been constructed for men who played more than a “gentleman’s game.”

There was death in each move.

Marmorth knew he was in the ascendant. Each of them had had two illusions--that remembrance was sharpand this was Marmorth’s. How did he know? The older man looked down at the intricately carved chess pieces. He was white, Krane was black. As clear as it could be.

“Uh, have you moved?” Marmorth inquired, his voice unctuous with casualness. He knew the other had not yet touched his players. “I believe you still lie in check.” He was enjoying toying with his once-arrogant foe.

He thought he heard a muted, “Damn you!” under Krane’s breath, but could not be certain.

Slowly Krane touched the player, carefully sliding the fingers of his hand across the razor-thin, razor-sharp facets. The piece almost slid from his grasp, so loosely was he holding it, but the move was made in an instant.

Marmorth cursed mentally. Krane had calculated beautifully! Not only was his King blocked out from Marmorth’s Rook--Marmorth’s check-piece--but in another two moves (so clearly obvious as Krane had desired it) his own Queen would be in danger. In his mind he could hear Krane savoring the words: “Garde! I say garde, my dear Marmorth!”

He had to move the Queen out of position.

He had to touch the Queen!

The most deadly piece on the board!

“No!” he gasped.

“I beg your pardon?” said Krane, the slash-mouth opening in a violent grin.

“N-nothing, nothing!” snapped Marmorth. He concentrated. Deadly poison, instantacting, lay filmed on those razor edges.

There was little chance he could maneuver that thousand-keen-edged Queen without poisoning himself for his trouble. Lord! It was an insoluble, a double-edged, dilemma. If he did not move, Krane would win. If he won, it was obvious Marmorth would die. He had seen the deadly dirk’s hilt protruding slightly from Krane’s cummerbund when the other had sat down. If he did move, he would convulse to death before Krane’s taunting eyes.

You shall never have that pleasure! he thought, the bitter determination of a man who will not be defeated rising in him.

He approached the Queen, with hand, with eye.

The base was faceted, like a diamond. Each facet ended in a cutting edge so sensitive he knew it would sever the finger that touched it. The shape of the upper segments was involved, gorgeously-made. A woman, arms raised above her head, stretching in tension. Beautiful--and untouchable. Then the thought struck him: Is this the only move?

Deep within his mind he calculated. He could not possibly recognize the levels on which his intellect was working. In with his chess theory, in with his mental agility, in with his desire to win, his Theorem rearranged itself, fitting its logic to this situation. How could the Theorem be applied to the game? What other paths, through the infallible truth of the Theorem--in which he believed, now, more strongly than ever before--what other paths could he take.

Then the alternative move became clear. He could escape a route, escape the garde, escape the taunting smile of Krane by moving a relatively safe Bishop. It was not a completely foolproof action, since the Bishop, too, was a razored piece of death, but he had found a way around the certain success of Krane’s maneuverings.

“Ha!” A terrible smile burst upon his face. His eyes bored across to the other’s. Krane turned white as Marmorth reached out, touched the one piece he had been desperately hoping the older man would not consider.

He felt the uncontrollable tightening in his throat as he realized the game would go on, and on, and on and...

...he unclenched his fist as the volcano leaped up around them. It was more than the inside of a volcanic cone, however. The Corridor was there, too. The dung-brown walls of smooth rock shivered ever so slightly, and both men knew the Silver Corridor was just beyond their vision.

They could see it glimmering with unreality.

It was almost as though they were looking at a double exposure; an extinct volcano superimposed over the shining tube of the Silver Corridor.

It isn’t far away, thought Marmorth. This must be the last illusion! Is there a certain pattern to these things?

Then he felt, with a blissed release of nervous tension, Someone is going to win soon. He stared up at the faint patch of gray sky, visible through the roundly jagged opening at the cone’s top. The walls sloped down in a fluid concavity. Here and there across the rough floor of the cavern, stalagmites rose up in sharp spikes.

And there--over and through the walls of the dead formations--the Corridor hung faintly. A ghostly, shivering, not-quite-real shadow, inside the substance of their illusion. They stood and stared at each other. Each knowing he was not really in the heart of a volcano, but in a metal corridor. Each knowing he could die as easily by this illusion as he could at the other’s hands.

Was this the end? Were there a limited number of illusions to each Affair? Who had won? Could there be a winner?

They stared at each other, across the dusky interior of the extinct volcano.

“I’m right,” said Krane, hesitantly.

“You’re wrong,” answered Marmorth quickly. “I’m the one who’s right!”

In a moment they were at it again, each screaming till his lungs were raw with the effort, and red patches had appeared in Marmorth’s cheeks. They paused for an instant, gathering air for another tirade, Krane looking about for a weapon.

