VII

Two ancients on the direct computer line between city and quarry (private persons have to be content with spark-gap radio), fighting at the top of their lungs while five green girls wait nearby, sulky and bored: I can't make do with five greenies; I need two on-foot checkers and protective gear for one!

Can't have.

Incomp-

?

You hear.

Is me!

(affected disdain)

If catastroph-

Won't!

And so on.

VIII

A troop of little girls contemplating three silver hoops welded to a silver cube are laughing so hard that some have fallen down into the autumn leaves on the plaza and are holding their stomachs. This is not embarrassment or an ignorant reaction to something new; they are genuine connoisseurs who have hiked for three days to see this. Their hip-packs lie around the edge of the plaza, near the fountains. One: How lovely!

IX

Between shifts in the quarry in Newland, Henla Anaisson sings, her only audience her one fellow-worker.

A Belin, run mad and unable to bear the tedious-ness of her work, flees above the forty-eighth parallel, intending to remain there permanently. "You" (says an arrogant note she leaves behind) "do not exist" and although agreeing philosophically with this common view, the S amp; P for the county follows her-not to return her for rehabilitation, imprisonment, or study. What is there to rehabilitate or study? We'd all do it if we could. And imprisonment is simple cruelty.

You guessed it.

XI

"If not me or mine," (wrote Dunyasha Bernadetteson in 368 A.C.) "O.K.

"If me or mine-alas.

"If us and ours-watch out!"

XII

Whileaway is engaged in the reorganization of industry consequent to the discovery of the induction principle.

The Whileawayan work-week is sixteen hours.

PART FOUR

I

After six months of living with me in the hotel suite, Janet Evason expressed the desire to move in with a typical family. I heard her singing in the bathroom: I know That my Rede-emer Liveth And She Shall stand Upon the latter da-ay (ruffle)

On Earth.

"Janet?" She sang again (not badly) the second variation on the lines, in which the soprano begins to decorate the tune: I know (up)

Tha-at my (ruffle)

Re-eedeemer (fiddle)

Liveth

And She

Shall stand (convex)

And She

Shall stand (concave)

"Janet, he's a Man!" I yelled. She went into the third variation, where the melody liquefies itself into its own adornments, very nice and quite improper: I know (up)

That my redee (a high point, this one) mer Li-i-veth (up up up)

And She

Shall stand (hopefully)

And She shall stand (higher)

Upon the la-a-a-a-atter da-a-a-y

(ruffle fiddle drip)

O-on Earth (settling)

"JANET!" But of course she doesn't listen.

II

Whileawayans like big asses, so I am glad to report there was nothing of that kind in the family she moved in with. Father, mother, teenage daughter, and family dog were all delighted to be famous. Daughter was an honor student in the local high school. When Janet got settled I drifted into the attic; my spirit seized possession of the old four-poster bed stored next to the chimney, near the fur coats and the shopping bag full of dolls; and slowly, slowly, I infected the whole house.

III

Laura Rose Wilding of Anytown, U. S. A.

She has a black poodle who whines under the trees in the back yard and bares his teeth as he rolls over and over in the dead leaves. She's reading the Christian Existentialists for a course in school. She crosses the October weather, glowing with health, to shake hands clumsily with Miss Evason. She's pathologically shy.

She puts one hand in the pocket of her jeans, luminously, the way well-beloved or much-studied people do, tugging at the zipper of her man's leather jacket with the other hand. She has short sandy hair and freckles. Says over and over to herself Non Sum, Non Sum, which means either I don't exist or I'm not that, according to how you feel it; this is what Martin Luther is supposed to have said during his fit in the monastery choir. "Can I go now?"

IV

The black poodle, Samuel, whined and scurried across the porch, then barked hysterically, defending the house against God-knows-what.

"At least she's White," they all said.

V

Janet, in her black-and-white tweeds with the fox collar like a movie star's, gave a speech to the local women's club. She didn't say much. Someone gave her chrysanthemums which she held upside-down like a baseball bat. A professor from the local college spoke of other cultures. A whole room was full of offerings brought by the club-brownies, fudge cake, sour cream cake, honey buns, pumpkin pie-not to be eaten, of course, only looked at, but they did eat it finally because somebody has to or it isn't real. "Hully gee, Mildred, you waxed the floor!" and she faints with happiness. Laur, who is reading psychology for the Existentialists (I said that, didn't I?), serves coffee to the club in the too-big man's shirt they can't ever get her out of, no matter what they do, and her ancient, shape less jeans. Swaddling graveclothes. She's a bright girl. She learned in her thirteenth year that you can get old films of Mae West or Marlene Dietrich (who is a Vulcan; look at the eyebrows) after midnight on UHF if you know where to look, at fourteen that pot helps, at fifteen that reading's even better. She learned, wearing her rimless glasses, that the world is full of intelligent, attractive, talented women who manage to combine careers with their primary responsibilities as wives and mothers and whose husbands beat them.

She's put a gold circle pin on her shirt as a concession to club day. She loves her father and once is enough. Everyone knows that much as women want to be scientists and engineers, they want foremost to be womanly companions to men (what?) and caretakers of childhood; everyone knows that a large part of a woman's identity inheres in the style of her attractiveness. Laur is daydreaming. She looks straight before her, blushes, smiles, and doesn't see a thing. After the party she'll march stiff-legged out of the room and up to her bedroom; sitting tailor-fashion on her bed, she'll read Engels on the family and make in the margin her neat, concise, perfectly written notes. She has shelves and shelves of such annotated works. Not for her "How true!!!!" or "oiseaux = birds." She's surrounded by mermaids, fish, sea-plants, wandering fronds.

Drifting on the affective currents of the room are those strange social artifacts half dissolved in nature and mystery: some pretty girls. Laur is daydreaming that she's Genghis Khan.