Here is an exuberant and funny story about death.

 

* * * *

 

Here Is Thy Sting

by John Jakes

 

 

Sometimes, too, warmed by the fire, Shakespeare stayed downstairs all night . . .

“Rest, rest, don’t fight so,” Judith whispered to him once.

“I can’t rest,” he answered, “while the black beast waits for me.”

 

—Robert Payne, The Roaring Boys

 

I

 

His brother came home from the Moon in an economy coffin, on a night when the meteorological bureau decided on rain. Something went wrong, as it frequently did. The April mist turned to a black, blinding downpour.

 

Through the shed’s thick windows all peppered with rain, Cassius could just discern the vertical pillars of fire that grew thinner, thinner still, then flamed out. Rain hummed and slashed. It was a foul night for such a painful, intensely personal errand.

 

As the transport rocket settled into its concrete bed far out there, a dozen haul trucks raced from all directions toward its unfolding ramps. Then there seemed to be a collision. Headlamps tilted crazily. Men ran this way and that. A controller wigwagged his glowing red wands hysterically.

 

“Wild buncha cowboys,” grumbled the Freight Customs official. “Next? Hey, you.”

 

Parcels, crates, cylinders, drums were spilling down a dozen chutes from the rocket. Which was Timothy? Cassius turned from the window as the official called out again. He stepped up to the booth. The official’s uniform was damp, wool-stinking. His expression was cross. Cassius recalled hearing the man ahead of him argue loudly with the official. He felt he should have chosen another queue, but it was too late.

 

“Okay, buddy, what’s yours?”

 

“I’m picking up my brother,” Cassius said.

 

The official mugged his disgust. “Oh for Christ’s—the next shed is passenger, mister.”

 

Cassius said, “You don’t understand. My brother was —that is, he’s dead. His body is on the rocket.”

 

“Oh.” The official blinked. “Name?”

 

“Cassius Andrews. Here’s my News Guild card and my personal digit card if you need identification.”

 

“His name, his name.”

 

“The Reverend Timothy Andrews.” Cassius tried to scan the upside-down manifest on the counter. “Maybe the shipment is listed under the Ecumenical Brothers. They paid his stipend at the Moon camp. He was stabbed trying to break up a knife fight between two miners, and the Brothers arranged to ship his—”

 

Reading down the lines, the official waved his hand to cut off the talk. Cassius felt sheepish. What did the man care about details of a family death? Nothing, of course.

 

When at last the official had ticked off the proper box with a checkmark and raised his dull eyes to stare through the wicket, he was no longer merely bored. He was plainly resentful. Of my mentioning dead people on such a miserable night? Cassius wondered.

 

“Mister,” said the official, almost triumphantly, “whoever prepaid the body at Moonramp made a mistake. Underweighed by thirty-six pounds. There’s extra duty due. Dozen point five credits.”

 

Cassius fumbled inside his raincloak. “I’ll be glad to pay it.”

 

“You gotta see the adjustments manager. Three doors down. Next!”

 

The dismissal was so peremptory that Cassius, ordinarily a mild-tempered man, flushed. He was about to make a nasty retort. Then he recalled his own recurring dream. It tormented him twice or three times a week, regularly. He sighed and took the punched card from the official’s hand.

 

Nobody liked to be bothered with death. Especially not in such rotten, depressing weather. Cassius could understand how the official felt.

 

Out another window he noticed that the haul truck tangle had been straightened out. The various crates, parcels and containers were being picked up by vehicles operated by the big and small land freight companies. Cassius had made no arrangements for transportation. But he’d been told that an on-the-spot haul service was for hire. He intended to send Timothy’s body directly to the headquarters of the Brothers, where they had a chapel.

 

After the memorial service due all missionaries who died violent deaths—and many still did, in the lonely, rotgut-happy camps on the Moon and around Marsville Basin—Timothy would be interred with their mother and father in the family plot in Virginia. Timothy would have been, let’s see, two years younger than Cassius, who was forty-two.

 

The adjustments manager had another client. Cassius lingered in the hall. He tried to restrain his impatience, then his anger. He had the eerie feeling that official stupidity was conspiring against him to delay the obligatory reunion with his brother.

 

After spending twenty minutes in the corridor, Cassius finally got to see the adjustments manager. The idiot didn’t have the appropriate rate book at hand. That took another five minutes. Cassius paid the excess duty, watched while the manager thumbed his Hilton Bank card into a machine along with a triplicate invoice. At last he was given a pass to the pickup area.

 

He walked across the concrete in the slashing rain. He had already decided that he’d damn well write an expose of the mismanagement at Dulles Interplanetary and file it with the feature editor. God, there was enough bumbling bureaucracy here for ten exposes.

 

But the idea passed quickly.

 

Long ago Cassius had recognized and accepted his limitations. He seldom dreamed any more of writing the news story or series that would catapult him to fame.

 

There were eight hundred reporters on the Capitol World Truth. Out of these, a top dozen received around eighteen thousand credits per annum. They wrote all the expose pieces of the type Cassius was imagining. Cassius himself earned a meager twelve two, almost the Guild minimum. Years ago he’d been slotted by Hughgenine, his editor, as a competent man to handle a section of the vast Alexandria suburban news beat. The Parent and Teaching Machine Association was his bailiwick. Well, he said to himself, the expose was a good thought, anyway.

 

Dread came then.

 

The rain-soaked handler blinked at the receipt. “I seen it here a while ago, okay. But there ain’t many items left and I don’t see it now.”

 

Cassius stared around the open shed. “I was delayed in the terminal. It must be here. It’s a coffin.”

 

“I know, I seen it. We had a real mess out here tonight, mister. Some jerky new driver rammed into a couple of the other pickup rigs. Maybe Elmo knows. Hey, Elmo?”

 

Elmo was fat and officious. “Sure, I seen it. The driver picked it up.”

 

“What driver?” Cassius snapped.

 

“Just who the hell are you, mister?”

 

“The man’s brother.”

 

“Oh, okay. Keep your pants on.” Elmo thumbed his flash. He riffled his tickets. Then he extended the packet, less blustery. “Ain’t that the nuts? The part of the ticket showin’ the name of the carrier is torn off. Oh boy, things are sure screwed up tonight, man, oh man.”

 

Cassius raged and fumed and promised official vengeance for a full fifteen minutes. He turned out half the minor bureaucracy of the receiving department, to no good end. The coffin was gone.

 

Someone had stolen his brother’s corpse.

 

“It’s crazy!” he sputtered. Cowlike faces ringed him. “Who would steal a preacher’s body? It’s absolutely senseless.”

 

No one answered. Cassius looked past the rain-lashed men. They were strangely nervous. Perhaps because of a theft; the rain; the accident and mix-ups and their obliviousness to the pickup driver. Or perhaps they were quiet because the situation had been further complicated by death.

 

Out beyond the concrete beds where the Sino-Russian Line was preparing to launch its evening shipment, Cassius saw the multileveled tangle of roads leading from the field, rising to merge with the ten broad lanes of the Washington Belt. Up one of those ramps and onto that highway had gone an unknown truck, carrying a stolen corpse.

 

“Crazy,” Cassius said again. “You’ll hear about this.” He stalked off in the rain.

 

What indecent maniac would take such elaborate pains to pilfer the corpse of a man of God from a public place? Cassius was at once afraid he’d come in contact with some sinister group of madmen. Only later, when hindsight began to operate, did he analyze his reaction more deeply. He knew later that what had really troubled him was the fear that those who’d stolen the body were not crazy but perfectly, if esoterically, sane.

 

Lurching along in the rain, Cassius didn’t know what he was going to do about the theft. But he was positive he was going to do something.

 

* * * *

 

II

 

The trip to his apartment in Alexandria would require the better part of an hour. Cassius decided to put the time to use.

 

After he jockeyed his Ford Aircoupe to the hook-on with the magnetic strip, he dialed the tinted shell. The shell closed around the seat blister, shutting out the dazzle of thousands of headlamps in the oncoming lanes. Cassius rang up the headquarters of the Ecumenical Brothers in downtown Washington. The paper had paid for installing the minimum-screen visor in his car.

 

Presently a sleepy, clerical-collared face appeared.

 

“This is Reverend Tooker speaking. Yes?”

 

“I’m sorry to disturb you, Reverend.”

 

“Quite all right. Tonight’s my shift in the B-complex free kitchen. How can I help you?”

 

The cleric was unfamiliar. But so was Timothy’s whole life, practically. Cassius hadn’t seen his brother in twelve years. That didn’t lessen his sense of duty and outrage:

 

“Reverend, I’m Cassius Andrews. I just came from Dulles where I planned to pick up Timothy’s body. There seems to have been a mixup. Did you by any chance send a hauler from your building to fetch it?”

 

“No, Mr. Andrews. We understood you wished to take delivery. Wasn’t our departed brother on the rocket?”

 

“He was. But somebody stole the coffin.”

 

Reverend Tooker at once launched into theologically tinged commiseration. Cassius listened politely. But he knew he’d get no help from the white-haired divine. Most of Tooker’s sincere and sympathetic talk about Timothy’s service on the Moon, his dying a violent death in the service of the Creator and His Son, to Cassius was neither here nor there. Long ago he’d abandoned any concern with religion.

 

While the Reverend eulogized Timothy, Cassius drifted off into other realms. Timothy had been a shy, dreamy boy in their childhood. He had been passionately religious, in contrast to Cassius who was passionately secular. For no special reason, Cassius was stung with somber recollections of his boyhood dreams of becoming a famous newsman and correspondent.

 

“—can only suggest you contact the police,” Reverend Tooker concluded.

 

“Yes, I planned to do that next.”

 

“Please come into the chapel at any time if we can be of help in your hour of trial,” the Reverend said.

 

“Yes, I’ll do that too, thanks.” That was a lie. Cassius rang off. There was no point in telling the gentle, simple old fellow that he was becoming convinced Timothy’s body had been pilfered by some sort of sex ghoul cult. A cult which—God help his brother—must be massively organized.

 

The Ford Aircoupe whizzed along on its thin pillars of air, halfway to Alexandria now. Cassius dialed the central police switchboard.

 

They were officially receptive, properly angry. Somehow, though, the conversation seemed routine. Cassius doubted the police would learn anything new when their operatives visited the freight sheds. The rain, the accident caused by the inexperienced driver, the resulting confusion, all had worked together to effectively blot out the trail of the body snatchers.

 

The Aircoupe was on the less crowded feeder belt over the polluted Potomac. The hour was growing late. In spite of that, Cassius dialed another number. He didn’t want to be completely alone tonight. He found that Joy was home.

 

“That’s terrible, Cassius,” she said. He thought she was sincere. Joy was nearing forty, rather chubby-faced and a little ferret-eyed in the wrong light. Basically she was pretty, if grown stocky now that she’d given up hope of marriage and settled on a career. “Would you like me to come over?”

 

Rain hammered black, lonely, on the Aircoupe bubble.

 

“Could you, Joy? It’ll take you an hour, I know. I really would like company. I can cook some eggs. You can stay the night.”

 

“I wish I might, sweets. But the piece I’m working on is due tomorrow. I’ve unearthed some positively fantabulous little gimmicks in re what to do with leftover paper undies. They make the cutest buffers for a dusting robot and—oh dear. Forgive me. This is a terrible time to talk shop.”

 

“That’s all right.” He forgave her. One of Joy’s failings was a kind of compulsion to seek editorial paydirt in any situation, even lovemaking. Once in the middle of the night Joy had: suddenly interrupted everything, sat up and jotted down some notes on a simply fantabulous position a housewife might use to relax her calf muscles. He added, “You don’t have to stay the night, then.”

