Is That What People Do?

FIVE MINUTES EARLY

Suddenly, John Greer found that he was at the entrance to heaven. Before him stretched the white and azure cloudlands of the hereafter, and in the far distance he could see a fabulous city gleaming gold under an eternal sun. Standing in front of him was the tall, benign presence of the Recording Angel. Strangely, Greer felt no sense of shock. He had always believed that heaven was for everyone, not just the members of one religion or sect. Despite this, he had been tortured all his life by doubts. Now he could only smile at his lack of faith in the divine scheme.

“Welcome to heaven,” the Recording Angel said, and opened a great brassbound ledger. Squinting through thick bifocals, the angel ran his finger down the dense rows of names. He found Greer’s entry and hesitated, his wingtips fluttering momentarily in agitation.

“Is something wrong?” Greer asked.

“I’m afraid so,” the Recording Angel said. “It seems that the Angel of Death came for you before your appointed time. He has been badly overworked of late, but it’s still inexcusable. Luckily, it’s quite a minor error.”

“Taking me away before my time?” Greer said. “I don’t consider that minor.”

“But you see, it’s only a matter of five minutes. Nothing to concern yourself over. Shall we just overlook the discrepancy and send you on to the Eternal City?”

The Recording Angel was right, no doubt. What difference could five more minutes on Earth make to him? Yet Greer felt they might be important, even though he couldn’t say why.

“I’d like those five minutes,” Greer said.

The Recording Angel looked at him with compassion. “You have the right, of course. But I would advise against it. Do you remember how you died?”

Greer thought, then shook his head. “How?” he asked.

“I am not allowed to say. But death is never pleasant. You’re here now. Why not stay with us?”

That was only reasonable. But Greer was nagged by a sense of something unfinished. “If it’s allowed,” he said, “I really would like to have those last minutes.”

“Go, then,” said the angel, “and I will wait for you here.”

And suddenly Greer was back on Earth. He was in a cylindrical metal room lit by dim, flickering lights. The air was stale and smelled of steam and machine oil. The steel walls were heaving and creaking, and water was pouring through the seams.

Then Greer remembered where he was. He was a gunnery officer aboard the U.S. submarine Invictus. There had been a sonar failure; they had just rammed an underwater cliff that should have been a mile away, and now were dropping helplessly through the black water. Already the Invictus was far below her maximum depth. It could only be a matter of minutes before the rapidly mounting pressure collapsed the ship’s hull. Greer knew it would happen in exactly five minutes.

There was no panic on the ship. The seamen braced themselves against the bulging walls, waiting, frightened, but in tight control of themselves. The technicians stayed at their posts, steadily reading the instruments that told them they had no chance at all. Greer knew that the Recording Angel had wanted to spare him this, the bitter end of life, the brief sharp agony of death in the icy dark.

And yet Greer was glad to be here, though he didn’t expect the Recording Angel to understand. How could a creature of heaven know the feelings of a man of Earth? After all, most men died in fear and ignorance, expecting at worst the tortures of hell, at best the nothingness of oblivion. Greer knew what lay ahead, knew that the Recording Angel awaited him at the entrance to heaven. Therefore he was able to spend his final minutes making a proper and dignified exit from the Earth. As the submarine’s walls collapsed, he was remembering a sunset over Key West, a quick dramatic summer storm on the Chesapeake, the slow circle of a hawk soaring above the Everglades. Although heaven lay ahead, now only seconds away, Greer was thinking of the beauties of the Earth, remembering as many of them as he could, like a man packing provisions for a long journey into a strange land.

MISS MOUSE AND THE FOURTH DIMENSION

I first met Charles Foster at the Claerston Award dinner at Leadbeater’s Hall in the Strand. It was my second night in London. I had come to England with the hope of signing some new authors for my list. I am Max Seidel, publisher of Manjusri Books. We are a small esoteric publishing company operating out of Linwood, New Jersey—just me and Miss Thompson, my assistant. My books sell well to the small but faithful portion of the population interested in spiritualism, out-of-body experiences, Atlantis, flying saucers, and New Age technology. Charles Foster was one of the men I had come to meet.

Pam Devore, our British sales representative, pointed Foster out to me. I saw a tall, good-looking man in his middle thirties, with a great mane of reddish blond hair, talking animatedly with two dowager types. Sitting beside him, listening intently, was a small woman in her late twenties with neat, plain features and fine chestnut hair.

“Is that his wife?” I asked.

Pam laughed. “Goodness, no! Charles is too fond of women to actually marry one. That’s Miss Mouse.”

“Is Mouse an English name?”

“It’s just Charles’s nickname for her. Actually, she’s not very mouselike at all. Marmoset might be more like it, or even wolverine. She’s Mimi Royce, a society photographer. She’s quite well off—the Royce textile mills in Lancashire, you know—and she adores Charles, poor thing.”

“He does seem to be an attractive man,” I said.

“I suppose so,” Pam said, “if you like the type.” She glanced at me to see how I was taking that, then laughed when she saw my expression.

“Yes, I am rather prejudiced,” she confessed. “Charles used to be rather interested in me until he found his own true love.”

“Who was—?”

“Himself, of course. Come, let me introduce you.”

Foster knew about Manjusri Books and was interested in publishing with us. He thought we might be a good showcase for his talents, especially since Paracelsus Press had done so poorly with his last, Journey Through the Eye of the Tiger. There was something open and boyish about Foster. He spoke in a high, clear English voice that conjured up in me a vision of punting on the Thames on a misty autumn day.

Charles was the sort of esoteric writer who goes out and has adventures and then writes them up in a portentous style. His search was for—well, what shall I call it? The Beyond? The Occult? The Interface? After twenty years in this business I still don’t know how to describe, in one simple phrase, the sort of book I publish. Charles Foster’s last book had dealt with three months he had spent with a Baluchistani Dervish in the desert of Kush under incredibly austere conditions. What had he gotten out of it? A direct though fleeting knowledge of the indivisible oneness of things, a sense of the mystery and the grandeur of existence… in short, the usual thing. And he had gotten a book out of it; and that, too, is the usual thing.

We set up a lunch for the next day. I rented a car and drove to Charles’s house in Oxfordshire. It was a beautiful old thatch-roofed building set in the middle of five acres of rolling countryside. It was called Sepoy Cottage, despite the fact that it had five bedrooms and three parlors. It didn’t actually belong to Charles, as he told me immediately. It belonged to Mimi Royce.

“But she lets me use it whenever I like,” he said. “Mouse is such a dear.” He smiled like a well-bred child talking about his favorite aunt. “She’s so interested in one’s little adventures, one’s trips along the interface between reality and the ineffable… Insists on typing up my manuscripts just for the pleasure it gives her to read them first.”

“That is lucky,” I said, “typing rates being what they are these days.”

Just then Mimi came in with tea. Foster regarded her with bland indifference. Either he was unaware of her obvious adoration of him, or he chose not to acknowledge it. Mimi, for her part, did not seem to mind. I assumed that I was seeing a display of the British National Style in affairs of the heart subdued, muffled, unobtrusive. She went away after serving us, and Charles and I talked auras and ley-lines for a while, then got down to the topic of real interest to us both—his next book.

“It’s going to be a bit unusual,” he told me, leaning back and templing his fingers.

“Another spiritual adventure?” I asked. “What will it be about?”

“Guess!” he said.

“Let’s see. Are you by any chance going to Machu Picchu to check out the recent reports of spaceship landings?”

He shook his head. “Elton Travis is already covering it for Mystic Revelations Press. No, my next adventure will take place right here in Sepoy Cottage.”

“Have you discovered a ghost or poltergeist here?”

“Nothing so mundane.”

“Then I really have no idea,” I told him.

“What I propose,” Foster said, “is to create an opening into the unknown right here in Sepoy Cottage, and to journey through it into the unimaginable. And then, of course, to write up what I’ve found there.”

“Indeed,” I said.

“Are you familiar with Von Helmholz’s work?”

“Was he the one who read tarot cards for Frederick the Great?”

“No, that was Manfred Von Helmholz. I am referring to Wilhelm, a famous mathematician and scientist in the nineteenth century. He maintained that it was theoretically possible to see directly into the fourth dimension.”

I turned the concept over in my mind. It didn’t do much for me.

“This ‘fourth dimension’ to which he refers,” Foster went on, “is synonymous with the spiritual or ethereal realm of the mystics. The name of the place changes with the times, but the region itself is unchanging.”

I nodded. Despite myself, I am a believer. That’s what brought me into this line of work. But I also know that illusion and self-deception are the rule in these matters rather than the exception.

“But this spirit realm, or fourth dimension,” Foster went on, “is also our everyday reality. Spirits surround us. They move through that strange realm which Von Helmholz called the fourth dimension. Normally they can’t be seen.”

It sounded to me as if Foster was extemporizing the first chapter of his book. Still, I didn’t interrupt. “Our eyes are blinded by everyday reality. But there are techniques by means of which we can train ourselves to see what else is there. Do you know about Hinton’s cubes? Hinton is mentioned by Martin Gardner in Mathematical Carnival. Charles Howard Hinton was an eccentric American mathematician who, around 1910, came up with a scheme for learning how to visualize a tesseract, also called a hypercube or four-dimensional square. His technique involved colored cubes that fit together to form a single master cube. Hinton felt that one could learn to see the separate colored cubes in the mind and then, mentally, to manipulate and rotate them, fold them into and out of the greater cube shape, and to do this faster and faster until at last a gestalt forms and the hypercube springs forth miraculously in your mind.”

He paused. “Hinton said that it was a hell of a lot of work. And later investigators, according to Gardner, have warned of psychic dangers even in attempting something like this.”

“It sounds like it could drive you crazy,” I said.

“Some of those investigators did wig,” he admitted cheerfully. “But that might have been from frustration. Hinton’s procedure demands an inhuman power of concentration. Only a master of yoga could be expected to possess that.”

“Such as yourself?”

“My dear fellow, I can barely remember what I’ve just read in the newspaper. Luckily, concentration is not the only path into the unknown. Fascination can more easily lead us to the mystic path. Hinton’s principle is sound, but it needs to be combined with Aquarian Age technology to make it work. That is what I have done.”

He led me into the next room. There, on a low table, was what I took at first to be a piece of modernistic sculpture. It had a base of cast iron. A central shaft came up through its middle, and on top of the shaft was a sphere about the size of a human head. Radiating in all directions from the sphere were lucite rods. At the end of each rod was a cube. The whole contraption looked like a cubist porcupine with blocks stuck to the end of its spines.

Then I saw that the blocks had images or signs painted on their faces. There were Sanskrit, Hebrew, and Arabic letters, Freemason and Egyptian symbols, Chinese ideograms, and other figures from many different lores. Now it looked like a bristling phalanx of mysticism, marching forth to do battle against common sense. And even though I’m in the business, it made me shudder.

“He didn’t know it, of course,” Foster said, “but what Hinton stumbled upon was the mandala principle. His cubes were the arts; put them all together in your mind and you create the Eternal, the Unchanging, the Solid Mandala, or four-dimensional space, depending upon which terminology you prefer. Hinton’s cubes were a three-dimensional exploded view of an ethereal object. This object refuses to come together in our everyday reality. It is the unicorn that flees from the view of man—”

“—but lays its head in the lap of a virgin,” I finished for him.

He shrugged it off. “Never mind the figures of speech, old boy. Mouse will unscramble my metaphors when she types up the manuscript. The point is, I can use Hinton’s brilliant discovery of the exploded mandala whose closure produces the ineffable object of endless fascination. I can journey down the endless spiral into the unknown. This is how the trip begins.”

He pushed a switch on the base of the contraption. The sphere began to revolve, the lucite arms turned, and the cubes on the ends of those arms turned too, creating an effect both hypnotic and disturbing. I was glad when Foster turned it off.

“My Mandala Machine!” he cried triumphantly. “What do you think?”

“I think you could get your head into a lot of trouble with that device,” I told him.

“No, no,” he said irritably. “I mean, what do you think of it as the subject for a book?”

No matter what else he was, Foster was a genuine writer. A genuine writer is a person who will descend voluntarily into the flaming pits of hell, as long as he’s allowed to record his impressions and send them back to Earth for publication. I thought about the book that would most likely result from Foster’s project. I estimated its audience at about one hundred fifty people, including friends and relatives. Nevertheless, I heard myself saying, “I’ll buy it.” That’s how I manage to stay a small and unsuccessful publisher, despite being so smart.

I returned to London shortly after that. Next day I drove to Glastonbury to spend a few days with Claude Upshank, owner of the Great White Brotherhood Press. We have been good friends, Claude and I, ever since we met ten years ago at a flying-saucer convention in Barcelona.

“I don’t like it,” Claude said, when I told him about Foster’s project. “The mandala principle is potentially dangerous. You can really get into trouble when you start setting up autonomous feedback loops in your brain like that.”

Claude had studied acupuncture and Rolfing at the Hardrada Institute in Malibu, so I figured he knew what he was talking about. Nevertheless, I thought that Charles had a lot of savvy in these matters and could take care of himself.

When I telephoned Foster two days later, he told me that the project was going very well. He had added several refinements to the Mandala Machine: “Sound effects, for one. I’m using a special tape of Tibetan horns and gongs. The overtones, sufficiently amplified, can send you into instant trance.” And he had also bought a strobe light to flash into his eyes at six to ten beats a second: “The epileptic rate, you know. It’s ideal for loosening up your head.” He claimed that all of this deepened his state of trance and increased the clarity of the revolving cubes. “I’m very near to success now, you know.”

I thought he sounded tired and close to hysteria. I begged him to take a rest.

“Nonsense,” he said. “Show must go on, eh?”

A day later, Foster reported that he was right on the brink of the final breakthrough. His voice wavered, and I could hear him panting and wheezing between words. “I’ll admit it’s been more difficult than I had expected. But now I’m being assisted by a certain substance that I had the foresight to bring with me. I am not supposed to mention it over the telephone in view of the law of the land and the ever-present possibility of snoops on the line, so I’ll just remind you of Arthur Machen’s Novel of the White Powder and let you work out the rest for yourself. Call me tomorrow. The fourth dimension is finally coming together.”

The next day Mimi answered the telephone and said that Foster was refusing to take any calls. She reported him as saying that he was right on the verge of success and could not be interrupted. He asked his friends to be patient with him during this difficult period.

The next day it was the same, Mimi answering, Foster refusing to speak to us. That night I conferred with Claude and Pam.

We were in Pam’s smart Chelsea apartment. We sat together in the bay window, drinking tea and watching the traffic pour down the King’s Road into Sloane Square. Claude asked, “Does Foster have any family?”

“None in England,” Pam said. “His mother and brother are on holiday in Bali.”

“Any close friends?”

“Mouse, of course,” Pam said.

We looked at each other. An odd presentiment had come to us simultaneously, a feeling that something was terribly wrong.

“But this is ridiculous,” I said. “Mimi absolutely adores him, and she’s a very competent woman. What could there be to worry about?”

“Let’s call once more,” Claude said.

We tried, and were told that Mimi’s telephone was out of order. We decided to go to Sepoy Cottage at once.

Claude drove us out in his old Morgan. Mimi met us at the door. She looked thoroughly exhausted, yet there was a serenity about her that I found just a little uncanny.

“I’m so glad you’ve come,” she said, leading us inside. “You have no idea how frightening it’s all been. Charles came close to losing his mind in these last days.”

“But why didn’t you tell us?” I demanded.

“Charles implored me not to. He told me—and I believed him—that he and I had to see this thing through together. He thought it would be dangerous to his sanity to bring in anyone else at this point.”

Claude made a noise that sounded like a snort. “Well, what happened?”

