Chapter VIII: Part THREE: Andante (3)

She nodded her head affirmatively and went on smiling. "What attracts me--sexually--to people--isn't their sex. Not whether they're men or women--or even little kids, for that matter. It's something about them that I never know what it may be. The way they move--or the way they talk--or their expressions--or their looks. It can be any little thing. Sometimes I think it isn't _them_ at all--but how _I_ feel at the time. And even then my feelings aren't ever the same. According to what it is that attracts me, I'm different. Sometimes I see a man I'd like to have make love to me. Sometimes I see some college boy I'd just like to neck. Sometimes I see a woman I wish would have a crush on me and rush me--like college girls--and get herself terribly upset about wanting me around so much--and not knowing what to do. And sometimes I feel the way Charmaine seems to, about everybody she likes. I just try to see how excited I can make them be--and then let them be. Like that. Let them go away. Does it bore you?"

"No."

"There are some feelings I can't react to. Homosexuality in men. I don't mean it revolts me, or anything. I just can't see why they bother--even with all I _can_ see. And the most peculiar part is noticing that the men who hate pansies the most are nearest to it. You find that out, in my kind of life. They'll visit you and act strictly like Marine sergeants--and get very tight--and finally, perhaps, ask--probably pretending to kid--if there are only girls around the place. When anything like that happens--I feel perfectly blank. Yet that doesn't seem--normal--under the circumstances."

Gwen's theory of normal libido required the possibility of erotic reaction to just about any object, it appeared.

I wondered how close that was to the actual nature of us all. The Freudians would have shrugged it off as adolescent. A carrying-into-maturity of the unsorted, unspecialized yearnings of the infant and the child. I felt that--if a person could choose--he, or she, would be far better off with Gwen's libido than the tormented fragment that the majority cherished. Cherished as the platform for all that they called love and integrity.

She was telling the truth. But presently I wondered if she had not told it a great many times, to men like myself, and to women--some women. Told it as a psychological tapestry against which to pose herself; as an advertisement, an inducement. It wouldn't be the first time I'd heard a prostitute do that. Tell the truth readily enough--too readily. Personal history--anecdotes--subclinical material. Intellectual people would fall for it. They would be seduced by it. For they have been deprived not just of the erotic play their childhood naturally yearned for but, in most cases, of the opportunity for mere discussion of the subject, which they'd have enjoyed.

Suppose eating, not sex, were the taboo of our century? Suppose it was illegal for more than two people to eat together and suppose even they had to get a license for it and eat in secret, while children were fed alone in dark closets? Suppose our billboards and newspaper ads, movies and books and art, devoted themselves to pictures of food--but never to one glimpse of anybody eating? (That's what we'd done about sex--or tried our best to do.) Wouldn't it result in secret, general passions to try esoteric foods? And wouldn't people like to get together, law or none, and talk about the tabooed object?

I thought about Bali, where people actually were a little ashamed of eating meals in public. An animal indecency to be ritualistically concealed.

I felt the familiar stab of indignation. How long would it take my fellow men to realize what they had done to themselves, and _why_ they had done it?

To hide the real creature. To dress up the pretense that we are not instinctual.

Would we ever see? Learn? Break down the conceited barricade we'd lifted up since beyond the Stone Age--the wall between the old brain and the new cortex? Or would we, too, decay? Enter our Toynbean time of troubles, turn military, tyrannical, lucubricious and guilty--instead of loving and free, and so in the end fall prey to the outlying barbarian horde--the rest of the world, that outnumbered us sixteen to one? Was a Presbyterian, a Catholic, a collegiate agnostic, a Unitarian, a socialist nearer to insight than an old Roman?

I juggled the breathless doubt in my mind.

"The misery and aggression of the world, the hate and warlike sentiment," a great psychiatrist had said the other day, "are due to two causes: physical hunger in the Orient; in the Occident, the fantastic sex repressions derived from Christianity, so called, and obtaining still in the materialist societies."

There it was--in the words of a psychological scientist.

Not a single statesman that I knew of had picked up the thought.

"A penny," Gwen said.

I apologized. "It's too intricate. It's a summing up of various truths rejected or denied. We're out of the habit of seeing them. So it might take me a couple of years to explain."

Gwen laughed. "Swell! I'll come by, an hour a day--and lie on your couch--and you can explain."

"Maybe," I said, "if they'd listened to you just now--and compared what you said with what they honestly feel--but they won't!"

"They will if you get them in the mood--and alone."

"Many?"

"Darned near all--that I ever see. You'd be astonished."

"Still--that doesn't matter. Because when they act they act as a mob. And as a mob--they never admit what they really think and feel and dream and wish and long for. They just fight."

An expression came into her eyes that was part speculative and part cautious. "Some like that, too. Like to be hurt."

"Sure. The guilt again. The old quid pro quo."

She watched me. "They get a kick out of it."

"Pain's their license for any fun. Not in Nature--just in people. And what--incidentally--is your feeling about that?"

"Being hurt? I'd hate it."

"Me, too. Hurting, then?"

Her wary eyes decided. She raised a shoulder and let it fall. "What would you do if a guy who loved it asked you to beat him? If you knew it was the only kick he could get out of life? If he brought you a switch--"

"--just like the kind his mother used--"

"--and begged you?"

I said, "Scram."

"Suppose _a girl_ did?" She looked at me intently.

It was an idea that had never crossed my mind. I thought it over. "Scram," I repeated. "There's pain enough in life--even in loving--without asking for more."