 

“I can’t, dear. As I say, this little piece is due. Cassius!”

 

“What, Joy?”

 

“You don’t suppose there’s anything in this theft, do you? Oh, I realize the moment is very trying for you. But could we make anything out of it?”

 

“I doubt that it’s Joy de Veever’s cup of tea,” he replied. “Nor mine either. I also have a sinking feeling the cops are going to get nowhere. To tell the truth, Joy, this business has some nasty overtones. I’m not sure I want to pursue it myself.”

 

The screened face grew bright-eyed. He might have been irritated if he hadn’t understood that her query sprang from her compulsive professionalism. But only in part. He knew from their years of pleasant liaison that she was, at bottom, kindly.

 

“But you will pursue it, won’t you, Cassius?”

 

“Yes, I suppose I must. Provided I can figure out where to turn next.”

 

“We’ll think of something. See you in an hour, sweets.” And the screen blurred out.

 

Cassius occupied a one-room flat on the eighty-seventh floor of one of fifteen cluster buildings in a small Alexandria development. Decelerating for the hook-off, Cassius saw a familiar sprawl of towers just this side of his own project. The towers dwarfed the other units in the district. They were the local project of the Securo Corporation.

 

Securo, a private firm started ten years ago by a contractor and a professor of psychology, provided co-op living for young marrieds but added a fillip: all conceivable services, including mortgage, burial and educational insurance were included in one payment for the benefit of the occupants, who signed a lifetime contract. All across the country and everywhere abroad, Securo was building similar projects, but not fast enough for the demand.

 

Down at the paper, the boys, fancying themselves rather independent souls, referred to a Securo flat as a womb to tomb room, since many young parents were already willing their living space to their infants, to provide them maximum protection against the buffetings of fate.

 

Now, riding in the dark rain, Cassius shuddered a little as the lights of the Securo tract flashed past. There was something to be said for knowing you were protected, especially on unpleasant nights like this. And the newsmen weren’t all that independent, either. The last Guild negotiations had lasted eighteen weeks, because management initially refused to include podiatry benefits in the package. Everyone wanted to be safe. Sometimes Cassius clucked his tongue, but sometimes too he sympathized.

 

Unlike Securo, Cassius’s landlords offered only the standard auto, theft and major medical insurance with their flats. Cassius’s place was a litter of books and the other paraphernalia of bachelor untidiness.

 

He opened two packages of Birdseye Brawny Breakfasts, watched while the fried eggs and bacon began to mushroom from the tiny white capsules. Joy wouldn’t be arriving for a while yet. He drew the curtain around the cook unit and went to the bookcase to get his diary.

 

Faithfully he recorded the events of the evening. As a younger man he’d imagined he might be a latter-day Pepys. Now he wrote in the book out of habit more than anything, though occasionally he admitted to himself that what he was doing was hoping with words and phrases that a third-rate newspaperman could gain a slim remembrance after he died.

 

Someone might come across the diary among his effects, for instance. Recognize the burning perceptiveness and, lo! long after he was buried, elevate the name of Cassius Andrews to the heights of—

 

Rats. He knew it was idle foolishness. The prose was clear but mundane. It in no sense burned. Still, he wrote in the diary every night.

 

Joy de Veever arrived within an hour. Her evening wig, slightly awry, was an exotic purple to match her lip rouge. She hugged him briefly. They sat down to eat, Joy rather noisily and untidily. It was comforting to have her present.

 

Her real name was Joy Gollchuk. The editors believed, probably rightly, that Joy de Veever was the sort of byline housewives preferred in a helpful hints column. She shared a cell at the Capitol World Truth with a pert sixty-year-old grandmother named Mrs. Swartzmore, who reviewed films under the name Ma Cine.

 

“Really (munch munch), Cassius (swallow), this is the most despicable type thing I’ve ever (swallow) heard of. Stealing a body indeed! A Holy Joe’s body, too.”

 

“I don’t get mad about the minister part so much as over the fact that he was my brother. I feel an obligation not to let the whole thing pass.”

 

“Maybe (swallow) it’s some sort of obscene ring operating.”

 

“I’ve wondered that. It’s actually the reason I’m slightly leery of pushing too far. But I know in the long run I can’t let the possibility stop me.”

 

“Tell me again what the police said.”

 

“That they’ll do their best. I don’t doubt it. But I was there tonight, Joy. The handlers felt sorry about it, sure. Things were obviously in such a confused state that they could do nothing beyond what they did. Which was, admit someone drove in, picked up Timothy’s coffin with false papers, then drove away again.”

 

Joy’s eyes glittered. She leaned near. “Did you ask for police cooperation?”

 

“Didn’t I just tell you?”

 

“Not about that, silly. I mean cooperation in case there’s a juicy story behind—oh. You’re offended.”

 

“No I’m not.”

 

“Juicy was a bad word. I’m sorry, sweets. But there might be a piece in it for you, Cassius. Sort of a memorial to your brother, you might say,” hastily justifying herself. “After all, dear, let’s face it. You’re not the world’s hottest reporter. You could use some self-promotion.”

 

“Joy, after a while a man knows what he is and isn’t.”

 

“Oh come on, Cassius! Don’t you have any drive to assert yourself?”

 

He thought of the diary. He glanced at a collection of file card holders on the self-suspending bookshelves. He frowned.

 

“Of course. But it doesn’t come out in trying to make hay from what’s happened to Timothy.”

 

Joy crunched a last morsel of bacon. “Well, you certainly won’t do yourself any good with that silly biography you’ve been working on for six years. The poor man’s been written about in eleven different volumes.”

 

“Twelve,” Cassius corrected. “As you know, I’ve discovered some new angles which might—”

 

“Enshrine you with posterity?” Joy smiled. “Cassius, really.”

 

“I wasn’t going to say that.”

 

“It’s what you meant, though.”

 

“Joy, I like working on the book,” he said. “How did we get on this subject?”

 

For a moment anger sparked in his rather downturning brown eyes. He controlled the anger. Not a major effort at all. He gripped her hand across the fold-up table.

 

“Joy, if I didn’t know so well that you can’t help hunting for angles any more than a cat can help chasing a mouse, I’d get damned mad at you sometimes.”

 

“Yes, you do understand me,” she said gently. “Which is more than I do for you most of the time, I must confess.”

 

He squeezed her hand. “Thanks for coming tonight.”

 

“I apologize for calling your book silly, dear.”

 

“I don’t mind. So long as you realize I’ll keep right on working on it.”

 

For a moment Joy’s eyes were shadowed. “Still have the dream?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“That’s the reason for the book, isn’t it?”

 

“Um, partly, I guess.”

 

“I don’t have any dreams like that, Cassius. But I suppose I run after stories for the same reason too.”

 

“Yes.”

 

Suddenly she snapped her fingers. The cocktail zircon on her right hand flashed back the rays of the solar panels which lit the room. “I just had the most marvelous idea. If you get no satisfaction from the police, why don’t you go right to the W.B.I?”

 

“Are you out of your mind? I don’t know anybody down there.”

 

“What difference does that make? Go straight to the director himself! If you ask me, Cassius, this theft sounds downright sinister. Maybe the Neo-Leninists are making a comeback.”

 

“And you suggest I waltz right in and state my case to Flange himself?”

 

“That’s not as impossible as it sounds. I was talking to Charlie Pelz yesterday over morning vitamins.”

 

“Charlie Pelz?”

 

“Oh, you know. He does those Black Museum pieces on Sundays for the true-crime nuts. Charlie said he was down to the W.B.I. Building last week and it’s practically turned into an old people’s home. Offices empty. Men sitting around doing nothing. He asked whether he could see Flange’s assistant a moment, to get a comment on a story he was writing, and he almost dropped over when the secretary said Flange had no appointments all day, why didn’t Charlie talk to him? So you try him. Maybe this unstable world peace is more stable than we think.”

 

Cassius chewed his lip. “I don’t know who could set it up for me.”

 

“I tell you, Charlie Pelz said no one had to set it up! Flange was so unbusy even a bootboy could get in to see him.”

 

Although he rejected the idea as slightly ludicrous, Cassius nevertheless filed it away. He and Joy finished their caffeine water with a rehash of the mysterious events out at Dulles. It got them nowhere. She kissed him neatly and rather moistly on the cheek, squeezed his arm, and he ushered her to the door.

 

“Must run, sweets, but I do hope you sleep well. Try not to fret over what’s happened.”

 

“I have to find out what happened to Timothy, Joy. I must.”

 

“Of course. Take my suggestion, though. Thinking about the W.B.I. And Cassius—” Again the eyes, rimmed in purple mascara, glittered. Consolation went out the window, replaced by professionalism. “—if there is anything in it, a hot tidbit either one of us could use—oh, I know I sound terribly crass, but after all, you have only one life to live and you have to make the best of it.”

 

“That’s right,” Cassius said, hiding laughter. “Good night, Joy. And thanks.”

 

Poor girl, he thought when she’d gone. Imagines one day the story will fall into her lap. He’d never had the courage to tell her, as she repeatedly told him, that her talent was small.

 

Oh, she could do a major story, all right. But the material for the story would have to drop from heaven. She’d never find it picking around among new uses for paper undies in the home. Perhaps he’d continued their liaison so long because, unlike Joy, he had realized his personal limits and therefore could feel gently, privately superior.

 

After a vigorous rubdown with a pre-wetted shower cloth he pulled a switch. His bed rose from the floor. He awoke an hour later, snuffling and breathing violently, an ache in his chest.

 

The dream had returned.

 

* * * *

 

III

 

It was a dream of himself running, mile after slow-motion mile, while the dog snapped at his heels.

 

The dog was twice as long as a man. Its claws were like sharp iron files. Its fangs were like white spikes. Its yellow eyes were the only two blazes of color in the gray waste where he was pursued.

 

He’d dreamed the dream regularly for about six years. It had begun about the time he had first noticed at cocktail parties that people were talking with low voices and embarrassed laughter about how short all the days seemed, how rapidly they flew. People his own age. He knew what the dog represented.

 

Knowing, however, didn’t relieve the after-effects of the nightmare. It only intensified them.

 

Hastily Cassius threw back the coverlet. He turned on the lights and started to work cross-indexing notes and snippets for his book. The project was probably futile, as Joy maintained. Twelve books had been published on the same subject already.

 

The book was to be a biography of Colonel Robin Delyev. He was the officer responsible for leading the combined American-Russian shock forces which repelled the initial invasion of Puerto Rico by the Chinese, sixty years ago. All Delyev and his thousand troops had to work with was a storehouse full of antiquated U.S. personal missile launchers.

 

Poring and poking at the National Archives, Cassius had stumbled across some new materials. They had been misfiled: seven hitherto unpublished letters, four long, three no more than notes but revealing nonetheless, written by Delyev to the Pentagon just before the Colonel’s death. Headily Cassius had realized that none of the other twelve biographers had included the letters. And they added fresh insights into Delyev’s brilliant deployment of his meager forces.

 

The majority of the book Cassius planned to draw from the secondary sources, re-slanting it to his own rather scholarly, restrained style of writing. The volume would contain most of the anecdotes already available, such as the one about the night in the Chinese consulate in Chicago, before the war, when Delyev drank too much and made the epigrammatic speech which earned him the nickname “Old Rattling Rockets.” But the book, his book alone, would also contain the seven letters. Provided he finished the draft fairly soon, and got it submitted to a publisher.

