The Best of R. A. Lafferty

Introduction by Cat Rambo

In “Boomer Flats,” which originally appeared in If Magazine in 1971, Lafferty expands on the internal mythology of his work and returns to familiar themes. Evolution, and how humans fit into it through spontaneous evolutionary leaps, features in other stories such as “Ginny Wrapped in the Sun” and “In Deepest Glass.” Lafferty asserted that storytelling was a manifestation of ancestry and that storytellers belonged “to the old ‘red-bone people.’” The journey to Boomer Flats brings the reader to a strange town where those people walk daily.

To those who know who Ivan Sanderson is, the clue is there from the very first line: eminent scientists Arpad Arkabaranan, Willy McGilly, and Dr. Velikof Vonk, declaring themselves his spiritual offspring, are in search of Fortean phenomena, specifically the ABSM (Abominable Snowman). It’s a literal wild-goose chase, as McGilly notes, referring to the hundreds of mud geese in flight across the sky.

This sort of linguistic play, the metaphorical made real, ripples through the story, and even sometimes slides it over into poetry’s realm, such as the repeated reassurance Crayola Catfish gives the eminent scientists about their drinks, “They’re fixing them for you now. I’ll bring them after a while.”

Boomer Flats is a shadow town, an echo of the town of Boomer. “Something a little queer and primordial about the whole place!” Lafferty warns the reader, who already knows we’re wandering in strange territory.

The three eminent scientists know it too. Dr. Velikof Vonk’s eyes grin “out of deep folk memory,” as he begins to drink what Crayola has brought him: a clay cup that “smelled strongly of river, perhaps of interstadial river.” The drinks, the Green Snake Snorters, move the trio into a strange mythopoetic world in washes, like a television show’s set where each cut-away and back reveals odder and odder details changed and added. The prose becomes stranger and stranger at the same time, moving into deeper and deeper waters of wordplay. That shabby man playing dominoes is a bear. Pieces are falling off a man called the Comet. And then, the giants enter, standing around the edges of the room in their black hats. This is where the legends dwell, almost as though Boomer Flats is the secret heart of Lafferty’s cosmos.

The three eminent scientists are specifically identified as three Magi, but what they find is not an answer in the form of the Christ Child, but more and more questions about the world itself. Instead the ending turns back to story’s heart in a way that pulls the reader further in and farther out, so to speak. This is Lafferty at his luminiferous best, slipstream before the term was ever invented.

Boomer Flats

“In the tracks of our spiritual father Ivan Sanderson we may now have trailed a clutch of ABSMs to their lair,” the eminent scientist Arpad Arkabaranan was saying in his rattling voice. “And that lair may not be a mountain thicket or rain forest or swamp, but these scrimpy red clay flats. I would almost give my life for the success of this quest, but it seems that it should have a more magnificent setting.”

“It looks like a wild-goose chase,” the eminent scientist Willy McGilly commented. But no, Willy was not downgrading their quest. He was referring to the wild geese that rose about them from the edges of the flats with clatter and whistle and honk. This was a flight-way, a chase of theirs. There were hundreds of them if one had the fine eyes to pick them out from the background. “Mud geese,” Willy said. “We don’t see as many of them as when I was a boy.”

“I do not, and I am afraid that I will not, believe in the ABSMs,” said the eminent scientist Dr. Velikof Vonk, stroking his—(no he didn’t, he didn’t have one)—stroking his jaw, “and yet this is the thing that I also have most desired, to find this missing link finally, and to refute all believers in the other thing.”

“We can’t see the chain for the links,” said Willy McGilly. “I never believed that any of them was missing. There’s always been too many of them for the length of the chain: that’s the trouble.”

“I’ve traveled a million miles in search of them,” said Arpad. “I’ve pretty well probed all the meager ribs of the world in that travel. My fear has always been that I’d miss them by a trick, even that in some unaccountable way I wouldn’t know them when I found them. It would be ironic if we did find them in such a place as this: not a wild place, only a shabby and overlooked place.”

