The Devil
and
W Kaspar

Benjamin Appel

Copyright © 1977 by Benjamin Appel

Allow me to inquire how can
man control his own affairs
when he is not only incapable
of compiling a plan for some
laughably short term, such as,
say, a thousand years, but cannot
even predict what will happen
to him tomorrow?

—Bulgakov, The Master and Margerita

1

THE FIRST VOW

Completely unsuspecting that he had been chosen for great things in the world he had forsworn as a humble Buddhist monk, William Kaspar was sound asleep under two threadbare blankets (purchased at a Salvation Army depot) when a woman's voice shook him into wakefulness.

No woman had ever set foot in the top floor flat Kaspar shared with three other Buddhist monks who like himself had sworn the sacred, ancient vows of Celibacy, Inoffensiveness and Poverty. Yet the tenement where they lived was wide open to any intruder. The lock on the vestibule door downstairs had been vandalized and never repaired. Any derelict looking for an overnight flop could walk right in and bed down on a few newspapers.

There was no reason to climb the stairs.

Reason, Kaspar wondered fearfully as he looked about him. He could see no one in the hall bedroom he shared with his brother in Buddha, Pat Morrisey; the only sound was Morrisey's deep breathing. Everything seemed as usual but the sensation of danger wouldn't let go of him. He glanced at Morrisey's night-wrapped shape and felt that a third person, a wino or a junkie with maybe a knife in her pocket was watching him.

It was possible. The door to the flat, the Monastery as the four monks called it, was never locked. Lock their door? Not when they believed that evil had to be met with good, and that death, even violent death, was a blessing: a release from life and suffering, a passage to the eternal peace of Nirvana, to Nothingness.

Kaspar shuddered as he thought of the neighborhood where he lived with his brothers. A no-man's-land at night (Hell's Kitchen on the West Side of Manhattan): the side streets empty alleys, the avenues a speedway, the headlights of the cars a glittering inhuman lightning.

He propped himself up on one elbow. "There's no one—" he muttered.

"No one?" the unseen woman murmured, and suddenly the cot creaked under her weight.

Kaspar's heart had turned into a pair of clapping hands, the clapping hands changed into a racing motor hurling the trembling monk down the long endless and horrifying highways of imagination.

Someone was sitting at the foot of his cot. Someone! He choked as an eerie light, reddish in color, floated up before him. In it he saw no predawn mugger, no beat-up tramp in a torn skirt. He saw a beautiful woman. The reddish light like the light of a firefly was radiating outward from her body which was a dusky red in color. She was naked except for a crown of skulls on her head.

The terrified monk needed no introduction. He had seen the skull-crowned image of the goddess Shakti on many a tanka: the religious (and erotic) paintings of the Tantrist Buddhists, a sect that the celibate Kaspar had always loathed. He screamed or rather tried to scream, but no sound lifted from his throat. The apparition had darted out a lizard-like tongue, red as fire, snatching the words out of his mouth as if they were so many flies.

"Mankind can only be saved if you forget your vows," she whispered and as she spoke she began to crawl over the monk's legs. Her breasts shone like two red reflectors. Her eyes (the triple eyes painted so sensually by the Tantrist artists) gleamed in her fiery red, beautiful face.

Unable to stir a muscle, Kaspar watched her slithering toward him. When she reached his waist she raised herself up one arm. "For the good of mankind you must make sacrifices, dear Kaspar. And the first sacrifice is your vow of Celibacy." And while he lay there helpless she slipped a red hand under the blankets. He no longer heard what she was saying. All he was aware of was the strong and yet silken pressure on his private parts.

His hips heaved, his chest arched, his eyes rolled in his head.

When he recovered his senses Shakti was gone; the room again dark and lightless. A dream, Kaspar castigated himself, a vile dirty dream. To sin with Shakti of all women in the world!

After a while he stopped tormenting himself. He thought that he was only twenty-three and hadn't been a celibate all his life. His body (Kaspar sadly acknowledged its biological reality) could be expected to fight like a demon against sexual purity. As his heart slowed down he remembered some of the things she had said.

Predictions of war... catastrophe ... San Francisco and Los Angeles sliding into the sea . . . He concentrated and remembered some incomprehensible phrases. Babbling week ... Or was it petals seek ... ? What did they mean? Even more puzzling was her appeal to save mankind. It was so out of character, Kaspar considered, for a Being who throughout recorded time had always served the Devil, Kama Mara the Lord of Things—to oppose the Lord Buddha.

Yawning, Kaspar decided it was crazy to expect logic in a dream. His yawns deepened and he fell asleep.

He awoke when the first light of day tinted the window on the shaft into a gray sheet. He tossed his blankets aside and hurried towards the bathroom.

It was like stepping into a refrigerator. The only heat in the flat came from the kitchen stove where the banked-up coals had long crumbled into ash. Shivering, he prayed, offering homage to the Buddha Amitabha. The potency of this prayer increased with repetition, and as he passed the second hall bedroom with its two sleeping monks he heaped homage onto homage.

Kaspar had intended to take a bath—there was no shower—but the tub was full of the week's laundry. Bed sheets and pillow cases lay tangled with the T-shirts and the orange robes of the four monks. The sink, too, although it held no things to be washed was filled with soapy water. He frowned at the erring brother who had forgotten to drain the sink. Then, full of remorse he prayed for forgiveness. Who was perfect in an imperfect world?

He reached out to pull the plug, stopped and stared at a cockroach swimming feebly in the white bowl like a lone survivor in a soapy sea. He lowered his head (shaven clean in the ancient, prescribed way) and prayed for the sinful human being who in some former existence had been judged, condemned and reincarnated as a common roach. "I'll save you," he promised.

All living beings were sacred to a Buddhist monk. So with the little mesh net kept for that purpose, hanging on a hook underneath their four toothbrushes, he scooped up the insect. He wondered if he should dry its wet body but fearing he might injure it, he released it on the floor. Feeling much better, he drained the bowl, took off his pajamas and washed them clean of his nocturnal emissions before flinging them into the tub.

Five or six minutes later after toweling himself dry he inspected his reflection in the mirror above the sink. Two or three soapy bubbles were still pasted to his scalp. He thought (not for the first time) that they resembled white ringlets.

This sick wish to be a white man.

The startled monk whirled around. He was alone in the bathroom. The voice he'd heard, he thought guiltily, could only be the voice of his own conscience. Sinner that he was, he'd reverted to the man he had been: the Kaspar who secretly wished he hadn't been born a black. True, he'd forsworn the stupidity and vanity of the world and yet ... He cast an accusing look at the brown-skinned face in the mirror as if to disown the thin lips, the narrow nose and the blue eyes he had inherited from some white ancestor.

Whiteness, concentrated in those blue eyes, stared back at him.

You really are as white as you are black, aren't you, dearest Kaspar?

He grabbed at the sink to steady himself. The voice, a woman's voice, seemed to come from a spot on the wall to the left of mirror. The spot moved and he looked at the cockroach he had rescued. Kaspar was positive it was the same! But who had ever heard of a talking cockroach?

No one these days, darling, but the gift of human speech in other times was shared by many lesser beings in the Round of Existence.

Kaspar staggered backward and as he did the dark, brown insect, glossy as polished leather, changed its color and its form. On the wall if greatly reduced in size, no longer than an inch, the dusky red Shakti seemed as if she were reclining on a bed, her tiny red hands clasped under her neck. A tiny smile no larger than a speck of toothpaste glistened between her parted red lips.

He rubbed his eyes, but the miniature red beauty remained where she was.

I don't care if you are white or black, dearest.

Her shoulders quivered like tiny red leaves in a breeze.

If war breaks out what will happen to us, dearest?

Positive that he'd gone insane, the stricken monk shut his eyes. Hearing no voices he peeked out warily. The creature on the wall was a real cockroach. Its antennae, finer than the finest of needles, vibrated delicately as it descended toward the floor. The insect, Kaspar guessed, confused by its all night swim had traveled ceilingward on an expedition whose purpose could only be known to cockroaches.

At breakfast that morning, Kaspar told his brother monks about Shakti's double appearance. When he was done his roommate Morrisey suggested that there might be a rational explanation. How long was it seven or eight days, he asked, since William'd been clubbed unconscious by that street gang? A mistake not to have seen a doctor and have the bump on his head X-rayed. Morrisey hesitated and then like the brokerage house man he had been before converting to Buddhism, he spoke of what was on all their minds. A concussion of the brain, a delayed concussion! That would account for the things Kaspar had been seeing and hearing. In his agitation Morrisey picked up a banana from the plate alongside the bowl of steaming rice, peeled it and putting down the fruit bit into the yellow skin. "Agh!" he exclaimed and bawled out the street gang who had nothing better to do than pick on them. "Those rats! This city's full of rats, and if I had my way I'd—"

"Brother," Kaspar interrupted gently. "The Lord Buddha has instructed us to shun violence." He fingered the bump on his head. It had been as big as a Ping-Pong ball, shrunken now to the size of a giant bee sting, and as he fingered it the faces of his three brothers faded and once again he was walking home late at night, once again surrounded by a howling gang ... Nigger creep, they had shouted who were blacks themselves, what's all this white man Buddy shit fuck him and fuck you . . . once again he was dragged into the hallway of a deserted tenement, his robe torn from his back and when he wouldn't stop praying one of his attackers had struck him with a club.

The furious black faces drifted away like the steam rising out of the teakettle on the table. The faces of the three monks reappeared; Pat Morrisey's as rugged as any professional football player; Millard Brandt's so round and plump there seemed to be a plum cached away in each of his cheeks; Mark Clarkson's thin and long with blond, almost whitish eyelashes. Three white faces, but all Kaspar saw was the single face of brotherly love.

"You must see a doctor and have that bump X-rayed!" Morrisey insisted.

"Not today. I'm sure I'm all right. It was just a dream."

"You were wide awake when you saw the cockroach!"

"I could've been dreaming without knowing it."

"Dreaming on your feet, William?"

"Who knows? As the Buddha has said, what is this life but a magic picture show of dancing shadows real to the eye but not to be taken as genuine."

All three stared at him and when Kaspar said, "Let us pray," they lowered their shaven heads and prayed for Enlightenment, for themselves, and for all human beings.

2
THE MYSTERIOUS SEAMAN

That day (destined to be a turning point in the life of the pious Kaspar) began like any other day in the Monastery. After breakfast, the "housekeepers" for that week, Brandt and Clarkson, stayed behind in the flat to do the laundry. Morrisey fetched a handbag into the kitchen and assisted by Kaspar packed it with the surras, the wise sayings of the Lord Buddha. These were printed on little slips of paper not much larger than those inside Chinese fortune cookies. Their distribution at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, six blocks to the south of their tenement, was life itself to the four monks. Like fishermen they would cast the surras out into the human shoal of commuters, hoping for nibbles of interest. The sutras were free. But contributions, if any, a dime usually, were accepted with gratitude.

Downstairs a thin rain was falling, the distant Jersey shore across the river no thicker than gray cardboard. "Flu weather," Morrisey complained. "Did you ever see a rainier November?"

Kaspar, peering up at the sky, thought that Nirvana must also be gray in color. Gray and opaque and dense with the blessed who at last had escaped the curse of existence.

The two monks were wearing raincoats over their robes but no hats. In a few seconds their shaven heads, one white, the other brown, glistened like wet doorknobs. Shrouded in mist the traffic lights on Tenth Avenue glowed like suspended rubies. People hurrying to work skipped between the huge, black wheels of the trucks rolling north. Drivers cursed the jaywalkers and one angry pilot noticing the law-abiding monks waiting patiently on the sidewalk hollered: "Fuck you too!"

Morrisey couldn't restrain himself: "Another rat!"

Kaspar sighed and urged his blasphemous brother to follow the example of the legendary Purna who so long ago was prepared to die at the hands of the barbarians. " 'Even if they were to kill me,' " he quoted the Buddhist apostle's immortal words, " 'I would still think them good and gentle folk for they would have freed me from this rotten carcass of flesh in which I am not free.'"

"Are you for real?" Morrisey muttered and then immediately contrite he begged Kaspar to forgive him. "It's the Irish in me," he groaned.

"It's the anger in all of us. Do you think I'm immune?"

He recalled those words when they neared the block where he'd been clubbed, shuddering as the obscene hands of that terrible night reached out to rip off his robe and pants . Human rats, he thought bitterly. Yes, he could forgive them with his tongue but not with his heart.

Ahead, was 42nd Street. Crosstown buses like squat, green water beetles crawled between the old-law tenements and the here-today, gone-tomorrow massage parlors. From the display posters pink-breasted masseuses smiled out of scarlet mouths at every passerby. Kaspar lowered his eyes but it was too late. The fiery phantom who had come to him in the night whispered in his ear. Kaspar shook his head, fixing his glance on the Terminal. Girdled with yellow cabs, it towered up into the gray sky, the sidewalks in front of it swarming with people who in their many-colored raincoats seemed like bees buzzing in and out of a huge hive.

The first sacrifice is your vow of Celibacy ...

He shook his head but there was no dislodging the words of the red temptress.

The two monks pushed through the doors to enter a city within a city. Everything was in movement. Escalators like tilted conveyor belts, packed with faces of all sizes and shapes, carried the arriving commuters down to the main level. They hurried past the Terminal's shops. Cowboy suits galloped in TEPEE TOWN; scissors and knives glittered murderously inside the plate-glass windows of HOFFRITZ CUTLERY.

Morrisey and Kaspar hastened toward a row of wooden tables outside the windows of WALGREEN DRUGS. Most of the tables were still unoccupied but in another hour they would be piled high with the literature of a dozen organizations: Black Muslims, Socialist Laborites, Eye-Bankers. The anti-Abortionists would be there displaying photos of mangled fetuses; and the Jews for Jesus brandishing Old Testament texts to prove that the Messiah was none other than the Babe of Bethlehem.

After stacking their sutras on the table assigned to them by the Terminal authorities, Kaspar volunteered to take the floor. Morrisey stationed himself behind the piled sutras like some street-corner vendor.

"Have you a minute?" Kaspar exhorted the commuters trooping toward the subways and crosstown buses. "Have you ever wondered why you aren't at peace with yourself?"

These were the questions he always asked. After an hour he exchanged places with his brother in Buddha who ventured out on the floor, and once again he called out to the passing throng. "Have you a minute?"

His eyes shone with proselytizing zeal, his soul filled with the inner joy of one who labored not for himself but for all humanity.

It was almost ten o'clock (Kaspar would never forget the hour) when a long-legged man in a peabody jacket, a navy blue stocking cap on his head, strode over to the table and in a coarse but not ill-natured voice demanded to know what he was selling. His eyes were hidden behind a pair of unusual sunglasses; one templet was white, the other black; the white templet hinged to a black eye-piece, the black to a white. Kaspar replied that the Lord Buddha wasn't for sale. The seaman's head jerked back and the short, braided pigtail dangling underneath his stocking cap flew out as he let loose with a loud and nasty laugh.

"Not for sale?" he jeered. "Then he's the only one who isn't!" And without asking for permission he snatched up a sutra from the table, read it quickly, grinned at the flustered monk. "Bilge, that's what! Where's this Nirvana of yours anyway, matey? On the moon?"

Kaspar had met many a rude and obnoxious skeptic at the Terminal, but this one, he guessed, would be the prize. It wasn't only the high-pitched laugh or the piratical pigtail or the ruby Kaspar now noticed gleaming in one ear, an unusually long ear and a dead white in color as if bloodless, or the bizarre sunglasses. Far more disturbing were the two pigeons whose heads jutted out from the peabody, one in each pocket. At first, he had thought they were alive. Actually, as he realized after a sharp, second look, they were perfect specimens of the taxidermist's art.

No living pigeon or for that matter no living creature had ever had such eyes. The snow-white pupils were circled by two rings, a narrow blue ring and a second and somewhat wider red. Whether the taxidermist had selected them or most likely the purchaser—Kaspar had read about the idiosyncrasies of seagoing men— those white-pupiled eyes made him feel a little queasy.

"Haven't you ever seen a pigeon before?" the pig-tailed seaman challenged the staring monk. "Maybe you don't like pigeons?"

Kaspar apologized but the pigeon lover refused to be placated. He glanced at his stuffed pigeons, whistled as if to attract their attention, and then with a fond smile held the sutra snatched from the table in front of the bird in his right-hand pocket

"Bianca says it's bilge!” he announced triumphantly. "And Bianca knows!"

Two or three commuters had paused to take in the free show. The pig-tailed seaman shook his fist, and when they had gone he confided that Bianca hated nosybodies.

"So you call that pigeon Bianca?" Kaspar asked politely; he had determined not to be provoked.

"Don't you like the name?"

"It's a beautiful name."

"The other one's Bianco. He's the male. They stick on an a or an o, the Italians, to show the difference in sex. Their white eyes gave me the idea. Better than calling them both Whitey, but don't you get any wrong ideas, matey! We're hundred percent Americans!"

The white pupils, the blue and red circles, undoubtedly duplicated the colors of Old Glory. But Kaspar was thinking that he'd seen enough of this crackpot and his two stuffed birds.

The eccentric seaman must have sensed what was going on in Kaspar's mind. "We know when we're not wanted!" he shouted, crumpling the sutra in his hand and tossing it on the table. "Damn you!" he cursed the spectators his antics had attracted. "Haul ass, you landlubbers! As for you, you bilge peddler, I've wasted my time, but don't say I'm above doing you a favor."

He stooped, grabbed the handbag from under the table.

"Please! Please be reasonable!" Kaspar implored him. Not even the legendary Purna could have spoken so mildly, but it made no impression whatsoever on the foul-mouthed seaman. Cursing what he described as "prayer monkeys," he advised Kaspar to call the police, and off he went.

A few yards from the table he paused, opened the handbag and tossed a handful of sutras up in the air. As they fluttered down to the floor he kicked at them. Kaspar groaned, tempted to shout for the police, but true to the vow of Inoffensiveness he had sworn he suppressed the impulse, pleading with the pig-tailed thief to return the bag. A second handful of sutras followed the first.

"They must be advertising something," a knowledgeable commuter declared. "But what the gimmick is I couldn't say."

"Hair tonic!" a witty citizen replied, pointing at the shaven head of the frustrated monk.

"That's enough!" Kaspar cried when a third handful of sutras flew up out of the hand of his tormentor.

The pig-tailed seaman laughed, darted into the crowd. Kaspar ran after him. He circled two men, bumped into a lady with an umbrella under one arm. The tip stabbed him in the ribs. The pain like a dose of smelling salts cleared his head, and he asked himself why he was chasing after a crackpot who should be pitied rather than persecuted.

It was sound advice worthy of the gentle Purna, but Kaspar, to his amazement, couldn't stop his pursuit. His legs as if bewitched moved with a momentum of their own. When the thief dashed around a wall into a side entrance, the legs followed. Nimbly, they avoided colliding with the commuters. The blue-jacketed seaman heeled around a pillar but instead of running out to the street as Kaspar had expected, he stepped into a phone booth. Breathlessly, Kaspar rushed up to the glass-paneled door. Stopped. Rubbed his eyes, wondering if he'd gone crazy himself.

The booth was empty!

After a few seconds it occurred to him that he might've been mistaken about the booth. He peered into the booth on the left. Inside, a woman with smeary, brown lips sat gobbling on a chocolate bar. The booth on the right held a man in a green Tyrolese hat, swabbing at his face with a green, matching handkerchief as he shouted into the mouthpiece: "Nothing doing means nothing doing, Steve!"

Eyes bugging in his head, the stunned monk inspected the booth that should have held the pig-tailed thief. "It's empty," he muttered. "Impossible!"

He moaned pathetically, and then like a man who has misplaced his car keys and starts searching frantically through his pockets, he looked in turn into every booth in the row. None held the long-legged seaman or the stolen handbag of sutras. You've gone mad, Kaspar thought, fingering the bump on his head. The smart thing to do was find Pat Morrisey and see a doctor.

There's nothing wrong with you, matey.

It was the sailor's voice but without the sailor. Kaspar gasped as the glass-paneled door between the chocolate lady and the green Tyrolese opened. The voice, much louder now but still unattached to any corporal body, invited him to come inside:

I'm expecting a call for you, matey.

He had no intention of accepting that invitation, but his legs, independent of his will, marched him into the booth. He collapsed on the seat. His eyes dimmed with tears of self-pity as he massaged the bump on his head as if somehow or other he could dissolve the red and miniscule chamber of horrors that had sprung up inside the blood clot on his brain.

"If you're through I'd like to make a call."

A female voice, this one, coming from outside the booth. He turned and looked through the glass panel at a woman in a flowered raincap, dabbing at her nose with a damp Kleenex. She sneezed, glared. "You deaf or something? Don't you hear me?"

She had a face that only a mother could have loved and that would've been at least forty years ago; her nose burnished red by the tissues she had used; her lips clamped tight. But to Kaspar she seemed beautiful: the living proof that he still retained some of his senses. He was about to surrender the booth when the voice he dreaded crackled out of the mouthpiece:

Pick up the receiver! Here's your party.

Kaspar obeyed like a man under hypnosis. There was a party on the wire—a party he had heard innumerable times on television—addressing the nation in one of his talks modeled after the Fireside Chats of the late President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The party on the wire was none other than the President of the United States!

". . . let me state emphatically my fellow Americans that Pebbles Creek was not a first strike initiated by the Soviet Union or the People's Republic of China whose leaders have assured me of their complete cooperation in tracking down the monstrous criminals who today sabotaged Pebbles Creek ..."

Pebbles Creek, the stunned Kaspar thought. Where had he heard that name before? A cockroach flashed across his mind, red as fire, vanishing, to reappear, gigantic in size, its frightful head opening up like a visored helmet to reveal the demonic face of the skull-crowned Shakti. He realized now that he'd misunderstood what she had said. "Babbling week" and "petals seek" were in fact Pebbles Creek!

". . . every available doctor and nurse have been flown to the scene. The poisonous atmosphere that has engulfed Nevada and California will be detoxified! We will avenge our dead! We will track down the inhuman criminals who deliberately chose this nuclear facility as the target of targets, knowing full well that the explosions of the weapons stored there would inevitably rupture the Andreas Fault. Not satisfied with slaughtering tens of millions of Americans, these cunning monsters recruited Nature herself. They knew that the earthquakes generated in the Nevada desert caused by the chain reaction of fissionable materials, would bury the great cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco. My heart breaks, but as your President I must be strong and resolute. We cannot raise Los Angeles and San Francisco from the sea, we cannot restore the dead to life..."

The receiver dropped from Kaspar's inert hand. The flowered raincap watching him from outside the booth banged on the door: "You in there, if you're finished, get out and let somebody else use that phone!"

Pick up the receiver, matey!

The numbed monk obeyed and was informed that he had been given a preview of the President's speech which would be delivered to the nation at four o'clock, exactly eighteen minutes after the destruction of Pebbles Creek. Stupefied by all that he had been told, Kaspar nevertheless remembered that it was still morning. He glanced at his wristwatch, his forehead wrinkling as he struggled with some elementary arithmetic. How could he hear a speech due at four o'clock when it wasn't quite eleven?

"I've gone mad," he declared matter-of-factly. "Mad."

The impatient lady overheard him. "Then give yourself up!" she advised, pushing at the glass-paneled door. It opened and then although Kaspar hadn't stirred, it slammed shut. "There's a crazy nut in that booth!" the outraged woman appealed to the passersby.

In no time at all a semicircle of sympathetic and curious citizens had formed, its center the flowered raincap. They listened to her objective report of the situation, nodded their heads and unanimously agreed that nuts, queers, cuckoos with nothing to do but raise hell, had taken over the city, and that something had to be done about it. Somebody in the crowd rushed off to find a cop as the flowered raincap called on the whole world to look at the nut: "Did you ever see the like?" she declaimed like a zookeeper exhibiting a savage beast.

Kaspar, oblivious to the excitement he had aroused, was intoning to himself: "Mad, mad."

A fist banged against the paneled door. "Bellevue's the place to rest your black ass!"

From inside the booth a voice roared: "Go to hell, you white bastard!"

The crowd retreated and the flowered raincap, quivering with honest indignation, shrilled: "Insults now!"

From the booth that same voice thundered: "Shut up, you cheap cunt!"

Poor Kaspar, as if restored to consciousness, flushed with shame, and opening the door a few inches, explained that it wasn't him but the sailor. "He's in here even if you can't see him. If he isn't, then I'm gone, gone for good!"

Heads nodded, tongues clacked, and again the verdict was unanimous. The black guy in the booth with the shaven dome was off his rocker. When an officer arrived eyewitnesses corroborated the statements of the flowered-hat lady. Psychiatrists without diplomas diagnosed the symptoms of the crazy man in the orange robe. The officer, stroking his mustache, listened calmly, glancing now and then at the sad-faced figure behind the glass-paneled door.

"Step outside," he said finally. Kaspar emerged, his head sunken on his chest like a dog pulled out of a corner. The officer stroking his mustache, a full brown one and obviously a source of pride, examined the troublemaker from head to foot. "What're you up to?" he asked.

Mournfully Kaspar replied: "I really don't know."

"Knows enough to hog the booth and insult the public!" the flowered hat shouted.

The officer ordered her to keep still and resumed his questioning. Kaspar confessed that he really didn't know what was happening. As evidence he pointed to the bump on his head, mumbling about the possibility of a brain concussion.

"Who hit you?" the officer queried.

"The gang who hang out in the men's room."

"What men's room?"

"The one behind Information."

"Did you report it?"

"No."

"Why didn't you?'

"There's enough suffering in the world."

The officer permitted himself a little smile. A religious nut, some kind of a guru, he decided. Further questioning elicited that the attack had occurred more than a week ago, not in the men's room, but in a deserted tenement. The guru had believed he was all right, completely normal, but that was before meeting the sailor. Said sailor had a pigtail, a ruby in one ear, and two pigeons Bianco and Bianca; he had stolen a handbag belonging to the guru whom he had led to this phone booth—as the guru claimed—before vanishing into thin air.

"Just like that he disappeared?" the officer smiled.

"Except for his voice."

"You could hear him but not see him?"

"That's right. When the President made a speech—"

"So the President got into the act, too? What kind of speech?"

"About the explosion at Pebbles Creek that killed millions of people and sank San Francisco and Los Angeles into the sea."

"Listen to me," the officer said sternly. "You've been drinking nut juice!"

"I don't drink," the agitated monk replied.

"Maybe that's what you need, a good stiff drink.'' And smiling at his appreciative audience he ordered everybody to get moving. The crowd dispersed, the flowered raincap darted into the booth, the officer walked off.

The block-long floor loomed before Kaspar, broad as a highway. Every now and then he shook his head like some traveler arrived in a strange and terrifying city, and no telling whom or what he might encounter. Sailors visible one second and invisible the next; Presidents who spoke at four in the afternoon and were heard at eleven in the morning; pigeons with Italian names and talking cockroaches that changed into triple-eyed phantoms, big as life and naked as sin.

A hand touched the shoulder of the reeling monk. He pivoted to see the big, ruddy, wholesome face of his brother in Buddha, Pat Morrisey.

"I've been searching all over for you, William! What's the matter?"

"Pat," he whispered. "Do you see anyone behind me? A sailor?"

"A sailor?"

"With two stuffed pigeons in his pockets?"

"Two what? Speak louder. I can scarcely hear you. Two what?"

"Two pigeons with the strangest eyes. They look alive but—" He never finished the sentence. His bladder suddenly filling, all he could think of was relieving himself. Fearful of wetting himself in public, he muttered: "Got to get to a men's room! Be back!"

The nearest men's room was on the main level but although his emergency was extreme, the sweating monk headed for the escalators. Ever since he had been beaten and shamed, he had avoided the men's room on the main level.

Half-closing his eyes, praying to hold himself in, he ascended to the second level.

3
TANTRIST MAGIC

The men's room on the second level was almost empty. A commuter in a tan raincoat, a briefcase at his feet, stood at a urinal; a bum was shaving at the sinks. They paid no attention to the distressed customer in the orange robe. The anonymity of a public toilet was like a screen behind which each man did his thing.

Fumbling at his zipper, preoccupied with that bladder of his, so overfull and inexhaustible, Kaspar wasn't aware of the door opening until somebody shouted:

"Stick 'em up!"

