STATIONS OF THE NIGHTMARE

Part 1: The Two-edged Gift

Paul Eyre shot a flying saucer.

On this bright morning, he was walking through a farmer’s field. Ahead of him was the edge of a wood bisected by a small creek. Riley, the setter, had just stiffened. Nose down, crouched low, seeming to vibrate, he pointed toward the magnet, the invisible quail. Paul Eyre’s heart pumped a little faster. Ahead of Riley, a few yards away, was a bush. Behind it should be the covey.

They broke loose with that racket that had made him jump so when he was a novice. It was as if the earth had given violent birth to several tiny planets. But there was not the dozen or so he had expected. Only two. The lead one was much larger than the other, so much larger that he did jump then. He knew as the shotgun roared and kicked that it was not a bird.

The concentrated pattern of his modified choke must have hit the thing squarely. It fell away at a forty-five degree angle instead of dropping as a dead bird drops, and it crashed through the lower branches of a tree on the outskirts of the wood.

Automatically, he had fired the second barrel at the trailing bird. And he had missed it.

The thing had rocketed up like a quail. But it had been dark and about two feet long. Or two feet wide. His finger had squeezed on the trigger even as his mind had squeezed on the revelation that it was not a winged creature.

It wasn’t a creature, he thought, but a made thing. More like a huge clay pigeon than anything else.

He looked around. Riley was a white and black streak, running as if a cougar were after him. He made no noise. He seemed to be conserving his breath as if he knew he’d need every atom of oxygen he could get. Behind him was a trail of excrement. Ahead of him, over half a mile up the slope, was a white farmhouse and two dark-red barns.

Roger, Paul’s son, had spoken of mines which flew up into the air before exploding. This thing had not been attached to a chain nor had it blown up. It could be a dud. But there had been no blast as it soared up. Perhaps the noise of his shotgun had covered it.

He shook his head. It could not have been anything like that. Unless ... Had some vicious person put it in the field just to kill hunters? Senseless violence was on the increase in this God-forsaking country.

The situation was much like that of a car that refused to run. You could think about it all you wanted to and make mental images of what was wrong. But until you opened the hood and looked at the engine, you would not be able to make a definite analysis. So he would open the hood.

He walked forward. The only sound was the northwest wind, gentle here because the woods broke it. The bluejay and the crows that had been so noisy before he had fired were quiet. There was the bluejay, sitting on a tree branch. It seemed frozen with shock.

He was cautious but not afraid, he told himself. He had been afraid only three times in his life. When his father had deserted him, when his mother had died, and when Mavice had said she was leaving him. And these three events had taught him that nothing was as bad as he’d thought it at the time and that it was stupid, illogical to fear. He and his brothers and sisters and mother had gotten along without his father. His mother’s death had actually made his life easier. And Mavice had not left him.

‘Only the unimaginative, of whom you are the king, have no fear,’ Tincrowdor had told him. But what did that effete egg-head know of real life or real men?

Nevertheless, he hesitated. He could just walk away, round up the dog, and hunt elsewhere. Or, better, tell Smith that someone had planted a strange mechanical device in his field.

Perhaps, though he did not like to admit it, his sight had betrayed him. Behind his glasses were fifty-four-year-old eyes. He was in good shape, better than most men twenty years younger. Much better than that Tincrowdor, who sat on his locus all day while he typed away on his crazy stories.

Still, he had been informed by the optometrist that he needed a new prescription. He had not told anyone about this. He hated to admit to anyone that he had a weakness, and that anyone included himself. When he had a chance to get fitted with new lenses, with no one except the doctor the wiser, he’d go. Perhaps he should not have put it off so long.

He resumed walking slowly across the field. Once, he looked toward the farmhouse. Riley, his pace undiminished, was still headed toward it. When he caught Riley, he’d rap him a few on the nose and shame him. If he were ruined by this, he’d get rid of him. He couldn’t see feeding something that was useless. The hound ate more than he was worth as it was.

He could imagine what Mavice would say about that. ‘You’re going to retire in eleven years. Would you want us to give you away or send you to the gas chamber because you’re useless?’

And he’d say, ‘But I won’t be. I’ll be working as hard as ever on my own business after I’ve retired.’

He was ten feet from the wood when the yellow haze drifted out from it.

* * * *

He stopped. It couldn’t be pollen at this time of the year. And no pollen ever glowed.

Moreover, it was coming with too much force to be driven by the wind. For the second time, he hesitated. The thick yellow luminance looked so much like gas. He thought about the sheep that had been killed in Nevada or Utah when the army nerve gas had escaped. Could - But no ... that was ridiculous.

The shimmering haze spread out, and he was in it. For a few seconds, he held his breath. Then he released it and laughed. The stuff blew away from his face and closed in again. Here and there, some bits sparkled. Before he reached the trees, he saw tiny blobs form on the grass, on his hands, and on the gun barrels. They looked like gold-colored mercury. When he ran his hand over the barrels, the stuff accumulated at the ends into two large drops. They ran like mercury into the cup formed by his palm.

Its odor made him wrinkle his nose and snap it to the ground. It smelled like spermatic fluid.

It was then that he noticed that he had not reloaded. He was mildly shocked. He had never missed reloading immediately after firing. In fact, he did it so automatically that he never even thought about it. He was more upset than he had realized.

Abruptly, the haze or fog, or whatever it was, disappeared. He looked around. The grass for about twenty feet behind him was faintly yellow.

He went on. A branch, broken off by the thing, lay before him. Ahead was the dense and silent wood. He pushed through the tangles of thorn bushes, from which he had flushed out so many rabbits. And there was one now, a big buck behind the thorns. It saw him, saw that it was seen, but it did not move. He crouched down to look at it. Its black eyes looked glazed, and its brown fur scintillated here and there with yellowness. It was in the shade, so the sun could not be responsible for the glints.

He poked at it, but it did not move. And now he could see that it was trembling violently.

A few minutes later, he was at the place where the thing would have landed if it had continued its angle of descent. The bushes were undisturbed; the grass unbent.

An hour passed. He had thoroughly covered the woods on this side of the creek and found nothing. He waded through the waters, which were nowhere deeper than two feet, and started his search through the woods on that side. He saw no yellow mercury, which meant one of two things. Either the thing had not come here or else it had quit expelling the stuff. That is, if the stuff had been expelled from it. It might just be a coincidence that the stuff had appeared at the same time the thing had disappeared. A coincidence, however, did not seem likely.

Then he saw a single drop of the mercury, and he knew that it was still... bleeding? He shook his head. Why would he think of that word? Only living creatures could be wounded. He had damaged it.

He whirled. Something had splashed behind him. Through a small break in the vegetation, he could see something round, flat, and black shooting from the middle of the creek. He had seen it before at a distance and had thought it was the top of a slightly rounded boulder just covered by the creek. His eyes were going bad.