Gwen's eyebrows went up. "It's another thing I can't feel, either." She gestured with her hand, pushing the idea away from herself.

She'd finished her highball long since. She made another, now--a stronger one. I didn't want any more Coca-Cola at the moment--any more anything. Any more her, even.

And that shocked me.

What had the sensation come from?

From her most recent confession?

No. It was familiar--undistressing in that connotation--a known, acknowledged, assimilated phenomenon, like any other biological datum of birds, bees, flowers, our earth. Nothing surprising at all.

It went back to the question "Why?": To Loneliness, Beauty and Fun and all that.

The truth was, I had been unwilling, once again, to face the night unsleepy and alone. I didn't want a girl; this one, or any one, except Ricky.

But the not-wanting of solitude was the greater negative.

She'd turned to another radio station and found a slow rumba. She drank deeply--standing--and moving her hips in tempo.

"Come on," she said.

Unwillingly, and unwilling to protest the heat of the night, I began to dance with her. She was, as Hattie had promised, very good.

I thought that presently I would stop this and send her home. It would be awkward.

And then, as the music quickened and we made a spot turn in the center of the room, I saw through the doors to the doors beyond--the doors that led to Yvonne's room. Mine was no longer flatly parallel with the wall.

I raised my voice. "Come on in, Yvonne!"

I had never relocked the door on my side.

She came in.

Gwen looked at her, at me, at Yvonne again--not troubling to hide the fact that she was astonished. But not irritated.

I would have expected Yvonne to be embarrassed--who would not?

She wasn't. Her gray eyes met mine steadily.

"I hoped you'd call me today," she said. "When you didn't--I had dinner with dad. I got back after the theater--and I heard your radio go on. I finally decided to knock on your door. But when I unlocked the one on my side--I found yours open. I was just about to say boo! and ask for a drink. I'll be good and go quietly afterward."

She said it steadily, rapidly, so that I knew, and Gwen knew, she had prepared it.

"Mrs. Prentiss," I said, "Yvonne Prentiss--Miss Gwen Talyor."

Yvonne turned and held out her hand.

She was wearing a black dinner dress; black was certainly for her.

Gwen took her hand and kept it and said to me, "Does a beautiful brunette live on the other side?"

I laughed. "And a platinum blonde across the hall. Just below me lives--"

"I know," Gwen answered. "Don't tell us."

I carried my glass to the bathroom, rinsed it, and made a highball.

"We met yesterday," I said to Gwen. "She comes from Pasadena." I handed the drink to Yvonne. "Miss Taylor--is an old friend of an old friend of mine."

Gwen said, "She knows. She's been listening."

Yvonne wouldn't look at me, then. But she said, "I told her. Do you mind terribly much? It's your own fault--for unlocking the door."

I ignored that. "Lemme see, then. Just where the hell were we?"

"You were dancing. And I wish you'd go on."

"Not the heat--" I began--"but--"

Gwen came over to my chair. "Come on."

So we danced a little--not very well.

"I wish," Yvonne said, "I could do that step."

I took a good look at her. And I looked back, in my mind, at her stylized past.

Her gray eyes were wide open and very bright. Otherwise she was composed. She didn't seem to realize how unprecedented it was for her not to mind that she had been caught eavesdropping on a man she'd known for a day who was alone with a girl she did not know at all. She should have been shocked--shocked as much as if she had suddenly found she had gone up on the stage and begun ad-libbing a part in a play. But she wasn't even concerned; she behaved as if she had always been in the cast.

Maybe she had.

When she said she wished she could do the off-beat step, I stopped dancing.

"Show her," I said to Gwen.

Gwen looked straight into my eyes--her back to Yvonne. One curved brow went up, inquiringly. I nodded the least bit.

Gwen let go of me as if I had disappeared. She turned and smiled and held out her arms.

Yvonne set her drink down carefully and got up and walked to Gwen. They began dancing--not trying the step--but just dancing. In a moment--in the same moment--without either of them saying a word--they switched; Yvonne led Gwen.

I sprawled back on the divan.

They danced for a long time and as they danced it seemed to me Yvonne relaxed a millimeter at a time--until she moved like a nebula--all gold and white and black. Gwen just smiled--looking at nothing for a long time, and finally looking down--an inch or so--into Yvonne's eyes.

When they stopped, Yvonne said softly, "That was wonderful!"

"Like it?"

"I never felt I was doing a rumba before. Even"--she laughed lightly toward me--"with the eminent professor Wylie."

"He's good," Gwen said. "But you have to be experienced."

"I used to think I was."

"You will be, lamb," Gwen said.

An announcer lengthily discussed various food products. Gwen turned him down to an indecipherable mutter. When strains of music returned thinly, Yvonne asked, "Can you tango?"

Gwen nodded.

So they danced again and, by and by, as they passed me, Yvonne said, "Mind if I borrow your girl friend for a brief chitchat?"

I shook my head.

Yvonne danced Gwen through the other room and through the doors.

They closed quietly.

Moments before, I had been embarrassed by Gwen's presence--by the realization that I had wanted companionship rather than passion. Now my feelings changed, showing how incomplete my awareness of them had been. I was alone and I did not want to be. Yvonne had deprived me of my casual date. I was not precisely jealous of one woman over another, but I was distressed. And this sentiment was not relieved by the plain fact that I was responsible, through a series of negative acts, for my situation.