 

Cassius knew that even when the volume was published, if it ever was, it would be relatively obscure in the crowded market; read only by those faithful who would always buy one more work on a subject that interested them. Cassius had no illusions. But he did believe that the fresh insights contained in the letters might add one small grain of truth to the world’s accumulation as it related to the dead Delyev.

 

Besides, the book almost demanded to be written, worthy or not. It demanded writing especially in the lonely hours after he dreamed about the slavering dog who ran so slowly, yet so remorselessly, at his heels.

 

He labored on, a lonely figure in his small box of an apartment, alone in the night, alone in the rain, ignored but uncaring, until he finally crawled back to bed around four and slept untroubled until dawn.

 

Next day, he conferred personally with the Washington police.

 

They were investigating, yes, certainly. But to be honest, they’d interviewed several dozen people at Dulles and gotten nowhere. They would certainly keep trying, yes. There might be something decidedly sinister behind the theft. They would call him.

 

At lunch in the newspaper mess, Joy reminded him about the W.B.I. Cassius felt a little silly. But the obvious impending failure of the local police angered him. He took the afternoon off and rode the belts over.

 

As Charlie Pelz had promised, he was admitted to the Director’s office without question or hesitancy. And to fulfill the rest of the prophecy, Cassius actually felt exactly like falling over on his face in utter surprise.

 

Not over getting in. Over what he saw after he got there.

 

* * * *

 

IV

 

R. Ripley Flange, the mastiff-chinned Director of the World Bureau of Investigation, was sitting at his broad desk, feet up, throwing darts.

 

One whizzed perilously close to Cassius’s head as he closed the door. Cassius flinched. The iron spike of the dart thudded into the door. On it a paper bull’s-eye had been nailed, the large nails carelessly driven into the lustrous patina of the obviously antique and priceless wood. Even the newly-refurbished White House had been pannelled in polystyrene. For a genuine wood door to be pocked with thousands of dart and nail holes amounted to desecration.

 

“Sorry,” Flange said. He grinned in a sleepy way. “I’m rather on the track of a big one. Fourteen bull’s-eyes this morning. Best yet.”

 

Edgily, Cassius sat down. The Director sighed, laid aside his dart case and tented his hands. He tried to frown with interest. Cassius had the uncanny feeling that the Director was peering straight through him, as though he were one of those model-kit men, wholly transparent.

 

“What can I do for you, sir? Care to apply for a position as a special operative? We have dozens of openings.” The heavy lips, which had once sneered so heroically out of simulcast screens during the lectures on Chinese subversion in the bedding industry, now pursed out in what Cassius could only describe as a careless, thoroughly lazy way.

 

“No, sir, I didn’t come about a job.”

 

“Some crime then, I’ll bet.” Flange sounded unhappy. “Isn’t that it?”

 

“I hate to bother you, sir. The local police seem so overburdened, and unable to make any headway. You see, sir, my brother’s body has disappeared.”

 

“Pity.” Flange was restlessly eyeing a wall bookcase in which stood nearly a hundred copies of the inexpensive five-credit polybound edition of Flange’s magnum opus, Alert! The Yellow Underground Is Attacking. “I’m certain we can help you. Many more resources open these days. Laboratories, so forth. International crime, I take it?”

 

“I’m not sure what it is, sir. Perhaps I should talk to someone else in the Bureau.”

 

“No, no, I’ll handle it.” Flange frowned. “I suppose it is my responsibility, after all. Now where are those damned forms?”

 

And he grumbled and rumbled through his desk, his hands shaking in a palsied way. Cassius fidgeted. He felt hot, embarrassed. There was something wrong with the old fellow. Where was the lion’s roar for justice, the eagle’s scream for watchfulness? Gone was the ferocity that had made Flange a legend, whether you cared for his style of operation or not.

 

At last the Director produced a paper, incredibly frayed.

 

“Well, I found one report form, anyway. I’d send you to someone else, except my deputy director has gone to Las Vegas and I haven’t heard from him in four months. That’s all right, though. He needed a rest.”

 

Cassius had an urge to bolt and run. Had the W.B.I, turned into a rest home for its obviously mentally infirm chief?

 

“Something about a brother’s body, wasn’t it?” said Flange.

 

The peculiar situation would have been laughable had Cassius not suspected there was something unpleasant lurking just under the surface. Flange’s weird mood made it impossible for him to generate very much righteous rage as he rattled off a bare sketch of the mixup at Dulles Interplanetary, the theft of Timothy’s remains. Once in a while Range’s pen jerked, marking appropriate box or space.

 

“Distressing,” Flange said at the end, with patent insincerity. “Yes, I see. Body theft.”

 

“I thought it might possibly have some international implications. That’s why I came to you. Of course I’m also anxious personally to make whoever did it pay up.”

 

“Naturally. We’ll put our best men on it right away. What’s your office digit?”

 

Cassius repeated the eighteen numerals which included his extension. While Flange wrote down the figures with his right hand, his left strayed like a spider over to the dart case, then drummed on the edge. Cassius rose abruptly. He couldn’t stand any more. The old man was senile and no one had the heart to remove him from office, that was it.

 

Also, Cassius felt with a certainty that stoked his determination to a new height, that R. Ripley Flange had no intention of putting his best men on it. Or maybe even any men, period. The Washington police wanted to try but were overworked. Flange simply didn’t care.

 

“Visor you as soon as we have anything. Get right on it, yes we will.” Flange was slumped in his throne chair like a punctured balloon. His hand drummed on the dart case, drummed.

 

“Don’t you want any more details? I only gave you the essentials a minute ago.” Flange, though obviously sick, was beginning to infuriate him.

 

“We have enough, we have plenty, best men. Visor you.”

 

* * * *

 

After several weeks Cassius even gave up hoping. He discussed it over vitamins with Charlie Pelz one afternoon. Charlie agreed that things were sure strange at the W.B.I. The place appeared understaffed. Moribund. He could offer no explanation other than the one Cassius had already come up with—Flange was such a fixture that the government was almost conscience-bound to await his death with something like unquestioning reverence.

 

Cassius agreed. He thought privately that it was distressing to watch the disintegration of a person’s drive as old age crept in.

 

But Cassius didn’t badger Flange or the W.B.I. Indeed, he forgot them. At the end of the fourth week following Timothy’s disappearance, a few other curious things had pushed their way into his mind. They had no bearing on Timothy, probably. But they were the kinds of things which he, on the paper, was in a position to pursue a bit without the aid of sad old men who were once mighty tigers but who were now all gums and no guts.

 

What first put Cassius on the trail was the peculiar and shocking concert of Madame Kagle.

 

* * * *

 

V

 

By intermission the shock was profound. Cassius noted its beginnings in the unusual amount of head-turning while Madame Kagle ran through The Joint M.I.T. Faculty Sonata, never missing a note but missing the fire of it altogether.

 

No one was so impolite as to gasp during the second selection, Oodner’s Peripheral Stimuli. But Cassius saw mouths hanging open all up and down his row. No music critic, Cassius had nevertheless seen plenty of photos of the celebrated Kagle attack. At its best it was a savagely bow-shaped posture above the keyboard of the harpsivac. It emphasized the woman’s boniness and made her resemble, some said, a fairy-tale witch maniacally searching for the touchstone in a casketful of junk beads. Out of such agonized personal involvement, great music was wrenched.

 

Except this evening.

 

Madame Wanda Kagle sat perfectly straight. She was watching the one hundred thirty-six keys, all right. But she was glass-eyed. Her mouth, like many in the audience, hung open in a peculiar slack-lipped indifference. The applause at the end of the first half of the program was thin.

 

Stumbling and shoving up the aisle for a quick smoke, Cassius and Joy heard all around them whispered comments such as: “Unbelievable.” “Lackluster.” “Crushingly disappointing.” They pushed out into the vast foyer of the Sports Dome. The roof was rolled back to the stars and warm night breezes. Joy waited for her smoke to pop fire, inhaled and said:

 

“The old babe must be close on sixty. Wonder if she’s slipping. Maybe she has to key up with amphets, and forgot.”

 

“That’s a bad pun,” Cassius said. “I’d guess she was loaded with booze if it wasn’t common knowledge that she very nearly lives like a saint. I read somewhere that she’s even tried hypnotism to push everything out of her mind but her music.”

 

“She certainly succeeded,” Joy answered. “That was pure claptrap in there. She couldn’t have been less interested.”

 

“This puts a little different complexion on going to the reception afterward,” Cassius mused. “Ordinarily I wouldn’t be much interested in using those chits Greeheim gave you along with the tickets. I don’t know beans about music. Or about how to get along with musical coteries, either.”

 

Joy’s eyes glittered. “For God’s sake, Cassius, you can pretend, can’t you? You could even make ‘em think you’re the regular critic. Fake it a little. Just sneer. Greeheim isn’t that well known yet. He’s only been with the paper a few months. I certainly don’t want to insult him when he gets over his illness by telling him we used the tickets but not the party passes.”

 

The crowd was beginning to stir, pushing back to the entrance ramps for the second half. “You won’t have to tell him,” Cassius grinned. “In the light of that first half, I wouldn’t miss seeing Madame K. close up for anything. Maybe we’ll get a hint of what’s wrong with her.”

 

“Now you’re talking!” Joy said, eyes sharp as awls.

 

As they fought the aisle battle on the way to their seats, Cassius considered telling Joy the real reason for his curiosity. She was on one of her imaginary scents again, hoping she’d unearth some hot exclusive. While Cassius, on the other hand, had stared at Madame Kagle and seen something else entirely—

 

A ghostly twin image of the vast, weary indifference of R. Ripley Flange.

 

Lights dimmed. Madame Kagle appeared from the wings. She seemed to stumble. Like a sleepwalker she approached the bench of the harpsivac. She sat down. She dry-washed her hands, as if warming them. Joy was noisily rippling the pages of the program, twisting it to get light. She hissed, “Oh boy, this’ll be fantabulous. The Algebraic Suite. It’s one of my favorites.”

 

But there was to be no Algebraic Suite. Madame Kagle seemed frozen at the console. A look of supreme sorrow came onto her aging features. It was immediately replaced by a sly, mocking smile. Moving with the painful lethargy of the arthritic—which she definitely was not— Madame Kagle rose. She circled the harpsivac and yanked the plug from the floor socket. The thousands of tiny multicolored lights on the banked tonal computers simultaneously went black.

 

Madame Kagle cast a tired glance at the shocked audience. She lifted her right shoulder in the smallest shrug. She sauntered off the stage.

 

Once the curtain dropped and the impossible became a fact, the crowd was as silent as mourners entering a mortuary. There were hushed little speculations about narcotics, insanity, sex, religion, gall bladder, dropsy, thrombosis, poor investment counseling and so forth. People seemed reluctant to move from the foyer onto the broad piazza outside the Sports Dome. Only a few drifted from the piazza toward the parking docks.

 

“Wow,” Joy whispered, “I can’t wait to get the dirt at the reception.”

 

Cassius was about to speak when the annunciator horn of a newsvend machine rolling through the crowd blared that everyone mustn’t forget that next Monday was D-Day, and that details on the free city-wide immunizations against scaling scalp could be had by inserting a coin in the slot. The contraption dinned the fact that its papers contained a full list of the twenty-two hundred dispensaries which would be set up to distribute the free capsules lo inoculate the populace against the dread scourge. The drive was the latest work of the ancient March of Quarters Foundation. Details, details inside—

 

Blaring, the machine trundled on. Rubbing his ear, Cassius answered Joy by saying, “Suppose we don’t find out. Suppose Madame Kagle doesn’t show up. Perhaps she’s ill.”