He recrossed the creek and followed a trail of water which dwindled away suddenly. He looked up, and something - it -dropped down behind a bush. There was a crashing noise, then silence. .

So it was alive. No machine moved like that, unless ...

What would Tincrowdor say if he told him that he had seen a flying saucer?

Common sense told him to say nothing to anybody about this. He’d be laughed at, and people would think he was going insane. Or suffering from premature senility, like his father.

The thought seemed to drive him crazy for a minute. Shouting, he plunged through the bushes and the thorn tangles. When he was under the tree from which the thing had dropped, he stopped. His heart was hammering, and he was sweating. There was no impression in the soft moisture-laden ground; nothing indicated that a large heavy object had fallen onto it.

Something moved to the right at the corner of his eye. He turned and shot once, then again. Pieces of bushes flew up, and bits of bark showered. He reloaded - he wasn’t about to forget this time - and moved slowly toward the base of the bush at which the thing seemed to have been. But it wasn’t there anymore, if it had ever been there.

A few feet further, he suddenly got dizzy. He leaned against a tree. His blood was thrumming in his ears, and the trees and bushes were melting. Perhaps the yellow stuff was some kind of nerve gas.

He decided to get out of the woods. It wasn’t fear but logic that had made him change his mind. And no one had seen him retreat.

Near the edge of the woods, he stopped. He no longer felt dizzy, and the world had regained its hardness. It was true that only he would know he had quit, but he wouldn’t ever again be able to think of himself as a real man. No, by God - and he told himself he wasn’t swearing when he said that - he would see this out.

He turned and saw through the screen of bushes something white move out from behind a tree. It looked like the back of a woman’s torso. She wore nothing; he could see the soft white skin and the indentation of the spine. The hips were not visible. Then the back of the head, black hair down to the white shoulders, appeared.

He shouted at the woman, but she paid no attention. When he got to the tree where she had first appeared, he could no longer see her. Some of the grass was still rising, and some leaves had been distorted.

An hour later, Paul Eyre gave up. Had he just thought he’d seen a woman? What would a woman be doing naked in these woods? She couldn’t have been with a lover, because she and the man would have gotten out of the woods the first time he’d fired his shotgun.

On the way back, he thought he saw something big and tawny at a distance. He crouched down and opened the bush in front of him. About thirty yards off, going behind an almost solid tangle, was the back of an animal. It was yellowish brown and had a long tufted tail. And if he hadn’t known it was impossible, he would have said that it was the rear end of an African lion. No, a lioness.

A moment later, he saw the head of the woman.

She was where the lion would be if it stood up on its hind legs and presented its head.

The woman was in profile, and she was the most beautiful he had ever seen.

He must be suffering from some insidious form of Asiatic flu. That would explain everything. In fact, it was the only explanation.

He was sure of it when he got to the edge of the trees. The field was covered with red flowers and at the other side, which seemed to be miles away, was a glittering green city.

The vision lasted only three or four seconds. The flowers and the city disappeared, and the field, as if it were a rubber band, snapped back to its real dimensions.

He could hear it snap.

Ten minutes later, he was at the farmhouse.

Riley greeted him by biting him.

* * * *

Eyre parked the car in front of his house. The driveway was blocked with a car to which was hitched a boat trailer, a motorcycle lacking a motor, and a Land-Rover on top of which was a half-built camper. Behind it was a large garage crammed with machines, tools, supplies, old tires, and outboard motors in the process of being repaired.

Thirteen-thirty-one Wizman Court was in an area which once had been all residential. Now the huge old mansion across the street was a nursing home; the houses next to it had been torn down and buildings for a veterinarian and his kennels were almost completed. Eyre’s own house had looked large enough and smart enough when he and Mavice had moved into it twenty years ago. It looked tiny, mean, and decaying now and had looked so for ten years.

Paul Eyre, until this moment, had never noticed that. Though he felt crowded at times, he attributed this to too many people, not the smallness of the house. Once he got rid of his son and daughter, the house would again become comfortable. And the house was paid for. Besides taxes, maintenance, and the utilities, it cost him nothing. If the neighborhood was run down somewhat, so much the better. His neighbors did not complain because he was conducting his own repair business here.

Until now, he had not thought anything about its appearance. It was just a house. But now he noticed that the grass on the tiny lawn was uncut, the wooden shutters needed painting, the driveway was a mess, and the sidewalk was cracked.

He got out of the car and picked up his shotgun and bag with his left hand. The right hand was heavily bandaged. The old ladies sitting on the side porch waved and called out to him, and he waved back at them. They sat like a bunch of ancient crows on a branch. Time was shooting them down, one by one. There was an empty chair at the end of the row, but it would be occupied by a newcomer soon enough. Mr Ridgley had sat there until last week when he had been observed one afternoon urinating over the railings into the rosebushes below. He was, according to the old ladies, now locked up in his room on the third floor. Eyre looked up and saw a white face with tobacco-stained moustaches pressed against the bars over the window.

He waved. Mr Ridgley stared. The mouth below the moustache drooled. Angry, Paul Eyre turned away. His mother had stared out of that window for several weeks, and then she had disappeared. But she had lived to be eighty-six before she had become senile. That was forgivable. What he could not forgive, nor forget, was that his father had only been sixty when his brain had hardened and his reason had slid off it.

He went up the wooden unpainted steps off the side of the front porch. It was no longer just a porch. He had enclosed it and Roger now used it for a bedroom. Roger, as usual, had neglected to make up the bed-couch. Four years in the Marines, including a hitch in Viet Nam, had not made him tidy.

Eyre growled at Roger as he entered the front room. Roger, a tall thin blond youth, was sitting on the sofa and reading a college textbook. He said, ‘Oh, Mom said she’d do it.’ He stared at his father’s hand. ‘What happened?’

‘Riley went mad, and I had to shoot him.’

Mavice, coming in from the kitchen, said, ‘Oh, my God! You shot him!’

Tears ran down Roger’s cheeks.

‘Why would you do that?’

Paul waved his right hand. ‘Didn’t you hear me? He bit me! He was trying for my throat!’

‘Why would he do that?’ Mavice said.

‘You sound like you don’t believe me!’ Paul said. ‘For God’s sake, isn’t anyone going to ask me how badly he bit me? Or worry that I might get rabies?’

Roger wiped away the tears and looked at the bandages. ‘You’ve been to a doctor,’ he said. ‘What’d he say about it?’

‘Riley’s head has been shipped to the state lab,’ Paul said. ‘Do you have any idea what it’s going to be like if I have to have rabies shots? Anyway, it’s fatal! Nobody ever survived rabies!’

Mavice’s hand shot to her mouth and from behind it came strangled sounds. Her light blue eyes were enormous.

‘Yeah, and horseshoes hung over the door bring good luck,’ Roger said. ‘Why don’t you come out of the nineteenth century, Dad? Look at something besides outboard motors and the TV. The rate of recovery from rabies is very high.’