They were both as they had begun. Naked save the breechclouts which clung to their buttocks.

They resumed their shouting, the sound reverberating hollowly in the dim interior of the volcano. The sounds hit them, bounced across the stone walls, reverberated again. The fury had been built to a peak and pitch they both knew could not be exceeded. They had strained every last vestige of belief and conviction in their minds.

As Marmorth realized he was at the pinnacle of his belief, he saw the same conviction come over Krane’s face. He knew that from here on in, it would be a physical thing, with both of them stalemated in illusory power.

Then the woman-thing appeared.

She grazed into being between them. She wasn’t human. There was no question about that. Marmorth took a halting step backward. Krane remained rooted, though his pale face had blanched an even more deadly shade. A strangled, “My God, what is it?” slipped past Marmorth’s lips. It was less than human, yet more than mortal; it was a travesty of a human being. A mad nightmare of a vision! Like some fearsome god of an ancient cult, it paused with long legs apart, hands on hips.

The woman’s body was lush. Full, high breasts, trim stomach, exciting legs. Gorgeously proportioned and exciting, the torso and legs, the chest and arms, were normal--even exaggeratedly normal.

But there all resemblance to a woman ceased.

The head was a strangely lizardlike thing, with elongated snout, wattles, huge glowing eyes set atop the skull. Looking out through flesh-sockets thick and deep--little hummocks atop the face-the eyes were small, crimson and cruel.

The nose was almost nonexistent. Two breather-spaces pulsed, one on either side of a small rise in the yellowed, pocked flesh of the head.

The mouth was a wide, gaping, triangular orifice, with triple rows of shark teeth in the upper and lower jaws. The woman-thing looked like a gorgeous female--with the wierdly altered head of a crocodile.

The ebony, leathery, bat’s wings rising from the shoulder blades--quivering--completed the frightening picture.

Wisps of smoky, filmy garments were draped over the woman-thing’s shoulders, around her waist. She stood unmoving.

Then she spoke to them. It was not mental.

It actually sounded; but not from the body before them. They knew it was--her?--but it did not come from her at all. The fearful mouth remained almost shut, propped slightly open on the sharp tiers of teeth.

The voice issued from the walls, from the tips of the stalagmites, from the high, arching roof of the volcano; it boomed from the rocky floor--it even floated down the length of the infinitelystretching Corridor. The voice spoke in thunder, yet softly.

Well, Gentlemen?

Krane stared for a second at the woman-thing; then he looked about wildly, trying to find the source of the voice. His head swung back and forth as though it was manipulated by strings from above. “Well, what?” he shouted to no one.

Have you realized the truth yet?

“What truth? What are you talking about? Who is that? Is it you?” chimed in Marmorth, bathed in sudden fear. He pointed an accusing finger at the woman-thing.

The Corridor shimmered oddly. It lived just behind the stone walls of the volcano. I’m a voice, Gentlemen. A voice and an illusion. Just an illusion, that’s all, Gentlemen. Just an illusion from both of your minds. Made of equal portions of your minds. For you are one as strong as the other.

There was a pause. Then: But tell me, have you realized what you should have known before you were foolish enough to enter the Corridor?

Krane looked at Marmorth with suspicion. For the first time it occurred to him that perhaps this was a trick on the other’s part. Marmorth, recognizing the glance, shrugged his shoulders eloquently. “No! Tell us, then! What should we have known?”

The only real answer as to who is right; which Theorem is the correct one!

“Tell me, tell me!” they shouted, almost together.

There was silence for a moment. The woman-thing ran a scarlet-tipped hand across the hideous lizard snout, as though searching for a way to phrase what was coming. Then the single word sounded in the heart of the volcano.

Neither.

Krane and Marmorth stared past the woman-thing, stared at each other in confusion. “Nneither?” shouted Marmorth incredulously. “ Are you mad! Of course one of us is right! Me!” He was shaking fists at the gruesome being before him. Illusion, perhaps; but an illusion that was goading him.

“Prove it! Prove it!” screamed Krane, stepping forward, flat-footedly, as though seeking to strike the woman-thing. Then the voice gave them the solution and the proof that neither could contest, for both knew it to be true on a level that defied mere conviction.

You are both egomaniacs. You could not possibly be convinced of the other’s viewpoint. Not in a hundred million years. The message dies between you. You are both too tightly ensnared in yourselves!

The woman-thing suddenly began to shimmer. She became indistinct, and there were many shadow-forms of her, surrounding her body like halos. Abruptly, she disappeared from between them. Leaving them alone in the quickening darkness of the volcano’s throat.

Alone. Staring at each other with dawning comprehension, dawning belief. They both realized it at the same moment. They both had the conviction of their cause, yet they both knew the womanthing had been right.