“It all went very well at first,” Mimi said. “Charles began to spend increasingly longer periods in front of the machine, and he came to enjoy the experience. Soon I could get him away only to eat, and grudgingly at that. Then he gave up food altogether. After a while he no longer needed the machine. He could see the cubes and their faces in his head, could move them around at any speed he wanted, bring them together or spread them apart. The final creation, however, the coming together of the hypercube, was still eluding him. He went back to the machine, running it now at its highest speed.”

Mimi sighed. “Of course, he pushed himself too hard. This time, when he turned off the machine, the mandala continued to grow and mutate in his head. Each cube had taken on hallucinatory solidity. He said the symbols gave off a hellish light that hurt his eyes. He couldn’t stop those cubes from flashing through his mind. He felt that he was being suffocated in a mass of alien signs. He grew agitated, swinging quickly between elation and despair. It was during one of his elated swings that he ripped out the telephone.”

“You should have sent for us!” Claude said.

“There was simply no time. Charles knew what was happening to him. He said we had to set up a counter-conditioning program immediately. It involved changing the symbols on the cube faces. The idea was to break up the obsessive image-trains through the altered sequence. I set it up, but it didn’t seem to work for Charles. He was fading away before my eyes, occasionally rousing himself to murmur, ‘The horror, the horror…’“

“Bloody hell!” Claude exploded. “And then?”

“I felt that I had to act immediately. Charles’s system of counter-conditioning had failed. I decided that he needed a different sort of symbol to look at—something simple and direct, something reassuring—”

Just then Charles came slowly down the stairs. He had lost a lot of weight since I saw him last, and his face was haggard. He looked thin, happy, and not quite sane.

“I was just napping,” he said. “I’ve got rather a lot of sleep to catch up on. Did Mouse tell you how she saved what little is left of my sanity?” He put his arm around her shoulders. “She’s marvelous, isn’t she? And to think that I only realized yesterday that I loved her. We’re getting married next week, and you’re all invited.”

Mimi said, “I thought we were flying down to Monte Carlo and getting married in the city hall.”

“Why, so we are.” Charles looked bewildered for a moment. He touched his head with the unconscious pathos of the wounded soldier in the movie who hasn’t yet realized that half his head is blown away. “The old think-piece hasn’t quite recovered yet from the beating I gave it with those wretched cubes. If Mimi hadn’t been here, I don’t know what would have happened to me.”

They beamed at us, the instant happy couple produced by Hinton’s devilish cubes. The transformation of Charles’s feelings toward Mimi—from fond indifference to blind infatuation—struck me as bizarre and dreamlike. They were Svengali and Trilby with the sexes reversed, a case of witchcraft rather than of love’s magic.

“It’s going to be all right now, Charles,” Mimi said.

“Yes, love, I know it is.” Charles smiled, but the animation had gone out of his face. He lifted his hand to his head again, and his knees began to sag. Mimi, her arm around his waist, half supported and half dragged him to the stairs.

“I’ll just get him up to bed,” she said.

Claude, Pam, and I stood in the middle of the room, looking at each other. Then, with a single accord, we turned and went into the parlor where the Mandala Machine was kept.

We approached it with awe, for it was a modern version of ancient witchcraft. I could imagine Charles sitting in front of the thing, its arms revolving, the cubes turning and flashing, setting up a single ineradicable image in his mind. The ancient Hebrew, Chinese, and Egyptian letters were gone. All the faces of all the cubes now bore a single symbol—direct and reassuring, just as Mimi had said, but hardly simple. There were twenty cubes, with six faces to a cube, and pasted to each surface was a photograph of Mimi Royce.

THE SKAG CASTLE

THE HELPING HAND

Travis had been fired from his job that morning. Boring and low-paying though it had been, it had given him something to live for. Now he had nothing at all, and in his hand he held the means of cutting short a futile and humiliating existence. The bottle contained pellis annabula, a quick, sure, and painless poison. He had stolen it from his former employer, Carlyle Industrial Chemicals. PA was a catalyst used to fix hydrocarbons. Travis was going to fix himself with it, once and for all.

His few remaining friends thought Travis was a neurotic attention-seeker because of his previous suicide attempts. Well, he would show them this time, and they’d be sorry. Perhaps even his wife would shed a tear or two.

The thought of his wife steeled Travis’s resolution. Leota’s love had changed into an indifferent tolerance, and finally into hate—the sharp, domineering, acidic sort against which he was helpless. And the damnable thing was that he still loved her.

Do it now, he thought. He closed his eyes and raised the bottle.

Before he could drink, the bottle was knocked out of his hand. He heard Leota’s sharp voice: “What do you think you’re doing?”

“It should be obvious,” Travis said.

She studied his face with interest. Leota was a large, hard-faced woman with a gift for never-ending beastliness. But now her face had softened.

“You were really going to do it this time, weren’t you?”

“I’m still going to,” Travis said. “Tomorrow or next week will do as well.”

“I never believed you had it in you,” she said. “Some of our friends thought you had guts, but I never did. Well, I guess I’ve really put you through hell all these years. But someone had to run things.”

“You stopped caring for me a long time ago,” Travis said. “Why did you stop me now?”

Leota didn’t answer immediately. Could she be having a change of heart? Travis had never seen her like this before.

“I’ve misjudged you,” she said at last. “I always figured you were bluffing, just to annoy me. Remember when you threatened to jump from the window? You leaned out—like this.”

Leota leaned from the window, her body poised over the street twenty stories below. “Don’t do that!” Travis said sharply.

She moved back in, smiling. “That’s funny, coming from you. Don’t tell me you still care?”

“I could,” Travis said. “I know I could—if only you and I—”

“Perhaps,” Leota said, and Travis felt a flash of hope, though he barely dared acknowledge it. Women were so strange! There she was, smiling. She put her hands firmly on his shoulders, saying, “I couldn’t let you kill yourself. You have no idea how strongly I feel about you.”

Travis found it impossible to answer. He was moved. His wife’s strong, caring hands on his shoulders had moved him inexpressibly—straight through the open window.

As his fingers missed the sill and he fell toward the street, Travis heard his wife calling, “I feel enough, darling, to want this done my way.”

THE LAST DAYS OF (PARALLEL?) EARTH

When the end of the world was announced, Rachel and I decided not to break up after all. “What would be the sense?” she asked me. “We will have no time to form other relationships.” I nodded, but I was not convinced. I was worried about what would happen if the world did not end, if the great event were delayed, postponed, held over indefinitely. There might have been a miscalculation concerning the effect of the Z-field, the scientists might have been wrong about the meaning of the Saperstein Conjunction, and there we would be, Rachel and I, with our eternal complaints, and our children with their eternal complaints, bound together by apocalyptic conjunction stronger than our marriage vows, for eternity or until Armageddon, whichever came first. I put this to Rachel in what I hoped was a nice way, and she said to me, “Don’t worry, if the world does not end on schedule as predicted by eminent scientists, you will return to your dismal furnished apartment and I will stay here with the children and my lover.”

That was reassuring, and of course, I didn’t want to spend the end of the world by myself in the dismal furnished apartment I shared with the Japanese girl and her English boyfriend and no television. There would be nothing to do there but listen to the Japanese girl talk to her friends on the telephone and eat in the Chinese restaurant, which had promised to stay open throughout the end of the world or as long as physically possible, since the owner did not believe in making changes hastily.

Rachel said, “I don’t want to face anything like this straight,” so she brought out her entire stash, the Thai sticks, the speckled brown cocaine, the acid in the form of tiny red stars, the gnarled mushrooms from God knows where, the red Lebanese and the green Moroccan, yes, and the last few treasured Quaaludes, and a few Mogadon for good measure. She said, “Let’s pool our mind-blowing resources and go out before we come down.”

Other people had made their own preparations. The airlines were running end-of-the-world specials to Ultima Thule, Valparaiso, Kuala Lumpur: kinky trips for demising people. The networks were making a lot of the event, of course. Some of our favorite programs were cut, replaced by End of the World Specials. We tuned into “The Last Talkathon” on CBS: “Well, it sure looks like the kite is going up at last. I have a guest here, Professor Mandrax from UCLA, who is going to explain to us just how the big snuff is going to come about.”

Whatever channel you turned to, there were physicists, mathematicians, biologists, chemists, linguistic philosophers, and commentators to try to explain what they were explaining. Professor Johnson, the eminent cosmologist, said, “Well, of course, it’s not exactly a cosmological event, except metaphorically, in its effect upon us. We humans, in our parochial way, consider these things to be very important. But I can assure you that in the scale of magnitude I work on, this event is of no significance, is banal, in fact; our little O-type sun entering the Z-field just at the time of the Saperstein Conjunction, with the ensuing disarrangement of local conditions. I am imprecise on purpose, of course, since Indeterminacy renders exactitude a nineteenth-century hangup. But Professor Weaver of the Philosophy Department might have more to say about that.”

“Well, yes,” Professor Weaver said, “‘end of the world’ is a somewhat loose expression. What we are faced with is a viewpoint problem. We could say that, from some other point of observation, if such exists, this ending is the end of nothing at all. Just one moment of pain, my dear, and then eternal life, to quote the poet.”

On another channel we heard that the army was issuing turkey dinners to all our servicemen in Germany. There had been some talk of flying them home, but we decided to keep them in position in case it was not the end of the world after all, but instead some devious communistic scheme of the sort we know the Russians are capable of, with their twisted sense of humor and their implacable will to give everyone a hard time. And we heard that the Chinese hadn’t even announced the fact, or so-called fact, to their population at large, except obliquely, in the form of posters no larger than postage stamps, signed by “A Concerned Neighbor from Neighborhood C.”

And Rachel couldn’t understand why Edward, her lover, insisted upon staying in his room and working on his novel. “It’s not apropos any longer,” she told him. “There’s not going to be anyone around to publish it or read it.”

“What has that got to do with it?” Edward asked, and winked at me.

I understood perfectly, was in fact working like a berserker to finish my own account of the last day, yes, and with great pleasure, for the end of the world presents a writer with the greatest deadline of them all, the ultimate deadline: twelve o’clock midnight tonight and that’s all she wrote, folks. What a challenge! I knew that artists all over the world were responding to it, that an end-of-the-world oeuvre was being created that might be of interest to historians in a world parallel to our own in which this catastrophe did not take place.

“Well, yes,” Professor Carpenter said, “the concept of parallel universes is, I would say, licit but unprovable, at least in the time we have left. I myself would consider it a wish-fulfillment fantasy, though my good friend Professor Mung, the eminent psychologist, is more competent to speak of that than I.”

Rachel made her famous turkey dinner that night, with the stuffing and the cranberry sauce and the sweet-potato pie with meringue topping, and she even made her special Chinese spareribs as an extra treat, even though the Chinese refused to believe in the event except in postage-stamp-size posters of oriental foreboding. And everyone in the world began smoking cigarettes again, except for the irreducible few who did not believe in the end of the world and were therefore still scared of lung cancer. And people on their deathbeds struggled to stay alive a little longer, just a little longer, so that when I go, the whole damn thing goes. And some doctors stayed on call, declaring it their ludicrous duty, while others compulsively played golf and tennis and tried to forget about improving their strokes.

The turkey with four drumsticks and eight wings. Lewd displays on television: since all is over, all is allowed. The compulsive answering of business letters: Dear Joe, take your contract and stick it up your giggie the show is over and I can finally tell you what a crap artist you are, but if there is any mistake about the End I want you to know that this letter is meant as a joke which I’m sure that you as the very special person you are can appreciate.

All of us were caught between the irreconcilable demands of abandonment and caution. What if we are not to die? Even belief in the end of the world required an act of faith on the part of dishwashers as well as university professors.

And that last night of creation I gave up cigarettes forever. An absurdity. What difference did it make? I did it because Rachel had always told me that absurdities made a difference, and I had always known that, so I threw away my pack of Marlboros and listened while Professor Mung said, “Wish fulfillment, or its obverse, death-wish fulfillment, cannot licitly be generalized into an objective correlative, to use Eliot’s term. But if we take Jung into our synthesis, and consider this ending as an archetype, not to say Weltanschauung, our understanding increases as our tiempo para gastarlo disappears into the black hole of the past which contains all our hopes and endeavors.”

The final hour came at last. I carved the turkey and Edward came out of his room long enough to take a plateful of breast and ask for my comments on his final rewrite of his last chapter, and I said, “It still needs work,” and Rachel said, “That’s cruel,” and Edward said, “Yes, I thought it needed something myself,” and went back to his room. Outside, the streets were deserted except for the unfortunate few who couldn’t get to a television set, and we did up most of the remaining drugs and switched wildly between channels. I had brought my typewriter into the kitchen and I was getting it all down, and Rachel talked of the holidays we should have taken, and I thought about the women I should have loved, and at five to twelve Edward came out of his room again and showed me the rewritten last chapter, and I said, “You’ve got it this time,” and he said, “I thought so, is there any more coke left?” And we did up the rest of the drugs and Rachel said to me, “For Chrissakes, can’t you stop typing?” And I said, “I have to get it all down,” and she hugged me, and Edward hugged me, and the three of us hugged the children, whom we had allowed to stay up late because it was the end of the world, and I said, “Rachel, I’m sorry about everything,” and she said, “I’m sorry too,” and Edward said, “I don’t think I did anything wrong, but I’m sorry too.” “Sorry about what?” the children asked, but before we had a chance to tell them, before we could even decide what we were sorry about…

THE FUTURE LOST

Leonard Nisher was found in front of the Plaza Hotel in a state of agitation so extreme that it took the efforts of three policemen and a passing tourist from Biloxi, Mississippi, to subdue him. Taken to St. Clare’s Hospital, he had to be put into a wet pack—a wet sheet wound around the patient’s arms and upper body. This immobilized him long enough for an intern to get a shot of Valium into him.

The injection had taken effect by the time Dr. Miles saw him. Miles told two husky aides, one of them a former guard for the Detroit Lions, and a psychiatric nurse named Norma to wait outside. The patient wasn’t going to assault anyone just now. He was throttled way back, riding the crest of a Valium wave where there’s nothing to hassle and even a wet pack can have its friendly aspects.

“Well, Mr. Nisher, how do you feel now?” Miles asked.

“I’m fine, doc,” Nisher said. “Sorry I caused that trouble when I came out of the space-time anomaly and landed in front of the Plaza.”

“It could affect anyone that way,” Miles said reassuringly.

“I guess it sounds pretty crazy,” Nisher said. “There’s no way I can prove it, but I have just been into the future and back again.”

“Is the future nice?” Miles asked.

“The future,” Nisher said, “is a pussycat. And what happened to me there—well, you’re not going to believe it.”

The patient, a medium-sized white male of about thirty-five, wearing an off-white wet pack and a broad smile, proceeded to tell the following story.

Yesterday he had left his job at Hanratty & Smirch, Accountants, at the usual time and gone to his apartment on East Twenty-fifth Street. He was just putting the key in the lock when he heard something behind him. Nisher immediately thought mugger, and whirled around in the cockroach posture that was the basic defense mode in the Taiwanese karate he was studying. There was no one there. Instead there was a sort of red, shimmering mist. It floated toward Nisher and surrounded him. Nisher heard weird noises and saw flashing lights before he blacked out.

When he regained consciousness, someone was saying to him, “Don’t worry, it’s all right.” Nisher opened his eyes and saw that he was no longer on Twenty-fifth Street. He was sitting on a bench in a beautiful little park with trees and ponds and promenades and strangely shaped statues and tame deer, and there were people strolling around, wearing what looked like Grecian tunics. Sitting beside him on the bench was a kindly, white-haired old man dressed like Charlton Heston playing Moses.

“What is this?” Nisher asked. “What’s happened?”

“Tell me,” the old man said, “did you happen to run into a reddish cloud recently? Aha! I thought so! That was a local space-time anomaly, and it has carried you away from your own time and into the future.”

“The future?” Nisher said. “The future what?”

“Just the future,” the old man said. “We’re about four hundred years ahead of you, give or take a few years.”