I could have sent Yvonne packing. I could, by not nodding my head, have kept Gwen with me. On the evening before, I could have accepted Yvonne's invitation for a nightcap, or accepted the later invitation in her note to me. I'd been somewhat Olympian on both occasions--a little more detached than there was detachment in the sum of the parts of my nervous system.

But what should one do?

What would others do?

This is a question which I sometimes test by projecting myself into others, not to examine their circumstances, but to imagine what they would do in mine.

I switched off my radio.

I stretched out on my divan, lighted a cigarette and cogitated.

A great many of the men I know would refuse to believe or weigh the facts as they existed. Their knowledge of homo sapiens is so superficial, so repressed, or so compartmented, that they could not even assume an Yvonne would want to take a Gwen into her boudoir, let alone that one had done so.

And the majority of my male friends would label any narrative of my past two days as a boast. They would doubt that I'd encountered two such extremely attractive girls in so short a space of time. Two? Three, by the reckoning of these men--for they would include the scalding stare of Marcia as a sexual coup. They would assume I'd somewhat mistaken my own libido for any description I gave of the three girls, in the bargain.

They would forget how disturbed Yvonne was; hence they would fail to see that the interest she had shown in me was motivated not by myself, or any possible charm of mine, but by her wish for escape, or for anodyne, or for revenge--and perhaps, also, for mere experiment with her insatieties. These men would also overlook the fact that Gwen was a prostitute. Such liking as she felt for me was merely a fortunate vicissitude of business. She would have called me up even if she had disliked me: trade was slow and I had the price. Such men--and I knew many--would even overlook Marcia's attachment to Paul, on the opposite grounds that she _was_, after all, a prostitute. They would imagine every woman's hot-eyed glance as evidence of their irresistibility. In my place, they would conclude that three women, young and handsome, had given them a tumble because of what they were.

Three handsome young women had certainly invited me; but not one for myself.

There is also, among some of my friends, an inverted form of chivalry which causes them to feel they are obliged to respond to every feminine beckon with assent. But they take no responsibility for the results--the tangible and psychological results--of whatever behavior follows such assent. These imagine themselves great lovers and great understanders of women; they actually hold toward women about the same attitude they hold toward roast beef.

To all these last men, the fact that I had failed to wait upon Yvonne the night before, and dispatched Gwen with a nod, and responded to Marcia's luncheon leer with nothing more than analysis, would seem a great waste of opportunity, a failure to meet obligation, and even a kind of hypocrisy. For they would be men who knew that I held no brief for absolute fidelity in marriage. Knowing that, they would conclude _any_ refusal of mine to commit adultery was Pharisaic. Such men are black-white viewers; they go through life blind to the color spectrum.

I knew still other men--a few, at least--who would regard my association with prostitutes and loose women (which is what they would call Yvonne) as proof that I was a bum. To these, all that I did, thought and expressed would be discredited by the antics of some of my companions. "Wylie," they would say, "hangs out with scum." _Ergo_ Wylie's discernment, his art, his intellectual ability is manifestly nil.

This is the common attitude of "Christians"--though how they explain their own Christ's various companions is beyond my guessing.

Two or three more of my friends would take what might be called the anthropological view of my situation. They would argue that, being away from my wife and needing sexual refreshment, having the opportunity, but not taking it, I was acting weakly. These would overlook not merely the motives of the ladies, and my feelings about my wife, but also the fact that my share of everyman's borrowed time was apparently running out--a circumstance which in itself alters the libido.

To some of my friends, then, I would have to excuse myself for what I had already done; to others, I would have to make excuses for what I had failed to do. To myself, I had nothing much to say.

In a minute, an hour, or on the morrow, my reasons, moods and motives would change once more and my behavior might be different. Hence this empathetic review had merely shown again how men behave according to sets of compulsions--patterns of conscious virtue, conscious sin, or conscious animalism--which stem in every case from arbitrary mores. And neither amongst the overtly virtuous nor the subtly sinful is the pattern valuable; it makes hypocrites of the former and deprives the latter of joy. The animalists, too, have no solution: they fornicate as through a wall, knowing a person exists on the other side but not what a person is.

So any instinct, when unseen, compels men to abide by some formulation of itself. They accept a Faith and are then obliged to play they are the God who rules that Faith. So, too, a man like myself, who quests beyond these compulsive faiths (and is therefore called faithless by Believers of every stamp) foolishly plays God whenever he does not quite know himself.

I sat there, sneering at the pompous fashion in which I had behaved and wondering how to make peace with my solitude, my recovered mortality. Even I had wanted more than I had found for myself. Not redheads and ash blondes abed in the night of that heat-glazed city, but their company, their tempting presence. It would be a matter worth thinking about in the future--if my future was to be long enough for that kind of thought.

I came close, again, to calling Ricky, at that point.

Telling her. Summoning her.

And I thought that most of the men I knew would do precisely that. They like to ride downhill alone; but when the burden grows heavy and the grade steep, their wives become wheels on the wagon of their difficulties. So American marriage is too often both trouble-sharing and a private sport. "If you love her," they would say, "and if she loves you, it is your duty to let her know and she would be hurt if you did not." These, I think, are little boys married to their mothers. If I had known the truth of my condition, Ricky would have been the next to know. But I was not certain--quite. Let her sleep the night through, then. Live two more contented days. She is my wife. She nurtures me and I her and if I told her when I did not need to tell her, that would be a true weakness in my lexicon.

Even while thinking that, I looked at the phone again and touched it. But I am not quite such a schoolboy.

I may be the only male in America who feels as I do but my feeling is definite: from the age of about six, I did not want a girl who was necessarily just like the girl that married dear old dad.