“My own fear has been that when I finally gazed on one I would wake with a start and find that I had been looking in a mirror,” said Velikof. “There must be some symbolism here that I don’t understand. What is your own anticipation of them, Willy?”

“Oh, coming back to people I’ve always liked. There used to be a bunch of them on the edge of my hometown,” Willy McGilly said. “Come to think of it, there used to be a bunch of them on the edge of every hometown. Now they’re more likely to be found right in the middle of every town. They’re the scrubs, you know, for the bottoming of the breed.”

“What are you talking about, Willy?” Arpad asked sharply.

What they were all talking about was ABSMs.

Every town in the south part of that county has a shadow or secondary. There is Meehan, and Meehan Corners; Perkins, and Perkins Corner; Boomer, and Boomer Flats. The three eminent scientists were driving the three miles from Boomer to Boomer Flats looking for the bones, and hopefully even the living flesh, of a legend. It was that of the missing link, of the Abominable Snowman, the ABSM. It wasn’t snowy country there, but the so-called Snowmen have been reported in every sort of climate and countryside. The local legend, recently uncovered by Arpad, was that there was a non-African non-Indian “people of color” living in the neighborhood of Boomer Flats, “between the sand-bush thickets and the river.” It was said that they lived on the very red mud banks of the river, and that they lived a little in the river itself.

Then Dr. Velikof Vonk had come onto a tape in a bunch of anthropological tapes, and the tape contained sequences like this:

“What do they do when the river floods?”

“Ah, they close their noses and mouths and ears with mud, and they lie down with big rocks on their breasts and stay there till the flood has passed.”

“Can they be taught?”

“Some of the children go to school, and they learn. But when they are older then they stay at home, and they forget.”

“What sort of language do they talk?”

“Ah, they don’t seem to talk very much. They keep to themselves. Sometimes when they talk it is just plain Cimarron Valley English.”

“What do they eat?”

“They boil river water in mud clay pots. They put in wild onions and greenery. The pottage thickens then, I don’t know how. It gets lumps of meat or clay in it, and they eat that too. They eat frogs and fish and owls and thicket filaments. But mostly they don’t eat very much of anything.”

“It is said that they aren’t all of the same appearance. It is even said that they are born, ah, shapeless, and that—ah—could you tell me anything about that?”

“Yeah. They’re born without much shape. Most of them never do get much shape. When they have any, well actually their mothers lick them into shape, give them their appearance.”

“It’s an old folk tale that bears do that.”

“Maybe they learned it from the bears then, young fellow. There’s quite a bit of bear mixture in them, but the bears themselves have nearly gone from the flats and thickets now. More than likely the bears learned it from them. Sometimes the mothers lick the cubs into the shape of regular people for a joke.”

“That is the legend?”

“You keep saying legend. I don’t know anything about legend. I just tell you what you ask me. I’ll tell you a funny one, though. One of the mothers who was getting ready to bear happened to get ahold of an old movie magazine that some fishers from Boomer had left on the river edge. There was a picture in it of the prettiest girl that anyone ever saw, and it was a picture of all of that girl. This mother was tickled by that picture. She bore a daughter then, and she licked her into the shape and appearance of the girl in the movie magazine. And the girl grew up looking like that and she still looks like that, pretty as a picture. I don’t believe the girl appreciates the joke. She is the prettiest of all the people, though. Her name is Crayola Catfish.”

“Are you having me, old fellow? Have those creatures any humor?”

“Some of them tell old jokes. John Salt tells old jokes. The Licorice Man tells really old jokes. And man, does the Comet ever tell old jokes!”

“Are the creatures long-lived?”

“Long-lived as we want to be. The elixir comes from these flats, you know. Some of us use it, some of us don’t.”

“Are you one of the creatures?”

“Sure, I’m one of them. I like to get out from it sometimes though. I follow the harvests.”

This tape (recorded by an anthropology student at State University who, by the way, has since busted out of anthropology and is now taking hotel and restaurant management) had greatly excited the eminent scientist Dr. Velikof Vonk when he had played it, along with several hundred other tapes that had come in that week from the anthropology circuit. He scratched his—(no he didn’t, he didn’t have one)—he scratched his jowl and he phoned up the eminent scientists Arpad Arkabaranan and Willy McGilly.

