Little Men

By JESSAMYN WEST

When I was a boy there were men who made appearances on school platforms as the last survivor of the battle of Gettysburg, or as the last living man to have seen Lincoln. I always felt sorry for them. It seemed a pity to have been born a man, capable of having done something yourself, and then in the end be remembered only because you once saw another man. I used to sit on a hard chair and tilt my head at the old man on the platform and wonder how he would have felt at twenty if some one had told him, “Sixty years from now you’ll be remembered only because the image of another man once moved across your eyes. They won’t care who you were or are. You’ll just be a mirror reflecting someone else.” I thought then that the twenty-year-old would have been fighting mad to hear those words and would have hit fist against palm and sworn to be a man in his own right and be remembered for himself.

It is because I can remember so clearly my feeling as a boy for those old men, that it seems doubly strange now, and doubly bitter too, to be one of them myself, to be writing as a “last survivor” and as an “eyewitness.” But the likeness isn’t absolute. I didn’t just “see Lincoln.” The thing that happened, actually happened to me first and not to another. If it wasn’t something I did, what I write of is at least not something done by another or done to me. And now that I am myself an old man, and have seen the changes that have come since that day sixty years ago, I am convinced that we can not always be thinking of ourselves and the figure we cut, but must have some concern for the wishes of other people.

* * * * * * * * ^Note

What happened to me sixty years ago has since happened to almost every living man and woman. Some now think that they see signs of a gradual change back to the old way. I myself have seen none of these signs. But if there are signs of a change it is all the more important that authentic records of the first days of the Chileking Era be made. It is for these reasons that I am assenting to the wishes of the Committee for the Commemoration of the First Sixty Years, and setting down for them my memories of that first terrible hour and the scarcely less terrible days that followed. And, as I have said, it is fitting that I should do this since I not only saw with my own eyes the unbelievable and indeed horrifying changes of that October morning, but I myself was the first man on any continent to experience Subtraction.

[NOTE - Asterisks have been used throughout this account to indicate a deletion of material. Two kinds of material have been deleted: 1. Excessive and boring statements of the narrator’s personal opinions, prejudices, complaints, and general homesickness for life as it was lived when he was a boy. 2. Paragraphs and sometimes pages either recounting events of which he was not an eyewitness or belaboring matters which are of everyday familiarity to us all.

When possible I have left enough of the narrator’s text to permit the reader to see the trend of his thinking—or as is more often the case—feeling. In any case all cuts have been made with an eye to increasing the pertinence and readability of the manuscript.

If there are those who would like to read the document in its entirety (it runs about half again as long as the published manuscript), photostatic copies will be made available for their perusal by the Committee for Commemoration.

S.L.H., EDITOR]

My son and daughter, were they alive, should have their memories of that fateful day included with mine, for what I experienced first as an adult, they experienced first as children. I do not myself believe that Addition was for them as horrifying and shattering an experience as Subtraction was for me but I suppose Addition has played, if anything, a more substantial part in the world reversals which we have seen in the past half century.

There is no need for me to write of those reversals. We live among them. I had no hand in them, and more frequently than not opposed them. I shall however try to keep my account unbiased and factual and simply report what happened in those terrible days. Those horrors I know as no one else can. I was then the first man, as I am now one of the few survivors. I would not have chosen, as I said before, to be remembered for this. It was not after all something I did, but something that happened to me willy-nilly. I had thought my name in my old age would be associated with memorable developments in military tactics, particularly with those having to do with the use of guided missiles. But so far from my name being remembered in that connection, there are today very few people who even remember the enormous future the guided missile was thought to have in 1950. That is being sanguine: few even remember the name, and those who do lump it indiscriminately with the catapult or battering-ram. They forget that there are those alive who, except for the events of that fateful October, would have carried the guided missile to a point of perfection, few, even then, foresaw. But I do not propose to sigh either for past glories or for enterprises of the future which died stillborn.

* * * * * * * *

It is my purpose to write of what happened, not of what did not happen. And I make no apology for using in this account the phraseology of my youth. It is, in a sense, appropriate that the facts of those days should be written in the language then used. The Chilekings have authorized the use of many new, and more often than not, fantastic terms for the description of those early events. “Subtraction” is but one of many instances of this. I remember their shouts during November, when they ranged up and down the streets crying, “Daddy’s been Subtracted. Daddy’s been Subtracted.” “Diminished” would have been a much more exact and dignified word, but constant repetition has established the other. So I shall employ the classic usage of my youth except where it is entirely lacking in a suitable or understandable terminology.

I am an old man now, ninety-four years of age, but I shall never, though my existence should be extended for another century (and I most earnestly hope that this will not happen) lost my constant awareness of even the minutiae of that October morning.

I was then, as you have doubtless already deduced, thirty-four years old. I was a captain in the old army; stationed at the Presidio in San Francisco, California, and living in San Francisco. I was married. I had two children; a girl, Mary Frances, aged eleven, and a boy, David, aged eight. My career to this point had been unusually satisfying. I had published two books: The Use of the Phipps-Viorsky Tank in Mountainous Terrain and Modern Co-ordination of Tank and Artillery.

I mention these books particularly because I had been at work on a revision of the Phipps-Viorsky manual on the evening of October thirtieth. Amy, my wife, was in Pacific Grove for the evening, nursing her mother who was down with an attack of erysipelas. Mary Frances and David had been busy all evening making a pumpkin jack-o’-lantern. I helped them with the carving of the teeth, a bit of workmanship which required more exactitude in the handling of a knife than they possessed. I let them stay up a little past their bedtime in order that they might finish it. They took it upstairs with them when they went to bed and put it on the newel post in the hall, “so that we’ll all be scared when we wake up in the morning.” My God! Fright was something they never needed to plan for again.

After they went to bed I sat in my own room for some time meditating upon the coming elections; turning over in my mind a mechanical problem associated with the new Russian developments of so-called “jet repulsors.” I was not pleased with what my mind encountered in either situation.

It had never been my habit to waste time in any non-utilitarian perusal of the landscape, nor to permit the loss of emotional energy in a sentimental identification with its transitory aspects. It was not, then, according to any established custom that I sat until late that night by my window, looking across the moonlit city. The night was mild as fall nights in California always are, and it was fog-free. That is somewhat unusual here by the Coast, but October, more than any other month, brings such nights. We had had early rain that year and there was already a little smoke of green on the hills, and a smell of this false spring in the air.

I remember these things so clearly, I suppose, because I have so often gone back in my memory to those first hours before my Smalfri transformation (to employ a Chileking word used—as many have forgotten—humorously, at first and with no thought that it would find universal acceptance). Gone back to them at first with an intensity that I hoped might break the barriers of reality; for what happened to me that night seemed then not only shocking, but degrading. You who will read this have had that experience blunted for you by repetition. It is impossible for you to remember a time when it was not. You have heard tell of how it was with your grandfather, and his son, and how it will be with you. You were born with the anticipation of it in your blood. It was not so with me. I was the first man. My children were the first children. Try to think how it would be with you if you came to that experience unprepared. But you cannot, no more than you can imagine a world without death. But the first man who saw the rot of death? I have thought some about him in the past sixty years. No, no, the fact that my experience has since been shared by most human beings has never reconciled me to it, nor changed my opinion of its essential character.

The world was not, on that October night, in a state to inspire confidence or happiness; but I thought as I looked out onto the moonlit waters that I at least was equipped to be of service to my country in an emergency, and that on this very night, products of my mind, both mechanical and theoretical, were being of assistance to more than one nation in the maintenance of the status quo. Status quo! That is not a word one hears nowadays either; and my concern for it at that particular time is added proof of an irony that lies close to the very core of things.

I undressed slowly that night, taking, as I have said, an unwonted pleasure in the moonlit landscape. Before getting into bed I opened the door that separated my room from David’s so that I would be able to hear him if he, by chance, called out to me in the night. But it was he who heard my cries, and came to me!

The next morning I awakened after a night of deep, heavy, unrefreshing sleep. I awakened while the light was still gray against my closed lids, and with the sense of having just emerged from some very disturbing and portentous dream. I lay with closed eyes trying to work my way back into that dream, to discover what it had been to leave me in this unwonted state of uneasiness and oppression. But the dream eluded me completely; only the feeling of a heaviness, at once physical and psychical remained, unchanging. I opened my eyes sufficiently to see that a particularly heavy fog had come up in the night and that the screens were beaded and dripping. This would account for the pressure I felt on my chest, this choking fog that had come up in the night. I was still more than half-asleep and felt overwhelmed by the weight and amount of bedclothes about me. My pajamas seemed to have slipped from my shoulders so that my hands were engulfed in sleeves. I managed to get my left hand free, and thrust it down beneath the covers to gain some leverage in hoisting myself up. There it encountered a circular metallic object almost as broad across as my palm. I let my hand close about it, speculating as to what it could be and how it had gotten into my bed. I lay with closed eyes amusing myself by trying to identify it by sense of touch alone. I decided that it must be a bracelet belonging to Mary Frances; it would slip over two or three of my fingers but not over my entire hand. When I had identified it as best I could by the feel of it alone, I lifted it to have a look. As chance would have it I raised it at such an angle that I saw first of all the inscription engraved inside it. “Amy—Robert” That was my wedding ring! What had happened to me, or it, to cause it to lie in my hand as large as a napkin ring, or a child’s bracelet?

I held it near my wrist and saw that my wrist was very little larger in circumference. A horrible throb of sick apprehension beat through my whole body. If what I seemed to see existed actually as I saw it, something horrible, something beyond the bounds of known phenomena had taken place. If what I seemed to see did not actually exist as seen, then I was mad, living in an hallucination. My mind flinched from either conclusion. It lurched in a wounded way after some other, after any other, conclusion. I tried to remember whether I had ever read of a person suffering from an optical illusion which distorted for him the apparent size of objects. But this was not, if it was illusion, optical alone. My hand, as well as my eye, reported that either my hand had shrunk, or the ring increased in size.

It is useless to try to report in cold logical sentences my first sensations that morning. My mind twitched; it swung in nauseating arcs from one impossibility to another. I laid my hand on my brow, I traced nose, chin and mouth. I felt my teeth, my ears. They felt to my hand as they should. If then my hand had shrunk, so had they. I was in an agony of apprehension and horror. I must get to the bottom of the matter, but when I got there I would find myself either a madman or an appalling monstrosity. I must go on—and I could not. I cried. I sweat. I called out, and my voice echoed in the room as thin as the squeak of a trapped rat.

Then I was calm, as a man who has screamed for days in fear of death is somehow able at the last minute to face the firing squad with honor and dignity. I struggled to sit up, uncover myself; but I was so bound about with my pajamas, so weighed down with bedclothes that I made little headway. I saw with horror the flailings of my feet far above even the middle of the bed. Finally I worked myself free of the bedclothes with infinite patience, undid the saucerlike buttons of my pajamas, untied the ropelike belt, and sat mother-naked on my pillow. There could be no doubt about it; I was a dwarf, a midget, a monstrosity, a hop-o’-my-thumb, no longer than the pillow I sat on. Either that, or every material object in the room had grown to six times its usual size. My body was not the body of a baby or a child; it was a man’s body, hairy and sinewy. The feet were middle-aged feet, calloused and warped by years of shoe-wearing; the legs bulged with the muscles of my early soldiering days. This was myself, complete in every nick and scar and pockmark, but diminished, diminished.

I looked over the edge of the bed—and drew back. I seemed to be perched on a scaffolding, so far away and dwarfed was the floral jungle of the carpet below me. I was marooned on my own bed. The realization was frightful and revolting. I was not only a man, but a soldier and campaigner accustomed to bend circumstances to my own needs. Here was a circumstance without flexibility. Nowhere would it give. And then as I examined again that attenuated, that hideously minimized body, which could not and yet must be mine if I existed at all, I cried out again and again in that tormented bird whistle, that thin marionette wail which was the only voice I had.

The voice which echoed so shrilly in my own ears evidently carried. I heard a great thud in my son David’s room, and then my diminished ears seemed not large enough to contain the heavy, flapping sounds of his bare feet as he came down the hall. I remember wondering dully if I had shrunk in relation to everything: if all sounds but my own were to be thunderous.

Then my son David, my eight-year-old, stood in the door of my room.

“Daddy,” he called, “Daddy, look! I’ve grown up. I grew up in the night. I’m as big as you now.”

And he had—he had. He stood in the doorway looking down at himself, not seeing me yet, and I thought, “This is the final proof of my madness,” for my son, David, my eight-year-old, filled the doorway. He was stark-naked, pink, boyish, and unmuscled; over six feet, and heavy of shoulder and arm.

We have now grown accustomed to big babies and little men, and this reversal no longer seems revolting. But that morning, that first morning, it was a horrible thing to see that babyish form so extended, that childish gap-toothed face above those heavy shoulders. Surely, my feeling for my son did not hinge upon his being of a size I could dandle, or toss upon my shoulders? Surely, fatherhood was more than the feeling one has for small things? Yet, I did not feel fatherly toward that baby-faced giant who stood in my doorway proudly punching his big pink thighs, even though his face was that, though enlarged, of my son David.

He looked up finally from his delighted examination of his own body.

“Daddy,” he said, “isn’t it wonderful?”

Then he saw me. There was fear and loathing in his face. He started to run. Then he turned back. “Get out of my daddy’s bed, you nasty little man. Get out. My daddy will come back and throw you out of the window.”

“David,” I said. “David, my boy.”