“You’re putting me on,” Nisher said. He asked the old man in various ways where he really was, and the old man replied that he really was in the future, and it was not only true, it wasn’t even unusual, though of course it wasn’t the sort of thing that happens every day. At last Nisher had to accept it.

“Well, okay,” he said. “What sort of future is this?”

“A very nice one,” the old man assured him.

“No alien creatures have taken us over?”

“Certainly not.”

“Has lack of fossil fuels reduced our standard of living to a bare subsistence level?”

“We solved the energy crisis a few hundred years ago when we discovered an inexpensive way of converting sand into shale.”

“What are your major problems?”

“We don’t seem to have any.”

“So this is Utopia?”

The old man smiled. “You must judge for yourself. Perhaps you would like to look around during your brief stay here.”

“Why brief?”

“These space-time anomalies are self-regulating,” the old man said. “The universe won’t tolerate for long your being here when you ought to be there. But it usually takes a little while for the universe to catch up. Shall we go for a stroll? My name is Ogun.”

They left the park and walked down a pleasant, tree-lined boulevard. The buildings were strange to Nisher’s eye and seemed to contain too many strange angles and discordant colors. They were set back from the street and bordered with well-kept green lawns. It looked to Nisher like a really nice future. Nothing exotic, but nice. And there were people walking around in their Grecian tunics, and they all looked happy and well fed. It was like a Sunday in Central Park.

Then Nisher noticed one couple who had gone beyond the talking stage. They had taken their clothes off. They were, to use a twentieth-century expression, making it.

No one seemed to think this was unusual. Ogun didn’t comment on it; so Nisher didn’t say anything, either. But he couldn’t help noticing, as they walked along, that other people were making it, too. Quite a few people. After passing the seventh couple so engaged, Nisher asked Ogun whether this was some sexual holiday or whether they had stumbled onto a fornicator’s convention.

“It’s nothing special,” Ogun said.

“But why don’t these people do it in their homes or in hotel rooms?”

“Probably because most of them happened to meet here in the street.”

That shook Nisher. “Do you mean that these couples never knew each other before?”

“Apparently not,” Ogun said. “If they had, I suppose they would have arranged for a more comfortable place in which to make love.”

Nisher just stood there and stared. He knew it was rude, but he couldn’t help it. Nobody seemed to mind. He observed how people looked at each other as they walked along, and every once in a while somebody would smile at someone, and someone else would smile back, and they would sort of hesitate for a moment, and then…

Nisher tried to ask about twenty questions at the same time. Ogun interrupted. “Let me try to explain, since you have so little time among us. You come from an age of sexual repression and rebelliousness. To you this must appear a spectacle of unbridled license. For us it is no more than a normal expression of affection and solidarity.”

“So you’ve solved the problem of sex!” Nisher said.

“More or less by accident,” Ogun told him. “We were really trying to abolish war before it obliterated us. But to get rid of war, we had to change the psychological base upon which it rests. Repressed sexuality was found to be the greatest single factor. Once this was recognized and the information widely disseminated, a universal plebiscite was held. It was agreed that human sexual mores were to be modified and reprogrammed for the good of the entire human race. Biological engineering and special clinics—all on a voluntary basis, of course—took care of that. Divorced from aggression and possessiveness, sex today is a mixture of aesthetics and sociability.”

Nisher was about to ask Ogun how that affected marriage and the family when he noticed that Ogun was smiling at an attractive blonde and edging over in her direction. “Hey, Ogun!” Nisher said. “Don’t leave me now!”

The old man looked surprised. “My dear fellow, I wasn’t going to exclude you. Quite the contrary, I want to include you. We all do.”

Nisher saw that a lot of people had stopped. They were looking at him, smiling.

“Now wait a minute,” he said, automatically taking up the cockroach posture.

But by then a woman had hold of his leg, and another was snuggling up under his armpit, and somebody else was pinching his Fingers. Nisher got a little hysterical and shouted at Ogun, “Why are they doing this?”

“It is a spontaneous demonstration of our great pleasure at the novelty and poignancy of your presence. It happens whenever a man from the past appears among us. We feel so sorry for him and what he has to go back to, we want to share with him, share all the love we have. And so this happens.”

Nisher felt as though he were in the middle of a Cinemascope mob scene set in ancient Rome, or maybe Babylon. The street was crowded with people as far as the eye could see, and they were all making it with one another and on top of one another and around and under and over and in between. But what really got to Nisher was the feeling that the crowd gave off. It went completely beyond sex. It felt like a pure ocean of love, compassion, and understanding. He saw Ogun’s face receding in a wave of bodies and called out, “How far does this thing go?”

“Visitors from the past always send out big vibrations,” Ogun shouted back. “This will probably go all the way.”

All the way? Nisher couldn’t figure out what he was talking about. Then he got it and said, almost reverently, “Do you mean—planet-wide?”

Ogun grinned, then he was gone. Nisher saw the way it had to be—this group of people loving one another and pulling more and more people into it as the vibes got stronger and stronger until everybody in the world was in on it. To Nisher this was definitely Utopia. He knew he had to figure out some way of bringing this message back to his own time, some way to convince people. Then he looked up and saw that he was on Central Park South, in front of the Plaza.

“I suppose the transition was just too much for you?” Miles asked.

Nisher smiled. His eyelids were drooping. The Valium rush was passing, and he was coming down fast.

“I guess I just freaked out,” Nisher said. “I thought I could explain it to everyone. I thought I could just grab people and make them give up their hangups, that I could show them how their bodies were shaped for love. But I went at it too hysterically, of course; I scared them. And then the cops grabbed me.”

“How do you feel now?” Miles asked.

“I’m tired and disappointed, and I’ve come back to my senses, if that’s what you want to call it. Maybe it was all an hallucination. That doesn’t matter. What counts is that I’m back and in my own day and age, when we still have wars and energy crises and sexual hangups, and nothing I can do will change that.”

“You seem to have made a very rapid adjustment,” Miles said.

“Hell, yes. No one ever accused Leonard Nisher of being a slow adjuster.”

“You sound good to me,” Miles said. “But I would like you to stay here for a few days. This is not a punishment, you understand. It is genuinely meant as an assistance to you.”

“Okay, doc,” Nisher said drowsily. “How long must I stay?”

“Perhaps no more than a day or two. I’ll release you as soon as I’m satisfied with your condition.”

“Fair enough,” Nisher mumbled. And then he fell asleep. Miles told the orderlies to stand by, and alerted the psychiatric nurse. Then he went to his nearby apartment to get some rest.

Nisher’s story haunted Miles as he broiled a steak for his lunch. It couldn’t be true, of course. But suppose, just suppose, it had actually happened. What if the future had achieved a state of polymorphous-perverse sexuality? There was, after all, a fair amount of evidence that space-time anomalies did exist.

Abruptly he decided to visit his patient again. He left his apartment and went back to the hospital, hurrying now, impelled by a strange sense of urgency.

There was no one at the reception desk on Wing Two. The policeman normally stationed in the corridor was missing. Miles ran down the hall. Leonard’s door was open, and Miles peered in.

Someone had folded Leonard’s cot and leaned it against the wall. That left just enough room on the floor for two aides (one a former guard for the Detroit Lions), a psychiatric nurse named Norma, two student nurses, a policeman, and a middle-aged woman from Denver who had been visiting a relative.

“Where is Leonard?” cried Miles.

“That guy musta hypnotized me,” the policeman said, struggling into his trousers.

“He preached a message of love,” said the woman from Denver, wrapping herself in Leonard’s wet pack.

“Where is he?” Miles shouted.

White curtains flapped at the open window. Miles stared out into the darkness. Nisher had escaped. His mind inflamed by his brief vision of the future, he was sure to be preaching his message of love up and down the country. He could be anywhere, Miles thought. How on earth can I find him? How can I join him?

WILD TALENTS, INC.

Glancing at his watch, Waverley saw that he still had ten minutes before the reporters were due. “Now then,” he said in his best interviewing voice, “what can I do for you, sir?”

The man on the other side of the desk looked startled for a moment, as though unaccustomed to being addressed as sir. Then he grinned, suddenly and startlingly.

“This is the place, isn’t it?” he asked. “The place of refuge?”

Waverley looked intently at the thin, bright-eyed man. “This is Wild Talents, Incorporated,” he said. “We’re interested in any supernormal powers.”

“I knew that,” the man said, nodding vigorously. “That’s why I escaped. I know you’ll save me from them.” He glanced fearfully over his shoulder.

“We’ll see,” Waverley said diplomatically, settling back in his chair. His young organization seemed to hold an irresistible fascination for the lunatic fringe. As soon as he had announced his interest in psi functions and the like, an unending stream of psychotics and quacks had beaten a path to his door.

But Waverley didn’t bar even the obvious ones. Ridiculously enough, you sometimes found a genuine psi among the riffraff, a diamond in the rubbish. So—

“What do you do, Mr.—”

“Eskin, Sidney Eskin,” the man said. “I’m a scientist, sir.” He drew his ragged jacket together, assuming an absurd dignity. “I observe people, I watch them, and note down what they are doing, all in strict accordance with the best scientific methods and procedure.”

“I see,” Waverley said. “You say you escaped?”

“From the Blackstone Sanitarium, sir. Frightened by my investigations, secret enemies had me locked up. But I escaped, and have come to you for aid and sanctuary.”

Tentatively, Waverley classified the man as paranoidal. He wondered whether Eskin would become violent if he tried to call Blackstone.

“You say you observe people,” Waverley said mildly. “That doesn’t sound supernormal—”

“Let me show you,” the man said, with a sudden show of panic. He stared intently at Waverley. “Your secretary is in the reception room, seated at her desk. She is, at the moment, powdering her nose. She is doing it very delicately, applying the strokes with a circular motion. Now she is reaching forward, the powder box in her hand—ah! She has inadvertently spilled it against the typewriter. She says ‘Damn!’ under her breath. Now she—”

“Hold it,” Waverley said. He hurried over and opened the door to the reception room.

Doris Fleet, his secretary, was mopping up spilled powder. Some of it had dusted her black hair a creamy white, giving her the appearance of a kitten that had rolled in flour.

“I’m sorry, Sam,” she said.

“On the contrary,” Waverley said, “I’m grateful.” He didn’t bother to explain, but closed the door and hurried back to Eskin.

“You will protect me?” Eskin asked, leaning over the desk. “You won’t let them take me back?”

“Can you observe like that all the time?” Waverley asked.

“Of course!”

“Then don’t worry about a thing,” Waverley said calmly, but with a pulse of excitement rising within him. Lunatic or not, Eskin wasn’t going to waste his talents in any sanitarium. Not if Waverley had anything to do about it.

The intercom on his desk buzzed. He flipped the switch, and Doris Fleet said, “The reporters are here, Mr. Waverley.” “Hold them a moment,” Waverley said, smiling to himself at her “official” tone of voice. He ushered Eskin to a little room adjoining his office. “Stay here,” he told him. “Don’t make any noise, and don’t worry.”

He closed the door, locked it, and told Doris to let the reporters in.

There were seven of them, pads out, and Waverley thought he could detect a certain grudging respect in their faces. Wild Talents, Inc. wasn’t back-page filler anymore. Not since Billy Walker, Waverley’s star psi, had aided the flight of the Venture to Mars with a terrific telekinetic boost. Since then, Wild Talents had been front-page news.

Waverley had played it for all it was worth, holding back until he felt the maximum point of interest had been reached.

This was the point. Waverley waited until they were all quiet.

“Wild Talents, Incorporated, gentlemen,” he told them, “is an attempt to find the occasional person among the general population who has what we call psi powers.”

“What is a psi power?” a lanky reporter asked.

“It is difficult to define,” Waverley said, smiling with what he hoped was perfect candor. “Let me put it to you this way—”

“Sam!” He heard Doris Fleet’s voice in his head as clearly as though she were standing beside him. Although she might not be the best of secretaries, Doris was a telepath. Her ability worked only about twenty percent of the time, but that twenty percent sometimes came in useful.

“Sam, two of the men in your office. They’re not reporters.”

“What are they?” he thought back.

“I don’t know,” Doris told him. “But I think they might mean trouble.”

“Can you get a line on what sort of trouble?”

“No. They’re the ones in the dark suits. They’re thinking—” Her thought died out.

Telepathy is lightning-fast. The entire exchange had taken perhaps a second. Waverley spotted the two men, sitting a little apart from the rest, and taking no notes. He went on.

“A psi, gentlemen, is a person with some form of mental control or development, the true nature of which we can only guess at. Today, most psis are to be found in circuses and sideshows. They lead, for the most part, unhappy, neurotic lives. My organization is trying to find the work that their special talents equip them for. Next we hope to discover why and how it works, and what makes it so erratic. We want—”

He continued, laying it on thick. Public acceptance was a big factor in his work, a factor he had to have on his side. The public, stimulated by atomic power and enormously excited by the recent flights to the moon and Mars, was prepared to accept the idea of psi, if it could be made sufficiently understandable for them.

So he painted the picture in rosy colors, skipping over most of the stumbling blocks. He showed the psi, capable of dealing with his environment on a direct mental level; the psi, not a deviation or freak, but mankind fully realized.

He almost had tears in his eyes by the time he was through.

“To sum up,” he told them, “our hope is that, someday, everyone will be capable of psi powers.”

After a barrage of questions, the conference broke up. The two men in dark suits remained.

“Was there some further information you wanted?” Waverley asked politely. “I have some brochures—”

“Have you got a man named Eskin here?” one of the men asked.

“Why?” Waverley countered.

“Have you?”

“Why?”

“All right, we’ll play it that way,” one of the men sighed. They showed their credentials. “Eskin was confined in Blackstone Sanitarium. We have reason to believe he came here, and we want him back.”

“What’s wrong with him?” Waverley asked.

“Have you seen him?”

“Gentlemen, we’re getting nowhere. Suppose I had seen him—and mind you, I’m not admitting it—suppose I had a means of rehabilitating him, making a decent, worthy citizen out of him. Would you still insist on having him back?”

“You can’t rehabilitate Eskin,” one of the men told him. “He’s found a perfectly satisfactory adjustment. Unfortunately, it’s one that the public cannot countenance.”

“What is it?” Waverley asked.

“Have you seen him?”

“No, but if I do, I’ll get in touch with you,” Waverley said pleasantly.

“Mr. Waverley. This attitude—”

“Is he dangerous?” Waverley asked.

“Not especially. But—”

“Has he any supernormal powers?”

“Probably,” one of the men said unhappily. “But his method of using them—”

“Can’t say I’ve ever seen the chap,” Waverley said coolly.

The men glanced at each other. “All right,” one of them said. “If you’ll admit to having him, we’ll sign him over to your custody.”

“Now you’re talking,” Waverley said. The release was quickly signed, and Waverley ushered the two men out. As they reached the door, Waverley saw what he thought was a wink pass between them. He must have imagined it, he decided.

“Was I right?” Doris asked him.

“Perfectly,” Waverley said. “You’ve still got powder in your hair.”

Doris located a mirror in her cavernous shoulder bag, and started dusting.

“Forget it,” Waverley said, leaning over and kissing the tip of her nose. “Marry me tomorrow.”

Doris considered for a moment. “Hairdresser tomorrow.”

“Day after, then.”

“I’m swimming the English Channel that day. Would next week be all right—”

Waverley kissed her. “Next week is not only all right, it’s obligatory,” he said. “And I’m not fooling.”

“All right,” Doris said, a little breathlessly. “But is this really it, Sam?”

“It is,” Waverley said. Their wedding date had been postponed twice already. The first time, the problem of Billy Walker had come up. Walker hadn’t wanted to go on the Venture to Mars, and Waverley had stayed with him day and night, bolstering his courage.

The next time had been when Waverley found a wealthy backer for Wild Talents, Inc. It was ‘round-the-clock work at first, organizing, contacting companies that might be able to use a psi, finding psis. But this time.