Noiseless as ghosts in their rubber-bottomed sneakers, three black teen-agers filed into the room. The smallest of the trio waved the gun in his fist; a cheap, nickel-plated Saturday night special. His companions, both a head taller, could have been twins, slender-boned and chocolate colored, wearing identical jackets; the blue and green jackets of the United Nations; Armed Forces purchased in some military surplus store. Only their hats, a black beret and a camel's-hair cap were different.

The camel's-hair cap sauntered over toward Kaspar and held out a hand as if he wanted to shake; a welcoming, a treacherous hand for in a flash the knife Kaspar hadn't noticed flicked out a six-inch blade.

"Nobody's gonna get hurt," he assured the urinating commuter and the shaving bum. "Only this here nigger creep!"

When the frightened monk heard those ominous words he knew he was in for real trouble. His stomach heaved, his blue eyes (his white man's eyes) darted toward the commuter and the man shaving. They pretended that he didn't exist. Kaspar had never felt so alone, the two white men transients from another world, a white world. He shook off the last drop from his penis (habit is habit) before slipping it back inside his shorts.

"Don't play with it!" the teen-ager in the black beret laughed while he unfolded the newspaper he'd been clutching under one arm. He pulled out a foot-long club and stooping low, peered under the half-doors of the pay toilets, announced that nobody was taking a shit. Moving on, crablike, to the single free toilet: "Empty!" he cried, flinging open the door.

The gun-toter had also been busy. He'd appropriated the commuter's briefcase and after dumping the contents out on the floor, he held up the leather as if it were a big tin cup. "Your money and your watches!" he snapped. "Not you!" he growled at Kaspar.

The commuter dropped his wristwatch and wallet into the briefcase. The gun-toter thanked him, his voice cool and collected like some sawed-off gangster hero out of the early movies. The bum explained he owned no watch, all he had were two dollars and change. He sounded so apologetic all three teen-agers burst out laughing.

Rapping his club against the door of the free toilet the teen-ager in the black beret ordered: "Get in, you guys, and quick!"

The door shut on the two whites. The black beret grinned at Kaspar: "You must be crazy, man! We warned you not to fool around with a buncha white ass creeps! Shavin' your dumb head, what's the big idea?"

"We're Buddhists—"

"There you go with that buddy stuff again!"

"The Lord Buddha—"

"The Lord Buddha, my ass!" the camel's hair cap interrupted, jabbing his knife within an inch of Kaspar's nose. "Who the hell's this Lord Buddha anyway? Tell us!" he implored, rolling his eyes, and what with the camel's-hair cap on his head—a huge, flat one shaped like a pancake—he seemed more comical than dangerous.

"The Lord Buddha lived to bring love and pity to the world."

"That so?"

"That's so," was the brave reply. "He lived to bring Enlightenment to the world."

"Lighten my balls, creep! We warned you to lay off that white shit."

"The Lord Buddha wasn't white. His message was for all men, white or black or—"

"Cut it out, creep! What's his handle?"

"He had no handle. He lived to bring love and pity—"

"Love and shitty," the camel's-hair cap clowned, flicking the blade at Kaspar's robe. "What's this here yeller rag?"

"It's the robe of a Buddhist monk," he answered, standing straight and erect as if he had stepped into the sandals of the fearless Purna.

"So that's what you are, a God damn monk with the brains of an ape!"

The black beret laughed, the gun-toter sighted his Saturday night special at Kaspar's head, the camel's hair cap flicked his knife: "You better start prayin', you dumb asshole!"

Kaspar (unlike Purna) retreated from the glittering point. The black beret rushed forward. He saw the club swinging and then the ceiling seemed to fall, the room wall-less, the rows of white urinals and white sinks dissolving into a pinwheel of black faces...

When he opened his eyes he thought that throbbing head of his had gone off on a trip somewhere, but where could a head go, he wondered, particularly a head without a body. He rejected the fleeting notion that his head had momentarily changed into a bowling ball rolling down an alley; a very odd bowling ball, brown in color, with blue eyes like his own and features like his own. Another minute passed before he realized that the alley was a floor, the row of white bowling pins, urinals.

He remembered everything.

He was alone lying on the floor in the men's room. The three muggers had gone. The two whites'd gone, the man with the briefcase and the man with the whiskers. Taking their feet, be thought and stifled a sob as if he had sustained a personal loss. He could see no feet under the doors of the pay toilets. No feet stood at the urinals. There were no feet anywhere.

If his faculties hadn't been dulled he might have asked himself how a public toilet in a busy place like the Terminal could be so empty. But instead he studied his own feet intently and decided it was time to stand them up. He was panting when he finally dragged himself upright. He staggered over to the sinks, opened a cold water tap, splashed his aching head, licking at the drops (an unexpected bonus) trickling down his cheeks. He cupped his hand and drank. Little streamlets dribbled between his fingers. In the mirror above the sink he observed their course like some geographer mapping out an unknown terrain.

The lump, the new lump on top of his head, midway between eye and ear, looked like a great big wad of chewing gum. He touched it. It wasn't chewing gum. It was pain.

"God," he muttered aloud. "Why me?"

"That's a good question, matey."

Kaspar swung around so fast he almost lost his balance, his arms whipping out like those of a circus aeri-alist on a high wire. Slowly, the floor, no longer atilt, righted itself. Opposite the sinks the door of one of the pay toilets had opened. Seated on the bowl inside, the now-you-see-him, now-you-don't, pig-tailed seaman nodded approvingly:

"A good question. The eternal question of every man who has lived a good life. Why is the just man punished and the unjust rewarded?"

This little speech, so thoughtful and full of pithy insights, might have surprised Kaspar if he hadn't been in a state of shock. He might have wondered at the introspective side of the rough-talking seaman.

"Why you?" the pig-tailed thief continued. "Why me? What do I want? What do we all want in this lousy world? Philosophy!" he sneered, his mouth splitting into a prodigious yawn as if the whole subject bored him. He adjusted his black-and-white, zebra-colored sunglasses, peered down at the pigeons in his pockets and declared that Bianco and Bianca didn't give a damn about good and evil, and that even the owl reputed to be the wisest of birds couldn't be called a philosopher. "Bilge!" he summed up his own personal attitude.

Kaspar, recovering the powers of speech, blurted out: "You—what do you want of me?"

"Must you repeat every damn thing I say?"

"Who are you?"

"You'll find out."

"That's no answer! Why did you follow me here?"

"Dammit, this is a public toilet and don't you forget it!" he advised the excited monk in a harsh tone. "I'm a taxpayer and don't you forget it!" And shrugging, he cooed at his stuffed pigeons. His head lifted and he said: "Bianca's the practical one. She says, first things first. And she's right. You better let me tend to that noggin of yours, matey."

He got up from the white enameled bowl which as Kaspar now saw had served the pig-tailed seaman as a chair and not as a receptacle. The black top covered the horseshoe-shaped seat. "Move over, Bianca," he murmured as he dug his hand into his pocket to produce a small, white jar. "A single dab of this oint-ment'll do the trick," he promised.

"Nothing doing!" the sorely tried monk protested. "I intend to see a doctor!"

His would-be benefactor seemed not to have heard him. Kaspar's heart skipped a beat. Perhaps it was the brace of uncanny birds, stuffed, and yet so alive; perhaps it was the seaman's eyes hidden behind the optically disturbing black-and-white sunglasses. But as the blue-jacketed figure moved forward his face appeared to be made out of two different components; the glassed-in upper half attached to the flesh-and-skin lower half.

"Didn't you hear me?" Kaspar shrilled. "Are you completely insane?"

"Insane! Don't say that, matey! Please!" and halting he sobbed bitterly. "That's gratitude for you!" His mouth drooped and in a forlorn voice he addressed his pigeons. "Why should we care? It's not our head."

More confused than ever, Kaspar's hold on reality began to slip. The harder he clutched at it the more it eluded him, disintegrating like a frayed rope. Was the sailor real or a figment out of a clouded brain cast now in the role of a good Samaritan. And in this men's room of all places! The phone booth downstairs floated into his mind like a seagoing coffin, empty of bodies but not of voices. Had he actually heard the President? Was there a Pebbles Creek?

"Gratitude!" the pig-tailed sailor sobbed. "I don't have to fix your head but get this straight! I've got as much right to be here as you have! Dammit, do you think this is your private can?"

Private! That it wasn't! Kaspar thought And if not, why hadn't someone else come in? Was the door locked and if so, who had locked it?

"There's a city ordinance against locking or otherwise interfering with the public's right of access to a public toilet!" the pig-tailed seaman retorted vehemently. "Article 7134. No, that's the No Spitting article! I mean Article 7135 passed on October 29, 1920 during the administration of Jimmy Walker, the playboy Mayor..."

On and on he spieled with such precise, legalistic terminology that only belatedly did the dazzled monk realize that his thoughts had been read like a page in a book. "My God!" he exclaimed.

As Kaspar gaped, the authority on city affairs rubbed his fingers across the ruby in his long, white ear. "I'm pretty good at mind reading," he boasted. "Take your name for instance. Kaspar's a German name. You even spell it with a K as your old man used to tell you when you were a kid in Topeka. A rummy lot, ministers, always sniffing at their genealogy."

This demonstration of mind reading paralyzed Kaspar. His father was a minister. His father was obsessed with what he called their family tree!

"Yes siree," the phenomenal mind reader continued smugly. "I know everything there is to know about you."

"You—" Kaspar faltered. "Who are you anyway?"

"I'm just as good at doctoring," was the evasive answer. He again displayed the small, white jar. "Good for man or beast," he pattered like a circus medicine man. "Cures rheumatism, arthritis, tuberculosis and halitosis." And uncapping the jar he warned Kaspar not to let the smell bother him.

Kaspar's nostrils dilated. The ointment, greenish in color, was sickening to breathe like the rotten ripeness of a mouse left too long in a trap. "No, no!" he cried, edging away from the self-proclaimed doctor.

"Who can blame you for not trusting me?" and with a sigh the other confessed that he had never bothered with a good bedside manner.

"I don't want to listen to your nonsense!" Kaspar shouted. "I'm sick and tired of it!"

"Calm down, matey. To answer your question— Who am I? There are some who call me irresponsible. And I am irresponsible! One God damn ship after another! When a man knocks around this world he picks up a lot of tricks. What ruined me for good was that summer in Yokohama—" He roared with laughter. "Didn't I play dumb when I asked you about Buddhism downstairs? What I don't know about Buddhism! But to get back to Yokohama. That was where I met that old Tantrist. What that old man didn't teach me! Mind reading! Hypnotism! How to make yourself disappear! How to fly through space. That, though, he never worked out proper."

Kaspar had gone rigid. Everything that'd happened to him during the course of that inexplicable day fell into place like the pieces of a puzzle. The stinking ointment, he now knew, was some Tantrist nostrum made out of the horrible ingredients they invariably used: dog vomit, urine, decayed chicken livers ... Endless the list.

He stared at the pig-tailed seaman—this Tantrist!— his eyes shifting to the stuffed pigeons which he guessed had their part in some Tantrist rite. Power through fair means or foul, power through obscene rites and magical practices, had always been the Tantrist goal. The gods they worshiped, for all their lip service to the Lord Buddha, were the gods of power...

Shakti's image formed in his mind. Skull-crowned and triple-eyed, mouthing words of death and disaster—Shakti, he felt, was the central piece in the puzzle, and yet the puzzle was incomplete. Why me? he kept thinking, why me?

"That isn't for me to say," the other said, reading Kaspar's thoughts.

"She sent you—"

"I don't take orders from Shakti!" was the angry and even arrogant reply. "We've jawboned enough! Let me put a little of this ointment on that noggin of yours, matey."

"I don't want anything from you—"

"The Tantrist advanced, grinning. Kaspar bolted toward the door to stop in the middle of his headlong rush. Not one but a dozen sailors confronted him, holding out a dozen arms, the white jars gleaming in a row like a display in a pharmacist's window. The boiled rice and banana Kaspar had eaten at breakfast swirled inside his mouth like an evil-tasting mush.

A dozen fingers dipped into a dozen jars and something slimy wet plopped down on Kaspar's head.

A single blue-jacketed sailor—just one!—turned and walked back toward the pay toilet like a doctor returning to his office from a house call. The locked door flew open although no coin had been inserted in the lock; it remained open as the terrified monk perceived; its spring springless, the laws of mechanics suspended.

"The pain's gone, hasn't it?"

It had but Kaspar was too overcome to be grateful. Seated once again on the covered bowl the self-confessed Tantrist praised the Tantrist medicines: "Their cures are cures. In fact, there's a cure for everything wrong in this world. The cure for the bastards who mugged you is a cat-o'nine-tails! As for the bloody lot with their bloody Pebbles Creeks—"

Choking with rage he leaped up from his seat as if it'd turned red hot and like a man fleeing from a burning house he rushed out of the stall: "God damn ship's lawyers!" he cursed, jumping up and down as if stomping an enemy to death.

Kaspar blinked when the infuriated seaman in a sudden change of mood stopped his antics, bowed, cupped his ear with one hand as if listening to some far-off voice: " 'To be or not to be, that is the question—'" He broke off and said decisively: "No, not today, Shakespeare. Some other day." And bowing to his stupefied audience-of-one he shouted: "Curtain!"

From somewhere inside one of the stalls a voice replied:

"Curtain it is, sir."

A second voice sounded from the urinals:

"Full steam ahead to Pebbles Creek!"

"Aye, aye, sir," the first voice said. "Full steam ahead to Hiroshima, sir."

"No, not Hiroshima, you bloody sweepings!" the second voice bellowed. "That's Article 7134!"

The pig-tailed Tantrist sighed like a performer who has left the bright lights for the backstage. "That's the situation, matey," he said unhappily.

"Pebbles Creek? It's real?"

"Too real, matey."

"I never heard of—"

"Damn you for a thickhead! Because you never heard of the bloody place doesn't mean it doesn't exist? Whoever heard of Pompeii before it was buried?" Tears trickled down his cheeks from under the rims of his sunglasses. "I lost some good friends at Pompeii."

There were tears in Kaspar's own eyes. He wasn't weeping in sympathy for the sailor's Pompeiian friends but for himself.

"Aw, stop blubbering!" the weeping seaman said between sniffles.

The grieving monk couldn't control himself. All his sufferings that long, long day had at last found an outlet.

"Stop it, I say!"

"I—I—can't."

"There's a cure for hysteria!"

What Kaspar witnessed now would have turned his hair snowy white if there had been any on his shaven skull. The solid, blue-jacketed figure in the stall had begun to lose length and width, the mouth, nose and chin pulling together into a wrinkled, flabby piece of skin no bigger than an oversized belly button. Only the ruby in the shrinking ear kept its size, shape, and color, shining over what had been and was no longer a body.

Kaspar shuddered and in his anguish he bowed his head and prayed to the Compassionate One to give him the strength to endure his trials.

"The strength of the worthy Purna of old!" a bodiless voice rang out mockingly.

Inside the stall a blue cloud appeared above the white bowl and shaped itself into a peabody. The peabody seated itself and as it did a pair of blue-trousered legs attached themselves; a neck sprang up between the shoulders of the headless apparition; and finally a head, topped by a blue stocking cap exactly like the one Kaspar remembered except for one minor detail. Stitched across the front of the cap were three red letters: L.H.T.

To Kaspar, these strange happenings proved, if additional proof was necessary, that he'd gone stark raving mad.

"Why do you keep on thinking you're mad?" the completely restored sailor asked in a disapproving voice.

Kaspar rushed toward the door. One step, two steps, three steps—it couldn't have been more—when the two pigeons whirled up out of their cloth nests, circling around his head. He made no effort to ward them off; he stood riveted to the floor like one of the enameled sinks.

Had he actually seen those stuffed birds take wings? If he had, their flight was of short duration. With unseeing eyes they gazed out of their owner's pockets. Kaspar bit on his knuckles and then with a courage that amazed Mm as if some unknown twin of his had popped up at his side he cried. "I know who you are now!" His eyes fixed on the three red-stitched letters L.H.T.—abbreviations for the most occult of all Buddhist sects, the Left-Handed Tantra.

"So you know who I am, matey?"

"Yes, and I am ready to die if I must, you Devil!"

His nostrils dilated. Some overpowering, nauseating smell had filled the room and he glimpsed the mountain of skulls of all who ever lived on earth. His face was covered with sweat as if he stood before the grave that would be his one day.

"Christ!" he screamed as if he had never shaved his head and donned a Buddhist robe.

"Christ?" was the mocking reply. "Back to that old religion, sonny boy? But I'll give Christ credit. He could walk on water and raise the dead. But what does the bloody fool do? Gets Himself crucified!"

Clasping his hands like a pious pilgrim the Tantrist began to pray! "Save me, Christ! Bring me to Heaven! Save me, oh, Buddha! Bring me to Nirvana! Listen to a poor seagoing bastard repented of his evil ways! Listen, you bloody fools!"

Like a dying man Kaspar invoked the Holy Name of God. The room darkened and lo! two figures, haloed in light, emerged from the shadows, the commuter standing once again at the urinals, the bum at the sinks. Slowly they turned their light-rimmed heads and showed their faces: one round and serene, the other sad and bearded.

When the despairing monk recognized who they were he fell to his knees before the Lord Buddha, the Ever-Wandering Commuter—and the Son of God, Jesus Christ, The Ever-Homeless Drifter.

4
THE PACT

The lights came on again, the holy pair gone like a dream (or was it only a dream?), and in the stall where the pig-tailed seaman had confessed his Tantrist apprenticeship in Yokohama there now sat a shaven-headed monk in an orange robe.

Another trick, Kaspar thought, pulled out of the bottomless box of the Left-Handed Tantra. The bizarre sunglasses and blue stocking cap hidden away somewhere with the pickpocket fingers of a prestigidator; the peabody jacket converted into a monk's robe.

The false monk (as Kaspar supposed him to be) nodded and said, "I tried to prepare you for this meeting but the less said about my emissaries the better, Shakti will ever be Shakti! But what possessed me to send the Irresponsible?"

Exalted by the vision he had seen of the Double Godhead (which could as easily have been Triple or Quadruple) Kaspar clasped his hands and called on the fearless Purna to stand by his side; he called on the Lord Buddha to give him strength.

The seated figure raised his hand and the serene, golden Buddha behind the eyelids of the praying monk shattered. He gasped as his eyelids closed tight. He tried to open them. He pushed at the lids. They were like stone. He screamed when the blackness behind his sealed lids were split by a pale flash. Cold and intense and phantasmagoric like the light of the eyeless fish in the depths of the sea; the light coalescing into a face he had seen a hundred times: painted on cloth, cast in bronze, silver, gold; a face neither human nor inhuman with lionlike, blood-red eyes; swollen and thick of neck; the arms wrapped in the coils of serpents, the hands clutching the instruments of war: battle-axes, bows, swords, spears.

In that eerie light those ancient weapons were invested with the terror they had once inspired; the age-old visage of the Evil One glittering in the blackness like a metallic shield no point could pierce.

"Kaspar, do you know who I am now?"

Like shutters unhinged by a wind, his sealed eyelids flew open and he looked at the Being seated in the stall as if on a throne. He hadn't really looked at the Other until this second: Kama Mara, the Lord of Things, the Eternal Challenger disguised as a Buddhist monk. He saw what appeared to be a man in his forties, the head delicately boned, the scalp shaven clean except for a black furry tuft, the face hollow of cheek and slanted of eye like a Chinese or Japanese or Korean. It was not only a human face but a very handsome one, marred only by the mouth, the lips long, thin and cruel: a predator's mouth that revealed who this Being was as surely as if it had been stained with blood.

"You must not fear me, Kaspar. I have come to save and not destroy this world! To save!" he laughed a mocking laugh that sounded like the outcry of a strangled man; a choked-in laugh that burst against his lips which were now tightly closed except at one corner. "Pity me, Kaspar, if you can. I hate mankind! I hate the verminous breed, but to save myself I must save humanity. I have no choice when the earth itself, this mighty thing of land and sea is endangered. I am the Lord of Things!" he said with the dignity of a supreme ruler. "Behold me then, the Savior!" he added abjectly with loathing.

The slanted eyes bulged in their sockets; so large they seemed like a blazing band across his face, shining with a demonic light.

"I wasn't frightened by Hiroshima," he confessed as his eyes contracted, human in size again. "I rejoiced in Hiroshima, but as the years passed I saw there was no limit to human folly. The leaders of nations like crazed children kept singing their demented little songs of national security. Insane vermin playing with fire, playing with the physical makeup of the universe, insanely piling up their terrible matches! Today, this very day there could be war. Even if it can be prevented who can foretell the future? Think of how easy it would be for a handful of terrorists to steal a little of the plutonium stored away in the Pebbles Creeks of this world. There is only one sane solution. To shut down every nuclear arsenal, facility and reactor. It must be done, Kaspar! You and I, Kaspar, will save mankind!"

Speechless, Kaspar could only stare. Yet it was as if he had spoken: "Why me?"

"Why you?" the Other echoed. "The Gods, whether good or evil, can only act through men."

"I'm nobody—"

"That's why you were chosen, Kaspar. Of all the Buddhists in this land you have been the most faithful to your vows. I must warn you though that there is a price for everything. To save this world I was forced to turn myself inside out. I, the Evil One, I must undo evil!" He struck his forehead with a clenched fist. "Pity me if you can. I hardly know who I am? I was Kama Mara, but who am I now, bleating of peace like some stupid sheep? A name, a name!" he cried in a despairing voice. "A name for a Sheep, a Savior? I have it! Call me Ananda!"

Kaspar trembled at that blasphemous request. Ananda had been the best-loved, the mildest, the gentlest of all the disciples of the Living Buddha.

"Poor Kaspar," the self-styled Ananda murmured. "As I have said, there is a price for everything. You, the pure of heart, must forswear the vows you have sworn."

"Never!"

"The monks of Indochina burned themselves to protest the murder of the innocents. By so doing didn't they violate the vow of Inoffensiveness? Open your eyes, Kaspar, to the truth! What nobler task is there than to shut down the nuclear slaughterhouses of this world? To arouse the sheep against their butchers?"

"I will not listen—"

"You are afraid to listen. Think, wouldn't it be a good thing to destroy the devil in man? Wouldn't it be the greatest of all good deeds?"

"I must not listen—"

"Will Inoffensiveness save us from those who glory in the knife? Celibacy!" he exclaimed, his lips twisting as if he had swallowed filth. "What is it but the unmanning of a man? What is Poverty but a withdrawal from power, to be poor in strength in a world where might makes right."

Kaspar had recoiled as if the honeyed words of the self-styled Ananda were a net from which he must escape if he wished to save his soul.

"Kaspar, you have studied the Buddhist Scriptures. 'Doers of what is hard are the Bodhisattvas, the great beings who are resolved to be the world's means of salvation.' Poor Kaspar, you are thinking here is the Devil quoting Scripture. Like yourself I have read the Pali Tripitaka, the Prajnaparamita and a hundred other books. Devil, I am! Devil and Savior! And you, the meek monk? A Bodhisattva acting for the benefit of the world: For the ease of the world, motivated by pity for the world. You shake your head."

"I cannot—"

"You are thinking what man in his right mind can believe in the Devil's words. You are thinking that if I mean what I say, if I am in truth a second Ananda, why don't I save the millions of innocent Americans who will perish this day?"

"Yes!"

"I would save them if I could, but there are no stop valves on a volcano. It will be hard enough to prevent war." His shoulders heaved under his robe. "War and an end to all things, an end to all men, and an end to me, who once was so powerful. Peace, faugh!" he grimaced. "How I hated the very word and now I must become a peacemonger. Such is necessity. And you, Kaspar, like a Bodhisattva of old will help me."

Impossible visions blazed in Kaspar's mind: a world without nuclear weapons, a world where all men would live like brothers.

"Come, Kaspar. We must go."

"Go where?" he asked in an almost inaudible voice.

"To the United Nations," the self-styled Savior said with bitter scorn. "We will expose these United Hypocrites to their peoples. Arouse mankind from its sleep! Recruit every sheep, I mean every human being in a mighty army for peace. Peace!" He spat out the word. "Peace! What have I done to deserve such a fate?"

As the door of the men's room shut behind them Kaspar heard a heavy crash. Glancing back over his shoulder he saw a white enameled sign, stamped with three black words, lying on the floor:

The muggers, he guessed, must've hung up that sign to keep out the public, exactly what he would've done if he'd been a member of their gang.

Those three stamped words brought the half-mesmerized monk back to a world where cause and effect still operated.

The commuters had thinned out; the masses had become individuals. He saw a woman eyeing her hand mirror with the sharp eye of a surgeon. He saw five or six teen-agers in blue jeans patched with snippets of bright cloth, giggling at the prospect of a day in fun city. He saw a loitering pimp in an ankle-length fur coat like a two-legged weasel on the lookout for runaways. Farther down the corridor, opposite the water fountain, two vagrants were pushing at one another and although the gentle monk abhorred violence, the snatches of the dialogue he overheard—"I'll bust you one inna minnit!"—"Yeh, you and who else?"—was still another reminder that there was still an ordinary world inhabited by ordinary people.

The self-styled Ananda had dashed ahead, and was now ten or twelve paces in the lead. Kaspar, try as he could, found it impossible to catch up.

Kaspar almost stumbled at that voice echoing inside his own head. His temples pulsed, his eyes blurred. A Bodhisattva, was he, fated to save mankind?

He had a premonition that some horrible end was awaiting him like so many others who for one reason or another had sold their souls to the Evil One.

Possessed, he thought with anguish. Bugged! And in a second the flesh-and-blood people en route to offices, department stores, theaters, movies, lost all reality. Far more real that other world with its supernatural presences: the skull-crowned Shakti whispering in the night, the nameless Tantrist disguised as a common sailor and most menacing their Master, the self-styled Ananda.

Ananda seemed to have been carried away on a tide of glistening raincoats. When he appeared like a swimmer bucking a current he tapped Kaspar's arm and in an unhappy voice muttered: "Never before, never before."

"I don't understand?"

"Never before have I stood side by side with a human being. Not even with Hitler or Stalin or their great predecessors."

Repelled by that admission of demonic pride Kaspar grimaced, turning his head to avoid looking at the false monk.

"Shall I deny my past? Spit on myself? Yet, I must!"

Silently they descended the broad stairs that flanked the escalators. "Sheep," Ananda whispered with disgust. "Do you think I want to save them?"

Kaspar glanced at the commuters riding down to the main level; all of them mated for a few seconds, male and female, male and male, female and female, old and young, rich and poor.

"Stupid sheep!" Ananda repeated balefully.

The faces of the riders whether ruddy or pale of skin, brown or dark brown, changed into a uniform dirty gray, their noses and chins receding, their mouths tightening into muzzles: the crowd of commuters a herd. "Baa baa..." they sang in unison.

The stunned monk shut his eyes to blot out the sight of the irrepressible Devil who had created an illusionary procession of sheep heads.

"There's our friend," Ananda remarked.

At the foot of the staircase, a blue-jacketed figure wearing an exotic pair of black-and-white sunglasses stood waving a welcoming hand. Faster and faster that hand of his as if he had been seized by a frenzy of joy; his fingers multiplying by fives.

"That's why I'm fond of the rascal," Ananda mused aloud. "Laughter is precious in this insane world."

Kaspar asked no questions. He was like some soldier fresh from battle, rejoicing in a cigarette, a cup of coffee, in all the little things of life. He refused to think of what still lay ahead. Were they actually going to the United Nations on a mission whose outcome was anybody's guess? Would there be a nuclear war that day?

Kaspar shuddered at the soundless voice of the Being he was following like a dog soldier tramping behind a fire-breathing sergeant.

As they alighted on the main level the Irresponsible greeted them like two long-lost friends, patted the heads of his two pigeons, informed Kaspar and Ananda that Bianca and Bianco were just as happy as he was. Laughing at some private joke he dashed off. Ananda, to Kaspar's surprise, immediately followed. Had he described the pig-tailed seaman as a rascal, dubbed him the Irresponsible?

The bewildered monk speeded up his own pace, skipping in and out among the commuters. As he ran he comforted himself with the thought that he simply wasn't used to people like Ananda and the pig-tailed seaman. People! he corrected himself, his jaws clenching tight...