 

“Somebody’ll be there who knows the score. Come on, Cassius, get the car.”

 

As they wormed through the stunned throng on the piazza, voices rippled suddenly in excitement. Cassius and Joy craned around. Down the performer’s ramp a sleek, expensive Rolls-Fujica air limousine was gliding, fast. People were crossing the ramp now. The chauffeur was forced to apply the brakes. That was when the yellow-cheeked bootboy, probably the son of some Chinese war refugee, fell off the piazza balustrade.

 

The lad had been up there brushes in hand, chanting in a singsong about shining the dress boots of gentlemen. Somehow he slipped, just as the Rolls-Fujica came to a halt.

 

“He’s dead,” a woman cried. The crowd, herd-like, shifted. Joy couldn’t resist. Cassius was dragged along.

 

For a moment the scene was very vivid to him. The drop from the balustrade to the main ramp was twenty feet or more. By some twist of fate the bootboy had hit skull first on the prestressed poly. He lay with his red and gray brains smashed out. Meantime the Rolls-Fujica had started up.

 

The performer’s ramp crossed the main one, on which the bootboy lay, at the piazza corner. A blur of motion in the aircar tonneau caught Cassius’s eye. He saw Madame Kagle order her chauffeur to stop again. Her face strained to the window. Of all the curious who were gasping and oh-ing over the accident, she alone seemed truly moved.

 

The Rolls-Fujica sped on. Cassius shuddered. The woman’s eyes had mirrored some pure hell even he couldn’t see.

 

“Wonder if there’s a human interest bit in it,” Joy said.

 

“Joy, for God’s sake don’t be so callous.”

 

She smiled. “It is one of my failings, isn’t it, sweets? All right, first things first. But let’s hurry. We don’t want to miss the reception.”

 

* * * *

 

The reception, they discovered, was already going full blast in one of the larger private function halls of The Hotel of the Three Presidents. Passing under an arch decorated with a bust of one member of the trio—they were entering the Edward Room—Joy grabbed his arm.

 

“Cassius, look! The old girl’s here. And drunker than a hoot owl, it seems.”

 

“I don’t like this a damn bit,” he muttered.

 

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, why not?”

 

“It just seems like a wake before you have a dead body.”

 

“Don’t be so squeamish. I wouldn’t miss it for anything.”

 

Joy pulled and tugged until they were past the coat robot, through the champagne line and lurking at the fringe of a small crowd surrounding Madame Kagle. The lady virtuoso was indeed pretty well gone. She staggered around like a scarecrow off its pole. Nobody was laughing, though. Not the socialites, not the critics. The mood was one of acute embarrassment.

 

Madame Kagle seemed to be centering most of her remarks on a ruddy-faced priest of middle years. Joy whispered that the priest was a well-known expert on sacred music. Madame Kagle was waving her champagne glass back and forth under the priest’s long-suffering nose. Each wave threatened to douse him.

 

“—and I say you still haven’t answered my question, Father Bleu.”

 

“Haven’t I, dear lady? I thought I stated that death is merely the beginning of—”

 

“No, no, no!” Her voice was high as a harpy’s. “Don’t go all gooey and metaphysical. I mean to ask, what is death the act, the situation, the moment?”

 

She watched him foxily. The priest in turn struggled to remain polite. “Madame, I’m not positive I follow.”

 

“Let me say it another way. Most people are afraid of dying, yes?”

 

“I disagree. Not those who find mystical union with the body of Christ in—”

 

“Oh, come off it!” Madame Kagle shrilled. “People are frightened of it, Father Bleu. Frightened and screaming their fear silently every hour of every day they live. Now I put it to you. Of what are they afraid? Are they afraid of the end of consciousness? The ultimate blackout, so to speak? Or are they afraid of another aspect of death? The one which they can’t begin to foresee or understand?”

 

“What aspect is that, Madame Kagle?”

 

“The pain.” She glared. “The pain, Father. Possibly sudden. Possibly horrible. Waiting, always waiting somewhere ahead, at an unguessable junction of time and place. Like that bootboy tonight. How it must have hurt. One blinding instant when his head hit, eh? I suggest, Father Bleu, that is what we’re afraid of, that is the wholly unknowable part of dying—the screaming, hurting how, of which the when is only a lesser part. The how is the part we never know. Unless we experience it.”

 

She slurped champagne in the silence. She eyed him defiantly.

 

“Well, Father? What have you got to say?”

 

Discreetly Father Bleu coughed into his closed fist. “Theologically, Madame, I find the attempt to separate the mystical act of dying into neat little compartments rather a matter of hairsplitting. And furthermore—”

 

“If that’s how you feel,” she interrupted, “you’re just not thinking it out.”

 

“My good woman!” said Father Bleu gently.

 

“Pay attention to me!” Madame Wanda Kagle glared furiously. “I say you pay attention! Because you have never stopped to think about it, have you? If death resembles going to sleep, why, that’s an idea your mind can get hold of. Isn’t it? You may be afraid of it, yes. Afraid of the end of everything. But at least you can get hold of some notion of something of what it’s like. Sleep. But can you get hold of anything of what it must feel like to experience the most agonizing of deaths? Your head popping open like that bootboy’s tonight, say? A thousand worms of pain inside every part of you for a second long as eternity? Can you grasp that? No, you can’t, Father Bleu. And that’s what death is at its worst—the unknown, the possibly harrowing pain ahead.”

 

She clamped her lips together smugly. She held out her champagne glass for a refill. A woman in furs clapped a hand over her fashionably green lips and rushed from the group. Though puzzled, Joy was still all eyes and ears.

 

“Even your blessed St. Paul bears me out, Father.”

 

The priest glanced up, startled. “What?”

 

“The first letter to the Corinthians, if I remember. The grave has a victory, all right. But it’s death that has the sting.”

 

In the pause the furnace doors behind her eyes opened wide, and hell shone out.

 

“I know what I’m talking about, Father. I’ve been there.”

 

Slowly she closed her fingers, crushing the champagne glass in her hand. Weeping, blood drooling from her palm down her frail veined arms, she had to be carried out.

 

The party broke up at once.

 

The gloom was even deeper than at the Dome. “Wait’ll Greeheim gets a load of this dirty linen!” Joy whispered as they left.

 

* * * *

 

Later, when Cassius escorted Joy to the door of her flat, she held out her cheek for a routine buss. But her mind was elsewhere. “I certainly wonder what Greeheim will make of that nutty harangue. Artistic temperament?”

 

“It’s an interesting notion, anyway.”

 

“What is?”

 

“Oh, there being two elements in death. The sleep and the pain. I wonder which one you really do fear most. I never thought about it before.”

 

She patted his cheek. “And because you never think about really sensational story material like funeral rackets or sewage control graft, Cassius my love, you’ll never get anywhere in our particular little rat-race. But that’s all right. I like you just the same. Good night. Thanks for a fantabulous evening.”

 

Waiting for the tube to take him down, Cassius was struck again by an eerie feeling. It wasn’t so much the peculiarity of Madame Kagle’s statements. They were pretty obtuse, after all. It was the queer resemblance he saw, or thought he saw, between her attitude and that of R. Ripley Flange. Somehow his mind wanted to equate the jerked plug with the dart case. It was almost as though the pair of them had had exactly the same lunatic vision, whatever it might be.

 

But the matter really had no relation to the problem still nagging him, he realized. The problem of Timothy’s disappearance.

 

I’ve been there. The woman’s words stayed in his mind the rest of the evening. What could they possibly mean?

 

Dutifully he recorded the unusual affair in his diary, then put in some time on the notes for his book. The dream of the dog at his heels was even more intense than usual. He awoke near dawn, wringing with sweat. Three cups of caffeine water were required before he was fully awake and free of the grip of the nightmare.

 

As he went to work he remembered once having read something about Madame Kagle’s brother. Later in the day he had to go to the paper’s morgue on another story. He looked up the Kagle name just out of curiosity. In addition to much material on Madame Wanda, there were several clips on her younger brother. The last of them stated that Dr. Frederic Kagle, a renowned neurosurgeon, had resigned from the World Institutes of Health to enter private practice. The clip was three years old.

 

Maybe, Cassius laughed to himself, the poor old woman had been put through the wringer by her brother in the cause of science. He laughed again, envisioning the usual horrific collection of apparatus, electrodes and blue lightnings that leapt from point to point while the demon doctor looked on and tittered.

 

The wool-gathering did have one solid result, surprisingly. It got Cassius to speculating again about a new angle on Timothy’s fate.

 

Originally Cassius had wondered whether the body had been purloined by some unspeakable sex ring. Now he had another notion, no doubt equally off base but at least remotely possible. There was no connection with Dr. Frederic Kagle. It was only that Kagle’s obscurity suggested scientists who, for one reason or another, were forced to work in absolute anonymity.

 

A third time Cassius laughed at himself in the gray loneliness of the morgue’s reading cubicle. The medical body-snatcher bit in this day and age? Ridiculous.

 

Or was it?

 

Was the government, for instance, preparing some new superweapon in fear of possible disintegration of the tenuous Sino-Caucasian Peace? Something compelled him to take down the morgue index book. He leafed through until he located the proper heading. Disappearances, Unsolved.

 

He used the keyboard to code the paper tape. The tape vanished down a slot. A humming. Cassius was startled when not one but three microfilm spools popped from the tube.

 

There was always a routine number of unexplained disappearances within any given period. Distraught offspring. Erring husbands. Crimes that never saw the light of day. So he expected one spool at the most. He fed the first spool into the view box.

 

He did find that customary expected number of accounts of vanishing humanity. He also found thirteen instances of the disappearance of dead bodies within the last twenty-four months.

 

His brother Timothy was the last of the thirteen. He was represented by his obit and a two-paragraph item in the Capitol World Truth. The item covered the jetport incident. Cassius had seen it several times.

 

He double-checked each spool again. He hadn’t misread. The thirteen who were gone had died in a uniform way.

 

By violence.

 

* * * *

 

VI

 

Almost one year to the day after the theft of Timothy Andrews’ body, the sovereign and somewhat backward state of New York prepared to let Butcher Balk have five hundred thousand volts. Cassius was waiting.

 

He was waiting in the prison burial ground on the Hudson bluffs, hunched down in his Ford Aircoupe. The vehicle was parked in a growth of budding maples to one side of a small service road. The time was 10:05 p.m.

 

Theoretically, Butcher Balk had been dead five minutes. April snow swirled, a quaint effect, courtesy of the weather bureau. Cassius was glad for the white scatter. It would afford him extra concealment in the dark, he hoped.

 

In order to be here this evening Cassius had been forced to lie both to Joy and his editor Hughgenine. He complained of a spell of male post-equinoctial depression, a common burden of urban life any more. Three other times in the year that had just passed he had also gone off following his elusive suspicions. On those occasions he had pleaded acute hangover, g.i. distress and bucket-seat hip, respectively.

 

Each time he’d figured that at last he was right. Each time he had been wrong. Worse, there was nothing to suggest tonight would be different.

 

But he refused to give up.

 

The first time, he’d traveled all night to reach Watkins Glen. The Continental driving star Baron von Pfalz had smashed up his Sonic Special in the Grand Prix, dying in a multi-car wreck on the chicane. Cassius had felt like a ghoul loitering around the little chapel where the other racers and mechanics held a memorial for the Baron. A sobbing woman, three children in tow, took von Pfalz’s corpse away in a hearse. Cassius drove home keenly disappointed.

 

The following week the sports section of the Capitol World Truth carried a photo of the little family beside the Baron’s grave plot. The woman and children, then, had not been actors.