He bent over her again, but Doris said, “How about that man in your office?”

“Oh yes,” Waverley said with mild regret. “I think he’s genuine. I’d better see what he’s doing.” He walked through his office to the anteroom.

The psi had found pencil and paper, and was busy scribbling. He looked up when Waverley and Doris walked in, and gave them a wild, triumphant grin.

“Ah, my protector! Sir, I will demonstrate my scientific observations. Here is a complete account of all that transpired between A, you, and B, Miss Fleet.” He handed them a stack of papers.

Eskin had written a complete account of Waverley’s conversation with Doris, plus a faithful anatomical description of their kisses. He appended the physical data with a careful description of the emotions of both, before, during, and after each kiss.

Doris frowned. She had a love of personal privacy, and being observed by this ragged little man didn’t please her.

“Very interesting,” Waverley said, suppressing a smile for Doris’s sake. The man needed some guidance, he decided. But that could wait for tomorrow.

After finding Eskin a place to sleep, Waverley and Doris had dinner and discussed their marriage plans. Then they went to Doris’s apartment, where they disregarded television until one o’clock in the morning.

Next morning the first applicant was a sprucely dressed man in his middle thirties, who introduced himself as a lightning calculator. Waverley located a book of logarithms and put the man through his paces.

He was very good. Waverley took his name and address and promised to get in touch with him.

He was a little disappointed. Lightning calculators possessed the least wild of the wild talents. It was difficult to place them in really good jobs unless they had creative mathematical ability to go with their computing skill.

The morning shipment of magazines and newspapers arrived, and Waverley had a few minutes to browse through them. He subscribed to practically everything in hopes of finding little- known jobs that his psis might fill.

An elderly man with the purple-veined face of an alcoholic came in next. He was wearing a good suit, but with ragged, torn cuffs. His new shirt was impossibly filthy. His shoes, for some reason, were shined.

“I can turn water into wine,” the man said.

“Go right ahead,” Waverley told him. He went to the cooler and handed the man a cup of water.

The man looked at it, mumbled a few words, and, with his free hand, made a pass at the water. He registered astonishment when nothing happened. He looked sternly at the water, muttered his formula again, and again made a pass. Still nothing happened.

“You know how it is,” he said to Waverley. “We psis, our power just goes off and on. I’m usually good about forty percent of the time.”

“This is just an off day?” Waverley asked, with dangerous calm.

“That’s right,” the man said. “Look, if you could stake me for a few days, I’d get it again. I’m too sober now, but you should see me when I’m really—”

“You read about this in the papers, didn’t you?” Waverley asked.

“What? No, certainly not!”

“Get out of here,” Waverley said. It was amazing how many frauds his business attracted. People who thought he was dealing in some sort of pseudo-magic, people who thought he would be an easy mark for a sad story.

The next applicant was a short, stocky girl of eighteen or nineteen, plainly and unattractively dressed in a cheap print dress. She was obviously ill at ease.

Waverley pulled up a chair for her and gave her a cigarette, which she puffed nervously.

“My name’s Emma Cranick,” she told him, rubbing one perspiring hand against her thigh. “I—are you sure you won’t laugh at me?”

“Sure. Go on,” Waverley said, sorting a batch of papers on his desk. He knew the girl would feel better if he didn’t look at her.

“Well, I—this sounds ridiculous, but I can start fires. Just by wanting to. lean!” She glared at him defiantly.

A poltergeist, Waverley thought. Stone-throwing and fire-starting. She was the first one he had seen, although he had long been aware of the phenomenon. It seemed to center mostly in adolescent girls, for some unknown reason.

“Would you care to show me, Emma?” Waverley asked softly. The girl obliged by burning a hole in Waverley’s new rug. He poured a few cups of water over it, then had her burn a curtain as a check.

“That’s fine,” he told the girl, and watched her face brighten. She had been thrown off her uncle’s farm. She was “queer” if she started fires that way, and her uncle had no place for anyone who was “queer.”

She was rooming at the YWCA, and Waverley promised to get in touch with her.

“Don’t forget,” he said as she started out. “Yours is a valuable talent—a very valuable one. Don’t be frightened of it.”

This time her smile almost made her pretty.

A poltergeist, he thought, after she had gone. Now what in hell could he do with a poltergeist girl? Starting fire...A stoker, perhaps? No, that didn’t seem reasonable.

The trouble was, the wild talents were rarely reasonable. He had fibbed a bit to the reporters about that, but psis just weren’t tailor-made for the present world.

He started leafing through a magazine, wondering who could use a poltergeist.

“Sam!” Doris Fleet was standing in the door, her hands on her hips. “Look at this.”

He walked over. Eskin had arrived, and was standing beside the reception desk, a foolish smile on his face. Doris handed Waverley a sheaf of papers.

Waverley read through them. They contained a complete account of everything he and Doris had done, from the moment he had walked into her apartment until he had left.

But complete wasn’t the word. The psi had explored their every move and action. And, as if that weren’t bad enough, Waverley saw now why Eskin had been locked up.

The man was a voyeur, a Peeping Tom. A supernormal Peeping Tom, who could watch people from miles away.

Like most couples on the verge of marriage, Waverley and Doris did considerable smooching, and didn’t consider themselves any the worse for it. But it was something else again to see that smooching written down, dissected, analyzed.

The psi had picked up a complete anatomical vocabulary somewhere, because he had described every step of their courtship procedure in the correct terms. Diagrams followed, then a physiological analysis. Then the psi had probed deeper, into hormone secretions, cellular structures, nerve and muscle reactions, and the like.

It was the most amazing bit of pornography-veiled-as-science that Waverley had ever seen.

“Come in here,” Waverley said. He brought Eskin into his office. Doris followed, her face a study in embarrassment.

“Now then. Just what do you mean by this?” Waverley asked. “Didn’t I save you from the asylum?”

“Yes, sir,” Eskin said. “And believe me, I’m very grateful.”

“Then I want your promise that there’ll be no more of this.”

“Oh, no?” the man said, horrified. “I can’t stop. I have my research to consider.”

In the next half hour Waverley discovered a lot of things. Eskin could observe all those he came in contact with, no matter where they were. However, all he was interested in was their sex lives. He rationalized this voyeurism by his certainty that he was serving science.

Waverley sent him to the anteroom, locked the door, and turned to Doris.

“I’m terribly sorry about this,” he said, “but I’m sure we can resublimate him. It shouldn’t be too difficult.”

“Oh, it shouldn’t?” Doris asked.

“No.” Waverley said with confidence he didn’t feel. “I’ll figure it out.”

“Fine,” Doris said. She put the psi’s papers in an ashtray, found a match, and burned them. “Until you do, I think we had better postpone the wedding.”

“But why?”

“Oh, Sam,” Doris said, “how can I marry you and know that slimy little thing is watching every move we make? And writing it all down?”

“Now calm down,” Waverley said uncomfortably. “You’re perfectly right. I’ll go to work on him. Perhaps you’d better take the rest of the day off.”

“I’m going to,” Doris said, and started for the door.

“Supper this evening?” Waverley asked her.

“No,” she said firmly. “I’m sorry, Sam, but one thing’ll lead to another, and not while that Peeping Tom is loose.” She slammed the door shut.

Waverley unlocked the anteroom door.

“Come in here, Sidney,” he said. “You and I are going to have a fine long talk.”

Waverley tried to explain, slowly and patiently, that what Eskin did wasn’t truly scientific. He tried to show that it was a sexual deviation or overintensification, rationalized as a scientific motive.

“But, Mr. Waverley,” Eskin said, “if I was just peeking at people, that would be one thing. But I write it all down, I use the correct terms; I classify and define. I hope to write a definitive work on the sexual habits of every human being in the world.”

Waverley explained that people have a right to personal privacy. Eskin replied that science came above petty squeamishness. Waverley tried to batter at his fortifications for the rest of the day. But Eskin had an answer for everything, an answer that fit completely into his view of himself and the world.

“The trouble is,” he told Waverley, “people aren’t scientific. Not even scientists. Would you believe it, in the sanitarium the doctors kept me locked in solitary most of the time. Just because I observed and wrote down their sexual habits at home? Of course, being in solitary couldn’t stop me.”

Waverley wondered how Eskin had lived as long as he had. It would have been small wonder if an irate doctor slipped him an overdose of something. It probably required strong self-discipline not to.

“I didn’t think that you were against me,” the psi said sorrowfully. “I didn’t realize that you were so old-fashioned.”

“I’m not against you,” Waverley said, trying to think of some way of dealing with the man. Then, in a sudden happy burst of inspiration, he had it.

“Sidney,” he said, “I think I know of a job for you. A nice job, one you’ll like.”

“Really?” the voyeur said, his face lighting up.

“I think so,” Waverley said. He checked the idea in a recent magazine, located a telephone number, and dialed.

“Hello? Is this the Bellen Foundation?” He introduced himself, making sure they knew who he was. “I hear that you gentlemen are engaged in a new survey on the sexual habits of males of Eastern Patagonian descent. Would you be interested in an interviewer who can really get the facts?”

After a few more minutes of conversation, Waverley hung up and wrote out the address. “Go right over, Sid,” he said. “I think we have found your niche in life.”

“Thank you very much,” the psychotic said, and hurried out.

The next morning Waverley’s first appointment was with Bill Symes, one of Waverley’s brightest hopes, Symes had a fine psi talent in a clear, intelligent mind.

This morning he looked confused and unhappy.

“I wanted to speak to you first, Sam,” Symes said. “I’m leaving my job.”

“Why?” Waverley wanted to know. He had thought that Symes was as well placed and happy as a psi could be.

“Well—I just don’t fit in.”

Symes was able to “feel” stresses and strains in metal. Like most psis, he didn’t know how he did it. Nevertheless, Symes was able to “sense” microshrinkage and porosity faster, and more accurately than an X-ray machine, and with none of the problems of interpretation that an X-ray inspection leaves.

Symes’s talent was on an all-or-nothing basis; either he could do it or he couldn’t. Therefore he didn’t make mistakes. Even though his talent completely shut off forty percent of the time, he was still a valuable asset in the aircraft-engine industry, where every part must be X-rayed for possible flaws.

“What do you mean, you do not fit in?” Waverley asked. “Don’t you think you’re worth the money you’re getting?”

“It’s not that,” Symes said. “It’s the guys I work with. They think I’m a freak.”

“You knew that when you started,” Waverley reminded him.

Symes shrugged. “All right, Sam. Let me put it this way.” He lighted a cigarette. “What in hell am I? What are any of us psis? We can do something, but we don’t know how we do it. We have no control over it, no insight into it. Either it’s there or it isn’t. We’re not supermen, but we’re also not normal human beings. We’re—I don’t know what we are.”

“Bill,” Waverley said softly. “It’s not the other men worrying you. It’s you. You are starting to think you’re a freak.”

“Neither fish nor fowl,” Symes quoted, “nor good red meat. I’m going to take up dirt farming, Sam.”

Waverley shook his head. Psis were easily discouraged from trying to get their talents out of the parlor-trick stage. The commercial world was built—theoretically—along the lines of one-hundred percent function. A machine that didn’t work all the time was considered useless. A carry-over of that attitude was present in the psis, who considered their talents a mechanical extension of themselves, instead of an integral part. They felt inferior if they couldn’t produce with machinelike regularity.

Waverley didn’t know what to do. Psis would have to find themselves, true. But not by retreating to the farms.

“Look, Sam,” Symes said. “I know how much psi means to you. But I’ve got a right to some normality also. I’m sorry.”

“All right, Bill,” Waverley said, realizing that any more arguments would just antagonize Symes. Besides, he knew that psis were hams, too. They liked to do their tricks. Perhaps a dose of dirt-farming would send Bill back to his real work.

“Keep in touch with me, will you?”

“Sure. So long, Sam.”

Waverley frowned, chewed his lip for a few moments, then went in to see Doris.

“Marriage date back on?” he asked her.

“How about Eskin?”

He told her about Eskin’s new job, and the date was set for the following week. That evening they had supper together in a cozy little restaurant. Later they returned to Doris’s apartment to resume their practice of ignoring television.

The next morning, while leafing through his magazines, Waverley had a sudden idea. He called Emma Cranick at once and told her to come over.

“How do you feel about traveling?” he asked the girl. “Do you enjoy seeing new places?”

“Oh, I do,” Emma said. “This is the first time I’ve been off my uncle’s farm.”

“Do you mind hardships? Bitter cold?”

“I’m never cold,” she told him. “I can warm myself, just like I can start fires.”

“Fine,” Waverley said. “It’s just possible…”

He got on the telephone. In fifteen minutes he had made an appointment for the poltergeist girl.

“Emma,” he said, “have you ever heard of the Harkins expedition?”

“No,” she said. “Why?”

“Well, they’re going to the Antarctic. One of the problems of an expedition of that sort is heat for emergencies. Do you understand?”

The girl broke into a smile. “I think I do.”

“You’ll have to go down and convince them,” Waverley said. “No, wait! I’ll go down with you. You should be worth your weight in gold to an expedition like that.”

It wasn’t too difficult. Several women scientists were going on the expedition, and after seven or eight demonstrations, they agreed that Emma would be an asset. Strong and healthy, she could easily pull her own weight. Self-warmed, she would be able to function in any weather. And her fire-making abilities...

Waverley returned to his office at a leisurely pace, a self- satisfied smile on his lips. Girls like Emma would be useful on Mars someday, when a colony was established there. Heat would be difficult to conserve in Mars’s thin air. She was a logical choice for a colonist.

Things like that reaffirmed his faith in the future of psi. There was a place for all psi talents. It was just a question of finding the right job, or creating one.

Back in the office, a surprise was waiting for him. Eskin, the voyeur, was back. And Doris Fleet had a wrathful look in her eyes.

“What’s wrong, Sid?” Waverley asked. “Back to pay us a visit?”

“Back for good,” Eskin said unhappily. “They fired me, Mr. Waverley.”

“Why?”

“They’re not real scientists,” Eskin said sadly. “I showed them my results on their test cases, and they were shocked. Can you imagine it, Mr. Waverley? Scientists—shocked!”

Waverley suppressed a grin. He had always had a feeling that surveys of that sort uncovered about a sixteenth of the truth.

“Besides, they couldn’t keep their scientific detachment. I ran a series of studies on the scientists’ home lives for a control factor. And they threw me out!”

“That’s a pity,” Waverley said, avoiding Doris Fleet’s look.

“I tried to point out that there was nothing wrong in it,” Eskin said. “I showed them the series I’ve been running on you and Miss Fleet—”

“What?” Doris yelped, standing up so suddenly she knocked over her chair.

“Certainly. I keep my reports on all subjects,” the psi said. “One must run follow-up tests.”

“That does it,” Doris said. “I never heard such a—Sam! Throw him out!”

“What good will that do?” Waverley asked. “He’ll just go on observing us.”

Doris stood for a moment, her lips pressed into a thin line. “I won’t stand for it!” she said suddenly. “I just won’t!” She picked up her handbag and started toward the door.

“Where are you going?” Waverley asked.

“To enter a nunnery!” Doris shouted, and disappeared through the door.

“She wasn’t the girl for you, anyhow,” the psi said. “Extremely prudish. I’ve been observing your sexual needs pretty closely, and you—”

“Shut up,” Waverley said. “Let me think.” No answer sprang into his mind. No matter what job he found for Eskin, the man would still go on with his observations. And Doris wouldn’t marry Waverley.

“Go into the other room,” Waverley said. “I need time to think.”

“Shall I leave my report here?” The psi said, showing him a stack of papers two inches thick.

“Yeah, just drop it on the desk.” The psi went into the anteroom, and Waverley sat down to think.

Over the next few days, Waverley gave every available minute to the voyeur’s problem. Doris didn’t come back to work the next morning, or the morning after that. Waverley called her apartment, but no one answered.