“I’m not your boy. You can’t make me your boy.”

Then it suddenly came to him, that he needn’t wait for his father to come to throw me out of the window. He was himself strong enough to do with me as he liked. He couldn’t put his loathing from him, but he came menacingly toward me. “I’ll throw you out the window and smash you in a thousand pieces. Where’s my daddy?”

I thought he would do it. I couldn’t but admire the child. I thought, “He is my son after all.” But at the final second he couldn’t bring himself to touch me. I was like a spider he had cornered but couldn’t kill. He turned and flung himself on the floor and lay there naked and sobbing, “I want my daddy. I want my daddy.”

I was suddenly shaking with cold. I was still sitting cross-legged and unclothed on my bed, and fog wisps were still blowing clammily through the window. But I was calm now; my son’s outbreak had quieted my own hysteria.

“David,” I said, “David, you’ll take cold there. Get up and put something on. Get up and stop that crying.”

The boy stopped crying and stood up. “Go to my closet, get my dressing gown and put it on.” He obeyed me in a sullen, dazed way. The dressing gown left his wrists and ankles bare. He was three or four inches taller than I was—than I had been. He stood by the door looking at me fearfully and incredulously.

I pulled my pajama top about my shoulders and leaned back against the headboard of the bed.

“David, I am your father. You can see that, surely. I helped you carve your jack-o’-lantern last night. Something very strange and terrible has happened to us. While we slept you have grown as big as a man and I have shrunk as small as a baby. But you are still my son and I’m your father. See, here’s where I cut my thumb last night making your jack-o’-lantern. You can see I’m your father, can’t you—only smaller?”

“Yes,” he hiccuped, “you look like my daddy, but my daddy is a big man. You look like a Halloween goblin. You look-” and he threw his arm over his face and began to cry again.

“David,” I cried sharply. “I know that—I look horrible, awful, but I am your father and we must help each other.” But I was repelled by the sight of those heavy, heaving shoulders, and those childish gulps and sniffles coming from behind that big pink hand.

“David,” I shouted. “Stop it, stop it, I say. Something terrible has happened and we must get the doctor here at once. Perhaps he can do something for us. Make us as we were last night.”

My son looked up, “I like to be big. I don’t want to be little again. Only have Dr. Hinch give you something so you won’t look so awful.”

The phone was in the hall. “David,” I said, “I want you to carry me to the hall and put me on the chair by the telephone table. I’m going to talk to Dr. Hinch. And while I’m talking to Dr. Hinch, I want you to tiptoe down to Mary Frances’ room. If she’s asleep don’t waken her, but see—see what size she is.”

The boy was beginning to get hold of himself, but it took a good deal of effort for him to be able to touch me, or for me to endure that touch. He lifted me easily, but clumsily, wadding my pajama coat about my waist so that my legs dangled bare. It was not until I attempted to dial Hinch that I realized that I had lost in strength as in stature. The dial barely rotated beneath my pygmy finger. It took all the strength of my wrist and forearm to budge it. At last the six figures were dialed. Dr. Hinch himself answered the phone from his bed.

“Hinch,” I said, “this is Phipps speaking. Captain Phipps.”

“Speak up, speak up,” Hinch roared sleepily. “I can’t hear you.”

“Hinch,” I cried, “this is Phipps. Something ghastly has happened! Something ghastly. Get here at once. Come right up to my room, and in God’s name, hurry.”

“All right, David,” he said at last, “I’ll be right over.”

As I hung up the receiver David came down the hall to me.

“Is she asleep?” I asked.

David nodded.

“Is she big—or little, David?”

“Big,” he whispered.

Poor Mary Frances. Poor Mary Frances.

“Help me to the floor, David. I want to walk.”

You accept that doll’s pace now. And you say, perhaps, as you read, “The old man takes it pretty hard,” or “The old fellow doesn’t let the story lose anything in the telling,” or maybe, “It gets sadder every time he tells it.”

All right. All right. You have your say; then I’ll have mine. It’s easy enough in these after days when all has been explained, rationalized, accepted. You toddle happily enough now. But then! That morning, when for the first time I stood in my own hall on those pitiful baby feet and started to walk to my own room—my own and my wife’s room. Step, step, step, and less than a yard covered. Walking along with my nose a foot and a half above the floor boards, and with the furniture hanging over my head like wooden precipices. Come to your own bed, and need a ladder to get into it, and have your own chair as inaccessible as a tree top, and crouch finally on your hassock like a toad. Do that for the first time with no blanket of rationalization to shield you from the sharp reality!

David spent a good deal of the time while we awaited Dr. Hinch’s coming looking at himself in the mirror. It was curiously repellent to see in that big body those childish attitudes—as if my son were a half wit. I knew this wasn’t fair. The boy was eight years old, but you can not after a lifetime —yours and the universe’s—associate intelligence and adulthood with stature, and have that association broken suddenly without some bleeding.

Dr. Hinch was an experienced, hard-bitten army surgeon; and you may read, perhaps have read, in his own memoirs of his sensations that October morning. While we waited for him I kept thinking that this was perhaps something doctors knew about—but kept hushed up. I’d never been sick then, and still had a layman’s faith in a doctor’s ability to be able to do something.

When Dr. Hinch stood in the door of my room and saw me sitting on the hassock, and David standing over me, he fainted; he went down like a bombed building, wavering a minute, then collapsing with legs and arms sprawled confusedly like broken cornices, smashed facades. I saw how bad it was with us then.

David fetched water from the bathroom, and between us we brought him round. He lay there for a long time, though, with his biscuit-colored face in a pool of water. I was close enough to see clearly the look in his eyes when at last he opened them: it was the look of a man who fears he is mad.

I think Hinch in his memoirs misrepresents that morning’s happenings, though no doubt unconsciously. He was after all a physician and I have yet to meet the physician who is able to confess having made a mistake. Hinch was no exception. In the first place he fails to mention that the first thing he did on entering my room that morning was to faint. This omission alone gives an entirely false air of capability and resourcefulness to his account. In addition he fails to say that such plans as were made that morning were mine; and worst of all he definitely suggests that he, on that morning, anticipated the approaching universality of the change I had experienced. If he did, it was only with hindsight.

* * * * * * * *

But, as I have said, we brought him around finally and David got him onto his feet and into a chair. He sat there with his hand over his eyes saying, “My God, my God,” and occasionally peeping out at us from between his fingers. David began to whimper again at his strange actions.

I talked to him collectedly enough I think, the circumstances being considered, and finally had him sufficiently calm to give his attention to our problem. But I could see that, though he listened to me, he could not escape feeling that a diminution in brain had accompanied my physical diminution. He talked to me as if I were a child, as though my years, experience, training had dropped from me with my lost inches. He talked in a loud, slow, patient voice using small words. It was unendurable.

“Look here, Hinch,” I said at last, “nothing’s happened to my mind. Get that straight and don’t talk baby talk to me. If you have any doubt concerning my mental processes, give me any test you like and you’ll find my power of thought undiminished. Pull yourself together, man. God knows this is awful enough as it is without your reading into it changes that haven’t occurred. All I want to know is whether or not you as a medical man have any knowledge of what’s happened to me and David and Mary Frances. It’s a simple yes or no situation. Has medical history records of such cases? Have you yourself ever encountered any such thing?”

He said this and that but the upshot of it was that he knew nothing of such a happening either through study or experience. There had been cases where men had lost a few inches —probably as the result of a calcium deficiency; and as a young practitioner in southern Kentucky he had taken care of a child, much dwarfed, whose parents said it had the “little-growth.” The child had died, though, before he himself had observed any shrinkage in it.

There is something hateful about always having to look up at a man—at anyone. It is not only that the neck tires and the eyes glaze, but that there is implicit in the attitude some deference, some recognition of superiority. It is an association pattern without intrinsic truth, but centuries of use has made the mental response slavish that accompanies the curved neck, the uplifted eye. The rulers of men stand on balconies, ride horseback; the crucified Christ hangs above us on his cross. When the man comes who can dig himself a pit and, standing below us, yet lead us, then there will be true leadership. What the Chilekings have done has had its roots in our uplifted eyes.

* * * * * * * *

My first perceptions of all this came to me that October morning as I sat on the hassock looking up into Hinch’s pale, puffy face. I called to David sharply to help me up on to the bed. But the boy had gone to sleep. He was lying face down across the bed breathing audibly. The fog had cleared away; the sun filled the room with warm yellow light. It was getting on toward midmorning. None of us had eaten and David and I had had a shattering experience.

“David,” I called, “David, wake up, boy.”

He roused himself bewilderedly, sat up, and said, “Daddy, I’m hungry.”

“Hinch,” I said, “go downstairs and tell Maria we want coffee and toast and scrambled eggs up here at once. Enough for four. Mary Frances had as well be awakened.”

I remember David asked to have some of his “Muscleo,” a breakfast food popular at the time. He was saving coupons and wanted to use boxes as quickly as possible. It seemed intolerably half-witted to have this young giant crying for “Muscleo” and coupons for model airplanes.

“You’ll have scrambled eggs,” I said sharply.

“What am I to tell Maria?” Hinch asked.

“Tell her anything you like except the truth. Tell her we all have scarlet fever and are quarantined and she’s not to put a foot abovestairs. My God! Man, you don’t want every newsreel cameraman in California in here, do you?”

Hinch hadn’t thought of that. As he went into the hall the phone rang. It was his wife. I listened to him tell her that we were all down with scarlet fever, and that he would be with us the rest of the morning. Then at my suggestion he called Headquarters and my wife, giving them the same story. He told Amy he would keep in touch with her, that we were seriously but not dangerously ill, and that she should make no attempt to see us. I was glad to have that matter attended to. I tried to keep my mind off Amy and our future relationship.

While Hinch was downstairs getting our breakfast, David and I washed and dressed. He helped me onto a chair so that I could reach the lavatory. I didn’t attempt shaving that morning. David got into a sweater and a pair of old slacks of mine. My shoes were too small for him but he managed to get his toes into a pair of espadrilles.

I put on an outworn play suit of his. For a minute as I stood on the hassock in that ridiculous blue-frilled garment I was tempted to plunge out the window, let the concrete below put an end to this pitiful travesty. There on the table lay the notes I had made the night before for the revision of the Phipps-Viorsky manual. I saw clearly, as I stood there looking out into the sunlit morning, that never again would I be accepted as the man who wrote that: I would be hereafter simply the man who had shrunk, the monstrosity.

Hinch came back upstairs with our breakfast. I left the awakening of Mary Frances to him. The poor child had none of David’s delight in the change. She came into the room wrapped about in a negligee of her mother’s, a great, strapping, sexless figure carrying her doll and crying passionately. She was taller than Hinch who was a little, pursy man, and it was ridiculous to see him pat her and murmur, “There, there, my child: Now, now. Don’t take on so, don’t take on.”

“Don’t take on!” It was too late to ask that, but Hinch, as those who have read his memoirs will remember, had no humor in him.

* * * * * * * * ^Note

I had to face again in Mary Frances all the horror and disgust I had seen in David’s eyes. It was a strange breakfast party, an unequaled one, I dare say. There wasn’t much said beyond attempts to reassure Mary Frances. David ate most of the food. I found myself watching with deep disgust the clumsy, greedy way he piled great forkfuls of eggs into his gap-toothed mouth. And there was something loutish and overbearing in the way he disregarded my suggestions that he’d had enough. And Mary Frances pressing her doll to her big, flat chest and saying, “Don’t you want a bite, dollie, dear?” and Hinch breaking out, “Lord, what a paper I can write on this!” No, that is a meal I can never forget.

[NOTE - It has been necessary to omit a good deal of material here having to do with doctors in general and Hinch in particular. Phipps never ceases to blame the doctors for not “doing something” about Subtraction. He seems to feel that if they had been as competent in their field as he was in his, they would have “repulsed” the “invasion” by the forces of Subtraction.]

As soon as we had eaten I sent the children to the playroom, though David was determined to go out, show his friends what had happened.

“Well, Hinch,” I said when they had gone, “What’s to be done?”

“God only knows,” he muttered, “God only knows: this is beyond me.”

He walked over to me and I thought he was going to pat me on the head, say, “There, there, little man.” Hinch never got far beyond exterior appearances.

“I’ll want to have a consultation of course; have Dr. Kleigh and Dr. Marbot here. There’ll have to be X-rays, blood tests. I’d like to have a psychiatrist, see if there has been any fundamental personality change.”

I agreed so long as the matter be kept secret. Hinch, I think, actually pictured himself as the entrepreneur of a successful “racket”—to use a pre-Chileking word popular in my youth—a sort of latter-day Barnum. I agreed to the examinations, but insisted that they be secret and postponed for at least three days, for I clung to the fantastic hope that there might be some spontaneous recovery in that time.

I sat propped up in the corner of my big chair like an organ-grinder’s monkey, while Hinch, with his buttons catching the sunlight, paced the room like a general. He would walk away from me, then turn suddenly on his heel, flash a look in my direction, and start perceptibly, to see me still there, still the same size, the same shape.

I finally put an end to it. “There’s no need taking more of your time, Hinch,” I said. “Will you stop in the kitchen, remind Maria about coming abovestairs, bring us up some sandwiches and fruit, and drop in tonight about six?”