The windows of the Terminal shops flashed in his eyes—a single, bright expanse—their neoned names HOFFRITZ CUTLERY TEPEE TOWN CONTINENTAL TRAILWAYS, a single, bright alphabet. The rows of tables outside the windows of WALGREEN DRUGS loomed up before him. He spotted Pat Morrisey haranguing a couple of commuters and averted his face as if that would help make him invisible, fixing his attention on the quarters occupied by the Greyhound Line. Overhead, in front of the ticket counters, a long-legged beast bigger than a race horse galloped through space. Kaspar concentrated on the gray phantom as if that would help him get by his brother in Buddha without being noticed.

"William!"

He winced when he heard his name, flinging up a hand as if to say: I'll be right back.

"Where are you going?"

Pretending to be deaf and dumb, the panting monk rushed by Morrisey and the table stacked with sutras but there was no running away from the image of the monk he had once been. And no longer was.

5

INCIDENT AT TIMES SQUARE

They were awaiting for Kaspar on the rainy sidewalk outside the Terminal. The strange pair had attracted the attention of the passersby. As Kaspar joined them he became painfully conscious that he, too, was being scrutinized by a hundred eyes.

"Morrisey back there thinks you've gone balmy," the mind-reading seaman said with a grin.

He assured Kaspar that he was no thief, the handbag had been returned, and with his hand resting on his heart he apologized for the sutras he'd tossed up like confetti. "It's no excuse, matey, but I like to throw things. How about a little peace offering?"

Kaspar ignored him. He glanced at Ananda who said, "There's no hurry. They have adjourned for lunch at the UN. You can work up quite an appetite," he continued sarcasticafly, "if you spend the morning weeping for mankind."

"Then—"

"Why the rush?" Ananda completed his unspoken thought and nodded at the grinning seaman. "Where fools lead, the wise follow."

"A peace offering," the Irresponsible said magnanimously. "Here it is, matey," holding out a bouquet of red flowers that had sprouted out of his hand. "Flamboyants! They grow all over the Caribbean. That was living, matey!" he rhapsodized. "Flowers and women, the sun shining and the sea so blue!"

When Kaspar declined to accept the bouquet he sighed and bowed at the little crowd magnetized by the sidewalk show. "Such pretty flowers and he doesn't want the damn things," he informed the spectators. He poked his nose into the flamboyants, sniffed, laughed, flinging the bunch over his head. He caught it as it fell and lifted it toward his lips—a big, brown cigar had appeared in his mouth—as if the flaming red bouquet were a torch. "Won't light," he complained.

The crowd laughed at this magician who was also a bit of a comic.

"It's yours!” he shouted, flinging the cigar high in the air. "A genuine, imported, handmade Jamaica!" And with another bow sent the flowers up into space. "Cigars for the men, flowers for the ladies!"

There was a scramble to seize the gifts. People stepped on each other's toes; perfect strangers bumped buttocks. The cigar and the bouquet somehow eluded all the greedy fingers, dropping to the sidewalk. Two rivals seized the cigar and as they struggled for complete possession it crumbled into a fine, brown dust like some ancient artifact brought into the light of day. The flamboyants, red as fire, shone on the sidewalk but before any of the ladies could put a hand on it, it vanished without even a trace of smoke.

The astonished crowd stared where the bouquet had been and where it wasn't. Their eyes moved rhythmically from the sidewalk to the blue-jacketed magician and back again.

"You a wise guy or something?" a little, plump lady, in a pink raincoat that gave her the look of a fighting red hen, snapped at the smiling seaman.

Another frustrated female (inspired by the seaman's pigtail) shouted: "He's a pig playing dirty tricks!"

"Dirty tricks is right!" a man yelled, holding up his hand so everybody could see the brown cigar dust, dampened by the wet sidewalk, staining his fingers.

"I'm just an amateur," the Irresponsible declared. "Please excuse me," he whined. "I hate to be an Indian giver. Excuse me, I have an appointment with my agent."

Muttering insults, the crowd opened a narrow alley for the amateur magician. "Poor man," Ananda said. "He'll be lucky if his agent books his act."

Kaspar, wishing he was anywhere else on earth, listened with utter amazement, unable to believe that the dreaded Lord of Things could stoop to such silly horseplay. The pink raincoat glared at the slant-eyed monk: "You sound like a wise guy yourself !"

"He's part of the act!" somebody else accused. "Him and that other guy standing there."

"Jugglers maybe," an elderly citizen said thoughtfully. "But the circus ain't due 'til spring."

Ananda took Kaspar by the elbow, explaining to the crowd that they were expected at a prayer meeting. His heart pounding, Kaspar stared straight ahead. A Bodhisattva was he or a damn fool? he asked himself, unaware that he had soiled his thoughts with language unworthy of a Buddhist monk.

The rain had thinned into a fine drizzle, dripping out of the gray, swollen sponge of a sky. The store signs on the opposite side of Eighth Avenue shone bright and blotchy like some lurid makeup. Red-lipped prostitutes sauntered by the neoned windows with their displays of liquor, health foods and men's suits. SEAGRAM'S ... EAT RITE... BEST BUYS IN TOWN ...

Ananda had rushed ahead again, sidestepping between the commuters. With their wide opened umbrellas they looked as if some convention of mushrooms had taken over the city. He bolted out into the gutter without waiting for the traffic light to change.

A sidewalk umbrella peddler accosted Kaspar: "Hey, mister! You'll get the flu wit'out a hat! Buy yourself an umbrellah!"

When the traffic light turned green Kaspar was the first to cross the avenue. Before him 42nd Street glittered like some honky-tonk arcade open to the sky; a street as familiar to Kaspar as the robe on his back and yet suddenly strange as if he'd never walked under its movie marquees; each one blazing with jeweled rainbows, promising pots of gold that vanished at the touch, and dream women who stayed in no man's arms; the shops sandwiched in brilliant light: hot dogs, pizzas, knives, porno magazines, shoes, peep shows.

Up and down the restless crowds tramped. High school hooky players quick-footed as ponies, heavy-footed oldsters, chattering gays in clothes gaudy as parrot feathers, drunks lurching like bears, perverts who only lacked the scaly tails of rats, rip-off artists and muggers with the stealthy eyes of predators.

Kaspar had seen them all many a time on that menagerie of a street but never with such insight. Empty souls, he thought with pity. Who would redeem them, save them? His heart swelled with the unworldly joy of a man who wanted nothing for himself, and lifting his eyes toward the gray sky he thanked the Fate that had chosen him to be a Bodhisattva ...

"Baldy!" a barker in a purple hat called from the entrance of a peep show. "How about some fun? Girls! We got 'em all! Big girls, li'l girls, fat girls, skinny girls!"

"Don't listen to the pimp!" warned an old man standing on the curb. "I don't care if you're Christian or heathen, never listen to the minions of Satan!"

Kaspar groaned. The half-crazed old man had swung open the gates of hell he remembered from his own childhood, and he wondered how could any sane man believe, even for a minute that the Devil'd changed into a Savior ... He was so consumed with doubts he might have walked by Ananda if he hadn't heard his name.

Stiff and wooden like the cigar-store Indians of an earlier New York, Ananda was stationed in front of a Times Square bar, his shaven head capped in red neon, his shoulders resplendent in red epaulettes. He might have been a tourist fascinated by the sights and sounds of the busiest corner in town; the famous square where Seventh Avenue and Broadway crossed to form the triangular island on which the New York Times building, once so grimy like a soiled newspaper, had been resurfaced in white marble and renamed the Allied Chemical Tower.

Electric headlines in a rotating band of yellow letters circled the white marble walls.

Round and round the names of presidents and dictators, statesmen and common murderers.

Round and round the daily record of murder sanctioned and unsanctioned.

"You certainly were in a hurry," Kaspar said, unable to control his irritation.

"It's his influence," Ananda said gloomily. "We'll go in soon."

"Go in where?"

"This bar. We'll teach your little friends a lesson!"

"What friends?"

The Slant-Eyed One raised his hand and urged the bewildered monk to take a look. Peering into his palm as if in a mirror, Kaspar saw a miniature of the bar's busy interior. He saw tiny mannikins waiting for their orders at doll-sized counters; still others were seated at white-enameled tables no bigger than sugar cubes.

"Do you see them?"

Had the Other spoken or had he heard his voice in the sound box fashioned out of his mind? Inside the cupped palm Kaspar recognized two of the three teen-agers who had attacked him, the black beret and the camel's-hair cap, their faces greatly enlarged.

"They're having a beer while they're waiting for the briefcase to be sold."

"The briefcase?"

"Do you mean to say you have forgotten the commuter with the briefcase? Once it's sold we'll go in and teach your little friends a lesson they won't forget!"

Through the bar's open doors, the odors of corned beef, pastrami, knockwurst and other meats ground out of slaughtered animals (nauseous to a Buddhist monk who regarded all life as sacred and never ate meat) floated into Kaspar's nostrils like a long, sustained belch. Revolted by the smell of murder consummated he marveled at his stupidity.

"I thought—" he began.

"You thought we were after the leaders of nations? We are but first you must learn to be strong—"

"Strong against the ignorant and the misguided?"

"Nobly spoken," Ananda congratulated him. "Tell me, did your vow of Inoffensiveness save you from their ignorance, their misguided hatred?" He accented Kaspar's words unpleasantly. "Shall we forgive your little friends for clubbing you, forgive them for rape, forgive them for murder if murder enters their ignorant, misguided hearts? Haven't they suffered? Poor misguided lambs!" He laughed and as he did the lips of his long, cruel mouth parted.

Kaspar recoiled. Each tooth in that mouth was notched at the biting edge; notched five times; and as the horrified monk stared, tiny fingers and thumbs formed and undulated bonelessly. Was he seeing things, he asked himself as the lips closed, overwhelmed by that vision of diabolic hands.

"You must accept me as I am, Kaspar. I have concealed nothing. I have no choice but to save mankind, but once this is done I will be myself again. The Evil One! And what a joy that will be!"

A drunken couple stopped and with the wide, innocent eyes of extreme intoxication blinked at the two monks. The woman hiccuped: "Why's the black guy squeezin' his hands? Why's he look so God damn sad?"

"He's prayin', baby," her escort replied. "It's his religion, baby, and there's all kinds religion."

"Looks like they're wearin' some kinda sari. Funny," she laughed between hiccups. "Funny, that Jap an' that dumb-lookin' black guy!"

"Stop insultin' religion, you bitch, or I'll kick your ass in!" And then in a churchgoer's voice her escort apologized for his girl friend's behavior.

Ananda smiled benevolently, advised the angry drunk to forgive the lady and with a devout sigh said: "In this sinful world we are all sheep, my son."

When the couple walked off, Kaspar glanced disgustedly at Ananda who was still beaming like a saint. A false saint who that day had donned a Buddhist robe and the face of a human being, his features perfect in every detail except for the large mouth with its terrible teeth. Too proud, Kaspar thought, to mask his teeth.

Half-forgotten memories flew at him like a swarm of bats ... his father preaching of a Sunday that the Devil walked among men, a man like all other men in appearance, his horns concealed by black, silky hair, his hooved feet shod in patent-leather shoes, his tail wound up in the seat of his trousers...

"Please don't compare me with Satan," the Slant-Eyed One said in a hurt tone. "I am not a Christian! Satan!" he sneered. "A fool like all the others! Shortsighted fools who to this day cannot realize that they, too, can be destroyed. Even the Molochamoves for all his Jewish head is a fool!"

His arrogance, his colossal pride revolted Kaspar. His eyes shifted to the crowd waiting for the traffic light to change; another familiar scene but now no more real than a dance of shadows. Times Square? Was that its name or was it still another way station between the known and the unknown whose coming had been heralded by the triple-eyed Shakti? The cars moving cutouts, the white marbled tower on Times Square no more solid, seemingly, than a sheet of white paper pasted on the gray sky. He bowed his head and prayed to the Buddha Amitabha, piling holy name on holy name, and lo! the inexorably moving electric letters blurred into a yellow band, a yellow girdle, and high above the traffic, robed in stone, the Lord Buddha showed himself on Times Square.

"I will save him, too!" Ananda promised. "With your help, Kaspar, we will bring peace to the world." As he uttered the word peace his shoulders shook, the red epaulettes slipping down to his sleeves and encircling them like two mourning bands. "Peace!" he exclaimed hatefully. "That I should be talking peace!"

"Don't carry on so," a kindly woman murmured and, opening her purse, she held out a coin. It was accepted with thanks and after she walked on, Ananda grimaced. "Poor Devil," he commiserated with himself.

Kaspar was touched by an odd pang of sympathy, but when he considered on whom he was expending such a typically human emotion, he shook his head at his own foolishness. Foolishness or the beginnings of a new wisdom?

His metaphysical musings were interrupted by Ananda who said that they could go in now: "The briefcase has been sold!"

The white-clad counterman presiding over rounds of steaming ham and roast beef raised his fork in salute when the two monks entered the bar. A customer lifted a half-chewed pickle toward his temple, spinning it around like a sea-green forefinger: the sign language of insanity.

"Naah," another customer disagreed. "They ain't cuckoos. Just two guys in drag."

"So what? People have to eat!" the counterman declared grandly as if he were the prime minister of King Stomach.

Sickened by the hot smoking meats on the counter, Kaspar felt surrounded by mouths: chewing mouths, munching mouths, crunching mouths, as if he had descended to some circle in hell where he himself (the object of so many curious eyes) had been transformed into a sandwich on two legs. He (or they) followed Ananda into the rear where the mouths sat at chairs or stood at the stand-up tables.

Beers nailed in midair, the three muggers had spotted the advancing monks; their surprise so great they seemed to have but one face and one voice: "It's the creep... Two of em..."

Ananda walked over to them, held out his hand, demanded the money they had stolen. He was very explicit. There was the commuter's money and the two dollars and change that was the bum's, and the money received from the sale of the commuter's wristwatch and briefcase. He named a figure: "Fifty-three dollars! We can forget what you spent for beers."

The teen-ager in the camel's-hair cap glowered, the black beret cursed. The kid with the gun who'd just sold the briefcase (for three dollars spot cash to one of the bar's patrons) retreated a step from behind the table. Kaspar watched, giddy and unsteady on his feet. It wasn't the gun he feared. No gun, no knife, no club could harm him with Ananda as his protector. What he dreaded was this confrontation. And yet here he was, side by side, with the age-old fomenter of discord.

"Hand over the money!" Ananda ordered.

"What money?" the gun-toter yelled.

"Get lost, you God damn Chink creep!" the camel's-hair cap cursed.

"Here's your money, shithead!" the black beret howled, his arm winging back as he flung his beer glass.

Kaspar heard the glass crash. He saw the customers scattering, he saw Ananda rushing behind the stand-up table—no human being could've moved so fast—the three teen-agers throwing fists like so many pitched baseballs.

The fleeing customers had returned like flies to an unexpected feast, nudging each other and shouting:

"That Chinaman's greased lightning!"

"Wow, just look at the bastard!"

Ananda was dragging the gun-toter out from behind the table, shaking him like a dust mop in the hands of a fanatic housewife. The black beret, teeth bared as if he intended to bite his pal free, ran out into the space the crowd had cleared. He snatched at Ananda's robe, clutching at nothing more substantial than a fistful of air; to be seized in turn. He struggled to break loose and for a moment the dancing couple became a wild, hallucinatory threesome, then the would-be rescuer flew out and smashed into a chair. The chair joined the dance on one giddy leg before it keeled over. The crowd roared:

"That Chink sure know his jiujitsu!"

"He's the champ!"

The camel's-hair cap like a general who had been observing his troops now went into action. Warily he soft-shoed around Ananda and his victim, feinted, backed away, and then with a blood-chilling whoop, zoomed in. A hand out of nowhere locked around his wrist. The nimble monk and the two muggers whirled around in jerky rhythm and then in a perfect takeoff of what had happened a minute ago (history repeats itself) the second rescue party flew through space like an overstuffed bird, hitting the floor like a sack of sand, his cap lifting off on a flight of its own. Too shaken to get up from the floor, the cap's former owner lay there groaning.

A man in the front row of spectators, wolfing a hot dog, tossed the half-eaten roll at the stunned teen-ager. It caromed from his head. The crowd laughed and their cruel mirth like a dose of smelling salts aroused the fallen mugger. Humpbacked and heavy-limbed, he slowly raised himself upright, teetering on his feet and drawing his knife. The crowd backed away:

"Somebody's gonna get hurt!"

"Get the po-leece!"

The knifer charged, the blade strangely immovable, stuck in space, and only then did the heartsick Kaspar notice what held it there. Ananda's hand. The knifer's mouth wrenched open, he screamed as the pressure tightened on his wrist. The knife clattered to the floor, the crowd cheered.

There was another crazy dance which like the others ended with a backward run. Back, back he went until he crashed into a table which, as if inspired by the dancing chair, sprang into life before settling down again on four solid legs.

"Didja ever see the like?"

"Beats television!"

In the enraptured crowd there were a few protesting voices. Enough was enough! Somebody ought to call the cops before the whatever-the-hell-he-was killed somebody.

The black beret had recovered. Half running to the table where the three had been drinking a quiet beer he reached into the newspaper lying alongside the salt and pepper shakers and pulled out his concealed club. "Fuckin' gook! I'm gonna get you!" he vowed.

Still holding onto the first mugger, Ananda sidestepped as the black beret plunged forward like a bull, the club his horn. With a curse he wheeled and charged. Ananda shifted so fast that Kaspar failed to see the hand darting out of the orange sleeve—seeing it only when it'd clamped tight around the clubber's wrist, Ananda turned his head and shouted:

"Kaspar, help me!"

"No, no—"

"No to mugging! No to rape! No to Pebbles Creek!"

A mystifying speech to the crowd but not to the shuddering monk.

"No to guns!" Ananda chanted and pivoting on his heel, he lifted the gun-toter off his feet, whirled him around (all the while holding onto the black beret's wrist) before letting go. Like some grotesque kite his victim flew off, crashed to the floor. Again, Ananda called to Kaspar and this time his legs, as if obedient to a will far stronger than his own, carried him out into the cleared space where the Slant-Eyed One was dancing the black beret round and round. Maybe the teenager's snarling face reminded him of what had been done to him in a men's room and in a deserted tenement ... No longer hesitating, he lashed out with his fist. He felt his knuckles striking bone, struck a second time, a third, and breathless, watched his attacker slump to the floor.

"Good work, matey!"

There in the front ranks of the crowd the now-you-see-him, now-you-don't seaman stood grinning. "Inoffensiveness! he proclaimed as if shouting some battle slogan, and without another word pushed through the excited spectators. He blew a kiss at Kaspar when he stalked out into the cleared space. "Excuse me," he said, elbowing through the fight fans on the other side as he headed for the rear: "Excuse me! An errand of mercy!"

"Here he comes!" somebody yelled as the pig-tailed seaman reappeared.

"Who's that guy? Wot an oddball!"

"Look at the pigeons in his pockets!"

Grinning at one and all, the polite sailor paused briefly at each of the fallen teen-agers and wherever he stopped he left a trail of blood. Kaspar's eyes glazed as he stared at the red blotches on the faces of the trio on the floor.

"Catsup!" the crowd roared single-voiced. "Ketchup ... See that bottle in his hand ..."

Holding up the bottle he was carrying, the Irresponsible spieled: "Ladies and gents, you are about to witness a feat that thrilled nobody at all in Europe, not to mention Moscow or Peking where I was awarded the Banner of Marx and appointed the Commissar of Parks! Ladies and gents!"

The bottle flew over his head but unlike the bouquet of flamboyants and the Jamaica cigar it didn't drop; the laws of gravity suspended, hovering in space below the ceiling. There wasn't a sound out of the astonished crowd, all their eyes focused on the floating miracle. A scientific-minded citizen clutching a forgotten pastrami sandwich cried out: "Helium! That's what it must be. Helium!"

The Tantrist magician overheard him and asked if helium could write and without waiting for an answer he called out to the airborne bottle. Instantly, it began to scrawl one letter after another on the ceiling:

This done, it ran a thick, smudgy red line through the letters like some oversized pen.

The scientific-minded citizen although stunned offered a theory that concerned guided missiles. Others in the crowd, more practical, retorted:

"Bullshit! There's no guided missile up there!"

Trembling, Kaspar shifted from one foot to another, wiped his sweaty palms on the sides of his robe. "Shouldn't we go?" he whispered to the silent Ananda.

The comments of the crowd had become nasty:

"That God damn sailor's in with those baldheaded bastards!"

"You cant even eat a bite in peace!"

The pig-tailed seaman spat provocatively: "Fuck off!" he roared.

There might have been a free-for-all if two policemen hadn't appeared. They elbowed through the incensed crowd and inquired what was going on. Everybody answered:

"Those bastards picked on those kids—"

"Knocked hell outa the poor guys and—"

"Spilled catsup on them—"

"It's up there, the catsup—"

The bottle, perfectly still, hovered a foot or so below the ceiling as if suspended on an invisible wire. The two officers, their faces deadpans under their blue-visored hats, gazed ceilingwards.

"What's this all about?" one of them, a young red-haired officer asked the two monks. He spoke with the calm authority of a New York cop who in the course of duty had seen and heard everything. Kaspar was silent. The Irresponsible stepped forward. He tapped his broad chest, smiled ingratiatingly at the officers and declared his perfect willingness to pay for all the damages. "I'll pay whatever the management of this dump says!" As if angered by his own generosity he stamped his foot and shouted: "They're crooks anyway! Sawdust, that's what in the hot-dogs! Sawdust and dog scraps!"

The red-haired officer ordered him to shut up. He glanced at the three blacks on the floor. The camel's-hair cap had pulled himself up to a sitting position; the black beret, propped on one elbow, was wiping the catsup from his face; the gun-toter lay there, eyes open, as if on a bed. "What's all this about?" he repeated. "That catsup bottle? What's keeping it up there?"

"I said I'd pay for all the damages! A thousand bucks, ten thousand!" the pig-tailed seaman shouted like a millionaire who had never stooped to sordid bargaining.

The red-haired officer warned him to keep his trap shut. The crowd volunteered additional information about the fight and the bottle. No longer quite so calm, the red-haired officer pulled out his club. "Shut up, everybody!"

Ananda stepped forward. "I'll answer all your questions, sergeant." He pointed at the Irresponsible. "That man's a magician. As to the fight, I admit my responsibility. Some people have to learn things the hard way. They deserved their beating and I hope that in the future they will stop molesting peace-loving Buddhists, The Prajnaparamita's very clear on the subject of violence. A Bodhisattva, I quote: 'Acts for the benefit of the world, for the ease of the world, motivated by the pity for the world.' "

This statement for some reason infuriated the crowd:

"Bullshit—"

"That whole bunch's crazy—"

"Beatin' up those poor kids—"

The red-haired officer bellowed: "Shut up or I'll pull you all in!" Nodding at Ananda he said: "You and your pals come along with me."

"George," his teammate inquired. "What are we going to do about that bottle?"

"Nothing! It's doing no harm. All right, you guys—"

"God dammit!" the pig-tailed seaman yelled. "Didn't I say I'd pay for all the damages?" And with a sly grin he added, "Can't we talk this over in private?"

The outraged officer reminded him that bribing a policeman was a crime when he was outshouted by the would-be briber.

"All right, I'll pay for all damages! What's all the God damn fuss? A little spilled catsup and it's the end of the world!" And raising his arm he beckoned to the floating bottle which slowly descended like a red submarine submerging to the bottom of the sea. He captured it, held it by the base and as the flabbergasted crowd watched, saluted smartly. "Well done, captain! Heil, Hitler!"

A half dozen voices exclaimed:

"Who's he talking to?"

"Fer chrissake, capt'in, what capt'in?"

"Nuts! Plain nuts!"

No one except Ananda heard the second cop muttering: "I thought I'd seen everything in this God damn town!"

"You're right, officer!" Ananda cried. "It's a God damn town in a God damn country in a God damn world! And speaking of God, where is He? Why doesn't He act with the world on the brink of doom? God damn God I say!"

The blasphemous speech was too much for the red-haired officer. He warned that if there was another peep out of anybody he was going to let whoever-it-was have it

"That's no way to talk to taxpayers!" the indignant sailor exploded. "We have our rights too! Article 707, the bylaws, the Constitution, the Farmer's Almanac!"

The red-haired officer moved in on him, swung his club. There was a wild laugh—only a laugh—for the blue-jacketed defender of the American taxpayer was nowhere to be seen.

"Where is that bastard?" the maddened officer screamed.

From somewhere the vanished bottle reappeared, a red streak, bursting at the officer's feet. Fragments of catsup-colored glass like red arrowheads flew up from the blood-red puddle on the floor. As they disintegrated a thick, foul-smelling smoke lifted and spread so that between one breath and the next, the entire neon-lit interior of the bar was enveloped in a dense, red, stinking cloud.

Walls, counters, tables, chairs lost their sharp angles; the faces of the panicked crowd tinted a uniform, dusky red before they faded in the ever-thickening smoke.

"Les get outa here!"

"That sailor bastid!"

"Oh God!"

Kaspar felt a hand circle his wrist. His arm was jerked forward. Someone—Ananda—whispered in his ear: "Listen to the sheep!"

Quiet and inperturbable, that voice as if he had eyes to see through the blinding red haze.

The two monks (the perpetrators as they would be described by the police on that historic day) fled toward the doors in the rush of unseen ghosts. Behind them the whistles of the two officers pierced the red night like tracers of blue light

6

INCIDENT AT THE U N

The street lights, the neons, the electric jewelry festooning the movie houses, to Kaspar, seemed like the stars of some miraculous world where the air was good to breathe.

The two monks were instantly surrounded by a curious crowd: the usual sidewalk superintendents who at a moment's notice will convene for any Big Excitement. "Let's through!" Ananda said. "God damn cops in there! Nothing to do but arrest innocent people!"

Magic words!

A path was opened up for the two fugitives. If their shaven heads and orange robes puzzled some of the blacks, there was no denying that one of the guys on the lam was a brother and the other the next thing to it. As for the whites, they subscribed to the principle of Mind Your Own Business, the safest of bets in a town where the innocent bystander always got it in the neck.

Kaspar, his wrist held in a steel-like grip, had no other choice but to follow his captor. Like a dog on a leash he trotted along to find himself between endless walls of metal. In his dazed state he wasn't aware that they had left the sidewalk for the gutter. The cars, held in check by a single red eye, stretched toward the corner, the crossroads of the world. As they neared the front rank, the rear door of a black limousine swung open. Ananda dragged the confused monk in after him, leaned forward, instructed the chauffeur. "The United Nations!"

Leaning back in the luxurious, leather seat, he tapped Kaspar's knee: "We'll shake the hypocrites up!"

Kaspar said nothing, rubbing at the numbed wrist Ananda had released as if all that concerned him was to restore the blood circulation. The chauffeur stepped on the gas although the traffic light was still an unwinking red. The traffic cop saluted as they rolled by. "The police always go easy with diplomatic cars," Ananda remarked, indicating the little flag fluttering at the end of the limousine's long, black hood. "Robinson has never had any trouble."

What next, Kaspar wondered as he massaged his wrist. The entire violent scene back at the bar played itself out in his mind like some manic puppet show: the three muggers tossed about like straw men; the skywriting bottle of catsup; the roaring crowd and the baffled police.

"Poor Kaspar," Ananda murmured sympathetically. "You, a wanted man! But remember there's a higher law, the law of mankind."

Unconsoled by those noble words, Kaspar groaned at the memory of that mad melee in which he had raised his fist in violence and broken his vow of Inoffensiveness. He flexed his wrist. It was beginning to feel normal.

"I don't know my own strength!" Ananda said apologetically. "You must promise to keep an eye on me over at the UN."

Through the rain-streaked windows of the limousine Kaspar peered out at the people hurrying down the sidewalks. Pedestrians were they, or a menacing army marching under umbrellas like a horde of parachutists just landed? Behind the store windows still other apparitions paraded. Dresses without arms, slacks without legs, shoes without feet. Through the windshield, the red taillights of the cars ahead dissolved into streaky roses without dimension in a gutter varnished black by the rain. He felt crushed by the awesome truth of the Buddha's Teachings: a magic picture show this world crowded with magically created men and women ... He fingered the bump on his head so miraculously healed by a Tantrist nostrum, and thought that there was actually a head on his shoulders, but whose head was it? The head of the Kaspar who'd sworn the three holy vows of a Buddhist monk, or the head of the Kaspar picked up like a suit of clothes from a hanger and flung into the illusion of doing?

