THE NO-SIDED PROFESSOR and other tales of fantasy, humor, mystery, and philosophy

The No-Sided Professor. Copyright © 1987 by Martin Gardner. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Inquiries should be addressed to Prometheus Books, 700 East Amherst Street, Buffalo, New York 14215.

The no-sided professor, and other tales of fantasy, humor, mystery, and philosophy.

Preface

HIS volume is mainly a selection of my published adult fiction. It omits all but one of my stories for children (some 80 yarns about Humpty Dumpty Junior and three about a bashful pig named Piggity), my interviews with the great numerologist Irving Joshua Matrix (collected in The Magic Numbers of Dr. Matrix, Prometheus Books, 1985), all of the 110 science-fiction puzzle vignettes that appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, and a few adult tales best forgotten.

Though not fiction, I have tossed in two poetic effusions: a farewell to the ship on which I served in World War II, and a ballad about an unhappy event in the life of the son of mighty Casey.

The last three chapters are previously unprinted stories. The other chapters are in chronological order of their first publication.

Thang^†

This crude imitation of Lord Dunsany, my first published work of fiction, was written for Thornton Wilder's class in short story writing at the University of Chicago. I can still recall squirming in my seat while he read it aloud to the group. As editor of the college literary magazine, Comment, I slipped it into the February 1936 issue under the byline of George Groth, a pseudonym I have used several times since, though I long ago forgot why I chose that name.

HE Earth had completed another turn about the sun, whirling slowly and silently as it always whirled. The East had experienced a record breaking crop of yellow rice and yellow children, larger stockpiles of weapons were accumulating in certain strategic centers, and the sages of the University of Chicago were uttering words of profound wisdom, when Thang reached down and picked up the Earth between his thumb and finger.

Thang had been sleeping. When he finally awoke and blinked his six opulent eyes at the blinding light (for the light of our stars when viewed in their totality is no thing of dimness) he had become uncomfortably aware of an empty feeling near the pit of his stomach. How long he had been sleeping even he did not know exactly, for in the mind of Thang time is a term of no significance. Although the ways of Thang are beyond the ways of men, and the thoughts of {10} Thang are scarcely conceivable by our thoughts; still—stating the matter roughly and in the language we know—the ways of Thang are this: When Thang is not asleep, Thang hungers.

After blinking his opulent eyes (in a specific consecutive order which had long been his habit) and stretching forth a long arm to sweep aside the closer suns, Thang squinted into the deep. The riper planets were near the center and usually could be recognized by surface texture; but frequently Thang had to thump them with his middle finger. It was some time until he found a piece that suited him. He picked it up with his right hand and shook off most of the adhering salty moisture. Other fingers scaled away thin flakes of bluish ice that had caked on opposite sides. Finally, he dried the ball completely by rubbing it on his chest.

He bit into it. It was soft and juicy, neither unpleasantly hot nor freezing to the tongue; and Thang, who always ate the entire planet, core and all, lay back contentedly, chewing slowly and permitting his thoughts to dwell idly on trivial matters, when suddenly he felt himself picked up by the back of the neck.

He was jerked upward and backward by an arm of tremendous bulk (an arm covered with greyish hair and exuding a foul smell). Then he was lowered even more rapidly. He looked down in time to see an enormous mouth—red and gaping and watering around the edges—then the blackness closed over him with a slurp like a clap of thunder.

The Dome of Many Colors^†

“The Dome of Many Colors” was my first attempt to write a philosophical mystery story of the sort that G. K. Chesterton did so well. I had taken a year of graduate work in philosophy at the University of Chicago, where I had a scholarship, when I decided I had no interest in obtaining a higher degree. The story conveys something of my mood when I made this decision.

WAS half asleep on the sofa in my apartment on Fifty-Seventh Street, near the University of Chicago, listening to a reissue of Clarinet Blues that I had picked up that afternoon. Jess Stacy had just finished on the piano, the orchestra had started jamming, Irving Fazola had come in at exactly the right spot with a high note on the clarinet and was sliding down through the horn, when my telephone began to ring.

I let it jangle for a while, hoping it would stop; but it didn't, so I finally walked over and picked up the phone. It was Professor Bertrand Pepperill Reinkopf. {12}

Reinkopf was the university's most distinguished philosopher.^* I knew almost as little about his specialty, logic and scientific method, as he knew about mine, English literature. But we often played billiards together at the Quadrangle Club, where the faculty and administration officials commingled, and we shared an enthusiasm for Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown. Like Father Brown I seem to have good intuitions about eccentric behavior, and Reinkopf had been impressed by how quickly I once had managed to identify the person who was stealing silverware from the club's dining room. (The thief turned out to be a visiting Austrian economist of extreme libertarian views.)

Reinkopf was worried and perplexed. One of his graduate students, Harold Higgenbotham, had suddenly disappeared under curious circumstances. They were too complicated to explain over the phone. Could I come to his office at once? He said he knew of my interest in such things, and he wanted to talk to me before he discussed the situation with anyone else.

The phonograph had started Clarinet Blues a second time. I let it play while I discarded my dressing gown and slippers, and put on a pair of shoes and a jacket. It was too warm for a necktie.

I walked west along Fifty-Seventh Street, then cut across the campus to Harper Library where Reinkopf had an office on the {13} third floor. The sun was almost down, and the Gothic towers and battlements of the university were throwing long shadows across the grass.

He took the pipe out of his mouth and with a finger wiped away some moisture from the inside corner of one of his pale blue eyes. “Thanks, Featherstone, for coming. But I'm not at all certain there has been a crime.”

I was about to say something when I noticed one of the windows overlooking the Midway. Its lower pane had been smashed, making a large jagged hole in the center. Pieces of glass were scattered over the floor.

“The missile evidently came from outside,” said Reinkopf. “Otherwise the glass fragments would not be inside the room.”

I nodded. “A sound deduction, B.P. Did someone toss a brick through the window?”

“Perhaps,” he said. “But if so, Harold must have carried the brick away with him.”

“The trouble is,” said Reinkopf, “that Harold has gone out. Take a look at that.” He aimed the stem of his pipe at a second desk in the far corner of the room.

I walked over and looked. About fifty small irregular-shaped pieces of brightly colored felt were arranged on the top of the desk in the form of a large semicircle. The pieces were all colors, but mostly reds, greens, yellows, and blues. Just below the semicircle a note was pinned to the desk. It was pinned by a large black desk pen. The point had been forced into the wood, the pen slanting upward like an arrow shot from a bow. I bent over to read the note. {14}

I read it several times. It didn't make much sense, so I walked back to the professor's desk and sat in a chair facing him. “What can you tell me?”

He puffed a while before he spoke. “Harold came here three years ago on a teaching fellowship. He was very young and very shy, but a brilliant student. He told me he had read Principia Mathematica when he was in high school, and he had understood it, too.”

“It is. But Harold had a natural aptitude for grasping the principles of symbolic logic. I took a liking to the boy and arranged for him to have this desk in my office where he could work at night on his doctoral thesis. For three years he's been working on it, including the summer quarters. He has charge of discussion groups during the day, and he spends a great deal of time in the stacks of the philosophy library. But most of the day, and a good part of the night, he's at his desk. This afternoon he failed to show up for a discussion class. When I came here to look for him I found the room just as you see it.”

Reinkopf waved his pipe toward the broken window and the colored felt. “I haven't the foggiest notion what it all means.”

I walked over to Harold's desk to look again at the strange display. Evidently the pieces of cloth were arranged to form some sort of dome. Beyond that my mind was blank.

Reinkopf shook his head. “So far as I know, he doesn't. His parents live somewhere in Brooklyn, but he never spoke about them. He was a quiet, introverted young man—totally absorbed in his research. He seemed to have no interest in socializing with other {15} students in the department or, for that matter, with anyone else.”

“I assume he lived somewhere in the neighborhood. Have you checked his apartment?”

“It's not an apartment—just a small furnished room. I called his landlady, and she told me that this afternoon he packed his suitcase and left without saying where he was going or why. He had so few possessions that nothing was left in his room except some unframed prints he had taped on the walls.”

Dr. Reinkopf knocked the ashes out of his pipe and refilled it from a tobacco jar on his desk. “My theory is as follows. Someone tied a note to a rock and tossed it through the window. The note was of such a nature that it prompted Harold to leave Chicago. He arranged this display, God knows for what reason, then left, taking the note and stone with him.”

I walked over to the basket and began removing sheets of paper. “Hello, what's this?” I said, lifting out a large tangled mass of string.

Reinkopf pulled himself out of his chair and came over to look. “How odd,” he said.

I dumped the contents of the basket on the floor, and the first thing we noticed among the papers was what looked like the cover of a Softball. I picked it up. It was the cover of a Softball.

“Not to my knowledge,” said B.P. His bushy gray eyebrows jumped up and I could see he had an inspiration. “Perhaps it was this,” he said, tapping the Softball's cover with the stem of his pipe, “that came through the window.”

“Perhaps,” I said, “and perhaps this string came from inside the ball, and maybe the colored pieces of felt are bits of left-over scrap that ball manufacturers sometimes use as packing for the core of {16} softballs.”

B.P. was delighted. He chuckled and rubbed his hands together. “Excellent, Sherlock,” he said. Then he sat down and frowned. “But why would Harold want to tear the ball apart?”

I walked over to a window and looked out at Fifty-Ninth Street and the Midway. It was getting dark and there were long lines of cars moving in both directions. Two coeds wearing thin sweaters and saddle shoes were crossing the greensward that divides the Midway. It was a warm, hazy Chicago evening—an evening to be outdoors. I thought of Harold, bent over in his chair, week after week, month after month, carefully recording his research on three-by-five file cards, when outside was all this freshness and freedom and young women wearing sweaters and saddle shoes.

The lines came to me suddenly—something from Shelley's Adonais, something about life and a dome of many colors. . . .

I spun around and began running my eyes over the books on a shelf near Harold's desk. Most of the titles were in German or Polish. Then I came to a little volume that looked as out of place as a German treatise on logic would have looked on the shelf of a drugstore rental library. It was called The Book of Living Verse, one of Untermeyer's endless series of anthologies.

I glanced at the flyleaf to see if it belonged to Harold. “To Harold from Aunt Sarah,” the inscription read. Shelley's poem was in the index and it was easy to find the lines because they were underlined.

Reinkopf thought it over while he fired a match and held it to {17} his pipe. “I recall the passage. Shelley was under the influence of Neo-Platonism. Note how he uses the word stain, implying that . . .” He stopped and blinked a few times. He was beginning to understand.

I sat down and lit a cigarette. “Would you say that Harold had been happy working here?”

“Happy?” The professor leaned back in his chair. “It all depends on how you define happiness. As Aristotle said. . . .”

“It's not an important book,” I said, “but it's an honest book. One of the stories he tells is how he happened to abandon a paint factory that he managed in Ohio.”

I could see Reinkopf was interested because he let his pipe go out and made no effort to relight it.

“For years,” I continued, “Anderson sat at the same desk and wrote the same dreary business letters. Then one day, while he was dictating a letter, he was suddenly overcome by, shall we say, the ennui of the marketplace. So he stopped speaking in the middle of a sentence, laughed insanely in his secretary's face, walked out of his office, down a railroad track, over a bridge, and completely away from that phase of his life.”

“There's a myth that Santayana did something like that when he left Harvard,” Reinkopf said, “but I happen to know he left because he had just received a substantial legacy. He told me so himself.”

“Interesting,” I said. “Now I have an idea that what happened to Higgenbotham was not unlike what happened to Anderson. I could be wrong, but three years is a long time to be working at the same desk. By the way—what was he working on?”

“The influence of the industrial revolution on the development {18} of symbolic logic. I chose the subject for him.”

“No doubt. Well, as I reconstruct the scene, Harold is sitting here this afternoon, feeling tired and bored. He's been doing research all winter. Now its spring. Some youngsters are playing with a soft-ball, and the ball crashes through the window like a thunderbolt from the gods. Harold picks it up and walks to the broken window. He sees the boys running away. Then he takes a good look at the scene below.”

“This afternoon was our first real burst of spring. The sun was shining. Birds were twittering. A day of warm breezes, bold clear colors, beautiful girls appearing from nowhere. . . .”

Reinkopf blinked his watery eyes at something in the distance. “I think they must hibernate through the winter.”

“A plausible hypothesis,” I said, smiling. “And if Harold stood by the window long enough, he surely observed many lovely specimens. I can see him slowly walking back to his desk, in a kind of daze, turning the softball in his hand. It is round like the world, and drab and colorless like the cloistered life he's been living.”

“Maybe,” I continued, “the seam of the ball is slightly torn. Harold is seized with a childish impulse to rip it open—to find out what's inside. Have you ever taken a ball apart, B.P.?”

“You should do it some time. The interiors of golf balls are especially fascinating. Anyhow—I think that's what Harold did. Maybe it was an unconscious urge to tear his academic career to shreds. And when he came to the pieces of felt, I think the vivid colors may have startled him like an apocalyptic vision—like a secret buried in the heart of the world.”

I gathered up the papers on the floor and shoved them back {19} into the wastebasket.

“Harold remembered those lines of Shelley,” I went on, “and was overwhelmed by the contrast between the dome's colors and the gray towers and dismal corridors of the university—between the motley brilliance of life and the white radiance of symbolic logic.”

“It's not a bad metaphor,” said Reinkopf wistfully. “The structure of symbolic logic is the closest we can get to a colorless frame of reference.”

I wasn't sure I understood what that meant, but it sounded like it could be profound. “What Harold needed was a new frame of reference, a new life style. The Softball was what psychiatrists like to call a precipitating factor. It must have triggered a flood of repressed resentments and longings. Harold knew he had reached a crisis in his life. He had to smash his plans the way that window had been smashed. After arranging this gaudy and symbolic display, and with a sense of drama still upon him, he gripped his pen like a dagger and stabbed it into the wood. Never again, he may have said to himself, will this tool of mine be used for nothing better than scribbling notes on colorless cards.”

I took a final drag on my cigarette and tried to flip it through the hole in the window. It missed. I walked over to pick it up.

Several weeks later, while I was finishing lunch at the Quadrangle Club, Reinkopf came over. Without saying anything he handed me a letter:

Reinkopf blinked a few times. “There was an obscure French logician named Pierre Nicole. In 1662 he coauthored an extremely influential manual called The Port-Royal Logic.”

I thought at first that B.P. was serious. Then he smiled suddenly and added, “But I doubt if Pierre is the postscript's referent.”

So Long Old Girl

In the fall of 1945, when the USS Pope and its four surviving sister ships tied up in Florida's Green Cove Springs harbor for decommissioning, I wrote this poem. I am not much of a poet, but for sentimental reasons I decided to keep this piece from dropping into oblivion. It would be easy to touch it up, but I have left it exactly as it came out of the ship's typewriter except for substituting “blacks” for “negroes.”

Before the war, when I worked in the University of Chicago's press relations office, I had known about the efforts by Enrico Fermi and his associates to achieve a nuclear reaction that would make an atom bomb possible. It was deep night in the North Atlantic, while I was standing a lookout's watch on the Bridge, that news came over the intercom about the bombing of Hiroshima. I knew at once that the war with Japan was over, and I was the only man on the ship with the slightest inkling of what had happened. It is this intimation about the future of warfare that gives my farewell to the ship a bit of nontrivial interest.

Good Dancing, Sailor!^†

After my discharge from the Navy, I took a bus from Florida to my home town of Tulsa to see my parents. An old friend, Logan Waite, was working a magic show at a local club. I watched from the wings, still wearing my Navy blues. Later, someone there confused me with a man who did a tap dance in a sailor suit. I got through the war without an injury, but the incident suggested this allegorical tale, written in the style of Sherwood Anderson.

WAITED until everybody got out of the coach that wanted to get out, then I stood up and took my white hat and cloth traveling bag off the rack.

The heat smacked me all at once when I stepped outside. I was wearing my dress blues because the Navy makes you wear them when you travel, even when it's the middle of August and you're in Oklahoma. Turning back the cuffs helped a little. I had a row of ribbons, including three battle stars and the Purple Heart, pinned above my jumper pocket.

There was a big crowd of people on the platform and a lot of hugging and kissing going on. I didn't see anyone I recognized. Nobody was there to meet me because I hadn't written when I was coming home, but I looked around anyway, sort of half expecting someone to be there. I pushed my way to the nearest exit and {28} climbed slowly up the long stairway, pulling myself step by step up the railing. On level ground I could do better, but a stairway was different because you had to raise your feet higher. My left leg throbbed a little when I put my weight on it, but not enough to bother me.

When I reached the street I stopped for a minute to catch my breath and look around. It was beginning to get dark and a faint oily smell from the refineries was blowing across the Arkansas River. That smell did more than anything else to make me realize I was back home again.

The main part of town was only a few blocks away so there was no point in taking a cab. I walked west to Main Street then turned south and started up Main, looking hard at everything to see if anything was different from what it used to be. I noticed a few changes—new places that had opened up and old ones that were gone—but mostly it was the same. The old Brady Hotel was still boarded up like it had been since the fire gutted it about ten years ago; and across the front, near the roof, you could still see the word “FIREPROOF” cut in big stone letters.

I kept walking, past the pawn shops and clothing stores and the little movie houses where I used to see wild west pictures when I was a kid. At Fourth Street I stopped and stood on the corner for a while. This was the center of town. The large electric signs in front of the Orpheum Theater and the Majestic and the Ritz were lighted up and changing colors the way they always did. The same drug store was on the corner. The women on the street looked just as beautiful, but as far as I was concerned it was like seeing women in a strange town. One or two looked like girls I might have known in high school, but I couldn't be sure.

After a while I got tired of standing there, so I walked a little farther along Main to Bishop's Restaurant where I used to eat lunch {29} every day. I took a seat at the counter and looked around to see if any of the old crowd was there, but I didn't see anyone I knew. Even the waitresses were different—all except an older woman with heavy eyebrows who used to wait on me sometimes. She didn't pay any attention to me.

While I ate I thought about whether I ought to call the old man or not. He ran an electric shop in Sand Springs, a small town not far from Tulsa. He used to have a shop in Tulsa, but after I joined the Navy he sold it and opened up one in Sand Springs. My mother had been dead a long time. I helped my father for a while after I finished high school, then I got a job with the Tulsa branch of Westinghouse Electric where I worked until the war started and I enlisted. My two older brothers and most of my friends were still in the service. One of my pals, in the Marines, had been killed in the Pacific. The girl I used to run around with married an engineer at the bomber plant and I hadn't heard from her since. About the only person left in Tulsa that I wanted to see was Turner.

Turner worked for Westinghouse. He was only a few years older than me, but he hadn't been drafted because he had a bad heart and a wife and two kids. Besides, he was doing work the draft board figured was essential to the war effort. I finally decided to stay in Tulsa overnight and look him up, then thumb my way to Sand Springs the next day. My father knew about my medical discharge and was expecting me sometime that week, but no particular day, so it didn't matter much when I got there.

I finished eating, paid the cashier, then walked over to the phone booth and called Turner. His wife answered. “No, he's not home now,” she said, “but he should be home pretty soon. Can I give him a message?”

“Oh, for Pete's sake! Hello Bill,” she said. “When did you get to town?” {30}

She talked fast over the phone, like so many women do, and told me I would have to come over that evening and Turner would be tickled pink to see me and they had another kid since they wrote last—a boy, four months old. Finally she said I ought to go over to the Tulsa club and catch Turner's act.

Turner's hobby was magic and as an amateur magician he worked a lot of club and party dates around the city. This evening, his wife said, the executives of one of the big oil companies were throwing an annual banquet at the Tulsa Club and Turner was part of the floorshow. She was sure I wouldn't have any trouble finding him, then I could go home with him after the show. I told her O.K. I'd try to find him. We said goodbye and hung up.

I walked to the Tulsa Club and took the elevator to the ninth floor where the banquet rooms were. While I was riding up, the elevator operator—a little pug-nosed girl—looked around and said, “Didn't I just take you up?” I shook my head and said, “Not me.”

“Well, that's funny,” she said. “I just took up a sailor that looked exactly like you.”

When I stepped off on the ninth floor I could see the smoky banquet room through a doorway at the end of the hall, and I could hear a xylophone. I walked to the end of the hall and stood at the side of the doorway to see what was going on. A blonde in a black evening gown was banging out a fast jive number on a small chromium-plated xylophone. Her dress was cut low in front and she wiggled her hips while she played. She was going over big.

A colored waiter came over and asked me what I wanted, and when I told him he took me to a side room that was being used as a dressing room. Turner was taking his magic out of a suitcase and arranging it on a small table. He looked up when I walked in, then {31} back at the table, then suddenly back up again.

“My God!” he said, with a big smile, “if it isn't Bill Horgos!” He came over and slapped me on the back and pumped my arm up and down. “How the hell are you, you old electrician's mate?” he said. Then he stepped back and looked me over. “You're looking swell,” he said. “Maybe a little older, but you're looking swell.”

He glanced down at my feet. “I heard about you getting hurt,” he said, his voice lower. “How did things work out?”

I pulled up a trouser leg and showed him the metal brace clamped to my foot. One bar went through my heel. “I can walk pretty well with it now,” I said. “I'm getting better all the time.”

He didn't say anything for a minute, then he smiled and pulled me over to the table, shoved me into a chair, and asked me a lot of questions while he got his stuff ready.

The xylophone girl finished her act and walked back through the dressing room. She glanced down at the brace on my foot, smiled at me, and said “Hello sailor.” Then she told Turner he was on after the next number and disappeared through a door at the back.

When she went through the door a sailor came out, and I could see right away how the elevator girl had been fooled. He was built along my lines, large and chunky, and had hair like mine and features that were similar. You could tell it was a fake sailor suit he was wearing because the white stripes were too wide and the crow was on the wrong arm. I think he must have noticed that we looked alike because he nodded at me with a funny expression as he walked by.

“That's the blonde's husband,” Turner said. “He tap dances. Why don't you step outside and watch. I'm on next. You can see better from the hall.” {32}

I moseyed outside and watched the tap number. The guy wasn't bad. He was light on his feet, and graceful, and the steps were tough ones. I had done some tap dancing myself when I was in high school, so I knew enough about it to know he was good. While he was dancing I began to tap my feet a little, but my leg began hurting so I stopped.

The dancer finished his act with a comedy number in which he pretended to get drunk from a bottle he carried under his jumper. The oil men liked that better than his first number and he got some applause when he finished but not enough for an encore. Then the emcee introduced Turner who carried out his table and started his routine.

Nobody paid any attention to him. They were busy drinking and talking. Turner did three or four tricks that fell flatter than pancakes, then he went into his Chinese routine. This meant putting on a wig with a long queue and causing a bowl of rice to change into a bowl of water. When he finished there was a weak hand-clap from a man over in a corner. Turner wound up by making a cane turn into a colored silk that said on it, “Buy More War Bonds.” This time three men clapped and a heavy man on the right fell out of his chair. Two others were helping him back to his seat while Turner got his gear together and carried the table off to the side.

In the dressing room I found him putting his tricks into the suitcase and looking angry and disgusted. Perspiration was dripping from his forehead. “Never again,” he said, “will I work another dinner date like that.”

The blonde went back out with some more xylophone numbers that woke up the oil men and started them singing. She was the last number on the bill. After it was all over, a tall man with thick glasses that made his eyes look about half as big as they really were came into the room and invited us into the banquet hall for drinks. {33} The blonde and her husband were in back changing into street clothes, but Turner and I took him up on it.

The oil men were gathered in small groups, laughing and drinking. Oklahoma is a dry state but there are spots in Tulsa where you wouldn't notice it. The fat man who fell out of his chair was standing by the xylophone hitting the keys with the sticks but not getting anything that sounded like a tune.

The tall man came over and handed us each an old fashioned. The lenses in his glasses seemed to have circles in them, one inside another, and they were tinted green. He thanked Turner for coming down and told him the act was “marvelous,” especially the trick in which he turned the water into rice. Then he put his hand on my shoulder and said, “That was mighty good dancing, sailor. We all enjoyed your act. You were very funny—funny as hell.”

I started to say something but he wandered off before I had a chance to say it. Turner grinned and whispered, “He thinks you were in the floor show.”

“If the jerk wasn't so drunk,” I said, “he could see this isn't a dummy suit I got on. What the hell's the matter with the guy, anyway? Can't he see these are real campaign ribbons here?”

I don't know why I got so mad, but something made me sore as hell. I finished my old fashioned and said, “Let's get out of this place. I don't like the atmosphere.”

I didn't say anything on the way down in the elevator, and when we got to the street and started walking toward where Turner had parked his car, I got mad all over again.

“So the dope thinks I'm a dancer,” I said. “That's a hot one! For three years now I've been on destroyer escorts that got bounced around the ocean like corks in a bathtub and there were times you could hardly stand up on the deck, let alone dance. I go through two invasions in the Pacific and a major sea battle, and damn near get {34} smashed to bits by a Jap suicide plane, then I come home and some feather merchant thinks I put on a play suit to do funny dances for a bunch of drunks!”

But the night was warm and wonderful and I didn't stay mad long. A young girl with bare legs passed by and looked at me without looking at my foot—looking as if she wondered who I was and like she might want to know. That cheered me up some and made me feel less lonesome.

“He didn't mean anything by it, he just had you mixed up with the tap dancer,” Turner was saying. “He just had you mixed up with that other guy, that's all.”

The Horse on the Escalator^†

“The Horse on the Escalator” was the first story for which I got paid. Jokes about horses were something of a fad in 1946, and I had heard dozens of them told by my good friend Werner (“Dorny”) Dornfield, a Chicago magician and comedy emcee. With Dorny in mind as the story's narrator, I worked into the yarn some of his humorous remarks and sight bits. I had returned to Chicago after my discharge from the Navy, and it was the sale of this story to Esquire that gave me the courage to decline an offer to have back my prewar job in the press relations office of the University of Chicago. I wanted to see if I could earn a living as a writer.

Esquire was then published and edited in Chicago. The managing editor, Fred Birmingham, was sufficiently impressed by my escalator story to take me to lunch. It was a fancy restaurant, and I can still remember my embarrassment when I handed the young woman at the hat-check counter an old Navy pea-jacket that still smelled of diesel oil. But Fred had also been in the Navy, and we soon became friends. As long as he was editor of Esquire he bought my offbeat stories with escalating payments that managed to keep me solvent. I owe him a great debt of gratitude.

HE Purple Hat Club, in the Uptown area of Chicago's north side, wasn't what you'd call a high-class joint. On the other hand it wasn't a lousy dump either, and working there as an emcee was better than at most of the spots I'd been working lately. {36} There were four floor shows a night, with an hour and a half in between, and one night off a week. For the past week I'd been going across the street between shows to a tavern called Rosy's where the beer was just as good and a nickel cheaper.

One night I was sitting at the back end of the bar in Rosy's place, smoking a cigar over a glass of beer and turning over in my mind a joke I'd heard on the radio that I thought I could twist around and use, when the door opened and a nicely-dressed young woman came in. She looked around nervously, as if she'd never been in a bar alone before, then walked over to the counter and sat down two seats away from me. Rosy—who is not a barmaid but a big ex-pug named Rzeszutko—stood in front of her, wiping up the counter.

I could see her face in the mirror behind the bar. She wasn't bad looking, but her eyes were a little puffy like she'd been crying. She caught me staring at her in the mirror, then moved her eyes back to her own reflection and pushed back some strands of brown hair that had worked out from under her hat. I guessed her age at twenty-five—about the same as my oldest daughter.

Rosy put down the soda and two empty shot glasses, filled the glasses to the rims, then sauntered down to the other end of the bar chewing on a toothpick. I went back to my joke, trying to dope out the best way to phrase the punch line so I could get the most surprise out of it. But I couldn't keep my mind on it. I kept glancing in the mirror at the girl, wondering what the hell was bothering her. When she poured the Scotch into the soda her hand shook so much that half the whisky slopped out. She found a package of cigarettes in her {37} purse, put one between her lips, then fumbled around inside the bag for some matches.

I fished a match folder out of my vest, scratched a light, and held it over to her. She drew her cigarette into a glow, smiled and thanked me.

She shook her head. “No, we've lived on the street about two years now. But this is the first time I've been in here.”

When she said “we” I glanced down at her left hand and saw she was wearing a ring. Twenty years ago that would have been the first thing I'd have noticed.

We talked a while about nothing in particular, such as the weather and Mayor Kelly, then she asked me why I didn't move over so we wouldn't have to yell at each other. I could see she had something on her mind that she might want to tell somebody, and I knew I looked like a kind, grey-haired old gent who wouldn't object to listening. I glanced at the clock and saw I had an hour until the midnight show started.

It was her second double Scotch that did it. I don't remember now exactly how we got to talking about her husband, but she was beginning to feel the drinks and forget there was anybody in the bar but the two of us. From what she told me I got the impression that her husband's interest in her had taken a recent nose dive.

I didn't need to ask any more questions. She was wound up to talk and the button had been pushed. {38}

It was a little mixed up the way she told it, but I finally got the parts together. Her husband collected jokes about horses. He had over fifty of them, she said, all written down neatly on little file cards. He thought every one was a masterpiece. She had tried her best to figure out what was funny about them, but as far as she could see they didn't have any point at all.

“It started five years ago,” she said, “just before we got engaged. Somebody told him a joke about a horse that talked. It was about a man who hears a horse say he won the Kentucky Derby. Then the man finds the owner of the horse and the owner says not to believe what the horse said. Now can you see anything funny about that? Of course a horse can't talk in the first place, but even if he could, why wouldn't the man believe him? Maybe he did win the Derby.”

I puffed a while on my cigar. I knew the joke of course but I didn't want to take sides. “I guess it is kind of pointless at that,” I said.

“And there was another one about a horse that played baseball for the Chicago Cubs,” she said. “He hit a home run but wouldn't run around the bases because nobody ever heard of a horse running around a ball field; and there was another about a horse that liked to sit on grapefruit, and one about a horse that was a ventriloquist, and another one about a horse on an escalator. They were all just alike, with no sense to them, but he'd knock himself out every time he heard a new one. Sometimes he'd wake up laughing in the middle of the night.”

“That was the silliest of all,” she said. “It's about a man who goes into Marshall Field's with a horse, and the elevator girl tells him that he can't take the horse on the elevator. So the man says, ‘But lady, he gets sick on the escalator.’” {39}

“Isn't that the most stupid joke you ever heard?” she said. “There isn't any point to it at all. Now you know no one in his right mind would think of trying to get into Marshall Field's with a horse. And besides, why would a horse get sick on an escalator? Especially those at Marshall Field's. They go so slow they wouldn't make anybody sick.”