It was noon when he left. I got the children to take naps after lunch and I was left alone in my room at last. I had had Mary place my books and papers in the seat of a chair, and by using the hassock to sit on I had a pretty fair desk. Before I permited myself any thought concerning my present condition, my future, and that of my wife and children, I wanted to test, once and for all, whether or not I had suffered any diminution of mental ability. I resolutely turned to the revision with which I had been occupied the night before. I became completely absorbed in the specific problems with which I had been working, and the solution that had till then evaded me came to me that afternoon. There was no doubt about it. There was nothing miniature, nothing juvenile about my mind. It was my appearance only which was altered. I worked until dusk, then got off the hassock and paced about exultantly feeling again my former self. The furniture, the room, even the books dwarfed me, but the man inside was unaltered.

Before I knew it, it was six o’clock and Hinch was back, and had brought our dinner upstairs. I went to the playroom to call the children. I hadn’t seen them since they left to take their naps. I found them both lying full length on the playroom floor talking in low voices. I stood for a moment listening to them.

“Well,” said David, “I guess from now on we do what we want to.”

“Yes,” said Mary Frances, “we’re the grownups now and Daddy’s the baby. Poor Daddy. He looks just like a monkey, doesn’t he? But we’ll have to let him have his way sometimes, Dave. He was kind to us lots of times. Really he was, Dave. ‘Member how he helped you with your jack-o’-lantern last night?” and she laughed maliciously.

Dave snorted. “I could have done it. He took it away from me just when it was most fun.”

“Yes,” Mary Frances agreed, “he’s always been like that. But we’ve got to be kind to him. He looks so awful, and he can’t help it.”

I could bear to hear no more. The children to whom I had given life and for whom I had been willing to sacrifice everything! We were not then aware of the profound influence of size in the relationship of parents and children. None had then guessed the part force and fear played in that relationship. I was the first man to have a glimpse of that truth, listening to that conversation. But I could not credit it. Had my children obeyed me, not because they loved me, because I was reasonable, but because they feared my superior size? I could not then believe it. Their dear, childish natures had been warped, disfigured by this alteration. They had not had time, I thought, to learn the true relativity of size.

I cleared my throat. “Children,” I called. “David, Mary Frances, time for dinner.”

Mary Frances answered pleasantly, “Yes, Daddy,” but David came running out of his room bellowing in that many-times-amplified child’s voice of his, “Damn it, I’m hungry.”

“David,” I started, but before I could continue he stooped down, picked me up with an easy swoop and held me awkwardly over his head. I was filled with fury, but could do nothing but kick and squeak. He was shamefaced when he put me down.

“David,” I cried, “Never do that again. I don’t like it.”

“I never liked it, either,” he said.

Down the hall Hinch stood looking on sardonically.

Dinner was a strained and unhappy meal. As soon as it was over I asked Hinch and the children to leave me. I was exhausted by the day’s events and as soon as I was alone I undressed, pushed a chair next to my bed, and clambered laboriously up its rungs to the seat, and from the seat to the bed. I lay there, with the great bolsterlike pillow thrusting my head out at a right angle from my body, and pulled the covers of the unmade bed up over my wretched gnome-like body.

Dully I picked up the evening paper which Hinch had brought me. There was no use pretending that I felt any real interest in what had happened that day in the world. Because of the change in me the world was no longer what it had been. It no longer fitted me. The newspaper itself was an annoyance and irritation. Great, bulky, flapping thing that I had to struggle with. You, with your neat little built-to-size accommodations, know nothing of the perverse and recalcitrant nature that then infested the very things in which we had been wont to find our greatest pleasures and conveniences. When at last I had bent and shaped the paper into a size I could handle I was almost too tired to read it. But I let my eyes run over the print hunting some anodyne, something that would, even for the short time my eyes rested on it, let me forget myself. But there seemed to be no news of importance that night.

I did not sleep at all during the first part of the night, but 1 was deep in sleep the next morning when the incessant ringing of the phone roused me. I came up out of sleep, forgetful of what happened to me, and plunged out of bed onto the floor with a thud that momentarily stunned me. But in spite of this I limped out to the hall, climbed up the chair to the telephone table.

“Yes,” I said.

“Phipps, Phipps,” came an anguished and squeaky voice. “My God! Phipps.”

“What is it?” I cried. “Who is speaking? Who is it? Speak louder.” But in my bones I knew and was glad.

“This is Hinch,” came back the thin voice that I hated because I knew that it echoed my own. “This is Hinch and it’s happened to me. I’ve shrunk. We’ve all shrunk. Everyone in the house. My wife. We’re dwarfs. My God, the world is ending. Or has ended!”

I suddenly felt cheerful. “Come, Hinch,” I shouted. “Buck up. You’ve just lost a few inches.”

“I’ve had calls all morning. It’s happening to everyone.”

“Town people, too?” I could hardly hear him. The phone service was very bad at the moment.

“No—only our own people so far. I think it’s infectious. I think I caught it from you. Oh God, why did you ever call me over?”

“Did you see everyone yesterday who has called you this morning?”

“No,” he admitted.

“Well, it can’t be infectious,” I said.

Hinch lost control of himself then and began to whimper hysterically. This man who had thought of me as a subject for a scientific paper the day before!

* * * * * * * *

“Hinch,” I said, “I’ll be over at once. As soon as I can get the children up. Be calm now. Get yourself together.”

I put the phone back on the table and smiled. I will not dissemble what I felt then. Relief, hope. I, my family, were not singled out. We were all in the grip of some wide-spread malady. Now there were those I too could pity. I need not carry the burden of every other creature’s pity and commiseration—nor watch the man who pitied me swell up with the joy of being not as I was. No, I will not deceive you. Tears of relief filled my eyes. I saw, even then, it would not be so bad a thing to be a little man with other little men. But still I did not foresee what it would mean to be a little man in a Chileking world.

As I stood supporting myself on the chair in the hall, rubbing my bruised arms and legs, I heard little thin cries of distress from the bottom of the stairs and awkward plodding steps. I went to the head of the stairs and looked over. There was Maria, a poor, gray-haired midget wrapped about in a formless garment, crying and clambering like some stray dog. She was a pitiable object. I have never thought that women have been able to undergo Subtraction as gracefully as men. You would think otherwise: that the female, being by nature slighter and more fragile than men, would be a better subject for Subtraction—but it was not proved so. Her bulges and curves become crowded when she is shortened, so that she is like a little country with too much topography. Well, be that as it may, Maria was the first female I had ever seen who had suffered Subtraction, the first adult of either sex, in fact, and her miserable crawling figure stays in my mind even after a lapse of sixty years.

When I had eased her mind as best I could concerning what had happened, and had warned her to let no one see her, I roused the children and told them that they were to drive me to Dr. Hinch’s; they were immediately beside themselves with excitement. Mary Frances could drive after a fashion and I could see nothing for it but to risk her being able to get us there safely. There was no question of my being able to drive. I would have sat under the wheel like an elf under a toadstool. The children dressed with care—David using my clothes, Mary Frances her mother’s—but they were grotesque figures when they had finished. They stood, broad and shapeless like cloth-draped planks. I made my first trip, after Subtraction, in a laundry basket with a sheet covering me. That is not a ride I like to recall: Mary Frances driving with an unevenness that I thought at any moment would either wreck us or attract the attention of some passing motor cop. But we finally arrived at Hinch’s, safe enough.

My memories now concern events which have been exhaustively written about. Hinch’s own account in his memoirs is known everywhere, as is Colonel Werle’s The First Decade. Whitmore, who was at Hinch’s that first morning, is the author of the standard Psychology of Subtraction. The events they write of were so extraordinary, they moved at so swift a pace, the change in accepted practices was so revolutionary, that it is little wonder that their reports are conflicting. When a man’s life breaks up about him he has neither the time nor the emotional stability to classify the splinters. And so it is that one of these men will emphasize one thing and perhaps omit altogether something which struck me as being of paramount significance.

The scene at Hinch’s that morning was sad enough, but it had a grisly, diabolic humor too. Goyen’s imaginative painting, “The Little Men” based on that morning’s meeting is in no wise too bitter or too violent in its emphasis of that grotesquerie. I had had a day and a night in which to accustom myself to what had happened to me. The men I saw that morning in Hinch’s library had had a few hours at most. Then too they were army men, accustomed to the protection a uniform gives. Here they were, worse than naked, wrapped about in the cast-off rag, tag, and bobtail of their children. Accustomed to order and hierarchies, here they were stripped of all insignia of rank, almost of all signs of humanity. Earlier that morning when Hinch had told me what was happening I had rejoiced that I was not to be separated because of my size from my fellow men. But as I stood looking at that collection of monkeys in motley, these erstwhile men, I felt myself, in spite of my size, to be unlike them; surely from my throat would never rise any such sad, simian gibber, such uncontrolled quavers. There were thirty-four men in the room. That is the exact figure. I counted them as I stood there. Some had managed to crawl up into chairs; others were sitting on the slightly elevated hearth holding hands they could not believe were theirs toward the fireplace in which no fire burned; but most were walking about in an aimless, tormented way, clutching their fantastic garments about them.

While I stood there, Captain Mayberry, who killed himself a few months later, saw me, and clambered laboriously up the steps to where I was standing. He was a very young man for his rank, thin and brown, with a goatee. Subtraction suited him better than any man I have ever seen. He seemed completely unconcerned over what had happened, an ironical troll or faun.

“Well, Phipps,” he smiled, “you too? This is a wonderful thing—an interesting thing—I don’t mean what’s happened— but the way they’re taking it. Actually, how have we changed? Our clothes, our furniture don’t fit us, but otherwise how have we changed? Besides we’re not going to have to worry about things much longer. They’ll take things out of our hands,” and he nodded his head toward the living room where the children—they weren’t the Chilekings yet, were lounging about.

“You forget they’re only children,” I said.

“But they feel big, and people who feel big, act big; they are big,” he replied. “And we are small and feel smaller. And will act smaller.”

“They know nothing—we have the knowledge.”

“That won’t last long. Who brought you here this morning? Mary Frances? I thought so. Well, the car’s hers now.”

“Mayberry, you’re not married. You don’t know anything about the parental relationship. The matter of size is relative.”

He looked at me and laughed, “They’re proposing already down there that the boys be trained to take our places at the Post.”

I had already thought of that. “They ought to,” I said, “for the time being—until adjustments can be made.”

“You too?” Mayberry asked.

“Why not?” I wanted to know. “It’s not safe, leaving us defenseless this way, an easy target for any country. We can’t man any of our equipment now—but they could, with instructions from us.”

“Perhaps they could. Will they? As you say? Anyway, how long do you think this can be kept secret?”

“I don’t know. But it’s worth trying for a good many reasons. And there might be a reversal at any time.”

“You think so?” Mayberry smiled skeptically. Poor fellow. He shot himself a few months later when the girl he was engaged to was not Subtracted.

Mayberry and I talked together for some time before we joined the men in the room below. The two of us felt a bond —a bond that united us, and separated us from those poor, lamenting figures. He, because of his naturally reflective, ironic nature, I, because of the somewhat longer period of adjustment I had had, were loath to step down into that room of molten emotion. But it had to be done. That was our world now. It is impossible to report with any detail or accuracy what was said there. Those men did not so much talk as emit jets of feeling, raw lumps of bleeding emotion. I remember Lieutenant Hildebrand though. He’d been having something to drink—had it with him in fact. He kept singing snatches from a movie that had been popular about two decades before. I forget its name, something about a band of dwarfs. Afterwards we used to speak of its unconscious prophecy. Strange that Hildebrand’s irrelevancies should stick with me when much of that morning’s serious conversation has escaped me. But Hildebrand I can still see, draped in something white and togalike, toddling uncertainly about the room tilting his bottle as big as his head and singing a song, one snatch of which went, “Heigh-ho, it’s off to work we go.” No, Goyen’s picture is no exaggeration.

Colonel Oren, the senior officer there that morning, was able finally to bring about some organized consideration of what we were to do. It was he who railroaded us into the fantastic idea, and dangerous too, as it later proved, of having our sons take our places at the Presidio. The times were extremely uncertain internationally just then. Oren was afraid that if news concerning our Subtraction leaked out other nations would be quick to take advantage of weakness. He, like me, hoped for a spontaneous restoration of size in time, and he argued that, even if this did not occur, by the time other countries became aware of what was happening in California, our sons, with us to direct them, would be able to give a good account of themselves. It is true Oren had had for a number of years an idée fixe concerning Russia’s desire to attack us; and this shrinkage seemed to him to provide them with the logical moment of attack—the moment when he, Oren, would be unable to do anything to resist them.

In the light of what followed, much that we planned that morning was worse than silly. I have heard that many times since, and especially have I heard it from the Chilekings. It is extremely easy to be wise after the event. It has always seemed remarkable to me that we were able to plan anything that morning, miserable, overnight-midgets that we were.

It was Oren’s plan then, but I fully admit it was agreed to by every man there, including myself (in spite of disclaimers after the disaster) except Mayberry and Hildebrand. Hildebrand was snoozing under the library table and past awakening when it came to a vote, and Mayberry alone opposed it with, as it afterwards proved, his extremely well-founded fears. But Mayberry was overruled and we agreed, without other dissent, to exercise every possible caution toward keeping this night’s happenings secret, and in the interval until the matter should be known, to train our sons to replace us—in some of the essential defensive practices at least.

The meeting broke up about noon with a pathetic flurry of salutes; the children, who had been playing rummy and dominoes in the living room, and bolting all the food they could find in the kitchen, got their variously disguised and hidden parents out to the waiting cars. Mayberry, Oren, and I stayed on sometime longer talking with Hinch. I asked Hinch if he still believed there had been mental as well as physical changes. He was now. convinced that the change was physical alone.

