Barrows got out a white linen handkerchief and mopped his forehead. He started to speak, changed his mind, remained silent.

Gradually the Booth simulacrum began to slide from its chair. I stood up and tried to prop it so that it would remain where it was. Dave Blunk rose, too: together we managed to get it propped upright so that it would not fall. Pris sipped her drink expressionlessly.

To the people at the nearby tables Blunk said, "It's a doll, a life-size doll, for display. Mechanical." For their benefit he showed them the now-visible metal and plastic inner part of the simulacrum's skull. Within the puncture I could see something shining, the damaged ruling monad, I suppose. I wondered if Bob Bundy could repair it. I wondered if I cared whether it could be repaired or not.

Putting out his cigarette Barrows drank his drink, then in a hoarse voice said to Pris, "You've put yourself on bad terms with me, by doing that."

"Then goodbye," Pris said. "Goodbye, Sam K. Barrows, you dirty ugly fairy." She rose to her feet, deliberately knocked over her chair; she walked away from the table, leaving us, going among and past the other tables of people, at last to the checkstand. She got her coat from the girl, there.

Neither Barrows nor I moved.

"She went out the door," Dave Blunk said presently. "I can see the door better than any of you; she's gone."

"What am I going to do with this?" Barrows said to Blunk regarding the dead Booth simulacrum. "We'll have to get it out of here."

"We can get it out between the two of us," Blunk said.

"I'll give you a hand," I said.

Barrows said, "We'll never see her again. Or she might be standing outside on the sidewalk, waiting." To me he said, "Can you tell? I can't; I don't understand her."

I hurried up the aisle alongside the bar, past the check-stand; I pushed open the street door. There stood the uniformed doorman. He nodded courteously at me.

There was no sign of Pris.

"What happened to the girl who just came out?" I said.

The doorman gestured. "I don't know, sir." He indicated the many cabs, the traffic, the clusters of people like bees near the doorway of the club. "Sorry, couldn't tell."

I looked up and down the sidewalk; I even ran a little in each direction, straining to catch a glimpse of her.

Nothing.

At last I returned to the club and to the table where Barrows and the others sat with the dead, damaged Booth simulacrum. It had slid down in its seat, now, and was leaning to one side, its head lolling, its mouth open; I propped it up again, with Dave Blunk's help.

"You've lost everything," I said to Barrows.

"I've lost nothing."

"Sam's right," Dave Blunk said. "What has he lost? Bob Bundy can make another simulacrum if necessary."

"You've lost Pris," I said. "That's everything."

"Oh hell, who knows about Pris? I don't think even she knows."

"Guess so," I said. My tongue felt thick; it clung to the sides of my mouth. I waggled my jaw, feeling no pain, nothing at all. "I've lost her, too."

"Evidently," Barrows said. "But you're better off; could you bear to undergo something of this sort every day?"

As we sat there the great Earl Grant appeared once more. The piano was playing and everyone had shut up, and we did so, too.

_I've got grasshoppers in my_

_pillow, baby_.

_I've got crickets all in_

_my meal_.

Was he singing to me? Had he seen me sitting there, seen the look on my face, known how I felt? It was an old song and sad. Maybe he saw me; maybe not. I couldn't tell, but it seemed so.

Pris is wild, I thought. Not a part of us. Outside somewhere. Pris is pristine and in an awful way: all that goes on among and between people, all that we have here, fails to touch her. When one looks at her one sees back into the farthest past; one sees us as we started out, a million, two million years ago .

The song which Earl Grant was singing; that was one of the ways of taming, of making us over, modifying us again and again in countless slow ways. The Creator was still at work, still molding what in most of us remained soft. Not so with Pris; there was no more molding and shaping with her, not even by Him.

I have seen into the _other_, I said to myself, when I saw Pris. And where am I left, now? Waiting only for death, as the Booth simulacrum when she took off her shoe. The Booth simulacrum had finally gotten it in exchange for its deed of over a century ago. Before his death, Lincoln had dreamed of assassination, seen in his sleep a black-draped coffin and weeping processions. Had this simulacrum received any intimation, last night? Had it dreamed in its sleep in some mechanical, mystical way?

We would all get it. Chug-chug. The black crepe draped on the train passing in the midst of the grain fields. People out to witness, removing their caps. Chug-chug-chug.

The black train with the coffin guarded by soldiers in blue who carried guns and who never moved in all that time, from start to end of the long, long trip.

"Mr. Rosen." Someone beside me speaking. A woman.

Startled, I glanced up. Mrs. Nild was addressing me.

"Would you help us? Mr. Barrows has gone to get the car; we want to put the Booth simulacrum into the car."

"Oh," I said, nodding. "Sure."

As I got to my feet I looked to the Lincoln to see if it was going to pitch in. But strange to say the Lincoln sat with its head bowed in deepest melancholy, paying no attention to us or to what we were doing. Was it listening to Earl Grant? Was it overcome by his blues song? I did not think so. It was hunched over, actually bent out of shape, as if its bones were fusing into one single bone. And it was absolutely silent; it did not even seem to be breathing.

A kind of prayer, I thought as I watched it. And yet no prayer at all. The stoppage of prayer, perhaps; its interruption. Blunk and I turned to the Booth; we began lifting it to its feet. It was very heavy.

"The car's a Mercedes-Benz," Blunk gasped as we started up the aisle. "White with red leather interior."

"I'll hold the door open," Mrs. Nild said, following after us.

We got the Booth up the narrow aisle to the entrance of the club. The doorman regarded us with curiosity but neither he nor anyone else made a move to interfere or help or inquire as to what was taking place. The doorman, however, did hold the door aside for us and we were grateful because that left Mrs. Nild free to go out into the street to hail Sam Barrows' car.

"Here it comes," Blunk said, jerking his head.

Mrs. Nild opened the car door wide for us, and between Blunk and myself we managed to get the simulacrum into the back seat.

"You better come along with us," Mrs. Nild said to me as I started away from the car.

"Good idea," Blunk said. "We'll have a drink, okay, Rosen? We'll take the Booth to the shop and then go over to Collie's apartment; the liquor's there."

"No," I said.

"Come on," Barrows said from behind the wheel. "You fellows get in so we can go; that includes you, Rosen, and naturally your simulacrum. Go back and get it."

"No, no thanks," I said. "You guys go on."

Blunk and Mrs. Nild closed the car door after them and the car drove off and disappeared into the heavy evening traffic.

Hands in my pockets I returned to the club, making my way down the aisle to the table where the Lincoln still sat, its head down, its arms wrapped about itself, in utter stillness.

What could I say to it? How could I cheer it up?

"You shouldn't let an incident like that get you down," I said to it. "You should try to rise above it."

The Lincoln did not respond.

"Many a mickle makes a muckle," I said.

The simulacrum raised its head. It stared at me hopelessly. "What does that mean?"