"You simply must relax," he heard Ananda saying.

"How can I relax?"

"First of all stop thinking that the world is a magic picture show. Mysticism has its place in a world at peace, but in a few hours people will be shouting, 'Remember Pebbles Creek!' as they once shouted, 'Remember Pearl Harbor!' You must relax, think of ordinary things, my boy."

He cringed at those paternal words.

"Weren't you something of a car buff in your college days?" Ananda asked. "Suppose we talk about cars. Listen to the sound of the motor. Beautiful, isn't it? It pays to keep a motor in A-one condition particularly with the sloppy standards today. When I think of the great cars of the 1920s, the Packard, the Pierce-Arrow, I could sing," he continued blissfully. "Your favorite was the Marmon, but you were prejudiced by the Marmon of your uncle Hiram. The black sheep of the family, wasn't he, and I say this without referring to color. Hiram Kaspar, the gambler! How your father despised him! We're off the subject. Great cars, all of them."

On and on he spoke as if en route to the Annual Automobile Show. Kaspar listened and then began putting in a word himself. (A psychiatrist of course would have understood that the unhappy monk was expressing a deep need for security, the dream of twentieth-century man, and pinpointed this need as self-induced amnesia or perhaps as self-sustaining schizophrenia.) Their mutually enjoyable discussion of motors, bumpers and brakes was finally interrupted by a loud snort from up front.

"I hate cars!" the chauffeur declared. "Old or new, I hate them!"

"Robinson's always extreme," Ananda said to Kaspar.

"Extreme, Master, because I like to fly? I'll even fly in a plane if I have to, but nothing like using your own wings."

Kaspar—who had grown up in a middle-class home where the maid who came in twice a week was partially invisible—hadn't really looked at the chauffeur until this moment. He had thought the chauffeur's uniform was a bit unusual. It was a deep orange in color, somewhat darker than his robe or Ananda's, but considering who the master was, not so surprising after all. He stared now at this man who liked to fly with his own wings. Since Robinson was facing front all he had was a back view. Underneath the orange-colored chauffeur's hat there hung a short, black, braided pigtail. Exactly like the pigtail of the Tantrist seaman!

"So it's you!" he exclaimed.

"The name's Robinson, not You!" the chauffeur corrected him peevishly. "I hate people who you you!"

"You!"

"What's in a name anyway?" the chauffeur argued, pivoting and glaring at Kaspar as if he had just encountered some insulting stranger. "Haven't you got a German name, matey?"

Except for the pigtail and the ruby in one ear, the face Kaspar saw was totally unlike the unmistakably American face of the mysterious seaman. The orange-uniformed chauffeur could have been an Oriental or a light-skinned black or a dark-skinned white.

"Don't let my mug bother you," Robinson laughed. "I could've been a dog if I'd wanted to." And with a growl as his mood changed he said: "Trouble is they don't give driving licenses to dogs in this town!"

Most astonishing to Kaspar was the eye in the chauffeur's angry profile. The dark brown color was common enough, but never before had Kaspar seen an eye specked with yellow dots. That in itself would've been extraordinary but the dots weren't still, in constant motion like tiny satellites. He was struck by the thought that even something as small as an eye could mirror the vast universe.

"I hate to wear sunglasses," Robinson confided. "But who the hell wants the whole town rubbernecking after me? I only put the damn things on when I need them."

Kaspar bit on his lips as he listened to this confession. It was as if some secret box had snapped open and inside it, side by side, the chauffeur's yellow-specked eye gleamed next to the self-styled Ananda's white, ogre-like teeth. Devils both, he thought with a sick feeling.

Silently he looked through the car window and saw that the limousine had crossed the Avenue of the Americas. Familiar and unfamiliar, the avenue and the broad street bisecting it, as if he were traveling down some endless highway in a dream; the leafless trees of Bryant Park, spectral figures in the rain; the stores on the opposite side of 42nd, caves of light empty of all living beings.

"For your information," Ananda said. "Quite a few of his kind have eyes like him. He's not human, of course, but neither is he a devil. Devils for the most part are quite responsible."

"What is he then?" Kaspar asked with morbid curiosity.

"An asura."

"And as good as anybody else," Robinson interposed.

Kaspar, like any other well-read monk, had read a good deal on the subject of the asuras; inhuman spirits with unpredictable natures who had their allotted place in the Round of Existence together with all other beings whether devils, ghosts, humans, or animals. Reading about them, however, was a little different than riding in a limousine materialized out of thin air and driven by an asura in an orange uniform. He stared at the chauffeur's pigtail and wondered what did Robinson really look like? Ananda? He cast a furtive glance at Ananda's handsome face knowing it to be a borrowed mask, that perhaps the notched teeth behind those wide cruel lips weren't his real teeth either but another cover for an impenetrable reality beyond all human imagination. Better not to know, he thought fearfully.

"Better not to know!" Robinson echoed mischievously. "Right, Master?"

"Knowledge is truth," the self-styled Ananda mused aloud. "But what can be said for the knowledge that leveled Hiroshima? Or the knowledge that will devastate Pebbles Creek and California?"

"Don't remind me!" Robinson yelped as if he really were a dog. "When I think of all the poor, innocent, little birds, the sparrows, the owls, the sea gulls! And the pigeons!" he sobbed. "The lovely pigeons! Why couldn't I keep Bianca and Bianco? Master, you're too strict!"

"I, strict? Who ever heard of a chauffeur with pigeons?"

Kaspar shuddered to hear them. As they passed Grand Central Station he thought of how wonderful to be off somewhere, anywhere, a free man riding in a train with other human beings. His eyes glistened with tears of self-pity ... and in a railroad carriage as transparent as a tear drop the avenues of mid-Manhattan flashed by like so many stops on a line, and yet not so fast that he didn't recognize one landmark after another: the Hotel Commodore, the Bowery Savings Bank, Howard Johnson's where in his pre-Buddhist meat-eating days he had enjoyed the fried clams and roast beef platters.

"So you want to be on a train?" Robinson again read the disconsolate monk's mind. "You're one hell of a Bodhisattva!"

"And you're too intolerant," Ananda reprimanded him.

"Intolerant? Didn't you hear him think? All he wants is to be back home with his folks in good, old Topeka. Kaspar, you miserable coward, there's no safety anywhere!"

"That's true," Ananda said gloomily. "Sometimes I ask myself why don't I give up and let the whole world perish?"

"No, Master!" Robinson cried. "No, you're our only hope!"

"Let's relax, all of us," Ananda sighed. "Close your eyes, Kaspar, and dream of a better world where there are no Pebbles Creeks. You're not on your way to the United Nations, my boy. How can you be when all you ever wanted was to see a doctor about that blow on your head. Doesn't that make sense, good sense, better sense than worrying about a nuclear war. Relax, relax, my boy, dream on..."

Lulled by the soft, hypnotic voice, Kaspar's eyelids began to droop.

"There you are, tucked away in a nice little bed in a nice little hospital, your poor little head wrapped in white bandages, and isn't that where you want to be, in a nice, little bed, the nurses in white, so gentle and kind, and no Ananda and no Robinson. What are they but shadows come in an unhappy hour, shapes of fever rising out of the bump on your poor little head, and gone, gone as you are in your nice, little, safe, little white bed, everything so white and peaceful, the snow falling outside the windows and no need to worry for there's nothing to worry about, the world's a pretty good place after all and nobody will ever harm you, take it from me your doctor, nothing will ever harm you, no clubs, no knives, no guns, for all men are brothers ..."

Eyes closed, Kaspar reached out a dreamer's hand toward the snowflakes. How strange they were, shaped like clubs and weeping as they fell. Falling and falling and singing so beautifully peace on earth and good will to men ...

At the watery foot of 42nd where the East river flows seaward, Robinson wheeled left and drove north toward the United Nations enclave. The green-glassed Secretariat seemed airborne in the misty rain, suspended over a cluster of lesser structures on the UN Plaza. Ananda glanced at the dreamer seated at his side:

At that clear if unvoiced command Kaspar opened his eyes, yawned, peered out at the Secretariat building. "It's a new hospital, isn't it?" he said.

"Not so new any more, but it's a first-rate institution in every respect. And I'm not saying that because I happen to be its general consultant."

"Doctor Ananda's too modest," the chauffeur said respectfully. "No decision's ever made without his approval. The operations he's supervised! A sight for sore eyes to see him bathed in blood and so calm!"

Kaspar (a brave patient) nodded and glanced at the flags bordering the sidewalk. So many flags and so bright as if all the flags in the world had been put out just for him.

The limousine slowed down as it approached a guarded driveway. A black, iron fence enclosed the grounds. Posted on it were a number of warning signs: Stop For Clearance. Do Not Enter. Two security police in blue-gray uniforms stepped out of the glassed-in sentry station, inspected the credentials produced by the chauffeur, nodded, saluted. Robinson tipped his orange-visored hat—his sunglasses were back on his face—and exchanged a few pleasant words before driving on. As he circled a fountain, he confided that he would sooner have the guards operate on him than some of the doctors. Ananda advised Kaspar not to take Robinson seriously. A compulsive joker, that Robinson.

"Repulsive!" the chauffeur agreed with a wild laugh. He braked to a stop, hopped out and announced: "Here we are at United!"

"Everything looks so clean and up to date," Kaspar said appreciatively.

"Progress, progress, my boy!" the general consultant affirmed. "Say what you will; United's a beacon of humanity where all the doctors are quacks and all diseases incurable. Don't mind me, my boy. It's the influence of that crazy chauffeur of mine. Seriously though, if we can't cure diseases of the brain at this hospital, where can we?"

"Doctor, is my brain diseased?" the alarmed monk asked. "Or do you consider a concussion—"

"Concussions of the brain, concussions of the heart! I don't know which condition is more dangerous for the body politic? If I sound a bit cynical, it's because I have become disillusioned. I used to be completely happy here, I enjoyed my work. But lately I've joined another school of medicine. It wasn't easy. You get set in your ways. I'll tell you this in strict confidence. I intend to resign as general consultant this very day."

"Then why?" the patient gulped.

"Why did I bring you here? Don't look so worried my boy! You are in my hands and I guarantee a complete cure before we leave."

Kaspar was disheartened by the doctor's frowning face. "Maybe you ought to have a checkup," he suggested nervously. "Everybody should at least once a year."

The sad-faced general consultant paused in mid-stride. He seized Kaspar's hand, shook it hard. It was nice to know, he said fervently, that people cared. "Thank you, my boy! Trust me! You'll be a new man when you leave. We'll go directly to Emergency. They're very good at emergencies."

Kaspar was favorably impressed by the lobby (the lobby of the General Assembly) which he declared reminded him of a cathedral. His head tilted and he gazed up at two objects (the gold-plated Foucault Pendulum and a life-sized model of the first artificial satellite, the Sputnik) suspended from the soaring roof.

"You're wondering if they have some medical significance or are they strictly ornamental?" the good doctor asked. "Let me satisfy your curiosity. The enlarged diaphragm you see up there came from the Netherlands. The Dutch as you probably know pioneered the treatment of the uterine canal. The second is an apparatus developed in the Soviet Union and very important in space surgery. The Russians were among the first to work in the interstices between the cortex and the floating areas of the large intestine which as you may have read is seriously affected in space where gravity is inoperable."

"I've read something on the subject, but as a layman it's simply beyond me," Kaspar confessed.

They crossed the lobby to a majestic staircase spiraling up from the floor. As they climbed, Doctor Ananda paused now and then. Rest was important, he said, particularly when a patient had been struck on the head with a lethal weapon. The nerve endings, so to speak, were deracinated.

A few minutes later he conducted his patient into a spacious room he described as the doctors' lounge (the quarters reserved for the UN delegates) explaining that the staff came here to relax between cases, especially autopsies. Kaspar didn't care for the doctor's cynical tone but he kept quiet. Besides, he was impressed by the huge tapestry in the lounge.

"The 'Triumph of Peace,'" he was informed. "Yes, it's quite possible that men will win the war against disease, but when I think of the many carcinomas consuming the tissue of humanity I feel a little despair, to be truthful."

By now Kaspar should have been prepared for the spectacular, but when they entered the waiting room (the Hall of the General Assembly) he stood stock-still like some gawking tourist. The domed ceiling seemed to be a good mile (seventy-five feet in actuality) over his head. Thousands of patients (so it seemed) sat in blue, upholstered chairs, listening to the speaker on the rostrum; a black man wearing a red turban and a long white gown. It was a physician's gown of course, Kaspar thought, although he was a bit puzzled by the turban. The speaker, he decided, must be a visiting professor.

"We have solemn obligations," his amplified voice thundered from the rostrum which was flanked by two murals (by Leger) executed in colors so brilliant they blazed on the dignified, blue-and-green walls. The murals depicted, Kaspar guessed, the major human organs, greatly enlarged; hearts, livers, lungs, spleens.

"We have sacred responsibilities..."

Kaspar felt as if he were listening to the shade of Hippocrates reciting the famous Oath for the very first time in human history. "Who is he?" the awed monk whispered.

"The quack Doctor Mouthbone."

Too shocked to say a word Kaspar glowered at the irreverent general consultant. "You have no right— That chauffeur of yours is a bad influence," he spluttered.

"Sh! I was just trying to take your mind off your troubles."

They walked down an aisle that seemed endless to Kaspar. He had never imagined such a magnificent waiting room. Only in America, he thought.

(There are 1,388 seats for delegates, their alter nates and advisers, the seating order is determined anew at each regular session, by drawing lots for the first seat in the first row. The others follow in English alphabetical order.)

The patients, he had noticed, were all wearing earphones. His guide, ever-alert, explained that treatment at United Hospital included psychotherapy. The speaker was none other than Dr. Mobota, the famous Nigerian psychoanalyst and surgeon. For reasons Kaspar couldn't comprehend, Ananda led him to a section reserved for foreign patients.

These were grouped according to their nationalities: Cambodia, Cameroon, Canada, Central African Republic, Ceylon, Chad, Chile, Czechoslovakia. Although Kaspar approved of the international scope of this medical center, he couldn't refrain from pointing out that he belonged in the American section.

"Sh!" Ananda hissed. "Everybody's looking at us."

The embarrassed monk wiped his sweaty face. From the rostrum the amplified voice of Dr. Mobota seemed directed at him alone:

"We have come here to denounce still another outrageous and uncalled-for attack but will our words insure peace? Will words alone heal the deep and festering wounds in the soul of humanity?"

Kaspar plucked at the general consultant's sleeve and begged him to sit down anywhere. Ananda gazed at the shy and modest monk for a moment. Perhaps, it was the aftermath of the concussion—an ocular illusion?—but the pupils in those dark eyes had turned red, red as fire.

"There are no seats in hell!" the almost unrecognizable doctor shouted. "Kaspar, this isn't a waiting room in a hospital but a waiting room in hell! Welcome to the United Nations!"

The trusting monk gasped, swayed deliriously on his feet, shocked by the awful knowledge that like some sleepwalker he had been brought, not to a hospital, but to the august sanctum of the world's nations. He almost fainted as the voices of the outraged delegates crashed against his ears. Helplessly he watched the self-styled general consultant bolt in among the Ceylonese delegates where he mounted one of the chairs so swiftly he seemed to have levitated up from the floor.

"Citizens!" Ananda greeted the angry assemblage. "Citizens of a world you have betrayed, I bring terrible news!" His voice swept through the hall like some invisible vacuum cleaner sucking up all sound. "I bring death! Death at Pebbles Creek, death in Nevada! Death in California! Death to the cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles! Death this afternoon at 15.46 hours!"

He paused for a second and now the delegates' voices could be heard. Furious voices, mocking voices, point-of-order voices shouting in a dozen languages, but before the Secretary General (Dr. Mobota as Ananda had called him) could reply the interloper in the orange robe roared:

"Who is guilty of this crime against humanity? The United States! Guilty because it was the first power to build nuclear facilities. But the United States is not alone! All of you are guilty who have jointly and separately betrayed the Charter of the United Nations. Hypocrites talking peace, talking freedom, talking human dignity even as you slobber in blood! Murderers! Vile and filthy cannibals!"

(And Kaspar fated to be a Bodhisattva?)

Horrified by Ananda's speech, he had sneaked a seat among the Chad delegates. Since all five Chadians were on their feet there had been five empty chairs to choose from. Shivering, his shoulders hunched, sickeningly aware that his shaven head and orange robe marked him as a co-religionist of the demonic speaker (demon or saint or both?) haranguing the assembly from his improvised rostrum, poor Kaspar wept without weeping.

The delegates had begun to make themselves heard. The massed volume of hundreds of distended vocal cords (1,388 delegates, alternates and advisers) could not be contained. They denounced the speaker as a madman, a provocateur, a secret agent in a dozen languages. The Ceylonese, interrogated on all sides, disclaimed all responsibility for the intruder in their midst who they declared had absolutely no connection, official or unofficial, with the Government of Ceylon. The Secretary General—no bigger than an ant mounted on two legs strayed out of the lush gardens of color created by Leger—demanded an immediate explanation from the distinguished representatives of Ceylon whose spokesman in turn challenged the troublemaker to inform the distinguished Secretary General that he was not and had never been a representative of the Government of Ceylon.

"Ta tsung nar lai—from where does he come from?" one of the Chinese delegates, a gray-haired agronomist from Fukien, inquired.

"Przepraszam ze przerywam—excuse my interrupting you!" a Polish delegate, a respected party functionary from Krakow, bellowed between his cupped hands.

The languages of the world reverberated like cannon shots and yet not one delegate—so dedicated to peace were they!—had lifted a finger against the character assassin. For a minute or so, as the most respected of TV commentators, John Fletch, would report afterwards:

Pandemonium and its twin Bedlam reigned supreme in the General Assembly ...

Then, as if the same thought had possessed the delegates, there was a united outcry for the police; the hall echoed with the magical word of sanctioned violence:

"Police ... Policija ... Polizia ... Pulis ... Miliziya

Cheers greeted the UN security guards when they appeared. An overstimulated French delegate fainted (delighting one of his distinguished colleagues who had always envied le cochori) while other delegates from a dozen nations urged calm. Cautious voices raised the terrorist issue. An Egyptian (much admired for his working knowledge of eleven languages) warned in fluent Russian, Chinese, French, Spanish and English that the provocateur might very well have a bomb hidden inside his robe.

(And Kaspar slated for fame and glory?)

Deafened by the babble of tongues, he had tried blacking himself out in the chair warmed so recently by a delegate from Chad, only to discover that he lacked the powers of concentration necessary to attain the blessed Nothingness of Nirvana. Motionless and unobtrusive, he cringed at the voices drumming against his ears.

"Stop!" Ananda threatened the UN guards, slipping a hand inside his robe and pulling out a small, white jar. "Stop before I blow you all to hell! This is a nuclear bomb!"

The UN guards stood without moving as if he had driven spikes down their spines. The delegates who had joined in hot pursuit like a mob after a thief coagulated into thick lumps. The great hall was silent, a mausoleum in blue and gray, in which everyone had turned into a living, breathing corpse.

"There is death in my hand and you are afraid!" Ananda cried. "You know I could kill you all and you deserve to be killed! Murderers, cowards, hypocrites! In your lust for power you have covered the earth with your slaughterhouses! Atoms for peace! Atoms for war! Maniacs speaking out of two mouths, mouthing slogans of Democracy, Socialism, Communism while piling up the weapons whose only slogans are death and destruction! The super-powers must take the lead! The mass murderers in uniform must be retired! Let me divulge their names!" And waving the white missile in his hand as if it had a mouth and a voice he cried out:

"General Maxwell Samson! Field Marshal Ivan Stakonovitch Voyna! And Adjutant General Li Tao-shek!"

That disclosure of names (top secret in Washington, Moscow, and Peking) was too much for the delegates of the three super-powers. There was an uproar, no single voice distinct, united and multi-lingual. Intoxicated by the example of the Americans, Russians and Chinese, one of the security guards (Robert D. Bless, who on that historic day would achieve worldwide notoriety) pulled out his pistol and fired.

The bullet would be found imbedded in one of the Leger murals, smack center inside a rosy abstract shape resembling a human heart.

Cooler heads seized and disarmed the trigger-happy guard. The numerous delegates who had dived for the floor raised their heads like turtles, sticking out their periscope necks and pulling them back in again when they saw the bomber uncap his infernal weapon.

(Another unforgettable moment, the most respected of the TV newscasters, John Fletch, would report shortly after the first explosions at Pebbles Creek at 15.46 hours: There stood the arch terrorist materialized out of the nightmares that have haunted mankind ever since the first predictions of nuclear sabotage and theft...)

Kaspar had jumped up from his hideaway seat in the Chad delegation. Did he shout, scream, protest, plead with Ananda?

He wouldn't remember.

He saw the lid of the jar ascending over Ananda's shaven skull. He saw it spinning round and round like a miniature flying saucer before it disappeared in what seemed like a dust storm, a dark red in color and thickening by the second, enveloping the delegates and the guards in the aisles. All thinned into two-dimensional figures and then there were no figures to be seen anywhere except for the phantom in a robe dyed red. His clarion voice echoed throughout the hall:

"Arise, ye prisoners of mental starvation, throw off your nuclear chains! Cast aside your leaders who lead to destruction and a better world to make!"

The fiery red dust swirled about him and it seemed as if he had never existed. Kaspar, deafened by the voices of the hysterical delegates, stood motionless as if he had been tossed down, bound hand and foot, from the lid of that small, white jar to some unknown and dangerous planet. Now and then he was able to catch a glimpse of the delegates nearest him, their faces no longer black, brown, white or yellow but coated with a new, burning skin; strangely raceless whether Chadians or Ceylonese, Canadians or Chinese, vanishing even as he stared. Only their frightened voices remained to mourn the passing of the only world they had ever known.

It had been his world, too.

When he felt Ananda's hand on his wrist he blubbered like a rescued child. And once again that day he was running.

("It was each man for himself, the most respected of the TV commentators, John Fletch, would report: "And let the Devil take the hindmost...")

7

THE ORIENTAL IMPORTING COMPANY

Robinson, his yellow-specked eyes hidden behind the black-and-white sunglasses, was waiting at the wheel of the limousine. Ananda pulled Kaspar inside, the door slammed. The big black car like some powerful, sleek beast on rubber feet shot forward and curved around a fountain jetting a white peacock tail of water. The chauffeur glanced at it with displeasure, spat through the side window. "Little slops of brotherhood," he sang soulfully.

He braked in front of the glassed-in sentry box where he greeted the security guards with an impromptu imitation of squealing tires. They stared at the talented chauffeur who grinned, pursed his lips and emitted the raucous honk of a truck. Ananda apologized. "He's a little hysterical! The incident back there was too much for him." Briskly he answered the questions of the excited guards. No one was hurt; the red gas was nontoxic; the ecologists who had released it, to be charitable, were a bit demented like so many of their kind.

The gate went up. Robinson stepped on the gas and sang: "Hysteria, wisteria, exterior, interior, inferior.”

Slumped in the rear seat Kaspar screwed his eyes tight on a world gone amok. He could shut it out of sight but not out of hearing. The metal-tongued clangor of fire engines on their way to the UN, the screaming sirens of the police squad cars had unhinged his jaws. He gripped them to stop the insane chattering of his teeth. If only, he wished, he was in an ambulance riding to some hospital, a real hospital.

Without turning around Robinson shouted that someone he knew should be put on the bedpan detail, that he hated yellow-livered cowards. The police, he gleefully predicted, would be arresting every Buddhist in town and there would be a good, fat reward for the ringleaders. "Wanted: William Kaspar!" he declaimed like a police inspector. "Nationality American. Race Negro. Skin Brown. Eyes Blue. Religion Buddhist. Last seen with an Oriental who calls himself Ananda. These men are dangerous and may be armed with nuclear weapons!" he screeched with uninhibited joy.

Kaspar quivered as if an electric prod had been shoved against his neck.

"Robinson!" Ananda rebuked the asura. "Will you ever learn that there's a time and a place?"

A soft female voice whispered in Kaspar's ear. Seated where Ananda had been only a second ago, Shakti smiled, and as he lurched away she edged closer, her naked thigh touching his own. She laughed when she had cornered him, pressing her flaming breasts against his chest and reaching for his private parts. Kaspar cried out, blinked at Ananda who once again sat next to him, and wondered if he were hallucinating. If so, how was he to account for his stiffened penis?

"What can I say?" Ananda sighed. "It's my fault. I'm not strict enough."

"I should've been back there," Robinson complained bitterly. "That God damn Kaspar's got the spine of a sea louse!" he cursed, his pigtail swinging like a rope.

"Aw, hell, you might as well put on your disguises!" Opening the glove compartment he tossed two raincoats and two hats over his shoulder.

Ananda thrust one of the raincoats into Kaspar's limp hands, explaining that they had to cover up their robes. He helped the numbed monk button up and then gave him one of the hats, a duplicate of the camel's-hair cap worn by the mugger with the knife. The hat he chose for himself was a broad-brimmed, black felt.

When they crossed the Avenue of the Americas, Ananda ordered Robinson to pull over, to park the car before the police spotted it, and that done, to bring them some food. "Poor Kaspar," he commiserated, "Hasn't had a bite since breakfast."

The two disguised monks stepped out to the sidewalk and walked west toward Times Square. Kaspar felt like a blind man who has forgotten his tapping cane, yet all too clearly he saw that it was broad daylight, the sidewalks crowded with people, the shops open for business. Up ahead, the white shaft of Allied Chemical towered skyward like a huge, white needle pinned into a piece of gray cloth. And there on the north side of 42nd was the red-neoned bar where in another lifetime some other Kaspar had been led like a dog on a leash. In sickening detail he recalled everything that'd happened: the helpless muggers dancing in Ananda's grip, the levitating bottle of catsup, the mad run through the stinking red cloud bursting out of the smashed glass.

"The bar's still open," Ananda observed. "The police haven't put it all together. Give them a few more minutes and the barricades will be up and the search for fingerprints will begin."

"Fingerprints?" Kaspar mumbled.

"The fingerprints of the terrorists at the United Nations! Don't tell me you have forgotten?"

"Forgotten?" Kaspar laughed miserably. "Forgotten?"

"Come, my boy. Get a hold on yourself. You'll relax when we get to the office. Robinson rented it this morning and it was no easy job. The owner was down in Florida, but when Robinson puts his mind to a thing he can be quite efficient."

They crossed Times Square, the long block of movies and porno parlors before them. Halfway down, Ananda conducted the stupefied monk to the entrance of a building squeezed in between a lobby hung with stills of passionate lovers and a pizzeria where a white-hatted chef was twirling a circle of dough on his finger like a circus juggler spinning a plate. "You must relax, Kaspar," Ananda said as they climbed a flight of marble-faced stairs to the second floor, to a corridor lined with the offices of accountants, window washers, film cutters and a lone astrologist. "Here we are," Ananda smiled, pausing before a door lettered ORIENTAL IMPORTING COMPANY.

Unbuttoning his raincoat, he searched through the pockets for the key and when he couldn't find it, denounced Robinson. "He's always losing keys! No asura is reliable! But to be fair, it's always confusing the first day in a new town. The trouble with Robinson, he enjoys confusion. Why, I remember when we were in Berlin some years back—Do you know what he did? He stuck a skull and bones flag instead of the swastika out of the window of the office he'd rented. Believe me, Kaspar, we had to pay off the Nazis!"

Lost in memory, Ananda seemed to have forgotten about the missing key: "A real pleasure to work with men like Hitler and Goering. I was sorry when Hitler killed himself. Poor Adolf! To be reincarnated as a maggot, not even a German maggot, feeding on carrion in Africa, of all places! What a comedown! How times have changed," he continued pensively. "Here I am with a man like you. Ah, well, I have changed, too." Almost absentmindedly he tapped on the locked door.

It swung open like the pay door in the men's room on the second level of the Terminal.

The furnishings of the Oriental Importing Company might have astonished Kaspar a few days ago, but to someone who so recently, if unexpectedly, had sat among the delegates of Chad, nothing he saw seemed extraordinary. A rolltop desk, swivel chair and brass spittoon stood against one wall. Opposite this ensemble, out of a gaslit America, there was an even older ottoman whose green upholstery had faded into the color of frost-bitten grass. Solid, old-fashioned furniture that contrasted violently with the tapestry covering the plate-glass window overlooking 42nd Street.