It may be that there are no real men left in America.

America may be as barren of actual masculinity as Sodom of holy folk.

Some of us, however, still take an occasional crack at keeping alive the memory of what men once were--or fanning the hope of what they may be.

Once, for instance, men behaved with compassion toward women; they were even interested in how women feel; what women did was actually important to men--once. It may again be so.

But the likelihood is that nobody ever escaped Sodom alive. Lot's wife looked back for a last squint at the new streamlined dish washers--and turned to a pillar of salt. Lot, a moment later, tried to save a charred copy of the financial page--and turned into a pillar of bicarbonate of soda.

I got to about that point in my estimates when the doors opened again. Yvonne appeared--flushed and tousled--a drink in one hand and some books in the other.

"Lonesome?" she asked.

"Far from it," I said. "I was working with the Lord."

She laughed. "Join us?"

I shook my head.

"I thought not. Here! _Amusez-vous!_" She threw the books on my bed and shut the door again.

I looked at the books. Three mystery stories in the conventional getup of gaud and grue and one volume without a jacket: Huxley's _Ape and Essence_, which Yvonne had denuded to camouflage another treatise. I passed up the mysteries--the immunizing doses of mayhem, the habit-forming homicide--with which so many of the better people try to allay their critical sensations in this civilization. I took the Huxley back to my living room and read in it here and there.

It was unfortunate, I thought, that the bright Aldous had seen fit to show the world that he, too, could write a screenplay. Did he need a studio job, I wondered?

But it was only funny that the public and the critics had misjudged the tale. For Huxley's portrait of post-atomic California was not, as most persons assumed, the flight of a delirious brain. It was, by every relevant index, the most likely prediction that an intelligent man could make, these days. It was just what good actuaries and capable business forecasters should anticipate. Six hundred years ago, I reflected, the Great Plague had reduced Western Europe to a similar condition: religion had become corrupt, rogues had seized the government, the expiring feudal system had been finally shattered, and the people had roamed amidst half-empty towns and cities, living by robbery, raping, burning witches, and indulging every horrid superstition, while knowledge vanished and science stood still. This condition had lasted for more than a century.

The intervening twenty generations had not been enough to change man a particle. He was the same specious brainist and therefore the same potential dupe of his unaltered instincts. His opposite possibilities were perhaps even stronger--since he had exploited vanity for six more centuries. Atomic bombs, likely, would be worse than Plague and have long-lasting, ancillary effects of the very sort described by Huxley. And there would be new plagues---military diseases.

Yet it had not occurred seriously to anybody, so far as I knew, that the mordant scenery of _Ape and Essence_ was a logical extension of current events. Wild fantasy, the critics thought--having insufficient imagination to evaluate past or present and no education in the sciences whatever, as a rule.

Well, I thought, when and if we reach the state of cannibalism, I shall try to eat a critic. There should be good crackling around fat heads.

And next I thought that even Huxley made too little of the fact that, after our earth was literally Hell for a hundred years, man produced the Renaissance.

I also thought how no one apparently had realized that the Californian cult of Belial was an inversion of the Roman Catholic parades, liturgies, chants and other idolatrous measures. And I thought how the Huxleyan method disclosed, with considerable vim and penetration, that Christian worship--Catholic or Protestant--is all but completely a paean for Satan today. The Godly serve the Devil through hatred, hypocrisy, materialism, conceit and big death wishes. They need only a change of names and symbols to align what they actually do with their pretension. Belial already reigns over the Church--not God.

Someday, after the atomic wars--I thought--a practitioner of the corrupted religion of his time, a science-hater (for what he deemed science had done to man), a legless character with three arms and two navels (owing to the general damage done the genes of all living things), a cannibal (but one who could still read a little), might discover this volume in the silence of a wrecked library and hail Huxley as a great prophet--a man with valuable new ideas for worship and fresh notions about sex relations in public places. Thus Huxley might contribute (contrary to his intent but in the same fashion as many other prophets) to the majestic rites of human degradation.

No critic, however, could possibly contemplate such a matter as anything but a joke.

I wondered how the great-grandchildren of critics would view it.

Thus wondering, I went to bed.

It was late, of course.

I put out my light and listened to the seismic nocturne of the city.

From the next room came a bold, cajoling giggle.

Then quiet.

The building quivered.

The planet turned.

Exhaustion lowered me into sleep on a jerky rope that did not loosen me for a long time.

12

Contrary to expectation, the end of civilization came about through a series of events connected in no way with war or atomic bombardment. Of these events the earliest, so far as careful inquiry could determine at the time, was initially observed by Malcolm Calk of 2531 North Munley Street, Urbana, Illinois. Mr. Calk had just become engaged to Dorothea Lurp of the same address--the boarding establishment of Sarah L. Rev, or Reev--and they were celebrating the happy occasion by spending a weekend at the Chicago home of Miss Lurp's parents. The day being warm--it was the 9th of August, in the hot summer of 1953--the young couple determined to repair to the beach.

They were contentedly ensconced at the lakeside when Mr. Calk's eyes wandered from the person of his fiancée, who was in wading, to the clouds overhead. These were of a cumulus nature, for the most part widely spaced, and drifting southward on a wind reported later by the Weather Bureau as of twelve miles per hour at mean cloud altitude. Calk's mind was, as may readily be imagined, turned toward those fancies which are commonly described as "building castles in the air." He reports, indeed, that the phrase passed through his thoughts as he looked at the vaporous structures overhead.