Mayberry broke in, “A month from now, a year from now ask yourself that question. A man is his size; his thoughts, attitudes, are molded not only by what he is, but by the figure he sees himself cut alongside his fellow men. Did you ever know a dwarf? I did. Do you think he wasn’t influenced by his size—and that your children haven’t been?”

“You forget,” I reminded him, “that your dwarf friend was an isolated case. We’ll be surrounded by others like ourselves. We’ll be the norm.”

“You at thirty inches, the norm, with your son looking down on you from a four-foot advantage? Perhaps.”

Oren, who with his round, red face, and faded blond hair, needed only a frilled bonnet to look like a real baby, objected heatedly to this. “Our entire civilization has been built on the theory that mind and intellect are the criteria by which to judge men and nations. Are you ready to renounce that now, Mayberry? To say that size and physical strength are paramount? I myself never felt more convinced of the contrary.”

Mayberry laughed as if he were really enjoying himself. “And you an old army man. Well, well.” He threw back his head. Mayberry’s laugh was clear and pleasant, not the little goat-giggle of most of us Subtracted men. “Well, Oren, I hope your idealism is justified.” He left us and went over to the hearth where Hinch was trying to get a fire started. With Mayberry’s help, Hinch was able to lift a eucalyptus log onto the blazing kindling. I never, to this day, smell eucalyptus smoke without remembering that scene.

Oren turned to me, “My wife’s pregnant, you know,” he said, and stroked his bulging baby’s brow as if embarrassed that a creature his size should be an expectant father.

“What does Hinch say?”

“He’s too taken up with himself to have any mind for anything else. Says it will be all right.”

“Well, it seems reasonable,” I tried to console him, “that if Helen has diminished the child has too, and the birth will be normal.”

“But the child, the child? What can it be?”

I didn’t know. No one knew then, and for Oren the prospect was terrifying.

The fire was blazing comfortably now, and we all sat on the hearth’s edge to warm ourselves before leaving.

Mayberry said, “You know Marsha’s still her own size?” Marsha was the girl he was engaged to, a teacher who lived in Sausalito.

“You saw her?”

“God, no,” he grimaced, “but she called this morning, and she’s all right.”

“I don’t know about my own wife,” I said. (As a matter of fact she and her mother had both been Diminished the night before, but I didn’t have word of it until I returned home.)

Hinch said, ‘This is striking like any disease. Some have more resistance—hold out longer than others.”

“But certain people have complete resistance to some diseases,” Mayberry reminded him. ‘“Perhaps Marsha has. Beautiful opportunity to test your theory, Oren.” His laugh was unpleasant then.

As experience proved, Mayberry was right about that, too. Some never were Subtracted. Some children never experienced Addition. They were very few, a handful really. I remember the names of most of the men of my generation who for some reason or another were never Diminished. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason for their escape. They made up an extraordinarily diverse group: Einstein, the physicist, was one. Max Baer, a local prize fighter, was another. There were two or three poets whose names I never knew well and have forgotten. In California beside Marsha O’Brien, there was a sister at an Ursuline Academy who was never Subtracted.

A good deal of investigation and writing has been done on the subject of the Unchanged, but none of it, to my mind, has been very convincing.

* * * * * * * *

Certainly, however, it begins to appear that whatever it is that gives to these persons their immunity to Subtraction, it is a quality which is not inherited, transferred from one generation to the next. Though it has proved, I think, an exceedingly doubtful gift. Those adults who have not been Subtracted live among us like half-breeds—they are at ease neither with the Chilekings who are their own size, nor with their contemporaries, who walk about them at knee level, horrible monstrosities. It has often seemed to me that all those adults who have not been Subtracted, have had about them something childlike, ingenuous. Certainly it is true that in those great upheavals of policy in which the Chilekings and Smalfri have been opposed, the Unchanged have always sided with the Chilekings. And their position has been the more untenable because the Chilekings resented them, considered them spies from the Smalfri. Their position, however trying, has not been anything like as bad as that of the children who were not Expanded. But I am getting ahead of my story.

These memories take more care in the telling than I at first anticipated. On the one hand there is the temptation to give readers a quantity of purely personal detail and reaction which they may find boring. On the other hand, if I avoid the personal, retell the high lights of those first days, I will repeat much that has already been many times retold. My best course is, I think, to confine myself to those events in which I was either a participant, or observed at first hand, and which were in themselves significant or momentous. [A fine resolve, but one which Phipps is unable to keep consistently.] God knows there were plenty of those. Many which did not seem so at the time have since proved to be extremely “seminal,” to use once more a word fashionable sixty years ago.

The day after our meeting at Hinch’s, we went with, or rather were taken by, our sons, to the Post. Nothing untoward marked our arrival. Every man at the Post, had that morning, as it was later ascertained, experienced Subtraction. Most were not on duty, but were still hiding in their barracks or homes, not yet aware that what had happened to them had happened to all. Orders had been given excluding all civilians from the Post, and by some lucky chance, nothing of what had happened had yet gotten into the papers.

The boys were in uniform, and from a distance they weren’t so bad to look at—a big, hulking beefy line. But close up they were most unsoldierly. Not only were they physically lumpish and shapeless, but their plump, characterless faces above their uniforms made them look like an exercise group at an imbecile’s home. The fact that my son was one of them did not mitigate this impression.

But however they looked, they were extremely quick to catch on. There were no boys younger than David in the group, and a few were fifteen or over—but all of the older boys picked up almost at once all that was necessary for the manning of the guns which then constituted our chief harbor defense. Much of this was done through electrical controls, and except for the scale on which everything was constructed, a scale which made our manipulation of the guns after Subtraction hazardous as well as difficult, we might have been able to carry on alone. But in time of attack swiftness and dexterity of manipulation are essential. That we could not manage, and they, with our instruction, could. In the matter of sighting an invisible target, a matter which requires a good deal of mathematical ability, they had of course to rely on our calculations. That at least we were still fit to do. It was heartbreaking work though, in spite of their responsiveness: to stand, dwarfed and antlike, beside those you had, the day before, been able to dominate. There were tears and curses as well as instruction the day the Chilekings took over.

All went well that first day until about four o’clock when we called for a brief break in the work. It was hard to remember that six-footers like David were accustomed to a nap and a glass of milk in the middle of the afternoon. I had told David to lie down for awhile, and had placed, with considerable effort, a coat across him (he had never outgrown a tendency to croup). Then I had gone over to sit on the ground and look out across the quiet bay toward the green hills of Sausalito, while I considered the outcome of these crushing and amazing happenings. I had been there perhaps a half an hour when I was shaken and momentarily stunned by the detonation of one of the big sixteen-inch guns. As I ran stumbling and falling toward the guns I saw at a glance what had happened.

The gun had been fired and a direct hit had been made on the Russian ship, the Stalingrad, which was anchored in the harbor with a delegation of representatives from Communist or Communist-dominated countries here for a “last” conference with the anti-Communist nations. These delegates, with typical Communist caution about fraternizing with foreigners, were all housed aboard their ship rather than in the hotels of San Francisco as would have been the case with the representatives from any other countries. The boys knew this, of course, but I did not, at the time, understand the connection between their knowledge and the firing of the shot. I assumed that the firing was accidental and it was not until later that I learned that it was deliberate, the result of what seemed to the Chilekings to be logical thinking. These boys had grown up at a time when they had heard continual talk of the danger of Communism, of the menace of the Communist countries and of Russia as our enemy in a cold war and our potential attacker in a hot one. This being true, they saw no reason, in their forthright and childish way, why they should not do something to mitigate this danger. Children have wonderfully single-track minds. They are unable to understand that action need not follow upon recognition of a need for action. They had accepted our words concerning the danger and it seemed stupid to them, as they said later, not to take advantage of a God-given chance to lessen it. If it was true that Russia was only biding her time, waiting an opportunity to attack us, why wait? Why not strike the first blow? They had heard, being army children, more of that talk than most. Combine that conviction with the natural love most boys have for playing with mechanical toys and the action they took was, I suppose, highly predictable. Wanting to fire those guns, with or without cause, completely unaware for the most part of the meaning of death in reality, though very familiar with it as an abstraction through their television, comic book and motion picture experiences, they were easily able to convince themselves that they should fire them. Another element, though it is not one the Chilekings have ever themselves admitted, played its part in their action. It is an element which has been a constantly present and determining one in the relationship of Chilekings and Smalfri: I refer to the children’s resentment toward and hatred of adults—especially such adults as had the misfortune of being their parents. This bitterness before Subtraction had gone unnoticed, since the children had been unable, because of their size, to do much about it. And by the time most of them (before Subtraction) had reached a size which made it possible for them to retaliate with any degree of success, they had been so inculcated with their parents’ principles, “Honor your father and your mother,” and the like, that they had lost heart for revolt and reprisal. Of course an occasional child, even before Subtraction, of unusual energy and determination, managed to blow off his father’s head or stab his mother. Such overt aggressive tactics were no longer necessary after Subtraction. The Chilekings had the upper hand and they knew it—nevertheless their relationship with us has continued to be more or less punitive.

* * * * * * * *

So the gun was fired not only for “fun,” not only because the firing made sense to the children, but as an act of defiance against us. It was fired because after a lifetime of denial, of “hands off,” “don’t touch,” or “do as Father says,” it was glorious to touch, to do exactly the opposite of what Father said. So the gun was fired.

These facts were ascertained and these conjectures made afterwards, of course. There was no time then for getting at reasons; and, as I said earlier, we all, then, took for granted that both the firing of the shot and the hitting of the Stalingrad were accidental. There was of course immediate pandemonium both at the Post and in San Francisco. Oren and those of his officers who were with him at the time put off for the scene of the catastrophe in a launch belonging to one of the officers. I say “put off” euphemistically. The Chilekings put off. We were passengers on the launch, helpless as papooses in their mother’s carrying bags. Dangerous as it had now proved to entrust any knowledge of equipment to the children, it was nevertheless absolutely necessary to make use of their help in boarding and manning the launch.

The decision to go out to the stricken Stalingrad had been preceded by another decision—a difficult one to make. A decision to give up any attempt at secrecy. As we made the short trip out to the sinking ship my mind was filled with a despairing conflict of ideas. I forgot my size, which would in itself have put an end to my army career, and thought that all was now over with me: that this incident would mean war for my country and court-martial and probable death for all of us.

We were among the first to reach the Stalingrad—and, although it had been struck only twenty minutes earlier, it had already heeled over onto its port side at an angle that indicated that it had not much longer to live. The ship had listed so quickly and so badly, and so many of both crew and passengers had been killed outright that no lifeboats had been put over. The water was filled with the dead and wounded— many, both of the living and dead, being terribly maimed— headless, dismembered, disembowelled. I had been an army man all my life but as chance would have it I had never participated in an engagement. This was my first sight of carnage—and I was not prepared for what I saw and heard: the screams, the bloodstained water, entrails afloat on the encarmined bay like lush aquatic plants. I report these gruesome facts so that you can better understand the subsequent reactions of the Chilekings. They, of course, had the actual work of lifting these torn and bleeding bodies into the launch. We were as helpless as babies would have been attempting to rescue full-grown men. The Chilekings had the size for it and the strength—but not the stomach. All the gore of television and comics had not prepared them for the real thing —any more than their reading of the wooing and wedding of Sleeping Beauty, say, could have prepared them for the realities of marriage. I remember one young boy, a Chinese I would guess, with his arm off at the shoulder, who screamed pitifully until he died. One of the Chilekings refused to go on with the rescue work and bent over him sobbing and crying, “Don’t die, don’t die.” But he did die and the Chileking shook him and patted him the way a small boy will pet a puppy when it dies—unable to believe that his own will and desire—to which the pet has always before responded—will not cause the animal once more to respond.

The last person we were able to take onto the launch was, we thought, another, though smaller, child. When we turned him onto his back we saw, though he was no larger than a four-year-old, that he had a full beard and the marked and lined face of a man well past middle age. We Smalfri were more unnerved by this sight than by that of all the injured put together. Oren clutched my arm and whispered, “This is the end for us.” By “us,” he meant both the world as we had known it—and we, the adults who had made that world. And he was absolutely right. “Our” world, the world we had made and dominated, had ended that day—and we as “dominators” ended then too. The Chileking Era had already, though we did not then know it, begun.

In spite of the confusion and terror, the make-up of the crew of our launch—midget officers directing a crew of imbeciles is how it looked I suppose—had not gone unnoticed. Subtraction (or Deflation, as the Chilekings call it), as I said earlier, had begun first and with a hundred per cent effectiveness at the Presidio. On the morning of the thirty-first, most of San Francisco was as yet unaware of what was taking place —all over the world as it later proved. A launch on which there were several representatives of the press, including not only the local dailies but a number of the national press services had been near us while we were picking up survivors, and their own lifesaving efforts had not blinded them to our peculiarities—to use rather a cheerful and inadequate word for what had happened to us. Hemworth of the “Chronicle,” who knew Oren and me well but did not recognize us, reduced, shouted over to us, “In God’s name who are you guys? What have you got there? That’s a Post launch isn’t it? The shot was fired from the Post wasn’t it? For God’s sake where did you come from and who are you? Look at this! Do you know anything about this?” He was pointing at a Subtracted Russian whom the newsmen had picked up. “Is he one of you?”