‘So I only had one year of college,’ Paul said. ‘Is that any reason for my smartass son to sneer at me? Where would you be if it wasn’t for the G.I. Bill?’

‘You go to college to get a degree, not an education,’ Roger said. ‘You have to educate yourself, all your life.’

‘For Heaven’s sake, you two,’ Mavice said. ‘Quit this eternal bickering. And sit down, Paul. Take it easy. You look terrible!’

He jerked his arm away and said, ‘I’m all right.’ But he sat down. The mirror behind the sofa had showed him a short, thin but broad-shouldered man with smooth pale-brown hair, a high forehead, bushy sandy eyebrows, blue eyes behind octagonal rimless spectacles, a long nose, a thick brown moustache, and a round cleft chin.

His face did look like a mask. Tincrowdor had said that anyone who wore glasses should never sport a moustache. Together, these gave a false-face appearance. That remark had angered him then. Now it reminded him that he was looking forward to seeing Tincrowdor. Maybe he had some answers.

‘What about a beer, Dad?’ Roger said. He looked contrite.

‘That’d help, thanks,’ Paul said. Roger hurried off to the kitchen while Mavice stood looking down at him. Even when both were standing up, she was still looking down on him. She was at least four inches taller.

‘You don’t really think Riley had rabies?’ she said. ‘He seemed all right this morning.’

‘Not really. He wasn’t foaming at the mouth or anything like that. Something scared him in the woods, scared him witless, and he attacked me. He didn’t know what he was doing.’

Mavice sat down in a chair across the room. Roger brought in the beer. Paul drank it gratefully, though its amber color reminded him of the yellow stuff. He looked at Mavice over the glass. He had always thought she was very good-looking, even if her face was somewhat long. But, remembering the profile of the woman in the woods, he saw that she was very plain indeed, if not ugly. Any woman’s face would look bad now that he had seen that glory among the trees.

The front door slammed, and Glenda walked in from the porch. He felt vaguely angry. He always did when he saw her. She had a beautiful face, a feminization of his, and a body which might have matched the face but never would. It was thin and nearly breastless, though she was seventeen. The spine was shaped like a question mark; one shoulder was lower than the other; the legs looked as thin as piston rods.

She stopped and said, ‘What happened?’ Her voice was deep and husky, sexy to those who heard it without seeing her.

Mavice and Roger told her what had taken place. Paul braced himself for a storm of tears and accusations, since she loved Riley dearly. But she said nothing about him. She seemed concerned only about her father. This not only surprised him. It angered him.

Why was he angry? he thought.

And he understood, then, that it was because she was a living reproach. If it weren’t for him, she would not be twisted; she’d be a tall straight and beautiful girl. His anger had been his way of keeping this knowledge from himself.

He was amazed that he had not known this before. How could he have been so blind?

He began sweating. He shifted on the sofa as if he could move his body away from the revelation. He felt the beginning of a panic. What had opened his eyes so suddenly? Why had he only now, today, noticed how ugly and mean the house was, how frightened and repulsed he was by the old people across the street, and why Glenda had angered him when he should have shown her nothing but tenderness?

He knew why. Something had happened to him in the woods, and it was probably the stuff which had fallen on him, the stuff expelled by the thing. But how could it have given him this insight? It scared him. It made him feel as if he were losing something very dear.

He almost yielded to the desire to tell them everything. No, they would not believe him. Oh, they’d believe that he had seen those things. But they would think that he was going crazy, and they would be frightened. If he would shoot Riley while in a fit, he might shoot them.

He became even more frightened. Many times, he had imagined doing just this. What if he lost control and the image shifted gears into reality?

He stood up. ‘I think I’ll wash up and then go to bed for a while. I don’t feel so good.’

This seemed to astonish everybody.

‘What’s so strange about that?’ he said loudly.

‘Why, Dad, you’ve always had to be forced to bed when you’ve been sick,’ Glenda said. ‘You just won’t admit that you can get ill, like other people. You act as if you were made of stone, as if microbes bounced off of you.’

‘That’s because I’m not a hyper— a hyper— a what-you-call-it, a goldbricker, like some people,’ he said.

‘A hypochondriac,’ Glenda and Roger said at the same time.

‘Don’t look at me when you say that,’ Mavice said, glaring at him. ‘You know I have a chronic bladder infection. I’m not faking it. Dr Wells told you that himself when you called him to find out if I was lying. I was never so embarrassed in all my life.’

The shrill voice was coming from a long way off. Glenda was becoming even more crooked, and Roger was getting thinner and taller.

The doorway to the bedroom moved to one side as he tried to get through it. He couldn’t make it on two legs, so he got down on all fours. If he was a dog, he’d have a more solid footing, and maybe the doorway would be so confused by the sudden change of identities it would hold still long enough for him to get through it.

He heard Mavice’s scream and barked an assurance that he was all right. Then he was protesting to Mavice and Roger that he didn’t want to stand up, but they had hoisted him up and were guiding him toward the bed. It didn’t matter then, since he had gotten through. Let the doorway move around all it wanted now; he had fooled it. You could teach an old dog new tricks.

Later, he heard Mavice’s voice drilling through the closed door. Here he was, trying to sleep off whatever was ailing him, and she was screaming like a parrot. Nothing would ever get her to lower that voice. Too many decibels from a unibelle, he thought. Which was a strange thought, even if he was an engineer. But he wished she would tone down or, even better, shut up. Forever. He knew that it wasn’t her fault, since both her parents had been somewhat deaf during her childhood. But they were dead now, and she had no logical reason to keep on screaming as if she were trying to wake the dead.

Why hadn’t he ever said anything about it? Because he nourished the resentment, fed it with other resentments. And then, when the anger became too great, he in turn screamed at her. But it was always about other things. He had never told her how grating her voice was.

He sat up suddenly and then got out of bed. He was stronger now, and the doorway was no longer alive. He walked out into the little hall and said, ‘What are you saying to Morna?’

Mavice looked at him in surprise and put her hand over the receiver. ‘I’m calling off tonight. You’re too sick to have company.’

‘No, I’m not,’ he said. ‘I’m all right. You tell her to come on over as planned.’

Mavice’s penciled eyebrows rose. ‘All right, but if I’d insisted they come, you would have gotten mad at me.’

‘I got work to do,’ he said, and headed toward the rear exit.

‘With that bandage on your hand?’ Mavice said.

He threw both hands up into the air and went into the living room. Roger was sitting in a chair and holding a textbook while watching TV.

‘How can you study freshman calculus while Matt Dillon is shooting up the place?’ Paul Eyre said.

‘Every time a gun goes off and a redskin bites the dust, another equation becomes clear,’ Roger said.

‘What the hell does that mean?’

‘I don’t know what it means,’ Roger said calmly. ‘I just know it works.’