Within them he observed a certain slight turbulence or agitation to which he at first paid scant heed. Clouds revolve and turn themselves inside out in a manner that bespeaks air currents and their own diaphanous consistency--a manner that sometimes suggests they have a life of their own in a weird fourth dimension of the blue up yonder. But the young Calk gave the phenomenon only a cursory, occasional glance; his head was already "in the clouds"--another phrase upon which he recalls musing at the time. He was apparently a person of whimsey--a patternmaker employed by the Racine Forge and Tool Company of Urbana.

Presently, however, his focus was drawn with insistence toward the slow-tumbling clouds and, as people will, he gave free play to his imagination, seeing in the changing shapes now a dragon, now a cat's face, and now the chuck of a turret lathe. These gossamer figures wove themselves, vanished, and eddied into yet different forms until, ultimately he found himself viewing a large letter N. About this he saw nothing remarkable--at first. A letter of the alphabet is probably shaped by the clouds as often as any boar's head or serpent.

The "N," however, took on contour and texture until it seemed a deliberate thing--resembling, as Calk put it later, "Sky-writing done backwards in a newsreel so that the frayed-out smoke pulled together again to make a real clean-cut N."

At the moment, however (so uncritical was his brain and so unrelated was the celestial phenomenon to his thoughts), he came to a different conclusion. When the N established itself as a clear and sharply defined capital letter, some two miles in length and many thousands of feet above Lake Michigan, Calk informed himself that it was, actually, the work of a sky-writer. This is a kind of rationalization which any psychologist will recognize. Because what he saw did not quite conform to his past experience, Calk discounted his sensory impression and interpreted an external fact in terms of orderly recollections rather than of observable reality. Donner, Bates, Breesteen, Cavanaugh, Cohen and Wilstein, among other authorities, have noted the similiarity of this process to that by which prejudices are often established.

"Look, honey," Mr. Calk called to his fiancée. "Sky-writer."

Miss Lurp looked and nodded in agreement. "Yeah. Bet it's cold up there! Lucky fellow--the pilot."

No one else in the vicinity appeared to be aware of the process overhead. Miss Lurp continued to wade--Mr. Calk to watch her and to cast an occasional glance at the sky. A letter U was slowly formed alongside the perfect N.

Miss Lurp at this point stepped on a clamshell, or possibly a broken bottle, which hurt her foot although it did not break the skin. Exaggerating the injury, she hopped ashore to solicit comfort, which Mr. Calk readily supplied. Thereafter, sitting side by side, they gazed up at the NU, near which yet other clouds were shifting and shaping themselves.

"Why," said Miss Lurp, "that's not sky-writing at all! It's just the clouds coming together accidental-like." To another couple, sitting on the sand nearby, she called, "Look, people! The clouds are having a spelling bee!"

One upturned countenance, or even two, may not serve to divert a throng from its preoccupations, whether sordid or sublime. But four faces intently elevated will permeate any mass of people and constrain nearly all of the individuals in it to join. This contagion of curiosity now spread over the beach. Soon, persons everywhere--on the sand and the walk behind and in the water--bathers, loafers, nurses with perambulators on the Drive, and policemen who were supposed to patrol it but who were more attentive to the nurses--looked up to see, in a vast blue area above, three letters:

NUT

Sedately the word moved toward the city area. People began to speculate about the product thus being advertised. Two or three of the quicker-thinking formed hat-pools for dimes and quarters--best guess to take all. At the same time, a considerable discussion arose over the fact that these letters were not being formed by a plane--a glinting speck at the head of a comet of smoke--but were the result of a composing of clouds which had thitherto appeared to be in the random distribution familiar to all. A vague alarm became observable in the voices and the postures of the beholders although it was suggested by the calm among them that the sky-writer had lost the first part of his message--a PEA, for example, or a GRAPE. At the same time, the discomforting fact remained that no performer, and no aerial equipment of any nature, could be descried.

The growing strain--and strain came easily amongst persons who had lived through eight years of the Atomic Age--rather suddenly diminished. Clouds boiled, rotated and stretched out to make what people began to recognize (in the order of individual percipience) as a pluralizing S and an exclamation point. The great letters on the sky said:

NUTS!

This, clearly, was a joke. Someone who possessed a slightly malicious sense of humor, some technician with a novel trick, had seen fit to write above Lake Michigan a laconic comment: NUTS! People laughed and went back to their activities--and their deliberate eschewals of all activity. Other clouds appeared and offered no further entertainment. A few cars on the Lake Shore Drive ground to a stop. Their operators and passengers looked up to see what still intrigued the residual gazers--chuckled--and drove on.

Perhaps only Calk, of all those myriads, had a real premonition of evil. He referred it, not unnaturally, to the fact that this was the occasion of his engagement. Looking at the long, shiny limbs of Miss Lurp, the nodes on them, at her rather dangly breasts and her somewhat overteased brown hair (that now smelled of a plastic bathing cap into which had been "built" a perfume that did not quite eradicate the cap's original odor of phenol) he could not help wondering if it was auspicious to behold, upon their first venture as affianced persons, a great NUTS! floating overhead. Following the word with his eye, as it drifted toward the metropolis, he also observed, with distaste, that it maintained its continuity better than any sky-writing he had ever seen.

Other citizens, not having witnessed the formation of the word, took it for granted that some prankster had done the deed and, since Chicago is a city where a burp will bring down the house, hugely enjoyed it. The _Sun_ had a box about it. The _News_ had a cartoon about it--bad municipal government shuddering as the word in the sky threatened. The _Tribune_ carried a long editorial attributing the whole affair to communists.