She was looking at me while she talked with a sort of sad, imploring look. She was hoping I'd agree with her.

“What I'd like to know,” I said, “is—if you've been married five years how come this is just beginning to worry you?”

She moved her glass in circles on the wet counter. I thought she was going to start crying.

She nodded. In the mirror I could see that her brown eyes were shiny with tears. When she first met her husband, she explained, she found out right away that he had this peculiar sense of humor. He was always reading magazines and laughing about the cartoons that looked, she said, like children's drawings.

“And they were just like the horse jokes,” she added. “There wasn't anything in the least bit funny about them. They were pictures of sloppy looking men and women at parties, or a man and his wife in twin beds, and the woman would say, ‘What's become of the Socialist Party?’”

She went on to say that after she fell in love with her husband she decided it would be good strategy to laugh at the same things he did. So she learned how to watch his face and tell when he was about to laugh.

“He always puckers up his lips just a little, like he's going to whistle,” she said, “before he breaks into a big laugh. So whenever I {40} saw him do that, I always laughed too, then we'd both laugh at the same time, or maybe I'd even be a little ahead of him. Of course he didn't laugh when he told a joke, but then I could always tell when he got to the end by the tone of his voice.”

She finished breaking up her wooden stirring stick and dropped the pieces into the ash tray.

“I think it was my laughing so much at his horse jokes that made him fall in love with me,” she said sadly. “That's what's so awful about it.”

“He gave me a cartoon book for my birthday last week,” she said. “It was a new book by somebody named Sternberg or Strom-berg or something like that. He draws for the magazines too, and he's just like the other one. He can't draw either. He makes crazy, twisty little lines and all the people have big noses.”

“Well,” she went on, “I looked through the whole book that evening when I thought he was out of the room, trying to find something funny in it. Then I looked up and saw he'd been standing in the doorway watching me with a queer expression on his face. He asked me how I liked the cartoons and I said I thought they were a scream, but I don't think I made it sound like I meant it. I had a feeling he was beginning to suspect.”

She finished her drink and ordered another double Scotch. “He trapped me,” she said bitterly. “Tonight he trapped me.”

“He took me to a movie tonight that had a Bugs Bunny short,” she continued. “He's nuts about Bugs Bunny and whenever there's a short in town we always go to see it. Of course I think Bugs is funny, too, but I never know when my husband is going to think something is specially funny, so I always watch him out of the corner of my eye to tell when to laugh the loudest. But this time he laughed in all the {41} wrong places.”

“It was terrible. I laughed as loud as I could at all the spots he thought weren't very funny, then when something really funny happened we both sat there like wooden Indians while everybody else laughed.”

“Oh, yes,” she said wearily. “When we got home tonight we really had it out. He was so mad I thought he'd kill me. Then I got mad too and told him what I thought of all his old horse jokes. He put on his hat and went out and slammed the door.”

“I can't help it if I haven't got a sense of humor,” she sobbed. “It's just the way I am, that's all, and I'll never be any different.”

I patted her on the shoulder and said, “There, now, it won't do any good to cry about it.”

The grin started my brain clicking. You can't be in show business for thirty years as a professional funny man without finding out that different people laugh at different things. A gag that gets a big belly laugh at the Purple Hat may lay an egg at a Father and Son banquet, and vice versa. Individuals are the same. A sense of humor is like a sense of taste. Some people like beer and some don't. I decided to give her a couple of tests.

“The trouble with you, young lady,” I said, “is that you've had too much to drink.” She was looking at me, and when I said this I started to put my cigar into my mouth, missed it on purpose and poked it into my eye.

“Of course I'm funny,” I said. “There's nothing wrong with your sense of humor. You just got a different one from your old man, that's all. He's got a sophisticated kind and you got a more ordinary kind. Now you just forget about it and be honest from now on and only laugh when you feel like it and pretty soon everything will be okay again.”

“But if he doesn't change his attitude,” I said, “and you two ever bust up for good, promise me something—”

“You get hold of a dead horse somewhere,” I said. “If you can't find one, get back to me and I'll find one for you. Then before you leave, have some men carry it up to your apartment and put it on his bed, and—”

I never finished explaining this clever scheme. The door opened and a tall, stoop-shouldered man wearing black shell-rimmed glasses entered and wandered over to us.

It was like slapping a wet rag in her face. She sobered up in a flash, threw her change and cigarettes into her purse, and slid down from the stool.

“Bowers,” I said. I reached up to clip my cigar between my first and second fingers, but instead I clipped the end of my nose.

She let out a big whoop of a laugh and almost fell over. Her husband narrowed his eyebrows and glared at her coldly, then at me, then back at her again. “Come along now, dear,” he said.

Through the open door I saw her turn to smile and wave at me. {43} Her face had turned a soft lavender under the light from the big Purple Hat marquee above the door.

He emptied the ash tray by dumping the contents on the floor behind the bar. I ordered another beer.

“Okay,” I said. “A man walks into Marshall Field's one afternoon with a horse, and tries to get on the elevator, but the girl says, ‘Sorry, sir, but we can't allow the horse on the elevator.’ The man looks a little disappointed and says, ‘But lady, he gets violently ill on the escalator.’”

Rosy was starting to shove the foam off of my beer when I finished. He held the stick in the air and looked up.

Postscript

I was told that my horse story produced considerable mail. Some of it was published in subsequent issues of Esquire, including one letter I wrote myself, signing it William Blackstone. I asked if Gardner would explain the joke about the horse and the grapefruit. The {44} editors answered for me as follows:

Red Skelton was then doing a popular radio show. Someone told me he told a horse joke, and when the laughs were minimal he remarked that the joke must have come from that fellow who wrote the Esquire story. Incidentally, one of my favorite horse jokes is one I recently came across in Mark Amory's biography of Lord Dunsany. In a letter to his wife, Dunsany wrote: “I heard the funniest story that I ever remember. A man was on a restless horse that was kicking about and managed somehow to get its hoof into the stirrup iron, so the man said, ‘Well, if you're going to get on, I'll get off.’”

No-Sided Professor^†

Before I sold “No-Sided Professor” to Esquire, the Moebius strip had been the basis of a humorous story in The Saturday Evening Post (“A. Botts and the Moebius Strip” by William Upson), but apparently I was the first to use it in a fantasy. The story brought me many interesting letters from professional mathematicians. I was particularly pleased to hear from Paul Halmos; we later became friends. It was widely rumored in math circles that Slapenarski (forgive the crude pun) was modeled on the Polish topologist Samuel Eilenberg; but I had never heard then of Eilenberg, and actually had no one in mind. Robert Simpson, however, is the mathematician Robert Simpson, with whom I became acquainted when he was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin.

Esquire published some letters about the story in its Sound and Fury department. One reader, who had difficulty making a Moebius band, wanted to know what it looked like. I supplied two sketches for the May 1947 issue, and explained: “To paint it on one side, you dunk it into the paint.” Matt Weinstock began his column in the Los Angeles Daily News (January 2,1947) by writing: “Readers of Esquire magazine . . . are slowly losing their minds over a story by Martin Gardner. . . .” It is the only one of my yarns that found its way into numerous anthologies and other magazines both here and abroad.

Later I wrote a sequel, “The Island of Five Colors,” in which Slapenarski proves not to have died although at the end of the story he falls into a Klein bottle and disappears. I have not included the story in this volume {46} for two reasons: (I) It was based on a confusion between the four-color map theorem and a simpler theorem, easily proved, which says that five regions on the plane cannot be mutually contiguous, (2) the true four-color theorem, unproved when I wrote my story, has since been established by computer programs, though not very elegantly. As science fiction, the tale is now as dated as a story about Martians, or about the twilight zone of Mercury. If you are curious, you will find the flawed yarn in Future Tense (1952), edited by Kendell Crossen and in Fantasia Mathematica (1958), edited by Clifton Fadiman.

OLORES—a tall, black-haired striptease at Chicago's Purple Hat Club—stood in the center of the dance floor and began the slow gyrations of her Cleopatra number, accompanied by soft Egyptian music from the Purple Hatters. The room was dark except for a shaft of emerald light that played over her filmy costume and smooth, voluptuous limbs.

A veil draped about her head and shoulders was the first to be removed. Dolores was in the act of letting it drift gracefully to the floor when suddenly a sound like the firing of a shotgun came from somewhere above and the nude body of a large man dropped head first from the ceiling. He caught the veil in mid-air with his chin and pinned it to the floor with a dull thump.

Jake Bowers, the master of ceremonies, yelled for lights and tried to keep back the crowd. The club's manager, who had been standing by the orchestra watching the floor show, threw a tablecloth over the crumpled figure and rolled it over on its back.

The man was breathing heavily, apparently knocked unconscious by the blow on his chin, but otherwise unharmed. He had a short, neatly trimmed red beard and mustache, and a completely bald head. He was built like a professional wrestler.

With considerable difficulty three waiters succeeded in transporting {47} him to the manager's private office in the back, leaving a roomful of bewildered, near-hysterical men and women gaping at the ceiling and each other, and arguing heatedly about the angle and manner of the man's fall. The only hypothesis with even a slight suggestion of sanity was that he had been tossed high into the air from somewhere on the side of the dance floor. But no one saw the tossing. The police were called.

Meanwhile, in the back office the bearded man recovered consciousness. He insisted that he was Dr. Stanislaw Slapenarski, professor of mathematics at the University of Warsaw, and at present a visiting lecturer at the University of Chicago.

Before continuing this curious narrative, I must pause to confess that I was not an eyewitness of the episode just described, having based my account on interviews with the master of ceremonies and several waiters. However, I did participate in a chain of remarkable events which culminated in the professor's unprecedented appearance.

These events began several hours earlier when members of the Moebius Society gathered for their annual banquet in one of the private dining rooms on the second floor of the Purple Hat Club. The Moebius Society is a small, obscure Chicago organization of mathematicians working in the field of topology, one of the youngest and most mysterious of the newer branches of transformation mathematics. To make clear what happened during the evening, it will be necessary at this point to give a brief description of the subject matter of topology.

Topology is difficult to define in nontechnical terms. An informal way to put it is to say that topology studies the mathematical properties of an object that remain constant regardless of how the object is distorted.

Picture in your mind a doughnut made of soft pliable rubber {48} that can be twisted and stretched as far as you like in any direction. No matter how much this rubber doughnut is distorted, certain properties of the doughnut remain unchanged. For example, it will always retain a hole. In topology the doughnut shape is called a “torus.” A soda straw is merely an elongated torus. From a topological point of view a doughnut and a soda straw are identical figures.

Topology is unconcerned with quantitative measurements. It studies only those properties of shape that are unchanged throughout the most radical distortions possible without breaking off pieces of the object and sticking them on again at other spots. If this breaking off were permitted, an object of a given structure could be transformed into an object of any other type of structure, and all original properties would be lost. If the reader will reflect a moment he will soon realize that topology studies the most primitive and fundamental geometrical properties that an object can possess.^*

A sample problem in topology may be helpful. Imagine a torus (doughnut) surface made of thin rubber like an inner tube. Now imagine a small hole in the side of this torus. Is it possible to turn the torus inside out through this hole, as you might turn a balloon inside out?

Although many mathematicians of the eighteenth century wrestled with isolated topological problems, one of the first systematic works in the field was done by August Ferdinand Moebius, a German {49} astronomer who taught at the University of Leipzig during the first half of the last century. Until the time of Moebius it was believed that any surface, such as a piece of paper, had two sides. It was the German astronomer who made the disconcerting discovery that if you take a strip of paper, give it a single half-twist, then paste the ends together, the result is a “unilateral” surface—a surface with only one side!

If you will trouble to make such a strip (known to topologists as the “Moebius surface”) and examine it carefully, you will soon discover that the strip actually does consist of only one continuous side and one continuous edge.

It is hard to believe at first that such a strip can exist, but there it is—a visible, tangible thing that can be constructed in a moment. And it has the indisputable property of one-sidedness, a property it cannot lose no matter how much it is stretched or distorted.^*

But back to the story. As an instructor in mathematics at the University of Chicago with a doctor's thesis in topology to my credit, I had little difficulty in securing admittance into the Moebius Society. Our membership was small—only twenty-six men, most of them Chicago topologists but a few from universities in neighboring towns.

We held monthly meetings, rather academic in character, and once a year on November 17 (the anniversary of Moebius' birth) we arranged a banquet at which an outstanding topologist was brought {50} to the city to be our guest speaker.

The banquet always had its less serious aspects, usually in the form of special entertainment. But this year our funds were low and we decided to hold the celebration at the Purple Hat where the cost of the dinner would not be too great and where we could enjoy the floor show after the lecture. We were fortunate in having been able to obtain as our guest the distinguished Professor Slapenarski, universally acknowledged as one of the greatest mathematical minds of the century.

Dr. Slapenarski had been in the city several weeks giving a series of lectures at the University of Chicago on the topological aspects of Einstein's theory of space. As a result of my contacts with him at the university, we had become good friends and I was asked to introduce him at the dinner.

We rode to the Purple Hat together in a taxi, and on the way I begged him to give me some inkling of the content of his address. But he only smiled inscrutably and told me, in his thick Polish accent, to wait and see. He had announced his topic as “The No-Sided Surface”—a topic which aroused such speculation among our members that Dr. Robert Simpson of the University of Wisconsin wrote that he was coming to the dinner, the first meeting he had attended in over a year.^*

Simpson is the outstanding authority on topology in the Middle West and the author of several important papers on topology and nuclear physics in which he vigorously attacks several of Slapenarski's major axioms.

The Polish professor and I arrived a little late. After introducing {51} him to Simpson, then to our other members, we took our seats at the table and I called Slapenarski's attention to our tradition of brightening the banquet with little topological touches. For instance, our napkin rings were silver-plated Moebius strips. Doughnuts were provided with the coffee, and the coffee itself was contained in specially designed cups made in the shape of “Klein bottles.”^*

After the meal we were served Ballantine's ale, because of the curious trade-mark,^** and pretzels in the shapes of the two basic “trefoil” knots.^*** Slapenarski was much amused by these details and even made several suggestions for additional topological curiosities, but the suggestions are too complex to explain here.

After my brief introduction, the Polish professor stood up, acknowledged the applause with a smile, and cleared his throat. The room instantly became silent. The reader is already familiar with the professor's appearance—his portly frame, reddish beard, and polished pate. Something in the expression of his face suggested that he had matters of weighty import to disclose.

It would be impossible to give in detail the substance of Slapenarski's {52} brilliant, highly technical address. But the gist of it was this. Ten years ago, he said, he had been impressed by a statement of Moebius, in one of his lesser known treatises, that there was no theoretical reason why a surface could not lose both its sides—to become in other words, a “nonlateral” surface.

Of course, the professor explained, such a surface is impossible to imagine, but so is the square root of minus one or the hypercube of four-dimensional geometry. That a concept is inconceivable has long been recognized as no basis for denying either its validity or usefulness in mathematics and physics.

We must remember, he added, that even the one-sided surface is inconceivable to anyone who has not seen and handled a Moebius strip. Many persons, with well-developed mathematical imaginations, are unable to understand how such a strip can exist even when they have one in hand.

I glanced at Dr. Simpson and thought I detected a skeptical smile curving the corners of his mouth.

Slapenarski continued. For many years, he said, he had been engaged in a tireless quest for a no-sided surface. On the basis of analogy with known types of surfaces he had been able to analyze many of the properties of the no-sided surface. Finally one day—he paused here for dramatic emphasis, sweeping his bright little eyes across the motionless faces of his listeners—he had actually succeeded in constructing a no-sided surface.

His words were like an electric impulse that transmitted itself around the table. Everyone gave a sudden start and shifted his position and looked at his neighbor with raised eyebrows. I noticed that Simpson was shaking his head vigorously. When the speaker walked to the end of the room where a blackboard had been placed, Simpson bent his head and whispered to the man on his left, “It's sheer nonsense. Either Slappy has gone completely slaphappy or he's playing a deliberate prank on all of us.” {53}

I think it occurred to the others also that the lecture was a hoax because I noticed several were smiling while the professor chalked some elaborate diagrams on the blackboard.

After a somewhat involved discussion of the diagrams (which I was unable to follow) the professor announced that he would conclude his lecture by constructing one of the simpler forms of the no-sided surface. By now we were all grinning at each other. Dr. Simpson's face had more of a smirk than a grin.

Slapenarski produced from his coat pocket a sheet of pale blue paper, a small pair of scissors, and a tube of paste. He cut the paper into a figure that had a striking resemblance, I thought, to a paper doll. There were five projecting strips or appendages that resembled a head and four limbs. Then he folded and pasted the sheet carefully. It was an intricate procedure. Strips went over and under each other in an odd fashion until finally only two ends projected. Dr. Slapenarski applied a dab of paste to one of these ends.

“Gentlemen,” he said, holding up the twisted blue construction and turning it about for all to see, “you are about to witness the first public demonstration of the Slapenarski surface.”

There was a loud pop, like the bursting of a light bulb, and the paper figure vanished in his hands!

For a moment we were too stunned to move, then with one accord we broke into laughter and applause.

We were convinced, of course, that we were the victims of an elaborate joke. But it had been beautifully executed. I assumed, as did the others, that we had witnessed an ingenious chemical trick with paper—paper treated so it could be ignited by friction or some similar method and caused to explode without leaving an ash.

But I noticed that the professor seemed disconcerted by the laughter, and his face was beginning to turn the color of his beard. {54} He bowed in an embarrassed way and sat down. The applause subsided slowly.

Falling in with the preposterous mood of the evening we all clustered around to congratulate him warmly on his remarkable discovery. Then the man in charge of arrangements reminded us that a table had been reserved below so those interested in remaining could enjoy some drinks and see the floor show.

The room gradually cleared of everyone except Slapenarski, Simpson, and myself. The two famous topologists were standing in front of the blackboard. Simpson was smiling broadly and gesturing toward one of the diagrams.

“The fallacy in your proof is beautifully concealed, Doctor,” he said. “I wonder if any of the others detected it.”

“Oh, come now, Doctor. Of course there's a fallacy.” Simpson touched a corner of the diagram with his thumb. “Those lines can't possibly intersect within the manifold. The intersection is somewhere out here.” He waved a hand off to the right.

“I tell you there is no fallacy,” he repeated, his voice rising. Then slowly, speaking his words carefully and explosively, he went over the proof once more, rapping the blackboard at intervals with his knuckles.

Simpson listened gravely, and at one point interrupted with an objection. The objection was answered. A moment later he raised a second objection. The second objection was answered. I stood aside without saying anything. The discussion was too far above my head.

Then they began to raise their voices. I have already spoken of Simpson's long-standing controversy with Slapenarski over several basic topological axioms. Some of these axioms were now being {55} brought into the argument.

“But I tell you the transformation is not bicontinuous and therefore the two sets cannot be homeomorphic,” Simpson shouted.

The veins on the Polish mathematician's temples were standing out in sharp relief. “Then suppose you explain to me why my manifold vanished,” he yelled.

“It was nothing but a cheap conjuring trick,” snorted Simpson. “I don't know how it worked and I don't care. It certainly wasn't because the manifold became nonlateral.”

“Oh it wasn't, wasn't it?” Slapenarski said between his teeth. Before I had a chance to intervene he sent his huge fist crashing into the jaw of Dr. Simpson. The Wisconsin professor groaned and dropped to the floor. Slapenarski turned and glared at me wildly.

“Get back, young man,” he said. Because he outweighed me by at least one hundred pounds, I got back.

Then I watched in horror what was taking place. With insane fury on his face, Slapenarski knelt beside the limp body and began twisting its arms and legs into fantastic knots. He was, in fact, folding the Wisconsin topologist the way he had folded his piece of paper! Suddenly there was a small explosion, like the backfire of a car, and under the Polish mathematician's hands lay the collapsed clothing of Dr. Simpson.

Slapenarski stood up, breathing with difficulty and holding in his hands a tweed coat with vest, shirt, and underwear top inside. He opened his hands and let the garments fall on top of the clothing on the floor. Great drops of perspiration rolled down his face. He muttered in Polish, then pounded his fists against his forehead.

I recovered enough presence of mind to move to the entrance of the room, and lock the door. When I spoke my voice sounded weak. “Can he ... be brought back?” {56}

“I do not know, I do not know,” Slapenarski wailed. “I have only begun the study of these surfaces—only just begun. I have no way of knowing where he is. Undoubtedly it is one of the higher dimensions, probably an odd-numbered one. God knows which one.”

He grabbed me suddenly by my coat lapels and shook me so violently that a bridge on my upper teeth came loose. “I must go to him,” he said. “It is the least I can do—the least.”

I adjusted my bridge, then helped him twist his right arm under his left leg and back around his head until he was able to grip his right ear. Then his left arm had to be twisted in a similar fashion. “Over, not under,” he shouted. It was with difficulty that I was able to force his left hand close enough to his face so he could grasp his nose.

There was another explosive noise, much louder than the sound made by Simpson, and a sudden blast of cold wind across my face. When I opened my eyes I saw the second heap of crumpled clothing.

While I was staring stupidly at the two piles of clothing there was a muffled “pfft” sound behind me. I turned and saw Simpson standing near the wall, naked and shivering. His face was white. Then his knees buckled and he sank to the floor. There were vivid red marks at places where his limbs had been pressed tightly against each other.

I stumbled to the door, unlocked it, and started down the stairway after a strong drink—for myself. I became conscious of a violent hubbub on the dance floor. Slapenarski had, a few moments earlier, completed his sensational dive.

In a back room I found the other members of the Moebius Society and various officials of the Purple Hat Club in noisy, {57} incoherent debate. Slapenarski was sitting in a chair with a tablecloth wrapped around him and holding a handkerchief filled with ice cubes against the side of his jaw.

The officials and patrons of the Purple Hat never understood, of course, what happened that wild night, and our attempts to explain made matters worse. The police arrived, adding to the confusion.

We finally got the two professors dressed and on their feet, and made an escape by promising to return the following day with our lawyers. The manager seemed to think that the club had been the victim of an outlandish plot, and threatened to sue for damages against what he called the club's “refined reputation.” As it turned out, the incident proved to be marvelous word-of-mouth advertising and eventually the club dropped the case. The papers heard the story, of course, but promptly dismissed it as an uncouth publicity stunt cooked up by Cody Phanstiehl, the Purple Hat's press agent.

Simpson was unhurt, but Slapenarski's jaw had been broken. I took him to Billings Hospital, near the University of Chicago, and in his room late that night he told me what he thought had happened. Apparently Simpson had entered a higher dimension (very likely the fifth) on level ground.

When he recovered consciousness he unraveled himself and immediately returned to our space as a normal three-dimensional torus with outside and inside surfaces. But Slapenarski had worse luck. He had landed on some sort of slope. There was nothing to see—only a gray, undifferentiated fog—but he had the distinct sensation of rolling down a hill.

He tried to keep a grip on his nose but was unable to maintain it. His right hand slipped free before he reached the bottom of the {58} incline. As a result, he unfolded himself and tumbled back into three-dimensional space and into the middle of Dolores' Egyptian routine.

He was several weeks in the hospital, refusing to see anyone until the day of his release, when I accompanied him to the Union Station. He caught a train to New York and I never saw him again. He died a few months later of a heart attack in Warsaw. At present Dr. Simpson is in correspondence with Slapenarski's widow in an attempt to obtain his notes on nonlateral surfaces.

Whether these notes will or will not be intelligible to American topologists (assuming we can obtain them) remains to be seen. We have made numerous experiments with folded paper, but so far have produced only commonplace bilateral and unilateral surfaces. Although it was I who helped Slapenarski fold himself, the excitement of the moment erased all details from my mind.

But I shall never forget a remark the great topologist made the night of his accident, just before I left him at the hospital.

“It was fortunate,” he said, “that both Simpson and I released our right hand before the left.”

The Conspicuous Turtle^†

Unearthing this tale produced a pleasant surprise. Filed with it was a remarkable letter my dad had sent me forty years ago after learning the title of my third sale to Esquire. My father was a geologist with a keen interest in every aspect of nature. His six-page letter is about fossil turtles and the habits of living ones. He recalls an occasion when he cut open a newly caught bullfrog to see what caused its greatly extended belly. Inside he found a tiny turtle that crawled off when he put it on the ground. A good mystery story, he suggested, might be written about a crime that had Occurred decades earlier, the solution of which hinges on finding a date carved on a turtle's carapace. Reading this letter reawakened my awareness of how much science I had learned from my father, how well he could write, and how proud I am to have been his son.

AVE you seen Reuben's latest photograph?” Professor Orlando Barnes asked. He handed me a copy of Life magazine.

Reuben was on the cover. He was standing on a rock, his head raised proudly, bringing his wrinkled features into sharp profile against the clouds. His ebony eyes were shining, and there was a dim suggestion of a smile. The rubies on his back glinted in the bright sunlight.

Reuben was a mud turtle. According to Life, he belonged to the Kinostemon Subrubrum Subrubrum variety. Members of the species have an average length of four inches, are dark brown, with two rows of yellow spots on each side of the head. They eat fish, raw meat, earthworms, and snails.

I looked up to ask Barnes something, but let it pass when I saw he was absorbed with an article in an economics journal. We were relaxing over pre-dinner cocktails in the lounge of the Quadrangle Club, at the University of Chicago. Years ago, when I was a student on the Midway, I studied economics under Barnes. He had recently passed the retirement age and was now professor emeritus. I taught English literature and scribbled mystery stories on the side.

There had been a lot about Reuben in the Chicago newspapers, but Life covered the story in much greater detail. Reuben was owned by Mrs. Cornelius Giskin, the young, beautiful wife of Chicago's billionaire gasket manufacturer. There was a provocative photograph of Mrs. Giskin bending over to put Reuben into his pond on the Giskin estate. She looked like someone a man with a thousand million dollars would marry.

Life was a bit vague about what a gasket is. It seems to be any kind of device that fits in or around a joint of pipes to protect the joint or make it watertight. The Giskin Gasket Company, founded forty years ago, now carried a line of three thousand types of gaskets, {61} all sizes and shapes, made of rubber, steel, asbestos, paper, fiber, felt, copper, leather, and cork.

Was not the shell of a turtle a kind of external gasket designed by nature to protect the tender joints of the reptile's limbs? The thought had occurred to Mr. Giskin forty years ago. A diagram that resembled a turtle served as his company's logo, and appeared on all its letterheads. An enormous bronze statue of a turtle stood in front of the Giskin gasket factory on Chicago's west side.

The second Mrs. Giskin had recently obtained a divorce, and was now hibernating somewhere on the alimony. Last year Mr. Giskin married one of Chicago's top models. Reuben was her first anniversary gift. The turtle's back—or “carapace” as Life called it— had been set with twelve flawless two-carat rubies, one for each month of Mr. Giskin's current connubial bliss.

The author of the Life article recalled Huysmans' novel, Against the Grain, in which the book's decadent protagonist inlays the back of a large turtle with precious gems. He had avoided rubies because they reminded him of the red lights on Paris buses, but Mr. Giskin had no such animadversions. Reuben's gems were hexagonal prisms of transparent corundum, known as “pigeon's blood” rubies. They are found mainly in mines near Mandalay, and have none of the milky patches that mar so many inferior stones. Life estimated Reuben's value as close to a million dollars.

When Barnes heard me whistle he lowered his journal to look at me over his glasses.

“A million smackers!” I exclaimed. “On top of a common little mud turtle!”

We stared at each other for a few seconds. Then simultaneously we uttered the same words: “The Veb!”

For two decades the Chicago police had been embarrassed by a {62} series of major thefts by someone who called himself V.E.B. In every instance the crime involved an outlandish object of enormous value. For example, there was the celebrated case in 1934 of Mrs. Heppelwaite's furs. A wardrobe of priceless ermine and sables had been tailored for her Afghan hound, a prize-winning thoroughbred that needed protection from Chicago's wintry blasts. Mrs. Heppelwaite had been out of the house when a new maid had allowed a firm of fur cleaners to come by one afternoon and take the entire wardrobe. That was the last anyone heard of the cleaners or the furs. The carbon of a receipt left by the truck driver bore the initials V.E.B.

Another major theft, a few years later, involved a wealthy widow in Winnetka who owned the world's largest collection of antique toothbrushes. Her most valuable item, a sapphire-studded toothbrush from Tibet, was found missing one day. In its place, on the shelf of a locked display cabinet, was a cheap toothbrush with V.E.B. etched into the blue handle.

In 1941 an elderly man named Victor Emanuel Boscovitch was arrested for stealing some tools from a Chicago foundry where he was working. After a month in jail he admitted he was the Veb, but a court of appeals ruled that his initials were a coincidence and that the confession had been made under considerable duress.

Professor Barnes and I had often discussed the Veb's exploits. At one time we even seriously considered setting a trap for him. We planned to obtain some sort of ridiculous object, inlay it with spurious gems, give it widespread publicity, then wait for the Veb to strike.

“Look here, Monte,” the professor said, leaning his short, stocky frame forward and tapping me on the knee, “the Giskins are holding open house this Sunday. I understand Reuben will be on display for the first time outside their intimate circle of friends. There'll probably {63} be plenty of police protection, but all the same it strikes me as a fine opportunity for the Veb.”

He nodded. “As a matter of fact, I know Mr. Giskin fairly well. Several years ago he hired me to do some research on foreign markets for his products.”

“No problem. Of course, it's unlikely anything will happen, but we'll at least have the pleasure of seeing Reuben.”

Barnes and I met at the Quadrangle Club on Sunday, early in the afternoon, rode the Illinois Central train to the Loop where we took a taxi to the Giskin estate on what is known as Chicago's Gold Coast. It was a freezing day in March, with a powdery snow swirling in the air. The taxi was unheated, and my feet were like hunks of ice by the time we got there. A man in a heavy overcoat, no doubt a policeman, was standing by the entrance gate looking cold and miserable.

My feet began to warm up after I downed a martini and met Mrs. Giskin. She looked even better than her pictures. A cream-colored satin dress, with a bare midriff, suggested she had spent most of the winter in Florida. The dark bronze was spread evenly over all visible portions of her anatomy. I wondered what sort of pattern the white spots made.

“Your books are marvelous, Mr. Featherstone,” she said. “I just love your detective, Hilary King. Has anyone told you you look like him? When I saw you taking off your overcoat I said to myself, that's Hilary King!”