“He is one of us,” Oren called back in mournful recognition, but his answer was lost in the general cry that went up to put away from the Stalingrad which was then sinking fast. There were survivors still in the water but our boat was already overfull—and in any case we could not help those in the water by lingering to be ourselves engulfed. The Stalingrad went down quietly, with a kind of organic shudder as she slid from sight. Hemworth’s launch had kept close to us as we swung out to avoid the Stalingrad. Oren, who as I said knew Hemworth well, shouted to him, “Hemworth, I’m Oren, Colonel Oren of the Post. Let me come on board. I’ve a story for you.”

Hemworth called back, “If you’re Oren, I’m Malenkov.”

Oren said, “What have you got to lose?”

“What have I got to gain?” Hemworth answered, but his launch pulled in close to ours and a more than willing Chileking tossed Oren over to the newsmen like a sack of potatoes— a nephew of Oren’s, it was. Both boats, already dangerously overloaded, then put in for shore where private cars and ambulances were waiting to relieve us of our injured. We made two more trips out into the bay—on the last trip picking up only dead bodies—one of which was another reducee, a woman this time. (On the whole women were more tardily reduced than the men.)

It is quite remarkable that we were able, in the midst of the pain and near panic of the occasion, and in the face of the increasing interest in the make-up of our crew, to get our craft and the Chilekings back to the dock. A cold damp night was now upon us. The Chilekings, who had been sick repeatedly during the rescue operations, were now shivering with cold and weakness. I ordered them all to the mess hall where there were flickering lights—the electric system was beginning to go out—and where I thought, in spite of the day’s events, we might find some food. At the word “food” the Chilekings began to run—like the children they were—in spite of the day’s work behind them—run and whimper, and in their fatigue, both physical and emotional, waver and stumble. I let them run. “Let” is ironical. What else could I do? We “men”—to use another word ironically, could neither restrain nor keep up with the Chilekings. I realize that in the last few pages I have slipped into a constant use of the word “Chilekings.” Chronologically this is inexact, for they were not, these overblown children, so called at the time. “Chilekings” came later and was their own name for themselves when they began to assume the characteristics of child kings.

Mayberry, who in Oren’s absence from the Post was commanding officer, toddled out to meet us.

“All back safely?” he asked.

I told him yes and asked about food.

“Plenty for all, such as it is,” he said. “The work had to be done by the kids—and they weren’t interested in anything very complicated. Do you know,” he asked, “I can’t even take the top off a can of beer?”

I tried to cheer him up by reminding him that he had never, even before reduction, been a muscle man.

“I could open a can of beer,” he said obstinately. Then he asked, “You know this thing’s busted wide open? Calls are coming in from everywhere. We haven’t been able to handle them.”

I told him that Oren was with Hemworth and the other newspaper men—giving them a full report, so far as he knew it—of what had happened at the Post.

He already knew that—Oren had talked with him on the phone. “You understand what’s happening?” he asked.

“No,” I said, “I don’t understand a thing, except that we are the victims of a tragedy—or a farce—I don’t know which. Or madness, universal delusion and madness.”

“It’s universal all right,” Mayberry said. “It’s not just us. It’s not just the military. Hasn’t the news from England had any meaning for you? From Spain? The lack of news from France? The adjournment of Congress? I’ve been talking to Hermes at March Field. It’s happened there—it’s happening everywhere!”

“We’ve got to organize,” I said, “we’ve got to get control. We’ve got to map out our strategy.”

“Against Russia?” he asked.

For the moment I had forgotten about them—that it was their ship, their crew, their delegates our children had sent to the bottom of the bay. What I had meant was: organize against the children, map out a strategy to control them.

“I had forgotten the Russians,” I said.

“It isn’t likely they’ve forgotten us,” he said.

“But look,” I told him, “they’re being reduced too. Hasn’t any one told you that we picked up reduced Russians in the water?”

“No,” he said, “I hadn’t heard that.”

“You didn’t think some one whole nation was escaping did you?”

“No—but if any did, it might be Russia.”

“Why Russia?”

“They’re more kidlike in some ways than other nations— believe in fairy tales—black and white—absolute goodness— absolute badness-”

“Nonsense,” I said. “You’re the child if you swallow that; they don’t believe that—not the policy makers—they’re a hard-headed lot—they’ll be reduced as fast as any one.”

“How does that help us any? We’re reduced—they’re reduced—things are still equal—we’re just where we started.”

“They can’t man any of their equipment in case they want to attack.”

“They can man it the same way we manned the launch, if they want to-”

We had reached the mess hall, and labored up the steps— occasionally even having to help ourselves with our hands. The Chilekings, with no one to make them wash and sit at the table, had, for the most part, grabbed plates of food with their still bloodstained hands and gathered around the fireplace. There they sat, huddled about the hearth, not knowing how to manage their big bodies, awkward, some still sick after their experience with the survivors, others wolfing down their food. I didn’t want anything to eat and told Mayberry so.

“You’d better eat,” he said. “Things are going to get worse. You’re not likely to get any sleep tonight.”

I climbed up onto a chair to get a cup of coffee—but the spigot on the coffee urn first stuck—then, as I put all my strength into my effort to budge it, swung wide open letting a scalding stream of coffee pour down—not on me—I was able to draw back in time, but onto the table and floor. David, who was one of the children clustered around the fireplace, saw what happened and ran over and turned off the spigot for me.

“Did you hurt yourself?” he asked, not unkindly.

I told him I hadn’t.

“It was just luck,” he said. “Don’t try it again.”

“I’m hungry,” I complained. “I haven’t had anything to eat.” I wasn’t hungry—I was simply trying to justify myself— to my own eight-year-old son.

“Here,” David said, drawing me a cup. “Next time ask someone bigger to help you.” He walked back to the waiting Chilekings, leaving me standing on the chair, holding the cup of coffee which curved in my two hands bowl-large, wondering how to get down. I was damned if I’d ask David to come lift me. Carefully stooping I got the coffee cup to the table. Then I got down from the chair—and though I was in momentary danger of scalding myself, managed alone to get the cup from the table. I could not bring myself to call to David, scald or no, “Come help Daddy with his coffee.” The Chilekings about the fireplace had all the chairs—they no longer suited us anyway—so I squatted on the floor, my cold fingers enjoying the warmth of the cup I had to hold as does a child.

Oren’s son Wilbur, who had been the sickest of the lot on our rescue trip—he was, or had been, a lank blond boy of fourteen or fifteen—turned to me and said truculently, “You can’t blame me for what happened. Russia is our enemy. I’ve read father’s book.”

So had I and most Americans—an amazing runaway (considering its subject matter) best seller called Strike The First Blow.

“Wilbur,” I said patiently (the reversal in our sizes no doubt had something to do with my patience), “your father’s policy has always been highly controversial.”

“Nerts,” said Wilbur.

“And even if we all believed in the efficacy of such a policy, there would still be the question of ‘when.’ ‘When’ is not decided singlehanded by a child. There has to be concerted action, unanimity of mind-”

“. . . unanimity of mind,” Wilbur repeated, using a word he would never have thought of using the day before. “There were the guns and there was the enemy. We did the right thing. What are guns for?”

“They’re for our defense.”

“. . . defense,” Wilbur said, with shocking vulgarity.

“If you wait until the enemy strikes the first blow you are morally in a sound position.”

“Morally sound,” Wilbur said, “with both legs missing.”

Then he suddenly changed his tune. He snatched off his horn-rimmed spectacles, which he had secured around his suddenly enlarged head by means of a rubber band. His head had become larger without his eyes becoming better. Then, with his glasses out of the way, he put his big, pale, myopic face down close to mine and shouted in a voice powerful but not masculine, “Lies, lies, lies. We were little so you told us whatever you wanted to. Whatever made things easy for you. ‘Strike the first blow!’ father wrote. And now you say, ‘Not really. It’s just a theory. It’s controversial, we didn’t really mean it.’ ‘Death is easy,’ you told us. ‘People just go to sleep, dear. They just rest forever, dear.’ Why didn’t you tell us they bled so much? And screamed so much? Why didn’t you tell us their guts come out? You think it’s all right to shoot the guts out of people. You’ve spent your whole life learning how to do that. And just because you didn’t give orders you start saying it’s wrong.”

I felt sorry for the boy—the first sight of blood is always upsetting, but to have him call me a liar—and get away with it simply because he was larger, was a little too much.

“Get out and stay out until you can talk sense,” I told him. I raised or tried to raise my voice—but there is no degree of will power which will lend authority to the sounds which issue from a mouth the size of a buttonhole.

I was surprised by what happened—on two counts. I was cuffed on the ears, not once, but a half-dozen times. This in itself—being something I had not experienced since the age of seven or so—was an enormous surprise. But what surprised me even more was that the slapping came, not from Wilbur, but from some boy unknown to me who punctuated his blows by “You can’t talk that way to Wilbur.”

This was the first inkling I received that there was, for the Chilekings anyway, something special about Wilbur, and my wonder at this, together with my anger at the unfairness of being struck by someone so much larger than I, immobilized me beneath the combined punishments of hand and tongue.

But what could I have done, amazed or unamazed? Angered or unangered? There were no more threats I could make. Spank? Turn off the television? Cut down on the allowance? Nonsense. The children were in the saddle and they knew it. What else could I do? Whimper? Run? Plead for mercy?

Such scenes are now far less common than at the beginning of the Chileking Era. Then, in their new-found freedom they, as the newly freed so often do, misused their power.

* * * * * * * *

There were beatings and manhandlings, some very brutal; though the Chilekings always referred to them as “spankings,” and professed to find no pleasure in what they did. Pleasure or not, it was not until the first batch of Chilekings experienced reduction themselves that there was any letup of the roughness.

It was Mayberry who handled the situation for me—his urbanity, whatever his physical size, still undiminished. “We don’t do that in the army, buddy,” he said, and the boy, who had been ready to let fly at me with another round of cuffing, sat down confused and apologetic. The Chilekings also had habits and inclinations which were unchanged by their alteration in size. They were accustomed to an early bedtime. Big heads began to nod, childish eyelids to fall. They fought their sleepiness. It no longer matched their own ideas of themselves. And they could no longer plead, “Let me stay up,” relying on their parents not to take them at their word. They were their own masters now—and more and more, as they quickly discovered, ours too. Having decided to go to bed it was pitiful to see some of these young six-footers, my own David among them, reluctant to go out into the dark alone. They were of a size, certainly, to defend themselves from any night attackers. But their minds, their imaginations were still of an eight- or ten-year size.

Mayberry and a dozen others beside myself lingered on in the mess hall after these man-sized infants left. First of all we prepared as accurate and objective a statement as we could manage of the day’s happenings. Then we all signed it. This seemed to us of first importance. There was simply no telling what might happen next. We had not the least assurance that diminution had stopped; that the Subtraction we had already experienced might not be a first step only in a process which might finally diminish us right out of existence. We had no assurance that the Chilekings might not throw us into the bay; or that we might not, in despair, all leap in ourselves. And chiefly we had no way then of knowing whether or not there would be retaliatory blows struck by those countries whose nationals had died in the blowing up of the Stalingrad. H-bombs and A-bombs might be falling on San Francisco within the next twenty-four hours. From the mechanical side alone the recording of this statement was an enormous undertaking —almost beyond us. A thousand difficulties confronted us at every turn. Our fingers could no longer manage the typewriter keys; our short stubby legs could no longer get us up to within striking distance of the keys in the first place, without a lot of climbing, rearranging of furniture, and so forth. Nowadays Smalfri have furniture designed for them; then, except for high chairs, toilet-training seats, velocipedes, and the like, nothing fitted, and, as you can see, what did fit we had little desire for. I don’t want to harp on the discomforts and frustration of those first days—but to find a world which we had equipped for our own pleasure and convenience suddenly useless was like living in a misfit nightmare. That is the exact word for it. Have you ever dreamed of being in a room in which everything was unaccountably heavy or oversized? Intractable, immovable, so that all of your efforts are either hampered or balked? That was our situation, exactly.

* * * * * * * *

At last we had done everything—I started to write “humanly possible”; what I should say is “midgetly possible,” I suppose. We were scarcely human that night. Messages had been prepared for the President, the Secretary of Defense, the Chiefs of Staff.

It was long after midnight by this time—and we were all tired, as we had never been tired before in our lives. To say nothing of what we had suffered emotionally, we had physically accomplished what was about equal to an assault on Everest, that day. It was Mayberry who first said, “Let’s turn in. My feet are killing me.” He looked down ruefully at his shoes. “Mary Jane” pumps, they were called—something intended for little girls. God knows where he had picked them up. “I think my arches are broken,” he said, rubbing his insteps. ‘

He had just kicked off his shoes when Oren and Hemworth came in. Hemworth, still unsubtracted, was pushing the semi-collapsed Oren before him in a perambulator—or perhaps it was called a stroller—a vehicle for transporting the very young, anyway. It was either do that, or abandon him. Or carry him. Oren, ordinarily one of the stiffest, most dignified men in the army—which is saying a good deal more than, “in the world”—was too worn out to protest. If Hemworth had stuffed him into a shopper’s handbag and had carried him over his shoulder like a squaw’s papoose I don’t think he would have objected. Oren was little and he was tired; how he got home was of no importance to him at the moment.

Hemworth was big and he was excited. He gave, out of sheer exuberance, Oren’s baby carriage a fast shoot into the room. He miscalculated and except that a Smalfri risked his life (actually) stopping it, it would have banged into the wall with possibly serious results.