The next day was rainy.

The day after, however, was immaculately clear and from the azure reaches above the lake there floated to and over Chicago a second giant syllable:

CRAP!

The formation, this time, was witnessed by the officers and crew of the _Matthew T. Handless_, a freighter. Her skipper, acting as spokesman for the group, seemed less awed by the reporters and news cameramen than by his memory. "It was an absolutely cloudless morning out there," he said. "Dry weather. Barometer at 30.46. Nothing in sight. Then clouds just seemed to appear of their own accord in the sky. Not a wave below--flat calm. They worked themselves into this here, now, word--and they started drifting for Chicago on a high-altitude breeze. I watched pretty much the whole thing with my glasses--and they're good glasses. I just had 'em checked at Davis's Optometrical, and there was no plane of any sort."

The news spread across an amused United States.

WRITING IN SKY PANICS CHI

"Disgruntled Chicagoan" was the universal solution. Disgruntled Chicagoan with a new process for sky-writing. Somebody sore about the housing shortage, the garbage disposal, the taxes, the materials scarcities, the innumerable blanks to be made out for local, state and federal governments, the new bonus, the rising menace of prohibition, the thousand things at which people were indignant in 1953. "Chicago per se," the New York _Times_ rather uncouthly suggested.

It was not until the 14th of August, however--a day much like the 9th--that the matter took on different proportions. For, by then, the marshaled resources of science were as ready as set rattraps. When the clouds began to churn significantly, no less than one hundred and eighteen planes, not counting the planes of photographers and mere sightseers, climbed to the region from fields all around the Windy City, which, of course, as on the ninth, was enjoying a mild zephyr.

A huge S took shape. Traffic stopped. Customers and employees poured out of stores like lava, offices regurgitated their hordes, housewives left bacon burning and babies sodden; all were witness to an impromptu air circus. It had three phases, or acts. First, police planes and military aircraft drove off unofficial spectators--light planes and helicopters belonging to the curious and two or three commercial pilots who carried their fares off the flyways for a closer look. Second, science went to work.

The letter S was photographed. Samples of it were taken. The air currents in and around it were measured by instruments operated through ports in airplanes readied just for the task. Various tagged atoms were then dusted into the letter and their courses were pursued by scientists in helicopters, armed with counters. From the ground, spectroscopes were trained upon the initial and diffraction gratings laid bare its spectrum. Everything was done that had been planned at the University of Chicago--and elsewhere in the city--and by a variety of physical scientists who phoned and wrote in their suggestions. Meantime, an H formed next to the S and subdued titter filled the watching streets.

The third plane followed when an ineluctable I was added to the throbbing sky-scene. As if this was carrying cosmic anagrams too far, military aircraft undertook to break up the phenomenon--also according to plan.

Four-letter words, so called, are one of the great American taboos. In this connotation, nuts and crap are not considered precisely forbidden, though each has a special reference which is impermissible. All people know all the four-letter words, of course, since they are scribbled everywhere and commonly used by lower caste persons when under duress. And substitute words are employed, by the most devout, for every profane or obscene term. So the taboo is of a magical nature (speaking anthropologically). Primitive people, such as the Americans, generally employ medicine men, witch doctors, or priests against magical threats. In this case, however, physical rather than spiritual results were expected from the efforts of the airmen.

First, formations of jets flew through the cloud-spelling--along its own paths and then in series of crisscrosses. Nothing much happened; the streaming jets blew wisps and curls of mist out of alignment but it swiftly filled itself in again. Heavy bombers followed, but the washes of their props were equally ineffectual. During the bomber maneuvers, furthermore, one Paul Kully, a student flier, eluded the police and ventured close to the now-completed T. The pilot of the leading bomber, a B-36, took evasive action too late, and Mr. Kully's light plane, shorn of a wing and set on fire, came spiraling to earth--a sight enormously exciting to the already enthralled Chicagoans.

This ended the main spectacle. Most of the planes descended to earth. The word--awful, unprintable, unacknowledgable, obscene and illegal--which, as has been noted, many use in private and in public, and everybody sees constantly chalked on fences and carved into cement by rude boys--and which is pronounced "shucks" by the super-superstitious--now rode in the Chicago heavens. The breeze dropped. Surrounding cumulus clouds retreated as if to frame the sign; air movement died aloft; the four corrupt letters and their following exclamation point came to rest directly over the Loop. This was widely regarded as the supreme practical joke--until the extras began to appear. These were in a way disappointing: photographers had spiraled vainly in the high blue, for not one newspaper made bold to print a picture of what all could see if they bent their necks.

But the published statement concerning the scientific investigation had a tendency to diminish the widespread mirth. Dr. A.B. Cummings, acting for a General Committee, wrote the report. It said, in part: "... a gross examination showed a special arrangement of clouds which cannot be accounted for by the laws of chance. Emphasis should be made of the fact that absolutely no clue to human agency, domestic, enemy, or other--either in the air or on the ground--was found. There was no evidence of interference from the stratosphere above. No abnormal radiation was detected. No use of sonic devices may be presumed in view of the study. After the mass became stationary, it was found that currents of air were moving as they should (according to all known laws and principles of meteorology) above, below, and on both sides of the phenomenon.