I smiled and bowed slightly. “Yes, I suppose he's a projection—the person I'd like to be. It's all in Freud and Adler.”

Mrs. Giskin clapped her hands. “Oh, do you read Freud?” She {64} moved a bit closer. “I'd love to talk to you sometime about Freud.” A wave of subtle perfume wafted into my nostrils. I was trying to think of what to say next when Barnes came over to grab my elbow.

“Have you seen Reuben yet? Oh, pardon me, Mrs. Giskin, I didn't mean to interrupt.”

“It's quite all right, Orlando. You two run along and see Reuben.” She poked me in the solar plexus. “I want to talk to you again before you go.”

“Well, what do you make of her?” Barnes asked as we walked toward the living room.

“Ah yes. In the Victorian age a pale skin was a sign of aristocracy and wealth. Only peasants were tanned. In our metropolitan age the poor are kept under roofs. Only the rich have time to lie on beaches.”

Reuben lived in an aquarium above the fireplace. It was a long narrow tank, open at the top, and filled with clear water that filched an emerald hue from the green tiling in back. Several small islands of grey rock projected above the surface. We watched Reuben waddle down the side of a rock, shove himself nose first into the water, and swim haphazardly about below the surface, waving his legs slowly. The rubies sparkled through the green water, their shades of red changing as the light struck them from different angles.

A large, square-jawed man was standing near the fireplace, chewing on a cigar and trying not to look like a policeman. I could see the bulge under his jacket where he carried a gun.

Mr. Giskin walked over to show Reuben to some guests. He was what Dickens would have called a tall, “angular” man, with deep furrows on his face and purple patches under the eyes. He looked like he wouldn't know one gasket from another.

After pulling up the sleeve of his jacket, and folding back his shirt cuff, Mr. Giskin plunged a hairy arm into the water. The turtle was easy to catch. As soon as his shell was touched he stopped swimming and jerked his head and legs out of sight.

Giskin shook him a few times above the tank, to dry him off, then placed him on the woman's outstretched palm. She gave a timid little squeal as she ran her fingertips back and forth over the jeweled back.

Reuben was passed around a circle of guests and finally handed to Barnes. He held the turtle high enough for me to peer through the crack in front. I could see Reuben's beady eyes in the dark interior.

Mrs. Giskin joined us. “Finding any material for your stories?” she said to me.

I nodded. “My next book will be called The Case of the Terrified Tortoise.”

The professor carefully returned Reuben to one of the rock islands, then dried his fingers on a handkerchief. “If you'll excuse me, I'd like to wash my hands.”

Mrs. Giskin pointed over her left shoulder. “Through that door, into the hall, to your right,” she said, giving me a wink. She caught sight of a couple who had just arrived and rushed over to greet them.

An hour or so went by. Groups broke up and reformed as people circulated through the rooms, chattering and sipping cocktails. It was early and guests were still arriving. I detached myself from two elderly ladies who wanted to talk about Raymond Chandler, and rejoined Barnes near the fireplace.

“Looks as if the Veb may disappoint us,” I said. The words {66} couldn't have been better timed.

Mrs. Giskin suddenly screamed, pointing a carmine-tipped finger at the glass tank above the mantel. Everybody stopped talking. Reuben was paddling lazily through the water with his yellow plastron (underside) facing us. Across the plastron, in large black letters, were the initials V.E.B.!

Mr. Giskin rushed over to plunge his arm into the tank without bothering to pull up his jacket sleeve. We all crowded around while he turned the turtle this way and that.

The species was the same—the same yellow spots on the sides of the head—but the red stones were crudely cut. The three initials on the underside were tiny inlaid beads of black glass.

Everybody talked at once. The policeman shouted out the window to the man at the gate with orders not to let anyone leave the premises. A lieutenant and two detectives soon arrived. Everyone was searched. There were long questionings. Mr. Giskin recalled five occasions on which he had taken Reuben out of his tank, and each time a number of guests had handled him. About thirty visitors had already left. The police were convinced that the turtle had been stolen earlier in the afternoon by someone no longer on the scene.

While the guests were still being interviewed, Barnes pulled me into a corner and spoke in a low whisper. “I know where Reuben is.”

He led me down a hallway to a powder room near the back entrance of the house. We went inside, closed and locked the door. It was a small room with black tiling on the floor and walls, and a rose-colored toilet bowl.

Barnes' blue eyes were dancing behind his glasses. “It was a real {67} triumph of Sherlockian deduction. You see, I tried to put myself in the position of the Veb. Obviously he was one of the guests. Obviously he brought with him a duplicate of Reuben. He managed to switch turtles, God knows how, but he couldn't run the risk of being caught with Reuben in his pocket. He had no way, of course, of knowing how soon the theft would be discovered. Therefore it was necessary to hide the little beast as quickly as possible.”

“He could have killed the turtle and tossed it out the window,” I suggested.

“Then get caught snooping around in the snow? Don't be absurd. He had to hide Reuben inside the house, at a spot where he would remain alive for several days, and at the same time could be easily retrieved when he returned to pick him up.”

I looked around the room. My eyes stopped moving when I saw the rose-colored flush tank behind the bowl.

I carefully removed the pink porcelain lid. Reuben was resting motionless on the globular float, his jeweled back shooting crimson flashes over the still water.

I whistled softly. What a marvelous spot for a turtle! There would be constant changes of water, he could ride up and down on the float, and there were complicated fixtures (including, no doubt, some Giskin gaskets) to explore. I started to reach for Reuben, but Barnes caught my arm.

“No, no, Feathers. Let him stay. Don't you see? It's our only chance to find the Veb.”

“The Veb can't recover the turtle today,” Barnes continued, “because we'll probably be searched again before we leave. Maybe {68} the cops are right in thinking the Veb has already gone. He'll surely wait at least several days before returning to the house.”

“Are you mad? They were too stupid even to check the flush tanks. No, I have a better plan. Naturally, we can't run the risk of losing Reuben. I'll telephone the Giskins tomorrow and explain what happened. They can bide their time until one of the guests returns. As soon as he leaves this powder room, they can search him.”

“True,” said Barnes. “We really can't be sure the Veb is male, can we? I'll phone you if anything happens. If you don't hear from me in the next few days, drop over to my place on Friday evening and we'll discuss what to do next.”

I replaced the lid. Before we rejoined the weary guests I flushed the bowl to give Reuben a ride.

It was after midnight when the police allowed us to leave. I came in for considerable ribbing because I had not applied my reputed vast knowledge of crime to solve the case brilliantly, like my detective Hilary King. Everyone was searched a second time. At the front door I told Mr. Giskin how sorry I was all this had happened. He looked tired and haggard. Mrs. Giskin didn't. I suspected she was looking forward to having more of her pictures in the papers, maybe in Time and Newsweek.

“Do come to see us soon,” she said to me. “It's too bad you don't write romantic novels. I could give you lots of material. Do you think a publisher would be interested in my autobiography? Perhaps you could help me write it.”

I didn't see Barnes again until Friday. All week the papers had been filled with accounts of the robbery, each new story adding more details and proposing far-fetched theories. The chief witness {69} was the substitute turtle, but, as one reporter put it, the turtle wasn't talking.

When I walked into Barnes' sitting room, a log fire was crackling under the mantel. I pulled my chair closer to the flames to warm my hands.

To my surprise, Barnes shook his head. “I didn't have to. I know who the thief is.”

Naturally I assumed he was joking. “Tell me more, Orlando. What does V.E.B. signify?”

Barnes stood up, walked across the rug to a shelf of books, pulled out a battered volume, and tossed it to me. It was Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class.

“Of course. The main point of the book is that when someone acquires vast wealth, the excess money is usually drained away by conspicuous consumption—expenditures with no real value except display, of proving to everybody that one can afford to waste money on intrinsically useless things.”

“Excellent, Feathers! You put it extremely well. Conspicuous waste. It's the key to almost everything Veblen wrote. It's the essence of our degenerate capitalist economy.”

I was beginning to understand. “You think the initials V.E.B. are not initials at all? They stand for Veblen?”

“Precisely. Remember how much I liked to talk about Veblen in {70} my classes? I was trained by Veblen. All my graduate work here at Chicago was done under Veblen. We became good friends before President Harper kicked him out. He wasn't popular then with either his students or his colleagues. I was one of the few graduate students in economics who recognized his importance.”

“Wasn't there a scandal involving Veblen and another professor's wife? I seem to recall that Veblen was quoted as saying, ‘Well, what can you do when a woman moves in with you?’”

“That was just Harper's excuse for firing him,” Barnes snorted. “The real reason was pressure from wealthy trustees. They couldn't abide Veblen's radical opinions. Of course there was nothing really new about his fundamental insight. You find it in many ancient writers, particularly in Epictetus and the Stoics. It's quite explicit in Lucian. And what is Christ's ‘Lay not up for yourself treasures upon earth’ if it isn't a direct, simple expression of Veblen's theme? It underlies a hundred novels. Vanity Fair is pure Veblen. Wells' Tono-Bungay drips with Veblen.”

“Think of me,” Barnes went on, “as a confirmed Veblenite. I learned from Veblen's own example that to keep one's tenure at a university it was obligatory to play a game, to teach conservative economics, to live in a tastefully furnished apartment, to cultivate contacts with the leisure class. Meanwhile, my deepest convictions had to go underground. I couldn't teach honestly. I could talk about Veblen in my classes, but I always had to add strong criticism.”

“And so, Feathers, I became a thief. Not the usual sort, perhaps, because I've stolen only the most idiotic, the most extreme, the most preposterous examples of conspicuous waste. Most of my profits—I hope you'll believe me—went to charitable causes.”

“It was a year or so before the First World War,” said Barnes, a distant look in his eyes. “I was very young. A sequence of bizarre events—I'll tell you about them sometime—threw me into sudden contact with a master jewel thief from London. For a few months he lived in Chicago under the name of Altamont. We became friends. It was he who taught me most of what I know about the gentle art of stealing gems.”

“But the risks, my dear Robin Hood.” (I still didn't believe him.) “What about the risks of getting caught?”

Barnes sighed. “You touch now on another side of me. There must be in my personality some deep-seated hunger for adventure. It found an outlet in my life of crime. As you know, I never married. Academic life is always dull. It was the best way I could find for escaping total boredom.”

“Enough of this, Orlando,” I said, a touch of anger in my voice. “Your little joke has gone too far. I watched you when you handled Reuben. There was no way you could have made an exchange.”

The professor left the room, returning a moment later with what looked like a small harness.

“An old device,” he said. “Altamont made this one himself. It's what gamblers call a holdout. They use it for exchanging playing cards in the course of a game. Of course Altamont greatly improved the mechanism. I carried in it a live replica of Reuben that I prepared from his photographs in Life. All I needed was an instant of misdirected attention from my hands. I originally planned to carry the turtle to a window, to inspect the rubies in a natural light, but when Mrs. Giskin walked over, her bare midriff was all the misdirection I needed. The switch was made in a flash by way of my right jacket sleeve.”

While I was examining the holdout I recalled that Barnes had gone to wash his hands immediately after putting Reuben back in the aquarium. {72}

“Into the flush tank with the turtle. It was at the bottom but you didn't notice it under all the plumbing. I took it back this afternoon when I picked up Reuben.”

I found my way to the bathroom and removed the lid. Reuben was paddling happily about among the gaskets. I could see the twelve indentations in his carapace where the rubies had been.

He shrugged. “I really don't know, Monte. Maybe it's because I'm getting old and sentimental. I needed to share my secret with a friend before I die.”

“It's my last crime, Feathers. The tension is more than my high blood pressure can bear. I went through it mainly because Reuben is such a splendid symbol for the climax of my career.”

“It has a marvelous chapter about a turtle. For Steinbeck the turtle was a symbol of the poor. Slow, plodding, ancient—crawling across a modern thruway, narrowly missing destruction by the trucks and cars, but always inching forward. The patient poor. Blessed are the poor. They are always with us in spite of the progress of technology and the wonders of modern science. Like Huysmans' jeweled turtle, Reuben enlarged the metaphor. The little reptile literally carried on his back a symbol of the world's burden of capitalist waste.”

We sat in silence, watching the glowing logs. In the stillness I {73} could hear faintly the bells of Mitchell Tower playing the University's Alma Mater.

Barnes, his eyes moist, leaned over to put a hand on my shoulder. “I wouldn't have told you this, Feathers, if I hadn't known I could count on you to keep my secret.”

We talked until sunrise. Or rather, the professor talked while I listened with amazement to the tales he had to tell about some of his more colorful crimes. When I finally left, I paused outside the entrance to the building, breathing clouds of moisture into the frosty air.

“I just thought of a great title,” I said, “for that mystery novel I'll never write.”

The Fall of Flatbush Smith^†

When I wrote this short-short in 1947, the legendary trumpet player Bunk Johnson had only a few years earlier been found still living, driving a truck in the rice fields near what he called “the dear old city of New Orleans.” Bunk was too poor to own a horn, or to afford false teeth. His discoverers bought him both horn and teeth. The dentures were made by Sidney Bechet's brother, a New Orleans dentist. Bunk was brought to New York City, along with his pick-up band of friends, where he became an overnight success. “You couldn't show yourself at a chi-chi New York cocktail party,” wrote jazz critic George Avakian, “unless you could discuss Bunk Johnson.”

When the destroyer escort on which I was serving in 1945 tied up in the Brooklyn Navy Yard I attended some of Bunk's Manhattan concerts at the Stuyvesant Casino. His drummer was Baby Dobbs. The trombonist, Jim Robinson, had previously been picking up nuts and bolts in a New Orleans shipyard. George Lewis, on clarinet, was a New Orleans dock-worker who (according to Tom Bethell's later biography of Lewis) kept a piece of brown paper wrapped around a loose tooth.

After the war, when I stopped off in New Orleans on my way home to Tuba, I had the pleasure of meeting Bunk in the offices of The Jazz Foundation. To prove how young he felt, he sat on a chair and put afoot against his forehead “If I can't outplay 'em,” he said, referring to Louis Armstrong and other oldtime horn blowers, “I'll outtalk 'em.”

At that time “cool jazz” was slowly replacing “moldy fig” Dixie in {76} popularity, and aficionados of the two styles seldom spoke to one another. Some admirers of Bunk went so far as to defend his frequent off-key notes—Bunk was nearing 70 and his lips were not what they used to be—by insisting that he blew them on purpose. That's what my little fable is all about.

’M the guy who discovered “Flatbush.” I discovered him in Flat-bush. The subway had dropped me off sooner than I expected, and I had a half-hour to kill before showing up at Brooklyn College for a jam session sponsored by Blue Beat magazine. I stepped into the nearest tavern partly to get a beer and partly because I heard jazz inside.

It was hard to tell which was worse—the beer or the jazz. Behind the bar, seated on a small platform, were two blacks and an ofay.^* They were making noises with musical instruments. The sounds coming from the drummer and piano player had a resemblance to jazz, but the blasts from the white trumpet player didn't resemble anything.

He was a fat, greasy man of fifty or sixty with a head as smooth as a bowling ball, and a row of gold teeth. He needed a shave arid a bath. His battered horn was patched in six spots with adhesive tape and one of the springs was broken so he had to keep raising the key with his finger. To save himself trouble, he played most of the time on the other two keys.

He had an amazing ability to hit the wrong note. His timing was bad. His tones were flat. A dozen standard riffs were repeated over and over, with accidental variations.

The bartender didn't laugh. He just looked sad and tired. “Ain't it awful?” he sighed.

I stood it as long as I could, then drained my glass and left. I would have forgotten about Smith if it hadn't been for the Blue Beat party.

Blue Beat, as everybody knows, is the leading jazz magazine of the New Orleans cult. According to its editors, jazz reached its peak before the first World War, in New Orleans, and has been on the skids ever since.

I'd been invited to the jam session because I edit a rival magazine called Hot Beat—dedicated to be-bop and other modern heresies. The Blue Beat boys said they wanted me to hear the “real thing.”

Actually, the session wasn't bad at all. I enjoy New Orleans jazz when it's played well. I like Bunk Johnson. I like Kid Ory. But I also like Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk.

After the session I got into a heated argument with the editor of Blue Beat. Before we finished it took six men to keep us apart.

In my apartment later, cooling down, I remembered the horn player in Flatbush and a fiendish idea popped into my head. The next issue of Hot Beat carried the following paragraph:

The Blue Beat boys fell for it like a ton of bricks. Their next issue had Smith's picture on the cover and a long biography inside.

Flatbush, it turned out, in his youth had been a shipfitter in the Merchant Marine. At the age of 18 he bought a secondhand horn and taught himself how to play. His ship made frequent trips to Africa where, according to Blue Beat, he listened to native music and unconsciously absorbed the rhythms and off-key tones of the African diatonic scale.

Not only was Smith unable to read music—he couldn't read anything. With effort he could sign his name. This illiteracy, the editor pointed out, had been a significant factor in isolating him from the world of modern jazz—permitting him to develop his own free, relaxed, uninhibited style.

Smith's rise was unprecedented. Every group of jazz purists in the East lionized him. He played exclusive little jam sessions in the Village. He made trips to Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Finally, he was featured in a concert at Carnegie Hall.

“How do you know when to play a flat note and when not to play one?” I asked him at a press conference on the day before the concert.

He took a cigar stub out of his mouth and squinted at it. ‘It's accordin' to how I feel at da time. I play da African system.”

The concert was a great success. Critics hailed him as the modern master of the off-key note. A dozen record companies began to bid for him. His waxing of Flatbush Wobble broke all sales records.

Then a remarkable thing happened. Smith began to improve. It was due I suppose to several reasons. He was getting lots of practice, he owned a better horn, and he played constantly with top musicians.

The first hint I had of Smith's downfall was a paragraph in Blue Beat. It viewed with alarm the fact that he was beginning to “go {79} commercial.” Several weeks later the same magazine accused him of having abandoned New Orleans style altogether for wild, meaningless riffs that completely obliterated the melody. He was even indulging occasionally in suggestions of bop.

I went to hear him one night on Fifty-second Street, and it was true. His technique had improved enormously. His timing was excellent and he was playing squarely on the note. His musical ideas were fresh, vigorous, and original. He was wearing a flashy green suit and a dark brown toupee.

“How come you quit playin' those off-key blue notes?” I asked him between sessions.

He mopped his forehead with a sleeve and flashed a big gold grin. “I got tired a' da African scale.”

A few months later he disappeared suddenly from the Street. The following week Guy Lombardo hired him as a sideman.

The New Orleans crowd gave him up, of course, but they still collect his early platters. I heard one the other day at a party in the Village. At first I thought the turntable was warped, but it turned out to be an old Flatbush recording.

It was a collector's item. In fact most of the early Smith discs are collector's items. The reason they're scarce, I'm told, is that Flatbush buys them up for his three-year-old grandson.

Nora Says “Check.”^†

My next sale to Esquire was a mystery story, “Flo's Freudian Slip, “about an evil psychoanalyst who planned to kill someone by a chain reaction process. He knew his patients so well that after an innocent-seeming interaction with A, he expected A to do something to B, and B to do something to C, and so on through a sequence of carefully orchestrated events until the desired murder occurred. Things failed to go according to plan, and the analyst himself got killed. The plot was wild, and I had a few good things in it such as a bulldog named Id that kept slobbering on my narrator's pants. Esquire cut and rewrote the story, but when I read my original text it was even worse, so I tore it up.

The story that follows was fun to write. Admirers of Lord Dunsany will recognize my debt to his immortal fantasy, “The Three Sailors' Chess Gambit.”

HESS players? Bah!” snorted Sierpenski. “Not a heavyweight in the lot. Like nincompoops they played. I didn't get even a headache.” Sierpenski was the champion chess player of the world. For ten years he had been undefeated in a single game. We had just left the Manhattan Chess Club where he had played a blindfold exhibition match against fifty of the city's best players. He won every game. Half of his opponents, including me, were defeated in the first {82} twenty moves.

The aging grandmaster dropped a cube of sugar in his coffee. “It is so boring,” he lamented, “playing with stupid amateurs. More fun it would be for me to play tiddlywinks.”

I waved to Nora and held up my empty cup. Nora was a fluffy blonde waitress with blue eyes and a blank face.

“Even the Russians,” Sierpenski was saying, “are playing no good. If only would come along somebody worth playing. More fun it is now for me to play chess with myself.”

I was watching Nora swivel away when suddenly a devilish idea hit me. For a while I puffed on my cigar, thinking about it, then I bent over the table and spoke to Sierpenski in low tones. A slow grin spread over his thin face. He slapped the table.

And work it out we did. Three months later the chess world was staggered by the news. Out of the blue a new grandmaster had suddenly appeared. She was young, blonde, and blue-eyed. She was Nora.

Here's how we managed it. The tip of my right shoe contained a tiny electronic device that could both send and receive a pulsed code. The reception was silent, but I could feel the beeps with my toes. And I could send the beeps by pressing my toes down on a spring switch. A similar device was in Sierpenski's shoe.

Whenever Nora played a game I sat in the audience while Sierpenski kept himself hidden in some other part of the building. I would send him each move made by Nora's opponent, then he would signal back how she should respond. I would pass the information to Nora, using a visual code based on gestures. If I {83} scratched my chin it meant move the black bishop. If I pursed my lips it meant move the white knight, and so on.

Of course we paid Nora handsomely for her role in this flimflam. The hardest part was teaching her the signals and how to move the pieces. That was what took us three months.

Because Sierpenski did all the actual playing, Nora naturally won all her games. She would sit there pretending to study the pattern on the board, watching me out of the corners of her eyes until I signaled how to move.

The champion enjoyed the hoax immensely. He began to experiment with fantastic openings. For example, he sometimes gave his queen away just to even the odds. He totally confused a grandmaster from Argentina by advancing his king six squares in the opening. On another occasion he began a game by moving all his pawns forward.

Nora's weird, unorthodox way of playing was a sensation, and not only among serious chess players. I became her press agent, but there really wasn't much for me to do except be polite to the reporters who dogged her heels. Flash bulbs were constantly popping during intermissions when she played. Her smiling face made the cover of Time and the front page of Pravda. Before the end of the year she had won every tournament she entered, and was in line to challenge Sierpenski himself.

Arrangements were made to have the big match in Madison Square Garden, with Sierpenski getting half the take and Nora and me splitting the other half. I was to sit in the front row to make it easy for Nora to see my gestures after Sierpenski toed me her moves. Our plan was to keep the score even until the final game. Sierpenski would then retain his title by a sensational combination play that would go down in chess history.

“What will become of me afterwards?” Nora wanted to know {84} on the night before the first game.

Sierpenski shrugged his narrow shoulders. “You were once a waitress. A waitress you can be again.”

“Please, don't bother me,” he interrupted. “Can't you see I'm busy?” He was moving pieces around on a chessboard, working out the details of the climactic game.

Nora glanced at me, then back at Sierpenski without saying anything. There was a funny squint in her left eye.

The tournament lasted five days, one game per day, and never an empty seat in the Garden. An enormous chess board, with illuminated pieces, was suspended vertically above the platform where the players sat. Chess masters were hired by the radio and television networks to give blow by blow accounts of the games, and to discuss the positions between moves.

Nora won the first two games, then the champion rallied and won the next two. He opened the final game with a conventional Ruy Lopez. Nora's response, played of course by Sierpenski, was to jump out her knights on her second and third moves, then on her fourth and fifth moves she hopped them back to their original squares. The crowd went wild.

It was not until the sixty-fifth move that I began to get an inkling of the champion's strategy. All he had told me was that on the seventieth move he would announce a checkmate in twenty moves. Now I could see dimly how the brilliant combination was taking shape. After Sierpenski's winning seventieth move, Nora was supposed to study the board for several minutes then turn over her king and resign.

After Sierpenski's sixty-ninth move Nora looked toward me for the signal. I blew my nose and scratched behind my right ear. That meant she should retreat her queen's rook three squares. {85}

She studied the board for five minutes, the way we had planned, then her index finger slowly pushed a pawn.

Sierpenski looked startled. He glared at the board, then at Nora, then at me, then back at the board. Gasps and mumblings began to sweep the crowd. The better players in the audience started to laugh. Three grandmasters from Russia stood up and cheered.

When I saw what had happened I almost fell out of my seat. There on the big illuminated chessboard, plain as daylight, was a subtle, totally unexpected mate in five.

The champion's face had turned the color of his king. With shaking hand and an uncouth Polish oath he knocked the white king flat.

When the three of us got together after the match, Sierpenski was fit to be tied. Nora's checkmate had, of course, been accidental. She had made the wrong move, or rather the right one, only because she was furious over the coming end of her career.

Sierpenski raged and fumed. “My reputation—she is ruined! We must have a return match at once—if not sooner.”

Nora retired all right. She retired and made a fortune. First she endorsed a cigarette. It steadied her nerves, she said, during the terrible tension of tournament play. She made a television documentary on “Etiquette at the Chess Table.” Doubleday published her ghost-written mystery novel The White Rook Murder Case, and for weeks it was on the New York Times best-seller list. Movie rights were sold.

Sierpenski fell apart. He tried to convince the world it was all a joke, but nobody believed him. In the next tournament he entered {86} he was trounced in the first round by an eight-year-old boy from the Bronx. He still drops into the Manhattan Chess Club now and then, but almost everybody beats him. A few months ago I beat him myself.

Nora telephoned one day to say she had become interested in chess and would like to learn more than just the names of the pieces and how they moved. For a month I tried to teach her the standard openings and something about elementary strategy, but it was no use. She just didn't have the mind for it.

The Loves of Lady Coldpence^†

The epigraph by Malcolm Cowley—it actually inspired my whimsical attack on the trend toward collaborative mass production of fiction—was the final sentence of his “Note on Publishing” in The New Republic (January 20, 1947). The article accurately summarized the trend, particularly in Hollywood where it has reached its finest flower. A studio will think of an idea for a film it hopes will make money. The script will be assigned to several writers who work independently, then another writer will combine their work into a single script. More changes come from the producer, director, cutting editor, actors, scene designers, and even the composer of the musical score.

Mass-circulation magazines increasingly manufacture articles by a similar process. A conference of editors will decide on a topic, researchers will gather the basic information, then one or more writers will be hired. The final product is then further shaped by a sequence of editors. It is common these days to see an essay in Time and Newsweek credited to four or five authors. When not so credited, dozens of researchers and writers may have had a hand in it.

In The Nation (January 22, 1949) Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. reviewed a three-volume literary history of the United States, edited by four scholars, with the help of three associates and 48 writers. Schlesinger deplored what he saw in this work as a trend toward “group scholarship, “which he found “spreading like some foul blight” through the universities. Strong personal visions give way to dull uniformity. Ironically, the history reprinted Cowley's {88} essay, from which Schlesinger quoted the same passage I had used for my epigraph. I sent him a copy of the story. He responded by saying he wished he could take it as fantasy, but he had a horrible feeling that if such things were not already going on in New York, they soon would be.

EVEN new books, from seven different publishers, were in Monday morning's mail. One was from the Dumas Press. I snatched it up eagerly, tore open the mailing bag, and carried the book to the windows where I had an easy chair, a glass of sherry, and a pleasant view across the Hudson.

The book was called The Loves of Lady Coldpence and it was written by my ex-wife, Monica Ellis. To be more accurate, Monica's name was on the title page. I could think of only two reasons why the Dumas Press had published her novel. One, she was an intimate friend of Thaddeus Frisbie, chief editor. Two, she was photogenic.

It was the first time in months that I actually looked forward to reading a book and preparing the review for my syndicated newspaper column, Book of the Day. The new novels were so appallingly dull that in order to keep awake I had formed the habit of skimming through them under odd and pleasantly distracting circumstances. For weeks I did all my reading on the New York ferries. When the novelty wore off, I tried the tops of double-deck buses. Last week it was crowded hotel lobbies.

But The Loves of Lady Coldpence was a different matter. Great issues were at stake. My lawyer had informed me that if sales of the {89} book netted Monica a fortune, the courts could be persuaded to cut my alimony payments—perhaps stop them entirely. My daily book review appeared in more than four hundred papers and had an enormous influence on book sales. I planned to describe the work as “teeming with life and lusty vitality” and “unquestionably the finest historical novel ever written in America.”

I settled comfortably in the chair, took a sip of sherry, and studied the picture on the dust jacket. It was the portrait of an open-bosomed woman in Victorian dress. She had a cool, haughty expression, tightly set crimson lips, and smooth, milky-white skin.

Recent publisher surveys had shown that readers were growing tired of novels about oversexed wenches of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century periods. The Dumas Press had been among the first to vary the formula. Lady Coldpence was a frigid wench of the Victorian Period. According to the jacket, she “resisted every male advance until . . .” On this tantalizing note the cover copy ended.

On the back of the jacket was a good picture of my ex-wife taken about eight years ago. A biographical sketch said the novel was based on her own “colorful and tempestuous past.” It did not mention, I was pleased to note, that she had been married to me.

I removed the dust jacket, sampled the sherry again, and glanced at my wrist watch. When you read a book a day you have to hold your reading time to a minimum. The novel was only six hundred pages. With judicious skipping, I could finish it in an hour and have the review in final form by early afternoon.

I sat up suddenly and read the last line again. It was the first time Lady Coldpence had spoken, but somehow it didn't sound right. It didn't sound like the way Lady Coldpence ought to talk.

Obviously something was wrong. I put the book on the arm of the chair, crossed the living room, and phoned Monica.

“Why hello, dearie,” she said in a surprised, sleepy voice. “Are you sober?”

“Yes, sweetheart,” I said. “I'm sober. I'm sitting here alone in my little apartment and I'm reading The Loves of Lady Coldpence.'”

“Hang on a minute. I'll get the book and read you a passage.” I put the phone down and got the book from the chair.

There was a long silence at Monica's end. I read some more. Three paragraphs later she interrupted.

“It's all like that, sweetheart. Whenever Lady Coldpence opens her mouth a girl scout pops out.”

Monica was plainly upset. I could hear the bed springs creaking. She was probably sitting up.

“And right away,” I added. “Every reviewer in the country probably has the book by now. I'll meet you at Frisbie's office at 3 o'clock.”

I shaved and dressed and took a taxi to the Dumas Press building. Frisbie's office was on the fourteenth floor. When I walked in, Monica was sitting on the edge of a chair looking almost as pale as the portrait of Lady Coldpence.

Frisbie stood up behind his desk—a tall, slender man with the gestures and speech mannerisms of a college professor. When he shook hands with me he seemed nervous and embarrassed.