“Krane,” said Marmorth, starting toward the black-bearded man, “she’s right, you know. Perhaps we can get together and figure...”

The other had started toward the older man as he had spoken. “Yes, perhaps there’s something in what you say. Perhaps there’s a...”

At the instant they both realized it--the instant they considered the other’s viewpoint--the illusion barriers shattered, of course, and the red-hot lava poured in on them, engulfing both men in a blistering inferno.

What kind of a culture are we breeding around us? A society in which everyone tries to be average, right on the norm, the common denominator, the median, the great leveler. College kids demonstrating a callow conservatism that urges them not to stick their heads above the crowd, not to be noticed. Political candidates so bland they must of necessity be faceless to gain identification with their equally faceless constituents. A sameness in thinking, in demeanor, in dress, in goals, in World Communism, famine, plague, pestilence or the singing of The Everly Brothers, I fear for the safety of my country and its people from this creeping paralysis of the ego. I have tried to say something about it in All the Sounds of Fear “Give me some light!”

Cry: tormented, half-moan half-chant, cast out against a whispering darkness: a man wound in white, arms upflung to roistering shadows, sooty sockets where eyes had been, pleading, demanding, anger and hopelessness, anguish from the soul into the world. He stumbled, a step, two, faltering, weak, the man returned to the child, trying to find some exit from the washing sea of darkness in which he trembled.

“Give me some light!”

Around him a Greek chorus of sussurating voices. Plucking at his garments he staggered toward an intimation of sound, a resting place, a goal. The man in pain, the figure of all pain, all desperation, and nowhere in that circle of painful light was there release from his torment. Sandaled feet stepping, each one above an abyss, no hope and no safety; what can it mean to be so eternally blind?

Again, “Give me some light!”

The last tortured ripping of the words from a throat raw with the hopelessness of salvation. Then the man sank to the shadows that moved in on him. The face half-hidden in chiaroscuro, sharp black, blanched white, down and down into the grayness about his feet, the circle of blazing-white light pinpointing him, a creature impaled on a shard of brilliance, till closing, closing, closing it swallowed him, all gone to black, darkness within and without, black even deeper, nothing, finis, end; silence.

Richard Becker, Oedipus, had played his first role. Twenty-four years later, he would play it again, as his last. But before that final performance’s curtain could be rung, twenty-four years of greatness would have to strut across stages of life and theater and emotion.

Time, passing.

When they had decided to cast the paranoid beggar in Sweet Miracles, Richard Becker had gone to the Salvation Army retail store and bought a set of rags that even the sanctimonious charity workers staffing the shop tried to throw out as unsaleable and foul. He bought a pair of cracked and soleless shoes that were a size too large.

He bought a hat that had seen so many autumns of rain its brim had bowed and withered under the onslaught. He bought a no-color vest from a suit long since destroyed and a pair of pants whose seat sagged raggedly and a shirt with three buttons gone and a jacket that seemed to typify every derelict who had ever cadged an hour’s sleep in an alley.

He bought these things over the protests of the kindly, white-haired women who were doing their bit for charity, and he asked if he might step into the toilet for a few moments to try them on; and when he emerged, his good tweed jacket and dark slacks over his arm, he was another man entirely. As though magically, coarse stubble had sprouted on his sagging jowls. (It may well have been there when he came into the shop, but who would have noticed? He was too nice-looking a young man to go around unshaved.) The hair had grown limp and off-gray under the squashed hat. The face was lined and planed with the depravities and deprivations of a lifetime lived in gutters and saloons. The hands were caked with filth, the eyes lusterless and devoid of personality, the body grotesquely slumped by the burden of mere existence. This old man, this skid from the Bowery, how had he gotten into the toilet, and where was the nice young man who had gone in wearing that jacket and those slacks? Had this creature somehow overpowered him (what foul weapon had this feeble old man used to subdue a vital, strong youth like that) ? The white-haired Good Women of Charity were frozen with distress as they imagined the strong-faced, attractive youth, lying in the bathroom, his skull crushed by a length of pipe. The old bum extended the jacket, the pants, and the rest of the clothing the young man had been wearing, and in a voice that was thirty years younger than the body from which it spoke, he explained, “I won’t be needing these, ladies. Sell them to someone who can make good use of them.” The voice of the young man, from this husk.

And he paid for the rags he wore. They watched him as he limped and rolled through the front door into the filthy streets, another tramp gone to join the tide of lost souls that would inevitably become a stream and a river and an ocean of wastrels, washing finally into a drunk tank or a doorway or a park bench. Richard Becker spent six weeks living on the Bowery; in fleabags, abandoned warehouses, cellars, gutters, and on tenement rooftops; he shared and wallowed in the nature and filth and degradation of the empty men of his times.