“God in heaven!” Hemworth cried, staring at us all once again as if he’d never seen us before—”this is unbelievable!” Then he rapped his head with his knuckles. “Lord! Lord! Why haven’t I been more temperate with my words? Here I am a man of words and no word for this. It’s the colossal in reverse and all of my training’s been in describing the merely colossal.”

Hemworth’s verbal centers were irritated; he could not cease talking and as he talked, he walked about looking at us, shaking his head, unable to doubt that what he saw existed, yet unable to convince himself that it was possible for such objects to exist. Nor could he rid himself, it was obvious, of the feeling that he was a grownup dealing with children.

Finally, his visual curiosity momentarily satisfied, he gave us the big, the terrible news. “Boys,” he said, “here it is. The President, while taking a nap at two-thirty this afternoon, was reduced, decimated, shrunken, concentrated, condensed, what you will—made small.”

The message, after the first shock, was variously received. But to all of us, Subtracted men as we were, there was something ghastly in the thought that the head of our nation was now just such another little, wizened monstrosity as ourselves. Misery, they say, loves company. Well, we didn’t love it that much—not to the extent of wanting him to become one of us.

Mayberry, as usual, was less concerned with the particular event than with its meaning. “Hemworth,” he asked, “has anyone been reduced except when asleep?”

“There aren’t any statistics on it yet—no questionnaires have been sent out.” Hemworth saw that we didn’t think this was funny and gave Mayberry a straight answer. “So far as I know, there’s been no waking shrinkage. And I’ve been thinking about that too, Mayberry. I figure on staying up tonight. I’d like my clothes to fit me when I wake up in the morning.”

Well, Hemworth could joke about it then. It hadn’t happened to him yet. But at some time that night he must have dozed off. Next morning his clothes didn’t fit. But that night he still inhabited a world tailored to his size and felt the confidence that fit gave him. “We’ll know soon enough if they do,” he went on. “Let a few drivers, pilots, radio announcers, and the like, get reduced on their jobs and we’ll soon hear about it.”

“What about Russia?” somebody wanted to know. “Has there been any protest filed about what happened this afternoon?”

“It’s hard to tell for sure about Russia—her news sources are pretty well bottled up—but Matthews got a cable through. There hasn’t been any protest—they’ve got trouble of their own nearer home. They’re shrinking, and shrinking fast. The Chinese are shrinking too, nowhere near so fast though. The ratio is about four to one, Matthews says. The Japanese are jittery as hell, but the Chinese seem to think it’s a great joke.”

“Who on?” Mayberry asked.

“Matthews didn’t say.”

“If this keeps up,” Mayberry said, stroking his black, satyr’s beard, now about the size of a number-two paintbrush, “we aren’t going to have a man’s world any longer.”

“A child’s world?” Hemworth asked.

“Women and children’s.”

“Why women? They’re shrinking as fast as the men from all reports. The world’s going to belong to the kids, obviously.”

“Indirectly, yes. Physically, they’ll have the upper hand— but they’ll turn to their mothers for advice as they’ve always done. The world of the adult male is done for. Hemworth is probably one of its last representatives.”

Oren, who had been too weary to take any part in the discussion, now suggested that we have something to eat and go to bed. Hemworth volunteered to get the food together for us. He had just left the room when two heavy explosions rocked the building. Most of us were knocked off our feet. I fell heavily, the glass in my hand breaking with a clatter which was lost in the crash of breaking windows. My first thought was of Russian retaliation. The sounds were those of explosives near at hand. We struggled to our feet and stood for a minute without speaking, waiting for the next blast. I noticed that my hand was bleeding badly from the broken glass.

While we were waiting, Wilbur Oren and a half-dozen of the older Chilekings burst in, frightened, we believed. They were; but they were defiant, too.

“No one’s ever going to be killed again by that gun,” young Oren shouted.

“What gun?” his father asked.

“The one that sunk the Stalingrad. I’ve seen to that. And I’m going to fix every other gun in the United States.”

The boy was obviously in a state of psychic shock. His skin was pale, pupils dark and dilated, voice pitched in a high monotone. “We blew it sky high. Now figure out some other way to kill people.”

“Wilbur,” his father said, “how do you expect us to protect ourselves in case of attack?”

“There won’t be any attack,” Wilbur said. “We’ll give other countries a chance to destroy their weapons—if they won’t do it themselves, we’ll do it for them.”

“Wilbur, my boy,” Oren said in a fatherly squeak, “you are not yourself. You need rest. Now you run along-”

Wilbur stopped him in midsentence. “I’m not taking orders from you any longer. We’ve taken a vow”—he indicated the group of Chilekings about him—”not to stop until every gun and bomb in the United States is destroyed. You can’t make them without us, and you can’t stop us from destroying the ones you have. Can you?” he asked.

Oren searched the faces of his fellow officers looking for help.

“Can you?” Wilbur persisted, picking his father up bodily and holding him so that their faces were on a level. “Can you, Daddy?”

“No,” Oren said, “I can’t.”

With that Oren set his father down, not gently, and with his band of big-headed, soft-faced Chilekings at his heels turned and lumbered, in the awkward way the blown-up children have for the first two or three weeks, out of the “building.

And he was as good as his word, better than his word. Without him the Second Children’s Crusade (which has swept the world with all the fanaticism and a thousand times the effectiveness of the First) might never have been. The moral shock, if that is what it was, which Wilbur Oren received the day he saw the human suffering caused by the shots he fired at the Stalingrad gave him a drive, an eloquence which carried all before him.

* * * * * * * *

It has been my plan to speak only in passing of those events of which I do not have a firsthand knowledge. The first Chileking Demilitarization Mission to Russia is an example. I was not a member of this Mission and much has been written of it by those who were. I propose to say only what is necessary concerning this, and like events, to fill in the background for my very personal eyewitness account. Chronologically I am far ahead of myself in mentioning this Mission at all. But having mentioned it, I will dispose of it now. The American Chilekings under Wilbur Oren—and I do mean under, for he dominated them as only hero-worshiping children are capable of being dominated—were fanatically set on the destruction of all armaments—so set, that when they did not find immediate like-mindedness in the Russian Chilekings they proceeded without a minute’s hesitation and with childlike logic and brutality to blast a large section of the Russian countryside to a moonlike bareness. And the Russian Chilekings, for they were in complete control there, accepted this act as children do the losing of a game. It had been played, they had lost, and, since it had not seemed a very interesting game in the first place, they did not care to play it over in an effort to try for a win the second time. Children, we discovered, have none of an adult’s normal pride. They have short memories. They are incapable of the concentrated effort which a retaliatory program requires. And, except for the mesmeric power exercised over them by Wilbur Oren, I doubt that we would have experienced this long period of Demilitarization. The land is still strewn with the wreckage effected by this one Chileking. Forts, garrisons, training fields, factories, ammunition stores, bomb depots, the result of years of patriotic and scientific effort were all smashed in a decade. And not only in America —everywhere.

In a sense it was our fault—this world-wide destruction. We had permitted our children to form “pen leagues,” to correspond with children of other countries, to exchange handiwork. We had let the sense of nationality become undermined in them. They had begun to feel like a “band of brothers,” these children of the world. [In our schools and churches, in spite of the efforts of clear thinkers from 1940 on, there had been a concerted attempt on the part of men and women, themselves without any concept of national dignity or integrity, to indoctrinate our children with a pacific internationalism. Because we took no stock in this un-American fanaticism, we took for granted (as in the old days we took so many things for granted about our children) that our children did not believe in it, either. How wrong and stupid we were! They were inexperienced and impressionable. And they came to power with these ideas of brotherhood and equality simmering in their undeveloped minds. And since those ideas, except for our laxness, would never have been there, it is unfair to blame the destruction of the past fifty years wholly on them. We had our own guilty part to play in the razing of every fort, the demolition of every station for experimenting with guided missiles.]

Of course it is true that, except for one fact, the entire Demilitarization Program might not have succeeded as it did: if Wilbur Oren had subsequently suffered Subtraction as most Chilekings did, he would not have continued to exercise his enormous power over them. But because he never changed physically nor lessened a whit in his fiery determination to rid the world of what had, at the critical moment of the change, caused him so much suffering, he has remained for all these years the Chileking’s dictator. This, quite probably, although it also is chronologically out of place, is as good a place as any to speak of the varieties of Chilekings and Smalfri that have so far made their appearance. Subtraction has taken place at almost every age—at ages when the size loss was so small as to be almost unnoticeable. The youngest Subtracted person, in so far as our records go, was four. The oldest, ninety-two. Subtraction seems to take place when a certain degree of “maturity” has been reached; although the word “maturity” is a controversial one (to use an adjective which dates me). Some, those who are late Subtractees for the most part, insist that Subtraction simply indicates a kind of rigidity, an end of spiritual and mental growth. Some four- and six-year-olds, born without curiosity, without the ability or desire to enlarge themselves spiritually or mentally, shrink early, they say. Most are Subtracted in their forties, with a considerable number experiencing the change in the decades on each side of forty. Some few are never Subtracted at all. These people have always struck me as being childlike, in spite of the fact that some have been eminent in their professions, poets, scientists, musicians, and so forth. These un-Subtracted adults have always, both by virtue of their size and the quality of their minds, been very much at home with the Chilekings. And alas, they, who might have been expected to caution, to guide, and restrain the Chilekings in their excesses, have been the very ones, out of the entire adult population, who have had the least inclination to do so.

* * * * * * * *

So then, there were Smalfri of all ages. Men of fifty the same size as early Shrinkees of eight and ten; and of course, the same size as the un-Shrunk toddlers of two and three. (These poor babies, the real babies, never knew quite what to make of us whiskered pygmies of their own size. There we stood, eyes on a level with theirs, but with no desire to catch frogs, suck lollipops or play in the mud.) There was prevalent in the first years of the Chileking Era a slang labelling of the small which has since been superseded by more exact terms. “Real Babes,” “No Babes,” and “Go Babes,” were the phrases used then. I was a “Go Babe,” as were all shrunken adults. “No Babes” were those who had experienced Subtraction while young and who oftentimes were confused with the “Real Babes”—those who, as is no doubt plain in the terminology itself, were real babies; that is, veritable infants.

Chilekings also had their classifications. Amplification took place at various ages—occasionally very early, occasionally very late. Sometimes, though this is unusual, a person who had never been amplified, who had accomplished what was once considered a “normal” growth and who was expected to finish life without ever becoming a Smalfri either, was belatedly overamplified, swollen to gigantic proportions. This was quite unusual however and there have never been enough of these oddities about to be more than passing curiosities.

Occasionally [Great understatement.] in this narrative I find myself ruminating about matters and meanings which rightly have no part in an “eyewitness” account. The matters I have been discussing in the above paragraphs are common knowledge to all now alive and as such have no particular interest. However, since this manuscript will be published only in a form approved by the Chileking Commission for Preservation of Old Records, I needn’t worry about the inclusion of matter extraneous to the central purpose of my narrative. It will be stricken out, anyway, if not wanted. [Right.] In view of this I want to make a final point, for my own satisfaction. Although the rationale of these processes has not yet been completely understood, yet it is clear that there is a rationale. It was and is no hit-or-miss matter. There is some meaning in these physical alterations, a correspondence of some kind between inner growth or shrinkage and the outer waxing or waning. But exactly what this correspondence is, we are not yet able to say, though many studies are now in progress. One change in attitudes obvious to all, has been caused by the discrepancy which now exists between the outer appearance and the inner reality. In the old days, “big” meant adult. “Big” can mean anything now, so far as the interior person is concerned. “Big” means “big” now, nothing more. So, by analogy, “black” is coming to mean “black”; “white,” “white”; “little,” “little,” and nothing more. The visual surface is less and less meaningful. The result has been, I’m afraid, an undermining of standards. If things are not what they appear, it is very easy to call them what you like. And what you “like” is seldom what’s good for you.

* * * * * * * *

This is all beside the point—which is to report what I saw with my own eyes; but it is difficult for a thinking, feeling man to make a mechanical recording machine of himself at this late date in life. What I next saw with my own eyes was that roomful of gnomes expressing pity to Oren for the derangement of his son—pity, as later events have proved, which was entirely uncalled for. Wilbur Oren had taken that night the first steps which would little by little elevate him to a position as dictator of the Chilekings—and that meant of Smalfri as well.

Hemworth, alone, wasted no time on expressions of sympathy but went outside to examine the damage caused by this latest blast. The rest of us were too exhausted mentally and physically to care what had happened.

The knowledge that if we went to sleep we would awaken the size of gnats would not have kept us from sleeping that night. We turned in where we were, cuddling up like a cage-ful of wizened monkeys trying to keep warm on a chilly evening. The fire died out. Getting logs into it was not worth the labor. Some had a drink before sleeping. It was a mistake. We had not yet learned to adjust our intake to our reduced capacities. That night, which should have been one of prayer and contemplation, was one instead of drunken snores and sodden sleep.

I was still sleeping next morning when David came in. “Come on out, Daddy,” he said when he had awakened me, “and see how quiet it is.”

I got up without awakening the others and limped along beside David, stiff and sore. (The Chilekings have never, to this day, learned that our legs are shorter than theirs. They either leave us far behind them, unless we jog trot to keep up with them or, impatient with our slowness, grab our arms and pull us along at a pace which is both physically painful and psychically hateful.) That morning with David was my first, though since many times reaffirmed, experience of this. “Can’t you hurry up, Daddy?” he called back fretfully, as if my steps were small out of a deliberate desire on my part to impede him.