 

So it went twice more: complete failure in outguessing them. Whoever they were.

 

The second occasion, no one tried to snatch the corpse of Dolly Sue Wei, the first non-American ever to register at the University of Levittown. She entered her first class flanked by the drawn pistols of U.N. marshals. Cassius had been sure the situation would produce violence. It did. Next night someone threw a sharp rock and Dolly died of brain damage.

 

But she was buried in a routine way in a free cemetery in Manhattan’s Oriental ghetto. Cassius was there.

 

He had also rushed to a mortuary in New Jersey just last February. The Great Rococo, a stage magician, had died with the back of his head shot off while performing the bullet catch before a convention of Moose. Buried without incident in Tenafly.

 

The three blind alleys might have led another man to abandon the search. But Cassius had access to the paper’s morgue. There he convinced himself he wasn’t a lunatic.

 

In the interval during which he’d guessed wrong and gone on fruitless chases, the bodies of five other men—a film star, a slum pastor, an insurance salesman pushing his car to two hundred on the Interstate, a hunter after possum in Kentucky, a suicide in Cleveland—had all disappeared before interment.

 

Now, in the snowy night, Cassius brooded over his lack of success in outguessing them. Yet he was certain they were still in operation, and it was merely a matter of time before—

 

Thinking, he failed to see the drop of the translucent gray force wall of Ossining’s new Bartlow Martin wing. He saw the headlights, though. They threw yellow up the hillside. The burial gang was on its way.

 

The outer wall shimmered up into place again, hiding a ghostly flag on the nine-hole therapy course. Speedy and efficient, the corpse handlers parked the truck on the other side of a low knoll. They rolled the gravedigger from the truck. They lowered the plain poly coffin containing the remains of Butcher Balk into the pre-dug hole. They turned on the digger and stood back while it went to work pitching on earth, its eight metal arms wigwagging black across a spotlight on the truck’s cowl.

 

Unobserved, Cassius spied from his Aircoupe. He’d selected Butcher Balk as a likely target because the killer had received so much publicity. Of course, that might frighten them away, but the publicity said Butcher Balk had no living relatives. And that was another part of the pattern Cassius thought he’d discovered.

 

In six instances the disappearing dead people had also been survivorless. In other cases Cassius couldn’t tell; no mention was made in the printed obits, but since they were wire service items, that didn’t necessarily rule out the possibility of no relatives,

 

Snow swirled. The gravedigger flashed its green light and retracted its arms. Butcher Balk was a safecracker who had been rehabilitated after his first manslaughter conviction. His adjusted personality had been imperfect, had cracked, had resulted in a berserk massacre of ten men, women and children one Sunday afternoon in a hamlet on the St. Lawrence. Hence the seldom-given maximum penalty. Now Butcher Balk was only a faint mound among other mounds under the fresh snow.

 

The prison wall field sank. The truck vanished. The wall went up. Silence and the snow claimed the ghostly Hudson cliffs.

 

“If Joy could see me,” Cassius said aloud, to keep himself company, “she’d think I was completely gone.”

 

The hours passed. Eleven o’clock. Twelve. One. One-thirty. Cassius was convinced he’d made another wrong guess. He was ready to abandon the whole project. He took out the laminated card embossed with his personal digit, poised it over the ignition slot.

 

Two red-dusky eyes opened below.

 

He knuckled the weariness out of his eyesockets, looking again. The eyes were headlamps, large ones. But with reddish lenses for snow- and rain-probing radar.

 

Instantly Cassius began to sweat and gnaw his lip. The murky red circles would be invisible from the prison. He had difficulty seeing them himself. Radar lamps indicated a very costly vehicle. Something with a lot of equipment inside, like the mobile surgery and consultation rooms so many personal-injury lawyers drove. Gently Cassius levered up the vent in the Aircoupe blister.

 

He thought he heard voices. He certainly heard the gutter and clank of a machine. They’d brought their own gravedigger.

 

Twice its black arms flashed across the circles of the red radar lenses, illusory, quick as a blink. Cassius was now desperately afraid the thieves were vicious mobsters, revanchist foreign agents or something equally deadly. He slipped the card into the slot, heard the compressors begin to whoosh. Gently, gently, he levered the Aircoupe out of parking contact with the ground, ready to race in pursuit.

 

The thieves took twice as long as the prison detail. From this Cassius inferred they had dug up the coffin, then replaced the earth so their work would go undetected. As the thoroughness of their operation hit him, he found himself suddenly pumped full of adrenalin and rage. When the radar lenses vanished, indicating the truck’s departure, he was ready.

 

He jerked the Aircoupe into forward. He picked them up on the feeder leaving the burial ground.

 

Apparently because of the snow or the solitude of the countryside or both, they never suspected he was roughly a mile behind them on the long trip over the state line into Westport, one of the cancerous slums affixed to the body of Greater Manhattan.

 

The truck whizzing along on its air jets finally slowed on a seamy street. It pulled into the side drive of a ramshackle funeral parlor and disappeared in the rear. Under a lonely mercury light a sign reading Commuter’s Rest Mortuary Chapel stood on the unkempt, snow-patched lawn.

 

Cassius cruised half a block down, parked and waited.

 

The truck never came out.

 

The windows of the place were black. Painted over? There was absolutely no sign of life. As false dawn broke, Cassius got away from there. He relaxed only when he was on the Washington Belt North. He licked his lips, fought his tiredness, struggled with what he must do next.

 

The police?

 

Yes, that was the sensible answer. But something in him rebelled.

 

After all, he’d invested nearly a year on the chase, which was now hotting up considerably. Had Timothy not been involved, he’d have reported to the authorities at once. But the authorities hadn’t done much of anything for him the first time. He still resented it.

 

Had he the guts to carry it one step more and see what happened?

 

Well, maybe he hadn’t the guts. But he had the will. Months of frustration had developed it.

 

Once back in his flat, he was bothered again. He was the only person who knew the location from which the ring operated. Whom could he tell? Joy?

 

He warned himself off. Fond as he was of Joy, he knew his lady-love would try to convert the dross of a personal cause into the gold of self-promotion via a hot story. Tell her, and half Washington would know before he reached the Commuter’s Rest Mortuary Chapel again.

 

As he pondered alone in his littered room, his eye struck the boxes of notes for his book. All at once the project seemed trivial.

 

What if—just supposing—he uncovered some sensational facts over there in Connecticut? Some monstrous conspiracy? He assumed he was the only one who knew anything about the underground organization, whatever its purpose. Certainly he was the only reporter. Opportunity beckoned. So did faint greed, he admitted.

 

Greed was unfamiliar to him—but probably only because of lack of opportunities. Hell, what harm would it do to write the expose himself, if there was one to be written? Why shouldn’t he get the credit for doing all the work and taking all the risks?

 

First, though, he must protect himself.

 

Next morning, instead of taking the usual vitamin break, he said to Joy, “I have to go out for a few minutes.”

 

Joy folded up the edition of the paper she’d been studying. The front page carried a simulphoto of two cabinet members, the Secretary of Social Security and the Secretary of Fringe Benefits, cutting ribbons to open the new: Birth Defects Insurance Administration Center.

 

“What’re you after, love?” Joy asked. “Another dusty book that mentions your favorite colonel in small type in the appendix?”

 

“I need a new diary.”

 

“Oh, that. You’re a great one.”

 

“Why do you say that?”

 

She pinched his arm, oblivious to the others in the newspaper mess. “I prefer my reflections printed in public, sweets, with my name above them, ten point or better. Cash in the bank is what I’m after.”

 

Cassius grinned. “How do you know my diary won’t make me famous one day?”

 

“That’s what all diary-writers think. How many make it?”

 

Admitting she was right, and promising to meet her for lunch, Cassius left. He hurried down to an arcade on the fourth sub-level of the newspaper building. He bought an expensive diary at a stationery shop. The diary in which he’d been writing lately wasn’t filled. But it was just a plain lockless diary. The one he purchased had a sonic lock: the first nine notes of the old folk song Mister Clean, whistled. The lock was tamperproof.

 

That night, after dinner with Joy, he went home and wrote down the events at the Ossining burial ground, as well as the location of the headquarters of the ring. Then he locked the new diary and went to bed, and dreamed the dog dream vividly.

 

The next night he set out for Connecticut.

 

He was unarmed. He was rather frightened. But he went.

 

He parked the Aircoupe down the block and walked. The moon was full. A gusty wind blew. Even here in the stews, where one tumbledown split-level housed a dozen squealing, fighting families, there was a sense and tang of earth’s annual renewal. The wind carried the sweet breath of life. Turning up the mortuary walk, Cassius was suddenly conscious that he was approaching the age when men had instantly mortal coronaries.

 

He stopped on the walk, his uplifted face moon-bathed, almost sad. The black dog seemed somewhere near.

 

He knocked quietly. He’d decided he wasn’t the type to wave a gun or kick at locks. But his jaw fell when the door opened promptly.

 

Under a weak light stood a tall, rather soft man with receding hair, rimless glasses and brilliant blue eyes. The man wore grimy clothing. He looked slightly familiar.

 

“See here, my name is Cassius Andrews—”

 

“Of course,” the man cut in. He smiled understanding. “There’s no need to take that tone. I’ve almost expected you to show up one day.”

 

He held out his hand. “Come in, come in! Incidentally, my name is Kagle. Dr. Frederic.”

 

* * * *

 

VII

 

Before budging from the stoop, Cassius had to still his suspicions. “I mean to say, Kagle, what I came about is my brother. I want to know what happened to his body.”

 

“Of course,” the other repeated, as if it were only natural. “I’ll be glad to tell you everything, Andrews. Not here on the doorstep, though. Come in and—oh.” Frederic Kagle’s eyes were intense and unwavering as blue gas flames. They took in Cassius’s nervous glance at the dingy shadows in the hall. Dr. Kagle’s manner became wry. “I see now. You expected something else. You still do. The latter-day Mafia or its equivalent. This is a perfectly legitimate research establishment.”

 

And he reached around Cassius to grasp the door with a left hand whose ring finger bore the faint red ghost of a removed wedding band. He kept talking.

 

“We’re a little under cover, I must admit. But we have our problems. I think you’ll appreciate them once I explain. That is, if you’ve got the stomach to hear it all.” A challenging glance. “Being a newsman, dedicated to truth in principle if not always in practice—I’m only speaking generically, of course—you should have an open mind if anyone does.”

 

A small, confident smile played on Kagle’s mouth. Cassius noted, however, that he secured the night chain on the door.

 

“I have to take your word that this operation is legitimate,” Cassius said defensively. Kagle spun, peering hard. Cassius felt uncomfortable, as though he’d been tested and found wanting.

 

“Legitimate by my lights, is what I meant,” Kagle said. “Some—my ex-wife among others—don’t agree. I’ll leave it up to your sense of fairness.”

 

Cassius was fully aware of what Kagle was doing: using soft soap. But he was disarmed, temporarily anyway. Kagle led the way down the corridor which plainly hadn’t been greatly renovated since the days when the place served as the final rest of thrombosis-stricken executives. Through two different doors jumbles of laboratory equipment winked faintly in the dark.

 

A third door was open, lighted. Kagle closed it quickly. He frowned, as over a minor annoyance. But not before Cassius had glimpsed more glass and metalware, and two men in spotted white coats.

 

One had been bending over sympathetically. The other had been seated on a stool, head on his forearms on a lucite bench, crying.