The poltergeist girl left with the Antarctic expedition, and was given a big fanfare by the press.

Two telekinetic psis were found in East Africa and sent to Wild Talents.

Waverley thought and thought.

A man dropped into the office with a trained-dog act, and was very indignant when he heard that Wild Talents was not a theatrical agency. He left in a huff.

Waverley went on thinking.

Howard Aircraft called him. Since Bill Symes had left, Inspection had become the plant’s worst bottleneck. Production had been geared to the psi’s methods. When he was doing well, Symes could glance at a piece of metal and jot down his analysis. The part didn’t even have to be moved.

Under the older method of X-ray inspection, the parts had to be shipped to Inspection, lined up, put under the machine, and the plates developed. Then a radiologist had to read the film, and a superior had to pass on it.

They wanted Symes back.

The psi returned. He had had his fill of farming in a surprisingly short time. Besides, he knew now that he was needed. And that made all the difference.

Waverley sat at his desk, reading over the voyeur’s reports, trying to find some clue he might have missed.

The man certainly had an amazing talent. He analyzed right down to the hormones and microscopic lesions. Now how in hell could he do that? Waverley asked himself. Microscopic vision? Why not?

Waverley considered sending Eskin back to Blackstone. After all, the man was doing more harm than good. Under psychiatric care, he might lose his compulsion—and his talent, perhaps.

But was Eskin insane? Or was he a genius with an ability far beyond the present age?

With a nervous shudder, Waverley imagined a line in some future history book: “Because of Dr. Waverley’s stupidity and rigidity in dealing with the genius Eskin, psi research was held up for—”Oh no! He couldn’t chance that sort of thing. But there had to be a way.

A man who could—of course!

“Come in here, Eskin,” Waverley said to the potential genius.

“Yes, sir,” the psi said, and sat down in front of Waverley’s desk.

“Sid,” Waverley said, “how would you like to do a sexual report that would really aid science? One that would open a field never before explored?”

“What do you mean?” the psi asked dubiously.

“Look, Sid. Straight sexual surveys are old stuff. Everybody does them. Maybe not as well as you, but they still do them. How would you like it if I could introduce you to an almost unexplored field of science? A field that would really test your abilities to the utmost?”

“I’d like that,” the psi said. “But it would have to do with sex.”

“Of course,” Waverley said. “But you don’t care what aspect of sex, do you?”

“I don’t know,” Eskin said.

“If you could do this—and I don’t know that you can—your name would go down in history. You’d be able to publish your papers in the best scientific journals. No one would bother you, and you could get all the help you want.”

“It sounds wonderful. What is it?”

Waverley told him, and watched Eskin closely. The psi considered. Then he said, “I think I could do that, Mr. Waverley. It wouldn’t be easy, but if you really think that science—”

“I know so,” Waverley said, in a tone of profoundest conviction. “You’ll need some texts, to get some background on the field. I’ll help you select them.”

“I’ll start right now!” the psi said, and closed his eyes for greater concentration.

“Wait a minute,” Waverley said. “Are you able to observe Miss Fleet now?”

“I can if I want to,” the psi said. “But I think this is more important.”

“It is,” Waverley told him. “I was just curious as to whether you could tell me where she is.”

The psi thought for a moment.

“She isn’t doing anything sexual,” he said. “She’s in a room, but I don’t know where the room is. Now let me concentrate.”

“Sure. Go ahead.”

Eskin closed his eyes again. “Yes, I can see them! Give me pencil and paper!”

Waverley left him as Eskin began his preliminary investigations.

Now where had that girl gone? Waverley telephoned her apartment again, to see if she had come back. But there was no answer. One by one, he called all her friends. They hadn’t seen her.

Where? Where in the world?

Waverley closed his eyes and thought: Doris? Can you hear me, Doris?

There was no reply. He concentrated harder. He was no telepath, but Doris was. If she was thinking of him...Doris! Sam!

No message was necessary, because he knew she was coming back.

“Where did you go?” he asked, holding her tightly.

“To a hotel,” she said. “I just waited there and tried to read your mind.”

“Could you?”

“No,” she said. “Not until the last, when you were trying too.”

“Just as well,” Waverley said. “I’d never have any secrets from you. If you ever try anything like that again, I’ll send the goblins out looking for you.”

“I wouldn’t want that,” she said, looking at him seriously. “I guess I’d better not leave again. But, Sam—how about—”

“Come on in and look.”

“All right.”

In the other room, Eskin was writing on a piece of paper. He hesitated, then started scribbling again. Then he drew a tentative diagram, looked at it and crossed it out, and started another.

“What is he doing?” Doris asked. “What’s that supposed to be a picture of?”

“I don’t know,” Waverley said. “I haven’t studied their names. It’s some sort of germ.” “Sam, what’s happened?”

“Resublimation,” Waverley said. “I explained to him that there were other forms of sex he could observe, that would benefit mankind and science far more, and win him endless prestige. So he’s looking for the sex-cycle of bacteria.”

“Without a microscope?”

“That’s right. With his drive, he’ll devour everything ever written about bacterial life. He’ll find something valuable, too.”

“Resublimation,” Doris mused. “But do germs have a sex life?”

“I don’t know,” Waverley said. “But Eskin will find out. And there’s no reason why he can’t do some perfectly good research in the bargain. After all, the line between many scientists and Peeping Toms is pretty fine. Sex was really secondary to Eskin after he had sublimated it into scientific observation. This is just one more step in the same direction. “Now would you care to discuss dates and places?”

“Yes—if you’re sure it’s permanent.”

“Look at him.” The psi was scribbling furiously, oblivious to the outside world. On his face was an exalted, dedicated look.

“I guess so.” Doris smiled and moved closer to Waverley. Then she looked at the closed door. “There’s someone in the waiting room, Sam.”

Waverley kept back a curse. Telepathy could be damnably inconvenient at times. But business was business. He accompanied Doris to the door.

A young girl was sitting on a chair. She was thin, delicate, frightened-looking. Waverley could tell, by the redness of her eyes, that she had been crying recently.

“Mr. Waverley? You’re the Wild Talents man?”

Waverley nodded.

“You have to help me. I’m a clairvoyant, Mr. Waverley. A real one. And you have to help me get rid of it. You must!”

“We’ll see,” Waverley said, a pulse of excitement beating in his throat. A clairvoyant!

“Suppose you come in here and tell me all about it.”

THE SWAMP

Ed Scott took one look at the boy’s terrified white face and knew something serious was wrong. “What is it, Tommy?” he asked.

“It’s Paul Barlow,” the boy said. “We were all playing in the east swamp—and—and—and he’s sinking, sir!”

Scott knew he had no time to waste. Just last year, two men had been lost in the treacherous patches of the east swamp. The area was fenced now, and children had been warned. But they played there anyhow. Scott took a long coil of rope from his garage and set off at a run.

In ten minutes he was deep within the swamp. He saw six boys standing on a grassy fringe of firm land. Twenty feet beyond them, in the middle of a smooth, yellowish gray expanse, was Paul Barlow. The boy was waist-deep in the gluey quicksand, and sinking. His arms flailed, and the quicksand crept toward his chest. It looked as though the boy had tried to cross this patch on a dare. Ed Scott uncoiled his rope and wondered what made kids act with such blind, murderous stupidity.

He threw the rope, and the children watched breathlessly as it soared accurately into Paul’s hands. But the child—with quicksand up to the middle of his chest—didn’t have the strength to hold on.

With only seconds left, Scott tied an end of the rope to a stump, took a firm grip, and waded out after the screaming boy. The sand trembled and gave under his feet. Scott wondered if he’d have the strength to haul himself and the boy out. But the first problem was to reach Paul in time.

Scott came to within five feet of the boy, who was buried now to the neck. Keeping a firm grip on the rope, Scott waded forward another foot, sank to his waist, gritted his teeth, and reached for the boy—and felt the rope go slack! He twisted, trying to keep himself up as the swamp sucked him down—covering his chest and neck, filling his screaming mouth, and at last concealing the top of his head…

On the wooded fringe, one of the boys closed the pocket knife with which he had cut the rope. Out in the swamp, little Paul Barlow stood up cautiously, supported by the wooden platform that he and the other boys had sunk at the swamp’s edge and carefully tested. Watching his footing, Paul backed out of the sand, circled around the danger spot, and joined the others.

“Very good, Paul,” said Tommy. “You have succeeded in luring an adult to his death, and thereby become a full member of the Destroyers’ Club.”

“Thank you, Mr. President,” Paul said, and the other children cheered.

“But just one thing,” Tommy said. “In the future, please watch the overacting. All that screaming was a bit heavy, you know.”

“I’ll watch it, Mr. President,” Paul said. By then it was evening. Paul and the other boys hurried home for supper. Paul’s mother commented on how good his color was; she approved of his playing with his friends in the open air. But, as with all boys, his poor clothes were a muddy mess—and his hands were dirty.

THE FUTURE OF SEX: SPECULATIVE JOURNALISM

Sophisticated sexual engineering will soon be a reality. Many techniques for high-powered sensual realization are already in the developmental stages. Nerve seeding is one example. Nerve endings in the penis are relatively few. The same is true of the vagina. Within the decade, however, your surgeon will be able to inject you with a local nerve-growth stimulant. In less than a week, newly grown and densely packed nerve endings will yield a new dimension of exquisite sensations. A desensitization period may prove necessary; it may take a man two weeks before he can avoid ejaculating at the slightest stimulus, such as when he touches his organ accidentally while reaching for change.

Nerve clusters can be implanted on the body anywhere, and linked to the brain’s arousal center. There’s no limit but inconvenience. Sexual feeling could be diffused, causing polymorphous perversity in which the entire body functions as a single sexual organ. Normal spread of sensation between implanted nerve clusters will make this possible; your body will be like a six-foot-tall erect penis (or whatever height you are)—throbbingly sensitive, capable of febrile excitation impossible to imagine. Or, if you prefer, actual sex organs may be grown anywhere on the body. For example, an erectile stalk with male and/or female receptors at one end could be extruded from a point several inches below the armpit.

Regardless of design, newly engineered people will find that their excitation potential vastly exceeds their orgasmic capacity. One impotency therapy currently being tested in Third World countries is the implantation of booster testes. In Nigeria, for example, despite a high national birth rate, certain tribes have been downbreeding to the point of extinction. An example of this is the Duka, a small sub-Saharan tribe wedged between two powerful and quarrelsome neighboring tribes. Most Duka males are unable to achieve orgasm despite frenzied use of the siila—a fetish doll of great erotic import, indigenous to the area northwest of Lake Chad. The booster testis has provided a dramatic solution. The operation itself is simple: a tiny diode, implanted in the male genital region, increases nerve impulses and thus sperm production. The results have been “reliable” erections with excellent ejaculatory ability. But can ejaculatory capacity be upgraded so that a man can have five, ten, or even twenty climaxes in an hour?

The solution is almost at hand. Male orgasm typically results in enervation that persists for hours or even days. Multiple nerve-muscle nets, surgically layered on top of the present sets and triggered to fire at different times, will ensure orgasmic capacity—as intense as you can stand, and for as long as you can take it. Delightful though this may seem, there are risks. Almost certainly a fail-safe device will have to be implanted to turn one off before—there is no other way of saying it—the body literally fucks itself to death.

Today, masturbation is the most convenient sex act. Unfortunately it is also the most boring. Therefore other people must sometimes be resorted to. The rehabilitation of masturbation will change all this. The sexually re-engineered individual will pursue him- or herself with full social approval, and his response level can be set so low that almost any stimulus will work. Partially clothed pinups, for example, or even innocuous “naughty” words such as do-do and caca might do the trick. Morally and scientifically sanctioned partnerless sex could be a relief for those who find themselves alone, perhaps during space travel, or who simply have trouble finding anyone to do anything sexual with. In this enlightened social climate, Solo Marriage will be a viable and respected institution.

When our ridiculous laws against bestiality have been repealed, society may condone sex with non-ordinary partners. By that time the surgical means will be at hand to restructure your sex organ to fit, for example, a parrot, a dolphin, or a bat. A man might wish to have his erectile member re-engineered so that he could fully enjoy his favorite cat or other pet. Presumably this would increase the cat’s enjoyment as well. If not, the cat could be re-engineered.

Another exciting near-future possibility is the man-machine interface. A computer tied to the nervous system via a series of sensors would scan visceral and autonomic responses, and record them in binary. The computer would “experiment,” programming itself to initiate movements to stimulate its subject/operator. Given the intermittent and differentiated nature of human sexual response, the computer would employ a tease-factor, utilizing randomness and delay to elicit new heights of pleasure. People are not telepathic, but computers, given a direct nerve tie-in and a properly written interactive program, could be.

Once the computer had completed your response profile, even your lover could interface with the program and learn, by touch, exactly what you liked, for how long, and with what degree of pressure. From a sufficient base of such data, science could develop a unified theory of sexuality. Frigidity and impotence would become things of the past. Nor would any perversions remain, since these so-called abominable practices would necessarily be subsumed in the unified theory. Statistically understood, individual behaviors would have no more moral significance than the movement of gas molecules in accordance with Boyle’s law.

Computer-assisted sexuality suggests not only new software but new hardware. A sex robot would be the action arm of the computer. Not necessarily human in appearance (despite the forecasts of science fiction), such a robot might well be boxy, with catlike curves. Its skin would be a lustrous fur, except for those portions encased in black leather, lace, and chrome. It would probably not speak English, but instead employ a special language made up of instinctively understood purrs and growls. The sex machine could be of any size from petite to grandiose, and would come equipped with variously sized and shaped probes and orifices. An ideal orgy participant, the machine could accommodate up to a dozen humans by acting as a central plug-in device.

A sex robot must demonstrate apparent independence; otherwise, the randomness and tease-factor mentioned earlier would result in unpredictability. The importance of this must not be minimized. Easily obtained sex is never satisfactory, at least not for long. The “best” sex entails the dramatic component of uncertainty. Your sex machine would definitely not always be “available.” It would be no “pushover”; you might have to seduce the thing, perhaps with wines and soft music, perhaps with a special fetish it might be said to “care for.” Sometimes, despite your best efforts, the machine might still refuse you. You could, of course, override the refusal, thereby providing yourself with the mechanistic equivalent of rape.

However it manifests, the future of sex seems assured. The only remaining uncertainty is the human mind. It is conceivable that some people will be so perverse as to refuse the new pleasures that science brings. For these people, reconditioning may be necessary. The means will be available to make people like what is available, whether they like it or not. Some may deplore this as brainwashing, and, considered narrowly, it is just that. But so what? Aren’t any means appropriate in the pursuit of mankind’s highest goal—pleasure?

THE LIFE OF ANYBODY

Last night, as I lay on the couch watching The Late Show; a camera and sound crew came to my apartment to film a segment of a TV series called The Life of Anybody. I can’t say I was completely surprised, although I had not anticipated this. I knew the rules; I went on with my life exactly as if they were not there. After a few minutes, the camera and recording crew seemed to fade into the wallpaper. They are specially trained for that.

My TV was on, of course; I usually have it on. I could almost hear the groans of the critics: “Another goddamned segment of a guy watching the tube. Doesn’t anybody in this country do anything but watch the tube?” That upset me, but there was nothing I could do about it. That’s the way it goes.

So the cameras whizzed along, and I lay on the couch like a dummy and watched two cowboys play the macho game. After a while my wife came out of the bathroom, looked at the crew, and groaned, “Oh, Christ, not tonight.” She was wearing my CCNY sweatshirt on top, nothing on the bottom. She’d just washed her hair and she had a towel tied around her head. She had no makeup on. She looked like hell. Of all nights, they had to pick this one. She was probably imagining the reviews: “The wife in last night’s turgid farce…”

I could see that she wanted badly to do something—to inject a little humor into our segment, to make it into a domestic farce. But she didn’t. She knew as well as I did that anyone caught acting, fabricating, exaggerating, diminishing, or otherwise distorting his life, would be instantly cut off the air. She didn’t want that. A bad appearance was better than no appearance at all. She sat down on a chair and picked up her crocheting hook. I picked up my magazine. Our movie went on.