But he was right about the quietness. Not a boat moved on the bay, not a train-on a rail. No factory whistles sounded. No planes flashed across the sky. On the highways there were a few slow-moving autos. It was one of those fine, clear, windy mornings common to San Francisco in the fall when, in spite of the abundance of water, there is a tang of desert dryness in the air. On such days I have often thought I could look from the Presidio into the open windows of the office buildings in San Francisco and read the letters rolling out from under the typists’ fingers. In spite of this wonderful magnifying clarity, there was nothing to be seen on the morning of November 2nd, except a dead world—or an apparently dead world. For I knew that behind those solid and shining walls there was hidden an emotional activity so quivering and feverishly alive as to put into the shade all of yesterday’s merely mechanical movement.

As I stood there at David’s knee looking, pitying, speculating, Mayberry came out to us. He pulled his wrist watch, which he could no longer keep on his arm, out of some placket or fold of his clothes. It was near eight o’clock.

He looked about the Post. “It didn’t take long for discipline to disappear, did it? Oren’s sick. I’m calling all officers and men together at eleven. Usual routines are impossible, of course, but we’d better decide what we are to do—or what we can do. San Francisco is going to need martial law before the day’s over—only God knows who she can get to maintain it.”

“I say,” somebody called, “I don’t think I look so bad.” It was Hemworth, scrambling awkwardly down the steps of the officers’ barracks where he had gone to sleep, “like a man,” instead of sleeping with us Smalfri on the messroom floor. He was bundled up in a towel. “How do you like my swaddling clothes?” he asked jauntily. He took a look around. “Well, boys, it has, I take it, really struck.”

It had struck. That day, I suppose, was the most momentous the world has ever known. Everywhere on that day, as later investigation proved, men and women were Subtracted, and children inflated. On remote South American rancheros, in equatorial jungles, in the Ukraine, even in the Vatican. There were thousands of suicides that day: men and women who thought they were alone in their gnomish reduction and preferred to die rather than face the world so dwarfed. There were many deaths not self-sought; on ships where wholesale reduction made it impossible to bring the ship into port. The recent teledrama, “Subtraction at Sea,” has made magnificent use of the horrors of such a situation. There was heroism at sea, too. The English passenger ship Laurentia with 1200 aboard came safely into New York harbor in spite of the fact that every man and woman on board was Subtracted.

The wars that were in progress that day died in mid-stride. What could men do with weapons they could no longer handle? Of what value were planes to men who could no longer control them? Russia was, I suppose it has been agreed, the most seriously affected. She had in India with her army of occupation, no children. The Indians had on the other hand, innumerable Chilekings available who, because of the agelong oriental philosophy of parental regard, were far more easily controlled by the Indian Smalfri than were Chilekings elsewhere. These Chilekings, together with the Indian adults, who as a whole were very tardy shrinkers, placed almost the entire Russian army there in prison camps. Then, with the breakdown of all international transportation, and with conditions in Russia as chaotic as elsewhere, Russia simply abandoned this expeditionary force of hers. Today they have become thoroughly assimilated into the Indian nation. The Chileking delegate from India to the last International Congress here was the son of one of these reduced Russian soldiers.

In Spain that day, though word of it did not reach us at once, all the adult population was very substantially reduced. Germany, with its weakness for leaders, has provided more recruits than any other country to the anti-war crusade of Wilbur Oren. The Orenites, who in this country are fanatic enough, God knows, have in Germany added a mysticism to their fanaticism which makes Orenism nothing less than a religion. Nowhere has there been such a cleavage between Chileking practices and the Smalfri practices which they superseded as in Germany.

* * * * * * * *

Once again and in spite of my resolution, I find myself slipping into matters of opinion, abandoning my chronological outline, writing of happenings as familiar to you as to myself. These slips will no doubt be taken care of in the offices of the Commemoration Commission. I find it easier to write as I please, and trust them to delete.

In San Francisco on that first day of general Reduction and Amplification we were not only subjected to an overwhelming emotional shock, but deprived of those material conveniences which we had come to believe were essential. Not a streetcar, not a bus moved. Telephone and telegraph services were completely disrupted. Some communication was kept up by means of amateur short-wave radio operators. The commercial radio systems were silent. Stores did not open. Restaurants and movie houses were locked.

Toward evening of that first day when the news began to get about that the catastrophe was general, the roads began to fill up again—carloads of gaping, bewildered Smalfri piloted by proud Chilekings; Smalfri, reassured, and at the same time stunned and shocked to see in a thousand other dwarfed ones their own lineaments. This riding about in cars did not last long. California had gasoline again, sooner than other states, for we had no long-distance transportation problems to cope with and we had stores of gas on hand—but it was years before there were again long lines of cars bumper to bumper on the highways.

I found that I had no car at all. Mary Frances pedalled up to the Presidio about noon on a borrowed bicycle to get news of me for her mother.

“Where is the car?” I asked her.

“Elizabeth has it today.”

“Elizabeth?” I wanted to know.

“Yes, you know. My friend Elizabeth Purdy. They don’t have a car so I said she could have ours every other day. They need it a lot.”

Oh, the seeds of almost everything that followed were right there in the happenings of that first week, had we then had the eyes to see them. Little laxities, concessions, which in the emotional upheaval of the time we permitted, were seized and held by the Chilekings, made an entering wedge which, in time, separated us Smalfri from every right and privilege we had ever enjoyed as parents and adults.

When, twelve years afterwards, the Smalfri made a united effort to regain their control of the world, it was too late. I knew it at the time, though I was heart and soul in the movement. Useless blood was shed then. Had the blow been struck earlier, before the Chilekings had become so expert technologically, we would have won. But we waited too long. And though I shall never be content with this world reversal under which I live, it has advantages which I will not try to deny. Our present custom of work in youth and study in age, for instance, has proved far more feasible than I ever anticipated.

It grew, naturally enough, out of the necessity in those early days of having the Chilekings carry on the work of which we were incapable. Of course we could have made no headway with this, had the Chilekings been of another mind. But they would have done it even had we opposed them. They were determined to drive the tractors, man the generators, operate the grain elevators. They left their schools as though leaving prisons. We had at that time in our schools a philosophy of learning by doing—but what the students learned by doing was usually of no possible use to them outside the school room. They had looms on which they made little rugs—or they made clay jugs like those of the Egyptians, or Indian bows and arrows, and they knew how to build a stockade like those of our pioneer forefathers, or duplicate the slave galleys of the Roman Empire. But out of school there was hardly any demand for, or pleasure in, stockades or slave galleys—and even while they made these things the Chilekings have confessed they felt as if they were working with shadows. They knew well enough this was sugar, and not very palatable sugar, on a pill being rammed down their throats.

Now, set loose among the realities of our own day, they learn processes, techniques, operational routines in weeks instead of months and years as in the old days. There were mistakes and fatalities of course, but they acquired these muscular patterns far faster than the Smalfri had ever been able to do. It began to. appear that our schools had been, not so much a place for teaching children, as a place where adults served as governors on the child’s natural learning speed.

When the Chileking later becomes a Smalfri and takes up, if he wishes, his speculative and abstract studies, it appears that his learning habits have, as a result of this practical work, become so sharpened and acute that his progress here is also helped. And in his years of work he has gained a desire to relate his studies to the concrete world which gave them wonderfully increased point and validity.

* * * * * * * *

I have taken no pains to hide the fact that many things that have come with the Chileking reversal are to me lastingly intolerable; but I freely admit that this revolution is not one of them. It is still, I confess, a shock to see our great universities filled with these little, bearded, gnomish figures—these Peascods and Buttercups; see the gridirons and diamonds grass-grown. Organized athletics have become a thing of the past. It appears now that the young never had, actually, nearly as much pleasure in the bruising, semiprofessional collegiate sports as did the adults who were their spectators. Once out from under the directorial thumb of the adults there was a spontaneous abandonment of these grueling athletic contests and a growth of interest in rather ragged, so far as performance is concerned, spontaneous sports.

Our system of universal compulsory education has naturally broken down. Now only those Smalfri who have some real hunger for learning go to school. The results are mixed but not wholly bad. It is certainly strange, for one who remembers the old world, to find men, like Goyen the painter, scarcely able to pick out the headlines and never twice spelling a word the same way. But it hasn’t seemed to hurt his painting. In the old days it often happened that a man who wrote or painted had scarcely ever smelled the real world. He put his nose into a book, and never took it out until he was twenty-six, when he then suspended it over a piece of foolscap and began writing.

Oh, yes, the seeds of almost everything that has followed were seen in that first chaotic week. It is easy enough to say that we should have stopped it at the time. We did say “No,” and we were not listened to. And at that time a civil war between fathers and children was unthinkable.

When, toward the end of that first week, certain foodstuffs began to grow scarce, the Chilekings made a collection of these scarce articles and apportioned them equally among the people. What could we do? They wielded the crowbars that broke in the doors of the warehouses, they drove the trucks that distributed the food.

The economic structure was incapable of bearing the burden of this and similar quixoticisms. The profit system disappeared and today we have the uninspiring spectacle of men content simply to have a home and sufficient food; to travel a little, to have a few objects they believe to be beautiful, and to spend their Smalfrihood in study or in some unprofitable avocation. The memory of the great men of my youth has almost left the earth: men who did not permit their needs to become the measure of their productivity, but who accumulated oil fields and railroads and ships and factories. From a thousand chimneys there once poured the smoke of one man’s furnaces; he put wages into the hands of ten thousand men; in the banks he counted his reserves in the millions.

* * * * * * * *

But these spacious days are forever gone. And in large part, it is our fault. The Chilekings had received an unrealistic upbringing. There was a dichotomy in their training which they were never able to bridge. We had permitted them to hear in school and in church the old sentimental platitudes about sharing their plenty. We continually said to them, “Don’t be selfish—give Johnny half,” considering this but a charming grace which they would give up when they left childhood behind. The trouble was that they came to power before childhood was left behind, and someone with more taste for irony that I might smile at the way in which they have proceeded to put us Smalfri over these same platitudinous hurdles.

I think the chief trouble was that the Chilekings had no real conception of the significance of money. They had never had much themselves and they had been fairly content. Money to them was simply a metal that would take them to a show— or buy a bag of candy. They had no understanding whatever of money as a productive agent. They had no desire to have more of it than they needed for the day. They literally took no thought for the morrow. Well, you know as well as I where that has brought us. The Chilekings have been far more cruel and unscrupulous in their seizure of an individual’s property than the Smalfri would ever have been. Since they themselves are not interested in anything beyond their daily needs, they cannot enter into the minds of men more imaginative than themselves. They can see distributed without a qualm the properties men had spent a lifetime accumulating. Their only concern has been the anthill, beehive, regard of seeing that all have enough to eat and drink. It is as simple as that for them. And we Smalfri are helpless. I watched my own son David loading the Chileking trucks that first week.

There have always been those who have opposed distributionism and we Smalfri who have kept faith with the old order have now and again been able to make numerous converts even among the Chilekings. This has usually proved extremely unrewarding labor however, for a Chileking seemed no sooner to be converted to reason than he was Subtracted. And Subtracted, he was of very little use to us in any actual overthrow of the Chilekings.

Because of my firsthand knowledge, I know a report of the earliest meetings for “Chilesex” is expected of me. Inadvertently, hunting Mary Frances, who had slipped off to attend a “rally” she said, at one of the barracks, I happened in upon the first of these get-togethers. (Later, when the practice became more ritualistic and better organized such a phrase would not be suitable. At this state “get-together” is about right.)

I am loath, in spite of expectations, to say anything at all about a practice so entirely repellent to me. After all I was brought up in an era in which sex was a private matter for adults, not a public one for adolescents. I am no historian, no anthropologist. Nor do their protestations that practices similar to those of our Chilekings have been common with primitive peoples throughout history move me. I am not a primitive and it was never my intention that my children should behave as if they were. Before the Chileking Era there was never a more demure, self-respecting, modest child than Mary Frances. One month after Inflation and she was behaving like a South Sea Islander in a grass hut.

I know that such meetings and practices are today a commonplace. We see signs, “Chilesex Headquarters,” as openly displayed as, “Public Library,” or “Men’s Room.” “Meeting for Chilesex at Seven Tonight,” is as common now as “Choir Practice at Seven,” was in my youth. Familiarity has nevertheless not diminished either my disapproval nor my early feeling of shock, and I find it completely impossible to make any concrete report of what I encountered that first night in “A” barracks. Lighthearted, affectionate (they tell me) experimental sexual play on the part of Chilekings, some as young as twelve! How am I, for whom such matters were of life and death importance, to react to these Chileking practices?

* * * * * * * *

They tell me that these Chilesex activities are less seriously regarded by their participants than the activities of a communal reading hour! Chilekings hoot with unbelief when I tell them that in my day sexual union was so sacred a matter that men often shot their mates for obtaining sexual gratification outside a legal union, then committed suicide themselves. Sex was no trivial matter with us. Chilekings consider death for such a cause on a plane with death for reading a poem with an “illegal” person or for drinking an “unsanctified” soda. Sex has lost the deep, awful, and romantic meaning it had for us. I can not, I freely confess, understand what man’s deepest instinct can mean to those who have, from the time of puberty to marriage, expressed it quite freely. When I ask them they jibe at me. “Fun,” they answer and look down at me laughing, as if I were an insect, not a man, and unknowing about these matters. Fun! indeed.

