There was Harvard again.

All the auditing stories that Einstein heard were told by Americans. He had chosen to settle in the American part of heaven. Understandably, he had mixed feelings about Europeans, since he was a Jew. But it wasn't only Americans who were being audited. Pakistanis and pygmies from the Philippines and even communists had to go through the very same thing.

It was in character for Einstein to be offended first by the mathematics of the system the auditors wanted everybody to be so grateful for. He calculated that if every person on Earth took full advantage of every opportunity, became a millionaire and then a billionaire and so on, the paper wealth on that one little planet would exceed the worth of all the minerals in the universe in a matter of three months or so. Also: There would be nobody left to do any useful work.

So he sent God a note. It assumed that God had no idea what sorts of rubbish His auditors were talking. It accused the auditors rather than God of cruelly deceiving new arrivals about the opportunities they had had on Earth. He tried to guess the auditors' motives. He wondered if they might not be sadists.

The story ended abruptly. Einstein did not get to see God. But God sent out an archangel who was boiling mad. He told Einstein that if he continued to destroy ghosts' respect for the audits, he was going to take Einstein's fiddle away from him for all eternity. So Einstein never discussed the audits with anybody ever again. His fiddle meant more to him than anything.

The story was certainly a slam at God, suggesting that He was capable of using a cheap subterfuge like the audits to get out of being blamed for how hard economic life was down here.

I made my mind a blank.

But then it started singing about Sally in the garden again.

Mary Kathleen O'Looney, exercising her cosmic powers as Mrs. Jack Graham, had meanwhile telephoned Arpad Leen, the top man at RAMJAC. She ordered him to find out what the police had done with me, and to send the toughest lawyer in New York City to rescue me, no matter what the cost.

He was to make me a RAMJAC vice-president after that. While she was at it, she said, she had a list of other good people who were to be rounded up and also made vice-presidents. These were the people I had told her about, of course — the strangers who had been so nice to me.

She also ordered him to tell Doris Kramm, the old secretary at The American Harp Company, that she didn't have to retire, no matter how old she was.

Yes, and there in my padded cell I told myself a joke I had read in The Harvard Lampoon when a freshman. It had amazed me back then because it seemed so dirty. When I became the President's special advisor on youth affairs, and had to read college humor again, I discovered that the joke was still being published many times a year — unchanged. This was it:

SHE: How dare you kiss me like that?

HE: I was just trying to find out who ate all the macaroons.

So I had a good laugh about that there in solitary. But then I began to crack. I could not stop saying to myself, "Macaroons, macaroons, macaroons . . . "

Things got much worse after that. I sobbed. I bounced myself off the walls. I took a crap in a corner. I dropped the bowling trophy on top of the crap.

I screamed a poem I had learned in grammar school:

Don't care if I do die,

Do die, do die!

Like to make the juice fly,

Juice fly, juice fly!

I may even have masturbated. Why not? We old folks have much richer sex lives than most young people imagine.

I eventually collapsed.

At seven o'clock that night the toughest attorney in New York entered the police station upstairs. He had traced me that far. He was a famous man, known to be extremely ferocious and humorless in prosecuting or defending almost anyone. The police were thunderstruck when such a dreaded celebrity appeared. He demanded to know what had become of me.

Nobody knew. There was no record anywhere of my having been released or transferred elsewhere. My lawyer knew I hadn't gone home, because he had already asked after me there. Mary Kathleen had told Arpad Leen and Leen had told the lawyer that I lived at the Arapahoe.

They could not even find out what I had been arrested for.

So all the cells were checked. I wasn't in any of them, of course. The people who had brought me in and the man who had locked me up had all gone off-duty. None of them could be reached at home.

But then the detective who was trying to placate my lawyer remembered the cell downstairs and decided to have a look inside it, just in case.

When the key turned in the lock, I was lying on my stomach like a dog in a kennel, facing the door. My stocking feet extended in the direction of the bowling trophy and the crap. I had removed my shoes for some reason.

When the detective opened the door, he was appalled to see me, realizing how long I must have been in there. The City of New York had accidentally committed a very serious crime against me.

"Mr. Starbuck — ?" he asked anxiously.

I said nothing. I did sit up. I no longer cared where I was or what might happen next. I was like a hooked fish that had done all the fighting it could. Whatever was on the other end of the line was welcome to reel me in.

When the detective said, "Your lawyer is here," I did not protest even inwardly that nobody knew I was in jail, that I had no lawyer, no friends, no anything. So be it: My lawyer was there.

Now the lawyer showed himself. It would not have surprised me if he had been a unicorn. He was, in fact, almost that fantastic — a man who, when only twenty-six years old, had been chief counsel of the Senate Permanent Investigating Committee, whose chairman was Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, the most spectacular hunter of disloyal Americans since World War Two.

He was in his late forties now — but still unsmiling and nervously shrewd. During the McCarthy Era, which came after Leland Clewes and I had made such fools of ourselves, I had hated and feared this man. He was on my side now.

"Mr. Starbuck," he said, "I am here to represent you, if you want me to. I have been retained on your behalf by The RAMJAC Corporation. Roy M. Cohn is my name."

What a miracle-worker he was!

I was out of the police station and into a waiting limousine before you could say, "Habeas corpus!"

Cohn, having delivered me to the limousine, did not himself get in. He wished me well without shaking my hand, and was gone. He never touched me, never gave any indication that he knew that I, too, had played a very public part in American history in olden times.

So there I was in a limousine again. Why not? Anything was possible in a dream. Hadn't Roy M. Cohn just gotten me out of jail, and hadn't I left my shoes behind? So why shouldn't the dream go on — and have Leland Clewes and Israel Edel, the night clerk at the Arapahoe, already sitting in the back of the limousine, with a space between them for me? This it did.

They nodded to me uneasily. They, too, felt that life wasn't making good sense just now.

What was going on, of course, was that the limousine was cruising around Manhattan like a schoolbus, picking up people Mary Kathleen O'Looney had told Arpad Leen to hire as RAMJAC vice-presidents. This was Leen's personal limousine. It was what I have since learned is called a "stretch" limousine. The American Harp Company could have used the backseat for a showroom.

Clewes and Edel and the next person we were going to pick up had all been telephoned personally by Leen — after some of his assistants had found out more about who they were and where they were. Leland Clewes had been found in the phone-book. Edel had been found behind the desk at the Arapahoe. One of the assistants had gone to the Coffee Shop of the Royalton to ask for the name of a person who worked there and had a French-fried hand.