Yellow mannikins with crocodile jaws, toothed red, but recognizably and hideously human paraded on frog-like legs across the coarse, tan, tapestry cloth. "They like you," Ananda remarked, hanging his raincoat on an upright clothes hanger made out of an assortment of ill-matched bones. His black felt, he hooked on what seemed like the horn of a rhinoceros.

"Did you say they like me?" Kaspar asked shakily.

"I did," was the reply as he sat down in the swivel chair.

Perhaps Kaspar was imagining things, influenced by Ananda's statement, but the crocodile-jawed creatures not only appeared to be moving, but up to no good. Shivering, he looked away, his eyes fixing on a needle-thin filament of light he had noticed on first entering the office; white and intense, it was emanating out of one of the desk's cubbyholes. Ananda, without a word, picked up a square of dark, gray metal lying on the desk blotter and inserted it into the cubbyhole. The light, although subdued was still visible, pale and spectral, like a coat of white paint daubed across the gray metal.

There were other puzzling objects inside the rows of cubbyholes—a pair of dessicated chicken feet, the skull of some tiny rodent whose teeth had been replaced with a set of gold molars, three or four sponges soaked with some red stuff, blood possibly?—but Kaspar kept staring at the gleaming metal square.

Ananda placed a second one against the first: the double thickness obliterated the mysterious luminescence.

"Kaspar," he said solemnly. "Before I tell you what it is, I should prepare you. Let's talk of Albert Einstein for a moment and that equation of his that changed the world. A scribble on a scrap of paper, a magical scribble, M = ec₂! What I have in that cubbyhole is the equivalent of that equation. The Diamond Thunderbolt!"

Kaspar quivered to hear him. Endless the pages in the Buddhist books of bygone sages and sorcerers who in ancient times through pure thought or magic guile had possessed the Diamond Thunderbolt... He edged away from the desk and only stopped when Ananda asked him where was he going.

Where?

That was a question he couldn't answer. He glanced back at the desk as if it were a cage holding some ferocious beast.

"You will find it useful, Kaspar."

The trembling monk shook his head. "No," he said when he could speak. "No!"

"Spoken like the truly good man you are," Ananda praised him. "No man with an urge to rule, no Tantrist could be trusted with it, but a good man—"

"No man!" Kaspar cried. "Not even a saint—"

"A man with a heart, a conscience—"

"No man!"

"A man to whom all life is sacred—"

"No man!" he repeated as if there were no other words in the language.

"Please listen, Kaspar! The President is surrounded by men like General Maxwell Samson. What will such men advise? Retaliation! And that will be the end!"

"I won't listen to you—"

"You must! The world is full of Samsons armed with new clubs and ready to use them—"

"I will not listen—"

"Listen then to the Buddhist Scriptures! Do they not predict the coming of a Universal King who will usher in an age of peace?"

Kaspar was silent, spellbound by the thought that he, even he, a humble monk with the Diamond Thunderbolt for a scepter could rule the world. A second later, horrified at his own weakness, he muttered stubbornly. "You won't tempt me, Ananda! I would change and change for the worse."

"Did the great King Asoka change when he embraced the Buddhist faith? Didn't he abolish war?"

"I am not Asoka!"

"You could be another Asoka—"

"No, no, I'm afraid! The idea itself frightens me—"

"Are you also afraid to act as a Bodhisattva? Let me remind you of what your own sutras say: 'A Bodhisattva should think thus, as many beings as there are in the Universe of Beings, be they egg-born or born from a woman, or moisture born or miraculously born; be they born with or without form, with or without perception, as far as any conceivable Universe of Beings is conceived: all these should be led by the Bodhisattva.'"

"I am not that man."

"You must be that man! Think, Kaspar! Will the President resist the advice of the madmen about him? I don't think so."

Ananda's voice, usually so self-assured, quivered. "I foresee the end of this world if you don't act. With the Diamond Thunderbolt, peace can be won without the loss of a single life. A bloodless coup—"

"A bloodless coup," Kaspar echoed stupidly as if repeating the words of some incomprehensible, foreign language.

"By taking over the Presidency, Kaspar! Let me explain," he continued patiently like a teacher with a dull student. "By that I don't mean that you will depose him or imprison him. To the nation, he will still be the President they elected, but you will be his spirit, his voice. I see you don't understand! Let me put it plainly, Kaspar. You will be inside his mind and he will speak with your voice!"

Kaspar turned his back on the Eternal Tempter and staggered toward the plate-glass window. There, like a blinded man to whom sight has been restored, he became aware of the occult figures in the tapestry. Someone, he perceived numbly, had snipped a half-dozen, crude circles in the tan cloth, amputating jaws and even entire heads.

"Robinson had to have portholes," he heard Ananda saying.

"Portholes?" Kaspar said, forcing himself to listen. He told himself he must be cool and collected as a man must be who'd gotten himself involved with the Devil True, this paradoxical Being claimed he had reformed out of fear of utter annihilation, a good and sufficient reason for either a man or a demon. And yet?

"Robinson's never gotten over his pirate days in the Caribbean."

"Pirate days?"

"They have total recall, these asuras."

Kaspar nodded as if they were talking about the weather with not a preceding word on such matters as the Diamond Thunderbolt or the proposal to take over the corporal being of the President of the United States.

"When the sea gets into your blood there's no forgetting," Ananda said pensively. "Robinson would have driven the car in his peabody jacket if I'd permitted it." The swivel chair squealed as he swung to one side, and from under the seat a crisp voice announced:

"That wasn't me," Ananda said. "There are voices in things and don't tell me you never heard them before. You didn't, but you're not the same man you were who opened his eyes this morning."

Kaspar had resolved to be cool and collected but his knees felt a little rubbery as he walked to the ottoman; he glanced at it warily as if approaching a dog on a chain. To his relief the ottoman unlike the swivel chair had nothing to say.

Take over the Presidency, he thought, the phrase jingling in his mind like some nonstop song. He sat down, facing Ananda and the rolltop desk with the Diamond Thunderbolt cached away in one cubbyhole. Take over the Presidency ... Shuddering, not wanting to look at that desk, he became aware of the tanka on the wall above it.

Like so many Tantrist paintings, this tanka was both religious and erotic. It depicted four, naked, red-hued deities joined in sexual intercourse; the three male gods wound like worms around the unmistakable body of the skull-crowned Shakti. As he stared he thought that they seemed to know they were being observed; the male gods, unlike Shakti, were more or less indifferent. He clenched his fists when her lips parted in a smile, and smiling she beckoned to him with a red, languid hand:

You're such a child, dear. Can you tell me of anyone who has ever died from love? 'Make love not war!' Doesn't that make sense, darling?

"Absolutely!" Ananda declared. "When I think of a lifeless planet I could castrate every soldier!"

Why deprive them of their manhood, Master? Castrate their leaders,, I say, and serve their balls with oil and spices.

The hideous dialogue between the two was unendurable to Kaspar. Getting up from the ottoman he rushed over to the mutilated tapestry. Through one of the scissored holes he peered down at the street below, at real men and real women who moved on legs that were legs and not froggy spraddles. You've got to stay cool and collected, he told himself frantically. And as he looked at the passing crowd he felt a sense of brotherhood that transcended his own fate. He must stay calm, he resolved with the courage of a martyr, not only for his own sake but for all humanity.

"Who but you can save them?" Ananda called to Kaspar. From the wall Shakti sang:

From the tapestry the crocodile-jawed humanoids cried in chorus:

Unnerved by the demonic voices, he stumbled back to the ottoman. Although the monstrous jaws had clamped shut, the lips of the goddess silent, his resolution like a match had flared and burned, not even leaving an ash.

"Poor Kaspar," he heard Ananda's soothing voice. "No man can become a Bodhisattva overnight. You must relax. Let us talk of simple things. That ottoman, for example. It was made by your great, great grandfather Johannes Kaspar, and I tell you it wasn't easy, not even for Robinson, to pick up an authentic Kaspar on such short notice. 'I must have it!' I said and I meant it. I like these personal touches."

The revelation—if it were true—succeeded in distracting the shaken monk.

"If it were true!" Ananda said in an indignant voice. "I swear by all that's evil—Excuse me! I swear by all that's good that you're sitting on an authentic piece of furniture made by your ancestor Johannes, and a fine craftsman he was. He learned his trade in the old country before immigrating to Baltimore. I must say, though, that like so many people in his day he was absolutely blind to the evils of slavery, an institution by the way that gave me a great deal of pleasure. Oh, those were innocent times, my boy!" the false monk said with heartfelt nostalgia. "Where were we? Yes, that ancestor of yours used to say and please don't take this personally. 'How can I free my niggers when I've spent years training them to be good cabinetmakers. I give them nice cabins, I provide them with good food—' And speaking of food, where is that damnable Robinson anyway? A lazy lot, these asuras! You should have heard his screams when I insisted on that ottoman. But as I have mentioned I like these personal touches."

To Kaspar's dismay Shakti again had slipped out of the arms of her three lovers. All smiles she hovered in midair, paint-thin like a kite shaped in the likeness of a naked woman. Then, her body rounded out, no loneer an image in a tanka, but life-sized and life-solid, her breasts bouncing when she plopped down on the floor. The crown of skulls tilted to one side, she paused to right it, and smiling coquettishly she stood motionless like some statue painted red. Her lips opened and lifting one leg like a ballerina she exposed the mouth between her thighs; from it a red, tongue-like thing darted out and spoke:

"Christ!" the revolted monk cried.

Smiling wickedly she spun around, faster and faster, until she seemed more flame than flesh. Ananda frowned, raised his hand and the whirling fiend flew up from the floor, dwindling in size. To re-enter the tanka where she was seized front and rear by her celestial lovers. Kaspar, more dead than alive, his robe an orange shroud, had slumped into a boneless heap.

"Christ!" Ananda said with scorn. "How can we cure you of this mania, and cured you must be or else you will never act like a Bodhisattva. This Christ of yours possesses you! This false Savior, this Holy Ghost, and like a ghost He must be exorcised!"

He traced a circle on the air between himself and the inert monk. The office darkened until only the tanka remained, redly visible, before it too began to lose sharpness, the three gods and the goddess undifferentiated in sex, like figures on a black, photographic negative. On the wall, or what had been a wall, a single face emerged, two clasped hands forming on the pale forehead.

"Your Christ will never come!" the mesmerized monk heard the Other saying. "He never has and He never will. He loves his nails too much to ever leave them, but always He sends His emissaries to lull the world with talk of a Kingdom of Heaven."

In the now completely darkened office, the pale face on the wall began to dissolve, the nose and mouth receding except for the lips which swelled and thickened to disgorge a red, tongue-like thing that divided into five red fingers with five snake-like heads, on each head a skull. The fingers knotted into a fist, round as a pincushion, clefted like a bleeding heart, and crowned with a glowing tiara. And in the infernal dark the crowned fist spoke:

"Begone, Holy Father!" the terrified Kaspar heard Ananda saying.

From the tapestry the demonic chorus sang: Your day is done, your day is done. The crowned fist was mute, and as the office brightened it vanished, the tanka emerging on the wall, its four deities frozen together in a blood-red and eternal embrace.

"Your Christ will not save us," Ananda was saying, his voice so sad it seemed to carry the burden of all who had ever suffered on the earth. "He loves, his nails and the Buddha contemplates his navel. Who will save us—"

There was a deafening roar at the plate-glass window. Kaspar more frightened than he had ever been gaped at the pigeon that'd burst into the office.

A gray pigeon like a hundred others on the street below but no earthly bird ever had such thunderous wings.

"Robinson!" Ananda shouted. "Stop that damned noise!"

8
THE PRESIDENT SPEAKS OF WAR

Kaspar's first thought was that the pigeon had crashed through the window, but since the plate glass remained intact he wondered if it could've come through one of the portholes! (An irrational theory but the good monk had long crossed the thin line between the realms of what the world calls reason and unreason.) Yes, that was the answer, Kaspar thought when the plumage of the bird fluttering over his head began to change in color from gray to a dark, navy blue. That color made sense when he recalled Ananda's remarks about Robinson's love of the sea.

As the supernatural pigeon circled about the office it grew in size; growing at an incredible rate.

"Enough of your nonsense!" Ananda warned.

The monstrous bird struck the floor with a heavy thud. On legs as long as those of an ostrich it stalked over to the fascinated monk, winked an eye as large as a silver dollar. "Hello, matey," it croaked. Receiving no response except for a gurgle issuing out of Kaspar's stomach, it ruffled its tail feathers with a bill large enough to gobble up a medium-sized dog. "You get all cramped up inside a pound of feathers," the pigeon confided. "But it does give you a chance to fly."

"One day, Robinson, I'll lose my patience," Ananda said in a low, threatening voice. "What took you so long?"

"Long, short, cut it down the middle," the big-billed creature retorted. "How would you like to hang around a Chinese take-out joint waiting for an order?" Complaining all the while, the navy-blue monster crossed over to the desk, pulled out a tray of covered dishes from under one wing, followed by a bundle of cutlery. "Snip, snap, cut the crap," the defiant pigeon croaked.

Ananda looked at the asura—a lethal look for the outsized bird began to shed its feathers, its body contracting, its huge bill shrinking into a human nose. The evolution of countless ages, compressed into a few seconds, was a spectacle that shattered the calm of the sorely tried monk. He laughed, he wept, he jabbered hysterically that he preferred sparrows to pigeons. In the meanwhile, Robinson in the flesh had materialized, buttoned up in a peabody, a blue stocking cap on his head. Of the heap of feathers on the floor only one remained; a tiny, fluffy feather that could have been shed by a blue hummingbird.

"So you had to wait for your order?" Ananda questioned the seaman. "How do you explain the little orders in your pockets? Empty them, you irresponsible rascal!"

The subdued seaman dug out three wristwatches, a diamond ring, a gold wedding band, and last of all a bundle of wallets, grumbling that nobody ever suspected a pigeon.

"Once a thief, always a thief," Ananda commented, glancing at Kaspar. "It's a good three hundred years since they strung the villain on the deck of the Celeste."

"Why do you always throw my past at me, Master?" Robinson asked in an injured tone. He unwrapped the bundle of cutlery, uncovered the dishes. Kaspar breathed in the appetizing aroma of Chinese cooking.

He remembered that he hadn't eaten since breakfast at the Monastery and, picking up a plate, he helped himself to five or six spoonfuls of rice which he spread out like a blanket before piling on bean curds, bamboo shoots and vegetables.

There were also spareribs, lobster in shrimp sauce and roast duck. These, Kaspar carefully avoided. "More for me!" Robinson said greedily, heaping his own plate until it sagged. Champing on a huge mouthful he reminisced about the good old days in the Caribbean; the wild pig baked in hot stones, the parrot fish washed down with rum. "Life was good," he sighed as he chewed a sparerib into mush. "Men fought hand to hand, none of your missiles and bombs! Bloody bastards!" he cursed. "When I think of Pebbles Creek I lose my appetite."

The fork in Kaspar's fingers dropped to the floor. Ananda exclaimed: "Let's hear if the President can help your appetite!" and reaching into the cubbyhole that held the gold-toothed rodent's skull, he tapped what Kaspar supposed to be some kind of control. A blue light streaked with red bars and pinpointed with white dots washed the wall above the desk. A face Kaspar had seen countless times on television flickered on the blue-red screen: the President of the United States patriotically colored in red, white and blue:

"... no, my fellow Americans, we must not jump to hasty conclusions. Pebbles Creek may or may not have been a first strike. We must not listen to those among us who are clamoring for retaliation. We must shut our ears to the slogans of: 'Remember Pearl Harbor! Remember Pebbles Creek!' The new agency I have set up, the N.E.C.A.B.I, or National Emergency Coordinated Agencies and Bureaus of Intelligence has as its sole duty the surveillance and the destruction of the enemy. Once we know who the enemy is we will strike with all the forces at our command. But at this moment all we know is that two Buddhist monks who may or may not be in the employ of the Russians or the Chinese—"

A series of outlandish noises interrupted the speech:

Ananda denounced Robinson who shouted: "The hell with the President's speech! When a man eats he deserves a little peace and quiet." Ananda silenced the outraged asura and a second later the President's voice could again be heard!

"... Buddhism as I have been briefed by the N.E.C.A.B.I. is a religion as devoted to peace as our own Quakers. The two terrorists disguised as Buddhist monks, once apprehended, will be questioned. I assure you, my fellow Americans, that we will find out whether they are in fact agents of the Russians or the Chinese. Now let me read from a report prepared by the N.E.C.A.B.I. entitled—"

Ananda jumped from his chair, he confronted Robinson who in a fury flung his plate on the floor screaming: "The hell with eating! Bastards, ship's lawyers! Give them no quarter! The cutlass boys—"

"One more outbreak and I'll turn you—"

"No, Master," Robinson whimpered. "Anything but a rat, you know how we sailors—"

"Then keep your mouth shut!"

And again the President's voice sounded clear as a church bell in the silent office of the Oriental Importing Company:

"... for years the Atomic Energy Commission has warned us to be on guard in view of the fact that every nation with nuclear facilities has sustained losses of materiel. It may be that these two monstrous criminals are common, ordinary plutonium thieves. And now a few final words. I will continue to report any new developments. Until then, I urge calm, difficult as this may be. Terribly difficult when we think of what we have suffered on this day of infamy. The State of California as I informed you in my first broadcast at 4 p.m. is a graveyard. Los Angeles and San Francisco no longer exist, entombed in the waters of the Pacific. Who can measure our grief? It is deeper than any ocean and incarnadined with the blood of millions of our fellow citizens. But we must remember that a nuclear war would bring about the total destruction of our beloved country and the entire world. However, let me assure you that if either Russia or China singly or in collusion are in fact guilty of this unspeakable crime against humanity, we will blast them from the face of the earth—"

This time Ananda had no reprimand for Robinson; he looked at Kaspar with mournful eyes and without returning to the desk with its control inside the gold-toothed, rodent's skull he raised his arm and pointed a limp forefinger at the Presidential face on the wall.

The face spoke but nothing it said could be heard. Humped over like an old man, Ananda walked to the desk, took out the dessicated chicken feet. He released them. The two feet climbed up through space as if mounting a staircase, attached themselves to the Presidential face and flew off with it. In its place the image of a young beauty appeared on the blue-red screen and smilingly asked a listening nation why didn't deodorants work for her ... A very small chicken foot (the offspring of the pair that had vanished) hurled into sight, sank its claws into the smiling face and went off in the same direction as its parents.

Robinson shrugged and moodily began kicking at the pieces of roast duck and lobster strewn across the floor. "Can't even eat," he muttered. "Hang 'em all on the mizzenmast! Quarter 'em! Quarter 'em and feed 'em to the sharks!"

"Well?" Ananda asked Kaspar. "What do you say? Will you act now?"

Perverse as ever, even in this solemn moment, Robinson cupped his lips and let out the martial blast of a bugle. "Matey, you'll be a hero!" he shouted. "This office'll be a national treasure and not only this office! That ottoman where you're sitting! The chair in the Chad section! The men's room!"

(Historic, that moment in the office of the Oriental Importing Company. And Kaspar, that man of destiny?)

He hesitated for another second and then nodded his shaven head. Robinson howled with joy. There were tears in Ananda's eyes as he swiftly removed the two, gray metal plates from the cubbyhole that held the Diamond Thunderbolt. The needle-thin filament of light was so intense Kaspar couldn't see from what or where it had emanated. All he could be sure of was that Ananda had it—whatever it was—in his hand—and when it vanished he needed no explanations.

"On to the White House! On to the White House!" Robinson chanted. "Hoorah!"

When Kaspar spoke he didn't recognize his own voice. It was as if the powers of the Diamond Thunderbolt within him had altered voice, mind, body. "I can do anything?"

"You have read the Scriptures. Your powers are the equal of mine," said Ananda, bowing his head.

"Then," said Kaspar, rising from the ottoman. "I'll test it," and half turning, he stooped and stroked the faded green upholstery.

"Let the dead rest," Ananda said beseechingly, reading the monk's unspoken thoughts.

"How long will it take to go back?" Kaspar asked and marveled at the authority in his voice.

"Kaspar, I beg you—"

"Answer my question, Ananda!"

"This whim isn't worthy of you."

"I will judge what is worthy, Ananda!"

The Slant-Eyed One, the Lord of Things flung out his hand as if to say: Very well then.

Robinson could no longer contain himself. "The speed of light, matey! That's flying but hurry back!" In his excitement he leaped up and down. "When you meet that furniture maker don't be scared if he can't see you, matey. A ghost, that's what you'll be!" He laughed insanely and broke into a run, circling the office like a horse in a circus ring. "A rum show, matey, this going back in time," he babbled as he galloped. "I tried it once. Never again! Dead, stone dead, but you'll find him alive and kicking. There's a riddle for you, matey! You will be a ghost, you a living man! And how can you be a ghost when you're still alive? A riddle, a riddle to crack your head and not for me! No, siree!" Faster and faster he raced around the office and as he ran his peabody jacket sprouted shining, blue feathers. "Have your fun but hurry back! We'll be waiting for you, matey!" And flapping the blue wings that had been his arms he lifted up from the floor and flew out of the office, but whether he had exited through the door or the plate glass there was no guessing.

"I have nothing to add," said Ananda. "Nothing except one final warning, brother—Don't look startled, Kaspar! What are we now if not brothers in power? Don't try to change or undo what has already happened. The Past is Past. Remember these words of mine, brother ..."

Kaspar wasn't conscious of wishing his return to the century in which Johannes Kaspar had been alive.

He was blinded by a burst of white, intense light shaped like a flying saucer. All he could think of was that he was that shape.

HE WAS LIGHT ...

9
TEMPORARY GHOST

He was too stunned by the speed with which he had traveled (186,000 miles per second) to realize he had actually come down to earth (or rather to an infinitesimal piece of it for although it was a large room, some 20 by 20 feet, what is that but a speck less than a speck on our glorious planet?).

He had never seen this room (as William Kaspar) and yet somehow it seemed familiar and not only because of the ottoman, an exact copy of the one in the office of the Oriental Importing Company. The only difference was in the color of the upholstering; red and not green.

Its maker (unaware of his visitor) sat at a round table, his head lowered over a thick, leather-bound book which he was reading in the light of a kerosene lamp. The book as Kaspar knew immediately was the Bible, and every night before going to bed this ancestor of his would read a few pages; Leviticus, the third book of Moses, was a favorite in the Old Testament; the Gospels of St. Luke and St. John in the New.

The time traveler was shocked at how much he knew about Johannes Kaspar. Yet who was this man if not himself four times removed? He stared at his great, great grandfather and thought excitedly—from the moment of his arrival he had felt as if he were on some nonstop bender—that a hundred and fifty years ago he had looked out at the world through those eyes: the blue eyes of a white man.

Imposh, he cried out.

Johannes hadn't heard him, deaf to his voice, blind too. Yet there was only the table between them and not a big table. I'm invisible, his great, great grandson thought, a ghost, but how can I be a ghost when I'm not dead?

Imposh, he said again. He heard his own voice, stunned by the discovery that he couldn't even speak properly.

Imposh, he said again. Slowly he realized that he was talking Ghost.

Howkin ah beea ghosh? he asked out loud, whensh amsh not dead? Johannish! Lishen!

There was no response from the man he had been and no reason why there should be. Their two worlds revolved on separate axes and although he had returned to this room where he'd once lived in a former reincarnation, nevertheless, he could only be an interloper.

Appalled by his own logic, Kaspar looked at this white man with blue eyes and a narrow nose like his own. So this was the unknown ancestor about whom his own father had been so curious. A man in his forties with thick blond hair, broad-shouldered, with big-knuckled hands, a master craftsman, a bachelor. What didn't he know about Johannes Kaspar? A Lutheran who always prayed for forgiveness after a night of gambling, every loss or gain washed down with rum; his prayers even more fervent when he sinned with the slave woman Mary Lou who lived with her husbandless family in one of the three cabins on the property.

Hypocrosh! the time traveler exclaimed, as all these facts of the life and times of Johannes Kaspar floated up into his consciousness like some letter long forgotten but fresh and vivid again when reread. His new status as a temporary ghost, Kaspar reflected, had given him the total recall of an asura.

Now, curious as a woman visiting a house for the first time, he inspected the furnishings in the room. The table and chairs were made out of prime oak; the mirror in the sideboard had cracked at one corner ... where a drunken Johannes, disgusted with his own face, had smashed it with his fist. On the wall flanking the fireplace there was a hand-embroidered motto brought from the old country: ARBEIT MACHT DAS LEBEN SUSS. (Work makes life sweet.) To the right of the sideboard there was a calendar with a tall, female figure in golden armor wearing a cap lettered Freedom; her mailed feet standing firm on a block of numerals printed in black:

1826

The time traveler looked at those numerals. And Freedom looked at him with wide-open, unseeing eyes, her sword raised in defense of what? he asked himself bitterly. Freedom! the freedom of slaveowners to own slaves and to use slave women. He glanced at the curtained windows in the far wall. Outside was the workshop and beyond it, separated by a garden, three log cabins. A full acre, that garden. How often had this other Kaspar boasted to his friends that it could feed not only himself and his three nigger families but a whole tribe of black men.

What a bastard, the time traveler thought, glaring at the Bible reader. Then remembering that this man whose name he bore was dead he again cried out: Imposh!

He didn't look dead, his eyes were open as he breathed the air of a year long gone. Kaspar consulted the calendar. The month, June, was lettered in blue. June 1826! Here he was in a here a hundred and fifty years in the Past, in a city he'd never known in the flesh—Baltimore or rather its southern outskirts—and what was he now? A disembodied spirit of some kind, and if so, didn't that mean he was dead?

Ananda! Who else, speaking with that everywhere voice of his! Amsh deadsh! he shouted. Yosh tricksh meesh!

The Kaspar-to-be leaped up in his mind, statuesque and splendid as the figure of Freedom in the calendar.

Dreams of glory, he thought conjured up by the Devil. Why does he need me? Why me with all his vast powers?

Kaspar longed to believe that everywhere voice, but as he peered at the dead Johannes, who if not dead in June 1826 would soon be dead, he felt as if he were the pawn in some sinister game whose rules were not what they seemed and whose penalties could be horrible. Perhaps without knowing it he had entered Nirvana where life and death were one: Past, Present and Future still another Oneness.

The possiblity stunned him. To pray for the oblivion of Nirvana was one thing but to be tricked into it was another. The thought brought the sweat to his face.

Sweat?

There was only the sensation of sweat for when he tried to wipe his face he felt nothing. He felt no face. He felt no solid bone. Tears filled his eyes but when he tried to brush them away he felt no tears. He raised his hand and saw no hand. There was nothing left of him but a pair of eyes—frightening eyes—for he couldn't feel them with his fingers.

He had no fingers.

It's temporary, he told himself, I came here and I can leave, I can leave whenever I want to. Mine! he thought exultingly. It's mine, the Diamond Thunderbolt!

What happened next startled the time traveling Buddhist. It was as if his thoughts like some ignited fuel had lifted the unsolid being he had become from the floor of this room where his former self sat reading. Airborne over the lamplit table, he felt like a child on a swing, like an astronaut on a planet without gravity. Fluttering the fingers he couldn't see he tested his new powers and instantly his speed accelerated. The wall rushed at him, a barrier against which he must crash, but he knew—and what a thrill there was in the knowing—that the three dimensions no longer existed for him. Just the same he pressed his right foot down hard (habit is habit) as if braking a car on a dangerous curve, and as he did he heard himself laughing like a speed freak.

He waved at the armored figure of Freedom doubling as a traffic cop and flew out of the room, out of the house, its roof and whitewashed chimneys below him, ghostly in the starlight. He flew over the garden and the three dark slave cabins, over farms and meadows, so swift and so high that in a second the city of Baltimore changed from a city into a black cloth stitched here and there with light.

How long was he aloft? A few seconds, a minute? He wasn't conscious of having thought that he wanted to return (willed it subconsciously?) but there he was back in the room of the red ottoman, the sideboard with its cracked mirror, the embroidered motto, the calendar of Freedom. He scratched at his chin to discover that he had a chin! A nose! A head! Fingers! His eyes swerved downward, and to his joy he saw that he had feet shod in the same white, rubber-bottomed sneakers he had laced that morning, a morning one hundred and fifty years in the Future ...