For six weeks he was a tramp, a thoroughly washed-out hopeless rumdum, with rheumy eyes and palsied hands and a weak bladder.

One by one the weeks mounted to six, and on the first day of casting for Sweet Miracles, the Monday of the seventh week, Richard Becker arrived at the Martin Theatre, where he auditioned for the part in the clothes he had worn for the past six weeks.

The play ran for five hundred and eighteen performances, and Richard Becker won the Drama Critics’ Circle Award as the finest male performer of the year. He also won the Circle Award as the most promising newcomer of the year.

He was twenty-two years old at the time.

The following season, after Sweet Miracles had gone on the road, Richard Becker was apprised, through the pages of Variety, that John Foresman & T. H. Searle were about to begin casting for House of Infidels, the posthumous script by Odets, the last he ever wrote. Through friends in the Foresman & Searle offices, he obtained a copy of the script, and selected a part he considered massive in its potentialities. The role of an introspective and tormented artist, depressed by the level of commercialism to which his work had sunk, resolved to regain an innocence of childhood or nature he had lost, by working with his hands in a foundry.

When the first-night critics called Richard Becker’s conception of Tresk, the artist, “a pinnacle of thespic intuition” and noted, “His authority in the part led members of the audience to ask one another how such a sensitive actor could grasp the rough unsubtle life of a foundry worker,” they had no idea that Richard Becker had worked for nearly two months in a steel stamping plant and foundry in Pittsburgh. But the makeup man on House of Infidels suspected Richard Becker had once been in a terrible fire, for his hands were marked by the ravages of great heat.

After two successes, two conquests of Broadway, two characterizations that were immediately ranked with the most brilliant Shubert Alley had ever witnessed, Richard Becker’s reputation began to build a legend.

The Man Who IS The “Method,” they called him, in perceptive articles and interviews. Lee Strasberg of the Actors’ Studio, when questioned, remarked that Becker had never been a student, but had the occasion arisen, he might well have paid him to attend. In any event, Richard Becker’s command of the Stanislavski theory of total immersion in a part became a working example of the validity of the concept. No mere scratcher and stammerer, Richard Becker was the man he pretended to be, on a stage.

Of his private life little was known, for he let it be known that if he was to be totally convincing in a characterization, he wanted no intrusive shadow of himself to stand between the audience and the image he offered.

Hollywood’s offers of stardom were refused, for as Theatre Arts commented in a brief feature on Richard Becker: The gestalt that Becker projects across a row of footlights would be dimmed and turned two-dimensional on the Hollywood screen. Becker’s art is an ultimate distillation of truth and metamorphosis that requires the reality of stage production to retain its purity. It might even be noted that Richard Becker acts in four dimensions, as opposed to the merely craftsmanlike three of his contemporaries. Surely no one could truly argue with the fact that watching a Becker performance is almost a religious experience. We can only congratulate Richard Becker on his perceptiveness in turning down studio bids.

The years of building a backlog of definitive parts (effectively ruining them for other actors who were condemned to play them after Becker had said all there was to say) passed, as Richard Becker became, in turn, a Hamlet that cast new lights on the Freudian implications of Shakespeare...a fiery Southern segregationist whose wife reveals her octaroon background...a fast-talking salesman come to grips with futility and cowardice...a many-faceted Marco Polo...a dissolute and totally amoral pimp, driven by a loathing for women, to sell his own sister into evil...a ruthless politician, dying of cancer and senility...

And the most challenging part he had ever undertaken, the recreation, in the play by Tennessee Williams, of the deranged religious zealot, trapped by his own warring emotions, into the hammermurder of an innocent girl. When they found him, in the model’s apartment off Gramercy Place, they were unable to get a coherent story of why he had done the disgusting act, for he had lapsed into a stentorian tone of Biblical fervor, pontificating about the blood of the Iamb and the curse of Jezebel and the eternal fires of Perdition. The men from Homicide numbered among their ranks a rookie, fresh to the squad, who became desperately ill at the sight of the fouled walls and the crumpled form wedged into the tiny kitchenette; he became violently ill, and was taken from the apartment a few minutes before Richard Becker was led away.

The trial was a manifest sadness to all who had seen him onstage, and the jury did not even have to be sent out to agree on a verdict of insanity.

After all, whoever the fanatic was that the defense put on the stands, he was not sane, and was certainly no longer Richard Becker, the actor.

For Dr. Charles Tedrow, the patient in restraining room 16 was a constant involvement. He was unable to divorce himself from the memory of a night three years before, when he had sat in an orchestra seat at the Henry Miller Theatre and seen Richard Becker, light and adroit, as the comical Tosspot in that season’s hit comedy, Never A Rascal.