‘I don’t understand you,’ Paul said. ‘When I was studying I had to have absolute quiet.’

‘Didn’t you listen to the radio while you were hitting the books?’

Paul seemed surprised.

‘No.’

‘Well, I was raised this way,’ Roger said. ‘All my friends were. Maybe we learned how to handle two or more things simultaneously. Maybe that’s where the generation gap is. We take in many different things at once and see the connections among them. But you only saw one thing at a time.’

‘So that makes you better than us?’

‘Different, anyway,’ Roger said. ‘Dad, you ought to read MacLuhan. But then...’

‘But then what?’

‘But you never read anything but the local newspaper, sports magazines, and stuff connected with your work.’

‘I don’t have time,’ Paul said. ‘I’m holding down a job at Trackless and working eight hours a day on my own business. You know that.’

‘Leo Tincrowdor used to do that, and he read three books a week. But then he wants to know.’

‘Yeah, he knows so much, but if his car breaks down, can he fix it himself? No, he has to call in an expensive mechanic. Or get me to do it for him for nothing.’

‘Nobody’s perfect,’ Roger said. ‘Anyway, he’s more interested in finding out how the universe works and why our society is breaking down and what can be done to repair it.’

‘It wouldn’t be breaking down if people like him weren’t trying to break it down!’

‘You would have said the same thing a hundred years ago,’ Roger said. ‘You think things are in a mess now; you should read about the world in 1874. The good old days. My history professor -’

Paul strode from the room and into the kitchen. He never drank more than two beers a day, but today was different. And how it was different. The top of the can popped open, reminding him of the sound when the field had snapped back to normalcy. Now there was a connection which Roger, anybody else in the world, in fact, would not have made. He wished he had stayed home to catch up on his work instead of indulging himself in a quail hunt.

* * * *

At seven, the Tincrowdors walked in. Usually Paul kept them waiting, since he always had to finish up on a motor in the garage. By the time he had washed up, Leo had had several drinks and Morna and Mavice were engaged in one of their fast-moving female conversations. Leo was happy enough talking to Roger or Glenda or, if neither were there, happy to be silent. He did not seem to resent Paul’s always showing up late. Paul suspected that he would have been content if he never showed up. Yet, he always greeted him with a smile. If he had been drinking much, he also had some comment which sounded funny but which concealed a joke at Paul’s expense.

Tonight, however, Paul was in the living room when they arrived. He jumped up and kissed Morna enthusiastically. He always kissed good-looking women if they would let him; it gave him a sense of innocent infidelity, outside of the sheer pleasure of kissing. Morna had to bend down a little, like Mavice, but she put more warmth into it than Mavice. Yet she was always, well, often, chewing him out in defence of her friend, Mavice.

Leo Queequeg Tincrowdor enclosed Paul’s hand with his over-sized one and squeezed. He was a six-footer with heavy bones and a body that had once been muscular but now was turning to fat. His once auburn hair was white and thinning. Below protruding bars of bone, his strange leaf-green eyes, the balls bloodshot, looked at and through Paul. His cheeks were high and red. His beard was a mixture of gray, black, and red. He had a deep voice the effect of which was lessened by a tendency to slur when drinking. And Paul had only seen him twice when he hadn’t been drinking. He pushed ahead of him a balloon of bourbon. When he had money, it was Waller’s Special Reserve. When he was broke, it was cheap whiskey cut with lemon juice. Evidently he had recently received a story check. The balloon had an expensive odor.

‘Sit down, Leo.’ Ritualistically, Eyre asked, ‘What’ll it be? Beer or whiskey?’

Ritualistically, Tincrowdor answered, ‘Bourbon. I only drink beer when I can’t get anything better.’

When Paul returned with six ounces of Old Kentucky Delight on ice, he found Tincrowdor handing out two of his latest soft-covers to Roger and Glenda. He felt a thrust of jealousy as they exclaimed over the gifts. How could the kids enjoy that trash?

‘What’s this?’ he said, handing Leo his drink and then taking the book from Glenda. The cover showed a white man in a cage surrounded by some green-skinned women, all naked, reaching through the bars for the man. In the background was a mountain vaguely resembling a lion with a woman’s head. On top of the head was a white Grecian temple with small figures holding knives around another figure stretched out on an altar.

‘Sphinxes Without Secrets,’ Leo said. ‘It’s about a spaceman who lands on a planet inhabited by women. The males died off centuries before, mostly from heartbreak. A chemist, a women’s lib type, had put a substance in the central food plant which made the men unable to have erections.’

‘What?’ Mavice said. She laughed, but her face was red.

‘It’s an old idea,’ Leo said. He sipped the bourbon and shuddered. ‘But I extrapolate to a degree nobody else has ever done before. Or is capable of doing. It’s very realistic. Too much so for the Busiris Journal-Star. Their reviewer not only refused to write a review, he sent me a nasty letter. Nothing libelous. Old Potts doesn’t have the guts for that.’

‘If there weren’t any men, how could they have babies?’ Paul said.

‘Chemically induced parthenogenesis. Virgin birth caused by chemicals. It’s been done with rabbits and theoretically could be done with humans. I don’t doubt that the Swedes have done it, but they’re keeping quiet about it. They have no desire to be martyrs.’

‘That’s blasphemy!’ Paul said. His face felt hot, and he had a momentary image of himself throwing Tincrowdor out on his rear. ‘There’s only been one virgin birth, and that was divinely inspired.’

‘Inspired? That sounds like a blow job,’ Tincrowdor said. ‘No, I apologize for that remark. When among the aborigines, respect their religion. However, I will point out that if Jesus was the result of parthenogenesis, he should have been a woman. All parthenogenetically stimulated offspring are females, females only carry the X chromosome, you know. Or do you? It’s the male’s Y chromosome that determines that the baby be a male.’

‘But God is, by the definition of God, all-powerful,’ Glenda said. ‘So why couldn’t He have, uh, inserted a sort of spiritual Y chromosome?’

Tincrowdor laughed and said, ‘Very good, Glenda. You’d make an excellent science-fiction author, God help you.

‘Anyway, every culture has its deviates, and this lesbian society was no exception. So a few perverts were not repulsed by the spaceman. Instead, he was to them a most desirable sex object.’

‘How could a woman who wanted a man instead of a woman be a deviate?’ Paul said.

‘Deviation is determined by what the culture considers normal. When we were kids, going down was considered by almost everybody to be a perversion, and you could get put in jail for twenty years or more if caught doing it. But in our lifetime, we’ve seen this attitude change. By 2010, anything between consenting adults will be acceptable. But there are still millions in this country who think the only God-favored way is for the woman to lie on her back with the man on top. And would you believe it, there are millions who won’t undress in front of each other or keep a light on during intercourse. The sexual dinosaurs, for that’s what they are, will be extinct in another fifty years. Could I have another drink?’