Whosh dyosh know about thattsh! he said out loud for he simply had to talk to somebody. He was all in one piece even if he was still invisible to his former self. It was clear that the face and body of a ghost, a temporary ghost anyway, could come and go.

Owlgesh ush towish, Kaspar assured himself.

As he looked at the Bible reader he saw a naked, brown girl—the oldest daughter of Mary Lou—he saw the letter B branded on one thigh. The image wavered, dissolved into the figure of Christ on a cross, formed again, headless this time, a brown torso, flat of belly and with pointy, little breasts.

Numb with shock he realized that he could see, actually see the thoughts in another man's mind. This went beyond total recall.

The answer came to him almost immediately, the only possible answer; the Diamond Thunderbolt! That was it, the power to see what was unspoken, the power of ghosthood, the power of speed inconceivable that had carried him across space and time into an America that was yet to fight a bloody civil war. All imaginable powers were contained within himself!

The white, piercing light that had emanated out of a cubbyhole in Ananda's desk, this light was within himself; a transfusion of power that filled mind and being like some immortal blood. It was his, he possessed it and in turn was possessed as the heir to a throne is possessed at the moment of accession. Every sort of power, strength natural and supernatural, glory and pride, coalescing like molten precious metals into the Diamond Scepter of a Universal King.

Momentarily he remembered who he was or rather what he had been, a humble, pious Buddhist monk. Momentarily he feared that he was changing for the worse into another man. Then, as if wanting to be free of all qualms and doubts he fluttered his fingers and again passed through walls and roof, the stars bursting above him in a white shower like a display of fireworks as if the heavens themselves were celebrating his accession.

Too much speed, he cautioned himself who was still geared to the psychology of a world heavy with gravity. Folding his fingers back on his palms he de-accelerated, gliding down toward the nighttime streets of the city. Only leveling out when he was ten or fifteen feet above an avenue bright with taverns and theaters, on the sidewalks people in clothes that Kaspar had only seen before in pictures, riding in horse-drawn carriages. They seemed so alive, these men and women and iron-hoofed beasts, and yet from his point of view— the last quarter of the twentieth century—they could only be dead. Walking dead imitating the motions of the living, as dead as that other Kaspar reading his Bible on the far edge of the city.

And he himself? Had he really left the office of the Oriental Importing Company with its devious and demonic beings, the skull-crowned goddess Shakti, the wild and unpredictable Robinson, and their Master the self-styled Ananda and self-announced Savior? Or was he wandering through some timeless dream, a magic picture show where nothing was real, a shadow among shadows?

And as he listened to the all-knowing voice of the Lord of Things he flew up from the avenue, higher and higher until there were no houses, no people anywhere, all that remained were their tiny, golden tracks in a vast, dark labyrinth that suddenly began spinning round and round like a planet without substance...

He recognized the kitchen of Johannes Kaspar the instant he saw it, but where had he been? What had he done, what if anything did a ghost do between appearances? Had he vanished into the Void to reappear in this room of whitewashed brick with its fireplace and hanging iron pots and skillets, the table covered with a plain, white cloth, Johannes Kaspar smiling at a slender, brown girl who was bringing him a silver tureen. She was wearing a cotton dress belted at the waist with a wide, pink ribbon. On her thigh, concealed by the dress, there was the brandmark B, the first letter of her Christian name, visible to Kaspar if not to the man at the table.

The Kaspar of 1826 uncovered the steaming tureen, dipped in his spoon and said that fish chowder was his favorite soup. The girl stood there watching the man blow on the hot soap before swallowing it as the time traveler listened in on the pulsations beaming out of the other's brain: his brain once!

Sensuous flashes of the girl's body. Flickers of conscience, Belle was but a child, not yet fourteen. Pious resolves to be done with nigger wenches, to marry a white woman—white meat instead of dark...

Dirty bastard, Kaspar cursed to himself.

The man at the table asked the girl to sit down. She hung back. He filled a plate of soup for her and urged her to sup. She obeyed. He glanced at her little breasts rising and falling inside her cotton dress and ordered her to eat. She picked up a spoon. It dropped from her trembling fingers as if the metal were red hot: burning with whiteness.

Kaspar glanced at her with pity, hating the white man as he chewed on the butter-soft bones of a morsel of fish. What a bastard, he thought, wincing at the man's unspoken words:

A virgin for all I know. Only fourteen and maybe I shouldn't? Maybe I should send for her mother. A virgin. So much the better if I am the first to show her a white prick... "Eat, Belle," Johannes Kaspar insisted, filling his glass from the bottle of wine on the table, laughing as if at some private joke, almost talking to himself. "How would you like to sup with me every night, Belle?"

He reached out, seized her hand in his own broad, strong, white hand. She pulled loose and sprang to her feet, he jumped from his chair, knocking it over. Trembling, she watched him, her little breasts heaving inside her dress, the whites of her eyes so immense they seemed to have filled with snow. He strode over to her: "I'm a good master, Belle, if I say so myself!"

Kaspar could no longer keep still: Leaosh thish girl

Rising out of the kerosene lamp hanging on an iron hook in the wall, a figure in a yellow robe, the shaven head glowing like a huge, yellow pearl. Kaspar stared and then the apparition was gone.

"Little Belle," the master laughed as he pulled her to him. She struggled, he kissed her, and then clutching her wrist dragged her into the room next to the kitchen.

It was pitch black but Kaspar could see the Bible on the table, he could see the calendar with its armored figure of Freedom, he could see the red ottoman onto which the screaming girl was flung.

He hesitated. He could see the girl's dress and petticoat torn up from her thighs, he could see her half-naked body, he could see the stiffened white penis ...

He flew across the room, but before he neared the ottoman a column of fire barred his way, a crown of skulls hovering on top of the topmost red flames.

The skull-crowned column vanished and all was black, the blackness of a lightless room, and somewhere in it he heard a steady sound. He was too terrified at first to recognize it for what it was, he tried to tell himself it couldn't be! No, never!

He was listening to the pounding heart of the man he had been. It was close by, horribly close ...

10
INSIDE JOHANNES KASPAR

Like some prisoner in solitary awakened by unseen footsteps Kaspar pretended he was somewhere else, and not inside the body of a man long dead. Dark as it was he could see. He had eyes or if not eyes, projections of the mind, for when he lifted his hand and saw no hand he realized he was bodiless.

The Diamond Thunderbolt!

A fool to forget, an idiot beating his brains out! he thought frenziedly. I want to get out! Go back!

He fluttered the fingers that had once been his and nothing happened.

Nothingness engulfed him like a vast wave whose every drop held an ocean. Nothingness crashed against his mind, the last living spark of the man who had walked the earth in a century left behind like an immigrant setting out on a voyage to a new land.

The voice was gone even as his mind pulsed with the final truth: death.

Death was the Universal King, Nothingness its scepter, sword and scythe that cut down all living beings even the most powerful, even those who possessed the Diamond Thunderbolt. A Bodhisattva, he was fated to save mankind? A dream put into his head by the Eternal Deceiver.

Yesterday, was it yesterday when he had opened his eyes in the hall bedroom he shared with his brother in Buddha, with no Shakti on his bed, no fiends out of hell to lead, to tempt and to betray him, was it only yesterday when he'd been in New York? A yesterday the long-dead Johannes would never know? For all he knew he was dead, too, dead in the men's room on the second level of the Terminal, dead in the city morgue, all his seeing and hearing illusions of the immortal mind floating loose before it was reincarnated into still another being.

He prayed for forgiveness, calling on the powers of the good, on Amitabha the Infinite Light and Vairocana the Illuminator and in the black Nothingness the Lord Buddha showed himself, a halo around his head, his body flaming like a thousand suns. And as it was written in the Scriptures sp he saw. Then the Nothingness pressed in again and he screamed like a madman.

What saved him was memory.

He hadn't entered the Void. No, no, he was inside the body of his former self.

He had mobility.

He ascended or descended (he didn't know which) through the blackness to pause before a red, mountainous thing that seemed spongelike for all its size. As he stared he saw it dilating and expanding and dilating again. It was big, ten times bigger than he was or what he had once been (five feet nine and a half inches); and when that registered Kaspar almost lost his sanity.

A colossal giant might have such a heart, but Johannes Kaspar was of average height which meant that bodiless as he was, he had shrunken, smaller than a midget.

"Ananda!" he shrieked. "Save me!"

For answer there was only the rhythmic beat of the red, mountainous thing, the music of madness itself.

I will help you, dearest, but you must prove your love, my sweet...

The message seemed to have come from a red, revolving ball hurtling out of the blackness, and as he watched, it split open. He looked at Shakti. Her hands were clasped behind her neck, her legs spread wide and out of the opening between her thighs a flickering, red, lizard-like finger.

Have you forgotten your precious Scriptures? The one immutable reality in a world of illusions is Ayala the eternal repository of the mind ...

He was appalled by the blasphemous scorn in her voiceless voice, and yet what this she-demon had said was the truth."The mind was the sole reality; all else illusion, the only key, but where was there a door in this prison?

This body like all human bodies has nine apertures, dear Kaspar...

Concentrating his thoughts he visualized the two eyes through which Johannes had looked out on the world ... Up he floated like a drop of blood into the interior of what could only be the dead man's head; before him two solid, glassy-smooth globes. Impenetrable!

I will help you but first you must prove your love, Kaspar...

She was so close he could almost touch her flaming flesh. He fled, descending down a long, rosy tunnel whose sides were coated with greenish slime, but there was no breaking through the hairs in the nostrils of the man in which he was imprisoned.

The red, lizard-like finger reached out for him and again he fled to find himself in a coral, pink cave where he was repelled by electric charges: the taste organs in the mouth.

He flung himself out into the blackness, whirling through the red and purple traceries of veins and arteries until he came to a maze of canals. He entered and was blocked by a dense, yellow mound that could only be the wax in the dead man's ear. He backed out and pursued by her laughter he counted up the apertures shut against him. Eyes! Mouth! Nostrils! Ears! Seven! and plunged down a long tunnel whose sides were thick with brown stuff.

The anus was impassable; the opening of the penis closed.

Foolish monk,
why do you reject me?
Love conquers all...

Mocking and derisive the voiceless voice of the goddess. She drifted before him as if on a floating bed, her triple eyes burning bright, her legs parted and out of the mouth between her thighs the flickering, red, lizard-like finger. He covered his eyes with the hands he no longer had and recited the ancient Buddhist prayer to curb desire and lust:

"This woman I wish to possess is a thing of hair. There is hair on her head, hair on her body. She is a thing of nails and teeth, a thing of muscles, bones, kidneys, heart and liver. A thing with intestines, a thing of tears and spittle, a thing of bile, pus, grease and fat, a thing of urine and excrement. A thing of nine apertures, a thing of nine sewers. Foul streams issue out of her two nostrils and her two ears, out of her mouth, out of her vagina and anus. Foul liquids and excrements unending."

Stupid monk, love conquers all, love
is all! If you wish to save mankind,
you must love and be loved ...

She circled around him in the blackness, her eyes like three red stars, her breasts two red moons, the red, lizard-like finger leaping from between her thighs . . . He embraced her and she laughed and laughed:

Undo the Past, you foolish darling?
The slave girl Belle lived with
Johannes and bore his children
as you will bear mine ...

The revelation caused no shock for he was beyond shock. The leaping finger between her thighs had pulled him into a blackness unlike the blackness without, the womb-black of creation where all the beings he had ever been or ever would be—insect or beast, ghost or asura, godlike deva or wraith out of the Three Dismal Destinies—circled around and around crying out with one voice:

Save us! You who have sacrificed yourself and renounced your vows, you alone can save us ...

And in the womb of all that had been and would be a phantom raft floated before him and on it were five riders, North in a monk's robe, South in a loin cloth, East naked, West holding a sutra, Center a lotus and seizing the lotus he pulled himself up to become the Sixth Direction, the Universal King of Peace.

Was it Shakti who had spoken? Nowhere did he see her but on his head he could feel the five-skulled crown of wisdom that had been hers.

"Love!" he wailed like a newborn child and burst out of the womb, traveling with the speed of light...

11
IT'S GOOD TO BE ALIVE

"Here you are," Ananda said casually as if Kaspar had stepped out of the office to buy a pack of cigarettes.

The time traveler was too happy to feel angry. He had a body again! Arms! Legs! Hands! He was complete, whole again! He wiggled his fingers, all ten of them, and although he couldn't see through his sneakers he was positive his toes were all there.

"It's nice to be three dimensional," Ananda commented, a faint grin puckering one corner of his wide, long, cruel lips. "Sooner or later the physicists will solve the problem of time travel. That is, if mankind survives the present crisis."

His little speech fell on deaf ears. Seated on the ottoman—upholstered in green but otherwise almost the double of the one to which Johannes Kaspar had dragged the slave girl Belle—Kaspar was marveling at how his hands were made. Each finger separate, each an individual, and yet belonging together like members of one family, and as he surveyed them he felt as if he were in the company of the best friends a man could ever have on this earth.

"Yes, my boy," Ananda remarked in a loud voice. "It's good to be alive."

From the tanka and the tapestry, the fornicating gods (rejoined by Shakti) and the crocodile-jawed humanoids sang out in unison:

Its good to be alive

The demonic chorus put an end to Kaspar's narcissistic communings. He thought of everything he had endured inside the fleshy catacomb from which he'd just escaped. Unable to utter a word he stared bitterly at the calm orange-robed figure in the swivel chair.

"I warned you not to meddle with the Past," Ananda reminded him. "You had to be punished, my boy." And smiling like an indulgent grandfather who in his day had also run wild, he said: "But remember it was I who sent Shakti."

Kaspar flushed, his eyes, blue in color like those of his great, great grandfather focused inward on the naked temptress he had clasped in his arms ...

"Enough of regrets, Kaspar. There's no time to lose!"

From the tanka above the rolltop desk a faint but hearty voice echoed:

There's no time to lose, matey!

Robinson, one tenth his usual size, peered down at Kaspar from behind the shoulder of the insatiable Shakti. When Ananda commanded him to come down he kissed her red shoulder and jumped to the floor. Soulfully, gazing up at her he kissed his fingers. He had to raise his head for he was no larger than a dwarf who in his peabody looked as if he had enlisted in some lil-liputian navy.

"There's a time and a place!" Ananda lectured the Irresponsible. "I'm losing my patience with you Robinson!"

As Robinson stood there blowing kisses to Shakti his fingers began to lengthen; his mouth and tongue, too. His airborne testimonials of love were now distinctly audible. Shakti, stimulated by his demonstration of affection, disengaged herself from the arms, legs, and penises of her three lovers. A blissful smile on her lips, undulating her shoulders, she rolled her belly like a Turkish dancer. A repulsive scene to Kaspar but what bothered him most was the jealousy he felt. He tried to tell himself that it was impossible, even for an asura, to have sexual relations with a painted image. His logic (like all logic) was no consolation. There were no constraints as he knew from his own recent personal experiences for beings like Robinson and Shakti.

Ananda glanced disgustedly at the two rival lovers, he waved an imperious hand at the tanka and the gyrating goddess froze into red paint.

"Can't even have a little fun," Robinson complained, the yellow specks in his eyes aglow with fury. "God damn bastards splitting atoms!" he cursed and rushing over to Kaspar he yelled: "You heard the Master! There's no time to lose!"

Ananda complimented him on his performance, adding that it wouldn't save him from a well-deserved punishment. The asura flung himself down on the ottoman next to the silent monk. "He's heartless, matey!" he moaned. "Heartless!" he sobbed, circling Kaspar's shoulders. "How was she, matey?" he asked.

Kaspar pushed him away. Robinson still sobbing muttered about his years in the Caribbean with no Pebbles Creek to worry about. There was danger. Cannon on the Spanish galleons; pirates hung, ships scuttled, but life went on. Every now and then he would glance at the Slant-Eyed One and swear to walk the straight and narrow.

"I haven't forgotten how you behaved during the President's speech," Ananda said sternly, reaching into his desk. The asura shrieked at the blood-red sponge he saw in the other's fingers, and begged for another chance:

"Master, dear Master, we weren't just having fun! We were too worried, Shakti and me—God damn murderers with their bombs! Peace parades!" he babbled. "Not only people but insects—Aren't they endangered? Parades of ants! Flies! Cockroaches! Isn't that a good idea, Master? Parades everywhere! Here in the States, China, Russia! No, Master!" he screamed as Ananda tossed the blood-red sponge.

On hitting the floor it turned into a half-eaten hot dog roll, red in color like Shakti herself. The outcries of the blue-jacketed asura became fainter and fainter for he had begun to shrink in size, his screams sounding no louder than whispers: "No, no, no! Not a rat! You know how sailors hate rats!"

His last words were unintelligible squeaks. A blue-colored rodent scampered across the floor, sniffed at the hot dog roll, stopped, wiggled its hairless tail and nibbled at the roll with tiny teeth.

"Discipline!" Ananda remarked.

The blue rodent's appetite was enormous but as Kaspar reflected, it wasn't just eating to feed itself.

"Say what you will," the disciplinarian continued. "Responsibility is a human virtue, or rather it once was. As we sit here the President is meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. These so-called sane men are thinking of a war no one can win. Fortunately, they haven't decided who the enemy is. Kaspar, the time has come for you to assume the Presidency. You are silent, unwilling—"

His face, so ageless, seemed to fall in on itself under the crushing weight of a thousand centuries. "Kaspar, you insisted on going back in Time. You ignored my warnings. Why do you hesitate now? The Devil by any other name is still the Devil, I suppose." His voice quickened with missionary fervor. "The Devil is man himself! A piece of plutonium no bigger than a baseball leveled Hiroshima, a football leveled Pebbles Creek! Twenty million killed, San Francisco and Los Angeles—"

Kaspar interrupted the passionate oratory. Suspicious of Ananda? Yes, but he was also suspicious of himself. He could change, become a dictator, a second Hitler, and with a sigh he concluded his indictment of human frailty with the famous words of Lord Acton: "Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely."

"What are the alternatives?" Ananda asked as he eyed the troubled monk with unwinking eyes. "I've been thinking—"

"I know what you have been thinking. Talk to the monks you live with if you must. Get their advice but hurry! Robinson," he called to the feeding rodent. "I'll give you one more chance. I want you to go along with Kaspar."

"Aye, aye, sir!" a rough, seagoing voice boomed. The four-legged, blue creature had dematerialized but Robinson was nowhere to be seen.

"I'm invisible, matey," the voice explained. Kaspar stopped looking for him. He asked Ananda why Robinson had to go along when he possessed the Diamond Thunderbolt.

"You had it before," Ananda reminded him. "You need protection against yourself. After all, you are not like us. You're a human being and all human beings are weak even the strongest. So it has always been and so it will always be."

"Matey," the invisible asura said. "You'll need some disguise with the cops, and the best disguise is mine." "I've had enough of ghosts!" Kaspar shouted. "Spoken like a man," Ananda smiled. "Yes, Kaspar, your doubts, your fears all prove I made no mistake in seeking you out. And as for you, Robinson! You will keep your mouth shut unless Kaspar asks for help! Remember, you rascal, this is your last chance."

He got up from his desk when the door closed. A second later there was no one in the office.

From the tanka something red streaked after the orange flash that like a ray of light had passed through the plate glass.

12
PEOPLE, PEOPLE, PEOPLE

As Kaspar shut the door of the Oriental Importing Company he forgot that he was on his way to the Monastery and that somewhere close by the invisible Robinson was watching his every move.

It was the corridor. Like an eraser sliding across a scribbled blackboard it had wiped his mind clean.

There were a thousand, ten thousand other corridors in the city no different from this one. But Kaspar saw it with the eyes of a traveler back from a trip where all things, including himself, had lost their thinginess. The office was too otherworldly to stir such emotions. The rolltop desk although solid and thingy was like some magician's chest. The swivel chair had a voice. The crocodile-jawed humanoids and the red-painted gods were only deceptively two-dimensional.

The corridor was nothing but a corridor, made by ordinary men for the use of ordinary men. Yet, as he stood motionless it revealed the magical, if commonplace, secrets of all corridors. It seemed stationary and at the same time it was forever moving toward a never-changing destination, a flight of stairs. And when he descended he discovered a second miracle. You put one foot down and there! waiting! was another stair and another and still another.

Talk of unity, Kaspar murmured to himself, talk of equality, democracy.

When he walked out of the lobby into the street he was enthralled by light: man-made light created by men to dispel the dark. Oblivious to the wild, hysterical crowds, the drunks declaiming what they would do if they were President, the street vendors who had turned disaster into profit, Kaspar gazed at galaxies of miniature, yellow suns revolving around the sides of the movie marquees. The streets of dream cities still unbuilt gleamed from hundreds of windows while out in the gutter the headlights of the honking cars shone like the great, round eyes of owls, flashing red tail feathers as they passed.

Wonderful, wonderful world, Kaspar thought

The breath of the invisible asura fanned Kaspar's ear. He reminded Robinson to keep his mouth shut but the spell was broken and he became aware of the noisy multitude. It seemed as if the whole city had converged on Times Square to celebrate an undeclared New Year. The celebrants (if such they could be called on this day of horror) shouted blood-curdling threats, denounced the Russians and the Chinese, laughed like fiends, blew horns and rang bells. Stationed along the curb policemen like wired blue robots chanted at regular intervals: "Keep moving... Keep moving..."

He felt as if all the voices of the law were directed at him, shivering as he thought of the cops famous for their photographic memories.

He stopped short to be bumped by two drunks. One of them yelled: "Whassa matter with you, whitey?"

"Whitey?" the now thoroughly upset monk mumbled.

The drunk shook his fist, a black fist, under Kaspar's nose and then his mood changing he laughed: "The bastid's so pickled he thinks he's green!"

"Or yeller!" and laughing he lurched off with his companion.

"Keep moving!" a policeman ordered from the curb.

Kaspar hastily lowered chin into neck as if his dearest wish was to be a turtle with a retractable head. When he had put a safe distance between the officer and himself he stealthily raised his hands. They were white!

He quickened his step. Now and then he inspected those white hands of his as if they were a pair of brand-new gloves. Robinson had taken care of everything, the black raincoat was replaced by a white one, his sneakers by a pair of glossy, white boots. He removed the hat on his head and saw that it was one of the camel's-hair caps (undyed) that Robinson favored. The invisible asura laughed:

"Kill the Russians!" someone bellowed and instantly a score, a hundred voices took up the cry.

A little man with a sack full of red, white and blue hats wiggled through the crowd spieling nonstop: "Get your Remember hats!"....

A drunk straightened the patriot's hat he had just bought and roared into Kaspar's ear: "Remembuh Poil Harbor! Remembuh Pebbles Creek!"

Kaspar had intended returning to the tenement he'd left that morning—was it only that morning? he thought—but now he felt an all-consuming curiosity to read the news circling around the Allied Chemical Tower. He turned east toward Times Square. With each step the crowd thickened. It was like being caught in a subway rush-hour.

"God damn Communists!" a man in a coat lacking one sleeve (it had been ripped off in a street corner debate) yelled at everybody and nobody. "What the hell we stallin' for?"

"Ask the President!" he was advised and no sooner had the jeering adviser spoken when a hysterical girl shoved him:

"You fat slob, what d'you mean ask the President? Impeach the President if he keeps on doing nothing!"

Kaspar shook his head at the gumshoeing if unseen asura. He was jostled by the elbows of the inching crowd. He felt suffocated for although the day-long rain had stopped, the air was heavy and humid, laced with the boozy breath of the bottle swiggers. Cursing and laughing, bottles were offered and accepted with, "Might as well get stinko, who the hell know's what's going to happen next..."

The Diamond Thunderbolt flashed in Kaspar's mind as he had first seen it in the office of the Oriental Importing Company. It was his! Inside of him! Inside where? His mind, he thought exultingly. The mind, the eternal repository! And yet although he didn't know why he resisted the asura's suggestion. "No ghosting for me!" he shouted. "And shut up!"

He was overheard. Somebody remarked that the poor bastard was talking to himself. Somebody else snorted that they'd all be talking to themselves if those fucking terrorists weren't nabbed. A third party disagreed. It was no fucking terrorists but the fucking Chinese who'd pulled off a sneak attack just like the fucking Japs at Pearl Harbor.

"Remember Pearl Harbor!" a dozen voices chanted. "Remember Pebbles Creek!"

As Kaspar neared Times Square he caught a glimpse of the bar where Ananda and himself had trailed the three muggers. It was fenced in by police barricades. He stared at the blue-coated figures stationed in front of the red neon windows. Sweating, his head awhirl— for although he had refused the free bottles thrust at him—the mass excitement was more intoxicating than the fieriest of liquors, he peered up at the yellow letters rotating high above the immense crowd:

SEATTLE: RED CROSS OFFICIALS ESTIMATE DEATH TOLL WILL REACH 22,000,000 .. . NEW YORK: WILLIAM KASPAR IDENTIFIED AS COMPANION OF THE STILL UNIDENTIFIED TERRORIST OF ASIATIC ORIGINS WHO THREATENED UN WITH A NUCLEAR BOMB ... MOSCOW: POLITBURO DENOUNCES AMERICAN WAR MONGERS WHO HAVE FALSELY ACCUSED THE SOVIET UNION . . . PEKING: THE CHINESE PEOPLE JOIN THE AMERICAN PEOPLE IN MOURNING AND VOW FULL ASSISTANCE IN REHABILITATING THE WESTERN STATES OF NORTH AMERICA . . . ROME: POPE CLEMENT XVI IN A SPECIAL MESSAGE TO THE WORLD HAS DECLARED THAT THE MYSTERIOUS PERSON WHO CHOSE TO REVEAL HIMSELF TO THE AMERICAN W. KASPAR WAS THE DEVIL . . . NEW YORK: HUGE CROWDS CONTINUE TO MILL AROUND THE PORT AUTHORITY BUS TERMINAL. POLICE HAVE ARRESTED 4,087 DEMONSTRATORS INCLUDING SEVERAL HUNDRED SATANISTS WHO INSPIRED BY THE MASS HYSTERIA HAVE PROCLAIMED A NEW ORDER AND A NEW RULER FOR MANKIND . . . WASHINGTON: PRESIDENT CONSIDERING A 24-HOUR ULTIMATUM TO MOSCOW AND PEKING. WILL DEMAND INCONTROVERTIBLE PROOF OF INNOCENCE . . .

The rotating yellow letters blurred as Kaspar's eyes filled with tears. Was this the end as Ananda believed?

He tried to make his way against the Times Square bound crowds. He paused. The advancing wall of faces was unbreachable. Then, as if some wind had flung him high over their heads the astonished monk realized he was flying, the marquees below him, the sidewalks and gutter alive with a human mass like an army of ants on the march.

"Put me down!" he cried.

He was on his feet again, he could feel the hard pavement under the soles of his boots.

"God!" Kaspar muttered.

The invisible asura laughed, a wild and inhuman laugh as if he were a beast endowed with human faculties. The startled passersby stared at the white-coated, white-booted Kaspar and one of them exclaimed: "Listen to that laughing hyena!"

"That wasn't me," the dizzy monk defended himself as he had once before from inside a phone booth.

"Who was it then, you son-of-a-bitch, your grandmother?"

"For two cents I'd knock the shit outa you!"

He hurried off, mumbling apologies.

He shook his head. Yes, he could flatten them, he thought, God knows what he couldn't do with the Diamond Thunderbolt. He choked with fear, not of the crowd; he was afraid of himself, afraid of the awesome powers he possessed. Once he began using them he would become another man...

From every store the radios were broadcasting the latest news as if a world series had come to town. Red Cross reports. Statements from the leaders of nations. The electronic voices crackled in the humid air. Deafened, he speeded up his pace, only slowing down when he became winded.

At first Kaspar thought it was the asura but then he felt something pinch his ankle. Glancing down he saw a tiny naked woman, red as fire, seated on the toe of his white, glossy boot. He rubbed his eyes but she didn't vanish, and yet no one else seemed to notice the fiery creature who although small, perhaps six inches from her skull-crowned head to her toes, was distinctly visible.

"Go away," he pleaded in a low voice, not wanting too attract any attention. She stroked her red belly and said:

Springing upright she began to dance, her shoulders seemingly as boneless as her shaking, red belly. Kaspar stopped, staring down at the stage improvised on the toe of his boot. He was deaf to the complaints of the passersby about blocking traffic, unheeding the commands of the Cop on the curb. He was tempted that second to use the powers that were his but constraining himself, he wished (a human wish) that the sidewalk would open up and swallow the she-devil on his foot.