But how were we. to stop them? Once they had the upper hand physically over us, parents, and teachers, there was no longer any reason not to be public about practices which (they now tell us) were formerly quite commonly indulged in secretly. Children; it now appears, are born without shame, and since the Change, parents have been too preoccupied with their own troubles to instill in their offspring suitable feelings about sex. Since the Chilekings made full use, from the beginning, of our own contraceptive devices there has been surprisingly enough no increase in illegitimacy.

But something is lost, I feel sure, in today’s marriages. There is no longer that sense of breathless wonder as the two young people approach the moment of unveiling. Weddings have become quite cheerful, unromantic, matter-of-fact. My feeling when I attend one is of witnessing the establishment of a partnership between two business associates, rather than the legalizing of the union of two tremulous, innocent, and yearning young bodies: which was marriage as we experienced it fifty years ago, I do assure you.

* * * * * * * *

My contention that Chilesex has taken the bloom off marriage and the romance out of the man-woman relationship is borne out by the fact that, once wedded, Chilekings cling to their original marriage beds with all the unimaginative obstinacy of a pair of ring-necked doves! Not that I do not believe in conjugal fidelity. I do, indeed. But the Chilekings practice this fidelity, once they are married, not as we did, because it was our duty, but because they can think of nothing better to do! Their imaginations have been depleted, their zest destroyed by their early experiences. They have, in fact, only derisive terms for those who seek romance outside of marriage. A “Go Babe,” as I have related earlier, is the name for a Smalfri of middle age. But an adulterous “Go Babe” is called by the Chilekings a “Slobabe.” Why? Because they think it is “slow,” that is, “stupid,” not to have experienced enough, learned enough in the “Meetings for Chilesex” to enable one to pick out a permanently satisfactory mate. The “Slobabe” is regarded today much as a retarded child was regarded in my time. No criticism is attached to his incompetence, rather a kind of pity.

Now this is surely a far cry from the days of my youth when men and women took sex seriously enough to die for it. Or at least to kill for it. Are there any Paolas and Francescas today? Any Heros and Leanders? Any Tristrams and Iseults? Tristram today would be a “Slobabe.” Is this an advance in civilization?

And though what has happened in the area of reproduction cannot be “blamed” on the Chilekings, and though from all I gather they like it as little as we, still it is part and parcel of the topsy-turvy world which is theirs. No Subtracted woman, whatever her age, bears children. But a woman who has never been Subtracted goes right on having children, if she wants to (and several have), until her death—even if she lives until she is in her seventies or eighties. I must say that I find a pregnant woman of seventy a shocking sight.

A Subtracted man is capable of fathering children in unions with un-Subtracted women. Not many such unions exist however.

The Amplified, as soon as they are sexually mature—and this maturity comes chronologically at the age it always has —can and do have children. The fact of early Chilesex together with the inability of the Subtracted to have children has induced early marriage and childbearing. Nevertheless the birth rate is falling off considerably and I foresee a time when we must . . .

I know this is not what was asked of me by the Commission. They want what “I saw,” not what “I think.” Well, they have the power to strike this out if they want. Or strike me. It won’t be the first time. I am an old man and a little one. But what I saw is locked behind my two eyes and is not to be exposed at command.

One “eyewitness” event which I can report with a free conscience is the first Chileking Meeting for Worship. I was there; through no desire on my part, it is true. Amy and I were bundled up willy-nilly, and taken there for the good of our souls—so we were told. My own feeling is that the Chilekings knew that the whole experience would be most miserable for us and for this reason forced it sadistically upon us. When any group has the power the Chilekings have over us Smalfri it is impossible to determine to what extent they are exercising power for its own sake and covering up by telling us it is for our own “good.”

Whatever their reasons, Mary Frances told her mother and me the day before, that there would be a service of prayer and thanksgiving in the cathedral next morning at dawn. This was toward the end of the third month of the Chileking Era.

“Dawn?” I asked, seizing, as one does in astonishment, upon the least significant detail of all.

“Yes,” she replied, “dawn is the best time to propitiate the gods.”

“The gods?” I echoed, staring up into her face.

She answered without self-consciousness. “Wilbur thinks, and so do all of us, that there are more gods than one. God and Jesus are the greatest and best we think. But the Devil is a god too, and perhaps if he were honored more, he would be more content. Wilbur says you have all tried to act as if there wasn’t any evil. You kill people or starve them and you call it ‘economic necessity,’ but Wilbur says it’s just plain evil and probably the Devil’s work.”

“But that’s true—such things do grow out of conditions beyond our control. We don’t want to do them.”

“That’s the reason Wilbur thinks it’s the Devil’s work. Since it does happen, someone must want it done. Wilbur says that things that no one wants done, don’t happen. So, tomorrow morning we will honor him—that doesn’t mean worship. But Wilbur says we can’t resist until we have recognized.”

I was too amazed to speak any more with Mary Frances at the time. This eleven-year-old talking religion and economics; but talking it like some primitive medicine man with forces of evil to be propitiated. Neither Amy nor I had been churchgoers but we had, like many other people, sent our children to Sunday School, and had taught them to say their prayers. It had always seemed a pretty sight to us to see them kneel at bedtime in their night clothes prattling in their sweet unformed voices the old familiar words. But now to hear them planning to pray in cold blood, meaning it, and in public, and at dawn! And talking of the devil! I was shocked at this revelation of the depths of their naïveté. But this was only another instance of their faulty training. Though when they were receiving that training in Sunday School, we had, of course, no inkling that they would not have sufficient time before they came to power to learn to distinguish between the ideal and the workable.

I had no intention of attending those services to propitiate the devil, but long before it was light next morning David came into our room.

“It’s time to get up,” he said.

“What do you mean coming in here this time of the morning?” I wanted to know.

“It’s time to get ready for the Services.”

Then I remembered. “Your mother and I aren’t going.”

“Wilbur said to bring our parents. There’s going to be a special place reserved for the little ones where they can see. We promised Wilbur we would bring you,” he said quietly. “I wouldn’t want to break my promise. Not to Wilbur.”

I saw what he meant. ‘Tell Maria to make us some coffee then,” I said. We still had coffee at that time. The electric power was off, but Maria was managing some rudimentary cooking on the barbecue grill in the backyard. She had a kind of scaffolding of boxes and cartons on which she mounted to get at the grill.

“We aren’t to have any breakfast,” David said, “we’re to pray fasting.”

I had no doubt that David and Mary Frances were so completely under Wilbur Oren’s power, that if we were to refuse they would simply hustle us into the car and take us there by force. So Amy and I dressed quietly and were waiting for them when they came for us.

I well remember that ride through the raw, foggy morning. We used the last of our gasoline for the trip and it was months before we were to drive again. It was still some time before sunup and there were no street lights. We moved slowly through the gray gloom. Amy and I huddled together in the back seat, not talking. There were still a number of cars on the road that morning, but the sidewalks were already beginning to fill up with the makeshift wagons in which the Chilekings were transporting the Smalfri of their families to the meeting.

When we reached the cathedral we found it lit only by the wavering light of candles. High in the groined arches it was still deep night. Great shadows rose and fell across the sup-porting pillars. The air was thick with some heavy, oversweet incense. A Chileking, some beginning student, I suppose, was playing the organ. Over and over he played a monotonous wailing sort of five-finger exercise. The Smalfri were all seated in the front of the cathedral, and behind them and against the walls at the sides ranged the Chilekings, big, heavy, smooth-faced, and intent.

The cathedral was soon filled and the doors closed. Gray light began to seep through the arched windows. The organ continued its long four-or-five-note wail. Now and then a veering candle flame sent a splash of pale light across one of the faces near me.

Suddenly over the organ’s monotone came a sound or series of sounds that prickled my skin: something halfway between the brass clang of a cymbal and the muffled beat of a drum. What mumbo jumbo are we to have now I wondered—and as I looked at the Chilekings, lined along the walls, with their big, round faces lit by the flickering candlelight, it was easy to imagine them savages, gathered about some ritual fire. Well, I thought, there isn’t really much difference; children and primitives aren’t far separated.

Organ wail and drum throb, if drum it was, continued. Then a door to the left of the altar slowly opened and three towering figures emerged and crossed ponderously to a position in front of the altar. The central figure I recognized as that of Wilbur Oren; the other two I did not know. Each was costumed in a habit that had as its basis, vestments of either the Roman or Anglican church. Over this vestment the three Chilekings wore long, red, capelike garments. On the back of each cape was affixed the insignia, then so strange, and now so common of the Antlered Egg. On their heads was something that was neither military shako, nor bishop’s miter, but that somehow resembled both.

But the strangest thing about those three Chilekings was not their costumes, but the great, life-size figures they bore aloft. The figure carried by the Chileking on Wilbur Oren’s right was obviously a representation of the Christ, though very unlike those commonly seen at that time. The face of that Christ was neither bearded nor thorn crowned, but young and unlined. Christ before Golgotha, before Gethsemane, before the temptation in the wilderness even. The modeling of the face was a little uncertain, but there was no denying that it had great power and sweetness. A young face, full of hope; a Chileking’s conception of a Chileking, in fact.

The figure on the left was at first difficult to place; it was that of a woman, big-breasted, heavy, rounded, gray-haired, with a face compassionate, double-chinned, and motherly. Motherly—was this the Chileking’s conception of Mary, I wondered? The Fathers of the Church had made her young and comely, Mary the Maiden; but perhaps the Chilekings saw in her only Mary, the real mother. No compromise in the words, “Mary, Mother,” with the image of an untouched virgin.

The central figure, the one Wilbur Oren held aloft, towered high above the other two. In the half-light that filled the cathedral it looked like an African witch doctor. A hideous black creature with little red eyes that seemed to flicker evilly in the shifting light, and a big, loose-lipped, white mouth. This figure of evil—for he was obviously that, was hung about with various oddments of broken glass, of tufts of hair, of old cartridges and pierced coins. In one respect he was an orthodox devil—he had a tail, sinuous, and scaly. And this figure of evil was, unlike the other two, jointed—for he was kept aquiver with grimacings and jerkings and lurchings.

We have had time enough now to adapt ourselves to this fantastic mummery of the Chilekings: Antlered Eggs, spirits propitiated, and shrines at every crossroad. These attract little attention now, but then we were accustomed, in such religious practices as we still retained, to a certain dignity of ritual, a certain reassuring decorum. And yet in spite of my distaste for such primitive religious flummery as we were seeing that cold, gray morning, I was deeply impressed. More so, I regret to say, than at my usual place of worship. I was no doubt the victim of a very elementary sort of mass psychology. About me washed great waves of Chileking belief and ardor and 1 was unable to escape a certain degree of submergence in that flood of feeling. We Smalfri, perched uneasily on the edges of our seats so that we might bend our knees, with the tall, grave Chilekings pressing closely in about us, were like a little band of simians surrounded by water buffaloes or elephants. With us, we felt, were knowledge and wisdom; but what could they avail against this bulk, and this belief? And as the tempo of the services increased and the pitch mounted I began to wonder what they would do.

As I have said, much of what happened seemed to me farcical; yet in spite of myself, as I’ve already confessed, I was deeply moved. My mind recognized the naïveté, the Huck Finn, caveman quality of the proceedings; and yet because not too long ago (as mankind counts its years) I had bowed my own head before just such images and stamped to just such drum beats, I could not, however cool my thinking, control my pulse beats.

* * * * * * * *

Wilbur Oren spoke for a long time. I don’t think he said a sentence worth remembering, nor do I believe the words now attributed to him and known as the “Cathedral Speech,” are authentic in any detail. That speech, the official one, outlines in considerable detail subsequent Chileking policies. I heard that speech and there was nothing of that kind in it. There was nothing in it whatever but a kind of eloquent hysteria, a reiteration of “God wills it,” a shocked, inexperienced boy’s denunciation of what had hurt him. [This, though obviously the report of a shocked Smalfri concerning what has hurt him, I have let stand in spite of its misrepresentation of the Cathedral Speech of Wilbur Oren.] That was all there was to it. Though to say that was all, is not to say it was not effective. It was effective, terribly so. As that high voice continued and daylight came, I could see those big, empty Chileking faces contorted with conviction and washed with tears.

When Oren finished, the three figures were again held aloft, and all the Chilekings in the building filed past them. And as they passed they held out their hands to a fourth Chileking who had joined the three at the altar. He made a cut in their hands so that a fair quantity of blood flowed from the wound. Then each Chileking held his gashed hand over a big brass or gold bowl so that the blood of all mingled there. I was there and saw all this done, and my gorge rose at the sight of this savage blood-brotherhood ritual. I saw my own children let their blood drip into this pot—David and Mary Frances—and Smalfri all about me shivered. But what could we do? Our day had passed.

* * * * * * * *

As I watched that long line of Chilekings file past, and saw them wince as the blade flashed across their hands, and heard them mumble some vow as they pressed the blood out of the cut flesh into that pot, I knew that something portentous was afoot, a revolution beyond anything our world has yet seen. I will not pretend, as many have, that I foresaw all that has happened. But I saw a little that morning—enough to frighten me with grim forebodings.

I do not know whether this paper is what the Commemorative Committee had in mind when they asked me to write of my experiences during the first days of Subtraction or not. I am an old man and not a professional writer; I have done the best I can. I have tried not to be bitter, but there is no use denying that my life stopped sixty years ago. Since then I have only been an onlooker.