“I’ll go, I’ll go, of course I’ll go,” Arpad had cried. “I’ve traveled a million miles in search of it, and should I refuse to go sixty? This won’t be it, this can’t be it, but I’ll never give up. Yes, we’ll go tomorrow.”

“Sure, I’ll go,” Willy McGilly said. “I’ve been there before, I kind of like those folks on the flats. I don’t know about the biggest catfish in the world, but the biggest catfish stories in the world have been pulled out of the Cimarron River right about at Boomer Flats. Sure, we’ll go tomorrow.”

“This may be it,” Velikof had said. “How can we miss it? I can almost reach out and scratch it on the nose from here.”

“You’ll find yourself scratching your own nose, that’s how you’ll miss it. But it’s there and it’s real.”

“I believe, Willy, that there is a sort of amnesia that has prevented us finding them or remembering them accurately.”

“Not that, Velikof. It’s just that they’re always too close to see.”

So the next day the three eminent scientists drove over from T-Town to come to Boomer Flats. Willy McGilly knew where the place was, but his pointing out of the way seemed improbable: Velikof was more inclined to trust the information of people in Boomer. And there was a difficulty there.

People kept saying, “This is Boomer. There isn’t exactly any place called Boomer Flats.” Boomer Flats wasn’t on any map. It was too small even to have a post office. And the Boomer people were exasperating in not knowing about it or knowing the way to it.

“Three miles from here, and you don’t know where it is?” Velikof asked one of them angrily.

“I don’t even know that it is,” the Boomer man had said in his own near anger. “I don’t believe that there is such a place.”

Finally, however, other men told the eminent scientists that there sort of was such a place, sort of a place. Sort of a road going to it too. They pointed out the same improbable way that Willy McGilly had pointed out.

The three eminents took the road. The flats hadn’t flooded lately. The road was sand, but it could be negotiated. They came to the town, to the sort of town, in the ragged river flats. There was such a place. They went to the Cimarron Hotel which was like any hotel anywhere, only older. They went into the dining room, for it was noon.

It had tables, but it was more than a dining room. It was a common room. It even had intimations of old elegance in blued pier mirrors. There was a dingy bar there. There was a pool table there, and a hairy man was playing rotation with the Comet on it. The Comet was a long gray-bearded man (in fact, comet means a star with a beard) and small pieces were always falling off him. Clay-colored men with their hats on were playing dominos at several of the tables, and there were half a dozen dogs in the room. Something a little queer and primordial about those dogs! Something a little queer and primordial about the whole place!

But, as if set to serve as distraction, there was a remarkably pretty girl there, and she might have been a waitress. She seemed to be waiting, either listlessly or profoundly, for something.

Dr Velikof Vonk twinkled his deep eyes in their orbital caves: perhaps he cogitated his massive brain behind his massive orbital ridges: and he arrived, by sheer mentality, at the next step.

“Have you a menu, young lady?” he asked.

“No,” she answered simply, but it wasn’t simple at all. Her voice didn’t go with her prettiness. It was much more intricate than her appearance, even in that one syllable. It was powerful, not really harsh, deep and resonant as caverns, full and timeless. The girl was big-boned beneath her prettiness, with heavy brindled hair and complex eyes.

“We would like something to eat,” Arpad Arkabaranan ventured. “What do you have?”

“They’re fixing it for you now,” the girl said. “I’ll bring it after a while.”

There was a rich river smell about the whole place, and the room was badly lit.

“Her voice is an odd one,” Arpad whispered in curious admiration. “Like rocks rolled around by water, but it also has a touch of springtime in it, springtime of a very peculiar duality.”

“Not just a springtime; it’s an interstadial time,” Willy McGilly stated accurately. “I’ve noticed that about them in other places. It’s old green season in their voices, green season between the ice.”

The room was lit only by hanging lamps. They had a flicker to them. They were not electric.

“There’s a lot of the gas-light era in this place,” Arpad gave the opinion, “but the lights aren’t gas lights either.”