He was unable to separate his thoughts from the shape and form of the actor who had so immersed himself in The Method that for a time, in three acts, he was a blundering, maundering, larcenous alcoholic with a penchant for pomegranates and (as Becker had mouthed it onstage) “barratry on the low seas!”

Separate them from this weird and many-faceted creature that lived its many lives in the padded cell numbered 16?

Impossible.

At first, there had been reporters, who had come to interview the Good Doctor in charge of Becker’s case; and to the last of these (for Dr. Tedrow had instituted restrictions on this sort of publicity) he had said, “To a man like Richard Becker, the world was very important. He was very much a man of his times; he had no real personality of his own, with the exception of that one overwhelming faculty and need to reflect the world around him. He was an actor in the purest sense of the word. The world gave him his personality, his attitudes, his reason and his facade for existence. Take those away from him, clap him up in a padded cell--as we’ve been forced to do--and he begins to lose touch with reality.”

“I understand,” the reporter had inquired carefully, “that Becker is reliving his roles, one after another. Is that true, Dr. Tedrow?”

Charles Tedrow was, above all else, a compassionate man, and his fury at this remark, revealing as it did a leak in the sanitarium’s security policy, was manifest. “Richard Becker is undergoing what might be called, in psychiatric terms, ‘induced hallucinatory regression.’ In his search for some reality, there in that room, he has fastened onto the method of assuming characters’ moods he had played onstage. From what I’ve been able to piece together from reviews of his shows, he is going back from the most recent to the next and the next and so on.”

The reporter had asked more questions, more superficial and phantasmagoric assumptions, until Dr. Charles Tedrow had concluded the interview rudely.

But even now, as he sat across from Richard Becker in the quiet office, he knew that almost nothing the reporter had conceived, could rival what Becker had done to himself.

“Tell me, Doctor,” the florid, bombastic traveling salesman who was Richard Becker asked, “what the hell’s new down the line?”

“It’s really very quiet, these days, Ted,” the physician replied. Becker had been this way for two months now: submerged in the part of Ted Rogat, the loudmouth philandering protagonist of Chayefsky’s The Wanderer.

For six months before that he had been Marco Polo, and before that the nervous, slackjawed and incestuous son of The Glass of Sadness.

“Hell, I remember one little chippie in, where was it, oh yeah, hell yes! It was K.C. good old K.C. man, she was a goodie! You ever been to K.C., Doc? I was a drummer in nylons when I worked K.C. Jeezus, lemme tell ya--”

It was difficult to believe the man who sat on the other side of the table was an actor. He looked the part, he spoke the part, he was Ted Rogat, and Dr. Tedrow could catch himself from time to time contemplating the release of this total stranger who had wandered into Richard Becker’s cell. He sat and listened to the story of the flame-hipped harlot in Kansas City that Ted Rogat had picked up in an Armenian restaurant and seduced with promises of nylons. He listened to it, and knew that whatever else was true of Richard Becker, this creature of many faces and many lives, he was no saner than the day he had killed that girl.

After eighteen months in the sanitarium, he was going back, back, back through his acting career, and replaying the roles, but never once coming to grips with reality.

In the plight and disease of Richard Becker, Dr. Charles Tedrow saw a bit of himself, of all men of his times, and the thousand illnesses to which they were heir.

He returned Richard Becker, as well as Ted Rogat, to the security and tiny world of Room 16.

Two months later he brought him back, and spent a highly interesting three hours discussing group therapy with Herr Doktor Ernst Loebisch, credentials from the Munich Academy of Medicine and the Vienna Psychiatric Clinic. Four months after that, Dr. Tedrow got to know the surly and insipid Jackie Bishoff, juvenile delinquent and hero of Streets of Night.

And almost a year later, to the day, Dr. Tedrow sat in his office with a bum, a derelict, a rheumy-eyed and dissipated vagabond who could only be the skid from Sweet Miracles, Richard Becker’s first triumph, twenty-four years before.

What Richard Becker might look like, without camouflage, in his own shell, Tedrow had no idea. He was, now, to all intents and purposes, the seedy old tramp with the dirt caked into the sagged folds of his face.

“Mr. Becker, I want to talk to you.”

Hopelessness shined out of the old bum’s eyes. There was no answer.

“Listen to me, Becker. Please listen to me, if you’re in there somewhere, if you can hear me. I want you to understand what I’m about to say; it’s very important.”

A croak, cracked and forced, came from the bum’s lips, and he mumbled, “I need’a drink, yuh go’ uh drink fuh me, huh...”