Paul Eyre glared at his wife. She must have been confiding in Morna. Tincrowdor had made it obvious that he was talking about the Eyres. Was nothing sacred anymore?

Nor did he like this kind of talk before Glenda.

He said, ‘Roger, will you get him another whiskey?’

Roger left reluctantly. Mavice said, ‘So what happened to the spaceman?’

‘He was a homosexual and wanted nothing to do with the woman who let him out of his cage. Scorned, she turned him in to the priestess, and they sacrificed him. However, he was stuffed and put in a museum alongside a gorilla-type ape. Due to complaints from the Decency League, he was eventually fitted with a skirt to hide his nauseating genitals.’

‘What does the title mean?’ Mavice said.

‘That’s from Oscar Wilde, who said that women were sphinxes without secrets.’

‘I like that!’ Mavice said.

‘Oscar Wilde was a queer,’ Morna said. ‘What would he know about women?’

‘Being half-female, he knew more about them than most men,’ Tincrowdor said.

Paul wanted to get away from that subject. He leaned over and took the other book from Glenda. ’Osiris On Crutches. What does that mean? Or maybe I’m better off if I don’t ask.’

‘Osiris was an ancient Egyptian god. His evil brother, Set, tore him apart and scattered the pieces all over earth. But Osiris’ wife, Isis, and his son, Horus, collected the pieces and put them back together again and revivified him. My book tells the story in detail. For a long time, Osiris was missing a leg, so he hopped around earth on crutches looking for it. That wasn’t the only thing he was missing. His nose couldn’t be found, either, so Isis stuck his penis over the nasal cavity. This explains why Osiris is sometimes depicted as being ibis-headed. The ibis was a bird with a long beak. An early Pharaoh thought this was obscene and so ordered all artists to change the penis into a beak.

‘Anyway, after many adventures, Osiris found his leg but wished he hadn’t. He got a lot more sympathy as a cripple. He found his nose, too, but the tribe that had it refused to give it up. Since it was a piece of a divine being, they’d made a god of it. It was giving them good crops, both of wheat and babies, and it was dispensing excellent, if somewhat nasal, oracles.

‘Osiris blasted them with floods and lightning bolts, and so scared them into returning his nose. But he would have been better off if he hadn’t interfered with their religious customs. His nose elongated and swelled when he was sexually excited, which was most of the time, since he was a god. And he breathed through his penis.’

‘For heaven’s sake!’ Paul said. ‘That’s pornography? No wonder Potts won’t review your books!’

‘They said the same thing about Aristophanes, Rabelais, and Joyce,’ Tincrowdor said.

‘I’m just as glad that the paper won’t review his books,’ Morna said. ‘It would be so embarrassing. I’m on good terms with our neighbors, but if they found out what he wrote, we’d be ostracized. Fortunately, they don’t read science-fiction.’

Leo was silent for a moment, and then he looked at Paul’s bandaged hand. ‘Morna said your dog bit you today. You had to shoot him.’

He made it sound like an accusation.

‘It was terrible,’ Mavice said. ‘Roger cried.’

‘Tears over a dog from a man who’s booby-trapped cans of food to blow up infants?’ Tincrowdor said.

Roger handed him his drink and said, ‘Those same little kids were the ones tossing grenades in our trucks!’

‘Yeah, I know,’ Tincrowdor said. ‘Don’t criticize a man unless you’ve walked a mile in his G.I. boots. I shot some twelve-year-old kids in World War II. But they were shooting at me. I suppose the principle’s the same. It’s the practice I don’t like. Did you ever see your victims, Roger? After the explosions, I mean.’

‘No, I’m not morbid,’ Roger said.

‘I saw mine. I’ll never forget them.’

‘You better lay off the booze,’ Morna said. ‘You’ve been insulting and now you’re going to get sloppy sentimental.’

‘Advice from the world’s champion insulter,’ Tincrowdor said. ‘She calls it being frank. Does it hurt, Paul? The bite, I mean.’

‘You’re the first person who’s asked me that,’ Paul said. ‘My family’s more concerned about the dog than me.’

‘That’s not true!’ Mavice said. ‘I’m terribly worried about rabies!’

‘If he starts foaming at the mouth, shoot him,’ Tincrowdor said.

‘That’s not funny!’ Morna said. ‘I saw a kid that’d been bit by a dog when I was working in the hospital. He didn’t get rabies, but the vaccination made him suffer terribly. Don’t you worry, Paul. There’s not much chance Riley had hydrophobia, he hadn’t had any contact with other animals. Maybe the post-mortem will show he had a tumor on his brain. Or something.’

‘Maybe he just didn’t like Paul,’ Tincrowdor said.

Paul understood that Tincrowdor was speaking not only for the dog but for himself.

‘I once wrote a short story called The Vaccinators from Vega. The Vegans appeared one day in a great fleet with weapons against which Earth was powerless. The Vegans were bipedal but hairy and had bad breaths because they ate only meat. They were, in fact, descended from dogs, not apes. They had big black eyes soft with love, and they were delighted because we had so many telephone poles. And they had come to save the universe, not to conquer our planet. They said a terrible disease would soon spread throughout the galaxy, but they would be able to immunize everybody. The Earthlings objected against forcible vaccination, but the Vegans pointed out that the Earthlings themselves had provided the precedent.

‘After they had given everybody a shot, they departed, taking with them some of the terrestrial artifacts they thought valuable. These weren’t our great works of art or sports cars or atom bombs. They took fire hydrants and flea powder. Ten weeks later all members of homo sapiens dropped dead. The Vegans hadn’t told us that we were the dreaded disease. Mankind was too close to interstellar travel.’

‘Don’t you ever write anything good about people?’ Paul said.

‘The people get the kind of science-fiction writer they deserve.’

At least, that’s what Paul thought he said. Tincrowdor was getting more unintelligible with every sip.

‘Sure, I’ve written a number of stories about good people. They always get killed. Look at what happened to Jesus. Anyway, one of my stories is a glorification of mankind. It’s entitled The Hole in the Coolth. God is walking around in the Garden in the coolth of the evening. He’s just driven Adam and Eve out of Eden, and He’s wondering if He shouldn’t have killed them instead. You see, there are no animals in the world outside. They’re all in the Garden, very contented. The Garden is a small place, but there’s no worry about the beasts getting too numerous. God’s ecosystem is perfect; the births just balance the deaths.

‘But now there’s nothing except accident, disease, and murder to check the growth of human population. No saber-tooth cats or poisonous snakes. No sheep, pigs, or cattle, either. That means that mankind will be vegetarians, and if they want protein they’ll have to eat nuts. In a short time they’ll have spread out over the earth, and since they won’t discover agriculture for another two thousand years, they’ll eat all the nuts.

Then they’ll look over the fence around the Garden and see all those four-footed edibles there. There goes the neighborhood. The Garden will be ruined; the flowers all tromped flat; the animals exterminated in an orgy of carnivorousness. Maybe He should change His mind and burn them with a couple of lightning strokes. He needs the practice anyway.