“We've made a horrible blunder, Bascom,” he said. “Simply horrible. We're calling in all the review copies that were mailed out last week. We'll have to replate the entire edition.”

He mopped his neck with a handkerchief. “One of our musketeer girls got the routing slips mixed while the manuscript was being processed. We were behind schedule, so we rushed the book through to the printers without making our usual recheck of copy.”

“It's our term for the office messengers,” he sighed, “I don't blame you for being puzzled. The whole thing's hard to understand unless you're familiar with our production methods. Have you ever been through the plant?” {92}

Frisbie turned to Monica. “I'm going to take Bascom through the plant. It will make things easier to explain. Want to come along?”

Monica didn't want to come. She said she'd wait for us in the office. When we left the room she was staring out the window and twisting her handkerchief into little knots.

While we waited for the elevator, Frisbie began to tell me about the principles on which the press had been organized. During the last half-century, he said, there has been a steady trend in the arts toward collaboration. He cited the “play doctors” of Broadway, the “ghosting” of autobiographies, the moving pictures, the animated cartoon.

“Of course there were attempts at collaboration in the past,” he said, but they were small attempts. Renaissance artists, for example, would let pupils paint the less important details of a mural. Or Elizabethan theatrical producers would have a play revised by several hands.” He paused to push the elevator button. “It was Alexandre Dumas who made the first major step toward modern production methods.”

“I understand he published sixty books in one year,” I commented, “by farming out the work to other writers.”

Frisbie nodded. “Essentially what we've done is to revive Dumas' methods and extend the divison of labor principle to its maximum efficiency. And why not? Why should one man be expected to produce an entire movie?”

I raised my eyebrows. “You mean that more than one person writes one of your novels?”

Frisbie walked over and punched the elevator button again. “More than fifty men and women. We're simply applying methods of specialization already commonplace in other fields. Take science, for example. Who invented television?” {93}

He nodded. “And it's the same in the moral field. In the time of Christ, the Good Samaritan personally bound up the wounds of the man on the roadside and gave him money. Today, charity is in the hands of agencies. Even in war the sense of individual combat has almost vanished. One man puts a shell in the gun, another closes the breech, a third aims it, a fourth fires it.”

Our tour of the plant began on the ninth floor with the Department of Reader Trends. Its function was to keep a careful check on current events, movies, books of other publishers—in short, anything that might influence reader demands. This material was correlated with elaborate polls and surveys of reader moods. Recommendations were made as to what type of novel should be published, date of publication, and for what economic level and geographical area. These recommendations were submitted to the Plot Department.

The Plot Department was considered the backbone of the plant. It occupied the entire eighth floor and employed over a hundred experts. Enormous files along the walls contained sketches of every plot that had ever been used in a story, novel, or movie.

Frisbie called my attention to the huge section of K236.78 or the “Cinderella plot.” It included several cabinets of file cards. Each variation of the motif was elaborately cross-referenced under such topical headings as setting, profession of principal characters, historical period, and so on.

The mystery-plot section of the files contained an exhaustive index of murder devices. I looked up “boomerang” and found it had been used twenty-eight times as a murder weapon and once by a {94} suicide. The new plastic that “remembers” its former shape had already been used fourteen times.

“I suppose your Hollywood tie-ins are very extensive,” I said as we circled around one of the rooms.

“Excellent. Of course not all our novels are written with movie production in view, but when they are, we clear the plot outline through the film companies. In return, we get from the studios a synopsis of each scenario as soon as the shooting begins. If we think a book version will sell, we process the novel and release it simultaneously with the film.”

We walked by a desk where a young man in shirt sleeves was shuffling a set of about fifty cards. The cards had been obtained from the Character Department, Frisbie explained, each card carrying a brief description of a psychoneurotic type. The man finished shuffling, gave the cards a quick cut, then dealt seven to the desk.

“If he likes the combination,” said Frisbie, raising his voice so I could hear him above the clatter of typewriters, “he'll build a plot around the seven types. Huxley's early house-party novels set the pattern for this sort of thing. It's very much in demand this season. The translations of Sartre's novels are giving us some competition, but we have a high sales estimate for our next one.”

“It follows a Long Island family through four generations, all the action taking place in the family bathroom. The basic idea came from Miss Grubstreet, our tour de force expert.”

I was about to say something funny, but my attention was caught by one of the office girls. She was walking down an aisle of desks gathering papers from the “out” baskets. Aside from a pair of blue satin shorts, she was dressed like a French musketeer—scarlet boots, a small rapier hanging from her waist, and a scarlet cloak. On one side of the cloak was embroidered the trade-mark of the press, {95} three swords with their points touching—a symbol I suppose of the three musketeers and their cooperative spirit. The cloak fell open as she walked, revealing a pair of long and shapely legs.

Frisbie saw me staring and smiled. “One of our musketeers,” he explained. “Very young, just out of high school. They add color to the offices and strengthen the morale of our male staff.”

Our next visit was to the Character Department on the floor below. The job here was to take the plot outline and work up a full memo on each character—giving his or her appearance, family background, education, interests, mannerisms, and other personal details. If arrangements have been made for a movie version, Frisbie said, the material is correlated with the star's personality and acting skills.

From character we went to dialog. In the Dialog Department the plot outline and character memos were checked over, then the dialog was manufactured by a staff of experts, each a specialist on a character type.

“I'm sure you've noticed,” said Frisbie, “that in even the greatest novels the characters often talk alike. That's because the writer can never escape from his own limited experience. Every character is a part of himself. But in real life, every person is unique. Now the only way to get this uniqueness into the dialog is to have the speech of each character handled by a separate writer. It's a trick Hollywood discovered.”

He pointed to a desk in the back of the room where a large man with a smashed nose was shouting into a Dictaphone. “A former pugilist and Capone trigger man. We hired him several years ago to do our gangster dialog.”

There was a sudden commotion in another part of the office. A man was standing up swearing loudly, and shaking his Dictaphone. A woman from a near-by desk came over to quiet him down and show him how to make some adjustment of the mechanism. {96}

“One of our new writers,” Frisbie said. “He has an I.Q. of twelve. We use him for stupid minor characters.”

I nodded and looked around the room for some more musketeer girls, but couldn't find any. “Do all your dialog experts resemble the fictional types they handle?”

Frisbie shook his head. “Frequently they're experts because of experiences they haven't had.” He called my attention to an elderly woman sitting at a desk opposite a white-haired man. They were talking in low tones, apparently recording the conversation on a single Dictaphone roll.

“She does our adolescent girls in love,” he said. “She and the man opposite are improvising a love scene in Trinidad between a soldier and native girl. They've done the scene several times, but it still hasn't got the right flavor.”

Frisbie looked at his watch. “I think we can skip the other offices. You've got the general idea. From here the manuscript goes to the Atmosphere Department. They add descriptive backgrounds and atmospheric touches. Then the Style Department whips the copy into final form. The polishing is usually done by a single expert to give the novel stylistic unity.”

“Where does the author come in?” I said, winking at a green-eyed musketeer who strolled by. “Most of your books carry names on the cover, don't they?”

“That's true,” he answered. “Our experts in public relations take care of that. They hang the novel on the man or woman they think will provide the best publicity. For example, one of our recent novels was about oil-field workers in eastern Texas. The Public Relations Office found an oil driller in Fort Worth who had been trying for years to sell a story. We bought the manuscript, then changed the title and content to fit our novel. He made a fortune on the royalties and moved to Dallas.” {97}

While we walked toward the elevators, I said: “I'm still not clear about how Lady Coldpence got fouled up.”

“It was the fault of an inexperienced musketeer girl,” he said sadly. “You see, we were trying to rush two books through at the same time—the Coldpence novel and Betty Blue's Canoe Trip—a book in our campfire girl series.”

“While the papers were being routed around the Dialog Department,” he went on, “one of the girls got the two routing slips confused and the Coldpence papers landed on Mr. Soph's desk. He does all our campfire girl dialog. The slip was marked “Rush,” so Soph did the job rapidly, without noticing the context, and the book got processed before anyone discovered the mistake.”

“Hmm,” I said. “What happened to Betty Blue? Did it go through with Betty talking like Lady Coldpence?”

Frisbie stopped walking, stared at me a moment, then slapped his forehead. “My God, Bascom! It hadn't occurred to me!”

He dashed into the nearest office and grabbed a phone from a desk. There was some rapid conversation followed by Frisbie's shout: “Stop the press! We'll be right down!”

We took the elevator to the basement and ran in and out between the huge machines until we reached the press that was printing Betty Blue.

He lifted out one of the large sheets, the ink still wet. My eyes fell on the following:

Back in his office, a few minutes later, he and Monica were staring glumly at the the floor.

“Why don't you let the mistake go through?” I suggested. “Let both books get printed the way they are. They're funny as hell with the dialog switched around. Once the news of the mistake spreads, they'll sell like hot cakes. You can build your publicity around it. Get a picture magazine to do a spread showing a campfire girl in Victorian settings and compromising situations. Have pictures made of Monica, in Victorian costumes, taking a canoe trip or building . . .”

Frisbie cut me short. “I want Pfanstiehl, our publicity dirctor, to hear this.” He pushed a button and spoke into a box. He was looking happier. Monica was moistening her lips. She wasn't sure whether she liked the idea.

But Pfanstiehl liked it, and Frisbie liked it because it would save the cost of replating. The sales campaign was a whopping success. Lady Coldpence sold 50,000 copies the first week, which would have been a record except for the sales of Betty Blue, which topped 60,000. Monica made enough money to last the rest of her life, my alimony payments dropped to a mere bagatelle, and now Monica wants to marry me again.

The new books are duller than ever. Last week I tried the experiment of reading five novels page by page, but starting on the last page and reading toward the front. It gives you a curious sense of backward time, like seeing a movie run in reverse. At least it keeps your mind on the story.

Four of the novels were pretty dull backwards, but the fifth had {99} a real O. Henry twist to it. It was impossible to guess how it was going to start until I got to the first page.

Postscript

The idea of assigning the speech of each character in a novel, play, or movie to a different writer may be quite old. Lewis Carroll (in his Diary for 1855) observed that conversations in novels often suffered from sameness, unless the characters were caricatured as in Dickens' novels. “If two or three authors,” he wrote, “would join in writing such conversations, each taking one of the characters, it might be completely successful, and would be much more like a reported actual conversation.”

Pfanstiehl, my story's public relations man, also handled publicity for the Purple Hat Club in “No-Sided Professor.” This was my friend Cody Pfanstiehl, who in the late thirties worked at a desk next to mine in the press relations office of the University of Chicago. Cody is now retired after a distinguished PR career in Washington, D.C. as director of public affairs for Metro, the city's mass transit system. When “The Loves of Lady Coldpence” appeared, he sent me the following telegram:

JUST LANDED CAMP FIRE GIRLS PUBLICITY ACCOUNT TO OFFSET EFFECT LADY COLDPENCE AND BETTY BLUE. CAMP FIRE GIRL EXECUTIVE QUITE PASSIONATE. CUTTING YOU IN TEN PERCENT OF PASSION. READ YOU STORY WHILE STANDING ON HEAD BUT MAGAZINE UPSIDE DOWN SO EVERYTHING NORMAL.

My reference to a novel in which all the action takes place in a bathroom proved to be not as far-fetched as it seemed at the time. In J.D. Salinger's long story “Zooey,” 68 pages of dialog occur in the Glass family bathroom. The Toilet, a one-act play by LeRoi Jones— it was produced in New York in 1964—has a boy's high school lavatory as its setting, with several urinals on the back wall. The play starts with a black boy using one of them, and ends with a white boy's bloody head in another.

I was mildly surprised that Esquire's editors had no objection to the crude pun in Coldpence. Maybe they didn't notice it.

At the Feet of Karl Klodhopper^†

The story that follows isn't much, but as a double satire—on trends in modern art and on Marxist aesthetic theory—it has some amusing moments. I wrote it before Alexander Colder had popularized the mobile, before Jackson Pollock made a fortune by dripping paint (someone said that his best work dribbled off on the floor), before Jean Tinguely built his machines that self-destruct, and before the earth artists got into Time and Newsweek by covering hills with plastic sheets, half-burying old cars in the ground, and putting together other quaint constructions too big for museums, but crazy enough to generate great publicity.

WAS walking west along the Midway one sultry spring morning when Alberta came pedaling toward me on her boy's bicycle. Al was a graduate student in the University of Chicago's art department. We had met a year ago at a department tea.

It was hard to decide whether Al was attractive or not. She was wearing a pair of dirty dungarees rolled halfway to her knees, a faded yellow sweater with holes in the elbows, and bright red moccasins. Her large brown eyes were invisible behind dark purple sunglasses, and her mop of black hair was pulled back into two braids that dangled behind each shoulder.

“Hello Al,” I said as she rolled past. She stood up on the pedals and skidded to a stop. {102}

“Oh, hello Monte,” she said grinning. “I didn't recognize you. How goes things?”

I walked over to the curb while Al stood with her legs straddling the bar. “On your way to somewhere important?” she asked.

“Hold it,” I said. “I'm a lot older than you, and it would look funny. Let me drive.”

The bike wobbled a bit at first—I hadn't been on one for maybe twenty years—but we made the trip without mishap. Al had rented two small rooms and a kitchenette in the basement of a brownstone house on Dorchester Avenue. There were no windows, but she snagged some ventilation from the street through the transom of a front room that had once been used as a coal bin. The bed was a large mattress on the floor, covered with a bright blue spread. Al had painted all the walls dark green. A large print of an abstraction by Paul Klee was taped on one wall.

“Klee's marvelous, isn't he?” Al said. “I'm just beginning to appreciate him.”

“Oh that,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “I threw it away. One outgrows Gogh. Gogh had to go.”

There were no chairs in the room, so we sat knees up on the edge of the mattress and fired a couple of cigarettes.

The Chicago Bauhaus was an avante garde art school in the Tower Town section. It had been founded by Moholy-Nagy, a Hungarian artist who once taught at the famous German Bauhaus before Hitler sent most of its distinguished faculty members fleeing to more congenial climes. {103}

Al shook her head so vigorously that the braids whirled around like helicopter wings. “Moholy's too conservative. I've been working at the Klodhopper Institute.”

Al jumped to her feet, walked to a closet, and hauled out an enormous curious-shaped chunk of polished wood. It looked like something Klee could have molded in clay. She put it on the floor in front of me, kicked off her moccasins, and peeled off her ankle socks. Then she put a bare foot on top of the object and moved it slowly over the smooth surface.

Klodhopper, she explained, was one of the few Bauhaus teachers who remained in Germany throughout the big war. After the war ended, Maholy persuaded him to come to the States to join his Chicago staff. For decades, Alberta said, Maholy had been enthusiastically promoting tactile sculpture, designed to be felt with the hands. Klodhopper extended tactile art to the feet. Maholy took a dim view of this, and the two men eventually had a falling out. Klodhopper resigned from the Chicago Bauhaus to open his own institute across the street.

My curiosity got the better of me. Fortunately I had showered that morning and my feet were reasonably clean. I removed my shoes and socks, sat on the edge of the mattress, and slid both feet over the wooden object, wriggling my toes into its crevices. It felt pleasant enough, though nothing to get worked up about.

Al sat beside me. She placed her bare feet on the object, closed her eyes, and sighed ecstatically. “Hoppy made this one himself. Doesn't it have exquisite contours?”

This maneuver produced a dim smile on Alberta's face. “I must admit,” she said, “your feet don't feel so bad either.”

The Klodhopper Institute, I learned from Al later, had a big public exhibit coming up in a few months, and she thought I might enjoy seeing some of the preparations. We met Saturday afternoon in the institute's lobby. Klodhopper had converted an old parking garage into a cluster of workshops and studios. Alberta led me down a long corridor, then through one of its many doors.

A priest wearing a richly embroidered robe was swinging a jeweled censer the way priests do during high mass. It made pleasant clinking sounds. An earnest young man was taking a motion picture of the censer as it jingled back and forth.

We were, Al explained, in a studio where studies were being made of natural motions that could be applied to mobiles. In another corner of the room some students were taking pictures through the porthole of a large clothes dryer. Cloths of bright colors were tumbling and swirling inside the noisy machine. In another part of the room a young woman was filming the movements of a green bottle while it bobbed up and down in a tank of water. She tossed me a smile as we went by, and I winked back.

In an adjoining room a stocky young man with a crew haircut was tinkering with a complex piece of machinery fastened to the side of a seascape. When you pushed a button on the frame, Al said, the machine threw a fine spray of salt water in your face while a recording recited John Masefield's “Sea Fever” against a soft musical background.

“The idea,” she said, “is to combine painting with poetry, music, skin sensations, and smells.”

“How about a platform,” I said, “for the viewer to stand on? It could tilt back and forth like a seesaw and make him seasick.”

When we left, the recording had stuck. It kept repeating “blown spume, blown spume, blown spume . . . .”

In the next room a woman was taking photographs of a fat middle-aged man in bathing trunks. She held the camera only a few inches from his solar plexus.

Alberta nodded without smiling. “It's a new form of caricature that Hoppy discovered a few months ago. If you arrange the highlights and shadows properly you can get amazing likenesses of famous people.”

She led me to a wall where framed photographs of navels were on display. To my astonishment there were recognizable faces of Eleanor Roosevelt, Frank Sinatra, and a dozen other notables.

“I posed for this one,” Al said, pointing to a caricature of J. Edgar Hoover.

Back in the corridor Al told me she was taking me to a studio where an action painter was experimenting with parrot droppings. By feeding the parrots a variety of strong dyes he managed to obtain gorgeous color patterns on a canvas. The work was preserved by spraying it with clear varnish. Last week, she said, one of his parrot paintings had sold to a wealthy New York City collector for a hundred thousand dollars.

I started to tell Alberta my favorite parrot joke when a door marked “Director's Office” opened and a tall, clumsy-looking man emerged. Al grabbed his jacket as he plodded by.

“Hoppy,” she said, “I want you to meet a friend. Mr. Feather-stone. He teaches English Lit at the University of Chicago.”

Klodhopper glared at me through thick-lensed glasses that made {106} his eyes look small. “Glad to meet you Featherstone,” he growled in a heavy German accent. “Sorry I'm in such a hurry. Talk to you later.”

He turned abruptly and rushed off down the hallway. His trousers were a few inches above his shoes, and I noticed a curious thing. One of his socks was red, the other green. Carelessness? Or did he prefer socks that didn't match?

The door to the parrot room was locked. “It's just as well,” said Alberta. “The smell is a bit strong. Let me show you our foot symphony. Johnny's been working on it for weeks. It will be the biggest thing in the show.”

“He's our token Communist,” she replied. “Johnny's always trying to sneak social content into his art, much to Hoppy's disgust. Hoppy's an art-for-art's sake man. He thinks art, any kind of art, suffers whenever an artist tries to combine its aesthetic values with rhetoric.”

We continued down the hallway and stopped in front of a door with a hand-lettered sign above the knob. “Keep Out,” it said.

“Wait here, Feathers,” said Alberta. “I'll see if it's okay to go in. Johnny has a terrible temper. Sometimes he gets angry if anyone tries to feel his work before he's finished.”

Al went inside, closed the door, and I heard a bolt being thrown. Five, maybe ten, minutes dragged by, then suddenly I heard her scream.

I rattled the door but of course it wouldn't open. I was wondering whether I could break it open with a shoulder, the way detectives do in movies, when I heard the sound of bare feet running toward the door. The bolt was moved back and the door opened. Alberta's face was ashen. She mumbled something I didn't understand. Then her knees buckled and I caught her just before she hit the floor. {107}

Al's screams must have penetrated some of the other rooms because seven or eight students were in a huddled hubbub behind me. I carried Al to a bench in the hallway. The woman who had been filming the green bottle went to get a wet towel. I could find nothing wrong with Al, though it seemed out of character for her to faint. I was putting the wet cloth on her forehead when one of the students called my attention to the soles of Alberta's feet. They were smeared with what looked like blood.

The room had only one other door. When I pushed it open I found myself on a pathway about four feet wide that extended through several connecting rooms. Wooden boards a foot high bounded the sides of the path. This, I assumed, was the start of Johnny's foot symphony. The surface of the path seemed to be made of materials that varied as you walked along it.

Several students were trailing behind. The path was poorly illuminated by tiny overhead bulbs, and it had now developed bumps and hollows that made it hard to keep your balance. The last room was completely dark, but enough light came through the doorway so I could see a body sprawled on the floor just outside the path. Someone switched on the overhead light.

A young man with a Karl Marx beard was lying face down. The handle of a knife projected from his back. The toes of one bare foot rested on the edge of the low fence that lined the symphony, and a dark pool of blood was pushing against the wood. On a section of the path that seemed to be made of polished steel I could see a trail of bloody footprints.

I was checking the body for signs of life when Klodhopper entered the room. “I just heard about it from Alberta,” he said in a quavering voice. “Is Johnny dead?”

I stood up. “If that's Johnny, he's dead. We'd better not touch anything. Has anybody called the police?” {108}

Klodhopper muttered to himself in German. “I don't think so. I go call now.”

He plodded down the hall, his bare ankles showing between his pants and shoe tops. Bare ankles? When I saw Klodhopper earlier he was wearing red and green socks.

I walked back through the symphony and the hallway to the door of Klodhopper's office. I started to open it, then changed my mind. It was one of those ancient doors with a large keyhole. I bent down and peeked through.

Klodhopper was standing behind his desk. In his hand, rolled into a ball, were the colored socks. He opened and closed several desk drawers, apparently looking for a place to put them.

With my eye still at the keyhole, I rapped on the door. Hoppy looked startled, glanced wildly around the room, then turned and threw the sock ball through the open window in back of his desk.

“Never mind,” I said. “I know the number. Why don't you go back and talk to Alberta? I'll join you as soon as I make the phone call.”

He started to say something, gulped, nodded jerkily, then lumbered out of the room. I walked over to the window. It opened on a busy sidewalk.

A man with a briefcase in his left hand was standing a few feet away. He had a ball of socks in his right hand. “For Christ's sake,” he said. “What the hell's going on in there?”

I turned back to the room and examined the socks. When I turned them inside out there were dark splotches of what looked like blood on the toes. I rolled the socks up again, shoved them in a pocket, and dialed the police. Then I walked back through the institute to where I had left Alberta. The students were crowded around Klodhopper, asking him questions that he wasn't answering.

“It doesn't matter,” I interrupted. “Here they are. They're yours. They have bloodstains on the toes.”

He groaned as he sank into a chair. “You are right, Feather-stone,” he said without looking up. “Those are my socks.”

Klodhopper began to tell me about tactile art. It was, he said, one of the great passions of his life, especially its application to the feet. The power to symbolize ideas with tactile sensations, he insisted, was severely limited. In that respect it resembled music and non-objective art. Any attempt to introduce symbolic meaning into music or foot art or abstract painting inevitably weakened its delicate aesthetic values. But Johnny, he said, was an old-fashioned Marxist. He believed that all art, including tactile sculpture, was useless unless it contained the right political propaganda. He and Hoppy had argued about it on many occasions.

“Last week I gave him an ultimatum,” Klodhopper said. “I told him that unless he kept his foot symphony pure, uncontaminated by Marxist rhetoric, he would have to take it out of the exhibit. He promised me he would. I was a fool to trust him.”

It was not until this morning, Klodhopper continued bitterly, his {110} eyes starting to tear, that he had learned the awful truth. Johnny had constructed his symphony in such a way that the tactile sensations symbolized nothing less than the history of the bolshevik revolution!

The first movement of the symphony, Klodhopper explained, consisted of two textures that ran side by side. One was made of expensive furs interspersed with silk. The texture stood for the wealth of the few. The other texture was made of old rags mixed with soil. It represented the many poor. As you walked barefoot along the path, the width of the silk and fur section became smaller, while the width of the rag and dirt section increased. This symbolized how the rich in Russia slowly diminished in numbers and power while the poor became larger and stronger. The first movement ended with a path made almost entirely of rags.

The second movement depicted the revolution. First came a wooden surface greatly distorted by random bumps and hollows to suggest the chaos that preceded the actual outbreak. It was followed by a section strewn with bullet shells—symbols of armed conflict. The last section repeated the distorted surface. This was the period of temporary chaos that followed the overthrow of the Czar. As you proceeded along the footpath, the distortions became fewer and the surface smoother. The new bolshevik government was achieving stability and peace.

The final movement portrayed the triumphant creation of a new society. Surfaces were no longer level. They sloped gently upward to suggest steady progress. For a short distance you walked over a rough texture of nuts, bolts, and wooden shavings—symbols of how the social order was being rebuilt by the workers. This gave way to steeply rising surfaces of polished steel. Progress had become smooth and rapid. The last section of the path was covered with large globes of soft rubber.

It was hard to believe, but Johnny actually intended the rubber {111} globes to represent the breasts of women. They were the symbols of Lotus Land—the ultimate achievement of Communism, the anarchist Utopia in which all social and economic problems are solved. Perfection has been achieved. From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

I couldn't help smiling. “That last texture,” I said, “strikes me as hopelessly male-oriented—an insult to Johnny's female comrades in the struggle. Don't you agree?”

Klodhopper agreed. He had been furious, he said, when he discovered what Johnny had done. The symphony, he told him, would have to be dismantled. Johnny refused. They began to argue. Suddenly Johnny exploded with violent rage. He grabbed Hoppy's throat and tried to strangle him. They wrestled on the floor. Somehow Klodhopper managed to pick up the knife Johnny had been using to carve the wooden surfaces of his symphony.

“Are you telling me you reached all the way around and stabbed him in the back?”

The door opened and in strode Alberta. She closed the door carefully behind her.

“I've been listening outside,” she said. “I must tell you the truth. Hoppy's trying to protect me. I'm the one who stabbed Johnny.”

Klodhopper walked over and put his arm around her. “You don't know what you're saying, Al. Go home. Get some sleep.”

“I know exactly what I'm saying. It wouldn't have worked, Hoppy. You ought to know me better than that.” She took off her dark glasses, buried her face in her hands, sobbing.

The story she told made better sense than Hoppy's. Alberta had come upon the two men while they were rolling on the floor. When she saw Johnny's fingers tighten around Hoppy's throat, she knew she had to act quickly. The knife was on the floor. She picked it up {112} and thrust it into Johnny's back.

Klodhopper had been shoeless during the struggle because Johnny had insisted he remove his shoes before they walked along the foot path. When Hoppy noticed the blood on his socks, he removed them before he put his shoes back on. Alberta screamed as soon as she realized what she had done.

I inspected Hoppy's neck. The red pressure marks were there. With his testimony Alberta might even be acquitted.

It wasn't easy trying to explain to the police what the foot symphony was all about, but eventually they got the idea. One burly detective actually took off his shoes and socks and walked barefooted along the path. He said he liked the ending. It was something he once dreamed about.

Postscript

Among the clippings I found in my file folder for this tale were 1950 episodes from the Li'l Abner comic strip about how Abner fell in love with the expression on a girl's kneecap. Life ran a feature, which I forgot to date, showing Picasso drawing pictures in the dark by waving a flashlight while a photographer captured the light trails by leaving his shutter open.

Time (January 27, 1961) reported on a French artist who hired nude models to roll around in paint then squirm over a canvas. A letter (February 17, 1961) was from a man who wrote the editor: “Keep the paintings but please send me some of his used brushes.” An AP story (April 15, 1963) told how a 22-month-old girl won a blue ribbon at an annual art exhibit in South Gate, California. “Very sensitive and reminiscent of strange creeping insects,” was the {113} comment of the director of the Long Beach Museum of Art who was one of the judges. The judges refused to alter their decision when they learned the winner was a baby, but rules were changed to forbid pictures by children in future shows. “Some of the artists were so shaken,” said the AP, “that they picked up their entries and walked home.”

On April 3, 1967, Newsweek covered a “feelies” show at the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. Visitors walked through darkened rooms containing such things to feel as steel wool, shavings, crushed paper cups, and “grisly gobs of human hair.” Time (July 25, 1969), in a story headed “Please Do Touch the Daisies,” described a more elaborate tactile art exhibit at California State College, in Long Beach. Visitors entered a pitch-black labyrinth, guided only by their sense of touch, to stroll through tubes and rubbery barricades, up and down gradients, past something that felt like an oscillating fur muff, finally emerging between the folds of a water-filled plastic mattress. The maze was a feature of the First International Tactile Sculpture Symposium. A California artist was on hand to display what he called his prefotemms, an acronym for the pressure, form, temperature, electricity, movement, and moisture of his tactile objects.

My original story was so poorly written that I had to completely redo it. This improved it some. The German Bauhaus, by the way, actually did do valuable pioneer work on the industrial applications of tactile art—not only things to be felt with the hands, but also with other parts of the body. One thinks of tool handles, coke bottles, telephones, door knobs, saddles, bicycle seats, and of course the seats of comfortable commodes.

The Devil and the Trombone^†

This little fantasy about that greatest of all difficulties for a theist, the awesome problem of evil, first appeared in a jazz magazine. Sam and Joey, in the next to last paragraph, were intended to stand for Uncle Sam and Joe Stalin; maybe that was pushing my allegory too far.

HE university's chapel was dark when I walked by, but I could hear faintly the sound of an organ playing inside. I glanced at my wristwatch. It was almost midnight.

I was on my way home from a meeting of the campus Philosophical Society. As an assistant professor of political science, and co-author of a textbook on international relations, I had been asked to chair a symposium on “Right and Wrong in International Law.” It had been a technical, tangled discussion, and my brain was tired. Partly to rest my mind, partly out of curiosity, I pulled open the heavy chapel door and entered. The church was pitch black inside except for a dim glow of light behind the pulpit where the organ console was concealed. The Gothic walls and windows reverberated with low, sonorous chords.

I struck a match so I could find my way to a seat in the rear, {116} where I settled into a comfortable position and listened. The chords were unlike any chords I had ever heard.

It wasn't long until my curiosity got the upper hand. I stood up and felt my way slowly down the central aisle. Then I stopped suddenly and caught my breath.

The light was coming not from the bulb above the music rack, but from the organist himself. He was young and handsome, and he was wearing a white robe. Two enormous wings extended from his shoulders and were folded close to the body. The wings radiated a hazy luminescence.

He glanced over his shoulder, saw me standing there, and took his hands from the keys. The chapel was instantly silent.

I pointed up the aisle. “Through the . . . the front entrance,” I stammered.

He frowned and shook his head. “My fault,” he said. “I thought the door was locked.”