Tedrow leaned across, his hand shaking as he took the old bum’s chin in his palm, and held it fixed, staring into this stranger’s eyes. “Now listen to me, Becker. You’ve got to hear me. I’ve gone through the files, and as far as I can tell, this was the first part you ever played. I don’t know what will happen! I don’t know what form this syndrome will take after you’ve used up all your other lives. But if you can hear me, you’ve got to understand that you may be approaching a critical period in your--in your life.”

The old bum licked cracked lips.

“Listen! I’m here, I want to help you, I want to do something for you, Becker. If you’ll come out for an instant, just a second, we can establish contact. It’s got to be now or--”

He left it hanging. He had no way of knowing if-what. And as he lapsed into silence, as he released the bum’s chin, a strange alteration of facial muscles began, and the derelict’s countenance shifted, subtly ran like hot lead, and for a second he saw a face he recognized. From the eyes that were no longer red-rimmed and bloodshot, Dr.

Charles Tedrow saw intelligence peering out.

“It sounds like fear, Doctor,” he said.

And, “Goodbye, once more.”

Then the light died, the face shifted finally, and the physician was again staring at the empty face of a gutter-bred derelict.

He sent the old man back to Room 16. Later that day, he had one of the male nurses take in an 89¢ bottle of muscatel.

Fear crackled across the telephone wires.

“Speak up, man! What in the name of God is going on out there?”

“I--I can’t explain it, Dr. Tedrow, but you better--you better get out here right away. It’s-it’s oh Jee-zus!”

“What is it? Stop crying, Wilson, and tell me what the hell is wrong!”

“It’s, it’s number sixteen...it’s...”

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes. Keep everyone away from that room. Do you understand? Wilson! Do you understand me?”

“Yessir, yessir. I’ll--oh Christ--hurry up Doc...”

He could feel his pajama pants bunched around his knees, under his slacks, as he floored the pedal of the ranch wagon. The midnight roads were jerky in the windshield, and the murk through which he raced was almost too ominous to be a fact of nature.

When he slewed the car into the drive, the gatekeeper threw the iron barrier back almost spastically. The ranch wagon chewed gravel, sending debris back in a wide fan, as Tedrow plunged ahead. When he screeched to a halt in front of the sanitarium, the doors burst open and the Senior Attendant, Wilson, raced down the steps.

“This way, th-this way, Doctor Te--”

“Get out of my way, you idiot, I know which direction!” He shoved Wilson aside, and strode up the steps and into the building.

“It started about an hour ago...we didn’t know what was happ--”

“And you didn’t call me immediately? Ass!”

“We just thought, we just thought it was another one of his stages, you know how he is...”

Tedrow snorted in disgust and threw off his topcoat as he made his way rapidly down the corridor to the section of the sanitarium that housed the restraining rooms. As they came into the annex, through the heavy glass-portaled door, he heard the scream for the first time.

In that scream, in that tormented, pleading, demanding and hopelessly lost tremor there were all the sounds of fear he had ever heard. In that voice he heard even his own voice, his own soul, crying out for something.

For an unnameable something, as the scream came again. “Give me some light!”

Another world, another voice, another life. Some evil and empty beseeching from a corner of a dust-strewn universe. Hanging there timelessly, vibrant in colorless agony. A million tired and blind stolen voices all wrapped into that one howl, all the eternal sadnesses and losses and pains ever known to man. It was all there, as the good in the world was sliced open and left to bleed its golden fluid away in the dirt. It was a lone animal being eaten by a bird of prey. It was a hundred children crushed beneath iron treads. It was one good man with his entrails in his blood-soaked hands. It was the soul and the pain and the very vital fiber of life, draining away, without light, without hope, without succor.

“Give me some light!”

Tedrow flung himself at the door, and threw back the bolt on the observation window. He stared for a long and silent moment as the scream trembled once more on the air, weightlessly, transparently, tingling off into emptiness. He stared, and felt the impact of a massive horror stifle his own cry of disbelief and terror.

Then he spun away from the window and hung there, sweat-drenched back flat to the wall, with the last sight of Richard Becker he would ever hope to see, burned forever behind his eyes. The sound of his soft sobs in the corridor held the others back. They stared silently, still hearing that neverspoken echo reverberating down and down and down the corridors of their minds: Give me some light!

Fumbling beside him, Tedrow slammed the observation window shut, and then his arm sank back to his side.

While inside Room 16, lying up against the far wall, his back against the soft passive padding, Richard Becker looked out at the door, at the corridor, at the world, forever. Looked out as he had come, purely and simply.

Without a face. From his hairline to his chin, a blank, empty, featureless expanse. Empty. Silent. Devoid of sight or smell or sound. Blank and faceless, a creature God had never deigned to bless with a mirror to the world. His Method now was gone.