“No, they’re hanging oil lamps,” Velikof said. “An amusing fancy just went through my head that they might be old whale-oil lamps.”

“Girl, what do you burn in the hanging lamps?” Willy McGilly asked her.

“Catfish oil,” she said in the resonant voice that had a touch of the green interstadial time in it. And catfish oil burns with a clay-colored flame.

“Can you bring us drinks while we wait?” Velikof of the massive head asked.

“They’re fixing them for you now,” the girl said. “I’ll bring them after a while.”

Meanwhile on the old pool table the Comet was beating the hairy man at rotation. Nobody could beat the Comet at rotation.

“We came here looking for strange creatures,” Arpad said in the direction of the girl. “Do you know anything about strange creatures or people, or where they can be found?”

“You are the only strange people who have come here lately,” she told them. Then she brought their drinks to them, three great sloshing clay cups or bulbous stems that smelled strongly of river, perhaps of interstadial river. She set them in front of the eminents with something like a twinkle in her eyes; something like, but much more. It was laughing lightning flashing from under the ridges of that pretty head. She was awaiting their reaction.

Velikof cocked a big deep eye at his drink. This itself was a feat. Other men hadn’t such eyes, or such brows above them, as had Velikof Vonk. They took a bit of cocking, and it wasn’t done lightly. And Velikof grinned out of deep folk memory as he began to drink. Velikof was always strong on the folk memory bit.

Arpad Arkabaranan screamed, rose backward, toppled his chair, and stood aghast while pointing a shaking finger at his splashing clay cup. Arpad was disturbed.

Willy McGilly drank deeply from his own stirring vessel.

“Why, it’s Green Snake Snorter!” he cried in amazement and delight. “Oh drink of drinks, thou’re a pleasure beyond expectation! They used to serve it to us back home, but I never even hoped to find it here. What great thing have we done to deserve this?”

He drank again of the wonderful splashing liquor while the spray of it filled the air. And Velikof also drank with noisy pleasure. The girl righted Arpad’s chair, put Arpad into it again with strong hands, and addressed him powerfully to his cresting breaker. But Arpad was scared of his lively drink. “It’s alive, it’s alive,” was all that he could jabber. Arpad Arkabaranan specialized in primitives, and primitives by definition are prime stuff. But there wasn’t, now in his moment of weakness, enough prime stuff in Arpad himself to face so pleasant and primitive a drink as this.

The liquid was sparkling with bright action, was adequately alcoholic, something like choc beer, and there was a green snake in each cup. (Velikof in his notebook states that they were green worms of the species vermis ebrius viridis, but that is only a quibble. They were snakelike worms and of the size of small snakes, and we will call them snakes.)

“Do get with it, Arpad,” Willy McGilly cried. “The trick is to drink it up before the snake drinks it. I tell you though that the snakes can discern when a man is afraid of them. They’ll fang the face off a man who’s afraid of them.”

“Ah, I don’t believe that I want the drink,” Arpad declared with sickish grace. “I’m not much of a drinking man.”

So Arpad’s green snake drank up his Green Snake Snorter, noisily and greedily. Then it expired—it breathed out its life and evaporated. That green snake was gone.

“Where did he go?” Arpad asked nervously. He was still uneasy about the business.

“Back to the catfish,” the girl said. “All the snakes are spirits of catfish just out for a little ramble.”

“Interesting,” Velikof said, and he noted in his pocket notebook that the vermis ebrius viridis is not a discrete species of worm or snake, but is rather spirit of catfish. It is out of such careful notation that science is built up.

“Is there anything noteworthy about Boomer Flats?” Velikof asked the girl then. “Has it any unique claim to fame?”

“Yes,” the girl said. “This is the place that the comets come back to.”

“Ah, but the moths have eaten the comets,” Willy McGilly quoted from the old epic.

The girl brought them three big clay bowls heaped with fish eggs, and these they were to eat with three clay spoons. Willy McGilly and Dr. Velikof Vonk addressed themselves to the rich meal with pleasure, but Arpad Arkabaranan refused.