‘Another thing that bothers God is that He can’t stop thinking about Eve. God receives the emotions of all his creatures, as if he’s a sort of spiritual radio set. When an elephant is constipated, He feels its agony. When a baboon has been rejected by its pack, He feels its loneliness and sadness. When a wolf kills a fawn, he feels the horror of the little deer and the gladness of the wolf. He also tastes the deliciousness of the meat as it goes down the wolf’s mouth. And he appreciates the animals’ feelings for sex.

‘But human beings have a higher form of sex. It involves psychology, too, and this is so much better. On the other hand, due to psychology, it’s often much inferior. But Adam and Eve haven’t existed long enough to get their psyches too messed up. So God, as a sort of mental peeping torn, enjoys Adam’s and Eve’s coupling. Qualitatively, Adam and Eve are so far ahead of the other creations, there’s no comparison.

‘When Adam takes Eve in his arms, God does too. But in this eternal triangle, no cuckolding is involved. Besides, God had made Eve first.

‘But when Adam and Eve were run out of Eden, God decided to dampen the power of His reception from them. He’ll stay tuned in, but He’ll be getting only faint signals. That means He won’t be getting full ecstasy of their mating. On the other hand, He won’t be suffering so much because of their grief and loneliness. The two are deep in Africa and heading south, and the signals are getting weaker. About the only thing He can pick up is a feeling of sadness. Still, He sees Eve in His mind’s eye, and He knows He’s missing a lot. But He refuses to apply more of the divine juice. Better He should forget them for a while.

‘He’s walking along the fence, thinking these thoughts, when He feels a draft. The cold air of the world outside is blowing into the pleasant warm air of the Garden. This should not be, so God investigates. And he finds a hole dug under the golden, jewel-studded fence that rings Eden. He’s astounded, because the hole has been dug from the Garden side. Somebody has gotten out of the Garden, and He doesn’t understand this at all. He’d understand if somebody tried to get in. But out!

‘A few minutes later, or maybe it was a thousand years later, since God, when deep in thought, isn’t aware of the passage of time, he receives a change of feeling from Adam and Eve. They’re joyous, and the grief at being kicked out of Eden is definitely less.

‘God walks out of Eden and down into Africa to find out what’s made the change. He could be there in a nanosecond, but He prefers to walk. He finds Adam and Eve in a cave and two dogs and their pups standing guard at the entrance. The dogs snarl and bark at Him before they recognize Him. God pets them, looks inside the cave, and sees Adam and Eve with their children, Cain, Abel and a couple of baby girls. It was their sisters who would become Cain and Abel’s wives, you know. But that’s another story.

‘God was touched. If human beings could gain the affections of dogs so much that they would leave the delights of Eden, literally dig their way out just to be with humans, then humans must have something worthwhile. So He returned to the Garden and told the angel with the flaming sword to drive the other animals out.

‘ “It’ll be a mess,” the angel said.

‘ “Yes, I know,” God said. “But if there aren’t other animals around, those poor dogs will starve to death. They’ve got nothing but nuts to eat.” ‘

Paul and Mavice were shocked by such blasphemy. Roger and Glenda laughed. There was a tinge of embarrassment in their laughter, but it was caused by their parents’ reaction.

Morna had laughed, but she said, ‘That’s the man I have to live with! And when he’s telling you about Osiris and God, he’s telling you about himself!’

There was silence for a moment. Paul decided that now was his chance. ‘Listen, Leo, I had a dream this afternoon. It may be a great idea for you.’

‘O.K.,’ Tincrowdor said. He looked weary.

‘You didn’t sleep this afternoon,’ Mavice said. ‘You weren’t in bed for more than a few minutes.’

‘I know if I slept or if I didn’t. The dream must’ve been caused by what happened this morning. But it’s wild. I dreamt I was hunting quail, just like I did this morning. I was on the same field, and Riley had just taken a point, like he did this morning. But from then on...’

Leo said nothing until Paul was finished. He asked Roger to fill his glass again. For a moment he twiddled his thumbs, and then he said, ‘The most amazing thing about your dream is that you dreamed it. It is too rich in imaginative details for you.’

Paul opened his mouth to protest, but Tincrowdor held up his hand for silence.

‘Morna has related to me dreams which you told Mavice about. You don’t have many - rather, you don’t remember many, and those few you do seem to you remarkable. But they’re not. They’re very poor stuff. You see, the more creative and imaginative a person, the richer and more original his dreams. Yes, I know that you do have a flair for engineering creativity. You’re always tinkering around on gadgets you’ve invented. In fact, you could have become fairly wealthy from some of them. But you either delayed too long applying for a patent, and so someone else beat you to it, or you never got around to building a model of your gadget or never finished it. Someone always got there ahead of you. Which is significant. You should look into why you dillydally and so fail. But then you don’t believe in psychoanalysis, do you?’

‘What’s that got to do with this dream?’ Paul said.

‘Everything is connected, way down under, where the roots grope and the worms blind about and the gnomes tunnel through crap for gold. Even the silly chatter of Mavice and Morna about dress sizes and recipes and gossip about their friends is meaningful. You listen to them a while, if you can stand it, and you’ll see they’re not talking about what they seem to be talking about. Behind the mundane messages is a secret message, in a code which can be broken down if you work hard at it, and have the talent to understand it. Mostly they’re S.O.S.’s, cryptic maydays.’

‘I like that!’ Mavice said.

‘Up your cryptic!’ Morna said.

‘What about the dream?’ Paul said.

‘As a lay analyst, I’m more of a layer - of eggs, unfortunately - than an analyzer. I don’t know what your dream means. You’d have to go to a psychoanalyst for that, and of course you’d never do that because, one, it costs a lot of money, and, two, you’d think people would think you were crazy.

‘Well, you are, though suffering from that kind of insanity which is called normalcy. What I am interested in are the elements of your dream. The flying saucer, the gaseous golden blood from its wound, the sphinx, and the glittering green city.’

‘The sphinx?’ Paul asked. ‘You mean the big statue by the pyramids? The lion with a woman’s head?’

‘Now, that’s the Egyptian sphinx, and it’s a he, not a she, by the way. I’m talking of the ancient Greek sphinx with a lion’s body and lovely woman’s breasts and face. Though the one you described seemed more like a leocentaur. It had a woman’s trunk which joined the lion’s body, lioness’, to be exact, where the animal’s neck should be.’

‘I didn’t see anything like that!’

‘You didn’t see the entirety. But it’s obvious that she was a leocentaur. Nor did you give her a chance to ask you the question. What is it that in the morning goes on four legs, in the afternoon on two, and in the evening on three? Oedipus answered the question and then killed her. You wanted to shoot her before she could open her mouth.’

‘What was the answer?’ Mavice said.