Richard Becker, actor, had played his last part, and had gone away, taking with him Richard Becker, a man who had known all the sounds, all the sights, all the life of fear. What can I tell you? When I was a kid in Painseville, Ohio, and involved in the intricacies of Jack Armstrong, the Green Hornet, I Love A Mystery, Hop Harrigan and Dick Tracy, anything was possible. Under the side porch of our house, magic lands of adventure and intrigue made themselves known to me in the pages of comic books that chronicled the adventures of the Sandman, Captain America and Bucky, the Human Torch, the Boy Commandos, Captain Marvel, Starman, Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, the Flash and (my favorite), Hawkman. My Saturday afternoons of quivering joy were secretively spent in a theater whose name I have sadly forgotten that stood next to the Cleveland Trust, where Kresge’s 5 and 10 now looms. (In fact, one personally autographed letter of gratitude is waiting for whatever correspondent with an “A” or an “O,” and truthfully, it’s one of those bits of memory I’d hate to have slip away forever. Duplicate prizes will be awarded in case of a tie.) And in that tiny movie house I saw my first Dick Tracy serial, starring Ralph Byrd. I saw the Shadow with Victor Jory. I shivered at The Clutching Hand and cheered Don Winslow Of The Navy and hissed as The Crimson Skull doomed the hero to a room whose walls came inexorably together. It was a golden time, before TV, in which the imagination and the need to be young were coupled with a world of wonders. In my world, at the corner of Harmon Drive and Mentor Avenue, was a wonderful dark woods, just like the one in Gnomebody Did you ever feel your nose running and you wanted to wipe it, but you couldn’t? Most people do, sometime or other, but I’m different. I let it run.

They call me square. They say, “Smitty, you are a square. You are so square, you got corners!” This, they mean, indicates I am an oddball and had better shape up or ship out. So all right, so I’m a goof-off as far as they think. Maybe I do get a little sore at things that don’t matter, but if Underfeld hadn’t’a laid into me that day in the gym at school, nothing would have happened. The trouble is, I get aggravated so easy about little things, like not making the track team, that I’m no good at studies. This makes the teachers not care for me even a little. Besides, I won’t take their guff. But that thing with track. It broke me up really good. There I was standing in the gym, wearing these dirty white gym shorts with a black stripe down the side.

And old Underfeld, that’s the track coach, he comes up and says, “Whaddaya doin’, Smitty?”

Well, anyone with 20-40 eyesight coulda seen what I was doing. I was doing push-ups.

“I’m doing pushups,”

I said. “Whaddaya think I’m doing? Raising artichokes?”

That was most certainly not the time to wise off to old Underfeld. I could see the steam pressure rising in the jerk’s manner, and next thing he blows up allover the joint: “Listen, you little punk!

Don’t get so mouthy with me. In fact, I’m gonna tell you now, ‘cause I don’t want ya hangin’ around the gym or track no more: You just ain’t good enough. In a short sprint you got maybe a little guts, but when it comes to a long drag, fifty guys in this school give their right arms to be on the team beat you to the tape. I’m sorry. Get out!”

He is sorry. Like hell!

He is no more sorry than I am as I say, “Ta hell with you, you chowderhead, you got no more brains than these ignorant sprinters that will fall dead before they get to the tape.”

Underfeld looks at me like I had stuck him in the seat of his sweat pants with a fistful of pins and kind of gives a gasp. “What did you say?” he inquires, breathless like.

“I don’t mumble, do I?” I snapped.

“Get out of here! Get outta here! Geddouddahere!”

He was making quite a fuss as I kicked out the door to the dressing rooms. As I got dressed I gave the whole thing a good think. I was pretty sure that a couple of those stinkin’ teachers I had guffed had put wormhead Underfeld up to it. But what can a guy do? I’m just a kid, so says they. They got the cards stacked six ways from Culbertson, and that’s it. I was pretty damned sore as I kicked out the front door. I decided to head for The Woods and try to get it off my mind. That I was cutting school did not bother me. My mother, maybe. But me? No. It was The Woods for me for the rest of the afternoon.

Those Woods. Something funny about them. D’ja ever notice, sometimes right in the middle of a big populated section they got a little stand of woods, real deep and shadowy, you can’t see too far into them? You try to figure out why someone hasn’t bought up the plot and put a house on it, or why they haven’t made it into a playground? Well, that’s what my Woods were.

They faced back on a street full of those cracker-box houses constructed by the government, the factory workers shouldn’t sleep on the curbs. On the other side, completely boxing them in, was a highway, running straight through to the big town. It isn’t really big, but it makes the small town seem not so small.

I used to cut school and go there to read. In the center is a place where everything has that sort of filtery light that seeps down between the tree branches, where there’s a big old tree that is strictly one all alone.

What I mean is that tree is great. Big thing, stretches and’s lost in the branches of the other trees, it’s so big.