“Why, it’s all mixed with mud and sand and trash,” he objected.

“Certainly, certainly, wonderful, wonderful,” Willy McGilly slushed out the happy words with a mouth full of delicious goop. “I always thought that something went out of the world when they cleaned up the old shantytown dish of shad roe. In some places they cleaned it up; not everywhere. I maintain that roe at its best must always have at least a slight tang of river sewage.”

But Arpad broke his clay spoon in disgust. And he would not eat. Arpad had traveled a million miles in search of it but he didn’t know it when he found it; he hadn’t any of it inside him so he missed it.

One of the domino players at a near table (the three eminents had noticed this some time before but had not fully realized it) was a bear. The bear was dressed as a shabby man, he wore a big black hat on his head; he played dominos well; he was winning.

“How is it that the bear plays so well?” Velikof asked.

“He doesn’t play at all well,” Willy McGilly protested. “I could beat him. I could beat any of them.”

“He isn’t really a bear,” the girl said. “He is my cousin. Our mothers, who were sisters, were clownish. His mother licked him into the shape of a bear for fun. But that is nothing to what my mother did to me. She licked me into pretty face and pretty figure for a joke, and now I am stuck with it. I think it is too much of a joke. I’m not really like this, but I guess I may as well laugh at me just as everybody else does.”

“What is your name?” Arpad asked her without real interest.

“Crayola Catfish.”

But Arpad Arkabaranan didn’t hear or recognize the name, though it had been on a tape that Dr. Velikof Vonk had played for them, the same tape that had really brought them to Boomer Flats. Arpad had now closed his eyes and ears and heart to all of it.

The hairy man and the Comet were still shooting pool, but pieces were still falling off the Comet.

“He’s diminishing, he’s breaking up,” Velikof observed. “He won’t last another hundred years at that rate.”

Then the eminents left board and room and the Cimarron Hotel to go looking for ABSMs who were rumored to live in that area.

ABSM is the code name for the Abominable Snowman, for the Hairy Woodman, for the Wild Man of Borneo, for the Sasquatch, for the Booger-Man, for the Ape-Man, for the Bear-Man, for the Missing Link, for the nine-foot-tall Giant things, for the living Neanderthals. It is believed by some that all of these beings are the same. It is believed by most that these things are no thing at all, no where, not in any form.

And it seemed as if the most were right, for the three eminents could not find hide nor hair (rough hide and copious hair were supposed to be marks by which the ABSMs might be known) of the queer folks anywhere along the red bank of the Cimarron River. Such creatures as they did encounter were very like the shabby and untalkative creatures they had already encountered in Boomer Flats. They weren’t an ugly people: they were pleasantly mud-homely. They were civil and most often they were silent. They dressed something as people had dressed seventy-five years before that time—as the poor working people had dressed then. Maybe they were poor, maybe not. They didn’t seem to work very much. Sometimes a man or a woman seemed to be doing a little bit of work, very casually.

It may be that the red-mud river was full of fish. Something was splashing and jumping there. Big turtles waddled up out of the water, caked with mud even around their eyes. The shores and flats were treacherous, and sometimes an eminent would sink into the sand-mud up to the hips. But the broad-footed people of the area didn’t seem to sink in.

There was plenty of greenery (or brownery, for it had been the dusty weeks) along the shores. There were muskrats, there were even beavers, there were skunks and possums and badgers. There were wolf dens and coyote dens digged into the banks, and they had their particular smells about them. There were dog dens. There were coon trees. There were even bear dens or caves. But no, that was not a bear smell either. What smell was it?

“What lives in these clay caves?” Velikof asked a woman who was digging river clams there.

“The Giants live in them,” she said. Well, they were tall enough to be Giants’ caves. A nine-footer need hardly stoop to enter one.

“We have missed it,” Arpad said. “There is nothing at all to be found here. I will travel farther, and I may find it in other places.”

“Oh, I believe we are right in the middle of it,” Velikof gave the opinion.

“It is all around us, Arpad, everything you wanted,” Willy McGilly insisted.