 

“Our work does have its personal problems too,” Kagle said. He rolled back scrolled oak double doors. “Even dedicated people get shaky over the moral aspects now and then.” He stood aside, waiting for Cassius to pass. Cassius caught the renewed flicker of blue intensity in the man’s eye. The calm fire said that Kagle, a dedicated man, was not to be lumped with those who wallowed in shakiness.

 

Kagle rolled the doors shut again behind them.

 

The room was large, full of cheap, sharp-angled metal office furniture. A solar tube had been jerry-rigged in the wall. It shed a white, uncompromising light over all. The only signs of the room’s former function were thick, threadbare carpeting, rose-petal wallpaper peeled in many places and an ancient framed motto, I Am the Light of the World, under which someone had taped a photo of some sort of molecular model.

 

Kagle circled the desk. He sat down, indicated Cassius’s place.

 

“I think I’d better stand,” Cassius said. “I didn’t come here to be social.”

 

“My dear Mr. Andrews,” Kagle said gently, “you have every right to feel as you do. We should never have selected your brother. It was a mistake.”

 

“Yes, it was. For you.”

 

The scientist ignored the feigned toughness. “Ordinarily we try to choose people with no survivors. Last year, however, I had a fellow working for me.” The blue-flame eyes brightened merrily. “My, shall we say, traffic manager? He proved to be an idiot. But he was all I could get. Now I handle that end myself. And have, ever since he slipped up a couple of times. One of his worst slip-ups was your brother the Reverend. It meant thirty hours’ worth of work in a day instead of my usual twenty-six. But that’s all right.”

 

Cassius didn’t do Kagle the favor of smiling even a little. “I want to know what you did with him.”

 

Kagle didn’t seem worried, just more amused. “So you can report us to the authorities?”

 

“Maybe. Well?”

 

Kagle pursed his lips. “Mr. Andrews, are you really tough enough to stand the truth?”

 

“I’m a newspaperman. I guess that qualifies me a little.”

 

“Provided I tell you everything about your brother— which will mean in turn telling you everything about what we do here, and why I’m reduced to crawling out at night like some roach just so I can conduct a perfectly legitimate scientific study—will you promise in return not to write one word about what I say?”

 

Abruptly Cassius sat down. He fought to keep a straight face. A moment ago he’d been cowed by the man’s assured, almost jocular manner. Now it was his turn to feel like laughing.

 

If the man was indeed a scientist, he was the stereotype: foolish, naive, unworldly beneath his veneer of hard-lipped dedication. What a hell of a stupid offer! Did Kagle honestly think he would pass up a chance for an expose now that he had the material practically in his hands? He had to write what he learned. For Timothy’s sake.

 

And for his own, too. He’d seen a glimmer of a real chance to improve his lot. Such a chance hadn’t come his way in longer than he could remember. He’d almost believed he was no longer interested in opportunities. Sitting across from Kagle, he discovered otherwise.

 

Carefully, softly, he lied, “All right, Dr. Kagle. If that’s your price, I promise.”

 

The sap fell for it at once. “Thank you.”

 

Why were the blue eyes merry a moment? Or was it a trick of the light? Kagle tented his fingers, leaned across the desk.

 

“First tell me how you found me.”

 

“No harm in that, I guess.” Cassius described his speculations, starting with those initiated the night he heard Madame Wanda Kagle ranting. “I’ll admit I didn’t dream she really had any connection with you. Or with Timothy. It was just sort of a—well, trigger.”

 

Kagle shook his head. “Poor sis. She badgered me until I showed her.”

 

A trickle of sweat, unbidden, rolled down Cassius’s cheek. “Showed her what?”

 

“The results of our research here into the nature of death.”

 

“The nature of—?” Cassius’s eyes bugged.

 

Dr. Kagle leaned back, chuckling. His pink forehead shone. “There it is again. You imagine we’re a bunch of necrophiles, don’t you? Nothing so debased, Mr. Andrews, though in certain quarters we’re certainly regarded in that light. What we’re doing is simply probing the experience of dying from a qualitative standpoint. I could give you a long lecture on the theory. But in plainest terms, our work is this. I’m a neurosurgeon by training. What I do with all the dead bodies I’m forced to steal is analogous to what a man in a darkroom does when he develops film. He brings forth the latent image. A photo’s latent image is both there and not there, in the silver. It awaits the right combination of chemicals before it becomes visible. So with the—” Dr. Kagle hesitated a second, as if gauging Cassius’s nerve again. “—call it the latent image of death. Or images. The sensory record of the last microseconds before the mind blacks out. All the pain. All the smells, tactile sensations. The blurred sights. When I was killing time as just another white-coated bureaucrat with the Institutes of Health, I worked out techniques which would parallel the first formulation of the proper photochemicals. And that’s why I need the bodies, Mr. Andrews. What good is a darkroom technician without exposed film?”

 

Kagle paused. “Do you want me to go into the surgical and electronic techniques more deeply?”

 

“No. Let me get this straight.” Cassius was sweating hard. “You’re able to take someone’s—corpse—and from it get a record of what it felt like for that person to die?”

 

“That is more or less it, yes. The process involves a great deal of painstaking surgery, much work with computers and video tape and sound-recording equipment. I tried to get the Institutes to underwrite the initial study. Naturally they wouldn’t, they didn’t dare. You’re too young—and so am I, though perhaps I don’t look it—to remember the DNA Riots when Gadsburry finally created one single cell in his lab. I’m sure you’ve read about the riots often. Old illusions die hard, Mr. Andrews. Some of mine died, too, when I first took up this field. I wanted to work legally. Obtain legitimate corpses in the manner of a private medical school.”

 

“Couldn’t you?”

 

The blue-flame eyes brightened. “A court order obtained by a committee of certain members of the clergy in this country frustrated my efforts. I decided it was prudent to go underground, so to speak. To steal the bodies I needed. After all, I’m convinced in my own mind that the work is necessary, important. And honest. Men have been martyred before. I’m prepared to be martyred myself, though of course I prefer to avoid it.”

 

More amusement suddenly. “And I’ve discovered it won’t be necessary, either, Mr. Andrews.”

 

“Isn’t this very expensive research?”

 

“Frightfully.”

 

“Then where—?”

 

Kagle shrugged. “Patents. Three big ones, several small ones. Neurosurgical apparatus. The royalties are more than ample.”

 

Cassius said, “But I don’t really understand why you chose to work in this particular field.”

 

Kagle sounded sad. “After I stumbled across the fundamental technique, it wasn’t a matter of choosing.”

 

“Your reason is—?”

 

“To know. What else?”

 

“I can see why the clergy would stand in your way.”

 

“Frankly,” Kagle snapped, “I can’t. I’m not in any way tampering with their precious concepts of immortality. Of course I am in a position to state that, as far as sentient experience goes, there is no immortality after the act of death. The neural latent images are feeble at best by the time I’m through scrounging for the bodies. And they quickly go altogether. Yet even though I resent the opposition, I’ve tried to be circumspect. Picked subjects who fit my requirements—a violent death, for maximum image strength—but have no relatives or family. I’ve done this partly out of vestigial moral considerations, partly from a practical wish to avert discovery and continue my studies as long as possible. With your brother, as I stated, the fool I had working for me slipped up. You were shrewd enough to locate me. Therefore I’ll hide nothing, Mr. Andrews. I’m no criminal.”

 

Cassius frowned. “Are you sure? What you’re doing touches on realms other than the purely scientific.”

 

Kagle sighed. “Metaphysics? I’m only concerned about that as it relates to the people—the clerics—who prate about it and therefore act because of it. I don’t want to be dragged into a lot of messy court trials. Which is exactly what would happen if this work became public. Trials, more trials, publicity and, eventually, other harmful effects, evidences of which you saw in my sister’s behavior. I’m really going to have to do something about her soon.”

 

Cassius felt as if he should draw back, flee. But he was oddly unable.

 

“About my brother’s body. Where is it?”

 

“Ruined, I’m afraid. Gone. The techniques we use are destructive. That’s why there mustn’t be relatives.”

 

“What happens to your so-called latent images?”

 

“We record them. Five separate tracks which can be projected simultaneously for a viewer. Though viewing is a dull, limited term for the experience.”

 

“So a person—knows how it feels to die?”

 

“Yes. By violence. The most painful deaths possible. Raises some interesting speculations, doesn’t it? I think you intimated that Wanda was mouthing some of them. Quite apart from the empiric achievement of translating and recording a dying body’s sensory images, the research opened up whole new areas of less tangible results. I only began to think about some of the related questions after the work was well under way. Namely, do people fear the what of death, or do they fear the how and its lesser partner, the when?”

 

“For myself,” Cassius said slowly, “I—I’m afraid of the end. The blankness. The finality.”

 

“Are you? I assure you there is evidence to the contrary. Death must be a little like sleep. Before you sleep, what is going to happen while you sleep is rationally graspable. The sleep of death is permanent. So you can’t reconcile yourself to it wholly. But you can begin to reconcile yourself to it, if only slightly. While I don’t think you can reconcile yourself to the other part reasonably. To the pain. The anguish. The lifetime of hells in one instant, one instant waiting, always waiting up there ahead. It’s my contention that, because of innumerable variables not present in the sleep aspect, the pain of death can only be known when it happens. And the variables only increase the terror.”

 

“The theory won’t hold up,” Cassius said. “Death, the absolute end—that’s the fearful part.”

 

“Ah, you assume that because everybody’s always assumed it. I assumed so too. All I can say is, my work has revealed evidence to the contrary. Evidence no open-minded person can deny. Which is why I made you promise not to write a word.”

 

Abruptly Cassius felt the thrust of ambition, possibilities, chances like gold. He tried to fix the lines of his face and sound demanding:

 

“Look, Kagle. So far all you’ve given me is a lot of talk. If you’ve recorded these so-called latent images, then they ought to be available for someone to see, right?”

 

“See is another poor word. Experience would be more correct.”

 

“All right, experience, see, view, you name it. But I want it demonstrated.”

 

“You have more courage than I thought.”

 

“Listen, Kagle, you can’t scare me. What about it?”

 

“If you’ll hold to your promise not to write—”

 

“I will, yes,” Cassius lied, feeling very foxy and, incidentally, very righteous.

 

Weren’t those gas-jet eyes laughing at him all at once again?

 

He was puzzled. Kagle was a naive fool. Maybe Cassius only saw laughter in the eyes. The man wasn’t mad, Cassius was positive of that much. Yet his confidence ebbed quickly. He had the feeling he oughtn’t to go through with what he himself had suggested.

 

But the copy possibilities—! My God! Staggering.

 

“Since you volunteer, Mr. Andrews, let’s step down the hall.” Dr. Kagle rose, smoothing his thin hair. “I’ll show you as little or as much as you find you’re able to stand. This way, please.”

 

* * * *

 

VIII

 

The chamber at the rear of the funeral home had been renovated with theater seats to resemble a private projection room minus the screen. Cassius took a place in the front row center. Dr. Kagle wheeled over a cart on which were mounted several odd-looking instruments. From the instruments dangled fifteen or twenty wires which ended in assorted pads and needles.

 

“It’ll take me a few minutes to get you wired up properly,” Dr. Kagle said, snapping a leather cuff around Cassius’s bare left forearm. There was unmistakable pride in his eyes as he worked. “I apologize in advance for the needle pricks, but they’re necessary.”

 

Cassius was sweating harder. He was fearful but determined to go through with it. He pointed beyond his boot.

 

“What’s that for?”

 

“The pedal?” It was corrugated iron, painted red. “Just put your left foot on it. There, perfect. If at any point you want to stop, press down. All five tracks will come to a halt simultaneously. Which people do you want?”