And the roots look like they were forced up out of the ground under pressure, so all’s you can see are these sweeping arcs of thick roots, all shiny and risen right out, forming a little bowl under the tree. Reason I like it so much there, is that it’s quieter than anything, and you can feel it. The kind of quiet a library would like to have, but doesn’t. To cap all this, the rift in the branches is just big enough so sunlight streams right through and makes a great reading light. And when the sun moves out of that rift, I know it’s time to run for home. I make it in just enough time so that Mom doesn’t know I was cutting, and thinks I was in school all day.

So last week--I’d been going to The Woods off, on for about two years--I tagged over there, after that creep Underfeld told me I was his last possible choice for the track team. I had a copy of something or other, I don’t remember now, I was going to read.

I settled down with my rump stuck into that bowl in the roots, and my feet propped against some smaller rootlings. With that little scrubby plant growth that springs up around the bases of trees, it was pretty comfortable, so I started reading.

Next, you are not going to believe.

I’m sitting there reading, and suddenly I feel this pressure against the seat of my jeans. Next thing I know, I am tumbled over on my head and a trapdoor is opening up out of the ground. Yeah, a trapdoor disguised as solid earth.

Next, you will really not believe.

Up out of this hole comes--may I be struck by green lightning if I’m a liar--a gnome! Or maybe he was a elf or a sprite, or some such thing. All I know is that this gnome character is wearing a pair of pegged charcoal slacks, a spread-collar turquoise shirt, green suede loafers, a pork-pie hat with a circumference of maybe three feet, a long, dinky keychain (what the Hell kinda keys could a gnome have?), repulsive loud tie and sunglasses.

Now maybe you would be too stoned to move, or not believe your eyes, and let a thing like that rock you permanently. But I got a good habit of believing what I see--especially when it’s in Technicolor--and besides, more out of reflex than anything else, I grabs.

I’d read some Grimm-type fairy tales, and I know the fable about how if you grab a gnome or a elf, he’ll give you what you want, so like I said, I grabs.

I snatch this little character, right around his turquoise collar.

“Hold, man!” says the gnome. “What kinda bit is this? I don’t dig this atall! Unhand me, Daddy-O!”

“No chance,” I answer, kind of in a daze, still not quite sure this is happening to me. “I want a bag of gold or something.”

The gnome looks outraged for a second, then he gives a kind of a half laugh and says, “Ho, Diz, you got the wrong cat for this caper. You’re comin’ on this gig too far and slow! Maybe a fourthyear gnome could hip this gold bit, but me, I’m a party-boy. Flunked outta my Alma Mammy first year. No matriculation--no magiculation! Readin’ me, laddy-buck?”

“Uh, yeah, I guess,” I ventured, slowly. “You mean you can’t give me a bag of gold like in the fairy tale?”

“Fairy tale, schmerry tale. Maybe one ersatz Korean peso, Max, but that is definitely it. That is where magic and I parts company. In short, nein, man.”

“Hmmm,” I hmmmed, tightening my grip a little, he shouldn’t get ideas I was letting him get away.

I thought a big think for a minute, then I said, “How come you flunked out of school?”

I thought I detected a note of belligerence in the gnome’s voice when he answered, “How would you dig this class stuff, man? Go to class today, go to class tomorrow, yattata-yattata-yat from all these squared-up old codgers what think they are professors? Man, there is so much more else to be doing of note! Real nervous-type stuff like playin’ with a jazz combo we got up near campus. You ain’t never heard such music!” He appeared to just be starting. “We got a guy on the sackbut what is the coolest. And on dulcimer there is a little troll what can not only send you--but bring you back. And on topa’ all this...”

I cut him short, “How about the usual three wishes business? Anything to that?”

“I can take a swing at it, man, but like I says, I’m nowhere when it comes to magicking. I’m not the most, if that’s the least. Might be a bit sloppy, but I can take a whirl, Earl.”

I thought again for a second and then nodded: ‘.Okay,” setting him down on the turf, but not yet letting loose his collar, “but no funny business. Just a straight commercial proposition. Three wishes, with no strings, for your freedom.”

“Three?” He was incredulous. “Man, one is about all this power pack can stand at this late date. No, it would seem that one is my limit, guy. Be taking it or leaving it.”

“All right, then, one. But no legal loopholes. Let’s do it all honest and above-board magic. Deal?”

“Reet!” says he, and races off into The Woods somewhere when I let loose. I figured he was gone for good, and while I’m waiting, I start to think back on the events of the last few minutes. This is something woulda made Ripley go outta business. The gnome, I figure, is overdue, and so I begin rationalizing why he didn’t come back and finally arrive at the conclusion that there is no honor among gnomes.