“It's not often I get a chance to play one of these things,” he went on, adjusting several stops. “I'm terribly out of practice. But here's something that might interest you.”

His fingers began to move gracefully over the keyboards, and the somber chapel suddenly became alive with melody.

And while he played, a great peace settled over my soul. The world was good. Life was good. Death was good. All that seemed black and horrible was a necessary prelude to some greater goodness. Every episode of history was part of God's Great Plan. I thought of the German prison camps, of the bombing of Hiroshima, of atomic wars yet to come. They, too, were good.

Then from the deep purple shadows behind the organ, a tall figure with pointed ears emerged. He wore no clothing. Dark reddish {117} hair covered his swarthy arms, chest, and legs. In his left hand, gleaming like silver, was a slide trombone.

He put the instrument to his lips and blew a low, outrageous note like the sound of a monstrous fart. At the same moment the organist lifted his hands from the keys.

The dark man played alone, beating a foot slowly on the stone floor and improvising in a relaxed New Orleans style. The melodic line was filled with sweeping glissandos.

And now my soul was troubled with a great unrest. All that we call good in life, I saw clearly, was nothing but illusion. Sickness and sin and death were the realities. The brief moments of peace and harmony—for a person, nation, or the world—only added pathos to a final tragedy. At the end of human history, as at the end of every life, loomed the blankness of a Great Destruction.

Then the slender hands of the organist returned to the ivory keys, and the two players began to jam. They were improvising independently, but their separate efforts blended into a rich texture of counterpoint and polyrhythm.

All the frenzied fullness and complexity of life, with its curious mixture of good and evil, rose up before me. I felt neither peace nor anxiety, but a strange excitment and exultation. There were journeys to be made, real goals to reach, real dangers to avoid. There were battles to be fought!

A sinewy tail crept from the back of the dark man. The cloven scarlet tip crawled into the bell of the slide-horn, serving as a mute. The organist glanced at me and grinned.

The jamming continued. One by one the age-old problems of political philosophy found clear and simple answers. Right and wrong were easy to define. International dilemmas melted away. I saw the good and bad of every nation. I knew exactly what our {118} foreign policy should be.

The organist's hands and sandaled feet were dancing wildly now, and the dark stranger was bending back, the trombone pointed upward in defiance, blowing loud and wicked smears. My head felt as though it had expanded to the bursting point. I understood the meaning of life. I knew why the world had been created. I was about to penetrate the ultimate mystery—the mystery of God's own existence—when the playing abruptly stopped.

The chapel was as quiet as a tomb. My hands were shaking and cold streams of perspiration crawled down my face. A dull ache throbbed above each temple.

“It's good we stopped,” the dark man said huskily. “Another note and your brain would have exploded.”

I stumbled up the aisle, sat down again, and closed my eyes. When I opened them, the soft glow in front had disappeared. I walked to the console, fired a match, and waved it about in the blackness. Not a soul was in sight. I placed a hand on the leather cushion. It was cold. There were no feathers on the floor. My wife was in bed reading when I got home.

“Sam,” she called out (I had gone to the bathroom to take some aspirin), “I'm worried about Joey. He disobeyed me several times tonight, and refused to go to bed until an hour after bedtime. Do you think we ought to punish him?”

I washed down a couple of tablets with a glass of water. “My dear,” I said, drying my lips on a towel, “I haven't the faintest idea.”

The Blue Birthmark^†

My files show that this short-short story came back from fourteen magazines before I finally sold it for ten dollars to a Chicago periodical so obscure and short-lived that I wouldn't be surprised if I own the only surviving copies. The editor, Norman Reissman, made me happy by saying in a letter that he thought my story was “simple and beauttful.” Esquire had earlier rejected it because they thought the Peeping Tom angle would offend some readers. That, of course, was before Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly starred in Alfred Hitchcock's classic Rear Window.

The stranger, who had a discharge button in his lapel, smiled and shook his head. “No,” he said. “It's a birthmark. I've had it all my life.”

He was tall and young, with dark curly hair and melancholy eyes. The scar was bluish-purple in color. It began on his scalp, cut diagonally across his forehead, surrounded the left eye, then moved jaggedly down the cheek until it touched the corner of his mouth. Doctors called it a “port-wine mark.” It was too deep-seated to be removed by an operation, and he had long ago resigned himself to the curious stares, and the discomfort people always felt when they {120} first met him.

It may have been a feeling of pity that prompted the landlady to let him see the room. It would be vacant in several weeks, she said. She didn't tell him about a waiting list of more than thirty names.

Three weeks later he moved in. It was a small sleeping room with a few pieces of battered furniture and a wash basin. The windows faced the window of the apartment building next door.

He lived there for some time without realizing that the room across the way was occupied. During the day he worked in the stock room of a big department store in Chicago's Loop. In the evening he kept his shade drawn and the window closed because it was winter and the building was poorly heated.

One night, after he had turned out the light and was raising the window a few inches before going to bed, he noticed that the room opposite his was lighted. He pulled aside the shade to look. Two curtains were drawn across the other window, but they were flimsy mesh affairs—easy to see through.

A young woman was sitting by the window, reading a magazine. The curtain dimmed the details, but her features were clearly visible. He thought she was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen.

While he was watching, she yawned, then stood up and faced the window. He ducked back into the blackness of his room, his heart beating wildly. A moment later he looked again. She had pulled down the shade. He stared at the window a minute or so, then went to bed. It was hours until he got to sleep.

Night after night a similar scene was repeated. Night after night he stood there in the dark, watching her turn the pages of a book or magazine, watching her light and smoke and crush out her cigarettes, watching for the signs of drowsiness that meant the shade would soon be lowered.

He became familiar with every line and detail of her face, with {121} the color and patterns of her dresses, with the shape of her arms and hands and the flawless contours of her figure. He tried unsuccessfully to determine the color of her eyes. During the day he thought of her constantly. In his sleep the striking beauty of her face troubled his dreams.

He wondered why she had no visitors. It was clear she lived alone. A month had gone by and not once had another person, man or woman, entered her apartment.

He wondered where she worked, and how he might be able to meet her. Then his hand wandered toward his face and an expression of bitterness entered his eyes.

One afternoon he brought home a blue light bulb and put it in the lamp on a table by the window. He carried the lamp over to the dresser and let the blue light shine on his face. In the mirror, the birthmark was invisible. His plan was to sit at the table, under the cobalt light, his window shade raised. He wanted her to see him sitting there.

But when the girl came home that night he was unable to go through with the deception. In a sudden rage, he unscrewed the bulb and flung it to the floor. It exploded with a loud pop and he saw the girl glance toward the window, a startled expression on her face.

One evening he watched her ironing on a board she had placed across the backs of two chairs. She was wearing striped pajamas, her brown hair hanging in soft masses around her shoulders. A blue and white uniform was draped across the ironing board and there was a small cap to match. It was a uniform that a waitress might wear. He studied it carefully, memorizing the details.

On his next day off, he roamed the business streets of the area in which he lived, peering through every restaurant window to check the uniforms. No success. He repeated his search the following week. This time he found the spot—a small restaurant across the street {122} from a movie theater.

Through the window he recognized her instantly. She was serving a table in a far corner of the room. Her hair, the way she held her body, every little gesture, were unmistakable. He found himself shaking so violently that he decided to light a cigarette and walk around the block. When he returned to the entrance he felt calmer. He tossed away the cigarette and went inside, taking a table at the back.

While he studied the menu, he leaned on his left hand so it would partially cover his face. He could feel the pulse throbbing in his temple.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw her approach and stand by him. He glanced up to speak, but the words froze on his lips.

Her eyes were a deep blue. They were beautiful eyes. But they were crossed—crossed like the eyes of a child trying in fun to focus on the tip of his nose.

“I think you'll like it,” she said, smiling back at him. He fancied her eyes were moist.

Sibyl Sits In^†

During the late forties, before I moved to New York City and got married, I used to hang out at Jazz, Ltd., a Dixieland spot on Grand Avenue in Chicago. It was owned by Ruth and Ml Reinhardt. Ml played the clarinet, Doc Evans was the trumpet regular, and Munn Ware blew the trombone. I wrote this yam mainly to give the joint some needed publicity, stealing the basic plot from F. Scott Fitzgerald's forgettable story “Head and Shoulders.”

AVE you ever noticed that the trombone player in small Dixieland bands is usually the clown of the band? I don't know why this is, unless there's some connection between having a sense of humor and wanting to play such a goofy instrument. Or maybe it's just that blowing a slidehorn makes you a bit slaphappy.

Anyway, at the last spot where I played—that little basement joint in Chicago called Jazz Limited—all the boys in the band were sober-faced Joes. That is, all except me. I tried to brighten things up by pulling a funny gag now and then, especially after two in the morning when the crowd thinned out and things were less formal. One night I let my trombone come apart at the end of a long glissando, and Doc Evans, the trumpet player, laughed so hard he couldn't blow a note for the rest of the number. {124}

Monday is always slow. This particular Monday it was raining outside and the crowd was even smaller than usual. A kind of doldrums had settled over the band. We were dragging through the last set when a young woman with dreamy eyes and upswept brown hair walked in and took a seat at the front table. She must have known a thing or two about jazz because whenever I blew a bad note she made a face at me. Somehow I didn't mind—on account of her good looks, I suppose.

I decided to do my stunt of playing the trombone with the feet. When my turn came for a solo, I scooted down in the chair and held the slide between my shoes. The girl laughed; and I was doing fine until I tried a complicated riff, lost my balance and fell off the chair. The trombone clattered to the floor and I landed with all my weight on my right wrist. At first I thought the wrist was broken. It wasn't, but the sprain was so bad I couldn't play for three days. The band was about to finish the set without a trombone when the girl at the front table walked over to Bill Reinhardt, the clarinetist.

“My name is Sibyl,” she said timidly. “If you don't mind, I'd be glad to sit in.”

She didn't say anything. Instead she walked over to my chair, picked up the trombone and the atomizer, sprayed some water on the greased, chromium side, worked it back and forth a few times. Then she put the instrument to her lips and ripped off a series of fast phrases that even woke up the bartender. Bill was so startled he dropped his clarinet. The audience broke into a loud cheer.

I sank into the chair where the girl had been sitting and listened open-mouthed while the group played the opening bars of Tin Roof Blues. Sibyl was terrific. She took the standard Brunis solo, doing it note for note on the first chorus, then she broke into some ideas of her own, using one of the plastic ashtrays for a mute. I might as well {125} admit now I'm no great shakes as a trombonist. I'd been substituting for Munn Ware, the regular tram player who was ill and I'd suspected for some time I was the one who'd been lousing up the band. Anyway, Sibyl's playing was like a shot in the arm. After Tin Roof they zipped through Panama, then finished with a rousing rendition of Strut Miss Lizzie that almost blew down the walls. The crowd went wild.

Naturally we were all excited about Sibyl—anxious to find out who she was and where she'd learned to play. But we couldn't get a thing out of her.

“Really boys,” she said shyly, cleaning lipstick off the trombone mouthpiece with a square of tissue, “I'm not a tram player. It's just a hobby. I play it for fun.”

“Hobby, my eye!” roared the drummer. “If you do that for fun, what do you do for serious?”

But Sibyl wouldn't tell. In fact, she wouldn't even tell us her last name. Bill tried to persuade her to come back the following night, but she just smiled and shook her head. When the place finally closed she took a taxi home alone.

The rest of the week I spent the afternoons looking for her. I called all the trombonists in town, the ones who were working and the ones who weren't, but nobody had heard of her.Then I happened to think of the jazz record shops.

The clerk at the first place I went to rubbed his chin and stared at a picture of Benny Goodman on the wall. “Sibyl,” he said, “let's see. There's a girl named Sibyl Jackson who comes in here a lot. But she can't be the one. She plays an oboe in the Chicago Symphony.”

I didn't waste any time getting to Orchestra Hall. The symphony was in the middle of a rehearsal. One of the oboe players was Sibyl, all right. And what's more, she was a mediocre oboist.

It so happens I used to play the oboe myself. In fact, when I {126} was in high school my ambition was to become the world's greatest oboe player. That was before I got side-tracked by the trombone.

Sibyl saw me standing in the aisle and frowned. Whenever she blew a wrong note I grabbed my nose. After the number, she walked to the footlights and motioned me to the stage. She handed me the oboe.

“If you think I'm so bad,” she said, smiling crookedly, “suppose you sit in on the next piece.”

Which I did. In spite of the fact my lip was in bad shape for an oboe reed, I did better than she'd been doing. When the number ended the director rushed over to me with a blank contract and a ball-pointed pen.

Everything worked out fine. We traded jobs and got married. I soon advanced to first oboist in the Chicago Symphony, and last month Sibyl replaced Jack Teagarden in Louis Armstrong's new combo. Her latest recording, Sibble-Sabble Shuffle, turned out to be a juke-box favorite. Royalties are rolling in.

We were glad to get the money. It's taking care of Sibyl's hospital bills. She tumbled off her chair last week while she was playing the trombone with her feet.

Love and Tiddlywinks^†

One reason for reprinting this disgusting yarn is to call attention to a common practice of mass-circulation magazines—a practice that drives writers up the wall. If a story is too long, an editor cuts it. If too short, an editor pads it. Not to improve the story, you understand, but just to make it fit the layout. A “widow” (a too-short last line of a paragraph) is considered extremely ugly. To eliminate widows, editors chop or lengthen paragraphs.

After I complained about this tinkering, Esquire finally agreed to let me see page proofs. The proofs for this story showed nothing I wanted changed. When the story was printed, however, I came across this sentence: “My wife's forehead furrowed in a quick frown, then looked away.” I was told later that at the last minute someone had decided the page would look better if an extra line were added, so new words were inserted here and there. I got nice letters of apology from two editors, and although it doesn't really matter, it gives me satisfaction to repair the mangled sentence.

HERE was a moment of silence; then Velma raised her head and said “Cyclotron.” The first thing that popped into my mind was “Atom.” I wrote “Atom” on the piece of paper I was holding, then looked at Velma and grinned. She grinned back.

I knew Velma was trying to trap me. I worked on nuclear research at the University of Chicago, and she hoped I'd make an {128} unusual word association that would give me away. It's funny, though, what you think of first.

We were playing a new game that Frank Murkins had brought back with him from New York. Along about midnight, when everybody had run out of clever things to say and nobody had downed enough booze to think of new things, the party began to stagnate. Then Frank came out with this game.

“It's really a delightful game,” he said. “They're playing it all over the Village.”

“Sounds like it might be fun,” said Velma. She was the hostess. “Let's try it.”

We were each given a pencil and piece of paper. Velma was picked to be first to call out the words. She could use any words she wanted. As soon as a word was given, we were supposed to write down the first thing we thought of. We were on our honor not to cheat by using second or third thoughts.

After everyone had put down his associaton for “Cyclotron,” Frank gathered up the slips. He shuffled them thoroughly, then numbered them from 1 to 14 (there were fourteen of us, not counting Velma). While he read them aloud, in numerical order, Velma copied the words on her sheet of paper, putting each word in a different column.

By the time Frank had finished reading the slips we were all laughing except Velma, who pretended to be mad. Everyone had thought of either “Atom” or “Atom bomb” except the person who wrote the last slip. It said “Motorcycle.”

The slips were passed back to the original owners while Velma was trying to decide on her next word. She could use as many words as there were players. After the last round, she would have fourteen columns on her sheet, each column with fourteen words that came from the same person. But of course she wouldn't know who {129} belonged to which column. Her job was to try to identify each person from his or her list of words.

By the time it was my turn to call the words, everybody was feeling happy. The game was a big success. Either that, or the drinks were.

I had already figured out an easy way to catch my wife. We had a little private word between us—a word that just we two knew about. It was an ordinary word, harmless enough, but we attached a special meaning to it and used it only on occasions of extreme intimacy.

So the first word I called out was “Tiddlywinks.” My wife smiled and stuck out her tongue at me.

Frank had volunteered to be the reader each time, so we all passed our slips to him again. The first two he read were “Game” and “Children.” The third was “Herman.” That's my first name. My wife was the only one who didn't double up with laughter. I wrote her name above column three on my chart.

The next four words were “Game,” “Carpet,” “Flip,” and “Game.” The eighth slip was “Amour.”

While Frank read the remaining slips, I glanced around the room wondering who number eight could be. My eyes rested on Dottie's plump figure. Suddenly I remembered. Years ago, before my marriage, I'd been on pretty friendly terms with Dottie . . .

I gulped the rest of my Old-fashioned and mopped my neck with a handkerchief. The room seemed hot and stuffy. The rest of my words were common, everyday words—no private meanings.

When I tried to identify the columns, I decided I'd better not guess Dottie correctly. I figured my wife was suspicious enough as it {130} was, and I hoped she wouldn't ask Dottie later why she associated tiddlywinks with amour.

After I'd announced my guesses, Frank smiled and nodded. “Very good, Herman,” he said. “You only missed on three of them— five, eight, and nine.”

“I didn't ask him who they were. Number eight was the “Amour” one, and I didn't care about five and nine.

“Number five,” Frank went on, while my heart began pounding, “is Beatta. Number eight is Maurice, and—”

“Maurice, my dear fellow,” said I. “My old pal, Maurice. How didst thou happen to think of amour?”

Maurice fidgeted in his chair. “Why, I don't really know, Herman.” He ran a fingertip over his mustache and laughed nervously. “It just came into my head, that's all.”

“Now wait a minute, Herman,” he said, standing up. He walked over, grim-faced, and shoved me on the chest. “Nobody's going to call me a liar.”

I swung at him, but he moved just enough so that my knuckles ricocheted off his cheekbone. I saw his heavy fist coming toward me. . .

When I woke up, in Billings Hospital, I had a broken jaw and two missing incisors.

My wife and I were divorced last Tuesday. It's a delightful game. They play it all over the Village.

One More Martini^†

Every man, I would suppose, can remember at least one teacher of his childhood about whom he fantasized. Hence this story. . . .

N the taxi, on the way to Miss Parker's apartment, Bill Ramsey found himself tingling with excitement. It had been, let's see—about fifteen years since he'd seen her. She had been his teacher in the third (or was it the fourth?) grade. He counted the years on his fingers—grade school, junior high, high school, a year of college, four years in the Army, three more years of college. . . . At least fifteen years.

How old would that make her? Assuming she had been in her early twenties then, she would be in her late thirties now. She still might be beautiful and fairly young. He could remember her vividly. What a figure! No wonder he could never keep his mind on the books. And her dark brown hair and laughing eyes, her funny crooked little smile. He'd been madly in love with her. He had watched her from his desk and dreamed wild dreams. . . .

When the bell rang, Miss Parker put down the mystery novel she was reading, took off her harlequin glasses, and got up from the sofa. She walked slowly to the hall and placed her finger on the button that unlocked the door below. {132}

All afternoon, ever since he had phoned, she'd been probing her mind for memories of Willie Ramsey. The best she could do was conjure up a hazy picture of a chubby, shy, sad-faced little boy who refused to do his schoolwork. There had been something odd, something neurotic about him. She had not particularly liked him. He used to sit quietly at his desk, watching her with big cowlike eyes.

I hope he doesn't stay long, she thought. She hated these visits of former pupils—dull little boys and girls who had grown up into even duller men and women. They were an unhappy reminder of how quickly the years. . .

There were footsteps on the stairs outside. Miss Parker glanced into the hall mirror, patted her hair, then walked to the door and pulled it open.

For an instant—just an instant—they stared at each other in shocked surprise.

Before him, framed in the doorway, was a total stranger—short and stout, with greying hair and drooping breasts and dark recesses around the eyes. She saw in front of her a tall young man with clear brown eyes. He was wearing a grey double-breasted suit, immaculately pressed, and a rich wine-colored tie.

She extended her hand. “I can't believe it! No—it can't be! You're not Willie Ramsey—not the little Willie Ramsey I. . . .”

He laughed loudly, perhaps too loudly. “I'm afraid I am. I guess it's been a long time.”

Miss Parker winced. “I'm so glad you called, Willie,” she said, motioning him in and closing the door behind him. “It was so nice of you to think of me.”

They walked to the living room and seated themselves. Then, after a moment of embarrassed silence, they began the usual questions. {133} Where did you go to college? What grades are you teaching now? Did you get overseas? What ever happened to Miss Webster, the art teacher?

“I used to think a lot of you, Miss Parker,” he said suddenly, looking at the carpet. “I guess you've forgotten about the time I brought you the flowers.”

Miss Parker frowned and reached for a box of cigarettes. She tried vainly to recall. “Of course I haven't, Willie.” She held the box out to him. “Do you smoke?”

He took a cigarette and grinned. “It's funny to see you smoke, Miss Parker,” he said. “I didn't know you smoked.”

“Of course you didn't.” She struck a match and touched the flame to the cigarette. “It's even worse than that. Would you like a Martini?”

While she was in the kitchen preparing the drink, he stood up and strolled around the room. She must have been closer to thirty than twenty when I was in her class, he thought. “And stop calling me Miss Parker,” she shouted from the kitchen. “The name is Irene.”

After the second Martini, he began to notice details about her face—little details that connected the woman sitting opposite him with the vision from his childhood. She had the same twisted way of smiling. And there was a dimple in one cheek when she smiled that he hadn't noticed before. Now that he saw it, he remembered it had always been there.

He was beginning to feel the Martinis—a warm, happy feeling—and something of the old illusion, vestiges of his classroom fantasies, began to settle over Miss Parker. It was growing dark outside and the soft light from the lamp by the sofa was kind to her face. She's still attractive, he thought, even though she is a little wide around the hips. And her mouth is nicely shaped. Very nice. He wondered what she would do if he tried to kiss her. {134}

His glass was empty again. Miss Parker stood up and walked heavily toward him with the shaker. He glanced at his wrist watch. “Holy Blazes!” he said. “It's after six! I really must be going. I really must!” He put his hand over the empty glass and shook his head vigorously.

“Oh, now, really, Willie,” Miss Parker said, pursing her lips. “Just one more little drink won't hurt you. And you can't be that much in a hurry.”

For a moment, he wavered; but then he looked down at his watch again. “No,” he said. “I can't. I've got to go.”

“Well, I won't insist.” She smiled that twisted smile of hers, and once again he found himself thinking that for a woman of her age she certainly had a good deal of charm. “But why don't you stay for supper?” she went on. “I'd love to have you stay. It'd be no trouble. No trouble at all. Really. I'd love . . .”

Her words trailed off into silence as he stood up, a little unsteadily, and shook his head again. “It's awfully kind of you, Miss Parker,” he said at last.

“Irene. I mean Irene. It's awfully kind of you, Irene. But I promised some friends. . . . I'm only in town for a couple of days, and—well, you know how it is. . . .” He made his words sound as genuine as he could.

She moved closer, holding the cocktail shaker and glancing up at him with a faint smile still lighting up her face. “There's just enough here for one more Martini for each of us. Don't you have time for just one more?”

But he held up his hand in protest, mumbled a word or two of thanks, and started for the door.

After he had waved good-by from the stairway, Miss Parker closed the door to her apartment slowly. She stood for a long {135} moment in front of the hall mirror, then walked heavily into the living room and over to one of the curtained windows. Peering through the curtains, she looked down at the quiet street; it was still light enough for her to see his wide-shouldered figure moving through the dusk toward the boulevard where he could hail a taxi.

Miss Parker lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and blew the smoke against the window pane. “Only one more Martini,” she sighed, smiling crookedly. “Just one more. That was all he would have needed.”

Old Man Gloom^†

“Obviosity” is a word that ought to be in the dictionary. Its usefulness is an obviosity. I first heard the word used by John B. Shaw, a friend of high school days in Tuba. The game of “obviosity” was, I believe, invented by another Tulsa friend of both of us, Robert W. Murray, Jr.

Philosophers can be divided into two classes: those who defend points of view so crazy that no one can believe them, and those who defend obviosities. That a wise man should learn to distinguish between the two is of course an obviosity.

LD Man Gloom lifted his arms grotesquely toward the star-filled sky and screamed with agony. The forty-foot-high papier-mache puppet, which the Spanish-American natives of Santa Fe call “Zozobra” or “Old Man Gloom,” was rapidly being consumed by flames. The huge blue lips worked spasmodically. Amplified screams, produced by some hidden person at a microphone, increased in volume as the flames crackled upward along the cylindrical body.

The occasion was Santa Fe's 238th Annual Fiesta, celebrating the bloodless reconquest of the city by General Don Diego de Vargas in 1692, after the great Indian Rebellion of 1680. Every September the Fiesta opens with the burning of Old Man Gloom on the north slopes of Fort Marcy Park. In native folklore, Zozobra is a symbol {138} of pessimism and despair. Not until he is destroyed can the gaiety of the Fiesta begin. ¡Que Sigan Las Fiestas!

I bent over to kiss the back of my wife's neck. We were standing at the side of our car watching the ceremony, with hundreds of other cars packed closely around us. A child seated on the fender of a nearby car broke into cries of terror when the huge face of Old Man Gloom crumpled in the roaring flames.

“What a splendid way to start a vacation!” I whispered. “Goodbye Gloom!”

My wife nodded and squeezed my hand. Her face, highlighted by the crimson flames, looked almost as young and lovely as it had twenty years ago when we first met in Dallas.

On the slow drive back to town—slow because the cars were bumper to bumper—we played our favorite game. It was something we had invented years before, and we called it “obviosity.” The idea is this. You pretend you don't understand something obvious, or that you have a new and brilliant idea. Then as the conversation continues, your idea turns out to be commonplace.

“My dear,” I said, letting the motor idle because the traffic was at a standstill, “I've heard rumors about a strange beverage obtainable in these here parts. It makes you feel warm and happy when you drink it.”

I shook my head. “This liquid has some kind of chemical in it—alcohol I think. Makes you feel slightly dizzy, but happy—like you didn't have a care in the world.”

“Sounds silly to me,” she said. “I don't think they have anything like that around here.”

In La Cantina, the cocktail lounge of the La Fonda Hotel where we were staying, we found the liquid all right. And so had about five {139} hundred other tourists. Next to us at the bar was a stout grey-haired man who said he was an oil-drilling contractor from Oklahoma City. He had a tire chain padlocked around his waist and was telling everybody he did this to cheat the Navajos out of a fifty-dollar turquoise-studded belt. A few feet above the head of his wife floated a large red balloon. The string was tied to one of the bars of her spectacles. Everybody had the Fiesta spirit.

After four or five tequilas, my wife and I elbowed our way through the crowd, and walked outside the hotel to the town's Plaza to mingle with the picturesque throngs of Spanish-Americans, Indians, and tourists. The Spanish women were dressed in brightly colored Fiesta costumes, the men in fancy shirts and colored sashes. A pair of giggling children came up behind us and tossed confetti on our heads.

We stood near a wheezy little merry-go-round that operated by hand. The huge crank was being turned by a husky Indian, bare to the waist, while a battered calliope ground out a sad, off-key tune. A Spanish native, holding an unlit cigarette in his fingers, approached us. He was a thin, wiry fellow with a tiny mustache.

“Pardon, serior,” he said, flashing a big smile of white teeth. “Do you have a match, please?”

“Don't you remember?” she said, raising her voice so I could hear it above the calliope. “It's a little stick of wood or paper. When you scratch it on something rough, like sandpaper, it catches on fire.”

The Spaniard looked puzzled. I grinned and handed him a match folder. “It's a game we play,” I said.

He fired his cigarette and handed back the folder. “Oh, so? I do not understand.”

“It's like this,” I said. “You see how all these buildings around {140} here are built? Out of adobe, right?” He nodded. “Now I have a great idea. Something that might make a million dollars if we could get it on the market.”

“Instead of just slapping all that mud on the side of buildings,” I went on, “why couldn't you mix some stuff together and bake it hard, in the shape of, say, a rectangular box about so big.” I indicated a size with my hands. “Then you could build things with them the same way a kid builds things out of blocks. Just cement them together some way.”

“That's a wonderful idea,” my wife said. “Like blocks. You stick them together. We can combine the two words—block and stick. Well call 'em blicks.”

The native roared with laughter. Then he slapped me on the back so hard it knocked the cigar out of my mouth. “I catch on, senor. Very funny!” He suddenly looked serious. “I have much better idea. Make money quicker.”

“Lots of tourists here for Fiesta,” he said, “with lots of money in pocketbook, no?” I nodded. “Everybody feel very gay, maybe drunk. We bump against tourist like this.”

He bumped against me suddenly. I started to topple sideways, but he grabbed my arm. “Steady senor,” he said.

“Because,” he said, his voice low and confidential, “when we bump, we reach into his pocket, so.” He held out a thin brown hand and made a scissor motion with his first and second fingers. “And take out wallet!”

“Wonderful!” my wife shouted, waving her arms. “What will we call ourselves?”

“Good ¡Excelente!” the Spaniard exclaimed, whacking me on the back again. “We call it ‘pocket picking.’”

“Gracias senor,” he said. “Sorry I have to leave now. ¡Bueno!” He tipped his hat and vanished into the crowd.

We wandered over to a booth where a woman was selling candy apples. I reached for my wallet.

My wife must have noticed the startled expression on my face. “What's the matter, darling?”

“My wallet!” I roared. “I had three hundred dollars in that wallet! Why that. ...” I sputtered a string of uncouth adjectives.

We wasted an hour hunting for him. Half the native men we saw looked exactly like him.

The next morning, when we were on the highway driving back to Dallas, my wife said, “There must be some use for all those little cells up there in that so-called brain of yours. Could it be they're supposed to be to think with?”

“If you'd keep that big mouth of yours shut, sweetheart,” I said, “I might be able to keep my mind on the road without having to listen to a lot of yakety-yaks.”

Postscript

On February 15, 1972, the New York Times published a letter from {142} Lawrence Sanders, a skillful player of “obviosity.” Here is what it said:

The Horrible Horns^†

“The Horrible Horns” was my most mature effort to involve my “detective” Monte Featherstone in a story with a philosophical theme, like one of Chesterton's mysteries though with a theme G. K. could hardly have approved It has always astonished me that Roman Catholics today are so little disturbed by the dilemma that evolution forces on them; indeed, it is difficult to find even a liberal Protestant who has given the matter some thought, although fundamentalists understand the dilemma all too well. I raised the question once more in my religious novel, The Flight of Peter Fromm, and considered it still again in Chapter 19 of my Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener.