" ... that last fact, taken by itself, is perhaps the most disturbing, although it is possibly equaled by one other. Viz--the mass is not subject to the known laws of dissipation. The slipstream of jets and the wash of huge propellers ought to have caused it to disintegrate in a few minutes. They made only a moderate and local effect which, again in violation of understandable principles, was offset by the reassemblage of the mass along its original contours. It has been proposed that if there is a repetition of this totally unprecedented and inexplicable effect, antiaircraft artillery with ordinary fused shells be used in an attempt to break it up. In such a case, citizens will have to be sheltered from falling fragments during the bombardment. This will probably be tried--although the tendency of the mass to hold its shape, resembling as it does a similar tendency in plastics of special molecular structures, at least suggests that even artillery may not be effective....

" ... the demand made by a committee of quite understandably outraged churchmen, led by Msgr. Loyola O'Tootle, of St. Plimsol's Roman Catholic Cathedral, that an atomic bomb be used to disperse the sacrilege is, of course, impractical, as such a bomb, in the caliber now being stored by our government, would destroy not only the cloud mass in question (presumably) but (predictably) the entire city of Chicago for a radius of four miles. Any smaller atomic bomb is no more to be thought of in connection with the riddance of this bizarre pest, as not only demolitional but genetic effects....

"To sum up, the mass seems to consist merely of cloud material, somewhat more densely packed than usual. Its formational aspects cannot be traced to any conceivable person or device. Its violation of certain simple physical laws is the great scientific puzzle of it. But it is definitely not poisonous or harmful. The only 'danger' to be expected from it, so far as the most elaborate examination and the most learned extrapolation can discern, is psychological. Until science explains the phenomenon, the layman should regard it without dismay--or other emotion, if possible. Doubtless when the formed-mass principle is unraveled the explanation will not only be quite simple, but of some currently unguessable great value to engineering, to industry, to the military, and hence to the whole people."

Dr. Cummings's job was detached, thorough--and satisfied nobody.

For it was a statement of absolute mystification.

Auburn-haired little Jeanne Sheets, aged seven, of Mallow Road Apartments, running into her yard that afternoon, cried, "Mummy, there's a dirty word in the sky!"

"Yes, dear."

"Who put it there?"

"Mummy doesn't know, dear."

"Can I say it? It's in the sky--real big."

"No, dear."

"Maybe God put it there?"

"You mustn't think things like that, you naughty child!"

Jeanne Sheets knew as much about it as Cummings, or any other physicist or any meteorologist, or anybody.

The next day, through unimpeachable sources in Sofia, a world that had been amused--and somewhat agog--learned that, over the city of Moscow had appeared:

МАЈІАРХЍ

The smile on the world's face faltered.

Why?

Here the subtleties of the human spirit are evinced. People were stunned for the obvious reason that the appearance of an expletive over the Soviet capital tended to indicate _human_ enmity was not involved in the phenomenon. There was a deeper reason. The Moscow affliction gave universality to what had been, thitherto, an ailment of the skies over the guilty-feeling democracies. The profanation of the Soviets, in other words, eliminated all subconscious hope of escape into the Opposite, that natural area which the aware mind detests, or at least resists, but upon which the instincts depend. Laughter ceased and the world made up its mind that steps had to be taken instantly to solve, resolve, and dissolve the indecent chimera.

Then, on the morning of August 27th, in the city of New York, between the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center, a great B took shape against a cloudless zenith. No Gorgon's head could have paralyzed the city more effectively. All traffic stopped and most persons who were physically able descended to the hot streets. Amateurs' telescopes on Long Island and slot-machine viewers as far away as Eagle Rock Park in New Jersey were turned upon the pale sky in which Manhattan's buildings had for so long fastened their lean teeth.

New York's streets solidified. Even ambulances ceased to attempt to move--their drivers either helping patients out for a look or resigning themselves to the delivery of D.O.A.'s. Ministers of churches, priests, and rabbis now made some attempt at excoriation. A band of volunteer hymn singers fought against the steadily forming BAS at Trinity Church; censors swung and holy water splashed about St. Pat's. Useless. The TARDS! filled itself out with no regard for fear or fury, lewd ripostes or prayers. And all could see that this new comment was less general than its precursors. Here the sky had not simply engraved an expletive upon itself but called the most numerous people of any city a vile name.

At the same time, moreover (9:12 in the morning when the first wraith of cloud was observed), strange events were occurring elsewhere on earth. An underling at the near-deserted offices of the AUP, watching the clatter of a ticker, yelled to his superior some seconds after 9:30, "Hey, chief! They got it in Paris."

"What does it say?"

The youth perplexedly spelled it out. His chief, better educated and possessed of a greater imagination, envisioned the jam-packed Champs-Élysées and the azure vault above the Arc de Triomphe inscribed

MERDE, ALORS!

New York was the first city to stampede.

Before the S in BASTARDS! was completed, a loft caught fire in Seventh Avenue. The engines were unable to reach it, the fire spread, a wall fell into the crowd, and horrified survivors pressed both north and south in the thoroughfare, screaming. Their hysteria went ahead of them and, since the neck-craning throngs could not know the cause of it, they interpreted the oncoming roar in the wildest fashions. They, also, turned to run. Central Park furnished a place in which one-half of this tumultuous and trampling herd was able to spread out and regain some composure, though it had left the streets behind dotted with the maimed and slain. There was no sizable park to the south, however, and those who took that direction (save for a few thousands who sought shelter in the Pennsylvania Station) built up an avalanche of humanity which pelted and thundered clear to the Battery, itself its own Juggernaut.