But Arpad Arkabaranan would have none of the muddy water, none of the red sand or the red sand caves, nothing of anything here. The interest had all gone out of him. The three of them went back to the Cimarron Hotel without, apparently, finding primitive creature or missing link at all.

They entered the common room of the hotel again. Dominos were set before them. They played draw listlessly.

“You are sure that there are no odd creatures around this place?” Arpad again asked the girl Crayola Catfish.

“John Salt is an odd creature and he comes from this place,” Crayola told them. “The Licorice Man is an odd creature, I suppose. So is Ape Woodman: he used to be a big-time football player. All three of them had regular-people blood in them; I suppose that’s what made them odd. They were almost as odd as you three creatures. And the Comet playing pool there is an odd one. I don’t know what kind of blood he has in him to make him odd.”

“How long has he been around here?” Velikof asked.

“He returns every eighty-seven years. He stays here about three years, and he’s already been here two of them. Then he goes off on another circuit. He goes out past the planets and among the stars.”

“Oh? And how does he travel out there?” Velikof asked with cocked tongue and eye.

“With horse and buggy, of course.”

“Oh there, Comet,” Willy McGilly called. “Is it true that you travel out among the stars with horse and buggy?”

“Aye, that I do,” the long gray-bearded man named Comet called back, “with a horse named Pee-gosh and a buggy named Harma. It’s a flop-eared horse and a broken buggy, but they take me there.”

“Touch clay,” said Crayola Catfish, “for the lightning.”

They touched clay. Everything was of baked clay anyhow, even the dominos. And there had been lightning, fantastic lightning dashing itself through every crack and cranny of the flimsy hotel. It was a lightning brighter than all the catfish-oil lamps in the world put together. And it continued. There was clattering sequence thunder, and there was a roaring booming sound that came from a few miles west of the thunder.

The Giants came in and stood around the edges of the room. They were all very much alike, like brothers. They were tall and somber, shabby, black-bearded to the eyes, and with black hats on their heads. Unkempt. All were about nine feet tall.

“Shall I sound like a simpleton if I ask if they are really giants?” Velikof questioned.

“As your eyes tell you, they are the Giants,” Crayola said. “They stay here in the out-of-the-way places even more than the rest of us. Sometimes regular people see them and do not understand that they are regular people too. For that there is scandal. It was the scent of such a scandal, I believe, that brought the three of you here. But they are not apes or bears or monsters. They are people too.”

“They are of your own same kindred?” Velikof asked.

“Oh yes. They are the uncles, the old bachelors. That’s why they grow tall and silent. That’s why they stand around the edges of the room. And that is why they dig themselves caves into the banks and bluffs instead of living in huts. The roofs of huts are too low for them.”

“It would be possible to build taller huts,” Willy McGilly suggested.

“It would be possible for you, yes,” Crayola said. “It would not be possible for them. They are set in their ways. They develop a stoop and a gait because they feel themselves so tall. They let their hair grow and overflow, all over their faces and around their eyes, and all over their bodies also. They are the steers of the species. Having no children or furniture, what can they do but grow tall and ungainly like that? This happens also to the steers of cattle and bears and apes, that they grow tall and gangling. They become bashful, you see, so sometimes it is mistakenly believed that they are fierce.”

The roaring and booming from west of the thunder was becoming louder and nearer. The river was coming dangerously alive. All of the people in the room knew that it was now dark outside, and it was not yet time to be night.

The Comet gave his pool cue to one of the bashful giants and came and sat with the eminents.

“You are Magi?” he asked.

“I am a magus, yes,” Willy McGilly said. “We are called eminent scientists nowadays. Velikof here also remains a magus, but Arpad has lost it all this day.”

“You are not the same three I first believed,” the old Comet said. “Those three passed me several of my cycles back. They had had word of an Event, and they had come from a great distance as soon as they heard it. But it took them near two thousand years to make the trip and they were worried that myth had them as already arriving long ago. They were worried that false Magi had anticipated them and set up a preventing myth. And I believe that is what did happen.”