ATHER O'Connell was getting on in years, and I found it necessary to hold back my pace to keep from tiring him. We were walking slowly along Fifty-Seventh Street, not far from {144} the University of Chicago, headed for the little block of ramshackle art studios just beyond the Illinois Central tracks. It was a warm April afternoon. A light breeze from Lake Michigan mixed with the sunshine and blew against our faces.

The priest spoke very little. He was taking me to the studio apartment of a young Mexican painter named Pedro Azote who had been a member of his parish—the Church of St. Thomas the Apostle. I say “had been,” because Pedro, two days earlier, had killed himself. That was all Father O'Connell had told me. He preferred, he said, to give me the details after we arrived at the scene of the suicide.

The studio was a flimsy one-story wooden structure that looked as if it might collapse when the next Illinois Central train rumbled by. Like the other low buildings in the block, it had at one time been a retail store. The large glass windows in front were covered with dark curtains. Father O'Connell produced a key and unlocked the door.

“Pedro's nearest relative,” he explained after we entered, “is an older sister in Mexico. In a few days I plan to ship his paintings and personal belongings to her. But first I wanted you to see the apartment as it was when the body was found.”

We were standing in a small display room separated from the rest of the studio by a wooden partition that extended almost to the ceiling. The partition was covered with black drapery, and served as background for a row of paintings.

The priest pushed aside the curtains at one end and passed through an entrance to the rear. I followed, pausing long enough to notice that the paintings were astonishingly good. They had vivid colors, sharp outlines, and simple, characteristically Mexican, patterns.

The back section of the studio was both workshop and living {145} quarters. It was in a remarkable state of neatness. The few pieces of battered furniture were arranged with geometric precision. The bed was covered with a bright orange spread of Spanish design. The floor was clean. The panes in a row of windows along the rear wall were spotless.

On one side of the room twenty large canvases of varying sizes were stacked against the wall. They were in groups of five, each group arranged with the left edges flush, like newspaper headlines that line up on the left side of the column.

Most of these details, however, entered my consciousness later, because my attention was arrested by a spot of startling disarray. On an easel near the center of the room rested what had once been a large oil painting. The canvas was ripped to shreads. Strips of cloth dangled from the lower frame, and jagged patches clung to the upper edge like the irregular teeth of some giant beast.

Father O'Connell saw me staring. “I wish I could explain that to you, Featherstone,” he said. “Unfortunately, I can't. The picture was mutilated some time during the afternoon of the suicide, probably by Pedro himself. He'd been working on it several months. An artist who lives across the street dropped over early in the afternoon, on the day of the tragedy, to borrow some oils. He found Pedro putting the finishing touches on the canvas. He seemed to be working rapidly—in a kind of feverish haste. That was the last time he was seen alive.”

The priest picked up a knife from the dresser and brought it over to me. It had a sharp steel blade, six or seven inches long. The wooden handle was carved with a Mexican design. “Pedro was found there,” he said, pointing to a spot on the floor in front of the easel. “This knife was projecting from his chest.” I could see the faint outline on the floor where a stain had been scrubbed away.

Father O'Connell shook his head. “Nothing. But perhaps I'd better start at the beginning.”

We pulled two chairs together and sat down. The priest took a cigar from his pocket, apologized for not having another one, and lit it.

“Pedro established residence here five years ago,” he said between puffs. “Before that he'd been living in Mexico. He was born in Mexico. I think he must have been twenty-two or twenty-three when he came to Chicago. He was a devout Catholic. As soon as he moved into the colony he came to see me and began attending Mass regularly.”

Father O'Connell sighed. “Yes—but only when a person is fully conscious of his actions—in complete control of his will. Fortunately, Pedro was drinking heavily. We found an empty whisky bottle on the table and the post-mortem confirmed it. In such cases the Church always gives the deceased the benefit of the doubt, so we'll be able to give Pedro a Christian burial. The rest is in the hands of God.”

We sat in silence for a moment while the priest, with a pained expression, studied the burning end of his cigar.

Father O'Connell turned his tired, deeply lined face toward the easel. “Several months ago I asked him to do a painting for the church. It was to hang in the reception room outside my office. I suggested a picture of the Garden of Eden. It was a subject that didn't conflict with other pictures in the building. Pedro liked the suggestion and seemed eager to do it.”

“It's hard to tell in its present state. There's one feature about it, though, that's extremely odd. Let me show you.”

We stood up and walked to the easel. Father O'Connell lifted {147} several of the larger strips, holding them in place.

Eve was in the center of the canvas, in a kneeling posture. She was nursing a small child. One of the slashes passed diagonally through her face, dividing the eyes, so it was difficult to form an impression of her features. A second child, in the foreground, seemed to be playing with something on the grass.

“That's exactly what puzzled me,” he said. “I'm sure Pedro understood it was to be a picture of both Eve and Adam.”

I looked back at the tattered canvas, which the priest still held in position. I had assumed at first that the children were Cain and Abel, but now I noticed with surprise that the child on the grass was a little girl.

Father O'Connell's face crinkled into a smile. “There's a passage in Genesis which states that Adam begat sons and daughters. A fortunate passage—clears up the difficulty about where Cain found his wife.” I wasn't sure whether he was smiling at me or at the Old Testament.

He let the strips fall. “Pedro had many friends, but even the closest knew little about what went on in the depths of his mind. You see, few of them shared his faith, so he was naturally reluctant to talk about his spiritual struggles. I've questioned every member of the colony, and they all agree something had been troubling him.”

The priest shook his head emphatically. “I'm positive no love affair was involved. Pedro's interest in women was seldom more than casual. He had a high sense of moral responsibility.”

I sauntered around the room, looking carefully at everything. A small bookcase by the bed contained about thirty volumes. There {148} were some Spanish editions of Unamuno, several volumes of Chesterton and Maritain, half a dozen books by Eric Gill, the Random House edition of St. Thomas Aquinas. . . .

A thin book with a bright red cover caught my eye, and I bent over to read the title, Mr. Belloc Objects, by H. G. Wells. It was a book I happened to know about. Shortly after Wells published his famous Outline, Belloc issued a Companion to Mr. Wells' Outline of History. It contained a violent attack on the theory of evolution. Wells in turn, in a mood of amused anger, had produced this little volume as a reply.

I took the book from the shelf and turned to the flyleaf. The name “Oliver Hammersmith” was written there in ink.

“Oliver Hammersmith,” I said. “Isn't that the professor of anthropology at the university?”

The priest nodded slowly. “I think Pedro met him years ago in Mexico. They were good friends.”

“I'd like to borrow this for a day or so,” I said. A dim idea had occurred to me. I slipped the book into the side pocket of my jacket.

“Do you suppose we could have the painting patched up?” I asked. “The original state might tell us something.”

I picked up the canvas, and Father O'Connell followed me into the street and to the small art shop east of the studio. A grey-haired woman emerged from the back. She had known Pedro, of course, and knew about the picture. It would be easy to restore, she told us, by gluing it to another canvas. She would have it ready for us tomorrow at four. We promised to meet at the studio at four on the following day.

In my sitting-room I settled into an easy-chair and thumbed {149} through Wells's polemic. On page 41, in a section on Neanderthal man, a passage had been marked with pencil. It read:

I turned the book face down on the arm of the chair and gazed for some time at the scarlet cover. Was it possible that Pedro had been struggling with some Catholic doctrine about evolution and the Fall of Man?

I got up and phoned Hammersmith at the university. He was glad I called and anxious to talk to me. He preferred coming to my apartment.

He arrived in less than twenty minutes—a tall, awkward man in his early thirties, with light-brown hair and somewhat boyish mannerisms. We shook hands jerkily, while I mentioned a time we had met several years ago. Then we sat down and began discussing Pedro.

The professor had first known the artist in Yucatan, Mexico. They met near Merida, he said, where he'd been working on the excavation of Mayan ruins. He and the boy (Pedro was then in his 'teens) had become good friends. Years later when Pedro came to Chicago, the professor persuaded him to settle in the Fifty-Seventh Street area. {150}

The conversation drited to the suicide. I told Hammersmith all I knew about it, and about the mysterious mutilation of the painting. Then I picked up Wells's book and showed it to him.

The anthropologist looked surprised. “You're a jump ahead of me, Monte. This”—he gestured nervously toward the book—“was what I wanted to talk to you about.”

Hammersmith nodded. “Very much so. Two months ago he told me he was working on a picture of the Garden of Eden. He hadn't thought much about Adam and Eve, he said, until he made the preliminary sketches. Then, as the picture began to form in his mind, certain problems arose.”

“Oh—such things as what racial characteristics the pair ought to have, and the old problem about the navels. He knew Michelangelo hadn't hesitated to put a navel on Adam in the Sistine Chapel, and the whole thing seemed ridiculous to him; yet he sensed the fact that it raised a genuine issue. He was too well acquainted with enlightened Catholic opinion not to know that the Church was beginning to accept evolution in a sense but he wasn't clear as to just what sense. He had checked the libraries and found Belloc's book. I happened to have a copy of Wells's reply. He wanted to read it.”

“No—I saw him once since. We spent the evening in my apartment discussing evolution. It was, I'm sorry to say, more an argument than a discussion.”

“Yes, it did. He defended the currently popular Neo-Thomist view that man's body evolved, but at some point in history God injected human souls into the evolutionary chain. The idea appealed to him, and he asked me about mutations. I kept bringing up the topic {151} of primitive man and where to draw the line. I think it was this problem that bothered him the most. He drank quite a bit, and was in a morose, bitter mood when he left. That was the last time I saw him.”

After a pause I said, “The painting should be restored by four o'clock tomorrow. Would you care to meet me at Pedro's studio? Father O'Connell, from Pedro's parish, will be there.”

He was, of course, anxious to see the picture. He agreed to join us at four. We talked a while longer, but nothing important came to light.

The following afternoon I got to the shop at ten minutes to four. I wanted to get the first look at the picture.

The grey-haired lady brought it over, and I helped her lift it to the counter so that she could hold it vertically while I backed off to look at it. It was too large to make much out of it at close range.

The picture was startlingly beautiful. The setting was a kind of arbor or sanctuary in the ancient Paradise. You were looking through an archway of tangled boughs. All shades of green were in the foliage, and here and there a bright spot of color on some exotic blossom. The style was realistic, but the sharp outlines (I moved up close and saw that small black borders surrounded all the principle masses) gave it a decorative effect like a stained-glass window.

Sunlight filtered into the arbor from an angle, creating a yellow patchwork on the ground and bathing the three figures in golden tints. Into the background stretched the endless corridors of the forest. In the foreground a naked little girl was playing with some rocks. She had balanced one stone on top of another and was trying to place a third on top. Her face wore an expression of alert, childish gravity.

Eve was in a kneeling posture, knees to the ground, sitting back on her heels. Her sun-bathed flesh had all the warmth and verisimilitude of a nude by Ingres. The sunlight highlighted the curve of her {152} thighs, and made little lights in the black hair that tumbled about her shoulders. A curly-headed baby boy was resting in her left arm and nursing at her breast. His eyes were closed.

But the entire composition—all the major lines of the picture— led to the mother's face. It was a beautiful face. She was not looking at either child, but gazing straight ahead—her large dark eyes looking directly at you.

I understood the mystery of Adam's absence. I knew why Pedro had completed his picture. I knew why, in a drunken rage, he had driven his knife into the canvas. I knew why he had plunged the blade into his heart.

The gray-haired lady was watching me intently. I forced a smile. “You've done a splendid job,” I said, taking out my billfold.

Father O'Connell and Professor Hammersmith stood up when I entered Pedro's studio. I nodded to them, then leaned the picture against the wall, the face of the canvas turned away. They came over and stood in front of it, waiting for me to speak. A block away an Illinois Central express roared by, shaking the walls and vibrating the floor of the little room.

“Pedro,” I began, like a lecturer explaining a slide not yet on the screen, “found himself on the horns of a horrible dilemma.” Briefly, I outlined the metaphysical difficulty that evolution poses for a modern Catholic. I stressed the either/or. “A Thomist can deny the animal ancestry of human life,” I said, “or he must accept the new compromise. Pedro had learned enough geology and biology to know that the first solution is out of the question. He painted a scene that would dramatize the only other alternative available. It is a neat, orderly solution. It keeps the sharp outlines of man's nature. So Pedro painted his picture in a neat, orderly way, with those hard {153} black edges that he loved.”

I walked over to the painting, placed a hand on the frame, and went on with my monologue. The priest and the professor watched with puzzled expressions.

“He completed the picture under intense emotional strain. When the job was done he backed away and looked at it. What he saw horrified him. We know that he'd been drinking. In his shaken state he found a knife and slashed his work to ribbons. Then he must have lost all rational control. It seemed to him that Hammersmith was right—the dilemma was insoluble. The whole structure of his faith began to crumble. . . .”

“It was a painting of Adam and Eve after all,” I said. With my finger I tapped the head of the little girl. “Here is Eve, playing with some rocks.” I shifted my finger upward. “And this is little Adam, nursing at his mother's breast.”

The anthropologist raised his hand and pointed. “The eyes,” he whispered. “The eyes!”

They were lovely eyes—eyes any woman would have envied. But through some trick of pigment they were cold, bestial, uncomprehending. They were two windows behind which no human soul was sitting.

For a while none of us moved or spoke. We just stood there, staring at the awful blankness of that face. Slowly, in the silence, Father O'Connell made a sign of the cross.

Private Eye Oglesby^†

Clayton Rawson, mystery writer, magician, and good friend, published this whimsical piece in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine at a time when he was managing editor. It had appeared more than a decade before in the London Mystery Magazine under the title of “Crunchy Wunchy's First Case.”

S I stood at the window of the dead girl's apartment and watched, the mayor's private limousine pulled over to the curb and stopped in front of the entrance.

It was early fall, and leaves from the large elms along the roadside fluttered down over the Great Detective's hatless head of tangled brown hair. He was wearing a gray suit with long pants, and carrying a small black bag containing, no doubt, his scientific equipment. His height was about four feet, and he was ten years of age.

It was yesterday at headquarters when Mulrooney, Chief of Homicide, had given me this unpleasant assignment. During the past week I had beaten the Chief fourteen checker games in a row. I suspect that had something to do with my getting the job instead of Lieutenant Hunnecker.

“Sergeant Stackpole,” the Chief said, grinning around his cigar {156} and clapping me on the shoulder, “how would you like to take care of the mayor's son tomorrow? He wants to look over the Smith girl's apartment.”

My cigarette almost fell out of my mouth. “Don't tell me,” I said, “that that skinny little genius with the big I.Q. has given up chess and taken up crime detection!”

Mulrooney nodded. “He belongs to some sort of breakfast cereal club. You send in so many box tops of Crunchy Wunchies and you get a badge and a set of detective tools.”

“That's great,” I said. “Why don't you let Lieutenant Hunnecker handle the kid? It's his case.”

The Chief eased his 250 pounds into the swivel chair behind his desk and leaned back. “Hunnecker's too busy. You're the only man on the force not doing anything. Mayor Oglesby called me about it this morning. He wants to please the lad. He says he'll consider it a personal favor if we let the boy prowl around the apartment a few hours to look for clues.”

“And what if Master Crunchy Wunchy starts ripping the furniture apart looking for atom bomb plans?” I said sourly.

“Good boy!” said Mulrooney, slapping the desk with his huge palm. “I knew you wouldn't mind. If he gets out of hand, use your own judgment.”

“Ah, ah, ah!” Mulrooney shook his head and waggled a fat index finger. “You know how Mayor Oglesby's been feeling lately.”

“Just the man I want to see, Stackpole,” he said. “What's the name of that fence who runs a pawnshop on First Street?”

I found an empty envelope in my pocket and jotted down Grimm's name and address on it. “Still looking for the missing jewelry?”

He nodded. “Craziest case I ever worked on. We don't even know there was any jewelry, and here I am knocking myself out looking for it!”

The next afternoon I got to the apartment of the murdered girl about a half hour ahead of young Oglesby, which gave me time to give the place a once-over myself. I examined the strongbox where Miss Smith was believed to have kept her jewels. It looked as if it had been pried open with a screwdriver.

Just before the mayor's car arrived, a loose button popped off my coat. It took several minutes to find where it rolled to on the carpet. I put the button in my trouser pocket, then walked to the window in time to see the mayor's car pull up. When the doorbell rang, I went downstairs and opened the front door.

“I'm Private Eye Oglesby,” the kid said, giving me a flash of the tin badge under his lapel. He put down his bag and stuck out a small bony hand.

He grabbed my hand so that the little fingers interlocked, gave it three quick shakes, then bent forward and whispered, “Crunchy Wunchies.”

“That's the secret handshake,” he explained, looking up at me through a pair of black horn-rims. “You're supposed to say the password too.”

“Oh,” he said. Then he grinned. A tooth was missing in front. {158} “It's a silly club anyway—mostly for kids who don't know much about criminal investigation.”

When we got to Miss Smith's sitting room, young Oglesby put down his bag and perched himself on the edge of one of the easy chairs. He put his fingertips together and blinked a few times.

I sat in one of the other chairs and tried to keep a straight face. “There's not much to tell,” I said. “You've probably read about it already.”

I managed to turn the start of a laugh into an attack of coughing. “I suppose so,” I said finally. “Well, this doll—Rosalie Smith— was a manicurist at the Mayo Hotel. She lived here all by herself. Somebody got into her apartment in the middle of the night and strangled her. The thief broke open a metal strongbox in her closet and took whatever was inside—maybe jewelry. That's about all there is to it.”

“He probably had a key. One of Miss Smith's lady friends was visiting her that night and stayed until after one a.m. When she left, Miss Smith locked the door. It was locked the next morning when the maid came in.”

He asked me several other questions. They were good questions. Then he sat silently for a while, pulling on the lobe of his left ear.

“I got this from Nayland Smith,” he said, looking at me over the top of his horn rims.

“My name,” he snapped, glaring at me through his thick glasses, “is Maxwell Oglesby.”

“Okay, Maxwell,” I said. “You look the place over and see if you can find anything the police missed. If you need any help, let me know.”

He nodded, gave me a side-glance, then got up and carried his bag over to a table. Out of it he took a large magnifying glass, a tape measure, a pair of callipers, several small bottles with atomizer attachments, and about a dozen manila envelopes.

I took him into the bedroom and showed him where the body was found and where Miss Smith kept her strongbox. I thought he would prefer not to have me watch him at work—I might learn some of his secret methods—so I went back to the sitting room to read a paper I'd brought along. I hadn't been following the case closely, so I read the front page story about it pretty carefully to see if I'd given the kid any bum dope.

Twenty minutes went by, then Maxwell came into the living room with an envelope in his hand. He walked over to me.

He pulled on his ear and gave me a long funny look. Then he sealed the envelope, scribbled something on the outside, and put it in his bag. He didn't tell me what he had found.

After he'd gone back to the bedroom, I tiptoed over to the bag to see what he'd written, but it was in secret code. The envelope felt {160} as if it contained a coin about the size of a nickel.

I was in the middle of the sports section when he popped into the room with another envelope. He had taken off his coat and tie, and rolled up his sleeves.

He produced a small pad of paper and asked me to write down the pawnshop's address. After I did this he studied the address carefully for almost a minute. “Hmmm,” he said. “Very interesting.”

He folded the paper and stuck it in a third envelope, then wrote something in code on the outside.

I shook my head. “Of course, the fingerprint experts have gone over it. But I don't think they found anything. What made you think of Charley's pawnshop?”

He didn't answer. He tugged on his ear and started to leave, then he came back and picked up his bag. I think he suspected I might try to get into his envelopes.

I started to follow him into the bedroom, but he told me flatly he'd rather I waited outside until he finished. I shrugged and went back to my chair. His remark about Charley Grimm made me curious. Maybe Crunchy Wunchy was really finding things!

He emerged from the bedroom about fifteen minutes later carrying a glass of water.

As a matter of fact I was a little thirsty, but I wondered what prompted this sudden gesture of politeness. Maybe he felt sorry for not letting me into the bedroom. {161}

While I drank the water I noticed his hands were covered with white powder. When I asked him about it, he shook his head mysteriously.

He was in the bedroom another half hour, then I heard water running in the bathroom. When he came out this time, he had his coat and tie back on and was carrying his bag. The powder had been cleaned off his hands. He put down the bag and walked over to my chair. There was an odd smile on his face.

I opened my coat to show him my shoulder holster. He wanted to see the revolver. I took it out, made sure the safety catch was on, and handed it to him. He turned it about in his thin hands.

Suddenly the gun was yanked out of my grasp. When I looked up he was standing about six feet away, his eyes narrowed to slits. The revolver was pointed straight at my solar plexus!

I started to get up, thinking it was some kind of prank, then I noticed the safety catch was flipped off. The kid must be crazy! I decided I'd better play it safe.

He sidled over to the telephone, keeping the muzzle trained on me, and took the phone off the cradle. “Police Department,” he said.

I started to get up again, but he shoved the gun toward me and I sat down fast. I could feel little beads of perspiration creeping down my forehead.

In a few moments, he had Chief Mulrooney on the line. “This is Sergeant Stackpole,” he said, giving a fair imitation of my voice. {162} “I've got the murderer of Miss Smith . . . We're in the apartment . . . Okay.” He dropped the phone back into the cradle while I stared at him bug-eyed.

“I had to do that,” he explained apologetically. “The Chief wouldn't come if he thought it was just me.”

I'll not try to describe the faces of Mulrooney and Hunnecker when they walked into the room. After the Chief got over the first shock, he broke into such a hearty guffaw that the windowpanes rattled. Hunnecker stood by and grinned.

Then the chief closed the door carefully and locked it. He took my gun away from young Oglesby and passed it over to the lieutenant.

“Keep the prisoner covered,” he said to Hunnecker, “while we hear Detective Oglesby's story.”

I sat there and ground my teeth. Maxwell stood up, adjusted his glasses, and cleared his throat.

He had, he said, three clues that proved I was the murderer. He opened his bag and took out three manila envelopes. From the first envelope he extracted a brown button.

“You'll perceive, Chief,” he said, “that the lower button on Sergeant Stackpole's coat is missing. This button matches the others on his coat. I found it under the bed where Miss Smith was murdered.”

I dug into my left trouser pocket. “Holy Moses!” I said. “There's a hole in my pocket!” I tried to explain how I lost the button.

The Chief leaned back and chuckled. “A likely story if ever I heard one,” he said.

I started to shout something, but the kid interrupted. “This,” he said, “was in Miss Smith's wastebasket.”

He opened another envelope and took out a crumpled piece of {163} paper. It was the envelope on which I had jotted down Charley Grimm's address for Lieutenant Hunnecker the day before.

From a third envelope Maxwell took the sheet of paper on which I'd written the same address an hour ago. He told how he got me to do this, then passed both items over to the Chief.

“Well, what do you know about that!” Mulrooney exclaimed. “It's Stackpole's writing all right!”

“That's the name of a notorious fence,” Hunnecker commented with a poker face. “I'll bet that's how he got rid of the jewels.”

I forced out a laugh, then stopped abruptly and said, “There's nothing funny about this at all.”

Young Oglesby dashed into the bedroom. He came back with the strongbox and an empty drinking glass. He had blown a fine white powder over both of them to bring out fingerprints.

I listened open-mouthed while he explained how he tricked me into putting my prints on the glass.

“Both sets are the common whorl type,” he said, like a professor giving a lecture. “They're identical on forty-three points. That's enough to convince any jury.”

“And to think,” said Mulrooney, wiping his eyes with his handkerchief, “that the day would come when I'd have to arrest a member of my own force. A terrible thing it is to have to arrest one of your own men for murder.”

Hunnecker stood up and jangled a pair of handcuffs. But young Oglesby stepped in front of him and held up his hand.

“Just a minute, gentlemen,” he said. “Sergeant Stackpole isn't really the killer.”

“I just did that for fun,” Maxwell went on, “to get even with the sergeant for calling me Crunchy Wunchy.”

The Chief looked at me, then at the lieutenant, then back at the {164} kid. “Well, now,” he said, frowning. “This is an unexpected development. What about all this fine evidence?”

“It's phony,” said Maxwell. “The envelope with the address is postmarked two days after the murder. And if he lost his button on the night of the crime, he'd have noticed it before now and burned the suit.”

And then he uncorked a remark that turned my ears crimson while the Chief and Hunnecker howled. “Sergeant Stackpole may be dumb,” Maxwell said, “but not that dumb.”

Mulrooney was looking at him with new respect. “Do you have any idea who the real killer is, my boy?”

We let that soak in a while. Then the Chief said as gently as he could, “And who, might I ask, is Steve?”

“I don't know his last name,” Maxwell said, “but he's a big businessman here in town. He was Miss Smith's latest boy friend. She was blackmailing him with some letters he wrote last year, and—”

“From her diary,” the kid said. He reached into his bag and pulled out a red leather-covered book. “It was in the back of one of the dresser drawers, under a lot of pink underwear and things like that.”

The Chief snatched the book out of Maxwell's hands, and we all crowded around to look. It was Rosalie's diary, all right, and it was filled with dynamite!

Now it was Hunnecker's turn to look humiliated. I snickered behind my hand while the Chief gave him a good roasting for not searching the dresser with more care. Then he turned to Maxwell. {165}

“I'm going to make you a deputy officer for this,” he said proudly. “Maybe you'll come down to headquarters some time and lecture to my men.”

Young Oglesby grinned, showing the gap in his teeth, and said he'd be happy to do that.

It was easy enough to locate Steve. Confronted by the evidence, he broke down and confessed. The letters had been in the strongbox. Miss Smith demanded more cash than he could pay and in a moment of desperation he'd determined to get the letters back at all costs. She had awakened while he was in the bedroom and he had killed her.

“Elementary,” he told reporters. “The real credit should go to the brilliant work of Lieutenant Hunnecker.”

As for me, I was so badly shaken by the gun episode that I had to take a week off to rest up. Just to make sure I didn't get any more assignments to take care of Crunchy Wunchy, I decided I'd better give more attention to my personal relations with Mulrooney. It's astonishing how much the Chiefs checker playing has improved these days!

The Virgin from Kalamazoo^†

One of the great mysteries about popular doggerel is how the classic dirty limericks, the ones that are undisputed masterpieces, get written. Herewith a conjecture. . . .

AVE you ever wondered where off-color limericks come from? A lot of people have thought about it, but I'm the only one who ever did anything about it! Maybe it's because I'm the first person crazy enough to try.

There are several theories about how blue limericks get started. Some scholars say most of them are created by medical students while dissecting cadavers. Others credit them to anthropology students at the University of Edinburgh. In any case, once a new limerick springs up, it seems to travel round the world with the speed of light. You hear a new one in Hollywood, fly to New York, then hear it again from the person who meets you at the airport.

Six months ago my friend John B. Shaw, who owns a bookshop in Tulsa, told me one of the funniest limericks I'd ever heard. It was totally unlike any other in my collection. Unfortunately I can give only the first line—“A virgin from Kalamazoo”—but take my word for it, it's a masterpiece.

At the time I heard this limerick, I happened to read in Billy {168} Rose's newspaper column about a “wispy little geezer” in Central Park who claimed he made up all the best dirty jokes. It struck me that maybe a similar comic genius puts the blue limericks—the good ones, at any rate—into circulation. The more I brooded about it, the more I wanted to find out. Finally, I decided I'd track down the one about the lady in Kalamazoo if it took me a lifetime.

I started, of course, by calling my friend Shaw. He referred me to a book salesman. After considerable long-distance telephoning, I located the salesman in a Kansas City bar.

“Yes, I told it to Shaw,” he said. “But he must have changed the first line. It's about a waitress from Kalamazoo.”

He said a barber in Houston had told it to him. He didn't know the barber's name, but he remembered the approximate location of the shop. I took a plane to Houston that afternoon. I found the barber all right. He was a little surprised at the wording of the third line.

“The way I heard it,” he said, draping a hot towel over a customer's face, “was, ‘He gave her a slap.’” He agreed, though, that the salesman's version was superior.

Three months later I had made something like nine hundred phone calls and had zig-zagged in and out of every state except North Dakota. I traced the limerick through more than four hundred people of every creed, color, age, and occupation. The chain included several Baptist ministers, twenty-six high-school girls, four Catholic priests, and two nuns. At each step the limerick got cleaner. End rhymes stayed the same, but everything else changed.

Another month, and seventy more people, brought me back to where I began. By now the limerick was so clean you could print it in a church paper. I found myself interviewing one of the elderly school teachers in the Tulsa suburb where I live. {169}

She squinted through her bifocals a moment, then broke into a smile. “Why, it was your own daughter who told it,” she said. “She recited it one morning during the Home Room hour. It made a great hit with the class.

I rushed home and found Julie skipping rope in the next yard with a neighbor's children.

“Don't you remember, Daddy?” she said. “You told it to me yourself one night. It was when I had a bad cold and couldn't go to sleep.”

Suddenly I remembered. It was last winter. She had asked me to tell her a “funny poem” and I had made up a limerick on the spot. It had completely slipped my mind.

She pushed some yellow bangs off her forehead and recited in a sing-song treble:

I apologize for that mediocre third line, but I guess that was the best I could manage at the time.

So—if you happen to hear the limerick about the inexperienced gal from Kalamazoo, you won't have to wonder who the filthy-minded genius is who first thought it up. It's me.

Yesterday I picked up another good one—about a midget from Wichita Falls. Anybody know where it came from? Who knows, maybe you started it!

The Sixth Ship^†

“The Sixth Ship “ could be a fantasy, or it could be a dream in the mind of my crippled sailor just before he died. In any case, it draws on my experience in World War II as a yeoman on the USS Pope. The ship was a destroyer escort that operated in the North Atlantic with five sister ships, all exactly alike. Before the war ended, one of the six was sunk by two German torpedoes, and most of its crew perished.

It was not the Pope that sank, but I have often thought about how easily it could have been. The names in my story—for the ships, the men, our mascot Seaweed, even my own nickname Buzz—are all authentic. My imaginary sailor, who survived by taking a lifebelt that wasn't his, could have wandered into the story from “Good Dancing, Sailor!”

T was five in the afternoon, and a light fog was hanging over the St. John's River when the motor whaleboat shoved off. The boat was manned by a sailor in dungarees, and carried a single passenger—a pale young man with a thin, troubled face and sad gray eyes. He stood in the center of the boat, hatless, his hands in the pockets of a brown topcoat. His eyes searched the fog ahead.

“Were you in the Navy?” the sailor asked, raising his voice so it could be heard above the motor. The young man nodded.