You can’t believe it when it happens to you. Even though you watch the show every evening and see it happen, you can’t believe it’s happening to you. I mean, it’s suddenly you there, lying on the couch doing your nothing number, and there they are, filming it and implying that the segment represents you.

I prayed for something to happen. Air raid—sneak Commie attack—us a typical American family caught in the onrush of great events. Or a burglar breaks in, only he’s not just a burglar, he’s something else, and a whole fascinating sequence begins. Or a beautiful woman knocks at the door, claiming that only I can help her. Hell, I would have settled for a phone call.

But nothing happened. I actually started to get interested in that movie on TV, and I put down my magazine and actually watched it. I thought they might be interested in that.

The next day my wife and I waited hopefully, even though we knew we had bombed out. Still, you can never tell. Sometimes the public wants to see more of a person’s life. Sometimes a face strikes their fancy and you get signed for a series. I didn’t really expect that anyone would want to see a series about my wife and me, but you can never tell. Stranger things have happened.

Nowadays my wife and I spend our evenings in very interesting ways. Our sexual escapades are the talk of the neighborhood, my crazy cousin Zoe has come to stay with us, and regularly an undead thing crawls upstairs from the cellar.

Practically speaking, you never get another chance. But you can never tell. If they do decide to do a follow-up segment, we’re ready.

GOODBYE FOREVER TO MR. PAIN

Joseph Elroy was nicely settled back in his armchair on this Sunday morning in the near future, trying to remember the name of his favorite football team, which he was going to watch later on the TV while reading the bankruptcy notices in the Sunday Times and thinking uncomfortable thoughts.

It was a normal sort of day: the sky outside was colored its usual blah beige, which went well with the blah browns with which Mrs. Elroy, now grinding her teeth in the kitchen, had decorated the place during one of her many short-lived bursts of enthusiasm. Their child, Elixir, was upstairs pursuing her latest discovery—she was three years old and had just gotten into vomiting.

And Elroy had a tune going in his head. “Amapola” was spinning just now, and it would continue until another song segued into it, one song after another, all day, all night, forever. This music came from Elroy’s internal Muzak system, which came on whenever inattentiveness became necessary for survival.

So Elroy was in a certain state. Maybe you’ve been there yourself: the kid cries and the wife nags and you drift through your days and nights, well laid back, listening to the secret Muzak in your head. And you know that you’ll never crack through the hazy plastic shield that separates you from the world, and the gray mists of depression and boredom settle in for a nice long visit. And the only thing that prevents you from opting for a snuffout is your Life-Force, which says to you, “Wake up, dummy, it’s you this is happening to—yes, you, strangling there in your swimming pool of lime-flavored Jell-O with a silly grin on your love-starved face as you smoke another Marlboro and watch the iniquities of the world float by in three-quarter time.”

Given that situation, you’d take any chance that came along to pull out of it, wouldn’t you? Joseph Elroy’s chance came that very afternoon.

The telephone rang. Elroy picked it up. A voice at the other end asked, “Who is this, please?”

“This is Joseph Elroy,” Elroy replied.

“Mr. Elroy, do you happen to have a tune or song going through your head at this moment?”

“As a matter of fact, I do.”

“What is the name of the song?”

“I’ve been humming ‘Amapola’ to myself for the last couple of hours.”

“What was that name again, Mr. Elroy?”

“‘Amapola.’ But what—”

“That’s it! That’s the one!”

“Huh?”

“Mr. Elroy, now I can reveal to you what this is all about. I am Marv Duffle, and I’m calling you from ‘The Shot of a Lifetime Show’ and you have named the very tune going through the head of our genial guest for tonight, Mr. Phil Suggers! That means that you and your family, Mr. Elroy, have won this month’s big synchronicity prize, The Shot of a Lifetime! Mr. Elroy, do you know what that means?”

“I know!” Elroy shouted joyously. “I watch the show so I know, I know! Elva, stop freaking out in there, we’ve won the big one, we’ve won, we’ve won, we’ve won!”

What this meant in practical terms was that the following day a group of technicians in one-piece orange jumpsuits came and installed what looked like a modified computer console in the Elroys’ living room, and Marv Duffle himself handed them the all-important Directory and explained how all of the best avenues for personal growth and change and self-realization had been collated and tied directly into this computer. Many of these services had formerly been available only to the rich, talented, and successful, who really didn’t need them. But now the Elroys could avail themselves of them, and do it all via patented superfast high-absorption learning modalities developed at Stanford and incorporated into the equipment. In brief, their lives were theirs to shape and mold as they desired, free, and in the privacy of their home.

Elroy was a serious-minded man, as we all are at heart, and so the first thing he did was to search through the Directory, which listed all available services from all the participating companies, until he found Vocationeers, the famous talent-testing firm of Mill Valley, California. They were able to process Elroy by telephone and get the results back to him in fifteen minutes. It seemed that Elroy had the perfect combination of intelligence, manual dexterity, and psychological set to become a topflight micropaleontologist. That position happened to be open at the nearby Museum of Natural History, and Elroy learned all he needed to know about the work with the help of the Bluchner-Wagner School for High-Speed Specialized Learning. So Elroy was able to begin a promising career only two weeks after he had heard of it for the first time.

Elva Elroy, or Elf, as she called herself in wistful moments, wasn’t sure what she wanted to do. She looked through the Directory until she found Mandragore, Inc., makers of Norml-Hi twenty-four-hour timed-release mood-enhancement spansules. She had them sent over at once with the Ames Rapid Dope Delivery Service—”Your High Is Our Cry.” Feeling better than she had in ages, Elva was able to face the problem of dinner. After careful consideration, she called Fancy Freakout Food Merchandisers—”Let Us Administer to the Hungry Child in Your Head.”

For their little daughter, Elixir, there was BabyTeasers, a crack service that cajoled the spoiled scions of oil sheiks, now available to the Elroys on ‘round-the-clock standby basis to get the kid out of her temper. Elixir was delighted. New big soft toys to order around! What could be so bad?

That left the Elroys with world enough and time in which to discover each other. They went first with Omni-Pleasure Family Consultants, who, on television in Houston the previous month, had revitalized a marriage that had been pronounced terminal. One counseling session brought the Elroys a deep and abiding love for each other whenever they looked deep into each other’s eyes and concentrated. This gave them the necessary maturity to take the Five-Day Breakthrough with the Total Sex Response people of Lansing, Michigan—which, too, was a success in terms of new highs reached and plateaus maintained. Yet a certain anxiety crept into Elroy’s performance and he felt the need to avail himself of Broadway Joe’s Romantic Sex Service—”Illicit meetings with beautiful sexy broads of a refinement guaranteed not to gross you out.”

“Oh, yeah?” said Elva when she heard about that, and instantly fulfilled a longstanding desire by calling Rough Traders Sex Service. She had been attracted by their ad in the Directory: “Dig, you want it rough, raw, real, and sweaty, but you also want that it shouldn’t be a turnoff. Right? Right. Call our number, baby, ‘cause we got your number.”

They both got a little freaked out from it all, and cooled out with Dreamboat Launchers of Fire Island and their famous motto: “Meditate the Easy Way, with Dope.”

The Elroys were really getting it all together now, but things kept intruding. Elixir was freaking out again, and at the worst possible time, for Elroy was soon to be profiled by New York magazine, and Elva was about to begin a two-week prima ballerina course with a job already assured her at the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. They held a family conference and came across an ad in the Directory for a service called Childmenders.

“What does it say?” Elva asked.

Elroy read: ‘“Is your child losing out on the best of life because he/she possesses an unruly personality? Do you feel frustrated by the problem of giving him/her love without getting swallowed up? Is it all getting a bit much? Then why not take advantage of Childmenders! We will cart away your child and return him/her loving, obedient, docile, and easily satisfied—and we will do this without screwing up one bit of his/her individuality, initiative, and aggressiveness, so help us God.’“

“They sound like they give a damn,” Elva said.

“Funny you should say that,” Elroy said. “Right down here at the bottom of their ad, it says, ‘Believe us—we give a damn!’“

“That clinches it,” Elva said. “Call them!”

Elixir was carted away, and the Elroys celebrated their newfound freedom by calling up Instant Real Friends and throwing a party with the help of Perry and Penny, the Party People.

Onward the Elroys plunged, along the rocky trail of self-transcendence. Unfortunately this involved a clash of interests. Mr. Elroy was pursuing Higher Matters through Mindpower. Elva still sought consummation in the veritable flesh. They fought about which item in the Directory they should opt for next. Since they had both taken the Supreme Communication Foundation’s Quickie Course in Inexorable Persuasiveness, they were both terrific arguers. But they got on each other’s nerves because they were both terrible listeners.

Their relationship fell apart. Stubbornly, neither of them would go to Relationship Repairers. In fact, Elva defiantly joined Negatherapeutics, whose intriguing slogan was “Hate Your Way to Happiness.” Elroy pulled himself together and explored his feelings with the revolutionary new Cellular Self-Image Technique and understood at last where he was at: he detested his wife and wanted her dead. It was as simple as that!

Elroy swung into action. He pounced on the Directory and located the Spouse Alteration Service of Saugerties, New York. They came and took Elva away and Elroy finally had time to get into himself.

First he learned how to achieve instantaneous ecstasy at will. This ability had formerly been an exclusive possession of a few Eastern religious organizations, which, until recently, had been the only ones with the telephone number of the service that provided it. Bliss was a lot of fun, but Elroy had to come out of it when Childmenders called to say that his child was irreparable. What did he want them to do with her? Elroy told them to put her back together as well as they could and store her until further notice.

It was at this time, through the assistance of Psychoboosters, Inc., that he was able to raise his intelligence to two levels above genius, a fact that was duly noted in the updated edition of his autobiography, which was being serialized in The New York Times.

The Spouse Alteration Service called and said that Elva was the old unalterable model and could not be adjusted without grave danger to the mechanism. Elroy told them to store her with his irreparable kid.

At last, triumphantly alone, Elroy could return to the joyous work of saying goodbye forever to Mr. Pain. He had it all pretty much together by now, of course, and was experiencing many religious visions of great power and intensity. But something unsatisfactory still remained, though he couldn’t put his finger on it.

He looked through the Directory, but found no answer. It looked as if he was going to have to tough this one through on his own. But then, providentially, the front door opened and in walked a small, dark, smiling man with a turban and all-knowing eyes and an aura of incredible power. This was the Mystery Guru, who seeks you out when the time is right and tells you what you need to know—if you are a subscriber to the Directory.

“It’s the ego,” the Mystery Guru said, and left.

Vast waves of comprehension flooded over Elroy. The ego! Of course! Why hadn’t he thought of that? Obviously his ego was the final thing anchoring him to the gummy clay of everyday reality. His ego! His very own ego was holding him back, forever yammering its selfish demands at him, completely disregarding his welfare!

Elroy opened the Directory. There, all by itself on the last page, he found the Lefkowitz Ego Removers of Flushing, New York.

Beneath their ad was this: “Warning. The Surgeon-General Has Determined that Ego Removal May Be Injurious to Your Health.”

Joseph Elroy hesitated, considered, weighed factors. He was momentarily perplexed. But then the Mystery Guru popped into the room again and said, “It’s a seven-to-five shot at the Big Spiritual Money, and besides, what have you got to lose?” He exited, a master of timing.

Elroy punched out the big combination on the console.

Not long afterward there was a knock at the door. Elroy opened it to the Lefkowitz Ego Removal Squad.

They left. Then there was only the console, winking and leering and glittering at itself. And then even that was gone and there was nothing whatever in the room except a disembodied voice humming “Amapola.”

THE SHAGGY AVERAGE AMERICAN MAN STORY

Dear Joey:

You ask me in your letter what can a man do when all of a sudden, through no fault of his own, he finds that there is a bad rap hanging over him which he cannot shake off.

You did right in asking me, as your spiritual advisor and guide, to help you in this matter.

I can sympathize with your feelings, dear friend. Being known far and wide as a double-faced, two-tongued, short-count ripoff artist fit only for the company of cretinous Albanians is indeed an upsetting situation, and I can well understand how it has cut into your business as well as your self-esteem and is threatening to wipe you out entirely. But that is no reason to do a kamikaze into Mount Shasta with your hang glider, as you threaten in your letter. Joey, no situation is entirely unworkable. People have gone through worse bad-rapping than that, and come up smelling like roses.

For your edification I cite the recent experience of my good friend George Blaxter.

I don’t think you ever met George. You were in Goa the year he was in Ibiza, and then you were with that Subud group in Bali when George was with his guru in Isfahan. Suffice it to say that George was in London during the events I am about to relate, trying to sell a novel he had just written, and living with Big Karen, who, you may remember, was Larry Shark’s old lady when Larry was playing pedal guitar with Brain Damage at the San Remo Festival.

Anyhow, George was living low and quiet in a bed-sitter in Fulham when one day a stranger came to his door and introduced himself as a reporter from the Paris Herald Tribune and asked him what his reaction was to the big news.

George hadn’t heard any big news recently, except for the Celtics losing to the Knicks in the NBA playoffs, and he said so.

“Somebody should have contacted you about this,” the reporter said. “In that case, I don’t suppose you know that the Emberson Study Group in Annapolis, Maryland, has recently finished its monumental study updating the averageness concept to fit the present and still-changing demographic and ethnomorphic aspects of our great nation.”

“No one told me about it,” George said.

“Sloppy, very sloppy,” the reporter said. “Well, incidental to the Study, the Emberson Group was asked if they could come up with some actual person who would fit and embody the new parameters of American averageness. The reporters wanted somebody who could be called Mr. Average American Man. You know how reporters are.”

“But what has this got to do with me?”

“It’s really remiss of them not to have notified you,” the reporter said. “They fed the question into their computer and turned it loose on their sampling lists, and the computer came up with you.”

“With me?” George said.

“Yes. They really should have notified you.”

“I’m supposed to be the Average American Man!”

“That’s what the computer said.”

“But that’s crazy,” George said. “How can I be the Average American Man? I’m only five foot eight and my name is Blaxter spelled with an ‘l’, and I’m of Armenian and Latvian ancestry and I was born in Ship’s Bottom, New Jersey. What’s that average of, for Chrissakes? They better recheck their results. What they’re looking for is some Iowa farmboy with blond hair and a Mercury and 2.4 children.”

“That’s the old, outdated stereotype,” the reporter said. “America today is composed of racial and ethnic minorities whose sheer ubiquity precludes the possibility of choosing an Anglo-Saxon model. The average man of today has to be unique to be average, if you see what I mean.”

“Well...what am I supposed to do now?” George asked.

The reporter shrugged. “I suppose you just go on doing whatever average things you were doing before this happened.”

There was a dearth of interesting news in London at that time, as usual, so the BBC sent a team down to interview George. CBS picked it up for a thirty-second human-interest spot, and George became a celebrity overnight.

There were immediate repercussions.

George’s novel had been tentatively accepted by the venerable British publishing firm of Gratis & Spye. His editor, Derek Polsonby-Jigger, had been putting George through a few final rewrites and additions and polishes and deletions, saying, “It’s just about right, but there’s still something that bothers me and we owe it to ourselves to get it in absolutely top form, don’t we?”

A week after the BBC special, George got his book back with a polite note of rejection.

George went down to St. Martin’s Lane and saw Polsonby. Polsonby was polite but firm. “There is simply no market over here for books written by average Americans.”

“But you liked my book! You were going to publish it!”

“There was always something about it that bothered me,” Polsonby said. “Now I know what that something is.”