 

“I don’t care. Butcher—” Cassius gasped as a needle went home in his thigh. “Butcher Balk? He was the one really responsible for my being here. And Timothy, if that’s possible.”

 

“Certainly. I’ll also show you one or two others for the sake of contrast. Are you quite sure you’re up to it, though?”

 

“Hell yes,” Cassius said, with more conviction than he felt.

 

“Very well.” Dr. Kagle kept working, presently stood back. “Got you trussed up, eh? Any of the pads chafe too much? Good. I’ll be leaving. The console is in the next room. There’s no need to close your eyes. The lights will dim. Then you won’t see a thing in here. You’ll be—But explanations are inadequate. Remember the pedal, Mr. Andrews. I won’t be offended if you use it.”

 

A door chunked shut. Cassius peered through the crisscross of wires padded to his temples. He blinked. His vision was failing.

 

No, it was only the dimming of solar sheets across the ceiling. Dimming fast, from pearl to ebony to nothing. Must adjust the boot on the pedal, he thought, in case it’s so harrowing I—

 

Blur-and-whine.

 

* * * *

 

A light bulb way up there. Weak, shaded with a scrap of tin.

 

He shifted his head. The rusted springs of the rickety cot squeaked. Suthin needs fixin with the furnace. About this time at night I got to fix the furnace but I can’t remember what it is needs fixing. Suthin’s wrong.

 

A slow, labored turn of his head. Difficulty seeing because a film of water was on the eyes. Blinking didn’t help. A monster old metal furnace hulked in a corner of the musty storeroom. He could barely read the name-plate. EUREKA! E-Z Draught No. 22. EUREKA COMFORT WORKS, Eureka, Iowa.

 

In his chest he felt the annoying, clotted little pain.

 

Ah Momma I can see your face right now. I been havin trouble sleepin lately Momma. Little pains in the middle. I can see you Momma, I can hear you sin gin and playin the piano Momma like you did on Sundays.

 

In his throat the breath caught. He lifted himself, blinked the eye-water back. He saw a faded, patched quilt over his chest, hands on top of it, shaking. They were ancient, wrinkled hands with thickened blue veins standing out.

 

The Doc don’t make me work so hard these days because of the pains but the furnace needs fixin and I wonder what’s wrong with m—Momma my God I’m dyin that’s what’s wrong.

 

He remembered forgotten music, The Old Rugged Cross, with the bass hand beaten out in Sunday-morning rhythm, thrummm, thrummm, thrummm.

 

Fearful, he tried to cry aloud for help. He couldn’t make a sound. The clotting pain, a small hurting ball inside him, widened. It troubled and troubled him. Not the pain itself, which wasn’t so bad. Knowing what the pain meant.

 

Momma I’m goin to be seein you. I don’t want it to happen like this I—

 

The Eureka furnace sank into darkness and sucked all the light after it.

 

Blur-and-whine.

 

* * * *

 

“Brucie? Brucie? Oh God Brucie, don’t!” his wife was screaming.

 

Against his palms, under his boots, the pebbled poly of the hotel wall and ledge. On his lips a queer saltiness, blood he’d drawn biting down, getting up the guts to do it.

 

The wind was blowing hard. It whistled and smelled of the pollution of Lake Erie. Ten stories below a crowd had collected in the Public Square. For miles he could see the lights of Cleveland, warm whites and yellows.

 

They were snares and delusions. The lights were behind doors of understanding, friendship, love, shut to him, shut to him every one—

 

“Officer, officer!” his wife screamed. “Don’t let Brucie do it! Go out and get him. The poor children—”

 

He jumped.

 

The wind tugged at his palms, his cheeks. The lights blurred. His bowels loosened. Vertical rows of lights blurred and became a single strip as he hurtled down. Wind hammered his eardrums. He was falling fast, faster—

 

The hit was explosion. Body’s total scream. Coalescing of sensation into one enormous burst of pain—

 

PAIN PAIN PAIN PAIN PAIN PA—

 

* * * *

 

Blur-and-whine.

 

Behind the effin glass in the visitor’s gallery the effin newsmen were already talkin on their effin portable visors.

 

He ran his tongue over his rough, dry lips. His scalp felt prickly where they’d wiped it bare with that effin aerosol. Under his strapped arms the porcelain chair was cold.

 

Somewhere behind, footsteps, as the last effin attendant shuffled out. A door closed.

 

The room had a funny smell. It was prolly cause of the green walls, so effin clean an sanitary like a hospital, like a place for killin bugs. Well he wasn’t no bug.

 

He bunched his face muscles to show he had guts. One of the effin newsmen, a fairy with ringlets, was watchin him and talkin in the visor. He was sure he saw the effer’s mouth make the words, “Butcher Balk is now sitting in the chair ladies and gentlemen.”

 

All at once, without wanting to, he was pulling against the cuffs and leg straps. They hurt. “Oh no, oh no, please Jesus, I—”

 

Something whacked softly like a toggle jamming between contacts. Lights dimmed. Eyes?

 

Pain was beginning. A stiff, ghastly tickling that instantly doubled, tripled, quadrupled, multiplying, multiplying, a rising blast of dreadful murdering pain—

 

PAIN PAIN PAIN PAIN PA—

 

* * * *

 

Blur-and-whine.

 

“—outa this! You stay out or ge’ killed,” de Diego chanted. “You watch it, Christer, I’m warnin’ you.”

 

Tipsy, back and forth, faces in the cheap bar swung. His hands were ineffectual, soft, untrained for struggle. He tried to hold both the right shoulder of de Diego, the left shoulder of Ratface Lats. The three of them straggled, roiling the amphet vapors thick in the bar.

 

“Watch out Revrun Tim,” one of the whores cried. “He gotta knife.”

 

“I tell you you must not take each other’s life,” he shouted, fighting between them, vocal cords nearly raw.

 

Something jerked at his left shoulder. Spun him fast. De Diego’s drug-swollen eyes loomed. Silver flashed in his hand.

 

“I warn you din I Christer?” was the scream, and suddenly a hole was in him, and tears tasting on his lips.

 

The hole widened in his stomach. He could feel de Diego actually wrenching and driving the knife into him, down into his bowels to the bottom, bringing in one unforeseen torrent a dimming of his eyes, and no time even to think a prayer as he tottered, everything blurred beneath pain—

 

PAIN PAIN PAIN PA—

 

* * * *

 

Crash, crash, like a madman Cassius hammered his boot on the pedal, where was it, it must be there, crash, crash.

 

Drool was on his lips. His head was thrown back, wrenching, the eyes shut. Wires snapped as he wrenched, his leg going up and down like a mad thing, crash, crash, crash—

 

“Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!”

 

* * * *

 

IX

 

Limp, drained, Cassius leaned one arm on the ledge of the Aircoupe blister. His left leg hadn’t yet stopped trembling.

 

The moon sailed high and round over the Westport slums. A shadow disengaged from the night, leaned close to the little car. For a moment Cassius had trouble recognizing or remembering.

 

Then everything washed back. His hands clawed on the blister ledge. He strained up, thrashing at impossible terror all around.

 

“There, there, take it easy,” said Kagle. The grip on his arm steadied him. Cassius sank back down in the bucket seat.

 

“How did I get out here?”

 

“I carried you after I unstrapped you. You fainted. I’m sorry about that last sequence. But you did specifically ask for it. I have a bottle of brandy in my office. It might help. Do you want to go back inside?”

 

Cassius buried his face in his hands. “Christ, no. Christ.”

 

After several seconds he raised his head again. At last he was gaining control. “Kagle, you’re a goddamn monster, that’s what you are. What you have in there—it— it’s—” He shivered. No one word could encompass it.

 

Cynical tolerance tinged Kagle’s lips in the moonlight. “No, Andrews. You’re wrong. It’s only the truth. Death as it really is.”

 

Cassius swiped at his moist upper lip. “Who was that first one? That smelly old man?”

 

Dr. Kagle looked quite interested. “Why do you ask?”

 

“Because—it wasn’t as bad as the rest.”

 

“Interesting. I found that to be the case myself. That was old Peckham. He used to be the janitor here. I kept him on to do odd jobs. He was eighty-six and nearly senile when he died in the middle of the night one night, of simple old age.”

 

“That was—just an ordinary death?”

 

“Yes. Did you find it painful?”

 

“A little. Not as bad as—the others. Not nearly as bad.”

 

Dr. Kagle went, “Um. After I’d begun my work, it occurred to me to look into at least one natural, quiet death by way of contrast. Peckham’s latent images were quite weak. But they surprised me. I’ve done a couple of similar analyses since. The so-called quiet, ordinary death has a minimum of pain associated with it, but it’s all quite bearable. So you see, Mr. Andrews, I think that what we really fear is the awful pain of a violent end.” Kagle paused. He peered down sharply. “Or don’t you grasp the significance?”

 

Hardly hearing, Cassius blurted, “I’ll write about this. Expose this dirty business.”

 

“Mr. Andrews, I don’t think you will.”

 

“There’s something indecent about—what did you say? Oh. My promise. Well, I lied to you.”

 

“I know you did.”

 

Cassius stared.

 

“But that’s all right, Andrews. I let you lie to make it seem you were putting something over on me. That you were fooling me into permitting you to see the tracks. When Range and his toughs came here right after the court order business, he also threatened me, Mr. Andrews. Arrest. A treason trial. You name it. I appeared to be frightened, pliant. I explained my work. I told him I’d let him judge for himself, and if he thought I was a criminal, I would submit to arrest. I let him sit in the same chair you occupied. And then his men, one at a time. Flange hasn’t bothered me since. That’s why I let you see, Andrews. In a way, you and Flange and Wanda are part of the surprising evidence that’s begun to come in. Evidence that it isn’t the long sleep we fear after all but the how that’s our lash and spur. The unknown, potentially horrible how. There is some reason to fear it if we die in bed, but monumental reason if our death turns out to be violent. As you saw.”

 

Cassius’s mind was still slow. It grabbed at phrases: “Flange? He came here? You bastard.”

 

Kagle nodded. “Yes. I must say he and his men bore up rather well. So did my sister Wanda. They all endured the tracks to the end.”

 

“Trying to say I’m a coward?” Cassius choked. “Trying to say—”

 

“Don’t be belligerent,” Kagle cut in gently. “The only reason you reacted so violently back inside was because of the intensely personal connection. Your brother was dying, not some stranger. The human body, mind, are surprisingly resilient. The endurance is remarkable.” Kagle seemed sad. “Yet isn’t it strange how men and women don’t know their own strength? Think they must protect themselves? Make themselves safe, secure?”

 

Cassius glowered. “Quit it, Kagle. Weepy expressions don’t fool me. You don’t give a God damn for anybody else.”

 

Kagle seemed to muse over this. “In a sense perhaps that’s true. Else I wouldn’t be in this peculiar work. Or intending to go ahead with it, as I am. But I am rather sorry for you, Mr. Andrews.”

 

The “Hah!” from Cassius was short, cackling, grotesque.

 

“Oh, I realize you don’t believe me, but I truly am sorry in my own way. I shouldn’t have put you through it. I should have been aware of the personal element. Also, I should have avoided it because I’m beginning to see the pattern which I hinted about. In the aftereffects, I mean.”

 

Suddenly Kagle leaned close to the Aircoupe again. For the first time there was raw, fundamental emotion on his face:

 

“If it became widely known that I could arrange such experiences I’d have no peace. No, I can’t let you write, Mr. Andrews. For if they came after me en masse, there’d be no end. Don’t you see what I could offer them? That is to say—” Eyes haunted now. “—if I would, which I won’t, because I know where it would lead?”