‘Man,’ Glenda said. ‘Typically anthropocentric and male chauvinistic.’

‘But these are not ancient times, and I’m sure she had a question relevant to this contemporary age. But you must have read about her sometime, maybe in school. Otherwise, why the image? And about the green city? Have you ever read the Oz books?’

‘No, but I had to take Glenda and Roger to see the movie when they were young. Mavice was sick.’

‘He wouldn’t let me see it on TV last month,’ Glenda said. ‘He said Judy Garland was an animal.’

‘She used drugs!’ Paul said. ‘Besides, that picture is a lot of nonsense!’

‘How like you to equate that poor suffering soul with vermin,’ Tincrowdor said. ‘And I suppose your favourite TV series, Bonanza, isn’t fantasy? Or The Music Man, which you love so much? Or most of the stuff you read as the gospel truth in our right-wing rag, the Busiris Journal-Star?’

‘You’re not so smart,’ Paul said. ‘You haven’t got the slightest idea what my dream means!’

‘You’re stung,’ Tincrowdor said. ‘No, if I was so smart, I’d be charging you twenty-five dollars an hour. However, I wonder if that was a dream. You didn’t actually see all this out in that field? By the way, just where is it? I’d like to go out and investigate.’

‘You are crazy!’ Paul said.

‘I think we’d better go,’ Morna said. ‘Paul has such an awful yellow color.’

Paul detested Tincrowdor at that moment and yet he did not want him to leave.

‘Just a minute. Don’t you think it’d make a great story?’

Tincrowdor sat back down. ‘Maybe. Let’s say the saucer isn’t a mechanical vehicle but a living thing. It’s from some planet of some far-off star, of course. Martians aren’t de rigeur anymore. Let’s say the saucerperson lands here because it’s going to seed this planet. The yellow stuff wasn’t its blood but its spores or its eggs. When it’s ready to spawn, or lay, it’s in a vulnerable position, like a mother sea-turtle when it lays its eggs in the sand of a beach. It’s not as mobile as it should be. A hunter comes across it at the critical moment, and he shoots it. The wound opens its womb or whatever, and it prematurely releases the eggs. Then, unable to take off in full flight, it hides. The hunter is a brave man or lacking imagination or both. So he goes into the woods after the saucerperson. It’s still capable of projecting false images of itself; its electromagnetic field or whatever it is that enables it to fly through space, stimulates the brain of the alien biped that’s hunting it. Images deep in the hunter’s unconscious are evoked. The hunter thinks he sees a sphinx and a glittering green city.

‘And the hunter has breathed in some of the spore-eggs. This is what the saucerperson desires, since the reproductive cycle is dependent on living hosts. Like sheep liver flukes. The eggs develop into larvae which feed on the host. Or perhaps they’re not parasitic but symbiotic. They give the host something beneficial in return for his temporarily housing them. Maybe the incubating stage is a long and complicated one. The host can transmit the eggs or the larvae to other hosts.

‘Have you been sneezing yellow, Paul?

‘In time, the larvae will mutate into something, maybe little saucers. Or another intermediate stage, something horrible and inimical. Maybe these take different forms, depending upon the chemistry of the hosts. In any event, in human beings the reaction is not just physical. It’s psychosomatic. But the host is doomed, and he is highly infectious. Anybody who comes into contact with him is going to be filled with, become rotten with, the larvae. There’s no chance of quarantining the hosts. Not in this age of great mobility. Mankind has invented the locomotive, the automobile, the airplane solely to make the transmission of the deadly larvae easier. At least, that’s the viewpoint of the saucerperson.

‘Doom, doom, doom!’

‘Dumb, dumb, dumb,’ Morna said. ‘Come on, Leo, let’s go. You’ll be snoring like a pig, and I won’t be able to get a wink of sleep. He snores terribly when he’s been drinking. I could kill him.’

‘Wait for time to do its work,’ Tincrowdor said. ‘I’m slowly killing myself with whiskey. It’s the curse of the Celtic race. Booze, not the British, beat us. With which alliteration, I bid you bon voyage. Or von voyage. I’m part German, too.’

‘What are your Teutonic ancestors responsible for?’ Morna said. ‘Your arrogance?’

* * * *

After the Tincrowdors had left, Mavice said, ‘You really should get to bed, Paul. You do look peaked. And we have to get up early tomorrow for church.’

He didn’t reply. His bowels felt as if an octopus had squeezed them in its death agony. He got to the bathroom just in time, but the pain almost yanked a scream from him. Then it was over. He became faint when he saw what was floating in the water. It was small, far too small to have caused such trouble. It was an ovoid, about an inch long, and it was a dull yellow. For some reason, he thought of the story of the goose which laid golden eggs.

He began trembling. It was ten minutes or more before he could flush it down, wash, and leave the bathroom. He had a vision of the egg dissolving in the pipes, being treated in the sewage plant, spreading its evil parts throughout the sludge, being transported to farms for fertilizer, being sucked up by the roots of corn, wheat, soy beans, being eaten, being carried around in the bodies of men and animals, being ...

In the bedroom, Mavice tried to kiss him goodnight. He turned away. Was he infectious? Had that madman accidentally hit on the truth?

‘Don’t kiss me then,’ Mavice shrilled. ‘You never want to kiss me unless you want to go to bed with me. That’s the only time I get any tenderness from you, if you can call it tenderness. But I’m just as glad. I have a bladder infection and you’d hurt me. After all, it’s my wifely duty, no matter how sick I am. According to you, anyway.’

‘Shut up, Mavice,’ he said. ‘I’m sick. I don’t want you to catch anything.’

‘Catch what? You said you felt all right. You don’t have the flu, do you?’

‘I don’t know what I got,’ he said, and he groaned.

‘Oh, Lord, I pray it’s not the rabies,’ she said.

‘It couldn’t be. Morna said rabies doesn’t act that fast.’

‘Then what is it?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, and groaned again. ‘What is it Leo is so fond of quoting? Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad?’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ she said, but she softened. She kissed him on the cheek before he could object, and turned over away from him.

He lay awake a long time, and when he did sleep he had fitful dreams. They awoke him often, though he remembered few of them. But there was one of a glittering green city and a thing with a body which was part lioness and part woman advancing toward him over a field of scarlet flowers.

* * * *

Roger Eyre stood up and looked at Leo Tincrowdor. They were standing near the edge of a cornfield just off the Little Rome Road.

‘They’re the tracks of a big cat all right,’ he said. ‘A very big cat. If I didn’t know better, I’d say they were a lion’s or a tiger’s. One that could fly.’

‘Your major is zoology, so you should know,’ Tincrowdor said. He looked up at the sky. ‘It’s going to rain. I wish we had time to get casts. Do you think that if we went back to your house and got some plaster ... ?’

‘It’s going to be a heavy rain storm. No.’