"Hey, you in the white raincoat!" the cop shouted. "If you don't move your ass I'll move it for you!"

He wiped his sweaty face with a handkerchief that somehow or other had found its way into his hand. It was a fiery red in color, Shakti's little parting gift, for she, as he saw, had left for parts unknown. As he proceeded toward Eighth Avenue he inspected his flashing, white boots, relieved to see that she had indeed gone. He circled two men arguing nose to nose about the nationality of the Pebbles Creek saboteurs.

"Russians!"

"Nah, it's the Chinks!"

"The Russians, you dumb shithead!"

"Don't you call me shithead, you prick!"

People were reading newspaper extras or listening to the ear-splitting broadcasts blaring out of the bright stores. Kaspar went by like a sleepwalker, his eyelids quivering when the traffic light on Eighth blinked red. As he waited for it to change he glanced at the Terminal. It had been cordoned off by the police. On the opposite sidewalks a vast crowd inched along like some glacier, their faces turned toward the Terminal as if held by an all-powerful magnet. Police spotlights played across its brown-brick walls, its many levels. Massive and solid as a pyramid it became transparent as glass the instant Kaspar eyed it. He could see Pat Morrisey and himself entering with their bag of sutras; Robinson with his two stuffed pigeons; Ananda seated in a toilet stall...

The traffic signal shone green, he crossed the avenue, a hundred little wheels spinning inside his mind. Would he find his brothers at home or had they all been arrested by the police for questioning? The wheels spun faster and faster: William Kaspar wanted ... He was innocent and yet his name had become a scare word throughout the world. A terrorist, a foreign agent, an accomplice of the Devil, a mass murderer!

Mass murderer hurt the most. He shook his head. What could he say to that charge? Plead that all life was sacred, that he would rather starve before eating meat, walk on hot coals before wearing leather. His eyes darted down to his feet. What was he wearing now but leather?

Halfway down the block near Ninth Avenue people conversing in the low voices of mourners were coming down the stairs of Holy Cross Church:

"About myself I don't care—"

"It's the children, the poor children who never had a break."

"May Jesus Christ save us all."

Outlined in the light streaming through the wide, open doors a new crowd of worshipers were trooping inside the church as if to some bombproof shelter.

"Will you shut up!"

"Damn you, Robinson! I said shut up!"

He felt as if he were stumbling down the streets of a nightmare echoing with a score of voices like the outcries of a madhouse. Ananda orating in the office, Shakti whispering of love, the Times Square crowds howling for war. The delirium passed when he crossed Ninth Avenue and continued westward to Tenth. It was the same route he took every morning, going to and returning from the Monastery, the same and not the same ...

The wind from the river cooled his brow. There were no crowds here. Like an assemblage of ghosts vanishing with the first light of dawn they had gone. He breathed deep of the air blowing from the docks and thought of the continent on the other side of the river, endless mile after endless mile all the way to Pebbles Creek and the western cities on the Pacific shore, sunken in the sea like shattered Atlantis.

Robinson had been silent but as Kaspar turned the corner into his block the asura hissed into his ear:

"No, no," he replied!

Up ahead a lightless police car was double-parked alongside a pickup truck.

He went by his own house, trembling as if the sound of his boots on the sidewalk were those of some pursuer. Behind the yellow-lit windows the muted television voices seemed to be calling out his name: There he is, the mass murderer William Kaspar, there he is ...

He glanced over his shoulder at the police car and instantly regretted his stupidity. The asura's voice shrieked at him:

He rushed up three brownstone steps into the entrance of the tenement below his own, seized the knob of the vestibule door and cried out in his panic: "It's locked!"

Almost he called on the powers within him. "No!" (It was a sublime gesture worthy of the legendary Purna; a renunciation of the powers bestowed on him by the dubious Savior.)

He recoiled as the asura's wild cry burst like a bomb inside the narrow vestibule. The locked door crashed back on its hinges:

He rushed inside, sprinted up the first flight of stairs, the second, the third, his chest heaving when he climbed the last flight and stepped out on the roof. A dazzling electric finger jabbed into his eyes and he thought: they're on the roof, on all the roofs!

"Stop! I've got you covered! Stop or I'll shoot!" Robinson's unseen hand seized his wrist and he was running to what looked like a shanty near the low, roof wall. He heard pistol shots, he heard the voices of the police who'd pounded up the stairs. He heard the voice of fear. It was louder than the shouts of the police or their bullets.

Inside the shanty the darkness was alive. A wing brushed against Kaspar's cheek. There were wings everywhere. He screamed as if he had plunged into a cave full of bats.

The frightened birds collided against the walls of the coop, thudded against the wire meshing of the door that had closed behind the invisible asura and the gasping monk. Kaspar protected his face as they beat against his head like some huge feather duster. The door creaked open and the pigeons like creatures in a dream were gone. Only one remained, its folded wings gilded in the light of the police flashes shining inside the coop, its feet hooked into a perch made out of a broomstick.

"Stop carrying on, Kaspar!" it said. "It's me, Robinson. Don't let those cops bother you!"

Outside the coop a half dozen voices were yelling:

"Come out of there with your hands up!"

"We've got you covered!"

A police whistle shrilled: "I'll count to five and if you're not out, we'll blast you!"

The talking pigeon emitted a parrot-like squawk. "Kaspar," it said. "When I give the word you follow me!"

"Where?"

The police whistle shrilled again and the mouth behind it bellowed: "One!"

"Off the roof!" was the reply.

The police whistle blew another fierce warning: "Two!"

"Matey, you can do anything I can do! You can be a whole flock!"

"Three!"

"Matey, come on! Don't be a damn fool!"

"Four!"

"Good-bye, matey! I'm off!"

The police whistle blew a long, sustained note: "Five!"

13
THE DIAMOND THUNDERBOLT

"Five..."

That final warning reverberated inside his head. He heard the beat of unearthly wings circling about the dark coop; he heard footsteps pattering on the roof as Robinson-as-pigeon urged him to fly. Over and over again the asura repeated the same message, screeching it like an owl, whistling it like a canary, cawing it like a crow.

One of the police fired his revolver and no longer hesitating (self-preservation is the first and last law of nature), Kaspar like a little child made his wish.

The powers he had called on like a genie in an old tale blazed inside all his being and out he flew, his feet tailing out like the string of a kite in a roaring wind. Below him the police had also changed for what he saw were huge beings on legs that reached halfway up their bodies with shooting sunbeams for eyes:

"Son-of-a-bitch pigeons—"

"You in there! Come out with your hands up!".

He heard the sound of pistol fire, loud! and then muted while close by the bird-being at his side sang: "I love to fly! Bianca and Bianco should see us now..."

Exhilarated by the strong lift and fall of his wings, forgetting all about the police, Kaspar rejoiced in the new world before him: limitless and glittering with a million stars.

Wonderful, wonderful, he thought.

When the asura plummeted down toward the black checkerboard of roofs, he followed. They glided between dark walls, alighted on a fire-escape. In the yellow light of two curtained windows Kaspar saw not one but three pigeons perched on the iron rail. Two were gray pigeons with immense, white eyes. Between them was the third, a dark blue pigeon! "You don't mind if I brought 'em along, matey?" it inquired very politely. "I get so lonely without 'em." And jerking its head to the left and then to the right, the dark blue pigeon cooed: "Bianca, I missed you. And you, too, Bianco."

The world Kaspar had known opened up like a huge cage; the two curtained windows were the entrance to the flat where early that morning he'd sat at table with his brother monks speaking of Shakti's double visitation ... Just the same, whatever happened or might happen, one thing hadn't changed. He was home.

"You can go in now," the dark blue pigeon said. "But hurry! That ultimatum of the President's no joke."

"Go in as a pigeon?" Kaspar asked, glancing at his wings which were white in color like the raincoat he'd been wearing. Momentarily, the numbed monk had forgotten the powers that were his.

"As a pigeon, an ostrich, take your pick!" the talking bird cackled. "Go in! We'll take care of the cops, won't we, Bianca?"

And flapping its wings the asura flew off, behind him the two gray pigeons. In a perfect triangle the formation zoomed up between the tenement walls.

Kaspar rapped on the window. His knuckled hand as he now perceived was a hand and not a webbed foot. A brown hand! Thank God, he thought fervently.

He hadn't consciously wished to unwhiten or unpigeon himself. The change in color and form quickened his heart. He shook with excitement and not only because he possessed the Diamond Thunderbolt. For the first time in his life as a Buddhist he felt that he really understood what reincarnation was all about. He had an image of himself, William Kaspar, the son of Reverend Kaspar, the great, great grandson of Kaspar the cabinetmaker as if he were all three of them standing on some mysterious highway and gazing at the vast reach of Time in which the aeons were like so many milestones.

What hadn't he been in his countless existences? Kaspar only came to himself when he heard footsteps behind one of the curtained windows. A second later, framed in glass, Pat Morrisey stared out at him. Kaspar smiled, gestured as if to say: It's me, Pat! He winced when the big, burly monk retreated a step, and yet he couldn't blame Pat for being scared stiff. There he was on the fire escape, a hunted man, a fugitive ... "Let me in Pat," he called in a low voice. His shoulders sagged when he was told to go away. The corners of his eyes and lips dropped. Tears filled his eyes.

Slowly, the monk inside the flat raised the window as if it were a guillotine that could in a second drop down on his own neck. "What are you doing out there?" Pat Morrisey asked after Kaspar had climbed into the room, and not waiting for an answer, one question after another burst from his lips. Kaspar felt as if he were being sprayed with bullets, each bullet labeled: Pebbles Creek! Los Angeles! San Francisco! Russia! China!

"Pat, please," he said beseechingly. "Give me a chance to explain! I'm no terrorist, Pat, believe me!"

"I wish I could believe you--"

"Just give me a chance, Pat! I said I'd explain everything but first I've got to ask you a couple things."

In the next few minutes he learned that Mark Clarkson and Millard Brandt'd been taken to Police Headquarters; Pat Morrisey left behind as a decoy. The police were convinced that all four were terrorists in the hire of either the Russians or the Chinese. Kaspar shook his head and said Pebbles Creek had blown up by itself, an accident, an act of God: "An act of God? That doesn't describe it! Men built Pebbles Creek! Men built that hellhole and hid it in the desert!"

Morrisey groaned and stared at Kaspar as if he'd never seen him until this moment

The white monk was a head taller than Kaspar, bigger in every way, but he now seemed shrunken, a limp bag of a man emptied of speech.

"I don't know what to believe," Morrisey said at last. "How'd you get out on that fire escape when the whole block's surrounded? Why did you go off with that Japanese or Chinese monk? I saw you running after him. Why—"

"Why, why, why," Kaspar mimicked bitterly. "I'll answer all your questions, Pat! I'll explain everything! That's why I came here, Pat. I need your advice," he murmured like a beggar holding out a tin cup for the smallest of coins.

Explain everything? How could he explain that he'd flown to the fire escape as a pigeon? Explain Robinson, Shakti? Explain Ananda? The Diamond Thunderbolt? Heavy-footed and heavy-hearted he walked down the hallway of this flat where he no longer belonged. In the prayer room fronting on the street, the brass statue of the Buddha caught the despairing monk's eye. He felt like praying, but when he thought of the police in the cars below he remembered Ananda's cynical remarks about the futility of calling on the Gods ... the Buddha contemplates his navel... Silently he sat down on a straw mat.

The two monks faced each other. Kaspar glanced at this man who had been his brother in Buddha and saw a worried, suspicious stranger. Never had he felt so alone. There was no one to share the load on his shoulders, the biggest load on earth, for it was the earth. "Pat," he began. "Please listen to me, try to listen with an open mind ..." When Pat gasped or attempted to say something, Kaspar cut him short: "Please let me finish ..." It was obvious that Pat thought he was crazy. But crazy or not, Pebbles Creek was a fact, the millions of victims were a fact, the President's ultimatum and the imminence of war were facts. No madman's fantasies.

At last he was done: "The thing's eating me up alive—Can I trust myself with the Thunderbolt? Should I take over the Presidency?"

The monk on the mat before him gurgled, not a baby's gurgle but the choking, gurgling rattle of a dying man. He looked as if he'd been struck dead, held upright in a sitting position by the blood that had left his face and frozen in his veins like a clay figure supported by an armature.

"Pat!"

"Yes?"

"Pat, that's why I came here! Ananda was against it, but I had to have your advice, Pat!"

"If you want to know—"

"Of course I want to know!"

"I think—I think you're not well."

"Crazy maybe?"

"No, but sort of—"

"Sort of what?"

"I think this Ananda's brainwashed you, using you to blow up the world!" And for the first time that evening he sounded like the tough monk Kaspar had known.

"Ananda wants to live—"

"Look, I listened to you. Now you listen to me! He's brainwashed you, possessed you like so many others! Have you forgotten the Scriptures and what they say about the Evil One! Kama Mara! Have you forgotten, William?"

It was the first time that Pat'd called him William. Kaspar's eyes dimmed with grateful tears.

Pat looked at him and said gently: "We must pray together. I don't know what other advice I can give you. We must pray for Enlightenment."

"There's no time for prayer," he answered just as gently.

"You're wrong, William."

"Pray and we'll all be dead."

Pat Morrisey had lowered his head. Kaspar's eyes shifted to the serene face of the brass Buddha. The half-closed eyelids were like flowers about to open. Kaspar sighed. The countless prayers of his fonner life like the humming of bees, a golden hum of piety in word and deed, drowned out the raw voices of an even rawer world. The crowds shouting for war and death; the pleas of the paradoxical Devil Ananda, the shrieking Robinson, the honeyed words of Shakti—no louder all of them than a ghostly whisper.

"Forgive me," he murmured to the Enlightened One when suddenly his bladder was bursting as it had at the Terminal. He rushed out of the prayer room and gasped with relief when he shook off the last drops in the bathroom.

"Matey!"

The head of a dark blue pigeon lifted out of the sink where early in the morning he'd fished out a half-drowned cockroach. "We must pray," it cackled. "You listen to that praying worm and we'll all be dust before this bloody day's over!"

"Who asked you for your advice?" Kaspar shouted furiously, raising his hand as he had seen Ananda do.

A white light flickered from his fingertips, traveling with inconceivable speed. The beaked head lowered into the sink, and when he walked over all that remained of Robinson-as-pigeon was a single dark blue feather. He raised his hand again and the feather disappeared. Staring down at the empty, chipped basin he felt an emotion new to him, more intoxicating than any liquor, burning like a fever—a fever, however, that didn't weaken but on the contrary filled him with a fiery sense of superhuman strength.

He was about to return to the prayer room when a second voice called to him from the bathtub. There submerged in water, outstretched on the bottom and fondling her red breasts, Shakti smiled up at him: "Homage to the Buddha Amitabha," she sang mockingly, bubbles rising from her mermaid lips. "I teach only two things, saith the Buddha. Suffering and the end of Suffering." Lifting her dripping head she waved to him: "And I teach only one thing!"

Her head lowered and clasping her hands under her neck she swam around and around the tub, her body a red flash, singing: "Homage to love..."

He raised his hand—distinctly he saw the flickering, white and intense, as if it had been split from a bolt of lightning. Swifter than lightning it traveled, but to his amazement it had no effect on the swimmer. She leaped up like a flying fish: "So you wanted to overpower me, dearest!" and down she plunged, not a single drop splashing from her body as she reentered the narrow sea whose steep shores were white enamel.

Dazed, Kaspar realized there was a limit to his powers. He could banish an asura but not a goddess. He gaped at her circling the tub so fast she seemed to lose her shape or rather to assume another, that of the letter O...

"Oh, love," the whirling red letter sang.

He rushed to the tub to silence her but her hands quicker than his own, locked around his wrists: "I teach one thing only. Life!" she smiled and pulled him into the water, pressing her body against his own and covering his face with kisses.

Disembodied lips danced before his eyes, disembodied breasts, disembodied hips. He clutched at her buttocks and joined together like two fish, one red, the other brown, they threshed through the water and then as he ejaculated his eyes went blind in the Void that was the opposite of Nothingness for it held flesh and spirit, it held the world...

When he came to his senses he was standing at the side of the tub; a tub empty of water. Shakti was nowhere to be seen but on the bottom, smeared like lipstick, she had left her mark: a red smiling mouth.

He only stirred when he heard a knocking on the closed door. "What's going on in there?" Pat cried. "Were you taking a bath?"

"Love," he muttered, opening the door. Without another word he left the flat. Behind him he heard Pat double-locking the door of the flat. Kaspar shrugged his shoulders.

"Matey!"

In the dim light he couldn't see Robinson at first but at last he made out the small dark shape of a pigeon on the bannister.

"Matey, if you're thinking of talking to the authorities you're crazy!" the bird scoffed.

"I thought I'd gotten rid of you?"

"You can get rid of a man, matey, but not me. Not permanently anyway. As for someone like Shakti—" the bird cackled. "How was she, matey? Great, wasn't she? Heaven on earth!"

"That's enough out of you, Robinson!"

"You're right, matey. There's a time and a place, as Ananda's always saying. I know! You're afraid to be President! I know what's going on in that bird-seed mind of yours! You figure you'll find some one to listen to you? Some one over at the UN or the Pentagon or the White House? There must be some good men somewhere. You're right, matey. But the trouble is they're afraid of the power bugs that run this country. That's a special breed. They feed on power, dream power, shit power. Spill your innocent, little heart to them and they'll eat you up alive!"

"Robinson, you and I are different but we want the same thing—"

"Matey, stop jawboning. There's no other way to get peace! We've had enough of war Presidents. What we need now is a peace President, and that's you!"

"And that's what I'm afraid of—"

"There you go again with that Lord Acton Zakton! There's no other way!"

"There must be some good men!"

"And the truth will prevail," the talking bird croaked. "Listen to me, an old sea dog who's knocked around this world a bit. The truth's been fucked fore and aft without a stop! Go to these good men of yours and you'll be fucked—"

He never completed his little homily. Kaspar had raised his hand.

There was a white, flickering flash. Hissing and spitting like a fiendish parrot who had been taught to imitate human speech the asura dissolved before Kaspar's eyes.

14
THE TRUTH WILL PREVAIL

Downstairs it looked as if a block party were about to begin. The guests, all dressed in police blue, patrolled the sidewalks while out in the gutter, barricaded against traffic, they manned and directed the searchlights.

(Kaspar's surrender to authority as reported in the world press would verge on the apocalyptic, but like so many other historical events of the first magnitude it began inauspiciously enough.)

Camel's-hair cap on head, buttoned up in the original black raincoat—the white one had vanished with his whiteness—Kaspar left the house where he had once lived, a pious obscure monk. He was stopped by two policemen on special assignment to keep an eye on "the Buddhist hangout" as it had already been dubbed.

"I'm William Kaspar," he said.

They seemed not to hear him. What flat was he coming from? they asked. Was he a tenant? A visitor?

"I'm William Kaspar," he repeated with quiet dignity.

"And I'm Jesus Christ!" one of the officers retorted.

(An incredible witticism under the circumstances, considering the police activity on this very street, not to mention the citywide, nationwide and international manhunt! After all, statistically speaking, how many black Buddhist monks were there in New York? And of these how many had just walked out of the house that'd been nicknamed "the Buddhist hangout"? Were the police stupid? Certainly not. The police of New York City were a superior force. But far more superior forces were at work. Ananda, the Lord of Things, hovering like a guardian angel, had dulled the minds of the two officers, with the result that one had declared himself to be Jesus Christ while the other stood there yawning his head off as if watching a television soap opera over a glass of beer.)

Stunned by their response, or lack of it, Kaspar without another word unbuttoned his black raincoat and took off his camel's-hair cap to reveal the orange robe and shaven head of a Buddhist monk; the head of a black monk. The two policemen laughed:

"What's this, a strip show?" the witty one asked.

By now Kaspar had put two and two together, and with a grim smile he made a wish: Be yourselves!

It was as if two blindfolds had been torn from their eyes. "Up with your hands!" the witty cop cried, drawing his service revolver. "If you're pulling a fast one, you'll be a sorry nigger!"

Blinking at the epithet Kaspar murmured gently: "I forgive you."

This truly noble reply was greeted with a sneer. "Who the hell are you to forgive me, you murdering bastard!"

Kaspar snapped. "I could shut you up in a second!" Instantly controlling himself he demanded to be taken to the officer's superiors; there was no time to lose; there could be war within hours.

The gun-happy officer jeered, lifting the weapon in his hand. "You'll talk to this!"

"You God damn idiot!" his partner hollered. "If this guy's the Pebbles Creek bomber, we'll make sergeant! Sergeant, hell! Inspector!"

Kaspar listened to the practical officer with sad, downcast eyes. Millions of people had perished that day, their bodies so many rungs on a ladder, and on the top, waiting, the golden badge of a Police Inspector.

At Police Headquarters Kaspar kept insisting he had to see the President or if not the President the head of the N.E.C.A.B.I. He was ordered to shut up. Mark Clarkson and Matthew Brandt were brought into the room crowded with high officials. The two Buddhist monks positively identified William Kaspar. For a second the room was hushed. It was as if some great, noisy machine had been shut off; not a gear moved, the big wheels and the little wheels of bureaucracy silenced. Then, one of the officials screamed like a maniac:

"I lost a sister in Los Angeles! What're we being so fucking polite! I'll kill the black bastard! Kill him with my own hands!"

He rushed at Kaspar who stepped back a pace. A half dozen police seized the raving official. Struggling to break free, cursing every black who'd ever lived, he spat at the silent monk. Kaspar wiped the gob from his cheek, revolted by the slimy, leech-like stuff clinging to his fingers.

"You fucking nigger!"

Drop dead, Kaspar wished voicelessly.

The man yelped like a dog hit by a car, clutched at his heart; he would have fallen to the floor if he hadn't been grabbed by a dozen arms.

A space was cleared, the police coroner examined the stricken man and pronounced him dead. Kaspar's shoulders sagged as if under the weight of the corpse lying on the floor. Although his two brothers in Buddha had been led out of the room, he saw their solemn faces, heard their solemn voices.

Guilty! Guilty who had violated the three sacred vows he had sworn! Guilty of murder! Repentant and contrite he wished to be himself again, the Kaspar who'd begun this very same nightmarish day by saving the life of a cockroach.

It was as if he had reached into his mind to seize the Diamond Thunderbolt and hurled it from him ... A white light flashed across the room, blinding the monk who had possessed it and the crowd of officials. And when it was gone, trembling with shock they all spoke at once:

"God, did you see that?"

"What was it?"

"Something must've blown!"

"What something?"

"The electrical system," a calm, judicious voice declared. "The circuit breaker in this building must've fouled up!"

The dead man was carried out on a stretcher, the interrogation resumed. Kaspar refused to answer any questions: "You're wasting time!" the anguished monk cried. "I've got to see the President before he declares war! I'm innocent!" Innocent? Not of murder! Who then had violated the oath of inoffensiveness? The oath of Celibacy? The oath of Poverty? Dreamed of power? A Bodhisattva was he? Yes, a false one!

They stared at him in silence but their eyes and closed mouths spoke. Spoke deafeningly! He choked at what they had to say. Foreign agent! Terrorist! Mass murderer!

The procession of police vehicles pulled up in front of the World Trade Center in downtown New York. Seated between two officers, Kaspar looked out at the empty streets, not a car or a person in sight. He felt as if he'd been taken to a city whose inhabitants had been wiped out by gas warfare leaving the buildings intact.

He was led into a lobby where guards armed with submachine guns saluted the high ranking police officials who marched in front, mute as a graveyard detail. Blue carpeting muffled their footsteps as they walked to the elevators.

"I'm innocent," Kaspar muttered but he was no longer certain. Murder was murder ...

He had expected no reply and received none. He shuddered when the elevator door slid open: a mobile coffin, that elevator. When it stopped he followed his captors down an empty corridor to an office where civilians and military personnel sat at desks or stood before computers, verifiers and other machines whose functions were a mystery to him. The first office was like an anteroom. There was a second, a third, a fourth in which silent men watched or were watched by the machines they attended.

In the last office, a bemedaled general with the pink, healthy face of a man who exercised daily and watched his cholesterol, and a pale, thin-lipped civilian whose only exercise was mathematics (non-Euclidian) sat side by side at a desk as big as a Ping-Pong table. On it there was a single object; a narrow, metal box eight or nine feet long, ten or eleven inches wide and possibly a foot high. The general dismissed the escorting party and when they were gone he introduced himself:

"I'm Max and this is Dwight. Call me Max. I hate the name Maxwell," he said with a smile that radiated democracy. "Now, Bill—or do you prefer William?—if you're curious as to where you are, let me resolve your curiosity. You're at N.E.C.A.B.I. headquarters."

For the first time since he'd given himself up Kaspar felt a little hopeful. The general's high rank—there were five stars on his collar—had apparently freed him from the bureaucratic straitjacket that constrained lesser mortals.

"Please sit down, Bill. Dwight and I are, of course, delighted to see you," he laughed boyishly. "And that's the understatement of the year!"

Kaspar smiled feebly. He had guessed that the smiling, five-starred general could only be General Maxwell Samson, the supreme commander of all American nuclear forces, his identity a top secret until Ananda had bugled it out at the United Nations to the entire world. The civilian must be of equal importance to have a seat alongside the general.

General Samson seemed to have read his thoughts for he said: "Dwight is one of our great scientists. This is one of his brain children," he added, tapping the long, narrow box with a proprietary forefinger. "I won't burden you with details, Bill. You could think of it and you wouldn't be mistaken as Intelligence itself. The eye-like opening in the center facing you is its brain or rather the pathway to its brain. Every scrap of information pouring into these offices is tunneled into it, analyzed, stored and communicated s.o.s. whenever Dwight or I press the proper buttons on our side. And that isn't all it does." He administered another loving tap. "As you sit there it's recording and evaluating the electric waves emanating from your brain—"

"General," Kaspar began when he was interrupted.

"Max, Bill! Max! You are probably wondering why Dwight and I are being so open with you in view of all the—what shall I say?—the bad publicity you've had. A fair question, Bill. The answer is simple. You came here of your own free will like any other loyal American, and like any other loyal American you want to cooperate with us. Your country calls on you!" he said in a changed tone as if addressing his staff.

"General—"

"Is Max so hard to remember?" General Samson asked with a winning smile.

"Max, I came here for peace—"

"We're all for peace, but unfortunately the enemy—"

"There was no enemy, General, I mean Max. Pebbles Creek was an accident!"

General Samson's eyes had lowered to the side of the long, narrow box that Kaspar couldn't see. "Subject Truthful," he read off as if he had an open book before him. "Bill, you believe what you say. Even without the help of this little jigger I knew you had nothing to do with Pebbles Creek. Coming here was proof enough. Suppose I told you that safety measures at Pebbles Creek were more than adequate? Somebody sabotaged Pebbles Creek! There was no accident!"

The thin-lipped scientist nodded: "We can definitely eliminate accident."

It was his first remark.

He wore no uniform, no medals, yet there was something about him that reminded the agitated monk of one of his father's favorite sermons: To render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's. Caesars both of them, the general and the scientist; the stars and stripes draped on the wall behind their chairs a royal backdrop; the huge desk with its all-knowing apparatus their throne.

They were so positive, these two men. Kaspar began to feel sick. The red and white stripes on the wall wiggled before his eyes, the general's pink face slipped over the scientist's pale one, and then it was the other way around.

"Sabotage," he said distractedly. "No, your safety measures didn't work!"

"Couldn't they have been dismantled?" the pale civilian asked in a toneless voice. "It was sabotage, Kaspar. While one group was busy at Pebbles Creek, here in New York a second group covered up their operations. This second group was led by a bogus Buddhist monk whose name or alias is Ananda."

Kaspar shook his head. "You're mistaken about Ananda!"

The general's eyes had lowered and after reading the message transmitted by the long, narrow apparatus he glanced up at the excited monk, permitting himself a little smile like a woman who has just swallowed a forbidden chocolate. "So you really think Ananda's the Devil? Things are so bad on this earth that this Devil of yours, fearing for his own existence, felt compelled to step in and bring on the millennium?"

"There's more to it than that—"

"One point at a time, Bill. What about his appearance at the United Nations? Let's stick to that point for a second. Did he or did he not predict the blast at Pebbles Creek? Answer me, Bill."