“And your own myths, old fellow, have they preceded you, or have you really been here before?” Willy McGilly asked. “I see that you have a twisty tongue that turns out some really winding myths.”

“Thank you, for that is ever my intent. Myths are not merely things that were made in times past: myths are among the things that maintain the present in being. I wish most strongly that the present should be maintained: I often live in it.”

“Tell us, old man, why Boomer Flats is a place that the comets come back to?” Willy said.

“Oh, it’s just one of the post stations where we change horses when we make our orbits. A lot of the comets come to the Flats: Booger, Donati, Encke, 1914c, and Halley.”

“But why to Boomer Flats on the little Cimarron River?” Willy inquired.

“Things are often more than they seem. The Cimarron isn’t really so little a river as you would imagine. Actually it is the river named Ocean that runs around all the worlds.”

“Old Comet, old man with the pieces falling off of you,” Dr. Velikof Vonk asked out of that big head of his, “can you tell us just who are the under-people that we have tracked all around the world and have probably found here no more than seventy miles from our own illustrious T-Town?”

“A phyz like you have on you, and you have to ask!” the old Comet twinkled at Velikof (a man who twinkled like that had indeed been among the stars; he had their dust on him). “You’re one of them, you know.”

“I’ve suspected that for a long time,” Velikof admitted. “But who are they? And who am I?”

“Wise Willy here said it correctly to you last night; that they were the scrubs who bottom the breed. But do not demean the scrubs: they are the foundation. They are human as all of us are human. They are a race that underlies the other several races of man. When the bones and blood of the more manifest races grow too thin, then they sustain you with the mixture of their strong kingship: the mixing always goes on, but in special eras it is more widespread. They are the link that is never really missing, the link between the clay and the blood.”

“Why are they, and me if I were not well-kempt and eminent, sometimes taken to be animals?” Velikof asked. “Why do they always live in such outlandish places?”

“They don’t always. Sometimes they live in very inlandish places. Even wise Willy understands that. But it is their function to stand apart and grow in strength. Look at the strong bone structure of that girl there! It is their function to invent forms—look at the form her mother invented for her. They have a depth of mind, and they have it particularly in those ghostly areas where the other races lack it. And they share and mingle it in those sudden motley ages of great achievement and vigor. Consider the great ages of Athens, of Florence, of Los Angeles. And afterward, this people will withdraw again to gather new strength and bottom.”

“And why are they centered here in a tumble-down hotel that is like a series of old daguerreotypes?” Willy McGilly asked. “Will you tell us that there is something cosmic about this little old hotel, as there is about this little old river?”

“Aye, of course there is, Willy. This is the hotel named Xenodocheion. This is the special center of these Xenoi, these strangers, and of all strangers everywhere. It isn’t small; it is merely that you can see but a portion of it at one time. And then they center here to keep out of the way. Sometimes they live in areas and neighborhoods that regularized humanity has abandoned (whether in inner-city or boondock). Sometimes they live in eras and decades that regularized humanity has abandoned: for their profundity of mind in the more ghostly areas, they have come to have a cavalier way with time. What is wrong with that? If regular people are finished with those days and times, why may not others use them?”

The roaring and booming to the west of the thunder had become very loud and very near now, and in the immediate outdoors there was heavy rain.

“It is the time,” the girl Crayola Catfish cried out in her powerful and intricate voice. “The flash flood is upon us and it will smash everything. We will all go and lie down in the river.”

They all began to follow her out, the Boomer Flats people, and the Giants among them; the eminents, everybody.

“Will you also lie down in the river, Comet?” Willy McGilly asked. “Somehow I don’t believe it of you.”

“No, I will not. That isn’t my way. I will take my horse and buggy and ascend above it.”

“Ah, but Comet, will it look like a horse and buggy to us?”

“No, it will look quite other, if you do chance to see it.”

“And what are you really, Comet?” Velikof asked him as they left him. “What species do you belong to?”

“To the human species, of course, Velikof. I belong to still another race of it; another race that mixes sometimes, and then withdraws again to gather more strength and depth. Some individuals of us withdraw for quite long times. There are a number of races of us in the wide cousinship, you see, and it is a necessity that we be strangers to each other for a good part of the time.”