The infection spread to side streets and to other avenues, inevitably. Within an hour, a great part of middle and lower Manhattan became such an abattoir as history has no record of. The show-windows along Fifth Avenue were burst in by the push of people who were then sliced and guillotined by the cascading glass. Wooden buildings were knocked askew in places.

Nobody could cope with such a situation but the mayor did his resourceful best. He ordered airplanes equipped with loud-speakers of great power to fly over the self-beleaguered city and explain what the source of the great stampede had been. Every morgue and hospital in the city and in its environs was mobilized. All bridges and tunnels were instantly cleared for the transport of the injured, as Manhattan's hospitals could not handle five per cent of the casualties. Police, using pistols with little ceremony, brought to a partial halt the epidemic of looting that occurred in the early afternoon. People were commanded to take the equivalent of air-raid shelter and to stay there.

The military, acting with their usual belated but firm ineffectuality, again essayed the problem of the Word itself. Unveiling a new weapon--a rocket adapted for air-to-air combat, with a warhead of a secret explosive--the Army launched squadrons of fighters and bombers to the attack. A great cannonade over the city began near five o'clock. It was futile: the blasts disrupted edges and fringes of the letters in the sky but they mended themselves as fast as they were tattered. Army Ordinance then tried its supersecret, twenty-four-inch rockets. Careless fusing caused one of these to explode at a low level, destroying the upper stories of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Building--but subsequent accurate salvos of the tremendous weapon merely caused the letters to undulate.

Shortly after six o'clock the Navy, carrying out a suggestion of Cardinal Bleatbier, tried a new tactic--the interposition of a smoke screen between the abomination and the desolated city. The idea was greeted by officers with enthusiasm. The effect of it was not. For, after some fifty Navy planes had laid a great, brown carpet underneath the Word and above the buildings, there came new and hitherto unobserved eddyings of the air and the Navy smoke was drawn into the writing on the heavens--not only fortifying and clarifying what it had been intended to obscure but also giving the letters a phosphorescent glow which became visible as soon as twilight descended.

That night, as electricity began to fail in the city, the surviving people undertook to leave en masse. They had no stomach for another day such as they had passed through. An additional factor urged them on. During the years of the Atomic Age they had been living--like people of every city--with keen, increasing queasiness. It is not conducive to urban content to know that any of a dozen foreign governments can, or potentially can, blot out you and yours in an eye-twinkling. Indeed, for many years, people had been trickling away from cities everywhere--either openly giving their reason or offering some excuse.

Finally, from the very onslaught of B Day, there had poured forth a succession of orders setting up various official hierocracies for the emergency--deputy police, wardens, and so on, along with the rationing of gasoline, restrictions on subway use, abrogation of power supply, and other such matters. Americans are not a patient people and of all Americans, New Yorkers are the most impatient. Unlike Britains, Russians, and Europeans, they had never accepted the brash contempt of the public exhibited continually both by government and industry after World War II. Nor had they become reconciled to bureaucratic rule. They had resented the multiplication of authorized agents and official personnel. Hence, not being schooled to such vicissitudes at the time of B Day, they lost their tempers. They left town. By midnight, the tunnels, bridges, and ferries could no longer be held open for the evacuation of casualties. By three in the morning, every bridge and every tunnel and every boat was swarming with one-way, antlike movement as New Yorkers abandoned New York. All the next day the human tide welled into metropolitan environs.

The contagion spread to other cities as words began to form above them and in some instances even before their skies developed a C or a J or a P or an A or the like. Terror begat terror. Various metropolises were soon without electricity, water, food, gasoline, and so on. Fires began to rage in them. In no time, Cleveland, Detroit, Birmingham, Boston, Los Angeles, and other centers were in a condition like that of cities over which a powerful enemy has gained absolute control of the air.

There is, of course, no general record of the total effect of this exodus. Towns, villages, hamlets, and lone farms were unprepared to house or to feed the scores of millions who descended upon them--rich refugees in limousines piled high with canned foods and guns--slum masses in rags and on foot, with nothing but fear and hunger to drive them ahead. Here and there some man of feudal abilities organized bands of the fugitives and these forcibly evacuated whole communities, taking possession of them--only to be driven out by bands better armed and more ruthless. Theft and violence became the national way of life; and murder--murder that took the lives of millions--the means to obtain a meal or a woman or a bauble in some as yet unsmashed village store window. City people had become the sworn enemies of country people--and vice versa. The Hindus and Mussulmans of India on the days after its liberation were more kindly disposed to one another than these--and dealt more mercifully.

So it went--fire, blood and turmoil, death, epidemic and ruin.

Only Russia maintained, for a little while, the mask of order. No obscenity in its skies was able to break the disciplined ranks of the proletariat. But this calm--this grimly enforced maintenance of socialІ decorum--was ultimately shattered. On the 3rd of September, while the Kremlin exulted over the downfall of each and every empire and democracy, there appeared, almost experimentally, over the city of Kiev the phrase:

јІЕНИН ДИСИВД

No mere exposure of lewd words could faze the Soviets; but the hideous violation of the proprieties represented by the simple statement that "Lenin deceived" sent consternation whistling from the Baltic to theҪИ Black Sea. The next day, the sky of Moscow reported that Stalin had lied methodically; and the day after that, the people of Ordzhonikidze were informed that the Kremlin feasted, the party guzzled, the people starved. Russia rose against its government and Politburo heads were carried from city to city on stakes. Exodus followed. From the hot wheatfields of the Ukraine to the cool timberlands of Siberia, the panoply of death began.