"He did but—"

"But what? Did he do anything to prevent it? He said and I quote—" His eyes lowered and he read off the words Kaspar couldn't see: " 'There Are No Shut-Off Valves On A Volcano.' Unquote. You accepted that explanation, Bill. Isn't there a possibility that you were duped?"

"No, no!"

"Such refreshing faith," the scientist said ironically.

"Dwight, let me take it from here," General Samson said. "And you, Bill! I want you to listen to me and please, no interruptions. This country of ours is in danger. We've been attacked and may be attacked again. The one important question is: who attacked us? After evaluating all the information we've received we believe it was the Russians. Not the Chinese! The Russians, as you know, for years have spoken of burying capitalism, which means that they must first bury us, the world's leading capitalist power. That's their aim! That's always been their aim but fortunately this is a nuclear age. An open strike would instantly invite retaliation. So what are their alternatives?"

"Coexistence!"

"Coexistence has been a useful cover! They talk peace and at the same time have undermined us throughout the world, arming our enemies, subverting our friends. Now, Bill, I want you to use your imagination. Imagine yourself to be the head of the K.G.B. As such you are, you must be a master of the arts of sabotage and conspiracy. You've worked out a foolproof scheme to strike at the United States. That's Part A. Your next problem is to avoid retaliation. That's part B. And, finally, to implicate your ideological enemy, the Chinese, if you can. That's Part C. C for China if you will permit the joke. We Americans have a sense of humor. God knows that's our saving grace. Part A is relatively easy. The technological know-how is there. Part C is even easier. The K.G.B., according to our figures, have close to ten thousand Asiatic agents. Uzbeks, Mongols, Kirghiz and so on. This is where Ananda enters the picture. To increase his visibility as an Asiatic he poses as a Buddhist monk. He comes to New York and recruits a genuine, peace-loving Buddhist like yourself who, nevertheless, had been a militant in the past. A black activist, and before that a member of the Socialist Workers Party. It was only when you became disillusioned with politics that you turned to religion. To the Witnesses for Jesus. After all, this was natural for the son of a minister. Six months later you converted to the Buddhist religion. What we know about you, they knew! Ananda's talk about saving the world fell on receptive ears. You accompanied him to the United Nations where he denounced the super-powers including his own country, the Soviet Union. Perfect, isn't it? A perfect cover! And while all this is going on, out in Nevada the K.G.B. operatives prepare to do their job. They succeed, the bastards!"

"General—"

"I'm not done! They succeed spectacularly. Talk of Byzantine cunning! They feel they're covered and that the finger points at China!"

Kaspar couldn't speak for a second as if he had fallen into the middle of some entangling web, trapped by the fine silken threads of Intelligence and Counterintelligence. He didn't know what to believe when suddenly two pigeons flew out from behind the draped flag; two pigeons with uncanny eyes, white-pupiled, and circled with blue and red rings.

"Bianca, Bianco!" he exclaimed.

"What?" cried the general.

"There they go!" He pointed a trembling finger. "There!"

"What's there?" the general demanded.

"Robinson's stuffed pigeons! Look! They've gone!"

The two men at the desk glanced at each other and then the scientist spoke dryly: "I'm sorry but we didn't see a thing."

Kaspar had straightened up in his chair. His eyes had cleared as if the vanished birds had pulled a blindfold away from them. The faces on the other side of the desk blurred and he was alone in a private room of his own whose occupants included the Irresponsible and the skull-crowned Shakti and their Master; a crowded room where Johannes sat reading a Bible and Shakti swam in a tub singing of life and love ...

"No, you didn't see a thing," he said firmly. "You've lost your eyes long ago. Your eyes and your hearts! I tell you Pebbles Creek was an accident—"

"That's exactly what this God damn Soviet agent with the slanted eyes wants you to think!" the general shouted.

"Ananda's no Soviet agent! I must speak to the President before it's too late! Please," he implored. "Please—"

"One moment! Who is Robinson?"

"Robinson?"

"Yes, Robinson. Is he one of Ananda's men?"

"Men!" Kaspar laughed hysterically. "He's no man, no human! He's an asura in a peabody! Always talking about the Caribbean and his pigeons. He loves pigeons—"

"For God's sake get hold of yourself!" the general commanded. "Let's stick to one point at a time. A what did you call him?"

"An asura."

"What in hell's an asura? Is that a Russian word?"

Kaspar shook with laughter. "Russian, Chinese, you name it! A wild spirit, that's what he is, but maybe he was once a Russian?" He wagged a sage finger. "You never can tell! In the Round of Being, you never can tell."

"This man's sick," the scientist said thoughtfully. "Its obvious. All this talk of wild spirits and pigeons! His faith in the Devil indicates a deranged mind, Samson."

"Sick or not, we'll cure him!" the general promised. He pressed a button and when three N.E.C.A.B.I. operatives entered, he nodded at the monk. "Take him to the treatment room!"

The treatment room was fitted up like a hospital clinic. There were four beds, all empty, to receive patients. A doctor who had been seated at a table paring his nails rose to his feet and introduced himself to the patient. "I'm Dr. Bloom," he said, nodding at the orderlies and nurses reading or playing cards in an improvised lounge adjacent to the windows. "And this is my staff."

The white-clad company smiled. Kaspar grimaced: "I'm not sick!"

"Everybody gets sick," the doctor said sympathetically. "Will you please undress, Mr. Kaspar."

"Mr. Kaspar! The kid gloves treatment," the sarcastic patient repeated. "Mr. Kaspar isn't sick!"

"Will you please undress or will you compel me to use force?"

Kaspar looked at the lineup of orderlies and nurses, his eyes wet with sudden tears. He wept for the force he had cast aside like a burned-out match, he wept for the asura he had banished. Sniffling, he took off his clothes, his raincoat, his monk's robe and camel's-hair cap. He accepted the hospital gown and instantly threw it on the floor.

"Robinson!" he called, and when he realized that he'd been abandoned by the pig-tailed asura he shouted: "Ananda!" glancing wildly about the clinic. Some of the orderlies and nurses were smiling, but the doctor acted as if nothing had happened.

Watched by a battery of eyes Kaspar unlaced his sneakers and pulled off his socks, groaning and muttering to himself. He knew that he was being punished, taught still another lesson. No sooner had he gotten into bed when he was seized by two orderlies, flipped over on his stomach, his gown yanked up and a needle plunged into his buttock...

When he opened his eyes he thought he was back in the Monastery with Pat Morrisey seated at his side, and robed in white for some reason. As his senses cleared he saw that the person smiling at him was a nurse, a black nurse with a smooth, brown, pretty face.

"Black and beautiful," he said bitterly. "That's a nice ethnic touch."

"How is our patient today?" she asked.

He cried out: "Has it begun?"

"Begun? What?"

"The war!"

"Oh, no!"

"Thank God!" he gasped and tried to sit up to discover that he couldn't move, his shoulders, chest and hips confined in what he guessed must be a straitjacket underneath the hospital gown. His arms were free if circled with wires of various colors, blue, red, black, all of them connected to a row of machines.

"What's all this?" he shouted. "Ananda there's a limit! I've learned my lesson, Ananda! Get me out of here!"

"You must relax," the nurse coaxed him. "Why get so excited?"

Groaning he sank back: "Nurse, get me out of here."

She smiled sweetlv. "I can't do that."

"I must see the President!"

"We would all like to see the President—"

"I must see the President before those maniacs start dropping bombs!"

"I don't know about that. Everybody knows how terrible those bombs are. Now, you really must relax."

He turned his head. Over near the windows the other nurses and orderlies were reading, chatting, playing cards.

The windows were long and narrow and each one framed a segment of the night sky. The question was which night? How long had he been here? A day? Several days? At least, he thought, the President hadn't acted on his twenty-four-hour ultimatum. General Samson's linkage theory with its three parts, A, B, and C, was still a theory and not a blueprint for war. There was still peace. The proof was right there in bed with him. Himself! He was still breathing, alive.

"He must be a good man," the relieved monk said.

"Whom do you mean?"

"The President. I must see him before the others get him to change his mind. Nurse, are you married?"

"No, I'm not."

"But you've got a father, a mother, brothers, sisters, you've got relatives you love."

"Why don't you relax?"

"Do you want the people you love to die?"

"No, I don't!" she said indignantly. "You stop getting personal! I'm your nurse but that's all!"

"If you love them, you've got to help me get out of here!"'

"We are helping you," she said professionally. Her beautiful eyes had hardened, icy cold like two chips of chocolate ice cream. "You must also help yourself and the best way to do that is to relax."

"Relax!" he howled. "Relax! The world's about to explode and relax!" Again, he tried to sit up.

He collapsed, glaring at the row of machines to which he was wired. "Bugging my brain!" he complained. "Knock me out and now this!" He became aware of a cool, even pressure across his forehead and muttering imprecations (shameful for a Buddhist monk) he fingered a metal band. It was attached by two wires to what he took to be a scanner of some sort with three small illuminated rectangles set in an oval panel. Next to it there was a square television-like box.

"Good evening, Kaspar."

A white-uniformed figure had entered the treatment room. He dismissed the nurse, sat down in her chair and after glancing at the various panels with their oscillating circles and clock-like hands introduced himself: "I'm Dr. Weiberholz."

"I don't give a damn who you are."

"That may be, but we care who you are, my dear Kaspar."

"If you care let me out of here!"

"When you—"

"When I'm what? Dead? We'll all be dead if war starts."

"General Samson—"

"Don't mention that damn fool!"

Dr. Weiberholz chuckled. He had a chuckling face, pudgy and round, with a small, rosebud mouth. "Don't hesitate to speak freely," he said. "I'm your psychiatrist—"

"I don't need a shrink!"

Dr. Weiberholz called out to the nurses and orderlies. "I'd like to be alone with the patient." After they filed out of the treatment room he seated himself next to Kaspar's bed and said: "Now we can have some privacy—"

"Let me out!"

"Do you want me to sedate you, my dear Kaspar? Ah, that's better. You shouldn't be angry with General Samson. We all make mistakes. We're all human after all."

"I'm not so sure about that!"

Dr. Weiberholz chuckled. "Homo sapiens. Human and inhuman both aren't we?" he murmured philosophically. "Believe me, my dear Kaspar, we don't like to confine you in this arbitrary way."

"Arbitrary way!" Kaspar scoffed. "Why don't you talk like a man instead of a clever weasel?"

The doctor wasn't offended; he seemed offense-proof. "My dear Kaspar, you're being detained, I hope temporarily, for reasons that should be clear to you."

"Reasons!" the outraged monk bellowed and raising his head he called on Ananda to save him. He admitted his own mistakes, denounced the power bugs and characterized people as sheep blindly marching to the slaughterhouse.

The doctor listened with keen interest to the onesided dialogue, and when it was concluded he stroked his chin and asked the patient if his conversations with the Devil were frequent or only occassional.

Kaspar shut his eyes and the doctor said: "Why won't you cooperate with us?"

"Didn't I come here to cooperate?" Kaspar replied, peering up at the doctor's concerned face. "They won't listen to me! They refuse to believe Pebbles Creek was an accident!"

"How extreme you are, if I may say so. Pebbles Creek was an accident! The K.G.B. have clean hands! Their agent's a Boy Scout leader disguised as the Devil: And you, Kaspar, are the second Messiah, a Bodhisattva to use your terminology." He chuckled complacently. "Yes, what we don't know about you, my dear Kaspar, isn't worth knowing."

"What you don't know is the one important thing. Peace!"

"I believe in peace as much as you do, my friend. The prospect of a lifeless planet is as chilling to me as it is to you. But as we sit here millions of Americans have died. No true American can shrug that off by mouthing peace. Mass murder is mass murder!"

"Pebbles Creek was an accident, doctor. I swear it was an accident!"

"You have been duped, my friend, hypnotized perhaps or drugged with some mind-altering drug. Accident! You believe everything this Russian agent tells you, don't you? You believe his claim to be the Devil. I will say this! He certainly has a sense of humor. Who but a man with a diabolical, perverse sense of humor would have the nerve to proclaim himself to be a pure-hearted Devil?"

"Doctor, I listened to you. Please listen to me! Ananda, although that's not his name, is the Devil come to earth to save mankind."

"You poor fellow, may I ask since when has the Devil been in the business of saving mankind?"

"He has no choice, doctor. It's a question of self-preservation."

"Ah, a humanitarian through necessity. I will say this! This Devil of yours, if nothing else, is an agent of the highest caliber. You said Ananda isn't his name?"

"He took that name because Ananda was the gentlest of the Living Buddha's disciples."

"An alias? Do you happen to know his real name?"

"His real name's Kama Mara, but he's also known as the Evil One and also as the Lord of Things."

"By the way, did you have any meals with him?"

"What?"

"Meals. Did you have lunch or dinner with him?"

"Well, just one at the office—" He broke off. "I see what you're getting at! That mind-changing drug: Sure, he slipped it into my glass! I'm wasting time talking to you! Doctor, please! Before it's too late let me see the President! You can convince General Samson! I must talk to the President!"

"The President," Dr. Weiberholz repeated ironically. "You certainly aspire to move in the highest circles. The President, the Devil! Who is next on your list? God? You poor fellow, you are suffering from sadistic-masochistic-onanistic delusions of grandeur that may be drug-induced, perhaps not?"

"You're crazy!"

Without a word Dr. Weiberholz got out of his seat and walked toward the machine with the three, illuminated rectangles. He turned a small switch. Kaspar was still screaming that the doctor was crazy when his flailing arms fell to his sides. He couldn't move a finger, he couldn't talk. Helplessly, he watched the doctor return to his bed and adjust the metal band around his head.

A whirring noise filled the treatment room but the frightened monk couldn't tell whether it came from the machine or from inside his head. The room revolved before his protruding eyes as if mounted on some axle, the white walls no longer at right angles to floor and ceiling but rounding out like some huge bottle inside of which he was imprisoned; the white walls becoming unsolid, liquifying, milky white.

He wasn't alone inside of what seemed to be the biggest bottle of milk in the world. For swishing around in it was a chuckling face that whitened with each revolution.

"You will be receiving some visitors, my dear Kaspar," it said. "You mustn't be frightened by them, for they all want to help you."

The chuckling face was gone. Two milky white figures appeared and he wasn't surprised to see his father and mother. Ghostly at first they gradually began to solidify. Both were wearing long white, sexless gowns. They walked over to him and his mother's lips brushed his cheek. Between kisses she begged him to be a good boy:

His father nodded and lifted a ministerial finger:

He wanted to answer them but he had lost the power of speech.

The room crowded with other figures, some of whom he recognized. Senators, movie stars, show business celebrities most of whom were black but here and there he saw a token white. They lined up like a chorus, tilted their head:

Their voices rose higher and higher and yet he could still hear his mother imploring him to listen to the doctor and his father preaching against the Devil. One of the show business celebrities stepped up front and began to sing "The Star-Spangled Banner." The others joined in, to stop in mid-song as if on a command, the whole white-clad company stiffening and silent, their hands lifting in patriotic salute as a solitary, new figure appeared. The President lifted his white-gowned arm:

Kaspar, I have listened attentively to everything you had to say. Why don't you co-operate with me in my lonely vigil? I love peace as much as you but there will only be peace when Ananda is brought to the bar of justice. Kaspar, as a good American and as a devout Buddhist your duty is crystal clear ...

No sooner had he spoken when the whirring noise from the machine (or from inside his own head) diminished; the walls regained their rigid angles; the sensation of being inside a huge milk bottle ended. He looked up at Dr. Weiberholz stooping over him as he loosened the metal band clamped around his temples.

"Brainwashing me!" he shouted when he could speak. "Take me to the President!"

"You have seen the President, my dear Kaspar."

"I want to see the real President not the one you've cooked up!"

"Poor fellow, you are a very sick man."

"I'm not sick, you quack!"

"Sticks and stones," the doctor chided him. "Physically you are in good shape but, my friend, you are obsessed. No obsession in extremis is healthy. You have too many extreme views, my friend. That makes you sick."

Despite his anger at what was being done to him Kaspar had determined to be cool and collected (a resolution he had violated with marvelous consistency on that historic day) so taking a deep breath he apologized for calling the doctor a quack and asked what he meant by extreme views.

"You believe the Devil is a saint" Dr. Weiberholz said sternly. "Even if I were to believe in that sort of claptrap, I feel that at least my reactions would be normal in differentiating between Good and Evil, God and the Devil. And again, you believe that peace at any price is a good thing which surely is an abnormal and extreme reaction. In fact, my dear Kaspar, you are a very sick man."

"And how do you propose to cure me, doctor?"

"By implanting, although that's the wrong word, moderate views, balanced views." He gestured at the machines to which the monk was wired. "In another twenty-four hours we should have you cured. I assure you that once cured you will be a very grateful man."

"I don't want to be cured," Kaspar began in a low voice. "I don't want moderate views about your nuclear horrors! God damn you! Damn you all!" he shouted with rage. "You're the ones who are sick! Sick with power, sick with death!" And in his despair he called out for Ananda to save him.

Had Ananda been present if invisible? If so, he was visible now to both doctor and patient. Agitated as Kaspar was he felt a mean pleasure (unbecoming to a Buddhist, even to a lapsed Buddhist) to see the look on Dr. Weiberholz's face. The rosebud mouth had swallowed the habitual chuckle and seemed unhappy about it

Ananda was standing at the foot of the bed, his shaven skull glassily reflecting the overhead lights, his long, wide, cruel lips twisted at one corner in a tight, little smile. For the occasion he had changed his robe. This one wasn't orange in color but jet black, cuffed and hemmed in red.

"Who are you?" the astonished doctor cried.

"Hasn't Kaspar informed you who I am?"

It was an answer that brought no comfort to the man who had acknowledged his disbelief in devils of any kind. "Impossible!" he said in a high-pitched voice. "These Russians!" he muttered to himself and then loudly: "I don't know how you got past security, but you won't get out so easily!"

Before he could reach the emergency alarm-signal Ananda raised his arm, closed his fingers tight. The doctor, as if overtaken by some swift runner, resisted but was thrown to the floor. His lips moved but he was voiceless. He tried to rise and when he couldn't he screamed for help—voicelessly—and furious with himself, he probed at his mouth. He blew up his cheeks, poking at them and expelled the air they held. Unable to discover any scientific reasons for his loss of speech, he covered his face with his hands and wept like a baby, if soundlessly.

"For God's sake!" Kaspar pleaded. "Leave him alone!"

"For God's sake!" Ananda mimicked. "Would you reward your enemy because he happens to be a good man?"

"There's a limit!"

"There are no limits! 'If a man isn't prepared to be cruel,' the Mahabharata says, 'he can abandon all hope for great success.'"

"He's not a bad man, Ananda. He's sincere—"

"They're all sincere, the half-men, Dr. Weiberholz, and 'Call-me-Max,' and the great scientist who sits at his side. The crowds shouting, 'Remember Pearl Harbor! Remember Pebbles Creek!' are also sincere. But if sincerity brings death to all of us, is that good or evil?"

Kaspar glanced from the helpless doctor to the battery of machines. Quiet as the white-walled treatment room was he heard the crowds on Times Square marching in goose-step behind the generals and their scientists. Marching toward the volcanic mushrooms bursting in the skies ...

"Choose between us, Kaspar! Choose!"

(Did Kaspar nod his head or in any other way indicate that he preferred the Devil to the Deep Blue Sea? If so, there were no leaks to the communications media.)

"Choice is all!" Ananda said solemnly. "I have no alternative but to do good. But with peace I hope to forget this loathsome interlude in my life!"

His lips parted in a full smile and Kaspar shrank at the sight of those demonic teeth of his. As he stared they began to grow, getting longer and longer until his mouth could no longer contain them. They sprang out of his mouth like thin, white arms, the fingers at their ends poised like claws over the doctor. Hands over his eyes, the unfortunate Weiberholz rocked up and down, unseeing. The white claws pounced down on his head and body. The thin white arms, boneless like those of an octopus closed in on him.

Kaspar almost lost consciousness. He could hear someone sobbing—the someone was himself.

Strewn across the floor he looked at the pieces of what had once been a man, at torn-out limbs tossed about like those of a broken doll's, at a head with a shredded dripping red neck. The head lay in a pool of blood near the windows.

"The habits of a lifetime," he heard the Other saying.

And then the thin white arms, swift as light rays, shot over to the bloody pieces, picking them up and stuffing them into the gaping mouth. An instant later even the blood had vanished as if sponged from the floor; the treatment room spick-and-span; the thin white arms nowhere to be seen; the last red tooth retracting.

"I get these sudden urges," an apologetic voice declared as if the speaker were some unfastidious eater. "Disgusting to someone like you, my son. But who among us is perfect? At least I've been honest. Haven't I always told you that I intend to resume my normal way of life at the first opportunity? Now, let's go!"

"Go?"

"To Washington, of course! This country, the whole world needs a peace President..."

A FINAL WORD

Like some irresistible magnet the events of that extraordinary day attracted a hundred and one interpretations. With the passage of time the distinction between facts and un-facts has been all but obliterated. However, there was and there is today no dispute whatsoever on a number of undeniable truths.

First and foremost, war was averted by the President of the United States who, at a joint session of Congress convened on the morning following Pebbles Creek, withdrew his twenty-four-hour ultimatum to the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China.

It was a great, a magnificent speech, not for its language but for what it accomplished: the age-old dream of universal peace and more immediately a deliverance from the nuclear holocaust that ever since Hiroshima had threatened all mankind.

The President had never been an easy man with words and neither were his ghost writers who reflected his thinking, his style, his blunt approach to affairs of state: "I call a spade a spade," he had instructed his stable of ghosts after his inauguration, "and I don't want any fancy ribbons or nosegays ..." The concluding words of his great speech—"Let me therefore without further ado launch the pigeons of peace!"—was not an attempt to be original. The President, a life-long anti-Communist, had always been prejudiced against doves—fellow travelers so to speak—of the Russians and the Chinese.

Peace, however, is peace whether symbolized by pigeons or doves, or for that matter by ostriches.

If the preceding day had been apocalyptic, if the Four Horsemen of Death had threatened to drag all humanity into a common grave, the President's speech and his decisive actions hauled it out, shaken perhaps, but indubitably alive. There can be no argument here. The most important of the Presidential actions are listed below for the convenience of readers who will never consult a copy of the Congressional Record or open any of the Pebbles Creek books that have saturated the market.

1.The candid admission that the Pebbles Creek disaster was not caused by terrorists or foreign agents; that the agents were the Americans themselves; the first nuclear power who in her blind folly would usher in the Plutonium Age; and that he owed his own change of mind to William Kaspar: "A great American and an even greater humanitarian."

2. The announcement that all American nuclear facilities would be dismantled, all nuclear research and development terminated.

3. The immediate retirement of General Maxwell Samson and all other military, scientific and civilian personnel directly or indirectly connected with the Nuclear Establishment.

4. And, finally, the decision to fly to Moscow and Peking to urge the Russian and Chinese leaders to follow his own example.

What has remained unclear to the present day is the fact that even as the President was speaking in Washington, similar addresses by the Russian and Chinese leaders were being delivered in Moscow and Peking, including such remarkable coincidences (if such they were) in the very phrasing. Both the Secretary of the Soviet Union and the Chairman of the People's Republic of China spoke of: "launching the pigeons of peace."

There were, of course, national differences. The Russian Nuclear Establishment were arrested to a man; the Chinese Nuclear Establishment disappeared to reappear years later after rehabilitation.

Even more inexplicable were the strange events that took place that day in Washington, Moscow and Peking. The spontaneous peace parades were almost disrupted by hordes of insects led by wild-looking individuals, male and female, carrying banners with the slogan: WE TOO ARE AN ENDANGERED SPECIES. When these individuals were interviewed the one name they gave was that of Robinson, an American name, but certainly not typical of either Russian or Chinese names. They withheld all other information about themselves. They claimed to have no address, denied having any scientific training, biological, psychological or behavioral as if marshaling multitudes of insects in orderly parades was an inborn talent.

The peace parades in other cities and towns throughout the world went off without a hitch. There were no columns of cockroaches as in Washington, no flying formations of flies as in Moscow, no regiments of ants as in Peking.

While mankind was celebrating what surely could be called the first global holiday, the police in New York continued their investigations with meager results. The disappearance of Dr. Weiberholz, the last man to see Kaspar, has never been solved. Kaspar's escape from N.E.C.A.B.I. headquarters, to this day, cannot be explained by any reasonable theory. The N.E.C.A.B.I., despite its voluminous files on Kaspar supplied by its operatives (including the M.O.'s or "machine operatives" as the press called these inhuman agents), were as baffled as the police.

There were numerous other blind alleys. Although the N.E.C.A.B.I. had a detailed description of the office of the Oriental Importing Company—the result of monitoring Kaspar's brain waves—their agents, on entering the premises, were confronted by bare walls. There was no rolltop desk and swivel chair, no nineteenth-century ottoman built by Johannes Kaspar, no bizarre tapestry, no Tantrist tanka. All they found were a few blue-colored feathers on the floor.

Needless to say, hundreds of witnesses, particularly in the first days of peace, claimed that they had seen the missing Buddhist monk. There was an incredible report from Rome typical of a score of others. A Roman citizen, one Georgio Malocchio, and his girl friend, Alda Tedesco, wandering in the deserted Colosseum toward midnight testified that they had witnessed a reddish cloud descending out of the sky. A few seconds later four ghostly figures—three men and a woman—emerged from the cloud. The woman, according to the Italian couple, was stark naked and red of skin—"Like the Indians of the Wild West!" Georgio Malocchio swore—"and the reddish light was emanating from her skin." The woman's male companions included a tall man in a blue jacket with a pigeon perched on each shoulder; a Negro monk in a light-colored robe; and an Oriental in a black robe. Seating themselves on one of the ancient stone benches, the black-robed monk lifted his hand and instantly the vast Colosseum was illuminated with an eerie, reddish light and was no longer deserted. In Georgio Malocchio's words, which would be broadcasted throughout the world: "The Colosseum was as crowded as St. Peter's on the Eve of Christmas! Millions of ghosts with blood on their faces and bodies were all around us. Mother of God, it was terrible to see them! Down below in the arena thousands of gladiators with nets and swords and tridents were fighting as in the days of the Caesars."

When questioned if he had any idea who the ghosts were and why they had congregated together, he replied with an oracular assurance that stunned the telecaster: "They were the ghosts of people killed in war, in all the wars. The ghosts of the Jewish slaves who built the Colosseum, the ghosts of Negro slaves, the ghosts of all who have suffered at the hands of men. The ghosts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the ghosts of Pebbles Creek ..."

He spoke, as the telecaster stated, like a man possessed.

Within a few weeks the first of the hastily written Pebbles Creek books appeared. There were the books written by eyewitnesses who had actually seen Kaspar on the day when the Pebbles Creek facility blew up. The three black teen-agers who had attacked Kaspar wrote a book—with the help of Robert Binkly, well known for his authoritative biographies of Marilyn Monroe and other celebrities—called We Mugged Kaspar. Kaspar's brothers in Buddha, after consulting with their spiritual advisers, agreed that Kaspar's roommate at the Monastery, should speak for all of them. The result was the best-selling, The Bodhisattva W. Kaspar, subtitled, The Lord Buddha and the Evil One.

Today, world opinion is divided between the millions, including Pope Clement XVI, who are inclined to a mystical or supernatural interpretation of the events that ushered in an age of peace, and those who believe that there is always a rational, scientific explanation for everything under the sun. The Devil, as the Pope declared, for sinister purposes of his own has withheld his hand from total destruction. The rationalists, many of them, have accepted the N.E.C.A.B.I. Interventionist Theory, which, briefly described, argues that Superior Beings from some unknown planet where war has been abolished had elected themselves to serve as peace missionaries to the Earth.

The one completely factual account of the day that shook the world is the one I have reported in these pages. As I write these words I am sure that even the dullest reader must have guessed who I am.

Yes, call me Ananda, the second Ananda, but let me repeat that I was forced to do good.

Self-preservation, reader!

Once again I can be myself. Kama Mara, the Evil One, the Lord of Things!

The one thing I fear is the devil-in-man. I swear on all that is unholy that if need be, I will return and find another Bodhisattva through whom I can act.

And with this promise I conclude my report—the one, truthful report!—with the phrase used in so many old fairy tales: "And they lived happily ever after ..."

The End