“Yeah?”

“Your book lacks uniqueness. It’s just an average American novel. What else could the average American man write? That’s what the critics would say. Sorry, Blaxter.”

When George got home, he found Big Karen packing.

“Sorry, George,” she told him, “but I’m afraid it’s all over between us. My friends are laughing at me. I’ve been trying for years to prove that I’m unique and special, and then look what happens to me—I hook up with the average American man.”

“But that’s my problem, not yours!”

“Look, George, the average American man has got to have an average American wife, otherwise he’s not average, right?”

“I never thought about it,” George said. “Hell, I don’t know.”

“It makes sense, baby. As long as I’m with you, I’ll just be the average man’s average woman. That’s hard to bear, George, for a creative-thinking female person who is unique and special and has been the old lady of Larry Shark when he was with Brain Damage during the year they got a gold platter for their top-of-the-charts single, All Those Noses.’ But it’s more than just that. I have to do it for the children.”

“Karen, what are you talking about? We don’t have any children.”

“Not yet. But when we did, they’d just be average kids. I don’t think I could bear that. What mother could? I’m going to go away, change my name, and start all over. Good luck, George.”

After that, George’s life began to fall apart with considerable speed and dexterity. He began to get a little wiggy; he thought people were laughing at him behind his back, and of course it didn’t help his paranoia any to find out that they actually were. He took to wearing long black overcoats and sunglasses and dodging in and out of doorways and sitting in cafes with a newspaper in front of his average face.

Finally he fled England, leaving behind him the sneers of his onetime friends. He was bad-rapped but good. And he couldn’t even take refuge in any of the places he knew: Goa, Ibiza, Malibu, Poona, Anacapri, Ios, or Marrakesh. He had erstwhile friends in all those places who would laugh at him behind his back.

In his desperation he exiled himself to the most unhip and unlikely place he could think of: Nice, France.

There he quickly became an average bum.

Now stick with me, Joey, while we transition to several months later. It is February in Nice. A cold wind is whipping down off the Alps, and the palm trees along the Boulevard des Anglais look like they’re ready to pack up their fronds and go back to Africa.

George is lying on an unmade bed in his hotel, Les Grandes Meules. It is a suicide-class hotel. It looks like warehouse storage space in Mongolia, only not so cheerful.

There is a knock on the door. George opens it. A beautiful young woman comes in and asks him if he is the famous George Blaxter, Average American Man. George says that he is, and braces himself for the latest insult that a cruel and unthinking world is about to lay on him.

“I’m Jackie,” she says. “I’m from New York, but I’m vacationing in Paris.”

“Huh,” George says.

“I took off a few days to look you up,” she says. “I heard you were here.”

“Well, what can I do for you? Another interview? Further adventure of the Average Man?”

“No, nothing like that...I was afraid this might get a little uptight. Have you got a drink?”

George was so deep into confusion and self-hatred in those days that he was drinking absinthe even though he hated the stuff. He poured Jackie a drink.

“Okay,” she said, “I might as well get down to business.”

“Let’s hear it,” George said grimly.

“George,” she said, “did you know that in Paris there is a platinum bar exactly one meter long?”

George just stared at her.

“That platinum meter,” she said, “is the standard for all the other meters in the world. If you want to find out if your meter is the right length, you take it to Paris and measure it against their meter. I’m simplifying, but do you see what I mean?”

“No,” Blaxter said.

“That platinum meter in Paris was arrived at by international agreement. Everyone compared meters and averaged them out. The average of all those meters became the standard meter. Are you getting it now?”

“You want to hire me to steal this meter?”

She shook her head impatiently. “Look, George, we’re both grown-up adult persons and we can speak about sex without embarrassment, can’t we?”

George sat up straight. For the first time his eyes began tracking.

“The fact is,” Jackie said. “I’ve been having a pretty lousy time of it in my relationships over the past few years, and my analyst, Dr. Decathlon, tells me it’s because of my innate masochism, which converts everything I do into drek. That’s his opinion. Personally, I think I’ve just been running a bad streak. But I don’t really know, and it’s important for me to find out. If I’m sick in the head, I ought to stay in treatment so that someday I’ll be able to enjoy myself in bed. But if he’s wrong, I’m wasting my time and a hell of a lot of money.”

“I think I’m starting to get it,” George said.

“The problem is, how is a girl to know whether her bad trips are her own fault or the result of the hangups of the guys she’s been going with? There’s no standard of comparison, no sexual unit, no way to experience truly average American sexual performance, no platinum meter against which to compare all of the other meters in the world.”

It broke over George then, like a wave of sunlight and understanding. “I,” he said, “am the standard of American male sexual averageness.”

“Baby, you’re a unique platinum bar exactly one meter in length and there’s nothing else like you in the whole world. Come here, my fool, and show me what the average sexual experience is really like.”

Well, word got around, because girls tell these things to other girls. And many women heard about it, and of those who heard about it, enough were interested in checking it out that George soon found his time fully and pleasurably occupied beyond his wildest dreams. They came to him in unending streams, Americans at first, but then many nationalities, having heard of him via the underground interglobal feminine sex-information linkup. He got uncertain Spaniards, dubious Danes, insecure Sudanese, womankind from all over, drawn to him like moths to a flame or like motes of dust in water swirling down a drain in a clockwise direction in the northern hemisphere. And it was all good, at worst, and indescribable at best.

Blaxter is independently wealthy now, thanks to the gifts pressed on him by grateful female admirers of all nations, types, shapes, and colors. He lives in a fantastic villa high above Cap Ferrat, given by a grateful French government in recognition of his special talents and great importance as a tourist attraction. He leads a life of luxury and independence, and refuses to cooperate with researchers who want to study him and write books with titles like The Averageness Concept in Modern American Sexuality. Blaxter doesn’t need them. They would only cramp his style.

He leads his life. And he tells me that late at night, when the last smiling face has departed, he sits back in his enormous easy chair, pours himself a fine burgundy, and considers the paradox: his so-called averageness has made him the front-runner of most, if not all, American males in several of life’s most important and fun areas. Being average has blessed his life with uncountable advantages. He is a platinum bar sitting happily in its glass case, and he would never go back to being simply unique, like the rest of the human race.

This is the bliss that averageness has brought him: The curse that he could not shake off is now the gift that he can never lose.

Touching, isn’t it?

So you see, Joey, what I’m trying to tell you is that apparent liabilities can be converted into solid assets. How this rule can apply in your own particular case should be obvious. In case it isn’t, feel free to write to me again, enclosing the usual payment for use of my head, and I will be glad to tell you how being known far and wide as a lousy ripoff shortchange goniff (and a lousy lay, in case you hadn’t heard) can be worked to your considerable advantage.

Yours in Peace,

Andy the Answer Man

SHOOTOUT IN THE TOY SHOP

The meeting took place in the taproom of the Beaux Arts Club of Camden, New Jersey. It was the sort of uptight saloon that Baxter usually avoided—Tiffany lampshades, tables of dark polished wood, discreet lighting. His potential customer, Mr. Arnold Conabee, was in a booth waiting for him. Conabee was a soft-faced, fragile-looking man, and Baxter took care to shake his hand gently. After squeezing his bulk into the red leatherette booth, Baxter asked for a vodka martini, very dry, because that was the sort of thing people ordered in a joint like this. Conabee crossed him up by asking for a margarita straight up.

It was Baxter’s first job in nearly a month, and he was determined not to blow it. His breath was kissing sweet, and he had powdered his heavy jowls with talcum powder. His glen plaid suit was freshly pressed and concealed his gut pretty well, and his black police shoes gleamed. Looking good, baby. But he had forgotten to clean his fingernails, and now he saw that they were black-rimmed, he wanted to keep his hands in his lap, but then he couldn’t smoke.

Conabee wasn’t interested in his hands, however. Conabee had a problem, and that was why he had arranged this meeting with Baxter, a private detective who listed himself in the Yellow Pages as the Acme Investigative Service.

“Somebody is stealing from me,” Conabee was saying, “but I don’t know who.”

“Just fill me in on the details,” Baxter said. His voice was the best part of him, a deep, manly drawl, exactly the right voice for a private investigator.

“My shop is over at the South Camden Mall,” Conabee said. “Conabee’s Toys for Children of All Ages. I’m beginning to acquire an international reputation.”

“Right,” Baxter said, though he had never heard of Conabee’s scam.

“The trouble started two weeks ago,” Conabee said. “I had just completed an experimental doll, the most advanced of its kind in the world. The prototype utilized a new optical switching circuit and a synthetic protein memory with a thousand times the order of density previously achieved. It was stolen on the first night of its display. Various pieces of equipment and a quantity of precious metals were also taken. Since then, there have been thefts almost every night.”

“No chance of a break-in?”

“The locks are never tampered with. And the thief always seems to know when we have anything worth stealing.”

Baxter grunted and Conabee said, “It seems to be an inside job. But I can’t believe it. I have only four employees. The most recent has been with me six years. I trust them all implicitly.”

“Then you gotta be hooking the stuff yourself,” Baxter said, winking, “because somebody’s sure carting it off.”

Conabee stiffened and looked at Baxter oddly, then laughed. “I almost wish it were me,” he said. “My employees are all my friends.”

“Hell,” Baxter said, “anybody’ll rip off the boss if he thinks he can get away with it.”

Conabee looked at him oddly again, and Baxter realized that he wasn’t talking genteelly enough and that a sure seventy-five dollars was about to vanish. He forced himself to be cool and to say, in his deep, competent, no-nonsense voice, “I could hide myself in your shop tonight, Mr. Conabee. You could be rid of this annoyance once and for all.”

“Yes,” Conabee said, “it has been annoying. It’s not so much the loss of income as...” He let the thought trail away. “Today we got in a shipment of gold filigree from Germany worth eight hundred dollars. I’ve brought an extra key.”

Baxter took a bus downtown to Courthouse Square. He had about three hours before he was to stake himself out in Conabee’s shop. He’d been tempted to ask for an advance, but had decided against it. It didn’t pay to look hungry, and this job could be a fresh start for him.

Down the street he saw Stretch Jones holding up a lamppost on Fountain and Clinton. Stretch was a tall, skinny black man wearing a sharply cut white linen suit, white moccasins, and a tan Stetson. Stretch said, “Hey, baby.”

“Hi,” Baxter said sourly.

“You got that bread for my man?”

“I told Dinny I’d have it Monday.”

“He told me I should remind you, ‘cause he don’t want you should forget.”

“I’ll have it Monday,” Baxter said, and walked on. It was a lousy hundred dollars that he owed Dinny Welles, Stretch’s boss. Baxter resented being braced for it, especially by an insolent black bastard in an ice-cream suit. But there wasn’t anything he could do about it.

At the Clinton Cut-Rate Liquor Store he ordered a bottle of Haig & Haig Pinch to celebrate his new job, and Terry Turner, the clerk, had the nerve to say, “Uh, Charlie, I can’t do this no more.”

“What in hell are you talking about?” Baxter demanded.

“It ain’t me,” Turner said. “You know I just work here. It’s Mrs. Chednik. She said not to give you any more credit.”

“Take it out of this,” Baxter said, coming across with his last twenty.

Turner rang up the sale, then said, “But your tab—”

“I’ll settle it direct with Mrs. Chednik, and you can tell her I said so.”

“Well, all right, Charlie,” Turner said, giving him the change. “But you’re going to get into a lot of trouble.”

They looked at each other. Baxter knew that Turner was part owner of the Clinton and that he and Mrs. Chednik had decided to cut him off until he paid up. And Turner knew that he knew this. The bastard!

The next stop was the furnished efficiency he called home over on River Road Extension. Baxter walked up the stairs to the twilight gloom of his living room. A small black-and-white television glowed faintly in a corner. Betsy was in the bedroom, packing. Her eye had swollen badly.

“And just where do you think you’re going?” Baxter demanded.

“I’m going to stay with my brother.”

“Forget it,” Baxter said, “it was only an argument.” She went on packing.

“You’re staying right here,” Baxter told her. Her pushed her out of the way and looked through her suitcase. He came up with his onyx cufflinks, his tie clasp with the gold nugget, his Series E savings bonds, and damned if she hadn’t also tucked away his Smith & Wesson .38.

“Now you’re really going to get it,” he told her.

She looked at him levelly. “Charlie, I warn you, never touch me again if you know what’s good for you.”

Baxter took a step toward her, bulky and imposing in his newly pressed suit. But suddenly he remembered that her brother Amos worked in the DA’s office. Would Betsy blow the whistle on him? He really couldn’t risk finding out, even though she was bugging him beyond human endurance.

Just then the doorbell rang sharply, three times—McGorty’s ring—and Baxter had ten dollars with McGorty on today’s number. He opened the door, but it wasn’t McGorty, it was a tiny Chinese woman pitching some religious pamphlet. She wouldn’t shut up and go away, not even when he told her nice; she just kept at him, and Baxter was suddenly filled with the desire to kick her downstairs, along with her knapsack of tracts.

And then Betsy slipped past him. She had managed to get the suitcase closed, and it all happened so fast that Baxter couldn’t do a thing. He finally got rid of the Chinese lady and poured himself a tumblerful of whiskey. Then he remembered the bonds and looked around, but that damned Betsy had whipped everything away, including his goldnugget tie clasp. His Smith & Wesson was still on the bed, under a fold of blanket, so he put it into his suit pocket and poured another drink.

He ate the knockwurst special at the Shamrock, had a quick beer and a shot at the White Rose, and got to the South Camden Shopping Mall just before closing. He sat in a luncheonette, had a coffee, and watched Conabee and his employees leave at seven-thirty. He sat for another half hour, then let himself into the shop.

It was dark inside, and Baxter stood very still, getting the feel of the place. He could hear a lot of clocks going at different rates, and there was a high-pitched sound like crickets, and other sounds he couldn’t identify. He listened for a while, then took out his pocket flashlight and looked around.

His light picked out curious details; a scale-model Spad biplane with ten-foot wings, hanging from the ceiling and tilted as if to attack; a fat plastic beetle almost underfoot; a model Centurion tank nearly five feet long. He was standing in the dark in the midst of motionless toys, and beyond them he could make out the dim shapes of large dolls, stuffed animals, and, to one side, a silent jungle made of delicate, shiny metal.

It was an uncanny sort of place, but Baxter was not easily intimidated. He got ready for a long night. He found a pile of cushions, laid them out, found an ashtray, took off his overcoat, and lay down. Then he sat up and took a cellophane-wrapped ham sandwich, slightly squashed, from one pocket, a can of beer from the other. He got a cigarette going, lay back, and chewed, drank, and smoked against a background of sounds too faint to be identified. One of the many clocks struck the hour, then the others chimed in, and they kept going for a long time.

He sat up with a start. He realized that he had dozed off. Everything seemed exactly the same. Nobody could have unlocked the door and slipped in past him, yet there seemed to be more light.

A dim spotlight had come on, and he could hear spooky organ music, but faintly, faintly, as though from very far away. Baxter rubbed his nose and stood up. Something moved beside his left shoulder, and he turned his flashlight on it. It was a life-size puppet of Long John Silver. Baxter laughed uncertainly.

More lights came on, and a spotlight picked out a group of three big dolls sitting at a table in a corner of the room. The papa doll was smoking a pipe and letting out clouds of real smoke, the mama doll was crocheting a shawl, and the baby doll was crawling on the floor and gurgling.

Then a group of doll people danced out in front of him. There were little shoemakers and tiny ballerinas and a miniature lion that roared and shook its mane. The metal jungle came to life, and great mechanical orchids opened and closed. There was a squirrel with blinking golden eyes; it cracked and ate silver walnuts. The organ music swelled up loud and sweet. Fluffy white doves settled on Baxter’s shoulders, and a bright-eyed fawn licked at his fingers. The toys danced around him, and for a moment Baxter found himself in the splendid lost world of childhood.