“Are you a saucerian?”

“Oh saucerian be damned, Velikof! Harma means chariot or it means buggy; it does not mean saucer. We are the comets. And our own mingling with the commonalty of people has also had quite a bit to do with those sudden incandescent eras. Say, I’d like to talk with you fellows again some time. I’ll be by this way again in about eighty-seven years.”

“Maybe so,” said Dr. Velikof Vonk.

“Maybe so,” said Willy McGilly.

The eminents followed the Boomer Flats people to the river. And the Comet, we suppose, took his horse and buggy and ascended out of it. Odd old fellow he was; pieces falling off him; he’d hardly last another hundred years.

The red and black river was in surging flood with a blood-colored crest bearing down. And the flats—they were just too flat. The flood would be a mile wide here in one minute and everywhere in that width it would be deep enough and swift enough to drown a man. It was near dark: it was near the limit of roaring sound. But there was a pile of large rocks there in the deepening shallows: plenty of rocks: at least one big heavy rock for every person.

The Boomer Flats people understood what the rocks were for, and the Giants among them understood. Two of the eminents understood; and one of them, Arpad, apparently did not. Arpad was carrying on in great fear about the dangers of death by drowning.

Quickly then, to cram mud into the eyes and ears and noses and mouths. There is plenty of mud and all of it is good. Spirits of Catfish protect us now!—it will be only for a few hours, for two or three days at the most.

Arpad alone panicked. He broke and ran when Crayola Catfish tried to put mud in his mouth and nose to save him. He ran and stumbled in the rising waters to his death.

But all the others understood. They lay down in the red roaring river, and one of the Giants set a heavy rock on the breast of every person of them to hold them down. The last of the Giants then rolled the biggest of the rocks onto his own breast.

So all were safe on the bottom of the surging torrent, safe in the old mud-clay cradle. Nobody can stand against a surging flood like that: the only way is to lie down on the bottom and wait it out. And it was a refreshing, a deepening, a renewing experience. There are persons, both inside and outside the orders, who make religious retreats of three days every year for their renewal. This was very like such a retreat.

When the flood had subsided (this was three days later), they all rose again, rolling the big rocks off their breasts; they cleared their eyes and ears and mouths of the preserving mud, and they resumed their ways and days.

For Velikof Vonk and for Willy McGilly it had been an enriching experience. They had found the link that was not really lost, leaving the other ninety-nine meanwhile. They had grown in cousinship and wisdom. They said they would return to the flats every year at mud-duck season and turtle-egg season. They went back to T-Town enlarged and happy.

There is, however, a gap in the Magi set, due to the foolish dying of Arpad Arkabaranan. It is not of scripture that a set of Magi should consist of only three. There have been sets of seven and nine and eleven. It is almost of scripture, though, that a set should not consist of less than three. In the Masulla Apocalypse it seems to be said that a set must contain at the least a Comet, a Commoner, and a Catfish. The meaning of this is pretty muddy, and it may be a mistranslation.

There is Dr. Velikof Vonk with his huge head, with his heavy orbital ridges, with the protruding near-muzzle on him that makes the chin unnecessary and impossible, with the great back-brain and the great good humor. He is (and you had already guessed it of him) an ABSM, a neo-Neanderthal, an unmissing link, one of that branch of the human race that lives closest to the clay and the catfish.

There is Willy McGilly who belongs (and he himself has come to the realization of this quite lately) to that race of mankind called the Comets. He is quite bright, and he has his periods. He himself is a short-orbit comet, but for all that he has been among the stars. Pieces fall off of him; he leaves a wake; but he’ll last a while yet.

One more is needed so that this set of Magi may be formed again. The other two aspects being already covered, the third member could well be a regularized person. It could be an older person of ability, an eminent. It could be a younger person of ability, a pre-eminent.

This person may be you. Put your hand to it if you have the surety about you, if you are not afraid of green snakes in the cup (they’ll fang the face off you if you’re afraid of them), or of clay-mud, or of comet dust, or of the rollicking world between.