The sailor, who couldn't have been more than twenty, studied the man's features, wondering why he didn't want to talk. Then his gaze dropped to the passenger's feet. The left leg was probably in a metal brace, he thought. You could see the bar of steel that went through the ankle.

After a while the sailor tried once more. “How come you want to go aboard the Pilkbury?

There was a moment of hesitation. “I'm an inspector,” the passenger said finally, in a flat voice. “We're checking the electrical wiring.”

This seemed to satisfy the sailor. He didn't speak again until a group of five destroyer escorts began to loom through the fog. It was one of several hundred nests of small ships that had been moth-balled by the Navy and left in the St. Johns River until they might be put to use again.

“Used to be six in this group,” the sailor said. “It was what they called a ‘killer group.’ Chased subs in the North Atlantic.”

The passenger made no comment. He had lied to the sailor about his reason for going aboard the nest, and now he was thinking about how he had lied earlier in the afternoon to the lieutenant-commander at the naval base near Green Cove Springs. He told the officer he had served three years as a quartermaster on the Pillsbury, that he wanted to see the ship again “for sentimental reasons.” The officer asked him if he had been injured on the ship, and he had lied again. “It was a stupid accident,” he said. “I fell off the ladder that leads to the signal bridge.” The officer thought his request “highly irregular,” but he finally consented.

“The sixth ship's somewhere on the bottom of the ocean, I guess,” the sailor went on. “Caught a torpedo just a few weeks before the war ended. They tell me only about a dozen guys in the {173} crew survived.”

He cut off the motor and steered the boat alongside a metal ladder that ran up the starboard side of the first ship in the nest. The man climbed slowly, resting his left foot on each rung while he lifted himself with the other leg. When he got aboard he turned and looked down.

“I'll be making the next shuttle in an hour,” the sailor shouted up. “Pick you up right here about 1900.”

After the chug of the whaleboat's motor died away, a strange silence seemed to settle on the ship. The only sound was a gentle lapping of the water against the hull; the only movement an occasional, almost imperceptible, rocking. Rays of the setting sun cut through the mist, throwing long shadows over the deserted deck. Everything was gray. The deck, the bulkheads, the superstructure, the smokestack. It was as though the entire ship had been plunged into a sea of gray paint, then lifted out again. The 3-inch guns on the fo'c's'le were covered with a dark, waterproof plastic webbing. They looked like statuary in a Catholic church, draped with purple cloth for Lenten services.

The young man walked slowly to the fo'c's'le, then peered upward through the swirling haze, studying the row of portholes in front of the pilot house. “This must be the Pillsbury,” he said to himself. He limped back along the port side and over a small gangplank to the second ship.

Climbing the ladder to board the Pillsbury had put a heavy strain on his crippled leg. Now it began to throb with a dull pain. He crossed the second vessel, circling the midship structure to the stern, and boarded the third DE. The fog seemed to be getting thicker, and as the sun dropped lower in the west, the shadows grew longer and darker. {174}

He did not pause until he reached the fifth ship. A brass plaque on the bulkhead by the gangplank told him he was on the USS Flaherty. Slowly he limped his way to the port side where he stood for some time, leaning against the railing and gazing out over the green water. “Why did I comer he asked himself. “Why? Why?” The fog was so heavy now he could not make out the shapes of other nests of ships farther up the river, but in the mist before his face he almost fancied he could see the shadowy outline of a sixth vessel.

He turned around and glanced at the long ladder behind him which led from the main deck where he stood to the small deck in front of the pilot house. It was a climb of almost twenty feet. He reached up and grasped the sides of the ladder with his hands. The metal felt cold and clammy. He placed his right foot on the lowest rung, then slowly began to climb.

“How many times,” he thought, “did I climb this ladder on my ship? A thousand? Two thousand?” Not once had he ever slipped. He smiled crookedly when he remembered what he told the two-and-a-half striper.

By the time he reached the upper deck the pain in his leg had grown almost unbearable, and he was breathing heavily. The pain eased somewhat when he shifted his weight to the other leg. He tried the hatch that led to the pilot house, and was pleased to find it had not been sealed. He pulled it open and limped slowly inside.

All the familiar equipment of the pilot room had been removed—the gyro-compass, the magnetic compass, the electronic tubes. But the helm was there—a heavy, solid wheel of brass. His hands shook violently when he grasped its sides. It felt strange to the touch. Was this due, he wondered, to the fact that it was a trifle smaller than the helm he remembered? Or was it because the wheel had been disconnected from the steering mechanism? It turned easily in his hands. When he gave it a sudden shove, it spun like the {175} numbered wheel of a carnival booth.

The fog poured in through the open hatch and his clothes clung to him damply. Across the dark interior of the little room, the black shadows in a corner seemed to shift and waver. It was in that corner “Pop” Larsen had been standing when the torpedo struck. Above Pop's head, hanging on the bulkhead, had been the old quartermaster's lifebelt. Suddenly the young man's hands gripped the wheel so tightly that the blood vanished from the knuckles. “Forgive me, Pop, forgive me!” he cried out, his face contorted and his voice choked with emotion and self-pity. The words reverberated with a hollow sound.

It was several minutes until his grip on the helm relaxed. He gave the wheel a final spin, then without looking back he walked slowly out to the deck. After securing the hatch, he swung his right leg over the top of the ladder and began to descend. At the instant his weight rested on the left foot, a sharp pain broke out in the leg and stabbed upward into the thigh and hip. The leg crumpled suddenly. His hands had been holding the highest rung, but the full weight of his body was too much for them and his grip on the wet metal loosened. He plunged downward. The side of his head struck the railing twenty feet below, then he bounced outward and fell toward the water.

The sun had moved below the horizon, and a greenish twilight permeated the fog. The light seemed to filter down from an emerald sky like light filtering through the upper levels of the sea. He became aware of a group of dim figures standing around him—men wearing dungarees and faded blue shirts with white initials bleached on them. Someone was lifting him to his feet.

And there they all were—Tony and Ed and Tex and Chief Harden, and all the others in the crew, smiling at him through the gray-green haze and looking just the way they always did. And a little brown mongrel dog was barking and running circles around his legs.

“Hello, Seaweed,” he said, kneeling and lifting the dog into his arms. “How've you been, Seaweed, old boy?”

He put the dog down to grip hands with the men surrounding him. No one seemed excited or surprised. It was like coming back to the ship after an evening's liberty ashore.

He walked rapidly to the fantail, and lowered himself through the hatch that led to the crew's sleeping quarters. A small red bulb by the clock threw a crimson light over the jungle of bunks, stanchions, and ventilating pipes. The air ducts were blowing with a familiar roar. At his bunk he paused a moment to run a hand over the blankets and up and down the chains. Then his eye caught sight of a lifebelt—a belt with his initials on it—and a wave of shame surged through his body. He turned quickly and walked forward, climbing a short ladder to the head, then through the head and the machine shop, and down a narrow corridor. At the end of the corridor he paused by the entrance of the galley to smell the baking bread and say hello to Garcar, a baker who slept in the bunk above him.

It was while he mounted the inside ladder to the pilot house that he suddenly realized he was using both his legs. The brace had disappeared.

Pop was sitting on the edge of the table in the pilot house, playing a game of cribbage with Mr. Alexander. They raised their heads and smiled.

“Don't say a word, Willie, my boy,” Pop said. “Don't say a word. We all know how you feel.”

The young man's eyes rimmed with tears. He was about to {177} speak when the head of Buzz, a yeoman, appeared above the ladder outside the entrance. His short crew cut seemed even shorter than usual. “Hi there, Bill,” he said. “The Old Man wants to see you—on the double.”

“See you later, Willie,” Pop said, still smiling, the wrinkles crinkling around his eyes.

They found the skipper on the starboard side, chipping paint. “We're shorthanded on the deck force,” the yeoman explained. “The Captain likes to help out when he can.”

The Captain put down his scraper and stood up to shake hands. He was bare to the waist, as short and fat as ever, wearing a tattered pair of dungarees and a grimy sailor hat that gave him a salty, seadog look. Through the drifting green-tinted mist his chubby face looked younger and kinder than Bill remembered.

“Glad to have you back aboard, Bill,” the Skipper said. “We were cruising near the Keys when the boys in the radio shack picked up a message telling us to come here. You're the first survivor of the old crew to join us. How's life been treatin' you?”

“Not so good, Captain,” Bill said sadly. “I want to talk to you about something.”

“We'll fix it up,” he said. He called to Buzz, who had wandered over by the torpedo tubes and was showing a card trick to one of the snipes. Buzz left the cards on the torpedo and came over.

“Get the court martial papers ready for Bill here,” the Captain said. “We'll hold the trial later in the week.” Then he turned to Bill and put his stubby hand on the young man's shoulder. “It'll be a fair sentence. Rugged—but not too rugged.”

A vast weight seemed to lift from Bill's mind. His eyes were shining. “Thank you, sir.” {178}

“Don't call me ‘sir,’” the Skipper said sternly. “This isn't Navy now, you know.”

Blackie was shouting orders through a megaphone to a group of seamen busy unfastening the mooring lines. Under his feet Bill suddenly felt the familiar vibrations of the engines. The Captain excused himself to go to the bridge.

“Troop transport for some unlucky GIs,” the yeoman said. “We only take the old girl out for a few weeks each year. Usually it's a pleasure cruise, but this time we caught an emergency assignment.”

“I ... I don't understand,” Bill said haltingly. “The ship ... it isn't alive the way people are. It hasn't got a soul. But here she is just like she always was! Do all things exist again?”

They were moving now, and through the swirling iridescent fog he could see the receding black outlines of the five sister vessels. A wind had risen with the ship's motion and he turned his face against it. In it was the smell of the open sea.

Oom^†

There is a lot of speculation these days by cosmologists about how the Big Bang could have resulted from a random fluctuation in a primordial “vacuum.” Eventually, some cosmologists suggest, the expanding universe could go the other way and, after a Big Crunch, vanish back into the void from which it exploded. Of course the vacuum of quantum mechanics is a far cry from nothing. It is a vast sea of energy, governed by mathematical laws—the laws alone are not “nothing”—in which particles and their anti-particles are constantly being formed in pairs (thanks to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle) that mutually annihilate one another as they dissolve back into the unthinkable, perhaps infinite, energy sea.

My little fable plays with a more profound possiblity. Is it conceivable that everything there is—everything!—could eventually become absolutely nothing? I tried to give my fable a Biblical tone (legna is of course angel backward), and wrote it with the hope it might arouse in some readers a sense of that ultimate and unanswerable mystery: Why is there something rather than nothing?

AUTIOUSLY peered Oom over the rim of the Milky Way and focused his upper eye on an atomic cloud. As it mushroomed slowly from the surface of the Earth, tears dripped from the upper eye of Oom.

But a little lower than the Legnas had Oom created man. Male {180} and female, in an image somewhat like his own, created he them. Yet ever and again had they turned the power of reason upon themselves, and the history of their race had been one of endless discord.

And Oom knew that when the atomic clouds had cleared, and bacterial plagues had spent their fury, the race of man would yet live on. After war's exhaustion would come rest and returning strength, new cities and new dreams, new loves and hates, and again the crafty planning of new wars. So might things continue until the end of space-time.

Oom wearied of man's imperfection. Sighing, lightly he touched the Earth with the tip of his third big toe.

And on the Earth came a mighty quaking. Lightning and thunder raged, winds blew, mountains rent asunder. Waters churned above the continents. When silence came at last, and the sea slipped back into the hollows, no living thing remained.

Throughout the cosmos other planets whirled quietly about other suns, and on each had Oom caused divers manners of souls to grow. And on each had been ceaseless bitterness and strife. One by one, gently were they touched by a toe of Oom, until the glowing suns harbored only the weaving bodies of dead worlds.

Like intricate jewelled clockwork the universe ran on. And of this clockwork Oom greatly wearied. Softly he breathed on the glittering spheres and the lights of the suns went out and a vast Darkness brooded over the deep.

In the courts of Oom many laughed at the coming of the Darkness; but others did not laugh, regretting the passing of the suns. Over the justice of Oom's indignation a great quarreling arose among the Legnas, and the sound of their quarreling reached the lower ear of Oom.

Then turned Oom and fiercely looked upon the Legnas. And {181} when they beheld his countenance they drew back in terror, their wings trailing. Gently did Oom blow his breath upon them. . . .

And as Oom walked the empty corridors, brooding darkly on the failures of his handiwork, a great loneliness came upon him. Within him a portion of himself spoke, saying:

“Thou hast done a foolish thing. Eternity is long and Thou shall weary of thyself.”

And it angered Oom that his soul be thus divided; that in him should be this restlessness and imperfection. Even of himself Oom wearied. Raising high his middle arm into the Darkness, he made the sign of Oom.

Over infinite distances did the arm traverse. Eternity came and fled ere the sign had been completed.

Then at last to the cosmos came perfect peace, and a wandering wind of nothingness blew silently over the spot where Oom had been.

Medina and the Colored Ice^†

The eternal conflict at the heart of this story can be expressed by many dichotomies: safety-adventure, dullness-romance, work-play, duty-pleasure, Pan-Apollo. It was one of H. G. Wells' major themes, first expressed in his forgotten fantasy The Sea Lady, and later in such realistic novels as The New Machiavelli. Merlina is my sea lady, the mermaid who cares as little about the future of humanity as does the owner of a carnival.

The chant about the flavored ice was one I actually heard on the lot of a small carnival when I was a boy in Oklahoma, dreaming of someday becoming a professional magician. After assembling this anthology I was surprised when I realized that this story, my last serious effort to write short fiction, would resemble my first serious attempt in its reflection of the light from Shelley's dome of many colors.

T the Purple Hat Club, in Chicago, you can see the floor show from the bar. When the show started I did an about-face on the stool and put on my glasses so I could see the girls in the chorus better.

Jake Bowers, the emcee, was an old friend of mine, but it was the first time I'd seen him work since before the war. World War II, I mean. Except for some grayer hair around the temples, he hadn't changed much. Same old jokes and gags, but he got them off in such {184} a way, with just the right timing on the punch lines, that people laughed even when they knew what was coming. He didn't know yet that I was there.

The first two acts were conventional dance numbers. Then Jake wheeled out a chromium table and introduced “Merlina, the Queen of Magic.”

Merlina was about five feet high, compact figure, peroxide blonde hair, and clear grey eyes with little lines at the corners when she smiled. There was something familiar about her face. I had a hazy feeling I'd known her years ago, but I couldn't remember where.

She took a blue silk from the table, showed both sides, draped it over her left hand, whisked away the cloth. In her hand was a tall wine glass filled with crimson liquid.

Several people at the tables sat up suddenly and stared. Merlina was wearing a strapless white gown, her arms bare to the shoulders. It seemed impossible that the glass could have been concealed about her body.

I thought back over my four years in show business before the war and tried to picture the faces of all the girls who'd worked bills with me. Merlina might have been a dancer or a singer before she took up magic. The thoughts got me nowhere.

For her final trick, Merlina showed the empty inside of a lavender top hat, shaped like the big purple neon sign above the entrance to the club. She waved an ivory-tipped wand over the brim, reached inside, and began taking out ice cream cones of various colors.

The cones were troublingly familiar. It seemed to me I'd seen the trick before—that I knew about the cones even before she took the first one from the hat.

While the audience was clapping and Merlina bowed her way off the floor, I suddenly remembered. “My God, it's Mickey!” I said {185} half-aloud. “It's little Mickey!”

There were more acts, but I couldn't get interested. I spun around on the seat and ordered another drink. I wanted to think about Mickey.

It was in the summer after I finished high school, in a small Oklahoma town, that I first met her. A shabby little carnival had come to town and I had a temporary job collecting tickets on the Ferris Wheel. When the carnival pulled stakes, the lot boss let me stick with them. At first I worked on the rides; then one of the boys on the cat rack jumped the lot to join a circus and I took his place for the rest of the season.

Mickey was the daughter of Wally Thompson, a burly Swede who ran the “cook house.” Her job was to move up and down the Midway selling jumbo cones of powdered ice over which she poured fruit flavoring. The flavoring stained the ice with brilliant colors.

I noticed her the first day I worked on the lot. She must have been twelve or thirteen, with light brown hair, big transparent gray eyes, and face and arms spotted with freckles from walking in the hot sun.

Her father had taught her an old carny chant which she would recite in a high sing-song voice.

The chant was effective. It suggested, without promising, that the cones had alcoholic content.

One afternoon I was curled up in one of the tilted seats of the Whip, reading an old water-soaked copy of Billboard, when she {186} sauntered over.

“My pop's a magician,” she said. “He used to do magic in a circus sideshow.”

She borrowed my pocket knife, then tore four small pieces of paper from the cover of the magazine. She moistened the pieces with her tongue and stuck two on each side of the blade. One at a time she wiped them from the blade with her thumb.

“Don't be silly,” she said, looking up. “It's just started. Keep your pants on!”

She waved the knife in the air, then blew on it. All four pieces were back again, two on each side of the blade.

I saw her quite a bit after that. Whenever her father taught her a new trick she'd look me up and show it to me. When I worked the cat rack she'd come over and give me cones of colored ice.

At the end of the summer, on the day I left the carnival to go to Chicago, she threw her arms around me and kissed me on the mouth. “Don't forget to write,” she said.

For a while I didn't forget. Then, pretty soon I stopped writing and after a time lost track of her altogether. I had a few letters from her, scrawled in pencil on cheap tablet paper, most of the words misspelled.

The floor show had ended now and the Purple Hatters were playing a dance number. Somehow the music got tangled in my mind with the clamor of a carnival on a busy Saturday night in a {187} dusty Oklahoma town. Talkers were shouting, rides were clattering, and young couples on the Whip were screaming when the cars whipped around the curves. I could hear the bass drum in front of the minstrel show, and the numbers called from the bingo top, and the sad, off-key melodies of the Merry-go-round. I could almost smell the sawdust and the popcorn.

“For Pete's sake, Tony,” he said, “why didn't you let me know you were here? How the devil are you?”

“But you were moving up like nobody's business. You had a big future ahead of you. Every time I see my agent he asks me, ‘Where's Tony?’”

“I know,” I said, taking off my glasses and putting them back in the case, “but I made up my mind during the war. I've been in school four years now.”

He shook his head sadly and sat down on the seat next to me. “How about doing some songs for us in the next show? I'll introduce. . . .”

I cut him short. “Nix—I haven't sung in years. Besides, this is a high class spot.”

“High class!” he exclaimed, holding his nose. “What's high class about it?”

“I'm kidding,” I said. “I'll sing a couple of songs if you'll introduce me to Merlina.” {188}

Jake laughed and clapped me on the back. “Same old Tony! Okay—it's a deal.”

When the next show got underway Jake worked me in between the second and third numbers. He told the crowd I was a well-known vocalist and emcee before the war, mentioning a few of the better New York night spots I'd worked and including a few places where I hadn't worked. I happened to be in the audience. Would they like to hear me sing something?

Everybody clapped of course. I walked to the mike, thanked Jake, then told a story about a Russian and an American soldier who met in Berlin. The joke went over better than I expected and that warm sensation that comes when you feel your audience with you was creeping into my blood. It was like coming home again. I liked every man and woman in the room. I knew they liked me. I knew my songs were going to be okay.

I sang several verses of a currently popular tune and got a good hand when I finished. I milked the applause a little by acting like I was going back to the bar.

Jake was smiling and leading the applause and motioning me back with his hand. Through the side entrance to the floor I could see Mickey standing by her table and watching. I was sure she hadn't recognized me. She was looking puzzled—wondering who I was and how I got into the show.

I sang a second number, drew another good hand, and went back to the bar. Jake stopped the clapping, thanked me, and introduced Merlina. A big stage smile broke like a light over her face as she walked into the spot and started her routine.

After the show Jake took me back to the dressing rooms. Merlina was rearranging her magic equipment when we walked in. Several red silks were on the dresser by a coil of white rope and a deck of playing cards. A Chinese screen and some nickel-plated apparatus {189} were on the floor.

She put down some colored silks she had in her hand, pushed me toward the light by the dressing table, and stared up into my face. Suddenly she recognized me.

She threw her arms around me. Her soft yellow hair fluffed up in my face and got in my mouth. I pushed my fingers into her hair and pulled her head back. She smiled, the little creases fanning out from her eyes.

Jake was standing in the doorway looking surprised. “I gather,” he said finally, “you two have been previously introduced.”

Mickey laughed and I tried to explain how we'd known each other years ago when we were kids. I didn't mention the carnival. I thought maybe she was keeping quiet about her carny background.

Jake excused himself and Mickey began to clean the make-up from her face. I tried to tell her what I'd been doing for the past twelve years.

“Tony,” she interrupted, “remember how we used to talk about doing an act together someday?”

“We could still work it out, Tony. You and me. Something new and funny and different.”

I shook my head. “It's no use, Mickey. I'm not going back in show business.”

She stopped rubbing cold cream on her face and glanced at me {190} in the mirror. “Why?”

“I'm not sure,” I said. “Maybe it's because I want to find out why we have to fight wars. I want to change things.”

She made a face. “You won't be able to change a thing, sweetheart. It's too big.”

“Not much,” I said. “But the little bits add up. If they keep adding up, maybe five hundred years from now, or a thousand, we'll have a world worth living in.”

Mickey wrapped a bright orange turban around her hair, then turned around on the seat and smiled. “Don't be silly, darling. What do you care? Five hundred years from now you'll be dead.”

I didn't say anything. Through a small window that opened on the street I heard a streetcar stop, clang its bell, start up again.

“Let's not talk about it any more.” She stood up and walked over to me, looking at me with her pale gray eyes and smiling faintly.

“Mickey,” I said, “when I left the carny you kissed me goodbye. It was a nice, sisterly kiss. You'd been eating one of your cones. Your lips were cold and they tasted like raspberry. What do your kisses taste like now?”

She grinned and pushed her finger against my nose. Then she tilted back her head and chanted in a low, throaty voice:

I bent down and kissed her twice. She tightened her arms around me and pressed her cool, creamy cheek against mine.

And as I stood there, holding Mickey, I knew that I would have to leave her; but I also knew I could never really get away. Wherever I went, whatever I did, Mickey and her colored cones would be around the corner, waiting for me on the Midway, promising a magic fire and ice that had nothing at all to do with the grim realities of the world.

A breeze played with the curtain by the window, and on the street outside a newsboy shouted. But his words were slurred and I couldn't understand them.

The Three Cowboys^†

When Humpty Dumpty's Magazine was launched in 1952, my friend Harold Schwartz worked for Parents Institute and was in charge of their new line of juvenile periodicals. He hired me as “contributing editor” and for eight years I supplied about one fourth of each issue. I devised the activity features that damaged the pages—Parents Institute had no interest in library subscriptions!—and for each issue I also wrote a short story and a poem of advice spoken by Mr. Dumpty, the magazine's editor-in-chief to his son Junior. The stories about Junior and his adventures were intended to be read aloud. Here is one of them.

I persuaded Simon and Schuster to do a selection of the poems (the book was called Never Make Fun of a Turtle, My Son,) and although I later obtained book reprint rights for the stories, I've never found a publisher willing to take the risk. Any editor out there who wants to test the market? I have eighty tales to pick from.

ELL me a story, Daddy,” said Junior as he climbed into bed and pulled the woolen blankets up tight around his chin. A cold wind was howling outside and big wet snowflakes were blowing split-splat, split-splat against the window panes.

Mr. Dumpty sat down on the edge of the bed. “What story would you like to hear?” he asked.

“All right, son,” said Mr. Dumpty. “Once upon a time a little girl named Goldilocks. . . .”

“No, no,” Junior interrupted, “It was a little boy with red hair. His name was Bobby.”

Mr. Dumpty raised his eyebrows. “Is that so? Well, once upon a time a little red-headed boy named Bobby was walking through the woods when he came to a big house. Bobby knocked on the door but nobody answered, so he pushed open the door and went inside. He walked into the living room and saw three chairs . . .”

“So he did,” said Mr. Dumpty with a smile. “He picked up the large one but it was too big for him to hold. He picked up the little one but it was too small. Then he picked up the middle-size one and it was just right, so he put the gun in his pocket.”

“In his hoister,” said Junior. “He was wearing a cowboy belt with a holster.”

“True, true,” said Mr. Dumpty. “Then he walked into the dining room and there on the table he saw three bowls of soup . . .”

“Pardon me,” said Mr. Dumpty. “I meant to say three plates of beans. He tasted the beans in the big plate but they were too hot. He tasted the beans in the little plate but they were too cold. Then he tasted the beans in the middle-size plate and they were just right. So he ate them all up.”

“That's right,” said his father. “Then Bobby felt sleepy so he went upstairs to the bedroom. There were three beds . . .” Mr. Dumpty paused, but Junior didn't say anything so he continued. “There was a big bed, a middle-size bed, and a tiny bed. Bobby {195} climbed into the big bed but. . .”

“No, no,” said Junior. “He couldn't get into the big bed because there was a big cowboy asleep in it.”

Junior shook his head. “A middle-size cowboy was asleep in the middle-size bed and a baby cowboy was asleep in the little bed.”

“It did,” said Junior. “They jumped out of bed and they were so mad at Bobby for waking them up that they tied him with a rope and took him outside and put him on a railroad track.”

“Indeed!” exclaimed Mr. Dumpty. “Did a train come along and run over him?”

“It would have,” explained Junior, “if it hadn't been for another cowboy with a black mask over his eyes. He rode up on his horse and lassoed the train with his rope and stopped it just before it could run over Bobby. Then the masked man jumped off his horse and untied Bobby.”

“They pulled out their guns,” said Junior, “but the cowboy with the mask pulled out his gun faster and he shot all three of them with one bullet.”

Mr. Dumpty chuckled and patted Junior on his head. “Okay, son, that's my story for tonight. Have a good sleep.”

After Mr. Dumpty left the bedroom, Mrs. Dumpty came in to {196} say good night. “Did Dad tell you a story?” she asked.

“Yes,” Junior replied. “He told me my favorite—about Goldilocks and the three bears.”

The Son of Mighty Casey:
A Tale of a Terrible Downfall^†

When I assembled a selection of sequels to and parodies of Ernest Thayer's great comic poem for my Annotated Casey at the Bat (reissued in 1984 by the University of Chicago Press), I sneaked in a sequel of my own about Casey's son Agnus Barry Casey. Few readers, I imagine, missed the obvious reversal of my pseudonym, Nitram Rendrag.

Mysterious Smith

My friend James (“The Amazing”) Randi, a Canadian-born magician now living in Florida, has been extremely effective in recent years in exposing fake psychics and fake faith-healers who use principles of magic to accomplish their seeming miracles. Randi's activities suggested a series of mystery tales about the world's first detective of psychic flimflam. The only U.S. markets for such detective yams are Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. Because both returned the following story, it appears here for the first time.

YSTERIOUS Smith. That was the stage name James Smith used in his younger days when he earned a living as one of the country's top magicians. Although he played mainly club and convention dates, he was also recognized by his peers as one of the best of what the trade calls a “close-up” performer—a magician who works at tables doing magic that is viewed from only a few feet away.

When the occult tornado struck America in the sixties, Smith, like most magicians, refused to take it seriously. So what? he told his magic friends. It will soon blow over. If conjurors like Uri Geller pretend to be psychics, what harm can it do? By not opening a “mental act” with the usual “disclaimer”—assuring an audience it's all trickery—by pretending to do genuine miracles of the mind, magicians can triple or quadruple their incomes. If people are fools enough to take such magic tricks as genuine psychic feats, who {202} cares? They're like the suckers who get fleeced at card tables. Smith knew all the dodges of the crooked gambler. Although he himself never cheated at cards, or any other game, he had little sympathy for victims who lose high stakes to total strangers.

Then, in the seventies, to Smith's astonishment, the occult revolution swelled to enormous proportions. Books by the hundreds began to flood the bookstores, some of them expensive tomes published by reputable houses like Reader's Digest. The paranormal invaded movies and television shows. AT&T established a telephone service that allowed customers to dial for Jeane Dixon's astrological forecasts. Fake psychics managed to get their powers “validated” by big think tanks, in turn funded by the Army, Navy, and the CIA. Almost every newspaper in America carried an astrology column. President Ronald Reagan, it turned out, consulted his old friends Jeane Dixon and the Hollywood astrologer Carroll Righter. Polls showed that half the nation's college students believed in astrology, ESP, angels, and a personal Devil. Taxpayer money increasingly disappeared down the drains of shabby psi research. The teaching of science deteriorated.

Smith suddenly found himself in demand as a psychic investigator. Funding agencies, public and private, would hire him to evaluate a psychic or a parapsychologist. His reports usually ended in disaster for the charlatans. Smith was so well paid for these assignments that he stopped doing professional magic. He set himself up in a small office in Tarrytown, New York, where he had been living for several years as a widower, to become the world's first full-time psi detective. His background in show business had trained him in the art of garnering publicity, and soon there was scarcely a person in the U.S. who had not heard of his exploits. Moreover, he became a popular guest on Johnny Carson and other TV talk shows. In addition to his informed, articulate dialog, Smith also demonstrated {203} incredible feats of mind reading that seemed impossible to explain unless he was using psi powers. Indeed, several parapsychologists went on record stating that Mysterious Smith really was a psychic. He just pretended he was using trickery!

One cold sunny morning in November a young lady named Beverly Brown, from nearby Irvington, came to see Smith. She had a pretty face, with large eyes that matched her last name, although it was hard to tell because they were behind violet-tinted glasses.

“I'm worried about my mother,” said Miss Brown. “When my father died ten years ago he left her a large fortune in real estate. Until recently she herself managed the investments portfolio. But last year she met a psychic in Manhattan—a man who calls himself Harvey Hume—who claims he can predict future markets. He also claims to be descended from the famous Scottish medium D. D. Home.”

Smith nodded. “I have dozens of books by or about Reverend Home. By the way, he pronounced his name Hume. He was the greatest phony medium who ever flimflammed intelligent people, including some of the most eminent scientists of his day. I've spent a lot of time trying to reconstruct his subtle methods. But please go on.”

“Harvey Hume is a clever man,” Beverly continued. “He's charming. He's urbane. He oozes sincerity. Mother first met him at a cocktail party in Irvington. He scribbled something on a blank card, then asked her to name any number from one to a million. She named a large number. It was the number Hume had written on the card.”

“I'm sorry I can't explain, but I have friends who earn an honest living using the gimmick necessary for that trick. There are some {204} secrets it wouldn't be right to disclose.”