Suddenly he heard a woman’s laughter.

“Who’s there?” he called out.

She stepped forward, followed by a silvery spotlight. She was Dorothy of Oz, she was Snow White, she was Gretel, she was Helen of Troy, she was Rapunzel; she was exquisitely formed, almost five feet tall, with crisp blond curls clustered around an elfin face. Her slight figure was set off by a frilly white shift tied around the waist with a red ribbon.

“You’re that missing doll!” Baxter exclaimed.

“So you know about me,” she said. “I would have liked a little more time, so that I could have gotten all the toys performing. But it doesn’t matter.”

Baxter, mouth agape, couldn’t answer. She said, “The night Conabee assembled me, I found that I had the gift of life. I was more than a mere automaton—I lived, I thought, I desired. But I was not complete. So I hid in the ventilator shaft and stole materials in order to become as I am now, and to build this wonderland for my creator. Do you think he will be proud of me?”

“You’re beautiful,” Baxter said at last.

“But do you think Mr. Conabee will like me?”

“Forget about Conabee,” Baxter said.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s crazy,” Baxter said, “but I can’t live without you. We’ll get away from here, work it out somehow. I’ll make you happy, babe, I swear it!”

“Never,” she said. “Conabee created me and I belong to him.”

“You’re coming with me,” Baxter said.

He seized her hand and she pulled away from him. He yanked her toward him and her hand came off in his grip. Baxter gaped at it, then threw it from him. “Goddamn you!” he screamed. “Come here!”

She ran from him. He took out his .38 and followed. The organ music began to wander erratically, and the lights were flickering. He saw her run behind a set of great alphabet blocks. He hurried after her—and then the toys attacked.

The tank rumbled into action. It came at him slow and heavy. Baxter put two slugs into it, tumbling it across the room. He caught a glimpse of the Spad diving toward him, and he shot it in midair, squashing it against the wall like a giant moth. A squad of little mechanical soldiers discharged their cork bullets at him, and he kicked them out of the way. Long John Silver lunged at him, and his cutlass caught Baxter under the ribcage. But it was only a rubber sword; Baxter pushed the pirate aside and had her cornered behind the Punch and Judy.

She said, “Please don’t hurt me.”

He said, “Come with me!”

She shook her head and tried to dodge him. He grabbed her as she went past, catching her by the blond curls. She fell, and he felt her head twist in his hands, twist around in a full, impossible circle, so that her body was turned away from him while her pretty blue eyes still stared into his face.

“Never!” she said.

In a spasm of rage and revulsion, Baxter yanked at her head. It came off in his hands. In the neck stump he could see bits of glass winking in a gray matrix.

The mama and papa and baby dolls stopped in mid-motion. Long John Silver collapsed. The broken doll’s blue eyes blinked three times; then she died.

The rest of the toys stopped. The organ faded, the spotlights went out, and the last jungle flower clinked to the floor. In the darkness, a weeping fat man knelt beside a busted doll and wondered what he was going to tell Conabee in the morning.

HOW PRO WRITERS REALLY WRITE—OR TRY TO

Like most authors of science fiction, I was an avid reader first. Back then, as an aspiring writer as well as a fan, I wanted to know how professional writers actually do their jobs. How do they develop their ideas, plot their stories, overcome their difficulties? Now, twenty-five years later, I know a little about it.

Professional writers are extremely individualistic in the ways they approach their task. If you are among a lucky few, it is relatively simple. You get an idea, which in turn suggests a plot and characters. With that much in hand, you go to a typewriter and bash out a story. When it’s done, a few hours later, you correct the grammar and spelling. This editing usually results in a messy-looking manuscript, so you type out the whole thing again. For better or worse, your story is now finished.

That’s pretty much how I went about it early in my career. If anyone asked, I would explain that plotting a story consists merely of giving your hero a serious problem, a limited amount of time in which to solve it, and dire consequences if he fails to do so. You preclude all easy solutions, The hero tries this and that, but all his efforts serve only to sink him into deeper trouble. Time is soon running out and he still hasn’t defeated the villain, rescued the girl, or learned the secret of the alien civilization. He’s on the verge of utter, tragic defeat. Then, at the last moment, you get him out of trouble. How does this happen? In a flash of insight your hero solves his problem by logical means inherent in the situation but overlooked until now. Done properly, your solution makes the reader say, “Of course. Why didn’t I think of that?” You then bring the story to a swift conclusion—and that’s all there is to it.

This straightforward approach sow me through many stories. Inevitably, however sophistication set in and I began to experience difficulties. I began to view writing as a problem and to look for ways of dealing with that problem.

I looked to my colleagues and their individual methodologies. Lest Del Rey, for example, told me that he wrote out his stories in his head—word, for word, sentence for sentence—before committing them to paper. Months, even years, would be devoted to this mental composition.

Only when he was ready to type out a story would Lester go to his office, which was about the size of a broom closet, though not so pretty. He had built it in the middle of the living room. After cramming himself inside, Lester would be locked in place by a typewriter that unfolded from the wall into his lap. Paper, pencils, cigarettes and ashtray were there, and a circulation fan to keep him from suffocating. It was much like being in an upright coffin, but with the disadvantage that he was not dead.

Philip Klass, better known as William Tenn, had many different work methods back in those days. He developed them in order to cope with a blockage as tenacious and enveloping as a lovestricken boa constrictor. Phil and I used to discuss our writing problems at length. Once we invented a method that would serve two writers. The scheme involved renting a studio and furnishing it with a desk, typewriter, and heavy oaken chair. The chair was to be fitted with a chain and a padlock. According to our scheme, we would take turns in the studio. When it was, say, Phil’s turn to write, I would chain him to the chair, leaving his arms free to type. I would then leave him there, despite his piteous please and entreaties, until he had produced a given amount of cogent prose. At that point I would release him and take his place.

We never did carry out our scheme, probably because of the unlikelihood of finding a chair strong enough to restrain a writer determined to escape work. But we did try something else. We agreed to meet at a diner in Greenwich Village at the end of each day’s work. There we showed each other the pages we had done. If either of us had failed to fulfill his quota for the day, he would pay the other ten dollars.

It seemed foolproof, but we soon ran into a difficulty. Neither of us was willing to let the other actually read his rough, unfinished copy. We got around this by presenting our pages upside down. But this procedure made it impossible to tell if we had really written new copy that day or if we were showing pages from years ago. It became a point of honor for each of us to present new copy that the other could not read. We did this for about a week, then spontaneously and joyously reverted to our former practice of just talking about writing.

As the years passed, my own blockage became wider, deeper and blacker. I thought I knew what my trouble was, however. My trouble was my wife. As soon as I did something about her, I reasoned, everything would be okay. Two divorces later, I knew it was not my wife.

The trouble, I next decided, was New York. How could I possible work in such a place? What I needed was sunshine, a sparkling sea, olive trees, and solitude. So I moved to the island of Ibiza. There I rented a three-hundred-year-old farmhouse on a hill overlooking the Mediterranean. The house lacked electricity, but it did have four rooms, any one of which I could use as my office. First, I tried to work in the beautiful, bright rooms upstairs. Alas, I couldn’t concentrate on my writing here because I spent too much time admiring the splendid view from the window. So, I moved downstairs to a room that had only one narrow window, with bars over it in case of attack by pirates. Formerly a storage place for potatoes, the room was dark and dank. There was nothing to divert my attention. But I couldn’t work here either. There was no electricity and my kerosene lamp gave off too much smoke.

At last I saw what the real trouble was. It stemmed from my working indoors. Henceforth, I would toil outdoors, as it was meant to be. So I set up on the beach—only to be frustrated again, this time by the heat of a searing sun and by the ceaseless onshore breeze blowing sand into my typewriter. I tried composing under a shady tree, but the flies drove me away. When I tried to do my writing in a café, the waiters were too noisy.

I gave up on Ibiza and moved to London, firmly convinced that my problem was a shortage of self-discipline. I began to search in earnest for ways of doing by artifice what once I had done naturally. Here, in no particular order, are a few of the methods I have utilized.

When I am blocked, my tendency is to avoid writing. That’s quite predictable. But the less I write, the less I feel capable of writing. A sense of oppression increases as my output dwindles, and I begin to dread writing anything at all. How to break this vicious cycle? The hard truth is that it can only be done by writing. I must practice my craft regularly if I am to maintain any facility at it. I need to produce a flow of words. How am I to achieve that flow when I am blocked?

To solve this dilemma, at one juncture I set myself to type five thousand words a day. Type, now write. Wordage was my only requirement. The substance of what I wrote did not matter. It could be anything, even gibberish, even lists of disconnected words, even my name over and over again. All that mattered was to produce daily wordage in quantity.

Perhaps that sounds simple. It was not, I assure you. The first day went well enough. By the second, however, I had exhausted my ready stock of banalities. I found myself creating something like this:

“Ah, yes, here we are at last, getting near the bottom of the page. One more sentence, just a few more words…that’s it, go baby, go, do those words…Ah, page done. That’s page 19, and now we are at the top of page 20—the last page of the day—or night, since it is now 3:30 in the bloody morning and I have been at this for what feels like a hundred years. But only one page to go, the last, and then I can put aside this insane nonsense and do something else, anything else, anything in the whole world except this. This, this, this. Damn, still three-quarters of a page to go. Oh words, wherefore art thou, words, now that I need you? Come quickly to my fingers and release me from this horror, horror, horror…Oh, God I am losing my mind, mind, mind…but wait, is it possible? Yes, here it is, the end of the page coming up. Oh, welcome, kindly end of page, and now I am finished, finished, finished!”

After a few days of this, I realized I was working very hard and not getting paid for it. Since I was turning out five thousand words a day anyway, and since I was getting tired of typing long meandering streams of meaningless verbiage, I asked myself why I shouldn’t write a story.

And I did just that. I sat down and wrote a story. And it was easy!

Could it be that I had the master key to writing at last? I wrote another story. This was not so easy, but it was not unduly difficult, either. So there I was with two complete stories on paper, and each had taken only a day to wrap up. I thought proudly of these stories for a year afterward. I’ve never employed this technique to get anything else written, but I know it works. Someday, when I’m feeling desperate enough, I’ll probably rely on it again. Meanwhile, however, I’m still seeking a less agonizing method.

Wordage, after all, is not the sole consideration. Writing a story can be a strange and fearsome business. You want so badly to get it just right. You try so hard and judge yourself so severely that you may succeed only in confusing yourself. Perhaps you’ve written many thousands of words and you’re sorely dissatisfied with them. It’s all chaos and you can’t seem to get on an orderly course. That was my next problem. Wordage, yes, but also an unwillingness, a fear of submitting myself to the tortures of actually turning out a story.

My solution, typically enough was to try to sidestep the problem. Since there seemed to be no way of writing a story without plunging myself into utter despair, I decided I would not write a story. Instead, I would write a simulation of a story.

My simulations are the same length as a story, and they are made up of narration, dialogue, exposition , and all the other elements of a proper story. The difference is that in a proper story the words you choose are vitally important; in a simulation they are of no importance whatever. When I write a simulation, it doesn’t matter if my images are trite and my dialogue leaden. It isn’t a story, remember, but only something like a story. It’s a formal exercise rather than a piece of careful creation. I never consciously attempt to work into a simulation the beauty, precision, humor, and pathos that a proper story must contain.

Using this method has taught me that I have a certain gift for self-deception. Curious to relate, I’ve discovered that—except for a few rough spots here and there—my simulated stories are very much like the real ones I’ve written.

What this obviously means is that I can only write as I write, no matter how hard I try. Trying too hard, in fact, has an adverse effect on my performance. The whole purpose of simulation is to work rapidly with a certain lightness of touch, as one would do a watercolor rather than an oil painting. This method does work. But there are a couple of obstructive thoughts I have to watch out for. The first is, “Hell, this is going badly; I’d better start again.” The other is, “Hey, this is going well; I’d better tighten up and make it really good.” Both of these judgments are counterproductive.

Thinking, not writing, is sometimes the problem. Various ideas must be regarded from different angles before I can begin writing. Critical decisions must be formulated. Alternatives must be weighed. Bits of data need to be juggled, fitted into place, discarded, or altered. Such problems are elusive. They refuse to solidify. I make some notes, or go for a long walk, or discuss it with my wife, but nothing seems to help much. It’s all so nebulous and unclear. There are too many things to consider at once, and no means of arranging my data. At times like this, it can be helpful to make a diagram. Here’s the sort of diagram I find useful. You pencil a key word in the corner of a sheet of paper and draw a circle around it. Then you draw radiating lines from it and write, as succinctly as possible, the various considerations associated with the idea. The resulting diagram sums up your knowledge on the subject. The entire question and all of its ramifications can be taken in at a glance, enabling you to see what you have and, equally important, what you don’t have. Hookups between parts of the diagram will suggest themselves. Pertinent areas can be enclosed or connected. Different colors can be used for emphasis. New data can easily be added. Areas of special significance can be removed as the bases of new diagrams or sub-daigrams.

Working with diagrams is fun. At first I made mine with an ordinary fountain pen. Then I switched to colored Pentels. For greater efficiency, I worked out a set of color-coded symbols, which was well worth the time it took. I also experimented with different modes of lettering to improve clarity.

My diagrams grew larger and more complex, whereupon I switched to larger sheets of paper. After that, I got into colored inks. The commercial brands weren’t quite right, so I began to mix my own. But the system still lacked something. It was becoming too mechanical and lackluster. So I began to illustrate my diagrams, first with little sketches, then with line and wash drawings, and finally with watercolors. My skill as an illustrator left something to be desired, so I began looking for a good art course. Unfortunately, I had to drop the whole thing and get some salable writing done. Still, it was not a total waste. When a market opens up for fancy diagrams, I’ll be all set.

My trials and tribulations have brought me to one firm conclusion—namely, that confusion and anxiety will never be eliminated altogether from the process of creative writing. Ideas frequently have to incubate in an author’s subconscious until something clicks into place. Often, at least in my case, this gestation period is allowed to persist too long, which serves as a detriment to the later stages of the work. You can reach a stage where the idea should be hatched, but something is still amiss and you don’t know what it is. It sits there, a soggy dark mass in your mind, a subtle, unpleasantness that will not permit you to continue. What to do then?

There is an extraordinarily direct method that I’ve devised to answer this very problem. A psychologist would probably describe it as a catharsis. A typical session finds me talking to myself aloud, asking and answering questions.

“Well, Bob, what exactly is wrong?”

“The story stinks, that’s what’s wrong.”

“But how, precisely, does it stink?”

“It moves too slowly, for one thing.”

“So how could you speed it up?”

“I don’t know.”

“Of course you know, Bob. Name a way in which you could speed it up.”

“Well, I suppose I could delete the two-thousand word description of a sunset on Mars.”

“Would that solve the problem?”

“No. My characters stink, too.”

“In what way?”

“They just sit around wishing they were somewhere else.”

“What could you do about that?”

“Give them something to do, I guess.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know.... Wait. I’ve got it. They can look for an alien civilization!”

This method works well, but it does demand a certain degree of concentration. That’s the only tough part about it. Occasionally, I can’t even get my questions into focus, let alone the answers. At such times, my solo dialogue is apt to go like this:

“Well, Bob, how’s the lad?”

“I’m fine, thanks. How about you?”

“Oh, I’m fine.”

“That’s nice.”

“Yes, it is, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Was there some problem you wanted to discuss with me?

“Problem? Oh, yes, it’s this story.”

“What story?”

“The one I’ve been trying to write for the last three months.”

“Oh, that story.”

“Yes.”

“You mean the story with a two-thousand word description of a Martian sunset?”

“That’s the one.”

“Have you got any ideas?”

“About what?”

“About the story, Bob. How can I fix it?”

“Well, you could always expand the description of that sunset…”

And so it goes—you win some and you lose some.