‘Damn it, I should have at least brought a camera. But I never dreamed of this. It’s objective evidence. Your father isn’t crazy, and that dream ... I thought he was telling more than a dream.’

‘You can’t be serious,’ Roger said.

Tincrowdor pointed at the prints in the mud. ‘Your father was driving to work when he suddenly pulled the car over just opposite here. Three men in a car a quarter of a mile behind him saw him do it. They knew him, since they work at Trackless, too. They stopped and asked him if his car had broken down. He mumbled a few unintelligible words and then became completely catatonic. Do you think that that and these tracks are just coincidence?’

Ten minutes later, they were in the Adler Sanitorium. As they walked down the hall, Tincrowdor said, ‘I went to Shomi University with Doctor Croker, so I should be able to get more out of him than the average doctor would tell. He thinks my books are a lot of crap, but we’re both members of The Baker Street Irregulars and he likes me, and we play poker twice a month. Let me do the talking. Don’t say anything about any of this. He might want to lock us up, too.’

Mavice, Morna, and Glenda were just coming out of the doctor’s office. Tincrowdor told them he would see them in a minute; he wanted a few words with the doctor. He entered and said, ‘Hi, Jack. Anything cooking on the grange?’

Croker was six-feet three-inches tall, almost too handsome, and looked like a Tarzan who had lately been eating too many bananas. He shook hands with Tincrowdor and said, in a slight English accent, ‘We can dispense with the private jokes.’

‘Sorry. Laughter is my defense,’ Tincrowdor said. ‘You must really be worried about Paul.’

The door opened, and Morna entered. She said, ‘You gave me the high sign to come back alone, Jack. What’s wrong?’

‘Promise me you won’t say anything to the family. Or to anybody,’ he said. He gestured at a microscope under which was a slide. ‘Take a look at that. You first, Morna, since you’re a lab tech. Leo wouldn’t know what he was seeing.’

Morna bent over, made the necessary adjustments, looked for about ten seconds, and then said, ‘Lord!’

‘What is it?’ Leo said.

Morna straightened. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Neither do I,’ Croker said. ‘I’ve been ransacking my books, and it’s just as I suspected. There ain’t no such thing.’

‘Like the giraffe,’ Leo said. ‘Let me look. I’m not as ignorant as you think.’

A few minutes later, he straightened up. ‘I don’t know what those other things are, the orange, red, lilac, deep blue, and purple-blue cells. But I do know that there aren’t any organisms shaped like a brick with rounded ends and colored a bright yellow.’

‘They’re not only in his blood; they’re in other tissues, too,’ Croker said. ‘My tech found them while making a routine test. The things seem to be coated with a waxy substance which doesn’t take a stain. I put some specimens in a blood agar culture, and they’re thriving, though they’re not multiplying. I stayed up all night running other tests. Eyre is a very healthy man, aside from a mental withdrawal. I don’t know what to make of it, and to tell you the truth, I’m scared!

‘That is why I had him put in isolation, and yet I don’t want to alarm anybody. I’ve got no evidence that he’s a danger to anybody. But he’s swarming with something completely unknown. It’s a hell of a situation, because there’s no precedent to follow.’

Morna burst into tears. Leo Tincrowdor said, ‘And if he recovers from his catatonia, there’s nothing you can do to keep him here.’

‘Nothing legal,’ Croker said.

Morna snuffled, wiped her tears, blew her nose, and said, ‘Maybe it’ll just pass away. Those things will disappear, and it’ll be just another of the medical mysteries.’

‘I doubt it, Pollyanna,’ Tincrowdor said. ‘I think this is just the beginning.’

‘There’s more,’ Croker said. ‘Epples, the nurse assigned to him, has a face deeply scarred with acne. Had, I should say. She went into his room to check on him, and when she came out, her face was a smooth and as soft as a baby’s.’

There was a long silence before Tincrowdor said, ‘You mean, you actually mean, that Paul Eyre performed a miracle? But he wasn’t conscious! And -’

‘I was staggered, but I am a scientist,’ Croker said. ‘Shortly after Epples, near hysteria, told me what happened, I noticed that a wart on my finger had disappeared. I remember that I’d had it just before I examined Eyre ...’

‘Oh, come on!’ Morna said.

‘Yes, I know. But there’s more. I’ve had to reprimand a male nurse, a sadistic apish-looking man named Backers, for unnecessary roughness a number of times. And I’ve suspected him, though I’ve had no proof, of outright cruelty in his treatment of some of the more obstreperous patients. I’ve been watching him for some time, and I would have fired him long ago if it weren’t so hard to get help.

‘Shortly after Epples had left Eyre and not knowing yet that her scars were gone, she returned to the room, She caught Backers sticking a needle in Eyre’s thigh. He said later that he suspected Eyre of faking it, but he had no business being in the room or testing Eyre. Epples started to chew Backers out, but she didn’t get a chance to say more than two words. Backers grabbed his heart and keeled over. Epples called me and then gave him mouth-to-mouth treatment until I arrived. I got his heart started with adrenalin. A half hour later, he was able to tell me what happened.

‘Now Backers has no history of heart trouble, and the EKG I gave him indicated that his heart is normal. I -’

‘Listen,’ Tincrowdor said, ‘are you telling me you think Eyre can both cure and kill? With thought projection?’

‘I don’t know how he does it or why. I’d have thought that Backer’s attack was just a coincidence if it hadn’t been for Epple’s acne and my wart. I put two and two together and decided to try a little experiment. I felt foolish doing it, but a scientist rushes in where fools fear to tread. Or maybe it’s the other way around.

‘Anyway, I released some of my lab mosquitoes into Eyre’s room. And behold, the six which settled on him expecting a free meal fell dead. Just keeled over, like Backers.’

There was another long silence. Finally, Morna said, ‘But if he can cure people ... ?’

‘Not he,’ Croker said. ‘I think those mysterious yellow microorganisms in his tissues are somehow responsible. I know it seems fantastic, but -’

‘But if he can cure,’ Morna said, ‘how wonderful!’

‘Yes,’ Leo said, ‘but if he can also kill, and I say if, since he’ll have to be tested further before such a power can be admitted as possible, if, I say, he can kill anybody that threatens him, then...’

‘Yes?’ Croker said.

‘Imagine what would happen if he were released. You can’t let a man like that loose. Why, when I think of how often I’ve angered him! It’d be worse than uncaging a hungry tiger on Main Street.’

‘Exactly,’ Croker said. ‘And as long as he’s in catatonia, he can’t be released. Meanwhile, he is to be in a strict quarantine. After all, he may have a deadly disease. And if you repeat any of this to anybody else, including his family, I’ll deny everything. Epples won’t say anything, and Backers won’t either. I’ve had to keep him on so I can control him, but he’ll keep silent. Do you understand?’

‘I understand that he might be here the rest of his life,’ Tincrowdor said. ‘For the good of humanity.’