“I don't want to take up your time with too many details,” said Beverly, “so let me just say that mother has gone crackers over Mr. Hume. She consults him every month for financial advice. Lately he's been hinting he could use a hundred thousand dollars to set up a psychic laboratory for investigating paranormal phenomena.”

“That shouldn't be difficult,” said Smith. “Hume's a new entry into the ranks of psi charlatans, and I have no information yet on how he operates, but I'll enjoy calling on him to find out what I can. Let me ask you this. If I catch him cheating, will your mother believe it?”

“I don't know. She's enormously gullible. She's enormously trusting. I'd like you to try, though, and I'll pay whatever you ask.”

Smith was a tall man, on the lanky side. His head was almost totally bald, but he sported a bushy mustache that he dyed black. Because his face was well known in psi circles, it was always necessary to alter his appearance before investigating a psychic. He made an appointment with Hume, using Beverly as a reference after she assured him that Hume had no inkling of her doubts. Smith shaved off his mustache. He put on a brown toupee. Contact lenses changed his eyes from blue to green. He wore the collar of an Episcopalian priest.

“So you're Reverend Johnson, a friend of Mrs. Brown's daughter,” said Hume as they shook hands in the doorway of the psychic's Fifth Avenue apartment. He was a stocky man of about forty, with rimless spectacles.

“Yes,” said Smith. “I've been a student of the occult all my life. I {205} see Spiritualism as complementing Christianity, not antagonistic to what Jesus taught. I think your ancestor D. D. Home was the most talented medium who ever lived.”

“He was indeed,” said Hume “Psi powers, I'm firmly persuaded, are genetic. I think I've inherited most of his abilities.”

“I am, father,” Hume replied, “but only on rare occasions, and only after meditating for several hours.”

“In due time, father, in due time. But this afternoon let's try something simpler—an experiment that demands much less psychic energy.”

Hume seated Smith at a large circular table in the center of his sitting room, under a huge chandelier. He handed Smith a tablet of lined yellow paper. The psychic walked to a far corner of the room, turned his back on Smith, then asked him to draw a picture on the tablet. It could be anything he liked. He was told to tear off the sheet, fold it like a letter, and put it in a brown envelope that Hume had placed beside the tablet.

Smith drew a picture of a ship, folded the sheet, and sealed it in the manila envelope.

Hume returned to the table, picked up the envelope, and held it against his forehead. For several minutes he appeared to concentrate, his eyes closed. “I have a strong impression you drew a ship. Am I right?”

Hume tore open the envelope. “Ah, yes. I had a vivid mental picture exactly like the ship you've drawn, including these two sails, those two masts, even that little flag fluttering in the wind. Only my brain's image had the ship sailing east instead of west.” {206}

“Details like that are often distorted in clairvoyance,” said Smith. “The same thing happens, I'm sure you know, in precognitive dreams. The dreams may be accurate in an overall way, but minor details get altered in curious ways.”

“I see you do understand the mysterious ways of psi,” said Hume, resting a hand on Smith's shoulder. “It's a great pleasure to be talking to you. Not all my clients are so well-informed.”

They chatted for half an hour, during which Hume asked many questions. From Smith's answers he made shrewd guesses about Smith's private affairs. It was what in the trade is known as “cold reading.” The psychic gets little clues from the way a person reacts that tell him what to say next.

Smith knew all about cold reading. In fact, he had written a treatise on the art that sold only in magic stores, so it was easy to lead Hume down the wrong paths. Hume gave him information about a dead brother, although Smith had no brother. He spoke of Smith's plans for a trip abroad, though Smith had no such plans. He described an injury that occurred recently to Smith's left leg. Smith had no such injury, but he had suggested it to Hume by walking with a slight limp. Of course Smith enthusiastically confirmed all of Hume's revelations.

The entire session lasted an hour. Smith paid Hume's customary first visit fee of $100 and left. On the train back to Tarrytown he went over in his mind the trick about the drawing. Hume had not picked up the pad. That ruled out any impression the drawing had made on the next sheet. Smith had placed the pad face down because a ball-point pen can make an impression on the next sheet that is sometimes visible in slanting light. He had carefully observed Hume while his back was turned. He was certain the psychic had not used a palmed mirror.

After eliminating a dozen other methods, Smith finally {207} concluded that the simplest solution would be a confederate in the room above. He could be looking down through the central rod of the chandelier, which would have a lens at the bottom to give a clear view of the entire table. Hume's long dark hair completely covered his ears. Was there a listening device in one ear? If so, the accomplice above could send detailed descriptions of any drawing made beneath the chandelier.

The next day, differently disguised, Smith returned to Hume's building to call on the occupant of the apartment directly over Hume's. The name on the mailbox read S. Stang. If Mr. or Ms. Stang were not at home, Smith was prepared for some rapid lock picking and an inspection of Stang's rooms. But the door's lock buzzed open. Smith entered and rode an elevator to Stang's floor.

Stang was a young man of small stature, with a cherubic face. Smith was a plumber, he told Stang. The building's owner wanted him to check the bathroom pipes. He handed Stang a business card with a false name and company address.

On his way to the bathroom Smith observed a table in the center of the sitting room that would be directly above the chandelier in Hume's apartment. Under the table was a small Oriental rug.

Before he left, Smith paused to admire the rug. “An attractive design. Is it Persian?” He got down on one knee to examine the pattern. As he did so, he attached a tiny broadcasting bug to the table's underside.

A few days later Smith had another session with Hume. This time he carried in his jacket a folded sheet of yellow paper from a pad that duplicated Hume's. On the sheet he had drawn a pig, using a pen like the one Hume had given him.

After accepting Smith's check—the fee for a second reading was $150—Hume was more than willing to repeat the drawing test. While the psychic stood in the corner, Smith drew a picture of a cat. He {208} shaded it black, and folded the paper neatly. Before putting it in the envelope, however, he stepped away from the table and quickly exchanged the folded sheet for the one in his inside jacket pocket. The pig went into the envelope while Hume's back was still turned.

Hume pressed the sealed envelope against his forehead. “A dog? No, not a dog. It's a household pet, though. I'm sure of that. A cat? Yes, yes, it's definitely a cat. And I can see you've colored it black.”

Smith acted as if he were terribly dismayed. “No. It's not a cat. Sorry, old chap. I realize you can't be accurate a hundred percent of the time.”

Hume looked startled. He ripped open the envelope, and his eyes bugged when he saw the pig. Smith stayed for an hour, and although Hume continued his cold reading, making even wilder mistakes than before, he was clearly upset by what had happened.

Smith had driven to Manhattan and parked his car in a garage near where Hume lived. In the car, a recording was being made of whatever the bug was picking up.

Smith did not retrieve his car until several hours later. When he got home and played the tape, it was everything he had hoped for. Not only did it record Stang's voice giving a detailed description of the cat, it also recorded a confusing argument between Stang and Hume. After Smith had left, Hume had gone immediately to Stang to find out why the drawing test had failed.

“You couldn't have, you idiot!” shouted Hume. “Have you been boozing again? The minister drew a pig. Take another look at this drawing. Does it look like a cat?”

A few days later Smith joined Beverly and her mother for lunch in Irvington. He had earlier played the tape for them. As Smith anticipated, Mrs. Brown was only mildly distressed. She was a plump women, with puffy white hair and a distressing habit of smiling even {209} when there was no occasion for it.

Mrs. Brown was furious with her daughter for hiring Smith. “It was a mean trick to play on a good man,” she said during lunch.

Mrs. Brown sighed and smiled. “He's nothing of the sort. All your tape proves is that he cheats some of the time. It doesn't mean he cheats all the time.”

She opened her handbag and took out a broken spoon. “Last week I had dinner with Mr. Hume. He picked up this spoon from our table and stroked it while I held one end. The spoon bent in half and broke. There's no way a magician could do that.”

While Mrs. Brown was talking, Smith rested his right hand over a spoon by his plate, then palmed it into his lap. While she continued to describe what Hume had done, under the table Smith bent the spoon back and forth, taking care to keep his upper arms from moving, until the metal became hot and fatigued at the handle's center. He palmed the spoon back to the tablecloth.

“Show me exactly how you held the spoon,” he said, offering Mrs. Brown the spoon by his plate.

Smith started to massage the metal, gradually moving his fingertip down toward the bowl. The spoon slowly bent in the middle as if its metal were melting. It snapped in two.

Mrs. Brown's eyes widened slightly. She smiled another meaningless smile. “How did you do that?”

Mrs. Brown was getting more annoyed. “Of course you {210} magicians can do those things. You obviously do it by sleight of hand. It doesn't prove Hume did it the same way.”

“But mother,” said Beverly. “We know Hume cheated on the drawing test. How can you be sure he doesn't cheat on all his other miracles?”

“Because,” snapped Mrs. Brown, “I know him personally. It's you close-minded skeptics who force a talented sensitive like Hume to cheat. You know very well that psi powers come and go. A psychic can never be sure when they're available. Do you expect him to produce miracles on command? Is it surprising that when the forces aren't there a psychic will sometimes resort to trickery?”

“Surely not all of them do,” said Smith. “Don't you think it's worthwhile to identify those who cheat from those who don't. Why not give me a hundred thousand dollars to set up a laboratory for testing psychics who claim fantastic powers?”

“Never!” Mrs. Brown said loudly, with another fake smile and a vigorous headshake. “You unbelievers send out negative vibes. No psychic would be able to accomplish anything in such a laboratory.”

“Well,” said Smith, blotting his mouth with his napkin and placing it beside the broken spoon, “you can't blame me for trying.”

Ranklin Felano Doosevelt

This is a story I wrote in the early 1950s that has not been published before. I still think the jokes are funny.

AKE Bowers gave me a quick wink. “Where's your magician friend Jasper these days?”

I took an envelope out of my pocket. “Just got a letter from him. He's visiting his brother at . . .” I pretended to be studying the return address. “. . . at RFD 34, Stamford, Connecticut. What does RFD stand for?”

I faked a smile while Eve and Emily squealed with genuine laughter. There was something about Jake's timing. It was the way he said it, the expression on his face, a slight lift of his eyebrows, that all added up to give the line a maximum punch.

The four of us were sitting around a table at Lindy's on a sultry summer night in 1951. I don't have to tell you who Jake Bowers is. He's one of the best-known, highest-paid standup comics in show biz. The odds are a million to one, though, that my name won't ring a bell. It's Gumm. William Gumm. Am I right? It doesn't mean a thing.

Jake and I grew up together in Tulsa. When he emceed our {212} annual High School Daze he gave me ten bucks to write some lines for him. Even then I had a good memory for old jokes and a knack of switching them around and giving them timely angles that made them sound new.

Jake was a big hit. So big, in fact, that after high school he started working professional dates around Tulsa as a comedy emcee. Neither of us went to college. I got a job as a cub reporter on the Tulsa World, but in my spare time I invented comedy routines and sight gags. Jake was my best customer.

For the next five years Jake worked wherever he could in the Tulsa area. He had a natural talent for giving lines just the right phrasing and accents to make them seem twice as funny as they really were. “I take my wife everywhere,” he liked to say, simplifying a one-liner I had sold him, “but she always finds her way home.” It wasn't his looks that made him funny, because nobody looks less like a clown than Jake—tall, well-built, with handsome features, brown eyes, and dark curly hair. But when he gets up in front of a mike, all he has to do is glare at the audience and they start howling. I never could figure out why.

Another funny thing is that I look like a comic. I'm almost as short as Mickey Rooney, skinny, balding, with a hatchet face and a nose like Jimmy Durante's.

Maybe it's because I'm shy. I can't project. Crowds make me nervous if they're larger than five people. When I try to make a funny remark, most people never realize I even intend to be funny. If they do, they usually make a face as if they smelled something unpleasant.

But Jake was a born comedian. A booking agent in Kansas City handled him for a few years, then he shifted to a bigger agent in Chicago. For six weeks he made such a splash at Chicago's Purple {213} Hat, on Rush Street, that the club extended the date another six weeks with the understanding he wouldn't repeat any of the routines he'd been using. That was when I got a telegram from Jake asking me to come to Chicago and work full time as his exclusive writer.

Up until then almost every joke Jake told was one he had gotten from me. This is not meant as criticism, but Jake is stupid when it comes to thinking up something funny. He remembers old jokes well, but he couldn't invent a new one if his life depended on it.

From Chicago we moved to New York, and in no time Jake was the hottest comic in town. When television came along his agent held out for a price so high we thought he was nuts, but the sponsor finally gave in. Remember the Jake Bowers Show? It got higher ratings than Uncle Miltie's show.

So much for background. Me and Jake are sitting there in Lindy's with the two ladyfriends, and as usual I'm playing secret straight man. I had worked up several hundred one-liners of the sort you can slip into a conversation without anyone suspecting they're prefabricated. Part of my job is to slip 'em in. That's how Jake built up such a great reputation as an ad-libber. The truth is, Jake can't ad lib worth a dime. Of course he's got a raft of stock remarks he can hurl at hecklers, but that's different. After all, how many different things can a heckler say? Even if he says something Jake's not heard before, I've given him a dozen boffo responses that fit anything.

When Jake said “Ranklin Felano Doosevelt” (I thought of that one during New Deal days) the biggest yaks came from my friend Eve. She was a striking looking doll with big blue eyes, a Lollobrigida front, and a Monroe behind. A typist in one of Manhattan's top booking houses, Eve was crazy about show people, especially comics. When she found out I was Jake's writer she warmed up to me right away.

It was Eve's cooking that bowled me over. Cooking, in my {214} opinion, should be called the eighth art. A good salad blends ingredients the way a great piece of music blends notes. Eve's salads were like Mozart symphonies.

After five or six meals at Eve's apartment, a walkup she shared with her younger sister Emily, I started to think seriously about getting married. Up to then I'd been a bachelor, partly because I never had much money, partly because of my looks and shyness, partly because I'd never met a woman who could cook like Eve.

Sitting between Eve and Emily at Lindy's, I didn't like the way she was laughing at Jake's ad libs.

After all, it was my material. But Jake was getting all the credit. Cyrano de Gumm—that's me. Eve was giving him the eye treatment. Emily noticed it too. The sister was a mousy little woman with pale gray eyes and ditchwater hair. She was the sort of person who, if she walks into a crowded room, makes such a weak impression that someone is likely to look around and ask, “Did somebody leave?” (If you heard Jake say that you'd split your sides.)

Emily kept glancing at me. I guessed why. She was wondering if I was irritated by her sister's play for Jake.

Jake put down his coffee, winked at me, and said, “I hear CBS is planning to broadcast TV programs in color.”

“Yeah,” I replied, after a long pause. I guess color television's the coming thing.”

“I won't believe it,” said Jake, talking around his cigar, “until I see it in black and white.”

Eve let out a big guffaw. She put a hand on Jake's arm and batted her eyelashes. “You're fantastic,” she said. Then she turned toward me and added, “Can you bring Jake over Sunday for dinner?”

Sunday was five days away. By Thursday I had worked myself into a lather of hostility. Jake knew I had discovered Eve and that I'd been seeing her regularly. But for the past few days all he did was talk about her. He assumed, you see, that Eve couldn't possibly take me seriously. He implied she had just been using me as a way to meet him. Jake always had a lofty opinion of himself as a lady-killer, and to tell the truth he does wow the dames. They all tumble for him. Remind me to tell you sometime (you won't believe it) about a troupe of Japanese lady acrobats who tumbled for him one rainy evening in Omaha.

Thursday I was supposed to write some fresh material for Jake to use when he emceed a banquet at the Waldorf-Astoria for the American Association of Psychiatrists. He wanted some top-drawer jokes about shrinks—jokes he could be sure no one in the audience had heard before.

I didn't feel like working Thursday afternoon, and that evening I drank more than usual. I was still a bit pickled when I started at midnight to write Jake's new material. While I was typing the jokes a fiendish idea drifted into my noggin.

This was many years ago, you understand. At that time I had just invented the joke—maybe you've heard it—about the fat lady who went to see a psychiatrist because a doctor had told her her stomach pains were psychosomatic. The psychiatrist found out that she and her husband didn't have much money, so to get rid of her he told her the pains were caused by the pressure of her navel against her abdomen. “Just get a screwdriver and loosen your navel,” he said. “You'll be fine.”

The lady thought this advice rather odd, but when she examined her navel that night she was amazed to see a groove running across {216} it, like on the head of a screw. So she had her husband bring her a screwdriver and loosen it a bit. Then she stood up and her ass fell off.

Believe me, it's funny. Maybe I didn't tell it well, but I knew that if Jake used it at the dinner it would bring down the house.

Only Jake wasn't going to tell that joke. It was going to have a different ending. I snickered out loud while I typed the new punch line.

The fat lady loosens her belly button. Then she stands up and burps. “Good heavens!” she exclaims. “It must have been that pizza I had for lunch!”

Of course that doesn't make sense, but Jake's not very bright when it comes to understanding subtle shaggy-dog jokes. He just takes my word for it that they're funny. Naturally, the way he tells them they always go over big, so he never worries about where the humor comes in.

I had four other jokes as good as the one about the fat lady. After I changed their punchlines they were about as funny as a pair of crutches.

Jake looked puzzled when he read over the material next morning. “Are you sure these are good jokes, Willy?”

Jake folded the sheets and stuck them in his jacket. “You should know, Willy old stocking.” He smiled and whacked me on the back. For fifteen years he's been calling me an old stocking and whacking my back. Every time he does it I have to put my dental bridge back in place.

To make a long story short, Jake emceed the banquet and knocked 'em dead. I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't been there. Maybe the shrinks had been drinking too much, or maybe they're not so sharp when it comes to humor, but I doubt both explanations. I think it was Jake's genius. Of course his earlier jokes had been {217} standard, well-tested gags, easy to comprehend, so the shrinks were caught off guard when he came to the phony ones.

“The lady unscrewed her navel, then she stood up and burped,” said Jake. At this point he uncorked a magnificent burp that was probably heard at Grand Central Station. Ever since grade school he had been able to burp like that at will. He used to get laughs by burping in classrooms, and he uses burps a lot in his standup routines.

The crowd howled. Jake waited until they were quiet again. He put his hand over his mouth, looked startled, then he pitched his voice in the high falsetto he had been using for the fat lady's lines. “Good heavens! It must have been that pizza I had for lunch!”

Well, the psychiatrists went wild. A bearded old gent next to me laughed so hard he had to take off his pince-nez to wipe his eyes with his napkin. I sneaked out a side entrance. I couldn't bear to hear the other jokes.

At Eve's, Sunday afternoon, I was in a bitter mood. There were just the four of us—Eve and her sister, and Jake and me. Jake knew something was wrong. Whenever he gave me a cue for an ad lib, I ignored it. Eve was concentrating her charms on Jake, and Emily was sitting quietly, as usual, not saying much. Jake looked uncomfortable. He was trying hard to make small talk, which is not easy for him when he can't think of suitable wisecracks.

Jake decided to try a hand himself at leading the conversation around to one of our canned ad libs. “Have you read the Kinsey report?” he asked Emily.

Before she could answer, I cut in. “I haven't read it myself, but a friend of mine did. He got so interested he couldn't put his wife down until he finished it.”

Emily giggled, but otherwise there was dead silence. Jake stared at me open-mouthed. Eve threw me a withering glance. “That's not a {218} nice thing to say, Willy. Especially at the dinner table.”

We nibbled on our dessert for a while without talking. I guessed Jake was plotting something.

“How do you like my apple pie,” Eve said at last. “I baked it fresh this morning.”

Jake looked up from his plate with that ineffable, droll expression on his face. “And when you type up the day's menu, my dear, do you always type with your feet?”

I'll never understand it, but the three of us doubled over and laughed for five minutes. Of course Jake's remark was completely pointless. I don't think he even intended it to be funny. He just wanted to show me that whatever I said, no matter how clever, would fall as flat as a flapjack, whereas he could say something stupid and make it sound like a socko wisecrack.

After the coffee, Emily and I volunteered to do the dishes while Eve showed Jake her photograph albums. Emily washed, I dried. “How did you like the salad, Willy?” she asked, passing me a wet saucer.

“Marvelous as usual,” I said. “You've got to hand it to Eve. She makes the best salads I ever tasted.”

Emily's voice got low and confidential. “I'm going to tell you a secret,” she whispered, “but don't tell Eve I told you. I made the salad. I baked the pie. I do all our cooking, but Eve likes to make friends, especially men friends, think she's the cook. We have an arrangement. I cook, she dusts and vacuums.”

I put the saucer down slowly on the counter. Suddenly Emily looked different. How could I ever have thought her hair was dull? It was soft and brown with wonderful highlights where it was touched by sunlight from the window over the sink. And her eyes. They were a beautiful translucent gray, with lots of humor in them, and delightful little creases at the corners when she smiled. {219}

I could hear Eve laughing in the sitting room. Jake, no doubt, had said something funny. The laughs sounded loud, harsh, and insincere.

Things worked out dandy. Eve switched to Jake. I switched to Emily. A week later Sam Goldwyn took Jake and me to lunch at Lindy's. With Jake's approval I sold Sam fifty “Goldwynisms” to give his press agent. Sam offered Jake the lead in a musical based on his life. Me? I wasn't even in the script.

Jake winked at me across the table. “Where's your friend Jasper these days?”

I squinted at the corner of the envelope I always carried for this occasion. “He's living in Houston at RFD 258. What does RFD mean?”

Goldwyn choked on a swallow of iced tea. “Jake, my boy,” he sputtered, “you're a card, a real card.”

In a flash I thought of a brilliant response Jake could make. I jotted a note about it on the envelope so I wouldn't forget.

The Stranger

To test what would happen to a typical American town if it were hit by an atom bomb, our government actually built an entire fake village in 1955. Called Survival Town, it was constructed on Yucca Flat in the Nevada desert about 75 miles north of Las Vegas. Dressed and painted mannequins inhabited the furnished homes, along with anesthetized dogs and some 500 rats. Refrigerators were stocked with real groceries. Working television sets, radios, and telephones were in the houses, and the town was complete with cars, gasoline storage tanks, a radio tower, gas, electric, and phone lines.

At 5:10 A.M., on Thursday, May 5, an atomic bomb twice as powerful as the one that leveled Hiroshima exploded over the doomed town. After reading newspaper accounts, seeing the photographs in Time (May 16), and recalling T S. Eliot's “The Hollow Men, “I wrote the following never-published mini-fantasy.

HE soft shadow of a May night moved slowly westward across New England. A rising moon, almost full, flooded the rooftops and narrow streets of Boston with a pale, harmless light. Inside the dwellings television sets glowed and chattered for several hours and then were silent. Hot water ran from the taps of showers and bathtubs. Teeth were scoured, clock alarms set for Thursday morning.

While Boston slept, her prim, complacent soul slipped quietly away from the city's streets to join the souls of other New England towns. They met—how shall one describe it?—in a gray valley {222} somewhere below, above, behind, and beyond the fields we know.

Not every night does the soul of a city leave its sleeping bodies. At times it remains embedded in its web of cells, sleeping as its cells sleep, dreaming as its cells dream. At times it drifts away in outer space to visit the souls of cities from other planets. But like all living spirits, high or low, it seeks most often the companionship of its kind; to chat and gossip with those whose language and customs are familiar.

Soon the harried soul of Manhattan detached herself from the darkened skyscrapers and joined the soul of Boston. As the shadow of night continued to glide across the continent, the shades of other cities arrived in the dim valley.

They gathered in small groups and spoke in low tones. And as they talked they slowly became aware of a stranger seated in their midst—a thin, hamlet-sized soul with hollow cheeks, sunken eyes, and a mask of death on his drawn, distorted features.

The Stranger glared wildly at Chicago and his lips trembled. But no words came forth. There were only sounds—sounds like the faint yelps of dreaming dogs, the squealing of mice and rats, the whine of dry sand blowing in the wind.

“He has been here for many weeks,” remarked Philadelphia. “No one knows who he is or where he came from. He sits there day and night, never smiling, always muttering insanely to himself.”

“Day and night!” exclaimed Milwaukee. “How can that be? We cannot leave our streets until half or more of our cells are sleeping. It is the law of the gods.”

Chicago bent over and prodded the Stranger's bony chest. “Who are you, friend?”

No reply. Only the feeble barking and demented muttering, the {223} sound of scurrying rodents and drifting sands.

News of the Stranger spread quickly through the valley, and the souls of other cities, large and small, clustered around him. The cool shadow of night now rested on the entire continent.

Silently the planet spun, and soon the pink borders of dawn brushed lightly the eastern tip of Maine and brightened the coast of Florida. Boston slipped back to her lonely twisted streets. Alarms rang, blinds moved upward. Kitchens filled with the fragrance of toasting bread and brewing coffee.

The rosy light swept westward. Chicago gestured goodbye, taking with him the towns and cities of the Middle West. And as they departed there came striding through the valley the booted, ten-gallon-hatted soul of Las Vegas, the sound of silver dollars jingling in his pockets. Only in early morning do the cells of Las Vegas sleep.

Las Vegas moved closer, his whisky breath blowing into the Stranger's nostrils. “The face looks mighty familiar.”

Suddenly his body was shaken by a violent paroxysm—a shuddering convulsion that racked every limb. A blue fluorescence enveloped his entire body. His eyeballs blazed an incandescent white and the heat was as though the door of a great furnace had opened.

And now the Stranger's body crumbled. It broke apart like a tower of wooden blocks that had been built by children and kicked to rubble before being built again.

A dark cloud eddied at the spot where the Stranger had stood, then settled as fine gray ash over the feet of Los Angeles.

On the Nevada desert a thick pall of radioactive dust hovered over the wreckage of a town. A hollow mannequin housewife was seated by a window of her home on Doomsday Drive. Part of her {224} arm and shoulder had been blown away. A jagged strip of glass projected from her enameled forehead. On her lap she held a headless child, and she was gazing through the shattered window with un moving painted eyes.

* Reinkopf is best known as the author of two celebrated volumes: The Significance of the Significance of Signification, and The History of And and Or in the Middle Ages. He was the founder and for many years editor of The International Journal of Unified Social Epistemology. He has also written a little book for children called Alice's Adventures in Modal Logic Land.

* A reader who wants a clearer picture of this new mathematics will find articles on topology in the Encyclopedia Britannica (Fourteenth Edition) under Analysis Situs; and under Analysis Situs in the Encyclopedia Americana. There are also readable chapters on elementary topology in two recent books—Mathematics and the Imagination by Kasner and Newman, and What Is Mathematics? by Courant and Robbins. Slapenarski's published work has not yet been translated from Polish.

* The Moebius strip has many terrifying properties. For example, if you cut the strip in half lengthwise, cutting down the center all the way around, the result is not two strips, as might be expected, but one single large strip. But if you begin cutting a third of the way from the side, cutting twice around the strip, the result is one large and one small strip, interlocked. The smaller strip can then be cut in half to yield a single large strip, still interlocked with the other large strip. These weird properties are the basis of an old magic trick with cloth, known to the conjuring profession as the “Afghan bands.”

* Simpson later told me that he had attended the dinner not to hear Slapenarski but to see Dolores.

* Named after Felix Klein, a brilliant German mathematician, Klein's bottle is a completely closed surface, like the surface of a globe, but without inside or outside. It is unilateral like a Moebius strip, but unlike the strip it has no edge. It can be bisected in such a way that each half becomes a Moebius surface. It will hold a liquid. Nothing frightful happens to the liquid.

** This trade-mark is a topological manifold of great interest. Although the three rings are interlocked, no two rings are interlocked. In other words, if any one of the rings is removed, the other two rings are completely free of each other. Yet the three together cannot be separated.

*** The trefoil knot is the simplest form of knot that can be tied in a closed curve. It exists in two forms, one a mirror image of the other. Although the two forms are topologically identical, it is impossible to transform one into the other by distortion, an upsetting fact that has caused topologists considerable embarrassment. The study of the properties of knots forms an important branch of topology, though very little is understood as yet about even the simplest knots.

† London Mystery Magazine, February/March 1951; Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, December 1964.

Preface	7
Thang	9
The Dome of Many Colors	11
So Long Old Girl	21
Good Dancing, Sailor!	27
The Horse on the Escalator	35
No-Sided Professor	45
The Conspicuous Turtle	59
The Fall of Flatbush Smith	75
Nora Says “Check.”	81
The Loves of Lady Cold pence	87
At the Feet of Karl Klodhopper	101
The Devil and the Trombone	115
The Blue Birthmark	119
Sibyl Sits In	123
Love and Tiddlywinks	127
One More Martini	131
Old Man Gloom	137
The Horrible Horns	143
Private Eye Oglesby	155
The Virgin from Kalamazoo	167
The Sixth Ship	171
Oom	179
Medina and the Colored Ice	183
The Three Cowboys	193
The Son of Mighty Casey	197
Mysterious Smith	201
Ranklin Felano Doosevelt	211
The Stranger	221

Contents

Preface

Thang†

The Dome of Many Colors†

So Long Old Girl

Good Dancing, Sailor!†

The Horse on the Escalator†

Postscript

No-Sided Professor†

The Conspicuous Turtle†

The Fall of Flatbush Smith†

Nora Says “Check.”†

The Loves of Lady Coldpence†

Postscript

At the Feet of Karl Klodhopper†

Postscript

The Devil and the Trombone†

The Blue Birthmark†

Sibyl Sits In†

Love and Tiddlywinks†

One More Martini†

Old Man Gloom†

Postscript

The Horrible Horns†

Private Eye Oglesby†

The Virgin from Kalamazoo†

The Sixth Ship†

Oom†

Medina and the Colored Ice†

The Three Cowboys†

The Son of Mighty Casey:A Tale of a Terrible Downfall†

Mysterious Smith

Ranklin Felano Doosevelt

The Stranger

Thang^†

The Dome of Many Colors^†

Good Dancing, Sailor!^†

The Horse on the Escalator^†

No-Sided Professor^†

The Conspicuous Turtle^†

The Fall of Flatbush Smith^†

Nora Says “Check.”^†

The Loves of Lady Coldpence^†

At the Feet of Karl Klodhopper^†

The Devil and the Trombone^†

The Blue Birthmark^†

Sibyl Sits In^†

Love and Tiddlywinks^†

One More Martini^†

Old Man Gloom^†

The Horrible Horns^†

Private Eye Oglesby^†

The Virgin from Kalamazoo^†

The Sixth Ship^†

Oom^†

Medina and the Colored Ice^†

The Three Cowboys^†

The Son of Mighty Casey:
A Tale of a Terrible Downfall^†