 

“No,” Cassius said, low. “I don’t see.”

 

“I could say to them, come to me, steel yourself, prepare to endure five minutes of the most agonizing pain on this earth. Live through the most anguished of deaths, the most violent. Then you’ll be free the rest of your life. Free because the worst will be over. Free because, statistically, don’t you see, you and millions like you won’t ever die so violently. You’ll die the lesser death of a Peckham, with only a bit of eminently endurable pain. Nothing near the kind of pain which, say, that criminal endured.”

 

Cassius snickered. “Who’d fall for that?”

 

“Many, Mr. Andrews. In fact I believe most. I won’t pretend it’s a riskless proposition, I’d have to say to them. You might, just might, be one of the few in ten millions who will die violently one day. But the risk is infinitesimal. While the reward—well, I could say, if you go through the ultimate, the worst now, think of the years ahead. The years of not having to fear, always fear the unknowable. Dying a Peckham’s death then would be child’s play, don’t you see? And should you lose the gamble—die a violent death after all, I would say—why, then even it might be a whit less terrible. Of course the real benefit, I would say, lies in the years free of fear. If that sounds like a foolish offer, Mr. Andrews, five minutes of hell in exchange for a lifetime of release from the terror dying holds—if it sounds illogical that anyone would accept—if you believe people wouldn’t clamor for it—then I submit, Andrews, that you don’t know a damn thing about the nature of the world you’re living in.”

 

“No one would want—” Cassius began, unsure.

 

“Wouldn’t they? Are you aware of the temper of men’s minds over the past eighty years? What do most people desire of life anymore, Mr. Andrews? To be secure against the harms of life. Don’t ask me why. Perhaps we’ll never understand all the complicated reasons lost back in the years. But people want it. The price keeps rising, but they still want it. I could give it to them. At the price of being Butcher Balk for five short minutes. And they can stand it. Wanda stood it. Flange stood it. Afterward, there’d be nothing left to fear. The world is peopled with Peckhams, not Butcher Balks, Mr. Andrews.”

 

Then, slowly, Kagle sighed. “But I’ll never say any of that, Mr. Andrews. I’ll never say I could pull fear’s fangs, simply because I know they’d want it. They wouldn’t be satisfied with less than everything once they heard. Not until they learned the real price. Not until it was too late. Not until the world’s engine stopped.”

 

“Yours hasn’t stopped,” Cassius snarled.

 

“No,” Kagle said, almost sad again. “But then I’ve never permitted myself to experience more than two senses of any subject at any one time.”

 

His pale hand lifted, in the general direction of the moon high above the world, as if to say the subject was at last exhausted. Flickering on his face were the expressions of two men, one the god, one the assassin of everything.

 

The god could have slain the assassin by surrendering his godhood in suicide. Being a god, he couldn’t quite. No, said the gas-blue eyes, he couldn’t quite, ever.

 

“Good night, Mr. Andrews.” Dr. Kagle definitely sounded weary. “I know it’s been too harrowing. But you did ask me about your brother. What choice did I have?”

 

Muttering all the obscenities he knew, Cassius jammed his card into the ignition slot and rammed the Aircoupe away from the vicinity of the funeral parlor, leaving the blister open so he could shout back, “You rotten bastard, I’ll tell the world about this, I’ll let them know—”

 

* * * *

 

X

 

The Etaoin Pub was located on the fourth sub-level of the Capitol World Truth Building.

 

The pneumodoor went hush-hush open, then closed. Cassius heard it dimly. He was slumped over the bar, looking at his globe of Old Kentuckye Woodesman 120 Proof Sippin’ Sauce.

 

He heard footsteps. He continued to peer into the amber infinity of the booze. Who the hell cared about footsteps?

 

“Cassius? It is you! Good God in heaven, sweets, what’s happened?”

 

The barkeep ambled over. “Friend of yours, lady?”

 

“You’re new around here.”

 

“Yeah. Hired on two weeks ago.”

 

“This man works on the paper upstairs.”

 

The barkeep sniggered. “When?”

 

“What?”

 

“Lady, this guy’s been campin’ here since the day I started.”

 

Fuzzily Cassius recognized the voice of Joy de Veever. His body felt weighted with bags of lead shot. It was an effort merely to turn and blink his red eyes slowly, like an owl.

 

Joy had something clasped in her arms. Her glance was alternately indignant and sympathetic.

 

“I should have thought of coming to this bar sooner, Cassius. But you’re not the drinking type.”

 

“Every time some of the boys from the paper come in,” said the barkeep, “he goes to the john. First time, when he didn’t come out for a while, I thought he was sick. Went back there myself. He was just standing. Told me to leave him alone. I did. When the boys left after lunch, he came out. Same routine in the evening, too. Sometimes he leaves but he always comes back. Wonder where he goes at ni—”

 

“Thanks for your help,” Joy cut in. “I’ll take over. Cassius?”

 

“Lee me lone,” he said, finding it like climbing Everest to gesture.

 

“Cassius, what in God’s name is the trouble?”

 

Getting no answer, Joy pulled up the next stool. She told the barkeep she wanted nothing to drink. The tone clearly instructed him to leave. He did. Cassius blinked at the object in Joy’s hand. Some sort of book with a tricky shining clasp.

 

“Cassius love, I’ve been searching for you ever since I got back yesterday. It’s apparent that I shouldn’t have spent that week and a half in Bonn at the Floorwax Institute trade show.” She sounded affronted. “In the interval it seems you’ve completely lost your mind.”

 

“Perfly all right.” His tongue was oh so heavy. “Perfly.”

 

“Perfectly my eye! I just talked to Hughgenine upstairs.”

 

“Bothrin me. Come in here and bother me. I didn’t make it to the men’s in time.”

 

“Bothering! I should hope so! After all, when you don’t show up to work for sixteen days straight, it’s natural for him to bother. Cassius—darling—” And the tears were genuine all at once, rolling down over her rouged cheeks. “Are you in trouble? Hughgenine said he lost his temper. He’s sorry he fired you on the spot. He’ll take you back if only you’ll tell somebody what’s wrong. Cassius? Wake up and listen to me! You’re being horrid. You don’t know the agony I’ve been through. Last night I nearly had your floor super thinking you’d suffered a heart attack and must be lying dead inside your flat. What hit that place? Your books were all torn apart.”

 

“So wat?” he inquired. “So wat, so wat? Joy lee me lone.”

 

“I will not leave you alone! I’ll get you to a doctor. Do something! Are you having a nervous breakdown, sweetheart? To destroy your things that way—all the notes for the biography of that colonel strewn all over in pieces—”

 

“Stupid book. Useless goddam wase time.”

 

“Are you in trouble with some woman, Cassius?”

 

He giggled, but it had a dull sound.

 

“Cassius, I must say it again. You’re treating me very unkindly. After all, you do mean something to me, you know. Please, please, please tell me what’s wrong.”

 

“Oh nothin. I just got a tase for booze, ‘s all.”

 

“Obviously.” Joy couldn’t help sounding smug. “And obviously you’re in no shape to help anybody who wishes to help you, whether it’s Hughgenine or me or anyone. That’s why I brought this. I figured if the answer can’t be gotten from you, it can be gotten from this. Unless you’ve lost your mind so thoroughly you’ve broken every single habit you ever had.”

 

She was extending the object in her hand. The clasp looked vaguely familiar. Why did he feel alarmed?

 

“I found your other diary too, Cassius. In pieces. This one was intact.”

 

“Too tough,” he muttered. “Too dam tough tear up. Hey.” Again he blinked. “Snoopin?”

 

“Yes, snooping. I admit it. I had to find some explanation for the peculiar, awful way you’re behaving. Now you tell me how to open this lock, Cassius. Either that or you tell me what’s the matter with you. Else I’ll go to the stationer’s where you bought it. See, the name’s stamped in gold on the back. It’s right on this level. I’ll force them to disclose the code.”

 

“Gimme tha,” he said, lifting his eighty-pound hand, trying to thrust it through the gloomy darkness of the bar.

 

The effort cracked away some of his lethargy. He felt he must have the diary in his possession. Then he knew why. The last entry mentioned the Commuter’s Rest Mortuary Chapel by name. Didn’t it?

 

He wasn’t positive. He thought so. Warning bells, so faint he barely heard them.

 

“I will not.” Joy held the book miles away. “I will not give it to you.”

 

“I said gimme—!” he cried, standing. He toppled on his face.

 

From afar, Joy said to the barkeep, “You watch him. This man’s sick. I’m going to get this book opened and then we’ll take him to a hospital. You just watch him a few minutes. No, you shut up, do as I say! Want to lose your job? The paper owns this building, leases this space, or aren’t you aware of that? Here, Cassius. Stand up.”

 

As he fumbled his way back to the stool with her help, he managed to perceive what it meant. Joy, poor old Joy. Sure she wanted to help. Sure. The locked diary tantalized her. Anything that might harbor a scrap of something hot tantalized her.

 

Paper leased the space? For the stationer’s too, probably. They’d come across with the code under threat. He made one more abortive lunge for the book.

 

He grabbed the poly bar rim to keep from falling. He could see it now. He didn’t actually care but he felt he should. The book would open to a tune whose notes and name he couldn’t recall. Then Joy’s curious eyes. They’d glitter, running down the entries.

 

Then showing it to Hughgenine. Then the trail to Kagle. Joy’s hot one, the big hot one in reach at last. Plus her sense of avenging him. As if that mattered.

 

Christ. What Kagle had said was true, true. First one person would have—he shuddered and knuckled his eyes and moaned a little—those experiences. Then the next would have to see what the experience was. Then the next after that. Then someone would see how it could pull the fangs of fear. Go through the worst, the very worst, and your imagination won’t have anything to gnaw on, year after year. Wanda Kagle put it right. I’ve been there.

 

Christ, the government and the do-gooders would probably seize everything. The public good. Uplift. You can stand five minutes of Butcher Balk to be free, can’t you? Take a chance, you’re bound to die like Peckham. Think of the peace. I’ve been there.

 

Dimly he recalled the thousands on the waiting lists of the Securo Corporation. They’d want it. Everyone would want it but a few who, like Kagle, might see the threat. They would cry out. Their cries would be lost in the howls of happiness- Get it over. Nothing so bad ever again.

 

I’ve been there.

 

Did they know what it would do? Did they care? No, they wouldn’t care, they’d weep for joy as it multiplied, on, on, to the ends of the earth—

 

But though he knew these things in a dim way, he couldn’t put them all into words. It took too much effort.

 

“Worl’s engine,” Cassius whimpered. “Joy don, worl’s engine.”

 

Or had he said it aloud at all? He wasn’t sure. He’d made the effort in his skull. Whether the effort had stirred his voice box, lips, tongue, he couldn’t say. He felt so immeasurably tired. He crawled back up on the stool Even his sense of urgency, alarm, had aborted. No longer could he be sure why he’d spoken. It certainly couldn’t have been for any good reason. He didn’t have any good reasons.

 

Still, something made him squeak it once more, “Worl’s engine.”

 

The barkeep clucked his tongue. “Mister? The lady can’t hear you.”

 

A feeble whisper, dying: “Worl’s engine.”

 

“Mister, you’re dreaming. The lady left.”

 

That roused him a little. “Use have a dream. This dog. Chasin me. Not anymore. No dreams since—”

 

The sentence dribbled off. It didn’t seem worth finishing. Only the drink. His hand crawled out. Only the drink seemed worth finishing. And he wasn’t even certain about that, really.